Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Saturday, January 29, 2005 The Pitch: It's Still like The Sorrow meets The End! Finished Metal Gear Solid 3 last night after dinner: liked it so much, I may go back and play again as there are all these little extras I'm obsessed with finding and completing. Then onto the end of GTA, and then that's it. Except for maybe a rental of The Punisher. And maybe Mercenaries. And then that's it. But what about when that sequel to Champions of Norrath comes out next month? Arghhhh...Edi and I watched the "uncut" version of Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. From what I can tell, they cut maybe twenty seconds of this for the theatrical release, so I'm glad I got this used & cheap. The movie completely comes apart at the end (it would've helped if the marketing people had kept a lid on Demi Moore's role in the flick since the whole thing is angled really well to be a surprise; but frankly, the weirdo lesbian/mirror/"I'm like you, you're like me" scene with Demi and Cameron made absolutely no sense anyway) but there's a lot to like here: Cameron Diaz's genuine amusement whenever she goes into "sex kitten" mode; Justin Theroux's hilarious-yet-scary-yet-hilarious villain; Cameron Diaz's genuine amusement whenever she starts rolling her butt; those anime-derived close-ups in the utterly absurd dirt-bike race; and etc. I haven't dipped into all the "bonus features" yet, but I like where McG and his producer pal talk about why they picked the songs they used in the film. Listening to the producer pal, a mopey thirty-something dressed like a mopey twenty-something, use words like "banging" to describe songs is one of the sublime delights of cinema--I can't help but imagine him giving date-rape drugs to seventeen year olds every time he opens his mouth. Oh, and hey! I've got a theory about Franz Kafka. I was re-reading Introducing Kafka by David Zane Mairowitz and Robert Crumb and I noticed something really interesting that might explain a lot about Franz K. So now I have to figure out if I dig in my heels, do shitloads of research, and try to write an academic article that will likely be either unpublished or obscure, or just blab about it in my blog and get it out there. I'll let you know which one I choose. I am utterly messed up with regards to time: ten days ago, I couldn't believe it was still only mid-January. Now, I am stunned that the month is over so soon. Now it's time for Edi's birthday, Valentine's Day, and the fear and loathing an upcoming tax day always inspires me. Sounds "banging," no? Work has come in, and both of my co-workers--both of them!--are at lunch. How two men who start work two hours apart can take lunch within twenty minutes of each other is a mystery I can't begin to unravel (not with work sitting in front of me, anyway). I'm almost hoping they're having sex in a closet somewhere--that way, I can pretend I'm not the only one getting screwed. posted by Jeff | 6:14 PM | Thursday, January 27, 2005 The Pitch: It's like The End meets The Sorrow! Yes, after a certain amount of trauma, the new monitor has arrived. It seems pretty keen and I'm looking forward tomoving it into position, but at the moment, I've got two computers on my desk, side-by-side, and laboriously copying files from one to the other. I'm in the home stretch, however: just an assload of pictures, maybe a few more music files, and this new computer will be ready to take over (provided I can get all of its problems with my palm pilot and USB hub taken care of). The great thing about new monitors is they are their own juicy little product: I could hook it up to the old computer and pretend I've got a hot new and competent computer. Sadly, I'd just be pretending.I'm stuck on the final battle for Metal Gear Solid 3--a ten minute duel with the boss in this glade of pale gorgeous flowers. As the two of you run about and hi-yah each other, petals are displaced and spin into the air. It's lovely, silly, and sad, just like you'd want from a Japanese video game. Ooops. my USB card is filled up. Gotta get back to the tedium that is file transfer. More, I hope, later. posted by Jeff | 5:03 PM | Wednesday, January 26, 2005 The Pitch: It's like That Obscure Object of Desire meets Awful Skate (or, The Hobo on Rollers)! Inspired by Tim's DVD list, I took the time today to download that same software and index my own DVD collection. Tim's got fifty more movies than me, and infinitely better taste. I'm having fun comparing his collection to mine--how weird is it that we each only have one Lord of the Rings movie? He has The Thing and Assault on Precinct 13; I have Escape From New York and Dark Star; he has Blue Velvet and I have Mulholland Dr.; he's got Boogie Nights and I have Magnolia & Punch-Drunk Love. The collections seem to underline how similar and yet very, very different we are--the collections of two people doomed to agree generally and disagree specifically. (Or maybe not--I want Boogie Nights and blue Velvet and Assault on Precinct 13 as well...) Although looking at his collection makes me realize some of my films have been misplaced. I know we bought the same Aaronofsky two-pack so I should have a copy of Pi around here somewhere, for example...That's