Category: Personal

Very good news that the baby was found alive and apparently healthy but what really struck me as odd was the multiple uses of the word fetus to refer to a baby cut from her mother’s womb (of course killing the mother by doing so).

The SciFi Channel earlier this week debuted a four hour movie called Legend of Earthsea and, despite generally miserable reviews, got “big ratings.” The telefilm was derived from two classic novels by Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, and the author herself was upset enough to post a disparaging essay titled Earthsea in Clorox. Novelists winding up furious at how Hollywood treats their work is nothing new–some authors have refused the dangled gelt while others have only accepted when a studio was willing to give them meaningful involvement in the production–but Le Guin’s essay is particularly interesting because of her focus not on how her storyline was changed but because the main characters’ skin colors were. [via Neil Gaiman’s Journal]

Odd coincidence that I read Dan Gillmor’s post about new evidence of Marines torturing Iraqi prisoners as I was watching an episode of Law & Order in which the defendants were members of a modern American militia who felt crushed by our government.

From 1999, writer/directors Allison Anders and Kurt Voss explore the world of the leftover rock star in Sugar Town. Sadly the duo don’t come close to the creative achievement Anders made with a previous music industry insider look-see, Grace of My Heart, and instead get stuck in a morass cataloging cliches.

Michael Des Barre, John Taylor and Martin Kemp are all actual rock stars–okay, Des Barre less so than the others and more famous for playing rock stars on screen–and the fourth member of the unnamed film band, Larry Klein, is a professional musician and ex-husband of Joni Mitchell; the film also features punker turned actor John Doe as a studio guitarist. The women in their lives are played by Beverly D’Angelo (a rich widow willing to finance their album if Des Barre will satisfy her), Ally Sheedy, Roseanne Arquette (Taylor’s wife, coming to grips with the Hollywood reality that her best film days are in the past), Lucinda Jenney and Jade Gordon.

In a way this reminded me of a lot of Robert Altman’s films, especially the less successful ones like Short Cuts and Ready to Wear, trying to weave a series of short stories around a loosely connected group of people. But at least Altman had the clout to make his films long enough whereas the 92 minutes allotted Sugar Town aren’t enough to create meat on most of these bones. The film would have worked much better if Anders and Voss had focused on Taylor and Arquette with perhaps Gordon’s cutthroat arc as the mirroring subplot. Oh well.

not recommended

He couldn’t beat a dead man in a state vote, but is this next: A Supreme Court Seat for John Ashcroft? Pardon me while I go clean up. [via SCOTUSblog]

To be watched tomorrow: AtomFilms – The Snowman

Later: Not as funny to me.

Game just ended. We dominated almost the entire way but could only score one goal after 71 minutes. Looked like a win even so but then there was one breakdown in the defense less than a minute before the end and we gave up the tying goal. Stupid!!!!!!!!!!! So instead of taking six points from two winnable games Saturday and today, we have just one. Arghhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!

Very cynical but very true: Rules for Shopping at Fry’s Electronics

Springsteen has posted his recent acoustic 12 string version of the Star Spangled Banner for your listening pleasure (Windows Media, Real or Quicktime, your choice). You can celebrate his Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance Grammy nomination for Code of Silence (from The Essential Bruce Springsteen CD) while listening.

Most legendary matches from the World Cup over the years have been the one off upsets like the thrown together team of American amateurs who beat England 1-0 in 1950. One of the great stories, though, is the absolutely unknown North Korean team which travelled to England for the 1966 Finals, not only because they beat Italy to reach the last four–and took an early 3-0 lead against Portugal before collapsing to star Eusebio’s four goals–but for the way in which the people of Birmingham (where they were based for the opening round) took them on as favorites only a dozen years after the Korean War.

The Game Of Their Lives is a terrific documentary from Daniel Gordon which looks at the North Koreans’ 1966 experience as well as visiting the usually off-limits nation to film interviews with the (still living?) players and their manager. While the historical bits were interesting for me, always love to see some of what happened before I got to be a fan, the really meaningful moments were the interviews and scenes filmed inside North Korea.

The secretive communist regime rarely allows foreign cameras in or their people to speak to journalists and many outsiders tend to belittle the cult of Great Leader and Dear Leader (father/founder of the nation Kim Il Sung and his son/current dictator Kim Il Jong). The players, though, made heartfelt comments about their Great Leader which made me think about how different people see the same things differently. They all broke down in tears during a scene filmed at a memorial featuring a huge statue of the man who lead their country at the time of the Finals, all wishing that he were still around to guide them.

