| One Week in the Mountains |
I’m going on vacation for a week. I’ll be in Tennessee at The Appalachian Institute of Jurassic Being and Nothingness. I’ll fill you all in when I get back! Until then, enjoy surfing through Cyberspace without me! |
|
|
I like to dance. I wouldn’t say I’m “good” at dancing, and neither will I feign humility by dubbing myself a “bad” dancer. Can’t we just do away with such arbitrary dichotomies? But I think it’s not overly self-aggrandizing to call my dancing style an entertaining one. Regardless of what people think of my seismic spasms, I have fun when I’m flailing about, and that’s all that matters. Below, you will find two videos that document a wide range of my bodily movements. On the left, I’m a robot performing a “tragic love/hate story” with my mad scientist master. My slick, sensual co-star Alex runs the blog Meccanik Dancing, a weekly chronicle of thrilling dance routines filmed in his bedroom. On the right, I’m a pixelated electronic rock star spinning behind a turntable in a British cell phone commercial. Try and spot my blurry performance! You can read more about that strange experience in an earlier post that featured a teal blazer and a horrifying haircut. For bonus points, check out my 2005 submission to Learning to Love You More, the Miranda July/Harrell Fletcher cyberspace art project that has recently been made into an IRL book. I made a video of myself dancing for one of the many participatory assignments that comprise the site. You can also see me dancing in the streets of Echo Park for a Lavender Diamond video. Hey, I’ve got a pretty impressive resume here– Cirque Du Soleil, here I come! |
|
I’ve been working at Mean magazine since October, and my first issue as Associate Editor is about to hit newsstands! I’ve got three articles in the issue: two interviews with fashion designers Luella Bartley and Peter Jensen, and a write-up on the insanely cool digital-only re-issue label, Anthology Recordings. The issue also includes rad conversations with two of my favorite bands– ELO and Goblin– along with pieces on designer Brian Lichtenberg and Xiu Xiu, Devendra Banhart’s artwork, Totally Radd!! trading cards, an illustration by Alexa Shapiro, and much more. While you’re at it, check out the Mean website, which I’ve spent the last week completely redesigning. Issue 15 comes out March 18th, and you can pick it up at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble, among other fine retailers. In other news from my crazy-busy work life: I booked an Orbit commercial recently! I can’t wait to see the spot, which promises to be hilarious– it comes from the uber-creative duo known as The Perlorian Borthers, a director/art director team responsible for some of the most entertaining commercials I’ve ever seen. I’ll write more about that one when it starts appearing between commercials breaks on Girlicious and Cavemen. In the meantime, check out my
|
|
|
|
|
|
I spent the last week in New York, visiting my good friend (and fellow Davis High School alumni), Herrie Son. Her boyfriend, cinematic wunderkind Kyle Komline, took us to the Explorer’s Club - a pseudo-secret society of Upper East Side geriatrics dedicated to traveling the globe and eating tea and cookies in dedadent trophy rooms. I won’t go into detail, I’ll just tell you that if you have two legs and live in New York you owe it to yourself to find your way to one of their public events. And they’re only five dollars with student I.D.! We also went to classy, intimidating men’s clothiers Turnbull and Asser and Jay Kos, and a masqued ball at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mimi Zora took me to a WGA screening of the new Woody Allen movie (stop it Woody, just stop it) and a hilariously bad T.G.I. Friday’s in Times Square. I did all the requisite vintage shopping in Williamsburg with Herrie, and my formerly cyberspace-friend Michael took me to a crazy Chinese supermart and a Project Runway 4 party in Park Slope. I sat in on some NYU classes, including one taught by Antonio Monda. All in all, it was fun. And that’s how I spent my vacation! Would you like to look at some pictures? You can do that, after the jump. |
Paul Thomas Anderson is one of my favorite filmmakers. Watching Magnolia at the age of 12 was a major turning point in my adolescent development, and single-handedly inspired my desire to become a filmmaker. I was lucky enough to work as a P.A. on the set of There Will Be Blood last August, after harassing Anderson at a rare public Q&A earlier in the year. I spent a lot of time on a dusty ranch near Palmdale operating the air conditioning unit, assisting the video assistant, and lugging buckets of fake oil from place to place. It was an intense, fascinating experience, and gave me an amazing first-hand perspective of the day-to-day realities of filmmaking.
