Kristen Michelle Powell

Yeah!

kristenmpowell — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 04:47:51 +0000

So now that it’s fall, it’s pretty clear I’m never delivering on my promise for a second summer mix. But I did make you another mix CD. It’s just not summer music.

If you’ve had to live with me, work with me in the mornings, work with me late at night or sat really close to me on the bus when I’ve had headphones on in the past five or so years, you’ve probably been subjected to Françoise Hardy. Particularly this totally context-free compilation CD.

I’m sorry if I’ve put this on every mix CD I ever gave you. Because I might have.

To give some context: Françoise Hardy was a member of the yé-yé girl scene, a sort of ’60s French pop that really, really appealed to my Belle-and-Sebastian-loving, “69 Love Songs”-on-repeat, 18-year-old soul. This was also probably somewhat related to my fixation with French technicolor musicals and American girl groups. And then I became weirdly obsessed with that Hardy album, lost like two-thirds of my music in the Great Hard Drive Crash of ’09 and forgot about yé-yé as a genre outside of Hardy.

So I would like to thank The Hairpin for reminding me. Thank you thank you thank you.

My computer just had a seizure as I downloaded music from 400 different places at once.

I may not speak French, but, hand to God, this genre was meant for me. Moreover, I might flip a table if I’m somehow squeezed into another manic pixie dream girl-shaped hole, so pardon my French when I say, these songs will change your life. Or at least mine.

The mix is not just yé-yé, but it’s inspired by it.

Click on the picture of Françoise being a BAMF to download.

Tracks:
1. “Submarine” – Grass Widow
2. “Tous Les Garcons et Les Filles” – Françoise Hardy
3. “L’adorable Femme des Neiges” – Christine Haume
4. “Is This What I Get For Loving You” – The Ronettes
5. “Je Pense a Lui” – Françoise Hardy
6. “La Moustache a Papa” – Anna Bell
7. “Don’t Hurt My Sister” – The Beach Boys
8. “Un Tours Dehours” – Sylvie-Anne
9. “Mother’s Little Helper” – Rolling Stones
10. “Kodachrome” – Paul Simon
11. “C’ Est Le Passe” – Françoise Hardy
12. “Les Mains Dans Les Poches” – Les Roche Martin
13. “Let Me Go Home” – Camera Obscura
14. “Tu Te Moques de Moi (I Don’t Wanna Leave You)” – Ria Bartok
15. “He Cried” – The Shangri-Las
16. “Les Trois Couleurs de L’amour” – Alice Dona
17. “Why Don’t You Say” – Summer Camp

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

kristenmpowell — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 08:37:46 +0000

A Theme By: Kristen, Age 23

This summer, I did a lot of things. I broke my foot. I moved to my mom’s house. I had a lot of free time.

I watched a lot of TV when I first got to my mom’s. I do not usually have TV. I only kind of like TV. It kind of eats my soul. It tried to suck me in with its icy, blue hands.

Later, I think TV was very important to me. It planned my day for me. It helped me fall asleep. It even picked my food for me. (It also made my hands look like dinosaurs, for some reason)

It is hard to not be able to do things the way you usually do. You feel kind of crazy. I was tired and sad, but soon I was allowed to walk without crutches! It was exciting! I went to the historic district. There is coffee there.

The coffee is bad, though. I don’t like it. It made me miss my normal life, so I started a lot of projects. For example, I started a painting and I tried to get rid of a lot of things from my childhood.

I did not finish any of the projects. Then, I tried to do things that seemed regular. I got tattooed twice during my summer vacation, once in my hometown and once in New York.

It was really hot at the one tattoo shop. After, I decided to visit some of my friends. I went to Philadelphia to visit my friend Kendra and pour latte art at Thursday Night Throwdown.

Kendra says, “Coffee people know how to party!” Kendra is right.

I also went to Honfest in Baltimore with my friend Lindsay. We had fun. It was very Maryland-y.

(Yes, cartoon-me, I know it’s not a drawing. But I like this picture.) I met Elvis. He was nice. He was very quiet.

