Moon Sash Productions

Rites of Spring

2011-04-02T12:59:00.003-05:00

The first real ride of the season - a seventeen mile soupcon south of Iowa City. Many cyclists joined me in this grim and painful salute to a glorious, sunny day. I wondered why everyone I passed on the way out looked so dour - I suppose it was because of the wind, which the weather website claims blew at fifteen miles an hour. On the way out it gave me the impression that I was in great shape and would have my summer fitness back in a week; on the way back it revealed that it had been lying and toying with me and that actually I was a fatty who was going to get all out of breath and wish for a Clif bar and a kindly van driver.

This was a complete ride - I got to offer help to some stranded cardiologists (they declined, I guess they had extra tubes), and to tell an angry SUV driver that I felt that his honking and swerving denied my subjectivity. He did not think that cyclists should turn left. Perhaps I had pulled out into the road to turn too abruptly, and was a little at fault. He may have needed to apply the brakes, or at least slacken his acceleration, which as we all know is bad for gas mileage and hence mother earth.

I also saw two cute Basset hounds, one of whom smiled at me and lumbered towards me while looking at me with his eyes.

Oh god

2010-10-08T14:07:00.001-05:00

SEEN south of IC:

A spider with a body the size and color of a ripe green grape, crawling into the road. I assume it was planning to capture a few trucks.

Panic in the Pyrenees!

2010-10-05T16:36:00.004-05:00

On the way back from my usual ride south of IC I got into a genuine DUEL with a bearded hipster cyclist wearing two-tone Raybans and no helmet. He was also riding a mountain bike and carrying a heavy backpack. We pulled up next to eachother at the light at the bottom of Gilbert, where it meets Bowery near the terrible Japanese restaurant. Neither one of us spoke; we exchanged mute male glances and then stared grimly ahead. As Tacitus wrote of the first meeting between Caesar and Mecha-Caesar, "Shit was ON."

I slew all on the first leg - I attacked immediately and, for once, clipped in on the first stroke without trying. My diamond-clear memory of the cracks and irruptions in the pavement served me; I slalomed past bumps and crevices, hissing along in the biggest of big gears. The hipster groveled along behind, not even trying to pass me.

We met at the light at the intersection of Gilbert and Burlington. We each stopped behind a black Audi. The car's driver was either impatient or filled with automotive joie de vivre; he repeatedly popped his clutch, rolling back and forth like some lathered bull in a chute. The hipster and I grew more agitated; I began bopping along to my music (Ke$ha's "Party at a Rich Dude's House"); the hipster did likewise. College students moved around us, ignorant of our savage combat. A flock of birds wheeled overhead, streaming counterclockwise in a great elegant crescent, heading for their roosts on the gables of Iowa City. It would implicate me in irresponsible literary license if I were to insert a peal of thunder, although it wouldn't violate the spirit of the moment.

Presently the light changed; the Audi wallowed ahead, though we had each expected it to surge. The hipster attacked and it fell to me to grovel, to blow chunks (to employ Bob Roll's pungent phrase) as the hipster sailed off north on Gilbert, smirking over his shoulder. He rides on; some say he never slows; he dances atop the pedals; he says he will never die.

More Bikin'

2010-09-09T13:21:00.002-05:00

Today on my ride south of IC I saw:

- Three or four dead raccoons, some huge, all pretty sad.

- An enormous caterpillar, the size of a cigar (alive and well).

- A heat mirage - the pavement looked underwater. It wasn't actually all that hot out, but I guess that's when this sort of thing happens? It was like a car commercial.

The windy city

2010-09-06T14:42:00.002-05:00

A magical 17-ish miler south of IC today - groveling into the wind the whole way out, flying back in top gear. As I rolled into town I felt drops of rain through the vents in my helmet. A friendly motorcyclist squeezed past me at a stop light. On the way out, by the bridge on the bikepath that passes the waste treatment plant, I got behind some nondescript weaving slowly back and forth across the pavement, holding a mincing dog on a lead. He got over on the grass when he noticed me behind him. As I passed I looked back and I couldn't read the expression on his face - he was smiling, but like he was about to throw up.

Rain

2010-08-31T14:18:00.002-05:00

So I took my new S-Works Turbo tires out in a drizzle today and I think they do provide better "suppleness" and "tolerance" and "gripsmanship" than my old Mondo Pros. So if you absolutely have to buy some new tires and they have to be S-Works Turbo clinchers then I am here to tell you that everything will be fine.

On the cute little pond loop by Napoleon Park I saw a rollerblader scare the DAYLIGHTS out of a man who was walking. The man took it in good humor. I also got chased, twice, by an adorable standard poodle. He had the doggy look of transcendent joy on his face. I think his owner was annoyed at me but I didn't want to stop and pet him and teach him that all cyclists want to say "a chew chew chew" and inspect his flews. I should write to The Ethicist, this is about his level of complexity.

Just outside my house I dropped a pretty lady on a hybrid with huge, laden panniers. I blew past her up a hill in the huge gears with my safety light blinking. This is about equivalent to beating a distracted toddler in a foot race - she was just pedaling along. About a block later I dismounted at my front door. She shouted "work that thing!" at me as she rode past - she was smiling so I think it was in good fun. Bicycling!

Old Bike me Do

2010-08-28T14:18:00.002-05:00

A weird ride south of IC today. Spotted:

- One tandem, ridden by a rather grim couple.

- One small airplane, hovering with its nose into the wind.

- One dried frog, perched on three legs as if in mid-leap.

IC Wiener

2010-08-22T15:34:00.002-05:00

SPOTTED on Gilbert St., near the bad Japanese restaurant: a legitimate flip-flop fixie hipster, riding an elegant old road bike with the handle bars rotated around so that the brake levers pointed directly towards the rider, as if in accusation. The bar ends consequently pointed towards the heavens. I guess this would be a great "steez" if you wanted to activate your brakes by punching instead of squeezing. Guy had some nice boat shoes on.

ALSO, south of IC I stopped to adjust my saddle and a nice guy from BIC swooped by and asked me if everything was OK. He had the best bike repair inquiry manner I've ever seen - no world-weary scorn or condescension whatsoever.

Bike Report 2k10

2010-08-21T10:45:00.005-05:00

A wee jaunt south of IC this morning. I spotted only one recumbent, and many fine mountain bikes and hybrids. There was one completely rube-looking guy in a t-shirt and shorts on an undistinguished mountain bike who was absolutely HAULING around the little paved bike trail near Napoleon park. Specialized-Mercy Team, recruit him! He goes by the name EL GUAPO.

I also managed to flail around trying to clip in so dramatically that I tilted my saddle down so the nose was pointing at the front wheel. I did this about five minutes after getting on the bike and didn't notice until I got back home. In fact, I was thinking "wow, these new bib shorts have a GREAT chamois! The saddle feels so comfortable!" Now who's the rube, SAMSKY?

Also: only two short years ago I was lavishing praise on Brooks saddles and sneering at the fact that there are people out there who buy carbon fiber water bottle holders. Well, I got a (cheap) Cutter carbon fiber bottle cage and I have to say I really like it, though this is probably just because it has a better design than the plastic Specialized cage I was using. TWO GRAMS LIGHTER BROSEPH.

Spice 2!

2010-08-17T11:41:00.001-05:00

Here's a report on my recent trip to Duke at Splice - you may find it toothsome, or possibly overwrought and mawkish, or maybe all three!

Spice Today!

2010-08-01T00:14:00.002-05:00

Russ Smith at Splice did a rad Q&A about my book! Check it out.

Also, just saw The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Man was that unpleasant. Apparently the original Swedish title was Men Who Hate Women, which seems about right. Gross out to the max. I thought that the Swedes only dealt with death through chess games and comic tree-sawing but I guess they SHOWED ME!

Aw, man

2010-05-18T13:51:00.002-05:00

Today on my ride south of Iowa city I saw a beautiful gray cat who had been struck and killed by a car. I see many dead animals on each ride: deer, turtles, countless birds, raccoons (one today, in fact), frogs. In Princeton I saw squirrels.

I used to see this little cat all the time on my rides - he would stride around the fields near the sod farm, ranging all the way to the intersection with 520th st. I looked forward to seeing him. He always looked so pleased and proud of himself, like he was surveying his lands. His tail was up, and he marched along with dainty precision. It was very sad to see him there on the shoulder. I stopped at the house where I thought his owners lived but no one was home.

Rike Ratch

2010-05-15T15:32:00.001-05:00

The usual south of IC route:

- A commuter, walking his bike. He assumed the air of ostentatious disinterest that New Yorkers use to avoid panhandlers when I asked if he had a flat. He grudgingly admitted that he did but refused my help, which is probably best for both of us since I am not exactly a whiz with the ol' tubes.

- A pack of heavily laden touring cyclists, probably training for RAGBRAI. They were carrying so much equipment that they had to do away with luxuries like helmets and drop bars.

No recumbents or tandems!

The Capricious Critic - out now!

2010-05-11T18:37:00.003-05:00

Ladies and gentlemen, The Capricious Critic has been published by Otis Books/Seismicity Editions and is now available through SPD in California! The book collects a few of my Smyles and Fish columns and a huge amount of new material, including snarky references to Princeton landmarks, a trip to the moon, and a few dozen synonyms for halberd. You will love it beyond reason!

Bikewatch Continues

2010-04-15T19:44:00.002-05:00

Today I saw:

Three or four brass keys amidst gravel and pennies at the base of Grand Avenue and Riverside; it had kind of a supernatural feel.

1 lonely recumbent bicycle.

Bikewatch 2K10

2010-04-04T14:49:00.001-05:00

On the only 17-miler south of IC I saw:

3 recumbents, one in the elusive three-wheel non-tadpole form.

The local Specialized team also blew by my in the humorless, intense fashion to which I aspire.

BikeWatch 2K9

2009-09-13T11:38:00.002-05:00

Oh hello there blog! I didn't see you come in!

18 Mile morning ride in Iowa City
Exotic Bike Count:

5 (!) tandems, three of them the elusive flat-bar variety
2 recumbents

This does not count the several dozen bicycles I saw whose handlebars soared majestically in the air, hovering around their riders' chins. These bicycles are not, at least in these climes, exotic.

The Perfect Family

2009-03-12T08:31:00.001-05:00

Two pieces of news that will surprise no one:

- Levi Johnston has quit the oil field.

-AND-

- Johnston and Bristol Palin have separated.

An Excerpt from my "The L-Word" Tie-in Novella (NOT FAN FICTION!)

2009-01-24T21:26:00.004-05:00

Evil lesbian nightclub owner Dawn Denbo stormed out of She Bar. "Curse Kit Porter and Helena Peabody!" she muttered, "I will make them pay for buying my nightclub and kind of humiliating me in front of a bunch of people!" But Dawn Denbo had not been paying attention as she walked into an alley. The alley was as dark as the soul of evil lesbian arriviste Adele Channing. Dawn Denbo walked past a dumpster, shivering with cold - or was it evil?
"BLAH!" yelled the vampire Lestat as he jumped out from behind some boxes or a parked car. "Drink from me and live forever!"
Dawn Denbo considered his offer.
"Also you can team up with me and Sonic the Hedgehog to get back at those conniving wenches from The Planet!" Lestat offered. "Sold!" replied Dawn Denbo.

AND THUS BEGAN THE SAGA OF VAMPIRE DAWN DENBO!

Look for the novella in stores as soon as I get an agent and an offer for publication and iron out some minor intellectual property issues!

Dr. House, M.D.

2009-01-19T10:25:00.003-05:00

So last night I had a dream that I was on House, and I was a resident and was bossing around some of the new interns. The main plot was a leftist girl with some mysterious disease who kept leaving the hospital to attend protests and play folk guitar. At one point when we were following her famous actor Daniel Craig walked by on an embankment and he waved at me and I got very excited and told my fellow doctors that being a celebrity must be like being the only person in a world of dogs, because everywhere you go everyone is super-excited to see you.

Girl Problems

2008-11-06T23:50:00.002-05:00

As you might notice, I am totally in this video! Check out Girl Problems' Myspace for mo' info, RIGHT NOW.

FOR REAL GUYS?

2008-11-04T23:04:00.001-05:00

HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN?

The Perfect White Ninja

2008-10-27T07:58:00.001-05:00

You can find it here.

Iron Legs versus Bag of Trash

2008-09-09T09:46:00.003-05:00

My mother, who has many conservative email interlocutors, sent me this impassioned speech from some manner of internet preacher. It's quite an amazing performance, much in the spirit of "Leave Brittney Alone!"

Notes from the Reception of my Literary Career

2008-09-08T22:04:00.002-05:00

Readers, hark to this review of the most recent issue of Beeswax; it makes special mention of my contribution, the short story "Some Events of the Spring of 1999, Bordeaux, France." By "special mention" I mean that the author of the review didn't know if the story was fiction or reportage (it's fiction, salted with real landmarks of Bordeaux). I don't know if this means I did my job especially well or especially poorly, but having my work described as "mystifying" certainly gives me a little frisson.

Controversial new McCain Campaign Ad May Alienate Conservative Base

2008-08-31T07:53:00.000-05:00

DOES ANYONE KNOW WHO THIS "BRACK OBAMA" GUY IS?

2008-08-27T18:50:00.003-05:00

APPARENTLY HE IS A BIG DEAL IN POLITICS????????

In Stereo!

2008-08-27T10:18:00.001-05:00

Readers, you may enjoy my new article at Splice, a catalog of depressing songs accompanied by depressing videos!

Notes from my Internet Career

2008-08-19T08:23:00.002-05:00

Readers, please turn to Splice Today, a (dare I say) avant-garde website specializing in cultural criticism and having a totally rad design. I have an article there on the Brooks leather saddle, and you should expect to see more from me soon.

A note on the Venture Brothers

2008-08-17T12:05:00.003-05:00

I must admit that the first time I saw the Venture Brothers I thought it was kind of dumb, but I have since grown to love and cherish it as only a grown man can love and cherish a cartoon. Anyway, it's really good and the first part of this season's finale was wall-to-wall excellent.

YOU BE THE JUDGE!

2008-08-05T09:46:00.001-05:00

VERSUS

Looks at Books

2008-07-13T22:13:00.005-05:00

What's up, Internet? Me, my energy is through the roof since I unlocked the potential of regular cardio workouts. I've also started wearing UnderArmor and saying "'sup?" Soon I will be as unrecognizable as the pale waif at the end of that Edward Gorey story, only in the opposite direction.

And now, some DISSAPOINTING BOOK REVIEWS!

The Night Land
William Hope Hodgson
I'm a little late on this one, since it dripped from the syphillis-addled pen of William Hope Hodgson in 1912. In a typical move for books of this era Hodgson's novel concerns the comings and goings of psychics who live in a gigantic silver pyramid several millions years into the future. The sun has gone out and terrible powers prowl the land, just completely killing the shit out of anyone they catch. The first half of this long narrative is pretty interesting and defies comparison to any other writer I can immediately think of. The protagonist stumbles around blindly in a suit of armor, relying for his safety on the home audience observing him through high-powered binoculars and signaling him with the 1912 idea of a Jumbotron. Various horrible things attack him. H.P. Lovecraft (unsurprisingly) loved it; I did not. In the second half the hero reunites with his (extremely) long-lost love and after that it's page after page of stomach-turning twee mincing: they argue for pages and pages about which one of them will give the other one their cape. An interesting curio - the text is available for free on the internet.

The Book of Lost Things
John Connolly
Hey, book-writing public, can we maybe have a moratorium on people explicitly acknowledging debts to Joseph Campbell and his god-damn Hero's Journey? And then, after that, can we have a big "get-together" where we inform the world community that just because you can get all excited about the supposedly ubiquitous "Trickster" category in world myth doesn't mean you should? Has anyone heard of Claude Levi-Strauss?

ANYWAYS, The Book of Lost Things is actually pretty good. Set during World War II it follows a boy named David as his family falls apart and then he gets blowed up by a crashing German bomber and travels to Darkly Re-Imagined Fairytale World, where anthropomorphic wolves menace him and the Crooked Man (eventually) offers him a terrible bargain. I think the story can't pick what it wants to be - self-indulgent gory action romp, or over-metaphorized psychological coming-of-age tearjerker. Other critics have pointed to a bizarre interlude with Snow White and the Seven Dwarves as a symptom of the book's schizophrenia; I rather liked this portion, but I'm surprised that the editor didn't cut it, since it does contrast jarringly with the rest of the narrative's largely desperate tone. The slightest touch of thought's keen razor will begin to unravel major plot points as well (why, for instance, did the Crooked Man give David so many opportunities to grow emotionally self-reliant or be horribly killed?)

Connolly apparently writes thrillers, and much of the narrative moves along like one. It's certainly hard to put down, but in places the writing gets a little sloppy, the dialogue is leaden (although it's coming out of the mouths of knights and woodsmen - how natural can it be?), the characters are not terribly complex, and David's critically important emotional journey from petulant child to dude-stabbing badass is not really believable. Tune in for well-imagined villains, surely written action, and a satisfying little dab of schmaltz at the end. Not great literature; skip the conversation with the author at the end unless you have a specific reason to destroy your admiration for the book.

I am basically a huge jock now

2008-07-02T18:38:00.002-05:00

Oh hello there internet! I didn't hear you come in!
Anyway, I bought a used bicycle and have started biking, which seems to me like the least loathsome form of exercise. Time will tell. I've been working furiously on a project for S&F over the past few months, and you can bet that I will tell you all about it when it comes to fruition.

Horribly Depressing Crap

2008-02-22T12:59:00.003-05:00

I urge Moon Sash's loyal readers to visit this website and urge their representatives and senators to ban the export of American horses to Mexico and Canada for slaughter. Search for your zipcode at the main page and it will set you up with an automatic email form to send to your representatives. The form urges them to support an act which will ban this horrible abuse. The details of this practice are pretty harrowing and awful. I'm sure that if this bill passes some novel form of cruelty will spring up to replace the current one, but it's still worth supporting.

Life Imitates Bart

2008-01-19T13:29:00.000-05:00

See this link for the major GOP candidates as Buffy villains. Thanks to Betsy Smith, who linked to this on Facebook.

My Incredibly Famous Life

2008-01-16T19:39:00.001-05:00

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Internet, once again I come before you to shill for Beeswax magazine, in whose latest issue you can find my multiple page-spanning short story "Some Events of the Spring of 1999, Bordeaux, France." At $4 the issue is a bargain, even if you tear out my story and discard the rest of the magazine like the lifeless shell of a denuded cannolli. The story features several real stores from the Rue Ste. Catherine in real Bordeaux, where I once bought a perfectly good H&M suit for $12.00.

The Madness of King Internet

2008-01-16T14:21:00.000-05:00

Fans of my c olumn at Smyles and Fish may rejoice; the new one is up. It continues my sexy adventures with Doctor-Professor Lothar de Groot, the man who has elevated cruelty to fruit to its current, lofty height.

Reviews That Made the News

2008-01-08T13:30:00.000-05:00

JUNO
What is this, Napoleon Dynamite for smart people? No, it isn’t, and it invites only superficial comparisons to that catchphrase-laden abortion of a film. Juno, played by Ellen Page (who turned in a comatose performance as “Kitty Pride” in the last X-Men film), is a sixteen year old girl who has sexual intercourse with George Michael from Arrested Development and gets pregnant. Hilarity ensues, aided immeasurably by the movie’s fine cast (Allison Janey, the guy who played Vern Schillinger on Oz, Jennifer Garner, and Jason Bateman). Juno cracks wise with about 97% of her lines, which sounds a little forced but may or may not be perfectly natural for a teenager deeply invested in seeming like a badass. Garner and Bateman provide a nuanced, reserved performance as a disintegrating couple interested in adopting Juno’s baby. The movie’s generally cheerful atmosphere and likeable characters sometimes push the central conflict into the background, but it’s ultimately pleasing even though nothing really awful happens. Highy recommended.

THE GOLDEN COMPASS
This review comes in on the late boat from lateness junction, but the film is still in theaters so I think it meets the strict relevancy requirements of this blog that no one ever reads. Many other critics have bemoaned the fact that the movie version misses Phillip Pullman’s stately pace, glossing over concepts that Pullman explores in depth. These critics are nitwits; Pullman’s tendentious, portentous work desperately needs this big screen enema. Lyra’s adventures come off as adventures in the movie, not painful lessons in multiculturalism or skepticism. The action moves swiftly from scene to scene without bogging down in Pullman’s unbearably tedious explanations of dust and daemons. If Pullman’s original novel had made daemons into anything other than an on-the-nose, inconsistent representation of the human soul the movie would have done him disservice. As it is, they still seem important enough that the trauma of being separated from one’s daemon seems appropriately traumatic. The film avoids the mega-downer ending of the novel by lopping it off entirely, which may very well make for an extremely depressing sequel. Look out for Ian McShane in a surprise role as evil bear king Norsely Scandinavian.

Synthetic Biology and the New Fruit: Reflections on Modern Equipment

2007-11-13T22:29:00.000-05:00

Ol' Smyles and Fish has my new column up, and I think you will all enjoy the heck out of it.

Neu Columne

2007-08-27T21:52:00.000-05:00

A typical scene from my dissertation fieldwork

Tune, if you will, your internet browsers to Smyles and Fish, where you will find my new column, which reviews the evil Druids of New Hampshire.

Abdominate your Abs with the Abreactor!

2007-08-05T15:06:00.000-05:00

Read, if you will, this excellent New York Times Book Review essay on conservative conversion narratives. In it Stephen Metcalf dissects a collection of essays that describe how their authors became conservatives. Metcalf precisely likens their conservativism to obsessional neurosis - it is rooted in a primal trauma (caused, in these accounts, by liberal academics or feminists or both) which the conservative constantly re-experiences. This always fresh trauma lends to their political arguments the raw personal heat that speaks so persuasively to ordinary American people (despite the fact that their authors are invariably extremely privileged elites). Basically, Metcalf claims that conservatives are a bunch effete nerds who never got laid in college, an argument which I myself have championed on this very blog.

My Original Carnivàle Novella [NOT Fanfiction!]

2007-07-26T16:06:00.000-05:00

Ben Hawkins was feeling depressed. He was so sad that he could barely get up from under the truck in the morning and pull on one of his collection of grimy undershirts. He sat in the chow tent toying with his tin dish of carny beans. "Hmmm," he said to himself, "I sure hope I get some kind of artistically filmed horrifying vision soon, otherwise I'll never find my grimy weirdo father Henry 'Hack' Scudder or my lady friend Sofie with whom I had sexual intercourse in a truck."

Meanwhile, Lila said or did something disgusting.

Ben Hawkins was having an eerie vision of Scudder's Navy days; Scudder had been an ensign aboard the U.S.S. Casual Elegance during World War I. Scudder was grooming a bear which had been smuggled aboard in a false torpedo by Dr. Lodz. The bear's hair began sticking to Scudder's shedding comb, coming out in nasty clumps. It revealed that the bear had a mystical tattoo: a muscular male centaur with a busty barbarian maiden riding him, each hand holding aloft a sanguinary battle axe. "Every prophet in his house!" said the bear, facing directly into the camera. Ben Hawkins, back in the chow tent, got a nosebleed and was asked to leave because of health code strictures. He staggered over to the Management trailer to meet with Samson.
"What's the good word, kid?" Samson asked him. "I think I know where Scudder is," Hawkins replied, taking a seat in the cluttered trailer.

Meanwhile, Samson was a dwarf.

Ben Hawkins stepped out of the truck, shading his eyes against the descending sun. Atop a nearby hill crouched a scabrous shack, its front door gaping open on its leather hinges. Hawkins climbed the hill. A wizard emerged from the shack.
"I foresaw your coming, Ben Hawkins," he boomed, stroking his long white beard. "I am Lord Fluffheart, tenth level animagus and Wizard of the Faerie Grove. I can also turn into a busty anthropomorphic female fox."
"It looks like my erotic adventures are only beginning!" said Ben Hawkins.

Wingardium Leviosa!

2007-07-19T11:02:00.000-05:00

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Spoilers!

In the final scene, Voldemort seals Harry in an envelope of Impolex-G and launches him on an uncertain trajectory in a V-2 rocket...or DOES he?
Sirius Black re-appears and explains to Harry that he was "just resting" during book 6; Bellatrix Lestrange kills him AGAIN by tricking him into eating a tack.
Harry transfers to Simon's Rock College of Bard and gets his own radio show "Untitled Monday Rock Arriba."
Hermione's cat Crookshanks revealed to be a Death Eater/animagus/furry named Lord Fluffheart.
[MAJOR SPOILER] In at least one scene, the characters will eat wacky-sounding food.

Spine-tingling!

A non-funny and distinctly unhappy post

2007-07-18T16:31:00.000-05:00

Many of you may have read or heard about Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, who apparently was running a dog-fighting ring out of a home he owned in Virginia (he has yet to be convicted, but the evidence looks very strong). I urge all my readers to visit the American Humane Society webpage and send a letter to the NFL commissioner through their form. The letter urges the NFL to suspend Vick. I will not repeat the details of the investigation here, but they are readily available (through the New York Times for instance), and you should probably learn them before sending the letter.

Whine Dining

2007-06-29T07:46:00.000-05:00

Gentle reader, my new column over at Smyles and Fish contains reviews of several Newport, RI restaurants. I do not in the least exaggerate when I write that these reviews could save your life.

Movie Time means Time for the Movies Time

2007-05-31T09:42:00.000-05:00

Oh, hello there! I didn't see you come in! I know I've been neglecting the ol' blog recently, but that's because I've been suffering from

MOVIE FEVER!

which is a condition in the same family as being boy-crazy or reet petite.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Salty Brine Chest Tropical Island
Well, we all knew what we were getting with this one. The entire cast of the previous two movies returns for another overlong, sumptuous swashbuckling adventure. The plot starts off incomprehensible (does anyone actually remember what happened to Johnny Depp at the end of the last film? And who exactly is the East India Company rep who has snatched Davy Jones' heart?) and gradually fades into obscurity as the films debarks into a series of silly set-pieces. The best scene is doubtless the pirate's council on Murderous Blood Island (or wherever), in which a large group of racial caricatures brawl over the arcana of the pirate's code. Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom gamely recite their incredibly stupid Hallmark-card dialogue, and Geoffrey Rush pulls out ALL the stops and delivers a scenery-chewing but extremely entertaining performance as Famous Pirate #3. Fun drivel.

28 Weeks Later
The first ten minutes of this movie are the most harrowing, frightening images ever set to film. The rest of it lags on a little long and delivers some rather heavy-handed digs at the United States Army; ultimately, it fails to live up to the lonely, Heart of Darkness style psychological terror of its predecessor, but it's certainly frightening and entertaining. Robert Carlyle gets to reveal his inner Begbie and the child stars are capable and not annoying.

Fracture
"I killed my wife untraceably with some fava beans and a nice Chianti! FLPLPLPFLLLLFLPPPPLFFFFPPPPPP!" Ryan Gosling is great, and this movie has the World's Fastest Relationship ("Hi I'm your boss call me later can we not do this at dinner I don't think it's working out"). The central puzzle is very interesting until about an hour out from the end, when it's possible to figure it out and get hella bored. Probably worth seeing.

New Column at Smyles and Fish

2007-05-02T08:52:00.000-05:00

Gentle reader, tune your internet browser to the columns section of Smyles and Fish and there imbibe the delight of a review which makes sarcastic and polemical reference to that titan of bathos Megatokyo.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: Nerd Edition

2007-03-25T22:07:00.000-05:00

Oh Internet, they have restored Starbuck to us, and in ten short months we'll get to thrill again to her wacky adventures with her fellow pilots Corndog, Scooter and Jumblo!

ALSO Rome has ended without any poisoned figs or amphitheaters filled with wine. A bittersweet finale, made especially poignant by the scene in which Pullo slays a cockatrice while Vorenus takes pictures on his camera phone.

Tears of a Nerd

2007-03-04T22:57:00.000-05:00

Oh Internet, did they really just kill off Starbuck? WHATEVER THE OPPOSITE OF "LOL" IS, THAT IS WHAT I'M DOING!

Some Rebranding

2007-02-28T16:41:00.000-05:00

From now on, graduate school is to be known as Thunder Quest. Grad students will be called Thunder Warriors. GREs become TQREs, etc. Please update your agendas, palm pilots, Wikis etc.

Notes from my Literary Career

2007-02-25T10:33:00.000-05:00

Good ol' segrant recently got me a gig writing a column for a new experimental literary magazine, Smyles and Fish. The magazine does not focus on aquaculture or marine heritage preservation, which I know will turn off some of my early readers who stuck around hoping for more colossal squid reporting, but it does feature a pretty impressive corps of contributors, and should have a new column from me every other week. I'm writing The Capricious Critic, in which I capriciously criticize whatever idiotic passion has possessed me at the time of writing. The first column covers the lute (unfortunately, I couldn't get a sailor's hornpipe, nautical readers). Read and enjoy!

They Should have Stuck to Cuckoo Clocks and Getting Bombed

2007-02-04T11:36:00.000-05:00

A review of Storm Front, by Jim Butcher

As many of my more nerdy readers may know (and I can’t imagine that I have any non-nerdy readers at this point) the Sci-Fi channel recently debuted “The Dresden Files”, one of their signature fun, lo-fi shows about the supernatural. I’ve only seen two episodes, both of which were essentially boring, but the setup and the characters are robust and it may get better if they can avoid stretching thin and brittle plots out to an hour. The basic premise is that Harry Dresden is a wizard (of the potions and wands variety) who consults for hot police detective Murphy in Chicago. He lives in a nice loft with his idiotically dressed French ghost roommate and has romantic tension with detective Murphy, who is a Lady. So the show may very well be worth watching.

After seeing that the show was based on a series of novels, I thought to myself “Hey, I will read almost any egregious crap as long as it has vampires or some shit in it, why not try these?” Well, Storm Front has one vampire in it. It has almost no other merits. It’s a conventional detective story, so conventional in fact that I wonder if Mr. Butcher wrote it using some kind of system. It takes two seemingly unrelated cases and resolves them together in the end, with what feels like a carefully numbered set of red herrings and obstacles in between. Sound familiar? This may be a problem inherent to detective novels, but Butcher handles it especially poorly.

The novel’s Dresden the wizard is supposed to be a wounded loner but comes off as more of an antisocial nerd. He constantly wears a long waxed cotton duster, of the type favored by child molesters and D&D enthusiasts, and he attends the formulaic final confrontation wearing sweatpants. He spits out unfunny wisecracks constantly, as if he attended a detective novel protagonist public speaking seminar. He generally handles every confrontation so incompetently that it’s even more annoying that he keeps mentioning that he is a powerful wizard.

