January, 2009

  1. ALL I EVER THINK ABOUT THESE DAYS IS THE BEATLES.

    January 31, 2009 by ms. xandra

    Because I am TAing for the Beatles class.

    Did you know that Ringo was the most popular Beatle?  He got the most fanmail of them all, which is a 100% true fact that I learned in school.  Ringo is also my most favourite Beatle because he is so awkward and floppy.  The only word to properly describe Ringo is floppy.  He is also the least pretentious Beatle.  And then there is this:

    SO MANY QUESTIONS! Why are they sitting on stools, all in a row? Why are they bouncing up and down as though they are on a bumpy elephant ride? Why is it raining giant dandruff flakes? Why do John and George look like such uptight bastards? And most importantly: Who was like “Ringo, you’re going to sit at the back with this umbrella”? Because whoever it was was a genius, because Ringo hanging out with his umbrella at the end of the row like a jolly reject Beatle is the funniest thing I have ever seen. I keep re-watching this video in an attempt to unlock its mysteries.

    George is also kind of hot, though.

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  2. Shangri-Las! Puppets! Zeitgeist!

    January 30, 2009 by ms. xandra

    I arrived home last night to two pieces of fantastic news and one piece of fantastic mail.  The fantastic mail was a 45 of the Shangri-La’s Leader of the Pack b/w Never Go Home Anymore (!!!), so thank you Tanya for being the kind of friend who knows exactly what my heart desires.

    The fantastic newses were:

    1.  The Bob Baker Marionette Theatre has been saved!

    2.  The Snuggie, the blanket-with-sleeves, not to be confused with the Slanket, has been declared the raiment of the zeitgeist!*

    *Note that this is particularly hilarious to those of us who frequent the bus home to West Hollywood at rush hour on weeknights and thus spend a more than healthy amount of time watching infomercials on Bus TV.  While some people think it is fun to make fun of certain (WONDERFUL, AMAZING, USEFUL) products** that are advertised thereon, I think the Snuggie example illustrates that it is best not to mock the wares of Bus TV, lest one miss the zeitgeist.

    **What I am doing here is advancing the argument that the PedEgg is the Personal Grooming Tool of the Zeitgeist.

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  3. No business like show business!

    January 28, 2009 by ms. xandra

    And then today I had the idea that I live in fucking Hollywood, so I should just call in some showbiz connections, and forget the one-woman show, I could make a feature film, right? And then I remembered that my showbiz connections are as follows:

    1. I met two animators for The Simpsons at a concert a couple of months ago,

    2. I know a guy who plays a tour guide on the jungle cruise ride at Disneyland.

    And that is why I will not be making a feature film.

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  4. My personal favourite is “stake driven through the heart.”

    January 26, 2009 by ms. xandra

    Hey, remember that time I got really depressed about boys and started quoting Sylvia Plath, like an angsty 17-year-old?  I promise it won’t happen again, at least not this month (note that there is hardly a week left to the month).

    But anyhow.  On to more important things, like…

    DJ mixing class!  So great.  It is me and Shelina and a bunch of 18-year-old boys who needed to be told that the term “mix tape: comes from “cassette tape” which were these things we used to record stuff onto back in the 1990s.  Golly.  This week I am going to mix The Shangri-Las with MC Lyte and it is going to be super awesome.  Also, today I picked up a record of horror movie sound effects (including:  Arm Chopped Off, Sawing Leg Off, Grave Digging (In Stoney Ground), Grave Digging (In Wet Ground), Eerie Wind, Weird Wind, Wind Howling in Ship’s Rigging, and, inexplicably, The Electronic Swamp), which clearly means that I am going to be named Most Likely to Succeed by my DJ School Yearbook.

    And now bedtime, for a have a long day ahead of me tomorrow in which I will read that entire Paul Gilroy book and think of lots of intelligent things to say about it for my meeting on Wednesday.

    Oh, hey, also:  someone is finally starting a Fringe Festival in Los Angeles!  Which means that I might finally have a venue for this one-woman show I am working on (as of this morning) about how shitty everything is!  Tanya is my Associate Producer.  WE’LL SEE YOU AT THE TONY AWARDS!!!!!

