2.12.2007
it is 1:25 am and two men are exploding the moon
It was a good weekend. (You can listen to the song "Good Weekend" by Art Brut if you like. Click on "Releases" on the bottom to get to the music! His good weekend was a little different than mine.)
My good weekend started out Friday with some SOULcialism dancing. The Prince Symbol Album served well (as usual) for some pre-dancing funkification. While Soulcialism is open to anyone, the crowd was full of CMU people that we knew -- it felt like someone's really good house party. It probably helped that the venue is "the White Eagle" which is an old Polish bar in what's pretty much ... a house. It was fun to run into lots of people there, but at some points the grad-student-ification was too much. I was going to get drinks at the bar and I walked past two guys having an intense conversation. One guy says to the other, " Let me just say two things. One: Google does not provide blablablah storage." and I kept walking, so I missed thing 2.
Saturday night there was a CMU fancy-ish event at the Phipps conservatory. There were cupcakes and other foods and drinks, and plants, but the room with the food and drink and music was sadly plant-free. The rest of the conservatory was beautiful -- we thought they could have thrown a few plants in pots in the room with all the food and music.
Sunday, there was some spoons-HH-jcreed songwriting at our place. I made chicken dumpling soup and did some work, with the pleasant addition of a house band. Then we went off to see The Science of Sleep and took along some dessert that deserves its own post. The movie was good, but not as good as I hoped. The director (Michel Gondry) also did "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" which I really loved. Eternal Sunshine was written with Charlie Kaufman, while the movie we saw yesterday was written by Gondry alone. It was pretty clear from the DVD extras (and the movie) that the small cast and small crew of friends were having a fun time making the movie, so I enjoyed watching the animation and colors and visual effects vicariously. (Like: "Oh man, that prop looks like it would have been fun to make.") The actual storytelling left something to be desired, though, and it seems like M. Gondry was just too close to the events in the movie to craft a good story that other people (besides him) could really benefit from. In the extras, he keeps talking about how the office of the protagonist has a hallway here because that's where the hallway was in his old office, or that the set design for the woman's apartment had to be just right, because the woman that the character was based on had such a strong visual style. It was almost painful to watch the "making of" documentary, when he's asking the actress who plays the protagonist's love interest "but, do you think she loves him? Does she love him?" So, in many ways we're watching someone else's piece of therapy. And as long as you can enjoy that, I think it's a movie worth watching.
P.S. - If you act quickly, you can be my 4th friend on Barack Obama's campaign website. All the cool kids are doing it! Being passionate about politics is the new apathy, everybody.
My good weekend started out Friday with some SOULcialism dancing. The Prince Symbol Album served well (as usual) for some pre-dancing funkification. While Soulcialism is open to anyone, the crowd was full of CMU people that we knew -- it felt like someone's really good house party. It probably helped that the venue is "the White Eagle" which is an old Polish bar in what's pretty much ... a house. It was fun to run into lots of people there, but at some points the grad-student-ification was too much. I was going to get drinks at the bar and I walked past two guys having an intense conversation. One guy says to the other, " Let me just say two things. One: Google does not provide blablablah storage." and I kept walking, so I missed thing 2.
Saturday night there was a CMU fancy-ish event at the Phipps conservatory. There were cupcakes and other foods and drinks, and plants, but the room with the food and drink and music was sadly plant-free. The rest of the conservatory was beautiful -- we thought they could have thrown a few plants in pots in the room with all the food and music.
Sunday, there was some spoons-HH-jcreed songwriting at our place. I made chicken dumpling soup and did some work, with the pleasant addition of a house band. Then we went off to see The Science of Sleep and took along some dessert that deserves its own post. The movie was good, but not as good as I hoped. The director (Michel Gondry) also did "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" which I really loved. Eternal Sunshine was written with Charlie Kaufman, while the movie we saw yesterday was written by Gondry alone. It was pretty clear from the DVD extras (and the movie) that the small cast and small crew of friends were having a fun time making the movie, so I enjoyed watching the animation and colors and visual effects vicariously. (Like: "Oh man, that prop looks like it would have been fun to make.") The actual storytelling left something to be desired, though, and it seems like M. Gondry was just too close to the events in the movie to craft a good story that other people (besides him) could really benefit from. In the extras, he keeps talking about how the office of the protagonist has a hallway here because that's where the hallway was in his old office, or that the set design for the woman's apartment had to be just right, because the woman that the character was based on had such a strong visual style. It was almost painful to watch the "making of" documentary, when he's asking the actress who plays the protagonist's love interest "but, do you think she loves him? Does she love him?" So, in many ways we're watching someone else's piece of therapy. And as long as you can enjoy that, I think it's a movie worth watching.
P.S. - If you act quickly, you can be my 4th friend on Barack Obama's campaign website. All the cool kids are doing it! Being passionate about politics is the new apathy, everybody.
