Wednesday, March 15, 2006

"Where Did Our Love Go" by The Supremes

That's the song that was #1 when I was born. You can find out yours here.

I have been busy busy busy! I'm going to work backwards to keep you informed of every nuance of my ever more exciting life. Yesterday wasn't exciting at all – work, dr.'s appt., dinner with friend. The dinner was pleasant and we chatted away for 2.5 hours, but it was not exciting. Monday night there was a concert I had been wanting to attend since it was announced (I have no clue when that was). The concert was The Sisters of Mercy and I was GEEKED. When it was over, I was more disappointed than anything else. Other than heartily wishing whoever invented the smoke machine a slow and painful death. We arrived when the doors opened and my friend C and I got a spot up front and center – well, there was one layer of people in front of us. 20 minutes into the opening band – you know you're old when you're thinking "Oh, please, just give me the main band and let me get out of here." It didn't help that the band sucked. Every single song sounded the same and you couldn't hear a single word the lead singer was "singing." It was painful and much too long. Oh yeah, back to my story, 20 minutes into the opening band, The Warlocks, some guy pushes his way through the crowd and proceeds to stand in front of me. Yeah, you're right, that didn't sit well with me, especially when he tried to bring his girlfriend with me. I informed him that I had been standing there for 90 minutes and he was not going to waltz in w/his girlfriend and stand in front me. I widened my stance and was moving nowhere. The girlfriend finally gave up trying to get in front of me and went on the other side of the boyfriend blocking C's view. It turned out pretty well, though, because people directly behind the usurpers started pushing and acting stupid, so it was good C had moved. We're too old to be moshing, people!

There had been a rumor that Andrew was lip synching in the concerts, so C and I paid very close attention. I don't know if it was fortunately or unfortunately, but he wasn't lip synching. The sound guy sucked completely. He needed to do some adjusting so that we could hear the singing, not just the guitars. Oh yeah, The Warlocks had TWO drummers (and one of them couldn't keep a beat, according to Davo) and I think they reset my heart calibration they were so freaking loud. The usurper was busily taking picture of both bands through all of the smoke the machines were pumping out. I asked him how many pictures of fog he took. 30 pictures of a guy you could hardly see standing in fog. How much more goth can you get?

The fun part of the evening was seeing all the people I haven't seen in a good 10 or more years. Damn, but we're all looking older, greyer and a few of us have a few extra pounds. I saw a guy I dated oh so briefly. He's still married to the woman he dated after me. Good for them. Some of the people I saw were just people I recognised from the goth/punk scene. It was just crazy and a tad surreal.

On Sunday I went curling for the first time. Dang, but it was fun. Let me tell you, it's freaking harder than it looks! The sweeping is really hard. My shoulders are still sore and I didn't take my rings off, so I have a blister at the base of a finger. Ouch! I only fell once and that was when I was "throwing" the stone and it certainly didn't hurt as I was only about four inches off the ice to begin with. It wasn't falling so much as sitting with a little more force than usual – sort of like the way a toddler falls on their butt. I can't wait to go again, although I'll have to because the curling club closes at the end of March for the season.

From there I went to the niece's 16th b-day party. It was the usual cast of family and neighbors and she liked the Egyptian goddesses papyrus painting kit I got her.

Saturday was spent in front of the television. At home I watched Beyond the Sea. I liked it and certainly don't think it deserved the reviews it got. It wasn't fabulous, but it was watchable and Kevin Spacey was quite good. In fact, it put me in a Kevin Spacey mood, so I got out Pay It Forward, another movie I liked a lot better than the reviewers/critics did, which could be why I own it. I saw the movie first and then bought the book and have to say that I like the movie version better. I wonder if it has something to do with timing. I saw The Pelican Brief before I read the book as I had read The Firm by Grisham and despised with every fibre of my being. I forget why I saw The Pelican Brief, but I did and I liked it, so I read the book and liked the movie better. Any book that I have read before seeing the movie, I prefer the book. Examples: The Bourne Identity (the Matt Damon one which was so different from the book I wondered why they bothered pretending, the Richard Chamberlain version was perfect), all four Harry Potters (although I thought they did a pretty good job on the last one), etc. (I can't think of any more right now.) The Firm is the only one where I hated the book as much as the movie or vice versa. What a complete waste of everything that poorly written piece of trash was (and still is).

