"You've got bruises on your body."

Wes Anderson, a filmmaker you either get or you don't, has a new short film available on iTunes entitled Hotel Chevalier. It's currently a free download, and it's intended as somewhat of a prologue for the new Anderson movie, The Darjeeling Limited, which opens the New York Film Festival tomorrow night.

I'm a sucker for every Wes Anderson film -- from Bottle Rocket to The Royal Tenenbaums to even The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. To some, his wide-screen, highly stylized images seem to overtake the plots of his work, but I disagree. I'm instantly transported into a quirky and comfortable atmosphere watching his movies, and his characters, while eccentric, are still completely identifiable and sympathetic.

Thirteen minutes long, and soley situated in a Paris hotel room, Chevalier is a sweet affair that follows a man (Jason Schwartzman -- playing the role he plays in Darjeeling) on the run from a former lover (Natalie Portman) only to have her unexpectedly show up at his door. The short has the hallmarks of a great short story: incidents touched upon, fragile emotional states personified and hinted in words and images, and ultimately, an ending without a comfortable resolution.

Anderson says Chevalier will screen before the premiere of Darjeeling at the NYFF, and it will be included on the DVD of that film as well.

"...but it's thick."

I finally caught up with 30 Rock, Tina Fey's Emmy-award winning comedy series about the trials of an SNL-type show, on DVD this past week. Besides The Office, this is the funniest program on television. In fact, it may be better than The Office. Fey's smart-as-a-whip dialogue pops off slick zingers left and right like a Gatling Gun (see if you can catch the above quote in the first episode), and the cast, headed by Fey's sharp portrayal of the helpless and neurotic show's head writer and Alec Baldwin's too-smooth-for-his-own-good Jack Welch-worshipping GE exec-in-charge, is a well-rounded group of performers that help fuel the show.

Besides how can you not love a show that features Elizabeth Taylor beating a man senseless with a fire extinguisher? That has one of the characters stung by Chris Hansen? That finally delivers on the comedic promise that Tracy Morgan showed during his SNL stint? And that has Baldwin's character dating Condi Rice and threatening to kick Vladimir Putin's ass for rubbing her butt at a photo op?

And I'm not even halfway through season one...

Ryan Adams, Mick, & Cake

My playlist this week. Download these songs for your audible entertainment.

“Dance All Night” – Ryan Adams (above). Look, Springsteen will always be numero uno in my book, but Adams is my new musical obsession. His talent boggles my mind along with his ability to jump from steel guitar infused, tear-in-my-beer country to straight ahead solid rock. This tune -- from disc two of his finest work, Cold Roses – is a breezy and infectious song about a woman finally finding true love. If “Dance All Night” doesn’t put a smile on your face, then it’s Lithium time for you friend.

“Too Many Cooks (Spoil the Soup)” – Mick Jagger. Back in 1973, John Lennon was kicked out of the house by Yoko Ono. So, he hopped a jet to L.A. to hang out with Alice Cooper, Harry Nilsson, David Bowie and others. He also did some recording with these folks. This cut, an old Willie Dixon song, came from a session he produced with Jagger on lead vocals and Nilsson singing back-up. The quality of the recording is a little rough, but it carries a funky, very 1970s vibe with an amazing sax solo by Stones sideman Bobby Keys. One can easily picture a young Mick performing this song in a white polyester bell-bottomed outfit boogying away in rhinestone platform shoes on Soul Train circa 1973. The official release will come Oct. 2 on the compilation album The Very Best of Mick Jagger.

“War Pigs” – Cake. The alt-funk-rap-rock band covers the Black Sabbath classic on the new collection, B-Sides and Rarities. It’ll make headbangers and too-sardonic-for-their-own-good hipsters unite in metal delight.

Willy and Dave

Here's next week's "All Over the Map" for you from Arkansas Weekly.

Allow me to introduce you to Willy and Dave.

Willy and Dave are freshmen at colleges that are about an hour apart from each other in central Arkansas. Childhood friends, they also played football together at an area school and both are continuing to follow their gridiron dreams into the collegiate level.

It’s fair to say the transition from being cared for to having to take care of themselves has been somewhat rocky for our two heroes. Once, during the first week or two of school, Dave came down with a cold. So, doing what had come naturally all of his life, he called his mom.

“Mom,” he said. “I have a cold.”

“Okay,” she said. “Just get yourself a nasal decongestant.”

“Huh?”

“You need to go and get a decongestant, honey.”

“Uhhh…what’s a decongestant?”

His mom sighed and said: “Honey, it’s medicine that will clear all of the junk in your nose and head. Helps you breathe better.”

“Huh?” A pause. “Oh.” Another pause. “Uhhh…where can I get this…uhhh…decongestant?”

“Honey,” she said. “Just go to a pharmacy or Wal-Mart.”

“Huh?” A pause. “Oh.”

