Portland Free Time Update

A few business matters to attend to, before getting into something that I'm more excited about blogging (how sad is that?)

First off: TCM, one of my favorite television channels, has released a list of the fifteen most influential classic movies. Usually, with movie lists, I always find something amiss (especially with things like the AFI list, which just seems like studio/Oscar pandering), but I pretty much agree with all of these, and having seen most of the films, highly recommend them, it's a great way to look at film history. For example, once my film prof showed us the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin next to a similar scene in The Untouchables, or you could look at the design of something like Metropolis and then watch Blade Runner, it's descendant in more ways than one. Check it out, do some research.

Now that I've got my movie recommendations out of the ways, here's a music one: Run On Sentence, a band that I was lucky enough to see preform briefly for Live Wire, a radio show that they tape live in Portland. The rest of the show was mostly passable, but Dustin Hamman and co. really impressed me. Of course, the trend of men with beards writing folk songs and playing acoustic guitars is on the rise today (see Iron and Wine, Fleet Foxes, or the other musical guest on Live Wire, Horsefeathers), but Run On Sentence is different, incorporating blues and latin rhythms into the music, and a more self-conscious, unpretentious feeling to the lyrics. Also, it's a band name that doesn't incorporate animals, metal, wood, or anything else that can be blindly pulled out of a page of Leaves of Grass.

And speaking of radio, here's an interview with Terry Gross that Drew Barrymore did in promotion of the HBO adaptation of the wonderfully disturbing documentary Grey Gardens. It was entertaining, and as a girl who isn't afraid of modern romanticism, I gotta say that I pretty much love Drew Barrymore in anything, and for the first time I am very sad that we don't have HBO at my house. Also, Jessica Lange plays big Edie Beale, so that makes it doubly great.