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Daily Blah for... Saturday, December 21, 2002
Dunbloggin' ...
At least for now. I'm heading off with Petra for Christmas in Arizona, with her family, and New Year in Mexico with friends. There's a chance I might send a missive or two from exciting Scottsdale. Then again, I've got better things to do than talk to you lot. It's the holidays! What are you doing browsing blogs anyway? Go enjoy yourself. (Yes, there are things more enjoyable than the Daily Blah. Friends, family, parties and toys, toys, toys). See you in 2003.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, December 19, 2002
In A World ...
All hail Hal Douglas, better known as the guy with the really really really deep voice on all the movie trailers. It turns out he has a sense of humor about his job. The trailer for Jerry Seinfeld's new documentary, "Comedian," shows nothing but Douglas in a voice-over booth trying out his stock phrases -- "in a world where ... in a land ... in a time ... a renegade cop ... now more than ever ..." before being fired by the director. It's fast becoming a cult, and if you haven't read the transcript or seen the trailer itself -- well, what are you waiting for? Click on the links, you robot renegade cop.
Someone really needs to string all of Douglas' greatest hits together and set them to a funky beat. There's a number one record right there.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, December 17, 2002
Adopt, Adapt, Improve
I've been wanting to write a blog about Adaptation, the new movie from Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufmann (genius team behind the outrageously original comedy Being John Malkovich). But it's damn near impossible.
Like Kaufmann, whose desparate struggle with turning The Orchid Thief into a screenplay -- how do you make a movie about flowers? -- is at the center of the film, I am too much in awe of the subject to write a word about it. There are just too many layers to the thing.
On one level, it's just laugh-out-loud funny. On another, it's about the wrangling that goes on within every writers' brain between the urge to be original (represented by sad, balding, flop-sweated Charlie) and the ability to write crowd-pleasing, forgettable crap (represented by Charlie's fictional brother Donald, an idiot savant who blunders into the screenwriting business and makes a packet).
When Charlie asks for Donald's help with the script, the movie takes a rapid turn for the cliched. The brothers get wrapped up in a sordid detective story involving orchids, drugs and death that has nothing to do with the original book. All nicely satirical, except it isn't played for laughs. The last half-hour looks, sounds and feels like a genuinely bad Hollywood paint-by-numbers. The script intentionally self-destructs. And yet ... it does everything the fictionalized Charlie wishes for. We do learn a lot about flowers, about evolution, about adaptation, not least in the way the movie itself ultimately adapts to its natural environment (the average cinema audience).
Speaking of evolution, Nicholas Cage -- who plays both Charlie and Donald in prosthetic jowls and bald wig-- is like a fully-formed biped compared to the single-celled bacteria of his previous roles. Cage single-handedly ruined the screen adaptation of Captain Corelli's Mandolin with an Italian accent so fake you wanted to roast him like a glazed ham. Now he makes us believe, and I mean strongly believe, in the existence of polar-opposite twins. Give that man an Oscar. Hell, give him two.
Daily Blah for... Friday, December 13, 2002
Happy Birthday, Dear Blah
Exactly one year ago, on a rainy San Francisco evening much like this one, I sat down to write the fateful words: "I feel a Personal Technology column coming on." Little did I suspect what I was setting in motion.
There's an aphorism about journalists -- we're all would-be book writers who need the spur of daily or weekly deadlines to do anything. It's true. We're not lazy; we're just perfectionists. We like deadlines because they cover for second-rate prose. "Well, I could have written that last piece like I was John Hersey," shrugs the hack, "but alas, I was on deadline."
Without any sort of deadline for writing this blog, I've found it all too easy to procrastinate. Daily Blah? More like two or three times weekly, if I counted up my entries over the last year. But what amazes me is that I managed to keep it up at all.
It takes a month to turn repeated activity into a habit, or so the neurologists tell us. (I'm reading the excellent Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot right now -- which, by the way, confirms that line at the end of the movie Amelie about there being more connections in the brain than particles in the universe. What an arresting piece of trivia that is.)
