A Commonplace Book

The A.V. Club loves lists. Previously a subsection of The Onion, The A.V. Club has since come into its own producing a pretty overwhelming number of critiques and feature articles, most of which come down to lists of songs or movies centered around a specific topic.

To coincide with the release of Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, The A.V. Club put two lists up: “16 Films Without Which Wes Anderson Couldn’t Have Happened” and “10 Films That Couldn’t Have Happened Without Wes Anderson.”

The first list, films predating Wes Anderson, sprung to mind as I finished Jack Nicholson’s Five Easy Pieces. Including it in a list of films necessary for the existence of Wes Anderson might be drawing too strong a thread of causality from one to the next, but I couldn’t help seeing shades of Wes Anderson, especially The Royal Tenenbaums, through the entire movie.

Maybe there’s universal appeal to the story of a son who flees his socially dysfunctional family of post-upper class savants, especially driven away by the impossibly distant father figure at its head, and goes in search of something different, something other. (Monomyth, possibly?)

Even so, the minor characters have quirks and unsettling misbehaviors that add more to the movie than just advancing Nicholson’s reassociation with his family. Does the brother need to be wearing a neck brace throughout? Probably not, and it’s in those quick details that the similarities to Wes Anderson stick out. At the same time those quick little pieces of life infuse the movie with a greater life, and elevate well beyond the other more standard late-60s paeans to the counterculture.

I’m not sure this should be as highly regarded as it is, but it can’t hurt to use this clip here to highlight the movie’s most famous scene:

There were a lot of highlights at Daft Punk’s Keyspan Park show in August. It might be a touch dramatic to describe that night as a gesamtkunstwerk but the robotic duo definitely brought a show that was more than the sum of its parts. One of my favorite moments was their new remix of “Harder Better Faster Stronger”. It was tinged with a more acid synth line and set off by a more trancey bass line. Combined with some well-placed samples from “Around The World” it absolutely tore the roof off. (Granted, there was no roof to begin with, but I think my point is clear.)

Although the artists allowed anyone to come and film the concert, it was insinuated after the tour that there would be no concert DVD. That was a bit of a letdown, but Daft Punk has come through with the next best thing, a live concert album. Right now the lead single, that very remix of “Harder Better Faster Stronger” I was so enamored with, is only available on the French iTunes here. But for people on the cheap, the good folks at Discobelle have it up to check out here: “Harder Better Faster Stronger (Alive 2007)”. The usual music blog disclaimers apply.

(Photo courtesy of Cobrasnatch.)

Boing Boing, fine purveyors of Wonderful Things, recently ran a few paragraphs from Dan Shahin at Hijinx Comics in a post which can be found here. The main thrust of the post/press release was that Dan also operates an online comics retailer, ComicBookShelf.com, which has dedicated 10% of all future sales to charity. Half will go to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and half to the Hero Initiative. That 10% has also been doubled for the entirety of October. (Supporting the Hero Initiative sounds like a great idea to me, although that might simply be due to my having finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay not more than two weeks ago.)

And while the site’s charitable donations are laudable, it was the last paragraph of Dan’s note that really caught my eye:

We carry a wide array of books and our open source bookstore recommendation algorithms let you rate books and get recommendations. Kind of like Netflix does, but for graphic novels.

This is, in a word, awesome.

For movies, books, and other entertainment I usually like the idea of putting your faith in one or two cultural critics who haven’t let you down very much. I’m currently leeching ideas from the superb staff at The AV Club, and if it weren’t for a ringing endorsement from one of their staff writers, I never would have sat down for Friday Night Lights, which ended up as one of my favorite TV shows of the past season.

Despite this, I also like the social-networking or algorithm-based suggestion system. I can think of at least one or two movies which liked and had watched based solely on a Netflix recommendation, so the idea of a comic book recommendation system based on amalgamating other users’ opinions could be awesome. The only catch? There have to be other users.

I’m not sure how long Comicbookshelf.com has had their system up and running, but even most of the more popular comics, or rather the ones I immediately ran to look at, had 2-3 votes at the most. Obviously the market size for comic books is smaller than that of major motion pictures, but I’m hoping that more people will begin to go through the site on an occasional basis and mark up how they feel about each comic book. I’ve been burned once or twice before on comic books that I heard would be good, that looked good, but didn’t end up being good. $14.99 gone like that.

So while I can’t drive any legitimate traffic towards ComicBookShelf.com myself, I can at least add an extra drop in the Google algorithm bucket and include as many key words as possible in this post to drive some comic book fans in that general direction.