Little Reviews: Poem for Wednesday and Renfaire Fun

Pimp My Ride
By Jennifer L. Knox

The '86 Chevy Suburban laced by rust,
pocked with bird poop, antenna wiggling
in its Bondo-clogged hole is only one way
the story begins. In another, we never
bought the blue behemoth—we bought
a '63 Oldsmobile from a lady named Dolores.
In another, Dolores drove into a tree before we
were ever even born; in another, we owned a house
with a garage that kept the rain off, the rust out,
and the paint nice; in another, it was all mine,
we'd never met; in another, yours and someone else's.
Likewise after the ride is pimped—metallic flames
in red and pink unzipping across its sparkly black
body, blitz of chrome, titanium woofers, enough
silver satin inside to line nine caskets—this
is only one story: another's bright white
and blinds like an elephant made of sunspots;
another's plantain-green and full of gold;
another's purple with a sink in the back,
where we're arguing; in the back of another, high
and high-fiving; in another, going at it
like two teens made of monster truck tires.

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Another from this week's New Yorker.

Tuesday was mostly a chores-and-laundry day around here. I watched Vicky Cristina Barcelona while folding, which was a monumental disappointment -- the acting is okay except for the guy playing Vicki's fiance, who was all too obviously the character Woody Allen would have played had Woody Allen been young enough, but the script is a pretentious mess, in love with the idea of the young, rich, and bored sitting around talking about art and music, and it's really sexist even for Woody Allen -- poor Javier Bardem, unable to have true love in his life despite getting to have sex with Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, and Penelope Cruz, who totally brings the movie to life when she first arrives but then degenerates into a typical Woody Allen crazy desperate clinging female a la Johansson in Match Point or Anjelica Huston in Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Even the love scene between Cruz and Johansson and the three-way with Bardem are really bleh, something I simply would not have believed possible had I not seen it, considering these are three of the hottest people on the planet -- a nice tame male fantasy of two girls at once with both of them adoring him. Through the whole film, as both Vicky and Cristina realize that what they thought they wanted isn't really what they want, I thought the film was heading toward the two women realizing they really have feelings for each other, but of course that would cut out men from the possibility of banging these two really hot women, consecutively or concurrently, so instead we get a stupid ending in which Vicki settles for what she no longer wants with her now-husband and Cristina goes back to drifting. We never get any sort of answer about whether Juan Antonio really stole Maria Elena's style or whether Vicki's photography comes to anything.

Paul was still in a barbecue mood after the weekend, so we had grilled veggie burgers for dinner, then made s'mores again with somewhat more success over coals than the gas grill. I don't have a lot to say about this week's Glee, which bored me instead of offending me this week, except for -- spoilers -- the glorious Sue Sylvester and her explanation of the Chicago Fire: "It was just a harmless prank back in Chicago with Mrs. O'Leary's cow. He ended up igniting that cow's flatulence, and an entire city burned. That young terrorist went on to become the first gay president of the United States...Abraham Lincoln." ROFL! I liked Mercedes and Quinn becoming more friendly, even if it was contrived, and I found the Rachel/Jesse and Terry/Finn storylines utterly preposterous.

Here are some more photos of the Virginia Renaissance Faire from last weekend: