as you do

Make honey, others don’t.

2011-03-14T16:54:00.001+01:00

This was somewhat intended to be a review of the Resident Evil-movie series, which then morphed before fingers hit keyboards into a contemplation of zombies in general, then turning into a review of a completely different zombie-movie-staple (Night of the Living Dead, in fact) and back to Resident Evil. In the end, it’s zombies.

I hate zombies. Used to be a time not so long ago where I couldn’t see a trailer for a zombie-film without suffering really quite horrid nightmares for days after. Watching “Shaun of the Dead” even though I really, really liked it, meant not really sleeping for about three weeks. Zombies, they freak me out. I do occasionally sit through zombie-movies or read zombie-related material on- or offline, suffering the insomniac results, because it pays to keep track of the enemy, and to run through scenarios of an “break glass in case of zombie-apocalypse”-nature. It also, for such is my nature, forces me to consider the mechanics of zombie-ness.

Traditional living corpses, at least in mainland-Europe, where not needfully as freaky. They tended to be corpses that were “left alone” and therefore open for possession, after which they would mimic their former lives by trying to move back into their old homes, communities and, in most more icky cases, loved ones (yes, that said they tried to move into their loved ones. Think about it). The reasons they were “left alone” would be any of the usual things that would leave you outside the standard medieval community. Suicide, being a horrid criminal, going against the wishes of the local clergy, that sort of thing. They tended to result in being buried outside of the graveyard (get it, get it?) which meant you were *cough* wide open for any demon or otherwise looking for a place to stay.
Now, I agree, obviously, that this is somewhat creepy, but since traditional European animated corpses got Stokered into attractive, slightly but derangedly bisexual pretty things the creepiness swiftly dissipated, with the new breed of vampires taking over all the “living dead” symbolism of “just because it looks familiar does not mean it does not want to hurt you” and “we don’t talk about uncle Bob because of what he did which we will also not discuss but it can be contagious so stay away from what looks like uncle Bob but isn’t” (also known as “Fear of the outsider”, “Uncanny Valley” and “the monster in our midst”)

Modern zombies (and the term “modern” absolutely and irrevocably does not, in any way, shape or form, apply to zombies nowadays, but hey, license) have a completely different symbolic value. They actually represent not the fear of the slightly known, but the fear of being fully known. The great, blind, grasping masses that nonetheless have you completely in their power, and if they do get you, they get inside your head and take everything of value out of it, turning you into one of them, and all of them, in a little way, into something that is a little more you.

Less original movie-makers, even in their time, tack some sort of consumerist commentary onto the standard “there is tons of us, you cannot escape”-creep-factor but since we have, as a planet, accepted the tenets of capitalism a while ago now you could tack that little inkling of a good idea onto everything and get away with it.

So what freaks me out about zombies? Idiocy.

After more than a quarter century of having a brain that works somewhat different than the brains of most people I meet on a daily basis, I live in a constant fear that I am going to turn out to be more than slightly retarded but with most people around me thinking I’m being very brave about the whole thing and it would be callous commenting on my obvious problems, and only discussing them when I am safely out of earshot. And zombie movies bring home that “you are only a few steps away from mindless drooling, we all know it even if we are not saying anything” feeling to an extent that I can only assume my Shadow has been dead for ages but refuses to lie down for fear of being ridiculed. Strangely enough, only actual zombie-movies do this to me. Movies in which people merely exhibit zombie-like characteristics due to a virus or otherwise-invasion based affliction do not as such affect me at all, but as soon as people need to have died before shambling pitifully ‘long once child-filled streets and whatnot I am gibbering behind the couch.

But lately, that has been changing. And quite a bit, as evidenced by the fact that I have recently seen the first three parts of the Resident Evil-series without actually gibbering in fear even once. Gibbering in wordless anger, suuuure, and even in amazement in some ways, but not fear. Nor have the traditional dreams surfaced. This is always a bonus. Well, this is usually not a bonus, but this time, it is.

Something did get me though.
In the Resident Evil series, it is explained that the virus responsible for all this crap basically re-animates dead tissue with all their base instinct in tact, especially their hunger. And this is ok, I can get with that, even though we thankfully not see any zombies in full rut, and the zombie-folk do respond as a pack of very hungry animals, preferring to prey on the weak and alone first and only really attacking en masse. What gets me here is that we see zombies. Multiple ones. There shouldn’t be. Not really.

Ok. Zombies have an incredible hunger, and can still process what they used to be able to process. This works. It also stands to reason that they would try to go after things that they can most easily ingest, which is what every animal does. You go for the best average where it comes to personal risk versus gain. This ensures that it stands to reason that zombies would eat human. After all, zombies are basically made of human, and this would imply that human meat would have most of the building blocks you’d need. Also, when you have one cornered and worked to the ground, there is very little personal risk left over and you can eat to your hearts content. They are more nutritious than a chocolate bar and you don’t run the risk of being crushed by a vending machine you just tried to work open with your little ineffective zombie-paws. Combine that with the fact that being bitten by a zombie makes you a zombie, a nice and continuous string of infections and more zombies seems to be the only logical conclusion. Only it isn’t, because there is no reason to stop eating the other person after you have started. Even a zombie is still made of human meat and leaving it shambling around is just competition. So logically the first person to turn Z-side should have eaten the second one, and the third, and so on until they infected one that was bigger/stronger/faster which would then eat them and continue on. You’d have dozens of zombies, not millions, and a few piles of maybe animated but certainly just mushy and well-chewed flesh.

In the Day/Dawn/Evening/Twilight/Shortly before sunset/Whutever of the Dead series, it is somewhat established that hell is full, and those who die come back and inhabit their old bodies, albeit murderously insane. I am ok with this, as it clearly explains everything that happens in the movies given some liberties with basic tendon-strength, as most other issues have been waved away with a generic “they cannot re-die, unless you give them no body to re-inhabit afterwards”. In the Night/Day/Return/Whutever of the Living Dead (one word difference, entirely different universe) it is established that the zombies in question need the energies of living beings to maintain their own organic processes, preferably the brains, after being re-animated by a chemical substance. I am also ok with this, as it makes at least some sense. By all means humans are propelled ever onwards by some biological mechanism, and expressing this in a basic “energy” equivalent stored in human organs in such a way as to be harvestable by chemically altered corpses might be effectively ludicrous but basically somewhat sound within the confines of your story. I ask for no more. In this last example, there should also not be any other zombies, and to be honest, there aren’t. There are a few, but mostly contaminated with the same chemical (which is excreted by the zombies, in fact). It is also established that zombies can, and do, eat other zombies but that the return on investment is so much lower that it makes very little sense. This same argument is not, however, made in Resident Evil.

Even going from a starting point of a few hundred zombies with not enough time to start eating each other before fresh human flesh, which is arguably preferable over dead zombie flesh, shows up there are literally miles and miles of zombies who have had no chance of even sensing the human snacks that somehow just sit there and wait until a human pops by, usually in groups, and NOBODY eats ANYBODY. This makes no sense.

Retro-actively making the argument that the deceased flesh becomes immediately inedible or all zombies are part of one bigger organism that does not feed itself is obviously an option, and one that I cannot imagine the writers shying away from at all, but then why not give us that explanation in any of the first couple of movies? It would explain why zombies usually (but not always) stop attacking after somebody has been bitten, at least. So I’m sure that would be what they would go for to ultimately explain it but then what? What were zombies supposed to eat? If their new genetic make-up makes them attack humans only to propagate itself, a perfectly acceptable evolutionary action, what were they supposed to use for food? Never do we see zombies attack other species to then finish them off, they express only a mindless hunger for meat but nothing else seems to interest them overmuch.

I am going so far as to say I would accept the explanation that the virus only wants to maintain itself by jumping from host to host, uncaring of what happens to the host apart form the fact this host needs to be able to continue spreading, as most viruses ultimately do, but then why re-create them in the image of rotting corpses? Surely altering their make-up to make them all resemble skinny people with good skin that smell nice must also be on the list of possibilities, and would be a lot more effective where world domination is concerned. Or at least more fun to look at.

the bridal issue (2)

2011-02-24T17:09:00.002+01:00

“Later this week” freely translates into “next month, apparently, but I have a sense of style, not time. So, on with the show.

Last time I promised to discuss the last few topics when it comes to bridal dresses, patterns, advice and friends. Let’s get cracking.

Patterns
I find it difficult to talk about tradition when it comes to bridal wear, as most of what we now consider traditional in the dress only really started happening in the last 70 years or so, which means that “traditionally” really means “before wedding dresses”. In that sense, patterns can be considered tradition, as patterned fabrics were a part of daily life and therefore used in wedding dresses.

The modern, tradition, however, shies away from patterned materials to an extent. You find laces, which are obviously but subtly patterned, and some applications of the decorative arts around waist, hemline and shoulders, but one does not really often find patterns, as such, in bridal couture.

Which leaves us with simpler pattern-based questions, or really, line based questions. Most people will tell you that horizontal lines are fattening, and vertical lines are slimming. This is, regretfully, false. Horizontal lines actually make you look taller, and vertical lines make you look wider, especially if the lines are really close together.

Now before everybody starts rushing towards the oft-neglected horizontal line, there is such a thing as taste, and most wedding dresses I have seen with a horizontal pattern seemed to lack a good deal thereof. The charming lady in my little image up there might look tall and statuesque, but imagine that same picture in yards of white satin and frills and it looks suspiciously less charming.

As with almost everything when it comes to fashion, less is usually more. Any combination of lines can be flattering, providing you follow the following simple steps:

Your body cinches in around the waist, upper breast, wrists and ankles. If any lines are in your dress, they should be there. So your hemline, waist, shoulders and sleeves can have a definite horizontal line, either in embroidery, contrasting fabrics or thread. Everywhere else will more than likely make you look shorter.
Your body has natural vertical lines in your legs, arms, and torso. If you already have a cinched waist, your legs will look longer, and you need to do nothing to make them appear even longer than that. The same goes for your arms, as the lines of the fabric will likely already give you long, slender arms. Your torso, however, might be in want of some help, as you have probably cut it in two already with a sash or the shape of a corset. If you feel your torso does not get enough attention, I would suggest going for simple corsetry or stitching, not straight up and down and in a color that in no way contrasts with the rest of the bodice.

This is bad

This is better

This is good

A straight thin line looks like a cut or slit, a broad straight line will distract from the shape of your dress. There really is no perfect width here but if you are going for a definite pattern, make it definite, and don’t wimp out on the last stretch, as it will look cheaper than just getting it wrong.

Your friends, and the advice you should take.

None, obviously, as this is your day and nobody is going to stand in the way of how you really want it and live.

But, if you do decide to take advice from anybody, avoid the following :

Friends who are soon to get married : as they will either steal, or graciously allow you to copy ideas, and you might end up with two weddings that look too similar by half. Subconsciously, they will likely try to sabotage your wedding in favour of their own.
Friends who have “opinions” on the state of matrimony : Need I explain this?
Friends who are bitterly single : Again, you are not seeing this one yourself?
Friends that make you feel somewhat uncomfortable in the area of appearance : Not just your too skinny model-friend, but also your slightly overweight best mate from college. If at any point during the picking of the friends you think “But I/She/He might be uncomfortable when I get undressed in front of them or try on several outfits” just scrap them. You will be discussing and trying on a lot, and you don’t need the aggravation.
Outrageous friends : As you want timeless and stylish, not hip and happening but ultimately tacky.
Sales-clerks between the ages of 20 and 45, and older if clearly unmarried : because they combine the annoyances of the outrageous friend with the persistence of a shark smelling a good deal. Even as a mixed metaphor, you should be able to see this is a bad thing.

Advice you should take :

Mine : Obviously
Friends who have been married for a while or are not “in that place” right now : They can have a clear eye unclouded by jealousy or subterfuge, and can bring experience and honesty without losing too much ground themselves.Sales-Clerks over the age of 45, clearly married or working in an established salon : they have experience, they have seen women get married before and if it is a good establishment, they should not be more interested in their commission than your happiness.
Someone who makes you laugh : Not for their advice, necessarily, but bring them along to keep bride-zilla at bay.
Your parents’ : Nowadays they will not be paying for the thing anymore most likely, but they have paid for a lot of things up to now, and they have a vested interest in seeing their little one look pretty, and jealousy or uncaring commercialism is probably far from their minds. They also have some experience, have probably been to some weddings with well- and badly dressed brides and can tell you what other’s did wrong so you don’t have to.

Obviously the lists above are not definite, carved in stone or immutable. You probably know who you are going to ask for advice and who not, and if it feels good, go for it. But from my first category I would take most things they say with a grain of salt, most definitely.

This ends my two-piece on bridal wear, I hope you find what you are looking for, or put it on and you’ll “just know”.

I am certain you’ll look beautiful, and radiant, no matter what, and if not, that nooooobody will let you know until yonks later.

the bridal issue. (1)

2011-01-24T15:47:00.000+01:00

Two weeks ago, I gave you some pointers on how to arrive elegantly dressed at a wedding you have been invited to, with a swift cliff-hanger on bridal couture. Now we all realize that the world of the trousseau is slightly wider than one can easily cover in two paragraphs so I’m giving this another shot.

Wedding dresses are a big thing. They are on average ridiculously expensive, you will only wear them once (even if you do get married several times over the course of your lifetime it is very tacky to wear the same dress twice) and to be perfectly honest, given that you are dealing with a slightly biased audience, it is very easy to not really look as good as people tell you you do but you’ll only really find out when you are looking at the photos a little while later. And you’ll probably won’t mind anyways.

But I will.

So for my sake, let’s go over a few things that are easy to do wrong while shopping for a dress and how you can easily avoid a raised eyebrow from the fifth row messing with your head.

Fashion
Wedding dresses used to follow modern fashions very, very faithfully. And then flapper dresses happened, and two world wars, and when the sartorial and political smoke cleared, they didn’t anymore. For the last 80 years or so, wedding dresses have been modeled along Victorian lines, with long waists, bustles and petticoats and florals featuring very heavily. In economically more affluent years, fashions become sleeker, and in these years the Grecian lines come in, with high waistlines, clear lines and simple shapes with little decoration being the norm.

If there is anything in the world that embodies artistry, elegance and style, it is the kimono, a simple garment that has weathered every storm to come out clean, elegant and with the utmost respect and understanding of tradition. Wedding dresses should do the same thing, showing grace, purity and style, but also show that what you are doing has a sense of timelessness, tradition and respect to earlier generations.

Do not:

Purchase a hello Kitty wedding dress (Google can find it for you), “the dress from that video-clip”, “The dress from that movie” or a dressed themed in a way that your mother or as yet unborn child would not recognize.
Buy a “Fashion dress”, including short skirts, showgirl skirts or dresses in colours that are completely hip right now but will not be soon.
Get a dress that is “Just like the one X had” whether X is a friend of yours, or a bridal magazine, or a celebrity. Your wedding is YOUR wedding, not a copy of somebody elses.

Do:

Get a timeless dress that would have looked good and that you would have appreciated seeing in photo’s 50 years ago, and 25 years ago, as it will mean you will probably appreciate it after that time as well.
Realise that a wedding dress is a uniform. The colours and shapes have been pretty much set. But as with any uniform, it is the individual details and chamrs that make it stand out. Nobody else in your life has your exact combination of features, and you would feel strange if they did. The same should go for your dress.
Allow yourself to be inspired by dresses you liked, but mostly by those that were worn well by people who look like you. If you are not a 6ft Amazonian blonde, getting all your inspiration form photos featuring 6ft Amazonian blondes will ensure that you will not look good.

Form
Yours, mostly, should dictate the shape of your dress. As with all clothing, if it neither obscures what you have yourself nor pushes it into a new shape altogether, you are probably good. But wedding dresses are a little bit special in this regard, and allow a little leeway when it comes to the shape you are providing…
Do not:

Overemphasize your natural features. If you are busty, do not also go for tight corsetry and push-ups, as it will just look cartoonish and cheap. Also, if you have the slightest feeling that people in your audience will think “Oh there she is again with her…”(and they will) you should adjust to avoid.
Overestimate your abilities. The run-up to your wedding is stressful and busy, and you will probably not go to the gym 17 times a week or stick to a very rigorous diet. By all means strife for losing some weight, but don’t expect to drop several sizes for the big day. Shop accordingly.
Underestimate your abilities. You probably have a few amazing features that a wedding dress will allow you show off to their fullest, and there is nothing wrong with allowing it to do so. Just don’t go overboard, or veer into tacky.

Do:

Be honest with yourself. You could be a little chubby, or your upper-body could be somewhat long, or you could have disproportionate arms. These things happen. Don’t hide them, but find a dress that makes them less noticeable.
Allow your personality to shine through in your choices. If you are a natural tomboy with no tendency for girlishness whatsoever, do not go for an enourmous frilly ball-gown. Adjust what you wear to what makes you feel comfortable, and pretty. Not just on of those two.

I am realizing this is getting somewhat lengthy so I am going to get back to the final topics (patterns, advice and friends) on wedding dresses later this week. Watch this space!

Wedding Style

2011-01-12T16:19:00.002+01:00

There are, on a rough average and regardless of how often these occasions occur, about three circumstances where it is important to be timelessly, elegantly dressed, styled and behaved. These are those moments that are distinct links in time, and that are irrevocably linked to the absolute, unavoidable passage of time. These circumstances are birth, marriage, and death. And the occasions associated with them baptism, weddings and sepulchral ceremonies.

Obviously being well-dressed for either your baptism AND your funeral is mostly the responsibility of other people, and being well dressed for attending either a baptism or a funeral is ridiculously important as it is two of the absolute best occasions to sniff huffly at badly dressed people and being one of them quite distances you from this pastime. But weddings?

Either as one of the bridal party or a guest, people please.

While at a wedding you are, barring a few hopefully decidedly private moments, constantly surrounded by professional photographers (if you are lucky), amateur photographers (if you are not) or both (if the bride and groom are exceptionally cruel) and more than likely also submerged in a sea of broken whites, clear silvers and glowing ivories, so showing up in a fully denim outfit with your hair shaped and coloured like a cranky dessert is not just a bad choice but a bad choice that will be in photographs that people will still be looking at long after you, yourself, are in fact dead and buried.

So, how to actually BE well dressed for a wedding? You will basically fall into one of four basic categories, to wit : A male guest, a female guest, a male member of the bridal party, and a female member of the bridal party. There are, obviously, subcategories, as being a well-dressed bridesmaid is not the same as being a well-dressed bride, but as a rule of thumb that is your first decision: Am I a guest, or am I one of the bridal party?

As a guest, male or female, you have a few basic questions you need to ask yourself and somebody “in the know” of both the ceremony and the reception or celebration.

1) What colour will the bride be wearing?
2) What colour will the groom be wearing?
3) If applicable, what colour will the accessories of the bride and groom be?
4) What colours will the bridesmaids and groomsmen be wearing or sporting?
5) Which colours will the main decorations be in?
6) Will the ceremony be in a church, town hall or at another location entirely?

From here, it is very simple. You do not wear any of the colours that are the answers to questions 1, 2 and 3. If the answers to questions 4 and 5 differ from the first three, these are also off limits entirely except when explicitly requested by either the bride or her direct representative, in case of a themed wedding.

The answer to question 6 will tell you what mode of dress you should adopt for which part of the day, if the invitation itself does not already spell it out. If nothing is mentioned and you are unsure, only the bridal party will wear morning dress or full formal outfits, as a guest you are best of with simple, semi formal dress. If the ceremony is held in a church, be aware that it is a place of respect and worship, and therefore showing more skin than strictly needed, or in places that can be assumed “unfortunate” will be a source of both shame and gossip for years to come.

As a man:

Simple formal dress, preferably two pieces, as three-piece is rather more formal than most occasions require. If you are planning to dance and the dances are not formal styles (waltz, quicksteps and slow-foxtrots are formal dances, during a wedding) you can consider a waistcoat or vest as they remain “dressed” even when you take of your jacket, vests or waistcoats should match the suit, but not clearly be part of it. If the dances are formal styles, you really should keep your jacket on, and buttoned, while dancing.
A tie and pocket-square in matching, but not identical, fabrics that match the “feel” of the evening.
Shirt can be white, and really should be, or ton-sur-ton on the fabric of the tie, when you know what you are doing and can pull it off.
Black (and polished!) shoes
Little or no jewelry. Remember, watches are strictly a day-time accessory. Cufflinks, however, can be metal or jeweled and even a bit “novel”.

Following the list above is not heavily exciting, but you won’t appear foolish, underdressed or like you have just come from work. Which you will appreciate, during the obligatory slideshow at their fifth anniversary.

As a woman:

Simple sheath-dress, just over the knee, not too décolleté, or a long-ish cocktail dress. Full length is very formal, and should really only be worn by the bride and het mother and mother-in-law.
No spaghetti-straps, strapless concoctions, or bow-tied halters. You are there for the happy couple, not for happy coupling.
“Pretty” rather than “stunning” high-heeled shoes, with a bit of sparkle.
The hair tied up in a simple chignon, or pulled back from the face in anything but a ponytail.
Bare shoulders, open backs, stunning up-does and incredible necklaces and bracelets are the province of the bride, and just the bride.
As are strappy shoes, garter-belts, stockings, heavy corsetry, jewels-in-the-hair, cleavage and other direct sexual references between ankle and crown. Sorry.
A clutch-bag, but smallish and not garish or bejeweled.
No opera-gloves, large rings, cloaks, manteaus, or other trappings of high drama.

Following the list above will make you look elegant, mature and more than likely incredibly attractive without outshining the bride. Which, let’s face it, is what you are aiming for.

As a member of the bridal party, your life is likely to be a lot easier than any of the guests, as most decisions will be made for you by a rather frantic young woman who is more than willing and able, and probably hunger crazed enough to boot, to simply eat you if you do anything that stands between her and the best day of her life. If you are a man, expect to be told what to wear, where to show up, and who to talk to during. If you are the groom, this counts double, as there will even be somebody telling you what to say during peak moments of today’s performance. Some people consider this sufficient practice for the marriage itself.

If you are a woman and not a bridesmaid, you are either the mother of the bride or groom, in which case matronly elegance is really all that is expected of you. You will likely be heavily involved in the proceedings so should have a pretty good idea of how you can look your best, but some pointers never go awry.

Your clothing colour should, if you are the mother of the bride, be a darker or dustier version of her colour or accessories. Muted plums and purples for red accessories, darker blues for sapphires, and greens and browns if the bride is in emerald. If you are the mother of the groom, the same goes, but for his accessories. If the whole shindig is done in white, ivory, darker golds and silvers are your thing. Consider that in photographs you will likely be close to your child, and you want to look matching, but not like you copied his or her outfit.
You are one of the few women who can get away with a floor-length dress apart from your daughter or daughter-in-law-to-be. Go for it, I say.
Nothing overtly sexual is required, and you should certainly not flash any skin that might be considered inappropriate. Regardless of your charms, today is for somebody else to show of.
Jewelry can be flashy and even somewhat outrageous, providing they are family pieces or gifts from the happy couple. If you buy new jewelry for the ceremony, keep it understated.
Shoes should be closed toed, with somewhat of a heel, but steer away from boots or ankle-boots.

If you are a bridesmaid a friendly bride will have selected a dress for you that will make you look elegant and somewhat demure. Do not, ever, alter it without discussion. If the bride has allowed you to pick out your own dress, follow the rules for a standard guest, but in pre-selected colours, and a more upscale formality. As a bridesmaid, you can have a more spectacular hairdo and jewelry than the rest of the guests, but no more than the bride.

If you are male, you are the groom, father of the bride or groom, or a groomsman. You will likely be asked to be somewhat formally dressed, in pre-described colours. Follow what you have been given, but:

Never dye or change your hair shortly before the wedding
Do not get into fights or otherwise bruise or scar yourself shortly before the wedding
Always learn how to work your accessories. No watches after 5 pm, a cummerbund is tied so the creases point upwards, and only Tom Ford should try to get away with a square-folded pocket-square.
This is one of the few occasions where your accessories will probably exactly match in both colour and fabric. It is a shame. Never do it again and this will be forgiven.
Black shoes. Always. No contest. If black shoes do not go with the outfit chosen : complain. But wear them still.
Try to subtly, but decidedly, move the decision makers away form novelty colours and fabrics. Powder blues and shiny fabrics are not what you want to see in ten years time when you have to re-live your wedding. Do not risk your life for this, be subtle. This is real practice for marriage.

As the bride you are likely to be well aware of what you want, and more than able to make your own decision, informed solely by your mother, some close friends, every gay man you have ever met and a billion-dollar-industry of bridal magazines, shows, expositions, soirees, party-planners, flower-people and what not (made up mostly out of every gay man you have ever met).
But, some small comments before you embark on your journey towards the graceful and elegant vision that will stroll down the center isle of the church:

A wedding dress made up of horizontal stripes will make you look taller, but also invite comments on the wisdom of horizontal stripes.
The bodice of your dress should not elongate your waistline. If anything is optically lengthened, go for the legs.
Cap sleeves are better than spaghetti-straps.
No visible zippers. If you absolutely cannot be sewn into your dress on the day and have to have a visible closing mechanism, a row of small buttons is fetching and classy. If buttons are too persnickety, and they often are, hide the zipper somewhere in the material.
During this day you will likely have stockings, garters, a garter belt, high heels, a constricting bodice, bare shoulders and arms, open shoes and some cleavage. These items are there to subtly keep in mind what will happen that evening after you have been whisked of by your husband. Anything else that will put the mind to the marital arts is tacky.
Your dress should not be a copy of a wedding dress from any movie, video clip, book or illustration. With the exception of the dress and veil combination in “How I married an axe-murderer” which I think is too short, but gorgeous.
A “Novelty” wedding dress is a wedding dress that you will deeply, deeply regret. As are most too short dresses.
Speaking of copied dresses… A “showgirl skirt” is deeply unacceptable unless you have exceptional legs, and want to hear about them every time you show people the photos. Which means it is acceptable roughly never, regardless of how good your legs are. (You know who you are, Guns and Roses…)
The standard rule: If it looks good on the model, it might not look good on you, but if it looks bad on the model, it WILL look bad on you” applies here more than anywhere.
As does: “Just because you can get into it does not mean it fits.”

So far, so rules. Weddings should be elegant, classic affairs that you can look back on in years to come with a tear in your eyes and a smile in your heart. A tacky, novel wedding plan is an invitation to re-new your vows a short time later without all the embarrassment, and possibly with half the church filled with different people. Keep this in mind.

Canadialand 4: Horsecarried Kevinage, euhm, drawn.

2010-05-26T05:22:00.000+02:00

Just to put everybodies worries at rest, no, nothing happened. I am travelling with older (but massively spry and frighteningly acute) women, who seem to all come equipped with minor but annoying medical issues. And one of those had us trudging to the local medical centre at ten of the o'clock last night.
Woodstock, Ontario being what it is, you don't trudge hither and then shortly fro, no (no no no no), you trudge hither and about three hours later fro. The first hour and a half wasn't that bad, but after Aunty N and N were called in, I was left to my own devices, which consisted of one OK magazine, one People Magazine, one toy train set, three half chewed books about recognizing numbers and certain ducks, and fond but useless memories of the very cute guy that was wheeled out of the waiting room as we entered it.
I had been deeply contemplating the "If you have a stroke"-poster on the wall for twenty minutes by the time we could do the second half of the trudging. Hey, the guy was cute and all, but being in a waiting room under close scrutiny of the lovely people of the nursing staff swiftly exhausts the options your brain provides.

And the day started out so well. We noodled down to the centre of town for a very, euhm, interesting parade in the full Canadian sun (Sunburn? Nah, there has to be combustible material left for something to be called a burn) after which we sojourned to the farm of In and An. The parade, mostly made up of big men in small cars, small women in big cars, clowns (shudder) and various local marching bands did have going for itslef the fact that it had one man so determined to reach heaven that he decided to walk there himself when he died, about three years ago. Somebody gave him a flag to carry. Lush.

Once on the farm, we were being treated to a beautifully chargrilled or deliciously deepfried version of the thing An managed to shoot the previous couple of months. It was glorious. I made my well-received olive bread, which was good, but it really can't hold a candle to a man holding a 6 kilo turkey above a vat (yes, vat) of boiling oil.

After dinner, we all got a chance to ride one of In's horses. The name of the horse I can't remember, but I can say that riding skills disappear over time, and everybody who says otherwise lies. That thing stalled withing seconds of me hoisting myself over it's back, and it wasn't a weight issue. I think I wasn't gentle enough with the clutch. All In's helpful comments (Use your legs, he stops moving when you stop riding, don't let him see the fence (Excuse me?)) in spite, I did not have any sort of feeling for that animal.

My mother, however, did. Which made me proud. My mother, for those who don't know her, is not a large woman. This horse, for those who don't know it, was a large animal. My mum had spent three solid days saying things along the lines of "I've never even touched a horse, they scare me, they are so big, I am not getting on one of those, no, never", which she kept up until about three minutes after she had started leading it around the paddock. In walked with her, but she still did very well. It was a bit shaming, I have to say, so I stuck to petting there incredibly friendly half-Husky half brown Lab.

Today was spent shopping in London, finally netting me my promised birthday present from my mum in the form of a Swarovski crystal bracelet and yet another pair of wicked cool shoes.
Wallets depleted, we spent a while in the house of yet another cousin, B, with his wife T. B and T are flippers, buying house, fixing them up and selling them with a profit. Their current house is in flux, but going to be gorgeous. For today as for the holiday, I'll be posting pictures at a later date.

We closed of our last day here at the house of Aunty G and Uncle M, and I am currently in the lobby of our hotel writing this. I am also exhausted, sunburned, a little bit hungry and I haven't had more than 13 minutes of straight reading for 5 days. I am looking forward to going hoooome.

See you all soon,

Kevin.

Canadialand 3 : Moisture Moments & Coming out, well, sorta.

2010-05-24T14:35:00.001+02:00

For those who are unaware of how the set-up is here (Everybody but about three of the people who are on the actual trip), some additional information: My little group consists of seven people. There is me; your dashing hero, K. Then there is my mother and her sister, H and W1. Along for the trip are two cousins of my mom, N and W2, W2 also the only other male presence in the group. Closing of the ranks are two of my mothers's aunts, my great aunts Aunty N, and Aunty R. We are visiting another of my mother's extended coteries of aunts, Aunty G (who turns 80 tomorrow) and her uncle, Uncle M.

I can say it is a good mixture of people. All seven of us exhibit moments of incredible mental acuity that do, but barely, outweigh the moments of intense "Ah yes, I should have seen that coming, can somebody come and help me now please"-stupidity.
But more importantly, it is a good mixture of different styles and senses of humor. Where I personally tend more to the situational, punny type of jokes, we have with us a physical joker (W2), some who find the funny side in day to day situations (H, W1, N) and those who are generally appreciative of the concept of humor (yups, everybody). It makes for some interesting car trips, I can tells ya.

Yesterday brought us to the stunning Niagara Falls. On my previous visit, my brother and I managed to make about 67 photos of water (And this is the falls from another angle, and this is the water underneath the falls, and these are the american falls, and these...) and yesterday would have been no different if my camera hadn't experienced a small moisture moment of it's own during the "Explore the Roar" boatride. At some point all my photos developed a soft-focus, ABBA-video-like effect that was charming, but not intended. Luckily a few minutes in the sun fixed the issue.
I still say the blasted thing had nothing to complain about, it might have gotten a tad wettish, I personally, along with W1, managed to pick exactly those spots on the boat where, for some reason, water just happened. (Hey look W, a free spot on the railing, let's stand here an-SPLOOSHHgggkkkggburblerble"Is that a trout in your ear?")

After having been wetted, we had good burger inflicted upon us by the daughter of Aunty G and her husband, In and An, who are providing is with BBQ this evening. I'm looking forward to that.
Yesterday we also had a piquenique party for Aunty G great-granddaughter, who turned 2 and might well be one of the most precious children I have ever seen. Amazingly focused and aware of what she wants (sticks) she sort of moseys around picking things (sticks) up, judging them (stick or no stick) and then carries them around. Crowning moment of Awesome for my mom and I was were she selected our present as the top one, refusing to open her other presents untill ours was opened and added to her current collection (of sticks)

To give you an indication of the group dynamics... I made a joke. Obviously, it was a bad joke, for I am I. My mother chose that moment to pick a piece of lint of my shoulder, but I thought she was coming in to give me a swift (deserved? who can tell(I can: Yes)) smack. So I ducked. So she missed my shoulder. And then said "do you think I'm gonna hit you?", and pretended to hit me for real, but missed. And smacked W2 on the knee. Three-stooges-style-youtube-gold. Sad but true.

We closed the day of visiting a big souvenir store where everyone managed to find something moose-themed but me, but I have a few days left. They did sell fudge, which caused me to remark "I don't eat Fudge, I just pack it". I do think this is as close to actually coming out ass I am going to get this holiday... :)

Anyways, off to my BBQ, where I am going to try to create some good olive-bread and garlic mayonnaise.

Love, ey,
K.

Canadialand 2 : Son of Canadialand

2010-05-22T22:12:00.000+02:00

Today was... Churchy. I am here visiting relatives who happen to be moderately to extremely religious. I am not. This is not a problem, as I do consider myself a spiritual person and respect the religious beliefs of others. Where it does become a problem is when those others religiously believe things that I don't agree with.
Even that is possible to overcome, I can dissemble like nobodies beeswax, but in this case...

I spent the morning having lunch in the church/meeting hall of the local Salvation Army branch, where my great-aunt and uncle are active members. I also spent the morning carefully avoiding all personal pronouns when discussing my current lovelife. "My ex and I broke up a few months ago"... "The house belongs to my Ex so I am just taking my furniture"... " I went to Australia with my Ex and stayed with....hi....hi...my never-to-be parents-in-law". It's both interesting and tiring. It becomes even more interesting (but slightly less tiring) when you have to explain why you don't have kids/wife/girlfriend, being all young, strapping and studly as I am. I have now resorted to telling people that "no lady has managed to catch my heart" and "I'd like to, but they run darn fast on those strappy high heels of theirs".

I fooled nobody, I think, but I like to feel like I did. At least I didn't swish. I did enjoy the moment at the table with the cake where somebody was explaining how being Gay didn't happen here only for a young boy to come up and asked specifically for the piece of cake with the purple flowers and the marzipan ladybugs. He pointed at the piece, limpwristedly, and swished off happily back to his mom. Hmmm, no gays.

On an unrelated note, it turned out the boys name was Keegan. Which is kinda cool, as I was named after a soccer player called Kevin Keegan. But for the grace of God (which he still basked in), there went I.

I have to say darn, as all forms of swearwords are heavily frowned upon. When I went to Australia with Tafkab I was warned to keep it clean, but since I heard both of his parents cursing within minutes of arriving I thought I was safe. Here, no such luck.

So far, we've caught up with local family members, easily distinguishable because they are the only few who are not dressed almost exclusively in tans and dark greens, or ohter colours best described as "Motley". The weather has turned a bit sour today, which is less pleasant, especially as we are planning to go to Niagara Falls tomorrow. A trip to Toronto is no longer on the books as we have been almost fully booked throuhout the week we are here.

So far, none of the usual family mishaps have occured, allthough I did almost walk straight through a flyscreen several times. I am hoping for a good slapstick moment in the next few days.

Greetings from lovely Woodstock, Ontario, home of the motley crew.

Kevin

Canadialand!

2010-05-22T04:58:00.000+02:00

So, first of, being picked up at 5.45 sucks. There is no nicer way to say this, it is par excellence a time that you should only see when you stay up to experience it, never because you wake up for it. And yes, I now sunrises are romantic, but let's face it, DVDs have them in better colour than real life.

But, having stood up at fudging5fudgingo-fudgingclock in the morning, being woken up by your mother singing in the shower, you might as well make the best of it. In my case, the best means grumbling nigh-uncontrollably until you hit the airport. At that point, the grumbling turns into so much despairing eyes raised towards the heavens that my occular muscles have developed carpal tunnel.

But it is actually very nice and warming to be coddled in the warm and inviting bosom of my family, even if that warm and inviting bosom is also remarkably stuffy and for some reason stuffed with dead animals. I kid you not, every single story either starts with a dead animal or ends with one. Unlike most of my conversations however, none ends with a punchline.

Eight hours of not sleeping later, we land in Toronto, at remarkable temperatures and practically no cloud coverage. This in no way explains the turbulence we had, I think we hit a deer or something at 10000 meters.

We've been here for two days now, catching up with the local shoots of our large and remarkably uniform family tree. I'm not able to post pictures, as my camera has not actually achieved thelepathy, but I will soon enough. So far, it's been a lot of fun.

I've not actually caught up on my sleep, as these people seem to be physically unable to go to bed at a reasonable hour, which explains why I can't actually anecdote at you just yet, but I'll be back after tomorrow, when I am going to a church service, after which we have a two-hundred person dinner, after which we have a surprise party. My horoscope actually says that what looks like a family gathering will turn into a date-like situation. It's going to be interesting, this church thinks gay men should be killed. I agree, obviously, for the most part, but not in my own, specific, case.

Wish me luck,
Kevin

Chloe

2010-03-17T14:18:00.000+01:00

I hate things. This is not a surprise, nor is it a secret. Especially when it comes to movies I have a tendency to hate things to the exclusion of positive characteristics. Sometimes, however, I hate things so much they don’t even register anymore, which means I occasionally find myself in theatres surrounded by things I hate (cold, people, sticky floors) looking at things I hate even more (Valentine’s Day was a wonderful case in point). I sat through Happy Feet, realizing halfway through that I hated tap. I sat through the Wolfman, realizing halfway through that I hated Benicio del Toro. Clarification: I did not hate tap or BdT in the movies I hate both full time, all the time, just so, so much that I never noticed they were in the movies until the movie had well and truly started.

