In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a number of new things over there in the sidebar to look at. Horray. Though they’re mostly concerned with my media inputs for the year, they’ll also cover past and present output of writing and crap like that.
Archive for the ‘review’ Category
New Things
Thursday, January 17th, 2008Review: Among other things, I’ve taken up smoking
Thursday, November 22nd, 2007I’ve just finished reading Aoibheann Sweeney’s Among other things, I’ve taken up smoking whose cover I mentioned here, and it was a very good little novel. It’s a novel not so much about coming of age but of coming to know yourself. Throughout it there’s a kind of steady pacing throughout the novel toward the conclusion of the book that feels right, the actions of the main character Miranda feel as if they’re not choices but almost things she felt she would do already. This feeling of momentum is compounded by the consistent characterization throughout the novel of the main characters. Sweeney’s inclusion of Ovid’s Metamorphosis as a central parallel to the plot of the book is worked in just enough so as to not taken over the novel with the author’s love of the text, she knows we want to read about the change in Miranda. we’re reading about her task in looking at her past and holding it up to the new circumstances of her present. The novel seems sort of odd in that it’s told in the past tense by a first person narrator and I felt a sort of oldness and maturity seeping into the book so I was hearing an old story through the eyes of a present narrator. This makes the earlier chapters feel like I’m supposed to think of the narrator as they were when first going to school but the effect is more of the narrator looking through the old eyes and seeing the past with a maturity of understanding. This understanding clearly grows throughout the novel as it is it’s main goal. The past tense and first person combine to give it the momentum of leading to a conclusion from a past understood through the intervening experiences. This struck me as I was reading as perhaps a weakness, an oddity that made the novel feel as if it sought too quickly to end and was sacrificing an immersion in the past that robbed the novel of a power to show the great change and coming of age we see in the novel’s plotting. Instead, we’re given the past as a thing leading inexorably toward where it is we are now. At the conclusion of the novel the technique feels less an oddity and more a shoring up of Sweeny’s goal of showing that her character would come to be where she is and that her past could not have lead elsewhere because of who she is, it is her character that determined how she acted and her father’s influence in raising her she could not have made any other decision. A scene where she is at a wedding in Connecticut is wrought with an awkwardness and tinged by Miranda feeling out of place, she then leaves the wedding without trying to explain this to herself or anyone else in any depth. Her decision is not the result of tremendous deliberation, she just acts in the way that makes her feel most right. This gives her character a wonderful strength, she does what feels most right and is happier and better for it, or so it seems to me. If you’ve managed to read this far down, I applaud you and will be surprised if I really need to come right out and recommend it to you. It was a novel whose goodness arises not out of intricate plotting or intense dialogs but from narrating the process of, the metamorphosis into knowing yourself in relation to the world at large, not so much that you know a film will make you sad or that you’re allergic to pickles but that a certain behavior or situation in the endless sea of possibilities before us in life will push you most toward your own happiness.
Among other things, I’ve taken up smoking by Aoibheann Sweeny from Penguin Press, New York 2007.
God: If you’re not dead, asleep, or drunk please kill the internet, maybe.
Saturday, November 17th, 2007Seriously. I won’t like to it but there is a picture to go along with this quotation:
most of this post is a long non-insightful head scratching session on my part.
…his voluntary amputations sent me these pictures of his dried/mummified toes and “forefoot” — it’s actually a really neat artifact, because if you look closely you’ll realize that he first amputated the central three toes, let them heal, and then removed the front of his foot in a single piece… So the larger mummified amputation has a healed amputation on it!The larger of the two sections is about six months old in this picture — his amputation has healed well, and he’s very happy with the results.
the questions to ask of an individual who does this are obvious to anyone who doesn’t cut off their own fucking foot. After short contemplation though, I have to wonder who does this? does theguy cut off his own toes? Are there medical professionals involved at any stage? What is wrong with this country[because I’m going to chalk this up to an “only in American” thing. We’re a free country, free to cut off your own fucking foot if you goddam want to, hopefully he doesn’t claim disability…or get protection under the ADA…basically, what I’m saying here is, if you do this to yourself, I hope tax dollars aren’t helping you to live a better life when there’s people who, you know, don’t have choice via an explosion during a deployment in Iraq or perhaps a disease or something. I’m driving toward wondering if there is yet a place for a person like this in our society at large, for some reason, it’s sort of a sticky thing in my head, part of me says, if you want to do that, go ahead. Unless we decide as a culture that a person who wants to cut off their foot is mentally or psychologically diseased, which, seems a valid claim, no one questions that suicides are unhealthy so I think it’s safe to extend the same sorts of psychological stigmatizing to this person. It is disturbing though that via the internet, this person has attained the status of a person who’s actions are clearly by almost anyone’s standards extremely unhealthy. The explosion of subcultures has made them less marginal, and unsurprisingly, Warren Ellis linked to this, as he is the man who is screaming at the top of his lungs about just this sort of thing all through his novel Crooked Little Vein as well as in his blog. Basically his point is that a lot of fucked up shit happens and the internet has made the revolting underbelly of human behavior visible. I lost my main train of thought here a long time ago. I think it’s something like this: Internet + culturally and societally deviant subcultures = slow normalization. This is already obvious to Ellis so I’m not sure why I bother rehashing it here. I guess it’s just to run it through my brain, try to make some sense out of a man cutting off, mummifying photographing and then sending the pictures of his own foot to other human beings. How different is this from Saint’s relics? How long before you can legally purchase mummified toes on eBay?
