And We Shall March

I CANNOT BELIEVE The Entire World Cup Rolled Without Me Knowing About Gandalf & The Fellowship Of The Vuvuzela!!!

Via Oakley, undead Slave Leia goddess of LA Zombies:

Hollywood Fringe Festival Follow-Up: Laura Brody's Fantastic Event (Now With More Thor)!

Why yes, I'm still mainly talking about other people instead of Moiself. Habit! I'll get around to Me soon.

When I saw Laura Brody's event pop up on the Fringe list of offerings, moi head went THAT IS SO AWESOME and immediately put her on the 5 Questions list. Via the fabulous internal communication system on the Fringe site, got in touch with her. I loved her answers.

Alas, I also knew I wouldn't be able to go to her live draping due to schedule, but I wanted to actively support in some way. I don't sew at the level she does, but I do quilt and sew, and as we all know people who sew have got tons of cloth sitting around waiting for you to do something with it.

We talked some more, I kind of GeekRaved at her once I independently discovered she did the costumes for the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society film The Call of Cthulhu, she gave me an idea of her raw materials needs for her Fringe event, we compared schedules.

So! During halftime of the USA v. England game,*** I flew over to Tribal Cafe with a giant garbage bag of linen, mudcloth, cotton, a bit of Vintage Mom Cloth, some zippers, some trim. We got to talk a little bit more and I was so super impressed with her even more. Charismatic, direct, funny, a lot of big picture stuff going on in that head. If I didn't have to get back to the party for the rest of the game I would have stayed there and listened to her more.

Brody's show also won the Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts award at the Fringe! She wasn't at the awards ceremony due to injury, but when her name was announced I cheered so loudly that the emcee hilariously mocked my outburst as the loudest thing he'd ever heard from someone who didn't actually win an award themselves. Hee! I was just very happy for her.

This is Laura, posing for my CrackBerry outside the Tribal Cafe!

     

That jacket she's wearing? She made it of course, all reclaimed from various things. One of those things? Leftover cloth from a major character costume in the upcoming Thor movie!

THOR MOVIE CLOTH CLOSE-UP!!!***

   

Apparently those Hollywood People tend to just toss leftover cloth used for costumes, and she has the hook-up for where to snag their discards, which she then puts to fantabulously good use. Wow. Also I am SO jealous. I want the hook-up!

You can see some pictures from Brody's Presque Pret a Porter event at the Fringe here at one of her homeports. I've seen several pics from the event, not all of them are in a linkable space online. It looks like not only did she have a great turnout, but they all had a fun time. Rock! I do so wish I could have been there.

Brody also holds forth at her Etsy shop, Dreams By Machine, and she blogs here. Keep up with her blog for announcements about her upcoming appearances. She's got some things on deck that sound really cool.

Meeting Brody is yet one more thing I am thankful for about the Hollywood Fringe Festival. I never would have met someone like her if not for the all-access landscape provided by the H'wood Fringe organizers.

***  I wasn't actually rooting *for* anyone in that match due to the Always Root Against The Colonial Powers (founding or modern) thing, but man do I feel sorry for that poor goalie from England. I hope they have our equivalent of the witness protection program over there. 

*** For the record: The only reason I care about the Thor movie, having never actually in life read a Thor comic book because who gives a fuck, is because Branagh is directing it and I like his movies, and because he dropped the gorgeously talented Stringer Bell into the role of Heimdall, freaking out a significant portion of fans who, strangely, don't seem to have a problem at all with what happened in yet another whitewashed casting re: Airbender. How curious. If by "curious" you mean "typical".

The Unrelenting Insensitivity Of My SO CALLED FRIENDS Continues

It's official. I'm getting new friends.

I Thought They Were My Friends, But Apparently The Are Actually EVIL BASTARDS

Dunno where this came from, but they all sent it to me.

Sigh.

