Review: Room

Room by Emma Donoghue
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a very delicate subject matter to capture and convey, and deciding to tell the story through the voice of a child was brilliant. Just the right mix of the child’s understanding of the world and the overheard voices of adults to flesh the story out perfectly. Extremely well written.

View all my reviews

Tarte Shining Stars: Slender Tampon

So I promised I’d post about some things I like, and this is that post! (you can refresh yourself on my review system here.)

I’ve been eyeballing Tarte makeup for awhile, but it’s pretty expensive to experiment with, and I haven’t wanted to take the plunge (I really hate returning makeup. I know most places will let you, but I always feel like some kind of scam artist, so the stuff I don’t like usually languishes in a drawer until I throw it away.)

Before Christmas I was at Beauty Brands in a bad mood, and so splurged on several things I’d usually not have purchased. One of them was this Tarte “Shining Stars Limited-Edition Best Sellers Collection”

This set contains:
- full size EmphasEYES™ Waterproof Clay Liner in Black
- deluxe mini Cheek Stain in Flush (sheer berry)
- deluxe mini Lights, Camera, Lashes! Clinically-Proven Natural Mascara in Black
- deluxe mini LipSurgence™ Natural Lip Tint in Enchanted (rose)

It was mostly that cheek stain that I wanted to try, since a full-size tube of it is $30, which was more than I wanted to gamble on not liking it. But I DO like it. I like it lots. It’s sheer and a great color, it stays on all day without looking over-done, and it spreads easily, smells nice and feels awesome when you apply it. Total win!

The other items in the set are decent, but nothing to write home about. The clay eyeliner is good (I had to go buy a special brush just to use it!) it’s tricky to apply until you get the hang of it, but once it’s on that stuff is not going to budge at all. The mascara is nice, it has a good, thickly-bristled brush and it doesn’t seem to flake off too badly, nor does it clump up on the brush. The lip tint is okay. It’s an ok color and it stays on a decent length of time (for the type of product it is) It also has a lovely smell/taste from the peppermint oil in it. However, I don’t like their delivery system. When you combine the odd shape of the stick with the consistency of the product, you end up with this:

Unless you use absolutely no pressure at all when you apply it to your lips.

So, of all the products here, the cheek stain is a definite re-buy item for me. The mascara is a maybe, as it’s only $19 and it seems to perform well. I will give that a longer test run. The eyeliner in that little tub will probably last me the rest of my life, and the lip tint is a “nope” since the individual tubes are $24 for what is basically peppermint flavored sheer gloss. Not worth it.

I am interested to try some of their clay waterproof liners, but the most economical way to do that seems to have been this holiday set, and it’s sadly out of stock. I will wait until next year.

The Emperor’s New Lipstick

I’ve been on a product-purchasing bender this fall and winter. Since we humans don’t really have to stock up for winter foods anymore, I have mutated that hoarding/nesting instinct in the direction of nail polish and lipstick. Eyelid primer and colorful stockings. Necklaces and thigh-high socks. If it’s colorful or fuzzy or sparkly or seems in any way a thing to bring me comfort or cause me delight, I’ve purchased it. I follow a crap-ton of blogs and feeds and tumblrs that recommend various products, and there do I hear of the latest trends in micro-glitter holographic nail polish, or 100-inch socks, or terrarium necklaces. And I BUY ALL THE THINGS. At least here lately.

I’ve been meaning to review some of the things I have purchased, because some of them are awesome, some less so, and I like to share my experience, in part because I rely on other users’ experiences to make my own purchasing decisions.  But mostly I’ve been too busy playing with my new toys and painting/repainting my nails to even bother. Until today.

Today I am blogging about a product that is an epic, utter failure. That’s not unique really, not all products suit all people, and sometimes you’re bound to be disappointed. However. This is the perfect storm of an expensive, highly-touted, much anticipated product that turned out to be an epic failure, and that’s worth noting.

Now, when I want to invest in a new brand that is online-only (or sold only on the coasts and in remote German villages, which effectively makes it online-only for the rest of us.) I try to do my due diligence. I read reviews. I look for YouTube videos describing user experience with the product. I read up on the company’s marketing copy and carefully ponder swatches to see if I think a thing will work for me. So when people started recommending Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics, that’s what I did. I read about this AMAZING WONDER PRODUCT called “Lip Tar,” which was described as some sort of Holy Grail lip product. From the company’s own marketing copy, the product is described thusly “A stunning new innovation in lip color, OCC Lip Tar combines the longevity of a lipstick, with the ease of application of a gloss.”

