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wednesday, may 31

Oh wow. Look at the pictures and tell me who suffers by comparison. Sometimes beauty is its own justification. 5:28 PM +

Nice. (And is that Morse Code along the top?) [via dink] 2:50 AM +

The street lamps are widely spaced in residential suburbia, and on a breezy night like tonight, you can hear the trees whispering just beyond their illumination. There's anticipation in the encroaching shadows, and in the mysterious, muted growl of traffic somewhere, far off, beneath the shared starlight. Or maybe it's straylight. A passage from William Gibson's Neuromancer:

"Straylight reminded Case of deserted early morning shopping centers he'd known as a teenager, low-density places where the small hours brought a fitful stillness, a kind of numb expectancy, a tension that left you watching insects swarm around caged bulbs above the entrance of darkened shops. Fringe places, just past the borders of the Sprawl, too far from the all-night click and shudder of the hot core. There was that same sense of being surrounded by the sleeping inhabitants of a waking world he had no interest in visiting or knowing, of dull business temporarily suspended, of futility and repetition soon to wake again." 2:34 AM +

tuesday, may 30

So I was channel-scanning the other night, and it was my abject misfortune to stutter-click across VH1 whilst it was re-broadcasting its latest Divas special. This is gonna be a relatively vague and hyperlink-free ramble, because I'm generally ignorant of or indifferent to this phenomenon, and am not particularly desirous of slow-surfing over my dial-up connection just to troll for Celine Dion-related browser cookies.

But anyway, as I watched, transfixed, for about five minutes (until my sister came round and slapped the remote out of my hand, thankfully), I thought to myself, as I have occasionally in the past: Who watches this shit? I mean, a lot of people, obviously, because VH1 seems to air (or skillfully recycle) portions of the series on some sort of trimester-based schedule. And then I'm pretty sure there was this stupid "Dudes Strike Back" counterprogram several weeks ago, because I remember seeing this picture in Entertainment Weekly documenting the folly. I guess people enjoy it?

The segment I saw wasn't very convincing. An extra-terrestrial-looking Donna Summer heaved onstage to some warmed-over disco chestnut, while the camera intermittently cut to shots of pseudo-famous people in the audience (Hilary Swank and Cheri Oteri, overdressed both, gettin' jiggy with their skinny white-girl bad selves ... for example). And that was about it. In a word: lame.

And then I thought about the word: "diva." Another one of those vaguely desultory assignations which has been misappropriated by the media mix-masters and repurposed into a term of empowerment (and marketing tie-ins). Growing up, I remember it being applied mostly in a classical context (shades of Kathleen Battle's celebrated tussles with the Met). These days, suddenly, every half-baked dog-whistle is a "diva" -- the way every celery stalk with bile-breath was a "supermodel" a few years back. Christina Aguilera is apparently a "diva-in-training." The prosecution rests. (Incidentally, I would like to nominate a word which I think is ripe for commercial pillaging: jackass. It rolls off the tongue ever so nicely. Put it in a beer commercial and people will totally forget it ever had a negative connotation.)

I guess we're programmed from an early age to have bad taste. I overheard my little brother and sister (kindergarten and fourth grade, respectively) discussing some school-wide musical recital they had to participate in recently. This, of course, triggered a repressed memory of similar indignities suffered by myself when I was their age.

Like when they made us sing "Wind Beneath My Wings" to our principal for sixth grade graduation. And our principal, one Mrs. Moore, got all teary-eyed. Even at the time, I remember thinking: You're making us sing this to you. And it was a fucking Bette Midler song, man. That's child abuse. (And as an English major, I have to complain about the fact that roughly thirty of us were singing lyrics which employed the first-person singular pronoun exclusively. Very perverse. Twisted, even.)

You know what I would pay cash-money to see? Little kids singing trip-hop or thematically inappropriate disco-era stuff in a school-auditorium setting. It would definitely be an iMovie moment. The parents would tweak out for sure. Imagine your prized moppet and his or her peers belting out Massive Attack's "Dissolved Girl" or Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly" in four-part harmony (choreography optional). (Part of me would also love to see the tots try a Britney Spears number on for size, but I fear the irony would be lost on the attendant parentage.) Baz Luhrmann had the right idea when he featured a boys choir singing Prince's "When Doves Cry" with completely unironic reverence in 1996's wonderfully bad-good Romeo + Juliet. The media has its finger down everyone's throat so much these days that laughter and vomiting are pretty much synchronized activities. 5:21 PM +

monday, may 29

This Newsweek article gives off the weirdest vibe. Ostensibly, it's a shout-out to retiring General Electric CEO Jack Welch's personal assistant -- one Rosanne Badowski. It purports to explore the unique dynamic which arises between high-powered corporate executives and their "uber" personal assistants. Fair enough. But the outlook of the article is so tenuous and ambivalent, it's creepy. There's a pronounced undercurrent of class struggle and resentment which seeps up through the text from time to time. A few choice quotes:

"Controlling the corner office isn't what Badowski, 43 and single, dreamed of while growing up a few miles from GE headquarters."

"The job demands sacrifices. She's virtually hobbyless; she's tried signing up for tennis lessons and local clubs, but usually has to cancel. She rarely takes vacations. She just called off a planned trip to China because she worries it would interfere with prepping for a business trip."

"She receives no gift on Secretary's Day because both she and Welch dismiss it as a Hallmark holiday."

"Like most employees, she'd like more feedback; though Welch pens long annual evaluations of GE's key managers, Badowski hasn't had a written review in nine years. 'There should be one for the files, a written appraisal that I've done a good job,' she says. Welch replies that Badowski gets so much daily feedback that a written evaluation is unnecessary."

And it gets creepier: "'He's like a spouse that doesn't say "I love you" anymore,' Badowski says. 'At the end of the day, you know you still love the person.'" Um, she wants a written evaluation, right? How 'bout a psych evaluation.

And finally, there's my favorite tidbit, which would make Karl Marx blush (or beam; I'm not particularly well-versed in his pathologies): "Despite mile-wide differences in pay and status, their relationship has elements of an ordinary friendship. At 10:30 on a Sunday night in January, Badowski's home phone rang. 'Ro, did you see that play!' Welch yells. He was calling to commiserate over the Super Bowl.... Those phone calls may cease when Welch vacates his office next spring. Badowski would happily work for him in retirement if he asks, but he hasn't yet." Golly, ingratiating condescension with a splash of callous disregard. Yum.

The moral of the story is: no matter whose lackey you are, at the end of the day, you're still a lackey. Here's hoping, for Jack Welch's sake, that no one slips his secretary a copy of The Temp. 5:03 PM +

sunday, may 28

Six Degrees of Separation was just on Bravo. I love that movie. Normally, I think plays suck, and movies adapted from plays are that much worse; but somehow, Six Degrees totally works. It's overwrought and very verbose (not to mention a little pat), but it's so damn smart that I don't mind. It completely captures a sentiment I've expressed here before -- namely, that too much education can short-circuit a small mind. It's a dreamy, money-scented meditation on the high-minded hypocrisy of the leisure class. And the cinematography is surprisingly good, although there are places where the shots look a little unsteady, as if the budget was faltering.

Acting-wise, Stockard Channing, not playing white trash for a change, stands out in my mind as particularly marvelous, although the cast as a whole is great. And yeah, even Will Smith is adequate. It's always surprised me that he cut his celluloid teeth doing an artsy little film -- and then promptly became a Fourth of July fixture. (Well, okay, Made in America fucks my thesis just a bit -- but good manners preclude me from dwelling on that stinker.) No looking back, I guess.

(And holy god, did you know Heather Graham's in it too? I totally didn't remember. This is like the time I saw that stupid Alec Baldwin-Nicole Kidman movie ... um ... Malice, that's what it's called ... anyway, Gwyneth Paltrow has a tiny tiny part in that film. Another interesting -- if not auspicious -- early role.) 12:38 AM +

saturday, may 27

Play a Game Boy long enough and you start to hear its monoaural sounds inside your head as you dose in the afternoon. The recent memory of 4-bit grayscale sprites plays out against your closed eyelids.

That's what home is all about -- simple images set to tinny music. It's like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: you cross a barrier and the greater world with its real obligations becomes distant, diffuse. Theoretical. Your insides turn to vanilla pudding.

Tomorrow, I'll draw up a list of errands for myself. Wasn't I supposed to find a job? I'm pretty sure my life changed in a big way last week. But right now, I'm home. Where will home be in three months? 8:29 PM +

Oh look: another insidiously creepy low-budget flick ostensibly aimed at children. Terrible production values plus Alec Baldwin plus Peter Fonda equals box-office poison. But it'll clean up in ... nah, it won't clean up anywhere. (The truly fourth-rate official movie site doesn't help matters.) 5:05 PM +

Haha. I've discovered that the best response to cheesy-feeble advertising slogans masquerading as wit is to answer the guilty exclaimer with matched (and therefore slightly mocking) inflections, substituting a non-sequitur for the offending commercial copy. I'm partial to "MOME RATHS" or "TOYBOAT." Additionally, blurting out "ORPHANS!" will usually stop unfunny people dead in their tracks. Here's a sample scenario:

Dork: "Time to make the DONUTS!"
Me: "MOME RATHS?!"

Furthermore: A simple Fozzie Bear "WAKA WAKA WAKA!" will often work just as well, if you're feeling less verbal. 12:10 PM +

This game "rocks fantastic," to borrow an expression from the colloquial mob. While I'm neither a prolific nor particularly adept gamer, I've been putting my little sibs' Dreamcast through its paces; and let me tell you, Rayman 2 is lambent stuff -- a cracked-out amalgam of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, dramatically lit and colored. The art design is dreamy, the gameplay is challenging (well, for me, anyway; the sibs kick my ass), and the pay-offs are dazzling. A veritable photon parade. 11:27 AM +

friday, may 26

My little brother brought a beanstalk home for Mother's Day. Why a beanstalk, I have no idea. Things have a way of making sense -- or simply not mattering -- when you're in kindergarten. Ever since then, the little plant has been doing its chemotropic thing, searching for another plant to wrap itself around, to no avail.

There's a passage from Douglas Coupland's Shampoo Planet that I like: "My arms slow to a stop. I feel feverish -- hallucinogenic. 'Mom, there are these flowers in the desert -- ' but I can't continue. Tomorrow, in another world, I will tell my mother about these flowers that grow in the Nevada desert, tricked into blooming by the false sun of nighttime nuclear explosions, in good faith reaching out for light, instead only pollinating the sterile sands, forfeiting the future of all flowers to follow." 9:35 AM +

You may be surprised to know that my cinephile tendencies slip below the radar whenever I come home. For example, I haven't seen a certain film yet, and have no plans to until sometime next week. The suburban gigaplexes, a-swarm with mallrats, nuclear families and the Borders overflow crowd, seem to resonate with some deep-seated phobia of mine. It's really rather odd. The proletarian masses of the metropolis give me no pause, but the bourgeoisie stop me dead in my tracks. College will do that to ya. (Well it did it to me, anyway. Not that I'm a hipster or anything, but the 'burbs are insidious-creepy, man. Sundry petty treacheries committed behind closed doors under a big sky. No glamour.) 7:25 AM +

It's gratifying to know that somebody actually reads this section. Christine's a cool bean. 12:22 AM +

Evan demonstrates some killer design here. I like. 12:07 AM +

thursday, may 25

Props to awol for reaching to the subtextual core of my very special episode spiel and highlighting what I consider to be pederast ground zero in the desolate landscape of eighties syndicated television comedy (sub-baseline humor -- not even worthy of Fox circa 1987): Small Wonder. Vicki the kinderbot is every aspiring Humbert's fantasy. Just thinking about that show now gives me the creeps.

In my stupid screenwriting course last semester, we had to come up with five or six ideas for a short screenplay. Since I already knew what I wanted to do, I didn't take the assignment very seriously, and this was actually one of my "ideas" -- no joke:

"'I Was Jamie Lawson': A fanciful exercise imagining a day in the life of Jerry Supiran as a high-school junior or senior. Supiran is best (or solely) remembered as Jamie Lawson on the devastatingly lame syndicated 1980s sitcom, Small Wonder, about a nuclear family and its little-girl robot daughter. Supiran played the robot's human 'brother.' He was also overweight and somewhat sexually ambiguous, even for such a tender age. These trends are explored and highlighted in Supiran's (mostly negative) interactions with classmates."
5:06 PM +

Okay. No more slow-ass modem bullshit. I can't stand it anymore. I placed a call to Mindspring. We should have a shiny new DSL set-up in about three weeks. Which is more than enough time to pick up a comparably shiny AirPort base station. Hehe. 12:57 PM +

The Onion nails Britney but good. (I love the fourth infobar down.) 9:26 AM +

Not Tim Burton's best work, this commercial. Namely because the aesthetics are confused: while the "subject matter" calls for nihilism, Burton substitutes his trademark macabre sensibility. It would be like asking the late, great Edward Gorey to illustrate a graphic adaptation of a William Gibson novel. The styles don't blend. Although Kevin's right, it does have this "Matrix meets Bono and Wim Wenders" thing going on. Also a dash of Dark City, I should hasten to add -- although that may be redundant with respect to The Matrix. After all, the two films are variations on a theme; the former with inflections of Hopper, the latter with a glossy coat of Giger. Pulp noir versus comic-book cybernetics. Great stuff, both, when executed properly. Which is distinctly not the case with that Timex commercial. Blah. Better luck next time. 9:00 AM +

A friend once told me this weird story about how her little brother was away at camp one summer ... and how his troop (they're Canadian; he was in the Canadian version of the Boy Scouts ... er, Li'l Mounties? Mini-Mounties) was attacked by a bear. And how the bear supposedly chomped down on one of the kids.

Actually, on some kid's BUTT, to be more precise. As you might imagine, despite the incipient horror of picturing a bear ... bearing down on a child's behind, the very same image also moved me to tears of laughter for purely puerile semantic reasons. I mean, I could totally picture being on the playground in, say, the second grade, chanting: "The BEAR ate Bobby's BUTT!" Giggles would hypothetically ensue.

So a discussion commenced wherein my friend and I attempted to realistically consider the calamity and its aftermath. What exactly does one do if one's posterior is forcibly removed by a ravenous woodland carnivore? I mean, the ass is a fairly significant chunk of flesh -- muscles, fat, skin, et cetera. Did the child have to undergo some sort of horrible skin graft procedure? And aren't skin grafts often procured from the gluteal region? Were implants involved? Did he have to sit on one of those inflatable donuts for the rest of his life? So many questions. I'm really glad a bear never ate my butt.

