Unyielding Commissioning Has Had About Enough

Smashed - Greg Kot interviews Billy Corgan and more amazing blather comes out of his mouth. There is some interesting material, but with Corgan, you never know when he's going to reverse himself, so it must all be taken with a big grain of salt. Most notable is that he seems to admit that Zeitgeist isn't very good and that they've gotten better through touring. That was my exact premise for why the album was so weak. Still, Billy's always entertaining. My favorite quote:

"We didn’t come back for the cash, we came back to be great again. It made me mad that people thought we’re done, that we don’t have a future. Get out. We don’t want you. We’ve never been that band. That happy band. We picked up where we left off. We’re not the retirement band playing our old hits. ... I don’t give a [expletive] that most of my heroes got lame when they turned 40. I spent most of the last decade thinking about that. Why do they go from this insanely high level of work to diminished echoes of the past? And I think it’s a coziness thing. You do something amazing and you don’t want to lose the crowd that tells you that’s amazing. You’re out in the cold. Well we like to be out in the cold. We’re done with the record business, so we’re free to do whatever I want."

At this point, I feel like you can just throw out any topic to Corgan and he'll go off on an insane rant. For instance, if you were to walk up to him and say, I dunno, "Toaster!" His response would probably be something like:

"D'arcy wanted to take a toaster on tour because she was obsessed with having chunky peanut butter slightly melted on her PB&Js. This was back when we were driving around in a rented van and didn't have anyone's help with anything. James was still dating her and was totally conflicted because he knew it was a dumb [expletive] idea, but it was his girlfriend. So we battled over this [expletive] toaster for three weeks before we left town and it was one of the things the band never came back from. But [expletive] that. I don't want to talk about the past and all of those things. We're a new [expletive] band."

It's that time of year - The Onion's AV Club goes through their picks for the top 30 albums of 2008. Aside from Death Cab for Cutie being too high, it's a pretty solid effort.

It's that time of year, part II - Roger Ebert declares his top 20 movies of 2008. Alas, the move to Buenos Aires means that I've only seen, like, three of these. And I call myself a movie blogger. Anyway, as with just about anything written by Ebert, this one is worth reading.

Strike up the band, turn off the random - Eric over at Scene Stealers lays out his top ten fictional movie bands. Also, in the comment section, I scuffle with someone over the most insignificant of problems. Yay internets!

Denied - Mental Floss has a quiz about actors who were nearly cast in famous roles. It's a tougher quiz because you have to identify the lie instead of the ture statement. I don't know why. 8/10 for me. How'd you do?