the ocean

World Cinema

I finally saw Volver this weekend. I'm kind of a fan of foreign language films because they allow me to live my lifelong dream of reading in a movie theater. I especially enjoy Spanish-language films because they are frequently dirty. This allows me to sit in the dark and look at people's naughty bits while still basking in the glow of my own cultural prowess. You don't get that from Cars, let me tell you.

So anyway, Volver was pretty good. The visuals were a little more muted than I'm used to from Almodovar (apologies for not having a little accent mark to deploy above the second o), but I thought the story was interesting and the acting fairly compelling. It was probably the first time I've ever seen Penelope Cruz on the screen without wishing her physical harm. But it really makes a difference when she's actually able to speak the language without sounding like she's eating a battery.

Next I want to see Pan's Labyrinth. I'm hoping it's just like the original Labyrinth, but with less David Bowie. These days you wouldn't be able to tell him apart from the puppets.

Fun Explanations for My Uneventful Absence

-- kidnapped by Charles Nelson Reilly
-- working on that novel about smelting
-- harvesting the sorghum crop
-- caught up in wicked hide and seek grudge match
-- filming unauthorized biography of Burt Reynolds
-- recovering from brow lift
-- busy making my own hats
-- vacation getaway to Peoria
-- reviewing Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency tapes for hidden subtext
-- three words: jazz er cize
-- taping and retaping Comcast Personals ad
-- planning my Wheel of Fortune theme party

Demands, Demands, Demands

Roommate Liz is always brightening my day with her fun little surprises. She'll leave a picture of New York (the VH1 star, not the city) under my covers or a bag of pork cracklings in my shower. She figured out how to use our fireplace. She's knitting me a scarf right now. But she really outdid herself this week when she introduced me to the vast, wonderful world of Comcast On Demand television.

Now, I'd checked out On Demand before, but I somehow thought it was just a place you go if the 3000 airings a week of Sex & the City on TBS aren't quite enough for your or if you really, really want to watch Weekend at Bernies 2 and you want to do it now. It turns out, though, that Comcast Local features some amazing programing, such as a series of pet adoption ads where adorable, hyperactive puppies are described by laconic, unkempt veterinary assistants, and a whole bunch of video personal ads, where shellshocked-looking singles answer questions like "If you could have a superpower, what would it be?" and "Why should someone date you?" They also have a segment where they film the people from the personal ads going out on dates with each other at exotic locations like Navy Pier with predictably awkward results. It's heaven in a box, my friends.

And as if that's not enough, there's also a category called "sports and fitness," where they have workout programs like Urban Jams ("urban" apparently means "loud") and Latin Grooves (taught by a mushmouthed lady in a spangly silver skirt). Don't be surprised if I'm benching 350 by the end of the month.

Classics Revisited

I just finished rereading The Grapes of Wrath (because I felt like maybe reading it between hot make out sessions on the 10th grade band trip didn't exactly do it justice) and I couldn't help but think, man, what a downer! Who knew the Great Depression was so, well, depressing? (Wasn't it also supposed to be Great?) Why couldn't the Joads just go to the circus and eat cotton candy instead of suffering poverty and starvation? And maybe solve a mystery involving some adorable baby elephants? Now that would have been a novel. Luckily for everyone in the whole world, I've prepared the following list of improvements for other major works of world literature:

The Plague by Albert Camus -- Instead of a plague, what about a cornucopia of smiles? Don't they say that laughter is contagious?

The Awakening by Kate Chopin -- The kids are just adorable, but their mother's kind of a drag. Always so mopey! I'm thinking more of a Julia Roberts type.

The Trial by Franz Kafka -- Honestly, I was expecting something a lot more Law & Order. Can we maybe rip something from the headlines?

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner -- See, here we go again. Can't we maybe focus on the living? They're a lot more fun. Well, except for gay Republicans.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett -- Personally, I'd really like to see Godot show up, and be a zany Robin Williams type!

Beloved by Toni Morrison -- Yeah, slavery is a definite downer. I say set the whole thing at glamorous fashion magazine instead.

King Lear by William Shakespeare -- Okay, well the father/daughter thing is kind of cute, but the warring over the kingdom aspect kind of leaves me cold. What if they raised a prize pig for the county fair instead?

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger -- Easy on the swears, mister. You'll never make The Wonderful World of Disney that way.

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf -- Great, but instead of a room, can we make it a crop top? Sexy.

