Chris profile picture

Chris

Smoldering Human Dynamite Exploding With Ruthless Fury! Steel Bars Storing Up Their Hate, Stone Wall

About Me

"You don't really expect to see all those song titles in this little space, do you? Look at the cover." - Minutemen, "Double Nickels on the Dime" cassette
"This goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity." - John Maynard Keynes
"I hate him. Everybody says I’m supposed to be polite when I talk to you all, but I hate him," Jenkins said. "He talks too much, he doesn’t make sense, he’s fat, he’s sloppy, he acts like he’s the best thing since sliced bread. He’s ugly, he stinks, his mouth stinks, his breath stinks, and basically his soul stinks, too.
"Not too many people have personalities like that and survive in life. I don’t know how he does it." - Kris Jenkins of the Carolina Panthers
"Kinski says [the jungle] is full of erotic elements. It's not so much erotic, but full of obscenity. Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotic here. I see fornication and asphyxiation and choking, fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course there's a lot of misery, but it's the same misery that's all around us. The trees are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing; they just screech in pain. Taking a close look at what's around us, there is some sort of harmony. It's the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It's not that I hate it. I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment." - Werner Herzog, from "Burden of Dreams"
"It’s a deeply personal character and I was trying to find a new way of presenting how he would keep dark spirits at bay. I didn’t want him being a heavy drinker or a chain smoker. I wanted him eating jellybeans so he wouldn’t invite the devils in. I wanted him listening to Karen Carpenter to help him relax so he wouldn’t allow the devil with satanic Goth rock or something. Or, he’s watching chimpanzees do karate instead of The Exorcist. And, all three of those things I was doing in my own life. I was eating jellybeans out of a martini glass and listening to Karen Carpenter and on the Internet watching chimps do karate. And I thought, ‘Well this is funny, let’s put it in the movie.’ But it’s also true." - Nicolas Cage, on preparing for Ghost Rider, the new biopic about me.
"I'm just one individual. What can I do?" - AJ Soprano

My Interests

WFMU, the Best Show on WFMU, writing, learning, humorous minutiae, noir affectations, death, sandwiches, music geekery, the art du cinema, the occasional cute and/or funny animal, getting worked up about world crises, abstraction to the point of ridiculousness, the ongoing internal war between the desire for self-improvment and laziness (to be filmed as a six-hour miniseries for Danish television)

I'd like to meet:


Music:

70's glam, proto-punk, 80's post-punk, dub & roots reggae, first/second-wave ska, raw garage-y "rrreal" rock n roll, moody classical, some ambient, gospel (50's, 60's or earlier), 60's soul, raw nasty late 60's/early 70's funk, 50's pop and rock, long-defunct or recently reunited indie bands, weird grimey hip hop, late 80's-early 90's hip hop, retarded Baltimore club music, various tuneful noise, girl groups, indiepop, annoying jazz, old tyme country, some blues (further away from BB King and any white people the better), english folk, some soft rock, power pop. Specifically: Bob Dylan, Guided By Voices, the Wipers, the Fall, Funkadelic, James Brown, Prince, Neil Young, AC/DC, Husker Du, Sleater-Kinney, the Reigning Sound, the Oblivians, Mr Airplane Man, the Dirtbombs, New Pornographers, Neko Case, Laura Cantrell, Mission of Burma, Stooges, Television, Bowie, T-Rex, White Stripes, Tom Waits, Elliot Smith, Pavement, Fairport Convention, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Roy Orbison, Curtis Mayfield, Sly & the Family Stone, the Rolling Stones, Velvet Undergound, Jonathan Richman, Minor Threat, Public Enemy, MF Doom, De La Soul, Beastie Boys, Wu-Tang Clan, Talking Heads, Aphex Twin, Tim Hecker, Arthur Russell, Magnetic Fields, Miles, Mingus, Big Star, Elvis Costello, the Who, Thin Lizzy, Captain Beefheart, Sun Ra, Betty Davis, Ted Leo, Lightning Bolt, Brian Eno, Volcano Suns, Satie, Debussy, Penderecki, Led Zeppelin, Motorhead, Richard Thompson, the Roots. I also hate the singers of every band Pitchfork breaks.

