If you stop by this page wondering why it's not updated often, it's not that I don't buy records and CDs. In fact it's the opposite. I buy, burn, copy, and devour music non-stop, so I'm stuck as to what I should write on. I don't have the time to write on everything, so I'm thinking maybe I should just write on what I purchase. Just a thought.
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August 30, 2004
Must rethink this...
August 29, 2004
Los Angeles Trip
Jessica had the day free, so we made an impromptu trip to Los Angeles. First stop, IKEA, to buy a mattress for the new Lillehammer bed we got a few weeks ago. The bed replaced this fall-apart-voodoo-kenny futon bed we've been sleeping on for ages, the joints of which had fallen out. Sleeping on this old bed sounded like the creaky deck of the Flying Dutchman. So first I bought the frame, and for a stopgap measure, we had been using the old futon mattress. Now that at last is gone and our bed is dead comfortable. Like the Poang chair, just lying on it for a few seconds sucks the energy out of you.
Next stop: the Chinese mall off of Del Mar down in San Gabriel. Here we saw many ladies wearing these ridiculous sun-visors, called the Sunee, or something like that. Imagine a plastic sun visor, six inches long, and with the ability to tilt downward and cover the face. Hey, ladies, excuse me. This doesn't look cool, it looks like you are wearing a welder's mask. I tried to get a photo while we were there, but no luck. It seems like when it comes to rich Chinese women, irony and taste are X, the unknown value.
We didn't come to see masks, we came to eat Dim Sum, which we did, at Sam Woo's Seafood, a regular hangout of ours when we're in the area.
Then a trip to Pasadena and the Norton Simon Museum. The latest exhibit was Rajput Paintings from the Ramesh and Urmil Kapoor Collection, amazing Indian paintings of scenes from epic poems like the Bhagavatapurana. All the paintings were watercolors and about the size of a 8x10 piece of paper. But what detail! You really needed a magnifying glass to appreciate it all. Neither the exhibition walls, nor the accompanying book (from what I could see) explained how these were created. The brushes must have been like those modelers use, two hairs thick. We were disappointed to see that, though the museum store sold to-scale digital prints of some of these, the quality was dreadful.
Also on display was some prints by Ynez Johnston, which the curator wanted to juxtapose with the Rajput paintings nextdoor. Listen to this malarkey: "Johnston's unique style is characterized by recurring figures and shapes derived from both Eastern and Western cultures and ancient and modern times. As with miniature Rajput paintings, illuminated manuscripts and Chinese scrolls, Johnston's art is intended for intimate viewing and affords an endless voyage of discovery."
Load of old blunt pencil scrawls to me. Talk about suffering by comparison.
Back in Santa Barbara, we went into Montecito and ate at the Italian restaurant VaiVai. Good pizza. In a rare celebrity sighting for me, Michael Richards ("Seinfeld"'s Kramer) sat at the table next to us along with who I took to be his daughter.
August 23, 2004
Bo Knows Painting
Sunday was a day of lasts. It was last day at the S.B. Museum of Art to catch the Bo Bartlett exhibition, which I wanted to see again after a brief viewing a month ago. Bartlett is one of the latest in the new traditionalist (I'm sure there's some better name) school of American painting. He paints in oil, on big canvases, and depicts modern Americans in sometimes surreal settings that reference religious paintings of the old masters. He's modern, but the activities in his paintings seem timeless (there are no city scenes, no televisions, no consumer culture). His painting "Homecoming" (see above) shows a post-game bonfire at some high school stadium, but the activity seems like ancient ritual. A coach and a parent stand nearby, pointing off into the distance, discussing...what? The horizon is fields and water. Where are we? There are echoes of Hopper here, as well as Eakins. All his work has a great enigmatic quality to it, and they are very open texts. You bring what you want to them. His use of color is also astonishing, but the computer screen doesn't do it justice.
Also in its last day was Contemporary Arts Forum's "Videodrome" show, a daily program of recent video art. I hadn't been too lucky the days that I went in over the last month. Some video art is just atrocious--after patriotism, it is the last refuge of scoundrels. Only these scoundrels have DV cams and a few AfterEffects filters. Holly Mackay, whose title at CAF I've forgotten, but high on the ladder, invited me over for a final "best of" screening. Apart from a groovy short from Marco Brambilla called "Wall of Death" (various angles on a centrifugal stunt motorbike rider, looking like an old kinetoscope), I loved the collaborative shorts by Christoph Giradet and Matthias Muller (most recently known for their Hitchcock cutups). "Manual" cut together all these cutaway shots of scientific equipment, speakers, tape machines, and so on, from various 1950's Technicolor films and created an alienating universe of control, while a disembodied female voice tries to communicate something about memory and time. I also liked "Scratch," a similar set-up, this time using cutaway shots of record players from Hollywood films, looped like a runout groove. Both films were also good at fetishizing old technology. Holly and I agreed that we've definitely lost something when all machines lost dials and switches. Everything is run by a computer and a mouse these days.