My second favorite part was the interviews with people from Birmingham who were involved in those days as fans or civic leaders. They explained how the city, whose main soccer team had just been relegated and which viewed itself as underdogs to bigger metropolises like London, quickly took to the most unlikely visitors. I guess 1966 was a simpler time than today because even if the Cold War was in full force the visiting squad and the locals easily and commonly mixed together without incident; no way that would happen today.

From a film perspective, Gordon did a good job. He intercut archival footage with new material, and paced the game footage with the other discussions. Other than explaining the two Kims and the impact of the war on North Korea early on to give context and understanding to other material, he left politics on the sideline.

recommended even for non-soccer fans

Found through a Google Ad on a friend’s site, BlogSquirrel comes off instantly as yet another attempt to separate stupid naive businessmen from their cash. The service “[a]utomatically monitors 100,000+ blogs each day” as opposed to using Technorati which is not only free but monitors over 5,000,000 sites. I can’t find CyberAlert’s pricing (the navbar link returns a 404 error at the time this was written) but their PR Grants program page implies a cost of $3,000 per year. Founder William Comcowich justifies the service’s utility with articles that coin such amusing phrases as dotgone, at least when he isn’t using his talents to pimp for mortgage spammers.

Do I come across as antagonistic? Sardonic? Sure hope so.

A similar perspective…

Yes, it won or was nominated for a boatload of the 2003 awards. Even so, Mystic River is a decent movie. Not a great one, though, and I think the two Oscars to Penn and Robbins were more a result of not so strong competition; then again, Return of the King should have gotten more than the 11 Oscars it did.

Somewhat of a murder mystery, this film attempts to be more an exploration of what a tragic childhood event might mean to the lives–dare I say psyches?–of three boys from a blue collar Boston neighborhood, played as adults by Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon. The ending doesn’t answer the core question all that well and I do wonder if Dennis Lehane’s novel does it better, particularly since the screenplay was written by the less than stellar Brian Helgeland.

Clint Eastwood directed, but does not appear onscreen, and his oevre is hit and miss. Unforgiven , Play Misty for Me, and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil were terrific films but what about dreck like Space Cowboys, The Rookie, and The Bridges of Madison County? I don’t see much value added from his hands in this one. For instance, he uses a recurring motif of panning from the ground up to blank, generally grey sky. Wow, that’s a psychovisual for you!

Still, my qualms are mainly in reaction to the abundance of awards and hyped reviews accorded to Mystic River that I think are based on the original novel’s reputation, Eastwood and Penn, and the topical, touching subject of the childhood tragedy instead of what’s in the celluloid. I did like this movie.

recommended

For further reading, after the /.’ing finishes: Exponential Change – Singularity Investor

Very disturbing assessment of our options, slim and nearly none: The U.S. vs. a Nuclear Iran

Suzy Sandor, with a letter to the editor in today’s NY Times, complains that partisan primaries alienating and disconnected. This is a very strange, disconnected position, one that didn’t make any better sense a when it was on the ballot here in the November elections; while California voters were wise enough to defeat Prop. 62, I’m still not over the 46.2% of voters who cast yes votes. While the current two party system leaves much to be desired in providing quality candidates, allowing anyone to vote in any primary simply deprives the primaries of their actual meaning–to allow the members of a particular party to select their own candidate for a general election. Non-partisan primaries would most likely destroy the parties; if that’s the unstated goal of those behind these efforts, this is the wrong means to get there.

Congratulations, Matt Leinart on winning the 6th Heisman Trophy awarded to a USC football star. One more big thing to do this season: Lead the Trojans past Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl the same way you beat their QB and RB today at the Downtown Athletic Club. Suh-weet!

I’m of two minds about today’s match although both of them are unhappy with this result. One thought is that Everton, tied for second for the moment with Arsenal and having already won more games than in all of last season, are playing above their heads while we are missing four or five of our preferred starters though injury and had a tough match in midweek which Everton didn’t, not having qualified for Europe. The other is that this is a derby in which the Reds had an eight game winning streak and Benitez made a couple of puzzling choices in assembling the side; why were Alonso, Nunez and Finnan not on the pitch at the open?

