Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Jets to Brazil always makes me think of fall, changing seasons, and remembrance. I started listening to them at a pivotal moment when I was figuring out my identity and becoming an adult. I had long been a fan of Jawbreaker, and when Black Schwarzenbach started JTB, I went to one of their first national tours in 1998 for Orange Rhyming Dictionary in Milwaukee. They played with Fugazi, Compound Red, and the band I saw play most Milwaukee shows at that time, Promise Ring. It was an amazing show for the most part, and I met Blake before the show. For many Jawbreaker fans, Jets to Brazil took some getting used to, mainly because they toned down the former band's punk tendencies for more indie rock and pop influences. While 1995's  Dear You , Jawbreaker's final record, was moving in this direction, JTB added keyboards and sometimes resembled 1980s bands like The Psychedelic Furs or 1990s indie bands like Wilco more than the punk stylings of many of the Jawbreaker releases, Howev

Place matters in the grand scheme  as we plan the rest of our short lives in between careers, births, and death, tracing the lines of worry and doubt on faces that age like earthen masks,  cracking and morphing into new forms  that recall our parents and their familiar tragedies and strategies in months that begin with archaic, internalized letters, fomenting lethargy and resilience like the graying maples and elms, the wintry oaks, the desolate brown topped spruce,  as those seasons change and loss becomes static reality in this Upper Peninsula, this region of utmost cold, where the snow falls and blankets the silent masses, ergo, a laugh, a sound, an eruption of jubilant life in resistance to the colors that drain, clamorously calling out for meaning.  Ha! Relentless ones! You are stuck here! Lift up your choices and dig in!

One of my favorite Robert Johnson tracks despite its divergence from the blues idiom with an unfamiliar, more commercial vocal and guitar style. Vamping an interesting danceable tune, Johnson hawks for a street vendor and humorously sells his craft and her wares with enough double entendres for everyone. He recorded it in 1936 at Gunther Hall in San Antonio, and the music is catchier than many of his songs, providing valuable insight into the different types of songs he would sing in performance. Instead of the usual topics of souls and hard. troubled luck, Johnson invites us to have fun and buy some of his girl's tamales or just loosen up: "I got a girl, says she long and tall / she sleeps in the kitchen with her feets in the hall / Hot tamales, and they're red hot / yes she got 'em for sale" to an infectious rhythm. I wish Johnson had recorded more songs like this.  Track This  is a recurring feature of Snobbin' that turns the music appreciation dial up and

A journey through the history of film, narrative, and genre through connections between Lynch's filmography and Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz (1939) . Sometimes academic and historical (Amy Nicholson, Karyn Kusama, and many of the six chapters) and other times humorous and self-referential (John Waters), the documentary has something for film fans, Lynch obsessives, and everyone in between.

I am going to start a new series on Yasujiro Ozu's films in the upcoming weeks where I rank and write capsule reviews for fifteen of his films. I have started watching a representative portion of his filmography, ranging from the silent comedies to his later works that deal with family, marriage, and society in the post war years, including the Noriko trilogy ( Late Spring , Early Summer , and Tokyo Story ) and all the movies he made with the incomparable Setsuko Hara. So far this project has been fun, and I cannot wait to share the results. Prepare for a discussion surrounding culture, dialogue, and the ever-present tatami shots. 

I just watched all of the Coen Brothers movies on which they collaborated. Almost all of their films are good, and rating them was harder than I expected. I hope to eventually get around to their newer projects and those they scripted. A few of the later films could move up with additional viewings. 18. The Ladykillers  17. Intolerable Cruelty  16. Burn After Reading  15. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs  14. The Man Who Wasn't There 13. The Hudsucker Proxy 12. A Serious Man 11. Hail, Caesar! 10. Inside Llewyn Davis 9. O Brother, Where Art Thou? 8. True Grit 7. No Country for Old Men 6. Raising Arizona 5. Barton Fink 4. Blood Simple 3. The Big Lebowski 2. Fargo 1. Miller's Crossing