The Breslau Files

So I'm in Wroclaw, doing my festival gig. It's way more hardcore than I remembered. On the first day, we left work at 4:30a.m. And it wasn't the happy go lucky kind of "oh my look at the time" 4:30. It was gnaw your arm off get me outta here 4:30.

And then the same thing happened on the next day.

Now we're down to leaving around midnight, so I feel almost relaxed.

I'm eating tons of really unhealthy food and quite possibly already gained a couple kilos. Perhaps in response to that, my jaw stopped working today. It's happened to me once already, and last time mild anti-inflammation medicine worked, so I went to the doctor and told him just that. And he prescribed me Ketonal, which from what I understand is something akin to a horse tranquilizer. Anyway, I popped one and suddenly I was able to chew again, so I'm not complaining.

The work itself is kind of a pain, but the company is good. My co-translator was a very good bet. She is probably the most effortlessly cool person I know, has a good sense of humor, and appears to be completely unphasable, which comes in handy when dealing with the assorted freaks and geeks of ENH. Case in point - tonight, festival club:

bdq, walking up to her at the bar: Hello. I just wanted to look into your eyes.
dorota, meeting his gaze levelly, after a beat: And now, good bye.

There's humor, but it's of the unquotable, highly hermetic variety - either related to the sometimes absurd nature of our work, or springing from exhausted brainfarts. The current expression du jour is "shut down the reactors!", inserted whenever we have absolutely no idea what the person in the movie we're translating is saying (it's an actual quote from one of the translations, which inexplicably appeared on the screen instead of "I have a headache" or something equally unrelated).

I took it easy with alcohol tonight on account of the horse tranquilizer, so I had a rather Sober and Unkissed evening, but that was more than made up for by the unusually flirty Consort to the Beast, and the server goblin, who has taken to - literally - humping the wall. Something's gotta give soon, and I just hope I'm not anywhere near when it happens.

Oh, also: met (well, got better acquainted with, really) two new, potentially stellar people. So there's that.

Quickie

I already wrote about Pajiba vs. io9, but I forgot to mention that while io9's True Blood recaps are absolutely hilarious, Pajiba's are... just terrible. Bloated, boring, and utterly devoid of wit. (Yet their Entourage coverage is inspired. Go figure.)

Anyway, I loved the last episode so much that I even checked out the Pajiba recap, and sure enough - the things I liked about it most were the exact same things that got panned in the first paragraph. And the entire episode was written off as a disaster.

Meanwhile, I thought it was absolutely hilarious. Anna Paquin's delivery killed, I watched her crying scene at least 3 times... (actually, you can watch it here, in the io9 recap, and read the whole damn thing while you're at it. "Miley Cyrus, is that you?") I now firmly believe that all the flak she gets for playing Sookie is completely undeserved, it's not her fault her character's unlikable, and whenever they let her fly, she soars. I'm so happy that her Bill Compton's "Sookeh!" impression was just a first taste, and I hope they keep giving her comic material.

The new werewolf guy is a very nice addition, and I'll be completely on board once 1) I get over how cartoonish his body is and 2) he stops reminding me of Felicity's Scott Foley gone the way of the steroid.

The deranged new vampire guy is pure win, and he was Alvaro de la Quadra, the Spanish ambassador in Elizabeth, so obviously he was meant to rock (the laughable post-orgasmic void line from the previous ep notwithstanding). His car conversation with Tara was golden.

"It's skinny!" Even background characters got good material!

And they played that beautiful Massive Attack song in the strip club scene.

Ok, to play us out: a short interview with Sookie and the new werewolf guy.

I'm getting over the body as we speak, but at some angles, Noel Crane still rears his wholesome head.

Otherwise we'd go crazy

The festival is almost upon us, and it has imbued everyone involved with a seething hatred for Jean-Luc Godard. I get to translate a metric ton of his brain sewage into English, so I've developed a bit of an immunity, but still, sometimes the pain pushes through. To wit:

So, we asked to be told only about this, not about us, not about you – about something between us and you, you, who are we, we, who are you, we, who came from you. We placed “us” among “us”. We’re among us. Television is a family matter. Dad – day and mom- night. Dad – before and mom – after.

And then 20 more hours of that. Fun!