I deeply dislike Julianne Moore. I find she lacks depth as an actress and banks on little else but her oh so cool and clean and fragile “beauty” in whatever role she plays, and I thought her casting as not-just-to-my-mind-iconic Clarice Starling was a travesty only eclipsed by the rest of that heaven-renting disaster of a movie (Entertaining? Sure, gore almost always is. Good? Hell no).

I also dislike movies that are casted based on currently popularity of the cast rather than making effective (and affecting) use of the available pool of talent. Give me well-cast unknowns rather than badly cast bigger names. But I realize I am ranting against an unavoidability here, and I would never cast myself as Don Quixote, no matter how sturdy Rosicante, or how lovely Dulcinea. Some windmills refuse to be anything but giants, but some giants refuse to be anything but windmills, so it all works out, I find.

However, I do not hate either Julianne “Tales from the Darkside” Moore OR obvious casting so much that I avoid movies based on those aspects. I should, maybe, but I don’t.

I have been lucky in that regard as it has allowed me to see two movies with both Julianne AND relatively popularity induced casting over the last few weeks, and hey, colour me pleasantly surprised.

The first was “A Single Man” which is, apart form one small flaw, so very very poignant and touching and just all round good that it almost made me forget that I hate Julesy (and mohair sweaters) because she (like everybody in this movie) was just insanely, heartrendingly, believably on her acting-game. If you have not seen this movie yet, go see it. Now.

Reeling from finally having seen Julianne do something that did not make me want to slam her into a wall again (how else to explain that lack of profile) I decided to give the badly reviewed “Chloe” a chance as well. It has Julianne. It also has Amanda Seyfried. I do like Amanda Seyfried, somewhat, but I feel she is being overused at the moment. And I thought her somewhat to light and bubbly for the premise of the movie.

A premise that is as old, predictable and classic as it is simple: Woman (Jules) expects her Husband (Liam Neeson, another one for the “Oh really, you wanted a fatherly figure with an edge? Gosh” box) of cheating on her and decides to hire a prostitute (Seyfried) to seduce him, later suffering Horrible Consequences™ for her unwillingness to tackle the situation directly (Symbolism! Moral!).
Now, in this movie the Horrible Consequences™ are not altogether too horrible to behold. Yes, there is a little blood and some violence, but it could have all been a lot worse, and I seem to remember several movies where it did.

Seyfried seemed well set to massively disappoint, but I have to say, she didn’t. Her role as a prostitute could have been played darker, edgier and with a little more fatale glamour, but I think that the simple fact that she did not, that she kept it light, even comically teeny, made it all the more dangerous, all the more understandably seductive.
Because of course, this movie is about seduction. Not necessarily the sexual kind, but a slow and subtle game of leading astray is constantly being played. It is not always played well, obviously, sometimes the tactics and moves are a little… shall we say… pedestrian? But played it is and to relatively good effect.

I really enjoyed this movie. It was slow, but absolutely gorgeously filmed and many of the locations, outfits and shots echo a certain lush emptiness that matches the feel of the movie and the character’s very well, if a little too well in some cases. I’m not going to spoil the movie that much but to use the traditional beautiful-but-mottled-mirror-obscuring-a-face trick to imply a person’s slightly skewed way of seeing themselves has been done to death now, lovely as the imagery is.

Go see this movie as well. I’m not saying I don’t still dislike Julianne “can somebody beat her some” Moore with quite some passion, but I need to give her snaps for these two movies at least.

This post to ease myself back into some sort of regular blogging. My apologies for the long hiatus, I will strive to improve.

K

the Last House on the Left

2009-06-22T10:58:00.001+02:00

There is a mode of thought that there are only so many stories in the world, and at some point everything is merely a variation on a familiar theme, and I do subscribe to this theory to some extent. As such, it is no surprise to me that certain movie plots seem to be copied time and time again. After all, with a limited number of stories the number of stories that are eligible for cinematization needs be just as limited, only smaller.

That being said, I don’t really think we ran out of permutations of a theme sometime in the mid to late nineties in such a way as to explain the ENORMOUS amount of re-makes, re-imaginings and other ways of saying re-hashes that are now plaguing the movie-theaters. It becomes practically impossible to spoil anything for the sheer fact that there is nothing playing where the story is not known up front and in many cases has been known up front for the last twenty odd years.

In a way, the new version of tLHotL avoids the rather disappointing effect of being spoiled by never really being spoilable. After all, a spoiler suggests that the ending is unexpected, surprising, something you would not have seen coming if somebody had not just spoiled the movie for you. tLHotL not so, there is no surprise, no twists and turns within the tale, everything made starkly clear, and unpleasantly clear, from start to finish. In its own way, it is not even a thriller, for exactly that reason, and I am not even considering placing it in the “horror” category. Horror, after all, needs a supernatural (or nearly so) element, and thrillers need tension and excitement. This movie has no supernatural element (the Norwegian tale does, but not in the main part of the story) and as said no thrills. I would call this movie simply a “drama”, if not with the melancholy or sad connotations the word holds nowadays.

TLHotL, this time, is a re-make of a movie that was a re-imagining of another movie that was a re-telling of a traditional Scandinavian folktale, and with so many “re”s it is not surprising it lost some of the old tale along the way. What is surprising is how much it has lost since the relatively recent firs tLHotL. The original (for want of a better word) is no more exciting or surprising than this one, but is more uncomfortable, which in a movie like this counts.

The story, very swiftly (as so many old tales this one also can be synopsed incredibly swiftly) is: “Parents kill the people who raped and killed their daughter”. The story is told in simple (near) chronological order, starting with the presentation of the criminals, then the parents + daughter. After this murder, rape and some murder, and then more murder. It’s gory (although less so than the Craven original version) and unpleasant (see last line within brackets) but that is the (natch) meat and bone of the movie.

What I liked about Craven’s original was the fact that it made the viewer complicit in the horrible acts portrayed. What I hate about the current one is that it absolves the viewer from any responsibility towards the situation. In the original a horrible, almost five minute long, shot of a brutal rape that seems to go on for much longer and never relents makes you uncomfortable, makes you wish the camera would pan out, show something else, anything but this poor girl being abused. But it does not, and you feel as much a part of the scene as she. But as you are looking AT her you feel slightly, if subtly, that you are part of the group that allows this to happen to her, you have a responsibility, and somehow, you feel as though you could stop this, but don’t. The new version does pan out, showing trees and other people and more importantly, it only lasts a very short time. And this time, the viewer is placed outside the scene, and thus not really responsible, you care, somewhat, but not really, as the camera seems to care, somewhat, but not really.

When, in the original, the parents find the corpse of their daughter (I won’t spoil how, it is also not important) the decision “right, they raped and killed my little girl, I’m gonna be bitin’ me off some peen” is made willingly, swiftly and decisively. As I imagine mine would be. If I ever find out somebody killed my child that person is dead, never mind that they seem to currently be breathing, they might as well not be. The parents put all their love and caring they used to feel for their daughter into destroying, knowingly, other lives. Does it make them nicer people? No. Does it make them relatable? Yes. The switch in their characters is done so expertly you feel that this killer instinct was always there, just barely kept under the surface for the sake of their child. Their energy could have gone dark as easily as it went light. Symbolically this places the child as the cap on their rage, the one thing that stops these people from turning into murderous beasts.

In the new version, the parents are unpleasant, yes, but form first view about as menacing as a disgruntled bedbug. They seem to be unpleasant to each other, the dad is unpleasant to his daughter and the mother is mostly unpleasant to herself, by staying with these horrid people. The daughter never gets a chance to represent the key to their happiness as there simply is no happiness. When she is inevitably attacked and thus taken out of the equation of this family’s life, the rage is no turning point, no corruption form light to dark; it simply makes the last final step from grubby to foul.

I enjoyed the new tLHotL, unlike the friends I was with, but I did think changes were made that changed the message and the impact of the story. A lot of the “comic relief” bumbling policemen and the like were taken out where they really, really should have stayed in the movie. In the original, at several points, the story could have still been saved but wasn’t because people decided not to take the turn, not to check out the car, not to do this or that, and as a viewer, you get tense because everything could have turned out ok, if not for that small step. The new version does not have that, and unavoidably moves towards the finish. And an unavoidable fate is not an interesting fate.

The last and final point of chance that really did chance so much for me in this movie centers on redemption and escape. In the original, the parents meet up after their rampage, covered in blood, in the living room of their home. They end the story still in the story; they have already begun haunting the place of their crimes. There is no redemption for anybody, as nobody physically leaves the scene of the crime. Also, with their daughter dead and summarily avenged, what do they have to live for? You feel, if not know, that they are ready for a hell of their own making, no more love, or light, but no willingness or need for hate and darkness. A grey eternity rehashing their actions while sitting in that living room, in those clothes, close to their victims memories.
The redemption they sought, the peace they hoped to find is not, and will not be, there. They are punished for their violence, however understandable within the context of their actions, as they are judged by the same standards they have judged by.

In the new version, not only does the daughter live, she is also instrumental in her own and her parent’s survival (alerting them to the danger under their roof). The final scene of this movie has the parent’s, along with their daughter (and for reasons explainable one of the members of the criminal group) in a boat speeding towards help. They leave the place of dark to go into the dawn. They are by their actions or character redeemed. The family is stronger than ever, the daughter has found a new assertiveness along her mother, and the junior criminal looks towards no live of crime. Even better, he fills a void that was left by some unneeded and unexplained back-story death.

Completeness through adversity, strength through resistance and redemption through action are NOT tenets of this story, they are NOT heartwarming messages to take away. The original, as does the original tale, tell that revenge does NOT fulfill, that it does NOT make everything a little bit better, it just makes things worse. With the redemption of the family we condone violence; we say “given the situation you acted right” where they really did not. Remember that the daughter lived, and that therefore the cap was never off the rage, the energy that was put into lighting her life never needed to be turned towards avenging that same life. It makes all the actions unreasonable and the redemption and escape undeserved. It completely turns around the message of the story, and in doing so, negates the impact to such an extent that it makes the movie less “worth it” less debatable, less a topic for discussion (how would YOU act?) and more a standard (or sub-standard) exercise in gore.

International Kev

2009-03-30T11:44:00.002+02:00

In an unrelated but still very nice note, I have now gone cross-borders! A lithuanian co-worker of mine has a blogging friend who has a tremendously good looking blog on cooking related things that is paired with a more personal blog, for which I have written a short bit.

I am very proud of my first international blog, even if it proved impossible to translate.

You can find it (and the cooking blog, which looks really good) here:
http://pragarovirtuve.lt/instrukcija-kaip-atpazinti-geju/2462/

All stripes at fully open for happy!
K

Fashion, cyclical nature of,

2009-03-30T11:33:00.001+02:00

Fashion is not often seen as the most democratic and fair system of social interaction, given as it is to focus on those of us with slightly thinner than average bodies and slightly better than average faces, but there is an underlying balance in fashion as in all things that govern the chances even for those not currently shaped as in vogue as others. It has been said that fashion is a form of ugliness so bad we change it every 6 months, and with some unfortunate exceptions this holds relatively true. This means that those things in fashion now will soon not be, and those things not in fashion will be within an overseeable period of time.

The reason for this is as superficial as it is logical: Money. Or better yet, sales. And the money and fame that run concurrently with sales when discussing shops and brands.
If you are currently selling skinny jeans by the bucketload you know you are selling only to those people that wear skinny jeans. People who don’t aren’t buying. But soon enough the skinny jeans wearing crowd will have their fill of them, the market becomes glutted and it is in the best interest of stockists everywhere to start promoting the non-skinny jean, as the demographic of non-skinny jeans wearing people is ready to start buying again. Fashion is designed by the magazines, who are influenced by advertisers, who are influenced by sales, and see a real good thing in selling products to that group that holds the most money. So by setting up a relatively predictable cycle of opposing fashions the industry ensures that most of their own can stay in business while providing overall to all punters.

So if this year the a-line dress is very popular and worn under a bolero and over three-quarter length leggings all in primary colours, you can be almost certain that the next mode will be baggy pants topped with a cut-waisted upper body and the one-layered look in pastels or basic browns and grays will reign for a few months. Taken over two years (the rough time a buyer for a store needs to prepare for a new fashion trend) the see-saw of fashion will have ensured that people of all possible shapes, sizes, skin-tones and preferences have crossed the threshold of the store at least once, with a good chance of getting money from all of them.

But that is basic, day to day fashion, what about the vintage craze? What about the materials and forms which were fashionable three decades ago? Why do we feel the need to renaissance every conceivable style this and former centuries have seen? This is a process that is a lot more subtle, as it seems not to be inspired as much by direct sales but by the whims of designers. And it is. Obviously nothing is ever cut and dry black or white, and many things tend to inspire the look of an age, but bear with me here for a moment.

When I was younger my mother had one friend who everybody always commented on was very well dressed. She always had on high heels, always wore sleekly cut jackets and was usually not afraid to show a bit of cleavage. Her hair was usually swept and pinned up and she wore those kick-ass eighties glasses that give off a sexy-librarian vibe even if the gender of the person involved is not what is sexually attractive for you. Now when I think of a well dressed woman or when my friends ask me for advice on fashion, I notice I move into the friend’s direction very easily, after all, in my mind that is the template for a well dressed woman.

Fashion designers also have mothers, and more than likely these mothers also had a friend like that. So fashion designers also grow up with an image of a well-dressed woman (this all applies for men as well, obviously) somewhere in their head, which almost unavoidably bleeds through in their work. So when a new alternative need to be found for this season’s neckline it is very easy to just import the well-dressed-friend-of-mum’s neckline into existing shapes. And suddenly the 70’s neckline is back in fashion (which is itself a reflection of a 40’s neckline, because the person who introduced it into the 70’s also had a mum, and she also had a friend). But it is now used to augment and add to daily fashion that is inspired by many designers, and thus by many designers mum’s friends. This together will give a feel of an age in current fashion that grows naturally from all these borrowed elements.

These cycles together repeat ad infinitum, always inspired by best practices, new options in production and new fabrics and dyes to use to create an ongoing image of fashion as a constantly reinvented world where everything stays the same and everything comes back into fashion if only you wait long enough. Obviously, this is only an apparent truism as there are things that have, through impractically, lethality or stupidity become unfashionable for ever. The real test of ongoing style is the ability which items will be modish again in ten years and which shouldn’t even have been today.

Ties, what to do and what knot to do.

2009-03-17T16:01:00.005+01:00

Much as we have American sit-coms to thank for an encroaching childishness in the work-place, I personally can thank a specific American sit-com for a marked improvement on my style and sense of dress. Having changed recently from a long string of temporary jobs to a job that I hope will be the beginning of a long-enjoyed corporate career, I have also changed my style of dress from preppy-casual to a standard of suits and dress shoes, along with a modest but expanding selection of shirts and ties. Having been blessed by good advice in my past and a slight penchant for dandy-ism in my present, I do believe I have managed to weather this awkward and uncomfortable change with a reasonable amount of success, as evidenced that people still comment on my sense of style well after the novelty of suits should have worn off.

Suits (and shoes) will have their own entry on this blog, but I would like to start the subject of office-style with those accoutrements that allow for a little bit of flair or a great bit of garish insanity by adding a personal note to any uniform outfit; the tie. For every well chosen colour and knot-style walking the corporate hallways today there are several half-knotted wool concoctions holding together unbuttoned collars, which is a shame, as there really is not that much to the art of dapper deployment.

Personally, I like symmetry in my ties, so the traditional slanted stripes are not really a preferred part of my collection. Give me a solid colour or centralized pattern at any time. Others might prefer the college-look of blocky stripes slanting over their tie, and there certainly is something to be said for both options. There are things to keep into account however, as not every choice of pattern or colour goes with every type of shirt or suit.

For double-breasted or high-lapelled suits (three front buttons or three-piece suits), don’t choose a thin tie or a thin knot, but cover as much of the space between the lapels as possible without going overboard toward the cravat-point. For lower-lapelled suits (one or two front buttons) a thinner tie and less obvious knot will do fine, providing one does not walk around like a colour-coded blues brother. A good rule of thumb is the more shirt-fabric the suit allows you to see, the more fabric the tie can allow you to see. Less shirt-fabric between your lapels means larger knots and wider ties.

A striped suit and a striped tie can work remarkably well, but is very tricky. As always, if you are not exactly sure yourself it looks right, it probably does not. Smarter to go for solid coloured ties on a striped suit and allow your striped ties their time in the sun under a solid suit.

Bow ties are associated with clowns, eccentric uncles and slightly misguided dandies. Stay away from them (ties and personages). A cravat can be very elegant, but be prepared to be seen as an antiques-dealer on the way home to his much younger boyfriend. Comical ties and novelty patterns fall into one simple category : discount fare. These can send a very clear personal message, but that message almost aways is “I have no sense of humour” or “I wear what my kids can afford to get me”

Be careful choosing ties with shirts. Yellow tie on a blue shirt can make the yellow look green or the shirt look denim (if you are wearing a denim shirt with a tie already, please leave this blog now). It is best to stick with white or black shirts for brighter ties, as the colour will be brought out most. Striped shirts or more pastel shirts do well with muted ties.

Patterns other than stripes should be subtle, if possible a result of the ties’ weave more than a dying process. If anything on your tie looks painted on, it might as well be a novelty tie. Another risk of applied patterns is that they can disrupt the lower edge of the knot, or start shedding where you usually would tie the knot, which is regretfully also the part most on view.

Your knot should be symmetrical, fill your collar-points and match up with the lower line of the collar. It is best to choose a tie that fills the space you need to fill, but in the interest of maintaining the customary dimple right underneath the knot it is better to tie a tighter knot in a wider tie than to fluff the knot on a thinner one. Paradoxically, it is always better to have a double knot on a thinner tie than it is to under-knot a wider one as the amount of fabric also guides the type of knot. A knot should be tight, but never strain the fabric. You are presenting yourself, not tying down an errant pony. Personally, I prefer a half-windsor, as it provides a nicely symmetrical knot and allows easy knotting with different styles and materials.

The Pocket Square will be discussed in a separate blog later this week. For now, you should have enough fun with finding some good ties.

Kevin

Woman on a pier

2009-03-12T14:54:00.003+01:00

I haven't blogged in a while because I've had some problem getting into situations that require blogging or complaining in a public forum. But I still have my creative outlets, currently based around character sketches and suchlike. To get back into a semi-regular way of writing things out to the world, I have decided to just post a few of the snippets that float around my brain. Starting with this one.

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There is, as much as anything within a story can be said to be, a woman standing on the edge of a pier looking out over the cold grey water. She is gaunt and pale, her long black skirt rustling in the sea-winds. She is beautiful, or at least she appears beautiful, but one gets the impression she would have been merely pretty if she had not chosen to let herself go thin and whispy in the salty air, if she had had a life lived inside, with kitchen and kids and other words starting with K.
Instead, she stands there looking out over the sea and she personifies the wait, the loneliness and the loss of all who look upon her, and she is glorious. Boys who see her once on holiday with their family foresee and remember the rest of their lives, striving from then onwards to be the type of man to warrant such devotion and to be always awaited by a girl not quite so striking. Girls copy in one glance for ever the image of her shadow, her long skirts and cloudy wrap, and know that they also desire once to stand just so, be still and calm and terrible, and alone, because the loneliness alone implies a period when loneliness was the furthest from anybodies mind and what more to wish for than the certainty that you are or have been not alone?

She is the inspiration for love-songs and country-ballads, for long slow novels that treacle away drizzly Sunday afternoons when the air presses in and the world is filled with boredom and endless rounds of laundry, for she inspires and personifies longing and the final end of passion. She shows us what we all know deep inside. The knowledge that all relationships end in pain through betrayal or death, that all flowers wilt and that all puppies grow old and kittens grow cranky. To see her is to hear violins and low guitars playing in the distance and to remember the drum of heartbeats and the rasp of skin in the present. In her way she is daughter and sister and mother to all women who wear red dresses with buttons down their backs (who expect someone to be there to unbutton them when the dress needs to come down and who never have the time to stop and sit down and consider the future) and women who wear black and who wear sensible shoes and old hats to work in the garden (who remember buttons and red dresses but know that in the end you are best helped with dresses you can undo yourself and a good taste in tea).

Her frailness is not weakness, but strength, for who would attack one so obviously unable to consider retaliation. Her thinness, that would seem unattractive in another (more approachable) woman, is a boon here, no wind can seem to take a hold of her as she stands on the wooden walkway that leads to nothing but clouds and gulls and she seems not to be buffeted or accosted like the day-trippers looking for a photo-moment that only return with inside-out umbrellas and wind-disrupted raincoats. Here around her, we are told, no reality invades. She is lost in memories of the one across the water and no needs or certainties of the world she stands in can infiltrate the world she sees before her.

She is older than you, but not so old, as she met her love when they were young and they both had all the time in the world, and so she reminds you of how you were when you were young and had all that time stretching away in front of you. She is younger than you, but not so young because her love went away from her a while ago, at least long enough to take the colour from her cheeks and eyes and she foretells you of all the empty days ahead, and you think about the length of life and how much time there is left to fill and how few things you can thinks to fill them with.

She inspires sadness by telling you that life is sometimes sad, loneliness by showing you that it can be lonely and the smells around her are of salt water, of wearing clothes a day too long and tears that have been allowed to mould. She inspires joy because there is joy in the knowledge that love touches you, and happiness by showing you that keeping someone in your heart can mean more than all the people around you, the smells around here are crisp and sea-crunchy, of clothes that you put on again because you had so much fun you did not find the time to go home and change, and she smells of salt and sweat and memories of touches and strokes across bare skin.

She turns around, slowly, as you walk towards her. Her long hair streaming in the wind makes it hard to see her face, and her eyes can’t find you at first.

How many ships?

2008-07-30T09:39:00.001+02:00

There is a scene in the movie “The Last holiday” where one character asks another if the ceiling above them ever made her want to cry. The first character saw it for the first time, the second one saw it every day. By the end of the movie, character Two was seen staring up at the ceiling with tears in her eyes. Something really beautiful does exactly this, it attracts the eye, and fires up the mind.

Last week I had dinner with “the girls” from work, at a Thai restaurant. During this dinner, a beamer was projecting a Victoria’s Secret fashion show on the screen above our table, so apart from the (really quite excellent) food we had a constant viewing of more or less desirable flesh in more or less fabric to occupy us when not eating or discussing the food or the fashion.
During dinner, at several points, a certain amount of envy was expressed towards models in general and specific Victoria Secret models in particular. For reasons far, far beyond my comprehension.

I strife to live my life based on a guiding principle of beauty. I try to write, sketch and talk in a way that evokes a harmonic ideal, I like being around attractive people, and on the whole, I think I manage to inject at least a little of my own idea of beauty in my normal circumstances.
As such, it is quite pleasing to me to be working in a department filled to the brim with really quite attractive women. As a result, at my table during that dinner was a group that by rights would have send the girls on the screen scurrying to the bathrooms to vomit some more out of sheer insecurity. If Rainer Maria Rilke was right and beauty really is the beginning of terror that we are just able to endure, I work in an environment that is just one application of mascara and a swipe of lip-gloss removed from chaos. And yet these girls profess insecurity when compared to someone whose main goal in life is not to trip while passing Anna Wintour (who doesn’t do Victoria’s Secret of course, but that is hardly the point).

Then, earlier this week, I was having a discussion with another one of the “girls”, who wasn’t at the dinner, about attractiveness, or more specifically, about whether I had ever seen anyone so beautiful that the mere sight moved me to tears.
No, I haven’t, but I did know immediately what she meant. I know the feeling of having your heartstrings tugged by the sight of a face so incredible that it just makes you want to sit down and have a good sob.

And not just because it isn’t fair to the rest of us that there are people that look like they’ve stepped out of an airbrushing studio moments earlier, or out of a sense of not measuring up.
Certainly, I think it IS unfair that I have to fight the resilient forces of the evil pimple kingdom on a daily basis where some apparently roll out of bed and are given a quick firing in the kiln of porcelain-skin, but that is not, I think, the reason one gets emotional over something pretty. Given the fact that the “girl” in question here has a passport photo that would launch at least a good 500 ships and in real life tempers these good looks with a wicked brain (worth an additional 400 ships at least) and perky attitude (and another good 200 ships, maybe adding a rowboat or some such for good measure) that would slay a lesser man, I don’t really think jealousy was at the base of her reaction either. I think her response to seeing this beautiful boy comes from something far more meaningful, for all its’ ostensible superficiality.

Beauty like that moves us because we instinctively feel it has to, has to, mean something, and it is saddening that it probably does not.
God knows I am not a religious man, but I hope and pray in my moments of weakness that the sight of a striking face implies a plan, that the beauty alone means that there is a reason for that beauty. For if results like that come solely from the happenstance collection of a father’s nose and grandmother’s eyes into a whole that defies understanding than there is something seriously wrong with the world.

Studies show we associate good-looking people with pleasing character aspects. Show 100 people in the street a picture of a good looking man or woman, and a picture of a not-so good looking man or woman, and kindness, compassion, sweetness, sense of humor and suchlike are mostly attributed to the attractive person, whereas the lesser peon gets burdened with “mean”, “misery” and more descriptions that can at best be called less than favorable.

Again, this is because we feel that the looks alone should mean something more than good genes, should mean something other than sheer good luck and a good moisturizer. We see ideals behind the beauty, never mind if all that is really behind those sparkling eyes is just a litany of boredom, and never mind if all that this beauty is destined to become is a faded shadow of itself in years to come.

And that, really, is what lies at the base of our obsession of beauty. The direct, intuitive assumption that it cannot last, that it has to be, in some way, fleeting. As such, the limited availability alone ups the value of beauty to its’ logical extreme. The most beautiful girl in your class will turn into a no more than usually attractive woman after school, the bartender with the great smile and the brown eyes will grow bald and wrinkly. This means that the fact that they are gorgeous now is only more important, and more poignant. One of my brother’s friends was born an incredibly ugly baby, growing into a teenager so heartrendingly beautiful the only real option seemed to be to freeze him now and let it just be done with. Because this freezing never happened, he continued to grow into a normal face in the crowd. What good his beauty then, if nothing ever came of it?

There are those, and I am one of them, that say that beauty is its’ own reward.

Not for the carrier, but for those around it. For as much jealousy, hatred, and misunderstanding it can inspire, it also inspires love, joy, music and those lost and stolen moments in time where everything, for a split second, makes a little bit more sense. This is worth the occasional tear, and it certainly makes it worth the efforts of genes or gods to maintain beauty in the world.

Stripes at 00000, for I have found my most beautiful one (that would be Boyfriend, yes), and need no other,

Kevin

I really didn’t, but I will.

2008-07-29T10:24:00.002+02:00

“Would you like to be the one to declare Heath Ledger’s last movie crap? Especially with the whole Oscar-thing going on?” were the words Housemate had used to get her boyfriend to wait a little while to see what the reviews for “the Dark knight” would be. She was telling me this last Saturday while we were walking into the theatre to watch this very same movie.

And well, no, I would in fact not like to be the one to do so, even though I am traditionally not so afraid of my opinions differing from the norm. Not that her boyfriend is a sheep, far form it, but traditionally he is a little less (intentionally) rattling than I.
That being said, I’ll stand out on that most precocious of ledges and declare my heartfelt opininon: It sucks.

It does, it really does. I am sorry but it does. Yes, I will admit that Heath Ledger has his character down pat, and his mannerisms and stance convey a deep, deep creepiness that gives a person goose bumps. Facially, there is no creepiness. Yes his tongue moves freakily, and yes he looks freaky, but the look is mostly make-up. Well done make up, but to rely on make-up doing the trick for up-close acting is, in my opinion, a tad sad. Getting an Oscar for doing so is an insult. Completely different topic.

Saying that Heath out-acts the movie is not a stretch, he does. Then again, this is like saying that carrots are better at being carrots than potatoes.
Heath might not have been a tremendous actor, I feel he died too young for objectivity to decide, but the other actors in this movie “perform” with such a lackluster disregard to what they are trying to accomplish that if this performance is what gets the boy his posthumous Oscar I am going to submit to the academy the video of my own personal elementary school Christmas musical, as my own Oscar can’t possibly be far behind. After all, clearly all one has to do is do slightly better than a rasping, awkward and uncharismatic Christian Bale, and I think I reached that level of acting well before my voice changed.

“Batman: the Dark Knight” could have done better. There is a list of actors that have proven themselves in a great many movies previously, the Batman-series as a concept easily lends itself to a deeper-than-average interpretation, allowing for a nicely layered view of the superhero-genre, and there are many perspectives to the series that have not yet been wasted by earlier camptastic installments.
However, it does not do better. Sure, Michael Caine is charming as always, and Maggie Gyllenhaal does well enough, apart from the strange moment of bursting into song, but the rest of the cast, from Aaron Eckhart to Gary Oldman, phone in their performance, sadly resulting in an impossibility to really feel for any of the characters anything but a slight, but noticeable, aversion.

The movie, at first glance, doesn’t do much wrong. It is a little bit predictable (par for the Batman-course), and it is a little bit boring in it’s set up (again par) but really it shows some snide disrespect for previous movements. A joke at the expense of Tim Burton’s thematically and stylistically far better “Batman” really set of a chain of “too bad they went this way” moments. Even tacking the piss out of the original series is a bit sad, one would hope a movie that is flaunted and hyped like this one deserves to be treated so on it’s own merits, and not just because it can make fun of other movies so they look bad. This is a block-buster movie, NOT the lead-cheerleader in high school that only rules because she can put down those less fortunate.

All in all, the movie lacks the entertainment value, plot and refinement (it has Eric Roberts for goodness’ sake) to be good, and it lacks the ability to laugh at itself to be so bad it becomes funny. It was just boring, sad, and a little bit insulting (as it can apparently laugh at everything else quite easily).

As a comparison, Housemate and I watched “Catwoman” the next day, and found it almost refreshingly entertaining. And that movie also sucked. If a movie can’t easily outshine a bad spin-off of it’s original concept, maybe that’s a sign that the movie should be taken out back and shot.

A disappointed,

Kevin

Funny Games U.S.

2008-05-27T22:27:00.000+02:00

Those that have heard me speak for any length of time have almost certainly heard me utter the opinion that one should have opinions and principles roughly the height of a stepping stool. This way, the constant getting on and of a not particularly high horse can have somewhat of an aerobic positive effect.

However, there are some opinions I hold dear, and will defend to a -if perhaps not the- very end. I will grant you that there are not many, but there are at least some. I believe that there is no situation that asks for snapping one's fingers for service, and that berating wait-staff or chefs should be done only after any opportunity for spitting into food has passed. I believe there is no excuse for cruelty to animals, and that you should never kick something unable to kick back. I believe a lot of things.

Among my slightly less vehemently guarded measures of life is the fact I really do not approve of pirated or otherwise illegal copies and performances of music, books and films. This is not a principle I usually uphold all too strictly, I prefer to watch a “real” DVD to a pirated one and will not swiftly buy a ripped copy of a CD, but I do have a play list on youtube of my favourite music videos, and I do not have all those on CD or otherwise. A little hypocrisy goes a long way in these matters.

That said, my long-held opinion that watching a pirated movie detracts something from the experience has been giving a polish and shine this weekend when I had a chance to watch Michael Hanake's remake of his own movie “Funny Games”. Having first watched this as a down-loaded version and now in a official movie theatre, it gave me some measure of comparison. Granted, the down-load was of bad quality, but still, that goes some way to proving my point, actually.

Some context is required for understanding the really quite large differences between the two viewings. I had heard of the classic original version only in a far away way. The remake drew my attention because it stars the actor that seems destined to play me should my life ever warranted filming, Michael Pitt. But upon reading up on the movie, it seemed a good start to a night of thrillers and horrors. The story, a well-to-do family terrorised by a pair of polite, handsome but insane young men, allows for interesting ruminations on politeness and a good meditation on trusting your neighbours.

Watching this movie in a room filled with movie-buffs and in bad quality did not do well for the experience. The shocks and thrills seemed second-hand, and open for mockery, and it all seemed done before and made one feel tremendously blasé.

Watching it, however, in a movie-theatre, surrounded by people who do not analyse every movie to it's bitter end, and in a much better quality, suddenly the movie seemed to change. Much like showing your town to tourists will make you see the town in a whole new light, I saw this catalogue of displacement in a whole new light. Along with my co-watchers, I suddenly found the chance to wonder what I would have done in similar situations, and I bristled with them at the atrocious cheat perpetrated halfway through. Suddenly, the movie's implications became personal, the occasional breaking of the fourth wall more than a clever trick, a personal indictment.

For those who do not know the original or the remake, the story is simple, a family on holiday is trapped in their house with two psychopaths, who bet them the family will not be alive in twelve hours time. Simple, and we have seen it before. The psycho's seem polite and genteel at first, but so did Hannibal Lecter, and it doesn't hit home immediately. But the two also make use of the insular community of friends and neighbours they seem so easily and obviously to belong to, suddenly bringing the danger much closer to home.

The original is known as a classic, the remake, by the same director, with much the same dialogue and scenes, might not, but if it doesn't it is only by virtue of it's status as a remake. Viewed as a separate entity, the acting is mostly very well done, the subdued, actually never shown, horrid violence is wonderfully portrayed still, and the menace remains as true now as when this movie was made first.

I can advise any body to go see this, but there is a certain requirement for a willingness to discuss them movie and it's themes afterwards, so I advice bringing a group of argumentative friends, and adjourning to a good bar swiftly afterwards. And stocking up on eggs.

Back from the dead, I promised to do better this time,

Kevin

Royalty Schmoyalty, Esther had niet mogen winnen

2008-04-29T00:30:00.002+02:00

Gisteren, zondag, werd ik gevraagd of ik vandaag, maandag, het leuk zou vinden om aanwezig te zijn bij de finale-uitzending van de show “de grootste royalty kenner van Nederland”.

Omdat dit me inderdaad wel leuk leek, en het wel leuk was tot de uiteindelijke finale, heb ik nu drie dingen die ik vanavond even moet doen, die ik normaal niet of niet snel zou doen, en waarvan ik er nu al eentje aan het doen ben.

Dit blog-je is in het Nederlands, namelijk, een taal die ik in mijn schrijfsels eigenlijk niet vaak gebruik, maar omdat dit toch een Nederlands programma was en is, en dit stukje (volgens mij) gelezen moet worden door zo veel mogelijk Nederlanders heb ik nu mijn normale voorkeur voor het Engels even overboord gezet voor mijn moerstaal. Dat was 1.

Nummers 2 (twee) en 3 (drie) zijn in volgorde van belangrijkheid het feit dat ik nu het risico loop een vriendin van mij te beschamen, en het feit dat ik de uitkomst van dit programma ga verpesten.

Voor mij is de immer beringbaarde Marc van der Linden de grootste Royalty-kenner van Nederland in minstens gewicht, maar deze kwam voor deze uitzending niet opdagen.

Wie er wel kwamen opdagen waren de zes winnaars van de voorrondes, en zes “professionele” royalty kenners, mensen die van het uitpluizen van koninklijke leventjes hun beroep hadden gemaakt, zogezegd. Uit deze twee groepjes van zes werden twee winnaars gehaald, een “professional” en een amateur. Deze twee werden dan als goede kemphaantjes tegen elkaar opgezet voor de titel GrvN en de, toch heel mooie, trofee. Dit alles aan elkaar gepraat door de toch al niet zo te vertrouwen Bert van Leeuwen en een man die ik nog nimmer eerder had gezien, en wiens naam mij dus ook direct ontschiet.

Sinds ik Bertje eens heb zien vals-spelen bij een van zijn andere evangelische quizjes heb ik die man al niet meer vertrouwd, en laat ik het zo zeggen, het werd er vandaag niet beter op.

Maar goed, wat gebeurde er. De amateur-kandidaat, Ieneke (als ik dit verkeerd spel, Ineke, sorry, je bordjes kon ik niet lezen, ik zat achter je), bracht het met een enorme kennis van het koningshuis tot de finale, waar zij het mocht opnemen tegen de Pro, Esther Wolswinkel, redactrice van het blad Vorsten. Nu ontzeg ik Esther zeker niet dat zij ook een redelijke kennis van het koningshuis bezit, maar ze had niet mogen winnen. En ze won wel.

Ze won, omdat Bert tijdens het stellen van een vraag aan de twee niet helemaal begrepen had wat de regels waren, en een goed door Ieneke beantwoorde vraag daarom uit het programma moest mikken. Wat gebeurde er? Ieneke wist het antwoord, en zoals geïnstrueerd drukte zij dus toen de vraag was gesteld, en gaf haar antwoord. Echter, omdat ze blijkbaar “wat vroeg drukte, voor alle antwoorden op scherm stonden” werd deze vraag niet meegenomen in de uiteindelijke score.

Toen Esther dit later echter nog een keer deed, kregen we een tweede takeje om te voorkomen dat het er aanstaande woensdag uit zag alsof ze zo vroeg drukte. Ieneke werd gevraagd om vooral maar niet mee te drukken want dat zou “niet eerlijk zijn”. Esther's punt telde wel, Ieneke's punt zullen we buiten de studio nooit meer over horen, confetti werd afgevuurd en we moesten allemaal maar heel blij doen dat Esther had overwonnen.

