Woah.
A man rides a horse through a bonfire Monday in the village of San Bartolome de Pinares, Spain, in honor of San Anton, the patron saint of animals. Photo by Juinen (Getty) via Prashant Rao via The Wall Street Journal
Well, that’s certainly one way to practice English.
LOL e-mails
From my email this morning: The Knot’s 10 New Wedding Trends for 2012. My personal favorite, below:
“Brides can thank Kate Middleton and the latest Twilight installment for this wedding fashion trend — long sleeves and lace!”
THANKS, TWILIGHT. Love the vampire fantasy look. Apparently so does Kate. I’ll have to write her a thank you note.
Frances McDormand talking in the house on a megaphone.
All the richardrushfield:
The Complete List of All The Annoying Things In The New Wes Anderson Trailer
Congratulations to Wes Anderson. He has squeezed more preciousity into two minutes of trailer than most films can get into two hours of screen time. Not a single frame or line of dialoge resembles anything ever seen in nature, outside of the zany mind of a hipster art director.
1. The Title. It’s a shame there isn’t an Academy Award category for Most Annoying Title, because if there was, Wes Anderson would have a house full of trophies. The words used in Anderson titles have included: Aquatic, Darjeeling, Zissou, Chevalier, Fantastic, Royal and now Moonrise and Kingdom.
2. Children solemnly applying stage bird make up. The children solemnly doing adult grown up things is one of my favorite jokes in art. Now can we stop doing it for a week so it can be funny again.
3. 0:09. Yellow boy scout uniform. Let’s take childhood and throw in some splash of garish colors. Just imagine if your entire childhood had designed by Pucci…Think how special you would have grown up to be! Just picture a world where boy scouts dress in big bird yellow…with a forest green neckerchief and a little gold cornucopia. Can’t you just picture you and your friends going out in your yellow uniforms and building theater sets to dramatize last week’s episode of This American Life? What a world is could be!
And also, in case the audience fears that this is a children’s movie for children, let’s give them a taste of grown up, Euro inspired art direction that no child would ever naturally relate to to let them know, this is a movie about children for adults. And that isn’t creepy at all!
4. 0:17. Wounded, intense abyss staring girl/woman whose icy glare turns men to dust. Independent films yang to manic pixie girl’s yin. Last deployed by Anderson as the Gwyneth character in the Tenenbaums. Made wacky surreal because she’s wearing a bird suit.
5. Choral music. 75 years after the Rolling Stones recorded You Can’t Always Get What You Want, 50 years since it was used in The Big Chill, why does this still happen?
6. Oh, it’s children’s choral music.
7. 0:21 The very term Quonset Hut gives hipster art directors the vapors with excitement. The amount of oxygen they will inhale when they see this threatens the oxygen supply for the rest of us.
8. 0:25. Of course the nerd boy has stationary with his name printed on it.
9. 0:27 And Suzy’s personalized stationary has a little drawing of a little house on it.
10. 0:34 Girl in cotton dress standing in the center of the frame on the top of a lighthouse looking through binoculars like she’s in Umbrellas of Cherbourg or Madeline.
11. 0:36. Nerd boy. In coonskin hat. Viewed through binoculars. Standing alone in field of wheat.
12. 0:37. Another perfectly framed symmetrical shot. Was this film shot on Corel Draw?
13. 0:41. And another.
14. 0:46. Mid-century floor rug in the tent.
15. 0:47. “Jimminy Crickets”
16. 0:48. Fischer Price 45 player. Playing swinging 60’s music.
17. 0:50 Staring at each other into the camera. And now we’re in Marriage Italian Style.
18. 0:56 Frances McDormand talking in the house on a megaphone.
The rest of it is fine, either than the house up at the top of the tree, the motorcyle at the top of a tree, Jason Schwartzman as aviator glasses wearing boy scout priest, Frances McDormand saying “he does water colors, mostly landscapes and a few nudes” and whatever that 60’s Douglas Sirkesque font it is they use for the credits.
Books I’ve read that I liked (or not)
OK, I’m paring this down to books recently since what with the holidays and travel I’ve got some real catchup to do in terms of my media/food/drink consumption. Will start up again en serio next week. Basically, the gist of it is: ate a lot, drank a lot, read a lot, went on a bunch of planes.
Books I finished:
- Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending
- Emmanuel Carrere’s Lives Other Than My Own
- Patti Smith’s Just Kids
Books in progress:
- Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory
- Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang
- Sloane Crosley’s How Did You Get This Number
Books I totally gave up on:
- Crimes in Southern Indiana: Stories by Bill Frank
- Invisible by Paul Auster
Wilco, Nick Lowe and Mavis Staples rehearsing The Band’s “The Weight” backstage at the Civic Opera House. And here’s the song from Scorsese’s The Last Waltz.
After six years of design development with MIT Media lab founder Nicholas Negroponte and the non-profit organization he founded, One Laptop Per Child, fuseproject launches the XO-3 tablet. Their previous efforts gave more than 2.4 million children in 25 countries access to laptops.
“We was afraid you disappeared but nah, baby you magic.”
“You’re my child with the child from Destiny’s Child.”
Jay-Z made a song for his baby daughter called “Glory”— featuring young Blue Ivy herself.
(Source: laceuptrebor, via recallnumbers)
WOW. I never realized how much this song sounds like Enya. Both really into beaches, relaxing, etc. In other Ernest Greene-related news, I’m relieved to hear that the new season of Portlandia is available online.
Beyonce & Jay-Z rented out the entire floor of Lenox Hill Hospital for the birth of their daughter this morning, whose name, according to Goopy, is BLUE. Blue Ivy Carter. A bit excessive. And to think, last week, the Carters were just another couple having dinner in Carroll Gardens.
“The most terrible and beautiful and interesting things happen in a life. For some of you, those things have already happened. Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.”
— “The Future has an Ancient Heart,” from the always lovely Sugar on Stephen Elliott’s Daily Rumpus.
Married People Having Dinner
It seems like Colonie is the place to be on a Friday evening in Brooklyn Heights. Recommended: some combination of oysters, crostini, scallops and champagne. Yum. Observations about the MPHD:
Married Man: Honey, What are you thinking? (looking longingly into Married Woman’s eyes, and also the crostini)
Married Woman: Well, um, how much butter is in this food… (while heartily enjoying said food)
Married Man: Oh.
Topics covered: spousal concern, caloric intake.
As a soon-to-be-married person, I wholeheartedly participated in the Friday evening MPHD club. Topics covered at my table: married folk stuff like television (Portlandia, Parks & Recreation), how the food tastes (good), etc. A post-dinner drink at Brooklyn Social confirms that this is likely not a place where married people go on Friday nights, though I could very well be mistaken. A post-drink viewing of Portlandia confirms that this is absolutely what I would rather be doing.
