|
Daily Blah for... Sunday, April 30, 2006
The Soul of Sedaris
Tonight was the second time I'd been to see David Sedaris read. The first, you may recall, was in the relatively intimate, if a little 1970's-esque, First Unitarian Church in San Francisco. This time he was swallowed up in Cupertino's gigantic Flint Center, the stadium rock star of the literary world. His voice and his pacing were as laugh-triggering as ever. The all-new material, however, was a far lower quality.
Sedaris has two problems -- firstly, he's running out of quirky memories of his family to write about. His adventures with Hugh in France have served as a substitute, but they don't stand up on their own -- witness him straining to connect a story about a skeleton Hugh bought him, and how it haunted him, with a flashback to a childhood barbecue where his mother chided him for wolfing down his meat while he was choking on it. Both nice little set-pieces, but they don't hang together, at least not in the humorous essay form Sedaris is contractually wedded to.
Secondly, you get the sense he'd really prefer to be a fiction writer -- which is where he started, effectively, in the Barrel Fever collection. So he's straining to find a new style. He treated us to a nice little Aesop-esque piece on a Buddhist sheep and an inquisitive crow who gives the sheep a mantra to practice while the crow pokes its lambs' eyes about, based on a real incident he'd heard about in rural Normandy. Apparently this is a harbinger of more animal stories. But that's not much to expand a career on.
Mark Twain went from humorous essays and memories to the Great American Novel: hefty but rewarding topics like the Mississippi and emancipation. But there's something about Sedaris that seems to resist heavier topics, to suspect anything that is not trivial or a quirky character sketch. I would love for him to probe deeper on some topic or another.
After the reading, I stood in line with my friend Elinor for an hour so she could get a copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day signed for her mother. Sedaris, who had been chatting amiably at the simpering students and tourists in line in front of us, suddenly went quiet and cold when Elinor hit him with the request that he make some mention of marrying her mother in the dedication. Something was going on inside his head, and I couldn't help but wonder if he and Hugh had had The Talk -- the one every long-term gay couple must be having in Europe these days, surrounded by high-profile civil unions breaking out in Britain and Spain and the Netherlands.
"I may live with you somday [sic]," he wrote, "but marry? No way." I can't imagine Sedaris, a consummate writer who loves language and has written in such great detail of his meticulousness, neatness, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, does a lot of misspelling. I have since liked to think that the germ of a great novel about marriage, this century's emancipation issue, was brewing in his head. I like to think that, because every generation should have a Mark Twain.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, April 29, 2006
Brasso: Now 200% More Useful
That problem with my video iPod screen being scratched to hell and back by a close encounter with a book? All solved now, thanks to my friend Claudia's recommendation that I use Brasso to clean the screen. Ten minutes of application with a cloth, and the screen was shiny and new. Whatever is in Brasso had probably done this by eating away at the plastic covering, but it had at least done so in a uniform fashion. My home office now stinks of Brasso, but it was worth it. According to the Amazon reviewers, it works wonders on scratched CDs too. How do people find this stuff out? More importantly, why aren't the makers of Brasso marketing their product better to a younger generation? Who the hell cleans pewter any more?
Daily Blah for... Friday, April 28, 2006
A Night on the Mountain
I'd blogged about satirical versions of it, I declared it overhyped, but I never actually watched Brokeback Mountain until tonight. My response? I am, as my people say, gobsmacked. Hype usually destroys movies for me, but this one is resistant to hype. It's so gentle, so spare, so moving that you cannot fail to be awed. I never thought it would take a gay cowboy flick to reveal the true nature of love, but that it did -- even after everyone else said it did. Romeo and Juliet, crusted thick with centuries of cliche, eat your teenage hearts out.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, April 27, 2006
Future Boy Hails a Jet
The latest Future Boy column is up -- also known as Everything I Could Possibly Learn About Air Taxis in One Day.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Karaoke Expansion Packs
I don't think I've ever had quite as large a BLPM (or Belly Laughs Per Minute) as I did last night. Half-a-dozen good friends and I were road-testing the latest Karaoke Revolution games, Party and Country, with an assist from the Sierra Nevada brewery. The microphone-driven part of the game has lost none of its vast amusement potential -- witness Aaron singing all his songs in the voice of Elmer Fudd, and winning -- but the character creation bit has been kicked up several notches, and was enough to have us rolling on the floor by itself. You can now control every aspect of your singer's body and wardrobe -- and though, alas, you cannot get their wardrobes to malfunction, you can create caricatures of such grotesquerie that Fellini would be proud.
Katey, intrigued by what would happen if she increased the "curvy" quotient of her character, ended up with the most ridiculously distracting pair of pendulous breasts ever seen on a singer. Later, she was making a serious plea for more songs: "what this game needs," she said, "is more expansion packs."
"Oh honey," I said eyeing her character, "I think you've taken care of that already." We fell about the place. "Expansion packs" instantly became our new favorite euphemism.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Placeholder Headline
If you're noticing a lot of Blahs popping up on days that didn't previously have 'em ... well, that's because I'm trying to live up to my promise to post every day this year (and am being slippery by exploiting the Clintonesque loophole: I didn't say I would post on every day). I do at the very least set up a placeholder draft blog with the subject I would have written about on that day if I'd had the time. So when Blahs passim pop out of the ether, it's those placeholders being turned into fully-evolved entries.
Daily Blah for... Monday, April 24, 2006
A Better Editor Trap
Amazing the effect a new office has on one's mood. A couple weeks ago I moved into one that was twice the size of my dingy old box. The new one boasts a view of the Bay, Treasure Island, and (if you crane your neck) the Transamerica Pyramid. It also now has a dedicated games table, on which I plan to convert the remaining holdouts at the magazine to Carcassonne and Chrononauts. Result: I'm no longer watching the clock or taking long lunches. "What," I'll find myself thinking, "is it five o clock already?" Memo to corporate masters: the more square footage you provide employees with, the more productivity you can squeeze out of them.
Daily Blah for... Sunday, April 23, 2006
Better than Myers-Briggs? Not Really
My result in the "Better than Myers-Briggs" test: I'm the Achiever, with 59 percent self-confidence, 49 percent spontaneity, and 77 percent orbigidity. If that last word sounds made up, that's because it is. The whole test was made up by a 20-year-old Santa Cruz student, and it's just one of thousands of personality tests (AKA "chick crack") that form the user-generated content of sites like OK Cupid. Quite a scam these Web 2.0 businesses have figured out, getting ordinary people to write their content. Then again, the more unedited tests, the lower the quality of the actual test -- and the less likelihood of a Myers-Briggs lover like me ever taking an OK Cupid test again, if this experience is anything to go by.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, April 22, 2006
Make It till you Fake It
To Make Magazine's Maker Faire in San Mateo, a magnet for geeks of all stripes where I ran randomly into at least a dozen of my friends. And I'm glad I did, because hanging out with them was the best part of the entire Maker Faire experience. The celebrity geek factor was high -- look, there's Steve Wozniak playing Segway Polo; there's Larry Page being mesmerized by a robot that imitates Pollock by spraying paint around a giant canvas -- but a large chunk of the booths were barely worth the price of entry. One grusomely fascinating exception: the guy who had injected an RFID chip into his hand, and can now open his front door by waving at it.
Daily Blah for... Friday, April 21, 2006
You Know It Makes AdSense
Today's Daily Blah is brought to you in association with ... well, with whomever the Google AdSense service decided to put in the slot at the top of the page. I signed up for AdSense as an experiment -- well, wouldn't you be curious about how much money it brings in? -- but of course, if I get too many cries of horror from my loyal readership, I'll take it down. Papa doesn't need a new pair of shoes that badly.
Count it a victory for Larry and Sergey, who first outlined the AdSense idea to me in an interview in 2000. I was immensely skeptical at the time, amidst the crashing sound of so many dotcom business plans, and I may well have told them at the time that any system relying on micropayments and microrevenue was doomed to failure. Heh. Well, financial results like the one Google released yesterday don't lie, so consider this my official mea culpa.
This may be too much information, but I had a dream about Larry and Sergey last night. We were chatting at the Googleplex about a dozen different topics when I hit on the idea that I wanted to book them for an interview in seven years' time, when they turn 40. I thought that moment would make great Time cover material; they'd be poster boys for Generation X entering a new and difficult decade. Suddenly, in walked Queen Elizabeth II. She announced she'd had the exact same idea, and wanted to book them first. "No offense, dear," I told her, "but you don't have a lot of journalism experience. Television experience, sure. But that isn't the same thing."
Daily Blah for... Thursday, April 20, 2006
Mac Mania
Arik Hesseldahl, an old J-school comrade now installed at BusinessWeek online, has an interesting take on Apple's first quarter earnings. Buried in the report, he finds, is evidence that Apple is adding 77,000 new Mac users per quarter -- or half a million a year -- via its retail stores alone. That's not iPodders, understand, that's card-carrying, computer-owning Macheads being created or tempted over from Windows. And that's only from Apple store foot traffic.
I can believe it. When I went to buy that video iPod at the Union Square Apple store, it was a wet Wednesday afternoon -- but the place was a zoo. It was packed, not just with Asian tourists taking advantage of a weak dollar, but newbies of every conceivable rage, age and gender. They stood around looking clueless and packed the mini-theater for a live demonstration of how to buy a song on the iTunes music store. It can't be that hard, surely?
Now I don't consider myself an elitist; my career, after all, has been built on explaining tough techie concepts to Mr. and Mrs. Middle America. But there was something about the sight of all these newbies that really ticked me off. And it was this: where were they in 1996, when conventional wisdom had it that the company would be lucky to be sold to Sun? When the hardcore faithful like me still believed, and were pilloried by people like them for not using PCs? I wanted to buy Apple stock when I left J-school in 1997, when it was at its lowest ebb; unfortunately, my first post-school story was about Apple, so such stock swipe became ethically impossible. I'd be rich, or somewhat richer now.
Old schoolers should at least get some benefits. We should get to go to the front of the checkout line at the Apple store, perhaps. Another reason I got annoyed at the newbies: in one respect, I was as clueless as they. Nowhere in the store were we told how to actually buy an iPod (the non-intuitive answer, as I discovered by asking a security guard: stand in the checkout line). An almost perfect retail experience, but this one tiny detail is missing. Sounds like old-school Apple engineering.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, April 19, 2006
The Cow on California
"Don't we all have jobs to go to?" That was my first thought on arriving at the intersection of Market and Kearney at ten to five yesterday morning and finding that oh, at least ten thousand people had arrived ahead of me. I had pictured a handful of hardcore historians; instead, we had police helicopters, a vast crowd-control operation, giant TV screens, and thousands of tourists. The relative few in 19th century garb were surrounded by amateur photographers, eager to make something memorable of this early-morning event. Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, the fire chief, the police chief, all made speeches that went unheard by most of us. Homeland security officials went through the crowd handing out whistles and disaster planning kits. The whistles were a big hit, and the minute's silence, under the circumstances, was a dead loss.
What would the survivors of 1906 have thought? Well, some of them were there, and they seemed to think very little. One wasn't even sure, when Newsom interviewed them for the cameras, how old he was. You got a very palpable sense of history slipping away; the death of living memory. Of those that could remember, the eldest had been five years old at the time of the quake, and their most prominent memory was of a cow running scared up California Street. As a result of the quake? Or a foreshadowing, an example of animals going crazy ahead of a seismic event? Our link to the past wasn't sure. Personally, I was fascinated by the idea of cows in the city, especially on the street I drive every day. This is all we get of the living past: guesses, glimpses, snapshots, vague memories of cows amidst the crowds and police helicopters and skyscrapers.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Quake Rock
Well, I made it, and I've never been so sleep-deprived as I am now. Nor have I ever seen so many people gathered in one place at 5am. Didn't we all have jobs to go to? More details later, but first a more pressing concern: what songs should I put on my Quake Day playlist? Here's what I've got so far:
Shake, Rattle and Roll -- Bill Haley
You Shook Me -- AC/DC
I feel the Earth move -- Carole King
San Andreas Fault -- Natalie Merchant
Little Earthquakes -- Tori Amos
Not a bad start, but it's barely enough to last the early morning drive to downtown and back. Any other suggestions?
Daily Blah for... Monday, April 17, 2006
Wake, Quake, Shake, Bake
There are only a few times in one's life after the age of 30 when it seems worthwhile to contemplate voluntarily getting up at 4:30am -- or worse yet, staying up all night on a school night. The centennial of the great San Francisco earthquake is one of them. Shortly after 5am on Tuesday morning, it will be exactly 100 years since the Big One struck, and a bunch of us history-commemorating crazies will be gathering at Lotta's Fountain at Market and Third, one of the few remaining structures in the wake of the quake and fire and thus a rallying point for survivors. A wreath will be laid and actors dressed in 1906 fashions will stumble around like shadows of the dead.
Immediately afterwards, we're promised, comes "Shake-N-Bake," which advertizes itself as a "comedian-led walking tour ... full of fun games." I'm curious to see whether any comedian can really be funny in the wake of such a solemn moment -- especially such a solemn moment at five in the morning.
Daily Blah for... Sunday, April 16, 2006
Green Surprise
People should get more surprise parties in life, and for things other than birthdays. I was thrown a surprise party for my 30th birthday, which was delightful, but it was also like -- well, yeah, great, I got one for a milestone birthday, I got my due. Consciously, I wasn't expecting it. Subconsciously, I always had been. Know what I mean?
Tonight, Dan and Kathleen invited me over for what was billed as a casual gathering of friends they hadn't seen for a long time. And such it appeared, until most of them huddled in one room and returned with a cake box topped with an ace of clubs in green icing. A green card, in other words. (Don't ask me why it was the ace of clubs, although as someone pointed out, that is the lowest suit in the deck.) The icing on the cake itself read "Chris -- too legit to quit." Dan made a speech, everyone spontaneously sang the Star-Spangled Banner, and I was so moved that the only thing I could think to say was: "Okay, so why was it a big deal that the flag was still there? We were bombarding one of your forts, guys. The flag isn't exactly a strategic part of the target."
More delights were to follow, like a handwritten guide to America that pictured my travels thus far -- or were they, as it appeared, Christopher Robin's? -- as well as gifts that symbolized my new land of permanent residence, like cotton candy (note: not candy floss) and processed cheese slices. Yes, I thought, it was worth all that inconvenience, that bureaucracy, the injections, the x-rays, waiting in the freezing London snow. It was worth it, not for a stupid piece of plastic, but for this moment.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, April 15, 2006
Stranger in a Strange Bag
The new video iPod is all scratched to hell, dammit. Scratched, of course, only on its screen. Tiny but immovable scuff marks all over it. And all the poor thing did was sit in a bag for a couple of days with nothing but a Robert Heinlein short story collection for company. Well, at least that ends the search for suspects. Why so contemptuous of new technology, Bob? Just because this device is something you didn't quite foresee, doesn't mean you have to savage it to death. Bad science-fiction writer! No biscuit!
Seriously, Apple, the screen can get scratched by paper? Back to the drawing board, Mr. Ive.
Daily Blah for... Friday, April 14, 2006
My Heart Will Go On. And On. And On.