The novel has the slightly embarrassing odor of a personal male empowerment fantasy made public. The book is written in the first person, and Dresden pretty clearly stands in for the author – the other characters, to the extent that they exist at all, do so only to serve Dresden. Despite the fact that every single woman that Dresden meets is described as strikingly beautiful, there are no attractive men at all in Chicago. All the women obviously want to fuck Dresden (a few of them come right out and say it), but he is sexless and nerdy enough to make it through the whole book without sealing the deal. This is fortunate, since I would dread cringing my way through a Butcher-penned sex scene.

The novel is not long but consists almost entirely of padding. Each chapter, again in an intensely formulaic way, contains one conflict and a hook to the next conflict; the rest of the chapter usually consists of Dresden driving somewhere or thinking about and carefully summarizing the events that just happened. I really can’t stress how boring this is: Dresden doesn’t usually put the pieces of the mystery together, he just lays them out, again and again. Excruciating. It’s all especially frustrating given that Butcher actually seems to be a decent writer, just lazy and unimaginative. He also uses the word “quirk” as a verb, as in “her lips quirked into a smile.” Obnoxious, and something that I remember seeing in another terrible novel recently (I’ll edit its name in as soon as I think of it*). A big disappointment.

* It was A Walk on the Nightside by Simon R. Green. It's actually very similar to Butcher's work, but British and a lot more imaginative, and with more interesting characters.

I hope you can see this, because I'm doing it as hard as I can

2007-02-01T19:03:00.000-05:00

Finally, Homeland Security has the right idea: protecting us from the depredations of the Mooninites.

(A more permanent news story)
(And another)
(And a Boston TV channel goes the extra mile to protect us from Err's pixelated bird)

Spamityville

2007-01-24T20:00:00.000-05:00

White Elephant Reviews: The Amityville Horror (2005)

Really, and in a totally non-homoerotic way, I will watch anything with Ryan Reynolds in it, especially if it’s on OnDemand. I expected little, but this widely despised remake of the simultaneously boring and nerve-wracking original Amityville Horror pleasantly surprised me. It also made sure that I couldn’t get to sleep until 2:00AM. I had to eat a whole container of wintergreen mints and read The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy. It’s a pretty short book.

The basic plot is: the Lutz family gets a real bargain on a house in Amityville because the previous tenants were all murdered up real good. The Lutzeses move in undaunted, get somewhat daunted by the house's weird noises and unearthly visions, then eventually get very daunted but too hypnotized by the house's evil to leave. The local spirits work especially hard on Ryan Reynolds, turning him from a happy-go-lucky contractor into an embittered shut in child hating weirdo (perhaps this explains why he teamed up with Jessica Biehl to hunt vampires). This takes about a month. Then they move out, leaving all their worldly, 1970s-era goods behind. In between, some black goop oozes out of various parts of the house and a slutty babysitter gets really, really scared.

Anyway, if we judge horror movies by whether they inspire fear (or its more sophisticated and rarer cousin, horror), this one’s a winner. The movie was genuinely horrifying, in that it created a long-burning and hideous dread without having to actually supply too many scares. The director uses surprise cuts sparingly and very clumsily, since none of them are in the least scary. They’re about on par with a well funded haunted hayride and they consist mostly of actors in lots of white makeup drooling Hershey’s syrup out of their mouths. But the moaning sounds of the old house and Ryan Reynolds' against-type performance load on the tension big-style.

So the movie is pretty good. But the story is classic (and its structure is of course literally true, even if the haunting is disputed). Bear with me here: we have a man marrying a woman who already has children, so he’s a stranger and so are they. They buy a house (the scene in the movie in which they tour the house and make their decision is very finely done - the Amityville story is of course a real estate nightmare). The movie is in some ways also about the fact that you really don’t know what you’re getting with either house or marriage.

It kept reminding me of the Roman wedding ceremony. The Roman bride wore red and carried a torch, a strange fire which could kindle the hearth OR burn the house down. She was marked always as a stranger: her children were members of her husband’s family but she never really was. In the movie this is quite sensibly reversed with the husband as stranger, a vile torch ignited by a chthonic spark.

This is especially sinister given that the movie is in many ways so everday. It's just a family unhappy with its new house. They don't really even need an evil spirit to tear themselves to pieces.

"All roads lead to the same place"

2007-01-21T22:07:00.000-05:00

Brutus prepares to cast Expelliarmus and defeat Snape once and for all.

As loyal Moonsash readers know I'm a huge fan of Rome on HBO, and this season is pleasing whatever faculty I have that responds favorably to sex and violence drenched historical dramas. The first episode was a little rocky but the second one is an unparalleled delight: the return of Cleopatra, Vorenus' midlife crisis coming to a gothy head, and a prolonged, delightful brawl-for-all between Marc Antony, Atia and Octavian (Octavian decks Antony with some kind of ancient Roman bookend). We see none other than Lucius Vorenus come into possession of the ancient Roman version of the Gem Saloon, which should be utterly unbelievable and delightful in every way. Fixin' towards a bloody outcome indeed.

Extras has been a little different; the first episode was great but the second one felt like a huge and pointless setup for a moderately funny song by David Bowie. I worry that the celebrity guest stars will begin to overwhelm the tender and complicated overarching plot. It also looks a little like Ricky Gervais is repeating The Office's first to second season change: these two episodes have been decidedly heavy on drama and light on comedy. Gervais handled it well in The Office but who knows how it will pan out this time.

ALSO HOLY SHIT ON BATTLESTAR GALACTICA HELO JUST SHOT ATHENA/BOOMER/SHARON/PRETTY KOREAN ACTRESS whose character has gone through so many name changes I can no longer keep track. This blog post is OVER.

An Incoherent Sound of Rage

2007-01-12T09:24:00.000-05:00

A Seattle school has put a moratorium on viewings of An Inconvenient Truth because a bible-believing parent named Frosty objects to the presentation of science (It's worth noting that it seems that neither he nor his wife has actually seen the objectionable film). If this were a video blog, you could see me sputtering and bulging out my neck-veins with fury. The school has an official policy on "controversial issues," indicating that teachers must strive to present both sides of anything that invites heated debate. Shall we assume that the Holocaust will get the same rigorously impartial treatment [heavy sarcasm here, O People of the Internet]? Just read the article, which shows how religion and patriotism are bound up in a willful rejection of anything that might show a flaw in America.

A Milestone in Total Quality

2006-12-29T11:10:00.000-05:00

That's right, Holiday blog-readers: MOONSASH has upgraded to Google Blogger Blog-Me-Do 9,000 Professional 2K6 Ultimate Edition! You'll find basically the same look and same lackadaisical updating schedule with no significant new features - the MOONSASH way! Here's to the FUTURE!

Merrye Solstyce!!!

2006-12-26T11:48:00.000-05:00

If anything represents the Reason for the Season, it's a day-late photograph of Zelda cosplayers used without their permission and with entirely snarky intent.

Wishing all of Moon Sash's Fans a Safe and Delightful Holiday Season

More Notes from my Fiction Career

2006-11-23T10:23:00.000-05:00

Utne Reader reviews Beeswax magazine, favorably! They don't specifically mention my story, but I am pretty sure they were just being coy.

UPCOMING:
- Review of Thomas Pynchon's new novel Against the Day; I should have this read by QIII, 2009.
- A review of Cormac McCarthy's new dramatic novel The Sunset Limited.
- Perhaps, finally, a highlight reel of Warhammer 40K fiction. Of course much of Pynchon's new book takes place at a blimp convention in the year 40,800, so I may be able to kill two birds with one stone here.

Tristes Tropiques

2006-11-19T15:01:00.000-05:00

In my groundbreaking review of Final Fantasy XII I mentioned a 1990s semi-interactive screensaver about a man marooned on a desert island. The Internet has generously provided me with a wealth of detail on this subject: the screensaver is Johnny Castaway, a 1993 Sierra On-Line production. In my callow youth I adored screensavers, and I remember weeping many a salty tear because I would never have "flying toasters" because it was only for Apple computers. I did have Johnny Castaway, which even then I felt was kind of a disappointment. It was one of those screensavers that was essentially way too complicated to use for its intended purpose. Basically, it was an extremely slow-paced cartoon which consisted mostly of Johnny shuffling around his island in his tattered rags. Occasionally a little canned event would play. On holidays, Johnny would set up seasonally appropriate decorations. It was probably not worth waiting an entire year to watch Johnny string up from VGA tinsel on his palm tree. The whole thing bore an air of melancholy and although I thought it would be amusing to write about this little-missed piece of software ephemera, it's actually kind of depressing.

Start Digging some Nerd Holes

2006-11-17T12:36:00.000-05:00

A Review of Final Fantasy XII

As many of you (actually, just EHastings) may know, the demo of Final Fantasy XII filled me with disgust and I swore I would never buy it. It did not, at first, seem like a game, it was more like one of those semi-interactive screensavers that were briefly popular in the 1990s (Castaway Jim?). Yet here I am, having just spent about ten hours playing it, and it’s really awfully good.

Online review sites have, as usual, been gushing about the top-notch plot and characters. They are, as usual, giving Square-Enix entirely too much credit. Here’s the basic sketch: a disaffected, spiky-haired orphan teams up with a quiet princess to fight a cruel, mechanically-inclined empire. Is this sounding familiar, O People of the Internet? Within the first half-hour of the game, the protagonist’s female best friend plants her hands on her hips and tells him to be careful, something that every female character in every Japanese RPG is required to do as often as possible (don't worry, she gets kidnapped just a little later). The princess, whose name is something like Ashleigh Starla Modeine IV, confines herself mostly to spluttering and saying things like “I’ll never surrender!” Thomas Pynchon, this ain’t. On the plus side, although the things the characters are saying are stupid, the localization is very good, like a pretty good fantasy novel. Lord Vayne, the effeminate, long-haired villain (sound familiar again?) actually makes a very interesting, rhetorically ornamented speech early on.

The characters themselves are shopworn wares from the FF series stock – a determined knight, a determined plucky lad, a determined female sidekick, a determined princess, and a sarcastic but nonetheless determined sky pirate. The highlight character is Fran (yes, her name is Fran), an oddly accented furry who is screwing Sky Pirate Balthier in what must be some extremely awkward and unsatisfying virtual grappling. She has a neat, kind of vaguely Bjorkian accent but is otherwise a standard FF weirdo elf rabbit creature thing.

So as usual the plot and characters should be ignored, but the game mechanics, OH DOCTOR are they good. Two radical changes improve the combat system: no random encounters (all the enemies are already on the map and you fight them without transitioning to a battle screen), and no controlling your characters. The Gambit system, which EHastings accurately described as an autistic programming language, means that you can set general tactics for your characters and then just watch them level grind for hours on end. Somehow, they made this really, really fun. This isn’t as big a revolution as you might initially think: famous old PC games like Baldur’s Gate did basically the same thing, as did the more recent (and vastly better-plotted) Knights of the Old Republic series. FFXII’s gambit system is nonetheless a big improvement on the automatic combat of these other titles: the gambits let you set, in detail, actions for most possible scenarios, and the simple, intuitive system is nonetheless very powerful. You can take just a few seconds to set a behavior like, “If any of your allies are injured, heal them, unless they’re really severely injured, in which case you should give them a potion, and if no enemies are around you should recharge your magic and then heal everyone.” Afterwards, you can experience a brief moment of reverse Schadenfreude when you realize how excited you got over programming the behavior of a virtual rabbit-woman archer.

Anyway, the trademark of Final Fantasy has always been the endless parade of tedious, enervating random battles, and they are gone from this version. What could have been boring (watching your cyberdudes fight) just makes the game feel fast-paced and constantly new. Fighting, say, fifty enemies in a row take about ten minutes, gives measurable rewards, and requires only periodic nudges. Everything else is pretty much standard: you have a standard level board instead of the monstrous “Sphere Grid” from Final Fantasy X, so if you want to customize all your characters in bizarre ways, you can. If only there were a way to turn off the repetitive, vulgar music score this would be perfect. Highly recommended.

Reviews you can Use

2006-11-15T00:18:00.000-05:00

NB – No one will ever be able to use these reviews for any reason.

LAMY Safari Fountain Pen.

This is an inexpensive aluminum* fountain pen – no precious resins, pewter wizards or fragments of Abraham Lincoln’s DNA interrupt its smooth, industrial surface. It has a snap-on cap with a sleek but ultimately useless wire staple clip (as you can see in the picture, it’s U-shaped, so it bends whatever you clip it to; it’s also very tight). It’s very light and pretty large and the shape is very slightly squared. You could use it to write a check for €250 to a store in Munich that sells only stainless steel paperweights. The nib is almost without ornament, nearly black in color, and has a Teutonic rigidity. It seemed a little scratchy at first until I got the hang of it; it needs a very light touch despite its brutalist looks.

In a marketing move that could only come out of Germany this pen is advertised as being youthful and fun, as if “youthful” and “fun” weren’t already synonymous with fountain pens!. It comes in a variety of ultra-gay colors. If Lamy were an American company their ads would doubtless use rapping exotic animals or snowboarders. I can’t really conceive of any reason for a person other than me to buy this pen, unless you think you might like to write with a fountain pen and don’t want to invest too much of your inheritance in it.

* Mine is aluminum - they're also available in plastic for around $20.

Dexter

David Fisher moves to Miami, teams up with Richard from Sex and the City and becomes a serial killer. Also, he is no longer gay and is dating Darla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He is going to be so pissed when he founds out that she has Received the Dark Kiss of the Immortal Blood Rose of Seduction Vampire Style. In all fairness, this show is incredibly good. Dexter’s sister is appealing, the plot has been tight and, in a reversal of Showtime’s usual policy, the characters have depth and interest. Especialy Dexter. The writers have not made him a white knight who slays the guilty; he’s definitely a serial killer, a man who only feels alive and connected when he’s sawing someone’s head off.

Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction

This $20 Xbox game imagines a situation in which dynastic instability and violent conflict in North Korea result in a huge, disastrous war. Huh. The forthcoming sequel is set in Venezuela and is already drawing fire from that country’s legislature because they fear it is a tool of intimidation. This games takes the Grand Theft Auto formula to an actual warzone, but unfortunately they’ve brought along the GTA staples of uneven difficulty and unwieldy controls. If Venezuelans are afraid of tedious escort missions, getting run over by a van just as they’ve finally completed a 45-minute long operation for the fourth time, or being shot from nine miles away by some jerk-off with a rocket, then they may be right.

Zombie Adventure 3-D

2006-10-04T21:38:00.000-05:00

A review of The Road

I have written previously, gentle readers, of the fact that we live in the Age of Zombie Fiction, and as everyone knows zombies are the foul handmaidens of Death himself, come to scour the world of all the living works of man. Of course most zombie fiction actually offers a fun and exciting world, an escape from the boring problems of the everyday to a land filled with limitless enemies and equally limitless opportunities for ingenuity, bravery, and wit. The apocalypse, in these fictions, strips away the silly problems that we have invented to spin out the wheels of our days and provides us instead with survival in its sinewy and physical glory. The tough survivors of, say, Land of the Dead, I Am Legend, or Steven King’s Dark Tower series (the last two not strictly zombie fiction), basically live enviable lives. Beneath their thin and sexy layer of grit and danger, they’re doing what we all would really prefer. What’s more fun, filling out grant applications, or knocking out the staircase so you can shoot zombies in the head at your leisure? My networking associate tMa and I have frequently discussed the escapist allure of this fiction, the jolly physical fun of testing your zeal for living against the unlimited hordes of the dead, of building a secure new fortress life without having to do anything boring or inessential ever again.

