You can hear the concert Colin Meloy played in Virginia tonight on NPR's "All Song's Considered" page starting tomorrow. I knew it was going to air live tonight, but I was too wrapped up in Jan Svankmajer's Otesanek to remember. Now that is one movie that will make you never want to have children. Right from the beginning when they're fishing the babies out of a tub of water, wrapping them in newspaper, and selling them to women, I knew that this was going to put me off babies for a while. Don't worry, it's not a realistic movie about selling babies on the black market, it's surreality at it's best, a retelling of a Czech folktale about a childless couple. The husband digs a root out of the ground, carves it to look like a child, and gives it to his wife. If you've read any folktales you can guess the rest, of course it comes to life and is a monster and of course it starts eating people. And after watching a movie about a tree that eats people, what can a person watch but a movie in which Keanu Reeves embarasses himself with every line. No, not Matrix Revolutions. My Own Private Idaho. Liked the movie, still don't like Reeves. This movie is in no way the sequel to Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, not like Constantine. Alright. Also, I noticed an unexpected resemblance between My Own Private Idaho and The Decemberists's song On the Bus Mall. Which brings us back to Colin Meloy. Right 'round, like a record, baby.
I can't figure out why I am not desperately in love with Colin Meloy. I went to see him at the Paradise Club tonight and he was brilliant. He played Tarkio songs, and new songs, and covers (I got a copy of Colin Meloy Sings Shirley Collins). He played an "I'm having a baby song." And even though I told him, "no, Colin, no" when he said he had written one, it was a really great song. for its kind. And he looked so damn pleased with himself. He actually introduced it with, "I really want to apologize for this next song . . ." He said his mantra for this tour is "Less Talk, More Rock," but he didn't stick to that. Thank goodness.
I am alternating between singing hymns with my roommates and listening to Mountain Goats songs. "I hope you die, I hope we both die. . ." It's a weird combination. I've been on a Mountain Goats kick this week, listening to the four songs I have on my iPod over and over. I take back all the bad things I may have said about them. Nobody sings break-up like John Darnielle.
Here: listen to No Children from Tallahassee, the song that sparked my Mountain Goats revival.
Linnea's Bjork song for the week: Hyper-ballad
Keri's Bjork song for the week: Joga
Hope is currently obsessed with: Neko Case's "Blacklisted"
I just got back from seeing The Squid and the Whale and I just want to say: I'm sorry, I didn't know I was doing that. The movie for me was like those films that they show Adam in Clockwork Orange that make him feel sick when he does something wrong. Now whenever I start b.s.-ing in a falsely intellectual way I will immediately be reminded of this film, and then have to run to the bathroom.
The movie is about a family and a divorce. There is the father, the mother, and their sons, Walt and Frank. The father is a snobbish intellectual who is training up his sons to know that A Tale of Two Cities is minor Dickens, not as dense as Great Expectations or David Copperfield. "Minor" is a curse word and "dense" is the word of ultimate praise. Walt is the most receptive to his father's training and is continually asking for advice about what to think about books and films and people. An interchange that really sums this up is when the father and Walt are going out to a movie. Walt says, "We were thinking of Short Circuit." The father looks doubtful, then, in a correcting voice says, "Blue Velvet is supposed to be good."
And I've done that so many times. All I kept thinking while I was watching the movie was, "This is us, and we are horrible people." It was good, masochistic maybe, but good.
Hope and I went to the Kendall Square Cinema tonight and for the first time in my life I wanted to see every movie that was playing there. We went to see Casanova and we saw it and it was a lot of fun. Talk about hijinks ensuing. A costume drama complete with love, mistaken identity, and a deus ex machina. In Venice! But then when that movie got over we still had popcorn left, and we are "waste not want not" kind of girls, you know, so we had to go see another movie. Darn Hope and her exorbitant popcorn buying habits.
I hate sunny days. They make me feel like I need to get out of the house and do something when all I want to do is sit at home and read. And today the sun is really a lie, because it's darn cold out there. According to this it feels like 5 degrees farenheit. Hmm, glad I can't feel that.
