Let's Help The Africa
Mood:  suave
Nice, PFaz. I agree totally.

Today's title comes from a Japlish T-shirt owned by my sister-in-law. I'm a huge fan of Japlish. Japlish is the art of sticking random English words together and putting them onto T shirts and tote bags, like "Big Wednesday" or "Parachuting -- It Seem Casual!" (more examples are at engrish.com) Plus, of course, there are the classic Bad Captions For FOTR, Bad Captions For TTT, and Bad Captions for ROTK

But, I digress.

After vowing from here to Sunday I would never do so, lately I've been dipping into the strange and wonderful world of Faramir fan fiction. There's an entire underground cottage industry of fans who write stories based on Tolkien characters. The tales run the gamut from excellent to downright frightening (two words: "hobbit nipples"). I've learned not to click deeply into a story archive while eating.

Along the way, I discovered the peculiar sub-genre known as "slash", wherein characters of the same sex are paired up romantically (if they aren't already paired up within the story). Frodo/Sam and Aragorn/Legolas seem to be the most popular couples, but sometimes the pairings are completely random, as if the author spun a roulette wheel beforehand. Haldir/Gandalf. Pippin/Grima. Faramir/Sauron. Merry/Nazgul #3. Characters who never spoke to each other in the book, who never even came within 500 miles of each other, are all of a sudden expressing their undying love and humping like rabbits.

What amuses me is that all of this is about as far from Tolkien as you could possibly get. His prose doesn't exactly drip with eroticism. (To be fair, he never said that Legolas DIDN'T have hot gay sex with Eomer.) It's like entering a strange alternate universe where up is down and black is white and Aragorn owns the entire Bette Midler catalogue. My theory is that since the vast majority of slash authors are female, and the vast majority of Tolkien characters are male, slash is a veiled way of inserting themselves into the story.

Stranger yet are the slash crossover fics, where Legolas goes on a date with Achilles, or Giles from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" has a nine-way with the Fellowship. In these stories, fictional universes collide, with strange results. I was one of those kids who hated it when the peas touched the mashed potatoes, and crossover fics just squick me out. I'm sorry, but Star Trek people don't belong in Middle Earth. It is an abomination in the sight of the Lord.

But still amusing, nevertheless.

Princess Blog
Mood:  not sure
Okay, are these people drinking too many flat whites??? Or industrial black shorts?? The man has a huge range and should never be pigeonholed. Did anyone even think of Faramir while watching The Boys? Did Alex remind you of Lenny? Did Josh remotely resemble Father Damien? Okay, they both did make the earth move in their own special way, but come on, the man is a genius. I will say no more.

ON a side note, I'm so glad they label novels. Mostly b/c so many people dont read and therefore dont know what a novel is...KIDDING!!


Pardon me, I'm having a Molokia interview obsession...

Erin Go Blog
Mood:  lazy
Now Playing: 19th-Century Polka Ballads of the Upper Peninsula
Well, OK, so my name isn't Erin...but I am half-Irish. That should count for something, right?

One of the things that really impresses me about David is the slow evolution of his roles over the years. Gradually, he's gone from playing generic background characters with names like "Hotel Guard #2", to nerds and psychopaths, and more recently to bewildered men approaching midlife and battered by the demands of fin de siecle masculinity. Roles like Alex in "After the Deluge", Murray Whelan, and the forthcoming "Three Dollars" contain tremendous emotional depth and complexity. It takes a very skilled, nuanced performer to portray these men convincingly.

The conventional rap against David (if you can call it that) is that he's too goofy and singular-looking to play leading romantic men. Au contraire, mon frere. As the French say, it is to snort. Seachange and Better Than Sex should have laid that charge to rest years ago. I mean...just...look at him. Besides, David's true strength lies in portraying the edgy and eccentric and real. Airbrushed romantic heroes are boring and forgettable. Give us multi-directional hanks of red hair, and that sweet Aussie accent!

Gondor Bros. Dry Cleaning
Mood:  accident prone
Now Playing: Scrabble
Test passed, PFaz!

