once in awhile, anthony lane still hits it. on johnny depp in sweeny todd:

“His singing gives off the Cockney yowl of someone who has listened to too much early Bowie, and his ivory-pale face is crowned by a stiff black mane with a white blaze in it. If you had sat Susan Sontag down and broken the news that not everyone in New York reads Hegel, you would have got the same effect.”

gabe. we’re glad to have you back.

alert reader peter amidon alerted me to this: pat paulson

We’re nearing the 1 year anniversary of saxophonist michael brecker’s death. january 14. everybody listen to a michael brecker song today!

merry jewish christmas speakpeppery! thanks to everyone for the ongoing blogging efforts; i’ve been on hiatus. i’ve been very, very focussed on sentences of the form “if it had been the case that A, then it would have been the case that B”. i couldn’t do anything else. here is a great photo our friend ana nersessian took, “here is some curatorial debris from the museum of appalachia.”

hi thomas in vietnam!

merry christmas friends. happy birthday big baby jesus.

r.i.p. dirt mcgirt.

I am in my grandparents living room in western massachusetts. i’m listening to “8 diagrams.” it’s a kind of amazing act of restraint and clarity of focus on the rza’s part to have no posthumous appearance by odb on the record. there’s some really beautiful stuff on this record - not as experimental as enter the wu-tang, but also kind of unlike anything else that’s out there, moody and quiet melodic beats and low-key rapping.

studs terkel: what about… this would also make the other actors, too, be more imaginative, challenge them, too. They would do something…

buster keaton: Oh, yes, oh yes. We want to. Another thing we didn’t do in those days that they do today is that we didn’t rehearse a scene to perfection. we didn’t want that because it was mechanical then. We’d much rather… for any of our big rough-house scenes where there is a lot of falls and people hitting each other, we never rehearsed those. We only just sat down and talked about it, and, says, now he drops that chair, you come through that door and come through fast, and this person here sees you come and throws up their hands and from the center door you can see it. Now you come through and just about hit him. If you miss him, get her.

Now that’s the way we laid those scenes out, because when we did those rough-house cenes, if you had to do it the second time, invariably somebody skinned up an elbow or bumped a knee or something like that, and now they will shy away from it the next take or they will favor it. See, you seldom got a scene like that as good as the second time.

i did a little interview thingy/dreamtelling for the captain obvious blog

The BBC ran an article on the NHS’s health website allowing its viewers to vote on whether the genitals should be obscured on their anatomy figures. One solution being considered: a “drag-and-drop fig leaf.”

I had a massage this afternoon of a variety that any connoisseur (Dawn?) would recognize: skilled, professional, but entirely rote, unresponsive to the knotty particulars of my body. It was tangibly the product of a mental checklist, and how strange to think that this same woman has kneaded and prodded and poked through that same checklist on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different bodies. Imagine performing sex the same way, as an undeviating, non-reactive routine. Perhaps this hypothetical lover would have just one perfect (hypothetical) partner. Perhaps, somewhere in the world, there is a body that is perfectly suited to the massage I received this afternoon.

In the Anchorage airport, the 2AM desolation made surreal by the presence of 400 or so Chinese people en-route to Taipei, a cabinet labeled “These Items Are All Now Illegal” includes a handbag made of a dwarf crocodile (Wikipedia: ”The smallest extant crocodile.”), cleverly and rather gruesomely incorporating the head and all four feet.

In the Taipei airport a massive, brightly colored billboard cheerfully announces: “Hey bloggers! Post only authorized images, music, videos or writings on your blog or you could be blogging your way into court!”

In the Hanoi airport a particularly dazed set of parents stagger off a plane from Bombay and don’t notice my presence until a good 30 seconds after I, directly in their line of sight, have been jumping up and down, hooting, and generally making a spectacle of myself. They later claim that it was the pink airplane pillow around my neck that threw them off.

In the taxi into Hanoi, mom eases us into this new cultural experience with some Shakespeare in Afrikaans:
“Hamlet, ek is jou papa se spoekie!”
and
“Trek op jou broekies en voertsek.”

CAN I PACK CHAMPAGNE ON THE AIRPLANE???

Like, check it in my luggage?

Gray wants me to bring a couple bottles to Colombia. Apparently it’s absurdly expensive down there, along with contact lens solution, Aveda hair products, and “first aid supplies”.

I’m pretty ignorant about most things having to do with the physical world we live in. Will the change in pressure and what have you cause the cork to pop in my luggage, creating a loud sound that you can hear in the cockpit, and the pilots will think it’s a bomb that was detonated, and then we have to ground the plane as an emergency in Guantanamo Bay??

I came across this short film directed by Jessica Yu, who’s directed episodes of West Wing, and a documentary on Henry Darger, and went to Yale, and is married to Mark Salzman, who starred in Iron and Silk, which we had to watch in tenth grade for Asian History. Sour Death Balls is basically a short film that documents various humans trying to keep a really sour kind of candy in their mouths.



Here’s a link to the video on YouTube.

the wfmu blog is a gift from god. where else can you hear brian wilson’s 1989 rap single, “smart girls”?