It’s Lost in Translation meets The Love Boat

My new movie idea for 2004: Call it Lost at Sea, a poignant exploration of the strangely intense bond that forms with people trapped on a cruise ship for 7 days and 6 nights.
An Orange County surfer dragged along for his grandparent’s 50th anniversary meets a 50-ish divorcee from the Valley with a fondness for slushy drinks. There’d be way too much karaoke, insulated excursions at each port of call to inject some local color, and plenty of poolside scenes (cue the Baywatch bikini montage). The supporting cast could include a sympathetic bartender, a hapless purser, a coked up cruise director, and a comically lecherous ship’s doctor.
When the boat returns to LA, the sunburned lovers exchange AIM usernames. but the audience knows it’s over. Not because the divorcee’s custody agreement limits her AIM time to alternate weekends, but because it’s just too damn far to maintain a relationship between Orange County and the Valley.

Cruise Index: published from the Cabo@Mail Internet Cafe

Day 1 Cruise Index:
Length of ship, in feet: 915
Decks accessible to passengers: 9
Number of passengers, est.: 2,500
Number of teenagers: 250
Number of children: 250
Average poolside temperature at sea on, in degrees farenheit: 67
Number of books carried around: 2,000
Random airport titles: 500
Copies of the new translation of Don Quixote: 1
Copies of David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Funny Thing I’ll Never Do Again: 0
Copies of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: 0
Copies of Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon: 2 [!!]
Copies of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code: 1,496
Copies of The Da Vinci Code reported stolen from an unattended deck chair: 1
Price of a Diet Coke, either in a can or a glass: $1.50
Glasses of Diet Coke in a can: 2
Price of a cruise-long Coke Pass, which allows consumption of unlimited fountain drinks, including 15% gratuity: $37.95
Glasses of Diet Coke I must consume daily to make my Coke Pass cost-effective: 8.42
Estimated percentage of cruise spent walking back and forth to the bar and/or bathroom: 20
Daily wage of a cruise ship pool attendant: $18
Equivalent daily wage in Diet Cokes: 12
Equivalent daily wage in Yummy Yummy Mango Tango’s, a rum concoction designated as the Drink of The Day: 3
Fee paid to employment agent to secure job: $1,000
Months of work required to pay back agent’s fee: 2
Length of contract, in months: 6
Days off during contract: 0
Ranking among pool attendants of Christmas Day for the loneliest days of the year: 1
Year The Nation magazine began sponsoring cruises for its readers: 1998

Make a film in 24-hours two months ago

Just ask Dharma. According to the Formula, you can have only one creatively named character per sitcom. Fortunately, Wired Magazine articles have no such limit. And so, in this month’s wacky episode edition, Choire and Xeni team up to report on NYC Midnight, a DV Dojo -sponsored contest to write, shoot, and edit a film in New York, all in 24 hours.
What’s that, the contest was in October? And it started in May with a rewritten press release on Daily Candy? So Choire and Xeni had to sit on this great story for months, at least until the damn check cleared? That’s magazine publishing for you. I’d call it tired, but it’s the end of the year; everything’s tired.

Separated at Birth?

It used to be spelled with a Q, image: guardian.co.uk Rosa Parks, image: Life mag, via somewhere on AOL
Reunited at the millinery, now seated side by side
on the War-For-Peace bus (in the front, of course)

Funny, now I’m more at risk of getting sued than of getting killed in a German bar.

On Cycling

Over at Modern Art Notes, Tyler Green has solicited Art Top Ten lists from some folks, partly as a rebuttal to the too-hip-for-him lists in Artforum. [He reserves his best Ike Turner for Thelma Golden, who I like very much.] Anyway, my list is up now. Most of it is culled from the site, so fanatic greg.org readers [Mom, I’m talking to you] will probably not be shocked by any of it.
But I did surprise myself with one choice: I felt obliged to put the Guggenheim’s Friday marathon screenings of The Cremaster Cycle on my list. [I mean, I survived it, didn’t I?] But then I actually got choked up reading David Edelstein’s account of Trilogy Tuesday, the marathon screening of Lord of The Rings.
Granted, not everyone is going to thrill to the point of life-defining religious fervor when they see Return of The King (I’m not really much of a fan myself), but by any standard, LOTR must be considered a far more important, influential, and authentic achievement than Cremaster. And that’s before and after adjusting for budgets.