Zugenia's Procrastination Salon

Sounder has just begun on TCM.

Me: Is this movie going to make me cry?

D: For Christ's sake, baby, it's a movie about a dog. It's either going to play a sport or make you cry.

I don't know what you're doing tonight, but D and I are watching this:

Horrors of Malformed Men 1969 [Trailer]
by moidixmois

I can smell your envy from here.

D's summertime activities have produced more entertaining fare than my own. To wit:


Space Roke from Derek Jenkins on Vimeo.

In the year 2070, Colonel Blaze Blasterson crash landed on a strange planet. He's been stuck in that fiery wasteland for years, his only company a monkey named Reginald and a beat-up old karaoke machine. Slowly but surely, trudging across the desolate landscape in search of food and water, during their heartfelt duets under the stars, he and Corporal Reginald fell deeply in love. That all ended two years ago when Reginald was swallowed whole by a Flaming Blort. Left with nobody else to duet with, Blaze sings alone and dreams of his lost love. He's the loneliest man in the galaxy. Instead of being one of two "Islands in the Stream," he's found himself deserted.

In space, no one can hear you sing.

(This is what happened after we watched Robinson Crusoe on Mars a couple weeks ago.)

Despite the fact that several of his freelance employers are behind in paying him, so that we are lately eking out a living by not spending superfluous cash or, more frequently, feeling guilty when we do, D's quiet infiltration of mainstream culture continues apace. See this piece in the Arkansas Times, which tracks the buzz on his article in last summer's Oxford American on singer Teddy Grace: it received a shout-out from Ben Greenman at the New Yorker website, and may be the source and inspiration of a track on Elvis Costello's new album.

Also, tomorrow we hit the road so D can interview Judge Reinhold at the Little Rock Film Festival. I sense that an episode of Lady Z Gets Drunk with Judge Reinhold and Asks Him Too Many Questions About Fast Times at Ridgemont High is likely, if not inevitable.

It will make excellent material for my future testimonials on "D: The E! True Hollywood Story."

What else? The other night we went to see "Iron Man," and I agree with everything o_jenny said. It was way fun, everything that "Transformers" should have been and was not. Much of that had to do with the presence of one Mr. Robert Downey, Jr. He is at the top of my list of Celebrities I Am Allowed to Go Home With If Ever Given the Opportunity. (Incidentally, I believe the existence of such lists is entirely necessary to a healthy long-term relationship. Some time ago, however, I heard from a friend who experienced a crisis of sorts when the opportunity to go home with a member of her list actually materialized, and she wasn't sure if the list—or, more precisely, its permissions—were "real" or not. I suggest ironing out such details preemptively with one's partner.) The ONLY thing that might have made the movie better is if it had been the movie D and I fantasized about on our way to the movie theater, in which Robert Downey, Jr. actually plays himself hitting rock-bottom in the Hollywood spiral of leisurely self-destruction, checks himself into rehab, and there, fashions himself a flying robot suit and emerges a shiny superhero.

What else? Our house is infested with tiny ants. It is extremely annoying. They are also in my car.

What else? Pretty much all puppy, all the time. See dog blog for further accounts of cuteness and destruction. Life with puppy, today, means waking up at noon on the couch with a wet, snorfling nose in my face—not knowing how long I've been lying here or whether I managed in my early morning somnambulism to feed her, but certain that the moment I sit up I will find evidence of Bad Behavior.

What else? My office iMac completely self-destructed last week, and, armed with only my new MacBook, a firewire cable, and my Googling skills, I managed to diagnose the problem (a "kernel panic" of sorts) and, after three days of strife, to fix it (by doing some fancy footwork with the system folder). It seems my years of procrastinating on Macs have turned me into a semicompetent computer technician. Does that count as a marketable skill?

Last night I finally watched Juno. Since the moment I saw the trailer for this movie way back when, I knew I was going to like it, so it hasn't seemed very necessary to actually watch it. But I'm glad that I did, and I'll tell you why—in case you, too, have just heard too much about it and can't muster the enthusiasm to rent it.

This movie is a neat little fable about maturity. It's quirky and delightful, yes, but its real strength (as many others have mentioned) is the respect with which it treats its main female characters. Not just Juno, the pregnant teenager at its center, but also her stepmother (played by the always fantastic Allison Janney) and the prospective adoptive mother (played by Jennifer Garner, in one of the film's two truly great performances, but more about that anon). Both of these older women are initially mocked to a certain extent—Janney spends her evenings cutting out magazine pictures of weimaraners when, as Juno points out, "you don't even have a dog!" and Garner's straightlaced thirtysomething keeps an immaculate yuppie subdivision mansion, consigning her husband's guitars and music collections to the basement—but ultimately those characteristics that make them seem absurd Juno's (and our) eyes are precisely the characteristics that make them strong women in their own contexts. Janney meets Juno's scorn at her weimaraner habit by pointing out that the reason she doesn't have an actual dog is because that is a sacrifice she has made to be a parent. And Garner's perfectly cringe-worthy speech when we first meet her about how she was just "born to be a mommy" turns out to be a declaration of her ability to be the movie's hero. Janney's character is never anything less than Juno's "real mom" despite her explicit status as stepparent, and the movie's intelligent refusal to make the authenticity of constructed family bonds an issue quietly underpins the adoption narrative—we never doubt that adoptive parents could be a baby's "real family."

Ultimately, Juno is less about the trials of a sixteen-year-old girl than it is about the morality of knowing how to act your age. Maturity is not a state of being one reaches by jumping through certain hoops, here; instead, it is a state of grace achieved by fulfilling your present stage of life in the most responsible fashion, whether that means not getting a dog, adopting a child, or knowing that you are (in Juno's words) "ill-equipped" as a high-school girl to be a parent. I think this movie is in many ways aimed directly at viewers like me: women inclined to identify with Juno's style, her taste in music and her way of talking, but who are actually closer in age to Garner's earnest, maternal yuppie. We are grown women who still make mix tapes that sound exactly like the movie's soundtrack (seriously, I have actually made mixes that are, I think, EXACTLY the movie's soundtrack) and want desperately not to come off as Garner does in her first scenes—crisp, joyless, unembarrassed by her predilection for the Pottery Barn aesthetic and the joys of motherhood. But we are also the kind of women who are likely, as we reach thirty, to find ourselves married (as Garner's character is) to former boyfriends who have refused to give up their half-assed and increasingly sad rockstar ambitions (I am not speaking personally, here, by the way), and who are exactly at the point at which it's time to put away the crappy hamburger phone and start thinking about what it takes to be a grown-up—to keep a home, hold down a job, maintain a family. At one point, Garner's husband (played perfectly by Jason Bateman) and Juno share a laugh over Garner's nagging that Bateman doesn't "contribute"—but what we come to see is that while "contributing" to a household might not (perhaps shouldn't) make sense to a teenage girl, it sure as hell should to a married 34-year-old man on the verge of adopting a baby.

I really thought Garner was a knockout in this movie. I tend to like her anyway (I will admit that I LOVE 13 Going on 30, another movie made for me and my ilk, and, now that I write it down, an interesting counterpoint to Juno as a film about women whose identities fluctuate between thirteen and thirty years old) but I was really surprised by how well her character resisted the potential satire aimed at her, without having to reveal inner depths that are initially unapparent. She is always exactly what she says in her first interview with Juno and Juno's father; we just come to respect what that is as the film progresses.

The other great performance is the always pitch-perfect Michael Cera, who plays the unlikely father of Juno's fetus. He is exactly the kind of kid that some of us (now I am kind of speaking personally) remember, with a bit of shame, taking for granted in high school—the quiet, not-so-cool, desperately loyal boy whose perpetual crush bolstered our own adolescent self-confidence. Again, the movie beautifully fails to mock the pathos of such a character, instead revealing it to be yet another unlikely form of maturity that deserves Juno's, and our, respect. In the one scene in which Cera's character is pushed to stick up for himself against Juno's thoughtlessness, the lines he delivers are so true, and delivered with such reluctance (you'll know what I'm talking about when you see him swallow his "la la la") that I got a lump in my throat—a lump, it turns out, that arises in Juno's throat at the same time, and explodes into frustrated tears a little while later when she is alone in her Previa. This scene reminded me powerfully of one of the classic moments of teenage-girl-called-out-and-instilled-with-sense-of-shame-necessary-to-her-maturation: the scene from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (which, yes, I happen to be teaching today) in which Henry Tilney calls out Catherine Morland for harboring disrespectful thoughts, jarring her into a moment of teary self-consciousness that teaches her the difference between being a feisty, self-absorbed girl (fine up till now) and being a smart, respectful young woman capable of mature love and relationships.

