Category Archives: true life 2006

Good movie, good party

Last night we got to see the documentary some friends have been making. The reception was doubly fun as I got to spend quality time with Former Coworker Who Was Not My Boyfriend and other folks I haven’t seen in ages and ages. Plus, good DJ. I might be slightly biased about that, though.

As if writer/director/editor Shauna Lawhorne wasn’t over the moon from the reception the film received last night, she got several column inches in the “names and faces” column in today’s Washington Post:

Ambassador, musician and now documentary film star. You make us look bad, Andras.

The Hungarian ambassador to the United States, Andras Simonyi , and his band mates — Alexander Vershbow , U.S. ambassador to South Korea; Lincoln Bloomfield, former assistant secretary of state; and Dan Poneman, former assistant to the president — are the focus of a new documentary, “Rockin’ the Beltway,” that was screened at the Hungarian Embassy last night.

The flick follows the guitar-plucking ambassador and his crew, known as the Coalition of the Willing, with commentary from music notables such as Tommy Ramone (he’s a fan) and Chuck Young of Rolling Stone magazine (he doesn’t like the band’s name).

“The ultimate goal [of the film] is to make people see that you can be a serious diplomat or security expert and play music very seriously,” Simonyi, 54, told us yesterday. “It really is the story of rock-and-roll and how it affected our generation.”

The Coalition of the Willing performs fairly regularly in Washington — most recently at the 9:30 club and Walter Reed Army Medical Center — and elsewhere around the country for charity events. “Whenever we do a concert, we want it to be a serious event and a major fundraiser for a good cause,” Simonyi said.

First-time director Shauna Lawthorne , a production associate for a D.C. film company and a graduate student at American University, was roped into the project by a friend, Simonyi’s daughter, Sonja . “I said, ‘Your dad’s an ambassador?! He has a band?!’ ” she recalled. “I thought it was an interesting and entertaining story.”

Simonyi has lofty ambitions for the film: “I hope TV stations pick it up because it’s a great story about how different diplomacy and political life has become in the past few years.” Like an E! True Hollywood story?

It’s a very good film and I’m hoping very much they can get all the clearances they need as painlessly as possible so that they can show it in public – it’s a good story, well-told.

Welcome to Wisteria Lane

Until the DVDs arrived, I’d never seen an episode of Desperate Housewives.

Husband says he thought it was fiction. Husband is oblivious. Desperate Housewives is a documentary. It’s hilarious, yet I often find myself watching it the same way I watch someone being tortured with powertools on 24 or Alias: wimpering and peering through my fingers. Alcohol also helps.

I’m deeply traumatized yet I can’t stop watching.

dead formats society, reisenthel, and a charlton heston action figure

I’m unmotivated by real work and instead contemplating making a pixelvision movie in my basement starring the Planet of the Apes action figures. I’m doing this to avoid another task, recovering and remastering some aged audio tracks.

For this and other reasons, the wired.com piece, The Dead Formats Society is a quite timely.

Now, before I return to a world where apes evolved from men, let me take a moment to tell you about my new treasure. Husband is a nest-builder. He doesn’t understand what a joyful object this is.

Well damn. The Reisenthel site doesn’t allow deep-linking? Click “produckte” and look for “wandboard.” Er, if you don’t read German you’ll just have to look at the pretty pictures and nod and smile.

The wandboard is the greatest correspondance and bill holder ever. And it’s heavy nylon and very well-constructed so it doesn’t sag. Plus, groovy velcro closures. And the best part: 22 bucks.

I’ve spent way, way too much time lately engaged in the pursuit of a better bill organizer (as the poor Loungebunny, who I hauled around many stores a few weeks ago can attest).

Even The Container Store let me down. None of their wall-hanging organizers or racks were quite right. Visiting the Container Store did allow Husband and I to hear one woman say to another, “The problem is, I need more containers to store my containers.”

I have to tell you, this wallhanging doodad is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Actually, it’s better than sliced bread because you can stick little labels to it. You can stick labels to bread, I suppose, but that would be weird. Even to me.

Einfach clever, indeed.

slothbears and blog-birthdays, but not at the same time

I emailed Husband the story about the monkey-eating sloth bears.  Now, for some reason, it’s difficult to sell him on the idea of popping by the National Zoo on the way to work to see the sloth bear cub.  I think I may have scarred him. Stephen Colbert hasn’t been helping the situation.

In non-bear news, there’ve been tons of open studios and other art-related events of late.  all of which I’ve promised to post about. None of which I have actually posted about. My brain is simply still much too full to post about any of it in any sort of coherent way, but I’ll get around to it.

Not that I’ve ever let the need for coherence stand in my way.

Speaking of incoherence…

Can you believe the 5 year anniversary of this site came and went a few months ago? And maybe in five more years I’ll have the archives I partially destroyed by mistake restored.  I just noticed because I was thinking of merging all projects back into one place. Not killing anything, just moving it.  While I was contemplating all this, I found my original blogger log-in info…from 1999.  Which, ironically, I never could find when I needed it. Then I went hunting around and found that this particular site launched in April 2001.

That’s 35 in dog-years.

OK. So it’s not, but “that would be 35 in dog years if there was a quantifiable dog-to-human lifespan measurement indicator that had any degree of reliability whatsoever” doesn’t have the same concise zip.  And that’s me, nothing if not concise. And zippy.

What?

I think someone slipped me decaf today.

I (heart) Dwell

I love Dwell.

I love Dwell so much I wish I could actually live in it.

It’s possible I love Dwell just a little too much.

It’s possible my relationship with Dwell is becoming unhealthy.

I love Dwell because it appeals to me sense of not being surrounded by extraneous stuff. I am, remember, the person who can go to Costco and buy only the exact things on my list. I can (and do) go to places like Target and not impulse-buy. I just don’t have the time, patience or energy to get bogged down in defining my self-worth by the brand of blender I buy.

And yet, Dwell hypnotizes me and makes me susceptible to advertising I wouldn’t otherwise even read, let alone spend time thinking about.

For instance – a recent ad for Adobe products. I have nothing against Adobe products. I like photoshop, I just never use it anymore. Because I have no real reason to. Adobe doesn’t make the audio products I need and I don’t need any of their products to write. I have no reason to fetishize anything from this company. Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time staring at this ad:

A man stares out his office window. He’s tired or a bit haggard or filled with deep despair or extremely constipated. I can’t tell. Just suffice to say his facial expression and posture conveys neither contentment nor comfort.

On the facing page is this text:

Every once in a while you’re the first one in the office.
Not because you got up early.
But because you never left.

Introducing Adobe Creative Suite 2. Our most indispensible software, upgraded, integrated and built to work as one. So when an idea finally hits you, and it will, you’ll have all the tools you need.
Creative Suite 2. It’s everything but the idea.
Better by Adobe.

I looked at that ad and I felt this deep, deep longing for Adobe Creative Suite 2. I felt it was going to change my life. I was bereft not to have Adobe Creative Suite 2 because I might get An Idea and not have the tools to, uh, do whatever it is I’m supposed to do once I get the idea. Because this is the thing: I’m never the first one in the office. I don’t even work in an office. Plus, I don’t identify with the sad, constipated Asian man, and I certainly don’t want to be a sad, constipated Asian man.

Right now, in fact, the only tools I actually need are paper and a writing implement, everything else is gravy.

Hell, I don’t even know what Adobe Creative Suite 2 is or what it does.

And yet…Without it, I am incomplete.

That’s an effective ad.