Scott Pilgrim Vs. Me!

It was hot yesterday. I am such a wimp when it comes to the heat. I generally have three ways of coping with hot weather:

1. I crank up the AC and I don't leave my house.
2. I get in my car and drive until I'm at the beach, where it is always overcast and cold.
3. I go to the movies. I can always count on movie theaters to be properly air conditioned (well, with the exception of funky art-house theaters that were built in the 1930's, but that's irrelevant).

I had already spent too much time in my house yesterday and I live three hours from the beach, so it was time to go to the movies. I watched the trailer for "Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World" (posted below).

I decided to go see it based on the following:

1. It stars Michael Cera.
2. It has something to do with indie rock.
3. It features Michael Cera playing guitar in an indie rock band.
4. It's directed by the guy who did "Shaun of The Dead" and "Hot Fuzz."
5. The chick in the trailer had cool hair.
6. Parts of the trailer reminded me of "Kill Bill."
7. The love story part of it looked kind of cute.
8. Michael Cera is more than kind of cute.

So I conned Steve into going with me. We chowed down some Chinese food and made our way over to a pretty empty theater. Actually, we were the only people in the theater until the movie was about to start. Then a small clump of obnoxious teenagers came in. One sat right behind me and put his stinky feet up on the seat next to me. It was so repulsive that I made Steve move down several seats with me. There is nothing worse than watching a movie with stinky feet in your face.

Neither of us really knew what to expect from the film. I figured it would amuse and distract me for two hours but didn't have incredibly high expectations for it.

Five minutes into it, I leaned over to Steve and whispered "Oh my gosh, I love this film already." He gave me a silent yet enthusiastic thumbs-up sign. I looked over at him and noticed he was grinning. The opening credits overtook the screen and I saw the name JASON SCHWARTZMAN. I didn't realize that he was in the movie too and discovering this made me downright giddy.

Since it's based on a comic book, the film is pretty stylized and has a lot of references to video games and nerd culture in general (hence the reason Steve loved it so much). I'm usually unimpressed by comic book/superhero movies, but "Scott Pilgrim" was just fun. It had good music in it, hilarious dialogue, and enough clever cultural references to keep my inner hipster satisfied (though a true hipster probably wouldn't be caught dead in that theater).

Of course, the movie also deeply satisfied my inner nerd - a persona that I hide fairly well but has existed for years. *sigh* I guess it's time for an embarrassing history lesson.

When I was a junior in high school, I attended a charter school for kids who wanted to focus on Information Technology. I didn't really care about computers, but I needed a change of scenery from the chaos of public high school. The social ladder was completely flipped upside at that school. Nerds ruled the world and I usually ate lunch with the one misplaced jock and the one other female in the program. Fitting in at the nerd school proved to be just as difficult as fitting in at public high school. It didn't help that I was going through a pretty intense fashion phase that involved wearing vintage fur coats to the computer lab. I also had a thing for shoulder pads and often went to school looking like this (brace yourself, this is an actual picture of 17 year old Lauren):

Horrifying, right? Mary Tyler Moore called, she wants her jacket back.

Most of the nerd boys were a little bit in love with me. Though this helped me ace several computer programming classes, it was annoying because I just wanted some friends. At some point I decided that if I was ever going to be friends with anyone other than the jock and the girl (who really weren't that nice or interesting), I was going to have to be open-minded to nerd culture.

It was about that time that some stuttering nerd boy who had a thing for me offered to let me borrow his new copy of some stupid-looking graphic novel. I cringed but borrowed it just to be nice. I even read a few pages of it just to see what it was.

And then I stayed up all night reading it. It was much better than I had expected it to be. To his amazement, I returned the book to him the next day having read the whole thing. Without even hesitating, he supplied me with the next book in the series. And so began this strange season of reading graphic novels.

I think I borrowed an entire series from him over the course of a few weeks. I was embarrassed by the nerdtastic nature of the books and would keep them in the special zip-up pocket of my backpack during the school day. Once I made it home, I would go in my room and hide the book under my mattress. Yes, I know, I was acting like it was pornography or subversive political literature or something really offensive. There was nothing pornographic or subversive about it, but girls that wear vintage fur coats don't read comic books.

Looking back, I think the boy lending me the comics totally misinterpreted the whole scenario and therefore I accidently led him on. Actually, things got fairly ugly when he realized I just wanted to be his friend that borrowed all of his dorky-yet-fascinating comic books. He abruptly stopped talking to me. At first I thought it was because I returned a book to him with the cover bent a little bit (life in Lauren's backpack is rough sometimes). But when he hacked into my computer at school and started passing around my assignments for everyone to copy, I knew I had somehow unintentionally stomped on his little nerd-heart.


My trusty comic book supplier had become my enemy, so I began turning to the Internet for my nerdy comic fix. I paid attention to the web comics that boys in the computer lab were reading when they were bored and read them when no one was looking. Then I would reference them in the presence of nerd boys in attempts to gain acceptance and earn their friendship.