Ik snap dat je als professionele royalty-kenner moeilijk kan verliezen van een amateur, maar echt, dit is wel een heel lege overwinning, en als ik Ieneke was zou ik dit ook zeker niet over mijn kant laten gaan. Ik verwacht een woedende uithaal naar Bert aan tafel bij Carlo en Irene en wat traantjes tegenover Loretta, Ien, je hebt het verdiend.

Dus, voor iedereen die woensdag, op koninginnedag, dit programma gaat kijken, weet dan dat de echte winnaar door een heel subtiel trucje niet als winnaar uit de bus kwam.

Met vriendelijke groet,

Kevin

Style: Confidence vs confidentiality.

2008-04-09T14:05:00.001+02:00

One could, if so inclined and willing, draw a rather direct line between personal style and a certain measure of self-confidence. After all, expressing personality to a certain extent smacks of going against the grain, of “showing off”, which is something not lightly undertaken by those lacking in self-esteem. Also, one who is uncertain their stomach should ever see the light of day is not swiftly going to bare midriff, no matter what fashion says about this.

A counterpoint to this of course are those whose stomach really should not see the light of day, and who nonetheless pour themselves into tops so tight that showing copious amounts of flesh is nigh unavoidable. The line “just because you can get into it does not mean it is your size” springs to mind once more. These people cannot be said to be lacking in self-confidence, they can even be said to be slightly over-abundant in that specific regard. Most of them can also be said to be overabundant in the regard of stomach-and-lower-back-flab, but this is an unsavoury subject, and should best not be mentioned.

Now I am in no way harping on those with a little more body to carry around than usual. I myself cart a goodly amount of extra me around right in front of what I maintain are good abs if only you could see them through the flab, and as such would not deny anybody the right to be well-insulated. In fact, I find a little curvy or a little huggable a very attractive thing in any human being, and would as such only applaud anyone who wants to show off a little bit of curve or brawn.

But there is a line between showing what you’ve got and no longer showing your belt, and somewhere on that line does looking confident turn into showing what should be hidden, confidential.
The too-tight legging, the jeans that “hug” so low you are showing thigh between underwear and actual jean, the shirt so high or so tight it leaves nothing to the imagination, including the number and placement of chest-hairs, they are all examples of saying a little too much, of showing a little more than people who you don’t really know should know.

Clothing, traditionally, remains a way of showing off, showing what you have, and as such should be used to their best and fullest. It should not be used, however, to give people an intimate glance into your body’s personal life. Clothing, more than anything, allows a wonderful option for hints, for mystery, for hiding those bits that should only be revealed when a winning personality and good humour have made sure the other party won’t run upon reveal of aforementioned bits.

Classic self-hating homosexual.

2007-12-14T13:05:00.000+01:00

It’s always such an interesting term to me. Mostly because I am not. I am, in no uncertain term, a classic OTHER hating homosexual. This really is kind of strange, because I am not really a hate-y person, as a rule.

It has been commented upon by scores of friends that I let people get away with incredible amounts of truly horrendous things. A Mormon mother disowning her son because he is gay? I understand that it doesn’t mesh with her world-view. It’s not that she is a bad mother, it’s just that her being a good mother means she has a splendid chance to seriously fuck up her kid, but that doesn’t mean it makes her a bad person.An older man being afraid and therefore abusive to his timid foreign neighbor? He’s not a bad person, he is just scared, and fear makes us do strange things. He’s not a bad person either. Priests who refuse to marry same-sex couples? Fine by me, nobody should force a religion in a different direction then it wants to go. Using that as a reason for gay-bashing and discrimination of course is also wrong, because really nobody should be forced into a direction they don’t want to go.

So effectively I don’t blame people for their world-view, and I certainly would not hate anybody very swiftly either. Hate is destructive, and without any object to aim it at effectively it will destroy what is near, which is in almost all cases of my personal peeves me, and since I don’t want to be destroyed, I avoid large scale hate. But I don’t avoid large scale annoyance paired with the vocabulary of hate. In a way I sometimes think of myself as the Hannibal Lecter of annoyance. I wouldn’t really sauté somebody’s liver with nice Chianti just because they are bad violinists, but I will consider the option and then discuss how I would prepare a better dish with it. (wrap in bacon, flash fry and serve with a cool but fruity white)Effectively this means on the whole I am about as dangerous as a cricket, but sound very aggressive and hate filled. Besides, Crickets get up peoples noses.

But there are instances that really fire up my mostly dormant capacity for pure, unadulterated, screw-of-his-head-and-gleefully-drink-from-the-blood-spouting-stump hatred. Strangely enough, a large percentage of my classic a-little-more-than-pet peeves seem to tie rather beautifully into both my classicly stereotypes sexuality and my well known position as a know it all, pedantic gay man. As a rule, this gets me typified as “So Gay” and as a rule, this stereotyping is “So Wrong”.

I dislike flamingly queer people as a rule not because “they exhibit something I cannot accept inside myself” but because being flamingly queer is just plain annoying in its own right. NOBODY likes a squadron of teased-haired, badly mascara wearing guys in tank-tops strutting around like they have the best tits EVAH warbling around them while they are trying to enjoy an end-of-the-work-week-soft drink. So they effectively exhibit something I know lies inside myself (everybody has an inner queen) but cannot abide ANYWHERE apart from a good pride parade or a venue suited for queening. Of course, voicing this opinion as a straight men will get you called a homophobe, as a gay man it’s self hating. In my mind it would get you pegged as a well thinking human being.

I dislike people who ride their cards in the “saddest stories” poker-game of life to their very, very end. Yes, maybe your parents died, maybe you lost a sister, maybe your husband committed suicide. These things happen, and they are horrible. I’ve not had a wonderfully stabilizing child- and young adulthood, and nine times out of ten I can royal flush the sad pairs of these stories if it really comes down to it. But I dislike dwelling on it because it makes you a victim of circumstance. I had bad things happen to me, but whenever somebody in a conversation starts going “you wouldn’t say that if you knew that I …” I just really, really want to smash their head in. Whenever I say things to this extent in mixed company about not dwelling on situations of the past, learning and moving on without becoming a victim of circumstance I get roughly three reactions. The main one is usually good. “yes, good point”. The second one runs along the lines of “you gay people are always so strident” (no kidding). The third? “You wouldn’t say that if you knew how it felt to…” *cue batman montage of POW and WHACK*

I really, really dislike it if people are rude or inconsiderate towards wait-staff and store-clerks. These people are just doing their job, and as such do not deserve it to have you snapping your fingers, warbling “helllooohhooo” or otherwise making a nuisance of yourself. If you do this at my table or within direct conversational space thereof, I WILL ask you to please, please behave. On more than one occasion I was greeted in this request with a knowing wink and a comment along the lines of “I understand, I won’t stand in your way to get to this nice waiter” NO! NO! BAD RESTARANT PATRON, NO! This is not a cruising thing, this is a basic decent human being thing. Being excessively polite after this is just taking the piss, NOT making up for it.

For these and other reasons I have been called a CSHH. Which is blatantly wrong. I am not a CSHH. I barely hate anybody, let alone me. I am a classic humanity disliking person. As such, I am imminently suited for an online community, I say, where my hate as well as it’s more tender counterpart is fuelled on such a constant basis my aura has recently been sold of to sit on top of a tall building to alert planes.

Grtz,
K.

PS. This blog was posted as it appears here also on my journal on the site OkCupid.com, part of my ongoing attempt to get more readers on here, and fuel my fragile ego. If you found this through my journal, please browse some other entries, most are better than this one ;)

Style: Prestige, predilection, provenance.

2007-12-05T15:47:00.000+01:00

Apocryphal history has a Japanese connoisseur of kimono commenting on the fact that no more than 50 years ago, one could show him a picture of a woman in kimono, standing in a hotel lobby with her face away from the camera, and he would be able to estimate to an astounding degree her age, social status, family heritage, her husbands profession and the season and time of day the picture was taken. This is a far cry from the European fashionist(a) that can from a picture of a women roughly ascribe her to a certain decade (That’s eighties) but then again, there are experts that can attribute sartorial appropriations to incredibly specific measurements in time (that is so 5 minutes ago). But that said, apart from the intricately elegant closed system of Japanese culture, very few systems of fashion or style can base snobbism on the complexity of their rules.

Once upon a time, in a town far away, a cotton manufacturer stumbled on the fact that when cotton is bathed in a bath of caustic soda, and then bathed again in acid, it becomes long, lustrous and a lot more durable. The birth of mercerized cotton might not interest a great amount of people in our current hustle-and-bustle “I-don’t-care-what-it-is-as-long-as-it’s-stylish” world, but widely available cotton certainly has improved over the years. And not only cotton, materials, patterns and logistical solutions have evolved in quality and availability to an extent that there is no longer anything like different markets in clothing, and everything is, in theory, available anywhere.

Not even very long ago, and certainly for Europeans not very far away, what you wore and how it was worn was for a great deal based on two very simple variables of the human condition: Where are you from, and how much do you make when you are there?
Certain local patterns in weaving, embroidery, fabrics and colour were not copied, or very faintly copied, at any great distance from the town of their origin, and as a result, the standard man or woman in the street could be absolutely identified as being on the right street simply by the cut, colour and quality (I so craved a third “c”, but condition just doesn’t cut it, compunctiously) of their clothes. Only the rich or traveled wore materials or styles markedly different from their local counterparts to an identifiable extent.

A stylish lady in the 1800’s might deck herself out in Antwerp Lace or adopt a penchant for a particular style of bohemian embroidery, but these style-choices would seem crude compared to today’s possibilities of refinement. That said, today’s choices would seems indefinable to her, and to an extent too fiddly for absolute comprehension. And again, the possibility of refinement on offer today does in no way mean that people are more refined, and (regretfully) it certainly doesn’t mean people put more care and attention into their apparel as our ante-generational-friend.

Examples of this one still finds, if so interested, in the names and descriptions of clothing and material. Egyptian cotton, Irish Linen and Belgian lace or French embroidery might no longer hold as much captivating information as they did in days of yore, and certainly not as much information nowadays as Dior, Zegna or Chloe, but they certainly tell us a lot about their origins and ambitions.

Fashion-, or better yet style-, wise, the world has not gotten any bigger than it was in days past. In fact, it has gotten a lot smaller, and a whole lot easier to travel around. International trade agreements on fabrics, the world-wide availability of information and the multi-national identity of designers and stores ensure together that the cotton t-shirt I buy in my local store differs in no material way from the t-shirt my American pals buy in their local emporium, which in itself does not differ immensely from the one bought by my moscowegian counterpart in Russia.
A shame? Yes, in some cases. I certainly lament the fact it is nigh useless to travel to London for the fashion because the fashion in London is the same as it is here in Amsterdam (except for the Thomas Pink stores, off course, which are still a good reason to get on a plane), but at the same time the availability of many styles and materials makes it possible for me to look my best in whatever situation (or markedly less “my best” but I can’t blame the clothes for that).

But when it comes to status, clothing has lost a good deal of it’s impact in the apparent eye of the beholder, and only those detail- and label-minded among us will see on first glance what status and/or position your clothing is supposed to project. Where clothing used to make the man all in its own right, nowadays the perception of clothing by others goes a lot farther in determining the make of a man.

Where in days past a different style or material would set you apart as wealthy, or a fashionist(a), today anybody with enough determination to save up for it can deck him- or herself out in Vuitton-styled atrocities, or Chanel based bad choices, and if one is lacking this determination or funding, one can buy generic look-a-likes in the closest low street store. To a certain extent this is a logical by-product of the circle of faddish live (which really does move us all) where high end avant-garde designs are turned into prêt-a-porter concepts and then through generic easiness into bargain basement grabability. Anything that is worn enough will be watered down and copied, and so on ad infinitum. And ad nauseam, in some cases, off course.

So what is one to do if one wants to set oneself apart from the general population, but without the option of taking a train to Berlin for their spring ideas or sending your tailor to Florence for their needlework? Well, those options are off course still open, only much less useful nowadays. Vintage-clothing is always an option, but then again, it can all of a sudden become tres hip, and then where are you?

That said, it is only bad to be avant-garde if it turns out there is no garde, so a little bit of dare and originality is absolutely not frowned upon by the writer of this little piece. And if the followers never appear, simply discard and try again. Nobody achieved elegance and refinement first of without stumbling headlong in the wall of faux pas at their first tries.

Grtz,
Kevin

With Anthony Hopkins as the 8th dwarf: Freaky.

2007-11-23T17:10:00.000+01:00

Don’t get me wrong, I am a massive fan of the fantasy movie-genre, and as such I am more than willing to cut even the worst of the genre some slack for simply being what they are. Also, as a good gay man, I am not at all opposed to the current spate of action-ish movies that show reasonably buff men in reasonably little outfits, but the line needs be drawn somewhere.
Quite literally drawn, in the case of Beowulf, the latest Gaiman-penned screenplay to hit the silver screen in Holland. This fully CGI’d movie butchering and then raping one of the oldest surviving English stories has truly taken the cake with regards to just over the top application of available techniques and moral values.

There is an idea in animation and animatronics that is called the “uncanny valley”, coming from the idea that the more like a person something looks, the more we feel affiliated with them. In other words, the emotional response to something that looks like a human is more positive than something that does not look human. Up to a point. It turns out that when something comes close to looking human but quite clearly isn’t, we feel negative or uncomfortable towards them, but then as soon as they are less and less distinguishable from humans, we are fine with them as well. In short, the more something is clearly trying to look human, but isn’t, we find it uncanny, and if it is simply looking human, we find it acceptable. Apparently this is the reason people have averse reactions to clowns and zombies, because they kind of look human, but then again not.

Anyway, the problem with CGI-humans is that they never quite look human, for all the progress we have made in the field of hair and water as has been evidenced by the whole Shrek-line of movies, it is still all but impossible to reliably mimic the myriad of small muscle movements and suchlike that make a human really human. Thus CGI-Humans always look slightly, well, dead. And a full movie of slightly, well, dead humans just doesn’t really do It for me. After all, I loved Shaun of the Dead, but it did give me nightmares.
Beowulf, however, will not. Even though for most of its running time it wallowed in the shallow end of the uncanny valley, it had enough moments of reasonably pretty imagery to keep me from totally becoming freaked out. But just barely. That said; a good deal of the reasons I did not allow my willies to shiver me out of the theater is because I could barely keep my eyes of the screen. Not because it was so good, it was not, but because I kept wondering what horrible thing they were going to do to the story next.

The original story is very easy to surmise; Grendel kills people in hall, Beowulf kills Grendel, Grendel’s mother kills people in hall, Beowulf kills Grendel’s mother, Dragon attacks somewhere else, Beowulf kills dragon, but dies himself as well. Thus. 1700 lines of ye olde English masculine bovine excrement, but that’s just about the extent of it.
It is also, just about, the net result of this movie, only not quite.

Grendel, as the quintessential aggrieved neighbour, is a slightly to very grotesque thing, rotten skin all over, massive stature, and missing at least one ear and a cheek, but with an enourmous, and enourmously sensitive, eardrum. He goes berserk every time the king holds feasts in his hall and rather than banging a broomstick or posting a snide note on the communal message board, he just starts banging heads and chewing the communal messenger. Now if I were king, I’d move. But I’m not, and the king that is doesn’t. It’s rather sad, really, as Grendel really does have quite a good point, he is just a little overeager.
Anyways, enter B(eowulf), who as a rule has a tendency to slay or fight just about anything. He goes into the hall, falls madly in love with the zombie queen (CGI again) and decides he wants to have a piece of her graphically enhanced (meh) flesh, and the treasury of the kingdom. He sets his men to feasting while he strips, and when Grendel arrives, they fight, and B tears of the arm of the complaining interruption.

Yes. Strips. B, being brawny and MASSIVELY well bodied, apparently prefers to fight naked. Sure, he comes with all these reasons about how it’s only fair, and that if the enemy is unarmed and unprotected so should he be, but that doesn’t really explain why he starts undressing at the drop of a hat before having seen the enemy, or if there even is an enemy. Crickee, even in front of a fully clothed and well-axe-hung Frysian he starts undressing. Apparently the man like being nekkid. No skin of my back, as said, he has a good body, but the enourmous amount of candles, arms, knees, tables, balustrades, donkeys, lobsters, sea-monsters, dragon-scales, water, pointy helmets and otherwise items of a non-disclosing nature do get a little bit absurd very swiftly. Ah well, we do get CGI bum, and that did very much not suffer from any uncanniness.

Anyways, Grendel dead, Grendel’s mom, played by Angelina Jolie who looks like she is very much enjoying herself being all computer generated, comes to complain the next night. Violence apparently being genetic, she appears to B in a dream while she slaughters and hangs his men in the feast-hall by way of complaining. A slight overreaction maybe, but I know if anyone hurts my family I’m willing to write a VERY terse note so I suppose it all works out the same.

B follows her into her cave-lair, the woman is a water-demon, and naked as he is (again) she decides to not fight him but offer him the world if he just sleeps with her. Because she is Angelina Jolie, and the only woman in the time-period in heels (heels that apparently are a part of her body, by the way) B off course agrees, is made king of the land, and lives happily being fought by every other monster and his mother, but surviving on and on.

So far, apart from the not-fighting-but-fucking, the story follows reasonably closely the original story, and as such I have not spoilt too much of the happenings in this movie, while still expressing most of the things I really did not like to much about it or find absurd. Because it is slated to be one of the mayor movies of the winter season, I will not go on and spoil any more.
It is an entertaining move, but really, its crap, funny crap, entertaining crap, crap nonetheless. The main problem is that there is no acting whatsoever that is well picked up by the computer puppets, something I hoped I would look past after a while, but never quite did. I could not escape the idea that if they’d have just done a real life movie, it would have been better.

Stripes at 00110 “If my neighbour complains again, I’m ripping her arm off”

Grtz,
Kevin

EXACTLY

2007-11-20T15:15:00.003+01:00

It says something about a movie if the best thing you can say about it is that it is, at least, aptly titled. I realize I’ve said about “the Fountain” that it was aptly titled, and I still stand by that, but the aptness of “the Fountain” can hold no candle to the aptness of “Superbad”, the truly horrendous piece of regurgitated swill I almost forced myself to sit through yesterday.

And I ask myself now; “Why do I do these things to myself?”, why am I so stubborn in leaving a movie theater that I force myself to watch the interminable boredom of “Cashback”, why do I suffer the badly acted thinly veiled morality play that is “SawIII”, why, why, why?
Why? Because I am a movie-masochist. I secretly like nothing better than watching a bad movie for the slight chance of seeing cute people badly acting their way out of a paper bag. That’s why. That’s why I sat through “Cashback”, and “Saw”. Not that my efforts were rewarded or anything, but I live in hope that one day, out of the blue, the next Josh Duhamel will accidentally strip of in American Pie 65 and I can see I at least saw him naked in his first ever movie when he is a big star.

This did not happen, or had any faint hope of happening, during “Superbad” yesterday. Other things that didn’t happen during this truly terrible movie (or at least the 45 minutes I sat through before Housemate evoked the safety-word of movie-leavage) were: Something even remotely funny for those not humor-deprived since birth, the wolverine-vs-freddy style sla(sh/y)ing of that truly annoying and shite-ugly fat kid, the moment the “friends” of the fat kid finally told him to shut the bleeding fuck up and other thigns I really would like to have seen.
Ok, I am being a bit unfair, we did see fat kid’s throat being slit by a security guard, something that pleased me enough to whoop a little mid-movie, but that turned out to be a scene from fat kid’s imagination, something that pulled a well-meant “CRAP!!” from my toyed-with emotional psyche.

Ok, sorry, “Superbad”, movie about three guys, all nerdy, almost all acceptably nerdy for a standard high-school-movie, on their quest for pussy and suchlike, as one has now come to expect from high-school-movies. The three guys: Fat Kid (FK) who seems to be the leader of this little group of misfits but is more than likely just the guy the others hang around with just so people will spit on other people. Nerdy guy (NG) the classic nerd. Glasses, dark hair, pasty. Nerdlike, and therefore to my mind slightly endearing, but massively overshadowed by the sad fact he is friends with FK. And Average Guy (AG) who doesn’t really stand out in either direction, could be cute, could be ugly, but is nothing really. Dresses in brown.

After the initial set-up and introduction of this threesome, the movie tells us basically three things: They are all after girls, they are all idiots, and they should all die. So far, so same as every other high-school movie ever. Not exactly the same, as this movie sucks, whereas most HSM’s do have a certain charm to them. This one does not. From the first moment to the moment where I walked out, with the exception of the times FK was not on screen and the moment his throat was slashed, all it was was pure and simple crap.
Crap. Fucking crap. Effing crap. Rotten-corpse-of-Douglas-Adams flinging crap. No sign or show of any form of humor, charm or elegance in it’s execution, no power behind it’s convictions, no pure and simple movie magic in it’s make and pedigree.

I am certain the acting, however, was flawless. The three K’s did their very best, and did put down two reasonably believable characters and one truly atrocious one. But good acting of bad characters does not make a movie fun to watch. That said, the rest of the theatre was in stitches with every unnecessary “fuck” and every over the top allusion to the character’s rampant latent homosexuality, so it is possible the jokes just passed straight over my head (pun intended).

Is this it? Is this where we are headed? At least the “Naked Gun” movies had some planning in their badness. “Police Academy” lost it after a while but started smart enough through their bad jokes. “Revenge of the Nerds” had charm, “American Pie” was in places really, truly funny. But now we are getting these movies that seem only intend on being disgusting, stupid or demeaning, and if they can at all manage it, they go for all three of those. I thought I’d seen y worst movie with “Date Movie”, and I was wrong.
The worst part is that this movie is praised critically and through box office acclaim, it is “the next big thing” and the actors are lauded and feted around Hollywood. WHY? WHY in the name of all that is good and beautiful in the world WHY are we celebrating the type of jokes that special kid in the back of the class used to make until he was put into remedial teaching?
Honestly people, saying fuck fifteen times in a row is NOT funny. Showing an 8-year old drawing dicks is NOT funny, even though some of the dicks absolutely were. Watching a woman drink from a fat of her own fat is NOT funny. All these things, however, are happening in movies RIGHT NOW and there are audiences the world over that are laughing their retarded heads off watching this execrable garbage.

Can’t we get back to a world where humor was not based on excrement? I understand Mel Brooks’ statement that tragedy is when I cut my finger, and comedy is when you fall into an open sewer, but really, there is a massive difference between schadenfreude and filth.

Ah well, I am rerunning my episodes of the office to get the taste of FK out of my brain, then to go on to some actually funny things that don’t make me cringe.

Stripes at 00100, by now a well-known combination.

Grtz,
Kevin

30 Days of Night

2007-11-15T12:52:00.000+01:00

Well, what to say… I like vampire films. In fact, with the possible exception of vampire bats when applied to my own specific hairdo, I roughly like vampire-everything.
Vampires, as a psychological archetype or an evolutionary mental exercise, are massively interesting creatures. And every vampire novel or movie sets up its own vampire back-story, and ideas behind it. Part of the charm of watching a vampire movie for me is figuring out how they stack up to other vampires, given what we are told in any story.

Dracula was able to walk in daylight according to Bram Stoker, but Bela Lugosi would have burned horribly in the same situation. The Hunger's Miriam and John Blaylock had no problem with daylight either, and lacked fangs as well, but drank blood nonetheless, with the aid of a little knife secreted in a necklace. (An idea re-used in the badly homoerotic The Brotherhood) The Hunger, by the way, also has the strange distinction of being a very elegant movie about two people who are clearly and undoubtedly vampires, yet the word “vampire” is never used or seemingly considered.

That said, almost all vampire movies or novels have to exist in an internal universe where-in there exist no other vampire movies or novels, but there is an abundance of arcane text about same, because, as a rule, vampires target fringe groups, for the tasty drug-laced blood and the lack of uproar over a couple of missing people, yet nobody ever immediately jumps to the conclusion of undead fangy stalkage.

Now I know vampire fan-dom is a little more widespread among my circle of friends than some other groups of people, but I know that as soon as the sucked-dry corpses of urban outdoorsmen start showing up under Amsterdam’s bridges with two puncture marks on their necks, the first thing somebody will say would be: “euh, maybe it’s a vampire” as a joke if not the first sketchy lines on a psychological profile.
But no, vampires are always the last possible refuge of the well-thinking character, and then only after we have seen several instances of turning to dust, glowing red eyes, massive fangs, and turning into bats/wolfs or otherwise creepy animals.
Of course, I realize movies would sell a lot less well if they consisted of one victim, a victim’s friend who says “people, it’s a vampire”, other potential victims stocking up on garlic, crucifixes and the like, and a defeated vampire scuttling off into the moonset within the first five minutes of filming, and thus there has to be a certain tension, a moment of discovery, and somewhat of a hunt to allow for all the product placement that a modern movie needs to stay alive. This is also one of the reasons why vampire ideas keep changing with every new movie and every new book, because if established vampire-detergent always works, there is no tension.

Still, there’d be more tension than there was in 30 Days of Night, the first of two vampire movies to hit Dutch cinemas in the coming period. Now I am not expecting particularly much of the second one, but it has to be better than this exercise in dual sided stupidity.
Some spoilers ahead, by the way.

The idea of a vampire troupe hounding a small town waaay up North is not a bad one in its own right, and as such a good premise for a vampire movie. The town Barrow, setting of this little piece, apparently has no sun for a set period every year, during which most of the town moves to sunnier (or sunny, at all) climes elsewhere, and only a skeleton crew of law-officers and suchlike maintaining vigil in the dark of sunless days. So far, so good. During this period, the vampires decide attack and obliterate the town. Good plan, no light to burn the lily-white skin, reduced visuals for the human meatsicles, all nice and ready for the pickings.

So what’s wrong? Well, stupidity is wrong, for one. And ugly vampires, also wrong (but slightly forgivable). And more stupidity.

These vampires are smart enough o hatch a plan like this, are incredibly fast, know how humans work well enough to set bait and try to trap them into coming out, but no when in the thirty days except for the absolute last day do they start setting fire to possible hiding places.
Foolish things.
Once more it is proven it is a good thing I personally am not an undead scourge on human society, cause y’all’d’be fucked.
If it were me leading an intrepid band of undead explorers, the first thing I do is take as many humans out as possible, as is done in the movie as well, good. Then, during the first night, when the remaining humans have gone to ground hiding, I start setting fire to the houses. This will mean that any humans left inside will run out pretty swiftly, ready for the taking.
Considering the fact that there are only a couple of hundred houses in town, to about 25 vampires, this ensures that the whole town will be burned to the ground, bled dry and fed upon within about 4 days of the given 30 days of darkness. Given the fact we are told over the course of the movie that there are about 4 or 5 more towns nearby that are also completely dark, this means you can be back on your sun-blocked boat before day 25 and undo your belt for a good bloody burp.

But no, Vamps decide to wait with the burning until day 30. Why? No idea. Meanwhile they barely get to eat, and they also spectacularly fail to find about 30 hiding survivors. Vampire idiots.

Do the humans do better? Well, yes, but a) barely and b) only because of the aforementioned vampire stupidity. If you are fighting a vampire, and it is conclusively shown that only beheading will work, would you not start beheading them? I would. But no. You’d apparently continue trying to bring them down by pillow-fighting them, snowballing them, trying unsuccessfully to burn them, whatever. So they have to hide out on someone’s attic, with no food or water, and they still manage to not only survive, but come out looking chipper and in some cases remarkably well-shaven.
And don’t start up about the fact they can melt snow for drinking water. True as that may be, it takes MASSIVE amounts of snow for even a little bit of useful water, and considering there are about 9 people there, this would be a 24 hour job, that nobody is doing. Also, there just plain isn’t enough snow to do this without being noticed by anything paying attention.

There are a lot of moments in this movie that are just plain stupid, or barely understandable. Does this make 30 Days of Night a bad movie? In my opinion: yes. Was it an enjoyable-for its stupidity-movie? In my opinion, yes again. It is worthy of seeing for two real reasons: 1) the movie’s premise is well thought up and executed, if a little bit shaky, and 2) the sheer pleasure of picking it apart. The tension is build well in some rare spots, but mostly underdone by the obvious attempts at sorry comic relief.

Stripes at 11110, for 30.

Grtz,
Kevin

Looking for a career.

2007-11-07T13:25:00.000+01:00

Having left school at the tender age of 17 after being fully bullied for about 12 years straight, I cannot say I am worse of than I should be. In fact, I am very well of. I have Boyfriend, whom I love and who loves me, I have good friends, an ok family-life, and a beautiful house to live in, owned by aforementioned Boyfriend.

For me, the only thing currently lacking is a good/great career. For me not the wealth of wealth attracts me, but the possibility to do something I love doing, and to do it for a living. I have been writing this little blog for over two years now, to practically no success whatsoever but with great enjoyment, and it has been a good way to refine and grow into a reasonable writing style (to my mind, that is), I have written columns for company magazines, and even some reviews for a now defunct Fantasy magazine, and I think I consider myself good enough to “do something” in the field of creative, or not so creative writing.

As to this end, I have started writing to a couple of magazines today, linking to this blog, and asking around for a reasonable step to take to get into writing on a structured plan. I am slowly working on some short stories, trying to get some ideas for a lengthy novel, but at the moment the slightly journalistic bend of columns and suchlike draw me more than anything else.
So if there is anybody on my blog who likes it enough to return every now and then, and I do realize I have made that difficult with the slightly erratic frequency of my blogging, please point some people towards me. I need a working network right now, and I am not getting there as yet. And if one of my regulars know of a way into columns or suchlike, please let me know, either through the blog or through kevin.linnekamp@gmail.com
I am very willing to take any writing opportunity tossed into my lap, money at the moment is less of an issue than just getting read and known.

Thanks for your attention,
Stripes at 00001, “shameless pleading”

Kevin

Spirituality: Introduction

2007-10-25T14:55:00.001+02:00

Alternative religion has long been a hobby and interest of mine, never growing far beyond the usual breathing exercises and the occasional drawing of the Tarot for friends and acquaintances. But being very low key does not mean I have no interest or compulsion to up my involvement in religion and spirituality.

Ever since the death of my grandfather the question “What happens after?” has kept me in good philosophical and emotional curiosity, and as an avid purchaser of books I can say that my own personal library on religion and the occult can rival a good sized town’s version of same. As a result, I can hold my own in most discussion about the topics of reincarnation, ghosts, and mythical beings.
Because I also believe no subjects lacks connections with all other subjects, it is not strange for me to draw Maslow’s pyramid of personal growth in a discussion about the regenerative propensities of the common, garden variety Hydra, and I can say my bibliophilia has not helped last weekends moving of house.
Luckily, Boyfriend has kindly decided to give (well, rent) me one room for my own personal use, and making it an absolute fire hazard is going to be one of those personal uses.

Also, since I am trying to be rather more active on the blogging part of my life, I will strive to set up what I hope will become a series of short essays on a number of topics pertaining to the subject of alternative religion. They will be labeled “Spirituality” and they will contain my own personal experiences with the subject, but also theories and efforts by a multitude of other researchers in this very wide and interesting field.

For all those uncaring of this particular part of the proceedings, best not to read anything labeled “Spirituality” then, right?

For now, grtz, and stripes at “almost Halloween”

Kevin

Style: Hats

2007-10-18T16:20:00.000+02:00

Aah yes, the hat. The ever present symbol of the extremes of society. Class, elegance, hoodlums, they all have their hatty counterparts, and they all rely heavily on certain assumptions when it comes to head coverage.

Now, being sadly left over when the hat-abilities were handed out, I’ve never become a complete master of the hat. I do not have a good hat-face, and as such don’t wear them. The only thing ever looked remotely ok on my was a very, very bright blue Wallace & Grommet baseball cap, and as I am fast moving away from 25 years of age, this is not the decision I should be sticking with.

I can say this about hats, though, and I need to give Boyfriend his due for inspiring part of the upcoming rant-ette.

Why, in name of all that is good and beautiful in the world, why, when so much can be said and alluded, so much beauty and sophistication can be hinted at with a hat, do some people insist on choosing a hat so badly fitted that it looks at best like a bucket on a pumpkin?

Not a day goes by but that I have to be faced with somebody in a too small baseball cap, fully laced up in the back if possible as well, balanced in such a way that the bill protrudes scant millimeters past their forehead with the bulk and bubble of the cap sticking several inches out from the top of their head. And every time it is all I can do to stop myself from removing said hat, enlarging the head-space several hundred yards, and plonking it back so that it actually touches skin on more than the lower brim of the piece.
If that would fail, maybe to remove some of the skull of the wearer, as they are not quite making good use of it as it is anyways.

Seriously people, do we have no mirrors, or do we just refuse to self-reflect?

A pillbox hat on a woman can look instantly stylish, a wide brim harks of society, and a veil has mystery and distance. Men can go for the classic fedora, or a panama for that swanky feel of colonial times, and both sexes can easily go for the fun sportyness of a baseball cap. Hell, even beanies have their skater-charm.

As said, I can’t quite go on and on about hats, don’t know much about hatstory, but as with all clothing, size matters, and choosing the wrong one will rarely make you look smooth and well put together. It will make you look like a dork.

Just Wick It

2007-10-01T12:33:00.000+02:00

Well, quite. I do understand that there is a time and a place for horrible puns, and that the time and place might not be anywhere on the Monday morning, but hey, it’s been made, so we are all going to live with it, ok?

This weekend Boyfriend and I have FINALLY gone to London to see Wicked, the musical about the live of the Wicked Witch of the West, before she became such. Well, we’ve been to London before, but never to see this show in particular, and I am happy that we did.

The show, based on the book of the same name, tells of the green-skinned Elphaba, destined to be the enemy of all of the Land of Oz, of Wizard of OZ fame. And it does this well. Events from the well known WoO are seen from a completely different perspective, showing what has always been believed as true and right to maybe not be so very true and decidedly bendy.

There isn’t much I can tell about the show or the book without giving a lot away, so I choose in stead to harp a little bit about the things I didn’t really like. (Some change of the regular norm that will be ey?)

For one, the two main actresses, one of which (pun intended) had a very impressive voice, seemed to never really get into their role. This might seem a bit unfair to say, after all, the original cast of the show was known for their, and had excellently matched voices, and it is hard to take over a role in any way, but these two, though they certainly didn’t just phone it in, seemed to be faxing with a little bit of listlessness.
As an example, there is a famous anecdote about the original Glinda launching herself onto a set piece so violently she bounce doff on the other end, to much joy of the audience. This will never happen here, because, well, the cast seemed to just not care all that much.
That said; we might’ve just caught them at a bad night, as the show is certainly set up well, and they didn’t look the type to bring of lackadaisical performances as a rule.

I did enjoy the show quite a bit, I like the alternative to settled history it provides, I can remember WoO (although Boyfriend couldn’t) and I can enjoy anything with at lest a few snappy tunes. But I did not enjoy it as much as the two ladies sitting behind us. I can almost safely say that nobody enjoyed it as much as the two ladies sitting behind us. They were holding hands all through the first act, excited and happy to be there (handholding can be a sign of rampant lesbianism or musical enthusiasm, the theatre arts defy gaydar) and they laughed loudly at anything that happened.
And when I say loudly, I mean that when I took the plane back to Holland a day later we had some turbulence from the sound waves of their laughter having been bounced of the Alps and coming back towards England.
That, and they were, quite clearly, stupid. Granted, everybody gets a little stupid when watching a musical, it is the distraction of glitter that does that, but these two were really really stupid. Boyfriend at one point during one of the heavily foreshadowing opening songs nudged me and pointed out the obvious foreshadowing. I did the same thing just after the intermission. The two behind us pointed out EVERYTHING. “Yes, because she is EVIL!!!” “It’s so obvious she is GOOD!!” “There is a tree right THERE!!!!” Everything was a surprise to them, and EVERYTHING was exciting.

And then, just before they moved up in the intermission to cleverly apprehend some empty seats a couple of rows in front, one of them turned to the other and said the one line I will be repeating until the day I die: “I am so excited, my heart is literally beating IN MY CHEST!!!”

Yes, well, quite. So is mine. So is, in fact, the heart of almost everybody I know.

All joking and harping aside, the show is very entertaining, the music is in places absolutely beautiful, and it casts a very well thought through new light on childhood memories. I would advise anyone to go and see this, or at least get the soundtrack.

Stripes at “heart is in chest, all systems normal”

Grtz,
Kevin

Tell me why… (2)

2007-09-25T14:13:00.000+02:00

Because I ran out of steam a little halfway through my blog yesterday, thus cutting it a little shorter than I usually would’ve, I decided to cheat and name some things that happened today as a reason to hate yesterday.
I’d not advise anyone to do temporal displaced hating, as it can get quite tricky, but for the connoisseur it is one of the three most preferred types of hating.

First off, the guy who wears my shoes (GwwmS, or Gwooms) works in my office, and was wearing them today AGAIN. As I am slowly but surely turning into a male Imelda Marcos, I have started to dislike wearing the same pair twice in a row, depending off course on circumstances. (I am sporting a new pair of Adidas again today; man it is nice to be sample-sized) But Gwooms was not only wearing my shoes again, he was wearing exactly the same outfit, AGAIN. And he hardly looks like he guy who’d be able to get a one-night stand if he’d tried well disguised, oozing rohypnol and sporting several different strengths of chloroform on his shawl.
Gwooms’ shawl, by the way, is one of those checkered frilly tea-towel type things one associates with the lesser washed class of terrorist, if Boyfriend were to reply to this blog as well he’d probably have something to say about it.
Anyways, I know I am a great promoter of the “outfit” style of dressing, where a particular piece would most likely be joined with very definite other pieces, so that at least he’s doing correct. You just shouldn’t do it twice in a row. Especially not when wearing my shoes.