So from this you’re going to gather that this product is long-lasting and easy to apply, right? I mean, that’s what I thought, from reading their copy. Lasts like a lipstick! Easy to apply, like a gloss! And everyone in the blogosphere just raved about how “highly pigmented!” the color is, and how it’s just this must-have product.  But I am reluctant to jump into new brands that I can’t see in person, so still I resisted. I also read about OCC’s cool nail polish line, and I lusted after a color called “Blackboard.” Yet still I held firm. Even though they’re “100% Vegan and Cruelty Free!”  Then OCC had a sale. 20% off for the new year, and I decided to take the plunge. I ordered two lip tars, Trollop (cranberry pink) and Vintage (deep dark burgundy.) I also ordered two nail polishes, the aforecoveted Blackboard and a chartreuse called Wasabi. (FWIW The checkout process was so unprofessional and generic that until the actual package arrived I wasn’t sure if I’d been on a scam site.) Total cost including s/h was around $39 – which is a lot for me to invest in totally untried brands/products.

Since the shipping and handling took longer than I am accustomed to for cosmetics orders (probably partially due to the nail polish not being able to go USPS) I was hotly anticipating this delivery. When my package arrived yesterday I was super excited to finally try these miracle lip tars that every freaking person in the world seemed to be raving about.

Uber disappoint.

Where to start? The colors. Trollop is extremely… vibrant. Vintage is extremely… batcave death dark, to the point where they’d kick you out of the goth club for wearing this shit because they’d think you were being too dramatic. (I read “burgundy” and pictured, well, deep wine color? This color is brown. Dark brown. It’s a dark brown that maybe one time had a cousin who knew a guy who dated a girl who was red, and that girl had a purple sister. But mostly it’s brown.) The colors are highly pigmented, it’s true. This means that when you apply them (round one, bare lips, with a lip brush) they just sit atop your lips, rather than truly being on your lips, if that makes sense. They sit there but do not sink into your lip texture, so your original lip color shows through in cracks. It’s like – well it’s like what I imagine it would be like if you applied latex house paint to your lips. This does not look/feel/seem like a lip product. Then it starts bleeding outside your lipline, which is painfully obvious when the color is so dark. So lipliner is a must.

The culprits

I tried Vintage first, saw that I looked insane, wiped it off, tried Trollop. I am pale with dark hair, and I know that I need to stay with cool/blue tones rather than orange or coral. I thought a cranberry pink would be right for me (We’ve all seen cranberries, right? Definitely a blue/purple tone to that berry, not a coral or orange tone.) I am not sure who this color would look good on, but it’s not me. I looked like a kid who got into the paint pens or something. Wow, even more disappoint. So then I decided to blend the two together, to see what I got. Moderate success here, I got a color that wasn’t offensive, but really wasn’t all that exciting either. Sort of a suede-y dusty pink. The color continued to sit atop my lips, my natural lip color was showing through, and this stuff was feathering halfway to my chin within half an hour. In addition, my lips felt extremely dry, and the product smelled and tasted awful. Very chemically.

Aggravated, I went to paint my nails, thinking at least I could have cool chartreuse nails to cheer me. The color is a good thing about this polish, it’s certainly unique. But that’s all that’s outstanding about it. The website’s copy claimed that this was developed for “editorial” work so meant to go on smoothly and dry fast. I wondered if it might even be a one-coat polish. Nope. Definitely two coat, and the second coat doesn’t even go on all that smoothly. Then, rather than being quick dry, it actually took longer to dry than most of my other nail polishes. Even with a coat of Seche Vite on top, an hour later I went to the bathroom and ended up having to do touchups on two nails. This morning when I looked at it again, the color hasn’t settled well or leveled off on the nail, and it looks pretty crappy (again, super evident because the color is so bright)

You can see how this went on. Streaky and unlevel. And this is after a top coat to seal and level it out. I might be able to get a better result with a lot more time and patience invested but the product was advertised as being perfect for editorial work. Not so much.

I did some more reading on the lip tars, wondering if other people had as much negative feedback as I did. I found a couple negative reviews, beauty-blog people having the same issues I was. The feedback to those who had problems all seemed to be “You’re doing it wrong!” To me, a product touted as “easy to apply” shouldn’t require such specialized application processes that professional beauty bloggers cannot fathom it, but maybe that’s just me.

I re-read the website copy (and came to understand why they don’t show any of their swatches on actual lips) and I saw that they have an entire section of their FAQ dedicated to “WORKING WITH OCC LIP TAR” (Again, if you’re going to tout this as easy to apply, like lip gloss, maybe you shouldn’t need a whole FAQ about how to get it on your lips?) I read this in that FAQ “We recommend applying a tiny bead of Lip Tar™ with an angled lip brush, like our #009 Angle Brush to well-moisturized lip, starting in the center of the mouth and blending outward toward the lip line. Though certainly not required, Lip Liner will definitely enhance the look of Lip Tar™ and help you keep the color inside the lines.”

I had already determined that lip liner would be a necessity, but reading between the lines here I also realized that you couldn’t apply this product on bare lips. When they say “well moisturized” what they mean is “Bitches better have some balm on before they try spreading this shit.” So we have here a product that requires another product (another two if you count the lip-liner) and a lip brush to apply. The balm underneath (tried that this morning and it DOES look better) means that the product will not be long-lasting, and will feather even more than before.

