My Name Is...
When you've got a moniker like mine, you don't expect to see it too often. And you certainly don't expect to see it on a deli counter, or an antique tractor trailer. Such is the fun of doing domain name searches with your own last name.
I particularly like that first one. Classy.
Certifiable
I am now an Apple Certified Techinician. That means I can heal Powerbooks with the power of my mind. I can cure stricken hardware with the slightest touch. You could run over your iBook with a steamroller and kneel before me with a garbage bag filled with the broken shards, and I will smile gently and hand you back your computer, whole, functional, because I am a benevolent and merciful god. But I am also a vengeful god: mess with me, and I'll wipe your hard drive just by looking at it.
I am certified. FEAR ME.
Weather Update
Seven-thirty at night, and it's still 91 degrees. This summer's gonna suck, big time. On the way over here I ran into my comic-book-writing friend, who complained about moving to San Diego in a week. It's 70º and sunny in San Diego, you jackass!
I suppose it could be worse; I just saw that it's 108º in Phoenix. Which must mean that everyone in Phoenix is dead.
Pixie?
A request to friends, neighbors, co-workers:
if you've got any Pixies CDs, please let me borrow 'em. The iTunes Music Store ain't got none, and ever since Radiohead cited them, along with the Smiths and, surprisingly, U2, as their chief musical influences, I've been wanting to give them a listen...
Online Oasis
Forty-Second Street is hell at the best of times. Oppressive to the point of being offensive, packed to the gills with clueless tourists and rushing business types, garish, loud. Forty-Second Street sucks. And in 95-degree heat, it's worse. In the heat, it's like nails in your skull, and it'll drive you insane.
That is, unless you can make it to Bryant Park, where the noise level drops to an acceptable muted hum, and the fountain and the grass provide a little respite from the heat radiating off the pavement, and the free high-speed wireless Internet access allows you to sit in the grass and check your email and post to your website. Like I'm doing right now.
Chat Me Up
Yeah, the Power Mac G5 is great and all, but the neatest thing Apple announced yesterday is iChat AV, which enables users to do full-screen video conferencing over a broadband connection, with digital audio sound. Which means, basically, that you could talk to your friend at Sydney University over your computer. With no long distance charges. This is a very, very cool thing. And they even came up with a nifty little firewire video camera, to boot...
Hulk Me Baby One More Time
A couple nights ago, I had a dream that I was finally sitting in a theatre watching THE HULK, only to find that the movie was incomprehensible, a foreign arthouse flick with lots of talking heads and weird transitions. I woke up in a cold sweat.
Okay, well, maybe not in a cold sweat, but I was a bit disturbed. The point is, I have more than a bit of emotional investment in the Hulk, both the film and the character, and that the green guy has infiltrated my subconscious to the point when I'm dreaming about him. (I also had a different dream in which I had finally obtained a pair of Hulk Hands, and was walking around gleefully punching things, but that may have just been more an emotional release than anything else.) So my mood in walking out of the actual theatre last night, after viewing the actual film, is a bit hard to describe.
The thing is, when talking about the Hulk, the HULK filmmakers have done what most highly intelligent people do when looking to preemptively ward off accusations of "Sell-out!" while making a highly commercialized product that might be considered beneath them for lots of dough: they've taken a simple concept and made it a hell of a lot more complicated than it needs to be. Read some of the press about THE HULK, and you'll invariably find references to Jekyll and Hyde, or Freud and his almighty Id. On one hand, this is understandable, and even commendable: after all, who's going to take you seriously if you say, "I wanted to make a movie about a big green guy smashing stuff," and how could you draw out the smashing for two-plus hours without everyone getting a bit bored with the whole thing?
On the other hand, unfortunately, it sets up the loads of people who were primed by all the trailers and commercials showing the big green guy smashing stuff for a huge disappointment.
Me, I was well-informed beforehand about the character and the guys looking to immortalize him on the silver screen, so I knew what I was getting into. As such, I was well equiped to deal. I could deal with the long, LONG stretches of backstory and setup. I could deal with the exposition and the ham-fisted hints of what was to come ("You've got something wonderful inside of you, Bruce! I just know it!" Yes, yes, so do we, now can we just friggin' SEE it?) I was even able to deal with Eric Bana's banal, joyless performance, with acting so wooden it was a fire hazard. I could barely, just barely, deal with Nick Nolte. I could deal with everything, in fact, except for the one crucial bit: I couldn't deal with being bored to tears. Which I was, for much of the time.
