There is a God, part 2

Here is proof.

Best of 2008: Theater/Shows

Broadway/Off-Broadway
Equus
Originally billed just as Harry Potter naked, live on stage, I actually really enjoyed the actual play. Daniel Radcliffe has definitely (ahem) matured as an actor and it was really exciting to see him in something so completely removed from Harry. Richard Griffiths was incredible and I liked the story way more than I thought I would. Money WELL spent.

The Seagull
Starring Peter Sarsgaard and Kristin Scott Thomas, this was another great chance to see amazing actors live on stage. An ensemble piece that deals with love, family, etc, it also starred MacKenzie Crook, better known as Gareth from the British Office or the pirate with the wooden eye in Pirates of the Caribbean. He was the one that most impressed me.

Shakespeare in the Park: Hamlet
My feelings on this have already been chronicled here.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
As have my feelings on this one.

Comedy
Asssscat (Thanks Dan)
I saw two performance of this Upright Citizens Brigade show, originally created by SNL's Amy Poehler. The first one was far funnier than the second one, mostly because Rob Riggle formerly of The Daily Show was in attendance and he could make me laugh just standing there. However, it did introduce me to my favorite new addition to SNL before he made it there: Bobby Moynihan

Stella
Although a big fan of Wet Hot American Summer I hadn't seen much Stella before this show. Until my good friend Dan had me watch some over Thanksgiving break, which I was thankful for. It was all solid, especially when Paul Rudd showed up to "stand in" for David Wain while he went to the bathroom. Hey, Paul . . . Shawnee Mission West!

Late Night With Conan O'Brien
This was a fun one, mostly because we thought it would be kind of lame since the guest was Martin Short, but he turned out to be very funny. One thing to complain was the people in charge of the line. We were directed to the wrong one and ended up way in the back. This upset me, not so much the rest of my party. Conan, however, was his usual charming and funny self. Don't go to L.A., they'll ruin you!

Other
Times Talks: Sarah Jessica Parker
See here.

Times Talks: Ellen Page, Amy Ryan and Jason Reitman
Ditto.

Best of 2008: Music

I have never been the person to "discover" new bands. I always catch on way too late for that, mostly after I've heard a song in a movie trailer, T.V. show, commercial or movie. Otherwise, my good friends Alison or Adrienne Aggen usually make me fun mix CDs that brighten my musical horizons. So here are the bands/albums/songs that I listened to and enjoyed the most in 2008.

Listened Obsessively
Bon Iver, For Emma Forever Ago
Choice track: "Skinny Love, "Flume" and "The Wolves"

Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes
Choice track: "Your Protector" and "Blue Ridge Mountains"

Okkervil River, The Stand Ins
Choice track: "Calling and Not Calling My Ex" and "Lost Coastlines"

The Virgins, The Virgins
Choice track:"Fernando Pando" and "Teen Lovers"

Superb
The Ting Tings, We Started Nothing
Choice track: "We Walk" and "Great DJ"

Radiohead, In Rainbows
Choice track: All except "House of Cards," which is just ok.
Update: Upon further reflection, and a very persuasive video produced by Adrienne and Jared starring Jared, Adrienne's voice and one ugly doll with a Thom Yourke "lazy eye," I've come to have a new appreciation for the song. Well done, team.

Kings of Leon, Only By the Night
Choice track: "Sex On Fire" and "Revelry"

Deserves to be listened to more
Bloc Party, Intimacy
Choice track: "Signs" (acoustic)

Coldplay, Viva la Vida
Choice track:"Lost?" and "42"

You can do better
Ben Folds, Way to Normal
Choice tracks: "Cologne," "You Don't Know Me" and "Bitch Went Nuts" (only because it gets stuck in my head for days and the first line is hilarious "The bitch went nuts, she stabbed my basketball." What the?

Concerts

Amazing
Radiohead, All Points West Festival
Bon Iver, Town Hall
Okkervil River, Webster Hall
The Swell Season, Radio City Music Hall
Tilly and the Wall, The Knitting Factory (Thanks Dan!)


(Above) Okkervil River's Will Scheff. My god that is good hair.

Solid
Built to Spill, Terminal 5
Fleet Foxes, Webster Hall
Kings of Leon, All Points West Festival
Old Springs Pike, Rockwood Music Hall
Spoon, Terminal 5
The Ting Tings, McCarren Park Pool (Even though we only saw the last half of it. Poor crowd management.)
The Virgins, All Points West Festival

Eh
The Mountain Goats, Webster Hall (This is probably not their fault. I think was so tired that I was sleeping standing up, however, the fact that they couldn't wake me up probably says something about them.)

