My brain hurts

My work has been crummy and I'm dealing with some family drama. I don't wish to blog about such things, however, I want to blog about the fun and delightful things happening in my dullsville life in VA. So I will use this opportunity this blog presents as an outlet for presenting the fun and entertainment-oriented stuff rather than the depressing or downright boring details of daily life here.

Good news numero uno: The fantastic Gogol Bordello will be performing at Toad's Place in Richmond in June. Yes! I've missed them before because of my unwillingness to drive to D.C. or Blacksburg or due to poor time with work schedule. This time, it's on!

Good news numero dos: Word has hit the street that the legendary Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds will be in D.C. at the 9:30 Club on Sunday October 5th. No word on when tickets go on sale. I must attend this show. I've been into Nick Cave since I was in high school and I've passed up his shows before. I won't make the same mistake again.

Treis: The Cure show at the Patriot Center is Friday! Yeah! It's about freakin' time.

Quatro: Got my husband his early birthday gift: tickets to Weird Al Yankovic at the National in Richmond.

Cinco: Bellydance Superstars Raqs America extravaganza weekend in June! I've registered for a bunch of workshops and all sorts of fun stuff. I'll get to learn from my favorite dancer, Sharon Kihara (pictured above). Although her video is a bit advanced and too fast-paced, she's incredibly talented and I'm looking forward to the workshops. Matt's coming so that we can make it a weekend getaway and snuggle up at a hotel, too.

I took French in high school so I don't know number six in Spanish. It's rokku in Japanese. Numero Rokku: My beautiful Leah from NYC will be town this weekend. It's her birthday on Sunday so hopefully I'll get to see her.

I wish everyone a happy Cinco de Mayo! Hope to see some of you out at these upcoming shows (give me a shout if you're going to be there).

Wow, time flies

March was the longest month ever, April was the shortest. I can't believe it's May already.
The Lou Reed show was pretty good, especially considering the fact that we're talking about a guy who's pushing seventy. Unlike Iggy and Morrissey, Lou had the courtesy to keep his shirt the whole time. He also avoided breaking a hip, which was nice. The show began around 8:45 and ended at about 10:15, so I was home by 11pm so I was a happy camper. Lou was perhaps the coolest 66-year-old rocker I've seen. Instead of playing the insanely boring set of experimental new music that I anticipated he would perform, he actually played "I'm Set Free", "I'm Sticking with You", and my fave, "Sweet Jane". It was actually kinda rad. Go Lou.
In happy news: Matt and I finished all 29 episodes of Twin Peaks, starting with the pilot and finishing up with Fire Walk With Me. I may expand upon this cause it's quite a story, but I saw FWWM when I was a naive fourteen year old and when I hadn't seen any episodes of the television show. As a horror movie buff, I was pretty resilient at that age, but FWWM scared the living crap out of me. Terrified me, couldn't sleep for nights on end. Saw it again at the age of 22, still hadn't seen any of the tv show, still scared the s#!t out of me. When Matt said that we should watch the film, I was freakin' and was not excited to see it again for fear of endless sleepless nights. However, after taking in the tv show, I'm delighted to report that the film made so much more sense and I conquered my fear! Yay! I kinda even want to see it again soon.
The new Portishead album, Third, is out now. Do not walk, run to the store to buy it right now. Also, the Flight of the Conchords full - length is now available and it's wonderful. I laugh so hard I nearly cry every time I hear the track "Think About It".

Blast it

Got news today that tonight's performance by Lou Reed at the NorVa will not feature an opening act. I'm peeved because I heard that Japanese band Melt Banana would be opening up. They bailed and Lou's on his own. This could be construed as good news because the show will start and probably finish up early. Lou and I can both be asleep at an early hour. Even Iggy Pop had the good graces to wrap it up quickly so we could all go nite-nite early. I'm growing fond of aging rockers and their work ethic.
Still, I'm bummed about Melt Banana.

Another week

I've been slackin' on bloggin'. This has been a rather uneventful time period. I was slightly ill last week and had to take some time off work. I went to my aunt's 80th birthday party. My husband and I are still trying to plow our way through all 29 episodes of Twin Peaks. We're up to episode 22 or 23, I can't remember which.

Last night we took a break from Twin Peaks to watch the movie Wristcutters: A Love Story. It's a surprisingly enjoyable (albeit a bit slow-moving) black romantic comedy. Good stuff, plus Tom Waits is in it. He's actually in it a lot more than I thought he would be. He's funny, quintessentially Tom. He gets to have a great dog named Freddy (played by the immensely talented dog Foxie). Freddy was impressive because he looked just like a fusion of my first dog, a Cocker Spaniel named Max, and my current dog, an American Eskimo Spitz called Whitey. If I get another dog some day, I want a Freddy dog. But I digress, Wristcutters is fun and has great music and Tom Waits and Freddy. I couldn't find a picture of Freddy, the best I could do is the image above. You can see Tom Waits who is cradling the dog. That's the top of the dog's head there.

Nothing much else is going on. Going to go to hear Lou Reed at the NorVa on Friday. According to my friend Leah who waited on him at her posh restaurant in New York, Lou's quite old. She said he was nice enough, but definitely old. That was all she really had to say, so Friday's concert should prove interesting for geriatrics like me.

