Oh yes, I heard.
And of course it is damn sad, and mortifying, and more than a little pitiful. I feel for the kids, most, and for the missus (Sarah Lawrence, represent!). And on the subject of Ms. T, goddamn, because what hope in hell do the rest of us poor slobs have, if being whip-smart and wickedly funny and talented and a tall drink of gorgeous is not enough? Holy crap!
But meanwhile my lizard brain is all in a quandary, because The List, my List? has seemingly leapt from my subconscious and is running amok in the streets. Y'all have a List, right? The list of two to five celebrity free passes, against which you will brook no argument from your spouse or significant other? So that, if John Krasinski or Daniel Dae Kim, or both, should inexplicably show up on my doorstep bearing bottles of champagne, or massage oil, or both?...well, I could not be held accountable. The List. I invoke The List. Also I am single, so The List is under perpetual review at my own discretion or lack thereof.
So. Awkward. And ugly, and unfortunately titillating. Sigh. Anyway...Robert Downey, Jr. seems to have gotten his shit together, after a long, looong string of art-imitating-life-imitating-art, so...there is always hope. Get better, you beautiful trainwreck, for the sake of those chirrens at least. I will skulk back over here to the shallow end of the pool, where the water is uncomfortably hot and has the distinct whiff of sulphur. Dang, man.
Showing posts with label my pretend boyfriends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label my pretend boyfriends. Show all posts
Friday, August 29, 2008
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Geek, dweeb, or spaz
Okay, confession time. By all accounts, it has thus far been a stinko summer for me and mine; I've already mentioned how I would kind of like to take a little vacation to the back of my bedroom closet, curled fetally around a pillow and a pan of brownies. But I have been clinging to one thing, one wee bit of Summer Fun-ness that I have been gleefully awaiting for a long, long time. Wanna guess what it is? I cover it pretty well; you might be surprised.
Ohhhh yyyyeaaaaaah. Mulder and Scully in the hizzouse, one week away. Believe again, the teaser posters said, and I would like to point out here that yo, I never stopped.
It's funny, I know. I am not by any stretch of the imagination a science-fiction kook in any other capacity. When I worked at Waldenbooks eons ago, one of my colleagues wore a homemade Star Trek uniform for Halloween one year, and all. day. long. crazy customers came out of the woodwork to point out to her the many ways in which her collar, her insignia, her belt, were not regulation. I thought they were ALL bonkers. Sure, I had Star Wars action figures as a kid, and Sis and I squabbled so much over the Princess Leia that we each had to have one...but we did not secure them in plastic bubbles as an investment; they got buried in the yard, their tiny ray guns and lightsabers mauled in the vaccuum cleaner. (My mother famously fell asleep during Star Wars, the original, at the drive-in. "I couldn't take it, all that boop boop and beep beep," she shrugged afterwards.) I hear good things, but I've never seen a single episode of Dr. Who.
And I was a latecomer to the X-Files, too. I had some friends who were entirely obsessed, and I remember inadvertently dropping by their place once a little early for Friday-night carousing, only to find them watching the second-season finale, six inches from the t.v. screen. "SSSSHHHHHHHH," they hissed frantically. My sole initial thought about this U.F.O. television program was what kind of names are those?
So I still can't explain exactly when I got hooked. At some point I discovered it wasn't just about the alien menace...and thank God, really, because I was never there for the space guys. I was snagged by the dark and the wet and the gloom, the dreary familiarity of the Vancouver years. And then I went through a rough, dark patch in my own life, and I clung to this story, to these fictional people. I stayed for the dynamic, the romance in a classical, gothic sense--fascinated by these two brilliant, damaged, doomed, devoted characters struggling to do the right thing, to put away more ordinary monsters, to keep seeking a measure of justice while the world got smaller and darker and crazier around them, every minute. It's a sad story, really. For an hour a week, my problems were petty. Poor Mulder and Scully--in the end, they each have no one but the other. How lucky! How costly!
Also, it doesn't hurt at all that both of them are insanely scorching hot.
Anyway. So I have been a regular, in this and only this fandom--I cringe even using that dopey word, a little--and today I was squaring up plans with some Seattle folks in an online forum, to stay up way too late and go to a midnight madness premiere and scream like ninnies to see our adored Moose and Squirrel back on the big screen. We are going to see our old imaginary friends! It is going to be so much fun!
Then I sort of realized that the ladies I was chatting with are all college-age, or even younger. One young woman cannot attend the midnight movie because her parents said no. So technically I am old enough to be her mother. Oh goodness. Well, we all could do far, far worse for a role model than Dana Scully, that's for damn sure. We are not out knocking over 7-Elevens or huffing paint or whoring our way onto a reality show, because we have intellectual pursuits! Also we are dorks!
