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April 20th, 2012
10:46 pm - beat me up?
different people might want to beat me up for different parts of the next sentence, but it can't be helped:
I just heard bon iver's cover of bonnie raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me" and IT'S AWESOME. it makes me want to play piano. and be in 6th grade again.
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February 27th, 2012
February 25th, 2012
01:46 am - more reviews
well, my plan was to write about a movie I saw last night, because the recent spate of eh movies ended with this one. But it's late now and I'm packing my bag to fly home (whoohoo!) so I won't go into it. But the movie was A Separation, and it's excellent. Killer writing. Just killer.
But what I *will* make time to quickly relate is a book that I read tonight: "Duck, Death, and the Tulip".
So yeah, it made me cry. Then I read it again...and I cried again. Completely out of nowhere-- it was hot, the house was like an oven, just had a big meal, and about to go have birthday drinks with a friend, and spotted this book Claire had found today and bought as a gift for someone. It's a children's book (at least in format) and it is simple and beautiful and amazing.
Check it out. (I would suggest not reading any of the sample pages that are available on the website. you need to hold it in your hands and read it start to finish. :) )
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February 21st, 2012
10:01 pm
for dinner tonight I ate a raw ear of corn. Not that I ever thought about it, but if I had ever thought about it, I would have assumed that would never happen. Who eats raw corn?
I eats raw corn. that shit was like candy. Water was boiling in a pot, ready to cook up some tasty corn, but we skipped the middle man and ate the corn raw. And I do not regret it. Try it sometime.
Addendum, Feb 22: It may be worth mentioning that the corn in question was plucked from the stalk approx 4 hours before it met its demise. Individual results with storebought corn may vary.
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February 20th, 2012
10:39 pm - Shame.
indeed. As in, "it's kind of a shame this movie got made." No, not that's accurate. "It's kind of a shame that this movie got hyped up and made me eagerly pursue seeing it." That's more like it. Either it falsely represented itself, or I filled in some blanks erroneously in accordance with some high hopes that I had.
Whatever the case is, my understanding was that it was a character-intense movie, exploring this serial-womanizer and how his routine gets shaken up by the unexpected arrival of his sister to stay with him.
1. First problem: it was not very character intense. These were one-dimensional characters with little to no backstory, little to no development, and little to no resolution. He's not so much a womanizer as fixated on sexual energy and status. We don't see him charm the pants off women and then declare it time to ramble when the doin' is done. He is good looking and moody; if that works for a woman within eyeshot, then great, he takes her home. If not, then great, he looks at copious amounts of porn and masturbates furiously, or he calls up his regular prostitute service. Womanizing is about winning a chase or proving to yourself you've the man; Fassbender's character is just a butthound, and doesn't even seem to particularly relish it. (That in itself could be a statement of a different sort of exploration, that of the idea that despite the utter oversexualization of contemporary media and culture, and the primacy given to the pursuit of sex, its acquistition can too often be hollow, short on meaning, and ultimately unsatisfying to the point that we wonder if we've been deceived. But I'm not convinced that was this movie's statement.) He's more or less a sex robot.
So we got that. Then his sister shows up, and their introduction is awkward and full of weird sexual tension (he busts in on her in the shower and then proceeds to just stand there while water drips from her naked breasts and they say their hellos) that never gets addressed at all. This frustrating dangling of backstory in front of the viewer like a dramatic carrot is repeated later when he jumps onto his sister naked (true, he began with a towel wrapped around his waist) while she lies on the couch, pinning her down and yelling at her. This follows her walking on him frantically and joylessly masturbating. You see what I'm saying? This is rich stuff. Important stuff. Stuff the viewer wants to understand. Give us something. ANYTHING.
2. Second problem: For all the supposed artiness and drama, there is a lot of cliche shit in this movie. Cliche emotional moments, and amazingly even *these* aren't explained. To wit:
--his sister is a vagabond, a loner, emotionally damaged and nearly homeless...but also a bombshell lounge singer who has landed a gig at some swanky cocktail bar -AND-- apparently had an immaculately stylish evening gown stuck in her luggage, which we all assume was a crumpled Kroger bag.
--oh, and at the above-mentioned gig, she sings "New York, New York", and the brother cries. However, he hides the emotion from his dumb work friend, and when she comes to the table, he blows her off as well. This is never mentioned again.
--oh yeah, and the sister's arm is covered in scars because she's troubled and she cuts herself.
--oh yeah, and when he says she has to move out of his apartment and doesn't respond to her protest that she'll never see him again if she leaves, she slashes her wrists in the bathroom.
--naturally, while she's doing that, he's purchased himself a hot 3-way with a pair of lesbians (or at the very least, exceedingly bi-curious), which he doesn't appear to enjoy.
