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Daily Blah for... Wednesday, November 30, 2005
At Home with the Bennets
The best thing to be said about the new Pride & Prejudice movie is that it doesn't get in Jane Austen's way. I saw it last night, and even as I seethed at the terrible casting, I was overwhelmed, I was melted Darcy-style, I was filled to bursting by the pithy glow and gentile bite of one of my culture's greatest achievements. Finding yourself back in the Bennet household is an irrepressibly bubbly, joyous thing, even if it has been taken over by a family of imposters.
I do not think, as some of you do, that another film of P&P should not have been attempted in the wake of the triumphant 1995 BBC miniseries, hereafter referred to as the CFV (Colin Firth Version). That would be like saying no one should climb Everest out of respect for Hilary. P&P should be routinely scaled at least once a decade, just because it's there. And Joe Wright, our latest brave mountaineer, does add a few nice touches at base camps along the way. There are some great tracking shots at the society balls, which feel more like the highly-regimented meat markets they probably were. You can smell the desperation through the lace.
But the CFV was a perfect storm of casting, the kind of collection of talent that only comes along once a century, and Wright's actors were always going to suffer by comparison. Matthew MacFadyen has won a lot of praise for his Darcy, but I can't for the life of me see why. He's a wimp who repeatedly crumples in the face of Lizzie. Colin Firth had a glare that could pierce sheet metal. MacFadyen looks like someone just shot his puppy.
Brenda Blethyn and Judi Dench were born to play Mrs. Bennet and Lady Catherine, respectively, but every time they bustle on screen it's like they're acting in a vacuum. Donald Sutherland: I love him to death, but he was not, is not, could never be Mr. Bennet. The phrase "long suffering" is not in his lexicon. He's too Californian, all gleaming teeth and well-aged skin. When he delivers the killer line about Mrs. Bennet's nerves being his constant companions these twenty years, you simply don't believe him. You expect to see him out by the lake, leaning on his surfboard and taking long drags on a joint.
And Keira Knightley? She acquits herself well enough, I suppose. It's nice to see a Lizzie who is actually the age of the heroine in the book (ie. twenty). But Wright puts a heavy burden on her young shoulders, since we're supposed to see the majority of the film through her eyes (literally, in a couple of scenes). She simply doesn't have the talent, or experience, to convey the full range of Lizzie's inner life and make her seem mature beyond her years. Maybe. Or maybe it's just that my heart belongs to Jennifer Ehle, the CFV Lizzie. Whom, I am shocked to Google, was born and brought up in the US. She also, I am rather less shocked to Google, had an affair with Firth after filming the CFV. I should think so. Post-P&P affairs ought to be in the contracts of every movie Darcy and Lizzie, to generate just the right amount of chemistry, tension and pride.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, November 24, 2005
One More Addiction
The big hit at said party was Guitar Hero, the very latest in a hugely successful series of PlayStation games where you plug in an unusual controller (a microphone, a dance pad, and in this case, a guitar), and follow the harmonic/rythmic steps on screen. Karaoke Revolution and Dance Dance Revolution are still very successful when it came to sucking in people who don't usually pay attention to videogames. But Guitar Hero makes them both look like obscure variants of Mah Jong.
Everyone wanted to strap on the cheap brown plastic guitar and start shredding. One guy from my office told the colleague who drove him home to stop off at EB Games along the way, so he could get his own copy and start practicing the same night. And hungover as I was the next morning, I couldn't start the day without taking one more crack at the riff from Franz Ferdinand's Take Me Out. (By the way, in the spirit of the previous entry, here's my friend Souris rocking out to the same game, at the same time as my party, three hundred miles to the south.) I can't see this game creating a generation of Claptons, so little does its button-pressing resemble actual chord-playing, but I can see that a lot of Christmas evenings are going to be lost to its charms this year.
Almost as popular at the party was the hot new paper-based game, intriguingly called Eat Poop You Cat. Call it Pictionary meets Telephone (the latter being known to British readers by the un-P.C. name Chinese Whispers). And I would be remiss if I didn't mention the other addiction to have sailed merrily back into my life this week -- the fourth and finest version of the PC game known as Civilization. Fellow addicts (whom I can now actually meet, since this is an online multiplayer version) will know the world-dominating bliss of these first few days, before the lack of food or sleep or shaving starts to kick in. To quote the website of CivAnon: you only stop playing when you want to stop playing.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, November 23, 2005
The Lazy Man's Content Creation
I haven't bothered to buy a new digital camera in ages, not since a gorgeous seven-megapixel Casio broke down a few months after I bought it. The few occasions I've needed a camera -- showing the family my new house, for instance -- a cheapy-cheap five-megapixel model some no-name company sent to me has sufficed. Its washed-out colors are far from ideal, and I know in the long run I'll want better. But there is little incentive to buy a new model, just as there is little incentive to carry a camera around any more. Why? Because so many friends -- indeed, so many strangers -- are willing to share their snaps with me.
