Pearly Gates Is Open Late

2005-03-15T22:31:00.000-05:00

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!

2005-03-01T20:47:00.000-05:00

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"

2005-02-27T13:17:00.000-05:00

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."

2005-02-20T01:53:00.000-05:00

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)

2005-02-14T22:11:00.000-05:00

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.

2005-02-02T01:20:00.000-05:00

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

2005-02-02T01:19:00.000-05:00

Fun with Bathroom Optics #2

2005-02-02T01:18:00.000-05:00

Fun with Bathroom Optics #1

St. Valentine's Kettle Korn:

2005-02-01T20:52:00.000-05:00

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

"Is that another boy stuck on your shoe?"

2005-01-27T20:06:00.000-05:00

Yeah, forget Speak: Anniemal, uh, by Annie, is '05's real Lisa Frank binder-stylee deal. And I was all about "Chewing Gum" last summer. And Popjustice has been heralding the full-length; and since we usually agree, like, about 73.44532% of the time, take that as a "yea."

"There are some ba-aaa-aad people on the right..."

2005-01-20T21:58:00.000-05:00

Ah, yes: tonight, walking along the curve of Dupont Circle from P Street, this particular tune from Mr. Morrissey (regarding the Iron Lady, but we'll appropriate where we can get it) resonated quite well with the sight of limousines and charter buses snaking along, ferrying the dutiful across the northwestern swath of the city on this fine, frosty night. Couple this with the smelly, spaced-out hippies who couldn't figure their way out of the Metro with their "coffins" this morning, and you have the book-ends of what's wrong with what's going on.

Lame!

2005-01-19T10:32:00.000-05:00

Behold the cliched laziness that is Jennifer 8. Lee's travel tips for D.C.: from the gratingly expected ("Prostitutes and crack houses have given way to professional couples, quirky boutiques and ethnic fusion restaurants.") to the head-scratchingly stilted ("Unlike most old American cities, Washington has almost no critical mass of ethnic white immigrants to give it a distinct culinary legacy.").

Hey, and did you know that the 9:30 Club "is the performance space of choice for most headliners that pass through the district, like George Clinton and Chuck Brown"? Not just because it's, like, pretty much the only "space" in town, or anything...

2005-01-02T16:14:00.000-05:00

This is a view up Connecticut Avenue from the roof of the Wyoming a few minutes after midnight, Saturday. A few more minutes later, this douchebag from the floor below came up to the roof and complained how we were making noise and causing leaks in his apartment.

Idear!

2004-12-30T13:57:00.000-05:00

When people yammer on about how they wish they were British, they usually offer up a plethora of painfully pretentious reasons. I, on the other hand, usually solely ground my pining in the car-crash television* that the British are so good at packaging in tidy six-episodes bundles.

*My favorite part in their "autobiography" is when they went to Australia in 1985 to set up an ice show, but then Chris broke his leg, so he had to lay around the house they had rented while Jayne and some friend of hers drank a lot of red wine and laughed at him for, like, ten months.

OMG, Is It 1989 Already?!?

2004-12-06T22:54:00.000-05:00

When we last left the magnum opus that is Speak, the nation was asking itself, "Will sound match sleeve?"

The answer: track #2 most definitely does! It's ridiculously Teutonic-- it's so late-1980s German pop-metal (or 2005 Swiss Eurovision entry), it demands to be sung in an accent, with a video set in a rough, yet utilitarianly-chic, Berlin industrial estate, the cast clad in the neon clothing of my youth, the sky overcast with the winds of change.

The other ten tracks, of course, su-u-u-u-u-uck.

"You take the plane / I'll take the bus this time"

2004-12-06T21:44:00.000-05:00

Well-well, good to hear Mr. Hastert will eventually get around to scheduling a vote on that intelligence bill. Because he obviously had more than enough time this evening to step in front of the (moving) GUTS bus on Q Street, escorting his (presumed) appropriately-Talbot'sed wife to a holiday soiree of some kind, Town Car idling in the middle of the street, blocking up traffic to Wisconsin Aveune.

