Where the Boys Are – which I just finished watching five minutes ago.  It is the greatest film I have ever seen.  Connie Francis is in it, she plays a hockey player.  We don’t get to see her playing hockey, though, because the movie is set in Fort Lauderdale.  There’s a scene in a nightclub with a synchronized swimmer.  There are stupid hats.  There is a pretentious jazz band that plays a genre that they inexplicably call “dialectic jazz,” except for when Connie Francis sings with them, and then they play a genre called Neil Sedaka.  And everybody falls in love and tragic things happen and nice things happen and there’s lots of making out.  AN EXCELLENT FILM.

Lover Come Back – really, Doris Day’s hats are the centerpiece of this film.  Also, you should watch this one alongside Down With Love, and you will notice that Down With Love is not exaggerating the ridiculousness of Doris Day/Rock Hudson vehicles, not one little bit.  Also, this film features Fake Science, one of a few of my favourite things.

Get Yourself A College Girl – This is basically Where the Boys Are, except for they go skiing instead of to the beach.  And it has even more ridiculous and elaborate musical numbers (The Animals are in it!  And The Standells!  And that lady who sang The Girl from Ipanema!  So basically, it is a perfect movie if you ever find yourself stuck with a musicologist who you need to keep distracted), and there are really stupid costumes, and Nancy Sinatra.  Recently my criteria for choosing films has been “does it feature co-eds on vacation wearing stupid hats, and also musical numbers that involve the lead characters standing around watching a band, and therefore have absolutely nothing to do with the plot?” and this one fits the bill rather well.

Sex and the Single Girl – Actually, this might be the greatest movie I have ever seen.  Edith Head did the costumes!  And Lauren Bacall is in it!  And Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood!  And there is a half-hour long car chase to LAX where they play musical taxicabs and eat pretzels!  Basically, everyone spends the entire movie running around being irrational and looking fabulous. Natalie Wood plays Helen Gurley Brown, who, in this film, is not, in fact, the editor of Cosmo, but rather is a psychologist.  A very fabulously dressed psychologist.  Also, there is a subplot involving hosiery.

Incidentally, I am also reading the book Sex and the Single Girl right now, and it is a rather delightful combination of brilliant wisdom and complete and utter lunacy, of the kind that could only emerge from 1962.  I’m thinking of maybe doing a week-long blog project where I try to actually follow Helen Gurley Brown’s advice and see what happens.  It will probably end terribly, as so far, two chapters in, the crux of her advice seems to be “sleep with married men and make them buy you things,” which seems like, you know, a terrible idea.

PROJECT FOR NEXT WEEK:  See all of the movies that feature Paula Prentiss and Jim Hutton as co-stars.

Love,
Alexandra

Dear office computer,

It has taken me an hour to burn a cd on you, what is your problem? Oh, the things I do for Sgt. Pepper.

Hate,
Alexandra

Dear Readers,

This is the first time I have looked at my blog on this computer and I am dismayed to see that the header banner is not centered which fills my obsessive-compulsive heart with angst. Does that happen to any of you? If so, I will fix it this weekend.

Love, love, love, and also cookies,

Alexandra

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.

And yesterday we lost Harold Pinter.  Wonderful people are dropping like flies, what gives?

2.  I found myself in this really weird position oh, a couple of weeks ago, I guess, where I found myself in an argument defending Catholics. This was weird because, once upon a time, I was Catholic, but I’m not anymore because, well, I don’t actually believe in the Christian god, and I have obvious huge political reasons for wanting to distance myself from the doctrine of the church because they continue to preach some pretty fucked up things.  And also I am a huge fan of birth control.  It’s the greatest.  So I am pretty much a non-fan of the Catholic church.  (And also, transubstatiation is just plain creepy.)  But anyhow – having said all of this, I think it’s really important to distinguish between the offensiveness of church doctrine and the way church members actually live their lives, because there are thriving leftist activist communities within religion that work for inclusion and change but often get overshadowed by the crazies.  And although I’m not religious by any means, I have a lot of respect for the work that they do, often in opposition to official policy, but the person I was arguing with was a pretty ignorant jerk who would have none of this. Anyhow, the point of all this rambling is:  this post, about a Christmas service with Benedictine nuns was up at Shapely Prose (best blog ev-arrrr!) today (re-posted from last year) and it is really wonderful and great and really makes an important point about the kind of alliances we need to be building as feminists and activists.  And also it’s just a beautiful thing to read for Christmas.

(Cross-posted at Through the Bassline)

Of course this was not true.  CNN was doing a piece on Micheal Crichton, who is an author who is dead for real, not theoretically.

If you have not done so, please go watch The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra and Trail of the Screaming Forehead, like, immediately.

Also, I have no idea what this is, but I cannot wait for 2009 because it sounds like it will be the Greatest Film of All Time.

Also also, in case you haven’t noticed, I am, like SO into outer space these days.  But it’s a very specific vision of outer space.  It is, like, outer space in the mind of a twelve-year-old boy in approximately 1953.  It’s a magical place to be.

1.  A Nigella Lawson cookbook.   Either How to Eat or Nigella Express, but preferably Nigella Express because it has more pictures and we all know that the entire point of cookbooks is FOOD PORN.  (Yesss!  And now I will get a hundred hits to my blog from people googling for pornography featuring naked ladies covered in food.  Hello, creepy weirdos!  Thank you for making the internet a wildly uncomfortable place!)

2.  A citrus reamer like the one my mom got from the Pampered Chef.  Not only is it perfect for margarita making, it also serves double-duty as a self-defense device because it weighs approximately 57 pounds.

3.  A pair of really good headphones.

4.  A solution to my boy problem (problem being:  boys exist and are stupid but I still want to make out with them) that does not involve celibacy.

5.  A North America presided over by a team of kind, fair, benevolent, intelligent, democratically elected Philosopher Monarch-type people who just happen to agree with and enforce all of my opinions.

6.  Another new X-Files movie.  One that isn’t TERRIBLE.  I know it is possible.  I just watched Jose Chung’s From Outer Space.  I know it is possible.

7.  Somebody to go out dancing with.  I miss going dancing with my Sassyladyfriends.

8.  UNICORN.  (Item 8 could also be combined with Item 7:  A unicorn to go out dancing with.  That would be quite acceptable.)

I know I can count on you, Santa!  Don’t let me down!

Yours,

Xandra A.

And also! The slide show was held at the Petersen Automotive Museum, which is a place that I knew existed but is not a place I would ever have thought to visit (in fact, I think I found out about it and thought “a fucking car museum?  That is one place I will never go,”) but it turns out that the car museum is also fucking awesome.  They have the Micheal Keaton Batmobile, and, more importantly, the Adam West Batcycle.  And there was a special exhibit of vintage camping trailers, which is amazingly fascinating.  And they had Roosevelt’s car, and Eisenhower’s car, and Nikita Kruschev’s car, and a Bugatti owned by the former Prince of Persia, who I always thought was just a videogame character, and a car that looks exactly like the Fluevog car, and just really a lot of beautiful, beautiful vehicles.  And the circular-door Rolls Royce pictured here is, in person, the most fucking impressive and imposing and glorious and terrifying thing I have seen in a long time.  I think it is safe to say that I have changed my mind about cars because, apparently, cars can be art?  Who knew.  So, yes, I am now the kind of girl who would go to the fucking car museum, even though I really know nothing about cars at all.  No, actually, I know one fact about cars:  Never date a man who drives an Audi.  But that isn’t so much fact as it is Life Lesson That Was Learned the Hard Way.

ANYHOW.  It was really super.  Really.