Cormac McCarthy’s searing* latest novel, The Road, shows us a dirty, scoured world where the only things men can build are stockades of severed heads and meat lockers for their slaves. McCarthy has drawn a more vivid and infinitely more hellish apocalypse than any other writer I can think of. Life for the unnamed father and son protagonists of The Road is not stripped down to its fun, video-game essentials. Each day they contend with unglamorous and agonizing death. They spend the entire novel pushing a shopping cart through the horrifying wastes of an unnamed part of America, scrounging wherever they are able for canned food, old smoked meat, anything remotely edible. They sleep most nights curled together, the boy shivering for a long while, too afraid of other men to make a fire.

The landscape which they wander is scoured of all life and likewise scours the reader: it terrifies in a way that no other description of scenery has ever done for me. The world has burned, and a thick layer of ash dances forever between the opaque sky and the dead ground. The sun is gone and with it all the natural colors. Everything has turned black and grey. McCarthy’s usual landscapes are still there, under their pall of ash, but there is not life to them.

The father and son have to struggle so constantly against the cruelty of this new world that they never accumulate any of the neat equipment that so many other post-apocalyptic narratives feature. They have a gun with only two bullets; they’re afraid even to fire it lest it bring the attention of the other survivors, vile, tough men long accustomed to eating human flesh.

McCarthy’s novel is, in some ways, rather conventional for a post-apocalyptic story: it maintains the great post-apocalyptic narrative traditions of clever scavenging, ruined cities, and insane and bloodthirsty new clans. McCarthy, with his signature skill and economy, has boiled these clichés down to their bright white bones, unveiling a truer vision than many of his predecessors. McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic warrior bands have none of the panache of the usual imaginings of the end of the world: they’re not the leather-clad, sexually ambiguous monsters of Mad Max, nor the pale ghouls of Omega Man. They are mostly simply men, wrapped in layers of ugly rags against the permanent cold, bearded, armed with long steel pipes. They are indescribably more sinister and real than the more lurid imaginings of other post-apocalyptic worlds.

Out of these elements, the man and his son, the dead landscape of America, and the rapacious remnants of the rest of mankind, McCarthy weaves a graceful, moving story. The relationship between the man and his son is finely drawn and imagined in heartbreaking detail. Their constant, bitter grasping for survival repeats and repeats, but McCarthy’s unsurpassed prose skill keeps the wound fresh. Each minor victory (a few precious days spent underground in a never-used bomb shelter) and each horrifying setback (their cart stolen, a run-in with a warrior band) stings afresh. The ending, in its terse and rare beauty, is maybe even better than the finish to No Country for Old Men, itself a short masterpiece. The novel, with its bitter winds and cruel vistas, sticks in my mind, like a little snowglobe that I can shake and look into, hearing the uncaring wind and the little boy’s plaintive “Papa…Papa…” A sad, rewarding book.

PS – This Review is notable for having the most inane possible kicker in the history of the world: “Cormac McCarthy sends a father and son on the scariest road trip he can imagine. Seat belts fastened?” To me, this is equivalent to reviewing the New Testament under “God sends his only begotten son on a wild ride with an ending that will leave you on the edge of your seat!”

* The National Reviewer’s Association requires every review of this book to call it “searing” at least once.

A Tradition of Heritage

2006-09-20T17:42:00.000-05:00

Milestones in Total Quality

Moonsash turned one year old a few weeks ago – I celebrated by drinking Hoffbrau out of an empty, clean shampoo bottle, and also by forgetting about the anniversary entirely.

Movie Review Roundup

The Black Doodah
Fine actors, slavishly allusive cinematography, and exhaustive period detail can’t save this shallow, dull movie from itself. Apparently Brian de Palma is an auteur non pareil, and his movies are viewed as the crème de la crème, but I’m afraid that watching this one was more of an auto-da-fé than an experience of joie de vivre. De Palma is continually fascinated (so the New York Times says) by voyeurism and especially femmes fatales; why then are his femme fatale characters so thin and amateurish, and his scenes of voyeurism so clichéd?

The Illusionist
Fine actors, slavishly allusive cinematography, blah blah blah. Eerily similar to The Necromancer (considered to be the first gothic novel), this dull vampire LARP of a movie convinced me that Paul Giamatti is actually a fine actor, and that Rufus Sewell should be in more movies, but nothing else. Pretty boring, shot on a very few (nice) sets, uninteresting performances by Jessica Biel and Ed Norton.

Important Fountain Pen News

Many (none) of you may have followed my recent attempts to get Cambridge top-folding staple bound notebooks, in legal yellow, with a reinforced cover (available at the Princeton U-Store in years past, now apparently retired from Mead’s offerings). These notebooks, with their creamy deluxe paper and built-in cover, are perfect for taking field notes in fountain pen. They’re sturdy and they don’t immediately reveal your confidential notes (“nice lobby”, “another impressive lobby”, “good lobby restroom”) to everyone. But you can’t buy them anymore, and regular office stores astoundingly don’t offer anything comparable.

So I eventually settled on the Moleskine, an ultradeluxe notebook for people in Ivy club who want to burlesque note-taking during their vacation to Brazil (also Kean had one before they were cool at Princeton at least). I was extremely loath to take this step since Moleskine has a sizeable following, and I did not particularly want to make a statement of membership in an obsessive, twee group with my notebook (putting this much thought into notebook purchases, and then blogging about it, is of course neither obsessive nor twee). Also, Moleskines cost on average $15 a piece, so I might as well be writing on finely cured and pressed cocaine.

It also turns out that people from the internet have an ongoing argument of about the intensity level of the Council of Nicea about whether Moleskines work with fountain pens. I am here to tell you that in certain cases they do; I use one with a Visconti Van Gogh steel nib F fountain pen, with black Visconti ink, and the experience is perfect. The pen glides over the page like a finger dipped in butter and dragged along a sheet of glass, although the experience is (arguably) less psychosexually dynamic than engaging in a form of frottage with baking equipment. The ink doesn’t bleed or feather, and it doesn’t mark through the page. My particular Visconti has always written rather dry, so even the same pen and nib may not work for everyone. I have also tried writing in the Moleskine with an F, steel nib Faber-Castell fountain pen that I bought in Switzerland (Of course I jaunt off to Switzerland to buy office supplies! Hah hah! Tirrah!). This did not become a lovely memory. I was using a cartridge, and the ink flowed like the Tiber in March, feathering and beading everywhere and humiliating me in front of the luxury boat operators on Lake Geneva. It was, without a doubt, the most tragic thing that has ever happened to anyone I know.

Links for the obsessive and the bored
- the particular notebook I favor, for sale.
- Moleskine's unbelievably pretentious and poorly translated site.
- Possibly misguided list of pens that work with Moleskine (a lot of these Moleskine+Fountain Pen coma wedding sites suggest using Parker Quink, which I consider a grave perversion; I will probably never buy "Noodler's" fountain pen ink because it makes me picture a fat, balding man with a huge grey moustache, wearing a green Sears sweater, annoying a diner waitress by insisting on using his own pen to sign a credit card recipt for $6.48. For Christ's sake, why not call it Fayetteville Fine Inks or something? Jesus Christ.).
- The blog post that started this whole sick show.

He's Old, and his Skin is Cold

2006-08-31T09:17:00.000-05:00

I like George Bush, because he's willing to tell everyone else what he's thinking, no matter how innapropriate or crazy it is (link).

Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine

2006-08-30T15:11:00.000-05:00

See, I like Katherine Harris because she's willing to say what everyone else is thinking, no matter how insane everyone else is:

Link

and I dislike Katherine Harris because she helped engineer the fradulent, illegal non-election in 2000.

A Spend-o-Crat Problem in Central Russia

2006-08-22T23:44:00.000-05:00

A Quick Note on my Fiction Career

California fifth or sixth estate representatives Beeswax Magazine have sent to print the second issue of their literary journal, one which contains my only notable non-fan fiction writing, “The Narwhal.” The issue is now available for $6 plus shipping and presumably contains the works of artists and writers other than me.

A Quick Note on my Dance Career: A Review of Step Up

In this toes a-tappin’ dancetacular dense-faced Coach Carter alum Channing Tatum stars as Trance Banderwagon, a white boy from the ‘hood of Baltimore (AKA BODYMORE MURDALAND!). A wholesome lad, he wiles away his time dancing at high-concept houseparties, shooting hoops with his pals Mac and Skinny, and also stealing a huge number of cars. After a particularly ribald evening of spastic dancing at the local salon our hero and his friends indulge their sweet tooth for vandalism with the most delicious morsel of all: an ugly and amateurish stage set at the local performing arts school. Their black crime disclosed, our heroes come to grips with the ministrations of justice found body in a security guard; our hero takes the fall for his two friends and is assigned 200 hours of community service at the scene of the crime (I plan to commit a crime at the Bikini Inspectors training academy as soon as I finish this blog). This sets the stage for the true star of the movie: dancer/actress Jenna Dewan’s shrugs and bolero wraps. Dewan sports a new wrap or scarf or dance pinafore in almost every scene, to the extent that it begins to feel like they cut a subplot about her having terrible OCD or aphasia or something. The rest of the movie is charming and ultimately a few minutes too long. Watch for Six Feet Under’s Rachel Griffiths as the oddly wooden and bizarrely accented head of the dance academy, and The Wire’s usually fun Deirdre Lovejoy as Dewan’s mother. Griffiths seems heavily medicated and Lovejoy just sits around her Baltimore townhouse all day, oiling and re-oiling the furniture.

Christmas Ape's Calypso Adventure

2006-08-19T12:02:00.000-05:00

Give a hoot! Read a book as belonging to an essential category!

University of Minnesota English professor David Treuer, an Ojibwe Native American, is publishing two books which attack traditional ways of reading literature by or about Native Americans (New York Times article). Prof. Treuer is annoyed that academics read both kinds of writing as ethnography rather than literature. Native American writing and writing about Native Americans should take its place, he argues, alongside all other literature and should be read as such, rather than as a sociological document or piece of fieldwork data. This argument has a somewhat musty odor since it relies on the idea that we should read documents in particular, regimented ways; I’m not interested in getting into a theoretical citation contest here, but my experience in anthropology (the home discipline of ethnography) has been that everyone reads novels as ethnographies and ethnographies as novels or any other permutation of the two, whatever is most interesting. Insisting that literature be read as literature assigns essential and enduring qualities to literature as an object and is thus rigid and unreflexive. Dr. Treuer’s ideas are interesting and welcome and certainly persuasive (I am no expert on the scholarship of Native literature, so I have reason not to believe that it generally gets read as ethnography), but I find it more interesting as a description than as a manifesto. Certainly, he should draw attention to how the writings get read, but trying to re-assign them to a more correct category ignores their existence as a object in full contact with academic and popular readings. It’s also puzzling that he spends time criticizing Louise Erdrich for screwing up important details of Ojibwe language and regional dialect; if we are supposed to read her writing as novel rather than ethnography, imagination rather than empirical document, why should we hold her to such exacting standards?

REVIEW ROUNDUP

Pulse
As boring and un-frightening as a horror film could possibly be. Even the angular charms of Veronica Mars’s Kristen Bell can’t save this badly-paced, dull tale of evil ghosts who fax themselves to their unwitting victims. Led by a pasty white naked Sir Ben Kingsley, these ghosts travel through cellphones and IM to sap the life from their victims, leaving them deadened and without a will to live (much like the movie does to its viewers). As The Onion pointed out, the riot-proof apartments of downtown Romania don’t stand in for Ohio very well, especially since everything is covered with a thick layer of blue Final Cut filters. When I went to the bathroom after this movie a man with huge sideburns and his little son told me, unsolicited, “Whatever you do, don’t see Pulse.” Too late!

The Descent
It occurs to me that the monsters in this movie actually look almost exactly like the ghosts from Pulse, but have the advantage of being so scary that I had to have major heart surgery during the credits. The Descent is basically The Cave sans Piper Perabo and plus about a zillion times more directorial talent and nerve-wracking cinematography. Six no-name British or possibly Norweigan actresses enter a cave complex bearing climbing rope and emotional baggage and OH SHIT CAVE MONSTERS BITING EVERYONE’S FACE OFF OH SHIT A PIT OF CONGEALED BLOOD EVERYONE’S DEAD OH MY GOD! Highly recommended.

Miami Vice
I thought this was the big-screen version of Dr. Katz, but it turns out it’s Miami VICE, not ADVICE. That’s a little psychiatry/media humor just for you, no charge this time! This movie was very good but was so plotty that the actors didn’t have much room to move – Gong Li was the exception, delivering a long slow reveal of an interesting character and somehow seamlessly going from sharp-faced shrew to beautiful movie star without any obvious changes. You know the setup for the movie so I won’t summarize, but it’s definitely fun and worth seeing.

Talladega Nights
This was a pleasant surprise: Sacha Baron Cohen’s evil French NASCAR driver steals the entire movie, but even the scenes he’s not in bore a relatively light touch and were actually funny, unlike Anchorman and Elf. Watch for John C Reilly’s nuanced performance as imbecilic sidekick Cal Naughton (seriously).

The Life of the Party

2006-07-23T09:36:00.000-05:00

I'm sure that none of this will come as a surprise to any of you, but once again the Republican mystic insane religious zealot cabal and I have disagreed on a major issue, this time stem cells. This has been a Cirque du Soleil of ultra-conservative mastery of bad rhetoric: who can forget Bush appearing amid the throngs of Snowflake Babies, senator Brownback's memorable assertion that stem cell research would have killed Mother Teresa, John F. Kennedy and (!) Ronald Reagan, and Michael Steel of Maryland's well-publicized comparison of stem cell research to Nazi medicine? Oh, oh, this makes me tired and mad, almost too mad to blog. As I have said repeatedly over the last six years, this particular ultra-conservative constellation is almost impossible for me to understand. Starting a war in Iraq in order to line the pockets of Bechtel and Halliburton (even I will admit that this is probably not the only reason) is evil but nonetheless comprehensible since it's about money. But blocking stem cell research (like fighting evolution) just doesn't make any sense to me: there's no money in it, and (if the New York Times is right) it doesn't even play well with the moderate conservatives.

Bush has repeatedly justified our continued presence in Iraq as a kind of homage and compensation for the soldiers who have sacrificed their lives there in order to protect American and Iraqi lives in the future. Yet he has no trouble condeming scientific research that consumes stem cells as morally evil? This is classic Party of Life biopolitics: the state is responsible for fostering the production of killable, technically living bodies, not making sure that anyone has a decent life.

If we extend his logic, which casts fertility clinic doctors and research scientists as premeditated murderers, shouldn't we make masturbation and menstruation capital crimes? Every woman who cruelly and selfishly allows herself to go un-pregnant for a month could be murdering the next Martin Luther King! Every man who jerks off to a crudely photoshopped picture of Britney Spears as a centaur could be slaughtering the next Strom Thurmond! In some cases, in the womb, two eggs are fertilized and larger, more viable blastoma consumes the weaker one: FIRST DEGREE MURDER! As soon as the baby is born, it should be sent to a special infant's prison, and its perfidious mother should be tried as acessory or at least beaten with a strap by her husband.

