Without exaggeration or hyperbole, Liam Lynch’s homemade show Lynchland is one of my favorite things on the internet. Great fun, catchy songs, homebrew greenscreen, and self-rendered effects make for far more entertaining viewing than virtually any corporate-produced network show.
The downside to Lynch doing it all himself, of course, is that new episodes can be few and far between, especially when the show has to take a backseat to paying work. It’s been a long dry spell lately, but finally Lynchland Episode 23 is up at http://liamlynch.net–haven’t watched it yet, but with guest appearances by Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz (both of Look Around You) you can bet it’ll be first in the queue tonight. And hey, if you haven’t seen Lynchland before, it’s all new to you: scroll down to the bottom of the podcasts page and start at the top (maybe skip the Viewer Mail episodes).
I spent last weekend catching up on a bunch of music-related video stuff that I’d been meaning to get around to for one reason or another. Your results may vary.
I don’t really know how I avoided seeing 1991: The Year Punk Broke until now, as I recall liking the music Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr., the Ramones, et al made around that time and all. I’d think someone in my peer group would have insisted at one time or another. After viewing, however, I understand why word-of-mouth never recommended this for consumption: the movie is basically the worst piece of crap possible. It’s redeemed not even slightly by its inclusion of decent performance footage of the bands playing, due to shitty sound. Also, every time Thurston Moore talks on camera any decent person would want to punch him and not stop until he stops talking, he’s so goddamn annoying. This is a waste of even a fan’s time. I made it through to the end though, yay me.
Conversely, The Devil and Daniel Johnston was thoroughly enjoyable and recommended viewing for pretty much anyone. It’s a great story of which I only knew about half, as it turns out, and previous familiarity with the work of Daniel isn’t necessary — frankly the less familiar with him you are, the more surprising the film would probably be. Well-done on every level, not just as a music-related artifact: I’d recommend this wholeheartedly to anyone who enjoyed American Splendor, for example.
Thurston Moore also appears onscreen in Pavement’s Slow Century, afairly standard here’s-the-story-and-some-performance-footage recap of the band’s history. Pavement wasn’t the kind of band that lent itself to wacky tour antics or legendary rumors, so there isn’t much here in the way of big shocker moments — I imagine this would be pretty hard to get through if you didn’t already have an interest in the music of Pavement, so non-fans should probably skip this one. I pretty much enjoyed it throughout, though I can’t imagine I’ll be going back to rewatch it anytime soon.
The Sex Pistols’ There’ll Always Be An England is their first legitimate live performance video, which seems pretty surprising considering the amount of live Pistols performance footage I’ve seen over the years. Shot in London, basically There’ll Always Be An England and the bonus documentary The Knowledge both feature middle-aged men revisiting the sights, sounds, and locations of their childhoods. Not bad, but not great — if you didn’t like the live reunion album Filthy Lucre you won’t like this either, and I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone who’s not a Pistols aficionado. Way too many random shots of people in the crowd mouthing the words to the tunes, too, cut that shit out, director Julien Temple. I also watched a bootleg of the Pistols’ “last” show in San Fransisco, 1978, and the comparison was illuminating: young guys playing songs badly vs. older men plodding through the same songs nearly 30 years on. One thing is constant throughout though, and that’s that John Lydon/Johnny Rotten is always pretty entertaining no matter what else happens to be going on. Temple’s The Filth and The Fury remainsthe definitive Pistols video, though.
Pistols guitarist Steve Jones also pops up in Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, a mostly loving tribute to the deceased Clash leader (also by Temple — though sporting a somewhat contradictory title to the Pistols release) that does us the service of not glossing over Strummer’s willingness to discard friends in order to conform with punk orthodoxy, his long post-Clash fallow period, or his ongoing anxiety over coming from less-than-impoverished roots. The contrived “campfire setting for all the interviews” gimmick is a little over-the-top corny and pretentious all at the same time, and whenever a famous face pops up onscreen (Johnny Depp, John Cusack, Martin Scorsese) you know they’re just going to yammer some intolerable bullshit with no bearing on reality whatsoever, but there’s a surprising amount of documentation of even the earliest days of the Clash here and it’s mostly told in Joe’s own words thanks to extensive use of interview recordings and his radio show broadcasts. Falls short of wide Devil and Daniel Johnston-type appeal, but nice for anyone who ever even kinda liked the Clash.