So to sum up: Lip Tar! It’s difficult and messy to apply on the go, doesn’t last, dries your lips, looks artificial and weird, from what I read in their FAQ it will permanently stain your clothes and towels, and no they don’t take returns for any reason. Enjoy!

(Later I will review some stuff I really like, promise. I finally splurged on some Tarte stuff and some new Urban Decay and I love it all to pieces.)

Frostbite Friday

Here’s today’s nail experiment (well, technically yesterday’s)

It’s China Glaze “Frostbite” (bright blue base coat) and OPI “Last Friday Night” (blue glitter top coat)

I like both of these, the blue is insanely bright and hard for me to get used to, and also, it stinks. Or, it stank when I was applying it. Like skunk. I have never had a nail polish smell so foul.

But otherwise kind of fun? I don’t know if I would just wear the blue on its own, it’s kind of costumey. But fun to play with.

Winter’s Bone

So I saw this movie today.

Synopsis:

Seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) sets out to track down her father, who put their house up for his bail bond and then disappeared. If she fails, Ree and her family will be turned out into the Ozark woods. Challenging her outlaw kin’s code of silence and risking her life, Ree hacks through the lies, evasions and threats offered up by her relatives and begins to piece together the truth.

Based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell.

I don’t know that I enjoyed it, quite. It was really interesting to watch. The story was mundane and scary at the same time. It felt more like watching a documentary than a movie. Not in a voice-over narrative way, just in that the things in the frame were so… normal. They were so everyday. There was no Hollywood there, nothing was pretty or freshened up or clean. But at the same time the dirt and the mess and the cheap, falling-down ugliness of it all was not overdone. It just… was. My thought while watching it was that 100 years from now, if someone wants an accurate picture of this slice of Ozark life, then this will be the film to view. Or an accurate picture of what the heck people in America actually look like. What they wear and what their hair looks like and what they do. People with no money for highlights who can’t afford to buy whatever they want, even at Wal-mart. This was a movie about those people. And I think it more accurately reflects modern American life than a million rom-coms sets in Manhattan where people with no jobs live in giant apartments. This is a place where the front yards are littered with dogs on chains, and empty bottles of Mountain Dew. Where no one’s clothes match, and they’re just there to keep the elements out. Where people are fat and wrinkled and scarred and grimy.

I recommend it highly, not because it will make you feel either sad or happy, or that it will transport you to another place, like wonderful movies do. Just because it was such an odd feeling to see something so real up on the screen.

Housekeeping note: an old lady sat NEXT TO ME at the theater. NEXT TO ME. NO seat in between as buffer. How many laws does this violate? Naturally I got up and moved. What the hell, old lady?

I like this!

Just finished reading “Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture” by Ariel Levy. I totally think you should read it too! It perfectly captures a lot of my inherent uneasiness with the way that everyone from my friends to total strangers to popular media tell me I (and every other women out there) am supposed to be performing my sexuality. It talks not only about the objectification of women, and how that’s harmful to men AND women, but it also talks about the commodification of sex, and how that hurts everyone. Particularly enjoyed this passage: (bolding mine)

If we were to acknowledge that sexuality is personal and unique, it would become unwieldy. Making sexiness into something simple, quantifiable makes it easier to explain and to market. If you remove the human factor from sex and make it about stuff—big fake boobs, bleached blonde hair, long nails, poles, thongs—then you can sell it. Suddenly, sex requires shopping; you need plastic surgery, peroxide, a manicure, a mall. What is really out of commercial control is that you still can’t bottle attraction.

Anyway, if you’re needing some “Yeah, see that’s what *I* thought!” reinforcement about your decision not to wear a pair of Playboy bunny track pants and get your tits out for Girls Gone Wild, this is the book that will do it for you. And far from rejecting or demonizing healthy sexuality, this book reinforces that women should have sex when and if it brings them pleasure to do so, not for any of the other myriad reasons we’re told or expected to perform sexually.

Loved it! You should read it! Let me know if you want to borrow it!

Yay Netflix for Wii!

I am so not sorry for giving up my satellite and going to Netflix. I have not missed television at all so far, and have had much more time to focus on watching things I really want to watch and actually spending significant time reading again. I feel like I might even get my calm and my attention span back. I fear to hope, but maybe.

Tonight I watched the most fascinating PBS documentary, the first of three parts. It’s called “This Emotional Life” and the first episode focuses on relationships and why/how they’re important to us. They start at the beginning with attachment and various disorders relating to attachment difficulty, then they move on to discussing Asperger syndrome, bullying and how to prevent it, marriage and why relationships fail and why they succeed. They talk about the importance of friendships, and how we’re affected when we don’t have social ties. I found it totally fascinating and really well done.

They intersperse the various stories with short interviews with celebrities and for some reason I was very touched to hear Chevy Chase talking about how he has three friends. How he misses his wife when she’s not home and calls her just to hear her voice. How he’s struggled with depression. It’s not a good thing, exactly, but a somehow humanizing thing, to hear people we’d think of as successful talk about how they also struggle with these issues.

