We didn’t actually get to see Neko Case. It turns out that nobody else wanted to go, and neither Maria nor I owns a “car.” We’ll be at the New Pornographers show in August, though.
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The first Anacrusis ad ever is running at Blank Label and its principal sites for the minimum of 20,000 pageviews. Judging by the run length of other ads I’ve seen on the site, they burn through that pretty quick.
The fact that I am paying to persuade people to come and look at something else I pay to make available is not lost on me. I always said I wouldn’t advertise for my work until I thought it was good enough for anyone to read it and like it. I held true to that.
OKAY SO. The first Sad And Happy Movie Day is tentatively scheduled for Saturday, June 25th, at… my apartment. Which needs to have a cool name for when it functions as a clubhouse. Maria, why don’t we have a cool clubhouse name for our apartment?
We hit play at 1 pm, so get there earlier if you want to kibitz. We will be watching (or, in Ian’s parlance, “reading”) City of God and Shaolin Soccer. Popcorn will be provided, but you’re on your own for drinks and candy. You may also want to bring one of those folding camp chairs, if you have one; as we discovered this past Tuesday, seating is limited.
You should come!
Possible lineup for the one after this: What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Hackers?
“It’s a black… tank!”
I have seen Batman Begins, and you most likely haven’t, so this recommendation holds some temporary value:
You need to see Batman Begins.
Operation Batman on the DAMN IMAX went off fairly hitchless last night, and I think all eleven (!) of my companions enjoyed the movie as much as I did. The tickets were a couple bucks more, and the screen wasn’t as big as your typical museum IMAX, but the sound was excellent and–this is huge–we only had to sit through one preview and no commercials, not even the one with those idiots from Two and a Half Men. I’d pay two dollars extra any day for that.
Go see Batman Begins.
Aikido Bishops
The problem with chess as the universal metaphor for conflict–you know, like in every movie ever–is that there’s no nonviolent way to play.
I stated in an Anacrusis LJ feed comment-thread, last week, that Memento had more structural influence on my writing than basically anything ever. I realized later that that’s not exactly true; it did have a lot of influence, but before I saw Memento I was reading Margaret Atwood. Cat’s Eye, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake and Lady Oracle are all shuffle-structured books, although they tend to start at middle / beginning and finish at end / middle (whereas Memento starts at the beginning / end and ends at middle / middle). Orson Scott Card does a lot of shuffling within the corpus of The Worthing Saga, too; I actually read that in high school, so I guess it was really my first exposure to the style.
Of course, that’s omitting the randomly jumbled reruns of cartoons I watched as a kid, which seemed to come from different seasons at random–not that Thundercats drove a terribly epic tale, but the cast (to my perception) did expand and shrink on a daily basis. They weren’t doing it on purpose, though.
I’m not sure what single factor determines my fascination with these stories. My borderline ADD is certainly involved, which doesn’t imply a negative context: there’s something important and powerful about screwing with linearity, about building a narrative out of noncontiguous events. It makes individual elements of a story stronger, for one thing; there’s no room for laziness when every page has to give you something to take back to the larger structure. (Note that this is also one of the big reasons I like word-count fiction so much.)
I’m about a week late on this, but as somebody who’s been singing the “Clear Channel Sucks” song since 2001, I was fascinated to learn that they actually created a fake “anti-corporate” station in order to win back the listeners they lost by… being corporate. If there is any more flagrant evidence of a harmful and necrotic monopoly extant, I’d love to see it. What’s next? Ticketmaster sponsoring fake scalpers?
It occurs to me that they might already do that.
Anyway, there’s always Indy if you want your own interweb radio station that learns what you like. I can’t give it a glowing-eyes four-thumbs recommendation because, well, most of the music it plays is by people who wanted to get signed and couldn’t. Not all, but most. Still, I’m going to keep using it and see how good its collaborative filter gets; I’ll let you know if it does ever cross that golden threshold.