Best Opening Band
Black Joe Lewis and The Honeybears, opened for Okkervil River

Singles
Making its way to 25 Most Played (may not be new, but I discovered it during the past year)
"Almost Lover," A Fine Frenzy
"Apologize," Timbaland featuring One Republic-featured during a hot scene on Gossip Girl
"Ca Plane Pour Moi," Plastic Bertrand
"Circus," Britney Spears
"Disturbia," Rihanna
"Hard to Live in the City," Albert Hammond Jr.
"Paper Planes," MI.A.
"Sour Cherry," The Kills
"The Way I Are,"Timbaland
"Three Wishes," The Pierces
"With Me," Sun 41-ditto
"Womanizer," Britney Spears

And many of the above choice tracks.

Golden Globes

Best part of the night.



This and Kate Winslet talking more about her love of Leonardo DiCaprio than her husband. For which, I do not blame her.

Best of 2008: Movies

I'm late to the list-making party but, inspired by Dan, I wanted to share my feelings on the year's entertainment offerings, if only to invite spirited debate. I decided to do it in installments. Movies, Music and Theater. First up, my favorite, movies!

By my count, I saw 33 movies in the theater this year. Pas mal, but there was still plenty I wanted to see that I didn't. (movies are in alphabetical order)

Perfection
Milk (Tears and lots of them)
Rachel Getting Married (I heart Anne Hathaway!)
Slumdog Millionaire (Possibly my favorite movie of the year)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Whoa! Brad Pitt . . . I remember you.)
The Dark Knight (The only movie that when it was over, I instantly wanted to watch it again . . . and again . . . and again)
Wall-E (Waaaalllleeeee! tee hee!)

Excellent
Burn After Reading (this has been moved up due to a second viewing)
Forgetting Sarah Marshall (on second viewing, this moved up to excellent)
Frost/Nixon
Iron Man
Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist
Revolutionary Road (Kate! Leo! Fighting!)

Solid
American Teen
Doubt
In Search of a Midnight Kiss (A sweet little movie, see it)
Role Models
Pineapple Express (James Franco, even with that hair, anytime...)
Tropic Thunder (on second viewing, this moved down to solid, except RDJ deserves perfection)
Young @ Heart (Tee hee, old people!)

Decent
Baby Mama
Body of Lies
Kung Fu Panda

Dumb but Enjoyable
Definitely, Maybe (I liked this too much and it doesn't deserve it
Hancock (Funniest first half, followed by a train wreck of a second)
Mamma Mia
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (What the random?)
Pride and Glory (Oh hey Edward Norton)
Sex and the City (See here)
The Incredible Hulk (Again, Edward Norton thank you)
Twlight (My favorite part of this, is when Alison and I were both doubting Robert Pattinson's attractiveness, and then he showed up in a suit . . . sold.)
W

Eh
Changeling (Ok, Angelina, you can cry, what else can you do?)

Bad
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Ugh, Shia LeBeouf, get the hell out of Hollywood)

Wanted to See, But Didn't, Be They Good Or Bad (hello, Netflix)
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
A Christmas Tale
Australia
Be Kind Rewind
Choke
Funny Games
Ghost Town
Gran Torino
Hamlet 2
Happy-Go-Lucky
In Bruges
I've Loved You So Long
Man On Wire
Marley and Me
Quantum of Solace
Religulous
Smart People
Synecdoche, New York
The Class
The Duchess
The Reader
The Visitor
The Wackness
The Wrestler
Vicky Christina Barcelona

Any I should skip? Disagree with picks above? Let's hear it.

Who said New York City smells bad?

Guest Blogger: Adrienne on Synecdoche, New York

I still haven't seen this, I'm ashamed to admit. However, there has been a duel about if the film is "good" or not. Here Adrienne Aggen weighs in.

This movie exhausted me. Ruined me. Had me in fits. Tearing at my arm hair.

I imagine other people feel like this too, but I am going to make a wild guess that they don't take the time to figure out what it all means to them. Because they're so unquestionably mind-blown afterwards that they just want to go home and soak in some long, hot, VH1. No pretense about it, Synecdoche, New York is work. Hard work. I don't know how comfortable I'd feel filing it away under "entertainment." It kind of feels more like doing a research project.

