Category: ultracultural

Pleasures of the Big Screen

Damn, I just noticed how badly I’ve been neglecting this. Oh well, shit happens. Not that my media-/pop-culture consumption has trailed off at all. If anything, a brief burst of solvency found me treating myself to the occasional CD binge and an extra movie night or two.

I love going to the movies, I really do. As much as I hate when guys in personal ads say lame, boring, unoriginal things about what they like to do for fun, I have to admit that my first suggestion for a relaxing social activity with a pal is always to go to the movies. I love the immersive experience. And now that stadium seating is becoming de rigeur, I don’t even have to wince in anticipation of the physical discomfort — even for a li’l peanut like me — of sitting in one of those awful old seats.

Aside from the way heavy-duty sound and a large screen (and don’t give me any of that wussy crap about sitting too far to the front — you’re never too far up front until the the perspective becomes too weird to compensate for, in the first couple rows or so) completely envelop you and bombard you with the sensory input from the flick/movie/film (what I consider to be the three levels of cinematic quality), the most wonderful part about going to the movies is the social aspect. For better or worse, and it usually helps, you feed off the energy of the rest of the crowd when you go see a movie in a theater. It’s a vital part of the experience, and makes up for the added impediments to putting your feet up on the seat in front of you. I can’t tell you how many summer blockbusters have been salvaged for me by going to see them in a crowded theater on a Friday night (in Times Square, if possible, where the audiences are always the rowdiest) where the crowd shouts along with or at the movie, in a giant orgy of audience participation. I still remember when I realized that Godzilla 2000 was gonna be a hoot the moment that we heard a crash of glass in the back of the theater and the smell of malt liquor filled the air. Even if it’s as simple as the audience rooting for a real clunker like the sheep they are, the energy helps make the most of what might otherwise be a bad situation.

When I found out that The Nightmare Before Christmas was being re-released for Halloween this year, you know I was all for it. As much as I already loved the film, the added effect of enjoying it with all the trimmings of the movie-theater and audience experience just made it that much sweeter. I also started playing around with the interesting effects I get with my digital camera in low-light situations:

Not Just a Butt Pirate

God help me, but I’ve finally been sucked into Napster. Well, Macster to be more specific, because the iMac actually has decent speakers. (Mmmmm, right now I’m listeing to Pulp’s This Is Hardcore, which brings back happy, freaky memories of Kiki & Herb’s version.) It’s exactly the addiction I was warned it would be. Thank you, Covad, Verizon, and Internet Channel for finally connecting my DSL line after 8 months of dim-witted attempts. Thank you for making this possible. I started out small, just looking for that rare version of You Can’t Hurry Love by the Stray Cats, and then realized I ought to try and find good versions of the songs from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls to replace my 10th generation bootleg. And then I remembered that this weekend’s houseguests (I’m becoming a regular Bohemian B&B, so make a reservation), Wendy and William from D.C., told me I needed to get the Icelandic version of Birthday by the Sugarcubes, which led me to the songs Björk did with the Brodsky Quartet. While I was at it, I realized I desperately needed to have all the old-school hip-hop and freestyle that my friend Michael and I were listening to at the Boiler Room Saturday night, so it was off to find the Funky Four Plus One and Grand Master Flash, among others. While I was it, I grabbed Rapper’s Delight and part of UTFO’s Roxanne series. One thing led to another, and I was chasing down Christmas songs by Brave Combo and some live songs by David Byrne, including the unbelievable cover of Kraftwerk’s Model that he performed with the Balanescu Quartet on Sessions at West 54th. (By the way, if you ever catch that episode in reruns on your local PBS station, watch for my head bobbing up and down over David Byrne’s rear monitor, bopping to the mucis and grinning like an idiot.) Yes, and I also went looking for stuff by all the other people I’ve seen at sessions, like Cesaria Evora, Lyle Lovett, the Afro-Cuban All-stars, Moby (the theme from Cecil B. Demented), and so on and so on and so on. Ah, if only I had thought to ask about the Indian pop that sounded like C & C Music Factory they were playing at dinner saturday.

So if it seems like I’ve dropped out of site or I’m talking about music more than usual, just look for UltraSparky and see what I’ve been collecting. Hey, does anyone out there have squeeze’s fast live version of Goodby Girl from their six on Ten EP?

Meat Market

Forget all that queer counter-culture posturing you keep encountering on the Internet. Every gay blog I’ve looked at today has confessed to watching The Sexiest Bachelor in America last night, just like I did. We’re all ashamed. We were all horrified (if that eerie picture on Fox’s page for the show isn’t ominous, I don’t know what is). But we all made sure we didn’t have to pee during the swimsuit competition. (Which was lame, by the way. You know guys, there’s a reason the rest of the world makes fun of Americans for swaddling themselves with so much fabric on the beach. We look silly in all that fabric. And not as sexy as people are obviously hoping for.)

