It seems like lately almost every big media player has been issuing some sort of retraction or another, usually over those wacky missing WMDs. In spirit of these retractions, we here at Hooray for Anything are going to issue our own retraction. Last week we called Pufi Ami Yumi "an obscure Japanese band." We were wrong. Turns out that they're big enough with the hipster set that they were listed on Gawker as a "thing to do." If something is big enough to be in with New York hipsters than obviously they're not that obscure. We apologize. We didn't know. Plus, we like parallel sentence construction and calling them "obscure" fit into the sentence construction.

We still, however, maintain that writing an attack on smug elitist music snobs by writing about foreign Japanese pop bands is still a little on the pot calling the kettle black side of things. After all, what point is there in listening to non-English speaking bands if it isn't to impress people that you know bands from other countries? Besides, Japanese pop-culture obsessives are one of those little know subsets of sub-culture, usually consisting of Japanese ex-pats and white guys with an Asian fetish. Isn't the very point of being part of a sub-culture to be slightly on the elitist side of things?

Anyways, after stressing out last week about being able to find something, then spending both the lunch break and BART ride home reading the issue cover-to-cover to bring you the best in Wankdom, the writers of the Bay Guardian were nice enough to produce some wanking material straight off. This is the first paragraph of a review of the new movie "Tarnation," a movie made-up of old videos and other elements of "found" filmmaking. Extra points in this blurb for name checking Duchamp.

"EVERY GENERATION SINCE the onslaught of camcorder technology, and a few generations before, has secured its very own "found" filmmaker. Like Duchamp, choosing his ready-mades, critics and programmers and high-profile auteurs have selected – seemingly out of the blue – trademarked unknowns to carry an idea, usually awesomely expressed, to the general public. The found filmmaker doesn't arrive through the same old channels, hasn't hit up the usual funders, hasn't been bounced around talent agencies or even gone to film school, but shows up naked on Culture Beach with some treasure, dug up from the bottom of the ocean, that forwards a particular school of thought's prophesies about the future of film."


PS- for an added bonus, check out this review of some sort of art thing that we don't even know how to even describe- "Version". If the above wank is merely just a wank, this one is autoerotic asphyxiation