Spectacular

Hey, remember Pete Campbell's pristine little wife from Mad Men? Or repressed Annie from Community?

Even if you don't - read this.

Now in widescreen

I finally got pissed off that no youtube video I tried to post fit in the teensy little middle column of the previous layout, and switched templates. It's not as clean and polished, but definitely more embed-friendly. Comments, suggestions?

Back to the old thing until I figure out a way to mess with templates without getting rage blackouts.

Molten spike

So,  anybody seen Kickass?

Strands

It's been a headachey day. I've been trying to shake off a cold for a few days, and finally decided that what I need is some good old chicken soup. This being my world of nevercook, the part of chicken soup ended up being played by Vietnamese Pho from the takeout place. I hope it works.

I ended up in a professional cul de sac. I can either work on a Romanian documentary featuring quaint, rhymed folk ditties, a Polish newsreel featuring quaint, rhymed folk ditties, or a fairy tale featuring quaint, rhymed invocations. I've no idea how I got here, but I blame Twilight.

Which I finally watched, last night. I don't think it's possible to write anything new about the movie, and to just sum it up as "bad" seems completely beside the point. It was such a weird, disjointed creation. Definitely had that Harry Potter adaptation feel of trying to cram and stich together all these elements on a strict deadline, except without any... you know... action. The end credits took me completely by surprise (and were a total what the fuck of their own - who the hell chose that song?)

I genuinely tried to find the appeal, but I suppose I just didn't have the adolescent ovaries. I did like the cinematography. Well, ok: I liked the forest. The landscape shots. Seemed like a place I might want to live, or at least spend some time in.

Then again, I'm guessing they shot it in British Columbia, so that's not exactly news. I also liked some of the music, but my taste does have several glaring, gothic-skewing loopholes...

I could not, however, wrap my head around how remote the whole experience seemed to me. I felt like I was watching a film that was simultaneously its own, ready-made parody. The dialogue was so clunky and hollow at the same time. The girl's acting so... catatonic. She conveyed brain death with very limited means of expression (I swear, there was not a single line she did not either begin or end with a snort or an "um"), but maximum zeal. And then there was the creepy subtext of a mindless, infatuated drone clinging desperately to a guy who keeps saying - sometimes even jokingly - that he might physically hurt her. It all came together perfectly during the shitballs retarded Watch Me Glitter sequence, and the subsequent exchange:

E: I'm designed to kill.
B: I don't care.
E: I've killed before.
B: It doesn't matter.
E: I wanted to kill you. I've never wanted a human's blood so much in my life.
B: I trust you.
E: I try to play marbles with my ex-girlfriends' clitorises, but they're too squishy
B: I totally get that.

Ok, that last part might not have made it into the movie, but it really wouldn't look that out of place. Weird, weird thing.

What else... Ah. I'm madly in love with Jesse St. James. Not the pornstar. The fictional person who says stuff like "I picked the Stephen Sondheim biography section for our clandestine meeting place because only he would be able to express my melancholia." Now with video!

Over and out.

Data dump

Cayce puts the card facedown on the trestle table and signs its virgin back. Something seems to clunk heavily at the rear of her ethical universe.

---

[hilarious perfection]

Looking up now into the manically animated forest of signs, she sees the Coca-Colo logo pulsing on a huge screen, high up on a building, followed by the slogan "NO REASON!"

---

Curled in a body-warm cave of cotton broadcloth and terry, the remote in her hand, she unforgets her father's absence.

---

Cayce and the German designer will watch the towers burn, and eventually fall, and though she will know she must have seen people jumping, falling, there will be no memory of it.
It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority.
An experience outside of culture.

---

"Thank you. Just a moment, please, while I find my key." Actually it's in the pocket of her Rickson's, ready to be palmed when needed, but she checks the bathroom, the closet, glances behind the black furniture, then notices a large gray carrier bag, with the Blue Ant logo on the side, at the foot of her bed. She kneels to look under the bed, discovers it isn't the kind you can look under, and comes up, still kneeling, with the key, a plastic mag-strip card, in her hand. "I've found it. Thank you very much."

