The classiest fam in Hollywood loves Mara’s barrettes; this time Violet rocks them. Nice. Buy em here, and pass it on.

This is from Just Jared, and I must say: If the blog really is just a guy named Jared writing about celebrities, my hat is off to him. He publishes some tidbit of celebrity gossip roughly every 5 seconds. That’s dedication, homes. If you’re interested in the barrettes, you can buy a pair for yourself at Little Something; if you’re concerned that they’ll make you look like Jennifer Garner, you can ask Mara for some guidance in the proper way to wear them.

I’m glad that the barrettes got the full paparazzi treatment. A couple of photos just wouldn’t have been sufficient. Better get 17 and be safe. Check em all out.

(Congratulations, you big loser).

33. Hit a jump shot in pool. It’s not something you use a lot, but when you hit a jump shot, it marks you as a player and briefly impresses women. Make the angle of your cue steeper, aim for the bottommost fraction of the ball, and drive the cue smoothly six inches past the contact point, making steady, downward contact with the felt. Illustration: Leif Parsons.

There are some good, less predictable skills: 5. Name a book that matters; 21. Argue with a European without getting xenophobic or insulting soccer; 52. Step into a job no one wants to do.

And then there are the predictable things:

Drinking-related stuff: 17. Make one drink, in large batches, very well; 24. Know his poison, without standing there, pondering like a dope; 32. Describe a glass of wine in one sentence without using the terms nutty, fruity, oaky, finish, or kick.

Outdoors-related stuff: 14. Chop down a tree; 26. Cast a fishing rod without shrieking or sighing or otherwise admitting defeat; 51. Build a campfire; 55. Point to the north at any time; 68. Find his way out of the woods if lost; 69. Tie a knot; 74. Know some birds.

Sports-related stuff: 4. Score a baseball game; 11. Swim three different strokes; 65–67. Throw a baseball over-hand with some snap. Throw a football with a tight spiral. Shoot a 12-foot jump shot reliably.

Social context?

I would think that Esquire has made lists like this in the past, and if so I think it would be interesting to compare lists across time. For instance, there’s nothing explicitly sports-knowledge-related or steak-knowledge-related — “Have a favorite team,” “Know the difference between a New York Strip and a T-Bone” or something like that — all of which seem like they’d be requirements in the past. It would also be interesting to know if lists like this are recent developments. Would the Esquire magazine of Norman Mailer’s era craft a list like this? Probably not, actually. Or, if they did craft lists, they’d be one-item lists: “1. F*** lists.”

Via BuzzFeed.

It’s not a word, but lots of people like to use it as if it were. Over the past few years, I’ve heard it more and more often, but today was the first day I’ve ever seen it in the mainstream media. Hmmm.

Is there something deficient about “influential” or “resonant?” What about affecting, authoritative, controlling, dominant, effective, efficacious, forcible, governing, guiding, important, impressive, inspiring, instrumental, leading, meaningful, momentous, moving, persuasive, potent, prominent, significant, strong, substantial, telling, touching, weighty, beating, booming, deep, electrifying, enhanced, full, intensified, loud, mellow, noisy, orotund, plangent, powerful, profound, pulsating, pulsing, resounding, reverberant, reverberating, rich, ringing, roaring, round, sonorant, sonorous, stentorian, strident, thrilling, throbbing, thundering, or thunderous?

Like this stuff by Andrei Robu.

Via kottke.

I’ve spent a lot time combing through the archives of Paper Cuts, the blog of the New York Times Book Review editor Dwight Garner. It steers clear of smartypantsness, focusing on what one might call the lighter side of serious literature. In fact, most of the content is on the periphery of the strictly literary — a music playlist assembled by Miranda July, a quick, fun interview with Judy Blume, a scan of Jack Kerouac’s obituary (“his subject was himself and his method was to write as spontaneously as possible”), a scan of an ad for Ralph Ginzburg’s literary supernova Avant Garde that looks like the label on a Dr. Bronner’s soap bottle.

Garner also has a podcast in which he interviews authors and reviewers from current and upcoming Book Reviews. Every once in a while, you’ll suffer through some crap (e.g., Frank Rich gushing and giggling while furtively and unsuccessfully trying to hide the king-size man-crush he has on Don DeLillo). That said, most of the podcasts are informative and interesting.

