Back on the Blog

Hi, I'm back. Let's see, since I was last here I've continued with No Pussyfooting on East Village Radio for over a year now, while the blog has been taking a nap. Currently, my show airs late Sunday night/Monday mornings from 4 to 6a.m., but you can stream it any time. I'm at the top of the schedule, and my buddy Jeff is at the bottom with his show "Bring Out Your Dead." What fitting bookends! Check in at www.eastvillageradio.com for updates, because we're about to shift over to a new website shortly. It's pretty exciting.

But what exactly have I been up to? I don't know. I finished my Master's at NYU a while back, and spent a year in Pittsburgh working towards a Ph.D. Now I'm on a leave of absence for at least a year, back in New York. Those are the highlights. I've also been writing things here and there, and now that I'm unemployed I'm trying to step that up a little bit. I just wrote a short biographical piece on Sue Lyon (the female lead in Kubrick's Lolita) for the next issue of Stop Smiling. I also translated an article from Spanish on a top-secret file sharing website that's in the current issue of Film Comment that looks like this:

I've also got a teeny review in there of the new DVD of Cassavetes's Husbands, which Sony is going to release in mid-August, finally. Here's a summary of my already short review: This movie is great. The performances are incredible, the cinematography is beautiful, buy the DVD.


That's it for now. I think I might check back in later with my thoughts on The Hurt Locker.

blog on,
Margaret

public service announcement

If you live in New York, or near New York, go see this movie at the Film Forum. It's incredible, and unavailable (although I've seen an "unofficial" copy on the shelf at Kim's). I'm going to try to go today!



whoa whoa whoa wait a minute- what the fuck is this?????????? How did that just pop up on the website? There is no way I'm not seeing that, immediately. Later guys, I'm going to Film Forum now...

Total Recall

I've got a lot of work to do. Deadlines looming, various plans and projects swimming around in my head. But fuck it--tonight I let all of those intangible thought fetuses fall to the wayside and opted instead to cook up a tasty curry and watch TOTAL RECALL, which was so, so, amazing.



Paul Verhoeven rarely disappoints. It makes me kind of sad to think that movies like that are basically extinct now, and we'll probably never again see a blockbuster with special effects involving jello. (I do want to check out that new James Bond movie, though). Seriously--people tend to dismissively classify '80s/early to mid '90s movies as unerring trash--and they're right. But some of that trash was sublime. It's a slippery slope, because I'm not simply referring to pure camp here- or trite nostalgia, or empty kitsch. It's just that Verhoeven somehow projected his [genuine] sleazy foreigner idealism through the most decadent excess in ways that continue to surprise me. Plus I've said it before, and I'll say it again: movies like BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, TOTAL RECALL, and I don't know, THE GARBAGE PAIL KIDS MOVIE?, HOWARD THE DUCK?- I'm running out of examples here, but some of those movies are the closest you're going to get to true experimental cinema. I mean what the hell is really going on in BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA? And don't tell me if you know, because I'd rather hold on to my own neon green-infused impression of it.

I guess I'm going a little off track here. I set up this BLOG as a venue for my useless musings about prog rock and responses to Michael Anton Parker, but I haven't got around to that yet, and at the moment I'm not being very proggy--right now I'm listening to George Harrison's guitar gently weep. It's crying out, telling me to go to bed. Maybe tomorrow I'll accomplish some official business. .