I was lent some jewellery to wear to a party. There was a bracelet that looked really good on the cat. I went to get everyone to show them how bling the old barnyard mouser was looking and he wandered off. My wife has been looking for him for three hours now. I thought they were crystals. They were diamonds, apparently. Well, wherever he is, he looks good. I hope. – Alex James
Hulk Hogan? King Triton? Mustache, check. Terrifying upper body, check. Strange family situation played out for the world to see, check. Rebellious, and slightly slutty daughter, check. Twins.
This, this is Alex James. (I think I should probably just change the name of this blog to FLANNERY O’CONNOR LOVES ALEX JAMES since that’s pretty much a dream scenario in my book, and, as you the dear reader can second, is all I talk about.) He is sort-of but mostly used-to-be the bassist for Blur, and my adoration for him is well documented on this site. (He’s actually the second rock star I remember being attracted to, as a young girl. I saw the video for Buddy Holly and thought Rivers Cuomo was cute, and then the Coffee and TV video and liked the silly way in which Alex moved his head in time to the music.) Once Ryan S. brought his book (signed!) all the way from England through Tunisia in a plastic bag, and it finally made it’s way to me. So I read it, and got even more entrenched. He makes cheese! He has four kids with ridiculous names (Geronimo, Artemis, Gallileo and a girl named Sable.) and seems perfectly happy. I mean, he’s smug but I love it.
In fact, I think he might very well be the perfect looking person. (In the Country House music video, he sits in a bathtub and reads Balzac and gets poured a cup of tea and makes the craziest face.) One time he said that babies were like farts and old slippers, your own are all right, but other people’s are the worst.
So, you can imagine my surprise when I wandered into Star Trek a while ago and saw this visage:
Alex Jamesian in nature! His name is Karl Urban, he’s 37, and was also Eomer in Lord of the Rings, but I don’t remember him looking particularly A.J. in those days.
And we have our face off, two weirdos:
(Just a note in his defense, there’s someone walking directly behind him, he doesn’t just have a weird mullet/ponytail.)
Hahaha. He looks like Hugh Jackman sort of in that picture.
Joey asked me who I would interview if I could interview anyone, and it would certainly be Mr. James.
Books I’ve read in the past two months:
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2666 by Roberto Bolano
Straight on Till Morning by Mary Lovell
My Story As Told By Water by David James Duncan
Restarting: At Swim Two Birds by Flann O’Brien (which has always had a place on my bookshelf since I discovered that the back cover contains the high praise: “This is just the book to give your sister if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl”)
I’m going to start East of Eden this weekend, and have been taking a few cues from this list which seems mightily well ordered. I was flipping through Habit of Being, as I am wont to do, and Flannery O’Connor’s account of Katherine Anne Porter’s visit (I read Pale Horse, Pale Rider quite a while ago and liked it, although I gather this isn’t the prevailing opinion.) was rather amusing, she has this to say:
“Miss Katherine Anne [Porter] was very nice indeed. Very pleasant and agreeable, crazy about my peacocks: plowed all over the yard behind me in her spike-heeled shoes to see my various kinds of chickens. I didn’t hear her read but most of the people I talked to who did thought she read well. They say she had on a black halter type dress sans back & long black gloves which interfered with her turning the pages. After each story, she made a kind of curtsy, which someone described as “wobbly.” She’s about sixty-five. She’s been on her novel 27 years and says all her friends call it “you-know-what.” I hope I won’t be on mine 27 years from now…”
I had some further point which presently escapes me.
I’m about to launch a new site design, welded together by Andrew, (I can’t even say the name of his blog) who complains that my php is all enmeshed and I just throw my hands up because, what? if I knew how to fix these little problems, I might have done so before now.
The latest meeting of the Sam Seaborn Appreciation Society went well, I appointed myself Secretary and took minutes. Sam so far in this season of West Wing has shown himself to be well-versed in all facets of the law, a good friend to the weak, and a defender of the innocent in addition to his rather endless physical accomplishments, the least of which is that he looks like Rob Lowe.
This brings me to my salient point, could Sam Seaborn watch Wayne’s World and see Rob Lowe in it? Wouldn’t he just realize he was watching himself? Or do characters such as this live in a world where there is no Rob Lowe, there is no Martin Sheen or Allison Janney? We’re supposed to think this is set in our world, but we know it has to be at least a closely paralleled universe.
This doesn’t seem to bother anyone else, but I have to admit, it’s pretty much all I can think about when I watch a movie. If I watch Funny People, I wonder if there’s no Adam Sandler in the world of Funny People. This disconnect really bothers me, it’s almost as if we’re watching the most outlandish science fiction, a totally bizarro world where (depending on the size of the cast) there’s fewer and fewer cultural touchstones to inform our understanding. These movies might as well be in a new language, since their ties to reality are tenuous at best.
There’s nothing greater than getting into a television show that nobody really cares about anymore, or something so old that all the seasons have been available for years and your friends watched it when it was on air and now barely remember the plots, let alone the subplots, quotes and subtle nuances of character development. You know, the stuff I ache to hash and rehash and get nutsy over. I wanna talk about Jenny Schecter’s facial expressions and Sounder, or how Avon Barksdale was maybe named after the cosmetic company, or how if you watch the show long enough all you can hear from Lorelai is a high-pitched ringing noise that is the poster child for chronic tinnitus and if those girls ate only marshmellows and popcorn and hamburgers and all the crap that permanently gets discussed at Chez Gilmore, they’d be so fat you’d think you were watching Roseanne. You know, the deets.
All that to say, I started watching The West Wing, and six episodes into it, I already feel comfortable enough to guffaw loudly, or sigh indulgently, and mutter something along the lines of, “Oh, that’s just sooo Sam!” I’m already totally into the breakneck pace, the strange 1999 music, and feeling exhausted just watching all of them walk around and never sleep. So, get excited, because we’ve got like eight seasons ahead of us.
