As I begin my slow and painful descent into being a links blog, I can't help but sharing some highlights of the internet. It's like when my summer roommate from the deep south had a friend was over at our place, and the friend closed out of ESPN.com or CBS Sportsline or something and went (with a twang), "Well that's it--I've seen the Internet!" To folks like you, good buddy, I offer these gifts:
- This just in! I LIKE NICE THINGS bigger, better than ever! I'll let Jeff take a spin linking and reminiscing about his mad new creations that have the netart blogosphere rollin' in the hitz (and long overdue, if I do say so myself). So I'll leave that to him and pimp my own wares: a delightfully cute and web-savvy hand-drawn bit of artthat should hopefully please the other artistes on this board. Expect more big things from ILNT in the coming weeks...
- Pitchfork's typically best column is one that usually has nothing to do with music. Go figure. In this attempt to fight their way back to my attention, one Pitchfork column asks the intriguing question: do Americans know more about the Star Wars universe than Africa? A bit too much actual pontificating; I think the question's somewhat rhetorical tone alone is enough to make it a fun dinner party quip. Tell the IMF to cancel Hoth's debt!
- The great nerd-shirt debate. In the battle between two shirts that both have their charms (and awesome subject matter), it's pretty much a contest between the sayings themselves. HOLD IT! vs. OBJECTION! Life is tough, huh?
- Perhaps the greatest CNN.com lede on a website that's typically full of them, this article on NASCAR cheating starts with a great primer into the world of racing: "Stock car racing was built by those trying to beat the system. Many of the early racers learned their make-your-car-go-faster tricks to outrun the cops in the South, to run some moonshine and make a few bucks. Then they used the same tricks on their race cars on Sundays for a few hundred dollars in prize money. But NASCAR isn't about a few bucks anymore. It's a billion dollar industry, and every team spends millions on each of its cars." See, now if NASCAR actually played out like the Dukes of Hazzard or Smokey and the Bandit it sounds like, and not just some boring thing where cars go in circles while alpha males drink and punch each other, then maybe I'd actually care.
- Bamako finally opens at a theater probably not close to you. Dave takes big sigh of relief, congratulates self with long and hopefully relaxing President's Day Weekend, and Tuesday reconvenes to figure out how to market a movie that's directed by a 98-year-old Portguese director and intended as a modern sequel to a 40-year-old French movie. Dave sits back, considers taking extra day off. Ah, the joys of two jobs.
Both as a resident of New York and a worker in a slightly upscale area, I think the consensus is to act nonchalant around celebrities. You don't need to ask their last names to look up the accounts and pretend you don't know them at all, but there shouldn't be any fawning, and I think part of that may be due to New Yorkers' refusal to acknowledge anyone might conceivably be more important than them.
But what the hell.
Today after I returned from lunch I got a three person line with Uma Thurman in front (blocking the light because shes 9' tall), followed by Patti Smith and Amy Sedaris. How often does a concentration like that happen?
And originally I was going to blog about my love/hate relationship with the '80s TV show Crime Story (love 95% of the show's two perfectly written and acted seasons, hate both season endings for being ridiculous), but I guess my mind wanders elsewhere.
Greetings.
Two months into the new year, I finally got to see my favorite film of 2006... that is, if we are going by release date and not viewing date. (Under this order, I also saw my favorite film of 1961, so the limitations of this system are fairly obvious.) Anyway, Pan's Labyrinth has been usurped by Children of Men, a film with such audacious guts in its barely-cloaked politics and mastery in its writing and artistic direction that it blew everything but Pan's Labyrinth away. It's quite easy when dealing with heavy topics like Children of Men does to slip into either simple caricature or--even worse--into precisely the kind of limp entertainment it originally set out to criticize. I am specifically thinking here of the watered-down adaptation of V for Vendetta, which tried to create a more straightforward explosive blockbuster out of another tome all about the grey zones in relations of political power to violence.
Anyways... although Children of Men more realist than either the twisted fairytale background of Pan's Labyrinth or the darkly comic beaurocracy of Gilliam's Brazil, there is none of that obsession typical in many sci-fi features to ruin a great human story with constant you-are-there attention to what technologies might run the future. There are few opportunities to laugh in Alfonso Cuaron's film, and the short moments of blissfulness that do exist are permanently dampened by the viewer's persistent need to be on the lookout for violence and disruption on the horizon. Michael Caine's hippie father figure stole the show precisely because all the scenes in his idyllic cabin were prematurely ruined by the thought that everything here was too good to be true. A dystopia is a dystopia no matter how small.
But what really struck me after seeing Children of Men is how similar it is to Pan's Labyrinth, and indeed the two compliment each other nicely. Both draw powerful and terrifying analogies to the present political climate, one by looking to a past trauma and one by creating an apocalyptic trauma in the distance. Both focus on the innocence of children that is inherently destroyed by cynical adults, even the jaded fighters in the various resistance movements that often resemble the fascist leaders they are trying to topple... or merely replace. And finally, to avoid being didactic bores, both cloak their complex political cores and bitter social realities with traditional Hollywood genres, beautiful visuals and in the case of Children of Men, big-name actors. I would like to believe otherwise, but I'm very sure the reason these films made the Top 10 weekly grosses and actually got people in the theaters had nothing to do with the shock-and-awe display the audience was about to be subjected to.
Oh, and Monica and I snuck into Smoking Aces right after we got out of CoM, which was a really bad idea. On any other day I might have appreciated the blood for blood's sake, and it certainly delivered the "Felliniesque" carnival atmosphere Carnahan promised, but if the previous movie got anything across, it was a queasiness towards violence that Smoking Aces makes its core. It's always good to see Michael Batemen (i.e. Michael in Arrested Development) get work, though, even if only for two glorious minutes.
The title comes from a line in the "Pedophelia" episode of the British show Brass Eye, which accurately spoofed right-wing hysteric media years before Fox News led the way in a similar trend over here (Rupert Murdoch pretty much globalized and standardized this formula).
I don't expect anyone to comment on anything at this point, I'm just writing occasionally to write. In the near future I will be switching over to the glorious I Like Nice Things, where I'll hopefully soon be posting a short story Jeff goaded me into doing. Whether it's from boredom or the pent-up rage at imbecilic customers, I have recently averaged about 1-3 ideas per workday, which has convinced me I should maybe keep working until I get a really full range of options to twist into projects. That idea is what keeps me going every time someone holds up a copy of The Break-Up and says, "Is this fiction?" Upon my look of death, he corrects himself, saying, "What I meant by fiction is does it have magic stuff in it or is it, like, real?"**
**true story