Anyway, I'm in more or less constant contact with my boss/server goblin, who uploads* the movies I then distribute among our translators. Whenever she's about to leave her house, she asks if I need something uploaded before she goes. It's a sort of ritual. At one point, when I copy-and-pasted my order from our Big Spreadsheet, she went "Pfff! How about a challenge for a change?" So when I sent her my next order, I snuck in Inception, in full Big Spreadsheet regalia (director, running time, language, etc). This became a sort of running joke, until last night I got another yousendit package with a file called Inception. Inside it was this:

You've guessed it. That's Jean-Luc Godard.

Sometimes it's worth it.

* through a series of trial yousendit accounts, so I've already received files from: Buffy Summers, Amber Benson, Sookie Stackhouse, James Marsters...

Mosaic

As I grew up, I discovered that I loved to wear women's clothing as a way to express my sexuality and myself, even though I was quite evidently straight (...) My later girlfriends usually found it a huge turn on and we'd always have fun trading clothes, amongst other things (...) The story I always tell people is I was about ten years old, swimming at my grandmother's house. My cousin and I were in front of a mirror, he had a buzz cut hairdo, and I had a little kid mullet. All of a sudden, he bursts out laughing and pointing at me and the bit of wet hair that was kind of curled around my neck and says,"HA HA, you look like a girl! You look like a girl!" I did look like a girl. I had very soft features for a boy and with my hair a bit longer, it wasn't a hard sell. But his teasing didn't make me feel bad. I thought I looked kind of... cool. I was intrigued by my androgyny and felt almost empowered by it. So I grew up thinking that since I certainly wasn't born to look like some gruff, muscled out Dude-Guy, I might as well work with what the good lord gave me, which happened to be a good, sassy pout and a sweet ass. So, off I went.

Godspeed.

Charting out and analyzing all the different permutations has never been my thing, but something about this quote fascinated me. Well, not something, it's not nearly as vague as that: straight guys acknowledging they have a sassy (sassy! I died and went to heaven) pout and a sweet ass fascinate me. That's such an... abundant, multi-pronged space. Every time I stumble upon someone of this ilk, I feel slightly better about the world at large.

Oh, and here's the author:

Airbending

I already love M. Night Shyamalan's Avatar: The Last Airbender, just for inspiring critics from pajiba and io9 to reach new heights of enlightened hilarity. Here are some choice bits:

And yet, there is no life. It feels half-speed like a dry run of the production. In fact, Shyamalan went out of his way to suck any and all life out of the original material, like a Twihard horking feathers as she chews through her Cullenpillow.

Aang’s animal companions are practically an afterthought. Given personality in the series, here they were a burden on the budget. Momo, the lemur-bat, is akin to the monkeys from the Indiana Jones series. In the movie, we seem him occasionally flying around in the background. There might be one scene where we actually get shots of him rifling through a closet. He looks cool, which is more than I can say for dear Appa, the flying six-legged furry bison. Appa was my favorite part of the series. Here, it’s like Snuffleupagus washed up on the island Where the Wild Things Are and got gang raped repeatedly, until one of the offspring developed the ability to fly and escape.

- Pajiba

All the story beats from the show's first season are still present, but Shyamalan manages to make them appear totally arbitrary. Stuff happens, and then more stuff happens, and what does it mean? We never know, because it's time for more stuff to happen. You start out laughing at how random and mindless everything in this movie is, but about an hour into it, you realize that the movie is actually laughing at you, for watching it in the first place. And it's laughing louder than you are, because it's got Dolby surround-sound and you're choking on your suspension of disbelief.

And then there's Shaun Toub, who stands out for the opposite reason: He's an honest-to-shit actual actor, and he looks as out of place as a zebra that's wandered into an alpaca farm. You can actually watch the realization dawn over Toub's face that nobody else is doing any acting in this film, but he soldiers on, dedicated to his craft in spite of everything. Toub, who's playing the uncle of Dev Patel's tormented Prince Zuko, is the real tragic hero of this movie, as you watch him struggle to cling to his dignity as everyone around him drowns in narrative sewage.

- io9

Both are worth a read, though lately I've found myself favoring the io9 stuff. Pajiba is great at these thorough, profanity- and vitriol-laced critical behemoths, whereas io9 is more of a breezy zinger acrobat. And with all the Godard bullcrap sloshing around my brain, I'm currently in the market for something lighter.

Also, they have a real knack for killer lead-ins. My favorite one of late is this: "Taiwan's NMA News creates computer-animated depictions of current events that drive a flaming dune buggy into the uncanny valley. NMA's 3D take on the Leno-Conan tiff was amusing, but their version of the Al Gore sex scandal allegations is transcendental..."