A week goes by

Not much has been going on this past week. Work has been slow. My husband and I have been obsessively trying to make our way through the Twin Peaks gold box that I got him for Christmas. We've spent almost every spare moment watching Twin Peaks.
Last Thursday I experiences the Worst Bike Ride Ever. On this occasion, I ate s#!t hard on some gravel on a busy street. Following some bleeding (a little crying cause I am such a pu$$y!) and some limping, I witnessed some cops take down some guys in the parking lot of the Rite Aid near my house. I was trying to cut through the parking lot there to get to my house as quickly as my gimpy bleeding legs would take me, but the cops waved me away right before they ran up on this random car in the parking lot, brandishing their guns and screaming "get your hands up where we can see 'em!". Fun.
On Saturday I went to a great wedding. My husband's cousin got married. She's a lovely, smart, talented and pretty girl who married one heckuva douche bag. The wedding ceremony was a Catholic affair, so it was a bit long. Then to the reception which involved a rather impressive plated dinner and a cake made of a variety of cupcakes. The best part by far was watching the drunken revelers dance to silly disco and cheesy wedding music. Never in my life have I witnessed such bizarre dancing. The saying is that white people cannot dance, and this reception was populated by the whitest people on the face of the earth. Two out of the 100-odd people there were good dancers. Everyone else was insane. It was truly an amazing sight. My sister-in-law and I relished the opportunity to hang back and clown everyone while discreetly shooting video footage on her digital camera. I've e-mailed her to request this footage so that I can post it for all to see and enjoy. Still, the best part wasn't captured on film. My favorite disturbing moment was when the drunken bride was sandwiched in between her drunken douchebag husband and his Night At The Roxbury reject groomsman while they thrust and ground upon her. I immediately turned to my husband and thanked him for not dry-humping me at our wedding or at any time in public.
I never really suffered from allergies before, but here they have arrived in full force this spring. Yuck.
And that's my week. Wonderful and wild, full of bizarre behavior from the residents of Twin Peaks and from the family that I married into.

Lost Highway (and lost avenues, streets, boulevards, cul-de-sacs, etc.)

Last night my husband and I watched David Lynch's Lost Highway. I hadn't seen the film in nearly a decade, and I'm happy to report that it's held up pretty well considering that it's not thought of as one of Lynch's best films. It's a bit of a mess, but it's nevertheless a thought-provoking and creeptastic mess. Like the best of Lynch's work, Lost Highway leaves you pondering what you watched and allows you to try your damnedest to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. Is it about split personalities? Or is it about memory versus reality? Or is it simply about Patricia Arquette's boobies? Perhaps all three.

Slate posted a good write-up of the film last week in honor of the recent DVD release that offers a bit of insight into the movie. I direct you to this critique because I do not wish to delve into the movie, but instead wish to relate my experience of seeing it in the theatre on opening night back in 1997.

My initial Lost Highway screening was one of the most memorable movie-going experiences of my life. I was living in a college dorm in Richmond when I discovered that the new David Lynch film would be starting at movie theatres in Washington, D.C. that day. Always the obsessive, I managed to wrangle up a few of my best girlfriends to head up to the capitol city for a movie adventure. Three brave girls, Leah, Lynn and Leslie (never noticed those three L's) were up for it, so we started plotting our journey. One of the girl's roommates overheard that we were planning to drive up to D.C. and she warned us that we might want to consult a map. In these dark days of the late 90's, cell phones were a luxury for the wealthy and mapquest was a few more years coming. So my girls and I headed out towards the highway in my yellow '73 Volkswagen Superbeetle to go get a David Lynch fix.

We planned to see a 10pm show at some random Odeon theatre. By 9:30pm we had actually managed to find the city, but little else. We drove around the city of our founding fathers, getting more and more lost as time went on. We stopped to ask directions at least four or more times, getting more turned around and confused with each new set of directions (it didn't help that a lot of these driving directions came from men at gas stations with not much sense and even less teeth). We drove down numerous little side streets and hit a number of one-way streets going the wrong way. We were invited to a few "parties" by big guys drinking 40's as we puttered around through sketchy neighborhoods in search of our movie theatre. We were scared, tired and very confused.

Somehow, after two and a half hours of stopping and starting and turning around and around, we found the glorious theatre (it turned out to be somewhere in Dupont Circle). It was a dive with little screens, but we could have kissed the stained burgundy carpets. We made it just in time for the midnight show.

The film was insane, and it seemed to perfectly reflect our state of mind that evening. We all walked out feeling delirious and enlightened. Sex and murder aside, it was as though David Lynch had perfectly captured our mood that night. We all walked out thinking it was a work of genius.

Then we promptly got lost again. Took us about another half an hour to find the interstate.

We made it back to Richmond just in time to eat some breakfast and finally sleep. When the film was finally released on home video, three of us gals were living in an apartment together and we made a beeline for the video store. Upon a more lucid viewing of Lost Highway, we were a bit disappointed. The film didn't have nearly the same effect on us as it did the first time.

Now, a decade later, I can happily report that the film is standing the test of time admirably. I will soon be teaching a Surrealism in Film survey course at our art gallery and I'm excited about the Lynch aspect of this course (I intend to devote one class out of four to his work solely). I wholly believe that Lynch's work will be celebrated and studied for years to come, and, love it or hate it, Lost Highway will be considered a milestone in his oeuvre.

A first

Today I heard my crotchety, ultra-conservative father use the word "poetic" to describe a film. That film was No Country For Old Men.
You could have knocked me over with a feather.
Then he was sure to add, "It needed a better ending, though."