8 posts tagged “performance”
Last night, Ben and I saw Richard Cheese at the Red Devil Lounge on Polk. (Supervisor Chris Daly was leaving from the early show when we arrived.) This meant that I spent a couple hours surrounded by a bar crowd. They were in various stages of inebriation, laughing aloud at RC's lounge cover schtick, and ironically grabbing his ass when he walked around among the audience. This is probably about the same crowd that bar gets every night. Vanilla Ice will be playing there soon and I'm sure there will be many people ironically 'enjoying' his performance as well.
The thing is, Richard Cheese and his band are good at what they do. They can play. He can sing. His asshole stage persona (I don't want to know whether that's his true personality) wore on me a bit but was amusing. And Ben and I like to dance. And they were certainly playing dance-able music. There wasn't any room to dance among the sold-out crowd, though. And most everyone else wasn't even moving, except to go back to the bar for more drinks. So depressing.
Irony doesn't interest me quite as much as it used to. It's too simple and crass. Life if far more interesting than an 'ironic' lifestyle. I'd much rather sincerely declare my opinions than hide behind irony the way many, many people seem to. It looks cowardly to me to never admit to truly liking anything. If everything you like you only like ironically, then no one can fault you for your personal taste, which is unlikely anyway as such people are tasteless. It is quite cowardly to not even admit to having an opinion on your entertainment and fashion and whatnot, particularly as so many people base a large part of the identity on their clothes and favorite music and tv shows and movies and whatnot.
Such an unpleasant venue and crowd. Ben is amusing enough to have made up for it, though.
David won tickets to a comedy show from sfist. It was the closing concert of Sketchfest '07. Bruce McCulloch headlined, with Craig Northey and special guest Scott Thompson. Two 'kids in the hall'! What fun.
Also, some guy called Dragon Boy Suede (hey! I started reading a book about dragons today!) who was pretty damn funny, too. I'm not entirely sure how much of his schtick was actual technical difficulties and filler, but he did make me laugh repeatedly. I think I would've laughed more often at his jokes if I hadn't seen the punchline coming. Things are funnier when they're unexpected.
I really liked Hard n Phirm best, tho. I'd seen Chris Hardwick before at the Hollywood Improv in, like, 2003 or 2004. Some time before I moved to SF. That dinosaur song is still v. catchy and, sadly, topical. le sigh. I bought their CD after the show and learned that they're Rodeohead (country western-style Radiohead). Not that I'd ever actually heard Rodeohead before, but I'd heard of them, and that counts for everything. The only thing about HnP that disappointed me was that a song of theirs I'd never heard before and really really like isn't on their CD. oh well. I guess El Corazon will have to do for now.
What is your stupid human trick?
Submitted by Scarlett.
I can sound like I've been sucking helium whenever I like -- no helium required.
One of the wonderful things about artists is their ability to express the sorts of things that I've been feeling and thinking and unable to put in to words. That's precisely how I feel about this passage by Carrie Fisher:
The New Real was not being real, it was acting real. Suzanne was in the business of seeming--of entertaining people with her ways of seeming real. Portraying reality had become her way of experiencing it. She knew how to act like a regular person. She was self-consciously unselfconscious. She didn't mind being watched, but on some level she minded being recorded.
[Underline mine.]
I'm no Hollywood actress, but I do feel that I perform my life. I can't just be. I cannot 'naturally' express myself. I can't interact with the world without a self-reflexive awareness of my behavior. I'm still sincere. I mean the things I'm performing (most of the time). I just can't express them without performing them. If I'm left without performance, I clam up and hide in a corner. If I can't perform it, I can't do it at all.
I've accepted that this is my way of living. It used to make me feel uncomfortable. But this is just me. This is the way I think about my behavior. It works. No need to change.
I'm really looking forward to seeing Carrie's live show when I fly down to SoCal for the Christmas holiday!
This post on 1950s tips for being a good, subservient housewife is a little old, but I'm new to it. While Snopes says it's fake (and I'm on board with them), I had a different reaction than most of the politically-correct, feminist commenters.
The list of ways to make your husband happy looks like a guidebook for lying your way through a marriage in order to get what you want from your hubby. My mind immediately went to Irina Derevko from Alias. It's basically telling the housewife to put on an act. If you want to make a person happily complacent, being a 'model' 1950s housewife (as defined by the 'article' in question), seems like a great plan of action. It even suggests that you pretty yourself up a bit before your husband comes home. That's a total undercover spy move.
