1.) Old Bay Seasoned Potato Chips

2.) The Book of Mormon, the musical. And especially this song “I Believe” (Although “Turn it off” and “Hello” (and half a dozen more) are also amazing). I have never seen a funnier play in all my life. It was so good I was crying from laughing so hard.

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3.) Praising Mark Bittman. He posted this NYT article with 12 summer salads back in June. It included this awesome recipe for raw kale and carrot salad with blue cheese and a simple honey vinaigrette. It’s scrumptious. We’ve made it four times now. Hint: you can trade out the raisins and add toasted chopped nuts instead. Much better if you’re not crazy about raisins. Make this salad!

4.) Trixie Honeycups.

5.) Trash talking Mark Bittman. Did anyone read the same NYT magazine food feature three weeks later about grilled watermelon hamburgers? Did any of you try to make them? 1 1/2 inch sliced watermelon. Grilled. Cheese on top. Ketchup. Mustard. Mayo. Onions. Wrapped in a hamburger bun. We haven’t tried. But it sounds absurd. Did he really sample this before publishing it? But, in a half-hearted attempt to replicate, we did recently try to simply charcoal-grill watermelon. And it wasn’t so great. After a few bites, I just kind of wanted to be eating ungrilled watermelon. Did I miss something? Too many GNTs that night? Or does a food writer sometimes just get it really perversely wrong?

6.) The Song of Summer: Katy Perry vs Lady Gaga debate. While down the shore (thanks for spreading the word SG) this summer we haven’t been able to cross a beach or a boardwalk with out hearing one of these two great songs blowing around (“Last Friday Night” and “The Edge of Glory” in case you live in New Zealand). If you haven’t heard at least one of these songs while driving somewhere with your windows down and a companion or two chanting along with you, then you’re not having a ridiculously fun summer yet. There’s still time. Hurry, though! I need your help picking a winner. Or at least, picking which of the saxophone bridges/solos is better. 2011, the year of the Bruce Hornsby revival!

7.) Weekend visits from current and former TGWers who tolerate our occasional top 40 music obsessions.

8.) Mounting Major League Baseball energy. Milwaukee? Cleveland? Cincinnati? Pittsburg? Yep. Right on. (Oh, and it helps that our lil local team is having a decent season again.)

9.) The end of that nasty heat wave. Finally opening the doors and windows again. And tons of new summer music bouncing around. I meant to post a curated summer playlist here, but then no one really ever downloads those divshare files, and it’s a bit of a hassle as I have to convert iTunes tracks and it’s 11:25 already and I’m tired. So maybe by Xmas I can figure out how to add a mix of streaming tracks instead. And start earlier in the evening.

10.) Learning to swim

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Love youse! Have a great second half of summer!

Modern Family
I know I’m a year late coming to this awesome show. But it’s my new favorite TV series. (fyi, this recognition changes several times a year). I didn’t really get into it until Thanksgiving when my sister forced me to watch a couple episodes. And damn, it’s really funny. If you loved Arrested Development, you will love this. Not nearly as absurd, but still geniously-written and acted. It’s bound to be compared to The Cosby Show for decades to come. For those who don’t know, it’s a mockumentary-style comedy about three families related by blood. The older Dad (played by the Emmy-nominated Ed O’Neill, aka Al Bundy from Married with Children) and his hot young Columbian wife (played by the Emmy-nominated Sofia Vergara) are raising her overweight 10 year old son from a previous marriage. He (Al Bundy) has a gay son Mitchell (Emmy-nominated Jessie Tyler-Ferguson) who is partnered with Cameron (Emmy-winning Eric Stonestreet) who have adopted a Vietnamese baby. And he (Al Bundy) has a daughter, Claire (Julie Bowen) who is married to Phil (Emmy-Nominated Ty Burrell). They have three children. Describing the family tree makes it sound (yawn) so tired. I’m sorry. It’s really not.

We rented the first season to “catch up.” Although there’s really not much plot-line to catch up on. Each episode develops the characters and reveals more of their history. So knowing early episodes sometimes makes the jokes in later episodes a lot more funny. But it doesn’t matter. Just start tuning in. Wednesday nights on ABC. (Or, better yet, use a DVR and watch it later so you can fast forward through the 30% of the half hour that is annoying commercial messages). You’ll be happy you did (both parts, but I’m referring to tuning in to the show).

And if you’ve already been watching a while and ready to kvetch, please do, cause I like hearing good criticism about stuff I love. For instance, is anyone a little fatigued by the way each episode has to wrap up with a feel-good, family-affirming statement of goodness (human nature really *is* a kind thing!). But then, isn’t this the way all TV comedies have to be written. I don’t know. Maybe not.

Movies
For the first time in a long time, me and Honeycups have seen just about every Oscar nomination. What?! It’s been almost six years since this happened before. Hmmm, our son wouldn’t happen to be six? Anyway, it’s been really awesome to see so many movies. Finally saw King’s Speech. Man, we were avoiding it as long as possible. But what do you know, a great movie! I still don’t want it to win the best movie Oscar, but is every one else OK with Colin Firth getting the Best Actor Oscar? And Geoffrey Rush, Best Supporting? I think we are. And how about that Jennifer Lawrence for best Actress? Can I get an Amen?

And Music
Man, tough year so far. But the song (We’re having) A Spectacular Time (especially) and everything else on Base & The Superstructure’s new album still makes me happy. Also, I like the new album by Destroyer. You can stream Kaput here. I sure miss Dr. Waterman at times like these, what with his superhuman ability to extol the greatness of an album. And believe me, he would do it for Destroyer. It’s kinda special.

