11/19: Shimmy Shack

Friday Night Spoilers:

My biggest complaint about "Ray" was (besides the fact that I saw it in Tucson, K. & I hiding out for the weekend at a friend's place, where the volume on George's insane entertainment setup was set to "deafening" [earlier in the evening, he instructed K. and I to sit on the couch and hold on to each other, because he was about to " KICK OUR ASS." He then inserted "Master & Commander," flipped to the battle scene, and commenced to shred all eardrums in a 20-mile radius until his wife yelled from the back of the house that he may have killed the small dog and the big dog had just peed on the carpet.] Anyways, movies shown at their place are painful-loud) the ending. All that build up and beuatiful shots of multi-colored glass in a tree, cold sweats and then ROLL CREDITS: "Ray kicked drugs and had a v. happy life until he died, the end." I guess that's how it really went, being a biopic and all, but ???? I wanted more???

"Walk the Line" is "Ray", only with less Jamie Foxx.

Joaquin Phoenix makes a compelling fucking JR Cash. He is handsome and hairlipped and really, did a great job at making the guy human as opposed to mere legend.

Reese Witherspoon is just a dark-haired Reese Witherspoon who chirpily announces herself as "most amusing! look at me! LOOK AT ME." throughout the whole movie, and you kind of can't help but think of her not as June whatsoever, but really just as Legally Brunette.

Baby, baby, baby, baby, BABY.

Saturday Night, Live:

It does not usually take 4 hours to get to the Cutest Lil' Country Cottage Ever, Virginia, unless I travel with K. A late start, an exploded tire on her Honda, Bridget, a TripAAA visit/car switch, and stop for candy and gas later, we made our destination. Desination was decorated with cornhusks and front porch chairs and pumpkins and dogs in bandanas and 16 people I love. I was at the kid's table this year.

It was a Fakesgiving miracle for me to end up last in the food line, making less need to actually unbutton pants as previous years have seen. I was on driving duty, as the bird flu knocked me back to only 1/10 as intoxicated as the rest of the world, or so it seemed; so all in all my gluttony took a vaca in '05. It's hard to drink when you also have to use your mouth to breathe. I did make an 11 PM beer run to Grottoes. Also, there was some downloading which including the Smooth Sax Tribute album to Michael Jackson (P.Y.T. never sounded so Kenny G.) and a folk-acoustic version of "Little Red Corvette." There was a drunken wake-up or two around 3 in the morning that I missed, because I was snoring away on our flocked-velour red air mattress in the living room after a heady discussion as to the identity of man in movie "Glory" is the same man as in "Grey's Anatomy." (He's not.)

I don't know. The sun was shining, the dessert table plentiful, the garage stocked with PBR. Two of us turned a year older, cats were there. Life is good.

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Other/newsworthy:

- My draft entry on Capital File is now up to three pages in Word. Time to edit.

- Flickr photos tagged with "comic sans." Comic sans, my most fiendish nemesis.

- Also/maybe worth noting, I missed the speaking engagement w/ Kirk Savage, "Monumental Obsolescence: The Demise of the Equestrian Statue, and Other Tales from the Nation's Capital," from his (upcoming) book Monument Wars: The Changing Memorial Landscape of Washington, D.C. (Sounds more interesting to me than his last book, I think.) Apparently it was free and down in Harrisonburg on the 3rd. Oh well.

Anyhoos, the art dept. offers up a link to an old article of his re: memorials: Savage article.