is a blog by Brendan
“The sky over the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
In 1984, that meant the gray fuzz of static; in 2007, it mostly means the lurid royal blue that modern TVs automatically substitute when they don’t get a signal. Most cultivars of apple at the grocery are now red and green, rather than bright red. Peppered moths are now peppered again, instead of black (and were once black instead of peppered).
Are there other colors-by-reference that have changed in living memory?
I do this too, but nobody’s ever noticed. I do it a lot less when I have my headphones on.
bloody_peasants wrote an actual Quantum Fox story! I like it much better than any of its Anacrusis predecessors.
I finally watched Primer, with the expected result.
I guess I’m going to read the plot breakdown before I watch it again (yes, of course it’s on Internet; no, I’m not going to link to it). Mom claims that catch-what-you-can plots are the only kind I like, which is not quite true: I also like plots where good people do their best to destroy each other for perfectly good reasons. And romantic comedies.
Everybody compared Primer to Memento, but I think Primer is superior–both by its refusal to spell things out and by the fact that it doesn’t rely on a weird structure to screw with you. Rethinking a lot of things about structure, lately.
Why should I update when I have Stephen to sing my praises in microfiction and Paint?
“There was once a small cat named Brendan Adkins. He lived a happy life in a happy house with his happy cat cousins and happy dog friends. Everything was great, all the time, every day. Little Brendan Adkins had kitty litter and yarn and a small rubber mouse to play with. He had everything!
Things continued on in this extremely pleasant fashion until one day, when their owner (a small Italian man whom Brendan had always suspected of being involved in the mafia, but felt guilty and prejudiced because of it) got trashed on horse and fed all the dogs antifreeze.”
Dumber than Gladiator; much dumber than Braveheart. Still less dumb than Sin City.
Also, really loud.
I made empanadas! They looked like regurgitated horseshoe crabs. They tasted pretty good!
Holly launched her food blog! Yay! You have to understand that these aren’t fake foods covered in shellac and developing fluid: these are real things that I get to help eat. That alone, so far, has been worth the trip.
Of course, now it’s my night to cook and I am experiencing more stage fright than ever did on an actual stage. It’s not as if I’m trying to live up to the house standard. I just want to avoid the part of The Birdcage where they all take one sip in unison and then quietly, carefully, put their spoons back down.
Sometimes things I write have weird consequences.
I have weird feelings about this movie. I first watched it at GSP, almost ten years ago, when HOLY SHIT TEN YEARS I’M OLD
Let’s try that again. I watched it and I thought it was hilarious, which was remarkable in itself, given my stupid prejudice against anything made before 1981. In 1998 that was the kind of thing you thought about it. On vacation in summer 2000, we watched it get named the funniest American film ever and I pretty much agreed (given AFI’s own stupid but inevitable prejudices). Since then I’ve only trotted it out to prove that yes, I do like something made before I was born.
I watched it again last night with Holly and Kevan, neither of whom had seen it before. Now I’m all jumbled.
There are a lot of one-liners, but does that make a funny movie? I think improv training, the Daily Show and Arrested Development have done something to my humor palate such that those didn’t satisfy me. So I didn’t laugh much at it. But I did find it stunningly subversive.
Now, was it subversive when it was released? Certainly–it helped end the Production Code–but not in the way I’m thinking. A lot of the jokes now can be read as sly commentary on gay marriage, “cures” for homosexuality, and, er, Marilyn Monroe’s death. I don’t know if I’m reaching too far to do that. An English major would say no, but I got my degree in theatre.