Brick City

Brick City

There, up ahead,
a man pats an empty plastic bag, like a tambourine.
He shakes his head, side to side,
to side,
eyes glazed, marbled, cold.
Loosies, loosies, loosies,
the street sings.
Baby turtles scratch their plastic cages with tiny nails,
pawing furiously.
Loosies!
Shake your head, eyes to laces.
Add a brick.
Clickity-clack.
Clickity.
Clack.
Down the block, dark, hairy legs,
bowed out, ostrich-like.
Large calves, in a ruby-red skirt,
high-heels,
lumbering.
Loosies!
No, no, shake your head,
turn the music up.
Add a brick.
Shaggy! Shaggy!
Yeah you, you Scooby-doo,
mutha’ fucka’!
Add a brick.
Under the old RKO theater
small cherubs, open-mouthed, wide-eyed,
look down on the city.
Burned out windows,
pigeon shit,
sneaker shops,
below.
Prayer begins, the sirens shake pavement.
So many bricks,
so few buildings.

Quote of the day

I'm slowly working my way through the 2011 Booker Long List (link below), and I'm currently halfway through Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie (think Life of Pi + The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet). It's one of those books that makes your television so very easy to ignore, and that makes you wish that someone finally, finally, invented the never-ending novel. It's that good. I'll have a full review when I'm finished.

"This got us onto the subject of Jamrach's and how I worked there in the yard, and all the beasts that came and went over the years. It was the mention of the silent bird room that got him. I told him how they sat there unmoving in those tiny boxes, songbirds with locked throats, and he said that was all wrong. He said he hated to see a bird in a cage. "It's something to do with the wings," he said. "It's when they can't open them up."
We smoked silently and I thought about how that room had saddened me as a child, but I had grown used to it over the years as it became an everyday thing. It was just how the world was."

http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/stories/1514

Monster Bug Wars is one bat-shit crazy television show

Monster Bug Wars, a 60 minute television show currently airing on the Science Channel, is absolute insanity. You're probably asking yourself (a) what is Monster Bug Wars? or (b) what is the Science Channel? or more likely than not, you've never heard of either. The show and the channel bill themselves as "educational" television, but if this is what's teaching our children, God help us all.

So what, exactly, is Monster Bug Wars? Though it may sound like a SyFy channel movie of the week (e.g. Mega Python vs. Super Spider), if you DVRd the show in hope of some epic cheese you're going to be in for a bit of a letdown. The show pits a variety of bugs up against one another, and with footage captured from somewhere deep in the wilderness (probably a backyard in Echo Park), over the course of the hour, five bugs (from five 'fights') are crowned heavy weight champions of the grossest and lowest chain of the animal kingdom (the other five contestants die terrible, icky deaths). If this show doesn't sound absurd enough by this point, Monster Bug Wars launches itself into the ultimate drinking game stratosphere by adding the most ridiculous elements I've ever seen in a so-called "educational" television program.


First, before each bout, an insect "expert" from so and so university introduces each combatant. This is sort of like how HBO had Fight Camp 360: Pacquiao vs. Mosley except it's absolutely nothing like that. We hear about how ferocious each competitor is and what we can expect from their Mortal Combat finishing move ("watch out, because this ant can lift a thousand times its body weight! That's like if you could life 15,000 pounds!").

Simultaneously we're treated to some nifty CGI, because if the National Spelling Bee and the PGA get computerized intros, then there's no way we don't get to see a CGI Praying Mantis with claws that sound like Morimoto's knives getting sharpened. If you get your rocks off to quick CGI zooms of pincers, stingers, and fuzzy mandibles, then these segments will probably make your head explode.

But it's in post-production sound editing where Monster Bug Wars really shines. Take for instance the fire ant. Whenever said fire ant (CGI or actual fire ant) zoom-ins occur we get A TIGER GROWL. I shit you not. For beetles, Monster Bug Wars often employs the call of the majestic elephant. I had no idea the two were related, but now, thanks to this show, I have some amazing little informational tidbits to drop over small talk at cocktail parties. When I try to imagine how the wizards over at Monster Bug Wars managed to pull off these sound effects, I envision a tiny, one-inch man, out there in the somewhere in field, gently (yet simultaneously pissing in his miniature pants) leaning a boom mic as close as possible up to an ant's pincers.

[The Starship Troopers camera guy was shrunk down to the size of your pinky in hopes of obtaining the mythical roar of the fire ant.]

So, in summation, Monster Bug Wars is one of the greatest and most educational shows on television. I can also vouch for it as a fantastic drinking game. During the course of five bug battles, a litany of things can be won and lost on the outcomes a title card fights starring, for example, GIANT SCORPION vs. MAMMOTH WOOLY SPIDER. And yes, the mammoth wooly spider sounds like a bug from Starship Troopers, in case you were wondering.

So the next time your friend tells you he's watching UFC #771 for 79.99 you tell him you're watching TRAP-JAW vs. ANT LION, for FREE.

Review: Snowdrops

Snowdrops, the debut novel by A.D. Miller (current editor for The Economist) shortlisted earlier this year for the Man Booker award, is a superb character study that simultaneously paints a vibrant picture of the oil-rich and over-banked Moscow of the mid-2000’s. For someone about to embark in career of corporate law it’s also harrowing.

Snowdrops’ protagonist, Nick Platt, is a mid-30’s ex-pat corporate attorney in the “Wild West” years of Moscow. It’s the heyday of 2000 boom and money is flowing into Moscow as fast as oil wells are drilled. Nick’s law firm facilitates loans to quasi-gangster/quasi-corporate companies popping up throughout the country, and during his stint overseas, Nick becomes romantically involved with a beautiful Russian, Masha, and her sister. The sisters slowly involve Nick (or Kolya, as they call him) in a scheme which evolves as the novel pushes along, with Miller skillfully conveying the frozen Moscow wasteland, debauched nightlife, and moral ambiguity of the period throughout.

