"Women in Crested Butte are like parking spaces; they're either taken, handicapped, or way-the-fuck out there."
- on the bathroom wall of the Eldo bar
I really like the movie The Rocketeer. It's one of those movies I saw as a kid back when watching a movie and all of its sequels overandover again endlessly all weekend was deeply comforting (there was always that hope that the 100th playthrough would reveal some new scene or missed joke). This repetition, at such an early age, meant that any lines of dialogue that were beyond my understanding were nevertheless memorized permanently, if only phonetically. So it was with the original Star Wars trilogy, which means that phrases like "hive of scum and villainy" and "Chespo kutata kreesta krenko, nyakoska!" are in my head at the same depth as "hakuna matata" might be for someone else. Ultimately, this leaves me with the ability to quote the gibberish on screen, which some people* mistake for actually speaking a fake language. Anyway, the Rocketeer and Star Wars. Great movies, great characters, great crossover:
This is the beat poetry of my generation. I'm sure you've seen this, but take a moment and consider this medium as art— poignant snapshots of a culture. Breathtaking.
So I have this game that I play that I thought everybody played, but I guess not. It goes like this: somebody speaks a phrase in the course of a conversation that, in context, is unremarkable, but taken on its own has an enigmatic poetry to it. The challenge is to notice these phrases, determine if the phrase is the name of a band, a song title, or an album title, and then assign to it the appropriate genre of music. For example, I was joking with a friend about being fated to work in a cubicle and she said something about having a cube-shaped soul. I then stopped the conversation to announce that "Cube-Shaped Soul" is totally the name of the debut album of my neo-new wave folk shoegaze band. "Thunder and Lightning and Jazz" is totally the name of my post-mariachi prog rock band. And so on. Can you guess my all-time favorite phrase to have been plucked from a conversation?
*I was kind of seeing this girl. We watched Jedi with some friends and I knew Jabba's lines. She thought I could speak Jabbanese or whatever and gave me shit for it for days. E chu ta, what a stoopa!
- on the bathroom wall of the Eldo bar
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| Something for everyone... except illiterate rednecks. |
This is the beat poetry of my generation. I'm sure you've seen this, but take a moment and consider this medium as art— poignant snapshots of a culture. Breathtaking.
So I have this game that I play that I thought everybody played, but I guess not. It goes like this: somebody speaks a phrase in the course of a conversation that, in context, is unremarkable, but taken on its own has an enigmatic poetry to it. The challenge is to notice these phrases, determine if the phrase is the name of a band, a song title, or an album title, and then assign to it the appropriate genre of music. For example, I was joking with a friend about being fated to work in a cubicle and she said something about having a cube-shaped soul. I then stopped the conversation to announce that "Cube-Shaped Soul" is totally the name of the debut album of my neo-new wave folk shoegaze band. "Thunder and Lightning and Jazz" is totally the name of my post-mariachi prog rock band. And so on. Can you guess my all-time favorite phrase to have been plucked from a conversation?
*I was kind of seeing this girl. We watched Jedi with some friends and I knew Jabba's lines. She thought I could speak Jabbanese or whatever and gave me shit for it for days. E chu ta, what a stoopa!
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