Author: mike

Movies – October 09

*** The Wicker Man (1973)
**** Coraline

The 1973 Wicker Man should not be confused with the recent Nicolas Cage remake, which by all accounts is horrendous. This one was good. It’s a little off-putting at first, at least if you don’t like weird hippy pagan musicals, but on the other hand there’s some boobs and after a while the musical stuff goes by the wayside as righteous christian policeman edward woodward battles against the depraved pagan hippies. The ending is kinda sweet.

I can’t imagine Coraline being anything other than terrifying for a child, but that aside we thought it was great. It will be a long time before we let NLP see it, I think.

Books – September 09

**** Patrick O’Brian – Master and Commander
**** Patrick O’Brian – Post Captain
*** David Foster Wallace – Girl with Curious Hair

Yes, I’ve started rereading the Aubrey books. They’re just as good the second time, plus the additional pleasure of seeing previews of future people and events (oh look! it’s Pullings! etc).

Girl with Curious Hair is an interesting read for the DFWophile. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, but I feel like it’s still a little unformed. I consider his peak to be “A Supposedly Fun Thing…” and “Infinite Jest” and you can see him here playing with some of the things that would appear in those (e.g. reader annoyance, his very particular ways of rendering dialogue, certain obsessions with media, consumption, etc) but not doing it quite as well. The book’s novella “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” is a particular example of this. It is very DFWian in its way, but ultimately doesn’t really work (for me anyway) — it gets to seem a bit boring and annoying and pointless and sometimes tediously metafictional. In my opinion, DFW mastered these kinds of things in his best writing, but he was always in danger of falling into one or another of these traps, even later on. In Girl with Curious Hair, you see him working out some of his techniques, and you get a flavor of his later mastery, but with a lot of fail.

The book did however lead me to come across this enlightening insight into DFW, found here:

It wasn’t until Marshall Boswell’s Understanding David Foster Wallace was released did any critical work begin to focus upon the importance of Westward to DFW’s direction. On pages 16 and 17 of his publication, Boswell revealed that DFW had used the phrase ‘cynicism and naivete’ in Westward, in his essay E Unibus Pluram, and in Infinite Jest. Boswell wrote that Wallace ‘does not merely join cynicism and naivete: rather, he employs cynicism – here figured as sophisticated self-reflexive irony – to recover a learned form of heartfelt naivete, his work’s ultimate mode and what the work “really means,” a mode that Wallace equates with the “really human.” ‘

that rings true. There were some other good links there and here.

Books – August 09

The only thing I read in August was Infinite Jest and, as usual (this was my 5th or 6th reading), I am full of things to say about it about halfway through and then have nothing when I’m done. The problem is the book is too big for even any aspect of it to be summarized with some kind of blog post. My thinking always gets away from me until I’m left with a bunch of half-formed ideas that tail off into various tangents. I have about 3/4 of an essay around here somewhere about it from this time, which I will try to get into shape. But so anyway, I love IJ, I loved it as much this time as I do every time I read it.

State Lotteries Disgust Me

State-sponsored gambling disgusts both sides of my political personality. My cold, rational, libertarian side is completely offended by the idea of the state banning a commercial activity between consenting adults in order to have a monopoly over that activity and use it to raise money from the population. It just aggravates the offense that (1) the gambling ban is based on moralistic principles, which principles are then conveniently forgotten in the pursuit of lottery money; and (2) not only do we have the lottery, but my tax dollars go to finance ads encouraging people to gamble in them.

And then my warm, fuzzy, liberal side is absolutely disgusted by the idea that my tax dollars are going to ads to encourage people to gamble away their livelihoods via lies like “everyone deserves a bonus! daily scratch is the best way to get a bonus!” (yes, that’s more or less a quote from a radio ad). Okay, if people want to go out and piss away money they can’t really afford gambling, it is their right to do so, but do my taxes have to be used to entice them to do it? And does my very own government have to be the agent of their corruption?