Perhaps reading the Times editorial page or almost any other media outlet will give a more coherent and less histrionic picture of the situation, but this is what happens when we somehow have let ourselves be governed by a bunch of superstitious wierdos who base their decision making on opinion polls and the Book of Revelation. More and more poltical cartoonists and editorialists are catching on to the fact that our home-grown fundamentalist authoritarian oligarchy is not too too different from the Universal Islamic Calihpate that we are supposed to fear so constantly. If my fieldwork weren't turning out to be so oddly, surprisingly uplifting and positive, I would be really depressed now. It's a black pass we come to when the international pharmaceutical industry is doing a better, dramatically more humanitarian job than our government.

A Spotter's Guide to Whelks

2006-07-23T08:00:00.000-05:00

We Don't Live Here Anymore
An intimate, very unhappy movie with only four actors and a lot of hugging, but what actors, and what hugs! Naomi Watts, Laura Dern, Mark Ruffalo and Peter Krause are the stars, and the hugs are naked and sometimes against a painful-looking tree. The basic plot is that two couples cheat on their spouses in almost every possible permutation (it's what Closer might have been, had it been a good movie and not an embarassing Livejournal). It sounds leaden and depressing, but it's actually quite funny and completely riveting. From two Andre Dubus short stories. For fans of Six Feet Under, or people who just want to see Laura Dern step in cat poop, this is the can't miss hit of the summer!

Southern Belles
For maybe six minutes I tried to like this independent comedy about two obnoxious girls who (in one of the film's many twee touches) are both named Belle (OK, one is Bell, the other Belle). They live in rural Georgia and are trying to save up enough money to move to Atlanta (in real life, this would take maybe $80). This is an indie movie, and boy does it show, from the inexpert camera work to the NYU film school script filled with alternating leaden moralizing and faux-natural dialogue that sounds as fresh and unaffected as a Harold Pinter play. It stars Anna Faris and some doe-eyed no name - I adore Anna Faris, but she really was not very good or even very funny in the admittedly limited role of Belle (who, unfortunately, is the sidekick). This film looks like it was supposed to be a love-letter to the idiosyncratic south, but was instead a parade of idiotic, un-selfconcious cliches and one-note characters. Terrible.

Venom
This could have been a fun voodoo-and-murder filled romp, but instead was just kind of boring. Evil gas station attendant Ray (who I will call Ray Harryhausen) gets attacked by a magic devil suitcase filled with CGI snakes, then turns into a voodoo zombie intent on killing all the sexy teens who wronged him by either flashing their boobs at him or being polite to him. Too slow moving, and too much emphasis placed on the literally colorless bad guy, who kills people with such implements as a crowbar and at one point a tree. Mostly just the crowbar. This does fit into the interesting pop-media theory that post 2000 is the Year of the Zombie (wheras the 90s were for vampires, and the 80s werewolves). Give it a miss.

Movies I would like to see made: Devil Suitcase, Fatal Ablution, The Great Cuttlefish Caper, Those Two who would Steal the Moon (English remake), M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense Two: Ghosts in Da Hood (let me just point out here on the internet, where my voice will really be heard, that I hate Shyamalan and his work about as much as his rival overrated airhead childish auteur Tim Burton)

The Poo World

2006-07-14T23:27:00.000-05:00

A Review of The New World
I usually enjoy Terrence Malick (to the extent to which you can “usually” enjoy the work of a guy who has made like three films). I thought Days of Heaven was spectacular, and I would pick Malick over Tommy Lee Jones to direct a film adaptation of Blood Meridian. But The New World bored me when it was not unintentionally making me laugh. All the reviews of this movie have told the truth: the story of Pocahontas’ love with Colin Farrel and marriage to pioneer/psycho Christian Bale does not sustain the movie’s three hour length. Malick also aligns the Indians with nature and truth and the settlers with artifice and falsehood. How original. For all the love that Malick’s gaze lavishes on the Indians, it invests them with very little humanity. In an early scene beautiful ingénue Q’Orianka Kilcher and her brother play with one another in a field, mimicking antlers with their hands as if to say, “I am so innocent and connected to nature that I can’t tell if I’m an animal or not.” In a very tired and predictable way this film ennobles and cuts us off from its savages. Watch it for some sweet fish-burying scenes and in order to pretend that Christian Bale is about to murder everyone, but don’t expect any character, plot or insight.

The Devil Wears Blundstones

2006-07-09T10:51:00.000-05:00

A review of The Proposition

Never watch a movie written by a musician. Australian goth-rocker Nick Cave wrote this movie and it quite clearly reflects his sensibilities of hot, rural, sleazy violence. I actually kind of like Cave’s music (which doesn’t show up much in the film, except for a moronic ditty about the sun and the moon that Guy Pierce hums on occasion), but his screenwriting so far is not winning me over. This movie is about Australian bushrangers in the 19th century, and continues that subject’s unblemished streak of sentimental, unsuccessful productions (Ned Kelly, both book and movie anyone? I’ll admit here in cold cyber-print that I have a particular loathing for both). It stars Guy Pierce, who basically just grimaces his way through the role of hardened killer Charlie Burns, and Ray Winstone from Sexy Beast, who turns in a wonderfully understated performance as a rural police chief (if you don’t count the first scene, in which he keeps repeating “I will civilize this land!” and acts entirely unlike he does for the rest of the movie). The titular proposition is the deal that Winstone and Pierce strike: Guy Pierce has to kill his brother, Danny Huston, to save the life of his other brother, who looks like Pippin from Lord of the Rings and whose name is not important. The New York Times complained that Danny Huston was miscast as a sociopathic bandit with a penchant for elaborately orchestrated rapes, but I thought he did OK. The landscape and characters reel by in a relentless, lurid parade of ugliness and grit, but the plot is at once thin and contrived and the dialogue is wooden in the manner of pop lyrics, unsurprisingly. Sentimental and too gross, but not an entirely bad film.

A review of The Devil Wears Prada

If this film could have decided if it felt that the fashion industry is an elaborate farce or a vital organ in the body of society it would have been better. In fact, it should have been a sweetly dumb comedy about the idiotic affectations of New York’s high fashion crowd, but instead it turns into a disingenuous and boring meditation on whether Anne Hathaway should stay true to herself and her two-dimensional boyfriend Adrian Grenier. Early in the film Meryl Streep (as Miranda Priestly, Lauren Weisberger’s caricature of Anna Wintour) gives a long speech about how Anne Hathaway’s cerulean sweater was actually the product of a complicated series of decisions spanning years and miles but ultimately finding their sole author and parent in none other than Streep herself. This silly speech is supposed to raise the question of hey uh maybe like fashion is actually important? But luckily it isn’t. The movie is at least an hour two long and has too much Hathaway and not enough plot. I haven’t read the novel but my expectations, should I ever choose to do so, remain very low. Capable but entirely unimportant.

Stuporman

2006-06-30T21:57:00.000-05:00

A review of Superman Returns

The day before I saw this movie I managed to catch a Discovery Channel special called The Science of Superman.  In it various physicists and materials scientists discussed Superman’s abilities as if he were a real person. The directors and writers for the movie (who all looked about fifteen years old) also appeared to brag about how “realistic” they had made the film – they lavished special gratification on their research for a scene in which Superman rescues a commercial jet.  “We actually got the stress test data for the wing of a 777,” the director warbled, cutting right to the quick of what makes a good movie: accurate stress and tension characteristics faithful to the specs of real-world airframes.
     I still had a little hope for the movie thanks to Kevin Spacey and (especially) Parker Posey, but unsurprisingly the director sidelines Spacey’s surprisingly nuanced jailbird fop Lex Luthor and Posey’s delightful re-cap of her signature drunk-n-crazy character.  He focuses instead on Bland Turgidson, the new Superman, and pretty girl/occasional actress Kate Bosworth.  He also, for reasons which I pray came from focus groups in Wisconsin, includes an actual tow-headed moppet who performs, on seemingly innumerable occasions, Chopsticks.
     If the boring characters and bad acting have not warned you off, consider yourself on notice for the bombastic direction, oleaginous plot, and stale cinematography.  The film continually congratulates itself for referencing old, better Superman movies and the comic books. Not the point of a sequel/adaptation.  The last hour of the movie is one hideous cacodemonic roar of explosions and disasters; the first two hours suffer calamity equal in import but lesser in noise.  Superman is, by custom, a hard character to deepen: he’s basically a nice guy with none of the daddy issues of Batman or the psychotic rages of the Hulk, but this putrid film doesn’t even try. Awful beyond even the reach of humor (tMa and I kept up the wisecracks for about the first hour and a half, but then succumbed to an intense fatigue and depression).

Christmas Ape goes to Summer Camp

2006-06-28T21:31:00.000-05:00

As most (or "both") of my readers may already know, my short story "The Narwhal" has been accepted for publication in the new San Francisco-based literary magazine Beeswax. I stumbled across Beeswax, and its call for submissions, through Chris Onstad's Achewood, a webcomic which most (or "both") of you know I admire. It's a very interesting, very new magazine, and the publishers have experience in printmaking, which resulted in a first issue which reflected an attention to detail usually manifested in the devotional works of anchorites, an especially impressive feat given that it contained both prose and graphic art. The second issue is on pre-order for $5, and I urge each and every one (or "both") of you to secure a copy for yourself. Leaving it casually on the coffee table will guarantee the success of any romantic assignation that you schedule, at least if you schedule it near the coffee table.

POSTSCRIPT: Some ("none") of you may have read my microfiction "The Narwhal" in the Nassau Literary Review of 2003; although this story shares the same basic plot and characters as the piece published in Beeswax, it's about one-eighth as long and does NOT feature the protagonist's fraught and tender relationship with his father. It is closer to the very old original microfiction, an email written at four in the morning in which Tower factotum Tim Skerpon forcefully couples with a narwhal. If you're out there reading this, Tim, you probably don't even vaguely remember who I am or understand why I would want to write fanfiction in which you outrage an endagered sea mammal. I'm not sure if I understand it any more either.

Fixin' Towards a Bloody Outcome

2006-06-14T00:03:00.000-05:00

Motor Trend
For those of you who have been following my car trouble saga (and I know very well that there are none of you), they appear to have finally fixed the Jetta.  Tomorrow I face the melancholy prospect of returning the lavender Kia Spectra loaner, a car that has fixed for itself a wide and spacious place in my heart, and has made itself indispensable both for trips to the video game store and in the purpose of pulling in major babes.

The Omen
Dreary, overlong remakes seem to be the highest new star in Hollywood’s firmament.  There are a few good points: Julia Stiles has just the right mixture of cheekbones and upper-class entitlement to play Damien’s disaffected mother, and the fact that she tries to deal with her son’s literally Satanic evil by seeking therapy is the movie’s only interesting point.  Stiles gets about half an hour of screen time, spending most of it in WASPy catatonia, failing to enjoy her colossal British mansion and focusing on her own (legitimate) misery.  So much for the good.  The director inexplicably gives most of the rest of the film to Liev Schrieber (AKA Liv Tyler), a dour flounder of a man who has practically no face at all.  Schrieber reacts to his wife’s death and the, again literal, revelation that his son is the Devil with the level of irritation you would expect from a business traveler who has been bumped off the concierge floor.  Pete Posthelwaite appears as himself yet again, and a bearded man plays a photographer who apparently also does some freelance crime scene investigation.  Honestly, the movie was so 3 out of 5 mediocre that I can barely write anything about it. If you didn’t get enough scary bible-themed conspiracy from The Da Vinci Code, by all means see The Omen.

Veronica Mars Update Watch 2K6
The first season of Veronica Mars was totally sublime, but was so television-y that it can only be described as a chimera of other shows: Twin Peaks plus The O.C. with, as the box copy says, a dash of Buffy.  Charming, funny, and with a full-season plot so convoluted that it would fill almost a quarter episode of The Wire.  Thoroughly worthwhile.

Deadwood season premiere
Since it generally takes me four to five viewings to make sense of any given episode, I’ll confine myself to remarking that it looks just about as good as always, and seeing Bullock and Swearengen come together against Hearst is going to be amazing.  The New York Times recently reported that HBO has killed the show after this season, which is disappointing but perhaps timely, since Deadwood’s vertiginous forward motion is one of its signal virtues, and nothing can kill original plot like a few unnecessary seasons.

Killer Cars + Capsule Reviews

2006-06-01T23:06:00.000-05:00

Well, let's see. On my way back from Princeton last Tuesday some witches hexed my brand new VW Jetta turbodiesel, souring all the milk I had in the trunk and causing the car to start driving itself, speeding up a slowing down with great and terrifying whimsy. I got to spend a fun couple of hours waiting on the shoulder of I-87, reading Suttree and looking up every 0.01 seconds to see if the tow truck had arrived. Now I have the ultimate Volkswagen loaner car: a 2002 Volvo S-40. We'll see if the ol' TDI ever actually returns from the tender mercies of the Wappinger's Fall VW Repertory Automobile Mechanics, who have not so much as glanced at it in three days. This is the first car that I have actually leased and paid for entirely on my own, so it breaks my little heart to see it brung so low.

ALSO, see this post by tMa, which points out a horrifying truth about the Bush adminstration that I hadn't yet heard about and been enraged by.

Also, does anyone watch Veronica Mars? I know that Veronica herself had a wacky guest spot on Deadwood in which she runs afoul of Cy Tolliver, who hits her on the head so hard that she gets brain damage, then has her and her brother killed and fed to pigs. I suppose that kind of thing doesn't happen on Veronica Mars since it's on UPN or something.

SOME REVIEWS

Stick It
Really, this movie was 100% delightful, actually much better than its older clone sibling Bring it On. Star Missy Peregrym (coincidentally, also the name of her LARP character) has some charisma and is legitimately super hot. She also has the over six foot height so much in demand in the world of professional gymnastics. Jeff Bridges, the grizzled coach, puts in exactly the same performance he does in every movie, which is fine, and the supporting cast of weird preteen mutants actually seem like they might really be bizarrely sheltered gymnast types. Not much on plot or character or anything else for the serious, Apollonian viewer, but very fun for those of us who see several movies a week with their sarcastic friend.

X-Men III: Wolverine and the X-Me-Do
This movie gave me exactly what I wanted from it, but would have been improved if Magneto (Ian McKellen) had been more frank about his titanically stupid outfit. Also watch for some girl who can walk through walls and is clearly puttin' the spurs to Anna Paquin's boyfriend, and who spends the entire climactic battle scene looking either stoned or comically disinterested in the Brotherhood of Mutants' ultimate weapon: exploding mid-priced family sedans.

On Demand Crap Roundup

Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
Not as good as the original, in case you had not used your detective skills to figure that out. Grosser and less nice - when the she-johns actually have horrible deformities, it's just not funny.

The Incredibles
More like the incredibly overrateds.

Sky High
More like the incredibly good.

King Kong
It was like looking in a living, whimsical mirror whenver Jack Black was on the screen, but after only two hours and forty five minutes it got a little stale.

Conspiracy
If you see one chilling historical drama about the Wannsee conference, origin of the Final Solution, see this one. The best and only, but mostly the best.