The saving grace was, surprisingly, not the incredibly gorgeous Jennifer Connelly, who I could watch prune shrubbery for a few hours without losing interest. It was, in fact, the big green guy himself. Because the filmmakers, bless their hearts, got that one thing right: they created a main character you could feel for. And the Hulk, not Bruce Banner, is the main character. Bruce, in this incarnation, is so repressed and emotionless that he's dull as stones, and it's a shame that Bana couldn't have Bill Bixby around to advise him how to have some fun with the role. The Hulk, meanwhile, is just this poor guy, misunderstood and persecuted, who also happens to be able to throw tanks a couple miles and use redwood trees for baseball bats. He just wants to be left alone, so he can sit and smell the flowers in peace, and these damn gun nuts keep showing up and shelling him: hey, what would YOU do? Even more impressively, the completely computer-generated Hulk shows more emotion, and seems to be having more fun, than anyone else in the movie. How can you not laugh out loud at the sight of Big Green holding a Sherman tank over his head and shaking it upside down to get all the people out, or even better, of him catching a missle in one hand, biting off it's tip, and throwing it at the helicopter that fired it? Because, when you get right to the point of it, that's what we want to see when we go see a movie called THE HULK: we want to see a guy who's being bullied get the strength to take on his bullies and toss them around like sock puppets. That's the fun.
Unfortunately, these scenes are few and far between, and they're often ruined by a clumsy split-screen editing device that might have been a nice idea in theory, or if used sparingly, but which proves incredibly distracting when it shows up every thirty seconds. And then, in the last half hour, my nightmare came true, as the increasingly out-there Nick Nolte gets the opportunity to literally chew the scenery and the movie inexplicably morphs into a two-man dramatic theatre production, followed by a finale which makes no sense whatsoever.
So, I should have walked out of the theater detesting the thing. But the Hulk scenes, incredibly, redeemed everything else, and I walked home fondly replaying in my head the moment when the Hulk, having hitched a ride into the stratosphere on a military jet, loses his grip in the extreme cold and falls, spread-eagled on his back, staring up at the star-speckled sky just beyond the atmosphere. The look on his face is one of dismay, obviously, since he's in a bit of a pickle, but there's also just a bit of wonder there as well: shit, I'm falling from space, but, wow, what a pretty view! And that look is priceless.
Adolf in New York
A letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, received October 15, 1945, in its entirety:
From the FBI's released, and then recently un-released, file on Adolf Hitler's post-World War II whereabouts. Some interesting reading, courtesy of The Memory Hole.
Old School
"One of you, specifically John Lee, will spend most of your time just hanging out in your car eating nachos. You will all come back from time to time to this beautiful campus for reunions, and ask the question, 'Does anyone ever know what happened to John Lee?' At that point, he will invariably pop out from the bushes and yell, 'Nachos anyone?!' At first, it will scare the crap out of you. But then you'll share a laugh with your classmates and ultimately look forward to John jumping out of the bushes as a yearly event..."
Mobs Rule
(5) Find the item and stand around it. Unlike in MOB #1, where the participants were not to acknowledge one another, here you should greet even those you do not know. Talk among yourselves about the item and its relative merits and demerits. Only if you are blocked from seeing the item should you stray to examine other merchandise at the site.
(6) If you are approached by a salesperson, explain that everyone present lives together, in a huge converted warehouse in Long Island City, and that you
are there looking for a "[secret phrase]." Explain that you make all purchases as a group...
And so, earlier tonight, a mob of a couple dozen people showed up at Macy's to debate the merits of a $10,000 rug.
Randy, Describe Eternity
Every thousand years, this metal sphere, ten times the size of Jupiter, floats just a few yards past the earth. You climb on your roof and take a swipe at it with a single feather. Hit it once every thousand years 'til you've worn it down to the size of a pea. Yeah, I'd say that's a long time, but it's only half a blink in the place you're gonna be.
Where you gonna be? Where will you spend eternity? I'm gonna be perfect from now on.
I'm gonna be perfect, starting now.
[yeah, I've started listening to Built to Spill again.]
Matrix Madness!
My own geekness sometimes overwhelms even me at times. Times like right now, when, after enjoying a wonderfully exhausting essay on THE MATRIX RELOADED, I fired off the following email to its creator.
Beware: if you couldn't give a rat's ass about THE MATRIX and walk around wondering loudly what all the fuss is about, don't even bother reading any further. When I dive into a subject, I dive DEEP...
From: Eric Kurzenberger
Date: Wed Jun 11, 2003 10:13:01 PM America/New_York
To: btakle@charter.net
Subject: The Trinity function
Hey Brian,
I read and thoroughly enjoyed your essay, and I had a couple thoughts of my own that I just wanted to throw at you.