Strangely enough, Muller's own solo video work was dull, yet you could see what he brought to their collaboration (ideas of isolation and alienation).
August 22, 2004
While you are waiting...
In between feature movies (and Jessica just brought back a motherlode of them from Shanghai), we are currently stuck into the DVD box of The Sopranos, Season One. Yes, we're finally getting around to watching it. Hey, don't worry, we had never seen Sex and the City until earlier this year, and through the magic of DVD box sets, we've caught up (only the second half of Season Six to go). I prefer it this way too.
Pop and Politics don't mix...yeah, right.
A site with analysis of television, music, and film, and how it affects our place in this world (while all around tell you it doesn't, except when it pleases them), PopPolitics.com is back up after a hiatus of sorts. Glad to see it has a blog and not just a series of articles. Hours of good reading here, folks.
August 21, 2004
Late August, Early September
Dir: Olivier Assayas
1998
Late Autumn, Early September was such a realist followup to Olivier Assayas's oddball and entrancing Irma Vep, that it took me this long to getting round to watching it. But it's has Irma Vep's energy and comes alive onscreen in much the same way, that I realized that the director can handle both styles with aplomb. And for those who yearned for the experimentalism of Irma Vep, check out Demonlover.
Shot in grainy Super 16mm on handhelds, the film is a swirl of action and character, revolving around Adrien, a writer (Francois Cluzet), Gabrielle (Mathieu Amalric), his fan and sometimes assistant, Anne (Virginie Ledoyen), Gabrielle's current lover, and Jenny (Jeanne Balibar), his former. Assayas drops in and out of the their lives over a period of about a year, with an elliptical method that makes us put together what's happened in between. Adrien develops a serious illness but recovers, Gabrielle can't seem to let Anne fully into his life, friends come together to help Adrian, and other events that don't sound much on the page, but are fascinating to watch unfold. While Adrien sets the tone in an exchange on a train with Gabrielle ("I just turned 40 and I seem to be nowhere.") it's everybody who's in transition, not quite rich, not quite poor, not fully in or out of love.
Late Autumn really points out how, when it comes to relationships, the French are on a different planet than the New Puritans. After Anne disappears from Gabrielle's life for a while, she next see her enjoying a three-way between her workmate and an unknown man. An American film would have shown this excess as evil and an example of how far Anne had fallen. But Assayas treats it like a light afternoon daydream, scored with airy music. Anne and her workmate then have a conversation about how she still loves Gabrielle but still needs to explore her wider sexual needs. It's all matter of fact. (By the way, Virginie Ledoyen is heart-stoppingly beautiful.)
Adrien keeps a young 15-year-old lover, the boyish Vera with her Jean Seberg-like hairdo. She's treated fairly, not as some sign of Adrian's prurience.
Lead actor Amalric has a frazzled intensity, and, like most of the cast, is very watchable and unpredictable. Nobody is cast into any type, and even though Jenny looks like she is going to be the "crazy ex," she turns out to be stable as well. Maybe it's me--maybe I've just been watching too much Hollywood.
Z
Dir: Costa-Gavras
1969
For some reason I have dim memories of trying to watch this in my early 20s and falling asleep. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Z is in fact a punchy political thriller with a deeply cynical ending. I would like to think this change is in part due to a certain political maturity (ha ha ha) on my part. Or perhaps I was just awake this time. Yves Montand plays an anti-war, anti-American/imperialist left-wing senator who is targeted for assassination by the militarist government. Though entirely in French, the film is based on the assassination in1963 of Grigorios Lambrakis, a professor of medicine at the University of Athens. The beginning of the film states "Any similarities between people living or dead is deliberate." The gloves are off.
Montand's character gets clubbed after a speaking engagement and later dies on the operating table. The protagonist role slowly shifts to the investigating judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who begins with a neutral assessment of events and then becomes convinced of a right-wing coverup in play. Fast-paced camera work (not to be confused with shaky, incomprehensible camera work) keeps the large cast of characters and their interactions clear as Trintignant's judge builds a case.
