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9/9/09, huh? It’s an exciting day! It marks the last set of repeating, single-digit dates that we’ll see for almost a century (until January 1, 2101), and the Remastered Beatles catalog, Beatles Rock Band, and the new Apple iPod are all being released today.
But my favorite celebration today is my third wedding anniversary with the extraordinary Christopher Gandin Le. Suicide prevention expert, exquisite photographer (still and motion pictures), beloved friend, and the best damn husband and partner I could ever desire.
For our anniversary, he gave me the gift of music from one of my favorite artists: Erin McKeown. Since I first heard Distillation 9 years ago, I have loved this woman’s music, and have had a total crush on her as well. She’s excruciatingly talented across a wide variety of instruments and musical styles, her lyrics are poetic, her style is fantastic (check those Fluevogs!), and her live show is always fabulous. Oh, and she’s only 31; she’s been making great music since she was in college.
Her newest album, Hundreds of Lions, comes out this October on Righteous Babe records, and to raise funds for this self-financed album, she launched a very cool endeavor this summer.
Photo Credit: Nancy Palmieri
Dear Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber, Marc Webb, Eric Steelberg, the producers, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, and everyone else involved in making the movie (500) Days of Summer,
I’ve been subconsciously writing this letter for four months, since I first saw your movie at SXSW. I wrote on this site about my screening experience, but looking back, my post seems flippant and doesn’t indicate the depth to which your story delighted me. My husband wasn’t with me at the SXSW screening, which was unfortunate, because as soon as the credits rolled, I knew he would see himself on that screen. (As will many, many men my age.) Last night, I took him to see the movie at another screening in town.
I loved the movie again, maybe even more this time. You have created a masterful film that captures countless desperately honest moments. It was a visceral pleasure to watch. And I want to articulate some of the reasons why it has touched me so significantly.
I’ll cut here so I can spill lots of spoilers below. (Crucial Minutiae readers, if you’re going to see this movie, bookmark this post and come back once you’ve seen it. I don’t want to ruin your viewing experience.)
There’s a free party happening on the East River in Manhattan today from 3pm-7pm, and it celebrates the anniversary of Loving v. Virginia (1967), the Supreme Court decision that legalized interracial marriage in the U.S.
DJ Dhundee and DJ Tyler Askew will be spinning, there’s free BBQ all day long, and there’s free beer for the 1st hour. It’s at Solar 1, on the East River Waterfront at East 23rd St, NYC.
Go soak up some of the beautiful day in the company of beautiful, happy people and families!
On Monday, President Obama officially proclaimed June 2009 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month. This made my jaw drop and my heart soar. Yes, there is much more work to be done to truly “turn back discrimination and prejudice everywhere it exists,” as Obama asks Americans to do. But formal acknowledgments are a big deal in our country, and this is definitely an important first.
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On a fluffier note, check out this re-recording of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” with the vocalist singing/narrating what’s actually happening in the video (which is, by the way, completely creepy). Clever and hilarious!
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.
I got the tip on this clever, well-shot short film via Facebook. “Validation” is a fable about the magic of free parking, starring TJ Thyne (on “Bones”) and Vicki Davis, and directed and written by Kurt Kuenne (“Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father”). Spending 16 minutes watching this film is highly preferable to reading panic-bloated coverage about the swine flu, I promise.
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.
I am done talking, and have decided I need to dance. A LOT!
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Kimmi
Therapy Thursdays
Susan Boyle is this year’s Paul Potts.
Potts, a Carphone Warehouse salesman and 2007 Britain’s Got Talent contestant, rocked audiences with his rendition of “Nessun Dorma.” He went on to win the competition and was subsequently signed to Sony Records, where his debut album sold over 2 million copies.
Boyle seems poised to do the same.
Yesterday, I read that Virginia Woolf’s husband, Leonard, had a remedy for depression:
“move house, develop a new hobby, work with your hands, buy a puppy.”
The first one on the list interests me most–Moving. People have long changed home and scenery in search of a fresh start, a term used by D.H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bishop and practically everyone I know. As someone who has waved goodbye to many places, I experience a clockwork-like moving process. I start to itch for new-dom and make a choice in that direction. Then 2-3 weeks before leaving, I grow angry at the place. Somehow it makes the splitting up easier: “We weren’t meant to be together anyway. It’s just so obvious now.” Once I’m physically gone, the mourning begins.
I know. It’s a pattern I need to break.
For a moment, let’s put aside the pain of leaving a place you’ve attached to. Leaving can also be exhilarating. What is it about a new house, city, or landscape that allows us the promise of rearranging ourselves, doing all those things we always wanted to do, being better? As a kid, I relished the anticipation of exploring a new backyard and neighborhood. Each move felt like an opening. My goals: #1 I would become a better student and definitely nicer to my parents and brothers. #2 I would become my perfect self. We think a new outside will mirror a new inside. When you clean your bedroom, don’t your emotions suddenly fall into a neat order, at least for a couple hours?