Then, I visited my friends Hilary and Donny in Brooklyn. I do not like New York, but now I want to live there. We had fun. We went to the Mermaid Parade. We sat on the beach at Coney Island. We watched a man we called “The Captain.”

We played “That’s Your Boyfriend” for two hours.

After, I went to Boston to visit my friend Rachel. We tried to go to TOMB, but it isn’t there anymore. There is just an abandoned warehouse. We went to the John F. Kennedy Library. I learned things.

Every bar in Boston is the best Irish bar. They all have signs that say that. Sam Adams tastes better in Boston.

This summer I learned a lot of things and had some fun. Mostly, I am glad I am moving back to DC. In conclusion, I am glad summer is over.

I made you a mix CD pt. 1.

kristenmpowell — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 04:54:37 +0000

So I made you a mix CD. Well, ok. I made me a mix CD. It’s for the summer. And I made you a copy. It’s the kind of twangy bullshit I listen to in my car. I’m going to make a second one, that will be the kind of loud bullshit I listen to in my car. Click the really awesome, trite mix CD cover below to download it.

The track listing is as follows:

“I Love You, I Do” – Miss Erika Davies
“Birds of Paradise” – Basia Bulat
“Gold in the Air of Summer” – Kings of Convenience
“Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth” – Neko Case
“A House is Not a Home” – Field Music
“When a Pretty Face” – Adam Green
“Pondering the Night Sky” – Paleface
“What to Do” – Rolling Stones
“Any Fun” – Coconut Records
“The Ice Cream Man” – The Tornados
“Forget the Flowers” – Wilco
“Baby’s Arms” – Kurt Vile
“Chick-A-Boom” – Van Morrison

Enjoy!

I was an unfortunate tween.

kristenmpowell — Sun, 29 May 2011 05:43:04 +0000

I enjoy telling people how long and painful my awkward stage was. It was pretty bad.

I had bad teeth and orthodontics.

I also loved velour.

I made some really stellar fashion choices.

That’s a matching Bugs Bunny t-shirt/shorts/hat/scrunchie combo

And I was freakishly large.

I am six in this picture. And so are the other two kids.

And those are just the beginning of the horrifying photos I’ve found at my mom’s house. I made a top ten.

So, seriously, this extended-disco-remix-awkward phase lasted from the time I was about eight until I was probably 13. That was five solid years of absurd outfits, fatness, enormous hair and being a giantly tall woman-child. I’ve actually confirmed with the height chart on the garage door at my mom’s house that I was 5’3″ when I was nine. I also had glasses (briefly with bifocals) and a retainer at that point, quickly followed by braces and obesity.

Also, I’ve blurred everyone else’s faces. I love my family too much and I don’t think anyone in my Girl Scout troop really deserves that.

Without further ado:

10.

Oh, softball: the perfect sport for freak-tall children. I was a power hitter. That needed braces. Age eight. Softball season picture.

More Looney Toons. AND EXTREME FATNESS. Age 11. Family road trip to Canada, the absolute apex of my awkward phase.

And then there were overalls. Age 10. ~~The road trip where childhood cuteness went to die.~~ Oops. Scottsdale, AZ. Thanks, Ma$e.

JUST SO FAT AND SO MUCH HAIR. Is this why I didn’t have friends in middle school. Age 11. Same Canadian road trip.

So my mom doesn’t have curly hair and it took puberty for me to figure out this might look bad. Age 12. Birthday party.

Just another trip to Colonial Williamsburg with Girl Scouts. Where I’m wearing a homemade mob cap and am two heads taller than six other children my age. The reenactor can’t stop staring. Age 10.

So we’re getting to the point in these that I sort of actually have trouble looking at them. I use peripheral vision, like with a solar eclipse. You might want to try making a pinhole in a piece of black paper to view the rest.

4.

I’m glad I put the fanny pack under my belly. Age 12. On the way to the Girl Scout mall sleep-in.

Jennifer Garner, eat your heart out. I AM thirteen going on thirty. Age 11. Academy Awards themed birthday party

Umm. Yeah. This is magazine-sized also. Age nine. Softball season picture.

