Some Thoughts on a Saturday with Shinerbock

The commentaries John Carpenter tapes for his DVDs are object lessons in how commentaries should always go. He always tells you where a certain scene was filmed – very cool shit for obsessives like me who live for location shots in Los Angeles – and he always talks about the actors onscreen, how they got the part, and what happened with them while filming. You know, interesting stuff. For truly appallingly awful DVD commentaries, check out Top Secret or any of the Star Trek movies. Holy FUCK. John Carpenter hasn’t made a decent film in over 20 years, but god bless ‘em for his commentaries.





Coleen Gray is one of the most beautiful actresses of all time. Like Jean Harlow, she had that innocent, girl-next-door quality, but her incandescent beauty makes any film she's in worth your time. I pride myself on my independence, but Christ, if Coleen Gray told me to jump, my only question would be, how high? Hence my regularly placing Nightmare Alley in my DVD player. The Phantom Planet should be one of those pieces of crap where you think, shit, I’ll never get those 80 minutes back, but instead, because of Coleen Gray, you wish it was 240 more minutes. And despite what judgemental, snobbish movie critics everywhere say, The Leech Woman friggin’ rules, baby. Get with the program, folks.


I was driving the 900 miles back from Los Angeles lately, having finally achieved some calm, listening to a Who mix I’d made. Despite its heavy-handedness, I had thrown Imagine a Man into the mix for shits and giggles. It's pretty far from what I consider top-notch Who, but when you’re driving through the desert on a clear day, the guitar hooks you in, and that second verse shines blindingly, poetically, and profoundly. (“Imagine events,
 that occur everyday, 
like a shooting or raping, or a simple act of deceit... 

Imagine a past 
that you wish you had lived,
 full of heroes and villains and fools”). Thanks, Pete.



Lester Bangs on the albums that turned him onto music as a boy: “All these were milestones, each one fried my brain a little further, especially the experience of the first few listenings to a record so total, so mind-twisting, that you authentically can say you’ll never be quite the same again… They’re events you remember all your life, like your first real orgasm. And the whole purpose of the absurd, mechanically persistent involvement with recorded music is the pursuit of that priceless moment. So it’s not exactly that records might unhinge the mind, but rather that if anything is going to drive you up the wall it might as well be a record. Because the best music is strong and guides and cleanses and is life itself.” The entire Bible doesn’t make as much sense to me as those 116 words.