It was conversations such as this one that sometimes gave Dave’s mother pause. Not three weeks into college, and he had to have his mother tell him the basics of buying cold medicine.

It was, she thought, going to be a long four years.

So, dear reader, keep in mind what we’re dealing with as I tell you the following story.

Since they became college freshmen, Willy and Dave decided to start a tradition. Every Wednesday night, Dave would get away from his smelly, messy dorm and drive over to his buddy’s college town to have the “All You Can Eat Shrimp” at a local restaurant. Then, after devouring dinner, they would go spend the night hanging out at Willy’s ultra-nice apartment until sleep called.

Yet, there was only one bed in Willy’s place, so Dave had to sleep on the floor. And, the floor was not a comfy place to sleep. That’s when they decided to go and purchase a king size air mattress. They brought the mattress back to the apartment, ripped open the box, and stared at it for a moment.

“Uhhh,” one said to the other. “How do we get the air in it?”

A pause.

“Uhhh,” said Dave. “I guess I could blow it up.”

A pause.

“Uhhh,” said Willy. “Okay.”

Dave pulled open the air plug, put it to his lips and started blowing up the mattress.

Thirty minutes later, an exhausted Dave gave up. The mattress was not even halfway full of air.

“This sucks,” he said. “There’s gotta be a better way to blow this thing up.”

A pause.

“Hey,” he said. “Why don’t we take the air mattress to my truck, start the engine, and hook the mattress up to the tail pipe? Then, it’ll fill up really quick.”

Now, dear reader, it’s time for us take a pause.

Because although you might think I’m pulling your leg at this point, I can assure you I am not.

This is a true story. These two college freshmen actually thought one could hook the air plug of an air mattress to the exhaust of a pick up truck, rev the engine and have the carbon monoxide inflate the makeshift bed.

When they got to the truck, they realized the air plug on the air mattress was much smaller than the tail pipe.

“Uhhh,” one of them pondered aloud. “How do we hook it up to the pipe?”

They slowly looked down to the air plug. Then they slowly looked to the exhaust.

“Uhhh,” one of them said. “I think we just need to keep blowing it up with our lips.”

They turned around and walked back into the apartment with the limp mattress.

It’s unknown if they ever managed to manually blow it up. It’s also unknown if they ever figured out that, for a price less than the “All You Can Eat Shrimp” platter, most stores sell tiny little gadgets that can inflate air mattresses in a matter of minutes.

They’re located a few aisles over from the nasal decongestants.

Whoo-hoo!

I'm going to Hannah Montana with my bestest friends! I'm going to Hannah Montana! I'm going to Hannah Montana! I'm soooooo excited! I'm soooooo going to buy a Hannah Montana t-shirt! Whoo-hoo!

December 4, Little Rock! I got tickets! I got tickets! Everybody at work is going to be sooooo jealous cause it is sooooo sold out!

So, OK, on that Saturday, we're going to go to the Olive Garden before the show! Then we're going to the mall and we're going to Claire's and we're going to Limited Too and then we're going to see HANNAH MONTANA!!!!!

And after the show we're going to go have a sleepover at the Embassy Suites and we're gonna go swimming in the indoor pool and then we're gonna order pizza and watch the Disney Channel and then I'm gonna go back downstairs when everyone's asleep and then I'm gonna go to the bar and then I'm gonna drink a bunch of Crown Royals until I can't remember where I am!

It's gonna be soooooo cool!

This will make your day so much brighter.

Camille Paglia's column in Salon today has this little nugget of sunshine:

Should there be another major attack on U.S. soil, even Democrats suspicious of Republican hype would snap into survivalist mode, where defense of hearth and home is an elemental instinct. What Bush and company puff as the "war on terror" is no mirage: radical jihadism, exacerbated by the arrogant stupidity of our invasion of Iraq, does indeed threaten the very existence of Western civilization, whose peace and prosperity depend on a complex infrastructure and communications system vulnerable to catastrophic disruption by small bands of ruthless saboteurs.

Yeah, yeah. Whatever. All I wanna know is how Britney's doing?

T. Blanston, Jr. Returns

My good friend, T. Blanston, Jr., takes my spot in Arkansas Weekly tomorrow. Here's his contribution to literature...

Greetings to all from Rancho Paradiso, my beautiful villa on the shores of the gorgeous Loch Greers Ferry.

It’s been a while since I’ve entertained you with the phenomenal adventures from my life that is, without a doubt, more exciting than yours. But then, that’s why I have such a large fan base: the men want to vicariously live through my extremely envious life; the kids want to grow up to be like me; and the women, of course, simply want to marry me.

So, it is my duty to please you all with my written word.