There have been many examples in recent years of fans recutting movies into trailers that poke fun at tired Hollywood tropes, the best of the bunch being Shining, where the Kubrick/King horror classic is repackaged as a heartwarming romantic "comedy." But the trailer for Titanic: The Sequel enters a whole new realm of fake media, cleverly cutting in cliched scenes from other movies. The result you get is the horrible, pit-of-the-stomach sensation that they're actually going to launch this thing in multiplexes. I would love to know how many viewers were fooled.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, April 13, 2006
Future Boy Goes Green
My second Future Boy column, on why global warming is good for business, is up. And naturally, I've already had emails from enraged environmentalists who think I'm anti-polar bear. Clearly, they didn't read all the way to the end -- and didn't realize there are several ways to interpret that counterintuitive headline. But of course you're smarter than that, aren't you?
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Unicorns and Britney and Bathrooms, Oh My
Did I ever blog about volunteering at 826 Valencia, where every Wednesday I help run an after-school kids' newspaper? No? Well, my friend Helena, whom I persuaded to volunteer, has this to say about her inaugural experience, my brainstorming lesson. As usual, she describes it beautifully, so I don't have to.
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Powell's Panic Redux
Another reaction to the discovery of the 2000AD torrent is what I like to call Powell's Panic. I named this condition for Powell's City of Books in Portland, Ore., the largest bookstore in the U.S., which is where I first felt it. Powell's is so large, the shelves are so tall, the purchase options are so many, that it gave me hot, stinging flushes -- the realization that, were I to spend the rest of my life here, I could never read everything I wanted to read. As Elton John put it so eloquently in the Lion King: "There's more to see than can ever be seen, more to do than can ever be done." And he was singing that long before the rise of Bit Torrent.
I bought a video iPod last week, because the only way to persuade myself to take the bus in the morning -- rather than go through the expensive and gas-intensive routine of driving and parking every single day -- was the thought of losing myself in downloadable television, escaping the hideous sardine-tin surroundings of Muni via Arrested Development and Lost and Commander in Chief and the West Wing. And it worked. I no longer fear the lurching, tortoise-like time spent on the 1 California. Instead, I relish it. Driving time, I now feel, is wasted, non-video time.
But I'm faced with Powell's Panic again. There's more worthwhile stuff to download than could ever be watched, even if I took the bus every morning for the rest of my career. It's more than Bit Torrent; I've discovered a program called DVD2Pod, which, as the name implies, can transform an entire DVD collection into iPod viewable files. Boredom is soon to be a malaise of the past, it seems, like polio or smallpox. But a plethora of options, a tyranny of choice, Powell's Panic -- are these new diseases the inevitable result of progress?
Daily Blah for... Monday, April 10, 2006
A Torrent Too Far
For half a decade of my young life, my passion and devotion was narrowly focused on a comic book, a relatively well-written and gloriously-illustrated weekly dose of British sci-fi stories called 2000 AD. The title sounds quaint now, I know, and that is pretty much the point of my story.
What the 11-year old me craved most, you see, was a complete collection of 2000 ADs; every early Alan Moore tale, every episode of Judge Dredd. This was, I knew with all the solemnity of youth, a Herculean task. For I had come late to this party. My subscription, I still remember, began around Prog 390 (it was "program" or "prog," never "issue" -- quaint, right?)
And so the hunt was on. Each week I would send my mother down the market, where one stall sold an uneven selection of back progs for 10p each. Every month or so I would get to go to Newcastle, the nearest big city, where a shop called Timescape, run by grown-ups in beards and cool T-shirts, held a much more permanent collection in mint condition, but at outrageous prices; as much as five or ten pounds for the earliest progs, and even they didn't have anything as rare as a mint prog one or two, the Elgin marbles of my world.
Still, over time I amassed an fairly comprehensive collection. By the time I went to university, and put away childish things -- around prog 700, when the quality began to diminish -- I was missing less than sixty progs. The collection went in the attic, and sat in suitcases, and occasionally I'd come visit them, and transport the best ones delicately back to the US, where I'd buy special storage boxes and transparent sleeves to preserve them from the ravages of time for as long as possible, still not quite able to give up what I had strived for as a kid.
