I honestly cannot tell you whether these collectibles are at Amoeba because we order them, or because people bring them in at the buy counter, or what. But they are a cult fixture in my office at home, precisely because they go along in strange harmony with my vinyl and my books. Baudelaire gets on fine with Gina Carano. Giono and Brock Lesnar are a handsome pair. Somehow Rulfo's "The Burning Plains" and Diego Sanchez makes sense next to one another.  At the store, they match the random Brobee figures and Ace Freeley's or Misfits figures that are also available. Somehow there are toys that make sense to independent record stores.



The latest series, so the Round 5 website tells me, will feature not only Matt, but superstar Jon "Bones" Jones, who is MMA's Cassius Clay, and the "Outlaw" Dan Hardy, who is an Amoeba fan (check out what he found there in his What's In My Bag? video here) among others.

1) Requiem For A Dream (2000) – Ellen Burstyn is phenomenal (she was nominated for an Oscar in this role as Sara Goldfarb) in this film that centers on addiction and spiraling delusion of four linked characters played by Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly and Marlon Wayans. I’ve said it before: though it’s labeled a drama it’s actually one of the better horror films released in the last decade, and I remember Aronofsky himself saying it was a roller coaster ride that crashes into a brick wall — like that was most moviegoers' idea of fun! Burstyn’s palsied declaration, “I’m going to be on television,” with the refrigerator coming after her is indelible stuff. Each character ends up in the fetal position.

I know enough about war to realize it’s a kind of subconscious global pastime. I don’t pretend to know much more about it, which gives me a sense of defiant joy (which I protect fiercely). But I will say that over the past month, there’s been plenty of wartime montages going through my head and living space. For me, this leads to cool bouts of existentialism and return trips to the refrigerator for microversions of beer. I am not making light—I am just telling you how I deal with hazy information. All of war is hazy. In practice, and in truth. The beer is for the freedoms I’m meant to exhibit.

Anyway, three events occurred in rapid succession for me—I watched The Tillman Story, I received news that Osama Bin Laden was killed a full 24 hours after everyone else, and director/photojournalist Tim Hetherington was killed in Libya as he went about trying to search out the heart of the haziness with a video camera. These are all unrelated events, ranging from semi-recent to entirely recent, with a common denominator being “killed.” All of them are dead—atheist, pantheist, fanatic. All of them were individual parcels of manias, religion, neuroses, convictions and passions. All of them obscured at some point by media. All of them mysteriously driven.

Starting with Pat Tillman, who walked away from a coveted position in the definitive American psyche—an NFL football player for the Arizona Cardinals—to join the Army. Why he did this? Presumably because of a gnawing sense of obligation to live up to his military examples (relatives) in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The Tillman Story goes so far beyond what you’d expect, particularly when you’re not sure what you’re expecting. The documentary is fascinating not for capturing the All-American football player with the mysterious, patriotic bent, but because it demystifies. It plays at the fog of war itself, the underlying agendas, the cover-up of how he was killed, the family of his who won’t stand for it, and the size they become (pebble-like) when up against The Thing (high-ranking, untouchable military officials). It serves as a small, barely visible lantern in the haziness of war, zeroed in on in a courtroom and in the Afghanistan mountains. In effect, it is a story of obfuscation being at heart of things, with Pat Tillman’s face attached as a hero-tinted campaigning tool. The trick the film turns is a co-mingling sense of trust and distrust, the rising and falling ceilings of each. This thing touches on the outposts of what we know we don’t know. Hell, even Jon Krakauer wrote a book about Tillman, Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, that could be shelved in either fiction or nonfiction and be right in both instances.

If you were born in the 1970s, then there's more than a fair chance you're as deeply scarred/inspired by the “Crying Indian” commercial—the most effective public service announcement ever made—as I was. All the Earth Days in the world can't match what you knew at first glance watching that commercial... litterbugs are the worst sort of people and if you didn't give a hoot and went ahead and polluted, well... you'd make the Indian cry. (It turned out the tearful one was an Italian American named Iron Eyes Cody, now buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery . . . oh well, them's the shits.)

These days people need more than a one-minute PSA to get the message about protecting the planet. Between the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, and others, there are currently airing (as in, right this second) a zillion programs that relay the incredible diversity of life on Earth. Of course, the subtext for many is the nasty effect that we humans are having on it. Think it means anything? It does. But I personally still see people chucking things out of their car windows, or discarding plastic sacks directly onto the sidewalk, at which time violent atavistic urges course through me and I see that tear trickling down that sad, betrayed cheek. 

The latest installment of the Harry Potter universe, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, gives one a distinctly sinking feeling. Not because it means there’s only one more episode left, but because one begins to wonder if the films will be able to wrap up the series in a remotely satisfying way.

There’s still a popcorn kind of glee in watching a Harry Potter flick, but of late it’s seemed trickier for the films to capture the whimsy of the books, something present even in the later, darker chapters. Hallows, Part 1, for example, sees the appearance of Mundungus Fletcher (Mundungus being word that means “foul smelling tobacco”), one of the many fantastical character names author J.K. Rowling rolled out. The movies have just seemed to have lost the ability to have fun with them.

It’s been interesting to see them evolve. As Harry has grown older, the stories have become more sinister and ditto the movies, beginning with the genius stroke of allowing Alfonso Cuarón to direct the third installment, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. That film shed the twinkly quality that Chris Columbus brought (appropriately) to the first two flicks for a darker, hipper vibe. Suddenly Harry and company wore street clothes more often and felt more like real, modern tweens. It swerved visually away from the book in the small ways that movies should, without derailing Rowling’s narrative.