Despite the trashiness of this particular televised meat market — and for once it’s good to see men being the meat and not the shoppers, I might add — leave it to American televison to make sure that the winner was the most wholesome of all when it came right down to it. As if the only way to excuse such a tawdry (yet fun, in its way) celebration of beefcake was to show that in the end, it’s just good manners that matter the most.

But maybe that’s being a little too cynical of me. After all, this was on Fox, a fine, upstanding network if there ever was one. I’m not crazy about the lucky Mr. Virginia, but I was surpised and pleased that the judges (by coercion or actual fairness) would grant the prize to a guy who was all hairy and beefy, but not cut like a gym rat, the way the other guys were. Watch the swimsuit competition: he’s puffing up his chest so much to hold in his gut that he might pop a lung. Good for him, even if he was the blandest of them all.

She’s the One That I Want

OK, if you want to laugh your Ass off (and you’re not the squeamish type) you owe to yourself to catch I’m the One That I Want, the film version of Margaret Cho’s one-woman show. Like some of the best humor, it’s a fantastic blend of laughs, fun, and pathos. Just when you’re recovering from some bladder-busting irreverance, Margaret (who is fab-u-luxe) will switch to something incredibly personal and serious, and then wrap it up with a sassy one-liner. she rocks the house!

Work Ethic

Although I’ve heard some bad reviews of it, I finally watched Cradle Will Rock and thought it was fantastic. Like a lot of films that try to bea little epic in scope, it relied on developing some characters in broad strokes and schtick (although Bill Murray did wonders within that), but the overall effect was wonderful. Just watch it some time, OK?

It poses an interesting question: At what point do you become a prostitute for your work? I’ve wrestled with that one a lot over the years — it’s hard to avoid in graphic design. I can’t say that always made the noble choice, but I’ve at least tried to be pretty selective about my bedfellows and choose, whenever possible, to do work that I felt good about in the end. It’s a tough one.

One of the toughest realizations I ever made was about the nature of my work: I’m not interested in pure artistry as much as I am in good craftsmanship and good communication. Even when I’ve worked in more traditionally artsy media, I have always been more interested in exploring the medium or fine-tuning my skills than in making art for art’s sake. There have been times, and there are sure to be more, when I have become my own client and chosen to use my skills to communicate some idea of my own, but that’s not the reason I work. When my own agenda and my work come together, that may be art, but I’m not so interested in pursuing it by that name. Let someone else decide if what I do is art or not: I’m more interested in knowing if I’ve solved the problem at hand. Maybe that makes me a whore once in a while, but at least I’m a whore not trying to convince himself he’s a paragon of virtue.

As for Bill Murray, before I completely forget, I’d like to know when his comic antics crossed that line into sublime performance. Watch Cradle Will Rock or Rushmore and you’ll see that he’s not just a goofball, but that he’s also capable of some really subtle, underplayed brilliance. I would recommend watching the Criterion Edition DVD of Rushmore so you can see Murray’s wry smarts in full effect on an episode of Charlie Rose.

Giving Me Strength

I’m listening to one of my birthday treats, Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach’s Painted from Memory. Although I’m fond of them both, I never had much of an urge to get the album until I rented Grace of My Heart, a sort of dreadful movie filled with wonderful music. God Give Me strength, the big showstopper penned by Elvis and Burt, gives me chills whenever I hear it. I like the Kristen Vigard’s movie version better (get it here), but the album one is also sublime, very well suited to Elvis voice.

Opiated

God help me, but I bought a new TV yesterday and invested in an antenna, so now I’m watching TV at home for the first time in over a year. It still sucks as much as ever, but it’s still as hypnotic. My old TV, inherited from a pal who moved out of Boston on the spur of the moment, has been dying for a while now. The remote started getitng screwy last year and lately there have been some blank pixels appearing and ruining the rest of the picture. When I couldn’t display a picture from the DVD player sunday morning, I just got up, got dressed, and went out to Circuit City and dealt with the problem like any middle-class American ought to — I just bought a new one. The new antenna was an added bonus.

Some nice things I have seen since rejoining the ranks of the opiated masses:

  • A Simpsons rerun I hadn’t seen before, in which Apu must go through with his arranged marriage. The highlight was Homer, dressed as Ganesha, up in a tree getting poked by a stick, and whimpering, “All will die.”
  • Well, that’s about it, actually. But I can’t wait for Buffy, Angel, and a few other treats.

Battle Below the Ground

Brainstorm! I was taking the subway into work this morning (on-site work, not the usual stay-at-home-in-my-underwear work) when I was reminded of a good idea I had a while back. This one-armed harmonica player carrying a paper coffee cup filled with change entered from the back of the car, playing the same three bars of eerily perky music over and over again. After he passed, a chubby Asian guy hawking batteries and cheap plastic toys approached from the front of the car. No one was happy about any of this, even though some change was thrown in the cup and batteries were purchased.

