Last year I covered Miss Universe’s National Costume Contest. I didn’t realize when this year’s was, but it was pointed out that pictures were out and I had better get started.

I’m not sure who the actual winner of this event is (I think that doesn’t happen until Monday?). Since I have a different criteria than the judges of the pageant – they enjoy “bras that look like eyeballs” and I enjoy “Icelandic schoolmarm” – I wasn’t sure exactly how to go about picking a winner of my own.

I looked for overwhelming trends this year (including Nonsense Capes, Escape from Prom Island, I Was a Project Runway Challenge, and Shit You Have to Carry), but I finally stumbled across a picture that made me realize the difference between perception of these national costumes and their reality.

This is Japan’s national costume.

First of all, and I mean this: way to improve over last year, everyone. Sure, it’s completely over the top, but this is Miss Universe, not the Parade of Dignity, so whatever. And yes, she’s holding a fan as tall as she is, but hey, you guys got the memo about Shit You Have to Carry, so you’re just doing your job.

But, uh, here’s what it looks like in person.

In which pretty much no one learns a damn thing from last year, except Canada.
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I have a Tumblr. It’s mostly useful for an aggregated feed of handy screencaps of shows I don’t even watch, just so I don’t fall behind in knowing what’s going on with all the shows I don’t watch. (This is my life. I have no explanations.)

However, sometimes you get an image that is so awesome you don’t even know what to do except blog it on Tumblr, and then immediately blog it on LJ.

(Click through for hi-res and source.)

This image brings joy to my heart, forever. (And also fear, because I will have to begin tracking down the ones I don’t recognize, which will cut into my catching-up-on-shows-I-don’t-have-time-to-watch time.)

Last weekend I visited my parents. They live in a suburbia that I have been in the position to know for a few years, leave for many, come back to for a few years, leave for many, and then return to every once in a while for trips where I stick my head out the window a lot and marvel that there are trees right alongside the road like nature just exists wherever it feels like. (New York City: where mold is considered a houseplant.)

One thing that has changed remarkably little from my childhood is the strip mall a few miles away from my house, which still has the same ice cream chain, pizza chain, and grocery chain as it did when I was seven. It also has the dance studio where I spent one memorable year. Only one. You’ll see why.

The year? 1988. The class? Miss Somebody’s Pretend Jazz Dance For Mildy-Uncoordinated Young Ladies. Your writer? A GIANT. (No joke, in the picture of us in our recital costumes I’m about three inches taller than everyone else, which makes me look like I was held back three times for being an Exceptionally-Uncoordinated Young Lady.)

The recital number: “I Think We’re Alone Now,” by Tiffany. Hell yes it was. It was 1988.

The outfits: black camisole leotards with diagonal rows of hot pink sequins and fringe, as if Barbie had become a demented flapper. Plus, one of those hot pink sequin headbands that gave you migraines and left a sparkly residue on your forehead for weeks.

How long it took to put the routine together: one billion years. Stars were born and died before a room full of 7-year-olds had figured out how to get through this dance.

What I remember of the routine: a lot of repeat foot-taps on each side to fill time. A bastardized version of the Running Man, to be used during all relevant lyrics. Turning our backs to the audience and hugging ourselves for the “put your arms around me” lyric. Lying on the floor and lifting our pelvises into the air. (I don’t know what to tell you. Apparently this is an okay thing for seven-year-olds to do in a dance recital. They were more innocent times, I guess.) Doing The Lawn Sprinkler. A big leap near the end.

How I was: PISSED. I was one of three girls who had memorized the whole thing (this is before my memory turned to pudding). They put one of us in the first row, center, and the other two in the back row, on the edges. “To anchor the other girls,” they said. I was so far off to the side of the stage that I spent most of the routine behind a trellis.

This is actually, as it turns out, the ideal way for me to perform anything. The next time I got in front of an audience for debate or something in middle school, there was no trellis, and I had an attack of nerves that ended with me turning around and walking offstage and bombing that grade. (Whoops.)

However, at the time I was really proud of being one of three people who could memorize The Entire Thing, and I was not happy about being unable to prove it to anyone. In the VHS recording my dad took of it, you could occasionally catch a glimpse of my face through the trellis, absolutely fuming, looking like I was waiting to be alone with the song’s object so I could murder them without witnesses. (“The beating of our hearts is the only sound…soon to be singular.”)

That video has vanished into the mists of time, because the internet wasn’t popular yet (THANK YOU GOD), but as I drove past that strip mall last weekend, I got a memory rush of the entire thing, and realized I could remember more of that dance routine than I could of almost anything else that has actually happened to me in my life.

This is either a testament to the power of music, or proof that my brain is allocated as follows:

You make the call!

I saw Inception last night, for the second time.

A couple of lingering questions I had from my initial viewing were cleared up. A couple will just never be answered. I’m largely okay with it; I’m certainly willing to overlook them and enjoy the movie.

I’m definitely willing to overlook the things I didn’t like to watch some of the fight scenes and chase scenes, and to watch Cillian Murphy pulling a compelling emotional through-line out of ten lines in the script. Cillian Murphy: literally acting his way out of a bag since whenever Christopher Nolan started putting sacks on the poor guy’s head.

(Also, to watch Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page doing pretty much anything. Also, Tom Hardy, who is so much more in his element here than in Wuthering Heights that it seriously boggles the mind. Also Dileep Rao, and Marion Cotillard, and Ken Watanabe. Basically, see the picture below.)

One of the things that bothered me on my initial viewing was the seemingly-excessive exposition in the film’s first third…until last night, when something happened in the audience that made me realize why all that exposition might be necessary.

Vague spoilers for a minor subplot under here, and other random nattering about the movie.
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I’m guestblogging over at Ecstastic Days over the next week or so, and after a handwavey attempt to link writing and music (they are…both things that I like), I start things off with Nine Movie Composers to Know.

This is timely largely because of Inception’s amazing soundtrack, by the seriously productive Hans Zimmer (composer of 8 bajillion movies), and has brought new attention to the role that a score plays in a movie. Naturally, all scores play a large part, but this one in particular gets points for the cleverness of some of its cues. (Can you tell how hard I’m avoiding spoilers here? Please, everyone, just see the movie so we can all stop hinting.)

However, I’ve been a score nerd pretty much ever since I was a movie nerd, and the nine composers there are far from the only ones whose stuff I hoard. Yoko Kanno, Ennio Morricone, Clint Mansell, Trevor Jones, Bear McCreary, Philip Glass, Peter Nashel, Brian Tyler, Jeanine Tesori, Stephen McKeon – basically, I had to cut it off after nine, or it would have been a six-thousand-word blog post about how awesome music is.

Instead, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite pieces of movie music ever. (Both times it was used, Graeme, I see you over there recycling! You stop working for terrible TV and score a good movie this instant!)