Sloan’s reasoning for following so many feeds is compelling, almost romantic, even.

[William Gibson] said it’s like dipping a finger into the zeitgeist. It this river roaring past, and you’re just taking its temperature. The reason to go for scale — to subscribe to 700 feeds, not just 70 — is to increase the chance of weird combinations, of unexpected collisions that reveal something new and interesting.

However, the idea of following that many feeds terrifies me ― I can barely keep up as it is. I feel guilty whenever my unread count in NetNewsWire, a desktop RSS client for Macs, begins to pile up. The thought of missing any story gnaws at me, so the idea that I should be consuming news from eight times as many sources is a little frightening.

Gibson’s statement is bold, striving to reach some zen-like state where you willingly allow the rush of information to pour past, jumping in for yourself only when you feel compelled. Stretching this simile further, if following 750+ feeds is equivalent to a raging river, then maybe my ~100 are analogous to a small, woodland stream. Most of the time it’s entirely manageable — I could jump from one bank to the other if I had to — but sometimes, after a hard rain, it overflows and there’s nothing I can do but look down and watch from the bridge above. It’s less zeitgeisty than Gibson’s river, but I don’t have to worry about drowning.

I asked Brent Simmons, the creator of NetNewsWire, how these considerations factored into developing his software. While he was quick to point out that it’s impossible to generalize how people use RSS readers, and that of course there’s no “correct” way, he’s begun to worry about their utility.

“I do get concerned, though, that we, and our tools, haven’t evolved to handle this level of information,” he said. “It’s like when food is scarce, and suddenly it’s abundant — we over-eat. I think we over-read and over-communicate. It’s not just RSS: it’s Twitter and email and Facebook and IM and IRC and so on.”

I’m glad he brought up Twitter and Facebook, because it’s easy to forget that RSS overload is only really a problem for a specific subset of internet users. Simmons mentioned that at one point he figured out how many feeds the average NetNewsWire user subscribed to. It was 26. For most people, the question of how to deal with the crushing social ubiquity of Facebook is likely far more pressing.

I also spoke with Brian Shih, product manager of Google Reader, via email. He told me about the way using Reader changed the way he interacts with feeds:

For me personally, I know it made a big difference when we launched the ability to turn off unread counts. I used to try to read everything, but since turning off unread counts, it’s gotten a lot easier to just read when I want to, and ignore the rest.

I think there’s something to this. If I didn’t have that unread number staring down at me each time I open NetNewsWire, I might not feel so obliged to click through each headline (nor would I feel so guilty when I didn’t). But that’s such an obvious, surface-level detail. Surely, there’s something deeper, something more innate driving my inability to just allow those stories to flow past me.

Navneet Alang at Scrawled in Wax mulled over the same need for information in response to McNeil’s blog-bonanza-revelation:

How many feeds is not enough? This still feels like the right question. Because zero — or even fifty — is far too little. To be removed from that current would feel like death. But my problem is that my capacity to deal with that much potential information, always hovering just out of reach, has changed my ability to focus on one thing for an extended period of time.

So, how many feeds is not enough? That’s almost impossible to answer, says Simmons — “Enough for what, exactly?” — but there’s clearly a line somewhere. “I often think people subscribe to many more feeds than they need to, and they spend less time working on their own stuff than they’d like to. Which concerns me a lot, since NetNewsWire was designed to save time.”

Fever, an RSS reader designed by Shaun Inman, attempts to solve this very problem. By encouraging users to subscribe to as many feeds as possible, Fever self selects important stories based on how often they’re linked to by other blogs. The idea is to stop paying attention to unread counts, to free oneself from the tyranny of reading everything and focus just on reading what’s necessary.

In practice, I missed the unread counts. (It’s possible to enable unread counts in the application’s preferences.) As much as the buildup of unread feeds drives me crazy, I like the sense of accomplishment I feel when the counter hits zero — it’s the same feeling I get when checking items off a to-do list.

Not everybody shares that view. Judi Sohn, for one, says good riddance to unread counts:

I’ve always thought the whole idea of an unread indicator on a feed reader is silly. When you read the newspaper, do you really read every single word on every page? Does anything blink in your face telling you that you missed that article on page 14?

I think that comparison is misleading. While I don’t read every article, when I have time sit down to read the paper, I do try to at least glance at every headline. Using NetNewsWire is a similar experience — I don’t read every article piling up in my unread folder, but I always feel better flicking my eyes over each headline rather than resorting to the nuclear option and hitting mark all as read. That’s why I’ve switched back to NetNewsWire from Fever: I think it’s better for quickly scanning headlines and getting a better sense of everything that’s out there, rather than just what everybody else is talking about.

For me, I worry less about overlooking to information from the internet-at-large than missing a story from a favorite blog. Maybe I won’t experience some of the serendipitous intersections of news that Sloan talks about, but this way I don’t miss a single Gruber rant or Awl Listicle. That’s probably a false dichotomy — there’s no reason it should have to be an either/or decision — but it feels right. I don’t have any answers, but I do enjoy my spot by the stream.

Throughout the show the audience was rapturous — Mars’s voice could barely be heard over the sing-a-long to opening-song “Lisztomania” — and was never more energetic than when he entered the crowd during “1901,” the night’s final song. As the band left the stage to enthusiastic, grateful applause, it was plain to see that they felt much the same. Earlier in the day, while playing an acoustic set at a local record store, the band is said to have remarked that they have been waiting their entire career to play at First Avenue, the club featured in Prince’s Purple Rain. Their exuberance showed; you could feel the band keeping a grasp on their humanity for at least one more night.

I corresponded with Mars by email in the week leading up to their Minneapolis show.

The band live at First Avenue in Minneapolis; photo by Leslie Plesser.

The Bygone Bureau: I read that you wanted Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix to be a futuristic album, but lyrically — from French history to Hungarian composers — it feels very firmly rooted in the past. Was that a conscious decision?

Thomas Mars: Almost nothing is conscious in our songwriting, and since the beginning, we invite contradiction, confusion and luck. I guess we like to talk about things that are very French or unusual — I also like when things are not supposed to get along.

It’s really interesting that you approach songwriting in such an unconscious manner, especially because the album is — measured isn’t the right word, but nothing is out of place. Is that an example of the conflicting nature you mentioned?

We are full of contradictions, but I guess it somehow makes sense.

Songs like “1901″ recall French history very specifically. Was that influenced by your return to France to record, rather than going abroad like you did for It’s Never Been Like That?

There was a big musical genre in the ’60s called yé-yé — French people trying to pronounce “yeah-yeah.” French people were so fascinated by American culture they wouldn’t even bother to write songs; they would just do covers and adapt the lyrics in French. There was nothing French about it, it was just a bad French versions of an American classic songs. We are doing the exact opposite of what French people did in the ’60s. Our music is very French, and it talks about French stuff but it’s done in English.

Frontman Thomas Marss; photo by Leslie Plesser.

You spent three years working on some of these songs. Do you think the acclaim the new record is receiving will bring new pressures and a higher level of meticulousness to recording your next album, or will you be tempted to return to the loose and fast-paced qualities of the It’s Never Been Like That sessions?

Yes, I think it will bring new pressures. One thing we learned while trying to get our first record deal is that if you want to please everybody, you’re dead. Hopefully, we’ll keep that in mind.

So it’s clearly freeing to be out of your record deal. Does that lack of oversight present its own set of problems in any way?

Yes, you have no deadline but your own pressure to handle. You can lose touch with reality.

You said in a past interview that to record an album you have to go to a dark place, but this album feels light and airy and summery, even if the lyrics themselves are dark. How did you achieve that?

My favorite songs can make me feel either sad or happy depending on the state I’m in. The more I listen to music, the less I can tell the difference. I like when it’s all intertwined. It must be something about growing up — you have experienced many emotions, so they are all triggering each other.

That definitely seems to be the case with “Countdown.” Can you talk at all about the process of writing that song?

This is the only song we wrote in the control room because it was based on a very spheric and powerful sound and we needed to practice it loud. [Producer] Philippe Zdar was there and already thinking how important the mix was going to be— every effect on each instruments had to interfere with each other.

Guitarist Laurent Brancowitz; photo by Leslie Plesser.

You’ve been touring for almost half a year straight. Do you have any favorite cities or venues to play in?

One of my favorite shows was the last one in Denver. It was the day Michael Jackson died. Once our show was over we played Michael’s songs through the PA of the venue, and everybody stayed for a few hours and we all danced.

Otherwise, I like to play in Mexico City because the crowd is louder than a plane taking off.

Loud in a good way, obviously?

Yes!

Does playing a song night after night on tour ever change your perception of it, or its meaning to you?

It does a lot — otherwise you couldn’t play the same song over and over and feel like a human being.

What do you mean?

I guess it’s the same idea that a song can seem happy or sad depending on the state you’re in.

You gave away “1901″ for free prior to the release of the album. Do you think you’ll experiment more with varying modes of distribution in the future?

Yes. What’s great these days is that there is no one in between the musician and the listener. You can really decide how you want people to discover your music.

How would you prefer people discover your music?

There is no perfect situation, but it should hit you by surprise… or at night driving in an empty city.

Would you be open to your music appearing in video games like Rock Band or Guitar Hero?

Yes, I love these games. The problem is that if they keep the same system, in a few years time you’ll have tons of great drummers and no guitar players…

Phoenix is currently on tour. Their fourth album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, was released last May on V2 Records.

It’s a thought straight from Edward Norton’s unnamed narrator in Fight Club as he struggles to prove his self-worth through his Ikea purchases, a struggle I’ve fallen prey to while debating the merits of the Grevbäck TV bench as opposed to the Leksvik. But more than the appearance of my sofas and sitting chairs, I’ve become concerned about the meaning behind the posters and prints I choose to hang from my walls.

Growing up, my childhood bedroom was decorated by Drew Struzan-illustrated posters from the Star Wars: Special Editions trilogy. As each prequel hit theaters, I dutifully contributed to the Lucas Empire, further populating my wall space with the floating heads of Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen. In college I upgraded to more refined fare, i.e. posters for OK Computer, Eternal Sunshine and various Coen Brothers flicks.

But now that I have a place to call my own, I feel compelled to move beyond movie posters as decor ― they don’t seem very adult. My parents’ house is decorated with posters from the National Zoo and authentic, handmade Amish quilts. Maybe they fall outside the norm, but I can’t think of many households bedecked with posters from 8½ or The Godfather, either.

There’s a disconnect at play here: the adolescent in a bedroom plastered with concert posters eventually grows into the adult with Christina’s World hanging in the living room. While that’s a generalization and there’s no question that tastes change, it seems as though there’s a deeper transformation at hand. As adults, we become less interested in selling ourselves.

Maybe this seems obvious. As people grow older, the tendency to categorize oneself subsides and the need to fit in with regard to pop culture preferences wanes after high school graduation. Without the impulse to sell oneself as cool or hip, the idea of taking up wall space to advertise a band or movie sours.

But this ignores aesthetics. (It also ignores the fact that many teens would chaff at the idea that their decorative choices are anything less than pure, my younger self included.) There’s beauty, intrigue, or ingenuity to many movie posters that turns them into more than just advertising, that turns them into art just as much as any vintage travel poster. So why don’t movie posters get any respect? Why do I feel dirty for wanting to continue to hang film posters in my room? Why do I all of a sudden feel the need to buy certified, unimpeachable art?

In many ways, this is just the same unending debate of high art versus low art. But if I’m comfortable consuming low art as recreation, why am I uncomfortable displaying it in my home?

I see now that I’m still working to sell an idealized version of myself, just as I did in college, just as I did with my Empire Strikes Back poster in elementary school. Instead of cool, I’m now striving for refined; instead of looking hip, I’d rather appear sophisticated. The answer should be to decorate in whatever manner pleases me most, but the distinction between what I like and what I think I should like is more fine than I care to admit ― they’re two sides of the same coin.

So I’ve decided to avoid the debate altogether. I’m going to fill my apartment with houseplants instead.

