Movies with Velociraptor Hands: Dirty Dancing, Part 2

Read Part 1 here

All right dudes and duderinas, it's time for our discussion of the seminal film, Dirty Dancing, (aka the many poorly organized stream-of-consciousness notes I took while watching the movie) to truly begin.

Btw I just looked up "seminal" to make sure I was using it right and I totally was:

I am, of course, referring to the second definition.

Without any further ado, let the stream of consciousness ramblings begin!

-Baby does a voice-over at the beginning of the movie and I don’t think it ever comes back. Is that normal, to be like, “This is gonna be a movie with voice-over narration” for the first minute, and then just go, “Haha, psyyyche bitchesss, no voice-over for you!”

-“I’d be standing here dead.” No you fucking wouldn’t, guy, dead people can’t stand up. That’s like one of the core aspects of being dead, not being able to stand anymore.

-During dance class Penny says, “God wouldn’t have given you maracas if he didn’t want you to shake ’em” to a room of women in reference to their breasts, and I wanna know how that’s not sexual harassment.

-In Johnny Castle’s first appearance he’s wearing sunglasses at night, carrying his leather jacket over his shoulder, and holding a large sign that says “BAD BOY” with his other hand. (Okay maybe not the last one, but he may as well have.)

-I love how the manager of the hotel treats his dance teachers like they’re these hard criminals or something. They’re dance teachers. At a fucking summer camp for adults in the Catskills.

-Johnny tells Robbie the waiter to “put your pickle on everybody’s plate and leave the hard stuff to me” and I can't even choose a dick joke to make, there are just too many options. Also what sort of resort is this where everyone gets a pickle on their plate? Is that really a thing? That sounds awesome, sign me up for that.

-The hotel manager’s bitch of a grandson is gonna have a shitty career ahead of him if he really thinks the dance teachers “showing off for each other” isn’t going to sell lessons.

-Johnny’s nose is in his dance partner’s crotch at one point. Their platonic friendship is a strange one.

-Bitch Boy, as the hotel manager’s grandson shall now be known, tells Baby, “I love to watch your hair blowing in the breeze” when there is seriously zero breeze. Fuck this guy.

-I have never seen people in real life now dance as much like they're about to bone as the hotel staff at this party in 1963.

And on that wholesome note we'll end for today. Join me next time for my groundbreaking observations about dance montages.

Movies with Velociraptor Hands: Dirty Dancing, Part 1

Heya Velocininjas and Velocininjettes! You might’ve noticed that I’ve been blogging a lot more regularly lately, and even managed to do a few posts that aren’t Short Post and a Song posts. 

That is partly because I recently finished editing my novel Viable for the final time and am taking a break before I start editing/rewriting my (very) rough draft of Rebel, the second book in the Renaissance Experiment trilogy. Normally I would waste all that time and writerly energy making stupid jokes on Twitter, but I’m taking a break from that to work on self-publishing Viable. In the meantime the blog gets to endure my attempts at comedy instead.

Also yeah, don’t think I’ve mentioned yet, but I’m going to be self-publishing Viable in the very near future. In fact it’s being formatted this very second (unless you’re reading this a long time from now). Navigating the self-publishing process has been fun and tedious and exciting and frustrating and fascinating. It’s definitely been both complicated and time-consuming, but overall it's still been much easier and more manageable than I initially assumed.

As part of my break from working on The Renaissance Experiment trilogy, I decided to rewatch the film Dirty Dancing. I had not seen Dirty Dancing since high school, but had seen it many, many times between the ages of ten and sixteen. 

I fucking loved that movie. I grew up doing various forms of dance and therefore tended to appreciate dance movies more than your average person. I was also completely in love with Patrick Swayze, which I don’t think requires any explanation.

In the intervening years between high school and now I’ve had many people tell me what terrible, terrible, very bad, godawful film Dirty Dancing is. The dialogue is garbage and no one acts like real people. There’s no story aside from Baby and Johnny dancing at this hotel one time, a girl getting an abortion, and Baby and Johnny dancing at a different hotel this other time.

In general folks whose opinions I trusted found this movie I’d grown up adoring to be a heap of overly cheesy bullshit.

So I rewatched the movie for the first time in thirteen years to see if the film held up. I took several notes while watching, hoping I’d be able to structure them into a blog post of some sort.

But alas I am a lazy fuck who doesn’t feel like doing that now, so instead I’m just going to just transcribe my notes as I wrote them. It’ll basically be like I’m live-tweeting the movie, only it won’t be live and this isn’t Twitter. I took kind of a lot of notes, so I’ll also split this up into a few different posts. So, again, another way that this won’t be like live-tweeting at all. It was a bad comparison, I apologize.

See you all next time for Part 2 in the epic saga of me watching Dirty Dancing for the first time since high school!