I recently read a negative review of Snowdrops which claims that the “twist” comes too soon; because the reader knows what Nick does not so early in the novel, Snowdrops, as a “thriller”, fails. Perhaps as a “thriller” Snowdrops is a failure. But the reviewer misses the point. Snowdrops is not a “thriller”, not really. The schemes involved are not particularly elaborate, and as the reviewer notes, are telegraphed early in the novel. Instead the real question the reader grapples with throughout is how an educated British corporate lawyer became so easily duped. In answering the question we circle back to why I found Snowdrops so harrowing.

Nick is not a particularly engaging character and maybe that’s why his decisions throughout the novel are so fascinating. There is no indication of much in the way of a personality; while the book reads as a manifesto of his descent in moral ambiguity (written to his current wife (finance?)) we get no sense of character behind Nick’s words. He has no true friends (sans an alcoholic reporter and a superior at his firm), and has a strange and awkward relationship with his family. Akin to his Russian surroundings he is cold and passionless. This is what I think the book is largely getting at – Nick is a man going through the motions; no purpose, and no love. There is one moment in novel when he mentions he may not make partner in his law firm, but it is a throwaway. His relationship with Masha, no matter how fabricated, gives his life a spark worth writing about; she takes him to clubs, involves him in threesomes - she makes him feel needed and loved. Far from the life of a mid-30’s corporate attorney, Masha makes Nick feel young, with a life ahead really worth living. His relationship with Masha, coupled with the allure of Moscow, are an oasis which Nick, as shell of man (no matter how educated), is willing to to keep alive, even if it means jettisoning reality and rationality.

Snowdrops left me sympathetic with Nick’s decisions, at least in some respects. That alone is troubling. You pity Nick. You wonder how many lives play out in this world along the same lines. Ninety hour weeks of diligence for a transaction that may never happen. That shot at partnership for ten years of silence. Moscow, in all its fake glitter, fake wealth, and fake smiles, gave Nick two years more truly alive then London could give him in a lifetime as a corporate attorney. Even in the face Nick’s moral’s decisions, when Masha’s ploy has long been laid out in front of him, when the time for willful blindness has ended, Nick yearns for Moscow, for Masha.

What does it say when you’d knowingly accept a forged life in place of your own? Snowdrops is no thriller. At least not for me.

In Defense of Books

I’ll start this by prefacing that I come from a literary family; my maternal grandparents founded STORY Magazine, and helped champion some of this century’s most influential American writers (the recently deceased J.D. Salinger being among them). So when my father surprised me with the three hundred dollar Amazon Kindle (I cite the price only because I find it absurd) for Christmas several months ago, I was conflicted.

On a recent vacation, while sitting poolside, I pulled the sleek little device out from my bag, and a friend immediately asked my thoughts on this, the future of the publishing industry. If the Kindle, the Nook, or the iPad (a feminine hygiene product?) are, as prophesied, the future of the publishing industry, it’s going to be a sad, sad future. And then I proceeded to go on a bit of a rant, which may or may not have been fueled by several bloody marys.

I read every night before I go to sleep; if I don’t, I don’t sleep. It’s as simple as that. And I don’t read from the Kindle. There’s a stack of books by my bed, and I just go with whatever I feel like at the moment. Lately, I’ve fallen for the Library of Congress collections; 1,500 pages of thin, acid-free pages, that won’t yellow with age, and have little cloth bookmarks embedded in their spines. They’re authoritative editions for the most significant American authors of the last two centuries, and they’re great. Now back to the point.

There is something inherently satisfying about a paperback or a hardcover novel that the Kindle can’t replicate. There are the little things; the crease in the binding of that book you re-read every few years, chiseled so deeply down lining that when you flip through the pages your favorite passage magically appears. There are the scribbles in the margins, the bunny-eared corners, the coffee-ringed covers, and the browning sheets in your ten-year-old copy of The Fountainhead (which you never really got at the time, but told everyone you did anyway). And then there are the more important things; the feel of the book in your hand, the matte cover, the precision of the binding, the smell of paper. Books are for collecting, for sharing, for embracing. You lend your favorite book to a friend, you read a passage during a gathering (if you’re that kind of gal or girl), and then you pass them down to your children. They might even be worth something someday. Books surrounded me, and continue to surround me. They lined shelves in my childhood, and now they line shelves in my apartment.

Now take the Kindle. Admittedly, like everything these days, it is fast, and it is for the lazy, and the jetsetter. You no longer need to browse a book store because in thirty seconds your book is beamed, via Whispernet, to your Kindle. For something along the lines of half the price of the hard-copy (which again, just strikes me as absurd), you are guaranteed instant gratification, American hyper-capitalism style. But you can’t share this PDF you just downloaded for $ 9.99, and you can’t feel it (save for the cool metal and the plastic). I guess if you’re an environmentalist you can make the argument the Kindle and its ilk save a lot of trees. But any sense of experience and shared history is gone. And so a good portion of the joy leaves as well.

When you pick up a book you’re holding on to something that traces its lineage all the way back to Ancient Egypt and beyond. To monks illuminating Bibles candle-side during the Dark Ages. To a soldier in the trenches with his one of copy of whatever you want it to be. I told my friend the Kindle is very good for vacations, and it is. It’s light, it’s easy, and to be honest, no one would really want to borrow the Stephen King book I was reading anyway. But my point is this; books are important, and if you are lucky, they helped raise you. The way we shape them, and in turn, the way they shape us, is part of our history and our collective consciousness. To condense a library into a PDA or a Kindle, or a Nook, or whatever really cool, over-publicized device comes next is fine; just don’t do away with books.

I want to hand my children my beaten old copy of Goodnight Moon, grayed, and torn, and full of life, and see the look in their eyes when they drool, with equal ferocity, on the same pages my which my brother and I drooled. I want them to trace Harold’s purple line with their little fingers all the way across one piece of paper, hit a bump at the neatly stitched trench of the binding, and keep on going. I don’t want to hand them a piece of tempered steel with a chip and Whispernet access, which thanks them, ever so politely, for their $ 9.99.

Plus tax of course.

Dear Hollywood #2

Since you listened so very intently to my first suggestion (wait, no, you didn't), I’ve thought of another, maybe even better suggestion! Foolproof even! This one goes out specifically to all you pay-cable channels that can spend upwards 20 million dollars on things like Band of Brothers and Rome (so basically just you, HBO. Or Showtime, if you’re feeling lucky).

Two words. Ex. Machina. Well, that’s actually just Ex Machina, and it’s a story by Brian K. Vaughn (currently wrapping its run over on DC’s Vertigo imprint), who has a script circling agencies right now that's got everybody in a tizzy, and before this upcoming season, was a exec-producer on LOST (and writer of some of its finest hours). If you don’t know this guy now, and you know names like Bob Orci and Alex Kurtzman (should you know them?), you will definitely know him soon. I think. Maybe.

Anyways. Ex Machina. Right. Ex Machina is a story of a civil engineer (Mitchell Hundred) working for NYC who stumbles upon an artifact attached to the Brooklyn Bridge. It blows up, scars his face with some nifty green looking circuitry, and he finds he can control machines. Talks to them even. At this point you’re thinking – dude, I know this script. It’s Jake 2.0 but not in Vancouver (well, it probably will be in Vancouver anyways, but we’ll get to that later). If I wanted to buy a shitty show off SyFy or UPN (like 10 years ago) I could (this is still an HBO exec thinking here)! But wait! So for a few years he [Hundred] tries to be a superhero. He translates well to screen because he’s one of a kind. His powers are somewhat believable (if fantastical), and budget-wise, for a non-procedural, they make sense. You can just green his eyes and those circuits (mostly hidden from plastic surgery), and change his voice when he’s talking to machines. Anyways, it would work.

But now comes the good stuff. So he ends up saving one of the Twin Towers on 9/11. Genius! So BAM, already we’re in an alternate universe. Then he quits the superhero gig, which he was pretty crappy at. And runs for mayor. And wins! So now you’ve got an ex-superhero dealing with topical subjects (think The West Wing, but in Gracie Manor), with somewhat realistic super-human aspects (think Batman), PLUS, you get fanboys who try and connect the dots, and feed web-based meta-games and whatever time-consuming thing advertisers can think of (a-la LOST). And how do you get said fanboys? Well, and here’s where the show is elevated; there’s an arc. A BIG arc. Where did he get his powers? Turns out they’re from an alternate earth, and his powers we’re meant to be the first step in a war. And it all gets very creepy from there on out, but those can be the bread-crumbs. That’s the hook. BUT, the topicality of being the NYC mayor is what brings you back every week. And BAM! Get a good show-runner, cast Ron Livingston as Hundred (don’t worry, Defying Gravity lasted two weeks - if he'll do that, he'll do anything), cast Donald Sutherland as his mentor, somehow get Brian Cox and Ian McShane in the cast (because really, what don’t they elevate), and VIOLA! Insta’ Hit! And then make me show-runner.

P.S. Please film it IN NYC. Fringe moved this season to Vancouver along with everyone else, and it's really obvious. Like Colin Farrel in Phone Booth, everyone knows New York City streets aren't five cars wide, our pedestrian walkways aren't that clean, that's NOT what newstands look anymore (it's not 1985), we have hybrid cabs now, and the Crown Vic NYPD rides were sooooo early 90's.

Love, PSVIII

one more for the road

The McSweeney's slash fiction collection got me to pick up Sarah Manguso's memoir The Two Kinds of Decay (Picador, 2008), documenting her battle (beginning as a junior in college) with a wildly unpredictable and incapacitating autoimmune disease. It's an unforgettable read.

"The events that began in 1995 might keep happening to me as long as things can happen to me. Think of spacetime, through which heavenly bodies fly forever. They fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.

There are names for things in spacetime that are nothing, for things that are less than nothing. White dwarfs, red giants, black holes, singularities.

But even then, in their less-than-nothing state, they keep happening."

A few more quotes

I've been so, so, busy. So busy, in fact, that I've only been able to read snap and flash fiction (woe is me).

Which is where I found these:

"POSTMODERN
You are reading
SATIRE
You are reading in a clown suit
SCI-FI
You are reading in a spaceship
SPECULATIVE
You do not exist in a spaceship
REVISION
We've been through this before"
--Deb Ulin Unferth

And from David Eggers:

"Well then, they ask again, what does air feel like? And we have to think about this. Air feels like air, we say, and the fishes laugh mirthlessly. Think! they say. Think, they say, now gentler. And we think and we guess that it feels like hair, thousands of hairs, swaying ever so slightly in breezes microscopic. The fishes laugh again. Do better, think harder, they say. It feels like language, we say, and they are impressed...The air is like being wanted, we say, and they nod approvingly. The air is like getting older they say, and they touch our arms gently."

From How the Water Feels to the Fishes

I'm also a big fan of this one (Eggers again):

"In a moment of clarity you finally understand why boxers, who want so badly to hurt each other, can rest their hands on the shoulders of their opponent, can lean against one another like tired lovers, so thankful for a moment of rest."

and

"81

When the cannibal zombies come, the weakest die first. I turn off the film and think about my life. It is made of fear now. I begin running long distances, lifting weights, and training my mind to calm me in times of great stress. I work harder at my job, clear my apartment of clutter, and organize my finances. My friends have not watched the film. They praise my newfound strength and health."

- Sarah Manguso

They're all available in the McSweeney's box of short-short stories. (go check out their killer garage sale, going on now...if you haven't already)

a garden grows in Brooklyn (albeit in a truck)

Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney, two brooklyn-based documentary filmmakers, previously raised 10,000 pounds of corn for their 2007 award-winning documentary King Corn.

This time around, frustrated with Brooklyn's lack of farmable land, the two took matters into their own hands and decided to fill their truck-bed with everything from arugula to tomatoes. They filmed the entire experience (including segments filmed via timelapse via solar-powered camera) and the final product should be released sometime this winter.

For now, Ellis and Cheney have a few preview snippets up and running, showing what a few dudes from Red Hook and bunch of smart friends can do with some extra time on their hands.



You can find out more about the project at http://www.wickedelicate.com/.

Or just walk around Red Hook. The truck should be pretty easy to spot.

Frank Bruni, food critic, comedian

( Frank Bruni, circa a 1984 STYX concert)

Next month, Frank Bruni, the celebrated Chief restaurant critic for the New York Times will be exiting his post for greener pastures (he's just moving over to the Times Magazine so I'm guessing he keeps his old office). This very fat, very gay foodie, whose ten-year-old picture is seared into the retinas of petrified waiters city-wide, also tends to be hilarious when doling out his famed "goose-eggs" (that damning zero stars).

(If your restaurant includes Ninja waiters, do not expect high grades from Frank Bruni)

Here's an excerpt from his review of Ninja, which recieved a 'Poor':

"On my first visit, when I tried a $150 tasting menu with a dearth of culinary highlights but a surfeit of ninja pageantry, they reliably garnished this gesture with loud expectorations of a putative courtesy that sounded more like a rebuke, the phonetic rendering of which would be something along the lines of "Go-mayn!""

It only gets better, I promise:

http://events.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/dining/26rest.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

I'm also partial to this little zinger from Bruni's takedown of Kobe Club, which also seems to be inspired, at least in some degree, by Ninjas (2,000 samurai swords dangle upside down from the ceiling):

"If Akira Kurosawa hired the Marquis de Sade as an interior decorator, he might end up with a gloomy rec room like this. Will the last samurai to leave please turn on the lights?"

Eater.com has a complete rundown of Bruni's 21 goose-eggs lain over his four years and I'm planning on reading, and savoring, them all.

http://eater.com/archives/2009/07/countdown_bruni_goose_eggs.php#more

Quote of the Day

From James M. Cain (1892-1977), author of the hard-boiled novels The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Double Indemnity.

"I never feel that a city is really in the Big Time unless it has soap boxers damning the government in the parks, and parades that occasionally result in cracked heads. Why I regard such things as cosmopolitan I don't know, but I do."

From Paradise, 1933

"All grown-ups were children first. (But few remember it)."

There are certain books that you wander back to as an adult. Gravity pulls you to their dusty bindings, stuck deep somewhere in a bedroom closet. It can be years or even decades later, but when you finally open the pages they seem to be speaking a completely new language. It's as if the entire book changed along with you.

So you analyze the prose, picking the books apart word by word. How did I read this as child? I never remember it being so short! you think to yourself. Or maybe you just never had the need to read it so quickly. That feeling you had as a child, the one where you knew the book was telling you something, but you weren't really sure what it was, is long gone. Of course now you know what the author is saying. How could you not! The illustrations, which before had helped explain the book as much as the words are now nothing more than footnotes.

The Little Prince , by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, is one of these books. Exupéry seems to say there's no going back; no way to see the world as you once did. We grown-ups, blinded by things, our own self-importance, and as Exupéry writes, “numbers”, just don't have same good sense as children.

""If you tell grown-ups, "I saw a beautiful red brick house, with geraniums at the windows and doves on the roof...," they won't be able to imagine such a house. You have to tell them, "I saw a house worth a hundred thousand francs." Then they exclaim, "What a pretty house!""

As I was trying to recall my first time reading The Little Prince I felt as if Exupéry was telling me over and over gain to just give up. There’s no hope for us grown-ups, just as there's no hope for the narrator, living out his final days awaiting the Little Prince's return.

But maybe, years ago, I would have seen the Prince’s return as inevitable. And just like that, The Little Prince I had read so many years ago became a jumble of foreign words; a sealed tome, forever untranslatable.



From Antoine de Saint Exupéry's The Little Prince:

""Nothing's perfect," sighed the fox. "My life is monotonous. I hunt chickens; people hunt me. All chickens are just alike, and all men are just alike. So I'm rather bored. But if you tame me, my life will be filled with sunshine. I'll know the sound of footsteps that will be different from all the rest. Other footsteps send me back underground. Yours will call me out of my burrow like music. And then, look! You see the wheat fields over there? I don't eat bread. For me, wheat is no use whatever. Wheat fields say nothing to me. Which is sad. But you have hair the color of gold. So it will be wonderful, once you've tamed me! The wheat, which is golden, will remind me of you. And I'll love the sound of the wind in the wheat...""

weekend kickoff

Just to kick-start the weekend (a day early, but whatever), the Toronto-based duo MSTRKRFT, featuring John Legend. Pretty sure this video isn't official, but that doesn't make it any less terrific.

MSTRKRFT – Featuring John Legend from vincent haycock on Vimeo.

dash snow, 1981-2009

( Dash tagging the Brooklyn Bridge, in 2007)

New York City and the art world lost one their brightest young stars Monday night, yet again to a drug overdose. I caught a few of Dash Snow's photos at the Whitney Biennial, and knew his family (to whom he was estranged) and younger brother when I was in grade school. It got me thinking about how many artists we've lost senselessly young and well before their prime (Elliot Smith and Jeremy Blake immediately spring to mind).

I'm often asked whose artwork plasters the background of this blog and I guess now would be as good a time as any to discuss it. The digital painting is by Jeremy Blake (another New York City-based artist), whose work was often described as "Color Field set in motion" (NYT, Jeremy Blake, 35, Artist Who Used Lush-Toned Video, Dies, Randy Kennedy, August 1, 2007). I first saw an installation of his exhibited at a Biennial (not the same year as Dash's - 2004, I think), but started seriously following him after Paul Thomas Anderson's 'Punch Drunk Love', where he contributed to the various abstract hallucination sequences.

In 2007, after the apparent suicide of his long-time girlfriend, Blake walked naked into the Rockaways' surf. A fisherman found his body five days later, his clothes and wallet left behind on the beach. Frustratingly, there wasn't much left by Blake - the only book I could find, and I think perhaps the only one that exists, is for Winchester, a video series he completed in 2005, which shifted into a more narrative-based realm and focused on San Jose's famed Winchester Mystery House.

(a still from Blake's Winchester series)

You can read about Blake's unfinished work, 'Glitterbeast', in the New York Times article linked below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/arts/design/29blak.html

an album for the summer

Discovery, the side band of Wes Miles (Ra Ra Riot) and Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend), released their self-titled LP last week and it's definitely the catchiest thing I've heard all summer. I particularly love the looping work and build on So Insane.