Gwooms still far in the future, I was on the bus this morning. As I get the bus about a stop after the central bus-stop in my little town, there is usually the option of nabbing a seat, which I usually do, as it makes reading that much easier. So as well this morning, no worries. Then, a small, slightly fattish (dimension wise she was a tad bit more spherical than the Willendorf-statue) woman cam on the bus, and stood next to me, then proceeding to take of clothes and dislodge bags, and putting them all, along with her dripping wet umbrella, in the luggage netting above my waterproof head and not at all waterproof book.
Now, this is very wrong for two (2) reasons. First (1st), one should never put anything dripping above a reading Kevin, lest one is willing to carry ones ears back home in ones hat. I did not deliver the smack down of whoopass on this woman because, well, we were on a bus, and I was wearing light colored clothes, and fat people stain like all hell. I should know, I am one.

Second (2nd), even though I know that the luggage shelves are there for our convenience, it is not really common to actually use them. It was even downright odd to see them used at all, especially the way this woman used them. After stationing herself next to my left elbow she proceeded to take of layer after layer after layer of clothing, one more horrendously colored than the last, and piling them onto their less recently discarded counterparts. She was doing this from about 50cm away, though, meaning she had to lean across me, the person next to her, and the person behind me to get her preferred amount of color coded annoyance out among the masses.
Twenty seconds after having stripped down to a simply revolting piece of material that could have been a shift, a tent, or a muumuu, she noticed her stop coming up, and started to do the whole thing in reverse, donning clothing left right and center so as to be fully dressed when she arrived at her bus stop just 3 stops later. All in all, she could have easily walked it, mine is a small town, and the bus curves around it so that the space between where she got on to the bus and where she got of was about half the traveled distance, and would’ve taken all of three minutes to walk, and three and a half to roll.

Strange, strange fat woman.

Grtz,
K.

Tell me why…

2007-09-24T14:23:00.000+02:00

First off, I really do hate myself now. It’s Monday, and this blog is about this Monday and the few little reasons why I am not the happiest of Kevins on this particular Monday. Well, I am saying that wrong, actually, I am a reasonably happy Kevin, but also a cranky one. Because it is Monday and assorted other reasons yet to be touched upon in this blog.
So my title today, obviously, is an allusion to the well known song asking why certain people don’t like Mondays. And I hate that. Not because I don’t like the song, because I do actually like the song, but because it is a song often hummed/sung/tapped out on tables by people who simply don’t like Mondays. And, since very few of those people would open fire on a grade school, most of those people have no business doing whatever it is they are doing to this song.
And since I don’t actually intend to open fire on a grade school myself, I really shouldn’t either. But I did. Hypocrisy, thy name is Kevin.
That said, I would’ve gladly opened fire on a number of people, not least the fuckwad that set my alarm for 6.45 this morning (me), so I do have some right to the allusion.

Anyways, those who know me know that I am more or less non-secretly a person who thinks happiness in life is for me and practically nobody else. Those people whose happiness is not a thorn in my side are a small and personally (by me) selected group of individuals who I deem worthy, by virtue of any number of factors, to be deserving of some happiness themselves. For all other people, happiness just seems... well, wrong.
And never as wrong as when they seem to be getting their happiness from something I get my happiness from.
This morning, walking from Tram™ to Job™ I noticed someone wearing my sneakers. Well, not really, as mine were at that point safely at home, resting in my closet, but the same model converse high-tops in black with red piping and stitching. Now, I understand that they do not wait for me to sell these things to people, nor do they take them off the shelves as soon as I have slotted my bankcard through the little machine, so I am prepared to sometimes see things I have in my closet on other people as well. But it has been happening a little bit too often lately, and the annoyance here is cumulative.
Shoes make me happy, therefore I assume shoes make this other person happy, and he is getting his happiness from MY shoes (well, sorta) Thus, he needs some shooting. But then, it was a Monday morning and my aim isn’t remarkably good with pretend rifles as it is so I decided to let it pass, and just fervently hope he’d run into something big and preferably cement-filled on his way to his Job™
Also, this time it wasn’t as bad as when I’d be actually wearing the things myself, but thanks to Boyfriend’s Adidas-employed connections, I am toting a pair of new and rather cool dark blue Adicolor sneakers, so I am a little more forgiving in my deadwishings today.

Moving on into work, I am about knee-deep in idiot-drool by now, and quite frankly, considering my spiffy new shoes, it is not a place I want to be. Idiot drool doesn’t really stain, but it does get tacky pretty swiftly.
But enough for now, just a little rant to break up the style-sections. I’ll try to keep updating reasonably often.
No longer having stripes,
Grtz,
Kevin

Style: Gender Inequality

2007-09-21T14:01:00.000+02:00

When looking around oneself in any given high-street or shopping arcade, or even online, in magazines and on the ever-present billboards, one can’t escape noticing that men are getting rather a raw-deal, fashion wise. And we do, actually. Where women have a wide array of clothes to choose from when it comes to style, feel and intent, men can basically opt for about three or four choices, and that’s it. This has not always been the case, of course, men used to be as ranging in their attire as women, but, having been dubbed in some interminable past as the more robust and steadfast of the sexes, we have now been corralled in a very narrow realm of acceptability.
A swift comparison:

Women -Men
The little black dress -Suit (Black)
A little red dress -Suit (Black or Charcoal)
“his” shirt and jeans -Your own shirt and jeans
This wonderful silk blouse with
a simply DIVINE pencil skirt and my
new dark leather boots -Your own (nice) shirt and jeans
Efficient pant-suit in charcoal -Suit (Black or Navy)
Skirt and jacket -Suit (Black)
Cocktail-dress -Suit
Evening-gown -Suit (Maybe tails)
Wedding dress -Suit (Maybe tails or morning)
Granny pants -Boxer or brief
Thong -Boxer or brief
Baby doll -Boxer or brief
Garter belt, stockings, bodice -Boxer or brief (but nice ones)

See a pattern developing here? As a rule, women can walk into a shop and basically buy the same outfit umpteen times in slightly different colors and materials and have a number of different outfits for any mood or occasion, where men walk into a store, buy basically one outfit, and thus have one outfit. But he’ll have five copies of that one outfit.

I believe that this is the reason why men and women cannot shop together. Quite simply it is amazing for any man bred in the last half of this century to see why it is so difficult to pick the “right” items of clothing, mostly because whenever he went shopping there were only a few basic things to choose from. So he gets impatient, she gets annoyed, and it’ll be a cold night in bed tonight...
Two things need to be mentioned here;
1) New appreciation of men’s fashion and grooming has made sure that the availability of different items for the well dressed man (or the badly dressed one, as the case may be) has gone up quite a bit. Thus, the classical bored-with-shopping man will gradually die out a little, and is to an extent a stereotype that many modern men will not identify with at all.
2) Even though the above is an exaggeration it is not a terribly big one, men do have less choice and options as far as clothing is concerned as women. To a certain extent, the difference is academic, as there is still far more than enough to choose from for us, off course, but just less than there is for them. Also, categorizing for men is a dangerous thing to draw conclusions from, as one suit is not another and different cuts and materials have wildly different effects. That said, the same applies for women’s clothing, and the difference remains.

Obviously, the shape of the human body has shifted a little in the last 10000 years or so, but unless one subscribes too literally to Plato, the general number of appendages and suchlike hasn’t changed in any but the more unfortunate cases. Thus, women having the choice of pants and skirts, and men only having pants, limiting our respective options by about half.

Is this mean? No, not really. Is it by times unfair? Yes, absolutely. Is it avoidable? No, not unless the man-skirt gains a little more acceptance, and apart from certain subcultures I am not really seeing that happen anytime soon.

But men do have their options.
I prefer to think of clothing as a sort of blank canvas. Everybody wears clothing and everybody dos it differently, and an individual choice of material, style and color can make a lot form a very basic set. One can think of clothing as a uniform with the option to customize, and nothing shows off individualities as well as a uniform.
There is a tendency among writers to tackle “classic” subjects. The Ghost story, the Vampire story, the Romantic Comedy. Because these are almost archetypical styles, and roughly follow a set of rules and lines within the story, it is a very familiar place to be for the reader. But writers use these typical subjects to show of their own styles and turns, and the devil as well as the divine is really in the details here. And so could, and should, clothing be used.

Boyfriend, lovely man as he is, has a certain personal style in his clothing. He likes cufflinks over buttons, prefers a well cut suit over a flashy one, and has an apparent lifelong desire to own a few well tailored bankers’ shirts. The one with the colored body but white collars and cuffs. A commendable desire, I say, not only because I think he looks good in a suit, but also because a well-cut, classical suit with a well chosen shirt really is a point where it is almost impossible to go wrong.
That said, I do think he is a little too conservative in his attire, and most of our shopping expeditions can be scripted as a good half hour of me badgering him to get out of the mold a little bit, until he gets angry, and we get something about 10% away from his initial idea and onto my preferred result. As a rule, a pleasant exercise in clashing taste with an almost 100% success rate in general goodlookingness of Boyfriend.
As can be seen from the above, I have a completely different idea about formal wear, and have a tendency to be a little less traditional. I go for the bolder ties, contrasting colors and patterns, and have a tendency to be a little more ostentatiously dressed. I think it looks good, and I have been told thus enough times to have a confirmed opinion here.

What I am trying to say here is that we are both wearing a suit, might even both be wearing a suit of the same cut and color, but the way it’s been worn, and what it’s been worn with, can differ dramatically. A bright shirt or tie is a marked difference from a demure one, and different shoes or belts can do a lot as well.
Providing one remains reasonable, but with a personal flourish, it is very easy to adapt the uniform of a suit to an expression of individuality.

But it is, regretfully, easy to go wrong here as well. As a rule, patterns should either match all over, or clash all over. So a striped suit with a striped shirt and a striped tie is ok, if a little staid, but a striped-striped-dotted look will make you look like the tie you wanted to wear was eaten by the dog. Then again, striped-dotted-tartan is a choice, and with the right colors can look very well put together.

Style: Happenings, too much or not enough

2007-09-20T13:42:00.000+02:00

Another slightly more general message from the more stylistically inclined parts of my personality, this time of an oft made mistake in dressing and adorning ones’ self: stuff.
Yes, stuff, that’s the technical term for all the things that are happening on or in your outfit. Accessories, colors, prints, they all add up to a busy or sedate look, depending on choices. They also add up to a look that suits you to a tee, or a look that you should not consider even if you know everybody around you is or will shortly be blind.

So how does one explain succinctly when or how something in or on an outfit is something that “happens” instead of just a part of the base outfit? Good question, and not easy to answer. Well, actually, it is. Anything that is NOT the base color or cut of your outfit, hair or skin is “something happening”. Yes, skin and hair as well, no outfit is an outfit without someone in it, and just because it works on someone else does not mean it works on you, so you should always consider what you look like yourself before considering what you look like in a particular piece or set of clothes.
But as far as happenings go, consider this to include, but not exclusively mean, earrings, prints, tassels, streaks, belts, shoes, socks, bracelets, necklaces, glitter, feathers and so on ad infinitum.

As a swift illustration, a few outfits, one with almost nothing happening, one with a lot happening: In these two outfits it is easy to see which of the two has more happening to it than the other. The first outfit has simple lines, few decorations, and few distractions from the base of the outfit. I counted on first sight the three points highlighted, the sleeves, the beadwork on the bodice, and the beads and feathers on the train.
The second outfit immediately strikes as a lot busier, and not for nothing either, six items of distraction noted on the first look, to wit: the grey blazer to offset the black and green, the bow on that blazer, the long stole, the green shirt, the bag, and the pattern on the skirt in contrasting colors.
Which is better? Neither, depending on what you want to achieve. More stylish? Again, neither. There is no hard and fast rule what to wear where, after all. These two outfits are both very stylish, if in completely different ways.

Now for somewhat of a test. Two more pictures:
Which of these two has more happening?

Neither? Roughly correct. Both have a number of details and points that distract from the general outfit. The red outfit has the cap, the collar, the gloves, the wide cut of the pants, the epaulettes, the make up and the sown in crease of the lapel, where the colorful flapper has her shoes, her make-up, the hair, the fur, the coat-pattern, the hair-decoration and the large patterning on the dress to accentuate what she is wearing.

But how to decide when you have too much happening to an outfit? Well, a reasonable rule of thumb would appear gestaltlike from the above two pictures. To my mind, the red outfit has exactly the right amount of things done to the basic cut of her outfit, although she could stand to lose the hat, whereas the flapper has a riot of distractions, and it takes a good measure of woman to not be lost between all the contrasts and attention grabbers. Thus, it would almost be safe to say that contrast is the key here. If we look at the above two pictures again, and rate the distractions, according to contrast, then the red outfit suddenly has no distractions, as none contrast with the outfit itself, whereas the flapper has almost no distractions that don’t contrast at all.

One or two things that offset an outfit, like a belt or a pocket handkerchief, can look very stylish, but if it becomes impossible to see what the outfit was all about in the first place, style is often thrown right out the window. It has been said that one should create an outfit, stand in front of a mirror and remove the first thing that catches ones eye, and this is a good rule to live by, as it would nine times out of ten be the thing that contrasts most sharply with the rest of the outfit. Adding an extra piece so you have something to safely remove would be considered cheating, by the way, and cheating is rarely a recipe for style. No one really likes looking like they have just thrown something together in the morning, and nobody really has to.

Alternatively, if you stand in front of your mirror and notice that nothing catches your eye, you might be in danger of looking dull. And there is no style in dullness either. But then one has to find items that work well with an already chosen outfit, and that isn’t easy. Men, we have the positive side that almost all jewelry marketed for us will look good on most outfits; simple bracelets or necklaces will easily get you from Jeans-and-t-shirt to metrosexual. Women have it a little less easy, and are tempted to go overboard where men remain too bland.
A simple cut, easy line with little in the way of distraction can be helped by a brooch or a reasonably sparkly necklace, or even by putting a little extra time in hair and make-up, using your outfit merely as a frame for a pretty face.

To end this thing, men, everything above applies to us as well as to the women, just because examples in female fashion are easier to give does not mean we get a fee ride here. To illustrate, I am leaving you with two pictures of current men’s fashion, both with roughly the same amount of happenings, but not quite with the same effect.

Style: General Comments

2007-09-19T16:30:00.000+02:00

Because any reasonable Style section in any reasonable magazine is going to repeat itself over and over again anyways like a hamster reading out the brand of his spinnywheelthing, mine should not be a real exception to that rule. However, to make my own life and yours as a reader a little bit more interesting and in the long run rewarding, I am going to pre-empt the whole repetition thing by going into some base values of what style is and should be, so I can just allude to the main points later on and safely assume everybody will know what I am talking about. Or wrongly assume everybody knows what I am talking about. Same difference.

Style vs. Fashion

Style is not the same as fashion, although sometimes they do overlap quite a bit. It is entirely possible to be imminently stylish but not at all fashionable, and vice versa. The first, however, is far more likely. It has been said (by me, often) that style is what stays after fashion goes away, and up to a certain level, this is true, providing one takes a very long view of fashion, say a good 1000 years or so. As a rule, style is intricately personal, and uses what is available, where fashion is group-based, and creates availability.

Common sense

Common sense is one of the mayor points in both creating and having (a) style, and both are almost impossible to achieve without it. Obviously, those completely devoid of common sense but still striving for style can hire a stylist, but that would be a sensible thing to do, thus negating the lack of common sense again.
Applying common sense to appearance and wardrobe is actually surprisingly easy to advice, but very hard to do, judging from the amount of utter crap that still lingers despondently unworn on several of the shelves in my own wardrobe.
I will not give a hard and fast line on this topic, as I hope to brush against it often in these bits and most of this column will be heavily based on what I deem common sense anyway.

Size, or “the fact that it fits you does not mean it’s your size”

This particular subject is going to get its own blog, obviously, but bears saying something now. There really is very little more detrimental to looking good than picking a wrong size for your body. This goes both ways; as dressing in things that are too small can be as detracting from your looks as dressing in too over-sized a fabrication. Depressingly enough, a great deal of people have no idea what size they should be wearing, and thus wear things they really should not even have looked at in the first place. As a hint, anything that pushes your body into a shape it does not usually have is probably too small for you, and anything that does not show the shape your body usually has stands a good change of being too big. Neither is flattering in theory, and most certainly neither is stylish. One is almost always best of with things that skim one’s contours but leave some room to move comfortably.

Comfort

As style is dependent not only on you and your body, but also on your environment and personal situation, giving advice concerning comfort is difficult. Slack pants and a big t-shirt certainly are comfortable, but not in a large social gathering, and they certainly won’t make you feel more comfortable in the wrong company. That said; well-cut boot-cuts, good shoes and a fitted shirt can be less easy to move around in, but make you feel a lot more on top of the situation mostly.
All things being equal, however, you will look good in what feels good, and what feels good will show itself when you think for a little bit about the situations you are likely to encounter.

Vibe

A conversation with Boyfriend a little while ago about the way people dress actually prompted this series of solipsistic extravaganza, and most importantly, the fact that a lot of people miss the plank completely when it concerns what they want to show with the way they dress and what it actually shows.
A good example here is the classic comb-over, which generations of men think as shown a full head of hear where it more correctly points out the fact that there actually is no full head of hair. A woman dressing a little too brightly and too small thinking it shows she has a youthful outlook on life stands a better chance of showing not just her real age but going several years over when viewed from outside her own head.
To a certain extent, it is unavoidable that even the most careful planning and attention to detail might sometimes miss its objective, but the likelihood of this situation decreases massively when one puts some effort into staying within the lines of ones ability.

All in all, I have started this Style-section of my blog to put into words my own thoughts on the subject, but also because I have been asked in the past to get some ideas on paper about this. It is in no way meant as a style guide or some such, although I personally think it could become one over time. For now, it is just a showcase for me of mistakes I have seen made and can illustrate, and the wonderful things one sees and can share. And it is all about sharing, off course.

Fashion!

2007-09-19T14:58:00.001+02:00

Well… fashion… fashion… style, maybe. And even if that, MY ideas of style, which might not always match with other’s ideas of same. Having had some small schooling in the field of fashion, and a long abiding interest in the field of style, and having made my own good measure of momentous fuck-ups, I believe I have acquired at my young age a good eye for “what looks good” and what doesn’t, and a reasonable ability to match things from that first category to the people around me and myself.

I think my greatest fabfashionmoment was when M, a friend who shall remain an initial for this scriptorial, asked me to join her on a shopping trip, for shits and giggles. We arrived at a large clothing store where we swiftly dived into the stacks, pulling out a lot of things we thought looked ok, among which a pair of dusty green linen pants and a brightly printed purple top. Well, I thought it looked nice, she didn’t. Didn’t, until she came out of the changing rooms (some pressure was applied) and completely loved the outfit. She was actually commented upon it several times, and called me very excitedly when she saw a tv-presenter dressed in exactly the same outfit. I was very happy then, and am so still.

So I think I have a reasonable eye for the gross lines of style, and as such am going to create a number of blogs on that and directly related topics, starting of with the one directly after this one, which should be published later today. As a title and category for these, I will try to create an easy to reach label. Most likely: Style:[topic]

Feedback will be, as always, greatly appreciated.

Back is I

2007-09-17T14:39:00.000+02:00

Hello Possums.

It’s been a while since my last blog, and I have to apologise. As idle hands are the devil’s playground, these particular hands have been a small swing and a bouncy chicken for the last six or so weeks, both with regards to the actual day-job and the blogging addendum to said day-job.

Basically, I have been looking for work, and because boredom leads to inactivity for me, I have also not been blogging. Not been doing an enormous amount of anything, actually. Well, Boyfriend has purchased quite a large storage devise, and the paperwork concerning mortgages and suchlike has kept us both busy translating and then fighting over the translations for a few days, and Housemates return from the US and the thus added social options of seemingly endless picture viewing-parties have accounted for about 600 years of my time as well, but really, there is no excuse, I have been a bad blogger.

But now I have a job again, and thus I need my belletristic reprieve from the hazards of a customer-facing profession. Also, in my time of idleness I have been able to watch a number of movies and suchlike, and I might have something to say about things.

Those things, however, will have to wait for now, as this is simply a message to let every single one of my readers (5 people, still) know that I am both back and in good enough mental and physical help to start blogging again.

Stripes at 00010 “we apologise for the gap in delivery”

Kevin.

Snobism, zombies and the loss of emotional speed,

2007-08-08T23:41:00.000+02:00

I consider myself a snob. Not too the extent that I believe I am better than anybody else, but to the extent that I have trouble understanding or really believing that anybody can lack having experienced what I have experienced and still call themselves a cultured human being. Thus, if someone expresses to me the fact they believe they are a cultured human being, I immediately assume they will have seen every movie I have ever seen, listened to every song I have ever listened to, and eaten the same food in the same restaurants I have eaten them in. Not only that, but I take for granted that they have taken the same thing from all these experiences I have taken from them. The basic result of this is the situation where I will start quoting and rehashing and suchlike, and when I am met with the customary blank stare of my conversational partner, who almost inevitably never really paid that much attention to the dress worn by the second interviewee in a movie they didn’t really like five years ago, I immediately assume this conversational partner is full of shit and not worth talking to. Snobbery, thy name is Kevin.

This is not to say I only do or see those things I consider high-browed, as can be evidenced by the massive amount of people who saw me trying to masticate a hotdog last Saturday, while simultaneously trying to hide the evidence of doing so with all the verve of an elephant trying to hide in a mouse-hole.
In light of my ongoing quest to never miss a culturally important development in the realms of schlock-horror and bad exploitation, I have done something yesterday I have not often done before and more than likely never will do again. I have sat through what was effectively a zombie movie. And I despise zombie-movies. Why? They give me nightmares.

But as soon as the silver sneak screen yesterday flashed the opening credits of “Planet Terror”, Robert Rodriguez ‘ contribution to the double feature escapade set up by him and Quentin Tarantino, two things happened:
1) Boyfriend assured me that he would protect me from the zombies
2) I remembered that even though I hate Zombies I do love Rose McGowan, and the idea of her with a gun for a leg did it for me, in a completely platonic move way

So we stayed, and watched, and retched. Yes, retched. Without giving away even a single quark of the plot, this movie has gore. Good, fun, wholesome gore. Gore that befits the set-up of a seventies flashback really, which is the general idea behind the Grindhouse-double feature, the other half of which consists of Tarantino’s “Death Proof” which also has plenty of gore, even though it lacks somewhat in the zombie department.

Because for me it is almost impossible to talk about a movie without spoiling it like a tomato left out in the sun, I want to talk about the double feature idea itself, and more specifically about the moment where both movies lose some of their speed. And I am going to do this after this short introductory interlude that will seem to have nothing to do with the plot of this blog so far.

There is an meme running rampant in the mind of the horror aficionado that one should never “open the door”, for what I can imagine behind the door will always be infinitely more frightening than what is going to actually be behind the door. Suggestion, swift flashes and shadows hinting at the monster are more effective in many ways than the actual image of a slobbering pile of well animated plastic. Thus the build up to the reveal of what is behind the door should be a slow and subtle process, reminiscent of the best works of H.P. Lovecraft and Alfred Hitchcock. If the monster is shown to soon, the tension leaves swiftly to be replaced with scared little jumps whenever it appears suddenly again. That said, the monster should at some point be seen and explained, or there is no emotional investment in surviving the horror, which, after all, is not absolutely there.

To my mind the current spate of wet-little-ghostly-kids-in-long-hallways-style J-horror flaunts the rule above like there is no tomorrow, often staging a good part of the action after we have had a graphic and lengthy close-up of whatever is animating the little kid in all her glorious wetness. To me this means I am full of tension for about half an hour into the movie until we see the tentacle puppet master and then I sit there for an hour more thinking “Bah”.
I have started describing this as Emotional Speed vs Actual Speed, where ES is the swiftness of the emotions inside me and AS is the speed of what is actually happening in the movie. As long as I am investing in the development of the movie in my mind, the ES is quite high, but it is likely to happen during character build up and development, which means AS is usually low. Then, when shit hits the proverbial fan, the ES goes down and the AS starts up, with ES running steadily along in the background because I know these people now and want them to survive. Or die horribly if I find them truly annoying, which happens often.

The two “Grindhouse” movies lack nothing in AS, but quite a bit of ES. Strangely enough, and much as I would like to deny it, the Tarantino flick moves along at a pleasant to a swift pace in both cases for the first half, leaving a little of in the second one as far as ES is concerned, but in an entertaining and rewarding way, I would almost say. “Planet terror” Started of swiftly, stayed swift, and used characters and situations so darned swift in set up and movement it was almost impossible to invest emotionally. The few characters that were set up calmly and nicely instilled nothing so much as a “good on her” feeling in myself and Boyfriend, and the rest of the movie just invited to be torn apart.

All in all, choosing between the two is not something I would do, personally. They are enjoyable in their own right and work well together. If you are however looking for the better movie, see “Death Proof”. Not because it is excellent, but because I spent some time after the movie talking about it with people, dissecting it to some extent and wondering about it’s inner workings. With “Planet Terror” all I said was “That was gross, and I hope I don’t get nightmares”. Which I didn’t, by the way.

Well, it is late now, and I need my beauty sleep,

Till next time, stripes at “any nightmare free zombie is a good zombie”
Kevin

The Look of Love

2007-07-19T16:31:00.000+02:00

If the book of love is long and boring, the look of love is rarely so. This morning I had the dubious pleasure of being spectator of a missed match as profound as was I watching Dr. Zhivago. I was honestly tempted to start whistling Laura’s theme, but couldn’t think of the melody.

I take the bus in the morning, and due to issues with my normal buslines, I know have to take a bus in between my normal busses. Getting into this blasted second bus that I usually share with an assortment of drooling idiots and human flotsam (that last category I consider myself a proud member of, but not at 8 in the morning (because I am hardly human at that time (if ever))) this morning my beauty appreciating eye noticed a blond young man with absurdly blue eyes. This was as may be, and not really interesting as I have my own beautiful man at home and little need of blue eyed men on busses, so I launched myself into the fray of finding the least droolcovered seats and took out my book.

I noticed at the next stop that BEB (Blue Eyed Blond) was roughly in my line of sight. I also noticed that he was sort of immediately in the line of sight of a dark haired boy that had just entered the bus. This was a fact that was not missed by DHB (Dark Haired Boy) as he was basically rooted at the spot.
It was seriously beautiful to see. This new boy obviously immediately infatuated with BEB, but since this last was looking out of the window DHB could do little more but standing there with brown eyes melting over the object of his sudden affection.
Checking himself he turned round, at which precise moment BEB looked around as well, caught DHB in profile and the same situation basically happened in reverse.
BEB looked at DHB’ back and profile as a drowning man looking at a lifeboat, and with the recognizable hopelessness that comes with complete and utter love and the uncertainty of how to achieve it.

For the remainder of the bustrip these two managed to continue not looking at each other with a precision that would have put teams of synchronized swimmers to shame. When one turned, the other looked, and they were constantly split-seconds from noticing the other mirroring their grownng despair. Had but one looked a second longer they would’ve really seen each other, and who knows what would have happened. Every romantic fibre in my body screamed at life’s dishonesty at keeping these two apart, and at the same time all those fibres rejoiced at the idea that this type of drama hasn’t left the lives we lead today.

I hope they met up at the last stop and exchanged shy smiles and glances, they looked like they would have been a very nice couple, but in my head it is inevitable that they met up, and are already well on their way to their first cup of coffee.
It was like watching a really sweet romantic movie, frustrating, gladdening, uplifting. Now I am at work, waiting to go home and have my own lovey moments with the guy that luckily for me DID look the right way at the right moment, and has been looking that way a good many times after that.

For now, stripes at “follow your heart”,

Kevin

A rare restaurant review.

2007-06-18T16:26:00.000+02:00

Umoja, meaning “unity” in Swahili but apparently “slow and rude” in almost any other language, is the name of a restaurant that Boyfriend had passed and noticed a few times on his way to the station, and he wanted to try it and see if it was as good as it looked.
So, when we were invited by Ms O, a friend of Boyfriends’ to spend a night eatin’ and boozin’ in Amsterdam, he decided to prompt this culinary interest and guided us through its doors for the first try-out of this remarkable restaurant.

First, and last, if I have anything to say about it.

Truth be told, this restaurant really does look great. Very stylish, very clean, and very comfortable. This comfort quickly evaporated when we sat down at the table, as the hip-looking chairs had really understood the idea behind looking “design” and were about as comfortable as spending the night on a banister. That said, we had one of the few higher, 4 person tables, the other tables were low, and set up to seat two, and looked more comfortable.

After having sat down for a while, actually quite a long while, we got our first round of drinks. Since there were three of us, we asked if the 4th couvert could be taken away as well, which is only easier, and since I still do not drink anything alcoholic, I asked if my wineglasses could be taken away as well. The reaction to all this was the first time I felt like just leaving, as my question was met as was I a 3-year old sitting at the grown-ups table. For a second I had to check Ms O and Boyfriends face to be sure I had asked if my wineglasses could be taken away, as it was entirely possible I had asked the waiter to take the monster from under my bed, judging from his response.

Things did not quite improve from there on in. Our waitresses consisted of two people, a tallish man (TM) and a short woman (SW). It was tallish man that had already relocated me to the kiddies table by virtue as approach, so I was obviously more kindly disposed to short woman. SW at one point suddenly appeared beside my right arm with enough suddenness to completely freak me out, which is also always a good basis for a friendly relationship.

Anyway, about half an hour after ordering our drinks, we actually got to see them, and the tone was set for the evening. The tone, and the speed. The speed being “slow”.
We opted to go for the “surprise of the chef” 4 course meal, and it lasted for 4 hours. Which was, quite simply, too long.
Not that the food was bad, it was absolutely acceptable food, reasonable quality, and prepared with quite some care. A shame that it did not rise above the standard of a home-cooked meal in terms of quality or inventiveness.
But really, the speed which was garnered for almost everything, or better, the lack thereof, was what truly turned me off this restaurant. It is all nice and well doing a surprise menu, but of the 4 courses plus amuse bouche and bread, only the main course was actually warm, the rest being salads and carpaccios, which need not take more than 15 minutes. The fact that every course had about 40 minutes till the next one was absurd. It started to be a race against the loss of topics of conversation after a while, and in a group that has me and Boyfriend this is not a common occurrence.
At some point the wine that Ms O had ordered smelled and tasted suspiciously of cork. Not a good thing in wine, this taste, and it was sent back. After the customary “while” a new glass was brought, with an insulting little ditty about how he had decided to open a new bottle, just for her. Well, yes, and the fact that the last bottle had been fungussaly spoiled, duckweed.

The absolute coup de grace for this restaurants’ chances of revisiting was the asking for the bill. Well, not the asking, but the delivery. It came about 20 minutes after we asked (reasonable) and we were then left alone for almost half an hour (unacceptable). After a while, boyfriend walked to the back of the restaurant, he was going to pay with his bankcard anyway and the machines to do so are usually around the register.
Boyfriend came back swiftly, had apparently been ordered back to his chair and told to wait until they came by with their little machine. This is obviously just not done, he is there, the machine is there, let the man pay, I say.
But well, back he went, and after about 20 more minutes, he decided to try again.
This time he was again told that he needed to stay in his seat, as they were serving desserts, and off course he understood (no).

At least the little mobile PINthing followed him to the table this time, we paid the absurdly overpriced bill, WITH the cost of the spoiled wine on it as well, and left the restaurant, deciding to never eat there again, and the resolution to be more assertive in restaurants from now on, as I had wanted to leave after the first snubbing and should've.

I hope all who read this decide the same on the restaurants part, and remember that we pay these people to have a good time in their places, and as such can expect a return on our investment.

Stripes at “never again”

Kevin.

Yes, but is it Art?

2007-06-05T12:47:00.001+02:00

Last Sunday, Housemate, Boyfriend and I were up and about at the ungodly hour of 3a.m. to participate in a large scaled installation piece in the centre of Amsterdam. The reasonably well-known artist Spencer Tunick had chosen the background of an inner-city parking garage to stage about 1500 people and create his idea about an artful installation.
The word that wasn’t used anywhere in that last little paragraph but that paradoxically was used in our house and almost all conversations and news-items about the installation was “naked”.

And naked we had to be, we three and ALL the other 1500 people participating. This takes some mental adjusting. Nobody in our house has any real issues body-wise, it comes from being well attractive and all that, but still, there is a good difference between not minding if a towel slips in front of the significant other and just stepping out of your clothes in front of not only 1500 strangers but also every cabdriver in town that happens to pass the parking garage. The fact it is to my knowledge the only 24-hour shop in the vicinity only served to make the situation a tad more interesting.

Anyways, in town by three, in the garage by half past three, and the waiting began. First all the people signing in, then the waiting for the photographer and volunteers.
I think it was about 5 in the morning, dawn already breaking across the country, when we finally had a remarkably convoluted explanation of what we were supposed to do. But really, convoluted. I think we had about 25 minutes of explanation for the in total 5 different configurations, and they were not explained in a nice “first we do this, then this, then we go there, and do this” sort of way, but more like a high school kid improvising his show-and-tell bit.
At one point the man actually went “And then for the second part, I am going to select 17 people, and I will give you all slips of paper, and that will tell you what to do for the fourth part, but I might select more than 17, like if I want to have two groups, but then it might be for the second installation, so it could be that these 30 people need me to tell them to wait, and they should, because, well, after the first I need all the men downstairs.” Euh…. Right. Next year, make a plan and get someone who can actually string words together in a cohesive sentence to explain it to the peeps.

After all this less than perfect explanation, we were counted off in groups, more or less pushed towards our locations at the edge of the building, told to find a spot, and to disrobe on command.
And then the nerves obviously start kicking in. I am not really a naked person, by nature. In fact, I think I am, of the three in the house, the least naked as a rule. Housemate has a tendency to dry up after a shower in front of her compute, Boyfriend spends time naked whenever he is in a bedroom. I prefer to be shirtless but boxered, so to speak. But I had signed up for this thing, so naked I had to get.
And I did, and it was surprisingly easy at that. The fact everybody is to conscious of themselves to really pay attention to other people helped, obviously, and the direct and somewhat expected anonymity of being just a little pink blob in a sea of little pink blobs.

Naked and well, we went through the least interesting part of the day, the actual shooting. Well, least interesting, we had to perch on small folding chairs on the edge of a 6 story high car-park, and lean out somewhat across the ledge of the building. It was precarious to say the least, and damn uncomfortable to say somewhat more.
Pictures made, we went back inside, put some clothes on, went to the second location, disrobed and went through the whole positioning again, which basically ended the day for Boyfriend and me.
Housemate was sort of selected to participate in another installation, a tremendously cool one, so we decided to hang around and see if she was “used” by the artist. As it turned out, she wasn’t, but it was still cool to sort of see the inner workings of a creative mind be expressed through the use of other people’s bodies.
After a reasonable breakfast, Housemate went home, Boyfriend and I went to catch a couple of movies, aided by copious amounts of energy drinks to keep us awake. I ended the weekend with a slight red bull addiction, which is thankfully receding already.

So far for the actual events of the situation, now on to the observations.

Was it art? Well, yes and no. Art is totally subjective, and as such can’t really be judged, and there certainly were some very interesting images created by the combination of skin and concrete.
But really, the nudity is somewhat juvenile in my opinion, and it has already been done. Installations like these aren’t shocking or really confrontational anymore, and therefore lose a little bit of their poignancy.
Is this a problem for me? No. Tunick is a revered artist at the moment and the chance to participate in a project like this is not something that should be waved away just because it looks like a student prank gone demon-boil. But the artist’s idea that he’ll be doing this till he is 90 years old to me sounds like a bold claim, after all, being a one joke puppy never really served anybody well since the villagers of the alpine town had decided that they now understood how the elephants were a smart plan.

Nudity, though natural and functional and sometimes even beautiful, really has no place in a parking garage or petrol station. For one thing, grime gets literally everywhere, and is difficult to dislodge.

Nudity, though natural and functional and sometimes even beautiful, is not ALWAYS beautiful. And it is certainly not beautiful when a group of naked men are asked to kneel down and the man in front of you takes a step backwards before he kneels giving the term “brown-nosing” and all too literal feel. I was barely missed, and happily so.

The chance to ogle was off course taken up by almost everybody, some a little more surreptitious then others, but I know for a fact there was one small Asian gentlemen that was constantly about 2 inches away from being decked by Boyfriend, something much appreciated by myself, as I had no glasses on and could not really see that well who was impinging on my honour. I did decide the diminutive lech was after Boyfriend, but he disagrees.

All in all, a good experience, very interesting, and something that just “needs to be done” but not something I’d swiftly do again without knowing what the installation would be well in advance. I have no problem with the nudity, I do have some issues with the lack of organisation.
Anyways, the project is called Dream Amsterdam, and the website lives at http://www.dreamamsterdam.nl The pictures will be displayed on the streets of Amsterdam from the end of June onward.

For now,

Stripes at “yeah my shoes are somewhere in my bag, over there, with the rest of my clothes”

Kevin

On Birds, and the trust we put in them.

2007-05-24T12:12:00.000+02:00

Having been in a less than light mood lately, I have started to re-read parts of the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Not because in good goth fashion he holds my dire souls twixt the measures of his verses’ pincered grip, but because when one is in existential dread it is always good to realise the melodrama of ones actions, thus to negate them into self mockery and therefore good humour. After all, when one feels whiney and wallowing, what better to do than to root out someone who is even more versed and mired in the melancholic mood that permeates the occasional week?