Such a long weekend, and it's only Sunday morning.
Friday evening
The new Momus album, Ocky Milk, arrived. I had just enough time to load it into iTunes and change into a skirt before my roommates and I went to dinner at the fab Golden Era. Oh, those steamed vegi buns! Yum!
Danielle and I went to Friday Night Blues. They had a great live band this week. Danielle did pretty darn well for it being her first go at blues dancing. Trixie showed up a lil late due to St. Louis winning the World Series. Go somebody else's home team!
I wore Halloween colors. There were some people in actual costumes. Elwood from the Blues Brothers and Wonder Woman were the most memorable. It was a good night. I didn't even hurt myself!
Saturday
Breakfast at the Lucky Penny with Justin on our way to the Lemony Snicket / Gothic Archies performance down the Peninsula. We didn't get lost driving there or anything! We got seats in the fourth row, on the Stephin Merritt side of the stage.
Daniel Handler and Stephin Merritt were, of course, incredibly entertaining. They even played one of my favorite songs from the Snicket CD, Shipwrecked. Everyone had a great time, says I.
Afterwards, we went to Shaw's, which is a candy & ice cream shop. You can smell the mass amounts of sugar before you even open the door! I got yum yum yummy pumpkin ice cream. They have generous portions, too.
Then we went to the Haight to get accessories for Justin's costume, Disco Stu. It was insanely busy, as expected. We got a parking spot on Haight, though, and considering how crazy busy it was, the shopping trip was fairly painless.
I'll post about the costume party when I get the photos from Kevin. I didn't bother using my camera at the museum.
Before I get to the bits that may be **spoilers** (I'm not gonna bother figuring out whether they are or not), I'll just say that I like it and recommend it.
I spent the whole time trying to figure out how the plot was working. I definitely saw the reveals coming. But while I was watching I saw the clues and thought up the different ways in which the plot could have unfolded. That was a fun intellectual exercise. That would take some of the fun out of any repeated viewing, not bothering to wonder about all that.
The whole cast was completely awesome. Even Piper Perabo made me happy, in her way.
I really like the way Christopher Nolan directs the audience. He does a good job of leading the audience's attention where he wants it. Reminds me of the type of thing Hitchcock did. Not that anyone can truly compete with Hitch, but, you know. He does that thing of letting us know just enough of what's happening to make us anxious about the shit hitting the fan.
A memorable example of how Hitchcock did it masterfully can be found in Vertigo. I read that in the original story, the reader doesn't learn about Kim Novak's character's secrets until James Stewart's character does. Hitchcock rearranged things a bit. Novak's character decides to leave town and writes a note explaining the whole murder plot. Then she decides to stay and try to make it work with Stewart, cuz she's crazy in love. The audience knows exactly what happened. The male lead is still mystified by the uncanny doubling throughout the film. So the audience is sitting there for the last chunk of the movie watching as Stewart's character gets closer and closer to figuring everything out. And then instead of feeling some uneasy suspense about the murder mystery, the audience feels a building tension -- waiting for Stewart to snap and reveal what he knows and then let us see his reaction to all the fucked up shit he's been put through. Vertigo would have worked as a film if the audience learns about Novak's character at the end when Stewart's character explains how he figured it all out. It would have been an entirely different movie, though.
With The Prestige, the audience can see the plot coming. The real fun is watching the characters get there. And then seeing how they've fucked up their own lives along the way. Each of the lead magicians becomes too obsessed to enjoy their own lives and that obsession not only poisons their lives but everyone they share their lives with. They're too focused on performance to truly live.
Plus, Batman totally kicks ass, as usual. There's a bit that reminded me of the 1989 Batman (similar gags are in Die Hard and Mars Attacks! probly elsewhere, as well). In Batman, the batmobile charges through some building, machine guns blazing (cuz, y'know, Batman is totally against gun violence, but his car isn't) and then stops. A couple of spheres fall from the wheels to the ground, bouncing a bit. There's a pause. Then the spheres explode. In The Prestige, Christian Bale throws a little India Rubber bouncy ball towards Hugh Jackman. There's a pause while Jackman looks down and wonders for a moment what's up with the lil bouncy ball. Then he gets shot in the gut -- Blam!
Also, David Bowie plays Tesla. Just awesome. No other word for Bowie.