It's just as well, I guess, that I was never really into the whole summer camp phenomenon growing up. It always struck me as a massive hygiene compromise, and while I wasn't necessarily fearful of any attendant animal encounters, I was certainly aware of the possibility of psychological fallout from being (inevitably, I thought at the time) molested by a camp counselor. I'm pretty sure some of us still remember that episode of Mr. Belvedere where young Wesley Owens gets a curiously strong back rub from his troop leader. I remember it. Scared the piss out of me. I can't believe the FCC used to clear that sort of stuff for prime time.

Actually, the topic of very special sitcom episodes where one or several of the main characters get(s) molested is worthy of a college dissertation. The trend was especially pronounced during the mid-eighties, for some reason. I could go off about it, but I've always been distrustful of television, so I may have watched less of it than I should have growing up. But I'm sure Jon could provide us with some more insight into the matter. I hope he does, in fact. 'Cause now I'm suddenly interested a-fresh in the topic, with nary a hand to guide me. Does anyone else remember their favorite cautionary-but-funny pedophilia episode(s)? Think about it, then post an item to your weblog about it. We'll set off our own little "meta-meme" cascade. It could be fun. Come on, kids, play along. Future generations must not be allowed to forget the valuable lessons extracted from the misadventures of sitcom children past. Um, yeah!

Just been thinkin'. Thought I'd share. 1:34 AM +

wednesday, may 24

Underachievers, undead. 11:56 PM +

Okay. I hate animal crackers in general, but man oh man do I love these. Maybe 'cause they're covered with lard, I dunno. Mmmm. 10:43 PM +

As "Brad Pitt" might say: fuckin' hilarious, dude. 9:29 PM +

Hmmm. Yuck. Sounds eerily like an American Psycho copycat crime. (In the not very good film, the protagonist dispatches a vagrant with a knife, and there's pretty much wall-to-wall axe-wielding mayhem besides that.) I dunno if there's any correlation, but it immediately snapped into my mind as I read the news item. [via mutability] 5:19 PM +

Apparently I'm totally alone in this opinion, but I happen to really dig the new Salon. Haha ... maybe it just looks better on my Mac? 3:34 PM +

During breakfast, I was discussing the whole being-done-with-college thing with my sister, and I found myself quoting the closing lines of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The context is obviously completely different, but a certain complementary sentiment is expressed:

"Tom's most well, now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is, and so there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it and ain't a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and civilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before." 12:07 PM +

I like this editorial by Newsweek's Anna Quindlen. It's got a fine, Joan Didion-esque quality, and it affords a common-sensical window on an interesting topic: the politics of a political marriage. Quindlen demonstrates a facility for capturing human episodes in all their ramification: "The biggest public-relations mistake Bill Clinton ever made was to wag his finger at the camera and call Monica Lewinsky 'that woman,' like a fire-and-brimstone parson with nothing in his pants but his wallet. When the facts were in, that scolding duplicitous gesture was a finger in the eye of every American." A graceful and economic assessment. 10:47 AM +

Being a college graduate means I have to modify my résumé cover letter. Out goes all the "just around the corner" boilerplate; in comes some perfunctory slop about life's new challenges. [Incomprehensible gagging/spitting/groaning noise.] 8:35 AM +

The Times' A.O. Scott elucidates the dichotomy between the two Mission: Impossible films rather marvelously here: "The difference in the two directors' styles may account for the weird discontinuity between the two 'Missions.' Mr. De Palma composes fugues of paranoia, while Mr. Woo prefers to present grand operas of passion and betrayal. He's a first-class action director, maybe the greatest choreographer of mayhem since Sam Peckinpah, but he doesn't care much for suspense. And so, once the basic conflict is established, the story plods along, alternating between preposterous -- in a bad way -- speeches and even more preposterous -- but in a good way -- shootouts and slugfests." [thanks, marc] 8:12 AM +

Oh internet / you are so slow / now that I am gone / (back home). / Oh internet / you're like an axe / being pushed into my face / ever so slow-ly. / Ouch. 12:01 AM +

tuesday, may 23

And that about does it. I am outta here. No more Penn. Fin. 11:31 AM +

Don't go kissing any seals, I guess. [via prol] 10:46 AM +

Gurgle. 10:36 AM +

I am so tired right now. I think I'm getting by on limbic functions. 10:06 AM +

Still. Packing. 8:27 AM +

I'm gonna miss my high-bandwidth connection. I'd investigate setting up DSL or cable internet access or whatever at home if I were there more often, but I'm not. And the idea of my mother "surfing the web" on her own is frankly horrifying. She'd get molested in a Hollywood minute. I think if there's an online analog to the term "jail-bait," computer-illiterate mothers with new-found, unsupervised net access are certainly it. Sitting ducks. Orphans in the Neverland Ranch. The mind reels. 5:38 AM +

This kid, I like. 4:16 AM +

Have I mentioned how glad I am to be rid of my dork-ass roommate? Now I have the run of the apartment (for what that's worth) and I am nekkid!

Okay, actually, I am quite the opposite. I'm wearing, like, three layers of clothing because it's fucking unseasonably freezing right now, and there's no heating because the dorm can only accommodate one vector of climate control at a time, and the dragons that warm us from the bowels of Middle Earth have apparently gone into hibernation or something.

No, actually, the reason there's no heating is that it's more or less unsafe (apparently) to switch back and forth between the two systems. The attendant shifting of the building's sundry conduits undermines its structural integrity. (You think I'm making this up, but I swear that's what they tell us ... anyway.) Which means they can only flip the switch (or stoke the dragons or whatever) a couple of times a year. Which all boils down to missed nudity because it's cold. Which is probably related to how we're destroying the environment -- but oh, how I do digress.

Yeah, still packing. Grumble. 4:12 AM +

Free-association at its best. 3:58 AM +

Public service announcement: underachievers has temporarily relocated to this address while a hosting snafu is sorted out. Check it. 3:25 AM +

Irony: I'm "pulling an all-nighter" (quotes mandatory considering the sloppy-cheesiness of the expression) in order to get out of college, whereas I certainly haven't pulled one otherwise -- academically speaking -- since ... probably high school. So-called "higher education" (also ridiculous, you'll please note) has been one unremitting snooze-fest. And I have ... nah, I'll quit while I'm ahead. Some job-recruiter may see this and start to question my "work ethic" (hint). 3:08 AM +

I love that this blog has the word palsy in the title. (Okay, it's official: I'm procrastinating and vaguely cracked out of my mind. Even though it's just the moving jitters talking, I feel like I scored some blow. I'm wired. Or maybe I shouldn't have eaten one of these. I dunno. It'll probably never happen again. I'm usually as animated as a marble bust of Aristotle. So soak it up while it lasts, folks.) 2:52 AM +

Jessica is beautiful when she rants. 2:46 AM +

This site is growing on me. I've seen it linked intermittently, and now it looks like I'm gonna have to start visiting it regularly. Noted. 2:33 AM +

I sat down on the floor in the middle of my room just now, and started laughing when I realized how crazy-ridiculous I am for packing literally at the last minute. If I had a helpful clone of myself, it still wouldn't help. We'd just end up running smack into one another ... pratfall upon pratfall. And somehow one of us would be wearing a chef's hat, and there would be flour everywhere. Because that would be funny, see. (I'm also sleep-deprived and a little dizzy-delirious -- with all the hyphenation, alliteration, et cetera, which that entails.) 2:24 AM +

This is totally gonna make me sound like Jon (i.e., a filthy pervert), but I am in love with the girl on the right (headphones). I know she's, like, not legal and stuff (yet), but hot damn! There she is again! Lo. Li. Ta. 2:05 AM +

I've been packing for hours. Shouldn't have put it off.

Just now, I was clearing out my closet, and I came across an empty shoebox. And when the residual new-shoe smell hit me, I suddenly thought about last fall.

I remember this one evening when a friend and I ducked into Urban Outfitters after dinner in one of the dining halls, and I bought these big-ass CATERPILLAR hiking-sneaker ... er, things.

Remembering it made me sorta nostalgic for a moment. School's over. No more dinner in the dining halls. I guess I'll miss it a little. It was sweet and innocent, huh? But there'll be new memories soon enough, I guess ... to add to the old.

There's a Marcel Proust quote I like. (I don't particularly care for Proust otherwise, mind you, but the quote is nice.)

"When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, ... still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection." 12:56 AM +

monday, may 22

Have you ever seen Outbreak? Do you remember the part at the very beginning where the army helicopter detonates the contaminated MASH unit? As the explosive descends from the chopper, Zen-like, almost somnolent in its slow motion (major props to director Wolfgang Petersen), the soldiers on the ground watch it with the gentlest waking realization that everything is about to change -- permanently. And then, for a graceful instant, as the charge expels its fateful cargo, reality seems to contract ... ever so briefly. The conflagration follows, scattering men and metal like match sticks and confetti.

That's what graduation feels like. Not necessarily logistically or dynamically (god bless the nerdy masses and their pedestrian parents); but in my reptile brain, where the aesthetics are purer, that's what I'm seeing. It's a karma thunderclap, and I'm pretty sure it's a big deal. I may have more to say about it later today. A year from now, I'll probably have a lot less to say about it. Life's good like that. 2:43 PM +

I like this a lot. It's propulsive. It has a vector. (I'm referring to the writing, not the design.) [via malaprop] 12:27 PM +

" ... my breasts aren't that big. I guess they just appear bigger on TV and everything." Riveting. 12:17 PM +

I don't mind if Rabi keeps writing longer posts, as long as they're so lovely. 3:21 AM +

This is just too funny. A friend writes: "Today was was a pretty shitty day. It rained in the middle of the Wharton graduation ceremonies. Donald Trump, Sr. attended. There was a lot of pointing and snickering, especially when Trump, Jr. was called onto the stage. Trump, Sr. came with his mother and his trophy girlfriend. Damn, she was hot. I think his contract with the escort service is 'look but don't touch,' though." Just an ordinary day at Penn, folks. Now you know why I'm itching to leave. 1:08 AM +

sunday, may 21

Nice. Microserfs-Lego-block aesthetics (perhaps a hint of IconTown?) with some chill ambient background sounds. It's got mood, baby. [via a.complex] 4:09 PM +

Score! Dinosaur is in the house ... and it holds the deed. Granted, I was underwhelmed by it when I caught it on Friday. It's very obviously aimed at young'uns, replete with sitcom tomfoolery galore and a plot any third-grader could scientifically refute. But it's eye candy (although some of the digital composites are curiously flat), and frankly, I'm happy to see almost any animated feature succeed (well ... as long as it's Disney or Pixar; DreamWorks, Don Bluth et al can bite my ass), because it increases the likelihood that I'll get to dabble in the medium someday. Just don't go in expecting the sophistication of a Pixar production. The Mouse House definitely had theme park re-purposing in mind when they slapped this baby together. The whole time I was watching it, I kept waiting for Walter Cronkite to interrupt with a lecture on oil shale or somesuch. Very EPCOT lite. But it's only eighty minutes long, and the children in the audience seemed to dig the silliness. 2:35 PM +

saturday, may 20

I still haven't started packing. 10:36 PM +

I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I saw this. It reads like a South Park scenario. The fourth and fifth paragraphs are priceless. [via awol] 8:40 PM +

Simple, yet strikingly beautiful. [via atesque] 8:04 PM +

Amen to that, my man. Corollary: people should pay me to do whatever the hell I want. Yeah, that's a reach, for sure, but I'm a polyvalent sorta fella, just bursting with chewy idea goodness. Plug me in, see what develops.

During a particularly desultory job interview recently, my inquisitor asked me what my perfect occupation would be. In return, I asked: "Practically perfect, or ideally perfect?" He implied the latter -- and without hesitation, I responded that, ideally, I'd love to have Tom Hanks' grown-up job in Big. You remember what I'm talking about, dontcha? I wanna sit in a mad-snazzy office all day and play with all the new toys before the other kids get to. Any takers? 7:57 PM +

Rite of passage: cleaning up your browser bookmarks and email addresses. Organize, organize -- delete, delete, delete. 7:33 PM +

My friend Amy and I just spent the last hour stomping around this great big cemetery just along the southern perimeter of Penn's campus. It's at least a hundred-fifty years old, and it's gorgeous. Not Arlington National Cemetery picnic-pretty, but flat-out creepy-pop-up-book Sleepy Hollow stunning -- gray and lush and vaguely forbidding. It's some sort of historical landmark, and I've spied it from on high variously for over three years. Today, two days before school is officially out once and for all, I finally felt motivated to trudge on over. It's actually deceptively close to civilization, although once you're caught up in its hilly terrain, winding paths, and semi-abandoned manses, it seems like its own world. A foliar canopy, dripping with moisture, dotted with sepulchers humble and fantastic. A stone garden of forgotten people, scented with unseen jasmine; silent. I didn't think to bring my digital camera with me. Pity. Perhaps one more visit before I abscond from this place for good. It deserves to be remembered. (The cemetery, that is. Certainly not Penn.) 5:38 PM +

Yawn. 2:26 PM +

Man oh man, how much I do love Japan. [via palesky] 1:44 PM +

In general, the poor slobs whose misfortune it is to write regular columns about Hollywood's machinations are a curiously repulsive lot. On the one hand, they have to "inform" their writing with a certain degree of gratuitous negativity (often in the form of cattiness), so that poorly-informed readers will mistake the recycled gossip for insightful scrutiny and keep coming back every few days. On the other hand, since they are more or less media bottom-feeders with tenuous access to their livelihood, they also have to kiss a scandalous amount of ass and perpetually soft-pedal their remarks, in order that they may "enjoy" continued entry into the overcrowded parties and movie screenings that they so often write up. Reel.com's Jeffrey Wells is one example of this, although his info-to-fluff ratio is a relatively respectable seventy-thirty, which makes him a comparatively benign offender, and not worthy of a lot of ire. (Give the poor bastard his due, after all.)

Then we have Mr. Showbiz's Charles Fleming. I can't stand him. Reading his stuff gives me this sinking Jack Harvey feeling. (For the uninitiated, Harvey is The Onion's often dead-on parody of the form.) Admittedly, the dude occasionally expels something worthwhile (a recent, intriguing item on the genesis of Battlefield Earth); but in general, his stuff is so air-filled and stylistically inept that I have to wonder what his real job is. Take his most recent column, for example. He refers to 1999's summer movie season. And I quote:

"The season kicked off with The Phantom Menace, and went on to include The Sixth Sense, Tarzan, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, The Mummy, American Pie, The Blair Witch Project, Runaway Bride, Notting Hill, Wild Wild West, The General's Daughter, and Big Daddy."