I saw the completed film for the first time in its entirety on Monday night, and I’ve been slowly processing it ever since. As one can tell from the trailer alone, Blood is a complete departure from Anderson’s signature style, in both content and form. The distancing from his earlier work is deliberate, a definite attempt to approach filmmaking with a different aesthetic and with a fresh set of talent. Leaving the comfort zone payed off in spades: Blood is a precisely crafted minimalist masterpiece. In fact, I was surprised just how minimal it was, especially for a film that runs two and a half hours long and spans thirty years of California history. There was even less dialogue than had been laid out in the already sparse script, and several scenes of zealous theatricality had been toned down or removed entirely. By taking away the frog rain, pop songs, prosthetic dicks and decadent dialogue of his earlier films, Anderson has allowed himself to focus entirely on a careful study of the film’s anti-hero, Daniel Day Lewis’ magnificently callous Daniel Plainview.  Don’t get me wrong– I absolutely love the sugary opulence of the aforementioned filmic devices in Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love. I can’t get enough of Anderson’s magical realism, ADD ensembles and whimsical distractions– but with Blood he proves that beneath the surface-level bustle and embellishment, there is an undeniably epic foundation of cinematic talent at work. I wouldn’t call There Will Be Blood perfect: most glaringly for me, at least on the first viewing, were a few unexpected moments of misplaced humor that dampened the impact of crucial moments. I’d also be interested to know if Anderson was satisfied with trimming the film down to a “mere” 158 minutes, or if we’ll ever see a Coppola-esque four hour director’s cut. While it may not be a masterpiece, Blood is a terrific film– undoubtedly one of the best of the year– and an important step in Anderson’s slowly blooming canon of work.  On the technical side, Robert Elswit’s photography is gorgeous, and the monumentally unnerving score by Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood brings the film to a place of transcendence. Nothing needs to be said of Daniel Day-Lewis’ brilliance– I can’t imagine anyone else taking home the Oscar this year– but it’s worth mentioning that Paul Dano really turned it out in a difficult role, skillfully portraying a preacher with major delusions of grandeur. Young Dillion Freasier was impressive as Daniel Day-Lewis’ melancholy progeny, especially for a non-show biz kid– Freasier was cast on location in Marfa, Texas. The Hollywood Reporter has a well-written review that’s worth a read, and for fellow P.T. Anderson devotees, there’s always Cigarettes and Red Vines. |
I had no idea where we were going at 8:00am on a Monday morning, but I was ready for anything. My boyfriend, Rudy, was taking me to an undisclosed location for an all-day birthday surprise. Technically, my 20th birthday was on Tuesday– so this was my final day as a teenager– the last dawn before my bones would begin turning to dust, as all things must. As we exited the freeway, I figured we were going to Catalina Island, as the only other obvious destination at the exit in question was the Long Beach Aquarium, and we had been there for our anniversary. The ferry ride over was Rudy’s first boat trip, another indelible benchmark in one’s life. Luckily, he enjoyed the sensation of seafaring travel. As we pulled away from the shore, we could see a dark cloud hovering over the entire horizon– the ashes of half a million acres blowing off into the Pacific. Living in Los Angeles, you get used to this smog… but this is something else entirely. For the past three days, there has been a sepia tone filter covering the sky, causing the normally flattering sunlight to become a harsh reddish-orange. Catalina, however, was a pleasant distraction from the havoc raging throughout Southern California. Neither Rudy nor I had ever been to the island, and I was excited to find it an even more peaceful, magical place than I had imagined. We spent the day exploring the town of Avalon, rather than exploring the untamed interior (about 20 square miles of wilderness, where wild Bison roam). In Avalon (population 3,100), the de rigeur mode of transportation is golf cart. There are many beautiful homes that reminded me of Bay Area architecture, and the “downtown” area is filled with every kind of touristy business you can imagine. Most of the tourists were on their way out as we arrived, returning home from their weekend reprieves. We wandered the beach alone and took a bus tour of the area with about a dozen other quiet visitors. We played a game of air hockey in an abandoned arcade, ate at a couple of fully satisfying restaurants and completed 18 holes of miniature golf. Check out my pictures after the jump! continue reading |
R. Crumb did it best with portrait illustrations of girls from his high school yearbook, but it was a project by wunderkind photographer Brad Troemel, aka Very Young Millionaire, that got me thinking about high school crushes. That project, “Every Girl I Had A Crush On In High School” displays a no-frills-at-all succession of 24 black and white yearbook scans.  These girls’ identities are placed only within the context of the author’s admiration for them, most likely an unreciprocated feeling. They’re portraits of tragic conflicts in emotional agenda– Cupid’s misguided arrows that strike every teenager at least once. Frozen in time, these girls, who have by now become young women, are even more distant than they were at the ground zero of their implicit rejection. Back then, they couldn’t give the author what he wanted– now, all they can offer is a universally identifiable sense of nostalgia. It’s like something out of Wong Kar Wai: “At the high point of our intimacy, we were just 0.01cm from each other. I knew nothing about her. Six hours later, she fell in love with another man.” I scanned the senior portraits of some of my own missed connections. A few of them I knew, most of them I never even spoke too. All of them are presumably straight, and a couple might even come across this post, adding a whole layer of Web 2.0 self-awareness to all of these misguided adolescent notions. Anyway, as I edge towards my twentieth birthday, here are a handful of ghosts from my almost-bygone youth:
|