Life Is MISERY And Filled With PAIN

Nowhere in my bracket was the possibility of Brasil LOSES To The DUTCH Of All People! I have been ROBBED of my Brasil v. Argentina epic final battle! I have been BETRAYED. And worst of all, I HAVE BEEN HUMILIATED.

Over at the other outlet where I run my mouth waaay too much, once I realized I knew somebody from the Netherlands who also cares about World Cup I was all yay let's bet! Writer/artist Corinne Duyvis agreed to the terms. 

When Brasil won, she would have to wear a hideous giant green or yellow bow in her hair all day and post pictures to prove it. If due to some unnatural rift in the time/space continuum an alternate universe emerged and the Netherlands won, I would have to do the same, but with an orange bow.

I do NOT want to TALK about it !!!

That's my friend The Entrepreneur, enjoying a little bit of payback for my not being gracious in victory after Mexico was pummeled into the earth by Argentina. It's not the best picture of the lot, but it's my fave.

And she's being all BRAGGY about it!!!

I have four different Brasil shirts. One for quarters, for semis for finals and for day after victory. Now what am I gonna wear for the rest of the run? CURSE YOU DUTCH FOR RUINING MY BRACKET AND MY GAME WARDROBE!!!

Zombie Sightings And Airbender And Worldcup And Hollywood Fringe And Frieda Paras-Jones And General Getting Back To Life Sort Of Rambling

Now that we're on the other side of the terrifying/thrilling/exhausting/absolutely fucking amazing first-ever Hollywood Fringe Festival, we're slowly getting back to normal operations around here. I'm starting with the vast pile of I Cannot Deal With Any Email Unrelated To Fringe Until This Is Over, quickly followed by catching up on the RSS reader thingy and news outlets unrelated to World Cup.

I'll have more to say about Fringe next week, mostly about other people, probably. Konstantine! Laura! David! Shelby! Jacquetta! Khalil! ComedySportz! ABBIE SANGRIA!

At this moment dunno how I can talk about Moi experience without getting all gushy, and truthfully I'm still processing it all. These post-Fringe days have been emotionally similar to post-CCI days, which was very much a surprise, considering. So I'll talk about other people first, and by the time I get to Moi perhaps I can be more Informational Objective about that entry and not all happythrilledgratefulteary. But Goonan's going to get the overly-long gushy version. So far, Goonan doesn't seem to mind when I drop a 3K email on her. God how I love that woman.

Small HFF Preview: You know those slashy G.I. Joe conversations you have? Like you do? Let me tell you, there's NOTHING to prepare you for standing onstage about to talk slashy G.I. Joe stuff, only to look down and see sitting in the front row the man who voiced the G.I. Joe you're talking slashy about. O.M.G.

Onward.

Throughout all this, Frieda Paras-Jones died. Not fair. At all. The first of her three memorials was Wednesday night, and it was beautiful. Yes, this is a woman whose impact was so broad that three memorial services will barely contain it all. To my regret (and my cowardly fault) I never became a friend of hers because I was too scared to put myself before her to accept or reject me as a potential friend. But I admired her fiercely and learned from her in a gut-punch way. I kinda need to share that gut-punch story - when she told me I disappointed her and she was absolutely right - so will do so within the next couple of weeks. Right now my heart is with Guy & Carlos & Roxanne and all those at Southern, Northern and Bristol who knew her Truly. I knew her as an icon. They knew her as a person. My god that they have to go through this loss.

Meanwhile.

This amazing roundup of zombie-related items was in my reader thingy. Go forth to the homeport of PZ Meyrs and click on all of the links! ZOMBIES.

I'm very glad to read reports that Hollywood's whitewashed Airbender is actually a piece of shit. Good. I'm even happier that none of my close friends have so far wavered from their decision to abstain. For four of them this is really super hard to do, but they grocked to the Big Picture principle and rolled out. I'm glad that they're not missing a good movie, at least.

M. Night? I've seen all your movies, save this newest one. I am one of the very few people who saw Praying With Anger in an actual movie theater 18 years ago; that movie made me file away your name in my head for future tracking. I loved Unbreakable and The Sixth Sense, thought Signs was a hoot, felt I've sat through films far worse than The Village & The Lady In Water, both of which at least entertained a bit.