Moving is a good shake-up. It forces us to re-open our eyes, sharpen our senses, use new skills, get comfortable with fear and reorganize some of our beliefs. I’m in the camp that believes some movement in life makes for a more tolerant and brave person. Though in my recent thinking, I suspect it’s also addictive, a slippery slope to always looking for satisfaction outside of yourself.
In February, as news about the Chris Brown and Rihanna Fenty situation spread through the internet, Jay Smooth over at Ill Doctrine consulted with Elizabeth Mendez Berry, who wrote an article in 2005 called Love Hurts in Vibe Magazine, about domestic violence within (and without) hip-hop. (Here’s a link to the video of that interview, originally published on February 14th.)
Last week, Elizabeth Mendez Berry published a powerful follow-up commentary about the issue over at Ill Doctrine. Her piece begins in a “gang awareness” meeting with fifteen Bronx teenagers, discussing domestic violence. The conversation lands on this “bottom line: sometimes you’ve got to teach a woman a lesson if she gets out of line.” Until this moment:
In the midst of the rationalizing, one usually talkative young man stood up and walked out. When he returned twenty minutes later, he quietly told the group that his aunt had recently been murdered by her abusive boyfriend. It was no longer a hypothetical conversation. The jokes stopped. Young men who were significantly invested in their inner gangsters gave them time off, and started talking about how domestic violence had affected their lives–and it had affected most of them. The young woman, who minutes before had been arguing in favor of beating females who didn’t know their place, talked about how despite the rules, male gang members beat up on female gang members. Behind her swagger, she seemed anxious.
The rest of the article is as beautiful and honest as this excerpt — I highly recommend reading the whole thing. She’s a sharp reporter and writer, and this issue is a matter of life or death for too many women.
I can’t believe it. The 2009 SXSW Film Festival is finished. 25 movies in 9 days. Consider my brain and eyes officially and absolutely full.
I saw three final movies today, all of which involved some elements of fantasy and magic: The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, Monsters From the Id, and 500 Days of Summer.
Though I enjoyed all of them, my favorite was 500 Days of Summer, a surprising and funny not-love story, directed by Marc Webb, written by Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber, and featuring Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
I won’t lie; much of my enjoyment of the movie came from the pleasure of his (completely surprising to me) charm and sexy handsomeness. Also, his karaoke version of “Here Comes Your Man” was super-hot. (What can I say? I’m a sucker for the Pixies.) Also, we share the same initials, which I only realized this because the young women behind me in line kept startling me by talking about “JGL” this and “JGL” that, and I kept thinking they were reading my mind somehow. It finally dawned on me that they were talking about the actor in kind-of code.
But I also enjoyed the movie because it was well-told, beautifully shot, honest romantic comedy that tells you right from the start that it isn’t a love story. The filmmakers and lead actors were on hand to answer questions after the screening, and, it being a SXSW audience of filmmakers (aspiring and current), most of the questions were for the director and writers.
The writers both expressed how lucky they felt to have found a director who was on the same wavelength as they were, who took their unusually structured and wacky script and ran with it in the direction they’d wanted. I want exactly that for my movie — I want to stand on a stage in front of an enamored audience, expressing gratitude for my film’s director and standing in awe of how well the movie turned out, even better than my wildest dreams. And I want my movie to star two really hot guys.
A great way to end a film festival, I’d say.
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays, with a special daily edition during the SXSW Film Festival.
Hands down, the coolest moment of my day? Watching the new Spike Lee Joint, Passing Strange, on the big screen — while sitting right behind Spike Lee himself. It was wild to get to watch a director watching his own film. I don’t get star-struck easily, but that was really freaking cool.
The movie is a dynamically filmed and edited recording of the Broadway play of the same name, created by the musician Stew and his musical partner Heidi Rodewald. As I got the chance to tell him after the screening, I have never seen the raw energy of a live theater performance captured so well on film.
This one will be coming to you via IFC and PBS eventually, so keep an eye out for it, and see it on the big screen if you can. It destroys the old assumption that you can’t film theatre effectively. Spike Lee and his team just did.
Photo by Flickr user s.maentz
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays, with a special daily edition during the SXSW Film Festival.
After my six-film mania yesterday, it was inevitable that I’d need to take it easy today. I attended only two movies today, including the “Super Special Screening” this morning at the Paramount. I got in line with no idea what it was, until Janet Pierson, producer of the SXSW film festival, announced that we were about to watch Richard Linklater’s latest film, called “Me and Orson Welles.” It’ll be released in October, so I won’t say much about it, but I will say that one of my favorite moments of the day was watching Claire Danes’ performance in the movie. I know her mostly from her early and mid-1990s movies like R+J or Little Women, in which she played a tremulous ingenue, which was appropriate for her age at the time. In this movie, though, we get to see the actress playing a grown-ass woman, complete with gravitas, wit, and resonant lower-pitched voice. Something shifted between then and now, and she has come into her own presence as a strong actor. It was a pleasure to watch.