The Ultimate Revenge, featuring vintage early 80’s performances by Venom, Slayer, and Exodus, is basically just intertwined excerpts of Venom, Slayer, and Exodus playing at Studio 54 (the titular ‘revenge’ is on disco, to show you just how much this thing is a product of its time) along with some execrable interview footage. Slayer is pretty awesome, Exodus is pretty bad but with surprisingly good guitar leads, Venom is kinda corny but enjoyably so in that over-the-top classic metal way. Let’s face it though, there’s no need for caveats here — unless you’re already way into classic mid-80s metal you’re not even gonna think about trying to track this one down.
In these doldrums of summer, one really notices how slim and shallow the network’s offerings are; in the blush of publicity they’re great at making it appear something’s happening when nothing really is, but eventually one realizes it’s just new iterations of the same old tired soaps, game shows, overwrought “dramas”, and hacky sitcoms. Howard TV is something perhaps only Stern (or Oprah, his counterpart for the non-Y-chromosome segment of the population) could pull off, in that it’s essentially an entire channel devoted to the universe of Stern, his radio show, and the various characters that orbit within its gravity. Between the four-day-a-week Howard Stern morning radio show itself, the followup Wrap-Up Show, the behind-the-scenes activities of the Stern staffers, the ongoing circus that follows the show’s Wack Pack of hangers-on, and material drawn from the vault of videotapes originally shot during the time Stern was on the E! channel, there’s a near-constant flow of new, high-quality programming on Howard TV — I’d estimate there’s at least an average of around five hours of new content added per week.
The real downfall of Howard TV lies in its limited distribution. Thus far the material produced for On Demand remains solely available there, which is all well and good if you happen to be on one of the cable systems that carries In Demand Networks, but if not, well, you’re pretty much SOL. Especially now that Howard TV is branching out into producing more original programming (such as its two bowling shows and the Miss Howard Stern reality show), the service is perfect for Itunes video sales: it’s easy to imagine Stern fans loading up their ipods with the latest Howard TV content each morning for the subway ride into work, and the fact that this or another similar revenue stream isn’t being capitalized upon is ludicrous. It’s the problem Howard has (so far more-or-less successfully) been combating since leaving terrestrial radio for satellite: sure, the show is great, but do people know? If a person has neither satellite radio nor In Demand-enabled cable television (nor the proclivity towards filesharing), then chances are they don’t. But if they could get a taste of what’s going on at Sirius and Howard TV on Itunes, it could lead them into purchasing more, perhaps regularly, and maybe even signing up for a satellite radio subscription — you know, once all the Sirius/XM merger issues are settled. Without this additional avenue for revenue or exposure, the Stern circus will likely stay out sight and out of mind of most who don’t already number themselves among the converted.
Internet advertising can be a confusing labyrinth to navigate at the best of times, but here at aaronpoehler.com I like to keep things simple. Basically, you’ll notice that on nearly all posts and pages at aaronpoehler.com there is a single banner ad. That banner ad is managed through Project Wonderful, which allows advertisers to bid what they think the ad space is worth and what they’re willing to pay per day. The highest bidder at any given time has their ad displayed sitewide here, across both blog pages and static website pages such as the vault of music reviews, so if your ad is the winning one at any given time, your ad will be seen by visitors to virtually all pages on this site (the number of which is in the hundreds right now). Advertisers are charged only for the amount of time their ads are displayed and there are no per-click charges, so it generally ends up being a good deal for all concerned — unlike many internet ad schemes which are easily defrauded through false clicks, which is why I’ve stuck with Project Wonderful above AdBrite or Google Adsense. Plus, it’s nice for me that I generally find the ads placed through Project Wonderful are interesting links to cool stuff I haven’t heard of, rather than the untargeted spammy links I seemed to get with the other services.
So if you’ve got a website, product or service you’d like to advertise here, go to http://www.projectwonderful.com/advertisehere.php?id=15866&type=1 and sign up today. There are a bunch of interesting demographic data and site statistics there for your perusal as well, and of course, right below these words should be an ad banner by the current highest bidder. I wonder who it is right now?
