Books, August 2010

*** Denise Mina – Deception
*** Willa Cather – Death Comes for the Archbishop

Deception is a sort of thriller/mystery, with a sometimes unlikeable and pathetic narrator, Lachlan. His wife has been convicted of murder, and as he tries to find evidence to exonerate her, he instead learns more and more about the deceptions that underlay his marriage. In the end, the book is more a psychological portrait, of Lachlan and of the relationship of these two people. I found it interesting for its story and characters, but also to the extent that anyone who’s been in a relationship can identify somewhat with what goes wrong in this one. Anyway, this was my first Denise Mina book, and though it’s apparently nontypical, I’m looking forward to reading more.

I don’t feel like I really “got” Death Comes for the Archbishop. It was good, and I found the character of Latour fairly interesting, but on the whole I didn’t find the book that compelling. I felt like there was a certain amount of distance maintained between the reader and the characters, partly because large portions of their lives were sort of skipped over. For example, for much of the book Latour wants to build a cathedral, and it seems like it may become part of his big life’s work, a major focus of the book. But then the book skips ahead a bit, the cathedral is casually mentioned as having been completed, and that’s the last we hear. I also kept wondering why Willa Cather wanted to tell the story of this guy and what I the reader was supposed to get out of it. Of course, sometimes one wants to tell the story of an ordinary person, but in most books I think there’s some core character trait or story that the author feels compelled to draw out and present to readers. In this book I kept wondering — why does Cather care, and why should I?

Time

Time, a new song, with original lyrics, a rarity for me. The lyrics and music were heavily inspired by early New Order — the opening line is direct from “Denial”: “here I am in a house full of doors and no exits”, one of my favorite lines ever) and it just grew from there. It’s also by far my shortest song ever, at a radio-friendly 3:32. Writing lyrics was fun. In the past I’ve had trouble with that, tending to be too literal, resulting in awkward, heavy lyrics. This time I worried less about telling a coherent story and went with things that sounded like they fit the mood, and I think ended up with something that flows better and ended up meaning something after all.

Nora phrases

Nora’s saying way too much stuff to try and track it all any more, but here are some of her phrases.

Nona dood it! or Nona! or self!, all various ways of saying “I want to do it, not you” and often accompanied by crabs. And yes, she calls herself “Nona” and she says “dood” for “do”, which we all do now. E actually told someone at work “no, YOU dood it” when asked to do something one day.

Get out and get up. Get out is what she says in the morning when she wants out of her crib, but also one of her ways of saying she’s tired of being inside and wants to go on an outing. Also, outside! shoes on! Get out also means “get out of my chair I want to read books” (often preceded by self!). Get up is for when you’re comfortable sitting or lying down and Nora wants to go outside.

Peas (please). Rarely offered without prompting, but if she makes a demand and you say “what do you say?” or “what’s the magic word?” she’ll happily repeat the demand with peas on the end.

Beep-beep slide. Specifically refers to playing with her cars where she rolls them down a ramp (or has you dood it), but it’s usually the first thing she says once she’s out of the crib and wants to play in general.

Butt-butt. Exactly what it sounds like. Butts are funny.

Big bite. “I don’t want my food in little pieces, I want a big piece I can gnaw on.” Watching a toddler voraciously eat an entire peach is hilarious.

Come with me, which she says when she wants to come with you.

Busty out! When she wants to be busted out of her high chair or booster seat. Also Dumpy out!, when she dumps all her toys out of her toy box. She likes to narrate what she’s doing as she does it.

Movies, June 2010

**** Enchanted April
** Watchmen
*** 9
** Picnic
*** District 9
*** Out of Sight
** The Petrified Forest

I’ve always loved Enchanted April, and not only because it features Polly Walker wearing my favorite haircut. It’s just charming. I have to say that on watching it again after many years (though I reread it not too long ago), it was a little stranger and more off-kilter than I’d remembered. But that’s okay, it works.

Watchmen was fine. Watchable but ultimately forgettable, kind of a disappointment for such a good book.