OK, so here’s the idea: subway Face-Off 2000! It would be a video game with two missions. You’d be some classic subway merchant or panhandler — the guy with no legs on the skateboard, the Asian battery guy, the woman with the sandwiches from the homeless shelter, the deranged lunatic, the doo-wop crew, the school-candy seller, the beligerent bum, the Islamic preacher with the incense and the big mouth, the break-dance troupe, the deaf guy with the sign-language cards, the one-armed harmonica player, the mother-son mariachi duo, etc. (I swear to god I have seen all of these, repeatedly) Anyway, you’d be one of these characters, and your mission would be to make it from one end of a ten-car subway to the other. Your goal would be to get as much money as possible from the exasperated or angry commuters and the terrified tourists. Your success would depend upon the desirability of your wares or the effectiveness/pitifulness of your schpiel. Along the way, though, you would also have to dodge the police and avoid pissing off any subway riders who might get in your face. The big challenge, though, would be the Face-Off: You enter a car from one side, and have to battle for dominance of the car with another panhandler/merchant who enters from the other. You naturally would run into a few of these on the whole train, as we all do. The two of you would have to battle to the death, probably with someone getting thrown onto the tracks. You win the battle with no points if you’re doing OK but your opponent flees the train at a station.

OK, that’s my idea. You read it here first and I have the documentation, so don’t try anything shady. Programmers, call me! Next time, I’ll tell you about Poetry slam! and stage Mother showdown!

This, That, Other Things

Oh god, it’s happening again. I’ll warn you all right now — you won’t be hearing much from me for a while. This is not a vacation from dealing with the website, this is just a hunch that I’m going to be sitting in my uncomfortable deskchair sweating bullets for a few days while I try to crank out a few projects before deadline. Here’s a few topics for you to mull over and e-mail me about in the meanwhile:

  • I suspected that X-Men wasn’t really that good a movie, but I was so pleased that didn’t fuck it up as much as they could that I wound up really enjoying it. Plus, they got Wolverine right, which was the most important thing in the movie. How much, though, did you have to choke back YOUR nerdy instincts because of the ways they played fast and loose with the continuity of the comic book? (For example, why were Iceman and Jubilee students at the same time in the movie? Why, the very idea…!)
  • New York may not be the best city in the world in everyone’s eyes, but it has its perks. I was riding the Metro in Washington, D.C., yesterday morning, and everyone just looked so boring. Hardly anyone cute or funky or insane in sight. What fun is that?
  • Is it the jinx effect that’s making my life so aggravating right now?
  • I caught about ten minutes of Sex in the City this weekend, a sequence in which Miranda and her impossibly sexy (because of the dork factor that I love so much) boyfriend and she were talking about the number of sexual partners they had. that’s always a thorny issue to bring up with people you date, isn’t it? I always worry that if I tell I may come across as a total trashcan, or some prude who’s passed up even more opportunities than I took. Not that I worry so much about what people think on this issue, but I have my own conflicted notions about whether or not I’ve been too free-wheeling over the last few years. Sometimes I think I have, but more often than that I just regret all the chances I’ve passed up over the years because I was feeling too prudish or too unattractive or too shy.

The Midsummer Round-Up

Woo Hoo! 11 days into July and I finally post! Yes, it’s true. I’m not dead. Hell, I haven’t even been assuming that anyone would notice. If I were really desperate for attention, I might pull a stunt like this, but thankfully I’m not.

I’ve had friends in town for the last couple of weeks, keeping me entertained as I finished up a huge project or two, so there’s been plenty of fun. And plenty of media consumption. some highlights:

  • Chicken Run saw it, liked it an awful lot, have sworn once again that Jane Horrocks will always make me happy and that Imelda staunton will never get all the respect that she deserves in this country.
  • Eddie agreed with me that Tony Shalhoub is one of the most underrated actors in Hollywood today. I can’t think of a single performance of his I haven’t loved.
  • Decline of Western Civilization, Part III saw it, thought it was great, realized once again that I was never angry enough to make a good punk. Of course, the kids interviewed in it seem more lost and apathetic than angry, but that made for a lot of interesting moments, believe it or not. The bands seemed angry, but the kids seemed like they were too beaten down to be that angry anymore. It was a nice take on the scene, focusing on the kids more than the music this time around. Very sad, and also very funny. It remended me, though, of how sexy I find those punk rock guys, even the crusty ones.
  • P.S. 1 is my new favorite place on earth. seriously. Great artwork, incredible building, no crowds. I want to live there. If you come to visit New York, let me know and I will drag you out to Long Island City so you can see it for yourself. If you come before september we can even try out the outdoor sauna.
  • I read the new issue of Paul Baker’s Handbag! Completely hilarious and brilliant, as ever. Paul, I still want to spend the rest of my life with you. Being best friends is fine, if that’s all I can get.

Oh yeah, I also managed to knock out a complete and total redesign of UltraSparky in a few moments of spare time.