Books and all the rest
Please help. Any TV shows we should be watching (I plan to catch up on Breaking Bad–thanks Jeremy. And go Albuquerque!), or movies we should watch (we did skip Rabbit Hole and Biutiful. They seem too hard to watch. Has anyone else sat through them?), or any new music we’re missing? Books? Websites?

May this harsh Winter end soon!

Love,
Farrell

In 2003 it was !!!’s “Me and Guiliani Down by the School Yard (a true story).”

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In 2004 it was Fiery Furnaces’ “Chris Michaels.”

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2005 I can’t remember. Can you?

2006 I can’t remember. Can you?

In 2007 it was Dan Deacon’s “Wham City.” Let us not forget Bryan Waterman’s ecstatic post declaring it so.

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In 2008 we had MGMT’s “Time to Pretend.”

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In 2009 I gave it to Black Eyed Peas’ “I gotta feeling.”

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You’ve got the idea, right?  The thing is, I’m not sure anything this summer really lives up to the roof-raising expansiveness of those previous summer songs, unless it’s Robyn, but her song may be a bit too melancholy. (Melancholy summer songs are another thing altogether, and the ones listed above tend to be something other than brooding about summers gone wrong, or else we could go for Best Coast’s “Boyfriend,” or something like that, right?) So this is where I need your help. Suggestions, please. Do we have a summer song in 2010?

Here are a few preliminary nominations.  Big thanks to Lisa Tremain and John Wood, Dave B and F. P. Smearcase, ex-contributor and some of his Twitterific former students, and, of course, the lovely Trixie Honeycups for all their useful input.

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In short, a bit of a nerdfest. (To be fair, there were also some, as they say, truly ill DJ performances; I’m not sure if the ability to electrify crowds with your beats reduces one’s nerdiness or is a quality orthogonal to it, but I suspect the latter.)

And I had a great time. Which got me thinking about nerd pleasures. It occurs to me that some of the pleasures available to nerds are in a sense negative, such as:

(1) Not having to keep up with popular music, TV shows, movies, etc.

It’s a great relief to be able to let this stuff go if you want to. Of course, there are music nerds, TV nerds, movie nerds, and the like, but if you’re a nerd you’ve granted yourself permission to sit out whatever competitions of cultural consumption don’t happen to appeal to you. (Similarly, one of the greatest pleasures of being gay is not having to watch football, ever.) The other side of this pleasure is

(2) The wholehearted enjoyment of odd or not-widely-enjoyed music, TV shows, movies, etc.

Battlestar Galactica is an example of this for me; you may favor Firefly or the Underworld movies. A related pleasure is

(3) Knowing about odd or not-widely-enjoyed music, TV shows, movies, etc.

As just a small example, it is obvious that to hear Magma is to love Magma, yet there are many people who do not love Magma. Nerds get to hear Magma.

Really, though, (3) is just an instance of a much broader nerd pleasure, one of the most central to the nerd experience:

(4) Knowing stuff about stuff.

A couple of others to round out the list:

(5) The rush of pleasure that comes from solving a problem (such as debugging a tricky part of a computer program) after a long and difficult intellectual struggle.

(6) The company of other nerds.

That’s what I came up with, anyway. What are your nerd pleasures?

I’m speaking of Werner Herzog’s 1977 feature Stroszek, starring Bruno Schleinstein, Eva Mattes, Clemens Scheitz, and Clayton Szalpinski — interestingly the characters they play are named Bruno, Eva, Scheitz, and Clayton. This is a cast of outsiders; Mattes is the only professional actor. I’m not sure exactly what to make of this; you’d think a movie starring non-actors would probably suck. But this does not, not at all: the players are completely natural and unself-conscious onscreen; not always graceful but always in character. They inhabit the roles, because they have been typecast — and it is a testament to Herzog’s abilities as a director, that they remain themselves onscreen.

The key thing about the movie is that Herzog is absolutely fascinated by the ways people move and talk. He communicates that fascination to the viewer by showing exactly how his characters move and talk — this sounds pretty banal I guess but you come away from the movie as familiar with Bruno’s mannerisms as if they were your own. What keeps me coming back to watch it again and again, is the familiarity I feel for the people in the film — their troubles concern me as if they were my friends.

And wow, they have troubles. Bruno, Eva and Scheitz are beat up and beat down enough in Berlin that they decide to emigrate to the US, with no assurance of any way to make their living here beyond a letter from Scheitz’ American cousin Clayton vaguely assuring them that life is good in Wisconsin. So they come over, buy a mobile home on credit, and start working and drinking. And gradually (fairly quickly, really) come unglued.

The movie divides into 3 pretty distinctly different sections. The first half, in Berlin, is cramped and claustrophobic, with brightly colored, angular, arresting shots of the city and three characters lost in it. The soundtrack for this portion is provided by Bruno (who was a street musician before and after he was an actor) on his accordion and glockenspiel and a badly out-of-tune piano whom he calls Der Schwartze, his only true friend. The second half is in America, with wide open expanses and a deeply moving soundtrack of Country tunes, mainly repetitive cuts from Chet Atkins’ performance of “The Last Thing on My Mind.” And the third, brief portion is after everything has gone to shit — a cartoonish, slapsticky drive through central Wisconsin looking for a way back to sanity, not finding anything. Here is the brutal final eight minutes of the movie, with soundtrack by Sonny Terry:

Click here to view the embedded video.

“IS THIS REALLY ME!”

(In the spirit of a playlist, City of God might be a really good next movie — the segue from dancing chicken to slaughter yard is if nothing else really striking.)

The Modesto Kid blogs at READIN.