Um, dude? The Mummy came out BEFORE The Phantom Menace. Admittedly, this may be a fine and somewhat negligible distinction for the layperson, but if your livelihood is your supposed "insider" savvy, even a simple matter of botched chronology -- especially such an easily verified chronology -- is sloppy and inexcusable.

There's loads more to hoo-hah (such turns of phrase as "On the other hand, dinosaurs are forever" -- gag) and an archive of his semantic pratfalls, to boot. It all reads like it was cleared through Microsoft Word's grammar checker. Caveat lector, says I. 'Nuff said. 11:35 AM +

I've put up a new section, containing various prose fragments culled from my personal writings. It's similar to a series of blank verse fragments contained within the previous iteration of my site. I hope it doesn't make you vomit. Comments are welcome, as always. G'night. 2:31 AM +

friday, may 19

Mandarin, the cool bean with the kick-ass name, recently deep-sixed his snarky university hosting arrangement and now has his own domain: degenerated.org. Cool URL. Give it a look-see.

(I'm in a hyphenated-caffeinated sorta mood today, in case you haven't noticed. Can't explain it. Probably premature elation over my pending graduation.) 6:49 PM +

Henceforth, I'm only gonna post music encoded in RealAudio format. These whore-monger media search engines have totally been abusing the server today. Apparently my recent posting of a certain terrible Britney Spears excretion (hint: "Oops") in MP3 format has created a sort of cottage clearinghouse for wayward teeny-bopper click-throughs. I'm peeved. I've deleted the file in question, and I'll re-encode the other stuff when time permits. (Although, fortunately, no one really cares about the other stuff. The music I like is seldom what "the kids are listening to"; which is just as well, as it turns out. Sigh.) 1:48 PM +

Oh wow. A fourth-rate knock-off of a third-rate movie. I'm stoked. Coming soon to a pirated-video stand near ... Bangladesh. 12:55 AM +

thursday, may 18

Would it be impolitic of me to call her sassy? She gives good blog. 10:08 PM +

Well, this is somewhat sad, if not entirely unexpected. I always intended to order a pair of Tsubos from them sooner or later. I guess "later" turned to "never." As usual, they were done in by creeping elegance (incidentally, my favorite hobgoblin; might as well die pretty). [thanks, marc] 5:18 PM +

A Puccini sort of day. 1:08 PM +

It's one of those blustery-gorgeous, chalkdust-hazy, windy-perfect days, when the rustling of the leaves in the trees slams your cranium like the roar of the ocean, and the clouds are borne aloft with a convective grace that portends precipitation. A yellow-rain-slick, red-galoshes, Paddington Bear, Winnie the Pooh sort of day. 11:47 AM +

I want one. 10:21 AM +

This reminds me of that G.I. Joe episode where Cobra Commander uses a giant laser to carve a relief image of his face into the side of the moon. And it's just as stupid, if all the more frightening, because it's real. And then, of course, who can forget the time Pizza Hut considered projecting its logo onto the lunar surface? 2:07 AM +

wednesday, may 17

Woke up this morning. 12:18 PM +

tuesday, may 16

Know of any interesting job opportunities? Send 'em my way -- any and all takers. Looking for gainful employment is no fun. It's a cautionary experience. Every time I have an interview, I feel like taking a shower afterwards. Sigh. 7:36 PM +

Gone to New York for the day. Again. 8:13 AM +

Okay, this is pretty fucking exciting, if simultaneously gratuitous and patently ridiculous. I'm still uncertain of what to expect from a John Woo-directed Mission: Impossible. Admittedly, Brian De Palma's contribution to the franchise was a mess on its own terms, but it was such a beautiful mess -- sharp and shiny and terribly, terribly precise. Woo is somewhat more impassioned, and sometimes sloppy. I'll never forgive that master shot in Face/Off just after the speed-boat chase, where you can clearly make out Travolta's and Cage's stunt doubles (with different hairstyles and body types, no less). If you've seen the movie, you have to know what I'm talking about. Ugh. 2:41 AM +

According to John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists: "I've always said about faster, better, cheaper: Two out of three ain't bad. You can pick which of those you want to have, but you can't have all three." Case in point, and cause for hope. 2:16 AM +

monday, may 15

It's bullshit fun-time on campus, also known as Senior Week. And for some reason, today's mayhem reminds me of a passage from Conrad's Heart of Darkness (please bear with my pretentiousness):

"No, they did not bury me, though there is a period of time which I remember mistily, with a shuddering wonder, like a passage through some inconceivable world that had no hope in it and no desire. I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.... I admit my behavior was inexcusable, but then my temperature was seldom normal in these days. My dear aunt's endeavors to 'nurse up my strength' seemed altogether beside the mark. It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing." 6:55 PM +

I'm beginning to think every business is a cynical business. 2:37 PM +

What a slow day was yesterday. 12:10 PM +

sunday, may 14

With graduation about to cross over from nervous anticipation into recent history, I've been doing some thinking about the whole process. Four years is a chunk of change when you've only been blinking, breathing, et cetera, for twenty-two altogether. And with the job search in full swing, I've had the opportunity to observe, up close, what directions people head in a few years down the road. Prognosis: blah.

A lesson: too much education can ruin a weak mind. And I don't mean ruin as in "that cookie will ruin your appetite"; I mean ruin as in "your mutt ruined my bitch." You'll have to excuse my profanity, but I happen to think it's pretty profane how many people there are running around with what is obviously far too much information for their brains to accommodate. Just the other day it was my misfortune to witness an exchange between two corporate executives, a man and a woman, during which terms such as "post modern" and "bondage" were tossed about like so much silly string. And I realized that neither participant was particularly cognizant of what the other was talking about -- or what the conversation was about, for that matter. Intubated with a rolled-up liberal arts degree and then force-fed a steady diet of Vanity Fair articles and op-ed pieces in the Times (any Times will do, really) they had been reduced to schmoozing in some sort of upper-middlebrow pidgin, their thoughts encoded into politically-correct corporate-speak and socially-mediated referential nonsense. "Blah blah blah Monica Lewinsky. Blah blah blah Janet Reno. Blah blah blah SQUAWK!" My eyes glazed over; I could feel a volley of sneezes coming on.

It reminds me of this commercial for toilet paper I saw once on television when I was younger. This little kid was walking his toy elephants across a bridge made of bathroom tissue (to the strains of Henry Mancini's "Baby Elephant Walk"). The screen was bisected; to one side, the elephants marched across "that other brand" of toilet paper, and the bridge collapsed; the advertiser's brand, however, withstood the pachydermal advance. Correlation: some brains are super-absorbent and resilient; some brains collapse and end up covered in shit.