Today's topic: The FTA. Over the past year, the U.S. and Australia have been involved in a series of high-level negotiations for bilateral free trade. I don't know all the specifics, but my impression is that in exchange for access to American markets for Australian farmers and agribusiness, the Australian government is prepared to make concessions that will impact its film and television industry. Namely, the weakening of protective measures, and failure to set local-content quotas. That could prove very bad for the industry, which is already dominated by global processes.

Numerous Aussie actors have spoken out against this threat to their culture and livelihood. I have to agree 100% here; if anything, given the sorry state of U.S. television, I think the trade imbalance should run in the other direction. I'd much rather watch a series like After The Deluge than Am I Hot Or Not? At least Aussie television doesn't actively try to kill your brain cells. I would also hate to see a situation where Aussie filmmakers and actors are forced to compete against one another for scarce jobs and resources. We already don't see enough of David Wenham in the U.S. as it is.

As long as I'm ranting, I'll close with a minor pet peeve of mine: Why are modern-day fiction books ALWAYS labelled as "A Novel"? For example, Snow Falling On Cedars: A Novel. Are the publishers worried we won't recognize it as such? That we might mistake it for an encyclopedia, or a set of dinner forks? It seems vaguely redundant and pretentious, a shorthand indication to the buyer that You Are In The Presence Of Literary Greatness. If I ever write a novel, I'm going to insist that it be labelled "A Bunch Of Paper Covered In Squiggles".

Is this labelling practice going to extend to other consumer areas? Cheerios: A Cereal. Sony: A Television. Etc.

-- make_it_stop: a ranting nutcase

Mood:  flirty
Ok, this is a test to see if I can get the image working:

Yeah, you can order space food sticks online through NASA, PFaz...

According to this guy, you can also upload images to your entries....

I foresee much time being wasted here in the Grove.

-- make_it_stop

Space food sticks are still around? Kewl...

I said all my important stuff in my comment...

Can I really post an image here???

How It Began
Having announced the opening of "Daisy's Sacred Grove" with great pomp and fanfare, I then went on vacation for three weeks and left this blog to lie fallow. Sorry about the hiatus.

At any rate, here are three reasons why I love Australia:

1) Footrot Flats.
2) Space Food Sticks are still manufactured there.
3) David Wenham.

I first saw David in The Two Towers, and was impressed with his performance (albeit not so impressed with the changes to Faramir, though I understood the rationale behind it). Then I promptly forgot about the whole Lord of the Rings enterprise, and went about my business.

Several months later, I went to see Return of the King with a 103 degree fever singing in my ears. Sometime around the pyre scene, I realized I was in the presence of an incredible performance. (I may have been identifying overly much with the feverish Faramir, as he lay simmering on the screen without so much as an aspirin).

Long after the credits stopped rolling, David's emotional portrayal of the nearly-barbecued, less-favored younger son continued to haunt me. Back at home, I ripped the shrink wrap off my Two Towers Extended Edition and spent the rest of the week on the couch with a ginger-ale IV drip, marveling at the "Sons of the Steward" scene. Watching him swallow Denethor's abuse was like being punched in the stomach. The economy and subtlety of David's gestures and facial movements were just incredible.

This is going to sound incredibly stupid, but prior to then, I'd never particularly noticed acting as a craft before. I thought that, like many other endeavors in life, 90% of acting was memorizing lines and showing up on time. WRONG, wrong, wrong, wrong. So very wrong. Once the flu cleared up, I sought out David's other work (not easy to do outside his native Australia) and discovered that, apparently, there were dozens and dozens of different characters living inside this one guy. His presence drew attention to small things I'd never paid attention to before: timing, gestures, mannerisms, inflection. It was an astonishing revelation. I wanted to run out and grab people on the sidewalk and say "Look! ACTING!"

Hence the Dessicated Coconut website, my attempt at pamphleteering on David's behalf. It beats harrassing people at airports, anyway.

