Rules:

1. Entire library of 3,695 songs are fair game for the shuffle.
2. We must listen to each song (no matter how dorky, or embarrassing it is to me).
3. We comment.

Commence!

Song 1: "Sugar Lee" by Donny Hathway

Holden: This song always puts me in a good mood.

Jack: I liked it. I can see why it puts you in a good mood.

Song 2: "Rocks Off" by the Rolling Stones

Holden: Makes me think of summer in Chicago.

Jack: That album [Exile on Main Street] is one of the greatest albums ever made. And it makes me think of creating a Top Five list of Bands I Wish I Could Have Seen. What year is that album from, do you know?

Holden: 1972

Jack: I like this. This is fun.

Song 3 "We Have All The Time in the World" by Louis Armstrong

Holden: I think it's funny I have this song because the album it's on is called "The Best of James Bond".

Jack: This isn't such a "James Bond" song, is it? Especially that riff. The trumpet riff, that is.

Holden: Well I like this song because it reminds me to slow down.

Jack lights Holden's cigarette

Holden: It's very 70s.

Song 4: "Five on the Five" by The Raconteurs

Holden: This song makes me want to rock out. And there's a cowbell!

Jack: More cowbell. Sorry for the obvious but it was necessary.

Holden kisses Jack on the cheek

Jack: I love breakdowns. I love breakdowns. I do love breakdowns.

Holden: Would you consider this song "rock n roll"?

Jack: Yes of course. It's uptempo, it's got a poppy drumbeat not poppy, the drums lift it up and the guitar smashes it down.

Holden: That's a very professional-sounding assertion.

Jack: I wrote music reviews once. Maybe I'll show 'em to you. Did you know that about me?

Holden: I was not aware of that.

Song 5: "12 Variations pour piano en do majeur KV 265" Mozart

Jack: Is that French for Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star?

Holden: This song reminds me of ballet class.

Jack: Mozart or Beethoven?

Holden: Mozart, no question. You?

Jack: I don't know. But one of my favorite classical songs is Beethoven? From a "Band of Brothers" episode.

Jack relights his pipe

Jack: I think there's nothing more satisfying than a perfect score to a movie.

Holden: What movie do you think has a perfect score?

Jack: Rushmore. Any of the Wes Anderson films. Who is that guy, Mark Mothersburg from Devo?

Holden: Yes.

Jack: And you?

Holden: The Red Shoes.

Jack: What about Amelie?

Holden: That's a damn good score.

Jack: Is that the same cigarette? It went out?

Holden: Yeah, they do that because they don't have gunpowder in them.

Jack: I love gunpowder. That's one of my favorite green teas. But don't oversteep it, it gets bitter.

Holden: This is a fun game.

They have decided to do 10 songs instead of just five.

Jack: You know I was in Salzburg, the birthplace of Mozart.

Holden: Oh, rlly. This song is kind-of a review of lots of songs put into one. Where are your glasses?

Jack: In my backpack.

Holden puts on her reading glasses

Jack: Yeah, you're the one who's supposed to wear them when you're on the computer.

Jack leaves, opens the fridge and finds ice cream.

Jack: Yesss.

Jack feeds Holden a spoonful. She feels special. They are fourteen minutes into the song, briefly discuss breaking rule #2 but decide to follow the rules "this time". Holden is happy. She lights another cigarette. Jack begins having a discussion with her dog. He gets more ice cream and continues feeding Holden by the spoonful.

Song 6: "halfworld" by Splashdown

Holden: If it wasn't for those damn rules I made, I would have skipped this song.

Jack: Skip it.

Song 7: "Guinnivere" by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Holden: This song reminds me of when I went through my hippie phase in high school.

Jack: Did your dad listen to CSN&Y? Mine did.

Holden: Yeah...but I think this record was my mom's.

Jack: My mom hated Neil Young. I never understood.

Holden: I never knew there was a...what do you call that "magic" shit with the pentagrams?

Jack: Black Magic? Wiccan? Free Masonry?

Holden: Are there pentagrams involved in Free Masonry?

Jack: That's a good question. The Order of the Eastern Star, their main symbol is a pentagram? The Catholic Church tried to associate Free Masonry with devil worship, which of course is false.

Holden: I'm kinna done with this song.

Jack: Skip it, baby.

Song 8: "Loose Fit (12" Oakenfold/Osborne remix)" by the Happy Mondays

Holden: This can't be good. Ew, this is terrible. Why do I have this?

Jack: Don't ask me.

Holden: We're skipping. And I'm deleting this. It's taking up hard-drive space.

Song 9: "In This Home on Ice" by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Jack: How appropriate.

Holden: Why is it appropriate?

Jack: I listened to this album over and over and over when I was in Austria, and thought of you every time.

Holden blushes

Jack: There are some great lyrics in this song. Like that. "All that we have salvaged from the fire was a waste of time". See this is opposite of a breakdown?

Holden: It's a build-up?

Jack: No, it's a...what do they call it--

Holden: A crescendo?

Jack: No.

Jack plays air-drums

Holden: This is a great song.

Jack: Such a good song. It just keeps going and gets better. I love how he pulls a "David Byrne" and his voice becomes an instrument.

Holden: I love David Byrne.

Jack: I'm really happy that song played.

Song 10: "You're My Best Friend" by Queen

Holden: Damn, what was I just thinking? This is a great love song.

Jack: It makes me think of [REDACTED].

Holden: {REDACTED]?

Jack: Yeah, I went to high school with him. And it's my 15-year reunion right now! I wonder if he's there! Right now it's happening! (laughs)

Holden: I don't think I will go to any reunions. My generation has Facebook. My curiosities have been satisfied already.

Jack: What, I'm not in your generation?

Holden: Well, you are, but you're too old for Facebook, kind-of. That's the end of the game!

Jack: Too bad though! Come on! It's Wesley Willis!

Holden: Okay, this is the bonus round.

Song 11: "Harmony Joy Bus Ride" by Wesley Willis

Jack: What are you favorite Wesley Willis lyrics?

Holden: Hmm. Maybe "Take this job and shove it!"

Jack: Mine is "I whopped Batman's ass. I knocked him to the ground! He got up and knocked me to the ground!" Is that a Casio "sitar"?

Holden: I think so.

Jack: In the breakdown! What's the sign-off gonna be in this song, I can't remember.

Holden: I'm putting my money on Meineke.

Jack: I'm putting my money on "McDonalds! Breakfast of champions!"

Wesley Willis: "Ford!" something unitelligible

Jack: Well that was anticlimactic.

Once upon a time I fulfilled the duties of Petit Big Cheese at an animal hospital. I got to be the Cheese which suited my Napoleonic complex to a T, and I got to enforce Big Big Cheese's unpopular policies which felt singularly against nature. Neither here, nor there. My management philosophy incorporated a good deal of prank components. I believed that keeping the troops silly entertained once in a while fostered camaraderie and generated a better climate in the work place.

Mr. A, a patron of the practice, seemed to all like a man of irreproachable taste. Always dressed impeccably and exuding sophistication, he simply exemplified class. Sadly, his beloved kitty succumbed to cancer despite our best efforts.

A week after the cat's tragic demise, Mr. A. showed up at the practice bearing a gift for the Big Big Cheese. She unwrapped the beautiful silk paper, opened the box, delicately removed the soft tissue papers and came face to face with this:

Ugly Yellow Plastic Cat

Big Big Cheese paused. Was Mr. A. playing a trick on her or was he actually serious? She opted for erring on the side of caution and thanked him profusely for his beautiful present. He told her that the cat's green glass eyes reminded him of those of his belated cat. Unthinkable acts originate from unbearable grief.

Ugly Yellow Plastic Cat lived at the hospital for years. We re-gifted it amongst ourselves at each birthday. By the time another celebration came about, we would have completely forgotten about the ugly beast and were always surprised when we opened the box.

Nothing could instantly relax the atmosphere of a stressful day as well as Ugly Yellow Plastic Cat.

A nurse who had a bad day would monitor the boarding webcam and suddenly the yellow cat would appear out of nowhere.

Ugly Yellow Plastic Cat would get x-rayed and the film would be left on the viewing box of an exam room just before a doctor stepped in with a client.

We would find him in the cage of the dog that barked incessantly and the unnerving situation would be instantly diffused.

He would help with difficult feline pre-anesthesia procedures.

Our electrician contractor even caught him once fornicating with Piglet in the wiring closet.

After 9/11, Ugly Yellow Cat morphed into an extremely patriotic creature and began to exhibit disturbing anti-Old Europe sentiments.

I decided to take it home to Belgium for Christmas. I figured it would be interesting to see how many people I could convince to pose with the ugliest yellow plastic cat that ever existed. At the airport, he posed with the shoe shiner.

