half a dozen of one or the other

(revised on 5.10.08 @ 11:54 pm)

good - portland international film festival
bad - not at the KOIN
good - broadway made room for piff by giving us Lord of the Rings! and Mothman(which i/scott wanna see)

we didn’t get piff, so i didn’t get to watch bits of dozens of foreign films. but we did get fellowship fora week, so i got to watch the moria sequence daily in our biggest house. that was a good week.

bad - we also premiered Rollerball. whoo hoo. I think fifty people saw it all day, five showings? ick.
good - Balrog! watched moria battle/balrog twice, plus the ending before i came home

balrog beats rollerball remake. balrog is best sequence ever on big screen. balrog is win for life.

good - farscape(best show ever) has been renewed for season 4 and season 5, which means it’ll continue for another two years at least

or it’ll continue it’s steady quality decline, pull it back at the very end of season 4, and get shitcanned by scifi after they wrapped production, letting season 4 and the series end on a cliffhanger where crichton and aeryn are killed, when two minutes earlier they were happy and having a baby.

they did get to come back and condense all their season five plot ideas into the peacekeeper wars miniseries. it was 99% crap but had a good ending. i guess that’s better than nothing, except that if they’d lopped off the last two minutes of season four they’d have had a much better finale.

good - I get paid on tuesday, so I can search the web and try to find Yanzi Sun’s cd, as well as a couple others!

i was about to discover yesasia.com and actually be able to purchase some of the chinese and korean music i’d been watching on mvh and chinese top 20 for a year or so. identifying the chinese artists was a pain, because if the videos didn’t have english text, i had to go to an mvh fan forum and read a post weekly by a guy who translated the ct20 countdown for the fans who watched both shows. (mvh was put on by korean american high school students, ct20 was a condensed edition of the chinese channel v broadcast in chinese(i don’t know if it was mandarin or cantonese)).

i was able to identify most of the artists i really liked, but only able to track down cds for about half of them. the rest were out of print or my translations were bad. thankfully, most of the videos can now be found on youtube or youku.com.

and blah blah blah. i was still working a morning or so a week at kb toys which was still open in lloyd center, the hot water heater broke so i got to take a cold shower, and i had to clear off my desk for the repairman when he brought in the new heater, in case he had to move the thing.

this prompted me to put a shelving unit in the plywood box that was my bedroom down there, so my computer wouldn’t collect all the dust in the house while sitting on a desk at the bottom of the stairs.

this i then did. it was absurdly cramped. i’d ditched the bed and just had a twin mattress on the floor, and had to put that up against the wall so i had room to pull my chair up next to the computer desk. but it worked, and i kind of like having a cramped workspace made of shelves. a little pod surrounded by all my crap.

there’s a fantastic book i found at powells about tiny tokyo apartments, that was a counterargument to tokyo interior design books showing empty antiseptic spaces. the guy thought that was dishonest, nobody in tokyo really lives like that. they live in cramped overstuffed cozy dens.

like me, at the time.