Posts (page 2)

Which yet-to-be-released movie are you excited to see?

Speed Racer

I know a lot of people are ready to trash this but I'm dying to see it.  I loved the cartoons as a kid and I have had  a movie crush on Christina Ricci for a long time, so, yeah.  Speed Racer!

Have you ever been skinny dipping?

None of us had jacuzzis or we would have just gone home.  Instead, loaded up with booze and hormones, we climbed over the fence into the pool area of an apartment complex.  It was a spur of the moment thing, the kind of thing bored teenagers do to stave off the imminent intrusion of real life into our social group.  We were going to graduate this year and be split up into various small units and individuals as we made our ways to college, the military, or just real life.

The night was clear and beautiful, stars glowing down over the desert of my hometown and promise of achingly hot days to come under the cool breeze.  We shouted in whispers and helped the girls over the fence and stripped down to boxers or briefs, bras and panties, and we laughed at seeing each other thus.

The water was too hot and the bubbles were not quite powerful enough.  The wine was cheap and our moods were light.

Someone, emboldened by the alcohol and atmosphere took off a bra and threw it to the side.  Other garments followed until we were all exposed beneath the water, flushed and nervous and wondering how long it would be until we were caught.

Our conversation and voices and laughter grew louder and the security guard came to chase us away.  He turned his back while we dressed in sopping underwear and grinned when I shook his hand to thank him for being cool.

We piled back into cars and made for home, laughing still.

It's not often that epiphanies strike me while I'm in the midst of washing my hair but that's exactly what happened this morning.

See, I have what I like to call 'Merican hair.  In other words, I have dirty blonde (or dishwater blonde, whatever), straight, fine hair.  The kind of hair that women bleach, dye, curl, perm, highlight, streak, and style.  The kind that men resign themselves to the necessity of sporting either the Picard or the Kojak by the age of 40.  You know, plain, regular, hair.

Back in the day, somewhere in Jr. High or maybe my freshman year, I remember reading a piece on how to go from short to long hair or vice versa in a couple of years.  It may have been in Circus or Parade or Spin or some other music magazine.  I don't really remember and it's not important.  What is relevant is that this article showed one of the staff writers with eight different haircuts over the course of two years.  He went from very long, to kinda long, to shaggy, to styled, to short, to mohawk, to buzz cut, to shaved head.  So I started doing that in reverse.

Only I skipped the mohawk bit except for one time during the World Cup but I don't want to talk about that.

I started shaving my head and just letting it grow out, with one or two trims per year to give it a bit of direction and then left it long for as long (ba dump bump) as I could stand it, then out come the clippers and the process starts over.  It looks somewhat thuggish in the beginning and kind of shifty at the end, but in the middle, for a couple of months, it looks fairly respectable.  Hell, I even comb it for those few months.

And so in the shower this morning I realized that that is the perfect metaphor for how I live my life.  I'm too lazy to put in the work needed to maintain any one style for any significant length of time.  So I take the easy route, even knowing that it doesn't look that great and will earn me no respect.

Of course, now that I've realized this, I have no idea what to do about it.  Maybe it's time for a mohawk.

Trying to ease back into daily voxxing, but having a hard time finding the energy.  Still a bit drained from the past few months I think.  So, in lieu of a real post, I offer the greatest version of the greatest song ever recorded:

Proud Mary as done by Ike and Tina Turner.

Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium

So, I watched Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium the other day.  Don't look at me like that, I was on a nine hour flight across the Pacific.  I was desperate.

Anyway.

I really wanted to like this movie.  I really did.  I like odd, quirky, feelgood movies.  Especially ones whose main message is railing against the dying of the light and making every moment count.  I'm a sucker that way.  I mean, I like The Neverending Story.  Hell, I like Toys.  And I wish Emporium was of a rank with either of them.

Wonder Emporium did have a few noteworthy and memorable moments.  There are a few genuinely sweet moments, a few genuinely comic moments, and even a cameo that put a huge grin on my face.  It's just a shame that none of those moments had the movie's lead in them.  

The movie has three plots:  Boy must learn to make friends.  Girl must begin to believe in herself.  Man must rediscover his belief in magic.  And all three will do so with the help of an unlikely hero - Mr. Magorium.  Unfortunately, it doesn't really deliver on any of hem.  Much.  The standard elements are all in place and are all used well - you know the funny moment in the first act turns out to have emotional significance in the third; themes are presented with all the subtlty of a brick to the nose.

The trouble comes in that Dustin Hoffman, a capable actor in many respects, tried to play the title role as a version of Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka.  And the movie really needed Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka.

What I mean is, Depp's Wonka is an oddball who knows he's odd.  He knows that the rest of the world does not operate on the same mechanics that he does and so he pushes it further and further away until he is more clown than confectioner.  Wilder's Wonka, on the other hand, did not care if the world thought him odd.  He was perfectly content to run his factory, and by extension, his life, on his own terms and he thought only in terms of candy.