Where to start. Well. I’m taller than everyone. EVERYONE. The two people on the right are parents. And then there’s the cargo pants. And the braided pigtails. The round glasses. The braces. And that face.

Oh that face.

Look at that face.

Age 12? Maybe? Girl Scouts.

In conclusion, I hope you still want to be my friend.

This sort of feels like giving up.

kristenmpowell — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 04:18:22 +0000

I broke my foot almost six weeks ago now, and I’m moving back to Maryland for a little bit. I’m moving in with my mom, and it sort of feels like giving up, this going back to where I grew up thing. But actually Ellicott City is a really weird place, and it’s the kind of weird you don’t think is weird until you drag someone else into it.

(Michael Chabon grew up in the neighboring city, and had a lot to say about it, too)

I grew up in the kind of place where they just chained the doors of the theme park shut and built a shopping center on the parking lot. In front of the castle walls, letting the forest gobble it up like it’s Beauty and the Beast. The king just waves you in to the Blockbuster and the bagel place and the sports bar with the taxidermy bear in the doorway.

And then they took the storybook pieces away and put them at the petting zoo next to the high school.

I grew up where the back wall of some of the stores was low, rolling, East Coast mountain, carved away to make room for canal. And those stores sold three floors of fairy merchandise and coffee in mugs that smelled like burning tires and fudge and dreamcatchers and clothes with pockets to stash weed. You could walk down by the river and see the mill and the old railroad and an honest-to-goodness hobo camp (just past bridge with “Ozzy Rules!” and an inverted cross painted on it) and you could take off your shoes and wade in the river and come out covered in leeches.

You could visit your friend who worked at the railroad museum where she had to wear a wool costume even when the sticky mist came up from the canal and it was that gross, Mid-Atlantic too-hot.

We set ground sparklers off in the street in the summer and climbed fences in the winter to sled at the country club. We walked past mansions set back in the woods to get to each other’s houses and crossed bridges over creeks to get to school. We ate at diners and took pictures in antique shops pretending the couches were ours.

I wrote for a newspaper that had its offices in an old house. I took art classes in an old house, too. I worked at the mall, I did homework at Barnes & Noble and Starbucks. I sat on the lawn at Merriweather Post Pavillion, my ass soaked in beer and piss and God knows what else, saw Weezer and Dashboard Confessional and The Killers and Keane and Maroon 5 and Regina Spektor. Then I graduated on the stage there, paraded in a white gown, listened to someone sing “Good Riddance” to their guitar. Then I left, said I’d never come back. Just to visit: to cut off all my hair one summer while I work at the fabric store; to sleep after seeing Andrew Bird whistle in Baltimore.

I’m going to spend the next two months or so drinking milky coffee out of mugs that smell like burning tires and having my fortune told by a wizard like the one in Big. I’ll drive to the snowball stand and the beauty supply store and then I’ll never come back. Just to visit.

It Might Maybe be Alright, round 5

kristenmpowell — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 19:43:01 +0000

This is the fifth review in a mountingly disappointing attempt to find movies to relieve my post-adolescent angst about having to be a grown-up. Check the bottom for links to the rest.

Attempt 5: “Funny Ha Ha” (2002)

Basic plot: Marnie is in love with her best friend, Alex, but it’s not reciprocated. Also, she just finished college and is trying to figure out her life.

Actual plot: Meandering long-ass conversations stretch out an otherwise ten-minute story.

What I thought: This was genuinely terrible. There were like three good moments in the movie, tops. One of them was the lap-sitter scene, which is pictured above. It was with an extremely minor character, who would have been more interesting to follow than basically everyone else they did follow. All the dialogue sounded like an after-school special and it was shot terribly. The music was OK, but one of the guys from Bishop Allen, Christian Rudder played Alex, so it should have been. Rudder probably studied at the Michael Showalter school of acting, which is unfortunate, since they kind of look alike, and it made him seem horribly and terribly derivative. In fact, this movie would be a 100 times better and less derivative if it had been written by someone that understood absurdist comedy. Or writing. Because as it is, yuck.

