January 2002 Archive

Monday, January 28, 2002

Saturday, January 26, 2002

posted on 1/26/2002 03:49:41 PM

Friday, January 25, 2002

Schlock
For some reason, Valentine's Day seems especially insidious this year. I've been single on VD roughly 25 of my soon-to-be-28 years. It's not a holiday I get particularity bitter about. I usually make my own valentines for my friends. Maybe it's walking past the aisle of valentine candy at the grocery store and getting knocked over by the sugary smell. Maybe it's the buy! buy! buy! mentality when the economy sucks. Maybe it's the insipid "hot dates" and "great gifts" links on msn and the like. Valentine's Day is feeling especially synthetic. No biggie, just annoying.
Posted on 1/25/2002 12:11:22 PM

Wednesday, January 23, 2002

Is that all there is?
If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is...

Thanks, Peggy Lee, for such a beautiful voice.

2. Is that all there is?
Turner Classic Movies had one of my all time favorites movies on tonight - The Loved One
. I watched while I taped it for future hours of befuddlement. I adore the beauty of this movie, while at the same time, over and over again I think "I can't fuckin' believe they put that in a movie." Not that those two characteristics are mutually exclusive - just very rare in tandem.
I love the way this movie fell into my life. Many years ago, I was working on an event out-of-state which involved 20-hour days. I dragged my ass back to my hotel room and was flipping through the tv channels while I got ready for my meager 4 hours of sleep. I was instantly taken by a black and white movie. One trip around the channel line-up I saw two British men having a conversation in a restaurant with a person in an alien costume in the background. The next visit it was gorgeous shots of classical sculptures. The next - Jonathan Winters. I'd seen enough to know I wanted to see more, but didn't want to only catch a chunk of movie at 2 am. So, I watched just long enough to have a few names to run by the Internet Movie Database in the Morning. Jonathan Winters, Liberace and Milton Berle! Ran 'em and viola! The Loved One "A motion picture with something to offend everyone" as the tagline proclaimed.

If you adore black comedy and you haven't seen The Loved One, you should be shot.

Har de har har.

Posted on 1/23/2002 12:21:43 AM

Tuesday, January 22, 2002

Onanistic
James Lileks' The Bleat needs to be bookmarked and read often. And here's a true Lileksian gem which the bold adjective header refers to. This is a word whose Merriam-Webster "Top 10 Most Popular Sites for "onanism"" link needs to be clicked.

Interlinguistic
14 pages into Esperanto : Language, Literature, and Community and I'm hooked. I've gotten far too much flack for my interest in Esperanto and this book is giving me fuel for my defense. Besides I'm learning a lot about the the history of planned languages and their categorization. Interesting motivations and methods. I've also read about Sidney S. Culbert's "The Principal Languages of the World" which states that the world contains about 2 million Esperanto speakers. About twice as many as Estonian, it's alphabetical neighbor. Apparently, Culbert is an Esperantist, but he has compiled the most comprehensive tally of professionally proficient speakers of (a whole lot of) languages to date.

Best Esperanto nugget so far: "One Chinese Esperanto speaker described Esperanto as a linguistic handshake. When two people shake hands they both reach out halfway. When two people speak Esperanto they have both made the effort to learn a relatively easy, neutral language instead of one person making the huge effort to learn the other person's difficult national language and the other person making no effort at all except to correct his/her interlocutor's errors."

*

Posted on 1/22/2002 12:43:14 AM

Sunday, January 13, 2002

Wednesday, January 02, 2002

I'm on a bit of a movie binge - I can also recommend The Royal Tenenbaums and Ocean's Eleven. The former is hilarious and quirky in that beauty-of-awkwardness-kind-of-way. The latter is just a shitload of fun. The Shipping News is good, but is easier to appreciate than to love. It's a film full of anti-heroes.

I adore movies. Good ones. It may sound like I love every movie I see. Not so. I just have a strong movie filter before I plunk down my $8.75. There's a lot of blockbusters I have not seen and have no desire to "remedy" that. If I catch it on cable later, fine.

A recent lesson learned is to decrease the number of movies I see with other folks. Yes, it's an easy get together - dinner and a movie. But other folks tend to break my own internal rules about movies. One is - don't say disparagingly things about the movie 1) loudly 2) immediately. I'm a gigantic fan of critique, preferring it's constructive. But this is because 1) Berating a movie loudly in your seat is insensitive to the people sitting near you who may have enjoyed it which goes along with - 2) Don't trash talk a movie immediately. I am a big fan of sitting through the credits and letting my mind digest a little. Someone barking about how dumb so and so is interrupts that processing on the experience you just had the last couple hours. Granted having someone to talk about a really good movie is a thing to behold - but I think the viewing and interpretation is a mostly internal, individual thing. The exception to this rule is my friend Larisa. Our Venn diagram circles of movie preferences overlap so much that she's great to go to movies with.

Posted on 1/2/2002 08:46:35 PM

Tuesday, January 01, 2002

It is fan-fuckin-tastic. I walked out of that movie giddy, I enjoyed myself so much. More points for Soderbergh, who already racked up a bunch in my book for Traffic and The Limey.

BTW, HNY!

posted on 1/1/2002 09:41:01 PM