---

[incomprehensible without background information, so you'll have to take my word that it's cool]

"Yes, it ends in .ru Observe the protocol H-B"

Baranov, emailing from the hyphen.

---

Her mother had once said that when the second plane hit, Win's chargin, his personal and professional mortification at this having happened, at the perimeter having been so easily, so terribly breached, would have been such that he might simply have ceased, in protest, to exist.

---

[and an absolutely brilliant conclusion to the story, snuck in by way of an e-mail message from a background character]

Prion now has some connection with a Russian yogurt drink that is about to launch here, purchased I think by the Japanese. I know because it is part of my briefing for work now, this drink. Also because he has it in a cooler at the gallery - revolting! I think he will try to serve it at the opening but absolutely NO! So mystery Internet movie is out, yogurt drink is in.

---

The ending wasn't exactly stellar, but it was a very enjoyable read nonetheless. Next up... The Graveyard Book, I guess.

Strings

Several things, mostly musical.

I've struggled with it for a very long time, but it seems inevitable - I am going to like the Katie Melua atrocity, even with its twee, miscast vocals and crazy transitions. I hear everything that's wrong with it, but at the same time I can't help but see what it could have been, given a better delivery and perhaps a stronger oriental motif. Sidenote #1: the uptempo part reminds me of this thing, which is surprising in that I had managed to completely erase it from memory. Or so I thought. Sidenote #2: amping the poor girl's vocals up to an operatic echo is just setting her up for failure during live performances. She simply does not have the pipes.

Next up: I found a new erogenous zone - classical renditions of pop tunes. Which is what a bunch of kids from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music are doing (though I'm sure they're not the first). Now, if you're a kid from Australia looking for a song that lends itself to a classical interpretation, chances are you're going to end up doing this. And good for you. This, however, seems much less obvious, and therefore all the more... well, fun. Sidenote #1: apparently it's very difficult to look badass while playing the kettle drums (if that's what they're called). Sidenote #2: the lady straddling the cello seems to have no such problem.

Finally, last Friday ao treated us to a musical flashback which included this:

Someone at io9 wrote that this song sounds like losing your virginity at the Rennaissance Faire - and by God, yes it does! But I also used to firmly believe that "To me you're like a growing addiction that I can't deny" is the most perfectly delivered lyric ever. Though I have to admit part of its charm laid in the fact I had no idea that's what it said. And omg Nicole Kidman was in Batman Whatever? Who knew? 

Blindside

It seems I finally got hooked on a new TV series. It hasn't happened in ages, and I must have really been jonesing for an addiction, because I latched onto a huge, sprawling family drama, of all things. No homo.

Well, kinda. Anyway, it's called Parenthood (ugh), and it's kind of like Brothers and Sisters, except well-cast, -acted and -balanced, and without the ridiculous politicizing or hamfisted pathos. It has Peter Krause doing his best everyman-but-way-cooler and Lauren Graham as a disorganized, wild-ish single mom (shocker!), as well as a whole bunch of other actors I don't really know and that old guy who went ranted on Fox about how when he went on welfare the state didn't help him out (I'm not kidding, he really did.) Oh, and a guy who looks exactly like Zach Braff, so I hate him (the Scrubs trauma runs deep), but according to yssy is actually Kristen Bell's husband. Horrible, horrible mug. All of them have genuine chemistry with each other (even the repugnant Zach Braff clone), and at least some of the dialogue seems improvised - they keep talking over each other, cutting each other off, etc., so the whole thing has a very natural feel to it.

The writing is surprisingly good. I've watched 7 episodes so far, and there were only two unintentionally cringeworthy moments - or one, if you happen to have the stomach for watching slow-mo scenes of the "daddy & son on a bike" variety. And even the seemingly stock characters - like the requisite blond career woman with a big burly stay at home husband - have some depth. Blond career woman is actually my favorite character so far, by the way. She's kind of brusque, offputting and doesn't suffer incompetence lightly, so I totally identify with her and wait for the universe to realign itself and provide me with a big burly appendix of my own.