A couple of days ago, in an Alan Moore mood, I found I could download a Bit Torrent that contained, in a single compressed file, the majority of his opus. The thought occured: I wonder if there's a similar single-file Torrent for 2000AD? And there is. Prog one to prog 1,443. In less than 13 gigabytes.
I felt strangely cheated. It was too easy. All that striving, all those years of collecting, and now I can get the whole damn thing on my laptop at the click of a button? I wish I could say it's better to have the originals, but it really isn't. They're crumbling and yellow and smudged, and I'd cut bits out of them here and there. By contrast, jpgs are pristine; rotate the images, turn the laptop sideways, and it's like reading the Platonic ideal of a comic book, one you don't have to handle with kid gloves.
Maybe this is it. Maybe I've reached that age where the onward march of information technology becomes vaguely menacing. Perhaps this is how Nick Hornby's generation, who sweated blood amassing shelves of rare 45s, feel about the rise of MP3s. You realize our kids will think nothing of carrying devices that come pre-loaded with every book, song and movie ever made, automatically updated? There will be no such thing as collecting. Copyright, already an outmoded concept in a digital world of endless easy copies, will be long dead. Even the idea of having to download a piece of entertainment will be meaningless to them. There will be no struggle, and hence, perhaps, no sense of true worth. There will be only searching, sorting and consuming.
And so I'll wait. Perhaps at some point the lure of those missing 60 progs will become irresistible to my inner child. Or maybe I'll decide this is a torrent too far, and stick with crumbling yellow paper, because ... well, just because.
Daily Blah for... Sunday, April 09, 2006
Golden Sausage
Setting my clock radio alarm to NPR has had mixed results. Too often during the week, the news has infected my dreams, and given the nature of the news over the past five years, turned them into nightmares. I've lost count of the number of times I've been in some beautiful dream vacation spot that abruptly became flooded by Hurricane Katrina. Even when not in REM, I hardly relish the thought of being woken by the wit and wisdom of George W Bush. Nor, in the interests of balance, do I enjoy Jim Hightower's sneering commentaries, the well-worn sarcasm of which seems to encapsulate everything that's wrong about the way the left campaigns.
But life is much better on the weekends, when NPR turns wonderfully random. For instance, I was roused this morning by a discussion on golden sausages. To the befuddlement of my sleeping brain, a food writer was explaining how you can bake sausages in 24-karat gold leaf wrapping, which will cling to the fatty skin of the sausage and give your dinner guests something to remember for the rest of their lives. I was just starting to get into this fascinating discussion when my right hand went rogue and slapped the snooze button without authorization.
Later, I was sure I must have dreamt it. Surely eating gold is not only highly poisonous but prohibitively expensive? But no, as a minute of Googling revealed, the show and the writer were for real. (The show was To the Best of Our Knowledge, which you can listen to here, and the writer was Stefan Gates, author of The Gastronaut.) Gold is inert, it turns out, neither poisonous nor nutritious, while proper gold leaf (it must always be pure 24-karat if you want it to stick) is surprisingly cheap at around $30 a sheet.
It doesn't taste of anything, thus continuing gold's reputation as the supermodel of metals -- useless at everything except looking pretty. But for sheer anecdotal value, such a meal would be hard to top. And since all you have to do is wrap a sausage and bung it in the oven, it's perfect for lazy chefs like me. Take that, dinner party hosts who slave over a hot stove all day! Nothing says "stylish dilletante" like a golden sausage.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, April 08, 2006
A Pint of Shandy
Speaking of unfilmable books, I finally got around to seeing Tristram Shandy: A Cock and A Bull Story. The unrelenting postmodernism seemed to be a bit much for most of the sparse late-night audience, and my crew was the only one laughing uproariously. But I say without hesitation that this is one of the best films I've seen in recent times, the English answer to Adaptation. Arrestingly witty Cliff's Notes on the book, which I now don't have to bother reading, are sandwiched in between long and fascinating sequences of the (fictional) filming of the film. A tip of the tri-cornered hat to Steve Coogan, who not only did what Charlie Kaufmann did so bravely with Adaptation -- made us think of him as absurdly self-centered, insecure and neurotic -- but took it one step further by playing himself in the process. Thanks are also due to the designer of the film's equally postmodern Windows desktop-style website.
Daily Blah for... Friday, April 07, 2006
Day of the Wikimen
In his latest Live Journal, anarchist extraordinaire Aaron takes the throwaway idea I had at the end of my last Blah about V -- why not use a graphic novel as a movie script for once? -- and runs with it like the mad creative genius he is. Result: a proposal to film the supposedly unfilmable classic Watchmen with a multiplicity of amateur directors and visual effects artists, whose scenes would be voted on, Wikipedia style. The vote-winning scenes, all lifted straight from the book (which is pretty neatly divided into scenes already), would make it into the movie. You wouldn't need sets; the whole thing would be shot in front of green screens and finished in post, Sin City-style.
It would be a hard project to pull off without a single guiding creative force, but not an impossible one. You'd have to have a core group of unknown actors willing to stand in front of a green screen with a remotely-controlled camera for just about anyone who wanted to book them, but how hard would it be to find that kind of dramatic dedication in LA, city of eight million aspiring waiters? Casting, too, could be conducted by a vote. The first take would look like a dog's breakfast, but as the same scenes were re-edited by the group, a unifying visual style may start to emerge, organically. If it doesn't work, we've lost nothing, since Watchmen is never likely to be filmed anyway. If it does, we've just changed celluloid history -- and made lone, overpaid directors an endangered species.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, April 06, 2006
Subversive Accordions
Sticker seen on a boxy black musical instrument case belonging to a girl with bright pink hair on the Muni: "Subvert the dominant paradigm. Play accordion." Yes, I thought. This is the true spirit of punk. When everyone around you is playing punk, play polka.
It also reminded me I'd never blogged about Accordion Hero, a clever and almost convincing mock follow-up to Guitar Hero. Can't wait to see Bagpipe Hero. Oh, wait. Maybe I can.
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Happy Number Geek Moment
Just there ... there, for a second, at least in the Pacific US, it was 01:02:03 on 04/05/06. Who can fail to smile about such things -- or to be slightly melancholy that this moment, like all others, shall not come again in our lifetimes?
Daily Blah for... Tuesday, April 04, 2006
It's Easy Being Green
Sitting on the mat when I got home tonight was a minimally-marked envelope; indeed, its minimalism looked so much like a junk mail ploy, I nearly threw it away. Thankfully, I noticed the Homeland Security logo peeking out from a corner of the transparent window. Then I felt a credit-card thickness between thumb and forefinger. Could it be? Yes, it could. A mere five weeks after my London embassy interview, five months ahead of when I was told to expect it -- maybe they were just really trying to lower my expectations -- my Green Card had arrived.
To address the first question most people seem to have about this damn bit of plastic: yes, a bit of it is green. Not the front; that looks like a driver's license, except for the fact that it has my right index fingerprint (and a right villainous print it looks, given the scar on that finger). On the back, though, it says "Permanent Resident Card" in white-on-green, and the following in green-on-white: "United States of America, Department of Homeland Security. The person identified by this card is authorized to work and reside in the US." First rule of bureacracy: never use a simple phrase like "Green Card" when a plethora of words will do.
Below that is what I can only describe as a neat bit of anti-forgery metallic shinyness. Various important things are imprinted on it -- every state flag, the Statue of Liberty, my face -- but the thing that stands out the most is Alaska. Not intentionally, I expect, it just happens to be filled in whereas the continental US is merely outlined. The DHS, after all, is not noted for its skills in graphic design.
The accompanying bit of paper told me some surprising things about my new status. First of all, renewing it -- which I'll need to do in 2016 -- is as easy as filling out a form, assuming I don't commit any major acts of international terrorism. Secondly, citizenship is pretty much automatic, if I want it, after five years. And thirdly, I can now start bringing boatloads of family members over to work here. Any interest, folks?