The portrait of the explosive politics of the late '60s resonates through to today, especially as we gear up towards the antagonism of the Republican Convention. Doesn't that angry mob look just like the GOP bullyboys brought down to Florida in 2000 to stop the vote? Hmmm.
The Tricky Cad is Dead
I was surprised to hear, apparently several months late, that collage artist extraordinaire Jess Collins (later just known as Jess) had died this year. Jess is not very well known but his Max Ernst-meets-Lichtenstein cut-up of Dick Tracy comics, entitled "Tricky Cad" was a major influence on me as a teenager. You can find very small reproductions of the work in Pop Art books, but I've never the seen the thing close-up or in a decent reproduction. Surely these pieces are worth a reissue or a Taschen book of some kind. The one retrospective he had in 1993 produced a book that is now going for something like $75. Yikes.
Last month I traveled to San Francisco (I'm still working on the photo diary where you can see my journey) and in SFMOMA there were several large-scale works by him. At the time, however, I didn't know that Jess and Jess Collins were the same. One work was something close to 4x5 feet and was a collage of black and white engravings that he had then drawn as a whole, organic work. It was "everything but the kitchen sink" collage of the first order.
Read 2Blowhard's own blog entry on Jess, which is where I found the news.
I later wrote LACMA, where a number of Tricky Cad pieces are part of the collection, but the curator says that due to the fragile, all paper and glue nature of the work, they are not on display. I was happy, though, with the speed in which the curator got back to me (two hours).
August 19, 2004
Imagining a post-Imperialist world
Tom Engelhardt answers Jonathan Schell
As Chalmers Johnson has, to my mind, effectively explained in his book The Sorrows of Empire, from 1945 on, the United States pursued an imperial policy based on the military base rather than the colony. We would set up our bases -- little Americas -- in other countries, get extraterritorial rights for our troops, and with our economic power at our backs and close ties with local elites, go about our global business. Iraq, it seems to me, represents a striking deviation from this path. It is the closest thing in our lifetimes to a straightforward colonial land-grab (whatever pretty words the neocons may have woven around it). And it is clearly failing, hence all the military and intelligence officials up in arms and angry indeed. A Kerry administration would undoubtedly try to return us to our older form of imperial creep. The question is: Could it do so? Or rather, has the world so changed in the brief but wrenching interim that imperial policy in any form will prove bankrupt?
August 18, 2004
Doing a Lynndie
Can I be outraged at Iraqi prisoner abuse while at the same time laugh mightily at cheeky Brits' reappropriation of Lynndie's pose? Why, yes.
By way of Boing Boing
We got shut down...
...but we got up again. Over the weekend, the tedmills.com domain got suspended because I hadn't supposedly paid my renewal fee from old providers onestop.net, who apparently still own the domain registration. Unlike my new hosts, www.ipower.web, onestop doesn't open on the weekends, so I had to wait a few days and then call Monday morning. Even that took a long time: three hours of being told things were being sorted out, then finally, after I called back the third time, I was told I would now have to wait a minimum of 16 hours for service to be switched back on. Why, nobody could tell me. But back we are. There should be some new photo essays coming soon, so please look for them, as I had a great trip to SF to tell you about and Jessica went to Shanghai, land of public spitting.
But it was just a boulevard of broken dreams...
"He thought he was the King of America
Where they pour Coca-Cola just like vintage wine
Now I try hard not to become hysterical
But I'm not sure if I'm laughing or crying
I wish that I could push a button
And talk in the past and not the present tense
And watch this hurting feeling disappear
Like it was common sense
It was a fine idea at the time
Now it's a brilliant mistake"
--Elvis Costello, 1985
How right he was...