But Airbender? Fuck you onto seven generations for your complicity in this abominable whitewash, your pathetic attempts to O Lawd What We Gon Do Now jig dance around it in media interviews I will not link to, and your general cowardice. Fuck you and your entire production team and studio. It's 2010. STOP WHITEWASHING. JUST STOP.

You'll make some money on Airbender because most white people do not care about the big picture and will go see it anyway. So it goes. So it has always gone. But you need to make more than "some money" on this I think. You need to make lots. If you have taken excellent pan-Asian source material, put it through the whitewash wringer and turned it into LCD crap of middling interest to the broader non-fan audience? You'll be lucky to earn out your multimillion base expenses. Which of course means you've lost (until the dvds roll out, anyway). Good. And fuck you.

And so.

World Cup World Cup World Cup! The only sport I care about! Gorgeous men from all over Earth playing The Beautiful Game. We're in the kill-round stage now. I have two brackets - the fun one and the real one. In the real one, so far I have only been wrong about one game. This entry auto-posts one hour before My Boys From Brasil take on the Netherlands at WTF Time in the obscenely early morning. I'll be on the couch wearing one of my (four) Brasil shirts, with a giant mug of coffee and even more faith that Brasil will move from the quarterfinals to the semis.

So! From this site I give you my Brasil team member name!

AND EVERYBODY WILL BE SINGING IT

IN YOUR FACE, FRANCE!!!

MEXICO - 2

FRANCE - NOTHING! NADA! ZILCH!

FRANCE! YOUR FACE? RIGHT THERE? IN IT!!!!!!

1,001 Versions of Wavin' Flag by K'naan - WARNING: POST FILLED WITH YOUTUBE EMBEDS. Smaller Ones, But Still.

We'll get back to Fringe right after this!

Short version, soccer is the only sport I pay attention to, and it sucks that Fringe drops during first half of the World Cup. I am also notorious for knowing very little about music (though it's very nice and all). This post got Big Assists with big-picture ids from four friends who know about music, but could care less about World Cup.

This year Coca-Cola picked a song by K'naan, a Somali/Canadian musician, to provide soundtrack for its ad campaign during the games. The original was released back in the spring; I learned of it in April sometime. This version below featuring K'naan will.i.am and Guetta, is my fave. It has different lyrics than "happier" version used for the ad campaign. Image clips from this version show up in several of the other versions that veer from template:

I also very much like this version in a concert setting, which is just K'naan performing while the crowd has a great time:

Coke/FIFA took the happier version and did a whole bunch of bilingual runs with it, dropping in various stars from each region. Some of them kept pretty much to a template, like this one in Spanish, featuring David Bisbal:

I saw this one on Univision. I don't know if Mexico got a version and then Central or South America and Spain got their own, or if they just did the "Spanish! That'll cover 'em all!" approach. ) The one in Arabic featuring Nancy Ajram basically follows the template, with a bit more overt product placement. The Indonesian one featuring Ipang also pretty much sticks to template..I think. The link is to the only version of that one I could find and it's clear that whoever uploaded it added stuff to it.

But there's a whole bunch of them that replace the bulk of the template with more of a local culture, tweaking the beat and song flow a bit

France, featuring Fefe (French hip hop/rap):

China featuring Jacky Cheung and Jane Zhang:

I really like this one from Greece, which features Komis X and Professor Sinnerz and kicks the base waaay up (I had no idea Greek hip hop/rap existed):

Thailand, featuring Tattoo Color, is the cleverest of all the ones so far found, and also the funniest. Love the part where the band delivers the little boy to the stadium:

There are more, but that's all I've been able to track down so far. I can't believe Brasil didn't get it's own video, so it's probably just a matter of I still can't find it.

Nifty stuff! Great song.

Okay, back to auto-posted Fringe stuff.