The image at right is from a slide show of advertisements that appeared during the “golden age” of the NYT Book Review — 1962–1973.

News flash: Air travel really sucks right now (Washington Post). A couple of weeks ago, I too was touched by this national nightmare. On a Friday evening, I planned to fly from Dulles to SFO, but got slapped with an SSSS on my boarding pass (expired driver’s license) and a long security line and figured I would miss my flight. Good thing it was delayed. For three hours, initially. The gate agents reported that there was bad weather in New York, and this seemed reasonable to me because there were lots of people at the other gates who appeared to be pissed off and tired. Also, the storm was all over the hundreds of TVs that blast CNN at you. I got comfortable and watched an excellent movie (Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well) on my computer, fully believing what the gate agents were saying: The flight would not be canceled. They emphasized this: It would not be canceled.

After two more delays, at 2:30am, the gate agents delivered the obvious: The flight would be canceled. Within milliseconds, an entire plane-load of people freaked out, fumed, growled, shouted insults and then scrambled to get re-booked. Lines at the desks: 45 minutes. Hold time on the phone: 45 minutes. Likelihood of getting out of DC in the next 24 hours: Zero. Compensation for our trouble: Zero. Our flight appeared to be the only suckers left at Dulles, but of course the airline blamed the cancellation on acts of God and air traffic control and, on those grounds, they refused to give us even a voucher for a soda. (A recent Washington Post article examines traditional airline excuses).

But wait, there’s good news: The current issue of Popular Mechanics has an article about the FAA’s work on a GPS-based air traffic control system, which will be up and running by ... 2025. Ugh.

I won’t name the airline (because I am a gentleman), but I encourage you to look for clues in the title of this post. (Specifically in the first letter of each word. Thx, Khoi Vinh for the inspiration.)

Killer of Sheep is director Charles Burnett’s account of life in the LA neighborhood of Watts in the early 1970’s. It began life as his senior thesis at UCLA film school and until recently it was never seen outside art houses and museums. Despite all of that, it was among the first 50 films to declared national treasures by the Library of Congress. I saw it earlier this week at the Castro, and it lived up the hype.

Burnett’s account of his motivations in making the film seems like a good place to start unpacking the stuff that makes it so unique:

I wanted to tell a story about a man who was trying to hold on to some values that were constantly being eroded by other forces, by his plight in the community, and the quality of the job that he had. At the same time he wanted to do right by his family. I didn’t want to impose my values on his situation. I just wanted to show his life. And I didn’t want to resolve his situation by imposing artificial solutions like him becoming a doctor or a diplomat, when the reality is that most people don’t get out. I wanted to show that there is a positive element to his life, and that is that he endures, he’s accepted it. [From an excellent interview on Senses of Cinema]

To bring this story to life, he employs a style that seems improvisational, as much documentary as Italian neorealism. But there’s also something very new and genuine and particularly American about it — isolation, crumbling buildings, explosions of cruelty and anger, and the constant, chaotic motion of kids leaping across rooftops and crawling under buildings — combined, these things seem to evoke a very American way of poor, urban life.

More than anything, the movie makes you wonder at its very improbability: How in the world did he make that? Did he actually plan those moments that seem genuinely serendipitous?

Maybe it’s that the actors are untrained. The dialogue seems fresh, surprising and authentic even when it’s forced. Maybe it’s the pacing of the editing. Scenes start abruptly — children emerge from a hole, an entire neighborhood has assembled in a stairwell, kids hide behind a scrap of plywood. Most scenes also tend to end a couple of seconds early, or linger a few seconds longer. Maybe it’s the dialogue — it’s all mumbles or hollers or growls, with jazz and blues tracks adding rhythmic, sometimes hopeful counterpoints to the imagery. Who knows? What’s clear is that it speaks in a true, clear and unique voice. Go see it.

No dialogue. Dog mask. Chain link fence. Killer of Sheep. Photo: Milestone Films.

Here’s the bracket that I made on the Monday after the seedings were announced.

