Posting a lot about music this weekend

I'm belatedly listening to They Might Be Giants' 2002 rarities collection They Got Lost. TMBG Unlimited subscribers probably obtained most of this stuff a long time ago; I'd heard much of it on Dial-A-Song at some point. Nice to have it all in one place.

The real gems here are "On The Drag" and "Mosh Momken Abadan" (a stompy instrumental that is apparently a familiar Iranian tune), and two of John Linnell's greatest acts of lyrics-writing ever, "Rest Awhile" and "Certain People I Could Name." This last is flabbergastingly brilliant, in the ambiguous, unreliable-narrator manner that is TMBG's native territory.

I can't decide whether he actually has certain people in mind, or if the song is just about how easy it is to make damning insinuations about people based on comparison of little mannerisms (I suspect the latter, but also think many listeners would read the song on the other level and eagerly perform the implied projection). Or both.

I've been seeing a lot of this lately in political contexts, and it kind of bugs me even when the target is someone I despise (e.g. some blog comments I read a while back in which somebody went on and on about the sinister implications of the way Dick Cheney holds his lips), because it's so inherently unanswerable and suggestion so powerful. It reminds me of the late Gharlane of Eddore's insistence that a fleeting facial expression Bill Clinton once made on a raw satellite feed was incontrovertible evidence that he'd had Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's plane sabotaged. Maybe it's just that I'm personally very bad at getting emotional information from subtle facial expressions, so it's hard for me to believe that others can do this reliably by watching video, or argue with them when they do.

Half-remembered stuff

Nathan Shumate's review of the very strange Sixties Japanese cartoon Jack and the Witch reminded me of a half-remembered cartoon that I'd seen in my childhood and found kind of odd and disturbing at the time. In my extremely imperfect recollection there seemed to be a similarity of styles, though it obviously wasn't the same cartoon; I wondered if it was also a Sixties Japanese effort, maybe from the same guy.

Brief Googling reveals: Nope, the movie I remember was Der Zauberstein, a German movie from the mid-seventies released here as Once Upon A Time; I must have seen it in its first American theatrical release. And the style is actually not much like that of Jack and the Witch at all; it's much more conventional fairy-tale stuff, though I remember that things get pretty weird in Mrs. Holle's magical realm.

I think what reminded me of it was Shumate's description of a heavy scene in Jack and the Witch in which the little blue-skinned harpy-girl lies down to die in a freezing cave. Der Zauberstein's obligatory cute animal sidekick is a little blue dog, and there's a scene burned into my mind in which he more or less dies and is transmogrified into a blue flower, which then turns back into the doggy when our heroine kisses it, or something. In fact, that's pretty close to the only thing I remember about the movie, except that the glass-slipperish Macguffin was the garnet stone mentioned in the German title.

...And there's something about a magical choo-choo. I swear there is.

Your strange movie rumor of the day

Godzilla vs. Roland Emmerich Godzilla?!