9 was enjoyable — good animation, some compelling characters, and an interesting world for them to wander around in — but overall it didn’t quite come together for me. The story and some of the characters are fairly cliched, a lot of the details sort of sketched in, as though the director is really more interested in creating a mood and some interesting visual moments than in telling a story.

District 9 was also successful in some ways and not in others. My favorite things about it were first, the way the aliens and everything about them was made so matter-of-fact and quotidian, just another fact of life one has to deal with, and second, the way Wikus goes from being a total arrogant asshole to being an interesting character. His assholeness is kind of inherent in his sort of clueless arrogance, and in truth he doesn’t really stop being an asshole in that sense, but he turns out to have some reserves of decency. He’s a great character, and must have been fun to play.

Picnic was crazy melodrama. It was way over the top, sometimes amusingly — like the amount of screen time given to William Holden walks around shirtless while women ogle him, or the Rosalind Russell’s incredible bitchiness — but overall it just didn’t work for me (but then, I don’t really enjoy campy or ironically bad melodrama). The big mystery to me is why this movie isn’t more popular as a camp classic.

Out of Sight was pretty good. I’ve long heard of it as a good movie (or as a surprisingly good movie, given it’s Hollywood-cliche sort of story and casting), and it was surprisingly good for the basically empty entertainment that it is. Both George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez are appealing actors when they’re doing it well, and they do it well here, creating an appealing chemistry between their characters.

Petrified Forest was not bad but didn’t really work for me. I found the writing and acting too mannered, too self-conscious. It was a real old-fashioned melodrama, with conversations that were more the exchange of poetic monologues than anything like real dialogue between real people. It’s easy enough to see why Humphrey Bogart’s doomed, cynical gangster got so much attention, but in retrospect it’s almost a caricature of many of his later roles. His gangster, Bette Davis’s innocent girl yearning for freedom, and Leslie Howard’s jaded wanderer are all archetypes more than 3d characters, and while all three played them pretty well, I had trouble believing in them.

Meatastrophe

Last weekend, we had a situation. Mistakes were made.1 See, we had decided to share a quarter of a cow with a couple of other parties,2 which was, of course, occupying our packed downstairs freezer. At some point, I tried to fit some stuff in there, rearranged a bit, and (thought I) closed the door. At a later time, the door turned out to be open. Luckily, only a little of the meat3 had thawed beyond recovery. While we couldn’t refreeze the rest, we could salvage it — all we had to do was cook it all. So for the next five days or so, we had steak every night, along with delicious fruit cobbler4, while we also cooked and then froze a 10 lb brisket, a 6 lb roast, and an appalling number of meatballs.

As we stand today, the meatballs have been cooked and frozen, half the brisket was turned into corned beef yesterday, the other half was prepared and frozen to this recipe, and half of the roast went to failed carnitas while the other half went to a successful braise (which was just the carnitas recipe without the burning-to-a-cinder step). All in all, a reasonable recovery from a dumb mistake. More or less.

—–
1 By me. E appreciates me being clear about this.
2 For those keeping score at home, this works out to 1/12th of a cow in our freezer. It was about 40 lbs all told, which cost us somewhere around $130. A good deal, even if a lot of it was ground chuck.
3 Just some of that ground chuck, which frankly we won’t miss that much, certainly not as much as we would have missed the New York steaks.
4 From the frozen not-at-all-inexpensive fresh organic fruit E had painstakingly gathered, she would like me to mention.

Books, June 2010

**** Philip K. Dick – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
** Arthur C. Clarke – 2001: A Space Odyssey
*** Dashiell Hammett – The Glass Key

The similarities between “Do Androids Dream…” and “Bladerunner” are enough to recognize one as an adaptation of the other, but otherwise they are so different as to make the comparison meaningless, I think. Androids is a good book; Bladerunner is a good movie. But even though the basics of the story are the same, the details are so different and the overall emphasis is so different that it seems meaningless to consider them together and ask, for example, which one is better. I’ll leave it at that.