Hrm. Since I already cut the clip out anyway, I might as well post it (but via yousendit, I'm still wary of the youtube copyright hounds). Here's the aforementioned lawyer + husband teaching us all a valuable lesson about the subtleties of comedic timing and delivery.

Incidentally, the series made me realize that I missed out on absolutely all of the hallmark family experiences (well, American, serialized family experiences anyway). I never underwent a teenage rebellion, never had an embarassing conversation about the birds and the bees with my parents, never brought my significant other home for the first time, never spectacularly failed at group sports... then again, I've never had a son with a behavioral disorder either. And what really sold me on Parenthood, I think, was that I still found myself responding to what was going on onscreen. And pretty strongly, too.

Also, Peter Krause gives great overwhelmed father. Seriously, dude can act.

I hope they don't fuck it up too soon with some melodrama. I really do.

Keeping tabs

He was a good find. I hope he keeps putting out music, because this definitely hits the spot. I actually wanted to post this clip instead of the full song, but it could only be embedded as this huge blob that wouldn't fit into this layout... which is an issue I keep running into, actually. Anyway, hope you enjoy.

Abridged

Gonna chuck some quotes at you, as promised. No preface, so just try to keep up with me now (01:23).

Not the first time she's used [the forum] that way. She wonders, really, if she ever uses it any other way. It is the gift of "OT," Off Topic. Anything other than the footage is Off Topic. The world, really. News. Off Topic.

---

Seated, not bothering with the menu, Cayce orders coffee, eggs, and sausage, all in her best bad French.
The girl looks at her in amazed revulsion, as though Cayce were a cat bringing up a particularly repellant hairball.
"All right," says Cayce, under her breath, to the girl's receding back, "be French."

---

Assuming the footage is entirely computer-generated means that your maker eithyer has de-engineered Roswell CGI capacities or a completely secure rendering operation.

Thank you for your attention.

Down for a Jack Move

Here's a small convergence of popculture flotsam that is probably only amusing to me and no one else, BUT each of the individual components is at least a teensy bit noteworthy in and of its own, so...

I'm still reading Gibson's Pattern Recognition. There will be quotes, at a later date, but this is about a chapter title - Jack Moves, Jane Faces. It caught my attention, because I thought it was verb-based (and thus vague in a pretty clever way), and implied a cause and effect thing. Later it was explained that a "Jack move" was actually the main character's ex-boyfriend's name for an unorthodox action, while "Jane faces" belonged in the bedroom.

Part two: Bohdan recently sent me this bit of genius. And today, as I was linking it to someone else, I found out that the best thing about Shortbus  seems to appreciate it as well:

So I listened to it again, this time actually paying some attention to the lyrics, and caught the bit around 0:52. Which gave me a smile. Then I started wondering if it's really kosher to mimic a dead person's lisp, but pretty guy guitar where was I?

The final bit of serendipity happened as I was writing this post and realized I have absolutely no way of working my new favorite photo into it. If you watched the above clip in its entirety you know that is no longer the case (the one I wanted to post originally had no umbrellas in it). So feast your eyes:

The entire glorious buildup can be found here.

Over Indeed

This one's been brewing for a while, but somehow I never found the words. Still haven't, to be honest. Other than Spring is here, and life does not suck.

At around 4:30p.m. the sunset-ish light hits the kitchen windows just right, scattering rectangles of warmth all over my floor.

Mom showed me a peculiar toy store across the street from my apartment. It can only be accessed from the courtyard, and it's filled with really old school teddy bears, hand puppets, caleidoscopes - generally all the stuf that makes you go mushy and nostalgic. And in the back there's this short flight of winding stairs that leads you to a small salon with an old couch, a tea table, a wooden horse, and shelves filled with old, used fairy tale books, music boxes... the decor is so perfectly infused with the essence of childhood it's almost creepy. But it's not. It's wonderful.

I had lunch with Gosia at an Indonesian restaurant nearby. The food was sublime, I'm totally going back. Although the place was deserted - we were the only guests. I hope they don't go out of business or something.

