In case you’re not familiar, pedal pumping is a car/foot fetish for men who enjoy watching women pump the gas, generally in vintage cars, until they strand themselves by flooding the engine or draining the battery. Um, what? Countless variations on this scenario exist -- girls getting cars stuck in mud, Asians revving mopeds in the desert, stranded pedal pumpers with “stinky work shoes.” According to The Daily Beast, Michelle McGee even confesses to making a few pedal pump videos. So evidently there’s a market for painted hags who look like Skeletor pumping the gas with swastikas on their toes too. Most of the videos make up for their poor production values with sophisticated dialogue like “start, godammit,” “no, I don’t wanna be stuck here,” and “fuck this Mustang.”

A search for the fetish yields over 200,000 Google returns and thousands of YouTube videos. There are hundreds of websites that cater to the fetish including pedaltube.com, asianpedalpumpers.com, pedalteens.com and carstuckgirls.com. [All sort of/not really/but kind of Not Safe For Work?]

The Awl just posted a new piece by yours truly about WinterBand--aka the most important band of our time:

Just when I’d “discovered the magic” of Celtic Thunder and become certain that nothing could more effortlessly succeed at making my ears bleed, a friend sent me a link to North Carolina’s WinterBand--the most disturbing Christian rock band since, well, since ever. If you’re a geriatric, hobo-wizard, Jesus freak with a dirty mop-head hanging from your chin, it’s probably not the best idea to be too critical of others. But that doesn’t stop WinterBand’s namesake, Steve Winter, from attacking Catholics, Muslims, democrats, women and countless others for the intolerable sin of being outside his confusing comfort zone.

"The inevitable I-wanna-be-on-vacation factor makes the pretension harder to dismiss," says Robert Lanham, bestselling author of three books on cultural foibles.

Lanham suggests the key to a successful place-drop is knowledge of which travel war-stories will help and which will hinder -- something he carefully considered after stumbling upon a clothing-optional beach during a recent trip to Mexico.

"It's not going to win me any favours to place-drop that 'John Denver songs sure sound better when performed on a pan flute by leathery nudists in Tulum,' " says Lanham. "And yes, this happened.

In closing his talk, Monks read a popular piece from McSweeney’s entitled “Internet Age Writing and Course Overview” by Robert Lanham. The piece is written as an English class syllabus but satirizes the new state of writing on the Internet, from blogs to Twitter and Facebook. The “course” covered everything from “Week 1: reading is stoopid” to “Week 5: I can haz writing skillz?” and demanded “ENG: 231WR — Facebook Wall Alliteration and Assonance” and “ENG: 232WR — Advanced Tweeting: The Elements of Droll” as prerequisites, among others. Monks said the piece exemplified what McSweeney’s tried to publish: “pop-culture oriented conceptual humor.”

I recently went fishing with Dean Ween which was, well, awesome. From Vice:

Since getting his captain’s license last summer, Mickey Melchiondo, better known as Dean Ween, has been leading fishing tours off Long Beach Island, New Jersey. He’s the kind of skipper who also kindly gives shelter to anglers when there’s room in his trailer the night before and books it all himself through the magic of a lo-fi internet information page, mickeysfishing.com.

Mickey also has his own online fishing series called the Brownie Troop Fishing Show that’s kind of like that old Fishing With John series hosted by actor and musician John Lurie, but without the irony. The Deaner is dead fucking serious about fishing.

“Lurie’s show was more about the guests,” Mickey told me. “Mine is about the fishing.”

So far Mickey’s posted 11 episodes on brownietroopfs.com, a site that also looks like a 16-year-old designed it in 1996. Go there to watch guests like Butthole Surfers’ own Gibby Haynes get blind drunk and say stuff like “I dunno where the fuckin’ stern is.”

Like the rest of the world, I’ve been a fan of Ween since the early 90s, so of course I had to sign up for a Mickey-helmed fishing trip. As a committed landlubber with wobbly sea legs, I was plenty OK when Mickey called and said he’d prefer to surfcast. He had just returned from tour and finds it more relaxing. But at $300 a whirl, you might want to consider making him hoist the anchor instead.

Just hours after the nominations for the 67th annual Golden Globe Awards were announced, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut threatened to filibuster the ceremony should key concessions fail to be met.

"Unless Vince Vaughn gets a nod for his excellent work in Couples Retreat," said Lieberman, "I just cannot support the nominations. Sure, the American people love George Clooney and he was great in Up in the Air," continued Lieberman. "But if Vaughn is overlooked in the Best Actor category, I will have no choice but to filibuster."

Determined to avoid mistakes made by previous administrations, Obama announced on Friday that he'd let Congress be responsible for the language used on the White House's annual holiday card.