He also posed with the National Guard which was a bit of a tour de force, don't you think?

Once in the plane, he had to meet the captain. I don't think that right after 9/11, Ugly Yellow Plastic Cats were supposed to visit the cockpit, so I've somewhat concealed the identity of the aviator in the photograph.

Brussels unfortunately did not do much for Yellow Ugly Plastic Cat. The snow and gloomy gray skies bore on his soul like a ton of bricks.

We emigrated to the Island of Porquerolles in the south of France, and in the sun Ugly Yellow Plastic Cat thrived.

We went to the Vigiles, and he posed one last time with the Mediterranean sea as backdrop, before heading to Nice to catch our plane back to Freedom land.

All good things must come to an end. Back at the hospital, Ugly Yellow Plastic Cat became a bit of a nuisance. Big Big Cheese thought we spent way too much time fooling around with it. The straw that broke the Cheese's rind happened a day where stress was at its peak, and, out of sheer hysteria, we dangled the poor Ugly Yellow Plastic Cat in front of Big Big Cheese's surveillance monitor.

Re-enactment

The statuette was retired to a drawer. Years later, when I left the practice, I could not help but catnap Ugly Yellow Plastic Cat. I get attached to uglicious objects. Today, he happily resides on my mantel with white glow-in-the-dark gnome. It is a lovely conversation piece.

While my last wishes do not include internment with the plastic monstrosity, Ugly Plastic Yellow Cat remains a prized possession. A symbol of a decade of fun in a tensed work environment. There were many other pranks along the years including a male stripper I hired to pose as a deranged new client of very very conservative Big Big Cheese. I don't think he would have fitted on my mantel quite as nicely though.

El título se traduce como: Nunca estuve allí.

To the extent that most film criticism discusses the lens at all, you're more likely to find discussions of Orson Welles and Gregg Toland's use of the wide angle lens combined with deep focus in CITIZEN KANE, than any discussion of the properties of the long lens. This is partly because fairly long lenses were fairly standard for close-ups before KANE came along and changed the rules, and partly because Toland and Welles successfully publicised their work, so that the ideas behind it were out there, accessible to critics.

The ideas behind the long-lens closeup were far less discussed, because the approach had been commonplace for a long time. It's easy to see why: the long lens both flattens and flatters the subject, avoiding any of the fish-eye distortion of the wide angle, which tends to warp and uglify the face, making mountains out of moles (notable exception: AMELIE. Camera tests established that Audrey Tatou's face could look quirkily attractive through a wide lens, provided the camera was slightly above eye-level, so that her big forehead got the emphasis).

Also, unless you have massive amounts of light so you can stop down (as in the infinite, sun-blasted spaces of Leone's westerns), the long lens tends to result in a shallow depth of field, useful for separating the subject from the background. Since the movie screen is flat, anything that produces an illusion of depth can be handy (deep focus has a contradictory quality of flatness, since everything is equally sharp).

But beauty is hard to talk about, and the idea that deep focus results in the illusion of depth is ingrained.

These shots of Julie Christie, taken by cinematographer Nicholas Roeg for Richard Lester's bleakly romantic chronicle of a near-miss love affair in 1967 San Francisco, PETULIA, show another possibility of the long lens. Lester is fond (going at least as far back as THE KNACK, his 4th film) of using out-of-focus foreground material as well as background, situating the face, partially eclipsed, within layers of gleaming blur. It contributes to the kaleidoscopic quality of his work (often remarked upon, seldom analysed in detail) and strikes me as a purely photographic conceit, like the starburst filter, rather than a realistic one. You CAN get a shot like the above with the human eye, by sticking something between you and what you're looking at, and then mentally "cropping" the image so as to enlarge one detail of your view, but would you? The effect achieved here has little of nothing to do with realism, which is probably why it wasn't much used before the '60s and all that mucking about with zoom lenses (Sternberg may be an exception, since he loved filming through layers of smoke and streamers and veils and branches and rain and whatever else he could think of).

In the same way that golden age Hollywood films didn't like to show people talking in extreme longshot but with closeup sound (an approach which probably came in thanks to the radio mic, although dubbing could have produced the same result earlier), and felt that car scenes needed to be shot from INSIDE the windscreen, hence all those process shots whenever anybody went for a drive, a subconscious sense of naturalism probably stopped directors and cinematographers from exploiting the long lens in just this way (so it makes sense that Sternberg wouldn't be put off).