I'm going to Krakow at the end of April, to Berlin towards the end of May, and to a land of comic book make-believe shortly after. Kind of figured out a costume for the last one. Just need white pants.

Yoav's new record is coming out in a few days. Really looking forward to it. After that Natlie Merchant, Sarah McLachlan, Sia and Roisin Murphy. And possibly some others.

The dog days are over.

Bird's Eye

I had a bizarrely unpleasant learning experience recently - namely I came to realize how difficult it is to unequivocally relinquish something, even if you're not really interested in having it. It really caught me off guard and completely shut down my brain, leading to general unpleasantness and a bout of self-loathing. On one hand it kind of gives me insight into why certain situations in my life developed the way they did. On the other - it's certainly not the sort of insight that might result in empathy. Yes, it's human, but it's also low and ugly.

On the other end of the scale, I was also the recipient of a very clever and sweet romantic gesture straight out of a decently written romcom. Something from Sandra Bullock's oeuvre, maybe.

So there it is, the yin and yang of random encounters.

The Pitfalls of Guerilla Warfare

I went to Amanda Palmer's "ninja gig" in Warsaw tonight, and it was a fascinating experience. It took place at Powiększenie, which is a club near Nowy Swiat, in downtown Warsaw. It was basically Amanda passing time - until Neil (Gaiman) finished his book signing and took her out to dinner - by rambling hilariously about anything and everything (including Lady Gaga, her visit to Australia, and her attitude towards drugs) and playing some songs on a ukulele.

(Cue the story of the ukulele, which I need as foreshadowing: she bought it just for laughs, but then it turned out to be very useful, because she didn't have to lug around a keyboard everywhere, and could just do these gigs with a ukulele. She can't really play it, only knows 7 chords (but not what they're called), and refuses to learn more because then she would be a "ukulele player", and nobody wants to be that. Also, even though she got it 2 years ago for 19 bucks, and it's always a bit out of tune, she won't buy a proper one "the same way really beautiful people sometimes insist on staying fat so no one will love them". She only knows how to play about 4 songs on it, including Radiohead's Creep, which she learned for a corporate showcase of her album, because she figured people would find it charming. And they did.)

I had a great time, laughed my ass off throughout, and wished she would just sit there telling stories all night long. She actually made a comment about Henry Rollins doing just that, deciding at some point that he's just gonna do tours being Henry Rollins, and people going "yeah, ok". Apparently there's already some footage up on youtube, so here are her musings on Lady Gaga in song format (she meant to write a blog entry about it, but couldn't make it work, so she wrote a song instead. She hasn't memorized it yet, so she's reading the lyrics off her iphone, which is being held up by an audience member - hence the "scroll..." plea towards the end):



And now for the part where I try to wrangle my - still quite nebulous at this point - impressions into some sort of cohesive... thing. Basically: Amanda Palmer doesn't really have a stage persona. I'm not saying she's not charismatic - she oozes charisma. I mean it in the sense of a filter, a screen separating her from the audience. She essentially wears her heart on her sleeve, and seems to telegraph everything that's going through her head, either consciously or subconsciously, and in this case - mostly self-consciously. It's a bit tricky when you're a performer, because you're relied on to shoulder the show, to put on a brave face and soldier on, no matter what. And that, in turn, is tricky when you're doing a spur of the moment, guerilla gig, and the audience doesn't deliver the requisite spontaneity. There's a real fragility to these transient, unscripted moments, and I suppose it's very easy to suddenly find yourself sprinting in place, several feet off that cliff, cartoon coyote style, desperately trying to keep the illusion going.