At the age of 21, he was hired to write for The A.V. Club, the entertainment and popular culture section of The Onion. Rabin, now 33, has written for them ever since and is their head writer.

His recently released memoir, The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture, chronicles his life from childhood to his stint as a critic on AMC’s short-lived film review program Movie Club with John Ridley. Each chapter references a piece of popular culture that either resonated with him at the time or serves as a lens through which to view his life.

I spoke with him before his recent reading at Minneapolis’ Magers and Quinn Booksellers.

The Bygone Bureau: The couple interviews I’ve read so far have seemed to focus on how you’re 33 and writing a memoir.

Nathan Rabin: Yes, yes yes. I am deeply apologetic for it.

Was that something you expected?

Yeah, I feel like you have to justify yourself; you have to justify your existence. It’s a matter of feeling like I had a compelling story. I felt like after 12 years [of writing for The A.V. Club], I had the tools intellectually and artistically to tell it in a way that wouldn’t nauseate people.

I’ve been working on this for two and a half years, so I actually wrote a memoir when I was 31 years old. I’m even more agonizingly narcissistic and self-absorbed than people might imagine.

The book started out just about Movie Club, right?

It did. It was a subject that fascinated America. They were rapacious; they just couldn’t get enough. But it’s weird, people sometimes say, “Oh, I watched your television show.” And I want to say, “You damn liar. Nobody watched my television show!” I barely watched — no, actually I did watch my own television show. I have Shabbas dinner with my dad every Friday night, and the ritual was that we would eat the bread that he got from the soup kitchen — that’s another thing, I think food always tastes better if you’re ripping it out of the mouths of the disadvantaged. If I can steal money from poor people, than more power to me. It tastes more delicious-er. But yeah, we’d eat the challal from the soup kitchen and then we’d drink really nasty wine and watch my television show.

Do you feel like you’re recapturing any of that fame now that you’re touring with your book?

Movie Club never got any press. I was on Chicago Tonight once, and what I did not realize at the time — this is so beautifully pure to my whole television experience — is that my show had been cancelled. I didn’t know this and I had been telling people, “Wait for Movie Club to come back.” What had happened was that Head Producer Guy [Movie Club’s unnamed producer] had told me that we had been picked up for thirteen to fifteen episodes, and there was part of me that wanted to believe him.

But my pessimism and my skepticism have seldom steered me wrong. There was part of me that was like, “I don’t think this is true. I think you said that because you wanted it to be true. I think you’re trying to will it into existence and make something happen.” To be a producer you have to be that, you have to have this passion and drive, and I felt that he was carrying she show on his back to a certain extent.

He was not happy with his depiction in the book.

Oh really?

Some of the terms he used were “hatchet job” and “stabbed in the back.” He called me scum, and also “the worst kind of Hollywood phony.” At one point in my life I had this very convenient thought, that writers are assassins, and that people who write about their lives and the people they love are people who assassinate the people closest to them. That’s kind of overwrought and melodramatic and giving myself far too much credit — I’m not that malignant of a force or that powerful of a force.

I tried to tell the truth, I tried to be honest. Another thing about Head Producer Guy is that he never accused me of making anything up. He never said, “That’s not true.” He said, “Why didn’t you write this? I thought we were friends, you betrayed my—” But you know what? I feel bad and I feel that part of that is a bit of an overreaction, but part of it is justified.

When you’re writing a book it’s such an intense thing that you have to exist in a bubble. I held off showing it to anybody because part of me was like, “It’s too personal!” But after July 7, everybody in the world will be able to read it. It won’t be personal at all. Well, it is and it isn’t. It’s my personal pain, and it’s going to be public spectacle.

Part of me is just bracing for people like Head Producer Guy who will say that I’m the worst kind of scum. But I think I’m the better kind of scum. I don’t want to give myself too much credit, but my epithet will read, “Nathan Rabin, he was the better kind of scum.”

I thought it was interesting how you started the book with a spiritual awakening that was not to be.

