The ones you try to forget.

Double Dagger, one of Baltimore’s better punk bands, is calling it quits after nine years. If you’re in Chicago¹, DC, NYC, or Baltimore², you should check out one of their last shows.

Update: I totally should have called this post “Our history has no future.” Oh well.

This is austerity.

Via Yglesias, no one in Congress mentions this part when talking about “belt-tightening“:

The 46.2 million people in poverty in 2010 was the most for the 52 years that estimates have been published, and the number of people in poverty rose for the fourth consecutive year as the poverty rate climbed to 15.1% — the highest since 1993 — up from 14.3% in 2009.

Meanwhile, real median household income in 2010 was $49,445, down 2.3% from the prior year and below pre-recession levels.
…
While the data released Tuesday paint a grim picture, the results could have been even worse without government benefits such as extended unemployment insurance that were “pretty good at plugging some holes in the safety net and preventing even more people from falling into poverty,” said Harry Holzer, a public-policy professor at Georgetown University.
…
“Looking ahead, poverty seems unlikely to improve because of the way the economy is going,” [Edwin Park, vice president for health policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities] said. “State and local governments are retrenching, cutting spending, which will slow economic growth.”
…
Among children under 18, the poverty rate reached 22% in 2010, compared with 13.7% among those 18 to 64. In 2009, the poverty rate among kids was 20.7%, compared with 12.9% among those 18 to 64.

More than one of every five children lives in poverty in the US, and Republicans say more spending cuts are the answer. Right.

Linkwad.

• Did you want a reason to hate at least 50 of your fellow Americans?
• Did you want many, many reasons to hate the NCAA?
• Twitter analytics are on the way. @RWW, via @GinaTrapani.
• Graphs > words, because we are all three they’re more effective.

Spoiler-free thoughts on Bellflower.

Since I seem to be one of the few people who has seen Bellflower and energetically disliked it¹, I figured I should explain. But first, the good:

• The movie does a good job showing the fear, rage, and misogyny of the nerdy, emasculated and powerless man-child (the last few years’ favorite new stock character), which most recent TV shows and movies have swept under the rug.
• Although the reliance on super-short depth of field (seriously, it’s tilt-shift city) for the early relationship scenes initially bothered me, I think it works as a visual representation of head-over-heels, only-think-about-each-other new love.
• The film is visually striking, and is surprisingly stylish, as long as your idea of style is “Instagram shaky-cam.”

Now, the bad:

• Turns out, we already have a bunch of movies about powerless, undersexed man-children! And a lot of them are better.
• The characters are paper-thin, one-dimensional and flat, and aren’t helped by the actors, who are nearly all stunningly awful. Director/lead actor Evan Glodell, who delivers his “happy” lines with the frozen smile and rising inflection of a Miss USA contestant, is particularly intolerable.
• The movie’s cockeyed plotting, pacing, tone and continuity issues² make the thing an absolute mess.
• By the end, I would argue the movie has gone past portraying two damaged, possibly-misogynistic young men, and at least tacitly supports their worldview, if not outright celebrating it.

I’ll save spoiler-related criticism for a later post, but have to admit that I’m utterly baffled by the adoring critical consensus³. And critics acknowledge it–every positive review has some form of the phrase “Sure, it’s a mess, but it’s alive!” My response: Yes, it’s an inventive vision of an almost-post-apocalyptic world and the movie burns⁴ with passion, but it’s still horrendously onanistic, disjointed and, ultimately, a waste of time⁵.

Linkwad.

• This is the best idea for package pickup to date.
• Building a ghost town in the desert. If Breaking Bad has taught me anything, the place will be full of meth heads within a month.

And hey, here’s Wye Oak’s new video for “Holy Holy.”