I wasn’t too sure what to expect from this direct-to-DVD offering going in, as the stated intentions of the project seemed somewhat at cross purposes, combining influences and creative forces from many different areas — comics, animation, and film — in such a way that ‘too many cooks’ syndrome could easily have been a fatal flaw. Ostensibly, Batman: Gotham Knight bridges the gap between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight and is thus set in that continuity, but with scripts contributed by comics writers and then handed over to a variety of Japanese animators to render as they saw fit I was worried the end product would be disjointed beyond comprehension. Fortunately, while the individual episodes stand alone there is enough of a throughline connecting them to keep the viewing experience fairly cohesive despite the fact that Bruce Wayne looks like a teenage Asian boy in one episode and a 30 year old Caucasian man in the next. Over the property’s 70 year history the Batman has stood up to hundreds of differing interpretations, so none of the liberties taken here were too disturbing, though a few of the stylistic choices do beggar explanation, and the welcome presence of Kevin Conroy as the voice of the Dark Knight throughout was an absolute comfort. While not completely satisfying as a piece unto itself, many of Gotham Knight’s segments are pleasantly successful and overall the work is of a piece with the dark tone of Nolan’s movies. This isn’t a must-buy by any means, and nowhere near the quality of DC’s recent awesome animated offering The New Frontier, but it’s a worthwhile attempt to try something different with Batman and company and a good way for viewers to get themselves good and hyped for the impending premiere of The Dark Knight itself.
This new documentary covering the brief history of the incredibly influential Joy Division should really come in a two-pack with Control, the fictionalized treatment of the same material, as the two films contain a strikingly small amount of overlap. Control, based on Ian Curtis’ widow’s book Touching From A Distance, covers the internal stresses brought about in the perfect storm created by Ian’s marriage, work, sickness, and ambitions, while Joy Division (really, couldn’t we just have snagged another JD song for the title to make it less confusing and more search-optimizable?) fleshes out the story with a surprising amount of actual performance footage of the band and lengthy interviews with the surviving band members and hangers-on, including Curtis’ former mistress — probably accounting for Deborah Curtis being represented here only by quotes taken from Touching From A Distance. Still, it hardly matters, knowing that side of the story is aptly covered in Control. Director Grant Gee (Radiohead’s Meeting People Is Easy) even makes many similar stylistic choices as Anton Corbijn did in Control — no shortage of black-and-white images of crumbling industrial Manchester here, kids! While it’s a shame producer Martin Hannett was unavailable for comment due to premature decease, Tony Wilson’s lively presence here belies the rapidity with which his own mortality was approaching, and sleeve designer Peter Saville lightens up the proceedings markedly with his self-effacing, amusing commentary. While one might wish for a slightly more complete film to tell the entire story, it’s somehow fitting that the Joy Division story is split between the two incomplete halves of Control and Joy Division, and it’s hard to imagine anyone who enjoyed one not also appreciating the other.
Also newly issued to coincide with the recent spurt of interest in the band is the new compilation The Best of Joy Division. In the wake of the multiple rounds of collections of the band’s work that have come out over the past 25+ years there’s obviously not much new here (this is a band that only put out two actual albums during their existence, after all), but it’s a pretty unassailable 14-track selection and a good starter for anyone not already familiar with the band’s work — although it really could have been sequenced by simply putting Unknown Pleasures, Closer, and Substance into a CD changer and pressing ’shuffle.’ The UK edition does come with a bonus disc collecting the band’s complete recordings for the BBC, including both of their Peel Sessions, but if you’ve already got everything on disc one and don’t feel the need to buy it again for the nice package you could simply get the single-disc collection The Complete BBC Recordings instead, as the contents are identical.