The conceit of this book is that I joined together moments of my life with popular culture, and sometimes it’s a little iffy and sometimes the connection is very abstract. Like the chapter about visiting a brothel and linking that to the Steely Dan song, “My Old School.” And the more I knew about the song, I’m like, “Oh god, I am so wrong. I have no fucking idea what I’m talking about.” They were writing about something very specifically that happened to them at school; they were not writing about prostitution.

But this was one instance where there was a very direct link, where I was at an Orthodox Jewish summer camp, and we would pray and we would yell, “We want moshiach now, we want moshiach now.” We were really angry, like we were trying to demand things from God. That’s how pushy Jews are, they’re like, “We’re not going to wait for the messiah to happen, we’re going to angrily demand the messiah.” And God’s probably like, “Stop judging me, stop judging me! Fine. You can have your messiah. You can have pork and shiksas, whatever. Just leave me alone. I’ve had it with you. Chosen my ass.”

And then many years later when I heard Matisyahu — and I feel like I must apologize for writing about Matisyahu because he is painfully, painfully unhip. I might as well be writing about the Dave Matthews Band or GrooGrux and the Whiskey King. Whatever. But it was such a direct thing, because when his single came out, the chorus was literally, “I want moshiach now, I want moshiach now.” It took me back all those years.

It was so interesting because it was one of the periods of my life where I had the closest elements to a normal childhood. I had a step-mother, I had a father. They both had jobs. But at the same time, it was kind of a recurring theme in the book: being a fish out of water. And you find yourself thinking, “Why am I here?”

I think one of the reasons people are really responding to the stuff about my childhood is that children are powerless. They have so little power over their fate that I think there’s a vulnerability people really respond to. And once I become reasonably successful, they’re saying, “Who the hell cares if your TV show was crazy?” But, when you’re a child or a teenager, I think there’s this protective, nurturing element to human nature that causes you to really respond to it.

Photo by Chris Schodt.

One of the parts of the book I found most enlightening was the part in “Lukewarm Crawlspace Vermouth” where you discuss The Chronic and talk about growing up in the group home and how you responded to the theatricality of gangster rap.

On one hand, I was cognizant that this is a fantasy that we’re being sold. This is something that’s very empowering but is fundamentally false. There’s almost this cognitive dissonance, where obviously 50 Cent can’t be number one on the Forbes 500 and be selling cocaine and firing machine guns. [50 Cent was number one on Forbes’ 2008 list of richest hip-hop stars.] But it’s such an appealing fantasy, especially when you feel powerless, when you feel like adults and authority figures have this vice-like control over you. To feel like there are people who don’t have to abide by the rules everybody else does–it’s absolutely intoxicating.

You compare yourself to Tarantino in your use of pastiche.

I’m a cultural magpie!

But at the same time, I felt there was also a structural resemblance between your book and his films. It’s ultimately chronological, but it jumps around a lot within the chronology.

I think part of it is that I’m rambling and digressive. The Q & A’s for the signings I’ve been doing have been absolutely marathon affairs. Sometimes I’ll have people ask really, really strange questions. Like the reading last night, a gentleman — a very interesting character — showed me his tattoo of The Onion logo with a knife through it. He was like, “I’m a chef and I really love The Onion,” and I’m like, “I’m very glad to hear that.”

So it was positive?

It was a positive thing! It was a positive tattoo. He was combining two things that he loved, The Onion and a sharp knife that could be used to stab something. It’s funny, it reminded me of GZA. He was being interviewed for something, and said that [the Wu-Tang Clan] inspired a passion and loyalty that G-Unit never could. He’s like, “People have come up to me, and they have Wu-Tang tattoos. You ever seen anybody with a G-Unit tattoo?” And that kind of made sense. You know how Johnny Depp had that “Winona Forever” tattoo, when he was in love with Winona Ryder Forever, and then he had it changed to “Wino Forever” after they broke up and he became a horrible alcoholic? So, even this answer about how my answers are long and rambling and digressive and make almost no sense is long and rambling and digressive and makes no sense. The way I write is digressive and sometimes I go too far and need to be reigned in.