August 13, 2004
Bend Sinister - Vladimir Nabokov
Time Reading Program, 1947
Not just the name of one of my favorite Fall albums, but Nabokov's first novel in English. I had only read one other Nabokov before this (Lolita, of course, in 1995) and reading Bend Sinister reminded me of his mastery of language. The novel follows the philosopher and instructor Krug, having just lost his wife to illness, and living with his precious son in a society that is slowly growing into a Soviet-style totalitarian state, run by none other than a former schoolmate from childhood they used to call the Toad. Obstinate, Krug believes his intellect and position will keep him from harm, even as friends and family are disappeared around him. By the time reality intrudes and his child is threatened, it is too late. The Soviet state (how familiar is this system after reading (some of) Solzhenitsyn!) is presented in all its banal but surreal glory, yet this is in no way a realist novel, as Krug disappears in a landscape of dreams, ideas, thoughts, as does the novel itself, with Nabokov's wordplay (in English, so incredibly developed) making a kaleidoscope of sentences. The supporting characters often seem to be half-anagrams of Krug's name, or variations on a set of letters at least. One chapter is devoted to a intriguing, but ultimately facile re-thinking of "Hamlet". Nabokov appears on and off as a godlike character, toying with his characters, and Krug starts to become aware of this. For some reason, the overlapping realities reminded me of "The Singing Detective," though Nabokov came first, obviously. There's even a section that reminds me of Dennis Potter in interview in which Potter talked about past and present running simultaneously together, like sprinters on a track. Here's Nabokov:
Do all people have that? A face, a phrase, a landscape, an air bubble from the past suddenly floating up as if released by the head warden's child from a cell in the brain while the mind is at work on some totally different matter? Something of the sort also occurs just before falling asleep when what you think you are thinking is not at all what you think. Or two parallel passenger trains of thought, overtaking the other.
There's plenty to read about Nabokov and this novel on the web--Zembla is the main repository of scholarly work. I discovered that there was even a film version made of the novel, though unless someone like Peter Greenaway was making it, I can't imagine how true to the story it could be.
Note: Again, for a first novel in English, the vocabulary stretched my brain to its limit. Check out this list of words I had to look up:
megrim, triskelion, selenographer, amorandola, Keeweenawatin, mnemogenic, velvetina, ruelle, pauldron, salix, cardiarium, dolichocephalic, decorpitation, noumenon, eidolon, kurorts, deoculation, yarovization.
(The problem with Googling unknown words: every fifth word turns out to the name of a literary journal.)
How the Irish Save Civilization - Thomas Cahill
Doubleday, 1995
Enjoyable pop-history of how Ireland rescued higher learning and humanist Christianity during the Dark Ages. The book wastaken with me on my recent San Francisco trip as reading material. I finished a few days after I came back. This was the first of Cahill's history quintilogy (the other volumes looking at Jesus, the Jews, and two other as of yet unwritten subjects), and it's a good primer for studying Irish history and/or early British literature. Cahill backs up at the start and talks about St. Augustine (the first autobiographer in the West), then gets around to the savior of Ireland, St. Patrick, who, though he didn't chase the snakes out, did convert the natives from a warrish paganism to a calmer Christianity without causing the country to implode in corpses. Just for that he should be admired. But he also brought with him a promotion of learning, and very humane idea of how the church should interact with the populace, and (most importantly) a love of books and an inspiration to text copyists, who rescued as many Latin books they could and went ur-Kinko's on them.
Cahill often relies too much on quoting songs and poems at length when only a line or two would do, but he makes his case. That the Irish would later come to be known as a lesser people by the English is a major tragedy, and a prejudice that can still be felt (to put it mildly).
The Hills Have Eyes
Dir: Wes Craven
1977
Craven's second film, and one based on the Sawney Bean legend, the 17th century family of cannibals that preyed on hapless travelers near Edinburgh. (You can hear a great rendition of this legend on Snakefinger's "Night of Desirable Objects" album.)
Unfortunately, this wasn't as horrific or downbeat as I'd hoped from a 1977 horror film, just sort of quaint and low budget. There's only two moments where the film breaks through its genre safety zone, the first being the camper attack on the family in which the older sister and the mother is shot, the younger sister raped (or rather dry humped for ten seconds), and the baby kidnapped. This trades in its "afraid of the dark" scare tactics (of which there are too many) for terror and violence--scary marauding loonballs don't need fancy tools to kill, a gun does just as well. (This reminded me again of how short and ultimately non-terrifying slasher films would be if the killer had a machine gun.) The loose handheld camera presents the chaos well. The second moment is the finale where the brother-in-law (Martin Speer), a Sonny Bono lookalike, stabs to death the cannibal Mars in revenge for the death of his wife and for kidnapping the baby. And keeps stabbing, plunging the knife over and over into the guy's chest. Wes Craven wants us to see this as a sort of critique of how savage we all are underneath, but the circumstances stop this from being ethically dubious (it's not like he's going to perform a citizen's arrest on the guy). If, on the other hand, the brother-in-law had taken it out on one of the more innocent members of the cannibal family without provocation, we might have had to think a bit. In this case, I'm with Mr. Bono all the way.