Well, one can crawl into the embrace of one’s lovely boyfriend and watch sappy movies until the mood improves, but my lovely boyfriend is far away from me at the moment and this option was therefore not open for me, and watching sappy movies alone in a mood like that is a recipe for disaster only eclipsed by the horror of country music while in the presence of a warm bath and razor blades.

Mood thus through literature abated, I started thinking about a theme touched upon in EAP and other works of writing and mythology, specifically, the bird that perches in a book-lined study atop a bust of some Greek personage, intoning that single word of anguish to a grief-ridden narrator. And even more specifically still, about the mental state of someone who would put the wellbeing of his mind and soul into the uncaring talons and opinions of a feathered and beaked opponent.

Not that he is in bad company, this nameless narrator shouting at the blackened shadow above his study’s entrance.
Odin, the managing director god of the Norse pantheon was aided by two ravens who embodied thought and memory and who traversed the earth each day as his eyes and ears, reporting back to him each night.
The earlier versions of the Cinderella tales have the ghost of the protagonist’s mother personified by a small bird denouncing the stepsisters and stepmother as treacherous creatures set on bending the world to their desires.
Athena, goddess of wisdom, was accompanied by an owl, symbol of contemplation and dread calm.

In many tales, birds are, if not the harbingers of step sisterly betrayal, at least messengers for a world beyond our own, to be reached only through the medium of air. Obvious symbolism, air being the element of the mind, where fire and water belong to heart and soul, and earth to the material body. Thus, air, being the mind and the reason within it, would obviously bring forth those that judge or guide without heart, weightless retainers to a force above our own ability to deal with it.

Such a shame that the more factual nature of birds never factors into the approximating of divinity. Because birds are, well, vicious and stupid, to say the least.
If I was to put my mental and emotional state in the talons, beaks, paws or otherwise of any non-antropomorph being, I would certainly never pick the one species of animal that does little else but peck disheartenedly at the occasional dropped French frie in some godforsaken square in almost all big cities or makes it a habit to pound itself to death at any and all available pane of glass.

Granted, dropped French fries and panes of glass were not overabundantly represented in the classical worlds, but I find it hard to believe the birds have only gotten stupid in the years since the inventions of these things. After all, would evolution alone not have delivered us birds of remarkable intelligence and eloquence, if they have divine beings and motherly guides to start out from?

In the specific case of the studiously ensconced narrator the decision is easily understandable. He laments the loss of his love, is in a grey and dark mood, and having found an advisor that only answers with one word and one word alone starts asking questions where that one word promises only the worst of outcomes, giving him the chance to beat himself to death on the cliffs of his overpowering grief. Something I am sure we have all at some point in time have desired doing, after all, humanity is no stranger to wallowing in a bit of self pity.

But Noah had no need of such mood-enforcing exercises when he loosened not one but three birds from his famous boating experiment to find a good place to land. Sure, he had little at his disposal to be fair, but logic dictates that if there is enough of a landmass nearby to allow olive branches to be beakily plucked from it then surely mere time or a better, human, lookout would have proven to be as effective as the birds.
That said, it is almost astoundingly likely that the man was just getting tired of having build an ark with all his might and heart and faith and now watching it being crapped continuously on by anything with a metabolism and had just decided to get rid of anything he could not easily reach to kick, and considered it sheer luck that one of them happened to come back with digestible resources. The likelihood that an excellent recipe for dove smothered in olive oil has been invented at the spot.

Why? Why birds? Ok, easily answered, the link to air-symbolism is easily put down. But still, why? Birds are evil, annoying creatures with small brains in little heads that hold no more truth in their evil sodden souls than a drunk beggar railing at leather coats on the streets of Amsterdam holds the wisdom of the world in her bottle.
I just don’t get it, really, but perhaps this is because I have somewhat of an aversion to birds, but all I can think of thinking about Athena’s owl is the drycleaning costs of having something only able to poop processed mouse on ones’ shoulder.
Which, I think, is a bit of a shame.

For now, I will continue my avian ruminations, perhaps to be taken up at another stage.
Stripes at 11101, three birds in hand, one in bush,

Kevin.

For the turnout of this little blog I have relied heavily on the assumption that all my readers few of you as there are, are familiar with a specific work of poetry. This work or the one word that lies at it’s centre has not been named explicitly. For all those who request further information, please let me know.

Venom, Sand, Crap.

2007-05-21T16:43:00.000+02:00

Last week, Housemate and myself decided on a long overdue movie day. As I had a Tuesday off, we could nicely schedule in one or two movies for our customary Sneak. A plan was made, refreshments were purchased, and off we went.

The first movie, Blades of Glory, I’d already seen, and reasonably enjoyed despite a tremendous hatred for Will Ferrel. Still, the movie is exactly as one can expect of it, and this is not always a bad thing.
The third movie, the sneakly previewed one, was the movie Black Snake Moan, a surprisingly interesting movie about a town slut and a good Christian. This is a movie I would recommend to almost everybody, but it must be said that part of my reasoning here is a liking of Christina Ricci, who may have had her least Ricci-like role in this little flick.

But the second movie of the day is what we need to talk about here. Need? Yes. Need. After all, sometimes a movie so heinously uninteresting, so laissez fairly acted, so badly scripted and so uninspired in it’s direction and plot that upcoming moviegoers need to be protected from it with all summonable power and tranquilizers.

Which movie?
Spiderman 3.

The movie itself is almost al that could be expected, there are disasters, there are colourful villains who have outlandish powers to counteract the enlarged spideryness of the main character, there are daring rescues and some easily contrived backstories. So far, so reasonable. Nothing we didn’t see in the first two movies.
So what was there that we in fact did not see in the first two movies that we saw now and that propelled this movie into the higher stratospheres of utter and complete crap? I hear you ask this, and as luck would have it, I am well prepared and gearing to answer.

And where to start? Luckily, this movie had a good number of “those moments”. Unluckily, one has to almost relive them to find a good starting point.
What are “those moments”? Those are the exact moments in any film where you realize that impaling yourself on a beverage holder or checking whether it is really possible to gouge through your wrists with an empty crisp packet is preferable to continuing with watching a childhood favourite be bloodily raped in the ear.
And it is also the exact moment where you realize you can’t stop watching, for you might miss the redeeming qualities.
Not that there are very many, if any, in this steaming pile of offal that calls itself a film-reel.

There are a number of reasonable flaws one can mention. The fact that an escaped criminal can get away from policemen with dogs and guns on an open field? Unlikely, but artistic license. The fact that that same escaped criminal can stumble into an open pit thus eluding his would be captors? Yes, sure.
But at the moment where that same pit is the location of a particle physics testing facility where nobody notices that a good sized man has stumbled into what holds their presumably fragile and incredibly expensive testing machinery one has to realize one has inadvertently stumbled into something smelly…
To add insult to injury, the mention that the readings from within the pit o’ expensiveness where off was greeted by one of the scientists with the explanation that it was most likely a bird flown into the pit, which apparently happens often in these environments.

Two things:
1)If you are doing some carefully monitored research on something like particle physics, would you then not prefer to do so in an environment that has, among other things, a reasonable unlikelyhood of birds flying into your testing radius?
2) A bird with roughly the size and weight of a full grown man is a common occurrence?

But still, mister-escaped-convict has fallen into the sand, and for some odd reason a little bit of sand gets stuck in a little bit of his DNA and he turns into sand. I know this is roughly Spiderman canon and I should not say anything, but seriously. Sand. DNA.
In Jurassic Park, parts of amphibian DNA were used to splice together the DNA of dinosaurs from the blood sucked up by prehistoric mosquitoes. The dinosaurs then had some characteristics of the species that provided the splicing materials. This is far fetched, but ok.
SAND has NO DNA. I have eaten a good deal of sand in my life, working up to my bushel, and not yet have I been even able to turn into an enourmous sand-creature, and not for lack of trying, I might add. And for everyone who now wants to say something about nuclear physics, wave theories and the assumption of characteristics through insertion of alien objects: Shut up or I will arrange for some insertion, ok? This did not make sense.

The fact that the weight of roughly a man then walked out of the research environment in the shape of sand also makes little sense, but these scientist obviously had their funding set for years to come, so what do they care.

From here on in, the stupidity gets worse and worse. Letting canon and the inherent bad logic of a creature made of sand lie, as it really wasn’t what crappified this movie, there is more.

This movie introduces Venom. Starting as a black and gooey alien lifeform, Venom quickly morphs into an alternative Spidey suit. As such, it enhances the emotions and powers of its wearer. What it also does, it makes mild mannered reporters absolutely gross dickheads.
I think I need to scrub my retinas with a mixture of bleach and steel wool to get the image of the incredibly emo-looking Maguire strutting his stuff down the streets of New York from off my memory, but at least almost everybody in the movie responds to him with the same unhidden and great loathing I did, so I felt at least roughly justified during this little bit of the movie.
Another thing that Venom does, multifunctional as it is, is turn you into the Son of Mask, as was evidenced by the frankly embarrassing piano and dance number performed midway through this movie. The fact that Peter Parker ends this scene with a good hammering of the ever whiney Mary Jane is obviously not OK, but was more pleasing than anything else the movie offered, and all those who know how I think about slapping the little lady around would know what that says about the rest of the movie.

Coincidentally, the rapid mental decline of Aunt May is beautifully illustrated by her first reaction to her nephew telling her he hurt the love of his life, as she says the hardest thing here is to learn to forgive oneself.
This met with such an almost uncontrollable fit of laughter from Housemate and myself that we felt the need to turn it into a coughing fit lest we’d be forcibly ejected from the movie, but it must be said here that the hardest thing is in fact NOT forgiving oneself, but rather owning up to the dickhead one has become and asking forgiveness from the person one has slapped around a drinking establishment.

During all this strutting and slapping and badly dubbed piano-playing there is the umpteenth try to resurrect the long dead love triangle between MJ, Peter and, euhm… Harry? Bob? Tracy? Played by James Franco, the character of “the other guy” is so unremarkable and so dreadfully unnecessary that it becomes difficult to remember anything he really says. Which is odd, cause the guy’s only function in the movie is to be cuter than Spiderman himself.
In this instalment he apparently gets amnesia from being repeatedly being banged into a wall. Well, fair enough, he gets a beating that would get most people a good dose of death, so he gets off lightly, I guess. Plus, he gets to be in a hospital gown that very nicely shows off some shapely pecs and a good nipple, so who is worrying.
The amnesia gives us a stupid subplot that ends up literally nowhere but in a vengeance fuelled bit of overacting, like, you know, the last movie.
So, to recap, (H)arry thinks (P)eter, as Spiderman, killed his dad and wants revenge. The fact that his dad was a supercriminal does not really factor here, blood being thicker than intelligence and all that, but still.
H uses Dad’s equipment to attack P, loses, gets amnesia, remembers, attacks again, gets maimed, wants to attack yet again, when this movie starts delivering it’s kicks to internal consistency with renewed vigour.
It is at that moment that the butler, of all people, decides to put an end to all this senseless exploding and webbing, by giving us a bit of information that one the one hand would’ve been handy a few movies earlier, and on the other hand is so blatantly and stupidly untrue that all those who believe in the old “is truth beauty, is beauty truth” adage would be well forced to take their own life in absolute terror.

The line? “I bandaged your fathers wound when he lay dying, and they were self inflicted, nobody killed your father” or something of that ilk.
A few things:
1) We had just had a flashback to H cradling his dying father in his arms. So the butler was doing his bandaging at that very moment? No he wasn’t, we and H would have remembered.
2) H’s dad did indeed die of a series of events he had himself set into motion, but Spiderman did have a great hand in this. As I recall, grievous internal damage was the real killer here, which Daddy-H got in a fight with the arachnoid.
3) The butler could possibly have told this to the young ward before all the rampage, since he knows apparently all that goes on in the house. The fact that the very pretty H is by now a good look-a-like to a certain organ playing genius in the bowels of the Paris’ sewer, it would have been welcome information.

I am going to finish this rant pretty soon, but not before regaling to you the absolute coup de grace for the dignity of this film… The American Flag.

At one point, Spidey, on his way to erscue his girlfriend, stops for a goodly length of time to pose heroically in front of a crappily CGI’d image of the good old red white and blue.
It was at this point that Housemate and I chorused a few lines of “Oh Goden this is too cheap” and the movie took it’s final plummet to a future of alcoholism, pain and dejection.

Caveat Emptor, moviegoers.

Strips at Caveat,

Kevin.

Maintenance Blog

2007-05-10T11:31:00.000+02:00

Hello dear readers of this little corner that is my little corner of the internet.

Corner? Niche? Grotto?

Well, anyway, over the last few months some changes to this blog have been made, and some apparently need an explanation. And who am I to deny my readers this?

First of all, I have added some link-lists. Divided in cool, regularly visited, and the peeps I know that have their own blogs/sites.

Cool is for things I run into that I find cool, this will thus be populated with things that strike my interest at any given time, things that keep on striking my interest, and things that prompt some sort of project in my non-bloggy life.

Regularly visited is for those sites I spent a lot of time on, either through usefulness, funnyness, or for other random reasons. The first obviously Wiki and IMDB, for where else does a movie- and infobuff like me find his much needed cerebral sustenance.

Peeps I know that have their own website also get a link, starting with the inomparable Bienie, who has been a steady moviebuddy and great friend for nigh on six years now. Shoutout to Bienie.
My brother's band, Black Bandit, needs to be mentioned here as well. There are plans for me to write for the new website, something I am greatly looking forward to, but even if I wouldn't, the band is really getting into their sounds now, with the first small single being printed, and sounding great. Pleace visit them, they have music online, and it is not bad music.

Good, linkage out of the way, there is only the Meez left to explain. Meez, the 3d-ish online avatar. In this case,the Meez is me. Nto remarkably recognizable, the question "why is that girl dancing" has been asked, but in truth, it is me,and it is trying to look impatient. Why it is doing so in church is symbolic, points for those who can spot what it is symbolic off.

Anyways, I am leaving you guys again, soon there will be a movie review again, or possibly a website review, as I am in a reviewy mood but not in a movie mood...

Stripes at half open,

Kevin

Déjà vu?

2007-05-03T15:53:00.000+02:00

“The Fountain” the latest effort of the director of Requiem for a Dream and Pi was shown us as part of the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival. And well titled, in fact, it was. This movie describes itself best as a fountain.
A fountain of plain obviousness sparkling in the light of unrelenting repetition and set in a courtyard of empty beauty.

This movie, due to it’s visuals and enforced tearjerkyness is well on it’s way to be THE overrated film of the year, and since almost everybody who will see it will disagree with me I feel no compunction with regards to spoiling it, snide little bastard that I am.

The movie, pretending to weave three storylines in one, is about a doctor, name of Tom, played by Hugh Jackman, and his wife, Izzy, played by Rachel Weisz. Izzy is dying of a fast growing brain-tumour, and Tom is hard at work doing research on monkeys that apparently have the same type of brain-tumours as Izzy, and he thinks he is very close to a cure.
At the same time, it is about the book Izzy writes, which is about a conquistador in Spain, Tomas, who is looking for the tree of eternal life for his Queen Isabella, whose country is slowly being taken over by an inquisitor.
Thirdly, we have a futuristic Tom who is flying through space in a bubble, with a big and dying tree, trying to get to a nebula in which the tree can remain alive.

Is it obvious yet?

All three Toms being the same Tom and looking for a way to keep his wife with him for ever and ever and effur?

Well, it should be.

And if it isn’t, the movie lays it on. And lays it on thickly.
Examples?

Well… -At one point we see the “evil” inquisitor with a map of Spain, spreading bloodlike ink over the parts he has already taken over. The map is slowly, and spreadingly, taken over by these bloody patches.
-When Dr. Tom won’t go out walking with his wife in the first snow, as they apparently always do, he immediately afterwards loses his wedding ring.
-We get a number of shots of Tom whispering into Izzy’s neck, and the hairs there standing up to his lips. We also get numerous shots of him whispering to the tree, and the fibers of the tree reaching towards his lips.

And when I say “numerous”, I mean freaking “NUMEROUS”. Seriously, if you take out all the double shots form this movie, it loses about 45 minutes. The fact that it would also gain a great deal of solidity and speed need not concern us here, as it clearly did not concern the makers of this piece.

The makers, who also made “Pi” and “Requiem for a Dream”, both movies I really liked, RfaD even making it to the unwritten top of my movielist.
This movie will not. Although I am sure it will for many people.
It is emotional, striking and beautiful, but so, so very obvious.
There are no sweet and silent allusions to pain and the loss of power, in stead the mention that Izzy loses her feelings of warmth and cold is directly followed by a bathroom destroying session of ablutionary sex. See, it tells us, just because she is dying, she is no sad and simpering person, she has sex still!
Obviously, she is a sad and simpering person, just not in the scenes we see of her, and clearly uses this sexual act as a way to regain control of a husband (and through him, life, see symbolism) that is slipping away from her. If the directors had chosen to show us this, in stead of the empty pointing at sparks of dying life, this movie could not have impressed me more. As it is, it just saddened me.

At one point, she collapses in a museum, before the eyes of her horrified husband, and he cradles her until the ambulance arrives. Later, she says at that pont she felt complete, she felt held fast. And the chump answers: “yes, that was me, holding you”. Kinder souls would have liked to take him away and explain to him that she was talking about something else, which was presumably what the movie intended us to think. All I could think was that I’d rather hit him with a good sized clue-stick then and there, as it was so bloody obvious.

I would advise anyone to watch this movie, in all fairness. It is beautiful, and that counts for something.
Also, I will starts selling saltlicks, as a simple grain will not do you for the blatant propaganda against the movie-of-the-weeks in which Cancer is a fact of life, and I am hoping to make a profit as soon as this thing hits the theatres.

Gawd.

Shoes at all stripes but one down, guess which one out of five…

Kevin

Moon goddess looking for creator

2007-04-24T16:54:00.000+02:00

Boyfriend has asked me to do some research on the origin of this painting, and I am stumped.

It reminds me of some of William Blake's work, but the internet is sadly lacking in getting me the information I want.

Does anybody know who this painting is by, and when it was made?

So you are saying she looks “good” in a kimono?

2007-04-20T14:50:00.000+02:00

The answer, obviously, is an astounding yes. The question, perhaps less obviously, is about Gong Li. That said… less obvious? In the past few years of moviemaking we have seen a renewed interest in the visual and sartorial elegance of the far east. It can be said that most movies based in, on or around Eastern source-material in the west give the wrong image of Asian culture, and there is a certain merit to that point.

But what certainly can be said is that whatever the occasion, certain people thrive because they have a talent that seems to capture the spirit of an age. Cole Porter, the bisexual but prolific songwriter encapsuled in person and song the zeitgeist of his 1940’s joie des vivre. Kurt Cobain had not much to do to become the personification of the grumpiness of early nineties Seattle. A number of the reviled and revered have in their own way been able to so strikingly set an example of the time they lived in, that they are indelibly connected to an idea, a philosophy.
The green velvet of Oscar and the trailing scarves of Isadora stand a good chance of being joined by the kimono of Gong Li, who seems to have been taken up in the storm of events that can be described by one simple line that must’ve gone through the mind and come out of the mouth of a lot of producers in the last period:

Is there a Kimono in this movie? And if so, is Gong Li wearing it?

For really, has there been a movie coming out since “Memoirs of a Geisha” where a kimono was needed to be worn where it was in fact NOT worn by this woman?

Don’t get me wrong, those who know me, and those who don’t know me but know what Boyfriend looks like, know that I am a great appreciator of beauty, it might well be said it is one of the guiding principles in my life, and this woman looks good. In my mind, she will never be any more beautiful then she was as the courtesan Hatsumomo in the aforementioned diaristic endeavour, and in her version of that role she has without a doubt joined my personal list of appearances that define female beauty. But seriously, the joke is up now.

Last I have seen her in was in “Curse of the golden flower” which IMDB keeps telling me should be referenced as “Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia”, and who am I to deny it this due. And since I won’t be able to spell that title out all that often without going into carpal tunnel syndrome, this was all it is going to get.

The movie itself, a beautifully and colourfully shot drama to the backdrop of the forbidden city, about madness within the Chinese royal family. I won’t spoil this movie by going into details, but let’s be most certain about one single thing. She is in it, and there is kimono in it, and she is in that as well.

A sidenote… I have been using the word “kimono” as meaning “clothing” for most of this blog, it means “thing to wear” in it’s original language, and as such can be used in a piece about Chinese clothing just as well as it could have been used in a piece about Japanese clothing. Besides, Kimono was stolen from the imperial courts in China anyway.

Anyway, so far for now, I will strife to do more movie reviews from now on. This weekend is the “night of Terror” in Amsterdam, and Boyfriend and I are going to try and pull an all-nighter for this gala of gruesome gore. Most likely, I will have something to actually say about a movie after that again.

For now, stripes at half open,

Kevin.

2007-03-22T12:06:00.000+01:00

Stuck on Title

One of the good things about seeing a movie that is based on a historical event, is that it is virtually impossible to spoil. After all, all who have some interest in the backstory of what they are watching will know what is supposed to happen, and if you don’t, why watch the movie?
A movie about John F. Kennedy will likely end with the death of the main character, a movie about Marilyn Monroe no less so. A second world war movie will have the German alliance losing after a land-war in Eurasia, and Napoleon will never be depicted as anything but a world-conquering emperor manqué.

That said, some movies don’t completely follow the exact turns of events, and add something to their storyline to be spoiled by honest reviewers for discerning moviegoers.

Good thing I have a remarkably small amount of readers, and as such can spoil to my little hearts content, as there is little chance of ruining things for a mass audience. I say “good thing” in a remarkably sarcastic way. For all the praise this blog garnishes for me, word of mouth is not doing it’s best for my blog, which I think is a shame, as I like people reading this. What else am I doing this for, after all.
Well, yes, I do this for me and my almost unending megalomania, but that’s another story.

Anyways, back to movies. Specifically “300” the movie based on the Frank Miller comic based on the film based on a desperate last stand of a small piece of the Spartan army.
And a good movie it is. Visually arresting and very recognizable as a translation of a Frank Miller comic, it must be said that some of it’s storyline has been sacrificed to create this movie. Not that there is much storyline, but hey, if I wanted only pretty pictures I’d have kept to the movie-stills, thank you very much.

The story, for those interested, is of Spartan king Leonidas who goes against the advice and will of his council to try to stop the Persian king Xerxes (the first, lest this be confusing) from invading Greece. The place he chooses to do this is; the pass of Thermopylae, a narrow pass on the coastline of Greece, and easily defendable by a small contingency of men.
Well, small…
Sure, there are about 300 of them, give or take a few hundred Phoenician and assorted Greek stragglers, but in no dictionary can these men be called small.
Perhaps as a result of the weather or the idea of Spartan functionality, almost nobody of any importance in this movie is more than 1/4th clothed. This clothing, if present, would consist mostly of red cloaks, leather briefs, the occasional bandage and in case of the GodKing Xerxes, about half a mile of chain.

Is this a problem? Not really, as bar one all these people have bodies that I, personally, would kill for. The abundance of pecs, thighs, biceps, abs, shoulders and assorted parts of the male anatomy on display in this movie makes one think of a casting bureau’s portfolio gone steroid. If it wasn’t for the fact of Boyfriend, and the small thing that I think he is far more than shite-good looking enough for me, I probably would’ve invested heavily in time travel and a ticket to Sparta.
Seriously, David Wenham, or “the man with the least typecasted portfolio in Hollywood” who played the wimpy friar in Van Helsing even manages to buff it up with the big boys, in a very interesting display of abs indeed. Which I liked, as I found him very attractive indeed in Lord of the Rings, and it never hurts to see ones moviecrushes disrobe to a good extent.

Storywise all is predictable. There is a last stand, it fails, but it rallies those left behind to an extent to overthrow the would be conqueror. There is a beautiful queen who guards the homestead in name of her king, there is a slimy grand vizier type person who troubles her. It is all rather standard, but even in it’s standardness I think it is very well done.

All in all, I am very happy to have seen this movie, and am hoping to see it again sometime soon. Seriously, go see it.

In other news, this Saturday is the 6 month anniversary of the first date with Boyfriend, and I am very happy to have him in my life. We are going towards our official six month anniversary in a month or so, and I am very much looking forward to the next 6 months, and all the time after that I am planning to spend with him.
Because there is little chance of me to say rightly what I want to say to you, I am going to copy something down here by ee cummings, who says these things better than I can.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it inmy heart)
i am never without it(anywherei go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Ok, sappyness over now, I apologize to my readers who are not Boyfriend.

Stripes at half open,

Kevin

Get out of my cunting way, you cunting cunt.

2007-03-19T12:53:00.000+01:00

Sometimes you start to think if it may all be you. Am I the person at fault here? Am I the one to create a wrong situation without me knowing it? Am I?
Luckily, whenever bouts of self doubt like that appear, there also appears a fuckin’ retard to get juuuuuuuust in front of your right or left shoulder, in a way that they aren’t really in the way, as you can easily walk around them, but they are still shite annoying in their own right. That said, as last Wednesday has taught me, when faced with burrowing my way through a 300 lb American who has, despite size and weight, suddenly materialised right in fucking front of me OR burrowing myself into a red double-decker bus, I will choose to uproot the American megalith and suffer some shouted abuse. After all, they aren’t fast enough to catch me anyways.

Should the mention of the red double-decker not have tipped you off, I spent some time in London again. And London, being the theme-park it really is, is filled to it’s gills with annoying tourists, many quite incredibly big and stupid, and all of them striving to be in some indeterminate way annoying and obstructing to someone. Often one can see a classic move, where increasing lines of tourists stopping to look at something that caught their fancy block passage to a person exiting a store with arms full of bags and thus creating a blockade a revolutionary would be proud of.
The best thing, however, is to be on the other side of the street when one tourists attempt to be an annoyance is blocked by another tourists attempts to be as incredibly stalwart as humanly (touristly) possible, thus negating the efforts of the first. Nine times out of ten the first was actually trying to obstruct ANOTHER idiot tourist from creating complete chaos, which can now easily and disastrously ensue.

One needs to be across the street from this to really appreciate it, as being in between the battling whale penises would mean that it is easier to take your own life than to ever enjoy it again. I escaped with a semblance of sanity from a sixsome of moronic activity only because I launched myself willingly into traffic and survived with little more than some extra abuse spouted at my person from someone riding a bike. Since riding a bike and spouting abuse is a great Dutch pastime, I for a second felt like I was home, which saved my feeble little mind from breaking down and just starting a spree of touristslaughter. I just opted to muttering a new personal mantra from then on, which helped me get through the day. For those interested, the mantra bears striking resemblance to the title of this blog, if with a few more expletives thrown in.

Now, knowing London is a temple-district to stupidity, and knowing that the centre is overwhelmed with the offspring of whale-cousins, why go in there, one would ask? And a smart question this is, at that.
Well, partly this is a testament to my point that no matter how smart you are, sometimes you are simply an idiot as well. The other and greater part is the simple fact I like the cultural offerings of London. I like going to the theatre, the bookstores, the galleries. I like the architecture and the food. And I dislike passing up the opportunity to not see at least one show whenever I am there.

This time, however, I was at a loss what to go see. I have wanted to see Wicked for a good long while now, but am also planning to see that with Boyfriend some time in the future, so why go on my own now? And the offerings seemed rather frugal as to optional plans. I had a faint desire to see “The Woman in Black”, but wasn’t really in the mood for a thriller/horror done on stage, as I needed to go back to my hotel room all alone, and walking on your own in Whitechapel still brings images to my mind of distinguished gentlemen with a penchant for slitted hookers.

Then, my eyes fell on an online add for “Equus”, one of the most influential plays of the last 30 years in the English language. The fact it has a seventeen year old required to be naked for a good portion of the second act also helps cement a choice. The further fact this role is played by Daniel Radcliffe, and the added giggleoption of knowing you’ve seen Harry Potter nekkid obviously is a chance one can’t let pass by.

So off to the centre I went, and after acquiring a ticket for the show I was ready to spend an hour snooping through the cities better DVD-stores, I was in the market for some Eddie Izzard and I would not be denied.
And I wasn’t, as I am now the proud owner of all his stage shows on DVD, which pleases me mightily.

Getting myself back to the theatre a little early and assuming leaning position against a handy pillar I surveyed one of the most interesting configurations of theatre crowds I have ever seen. It was remarkably interesting. Me, an avid human watcher and discriminator in almost all things, could survey at any one time (in order of overlap, some groups/people belonged in two camps or more:
-The Harry Potter fans: A group that was most to be recognized by age (young) and the fact they almost all toted a parent who was markedly unsure about the smartness of being here.
-The dirty old men: A group that dribbled in in ones and small groups. Clearly there to see some seventeen year old flesh, and interesting in nothing else.
-The dirty young men: Groups of young, gay men there ostensibly for the play, but really there out of an interest in the boyflesh. Recognizable in a loud flashyness, and also by the way a member of the second group usually stood close by to get some ogling practice in.
-The younger theatre patron: there for the play, not unwilling to see some guy get naked, but very laissez-faire about the whole situation. Nakedness is an everyday occurrence, after all, as is theatre.
-The older Theatre Patron: Probably saw the play in it’s first running, and now back for more. A bit worried about the nudity and somewhat nervous in the crowds of youngsters and leches, but nonetheless a very dignified groups.
-The Tourist: An older or younger Theater Patron in their own country, here to get some culture in. The better type of tourist, but perhaps a little lost. Small groups, clearly not sure about how to get to the nearest subway station.

The play itself is rather impressive. It is ostensibly about a young man who blinds six horses with a sharp hook. But more than that it is about the psychiatrist that is assigned his case and his quest to find out why it all happened. I will not spoil the play for anyone, but I will say that it is excellent, and that everybody should go and see it.

As the play is hardly feel-good, I was in need of emotional sustenance after exiting a theatre. The fact I then ran into 5 closed bookstores was not at all helping. Luckily my never failing nose for letters led me to an open bookstore, a new Tom Holt omnibus, and some sundry reading materials.

Well stocked, well cultured, and ready I looked up my favourite Thai eatery, and after that my hotel.
As I was to spend only one day here, I had no unpacking or planning to do for the next day, and I had a very nice peaceful sleep.

A good trip, I say. Next time I go to London I most likely will be bringing Boyfriend, or he will be bringing me, for whatever difference it makes, and then I hope to be able to review Wicked, finally.

For now, stripes at half open,

Grtz,
Kevin

Missing Boyfriend and surges of pride.

2007-03-13T16:53:00.000+01:00

I find myself in a position not often inhabited. Boyfriend, he of the great lashes and skills wit a poached egg, is away for business. This is not an unusual thing, he has been away before, after all. But this time he will be away over the weekend, instigating the first weekend in the six months we have been dating that he and I are not together.
This displeases me mightily.

Now, don’t get me wrong, we are not one of those couples that need to spend every waking hour together and never see anybody else. But usually there is a great deal of choice involved when we don’t meet up. Having him a good amount of space away and not being able to go there with any facility, it feels less than splendid.

Good thing we had a well filled weekend this weekend to keep me going a little. A very nice dinner at the house of friends of Boyfriend was in the books for Saturday. Well, it was in his books, and after a little bit pf prodding it was in mine as well. And I am very happy I went there.

I used to have a theory that I called “picking up the puppy”, which means that you can be hanging out with someone for a while, never really thinking about them in a romantic way, and then you see them do something really sweet, like picking up a puppy or holding a baby, and you suddenly and romcommically realise the fact you have been liking them like that for a while now…
This is how it is supposed to go.

Obviously I have liked Boyfriend like that for a while now, after all, he is Boyfriend, but this weekend he managed to pick up a very big puppy nonetheless.
And I am not talking about his dog, who is also a very big puppy, and a very sweet one at that. (Just turned two… such a cool dog)

I was talking to the daughter of the house when suddenly someone had crawled behind the baby grand piano and did some tinkling on the ivories. Never one to ignore impromptu musicality, I turned round, and there was Boyfriend. I just about died. An enormous surge of pride made it’s way through me. Very embarrassing, these surges, but it was fun as well. Had I not already loved this man very much the effect could not have been greater. As it is, I am just continuing feeling really very fondly of Boyfriend.

I am not expressing myself very clearly and quite frankly, there is not that much to express, apart from the fact Boyfriend is one of the bestest people on the planet, and I am sad he is not one of the bestest people within 5 km of me. Not because he isn’t bestest, but because he isn’t fuckin there.

*sigh*

Stripes at all down, for “waiting to exhale”

Grtz,
Kevin

On Metal, and where to stick it.

2007-02-24T10:51:00.000+01:00

Weight was gained by me. Not a lot of it, and not unappreciated at that, but gained nonetheless. The weight in question is attributable to a small, light blue and very fake gemstone, set in a metal bar.
This bar, then, now resides jammed in the curve of my right ear.

I, of reasonably sound mind and soon to be desecrated (some more) body, had decided to get my ear pierced. A plan I had been running around with for a while now, but finally decided needed to come to fruition.
A bout of internetty research and suchlike taught me about the pros and cons, as well as some of the hygienic consequences of having a piece of metal forcefully injected in a part of ones body. A talk with the multipiercedness that is Housemate taught me of how to gauge the relative painfulness and some of the techniques used as seen from a receptive perspective. Last but not at all least where the talks with Boyfriend about whether it might be a tremendously bad idea.

All these things together, but surely most the input of Housemate and Boyfriend, combined with a last-moment coin-toss made me reasonably sure of my intent here. There was a piece of metal out there with my name on it, so to speak.

The internetty research continued then, after all, like having a tattoo set, you want this done by people you at least trust well enough to handle your body in a very intimate way, and in a place you can walk into without feeling scared or apprehensive. A calm mind and body after all are very conductive to a pleasant experience, in as much as it is possible when somebody is going to insert a foreign object in a place on you.

But I found a place. Dare2wear. (www.dare2wear.info, not quite sure if I am right to point you towards it here, but hey, good word of mouth is good word of mouth after all) What drew me to these people first of all was the amount of information they had on their site about the process, which I highly appreciated. I also liked the style of jewellery they import and have available. Calling them for more information landed me on their answering machine and the voice on it was very nice, which really cemented me in my choice.
So off I went, accompanied by the magnificence that is Boyfriend (Who is making me breakfast as I type this… I gush…) who had very kindly offered to advance me the money needed for this undertaking as my salary had not been actually arrived in my accounts and I am very much a “decision made, action NOW” person.

Arriving at a close door in first instance, as they proprietress of the store had stepped out for a few minutes. In all fairness, a good thing. As this was my first piercing I was rather nervous, had completely neglected to eat anything of any substance, and needed to pee like there was no tomorrow. Also, Boyfriend still needed to get me the promised money or at least have it in is wallet so I could feel like a good kept boy. So, anyways, having ingested an apple, a snickers bar and having had no pee whatsoever, we tried the store again, and it was open now.

A small store, with jewellery on the walls and in display cabinets. There was a girl in before me getting something pierced as well, and the general demeanour and outlook of the person doing the piercing was again very reassuring, moving around her tools with reference and explaining what she was doing very well. I was not sorry I chose this place. And am still not, at this point in time, all be it only a day after the fact.
So, the way cleared before me to get my poor ear hurt beyond all hurt it has ever experienced, I discussed my intentions with the women going to do the hurting. She was very advisory about different options before me, ring or bar, and the healing properties and likelihoods of both. Deciding on a bar, providing it could be sparkly, I signed the documentation and wavers stating I knew roughly what I was doing, and sat down to pick a colour of my sparkly bit.

I picked a dark red ball, my hair was pinned out of the way and selected from the tray of tools was a wooden toothpick. I must have looked momentarily frightened, as a swift explanation was given about the toothpick, namely that is was to be used to mark the spot where the needle was eventually going to pierce the pristine delicacy of my cartilage. Marked, disinfected and ready I awaited the needle.

Taking care of my breathing, explaining all that she was doing, the good person ready to insert a new hole on my body picked up her needle and put it against my ear, then swiftly putting it through a couple of layers of skin and bone.

I am not going to pretend it didn’t hurt, because it did. I am going to try to give you a sort of situational ketch of where I would place the hurt, roughly indicated by the response given to a hurt, in a sort of rough list.
· Banging your head on a kitchen cabinet: “AuCRAPDAMMITFOCKINGKITCHENTHIGNAUAUAU…*teary eyed*Au…crap.. mutter… au.
· Cutting your finger: “Au..Au.. AUAUAUAUAUAUAUFUCKAUDAMMITAUUUUAUITELLSYAAU..AU…au…”
· Getting pierced: „AU!auw..auw..auw..auw..“
· Getting a scraped knee: „Shhhhhhh.... Crap. Au.
· Getting tattoo’d: Hmmm, this is ok, this is ok, this is ok, this is ok, this is UNPLEASANT…UNPLEASANT….UNPLEASANT…Oh, this is ok again, this is ok..”
So as can be seen above, I would rate getting pierced at roughly halfway through the list of “things that hurt” as far as hurting is considered.

Anyways, out goes the needle, in goes the little bar, and on should have gone the sparkly bit.
One good/bad thing here was the fact that the little red sparkly bit that was supposed to go on the end of the little bar in my ear wasn’t designed to do just that. It was designed to go on a ring. But I have no ring in my ear at this point, I have a bar. The mortified piercer starts going through her box o’ sparkly bits, and I along with her, selecting ones that have all seemed to have suddenly lost their holes. Now lest this smacks of unproffessionality, not checking in advance, I have to say I actually really appreciated this time. It took my mind off the piece of metal in my ear, and I had very little difficulty relaxing and moving on in the situation, and it was clearly not the fault of the piercer.
I decided that another colour was just as well for me, after all, I am planning to amass a collection of piercings, and I could (and very likely will) always go back to retry getting my dark red body enhancement. So a sparkly blue was selected, screwed unto my new airport detector issue. (typing this I suddenly realise I have to fly to Munich in a week and this thing is not supposed to go out for the next two months or so… Interesting. Well, it will not be a problem)

Anyways, bar and ball firmly in their bleeding place, my hair was let loose again and immediately covered this new unbalance of my body. This was designed to happen, as I am not about to cut my hair anytime soon and the piercing was and is supposed to be only seen every now and then when I sweep my hair back. (those who know me know I do this all the time, but hey, a boy has to have it’s pretence of discretion) But it still felt like kind of a shame to cover it straight away. Another customer suggested I could just get a really long bar, but I decided the Madonna look would never really be mine.
Anyways, the hair also kept prying eyes of the fact I had a very bloody ear. Well, slightly bloody, but for an ear that has never been bloody since the midwife washed it clean, it feels like a lot of blood. I did decide to not wash the blood off straight away, but to give the piercing and the wound around it some time to get used to each other, and the skin some time to close around the metal stranger. This might not be everybody’s, but I am happy with this tack, sure, I had a bloody ear the rest of the night, but this morning there is little or no swelling and almost no pain, and it feels clean, so to speak, even though I am not touching the piercing yet. About to go shower, so I might add something to this blog about excrutiating pain sometime soon.

So I am pierced now, a little extra bit of sparkle in my ear, and I am mighty pleased. I would point everyone who decides to do the same to Dare 2 Wear, as my experience with the store was excellent.
I am now off to by some antibacterial soap and one of those plastic light-shades they put over dogs’ heads when they had surgery. Not so much for myself, but my great and wonderful boyfriend (who really poaches a mean egg, must be said) has accidentally brushed, and in some instances actually put his hand right on, my new addition, and since it is still rather sore, this needs to end.

Signing off for now, And stripes at 11001, which config symbolises the now partial imbalance of my face, as the piercing is to the right. Superficially as I am, I picked the right ear because my left eyebrow is better and I didn’t want the right side to feel left out.

Greetings,

Kevin.

“La plus expresse marque de la sagesse, c'est une esjouissance constante”

2007-02-13T11:43:00.001+01:00

Which translates roughly as “That which best denotes wisdom is constant enjoyment”?

I have long considered having the French phrase above tattooed somewhere on my body, as a reminder that life is a gift that can only be truly appreciated in all it’s facets when taken with wisdom, knowledge and the willingness to learn.

On the other hand, I am 25 years old now, hardly have my life in order, still a little damp behind my ears because I have no idea how to pick out a good towel. What claim have I got to wisdom? A favorite quote of mine denotes knowledge as knowing a tomato is a fruit, and wisdom as knowing not to use it in a fruit salad. Wisdom therefore knowing how to use the information stored in a brain.
Current philosophical theorizing gives wisdom as a more developed form of common sense, the ability to use available knowledge to come to good judgment.
Knowledge I possess, some useful, some less so, but what of wisdom then? Can I make a claim of being wise? As the song has it, I have studied the poets and the analysts, and searched through the occasional book on human behaviour (which I will remain spelling with that blasted “u” no matter what my spell-check has to say about it).
Yet I feel no closer to wisdom. Perhaps because of the reading and movies I have done and seen, in fact.

Literature and film give us a veritable deluge of characters and types who possess a wisdom given to them by learning, age and experience. Merlin and Viviane from Arthurian legend, The Dark Crystal’s Mystics and Audra, Christianities three wise men who understood to follow the star to Jesus’ birthplace, and a score of teachers, guides, sages and whatnot more. How can one not be daunted?

Especially in a time when showings of common sense seem few and far between, in global life as well as daily life. This statement is very hypocritical, and yet not so. If I myself do not always follow the dictions of common sense, can I expect others to do so in my stead? Perhaps not. In the same breath, if others do not follow the advisors on their shoulders well, can I be expected to do so?
Echoes of my mother swirl through my brain typing that, asking me if I would jump of a bridge if everybody else did, and my valiant denial of doing just that tries bravely to outdo their clamor.

I was planning on using a certain much maligned but re-chosen head of state as an example of the lack of common sense in the world. I will not, mostly because the man has had enough shit poured over him in the last few years, and because that horse is well and truly dead. But also because I myself live in a country almost famous for a certain type of government, that now seems unable to form any type of government. It used to be that elections were held occasionally, and that problems arising could be solved internally. The fall of a cabinet was a rare thing that would be met with derision and scorn.
But now, the last three cabinets have fallen. Where elections used to be held every four years, the first cabinet of our current interim minister lasted for all of 87 days.

Can we as a country not seem to be able to muster the information and experience needed to make a good decision? Apparently not.

And is this strange? A while ago I was with some friends in a bar. In this bar also was a table filled with late studenty type people. Some of these people decided to leave early, but paid for their drinks not with the waitress that had been serving them, but at a bar at the other side of the building. So obviously, when the waitress camee with the bill, the drinks of the early departees were still on it. And the stragglers refused to pay. And the waitress, with no real way to confirm the drinks paid for at the other bar were in fact the drinks that were now surplus on her accounts untill the registers were made up that evening, didn’t really want to take them of the receipt.

And this entire situation was easily avoidable had one, just, only, merely one of the people at the table rubbed two braincells together and tell their friends to just leave the money so the bill could be paid in full. Really, one just wants to start banging heads together, but one also fears it would do little damage.

And I myself am not always much better. Last Christmas Boyfriend and myself had what could be described as a “little spat”. I am a good deal more flirty and physical than he is with friends, and this makes him somewhat uncomfortable. Well, my side makes him uncomfortable, his side he is fine with.
This is known and understood, and yet the situation ended up with me kissing someone else right in front of him. In jest, and total jest, but still this is something I should have realized would upset him greatly, and I really should just have not done that. I didn’t realize, though, and I did. And it, predictably, did.
So why did it happen? I had the knowledge of his discomfort, but apparently not the wisdom to stop it from happening? Sure I thought it would not be a big deal, and for me, it really would not have been. But I should still have taken his feelings into account more, and not judge him as I judge myself. The knowledge was there, but using it effectively was far beyond me at that point.

There is even a high likelihood he will less than appreciate finding this little tidbit retold here, which goes to show even more that I should not make much claims to wisdom. On the other hand, we have weathered that particular storm without much damage to property, and are still going strong together, so perhaps I can break the occasional jug here.

Epicurus stated that the way to happiness in life was to create and maintain a state of sensory satisfaction. He did not, as is commonly misunderstood, advocate indulgence, he merely advised that to remain happy one should ensure that the senses are fulfilled and that this fulfillment can go on. By indulging one overfeeds, and thus creates dissatisfaction when the indulgence ends.
This to me seems a good way to handle things. And, given the title of this piece, a wise way. To ensure that you can fulfill your desires as and when they come up, but to not overly train them into inevitable dissatisfaction sounds to me like an enjoyable way of living.

And enjoyment, as said, is a good indicator of wisdom.

In the end, I don’t think I will ever feel any closer to wisdom than I feel right now. Wisdom is not a constant in anybodies life, it is something that comes and goes. Good decisions can be made by arguably less wise people, and the other way around can occur quite easily as well. All I can do and will try to do is to use what little knowledge I gain, and use it to the best of my abilities.

This does mean that it will for a while yet remain presumptuous of me to take the quote that started this all and use it as a tattoo. I am as yet unsure of what will replace it, as I do want to have another inking done, but hey, I am young still, this will come with time.

Until we are there, stripes at 01100: “Enjoy”,

Kevin

On pressure and old structures, felt and visited

2007-02-12T15:18:00.000+01:00

I have been remarkably remiss in my blogging lately, for which I apologize. The reason for my nonblogginess is not that very little happened to write about, but that more than enough happened to write about, and I felt pressured by myself to give you people as chronological a recounting as possible. Since this is hardly a real possibility for me, I write better about the things that just happened as they are still fresh in my mind, I got stuck.
So I decided to start of the new, non chronological blogging with a random rant, after which I will try to writ things in the order whit which they occur in my somewhat convoluted brain. That way, I ensure a reasonable blogging thickness, with a good chance of a rant every now and then, and some actual views into my strange but energizing life.

On whiz ze zchow…

A few weekends ago I, for the first real time in my life, had the choice to do the Bridget Jones thing and go away with Boyfriend for a weekend mini-break. More specifically, a weekend mini-break to London. Since I like London very much, and I like Boyfriend even more so, this was not a chance I would let pass, obviously. Given the fact he was also volunteering to pay for things there, providing I would just pay to actually get there, I was not going to complain about the situation anytime soon.
As it turns out, a friend of him lived in London, so we had a place to crash, and this for the small price of taking them out for a good dinner.

So plans were made, and guestrooms were appropriated. What was also done was the booking of tickets to two shows currently playing in London. I like musicals and musical theatre, Boyfriend was also not completely unwilling to give things a shot, and so we booked places for Avenue Q, already seen by me but wordofmouthed so hard I could hardly decline going again, and Spamalot, the Monthy Pythin musical. I myself am not really a fan of the Pythe, but hey, sometimes one has to do what one’s significant other wants to do, and I didn’t really mind going to see it anyways.

After a short and reasonably uneventful flight into the capital of Britain, I took a train to Tower Gateway, the stop close to the tower of London and in general my first stop going into this town. I like the tower, both it’s history and the way it looks, and to my mind no visit to London is complete without taking at least a swift peek at it when alighting there. No need to go in as Boyfriend was waiting for me around the subway station there and we had some ways to go still to get to the house of the aforementioned friend.

For those of you who have been to my house, I live roughly 45 minutes away by bus from the center of Amsterdam, which in Holland means you most likely live in a completely different town. In fact, I live two towns over from our Capital. In London, however, it means you are not even hardly out of town Center, which is funny, as almost anywhere in the real centre of London is less than half an hours walk from everywhere else in the centre of London. But anyway, having made the track to Putney, we found their house, took over the guestroom, met some new people, and went out to dinner, a good dinner, at a local Italian.

The Saturday was when it all happened, two shows booked, some shopping to be done, Boyfriend hadn’t been to London before so some sightseeing and subwaytravelling was also needed when possible, and of course some pictures needed to be taken.

The first show, Spamalot, was an experience. Not least because the show itself is quite good. Well, because it isn’t, really. As musicals go it is ok, and everybody goes into it with an enourmous effort, but really it is a rehash of Python jokes that we have all seen before, and at that it is not very well done. A shame, perhaps, but hey, something almost unavoidable. Still, it is a very enjoyable show.
Or at least it would have been. Had we had tickets anywhere near the stage. As it was, we had tickets closer to my house here in Holland. Which I could, incidentally, see, we were that high up.

Now let this not be seen as criticism aimed at the loveliness that is Boyfriend. The show was an “unknown”, as in there was no way of knowing it was going to be good or not, and as such forking out for the most expensive tickets might well have been (and would have been) a waist of money. Furthermore, he is from a country with a rather egalitarian view of things, which leads to the fact that apparently no seats in theatres there are really crap, only less desirable.
Well, these seats were… well, crap. Or they would have been crap, had any species of animal been able to survive the altitude to perform such actions. I myself was getting shorter of breath by the time we had climbed three or four floors up, and I had the distinct urge to shout “Ricola” when we were sort of halfway there. It was a good thing our theatre provided sherpas were willing to carry some of the books just purchased.

Anyways, after finally having crossed the snowline and slicing away the frozen remains of the guests perished there before us, we found that we were seated at an acoustically great spot. The sound was excellent where we were, if the stage was only the size of a postage stamp. On the other hand, a cleavage filled postage stamp, so perhaps I shouldn’t complain as much.
The show itself turned out to be, as said, ok. The seatprice was well worth it, and the fun to be had about the basic seatplace was worth it twice over.

A swift dinner and some more walking around later we took our seats for Avenue Q, a much better musical in my humble opinion, and the places, this time booked by me, were a good deal better accordingly. Boyfriend, as expected, had a great time, and I had a great time with him, so all was well.

The next day was regretfully already the return day, and after a good night spent at my place the weekend was sadly over. Not much exciting was done, to be honest, but it was a wildly enjoyable weekend I hope to do over sometime soon, if with different musicals, and perhaps from an hotel or suchlike actually a bit closer to the centre. But hey, beggars can't be choosers and all that.

Well, this as a quick “yes I am back to blogging-blog” Will try to keep updates coming again at a regular basis. Apologies this one was not all that interesting and a bit journallike. Will also strife to do better next time.

Grtz,
Kevin.

And then, suddenly, it hits you…

2007-01-05T15:06:00.001+01:00

There should be a word for the moment the realisation hits you that the situation is not all ok, not all spiffy and shiny. Obviously, calling it an “oh-shit-moment” does it’s job admirably, but I say a real, dictionary approved word is needed here. And I am pretty sure I am not the only one, so I say: come on and use the power of the internet, use it and come up with my word.

In another note, I just realised this is the second time I am asking all of you to come up with a word for me. Granted, last time it was a word that would chill the blood of an offending party to the point of involuntary suicide, but still.

Anyways, last Thursday the lovely Bienie and myself took our little butts into the cinema to watch the new animated picture “Happy Feet”, about a tap-dancing penguin. We’d both seen the previews, and I had found some tap dancing excerpts of our movie-choice. So we worked our way past the posters of the tapping P’guin, discussed the options of tapping within an animated environment, had a short conversation with the studenty girls behind us about the tapping options of your average penguin, and turned towards the screen to see a tapping penguin.
And we watched a penguin. And he tapped.

Then, roughly two scenes into the movie, two distinct and very separate realisations hit me.

The first, not at all unusual, was the fact that I needed to pee. And pee I needed. Not just a little nudge from the bladder upwards that he was in fact approaching fullness and would appreciate being empties anytime most convenient, no. No this was a full on bladder-kidney civil attack. For a second I truly felt like the next thing I was going to hear was a small “pop” and see my insides dribble softly out of the hole in my side. This did not, however, happen. I am quite happy about this, and so I imagine were the people who worked at the cinema. I have never worked in any cleaning capacity myself, but I imagine if I ever would, the thought “God I am happy there is no kidney debris to clean up here” would cross my mind more than occasionally.

The second realisation, somewhat less urgent but all the more persuasive for it’s subtle delivery, was “Kevin… you well and truly despise Tap… Why are you the FUCK here?!?”.
Now I never like shouting to myself, and would have severely disciplined me, but in this particular case, I had to agree with the vehemence of my feelings.

Because I really do hate tap. Don’t get me wrong, as a discipline and training it is remarkably difficult to master, it has subtleties well beyond my abilities to express and all the validity as an artform.
I just really do not like watching it at all. Really. Not one bit. If given the chance to ride a unicycle through a room filled with the spiderinfested corpses of clowns during a full moon on the anniversary of the day 20 circi (plural of circuses) burned down on an Indian burial ground while mad incantations were screamed across the ashes by the deeply burned clown who just managed to save himself with his spritzing carnation or watching a bit of tap, I would be willing to desecrate some clowny corpses in less time than it took you to read this sentence.
So I dislike tap. This sentiment was delivered by me on numerous occasions, I think only my diatribe on the inherent manipulations of small children had more airtime than Tap. But somehow this little fact had completely slipped my mind while planning to go to this movie, buying tickets for this movie, seeing the posters for this movie, and whatnot.

I turned to Zaandam-haling bombshell next to me and said this, and she answered with a weary “I know”…

So why not leave, you ask me? Was it the incessant sugary sweetness of the movie glue-ing you to your seat? Well, partly. Was it because you never walk out of a movie, having even sat through the cinematographically challenged disease-toting disaster that were AI and Intolerable Cruelty? Yes, this is also right. Actually, this is the only reason I kept my place in the theatre. Kevin be damned if he lets a fluffball on softshoe drive him out of his natural habitat.

Next thing, The bean turns to me, and whispers. What she whispers is surprisingly close to what I described above. “I need to pee, but if I stand up now I won’t want to go back again… so I am staying”
And we did. We were there to see roughly fifteen million hearts be made out of bubbles, fishcorpses, penguinphlegm, snow, stones, clouds, the sappy minds of thirteen 6 year olds. Seriously, if it is even remotely possible to make a heart out of something, this movie does it.

But in all fairness, the movie wasn’t the worst I’ve seen last year. Not the best, certainly, but also not the worst. If you have small kids and a full frontal lobotomie, by all means, go see it and be entertained. Just do not tap on the way there.

Stripes at half open,
Kevin.

Internal consistency, sequels and playing games.

2006-12-13T14:22:00.000+01:00

Yesterday was Tuesday, and Tuesdays in Amsterdam means Sneak Previews in the cinema. As a pair of somewhat avid moviegoers, Housemate and me gave Fate a chance to fuck us over, and got tickets to an unknown movie. Tagging along with us was the magnificent person who shall remain unidentified, except for the moniker “Liz”, which nobody will get but I will, and this is all that matters, really. Usually Boyfriend tags along as well, but he is working outside of the country this week, so no such luck for me.
Liz, Housemate and myself had settled into our red velvet seats, already getting a bit sugar high-y on cokes and chocolate chips, and ready to be entertained. By this time advertising and suchlike had already told us the movie we were going to be enjoying:

----- Saw III. -----

Now this immediately instilled me with the feeling I might not enjoy myself all that much. I liked Saw, the first instalment of this increasingly crap continuum of thought, but more from a “what would I do” perspective than from a movie-going one. Ok, from here on in, I will start spoiling all of them, so if you haven’t seen them, save yourself the effort.

*****SPOILERLINE******SPOILERLINE*****SPOILERLINE*****

Saw started with two men in a basement, chained to the wall by chains around their ankles, and a tape-recorder telling them that they are playing a game. One of them, a doctor, is given a gun and is told he has to kill the other within a set period of time, otherwise his wife and child will be killed. Alternatively, they can use whatever is in the room to get out, and walk away. Well…walk. As all there is in the room except for a pile of debris are a couple of saws… Now me, in a situation where I have to choose between a stranger and the people I love, I would’ve shot the stranger before the tape had time to finish. The basic “You will have to kill him otherwise your wife and child *BANG* be killed. Should you not” and then turn of the tape and start calling out to whatever person is behind this to come and get me. Granted, not the nicest thing to do, but hey, I never pretend to niceness.

During the movie, we get some flashback-material telling us who the game-master is, a serial killer named Jigsaw who gives his victims a game to play, where they will have to do something to save their own live. These things range from killing other people to climbing through a room of razor wire, and as one can imagine, it gets a tad gruesome. But interesting nonetheless, I will admit.

Saw II was a loose sequel to the first, where we have a game consisting of the traditional group of stereotypes in an old house, where they have to go through a series of tests to get to some antidote against the poison that permeates the air. Already the movie had lost me there. The house is so old, so rickety, so obviously falling apart that pumping it full of poisonous gas with any degree of effectiveness would also mean all small animals and probably most of the people living around the house would end op very dead from the sheer volumes of gas in the air. The house should also quickly start behaving like one of those tube thingies you sometimes see at gas-stations, where people attach it to a blower and it stands up straight, sometimes with comically flailing arms.

So the premise of this movie sucks from the get go. This is bad, but not too bad, movies can have a stupid idea as long as they remain internally consistent, I always say. This movie, however, isn’t. Well, it pretends to be, but it isn’t. The characters respond to situations in ways blindingly stupid. Again, me, in a situation like that, would directly start cataloguing what type of people our little group is made off, what everybody can and cannot do, and how good everybody is at what they do. Granted, this might have little or no effect but just on the off chance there is a toxicologist in the house I would do a little round up. And then slap the inevitable toxicologist for not making himself known before I needed to start counting.

This is off course something these people do NOT do. What they do, however, is start fighting, being uncontrolled, and generally idiotic. Not a problem, panic works itself out, I say. But then they are told that they will survive if only they follow the rules. Now this killer has been operating for a while, and is known for letting the people who play his games to it’s extreme point live. So there is no reason to believe this situation should be otherwise. Nonetheless, they start breaking rules as were they professional boxers, and the rules the noses of their counterparts. Fair enough, again, see what it does, perhaps the insanely intelligent criminal has made some mistakes and hopes that by making you follow rules he will get away with them.
Obviously, you stop breaking rules after the first few people die. Well, after the first does, I’d say. The reasoning is very simple: No breaking of the rules: Live! Breaking of the rules: Die! What would you choose?

This is not to say that the insanely intelligent killer has not made any mistakes. In fact, he made a lot. Quite apart from the filling a house with poisonous gas and leaving the antidotes inside, he has set up traps that rely on luck more than I do when playing pool. People get basically killed because they just happen to be at point A when somebody else does something at point B. Granted, it was said that the thing at point B should not be done, but there was no way the killer would know that anybody would be at point A. In one to me memorable moment one of the characters sees a vial of antidote in a glass cage and sticks both hands in, only to get stuck in the mechanic of the cages entry. Now, any sane person in her situation would call out for help, or better yet, not put both hands in at the same time, but use one hand to get the antidote and the other to stop the mechanism from locking. Luckily for old Jiggy, this character was distracted by something shiny when they handed out the brains, and she perishes.

Good, Saw II annoyed the freaking shite out of me. Not just for the complete randomness of the deaths, which didn’t really mesh well with my idea of “rules”, I mean, if a “rule” is “do not stand somewhere when someone does something sometime” I would ask for a bit of clarification. No the real reason it annoyed me was the fact that we get to see what happens outside of the house, and outside of the house the police are talking to the serial killing genius, currently dying from cancer of the something. Judging by his general behaviour, cancer of the personality is most likely the case.
For in the name of all that is good and beautiful in the world is this a boring man. And the cop he is talking to, incidentally the father of one of the people in the house, is not much better. So we are treated to half reasonable slasherpic, half emochatter. And I hate emo-everything, let alone the chatter version.

At least the movie ends with a reasonably interesting twist, and once more, people get fucked over in ways they would not have been had they just listened to the nice boring psychopath. This is always a good thing. I will at one point become a psycho, especially if these movies keep being churned out of whatever godsforsaken hellhole they churn these out of, and I would like to have the idea that it pays of to listen to a killer firmly entrenched in the collective mind.

But yesterday… Saw III. And indeed, another notch, hup and tackle closer to the seemingly inevitable point where I will pick up the closest thing to me and start bashing people over the head with it. I will hope for y’all’s sake that this happens while I am visiting a cotton candy maze.

The movie starts out with some gore, then going on to some gore, and segues smoothly into some gore. Only problem is that moviemakers nowadays don’t realize gore for it’s own sake does not really work. I mean come on people, even porn has the occasional flimsy storyline to get from action to action, and sex and gore being some of humanities pressing wants the two should have something in common. Now for all those who might state that sometimes porn does not have a storyline and gore should therefore not be forced to do the same: this is true, but that is what movies like “faces of death” are for. Also: Your mother shakes chickens in hell you froofy porn fiends.

Saw III, or “descent into perpetuity, step 3” as I will call it from now on, does pretend to follow the same basic rules the first step did, but it really doesn’t. The games can no longer be survived, and the people just die horribly. Now I have no beef whatsoever with someone who needs to kill people in elaborate ways. Sure, it is not the way I would have chosen, but I at the same time make it a point to not verbally disagree with people who need to kill people.
A good thing that the perpetrator of these kills, not the classic Jigsaw but a whiney apprentice, is punished in the end for her transgressions. Silly girl, going around killing people horribly without giving them a chance on a disfigured but functional live.

Well, functional… Not to want to toot my own horn here, but I am well aware of the fact my reasonable to good looks have gotten me out of some dire situations. Should some insane maniac decide to maim or deform me, I’m sure I would be a good deal less functioning. Even worse, I will probably stop functioning altogether. I’m hardly gorgeous but I am vain as a motherfucker, so being unable to look into a mirror for fear of cracking will make my life a bit less fun. But hey, saving up for plastic surgery beats not having to save up for a coffin in this matter, so ignore this sidetrack.

Anyways. Story. Well, story… Female Doctor is kidnapped by Apprentice Whiner to take care of Dying Jigsaw. Meanwhile, a Grieving Father wakes up in a box. Apparently Female Doctor has to keep Dying Jigsaw alive for the time Grieving Father takes to finish, positively or negatively, the task set in front of him. We will get back to GF in a second.

In order to get FD to cooperate with the insane scheme of DJ, AW fastens around the neck of FD a collar designed to discharge a few rounds of ammunition into the pretty face of FD. This collar is linked to the heart monitor of DJ and both the mechanism that links the two machines and the triggers to discharge the rounds are mounted on the outside of the collar. The key to this contraption is enormous, and placed with little ceremony but a lot of obviousness around the neck of AW. This immediately annoyed me. Well, not immediately, it takes a while for the movie to get up to speed enough to annoy me, before this, I was just bored. The only thing keeping me form walking out was the fact both Liz and Housemate are two incredibly attractive women, and they were nestled basically in my shoulder because of all the gore. Hey, it might be platonic but it is the basic reason I surround myself almost exclusively with beautiful women.

Ok, but it annoyed me. Why? Because this doctor is smart and level-headed, and she should have been able to figure out a way out of this. Hell, even I got the basic point. If it were me, I would have cornered AW somewhere in the enormous and sharp item-filled warehouse the incarceration takes place in and quietly slit her throat. Then put something between triggers and calmly disengage the lock. Perhaps, as an encore, kill the bedridden maniac DJ. But then, perhaps that oath they all have to take would keep her from doing this, but then, you know, call the cops.

The above does not happen, for some reason as “DJ might scare if you, FD, kill me, AW, and then he might try to help me and pull some wires out of the heart monitor.” Or somesuch nonsense (the actual reason given, I kid you not). OBVIOUSLY the insane maniac is going to go through a lot of trouble acquiring a FD able to rescue him and then kill her at the drop of a hat. Yes… AW, yes I’m sure.

What does, however happen, is a rather graphically shown piece of impromptu brain surgery, and a lot of psychological torture of both AW and FD, and some pretty gold lighted flashbacky memory scenes from DJ. Useless, meaningless till the next instalment flashbacks, but hey, they are all gold and nice and people love each other.
As an aside, “Bedridden Maniac DJ” will become my stage-name when I start organizing karaoke nights when I am in a nursing home.

Meanwhile we see GF traversing a maze with some trap type situations. Basically he is put face to face with three people he blames for the death of his son and the sequential too light sentencing of the person who drove over the tricyclewielding toddler. A very ugly toddler, it must be said. We get a lot of flashbacks (AGAIN. Flashbacks can be nice but ever since Memento they have become overused if nothing else) about dad grieving and dad being a basic dickhead to his daughter and dad brandishing a gun.

Anyway, he is put in situations where he will get a chance to forgive those involved in the accident that took his son. First off, in a freezing room, he runs into the naked body of the woman who saw the whole thing happen but fled the scene. She is occasionally sprayed with water, and understandably freezing. GF father spends a lot of time overacting and not saving this woman, until she finally is covered with a layer of ice, and THEN he forgives her and tries to free her. A bit late there, you hack.

In the next room he meets the judge who sentenced the driver that killed the son to roughly 6 months. Apparently the whole thing was really an accident or whatever, but still GF is very vengeful. Apparently not liking the fact that your son dies and that nobody really seems to care is a bad thing in a person, at least according to the schlocks we will for lack of a better word call the “Script writers” of this interminable piece of utter drivel.
Ok, so he meets up with Judge, who is tied down at the bottom of a metal container. Into this container feeds the meat-grinder next to it, which is itself fed by an onslaught of very decomposed pigs. You have to admire some creativity here. GF can save Condescending Judge by finding a key hidden in the pile of toys the Dead Son used to own. He can also put all the stuff of DS into an incinerator, which will burn everything except the key.

Now in the freezing room, at least GF himself suffered some damage, to unhook the woman he had to press his face into some freezing metal pipes to get to the key that would save her. In this instance however, he merely has to incinerate some toys. Granted, toys with an emotional meaning, but ultimately just foam-rubber and plastic. He does this, after much overacting deliberation and some flashbacks, and saves CJ.

Anyway, judge saved, room left, he gets to the last of his tests, the man that ran down DS. Now this man is put into a machine that slowly turns around, twisting arms, legs and ultimately neck in positions these things were never meant to be in. This obviously results in some bones splintering and whatnot. The key to this contraption is in a glass or plastic case and can only be taken out by triggering the shotgun in that same case and aimed at the key.
Again, were it me, I would either try to break the case and get the key out from the side, staying out of the line of fire, or kick and mangle the case until the aim is off or the gun fires. GF goes for the key, is missed by the shot himself, but CJ is conveniently in the line of fire, so we waist neither bullet nor a chance to have another gruesome but unlikely death. The question whether it is a smart or at least commendable effort to warn someone who is RIGHT IN FRONT OF A GUN that this gun IS GOING TO GO OFF NOW is not really tackled in this movie, but apparently it is just another piece of proof that GF is in all likelihood one of the most incredible dickwads seen in history. (A piece of proof I agree with, this time)

Regretfully, by the time GF is anywhere near the key or the killer of DS, the killer’s head has already turned round far enough to compete with most owls and that girl from that movie in the “Guess who can read their own underwear labels” sweepstakes.
So another corpse, another dollar, and GF is presented on the leaving of this room with a gun and a single bullet.

Now we flash back to DJ, AW and FD, where AW has gotten jealous enough of the relationship between DJ and FD (she despises him, he needs her) to want to kill FD. DJ begs her not to, AW shoots FD anyways, and RIGHT AT THAT MOMENT GF comes in, we find out FD is the wife of GF, and that this is again an example of the amazing timing DJ has. A little bit of explanation follows, AW was apparently displeasing DJ or something.

GF starts to take care of FD, who has been shot in the stomach and might still live, but obviously GF has learned very little, and kills DJ by applying a circular saw to his neck area. Heart-monitor stops, charges go off, FD buys the farm.
And another tape starts playing, telling GF that DJ WAS the only person who knew were the daughter of GF and FD is.

Fade to black.

*****Spoiler End*****Spoiler End*****Spoiler End*****

All this, and what feeling does it leave when you walk out? Well, the feelings of anger, sadness, and confusion rivalled for my attention. Anger that this piece of crap was made, sadness for all those who did like it and need to be put down as soon as possible, and confusion about who would fund this disaster.

Also, it gave me 6 pages of blog, a rare occurrence, but then, it did piss me off a bit, in case it wasn’t clear from the above paragraphs.

Please, please do not go and see this movie. If it bombs, perhaps we will not have to see the 4th…

Stripes at “GET THE FUCK OF MY SCREEN”

Kevin.

Sometimes, there is just no disappointment.

2006-12-12T15:25:00.000+01:00

This, in itself, can be remarkably disappointing, of course, but it does not really count, now does it? It always does a heart good to vent some ire and resentment at a cruel and uncaring world, and it always helps if one has a place to start from. Regretfully, my last few movie experiences have left me placeless, and bereft of irritation, so I will just have to wing it. But wing it I will.

First off, James Bond, Casino Royale. Because I kept hearing it was a surprisingly entertaining movie, and because it was the first Bond in a long while that was at least roughly based on a Fleming novel, I decided to chance it again. And as can be deduced from all above, I was not disappointed.

Sure, the man portraying this incarnation of the double-O really is ugly, despite a reasonable body I would say he is about as doable as the first ms. Bond, were she to be unearthed today. (This is absolutely no dig at the Rigg, loved that woman, but OHMSS was in 1969, and nobody looks right after 25+ years of being dead) In all fairness, this is slightly disappointing, after all, he is supposed to be getting the girl(s) and I always enjoy on screen smootching a good deal more when all participators are cute. No such luck this time.
But the movie, at least, was reasonably action filled, as a Bond needs to be, a good deal dumber than real life would ever be, as a good Bond needs to be, and storywise a mess of such momentous proportions that Lord of the Rings has something to be when it grows up. Things that are blatantly clear and obvious cannot get solved without the intervention of such a number of hints and information bombs that wading through those alone would take a good one and a quarter hour, and we have not even seen a good dress yet at this point in time.
But seriously, go see it. The movie is entertaining enough on it’s own, and as a Bond it does a good deal better than the previous few.

Next on offer last week was the movie based on Patrick Suskind’s incredible novel “Perfume, story of a murderer”. Now I love this book. Not in the least because I love the psychology of scent and the effects it has on our memory and emotions. The book goes into the creation of a scent so perfect that all who smell it are filled with love for the person wearing it. A story of the murder of several attractive young girls, by the hands of a deformed and plaguescarred dwarf.

The movie presents the themes and ideas from the book in a remarkable manner. Slowly passed for the most part, with some of the irreverent humor of the book, it really did a good job evoking the feelings the book evokes in me.

In a strange complement to the Bond movie described above, the main character in this movie is a good deal more attractive than he should be. Not that he is the most beautiful boy I have seen in a long time or anything, but he is certainly no deformed dwarf. All’s I can say is that I never pictured the literary Grenouille with eyelashes so lush and long they could entangle a stampeding bull-herd.

I have been paying attention to eyelashes a lot, lately, as an aside. I blame the fact that Boyfriend as incredible eyelashes, all starry and long and gorgeous. I, with my reasonable length and no curl, am jealous. Stupid bastard. On the other hand, I get to look at them, and he never sees them. So HA!

Ok, anyways. I understand that the realm of scent is very difficult to put into a motion picture, and I am happy to say the allusions in this film are very successful. Colours and setting work together to form a picture where one can practically see how it must have smelled.

The fact that the two most beautiful women in the movie share the same beautiful but strangelooking haircolour helps in seeing how they might have smelled somewhat alike, if this makes any sense.

It won’t, go see the movie, you’ll understand what I mean.

A very short blog this time, very sorry. Have a couple of ideas on the line, but can’t find all the words to post them here in the way I want to. Will try again later.

Till that time,
Stripes at half open.

Kevin.

How NOT to hurl oneself up a flight of stairs.

2006-11-15T12:07:00.000+01:00

Yes, I know, people usually hurl themselves DOWN flights of stairs, but this morning I saw a necessity to do things the other way for a change. Why? Well, to be honest, I have no idea.

I had a good night yesterday, which started off as looking like it was going to be a bad night. It all started when Housemate let me know she wasn’t feeling like going into town to catch the Sneak Preview, a standard staple for our working week. This annoyed me, as usually when she doesn’t feel like doing something she usually IS feeling like vegging out behind her computer for a night. This I usually don’t mind, but yesterday I wanted to do something.

No worries, a quick phone call later taught me she was mostly not looking forward to being home late and the chance of catching a bad movie, which is fair enough for me, and as I still owed her a dinner, it was easy to convince her to help me fill my evening. So off we went, biking through the rain, the diminutive women Housemate is nestled in the back of my coat to protect herself from the watery onslaught, on our way to a restaurant we had tried once before and liked.

About 5 minutes later, soaking wet and cold, not too mention miserable but somehow in a good mood, we stood in front of a closed restaurant. Not fun. Not to be disparaged, we adjourned to the restaurant across the street, as we had walked past it a few times before but not too good word of mouth had kept us from trying it out. Now, rain and coldness kept us from doing anything but try it out.

And a nicer forceful rain there has never been. Despite the incredible and tip-destroying gruffness of the staff, the dinner was excellent. On the mid-to-high side, cost-wise, but really very good. The entrees on their own consisted of a reasonable plateful of carpaccio for housemate, which despite being presented with all the charm and grace of a mud-flap still very much fulfilled her wishes, and my dove’s breast and pasta was a great way to start a meal as well.
Main course was a beautiful plate of deer for HM, and wild boar for myself, and really, pigs have something to learn from their wild counterparts. Finishing with French toast for housemate and vanilla ice cream profiterole for myself, we ended the meal well and truly stuffed, but pleased.

A few games of pool and a skype call with boyfriend deposited me in bed at around half twelve, very happy, and prepared to get up early this morning as the public transport was going to go on strike at 9 o’clock and I needed to be at work before that.

And I might as well say, I failed. Miserably. And wetly.

First off I slept right through my freaking alarm clocks. Yes… Multiple. No part measures for me, only the best is good enough, I go the distance. Only this morning, I did not go the distance. I did not even get started, actually.
So I woke up at the last possible moment to perhaps get the last possible bus, which would maybe deposit me at the transfer point at the last chance to get the last tram with a bit of luck.
Now the amounts of lasts and perhapses here should tip you off to the fact the undertaking did not instil me with a lot of confidence, and I did not look forward to the travelling to work today.

The bus was mercifully on time, even early, and the first leg of my travel was actually remarkably smooth. The fun started when I arrived at the place where I was supposed to catch the tram for the last bit of the journey. Now these trams roughly follow the route of an elevated highway at this point, and as a result I need to walk up a flight of stairs to get to the platform. These platforms are around second floor level, and the stairs are divided in three parts.

Anyways, I get out of the bus, and I hear my tram getting alongside the platform, so some speed is of the issue. Normally I would not run for a tram, but as there was a good chance it was going to be the last one to go for the next seven hours, I figured I should change my usual modus operandi a tad.
And thus, I hurled. I basically tried to sprint up the stairs, but it mainly consisted of me throwing myself up for two steps and being buffeted by people coming down them, putting me back a step. After doing some salmon jumps and throwing some people off the stairs, I arrived upside just in time get shoulderthumped by a big and annoying gentleman, and this thwarting served it’s purpose in a magnificent way, for I could here the tell tale sound of closing doors before I had recovered from his impact.
Missed the freaking tram. But I continue in the knowledge I left a smear of water, half rinsed shampoo and some of my blood on his clothing, so I have some vengeance there.