Pratfall of free-association: where am I heading with this? Let's just say I hope I always keep it real. Pink elephants, white elephants, whatever. I hope I always know what I'm talking about. I don't want to wake up one day, thirty years old, standing in an office, and not know why I'm smiling or what I'm saying. And if I even so much as turn and look in that direction, I hope one of my friends is there to slap me. Hard. 12:59 AM +

saturday, may 13

Some choice confabulation from Evan. 1:12 PM +

friday, may 12

One more quick thing before I head out: Ólafur Ágústsson of the University of Iceland offers a slightly less exclamatory translation: "I like highindustrial.com a lot and this is the reason I don't play golf." Cool. (I love how two completely different concepts -- I think? -- are encapsulated in one sentence.) Let's call this the definitive word on the matter. Case closed. We now return to our regularly scheduled English-language content. 10:53 AM +

I'm gonna be in Manhattan all day. Cheers and peace. Later. (Homework: keep those words a-comin'.) 10:00 AM +

Jo, the webmistress, comes to my aid (yet again) with a translation of the aforementioned Icelandic blurb: "In addition to that, I'm infatuated with highindustrial.com, and with this, even though I don't play golf." I'll consider myself complimented. 9:57 AM +

thursday, may 11

First Latin, now this: If anyone knows ... Icelandic, could you please translate this for me? (Probably a longshot, but worth a try nevertheless.) 8:02 PM +

I concur with Rabi -- anyone who thinks Filthy Philly is "the quintessential college town" has obviously been drinking too much tap water. If I had to describe Philadelphia in one word, it would be nonentity. I often feel as if the city manifests a certain identity crisis; or perhaps it lacks character altogether. Even more likely, many of its citizens just choose to look the other way because a lot of what's on display is so unsavory. Don't get me wrong: it's all right by degrees and with certain qualifications, but I honestly can't say I'll miss it once I'm gone. (This is a matter of personal preference. I'm not trying to step on any Philly-phile's toes.) 7:52 PM +

Oh, and regarding my earlier post about powerful words -- let's expand the scope to include any word that you ascribe some importance to, or that you find yourself favoring. I'll start: melancholy. A great word -- gentle but very precise, modest, honest. C'mon folks, phone it in: 877-487-9955Êext.655. It's F-R-E-E. 7:42 PM +

Today's been great. Tomorrow may be even better. Fingers crossed. 7:35 PM +

"I want to go to Penn so much that it is in my dreams every night." What a tool. [thanks, marc] 4:06 PM +

Haha, well said, and so true. I remember Old Spice being a case study in an introductory Marketing course I took freshman year. Someone in the class suggested that the manufacturer re-purpose it as a toilet bowl disinfectant. See also: Brüt. (And while we're at it, what's up with Drakaar, Cool Water, and Polo Sport? Frankly, they all give off that airplane lavatory smell. Which is a variant of the desperate college male smell.) 3:24 PM +

Much to my delight, it appears as though the carnage has begun. Battlefield Earth is one of those stinkers I've had on my radar since it was first announced several years ago. First of all, it's based on a "novel" by L. Ron Hubbard -- which would be akin to mounting a big-budget western built around a Louis L'Amour premise. Additionally, this is a vanity project for John Travolta, who is definitely the prize lapdog among overly-pampered stars. (I love how he's been doing the talk-show and junket rounds claiming that Battlefield is an old-fashioned populist entertainment -- pretty much what Kevin Costner said about The Postman.)

Then there's the horrible trailer, in which a particularly Shasta McNasty-looking Barry Pepper (dude, you are not ready for your close-up) squares off against Travolta and his platform-wearing cohorts (including Forest Whitaker, looking like he just walked in off a performance of Broadway's Cats). Mission to Mars already carpet-bombed any good will I may have had left for sci-fi in 2000. Hopefully, Battlefield Earth will elevate my critical sensibilities to a whole new stratum of contempt.

Incidentally, I'm not a connoisseur of crap in general. Cheap films (e.g., Plan 9 from Outer Space) are just tedious; however, a truly expensive, grand-slam cinematic debacle (Showgirls, any Sylvester Stallone vehicle) can serve as an excellent primer in the sometimes (often?) inverse relationship between excessive ego and deficient talent. It's also reassuring: hopefully, someday, someone will hand me large bags of cash with the mandate to mount the definitive hip-hop adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities. (Just Kidding. I wanna make good movies, not stinky-cheese ones.) 1:37 PM +

Gratuitous uReach exercise ('cause I don't know how to unregister and I never use the damn thing): Some words are incantatory. Ever notice? People use them as they would a shield or a sword -- or a curse, for that matter, and I'm not referring to expletives. An example from my own recent experience (overheard): fiancée -- hurled like a battering ram. If y'all can cull some more from your personal experience, I invite you to enunciate them clearly into my voicemail: 877-487-9955Êext.655. I'll check it later in the week. G'night. 12:35 AM +

This is sorta cute. 12:05 AM +

wednesday, may 10

Er ... I'm totally not seeing it. I guess my imagination is on the fritz. Or maybe the boys at mission control have been taking hits off a certain caterpillar's hookah. 10:14 PM +

Is anyone out there moderately proficient in Latin? I need to know how to say "rest in peace" for a little (very little) project I'm working on. The appropriate (and correct) translation would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. 9:29 PM +

Evan writes: "... [sometimes] my brain tells me to ... jump out of my chair and sprint out of class, then walk back in casually a few minutes later like everything is perfectly normal." Go for it, dude. I did that once in the seventh grade. More fun than you'd think. (And I should tell you about the twelfth grade sometime. Hehe.) 8:55 PM +

Miscellaneous music industry skullduggery. 7:25 PM +

Aviation chic. I dig it. 6:24 PM +

It's strange how the day can turn around completely in five minutes. Well five minutes after you've had a good long nap, experienced some nice weather, and received a possibly fortuitous phone call, anyway. 3:49 PM +

Does anyone else think the trailer for The Grinch is awfully reminiscent of Batman and Robin? I despise it when movies have that cheesy industrial-rave look (although, in this case, the filmmakers may have been aiming for fairy-tale gingerbread-house ... funny how it all bleeds together). Having said all that, Jim Carrey's exclamatory self-introduction at the end is pretty ... gRRReat. (Two cents: I still think that Jack Nicholson would have made a more interesting, if less animated, Grinch.) 12:27 PM +

Yep, that old expression about polishing a turd comes to mind when I look at this. Frankly, the rhetoric of the trailer is completely confused. They're attempting to graft a campy retro referentialism onto a nineties syndicated jiggle-vision aesthetic (e.g.). Since we're talking about variations on a theme, the dueling prerogatives cancel each other out -- sort of like how the two Ron Silvers collided catastrophically and were reduced to protoplasm at the end of 1994's Timecop.

In other words, the Charlie's Angels movie is shaping up to be snot. What were they thinking letting Drew Barrymore produce, anyway? She can barely speak in coherent sentences. I bet she has to learn all her lines phonetically. They probably have to coax her out of her trailer every morning with promises of oatmeal and hashish. [via ghost] 10:51 AM +

Yet another reason I'm glad I use a Mac. 10:02 AM +

This is a nice little blog at two o'clock in the morning. Check it out. And if you scroll all the way down and read what this fellow has to say about a "pa-tey," you may just have a warm 'n' fuzzy high-school flashback. Good stuff.

