The top searches for this blog continue to be inspiring:
daggering, thirst park chan wook, daggering adult fucking, what’s in the basket
I consider myself to be a pretentious person, but in no way a mature one. The comments on the Best Foreign Language Films of 2009 post (see below) are making me want to fill a Super Soaker with my own urine and seek retribution for all the goddamn bellyaching, sanctimoniousness and just generally tittish behavior therein. I know this is the internet, and therefore any communication is delivered with the forethought and consideration of a walking anus, but when every damn comment is a petulant, sublingual indictment of my person or choices…well, that grates.
Responses to the column seem to fall into two varieties: the first - “AIN’T DONE NE’ER HURD OF DIS YURE GAY LULZ QU33F!!!1~`” can be dismissed out of hand, but the second – “Where’s Sin Nombre and Thirst? This list is clearly gay and retarded!” really bring my piss to a boil.
I saw Sin Nombre – a nice film with attractive cinematography – good but not great. I saw Thirst, which was refreshingly Lynchian but otherwise not up to Park Chan Wook’s usual standards. I prefer to interpret the demand for their inclusion as: “Hey, I saw two foreign language films last year, or at least two I didn’t hate: Sin Nombre and Thirst! I didn’t see a goddamn thing from this list, therefore I must be validated by harkening for what I did see!” Fuck you.
It should also be noted that I am not above editing comments which I consider irredeemably offensive, such as those that bust me for grammar slips and/or typos or are just bitchy for no discernible reason. If you’re considering saying something like “This list sucks” or “This review is fucking terrible” without an adequate rebuttal or backing, don’t be surprised when you look back to find your comment now says “I’m a stupid ugly moron with an ugly face and a big butt and my butt smells and I like to kiss my own butt.” Some of my fellow Pajiba peers find editing comments unethical; I say fuck that, we’re arguing from a position of power.
In conclusion, I hope we can all play nice and, if sauciness and petulance are truly deemed necessary, we may at least endeavour our comments to be funny. If you can’t seem to find a way to back up a contrary opinion or phrase it in a way that doesn’t make we want to rape your mouth, well, prepare to get fucked with.
The 2009 Phillipino Book Awards
The Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore
The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters
The Season of Ash, Jorge Volpi
Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín
Drood, Dan Simmons
The City & the City, China Miéville
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
Once the Shore, Paul Yoon
Tinkers, Paul Harding
The 2009 Phillipino Music Awards
Top 20 Tracks of 2009:
20. Manic Street Preachers, “She Bathed Herself in a Bath of Bleach”
19. Dinosaur Jr., “I Want You to Know”
18. Fuck Buttons, “Surf Solar”
17. Cass McCombs, “You Saved My Life”
16. Julian Casablancas, “11th Dimension”
15. The Thermals, “Now We Can See”
14. Bowerbirds, “Northern Lights”
13. Camera Obscura, “French Navy”
12. Surfer Blood, “Swim”
11. Dirty Projectors, “Cannibal Resource”
10. The Pains of Being Pure of Heart, “Young Adult Friction”
9. Blue Roses, “I am Leaving”
8. Health, “Die Slow”
7. Phoenix, “1901”
6. St. Vincent, “The Strangers”
5. Grizzly Bear, “Two Weeks”
4. Pictureplane, “Goth Star”
3. Manic Street Preachers, “Me and Stephen Hawking”
2. Animal Collective, “My Girls”
1. Polvo, “Lucia”
Top 20 Albums of 2009:
20. The Mountain Goats, The Life of the World to Come
19. Antony and the Johnsons, The Crying Light
18. Cass McCombs, Catacombs
17. Sunset Rubdown, Dragonslayer
16. Dinosaur Jr., Farm
15. Camera Obscura, My Maudlin Career
14. Super Furry Animals, Dark Days – Light Years
13. Cymbals Eat Guitars, Why There Are Mountains
12. Bill Calahan, Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle
11. The Pains of Being Pure of Heart, The Pains of Being Pure of Heart
10. Phoenix, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
9. Dirty Projectors, Bitte Orca
8. St. Vincent, Actor
7. Russian Circles, Geneva
6. Mono, Hymn to the Immortal World
5. Polvo, In Prisms
4. Grizzly Bear, Veckatimest
3. Sunn O))), Monoliths & Dimensions
2. Fuck Buttons, Tarot Sport
1. Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilion
Monsoon Christmas
I’ll I’m trying to make up for my end-quarter blogging failure by doing some of those perennial end-year lists. There should also be a Pajiba piece appearing relatively soon. Stay tuned for a veritable bukkake of content.
This Christmas it rained. It rained for 72-hours straight, and then rained some more. I managed to reach Benton before the actual interstate flooded, so I could watch our state break its annual rainfall record from the comfort of my parents’ home and not the waterlogged I-30. I stayed inside reading Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and quibbling with my parents. Their précis of my personality in the form of a single Christmas present was a “Haunted Landscapes” calendar.
“What’s in the Basket?”
My Halloween costume this year, assembled in one swift trip to Wal-Mart 20 minutes before I was expected to a friend’s Halloween bash:
Ponyo
Latest Pajibin’ after a pretty lengthy hiatus:
“This is as loose an interpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale as has ever been made, but the source material here is only important insofar as Miyazaki can make it his own. His usual hallmarks return splendidly: the innocence of love, the tenuous balance of ecology, the primacy of visual experience, the lack of categorical good and evil, the beauty of the everyday, and the joys of minutiae. Ponyo unfolds unhurriedly and with a mysterious vibrancy. It is both rote and predictable to describe his films as “magical,” but that’s really the word we need. Is it the de facto belief in magic that allows a child to accept the existence of the fantastic without hesitation or suspicion, without a corresponding search for meaning? I would say so. Miyazaki’s gift is to let the rest of us do the same.”
I’ve been off my writing game, lately. Too few reviews and too few blogs. I’m not sure whether my overturned living situation or summer malaise is to blame, but I’ll see what I can do about it.
Guns and Joelses
I had a real shit-bath of a week: first I blew about $1,500 to keep my gelapi of a car together, then I got some insanely trenchant remarks from my professor about a paper I’d written, and now it appears that my ancillary hard drive (500GB filled with books and all the music I own) is dead or dying. I still do not have a bed, and the house is filled with my unpacked boxes and accoutrements because I can’t really set up the room until that is taken care of (fuck UPS ground-shipping in the balls). In times like these, I take great comfort in tormenting one of my housemates.
Meet Joel:
Joel is a man of many faces. He listens almost exclusively to death metal, watches Ultimate Fighting Championship with zealotry, and is an ardent Christian. Ardent. I’d describe his temperament as something between Ned Flanders and Snarf from “ThunderCats.” He regularly uses words like “flip,” “criminy,” and “jilickers” (seriously) in lieu of swearing and stares at the floor whenever there’s nudity in film or television. And yet listens to bands like Goblin Cock and Dimmu Borgir…
Imagine the look on poor Joel’s face whenever his petulant, ruthlessly cynical, and marginally insane housemate makes exclamations like “Goddamn buttfucking shitballs” at the slightest inconvenience or threatens to “rape his mouth” if he doesn’t take his dishes out of the sink. Imagine the sighs of exasperation and disgust that escape him when I recite from memory the lyrics of Faggot Bruce or leave a drawing of goatse on the dry-erase board:
Does this cheer me up? Oh my yes.
