Jawbreaker: One Crappy Movie

So on Friday, I was cooking some pasta, in that lazy Friday afternoon way, and I had the TV on in the background as I chopped up some beets and pondered the addition of chick peas to the salad I intended to make with the rotini. We recently got The Movie Network added to our cable package, so we can watch The Sopranos on Sunday nights, so I was indulging in a little channel surfing, and I found Jawbreaker. This little cinematic treat features the acting stylings of Miss Rose MacGowan, most famous for her peek-a-boo chain mail dress at the 1998 MTV Video Awards, and for her date and then-fiance, Marilyn Manson.

If ever there was a movie that would have benefited tremendously from the expertise of John Waters, it is Jawbreaker. This movie is crying out for him, in fact. The visuals are great, everything has this insane, candy-coated sheen to it (as befits the movie's title), and the script calls for camp, camp, camp on the part of its performers. And everything just falls a few steps short. A movie like this isn't supposed to say anything, it's not a moral indictment. It's campy fluff, and as such, it's supposed to go over the top. It makes me sad when a campy movie is afraid of its own drama queen-ness. Come out of the closet, Jawbreaker! You don't have to be afraid anymore!

Still, I think that for its concentration of B-list starlets (seriously, 15 years from now, who's going to remember Rebecca Gayheart? Yeah, that's what I thought), fantastic set design & costume direction, and it's classic high school popularity war run amok theme, Jawbreaker is destined for cult film status.
Sunday, March 11, 2001 02:04 p.m.

Watching Movies with Ang Lee
I'm posting this as a Memo to Myself -- along with doing the dumb things I gotta do and touching the puppet head, I need and want to read this article. No time now, but maybe later.
Sunday, March 11, 2001 02:01 p.m.

Right Said Fred
Fred wrote something about Timbaland that is so right-on, I can't hardly stand it. Read while you download Timba's brand-new bangin' jam, "Drop". Now those are some tasty beats.
Sunday, March 11, 2001 01:59 p.m.

Library Hotel
Be still, my beating heart! The entire place is arranged (loosely) according to the Dewey Decimal System! It's a cataloguer's dream! (Thanks to my parental units for pointing this one out.)
Sunday, March 11, 2001 01:57 p.m.

About the Weather

I left for work tonight at about 6:45. The snow had been swirling around in the courtyard for about an hour by then, just dancing, not really falling, with no destination in mind. Just these huge, fluffy flakes that would occasionally catch the light from someone's kitchen window. The wind was blowing hard from the North, so all of the north faces of the trees and signs and cars were very precisely defined with an edge of shimmery whiteness. I thought I'd better take a picture, but I didn't have a camera and I didn't want to be late. I'll do it when I get out of work later tonight, I told myself. I won't, though, because the wind was so strong that it blew all of the snow away, off the branches and signs and awnings and everything. Everything but the ground is all naked again outside, the tree branches stretching up to the sky, begging for something.
Friday, March 9, 2001 11:02 p.m.

What The Hell Is Punk Shit?
I love the Bishop. (Not as much as Hellsbelle does, but that's probably just as well, considering that she's the one to whom he is affianced.) Read the Bishop. Know the Bishop. Love the Bishop. If more bishops were like The Bishop, I bet we'd see an increase in church attendance by cool young hipster folk. Even among disaffected apostate slacker Jews like myself. Hey, Bish, did you take your name from an obscure Monty Python sketch? Not the one about "There's a dead bishop on the landing" but the one that was more like an action-adventure series starring a badass bishop (played, I think, by well-known badass Terry Jones)?
Thursday, March 8, 2001 10:32 a.m.

Handprints
Everyone (my folks, my beloved, my teachers, my employers) is always giving me endless guff for my terrible handwriting. I know, I know, it's illegible. I think faster than I can write, and so everything comes out looking, as Marcus put it once, as though I set a spider in an inkpot and then let the inky arachnid loose on the page. My penmanship has always been piss-poor. Which is why I learned to type 80 words a minute. Anyway, I'm done with feeling shameful about my crap handwriting. Here's Alice's cool handwriting on the web project. I wonder if she's still taking submissions?
Thursday, March 8, 2001 10:30 a.m.

Pituitary Tumour Madness
Dude, I had one of these. They are NO FUN. In fact, they are the exact opposite of fun; they are the anti-fun, sucking fun out of your life and replacing it with headaches and crankiness and sickness and MRIs and a prolonged series of needle sticks and IVs and expensive medication and nausea and the possibility of radiation therapy and lots of insurance forms and multiple hospitalizations and two surgeries and stress for you, your family, and your friends. For the record, my tumour was not a prolactinoma; it released growth hormone instead, so it messed with my life in completely different ways than those described in the linked article. In a few weeks, it'll be the one year anniversary of the day that I had my tumour removed through a (warning - very graphic image ahead) miracle procedure -- one which I'm very grateful to have been knocked out cold for -- and the change it's effected in my life cannot be overestimated. The lesson? If you have recurring headaches, don't ignore them. Go. To. The. Doctor. You may just have migraines or allergies or something else reasonably benign. If it's something more serious, the sooner you know, the better. All praise goes to the fine folks at UVA's Neurosurgery Unit, and to my parents for driving me down to Charlottesville a frightened but grimly determined girl and back to Philly a drugged-up, but considerably better-off one. And here endeth the PSA.
Thursday, March 8, 2001 10:30 a.m.

Isabel Allende Interview
Yes, another Salon link. I'm lazy. This one is for you, Saucy Folklorist!
Thursday, March 8, 2001 10:28 a.m.

Foxy Brown & L'il Kim Truce?
I'm all about hip-hop and obscure cultural detritus today. Which is to say that it's a completely normal Wednesday. I don't know who threw down with whom first, but ever since Tupac and Biggie left us, there's been no better rap feud than the one between Foxy Brown & L'il Kim. But now it's gone beyond the spitting of vicious rhymes and into the realm of real live violence, and it may be at an end. I just hope they never cut a truce record together. That would be too pitiful, like de-clawed tigers fake-attacking "victims" in a circus sideshow.
Wednesday, March 7, 2001 03:49 p.m.

Puffy's Trial -- The New Yorker Viewpoint
Depending on your feelings about rap in general, and Sean "Puffy" Combs in particular, you may think this article is either a brilliant piece of legal/popcultural reporting, or a fluffy bit of overacademic wankery. Either way, you'll think that the font on The New Yorker website is waaaaay to damn small. For a publication whose average reader is well past their best vision years, they've got no respect for the myopic among us. (N.B.: if you want to read this, do so before they change the FACT section next Monday. In the meantime, does anyone know how to capture old New Yorker links? Matt? Nanette? whatsername? Bueller?)
Wednesday, March 7, 2001 03:46 p.m.

The Sinatra Group
Gael has totally made my day. As some of you may know, Phil Hartman was my all-time favourite Saturday Night Live cast member, and his impression of Frank Sinatra is, in my opinion, pure comedy genius. It should come as no surprise, then, that The Sinatra Group is my absolute, all-time, hands-down, insert-your-cliche-here favourite SNL sketch. It is so funny, even now -- sweet merciful crap! -- ten years later. Now I can read and reread the transcript to my heart's content. Yay!
Wednesday, March 7, 2001 03:39 p.m.

The Game Unmasked!
Years ago, my cousins taught my sisters and our friends The Man Called E & Miss A how to play a game that was only called The Game - they said a friend of theirs had learned it in China, and he just called it The Game. So that's what we called it. You need at least two people, but you can play with many, many more than that (you just add a deck or two to keep things interesting), and it requires both skill and luck, and it's highly addictive and fast-paced, so you become addicted and play for hours at a time. It's a good thing that no money changes hands during this game, or I'd be in the poorhouse for sure. I'd heard once that The Game's real name is Palace, but had never been able to confirm that name -- never, that is, until now. Thanks once more to Gael and her neverending parade of fine links, I have confirmation that The Game is truly Palace. Or, as I prefer it, that Palace is truly The Game. I need to start a card night up here, man. I miss the Devil's Pasteboards!
Wednesday, March 7, 2001 03:25 p.m.

Magnetic Fields Live in Philly
Stephin, honey, do you think you could have consulted me before you confirmed that date at the Troc? I mean, I'll be around the weekend before that, but your playing in Philly on April 14 doesn't help me one bit, though it does make me gnash my teeth and read this interview as a stopgap measure. Any chance you'll release some more northerly tour dates sometime soon?
Tuesday, March 6, 2001 09:00 a.m.

REM Reveal What's On Reveal
New album out May 15. New tracklisting available for your reading & speculating pleasure.
Tuesday, March 6, 2001 08:59 a.m.

Marginalia
I write in my books. There, I said it. I write in them, I dog-ear the pages, I sit them, pages-down, on my desk, the floor, my bed, wherever. I'm a carnal, not courtly, lover of books. Which is just one of the reasons I could never be a rare books librarian. Anyway, back to the writing in books - there's this new book, by H.J. Jackson, who is a professor at U of T, and who lectured my Book History class a few weeks ago on the subject of marginalia (scribblings in the margins of books) and what we can learn about readers -- how they read, how they respond to what they read, what their particular reading experience is -- from what they write in their books. Her area of expertise is Coleridge's marginalia (apparently he was a lifelong annotator of books, writing up and down the margins of his own library, and custom-annotating books loaned to him by friends for the express purpose), and she's just published a gorgeous-looking book on the subject. You should check it out, whether you're a closet scribbler, or a proud annotator, or just horrified at the notion of someone defiling a book in that way.
Tuesday, March 6, 2001 08:50 a.m.

Smiths Blast From the Past
Well, Nanette beat me to this one, but that's no reason not to link it here. I've always felt it was one of those cruel accidents of birth that I never got to see the Smiths live. (The dream I had last week in which they rocked out at my high school gymnasium, with backing vocals by the Beach Boys, doesn't count, though it was brilliant at the time - thanks, subconscious!) Now, thanks to Rough Trade's 25th Anniversary Bash, I can! Between now and Friday, you can catch a few numbers from their 1984 gig at Sheffield Town Hall; on Friday, the Rough Trade site will stream the concert in its entirety. What a great start to the weekend.
Tuesday, March 6, 2001 08:47 a.m.

Hello Hi

I'm back! I'm in one piece, I haven't (to my knowledge) contracted any cloven-hoofed animal diseases, and I'm only mildly jet-lagged. Rock. I'll update properly -- now, with actual links! -- late-ish tonight. In short, it was an amazing trip, full of fun, cultchuh, food, romance, adventure, hotel hi-jinks, and meeting some of the loveliest darn people that side of the Atlantic.
Monday, March 5, 2001 08:32 a.m.