So perhaps it's taken a year to get Daily Blah under my skin. Or rather, to wear it over my skin. To get comfortable with the style of being spontaneous. With telling you some things about my life, but not revealing too much information. With expressing heartfelt opinions, but not worrying about reflecting badly on the magazine. With finding a comfortable middle ground between my two written languages: English and American.
And still the thing continues to evolve. There are a number of experimental directions I want to take it in: writing William Burroughs-esque cut-ups using the day's news, for example. It may resonate with you, or you may think I've gone bonkers. Either way, I hope you'll continue to give me feedback.
Here's to year two. Cheers. Mud in your eye.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, December 12, 2002
More Props for the Blah
Almost one year on from its humble bloggy beginnings -- 364 days, to be exact -- Daily Blah feels like it's starting to go places. Not so much a soaring eagle just yet, more a flightless but eager mutant bird whose stubby arms are sprouting feathers. "You look familiar," a woman at that company dinner the other night said. Turned out she's a regular reader and knew me from my caricature up there to the left. Regular readers; who knew? Plus last night I found out I'm being referenced alongside news sources: my brief Blah review of Linden Lab's Second Life is now featured prominently on its "in the news" page, not to mention homepage. Just underneath my colleague Lev Grossman's brief review for Time, in fact. Not that I'm getting competitive or anything. I'd like to assure my corporate bosses: you have nothing to fear. There is absolutely no need to buy me out. Please don't even think of trying to dazzle me with generous offers. Cease all thought of writing large checks. Daily Blah is not for sale.
Well, okay, $5 million, but that's my final offer.
Don't You Ever Ever Ever Do That Again
The flipside of personal effects taunting you with their loss: they often taunt you with how easy it is to come back, too. Like a kid playing a prank on his parents by hiding in the garden shed just before bedtime. That precious Palm device of mine turned out to be in the hands of the limo driver, based out of Menlo Park. He wasn't due to come up to the city any time this week -- but as amazing, inexplicable, deus-ex-machina luck would have it, I happened to have an appointment at a company in Menlo Park today. I nearly forgot about it because, of course, I didn't have the Treo.
I met up with the driver in a Denny's parking lot, and tipped him handsomely to reward his honesty. Just like I tipped the cab driver in Vegas. And the other limo driver a couple of weeks ago who retrieved my cellphone from his back seat while I waited, frantic and ready to board a plane, at LAX. If my gadgets continue to insist on sneaking out of my pockets like this, they're going to end up costing me twice what I paid for them. And yet I'll keep welcoming them back into the house with a clip round the ear and a "you had me worried sick!"
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, December 11, 2002
What Has He Got in his Pocketses?
It's almost too ironic to be true. The moment I write about the agony of losing personal stuff, my Handspring Treo -- packed to the gills with all sorts of diaries and memos -- decides to go walkabout. I'm pretty sure I left it in the back of a limo that took me to a company dinner last night. This would not be the first time I've lost it in the back of a cab: on my last day in Vegas, I found it missing as I checked out of my hotel and frantically rang round cab companies on my way to the airport. Luckily, it turned up at one of them just as my taxi was pulling into the departure terminal, and we were able to do a swift U-turn back to the lost property office. The bloody thing just seems to slip out of pockets all too easily.
Organizationally naked without it, frantically turning my apartment upside-down, I suddenly start to feel like Gollum: where are you, my precioussssssssss?
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, December 10, 2002
On Loss
There's a little-known song by the Divine Comedy that I love, called Lost Property. Most of the lyrics are a simple litany of stuff that has at one time or another found its way out of the possession of the lead singer, Neil Hannon: two tennis rackets. New sheepskin jacket. Blue Rizla packets. It's a sad, subtle hymn to a hard truth that we rarely like to recognize: that when personal effects decide to leave us, be they profound or petty items, we often have a difficult time coping. We go through the stages of grief. We long to see them all again. Which is exactly what Hannon does at the end of the song, in a dream, all piled up into the sky/and I cry/tears of joy.