I giggled like a lunatic, and that was before Janek reminded me what the uncanny valley actually was.

The loveless fascination

The chorus disappoints, but the opening is pure magic, and enough to make ma crave it every once in a while.

Ever played low-intensity gaze tag with a stranger for an entire evening? Ever wondered if that's actually the case, or if it's just a random glance that's somehow snowballed to become its own, increasingly awkward thing? Ever found out before the night ran its course?

'Cause I didn't.

lower case society

Today, pretty much out of the blue, I got depressed, because I'm a horrible human being. Well, not because I'm horrible - I'm quite fine with that. To be precise: I got depressed because of something that a non-horrible person wouldn't be bothered by at all.

So, that was fun.

But now le'ts move on to Marina and the Diamonds. Zuzia sent me this a while ago:

Which was, I suppose, as good an introduction as any, if you're into vocals-driven music. I listened to the whole record and it turned out to be really good, if completely different from the above clip. Think less stripped-down and sweater-clad, and more... hrm... wrecking mirrorball. While I was turned off by the most aggressively thumpy numbers (Girls and Oh no), I couldn't help but love the glamorously wasted Shampain - though I have to admit much of the charm lies in the imagery. It's just such a nice bitter survivor snapshot:

Elderly stars slide down the morning sky
Slipping away to find a place to die
I wonder when the night will reach its end
Cause sleep is not my friend

Drinking champagne, meant for a wedding
Toast to the bride, a fairytale ending
Drinking champagne, a bottle to myself
Savor the taste of fabricated wealth

But the album is all over the place stylistically. There's a legitimately beautiful - albeit spunky - ballad (Obsessions), a quirky indie something-or-another* (I Am Not a Robot), a Nellie McKay-esque acid trip (Mowgli's Road)... And towards the end of the album shit suddenly gets gothic. Seriously.

The disparity makes it difficult to pick out any favorites, but seeing as I've just come off my Florence and the Machine phase, and had a brief fling with some bombastic Muse numbers, I currently lean towards the aforementioned gothic finish, built around Rootless. I actually have no idea what that song's deal is, it really is shitballs crazy, but if you herald the imminent arrival of the chorus with fucking bells, chances are we're on the same page.

(Sidenote: is there a technical term for a distinct run-up to a chorus? Like a mini-bridge? A ponton maybe? Because that's often my favorite part. And on this album, both Rootless and Hollywood have awesome ones.)

And if that wasn't enough, it gets followed by Numb, which for the first few full album listen-throughs I thought wasn't even a real song, but rather some sort of Hollywood: Reprise (because of the WTF factor, and the mirrored "golden lie/light" motif). It makes absolutely no sense out of sequence, and might only be palatable after you've been stunned into stupor by the divebomb cathedrals from Rootless. And even then you're not quite prepared for the chorus valkyries warping in. Finally, she tops it of with Guilty, which somehow combines all of the elements found heretofore on the album - 80s synthetics, catchy pop fluff, unabashed theatricality, weird-ass transitions - into... well, something that clicks. At least with me.

Oh, and apparently she's awesome live:

Watch out for the camera guy's OMG BOOBIES moment

And she's playing Birmingham in October :)

* I think that's the song someone tried hooking me with a while ago, and failed. So it's Florence all over again. Except I actually like this one now.

Fadeouts

Marta dropped by with two bottles of rose wine in the evening, so work went out the window. She left around 10p.m. and I've been trying to resurface since. Right now it's raining outside, and I'm looping this:

It's not exactly groundbreaking, but it's definitely doing the job. As for what job that is... Who's to know.

I recently saw short documentary called Birds Get Vertigo Too about an aerial acrobat and her rigger, who are a couple. It opens with a shot of the guy shaving in the morning and a question: who gets more scared - the riggers or the artists? He says the aerialists (love that word) cry a lot before the shows, but they won't admit to being scared of heights. The last dialogue between them comes from some rehearsal, where he starts apologizing for being tired, and she explains that she just asked whatever it was that she had asked him about, because she wasn't sure if there was a problem, or if he was just worried she was too high. To which he replies that he was worried she was too high, but that that was just "his headspace".

It ends with footage from the actual show, with her doing her routine on a big silver hoop suspended in the air, and him darting up and down one of the poles as her counterweight. Halfway through, the spoken word background gives way to sounds of muted sobbing, probably recorded before the show, when the girl was getting ready to perform. Eventually they fade as well.

It's a really beautiful, and beautifully constructed piece. The author's name is Sarah Cunningham. It's her first film.

Brief Interviews

Saw two movies recently - an universally acclaimed one (The Squid and the Whale), and something that had been sold to me as a questionable first-time effort, with the emphasis on "effort" (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men).

The first one left me mostly cold and a wee bit annoyed. It felt like the lovechild of Wes Anderson and Todd Solondz, filled with frighteningly real and unlikable characters. I appreciated the whole hall of mirrors effect, with various people unwittingly echoing each other's sentiments and mannerisms, but there was nothing there that I could latch onto. I don't come from a broken home, I don't have siblings, and my sympathy compass is totally messed up. It's actually one of the reasons why I was never able to fully immerse myself in Mad Men - I usually empathised with the women, which was a very ungrateful exercise for the most part, and was primarily annoyed by Don Draper. The same thing happened with The Squid and the Whale - the father and the sons irritated me, so I was left with the mother, who didn't really provide an emotional anchor either, seeing as she was equally... three-dimensional.

Cue Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, which I really liked almost from start to finish. I remember reading on Pajiba that the book it was based on is basically unfilmable, and that despite their general good will towards John Krasinski (who wrote the script and directed) they felt it fell short. Well, I haven't read the book, and so find myself paraphrasing Kathleen Madigan yet again: "You don't see a frown on my face, do you? Should have waited for the movie instead, like a good American."

Now... it definitely feels like a book adaptation. A theatre play adaptation, even. The dialogue is actually more of a series of monologues, and all of them are very dense and verbose. Still, the only time I felt the pomposity explode the cinematic framework was when they saw it necessary to amp up an already larger-than-life tirade with some of that trademark indie movie discordant electric guitar and drums... jazz... thing.

As for specifics... the title basically says it all. It's a string of guys talking about their expectations, desires and thought patterns with brutal candidness, held together by a rather rudimentary plot. It works though. The monologues are very compelling (the book must be awesome), and there's quite a lot of talent involved. And by talent I mean fun faces - Bobby Cannavale, Lester from The Wire, Josh Charles (aka the dude who had Lara Flynn Boyle after him and still went for Stephen Baldwin. STEPHEN Baldwin, for crying outloud), Ben Shenkman playing a straight Louis Ironson, and a bunch of Hey, It's That Guy's. And John Krasinski himself, who got to perform the most harrowing of the monologues, and - in my opinion - sold it.

So yeah, if you don't mind your movies not trying to hide they're purely intelectual exercises - I highly recommend it.

Triple Threat

Today I was woken up by a call from yssy, who was waiting outside my house and took me out for breakfast and S&S (strawberries and sunbathing) in a nearby park. I doubt I got any tan - after decades of neglect it would take a plasma torch to burn away the alabaster - but bliss was featured prominently.

Tomorrow some cartoon birds better braid my fucking hair. I have come to expect a certain standard.

Heatwave

I hate this blistering heat. I'm completely useless during the day, barely scrounging up enough energy for cooling efforts, and then in the evenings I get inexplicably horny, which is equally bothersome.

But you do what you can to alleviate the situation. Yesterday, I went for short evening stroll, which turned into a very long evening stroll all the way to Filip and Natalia's place. I didn't get winded at all, it cleared up my headache almost instantly, and I was really quite elated until I stopped at their door to buzz them and for the first time felt what several kilometers covered at a brisk pace do to sandaled feet. It wasn't pretty, but the evening itself was. Managed to completely ignore the last 15 minutes of some soccer game and relax in choice company.

And tonight Darek suddenly popped out of the blue saying he was going for a joyride around the city and asking if I wanted to come with. Which of course I did, especially since it was raining. The minute I sat down in the car I felt drunk on life, and started babbling uncontrollably. I don't really know where we went, but at one point I saw a sign saying "Warsaw - 30km", so we must have crossed city limits at least once. The rain was pouring, there were no people around, and things were good, in general.

Which is the thought I'm taking to bed with me. Good night.

Closure

The answer to the riddle from the previous note is: Christina Aguilera, in a song penned by Sia. It was tough to pick a winner out of the deluge of submissions, but I suppose the award goes to anonymous. Unfortunately, it will never actually get delivered on acount of their anonymity.