Radio Days

This morning on my way to church (I drive even though it's like six blocks away, because I'm a proud American) I heard this amazing ad on the radio. In it, a couple decided to purchase a condominium sight unseen based on the fact that the female kept spelling the name of the development in song. Although the male was skeptical at first, he was won over by his lady friend's description of the "unique design" and "great amenities," as well as her strong and melodic spelling. The commercial ended with him declaring that he was "in." Another victory for commerce, I suppose.

I actually used to write radio commercials for a station I worked at back in college, and I've always loved the absurd logic that applies only to them. People frequently make major life decisions within the course of a fake thirty second dialogue with a friend, as in "Wow, it sounds like Greenfield Community College has everything. I'm going to go sign up today!" Similarly, these fake dialogues feature people launching without hesitation into discussion of the intimate details of their lives, such as "No, I haven't been able to get pregnant yet, even though Tom and I have been trying for over a year now." There may well be jaunty-sounding music playing behind these dramatic conversations. And everyone has an odd habit of stating the full name of the product or service being discussed repeatedly.

My personal top accomplishment in this area was probably the series of spots I wrote for a women's clothier, where I had to feelingly describe the merits of flowered mumus and support hose. I have to quite honestly say that the fashion world was probably changed forever.

Professional Development

The other day at work, one of my clients asked me if I was a student intern at my firm. Since I've now been an attorney for three and a half years and have in fact even represented this individual for almost a year and a half, I was a bit caught off guard by the question. I thought about challenging him to fight me, but since he was large and mustachioed, I decided instead just to take it as a compliment. It's not that I'm incompetent, it's just that I'm fresh faced and youthful. It's both a blessing and a curse, of course.

I actually haven't been super, super busy at my office lately, and I'm finding it kind of hard to adjust. Of course, keeping hours that aren't better suited to a textiles factory in the 1890s is probably a good thing, but when I'm idle I tend to do ridiculous things like starting a blog or latchhooking a rug with an image of a monkey on it. For instance, the other day I spent several hours watching old clips of 3-2-1 Contact on youtube. I'm a huge fan of The Bloodhound Gang, what can I say? Frankly, I just want to find out why Mr. Bloodhound wasn't ever there.

The good news (?) is that things aren't going to be slow for long. I've got a couple of depositions coming up, and may even start on a new case or two. I really, really hope that one of them is Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Disgusting Sneakers.

Globetrotter

I guess I'm coming to the table a few days late on this one, but how about those Golden Globes, eh? Unless you've been waiting your whole life to hear Tom Hanks repeatedly say the word "balls," in which case I'm guessing there's a SEARS catalogue somewhere you should be masturbating to anyway, it wasn't such an incredibly thrilling evening. For me, I think the best part was watching Ryan Seacrest really fervently pretend he wanted to screw every actress who walked down the red carpet, to the point that I half expected him to dry hump Judi Dench. To be fair, Maria Menounos definitely came in a close second in the insipid host department by first completely ignoring Globe winner America Ferrera and then asking her what she had to say to all those people who didn't think she could play Ugly Betty, causing Ms. Ferrera to wonder out loud if in fact there had been any such people. Now that's just good journalism, folks.

As for the awards themselves, I didn't really think there were that many surprises. I pretty much expected the acting award winners, although I was caught somewhat off guard by Forest Whitaker's apparently limited grasp of the English language. A bunch of penguins did beat out Beyonce for best song, but hey, flightless seabirds really know how to jam. I did enjoy the many awkward pairings among presenters, however, such as Vanessa Williams & Tim Allen (Vanessa Williams & Vanessa Williams' hair would have been sufficient) and 50 Cent & Helen Mirren (okay, I made that one up). Oh, and did anyone else notice that Cameron Diaz kind of looked like an Asian prostitute? Oh well, at least she didn't look like Hilary Swank.

By the Numbers

I have recently completed an incredibly important art project. Although I am sure that puppies have previously been represented in the visual arts, I am equally sure that they have perhaps never so feelingly been rendered. After literally a week of painstaking labor, I present to you a little work I call Puppy Climbing Over Log.

Here is my work station. On the left you can see my palette, where I had the incredibly difficult task of actually mixing several of the colors required for the painting. Believe me, if your white and black mixture gets even a little bit off, that puppy's nose is totally fucked.

Here's a shot from early in the process. I was tempted to leave it this way. After all, the instructions do say "[r]emember, you're the artist so feel free to improvise and use your imagination."
And the finished product. Doesn't that puppy seem to be jumping right out at you? He may well be. I'm pretty sure he has rabies.
As you can tell from the stubble, the tousled hair, and the random scarf, I am a tortured artist. I also have on glasses, which make me smart.

