NOTES FROM (THE FIRST) FRIDAY AFTERNOON (OF THE YEAR)
declaring the candidacy of my
mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they’re sort of like all those already-broken New
Year's resolutions. But without all the guilt...
• Last night, I heard Patrice King Brown tease KDKA's 11 o'clock news with the promise that we would hear what some of the twelve dead West Virginia miners wrote in their last notes to their families, and I couldn't help but cringe. I realize that the deaths of those poor men is a big story. And I know that TWM favorite Dennis Roddy pulled off a crisp and tasteful front-page story about one of those notes in this morning's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. But I couldn't help thinking then, and I still can't help thinking now, that some things just don't need to go public. If those notes were written to and for their families, then I don't think we have a right -- and we certainly don't have a need -- to read them.
• When someone like Jack Abramoff goes down, I feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Does that make me a bad person?
• I didn't think so.
• Of the new year's many treats, an early favorite is this week's re-emergence of the great, bloggin' Blizz. Whether he's lamenting all the liberal idiocy he's lately received in the mail -- welcome to the club, my friend! -- catching up with Mike Brown on the mean streets and restaurants of Philly, or wondering how long it will be before the eco-terrorists join the holiday wars and urge us all to Take the Trees out of Christmas, his wicked wit and acerbic asides are keeping me entertained this week, just as they have for the last twenty years.
• I have, as this site so often attests, long been an unabashed fan and promoter and supporter of Apple's incomparable iTunes Music Store. I made my first two purchases (Neil Young's Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and The Clash's London Calling) within a few hours of its launch, I recently crossed the 600-song purchase-point, and I now consider it, with apologies to Paul's CDs in Bloomfield, my favorite place to shop for new music. But I am not uncritical. And it's clear to me that, with one of their latest additions, the good people at Apple have made their first major misstep. The "Customer Reviews" hopelessly clutter what used to be clean, elegant album pages. And worse, they provide absolutely no value, save for some unintentionally hilarious grammar and occasionally creative spelling, dividing, as they inevitably do, into two camps: the ones that tell you the album sucks and the artist sucks, and the ones that tell you the album and the artist are both one of the ten greatest of all time. Both types are generally written with the subtlety of a feather boa and the delicacy of a sledgehammer; their insipid gracelessness grates on me even when I agree with them. I'm no great fan of the iMixes or the "Just For You" feature either, but at least both of those can be easily avoided; the latter can even be turned off altogether. I've already written to the iTMS Customer Service folks and implored them to eliminate, or at least to render optional, this pointless feature. And I worry that, as the iTMS continues to add more content and drift ever closer to Amazon-style bloat and omnipresence, the programmers and publishers are forgetting that the lean, clean design of the store has always been one of its greatest selling points.
• If the driving abilities and general attitudes of all the people I see with OBX stickers on their cars are any indication, those letters stand not only for Outer Banks but also for Obnoxious.
• Here's one to send the Non-Result-Oriented Competition types screaming into the streets: the great new board game Zathura, which is a near-perfect replica of the board game in the Jon Favreau movie based on the Chris Van Allsburg book (got that?). If you navigate around the board and reach Zathura in time, you win. Simple. And like just about every other board game on the planet. But Zathura, unlike just about every other board game on the planet, has a bit of a mean streak. After every turn, you draw a card, and about three quarters of those cards send you backwards on the board. Or send a robot to attack you. Or dispatch Zorgon aliens to attack and destroy your home. There are defenses, of course, but not many. And if those attacks destroy all eight pieces of the house before someone reaches Zathura, the game ends, and everyone loses. That's right: Everyone loses. It's happened to us twice already, and it's insanely, insidiously great.
• I don't know of another family board game -- or, for that matter, another non-family board game -- in which it is possible for every player to lose. But considering the sinister fun I have playing Zathura, sometimes wanting everyone to lose even more than I want myself to win, there should be a few more. It adds a welcome dose of urgency to the proceedings, and it's a deliciously grim reminder that in life, as in at least one science-fiction-themed board games, there isn't always a guaranteed winner.
• Great Title of the Week, for both its primary pun and its wonderfully constructed subtitle, goes to the nattily designed travelogue book, Adventures of a Continental Drifter: An Around-the-World Excursion into Weirdness, Danger, Lust, and the Perils of Street Food.
• His critics, and they are legion, are using PSU Coach Joe Paterno's comments about an FSU player accused of sexual assault -- It's so tough...A cute little girl knocks on the door. What do you do? -- as evidence that he's a dinosaur who should just shut up and retire. What he said was certainly stupid and tasteless -- uh, gee, Joe, there are plenty of things you can do short of sexual assault, if that's what happened -- but there's been more than enough evidence for any non-blue-and-white-bleeding jury to convict him on charges of Mesozoic thinking for at least a decade now. It's a shame it took a little bit of good old boy misogyny to get everyone to notice.