Anyway! Totally recommend this! Can’t wait to watch the other two in the series and see what they’re all about.

Ten Years and One Afternoon

I was conversing with a friend recently about how some books need to wait for the right time in your life to be read. You can try to read them any old time, but until you’re ready to pick up what they’re putting down, then you are just not going to, well, pick it up. You have to be in the right place to receive whatever message is there to be had.

Such is the case with Paulo Coehlo’s “Veronika Decides to Die” for me. I remember reading a review of this book in a magazine when it first came out, and thinking “I have to have that book. That book sounds amazing.” And I ordered it right away, and when it came, I started reading it, and then put it away in irritation and confusion. The book came out in 1998 and I have it in hardback, so that means I bought it close to then. ’99 probably, or early 2000. And so, for the next ten years that book sat on my bookshelf. It followed me through two or maybe even three moves. It was a book I always intended to pick up again. And today I did. “I am going to give that book another try.” I thought. And so I started again, and then I devoured it all in one sitting. So, now is apparently the right time for that book, for me.

The synopsis I read at the time talked about a character who decides that her life is meaningless and empty, the world is horrible and she is powerless to change it. So she decides to die. She overdoses on sleeping pills, but wakes up in a mental hospital, where she’s told that she’s done irreversible damage to her heart, and has only five days to live.

And the thought of that story appealed to me at the time, because I was intensely depressed and found most everything totally meaningless and the world totally hateful.*

But when I started reading it back then, the message was not what I wanted it to be. I wanted more darkness and despair. More proof that everything sucked as much as I thought it did. Not a lesson in how to change your life if your life feels empty. And so I abandoned it, because taking responsibility for making my life what I wanted it to be was not a thing I was ready for.

But today that message resonated with me, and I enjoyed someone telling it to me, very much. There is a lot of truth to the main theme of the book, which is that if your life feels meaningless and monotonous and full of restrictions, it’s because you’ve purposely constructed it that way, in order to feel safe. So you have to make a choice – safety and stagnation, or taking risks and feeling alive. And I think that for me every day is different. Today maybe I will take some risks, tomorrow I might curl up in the bottom of my closet with a blanket over my head. But knowing that life itself is not a stagnant, meaningless thing and that sometimes I strip the meaning from my life intentionally, because meaning is scary, is a good reminder.

I particularly loved this passage:

As she was walking down the corridors, lit by the same faint light as in the ward, Veronika realized that it was too late: She could no longer control her fear.

I must get a grip on myself. I’m the kind of person who sticks to any decision she makes, who always sees things through.

It’s true that in her life she had seen many things through to their ultimate consequences, but only unimportant things, like prolonging a quarrel that could easily have been resolved with an apology, or not phoning a man she was in love with simply because she thought the relationship would lead nowhere. She was intransigent about the easy things, as if trying to prove to herself how strong and indifferent she was, when in fact she was just a fragile woman who had never been an outstanding student, never excelled at school sports, and had never succeeded in keeping the peace at home.

She had overcome her minor defects only to be defeated by matters of fundamental importance. She had managed to appear utterly independent when she was, in fact, desperately in need of company. When she entered a room everyone would turn to look at her, but she almost always ended the night alone, in the convent, watching a TV that she hadn’t even bothered to have properly tuned. She gave all her friends the impression that she was a woman to be envied, and she expended most of her energy in trying to behave in accordance with the image she had created of herself.

Because of that she had never had enough energy to be herself, a person who, like everyone else in the world, needed other people in order to be happy. But other people were so difficult. They reacted in unpredictable ways, they surrounded themselves with defensive walls, they behaved just as she did, pretending they didn’t care about anything. When someone more open to life appeared, they either rejected them outright or made them suffer, consigning them to being inferior, ingenuous.

She might have impressed a lot of people with her strength and determination, but where had it left her? In the void. Utterly alone. In Villete. In the anteroom of death.

Veronika’s remorse over her attempted suicide resurfaced, and she firmly pushed it away again.

So anyway, I really enjoyed the book, and it had some good life lessons for me, in the place I am at right now, blah blah blah. And I was looking up when the book was published in order to accurately report just how long I had procrastinated finishing it, and then I saw that it’s been made into a movie, with Sarah Freaking Michelle Gellar as Veronika! And it’s going to be released in 2010 sometime, apparently, and here is the trailer for it!

And I am very excited as it seems to have a lady director! And I think that will add something to it. So now I am very curious to see the movie, and very glad that I finished the book. It was a quick read, just took me ten years and one afternoon.

*If you think that sounds like me now, you’re not quite wrong and you’re not quite right. Now I struggle with feelings like that, but back then I just lived them as pure truths. I realize I often sound very depressed when I write, but honestly, I am not that much. I just think about serious things, and serious things sound… well, depressing to some people. I almost never blog  ”Holy shit my day was amazing and life is the bomb-fucking-diggity!” even though I frequently feel that way, because, well, who the hell wants to read that? Nobody. That’s just some tiresome shit right there.