This Week in God

This morning at church the bishop said our mass, which meant that we had slightly better production values -- you know, larger hats, more musical numbers and the like. It also meant that the lady in front of me whipped out a funsaver camera and started taking random pictures of the bishop, apparently taking a loose definition of the term "fun." I'm not really sure what the occasion was, but he didn't try to convince me to join the seminary or bomb an abortion clinic, so I was fairly satisfied.

During the mass, though, my mind wandered a bit, as it sometimes does. This time I was thinking about my childhood religious experiences, however, as opposed to sex or the unwatched episode of Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency on my DVR. I used to have to spend every Wednesday night (I remember it was Wednesday because I always had to miss Unsolved Mysteries) taking Public School Religion class (or PSR, as those of us in the know call it). Each week we read aloud from a book called Growing in God's Love that had pictures of people in seventies clothing playing acoustic guitars on the cover. Of course, many of the kids in my class were from a neighboring farm town where reading didn't quite take the priority of going to the Dairy Queen or wearing purple denim, so it was often slow going. I recall that one of them once posited that the fruits of the Holy Spirit were apples, oranges, and bananas, causing the severe nun who ran our class to swell up with rage and announce that there was nothing funny here, a statement which was seldom if ever true. She had the same reaction when Sara Stumpf, whose father ran the second most successful tire yard in town, asked her if she had hair under her wimple.

I also spent three or four years as an altar boy, an experience I loathed, and not just because I once nearly got heat stroke during a four hour May Crowning service. Primarily I just hated being bossed around all the time -- hold this Bible up, carry that body and blood of Christ, wash these hands of that impurity -- it got pretty old. Plus those vestments didn't look good on anybody. The androgynous look is a hard sell.

Nws & Cmmnt

My home laptop, which I purchased from my law school way back when buying a computer was more like buying a house, has this fun technical issue whereby random keys will sometimes stop working. So occasionally I'll look back at a sentence and discover that I need to buy a vowel. The only real solution I've found to this problem is to repeatedly bang on the key as hard as I can, which I actually think is how John Grisham writes his novels. But anyway, if anything I type here doesn't make sense, it's because of that and not any of the standard reasons for me not making sense.

As for our news headlines, there's not a ton to report. I spent most of last night drinking cheap white wine with ice cubes in it in my friend's hotel room and reading the messages she'd gotten from guys on Match.com. This was kind of interesting because it turns out a lot of people use form messages for those things, so she would get really generic ones like the swoonworthy "Hey, I saw your profile and you seem really cool. If you'd like to get to know me better, write back." Then she'd get others that were shockingly specific, even to the point of asking her to meet at a certain place and time, which to me sounds like a recipe for a kidnapping. And then there were the people who definitely went with the overshare, including their DUIs, child custody disputes, and recent medical maladies in their "get to know you" messages. Entertainment, folks. That's entertainment.

Dream On

So I saw Dreamgirls last night and it was pretty entertaining. I really enjoyed the bad hair and eyebrows they gave Beyonce for the early scenes so we could be amazed by her allegedly enormous transformation into a glamorous star, and the subtlety with which the production emphasized Jennifer Hudson's supposed tremendous fatness (putting her in a rubber dress, showing that she climbs stairs slowly, having various characters randomly refer to her as fat). I also liked the movie because it carefully demonstrated how white people ruin music and entertainment without even incorporating footage of Jessica Simpson. At over two hours, it was perhaps a little long for what was essentially a semi-fictionalized Behind the Music, but I suppose I can't really begrudge it the time if I devoted an hour and a half to I Love New York on Monday. All in all I have to say good times.

But the most interesting thing about the evening has to be the fact that they arrested someone in the theater at the very beginning of the movie. I had noticed the security guards hovering around the entrance, but I figured they were just going to tell me to get my feet down off the railing and stop throwing popcorn at the image of J.Lo in the movie trivia. Instead, however, police officers arrived and took a gentleman away in handcuffs as the opening credits rolled. Who gets arrested at Dreamgirls? It was for crimes against fashion, no doubt.

Accomplishments

It was a pretty big weekend at my house. Roommate Liz and I have fully succumbed to our Midwestern instincts and taken up crafts in a major way. I spent literally hours carefully finessing a fine paint by number of a golden retriever puppy climbing over a log while Roommate Liz began knitting class and, along with it, the construction of the world's tiniest white scarf. Once I finish my paint by number (or PBN, as those of us in the know call it) I'm planning on getting a hot glue gun and making some nice mosaics from the shards of broken glass in the alley behind the condo. Plus I have procured several puzzles that I intend to roll out over the next few months. Needless to say, it is going to be a very long winter.

