WEEKLY TOP 10: I AM BOURNE AGAIN

10. Of course I'm talking about the Bourne Bridge that leads into Cape Cod. I always forget how nice the Cape is until I go there and dread having to come back home. The house my friend Kerry's parents rented in Chatham was nice, but the house (uhm, the Spillane compound) I visited in Hyannis, featuring a huge deck with ocean views, was astonishing. I have to find a job out there, maybe scraping barnacles off of billionaires' yachts or something.

9. I'm done with comic book superhero movies. It's not as though I was a big fan to begin with, but I'm officially sick of them. Sure, I liked Spiderman, which was surprising because I never really liked any of the previous incarnations. But I was thoroughly non-plussed by Spiderman 2 (which everyone else loved), so I have just decided to avoid anything and everything having to do with the newest movies about Batman, Superman, X-Men, The 4 Fantastic Men, or whomever. Enough already!

8. Probably nobody cares, but here's a video highlight of the Bad Art Auction I was at a few weeks ago. If you don't like that, here's a blooper reel of Zach's "twin brother" Seth Galifianakis being interviewed by Brian Unger (the actual interview is here). If that doesn't strike you as funny, well, I guess you're not a Zach fan.

7. Flooding cripples the entire NYC transit system! A tornado rips through Brooklyn! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!

6. National Treasure was one of the most preposterous and inane movies I've seen in quite sometime (I had only watched it because I had just gotten my new HDTV)--a Da Vinci Code for drooling morons. However, inexplicably a second one is coming out this year, and as with the first movie the screenplay was written by a couple called "The Wibberleys" (Cormac and Marianne). They are the same geniuses responsible for the horrendous Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, The Shaggy Dog and I Spy. So there's a really excellent chance that this ponderous sequel will also be a pile of horseshit.

Meanwhile, where did it all go wrong for Oscar® winner Nicolas Cage? I'm going to go with 1999's 8MM, an unintentionally laughable Bruckheimer disaster about the slimy world of underground porn. I might have to do a whole separate blog entry for that one.

5. I'm no longer rooting for players in sports, just teams. It's a waste of time to get attached to some player who will say something stupid, sign as a free agent for your hated rival, or stick a needle in their ass and lie about it, or all of the above--they'll just let you down eventually. And it's pointless to celebrate some guy's personal achievements, so I'll leave that to their family members.

4. The Simpsons Movie was very funny, but ultimately not especially memorable; a week later I can't really remember any jokes from it. I give it 8 thumbs up. And because of the marketing deluge, I'm tired of seeing everyone "Simpsonized" already.

3. How is it that French actress Julie Delpy isn't married yet? I've had a crush on her since the one-two punch of Before Sunrise and White back in 1995. She's gorgeous, independent and a music lover (and singer, apparently), and she's only 2 months older than me. So dare I say she'd make a great wife for me. I'll have to email her when I get a chance.

2. How funny is it that a Mets fan, wearing a Mets uniform, caught Baroid's home run ball? The Onion put it best: Destruction Of National Pastime Given Two-Minute Standing Ovation.

1. I'm watching FIGJAM! right now play his second round at Southern Hills on the PGA website. God bless free live online golf! These announcers have to stop complaining about the heat in Oklahoma. Anyway, it's the PGA's fault they decided to play the 89th PGA Tournament on that course in August, and it can't be hotter than when I attended Baltusrol in 2005, which averaged about 99° over the four days. Anyway, the only golfers that this heat will effect is the older players or those who are out of shape--well, good riddance! I guess that means John Daly will no longer be near the top of the leaderboard after today.

Why do sportswriters always get extra punny with golfer's names in their headlines? First round leader Graeme Storm brought on a downpour of bad jokes: "Storm Brews Great Opening Round", "Storm on PGA Radar", "Storm Surges", "It's not easy being a Storm in a tempest", "Storm Watch", "Storm Subsides", "Imperfect Storm", "Storm Downgraded". Bloody fucking hell, we get it!

ZACH DOES KANYE

This was one of the funniest things I saw at the Bad Art Auction was the, uhm, premiere (I guess) of the Zach Galifianakis video for Kanye West's "Can't Tell Me Nothing".



Now that's funny! Definitely funnier than the Kanye/Mike Myers video.

Filmed on Zach's farm in North Carolina, Will Oldham (aka Bonnie "Prince" Billy) plays his sidekick. Also check out Fiona Apple's "Not About Love".

BAD ART + GREAT MUSIC

I never win anything: contests, sports, lotteries, card games, hot girlfriends--you name it. But thanks to The Onion AV Club's "The Hater" website, I won free tickets, and all I had to do was send in the most irritating photo of Eva Longoria I could find. My hatred for "Desperate Housewives" (a show I've never even seen) finally paid off! It placed me on the guest list for the New York Magazine's Bad Art Auction, featuring host Zach Galifianakis and Band of Horses.

What a great idea for an event: auctioning off truly hideous art pieces for charity. Zach Galifianakis kicked off the festivities with about 20 minutes of his unique self-deprecating comedy ("I don't need this shit, I was in Corky Romano!"), as he welcomed everyone to the Panda Express (the Hiro Ballroom was decorated in an Asian theme), a tiny room that fit only about 500 people which made for an intimate show/auction/concert/thingy.

The bearded and bitingly sarcastic Zach then served as a brutally funny and not-at-all-skillful auctioneer for the Bad Art Auction for the New York Cares charity (or "New York Who Cares?" as he put it). And man, there was some seriously shitty art sold that night. The first item up for bidding was "Girl with Ostrich Head" and went down hill from there, including a weird Elton John lookalike throwing a discus, and an original painting of Richard "Don't let the mustache fool ya, I ain't no queer" Petty, which sold for an astonishing $500. As it turned out, it wasn't original at all, because mere minutes later he sold another one (though he gave both to the girl who overpaid for the first one). "Electroindierocker" Moby was also there to contribute a complete piece of crap from his own collection: a Porky Pig painting from Mexico that had an inflatable bladder behind it that you could blow up. Really.

But little did I know that the battle of the beards was just about to begin. Band of Horses somehow crammed six bearded musicians onto the tiny stage and played for an hour to close out the evening, the most spectacularly bearded of the band being lead singer Ben Bridwell. I don't know what else to say except that they rocked, even playing a few new tunes from their upcoming album. Someone told me that they were bad live, but this tight set proved them wrong. This craptacular 30 second video I shot shows that I was so close that the speakers blew out my camera's shitty little microphone (it's "Wicked Gil" in case you can't hear it, duh).



It was a fun night and well worth the trip downtown, even though I couldn't afford to buy any shitty art for my apartment. And hey, it was free.