This is kind of old, but it’s still pretty good. The Civil Wars in a Tiny Desk Concert, folks. Enjoy!

First a few of Laura Shigihara playing game music. A note about the Mario 2 one, she arranged it when she was eight. EIGHT! ...

Kees van Dijkhuizen has become my favorite person to follow on Youtube. His latest in the “Films of” series focuses on English director Guy Ritchie, whose films taught me that Englishmen can be scary gangsters too. Hope you enjoy the vid as much as I did. ...

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“378” caption=“It’s as weird and creepy as it looks.”] [/caption] Idol culture is weird. I mean, bizarre. It only just hit me while I was watching the opening of Perfect Blue that the main fans of these idol groups are men! The shitty, poppy, stupid J-Pop that is peddled throughout Japan by gaggles of over-cute women doing choreographed dances have male audiences. It’s so weird. I mean, in the states we have guys who perv over girl groups and female artists, but none of them would admit to being “fans”. ...

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“The titular character”] [/caption] I take great joy in watching the arc of an auteur’s style and career. Take Satoshi Kon. He’s had a relatively sparse directorial career that was tragically cut short due to pancreatic cancer, but there is a clear thread running through his work that I can trace from Perfect Blue all the way to Paprika (I’ve still yet to see Perfect Blue or Tokyo Godfathers, but they’re high on my list). Like Paranoia Agent before it, Paprika deals heavily with the subconscious/unconscious mind while also tying in the cinema history/construction of Millennium Actress. Dreams, reality, and obsession were also major themes of Perfect Blue, but I can’t speak to that without having seen it. ...

NPR’s Alt Latino has revolutionized my music space and I love it. I get all kinds of acts that aren’t even mainstream in the Latino community, like Gaby Moreno, who has a stellar voice (she really flaunts it in the third song). Enjoy.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Music joins WIBD!”] [/caption] Well, “music” of a sort. I have a last.fm thing that is linked to my tumblr that you can use to see what I’ve been listening to, artist-wise. No, unless a new awesome album comes out, the point of this is to talk about audio programming I’ve been listening to. Movies Morning Glory - This one came off the girlfriend’s Netflix queue. I had some interest in seeing it myself, but I didn’t realize just how much of a chicklit movie it was. It’s not actually based on a chicklit book, but I still got that vibe. Really didn’t do it for me. Also: full bangs are terrible. ...

A smart, talented, accomplished writer-actor like Myers spending years meticulously creating, rehearsing, and refining an obnoxious one-note cartoon like Guru Pitka is a like a group of brilliant scientists working around the clock for a decade to build a malfunctioning fart machine: a surreal waste of time, energy and manpower. -Nathan Rabin. " My Year Of Flops, Kicking A Man While He’s Down Case File #132: The Love Guru" I’ve heard over and over again that I should be reading Nathan Rabin’s entries in My Year Of Flops on The A.V. Club and I finally checked it out. Pretty neat to read measured, researched insights into terrible movies. If you like movies, check some of these out. ...

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“This is not my car, but my passenger window looks a lot like this.”] [/caption] Well…my car was broken into. Passenger side window smashed in and GPS/cell phone charger stolen. Good times…

There was no real-life book similar to Skeeter’s magnum opus; it’s a fictional flourish that feels like a college-educated white liberal’s wish-fulfillment fantasy of how she would have conducted herself had she been time-warped back to the civil rights era. I wouldn’t have just stood by and let it happen. I would have done something! Something brave! This silliness reminded me, perversely enough, of an old Eddie Murphy routine tweaking macho black males’ fantasies of how they would have behaved if they’d lived in the pre-Civil War South: “Brothers act like they couldn’t have been slaves back 200 years ago … ‘I wish I was a slave! I would f— somebody up!’” ...