I have now squandered the morning I'd slotted for class preparation to singing Juno's praises, so you should similarly drop something important and take an hour and a half to watch the movie.

Last night D and I went to see Neil Marshall's new film "Doomsday," mainly because we needed to get out of the house, and we are both devotees of "The Descent." We'd decided before going in that we didn't really care whether it was brilliant or not; if it was a competent, bloody, "Escape from New York" ripoff, we'd feel we'd gotten our money's worth.

As the closing credits began to roll, I exclaimed, "I LOVE THAT MOVIE. I LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT IT." Because I do.

The movie is, as the few U.S. critics who've reviewed the film all comment with some level of derision, a competent, bloody, "Escape from New York" ripoff. But what their sneer blinds them to is the way a new kind of director (and the two examples that come immediately to mind are both male Brits, interestingly—Marshall and Danny Boyle) is playing with his ability to render pitch-perfect genre movies that are a million times more intelligent and cinematically satisfying than the reels upon reels of derivative materials aiming flaccidly at some mythological "innovation" and "originality" inspired from beyond the formal boundaries of the movie form. And I mean "movie" as opposed to "film." The most thoughtful comments I've read on "Doomsday" all home in on how it's mired in its Movie-ness, and so fails to be (like "The Descent") what we would call a respectable Film. Matt Zoller Seitz writes in the NYTimes,

In terms of story, “The Descent” and “Doomsday” are as different as two genre films can be, but the falloff in artistic quality is still quantifiable. Where “The Descent” was a slow, quiet, exquisitely modulated, startlingly original film, “Doomsday” is frenetic, loud, wildly imprecise and so derivative that it doesn’t so much seem to reference its antecedents as try on their famous images like a child playing dress-up. Homage without innovation isn’t homage, it’s karaoke.

Yes. It is karaoke—and y'all know how I feel about The Karaoke—and it understands itself as such. Instead of grabbing an acoustic guitar and hitting the open mic with a bunch of soul-searching, navel-gazing "originalia," this movie decides to produce something people already know they want to hear, and explore where that preformed desire comes from. It's not just Entertainment for Entertainment's Sake, but a really smart pastiche of old—even outdated—popular forms injected with a dose of ingenious energy that animates those materials back into life. "Doomsday" is Shelley's Frankenstein, and it knows it. Its roots go way beyond John Carpenter and '80s punk to the British Gothic of the late eighteenth century—a good third of the action takes place in a revived medieval community housed in a Scottish castle, for Christ's sake. The Mad Max heroine battles an honest-to-goodness Black Knight. (And kicks his ass, obviously.) Back in "modern times," the castle had been drained of its historical force as a bastion of British primitivism by being transformed into an English tourist trap, humorously evidenced by the decaying "Gift Shop" and "Emergency Exit" signage. As in "Jurassic Park," the movie taps into the visceral thrill of seeing real barbarism burst through the veneer of commercial modernity. But Marshall's movie, true to its British roots, recognizes this experiment in stirring excitement in the hearts of disaffected modern individuals as a reprise of something popular writers attempted a couple centuries ago. "Doomsday"'s relationship to the Gothic tradition is like an awesome karaoke rendition of an awesome cover of something no one can really remember the original of—because the original doesn't matter to an audience in need of revival.

To put it another way, "Doomsday," like the Gothic novel (which I'm teaching right now, so you'll have to excuse the fact that I obviously have it on the brain), is committed to the idea that the memory of something can be a thousand times more affecting than an "original experience," whatever that means, precisely because it is fashioned for an audience who has no access to original experience because they've inherited an excess of experience. Everything in our world already comes from somewhere else. Go back to an "original," and if you're honest with yourself, you'll find it a disappointing derivative of something else just as disappointing. The only way to pursue meaning and satisfaction is to go forward—i.e. the karaoke bar, where cultural crap is revived night after night until, against the odds yet inevitably, something brilliant happens. The quintessential karaoke moment in "Doomsday"? When the leader of a tribe of neoprimitive Scots who have taken over a decayed Glasgow, during what Variety describes as "a sort of Burning Man-meets-Circus-Maximus setpiece," comes onstage and performs a stirring rendition of Fine Young Cannibals' "Good Thing" before they barbecue and eat one of the captured English soldiers. The Fine Young Cannibals were postmodern cannibals—their music (which I loved in middle school, and now) did to melodies what their band name did to the word "cannibal": drained them of viscera to transform them into endlessly reproducible forms, references enjoyable because of their alienation from anything truly stirring, which is to say frightening. But you send something like that into circulation, and eventually it is bound to return to the real, to be picked up as the theme song for some actual cannibals, returning the song to a home it never knew it had, making it more hilarious than ever before as it fuses with a kind of terrified hysteria absent from its so-called original.

I have to go watch a college basketball game now, so I'll wrap up by saying:

1. Screw The New York Times. If you don't get The Karaoke, that's your deal; it's not my problem you have no idea how to have fun in the 21st century.
2. I am so planning a course on "The Postcolonial Gothic," inspired directly by this movie.
3. If you can stomach blown-up bunnies and severed heads, go see this movie immediately and think about nothing but how much fun you're really having as you watch it. Then come back and tell me about it.

How strange: I seem to have taken an inadvertent hiatus from procrastinating for the second half of February. I have been busy, folks—reviewed a book, finished an article, wrote a conference paper, attended two conferences (one in Auburn, AL, the other in New Orleans), all the while teaching, writing recommendation letters, reviewing applicants to two different graduate programs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now I'm grading a pile of exams, writing more recommendation letters, planning my graduate seminar for tomorrow, and getting to work on both another article and a book chapter.

But that's not what you come here to read about.

So what have I got to say for myself extracurricularly? Auburn was fun; New Orleans was funner. I ate no fewer than two dozen raw oysters in my time there. Half of those were shucked for me, one by one, by the self-proclaimed "Baddest Shucker on Bourbon," who continually yelled, "YOU KNOW ME! I WAS ON CNN!" as he worked. I drank a hurricane. I danced in a jazz club. I ran out of money. Huzzah.

Last night D showed two amazing Jean Renoir films at Girl & a Gun: The River (1951) and The Golden Coach (1953). Stunning, both of them. D and I were the only ones there. People have no idea what's good. Oh well.

I am still totally, completely, and utterly sick of this stupid cast on my stupid arm. It's supposed to come off a week from today, and I plan to bitch about it until it does. I dreamt last night that I figured out how to squeeze out of it and I felt very clever indeed.

That's really all I can muster right now. I realize that I'm not very entertaining when my head's in my work, so I leave you with some poetry and animation culled from the internet and sent my way by a star student:

So D and a couple of his cronies, Shane and Sarah, have been conspiring to improve the quality of life here in Northwest Arkansas, and the result is The Film Alliance of the Ozarks. Here's their mission statement:

The Film Alliance of the Ozarks is comprised of filmmakers and citizens working together to better integrate film into the daily life of our community. We seek to reclaim film as an essentially social project by organizing skill workshops, collaborative events, and social initiatives designed to (1) involve members of our community in the process of filmmaking and (2) document the sights and sounds of our region.

You can also hear D and Sarah talking about the FAO on our local NPR station. They had their first general interest meeting last night at the public library and the turnout was fantastic. The first planned even is a children's super 8 film festival in the summer—they've got a bunch of cameras to hand out to kids for a day in the park, and then they'll collect and process the film and compile the shots into a film to screen for all the families. It looks like this thing is really happening, and it's freakin' exciting.

Sorry to be so missing lately; I've been writing. (Hear that? Writing!) I've got approximately 12 seconds before dinner's done to write something, anything, to keep the Salon arguably active, and so I'll say that last night D and I watched Memories of Matsuko (2006)—the latest film by Tetsuya Nakashima, who also directed the wonderful Kamikaze Girls (2004). Memories of Matsuko is a fairy-princess video-game musical tragedy that dazzled me and then made me cry and cry and cry. And cry. Seriously, I was a wreck, sobbing, "This movie is destroying me!" I highly recommend it.

My 12 seconds are up and I have to get the food but if you're interested in what else I've been watching, you should consult D's various viewing diaries, because he's better at keeping track of these things than I am.