Since the weekend, I've been going through these inexplicably real stages of grief about some things I will never see again -- and they were only ever composed of electrons in the first place. A dastardly piece of shareware I downloaded, called Deja Vu, that promised to synchronize folders of my writings across my Macintoshes, instead deleted a bunch of them. Everything I've written on my G4 Cube since July, in fact. Diaries. Chapters of novels. And the hardest-felt lost: in-depth accounts of those first few dates with my girlfriend, Petra. Gone, gone, gone, irretrievably gone. I've spent a couple of days learning the harsh fact that there is no way in hell, under the new Mac OS X, to undelete them. It's possible that some of the raw text is still there, buried deep in the bowels of the Unix operating system. But not even my geekiest friends have any idea how to get at it. How much that fact stings, how impossible it has been to get closure on the loss! It's as if I have a bunch of kids buried at the bottom of a deep mine shaft, almost certainly dead, probably dismembered, but no one knows how to get their bodies to the surface.
I'm a lucky man, I believe, in that I've had to suffer relatively few losses of people close to me in my life (two grandmothers, one friend who died of cancer at a heartbreakingly young age). Grief over lost stuff is nothing next to that. But it's real, nonetheless. The sooner we learn to accept this -- like Hannon did -- the better. It's just part of our pathetically human makeup to get emotional about inanimate objects. And electrons.
Daily Blah for... Friday, December 06, 2002
Live from Baghdad-by-the-Bay
It must be movie and TV review week. Here we go again: last night I was at the San Francisco premiere of Live From Baghdad, an HBO movie set to broadcast this Saturday. Adapted from producer Robert Weiner's book, it's the story of how CNN became the only network in history able to cover the outbreak of war from their hotel room. Lest anyone need reminding, this was eleven years and one Gulf War ago. You know you're getting old when an image that remains so clear in your mind -- in this case, the green-and-white night-vision shots of anti-aircraft fire lighting up the Iraqi sky -- starts to be commemorated in movie reconstructions. (It's also one of those irresistible "where were you when ..." moments, except that practically everyone was in the same place -- in their living rooms, sitting slack-jawed in front of CNN).
The movie was gripping enough, with a nicely realistic feel and only a few Hollywood cliches. (Somewhere in an LA sound studio, there's a guy making a lot of money out of plunking a couple of soft piano chords over the weepy scenes in every bloody major motion picture. Chord, chord, pause ... chord, chord, pause ...) Afterwards we were treated to a panel discussion with Weiner himself (looking nothing like Michael Keaton, who plays him in the movie), his co-producer Ingrid Formanek (looking nothing like Helena Bonham-Carter, and with a voice about ten octaves lower) and equally stentorian former anchor Bernie Shaw (looking nothing like ... okay, so his doppelganger bore an appropriate resemblence). All agreed that the movie had got the spirit of those heady, scary days pretty much right, although Formanek wanted it on the record that Weiner had never asked her if they'd slept together after any of their late-night drinking sessions. "If we had, he would have remembered it," she boomed, to whistles and applause.
All the panelists agreed that such you-are-there reportage is less likely to happen if and when war in Iraq resumes. Both the Iraqis and the Pentagon have become more savvy about restricting media access to the action -- or rather, about spoon-feeding us the pictures they want us to see.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, December 04, 2002
A Little History Lesson
Thank God -- or rather, thank the BBC -- for Simon Schama. His episodic History of Britain is showing repeatedly on the History Channel, and I simply can't get enough of its meaty goodness. The show stands out like a beacon of honest, communicative intelligence in the rest of that channel's turgid output (which seems largely concerned with how many times it can get footage of Panzer tanks and large explosions on the screen). Watch it once and you'll see what I mean.
