Say No To Internet Censorship, Dahlings!!

DAHLINGS -

I am certain my delightful worshippers know all about the government's attempt to censor and control what is on the interwebs. So I present you with this:

It is slightly hard to read. (My apologies, but it only reblogs to tumblr.)

The opening lines read:

Today, the world's Largest file sharing site

MEGAUPLOAD

was shut down by the FBI

At the bottom, the web address is http://www.google.com/landing/takeaction

Say no to SOPA and PIPA, dahlings!

Ciao,

Elisa

Welcome To Friday The 13th...

DAHLINGS -

Happy November 13!

And I've had a traditional November 13. First, the maid came in with the news that she had tried to wash a Charles James chiffon gown in the washing machine. She's currently locked in the utility closet.

Then I decided to take Fletcher for a walk in the park myself, since it isn't raining. I concealed my true identity with a peacoat (ugh), sunglasses and one of those conductor hats every woman in New York in wearing. As if wearing flats wasn't bad enough, a young man decided to show me his knife. His explanation was that he was not robbing or threatening me, just that he was proud of it. The young man had stabbed another gentleman the previous evening in a bar fight.

"Don't you think you should put that away?" I asked with as much sang-froid as I could.

"It's okay, I have a card," he responded. As twisted as this sounds, that is EXACTLY what happened. Then he told me that he had a gun in the back waistband of his pants. The young man let me walk away. This is why I have a driver and Leo walks Fletcher.

After I reported the youth to the police, I retreated upstairs for a restorative cup of tea. Oh, who am I fooling, it was a straight shot of bourbon.

Leo came in with my messages. A close relative needs surgery. This day simply keeps getting more delightful, and it's not even lunchtime yet.

I felt this song expressed how I feel at the moment. The first 1.17 minute is a spoken intro, which you can feel free to skip.




I should mention that I am Italian. So this seemed apropos. The original is in the first person, but I couldn't find a proper video for it.

One thinks that this is a cue to spend the rest of the day in bed with Fletcher and a hot toddy. No gentleman callers. God KNOWS what could happen.

Hope your day is far better than mine.

Ciao,
Elisa

A Timely Song To See In The New Year

DAHLINGS -

With the GOP primaries and Occupy movements swirling around us, your faithful correspondent thought that this song is particularly timely.

Written in 1931 at the height of the Great Depression, "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?" was originally a Broadway tune. However, it caught the anguish of the day so well, it became a popular standard. The subject was the men returning from World War One (one of the highest casualty rates in history) to find that there was no work and no place for ex-soldiers.

Other videos of this song include photographs of the riots that mass unemployment caused. You might want to have a look at those as well.

If it does not play here, please go to YouTube.





This is a particularly heart-breaking version, recorded in 1932. It is sung by a very young Bing Crosby, decades before he became the dull, cardigan-wearing "Der Bingle." The photographs depict people caught up in the events, including several famous Dorothea Lange portraits.

Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.

Ciao,
Elisa

A Last Word From 2011..

DAHLINGS:




Thank God 2011 is over! Let's hope 2012 brings everyone (particularly moi) better things.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Ciao,

Elisa (Who intends to be far more fabulous in the coming year)

Merry Christmas From Moi & Terry Gilliam

DAHLINGS -

I'm not exactly in the Christmas spirit. But this did give me a few laughs, and what better to share during the season than laughter?



By Terry Gilliam C. 1968


Enjoy your eggnog!

Ciao,
Elisa

Not A Very Merry Christmas

DAHLINGS -

This is the first Christmas I have spent without my beloved Bucky. Every year I would post a greeting from the two of us. This evening my eye fell upon it in a file and I wept. I am weeping now. The loss of this dog has been more of a blow that your faithful correspondent could have comprehended. Much of the first half of 2011 was spent mired in grief. (If you think this prose is a tad purple, tough.)

After the death of a loved one, there is the dreaded firsts: first birthday, first anniversary, first Thanksgiving, and now, the first Christmas.

Fletcher is sweet, albeit as neurotic as as a boxcar of Baldwins. But of course it's not the same. It can't be the same. I love him, but you cannot compare months to years.

Next month will be the anniversary of Bucky's death. If you don't hear much from me, that's why. Reviews of "House" might be the only things I write in this blog-thing.

Then again, I could post one sentence or picture a day, and pretend this is Tumblr.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, and whatever it is Buddhists do at this time of the year.

Elisa

Pascal Dangin Wants You To Hate Yourself

DAHLINGS -

It is no secret that yours truly has inveighed against the saturation of mediated images in film, television, magazines. In other words, everywhere. I first became fascinated (then much later outraged) by the widespread use of computers on images of--well, everything--after watching a computer animator assemble a bucolic background with mountains, trees, grass, and an old-fashioned train and tracks running through it. He moved the elements around, making sure the finished product was a faultless representation of a small town train station in the mountains.

