While it may have appeared to my readers that I was malingering for over three weeks, I had actually completely forgotten about my participation in the Annual Young Werther Symposium on Exacerbated Self-Pity and Drang. Or, as we like to call our little get together -- appropriating the turn of phrase from Gerard de Nerval -- "Werther without pistols."
Of course, the distinction of our special event is the opportunity to engage in intensewallowing for three straight weeks. I was especially honored to attend this year, because, after having submitted my initial billet four years ago, I finally was accorded the role of Lotte in the Ceremonial Concluding Mummery. (Yes, for whatever reason, the event draws only male participants.)
So, without further ado, and with the above offered explanation, I have the great pleasure to announce that I am much refreshed, and look forward to catching up on what appears to be a monumental backlog of events to be scrutinized -- Including the mysterious fate of ASM...
This just in from the Atlanta Journal and Constitution: Law students taking summer internships at big law firms in attempt to position themselves for future employment!
Next week, an exciting front page expose: Rising high school seniors complete community service projects to enhance their college applications!
Interesting article about Iraq the other day in the Washington Post. Of note is the slideshow that demonstrates that Iraqis definitely do not look like Naveen Andrews. I have hammered this nail before, and we will continue to provide evidence that it is an insult to the proud Iraqi people to assume that we resemble South Asians in some way.
For further demonstration of the differences between Iraqis and South Asians I give you Figure 1: a portrait of Caliph and famous Baghdadi, Harun al-Rashid.
As you see, he looks almost exactly like the Iraqis pictured in the slideshow.
Figure 2 shows the famous Indian prince Rama from the famed story called Rendezvous with Rama.
If you are having trouble identifying Rama in the illustration above, just look for the blue guy. Yes, he is shown twice. Soooo confusing.
There you go. I don't think the dramatic difference of appearance between Mesopotamians and Hindustanis could possibly be made clearer. But apparently, J.J. Abrams never bothered to figure out what an Iraqi actually looked like.
Again, this is the most insensitive piece of casting since Robert Rodriguez tried to pass off Antonio Banderas, a Spaniard, for a Mexican in Desperado.
"I'm NOT Mexican"
And by the way, it was pretty insulting to have Salma Hayek, whose parents are both Lebanese, portray Mexican painter Frida Kahlo.
"I'm NOT Lebanese"
I hope that Hollywood will come to its senses and factor in the appropriate sub-continent/blood lineage as it goes forward. If not, does anyone have George Clooney's phone number?
Turkey makes it exciting, but the Germans, as usual, exploit the Turks' efforts and impose limits on their aspirations. The skies unleash their fury on Basel, reminding us that if Julie Foudy and Tommy Smith were playing, we probably would be doing something else. All in all, the Milli Takimi plays with Heart, and can dream sweet tavuk gogusu dreams for 2010.
To get you in the mood for this historic Turkiye - Germany confrontation, here's a little ditty from the hipsters who straddle the German/Turkish divide... and who brought us the notorious Almanci Yabanci:
I would like to devote this celebratory video to Monkey, who I believe I caught sight of when the TV camera panned over the stands -- although all guys look the same with their shirts off and Turkiye written across their stomachs in red grease paint.
Is secularism's subtle rollback in Turkey the cause of the miraculous way in which the Turkish National Team is winning every game in Deus Ex Machina fashion? I, for one, am getting religion!
The Turks just made the Croats relive the battle of Krbava Field all over again! Will they succeed in extending their empire over the rest of Europe? All I know is, come Wednesday, the Germans are going to look like the wrong end of a Fassbinder flick, if the Milli Takimi keeps this up!
So Tommy thought he was complimenting Tuncay when, during the first half of today's Turkey-Croatiaquarterfinal match in Euro 2008 competition, he declared "He played with all the persistence of an Istanbul carpet seller!"
What was this remark truly, but yet another European belittling of how progressive and unencumbered by morbidEuropean nostalgia Turkey is today? Maybe to this haggis-eating lout, Turkey today is just another rusticOld World tourist destination teeming with swarthy, Euro-grubbing merchants.
But perhaps more tactful praise might have been directed at Tuncay, giving Ataturk's children their due and providing those watching at home with some sense of the complexity of contemporary Turkey. I don't know -- something along the lines of:
He played with all the persistence of a populist pro-Islamic politician.
Monkey, after reading your last post, I thought you should see this comic strip.
You're last post confused me quite a bit, and seemed to contain at best a 1:5 ratio of information to words. In fact, I think you might be keeping poor company, after all. For your story held for me a rambling incoherence not dissimilar from this Babyshambles song:
In any case, I finally have been able to take a breather from Cooties Camp. Not only have I missed blogging, but I had to digest your last two posts all at once. Of course, this is only a momentary respite, as we have quite big weekend plans for the boys. Tomorrow we're heading up to the 'burbs to take them to the Kohl Children's Museum, where they will be challenged to not touch anything despite whatever encouragements they might receive from museum staff.
