2008-05-21
LIALJ
Dear Scarlet Johannson,
There's a long tradition of folks covering Tom Waits songs, from The Ramones doing "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" to Norah Jones doing "The Long Way Home" to Rod Stewart and Mary Chapin Carpenter doing "Downtown Train" to Clay Aiken doing "Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis." By and large, most of these folks have done an admirable job, capturing the weariness of Waits' voice and the downtrodden beauty of the lyrics while making the songs their own.
That said, combining the worst of 80's synth-pop with unemotive vocals? What were you thinking, beyond "This is SURE to get me onto the next Golden Throats album?"
Still thinking of you lustfully, as long as you don't sing,
Fancycwabs.
There's a long tradition of folks covering Tom Waits songs, from The Ramones doing "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" to Norah Jones doing "The Long Way Home" to Rod Stewart and Mary Chapin Carpenter doing "Downtown Train" to Clay Aiken doing "Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis." By and large, most of these folks have done an admirable job, capturing the weariness of Waits' voice and the downtrodden beauty of the lyrics while making the songs their own.
That said, combining the worst of 80's synth-pop with unemotive vocals? What were you thinking, beyond "This is SURE to get me onto the next Golden Throats album?"
Still thinking of you lustfully, as long as you don't sing,
Fancycwabs.
What is the common theme in these list items?
- I've got no shortage of Twitter detractors on my friendslist, and given that tweets typically range from mundane to inane I can mostly agree (even if I'm a perpetrator myself). Twitter, is, however, the ultimate expression of millions of monkeys with typewriters, and as the saying goes, eventually they'll come out with Hamlet. How will we recognize it? Odds are it'll be picked up by favrd. In the meantime, it has a great signal to noise ratio. Check it out--even if you don't like Twitter. (If you are on Twitter, it's not going to pick up your favorites unless you tell it to, so don't forget to sign up.)
- My replacement laptop has a Blu-Ray drive, and Amazon had a decent sale on some movies over the weekend, so I picked up a couple of them. Blade Runner looks quite good, but honestly, I don't need to see the film grain and Ray Liotta's makeup in higher resolution on Goodfellas. Actually, you can kinda see makeup everywhere older films, so unless it was shot in 70mm like Lawrence of Arabia or Hamlet I wouldn't worry about spending the extra money on a Blu-Ray version if the DVD version is available.
- Monday night I picked up a four-pack of Delirium Tremens, thinking it was less expensive than it actually is. It's quite good, but neither three times as good as Newcastle nor 4.75 times as good as Yuengling, so I'll probably stick to the more budget conscious beers. Also, Hamlet.
(no subject)
Before Lucas potentially takes another giant crap on my childhood and ruins it for me, I suppose I ought to reminisce. Star Wars came out when I was six, and while I went to see it, my memories of it were informed more by later re-releases and sequels than by what I actually saw on the screen in 1977. At six years old, having seen little more than Disney rereleases and nature documentaries, I was barely aware that Han actually shot Greedo at all in the sensory overload, much less who shot first.
Things were different at age 10, when Raiders of The Lost Ark came out. I saw it several times over its run in Mobile (without competition from home video, it played for well over a year). I wrote a horrible (and thankfully lost forever) Mad-magazine-style parody of it (well, if Mad Magazine wrote prose) in the sixth grade. I found Temple of Doom to be a lighter, fluffier entertainment--in spite of its supposed "darkness"--filled with ridiculously contrived moments that really didn't ground the series in reality, a problem they solved somewhat in Last Crusade. I was as dissappointed to hear that they'd started referring to the first film as Indiana Jones and The Raiders of The Lost Ark as I was to suddenly be expected talk about Episode IV, the film that had always been simply Star Wars to me, as "A New Hope." When I heard about a sequel, I wasn't particularly excited, because the folks who felt about Star Wars the way I felt about Raiders were, um, just a little pissed off about what Lucas had done to their beloved series--but I figured I didn't actually have to go watch it. It's not as if the story was missing something.
That said, buzz has been pretty good from what I understand. Spielberg, in the intervening years, has moved from an excellent action film director to an Academy-Award winning director, and someone who might be able to rein in some of Lucas' more baroque impulses--and so I'm approaching it with cautious optimism, although I probably won't actually see it until Saturday unless I take some time off work.
THAT said, while it's technically possible, I do NOT want to see Indiana Jones stop in at a Burger King. *shakes fist* You have a couple days to cut any Burger King related scenes from any print I may watch, Speilberg. Consider yourself warned.
Things were different at age 10, when Raiders of The Lost Ark came out. I saw it several times over its run in Mobile (without competition from home video, it played for well over a year). I wrote a horrible (and thankfully lost forever) Mad-magazine-style parody of it (well, if Mad Magazine wrote prose) in the sixth grade. I found Temple of Doom to be a lighter, fluffier entertainment--in spite of its supposed "darkness"--filled with ridiculously contrived moments that really didn't ground the series in reality, a problem they solved somewhat in Last Crusade. I was as dissappointed to hear that they'd started referring to the first film as Indiana Jones and The Raiders of The Lost Ark as I was to suddenly be expected talk about Episode IV, the film that had always been simply Star Wars to me, as "A New Hope." When I heard about a sequel, I wasn't particularly excited, because the folks who felt about Star Wars the way I felt about Raiders were, um, just a little pissed off about what Lucas had done to their beloved series--but I figured I didn't actually have to go watch it. It's not as if the story was missing something.
That said, buzz has been pretty good from what I understand. Spielberg, in the intervening years, has moved from an excellent action film director to an Academy-Award winning director, and someone who might be able to rein in some of Lucas' more baroque impulses--and so I'm approaching it with cautious optimism, although I probably won't actually see it until Saturday unless I take some time off work.
THAT said, while it's technically possible, I do NOT want to see Indiana Jones stop in at a Burger King. *shakes fist* You have a couple days to cut any Burger King related scenes from any print I may watch, Speilberg. Consider yourself warned.