it's zmedsday!! (xvi)

it's tunesday! "andrew in drag" by the magnetic fields

I'm not a big fan of The Magnetic Fields. Blair likes them a lot more than I do. She has some stories from decades ago when she would go their shows and sit on the side of the stage. Between songs, lead singer, Stephin Merritt, would make fun of her clothing.

But six and a half (or so) years ago I was introduced to this video. Merritt was hosting a screening of a hard-to-find Japanese film from 1968 called The Black Lizard. Ethan and I went to see it -- I wrote about that experience in my now-defunct music blog. After the movie, they screened the video for "Andrew in Drag." And I liked it. I still do, even though I haven't actually bought the album.

cinema history class: scalps

Session: Spaghetti Nightmares, Week 4
Movie: Scalps (1987)
Directed by Claudio Fragasso

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
A group of renegade Confederate soldiers wants to capture a Native American woman for their colonel One particular Native American woman. Suffice to say she doesn't want to be captured. . Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:
Scalps struck me as very American as far as Spaghetti Westerns go. As with The Four of the Apocalypse (which we saw a week ago), there were actual good guys. I also noticed that there was very little emphasis on gunplay. Most of the Spghetti Westerns I've seen seem to emphasize guns. For example, To cite one example, In The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, the three main protagonists are all expert gunslingers and the story comes down to a final three-way shootout (which, I suppose, is of interest to game theorists). Here, there are guns, but it's not the same. On another note, this movie involved Native Americans. Of course, it's not the only one to do so (Navajo Joe comes to mind), but that's a topic that the Italian directors seemed not to have explored much. Now, having said that, I should acknowledge that 1987 was pretty late in the Spaghetti Western timeline. Also, as Keith pointed out, it was written by an American. So that may have something to do with it. At any rate, it seemed to play like a Louis L'amour novel.

Keith (and I think the others) kept making the obvious comparisons to the second Rambo movie, though to me it seemed more like 1984's Red Dawn. Either way, it was exciting. And the use of bows and arrows (combined with dynamite) was terrific.

So we were watching this movie, and there was good energy in the room. We were really getting into this. But it really upped the ante in the last fifteen minutes, and you could tell from how we were reacting. But the denouement was killer.

I think the quote of the night was Keith's: "It's relentlessly bloody and ugly and bloody and relentless."

Ratings:

Me: 10

Dave: 9.8

Ethan: 8

Joe: 10
Sean: 2 out of 4

Joe suggested that we start a new class ritual. At the conclusion of each session, we each indicate which was our favorite move of the session. So here are our picks for the best movies from the "Spaghetti Nightmares" session:
Me: Scalps
Dave: Scalps
Ethan: Three way tie between Cut-Throats Nine, Four of the Apocalypse and Scalps
Joe: Scalps
Sean: Four of the Apocalypse

i shoulda backed up

Let's be clear. Losing your data sucks.

My hard drive died this week. No, I hadn't been backing things up.

I literally cannot recall everything that I had that's now lost and has to be recreated as best as possible. But here's a partial list (not in any particular order):

• Medical records from the last several years
• Brokerage account records
• A list of accounts with various vendors, services and institutions, complete with passwords (encoded so that only I can interpret them)
• A list of movies that Ethan and I have seen in our weekly film class
• A draft of a newsletter for LIDS
• The membership list for the Jamaica Estates Association
• All the music I spent endless hours ripping from my CD collection.

A lot of the info (not the music files, mind you) are on paper. But, damn, who wants to go through all that paper?

I won't bore with the blow by blow of "well, I was working and then the blue screen came up, so..." Suffice to say it wasn't fun. Yeah... backups from now on.

it's zmedsday!! (xv)