cleolinda | Entries tagged with the black dahlia

Fairly productive today. We've also got Pete on the premises, and that dog and his lampshade are the saddest thing I've ever seen. Meanwhile, I'm thinking of going back over some of my old work, the really short pieces, and dusting them off again. I'm sure this will upset the three people in the world laboring under the delusion that I was a good poet, bless them, but the problem with most of my poetry is that I always try to cram a story in there between the lines, and it occurs to me now that I might just try expanding them into vignettes. My prose voice is probably one of my few real strengths, so it's worth a shot, I guess. It might be nice to try submitting to magazines again, I don't know. I'm thinking about posting a few of them here instead. So... we'll see.

Hm. So for today's flashback... let's go with that mini-entry about The Black Dahlia. Note: I only made up one thing in that entire paragraph, and that is "crushed by a falling anvil." Every single other thing actually happened in that movie.

Linkspam! ( Zac Efron NOT in POTC4 )

( More on The Black Dahlia )

All your unpleasant news in one quick burst: Man attacks wife, toddler in car. Kids missing after woman slain, fetus stolen. Rumors swirl over bin Laden's fate--that is, that he may have died of typhoid. That last one isn't unpleasant because I'm rooting for bin Laden or anything, I just want to clarify that. It's just... well. Anything war- or terrorism-related at this point, five years into this whole saga, is depressing to me.

Cosby: Let's give $8 each to build slavery museum. I felt kind of wary at first, like this was going to be kind of divisive (and let's be honest: "divisive" is often--not always, but often--a euphemism for "something that white people feel guilty about." Which is why, at the end of the day, I think he's right, he might have trouble getting donations), but he pulled me in at--

"The incentive is that they would join in with the rest of the United States of America in saying yes, as an American, I gave $8 to help build something that tells the story," he said in a teleconference with Wilder.

In a nation of some 300 million people, even a tepid response would surpass the $100 million goal, Cosby said.

He admitted this kind of campaign "generally fails badly."

"But I'm going to try again because I'm going to present this national slavery museum as a jewel that's missing in a crown."

More completely awesome jack o'lanterns. I so want to try my hand at this one next month.

This also made me smile.

Eraser worship.

The Evolution of [twentieth-century] Dance. Y'all, turn off the lights and close up the internet, it's time to go home. There will never be anything more awesome than this. Definitive proof that there is, in fact, at least one fearless, completely straight-faced, pasty white man who can dance.

So... we just got back from The Black Dahlia, and... I seriously have no idea what happened in that movie. ( spoilers )

Ohhhhhhhh no. No no no no no. My mother put a load of my sister's laundry in to wash this morning and asked me to put it in the dryer for a little bit and then hang it all up to dry. (For those of you asking where my sister was that she couldn't do her own laundry, her shift started at five this morning and she had a class last night. She's been a lazy cuss in the past, yes, but for the last six months, her schedule's been insane.) So I throw the clothes in the dryer, don't really look at them, and come back a couple of hours later to hang them up. They're covered in spots. Clutches of small, random, oily spots. Most of the load was polo shirts for work, but also in there? The outfit she was going to wear on her date tonight. Ohhhhhhhh no. And Sister Girl has, let us say, an Irish temper. I thought I had an Irish temper, but I realized it isn't really--with me, the amount of bluster is inversely proportionate to the actual amount of mad I am. I read something ridiculous in the paper, and it's like, "OH, WHATEVER, I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS GUY, DID YOU SEEEEEEE THIS?!"; someone does something shitty directly to me and I turn into my mother with the "I'm sorry, this is NOT ACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOR" Terrifying Calm thing. With Sister Girl, on the other hand, the dial's pretty much on eleven all the time. We're all going to die, is what I'm saying.

( CSI: Special Laundry Unit )

Movies this weekend: The Wicker Man at 17% fresh: snap. Crank seems to have amazingly good reviews at the moment, though.

Munch's "The Scream" found by police after two years.

Meanwhile: apparently by the time y'all got to the gelfling porn Wikipedia entry, it had been sanitized, making me look insane. Well, nothing ever disappears entirely from the internet, baby. (I like how a note on the history page says, "Classified everything below the first paragraph as 'Gelflings in Fan Fiction' since that is all the contents really are at best.")

Maybe the Russian Wtf, as y'all call it, was an ambulocetus? Yeah, I don't feel better.

("Russian Wtf" reminds me of the old joke--a reporter at a garden show or a greenhouse or something (look, I forget the context) asks the gardener what the big purple flower is, and he says, "Damn if I know." Next day in the paper, a picture of it with the caption: The rare purple damifino.)

Brian De Palma talks about The Black Dahlia a bit. "De Palma was juggling simultaneous plot lines 'that overlap in ways you don't realize until later,' he says. 'Some things I changed were too complex for audiences to absorb unless they were able to pick up the book. I had to pare down a lot of the eccentricities of the storytelling. If four things were going on simultaneously, we didn't need five.'" This is the kind of thing I find fascinating, if only for my own writerly purposes.

Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan in I'm Not There. Okay, I howled at this one. Maybe it works in action, but it's just hilarious out of context in stills. I forget which other actors are playing Dylan--seven total, I believe--but more of the cast in general is here. Definitely Heath Ledger, apparently.

Queen Fights for Right to Party, Blog. Brian May is ready to go over to MySpace and "apply a fist or two." I support this motion one hundred percent, sir.

Current Music: Tori Amos, "Jamaica Inn"

Not much going on today, except that I'm hoping to get in a swim before the daily monsoon arrives.