Oh Draconian Devil! Oh BABA BOOEY! (With a special bonus for lovers of Pete Hegseth)

2006-05-23T16:55:00.000-05:00

[Insert "So Dark the Con of Man" variant here], A Review of The Da Vinci Code
The Da Vinci Code is getting ciritcally panned, and has aroused a Christian furor equaled in stupidity only by the fear that Harry Potter would cause the youth of the world to take up devil worship. All this aside, it's quite a fun movie, capably directed and acted, visually pleasant, and not boring despite its considerable length. Tom Hanks is charming as always, Audrey Tatou is not annoying, and Jean Reno (who many of you may remember from his famous role in Genma Onimusha III: Demon Siege, although I hear he has also been in some French films) is delightful and intense. Paul Bettany shines as the lunatic albino monk Silas. His performance was so powerful and nuanced that it has caused me to develop an indelible prejudice against albinos, who I now believe are all murderous ascetics. I didn't even find the movie's plot particularly confusing - it was much less complex than some of the more baroque storylines in Angel, and the characters naturally had to explain what was going on to one another, so the exposition never bogged down. Delightful summer fluff.

Special Bonus: HegsethWatch 2K6
Again Mr. Rafil Bonerston-Smith has favored us with a delightful news item, a report on Guantanamo Bay which features quotes from Princeton war hawk/lesbian icon Pete Hegseth. It is available here if Mr. Bonerston-Smith has not already emailed it to you (this page will attempt to print when you navigate to it, I believe because of the "Hegseth Code"). I once had the pleasure of watching Mr. Hegseth shoot the leader of the campus Democrats with a paintball; Mr. Hegseth moved like some kind of white tiger robot, designed to protect Lex Luthor's gardens.

All Your Face are Belong to Us

2006-05-23T09:42:00.000-05:00

So I had my fieldwork proposal defense yesterday. This is a charming academic tradition in which the PhD candidate stands on a stool in his underwear and the faculty circle with permanent marker all the parts of his body that they feel are too fat. They then take a polaroid which is placed in a "Burn Book" and kept in the thesis room, on file, for posterity. My project was judged somewhat more harshly than others, so they also compelled me to carry a tiny Dora the Explorer backpack around for the rest of the day. All in all, not an entirely pleasant experience.

Please Go Away, Ramesh Ponnuru

2006-05-18T23:30:00.000-05:00

I don’t know how many of you saw Ramesh Ponnuru on the Daily Show yesterday. He was hawking his new book, The Party of Death, one of the endless recent parade of popular nonfiction books on politics. This particular book takes the stance that the Democratic Party is the titular Party of Death, encouraging murder and disrespect for life on a worldwide scale. The fact that Mr. Ponnuru is a senior editor at the National Review should let you know what to expect before even reading his book (and I will freely admit that I have not nor will I ever). Jon Stewart took a pretty hard line with Mr. Ponnuru and was gentleman enough not to point out that Ponnuru is a squeaky-voiced little wiener who has never touched a boobie.
Whether or not Mr. Ponnuru is a wiener has little to do with the argument of his book (though it may have quite a lot to do with the fact that he chooses to make this argument). Basically, abortion is the main issue: Ponnuru sees abortion as being wholly and indelibly defined as a lust for death, a state sanctioned murder, and an erosion of “our fundamental right to life.” Ponnuru claimed on the Daily Show that he advances a principled, ethical, rational argument against abortion that does not rely on Biblical interpretation (what this could possibly be I don’t know, and he didn’t say). He also claimed that he could make the same kind of scientific argument about stem cell research (one wonders if he also opposes blood tests, or surgery). Jon Stewart asked him how the President could justify shedding innocent blood in Iraq to defend us from the (imaginary) weapons of mass destruction while at the same time steadfastly opposing abortion and potentially revolutionary research on stem cells because it represents a sacrifice of innocent life to save other lives. Good question, Mr. Stewart.
Basically, this all boils down to Benveniste and Agamben’s Culture of Life. Mr. Ponnuru calls the democratic party a culture of death and champions a conservative valuing of life as an inalienable, sacred right. Yet when we make life sacred and inalienable, at the same time we absolve the state of any responsibility for its quality. No wonder we do not have national health care yet we enjoy unprecedented tax cuts for the immensely wealthy. No wonder the Bush administration and its conservative and evangelical allies assault sex and science education. This insistence on the sacredness of life cannot emerge from a scientific ethics; my opinion is that the current pusillanimous championing of the rights of the blastula comes from a bottomless hatred and fear of women, and a neurotic, consuming desire to control their reproductive organs. I’m really so, so sick of this. See my previous post for a better explanation of the culture of life idea.

Classic Review Corner

2006-05-18T15:42:00.000-05:00

A Review of Krazy Kat the novel
Jay Cantor, 1987

Jay Cantor wrote Krazy Kat in 1987, before Michael Chabon wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and before Jonathan Lethem wrote Fortress of Solitude. Krazy Kat contains no superheroes, since Cantor has borrowed most of his characters from Coconino County, home to the titular Kat and setting of the celebrated comic strip Krazy Kat. Drawn by George Herriman, the strip ran in the Hearst newspapers from 1913 to 1944. It little resembled our contemporary comics. The action in Coconino County took place on a full page, and the characters had room to do and say more than, say, Garfield or Beetle Bailey. The core cast was small: Krazy Kat, a natural philosopher and great mispronouncer of words (before Family Circus made the practice nauseating), Ignatz Mouse, who paid no attention to the law or to Krazy, and Offisa Bull Pupp, a bulldog cop who kept the peace in Coconino. Krazy, it so happens, loved Ignatz, and Offisa Bull Pupp loved Krazy; Ignatz, however, did not reciprocate the love of the Kat. He preferred to hurl bricks at Krazy’s head. Krazy took this as a token of affection and Bull Pupp took it as a crime. Many strips ended with Ignatz locked in Coconino’s jailhouse.
Cantor uses Kat & co. as a cast, letting them loose in five vignettes. The technique is academic. We see Cantor’s various themes through the opinions of the Kat, the mouse, and the bulldog: character steps in for theory. His themes too have an academic resonance, and Cantor aims high: he begins with Krazy reacting to the development of the atomic bomb (which coincided with the end of the strip’s press run), passes through Freudian psychoanalysis and revolutionary theory, skewers the culture industy and ends up in an intense consideration of the link between violence and sex. Cantor doesn’t just decorate his novel with these themes: his characters literally live through them, like performance artists. In the section on psychoanalysis, for instance, Ignatz gives a virtuoso reading of Freud by treating Krazy’s neurosis – it’s edutainment and I love it.
Krazy’s neurosis, which she picks up in the first chapter, drives the plot (which scarcely matters because the characters and images are so dazzling). Krazy and Ignatz have been out of work, and Ignatz, always meddling, takes her to see the atomic bomb tests at Alamagordo – after seeing the horror of the bomb Krazy changes; a piece of fallout burns a patch of her perfect black fur white. After this, Ignatz’s bricks begin to hurt, raising stars of pain rather than hearts of foolish love. Coconino County is a plastic place, and Cantor paints its shifting landscape, mesas blurring into clouds and clouds precipitating into cactuses; cartoon Krazy stands still against the backdrop, but after the tests she has to change, she cannot repeat her triangular drama with Ignatz and Bull Pup. No wonder Ignatz reaches for Freud.
So the rest of the book details Krazy’s efforts to become a person, what she calls “round”, as opposed to flat, like a cartoon or movie. Ignatz suggests that sex might be the best route to this, though he has only a hazy idea of what sex is – “I think they pee in each other”, he writes in a letter to Bull Pup. Since Krazy starts out as a full-fledged, interesting character her change works as a classic psychological narrative – she may think of her transformation as change into a new person, the fallout “giving her an inside,” but really she is becoming more herself, emerging rather than transforming.
Despite all its melting landscapes and intense theoretical involvement, Cantor really devotes his novel to character – Kat and mouse both grow and change throughout the narrative, but because they are cartoons Cantor can let them act these internal changes out in arrestingly direct ways. Krazy, for instance, goes rigid after some traumas (Ignatz compares her to “a Danish Modern coffee table”), and Ignatz has a chance to try his crackpot theories, playing psychiatrist, producer, and revolutionary in turn.
Cantor does eventually shift away from the cartoon in the final chapter, “Venus in Furs” (a reference to the classic Velvet Underground paean to S&M), which he originally published on its own in Playboy. Krazy appears here as Catherine Higgs Bosun, patient of Doctor Ignatz and daughter of a prominent physicist – a woman, not a Kat. Ignatz and Kate (The Kat’s new-minted name) waste no time in transgressing the doctor/patient relationship and plunge into a sexually inventive affair. In this final chapter the Kat is no longer strictly speaking a cat, Ignatz no longer a mouse, and Coconino resigns into Boston. We’re definitely still in a cartoon, one that stings and saddens the reader but in places lets the candy colors and startling lines of Herriman’s original vision shine through. Kate and Dr. Ignatz are cartoonish in the manner that most people I know are cartoonish – they fight, mock, and joke ferociously but not in the least unrealistically. When Kate, drunk in some horrible bar and separated from her mouse, leaves Ignatz messages on his answering machine we smile and cringe at the same time, but we never doubt that Kate the Kat would taunt him so: “‘I’m in Paris and I miss you terribly, darling, I wish you were here with me. Why couldn’t you have turned a new leaf over, so your baby could be your slave? Oh Ignatz,’ she snuffled, ‘Why couldn’t you behave?” Ignatz, still a lover of technology, replays the message to search for “French-sounding static.”

I Wish this Game were Bad, so I could call it God of Bore

2006-05-15T00:20:00.000-05:00

A Review of God of War

Like most people, I bought this game thinking it was the playstation version of the 1998 Brendan Fraser/Sir Ian McKellen vehicle Gods and Monsters. I was looking forward to a robust pool-cleaning sim interspersed with awkward intergenerational gay sex. This turned out to be something of a misconception. God of War is actually about a pale, extremely violent man named Kratos. Kratos sports a gothy pallor, an extreme sports goatee, and a livid red tribal surfer tattoo, yet he clearly could strangle with his muscular legs all of the subcultures which these affectations represent. He would not put up with any come-ons from Sir Ian McKellen either.
Kratos is living out a healthily bastardized version of the Hercules myth, but much like Hercules he is not enjoying most of it. It seems Ares, as Greco-Roman gods do, has made Kratos go nuts and kill his family. Kratos is out for revenge, big-style, and he will stab any number of people or mythological creatures to get it. The plot, a ridiculous pastiche of Greek myth, commits to being grim and nasty and thereby avoids the pitfalls of the singularly boneheaded Japanese video game style of allusion. You don’t have to collect the three Sacred Stones of HyperOlympus, and if some doe-eyed bobblehead suggested to Kratos that by working together and trying their best they could save the environment, Kratos would probably push her off a cliff. Shion from Xenosaga would last about one minute around Kratos. He would not appreciate it if she brought him curry.
Crossover fanfiction aside, this is a very good game. Kratos is a huge bad-ass, as mean and violent and singleminded as a character in a Cormac McCarthy novel, but he also fights his way through the game with a sinuous grace. Once you master the combat system, Kratos’ leaps and dodges become as important as the wide balletic arcs of his blades, and though Kratos may be a contender against Ian McKellan or a tiny, futuristic Japanese robotics engineer, he’s a little outclassed by most of the enemies in God of War. The game has one of the best balancing jobs I have ever seen: you never face a fight that’s impossible or unfair, but you never face an easy opponent either. Most of the monsters Kratos fights are Greek mythological figures given a sinister update: slavering, mad-eyed minotaurs and skull-faced Satyrs both make an appearance, as well as a colossal hydra and a fair number of centaurs who look as if they have wandered off a particularly savage chest-tattoo. Most of these enemies are bigger and stronger than Kratos, and they come at him in swarms, so be prepared for a challenge that may make you yell so loud at the TV that your frighten the dogs. The monsters are not Kratos’ only enemy: one particular challenge in which Kratos climbs giant, rotating bladed cylinders was so difficult that I developed carpal tunnel syndrome so severe that I now have to keep BOTH hands in leather gloves filled with Vaseline.
These hiccups aside, God of War delivers a much better experience than almost any other recent game (Resident Evil 4 rivals it, but suffers from some annoying Japanese video game clichés). The combat is always fun and rewards deep, ethnographic knowledge of the fighting controls (and the blocks and evasions are not simply ornaments!), there are some interesting puzzles, including a violent, ancient Greek version of Tetris, and Kratos manages to take the typical mindless rage of the video game protagonist and turn it into a satisfying character. At one point in the game, Kratos has just completed a ridiculous, enervating, grueling trial in order to obtain Pandora’s Box, which turns out to be the size and weight of a Toyota Scion Xb. He needs to bring the box back to Athens, and he is out in a giant temple in the desert, a temple that took three days climbing up sheer cliffs to reach. Kratos doesn’t even pause before he begins to push the box inch by tortuous inch back to the city. Perhaps the designers realized that actions sometimes can show character much more effectively than dialogue (and certainly better than the RPG stock phrase “…”), and that video games really ought to be relying on action. Eighteen thumbs up – it’s a Player’s Choice or something now too, so it’s only $20.

AMDB, yeah you know me

2006-05-14T16:23:00.000-05:00

A Site Plug, plus a review of Destroy All Humans

Recently, I have been spending a very great deal of time at somethingawful.com (having navigated there from x-entertainment). This site is probably beyond old news to everyone, but they seem to be consistently pretty funny, in a nerdy way, and they also relatively recently added a feature called the Awful Movie Database, a pitch-perfect parody of the IMDB. The idea is not that innovative: they copy the format of IMDB, then fill out the template with fictional movies like Hard Eagle (1993, Steven Segal) and Cannibal Barbarian (1982, Dir. Alan Smithee). The execution is perfect down to the smallest ethnographic details (Cyborg Warp's IMDB message board consists of six or seven posts by "CyborgKnight", all variations on "DVD??????"), but the actual substance of the parodies bears all the hoofmarks of a group of rather clever friends cracking eachother up, and furthermore is just very funny instead of impenetrable and in-joky. Take this triva from Hard Eagle:

Steven Seagal was furious when he learned that over sixty bald eagles were killed during the making of the film. In the director’s commentary track on the 1998 DVD release, Harold Wells explains that “we didn’t tell Seagal we were using real eagles, he would have shit his self. But what the fuck, a real eagle and a permit to be cruel to it costs way less than a really good fake eagle. We must have shot fifty takes of the scene where Geoffrey Lewis beats up that eagle and tears it apart. He kept asking for more takes. He loved it, he loved the feeling of power, I think. Plus we needed to kill about a dozen more eagles for the feathers on all those Indian… you know, those hats. We got really good at killing eagles, between Geoffrey and I. About as good as anyone ever has been, maybe.”

Worth a lengthy perusal. SomethingAwful's other sections are also pretty delightful, generally.

Destroy All Humans
If you want an Xbox game under $20, you actually have many, many options, most of which are better than Destroy All Humans. The premise seems like it can't miss: you play a wise-cracking alien in the style of 1950s schlock science fiction, bent on destroying the earth with your death rays and evil plots. The problem is, the developers go for humor with this. The reason that bad sci-fi is funny (much of the time) is that it's NOT played for laughs. But this game is definitely straining the sinews of its digital limbs trying to be wacky. The results brims with all the freshness and verve of Shrek II.

Maybe this would have worked if the jokes were actually funny: hearing an alien (for some reason doing a z-grade Jack Nicholson impression) crowing "It's probin' time!" before painfully electrocuting a kidnapped government agent is not really all that funny, and coupled with the game's extreme violence it embarasses rather than amuses the player. I don't know if they hired a professional writer for the jokes (my money's on "no"), but they are all of the same obvious and dim level. Your alien can (and unfortunately must) scan the minds of the unwitting humans around him, and they are all thinking something stupid that might perhaps seem screamingly funny to a group of foul-smelling men who have developed elaborate tics around their mousing technique. The male citizens of the game make searing assaults on 1950s conformity ("I have to keep up with the Jones! If only I could remember who the Jones were!") and the women think about nothing but sex and their own sex organs ("There's that not-so-fresh feeling again!"). The parentheses contain actual quotes from the game, in case you were wondering. Embarassing.