Our table is currently littered with scrabble chips, a trivial pursuit game, and wine bottles. These wine bottles just seem to grow from our table. We leave empty ones there, having not yet figured out the recycling situation, and when we come back in the room there are more full ones. Most convenient. It's the good wine fairies of course. I wonder if we could train them to do other things, like the dishes. Or the laundry. Speaking of laundry, our coin-opperated dryer seems to be rebelling against our intended cleanliness. It won't let us put in the coins and no coins=no drying. Every once in a while I go in and try to beat the thing into submission with a hammer, but it hasn't worked yet. Funny, that always works on my roommates. I'm sorry, that was a terrible thing to say. I think living here in Massachusetts is contributing to my uninhibited speaking habits. It's so amusing to me how people here will just tell you what they think straight out. It's like they don't even bother to run it through their minds before saying it. A few weeks ago one of the librarians at work asked me if I had dyed my hair then said, "That's sad, it looked so nice before." I have no response to that. And in a slightly different vein, another time I was talking to an older lady about some books she had checked out. They were about butterflies. In the middle of our conversation the lady just bursts out with, "Butterflies are so beautiful!" I just said, "Yes, yes they are."
First I felt like a blog geek, being the only one posting for weeks, and now I feel like a slacker. To tell the truth I've always been more comfortable being a slacker than an overachiever, but then paranoia kicks in and my beautiful facade is ruined. So I'm back on the blog, determined not to erase everything I write and get off my computer in disgust this time, not like last night. But last night there was red wine going on and tonight there's just tea.
I've started putting sugar in my tea again, at least at night. It's so much more cozy that way. This summer I quit with the sugar. I was at other people's houses in Scotland, then in the youth hostels it was hard enough to find milk, let alone sugar, too. And I love the simplicity of just the milk and the tea (milk first, we are prelactarian here), in the youth hostel mug, standing in the kitchen looking out into Uig harbor, or in the yellow chipped mug in the L'Abri garden. My favorite thing about L'Abri, and I may have mentioned this before, was the tea times. Twice a day, for half an hour, sitting on the grass in the sun (or the rain). Now I make tea in the staff kitchen on my breaks at work. There's nothing quite as cathartic as boiling water and brewing tea, even if I just end up throwing it out after that because there's just half and half or spoiled milk in the fridge. We've started using a regular kettle at the house lately, too. There were some incidents of fuse blowing last week that seemed directly linked to the electric kettle so we broke out Keri's "postmodern" kettle and everyone has to put up with me making a mad dash for the kitchen as soon as there's the faintest hint of whistling. I did pour the kettle a bit crooked the other night, when the power was out and I was trying to fill my hot water bottle so I've had this annoying peeling burn on my finger all week. So with the power going out and no heat and the occasional water going off we feel like we are getting the true Boston experience, just expecting Paul Revere to ride by any night now.
After many days heat has returned to our house. Today was the worst day yet, though. I was wearing a wool sweater over a wool sweater. In the house. Thank God for men with the great last name of Torchio who come bearing tanks of oil for us to burn.
I just want to say that the album Heart by Stars (yeah, yeah, it all sounds like middle school girls made it) is definately worth listening to. It took me a lot time to make myself listen to more than the first five seconds, which go like this "I am Evan and this is my heart. I am Amy and this is my heart. . . ." and then I would turn it off. Which is sad because it all gets better after that. Even that little part ends with a guy named Torquil displaying his heart. Torquil, what a great name. I especially love the song "Elevator Love Letter" and I really wish I had heard it in college so I could have played it everytime I went up to my room on the Carter Hall Elevator. But this album is full of great moments and it's making my bus rides to and from work very happy this week.
Well, I was going to do things this afternoon, like read maybe, or sleep, but I just keep listening to this one song over and over. It's "Lisa" by The Prayers and Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers. It was written as part of a compilation CD for Esopus Magazine about imaginary friends. They got the stories for the songs from real and relatively famous people. This particular song is from a story by Alan Sparhawk of Low about an imaginary friend he had when he was little. I found this quote from him about it:
"As a boy, from perhaps age 4 to 7, my dear imaginary friend was a small girl named Lisa. She lived in a small hole in the wall next to my bed. I always imagined her as a year or two older than me. She always seemed to have heavier, older-person things on her mind, so her demeanor was quite sober and even troubled, but never enough to keep her from finding time for me. She took care of me, gave me advice, and was great to have around when I couldn't sleep. I suppose she stayed with the house when we moved when I was 8. She probably has a family now."
Prayers and Tears have done something amazing with this story, evoking the idea of childhood love as well as imaginary friends. In a way this turns the story around and makes the imaginary friend the one who's imagining . . . but this sounds confusing.
Listen to it: Lisa
