Interiors

I'm looking for something in a stainless steel toilet.

Bait and switch

At a screening of The Triplets of Belleville last night, two previews made me feel surprised and grateful. Each was for a foreign language film: Monsieur Ibrahim, in French (duh), and Good Bye Lenin!, in German. Good Bye Lenin! I've been curious about for some time, and I'm glad it's coming to Madison; Monsieur Ibrahim, starring Omar Sharif, looks OK, but I wouldn't go out of my way to see it. Mostly it reminded me of the time I bummed a smoke off a Korean chum in graduate school and noticed it had on it a tiny picture of Sharif.

But what struck me about these previews is that they were subtitled. Whole, long stretches of dialog from both films appeared, with titles. I mention this because I have a pet peeve about many trailers for foreign films: watching them, you might suspect the films they promote have no dialog at all. These trailers explain the plot in an English voiceover ("In a world...where love triumphs"), and if you hear the actors' voices at all, they are exclusively: laughing, crying, speaking a character's name ("Am�lie!"), or saying one of the handful of foreign words everybody knows ("Bonjour!"). It's as though the trailers' producers hope to trick us into believing the movies are not, in fact, furn.

Checking in

Hi, friends! I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, etc. I started to blog about the Oscars, then realized that I didn't need to put any more prose about the Oscars into the world. So vive Bill Murray, and I'll leave it at that.

I've been busy the last few days, and that has been nice. The busyness also is the reason I haven't blogged. Something had to give: I have been in these alarming winter doldrums--alarming because they didn't relent, and I wasn't willing for the longest time even to acknowledge there was a problem. But there was a big problem. So I resolved Saturday to get out more, and work more, and I had busy days Saturday, Sunday and today, so hurrah me.

I think I also was getting obsessive about blogging, which has this way of feeling like productive work even though, really, it isn't. So although I have been making a point of blogging daily, that may change.

Now, as you were.

Redirection in Boston

Horrifying numbers came out this week about the scope of the Roman Catholic pedophilia crisis, and I'm dismayed by what Archbishop O'Malley of the Boston archdiocese had to say about them: "We must all do everything that we can to make sure that the scourge of child abuse not only within the church but in the wider society as well is wiped clean from our midst."

Even this apparently well-intended friar, who succeeded the disgraced Cardinal Law, can't refrain from lashing out at society--when no one but the church was talking about society. The church's standard defense throughout the sex scandal, from the pope on down, has been: society is wanton and immoral, so of course some of our priests are going to molest children. That dubious line of reasoning aside, did society cover up the crimes and transfer molesting clerics from one unknowing parish to another?

I'm tired of the blaming. Given the disastrous way the priests have dealt with their church's problems, I shudder to think what would happen if they were in charge of fixing society's problems, too.

Wow

The current single by British metal revivalists the Darkness, "I Believe In a Thing Called Love," is amazing. It sounds like Kiss, and Queen, and Boston, and all those great overwrought bands from my childhood. (Do I detect some .38 Special?) The singer, Justin Hawkins, squeals in an exciting, crazy falsetto, and he even shrieks "guitar!" before the guitar solo.

This is really fun, ballsy, hilarious, decadent music. It puts all those whiny neopunk/nu metal/emo mopes to shame, and even good rock bands like the White Stripes just may pale in comparison. Let's hear it for fun. I do believe in a thing called love.

You can download it for just $.99 on iTunes. (Yes, Windows people too.)

No place like home

Charles, do you think this picture was taken in your old building? The apartment's layout resembles yours.

Don't ask, indeed. And I won't tell.

Coming soon to a gay strip show near you

The University of Wisconsin Badger Dancers.

See more fascinating snapshots of UW undergrad lifestyle choices at www.thebadgerweb.com.