This catapulted me to Queen of the Nerds status (which is a little bit like "Queen of the Damned" but with less outfits made of leather and definitely less sex). Every boy in that stupid computer lab had some sort of weird crush on me. It was flattering and I got a lot of free computer help that way. But I really just wanted to be part of the group, not the star of teenage geekboy fantasies. I specifically remember there being some big geeky get-together at somebody's house on a Friday night. It was just going to be a lot of people drinking Mountain Dew and playing Mario Brothers or watching anime or something along those lines. I didn't even really like any of those things, but everyone in the IT cohort was going. Naturally, I wanted to go.

But I wasn't invited. This is pathetic, but I can distinctly remember sitting in my room on Friday night, writing in my journal and keeping my gigantic cell phone close by in case somebody remembered to invite me. The phone never rang. I decided I didn't want to be a part of that scene anyway.

The next week, I put on my sweatshirt that I had ripped up and sewn back together with safety pins. I got in touch with some people from public school and started a rock band in my garage. We called ourselves "The Accoutrements" and never left my garage, but that's irrelevant. That turned out to be my high school niche and my days of trying to fit in with nerds was over.

Except that nerdy part of me has never really died. Movies like "Scott Pilgrim" remind me that it's still there.

(Yes, I did manage to bring it back to the original movie review this post was intended to be. I have a way of rambling sometimes. Please forgive me.)

On another note, I found myself a little jealous of Ramona Flowers in the scene at the end where Michael Cera and Jason Schwartzman were fighting over her (kung fu fighting, to be specific). If I was in her position, I would just be like, "Hey guys, I can't choose between you. So I'm going to have to choose both of you. Welcome to my harem of adorably awkward hipster boys."

Anyway, go see "Scott Pilgrim." It's absolutely ridiculous, but it will make you laugh. It made me laugh, anyway. Actually, I think it's one of the funniest, freshest films I've seen in awhile.

And instead of sleeping last night, I stayed up making a silly avatar for myself on the "Scott Pilgrim" website. Because that's what all the cool kids are doing these days.

Oh man, I really am geekier than I give myself credit for, huh? I think I'm going to end this post before I incriminate myself any further.

Peace out, amigos.

An Open Letter to T

Dear T,

I don't know you and you don't know me. I don't know if T stands for Tyler, Timothy, Tina, or Transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania. All I know is that I have your mix CD.

I was feeling nostalgic yesterday so I listened to your mix in my car while driving to Steve's place. I hooked my old Walkman up to my cassette deck and jammed out to the most eccentric batch of songs I've ever encountered. Boyz II Men followed by Nine Inch Nails. The Black Eyed Peas on the same disc as The Ben Folds Five. The Presidents of The United States of America back to back with Supertramp.

I first experienced this wonderful combination of randomized mediocre music in the year of 2002. I was in middle school.

My great aunt found a whole pile of CDs laying on her lawn one day and gave them to me in a plastic zip-lock bag. It was always a mystery where they came from. I've always thought that maybe some gangstas stole a car and chucked all the CDs in the car out the window while driving past my aunt's house. But maybe it was just the magical music fairy making her nightly rounds. Who knows.

I was really excited about all the new CDs. The excitement wore off fast though once I discovered they were all awful things like Peter Gabriel and P Diddy back when he still went by Sean "Puffy" Combs. I was about to pass the whole collection over to my little brother when I noticed a homemade mix CD hiding behind The Greatest Hits of The Charlie Daniels Band.

"T's Mix" was written on the front in black Sharpie ink. There were some Roman numerals scribbled on the front as well to indicate it was part of a series.

I was completely intruiged by your mystery mix. I skimmed through the tracks with my little brother when no one else was home. I was too young to appreciate most of them. I scoffed at the Nine Inch Nails track, agreeing with my brother that the Weird Al version was way better. I didn't quite know what to make of The Black Eyed Peas and I think Ben Folds probably offended me.

But there was a punk rock cover of "Turning Japanese" that I thought was awesome for whatever stupid reason. I wouldn't understand all the innuendos involved in that song (and the 1980s in general) until college.

There were almost 20 tracks on the CD, each track a little weirder than the last. The mix finishes off with Stephen Lynch singing about the Special Olympics. I still remember listening to that song for the first time with my brother in the back of the house, laughing hysterically and then feeling like horrible people.

Right after the Lynch track, the theme from "Three's Company" plays and then the whole CD is over. My brother and I decided that the mix was mostly a dud and I put it on some dust-ridden shelf in a corner.

But as I got older, I found myself revisiting that awkward mix. There were all sorts of angry, anti-corporate rock songs towards the middle of it that fit in well with my pathetic teenage angst. Since I lived in suburbia and had no real problems, I had to get mad at really vague entities, like society as a whole. I was even an incredibly misinformed vegetarian for approximately five minutes (blame that one on reading "The Jungle" in history class).