It’s a brave new world, little things made big via the great cultural magnifying glass that is the Internet. It’s interesting how exploded proportions, importance and movements get online. If you only listen to the right group of people you’d like that Creative Commons is due to kill copyright any minute now and that soon your blog will be translated into Slovakian just because you gave it away. Maybe not the meek but the toe-amputators will inherit the earth.
It’s time to stop this useless rambling.
spectacular things:
Sunday, November 11th, 2007My second experience with Morphine: This time, it’s the band, not the heavily controlled and regulated narcotic. Like I’ve said, it’s one of those bands I should have already heard. basically, they’re pretty spectacular.
Also spectacular:
TV: Doctor Who (especially the second 1/2 of Season 3)
Film: No Country For Old Men (more on this later, when I see it again.)
Books: Crooked Little Vein (more on this later, when I finish it.)
Activities: [hopefully, finally] climbing again.
Dreams: American civil war, but in Japan, Blue v. Beige, not Blue v. Grey. Climbing up a mountain with Japanese family, fleeing. Looking back and down only a battle field whose rear guard is covered wagons.
tomorrow: trip to someplace via auto-mobile. Look for pictures on photo-blog. (http://www.photo-gloaming.net)
The movie I watched Tuesday night.
Saturday, September 15th, 2007The Third Man
Directed by Carol Reed, 1949.
Runtime: ~104 minutes.
This film is one I’d heard was good but knew nothing about; Welles isn’t a actor/director I’ve watched anything by before either. This is my favorite precondition for watching a movie largely because its so rare, I know nothing about the director, the actors, the plot, next to nothing. In this case I was expecting a good film and was not disappointed. The pacing was slow in the first hour or so of the film but this is due largely to the main character’s need to orient himself in a radically unexpected and quickly evolving situation, so even what I found least-watchable in the film is acceptable because it serves a purpose for the film as a whole. The cinematography and suspense in the closing scenes of the film are great. This film is what the pile of crap The Good German’s Directors wishes it had been. When you’re Steven Soderbergh, you’ve seen this movie, so what do you think you’re doing? You can’t improve on it and the plotting is not qualitatively different by too much, except its more heavily handed in The Good German. Also, Tobey Maguire was less than compelling and I was too busy wishing Clooney was Bogart and that I had actually spent the time watching Casablanca when Clooney interacts with Blanchette. So, in summary, The Good German != Good film but is equal to Casablanca + The Third Man – Quality.
The Third Man: 4/5
The Good German: 1.5/5
It took 3 sittings.
Friday, September 14th, 2007Inland Empire
Directed by David Lynch, 2006.
Runtime: 3+ hours.
So I finally finished watching Inland Empire. I’ve wanted to see this movie since it was in [a limited number of] theaters. Lynch’s films are at best dense, confusing, and sometimes appear almost plot less. On the other side of the coin, they’re rich in a color and sound that has a quality unique to Lynch. I’m going to stop pouring adjectives onto his films before I start to sound like I’m a Film Studies Major or something, I’ll give you the Netflix school of criticism before I tell you about the movie. I read somewhere, I think on the internet somewhere, that Lynch is credited with bringing art house cinema to mainstream audiences. If that means anything to you, you’ve probably already seen the film.
I also have to state that this movies is the most terrifying thing I have ever seen emitted from the television. Vertigo would be a close second but the fear in Vertigo and the fear here are incomparable. This is a movie that isn’t horrifying, as in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, there’s nothing here that is disgusting, nothing really visceral. This is an intellectual fear, a fear of the dark, of the unknown, of slowly sinking into the cold water of your worst nightmare in the dirty corner of your grandmother’s house years after she’s died. [That image is mine, not cribbed from the film's plot.] Well, now in a roundabout way I’ve made clear a distinction in this case between horror and terror, whose usage usually gets mixed up and made nigh-synonymous.
Anyway, the lighting and sound are really what makes the film as astounding as I think it is. This is clearly a hot-button issue, even in my apartment where I was watching the second 3rd of the film, hoping to finish it when my roommate Mike goes to bed so he can work. My roommate Gus goes and turns off the DVD player after Mike gets up. I sit there flabergasted for a second because I’ve been ripped from the experience of Lynch dragging me along shot by shot through the twisting and strangely developing narrative that I’m so enjoying. I regain my ability to speak again momentarily and say “hey man, what did you do that for? I was watching that.” To which he responds, “oh, sorry, I didn’t think you could possibly be enjoying that.” I just give up and go downstairs and sleep for the night.
When I was able to finish the film recently I was somewhat disappointed by the ending but still satisfactorily unsatisfied. It ends up being a kind of inexplicable that you’re not expecting, which shows that Lynch knows what his audience will think so he presents that obvious option most obviously so as to encourage further thought on what’s going on in the plot beyond “she went crazy,” or “she’s just in the movie.”
And finally: Laura Dern gets added to my list of “Attractive Blond Women over 40.”
(Dern is 1/2 the list, Jodie Foster being the other 50%. I’ve got to go see her new movie. This attraction may be borne out of my love for Jurassic Park and Contact and something Freudian about the age I was when I saw the films I’ll not give credence to.)
Inland Empire: 5/5