Quote of the Day

After a long weekend on the west coast I picked up Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, edited by David L. Ulin. Los Angeles is a funny "city" (if you can even call it that); disjointed, surreal, and not particularly attractive (save for the beaches), I find myself liking it nonetheless.

I’ve pulled the below passage from Stewart Edward White’s (1873-1946) The Rules of the Game (included in the anthology). It conveys, spot on, my reaction to Los Angeles - the fact that it was written a hundred years ago and remains relevant, speaks more I think to the enduring character of metropolitan areas than to anything else.

““Well, what do you think of our fair young city?” he grinned.
“It’s got me going,” admitted Bob.
“Took me some time to find out where to get off at,” said Baker.
“When I found it out, I didn’t dare tell anybody. They mob you here and string you up by your pigtail, if you try to hint that this isn’t the one best bet on terrestrial habitations. They like their little place and they believe it in a whole lot, and they’re dead right about it! They’d stand right up on their hind legs and paw the atmosphere if anybody were to tell them what they really are, but it’s a fact. Same joyous slambang, same line of sharps hanging on the outskirts, same row, racket, and joy in life, same struggle: yes, and by golly! the same big hopes and same big enterprises and big optimism and big energies! Wouldn’t you like to be helping them do it?”
“What’s the answer?” asked Bob, amused.
“Well, for all its big buildings and its electric lights, and trolleys, and police and size, it’s nothing more nor less than a frontier town.”
“A frontier town!” echoed Bob.
“You think it over,” said Baker.”

Finally, a summer show actually worth watching

Summer, known for its long weekends, mindless blockbusters, and lazy strolls in the park, has always been viewed as something completely different for network television executives: a fertile dumping ground for shows that didn’t (NBC’s Kings and ABC’s Eli Stone are good examples), or wouldn’t (I’m a Faux Celebrity, Shoot Me in the Head with a Nail Gun springs to mind) make it during the other nine months of year. This three month period of television purgatory, akin to your fridge the day after Thanksgiving, is of the take it or leave it variety; you’re either eating leftovers, or you’re going hungry.

But as the major networks lick their collective wounds, trying to figure out a way to staunch their slow audience bleed, cable has quietly moved in on their territory. TNT and USA have thrown the harmless Burn Notice, HawthoRNe (“she’s a RN, who’s the SOUL of the ER”), and Royal Pains into the ring, and they’re uniformly forgettable. Maybe summer just wasn’t made for watching TV. But three weeks ago, HBO, in all its infinite wisdom, premiered the second season of its wonderfully addictive True Blood. The show, run by Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, shares absolutely none of its predecessor’s pathos, which for a show about transsexuals, shape shifters, and vampires, is a good thing. Based on the ‘Southern Vampire Mysteries’, a series of novels by Charlaine Harris, Blood follows Sookie Stackhouse (played by Anna Paquin), a mind-reading, Bon Temps (a fictional Louisiana town) waitress, who falls in love with a two-hundred year old vampire. True Blood is steeped with allegory, and Ball (who is out), clearly wasn’t playing for subtlety. When a synthetic blood is discovered, successfully mimicking human blood types, vampires finally “come out of their coffins” (a line pulled directly from the show) and during the opening credits, “God Hates Fangs” is posted prominantly on a church billboard (pretty much summing up Bon Temp's opinion of vampires).

One would imagine that Blood was originally envisioned as HBO’s response to the mega-popular Twilight, but Blood shares none of the tween staple’s forced seriousness. Instead, True Blood flourishes in its own brand of absurdity. Sookie’s brother Jason (played by Ryan Kwaten), is a dumb as dumb gets, and by Season 2 Kwaten has nailed the furrowed brow of idiocy. As Jason’s roped into a retreat for the vampire-hating Church of the Sun, you’re just waiting for him to sleep with the minister’s wife - and promptly get caught (cue said furrowed brow of idiocy).

The beauty of Blood is that it’s often laugh-out-loud funny. While there are a few season-long mysteries, and horror scenes that aren’t actually scary (they’re usually just gag inducing), Ball’s smartly kept the show light and airy, with fleshed-out characters, high production values, and some much needed nudity. If True Blood were a junk food, it would be one of those chips with a big ‘No Trans Fats’ plastered on the front of the bag: you know it’s bad for you, but at least it could be worse.

True Blood airs Sunday at 9PM on HBO.

A few of my favorites clips:





The opening credits:

Quotes of the Day

I found today's quotes buried in a wicked Salon.com article (http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/review/2009/06/18/impact/ ) for the new ABC summer mini-series Impact, starring James Cromwell, and airing this Sunday at 9. The two-parter was originally set for broadcast on the Sci Fi Channel (should give you a good gauge of quality right there), and was produced by a German production company (ok, now you should be running).

A few of the gems are below.

"We have no other choice, sir. You can't hide from gravity!"

"Look, I can't even answer the questions on 'Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader,' but even I know the moon is not capable of manipulating gravity at this level." (This zinger is straight from the Chief of Staff)

and finally:

"Science has very much come under question these last few days. But, it's all I have."

Now lets pause for a moment and remember that someone was actually paid to write this. The lucky sap is Michael Vickerman, and yes, he went to film school. Some of the other writing credits under his belt include The Haunting of Sorority Row (winner of four Acadamy Awards) and Superfire - Inferno in Oregon (a paltry two Acadamy Awards). Sadly, I now feel I owe it to myself to watch his latest masterpiece.

"We are a part of something here that's going to be written about in the same context as Newton and Einstein. I know you don't want to miss out on that!" utters Natasha Henstridge towards the climax of the mini-series.

You're damn right I don't.

re-mixed movie trailers, YouTube style

I recently stumbled upon an entire sub-genre of YouTube clips where people take a considerable amount of time and effort to re-cut movies into trailers, completely changing the tone of the films. Some of them are terrible. Some of them are pretty amazing.

I've linked a few of my favorites below.