    Category Academe, Angst, Music | Tags: | 5 Comments

  5. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

    January 24, 2009 by ms. xandra

    After all this time, I’ve figured out that the best coping mechanism is to just convince myself that certain things never actually happened.

    (I should have loved a thunderbird instead.)

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  6. And then I flew a rocket ship to the planet Marva.

    January 19, 2009 by ms. xandra

    Zarah and I went to the Pasadena Doo-Dah Parade, which, basically, is a parade for the mad.  And, in many ways, it renewed by faith in humankind.  Here are pictures!  And also, my new goal in life is to be a Lady in a Fancy Dress, Sitting on a Car, Waving at the Masses when I grow up.

    In other news:  I have figured out how to write a musicology paper about space (outer).  It is ostensibly about the B-52s, but mostly it will be about space.  This will require many trips to the Observatory so that I can learn everything there is to know about space. I actually went there this Friday already, which made me flash back to those days when Young Alexandra, Age 13, saw the film Contact and decided that I would be an astronomer, until I realized that such a career choice would probably involve knowing lots of math.  So then I gave up on that and decided to be an opera singer, until I realized that I actually hate other opera singers, and only wanted to be an opera singer because my voice teacher told me that I did, and so now I am a musicologist who writes papers about space.  Ah, memories.  All alone in the moonlight.

    And also, at the Observatory there was a Tesla coil for no reason at all.  Tesla coils, as you may know, look pretty neat and shoot sparks in the air but don’t really have much purpose, other than to broadly indicate “SCIENCE” in a certain breed of science fiction film with which I am intimately familiar.  Ergo, awesome.

    Category Academe, Adventure, Culture, Los Angeles, Musicology, School, Space | Tags: | 2 Comments

  7. Beards: The Universal Language

    January 18, 2009 by ms. xandra

    1.  I saw Angelyne today, for real!  She was driving her hot pink corvette down Sunset Blvd in front of Amoeba and it was totally fucking rad and all of my dreams have come true.

    2.  I am thinking of embarking on a foolhardy, conceivably futile task.  No, it is not to find true love.  It is to watch all of the films for which Edith Head has been costume designer, in chronological order.  And obviously I will blog this experience.  This is foolhardy because Edith Head has done the costumes for over four hundred films.  It could potentially be my life’s work.

    3.  Hey, look what the internet made for me!  A gallery of beards for me to have  crushes on!  I fucking love the internet!

    4.  Immaculate Machine!  I’d forgotten how much I love that band, and then today, I remembered.

    5.  I was listening to the episode of This American Life from, like, two weeks ago and there was a story about this woman who had a spreadsheet of all of her romantic encounters, which was kind of validating, because, hey, I’ve got one of those, too!  And she managed to explain exactly what is so great about such a spreadsheet, something I hadn’t really been able to put my finger on:  when you reduce each jackass to a number, it becomes so much less traumatizing and so much more containable.  AND DID YOU KNOW:  Angelyne has apparently recorded a song called “I Always Keep a List of All the Guys I Kiss.”  Did you like what I did there?  How I brought everything full circle?  Yeah, I know.  I’m pretty awesome.

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  8. So, this one time, we went to Hawaii.

    January 16, 2009 by ms. xandra

    I was sustained by the transcendental coffee, delighted by the drinks made of fruit and rum and blue curacao, made vaguely uncomfortable by the culturally insensitive luaus, and seduced by the pineapples.

    And also I presented some conference papers.  And spent a respectable amount of time wearing leopard print.

    Category Academe, Adventure, Coffee, The drink | Tags: | No Comments

  9. A few quick items before bed

    January 7, 2009 by ms. xandra

    1.  Some things I forgot on the 2008 list below:

    - cardigans (which have clearly replaced blazers in my heart, sorry blazers, you were cute and snappy for a while but then I realized so many of you give me shoulders like a linebacker)

    - Meryl Streep (who is consistently super)

    - That time I finally saw Chris Leavins’ live show

    - X-Files 2:  If Only You’d Been Not Shitty, Then We Might Have Seen X-Files 3

    2.  David Lynch’s funny little book is sort of changing my life in a quiet way – I have to overlook some of the sketcy Transcendental Meditiation propaganda, and focus on the parts about not wearing Black Rubber Clown Suits of Negativity – because every night I read a few pages before I go to sleep and then I think about how David Lynch is such a hilarious crazy man with the best hair ever and how he invented Audrey Horne, my muse until the end of time, and how he made one of the two movies in which Nicholas Cage is inexplicably fucking hot, and how he’s so right in saying that to get in one good hour of really good creative activity you really need four hours and I feel happy and less guilty about how long it takes me to get anything done and then I wake up in the morning feeling not shitty.

    3.  In other news on the “Books Written by our Role Models” front, Clinton Kelly wrote a book about how to be better than everyone else and I hadn’t even heard about it, but luckily Tanya stays on top of such things and had it shipped to me.  I am glad my friends take good care of me and send me books of instructions on what to do if I ever need to cook a steak in a hurry or if  I accidentally fart in public.

    4.  I can’t decide if I should write a B-52s paper or a Shangri-Las paper for the pop music analysis seminar I’m taking.  Or if I should just abandon both of those ideas and go grunge – Babes in Toyland have been at the back of my mind lately.

    5.  I just got a custom-made camera case for my new camera from Hondamom on etsy – it’s like this, but smaller and with purple and blue flowers – and it is the loveliest thing!  Yay for lovely things.

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  10. A list of things that have been extremely significant in 2008

    January 3, 2009 by ms. xandra

    (In related news, my favourite songs of 2008 are here)

    Mascara

    It all started last Christmas, in the airport, when, as a result of a mad, irrational panic attack I decided to buy an overpriced tube of bright blue Diorshow at Duty Free.  Well, friends, it has changed my life.  I can’t leave the house without mascara because, well, why would I want to?  It basically just makes my entire face awesomer.  While the original tube of Diorshow has bitten the bullet (ladies:  toss your mascara after six months!  That shit expires and then gives you gross eye infections, which I learned the hard way, when I tried to stretch my Diorshow to last just a little longer, resulting in the Great Stye Epidemic of April 2008), I have now acquired a vast collection of mascaras in various colours, the most recent of which is my super-awesome Bad Gal Plum that I got the other day and is so much better than anything in the world.  Also, I really appreciate that the brush is the size of a large caterpillar.  I had to pick up some shitty drugstore mascara this summer when I’d accidentally forgotten my entire toiletry bag and was traveling around and it was the worst thing ever because the brush was the size of a q-tip.  Apparently once you go the way of fancy makeup, there’s no turning back.

    Related obsessions: You Rebel tinted moisturizer (this is the only thing I need to put on my face!  It’s moisturizer and sunblock and it’s tinted so it works like foundation!  It does everything!), Urban Decay Eyeshadow Primer Potion (just AMAZING).

    Preditictions for 2009: I will become obsessed with lipstick.  I have never owned a proper red lipstick and I want to.  I need to.  It will happen.

    Having a roommate

    Don’t get me wrong, I really like living alone.  I’m really good at it.  I really like having space and being independent and not having to deal with other people when I don’t want to.  But I think I reached a point where it just wasn’t healthy anymore and coming home to my tiny little studio apartment was becoming a source of despair.  I think living alone is really good for a while, but I think I need cycles of aloneness and not-aloneness, and the time had come.  My previous roommate situations had always been kinda shitty (Exhibit A:  my first-year roommate who was studying financial mathematics and who informed me that her goal in life was to be on the cover of Forbes; Exhibit B:  having my ex as a roommate for three awkward years), but now I have possibly the best roommate ever.  My roommate is awesome.  And I think we’re both just good at respecting each others’ space, so it’s like I have all the good parts of living alone without the accompanying despair.  And we share things!  And we cook together!  And we decorated our apartment and it’s lovely!  And we have friends!  Friends who come over for food and games almost every week!  And it’s just really good to have someone around who likes me and will watch Lois and Clark with me and who lets me hang giant framed portraits of Barbarella in the living room.

    Predictions for 2009: We will not get any work done because my roommate, in his awesomeness, has bought all of Star Trek:  The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine on DVD (and I have a crush on Benjamin Sisko.  There’s just something about men with exceptionally good diction, I don’t know).