That is old news. We know that every form of visual media use green screens, blue screens, CGI, etc. As your faithful correspondent has also spoken to a CGI expert whose job it was to fill out Sarah Jessica Parker's bony hands frame by frame in Sex and the City 2. Consumers are used to it, so what is the problem? But do they really know what it is that they have become used to?

Now your own camera can "fix" your pictures so your personal visual reality is more satisfying. Even if it does not match what you see in the mirror.

The cosmetic surgery industry is booming. More than at any time, people, men and women, hate their faces and bodies.

An article that addressed that several years ago was "Pixel Perfect" by Lauren Collins in the New Yorker. A profile of Pascal Dangin, a master retoucher who changes the world that you perceive far more than you are aware.



Pascal Dangin, founder of The Box. One assumes he has been suitably retouched.

Pascal Dangin is the premier retoucher of fashion photographs. Art
directors and admen call him when they want someone who looks less than great to
look great, someone who looks great to look amazing, or someone who looks
amazing already to look, as is the mode, superhuman.

...retouchers tend to practice semi-clandestinely. “It is known that everybody does it, but they protest,” Dangin said recently. I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive."

[During a session]...he proceeded to a shot of the actress reclining on a divan in a
diaphanous couture gown. “She looks too small, because she’s teeny,” he said. On
a drop-down menu, he selected a warping tool, a device that augments the volume
of clusters of pixels. The dress puffed up, pleasingly, as if it had been
fluffed by some helpful lady-in-waiting inside the screen.
Next, Dangin moved the mouse so that the pointer hovered near the actress’s neck. “I softened the collarbones, but then she started to get too retouched, so I put back some stuff,” he explained. He pressed a button and her neck got a little bonier. He
clicked more drop-down menus—master opacity stamp, clone stamp. ... He zoomed in so that her eyeball was the size of a fifty-cent piece. “I love all of this
little wrinkle”—laugh lines, staying put—“and the texture of skin. As you
retouch skin, you can very quickly shift the tonal value. If you put a highlight
where shadow used to be, you’re morphing the way the orbital socket is
structured. It leads to a very generic look.” Ultimately, he had minimized the
actress’s temples, which bulged a little, tightened the skin around her chin,
and excised a fleshy bump from her forehead. She had an endearingly crooked
bottom row of teeth, which Dangin knew better than to fix.

In another shot, the actress stood in the middle of a busy city street, in
front of a limestone building. Dangin blew up the segment of the screen that
showed her feet, which were traversed with ropy blue veins. Click. Gone.

“There’s a little slumpiness, and the knees look really big,” he said,
stroking a touch pad with a gray plastic stylus to contour the actress’s legs.

Source: Pixel Perfect

I urge my beloved readers to read article in its entirety. There is far more than can be conveyed in one entry. Next time you find yourself in despair because you don’t look like Anne Hathaway, bear in mind that Anne Hathaway doesn’t look like that either.

Ciao,

Elisa

Review: House Enjoys "The Perils of Paranoia" 8.06. And "Pencils."

DAHLINGS -

I didn’t review last week’s Parents because I had so little to say. Team: Teenage girl has MPD and cancer. House: dead child was deaf. It was supposed to have a “shocking twist.” If it was the child’s elaborate sarcophagus being opened, one must assume the promo monkeys never saw a few episodes of NCIS. Or one episode of Supernatural, where the gore-covered bodies pile up like cordwood. As usual, the episode botched the presentation of mental illness. The creators must dislike the mentally ill almost as much as they dislike women. House got punched a few times. Everybody had a glass of sangria and sobbed despairingly on the lawn.

Moving on to The Perils of Paranoia, the cutesy title warning of the stinking mound of ordure that was about to happen. My agonized screams could be heard for miles. My assistant Leo came in with a peach mango martini pour moi and stared at the flat screen in disbelief. “Why are you watching this crap?”

“I don’t know…” I gasped. “It used to be Hugh Laurie but he’s had all of this plastic surgery and he’s phoning in his performance. And Robert Sean Leonard but he’s not even trying to hide his contempt for the material. And Lisa Edelstein, but she’s gone. BUT I CAN’T STOP! GOD HELP ME, I CAN’T STOP!”

Leo shook his head with a sigh and took a seat.

You know when you see a comedy and all of the decent jokes are in the trailer? That was this week’s “prank war” between House and Wilson. I was so looking forward to it! Wilson believes House has a gun in his apartment. When he goes to ransack the place, an improbable hunting net traps him in the air, which is a funny image. What followed was ludicrous slapstick. Wilson finds a gun in a box marked “House,” in case House forgets who he is when he opens the box. In a scene that lasts approximately ten years and is written in crayon, House waves it around, points it at himself and Wilson, demonstrating with a pencil that the barrel is blocked. “You win,” Wilson sighs.

“Naturally Wilson doesn’t call the police because the crazy felon who runs Diagnostics has a gun,” I remarked to Leo.

"That’s ‘cause they’re married.”

