Yes I saw it. Not only did I see it, but I saw it opening night.
It was a wonderful B movie.
Oh darling Samuel L. Jackson (they had the foresight to run the promo for his next movie, which looks equally absurd, before the show) I have been your adoring accolyte since first I watched The Long Kiss Goodnight.
Jackson was undoubtedly the star of the show, and EVERYONE knew it at all times.
If you are the least bit upset by gross stuff (people getting bit in the eye, and other places you probably don’t want to think about) you should probably skip the first 45 minutes. Don’t worry, you won’t really miss anything.
Snakes on a Plane pulls no punches. You think it might not go there, but it does. I don’t know if revealling painfully obvious plot is a **spoiler** but if it is, you’ve been warned… read no further.

Yes indeed. Mid coital snakebites, the truly unlikeable characters getting bitten (well mostly( penile snakebites, snakes up a skirt, pythons, king cobras, young kids, Keenan from Keenan and Kel/ All That (or maybe it was Kel? I’m pretty sure it was Keenan). As soon as the snakes are released (within the first twenty minutes, under an AMAZINGLY absurd premise) I realized “Oh My God. Will I have to sit through an hour and a half of people screaming like this? Cause if so I will probably leave” When it turns out that the movie is not in fact an hour and a half of people screaming and running in a panic around a plane the movie gets much better, because you’ve had a glimpse of what it *could* have been.

And besides. Did I mention I’ve loved Samuel L. Jackson (who should probably be knighted, because his name would sound SO COOL as Sir Samuel L. Jackson) since I was thirteen? Yeah. I have.

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Originally uploaded by Rachel Ariel.

I got my first “real” job in the spring of my ninth grade year. I worked one day a week at a local independent children’s bookstore. Around the same time one of my good friends also got a job. She worked at a kite store. Over the subsequent three years of high school I maintained my job at the bookstore. One summer I got an additional job at a toystore, but I didn’t like it much and quit.

My friend who got the kite store job was fired the same summer they hired her because her mom wouldn’t let her walk alone to the nearest park to test out new kites alone (it was through a kinda sketchy neighborhood… this should also indicate just how young we still believed ourselves to be, though we wouldn’t have admitted it at that stage). I think that between the end of that summer and the summer between the end of high school, she held no fewer than six jobs. If I recall correctly they included: day care attendent, bus girl, supermarket bagger, coffee slinger, Conoco gas station attendant, and Bagel seller (at Einsteins).

Here is what I learned vicariously from her experience:
1. It should never be necessary to work three jobs as one person and do *anything* else full time (the closest I came to this was last summer, when I worked one full time job and two part time jobs. to clarify, this was me doing three jobs. What she did was work three part time jobs *and* go to high school. I think she was able to do this for about three months).
2. Smokers get added benefits.

You see, my friend started smoking because the other bussers at the restaurant where she worked would get to take smoke breaks in addition to their meal breaks. I don’t know how their “clock” system worked, as it is my understanding that there is a federally mandated amount of break hourly workers are supposed to have, but that was what she told me.
Her coworkers, who, for the record, were slowly killing themselves and producing furture drains on our health and welfare systems, got extra time off from work.

This has never bothered me before because I have always worked at places where a) if i said i needed to go for a quick walk and would be back in three minutes they said “cool” (as long as i wasn’t in the *middle* of helping someone) or b)i got my federally mandated 30 and 15.

However, since I started working in a windowless office I have developed a finely tuned sense of the inequality. I walk across the courtyard through the clouds of smoke, and rather than think about the people who are blackening their lungs (I’ve had too many smoking friends), I think “Oh man, look how they get to stand outside in the sun for FIFTEEN WHOLE MINUTES”.

I think that I am going to start scheduling “go outside” breaks for myself. For the next two weeks I get ten minutes in the rmoning and ten in the afternoon to remember about stuff like the sky, and clouds.

Stephen King once wrote a short story about a plague of body snatchers or something that only smokers were aware of. At the tender age of 13 it made me think that maybe there was an upside to killing myself with dried plants on fire in my mouth, on the off chance of alien invasion.

I have a sort of mixed awe of Sufjan Stevens. He has an amazing ability to weave music in a way that makes me want to crawl under the covers and read on a snowy day, stare up at the stars late at night, and ride my bike through unfamiliar neighborhoods on summer evenings. He’s found an amazing way to mix fact, fiction, narrative and music in a way that comes close to symphonic arrangement.

Reviews seem to be of two camps on The Avalanche. Those who say “This stuff is really good, and the best of this stuff would have been excellent on Illinois“ and those who say “This stuff is not as good as Illinois and didn’t really deserve to be put out simply because it exists.”

Illinois, like Michigan, was a concept album. The songs on The Avalanche mostly fit within the theme of Illinois, obviously. I can see how the songs that didn’t make the cut didn’t make it though. While they fit in the theme, and they fit musically, they might have seemed redundant (John Wayne Gacy is a better song than Saul Bellow, and Adlai Stevenson, and really, it is important to limit the number of profile pieces you include on your concept album). Springfield is very good… but also very similar to Chicago.

This is a wonderful album for people who enjoyed Illinois and definitely for people who like Sufjan Stevens. If it had been released instead of Illinois, or prior to it, it would not stand up. Hearing The Avalanche I am only more awestruck by Sufjan Stevens ability to compile an amazing album faced with myriad musical, lyrical and factual gems. Illinois stands head and shoulders above Michigan, and I await Stevens’ next album.