    Boys

    What a fascinating year it has been on the boy front.  Fascinating, fascinating.  In an unprecedented way.  There was laughter (the stand up comedian/game show champion!), there were tears (Jimmy, who may have actually broken my heart for a day or two), there was so much angsty drinking, and now there have been vows of celibacy (and this time I actually took down my online dating profile, which means I’m actually serious about giving up).  I’ve started a spreadsheet, in which I included the name of every boy I’ve gone on a date with, time and location of said date, and reasons why there have been no subsequent dates.  I’m not sure exactly what the purpose of such a spreadsheet is, but I just feel like it’s something kind of funny to have around.  I saved it on my computer as a document labeled “important tax information.” And now you know all of my secrets.

    Predictions for 2009: No more boys.  Dorothy Parker is the only person who really understands.  I might get her face tattooed over my heart.

    Fake Stuff

    I love Los Angeles because everything in it is fake and hilarious.  My family was here last week, and my whirlwind tour of the city included the following stops:  Fake Mexico, Fake Venice, Fake China, and Fake Egypt.  I did not take them to Fake Redwood Forest, because I feel like probably they wouldn’t have appreciated it very much.  But we did go to Disneyland, which is Fake Planet Earth, but it was actually kind of horrible because of all of the thousands of children (but I cannot say enough about the Enchanted Tiki Room, which is truly the most magical place on earth.  Tanya was like, “it sounds like Clifton’s, only with horrible singing robot birds.”  YES EXACTLY.  Only it is better than Clifton’s because there is no food).  And it’s funny, because my love for vaguely offensive early to mid 20th century fakery manages to be both ironic and non-ironic at the same time.  There is the so-bad-its-good quality on one hand, but on the other hand, I just love how ridiculous and funny people are (and my love for Clifton’s is a case in point:  I just love that some dude was like “I KNOW!  I WILL MAKE MY CAFETERIA LOOK LIKE MY DREAM OF A REDWOOD FOREST,” and then fucking did it.  It is so awesome.  I love that guy.  I want him to do an extreme makeover on my apartment and make it look like Barbarella’s spaceship).

    Predictions for 2009: I’m thinking of volunteering with the Los Angeles Conservancy.  You know, to help preserve all of the city’s glorious fakitude.  Also, somehow I want to become best friends with Charles Phoenix.  Oh, and I think we’re going to the Pasadena Doo Dah Parade this year, which is the Fake Rosebowl Parade.  OH!  And for my birthday, I have a grand day of fake fun planned, including:  a show at the Bob Baker Marionette Theatre; Lunch at Clifton’s; and there was a third thing.  It was really good.  I’ve forgotten what it is.  Probably it was Margaritas in a Pineapple at Really Fake Mexico, but almost that seems too predictable.  Maybe it was Dancing at That Place that I Always Go Past on the Bus That Has the Neon Sign that says “DANCING. COCKTAILS.” and That I’ve Wanted to Go To Because I’m Strangely Drawn to Places with Neon Signs that Say “DANCING.  COCKTAILS.”   Which isn’t exactly something fake, but somehow, it seems to fit in.

    The Shangri-Las

    Myrmidons of Melodrama is my album of the year.  I don’t care if it’s from the wrong decade.  Uh, century.  Shut up.

    Predictions for 2009: Shangri-Las Reunion tour?  Or maybe I will just start a tribute band.

    Elections

    Two misses (Canadialand, Prop 8 ) and a hit (Barack Obama).  Honestly, I just hope that we never again have to deal with a Canadian election and a U.S. election at the same time.  All that electioneering just made me totally annoyed with everyone all the time and I would angrily spout off about what a dumbass Stephen Harper is to anyone who would listen and then just get angrier. And also there was the part where half of California turned out to be assholes.  That was the most fucking awful thing that could have happened.

    Predictions for 2009: Canada will come to its senses and install Stephen Harper in an exceptionally cold and isolated igloo on Baffin Island where he can’t bother anyone anymore.

    Ukuleles

    For obvious reasons.

    Predictions for 2009: I have signed up for a DJ mixing class!  I am going to combine ukuleles and DJing for something that will clearly equal awesomness.

    Things I am going to accomplish in 2009:

    - knit more

    - stand up straighter

    - go to the Apple Pan once a month

    - become superstar DJ

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