Pop culture references can be such a dead end, too. I think there’s such as thing as the Family Guy effect, where if the reference is random and doesn’t have an emotional center to it, then it becomes very empty. One of the things I tried to do in my book was to have lots of pop culture references, but to have them mean something and to have them related to something that I believe people are going through. I wanted very badly for it to not just be snark, and not be just jokes.

One of the incredibly gratifying things about doing this tour is hearing people say, “This really resonates with my own bout of depression.” I feel like the secret of the book is that it’s kind of a serious book about depression. I went to kind of ridiculous extremes dealing with depression and I feel… I can’t say this without feeling so pretentious and self absorbed — “My book is saving the world!” — but it’s the greatest vindication. Growing up, there were books that just meant the world to me and made me feel like people shared my problem. It would just make me ecstatic if people felt that way about my book.

I was glad to see that you acknowledged A.V. Club regulars like Zodiac Motherfucker at the end of the book.

I felt a little bit self conscious about it because I didn’t want anybody to feel left out. I didn’t want people to say, “Well why did he get picked and not me?” Part of it is that Zodiac Motherfucker cracks me up. He brings a lot of joy to my life. When I see his all-caps messages on The A.V. Club, a little shiver of joy goes through my body. I’m insecure enough that I almost thanked everybody who was ever nice to me. I don’t know if that’s sad or over compensating or something.

It’s weird, the first part of any book I ever read was the acknowledgements, and I understand now why the agent and the editor are the first two people thanked in every book, because these books would not exist without them. It’s a little bit like winning the Academy Awards and thanking your agent. It’s like, “Who the hell cares about your agent and your manager?” But you’d just be a horrible, horrible ingrate if you were like, “First and foremost I want to thank my second grade teacher and my tai kwon do instructor.” They’re the ones who got you to the ball so you are contractually obligated to sleep with them on prom night. One of my specialties are really bizarre, really unwieldy, unsavory metaphors. That is one of them, one for the ages.

It’ll live on in internet infamy.

Some day I’ll have a little picture book of unsavory metaphors. For children. Deep Thoughts with Unsavory Metaphors by Nathan Rabin.

Do you think your interactions with commenters on The A.V. Club changed how you wrote the book or went about promoting the book?

I think Roger Ebert is this interesting guy. He’s as legendary and famous and big a cultural figure as there is in film criticism, and probably criticism as a whole, and one of the many things I love about him is that if you go to rogerebert.com, he’s constantly responding to readers. There’s this sense of being equals and having a conversation. I go through different cycles about comments, and there are times when I’m just feeling really fragile and somebody’s saying something mean about my voice and it will just ruin my day. You have to develop relatively thick skin. If you dish it out, you have to be able to take it.

Then, there was one time when I missed an episode of The Office for my TV Club post, and I just posted, “I screwed up, I didn’t know it was on. Talk amongst yourselves.” And the comments were as lively and luminous as ever. There were as many comments as if I had been there. I’m like, “Why am I even here? You guys just want to talk about this TV show.” I feel like, in that instance, I’m just part of the conversation. I’m not even the leader of the conversation. I’m just like, here’s my opinion. There’s this internet democracy that’s a beautiful and a terrible thing at the same time.

That’s actually Guns N’ Rose’s next album. It’s going to be called Internet Democracy and they’re going to take 27 years to record it.

I read that you saw “My Year of Flops” as a place to give movies that had been skipped over a second chance, just like pop culture gave you a second chance.

Very much so. One of the reasons I started it is that I have an innate affection for the underdog and for things that people revile and just dismiss. To put it into context, the book that I spent nine months writing was rejected. It was thoroughly rejected. I felt like such a failure and if I gave these films a second chance, maybe people would give me a second chance. A lot of this is the tortured way that my mind works; I felt like, karmically, it would be a good thing.

It was also intended as an antidote to snark and the idea that everything sucks. You know the idea that, “Let’s just be superior and sarcastic and vicious. Sincerity is for losers.” One of the ironies is that I don’t think I’m immune to snark; it’s something I do on a pretty regular basis. But I feel like there’s this underlying idealism to a lot of what I do. Without it, I think my work would be a lot less interesting and a lot less valuable. I care, man.