In the film, the Architect references Neo's "function" as a sort of reset device for the Matrix: random bugs build up in the system, and when they get to a certain point, Neo comes along and resets the whole thing to its beginning base setting. Neo's a human being who exists in the real world, but he ALSO fulfills a function in the Matrix: a program, in essence. And like any program, if he "crashes" (dies), he can be restarted. Agent Smith's infiltration of a human being (though we have yet to see how deep this infiltration is), is evidence that the connection between man and Matrix is much deeper than any of the humans in the film suspect, and how elements of the Matrix (and the mind) can override much of the base biological functions, especially in someone like Neo who is part man, part program.
Which brings me to Trinity. See, I think she is, unbeknownst to her, also part program, and that her creator may be the "Mother" to which the Architect is referring (because I don't believe it's the Oracle). My logic is this:
- Trinity fulfills a function, in that she aids Neo in his function of resetting the function, even going to far as to reset HIM (bringing him back to life in the first film). Her presence and assistance is what enables Neo to function ("They need you." "I need YOU.")
- Trinity provides her creator with direct, unfiltered information about the functioning and status of the Matrix. Any operating system worth its salt needs a program to monitor it, and Trinity, unlike the Oracle or the Agents, provides up-to-date feedback on the current operation of the Matrix, and how close it is to resetting.
- Trinity, like Neo, has died (crashed) and been reset. I don't believe that any of the other humans of Zion (even Morpheus) would be able to be revived from death, and I certainly have to believe the Wachowskis have a better explanation for the phenomenon than some kind of "love conquers all" puppy crap.
- Trinity gives her creator knowledge that is clearly desired by the machines: what it's like to love. Persephone's key role in the film seems to be to demonstrate that the machines are extremely interested in what love is, and how love drives human beings, and comments by the Architect only reinforce this. Trinity provides this information.
Thinking back on the the "sex scene" (which I don't believe was just an excuse to show some flesh), one of the things I remember standing out most was the focus on the sockets in Neo's and Trinity's skin: evidence of the machine in the man, the presence of the Matrix in their love.
Whew. Okay, I'm done. Sorry to unload on you, but I thought you might be interested. Again, great job with the essay.
Cheers,
Eric Kurzenberger
www.theforeignembassy.com
HTTF
The new Radiohead is good. Really good, in fact. I would almost go so far as to say it was superb. I would say even more, but I'm studying and exhausted and I would like to try to squeeze in one more episode of Buffy before I get to bed.
Sunrise
There's something indescribably Zen about flying in a taxi down the FDR along the East River, listening to Joy Zipper's "Check Out My New Jesus" on your iPod, in the moments just before dawn.
Then Sparklehorse's cover of "Wish You Were Here" comes on as you hit the Brooklyn Bridge and dawn breaks, as you know you've reached nirvana.
Ascension
For your viewing pleasure...I'm messing around with thumbnail images. Click it to see the big picture.
The Scar
"Nazis bad, kill that fucking teddy bear."
An excellent little story, with some perfect little drawings by fellow NYC weblogger Witold Riedel, who's got more artwork on his site. Good stuff.
Eclipsed
Photo of Saturday's annular eclipse, a phenomenon that occurs when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun but is too distant from the former to completely obscure the latter, causing a ring, or annulus, of sunlight to be visible. Neato.
[found on Die Puny Humans]
Stormy Weather
It's now been raining here in New York for roughly three months. And I, for one, am getting sick of it.
Hey, I'm not above the occasional rainy day, and I'm well aware of that April-showers=May-flowers thing. But April showers aren't supposed to start in March and run through to Junem and going by that equation, we're gonna have so many flowers this summer that they'll overrun cities and evolve into a new form of life.
I'm a sun person, see. I need sun. Yes, I know every other living thing on this planet needs sun, but really, I NEED it. These grey wet days affect me physically, psychically, metaphysically, you name it, and I get enough of 'em in a row, and I just get all screwed up. Unproductive. Unmotivated. Useless.
So when I woke up at eight-thirty this morning to the sound of dripping water, I figured, great, bring on another useless day, and was about to roll over and go back to sleep when I realized the dripping sound was a bit too close for comfort. And upon getting up to check it out, I discovered that Mr. Weather, having tired of wreaking havok on my psyche, had decided to kick it up a notch and invade my home as well. My ceiling was leaking. With gusto.
