Themes of the New Year: face punching, underground snowstorms, ye olde duderino, and prodigious use of the F bomb:
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It’s Carnivale in the truest sense: social mores are out the window, and everyone is looking to have The Night Of Their Lives. The girls look at you like they want to fuck you and the guys look at you like they want to punch you in the face.
To wit: I was punched in the face.
-Chris Chafin, “Passion Pit at Terminal Five,” New York Press, 1/11
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The makers of this film seem to have given slight thought to the psychology of teenage girls, less to the possibility that there is no heaven, and none at all to the likelihood that if there is one, it will not resemble a happy gathering of new Facebook friends.
-Roger Ebert, “The Lovely Bones,” RogerEbert.com, 1/13. Tip via Cribbster.
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Seriously, you know the line about how they “paved paradise and put up a
parking lot?” Like how they replaced something beautiful with something cold and heartless and commercial? That’s you. You’re the parking lot, motherfucker. You drove your shitty steamroller over something everyone loved so you could pander your sensitive pussyhound whine to people waiting in line at the Carl’s Jr. They paved Nirvana and put up a Counting Crow. Argh!
Maura Johnston and Christopher R. Weingarten, The 50 Worst Songs of the ’00s, F2K No. 1: Counting Crows ft. Vanessa Carlton, “Big Yellow Taxi,” Village Voice, 12/22/09
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In the vicinity of the accident the air had been instantly supercooled by the tons of escaping helium—which meant that several hundred feet underground, sealed off from skies and weather, snow began to fall. “Some say the world will end in fire / Some say in ice,” wrote Robert Frost, but in this sector of the Large Hadron Collider, the showstopping spectacle involved both at once.
Kurt Andersen, “The Genesis 2.0 Project,” Vanity Fair, 1/09
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DONALD: Wherefore thou playest not at ninepins on Saturday, Sir Walter?
WALTER: On our most holy Sabbath I am sworn / To keep tradition, form and ceremony. / The seventh and the last day rests the Jew; I labour not, nor ride in chariot, / Nor handle gold, nor even play the cook, / And sure as Providence I do not roll.
-Adam Bertocci, excerpted from “Two Gentleman of Lebowski,” via Thrillist, 1/8
Inverted Soapbox 