This was the Anchor Bay re-release and once again, Anchor Bay is the company to beat when it comes to horror DVD. No matter the quality of the movie, they always assume somebody is a huge fan and throw in lots of documentary extras. The making-of doc reunites most of the cast (except, strangely, Speer) and they talk about what was a quite rough shoot in the desert. Craven, as usual, is a very pleasant guy, very smart ("Last House on the Left" is a remake of a Bergman film, for example, just much more unpleasant), the son of fundamentalist Baptists who didn't get to see much film in his early years and who gave up a doctorate degree to get into filmmaking. I was never much a fan of Freddy Krueger, but if you've never seen it, "Wes Craven's New Nightmare" is self-reflexive, smart, and quite dark.
Waiting for Guffman
Dir: Christopher Guest
1996
What do you mean, you've never seen ______? I often get this. For a bloody film critic, there's a lot of stuff I just plain haven't watched. I'm perpetually playing catch up. In fact, just this weekend I got this Jon, who thrust a copy of Ozu's "Floating Weeds" at me in disbelief and disgust. For this film it was the video store guy saying to me, "Guffman again, eh?" and me saying no, I, um, haven't seen it.
So most of you know Guest's mockumentary of a community theater performance, a tribute to the small town of Blaine, Missouri, put on by the town populace under the directing eye of ex-New Yorker Corky St. Claire (Guest). The entire film was improvised along certain narrative guidelines, and again suggests that it is Second City, not the desperate comics of SNL (although many come from SC), that spawned the best comedians in the '80s. There's always been something infantile about Saturday Night Live, with its petty jostlings for movie projects superceding the work at hand. Second City, especially SCTV, always seemed more of a group effort, and you can still sense that togetherness when two or more appear in films together. Fred Willard always makes me laugh, but he doesn't steal scenes. He was great as the oblivious announcer in Best in Show, and his character in WFG is buffoonish without being a caricature. I wonder how some of SNL's best and brightest would be in a future Guest film? Will Farrell is good at cartoon characters, but could he present a three-dimensional person?
The DVD features about 20 minutes of extra scenes, and witty commentary from Guest and Eugene Levy.
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Dir: Blake Edwards
1961
By absolute coincidence, I wound up watching a second film this month based on a Capote novel, although you couldn't get further apart in tone. I tried to watch this film once before and jumped ship after bloody Mickey Rooney turned up with his buck-teethed Jappo atrocity. Two words for you, Mr. Rooney: Internment Camp. May you be haunted forever by the ghosts of Manzanar. (On the other hand, the Japanese may get as offended by this as "Rising Sun" (i.e. they don't). And they love Audrey Hepburn more than we do.)
That out of the way, the rest of the film was cutesy-cutesy, with plenty of charm from Audrey Hepburn, though her dialog was a bit laden-down with exposition and rang a bit flat. But then again, as her agent O.J. (played wonderfully in two scenes by Martin Balsam) notes, "she's a phony, but she's a real phony. She believes in it." That's probably good advice for watching the film. Both Hepburn and co-star George Peppard were about 32 when they filmed this, they look so much older than that.
Good friend Mr. C reminded me that this film influenced the rest of the '60s that followed, as Miss Golightly was a template upon which many a female molded themselves. (Poor Mr. C, that must have been agony.)
I actually choked up at the end, with its rainy-street reconciliation, but that was from my empathy for the lost cat "Cat" who got chucked out the taxi by a petulant Miss Golightly and was (temporarily) left to fend for himself in the downpour. If my wife was here (she's on a business trip) she would have been sniffing too. That is, if she hadn't snapped the DVD in two upon the appearance of Buckteeth.
(Great Mancini score, though I've never been a fan of "Moon River," the song Hepburn plays on guitar while sitting on her fire escape. Something about the line "my huckleberry friend" rubs me the wrong way.)
The Piano Teacher
Dir: Michael Haneke
2001
Similar in effect to Almodovar's "Talk to Her," this French film based on a German novel comes at us like a dangerous, erotic love story, while actually delivering a scary study in creeping insanity. We're too busy slotting the characters into their genre-determined space that we don't notice what's actually going on (and in this way we mirror the experience of the young man who falls in lust with the title character, Erika, played by Isabelle Huppert.
