Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Wednesday, September 03, 2003 God, so much stuff to say, so little stuff to say. I'm elbow-deep in comic books as I try to organize and record twelve longboxes of comic books. This is what I was doing last week, this is what I'll be doing this week. This is probably what I'll be doing next week if I'm not fucking careful. The Receptionists is a truly great name for a band, I think. But their album, The Last Letter, is driving me nuts at the moment. Waifish-sounding girl sings sweetly offkey while pennywhistles blow in the background, also offkey. Gah. Even less luck was had with Dashboard Confessional's MTV Unplugged Version 2.0, an album that seems to exist to make those who've never heard of Dashboard Confessional feel like a really big asshole. For essentially every song, the audience is singing along to every lyric. At points, the singer shuts up and the audience sings without pause straight through to the bridge. It's emocrap devotion taken to a terrifying level--like one could easily erect the American Nazi Party as long as its main tenets were moping over girls and yelping about love affairs ending badly. Maybe I'm on the wrong side of the fence (and only old jerks like me build 'em), but Dashboard Confessional sounded to me like a more generic, more presentable version of Conor Oberst. What else? Hawayein is part of the "Sikhs got it bad" genre of Indian film (I've seen one or two other films in this genre, but don't fill like digging for the titles now). What's cruelly great about Indian films is long running times allow for some sophisticated bluffs (at least to a newbie like me). The first 30 minutes of the movie plays like your average "new guy at college falls for the girl who thinks he's a playboy" Bollywood musical, and so when Indira Gandhi gets assassinated and anti-Punjab riots sweep the city of Delhi, it feels pretty ugly. People burned alive, women raped, crowds beating pleading old men--by the time you find out what happened to the protagonist's family, you're pretty sure there's not going to be any more charming collegiate courtship numbers. And true enough, from there it's brutality, brutality, brutality as warring tribes of Sikh freedom fighters and terrorists battle authorities and each other for control of the territory and a consulting Pakistani general (looking frighteningly like Stephen Seagal in his seventies) rubs his hands and evilly consults how best to create a Punjab state. Thank God for the person sitting behind me, who would go "tsk, tsk, tsk" whenever an atrocity occurred, as if machine-gunning a busload of innocent Hindus was roughly the same breach of etiquette as eating an entree with your salad fork. That helped. Ugh. I just looked over my shoulder and those comic books still haven't sorted themselves. Dammit. Well, I've loaded up on the Conor Oberst music. Back to work. posted by Jeff Lester | 10:14 AM | |
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