CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE
so apparently if you get your internet disconnected
then your attention-span will grow back within 6 months
and it might even grow back WITH A VENGANCE and you might
become somewhat addicted to books - choosing to read over
other activities like hanging out with friends or getting-it-on
with your girlfriend... you might get sucked in so much so that
you go to the restroom and find yourself
thinking "This book is not for you."
And that is what might happen to you,
so
... exciting.

ANONYMOUS
's
CGIFriday's
is aliiiiiive!

I took part the Thousand Lives project yesterday (as #14)
which was amazingly fun- the quickness of meeting these people
and within an hour: getting to know each other and then doing
a costumed photo shoot
Basically: Ana Plà Deu, a Spanish artist, embeds herself in people's apartments for a photo series shot by Waty, a Belgian photographer.
was pretty amazing. They are off to discover the American West for awhile, I
wish them best of luck.
-used universe

köpfmaschine is a dance project in buenos aires organised by Sully Morland- more to come.

LESS THAN 6-degrees of film wierdness.
After seeing inception I was googling Marion Cotillard (of recent Inception fame) and was not really surprised to find a link to a French film where she appears naked in a sex scene... afterall: French actress, French film...
although it was on par more or less the same pleasant surprise as realizing (after watching Casino Royale) that Eva Green was also in the Dreamers...

which - speaking of the ghosts of odd film histories - reminded me of this post: IRON MAN and SPIDER-MAN from two years back- a still from Wonder boys in which Robert Downey Jr. (who went on to become Iron Man) is in bed with Tobey Macquire (who goes on to become Spider-Man) ... and it all gets weirder. because...
IF
rumours turn out to be true that Joseph Gordon-Leavitt will become the Riddler in the third Christopher Nolan Batman installment
THEN
that means that 10 Things I Hate About You (with Heath Ledger as Petruchio to Leavitt's Hortensio- also embarrassingly one of my all-time favorite movies) is suddenly a film featuring the Joker and the Riddler... in High School. Right?

Pile on top of that Kenneth Brannaugh's appearance in Thor... (nope. We'll wait/aren't really that interested.)

But in really REAL reality maybe I am only really writing this post to get hits.... No, that isn't true, I am actually dorking out.

Profile status which would've functioned better as a blog post: Plowing through all the Frank Miller I can get my paws on. THank you English-language libraries for stocking books which you still do not know how to categoris/ze (i.e. Librarian grows confused & weary explaining that "well, some are in the Art book section, some are in the Young Adult section and others are in the Fiction section" when I ask where their Graphic Novels are located.) ALSO: Reality-shattering moment: "Romancing the Stone" is a bit slower-paced and also a bit less funny that i remember it being in 1985... 1985 was clearly a faster, funnier year. Does that work?

TRAVEL NOTE: it only took me 24 hours to stop freaking out, adjust, adn learn to really enjoy London. but, man, those first 24 hours were crazy-suckiness.
oh, and Empire magazine has a whole separete photobook thing included called "Unseen Empire - Celebrating 30 years of the Empire Strikes Back." Which is a bunch of fotos which were taken on the set. So, ja, apparently they really know how to directly market to me and only me, bypassing any of my logic or decision making centers of the brain I pick that up and b-line for the register forgetting all about food and water and for ₤3,99 I am in love.
NOTE ON TRAVEL NOTE: It is also possible that I have forgotten the social norms, expectations and boundaries of ENglish-speaking countries a bit... constantly feeling like i am being too social here. English-speaking countries now seem a bit / a touch anti-social, a touch private, not so communal... just an impression/thought.