Schama is like everyone's favorite history teacher: he makes this stuff come alive without using big words. He turns great swathes of a century into a warm, human story, without employing a Tolstoy-like cast of thousands. And he's just a little bit naughty, puncturing the pompous egos of the past with well-chosen quips. Most importantly, he's not afraid to send political messages -- not by thrusting them in our face, but by casually lifting up metaphorical rocks. The follies of the past are so obvious, once explosed to daylight, that nothing need be added. Take the British Empire. It was founded on trade, Schama reminds us, and on the concept that the poor nations of the world needed economic guidance and Western goods. The people at the top of the heap thought they were being benevolent. They knew people were starving because international trade was more important than feeding the hungry, but they always assumed their enlightened system would lift everyone up in the end. They were unable to perceive their own arrogance, precisely because they were at the top of the heap.
Sound familiar? I smacked my forehead after that one. It was the best argument against globalization I've ever heard. And believe me, I've heard a lot of half-baked arguments against globalization. This one got through, it clarified the whole damn issue, it practically made me want to run through the streets of Seattle lobbing rocks through Starbucks' windows. And it never once mentioned the words WTO, World Bank -- or, indeed, globalization. Funny how history can do that, in the right hands.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, December 03, 2002
The Naked and the Dead
To the Metreon, for a special screening of Steven Sodebergh's latest flick, Solaris. The "special" part being that it was a freebie arranged by Sun Microsystems, whose rather tenuous connection to the movie is that they happen to have a piece of software with the same name. Because of this they invite a bunch of journalists for free drinks, free food and their own private screening. It was like a dotcom boom nostalgia party. "I know," said the PR chick in charge. "It's very 1999."
The movie, meanwhile, was very 2001 -- perhaps too self-conscious a paen to Kubrick's classic and others of that era (including Solaris, the 1972 Russian original on which this is based). You almost expect George Clooney to start asking HAL to open the pod bay doors. There are lots of atmospherics, long silences, dreams within dreams, and a final descent onto a hauntingly beautiful planet. But this isn't 1968, and the audience wasn't on acid. (Well, not as far as I could tell). There was a lot of noticeable fidgeting and whispering and popcorn-chewing going on all around me. Our average attention span has certainly diminished in the last thirty-four years.
Kudos to Sodebergh, therefore, for getting such a movie made in the first place and for resisting any sort of Hollywood-ization of the script, which revolves around Clooney running into his dead wife (Natascha McElhone, for once allowed to use an unabashedly English accent) aboard a space station and remembering the ups and downs -- mostly downs -- of their tangled relationship. Fox marketing executives must be having a hell of a time selling this as a romance. The end remains appropriately ambiguous. Speaking of ends, perhaps the only bow to populism is the fact that we see Clooney's bottom much more than is strictly necessary. And far too little of McElhone's.
Daily Blah for... Monday, December 02, 2002
ID or not ID, That is the Question
A philosophical disquisition on the nature of existence and personal identity? Nah, just a plug for my latest column in this week's magazine. It's a timely piece on what you can do about identity theft. Answer: not much.
Stuffed
Now that Turkey Day and the subsequent slow weekend is over, it's time for us all to take the traditional Monday-after vow. Say it with me now: I solemnly swear that I shall join [insert name of nearest gym here], and adhere religiously to [insert latest fad diet here]. And I shall never touch another piece of pumpkin pie as long as I live.
Personally, I'm reaffirming my commitment to the Zone, a diet that seems to be slowly gaining credence in medical quarters. When first I started doing the Zone eighteen months ago, the effects were tremendous. I really did feel more alert, more energized, I could last between meals without snacks, and I dropped twenty pounds in the space of a year. I know I sound like an "after" testimonial, but it's true: balancing protein, carbs and fat in the right proportions works, at least for me. But my trouble began when I "lent" (read "lost") my Zone book to a friend. Without the text to keep me in line -- well, let's just say my mind got a little creative with the diet's boundaries. Picking up a fresh copy of the book this weekend, I was shocked to discover that a burger with fries was not to be found anywhere on the list of approved meals. Nor was anything with egg yolk. And a glass of protein-rich milk did not need to be balanced with carb-friendly cookies.
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