On the other hand, I was under the impression that 2001 was adapted from the book, but it turns out, I guess, to be the other way around, or at least that they were developed together. The book therefore follows the movie pretty closely, but elaborates on some things that are easy to do in books but not in movies (i.e. the inner thoughts of pre-homo-sapiens apes). It made for an interesting read, and made some aspects of the story clearer and more explicit, but I’m not sure it added much to the story overall. For example, in the movie I think it’s unclear how much affect the monolith actually has on human evolution; I’d always interpreted it as giving a nudge. In the book, however, the thing basically creates the human race, rather than giving a nudge. The entire mythos that involves the hyper-intelligent race of pan-dimensional beings or whatever is a little too explicit and leaves humanity with not enough self-development to be very satisfying. A bit of mystery was better.

I had thought I’d read every Dashiell Hammett, and I’ve actually owned The Glass Key for a while. But either I never got around to reading it, or I did and then forgot it entirely, because it did not ring a bell. I think I’d never read it, but it’s not impossible I just forgot, because I didn’t find it that memorable as Hammett stories go. But then, I think the continental op is his best stuff, and most of the rest pales in comparison.

Movies, May 2010

** Longitude
** The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Not many movies this month. Longitude was a film adaptation of a book I’d had mixed feelings about in March (liked the story, was pretty iffy on the author’s take on it). The movie was better, perhaps because it had Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon in it. We did get more focus on the principal characters and the amazing clocks, but it was still a little heavy-handed on the whole melodrama of who’s trying to sabotage whose efforts etc. In the end, I enjoyed it much more than the book and felt more satisfied with what I’d seen of Harrison and Gould and of Harrison’s clocks.

The imaginarium was kind of a hot mess of a movie, like most Gilliam efforts. Heath Ledger’s last, with Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell filling in as alternate versions of him to finish after he died. The various-people-playing-Heath-Ledger thing worked fairly well, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me that it wasn’t the original intention if Ledger hadn’t died. That said, it’s not that often that you see something strange and nonsensical in a Gilliam movie and think to yourself “that’s too strange for Gilliam to have intended it that way.” Overall the movie was… interesting. Not really sure what the point was supposed to be, and at the end I wasn’t really sure what I’d just seen, and mostly not in a way that involved wanting to go back and see it again. Not that I didn’t enjoy it while it was going on, but it didn’t make a lasting impression.

Books, May 2010

*** Shan Sa – The Girl who Played Go
**** David Wingrove – The Broken Wheel
*** David Wingrove – The White Mountain
** Charlotte Bronte – Shirley

The girl who played go is set in China, during the Japanese conquests of the 1930s. It provides a good view into life in that place and time. I didn’t feel that it so much followed a clear story as much as established a mood/emotion or took a snapshot of a time and some people — it was almost more poetic than novelistic in its overall impression. I enjoyed it, though didn’t get as into the details of the story as when I read Shan Sa’s “Empress” in April.

These are books 2 and 3 (of 9, I think) of Wingrove’s “Chung Kuo” series, set in a future where the world has basically become a giant city housing billions of people and Chinese culture has conquered all. I liked these two as much as the first book, and look forward to continuing the series.

Shirley was kind of an odd book. The blurb and first few chapters make you think it is going to focus primarily on the political/economic unrest of the time, when the gradual industrialization of mills in northern England was putting workers out of jobs and stirring up riots and unrest. But then it seems to become a sort of cliche and rather dull love story. But then the title character comes along (halfway through the book?) and suddenly you think it’s going to be very interesting after all. Shirley, though unquestionably feminine personally, has the swagger of a young nobleman, thanks to a father who’d wished for sons and raised her almost as one and to having inherited the estate and title. The relationship that develops in this part of the book between the sweet and innocent Caroline and the dashing Shirley is one of the best I’ve read in a long time, and I was hoping Bronte would go the unconventional route and have them end up together. Of course, I didn’t think they would be avowed lesbians or anything, but given the disappointments of the book’s romantic stories at that point, it was conceivable that they’d settle down together in a way that would have been wonderful. Alas, the conventional had to creep back in and the book ends as many do, with a couple of weddings. The men involved are not at all bad characters, but the love story happy endings seem honestly fairly cobbled together. The Shirley/Caroline ending would have been much better. I almost put the book down in boredom sometime during the early dull romance part of the book, but I can recommend sticking through that part to enjoy the middle and, to a lesser degree, the end. The politics and economics that form the background, as well, were interesting to read about.