I'll close by linking to David Duchovny's blog, because when the hell else am I ever gonna get to do that? Me and David, typing away in our Blogger templates late into the night, sharing our smarty smartassed thoughts with the Internet. We are practically, like, totally bonding and stuff. Step off, girls.
Edited to add: hold up. Steely Dan?! Feh. You're lucky you're pretty, DD.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Helluva town
The TiVo picked up On the Town the other night; I've probably seen it half a dozen times, but that didn't prevent me from sitting down in front of it again, with a plate of spaghetti, this evening. Three sailors on a 24-hour shore leave in New York, seeing sights and picking up dames--as a plot, it's wafer-thin, but what a giddy primary-colored love letter to the city it is. They used to show free movies, Friday and Saturday nights at Sarah Lawrence, and I remember that one year, On the Town was part of their "welcome to New York!" film series in September. (Probably they paired it with more nuanced portraits, like Fame. Or Taxi Driver.) I remember that during Ann Miller's big "Prehistoric Man" number, the young feminists in the audience became quite ruffled when Jules Munshin dragged her across the set by the hair. Oh, olden times! You so crazy!
But really. Cave-man antics aside, those are pretty well-mannered sailors. It's been a while since I've seen it, and I was surprised this time by how aggressive the ladies are, for 1949. Betty Garrett as Hildy, practically molesting poor scrawny little Frank Sinatra in that cab! That she drives, I hasten to point out, even though one of the other characters notes with perplexity, "the war's over!" Ann Miller's character, Claire, alludes to some sort of "guardian" she's supposed to have while conducting her anthropological studies in the big city; at any rate, she successfully evades said chaperone enough to get Jules Munshin in a headlock, and liplock, pretty quickly. I know this movie is hardly social commentary...and yet it hovers on some shimmery border between Rosie-the-Riveter days and the booming 50s with their accompanying rigid social strata--the stuff that I'm watching fall apart in Mad Men, set a decade later. Innnnteresting.
And that is some pretty heavy cultural significance that I'm attempting to hang on an MGM musical, so I'll knock it off and just talk about why I love it. The beautiful location shots for that first number--real, old, gorgeous, filthy New York. The traffic-light colors that run throughout the women's costuming. The little in-jokes: when Gene Kelly's Gabey shrugs off the passing girl that the others are ogling, Ozzie (Munshin) demands, "Who ya got waiting for ya in New York, Ava Gardner?" (And Frank does not even blink. I didn't get that one, when I was twelve.) Or, one of the first lines of dialogue, when they're all straight off the boat: "We nevah been heah befoah," Sinatra's character Joiseys, and perhaps they should have given that particular line to someone else? Because his delivery is somewhat unconvincing.
And ohhh, Gene Kelly. I am still hot for Gene Kelly. I went through a big classic-musicals phase, when I was in fifth or sixth grade, and sure, Fred Astaire's effortless gliding around was lovely. But Gene Kelly made me feel...funny. His dancing was not effortless: you could see him working at it, see that this was a man in very deliberate control of his body, of his physical and athletic ability. It...promised something, something I recognized before I understood it. Hot damn, Gene Kelly. His IMDB bio has this quote, among others: "I work bigger. Fred's style is more intimate. I'm very jealous of that when I see him on the small screen. Fred looks so great on TV. I'd love to put on a white tie and tails and look as thin as him and glide as smoothly. But I'm built like a blocking tackle." Um...yyyeah. And whew. What was I saying? Anyway. The fact that he was handsome--and ripped--aside, nobody did moony-eyed smittenness better than Gene Kelly. He'd float after a girl, two inches off the ground, clicking his heels together, and it was completely believable.
The movie just looks like fun, period. Why wouldn't it be fun, to be tearing around Manhattan with a hot sailor for one day, going to museums and nightclubs and doing datey things? Plus eventually evading the police and having a few Coney Island hoochie-coochie-show shenanigans thrown in for good measure? I am slightly older (to my horror) than all the participants in On the Town, I think; I'm sitting here now in a ratty United Way t-shirt and gym shorts, and I don't know that I could stay up for 24 hours, even on a date, even if you paid me. (For Mr. Kelly, maybe.) But it sure looks like fun.