And when I got my first car (a 1993 silver Chevy Lumina with tinted windows and two authentic bullet holes in the back), it only made since to load your mix into my car stereo and blast track number four - "Damn, It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta." You know, the song they play in "Office Space" when all the white guys are beating the crap out of the fax machine. The song went on for a whole five minutes and contained more profanity than the smoker's bathroom at my high school. But it was the closest thing to gangsta rap I had (other than Gorillaz...yeah, I'm super white) and therefore became the national anthem of my infamous Gangsta Car.

I loaded your mix onto my iPod before I left for college. Well, my iPod only held 500 songs, so I loaded the ones I really liked and left out Lil' Kim and Boyz II Men. Ben Folds ceased to offend me and became living proof that geeky white kids who play piano can rock out. I began to secretly fall in love with The Black Eyed Peas. And since I was just coming out of my intense They Might Be Giants phase, I thought The Presidents of The United States of America were brilliant.

Every once in awhile someone would look at my iPod and ask about the playlist labeled "T's Mix."

"I don't really know who T is," I would answer stupidly. "My great aunt found this mix laying on her lawn and gave it to me."

It was silly, but I always wondered who you are. What kind of person puts punk rock, 80s music, hip hop, Nine Inch Nails, and Steve Martin singing "King Tut" all on the same CD?

Surely you must be someone totally interesting. I always thought you were probably a boy. Maybe one that was a little older than me and wore beat up Converse tennis shoes. I thought we would probably be friends. Your musical taste never did match up perfectly with mine, but it was extremely diverse and eccentric. I like that.

The reality is that you're probably a 35 year old stoner who lives in your mother's basement. Maybe you made the mix when you were high and decided to play CD frisbee on my great aunt's lawn one night in the summer of 2002.

Or maybe you're some crazy alternative chick who was on a mission to spread music awareness throughout the land and purposefully left those CDs on that lawn. Like when I lived in the dorms and got all the ditzy girls on my floor addicted to 90s eurodance by anonymously leaving my mixes everywhere. But that was mostly just an experiment to see if I could get everyone to stop listening to country western crap nonstop.

Anyway, I'm starting to ramble. The point is, T, I don't know who you are. And I'll probably never know. But I'd like to thank you for the mix CD that fell into my hands eight years ago.

So, T, thanks for the tunes. You probably just thought that your CD disappeared into an open sewer grate or something, but it went to a good home. Sometimes I wish I could make you a mix in return. But your identity remains a mystery, so that would be impossible.

Peace/Love/Rock and Roll,

L

Tin Foil Hats and Boy George

Yesterday I was digging through my hard drive looking for music to play at a wedding reception tomorrow. I ended up getting distracted by a folder full of old pictures. I'm sure everyone in this tinfoil hat photo would cringe severely if they knew it was still floating around the internet, but it was too amusing to keep to myself. It was taken circa freshman year of college during some bizarre b movie appreciation night I was hosting in my dorm room (my roommate conveniently left town every weekend). I'm the one with the glasses and the brown stripey shirt (I believe that was back when my hair was still blond/mullet-esque).

I know that in reality freshman year wasn't really that long ago, but now that college is over it almost seems like a completely distant past life. Everyone is busy getting married and landing "grown-up" jobs these days.

Speaking of marriage, the big wedding I'm playing at/DJing is tomorrow. See the young guy on the far left with the goofy smile? The one in the tin foil hat? No, not the one with the toilet paper tube, that's the guy with the self-appointed nickname of "Ninja." I'm talking about the guy sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the girl who looks a bit disgruntled (ironically, that girl just got married to the boy that has another girl on his lap). Anyway, see the guy I'm talking about? He's a good friend of mine as well as one of Original Sound Trash's biggest fans. And tomorrow, he gets married to another good friend/OST super-fan. They are completely perfect for each other and I'm happy to see them get married. But it's also driving home the fact that everyone around me is growing up.

Personally, I still feel about 14 years old, so watching my friends do really adult things is really bizarro (get your mind out of the gutter, I'm talking about working full time, getting married, etc.). Maybe I'm stuck in a prolonged state of adolescence or something, but I don't think I'll be ready to do any of that "grown-up" stuff for awhile.

I heard a song yesterday that does a good job of explaining how I feel. It's a song I've heard before, but yesterday these lines really stood out to me:

should i choose a noble occupation
if i did i’d only show up late and sick
and they would stare at me with hatred
plus my only natural talent’s wasted
- "my alcoholic friends" (the dresden dolls)

Amanda Palmer, you say it better than I can.

Anyway, I should probably wrap this up before it becomes totally uninteresting. In the spirit of this weekend, I leave you a clip from "The Wedding Singer."

Hopefully Ryan and I will sound a little better than that Boy George impersonator. ;)

Happy Friday, everyone!