Nocturne, nocturne, nocturne -- g'night, folks. 2:34 AM +

So I stopped taking the antihistamines for my allergies. This'll probably backfire and I'll backpedal sometime tomorrow, but at least I haven't felt shitty and groggy today. I hate the way antihistamines more or less desiccate you and leave that scotch-tape feeling in your mouth. Yuck. I've totally been drinking too much water to compensate. We're talking hypertonic. Like, I think I was pissing lymph for a while ... although, admittedly, I dunno if that's possible -- but I totally could've bottled the stuff and sold it to alcoholics, it was so clear. Like, gin-clear (I love that expression). But now I'm feeling less ... pissy. Meds suck. Unless you're dying, I guess -- in which case, dying sucks. Yeah. Anyone wanna disagree with me on that? 2:20 AM +

I Dreamed of Africa has already been eviscerated by critics, but The Onion's Keith Phipps gets first prize for best slug line: "In the opening segment of I Dreamed of Africa, Kim Basinger breaks her leg. The rest of the film is so dull, you can almost hear the bone heal." I haven't seen the film, and I don't intend to, either, but I'll take his word for it. Well said. 12:49 AM +

tuesday, may 9

It's been a long, strange school year. And it's almost over. 10:55 PM +

Blah blah blah blue. 7:32 PM +

Brian writes: "lately I have been obsessed with Constructivist artwork." Cool. A similar predisposition was the wellspring of highindustrial, although certain cyberpunk and neo-Victorian sensibilities have since prevailed. 3:22 PM +

I've been having some strange dreams lately. Chalk it up to sleep-deprivation and allergy meds. As usual, they're difficult to recall upon waking. Have you ever looked at a light bulb a split second after you've cut off its electricity? Caught the inverse phantom bloom as its temperature contracts from orange to brown to black, the hint of the filament on your retina? That's my mnemonic gestalt these days.

Last night, I dreamt about rooftops. Sort of like the opening sequence from Hitchcock's Vertigo -- similar color values and light levels. And I was being chased by this little robot that I have trouble picturing now. It was a quadruped, no discernable head or tail. Pistons, joints, telescoping appendages -- small, quick, deft, almost a whirligig, tumbling toward me purposefully, menacingly.

That's pretty much it. The robotic aspect of it reminds me of an earlier dream. Dunno what it means, if anything. This article may have planted the seed. 2:56 PM +

Stupid Blogger™ (note the puerile adjective placement) finally stopped fucking with my archives. Backlog with abandon. Huzzah. 11:18 AM +

monday, may 8

A 300,000 volt stungun. Oh man, why does that excite me? (Perfect target, too.) [via psionic] 5:02 PM +

A friend writes: "If you thought that the PlayStation 2 can push a decent amount of polys, check out this upcoming PC game called Heavy Metal. That's the future of gaming ... ultraviolence, lots of ummmm ... polys, targeting the average 16 year old male. God bless America." Amen to that, bro. 4:43 PM +

The PlayStation 2's superior polygon count is finally demonstrated to my satisfaction. Just look at those ... er, cheekbones. [thanks, marc] 4:52 AM +

When I look at this, I'm reminded of Toulouse-Lautrec, albeit faintly and through various temporal and political distortions. 2:34 AM +

Ever notice how email has this way of piling up, and how you mentally tag certain messages for a "meaningful" response ... and then you let them sink to the bottom of your inbox until such a time as they have more or less expired (lost their immediacy or topicality) ... and then you sort of brush it off, and if the person who wrote you is persistent (or generously forgetful) they'll write you again? And this time maybe they'll get a quick (and slightly guilty?) promise to write more soon. As in, sooner or later. As in, probably later. Ever notice?

Lather, rinse, repeat. 1:04 AM +

It's been one of those blah skank sputter sneeze indoor days. Work to do, work to do. Allergies. Drip. Pop a pill for it, get hopped up, dry mouth, dry mouth. Too much artificial light. What color is eggshell again, by the way? Is it anything like putty? Fuck. 12:18 AM +

sunday, may 7

I attended a screening of Up at the Villa last night, which really should have been called Down in the Dumps, because that's the feeling it gave me in the pit of my stomach. It's the sort of stilted, affected British comedy of manners where tea and sandwiches are never far from hand, and you keep waiting for Hercule Poirot to burst in and declare, "It's not a cookie, madame. It's fruit and cake."

Kristin Scott Thomas, hell-bent on erasing any goodwill left over from her English Patient performance, is the female lead in this soggy production. She's also the only woman in the film who isn't geriatric, which means that every "bloke" has designs on her. ("You're a perfect specimen of the genus peach," whispers one swell dandy.) Unfortunately, the audience can't commiserate. Thomas resembles nothing so much as Saturday Night Live comedian Chris Kattan doing his Kerri Strug impression -- all grimaces and bugged-out eyes. Not a babe.

Other headliners in the cast include Sean Penn (smoking like his life depends on it), Derek Jacobi (or was it Judi Dench in male drag?) and Anne Bancroft (looking like one of those scary wooden puppets from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood of Make-Believe).

About ten minutes into the movie, my friends and I started playing this game where we pretended that Thomas' part was being played by Madonna, and that every old dude was Leslie Nielsen (an appropriate choice, considering the level of unintentional parody on display). It definitely made for a more entertaining film. I think every bad movie should feature Leslie Nielsen and Madonna ... and maybe that little cartoon monkey from Lost in Space.

As it stands, Up at the Villa is prosaically awful -- so devoid of ambition that it's not even a disaster. More of a pratfall, a mild bruise. Quick to fade ... to black. 5:35 PM +

Pixar rocks. 3:12 PM +

I'm not gonna be able to sleep tonight, because now this image is lodged in my brain: "There are three Howdy Doody puppets ensconced in a bank vault in Rhode Island, resting comfortably."

Three? Resting comfortably ... as in, alive, soon to awaken, ready to visit scary clackety-mouthed puppet havoc upon the world? I'm afraid. 11:57 AM +

saturday, may 6

Yikes. So it's true. Definitely conjures some weird-ass mental pictures (of ... well, weird ass-spanking). [thanks, will] 8:43 PM +

This is lovely. An inspiration. [via wockerjabby] 4:39 PM +

Recently acquired taste. The "Chocolate Roasted Peanut" bar tastes like a cardboard toilet-paper roll coated with envelope glue, but the "Chocolate Fudge" bar actually approaches grade-z foodstuff quality (e.g.) ... almost. 4:15 PM +

If you're wondering when I'm gonna get my ass cracking on all those sub-pages: June. Promise. I'll be home for a month before flying to Europe for a goof-off session.

In other news: I have some job interviews in New York later this week. (Yeah, no love from the Left Coast, apparently ... but I don't like it there anyway.) Hopefully that particular arrear will no longer be a frontal-lobe concern thenceforth. Fingers crossed. 12:01 PM +

Gladiator is terrific. The action sequences are electrified concertina wire, the special effects are seamless (Rome resurrected -- teeming, opalescent), and the performances are nuanced and consummate across the board. Even director Ridley Scott's typically soporific emotional lyricism is tolerable in its sparing application. This is the movie Braveheart should have been. May its coffers overflow.

Connie Nielsen deserves a special shout-out. She's smart, sexy, and in many ways the embodiment of common sense and morality in the story. I hope this film finally makes her a star. (You may remember her knockout turn as Satan's daughter in The Devil's Advocate, or her similarly sexy, if unrecognizable, participation in the otherwise completely forgettable Mission to Mars). 2:06 AM +

friday, may 5

"Brits love tits: Plastic surgery procedures have increased 50 percent in the past five years." Now if they'd only do something about their teeth. [thanks, marc] 3:11 AM +

So it looks like the long-gestating Alien(s) Vs. Predator project is finally moving forward -- and with James Cameron producing, no less. If this is true, it bodes well, since Cameron helmed the second Alien movie, which happens to be one of my all-time favorite films, period.