However, that Erika is slightly off her nut is shown in the first scene, where, returning home late to the flat she shares with her mother, she is berated for being a wanton libertine until violence ensues and she beats up mom a bit. Yikes. I'll wait in the hall, thanks.
As other critics have noted, we enter the film after the breakdown has happened. We're just around to watch the unraveling. Her cocky, assured, but talented student Walter (Benot Magimel), doesn't know this--he just sees the repressed wild thang hiding behind the librarian outfit. When they finally explode together halfway through the film, its a desperate display of control and masochism. This, also, has been proceeded by a subtly filmed piece of psychotic violence, as a very jealous Erika makes sure a young pianist (in her mind, her rival) doesn't play for a whole year. I'll let you find out how that happens.
Well, the film goes on from there, culminating in a series of unpleasant sex scenes that show just how far apart are the goals of these supposed lovers. It's not a film that you'd love to watch over and over again, but it is smart, brave, completely nuts, and features a wangdoodle of a performance by Huppert, who goes places many actresses would not. There was also a part of me that found the whole thing amusing, in a "sexual futility is funny" sort of way. But that's just me.
The American DVD has been cut, though I'm not too sure where. There's a strange fade/edit during the locker-room blowjob scene, and my friend Jon mentioned a disturbing self-abuse scene that was not on my copy. So shame on whoever released this DVD for being wimpy.
August 09, 2004
I'm a Creep
Here's a wonderful flash animation of Radiohead's Creep, apparently animated by one lone fella (whose name I've forgotten).
By way of BoingBoing
TomDispatch - Surprise!
Good morning! Let's start off the week with this hopeful editorial from TomDispatch, who reminds us that the BushJunta has been just as incompetent as they have been calculating:
Can there be any question that the Bush men would consider almost any scenario that might advance their candidate's second-term fortunes? I think not. But their incompetence shouldn't be overlooked either; nor should we focus too exclusively on such scenarios ourselves. In that focus lies a lurking fatalism which has its own dangers. It leads to an overestimation of the Machiavellian abilities of the somewhat inept Busheviks, treating them as if they were a comic-book cohort of X-men, superhuman in their ability to grab fate decisively by the throat, reorganize reality to suit their needs, and manipulate the American public. In fact, if you think about it a moment, the Bush administration has proven far less competent since it tossed the Iraqi dice than either its top officials or most of its opponents ever conceived possible. And there's a surprise for you!
Indeed, this has been four years of incompetence (just look at this weekend's outing of an al-Qaeda mole for nothing but political gain), although it's been an incompetence that has cost way too many lives (are we now near 1,000 for the death toll?)
August 04, 2004
Obama vs. Oh, bummer.
Please. Suddenly the Republicans are all into black people 'n' stuff because of Barack Obama. I bet they're spinning their MC Hammer CDs to catch up with the lingo, too.
Two black candidates vie to challenge Obama
After weeks of searching for a U.S. Senate candidate, Illinois Republicans have narrowed their choice to two black politicians, a development that all but assures Illinois will produce the fifth black U.S. senator in history.State party chairwoman Judy Baar Topinka said Republican leaders would interview Alan Keyes, a two-time presidential candidate, and Andrea Grubb Barthwell, a former deputy drug czar in the Bush administration, on Wednesday and then choose one to take on Barack Obama, a black state senator from Chicago and Democratic rising star.
?
[snip]Republicans, who have struggled to find a replacement candidate since Jack Ryan dropped out over embarrassing sex-club allegations in his divorce records, said race wasn't their motivating factor in choosing Keyes and Barthwell.
"These two were selected because of their strengths, not because of their color," said state Sen. Dave Syverson, a member of the Republican State Central Committee. "Voters are smarter than that. That clearly wasn't the intent."
I sure hope voters are smarter than that.
August 03, 2004
The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2001
Saying that The Corrections is a tale of a nuclear family coming together for one last Christmas--the father is slowly dying of Parkinsons--is like saying Ulysses is a story about two guys wandering around Dublin and only meeting in the evening. Jonathan Franzen's amazing novel made me laugh many times, not just at his humorous turn of phrase, or his ability to cut to the heart of an absurd situation, but his absolute skill at jumping back and forth in non-linear time in a fresh way, of spinning the reader round until familiar situations and locations are rendered strange and wondrous. It's a laugh at the deft slight-of-hand that he's perfected.
