Bad Monkeys (Ruff, Matt) 2007

When an author spends years hard at work on Sewer, Gas, and Electric (the bastard child of Snow Crash and the Illuminatus Trilogy) and then Set This House in Order (a psychological drama with a surprise ending), it's only natural that his next novel will be a fast-paced psychadelilogical trip with a multi-layered surprise ending. Bad Monkeys' page count is tiny compared to its predecessors in Matt Ruff's bibliography, but it's just the right length and you have to applaud him for knowing when to stop. However, while a fun read, Bad Monkeys feels a bit too much like the novelization of a screenplay. And heck, it could be a great movie, so now I wanna know whether it's been picked up, and if so, whether it's actually being developed, and if so, whether someone competent has been assigned to the project.

Things Fall Apart (Achebe, Chinua) 1959

"Okonkwo cleared his throat and moved his feet to the beat of the drums.  It filled him with fire as it had always done from his youth.  He trembled with the desire to conquer and subdue.  It was like the desire for woman."  

This passage neatly sums up everything I come to dislike, over the first 2/3 of the novel, about Okonkwo and the society that produces him.  Shouldn't we be happy that a society that allows men to beat their wives, forces them to kill their children at the whims of the gods, and so muddles them that they confuse rape with athletic prowess (the drums are calling the people to the wrestling matches, at which Okonkwo excelled in his youth.  Being a great wrestler is something to be proud of; feeling that the high you get from winning competitions is equable to forcing women is pathetic) is falling apart?  And yet, Achebe renders the death of Okonkwo's society at the hands of the colonialists a tragedy because what Okonkwo's society needs is to evolve, retaining what is good while shucking what is not, not to be torn apart.

Cut hair at home and SAVE

About two years ago my father-in-law gave me a vintage 14-piece barber kit from Sears, and I haven't been in a barbershop since. You can see some of the latest results here. Not bad, eh?

Across the Universe

Great music. Great singing. Great choreography. Inventive visuals. An engaging young actor in the lead. Strong supporting actors. With so much going right for Julie Taymor's 2007 all-Beatles musical, why does it end up as nothing more than an extended, glorified music video? Well, there's little in the way of spoken script, so we move from one musical number to another with scant connective tissue and no material for the characters to develop beyond the sketches in which they're introduced. I like a good cameo as much as the next, and Bono would make a good Doctor Robert as described in the song, so it's somewhat unfortunate that he's not... or at least doesn't appear to be, aside from a quickly spoken line referring to the song's lyrics. Still, his rendition of "I Am the Walrus" was amusing. Unfortunately, Eddie Izzard's Mr. Kite sequence, coming immediately on the heels of the Bono cameo, fails miserably because it extends a stretch of film that does nothing to advance what plot there is and lacks the musicality present in the rest of the film.

But back to what's good -- I'm always a sucker for Princeton footage, even when they play hell with geography; the "I've Just Seen a Face" sequence at the bowling alley is just fun; the a capella arrangement of "Because" in the tall grass is beautiful; and the sight of the strawberries pinned to a sheet with the juice running down like blood is interesting, at least until it's expanded upon in order to provide enough different visuals to fill up the entire song.

Engine Summer (John Crowley) 1979

Crowley just doesn't give a damn about plotting or pacing, at least, not in the way we're conditioned to expect from typical SF/F novels. Engine Summer is at least a little more accessible than, say, the Deep, retelling the old "growing up in far post-apocalyptic human civilization" story in a way only John Crowley can (or will) tell it, full of primitive magic, naive wonderment, and a flair for sly puns. This is a good "test" novel to decide whether you want to tackle Little, Big, or the Aegypt series.

Walking With Dinosaurs

Walking With Dinosaurs is a 1999 miniseries composed of six featurettes that follow the computer-animated lives of various dinosaurs throughout the mesozoic, according to some of the latest dinosaur research available. The animation is very good, and the music is solid. Kenneth Branagh is incredibly stiff as the narrator. One of his great strengths as an actor is the ability to imbue Shakespearean lines with life, so that you feel people actually talk that way. Perhaps trying to sound scientific or impartial, he too often speaks with too little affect, and the effect is dreadful for an actor of his caliber. It doesn't help that the script is, overall, not terribly interesting; in fact, the script would have us believe that what's shown in the documentary is how dinosaurs actually lived, bred, and died, and not educated guesses based on the fossil record. I hate that.

Still, the guesses are reasonably good, and my 3 year-old enjoyed it.

Vanya on 42nd Street

Vanya on 42nd Street is a 1994 offering starring Wallace Shawn and featuring Julianne Moore in a relatively early role. The premise of the film is that we are watching a rehearsal of a play, starting with the director, actors, and guests arriving at the theater (a wonderfully decrepit Amsterdam), and there is a beautiful and subtle transition from the actors playing "themselves" as they settle down before the rehearsal to the actual rehearsal itself. Unfortunately, this is the high point of the film. The actors do an admirable job, and we get something of preview to Moore's later work, though she was hardly unknown because of the Fugitive (and, I like to think, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle), but aside from that one moment of transition at the start of the film, you can easily forget that this is a rehearsal because there are no "intrusions" upon the performance, and it essentially becomes a straight film transcription of a stage performance. As such, it's difficult to recommend this as a film, but much to recommend it as a stage play.

Everybody run, the homecoming queen's got a... leg?!

Normally this is the sort of thing I deride as "national" news (I first saw it in the local Indie paper; see the heading "When Guns are Outlawed"), but the chance to make a Julie Brown reference was too good to pass up, and moreover, this heartwarming story of the former homecoming queen who attacks her sister with said sister's prosthetic leg has a personal twist. It turns out that this woman went to my spouse's high school! She graduated the year after my brother-in-law, who says he knew BOTH OF THEM -- apparently in the early 80's at Norwin, the jean-jacket druggie crowd was more organized than the BP's and voted themselves into all sorts of school positions (note: BIL was not part of the jean-jacket druggie crowd). Do you realize this means I have only 1 degree of separation from 100% pure white trash?!

Advanced visualization

Photographer Chris Jordan's Running the Numbers project contains some fascinating images. I particularly like "Barbie Dolls" because it creates a recognizable image at the "forest" level that ties directly into the statistic being cited. "Plastic Bottles" also creates a compelling image of a "sea" of bottles that is lacking in similar pieces like "Cell Phones" or "Paper Cups". I also like "Cans Seurat" for re-creating a familiar image, but there's no particular reason why /this/ particular image should arise from these particular materials, so it's less captivating than "Barbie Dolls".

The series as a whole would be more powerful, I think, if there was some attempt at common scale to the pieces. Part of the artist's "hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone", but even in images it's impossible to compare the impact of one million plastic cups used every six hours versus 8 million trees harvested every month versus 426,000 cell phones retired every day. How do we know whether these images/statistics are big or normal without anything with which to compare them?

Still and all, a great experiment.

the continuing adventures of "Specto Caveman"

A couple weeks ago...

Sarah (to Alex): Who or what is "Specto Caveman"?

Alex: I dunno what you're talking about.

Sarah: Connor's been playing games all afternoon involving him, or it, or whatever it is.

Alex: Must be a daycare thing. I'll ask about it tomorrow.

(that night, we have some time after dinner before bedtime and offer Connor a 1/2 hour of Planet Earth if we get the living room cleaned up)

Alex: Do you want to watch "Fresh Water" with the piranhas?

Connor: Yes, and the Specto Caveman!

Alex: Specto Caveman, specto caveman, aha -- spectacled caiman!!

Sarah & Alex: Ohhhhh...