It’s Official: Soundgarden Reuniting! | Spin Magazine Online.

All I can say is that I am hella amped. My 11- to 17-year-old self (after all, they did break up in ‘97) is rejoicing at the news, so in honor of those six awkward years, I am going to have to find a ticket with the quickness.

Ever since I was about ten years old and watching Comedy Central when it was still known as The Comedy Channel, I recognized that the comedian Gallagher’s routine was overly and detrimentally simplistic: he smashed things with a hammer, and people laughed at it. At that age I was waking up to the benefits of layering meaning onto things, so even my ten-year-old self realized that there was no depth to smashing watermelons with a hammer and, subsequently, little to no artistic value. Enough people apparently disagree with this that Gallagher is still floating around these days, so his popularity was also an early lesson in the large numbers of people who can be entertained by dumb things. (Myself fully included, but I feel like the performer has to be at least somewhat self-aware of the dumbness before I can enjoy it. Otherwise I’m worried that they’re just as dumb as their art.)

To sum up that paragraph, Gallagher is terrible. That’s why I found his interview with intellectual hipster bastion The A.V. Club so utterly compelling: the interviewer took a completely awful performer, gave him enough rope to hang himself about eight times, and got a really curious and entertaining read out the other end. It does a great job of communicating the subject’s lack of talent without ever directly touching on it, simply by giving a man who smashes things for entertainment the space to rant about the celebration of mediocrity.

Golf clap to you, David Wolinsky, for recognizing when less is more to make your point effectively.

Happy Holidays to all.

Love that Bariaga!

I’m not exactly on the ball here, as this movie was released in 1990, but the prof screened it today as part of an all-day MO 512 negotiations class simulation that was based on the events depicted in American Dream. I must say it was a pretty tangential thing to watch in negotiations class, but the movie was, in a word, real. It’s all about the strike at a Hormel processing plant in Austin, Minn., in 1985-86 and the relationships and conflicts that take place between management, the local union leadership, national leaders at the United Food and Commercial Workers — in a random personal fact, I was once a member of the UFCW — union rank-and-file and other interested parties. It’s tragic and sad to see, and yet by avoiding taking any particular side in the story, the film is more effectively illustrative of the Reagan-era decline of unions and the real-world impact that had on workers and their families. The meat-processing scenes will also make you want to take some time away from pork, but appetite for bacon is a small price to pay for one of the best documentaries I’ve seen in a long time.

Too many people here at b-school like to stereotype union members as greedy, obstructionist ogres, which gets old fast to a dude from Pittsburgh with union family and friends. (This is at one of the more liberal and friendly b-schools; I can only imagine the vitriol going around elsewhere.) I’d recommend this movie to them: unions can go too far and have self-interested leaders, just like management, but there are real people on both sides of the divide and that’s an important thing to keep in mind as a future business leader.

So go rent American Dream; you’ll be glad you did.

I hate being told that I look like a llama.

I assume I’m not the only one who’s noticed that clothing sizes have totally changed in the past 2-3 years or so — what used to be an XL is now only a large, what used to be a large is now a medium, and what used to be XXXL is now somehow listed in the normal-sized range at XL. G confirms that this is the case for women’s clothing too — a size 4 now fits what used to be size 6, size 8 fits a former size 10, etc.

This is pretty clever on the part of marketers, but I have to burst your bubble, you-who-think-you’ve-dropped-a-size: You may fit in a size 6, but unfortunately, you don’t actually fit in a size 6.

Sorry, yo.