"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
When there’s nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.
Today’s song is “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” by Stars. I seem to think I discovered the song, like a lot of great music, through Radio Paradise, and it was only much later that I saw the great video for it below.
“Grown Ups†is a pleasant, genial, good-hearted, sometimes icky comedy that’s like spending a weekend with well-meaning people you don’t want to see again any time real soon.
I missed my train this morning, so I had to stand around in the sweltering heat waiting for the next one fifteen minutes later. I live close enough to the train station that I could have walked back home, but that just seemed silly. Why walk home, stand around for five minutes, then walk back — and run the risk of missing the next train, too?
I wanted to get to the office earlier rather than later since we were having a production meeting (that is, a meeting with the head of production who was here for a day in the New York office) starting at 9:30. The meeting lasted until almost noon, and I had a couple of things I actually wanted to get accomplished before the end of the day.
And I think I did. I’m a little amazed that tomorrow is Thursday, especially since, for a couple of hours today, I was for some reason convinced it was still only Tuesday. The week hasn’t exactly gone by fast, but it’s somehow more than half over.
I may have to come up with some better criteria for these choices than the fact that they happen to come up on my iPod shuffle, but that’s what this one did, first thing this morning. It’s Laura Marling’s “My Manic & I,” which is a weird way to kick off the day. (“Morning is mocking me.”) Below is a live version, a little less polished than the official version (which has embedding disabled), but still pretty damn terrific.
This was television made by consummate professionals who were pretty sure no one was ever going to see it, and it was somehow gloriously awful and compellingly watchable all at once.
He does, of course, stop short of saying the sitcom ever got good.