The Hipsterization of Kings of Leon

Watch the Followill brothers' gradual devolution into hipsterdom.  By the grace of God, the drummer was spared, at the expense of his beard.

Next Time Around...I Don't Wanna Be A Man...I Want To Be...I Want To Be An Octopus

Yesterday, 17 March 2009, saw Carmen venturing out to La Pietra's garden setup for a few hours of sun-soaking and geetah plucking and reading and general lounging about.  Twas one of those interstellar/self-alignment days.  This post is intended to ensure that CP doesn't forget it, ever.

CHOCO STORY: THE BRUGIAN CHOCOLATE MUSEUM

This big chocolate egg is found in Bruges' big chocolate museum.  Sadly, the museum is not made of chocolate, but it does offer enough bizarre, miscellaneous chocolate-centric stuff to almost make up for it.  Almost.  Upon entry, there is complimentary chocolate, which is one of Carmen's favorite types of chocolate, along with milk, milk chocolate that is, although dipping chocolate products in milk can be very rewarding, especially Oreos, which are doubly satisfying when paired with milk as one can watch the milk slowly worm through the rivets and shapings of the Oreo choco shell.

Cortez brought chocolate back to the Old, grimy world.  Then he went back to South America and extinctified the Aztecs on his continent-spanning blood march!  Choco Story describes his role in Choco History as "Once in the Americas, Cortez bartered for the cocoa beans and knowledge of chocolate production from the Aztecs.  Later, he enacted his veritable genocide [sic]."

Both the monkey and the cocoa bean were fake.  :(

For centuries, each generation of the Belgian Royal Family has its own special chocolate tin designed for commemoration of their useless position and the storage of chocolate.  Notice the joy on the wee one to the far left.  Carmen imagines his name to be Greggy Boy, a precocious but strong-willed youth with a taste for poetry, fine linens, and the viola.  Also take note on how Greggy Boy's felicitous attitude decidedly juxtaposed the look of savage terror on his younger brothers face (HANS).

This is Jack Sparrow and Barbaras made out of chocolate.  The Orlando Bloom made out of chocolate was life-sized and horrifying and there were actual warnings against capturing it on camera for, as the signage warned, "detrimental repercussions to the human psyche" could occur.

My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. (Bruges)

The Belgian City of Bruges boasts both this picturesque, scalable belfry and a vial full of Jesus' blood that can be touched and prayed upon for 1,50 Euro.  At night, the city was mostly deserted, prompting blurry picture-taking and quiet dinnering.  Whereas Italy's beauty stems from its grandiose pulchritude's ability to overcome how everybody's been graffiting and littering on the place for centuries, Bruges was a much more intimate, clean affair, with the entire city center boasting unsullied cobblestones, small restaurants and shops that kindly offered life-shattering waffles and crepes, serene canals, and a lamp museum.

Carmen and TCS's boat trip down the canal was informative as it was fun.  While they didn't get the cool tour guide with the Ipod and Converses, their trilingual guide knew a bunch of stuff and was pretty adept at driving his boat.  One random building on the waterfront in Bruges has windows made of Viennese crystal that reflect light differently than regular windows.  How about that!

366 steps are climbed on one's way to the top of Bruges Belfry Tower.  Carmen got to see the grand-scale piano workings of the tower's bells, and views like the one shown above.  The best thing about Bruges is how modernity truly doesn't show up at all in the city center, or that the Europeanness of the place is really apparent from the onset, and the swans, too, of course.

This is a big ceramic horse dressed as a zebra in the Brussels train station.  Never, ever, go to Brussels.

"THE DEAD ARE STILL DEAD" or "DER."

After two months of movie theater withdrawal, CP's return to the partially sane, pseudo-Western world allowed for moviegoing and these subsequent reviews.

