Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

While I often thought GLB's final record didn't reach the heights of their earlier albums, I now realize that the polished songwriting, production, and lyrical honesty emphasize a maturity and growth. My downer '90s self also did not relate to the jubilant sound and lyrics. However, I still wish Paul Kimble was on bass.

Otis the cat should survey the trees and birds, But he'd rather annoy me. Since the sentinel spruce and maples do not heed him, He licks the window in small circles. Nearby chickadees care little For these feline demonstrations. The cold weather snaps us to attention, And the snow falls silently while we watch From inside a creaky house, hoping for touches of lenient spring amidst the wintery chills.

I have waited a long time for the new Charles Burns book. Final Cut is beautifully drawn, but the characters feel like ciphers. On the surface, the horror movie tropes and exploration of the human psyche feel like vintage Burns, and my younger self would have loved it. His connections between cinematic narratives and human connection show how fantasy sometimes separates us. However, Final Cut feels much emptier than Inside Out and less horrific than his best work. The science fiction horrors are only on the screen and in the mind and not realities for the characters as in other Burns stories. Thus, he shows that our disconnections can be more horrific than any fiction. That said, maybe I'm just that far removed from my teenage self and cannot find a connection to any of these characters or their familiar obsessions. As they slip apart, I found myself also withdrawing. Perhaps, that's the point.

Yasujuru Ozu's A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) and its remake Floating Weeds (1959) are masterworks in drama. Each tells the story of a traveling kabuki theatre troupe visiting cities on the Seto Inland Sea. The films' primary conflict revolves around the owner's excursions to visit his former mistress and their grownup son, who believes that the actor is his uncle. The lead actress becomes jealous when she finds out. She pays a younger actress to seduce the son, an act that complicates everything. Meanwhile the troupe's fortunes take a downturn as audiences are more interested in newer styles.  Both films include an amazing scene where the kabuki master and his mistress shout across a rainy street while walking back and forth, which reinforces their alienation and disconnection. Like many of Ozu's pillow and low-angle shots, he deftly builds characterization and setting through placement. Perhaps, the character studies and relationships in each are at their must s...

The second movie in Ozu's Noriko Trilogy, a series of films that stars the fabulous Setsuko Hara as a character named Noriko, although none of the films have the same characters. Thematically, many of Ozu's later films feel connected due to their emphasis on women's roles in post-war Japan and their similar English titles. They often deal with relatives who want to help marry off their single family members. In this one, the character Noriko is living in her family's home when her uncle (Kokuten Kodu) suggests that since she is 28, she should get married. Ozu always handles this common theme with subtlety and understanding of family dynamics.  Complications arise fairly quickly, and the family's plans go awry. They want Noriko to marry her boss's forty-year-old businessman friend, Mr. Manabe, but she has different plans. The mother of her widowed childhood friend Kenkichi Yabe (Hiroshi Nihon'yanagi) asks Noriko to marry her son. When she says yes, it aliena...

Snow on spruce boughs, The second coming of a rabbit Disrupts the morning silence I think of you asleep miles away In clouded memories of fog Here in the snowy north, The temperature dropped to negative 25 Even the birds are silent, But the spruces still contemplate our Tiny backyard, unaware of our plights.