Shining

The Shining as a family rom-com, appropriately re-named Shining.

"Meet Jack Torrance. He's a writer looking for inspiration." Classic. Love the use of Solsbury Hill.




David Lynch's A Goofy Movie

Had this actually been made, God save the children. [there's also a great David Lynch's Dirty Dancing clip, if you've got the time]




Glen & Gary & Glen & Ross

And finally, my personal favorite, David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross as a film dealing with tourettes syndrome (not much of a stretch there).

finally that Pixies/Godard mash-up everyone was clamoring for

Ok, so maybe there wasn't much demand for a Godard/Pixies mash-up, but there sure as hell should be now. I'm pretty sure the UK Surf remix is off of the B-sides album if anyone's interested (personally, I like it better than the original).

Quote of the Day

From reclusive British author James Hamilton-Paterson's Seven Tenths: The Sea and Its Thresholds (Europa Editions, 2009), a melancholy meditation on the ocean and man's destructive and transformative power:

"And then what pleasure to set up a hut, a fish drier; to pare things back to water and light, to knives and spearpoints, to order and silence! All men have an island, Donne should have said, for a suspended wheel rim being beaten in a cement block chapel on the distant mainland ought to tell us no more than the fish curling and flapping between our hands, bleeding rusty threads into the sea. That steely toiling from across the water brings no news, nothing we do not already know as later we climb the headland to watch soft dusk well up over the world's rim and efface the ocean below. It is not interesting to tot up the sunsets seen and perhaps to come. Those deaths, our deaths, are not plangent affairs but matters of geology. We are all at best marginalia in another era's fossil record. Go down to the hut instead through a drift of fireflies. Light the lamp, cook rice. There is nobody else on this island; there never was and never could be. Outside, the waves wring green flashes from plankton. The great mineral machine turns its fluid gears. The firefly in the thatch tugs us into its gravitational field."

monkey prostitution is all the rage

[ and yes, this monkey can paint better than you ]

I was recently re-reading a few of my favorite chapters from the 2005 New York Times Bestseller 'Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything' (basically a mishmash of pop culture and econ 101), when I remembered a great little article from several years ago (by the same authors) detailing an experiment looking to teach the value of currency to primates (or specifically, capuchins). According to the Times piece the capuchin "is pretty much focused on food and sex" (sounds pretty intelligent to me), making them perfect for this sort of behavioral study.

The most illuminating passage appears towards the very end, and makes it crystal clear that the capuchins did indeed learn the value of currency as they decide to partake in man’s oldest profession:

“Once, a capuchin in the testing chamber picked up an entire tray of tokens [the currency], flung them into the main chamber and then scurried in after them -- a combination jailbreak and bank heist -- which led to a chaotic scene in which the human researchers had to rush into the main chamber and offer food bribes for the tokens, a reinforcement that in effect encouraged more stealing.

Something else happened during that chaotic scene, something that convinced Chen of the monkeys' true grasp of money. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just
food but anything. During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)"

If these little buggers got away with all this in a lab, in the span of minutes, just imagine what'd they do in Vegas.

Read the article in its entirety here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/05FREAK.html

Finally, an Iraq War movie actually about the war

Movie-going audiences haven’t seen much from director Kathryn Bigelow since 2003’s box office flop K9: The Widowmaker, when Harrison Ford unhappily took home the statue for “worst accent in the history of film” (previously held by Keanu Reeves for his “British” accent in Dracula). The Hurt Locker, set to be released next month in New York and Los Angeles, should change all that.

Over the past few years studios have shied away from greenlighting any film that even touches on the Iraq War and for good reason - they’ve all been financial disasters. Curiously, they’ve also not actually been about the war. Case in point: Grace is Gone, starring John Cusack as a father struggling to tell his daughter about the death of her mother in Iraq. Picked up at Sundance in 2007 by the Weinstein Co. for four million dollars, it failed to break the million dollar mark worldwide. Home of the Brave, another Iraq-vet flick this time starring Jessica Biel (how realistic!) and Samuel L. Jackson only brought in half of that. In the Valley of Elah, Paul Haggis’ much ballyhoed follow-up to Crash (my pick for the least-deserving Best Picture Winner in Academy history) failed to recoup even one-third of its costs. A pattern starts to emerge. Nothing quite spells ‘immediate cash black hole’ to studios these days than an Iraq War Movie. But these films failed because they were inherently political. They either argued against stop-loss, George Bush, or the war itself. Americans get enough of that at home. They wake up to that. When people go to the movies they’re not looking for a rant from Rush Limbaugh or Keith Olbermann (or at least I hope not).

The Hurt Locker, which recieved a ten minute standing ovation in Venice, follows a three person Explosive Ordnance disposal unit (EOD for short), and brings along no political baggage. This is a film about soldiers who have one of the worst jobs on earth – they diffuse IEDs. Filmed in Jordan, often just miles from the Iraqi border, The Hurt Locker is grab-the-person-next-you intense. There are scenes so nail-bitingly taut and immersive that you’re almost compelled to turn and run out of the theater (kind of like the guy stumbling on screen in full body armor, screaming at everyone to move out of the blast radius). Bigelow employs a shaky, docu-drama approach to directing (Hollywood’s latest crutch to mask small budgets and poor acting) which fits here perfectly. You end up feeling akin to an embedded journalist. Bigelow intelligently chooses relative unknowns for the main characters (though Ray Fiennes and Guy Pearce make quick appearances) and they’re uniformly excellent. Jeremy Renner, who plays James, an aplomb, replacement staff sergeant, is the standout of the film. As a bomb technician, he works an impossible job, and unfortunately he’s very good at what he does (in one particularly harrowing scene he’s forced pull an IED out of the gut of a dead child). In a notable sequence, as James is set to defuse a roadside bomb, a car rolls up on his position. He puts down his gear and pulls his side arm, shouting at the driver while motioning for him to turn around. The man doesn’t understand English, and James doesn’t understand Farsi (a common thread throughout the film), so James shoots out the front window (after having stuck the gun to the driver’s temple). The car backs up and US troops pull him from his car. James laughs, saying something along the lines of “Well, if he wasn’t an insurgent, he sure is now.” It’s a sad, hopeless scene, and Renner pulls it off brilliantly.

