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Sunday, August 22, 2010

Admin/links/Tea Party, 8/22/10

I keep meaning to post stuff here and then not doing it; there's so many failed drafts. But here's what I've been up to since we last spoke:

• Greencine posts on Wendy Carlos' Tron score, my totally unexpected conversion to being onboard with digital projection, and in praise of Michael Cera. I'm up on Greencine once a week (Tuesdays if we can pull it off), so think of that as one of my usual blogging places. There's more stuff coming on the way, but I can't talk about it yet.

• A fairly lengthy-ish write-up for the LA Weekly on Thom Andersen's new film Get Out Of The Car.

• I also updated my personal website's viewing logs with 8 months' worth of notes, if that's your kind of thing.

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What I've been watching: Zero For Conduct, Sacha Guitry's La Poison, 1931's French obscurity Bouboule's Gang (primitive sound filmmaking with novelty value and location footage, but definitely not Lubitsch), Claude Autant-Lara's Four Bags Full (not sure why this isn't better known, aside from Autant-Lara being damned by the New Wave; this is a terrifically dark, bold Occupation comedy, aside from the cop-out ending, and deserves to be rediscovered, not least by Inglorious Basterds lovers), Frederick Wiseman's The Store, Salt and Eat Pray Love for Sight & Sound review, Inception (seriously?), Soul Kitchen, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, 1971's The Burglars, Popeye, Kiss Me Kate (almost killed me: '50s MGM musicals are my least favorite thing), Swing Time, Flying Down To Rio, Raoul Walsh's 1953 3D rarity Gun Fury, My Night At Maud's, Ozu's A Hen In The Wind, and Rohmer's totally terrific Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle.

Read Ken Auletta's Googled. We can talk about that if anyone's game. He's way too paranoid, but it's still worth a vigorous skim.

New listening from this year: The School, Loveless Unbeliever; The Walkmen, Lisbon; Eels, Tomorrow Morning; Lloyd Cole, Broken Record; Jaill's highly recommended straight-out-of-1978 power-pop That's How We Burn, The Burns Unit, Side Show. From before: the acoustic version of Prefab Sprout's Steve McQueen, Wipers, Youth Of America.

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Lastly: for personal, masochistic reasons, I'll be almost certainly attending the Tea Party rally (er, the "Restoring Honor Rally") in Washington DC next weekend. Long shot here, but I don't suppose anyone would like to pay me to write about it (I'm not a political writer obv.). But if not I'll put something up here when I get back.