I had two main goals this time out. First, I wanted to return to the conventional blog format. As I said in my announcement of the last redesign, the widescreen format was an experiment — a usability study, really. And what I discovered was . . . it wasn’t as usable. Second, and more importantly, I wanted to stretch my CSS skills a bit.
I read a book last weekend. A 302-page book. I was standing in Borders on Friday night, waiting for Joanna to get a drink, and I picked up a book, read the first few pages, and decided to buy it. Then I went home and finished it in three or four sittings.
Girish tagged me.
We got back to Knoxville late Wednesday night, and for some reason I’m still feeling jet-lagged and out of sorts. Maybe it’s just the depression that sets in each time I return to the routine and responsibilities of “real life” after a great vacation.
How’s that for the perfect end to my academic career? I got a good note in The Times Literary Supplement!
We’ve been running around town at such a pace that when we finally do return to the hotel each night, I don’t have much energy left to write. Here’s a snapshot of the last few days.
When we arrived yesterday at St. Paul’s, we discovered that it was closed to tourists. So after snapping a couple pictures, we headed south, taking the millennium footbridge across the Thames to the Tate Modern.
With two hours to kill before our room was ready, we dropped off our bags and wandered through the Egypt and Greece rooms at the British Museum.
On May 1st, just a few days after Joanna and I return from our trip to London, I will begin a full-time job as a web designer at the university, and I’m damn eager to get started. I’m especially excited about my new title: Artist.
For years, I’ve heard and read about Electrif Lycanthrope, an unofficial live release from 1974. Original vinyl copies still show up on the market from time to time, though at prohibitively steep prices. But now, thanks to the wonders of the Internet Archive, it’s right there, just waiting to be downloaded for free.
I’m still not sure why she grabbed me that day or why I’m the one who gets to share life with her. To say I’m grateful wouldn’t come close to expressing the mystery of it all.
To watch the body of Abel Ferrara’s films, as I’ve tried my best to do over the last month and a half, is to see a man wrestling obsessively — sadomasochistically, even — with the Irrational. The stylized violence, the scenery-chewing performances, the gratuitous and exploitative female nudity — all are window dressing. What’s at stake here is nothing less than the very possibility of grace.
Last week, a friend sent us a link to a British Airways deal, we talked about it for a day or two, and then we made our reservations. Twelve days, eleven nights, taking off three weeks from Friday. Crazy.
Varda, as much an essayist as filmmaker, explores gleaning as a hypertext of ideas: gleaning is an alternate economy; at times it’s a moral choice, at others a lamentable necessity; it’s both transgressive and communal; and, finally, it’s a metaphor for the artistic process itself.
I have no will power. Barely two weeks after deciding that I’d like to pick up a turntable, I now own a Music Hall MMF 2.1.
There’s no effort required to shuffle. And, even worse, no creativity. Listening becomes a wholly passive act, and the music suffers, dissolving into the atmosphere like so much Muzak.
If I’m remembering theory notation correctly, the change for “Inner City Blues” is i-IV. Two chords. It opens with twenty-four straight measures of the minor root before finally changing to the major IV, where it stays for all of four measures before returning to the root. Would have bored me senseless a decade ago; now, I’ll be damned if that change ain’t transcendent. The song is a chant-like, soul-filled lamentation. An angry prayer.
“People’s faces are in naked repose down in the subway,” Evans tells us, but why should we believe him? I’m not sure that I do, and Haneke almost certainly doesn’t.
One of my goals with this latest mix, “A Session of Dance Music,” was to gather some songs that wouldn’t inspire Joanna to take sarcastic jabs at my piss-poor taste. We just got back from a long drive, during which we listened to the entire disc, and her opinion seems to hover somewhere in the “Well, at least it doesn’t suck” range. So mission accomplished, I guess.
We have a five-disc changer in our living room, where we expect most of our neighbors to congregate during the cocktail hour. Because I don’t have the time to program a mix of music, I’m just going to drop five CDs in the player and hit “Random.”
I’m fighting the urge to buy a house down the street. It’s been on the market for several months now, and, after finding pictures of it online, I can see why.
But the adaptation of a written text to film also necessarily foregrounds the authority of images, imposing specificity on what an author might have chosen to describe more generally. I was surprised, for example, to find myself suddenly moved by an image of the small boxes in which Faunia stores the ashes of her dead children. In the novel, surprisingly little emphasis is placed on the ashes; Roth does not make of them an excuse for one of his patented ten-page diversions.
I remember sitting in my 9th grade art class with some guys who, during the previous summer, had apparently decided that they would become “skaters” and listen to The Dead Milkmen, Fishbone, and Suicidal Tendencies. I’d listen to ‘HFS every afternoon and try to keep up.
I can’t seem to find it now, but one of my all-time favorite Onion headlines is something like, “Area Man No Longer Able to Enjoy Ironically.”
Having already proven his deftness with coming-of-age stories, Cuaron (along with screenwriter Steven Kloves) understands that all the sound and fury of big budget spectacle signifies little unless it’s in the service of character, and so, here, the novel’s 400+ pages are neatly trimmed to show a single but significant stage of Harry’s development.
A day-by-day viewing log of my filmwatching habits in 2006, beginning with Alfonso Cuarón’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) and ending with Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Tout Va Bien (1972).
When I was aware of Winterbottom’s mise-en-scene at all, I was frustrated by its haphazardness — odd cuts are scotchtaped together by forced music cues, the camera jumps too often into the subjective perspective of unimportant characters (an after-the-fact narrative justification for Winterbottom’s use of a hand-held, I suspect), and the central story gets lost in the noise of several side-plots.
Joanna still tells the story of the first time she visited my family at Christmas. Although she had come from an upper middle-class home, she’d never seen so many presents under a tree. In fact, they weren’t just under the tree. They were under and around and near the tree. They were piled in corners on the opposite side of the room from the tree.
Of the ten best new films I saw this year, eight were festival screenings, and, of those, only two have a reasonable chance of making it to a theater here in Knoxville. I mention that in passing as a reminder of how these year-end best lists are shaped by distribution and by the brand of popular American film criticism that still ghettoizes the vast majority of world cinema into a single, convenient category, “Foreign Language Film.”
I had two main goals with this mix. First, I decided to divide it evenly between older and newer music. There’s always a jump of at least 15 years from tune to tune. But I also wanted the mix to be coherent, so I was looking for a tone that could maybe be described as “Songs that might actually sound better if they were played on an old, hissing record player.”