Then, the real test will come on Sunday, when we take them to the Shedd Aquarium,where, not only will they have to avoid touching starfish, but we will provide them with repeated tales that dissuade them from any draw the sea or itsvariouscreatures may have upon their impressionable young minds.
To wrap up our camp, we have planned out an evening full of surprises for our adepts of "the Cootie-free life"
I'll let you know how things go once it's all wrapped up.
Meanwhile, the faculty lounge has provided some interesting conversations. I just learned that one of my fellow faculty mentors was holding a workshop on "UnlearningGrey's Anatomy" At the end of a busy day, when we all gathered round to bang the drum a little bit, I asked one of his pupils what he learned in that workshop. All he could do was keep repeating "Isaiah Washingtonwas right." My colleague later explained to me, "These boys' mothers watch a lot of Grey's. Sometimes I worry, that if they don't keep repeating it, these kids may start to grow breasts."
I'm like, "Dude! Haven't you heard of the SciFi Network?"
I am leaving in some hours for Chicago, where I will take part in the week-long, "Annual Cootie Camp for Gifted Boys." If you're unfamiliar with the camp, it is a really special opportunity for gifted, inner city kids to learn how to avoid cooties. I will be there in my capacity of "faculty mentor." I will be guiding the kids through a workshop entitled "The Right Kind of Weird." Using my tested methodologies, the children participating in the workshop will learn techniques to avoid cooties such as endless dandruff, back-pimple picking in class, what to bring to lunch, and which type of marker to use when drawing on hands and arms.
I've been doing this with my summers going on several years, now, and I have to say, sometimes I feel like they're the teachers and I'm the student.
But with service comes sacrifice: I am not sure how much time I will be able to devote to the blog each day. Hopefully, Monkey will pick up some of the slack with more of his fascinating updates from Vienna.
L'ESS has crushed those Moroccan losers from Dar Baida!!! April 5: 0-1 April 22: 1-0 Twice Arab League champions in two successive years! Highlights once available...
That's right! Tonight -- or a few hours from now, l'Entente Setif will face off against Widad Casablanca in Blida for the Final of the Arab Champions League. We're expecting a second straight coronation for our Black Eagles.
If you don't remember the first leg of the final, hosted by the Widad, highlights are below:
There's this campaign ad that's been making the rounds of the popular blogs... and I had meant to post it up here, because I just love the catchy music they play in the background. So here it is:
Just found out upon seeing the reprinting that they've adapted Brick Lane into a movie!!!! Still, it's beyond me how it could take over six months for them to release it in the US...
Anyway, it's nice to see good writers get success.
For a while now, I have been nurturing a serious gripe about the silver screen. The movies once were dominated by glamorous, enigmatic and captivatingdames. And, then, somewhere along the way... something happened. Perhaps it was Julia Roberts... Perhaps it was Michael Bay... Perhaps it was Thelma and Louise... Somewhere along the way, less and less was asked of leading ladies, while the male leads somehow became man-crush-inducing charismatic.
Indeed, we are in an age where there is a mind-boggling proliferation of Cary Grants and Steve McQueens. We are in an age where the heady cocktail of machismo, presence, smolder and talent no longer sits on a dusty shelf by the Galliano in a bottle labelled Dirk Bogarde 1965.
No, in fact, it has been reported recently that 672 women got pregnant (including 16 over the age of 40) just as a result of seeing Shoot 'Em Up. Add that to the upwards of 20,000 men who came out to their wives or grown children after seeing Croupier, and you understand that we are dealing today with an unprecedented imbalance of masculine starpower on the silver screen. Not since the Renaissance has an art medium been this heavily lopsided towards the portrayal of masculine over feminine beauty.
In addition to Clive Owen, there is the versatile, adrogynous and finally earning a paycheck:
The "I don't care if it's about professional wrestling, as long as he's in it":
The man voted most likely to never have broken a sweat:
The guy you'd like to have as your best friend, but only if you didn't care about ever having a girlfriend ever again:
And the other guy you'd like to have as your best friend, but only if you didn't care about ever having a girlfriend ever again:
We are, by the way, deliriously happy to have seen the trailer for Pineapple Express and to realize -- not only that Paper Planes is ubiquitous in a good and much deserved way -- but also that James Franco has finally gotten a big screen role that exploits his strength as a comedic actor.
Now, it used to be that one could go to the movies and be much moved by the actresses -- what am I saying -- the icons!!! But now, quite frankly, the major actresses working in film today are interchangeable and innocuous. Can someone tell me the difference between Nicole Kidman, Naomi Watts, and Emily Watson? What about between Michelle Monaghan and Liv Tyler?
