A is for attitude

Happy Birthday!

My older son turned 11 yesterday. We had fun at the beach, even if the water was frigid.

My younger son had fun with us too.

Football Fun in New Orleans

DW and I were on Bourbon Street earlier tonight with her brother, who is in town for a conference. It was nice to see him, especially as he seemed to be enjoying the city. How they ever got hotel rooms for that conference is beyond me, as the collegiate football national championship game will be played at the Superdome on Monday night. It's like a Super Bowl weekend in the French Quarter, particularly as LSU is in the big game (hence the purple blog). Also, I saw some beads being thrown from balconies; I suspect I know what will start happening as the people down there become increasingly drunk. Alas, most people have no business showing their body parts in public, but that's what happens when people start throwing beads.

I just enjoy watching this clip of Les Miles, so I'm posting it here.

Also, whenever I go down to the Quarter on a crowded party night, I think of the A Streetcar Named Marge episode of The Simpsons, which hilariously pissed off the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Long before the Superdome,
Where the Saints of football play,
There's a city where the damned call home,
Hear their hellish rondelet:

New Orleans!
Home of pirates, drunks, and whores...
New Orleans!
Tacky, overpriced souvenir stores...

If you want to go to hell, you should take a trip
To the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Mississip':

New Orleans!
Stinking, rotten, vomity, vile...
New Orleans!
Putrid, brackish, maggotty, foul...

New Orleans!
Crummy, lousy, rancid and rank...
New Orleans!
. . . .

Lucky Seven

Gentle reader Sideon enjoys poetic song lyrics, and he recently matched up lyrics with various bloggers. I dig what Sideon selected for me:

Can't tell the real from reflections
When all these faces look the same to me
In every city such a desolate dream.
Some days are strange to number
Some say the seventh sounds a little bit stranger
A year of Sundays seems to have drifted right by -
I could have sworn in one evening.
And I'm not seized in desperation,
No steel reproaches on the table from before.
But I still can feel those splinters of ice
I look through the eyes of a stranger...

For rumours in the wake of such a lonely crowd
Trading in my shelter for danger
I'm changing my name just as the sun goes down -
In the eyes of the stranger...

-from The Seventh Stranger by Duran Duran

Happy Effing New Years

2008 started off with our neighbors blowing up fireworks to wretched excess, which we wouldn't have minded except that DW had lasik surgery last week and hadn't had a good night's sleep in days, which means that I hadn't had a good night's sleep in days either. Grrr! I was in a relatively bad mood when I got up yesterday morning.

So I was in a mood for a little light entertainment yesterday. I went to bed last night reading Milton's Paradise Lost, and, before that, viewed the delightfully fun Scarface. I'd not actually seen that film before, which is kinda odd given my attraction to violent movies. I avoided the movie due largely to its venerated status in the gansta subculture. I'm pretty much a snob about the whole gangster glorification of violence, which differs somehow from whatever buttons violent entertainment pushes in my own subconscious mind. I suppose the difference is that I don't view the characters in these films as role models to be emulated. Whatever. Anyhow, I picked up the "platinum edition" at WalMart yesterday, which includes a hilarious option of two running tickers at the bottom of the screen--one for "f-bombs" (over 200) and another for gunshots fired (2,049). I remember Scarface being very controversial in its day (1983), largely for the number of f-bombs and the extremely high level of violence.

"Say hello to my little friend."

Scarface originally was planned as a remake of a 1930s movie by the same name about Al Capone, but the film was reconceived in the wake of the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, a brilliant move that allowed screenwriter Oliver Stone and director Brian De Palma to make a film more relatable to audiences of the mid-1980s. De Palma later came out with The Untouchables, which was all about Capone and Elliot Ness. Scarface is about the rise and fall of Tony Montana (Al Pacino), a nobody from Cuba who ruthlessly works his way to the top of the cocaine business in South Florida. The movie is quite emphatic about how the American dream of wealth, power, attractive sexual partners, and wretched excess can end very badly, a la GoodFellas. Scarface, however, is much wilder than GoodFellas, perhaps because there was no organized crime tradition to reign in Tony Montana's crazier impulses. The director, writers, and actors were absolutely fearless, and, I would guess, knew that the critics and other cultural guardians of the day would vehemently denounce their film. It's a much better movie than I expected it to be, but it certainly isn't for everybody.