“She’s just one of the girls, she is not one of those one-in-a-million. As if to have and to hold would be holding me down with love and addiction. I think I’ve found someone, I’ve found someone to help me work it out…”

Kind of a soft alternative pop song from the mid-90s. I grew up in the northeast and listened to a lot of TMBG, Violent Femmes, and Talking Heads, so it’s possible that it’s from someone slightly adjacent to them, but it also might have just been on the pop radio station. It’s not “One In A Million” by Bosson, Ne-Yo, Aaliyah, or Trixter. I’m pretty sure I didn’t dream its existence.

I dunno, “Hey, you two make sieg heils while I take a picture” isn’t very guileful, it’s pretty much right out there. There’s no mistaking the hand gesture.

complaining about jellicle in Cats would be a lot like walking out of a Smurfs movie complaining about “Man, they sure do say ‘Smurf’ a lot.”

Thing is, there’s a lot about the source material that, if you’re not there for it, then you shouldn’t even be in the theatre. No plot, sexy cat monsters, absurd lyrics, that’s all there from the beginning. No, the 2019 movie is fucked up in ways that have nothing to do with T. S. Eliot or Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Post-production

Scott’s first cut of Legend ran 125 minutes long. He then believed there were minor plot points that could be trimmed and cut the film down to 113 minutes, so he tested this version for an audience in Orange County. However, it was decided that the audience had to work too much to be entertained, and another 20 minutes was cut. The 95-minute version was shown in Great Britain and then the film was cut down even further to 89 minutes for North America.

At the time, Scott said, “European audiences are more sophisticated. They accepted preambles and subtleties whereas the U.S. goes for a much broader stroke.” He and Universal delayed the North American theatrical release until 1986 so that they could replace Jerry Goldsmith’s score with music by Tangerine Dream, Yes lead singer Jon Anderson, and Bryan Ferry.

Scott allowed Goldsmith’s score to remain on European prints and the composer said, “that this dreamy, bucolic setting is suddenly to be scored by a techno-pop group seems sort of strange to me”. Normally, Goldsmith would spend 6–10 weeks on a film score, but for Legend, he spent six months writing songs and dance sequences ahead of time.

The Goldsmith score is… fine, I guess, but it doesn’t convey the intense 80s-ness of the movie as well as Tangerine Dream. It’s like Flash Gordon or Highlander without the Queen songs.

I think everyone should see the 2019 Cats. I was not bored, and I had a strong emotional reaction to the movie. Was it shit? Oh absolutely, in ways that I didn’t even know movies could be shit. But it was not boring! So if I were going to recommend a movie to someone who hadn’t seen it yet, Cats would be near the top of that list.

Movies that I actually love despite them having poor ratings…

• Event Horizon - 6.6 IMDB / 35% RT - Haunted house in space. Great performances from a great cast. Properly fucked up. Love seeing blue collar workers in scifi.

• Death to Smoochy - 6.3 IMDB / 42% RT - See Robin Williams go hard on the R-rating playing a children’s show host on a downward spiral. One of my favorite Williams performances.

• Legend (1985) - 6.3 IMDB / 41% RT - Shot entirely inside of a huge bag of cocaine. All vibes, don’t question any of it, logic has no place here. Watch the theatrical cut with Tangerine Dream, because the director’s cut with Jerry Goldsmith is honestly just vague fantasy noodling, and the 80s power jams are at least 40% of the charm.

And nobody thought to install some glass breakers on the bottom of their boots?

Edit: Hell, I’d even consider wedging a nice sharp piece of quartz into the tread of a boot.

But you still have to carry the weight of what you did to all those chickens.

The entirety of Holy Grail, for starters. My high school history teacher said that it was one of the most realistic depictions of life in the Middle Ages ever put on film.

After that…

“What have the Romans ever done for us?”

“The roads!”

“Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don’t they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads–”

…and…

“Oh, we used to dream of livin’ in a corridor! Would ha’ been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.”

You ever watch Gabby’s Dollhouse?

She stays in her room, full-time. She never interacts with anyone outside of her room. She receives deliveries from an unseen outside force, via a cart and ramp system that makes interaction between inside and outside impossible. She then uses her anomalous abilities to shrink down inside of her dollhouse and have adventures in a pocket universe.

She’s happily protected, in a contained, secure area which she never leaves.

Gabby is a comparatively benign SCP.

Dimethylmercury is an extremely toxic organomercury compound with the formula (CH3)2Hg. A volatile, flammable, dense and colorless liquid, dimethylmercury is one of the strongest known neurotoxins. Less than 0.1 mL is capable of inducing severe mercury poisoning resulting in death.

I remember hearing the story of Karen Wetterhahn, a chemistry professor who specialized in toxic metal exposure and who was using all of the recommended precautions, who got a couple of drops of the stuff on a glove and died less than a year later.

Don’t forget mercury!

There are always copies of The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran. There are always copies of The Two Towers or Return of the King, but frequently no copies of The Fellowship of the Ring. There are always copies of the Chronicles of Narnia books, but never an entire set from the same printing. The staff will always have an author that they will defend their excellent writing while acknowledging that they were horrible human beings, e. g. H. P. Lovecraft, Ernest Hemingway, and recently we get to add Neil Gaiman. If you’re very lucky, someone came in and sold a first autographed edition that’s worth $100+ but the buyer screwed the pooch and priced it at $10.

Edit: Hang out long enough, and you’ll get to hear a customer come in and ask “Can you recommend a book for me?” without providing any more helpful details, and you can hear the staffer’s soul break just a tiny bit more.

( . Y . )

SLXPLOVS

If you go through years of education, learn nothing, and all you get is a piece of paper, then you’ve just wasted thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars on a worthless document. You can go down to FedEx and print yourself a diploma on nice paper for a couple of bucks.

If you don’t actually learn anything at college, you’re quite literally robbing yourself.

Broke: Nothing matters.

Woke: Nothing matters!

Bespoke: 🎼🎶🎵 Nooothing! 🎶🎵 MAAAaaatters!! 🎶🎵

I only just learned about it today, myself. I work that day, but I might be able to shift things around.

I really wish that these protests were more widely shared in advance. I want to be involved, but only getting a couple of days advance warning makes it really hard. I know that sometimes you have to act fast, but if you want your movement to succeed then you’ve got to try to consider the real lives of all of the people who want to help, but are also really limited in their time. Plan protests on weekends, and if you’ve got to protest on a weekday, then plan it way ahead of time and give everyone a chance to plan to be there. I’m sure it looks better to have one big protest with 10X people there than ten protests with 1X people attending.

It’s a ghost costume!