I graduated from college May 22, 1992--incidentally, the day of Johnny Carson's last show, and the Friday of Memorial Day Weekend. My mom and I stayed on in New York City for the holiday, and when we got to our shabby-genteel, Let's Go-recommended midtown hotel, we learned that Memorial Day coincides with Fleet Week in NYC. The place was teeming with sailors, boyish in their caps and bellbottoms, everywhere we looked, crowding the lobby. It was as if we'd been dropped onto a soundstage. I was 22; I'd been up for a week straight, pretty much, either packing or partying; I was probably in no shape to have a 24-hour dream date. It didn't matter anyway: my mother introduced herself to one of the sailors in the phone-booth-sized elevator on our way up, and said, innocently enough, "My father was a Navy man!" And I am telling you, we did not lift a suitcase or open a door for ourselves for the rest of that entire weekend. (Most of which, I confess, I slept through.) Those boys were gentlemen, to a one. It might have gone differently, if I had been alone. And if any of them had looked like Gene Kelly. Oh well.
But really. Cave-man antics aside, those are pretty well-mannered sailors. It's been a while since I've seen it, and I was surprised this time by how aggressive the ladies are, for 1949. Betty Garrett as Hildy, practically molesting poor scrawny little Frank Sinatra in that cab! That she drives, I hasten to point out, even though one of the other characters notes with perplexity, "the war's over!" Ann Miller's character, Claire, alludes to some sort of "guardian" she's supposed to have while conducting her anthropological studies in the big city; at any rate, she successfully evades said chaperone enough to get Jules Munshin in a headlock, and liplock, pretty quickly. I know this movie is hardly social commentary...and yet it hovers on some shimmery border between Rosie-the-Riveter days and the booming 50s with their accompanying rigid social strata--the stuff that I'm watching fall apart in Mad Men, set a decade later. Innnnteresting.
And that is some pretty heavy cultural significance that I'm attempting to hang on an MGM musical, so I'll knock it off and just talk about why I love it. The beautiful location shots for that first number--real, old, gorgeous, filthy New York. The traffic-light colors that run throughout the women's costuming. The little in-jokes: when Gene Kelly's Gabey shrugs off the passing girl that the others are ogling, Ozzie (Munshin) demands, "Who ya got waiting for ya in New York, Ava Gardner?" (And Frank does not even blink. I didn't get that one, when I was twelve.) Or, one of the first lines of dialogue, when they're all straight off the boat: "We nevah been heah befoah," Sinatra's character Joiseys, and perhaps they should have given that particular line to someone else? Because his delivery is somewhat unconvincing.
And ohhh, Gene Kelly. I am still hot for Gene Kelly. I went through a big classic-musicals phase, when I was in fifth or sixth grade, and sure, Fred Astaire's effortless gliding around was lovely. But Gene Kelly made me feel...funny. His dancing was not effortless: you could see him working at it, see that this was a man in very deliberate control of his body, of his physical and athletic ability. It...promised something, something I recognized before I understood it. Hot damn, Gene Kelly. His IMDB bio has this quote, among others: "I work bigger. Fred's style is more intimate. I'm very jealous of that when I see him on the small screen. Fred looks so great on TV. I'd love to put on a white tie and tails and look as thin as him and glide as smoothly. But I'm built like a blocking tackle." Um...yyyeah. And whew. What was I saying? Anyway. The fact that he was handsome--and ripped--aside, nobody did moony-eyed smittenness better than Gene Kelly. He'd float after a girl, two inches off the ground, clicking his heels together, and it was completely believable.
The movie just looks like fun, period. Why wouldn't it be fun, to be tearing around Manhattan with a hot sailor for one day, going to museums and nightclubs and doing datey things? Plus eventually evading the police and having a few Coney Island hoochie-coochie-show shenanigans thrown in for good measure? I am slightly older (to my horror) than all the participants in On the Town, I think; I'm sitting here now in a ratty United Way t-shirt and gym shorts, and I don't know that I could stay up for 24 hours, even on a date, even if you paid me. (For Mr. Kelly, maybe.) But it sure looks like fun.
I graduated from college May 22, 1992--incidentally, the day of Johnny Carson's last show, and the Friday of Memorial Day Weekend. My mom and I stayed on in New York City for the holiday, and when we got to our shabby-genteel, Let's Go-recommended midtown hotel, we learned that Memorial Day coincides with Fleet Week in NYC. The place was teeming with sailors, boyish in their caps and bellbottoms, everywhere we looked, crowding the lobby. It was as if we'd been dropped onto a soundstage. I was 22; I'd been up for a week straight, pretty much, either packing or partying; I was probably in no shape to have a 24-hour dream date. It didn't matter anyway: my mother introduced herself to one of the sailors in the phone-booth-sized elevator on our way up, and said, innocently enough, "My father was a Navy man!" And I am telling you, we did not lift a suitcase or open a door for ourselves for the rest of that entire weekend. (Most of which, I confess, I slept through.) Those boys were gentlemen, to a one. It might have gone differently, if I had been alone. And if any of them had looked like Gene Kelly. Oh well.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Mulder, it's me
(Which is the one thing I have ever/will ever want to shout into a cell phone, whenever the spirit moves me.)
