The Early Years (2002-2005)

Dir. Jonathan Demme, 2002 A French New Wave homage, full of frenetic hand-held work which at one point moved from cool Godard-style work to just headache-inducing. But awful charming, and I like its view of Paris, all seedy and multi-culti. Plus, Thandie Newton is incandescent.

Overrated - mojitos, ___tinis, merlot - J-Lo’s from-the-block cred - the supposed underratedness of rap-rock bands - Sam Mendes - Heath Ledger - Anthony Lane - “Road to Perdition”, the movie - “Everyone Loves Raymond” - “Six Feet Under” - Scotland - Carrie - wins by starting pitchers - interleague baseball - the NBA salary cap - the amount of guilty pleasure one can derive from reality shows - the New York Times’ liberal bias - William Safire - Cary Tennis as chronicler of generations - “I Don’t Know How She Does It” - the hotness of the Bush twins - the freakiness of Bing-Bowie’s “Little Drummer Boy” - politically incorrect humour - pronouncing ‘Target’ with a soft ‘g’ - spelling ‘America’ with any number of ‘k’s - Tom Tomorrow - China - “Best (or worst) lie I’ve ever told” - Simon Cowell’s heartlessness - the staying power of “terror sex” - the sincerity of Strom’s renunciation of 1948 - Sean Combs, fashion designer - headlines with the phrase “____ and the City” - Industrial Light and Magic - the ‘Dolby Digital experience’ effects - the sex appeal of Dubya Underrated - Manhattans, Pimm’s, pinot grigio - “ti esrever dna ti pilf nwod gnaht ym tup” - the Datsuns, the Leaves - the Weitz brothers - Charlie Hunnam - David Denby - “Possession”, the movie - “Buffy” - “Gilmore Girls” - Wales - Miranda - on-base percentage - the wild card in baseball - Tomasz Radzinski - pitchers under 6 feet - Voice Over Internet Protocol - Dahlia Lithwick from Slate - the Ethicist - Cary Tennis as advice columnist - “The Nanny Diaries” - the hotness of the Olsen twins - “Last Christmas” - dirty jokes - saying “23 skidoo!” - anachronistic slang… “heavens to Betsy!” - the Boondocks - Taiwan - “_____ is sexy; ______ is sexier” - Paula Abdul’s niceness - the euro - water as a political issue - the sound of “Mills/McCartney” vs “McCartney/Mills” - clubbing in the 80s - WETA vfx - the THX sound - the sex appeal of John Major, apparently

R.I.P. Joe Strummer.

Here’s a good Chicago magazine piece about rock criticism. Mmm, Christgau worship. Speaking of which, here’s my traditional end-of-year lists. Like Michael Kinsley, I could never be a completist - we only have so much time, and I can’t devote as much of it to listening as I did back in college days. And I don’t get promos all the time anymore! So I admit I still haven’t got round to listening to the Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots or David Gray’s A New Day At Midnight. But of what I did get to hear this year, this is what moved me:

Triangulation Are people the sum of their mailing lists? What would your picture of me be if all you knew was that these were the lists I’m subscribed to? Bar None

Downtown Someone squash the Ketchup Song. Please. Anyway, so I’m back from Kuala Lumpur. Ethical dilemma: so DVD piracy is rampant in Malaysia and you can get most movies there - even the latest ones like Solaris, which hasn’t even come to the screens around here - for about RM10 (roughly S$5 or US$3). This is intellectual theft, of course. But at the same time, it’s often the only source of indie films in the region - films like Auto Focus or The Rules of Attraction (Dawson as psychopath!) probably won’t make it to the cineplexes or the video store. Or they’ll play the film fest circuit, which means I’ll have to wait till next year. Oh, I know it’s economics - the Picturehouse, my city’s attempt at an arthouse cinema, had to shut down eventually. But it still creates a moral morass.