• Though I am generally a proponent of college athletes honoring their commitments to their universities and actually (ahem) trying to finish their degrees, it seems to me that if Texas Longhorns Quarterback Vince Young has any interest in ever turning pro, the time is now. It's difficult to imagine, no matter what he might do next season, that his NFL Draft stock could ever be higher than after a 200-yard rushing, 267-yard passing, 15-point fourth-quarter-comebacking, eye-popping, jaw-dropping, mind-blowing performance in Wednesday night's Rose Bowl. That was the stuff of legend. And the source of one hell of a signing bonus.
• Only in the fiscally crazed, creatively bankrupt landscape of modern-day Hollywood filmmaking can a movie earn unanimously rave reviews, earn $173 million in its first three weeks of winter release, and still have the taint...of a loser. Though this is, I suppose, inevitable. It's what happens when you put accountants in charge of creating art.
• If you didn't see it in a movie theater this past summer -- and don't worry; not many people did -- I urge you to rent Wes Craven's cracker-jack Hitchcockian thriller, Red Eye, out this Tuesday on DVD. Suspense films, as one amateur critic and film buff wrote last August, don't come any more focused, any more efficient, or any more deliciously entertaining than this. (And that guy has impeccable taste.)
• A few months ago, I noted here that The Flight That Fought Back, the Discovery Channel's "reconstruction" and "dramatization" of the events aboard United Flight 93 on September 11th, 2001, was an awfully crass exploitation of the deaths of those poor passengers. And I stand by that assessment, even as I have to admit that portions of the trailer for Flight 93, a forthcoming feature film about those same events, are pretty damned haunting. My reaction to the entire trailer, however, only reinforces my point: the image of the air traffic control screen as it tracks the plane's erratic movement and eventual turnaround, coupled with the voices of controllers trying desperately to make contact with the pilots, gnaws deeply into your guts, but once the hijackers start shouting and the passengers begin to talk, the sense of grim reality recedes, and it's almost impossible -- for me, at least -- to ignore the fact that you're hearing imagination and melodrama masquerading as some sort of historical record. The director, Paul Greengrass, has made a couple of excellent films, and the no-name cast is certainly a wise choice. But I can't shake the feeling that this film, whatever path it takes, is painfully unnecessary. If it plays as a character drama, it will almost surely sag under the weight of its own considerable dramatic conjecture. If it plays as a fact-based account, a kind of dramatized history on film, it will seem like too much speculation delivered far too soon. If it plays as an action picture, no matter how well-made, it will feel like the basest kind of exploitation imaginable. Any way you play it, I can't possibly imagine that it will work.
• Of course, I could be wrong. I am, after all, the guy who thought that a film about a talking pig who thinks he's a dog, or one based on an old, cheesy Disney World ride, couldn't possibly work either. That's what happens, I guess, when you let teachers (and wordsmiths, and madmen) pre-judge art.
• Last night, I heard Patrice King Brown tease KDKA's 11 o'clock news with the promise that we would hear what some of the twelve dead West Virginia miners wrote in their last notes to their families, and I couldn't help but cringe. I realize that the deaths of those poor men is a big story. And I know that TWM favorite Dennis Roddy pulled off a crisp and tasteful front-page story about one of those notes in this morning's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. But I couldn't help thinking then, and I still can't help thinking now, that some things just don't need to go public. If those notes were written to and for their families, then I don't think we have a right -- and we certainly don't have a need -- to read them.
• When someone like Jack Abramoff goes down, I feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Does that make me a bad person?
• I didn't think so.
• Of the new year's many treats, an early favorite is this week's re-emergence of the great, bloggin' Blizz. Whether he's lamenting all the liberal idiocy he's lately received in the mail -- welcome to the club, my friend! -- catching up with Mike Brown on the mean streets and restaurants of Philly, or wondering how long it will be before the eco-terrorists join the holiday wars and urge us all to Take the Trees out of Christmas, his wicked wit and acerbic asides are keeping me entertained this week, just as they have for the last twenty years.
• I have, as this site so often attests, long been an unabashed fan and promoter and supporter of Apple's incomparable iTunes Music Store. I made my first two purchases (Neil Young's Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and The Clash's London Calling) within a few hours of its launch, I recently crossed the 600-song purchase-point, and I now consider it, with apologies to Paul's CDs in Bloomfield, my favorite place to shop for new music. But I am not uncritical. And it's clear to me that, with one of their latest additions, the good people at Apple have made their first major misstep. The "Customer Reviews" hopelessly clutter what used to be clean, elegant album pages. And worse, they provide absolutely no value, save for some unintentionally hilarious grammar and occasionally creative spelling, dividing, as they inevitably do, into two camps: the ones that tell you the album sucks and the artist sucks, and the ones that tell you the album and the artist are both one of the ten greatest of all time. Both types are generally written with the subtlety of a feather boa and the delicacy of a sledgehammer; their insipid gracelessness grates on me even when I agree with them. I'm no great fan of the iMixes or the "Just For You" feature either, but at least both of those can be easily avoided; the latter can even be turned off altogether. I've already written to the iTMS Customer Service folks and implored them to eliminate, or at least to render optional, this pointless feature. And I worry that, as the iTMS continues to add more content and drift ever closer to Amazon-style bloat and omnipresence, the programmers and publishers are forgetting that the lean, clean design of the store has always been one of its greatest selling points.