Not only that, interesting roles merely don't exist. As such, compared with male actors, very few women in Hollywood or in overseas studios are asked -- as Bertolucci famously required of the aforementioned Liv Tyler in Stealing Beauty -- to act through their "intelligent skin." This school of acting, of which -- among today's thespians -- Clive Owen is quite clearly the master, begot many fine performances from Isabelle Adjani in the 70s and 80s.
In Nosferatu, the combination of Kinski and Adjani formed perhaps the most beautiful pairing of human beings in the history of the twentieth century.
But where is today's Isabelle Adjani?
I realize that Adjani is still making movies, but that doesn't count. The "Gerard Depardieu rule" (La regle Gerard Depardieu) holds that once a French cinema icon makes his or her 25th film, every succeeding performance is self-caricature and thus, doesn't count as acting.
For a while, it seems some industry people were trying to have Monica Bellucci fill her stylish pumps, but then they realized that she's not actually an actress...
Cate Blanchett is clearly an exception, given that she has taken and stretched countless roles in many superb movies, including a particularly fascinating character as Bathsheba Hart in the 2006 film Notes on a Scandal (which I have not yet seen, but the Zoe Heller novel was one of the best of 2003). I have always had a soft spot for her among contemporary actresses, all the more since she does not have, to my knowledge, the annoying propensity of her contemporaries for taking off their clothes in front of Harvey Keitel...
While it would not be fair to say that she squandered her talent on the gimmicky I'm Not There and the overwrought Elizabeth the Golden Age... since after all, the greatest icons are also, a la Klaus Kinski, the most profligate with their talent... one has to admit that the quality of her performances, the sheer and obvious substance of her talent, dulls that certain whiff of ether that characterizes our Adjani at her finest.
(Also, she's no longer getting cast in sexy roles. I bet if she was French or even -- as Charlotte Rampling -- living in France, she'd be totally getting hot, sultryroles... )
And so it was that, resigned to have my movie-going become a purely homosocial activity replete with wistful man-crushes, that -- just the other day -- I went to see Forgetting Sarah Marshall. This was a perfect movie: the best comedy about love since Le Genou de Claire by Eric Rohmer.
Really, great things have long been expected of Jason Segel, whose Nick Andopolis is one of the most touching, painful, ridiculous and heroic characters ever to grace the small screen. And, finally, he delivers: with a brilliant screenplay about, essentially, Nick Andopolis all grown up.
As a whole, every element in the movie worked perfectly to depict the process of decristallisation that was the hallmark of Gerard de Nerval more lucid tales, taking the analysis of Stendhal before him and describing that process by which the illusions with which each gesture, each trait of the beloved becomes a premise for new transports crumble away and leave us with the recognition of ourselves, in a state of dereliction. Rohmer later worked magic with both Stendhalien and Nervalien dynamics. And now, Nick Andopolis reveals himself a modern day Pierrot, his lanky clown chasing illusions with sublime pomp and self-loathing. His Sarah Marshall is a masterpiece in watching the psychology of love dismantled and re-centered.
That dying love is rebuilt into a beautiful Chateau in Virginia Waters, with a parallel tale of nascent love and self-actualization underscores the sleek harmoniousness of Sarah Marshall's construction. The new beloved, unnamed in the title, and yet relentless in her ascent through the narrative, takes the form of the most beguiling female romantic lead since Catherine Deneuve in the Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
Wide-eyed... dark... wispy... umm... tough-minded and funny in a way that was much more real than the sort of screwball or flaky model heroines we have been spoon fed for quite some time now...
So, I never really watched That 70s Show... During its run, I was either overseas or obsessed with 7th Heaven. So, thankfully, Mila Kunis was never on my radar until quite recently... and it appears that her next movie will be one of those ubiquitous video game adaptations that don't really make much sense. But then, even Angelina Jolie and Daniel Craig had their Tomb Raider moment... and besides, she's Jewish! (She and James Franco -- so I can no longer complain that Hollywood is bad for the Jews.)
It will be good to follow the choices she makes with her career and how filmmakers use her admirabletalent in the future. Until then, though, I will have to wait until Forgetting Sarah Marshall comes out on DVD. It will be just like that time, many years back now, when, far from Claudine... she had told me that Jodie Foster was her favorite actress. So I would watch Maverick and Little Man Tate, pausing and advancing the tape in slow-mo, just to collect from Ms. Foster's apparition on the screen, that essence that drew Claudine's admiration, to capture from the actress, the woman who loved her.
And so shall it be from now: A patient, subdued appreciation for the woman who may save the American movie.
I made it out a coupla days ago... You wouldn't believe how many vanity plates you can make in just one week. My ego was so worn out by the end, that I have been spending all the time since getting my freedom back either at the movies or sleeping.
Meanwhile, I see that ASM has definitely given up blogging for the highlife in Kitzbuhel. At least he won't want for vitamin D...
