"While on the job, a window cleaner meets the love of his life, only to discover he's not the only one who has an eye for her."

"He is not a biologist and has rarely lived away from the coast of California—as a matter of fact, most of his posts are from Los Angeles and its immediately surrounding areas. Yet his work is startlingly compelling: not whitewashed or staff-approved, sometimes goofy, always surprising and beautiful and strange."

The whole score's pretty melodic/creepy/impressive, though you need to be able to tolerate a fair bit of dissonance early on (which makes more sense in context). All in all, far more worthy of your time than the film it bolsters and elevates beyond all reasonable expectations (if not quite high enough to make it worthwhile). Maybe just listen, though. It's not better in context.

Ever since I saw it for the first time, I've felt that The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is his most complete, most powerful, most thoughtful, most polished, and "best" film. ...But my favorite? That's actually a two-hander: Bottle Rocket and Moonrise Kingdom. And I love those two for the same reason, actually. Neither are quite as hard on their subjects as their cinematic siblings

"Star Wars kind of happened by accident for Erik, and he recorded his lines too late to be credited in The Return of The Jedi, so it wasn't until his latter years where the fans figured out that he was the voice behind the iconic 'IT'S A TRAP!,' and convention appearances all around the world swiftly followed."

"The clandestine approach to circulating banned popular foreign music eventually led to a law being passed in 1958 that forbade the home-production of recordings of 'a criminally hooligan trend.'"

That's a tall task, I know, especially given the last few weeks. But this should do the trick.

I'm going dark-ish for the next little while, in the interests of efficiency (and actual vacation). I'll be on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram sporadically, I suspect. And I might even throw a post or two into the mix, just to stay "sharp."

So, in honor of finding myself doing two radically different things at nearly the same time, here's a video of a professional football player who's also a pretty good opera singer. Talk about cognitive (and vocational) dissonance.

I began my adventure here, with Leonardo Leo (thanks to Saturday Chorale). Leo was "one of the leading Neapolitan composers of his day, particularly in the genres of theatre and church music." And this is wonderful stuff.

If someone described their work as "inspired by animator Hayao Miyazaki, manga artist Eiichiro Oda, and writer Roald Dahl," this is pretty much exactly what I'd expect it to look like. (And "Yoyo the Ricecorpse" is exactly what I'd expect them to call themselves. Because Dahl, remember?)

"In November 2012, the Los Angeles Times reported that directors who had been students in the California Institute of the Arts’ animation programs had generated more than $26 billion at the box office since 1985, breathing new life into the art of animation....Even more remarkable was that so many of the animators not only went to the same school but were students together, in the now storied CalArts classes of the 1970s."