dpnash

I have a birthday this month. And there's a "0" on the end of this one.

Here, if you care to console me by buying me something shiny...

(this concludes one of my two yearly shameless pleas for material displays of affection.)

:)

(Safe for work viewing, no actual nudity.)

So the Chicago Film Festival starts next week. Thought I'd post here some of the films I think I'm going to see, in case any local friends might be interested in joining....

"Red Cliff" - new martial arts epic from John Woo, based on a classic Chinese story "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms." We're getting a severely truncated version of the film - in China this film was four hours, in two parts - for us Westerners it's been chopped down to just over two hours, but reports are that it's still pretty good. John Woo himself will be at the screening on Friday 10/9, 7:30pm

"Ricky" - an odd looking film from French director Francois Ozon, who did one of my recent favorites, "8 Women." This is about a single mother who's new baby starts growing wings!

"Give Me Your Hand" - Twin brothers, one gay one straight, hitchhiking across Spain to the funeral of their estranged mother.

"The Girl on the Train" - famous French director Andre Techine, and starring Catherine Deneuvue. A "sexy, complex drama about deception and its repercussions."

"An Education" - "In the post-war, pre-Beatles London suburbs, a bright schoolgirl (Carey Mulligan) is torn between studying for a place at Oxford and the more exciting alternative offered to her by a charismatic older man (Peter Sarsgaard)."

"Eyes Wide Open" - a tale of gay love in Israel's Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.

"Spy(ies)" - (the title is an awkward transliteration of the French title "Espion(s)") - "a bright but underachieving airport worker gets his hands on the wrong bag and finds himself thrust into a dangerous world of international agents and life-threatening secrets."

"Persecution" - I'm unsure about this one. It stars two French actors I like, and is by famous director Patrice Chereau, who will make an appearance at the screening, but it looks like exactly the sort of overly-cerebral French film I don't like.

Finally, I might go to the special screening of the restored "North By Northwest" just to be able to see a Hitchcock masterpiece on the big screen for the first time in my life!

I don't often blog about this sort of thing, but I feel like I need to gloat a little bit for a moment.

To all the people who are waking up today to what an asshole Kanye West is, I say: where the fuck have you been for the past few years? The man has been throwing crybaby tempter tantrums when he doesn't win every award in the world for years. And every time I have called him a "narcissistic fucktard" because of it, I've been replied to with tons of excuses about "oh, but he's so taaaalented, it's ok, really, he doesn't meeeeeean it..."

So over the weekend he pulled another asshole stunt, this time interrupting white girl Taylor Swift at the "Video Music Awards" (the continued existence of which is a whole other rant...) and suddenly, suddenly this time everyone's actually pissed at the guy.

Folks, I was telling you all this years ago. But did you listen? Noooo.

"Oh, but he's just doing this shit for publicity." Bullshit. I don't think he even has the brains for that.

Oh, and the Glee cast's version of "Gold Digger" is totally better than Kanye's original.

Saw a post on Metafilter today about "what's the best love song you've ever heard?"

Lots of mentions of "In Your Eyes," "Time After Time," "God Only Knows," etc.

But then I remembered this...



Go on. Watch/listen. You don't even need to know German.

If that isn't Love turned into Music, then I do not know what either is.

To whom it may concern:

Would you mind please moving your building about 3 blocks south? You're blocking my view.

Thanks.

-Dan

(The Wagner excerpt I really wanted was the final scene of "Gotterdammerung" but I couldn't find it on YouTube - at least not the one from this same production at the Met with Behrens.)

"Instinct dictates our duty and the intellect supplies us with pretexts for evading it. But excuses have no place in art and intentions count for nothing: at every moment the artist has to listen to his instinct, and it is this that makes art the most real of all things, the most austere school of life, the true last judgment."

--Marcel Proust

Have you ever had a friend on Facebook whose posts are such an unending stream of "OMG MY LIFE IS SO AWESOME!!!" that you want to go piss in their cornflakes??

So a friend of mine on Facebook who recently saw the show Spring Awakening posted something about how he loved the play, but "the ending was awful." At the time I said nothing because I hadn't seen it. But now I have, so I wrote him to tell him I can now confidently say he's very, very wrong - the ending is gorgeous.

He wrote back this morning: "what the fuck is a purple summer anyway? I mean... Really...."

Joseph Campbell often quoted a line about how the best things are beyond words. The second best things are misunderstood, because they're the words or images that point toward those best things that words can never touch. It's why humans have been arguing and killing over minor religious differences for centuries - because they can't see past the words on the page, the paint on the wall, the marble on the pedestal.

So to speak like your high school English teacher for just a moment, "purple summer" is a metaphor that's deliberately unusual, drawing attention to its strangeness to shake the listener out of the easy expectations a song like things brings. When a song starts with phrases like "A summer's day, a mother sings" it's easy to fall into "oh, this is a nice happy song" mode. But then "purple summer" pulls you back out of easy reverie and asks you to really hear the finer details, to look closer.

The earth will wave with corn
The day so wide so warm
And mares will neigh
With stallions that they mate
Foals they’ve born

And all shall know the wonder
I will sing the song of purple summer

Purple summer is something you pass by every day but never really see, because everything about our lives pulls our attention away from it.

