sunday best-of blogging

best album to hem a dress to: penthouse, luna. i met this band in providence, ri, when i was 18 and made them sign the poster i stole off of the door to the club they were playing at, and it was dorky and pathetic, and we all knew it, and i didn't care. i love you, dean wareham. thank you for not laughing at me to my face. if it matters, i bet you'd like the dress.

artist most frighteningly devoted to his craft:



here's christian bale the way most of us know and love him, ripped like jesus and relieving my lungs of their troublesome burden of air more swiftly than a cannonball to the solar plexus. while i know mostly nothing about him as an individual and can't speak to his character, i can say with a great deal of certainty that this is the body i would program into my vanilla sky lucid dream. it's perfect, people. perfect. i crave it in a way that makes me blush even when i'm all alone in a dark, silent room. and here's christian making me want to die in a much less fun way in the machinist, which i got for christmas from my mom and watched for the first time on thursday:




MOTHER OF GOD. i've loved me some skinny men, but christian's body was so luridly grotesque in this film that it made me physically uncomfortable; i had a hard time sitting still in my chair while i was looking at it, and not at all in the happy, goose-bumpy way i've come to expect from past times with mr. bale. i was honestly uneasy. now, i know the movie came out a while ago and the sixty-plus pounds he dropped for the role are sort of old news, but they were old news to me, too, and i still got queasy watching him haul his jangly skeleton around for an hour and a half. a lot of that was the movie itself, though, which i think was great, although i probably need to watch it again to be sure. it was definitely troubling. christian plays a (drumroll, please) machinist who hasn't slept in a year, for no readily knowable reason, and he's a little edgy. the entire film is shot in overcast, brushed-metal tones and moves like a snowball rolling down a mountain, gaining density until what started out as a four-inch ball of packed powder ends up razing entire villages in the viewer's muddled, flinching head. at first i was annoyed by its orchestral score, sort of a cross between a scaled-down "peter and the wolf" and the instrumental background of every cheesed-out 1950s sci-fi debacle, but by the time the whole story finally came together i was so tense and distraught that i felt a tiny bit insane myself, so i guess it worked better than i expected it to. let me put it this way: the sixth sense didn't surprise me, and this movie made me pull my hair and talk back to the screen. (lest anyone be overly concerned for his health, christian finished the machinist and immediately transmogrified back into his hale and beautiful self in order to film batman begins.) congratulations, cast and crew, and thank you, christian bale, for being the only boy on the planet talented enough to make me sweat and/or recoil in horror at your command. you so crazy. oh, and just to be self-indulgent, let's take a moment to remember christian the way he was when he first caught my dewy little junior-high eye:



heh. dork. but heaven knows i'm soft for 'em. swing heil, indeed.

most poignant exchange from grey gardens:

big edie: that cat's going to the bathroom over there, right behind my portrait.
little edie: oh, that's terrible. isn't it terrible? it's just terrible.
big edie: i think it's wonderful. it's wonderful that someone here is doing exactly what they want to do.

now, maybe you know about grey gardens and maybe you don't, but the fact is, big edie is absolutely right—the cats peeing in the corners, and i guess the raccoons getting fat on wonder bread in the attic, are the only ones in the house who aren't endlessly mourning, or at least constantly reliving, the choices they didn't make, the chances they didn't take, the lives they're still sure they were meant to have but never will. when the camera zooms in on the face of the terrible/wonderful cat, its expression is one of utter calm and contentment; while big edie, at 79, has the bearing and attitude of a lot of older folks who are well past caring what the hell any of the rest of us think of them, it's still an expression i have a hard time imagining on either woman's face. i don't know if i want to recommend this movie, exactly, but i do believe a dedicated viewing will encourage you to think a bit differently about what course of action in any given circumstance is truly the least regrettable. i love my mom, and i've shot myself in the foot a few times trying to take care of her, because at the time it seemed like The Right Thing To Do, but there's no way i'd let us end up like this.

best e-mail alert: i have an extensive list of puerile sound clips that i rotate through as my mood shifts, but this one is my favorite right now. i'm on the hunt for some classic ren & stimpy quotes, so stay tuned. as if you could help it.