Movie Review – “Grimm”

Since subscribing to Netflix I’ve mostly been watching things streamingly. Getting a DVD in the mail and sending it back seems very 2007, somehow. I wasn’t sure if I would ever use the mail-order DVD service at all. But they have a decent selection of foreign-language films, and as I was watching one of them I realized there was an option to turn the subtitles completely off – and hey that’s cool. If I can do that, I can practice my Dutch. (Last time I tried to watch Dutch movies it was with the movie “Karakter” on VHS, and you can’t turn the subtitles off. It’s so distracting, at one point I taped paper over the bottom of the screen.) For years I haven’t been able to listen to anyone speak Dutch except on internet radio, and I don’t want to lose all my spoken language skills, so I started ordering Dutch language movies. But here’s the thing. Dutch movies come in only three varieties, as far as I can tell.

1. Movies about The War in Dutch or in English (if you have to ask which war, you’ve never seen a Dutch movie. ) – these movies can be good or bad, it’s a mixed bag.
2. Movies made by Dutch people,  not about the war, filmed in the English language – these movies can be good or bad, it’s a mixed bag.
3. Movies not about the war, filmed in the Dutch language – these movies care almost invariably bad. The movies that cannot get funding to be made in English are apparently never supposed to be made at all. And I am not saying that I LIKE it that way, I am only saying what I have observed to date.

So anyway, I know by renting a movie in Dutch I am taking a chance that it’s going to blow. However, it’s nice to practice my skills, as I said, and I can always just have in on in the background while I do other things. Even with that low standard, “Grimm” is going to earn a menstrual cup rating from me. Here’s the official synopsis:

Dutch director Alex van Warmerdam defies tradition in this absurdist, darkly comic retelling of the classic “Hansel and Gretel” fairy tale. Brother and sister Jacob and Marie (Jacob Derwig and Halina Reijn) are abandoned by their family in the forest, with no other guidance than a note advising them to travel to Spain to visit their wealthy uncle. Embarking on a surreal odyssey, the siblings find their fortunes taking a number of unusual turns.

Now, you can’t tell it from that very small cover art there, but those are two grown-ass people on the cover. A Hansel and Gretel rehash with grown-ass people at the center makes no sense. Sure, they’re left alone in the woods by their father. But they’re not retarded – why don’t they go do something for themselves? Sitting on the ground and crying as an adult is very tempting, I agree, but it’s not really a workable life plan. So they’re promptly taken hostage by a farmer and his wife, and the man is sexually molested at gunpoint, while the woman is locked in a shed or something.  (Of course, it’s only molestation b/c the farmer’s wife is meant to be perceived as unattractive. If she’d been “hot” it would have been a fantasy seduction scene. Don’t even get me started there, though.) They escape by knocking the fat farmer and his fat wife through a cement wall (Ha ha! Nothing funnier than fat people falling down! ) and then promptly turn to a life of crime/prostitution.  They kill their first john, find a gun, and take off for Spain on a motor scooter. Once there they do more crimes, then get taken in by some Spanish guy who marries the girl while the guy mopes around being all incestuously love-lorn. Then we get all urban legend, as the guy is knocked out and his kidney snatched for the dying sister of his sister’s new husband. Confused yet? They make their magical escape, then hide out in a Spanish ghost town, disinfecting his wound with out-of-date eggnog, and then riding a donkey and practicing archery until the evil bad husband comes to “claim his wife” and they kill and bury him in the middle of the ghost town. After which point the girl says “I want to go home.” and they head off for home on the motor scooter. Begging the question, if they had a home to go to – why did they travel to Spain in the first place?

Ugh. It was a hot nonsensical mess. It MIGHT have been more interesting if the actors were children. You can see children making these choices, and forgiving them, or at least having empathy. But with grown people playing the parts you can’t feel anything but disgust for their idiocy.  Anyway, it blew.

But it was still nice to listen to Dutch being spoken. Let’s hope the next movie will be a smidge better though.

Kharma

Picked up a book at Left Bank this week that is completely rocking my socks. Daniil Kharms’ “Today I Wrote Nothing”

Kharms (1905–1942) is described as the first Russian microfiction writer, and that alone is intriguing. He was part of a group of other artists and writers (the OBERIU) who were fascinated with the mundane and the absurd, and in most cases I do believe they thought those things were the same. His fiction is short, plain and startling. Since starting to read the book I’ve pretty much wanted to buy a copy for everyone I know and force them to sit down and read it while I watch them. It’s one of those books that almost hurts to be read alone, since every other page makes you want to read it out loud to someone. (The dogs don’t care much for absurdist Russian microfiction, it turns out.)

Anyway, since I’ve been all Kharms-infatuated this week, I was trying to find links for some friends so that they could read what I was rhapsodizing about – but it’s no good. The translation in this volume (by Matvei Yankelevich) is vastly superior to anything I could find elsewhere online. The translation in some cases changes the entire tenor of the passages, and I can’t recommend anything I’ve found online. You really have to have the book.

