May 3, Houston: The big one -- the Inprint reading -- occurs at the Alley Theatre on Monday, May 3. Do not miss it or you'll be sorry. I'm not kidding -- I'm going to say the craziest, most intellectual yet hilarious stuff I can think of, and I'll be sharing the stage with the ultra sexy Oscar Casares, too.
June 24, Houston: I'm one of the peeps scheduled to read at Poison Pen, at Houston's famous Poison Girl bar. Besides me, everyone there will be ultra, *super* sexy. Come see me and drink!
June 26, Washington, DC: I'll be reading at the American Library Association conference. Come on down.
My other blog: Go read my the Houston Chronicle parenting blog (or my ChronMomBlog, as I like to call it) and make sure my kids won't resent me more than other kids resent their own parents.
Buy my new novel, Lone Star Legend. Already did? Well, buy a few more for your friends, then. :)
Monday, July 30, 2007
Paw Prints, Your HeartEarlier today, in the restroom of my workplace, a Soap Opera Digest appeared before me and I happened upon an advertisement for this Faith Friend Collectible Music Box: Pet Dog Lover Gift. (Yes, that is what it's called. Don't believe me? Click the link and read the HTML header.)
I'm sure there's already at least one web site dedicated to enumerating these sorts of collectibles and making fun of them where applicable. So I won't make fun of this one... but I don't even want to, because something about it attracted me, actually. I don't know if it was the pale green color of the not-Faberge egg, or the dog's facial expression, or the pure overkill of the design concept -- a smiling Yorkie rising out of a not-Faberge egg, with a music box playing "You've Got a Friend," plus 22K gold accents and 100-plus Swarovskis, crystals, and rhinestones, all topped off with the inanity of this caption: "Yorkies Leave Paw Prints On Our Hearts" (all capped, if you please; yes, even the preposition). Despite this totally jacked-up concept, it manages to look sort of nice, in the end. In an Easter, pillow-mint sort of way.
I love it. Please, someone, buy me that thing for Christmas.
Enthusiastic Recommendation of a Five-Year-Old Movie
Oh my god, why did none of y'all tell me how much I would like AI: Artificial Intelligence? Was it because you were sick and tired of Steven Spielberg, or because Haley Joel Osment creeps you out? Well, I can certainly respect that, but we saw that movie on cable, at a hotel, over the weekend, and it just about killed me, I got so into it.
There's no use in me telling you all my thoughts about an old movie. I'll just say I liked it because it gave me a lot to think about. If you haven't yet seen it, you might want to rent the DVD and check it out. Or go to a hotel room and catch it on cable. (I swear, I see more movies in hotel rooms than anywhere else, seems like.) At first the movie pissed me off really badly, because I hate stories about evil mommies or even just run-of-the-mill, crappy mommies. But then I realized the crappy mommy was just incidental to the moral questions the movie wanted to ask, and so I relaxed and enjoyed the rest of the ride.
I can do something kind of useful for y'all today... Here's a link to the 1969 story the movie was based on: Super-Toys Last All Summer by Mr. Brian Aldiss. Free vintage literature! Enjoy.
Labels: cheese, pop culture
5:41 PM #Comments:
Those kind of sentimental "collector's item" gifts inspire actual tears for me because I imagine the earnestness (and loneliness?) of the people who actually buy and treasure them and it breaks my heart. I'm sure I'm reading too much into it.My two best poet friends were split down the middle on AI: one loved, one hated. I looked forward to breaking the tie, but when I finally watched, the stress of forming my opinion overwhelmed me. And I don't know what I thought of it. Now THAT'S pathetic!
# posted by
Marigoldie : 7:00 PM
GWEN oh my god. A.I. must have been on all weekend, because I stayed up very late the other night watching it. If I ever need to cry and cry and just can't manufacture those tears on my own, all I'll have to do is watch the later parts of that movie and bingo.
# posted by
pinky pinkerson : 6:57 AM
Marigoldie: I used to look away from the plates and music boxes and such for that very reason. Later, though, I met some people who owned whole sets of those things because they thought they'd eventually quadruple in value. And then I was cured.
Seriously -- people simply need to collect more tasteful yorkie simulacra. If it makes me judgmental to say so... well, look at the title of my blog.
:)
Pinky: Did you watch it late Saturday night? That's when we did.
I cried like a bastard, with tears just rolling, no eye-squinching or anything.
Then, yesterday, I read a few of the old reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and Ebert said it would have been a good movie if he hadn't known, all along, that the robot boy simply could not feel love, and therefore did not deserve our pity.
I was like, "Shut up, Ebert. You just told yourself that so you would cry all over your popcorn. You know you purposely stubbed your toe later so you could cry all alone and let it all out."
# posted by
Gwen : 2:10 PM
That is exactly when we watched it. I cried so much my husband called it "The Schindler's List of science fiction." Because he knows that whenever Schindler's List is on, I purposely watch the last few minutes so I can think of all my dead relatives and have a good cry. Too much info about me? :-)
I have no idea how they managed to take that wisp of a story and add millions of dollars of CGI to it to make a movie.
# posted by
pinky pinkerson : 3:15 PM
I have kind of an automatic flinch when Spielberg starts trying to yank my heart strings...he's so *obvious* about it. I'm usually a softy, but this movie annoyed me. It should have ended with David in the water, not some time later with aliens and/or super evoled humans doing an archeological dig.
And just from a science standpoint; if the ocean froze, it would not be an unmoving block of ice; water swells and expands as it freezes. The boy, his ship, and the ruins of NY would have been pulverized long before they could be dug up; glaciers grind things to tiny bits. The only things that get preserved in ice are ones that are in caves or fall into crevasses in an existing glacier or something.
(/ends geeking)
Oh but my grandmother loved Native American kitsch collector kitsch, like this:
http://www.collectiblestoday.com/ct/product/prdid-48931.jsp?_/_prod/_14+87/_/_/_/_&endeca=true&abbr=brad
. Actual Native Americans were another thing entirely.
# posted by
emjaybee : 8:46 PM
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