Grace, the punk who usually writes in this space, is off this week (again). Someone mentioned he’s having some digestive issues that came about when he drank about nine Red Bulls and mixed that with some oysters he found in an abandoned box by the side of the road near Diaz. Apparently, he was walking home after a hard night on Front St. in Newport, forgetting that he had parked his vehicle inside someone’s home.

But that’s just the scuttlebutt around the Batesville office. Don’t tell anyone.

Anyway, the past few months have been fabulous.

In March, many of you may have heard that I went on tour with country sensation Carrie Underwood. Now, I’m not really into country music (it’s been that way since I ended my relationship with Shania Twain back in 1996), but once Carrie and I laid eyes on each other I knew that it was my destiny to be with this woman – if only for three weeks. During the tour, her soothing country ballads and my mix of death metal, gangsta rap, and bluegrass mesmerized audiences across the country. Musical magic doesn’t come along often, but our co-headlining tour was an exception.

But in April, I realized my attention was moving away from Carrie and toward Waffle House. I have always been delighted with Waffle House’s delectable dishes such as the Waffle Stack Extreme, a health-conscious concoction with six waffles covered in cottage cheese, cheddar cheese, sliced Slim Jims, grilled onions, bacon, American cheese, six fried eggs, grits, tater tots, oatmeal, ice cream, six sausage links, hash browns, a slice of Spam, and tuna fish salad. Or then there’s the sausage patty meltdown: ten sausage patties stacked high and saturated in cheese, onion rings, cream gravy, brown gravy, chicken broth, mashed potatoes, deviled ham, sour cream, chocolate yogurt, and then completely fried in a thick, chunky batter. Or, finally, there’s my personal favorite that’s not on the menu: a big bowl of five scoops of pure lard smothered in butterscotch syrup. Yum.

My passion for the Waffle House cuisine prompted a vicious month-long battle for ownership of the popular restaurant chain. Apparently the owners were not satisfied with my initial offer of $1,000,000 and a VHS box set of classic Lawrence Welk episodes. So, I upped the ante and threw in a gift certificate to Orange Julius that I found in my vast collection of assets. Still – no dice.

So, I then entertained the idea of simply beginning a new chain of waffle eateries and building one beside each Waffle House in America. First: I had to come up with a name for my new restaurant chain. My first choice, Waffle Home, sounded too bland. I thought my second choice, Waffle Condo, was the keeper until someone told me that if a vandal painted an “m” after the “o,” we’d have problems. I agreed. So, I decided that Waffle Apartment was the name of my new chain that would bring Waffle House to its knees.

Next, I went to work on my financing arrangements and my business plan. After weeks of planning and crunching numbers, I realized the amount to build a Waffle Apartment next to every Waffle House in America would be close to $980,000,000.

This, I told myself, was not a feasible plan.

So, as of this writing, I have a proposal into Warren Buffet asking for his help in financing my ingenious scheme to dominate the world of waffles.

Warren, you know my cell number.

Onto other things about my summer that I know you want to know…

Yes…that was me whupping some butt in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Close friends know that I’ve been a cage fighter extraordinaire since I dallied in Thailand kickboxing matches back in the early `90s. But I’ve never been happy with the commercialization of cage fighting, and the televised matches do nothing but exploit a sport that, at its heart, is a gentle and wonderful reminder that men can beat the living crap out of one another in a ring surrounded by a fence.

In July, after my UFC matches ended and I realized most of my teeth were missing, I had extensive dental surgery. To recover, I went to the lovely resort town of El Dorado, Arkansas. There, I decided to mount a one-man show to highlight my skills as a solo interpretive dancer. Utilizing the song canon of Dionne Warwick, I delighted local audiences with my smooth dance moves and my impressive array of one piece spandex-based costumes.

Opening night went well, yet after I went to the local El Dorado Waffle House for an after-party things took a turn for the worse. Entering the restaurant, still clad in my gold spandex unitard from the finale, I was attacked by five truckers who were apparently jealous of how smashing I looked in my outfit.

My new set of teeth fell out of my mouth, and a Waffle House Extreme as well as large amounts of my own blood simply ruined my costume. Nevertheless, I still made the point of going back into the restaurant and ordering my scoops of butterscotch-covered lard.

And it was then, as I sat eating the delicious spoonfuls of pure animal fat, that I realized that no matter what happens, no one can shatter my dreams of becoming the only waffle magnate/UFC champion/solo interpretive dancer in the world.

It is, after all, the reason I was put on this nutty little planet called Earth.

Until next time, stay tantalizing.

No, wait. Don't forget what I said.

All in all...Magic disappoints me.

And yes: my heart grieves.

Sigh.

Forget what I said about Springsteen's newest.

Somehow a copy of the new Springsteen album, Magic, mysteriously ended up on my desk this morning. Very odd, I thought.

Being a die-hard Springsteen fan, I initially thought I should snap the CD in two and wait until the album's official release date, October 2, to legally purchase a copy. Needless to say, that thought lasted roughly .0000004 seconds.