Movies:

Most anything by: Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Wong Kar-Wai, David Lynch, John Cassavettes, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Mike Leigh, Luis Bunuel. Also: The Third Man, Tender Mercies, Safe, Taxi Driver, Big Lebowski, Raising Arizona, Stop Making Sense, Dark Days, Yi Yi, Withnail & I, Glengarry Glen Ross, Goodfellas, Passion of Joan of Arc, Le Cercle Rouge, Army of Shadows, Double Indemnity, Eternal Sunshine..., the Jerk, A Shot in the Dark, the Conversation, the Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Chinatown, Anchorman, 2001, Dr. Strangelove, Santa Sangre, The Holy Mountain, Dead Ringers, Network, L'avventura, Vertigo, Branded to Kill, Do the Right Thing, Once Upon a Time in the West, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Robocop, Au Hasard Balthasaar, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, the Battle of Algiers, the Apartment, Out of the Past, Playtime, Street Fight, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Breaking Away, The Sword of Doom, Ugetsu, Boogie Nights, War Photographer, Kiss Me Deadly, most Monty Python, Five Easy Pieces, the King of Marvin Gardens, the Good the Bad & the Ugly, the Magnificent Ambersons, Chimes at Midnight, Badlands, Scarecrow, Picnic at Hanging Rock, the Age of Innocence, Jackass 1 & 2, the Marriage of Maria Braun, Hoop Dreams, Crumb, Grand Illusion, Airplane!, Reds, Underground, Bloody Sunday, the Double Life of Veronique, Monterey Pop, Two-Lane Blacktop, the Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

Television:

The Wire (the greatest show ever made), Homicide, Deadwood, Brass Eye, Alan Partridge, The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, Twin Peaks, Upright Citizens Brigade, Peep Show, Home Movies, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Father Ted, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, Garth Merengi's Darkplace, Larry Sanders, The Singing Detective

Books:

I'm not saying you can't go wrong with these people, but you'd almost have to deliberately try: Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Charles Portis, Faulkner, Philip Roth, Richard Yates, Don DeLillo, Raymond Chandler, Studs Terkel, Milan Kundera, George Saunders, Sarah Vowell, Kafka, Vonnegut. Also: The Demon-Haunted World, The Denial of Death, 1984, Libra, The Third Policeman, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Awareness, Banvard's Folly, Atonement, Random Family, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Things They Carried, Chronicles (Bob Dylan), Middlesex, Jesus' Son, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (if you find that one in the humor section a grave stocking error has occured)

Heroes:

the Dalai Lama, Tom Scharpling, Steve Nash

My Blog

The Build-a-Movie Game

Last night on the Best Show on WFMU, Tom played a "Build-a-Movie" game, where listeners named three actors and he had to come up with the plot a movie starring all three.  It resulted in suc...
Posted by Chris on Wed, 22 Feb 2006 10:43:00 PST

Don't mess around w/ a guy in shades, oh no.

The following is copied from the homepage of Corey Hart's official website, www.coreyhart.com -- it's best you never know what strange turn of events led me there -- regarding a 2002 remix of "Su...
Posted by Chris on Mon, 23 Jan 2006 10:17:00 PST

Boneheaded movie cliche number 1,347

I've seen this one pop up in ads for both Syriana and the new Pierce Brosnan movie the last few weeks:  characters calmly walking away from an explosion they've caused and showing no reactio...
Posted by Chris on Tue, 10 Jan 2006 10:16:00 PST

Break out the Vince Guaraldi and booze.

Well, the Christmas onslaught is starting earlier and earlier all the time, with displays usually abundant around Halloween-time, but now is when the holly jolly gangbang begins in earnest. ...
Posted by Chris on Thu, 24 Nov 2005 03:33:00 PST

You learn something useless every day.

Today I learned that Johnny Marr from the Smiths' name is a pun on the French phrase "j'en ai marre," which roughly means "I've had enough."  Meaning of course that he was able to predict&nb...
Posted by Chris on Mon, 21 Nov 2005 01:10:00 PST

An important correction to a matter of greivous error

In a recent MySpace bulletin posted recently in the recent past, I answered a survey question about my favorite food with the response, and I quote, "lasagna." After some deliberation and thought I h...
Posted by Chris on Thu, 08 Sep 2005 11:12:00 PST

Sometimes I feel like a parenthetical child (....)

Addiction: It holds sway over all of us in one form or another (or so I've found). Some addictions are harmless, like gambling and nicotine; others are more deadly, like heroin (are you listening, C...
Posted by Chris on Mon, 01 Jan 1900 12:00:00 PST