Hey buds/Hey buds.

Well, crap.

My plan to begin daily blogging on 1 January was totally fucking foiled when I arrived home from CA on that date to find my Internet down, with one solitary light on the cable modem sadly blinking over and over and over. (Occasionally a second light would chime in for a stretch, just to tease me.) Time/Warner didn't have an available appointment for a week, so it was iPhone + a nearby UPS store until yesterday afternoon. My anal-retentive nature now wants to postpone everything for another year (or at least until some other suitable holiday or anniversary), but after watching Synecdoche, New York twice I'm inclined to engage in serious internal rebellion on that front. So here we go. I won't promise to post something every single day, but the joint should be considerably more lively than it's ever been before. And the title won't be different every time you check back.

One thing I'll be doing on a semi-regular basis—basically whenever I can't think of something better, e.g. now—is to share some of the many clips I've brought to my friend Chris Ereneta's annual movie clip party, the 12th edition of which took place on 31 December. This wacko musical number from Cory McAbee's The American Astronaut was shown in 2001; I tracked down a screener after seeing the film at Toronto that year, and to this day Chris' opening montage (link is to the 2005 version) features a short snippet from that particular VHS copy, which had a huge time code running along the bottom of the frame. You're spared that here, thankfully, though you still have to deal with one LUCHAGRINGO's dorky icon in the upper left.

This clip won the party's "What the Hell Was That?" award—an honor I have received six times to date, including this year for a clip from Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues.