12.27.2003
against pretention
i hope you all had a wonderful x-mas, etc.
last night i was accused by my sister katie of willfully hating things because of their popularity. i hear this a lot, i guess, being opinionated and a bit of a pain in the ass. anyway, in the opposite spirit, here are two lists:
ten totally mainstream things that i'm 100% into
(in no particular order)
1. christmas
2. every U2 album barring the most recent (including "pop," which is uneven, but not entirely bad)
3. cameron crowe's almost famous
4. buffy spin-off series "angel"
5. non-"nebraska"-era springsteen ("rosalita," for example)
6. "hardball" with chris matthews
7. "seinfeld" re-runs (with the exception of the really late ones, which get a bit tiresome)
8. REGIS PHILBIN
9. french fries
10. street hockey
ten artsy fartsy things that i'm not into
1. pavement
2. last tango in paris
3. katherine dunn's geek love (sorry folks, couldn't make it through)
4. the talking heads (i don't really dislike them, but i greet them with a very un-hip indifference)
5. sushi
6. dave hickey, though he is, admittedly, pretty funny
7. pretty much any movie about junkies, with a specifically icy place in my heart for darren aronofsky's miserable requiem for a dream
8. john kennedy toole's a confederacy of dunces
9. art openings
10. hippie-bashing (you know, where all your cool friends poo poo some poor white guy with dreadlocks-- i find this secretly conservative)
last night i was accused by my sister katie of willfully hating things because of their popularity. i hear this a lot, i guess, being opinionated and a bit of a pain in the ass. anyway, in the opposite spirit, here are two lists:
ten totally mainstream things that i'm 100% into
(in no particular order)
1. christmas
2. every U2 album barring the most recent (including "pop," which is uneven, but not entirely bad)
3. cameron crowe's almost famous
4. buffy spin-off series "angel"
5. non-"nebraska"-era springsteen ("rosalita," for example)
6. "hardball" with chris matthews
7. "seinfeld" re-runs (with the exception of the really late ones, which get a bit tiresome)
8. REGIS PHILBIN
9. french fries
10. street hockey
ten artsy fartsy things that i'm not into
1. pavement
2. last tango in paris
3. katherine dunn's geek love (sorry folks, couldn't make it through)
4. the talking heads (i don't really dislike them, but i greet them with a very un-hip indifference)
5. sushi
6. dave hickey, though he is, admittedly, pretty funny
7. pretty much any movie about junkies, with a specifically icy place in my heart for darren aronofsky's miserable requiem for a dream
8. john kennedy toole's a confederacy of dunces
9. art openings
10. hippie-bashing (you know, where all your cool friends poo poo some poor white guy with dreadlocks-- i find this secretly conservative)
12.22.2003
of interest
i feel like i've been neglecting the old blog a bit lately, partially because i haven't really had the time to fine tune many of my thoughts. but maybe i'm doing too much fine tuning-- making my posts too prim and proper or something. in that spirit, and in no order, here are a few things that are of interest to me lately:
trying to come to terms with marcel carné's film black orpheus, which provoked a peculiar mix of reactions within me. much of the action is stagey and simple in a superficial sense, though a profound strangeness eats through the more you watch it. the film's fantastic dance sequences accelerate this quality, and lend the more wooden areas of the story some needed weight. but even the wooden-ness (if that's even a word) becomes significant the more i think about it. this is one of the few films where i regret that for all of my schooling (and all of my film nerd obsessions), i have no academic experience with the subject of film. so i must exit black orpheus with a series of curious shrugs.
i'm also thinking through my love of x-mas, and coming up with a series of wonderful justifications for all my gooey sentiment...
first up would be the mass amounts of time devoted to window decoration in my neighborhood, with glittery, baroque results. nothing like a mobile doll baby fantasy world at every fourth door to remind you that "local culture" still exists in our downtrodden starbucks of a world.
second is the alastair sim version of scrooge, featuring the wonderful reformed-scrooge-wake-up-scene at the end. sim is so perfect in the role-- so goddamn miserable as pre-enlightenment scrooge-- that you almost fear for the poor house maid who is understandably freaked out by our hero's change of heart on christmas day ('i must stand on my head. I MUST STAND ON MY HEAD!!!'). sim plays grouchy to perfection for two thirds of the movie, only to flip it on its head and capture pleasure in all its giddy, scary glee. god bless us everyone.
third is the fact that i don't have to show up to work this year. whoo hoo.
on other fronts, i'm also loving the new record by the young people, which is some of the freshest music i've heard in a while. it's nice to listen to something and not hear the ghosts of familiar records (sonic youth, mc5, gang of four, snore... snore...)... the young people have a very distinct sound... the only band that comes immediately to mind is oddly another "young" band, the young marble giants, if only for their simplicity. beyond that, there's slight traces of the occasional pj harvey four track demo, but there aint nothing wrong with that. the songs have a strange sing-a-long quality to them as well, as if they come from some strange avant-garde pirate ship with moe tucker as its captain.
finally, i must once again steal good ideas from olivia, and send you off to this hilarious page. i laughed out loud several times.
trying to come to terms with marcel carné's film black orpheus, which provoked a peculiar mix of reactions within me. much of the action is stagey and simple in a superficial sense, though a profound strangeness eats through the more you watch it. the film's fantastic dance sequences accelerate this quality, and lend the more wooden areas of the story some needed weight. but even the wooden-ness (if that's even a word) becomes significant the more i think about it. this is one of the few films where i regret that for all of my schooling (and all of my film nerd obsessions), i have no academic experience with the subject of film. so i must exit black orpheus with a series of curious shrugs.
i'm also thinking through my love of x-mas, and coming up with a series of wonderful justifications for all my gooey sentiment...
first up would be the mass amounts of time devoted to window decoration in my neighborhood, with glittery, baroque results. nothing like a mobile doll baby fantasy world at every fourth door to remind you that "local culture" still exists in our downtrodden starbucks of a world.
second is the alastair sim version of scrooge, featuring the wonderful reformed-scrooge-wake-up-scene at the end. sim is so perfect in the role-- so goddamn miserable as pre-enlightenment scrooge-- that you almost fear for the poor house maid who is understandably freaked out by our hero's change of heart on christmas day ('i must stand on my head. I MUST STAND ON MY HEAD!!!'). sim plays grouchy to perfection for two thirds of the movie, only to flip it on its head and capture pleasure in all its giddy, scary glee. god bless us everyone.
third is the fact that i don't have to show up to work this year. whoo hoo.
on other fronts, i'm also loving the new record by the young people, which is some of the freshest music i've heard in a while. it's nice to listen to something and not hear the ghosts of familiar records (sonic youth, mc5, gang of four, snore... snore...)... the young people have a very distinct sound... the only band that comes immediately to mind is oddly another "young" band, the young marble giants, if only for their simplicity. beyond that, there's slight traces of the occasional pj harvey four track demo, but there aint nothing wrong with that. the songs have a strange sing-a-long quality to them as well, as if they come from some strange avant-garde pirate ship with moe tucker as its captain.
finally, i must once again steal good ideas from olivia, and send you off to this hilarious page. i laughed out loud several times.