-- make_it_stop

Daisy's Sacred Grove: A New Beginning

WELCOME to our peaceful, consecrated grove. Yes, it's official: Dessicated Coconut now has its own community blog. A place for insane, foaming jeremiads; bloated rants; sharp invective; babble; and polemic.

Or, a place to write down grocery lists and gush about pet hamsters.

Or, a doodle pad. \\@//

Or, a place to post minimalist entries of pure blank space.

So many possibilities. I'm getting teary-eyed just thinking about it.


-- make_it_stop

Stalk Lobster

One of the ironclad rules of Dessicated Coconut (besides "No wearing white before Memorial Day") is: Absolutely no paparazzi articles or photos, whatsoever.  The rule is observed out of respect for the privacy of David and his family, and also because I don't agree with the underhanded, stalker-ish methods they use to obtain photos and information.  If anyone's going to make stuff up and spread scurrilous rumors on DC, it's me.

Having said that, I'm going to violate that rule just this once, here in the Grove, because I think it's important to address this.  There's been a small kerfuffle in Daisy Nation lately, after a German tabloid published an article which claims Kate Agnew and David are a) married and b) pregnant.  The text of the article (translated by bellis) runs thusly:

In Lord Of The Rings he rode a horse and in Berlin he lets a limousine drive him around

Actor David Wenham (42, alias Faramir) were together with his pregnant wife Kate Agnew, daughter Eliza Jane (4) and a nanny driven from Hotel Concorde to a playground (somewhere, Tiergarten means Zoo) on Thursday.

After an hour they continued. The married couple went to the National Gallery and looked at black-and-white photos by Japanese Hiroshi Sugimoto (59). Afterwards they went to a designshop in Auguststrasse.

What is Wenham doing here? A couple of days off and sightseeing before the filming of his newest project starts. He's to be in Sönke Wortmans (48) next flick Die Päpstin (Pope Joan) and will be in front of the camera from next week on.

The film also stars John Goodman (56) Johanna Wokalek (33).

****

Personally, I think it's always prudent to consider the source before jumping to conclusions.  BZ Berlin, from what I've been told, is a German tabloid, along the lines of the Sun or the National Enquirer, which has a somewhat carefree approach to the truth.  The reporter who wrote the article obviously didn't speak to the family, just surreptitiously followed them around on what was supposed to be a private day off.  If Kate really is pregnant, I doubt they would break the news to a random papparazzo from a German tabloid, particularly if it was early in the pregnancy.  Generally, cautious people, and especially celebrities, don't publically confirm a pregnancy until they're well into the second or even third trimester.  (Unless you're the Duggars, and you announce it on the Today show even before the second line shows up on the pee stick).

As for the married part, Kate has been referred to as David's wife a few times before, mostly as the result of reporters making inferences and assumptions from what they've observed.  It's part of their job to sculpt a lively narrative about their subjects, but sometimes it leads to inaccuracies.  So, I would caution everyone not to accept any of this as gospel until there's corroboration from a more reputable source.

On a different topic, I saw a bizarre film the other day called The Norman Rockwell Code,  a spoof of The Da Vinci Code.  It had something to do with a cult of lobsters trying to stamp out mermaids.  At the beginning of the film, a director is found dead on the floor of the Norman Rockwell museum with a harpoon through his chest, clutching a lemon and a can of tuna fish.  The bad guy, who's half lobster and half human, is sort of like Silas, the albino Opus Dei monk from The Da Vinci Code.  He flagelletes himself by dipping his claws into a pot of boiling water and going "Ow!....Ow!...Ow!....."  Eventually, he's subdued with melted butter, and the police arrive and put giant rubber bands over his claws.

The director and lead actor were at the screening, and they introduced themselves afterwards, to much applause.  The lead actor said he was the youngest in a large Catholic family ("It gave me a HUGE ego!" he joked), and got bitten by the drama bug early on.

That reminds me of someone, but I can't quite put my finger on it....  Hm.  Oh well.  It'll come to me.