Damnit. I think I burnt dinner.

No, not the Tokidoki bag, but the iPhone I've been coveting for months because Apple officially controls my brain. That's right: with a boost from a Christmas contribution from D, I managed to scrape together the cash for the mighty pocket-sized gateway to a new life. Thanks to D, though, who, ever mindful of my cognitive grasp on reality, thoughtfully directed me to this warning from Mr. David Lynch on the potential dangers of the iPhone life:



Remember, fellow iPhoners. Never in a trillion years. It is, indeed, such a sadness.

Is the week after Thanksgiving maybe the saddest week of the entire year? Points of evidence:

1. If you've left Fayetteville for the holiday and now returned, you find the temperature has fallen a solid 30 degrees in your absence and the leaves, too, have dropped for good.

2. If you've taken a full week off to go to New York for the holiday, you've given yourself a little taste of vacation time only to discover that the semester has not, in fact, ended.

3. Most importantly, it's now a full year until the next Thanksgiving dinner.

Richard Prince's scary nurses!

Anyway, I'm back in the AR after a fantastic week with Derek and the family in the NYC. D and I caught Lamorisse's The Red Balloon (1956) and White Mane (1953) at Film Forum and Eagle Pennell's The Whole Shootin' Match (1979) at Walter Reade; we saw a spiral of Richard Prince pieces at the Guggenheim and roomfuls of portraits at the Frick Collection; we strolled through the rainforest at the Central Park Zoo and cruised The Strand; we ate Cantonese noodles and Koronets pizza and drank Turkish wine and caipirinhas and tasted the best trendy vegetarian cuisine since Zen Palate...

Yummy heritage turkeys!

... and that was all when we weren't partaking of my dad's special Thanksgiving heritage turkey and, leading up to it, a series of Kitchen Support Vodka Shots.



I think I'm returning to New York next month to catch sillygirl84 on her brief visit home from London, but before then I need to finish the semester, get an article manuscript out, and get D completely moved in. I'm also going to start writing book reviews again, but not until the next post; for now I'll just say that I'm reading Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and I love it. You can read the Wall Street Journal's interview with this M.I.A. sensation here—recommended to any other readers out there who've been waiting for his reappearance since 1996's Drown.

I've fallen into the questionable habit of doing a lot of stuff that I don't write about. I suppose it's better than doing nothing and not writing about it, but I don't know how it compares to doing nothing and writing about it, which is what I usually do 'round these parts, and it's almost certainly worse than doing a lot and writing about it, which is what I tell myself I'd do if I were independently wealthy. Even though it's probably a lie.

Anyway. I haven't been updating the Procrastination Salon, and I'm trying to make up for it now as I take a break from grading overdue response papers. So what have I been up to? Watching lots and lots of movies.

Last weekend, Derek and I went with our friends Gwynne and David to the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. Derek has been to the festival before, but I never had—in fact, I'd never been to Hot Springs, which is a fun, old-fashioned resort town. We stayed in the historic Arlington Hotel, drank the waters bubbling out the springs (which are, indeed, hot), and saw some amazing films in our short two days there. Highlights were Les Blank's All In This Tea, about the manufacturing and marketing of artisanal teas in China; A Son's Sacrifice, a short film about a young Muslim New Yorker's efforts to take over his father's halal slaughterhouse; and On a Tightrope, about Uighur orphans in China's Xinjiang Province who study the art of tightrope walking. All three of these were beautiful movies, definitely worth searching out, but On a Tightrope was my favorite—moving, captivatingly shot, visualizing a struggling culture against some of China's bleakest landscapes. (The Uighurs are a Muslim ethnic minority in China, but are the majority in Xinjiang, or the Uyghur Autonomous Region, a huge but sparsely populated region in the northwestern part of China, bordering Tibet, Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Kashmir. Thank you Wikipedia.)

On the way back, we stopped at Feltner's Whatta-Burger, which David promised was the best burger around, and it did not disappoint. madame_urushiol, I thought of you.

Upon our return to Fayetteville, Derek got The Girl and a Gun Film Society's Annual Film Vault of Horror! Halloween Film Festival going. Here's the schedule:

Tuesday, October 23

( I N ) H U M A N N A T U R E

6:00
Wendigo (2001), dir. Larry Fessenden

8:00
Ravenous (1999), dir. Antonia Bird


Thursday, October 25

H O M E I S W H E R E Y O U L O S E Y O U R H E A D

6:00
House (1986), dir. Steve Miner

8:00
House II: The Second Story (1987), dir. Ethan Wiley


Friday, October 26

T H E M O N T H L Y V I S I T

12:00
American Werewolf in London (1981), dir. John Landis

2:00
Ginger Snaps (2000), dir. John Fawcett

4:00
The Howling (1981), dir. Joe Dante

Sunday, October 28

S P O O F Y

12:00
Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), dir. Charles Barton

1:30
The Ghost Breakers (1940), dir. George Marshall

M O R E A L I V E

3:00
Dead Alive (1992), dir. Peter Jackson

5:00
Dellamorte Dellamore (1994), dir. Michele Soavi


S I L E N T B U T D E A D L Y

7:00
Dracula: Pages From A Virgin's Diary (2002), dir. Guy Maddin

8:30
Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (1921), dir. FW Murnau


Monday, October 29

S M E L L Y H O R R O R

6:00
C.H.U.D. (1984), dir. Douglas Cheek

8:00
Street Trash (1987), dir. J. Michael Muro


Tuesday, October 30

M I S S I N G L I N K S

6:00
Trog (1970), dir. Freddie Francis

8:00
Altered States (1980), dir. Ken Russell


Wednesday, October 31

G H O S T S T O R I E S F R O M T H E E A S T

2:00
Kwaidan (1964), dir. Masaki Kobayashi

5:00
A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), dir. Ji Woon-Kim


T H E G R A N D ( G U I G N O L ) F I N A L E

7:00
Equinox (1970), dir. Jack Woods


8:30
Carnival of Souls (1962), dir. Herk Harvey

So far, my favorite film has been Guy Maddin's Dracula, but I'm the one who specifically requested, nay, demanded Trog (Joan Crawford's last onscreen performance!), so I'm not calling Best Film just yet.

I have work to do, so I really shouldn't be here. Especially considering that I already spent some time this morning creating a new blog:

Is It Racist?

I couldn't help myself. Now collecting submissions.

But I also wanted to share the good news: according to New York Magazine's Vulture blog, the screenplay for Where the Wild Things Are adapted by Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze looks AWESOME. Yay!

The results of Wednesday's poll suggest that many of you are engaged in an evil conspiracy to get me in shape through the torture known as "exercise." At least now I know.

It's Friday and I'm not sure how I feel about Minus the Bear.

But I do know how I feel about the new biography of Joan Collins, reviewed by Jan Moir in the Telegraph. I feel, very deeply, that I must read it. I believe my fascination with Ms. Collins is fairly well documented among these pages, so this should come as no surprise. But even if I weren't already mildly obsessed with the green-eyed force of nature, the Telegraph's review would have sold me. Did you know, for example, that

During her first assault on Hollywood, Collins slept with so many men that she was known as the British Open. In later years, she would grandly claim that she was a proto-feminist exploring her sexuality and using her power to bewitch as leverage to get ahead in a man's world.

Others saw it differently. 'Joan's had more hands up her than the Muppets', was how one actress deftly put it.

And that

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, when she was living in Los Angeles and trying to make it in films, she was at her sexual peak, thirsting for young men like a vampire thirsts for blood.

Driving a pink Thunderbird – no, that's not a euphemism – she roared around Hollywood in chinchilla stoles and emerald bracelets and was rarely without a lover. 'It doesn't count on location', she remarked, of various saucy infidelities.

And that

Collins cheated on [cheating lover George Englund, apparently the great love of her life] with the son of a Dominican Republic dictator, who bought her a diamond necklace.

Her lover was furious, but Joan placated him by secretly buying a cheap copy of the necklace and flinging it into the Pacific on a romantic beach stroll to prove to George how much she loved him.

And that, according to Barry Cryer,

he was once commissioned to write a monologue for her one woman show, but claiming that she had been too nervous to remember half of his jokes, Collins only paid him half of his fee.

This stuff is simply too awesome. If I ever had any thought of doing something respectable with my weekend (which, let's be honest, is unlikely), such thoughts have been roundly spanked into submission by the prospect of spending the weekend with Joan.

I can't tell you how good it is to live in a major city again. No offense to the smaller towns where I've hung my hat—not that I have a hat—of late, but I'm finding it rejuvenating to wake up every day and walk into streets full of people, to carve out a routine in a culture thick with routines. I love the anonymity of city life, and how people park themselves at tables on the sidewalk with a book and a coffee and that's what they're doing for the day, and how, at the end of the day, when you think, What should I do now?, there are all these things to do.

Here's what I've done in the past week, besides read 17th-century travelogues at the Newberry:

• Saw Andrew Bird play a free show at his alma mater, Northwestern. One of the most gorgeous live performances I've ever seen. He's a classically trained violinist and a one-man troubadour who tours with a violin, a guitar, a looping device, and an immaculately dressed sock monkey. He speaks quietly, seriously, like he's turning ideas into lullabies; he sings like he's thinking aloud in musical phrases. I've been listening to his latest album all week, thinking about how he makes words mean what they sound like. Frankly, I'm a little in love with him.



• Karaoke at Friar Tuck's, where the bartender knows everyone's name and I saw a guy turn 21 and drink an obligatory shot out of the ass of an inflatable sheep.



• Saw the live show screening of Guy Maddin's recent creation, Brand Upon the Brain!, performed at the historic Music Box Theater with (in the words of the promotional material) "an 11-piece LIVE orchestra, a 5-piece LIVE Foley (sound effects) team a LIVE celebrity narrator [Crispin Glover], and Castrato supplementing the filmic image to comprise a one-of-a-kind cinematic spectacle." Freakin' amazing!



• Drinks at our local lesbian bar, The Closet, with Chris's friend Igor, a charming novelist who apparently won the equivalent of the "Croatian Pulitzer" for his first book, and who was slightly disappointed by the relatively low lesbian turnout at the bar that night. "I like it," he said, "you know—a little bit gayer."



• All-you-can-eat fish & chips at The Duke of Perth with esteemed colleagues David & Gwynne, who graciously picked up the check despite the fact that I misjudged the time of our date by over an hour. I also joined them the next day to see a film at my neighborhood Landmark Cinema.

In the coming weeks, Chris and I have tickets to see The Rosebuds and The National, and my sister's flying out next week for a Cubs game (did I mention I live blocks from Wrigley Field?), and tonight I'm going to see Kelly Link, Nick Mamatas, Ron Currie, Jr., and Lance Olsen read their stuff, because it turns out I'm living in the city where the Bookslut Reading Series happens.

I'm like a fish that's been tossed back into the lake.

Thank god for the Fayetteville Public Library. Not only did it come through with The Raw Shark Texts last weekend, right when I wanted it, but it has also supplied me with a constant stream of movies to keep me satisfied during the inter-disc Netflix lull. The Library, you will recall, fed my summer movie extravaganza; this week, it officially sponsored my Wednesday night, during which I watched two films, drank three iced teas, and ate four salads. (It's well-documented that I have a tendency to consume all in my path while sitting on the couch staring at a tv screen. I usually put some pasta and a bottle of wine in that path, or several limes and a bottle of vodka, but if I'm not actually very hungry or drink-y, I make a point of stocking up on lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, vinegar, and some benign beverage I can squeeze a lemon into, and I mindlessly graze on that all night. Taking care of myself is, in some ways, very much like taking care of an enormous, sedentary rabbit. But I digress.)

First up was Night of the Hunter (1955), a choice inspired by my recent conversations with Derek about Southern film, about which he knows a hell of a lot, and I know just about nothing. James Agee wrote the screenplay (based on David Grubb's novel), Robert Mitchum is awesome as a deranged preacher man hellbent on murdering women for the lord, and Shelley Winters is phenomenal as his latest lady-target. A lot of the action is carried by two Child Actors who don't really have the acting thing down, but who are used to interesting effect, not unlike the weird menagerie of animals scattered throughout the second half of the film. Sally Jane Bruce, as young Pearl, is particularly captivating as the movie goes on—a sad-eyed little gothic sweetheart, like something that just crawled out of a Mark Ryden painting. And I think this film may just have the most beautiful Body in the Water tableau I've ever seen.


Robert Mitchum so wants to cut Sally Jane Bruce.

Coincidentally, my second pick from the library also focuses on a strange, round-faced little girl, but this time one who can really act. This would be Jan Svankmajer's Otesánek (or Little Otik)(2000), in which a childless couple adopts a baby-shaped tree root who comes to life and eats everybody. Those of you familiar with Svankmajer's oeuvre know that he has this thing with orifices, and the eponymous tree root baby creature of this film has a magnificent one—a puckered, tubular hole in the middle of its head that is the first part of the wooden doll to come to life, as it sucks like a sea creature at the breast of its insanely delighted mother. The hole eventually grows teeth and a tongue, and dilates to take in increasingly large prey in gory enactments of reverse-birth; when it's not physically consuming things, or screaming for food in desperate baby-cries, the hole houses a huge, blinking eye that betrays no sign of interior intelligence, but just seems to be scoping the landscape for something more to eat. Not since Margaret Cho's description, in CHO Revolution, of witnessing a friend give birth ("Her fucking pussy exploded!!") have I been so earnestly grossed out by the prospect of human reproduction.

But the real star of the film is Kristina Adamcová as Alzbetka, a young neighbor of the couple and their monster-baby who has the adult world better figured out than anyone else. Her understanding and her ethical sensibilities are sharper than any grown-up's, mainly because she's learned everything she knows from books, and she knows to take perverse fantasies (like the fairy tale of the Otesánek) seriously as maps of human behavior. In her capable hands, Little Otik comes as close as the film will let him to resembling a human being. If babies are to become people, the film suggests, they don't need parents; they need big sisters.

On deck: Kieslowski's Decalogue and mollusk-monster classic The Monster that Challenged the World.

Blame it on the rain?

Apparently, there's a Milli Vanilli biopic in the works.

Oh, it hurts. The laughing; the anticipation.

[wipes tear]

When can I buy tickets?

Which is why I am unable to peel myself off the couch and away from the cinematic carnage that is Carnosaur 3: Primal Species. I couldn't not turn to it after reading Dish TV's description: "While stealing uranium, terrorists unwittingly unleash formidable man-eating dinosaurs."¹ And an hour and twenty minutes into the adventure, I must take the liberty of clarifying Amazon reviewer Joshua Koppel's claim that "if you like dinosaurs you will want to check out this movie"—he must have meant, "if you've always wondered whatever happened to Scott Valentine, a.k.a. Mallory's dim-witted and eminently lovable biker boyfriend Nick Moore on Family Ties, you will want to check out this movie."


Exhibit A: Scott Valentine

It turns out that in 1996, Scott Valentine was playing Colonel Rance (Rance? Yes, Rance) Higgins, head of the team of commandos called in to capture the formidable man-eating dinosaurs, who have happily devoured the international (i.e. talking in a range of poorly rendered British accents) terrorists and are now belligerently roaming around in a lab or a ship or a warehouse or something, looking uncannily like the deranged second cousins of television's most upsetting creation of all time, Barney.

Exhibit B: Part of a wider dinosaur conspiracy?

Valentine's Col. Rance Higgins proves himself quite the force to be reckoned with, mouthing off to authority ("Excuse me, sir, but I really don't think any one of these soldiers have been trained in hand-to-hand combat with a dinosaur!"), convincing the blond lady scientist to lose the Andrea-from-Beverly-Hills-90210 eyeglasses and the unsexy preoccupation with "research" and start shooting her some raptors, and maintaining through it all a face so straight it hurts. The complexity of his character is subtly drawn out through stoic fragments of dialogue with his soldiers ("Sir, did you ever serve in combat with a woman?" "Yes, once, in Guatemala.") and he displays the admirable ability to cut through the crap, even in times of crisis, and tell it like it is—particularly to blown-up dinosaurs ("You're not dragging me around anymore. You know why? You're dead, you shithead.").

In conclusion, it may not be Mansquito, but Carnosaur 3 is right up there on the list of Utter and Total Wastes of Time. Well played, SciFi Channel. Well played indeed.

---

¹I would like to note that life would be immeasurably more interesting if more sentences began, "While stealing uranium..." or ended with "...terrorists unwittingly unleash formidable man-eating dinosaurs." Do your part, dear readers, and try working them into conversation.

