Sunday, May 22, 2011
I Shame the Internet: Personal Updates and Horrible Jokes
It occurs to me that, though I’m a bit behind (but catching up!) on my actual creative-type writing, I do have plenty to report - even discounting the stuff I’m not going to talk about, such as, for example, the crazy crap that’s raining down from our governing body at work. No, crazy governance crap-rain is not where we’re going with this blog. Not today, anyways. So let’s take a step back and to the right, and see what we’ve been up to apart from that. Featured today: effluvium and fripperies. Hang onto your frippery-effluvium hat, because it’s fixing to pour.
A LIST: Summaries of Thomas the Train Engine Programs Available on Comcast On-Demand a Few Months Ago. Each episode contains five delightful nuggets of animated facially-equipped trains, and these were the five that the powers that be had lined up for our delectation:
* Beauty / Dog / Engine
* Gallant / Rescue / Step
* Tender / Buggy / Heroes
* Toad / Fish / Attract
* Trucks / Rock / House
Every one of these is a sublime writing prompt. So get off your tender buggy hero and start writing. Grand prize is free lifetime access to this blog. Stop whining, it’s already wrapped.
ITEM - Movies I recently saw: HPVIIpt1 (the Deathly, pre-Hallowed bits), and Thor. Both were decent recapitulations of big cool stories. Anthony Hopkins seemed radically underutilized in Thor; much of his work seemed to consist of replicating Odinsleep and acting as if he were capable of having fathered a massive slab of beefcake, which I sort of doubt, no disrespect Tony but let’s be honest with each other. The post-credits teaser for the Avengers was fun but most of the audience had already left the theater. Princess Amidala was pretty out of place but I liked how she kept whacking Thor with her truck, so I give her a pass. HPVIIpt1 was all I could have expected of it, but since I recently also saw The King’s Speech it was disconcerting to see the Queen Mother with such a poor coiffure and apologetically bad teeth. Also it seems that the cook from the new Upstairs Downstairs got et by a snake, which seemed thematically consistent and therefore meritorious. I knew as I was re-reading the text not long ago that I’d have trouble getting emotional for the scene where Harry tenderly lays to rest a bug-eyed plastic doll, so I sort of had to let that slip. Overall, if I split the $12 I spent on Thor between both flicks (which I can do thanks to my recent acquisition of a Netflix stream on my new Tivo, and the consequent major uptick in the number of movies I view), it was worth both the time and money to see them both.
Oh, on further research it turns out Anne Reid was the cook in U-D and Hazel Douglas was in HPVIIpt1. So that tanks it for me. Stupid wizards.
A-NOTHER LIST: Norma-Heroes. Having seen The Mighty Thor and a variety of other superhero movies lately I have been thinking of heroes who are not super. Here’s a list of the most obvious ones:
* Ironing Man
* Launder Woman
* The Credible Hulk
* The Fan-Fiction 4
* The Flush
* The Amazing Snyderman
* The Tidy Thor
* The Human Porch
* The Silver Bursar
* Bathman
* Souperman
* The Inedible Bulk, which I recognize is a double-up on Big Greenie but I couldn’t choose between them. I’m sure there are more to be thunk of but I could feel my geek quotient rising to dangerous levels by mere virtue of my preparing a blog post about funny superhero names. If I geeked out completely I’d lose mega charisma points. O wot a giveaway.
ACTIVITIES - The Musical Arts: I rarely get out to see live music but I loaded up with present and future tunes during the past week. Present tunes were represented by a Knitters concert at the GAMH, which I heard about the very afternoon it was going down and still was agile enough to attend with my two good friends Dave and Jon. It was a good long show where the band played every song of theirs I love except for Born to Be Wild, but since they shredded so hard on Rock Island Line I can cut some slack. Plus Dry River, Long Chain, and Burning House of Love, and innumerable others; and we got standing-room on the floor about 25 feet from Exene, John Doe AND Dave Alvin, who is so cool I could use him to keep biological samples fresh. And the GAMH is always a great place to see a show. Visual blandishments:
The marquee. The theater is next door to SF’s most explicit all-nude-girls-on-stage theater, which is really saying something in this town, but the GAMH hasn’t featured hookers since prohibition. Good times.
..
The ceiling of the bathroom foyer off the main entrance. This, in special recognition of all those who went through that Project Object incident with me, and remember any part of it. I can’t say I’d want to do that again, but in retrospect I’m glad I can say it’s part of my personal experiences. Man this dance hall has a lot of memories, and even some pungent gaps therein, and I’m speaking only for myself.
Apart from the Knitters show, which was over and done less than 12 hours between my learning of it and my being able to view it only in the rear-view mirror of memory, I’ve got tickets now for a concert I can anticipate for five months: in October, The Musical Box will be bringing its Lamb Lies Down show to San Francisco. The Lamb is my favorite Genesis album, and I’ll clarify right up front that I only ever listened to the version of Genesis that was fronted by Peter Gabriel. The Phil Collins pop juggernaut never made any impression on me, but the earlier albums like Foxtrot and Selling England by the Pound and such are such wonderful, rich albums… and the Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is the king among them, a two-LP magnum opus with a single, continuous (if sometimes somewhat incoherent) storyline. I listened to it for four days in a row when I discovered it in college and still have pretty much every note memorized - it just doesn’t get old for me. The original concert series for the album featured about 1500 projection slides and lots of costumes and weird set constructions. The Musical Box has licensed all of this from the band and replicates the original stage show note for note and slide for slide, with the advantage of using modern technology to avoid the glitches that hindered the original concert series. I got about a dozen friends interested in getting tix and we all went on line to place orders at the very moment they went on sale. I’m a little concerned that my first row orchestra pit seats may be too close, but I am prepared to deal with it. You can come back for the review in October. I’ll just be overanticipating it till then, which I will try to keep to myself.
GIRD YOUR LOINS - AN HILARIOUS JOKE: I was visiting the headquarters of the almond factory and asked to see the facility where they soak the almonds in water and then strip off their skins to make them tender and mild-tasting. “Oh, sorry,” they told me, “they only do that in our blanch office.” DAMMIT THAT IS HILARIOUS. Oh my reputation.
Next up: some damn thing or other. I’ve got a couple bits of this and that in the works. Might be worth it to come back and see. I mean, if you’re not chicken. Except for you actual chickens out there. It’s always nice to have you free-ranging my way. If you know what I mean. And if you do, fill me in, k? The comments are open and I do find it a bit confusing myself sometimes.
Bonus Photo:
A side of the San Fran Cable Cars most people don’t see - the actual cable, being spun by massive iron wheels at 15 mph under the city street. Cuz I thought it was cool and there’s no one here to stop me.