Short Post and a Song #148: Gillian is Black Mirror's Barb, I guess

[watching the end credits of the Star Trek episode of Black Mirror with Danfleet]

Capdan Picard: (at screen) But what about Gillian?? SHE WAS IN MARKETING

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"Quarter Chicken Dark" by Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile

I've always had a soft spot for string instruments, and play one of them (guitar, badly). Two actually if you include piano, but piano's kind of a weird percussion/string half-breed monstrosity that neither instrument family wants to claim as its own, so I'm not sure it counts. Recently I discovered this album of four of the best string musicians in the world playing together exists and got pretty damn excited about it. 

I don't know what musical genre this song/jam session falls into, but whatever it is rocks so very, very hard. Getting off to a fun and groovy start these guys take you through a fucking roller coaster ride, getting softer and slower, then faster and louder, playing around with the original melody in the laid-back and playful way only truly skilled musicians can. Chris Thile, the mandolinist, also has a cover of "Heart in a Cage" by The Strokes that I highly recommend.

Short Post and a Song #147: Here make yourself a belt, guy

Dan Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest recently ordered a belt on Amazon, and we were both pretty surprised by what he received:

I never thought the phrase "some assembly required" would apply to a belt, but I stand corrected.

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"Brain Stew" by Green Day

I have two sisters who are a bit older than I am (by four years and six years, respectively), and what that tended to mean growing up was that I got into quite a few books/movies/albums at an earlier age than appropriate. So I remember a distinct period in my early childhood where my Walkman alternated between Dookie, Insomniac, and a set of ten different "Best of the 50s" cassettes. ...It was a weird time.

Nowadays I still love early Green Day. It takes me back to my teenage angst, despite the fact that I originally listened to it as an angtsy eight-year-old. When I'm writing a scene where a character feels trapped, or angry, or both at once (aka my protagonist for most of Viable), I usually end up putting on "Brain Stew" to get myself in the right state of mind. There's something mad and desperate about the song that kinda makes me think of the brainwashy aspects of A Clockwork Orange. 

Short Post and a Song #146: She compared the song I ultimately chose to "early Coldplay" and I have no idea how to take that.

NURSE: Do you tend to get dizzy or faint when you get blood drawn?

ME: Absolutely yes.

NURSE: You should play some music on your phone, it’ll relax you.

ME: [panicking twice as hard now about whether she’ll like the song I choose] Oh ok cool.

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"One Summer's Day" by Joe Hisaishi

I know I may make it sound like I listen to a wide variety of cool and edgy music when I'm writing, but honestly about 50% of the stuff I listen to when working on my books comes from the soundtracks of children's movies and was written by the amazingly wonderful composer in the video above.

Joe Hisaishi has the power to take emotions and bottle them up into melodies that make your heart ache. "One Summer's Day" from Spirited Away is four minutes of bittersweet nostalgia that will have your throat swelling and your eyes tearing in just the first few notes, even if you're not sure why. You'll start thinking of the the hometown you don't visit often enough, or the last great day you spent with a friend you didn't realize until later you weren't going to see again.

Speaking of writing, I'm editing Viable for roughly the 4,239,101st time. I realized I went a bit mad with line breaks in one of my more recent edits so now I'm going back and putting things more or less back the way they were before I cut all my paragraphs to ribbons. 

It's been tedious and a little disheartening to spend so much time making a change, only to realize the change doesn't work and that it was better the way it was before. But I'm not putting everything back the way it was. A few of those new line breaks actually add some much-needed emphasis to a certain line, or amp up the humor of one of my protagonist's wittier asides. 

Sometimes with a book you'll dedicate A LOT of time to making a change that might only improve things by one or two percent. Sadly that's just the name of the game when it comes to creating any sort of art. It's up to you whether you choose to focus on the time lost—or on how even if it was only by the tiniest bit, you made something you were already proud of even better.

Short Post and a Song #145: SpongeBob's human arms are gonna give me nightmares

No matter what the rest of the world believes, always remember that stoned vandal (possibly radioactive?) SpongeBob on the back wall of the fried chicken place near my apartment thinks you are doing a great job.

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"Intergalactic" by the Beastie Boys

I don't have a fancy explanation for this one, guys: I just really fucking love this song.

The Opposite of Bitchin’

This afternoon I was on hold with the doctor’s office. I expected to be put on hold. I expected the hold music to be bad.

However I was not expecting there to be STATIC.

And I’m not talking a little static.

I’m talking driving through Two Gas Stations and an Abandoned Barn, West Virginia; straiiiining to hear “Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones through the nearly constant static on the shitty car radio since it’s still better than the “Give Us All Your Money Because Jesus” show on the only other functioning station, and since “Gimme Shelter” is a bitchin’ song.

This song, sadly, was not at all bitchin’. It was the downright opposite of bitchin’: It was this super peppy polka music.

So for forty-five harrowing minutes I sat with my headphones full of 85% mind-numbing static, and 15% abrasively upbeat accordion.

I got the referrals faxed where they needed to be faxed in the end, but my God, at what cost?