Movies, April 2010

** Lost, Season 2
*** District 9
*** Der Baader Meinhof Komplex

I enjoyed the first season of Lost pretty well, even while aware that it was a fairly silly and manipulative soap opera. Parts of season were still good, but I started to get tired of it, especially the way the characters just kept acting unrealistically stupid (let’s get the guns and run into the jungle again! let’s have the only doctor constantly put his own life at risk without ever training anyone else in basic first aid!). What kept me watching in the first season was the promise of having an interesting and mysterious world gradually pieced together bit by bit, but it started to become clear in the second season that a lot of things were just made up as they went along and that many questions would never be answered. And so I decided to stop there. Then, to satisfy my curiosity, I skimmed through the episode descriptions for season 3 and figured I’d made the right call — it seemed chock full of yet more new mysteries, full of pointless running into the jungle with guns, and not at all full of answers for anything. Having since dipped into the rest of the story and actually watched the series finale with friends — I don’t really feel like I missed anything, and after a few days of speculation I’ve almost completely forgotten about the show already.

District 9 was pretty great. I had no real idea where they were going to take the story, beyond knowing the basic premise, and it just went some really interesting places. Also, I liked the progression Wikus’s character follows from clueless asshole to interesting guy. Lots of good little details too.

Baader meinhof was interesting and compelling to watch, and the first half or so especially gave a great look at what the mood was like at that time in Germany. But as it goes more into the breakdown of the group and their time in prison, the new unexplained members of the group multiply, it is hard to follow what they are all doing or who relates to what, and some of it just gets annoying and dull. Overall a good movie, but I think it tried to cover too much and perhaps needed to focus a little more. Sure, history doesn’t make neat stories, but it’s good to pick and choose what you want to tell.

Books, April 2010

**** Patrick O’Brian – The Fortune of War
** A. J. Jacobs – The Year of Living Biblically
*** Shan Sa – Empress
*** Jane Austen – Sense and Sensibility
*** Georges Simenon – A Man’s Head

These reviews are way overdue by now, so let’s just get it done. Another good O’Brian book, as usual. Of course a good Jane Austen; I love Jane Austen.

The year of living biblically was amusing in some of its details but overall sort of rambling and eventually annoying. One thing that really bothered me is that he waits until about halfway through the book to reveal that he is seriously OCD (like compelled to touch things a certain number of times OCD, not like when people “I’m so OCD” and just mean that they wash their hands regularly), which I mean kind of sheds some light on the whole “following lots and lots of very picky rules” aspect of following the bible for a year. It just felt like cheating to save it for a mid-book reveal. And then I just could not stop thinking about how annoying the whole thing must have been for his wife. Poor woman. Finally, it just feels like he sort of does all this stuff and then at the end, no big breakthrough. He learns a few things, has some laughs, maybe gets a little religion, but in the end it just feels like he did a big stunt, wrote his book, and that’s that.

Empress was a reimagination of the life of China’s Empress Wu, who rose to become empress in the 7th century, told as a personal memoir. In history, she is mostly viewed as a power-mad dictator, willing to do anything to gain and hold power, but here we get her side of the story. The result is a fascinating book, with a compelling central character and lots of interesting detail about life in 7th century China.

I’ve read one or two other Simenon books, but long ago. This one was pretty good, interesting enough to want to read through quickly, though fairly throwaway once I was done. I will probably try some of his other books as well.