But this theme of the hard-working movie works, because the premise deals with one of the most emotionally taxing professions – artist. In this case, writer. The film is quick to remind us that being a creative person is rewarding but hardly the glamorous kick in the park it looks like. You can't turn your brain off. Ever. You're never done. It's not like you finish up at the office and then start the project the next day. No, you're constantly making mental notes and revisions and it's enough to drive a woman Sylvia Plath.

Even when the project is done, it's still not done. "A [poem] is never finished, only abandoned." Cliché, but true. You then have to have a maddening post-mortem, where you regret half of your creative choices and play the "if-only" game until you collapse in a pool of your own, wasted brain matter. I really can't think of anyone who works more than the artist, but enough about me, let's talk about the movie!

Well, actually that is kind of a quick sum-up of the premise. This concept of the ever-constant-Work, this blurred line between one's work and one's life is hammered upon with great skill, played by the always genuine Philip Seymour Hoffman as the messy but ambitious playwright Caden Cotard. You see, Caden's personal life is in shambles. His body is falling prey to diseases of every kind including bowel troubles, blood issues, sycosis (the homonym all too prescient and suggestive).

These scenes afflict us with some scatological icks, but they're much more tolerable than the Apatow brand of potty humor, and are appropriate for a movie about decay. After all, as Caden soon learns, we are human. We are temporary. We are our own carbon-based sets, prone to disease and discomfort and likely to collapse at any moment. And Caden is literally his own, fragile, walking theater piece.

His relationships are also fraying at the seams. His wife (Catherine Keener) is finding artistic success and trading her husband's affections for those of Berlin artsters, taking their young daughter Olive with her to saddening consequences.

This leaves Caden lonely, though admired by a bright young assistant (the always captivating Samantha Morton) and by the theater community at large, the latter all but saving his suddenly bleak life by tossing him a prestigious McCarthur grant. With this financial backing, Caden can now do something more important, more personal than the stage plays he's been translating in recent years. And he turns inward, taking inspiration from his life and his life alone.

What follows really proves to Caden and to the audience the certain inescapability of autobiography. We cannot help throwing ourselves into our work, and he cuts all the corners and takes this very literally. We then watch the following hour and a half and explore "Caden", keen as mustard to turn his life into his masterpiece, not realizing his life is already his masterpiece. And it takes him the whole 2 hours and 20 minutes before this concept finally jells in that disturbed, creative brain of his.

Instead, he undergoes the expensive and time consuming learning process and rents a huge Brooklyn warehouse and fills it with the junk and neuroses of his life. He creates exact replicas of his apartment and nearby haunts, casts his real life wife, ingénue Claire (Michelle Williams - who just keeps getting better as she grows into herself) as the wife of the Playwright. Further on he casts actors to play the Actors to play Actors for this play with in a play within a play. It could get confusing in this respect, and it does. But it's still always well-communicated, it's just like you need to pause the film, figure it out for a few minutes, and then press play again.

It's a funny movie, too. Caden's inability to totally control his actors and his assistants make for unexpectedly hilarious turns, as they help in rewriting the play of his life. He is the director of his play, but like a God, his players still have the will to be their own agents. This process is very organic for life, but not for the controlled environment of a stage, and this stresses out the already stressed Caden. But the humor is well-placed and smart, and it makes sense at the end that the story of all of our little lives are both tragedies and comedies. This is just my take, but I actually think Kaufman is pretty charitable to the often sad state of the human life. He loves Caden and hates Caden at the same time, and maybe this is just more than a bit self-reflective.

At about the halfway mark, play and life become completely interchangeable, and you can just see Kaufman snickering in the wings, adding another layer to this meta-madness. I think for the writer-director, like his protagonist Caden, this was his way of self-analyzation. He needed to create to understand himself. But it's unclear whether he finds it ultimately worthwhile. Is he praising art, or shaming it for it's obsolescence? In the end is Art insignificant or is it all that matters? I think he is torn, and this is partially why it's so complex.

Art. Just the word exhausts me, too. You know, the longest (ongoing) argument I've ever been in attempts to assign a "correct" definition to this concept and to classify, demystify, spiritualize, contextualize, and hyperanalyze it. And the leitmotif of this argument being: Does Art need an audience to be Art? What if—like those old Chinese poets who scribbled down poems and sent them down the river on origami boats, never to be seen by any other eyes—the art I create is just for myself - a commune between me and my God - is this not art? Or is it just artistic masturbation? Do I need an audience? Is the art I want to create founded in the Calvinist school of thought or is it not? Do I create to glorify God, self, or both? Or to understand self? Or all of these things? These are things that I guess run through other people's mind besides mine, to name a few Kauffman and the fictional? Caden.