Magorium is weird and knows it.  He revels in it.  He speaks in deliberate non-sequiters, trying to impart an entire philosphers worth of wisdom into every quip and pun.  His eccentricities seem affectations rather than genuine discombobulation.  (It's a word.  Trust me.)

The movie sets up a contrast between the weird and wonderful Magorium and ultra straight laced Henry, played by Jason Bateman in the movie.  And here is where the above problem really begins to come through.  Bateman's journey is so entirely disparate from anything Hoffman does; rather, his journey is manifest through the store itself (and it is a character in itself, as well as being the best part of the movie).  

The ostensibly main plot, Natalie Portman's journey to believe in herself is one we've seen a thousand times.  And here, again, we need a restrained, genuinely odd Magorium, rather than the deliberate clowning Hoffman gives us.

The other plot I mentioned gets dropped more or less completely at the end of the film.  

The movie is worth...obtaining...if not buying or, really, even renting, if only to see the effects that have been put to marvelous use bringing the store to life.  But that's about it.  Dammit.

Two weeks in America:  L.A. to Vegas to L.A. to Yuma to L.A. to Oklahoma City to Nashville to Memphis to Nashville to L.A. and back to Japan.

I'm tired.

All I've wanted for the past two days was to get home and sleep in my own bed.  I've done that.  Now, six hours after a good night's sleep I'm bored and wanting to leave again. 

I'm pretty sure there is a condition called Compulsive Wander Disorder and I'm pretty sure I've got it.

Transistor Rodeo

Between eMusic Audiobooks and Podiobooks, I have more books to listen to than I do ones to read.  I've just finished up Nina Kimberly the Merciless by Christiana Ellis, which has left a bit of room in my download queue for two new books:  Jack Palms 2 - This is Life by Seth Harwood, and Transistor Rodeo by Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff.

I listened to the first two episodes of the new books this morning and they're both off to great starts.

What is your favorite quote and why?

"I still have a little whisky left
I still have enough stretchers to carry the dead
But I can't save the burning birds
And they are telling me
Singing is fire, singing is flame"

       -- Singing is Fire, by Charles Bukowski

Just because I do.

I'm catching up on a lot of reading and blogging I had set aside before being waylaid by a mega-evil-super-genius-cold bug, so bear with me if this is a little out-of-date, at least as defined by the interwebnets.

Cory Doctorow, of the red cape and goggles and high altitude blogging, has written an interesting piece for Locus Online about the realities of any one company putting together an ebook reader with the market pull and power of the iPod.

Doctorow points out that even companies with fantastic new products, like the Wii and the Kindle, have a hard time getting enough factory time in China because they are unable to compete with the companies hiring Chinese factories to make the everyday widgets we all rely on.  Because the companies are unable to hire the factories, they are unable to drop the price for the hardware.  Because they cannot drop the price on the hardware, fewer units get sold.  This, combined with dwindling number of people who read for fun, combine to leave ebook readers a niche market that lacks the power to change the industry in the ways the iPod has.

Naturally then, it's only now that I have started to really want one.

In the past two months, I have read four books off of my laptop.  That's four more than I had ever previously read off of a computer screen.  On the other hand, I spend an hour a day checking e-mail and reading blogs off of the same laptop.  And I read lots of comics off of here too.

But what I've realized is that I do not actually mind reading off of the screen, I mind reading off my laptop.  I use a iBook G4, with a 12 inch screen.  Most of my ebooks are in PDF format and I use Apple's native Preview application to read them.  The problem is, by the time I have a comfortable font size for extended reading, I have necessitated endless scrolling to the bottom of the page I'm reading, back up, and then down the next page, over and over again.

I know changing software can help but I have neither the time nor patience right now to search through dozens of PDF viewers, looking for the one that lets me read a book comfortably.  Rather, I want an A4 sized eBook Reader.  I do not really care if it uses LED or OLED or E-Ink, I just want a comfortably sized screen that is still somewhat portable that I can read a book from.  But I want it to run in color and I want it to work with multiple formats and I want it to be able to connect to the internet and download blog and 'zine posts.

In other words, I want a laptop with a vertically oriented screen.

Because, the thing is, due to the increasing number of legitimate ebooks placed online by publishers and authors looking to drag themselves out of obscurity, I am reading more books on my digital devices than I am on paper.  I find that I am saving my money (and, more importantly, my bookshelf space) for limited hardcovers and signed editions of the books I love while downloading newer books and books from authors I have never tried before.

So, I looked at the Kindle, and I looked at the Clie and neither of them seem to be there yet.  Neither does the MacBook Air, shiny as it seems.  None of them have that almost instantaneous perfect useability that the iPod or the Nintendo DS have.  None of them seem to be ready to do what I want them to do.

Which means, I guess, that for now, I'll keep reading on my laptop and I'll keep wishing for a decent ebook reader.