Who is this C. J. Chivers? That's what I asked myself when, as I read his NYTimes story on the giant hillside swastika of Kyrgyzstan, I got to these lines:

But aside from the presence of the tree formation itself, unraveling the origins of the lost Nazis’ presumed insubordination is a chore undercut by time. History has become malleable, a yarn by turns sinister, wry, clever and Soviet.

Where does a journalist learn to write such sentences? Does he giggle as he types them, or does his head swell with orchestral gravitas? Which would I find funnier?

So I Googled our mysterious Mr. Chivers, and discovered through this interview that while certain chapters of his training are exotic indeed (he was a Marine before he was a journalist), others hit quite close to home: he attended Cornell (my parents' alma mater), went to the Journalism School at Columbia (my own alma mater), and his first job was at the Providence Journal, the hometown paper I avoided reading during my 7 years of grad school. More importantly, however, I suspect that C. J. Chivers and I may have the same sense of humor, though I'm still not sure he knows it's a sense of humor—he may believe it's a sense of truth. My suspicions were aroused when he stated in the interview, "I still read The Providence Journal on the web, watching the paper tell the story to the state. Who doesn't enjoy smelling all that muck getting raked?" He goes on:

After two years the editors moved me into the capital to cover the police at night and Buddy Cianci's city hall. Buddy's in jail now, but when he was banging around the corner office, swilling his scotch and cursing into his speakerphone, hemmed in by crooks and sycophants and cops in knee-high leather boots, he made my job interesting.

My point is that I am now fascinated by C. J. Chivers, and I wish he would write a pulp detective novel. I would totally read it. Perhaps I'll write him a letter to that effect. I am a bored, lonely woman and Saturday is my oyster.

"He only wants two things: to feed, and to mate."

Please note that as I write this, I am watching a movie on the SciFi network called Mansquito. I firmly believe that when opportunity knocks, one cannot not watch a movie called "Mansquito." I have been rewarded with such rich dialogue as "You were going to break protocol ... you make me sick," given voice by the hot lab assistant with the Fuck Me lips, and by watching this same lab assistant, now stripped down to her lacy pink bra and panties, beginning her grotesque transformation into a Womansquito. Now her cop husband is wrestling with the Mansquito himself, who bears an unfortunate resemblance to a degenerate Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. I think my favorite thing about hokey sci-fi horror flicks, though, is how someone inevitably points out the "Factual Errors" in the premise of the film in IMDb's "Goofs" catalog. In this case, some helpful viewer notes:

Factual errors: Since only female mosquitoes bite people and drink blood, the creature Ray Eriksson became should not have been feeding. Male mosquitoes feed on plant juices, so maybe the Eriksson creature should have gone around attacking trees.

Maybe he should have. Instead, he has now cornered his would-be Bridesquito in the lab and is, I believe, attempting to mate with her. I think she is now impregnated with Babysquitos. This is all profoundly disgusting, and it demands my full attention.

Life provides few joys as pure in their simplicity as the performances of Tim Curry and Ernie Banks in the phenomenally bad 1995 film Congo—Mr. Curry as the Romanian treasure hunter Herkermer Homolka, who sounds a bit like Boris from the original Rocky & Bullwinkle Show, and Mr. Banks as Captain Munro, who explains his role in the doomed jungle expedition thus: "I'm your great white hunter, but I'm black." The film also features a lovable talking gorilla named Amy,¹ played by someone named Lorene Noh, whose only other credit in IMDb is some 1999 television project called Primal Force, in which she played "Baboon patriarch." If this isn't enough to convince you to watch it for yourself, then a.) You and I clearly have very different notions of an ideal Sunday afternoon, and b.) The least you can do is read Amazon's compilation of quotations from the film, which includes such gems as "Are you serving that ape a martini?" and "Oh, no! The bad apes have the crystal lasers!"²

---

¹Also the name of my childhood dog, a deeply disturbed pound puppy—part beagle, part doberman, and all crazy—who regularly tried to kill our houseguests and never learned that the way to a human family's heart is not by, say, devouring their Easter baskets, plastic grass and all, and then puking up bits of chocolate bunny and colored aluminum foil all over their home and belongings for the next 24 hours, for example. Amy appears in my dreams more frequently than any figure from my childhood, with the possible exception of my unrequited high school crush.

²As far as Z and I could tell, this line was not actually in the movie, though it obviously should have been.

P.S. The second thing cable taught me this weekend: there is a Law & Order MOVIE. Who knew??

From last night's phone conversation:

Me: It seems like the producers of Snakes on a Plane really didn't know what they were onto for a long time. They wanted to call it Pacific Air 121.

Z: Yeah, they were probably imagining something like, "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard Pacific Air 121 ... oh my god, the captain is DRUNK! And there's a SNAKE ON THE PLANE! And ... sweet Jesus, there's a TORNADO! This is the WORST FLIGHT EVER!!"

Me: Actually, I would see that movie if it were called Worst Flight Ever.

Incidentally, know what the French title of Snakes on a Plane is? Yep:

I spent all day putting the final touches on the syllabus for my fall course in Restoration and 18th-Century British Lit, so forgive me for culling more LJ material from elsewhere than my own brain, because my brain is weary, and indulge me in thinking that the following New Yorker piece is freaking hilarious, because it is not often that the culture panders to those of us with an intimate knowledge of both bad '80s television and the work of James Boswell.

In honor of the impending release of Miami Vice: The Movie, TheNewYorker.com has resurrected from its archives Ian Frazier's 1986 piece Boswell's Life of Don Johnson. An excerpt:

To those several critics who, with but the most superficial knowledge, accuse Don Johnson of haughty and peremptory behavior, I reply that my friend has long suffered from a recurring melancholia, brought on by the exigencies of a career that no critic could ever sustain. In addition, I submit that Don Johnson became (through no fault of his own) a man of painfully divided loyalties: on the one hand, he belonged to the city while, on the other hand, he belonged to the night. We can only imagine the agonies of doubt this must have occasioned within him, as his mind turned first toward the one indebtedness, [and] then toward the other. Moreover, Don Johnson has been troubled at irregular intervals by a very rare disorder whereby the reflections of street lamp cross the lenses of his spectacles in dizzying succession and deafening airs from popular operettas fill his ears. That he has managed even the smallest degree of civility in the face of such impediments I consider a remarkable feat.

Link courtesy of the ever-vigilant folks at Bookslut.

P.S. I can't wait to see the Miami Vice movie, because I'll see anything with Gong Li in it, and also because I think Colin Farrell is yummy even though he grosses most sane people out.

The NYTimes reports that pioneering Asian American actor Mako has passed away at age 72.

Mako, who used only one name professionally, was born in Japan and came to the United States as a teenager. An Academy Award-nominated actor, he was also a distinguished presence on the Broadway stage, winning a Tony nomination in the leading role of the Reciter in the original cast of “Pacific Overtures.”

Mako earned an Oscar nomination for “The Sand Pebbles” (1966), in which he played opposite Steve McQueen. Among his other films are “Conan the Barbarian” (1982), “Conan the Destroyer” (1984), “Seven Years in Tibet” (1997), “Pearl Harbor” (2001) and “Memoirs of a Geisha,” released last year.

My family and I saw the revival of Pacific Overtures with B.D. Wong in the role of the Reciter—it was pretty awesome. The only one of Mako's films I've seen is the recent and forgettable Memoirs of a Geisha, but perhaps we'll watch The Sand Pebbles tonight in his memory.

I've not done a good job of reporting various films and DVDs watched this summer, so I thought I'd do a kind of round-up/catch-up post. Then I realized how many there were and got discouraged, and said to myself, Self, we'll do this, but we're not spending any more than one sentence on each one. Thus:

Superman Returns (2006): New guy plays Christopher Reeve playing Superman—or is it Superdeadbeatbabydaddy?

I, Robot (2004): Robots are the new minority, but this time racism is right.

Operation Petticoat (1959): Women infiltrate Cary Grant and Tony Curtis's submarine (read phallus) and hilarity (read emasculation) ensues.

The Lady Eve (1941): I was hooked at "My name is Jean but it's really Eugenia." And at Henry Fonda.

Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005): Can we cure the pain of mundane loneliness by "pooping back and forth"? (Note that this review is designed to require those of you who have no idea what "pooping back and forth" is to see the film and find out. If you don't laugh yourself into a coma at that scene, I think there is something wrong with you.)