One of my favorite exchanges so far is from his story “The Old Woman” about (you guessed it) an old woman who comes uninvited into the narrator’s apartment and promptly dies. The narrator doesn’t know what to do about this, and leaves the apartment to get drunk with a friend who has no idea what’s going on. Perhaps feeling his friend out about what to do, he has this conversation with him:

“What is your attitude towards dead people?” I asked Sakerdon Mikhailovich.

“Absolutely negative.” said Sakerdon Mikhailovich. “I’m afraid of them.”

“Yeah I can’t stand dead people either,” I said. “Were I to bump into a dead person, and if he wasn’t a relative, I’d probably kick him.”

“One shouldn’t kick dead people,” said Sakerdon Mikhailovich.

“I would give him a boot right in the muzzle,” I said. “I just can’t stand dead people and children.”

Which is an insane conversation, and yet is also something I feel like I’ve overheard my friends saying at the bar. Anyway, all I can say is that his writing is exhilarating, and inspirational, and it makes me feel fresh and clean in my brains. You probably need to read this.

Product Whoring – Bare Escentuals Buxom Lips

Sephora: Bare Escentuals Buxom Lips: Lip Plumpers.

I got a free tube of this in “Claire” from Sephora, with a gift set I purchased the other day. I am not one for lip plumpers usually – my mouth is small and lip plumpers just make me look like I have a small mouth that someone  smacked. Also, they have a tendency to burn and make the skin around my lips irritated.

Basically they make me feel like I’ve just spread some noxious toxic wasted on my face, and am courting some kind of skin disaster. Not really what I think of as comfortable and/or appealing. (I am looking at you, Too Faced Lip Injection Extreme.) But since I got this full-size sample I thought I would try it once and see if I liked it.

I LURVE it. It’s a pretty shiny neutral color, and it’s glittery without making you feel like a kindgergartener did a project on your face. It’s tingly, but not painful; it feels (and tastes) minty-fresh, actually. And at $18 it seems downright reasonable, compared to some of the products out there.  So I am officially product-whoring for it, it’s pretty awesometastic.

If I Strep for You, Will You Strep for Me?

OK so day two of being home with what I can only assume is strep throat. (Thanks again Dave, you fuck.)

I can only assume it’s strep because I refuse to call my doctor about it. For two reasons, at least.

One of which reasons is fuck doctors, they’re always wrong and assholish, and my primary care physician is way out in West County. Guess what I don’t feel like doing with the sorest throat this side of the Grand Canyon, and swollen glands? If you said “Drive some random, fucked-up, roundabout non-40 way to west fucking county to see some bitch doctor who’s probably going to misdiagnose you with an anal fissure?” you win. (I would also have accepted “Spend 45 minutes on the phone with your doctor’s cunty staff where they question all your symptoms and tell you things that you know for a fact are medically untrue?”)

The second reason is that the treatment for strep (characterized by a sudden severe sore throat, usually presenting with a fever and w/o regular symptoms of a head cold) is antibiotics. But whether you take them or not, strep subsides on its own within 3-7 days. I don’t want to take any antibiotics, and knowing that I can cut out the whole “dealing with cunty staff/driving to WC” part of this equation means: fuck a bunch of calling my doctor. I don’t want to take any antibiotics anyway, so I am skipping the whole modern medicine scene.

That said, I am just waiting around to get better, and bored out of my mind. I watched two movies yesterday that had been on my Tivo since we had free HBO back in January. One of them was Juno, and one of them was Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium. Both of them were fair to middlin’   movies, and both featured Jason Bateman. Way to be ubiquitous, Jason Bateman.

Juno was OK I guess. For some reason, since everyone made such a big deal about her use of language in the movie I expected to notice it more, but I didn’t notice it at all. Which means that either everyone else made too big a fuss over it, or I talk like that in my head. It had some very nice moments in it, and kept my interest, which I think is the intent of movies. I thought that the mis-characterization of abortion protesters as these innocent, naive kids from your high school who say things like “bornded” and only kind of mildy rebuke women walking into clinics was practically crimianlly negligent, but then again I have actually worked at an abortion clinic and walked through those protesters, so it’s not surprising that would tweak my buttons.

Perv Alert

Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium was obviously not geared at my demographic, and as such it had several moments which either lost my interest or made me feel uncomfortable. When that mother discovered Jason Bateman (a total stranger) together with her son in her son’s bedroom, playing dress up with the door closed… um, well, you could just tell that this was a kids’s movie by the fact that she didn’t mace him and call the cops.

Then in one of the last scenes of the the film, Natalie Portman gives up her dream of running the emporium, and takes a job playing piano in a hotel lobby or somewhere. Since she spent most of the film looking like this:

I was excited to see her looking very sleek and sexy all in black with slicked-back hair and red lipstick.