Thanks to Chris Schneider, who suggested I write something about PETULIA. I wasn't sure where to start (it's a very rich film), but zooming through it in search of frame-grabs inspired these musings).

Hopelijk had ze gewoon een lui dagske en is er niks aan het broeden...

En nu ga ik terug in mijn rijstpap roeren die op het vuur staat te pruttelen... mmm...

Gedrild? Bah nee gij... ;-)

Today is my dad's birthday. He told me to 'buy something for myself, have him pay for it, and that he would feel good because he bought me something'. But I didn't want to do that, so yesterday, after filling out an application at Target, I walked around.

Originally, I had wanted to buy him some SkullCandy headphones for when he's mowing the lawn. I've heard that is a very horrible chore to do, and I am glad I have never had to do it. But, no job, no money. So I thought, okay, if not the $50 ones, the $30 black ones. But my mother did not want to pitch in. I almost considered the $15 ones, but I will wait until Christmas or something. I'll most likely have money.

I ended up buying him a package of Starbuck's Dark Expresso Chocolate. This morning, my two younger sisters and I gave him the cards, and we ended up watching The Birzzare Foods show and Samantha Browns on the Travel channel. Which just reminded me of the movie Amelie. Amelie knows that her father has always wanted to travel, and gives the gnome to a flight attendant to take pictures all over the place and send postcards to her dad, which eventually inspires him to take off.

It kind of went down hill when my mom came home around..2ish? It was just akward and silent, except for the Mexican music playing in the background. Eventually, my dad retreated to the basement when my mom had finished grilling and came in to eat.

I wish my family was a family.

So I'm going to not think about that for a while and I will try to fnd information on how to shrink heads. I would imagine my next quest would be finding an object to attempt at shrinking.

If anyone actually sees this post, help, please?

Mickael Jackson n'a qu'à bien se tenir !

Tout le monde dance wao c'est génioule !

Ca fait mal un flash dans la gueule !

Le Martin qui s'enfume : mais qu'est-ce qu'elle me dit ?

Toute la troupe au Bal !

Hum 't'est bon le rosé !

Les Veuxhaullois !

On dirait qu'Amélie a tapé dans l'oeil de Serge !

Pas facile d'expliquer à une bande d'ivrognes !

Faut noyer un peu l'alcool avec les chip' !

Dur ce nouveau jeu ...

Roh lala mais comment on peut prendre un 3 ou un 11 ???

Serge et ses proies du Week end...



Le Gro était là, oui oui oui, il n'a pas fait QUE boire ou vomir, il a aussi participé (les 10 premières minutes)...





Fab se prend pour une tortue... Il voulait se baigner, c'est son kiki qui s'est planqué !

Morgen muss meine Mutter für einige Untersuchungen ins Inselspital und ich habe mich bereit erklärt mitzukommen, da sie nicht weiss wie lange sie warten muss und sich Zeit zu zweit nun mal besser totschlagen lässt. Ich werde dann bei ihr übernachten und wohl wieder in den Genuss kommen etwas Warmes zu essen. Im Sommer koche ich äusserst selten. Die letzten Tage habe ich mich nur von Bananen, Äpfeln, Milch, Pfirsichen und einem Teller Spaghetti ernährt. Okay, da waren noch zwei Tafeln Schokolade für die ich abends extra nach Bern fuhr. Manchmal passiert es, dass ich plötzlich unglaublichen Heisshunger auf Süsses kriege, so dass ich nicht einmal mehr schlafen kann. Irgendwie beängstigend. Zum Glück ist sowas sehr selten, schliesslich hat eine Tafel Schokolade so um die 550 kcal (ja ich weiss kacl sind veraltet, aber in Joule sind die Zahlen für mich schwerer zu merken, da grösser. Ja ich merke mir sowas.) und ich brauche etwa knapp 200 kcal will ich mein Gewicht behalten  (will ich nicht). Vier Tafeln Schokolade machen nicht satt...

Ansonsten warte ich ungeduldig darauf, dass endlich die neuen Zeiten für die Ballettstunden raus kommen und höre mir dieses Lied an. Es ist vom Soundtrack von "Die fabelhafte Welt der Amélie", den ich erst dieses Jahr gesehen habe. Einiges verpasst habe ich aber sowieso in den letzten Jahren...und dazu passt es ganz wunderbar.

Comptine d'un autre ete : L'apres midi