Safety first, right kids?

Best End Credits Music EVAH!

2004-12-03T23:43:00.000-05:00

Ween's "Ocean Man" followed by The Flaming Lips' "SpongeBob and Patrick Confront the Psychic Wall of Energy" on the SpongeBob movie.

Also! The best showing-up-at-work-really-hungover scene, too.

My Heart Is Calibrated 60 Degrees North

2004-12-02T20:26:00.000-05:00

I knew they'd make a pit stop here!

Ah, I remember like it was yesterday: five nights on the harbor, eating green apples at ten o'clock at night on deck, the sun hung like a five o'clock East Coast drive-time on Independence Day. Those across the bridge in the Grand Hotel (but do I vouch for Garbo or Bergman? Hint: I stood in Stöde where she wed the dentist) would never have my view of Gamla Stan, Södermalm, and Queen Christina's fishing in the city.

Also! Wintering Icelanders. Like I've always said, if I were the mayor of Reno, I'd make tracks to be Reykjavik's sister city: the biggest little city in the world.

Yay!

2004-11-24T13:56:00.000-05:00

Netjetters is back.

Jim from the third batch is my favorite: he opted to freeze his heart out from Norway to Japan, which enough people don't seem to do.

“That’s just from your end. It’s ’cause you’re never satisfied with me.”*

2004-11-23T01:46:00.000-05:00

I love Terms of Endearment**. It's an overblown, old-school melodrama trapped in a J.C. Penney catalog. And all of us, at some point or another, talk about everything except what we most wish to say when flush-up against loneliness, decked out in bad clothes and worse hair.

What I like most about it at the moment, though, is the score. Just as the movie tries to be one big Norman Rockwell, the score tries to be an Aaron Copland. But amongst all the copycatting sings the saddest, simplest little melody that resolves itself with this corny optimism: listen to the end credits-- it ends on an honest-to-God twinkle. Your American life can be the most miserable pile of shit, and you'll still have a lone oboe and chime fluttering about you, tilting your washed-out face to the sun.

*Similar to what the NotoriousRRZ has to say about Jennifer Connelly, my money was always on Debra Winger: she had the most expressive eyes and the best throat I'd ever seen. I spent hours in the mirror as a teenager trying in vain to widen and crane my own in the hopes of capturing her spark and defiant ease, ten years out of time and captive only to my own audience.

**This does not mean that I'm going to see that looks-like-a-piece-of-shit Spanglish, however.

"All these accidents / That happen / Follow the dot"

2004-11-18T15:47:00.000-05:00

Or the Amazing Yellow Line. Whichever.

What I dig most about Iceland is the multiplicities people take on, and the hum this makes in Reykjavik.

Correct Me If I'm Wrong...

2004-11-13T15:13:00.000-05:00

...but wouldn't the least metal moment ever actually be the countdown itself on VH1?

Hey, you, Vanessa Carlton:

2004-11-11T22:23:00.000-05:00

If only you'd recorded your song "White Houses" in the B-maj you've been playing on all the morning shows instead of the C-maj-as-heard-by-Billy-Joel on the record, I'd have totally bought a copy off iTunes. Synaesthesia, like.

And I hate "A Thousand Miles," (and "Ordinary Day," and sort-of "Pretty Baby") so, really: trust me on this.

2004-11-09T23:33:00.000-05:00

Is this how to interpret where all the porn is, too?

The question still remains: how do we account for the seemingly proportionate relationship of red states to strip clubs? I'm looking at you, I-45. You, too, I-75. Except Michigan: you're too broke for the champagne room.

2004-11-07T11:52:00.000-05:00

With the nation split like the pants on a fat pastor, can't we all agree that this may just be an oeuvre of such magnanimous tackiness that we may once again unite in shamefaced karoke? I mean, c'mon... for the chirrun, y'all.