The Hurt Locker is the best war film I’ve seen in years and easily outshines the handful of Iraq movies Hollywood's put out. The film is both helpless and heroic; a testament to the immersive and visceral power of film.

Sir Michael Caine puts you in your place and makes you stay there

[That's 'cutlery' to you, damn Yankee]

Currently Michael Caine is known for both elevating any film which he deems worthy of his innumerable and immense talents, and as that old british guy your mom would happily bang. Lately, "any film worthy of his talents" translates to "anything Chris Nolan is directing" (trust me, I used an online translation program - it's science). But Sir Caine wasn't always so lucky. Sir Caine, back in the day, used to be like any run-of-the-mill, out of work, non-SAG actor (except British), and he took whatever job would pay his bills (including the interest on that hundred grand Tisch student loan). But don't take my word for it, take some of his. And then have a good weekend.

"I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."
-on taking a role in Jaws: The Revenge

"I am in so many movies that are on TV at 2:00 a.m. that people think I am dead."

"The best research [for playing a drunk] is being a British actor for 20 years."

"First of all, I choose the great [roles], and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones, and if they don't come, I choose the ones that pay the rent."

What a cool old dude. They should make a movie starring Patrick Stewart, Michael Caine, and Sir Ian McKellen, and call it "Sweet Old British Dudes Bro-ing Out". Then just film the three of them getting high together by the craft-services trailer and that could be the entire movie. Genius! Green-lit bitches!

I do believe something fishy's going on here...

J.J. Abram's Fringe, like most of the things to which the maestro attaches his name, has quickly risen through the ranks to become one of my guiltiest pleasures. It's not a particularly great television show, and the pseudo-science is often utter drivel (most of the time they don't even try, i.e. deja vu is actually you experiencing an alternate universe...uh, ok, sure), but sadly it's better than most of what's currently on the tube. At the very least it's an attempt at serialization in a sea of murder-of-the-week shows.

The intro theme (composed by Mr. J.J. himself) is all kinds of great. The strange thing is – I knew I’d heard it somewhere else. So I did some serious YouTube digging and finally found this:





That’s the intro theme to the short-lived 2005 ABC series, Night Stalker, which starred that dude who’s banging Charlize Theron (and then forced her star in the eye-meltingly awful The Battle for Seattle), and the lovely Gabrielle Union. A remake of the cult classic, and run by X-Files alum Frank Spotnitz, it aired just six episodes.

Now here’s the intro to Fringe:





See any similarities? Something’s not right here people. Or maybe I'm just taking crazy pills.

The Criterion Collection strikes again

The Criterion Collection is known for plucking classic films from obscurity (films often lost or available only with terrible transfers) and transforming them into beautifully packaged (and colossally expensive) DVDs. The extras aren't just added studio advertisements but enlightening documentaries containing interviews with film historians and the films’ creators, often edited with direct input from the filmmakers. There are 3-disc editions of The Battle of Algiers and Bicycle Thieves, and FOUR disc sets for some of my personal favorites, Brazil and Seven Samurai that would take an entire day to process. They’re often stuffed with beautiful booklets, and the Criterion edition for Robert Altman’s Short Cuts includes all nine Carver short stories which inspired the film. I was looking over new Criterion releases this morning when I stumbled upon this gem –


-John Huston’s Wise Blood, which stars the super-creepy Brad Dourif. I’ve never seen the film (a well reviewed late-seventies piece, based off Flannery O’Connor’s first novel), but it’s the box art that really excited me. The artist is Josh Cochran, whose portfolio is just superb (you can find more his work, along with a post on the genesis of his Blood work at his personal site: www.johncochran.net). I love the composition and contrast for the cover, and obviously a lot people feel exactly as I do since most of the items for sale on his personal website are completely sold out.

Because no one demanded it, more Paul Auster

From the memoir 'The Invention of Solitude', Auster's highly personal reflection on his shell of a father, and ghost of man:


"From a bag of loose pictures: a trick photograph taken in an Atlantic City studio sometime during the Forties. There are several of him sitting around a table, each image shot from a different angle, so that at first you think it must be a group of several men. Because of the gloom that surrounds them, because of the utter stillness of their poses, it looks as if they have gathered there to conduct a seance. And then, as you study the picture, you begin to realize that all these men are the same man. The seance becomes a real seance, and it is as if he has come there only to invoke himself, to bring himself back from the dead, as if by multiplying himself, he had inadvertently made himself disappear. There are five of him there, and yet the nature of the trick photography denies the possibility of eye contact among the various selves. Each one is condemned to go on staring into space, as if under the gaze of the others, but seeing nothing, never able to anything. It is a picture of death, a portrait of an invisible man."

- Reprinted in the Picador edition of Auster's Collected Prose (2003)

The memoir is disjointed, as is Auster's memory of his elusive father. He paints the portrait of solitary, distant man, which often reads as a sort of train of thought narrative - as if Auster is figuring out his relationship with his father as he shuffles through His shuttered mansion, one dusty room, and one paragraph at a time.

Patrick Stewart is awesome

Patrick Stewart is awesome. Along with headlining two mega-million dollar franchises and rocking the shit out of any Shakespeare part he plays, he also makes pretty amazing cameos (not to mention his recurring character on Fox's 'American Dad!').

If you haven't seen Extras (which is good, but not close to the The Office (British) good) you owe it to yourself to watch this. Unless you're a middle-aged, single dude, and haven't watch Star Trek. Then don't watch this.



If I were interviewing candidates for World's Sweetest Grandpa, Patrick Stewart would win hands down.

Stewart's badass Sesame Street/ Shakespeare combo:



What a pimp.

Stewart, as Stewart, on Family Guy:



Patrick Stewart rocks your face. FACT.