This would all be OK if the game were good, but it isn't. It's like Grand Theft Auto if your in-game character were a quadraplegic. It gives you very few things to do, and veers maddeningly between soporific ease and unbeatable difficulty. Save your money: only six thumbs up.

Just My Lack

2006-05-12T20:23:00.000-05:00

A review of Just My Luck
Starring Lindsay Lohan, Chris Pine, Samaire Armstrong (from Entourage) and some indistinguishable British moppets.

Really, who doesn’t like Lindsay Lohan? From her adequate acting to her basically orange color, Lohan has something for everyone, from the film’s target audience of teenage girls to the balding lone pervert who made this particular cinema experience extra special. Watch it for up-and-coming British “indie” rock band McFly (you can hear their repertoire expand from one to three songs!), an even more twitchy than usual Samaire Armstrong, and a bunch of onscreen animal feces. I give it nine thumbs up. Also, at one point Lohan’s luck gets so bad that she demonstrates an Antigone-like perfect acceptance of the death drive; this places her in the space between life and death, the eerie realm of Das Ding and the Homo sacer, the zone of creation and annihilation populated by monsters and monstrosities. She uses this opportunity to wear bowling shirts and learn to repair fluorescent lighting fixtures.

As in the Cylinder

2006-04-29T11:03:00.000-05:00

Dear everyone,
To graduate does not take a direct object as a verb when used to describe an individual graduating from an institution. "Kimiko graduated college this spring" means one of the following things:
- Kimiko conferred a degree upon college this spring.
- Kimiko gradually changed college by degrees this spring.
- Kimiko arranged or divided college into steps or grades this spring.

I think people find that using graduate as a direct object verb in this way makes them sound smart or British or both (like Sir Ian McLellan), but in fact, to me, it simply sounds affected. Of course everyone will understand you perfectly, and I'm sure that in a few decades this usage will be standard and acceptable, but what is a blog for if not airing completely inconsequential grievances to a largely uninterested public? Here are some grammatically acceptable usages of to graduate.

- Hollywood Upstairs Medical School and Discount Electronics graduates a class of 200 this year.
- Elutherius Abednego Constington was graduated from Harvard in 1810.
- Barring further assault convictions, the university plans to graduate her this spring.
- I graduated from college.

Comments? Objections from Wobblies and Levellers?

Colossal Review Roundup

2006-04-23T22:15:00.000-05:00

Alright BLOGOSPHERE, get ready for a large number of very short reviews culled from this depressing month of April.

Scary Movie 4
If the writers had chosen to parody something other than War of the Worlds and The Grudge (which is a bizarre choice, given that the last Scary Movie parodied The Ring, which you need a scorecard to differentiate from The Grudge), this would have been a much better movie. Anna Faris is charming and very funny, and it would be nice if she had some sharper material to work with. Probably worth seeing on Stars, or if you are already at the mall waiting for a hairdressing appointment.

Silent Hill
Once I played Silent Hill 2 for about fifteen minutes and then got so scared that I literally couldn’t sleep for a week. This was in January of this year. This movie is not that scary, but it is extremely grimy and skin-crawlingly unpleasant. The movie fails to evoke the “oh shit, oh shit!” terror of the games, but does manage to weave together a pretty coherent, kind of interesting plot. Laurie Holden is compelling as freaked-out police officer Sybil Bennet, and Sean Bean is entirely misspent in a secondary role that looks like it was filmed as a response to focus-group viewing of an early draft of the movie. The monsters were somehow less terrifying because you can see them clearly; some of the mystery is eroded, so there’s less room to fill in the gaps with your personal psychosexual horrors.

Game Boy Review Roundup – Normal People Stop Reading
Many of you may know that I recently purchased a game boy advance, or as some like to call it a MicroNanoBoy. I did this so I could play games on the subway or train, and in fact it allows me to achieve this goal. The games, however, are not really all that good. Most people think that the game boy is a system for children, but most of these games would cause a carefree young child to convene a Stuffed Animal War Tribunal and sentence the game boy to being used as a very small skateboard ramp. The games are very, very difficult in the manner of classic Nintendo games like Kid Icarus, games that I mastered to such a low and spastic degree that I rarely made it past the opening credits.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
If you are autistic, you will really like this game. Very Japanese, very into punishing you down the road for decisions you make before you really know what you’re doing. I played it for many hours a day for about three weeks then got disgusted and quit. The graphics were charming but the whole experience felt somehow antiquated. The class-switching system is fun, the Laws system is definitely not fun. I liked the equipment management system. I did not like having some of my best soldiers look like deformed rabbits.

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
Very good. Too short, a little bit too difficult, but all in all a dreamboat.

Metroid Fusion
Made me want to throw the game boy into a storm drain. It seems like it consists of incredibly hard battles interspersed with fun use of your swell cyber-powers, but it’s actually just the typically annoying video game progression where by the time you get your awesome powers, they are not all that awesome. Why would I want to pay to have my alter-ego repeatedly killed by something that looks like a retarded bat wearing an airport metal detector?

Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
This made me want to throw the game boy into some kind of special storm drain that is twice as deep as a normal storm drain. Coupling graphics and inventory management straight out of Ultima Three with a delightful mechanic in which if a character dies, he or she is dead forever, this game was absorbing for about ten hours, then the scales fell from my eyes and I realized that I was replaying the same mission for the ninth time and that I secretly wished that all the characters were dead.

Advance Wars II
Shit sandwich.

Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga
Since E. Hastings endorsed Paper Mario, I thought this Mario RPG thing might work. Again, this game looks like it might be for children but is in fact better suited to mutant superchildren or baby robots or something. Puzzle minigames: way too hard and annoying. Princess Peach escort mission: abominable. Also, grow some fucking balls, Mario and Luigi! You’re like 40 years old!

Heads You Live, Tails you HOLLYWOOD MAGIC!

2006-04-12T22:18:00.000-05:00

A Review of Domino

At one point in Domino Tom Waits shows up in the middle of the desert, driving a classic convertible, bandages on his hands and stubble on his long and wolfish face. He tells Keira Knightley, her boss, her violent, sociopathic Latin lover, and their Afghan terrorist RV driver that they must sacrifice their lives to pay for a $300,000 operation for the grand-daughter of a 28 year-old DMV clerk/ Jerry Springer guest named Lateesha. During this scene 90210 alumnus Ian Ziering (playing himself) dances in his underwear, socks covering his hands, babbling hysterically after having drunk coffee larded up with mescaline instead of non-dairy creamer. This is indeed the weirdest scene in the movie, but not by too long a stretch. How could I not love it? I give it nine thumbs up. A. O. Scott recently wrote an article about how there were no great artistic flops produced anymore, that movies were focus-grouped and noted into safe mediocrity. This movie may be neither great nor artistic, but it is definitely not mediocre.

She Blinded me with Very Poorly Conceived Science

2006-04-10T23:24:00.000-05:00

Take this delightful test from the Harvard psychology department. Come back when you finish - I'll be waiting right here, in the BLOGOSPHERE!

Ok, basically, this test is supposed to measure your association of certain racial groups with negative ideas, in this case black people with weapons. The researchers claim that this is designed to detect the unconcious roots of racial profiling in almost everyone. In the debriefing page for the test they lament the fact that people who take the test most often associate harmless objects with white people and weapons with black people.

The test works in the following way: you can sort an object or person into one of two categories. it starts off with black on the right and white on the left; then it goes to weapons on the right and harmless objects on the left, then to black OR weapons on the right and white OR harmless on the left. Then it switches categories so that blacks are paired with harmless objects and whites with weapons. My test came back that I had a slight tendency to associate blacks with weapons and whites with harmless objects (cellphones were one of the representative examples, although I don't really think of them as harmless).

Here's the thing: the test measures how many mistakes you made and how swiftly you selected categories. I made many more mistakes in the final category (black and harmless objects versus whites and weapons). Is this because watching American History X in high school turned me into a big ol' racist? NO, it's because I got used to where the categories were on the test! It would be like suddenly having the turn signals on your car reversed: what you associate with them (left and right turns) has no intellectual or decision-making content. You simply know to push the stick down for left and up for right, and if these directions suddenly reverse you're going to make many mistakes. I cannot believe that this actually passes for statistically robust research even in a field as decayed and idiotic as psychology. Even in the dim and badly organized sociology and statistics class I took sophomore year they specifically told us not to design surveys like this, since they cause an egregious bias. The study is so flawed and so unimportant to almost every human being that only the blogosphere can pass judgement on it. The sentence? Death by drowning.

Our Stupid Country

2006-03-08T20:19:00.000-05:00

Oh holy fucking motherfuck sonofabitch, I am SO SICK of the insane and idiotic religious obsession abroad in our rapidly-getting-less-great nation. Fundamentalist Christians: you won. You control the government of the country. Please stop whining and focus your energy on stripping our civil rights and lobbying against women’s’ right to drive. I really, honestly love America but these people are SEVERELY trying my patience and they seem to be here to stay.

CASE ONE
Tresa Waggoner, a Colorado music teacher (and devout Christian!), basically lost her job because she had the Satanic pride and daring to actually teach music. She showed a video of Faust in her middle school music class. Parents objected in quite strenuous terms, because they thought the opera might cause their children to worship the Devil. The school suspended Waggoner. The mayor of the town resigned. No one bothered to mention Faust’s central role in the Western canon or its deeply Christian underpinnings. Hysteria and superstition triumphed.

Link
Link
Link

CASE TWO
See this week’s New Yorker for an article about how the Bush administration is prepared to oppose a vaccine for the Human Papillomavirus, the leading cause of cervical cancer. They are concerned that vaccinating against one of the many horrifying possible results of sexual intercourse might lead to young women (who, surprise! are the only ones who suffer from cervical cancer) having premarital sex, and, God forbid, possibly enjoying it. They would prefer that young women across America ACTUALLY SUFFER FROM A DEBILITATING CANCER AND DIE RATHER THAN HAVING SEX BEFORE MARRIAGE. Giorgio Agamben, you’re our only hope! The new model for the world really IS the death camp!

COMING SOON – A review of Galactic Civilizations II!

EDIT MARCH 9 - CASE THREE
I somehow forgot this one: South Dakota banned abortion, even in the case of rape or incest. Guess who the only people who can have abortions are - if you guessed women, you're right! Of course according to Fox News, 90% of rape victims were totally asking for it and in fact enticed their rapists over Myspace. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Deadeye Dick, "You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages - they haven't ended yet."

Link

Apparently 40 Years was not Long Enough

2006-03-04T22:55:00.000-05:00

A Review of The 40 Year Old Virgin

Wow. Steve Carrell is charming. He looks like a charming, ironic weasel and is appealing in his many dorky polo shirts. This movie is not charming. Perhaps the writers were in a bit of a rush and just stuck with the first draft of the script. Or perhaps they actually thought that lines like “If he starts waxing his pubes, I’m outta here!” were funny. Maybe, deep beneath the thick, trollish skin of this movie there are some good ideas. But they lie beneath an agonizing rubble of infantile, tired, dull-edged jokes. Sorry to all the (many) people who recommended this movie to me, and a big f-word you to all the newspapers and websites that gave this movie rave reviews. A sour, unfunny, unwatchable mess.

DestiNations 2K6

2006-02-27T14:40:00.000-05:00

First in the series of Rafil Bonerston-Smith Travel HotSpots, Ave Maria Florida:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2058771,00.html
Bring the kids, and the obedience!

Resident Weevil

2006-02-25T11:14:00.000-05:00

A Review of Resident Evil 4

We live in an era in which our desires are identified and answered before we even become aware of them (thanks, marketers!). For instance, I had no idea that I had an intense desire to be terrified and to shoot virtual Spaniards until I played Resident Evil 4.  This latest entrée in the series (and the only one I’ve ever played) leaves the Engrish shores of Raccoon City for a vile and nameless Spanish village.  The story starts out idiotic and then takes a back seat to the amazing, absorbing gameplay; basically, the President’s suspiciously Japanese-looking daughter has been kidnapped by some manner of Spanish cult (perhaps on her semester abroad in Seville?), and the task of her rescue falls to superagent Leon Kennedy.

     Poor Leon!  Over the course of this game his fate dooms him to being shot with arrows, burned, caught in bear traps, vomited on by gigantic insects, pummeled by gigantic oafs, shot at with catapults, attacked with chainsaws, and condescended to by a guy named Luis.  This is only in about the first two hours, too.  As in all Resident Evil games, Leon’s primary duty if to fight zombies, although in this case he is fighting uniquely Spanish zombies (only at this late date in the Playstation 2’s career have we possessed the technology to convincingly animate the Spanish zombie).  These zombies initially seem a little off, since they are not dead nor do they wish to eat Leon’s brain; eventually, you figure out that they have been infested by a parasite called the Plaga.  These creatures occasionally emerge to wave their hideously deformed and barbed limbs when Leon shoots the villagers heads off.

     The game is unremittingly gritty and unpleasant looking (without the white-hot intensity of the Silent Hill series, which is a good thing since it can be played without a double fistful of Xanax).  Plenty of surprises keep the tension up, but the game actually manages to instill dread, the acme of a horror series.  It’s just as scary to turn a corner and see a flock of parasite-riddled degenerate Spanish monks lurching slowly towards you as it is to hear the plaintive shriek of a Novistador, the game’s resident giant homicidal insects.  Resident Evil inaugurated the survival horror genre, and the staples are still here: restricted supplies, save point, and stiff controls.  However, someone at Capcom bucked the trend of Japanese software design and decided to emphasize fun.  Thus, ammunition and weapons are scarce but sufficient (you never have to ask yourself, “do I really have enough ammunition to shoot this blind, insane gladiator?”), and the controls are slow enough to instill a little bit of anxiety, but responsive and tight nonetheless.  You will rarely find yourself blaming Leon’s truck-like turning speed when you get killed, but you will get killed, and frequently, until you get the hang of things.  The game has a forgiving continue system, and is generally so fun that replaying most sections is actually pleasant.

     The plot and voice acting are pretty weak, and the writers keep doubling up on articles when they use Spanish phrases (“The Los Illuminados” for instance), but the most interesting parts of the story spring from the action itself – all the desperate gun battles and insane booby traps tell a much more interesting tale than Leon’s conversations with his controller or the Castellan, a perverted and diminutive holdover from Spain’s feudal days.  I give it nine thumbs up and a hearty recommendation to anyone (I played it on the PS2, although a graphically superior version was released first for the Gamecube, as if anyone who read all the way through the review didn’t know that).

New Russians

2006-02-22T23:23:00.000-05:00

A review of Nightwatch

Nightwatch, in one of its many subplots, features a deadly, world-ending curse. The movie itself suffers the curse of The Matrix: a puerile love for building an inconsistency-ridden mythology, the substitution of visual style for character, and woefully uneven plotting. Nightwatch even comes first in a trio, but unlike the original Matrix does not even provide any fun, male empowerment fantasy gunfights.