I'd been chastised by some fellow journos, on my return, for burying the lead -- taking the most important piece of information and putting it way down in the story, in other words, something we're never supposed to do in this profession. You got a green card, they said. Isn't that a big freakin' deal? And my answer was that it didn't seem real; that as when dealing with any bureaucracy, there was always one more step and potential slip; that I'd believe it when I had the plastic.
Now I have it, I can safely say it feels good to have. I can feel the accumulated stress of ten years of being temporary, of filling out long forms every time I fly back to the US, of being F-1 and H1-B and 0-1, of always having an end date, of being tied to Time Inc., all drain away. I've cashed out of the visa game, and not before time -- just as the whole immigration debate, a mainstay of politicians who want to distract us from their broken domestic and foreign policies, is hotting up again.
On the other hand, not much has really changed. I've felt like a resident for a long time already. Attention was drawn to my impermanence only in the brief, jet-lagged moments of border-crossing. Yes, I can work anywhere I want now. The cage door has swung open, and yet where would I go? "Well," a friend said today, "you've got a pretty nice cage." I had to agree.
I celebrated quietly, with some champagne and a first date. It seemed like a good night for new beginnings.
Daily Blah for... Monday, April 03, 2006
V, MF
I finally went to see V for Vendetta last week, and gave it one anarchic thumb up. I was pleasantly surprised by how little had changed from the book, or at least my memory of the book. The parts that were obviously intact, like Evey's stay in "prison" and the letter she reads there, were by far the most moving moments. And I stood by my original declaration, that I didn't care if the political battleground had shifted somewhat -- it was still a battle worth fighting.
But then I reread the book, something I hadn't done since a long coach ride back from a school exchange trip to Russia in 1991 -- and something I was trying not to do until I saw the movie. Reading it for the first time as an adult, I was blown away. It is certainly Moore's most harrowing, and possibly his most arresting work, a position previously reserved for Watchmen (with Promethea in second place), and I'd even put it on a par with 1984 -- in fact, it's basically 1984 with a happy(ish) ending. And how many of us who've read that book a dozen times wouldn't rather see Winston Smith slip on a vigilante mask and kick some Inner Party ass?
I could see what Moore was driving at when he said they'd de-fanged the fascism in the movie. They've defanged a lot, in fact. In the book, it is made abundantly clear that there has been an absolute racial and homosexual holocaust in Britain. The country is run by the Leader in conjunction with a kind of totalitarian proto-Internet called Fate; surely the Wachowskis could have run with that ball? The Leader's demise is much more complex, much more believable, and V doesn't have to sully his hands with it: natural human vanity, jealousy, greed and fear are seen to be more than enough. Then there's the pivotal acid trip taken by the policeman on V's trail: so much could have been done with that, and it's a poetic ending to have our detective driven mad by the naked truth of the country's crime. What were they afraid of?
I still think Moore is a bit of a prima donna about his work. On the other hand, once, just once, I'd like to see someone take a graphic novel and use it as a scene-by-scene movie script. Just film the whole thing as it was written, and how it looks. You never know how well it could work -- how many embryonic movies could be sitting meekly on the graphic novel shelves -- until you try.
Daily Blah for... Sunday, April 02, 2006
T, MF
I feel ambiguous about the fact that there's a British entry in the Narnia rap battle (see Blahs passim, ad nauseum). On the one hand, I would like to support it, since I've been covering this lame geek rap war from the start, and, well, I'm British. On the other hand, I cringe every time I watch this. It's really not that good, and not even in a so-bad-it's-good kind of way. My only fig leaf, as an Oxonian: well, of course it's rubbish; nothing good can ever come out of Cambridge.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, April 01, 2006
ITMFA
ITMFA. It's a word. It's a website. It's a movement, and a fast-growing one at that. It's an acronym and a euphemism. It is not an April Fool's. It's a political necessity. ITMFA, Congress. Don't make us wait till November.
|
|
|
|