The Onion Movie (2008): I’d heard rumors of The Onion being involved in a movie project several years ago, which never sounded like a great idea considering the wit of the average Onion article tends to begin and end with the headline — rare is the extended Onion piece which doesn’t swiftly beat a good joke into the ground, so how could they possible fill 90 minutes? It was hardly surprising when the project was shelved, which is part of why it’s so surprising to see it finally arrive unheralded in direct-to-DVD form. Some of the gags betray the film’s long gestation period, most notably some horribly dated bits riffing on once-virginal Britney Spears making sexually explicit music aimed at the pre-teen market — though it should be noted that these jokes would have been well past their sell-by date even in 2003, when this was reportedly shot (it’s really not good when even Mad TV beats you to the gag). A few aspects of the final project do come off somewhat unfinished, but for the most part The Onion Movie holds up far better than anyone would have any reason to expect, with many genuinely laugh-out-loud funny moments. The attempts at weaving some sort of coherent throughline into the movie via a thin plot about corporate influence on the news are dead weight (take the time during these segments to go to the bathroom or fix a snack without bothering to press pause; unless you’ve seen Network at least twice, you won’t care at all) and every instance in which a joke is repeated via a callback is one reuse of material too many, but the short-attention-span crowd should find The Onion Movie contains a high enough ratio of hits to misses to be worthwhile. If nothing else, it’s all worth it for the batter-dipped kitties.
A month or two ago, while we were still in the midst of the recent Writers’ Guild strike, a guest and I spent an entire evening watching TV and at the end of the night I realized we’d watched nothing but BBC material, VHS rips of great shows that were never released on DVD (I’m looking at you, Larry Sanders Show), and internet podcast shows. I also realized that barring few exceptions, American broadcast TV is pretty disposable. Despite the long downtime I never even bothered to get back to Heroes (the lackluster Season 1 finale and underwhelming reviews of Season 2 probably had something to do with that), and even since the strike was settled I still haven’t gone back to my Daily Show & Colbert Report habit–but I didn’t replace it in the rotation with Tom Green’s House Tonight, either. Not too many of the various podcasts or internet shows I try out bring me back regularly, I’m afraid, though I admit that’s an elusive feat even at the best of times.
The one true internet podcast show that always makes it into my playlist is Liam Lynch’s Lynchland, which carries on the spirit (and sometime the characters) of his old MTV puppet show Sifl & Olly but replaces the ultra-low budget S&O sock puppet gestalt with homebrew bluescreening and digital animation. One never knows what combination of self-documentation, original music videos, odd cartoon scenarios, and behind-the-scenes looks at Lynch’s paid work will comprise a Lynchland episode, but I’ve come to trust that no matter what it’ll be entertaining. I haven’t watched the latest episode (#20) yet, but it’ll definitely be at the top of my queue this evening whenever I have a chance to sit down on the couch for a few minutes.
In contrast, last week’s Lost sits waiting for me to get around to it. Somehow I suspect whatever shocking events are contained within will wait until then.
Below you may input your name and email address to receive announcements when there are new developments on AaronPoehler.com. I vow not to deluge you with forwarded chain letters and tasteless jokes.
Without exaggeration or hyperbole, Liam Lynch’s homemade show Lynchland is one of my favorite things on the internet. Great fun, catchy songs, homebrew greenscreen, and self-rendered effects make for far more entertaining viewing than virtually any corporate-produced network show.
I spent last weekend catching up on a bunch of music-related video stuff that I’d been meaning to get around to for one reason or another. Your results may vary.
In these doldrums of summer, one really notices how slim and shallow the network’s offerings are; in the blush of publicity they’re great at making it appear something’s happening when nothing really is, but eventually one realizes it’s just new iterations of the same old tired soaps, game shows, overwrought “dramas”, and hacky sitcoms. 
Internet advertising can be a confusing labyrinth to navigate at the best of times, but here at aaronpoehler.com I like to keep things simple. Basically, you’ll notice that on nearly all posts and pages at aaronpoehler.com there is a single banner ad. That banner ad is managed through 
I wasn’t too sure what to expect from this direct-to-DVD offering going in, as the stated intentions of the project seemed somewhat at cross purposes, combining influences and creative forces from many different areas — comics, animation, and film — in such a way that ‘too many cooks’ syndrome could easily have been a fatal flaw. Ostensibly, Batman: Gotham Knight bridges the gap between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight and is thus set in that continuity, but with scripts contributed by comics writers and then handed over to a variety of Japanese animators to render as they saw fit I was worried the end product would be disjointed beyond comprehension. Fortunately, while the individual episodes stand alone there is enough of a throughline connecting them to keep the viewing experience fairly cohesive despite the fact that Bruce Wayne looks like a teenage Asian boy in one episode and a 30 year old Caucasian man in the next. Over the property’s 70 year history the Batman has stood up to hundreds of differing interpretations, so none of the liberties taken here were too disturbing, though a few of the stylistic choices do beggar explanation, and the welcome presence of Kevin Conroy as the voice of the Dark Knight throughout was an absolute comfort. While not completely satisfying as a piece unto itself, many of Gotham Knight’s segments are pleasantly successful and overall the work is of a piece with the dark tone of Nolan’s movies. This isn’t a must-buy by any means, and nowhere near the quality of DC’s recent awesome animated offering The New Frontier, but it’s a worthwhile attempt to try something different with Batman and company and a good way for viewers to get themselves good and hyped for the impending premiere of The Dark Knight itself.