“Yes, but how did it make you feel?”: At least my life isn’t that bad.

Character I most relate to: If I ever discover myself identifying with anyone in this movie, I will seriously consider entering a convent.

What I learned: I better figure my life out before college ends. And/or I should start habit shopping now.

Rating: 0.5/5

Next up: “Metropolitan”
Previously: “Reality Bites”
Also: “Slacker”
And: “Kicking and Screaming”
More: “The Last Days of Disco”

It Might Maybe be Alright, round 4

kristenmpowell — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:35:20 +0000

This is the fourth review in a possibly endless (hopefully not) series describing my experiences with movies I have been led to believe might comfort me about the stresses of coming of age post-college. Check the bottom of the post for links to previous reviews.

Attempt 4: “The Last Days of Disco”(1998)

Basic plot: Two women who were sort of friends in college end up frenemies competing for love post-college on the cusp of the disco and yuppie-greed eras in New York.

Actual plot: I think that’s actually it, this time. The movie is about the last days of disco. And two women. And the sexual revolution. There are no particular complex sub-plots, but there are several things going on at once. Like the last days of disco. And the sexual revolution.

What I thought: Despite how simple I’ve made it sound, the movie is actually pretty complex. The characterization is really subtle and kind of beautiful, actually, though I spent the first half of the movie hating one group of people, and the second half hating just about everyone else. At the beginning, it takes itself too seriously, but I’m starting to feel like all these movies have this disaffected tone that has uneven results. “The Last Days of Disco” in particular suffers from this problem. I kind of want to punch Chloe Sevigny in the face constantly, but that might not even have to do with the character she’s playing (Although, hey, don’t bad-mouth Stan Lee, OK?)

About three quarters of the way through, there’s an argument about the social implications of “Lady and the Tramp” after which I finally felt like I was in on the joke. And then I was deliriously happy during an argument about identity politics and yuppie-dom. Aside from that, the movie is pretty cliche, and, again, the characterization was definitely the best part. Also, Chris Eigeman, who I forgot to mention was in “Kicking and Screaming,” and whom I secretly love, plays the same character he always does, so I was pleased with that. I have a lot to say about this one because it was kind of a mess. I’m eager to see if director/writer Whit Stillman‘s previous foray into post-college drama, “Metropolitan,” will be better.

“Yes, but how did it make you feel?”: Die, yuppie scum. I was disappointed because I felt like this had virtually nothing to do with becoming an adult after college, and mostly had to do with the tail end of the sexual revolution. All the male characters were basically the same person, except they all hate each other and have slight variations in virtue level, which seem to be directly correlated with their careers. Honestly, it is pretty boring. Seeing Dr. Wilson cut a rug was pretty priceless. (No, literally, this one is was free on Hulu and Fancast as well.)

Character I most relate to: Basically no one. Holly? Dan? The guy in the tin man suit?

What I learned: I super hate disco. And Chloe Sevigny.

Rating: 2/5

Next up: “Funny Ha Ha”
Previously: “Reality Bites”
Also: “Slacker”
And: “Kicking and Screaming”

It Might Maybe be Alright, round 3

kristenmpowell — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 16:30:34 +0000

This is the third review in a series about my attempts to identify and find comfort in coming-of-age movies skewed toward post-college life. The first is here and the second is here.

Attempt 3: “Kicking and Screaming”(1995)

Basic plot: The first 7 or 8 months post-college of the “Hawks,” structured mostly by the markers of a college semester.

Actual plot: Like “Reality Bites,” there’s a really strong undercurrent of love story, between Grover and Jane, in this ensemble tale. But this one works a lot better. It’s also about not becoming a “Chet,” “Kicking and Screaming’s” answer to Matthew McConaughey in “Dazed and Confused.” But less creepy and more erudite.

What I thought: This is probably only second in quotability to “Heathers”, one of my all-time favorite movies. The flashback scenes are a little rough, but it’s really well constructed. All of the characters were likable and undeniably human. Also, single most well-dressed group of guys in the ’90s, excluding Skippy.