I was very happy to see that the next one was on the little board already, but I had no idea whether it was going to show, strike and all. But there was at this point nothing I could do other than getting rained upon, as there was also no bus going back home. Had no tram arrived, I’d have been stranded.

Luckily, it showed, near empty, but it was there. I took my seat, considered the fact that it was a few minutes to nine, and that it could possibly only take me a few stops closer to work before refusing to go all the way. So I stressed. And I stressed every time it approached a station, as it could be the last.
But, well, anticlimactic life intervened once more, and the tram pondered it’s way all the way to my stop, and I arrived at work. Late, but there.
And wet.

Really truly fucking dripping WET. It’s raining over here. And I got wet. I got wet on the day the entire European sales team is in my office for a meeting, and I come in looking like a fucking Kelpie victim. An annoyed Kelpie victim at that. Allthough, to be fair, after mounting a very nice horse, being unable to get off it, and being dragged by it into a watery grave would possibly piss me off a bit more than actually being rained upon, but not MUCH more, is all I am saying.

Anyways, back to work, I needed to vent for a second.

Stripes at 10110, from now on meaning “I envy Kelpie victims, they don’t have to meet new people”

Kevin.

How Plato discovered bluffing

2006-11-14T14:31:00.000+01:00

Yesterday after class one of my classmates asked me whether I believe in True Love, as she is having some “issues” with her personal situation, and is debating her take on the whole “love and relationship” thing.
Without going too far into the story behind it, there is an Ex, and he might not remain Ex for long. So naturally she is considering whether Ex is really the one for her or not, and if there even is something like a “the One”.

This reminded me of a few years ago, when I just moved to Ireland.
The company I started working for over there paid for a Bed&Breakfast for two weeks, giving employees the time and chance to find their own, permanent, accommodation. I was rather lucky here, having a B&B close to the bus lines and with multiple rooms, a friend of mine was secluded away in a beautiful house, which was nonetheless situated a 35 minute walk from the nearest neighbours, and surrounded by very spooky forestage.
Another plus was the fact I shared the place with other employees of my company, thusly solving the problem of “but what if I can’t find anybody to talk to?”
I met a very nice young woman this way, with whom I started to spend some time walking through town and talking.

Before long, as these things are wont to do, the rumours started to happen, and not long after that, they proved to be grounded somewhat in reality.
Well…. HER reality.
Apparently I was already part of some sort of fantasy, prompting her to start “showing up” at places at some very strange hours.
This could of course not continue, I don’t mind being stalked when I am pet-free as much, but I really liked her as a friend and her feelings for me seemed not the wisest guides on the path of life. The fact that “feelings for me” are NEVER the wisest things to follow should be mentioned here, I can be quite chaos-catalysing.

So we had a talk, considering how our friendship was moving and what could be done about her feelings for me. This met with instant resistance and denial, and some storming off and slamming doors, after which we didn’t really speak for half a year. After this period, some e-mails started to be sent, describing the fact that she did indeed have feelings for me then and didn’t know how to deal with the situation. Now I am not vindictive and don’t hold grudges, and I also make no apologies for human needs, as feelings can not be hypocritical or fake, as long as you are honest about them, and forgiveness was soon given.
We continued our friendship over a distance and sometimes trained over to each other’s houses to spend a weekend talking and watching movies, it was all quite comforting.

Until we were standing on a bus stop discussing the way life was going and she suddenly, offhandedly and without any idea she was doing it, destroyed my perceived chances of acquiring good dating karma.
We were speaking about love, life, and destiny when she suddenly said that at least her obsession with me and the lack of result taught her that for her there was no one true love. And I balked like a little mule in front of a big bridge. Made of fire. A wood mule.
Because I do believe in True Love, deep down I am a romantic and sappy person, and I like little better than the idea that somewhere, somehow, everything is all right.
To then be used as evidence in someone else’s cynicism without beforehand giving this person ample reason and argument was unexpected and unwanted.

I don’t necessarily believe that there is One True Love, someone who will be the one and only for ever and ever, I think that this is fine for some but not for all and only living a full live will tell you what camp you end up in. I think there are a multitude of people who make a life a little more complete, and some who possibly could but you never meet, and some who could but don’t.

When humans first started being human, there were only a few of us, so only a few souls to go around. Creationism can be aligned with Plato to give us a “split soul” theory, which also ties in nicely with popular culture and soul mates. But it doesn’t end there.
There are 6 billion people on the planet, starting with only a comparative handful. So the souls must have split over and over again, and are most likely still doing so, even counting reincarnation, as some must go to Nirvana or Hades after all their cycles, not too mention that there are still more people being born.

So it seems logical that all these first souls have split over and over again, leaving us all with pieces of a complete one. Also the reason why you meet the same people in every life, all be it in different roles. They could simply have been parts of the same soul you as well were part of once.

It also means that there are many different people who can be your soul mate, and many ways for them to be so. Nobody knows exactly where they fit into the puzzle, and nobody needs to know, as long as there are still people/pieces around us who give us the relative perspective, and teach us the lessons we need to learn over the course of a lifetime. Friends, family, people you meet on a bus but who do change your outlook on life, they all were once part of the same being, and they all still have this effect on you because the soul recognizes it’s own, this recognition may well be the origin of love, friendship and trust, but also the base of hate and dissent, as who has personalities that all align perfectly?

So I believe that life brings us in touch with ourselves in more ways than one, and using more people than one, so it could be foolish to say that there is only one person to love on the planet. Also, if there is, and mine lives in Greenland/Australia/Brabant, how am I supposed to meet this person?
This last question might prove my optimism, as no matter how often I see God’s (dis) involvement in humanities happiness, I still do not believe hesheitthem would knowingly screw up someone’s life without a good reason, and usually the chance to meet will be there through moving, blind luck, vacations or internet. The fact that Boyfriend hails from the other side of the planet and all is an argument here, but I’m not sure yet if it is for or against my thesis…

So yes, I do believe in true love, and even in multiple true loves, but part of me still thinks there should be only one. I blame popular culture. I am luckily enough of a realist to appreciate what is there now, and to take things as they come. But I also like to keep the possibility of forever in the back of my mind. And will remain doing so for the foreseeable future.

I’ll tell you whether I was right in about a thousand years, providing I can keep up the immortality I have been practicing for the past 25 years.

Till then, stripes at half open,

Kevin

Ps. Also, the title to this blog is a VERY obscure pun, even for me, so I will explain it here.
**********Spoilerline****************

Plato wrote in his Symposium about how humanity used to look different from our current outlook, when we used to have four legs, for arms, two head. There were three sexes then, one man-man, one man-woman, and one woman-woman. The details and reasoning is a bit hazy for me, but the Gods split us up into the halfs of a whole we are now, and the pain of this separation was love. True love is described as finding the other half of the being you once were.
For details, check out Plato, he did some fine writing.
Now, true love is also what Wesley answers with the help of some bellows in "The Princess Bride" when he is almost dead and asked why he is hanging on. Only because he is basically dead and his lips don't work well, the magician interprets his words as "Two Blave", meaning to bluff.

Ok, those with somewhat refined senses of humour will kill me for the title-pun, lovers of philosophy for the bastardizing of Plato, and sappy 80's kids for the desecration of TPB, so I am dead either way, but as Housemate falls in all three of the categories she will most likely call first dibs. Which I now negate by doing so myself, as I do as well fall in all three categories.
Dibs.

Altercations in Public Transport, a rant in three parts.

2006-11-07T10:32:00.000+01:00

.I.

A few weeks ago, myself and the person who would shortly after that take up the role of Boyfriend were on the last bus into Amsterdam from my tiny place of residence. Well, the town is tiny, my house has an ample size. It needs to, as it has to accommodate my considerable and slow-moving bulk alongside the petite but fast-moving one of Housemate (she doesn’t think she is small, but she is, it’s that simple).

Anyway, we were on the last bus into town on a Saturday night, and at one of the stops a small group of people got on the bus, or attempted to get on the bus. Attempted, because one of these people was carrying a can of drink. Now, the pictograms stating that it is not allowed to do this have long since been taken from the busses in Holland, but the driver still decides who is allowed on his big yellow-green contraption. And in this particular case, the entire group was, except for the can.
Now what this particular can had ever done to the driver, I have no knowledge of, but I wager it had less to do with the can than it had to do with the incredible stupidity and horrendous arrogance emanating from the girl holding on to it.
This is all nice and well, of course, except the blonde bint refused to toss the can, or drink it really fast and get on the bus. Fair enough, get out of the bus, and stop whining, I would say.
Not her though… nooooo… The very idea of not whining would not have entered this young women’s brain had it hacked its way in there with an ice-pick and a blowtorch.
So she whined. And the driver refused. And then, to top off a situation already fraught with tension and aggressiveness (from me) her friend, who I am going to be referring to in my mind as Sluttana Slutford, decided to be diplomatic.
Now I like diplomacy. It is after all the art of saying “nice doggy” while looking for a rolled up newspaper, but in this particular case this girl was saying “nice doggy” to a canine who had it’s own rolled up newspaper, a large one. With wheels.
Also, el Slutto had about the diplomatic savvy of a drunk hyena trying to weasel his way into a high class country club by insulting the bellboys.
Predictably, the charm offensive failed, and the blonde bimbo still had not taken even a sip of her stupid drink, and the driver shut down the bus.
Let’s all say this: He shut down the bus.
MY BUS!
By now we had been standing there about twenty minutes, all late and annoyed, and now this person had caused a bus full of people to completely abandon all pretence of going further. Understandably, there were those who had something to say about this.
Soon the cries of “just toss the can or piss OFF” started to be heard from the back of the bus, whereas Sluttana had started to be noticeably aggressive towards the poor bus driver.

Now I do not directly agree with his stance, after all, the people seemed not all that drunk, and the chance of the can of drink being forcibly moving through the bus on its’ own seemed remote. But the simple fact of the matter is that he has the deciding “captain of the ship” like vote in the matter.
In the end, fearing they might be pummelled to death by the Saturday night crowd, the stupidity-team left the bus, shouting they’d wait for the next one (which would be along in about six hours) and we continued.
..II..

Not too long ago Housemate and I were on the bus back home. At some point in time I heard something behind me that sounded suspiciously like “All faggots must die” Now I hardly ever jump to conclusions, and wanted to hear a bit more about what was transpiring those few rows behind me. As I had just kissed Boyfriend goodnight when entering the bus, it seemed likely that this comment had been spurred by my actions. Housemate however was seethingly jumping into the fray as soon as she realized the topic of conversation.
Well, jumping into the fray… Housemate and I both believe that everybody has a right to their opinion, and I myself have at some point in time made the point that at least 95% of all homosexuals would be better of with a good dose of death in their diets.
But more important than the point made is the way a point is made, and this person was making his point at an incredibly loud tone of voice, and peppered with expletives. It was this, more than anything, which annoyed Housemate.
So she turned around, and politely asked him to either speak a tad softer, or speak in a way more suitable for public transport.
No go. Apparently “young people” nowadays (us) would have had a difficult time making themselves understood in whatever backwater dump this person grew up. The good man insisted that he had a right to his opinion (true) and that we should move to the back of the bus if we couldn’t take it (false)
Housemate kept politely trying to convince him that she did agree with the right to his opinion, but that she would like him to tone it down a second.
This obviously escalated. He started speaking louder and spouting more political blatant incorrectness, Housemate responded in polite but scathing fashion, I myself put my two cents in wherever I saw an option.
At one point, I turned back facing the front of the bus again and put forth to the ether my opinions on the situation, using, at one point, the word “shit”.
This prompted our friendly neighbourhood troglodyte to tell Housemate to tell her boyfriend to mind his language. This obviously after he had spent 15 minutes hosing us down with spittle and extremely right winged stupidity, so one might imagine the effect this had on both Housemate and me.

So I turned round, and told the good man that I was not her boyfriend, but that I am usually my boyfriends boyfriend. Housemate turned round, and told him that he could always sit further down the bus if this really bothered him.
He didn’t, but did get off at the next stop. Regretfully, we will never know if this was his actual stop or that he decided to wait for the next bus, but one can hope.
He did however leave us with a lot of unused adrenaline. Housemate had just about build up her battle aura, and I was getting well ready to use the “and listen now, you horrid little man” voice, all to no avail. So we spent the rest of the bus trip quietly seething, and muttering to each other about the state of the world.
Coming home Housemate did a nice rendition of the word “fuck” at the top of her voice on our little square, but one can imagine this hardly did anything for her frazzled disposition.

…III…

This weekend I was taking my usual bus home, and using my time talking to Boyfriend on the phone, when I noticed a young boy entering the bus, carrying his dog.
Now when I say carrying, this might call forth an image of a young boy, cradling a small dog in his arms, shielding it from the danger of outside and the inherent risks a bus poses to small dogs.
Wrong.
He carried that little dog as I would a rugby ball, he had the dog by it’s doggy shoulders, carrying it at arms stretched, and swinging it every which way (this is hard to do with a rugby ball, but I am sure I managed). The dog looked absolutely terrified, and seemed to be in some pain. I was about to say something when he put the dog on a seat and sat down, so I figured it was fine for now. Soon enough he was joined by people I assume were his brother and mother, judging from the striking similarity in god awful unattractiveness.
Boys started talking, one of the two, I’m betting the youngest, in such a volume and pitch that my glasses started vibrating so badly I was fearing for my eyes. Boyfriend lost a couple of drinking glasses just having the phone line open at the unfortunate moment the boy had just inhaled and saw something of interest.
And boy did these guys saw things of interest.
Now don’t get me wrong, I think Amsterdam, and especially the southern part, is a very beautiful city, and when one takes his eyes upwards a bit to take a look at the architecture even more so. I myself tend to admire the small streets and the particular schools of design on view.
But these guys would’ve been amazed and most likely a little frightened at your average garden variety rock, judging by the things they exclaimed excitedly at. I swear at one point one of them noticed his own hand, and thusly prompted a barrage of squeals and shrieks not heard since 1478, when a mouse was doing backstrokes in the ornamental fountain in the seraglio of wonky lord Harold Pier-Habsburg, collector of peacocks and sexual deviant, known to only get his rocks of with castrato’s during concerto’s for violin and flute.
Gods but these kids were loud.

Now it is rarely my place to admonish others on the subject of whelp-rearing, but when Boyfriend had cleaned up the splinters and asked me what that infernal noise was, I had very little choice but to explain to him the situation I found myself in. The mother obviously heard me, and started throwing me some dirty looks. Not that I cared, she was throwing them the wrong way, after all, as they should have gone to her monstrous offspring.
They luckily got off before long, but regretfully not before putting the dog on the bus floor in front of the door, and then yanking it by it’s chain down the three high steps on to the pavement. Had I gotten off at the same stop they did, I’d have exploded at them. As it was, I didn’t get the chance.

--------------------------

Two blogs in two days, indeed, I was struck by inspiration, apparently.

Stripes at half open,

Kevin

Fashion, sneakers, shopping.

2006-11-06T11:47:00.000+01:00

I have allowed myself to be swayed by the demands of fashion and trend, and have made a purchase this weekend that is quite unlike me in more ways than one.

This weekend the boyfriend and I have made a shopping expedition into the city, mainly to get some inspiration for decorating his hovel-ish abode. The fact that we went in on a Saturday, a day everybody knows is designed to test the patience of every window shopper ever while simultaneously providing every windowshopper ever with the chance to dally in front of storefronts, thereby testing the patience of all OTHER windowshoppers should make it hardly surprising that the amount of inspiration gathered was at best minuscule, and at worst to be described with the idea “But what exactly is WRONG with decorating the small wall with the entrails of the short and annoying woman right in front of me?”

To keep either one of us from disembowelling fellow shoppers with the sharper bones of other fellow shoppers, we decided to take a venture into a calmer part of town, and pay a visit to Boyfriend’s Dog. Dog, name of George, seemed to enjoy this small bit of attention very much, and I have decided to forgive him the usual doggy tendency to be highest up by using my head as a step and/or resting place for the sheer enthusiasm he put to light for trying to eat my hand.
After having taken the dog for a walk and spending some time doing relaxation exercises to steel ourselves for the onslaught of annoyance we were bound to encounter on the walk back to the bus, I suddenly remembered that the reason for me to go into town in the first place was to get new shoes. Shoes, the one item of clothing I truly despise shopping for.

Now I usually wear basic black, basic model shoes without much frillyness, and I maintain to others that this is for simple style reasons. This is a blatant lie.
I wear them because there is no gender ambiguity.
Shoe-stores confuse me, especially modern shoe-stores. All those same basic model white sneakerthingies and people milling about between them… I am never sure whether I am on the right side of the store or not. I like old-fashioned shoe-stores where the areas were clearly indicated, and the chance of being wrong was further negated by the fact that I, as a man, had no business in the part of the store with all the glitter and heals.
The fact that I am now a confirmed genderfucker makes this in no way easier, as I hate doing that by mistake as much as I like doing it on purpose.

So I have steered clear of sneakers in the past, until this Saturday. Armed and bolstered by Boyfriend, who is a sneaker-wearing person, I decided to brave the confusion and find some shoes. And I did. Yay!
I am now the proud owner of a pair of white K-Swiss sneakers, with dark red detailing, and a dark red/light red stripe shifter system.
And I love them. As usual, I have purchased an item of clothing I really like, and I can’t stop talking about them.
I never really liked sneakers, they make the foot a good deal flatter, and on people with large feet, the idea of a walking “L” is hard to escape.
But I love my new white sneakers.

But now a new problem arises. The Stripe Shifter system is designed to enable one to use their shoes as a medium for communication. The idea is that the stripes on the side of the sneakers can be “opened” or “closed” with slides on the stripes, making them either dark red or light red, or other colours as the case might be. And different combinations would carry a specific message. This can be quite elaborate, actually, as both shoes have two sides, with five slides each, who can all independent of the rest can be recognizably at open, closed, or half-way. This means that there are 20 slots with three options, totalling a 3 to the 20th amount of options, which accoridng to my calculator means 3.486.784.401 options.
I am not taking the option that the stripes can be worn at quarters or thirds as well, the options would grow higher, but the indication is hard to differentiate between.
Best is it, obviously, to maintain the same config on all sets of 5, giving a mere 243 different combinations.

This is all nice and well, providing people would get their freaking head round what a certain combination would actually MEAN.
So far I have been able to find out that all open means “gay”, which would be fine but is unlikely, as all stripes open negates the idea of the shifter, and it seems a tremendously non-straight idea. And all slides at half mast is “respect” which is fine by me as it is the config I find most visually pleasing.

But what if I decide to alternate? Is 2nd and 4th of the 5 stripes open a good thing, a bad thing? What if I am signalling my allegiance to CDA? What if I by wearing my shoes thusly protest for the treatment of Dutch Elm Disease by burning puppies (Hush Puppies, most like, considering competition wars and all that)?
Looking through Google results hardly helps, the manufacturers site gives no useful information, and nobody I know wears the things…
Can anybody help me out here?

I have pondered the idea of putting my age in, as 10011 should be 25, and open-closed-closed-open-open is an acceptable configuration, but then, who understands binary except for true geeks, and they hardly ever look at people’s shoes. It would be a good way to find the few fashion conscious geeks, but then I am already training Boyfriend to be one of those, and really, with me being one as well, I am already pushing critical mass… Indicating an age will become problematic in 7 years when I get above 32 years old, but that is a problem I will tackle then.

Until then, all stripes at half open,

Kevin.

There's more than one way to...

2006-10-03T15:00:00.000+02:00

Fill up movie time, apparently.

A few years ago "Eyes Wide Shut" became a critically acclaimed masterpiece for two masters of cinema. Stanley Kubrick did the set up, Steven spielberg brought it home. This gritty invasion of upper middle class sexuality has set teeth on edge and hearts afire the world over by finally showing what everybody has been wanting to see.

Sex between Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

Now I am among the last people to avert my eyes when attractive people have sex on screen, hell, I watch ducks fucking if given the chance. But this EWS-thingy was bad. There was no real sex to set my teeth on edge, and my heart did not get all fired up by a wel masked and caped Cruise stumbing into an orgy but then doing jack shite about it.
The movie DID set my teeth on edge by it's incredible, astounding, aweinspiring boredom.

The words "aweinspiring" and "awesome" are misused in modern linguistics, both denote a sense of awe, described by my dictionary as "an overwhelming feeling of admiration, fear, dread or reference". Nowadays most people find every bleeding thing awesome, and it is just wrong. Nope, the fact that your dog barks when you ay "bark" is not awesome. Or it might be, if a dog doing what it naturally does inspires you to fall to your knees, tears streaking down your face, and makes you raise up your hands in thankfulness for being made able to watch this spectacle.

My housemate usually tells me during discussions about language that "if everybody uses the words like that, it is a correct usage". And she has a point. Eventually usage will become so commonplace it is the standard, and therefor correct. In most cases this works retroactively, thereby making all previously wrong uses right. She mostly takes this stance when she is on a position that will undoubtebly become right soon enough, but is not quite yet, but that is ok, she is a very bright young woman and even though I will attack her position here until the cows come home, I am more than willing to accept that one of those cows will have a note stapled to it's side explaining she is from then on right. This saddens me, and in a way it saddens her as well, as it means that language has lost the battle once more.

Thus as well with "Awesome" and "Aweinspring", words that will be given over to the void of mediocre impressiveness soon enough. And I am quite happy to do my thing to delay this point in time. So, when I say that EWS was awe-inspringly boring, I actually do mean I was overwhelmed by boredom, and did indeed fall to my knees in front of the television (luckily I rented it) and cried for all the wasted minutes.
Becasue it wastes minutes. Major minutes.
The sad thing about masterpiece-dubbed drivel is that it inspires other filmmakers to try and do the same thing. And they never, ever, pick the things that make the movie slightly interisting, and they always pick the easiest stylistic choices to recycle.

An example of this would be Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. Scream was a satire and immitation of 80's teen slashers, with intelligent references, reasonable acting, a convoluted plot with enough twists to keep it going, and a bit of self-deprecating humor. IKWYDLS was a satire and immitation of Scream, with lousy acting, no references, no acting worth three shakes of a musquito's genitals, and all the humour to be found in the braincells of a clown.
In short, they did it wrong.

EWS was mirrored in a barrage of movies with one simple characteristic. A characteristic I could easily explain by stating it, but is perhaps best described by the reaction this little thing draws out of me. When I see a movie that has this characteristic I have but one thing on my mind, one sentence that reverbrates trough the grey folds of my brains, one cry in the night of stars that is my life.
It is, in the simplest and most easily understod terms, this; "IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS GOOD AND BEAUTIFUL IN THE WORLD, GET ON WITH IT!"

Gods but movies are SLOW. People....talking...about...things....with...all...the...speed...and.....emotion....of..............a..........dead....slug.
It annoys me no end.

This weekend me and Sabine watched three movies. To wit: "Lady in the Water", "Zwartboek" and "Brick". and christ did we stumble into the realm of movies that could well lose twenty minutes an hour if people JUST GOT ON WITH IT.

As to Lady in the Water, what to say. I have seen 4 of M. Night Samalamadingdong's 5 theatre-exploits, and bar none have I been annoyed. I have now decided I will just never see one of his movies again, until someone comes out of one with a truly, truly compelling reason. The buffer members of Take That and 'NSYNC naked in a pool of whipped cream would not get me into a theatre for that man.
The thing with S. Day. Shawoodiebop is that he tries to put in plot twists that any thinking man, woman, child or slightly bright rock can see coming from miles ahead. He's dead... He has asthma, so will be saved... water kills them... those beasts are fake... these are not the droids you are looking for... to serve man is a cookbook.
In this movie as well. The titular character needs to be saved by a bunch of peeps, a healer, a symbologist, a guild and a guardian. The requirements for these people are given, and we have, over the course of the movie, seen the people who fit these requirements.
But they don't go and get these people. Noooooo. They (slowly) go and get people we have not or barely seen before to fill the slots, and get all surprised that they don't do the job well.
A big woohey to that, I say. And a slow Woohey as well, because it was.

Zwartboek, a movie that has the same slow style of delivery, and actually does make it work, because the situations and plot allow the actors to set up a style of communication and deployment fitting to the situations. A movie that already has some reputations, and rightly so, as it is an incredible movie. Subject matter aside, when one grows up in Europe it is hard to miss all information about the second World War, the movie creates a morally ambiguous universe where right and wrong may not be clearly delineated, but nonetheless make themselves known and get their point across without ever insulting the intelligence of the audience.
Mad props to Carice van Houten by the way, an actress I have up til known barely been able to stand, but pulls through the 2 hours and 20 of movie-power in a way I have rarely seen an actress do with such flair and, well, beauty.

Then, Brick. A film noir set in the drug circuit around an american highschool. Film noir is one of my favourite genres, to be fair, and mostly because of the stylistic language and mise en scenes this type of movie demands.
And this is a style of movie that practically denotes slowness and articulated delivery. And it, well, delivers. It starts out a bit too slowly. The first half hour is a bit of a "yesyes, please do something now" string of moments, but it works, for when the movie does get going, it stays going.
And it mostly keeps going because it is Noir. Not Nu-Noir, not Noir-for-the-new-Era, it is simply Noir. It has the hardboiled dialogue, the violence, the dames and the angels. It actually has a girl you know is trouble as soon as she walks into the room, and it sticks to it's stylistic guns, which is apparently a brave thing to do nowadays, when was the last time we've seen a mainstream, hollywood blockbuster to stick to the same theme and structure and still got it's point across? Christ even bleeding Superman had an amusing side story and the denownment of the villain as ultimately futile, and I liked Superman, so don't start the hate just yet.

All in all, I had a good weekend. Even though I have had way to little sleep and done way to much, I had fun. I hope you all had as well, as usual, I would appreciate some feedback.
Oh, and a wave to all my new readers.. My numbers have been growing exponentially, apparently :) (Two people I know of have started reading this... )

Grtz,
Kevin.

Sing.. Sing a song... sing for, bleh

2006-09-22T11:48:00.000+02:00

Songs. Better yet, lyrics.

I am an avid movie-goer, as has been noted within the virtual pages of my little blog, and therefore see a lot, and I do mean a LOT, of pre-movie commercials. As in Holland these commercials have a tendency to run for months and months, I get a chance to see particular commercials over and over again untill I wake up screaming "DON'T KICK THE LEMONS" at least three times a week.

Now, one of these commercials, that has blessedly stopped running in theatres but is still viewable on television, is a Coca-Cola commercial. As Coke is my first and truest love, I naturally tend to pay attention. And salivate, but I have a hardwood floor so no worries there.
This particular commercial has one of the classic Coke-themes, the one that goes "I'd like to teach the world to sing...in perfect harmony..." all nice and well, untill we consider the line:
"Grow appletrees and honeybees, and snow-white turtledoves."

Aaaaahhh, so sweet. Wrong, obviously, but sweet. Wrong? Yes, wrong. Now I can see how one grows an appletree. No problems there. But honeybees? Is there an honeybee-bush I've missed? And don't get me started on the snow-white turtledoves.
You don't grow birds. You might hatch them, or breed them, or, of you are terrible into the idea of vertical references, you might even raise them. But not grow.
Even considerng this line now, it seems like people are approaching this the wrong way. This whole line will end in tears, I say. Well, tears and a Beekeeper smelling faintly of apples but mostly in birdshit, as he will be covered with it if this is all in the same orchard.

LISTEN to the music you are hearing, people, listen! The song is not only about a melody, it is about the text as well, even more so, I think.
There is a very famous song in Holland, called "De Vlieger" (The kite) in which the singer tells us that his son had his birthday yesterday, and got a kite. He then goes on telling that "the other day" he took his son out to fly the kite.
Now, if his son had that kite as a present YESTERDAY, would "the other day" not be TODAY? I can understand the difficulty of finding words to a melody, fair enough, but it should be possible to do so without, you know, lying or insulting the intelligence of your listeners.

There is an incredible amount of married couples, mostly in America, but I'm sure all over the world, that chose "I will always love you" by either Dolly or Whitney, as the song to play on their wedding day.
I like this. I like the fact that the music you choose reflects the way you feel about each other, I really do.
At the same time I find it sad to herald the divorce first chance you get on the wedding day. Because "I will always love you" is a song about NEVER SEEING EACH OTHER AGAIN.
You might as well've picked "Hit the road, Jack" or "Have to wash that man right out of my hair", allthough that last song can be quite appropriate the next morning, if the groom is a tad enthousiastic.
This is a prime example of why you should listen to the whole song, not just the title or the chorus, before deciding when to use it.

Words, as has been stated before on this blog, are important. And when quoting or using anothers words to express what you can't eloquently express yourself, even more so.
Nobody would pick "the sound of silence" for a commercial advertising car-stereo's, no matter how good the song is and how good it would be to listen to in the car with that stereo. So why do we not listen to our lyrics on very important occassions?
And even worse, why do we not expect the purveyors of our entertainment to hold up a standard of correctness? I understand that entertainment should first be entertaining, but really. is it so difficult to give some use to art?

Off again, but not before the credits: My housemate actually prompted this blog, as the honeybees/turtledove-peeve is hers more than it was mine.
Grtz,
Kevin.

This one is not going to be funny

2006-09-19T10:08:00.000+02:00

I came across this little movie on the glorious web today;
http://www.yikers.com/video_animals_vs_humans.html

And at first, I had a feeling of righteousness. I like animals way, waaaaay better than I like humans anyways, and this is a good example of some of the animal kingdoms getting their own back.
Getting their own back a bit.
And a very small bit at that.

And then it made me very... very sad. And very angry.

Because if we are fair, most animals we see in that movie will die. Are, even, already dead. The dog biting the television presenter? More than 70% chance it will have been put down within three hours after shooting. The elephants goring people? Most likely killed before their "victim" breathed their last breath. The bulls were mostly bull-fighting and therefore in all probability drugged to within an inch of their lives anyways. The fact that adrenaline and pure blind luck combined into a squoeshed toreador does not mean the beast will live.
There is even a good chance the bear, the gator, the horse and the killer whale in theSeaworld-type setting will be put down, allthough these animals are incredibly expensive. Which in itself is saddening... being expensive is the only way to survine taking your anger out on humanity? Explains why some of us have no qualms about the death penalty, after all, humans cost jack-shit.

I feel truly and socially ineptly happy that I am a white male, from a good and upstanding family, having received a good education, in a good job. Because it means I am worth money, which means that when I snap, I have a good chance of not being put down immediately.
I meant every single word of that last two sentences. Apart from the word "because". I am happy about the things mentioned because they give me a chance to live a life as I want to do. The simple fact that I would've been well within my right to say and mean the last part as well makes it all the more likely that I will, someday, snap.

We live in a world decided by simple laws of evolution, the stronger one lives, the weaker dies. The fastest animals, the most poisonous, the strongest, the teethiest, the ones with horns, these animals are designed by nature to survive over those without teeth, horns, poison, strength of speed.
Guess what, folks, humans are animals without speed, strength, horns, poison or any sort of really usable weaponry. Suuure, we adjusted by finding animals that were easily to domesticate and by inventing weaponry, and more power to us, I say. Evolution is a good thing. In the same light I used to say that humans can't really do anything that goes against evolution, because quite simply all that it entails is getting to the top rung of a ladder we have only the vaguest conception of.

But this evolution has placed me, and my generation with me, in an strange position.
The things happening to our world right now, global warming, decaying glaciers, species going extinct, are all processes we are about 75 years too late in fixing, and also processes we aren't likely to see most effeects of.
Research has proven that we missed our window of opportunity in most world scale problems by about seventy years. All we can now do is limit or delay the damage somewhat, but we also have to understand that the polar ice WILL be gone. Tigers WILL cease to populate the forests, as will panda's. But because we are working hard-ish on delaying it, they will most likely do so in about a hundred years or so.

I am 25 years old. My cells and molecular structure is designed to rapidly deteriorate after 125 years, if I make it that long. Which means that I might see the last Bengal Tiger in captivity. I might have a chance to weep over the news that the last of the great turtles cannot lay fertile eggs in controlled environments. I will have a chance to see clones upon sadly deformed and dying clones of sheep before we decide that it will never be possible to resurrect the Indian Elephant from the last cells of the last bull. (Elephant bulls, that is)
On the same note, living well and looking both ways before I cross the street will give me a chance to be one of the last people out of Venice. This time not because cholera is overtaking the streets, but because the streets are going to be taken over by the sea soon.
I will be able to stand at the rubble of the leaning tower, see what water and heat has done for the Taj Mahal, shudder looking at a London partly submerged in a Thames several sizes too big.

But I will not live to see the real consequences of all of the above. I will not see the population of Gaur and Buffalo rise and overgraze the countryside, with it's own set of problems. I will not see bamboo choke the forests, or watch how shoals of fish become overabundant. I will not see sea grass overgrown, and die, taking with it a mass of species of small fish, not to mention rot and pollute the world's oceans.

And this, even though I can lively imagine all of the above, is exactly what makes environmental health a topic that is strangely far from me. All my best intentions are dwarfed by the sheer helplessness I feel looking at the world around me, and the fact that I won't be really hurt by what is happening. Sure, the sheer waste of seeing some of humanities' most beautiful buildings crumble will hurt, a little, but I won't see my world chance all that much, I don't walk past the colosseum that often anyways, and I think I will only miss the idea of the building much more than the building itself.

The movie this started with had a number of comments on different sites where it is shone about how mother nature gets her own back, how animals can take their revenge. And I agree, mother nature might win this battle, sure. I only hope that someday soon humans will stop seeing their interaction with everything around them as a war.

Meh, I've tired myself out here, next time I'll go for a lighter subject, but this was rattling inside my head right now and needed to get out. I need a hug, or someone to tell me everything will be allright.

Big..orange..shiny...

2006-09-11T14:52:00.000+02:00

The tale of the anti-heckler.

I am one, I can admit that much. I am an avid and vocal heckler. I'm not ashamed of that. When a performance is good, I will applaud, tel my friends to go see, pay for merchandise and the like. When a performance is bad, I will heckle. I am of silver tongue and quick wit, and I use these attributes freely when trying to get somebody to just stop doing what they are doing. Mediocre singin, badly set up jokes, bad acting? I will heckle, heckle to my hearts content. My hope is that if I am ever on stage, people will do the same to me. Through heckling to greatness!

This weekend I was stopped. Stopped in such an absolute and incredible manner I can do no more than respect the artist who has silenced me. As most who read this know, it can sometimes be quite difficult to silence me, and he did it.

We, housemate, Sandra, Martin and I, were at a street fair in Uithoorn, my little hole in nothingness. And on this fair, there was a singer. Danny Panadero. A big, orange and shiny man. He sounded well, I have to admit, but he chose songs of such carnavalesque dutch horrendousness I couldn't help myself, I heckled. I threw in comments about songs, about the way he mangled lyrics, about his general orangeness, everything.
Then, he played a song I actually like, and to get my point across I punched the air a few times with the hand I had a purple scarf in, cheerleaderstyle. This caught the eyes of the orange Juggernaut, and all I could think was "Fucked, thy name is Kevin"

And yes, through the crowd he lumbered, light glinting of enormous sunshades, the orangeness of his face almost distracting from his bright yellow shirt, a big man, grey of hair and black of suit, an impressive character. I could feel his steely gaze on me, as small children were trampled underfoot and I desperately begged my friends not to leave me alone. Obviously and deservedly, they did (even though they heckled as well, bastards).
Standing right in front of me, singing "heb de hele nacht liggen dromen" (Dutch, translates as "been dreaming of you all night") for two verses right in my face, I have to admit, I fell silent. Not out of fear, mind, but mostly because I had no idea what to say now, and I actually liked the shiteload of attention it got me.
And, of course, out of fear, goes without saying, nearly.

He went back, pleased with the results of his actions, and started "YMCA" by the Village People after a few lines of banter in my direction. This, obviously, wasn't a problem for me, I'm very much out of the closet, and don't mind bantering with the stage when given the opportunity. I do respect his heckling techniques though, mark of a showman of some experience, if not directly quality.

Also, very happy that this helped me overcome my writer's block somewhat. I hope to have some more to blog about in the near future.
For now, be careful with big orange things.
Grtz,
Kevin.

Writer's block

2006-08-28T13:48:00.000+02:00

For the past few weeks I have been experiencing a writer's block. This annoys me.

For those of you who have spent their days waiting for me to update this only to be getting a rant about pancakes in the past I can imagine you don't really see the impact this could have on me, but rest assured I do a bit more writing than only this little blog o'mine.
Or better, at the moment, I do NOT do a bit more writing than this blog o'mine.

Usually I am putting things on paper, story ideas, blog ideas, column ideas. At this poitn in time nothing gets written. I have trouble finishing a simple e-mail asking for a few days of.
And that's not the worst part, actually. The worst is the fact that my language is deteriorating as we speak.
The simplest things escape me at the moment. The difference between "live" and "life" seems to be the flimsiest and nebulous of substances most of my days. "Then" and "than" are being switched basically willy-nilly in the faint hope of being right at least once in a while. Dutch words I know the meaning of escape all meaning when I try to explain them to others, and I can't even comprehend why I use specific words, whereas usually I pride myself on my ability to make language my personal bitch.