--and of course, he rushes home in a moment of panic and finds her, and sobs and calls 911 and tries to stop her bleeding with his bare hands.
--AND OF COURSE, SHE DOESN'T DIE FROM THESE WOUNDS.
--after she wakes up - in the hospital, with him by her side -, he goes outside onto a lonely NYC pier and cries.
--OF COURSE, IT'S RAINING IN THIS SCENE.
The sex isn't sexy. The tears aren't sad. The pain isn't very real. It's a high production-value movie peopled with characters that you don't really care about because you have no access to and no involvement with them. Which is unfortunate because Fassbender and Mulligan are good actors, it is interesting material to explore, and I like the boldness of doing an 18+ (the equivalent of NC17 here, though I don't know what rating is was released under in the US...?) movie with name actors and serious subject matter. But what ended up on screen was scenes of supposed high drama falling flat, and sex scenes that were little more than porn without the explicit penetration.
what a shame.
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January 15th, 2012
03:09 am - melancholia
i'm not sure how long ago it came out back home, but i just saw it. A few mixed initial reactions:
1. this movie is slow and boring, harkening at moments to the feeling of watching Tree of Life
2. this movie is kind of awesome, in that it is an art movie AND a sci-fi movie AND has good acting. Also, it's one of those movies where I say to myself, "man, the director had a vision and he/she sure stuck to it". A really strong style, and I don't mean "strong" qualitatively, I mean more like "convincing" or "committed" maybe. Perhaps "thorough".
3. movies like this must be weird during shooting. I mean, it's a collection of unhappy/unbalanced/unfulfilled characters, none of which interact with each other comfortably, and the subject matter is pretty grim (the whole waiting-for-the-world-to-end thing), and there's no real energy or action, so I imagine it would be a bit bleak around the set.
4. it makes me want to make movies. i didn't particularly love this one, but it would seem that Lars von Trier did. It seems like he had an idea, he was into it, and he created it as artfully and as powerfully and as beautifully as he could. And that's pretty cool.
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January 10th, 2012
01:39 am - welcome, 2012, come right in.
hi 2012, it's great to have you.
i have been intending to write for the last few days, but now I've just spent the last couple hours on picasa forums trying to fix a silly mistake I made. so i'm going to bed. tomorrow is my first day back at work in this new year, and I'll plan to write afterwards...
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December 19th, 2011
09:44 am - An Epic Moment in Music
There is no good/easily identifiable reason why Cisqo's "Thong Song" was stuck in my head this morning as I rode in to work. I didn't hear it this morning, or recently; it's not the tone I've chosen for my alarm or phone ring; I never particularly loved the song; I don't really have a thing for thongs. (A thong thing, if you will).
Nevertheless, as I peddled my (lovely! new!) bike in this morning, there I was, alternating "baby make ya booty go duh-duh-duh" with "thighs like what? what? what." This was all inaudibly safe, under my breath.
Once I got here, in an effort to share this beauty/clear my head, I related the song to a co-worker, who couldn't immediately remember it. So we you-tube'd it. And a whole new realm of wonder opened.
I had actually seen the video once before, but I had forgotten. It is so epic-ly fantastically bad that I came in to my office and watched it again. Holy crap it's awesome. It was always a terrible song, and that's fine. You heard it on Casey's Top 40 (or was it already Ryan Seacrest by then?), and you just wrote it off like a lot of other really crappy pop/hop-hip songs, a bad song written in the studio and assigned to some aspiring performer, the whole thing pretty far removed from music and just a vehicle to make quick money, do a summer tour, and call it quits.
And that's pretty much all true - except Cisqo did go on to release a clothing line which you never heard back from - but there's something different in this one, and you wouldn't know it without watching the video. These guys aren't doing the usual, suave and serious young black star thing. They are instead so cheesy and over the top that they probably risk getting beat up by the usual hip-hop posers. Even for the year 2000, when it came out, the dance moves are pretty silly (walking across the crowd? one-handed cartwheels?), and it seems like the whole video is perhaps his audition to be a backup dancer for Britney Spears.
Anyway, tease all you want, but there are a few Epic Moments in Music in here. Go watch the video and consider:
*at 2:16, in approaching a cluster of bikini girls shaking their wares vigorously, the camera tracks down a hot dog while mustard is applied. I'm familiar enough with all the sexual innuendo around phallic food objects, generally being licked/held/eaten (in one big ecstatic bite) by a half-dressed girl, but this is actually just a camera moving down a hot dog. Nobody hands the hot dog to a girl, nobody sees the hot dog, no one looks into the camera, no one holds the hot dog in the vicinity of a thong-ed behind. And in fact, the shot is only about half a second long. It's just a hot dog. In a hip hop song. Hilarious.
