memepunk

8/12/08 12:16 pm - Smoke and mirrors

Dear Anonymous Chinese Politburo Member,

Très lame, dude. Is a "flawless image" really flawless if it's fundamentally dishonest? What a shame you aren't more interested in impressing the world with honesty and open-mindedness than with stringent anime-esque standards of attractiveness for children under ten.

Here's a thought: maybe you could digitally alter the background of any shot during the rest of the Games in which smog appears. I know this poses a far greater technical challenge than the fireworks thing or your sham "singer" of "Hymn to the Motherland," but I'm sure you're up to it.

P.S. Sorry for playing the air quality card. I know it's a too-easy trump, but, really, you drove me to it.

Dear Yang Peiyi,

Well done! Keep up the singing; you've got a beautiful voice. Also, I think you're prettier than Lin Miaoke, and your teeth are perfectly fine.

7/17/08 07:30 pm - I should be spanked for not mentioning this sooner...

...but, if you are not listening to Ratatat, dude, you are missing out. They have been making my ears and brain happy for a year and a half or so. Mother of god, they are good. Just go buy all their CDs right now. And come see them at the Fillmore with me in September.

12/14/07 10:34 pm

11/13/07 09:41 am - I pick up my guitar and play

The AMPTP wants everyone to know that the reason they can't pay WGA writers for Internet downloads is because they haven't figured out how to make money from it yet, let alone how much money they can make from it someday, if ever. Can you hear the sad violins? I can.

But wait...

Oopsie. MAJOR FAIL.

11/1/07 01:08 pm - "You owe me five farthings," say the bells of St. Martin's


               INT. NEGOTIATING CHAMBER - NIGHT

                                     WGA
                         We want more apples and oranges.

                                     AMPTP
                         You can keep the apples we gave you
                         back in the Eighties, but you can't
                         have oranges.

                                     WGA
                         All right, forget the more apples
                         thing.  But we need those oranges,
                         man.  You're killing us here.

                                     AMPTP
                         For simplicity's sake, or maybe
                         just because we're capricious and
                         trying to piss you off, we're going
                         to refer to all fruit as "apples"
                         from now on.

                                     WGA
                         What?

                                     AMPTP
                         Hey, news media!  Get this--these
                         guys are still demanding more
                         apples!  Can you believe it?

                                     WGA
                         Are you on crack?

                                     VARIETY
                         Stop the presses!

                                     FEDERAL MEDIATOR
                         Are we done here, guys?  It's late. 
                         And I really need to pee.

                                     WGA
                         Corporate greedheads!

                                     AMPTP
                         Self-important parasites!

                                     FEDERAL MEDIATOR
                         Do we want to meet again tomorrow? 
                         No?  How about Friday?  No?

                                     WGA
                         We'll be at the LA Convention
                         Center if you come to your senses.

                                     AMPTP
                         Don't hold your collective breath! 
                         Hey, news media!  It's all these
                         guys' fault!  They're the ones
                         threatening to strike, not us!  Our
                         hands are tied here--everyone can
                         see that, right?  Right??

                                     VARIETY
                         Stop the presses!

9/7/07 05:48 pm - Swaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!

Ahem. If you haven't seen Hot Fuzz (by the writing-directing team that brought you Shaun of the Dead), you really should. This goes double for

agentplaid,

dr_strych9, and

nancy73.

6/28/07 10:19 am - Don't let me down

Transcriptage from Larry King's interview with Paris Hilton, which evidently happened last night (what was I doing? Reading The Pilgrim's Progress by the light of an oil lamp?):

KING: Taken drugs?
HILTON: No.
KING: Never taken drugs?
HILTON: No.

Oh, Paris, how could you let us down like that? When, obvy, you could have said something like:

KING: Never taken drugs?
HILTON: No, I always paid for them.

Now pull yourself together, swallow your vitamins, and get back on the It Girl horse. We've been relying on Cory Kennedy since you went away, and, let me tell you, she is no substitute.

6/18/07 03:52 pm - Little pink high-rises for you and me

I don't think I could love Julian Schnabel any more if you paid me to. The world needs more shocking-pink urban housing options! And the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation needs to lighten the fuck up. :)

6/12/07 04:02 pm - Seen on a sidewalk in the Financial District:

5/11/07 11:51 pm - Life imitates...

So we watched the movie Pecker tonight. It's a fun film, probably the least scatological of John Waters' oeuvre. I recommend it. Afterwards, I started putting away the stuff we'd picked up at Target this afternoon, when we went out to rent the movie.

I was putting away the things that go in the bathroom--saline solution, fluoride rinse, shampoo--and

earthlien came to the door just as I pulled out a container of deoderant that I thought he had picked up in the store. I noticed the top was off and searched the bag for it. It wasn't there, so I took the cap off his current deoderant to see if it would fit the new container. Two things occurred to me: his old container was nearly new, not even close to running out, and the new one was a different kind, much more perfumey than the stuff he ordinarily uses.

Right around then,

earthlien said, "What are you doing? I didn't buy that."

I said, "But it was in our cart at the store."

He said, "I thought it was something you were buying." He picked up the deoderant and looked it over. "Look," he said, "it's broken." The little wheely thing at the bottom that you wind the deoderant up with was broken off.

"I wonder if whoever put it in our cart broke it and took the cap off knowing that would mean we couldn't return it," I said. I'm so suspicious. But, really, if you're going to prank someone out of a dollar ninety-seven in the Health & Beauty section, you know, you've got to go the whole hog.

By this time we were laughing nearly hysterically. Let me explain.

In Pecker, there's a sequence in which two of the main characters, teenaged boys, go into a supermarket and engage in what they call "shopping for others." They stealthily insert unusual or inappropriate items (liver for a vegetarian hippie dude, Preparation H for a studly body-builder, etc.) into the carts of everyone in the store and then watch the to-do when everyone gets up to the register.

We had never seen Pecker before tonight. If "shopping for others" is some cultural phenomenon that exists anywhere outside the skull of John Waters, we were not aware of it. And nothing of this sort has ever happened to us in Target--or anywhere else, for that matter--before.

I love this planet. :)

5/9/07 03:59 pm - For pals in the Bay area...

Especially those who ride me when I don't remind them that there's some cool film or fest coming up: the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto is currently running a "Katharine Hepburn Centennial Celebration." You can view the schedule here.

I dig Katharine Hepburn, don't you? She wore the pants.

4/11/07 06:30 pm - Jokers to the right.

The problem for me with keeping a written journal (aside from the fact that the only one I've ever been able to keep for more than a week without getting poke-in-the-eye bored with myself was a private work log) is that, when you write all day, it's kind of a busman's holiday. I've been trying to write something about Cinequest, which was really fun and interesting and which I want to remember in detail in years to come, for a month now, and I just keep spinning my wheels on it. Maybe that's because it's kind of a long entry, and anything over a few paragraphs I tend to compulsively rewrite many, many times before making it available to anyone but myself. Which is sort of contrary to the whole intent of keeping a journal, isn't it? Journals aren't supposed to be polished, perfect gems of circumspection and urbane repartee. They're supposed to be memories. Of...you know, stuff.

So here's a bit of stuff: I had an epiphany in the shower the other morning. (All my epiphanies happen in the bath; if I stayed in there long enough, I'm convinced I'd attain nirvana, but I always get hungry before it happens.) Lost, the TV show, is Reservoir Dogs. To wit: bunch of jewelry-store robbers/random people arrive at a deserted warehouse/island, we flash back to episodes of their earlier lives that resulted in them arriving at the warehouse/island, things get desperate, someone gets tortured, no one is quite who they seem to be, people from outside the group pose a serious threat, the end. Whether Lost will culminate in a standoff at gunpoint after which every single character buys the farm remains to be seen, but I'm betting it won't. Then again, I haven't watched any of the most recent season, so I could be wrong.

3/23/07 10:59 pm - Tiny DJ set for an audience of one

We had watched too much Moulin Rouge and needed to get Nic and Ewen's rendition of Elton John out of our heads, so this is what I played for

earthlien. I cheated a little bit; three of these are from the same CD.

"Whip It" - Collide
"Heroes" - Blondie
"Are Friends Electric?" - Information Society
"Suffragette City" - Corpus Delicti
"Rock 'n' Roll (Ultimate Glitter Version)" - Executive Slacks
"Legs" - Art of Noise
"Turn It On" - Ladytron
"Hide and Seek" - Imogen Heap

What does it say about me that I own so many remakes of songs? What does it say about ART and LIFE and BAZ LUHRMANN and all that stuff?

I'm going to bed. Wake me up when you figure it out.

3/7/07 06:01 pm - Looking for the joke with a microscope.

I'll never make it as a writer.

I know this because, tonight, I am ditching a fancy, exclusive film festival VIP party at a swank-ass club with (very important point here) a complimentary martini bar in order to stay home and work. This is a serious offense. Hemingway and Fitzgerald would take turns beating me senseless while HST wandered in and out, muttering feverishly about golf shoes and discharging small arms in the general direction of my keyboard. Emily Dickenson, on the other hand, would no doubt praise me seven ways from Sunday, but that's only because she'd be so overjoyed to have someone to stay in and have pillow fights and talk about boys (girls?) with her. Real writers do not turn down free booze.

I am also a little bit regretful about missing out on possible networking opportunities, but, as I recall from last year's round of these types of parties, they actually suck for networking. The DJs are coked-up, Wednesday-night house bunnies who've been deaf since the age of sixteen and who don't realize that, hey, this is one of those dos where people might actually want to talk to each other. And, oh, by the way, this is San Jose, not Park City; pumping out more decibels here does not substantially increase the chances of Paris and Lindsay staggering in and executing an impromptu striptease on the bar while Bai Ling hoses them down with Cristal. These are indie filmmakers. We want to geek out about video codecs and quote Seijun Suzuki and Kaveh Zahedi at each other and speculate about what Lucas's career might have been like if he'd gone on making THX-1138s instead of Star Wars. We want to work the room for distribution deals, not dance partners. Don't make us scream our throats raw into each other's ears from a distance of two centimeters before resorting to cocktail-napkin semaphore. That's no way to begin a fruitful professional relationship.

Now, part of me thinks all this whinging is just a way of rationalizing my cowardly inclination to avoid networking at all costs, but it really is true. Honest. And the thing I'm working on is this close to being overdue, so I really do need to finish it and turn it in ASAP. Because there are things coming up over the next few days that I shouldn't let myself ~~avoid~~ ~~wimp out of~~ miss.

None of them involve free cocktails.

3/2/07 11:34 am - CQ17 Day 1

Once again this year, Cinequest has given me two all-you-can eat passes to their giant movie buffet. And I am so very, very hungry! I'm not sure how I warranted this piece of extreme generosity; maybe it's something they do for all their previous award winners. In any case, if anyone needs me between now and March 12, I'll be in one of several movie theatres in San Jose.

Yesterday, I saw a really good comedy called saippuaprinssi (The Prince of Soap). I've loved every Finnish film I've watched, but this is the first one I've seen that didn't take place mainly at night, during the coldest, dreariest part of winter, and sustain a deeply tragic tone throughout. There are probably a lot of fine Finnish comedies; maybe they just don't make it into American film festivals as much as they should. Seeing this one makes me want to find more.

I also watched the Mexican shorts program. It was great, maybe even better than last year's. In fact, out of ten or so short films, only one was really not that interesting. It had good production values, but it was pretty melodramatic, both in writing and in visual style, and I could see the twist ending coming a mile away. The best one, I thought, was about an old woman's relationship with her cow, a description which does it absolutely no justice. It's a gem. Oh, and elderly people cursing? Always gets a big laugh, in any language. Ayup.

Finally, there was We Are the Strange, which is marvellously trippy and such good eye candy that I sometimes found myself not attending to the story because I was too busy just looking at it. A little Miyazaki, a little Brothers Quay, a little Svankmajer, a tiny dash of Tetsuo, Iron Man and a whole lotta video game. And a nice long Q&A with the filmmaker afterwards, which made me want to drop everything and dive into this stop-motion animation project I've been thinking about for the last year or so.

Coming up later today: J.J. Abrams talks about "Revolutionizing Content for Audiences." And Christine Vachon gets the Maverick Spirit Award.

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