UPDATE: Since Monday, I’ve been spending a lot of time reading up on the teams I don’t know/care about — in SI.com and its Tourney Blog, statistical analyst Ken Pomeroy’s blog, the NYT Bracket blog, and the ever-unfriendly ESPN.com which must hide a lot of its useful stuff behind its subscription service, Insider. In any case, the more you read about the first round match-ups, the more confusing it all gets. I’ve seen many of the teams play at some point during the season, but I’m totally in the dark on pretty much any team from the Pac 10 (even though I live in California, I just really can’t even force myself to care about it) and almost all of the mid-majors.

One bracket change came out of this — I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Duke seems less likely to get upset by VCU. Duke has been criticized a lot for being soft, sloppy, and generally uninspired, and they’re coming off a stinging loss in the ACC Tournament. How could they not be hungry? They’ve got a bunch of talented players, and it just seems really unlikely that they won’t be able to pull off a win against a VCU team that has only played one team in the tournament (Old Dominion).

While I’ve only changed one outcome, my reading did produce many doubts in my bracket, which I detail below. (It also caused me to create three more versions of my bracket to account for the different scenarios that the pundits highlighted — What if Oregon can’t play defense? What if Oden explodes on the scene and dominates everyone? What if North Carolina is as good as they appear to be in 3-minute stretches?)

UPDATE 2: Incidentally, SI writer Grant Wahl’s bracket is almost exactly the same as mine. (Actually, same with Seth Davis). Same Final Four; same final game; same outcome. The only big differences are that he has Texas beating UNC (UPDATE 3: Now, so do I), and Creighton beating Memphis, whereas I have both UNC and Memphis getting knocked out in the next round. (I also have more first-round upsets than him ... Oral Roberts over Washington State, etc).

UPDATE 4 (in the week following the first two rounds): After two straight years in which my bracket burst into flames during the first weekend, I was just happy to emerge with 15 out of 16 teams still alive. Mostly, I got burned by my late changes — Texas beating UNC and Duke beating VCU — and by the fashionable upsets that I stubbornly decided to stick with — Georgia Tech over UNLV, Creighton over Nevada, and Oral Roberts over Washington State, each of which found their own agonizing way of driving a spear through my heart. Crxp.

As usual, there were a couple of teams that I was totally, totally wrong about: (1) UNLV. Obviously, these guys can play. I discounted them because (a) who did they beat? and (b) the coach’s son seemed to play an inordinately important role. Both seemed like big-time red flags. I ignored the fact that they were experienced, and that they were clearly pissed off by their #7 seed. Who would have thought that the team that rose to the occasion would be composed of hard-nosed guys led by journeyman coach Lon Kruger (UNLV), and not composed of McDonald’s All-Americans and led by the sainted Coach K? Seemed unlikely before it happened, but oh how sweet it is in retrospect. (2) Texas. During the two Kansas games, they were dangerously weak at guard. Both games would likely have been blow-outs if Durant hadn’t totally gone off in the first 15 minutes of each. Abrams is a terrible ball-handler who needs multiple screens to get his shot going, and Augustin is completely dominant one moment and out-of-control the next. USC forced these guys to play a bigger role by taking away Durant’s dribble; good call, Tim Floyd. (Didn’t really think I’d be saying those words anytime after 2002). On the other bench, Rick Barnes made no discernible adjustments. Again, not that surprising, in retrospect.

The next round looks mostly boring to me, though I guess half the games could be exciting — UNC-USC, if USC is able to hang on while UNC goes on its periodic runs, A&M-Memphis should display some good offensive firepower (unlike Pitt-UCLA, which almost certainly will be a grind-it-out snore-fest), and KU-SIU which could be exciting if KU has a hard time running its offense against the defense-minded Salukis. Let’s hope that it’s not exciting in this way.

... I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it.

It just gets better from there, really.

So apparently Google and Earthlink are teaming up to provide free WiFi service to all of SF (via Gizmodo). While we’re still a ways from knowing what this will actually mean — mainly, will be accessible at 14th and Valencia, third floor apartment? — it is intriguing to me that Google is involved. Unlike Earthlink, Google has never gouged me, or failed to provide service that I’ve paid for, or sold my name and home address to direct marketers.

So I guess you could say that I’m hopeful. Maybe someday soon I’ll be able to work from Pac Bell (er, I mean, SBC ... er, I mean AT&T) Park, or Buena Vista Park, or the little redwood grove outside the Transamerica building.

Or from my roof. (See the photo).