This new documentary covering the brief history of the incredibly influential Joy Division should really come in a two-pack with Control, the fictionalized treatment of the same material, as the two films contain a strikingly small amount of overlap. Control, based on Ian Curtis’ widow’s book Touching From A Distance, covers the internal stresses brought about in the perfect storm created by Ian’s marriage, work, sickness, and ambitions, while Joy Division (really, couldn’t we just have snagged another JD song for the title to make it less confusing and more search-optimizable?) fleshes out the story with a surprising amount of actual performance footage of the band and lengthy interviews with the surviving band members and hangers-on, including Curtis’ former mistress — probably accounting for Deborah Curtis being represented here only by quotes taken from Touching From A Distance. Still, it hardly matters, knowing that side of the story is aptly covered in Control. Director Grant Gee (Radiohead’s Meeting People Is Easy) even makes many similar stylistic choices as Anton Corbijn did in Control — no shortage of black-and-white images of crumbling industrial Manchester here, kids! While it’s a shame producer Martin Hannett was unavailable for comment due to premature decease, Tony Wilson’s lively presence here belies the rapidity with which his own mortality was approaching, and sleeve designer Peter Saville lightens up the proceedings markedly with his self-effacing, amusing commentary. While one might wish for a slightly more complete film to tell the entire story, it’s somehow fitting that the Joy Division story is split between the two incomplete halves of Control and Joy Division, and it’s hard to imagine anyone who enjoyed one not also appreciating the other.
Also newly issued to coincide with the recent spurt of interest in the band is the new compilation The Best of Joy Division. In the wake of the multiple rounds of collections of the band’s work that have come out over the past 25+ years there’s obviously not much new here (this is a band that only put out two actual albums during their existence, after all), but it’s a pretty unassailable 14-track selection and a good starter for anyone not already familiar with the band’s work — although it really could have been sequenced by simply putting Unknown Pleasures, Closer, and Substance into a CD changer and pressing ’shuffle.’ The UK edition does come with a bonus disc collecting the band’s complete recordings for the BBC, including both of their Peel Sessions, but if you’ve already got everything on disc one and don’t feel the need to buy it again for the nice package you could simply get the single-disc collection The Complete BBC Recordings instead, as the contents are identical.
The Onion Movie (2008): I’d heard rumors of The Onion being involved in a movie project several years ago, which never sounded like a great idea considering the wit of the average Onion article tends to begin and end with the headline — rare is the extended Onion piece which doesn’t swiftly beat a good joke into the ground, so how could they possible fill 90 minutes? It was hardly surprising when the project was shelved, which is part of why it’s so surprising to see it finally arrive unheralded in direct-to-DVD form. Some of the gags betray the film’s long gestation period, most notably some horribly dated bits riffing on once-virginal Britney Spears making sexually explicit music aimed at the pre-teen market — though it should be noted that these jokes would have been well past their sell-by date even in 2003, when this was reportedly shot (it’s really not good when even Mad TV beats you to the gag). A few aspects of the final project do come off somewhat unfinished, but for the most part The Onion Movie holds up far better than anyone would have any reason to expect, with many genuinely laugh-out-loud funny moments. The attempts at weaving some sort of coherent throughline into the movie via a thin plot about corporate influence on the news are dead weight (take the time during these segments to go to the bathroom or fix a snack without bothering to press pause; unless you’ve seen Network at least twice, you won’t care at all) and every instance in which a joke is repeated via a callback is one reuse of material too many, but the short-attention-span crowd should find The Onion Movie contains a high enough ratio of hits to misses to be worthwhile. If nothing else, it’s all worth it for the batter-dipped kitties.