The POTW is a prosecutor, who collapses with a heart attack in the cold open, but of course it’s not a heart attack or we’d have no show. We barely have one as it is. Turns out the uncharismatic patient has a secret bunker behind a bookcase on his wall (OH, COME ON!) loaded with a small infantry’s worth of automatic weapons and C-4 explosives. His wife does not take the news well.

"Sorry, honey,” he tries to explain. “I totally forgot to tell you that I built an underground bunker."

"Why?"

"Well, I had a free weekend..."

He only eats food he cooks himself—I’m assuming he grows his own meat and vegetables at his secret farm under the back porch—and drinks bottled water. The world is going to hell in a hand basket and this guy wants to go vigilante on the bad guys’ collective asses. Come to think of it, Hitler had a lovely secret bunker, with curtains. But I digress.


House thinks the paranoia is a symptom (that means that most of the GOP presidential candidates have diphtheria, too. Sorry to spoil this so soon). The patient didn’t have vaccinations. Do you think that storyline had anything to do with Fox News having a segment on parents refusing vaccines? Do it, Moms, or your kid will throw chairs through the window while hallucinating they’re being attacked by bears. Bears? Seriously? Vigilante Patient has an underground bunker and he’s afraid of bears? Does anyone even clock into the writer’s room?
"Oh, shit, bears!"



Speaking of ham-handed product placement, Adams, the pretty one, while driving with Park, the one whose voice annoys me so I want to reach down her throat and pull out her vocal chords, mentions her Ford cruise control. And a minute later we sail into a Ford commercial! My dear readers, I hoped the creators had a shred of integrity intact, but the Ford ran over the last shred. At least Adams didn’t crash the car into the patient’s house.

Long story short: the patient is paranoid. And he has diphtheria.

Park is paranoid that the rest of the team doesn’t like her. Unfortunately, she’s right. She goes to House for consolation. She is an idiot.

Wilson is paranoid that House has a gun. Wilson should be.

I’m going to make a stretch here to say that Taub is paranoid that Foreman has no personal life. Never mind the details. Foreman hooks up with a horrifically buff former America’s Top Model contestant who’s married. One saving grace of this episode was that Taub was relegated to snarking on the sidelines.

When Vigilante Patient is on the mend, he promises his wife they’ll move to a new house without a secret bunker. “Oh, honey, can it be English Tudor?” she asks, caressing his cheek. “Now that I know you’re an insane time-bomb who still might go off any minute, I love you even more.” Cue heartwarming music. VP plans to donate the arsenal to the Peace Corps. As long as the new house has no bears.

I mentioned the show’s overall dislike of women at the beginning. That was code for “rampant misogyny.” As a friend tweeted, “This is a sausage fest.” They are trying to fill the void left by Cuddy’s departure (her name has been uttered once or twice). Cuddy was a confident, mature, sexual woman with an impressive job. Now we get, what, an anonymous pretty cipher and a teenage geek? And a passel of middle-aged men? Eeeew.

One feels a certain fondness for middle-aged writers and directors, getting back at all of the girls who wouldn’t date them in eleventh grade.

Meanwhile, during clinic duty, House barks out the names of female clinic patients until he gets to the standard-issue Hollywood Hot Babe, and takes her into the clinic room. Har de har har. Let’s laugh at the less attractive women in the waiting room. Is it me, or is House’s awful make-my-ears-look-big dyed haircut making him look more Creepy Grandpa each episode?

"It’s not you,” Leo assures me. “He is Creepy Grandpa.”

The crowning touch is a scene where Chase and Adams, the pretty people, are on the verge of hooking up when Park gets on the elevator. Standing on either side of her, they look like her parents. She gets up her courage asks Chase for a drink, causing him to squirm with a “kill me now” expression on his face, before he agrees. Ha ha ha! Less attractive women are so funny! Especially when they come on to cute guys who’d rather suck on a tailpipe than get naked with them. But, who knows, maybe Chase and Park will get it on. I'd rather that that Chase and Adams.

Side note: what is with the gruesomely thin women on this show? America’s Top Model weighs about 70 pounds but still looks like she could out-bench-press Foreman. When she walks toward Foreman in the gym, he looks like a sofa compared to her. At least women who don’t eat make cheap dates.

At the close, House puts the box with the gun on the upper shelf on his closet, and then takes out his father’s ceremonial Marine sword, caressing it gently before returning it to its hiding place. This was the “mid-season finale” (when did television start using that term?). I guess come January we’ll be watching House explore his daddy issues. Because, honestly, what’s left?

Watching this mess lurch to its conclusion, Leo and I touched glasses. “We lived through it,” he said.

“But at what cost?” I retorted, paranoid that my IQ level had dropped twenty points.

In January House MD will be back to slog toward the finale.
Feel free to express yourself in the comments. But bear in mind that I am always right.

Ciao,
Elisa

EDITED TO ADD: Hugh Laurie has announced he is leaving acting after the final season of House. That's too bad, but understandable. A weekly series is an unbearable grind.

If you are going to post Anonymous comments, let it be known that you have to sign them somehow if you want to be published.