I’m curious about the Johnny Rotten quote you closed the book with: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

One of the conceits of the book is that I wanted the pop culture references to start before the actual book and then end after the actual book, and for them to comment obliquely on the book. I liked ending with a question mark, on an ambiguous note. The movie endings that I like the best, from the ‘60s and ‘70s, are the ones that end with a freeze frame, with a cryptic look on somebody’s face. This was my way of ending with a freeze frame and a question mark.

I also want people to be able to read this more than once, and, if I can be incredibly pretentious, I wanted it to have a Nabokovian denseness in terms of literary allusion. I wanted more Nabokov and less Family Guy. Although there’s something to be said for Family Guy; it’s often a very funny show. But I haven’t watched it many, many years.

You can read and hear the full, unabridged interview at Tim Lehman’s personal blog, Lehmanade.

Nathan Rabin’s memoir The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture is out now on Simon & Schuster imprint Scribner. You can find more of his writing at The A.V. Club or follow him on Twitter.

Turning a 40-page book, half-filled with pictures, into a feature-length movie is daunting, and judging by recent attempts, fraught with failure. (The Cat in the Hat, The Polar Express, and Curious George immediately come to mind, though I have admittedly not seen a one of them.) Matt Kirby identified the main pitfall of the process when he wrote, “Picture books are an art form altogether different from other types of literature. For me, they are an alchemy of story, poetry, and image, almost impressionistic works.”

“Impressionistic” is particularly apt; the process of turning a picture book into a film cannot be much different than adapting a painting. (I’m sure somebody has tried). The trailers for both Where the Wild Things Are and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs reveal the different philosophies of adaptation held by the creative teams behind each film, and offer insight into how the filmmakers went about turning their impressionist source material into something for the masses.

Meet Carroll.

The difficulties that Where the Wild Things Are has encountered are no secret; the film was pushed back a year to allow director Spike Jonze to re-edit and finesse the film after Warner Brothers found it to be “too weird, too scary… subversive,” and generally unsuitable for children. Though it’s not known what changes Jonze has made, the trailer still appears to hint at these elements, elements that were present in the book.

If there’s one thing the trailer captured perfectly from the book, it’s the tone. The book was unafraid to explore the fears and uncontrollable emotions of childhood. Sometimes a kid just needs a wild rumpus. That spontaneity and release is right on the trailer’s surface when Max and the Wild Things howl from a cliff’s edge at nothing and no one, or when the Wild Things toss Max and each other through the air, seemingly without consequence.

Likewise, the tone of Cloudy is where the most egregious changes have been made. The book always had a subtle undercurrent of foreboding, especially at the end when the weather revolts and and the townspeople are forced to flee Chewandswallow. Based on the trailer, I don’t see the film delving into such unsettling territory. A film where the kids cheer when a giant pancake crashes on top of their school likely would not then turn every character into a refugee, nor would it include imagery as indelibly creepy as this image from the book:

I’ll never forget those pale faces splotched with sore-like jelly.

The trailer for Wild Things also upholds the source’s economy of language. The book never contained more than three lines of text on a given page, and often had none. Fittingly, the trailer includes only a single line of dialogue and no voice-over narration. Wild Things author Maurice Sendak was a master of showing, not telling. His illustrations were so evocative they did most of the work for him. Jonze, or at least the editor who cut the trailer, understands this.

Cloudy never had such restraint. It was surprisingly wordy for a picture book, so perhaps it should be no surprise that the trailer includes narration littered with food puns. I’m not sure how telling the audience to “Prepare to get served” will help sell the movie, but I suppose it tested well.

Not quite the same.

Then there’s the issue of backstory. This is the most obvious area to expand on a picture book-turned-movie, since it lengthens the plot without changing the essential structure of the book. Wild Things adds backstory by explaining the childhood alienation Max feels. His father appears to be gone and his mom is dating a younger man. Meanwhile, Cloudy seemingly abandons the frame story of a grandfather telling his grandchildren of the magical land of Chewandswallow, instead focusing on a crackpot inventor who discovers a way to turn rain water into food, destroying the beautiful simplicity of the book, which never explains the food-based weather patterns. A brief shot in the trailer resembles Times Square in New York, suggesting that the film isn’t set in Chewandswallow at all, but in an approximation of reality.

