I’m not sure how I managed to miss out on this video for the last six weeks. I only saw a mention to it today, when it appeared on the Yahoo! buzz list. I clicked through and found the best, so far, parody trailer I’ve yet to see. Even better than the romantic comedy version of “The Shining.” Really. It’s moments like these that I thank my lucky stars for post-modern pastiche. Anyway, here it is, my first embedded YouTube video, “Titanic 2: The Surface,” created by Derek Johnson:
I’ve lived in sunny (most of the time) San Diego since September 1, 2005, and I’m still having nightmares about planes flying into buildings, people running from billowing smoke, and the paralyzing dread that accompanies waiting for the next thing to happen. In this dream, I was living in Washington, DC, five blocks from the Capitol and I watched a plane soar into the front steps. And so on. It was one of those epic dreams that seemed to last forever. The only good things about the dream was that Rob was there (and he wasn’t there the first time) and so was CJ Cregg (and she always makes me feel safe).
Recently, I was talking with a 17-year-old boy about our mutual desire to front a rock band and our mutual realization that such a fantasy will remain just that. He articulated our problem quite well: “I love to sing, but singing doesn’t seem to love me.”
I had long thought that I’d be a good singer if I just learned how. When Rob and I were preparing to get married, I decided to ignore those who’d told me I was tone deaf (including a Tony-nominated music director) and sing to him at our wedding. I chose “When You Say Nothing At All,” Rob’s favorite love song. It was to be a surprise, and I had a secret lesson with my best friend Curtis, a songwriter and music wunderkind who told me that if I practiced enough, I could get away with the performance. (Obviously, he said I wasn’t tone deaf.) I got into the habit of singing along with Randy Travis’s version on my iPod as I walked to and from the subway every day. I convinced myself that I sounded great—some odd vibration in my jaw and skull led me to believe I was harmonizing with Randy. Of course, I wasn’t, and, thankfully, I chickened out at the wedding; I didn’t need to humiliate myself in front of all of my family and friends. And when I finally sang to Rob in the comfort of our own home, I sounded worse than the worst lambs-to-the-slaughter on “American Idol“.
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Kidding!
Rob and I saw “The Da Vinci Code” in a packed matinee in La Jolla yesterday afternoon, and, well, it was pretty boring and pretty ridiculous and not very thrilling, and it was obvious. After about a half-hour, or maybe it was three hours, whatever would be a third of the way in, I said to Rob, [SPOILER ALERT!] “She’s the grail.” And then we had to wait another day or so before Landgon had his epiphany and tells Sophie. Lordy. Anyway, Ian McKellen is awesome, of course, and Audrey Tautou was lovely and appealing. (Somehow, I never saw “Amelie,” so this was my first Tautou, as it were.) Paul Bettany, as always, was brilliant. And freaky creepy. Tom Hanks was Tom Hanks, ya know, Everyman. I did like a lot of Ron Howard’s special effecty flourishes. The plot is pretty well-known by now, but after seeing it all put together I understood why the fundies, Catholic and Protestant, are obsessed with it: For the last few weeks, the religious kids at UCSD have had banners and tables and piles of leaflets and pamphlets all devoted to how the book isn’t true, because I guess the fact that it’s a novel doesn’t make that patently obvious. I also get why any Christian with an ability to think for him/herself is pretty amused by it. I was thinking about that for a couple hours last night, and then this morning, after seeing that the movie had made a gazillion dollars, I read the great Times piece–I love real-deal anthro journalism–on the phenom…which I have hypocritically posted after the jump.
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