I continue to be fascinated with the topic of how Americans perceive their countries of ethnic origin, regardless of how far in the past that origin was: how the Irish-Americans in Boston, for instance, find those new 20-something Irish migrants odd because these young Irish people don’t come from a land of poverty and of agriculture, but from a dynamic economy that’s very urban. (See the entry for “Foreign-Born Irish” in this Southie slang guide.) That was the redeeming part of The Guru, that Jim Mistry-Heather Graham film, for me I think: I liked how the Americans kept insisting on the Indian’s mysticism, when really he was brought up on Grease.

I love websites that exist for the purpose of debunking. Here’s =W=/Not =W= a site that points out all the fake Weezer songs lying around the file-sharing services. I don’t know which I think is worse, ignorance (people who throw a Weezer tag onto random songs) or duplicity (obscure garage bands who tag their songs as Weezer ones).

So The Harvard Crimson merged the Arts section back into the magazine (FM) section. Sigh. It was a good run while it lasted. I always thought one of the great things about the Crimson was that it could maintain separate Arts and Magazine sections. Look at the New York Times home page - which comes first? But of course I’m biased!

Sarah Silverman; Woody Allen as standup comic; Julie Christie; Michael Caine; Josie Lawrence and Tony Slattery on Whose Line Is It Anyway?; Paul Krassner, as always; “lay me down in sheets of linen”; the reappearance of David Byrne; old Black Box Recorder; Ryan Adams singing Gram Parsons; the White Stripes.

Lots of peeves people have about English as it’s written and spoken on this fair isle are fairly common. and fairly well-known. Some bother me (using “would” instead of “will” - ugh!) and some don’t (the inability to pronounce either of the “th” sounds). But these are my own peeves, or at least ones I haven’t heard anyone else complain about yet:

So I’ve been laid up with commitments over the last month and a half, which was topped off by the fact that I got my knuckle broken (my 2nd metacarpal, for the anatomically-inclined). AND THAT’S MY EXCUSE! But seriously, adult-onset left-handedness has been an interesting experience for me. :) Especially since before all this happened I was working on a story about a right-handed boy who wanted to pitch left-handed.

Does anyone else get upset that there’s a major building in Singapore named Millenia Walk? Has someone done ever pointed out that there should be two “N"s in the name?

Also, I love this - quoted in the same context as Nabokov on the syllabus to an Austen course! Thanks, of course, to subscribing to an Austen e-mail list about 6 years ago. Not claiming any literary genius for myself.

Just watched England beat Argentina with a lovely (or at least adequate) display… takes me back to being in that pub in Chester in ‘98, Beckham being sent off, Batty missing the kick, grown men crying on the streets of the town. The emotional intensity of that evening I suppose is adequate justification for supporting England, besides my usual predilection for supporting decent underdogs - i.e. teams that are good enough but never quite go all the way. Like the Sox.

An old post from my old home page: Best soundtrack ever: you know, Saturday Night Fever is pretty damn good, and i’m not sure whether i’ll pick Superfly over it. i suppose if i were seeking to maintain cred, i would, but the five-song run that is “Stayin’ Alive” / “How Deep Is Your Love” / “Night Fever” / “More Than a Woman” / “If I Can’t Have You” is hard to argue with. and i have a tendency to think that songs made for dancing get the short end of the stick, so i’ll vote for them.

I can’t believe I watched Spider-Man twice in one week. But it was way more fun than an event movie has any right to be, which seems to prove to me that the smart thing to do is not throw $25 million at Arnold and instead spread the wealth on solid character actors. That scene where Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane has just kissed Spiderman and he’s shunting off somewhere is just so good - you can see her girlish excitement at this new guy in her life. As is the slightly teasing tone in Tobey Maguire’s voice when he drops her off and identifies himself as “your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man”. It’s interesting to see the parallels to “Smallville” - geeky teenager trying to get a handle on his new superpowers, awkward relationship to the girl, etc etc.

All right, this statement reps my first step into blogging, which means I’ve run out of time to nicely format my own HTML just for my thoughts. Such a pity.