Fever Pitch (1997—UK version): Colin Firth really really really likes football, like, a lot.

After the Thin Man (1936): Nick & Nora, a young Jimmy Stewart, and inscrutable Chinese gangsters—it really sells itself.

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962): She went fucking insane.

Murder on the Orient Express (1974): With a cast like this, maybe everyone did it.

Thank You for Smoking (2005): For a movie about loose morals, it sure didn't have Katie Holmes take her shirt off. (More interestingly, perhaps, no one smokes a single cigarette as far as I recall. Discuss.)

Transformers: The Movie (1984): Robotkind is threatened by a giant horned anus that consumes all in its path; autobots rock out '80s-style and save the universe.

Short Circuit (1986): Number 5 is alive, and infinitely more charismatic than Steve Guttenberg.

Megalodon (2004): Gigantic prehistoric shark takes way too long to eat bad acting.

The Libertine (2004): In the Restoration period, bein' bad feels so ... bad.

The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947): A spinster judge (Myrna Loy), determined to fight pedophilia with more pedophilia, sentences an apparently crime-prone artist (Cary Grant) to date her smitten little sister (a blooming Shirley Temple, who occasionally bears a disturbing resemblance to Marilyn Monroe), which turns everyone on.

42nd Street (1933): Just keep watching—the Busby Berkeley is at the end.

OK, I think that covers it. I'll have to save catch-up book reviews for another time.

So, I'm lying in bed in our hotel room flipping through the glorious number of channels available on our cable-equipped hotel TV, when somewhere around C-SPAN Z says, "Oh, I know that guy." And I'm like, "That guy? The one on TV?" and he's like, "Yeah. I went to school with him."

This would not necessarily be worth noting if it were not for the fact that only two nights ago, I began reading King Dork by Frank Portman because the Bookslut kids are always going on about how great it is (and yes, so far it's pretty great), and I noticed in the author bio that Frank Portman is in a band, and just to make civilized conversation with my boyfriend (who is also in a band and, you know, listens to music and stuff), I'm like, "Hey Z, ever heard of the Mr. T Experience?" and he's like, "Yeah, we played with them."

Does he personally know everyone in the world? Or am I at the center of some weird Truman Show–esque conspiracy, and you people are all in on it? It's clearly one or the other.

Z and I are cruising the American heartland. The primary purpose of our trip is to find Z a place to live in Cincinnati. Our secondary purpose is to see Willie Nelson play Louisville. (Willie Nelson has long been on my list of People I Must See in Concert Before They Die. Knock on wood, etc. If he can make it through Wednesday night, we're good.) Our tertiary purpose is to stay in a classy B&B in St. Louis, where I intend to dance around singing the "Meet Me in St. Louis" song until Z makes me stop and even then I probably won't. Meet Me in St. Louis is one of my absolute favorite movies of all time with a cherry on top.

So far nothing interesting has happened. All I have to report is that there are a surprising number of porn superstores off the interstate in Missouri, and that gas is slightly more expensive in Illinois than in any of the other 5 states we traversed today. Assuming you all really are collaborating on the script of my life, I suggest you liven things up a bit or we're all in for a long week.

Look, I don't care what the stick-up-the-butt critics say (A. O. Scott, I'm looking at you); if pirates vs. Kraken isn't the greatest thing ever, I don't know what is.

+
What part of this does not equal awesome???

I do concede Z's point, however, that between Dead Man's Chest and King Kong, what with their reintroduction of the cannibalistic "native" as part of the formula for all-American blockbuster fun, he's "kind of nostalgic for political correctness."

Apparently, even the classiest of DVD runs (viewed over the past two weeks: The Lady Eve (1941), Operation Petticoat (1959), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), After the Thin Man (1936)) can, with the introduction of one silly robot movie (I, Robot (2004)), plummet straight into the very deepest depths of ignominy: Empire of the Ants (1977).

I think it's fair to say that the experience of watching this film resists representation. All you have to know is that it features Joan Collins and giant, radioactive ants, which are actually normal-sized, (probably) unradioactive ants filmed up close and then badly superimposed on the frame to create the cinematic illusion of giant radioactive antness. Now that's movie magic!

Plus, what with the bad sound, the '70s pantsuits, and the negligible acting, it really seemed like it was going to become porn any minute. But instead, some giant, radioactive ants would kill someone.

In the spirit of televised sports' Sounds of the Game, here are some of the things you would have overheard if you'd been there with us on the couch last night:

"They didn't do a good job of dumping that radioactive waste."

"[sigh]. Groups of people should never get on boats."

"I don't think they invented knee-in-the-balls until the late seventies."

"Who's that guy?" "He's just here for the porn."

"These ants aren't very good actors."

"Shouldn't this be called Empire of the Pants?"

"Get more eaten!"

And so on.

Lest you think our evening an entire waste, let me assure you that it inspired one of the Great Ideas of the New Millenium: a spin-off of the classic Tom Collins named—yes, you guessed it—the Joan Collins. We have not yet perfected the formula, but we suspect Tabasco may be involved.

1. If watching the Monkees' movie Head (1968) doesn't make you wonder, "Am I on drugs?" then you obviously are on drugs.

2. Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the longest game in the history of professional baseball—33 innings—played between my childhood hometown team, the Rochester Red Wings, and my more recent hometown team, the Paw[tucket Red] Sox. Cal Ripkin Jr. played for the Red Wings (then an Orioles' feeder) and Wade Boggs for the Paw Sox (a Red Sox feeder, duh). I love this story; it reminds me of The Iowa Baseball Confederacy by W. P. Kinsella, a novel I loved as a kid. Incidentally, since I grew up a devoted Yankees fan, I always considered the Paw Sox a special enemy, even though they had no particular beef with the Red Wings. I like that crossover of animosity between the major and minor leagues, and I like that this historic game grants my arbitrary marriage of the two teams some legitimacy. I cannot explain, however, how I came to live in the enemy territory of Southern New England for so long. My best guess is that God is mean.

3. In the immortal words of Daniel Handler, "I Love Murakami." Today, I specifically love Kafka on the Shore. I'm going to go read it now.

I have been trying, with various degrees of success, not to spend my every waking moment screwing around in cyberspace—an endeavor with the unfortunate side effect that, when I check my LJ to see what I've been doing lately, it looks like I've been doing nothing, nay, that I have ceased to exist. I assure you that I continue to exist in one form or another.

Yesterday Z and I blew off work and drove out to Devil's Den State Park, where we beheld green, green, and more green. I realized how accustomed I've become to encountering sea coast when I drive out into the country when I missed smelling the salt water on the air. But the mountains here are beautiful, and the air smells of more types of green than I can count, some of which I recognized from my upstate New York childhood.

( Click for pics )

We rewarded our exertions up the mountain with Mexican lunch specials and margaritas, followed by a long nap, followed by The Women (1939), a bizarre George Cukor flick featuring an all-female cast and starring real-life rivals Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford as, respectively, a jilted society wife and the scheming perfume-counter salesgirl who stole her man. The moral of the story seems to be, in the film's final words, that "pride" is "a luxury a woman in love can't afford," but if you can stomach the inanity of that sentiment it's well worth watching for the costumes, oh the magnificently preposterous costumes, particularly the hats. No woman completely devoid of pride would wear such things; she would disintegrate beneath the weight of their absurdity. I also enjoyed the sequence on the Divorce Train to Reno (I asked Z if we could get married so we could get divorced so I could take a ride on the Divorce Train), and recognizing Marjorie Main (who plays Katie the Maid in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)) and young Virginia Weidler (who plays the plucky Dinah in one of Cukor's next projects, the triumphant The Philadelphia Story (1940)).

Other recent evening screenings include All About Eve (1950), which Z had never seen, and the more recent Junebug (2005), a gentle domestic drama, captivatingly acted, even by Ben McKenzie, a.k.a. Ryan Atwood.

I've been reading, too, but reviews will have to wait till later. I have, like, work to do.

Today's Google Homepage Quote of the Day is from my beloved Dorothy Parker: "If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised."

This week Z and I have been dutifully adhering to a schedule that designates 9am-1pm as the Official Workday, which means that I am now Playing Official Hooky. I had a hard time extricating myself from a dream in which madame_urushiol was teaching me to shoot a rifle and got a somewhat late start. I can't start Officially Using My Brain until the coffee cup is empty.

