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Daily Blah for... Thursday, October 31, 2002
Baz and the Bohemians
Went to see Baz Luhrmann's production of La Boheme the other night, glad of the rare opportunity to see a major production in The City before it hits Broadway. My glee turned out to be justified. I was one of those people who adored Moulin Rouge to bits, and Baz' Boheme turned out to be more of the same -- Act II, set on the Left Bank, especially. His supertitled translation played as fast and loose with the libretto as Moulin Rouge did with musical history. Musetta was given the Nicole Kidman treatment, while Musetta's cuckold, the "sweaty old Englishman," was a dead ringer for Ewan McGregor's nemesis, The Duke. Our heroes' gray Parisian garret was squeezed behind a large neon "L'Amour" logo -- reminiscent of the absinthe-soaked "truth, beauty, freedom and love" scene in MR. And the Left Bank itself was all lights and noise and costumes and color: beautiful, bohemian bustle. I've never heard a crowd gasp all at once the way they did when those lights went up.
Baz, whom I saw a few weeks back at the Mill Valley film festival introducing an anniversary screening of Strictly Ballroom, is fast becoming my favorite director. Not only does he refuse to take himself or his work too seriously, which is a wonderful way to be after all the praise that's been heaped on his back, but he also seems to be drawing a very political line through history. A line that connects liberal, loving, life-affirming dots of culture, from Romeo and Juliet to the Montmatre bohemians, and reminds us it's all the same. If you're firmly on the side of truth, beauty, freedom and -- above all things -- love, nothing else matters. You may starve, you may die, but you are golden. No wonder Baz wanted to open Boheme in San Francisco. He, Rudolfo, Puccini, this city, we all feel the same way.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, October 30, 2002
Got It Yet?
How to spot a web trend, part 1: two or more friends from different arcs of your social circle e-mail you the same link. The latest: Black People Love Us. How to spot a web trend, part 2: a large number of people don't Get It, and often make their not Getting It known in angry and ever-more-amusing ways (check out the letters page). What to do about such people? Allow them to live out their lives in the same sad, misguided state of mind? No. This is too cruel. Perhaps blanket-bombing the country with educational leaflets containing easy-to-read definitions of the following words: Satire. Irony. Sense of humor.
Daily Blah for... Monday, October 28, 2002
Those Magnificent Men with their Paper Machines
Tired of the same boring old airplane simulation games? Here is a flight sim with a difference. Warning: wickedly addictive.
Mistakes at High Speed
My beach reading this year: You Shall Know Our Velocity, the novel by staggering genius Dave Eggers. A tale of twentysomething ennui that you might file in in the Easton Ellis and Coupland section of the library, but with enough twists to keep it amusingly original: the twentysomethings in question are trying to lose $80,000 they've received but don't believe they deserve, along with guilt over the death of their friend, in a variety of the world's most out-of-the-way countries. They're constantly mistaken, of course, but honest and forthright, not nihilistic and detached.
The most original thing about the book -- and I've drank just enough beer with Eggers to know he is obsessed with this -- is the printing and binding. For one thing, the narrative starts on the cover and continues on the inside cover with no break, no breath, no space for a signature-hungry title page. Otherwise the book looks very nineteenth-century, which leaves you nicely unprepared for the pictures of scribbled notepaper and such that jump out of the text without warning. Eggers has done this one on his own, printing a limited edition of 50,000, hunting down the perfect printer (which he found in Iceland), selling it through his website, and generally shunning the Barnes and Noble world so forcefully that you can almost taste his fat-walleted fear at how well his first book went down there.
But large publishing houses, for all their scary monolithic multinationalness, do take the time to thoroughly copy edit. Velocity is replete with mistakes. The most glaring of which is the loss of half a sentence that renders a picture unexplained, but there are lots of little ones that McSweeney's hasn't taken the time to acknowledge (which is not like the detail-obsessed Eggers). There are literals (road by where he means rode by) and hanging commas at the end of quotes. Maybe this is just my anal side coming out, but if I run into such things once I've invested myself in a book, I have to fight a very strong urge to put the thing down there and then. Each mistake seems to suck the authority of the author out of his work through a very wide straw.
Dave. Dude. You normally fret about this stuff. What happened?