sleep deprived live-blogging from cafe hurwundeki:
so: Two guys adding an office space to the back room of a cafe. If the construction workers (slavs of indeterminate origin) don't understand English then the obvious thing to just repeat yourself more loudly and angrily over and over (I thought this was a solely American strategy, but nope- apparently the English have this magical skill as well.) WHoa, hah!...
shit is softly and slowly hitting the fan... passive aggressive British faux-politeness vs. slavic no-B.S. indignant rage. I love it when brits get mad, it is so insane and awkward and sickly fun to watch. I think a fist fight is about to break out between a middle-aged librarian-looking woman - she's trying to enjoy tea with a friend amidst the screeeeeech of a saw-
with short grey dykey haircut and the barrel-chested power-saw-wielding slavish hulk. Damn. This is beautiful. (Eyes blurrrring...)
Wow. Hot shit. So tired. zombie tired. Oh shit, they hit something. Internet is DOWN. Internet DOWN! In a big "Free Wi-Fi" a man who looks like
a arab version of Russell Brand in my line of sight bothers to walk alll the way across two rooms just to ask if I'm online- I say "no, the workers must've unplugged something-" they've now barricaded themselves into the backroom the back room using an enormous antique trunk as a blockade... either the librarian won or they just don't want to deal with her shit. who knows. this cafe is beauuutiful, though. a noble-looking taxidermied penguin off to my left (surrounded by other stuffed bird friends) stares at a huge deer and gazelle above the door across the room.
.
on the train from Stansted I started to slip. multiple nights of barely any sleep caught up to me and I kept catching myself reinacting or acting out imagined or past conversations and then yapping on the phone in German rudely, arrrgh. a-hole. grumpy a-hole.
I like to listen to music WITHIN ITS CONTEXT- (i.e. sigur ros while drivng in iceland = absolutely perfect, and is JUST MAKES SENSE.) so I put Burial on and stuff the noize-cancelling headphones as far into my ears as they will go and just enjoy the ride- and enjoyable it is, with this soundtrack all the adorable monopoly housing up until Liverpool St. Station is magic, totally amazing. Boom, burble, driving along... I start writing crazy shit phonetically in English using the cyrillic alphabet- half to challenge myself and half to keep the German spiessers next to me from reading my notes.

This is the first time I have been in an English speaking country since early January... odd, it is all odd. Tension... always tension in the air... whoa-hey... London.
two men in their late 40s are sharing dirty stories and talking all fakey like Angelinos, one is American, the other a Brit- yuck- I get the impression that they are veterans of the electronic music world/scene...
Hurm. Understanding every tidbit of banter is always a curse. in German I actually have to pay attention- but here my brain is always "ON" whether I like it or not. that allows one to pick up and become washed away in/on all the truly inane BS people are constantly spouting. This would be a strong argument- if not THE prime argument- for never living in an English-speaking country ever again.
There are three other free seats at this huge table but no one will sit in them.
Neeeeed nap.
&
the internet is flickering on and off so often that the arab Russell Brand returns to consult me once again. no. no connection.
&
Surprised to encounter more Americans here than in Berlin... oh, plague. oh fun.

music post herefive years ago there was a snippet of a film montage (which was essentially an ad for the Sundance independent film channel) featuring this driving song which got stuck in my head for many months but I never knew what it was. today I finally re-encountered that song, which is apparently called "just human" by the Danish group Carpark North, turns out the video is also really quite beautiful, all those intense kids. the chorus just gloriously nails it somehow... normally I can't be bothered with contemporary pop-rock, but with this I can't help but get tingles on the back of my neck. so, here it is - 5 years later! (use headphones if possible):

meanwhile here is something artsier, also great, the band Crocodiles recommended by friend DifferenT Things - this cover/medley of Groove is in the Heart and California Girls is just great
bubba of tenfootman also tosses in his 2 cents which comes in the form of the Local Natives song Airplanes... perhaps the best song of these three

an odd moment. I've been meaning to write this post because veteran NPR reporter Daniel Schorr died on July 23, 2010
Being a big-time NPR junkie I was really sad about this... but the odd thing is that I also realized that he is the first person who I follow on twitter to have kicked the bucket... but his last post still stands
http://twitter.com/danielschorr
I wonder if in the near future if blogs or other such social media won't allow for a will in case of death.
imagine: somewhere in your settings you opt to : "contact so-and-so@emailaddress.com in case of death OR to power of attorney them to be able to post notice that final post which lies waiting saved somewhere... it makes sense, right? just a thought.

rainy night tonight. pda projects jersey shore onto the wall. we wacth the two most recent epispodes.
we then watched the wikileaks video of the AP guys & co. getting gunned down by the U.S. Military.

if you take the Russian word "хорошо" (meaning "good" and conveniently used in a clockwork orange because)
it sounds like "horror show" in English. in terms of fulfilling its role as entertainment, jersey shore
is in many ways "good" at entertaining - at least for folks of our ilk- because it is a horrorshow all the way.

the wikileaks video of the ap reuters journalists in iraq on the other hand is just a pure, plain and relentless horror show.

USED UNIVERSE mascot creature on the ROBOT REVOLUTION of 1997

Paris-based photographer/videographer Anne Sorrentino has some fascinating work on her site... you might see someone you know.

Just saw MOON (unfortunately dubbed in German) at Moviemento down the street. It is well worthwhile, especially if
you really appreciate Sam Rockwell as an actor (I do). Thinky thinky.