I then watched Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. I still need to watch the special features (there are deleted scenes awaiting me!), but I loved it. Of course, I think they're completely crooks and should spend a good long time in jail, and I mean a really friggin' jail, not a country club one!!! They bilked people of their pension funds and life savings. I'd dearly love to meet them and smack them upside the head!!! BASTARDS!

I finished watching Enron in time to go to BST's house for Foreign Film Night. Yojimbo was on the agenda for the evening. This was the movie that inspired Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood to make A Fistful of Dollars. I am getting A Fistful of Dollars from Netflix today (I've seen, but not recently and probably not all in one shot) to compare. I definitely recommend Yojimbo to anybody willing to watch a black and white non-English film. It's worth the effort.

The last movie of the day for me was Stalingrad which was good. I was actually disappointed when it started to discover it was not in black and white. When the movie was over, I said, "That sucked. It was good, but it sucked." By that I meant, that the movie itself was well-done and worthwhile, but that the circumstances were so not fun.

Friday was the symphony. I took a co-worker whose mother (as I found out) is my age. Yeah, I felt old. ;-) She said she enjoyed the symphony (Kathleen Battle sang some Toni Morrison poems and religious spirituals), and I introduced her to the fabulous Traffic Jam & Snug, as she's new to the Detroit area. I can't remember now what else we heard, but if anybody has no plans for Friday night, I have an extra ticket to the symphony and am looking for someone to join me!

14 Comments:

At Wednesday, 15 March, 2006, Blogger Jason said...

Guess it's a good thing I didn't go to see Sisters of Mercy. Dang it but I have to work at the restaurant on Friday. Otherwise I'd love to go to the symphony.

 
At Wednesday, 15 March, 2006, Blogger MJW said...

You might enjoy this very extensive web site:

Cash Box Top Singles.

As far as I can tell, it used to be a competitor of Billboard. You can navigate all the way down to each week's Top 100 chart from 1950 to 1996. It also lists the Top 100 for each year.

I search it all the time using Google as my dedicated "Cash Box" search engine. How do I do that? I type "Cash Box" in quotation marks and then in a separate set of quotation marks I type the title of a song or the name of a group (maybe you already know how to use Google that way). That way, Google searches only (or mostly only) the Cash Box web site, and you can either find the song in question or all top 100 songs by a particular group. It works very well.

I've seen two or three well done documentaries on Stalingrad. It's one of the few times in history where a person might almost feel sorry for the soldiers of evil army. If I remember correctly, only about five or ten percent of the 95,000 German soldiers captured there ever returned home (years after the war had ended). The rest died in the Gulags. Does the movie cover that part of the story at all?

I've never read a Grisham book. They're not my style, at all. His movies have helped me to pass a couple of hours, here and there, in a mildly pleasant way, but I wouldn't give them ringing endorsements. The only exception is The Firm (as I've mentioned to you before :-). I've watched it only once, and that was in February 1994. Maybe I was in the right frame and had the right combination of people watching it with me (even so, I was really hard to please, as far as movies go, in those days). Maybe I would hate it if I watched it again. My patience with the vast majority of movies, if rated between 0 and 100, has dropped to less than 1. I have about seven Starz! and Encore movie channels, and I guesstimate that I watch a movie on those channels about once every two months.

Anyway, I was simply fascinated with how well The Firm's plot twists worked out. It is one of the very, very, very few movies in which I was unable to predict practically every plot twist well ahead of time (that's more of an indictment of "formula" writers than it is a compliment of my abilities; in fact, it probably reveals just how much of my life I wasted in front of the TV while growing up). When I finally figured out the main plot twist, with about 3 seconds to go before it was revealed, I was thrilled. I barely had time to shout to everyone, "I see what he's doing!"

