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e=mcbrennan

Random Thoughts Collected and Computed: M. C. Brennan on LiveJournal

Created on 2003-08-17 23:15:50 (#1262923), last updated 2009-07-04

9,448 comments received, 6,186 comments posted

Basic Info
Name:penelope danger incorporated
Location:Los Angeles, California, United States
Website:M. C. Brennan's Shiny New Homepage
Bio
"She lives in California and is a writer, a wonderful writer."--Actor/blogger James Urbaniak, in Gothamist.

"...Hi-frickin-larious, a brilliant writer, musicologist, a renny-sance chick, always interesting, and fun to be around...Oh, and that sweet, sweet ass..."--Cartoonist Eric Paul Johnson

"Love the tunes...Stellar pop craftsmanship!"--Chris Hansen Orf of The Cartwheels/Zen Lunatics/Get Out magazine

Further celebrity endorsements welcome. Be creative. Lie if you must.

And now for some random information, most of which is probably true.

My favorite movie is Trust. Oh, and To Kill A Mockingbird. And definitely Bedazzled (the first one, but God Bless Toby Huss just the same) And Rushmore. And Head by the Monkees. Lord Love A Duck. Ninotchka. Band Of Outsiders. And Hedwig. And The Third Man. Tim Burton's Vincent. The Impostors. Nothing Sacred. The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek. The Red Shoes. Hellzapoppin'. The Lady Eve. The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox. The Maltese Falcon. Harold And Maude, obviously. Buckaroo Banzai. Laura. Edward Scissorhands. The Monitors. Mona Lisa. Night Of The Comet. Night Of The Hunter. Night Of The Lepus. And seven million and six others. Your dark comedies, your screwball comedies, your weird cult films, that's me. I likey the movies. At this exact moment I've been spending a lot of time with Hal Hartley, Preston Sturges, Colin Higgins, Hal Ashby, Powell and Pressburger, Ida Lupino, Godard, Neil Jordan, Bob Clark, and so on and so forth.

Favorite albums? Bowie's entire catalog (especially Hunky Dory, Ziggy, Station To Station and Scary Monsters). Ditto everything Sparks has ever done (especially Angst In My Pants). Donny Hathaway Live. Townes Van Zandt Live at the Old Quarter. Echo and the Bunnymen's Ocean Rain. Judee Sill's Heart Food. Olivia Newton-John's Totally Hot. Ella Fitzgerald's songbooks. Merle Haggard's Big City. Mary Margaret O'Hara's Miss America. River Roses' Each And All. Lou Reed's Transformer. Willie Nelson's Phases and Stages. The Psychedelic Furs' Mirror Moves. Talk Talk's It's My Life. Galen Herod's Bite The Wax Tadpole. Sinatra's In The Wee Small Hours. The Smiths' The Queen Is Dead. Fan Dance by Sam Phillips. Plus about 30,000 others. Your vintage/Texas/Bakersfield country, your hyperstylized New Wave, your 70s punk, your basic unadulterated human music, your dusty old 78s from the 20s and 30s, your one-hit-wonders from the 70s, that's me. Wherever a hobo is humming a showtune, I shall be there, dancing like a moonstruck fool.

Favorite songwriters: Townes Van Zandt, Bowie, Morrissey/Marr, Harry Nilsson, Judee Sill, Brian Wilson, Ned Rifle, Cole Porter, John Lennon, Willie Nelson, Paul Williams, Lyle Lovett, Carole King, Patti Smith, Harry Warren, Stevie Wonder, Cindy Walker, Merle Haggard, Jarvis Cocker, Randy Rogel, Chris Holiman, Caitlin Von Schmidt, Elvis Costello, Terry Garvin, Sam Phillips, Bob Wills, Bob Mould, Bob Dylan, Bob Barker, Bob Dobbs, whatever you've got.