In the end, it presents all the needed ingredients to give it Oscar nods, especially and unsurprisingly Best Orioginal Screenplay. It also benefits from an indie dreamboat cast (lookout for a knockout performance by Dianne Weist). I can't fathom the negative, "vanity-project" reviews it's getting. Don't all stories eventually reflect our own artistic credo? I see this then, less as a vanity project, and more as something very close to Truth. Microscopically, macroscopically (whatever it takes) trying to discover who we are through what we make and our role as Grand Creators – the closest we'll get as mortals to becoming Gods, even though even our "controlled" environments still belong to something greater. Thematically, it spoke to me (clearly). Haunted me in a way (hence the feeling like I HAD to write something about it, "*en muss sein.)" It's stimulates in a way that most movies don't – artistically, intellectually, spiritually.

And I dare you not have at least an hour of conversation about it afterward.

* Geez. Kundera, what a jerk I am.

Dr. Phil Gets Me

My mom sent me this Dr. Phil test. I was bored so I took it. It turned out to be pretty accurate, I'm ashamed to admit. I got a 37. Oprah got a 38. Even though I hate Oprah, I still feel ok about that.

31 TO 40 POINTS
Others see you as sensible, cautious, careful and practical. They see you as clever, gifted, or talented, but modest. Not a person who makes friends too quickly or easily, but someone who's extremely loyal to friends you do make and who expect the same loyalty in return. Those who really get to know you realize it takes a lot to shake
your trust in your friends, but equally that it takes you a long time to get over it if that trust is ever broken.

If you're curious, I'll send it to you. Doesn't take along.

I need to get back to work...

Guest Blogger: Alison on Uggs

Alison is (very) proud of her new purchase of Uggs. While I'm freezing in ballet flats, they seem like a good idea, but the rest of the time I berate her endlessly. She claims she is bringing the Uggs back for the non-mini skirt wearing population. She wanted a forum to state her case.

Ugg boots have become as standard a symbol of That Girl as the denim mini-skirt She is inevitably wearing. We've all seen Her, we've all been annoyed by Her. I am not That Girl. But I just bought Her shoes. I, my friends, am taking back Uggs. On behalf of all practical-minded girls with cold feet, I'm taking a stand. Why must I, whose worn Chucks and beloved flats are no match for sub-zero temperatures, suffer? No more, I say.

I first had the Ugg experience when I borrowed a pair of my sister's to wear to the KU/Nebraska football game. It was freezing. My face was raw, my hands were numb, but my feet... my feet were gloriously warm. And comfortable. I felt like rugged royalty, and yet, I couldn't silence my self-loathing. My head told me Uggs were an excellent idea: I get cold easily, I'm outside a lot, I've been looking for cold-weather shoes. My heart told me no: Uggs are gross. In the end, alas, you just can't mess with logic.

Buying Ugg boots is a lot like getting a tattoo: there's no coming back from it. At the store, my mom, knowing my internal struggle, asked me how I felt about my looming purchase. Happy? Sad? I said, in so many words, that I felt as if the part of my soul that housed my principles had been dealt a mighty, if not fatal, blow. She laughed. I scowled. And then I bought some boots.

I don't regret it. Uggs are O.K. They've served me well. Yes, the same Uggs so ubiquitous among the bleach-blond, S.U.V.-driving set. And I'm not only a convert; I'm here to convert you. You may be judging me, but I'm judging you for your inappropriate choice of footwear. So let's take back Uggs. Let's be cold no more. The shoe does not make the person, I'll have you know. It just makes her warmer.

I Heart NYC

I know it's been awhile and I have some drafts in the works but this was too amazing not to share.

So Autumn and I were leaving the movies (Role Models, pretty funny. Worth seeing) and we were walking on Broadway uptown toward the train. It was a normal Sunday afternoon, about 4:30, still light outside. So we're walking down the street and walking in the opposite direction is a man in his late thirties or forties with a bushy red beard. Sounds standard enough, right?

Until my eyes traveled upward and saw that the man was walking (at a perfectly normal pace) while a cat perched calmly on his head. Not a kitten, a full grown cat. It looked a lot like this, the cat was even the same color, in fact, this may be the same guy, just a few years ago:


I love this city!