Maui Wowie
Just this minute returned from what, according to Conde Nast Traveler readers, is not only the best island but also the best travel destination in the world. (That same survey lauded San Francisco as the top U.S. city and second only to Paris in the urban world at large, so Conde Nast Traveler readers clearly have their heads screwed on). But yes, Maui exceeded all expectations. It's more than the munificent weather and the god-like bookend volcanic slopes and the out-of-control Birds of Paradise. There's something palpably magical about the place, something you breath in the air, something you catch in the way sunlight plays with ripples on the surf, something you feel coming round all those switchbacks on the road to Hana, but most of all something you see on the faces of anyone who's been there longer than a couple of days. The Aloha spirit: friendly, trusting and very, very relaxed.
Perhaps a little too relaxed, as it turned out. Maui county is way too laid back to get caught up in Daylight Savings; that whole hour-forward, hour-back thing twice a year is just so tiresome. Uninformed of this fact, and believing all through Sunday that we were playing with an extra hour (as the rest of Hawaii was), we missed our flight back to San Francisco. Not too big a deal: a credit card here and there, a brief sojourn in LAX, and we returned about five hours later than intended. The greatest problem was the fact that we were buying one-way tickets on the same day of travel, which apparently puts us at high risk for hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings, and gave every airport flunkey in Maui and L.A. the right to dig through our bags, which they did with gusto. Pretty soon we figured out it was the checkerboard pattern on our tickets that marked us out as the potential terrorist Taylor family. It didn't take a rocket scientist, much less a brain surgeon, to spot that one. So why do they think the real terrorists won't? Excuse me, Mr. FAA: If you're going to screen baggage, you have to do it randomly. Make anyone who wants to do harm have to beat the odds, not beat a system.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, October 22, 2002
Pass the Blog, Dear
How you know you're living in the 21st century: my parents come to visit, one of the items of conversation is this blog, and we end up passing a wirelessly-connected laptop from lap to lap. There is much discussion about representation of some family members who shall remain nameless, ie. my mother. Suggestion is made that credits and corrections be added to each blog entry. And to cap it all, I sit here and write a blog entry while the conversation continues. It makes for a more lively familial interaction, to say the least. Coming soon: family gatherings where every member sits around the dinner table blogging about everyone else's blogs.
Daily Blah for... Sunday, October 20, 2002
Banana Gumboat Streamtrain Trousers
Meanwhile, in the world of fish-driven bicycles, it turns out I'm a skateboard with a built-in motion sensor.
Daily Blah for... Friday, October 18, 2002
The Tyranny of Stuff
Let me just clarify my comments yesterday, because I don't want to sound like a spoiled little rich kid. Yeah, when I started getting this kind of rubbish mailed to me, I thought it was pretty cool too. But soon it became routine, and I started to feel bad for the UPS and FedEx guys who keep jogging up and down my narrow, sloping side street just to bring me large packages full of NBA sweat. And then I got really irritated by the packaging itself -- all that useless cardboard and inexplicably inflated plastic bags and the most inanely irritating thing of all, polystyrene peanuts. Who invented those things? Who instilled them with a magnetic attraction to your clothing and to nice clean floors? Do they come pre-filled with static electricity? Does someone sit at the packing factory with a pile of tumble-dried laundry, carefully rubbing each peanut against a freshly-charged wool sweater?
But mostly, my problem is with the sheer volume. Note that I work at home; it's not like I can just leave the crap outside my office and have the cleaning staff take care of it. The packaging piles up faster than I can break it down and separate it into its recycling components. (As a good environmentalist, I am congenitally incapable of just trashing it.) Pretty soon I start feeling like Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer's Apprentice: there are too many brooms and way too much water for this amateur magician. And they just keep coming. The sound of packing paper sliding against my letterbox -- lo, even now as I write it sounds! -- makes all the muscles in the back of my neck tense up. The pleasure of ripping open a package has lost most of its charm. It's a King Midas kind of situation: be careful what you wish for.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, October 17, 2002
You've Got Stuff
You think you've got junk mail problems? I laugh at your junk mail problems. You should see the kind of crap that comes hurtling through my door every day. A sample of the last two days' deliveries: One zombie make-up kit, with real make-up, to promote the game House of the Dead III. One bottle of sweat -- it actually claims to be NBA sweat -- to promote the game NBA 2K3. One box of flavored popcorn -- containing large bags of apple, grape and spicy cheese-flavored popcorn -- to promote ... uh, I forgot. A beach towel. A couple of T-shirts. A little tchotchke with sand flowing through the stencilled-out name of some game. And of course games, games, games, more bloody games than I could ever play in ten bloody lifetimes. Does anyone want this stuff? Would anyone like to come over and make it all go away? I feel like I should start some sort of contest. You send me your real-life, can't-make-'em-up stories, I print the best ones, and mail you a box of games 'n' stuff in return. Any takers?