“Yes, but how did it make you feel?”: Like dragging your feet is OK. But that moving on is also OK. Again, really good narrative arc. I felt like I got “something” out of it. Not quite that Lou Pucci running through the streets moment, but the opposite in a really nice way. Like Chet says, “How do you make God laugh? By making a plan.”

Character I most relate to: A combination of Grover and Kate. And also Max and some Jane, and a even a little Miami. Very little Miami though.

What I learned: That there is life after college no matter how long it takes you to get there.

Rating: 4.5/5

Next up: “The Last Days of Disco”
Previously: “Reality Bites”
Also: “Slacker”

It Might Maybe be Alright, round 2

kristenmpowell — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:30:29 +0000

This is the second review in a series about my search for a movie to replace the heartening teen classics of yore with a more suitable coming-of-age subgenre. You can see the first here.

Attempt 2: “Slacker”(1991)

Basic plot: From morning to morning again in Austin, Texas.

Actual plot: Well there really isn’t one. It’s Richard Linklater’s stream-of-consciousness extravaganza. Pay really close attention to the monologue at the beginning. Ultimately, it’s about different theories of living.

What I thought: This actually spans the gamut of age groups, but as far as a cohesive treatise on Real Life, it’s pretty applicable. The way I felt about this film can be summed up in three words: Madonna pap smear. That is to say I’m still a little foggy (ha!). I definitely feel like I need to watch it again, which you can do for free right now, by the way, on Hulu and Fancast.

“Yes, but how did it make you feel?”: Really confused. The film is pretty nihilstic, but it’s definitely also what you make of it. I somewhat hated the ending. As a whole it mostly made me feel like no one ever has “it” figured out. I guess that could be comforting. It was also unsettling though.

Character I most relate to: Either the Dairy Queen photographer or the anarchist’s daughter. Both of whom are actually really minor, passive roles. I think that’s how this movie made me feel about my role in the world.

What I learned: To stop worrying. To go where the night leads. I sound like a commercial for light beer, but that seems to be what I got out of it.

Rating: 3.5/5 (It made me a little to sad. Also “Dazed and Confused” hit a lot of the same points a lot better.)

Next up: “Kicking and Screaming”

It Might Maybe be Alright, round 1

kristenmpowell — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:07:48 +0000

So I have this problem where I always start to panic when other people get to move on and I don’t. Since it is now the end of the summer between my junior and senior years, I’ve obviously hit full-panic mode. I used to cope by watching feel-good classics like “Thumbsucker” and “Ghost World” where life begins after high school. Well, that’s a problem now, isn’t it?

So it has been my goal for the past couple weeks to find some replacements for these movies. Below is my first review of a hopeful for such a film.

If anyone knows a movie where, say, Lou Pucci goes running through the streets somewhere POST-college, let me know.

Attempt 1: “Reality Bites”(1994)

Basic plot: Four recent college grads (no, seriously, it starts at graduation) make their first stab at Real Life in Houston.

Actual plot: Love story between Winona Rider’s and Ethan Hawke’s characters set against the backdrop of instability of post-college and also Gen X angst.

What I thought: Man, I miss the ’90s. I also missed what happened to Janeane Garofalo’s character. It really sucks to set up an ensemble cast and then not follow through. I had such high hopes for figuring out my future vicariously through her. However, it basically had the exact plot structure I was looking for in this kind of movie and it didn’t end too depressingly.

Also, Houston circa 1994 is exactly like D.C. circa now.

“Yes, but how did it make you feel?”: Actually, pretty good. I’m concerned that I went for the most promising title on my list first, and the film’s mumblecore cousins will only serve to disappoint in comparison.

::EDIT:: adding two more evaluations

Character I most relate to: Doubtlessly Janeane Garofalo

What I learned:: You know, I don’t think I learned anything. But I think that might be why I liked it; it made me feel like I can’t prepare myself any better than I am.

Rating: 4/5 (I’m being optimistic here and hoping something else will score higher.)

Next up: “Slacker”