Ed Wood’s last film, Necromania, long thought lost, has been found and released on DVD. Nick Paumgarten gives the naughty details in his article in the New Yorker. Rudolph Grey, who wrote the Wood biography, Nightmare of Ecstasy, on which Tim Burton based his biopic, discovered the negative in an LA warehouse. [via the Two Blowhards]
Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, the best day of the year to shop. We didn’t venture out until half past four. But we were going into the belly of the beast: Trader Joe’s. When the powers that be redid the El Cerrito Plaza shopping center, they ensured more stores than parking places. In the TJ quadrant this works out like gangbusters. Creeping along looking for a space, dodging abandoned yet moving shopping carts and pissed off grandmas, I listened to the lead singer of Cake being interviewed on NPR. The band had finally released an album, Pressure Chief, after a couple or three years. I’ve liked their psychedelie nouvelle ever since hearing Italian Leather Sofa sometime in the last millennium. That and the pleasant moment at the end of a Sopranos episode with Frank Sinatra as credit music. [Aside about the scene ending, the music kicking, and the credits rolling chez Filmbrain] Yesterday, while making the cranberry sauce for Erling and Lynne’s Thanskgiving, I listened to a Blondie CD that V. had picked up recently. Parallel Lines, copyright 1978, a quarter of a century ago. More time had elapsed since the New Wave-Punk era and now than between my mom’s Broadway show tune 45s and my listening to them as a kid on a windup Victrola. “Strange how potent cheap music is,” says Amanda in Noel Coward’s Private Lives. Meanwhile, Alan is preparing his psychedelic breakfast, and Crass is asking How Does It Feel to Be the Mother of a Thousand Dead.
It’s like a car crash happening on my street
Broken bodies at my feet
And sirens on the way
They’re too late
’Cause nobody’s going to save us
We’re a rubbernecker’s dream
We’re burning gasoline
Go take your economy car and your suitcase
Take your psycho little dogs
Take it all away
And go[Cake. 2004. Take It All Away (on Pressure Chief)]
There I was, at work on Wednesday mid-afternoon. All the native-born and long-time green card holders had decamped earlier that day or had never made it in, but there I was sitting with a Canadian, a Slovak, and an East German—programmers all—trying to describe the typical American Thanksgiving. Well, there’s too much food, it’s too bland, sports and parades on the TV, and people travel from afar to rekindle animosities dormant since last year. (At least that’s how most of my friends have described it to me.) Oh, yes, and the next day is the official first day of Xmas shopping. Watch out! But what about the story of the first Thanksgiving with the Native Americans and the Puritans? Too bad my office mate had elected not to come in today. As a Cayuga he might have shared his non-European POV with us. I never got to go to a traditional Thanksgiving meal like you see in the Norman Rockwell paintings until I was around thirty-something. You mean not everybody has roast chicken and pasta with pesto for Turkey Day? But surely, home-made ravioli with tocco sauce are consumed. No? Strange, maybe even weird. That leads up to what I’m doing today: going to a soi disant Orphans’ Thanksgiving. Though, V. & I are legally orphans, I think our hosts, Erling & Lynne still have a couple of DNA-donors kicking it around some place. I’ll make the cranberry sauce, and V.’ll make the wild rice stuffing.
Raya’s Dungeon has got to be the strangest prescriptivist website I’ve ever run across. While I personally like the idea of a grammatical dominatrix, Raya and her three chapters (so far) may not be for everybody.
Don’t be fooled by outward appearances. This is not your usual glimpse into the convolutions of the English language. This is, as the name implies, a dungeon. And Raya is the cruel dungeon mistress. If you enter these depths, you will be stretched on the rack of nouns and adverbs, pierced by the darts of exclamation marks and *shudder* commas. You will be impaled upon the prongs of teasers and *gasp* voice. You will be tortured by allusions to redundancy and possession ... yes, possession. I have warned you. Enter these halls at your own peril. If you survive, you may emerge, pale and shaken (by laughter), possessed by a new knowledge that might, just might, limber your tongue and jumpstart your pen.
I particularly like the alternate usage of delimiting asterisks instead of <b> or <strong> tags. She also seems, er, well, like totally addicted to ellipses, which don’t really mark the omission of any words per se, but are kind of like super-commas. Her site is being hosted by an MMORPG site.
