* Well this was fun: Travis Greenwood, of the genuinely excellent retro-movie-oriented t-shirt company Found Item Clothing, interviewed me about t-shirts for the Found Item blog. The ostensible focus is my t-shirt tumblr Fuck Yeah, T-Shirts, but it’s sort of a “towards a philosophy of the t-shirt” kinda deal. Before I sat down to answer Travis’s questions I’m not sure I ever thought through my love of t-shirts any further than “gosh, I love t-shirts,” so you’re getting some real first-draft-of-history stuff here in terms of me feeling out what makes a good t-shirt and what explains my affinity for them.

* Big Questions #15 is on its way! Anders Nilsen, best of his generation.

* Just this week I received the blu-ray of Michael Mann’s Heat as a gift and was surprised to discover a blurb on the back cover noting that the director had somehow tweaked the content of the film for this release. So I was struck by the lede for Matt Zoller Seitz’s piece on “director’s cuts” and their recut brethren for Salon, which is basically a plea to Mann to stop messing with his movies. Anyway, the piece is an argument-starter (to my mind especially when Seitz argues that Apocalypse Now Redux is less dreamlike than the original version). Check it out.

* Speaking of argument-starters, Tom Ewing presents an alphabetical list of rock-critic arguments. One of the list’s most interesting points is its discussion of the dialectic between “guilty pleasure” and “if it gives you pleasure, why feel guilty?”:

The “no such thing as a guilty pleasure” line ends up at a kind of naturism of pop, where the happiest state of being is to display one’s tastes unaltered to the world. But the barriers to naturism aren’t just shame and poor body image, it’s also that clothes are awesome and look great. Performing taste– played-up guilt and all– is as delightful and meaningful as dressing well and makes the world a more colorful place.

I think Ewing is simply overstating the need for guilt as a component of taste. Rejecting the concept of “guilty pleasure” isn’t a question of rejecting rejection–I loudly and proudly reject art all the livelong blog-day. Just by way of a for instance, Rob Sheffield’s gushing over “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” and “Tik Tok”–two songs constructed entirely of clumsily pandering cliches, the latter at least dubiously distinguished by the apparent aim of sounding annoying on purpose–in his epic interview with Matthew Perpetua this week made me want to smash Brett Michaels’s acoustic guitar over Ke$ha’s head like a felonious Bluto Blutarski, just by way of a for instance. My taste still has very clearly defined boundaries; they’re simply not defined by my reaction to the notion of what I’m “supposed” to like or dislike and subsequently feeling bad about the places where I don’t measure up. As a critic, consumer, and occasional maker of art, I don’t get anything whatsoever out of reacting to how I supposedly “should” be reacting. Rejecting “guilty pleasure” is simply exerting ownership over the entirety of your taste. To continue with Tom’s metaphor, it’s not about not wearing clothes, it’s about approaching art without asking “Does this song make my butt look fat?” (I understand that this could be a pose in and of itself, like how whatsisname in Singles‘ “thing” was “not having a thing”–but wouldn’t you rather your pose not involve dancing between other people’s raindrops?)

* Just some fine writing on the pleasures and perils of genre from Tom Spurgeon in his review of an otherwise unremarkable comic.

* The very talented superhero artist David Aja walks us through several covers for the “Seven Capital Cities of Heaven” arc from The Immortal Iron Fist, including one that was never used. Neat, thoughtful stuff.

* Kate Beaton kills political cartoons dead. They stink!

* Speaking of politics, I spent the bulk of this week completely unplugged from the internet, with checking in on what the Closed Caption Comics crew was up to and deleting spam comments the only exceptions. It’s difficult to describe how dispiriting playing catch-up with political blogs since yesterday afternoon has been. Since my shameful willingness to be duped by bloodthirsty fools and still more shameful willingness to aid them in duping others placed me on the wrong side of the Iraq War debate, I can therefore safely say that I’ve found nothing more upsetting in American politics since the dawn of my political sentience than the current campaign of naked bigotry against Muslims, wholeheartedly embraced by an entire political party and abetted and encouraged by a variety of prominent bigots and cowards in its supposed opposition. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Josh Marshall have been despairingly eloquent about this.

* I think this season of True Blood is the best so far, and I think this Rolling Stone cover is the best True Blood thing ever. True Blood is exactly what we want, right? Pervy sex, disgusting violence, fuck the squares? (Via Jason Adams.)

* I liked the Weezer tour based on their two good albums better back when I first saw it–when their two good albums were their two only albums.

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