Directing duties this time will supposedly be handled by Stephen Norrington (according to Harry Knowles' possibly cholesterol-addled speculation, anyway). Norrington, you may recall, directed 1998's Blade -- which admittedly is a pretty shitty film, but I think that has everything to do with the almost nonexistent script. On a technical level, it's fairly well-produced, atmospheric (remember that great blood-shower vampire club scene?), and ... well, stylish. Re-imagining vampires as high-rolling Armani-clad fashion burn-outs ... not that far-fetched.

Incidentally, this bodes well for another reason. Presumably, the aforementioned production won't involve Sigourney Weaver -- which is great, because I have my own idea for another Alien movie which does, and I don't necessarily want to have my thunder (such as it is) usurped before I get a chance to move forward with it. (Of course, by the time I have enough clout to produce it, Sigourney will probably look like Gloria Stuart -- but I'm sure we'll be able to finesse it in post-production.) 1:26 AM +

thursday, may 4

Ryan tells a tall tale 'bout a purdy lady and a ... varmint, I reckon? Very Larry McMurty. Purdy picture, too. 9:53 PM +

They were out of Cinn-A-Burst at the drugstore. Most unfortunate. Big Red is flagrantly inferior. Life's full of compromises. 9:23 PM +

It's beginning to feel like summer. 7:37 PM +

Great song. It has this ominously festive, "the night is gonna end badly" sorta feel. Play it loud. (Great album, too. Terrible film, however.) 2:35 PM +

The sidebar links were a trifle corrupt and outdated, so I've redressed that. And made them gray, because that's how I originally intended for them to look. I also employed a somewhat idiosyncratic labeling scheme (aesthetic prerogative), so if you're wondering where your link is -- assuming it's there -- just run a search through the source for your url. 1:52 PM +

Everything but the ... sink. Oops, too late. 2:27 AM +

Out of the mouths of babes. 2:27 AM +

This is cool. I found it via underachievers. I'd love to dabble in animation someday ... although I'd leave the math (in my world, anything that's beyond my immediate aptitude is classified as math; juggling is math; fire-swallowing is math; calculus is math) to people more ... numerically inclined than I. But I could be a director. Sort of rally the troops, maybe destroy a few paradigms along the way, tear into reality with a new vector.

A somewhat ineffable, latent desire presently. My most pressing concern is still finding a humdrum utilitarian job so I can fuel my dreams with lumps of coal. Salaried employ is the religion of the post-modern era. Stock tickers are the new rosary. Et cetera. 1:58 AM +

wednesday, may 3

Recently rediscovered pleasure: sleeping on my stomach. As I've grown older, it seems, I've taken to sleeping almost exclusively on my back; and while this is no doubt a boon for the firmament and surely builds character, nothing beats flopping over like a bag of bones and sort of mushing my face into the pillow with little regard for my jawline. (They made us watch this video in the sixth grade once where some orthodontist explained why it's bad to sleep on your face ... overbites and such.) I've noticed that most "grown-ups" tend to sleep on their backs (well, I used to notice such things -- and take them for granted -- when I was a little kid; I guess I'm too self-involved now). Small children, consisting mostly of cartilage (okay, not quite; but let's just say they do), seem to lack this nocturnal poise -- and more power to 'em. 8:41 AM +

Okay, one more thing before I go to sleep. Brian commented favorably on the design of this site, and I agree. Definitely good eye-feel. And interesting taste in literature too. Props. 4:44 AM +

Never mind -- I figured it out all by myself. Phew. No more talk of permanent links -- not ever. They're implemented, they work, knock yourselves out. 'Nuff said. G'night. 4:37 AM +

Oh wait -- ya know what? I don't think I did the permanent link thing right. There are supposed to be embedded anchors in all the entries now, right? Where are mine? Sigh. Help. 2:19 AM +

Speaking of Jonathan, I have to say I concur with his healthily positive outlook on Internook. I fear the day when we stop being able to laugh at ourselves -- because that's the day the weblogging "community" becomes a cult. Let's not take ourselves too seriously, okay? This is supposed to be fun. 2:14 AM +

With some trepidation, and Jo's chivalrous intervention, permanent links are now enabled. (Thanks also to Jonathan and Will for their thoughtful offers of assistance.) 2:09 AM +

Okay, inappropriately or not, I laughed when I read this. I mean, "A school bus designed to look like the space shuttle ... painted black and white and nicknamed Apollo Condor..."? That's so ghetto (and I mean that colloquially, not in a demographically disparaging way). 1:35 AM +

tuesday, may 2

This site is gorgeous. [via metafilter] 10:58 PM +

I love this thread. 10:41 PM +

PRETTY, pretty please? 9:29 PM +

In my never-ending quest for user-friendliness, I've been trying to implement permanent links, but Dreamweaver keeps choking on the additional tags. (Yeah, I use Dreamweaver. My freakin' WYSIWYG bad. Got a problem wid dat?) Anyone care to help me? Pretty please? 3:04 PM +

This film is such flaccid crap -- so why the fuck are so many nimrod plebes giving it props? What, are they lacing the popcorn with estrogen now? 9:39 AM +

Barf. 9:16 AM +

"At midnight last night, the Unites States disabled its intentional degradation of GPS signals available to the public. Known as Selective Availability (SA), the degradation feature was put in place to protect US military and government interests, but with changing times President Clinton and his cabinet 'realized that worldwide transportation safety, scientific, and commercial interests could best be served by discontinuation of SA.' This means that civilian users of GPS will be able to pinpoint locations up to ten times more accurately than they had previously been able to." [via macnn] 9:15 AM +

This has a "Being John Malkovich" sorta vibe. I like. [via malapropism] 2:11 AM +

Attention, shoppers... 12:55 AM +

My sister writes: "I don't recall any mention of this from your Spain jaunt. No unfortunate speed bumps, I take it?" 12:19 AM +

Today's mega-dose of super-scariness. 12:09 AM +

monday, may 1

Of red tape and measuring weights. 10:00 PM +

"My wealth couldn't buy you any Macromedia talent, homeslice." A great rant ("Ummmmmm....") from Justin. 7:15 PM +

This American Red Cross page is so ... even-tempered. It gives me these strange snuggly mommy-talk sensations. Warm fuzzies, even. [via ooine] 3:38 PM +

I caught Frequency last night, and surprisingly enough (wretched trailer to the contrary), I did not hate it. In fact, I sorta liked it. Admittedly, the film's physics -- quantum, meta, and otherwise -- are so tremulous as to collapse under even the most perfunctory scrutiny; but logic be damned, it gives the audience some great kicks. In a way, it operates like a dumbed-down variant of The Iron Giant -- i.e., it serves as a vehicle for every little boy's wish fulfillment.

The plot isn't so much a narrative arch as it is a series of right angles, which the New York Times' Stephen Holden characterizes thus (and with some uncharacteristic eloquence): "Paced at a gallop, these overlapping adventures tap into our wildest fantasies of time travel, of communing with dead loved ones, of reliving our lives knowing what we know now and of blood ties so deep and true and lasting they make all-American households like the Cleavers's look like vipers' nests." Precisely.

Dennis Quaid and Jim Caviezel are typically awesome (listen to me -- using superlatives to describe a B-movie ... I'm a bleeding heart), and Elizabeth Mitchell, whom I've never seen in anything before, is a certified hottie -- turning in a gently, credibly sexy performance in what could have been an overly idealized saint-mother-dishrag role. It's a fun, silly movie. Go see it. 'Nuff said. 9:16 AM +

This is shit-ass scary. 1:26 AM +