My late start is due, no doubt, to the fact that when I should have been going to sleep last night, I couldn't put down David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, kindly sent to me by o_jenny. I won't review it just yet, but it may be my favorite book to date by one of my favorite contemporary writers. I hang on his every word like he's the spellbinding date I never met.

Z and I have made a tentative plan not to spend every single evening sipping drinks in front of a television screen, but we've had such a good run of DVDs lately that it's hard to tear ourselves away. Briefly:

The Shanghai Gesture (1941): Ona Munson in the most incredible yellowface ever—seriously, she would rock the West Village's Halloween parade—as Mother Gin Sling, proprietress of a Shanghai "House of Vice." Apparently the house vices in the play on which the film is based were too much for the censors, so here Mother Gin Sling oversees a huge room shaped like an inverted wedding cake (to suggest a descent into hell?) where people play roulette in the bottom ring. But the vice is hardly the point; it's Ona Munson's hair. (See the film and you'll know what I mean.) Also starring Gene Tierney as the feisty Victoria, a.k.a. "Poppy," who in the play is a nymphomaniac but in the film is simply insane. So it's family-friendly.

God of Gamblers (1989): Chow Yun-Fat is wonderful as the uber-suave God of Gamblers who, courtesy of that legendary narrative device Bump On The Head, loses his memory and reverts to the mentality of a giddy 12-year-old. He's picked up by a group of hard-luck riffraff who parade him around town as, in the words of the Netflix disc sleeve, the "Retarded God of Gamblers." Obviously, hilarity ensues. In addition, the subtitles are a brilliant experiment in surreality.

Stage Door (1937): Um, Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, and Lucille Ball all in the same film. Enough said, really. I laughed, I cried (well, no, I didn't actually cry), and I realized Meg Ryan learned everything she knows from Ms. Ginger playing drunk. A new favorite.

Grand Hotel (1932): Again, the ensemble cast makes watching this movie a no-brainer—Greta Garbo as a weird Russian ballerina, Joan Crawford as a sexy but kind stenographer, John Barrymore as a hotel thief with a heart of gold, and Lionel Barrymore as a broken-down factory bookkeeper with some terminal disease drinking himself to death in style at the eponymous Grand Hotel of Weimar Berlin. Everyone is magnificent. Joan Crawford bears an uncanny resemblance to Gillian Anderson. Lionel Barrymore broke my heart. And Garbo is Garbo. Also, there's a great behind-the-scenes special feature on the DVD about how Garbo and John Barrymore, after a briefly chilly introduction on the first day of shooting, couldn't stop making out with each other in between takes. Classic.

Okay, I'd better pull out a book before truant officer Z catches me. And my coffee's gone.

This weekend nkb_vp_ltl drove down to Haverford to attend our two-woman Ladies Liquor Colloquium. The plan was to have several too many cocktails and to discuss Matters of Import—standard Ladies fare. What we did not know—what, I believe, we could not have anticipated—was that we would experience a paradigm shift so seismic that it would reduce everything we thought we knew to rubble. I leave this Easter weekend a different person than I entered it.

We saw Glitter.

There is no satisfactory way to narrate the weekend's events; indeed, it's likely that narrative is no longer possible in the PGW (Post-Glitter World). What I can tell you is that yesterday we made bloody marys and watched Glitter and Crossroads back to back. Many notes were taken. We knew that Glitter had somehow changed everything, but we couldn't say how. We couldn't even say what had happened in the movie except that at one point Mariah's head exploded into fireworks and we were pretty certain that disgusting man playing her love interest isn't even an actor. We drank a bottle of wine. The only thing that seemed to make any sense anymore was karaoke, so we went to Yeats in Wynnewood, which has started doing karaoke on Saturday night. When we got there, we were informed that there was no karaoke because of Easter. We protested that this made no sense because obviously Jesus would want us to sing karaoke and anyway, we'd seen Glitter and what are ladies supposed to do in a post-Glitter world if there's no karaoke? We ordered beers. We ordered dinner. We started talking to our waitress, who seemed to be the only person who made any sense to us anymore. We asked if she'd seen Glitter. She hadn't. We wondered if it was possible to live in the post-Glitter world without having seen Glitter and if so, does our waitress (Kate), and is that why she speaks our language? We asked her what ladies are supposed to do in a post-Glitter world if there's no karaoke and she said "go out, drink, and Dance Party USA." I said, "What's Dance Party USA?" She said, "Oh, that's just what I call dancing." We said, "You are one of us. Can we be your friends?" Then she was both our waitress and our friend and it turns out she used to work at Vinny T's, a.k.a. Vinny Testa(cle)'s, a.k.a. "The Testicle," which is so nkb_vp_ltl's favorite restaurant that she requested to go there for her birthday a few months ago and that's where we were going to eat last night except that we were late for karaoke which wasn't even there but if we had gone to The Testicle then we would never have had Kate for a waitress and then for a friend because she no longer works at The Testicle but at Yeats, where there was no karaoke because of Easter which makes Jesus sad on a day when he should be partying. This was precisely the moment we began to understand what it meant to live in a post-Glitter world. Everything was obviously fated and yet nothing made any sense. We finished our drinks and went to Kate's house so she could feed meat to her dogs. Then we went to the Bar Behind the Wawa which was closed but because it's a post-Glitter world Kate got the bartender to open back up just for us. We had our own bar. We called a local radio station to request music and nkb_vp_ltl left a long, detailed message on their answering machine explaining that we'd seen Glitter and there was no karaoke which is ridiculous because Jesus would totally, like, rock karaoke so we really, really, really needed them to play "Straight Up" and "I Hate Myself for Loving You" and "You Give Love a Bad Name," and then Pat Benatar came on the radio and it was obvious the universe was, like, reading our minds, so we did a few shots of Surfers on Acid and toasted to "not going to The Testicle" and discussed What Would Jesus Sing? (Our bartender: "King of Pain?" Brilliant.) Then we all went back to Kate's house, bartender too, and discussed The Simpsons and Family Guy and love and cannibalism and Glitter, above all Glitter, and then suddenly it was morning and we woke up nestled in among a pack of dogs in our waitress's living room.

Chillin' with our pack in a post-Glitter world.

One of us said: "What happened yesterday?"
The other said: "We saw Glitter, and woke up the next morning part of a pack of dogs."

Xavier the pup understands Lady Z's post-Glitter sleepiness.

Clearly it will take a lifetime to figure out just what it means to live in the PGW. Thus we have begun a new blog devoted to the question, What is going on? We call it I Saw Glitter Dot Com. We like to think of it as the beginnings of a new field of scholarly inquiry called "Glitter Studies." Please drop in—we can't take on the phenomenon that is Glitter all on our own, people.

When we got home this morning, we watched Glitter again. We are sick, sick ladies.

IMDb Celebrity News reports that the makers of the film Snakes on a Plane, in which a bunch of snakes get loose on a plane, have gone back and shot extra scenes to add "more gore, more deaths, more nudity and more snakes to the finished product."

Awesome.

Me: How would one would make a Brokeback Martini?
sillygirl84: Well, it would have to be something really manly, but also, um...
Me: A little fruity?
sillygirl84:Yes.

Thus we shall be drinking something along the lines of a scotch-and-raspberry/cranberry cocktail. I also stocked up on Jake's Fault, a.k.a. the "I Wish I Knew How to Quit You" shiraz.

See you all at the other end of the red carpet.

( Update 1 )
( Update 2 )
( Update 3 )
( Update 4 )
( Update 5 )
( Final update )

A final note on The Da Vinci Code, which I finished last night: if this book is to be believed, it takes a brainiac team including a well-published British Royal Historian, a world-famous Harvard symbologist, and a Parisian forensic cryptologist about 75 pages to solve a riddle that a young junior professor of 18th-century literature can figure out before reading the last line. I'm not kvetching, and I'm not boasting. I'm just saying that I think I should be more famous and better paid.

I did keep turning the pages right up until the very end, too enthralled with yelling the answers and impending plot twists to the characters even to get up and refill my wine glass. Which, in this reader's estimation, is a pretty fun way to spend a cold evening.

OK, enough of this Dan Brown business. When was the last time we had a good shark post? Or, for that matter, a good robot post? Do you see where I'm going here? Could it be ... robot sharks?

Pretty damn close. According to Discovery News, the Pentagon is funding research into neural impants that will turn everyday, run-of-the-mill sharks into "Stealth Sharks."