Now I'm writing on my kitchen table with my laptop, rather than at my desk with my desktop, since my desk was epicenter of The Leak. Luckily, I pulled my Quicksilver out of there before it got lost in the flood, and the damage, apart from the ceiling, appears to be minimal. But I'm not setting up at my desk again until I get the waterworks sorted out.
On a completely different note, tomorrow I may be guest-starring on LAW & ORDER.
Breakdown, Go Ahead and Give It To Me
I watched BREAKDOWN tonight. One of my personal favorites, esteemed member of a selection of films I like to think of as B-Plus-Movies: a B-Movie taken to a higher level by quality acting/concept/writing/all of the above. Doesn't aim higher than it should, doesn't pretend to be something it's not. Basically, a B-Movie done really, really well. JOY RIDE's one of the group. So's PITCH BLACK. If you need another example, look at pretty much anything John Carpenter did up until 1995.
Kurt Russell, you'll notice, is the King Of B-Plus Movies.
Anyway, I watched BREAKDOWN this time around mainly to be reminded of the structure of the film and how the story progresses. And, suitably, the story progresses like a Mack truck: starts up, builds momentum, then just plows right on through to the end. The story beats are clean, and each one is hit beautifully.
Here's how the first thirty minutes of BREAKDOWN goes...
Opens with Kurt and the missus in their shiny new Jeep Grand Cherokee on a drive through the desert, pleasant conversation setting up their relationship and situation (both of which feel perfectly genuine, thanks to some excellent dialogue). Kurt almost rams a black pickup truck that pulls in his path and has to do some dust-raising maneuvering around it, which serves the dual purpose of giving the audience a little jolt of what's in store and letting us know that Kurt's not a bad driver. Kurt and missus stop for gas and to let Kurt cool his nerves after the close encounter, but the stop only serves to extend the confrontation with the black pickup and its menacing driver, who pulls up alongside and gives Kurt some shit. A little rattled, but keeping his cool, Kurt and missus get back on the road, with Kurt putting on some speed to distance them from the black pickup as much as possible.
And then: the titular breakdown. Friendly trucker, played by the late, great J.T. Walsh, comes by and gives the missus a lift so she can call for a tow truck, while Kurt, worried that the black pickup will come by and mess with his ride, stays with the Jeep. After a little while and no pickup, Kurt gives the engine a thorough check, sees some plugs unplugged, and gets the thing running again. Drives up the road to the diner where he's supposed to meet the missus. She's not there, no one's seen her. Concerned, he heads for the nearest town, and on the way sees J.T. Walsh. After another adrenaline-pumping vehicular near-miss, he pulls over J.T., who now says he's never seen Kurt before in his life.
[This scene, incidentally, is directed perfectly and played brilliantly by Walsh. There's no sinister smile, no chilling music, no "Hey, that's my wife's shoe/necklace/dismembered finger in your truck!" In other words, no nod from the filmmakers to the audience to let us know that, yes, that is the same trucker, and He's Up To No Good. Walsh, in the scene, is confused but courteous, annoyed but helpful, as any innocent, reasonable person would be if he were suddenly accused of kidnapping. And as a result, we're as confused as Kurt.]
So, Kurt confronts J.T. J.T. comes back with the I-don't-know-you-from-Adam bit. Kurt flags down a cop, who searches the truck, then lets J.T. get on his way and advises Kurt to go into town and fill out a report. Which Kurt does, afterward stopping to stare despondently at the Missing Persons board, every available inch of which is filled with fliers. Then Kurt heads back to the diner to see if his wife has turned up, only to be turned away by the aggravated bartender at gunpoint after Kurt, desperate for evidence that his wife was there, attempts to grab the bartender's stack of receipts. Kurt, now at wit's end and seeing conspiracies everywhere he looks, heads for a phone to call the police again, then stops dead in his tracks when a local halfwit grease monkey says, Yeah, I saw your wife, and I know where she is. And then, confirming Kurt's conspiracy theories, the grease monkey drops the bomb that the police are in on it.
There's the first half-hour, which ends with Kurt running to his Jeep and taking off to the river, where he's been told he'll find his wife. In thirty minutes, we've watched Kurt narrowly avoid two high-speed collisions; be physically threatened twice, once at gunpoint; have his wife kidnapped; confront who he believes to be the kidnapper, only to learn that he may be wrong; have an encounter with the police; and learn of what appears to be a widespread conspiracy.
That's a good thirty minutes. Hell, you get the first near-collision, the introduction of the menacing black pickup, and the breakdown, in the first ten.
The point of all this, if you haven't guessed, is that I'm starting to work on another screenplay, and it's important for me to keep this stuff in mind.