There’s been a bunch of miscellanea building up on the blogging back boiler, but it’s getting harder and harder to blog these days. Recently, we rented In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-Wai. Every since seeing Wong’s Chungking Express, I’ve been a fan. The sixties decor seemed especially alien in the Hong Kong apartments and offices, and Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung are happy together. It’s one of the western pop songs that Wong uses that’s stuck with me: Nat King Cole singing Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps in Spanish (Quizas, Quizas, Quizas). This song came back to haunt me late on Saturday night. I’d just joined a couple of friend in the Mission district of San Francisco, first to hear Richard Friedman’s sound design for Threads at the ODC Theater. It was a fantastic show. Before it, we’d eaten at a Vietnamese restaurant, Thanh Tam II, and afterwards we had ice cream at Mitchell’s. Hmm. But the song: turns out that the local PBS channel is showing a British sitcom on late on Saturday nights. And the theme music for Coupling is Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps. The show is a mix of Seinfeld, Friends, and Frasier. I watched two episodes from the first season. I had not heard of it, and I had missed (thankfully) the American remake which lasted (mercifully) four episodes. On Friday, at work, Erling and Lynne called me up from Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse in NYC. They and everybody else in the place were having a bunch of fun. The Simpsons has just entered its 16th season, and Thomas Pynchon dropped by again to make some bad puns with two of his book titles.
I’m confused. Bush has a mandate with, er, from America. He won the election, but the Right’s still complaining like it’s 1999. Here’s the latest from a not-so-compassionate conservative:
- BUSH USA is predominantly white; devoutly Christian (mostly Protestant); openly, vigorously heterosexual; an open land of single-family homes and ranches; economically sound (except for a few farms), but not drunk with cyberworld business development, and mainly English-speaking, with a predilection for respectfully uttering “yes, ma’am” and “yes, sir.”
- GORE/KERRY USA is ethnically diverse; multi-religious, irreligious or nastily antireligious; more sexually liberated (if not in actual practice, certainly in attitude); awash with condo canyons and other high-end real estate bordered by sprawling, squalid public housing or neglected private homes, decidedly short of middle-class neighborhoods; both high tech and oddly primitive in its commerce; very artsy, and Babelesque, with abnormally loud speakers.
[Declaration of Expulsion in Human Events Online via Chicken or Beef?
Does the author think that proposing an ideological civil war is really the solution? Is this what Bush meant by starting the healing? The country is almost evenly divided between people who voted for Bush and those who voted for Kerry. White and Protestant, what happened to the Anglo-Saxons over the last century? But still anglophone and there’s no need for those loud speakers of Babelese. Sad and strange, it’s going to be a long four years.
Well, the US presidential election is done and over with, and now we can all return to language, poetry, and a creeping malaise.
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity,
heavily thickening to empire
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out,
and the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit,
the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness
and decadence; and home to the mother.
You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good,
be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance
from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s
feet there are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man,
a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught—
they say—God, when he walked on earth.[Robinson Jeffers. Shine, Perishing Republic]
A new book arrived in the post on Friday. It consists of reprints of articles from the first thirty years of Verbatim: The Language Quarterly. On Saturday, I finally got to crack it open, and read this:
When someone starts complaining to me about grammar, I listen intently. Not so much because I am entranced by yet another rant about the declining grammaticality of speaking and writing today, but because I am sure to hear an error in the speech of the ranter. It’s almost inevitable. English is a slippery divil; the rules are lagging far behind the caravan, and the inmates are not only running the asylum, they’re instituting managed care and turning a stupendous profit. English is messy, uninhibited, sprawling, and sloppy. That’s what I like about it. It’s a miracle when a good stylist can take the unmangeable tangle that is our language and craft a sparkling , coherent, evocative sentence out of it. In Verbatim, we believe that good writers are good writers nnot because of the rules of English, but in spite of them.
[Erin McKean. 2001. Verbatim: From the Bawdy to the Sublime, the Best Writing on Language for Word Lovers, Grammar Mavens, and Armchair Linguists, p.1.]
Lovely. It makes a good companion piece to Hall’s Leave Your Language Alone! which I have been re-reading recently. I do so love the intersection of humor and lingusitics.
What is it about kidney stones? [via the eyes have it] First Laura had them, and then the blogroll at Eye of the Goof pointed me at them.
This also in, regarding eyes:
Joachim Wittbrodt of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, and his colleagues have found that Platynereis has rhabdomeric receptors in its tiny eyes, and ciliary cells in its equally tiny brain. The ciliary cells perhaps regulate its daily activity cycle by sensing light, Wittbrodt guesses. “We think they are related to circadian rhythms. We have found that there is a direct connection to the area used for locomotion.”
From Nature [via As It Happens]
Some great election statistics maps out there. [thanks to Kerim at Keywords]
Just heard Bill Shatner (and thanks to MrBaliHai for a big dose of Shat the other day) singing the Pulp hit Common People, backed up by Joe Jackson (chorus) and Ben Folds (music). Well, OK, he doesn’t actually sing it, but he declaims it real swell. Won’t replace Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds or Tambourine Man on the old Archos jukebox, but ... Perhaps it’s a new national anthem for a new term? Bill’s got a new album called Has Been. Here’s a review.