“Young Forever” by Jay-Z and Mr. Hudson (of Mr. Hudson & the Library who you may remember I LOVE a LOT)
Technically Mr. Hudson’s part is a cover of “Forever Young” intermixed with some Jay-Z rap. Love the background music. Love!!
I had read and really enjoyed Hustvedt’s intense novel “What I Loved” (if you search for “Hustvedt” on this page you can hear more) and although I am not a big reader of nonfiction, one day in the bookstore this just insisted on coming home with me.
These are really interesting essays. My favorites were the literary ones – ponderings on The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald), The Bostonians (H. James) and Our Mutual Friend (Dickens) – and, as someone who was a New Yorker at the time, her essay on 9/11 from a NYer’s point of view.
The Minnesota stuff is all very familiar to me, I can picture those places not just from my own experiences in small towns there, and my undergrad experience at Gustavus (very similar to St. Olaf, where she went), but also from having been to many of the actual places.
She makes herself very vulnerable here. Way beyond anything I could ever commit to print. And at some points as similarly intense as in her fiction. Burning brightly.
Leisurely paced but not slow. Heartaching but not completely breaking. Really nuanced performances. Lovely music. Thumbs up all ’round.
ETA: And I forgot to tell you that my favorite drummer Jay Bellerose (from here and he played at this show also although I didn’t know it at the time) played in the movie / on the soundtrack. Oh YES! 🙂
“I Won’t Be Found” – The Tallest Man on Earth
Hear it here in its original and daytrotter versions (the daytrotter is the one I put on repeat). (Found via this post on Fuel/Friends, my all-time favorite music blog.)
Doctor: So where would you say your pain is on a scale from 1 to 10?
Me: My pain level? Is pretty low. My annoyance level? Is off the fucking charts.
(Three weeks of not being able to hear out of my left ear…and counting.)
Quite lovely.
I feel like I’ve seen a zillion movies about Elizabeth so it was nice to visit with a different monarch for a while. Emily Blunt was fantastic.
And I loved that she got to have a love story (and not a salacious one), even if it that meant I cried through a lot of it. Very nice interplay between the couple.
These outtakes are fabulous. (link via Go Fug Yourself.)
Very charming. Wonderfully voiced. I really love the puppet look vs. traditional animation.
Well. I guess I’ll have to eat crow. I thought this movie looked really, really dumb (as I may have mentioned here and also here) and I went to it somewhat against my wishes.
And I really enjoyed it.
It’s super heavy handed, almost clunkily so (“I AM A GOOD GUY! SEE THE SIGN ON MY HEAD!”), and very typical in its… racial… assumptions, let’s say, but despite that (or because of it?) it totally works on one’s emotions and I just couldn’t help but care about the characters.
And it doesn’t hurt that Sam Worthington is really kinda secretly sneak-up-on-you hot. (I have told you that before even though I didn’t know his name then and just called him that “half-terminator dude”.)
We paid for 3D and I thought the effects were SO MUCH BETTER than when I saw 3D Beowulf, but I am wondering if there’s a difference between 3D on the regular movie screen and 3D on Imax…
Another fantastic duo, I would recommend these just as highly as the Kristin Cashore books, but note that they are very, very different.
The dystopian universe here is almost Dickensian in its shadings (although with fewer of the finer details) and it definitely makes you, the reader, long for escape for these characters, for survival, for even just the littlest bit of hope.
Unexpectedly cruel with odd kindnesses. And, as in much YA, some growing up and self discovery along the way.
An adventure of endurance… You’ll want to block off a day for these as you will find yourself unable to do anything else.
And if you’ve read the story “Wealth” in Margo Langan’s “White Time” collection, it almost seems like they come from the same world. In fact, I drove myself insane for an entire afternoon trying to figure out where that story was from as they felt so much of a piece.