Until I realized that being styled this way was supposed to represent all the bad, bad trappings of being adult and un-magical, and that in keeping with the spirit of the film I should much prefer Natalie look like this:

(Which shows how in tune with her childlike side she is! It’s a new look I am going to call hyper-unsexualized!)  Than like this: (not a scene from the movie)

Naturally I felt somewhat conflicted.

I’ve also been reading a little bit, although I have to admit that I fall asleep pretty quickly when I lay down to read. I’ve been sticking my head in Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion, which I actually haven’t read yet, even though I bought it the week it was released. I’ve been having a problem reading non-fiction for the last year or so, especially when I agree at the outset with whatever the author is discussing. I mean, I am already an atheist, so do I need to read his whole book on how I should be an atheist? I accept the premise, I am not sure what else I am supposed to glean here.

Same thing with a lot of the political books that have come out lately. I get it, right wing fundies are assholes, Bush was a bad man, Cheney is a corrupt motherfuck. Do I have to read your whole deal to get the details, or can I just stipulate that I agree?

I know, I know, I need facts and to be better informed. And I will totally buy the stuff to support the authors. It’s just hard to make myself read a whole book on a topic I totally agree with when I started. Like a lecture on night being darker than day, I am not sure why I have to sit through it, exactly. Is this GenX Interwebs addict ADD rearing its misshappen head at me?

Anyway, rounding out day 2 of being at home and I am bored, bored bored. Going to work tomorrow no matter what, and going out drinking tomorrow night too. Alcohol kills bacteria, and I hear tequila is particularly good at it.

Persuasion

On the hopeless romantic front, I started re-reading Jane Austen’s Persuasion last week, which put me in the mood to watch the 1995 Ciaran Hinds/Amanda Root film version this weekend. And then I rewatched the last 20 minutes again today.

I think that as I age mature I am almost coming to have more of an affinity for this novel than I do for Pride and Prejudice. I know, say it ain’t so. But I think it might be so.

There’s something about the characters of Anne and Frederick that seems more familiar to me. Maybe because now I understand more about loves that are long lost, and the way that your family and friends play their own parts in relationships. It really is impossible to love in a vacuum, and the way that the people you love respond to each other, and the way that influences the decisions you make, affects every relationship.

Or maybe it’s just because I want to go back to Bath. Maybe I don’t even know why – I am just in a Persuasion kind of mood. Maybe it’s just because Ciaran Hinds plays the part of Frederick so very hotly, and Amanda Root’s wide-eyed vulnerability as Anne touches my heart.

The way the film is made is so understated, just as the novel was written. So much is left unsaid, but is still perfectly shown through the character’s expressions and subtle movements. The scene at the end where Anne’s hand is engulfed in Frederick’s gigantic paw is so laden with meaning that your TV screen practically melts.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen the film, you should.

“All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when all hope is gone.” - Anne Elliot, in Persusion

Death by Doyle

I am currently drowning in a sea of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-related stories, both film and written word.

A few months ago my marvelous Tivo started recording a show on PBS each weekend. It was “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” featuring Jeremy Brett as Holmes and David Burke as Watson. The series began in the mid-1980′s, and was pretty well done for the small budget it must have had at the time.

Jeremy Brett is an insanely energetic and curiously appealing Holmes, really bringing the detective’s most Asperger’s-like traits to life. You don’t like him, you admire him, you adore him, you find him irritating, you can’t look away.

His thin, pale Holmes is so focused and yet so inter-personally flawed, so intelligent and cold, it’s wonderful to watch. His snobby, dismissive hand gestures and sneering attitude toward everything  he encounters had me transfixed. (My own particular weakness fondness  for emotionally-unavailable geniuses notwithstanding.) His self-pitied moaning about the ennui of his existence, which he needs both cocaine and morphine to enliven, aroused my empathy.

I found myself remembering the stories (sans cocaine/morphine somehow) from reading them when I was younger (the one with the asp who climbs down the rope and returns at the sound of whistle being a horrifying favorite) and being fascinated all over again.

And so I kept watching . It was always a lazy weekend treat to drowse in front of the TV listening to Holmes castigate poor Watson for his shortsighted dunderheadedness.

David Burke played an adorable Watson, too. He was so happy! So willing to be pleased and impressed by everything! He was never angry or sullen or jealous, only willing to help and ready to play Holme’s foil. Charming.

The series ends with Holmes death at Reichenbach Falls, and then picks up in 1986 with his resurrection for “The Return of Sherlock Holmes.” This time a new actor  (Edward Hardwicke) plays Watson, and I was prepared not to like him so much, because he didn’t seem as happy—but after a few episodes he seems to have picked up that naive joy so characteristic to perennial second-fiddle Watson.

I didn’t think about the series much, just enjoyed it when Tivo picked it up.

Then after Christmas I was in Borders and ran across this book “Arthur & George” by Julian Barnes. I’d read Barnes’ “England, England” many a year ago, and remembered liking it, and it was $4.99 hardback, so what the heck. I had trouble getting into it, the first quarter of the book explains in great disconnected detail the lives of two young boys— lives which have no common thread running between them—which made me wonder why I was supposed to care about either of them. The “Arthur” in the title is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Holmes series, and “George” was some son of a vicar no one ever heard of.