Another question, which may be an artifact of the television broadcast rather than on the pitch actuality: Didn’t Everton have a player offside when Carsley made his goal-scoring shot? There was very definitely a blue shirt behind the last visible Liverpool defender and though he wasn’t involved in the play (even had his back to the goal) he also was at least partially blocking Kirkland’s view. I’m not sure exactly how the passive offsides rule might play in here but then again neither of the commentators made a mention nor did Benitez in what I saw of the post-game interviews.

Definitely an annoying outcome after Wednesday’s triumph against the Greeks, not to mention the glorious victory over Arsenal two weeks ago. You can talk about giving players like Alonso rest but, geez, couldn’t that wait until the much lower pressure of Tuesday’s match against Portsmouth?

Our top story tonight: Generallissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

Chevy Chase, Weekend Update, Saturday Night Live, 1975

Chase had a recurring bit in the Weekend Update segment during his short time on SNL, which Jane Curtain continued with a time or two, in which he would mention as newsworthy the fact that Franco, the recently deceased dictator of Spain, was still dead. However, in a sense, Franco actually wasn’t dead then and still isn’t now. Not that he’s alive in the sense that you are or I am today but that he hasn’t slipped into that ethereal, ambiguous place we call the past.

When someone dies, people usually give the comforting advice that deceased isn’t really gone as long as she lives on in your heart. So when everyone who knew that person finally passed on as well, 10 or 50 or whatever years later, death was truly final and that person extinguished. With exceedingly few exceptions, relatively speaking, that extinguishing is true for every single human born prior to the Industrial Revolution. Not counting surviving census (and similar materials), only major historical figures have anything still known and alive about themselves.

Since the Industrial Revolution began, however, modern media has been born and evolved. Newspaper archives and personal journals are probably the oldest such records and since Daguerre’s (or Talbott’s) and Edison’s inventions we’ve been preserving sounds and images. With the invention (and continuing improvement) of digital storage, nearly everything that currently exists in the various analog formats and everything stored digitally is being preserved and,with the right approaches, will never be lost. In a sense, then, none of us will ever truly die again. Are you reading this while I’m still alive or after spelunkering through drafty archives of the web’s birthing far down the road?

Set in a strange Latinized, banana republic America, masked and anonymous is as odd as you might expect from the combined creative efforts of Larry Charles, who came to fame as a writer on the epitomy of the big nothing, Seinfeld, and Bob Dylan (who co-wrote besides starring). The country is engulfed in a corrupt, eviscerated national gang war where no one can walk in a straight line or deliver one.

Because this is a Dylan movie, nearly all the parts are played by name, or at least recognizable, actors: Jeff Bridges, Penelope Cruz, Bruce Dern, Jessica Lange, Christian Slater, Chris Penn, Luke Wilson, Cheech Marin, Angela Bassett, Steven Bauer, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer, Fred Ward, Robert Wisdom and Tracy Walter.

The movie uses many of Dylan’s own songs, sung by him, sometimes by others, some even in other languages–Dylan plays a lost and now found ’60s singer named Jack Fate, pulled out of prison to be the star of a benefit concert put on by Goodman and Lange that no name star in masked‘s America is willing to play. Though unspecified higher ups require Jack to play a set filled with songs about rebellion and revolution, such as The Beatles’ Revolution, The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again, Elvis’s Jailhouse Rock; of course he performs none of them, the closest is his own Blowin’ in the Wind. Finally, Fate is the son of the country’s (dying) dictator though only he and a select few (seem to) know this.

Plenty of the dialog surely sounds like it could be Dylan lyrics. “Sometimes when I dream my dreams become my reality,” said Giovanni Ribisi. “Imagine yourself being reincarnated in the civil war in Babylon,” said John Goodman (who looks more like a whale than any famous mainstream actor since Marlon Brando in The Score). “The seeds won’t grow if you plant them on the carpet, or the hardwood floor,” says Jessica Lange. Hell, Wilson beats Bridges to death with an old bluesman’s acoustic guitar!

The big question is does Bob Dylan act in this film or just walk through it? To me that isn’t terribly meaningful–hasn’t he been acting out in public since the earliest days of his career?

recommended

Now that the highly lauded Google Suggest is out in the wild, how long will it be until some enterprising developer updates the Firefox search box to include it?