My real-life favorite moment of the day was sitting down to a Tex-Mex dinner and margaritas with four friends from out of town, two local pals, and Vu. One of my favorite things to do is gather together people that I adore and find fascinating and introduce them to each other. Good things always follow. My relationships with these folks span from being college roommates to meeting through a mutual friend and hitting it off from there. They’re all cool, talented people who are bringing new creative endeavors into the world, like a cooking site rich with recipes from the world’s best chefs, an online platform where artists connect with audiences, an interactive storytelling and publishing project for girls, innovative video games, creative commercials and short films, and a gal without a website who’s kicking ass as a fiction writer in the prestigious Michener Center at UT.
Yeah, I’m bragging on their behalf. I can’t help it; I’m thrilled and humbled by my friends’ talents.
The two hour dinner break turned into six hours of conversation and laughter, and I was glad I didn’t rush off to cram in another movie. It is a beautiful thing to know your limits, and to follow what feels warm and good. Sometimes that’s six movies, and sometimes that’s a relaxed dinner in the warm light at sunset. Today, it was the latter, and I will go to bed happy and satisfied.
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays, with a special daily edition during the SXSW Film Festival.
That’s right, folks, I watched six movies in twelve hours today. I think it’s my personal record. Even more surprising than the sheer amount of movies is the fact that they were all good — in fact, four were excellent, moving films.
In the interest of my bedtime and ability to do this again tomorrow, here are my top four, in the order I saw them, and with high recommendations that you see all of them if you get the chance:
1) Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love
This movie follows Youssou Ndour, Grammy Award-winning Senegalese singer and hero, over two years as he releases “Egypt,” an ambitious and controversial album on which he sings about his beloved Islam. (Western listeners not familiar with his name will certainly recognize his voice — he sang backing vocals on Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.”)
Ndour’s story and the movie’s telling of it brought me to tears several times; from the sheer power of his voice in performance, to the scenes with his grandmother, the film was beautiful and I want to see it again.
Trailer, and three more stellar films after the jump.
This is my second year attending the SXSW Film Festival, the eight-day panel-attending and movie-watching blitz in March. It’s exhausting bliss to plunge into dozens of movies, immersing yourself in a new world created with great care by filmmakers every time the lights go down.
For the next eight days, I’m going to post daily my favorite movie/video/panel/moment, to highlight a tiny slice of the abundant creativity found here.
Tonight I saw a showcase of music videos, including great ones for Gnarls Barkley’s “Going On” (dir. Wendy Morgan) and Talkdemonic’s “Duality of Deathening” (dir. Orie Weeks III). But this one was my favorite — it brought me to tears. It’s the Fleet Foxes video for “White Winter Hymnal,” directed by Sean Pecknold:
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays, with a special daily edition during the SXSW Film Festival.
I had every intention of blogging about He’s Just Not That Into You, but it will have to wait.
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I mean, come on. You can’t hold back the tides of change, evolution, and love.
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.
It’s weird to walk into a movie knowing how it’s going to end.
In general, I avoid the biopic because mid-movie I will inevitably start thinking about which scenes actually happened and which ones were manufactured to move the silver screen version of things along. Occasionally, I see a What’s Love Got to Do With It, where the acting is so good it actually doesn’t matter which parts of the story are true.
Fall 1993. Howard University Homecoming. In the dorm room of a friend of my friend C. I first heard Biggie Smalls’ “Party and Bullshit.”
Who. Is. That?
None of us knew then that B.I.G. would become Notorious, but I did leave DC with a tape of “P&B” on repeat.
So with early nineties nostalgia all over it, I facebooked my old-school, college crew (yes, Carman 7!) and planned a field trip to a Saturday night showing of Notorious.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Newton’s laws of motion. And President-elect Obama. And Chuck Bass.
Yes, this is what I do in my spare time.
Last week’s Gossip Girl found a drunken Chuck Bass, ambling along the edge of the roof of a very tall building. One misstep and he’d be splat! on the pavement like the bottle of Jack that slipped from his hand moments earlier.
But Gossip Girl is a television series. And Chuck (and Blair) are the reasons I tune in. So the threat of his death was a false one. As any avid GG fan can tell you they aren’t going to kill Chuck Bass.
This will be most amusing if you are a Nine Inch Nails fan, or if you wish you had edgier Christmas music to listen to this season. (NSFW: Explicit lyrics within.)
As my witty friend Matt put it, “Must go hang tiNINsel now, and drink eggnog from the perfect mug, the perfect mug, the perfect mug.”
Awesome concert photo of Trent Reznor by Mel; ridiculous Christmas lights added by yours truly
song via Deanna
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.
This guy’s rhymes and adorable parody made me smile and laugh so hard it brought tears to my eyes. He throws in a few stereotypes, but on the whole, he nails it. Especially the pho verse — so damn good!
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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.