Continue reading “State Lotteries Disgust Me” →

Hungarian Rhapsody

Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody #2 is one of my favorite pieces (me and everyone else). I was reading about it last week and listening to some performances, including Horowitz (I like what he does starting at about 4:10) and Jung Lin (check out the section starting around 5:00). I also came across a reference to Friz Freleng’s Rhapsody in Rivets, a cartoon that sets the construction of the “umpire” state building to the melody, which I had to watch. Hungarian Rhapsody might be the #1 piece of classical music for cartoons, because Rhapsody in Rivets led me to (in chronological order), Mickey Mouse, an orchestra of animals, Bugs Bunny and a mouse, and Tom and Jerry — all of them playing Hungarian Rhapsody, and all sharing similar gags. Rhapsody in Rivets has some great visual interpretations of the music, like the guy running up and down the ladder (4:20, 4:50), the diggers (4:10), the hammerers (5:20), and the bricklayers (5:30, 6:15). The Mickey Mouse cartoon probably tops the list for surrealism, when the piano and stool boot Mickey off the stage and the piano starts playing itself with its front legs while the stool dances (starting around 1:35). And then of course there’s Victor Borge‘s take, which is sort of like a Tom and Jerry cartoon but with real people.

Not a good sign

Skimming my spam filter this morning, I found a fundraising email from Michael Steele of the GOP, addressed to my old UW address — the one which is solely a spam target these days. The GOP buying email lists from spammers does not seem like a good sign for them. Good luck with that, fellas.

Movies – September 09

*** OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies
*** Dark City

Kind of a slow month for movies. OSS 117 wasn’t at all what I expected — a lot more slapstick and silly than the sort of cool spy parody I was expecting. It was pretty funny in places, not great. E found it uninteresting.

Dark City was about as I remembered — interesting and with lots of good bits but on a grander scale kind of silly. As I so often say in my reviews, the setup and the first hour of running around and figuring out what was going on was pretty good, but the working out of the plot kind of meh. And good ol pre-24 Kiefer Sutherland with his various overacted tics was just sort of odd.

Movies – August 09

**** The Wire, Seasons 4-5
* Jubilee
*** I’m Alan Partridge, Season 1, ep1-3

I don’t really know what to say about The Wire. It’s as good as everyone says. I was that into the idea of it, but got hooked about ten minutes into the first episode and was hooked all the way through the last episode of the last season. So if you haven’t seen it, I’d say just go watch it.

E got Jubilee because she thought it was a different half-remembered movie she’s always wanted to see. It wasn’t. Instead it was some awful Derek Jarman thing (and all that that implies). We watched a little bit and fast-forwarded a bit and then just gave up.

I like Steve Coogan and I thought Alan Partridge was pretty funny (though it contains a lot of the discomfort humor that I find so discomforting) but after watching about three episodes I felt like I’d gotten my fill.

Movies – July 09

**** The Wire, Season 3
*** Zero Effect
* Bottle Shock
*** Up the Yangtze

The Wire is still great. Season 3 brings in politics more, but also explores Bunny Colvin’s radical solution to the drug problem in the western and features his awesome paper bag speech. As a sometime libertarian, I really got into that storyline, and thought they worked out the implications, good and bad, in a meaningful way.

Zero effect was pretty good. I had no expectations (can’t remember how it got on my queue), and it turned out to be some good entertainment.

We were so thoroughly uninterested in the people we met in the first 20-30 minutes of Bottle Shock that we just ejected it and sent it back to Netflix. Sorry, Alan Rickman, I promise to watch you in something better soon.

We missed Up the Yangtze, a documentary about the effects of China’s three gorges dam on people living in the area, at SIFF last year and were looking forward to renting it. It starts off slowly but gradually picks up and becomes a fascinating and understated story. It follows a girl whose family’s house will be covered (like many’s) by the new lake created by the dam. Her family sends her to do menial work on a riverboat to support herself and her family, instead of going to school as she wants. The contrast between her rural family’s life and that onboard the riverboat (both among the more modernized young people working there and the rich tourists coming through) is staggering, and underlined by the images of the new lake slowly consuming the family house.

Mobile Chowfest

Seattle magazine organized a mobile chowdown for this past Saturday, featuring some of Seattle’s best food trucks. We met up with Cnote for it but it was ridiculously overattended. Long lines for everything, so we said screw this and wandered around magnolia until we ended up at Niko’s Gyros. It was okay, but I wouldn’t go out of my way for it. Not sure about Yelp’s 4-star average. Anyway, so mobile chowfest, nice idea but jeez.