*at 3:16, the key change. It was just a funny song until it got epic. And it got epic when they make a man-pyramid, he spacewalks over the crowd's heads, the string section (yes! the string section!) comes in, and the whole song changes key, taking that magical half-step up. It's so good, it sits you down in that deck chair, hands you that cold ice tea and all you can say is "ahhhhh". Refreshing.
Actually the rest of the video from here on can't even be dissected, it simply is. It's all blacklights and serpent Cisqo dancing among oddly glowing shaky bits, with a stuffy tuxedoed chamber orchestra playing on a dais.
Two final thoughts:
1. Was this the last video to get away with gratuitous use of neon + blacklights?
2. From wikipedia: The director of the video, Joseph Kahn, was quoted as saying, "I listen to 'Thong Song', and I say, 'Well, this song is about asses.' So you can either accept it and do something like I did, or you can go and try and turn the 'Thong Song' into some kind of Chemical Brothers video and make it all pretentious; about some fucking communist upheaval or something. Let's just relax and make a booty video, and let's make a really good one, and make it fun."
"Let's just relax and make a booty video." Well said, sir, well said.
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November 9th, 2011
09:40 am - um, hi?
yeah, so...three and a half months is a totally reasonable amount of time between entries. It also sadly illustrates the creative and thought-y content of my brain over the past third of a year. sigh.
Good morning. November 9th, 2011. Sitting in my over-air conditioned office listening to music, slowing preparing to start doing some actual work. The Melbourne Festival ended 3 weeks ago, but it's only just now slowing down to a enjoyable pace. Still lots to do, and there's already lots to do for the planning of 2012, but it is slowing down to more or less 9-to-5-able.
One sign of the return to a reasonable pace of life is that I've been able to read a book or two. I just finished Erik Larsen's In the Garden of Beasts, about the American ambassador to Berlin during the rise of the Nazi party. Pretty interesting, and I went to the library and checked out another Third Reich history book that Larson listed in his notes and sources. But I might be a little Nazi'd out, so I got a David Foster Wallace book too, who is a guy I've been meaning/wanting to read for a long time, but up until now I've only read a transcript of a universtiy commencement speech he gave (which was good). Anyway, so that's all a little bit exciting. Also have the new John Irving book, Last Night in Twisted River, though so far it hasn't sucked me in. Still going, though.
Anyway. No really big news to report. Have gotten out of town the last 2 weekends, which has been great. It's hard to extract myself from the city and the busy and the things to do, and then when i do, it's like 'ahh. duh, of course this is what you're supposed to do.' Just to get out around trees and smaller clusters of life and slower movements and sounds of wind and animals (sorry, frantically angry mating cats 2 doors down, you don't count). I like catching scents on the breeze that remind me of what is burned into my brain as "the way Australia smells", based on some of my very first experiences back in 2005-2006.
Speaking of smells, and I have most likely mentioned this before, but I am frequently hit with smell ja vu. Most of the time I don't think I'm actually smelling anything, it's just a random synapse firing somewhere in my brain. It happens a lot, and I gotta say, I like it. It can be all different things, but there are a couple recurring themes. One is smells associated with Nana - her hairspray, her apartment, her car, the basement of her apartment, the Children's Museum in Oak Ridge, TN, etc, and another is girls/girlfriends from back in the day. Like this girl named Jenny who hung out on our street for about a week one summer - I think she was a friend/cousin of our neighbor Tammy - she wore the strongest dose of some god-awful perfume that you can imagine ("Diamonds", maybe?), and I occasionally get whiffs/phantom whiffs of that scent and look around furtively for a 13-year old with a halter top, stonewashed jeans and teased bangs. Another one is a strawberry shampoo used by my 8th-grade girlfriend, that has sprung up now and then in the ole nostrils. Anyway, there's a bunch of them. There's no real point to this paragraph.
Actually, it was a segue to a taste ja vu moment I had last night, which was definitely not triggered by an actual taste. I had a complete recollection of my first taste of beer. (Whether or not it has any accuracy at all I don't know, but there is a moment in my memory which I have decided was the first time I tasted beer.) On the back patio at 126 Cherokee Place, having a cookout with family friends Tina and Donnie, a styrofoam cooler, and those funny squat bottles of Busch from the 80's. I have mentally shellacked the taste of that cold, cheap beer, and somewhere in the back of my mind, it's still my definition of what beer tastes like. So last night I was cooking dinner and not having a beer, and suddenly - boom - I headed for the mountains of Busch (pause) beer. Which inspired me to in fact have a beer. It was Boag's, it was not the same, and dumped half of it out. Sigh.
That paragraph didn't have much of a point either, except maybe - the next time I'm in America, can you please arrange a cookout and some Busch beer? Thanks.
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July 21st, 2011
09:51 pm - on the migration patterns of homo sapiens sapiens
...And scientists are reporting that already them mens has begun to follow.
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