Here’s my question: How did this become the “Dear God” album, considering at least half the songs on it are as good or better? Damn you, Sarah McLachlan. I hadn’t listened to it since maybe 1995, when Ted and I played the shit out of it. We both loved the Beatles, and I had a fondness for the synthy 80’s style. This album combines these qualities, and adds a little indie rock sensibility as well.

Now that the Cars and Hall & Oates have been on heavy hipster rotation for the past year or so, I’m surprised that XTC haven’t seen some props, especially for this album. Compared to other XTC albums, the vocals are more blended with the rest of the sound, rather than held above it, which reduces the saccharine edge of later albums (Oranges & Lemons, for instance). Maybe XTC just doesn’t have the kitschy cache of other 80’s bands, who knows?

Incidentally, you can read more about the most well-known song on the album. Here’s a fan of Sarah, explaining why it’s okay to love Sarah even if she questions the existence of God: “I do not believe that you should rule out a whole singer or album just because of one song that you do not care for.”

Most of my records, CDs and tapes sit idly in crates and on shelves, so here’s what I’m going to do: Every so often, I’m going to dust one off and see what it sounds like. Dredge the archive, and take a good long listen to something I haven’t heard in 2+ years.

Tonight, I begin the experiment with a randomly selected record: Sleater-Kinney’s All Hands on the Bad One, which I’ll admit I haven’t listen to in three years. Maybe four.

Here’s the thing about Sleater-Kinney and me. I’m probably one of the very few San Franciscans (of a certain age and neighborhood) who *likes* them but doesn’t *love* them and sometimes wishes they would cool it with the too-often shrill vocals. But of course everyone knows they’re politically-active feminists who play punk rock, so what’s my problem?

Let’s talk about Bad One. It’s got great moments: the title track and “The Professional” are rockin and fun — even after five years, they’re a couple of the all-time great songs to listen to while riding a bike. The problem is that, for the most part, this album is huge step away from their early, raw sound, which had a lot less Heart-esque power ballad voice. Songs like “Milkshake n Honey,” and “Ballad of a Ladyman” feature this voice, which for me is the element of their sound that rocks the least. (It comes down to this: If Carrie Brownstein harmonizes with Corin Tucker on a song, chances are that I’ll like it).

I’ll say something nice about them: I saw them move the crowd in a serious way at Dolores Park one summer. Their fans were freaking out, and the band itself was having fun and sounding good — even songs I didn’t like were pretty great. I really wish their albums captured this better. But like anything, their sound can’t be all things for all people, and they seem to please some group of people everytime they put out an album, so more power to them.

The Twin Cities are still full of good times, especially when the mercury plunges. A couple of weekends ago, I enjoyed the chill with my friends Fish, Katie and Becky (pictured, in front of the new wing at the Walker).

The highlights:

• Vietnamese sandwiches at the Jasmine Deli on Nicollet. Their sandwiches are fabulous, especially the BBQ chicken.
• The new and improved Walker. Twin Cities residents seem ambivalent — some love it, others are underwhelmed — but I was really impressed with the way that the new wing blends into the old, and the manner in which they space itself still seems intimate and surprising. Plus, it’s open late on Friday nights; how great is that? The Walker’s video installations have always been great, and I was really glad to catch a few moments of Jem Cohen’s “Lost Book Found” and “Blood Orange Sky” as we walked through — worth reading: A long, detailed interview with Jem Cohen by Rhys Graham. Also, an entire room dedicated to Sherrie Levine, a cabinet full of Fluxus stuff (still cool after all these years of imitators), and a great exhibit of Huang Yong Ping that included some live spiders and scorpions.
• Good, solid Midwestern dishes prepared Chez Panisse-style (local, organic, a little French) at Auriga. They also serve Kona coffee.
• Weird Norweigan snacks and crazy folk-art murals at Ingebretsons, a store that sells all sorts of Scandanavian crafts and gifts. Even weirder because it’s in a somewhat bombed-out part of Lake Street.
• A little waterfall in the middle of the city, Minnehaha Falls. Totally worth seeing, especially in winter.
• Fish and Katie’s totally awesome 60’s-style neighborhood movie theater, The Riverview, that shows fairly new movies for THREE DOLLARS. Are you kidding me? Plus, it has been totally restored, and totally reminds me of the heyday of Kansas City’s Glenwood, which I think has recently been gutted of all the 60’s schmaltz.

Incidentally, when I was growing up, a different Mike Mills was the bassist for my favorite rock band c. 1985–88 — REM. You can hear his thin, poignant harmonizing on Murmur, Reckoning, Fables of the Reconstruction, Life’s Rich Pageant, Dead Letter Office, and Document. (Don’t bother with anything after Document; it’s all downhill from there). Let’s hear it for all Mike Millses!

Take one character each from column A and column B, place them in one of column C’s settings, and voila! You have the makings of a New Yorker cartoon. Supposedly, this was the doing of a group of NYer cartoonists at a recent festival.

Balkinization, a blog that includes many quite interesting essays by Yale Law professor Jack Balkin, has an interesting discussion about why Democrats should not confirm Roberts. Balkin recently published an interesting piece in Slate about originalists and the concept of a living constitution: “Alive and Kicking: Why no one truly believes in a dead Constitution.”

If you’re willing to sift through the details — and each memeber of the Senate Judiciary Committee tends go into excessive detail before getting to his/her question — the NYT has raw transcripts: Day 1, Day 2.

So, a flurry of manuscript pages would arrive, buzzing with brilliant, but often disconnected passages, interspersed with what Hunter would himself call “gibberish” (on certain days) and previously rejected material, just to see if we were awake. “Stand back,” the first line would inevitably say, announcing the arrival of twenty-three or twenty-five or forty pages to follow in the fax machine. Soon there were phone calls from Deborah Fuller or Shelby Sadler or Nicole Meyer or another of his stalwart assistants. We always spoke of “pages,” as in “How many pages will we get tonight?” “We need more pages than that.” “Can you get those pages marked up and back to Hunter?” Pages were the coin of the realm; moving pages was our mission. I would mark them up, make copies for Jann, and then send them back.

The issue for the magazine was never that Hunter wasn’t the funniest, cleverest, most hilarious writer, sentence to sentence or paragraph to paragraph. The editor’s role was getting those sentences to pile up and then exhibit forward momentum. (Hunter called this process “lashing them together.”)

I submit for inclusion: No Han Solo! No roguish charmer! No swashbucking mercenary! Han is everything that the second trilogy’s characters aren’t: unpredictable, funny, charming; in short, INTERESTING. In the original trilogy, his unabashed egotism balances Luke’s piety and Leia’s bitchy coldness, making all three movies much less gag-inducing than they would have been otherwise.

Note to screenwriters: If you’re going to write a story about the clash of good and evil, you need a character like Han to balance the saccharine aspects of the two. Luke and Leia are pure and uncomplicated; this renders them uninteresting unless they’re contrasted with a character who actually displays human qualities. Han’s irreverence and greed is offset by a devotion to his friends, and this meaty, real stuff — plus sarcasm, fear, etc — helps viewers embrace the unreal stuff.

The second trilogy needed more Lord of the Rings-style stories involving friendship and adventure — something, anything to balance the melodrama and politics. I mean, c’mon. Lucas!? Why subject us to this? A character like Han could have interjected in moments like this, at the beginning of Phantom Menace:

BIBBLE : Your Highness, I will stay here and do what I can ... They will have to retain the Council of Governors in order to maintain control.
HAN: Yeah, good luck with that.
BIBBLE: In any case, you must leave.
AMIDALA: Either choice presents a great risk ... to all of us.
PADME : We are brave, Your Highness.
HAN: “We” are getting the heck out of here before the battle driods get any closer.

Disclaimers: (1) I’m not a Star Wars nerd. I thought that Episode 1 unequivocally sucked and left the theater (or blocked out everything) after the pod races. I laughed through most of Episode 2, except for the scenes that made me retch. Ditto Episode 3. And (2) While it’s fashionable to point out problems in these movies, I don’t have much experience with official Star Wars criticism beyond my own snide remarks and the snide remarks of others — so perhaps someone has already written about this.

Unrelated: Check out McSweeney’s amendments of some classic Obiwan lines: “The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy. Oh, it’s all horseshit. God.”

Next problem with the new trilogy: No Lando. ]]> http://douglemoine.com/2005/06/movies-sans-solo-the-real-problem-with-the-new-star-wars-trilogy/feed/ 0