In Which It Was A Week That Never Stopped

The Week in Review

Baseball celebrated its centennial in 1969, This Recording will celebrate its own occasion in 2106. It will be a special moment and we can only assure you that we will secure Joyce Carol Oates for that event. She'll be cold and brittle, but it won't feel like that when you see her up close.

In between those hundred long years, we will only think about how blogging was at the beginning. First came Prodigy...then Instapundit. Andrew Sullivan showed up a little later, asking if we'd seen any bears. We referred him to the Prodigy chatroom. It was like that for awhile. You weren't there. You didn't know.

• Almie's two types of guys.
• The Bachelorette made a poor choice among other poor choices.
• We learned important things about the world's biodiversity.

People who don't know how to blog, or how to blog reliably, are intruding on my cyberspace all the time. They write these long essays with no pictures of supermodels in between. Am I supposed to read such drivel? I prefer to spend my time quietly analyzing why Gif Party makes me laugh harder than anything else in the world.

• Michael Cera brought you his mixtape of his favorites.
• Lauren explained (500) Days of Summer better than I ever could.
• Almie thought it was really great you had a boyfriend.

These "pros" don't know how to blog, so some of them podcast, and others of them run Mediate. This is the way of things, you can't get too caught up in it. If the world stays this way, it might work to get angry. But the internet consumes all its inefficiences way better than any other medium ever has.

• Georgia brought you the thrill of kissing her for the first time.
• Ellen Copperfield broke up with her boyfriend in a multitude of ways.
• Molly brought the horror of True Blood to your doorstep.

We return so often to the classics.

• The 100 Greatest Writers of All Time parts 50-26.
• The 100 Greatest Writers of All Time parts 75-51.
• The 100 Greatest Writers of All Time parts 100-76.

You can find last week's Week in Review here.

"Autumn" — Message to Bears (mp3)

"Running Through Woodland" — Message to Bears (mp3)

"Hope" — Message to Bears (mp3)

In Which Hope Is Hope Get Used To It

Whatever Works If You Made Annie Hall

by WILL HUBBARD

In Woody Allen's new movie the main character Boris Yelnikoff tries to commit suicide twice, once landing on a piece of taut canvas and once on a woman that can see into the future. His life is a failure but he's got a great apartment; his friends are aging and moronic but everyone's still getting laid. The emotional stakes are so low that the movie's funniest aspect may be that Allen expects us to care when his protagonist falls in love.

Boris is played as well as could be expected by Larry David as Larry David for Woody Allen. It's hard to know what his character is trying to accomplish by repeating the inane phrase "Whatever works" over and over, though it's easy to understand what the filmmaker is implying—that it's possible to live godlessly if you have a single verbal statement that at least partially explains all human behavior. Like "There is no true God but God." Or "Are You Ready For Some Football?" Forrest Gump was too slow to believe in God but had dozens of these mantras, none of which made much sense either.

Let's take the comparison further, shall we? Both Boris Yelnikoff and Forrest Gump fall in love with a blonde Louisianan who uses them for money while fucking other dudes that either have AIDS or are actors living on boats. Both "tell it like it is." Both do not seem to be able to drive cars. The only difference I can think of is that one is a hyper-smart Jew and the other a retarded Gentile. Is the linear spectrum of intelligence actually a circle, like space-time?

All jokes aside, Allen's Boris does raise hard questions. The Hindu prophets gave us "there is the greatest misery in hope; in hopelessness is the height of bliss," but Boris seems to think he came up with it. He finds life chaotic, black, not simply devoid of hope but opposed to it. On the surface it's brave to write a character like this, but really, Woody, the only way to make him into good comedic cinema is for him to fall in love? One hopes that there could be another way.

And let us all agree that you should never get someone from one state in the South to mimic the accent of another Southern state, which is the crime Allen perpetrates in forcing Evan Rachel Wood, a North Carolinian, to pretend to be from Louisiana. She becomes more tolerable when she starts schtupping Larry David, uhhh Woody Allen, I mean Boris, but her incarnation as Melodie St. Ann Celestine will remain a miscasting for the ages.

Her mother, played by the elegant Patricia Clarkson, presents a more engaging problem—she's both whip-smart and completely benighted, an accurate Southerner to Ms. Wood's synagogue stereotype. As such her metamorphosis, just implausible and funny enough to constitute functional social parody, is one of the film's brighter points.

Larry David doing his best Woody Allen and a twelve year old asian girlI have read that people in the know don't really like this film. The Upper West Side audience with which I viewed it applauded loud and long, but I didn't make much of that reaction since they characterize the bulls-eye of the the film's marketing dartboard. My mother, who was also there with me and is a huge Woody fan, did not seem too impressed. I thought maybe she thought it was too darkly nihlistic, but she said later that it was Larry David that irked her, in a "two hour dose" rather than the thirty-minutes-broken-by-commercials one she's used to.

I thought to myself, hmmm. A Southern lady who watches Curb Your Enthusiasm, not exactly a snug-fitting peg in the Woody Allen's cosmology. But again, here as literally anywhere else, whatever works.

Will Hubbard is the executive editor of This Recording. He tumbls right here.

You can visit the This Recording tumblr here, and the This Recording twitter here.

"You Have Been Loved" - George Michael (mp3)

"Kissing a Fool" - George Michael (mp3)

"I Can't Make You Love Me" - George Michael (mp3)