It's spinning now in my laptop (I'm on cut 5 -- "Gypsy Biker"), and my earlier hesitations about the album turned out to be all for naught. It's not a guitar-heavy rocker like had been earlier suggested; the hardest song yet has been the lead-off cut, "Radio Nowhere." But it's still vintage Bruce. Good stuff so far, but it will take a few listens for my final thoughts about it to sink in.

By the way, to the lawyers of Columbia Records: I will be purchasing a legal copy of the CD on October 2. Just, ahem, wanted to make sure you, coughcough, knew that.

Lost Craig Arrest Transcript?

By now, everyone is very familiar with the saga of former Sen. Larry Craig. In June of this year, the Idaho Republican was busted in the men's room of the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport for soliciting a undercover officer. Over the weekend, Sen. Craig resigned his seat under pressure from prominent Republicans, but as of this posting, he is apparently reconsidering his decision.

Now, through sources I obviously can't disclose, I've come into contact with another transcript of a police arrest of man who may or may not be the former Sen. Craig. Keep in mind that the validity of this transcript is questionable, and it's likely (read: is) the satirical product of one strange individual (read: me) who can't sleep at nights and enjoys typing fake arrest transcripts.

But that is for you, intelligent reader, to decide...

LC (?): Okay – now, listen…I don’t do these kinds of things. I’m not gay.
OFFICER: Sir, sir – that’s not my concern.
LC: I’m a respectable person. I’m a respectable person. So –
OFFICER: Sir – that’s not my concern. We are focusing on this situation. Here. In the stall. Where you touched my shoe with your shoe.
LC: I’m not gay. It was…I didn’t intentionally touch your foot. You solicited me.
OFFICER: Okay – sir. You touched my foot through the bottom of the divider, sir, but we’re not going to get into that right now.
LC: Not intentionally. Not intentionally.
OFFICER: All right, now sir --
LC: I brushed your foot, possibly. Yes.
OFFICER: Okay, sir –
LC: But, not intentionally.
OFFICER: Sir, sir, sir…listen to me carefully: don’t disrespect me. Do not disrespect me. I’m not an idiot.
LC: I’m a respectable person. I do not do these things.
OFFICER: Okay – sir. I’m stopping you right there. I’m stopping you right there.
LC: And, I am not gay.
OFFICER: Okay – sir. Sir. Then tell me: why are you wearing leather chaps in an airport?
LC: I don’t understand…
OFFICER: You are wearing leather chaps, sir. At noon. In an airport.
LC: No, no…I’m not…no…
OFFICER: Do not disrespect me. You are wearing leather chaps.
LC: No. These are slacks. From Macy’s. Yes. And yes: well, they are, um, leather.
OFFICER: Leather chaps.
LC: Um…okay. I never…okay…yes…they are chaps, and yes, they are leather. But I’m not gay.
OFFICER: Sir, they’re bottomless. The chaps.
LC: No. Yes. Okay, I thought my wife had packed some Hanes. But – no, she didn’t. So. Yes. Okay. Yes. My bottom is exposed. But, the Hanes were not in the suitcase. No. But: I’m not gay. No.
OFFICER: Okay, sir – so, tell me why you’re also wearing a tight mesh shirt and listening to the latest Pet Shop Boys on your iPod?
LC: What? No. This is an old dress shirt. I’m very cost-conscious, and um, multiple washings can, yes, wear holes in the fabric.
OFFICER: And what about the Armistead Maupin collection in your briefcase?
LC: I’m not sure what you are implying. Maupin? I’m not sure…this was in my briefcase? This book?
OFFICER: He's perhaps the most prolific gay writer in America.
LC: What…? No. He's -- wait, how do you know?
OFFICER: That’s not, um, that’s not the issue, here.
TAPE UNEXPECTEDLY ENDS.
TRANSCRIPT ###

Ummm. Okaaay. Hmmmm.

Ummmm. I, uh, just heard a quick preview of the new Springsteen CD, Magic. Go here, and leave the window open, and you'll hear 10 to 20 seconds of each song.

I love the new single, "Radio Nowhere." It carries a rough, rocking vibe that's vintage Bruce mixed with a hard guitar sound that is extremely refreshing.

Hearing snippets of the rest of the album, however, gives me a little, um, pause.

pleasebegoodpleasebegoodpleasebegoodpleasebegoodpleasebegood...

Hey. Anybody know where those nukes are?

I don't know about you kids, but there's nothing like coming in from a refreshing morning jog, sitting down with an ice-cold bottle of water, firing up the laptop, and seeing this headline on the Drudge Report:

PAPER: AIR FORCE LOST TRACK OF 5 NUKES

To say I did a spit-take all over my laptop would be an understatement.

Thankfully, they found them.

Later today: did I unearth a new Larry Craig arrest tape?