I have to confess that I have been something of an inadvertent Luddite when it comes to mobile phones. I kept meaning to get one--my interest spiking each time we lost Mom somewhere in the wilds of the baseball stadium, or a piece of my old car fell off onto the highway--but I continued to forget about it with great regularity. For, oh, ten years. I was finally inspired to act by my recent college reunion (which was two months ago), when my peers were frenetically logging each other's numbers and calling each other from seminars and dorm room to dorm room and across the picnic table. I couldn't remember which rooms we'd all been assigned to, and without a phone was reduced to standing in front of various doors stage-whispering "Emily? Margaret? Emily? Hello?"
Kim says:
Just signed up for a cell phone. Now the Borg OWNS me.
Sis says:
eeek
Kim says:
yeah. but also I am a teensy bit excited.
Kim says:
do you remember when I called you from the AirPhone ™ once when I was flying back to college?
Sis says:
yes
Kim says:
it was something like $4 a minute, and the size of a brick. heh.
Kim says:
anyway, cheapo AAA deal, $20/month for 100 minutes.
Kim says:
I figure I will never come close to using that much, as it's only for 1. "Where the fuck ARE you?" 2. "I have been run off the road by a truck, help" and 3. "Hello, Snappy Dragon? I'm on 520, have the potstickers ready for me."
Sis says:
are you going to start voting on America's Got Talent now?
Kim says:
Oh. And that too, of course.
Sis says:
hee hee hee
Kim says:
10 votes for BoyShakira, coming up
Kim says:
Or I can play the Hell's Kitchen games: "Which chef will give Ramsay an embolism tonight?"
Sis says:
Christ, that man gives me high blood pressure
Kim says:
funny, he makes mine all just float away!
Sis says:
Fuckin' donut
Kim says:
DONKEY! DONKEY! DONKEY!
Sis says:
GET OUT
Kim says:
If I had it in me to behave like that as a boss, this week would have gone a lot different
(Mark Blankenship via both PopPolitics and Elastic Waist, today; potstickers via the wildly careening Dragon!Wagons, if you live in the delivery zone, you lucky duck.)
I have to confess that I have been something of an inadvertent Luddite when it comes to mobile phones. I kept meaning to get one--my interest spiking each time we lost Mom somewhere in the wilds of the baseball stadium, or a piece of my old car fell off onto the highway--but I continued to forget about it with great regularity. For, oh, ten years. I was finally inspired to act by my recent college reunion (which was two months ago), when my peers were frenetically logging each other's numbers and calling each other from seminars and dorm room to dorm room and across the picnic table. I couldn't remember which rooms we'd all been assigned to, and without a phone was reduced to standing in front of various doors stage-whispering "Emily? Margaret? Emily? Hello?"
So. Today I have succumbed to a cell-phone offer from the auto-club, and then conducted a whirlwind pop-cultural volley with Sis over the IM.
Kim says:
Just signed up for a cell phone. Now the Borg OWNS me.
Sis says:
eeek
Kim says:
yeah. but also I am a teensy bit excited.
Kim says:
do you remember when I called you from the AirPhone ™ once when I was flying back to college?
Sis says:
yes
Kim says:
it was something like $4 a minute, and the size of a brick. heh.
Kim says:
anyway, cheapo AAA deal, $20/month for 100 minutes.
Kim says:
I figure I will never come close to using that much, as it's only for 1. "Where the fuck ARE you?" 2. "I have been run off the road by a truck, help" and 3. "Hello, Snappy Dragon? I'm on 520, have the potstickers ready for me."
Sis says:
are you going to start voting on America's Got Talent now?
Kim says:
Oh. And that too, of course.
Sis says:
hee hee hee
Kim says:
10 votes for BoyShakira, coming up
Kim says:
Or I can play the Hell's Kitchen games: "Which chef will give Ramsay an embolism tonight?"
Sis says:
Christ, that man gives me high blood pressure
Kim says:
funny, he makes mine all just float away!
Sis says:
Fuckin' donut
Kim says:
DONKEY! DONKEY! DONKEY!
Sis says:
GET OUT
Kim says:
If I had it in me to behave like that as a boss, this week would have gone a lot different
(Mark Blankenship via both PopPolitics and Elastic Waist, today; potstickers via the wildly careening Dragon!Wagons, if you live in the delivery zone, you lucky duck.)
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