Purple summer is the first time you saw a butterfly as a child.

Purple summer is the breeze on your face on a night cool enough to sleep with the windows open.

Purple summer is the first time a lover touched your hand.

Purple summer is the Earth not caring about the pain we cause ourselves with morals and money, with small mindedness and cynicism.

Purple summer is a centuries-old Sequoia tree in a California forest, that was alive before us and may outlive us.

Purple summer is the memory of being loved by someone who's died.

Purple summer is the tightness in your throat when you're either so happy, or so sad, that you can't even speak.

Purple summer is all of these things. It's none of these things. Because any "thing" one tries to make it is never really enough.

Purple summer is...that everything just is.

So now it's better if I just shut up and let the song sing.

More votes please!!!

Side note: Dear Flying-Spaghetti-Monster how badly I could use some of that booze I'm drinking in that picture right about now...

You're all still voting for me in the Mad Men Casting Call every day, right? Right? :)

Did you vote for me in the Mad Men Casting call yet today? Well, what are you waiting for?

(Thanks for the support, everybody!)

VOTE FOR ME in the "Mad Men Casting Call!"

Vote early and OFTEN! I'm told people can vote "once a day" and it looks like they track by IP address. So vote from work, then vote again from home! Ask your friends to vote! :)

Public votes between now and August 11 determine the "top 20," and then the show producers choose the winners from there.

Ok, so I think this will be my official entry to the AMC "Mad Men Casting Call" contest. (More on that later as I'll be asking everyone to go vote for me!!)

But I took some more for fun: Please go have a look at the full set of seven pics and tell me what you think!

So, choreographer Merce Cunningham died yesterday at age 90.

Now, I fully respect his contributions to the world of modern dance. But of the major figures in 20th century dance, he's almost certainly my least favorite. The pieces of his work I've seen have always left me sort of...well...bored. Which is almost certainly to do with his whole concept that his choreography wasn't about images or stories or ideas, and that the movement, music, costumes, sets all were to be created separately by different people and weren't otherwise related. It's part of my somewhat old fashioned artistic philosophy, I suppose, but to me that sounds like a recipe for a big mess, not a real work of art.

I have always felt slightly vindicated by an anecdote about Mr. Cunningham related to me shortly after graduating college. I was talking with a college friend, Peter, who himself was a brilliant dancer and choreographer, and who'd spent a lot of time during school studying with one of Northwestern's dance teachers at the time named Tim O'Slynne. Tim had at one time either been a member of Cunningham's company, or at least studied with him (I forget). But Tim once told some of his students that as much as Cunningham vehemently insisted that his dances didn't have imagery or stories or characters, Tim and the other dancers always made their own up anyway, because otherwise they just couldn't remember the steps right!

Every night I get my own one of a kind Turner painting out my windows.

1. Nurse Jackie. I initially skipped out on this show because I saw the medical setting, and I've become so bored by TV shows always using the same settings (hospitals, cops/crime, and mafia). But on my Seattle trip my friend Chris got me to watch it with him one night, and I was pretty much hooked right away. I love dark humor, and this show has buckets of it. (I was totally sold for sure when Jackie, needing the hospital priest urgently for her dying friend, reached to feel the neck pulse of another dying man being given last rites and said "yeah, honey you got 10 minutes left, I need him for five." And yanked the priest away.) I would definitely call this the best thing currently running on television - though mind you, that's only valid until Mad Men returns in mid August!

2. Torchwood: Children of Earth. It's only a five night miniseries, but wow, they've packed an awful lot of awesome into this so far. (Still two nights left.) Best sci fi series around, now that Galactica's gone. Really, you all should try watching this.

[A quick Torchwood primer if you've never watched before:
A. Torchwood is a group originally established by the British government over a century ago to investigate and protect from alien incursions.
B. They're not officially part of the government or military or anything, they don't officially exist.
C. They have a base full of supercomputers and gizmos, some created by co-opting alien technologies they've found.
D. Captain Jack Harkness, the leader, cannot die. (the reasons have been explained in some episodes of Doctor Who, but to watch this you don't really need to know what they are.)
E. Captain Jack is also omnisexual, he'll fuck just about anybody, human or alien. Lately he's been fucking Ianto, another member of Torchwood. (and in fact the relationship between those two is a major part of why this show is so awesome.)
F. It may help slightly to know that at the end of last season, they lost two members of Torchwood in the showdown with a big bad guy.

There. Now you're pretty well set to check out this "Children of Earth" miniseries.]

3. The Big Bang Theory. There have been so many bad, bad sitcoms in the world lately that I figured the form was near death. But this really breathes new life into it. And I'm guessing about 90% of the people on my LJ F-list can totally relate to these characters.

Good television that you probably are already watching:

1. 30 Rock
2. How I Met Your Mother
3. Weeds
4. Robot Chicken
5. Family Guy
6. True Blood

Do I look like I'm from "Mad Men" here? (I mean the TV show.)

Banana Republic and AMC are having a contest. You upload a photo showing yourself in "Mad Men style" and it gets voted on. The winner gets a walk-on role on the show.

I'm trying to get the outfit right first, then I'll work on the pose and accessories. :)