If I go to a weekend campout, I know there'll be whole heaps of pictures posted to the group email list by the time I get back. If I go to a more public event, I can just Flickr the thing. Hell, sometimes I don't even need to go to the public event to create memories of it. I know, for example, that if I download a bunch of Dan's pictures of the Flock sculpture unveiled at City Hall last Friday and stick them in iPhoto, I will in years hence believe that I went to see it myself (instead of going to a learn-how-to-cook-gourmet-style event at Sur La Table).
What's the lesson here? That memory is fickle? Nope, it's that the content-creation community we call the Internet has the power to fill practically any gaps in your life that need filling. At some point in their Googling, every user has the following epiphany: if I think of something cool, chances are someone else thought of it first and made the damn thing already. This is especially true when it comes to free software, useful services, and scale models of San Francisco made out of Jello.
The next phase, perhaps, is that this rule will apply to blogging. As more and more people set up their blogs, there'll be less and less need for any one of us to bloviate about particular events in our lives. For example, thanks to Helena, there's no need to tell you about the time we accidentally discovered kalaidescopes on the new Octavia Boulevard. She's already done the experience justice, and there's little I would add. (The money quote from her blog: "My friend Chris stuck his tongue out, and it became a sunset.") Meanwhile, my friend Linda just started a blog called All Things Melted Cheese, so there's no need to elucidate on the Mac and Cheese interest she awoke in me. It's a perfect set-up for a lazy blogger like myself. I'll just link to my friends' write-ups, add a quick "I was there too" or "yeah, what she said", and only post here when I feel like sharing something internal; a dream, an opinion, something only I know.
Of course, the idea can be taken too far if we all get lazy about it. That seems to be what happened last night, when I threw a fabulous birthday and housewarming party, a delightful, never-to-be-forgotten, three-storeys-of-fun affair that nobody remembered to bring a camera to. Hmmph. Maybe it's time to replace that Casio after all.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, November 10, 2005
The Case of the Missing Cases
The last few hours of now-precious sleeptime were this morning filled up with the certain knowledge that I was on a trip to England and had managed to lose both my suitcases.
I had done so in quite a lackadaisical manner, too. I was wandering around in a daze, getting on and off trains, when I looked down and noticed there were no suitcases in my hands. I responded, at first, only with dim bewilderment, the way you might if you were suddenly empty-handed and had been sure you were holding a pen. And then the question arose: but if this is the UK, I must have brough some baggage, right? I can't remember having deposited my stuff anywhere since I arrived, so where the hell is it?
Note to self: never, ever let such logical questions intrude on dreams. What happens? My subconscious responds with logical answers. You must have left them, it said. It called up images of my inventory to bolster this argument. See this, the large purple one? You left this on the plane. That small black one over there? You must have left that on some train or other.
I must have spent a couple of hours running around hunting suitcases. Yes, I know dreams feel like they last a lot longer than they actually do. This one, however filled me with such anxiety that I was constantly waking up -- but not to the point where I was aware it was a dream. The situation didn't really give me a shot of adrenaline, so I wasn't propelled into fully alert wakefulness, the kind that would allowed me to laugh at the ridiculousness of the whole affair. Why not? Because it wasn't a life-or-death loss. Clothes? Ahh, I'll get some more. Laptop? It's all backed up; I can buy another one. It sucks, but I'll survive.
Plus, they might have still turned up. And while there was still that chance, I was stuck in this anxiety dream. Stuck in corridors full of slick mechanical complaints executives, stuck with heavily-made up counter-clerk fembots who reeked with feigned ignorance about the whereabouts of my bags. The bastards were obviously lying to me.
That I could have taken, but the humiliation! Friends lost not one opportunity to laugh, to insinuate cluelessness, to say they'd always suspected I'd have lost my head if it wasn't screwed on. This should have been my tip-off: my friends, generally, are not the kind of people to say such things. Not my American friends, at least, and these were all American friends, inexplicably transported to the other side of the pond. Yep, that should have been a real tip-off.