Bad times, my friends, bad times.
In the last few weeks I have seen a number of movies, some so very very bad they make Jaws 3D look like a very succesful cinematographic experience. But I find myself unable to tell you all about it. I am so very sorry.

For now, goodbye. As soon as the block lifts, I will let you know.

Grtz,
Kevin.

Spelling errors

2006-08-16T10:03:00.000+02:00

And how I do tend to make them.

No matter how carefully I try to keep most big errors out of my lines here, or while messaging, they do tend to sneak in. These are usually not the real "error" type of errors as much as they are the "mentally typing faster then your fingers are able to handle" type of errors.

I am quite good at avoiding words like catastrophe, with an F, will mostly not type "their" when I mean "they are" and should be counted on to hardly ever use simply the wrong word to say what I mean. Words are important, don't mess about, I always say.
But I will gleefully swap letters, misplace spaces and use the next letter over. Things like "Ye sI wuold love to go to am obie" aren't at all rare, for me, allthough I do usually apologize for them.

While chatting or messaging, I usually state quite quickly that spelling is completely optional, as long as I can get the gist of what is being said and the other party can understand me as well. This means the departure of the need to go back and revise everything. Now, only when I genuinely misspell or make a true mistake I can go back and edit.
That's while chatting. This blog-thing, I try to keep as clean as possible, but I do notice that usually I post with a few missed errors. I apologize for this. I do tend to re-edit once in a while to get them out, but errors are like cockroaches, if there's one there's more and short of burning down the house, nothing is completely going to eradicate them.

This brings me to the more general subject of language. A true love of mine, to be honest. I love language. I love puns, and wonderfully built sentences. I like big words and I like most accents and I adore local idiom. I can get excited by learning new words in other languages than my own, and a multi-language pun has a good chance of making me need to change my pants.

A friend of mine told me about a joke she shared with her mother, who was standing looking out of her apartment-window. Both friend and mother are Dutch, both speak very good English, and the mom is living in Florida. So naturally in conversations the two languages intermingle freely.
So the mom is standing looking out the window at a lilac bush. Lilacs, in Dutch, are called "seringen" which the mom said, and my friend replied with "well, pick them up then!"
This can have me in spades, and a load of people are never ever going to get it. Thing is, seringen sounds like "ze ringen" where "ze" is Dutch for the English "They", effectively getting "they ring".
Capital stuff, and very, very stupid at the same time.
I am a fan of the mom anyways since I was allowed to spend a week in Florida with them and found her snooping through the bag of books I bought over there. She sort of apologized with a statement I can no more than full-heartedly agree with: "It was a bag of books out in the open, it seemed lonely, so I snooped." Obviously, I could've made exactly that point.

Language. As I said, I like playing around with words. Messing them up a bit, using them to twist meanings and likenesses. Language is a type of magic, really. Relatedly, I know I truly fucked up in dealing with another good friend of mine when the language turns chilly, and polite.
I am the sort of person that will press boundaries, and will toy with you and your emotions every once in a while, but when the language suddenly turns all nice and friendly, things are very, very wrong.
Suddenly, words are chosen with extreme care and precision, they are pronounced with a cold exactness that would put a glacier to shame. I know the worst rows I've had with friends would seem to an outsider like a prime example of polite conversations, and conversely the best evenings I spend with people would prompt that same outsider to call the police or at the very least hide the sharp objects.
Which is good, my friends agree on the importance of words, and like it's acceptable to have one or two plates in the sink when friends come over, the house needs to be spotless and shiny when enemies arrive. So as well wordwise, between friends a slip up can be made, but in a tight spot, be scrupulously correct.

Actually, fairly, the wrong word in the wrong place can get on my tits in a way that is nearly unexplainable. People who use "labyrinth" when they should be using "maze" should be shot at sight. There is a difference people, a big one.
I was sitting on the bus a while back, and two people were having a conversation, and one of them said "...and so I nearly got lost, it was like a labyrinth" and I was ready for a massacre. Cause you can't get lost in a labyrinth, it has no forks, only bends. The danger of the labyrinth isn't in being unable to get out, it's in the desorientation of distance, of turns and twists. You can always just follow the path out of a labyrinth no worries, but they are symbolic for changing you.
In contrast to a maze, where you can get lost because it has different paths and pathways. A more complete view of this subject will be given in an upcoming post, I think.

There are more examples to be given, obviously, and each and everyone annoying enough to prompt a bitchslap from Mother Theresa. Don't use self-conscious when you mean insecure, it's not the same thing. Don't use gay when you mean stupid, or dumb when you mean uninformed. Just don't.

Using the right words is a mark of respect. Like spelling, if it is done right, I know. But rest assured, gentle reader, that I can and will respect you in the choice of my words a good deal better than I ever will trying to spell correctly.
That is, those of you I do respect, all others are free to find as much snubbing as you want in the badly typed mess I usually leave here.

Greetings for now,
Kevin.

Somewheeeeere, over the weekend

2006-08-14T09:33:00.000+02:00

Iiiii juuuust haaaaad
I have lost all the will to
Ever again leave my bed...

Right, not the best amount of syllables to try and stack into the tune of "Somewhere over the rainbow", but in fairness, it's true.
Plus, it was a good way to get all of you to be humming that blasted song today, and since I will be, I figured shared grief and all...

Anyway, waking up to the sound of raindrops on your windowpane can be one of the most uplifting experiences known to man. The steady trickling of water can be soothing and sweet, and very little is nicer than burrowing once more into a pile of pillows/good book/sweethearts chest and to drift of into nothingness for another hour or so.
Then again, noticing that you've overslept and need to get out of bed NOW and then being confronted with a veritable deluge of biblical proportions? Not so nice. I would even go so far as to say that I found it quite jarring and unpleasant, this morning. Jarring and unpleasant enough to convince myself not to go to work but to call in "too distraught to function"? No, not quite that jarring and unpleasant, although I hadn't reached the bus before I wished I had.
So it's monday, alltogether a crap way to spend 1/7th of a life, and the weekend is officialy over.

But a good weekend it was, actually. Seen a couple of movies, hung out with some friends, went on a failed quest for fries, and watched an episode of Buffy. All in all, I came out on top I guess, but needs must be met, and more detail must be gotten into. And I will.

Friday afternoon at work seemed a good way to get into a calm and easygoing fridaynight at home. I had bought a shiteload of books in the past few weeks and I was well planning on getting into those, when a goodly bored Bienie (http://bienietalk.web-log.nl/) appeared on my skype. Now, this as such is remarkable, mostly she is quite busy and we hardly ever chat online apart from cementing appointments and such things.
This time the end of the conversation prompted a sudden rush, as we had agreed to go see TFTF3: Tokyo Drift. Which started at seven and gave me not all that much time to get home, change, and get into town again.

But man... was it worth it.

I like "the Fast and the Furious" for a few very simple reasons. Them being; the cars & the boys. Now anyone who knows me will tell you I have about as much aptitude for cars as an native to Finland would have for the care and maintenance of tropical fish. And this person would be right. Right, that is, when talking about the kind of cars you see on Dutch highways. When taling about the classic American muscle cars that make nice deep woomping sounds while going really, really fast, I still no shite-all about them apart from knowing I want one. Want one. Wantonewantonewantone.
The fact Paul Walker was there in all his blonde studliness certainly helped, by the way.

I hated the second one, though. Strange, cause nothing really changed there. More of the same perhaps a disappointment.
But now, the third one. TFTF3: Tokyo Drift. Which has, apart form really quite spiffy cars a few other things to say for itself. It also boasts Lucas Black, a boy with eyebrows that for some strange reason get me all bothered and an accent that needs no reason to get me bothered at all. He does the "american in a strange land" role, and he does it quite well. Obviously, his character makes the types of choices that would make a normal man closely resemble roadkill on life's highway, but what does one expect from a movie like this.
The movie also has its' share of japanalia. The classic Japanese schoolgirl/boy gone wild, over the top manga-type people, a few ganguro-gals, which i have always found a fascinating idea, and so on and so forth. The movie has it's weak points, obviously, but actually it's quite allright. I liked the first one better, but it was a good sequel.

After a sturdy and nice meal at the local McDonalds (how they dare to call a teruyaki burger in any way asian is beyond me, really) we proceeded to see "Stay Alive", a teen slasher flick I have been wanting to see for some time now.
And I was pleased. Very pleased. I like teen slasher because they should at least provide some eyecandy, and some tension, and some scares, be they cheap or genuine. Regretfully, the succes of Scream has made sure that the genre has stopped taking itself all that seriously, and as a result, the movies have suffered. Scream was good, IKWYDLS sucked puppies.
Stay Alive watches like a departure from the very hip, self-depreciating humoristic approach to slasherflicking.
Not htta it hasn't it's share of tongue-in-cheekness or the requisite comic relief character, but it also has some very good scare scenes, and actually little or no cheap and easy scares whatsoever. When you think a character is going to die, he/she will most likely die. Simple as that. No cats jumping out from behind trashcans, no birds flying up inthe background. The noises in the night are wat is going to kill you, simple as that.
And I liked that. It nearly made me forget that the scriptwriters used one of my favourite historical characters and made her a computer-animated witch. But the animations were done well. The plot of the movie is a bit Ringu-like. It centers around a group of kids who get their hands on a computer game, and when people die in the game, they die in real life.
Now, obviously, you would want to stop playing before you die, and some of them try. Luckiliy for us, the game just continues without them, so we get a few death scenes.
Scenes that are, by the way, not out-of-the-way gory, but actually quite realistic. Final destination had it's guts, nailguns and blood but this movie doesn't and it's more effective for it.

Go see it, it's nice. I for one am waiting for the DVD now, not in the least for the fact that the main character is, really, very cute. Not cute in the way these movies usually have cute, just a normal guy-next-doory type of cuteness. And he was geeky, be still my heart.

After the movies I was texted by an old friend to see if I was still in town (yes) and if I was willing to join him for a drink (yes), so I went to a drag-queen oriented bar to meet up with him for a few cokes and a couple of hours belting to the gay classics. Good times.

Saturday I was going to meet up with Sabine and Edwin, a friend of Sabine's, to go see Superman Returns. Before meeting up with them I hopped into the store sellign a spencer I'd been eyeing for a while now, and which I have on good authority actually makes me look like the type of schoolboy you'd find in a good japanese mange. Pristine, innocent, sweet. And slutty, yes, and if anybody wants a poster boy for the worship of the Great Old Ones, I'm your man. :)

But Superman, oh god Superman. After Lucas Black, after Jon Foster, now Brandon Routh. My movies this weekend were filled with men that only made me think things along the lines of "do me, do me now, please". Never a bad thing.
Although the boy helped, the movie on it's own is actually quite entertaining, hell, even Parker Posey was cast right for once and I found myself not even tempted to kick her head in.
A movie that looks like people had a lot of fun making it, and I like seeing that sort of energy on screen. Obviously, as a Superman-flick, it has the story, plot and drive of a batch of cotton candy, but what does one expect. Superman as an action hero is not tormented, not drivem he needs not even be smart, as such. He is big, blue and strong, nuff said.
But they did their best, and apart from a few botched concepts here and there, it was quite entertaining.

Afterwards, we went to get a few burgers at our standar Irish Pub, and I went home to watch Trainspotting with my roommate. A good ending to the evening.

Sunday was spend mostly in bed, reading, behind my computer, gaming, and ended with hunger. And a craving for fries, or salmon eggs.
We have quite a good Japanese restaurant quite close to our house, and on the way to the snackbar I decided to take my roommate out to dinner there. I wanted Nigiri Ikura, which is a type of sushi with little orange salmon eggs, and she wanted the battered chicken.
When we arrived and were given our drinks, we found out that both our wishes could not be accomodated. They were out of Ikura, and the chicken was no longer on the menu.

Annoyed, we left after a starter, only to find ourselves too late to get a burger and fries from the snack-vendor. And then too late to get fries from the next closest one. After that, we travelled all through the town looking for a chipshop still open and finding jack shit.

Annoyed, we went home, popped some garlic bread in the oven, and watched an episode of Bffy the Vampire Slayer.
Shite thing, really, still a bit annoyed about it and not eating at the Japanese restaurant ever again. No-egg-bastard.

And thusly, my weekend. I'll try to do some regular posting again, need to get into the swing again and Sabine has promised to comment more after a nice compliment this weekend, so I need to give her an option to do so. The rest of you should perhaps do so as well, I need feedback people. Feedback!

Grtz,
Kevin.

Good things, and how they come in three…

2006-07-27T13:35:00.000+02:00

Or, you know, four. Sometimes two, sometimes five. But three is sort of what I’m going to stick with. Well, three point eight seven, fair enough.

Yesterday was my second night of my little trip to London, and I wanted to get the most out of my time here, so another return ticket for the city centre was bought, and I was on my train. I did three/four things last night, each on its’ own deserving of a small bit of joyous remembrance, together, they ruled. I’ll split my evening up for you.

“If this bookstore had tits, I’d marry it”

First thing I had my tiny little paper-and-letters-loving heart set on was finding Foyles. The most famous bookstore in London boasts four massive floors of stacks, with a claim to having the most titles on sale in Britain. Now, I don’t know about that, but shite, what an enormous amount of books. And how to tackle this? Do you browse, decide and go back for the books you want? Do you grab what you can and let the cashier sort em out later? Do you set up a bunk-bed in a forgotten corner near the coffee-shop and move in permanently?
Obviously, that last option would’ve been my choice anytime, but since I promised my housemate to go sailing in Holland this weekend it wasn’t the most workable option. She’d have forgiven me, without doubt, but still, I decided against residency.
I opted for walking up to the fourth floor, and working my way steadily downward, picking up what I deemed interesting enough for purchase. I set myself a limit of £ 100.00, which amounted in my estimation to something like ten to twelve books, depending on prices. This might seem to be a bit of a wide spread, but I really, reaaally do love books, and even at the current exchange rate I come out cheaper this way than buying the same books in Holland. (10 pounds is about 15 euro, but a ten pound book here would set me back about 20 euro in Holland, so I win)
So there I was, joyfully making my way past philosophers, fantasy, horror, DVD’s, CD’s, coffee table books, and I was in heaaaaven. Grinning, clutching my growing stack of books in my arms as were they so many cuddly toys.
Lovely books. I ended up with nine books and a DVD, totalling 103 pounds and change. I had pop culture, queer horror, entertainment, religious explanation, retelling of legends, general “ book”, graphic novel, comic fantasy and a semi hard-on and a sense of druggedness brought on by the subtle Viagra of dust and paper.
In short, I was happy. (The DVD sucked puppies, by the way, crap movie. But still, happy)
On to the till, where I needed to convince the girl behind it that I was going to be able to configure my new friends in such a way that they would all fit into my bag and I was not going to make use of the British/American tendency to pack every single Item in it’s own plastic bag. Foyle’s. I came, I saw, I came, I shopped. Grandness.

Puppet sex

With a considerably heavier bag hanging of my shoulder, I decided I wanted to see a show. I usually don’t go to movies or suchlike on my own, but they have a running performance of Mama Mia here, and I saw that with my ex-boyfriend a while ago and I wanted to wash the taste of him from my ABBA experiences. Thusly, I bought tickets for a completely different musical.
Quite unsure how that happened, actually, but I was standing at the box office, wanting a ticket to Mama Mia, and I actually bought a ticket to Avenue Q. Interesting choice, but a good one, as it turned out.
On a related note, I was patiently standing in line, last in a line of two, when an American family walked in from the street and asked me if had been there first or if they had been. Since I walked in right after the woman who was at that point being assisted at the counter, I felt pretty confident in saying I was in line before them. This met with general agreement, and then with blatantly cutting in front of me. Politely so, and with a semi-acceptable reason, but it was still strange. They were apparently late to their own show and couldn’t find the theatre. That’s fine; ask someone who knows, by all means, and yes, you can go ahead of me, no problem. But do not ask me if I was there first, if you are going to cut in line anyways.
So, the Americans proceeded to interrupt the (actually very cute and friendly) guy helping the customer and asking him how to get to the theatre. They came to him, because apparently they bought there tickets at that place yesterday, although they had another agent there then.
So he did a good job in multitasking, quite impressive really, while he booked the current customers tickets he simultaneously sketched the American’s route on a map of the area, effectively providing service to two clients at once. I was impressed. Obviously, work in customer service long enough and these things become the norm more than the exception, but I can still appreciate it being done well, one professional to another, so to speak.
Then…disaster struck. Well, disaster… the phone rang. Now, the ticket agent needs to do his job, and pick it up, but that would give him three client-points of entry, all requiring hands, and most people only have about two. So problem.
So he quickly finished the map, told the Americans where to walk to, apologized for the inconvenience to the line, and picked up the phone. No worries as far as I could see, the Americans had there directions, the woman at the counter was buying tickets for another date, and I still had a good forty minutes before my show was going to start.
Apparently, my assessment of the situation was wrong. The American started making trouble. I still don’t really know why, but he did. Started spouting abuse and threats to the agent, who had, as far as I could see, actually done everything possible bar shutting the shop and personally walking them to their theatre. And it escalated, nicely. The agent very subtly mentioned their show was about to start and that it wasn’t his fault that they were late. The American responded to this that they had gotten lost. The agent said that this was out of his hands but that he needed to take this call. The American started the abuse, the agent asked him to piss off. More shouting, more requests for off, and how to bugger it. It was grand. In the end, the Americans left, the agent apologized again to the line, finished the call, and on things went.
It was a shame the boy had resorted to impoliteness himself, but really, I couldn’t fault him anything.
I bought ticket, asked him where I could find the theatre, he did the map thing again, and I went in search for my evenings entertainment.

And entertainment it was. Avenue Q is a bit of a Sesame Street parody, a musical with puppets and “real” people. They don’t go for the kind of realism that the Street does though, the puppets are worn on the arms of the puppeteers, who also provide the facial expressions the puppets can’t. A nice combination of live-action and puppeteering, and very well pulled off I must say. The fact that the puppeteer/actors were actually very cute didn’t hurt the proceedings either.
The show is about Princeton, a puppet recently graduated and moving into a street that has a few human puppets, a few humans, and a few monsters. Monsters being a subset of society, apparently. The fact that monsters are seen as inferior to humans and human puppets allows for one of the best songs in the show; “everybody is a little bit racist”.

This should give you an idea about this thing. Gloriously politically incorrect, very irreverent and truly, truly funny. There is a song about a character wishing to give a lesson to a kindergarten about the Internet, which is interrupted by one of the others with the words “for PORN” in every appropriate place. (“The internet is a high speed network””FOR PORN”, “the internet is used for the sharing of information””FOR PORN”) and there is a scene with puppet sex. No full frontal puppet nudity, but still, definitely sex. And not the crass Team America way either, just healthy, fun, drunk puppet sex.
I think the best characters are the Bad Idea Bears. Incredibly cute and bubbly bears that nonetheless give bad, bad ideas. (“You could look for a job, or get BEER!”, “More drinks, More Fun! Yaaaaay” and one of the best: “its ok you don’t want to hang yourself now, but we are going to leave this rope here, JUST IN CASE”)
They are super.

Very very good show, I hate going to these things on my own but this was a good decision. I hummed a few of the songs on my way back to my hotel and generally felt good about things, as I do still. I hope this show will come to Holland, but if not, I’ll make sure to get friends to London to see it again. It ends in traditional semi sappy goodnaturedness, but that’s ok, sometimes. I can recommend this show to anybody, but you do need a bit of a dirty but open mind to get the most out of it.

“If this restaurant had a dick, I’d cheat on the bookstore with it”

After all that excitement, it was time to grab something to eat and get back to my hotel, after all, it was a school-night and the alarm was going to go off in the morning.
So I decided to look up a little Thai restaurant I had dinner in last time I was over here, because dinner was good then.
I made my way to Liverpool Street Station, walked up Middlesex and entered my preferred place of mealage.
A small, one room restaurant, light wood tables and chairs upholstered with red or yellow leather. The ceiling is exposed tubes and plumbing, but painted black. The walls are cream, decorated with golden wood carvings. On the ceiling are three light fixtures, two large yellow suns, not turned on, and a red ribbony thing with lights along the centre. Most of its lamps have burned out. Seven were working last time I was here, only five now.
I get a table, and order a Thai curry with roasted duck, cause, well, I like duck.
And like it is not strong enough a word.
So my meal arrives swiftly and friendly. A plate with a bowlful of steamed rice, sleepily dreaming to itself of whatever rice dreams of after being steamed. It looks so white and fluffy it’s nearly apologetic, as if it wants to make up for the rest of the meal, without actually checking if a make-up is necessary, which is a shame, as it isn’t.
The other bowl placed in front of me is filled with a murky yellowish liquid, steaming arrogantly to itself. This stuff apologizes to nobody, and it makes no claims on humility. It is yellow, milky, and it smells like the fall of a decadent civilization. Spices, curry, the meaty smell of roasted duck all lift up from the uniform and still surface as the ghosts of mermaids.
I ladle a good bit of the milky yellowness on to the pile of rice, which soaks up the liquid and leaves me looking at lychees, green peppers and roasted duck, naked without their protective camouflage.
Because I don’t want to make them uncomfortable, I spoon my way in there.
And I die. This is an incredible meal. The duck is moist and sweet, the lychees are fresh and give a very rich flavour to the dish, and the peppers are nice and crisp, and spicy enough to keep things interesting. The rice is steamed to perfection and after its initial bashfulness now wants a piece of the textural action, and the rest of the ingredients gladly give it the leeway it desires.

A great meal, finished off with a melon ice cream which is fresh and sweet and exactly what one would wish for in weather like this. I pay my bill, have a nice conversation with the waitress, get complimented on my English, which is always nice, and make my way to the hotel.

3.8 End of the evening

As it is really, really warm here and I had just had some nice spicy food I didn’t really see myself going to sleep yet, and since there is a DVD player on my laptop I opted to watch a movie. First, Bollywood and Vine, cross-dressing romantic comedy that tries, and that has its charming moments, but really, not a good movie. Ah well, can’t have everything, right?
I switched over to Urbania, a movie I had been looking for for a while, starring Dan Futterman in a sort of urban legend/revenge movie. And actually, it’s quite good. Dan plays a gay man who is trying to get over the loss of his lover, but we don’t really find out if the loss is due to a death or a break up, but the hints point towards death. He is travelling the streets looking for stories. Asking people to tell him theirs and him telling them others. Cut-scenes give us a take on well known urban legends. The baby left on the car roof, the stolen kidney, the microwaved dog.

I like Dan Futterman; I think he is a very good looking man in a way that keeps him normal and human. I haven’t seen much of him, mostly sit-com work and series, and as such I have never really thought of him as much of an actor. Now, I need to reprise my opinion. He puts down the role he is given incredibly well, managing to convey recognizable and complex emotion with simple facial expressions. He is sweet and kind, but lost, and menacing, and vengeful but we never find out really how vengeful until the very end, where we are left a bit unsure of what happened. Other actors are quite good as well, with the exception of Alan Cummings, who does fine with the material provided but mostly delivers a standard time-filler performance.

I can’t say that this is a complete step in my night, because my laptop-power ran out at a few minutes before the end of this movie. I am going to try it again tonight, we’ll see. I got all I needed from it, and I’ll be watching it at home soon enough I’m sure.
Then, I showered to get the days sweatiness of me, dried my hair, and went to bed.

One more night here, I gathered there is an after-work drink tonight, I’ll see what I’m going to do afterwards.

For now, I can only say:

Grtz,
Kevin.

London, my bitch be thee

2006-07-26T11:03:00.000+02:00

Well, sort of. And righteously so.

I am currently on my third visit to London, having been sent out here for a week of "getting to know people" in the London branch of my company.

The first time I was here was only for a few days, with friends, the second time was workrelated, and so is this time.

Now Londen, as has been previously posted here, fucks up my sense of direction. I am usually very good with finding my way but last time I was here I got royally lost. Subway directions completely eluded me, despite maps and logic, and I would give myself no more than a 60% chance of actually locating anything within a two hour walk, and this does incorporate the simple fact that ANYTHING in central London is no more than fortyfive minutes on foot.

But now, slowly but surely, I am catching my bearings. I figured out the underground maps (not that hard, unless you would happen to be me, which I am) and I can find my way around a good deal better than last time. I admit that the immediate Soho/Picadilly circus parts are still a bit baffling, but I usually end up where I want to be with an error margin of one or two streets. Last time I was here I had the same error marging, but now I get to where I was planning to go whereas before I kept misguidingly circling my destination wothout ever actually reaching it untill I got fed up and went home, or to the nearest bookstore to drown my sorrows. Some people go to pubs, I go to bookstores. To each his own, right?

But enough about logistics, let's get to the whining.

It's so incredibly dirtily warm here... Really. It's warm in Holland as well now, summer and all, and I don't mind that much, but it's so humid that everything feels dirty and sweaty. Now, I don't mind either dirty or sweaty, but together there are just a limited amount of places I like seeing them and "on the way to work" is not on that list.
My hotel is literally one street over from the entrance to the office, it is not even a three minute walk, walking slowly, and I was sweaty and gross on that short distance. Heavily annoying.

Speaking of my hotel... it is RIGHT NEXT to a railway. It's a good hotel, and the shower is amazing, but located very, very badly. it is a good thing the wheather is thusly that sleeping is only possible after things have cooled down a bit which happens after the trains stop running, but still... Apart from that, it tries to be designy and stylish but just about manages to pull of "nice". The elevator wals and some of the pillars and stuff around pretend to be upholstered woth leather, but since touch tells you it is the kind of leather that is actually made of plastic, it loses its' spiffyness quite quickly.
The room is fine, nothing fancy, the bathroom is ok, the shower has a water pressure that you find in English hotels but somehow never in actual English homes. In other words, the natives are showering in a drizzle, I am showering in a deluge.
It's grand. Truly. Of course the wheather insures that you are first dry, and then sticky again before a towel has had a chance to touchflesh, but still.

But, so, London. Truly a remarkable city. Of course it is a theme park now, LondonWorld(tm), where you get exactly what you expect within seconds of entering, with added tourists. But then, that can be said about any town of any size or import really, and since I am a tourist I can't complain.
And tourist I am. And loving it I do. I could try not to smile when looking at the architecture and give of a good "seen it all before" vibe, but really, I wouldn't want to. The city is in some points breathtaking in it's beauty and character, and you would have to be a right dumbass not to appreciate beauty when it presents itself.

So I keep the goofy grin when I stand on the elevator upwards form the underground, thank you very much. And I'll stay and look at the view of a small arch crossing a street and framing a stunning little park, if you don't mind.
Besides, the grin got me hit on yesterday by about five people, so again, I can't really complain.

Well, tonight I am going to catch a show or something, and check out Foyles, a famous bookstore. I'll let you know how it went.

SFNU

2006-07-18T10:13:00.000+02:00

Occasionally the impulse to put words to emotion is thwarted by the fact that the emotion itself is so overpowering, so strong, so incredibly THERE that the words you wish to use either do not accurately describe the emotion you're feeling, or they simply refuse to line up to be fired away.

A good example of this is the well known tendency of fourteen year olds with their first crush to only be able to discuss cheeses and frogs while around the object of their affection. Which is sad, really, there you are, all of fourteen, in walks the most beautiful girl you have ever seen, blond hair shining in the slanting sunlight, skin as fresh as the dew on roses, desire fills your brain, your blood-cells become heart-shaped and fluttery, your heart drops into your stomach, which isn't that bad, because your stomach is in your throat, and your brain is doing loopings in azure skies over a tropical island.
And you pluck up the courage to talk to her, you walk up to her, you move up close, she looks into your eyes, and the words in your brain are somewhat along the lines of "Hello, I just wanted to say you are very pretty, I would like to know if you would go out with me sometime?"
But you actually say: "Hi, I have bread, do you like frogs? I have frogs... Ok bye..." and then you are likely to punch her or steal her books or whatever. The emotion is there, but the words don't match and so you can't say them. Simple, everybody's been there.

Off course, the words in your brain are NOT “Hello…-…sometime?” These words are merely what you deem most prudent and wise to spout at that specific point in time, given the restraints of modernity, fashion and common sense. After all “Tussen droom en daad staan wetten in de weg, en praktische bezwaren” (Transl: Between fantasy and reality laws intervene, and practical constraints)
The words that are actually, really, deeply in your head would most likely run along the lines of…(and here I launch in to something I have been wanting to say to someone for a long, long time but never have and never will, obviously, as most people would simply understand or think anyway, guess what, you are right)
“You, to me, are more than life itself, more than the world I exist in, more than the fantasies in which I do not. You are what I wake up for in the morning, dream of at night and think about when the sun burns all other thoughts out of my mind. Should you not be in this world, for me it has no reason, no honest explanation of what should be the simplest of equations. You are what I long for, yearn for during the absence of you. You are what I hate, I love, I loathe. You simply are my everything, my life, my boat, my meal, my bed. Be my knight and damsel, but be my dragon too, be the castle I protect, the army that lays siege, the washerwoman and the stain. Belong to me but never be my possession, ask me to be yours but hold no sway over my heart.”
This is what you cannot say because it will sound corny and stupid, but you think it, and someday you will wish to have said it anyway. And then you will.

This weekend, regretfully, I did not fall into a teenage crush. Quite, quite, the opposite actually. But still, no words to really describe it. I am going to try though, that I am.

My housemate invited me to go along to the local pool-hall with a former co-worker of hers, and I went. Somewhat against my better judgement, I admit. I had been planning on spending the evening in with a movie and some solitude, but I went out. Bad plan? Yes.
It started very, very quickly to go downhill form the moment I met the Co-worker. I am going to call her Slippers.
Slippers? Why Slippers? Because the first thing she wanted to do is swing by her house to put on her “dressy” flip-flops. (The dutch name for flip-flops is “slippers”, thus, slippers)

DRESSY flip-flops? What? WHAT? What the freaking screaming puppyrodgering disastrous dope-addled obscenity flinging FUCK is a dressy flip-flop? Flip-flops are, at best, a beach-apparel type thing. When I see a flip-flop wearer I am immediately trying to see if I can spot the roll of toilet-paper because these shoes are MEANT for walking to the communal toilets on a campsite.
Now, I know they are fashionable. I know people are wearing these things EVERYWHERE now. But really, does anybody actually think these things will ever be dressy? Will there ever be a black-tie event where people will be considering whether black-tie also means you should wear your patent leather flip-flops?
There will probably be, the world is fucked up enough to allow it…

But yes, she wanted to put on her dressy thongs (Australian for flip-flops). And why? Not to look nice or anything, but because, in her own words, “if she was going to step into glass it wouldn’t reach her foot”
What? What? Once more please? If you are scared of stepping in glass don’t wear footwear that leaves YOUR ENTIRE FOOT UNCOVERED!

Or, you know, don’t step into glass, that usually helps me. When I see shards of glass on the floor, I avoid them until I have a duster and pail or a damp towel or, best option, an employee of the establishment I am in to clean up the glass. Then, when I am satisfied the glass is all gone from that particular place, I will STILL NOT STAND THERE unless it really, really cannot be avoided.
And I will be wearing good, nice shoes, not flip-flops.

No worries, I can survive clothing stupidity. Sometimes… But I tried to do so this time. (failed, as you see the blog here before you that should show my coping with this situation has left me with some residual anger)

And then commenced a sextette of poolgames of such an atrociously low quality and standard that an entire pantheon of Gods of Pool has sprung into existence, been angered, smote the unbelievers, and submitted to regretful void once more in the space of two hours at most. Oh my god did she suck at this game.

Now, as in most things, in playing pool I consider myself average to fair. I might not be the bestest player in the world, and I to having a good deal of luck a good deal of the time, but occasionally I can pull of a shot that would invest some awe and wonderment in most onlookers. This, I think, is typical for most people.

Most people, but not this girl. This girl who has clearly “learned” to play pool as a seductive measure and never progressed beyond that point. Everything about here screamed “I need someone to lean over me and grab this stick for me so I can make a shot”
Which is all nice and well, but while playing with a girl and a man of questionable heterosexuality it might not be the best course of action, it might just, you know, really really really piss them off…
So, after a few games of giving helpful advise which was then absolutely ignored (try hitting the red one with the white one….) we gave up an cycled home.

But not before she managed to innocently and unknowingly put the last barbed sting in my already torn and beaten mental flesh… She discussed a pair of pants she bought which where “neutral coloured, and made of a shiny…fabric”
Honestly, my knuckles wrapped around the steering bar of my bike where so white I feared I would split my skin and eject bone-shards from my hands.

Neutral coloured… does…not….exist. Simply. Doesn’t. It can be grey, or khaki, or black, or blue, fair enough, but neutral coloured is nothing. NOTHING. It amounts to answering “plaid” when someone asks you your favourite colour.
I was so upset I could not get thing into words... my anger, should I have been able to force it past my vocal cords would have forced her to take her own life, but it resisted. All that came out was a meaningless string of letters and sounds. "the....s...ug...di...fn...th...tk..."
I am convinced that I was very, very close to discovering a new word there, a combination of letters never seen before that would nonetheless put all my emotions of hate, anger, rage and loathing into perspective en relevant coherence. I would merely have to mutter the word, "SFNU" and her brain would independently of the rest of her understand wha tit had done and self-implode.

Regretfully and painfully, I did not find the combination. But I will keep trying..

Mindfuck movie and the blackening of my name

2006-07-13T10:00:00.000+02:00

Aaaaah yes, mindfuck movies. I love them. Movies that leave a person reeling, with too much to think about and too little answers. And there are quite a few of them, to be sure. I can mention Yeux d'Enfants, or The Dreamers, but even Lord of War or Party Monster can induce the general feeling of disorientation and the inclination towards cogitation.

And now, I can safely add Hard Candy to my lists.
And yes, righteously so. Now I am not saying that it is a technically great movie, and it might, will, not be everybody's cup of tea.

But the subject matter is great. It does remind me of Death and the Maiden, and righteously so, but sometimes there is a message that cannot be told too often, or too rigorously. Sometimes lessons do need to be learned by everybody.

This is a movie about pedosexuality, the sexual attraction to children. Now, in basics, I have nothing against those who are attracted to children. I see sexual preference in any way as no different or inherently better than others. Such is my thing in life. Hetero, Homo, Lesbian, the wish to be rogered by horses or ducks, all the same to me. I can and will not judge or punish anyone for his preference.
That being said, and I hope people are still reading this and see me explain my point, I am only talking about PREFERENCE. I can and will judge, and if necessary punish you for the ACTIONS you take to alleviate your yearnings.

Example: If one fancies sex with women, one can have sex with emotionally and physically available women, or one can shake hands with the bishop to any number of websites, or internal fantasies. No harm done either way.
Example2: Should one fancy sex with horses, one can buy a house next to a stable and spend one's days polishing the one eyed gopher to their hearts content and the sounds of whinnying and hooving. No worries. TOUCH a horse in a way you are not ONE FREAKING HUNDRED percent sure the horse wants to be touched and you should be punished.

Same applies to children. One cannot help a preference, no harm. You can move next to a school and listen to them play all day, no worries. You could even make pictures of children, perhaps, and "utilize" these for your pleasure, although I find this questionable, but if there is no way whatsoever that the child should ever know about this, fair enough.
But touch a child, watch child-porn (where a child has been touched) or do anything to cause harm to a child, and death should come on swiftest wings, albeit after extensive torture.

And don't get me wrong, I am not talking about a sixteen year old who knows damn well what he is doing but is by law deemed out of your reach. Arbitrary choices concerning ages of consent interest me not.
I am talking about those that are physically and emotionally too young or weak (when compared to yourself) to resist, put up a fight, or verbally or otherwise counter your desires.
If my point is unclear, I am willing to expand, this is a subject I would hate to be misinterpreted on. Please message me if you think I am too obtuse or unclear.

But, back to the movie, the movie is about a 32 year old man and a 14 year old girl who meet after a few weeks of chatting online. From the start it is clear that these two have plans on each other, and that He is enough of a predator to make use of the fact that She clearly wants to look older and braver than she really is.
He gets Her home, and the fun starts. And with fun, I mean mindfucking.

I am not going to go into details here, not because it will spoil the movie, the movie itself advertises quite clearly what is going to happen and multiple reviews have "given away" a few of it's surprises, so me spoiling it a bit won't hurt that much. It's just that details are inconsequential to the main part of the feeling this movie will hit you with.

The acting, simply put, is phenomenal. The girl especially handles the numerous close ups in a way that had chills run down my spine. Cinematography is very important here, the location and light have been used to it's best advantage, and very beautifully so.

The movie is uncomfortable, much of it is filmed in extreme close-up, and it is intimate and private in a way not many movies dare to be. I think there were only five "real" parts in the entire movie, and I am counting the waiter, so that says something. And yet it works. The closeness and intimacy make the situations more personal, one feels like one is looking in on something that one should not be seeing. It makes it all more real, acceptable.

Which is good, in a bad way.

See this movie, seriously, it is better, much, much better, than all the no-brained crap that is filling the theatres at this point in time, and it WILL give you something to talk about.

On another, more personal note, one can finally google my name and come up with results! Seriously. I'll save you the trouble, I'll give you the link. www.tele2nee.nl .
It's in Dutch, and I won't go into context, but suffice it to say I am pictured as a customer service employee that has kicked, raped and dismembered a Mormon tabernacle choir during a interview with a customer.
Great stuff, really. See it to believe it. I did post a comment, I hope he leaves it up there, otherwise I will repost here, but it will be in Dutch.

I don't actually think I have much native English readers, but it is nice to dream, is it not?

Grtz,
Kevin.