David O'Russell vs. Christian Bale = epic flip-out

According to Variety, the wheels are in motion for principal photography to begin on Fighter, a long-gestating project that now adds Christian Bale to a cast that already includes Mark Wahlberg (Brad Pitt was previously attached). The film follows Irish Rocky Mickey Ward and his half-brother, Dicky Eklund, a fellow boxer who kicked a drug habit and served jail time before backing Mickey to world lightweight championship.

David O’Russell (Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees) is set to direct, which I find particularly amusing, since this is the same David O’Russell famous for choking-out George Clooney on the set of Three Kings, reportedly saying “Why don't you just worry about your fucked-up acting?! You're being a dick. You want to hit me? You want to hit me? Come on, pussy, hit me.” Clooney describes the experience as “the worst…of my life.” Then, on the set of his existential-tragi-comedy “I Heart Huckabees”, someone actually filmed his flip-out on poor Lilly Tomlin, which I've embedded below (note Dustin Hoffman cowering in the corner - way to man up Dusty). According to the New York Time’s Sharon Waxman, who chronicled O’Russell in the excellent ‘Rebels on the Backlot’ (2006), “Mr. Russell ends his tirade by sweeping his arm across a nearby table cluttered with production paraphernalia. He storms off the set and back on again, continually shouting. Then he locks himself in his office, refusing to return.”



So now I hear that Christian “Am I going to walk around and rip your fucking lights down, in the middle of a scene?!?” Bale is going to be taking direction from David “a shower of bitches” (a phrase he used when accusing Chris Nolan of stealing Jude Law from Huckabees) O’Russell and I’m just waiting for the next YouTube clip to surface. There’s just so much potential. David O'Russell v. Christian Bale. Date TBA. Mark your imaginary calendars.

Tweenbots to take over the world with cuteness

Tweenbots, the brainchild of ITP graduate student Kacie Kinzer, is probably the cutest thesis project I've ever seen. Or maybe the only cute thesis project I've ever seen. The lil' cardboard robots are completely human-dependant, can only mosey in one direction at a constant (and hilariously slow) speed, and have a final goal in mind (printed on a white flag sticking out of the robots square butt). Kacie let one of them loose in Greenwich Village's Washington Square Park and over the course of forty minutes close to thirty different people intervened, lending a helping hand whenever he got lost, stuck under a bench, or just plain loopy. I particularly love the quote from some guy talking directly to our interpid little Tweenbot: "You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.” He then proceeded to turn the little guy back the way he had come. Oh, the amazing ability of humans to anthropomorphize any tiny thing with a big smile and googly eyes.

If the video doesn't make you smile (while showing how great a lot of New Yorkers are) then you yourself might be some sort of robot - though probably not half as cute as a Tweenbot.



Check out the entire site below:

www.tweenbots.com

listen to this

On March 3rd, Brooklyn-based The Antlers released Hospice, a full two years after their previous full-length album. Self-produced, it’s as good as anything I’ve heard all year (yes, better than Animal Collective), and well worth the wait. I’ve been playing it frequently and fully, as it should be listened. The record is completely realized over ten tracks, which unspool to tell the story of a home-care professional who falls in love with a troubled patient. A meditation on death, attempted suicide, hospital machinery, and ghosts (along with other uppers), these types of downtrodden topics could have easily fallen into an emo-shovelled trench with no hope of getting out. But they don't. Silberman, 22, The Antlers’ frontman, has a vocals style that ranges wildly. He can pull the falsettos of Jeff Buckley, with the sincerity of Wayne Coyne. This, along with the ambient background underlying his lyrics, help make the album play more like fleshed-out novel. The lyrics are haunting, and poetically so (the liner notes are particularly insightful - www.antlersmusic.com/linernotes.pdf). “Bear” and “Two” are probably the standout tracks for me, and I think it’s because they’re a bit more uplifting, at least in their arrangement (even though their subject is so foreboding): “You had a new dream/ And it was just like nightmare/ You were just a little kid/ And they cut your hair/Then they stuck you machines/ You came so close to dying/ They should have listened/ They thought that you were lying/ Daddy was an asshole/ he fucked you up/ Built the gears in your head/ Now he greases them up/ And no one paid attention when you just stopped eating/ 87 pounds! and this all bears repeating.”

It’s powerful, moving stuff, and well worth your time.

The album, in its entirety, is streaming below:

How to Scar a Poor Kid for Life (number 5)

[the Uruk-hai's the least of your problems, kiddo]

5. The Black Hole (1979)

This little masterpiece came out before I was born, but still managed to spread its dark, dark, tentacles throughout my nubile mind. To this day I haven’t been able to gather the strength necessary to re-watch the damn thing. As a SPACE.com article asked, twenty-five years after its original released date: “Does Disney’s ‘The Black Hole’ Still Suck?” I can’t imagine how not.

There’s not a whole lot to say about this Disney crap-fest except that it might be the oddest movie in the studio’s entire, monumental library. From what I can remember (and it’s not much – I must have been five at the time), it’s something of a hybrid between Star Wars and Time Bandits…if both were on a shit-ton of acid. Someone involved (or maybe everyone involved) must have had a raging hard-on for robots because I recall unnecessary reveal after unnecessary reveal where humans are robots, robots are humans, and all these robots chase after everyone else like a pack of dogs in heat. The real monster, sans the robots, is Maximilian Schell, who plays Dr. Reinhart, effectively making Darth Vader look like your grandma. He’s terrifying. I don’t really remember his master plans, but he lives alone on some massive ship orbiting a black hole (hence that creative title), obsessed with reaching the other side in some sort of misguided attempt at attaining immortality. Not really sure who gets paid to write this. Extremely dark, and as I remember it, confusing, the movie was bleak, in that whole “oh-shit-we’re-leaving-the-70’s-and starting-the-depressing-80’s” way. The tagline, “A Journey That Begins Where Everything Ends”, doesn’t even make any fucking sense.

In a lot of ways this movie falls into the same category as Time Bandits (number 8 on my list), which is that it was marketed towards kids, but really shouldn’t have been. It’s just one major pile of unmitigated and unintelligible creepiness. Between this and Terminator 2, the eighties only really convinced me of one thing: stay the fuck away from robots. And consider becoming a neo-luddite.