Well, this time the audience did not deliver, as people verged from non-responsive to embarassing, and the place seemed to put her in a different mindframe too. From what she said, the way these ninja gigs usually work is she posts online that she's going to be at a particular location (usually al fresco), people show up, she fucks around with the ukulele, and everybody has a laugh. This was the first one organized in an actual music venue, with a stage, an audience, and proper sound equipment. As time wore on, she seemed to grow more and more self-conscious about fucking up chords on the ukulele, and not giving people a "proper" musical experience. She kept saying how now she has to come back and do a proper show, because this way she can't show us what she actually does, which is play the piano well and perform her own music. And that this was just her being charming. The real "moment of truth", in my opinion, came at the end of the show. She reluctantly did a request (cringing about butchering the song on the ukulele), and after the applause died down, she said it was a really weird ninja gig ending, and probably the most anti-climactic one ever. Then, as people were starting to get up, she asked if she could just do one last, short song. And played Creep - i.e. one of the only songs she actually can do on the ukulele. And she really belted it out, gave an awesome performance, as if trying to say: "Look people, I really know how to do this. REALLY. Ok?"

Feeling complicit and co-responsible for a performance is a rather odd, and not entirely pleasant sensation, especially when you have nothing to bring to the table (I was too inhibited to ask what her attitude towards slaying vampires was during the Q&A session), but at the same time, I left the club adoring Amanda Palmer to bits and wishing there were more people like her in the world, so hey... maybe that was the plan all along?

Jumping bones

I was reminded recently of Dead Man's Bones. Apparently the record's out already. Will give it a listen once I get over the photo. To balance things out, the other guy is a complete uggo:

Fucking genetics.

She takes off her clothes, brushes her teeth, limbs wooden with exhaustion and vibrating with caffeine, turns off the lights, and crawls, literally, beneath the stiff silver spread on Damien's bed.
To curl fetal there, and briefly marvel, as the last wave crashes over her, at the perfect and now perfectly revealed extent of her present loneliness.

I've started reading Pattern Recognition and was surprised at how easily I slip into Gibson's prose. Brisk and concise, with sleek, cleanly executed flourishes. I find it strangely comforting - instant insulation in a perfectly accessible pocket universe. 

Days of begging, days of theft

I went to the Florence and the Machine concert last night, and it was an interesting experience. The place was dreadful, the audience - young. One of the first things I noticed was the seemingly universal understanding of the (English) stage banter. Literally the whole room - around 2000 people, give or take - laughed when she said she'd only been on a "quiet tour of Poland" so far, so she'd seen a lot of Polish churches, but hadn't sung in a Polish warehouse before. Lingua franca, no two ways about it.

As for the performance itself... let's put it this way: the audience delivered, and the artist quickly caught up with it. She opened with Howl, which is one of my 3 favorite songs of hers, and it was very disapointing. Sounded really lackluster, almost phoned-in. She didn't even try to hit any of the high... well, I don't even know if you can call them "notes" if we're talking about four full verses of the chorus. Then went Kiss With a Fist which really got the audience going, and I think over the course of the next few songs it dawned on her that these people were really responsive, and really into her. By Between Two Lungs (#6) she was belting it all out to the point where I was actually awestruck - and I don't even like that number. The absolute turning point, however, was The Drumming Song, which was just balls-to-the-wall awesome, and drove the audience into a bona fide frenzy. To wit (unfortunately the clip cuts off before the best part, which can be found here, but with shitty audio):

I think it was after this one that she suffered a mild sensoric overload and started just walking back and forth along the edge of the stage, staring slackjawed at the audience, hand on her mouth. I doubt I'll ever get tired of seeing musicians' first reaction to Polish audiences. The requisite declarations of this being the best gig of the tour followed, and kept resurfacing throughout the rest of the show. Which was from then on stellar, in a very frantic, heartfelt, no holes barred kind of way (I could almost feel her vocal cords fraying as she charged through Dog Days Are Over). Awesome, awesome stuff.

My only gripe is subjective: 2 out of 3 of my favorite songs were disappointing live. I wish she had opened with something else, so I could have heard Howl treated with the sort of reckless abandon she tapped into during the 2nd part of the show, but Blinding was actually the last song before the encore, and it still did not work. Once it's stripped of the gothic, spatial studio trimmings, you're left with just drums, an overwhelmed harp, and flat, militant vocals.

My last impression, as I watched her dart around the stage in that flowy frock, singing about Midas, bloodied feet, and the walls of Dreaming, was feeling really grateful that the current musical Zeitgeist actually allowed this sort of sensibility to enter the mainstream, because I can't wait for next offerings.