In other arenas, I also finished a terrible, terrible sketch (sample line: "What your father's trying to say, Billy, is that your Grandma Blanche is in hell now.") for a potential show later this year and went for a several mile run along the lake. This latter item was a bit of an accomplishment simply because, before this year, I continually found myself unable to run in long pants. I'm not kidding. I would always overheat and get a terrible headache and feel like I was going to pass out. But yesterday despite wearing the dark green Abercrombie track pants that I bought in college and used to actually wear to class when I was in law school (ever the fashion plate), I was just fine. I'm not sure if there's an award of some kind for this, but I really feel I ought to receive one.

A View From the Top

I think I would be remiss if I didn't take a moment to talk about a momentous television milestone that was reached this week, namely the airing of every episode of every cycle of America's Next Top Model on VH1. For almost a week America was held entranced by the exploits of the underfed and overstyled, as Tyra Banks and her merry band of modeling "experts," who themselves often look as though they've been sleeping in the studio and grooming themselves at the craft services table between takes, held forth on the nation's second favorite music network with only a tenuous, Nickelback-related connection to music. Whether you were more a fan of cycle one, which has production values that rival my tenth grade German project, or cycle four, where racial politics reached their fullest expression in a stirring debate over who Nelson Mandela was, there was plenty to love.

My favorite part of America's Next Top Model (or ANTM, as those of us in the know call it), is always the largely futile acting challenges they always give the models. You haven't lived until you've witnessed a six-foot model with impetigo attempt a cockney accent or a Covergirl commercial in Catalan. I also love the way they seek out girls with complicated backstories -- Hurricane Katrina victim, biracial bulimic, recovering alcoholic single mother -- only to boot them off the show in week two for having split ends. Of course, Tyra and the crew are on a never ending quest to make modeling about everything but actually being pretty, consistently stressing the importance of "personality" and "intelligence." You remember how Kate Moss totally tore it up on Charlie Rose with her insights on Chaucer that one time, right?

Anyway, there's one thing that's definitely clear -- the winners of ANTM always, always become enormous successes in the field. I simply won't buy a product unless Yoanna House's face has been associated with it. It's just good business sense.

Things I am Surprised to Find I Have Recently Googled, According to my Browser Cache

-- Agoraphobia
-- Apolo Anton Ono
-- Bill O'Reilly & Falafel
-- Chicken Soup
-- Day of Atonement
-- Free Bird
-- Herpes
-- Holiday Crafts
-- Leann Rimes
-- Light Bulbs
-- Luxembourg
-- Six Flags Cockroach
-- Xelogen

On the Clothing of Dogs and Other Holiday Traditions

As some of my more diligent readers may recall (if their courses of mediation will allow it), approximately a month ago I impulse purchased a rather fancy smock for my dog, who lives some five hours away from me. I decided to give it to her for Christmas, with almost heartrendingly adorable results:

As you can see, this sheik retro look fits DJ nearly perfectly. I think she also appreciated its durable fleece construction, as evidenced by her failure to rip it completely to shreds within a half hour.

Of course, we have TWO dogs, so it would have been completely gauche of me to not purchase some finery for the Big Beagle (I believe he is actually a cross between a beagle and a horse, but let's not get technical) as well. Luckily there is always Old Navy. Here Boo somewhat petulantly models a fetching (har har) patterned number.

And for the record, no, dressing your pets is NOT a mere matter of steps from dressing your lawn gnomes.

File Under "Years, New"

Back at work today after a week and a half off. It's the first time that I've actually been gone long enough for my office to look different to me upon my return. I checked three times to make sure none of my CDs were stolen. But no, the only actual difference was the big stack of exciting mail items like court reporter bills and press releases about partners serving on committees issued by my firm. Which is good, because I know the cleaning lady has totally been eyeing my copy of Abba's Greatest Hits.

New Year's Eve was very pleasant and relatively uneventful. Roommate Liz made a lovely meal, which was made even more enjoyable by the fact that I drank red wine for two hours before it was served. We had a few friends over and aspired to play board games, to the point of setting one up on the dining table, without ever actually doing so. (A hearty round of Super Mario 3 did erupt, however, as it invariably does.) Mainly we just chatted, drank, and watched the skeleton of Carson Daly host the Times Square countdown. I fear (hope?) that Tara Reid has put some sort of hex on him.

I'm not sure that it really feels like a new year to me yet, though. Maybe I should set to writing "2007" in multi-colored pen all over the back of my Lisa Frank notebook, just to drive the point home.