Ummm.... Sorry, I got carried away. ;-)

 
At Wednesday, 15 March, 2006, Blogger MJW said...

By the way, I hear that the Enron movie is also a ringing indictment of the Bush family/regime. Is quite a bit of the movie devoted to that part of the story?

 
At Wednesday, 15 March, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ok: Bizarre confession of the day: I work with two ex enron programmers. I know two more. They won't say anything about the wholle debacle and losing their jobs other than "yeah, but the parties were awesome..." and then stare into mid space, and mumble about fast cars in that odd way geeky boys do and then go back to their code.

I still want to ask more... but am somehow afraid of either trashing my dreams of knowing big time criminals, or might find out something terribly dull...

 
At Thursday, 16 March, 2006, Blogger Heather said...

I'm sorry that your concert didn't turn out to be as much fun as you hoped. When I went to see No Doubt a few years ago, I ended up with boucing teenagers in front of me who kept jumping backwards with their elbows out so I kept getting hit. When I finally shoved them and told them to bounce forwards, they got all pissy. That was when I decided I was too old for concerts.

 
At Thursday, 16 March, 2006, Blogger Kathleen said...

Jason - You missed nothing by missing Sisters.

Welfl - I'm exceptionally disappointed in you. ;-)

Yelayna - I'd be so tempted to ask them questions all day long!!!! They should hate Enron since all the employees lost their pensions and 401(k)s in that debacle. Unless they knew more and got their money out before the collapse.

Heather - I keep trying to grasp at my youth - which always makes me end up feeling older than I am. ;-)

 
At Thursday, 16 March, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Cash Box. I have research books on Billboard charts, and I need to find the Cash Box books.

Did you let the rock do the curling?

 
At Thursday, 16 March, 2006, Blogger MJW said...

Kathleen said: "I keep trying to grasp at my youth - which always makes me end up feeling older than I am."

Welfl says: Exactly why I long ago gave up even trying. I'm still "young" as long as I stay away from young people.

Smed said: "I have research books on Billboard charts, and I need to find the Cash Box books."

Welfl says: I have the giant Billboard Top 100 book for the years 1955-1993. I use it a lot because it has so much more info than the Cash Box site, but it is not always available to me; nor is it always convenient (like when I'm in my chair at one end of the house with my laptop, and the book is at the other end ;-). Cash Box, although limited, is with me wherever there is an internet connection.

 
At Thursday, 16 March, 2006, Blogger fakies said...

I love concerts, but nothing pisses me off more than someone trying to shove their way to the front. That's when the elbows come out.

I'm a big Grisham fan, but I wasn't a fan of the movie version of The Firm either.

 
At Thursday, 16 March, 2006, Blogger Scott said...

I almost always like the book better, as in The World According To Garp. But sometimes the movie makers do a good job. I know exactly what you mean about the Bourne Identity; it barely resembled the book at all. I saw the previous version which did a better job, but it was so old that and had that made-for-tv feel to it.

 
At Thursday, 16 March, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Wow, You have been busy. Sorry to hear about the concert. I hate when people stand in front of me and block my view. Especially when I had been waiting at that spot for a long time. That happened to me at my first concert. I was ripped away from the front area, Even though I was gripping the bar and than thrown into a mosh pit. I ended up on the floor, and bruised. Then some guy pulled me out, I thanked him and he proceeded to drunkenly feel me up.

So hey, it COULD have been worse. lol

My song was "bad girls"

And "Pay it forward" is really one of the best feel good films out there.

 
At Saturday, 18 March, 2006, Blogger Beth said...

Wow, that was so awesome about the song. When I was born, "I'll Be There" by the Jackson 5 was number 1. Too cool.

 
At Monday, 20 March, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Very eerie...when I looked up 9/11/2001 the song was FALLIN' by Alicia Keys.

 
At Monday, 20 March, 2006, Blogger mr. schprock said...

Wow, you do a lot of stuff! How do you cram it all in?

The last concert I went ot was Marylin Manson. Yeah, I felt a little old then too.

BTW, the number one song when I was born was the Gregorian Chant.

 

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