And the moral of the story is, if you're going to look for logical inconsistencies in your dreamtime, look hard or don't look at all.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Dead Penn (Not) Dancing
After all these years, U2 still gives good concert.
I can think of a few readers who are rolling their eyes at that statement. I'm thinking in particular of one good friend who, on the day Apple launched its U2 iPod, responded to my every reason why it was a good business move by shaking his head and repeating "U2 sucks". I would get much more cred from these readers if I talked about hanging with DJ Cheb i Sabbah, but that's for another Blah.
It's not too fashionable, in the San Francisco hipster/Burning Man artist community, to admit to liking any widely popular stadium band, let alone one that has been around long enough to constitute the soundtrack to our lives. Indeed, mine is a generation that does not like to think one band or singer can encompass a life. Previous generations had Sinatra and the Beatles. We have U2. We probably won't realize that until the band has broken up or (given its remarkable track record of stability and insatiability) all croaked on stage, simultaneously, mid-set, in another fifty years or so. But trust me. Some day we'll be nudging each other in nursing homes and smiling wistfully every time "The Fly" or "War" comes on the billion-channel streaming satellite radio. "Remember this?" we'll say, tapping our arthiritic fingers while the hired help, six generations below us, marvels that we were alive when this elevator music was written.
Last night's two-and-a-half-hour performance at the Oakland Arena was kind of a greatest hits of U2 show moments. There was the televisual assault of the Zoo TV tour (the one I most regret not seeing -- love those massively multiple screens, that Adrian Veidt-in-Watchmen stuff), the handheld floodlight twirling of Rattle and Hum, and the passionate humanitarian politicking of -- well, of practically every U2 show ever (but come on -- what would you do, given that kind of platform?). We weren't seeing much that was new, but we were seeing an extremely well-oiled machine. Bono is a past master at plucking a fan out of the audience, at sounding and looking sincere and humble, and -- a relatively new trick, this -- knowing the best moment to tell us to hold up our cellphones and "create a Milky Way." They also have a guaranteed, foolproof method of getting off stage at the end of the second encore without being forced back for a third. Simply play '40', which, as everyone who's listened to Under a Blood Red Sky fifty zillion times knows, ends with the crowd singing the main refrain over and over while the band leaves one by one. Then our Pavlovian training kicks in; we expect the crowd to slowly fade to silence, and start mentally shuffling through our LP collections.
What can I say? It worked. All of it. I sang heartily along to every word, except those of the so-so tracks on the new album I don't know yet, and gyrated as much as one can gyrate to the sound of jangly guitars. Though a natural introvert and a recovering snob, I nestled easily into the vastness of the crowd, feeling, as I so rarely feel, part of something significantly larger. There are very few bands that can do it for me.
Unfortunately they didn't seem to do the same for Sean Penn. The moody actor, clearly visible in brown suede jacket and greased-back hair in the section below our press seats, was standing stock still every time I glanced down at him. Not one tap seemed to escape his feet, nor did a single stadium-rock pump emerge from his fist. C'mon, Sean -- loved you in 21 Grams and Mystic River, but don't you ever cut loose?
Daily Blah for... Monday, November 07, 2005
Best Moment of the Week?
It may be a little early to give out such a title, seeing as we've only just begun and I've got a U2 concert, the opening night of the new Cirque show, and other fun dates yet to come. But I think it could be hard to beat this: after going out in the bitter rain for a run per my trainer's instructions, feeling incredibly virtuous, sitting in front of a roaring fire I made on the plush purple couch in my newly arranged library, in a robe with a large steaming mug of Chunky Monkey banana-flavored mocha and Beethoven on the stereo.
Life = Good.
Daily Blah for... Friday, November 04, 2005
Stop Dawdling, Get Scribbling
A big round of applause for Kathleen, who just wrote her first Wired News story—and it's already one of the site's top five most emailed. Appropriately enough, it's for National Novel Writing Month. Damn, that thing always creeps up on me. Not that it's too late to join in, of course. Maybe I'll give it a whirl. By the way, today is National Back Up Your Novel Day -- a sound idea.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, November 02, 2005
The Swiss are at it again
Mere centuries after perfecting the art of selling us on chocolate and clocks and banking services and neutral negotiations and cheese, the world's most humorless people have finally exported their first joke. It's called Coffee-Beer. Yep, it's what it sounds like, yeasty, frothy and caffeinated, just with none of the alcohol. Granted, not a brilliant joke, but this product can't be for real. Or can it?
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