I received this filer in the email (I think it might be affiliated with the Magenta guys [my fave Magenta flick!]), but if you will be alive and of your own faculties in Paris on Saturday, April 2, go see One-Two.

Yay!

The new Ivy album is out today. It's positively dreamy.

"Getting a hit is easy / As long as you're loud and cheap and sleazy"

Pay TV is what would happen if Stephanie Green from the Sleepover Friends book series entered the Swedish Eurovision heats. And it would be awesome.

"I Feel Cheap and Airy and Want to Talk About Movie Stars."

The preceding title comes from a diary entry I made February 5, 1995. Looking back, I have no idea what the hell its premise means, but I absolutely adore the stereotypically-Southern, pretentiously-naive line, "I feel cheap and airy and want to talk about movie stars."

Gee, Thanks, Mom (a Follow-up of Sorts)

Channel Four ran a poll for the 100 Greatest Tear Jerkers of All Time. Or something like that. Anyway, at #16 is this-here movie. Interestingly, the folks at C4 identify this particular scene:

Terms Of Endearment also features one of the most moving ever deathbed scenes, when Winger explains to her son that she isn't going to be around forever.

Alright, now, allow me to introduce my "Why This Movie Is Actually a Short Film Swallowed up in a Big Movie" half-baked "theory." I hold the opinion that you need only to watch the last four scenes (1. this "deathbed scene"; 2. outside the hospital; 3. death; 4. the wake) of Terms of Endearment, and you'll have watched a Terms of Endearment most true to its title. Strip out the distraction of flashy neighbors, misadventures in mother-daughter divadom, and the plot-propeller of "the cancer," and you're left with windows on people who aren't particularly comfortable with one another in a most uncomfortable circumstance. This great "deathbed scene" isn't a grand, weepy confession; it's a frosty eye-to-eye (and this scene has never made me cry, but has only left me more cynically deflated every time I watch it). I mean, come on: if your piously libertine mom propped herself up on, indeed, her deathbed and narrowed her eyes at you and said, "I know that you love me... and I want you to know that I love you as much as I love anybody, as much as I love myself," that might cast a pallor over your memory of the event, what with its notion that she deemed to elevate you up to her own esteem of herself only at her most vulnerable. Or that she pretty much lumped you in the same affection-league with "some dude."

Maybe later I'll continue with how 2., 3., and 4. round out. In the meantime, should you find yourself with too much time on your hands, I dare you to suffer the embarrassment and rent it to test out this hypothesis.

And, hey, look-- I really did go to Arizona last month. 

Fun with Bathroom Optics #2 

Fun with Bathroom Optics #1 

St. Valentine's Kettle Korn:

I say, convincing yourself you can write for a living is a bit like convincing yourself to fall in love with yourself.