‘Media’ Category

  1. I have officially declared this summer the Summer of Romantic Comedies Made Between 1960 and 1965

    July 27, 2009 by ms. xandra

    You should start with these:

    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.

    Category Awesome, Culture, Media, Music | Tags: | 3 Comments

  2. Dear Santa,

    September 28, 2008 by ms. xandra

    Is it too early for this?  No way.  It’s never too early to write to Santa. I’ve actually  been composing a blog post about how really upset the concurrent election campaigns in Canada and the US are making me (so upset that I have been waking up with weird stomach cramps) but I can only spend about two minutes at a time on it because otherwise I go plummeting into despair.  So to distract myself from despair, I have composed the following list entitled “What I want for Christmas, 2008 Edition.”

    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.

    Category Awesome, Books, Culture, Food, Internet, Media, Politics, X-Files | Tags: | 4 Comments

  3. Mermaids! X-Files! (What else is new?)

    September 12, 2008 by ms. xandra

    Oh, the internet is the greatest thing.  The internet allows me to transmit my hopes and dreams into a series of tubes, and then, on rare, sparkling occasions, actually finds people on the other end of those tubes who manage make my dreams come true.  Once upon a time, I said on this blog, “gee, I wish I had a ticket for that sold-out B-52s concert,” and then, lo-and-behold, a member of the Grammy committee and friend of the late, great John Peel had one with my name on it.  Once upon a two-days-ago, I said, “gee, I wish I had a ‘Mermaids for Layton’ button,” and just look at what that boy of Tanya’s slapped together for me:

    Amazing.

    Today I saw a bus that still had a lonely-looking X-Files 2 ad on it!  And it reminded me of those halcyon days preceeding the 25th of July, 2008, when we still had hope.  Hope that the X-Files movie would be not terrible.  Ah yes, I remember those days.  Those days before the world was introduced to Fox “Scratchy Beard” Mulder.  Those days before our dreams were shattered by a movie about Russian doctors harvesting people’s organs.  But at least we will always have Mulder and Scully in a rowboat.  Forever.

    And also there are funny billboards with David Duchovny’s face on them all over the city, advertising the new season of Californication.  Apparently he won the Golden Globe for best actor for the last season, which seems highly improbable because, well, who knew anyone was watching that show?  Even I wasn’t, and Fox Mulder is my second-best friend!  (Dana Scully is my first-best friend, and Walter Skinner is my third-best friend.  And Diana Fowley is my Number Two Worst Enemy, right after Karl Lagerfeld.)  So as I contemplated David Duchovny’s face as my bus was stopped at a red light on Sunset today, I got to thinking.  I have been living in Los Angeles for an entire year, and I have yet to even make out with David Duchovny, Sex Addict.  (An aside:  Why is it that in the media coverage of David’s sex addiction not one person has mentioned the scene in Trust the Man where David actually goes to Sex Addicts Anonymous and says “I am a sex addict.  I enjoy rubbing cold cuts all over my naked body”?  Oh, wait:  because nobody else saw that movie.)  Clearly I need to up my game.  So, in the interests of upping my game,  I have purchased an eyelash curler and have started referring to my bathroom exclusively as the “Powder Room.”  How these two things will succeed in helping me to up my game has yet to be determined. But, you know, good things come to those with very curly eyelashes who wait in powder rooms.  Or something.

    Category Internet, Media, Politics, X-Files | Tags: | 6 Comments

  4. Awesome things I should tell you about before I forget!

    September 8, 2008 by ms. xandra

    1.  I am going to the Chris Leavins Story Hour!  Amazing!

    2.  The other day, Cute Earnest Barista was like, “Hey, you should come to this show we’re having next week!  I think you’d really like it!” which either means that Cute Earnest Barista likes me, or that Cute Earnest Barista is worried that nobody will come to the show, and I look generically artsy enough that I might be inclined to attend that sort of event.

    3.  For breakfast this morning, instead of pouring milk on my granola, I poured on leftover iced coffee and it was so delicious.  Also, maybe this coffee thing is becoming a problem?

    4.  Margarita ice cream!  I am making some tonight!  And probably not sharing.

    5.  Did you listen to this week’s Vinyl Cafe?  You should download the podcast because it was SO FUNNY.

    Category Coffee, Internet, Media | Tags: | 5 Comments

  5. Delicious! b/w Gross!

    September 6, 2008 by ms. xandra

    Dear Friends,

    My oven is currently full of chocolate-stout cupcakes and bundt cake and love.  And let me tell you, I think this is my new favourite dessert recipe.  And I don’t even know how it will turn out yet.  There’s something about a big pot of beer and butter bubbling away on the stove that is just, well, makes a 2-bed, 2-bath, rent-controlled apartment a home.  And also the batter was pretty delicious (licking the beaters being the chef’s prerogative).

    Anyhow, anyhow.  I’m currently really annoyed about something.  And there will be a more lucid, detailed post about this on my soon-to-be-launched Other Blog.  But for now:  I am really fed up with the elitist, offensive rhetoric that is being employed by people who are opposed to the format changes over at CBC Radio 2.  I have yet to hear an argument that amounts to anything more than “Radio 2 should remain exclusively a classical music station because classical music is better and superior to popular music which is all verse-chorus-verse, and the national music station should be playing only music to edify the people.”  It’s really aggravating.  It’s especially aggravating because the people making these arguments are people who I guess are my colleagues – music educators, musicians, composers, etc.  It makes me so mad to see this false popular/classical dichotomy upheld, a dichotomy that is ultimately less about the music itself and more about identifying oneself as better than other people.  (Because – newsflash! – classical music is not better than popular music or vice versa.  Both are capable of being edifying or not.  And arguments to the contrary are strongly ideologically motivated.)  And it sort of makes a lot of sense to me that a national music station should try to appeal to as wide a demographic as possible, you know?  By playing lots of different kinds of music?  You know?  And I wish people would think of what it means when they say that, by playing music by “popular” Canadian musicians, Radio 2 is dumbing itself down.  That kind of rhetoric marginalizes both the artists and listeners.  I listened to the new 3:00 show the other day, which features mainly independent, Canadian musicians, and, let me tell you, I didn’t hear anything that I would describe as dumb.  Anyhow.  Mostly I’m just fed up with the kind of jackassery that I hoped was exclusively the domain of self-important music undergraduates.

    Oh, also annoying:  Stephen Harper, what is the point of the election you are going to call tomorrow?  I hate your stupid face (and also all of your stupid policies).  Hopefully the people of Canada will have the sense to fire you.  But I worry.

    Luckily for you, Stephen Harper, my oven timer is buzzing at me so I am stepping off my soapbox for the time being.

    THE END,

    Xandra A.

    Category Canadialand, Food, Media, Politics | Tags: | 2 Comments