Suffused

After drifting in and out of consciousness for several hours, I finally climbed out of bed at 1 p.m. Took a shower, grabbed a book, and got on a tram to the Morskie Oko park to join Natalia, Filip, Kazia, a cute little dog, and an even cuter baby girl. Plopped down on the grass and proceeded to have the nicest, most ridiculously relaxing day in ages. At one point Filip hopped off to grab some blankets and - get this - bring people home-brewed coffee in one of those "to go" paper cups. He actually called my cell from his place to ask if I take sugar in mine. I'm making a conscious effort not to hyperbolize, but it was amazing.

Around 4 we slowly made our way to Filip and Natalia's place - where we were joined by Szymon - had some delicious Indian take-out (I already warned them that I'll drop by just for the food), drank some wine, and lazily dispersed. I got home almost two hours ago and have since been half-heartedly trying to pull my brain out of molasses, as I really need to get something done by Monday. So far it's mostly been a book and music though.

Speaking of... this is one of those moments where I kind of regret only 5 people ready this thing now. Anyway, here's a little musical riddle - and my soundtrack for today. If you're in the mood for a simple, but really quite beautiful lullaby, give it a try. And then tell me who sings it. It's not a difficult one, so don't expect a huge challenge, but maybe you'll find some use for it on a blissful summer evening of your own.

Corpus Christi

For the past 2 days I've been doing an express translation of a documentary on how it sucked to be gay in Paraguay during the previous dictatorship. I thought was really well done, and not overly traumatic. It helped that the story was told from a personal angle - the filmmaker was basically just trying to figure out what happened to her uncle (who was found dead in his apartment several years before), and the whole familial and political context was only gradually revealed. Still, rape with a broken bottle was invoked at one point, and it was by no means a relaxing thing, so I desperately needed to unwind.

And unwind I did, scheduling a "lazy day with ice cream and waffles" with Ana. It is Corpus Christi after all (though it turns out neither of us knows exactly what the God-fearing folk are celebrating today). Met up downtown, went for a lazy stroll, plopped down by the river - where it was nice and cool - and talked. Well, to be precise, I spilled family scandals and saucy stories, while Ana kvetched. About students being dumb, about wages being too low, you name it. Fun was had. Then we went to that Mexican place at Plac Teatralny, where the waiter explained to me that a burrito is a tortilla baked in a pancake, and to Ana that the non-alcoholic drink called "Mandragora" consists of rum, lime and sparkling water.

Actually, yesterday I went to a vegan cafeteria, and the guy behind the counter served me rice instead of kasha* and some sort of lentil thing instead of a kofta. I only called him on the rice, cause it was GLARINGLY OBVIOUS, to which he apologized and said they were out of kasha and that he just inquired about my preference out of habit. Still, I felt like I was being punked. And now the tortilla pancake. A pattern? Is someone trying to test how much shit I'll eat to avoid a confrontation with the service sector? Cause man... "buckets" doesn't even begin to cover it.

And in the evening we had apocalypse weather again. This time a bizarre, intensely yellow dusk that made all the colors seem richer somehow. And then it turned to sepia. Still waiting for random people to supply me with images.

Oh, i went through the entire Muse album and only one other song caught my attention, but it did so with a fistful of grappling hooks - been looping it since. If you're into epic, Depeche-y, space opera sort of stuff, take a listen:

Several things. The title: is kind of awesome, and apparently a Club of Rome reference, so the IR major in me rejoices. The voice: I actually kind of hate, pitch-wise. I sometimes listen to people whose voices I'm not wild about (Tori, Alanis), but still, this would usually be a dealbreaker. However, something weird happens when I listen to live recordings, where the lead singer's vibrato is even more pronounced. Somehow this pushes the sound past Annoying, and into Gratingly Bizarre territory, and my brain starts treating it as yet another instrument. Also - I have to give him props for totally delivering live. He belts it all out effortlessly, and with studio quality. It's almost uncanny. Finally - while digging up info on the title, I happened upon a passage that said the opening line - Fear and panic in the air - is likely a reference to Mars, whose two moons are Phobos and Deimos, gods of fear and panic. Which, be it true or not, adds a very nice twist to an otherwise pedestrian lyric.

* how cool is it that kasza is kasha? Is it really that local a thing?

And the superstar is sucked into the supermassive

Heavy, boiling clouds over Warsaw, man. The sort that form just before the death ray strikes. Looks awesome.

Edit: and Ana provided me with visuals.

Edit2: And I stole another one from Kazia - this one shows the "death ray" clouds better