But judging a film by it’s trailer is clearly a fool’s exercise. Some of my favorite trailers have lead to unspeakably awful movies (I’m looking at you, The Phantom Menace). Yet, I would guess that more than any other factor, audiences base their viewing decisions on the previews and advertisements they see. So when a trailer indicates that Cloudy With a Chance of Meatball has jettisoned everything save for the barest approximation of the picture book’s premise, people will notice. Likewise, an Arcade Fire song over a trailer can’t disguise the fact that Where the Wild Things Are looks to be made by filmmakers who understand what made the book special.

This compulsion to download album after album might be linked to the music I missed during my formative years. Between sixth grade—when I would listen to the local pop radio station and tape songs like B*Witched’s “C’est la Vie” and Citizen King’s “Better Days” off the air in an attempt to create a mixtape of my favorite songs—and eleventh grade—when I bought my first iPod—I removed myself from music. It wasn’t deliberate, but during those years I listened to only a modest selection of albums. On September 11th, I remember going to my room and listening to the angriest CD in my meager collection: Americana by the Offspring. Maybe today I feel the need to play catch-up.

When I bought my iPod, the appeal wasn’t that I would be able to take my entire library of music with me wherever I went. I barely had a library to begin with. Rather, the iPod became the reason to acquire music; the collection became the goal, listening to the music became secondary to simply having the music. After buying the mp3 player, I loaded it with the few albums of mine that I wasn’t ashamed of. (…Baby One More Time didn’t make the cut; the Titanic soundtrack, however, did.) I found myself needing to find new sources of music.

My turn toward illegal downloading occurred conveniently right around the time when I began to develop a legitimate interest in the music I was listening to beyond simple enjoyment. This enlightenment spiraled long and hard, turning me onto new albums and artists with each circulation, until I began downloading entire discographies and subsequently dismissing them based on a couple of half-listened tracks. I was being presented with too much information. My library began to inflate with music I knew I was supposed to like, rather than music that I had actually taken the time to enjoy. New music, old music, there was no discrimination. Everything was equally left by the wayside.

Recently, I realized just how many songs sat at the bottom of my iTunes library, their play count resting permanently at zero. Making an effort to listen to all of these abandoned songs appeared to be the only way to walk along the virtuous path of a music hoarder.

Setting up a smart playlist in iTunes was the first step, but I needed parameters to keep the project honest and engaging. The first guideline was that any song in the playlist must have a play count less than one—that is to say, zero. Second, I filtered out all music that fell into the genres of classical or soundtrack. (Learning to appreciate Rachmaninov will require a wholly different project.)

The playlist weighed in at over 4,200 songs, embarrassing in a library that contains just over 7,000 songs to begin with. That was 12.2 days of unlistened-to music, equaling a staggering 34 gigabytes. The proof of my reckless consumption was sobering. To be fair, the playlist contained songs that I listened to on my iPod, or on other iTunes libraries where the play count had not transferred, but the enormity struck me all the same.

Since I began shuffling through the playlist, the barometer of my shame has decreased to 11.9 days. I have listened to “Track 15″ from Songs of Old Russia, filled with lots of hearty chanting, not unlike something that might come from The Hunt for the Red October soundtrack. Currently, the seventeen-minute Pink Floyd epic “Dogs” drifts from my speakers in a wave of hallucinatory synth rifts. Next up it “How’s It Going to Be?” from Third Eye Blind. I can only imagine what will play after that.

The opportunities that Oink presented were overwhelming, certainly for someone who possesses an innate tendency to collect intensely. It’s possible my compulsion to download has endured for so long because of the intense connection that can occur between listener and music, a bond that approaches spirituality. Or maybe it has lasted because, with the proliferation of file sharing, it has become an item that is free to collect and consume. I, however, tend to believe differently. Perhaps my appetite for music lives on because there is so much of it, because a complete collection is impossible, because there will always be more, because for each song that is deleted from my unplayed playlist, another will certainly be added.