godthedog

watched it all the way through tonight. you guys weren't kidding about flair going nuts at the end of the show, i don't think i've ever laughed harder at anything flair's ever done than that.

'the treasure of the sierra madre' - drags in places, but good stuff. 'poison' - weird as shit, but good stuff. 'the little shop of horrors' (original) - goofy, but good stuff.

post of the week. i disagree. the anal sex reference saves it from "god awful" status.

neutral milk hotel - "two-headed boy" cat power - "nude as the news"

i'm very excited about this. really. feel the excitement oozing from this post. feel it.

i've read some hemingway short fiction & i generally like it, but i see WAY too many young writers nowadays try to write like him, with their tight little sentences and their 2 or 3 laboriously chosen words that try to paint an entire picture. everything i read starts to feel the same.

educate me on joyce's poetry. from the way he wrote his prose, it seems that his poetry would either blow one's mind, or fail miserably. i was always afraid it would be the latter, as he appeared to be a prose writer at heart and doing his best when adapting things from other media to prose (like poetry and drama), rather than when writing firmly within those media. the dramatic chapter of 'ulysses' profoundly affected the way i look at literature and the world around me, but the actual play he wrote, 'exiles', is pretty underwhelming. topic at hand...poetry is something i can study and appreciate and examine, but the poems that have actually moved me were always far and few between, so i don't read much of it at all. most of the stuff i've studied in school i generally liked (dickinson, whitman, williams), and i've got MAD love for "the hollow men" and especially "the waste land." there's a friend of mine from drama who writes a lot of poetry, and some of that i dig. i dabble in writing it a VERY little bit, but it always makes me feel like a fraud to try to write a poem when it's something i really know jack shit about (and i'm a firm believer in ezra pound's method/credo that you need an extensive understanding of any medium you're working in).

very early this morning: 'singles'. good enough, and i enjoyed the seattle scene cameos, but it just didn't gel together very well & didn't have that same cameron crowe romantic magic. the characters weren't very well-drawn or deep, and i couldn't bring myself to care about them as much as, say, lloyd dobler or jerry maguire.

woo hoo, yet another chance for me to pimp lynyrd skynyrd's modern patriotic classic, "red, white and blue." and considering who wrote it, dylan's "gotta serve somebody" is pretty god damn bad. "You may be an ambassador to England or France, You may like to gamble, you might like to dance, You may be the heavyweight champion of the world, You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls "But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed You're gonna have to serve somebody, Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord But you're gonna have to serve somebody." and it goes on like that for SIX MORE DAMN VERSES. "masters of war" it is not. while i'm at it, i'll throw in another lame ass song by a great songwriter, lennon's "crippled inside," which goes like: You can shine your shoes and wear a suit You can comb your hair and look quite cute You can hide your face behind a smile One thing you can't hide Is when you're crippled inside You can wear a mask and paint your face You can call yourself the human race You can wear a collar and a tie One thing you can't hide Is when you're crippled inside and so on.

picking up on the arthur miller references, i LOATHE that man's dialogue. those lines are SO FUCKING REDUNDANT AND CIRCULAR, it's impossible to memorize. my senior year of high school i played the dad in 'all my sons' and i remember in one exchange at the end of act II my lines went like: "She's out of her mind." "What's the matter with you?" "What's the matter with you, what the hell's the matter with you?" "She's out of her mind!" it made me want to blow my brains out (which, appropriately enough, i got to do at the end of the play). musicals are cool enough. they've got their good shows & their bad shows, like any genre. and with the right attitude (i.e., goof around and not give a shit), they're a lot of fun to act in. i remember giving my drama teacher an aneurysm during 'anything goes' with a character named mrs harcourt onstage & we improvised a bit where i wouldn't stop calling her "mrs hardcore." i also improvised a bit where i prostituted some of my female crew members to a stowaway. i got away with that one for 3 nights before the teacher caught that one. and currently i'm playing the head bank robber in a journalism student's video project. i get to hold a condom wrapper in front of my girlfriend's face and say coldly, "I'm allergic to this brand." we start shooting tomorrow morning.

lynyrd skynyrd. see my post in "most hated songs". not only that, but aside from the end of "freebird" everything i've heard by them sounds like a bland glorified bar band.

off the top of my head, i'd like to add "red, white and blue" by lynyrd skynyrd. when i first heard this song, it came out not too long after "have you forgotten", and, hearing it on a rock station, i thought it was some unknown band doing a parody of that song. and holy shit was it funny. with lyrics like "we love our families, we love our kids/you know it's love that makes us all so rich...if they don't like it they can just get the hell out", how can they NOT be trying to be bad? those lyrics are spinal tap-like in their brilliant intentional badness, putting dumbass horribly trite songs like "have you forgotten" firmly in their place. then a few months later, i found out that the song was by lynyrd skynyrd. and that they weren't kidding, the song was just that bad. i still find the song funny, but in a more sad and pathetic way.

joni mitchell - 'blue' i would listen to this on my mom's turntable when i was a kid, decided to get my own copy of it yesterday. some of the more upbeat stuff doesn't quite work (like "carey"), but when she gets somber & tender it's beautiful.

is Fog of War out on dvd yet?? Or did ya steal it? ya dirty bastard in light of the oscars, it's getting a theatrical run here in athens (which will probably be VERY short-lived). yes.

neutral milk hotel - 'the aeroplane over the sea' (i think that's the title anyway). haven't listened to it all the way through, but i dig "two-headed boy" something fierce. also today i found, i kid not, a copy of shakespeare's 'king lear' on vinyl today. yes, a radio adaptation of the complete play, on four discs. it cost $8.

so far... last half of 'a woman under the influence'. 30-40 minutes of very good stuff, but oh my god do the other 2 hours ever suck. first half of 'general idi amin dada'. so far, interesting but not very engaging. will probably finish it later tonight. 'the fog of war'. damn good movie, but i wouldn't expect anything less from errol morris with such a rich and interesting subject. HIGHLY recommend it.

wow. my birthday is one day after ricky steamboat's. (well...2 days this year, but that's an anomaly.) that just made my day. if i wasn't so busy today, i'd break out the luger or hollywood blondes match in his honor.

"fun to sing along with in the car" edition: 1. beatles - "oh! darling" 2. prince - "kiss" 3. rolling stones - "bitch" 4. bonnie tyler - "total eclipse of the heart" 5. ween - "let me lick your pussy"

speaking of which, i heard "in a silent way" on the campus radio station this afternoon. i marked the fuck out, and i thought of you. in that order. i've also wondered what kind of reaction would be provoked if someone played coltrane's "ascension" on the air in its entireity.

"goodbye earl," by the dixie chicks. no contest at all. recently i also heard "gotta serve somebody" by bob dylan. that has to be the 'godfather III' of the dylan catalog, it made me want to cry. i don't even want to KNOW what shit that man was putting out in the 80s.

what. the. fuck. but i do like the classy gesture of saluting karl malden, who never gets any recognition.

speaking as a recently converted pixies fan, 'surfer rosa' was a much better entry point with the rocking really hard & the catchiness & what not, even though 'doolittle' is overall a stronger album.

i love that no-sell. the man landed right on his fucking neck, then got right back up. iti don't consider it business-exposing when you clearly see how much the move hurts, and that shit looked scary.

'forrest gump'. one of my best friends in high school was named jenny, and i swear every fucking guy who either hung out with her or tried to get her attention would say "why don't you love me, jenny? i am not a smart man, but i know what love is."

some say there is, but the beatles won it. so i give it a no.