The Lamberts were once a traditional Midwestern family, but their three children who have flown the coop, leaving a large, empty house, a mother who obsesses over Christmas and a father who is slowly losing his grip on reality. The eldest child Gary, is a successful businessman/depressed alcoholic with three kids and an awful, manipulative wife (Franzen gets in good digs at the generation of hassle-free parents raising sonofabitch children); middle child Chip is a failed professor and scriptwriter who is gamely hanging on to his youth and who leaves for Lithuania to join the dot-com revolution; finally, youngest daughter Denise is a famous chef whose sexual shenanigans have been a constant disruption in her life.
Each section of the novel is devoted to one of these five characters, but freely jumps about when it needs to. Although comic, it's also tremendously sad, but not in a maudlin way. Characters have epiphanies, but are usually in no state to change anything. Or they continue on their merry way.
The novel brims with three-dimensional characters to such an extent that I started to dream about situations in the novel as if I was sorting out events of the past day. Even more peculiar, there is a scene in the last part of the book where Gary, staying in his childhood bedroom, has a late-night hallucination that he can't leave the room because of the horror that waits for him in the hallway. He is forced to pee in a commemorative beer stein. It was only after putting down the book, falling asleep, and eventually rousing myself from a similar troubled non-sleep that I realized that the sequence suggests that Gary has the gene that is causing his father's dementia (father's basement, indeed, is full of empty coffee cans full of urine.) But it's again to Franzen's credit that he doesn't signpost this foreshadowing. I mentioned this to my friend (who was the one to recommend the novel) the following day and he hadn't caught it either. I suppose the novel would hold up to several rereadings, and Franzen seems to be making allusions throughout to the Chronicles of Narnia, among other things. But I can't remember enough about the books to get it all.
I meant to highlight phrases that I liked, but I got into the book so much I just forgot. I will, however, leave you with the one I Post-It noted: "Soon they were engaged and they chastely rode a night train to McCook, Nebraska, to visit his aged parents. His father kept a slave whom he was married to."
The novel is full of such turnabout sentences, and as such was a delight to read. Apparently, there's much consternation over Franzen's novel-writing style and/or his attitude to his characters. Just read the bloody book like I did.
(Check out this Franzen interview at Salon.com.)
Party Girl
Dir: Daisy von Scherler Mayer
1995
If it weren't for Parker Posey, this film wouldn't have much going for it, an irresponsible-youth-gains-maturity tale played out in a series of sketches. She plays Mary the titular party girl who lives day-to-day throwing rent parties in New York and waltzing around in fabulous clothes. There's trouble in the opening moments where we're not even shown how great these supposed parties are, before she is arrested for possession of a joint and sent out to get a real job. She does this by working for her godmother in a neighborhood branch of the NYC library.
There's a lot of cutesy-cutesy running gags about the Dewey Decimal System and a rather bland romance with a bland Lebanese falafel vendor. A subplot, featuring Mary's DJ roommate and his burgeoning spinning career, goes nowhere. As does a scene where they get in the shower together (she's late for work, he jumped his place in line). They kiss and nothing happens. Too many scenes are like this, suggesting plot twists but dropping them by the end of the scene.
Apparently, the film has a minor cult following, which I suspect is based around Posey's performance, which is always watchable, even though her character isn't the most likable or her character arc that fulfilling.
(This was another random library pickup from their DVD shelf. Can't win 'em all.)
Crazy Like a Sarcoptic Mangy Fox
Baltimore mystery animal case solved! It's a mangy fox.
Baby Mystery Animal Caught, IdentifiedThe mystery may be over as one of the creatures roaming through central Maryland was finally captured on Saturday.
According to the veterinarians at Falls Road Animal Hospital, the animal was a male red fox. However, Dr. Michael Herko -- a vet at the animal hospital -- and the man who caught the fox say it is not the mysterious creature videotaped in July, but a relative.
August 02, 2004
Latest Scare Tactics Apparently Three Years Old
But it did it's job of getting Kerry off the front page, right? What a crock.
Pre-9/11 Acts Led To AlertsMost of the al Qaeda surveillance of five financial institutions that led to a new terrorism alert Sunday was conducted before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and authorities are not sure whether the casing of the buildings has continued since then, numerous intelligence and law enforcement officials said yesterday.
More than half a dozen government officials interviewed yesterday, who declined to be identified because classified information is involved, said that most, if not all, of the information about the buildings seized by authorities in a raid in Pakistan last week was about three years old, and possibly older. "