Actors? William Powell. Carole Lombard. Madeline Kahn. Marion Davies. Gregory Peck. Leo McKern. Beulah Bondi. Ann Harding. Susan Tyrrell. Carol Kane. Cary Grant. Shelley Duvall. Stephen Fry. Audrey Hepburn. Tom Hulce. Turk Pipkin. Stephen Root. Mary Woronov. Eugene Pallette. Veronica Lake. Bill Nighy. William Fichtner. Bob Balaban. Bud Cort. Bill Murray. Paul Giamatti. James Garner. Jeffrey Jones. Eddie Izzard. Andy Richter. Martin Donovan. John C. McGinley. Steve Ihnat. Cillian Murphy. Steve Coogan. Hugh Laurie. Shirley Henderson. Johnny Depp. James Urbaniak. Brian Atene. Etc times infinity. As an alleged former actor, I admire character work above all else.

Writers? Stephen Fry is almost certainly the greatest living writer on God's green earth. Indisputably the funniest. Difficult to overlook the following, though: Terry Southern, Will Eno, Kurt Vonnegut, John Patrick Shanley, Salinger, Auster, Dorothy Parker, William Goldman, Louisa May Alcott, Flann O'Brien (Miles etc), Hunter S. Thompson, Roddy Doyle, Samuel Hoffenstein. Lots of others. I don't know, everything I own's been in storage for five years.

Television: Venture Bros, Life On Mars (UK only please), The Office, Scrubs, Torchwood, Doctor Who, Boston Legal, Pushing Daisies, Lost, Studio 60, The Knights Of Prosperity, Andy Barker PI, Lookwell, Cupid (the '98 version), The Prisoner, On The Air, SCTV, The Fugitive, The Invaders, Star Trek (original), French and Saunders, TWTWTW, Blackadder, Twin Peaks, Ths Muppet Show. Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, The Persuaders, Wallace and Ladmo, Almost Live, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, anything British or old or local or DIY or peculiar.

Uncle Willy's in the pantry doing weird and wonderful things.

Turn-ons: synaesthesia, levitation, astral protection, breathtaking prose, Underdog, string theory, the inarticulate speech of the heart, wax cylinders, bud cort, men in eyeliner, firm spankings, vintage animation, and every power-pop, new wave, alt-country, jazz, vocals, novelty, rock, classic country, opera, classical and alternative record ever made. And kittens! kittens riding ponies!

Turn-offs: fake people, b.o., quantum singularities, bellbottoms, philips-head screwdrivers, the relentless sticky one-way linear arrow of time, arch-conservatives, frog men with spearguns, people who lie about their turnoffs in their biography, hypocrites, self-referential sentences.

Proposition 65 Warning: Professional blogger on closed course. Do Not Attempt. Also, this journal contains the extremely occasional use of an entirely reasonable, moderate and measured amount of fucking profanity, dammit.

"As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from dessication."--Humphrey Lyttelton

"We are made to be immortal, and yet we die. It's horrible, it can't be taken seriously."--Eugene Ionesco

"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."
- Charles Bukowski



"Ours, the scientists keep telling us, is a universe which is disposable. You know, it might be just this one anonymous glory, of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust--to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish. Our works in stone, in paint, in print are spared, some of them for a few decades, or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash. The triumphs and the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life-- we're going to die. 'Be of good heart,' cry the dead artists out of the living past. Our songs will all be silenced. But what of it? Go on singing. Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much." -- Orson Welles, F For Fake

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"The greatest sorcerer [writes Novalis memorably] would be the one who bewitched himself to the point of taking his own phantasmagorias for autonomous apparitions. Would not this be true of us?

I believe that it is. We (the undivided divinity that operates within us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it strong, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and secure in time, but we have allowed tenuous, eternal interstices of injustice in its structure so we may know it is false."--Jorge Luis Borges, "Avatars of the Tortoise"

"The feeling of finishing the script, the first draft, was the high. Everything that followed -- though of interest, and sometimes slightly exhilarating -- could never match the idea of having just taken your story and racked your brain, finally having it on paper in a version you're willing to tolerate and ready to try to sell. I remember Joe Eszterhas calling me and saying, "Woo hoo! I just sold another one!" You know, there were fun times, but I didn't get into that whole money thing with Joe or the competition. It just seemed a little phony to me. Because ultimately, I like making money, but it's not exclusively what I'm trying to do. It won't make my life fulfilled. Directing comes closer than anything I've found yet to providing me with a good reason to get up in the morning that goes beyond just getting some money. Because all the money does is buy the bed. Getting out of it is the problem."--Shane Black

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