Franklyn:  Good ideas squandered all over the place.  This movie boasted Hollywood's second most underrated 30ish actor, an interesting conceit, and a fantasy world that's part colonialism, part masquerade.  Unfortunately, the script was bad.  Parallels between the fantasy world and the real world weren't effective because the happenings in the real world were sometimes more preposterous than those in Franklyn world.  Screenwriters should swear off the Iraq war along with the rest of humanity, as nothing redeeming will ever come out of that cesspool except waves of delicious oil for THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.  In the right hands Franklyn could have been the Naughties' Dark City, instead its this silly shamey thing.  Ryan Reynolds is underrated. 

Surveillance:  A pleasant surprise!  Since this was directed by David Lynch's daughter, Carmen expected a derivative, demented weirdfest chocked full of vagaries and violence and structureless abstraction, but, bizarrely, he was wrong!  The movie presented a pretty straightforward narrative, with great acting and the little weird flourishes that shock and surprise and make smiles.  The best thing about the movie is that the "twist" ending is incredibly obvious from very early in, and still the director manages to keep the audience interested and to present the events in a very idiosyncratic light.  Yayyyyyy. 

The Reader:  Why was this movie made?  Outside of Kate Winslet stealing Anne Hathaway's Oscar, The Reader presents absolutely nothing audiences haven't seen before, and this is only made exponentially worse by the movie relating itself through the most manipulative of historical vehicles: The Holocaust.  Why are they speaking English?  CP felt not anger towards the film but the kind of dull indifference that he experiences when looking at brown shirts without designs on them or interacting with really, really boring people.  Maybe a better analogy would be to say that watching The Reader is like watching home movies of your own childhood where someone else plays the part of you; it registers as something familiar and maybe evocative but ends up just being remote and lifeless and a mere imitation of something "real".  :(.

A Fake Mugging That Probably Wasn't Fake But Was Certainly Real in Experiential Terms But In Mugging Terms Who Really Knows

      Butt Bridge, Dublin, Ireland, Europe, Earth, Milky Way Galaxy, Universe.  In broad daylight, the two pale, male, handsome tourists snap panoramic views of the easing mass of alluvium that is the Liffey River.  They navigate camera menus.  They are satisfied with the photographic results.  A squat, bull-doggish Irishman turns a corner, heading North, angrily passing through a few idlers, onto the mostly deserted bridge, towards the tourists.  Trash and refuse bob in the Liffey.  The tourists start back across the Butt.  Increasing his speed, sending glances in a bunch of directions, the Irishman nears them, changing his vector abruptly as they go parallel, sort of bumping into the less-extremely-dangerous-looking of the two tourists.  We shall call him (the tourist) Mr. Cool.

     "Money," says the Irishman, lowly, eyes darting.

     The tourists continue undeterred.  Some contact is made with the man.  Everyone stops.

     "Money.  Money," repeats the Irishman, to Mr. Cool, completely ignoring Mr. Cool's co-traveler.  We shall call him Carmen, although he isn't really important in the story.

     Looks are exchanged.  "I don't have any money," says Mr. Cool.

     The Irishman pushes closer, his voice moving to a slurred whisper.  "Empty your fucking pockets.  Your wallet.  Everything.  Come on."

     Keeping his cool, Mr. Cool reaches into his jeans and produces a handful of change.  "I only have coins.  I don't have--

     The Irishman's countenance does a 180.  Suddenly, he is very happy about seemingly everything.  A ravaged smile comes across his face.  "Just kidding, fellas."  With a clap on Mr. Cool's back he prances away from the tourists, heading South on Butt Bridge.  

     After nearly a week's worth of heated, abstract debate, Carmen and TCS decided that the happening was not the product of a twisted Irishman's sense of humor, but a real and true mugging that became a fake mugging but remains still a real mugging, even though they were never mugged, but they were, mugged that is.  Above is a recreation of the scene, based of composites drawn from the witnesses, who were also the victims, that weren't actually victims, but were.  Crime is a complex art form.

In Bruges

But for real.