The movie follows Anton, an unlikable and greasy young Russian who has a bad run-in with a witch that opens his eyes to The Others. These Others live among us and come in two flavors: light and dark, although they all seem to be greasy Russian vampires. And some of them claim that they can change into animals, but they don’t. And his buddies the Light Others drive a magic utility truck. And Anton can see the future, only not very accurately and not after about half an hour into the movie, when the writers seem to have forgotten that he had that particular power.

Anyway, Anton runs afoul of a vampire hairdresser who stabs him repeatedly with scissors. He also finds a mysterious boy who is clearly going on to big things but spends the first part of the movie wandering around with a nosebleed and cowering. At one point the boy watches a few seconds of the episode of Buffy where she meets Dracula (this got a bigger reaction from the theater audience than any of the set pieces). At the end of the movie Anton fights a big villain who uses his own spine as a weapon (inexplicably, this is mirrored in scenes from a fictional video game, which looked a lot more fun than the movie; a similar technique is used to marginally greater effect in the abominable French action movie Samouraïs). He also makes friends with a magic owl who turns into an unattractive Russian actress. The visual effects, which are the only possible reason one might see this movie, are generally headache-inducing and unnecessarily gory; also, like the rest of the movie, they rarely make sense (why does Anton’s arm grow waxy and blue when he and his owl sidekick are voyaging through the spectral realm of the Gloom?). Terrible.

Looks at Books!

2006-02-16T17:18:00.000-05:00

The Third Policeman
Flann O’Brian

I was never able to get through Beckett’s Murphy, if that is indeed the Beckett I am thinking of, but I read The Third Policeman in about two days.  Of course, TTP had the massive benefit of not being written by Beckett at all – it’s by obscure, extremely stereotypically-named Irish author Flann O’Brian (not to be confused with Seamus O’Leprechaun or Top O’ the Morning).  The novel follows the misadventures of the nameless narrator, a would be scholar of de Selby with a wooden leg.  For those of you who don’t know de Selby, O’Brian made him up, and commentary on his works forms a footnoted intertext.  O’Brian handles this potentially annoying interruption with a light touch, and de Selby’s bizarre theories remind me of a cross between The Brothers Quay and Ben Marcus’ The Age of Wire and String, both powerfully weird and interesting artists.
     The actual plot, however, follows the aftermath of a murder/robbery, wending its way to a bizarre police station home to two policemen who seem to have wandered off the avant-garde stage and spend their time monitoring bicycle crime.  In the great absurdist tradition of Franz Kafka the narrator becomes embroiled in the machine of justice, with sexy results.  O’Brian handles his narrator’s predicament surely, and his frequent and sure touches of Irish humor give the story a lightness lacking in, say, Kafka’s parable of the door (which itself is of course not without humor, though not Irish, except for the part in The Trial in which K. pisses himself after Colin Farrell kicks him in the stomach).
     The chief joy in O’Brian’s novel is his language – he writes dialogue and action as surely as he does description.  He is funny, trenchant, sometimes moving.  I suppose you could call this a novel of ideas, but it has none of the annoying gravitas associated with people who use phrases like “novel of ideas.”  O’Brian is always and simultaneously puckish and serious.  The finale leaves something to be desired, but you will remember the images and episodes from The Third Policeman.  Quite wonderful.

More like KRAPka

2006-02-08T18:54:00.000-05:00

A Review of Kafka on the Shore

Once when I was a lad I read The Cider House Rules and liked it very much. I must have been around 16, the age at which one is most susceptible to John Irving’s adolescent sexuality and capable handling of language. I decided, as teenagers do, to become a John Irving fan, so I began reading his books one after the other. A Prayer for Owen Meany was the last on my list and I only read the first hundred pages. A Prayer for Owen Meany was so preachy, boring, contrived, egregious, and profoundly annoying that not only did it suck in and of itself, it caused all of John Irving’s other novel to suck by association. Where before I had seen sense and beauty now all I saw were vile reflections of Owen Meany.
I fear that Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore may have the same effect on the Murakami that I’ve read (notably The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, which everyone seemed to be reading about a year ago). In Kafka, Murakami indulges in every sin that mars Japanese pop culture – irresponsible allusion, woefully abstract language, and weirdness for its own sake. The irresponsible allusiveness is what bothers me the most – by irresponsible allusion I am referring to the Japanese taste for selecting Western materials in much the way I decided to become a John Irving fan. John Irving sounded like an interesting, sexy author, so I picked him out without actually knowing much of anything about him. If you have ever played a Japanese RPG you will know what I’m talking about – characters with names from Wagner show up, they throw in figures from Mesopotamian or French mythology, any big spaceship is named The Durandal, yet none of it actually bothers with the substance of allusion – it’s bricolage in which the author has assembled the pieces based on an extremely shallow appreciation of them. They have picked names out of a hat.
Take the title – the book only makes one direct reference to Kafka (a rather shallow remark on “In the Penal Colony”), and unless I am being deliberately thickheaded, it makes no implicit comments on any of Kafka’s work at all. The problems really arrive when Murakami actually tries to allude responsibly, because he doesn’t know as much about his interlocutors as he thinks. Sure, we have a bunch of public-library biographical detail about various famous composers thrown in, which is fine and probably accurate, but he seriously mars his story with, say, his vapid reflections on the Oedipus myth.
Most of these reflections come from the mouth of Oshima, who claims to have a woman’s body but the mind of a gay male. The mystery of Oshima’s body seems thematically tantalizing at first, by the way, but Murakami doesn’t really go anywhere with it and it ends up merely seeming like another piece of charming Murakami weirdness. It’s clear that Murakami thinks that Oshima is very smart, since Oshima frequently and volubly discusses everything from German philosophy to classical music with Kafka, the Mishima Yukio-esque protagonist. The problem is that Oshima sounds like he’s contented himself with the back covers of most of these books (and before you fire across my bow, E. Hastings, I maintain that Murakami ACTUALLY wants us to think Oshima is smart, and is not providing him as a comic pseudointellectual).
Murakami also suffers from a very bad ear for dialogue (and I don’t blame the translator for this). His character spend most of their time discussing things in extremely abstract terms They ask questions like what kind of life should one lead? What is the purpose of memory? Why do men make war? Stoned teenagers ask the same kind of questions, and nobody wants to read about them. Also, and this may border on the racist, but the characters take a typically Japanese conversational track and repeat questions (and quite a few statements) back to the people who ask them. Such a realistic touch feels out of place in the middle of such profoundly mawkish, unrealistic dialogue, plus it is boring as hell.
Murakami also loads the book with an astonishing amount of clichés. On occasion his language indeed does become beautiful, arresting, unique, but more often than not he contents himself with telling the reader what things are like instead of showing. For instance, Oshima keeps patting and grasping and otherwise reassuring Kafka – every time he does this, Murakami tells us it’s a “completely natural gesture.” Why? He also describes a bizarre, otherworldly chord in the song that lends the book its title – he doesn’t, actually, describe it, just tells us that it is bizarre or otherworldly.
His characters lean on clichés as well (which, up to a point, is OK as long as the clichés are in dialogue – people do use them). In some cases, notably Nakata’s frequent non sequiturs about “taking a dump,” this works to comic effect, but most of the time it just reads as if Murakami was trying to pad out the novel. All of his writer’s tics are here: frequent overlong descriptions of meals, uninteresting ruminations on pop music, people driving or getting driven around, things getting compared to wells, cats, missing women, sexually voracious 2-dimensional women, prostitutes, etc. Many people told me that Kafka on the Shore read like a remix of The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, which is apt, but I found that Kafka lacked the charm and vulnerability of its predecessor. And I worry that if I ever re-read Wind Up Bird I will be blind to its virtues and focus instead on the faults it shares with this mannered, useless novel. I would recommend reading some decent Warhammer 40,000 novelizations instead (or Steven King’s dopey but entertaining Cell, which I may review anon).

[The image, by the way, is Mishima Yukio as Saint Sebastien. Mishima used to get a boner whenever he saw paintings of Saint Sebastien, so posing for this picture must have been very special for him. I am aware the Murakami and Mishima are not the same person.]

Giorgio Agamben's Natural Good-Time Family Ban Solution

2006-02-04T13:08:00.000-05:00

As many of you may know I am a big fan of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. In it Agamben proposes a number of theories about the nature of the state that at first seem really interesting and cool and then after a little while start to seem ridiculous – here’s his short list:

1. The original political relation is the ban (the state of exception as zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion).

2. The fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as originary political elements and as threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zoē and bios.

3. Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.

(Agamben, 1995: 181)

The Homo sacer, Agamben explains, is a concept from ancient Roman law, in which a person is pushed out of the polity but is not actually executed; furthermore, it becomes licit to kill a sacred man, since he has already been removed from the realm of the living (and from human law) and placed under the purview of the gods. Agamben describes the life of the sacred man as zoē, the Greek concept meaning biological life. Zoē opposes bios, life within a meaningful system (for instance, a political system); zoē is life that is alive and JUST alive – Agamben pairs zoē with life in the death camps, life that the polity does not kill but does not really allow to live either: “bare life” in his words. Agamben goes on to argue that the fundamental goal of government is to produce as much bare life as possible, to generate killable, barely living bodies.

As I said above this seems very coherent and persuasive at first, then more and more ridiculous. Our very own ridiculous government is making Agamben’s theories look much more persuasive, if not any less chilling. If we think back to the furor over Terri Schiavo, for instance, Agamben’s theories look less lurid and more descriptive – for the Bush regime, Terri Schiavo is the ideal citizen, a body that lives but does nothing else and has no political aspirations or opinions except the ones assigned to her.

Bush’s recent State of the Union address also got me thinking back to Agamben. In it he mentioned animal-human hybrids, something that puzzled a lot of viewers who were not part of his ultra-conservative fundamentalist base. He was in fact referring to laboratory animals who had been partially hybridized (genetically altered to have human-like blood, for instance). “Human life is a gift from our Creator,” he explained.

The problem with this kind of reasoning (other than the fact that it prefers superstition, interpreted in a politically convenient way, to empirical science, which is a pretty big problem) is that it actually licenses surprising cruelties and abuses. Declaring human life sacred places it out of bounds – bans it. Agamben (drawing on Benveniste) observes that arguments about the sacredness of life in fact allow its destruction. If life is sacred, it is outside the responsibility of the political state and must live and (preferably) die on its own. This begins to explain the special congressional session to preserve the corpse of Terri Schiavo, Republican media’s venomous reaction to the idea of national health care (life is too sacred to be trusted to the government), and the Bush organization’s vicious war on science. This may draw its inspiration from fundamentalist religious beliefs, but it has the effect of creating an excuse for the government to produce docile, killable bodies for whatever purpose it desires. I wanted to draw an analogy between the Bush government’s media offensive against science and the bloodthirsty reaction to these now-infamous Danish political cartoons in the Muslim world – we have a government that uses religious reasoning to suppress the pursuit of life-saving science, the Muslim world has a political-media complex that calls for the death of anyone who satirizes their central religious figures. Is this a difference of degree or kind? All of these people need to grow the fuck up.

Bladed Thesis

2006-01-31T23:07:00.000-05:00

In the spirit of good ol’ Manny Farber’s termite art
A REVIEW of ELEKTRA
I saw this on HBO On Demand – it’s probably germane that I loved Daredevil, but only because Brennan and I had a whole drunken routine to go with it, not because it was in any way a good movie that a human being might enjoy watching. Anyway, here are the termite points about Elektra:
- Elektra suffers from severe OCD.
- Elektra’s father forced her to tread water over her mother’s objections.
- Elektra fell in love with a blind man in the previous movie, then another blind man (a woefully miscast Terrence Stamp) resurrects her and becomes her teacher, who then rejects her and throws her out of the dojo.
- The main villain’s superpower is apparently that he can turn into some nice 500 TC bedsheets; he also constantly tries to prove himself to his father.
So, either the movie is about the Death Drive, or it’s actually Miniature Elephant Art. By Miniature Elephant Art I mean crap that masquerades as crap that can easily be deconstructed and redeemed, but in the end is still crap; elephants pretending to be termites. That is, Elektra appears to be a dumb action movie, but contains some psychodynamic elements that seem to tread the border between trite character rationalization and heavily encrypted but interesting meditations on psychoanalysis; these meditations, however, turn out to be kind of pat and a little too easy to put together, which reveals that the crap was crap all along. If we want to be a little twee here we could turn around again and award the movie laurels for being so mannered as to cause us to notice ourselves making all these critical moves.

Touched by a Porkchop

2006-01-30T16:21:00.000-05:00

I just noticed this, but at some unspecified time in the past, Mr. Ryan Edwards, who is one of the actual FOUNDERS of Bullseyeart, posted a comment on my bloggery about Magic Butter (noting, as I did recently, that the site is now free). He also pointed out that I had combined other founders Josh Kimberg and Nick Cogan into one hideous chimera, "Josh Kogan", who as far as I know never existed, but if he did would probably have resembled the meat fairy in The Woodcutter. Anyway, it just goes to show that they care.

Bullseyeart Wikipedia

Hellephants

2006-01-30T15:20:00.000-05:00

I was just watching an old episode of Six Feet Under (one of my many favorite shows ever) in which Olivier Castro-Staahl, Claire's art teacher, brought up the opposed concepts of White Elephant Art and Termite Art. These ideas belong to Manny Farber (pictured), the film critic, and mean the following things according to facile internet definitions: White Elephant art destroys its meaning and creativity in pursuit of seriousness and acclaim (we have an English word for this: pretentious), whereas termite art burrows and eats away the boundaries of its genre as it goes forward, just eating and regurgitating wood fibers all crazy-style. Farber inscribes classic B movies in termite art, and laments that the institutionalization of the old B genres (sci-fi explosion epics, for instance) has turned termites into elephants. I just thought I might draw a little analogy here and say that White Elephant art is "L.A. Serious," the kind of films that seem to be reaching for an Oscar before they reach for meaning. Brokeback Mountain would perhaps fall into this category if its execution weren't so good much of the time - Ang Lee's terrible scene at the fireworks, for instance, is utterly White Elephant, and of course didn't occur in the story, which demonstrates the trademark concision and power of Termite Art (and is perhaps also embedded in a genre, the Western, that we don't ordinarily think of as serious). Pretty, pretty interesting.

Two Splendid Websites

2006-01-26T11:40:00.000-05:00

Encyclopedia Obscura
No, this is not an H.P. Lovecraft fanfic clearinghouse, it’s the website of Norwegian aficionado of obscure and misbegotten old Nintendo games, cartoons and movies. He’s a very funny writer (see his review of Korean martial-arts film Robo Vampire especially) and has unearthed some delightful Nintendo ephemera, including Kabuki Quantum Fighter, which I think I actually played in the late 80s.

X-Entertainment
A very, very similar but somewhat more encyclopedic website (oh, irony!), X-Entertainment covers the bizarre toys that we young males played with in the 80s. So many of them seemed so natural, yet most of them bore the indelible marks of total weirdness, or at least were made and marketed by Japanese people. The site restored to my memory such priceless jewels as Army Antz, Monster in my Pocket, and He-Man’s deadly enemy/grotesque freak of nature Modulok. Again, the writers are surprisingly good and many of the articles caused me to snort loudly during a particularly boring episode of House.

Come Mr. Taliban

2006-01-24T17:33:00.000-05:00

CHEERS to Harry Belafonte for being articulate and intelligent and letting our corrupt, misguided administration have it. Not that others have not said it before, but apparently the American people simply aren't listening.

JEERS to Wolf Blitzer for acting like a jerk-off in this interview with Harry Belafonte that I'm watching now.