queenmaker
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i stayed awake for all of howl's moving castle (deborah had previously estimated that i tended to fall asleep about thirty minutes in and i think that's accurate because there was this scene i think around that time where suddenly we're in the dark sky and howl is half mutated into a bird and flying above a Miyazaki war is hellscape and i was like "WHOAH never seen this part i thought this movie was just about a may-december romance"). i'm thankful for the impressionistic brushwork of the hidden flower garden pocket universe and for the just transcendent animation of the falling glowing magic stars oh my godddd. i'm thankful that afterward we went for dim sum and happily ate too much (two orders of siu mai, one order of har gow, one order of sticky rice with lotus leaf (i accidently typoed this as "lotus life" and yes it is a lifestyle), one order of pork buns, one order of shrimp and chive dumplings) and our table was across the street from a dispensary called "the dime store" (portland's dimes square is the nexus of eastport plaza movie theater and HK cafe dim sum and the dime store)
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the movie queenmaker (hulu) which i put on during dinner saturday after doing a bit of ketamine because i thought it was just going to be a light nostalgia trip through the period when the internet was changing my life but ended up being wayyyyyy more of a mindfuck because (spoiler alert, definitely watch the movie first if you think you'll be interested in this topic, okay i'm going to stop the spoiler alert now) it ended up being mostly the story of park avenue peerage which i never read but which was apparently a super insider-y blog about new york socialites from roughly the summer of 2007 - 2010 that turned out to have been written by a normal middle-class state school college student living in champaign-urbana who had no tangible connection to this world at all and which ended in that person coming to new york for a summer to intern for new york magazine and eventually having a nervous breakdown about their dissonance with this world and stoppef blogging and all of this was like so 🤯 🤯 🤯 because in the summer of 2007 i was a normal middle-class recent graduate of a state school without any connections who got some attention from new york media for that blog (obsessive analysis of the hills) and then more for my next one (weird scanner art tumblr) but was all through this period struggling with untreated mental illness and then had a nervous breakdown and in 2010 stopped blogging and when i think back i sometimes regret that i didn't have the capacity to capitalize on what i had then and make it into something more (and also just like live a normal life without constant psychic suffering!) but i'm also still and forever eternally grateful for the attention then of internet people in new york city (my friend emily, who actually did move to new york after college to work at an art gallery while i went to korea to teach ESL, and i once bonded in an email thread over always hearing the phrase "new york city" in our heads in the vein of that nineties salsa commercial) who just based on words i put on the internet made me feel interesting and smart and special and appreciated and just generally part of something at a time when the rest of my life was not making me feel those things <3.
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the song "bubalu" by feid and rema which i landed on surfing New Music Friday in the car on the way to the movies and which i have no idea what it's about is such a lovely pop confection (and then i just searched for an english translation of the lyrics and the first line of the chorus is "Dulсecita flow trululu, coconut cream" chef kiss)