"War on Christmas reform is one of the most important issues facing our nation today," said Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. "Should the president send out a card that says 'Merry Christmas?' Should it say 'Happy Holidays?' Does using an image of Frosty the Snowman on the cover become more inclusive if Frosty's wearing a colorful Kwanzaa vest and lighting a Menorah? These are all important questions for Congress to consider," said Gibbs. [...]

Though the war on Christmas debate is far-reaching, the public's attention has culminated around the White House card controversy. Fox News commentator Glenn Beck alleged that Obama is "passing the buck" about the card for religious reasons

"Wake up people, he's a Muslim," said Beck on Fox News, adorned in a hand-knit sweater with a large Santa stitched into its front (pictured).

"I don't even know if they have Christmas in Kenya," said Beck. "If Obama had his way, the White House card would read 'Happy Ramadan' and feature a picture of Santa driving a sleigh strapped with explosives."

Then, the air came out of the tires. Released in 2004, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou cost $60 million and took in $24 million. The more modestly budgeted Darjeeling Limited grossed $12 million in 2007, $5 million less than Rushmore. These were commercial failures, sure, but the critics were also starting to pile on. Phrases like "too precious," "cloying" and "detached" popped up more and more in Anderson's reviews.

In one case of hipster cannibalization, The Hipster Handbook author Robert Lanham, writing for the ubercool Viceland Web site, said of The Life Aquatic: "Wes Anderson doesn't make movies anymore. He creates overly precious paintings inhabited by emasculated man-children who knit sweater vests to the accompaniment of Belle & Sebastian while fantasizing that they're macho enough to skin a caribou with a pocketknife. The set pieces to The Life Aquatic are stunning, but watching this film is like visiting the Natural History Museum. It's a beautiful building, but most of its pleasures are filled with lifeless things."

New York Magazine has a long-overdue cover story on the Brooklyn music scene and the thing is pretty epic. The article discusses the latest wave of a-list indie bands—Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, Antlers, TV on the Radio—and canonizes the Dirty Projectors as "the most risk-taking" group of the crop:

Bitte Orca, it turns out, is Dirty Projectors' real New York album, an urbane and sophisticated outgrowth of the most fertile new-music environment the city has seen since the CBGB heyday of the seventies. It is no coincidence that it came out within months of beloved albums by two giants of the local scene—Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion and Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest. These three bands do not sound alike. Animal Collective layers lush, romantic harmonies on top of kooky, heavily sampled orchestrations, a sound that is equal parts madness and impeccable logic. Grizzly Bear has a much more down-to-earth, folky approach, reveling in the pure pleasure of melodies and the ways they can be turned inside out and upside down. But the three bands all embrace many of the same virtues: fearless sincerity, devotion to craft, agnosticism about digital technology (which is to say, they use it but don't fetishize it), profound musical curiosity, ingenuity at using the human voice as an instrument, and an uncanny ability to reproduce their complex material in live performance (in no small part because this is where the money is).

The author was kind enough to include a quote by yours truly:

Meanwhile, a more studious, art-focused scene was coalescing around a Williamsburg band called TV on the Radio, which released its label debut EP Young Liars in 2003. "They had art-punk, gospel, freak folk‚ everything interesting that was going on in Brooklyn," says Robert Lanham, the freewilliamsburg.com blogger, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1996. "TV on the Radio was just a completely different organism."

And later, they deem FREEwilliamsburg one of the "Five Voices That Matter in the Music Blogosphere." Yahoo!

Critics will of course say this article came a tad late, but the real arguments will revolve around their Brooklyn Top 40 list. (I was happy to see it included zero Hold Steady songs—hipster frat rock). Still, it was nice to see New York paying respect to the amazing music scene that has emerged. As I told the reporter, it's the most exciting time to be making (and listening to) music in the city since the late Eighties.

To be released by Criterion is the benchmark of excellence. Their 25-year-old catalog includes indispensable work from masters including Cocteau, Renoir, Maysles, Kubrick, Cronenberg, Godard, Kurosawa, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Hitchcock, Sturges, and, of course, Fellini.

It’s an impressive list of talent, which is why you can imagine my surprise when I arrived at the director responsible for film #40 in their catalog. Michael Bay. That’s right, Michael Bay, the dung beetle of cinematic vapidity, best known for his unparalleled skill at rolling oversized balls of shit into our nation’s cineplexes. If you’re not familiar with his work--is this possible?--Bay is responsible for Bad Boys I & II, Pearl Harbor, and Transformers, not to mention the career of Megan Fox. (She hates him too). Currently, Bay is remaking The Birds, which I’m assuming will be re-imagined to include a bikini-clad Maxim covergirl who blows away blood-sucking zombie pigeons with a grenade launcher.