"The Pentagon hopes to exploit sharks' natural ability to glide quietly through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients and follow chemical trails," said the report, carried in Saturday's edition.

"By remotely guiding the sharks' movements they hope to transform the animals into stealth spies, perhaps capable of following vessels without being spotted," the article said.

Without even mentioning the ethical issues of taking endangered wild animals and transforming them into remote-controlled drones of the U.S. military, it seems to me that this is a Very Bad Idea. Have these people never seen The Day of the Dolphin (the Oscar-nominated film in which George C. Scott and his hot lab-partner/wife teach dolphins to speak English by forging creepy paternal bonds with them and then watch in horror as their humanoid dolphin-son is abducted and used in a plot to assassinate the president)? Have they never seen Deep Blue Sea (in which a team of scientists have the bright idea to cure Alzheimer's by injecting mako sharks with a serum to make their brains grow really, really big and then are shocked when the sharks get really, really smart and take over the lab and eat everyone, including LL Cool J's parrot)? Is our government really funding a project to develop A Button that controls the minds and wills of a global Army of Sharks? Is no one on the Pentagon's payroll to ask questions like, What if the bad guys happen to get the shark remote? What if rewiring the brains of the ocean's most ferocious and ancient creatures doesn't exactly line up with the current national agenda? What if the sharks turn out to be as clever as they are in every movie scenario of this sort and turn around and eat us all en route to inheriting the earth?

For the second time in this post, I cannot help but feel that I have untold marketable skills that are not being put to use.

You'll never guess what your beloved Lady—nay, Professor—Z is doing this frigid Saturday afternoon. Actually, you could probably guess that I'm still in bed, and listening to one of these masochistically beautiful Melancholia Mixes I keep making, but you wouldn't have guessed that I'm reading The Da Vinci Code, now, would you?

Despite the multiple warnings away from this book I've received from people whose opinions are to be trusted (I can hear fsr44's cry now: "Don't do it! My God, woman, you have so much to live for!!"), at my dad's insistence I have decided to participate in this particular cultural phenomenon and read the book before seeing the movie. Let us state for the record: It is not well-written. Brown crafts his sentences using strings of clichés, then spells out the innuendo of the clichés, as if not trusting his reader to be smart enough to decode the simplest of literary languages without assistance. For example:

"I am Bezu Fache [...] Captain of the Central Directoriate Judicial Police." His tone was fitting—a gutteral rumble ... like a gathering storm.

That second ellipsis is actually in the text, as if Brown anticipated the reader's brain itching at the introduction of a menacingly masculine chief of police who speaks in a "gutteral rumble" [...it reminds me of something, a mood or something, you know, not good but, like, bad—bad like something bad about to happen—what could it be...??] until our narrative guide arrives to help us out of this terribly difficult allusive connundrum [ah yes, of course, that's what it sounds like: "a gathering storm." How clever].

So, yes, at moments like this (and there are many), I feel like I'm reading Remedial Thriller Fiction. But I didn't pick this book up expecting to be bowled over by the prose; I picked it up because, thanks to Alias, I'm a sucker for these secret-society-with-secret-codes-and-other-secrets-pertaining-to-the-oh-so-secret-lives-of-Renaissance-artistic-and-scientific-geniuses narratives. So much so that I actually watched National Treasure a few weeks ago (you know, that movie starring Nicholas Cage and Some Blonde German Chick No One Has Ever Heard Of in which George Washington or some other famous Mason has hidden a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence—yeah, that one) and let me tell you, once you've done that, you have conceded all rights to shame. Also, I cannot stand not being in on the secret, especially such a secret secret secret as this kind of narrative promises, especially when every other person in America knows it, including my sister, who ate this book up over Christmas several years ago, then disappeared with the book back to Rochester before I could happen to just, you know, steal a casual glance to see what all the fuss was about. I know, it's the kind of curiosity that's going to get this cat killed one day, or at least really bored and disappointed (see above re: National Treasure). But in the case of The Da Vinci Code, what my dad promised is true: I'm reading it quickly, and I keep turning the pages, and even with all my cynicism and better judgment intact, I haven't tired of it yet. So that's something, right?

Also, I believe this is going to make a fantastic movie, provided that silly lawsuit doesn't ruin things.

Am I a creepy old lady just because I love Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

I never really watched Third Rock from the Sun, though the few times I did, I noted both that it was pretty funny and that That Kid Is Cute. He proved himself similarly sweet in 10 Things I Hate About You, though it wasn't an opportunity for him to prove his cinematic chops or anything. But I always suspected that one day this boy a.) would emerge a breathtakingly beautiful young hunk-a hunk-a burning something, and b.) might turn out to be a pretty good actor, too. Well, I just watched Mysterious Skin, in which both wishes come true.

The cutest little delinquents in Kansas!

A beautiful film, based on an acclaimed novel, which in addition to a hot young Joey features Elizabeth Shue as his equally hot mom and Michelle Trachtenberg as a sinfully adorable punked-out little teenage fag hag. But enough about the film. What I want to know is this: Is Joseph Gordon-Levitt hapa?

Is he? Or isn't he?

I am actually not the first person to pose this question. A little digging around the internet revealed a thread in LJ's own halfasians community (who knew?) on this very issue. Unfortunately, no one could provide any definitive answers. I suppose some beautiful boys were simply made to inhabit mysterious skins. But let me just say this: We all know that Keanu Reeves is the original Hottest Little Hapa in the Biz, right? Well check out these two broody boy-peas in a pod:



Oooooooooh I could just eat them off the screen.

I suppose now's as good a time as any to plug Kip Fulbeck's The Hapa Project. Check it out.

I'm at one of those interim, it's-outta-my-hands stages of the whole job thing, and finding it very hard to concentrate on anything, even television. (Though last night's all-new CSI, entitled Pirates of the Third Reich, in which Melinda "Call Me Julie Cooper-Nichol" Clark made an appearance as the supersmart dominatrix Lady Heather who at one point straps a neo-nazi mad scientist to a car in the middle of the desert and slaps him with a bull-whip until he cries, kept me fairly enthralled.) Last night I dreamt about the I Love Egg! song, and that Posh Spice and Shakira were the same person and I had a huge poster of her in my dorm room, and that I finally hooked up with That Boy From High School I Never Hooked Up With (that last of which is a recurring event in my dream life, I confess). This morning I found myself finally signing up for the McSweeney's Book Release Club, which I've been trying to resist for weeks, and decided that in the interest of avoiding a full day of buying up my various wish lists through internet book sellers, I should go into the city and wander around. I think I'll go see Capote at some point, at which I'll release In Cold Blood, which I finished a few nights ago, and which puts Law & Order to shame.

I realized this week that I watch Law & Order with religious devotion because I have a serious problem that cries for therapeutic intervention, but I watch CSI with a similar devotion because it's really fucking good.

Someone say something witty and fun. Here we are now; entertain us.

Remember Bridge to Terabithia? That book by Katherine Paterson that you read over and over as a kid even though it made you cry and cry and cry?

They're making a movie of it.

I am going to go see it and cry and cry and cry.

I'm home in Riverdale for the weekend to see sillygirl84, recently back from New Zealand. Last night we watched an America's Next Top Model marathon on E!, and this morning I awoke to find Funny Face on TMC. This may be my new favorite Audrey Hepburn movie. I have no idea why I've never seen this film before. A bit of dialogue between Hepburn (bookstore employee cum fashion model Jo Stockton) and Fred Estaire (fashion photographer Dick Avery, who discovered Jo):

[During a photo shoot in Paris]
Dick: Now, today you're not happy. ... Heartbroken, suffering. You're Anna Karenina.
Jo: Shall I throw myself under the train?

But perhaps the best thing about this movie is the delightful casting of Kay Thompson—yes, the author of Eloise—as fashion magazine editor Maggie Prescott. Such a lady. Here is how Maggie and Dick end up in Jo's neck of the woods:

[Dick has been trying unsuccessfully to get vapid fashion model Marion to look like she's intellectually engaging a work of art]
Maggie: Marion might look better in a different background.
Dick: We can go on location. An intellectual hang-out.
Maggie: Somewhere with books.
Dick: A bookstore.
Maggie: —One of those sinister places in Greenwich Village! Come on, girls!

One day, I'll live in a house with a sign over the door that reads "God Bless This Sinister Place."

The set designer for Pride and Prejudice should win an award. Excellent deployment of chinoiserie, in particular.