• If the driving abilities and general attitudes of all the people I see with OBX stickers on their cars are any indication, those letters stand not only for Outer Banks but also for Obnoxious.
• Here's one to send the Non-Result-Oriented Competition types screaming into the streets: the great new board game Zathura, which is a near-perfect replica of the board game in the Jon Favreau movie based on the Chris Van Allsburg book (got that?). If you navigate around the board and reach Zathura in time, you win. Simple. And like just about every other board game on the planet. But Zathura, unlike just about every other board game on the planet, has a bit of a mean streak. After every turn, you draw a card, and about three quarters of those cards send you backwards on the board. Or send a robot to attack you. Or dispatch Zorgon aliens to attack and destroy your home. There are defenses, of course, but not many. And if those attacks destroy all eight pieces of the house before someone reaches Zathura, the game ends, and everyone loses. That's right: Everyone loses. It's happened to us twice already, and it's insanely, insidiously great.
• I don't know of another family board game -- or, for that matter, another non-family board game -- in which it is possible for every player to lose. But considering the sinister fun I have playing Zathura, sometimes wanting everyone to lose even more than I want myself to win, there should be a few more. It adds a welcome dose of urgency to the proceedings, and it's a deliciously grim reminder that in life, as in at least one science-fiction-themed board games, there isn't always a guaranteed winner.
• Great Title of the Week, for both its primary pun and its wonderfully constructed subtitle, goes to the nattily designed travelogue book, Adventures of a Continental Drifter: An Around-the-World Excursion into Weirdness, Danger, Lust, and the Perils of Street Food.
• His critics, and they are legion, are using PSU Coach Joe Paterno's comments about an FSU player accused of sexual assault -- It's so tough...A cute little girl knocks on the door. What do you do? -- as evidence that he's a dinosaur who should just shut up and retire. What he said was certainly stupid and tasteless -- uh, gee, Joe, there are plenty of things you can do short of sexual assault, if that's what happened -- but there's been more than enough evidence for any non-blue-and-white-bleeding jury to convict him on charges of Mesozoic thinking for at least a decade now. It's a shame it took a little bit of good old boy misogyny to get everyone to notice.
• Though I am generally a proponent of college athletes honoring their commitments to their universities and actually (ahem) trying to finish their degrees, it seems to me that if Texas Longhorns Quarterback Vince Young has any interest in ever turning pro, the time is now. It's difficult to imagine, no matter what he might do next season, that his NFL Draft stock could ever be higher than after a 200-yard rushing, 267-yard passing, 15-point fourth-quarter-comebacking, eye-popping, jaw-dropping, mind-blowing performance in Wednesday night's Rose Bowl. That was the stuff of legend. And the source of one hell of a signing bonus.
• Only in the fiscally crazed, creatively bankrupt landscape of modern-day Hollywood filmmaking can a movie earn unanimously rave reviews, earn $173 million in its first three weeks of winter release, and still have the taint...of a loser. Though this is, I suppose, inevitable. It's what happens when you put accountants in charge of creating art.
• If you didn't see it in a movie theater this past summer -- and don't worry; not many people did -- I urge you to rent Wes Craven's cracker-jack Hitchcockian thriller, Red Eye, out this Tuesday on DVD. Suspense films, as one amateur critic and film buff wrote last August, don't come any more focused, any more efficient, or any more deliciously entertaining than this. (And that guy has impeccable taste.)
• A few months ago, I noted here that The Flight That Fought Back, the Discovery Channel's "reconstruction" and "dramatization" of the events aboard United Flight 93 on September 11th, 2001, was an awfully crass exploitation of the deaths of those poor passengers. And I stand by that assessment, even as I have to admit that portions of the trailer for Flight 93, a forthcoming feature film about those same events, are pretty damned haunting. My reaction to the entire trailer, however, only reinforces my point: the image of the air traffic control screen as it tracks the plane's erratic movement and eventual turnaround, coupled with the voices of controllers trying desperately to make contact with the pilots, gnaws deeply into your guts, but once the hijackers start shouting and the passengers begin to talk, the sense of grim reality recedes, and it's almost impossible -- for me, at least -- to ignore the fact that you're hearing imagination and melodrama masquerading as some sort of historical record. The director, Paul Greengrass, has made a couple of excellent films, and the no-name cast is certainly a wise choice. But I can't shake the feeling that this film, whatever path it takes, is painfully unnecessary. If it plays as a character drama, it will almost surely sag under the weight of its own considerable dramatic conjecture. If it plays as a fact-based account, a kind of dramatized history on film, it will seem like too much speculation delivered far too soon. If it plays as an action picture, no matter how well-made, it will feel like the basest kind of exploitation imaginable. Any way you play it, I can't possibly imagine that it will work.
• Of course, I could be wrong. I am, after all, the guy who thought that a film about a talking pig who thinks he's a dog, or one based on an old, cheesy Disney World ride, couldn't possibly work either. That's what happens, I guess, when you let teachers (and wordsmiths, and madmen) pre-judge art.
Posted: Fri - January 6, 2006 at 05:33 PM
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Published On: Nov 30, 2007 03:57 PM
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Published On: Nov 30, 2007 03:57 PM