After a while it became more interesting, and in the end I was quite fascinated with the story. (No spoilers, but it’s a true-life tale of Doyle getting involved with a case of criminal injustice, which directly impacted the creation of the British Courts of Appeal. Let me know if you want to borrow it, it’s quite good.)  When I was done I  read the afterword. (Which, had it been the foreword would have made me much more interested in the book from the beginning) It said that all correspondence and newspaper articles quoted in the text were taken verbatim from the original stories/documents. Anyway, it was a great peek inside the mind of Doyle, and made me even more resolved to go get the collected Sherlock Holmes to re-read.

Books acquired Saturday (Dear Publisher: “Sherlock Holmes, The Complete Collected Stories and Novels, Volume 1″—  with the “Volume 1″ in teeeeeny-tiny type on the spine— is a ridiculous title. How each book “complete” if it’s one of a two-volume set? Luckily I noticed that the second copy of the book was smaller than the first and picked them both up, or I would have been mightily pissed when I got home.) And I’ve been happily devouring them ever since. Several things struck me:

1. How language evolves. “But Holmes! You can’t be serious!” I ejaculated. Seriously, Watson ejaculates at some point in almost every story.
   
2. How authors of that time period didn’t dumb-down their texts for their audiences. Liberal usage of $5 words and frequent un-translated German and French quotations show me that Sir Doyle expected a certain level of education from his audience, and that if they didn’t have it, they should reach up to his level of understanding, not expect him to shove his writing down to theirs.

I am now all caught up in this world of Victorian manners and language, which I think suited my personality much better than the era I was mistakenly born in. (Though I do quite approve of all the sanitation and antibiotics we have, don’t get me wrong.) Still only 1/3 of the way through Volume I and a whole Volume II to go after that. In addition, for the last week I’ve taken to reading at night instead of watching TV, and it’s really very cuddly up in here, with the dogs laying all over me and candles burning. It makes the long, stupid winter nights somehow less of a complete waste of time.

Two other notes. Jeremy Brett played Mr. Freddy Eynsford-Hill in the Audrey Hepburn film of My Fair Lady. And though I know a lot of popular TV & film characters would later be based on Holmes, the one who currently most reminds me of him in all his mannerisms is Sheldon on “The Big Bang Theory.”

Anyway, check out the PBS series if you have time, it’s quite charming.

The New World

Why are you saving me? I look like I smell bad.

Watched the movie “The New World” over the past two days. I totally see why it tanked in theaters.

It has all the ingredients of a win— Colin Farrell, Christian Bale, history, drama, sexual tension, beautiful scenery, starvation. You know, the basics. But even with these building blocks of excellence, this somehow manages to be one of the most disjointed movies that I’ve ever seen. I kept watching, hoping for it to speed up, clear up, something. But no. Where you wanted some exposition, all you got was another low-angle shot of wind through trees. Also – why was everyone such a mumbler? We’ve already got Colin Farrel fighting his accent, and Christian Bale fighting his teeth – do we need them to mumble through, too?

There was pretty much no character development, leaving you to apply your own explanations for the actions of the main players, who all seemed to be dramatic and torn for no fathomable reason. Things happened for no reason, in no order, with no explanation, leading to lots of questions on my part.

Was that one guy her brother, or what? What the frack was happening in that hut? Was that a dream or a hallucination? Why did they save him, then decide to kill him? Where did his armor go between when they shoved him in the hut and when he appeared before the chief?

I don't want you to notice my incongruously clean white teeth, so I will cover them with my hand, so coyly.

Why did these two fall in love? Were they bumping uglies out in the woods? Why so ambiguous, director-man? Why didn’t he just marry her then? No one seemed to care. I didn’t see her helping the colonists, when did that happen? Why didn’t he take her back to England when he went, then? Why the heck would he have her told he was dead? Why did she think she was married to him? They didn’t show them getting married – was that what was happening out in the woods when we cut away to wind in the trees for the 1674th time?

This movie needed some serious subtitles, and it also needed whatever that’s called when they flash some pertinent information up on the screen in between scenes. (While we were showing you yet another 45-second shot of a wind-blown field of grain, most of the colonists died, Pocahontas gave Smith a stellar BJ and all the fish died of fish cholera. That’s why we have all these starving, unintelligible orphans milling about. Now back to the action.)

The actress who played Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher) was as effective as she could be, considering the weird, rambling dialog she had to work with. Her primary function seemed to be looking perpetually hard done by, and her lips made her look as if someone had just smacked her in the mouth a minute ago, off-camera, so I guess that helped her to achieve the director’s goal – whatever that was.

Anyway, this movie aggravated me enough that I wanted to write it down, because this could have been an interesting story, but literally lost the plot and ended up sucking as a history, a love story,  and even a cautionary tale.