Glenn Ford dead at 90.

If you have a cell phone, you need to read this: "Trust Digital resurrected erased e-mails and other information from a used Treo phone provided by The Associated Press for a demonstration after it was reset and appeared empty. Once the phone was reset using Palm's awkward 'zero-out' technique, no information could be recovered."

Bartender gets $10,000 tip on $26 tab.

The Onion: "Amid growing personal concern that the subjects are not receiving enough national attention, singer–actress Jessica Simpson announced the launch Monday of an ambitious, multimillion-dollar campaign promoting awareness of her breasts."

sexion8: "Another wtf creature found dead. In this case, scientists DID haul it away, but not before plenty of photos were taken. It looks like something straight out of The Dark Crystal." Oh my God! They found Jen's master!

(Wow, there's a Muppet Wiki? Whoa--there's pictures out from the sequel already?)

(Whoa, whoa, whoa. Who the hell decided how the gelflings mate? Seriously, it's like gelfling porn. I love how the article has been slapped with a "canonicity" warning up top.)

New stills: The Wicker Man, Hollywoodland, Flushed Away (I was wrong, Em--it's not Ewan McGregor, it's Hugh Jackman), The Departed, The Black Dahlia.

My Tibetan cuff bracelets that I bought for a penny each plus shipping from China, shut up came in this afternoon! I love them. Really, it was a pretty good day all around--I got in a swim, I ate real food, I got presents that I bought myself, shut up in the mail. Here's hoping tomorrow starts a trend.

theferrett and I discuss Little Miss Sunshine a bit.

Holy shit: "All the girls in the beauty pageant, except Abigail Breslin, were veterans of real beauty pageants. They looked the same and performed the same acts as they had in their real-life pageants." Source interview: "So for us the issue was, how are we going to present this pageant in a way that can be as neutral as possible. For the most part, anyone who’s never seen what really goes on there, they’re going to be shocked by it. It’s a pretty shocking little subculture. But our goal was to try to just present it authentically, to just get real girls who do what they really do – we didn’t tell them when to smile, we didn’t tell them how to stand, we didn’t tell them anything." Let's revisit that picture again, shall we? I am terrified now.

You've seen the LMS directors' work before; you just may not have known it.

la_sonnambula on John Mark Karr and his visions of movie stardom: "And the movie wouldn't be just a little indie nugget either, it would be a blockbuster raking in $1 billion. He also told professor Tracey, 'I'm not gay, damn it. I am attracted to female children.' And he wants to have a sex change and become a nanny in Europe." Sadly, it was when we got to the "one billion dollars" part that I, the movie freak, went, "Okay, now I know bitch crazy." Also, way to get your slime on the transgender community while you're at it, Buffalo Bill.

Rome, Venice fests feud over broken pact. FIGHT! FIGHT!

Venice opens with grim murder movie "Black Dahlia." As opposed to the cheerful, happy-go-lucky murder movies you see so often.

Film to show doomed love of Spanish matador Manolete. Remember the on-set pictures of Adrien Brody in a hot pink matador costume? I know, it was a long time ago. They're from this movie. It actually sounds pretty interesting.

It's not that fewer books are being challenged--it's that we're not hearing about it. Sigh.

theatre_angel: "I feel a little bad asking this, but: for your next linkspam, whenever that may be, could you possibly put up this, which is a link to NRDC's new video campaign for their efforts to protect the Arctic Refuge from Bush's oil drilling. Because when your mother tells you to pimp something, it's hard to say no."

The Vile Videos. "'12 Books in 120 Seconds,' the first in a series of three panic-stricken videos leading up to The End, has appeared at lemonysnicket.com. Narrated by the infamous Tim Curry, it threatens to expose you to everything the Baudelaire orphans have suffered so far, in less time than it takes to brush one’s teeth." First poster to comment that "they stole your idea zomg!" gets slapped with a wet noodle. Like, a really big one. Lasagna, maybe.

CBS magazine slims down Couric in photo. "Couric, 49, said she hadn't known about the digitally reworked version until she saw the issue. The former NBC Today show host told the Daily News, 'I liked the first picture better because there's more of me to love.'" Awww.

The brains behind writer's block: new views of the muse. So... hypomania/hypergrafia is in one lobe, and writer's block is in the other? And maybe someday they'll be able to treat block? That kind of blows my mind. Also, it should make you feel a lot less guilty about being blocked in the first place.

Awww, a pimp for the book.

These totally go with my Flaming Chicken of DOOOOOM icon. Mmm, chicken.

I wrote 5300 words yesterday, because I am the mack. This was particularly nice after my publisher sent me another complimentary clipping--a review that included the phrase "in-yer-face unsubtlety" and ended with "this is probably one for the bathroom." Which is, of course, exactly what I need to hear while I'm struggling with trying to even get a second book started. Fortunately, those are the only two lines I happened to see before I folded the paper shut again and banished it to the sort pile across the room. My sister pointed out, in an unusual gesture of support, that this is probably not the kind of book that critics are going to like anyway, so if they had liked it I would have had to ask myself what I'd done wrong. Which is great in theory ("It's not FOR you!"), except that I get the feeling that my critics are saying, "I like a good book of parody, and this ain't it."

Wait, why am I gassing on about bad reviews? I thought this was supposed to be about how I'm really excited about developing a new story ~~which may or may not be FOR you~~.

A collection of links that've been piling up on me, so forgive me if they're a touch outdated:

( All Mel Gibson, all the time! )