"And I'm living inside of a little glass room/Living inside of the tube. . . "

[xiphias]

So, weekend was rather full. Lis and I have now been married for four years. We went out for dinner for it, to Duck Walk in Wakefield, a Thai restaurant that specializes in duck dishes.

Everything was okay, but nothing was spectacular, except the desert we got, the Ice Cream Inferno, which is ice cream in a fried shell, doused with 151 rum and lit. Took a good minute and a half to burn down to the point where we could blow it out. . . very good stuff.

I'd gotten a bunch of videos out from the library to maybe watch, including My Life as a Dog, a movie which I deeply, deeply loved when I was 13 or so. I really don't know why I loved it so much, and I have no idea if I'll still like it when I do watch it, now that I'm an adult.

Anyway, after dinner, we went across the street to a skeevey video store where we discovered a whole lot of really good videos that we'd been looking for elsewhere. There were like no mediocre videos in the entire place. Everything was either really, really good, or incredibly bad and cheesey. Nothing in the middle. And I like incredibly bad and cheesey movies.

Anyway, Lis looked for a copy of a thing called Elephant Parts. The video store had had a copy at one point, but it had vanished at some point along the way.

So, that was Friday night. Saturday, it was a rerun of Static Shock, so we lazed around in the morning, then went out towards the evening because it was A Nice Day, and because a friend of ours was in a bellydance recital that night in Brookline. So we wandered around Coolidge Corner, for a bit, then saw a bellydance recital.

Sunday was Father's Day, so we called out fathers, and I helped out Lis's father check for busted links on his website, www.i-kandi.com

It was Another Nice Day, so we wandered to Harvard Square. Went to Tower Records to get a copy of When Love Speaks. Which we did. While we were there, Lis found a DVD of Elephant Parts!

Lis agonized slightly over buying these, until I pointed out that she'd wanted the CD for a long time now, and she'd wanted Elephant Parts for even longer. I explained that we would count the CD as a present from me to her for her birthday, even though I didn't have my credit card and she'd have to actually buy it. . . and she could count Elephant Parts as a present from her to me, because she really wanted me to see this.

We did that. Or, rather, she did that. So I've now bought Lis a present for her birthday, even though she did. Woohoo! Way to get me off the present-buying hook, Lis!!

Anyway, now that we had a DVD we wanted to watch, we had to hook up our DVD player. See, Lis's parents, after upgrading to a better DVD player and discovering that we didn't have one, sent us their old one, which works absolutely fine and is in perfect shape -- they'd just gotten a fancier model free when they bought a better TV. But we'd never bothered to figure out how to actually hook it up.

Lis had a brainstorm about where we could physically put the thing without displacing our VCR, which helped, and then I needed to hook the cords together.

It worked.

We managed to get the DVD hooked up to the VCR which is hooked up to the TV, and everything works. You have no idea how amazingly odd this is to me. . .

And we watched Elephant Parts.

I really enjoyed it.

I find myself wondering how various of all of you guys would react to it. Like, there are a bunch of people on my friends' list who are under 20, and I wonder if Elephant Parts would be accessible to y'all.

See, Michael Nesmith is, in no particular order, a Monkee, the guy who invented MTV, a philanthropist, the executive producer of Repo Man, the son of Bettie Nesmith Graham, who invented Liquid Paper . . .

He is, in other words, a truly bizarre, whacko, artistic, creative genius. Funny as hell, too.

But "Elephant Parts" is clearly a product of the Seventies/early Eighties (early enough in the Eighties that they're really still part of the Seventies, if you see what I mean). And I just don't know if some of the things that they do translate. I mean, clearly Nez's rant at the beginning about gas prices doesn't translate, but then, it wasn't really supposed to, so it's not really a loss. But it's a very different culture in general.

I mean, folks who are 20 today probably don't remember a time when drugs were seen as ubiquitous, basically harmless, and really fundamentally not a big deal, not something to get stressed out about. So I don't know if "Elvis Drugs -- The Fun Way For Adults To Get The Drugs They Need" would work. . .

Comments

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

I've seen "Elephant Parts". It was on network TV here about 15 years go. I really, really liked it, but must admit I don't remember many of the details.

[cheshyre]

Actually, the bit which struck me as most dated was the routine mocking the Detroit car companies.
Do consumers today really see that much difference between buying foriegn vs. buying American anymore?

Plate O' Shrimp

[bikergeek.livejournal.com]

In the movie Repo Man, in the scene where Otto is first in the repo yard office, the TV is playing a scene from "Elephant Parts". (Michael Nesmith was the executive producer of Repo Man.)

[nolly.livejournal.com]

Michael Nesmith also looks a lot like my father, especially when comparing Monkees-era pictures. I have not yet seen Elephant Parts but it's in my Netflix queue.

[jadasc.livejournal.com]

Not so much -- especially since the lines are so blurred now that various foreign companies have bought out formerly "American" brands and keep them afloat.

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

Hey, d'you like TMNT? When Static Shock is in a rerun (and before that, the previous weekend's new show at 9am) they show the new TMNT - which maps *very* closely to the original comic book. I've been impressed, truthfully.

I'm glad you had a fun weekend. I've been needing to get out and do stuff a bit more than I have, and the above is a reminder of that.

We misseded ya Sunday, BTW.

[cheshyre]

FWIW, Peter David is writing the comic adaptation of the new cartoon.