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Having listened to a number of other Nurse with Wound records didn’t prepare me for the sheer outlandishness of Sylvie and Babs, widely touted as being one of the best NWW creations in the whole catalog. At the very least it was the most ambitious, requiring something like two and a half years of work and involving dozens of co-conspirators. The results are jarring even for existing NWW fans — perhaps doubly so for more recent converts rather than folks who have, so to speak, been with them from the beginning. “Stockhausen’s Hymnen on nitrous oxide” was one description; “K-Tel gone Dada” was how the record was described when it was still in progress — “one side being abstract, butchered versions of really famous hit records and the other is the ‘Beggar’s Opera’.”

The first NWW record in my life was A Sucked Orange, which turned out to be one of the worst places possible to start with the Nurse sound. That disc was little more than a collection of B-sides and outtakes, not all of them terribly distinguished, either, but it was at the very least a way of preparing me for just how fiendishly strange NWW could be. When I bought Babs, I brought it home at some ungodly hour of the night and listened to it twice through with my jaw dangling open for most of it.

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The Big Lebowski is a shapeless, genial, hilarious movie about a guy who is himself genial and hilarious and none too shapely. His name is Jeff Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), but he prefers to be called The Dude, and he spends a good deal of time tiresomely correcting people about this particular fact. This is probably due to the fact that he shares the last name of a local philanthropist, "Big" Lebowski (David Huddleston, looking disturbingly like Dick Cheney). The two could not be more dissimilar: The Dude does things like drink milk in the supermarket before paying for it with a rumpled personal check, while Big Lebowski creates programs for underprivileged urban children.

The only way to make these two characters co-exist in the same movie, it seems, is to put them into a screwball plot that's like The Big Sleep crossed with Animal House. In fact, big chunks of the plot of Lebowski seem inspired by Sleep — a powerful man in a wheelchair; a pornography subplot; a missing young woman; et any number of ceteras. It's close enough to count as homage, but it's played as comedy; the thriller plot is mostly a clothesline for gags.