Noiseless Chatter Archive

Let me take you on a journey through the past, to a magical time in our great planet’s history. I’ll set the scene for you: A bleary-eyed world disconnects from Facebook for two and a half hours in order to watch a film about Facebook. An animated show called The Simpsons celebrates 20 years on the air, eight and a half of which were worth watching. A young Jessica Simpson releases an album of warbling Christmas standards in the hopes that it will generate enough money that she can do her own holiday shopping. And America comes, at last, to the tragic realization that their new president isn’t a Magic Negro after all…but is rather, disappointingly, just an extremely intelligent leader with his nation’s best interests at heart. Yes, it’s 2010. And no I did not use a time machine to get us here…I simply inserted a dollar into Steam and downloaded World Basketball Manager 2010 , the absolute best 2010 simulator I have ever played. I haven’t played it yet…I’m about to p...

As ever, a few items of business in place of a proper update. BUT READ ON ANYWAY BECAUSE I AM LINKING TO SOME THINGS WHAT I WROTE AND YOU WILL LIKE THEM MAYBE. – Please take my readers’ survey! Click here to do so . Seriously. This will help a lot, and it will give you a chance to let me know what you do and don’t like about this blog as we move into year two. It should take around 5 minutes at most to fill this out, so please, please, please do take the time. Again, that survey can be found here . And it’s as mandatory as a voluntary thing could ever be. – Spam is outta control , and it’s not unique to my site at all. In fact, I’m sure I get a relatively small amount of it by sheer virtue of the fact that nobody knows this site exists. (See? I know it would come in handy!) Anyway, the long and short of it is that I will no longer be sifting through the spam queue to find legitimate comments. I’m sorry for that to be the case, especially since I have found a...

FTC Disclosure: I received a copy of this CD in exchange for review. No money changed hands and all opinions presented here are my own. Every so often I get the opportunity to review releases by smaller, independent or lesser known artists. This is something I’d love to do a lot more of on this blog, moving forward. To that end I was contacted early this year by the band Flicker, who wanted me to review their new album, How Much Are You Willing to Forget? In the meantime I read and reviewed Scott Bishop’s A Soul’s Calling first. Not because I hadn’t listened to this…but because I was finding it genuinely difficult to stop listening to this long enough to write about it. Doing reviews of unknowns on this blog led me to fear that I’d be flooding my reading and listening time with…well, stuff I’d rather not flood that time with. Here, however, Flicker has fenced me into the opposite problem: enjoying something to the point that writing about it feels intimidating. ...

I haven’t written a Valentine’s Day post (that statement will obviously be false by the time you read this), simply because I forgot to. Maybe I could have had some fun with it, but it’s now or never so I thought I’d make a little list of what I thought were some of the most romantic moments in films and television shows that I love. But, as always, I kept getting hung up on one of them…my absolute favorite of them: Tim taking off his microphone. I love The Office . I can’t say that enough. (But I can say it exactly as often as I hasten to add “the UK version” to that statement.) And this moment, this one moment of a minute or two throughout the whole of its 12 standard episodes and two longform Christmas specials, is exactly why I love it. It’s everything about the show that resonated with me, and it’s everything I’ve always wanted television to be. It’s the moment when an already-beaten character lets his guard down. It’s the moment when a man at the bottom reali...

FTC Disclosure: I received a copy of this book in exchange for review. No money changed hands and all opinions presented here are my own. When I was a boy, I used to go camping with my father. During one of these trips, my brother and I decided to take a little walk together. We didn’t think we walked very far, but trying to find our way back to the campsite was difficult. Everything looked the same and the return trip took at least five times as long as the journey out. Ultimately, though, we found our way back. That which you have just read is true. But it is not, I absolutely hasten to add, a story. It might be an anecdote, but I doubt it’d be a very entertaining one. More likely it’s the sort of thing I might bring up with a group of friends, all of whom are exchanging brief, inconsequential narratives on the same theme (being lost, childhood memories, camping with kids…). But even in the right context, it doesn’t become a story . It’s just something that ...

I just wanted to draw your attention to what has to be the most intriguing Kickstarter campaign I’ve seen yet. (It’s certainly the only one I’ve even considered donating to.) Aaron McGruder wants you to support a live-action Uncle Ruckus movie . And you know what? You really should. I haven’t written anything about The Boondocks here yet, but I will. I was a bit wary of the show before it premiered (and the comic strip never did anything for me) but from the moment I gave it a chance I realized that it was so much more than I expected it to be. It’s not the cheap humor of culture clash that I expected it to be…it’s a consistently strong and shockingly smart dissertation on race relations in America. Similar ground has been covered more times than I could ever hope to count in the past, but McGruder’s is an articulate rage, and it’s one that very knowingly has three fingers pointing back at him. That’s more than part of its charm…that’s its identity. McGruder doesn...

It’s my birthday today. I am thirty-two. I hope you don’t mind because there isn’t anything I can do about it. (I’ve tried.) When I started this blog one year ago (it’s my blog’s birthday, too) I very deliberately did not want it to be a record of personal things. I’ve done that before, several times, and it always leads to unfocused rambling that can’t possibly be of interest to anybody other than myself. So I decided to focus on pop-culture instead, and I told myself that if I ever felt the need to use the “personal” tag when categorizing a post, then it didn’t belong on this site. I’ve now broken that rule 16 times. I can’t speak for the others, but I think number 16 is important, because I went through a transformative experience just last month. I’m still processing it. Maybe writing about it, and opening it up for discussion, will make something more clear about it. Maybe not. But I wanted to talk about it anyway, because it’s important to me, and I don’t k...

Hello again! Returning from our post-holiday break we’re picking up our ongoing examination of The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou at exactly the nineteen minute mark. If you’re following along at home you’re…probably a pretty patient human being. This week’s entry might turn out to be a bit short, as I couldn’t find a particularly convenient breaking point…at least not one that comes in a reasonable amount of time. So our abrupt departure coincides with the abrupt arrival of Jane Winslett-Richardson, another new addition to Team Zissou, albeit one whose fresh perspective isn’t filtered through their celebrated past, like Ned’s. Jane’s perspective on Team Zissou is fixed much more solidly in the disappointing present, giving us our our ghosts of Christmas Past and Christmas Present, if we seek to carry on with our comparison of The Life Aquatic and A Christmas Carol . And, yes, we do. With Christmas itself so recently behind us, it’s perhaps worth mentioning a couple o...