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, October 15, 2002
The Culture of Sickness
This time I have a pretty good excuse for my absence. I spent much of last week in St. Francis Memorial Hospital (ah, and how funny it is to watch the merest mention of the word "hospital" cause looks of stern and attentive concern to cross the faces of even my most cynical friends). Happily, my presence there was due to one of the least serious things a person can possibly be hospitalized for: a case of cellulitis, a bacterial infection in the skin of my left calf, most likely caused by some impertinent little 'skeeter. Oral antibiotics weren't doing the trick, my fever spiked to 103, my girlfriend insisted I take a trip to the ER (left to my own devices, I most likely would have waited until the leg turned purple and dropped off), and before I knew anything I was hooked up to an IV and experiencing morphine for the first time. (Mmmm ... morphine ...)
And that should have been the whole story. IV antibiotics were doing their job; I should have been left alone to do mine, which was to grab as many Zs as possible. But this is modern American health care, and patients aren't allowed to rest. They must suffer a constant stream of interruptions from complete strangers -- that is, whatever assistants the nurse on duty has delegated her entire roster of tasks to -- who barge into the patient's room (doesn't anyone knock anymore?) bearing a variety of machines that go "ping!" [cf. Monty Python's Meaning of Life] and proceed to either draw his blood or measure how much his blood pressure/temperature/pulse rate has changed since the last time it was checked five minutes ago. Being complete strangers, of course, they also have to wake the patient up and ask what his symptoms are. How much of the increase in blood pressure is due to the interruptions, strangely, is not measured.
What western medicine needs is a good dose of eastern medicine. By which I don't mean acupuncture or aromatherapy; I mean the concept that the wellness of your body just might have something to do with the wellness of your mind. If you sacrifice a few measurements or a little delegation here and there to make sure a patient is calm, relaxed and --dare I use such a Californian term -- centered, they just might get better faster. As it was, I felt I would have done a lot better if my IV drip and I had taken a stroll (okay, a hop) across the street to the Nob Hill Grille and sat there for five days. Hell, it's where I got all my meals from; I would have saved on takeout bags. I shunned the hospital food because a) it was hospital food, and b) I just couldn't get used to the old person's mealtime schedule of 7am, 12pm and 5pm. What was this, a retirement home?
Well, yes. Kinda. And that's half the problem with hospitals. No matter what you've got, you're treated like a helpless nursing home inmate. They will take care of you, but on their schedule, not yours. You will be inculcated into the culture of sickness, and the initiation ceremony will take place every five minutes. The Kafka-esque result: a patient who starts off not very sick can be made to feel worse. No wonder I felt like stringing sheets together and abseiling out of the window.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, October 01, 2002
The Spies That Came In From the Hard Drive
Speaking of spyware, the response to my Time column on the subject in this week's issue has been unerringly positive (which is quite unusual with tech columns; where are all the geeks dying to quibble over some semantic point?). I've had quite a few e-mails from folks saying that Ad-Aware, the anti-spyware checker, has freed them from over 80 nasty little pieces of code lurking in their registry. And I thought turning up a dozen or so meant I was a heavy computer user.
Big Music Cuts a Big Check
Seems the music industry has finally been busted for price-fixing on CD sales from the mid-90's on. They have to pay out $143 million, but they don't have to admit wrongdoing. No word yet on whether that means they'll have to stop charging $17.99 for CDs that cost 50 cents to produce. Or ... wait a minute ... could it be possible that they'll just pass on the cost of the settlement to the consumer and hope we won't notice? I wonder.
Who cares, as long as we've got freely-available MP3s. By the way, if you want the best music-downloading tool without all that nasty spyware, try Kazaalite.
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