all. Nothing much more sophisticated to say than that. Out of the six used Bollywood movies I bought, only one doesn't seem to work with my DVD player. If I get a chance I'll test it on the PS2 and see if I have any better luck. Metal Gear Solid is kicking my ass. And my new monitor shows up tomorrow, which should allow me to take a huge step forward in transferring the rest of my old computer onto the new one. posted by Jeff | 8:05 PM | Tuesday, January 25, 2005 The Pitch: It's like Saturday Night Fever meets That Video for Dangerous Minds! Another reason to pre-emptively hate Be Cool: they turned Andre from Outkast into a dead ringer for Coolio! I have pictures--I will try to post later.In other thrilling news, Oscar nominations were announced this morning. I knew Paul Giametti wouldn't get nominated for Sideways since it's far too much of an "indy" film, but damned if he wasn't screwed by not getting picked, anyway. As is pretty much usual, I've seen almost none of the major nominated films (I counted four, and if we hadn't seen Collateral in the hotel in Reno, it would have been three) and probably won't see many more. I mean, Three biopics for Best Picture? Bleah. And it seems to me there's a nine-hundred pound gorilla Hollywood doesn't want to acknowledge and it's called Pixar: The Incredibles isn't nominated for best picture but Finding Neverland is? To quote Ralph Wiggum: That's unpossible! (pop-ups galore on that last link--sorry about that.) And yet, despite my general ignorance of most of the movies, I will put down cash money here and now that Clive Owen will take Best Supporting Actor. There is a chance Jamie Foxx will get a pity-fuck Best Supporting Oscar since he'll never, ever, ever, ever get it for Ray (because I think Johnny Depp is in the bag for Best Actor already) but back in the day, when Supporting Oscars went to those who deserved 'em, it'd be Clive in a heartbeat and a half. Still will, I bet. Another thing to keep in mind: Miramax is on its way out--will it try for one last mighty Oscar push, pulling out every god-damn trick in the book to get Oscars for its films? Or is it too under-funded, a shadow of its former self (and yet, behind the scenes, still as widely loathed as ever) and in many cases checkmated by having The Aviator and Finding Neverland nominated for so many of the same awards? At this point, I would say Depp and Scorsese will win on their own "merits," (and probably Blanchett, too) and Million Dollar Baby might take Best Picture as a farewell fuck-in-the-neck to Harvey Weinstein. But we'll see. We'll see. posted by Jeff | 8:40 AM | Monday, January 24, 2005 The Pitch: It's like Shorter meets Much Shorter! Saw some print ads for Be Cool on my way to work--there's this one boarded up store front along Mission where the bill-posters go nuts--and I have to say, it looks like it should be called Be Crap: John Travolta has squandered any good will I had ever given him because of Pulp Fiction and the like, and now must pay me to see his movies. In cash.I have no updated in forever, ever, ever. Because of some health stuff going on in Edi's family, I amy not have much time and/or inclination to update this page, so briefly, here's my usual batch of More Updates About Buildings and Food: Bollywood Engorgement: I am a happily bloated tic on the formerly fat underbelly of Bollywood cinema. Not only did I go see Elaan last week at the Naz Super Eight; not only did I surreptitiously snap pictures at the screen in an attempt to get a photo of my beloved India Film Certificate (I've been too scared to see if they turned out); not only did I find myself, on the way home, in front of the former beloved sight of the original Naz Super Eight (a rectangle of rainwater where only the foundation remains, colors of the traffic lights skittering on the surface like water bugs); but I bought an absurd amount of used Bollywood DVDs from the nail salon/video store across from the new Naz. Like, eleven Bollywood DVDs. I am unable to properly convey how happy this makes me--the closest I can come is to admit that, when I'm in the living room and can't make myself happy by looking at Edi, I look to the shelf with the Bollywood DVDs and feel a warm avaristic thrill. Video Entropy: Of course, the reason why Edi usually isn't in the living room is because my video game playing has driven her from it. I've jumped from playing GTA: San Andreas to Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater which, wacky controls aside, may be my favorite of the three PS/PS2 Metal Gear Solid games. The boss battles are wonderful--apart from the inevitable fuckin' battle with the Metal Gear, which made me play for literally half an hour after I wanted to quit just because it's such a pain in the ass and something I never, ever want to do again. I have taken a secret oath that, after completing both GTA:SA and MGS:SE to not play any video games for six months after completion. I'm putting it down in writing. Black lotus eating is pleasant up to a point, but I've got stuff to do. Updates About Updating Updates: I have not uploaded my last three Fanboy Rampages for the Comix Experience site. Nor have I updated my Bio page, my list of top movies, and my photos for Lazy Bastard. And the reason for this is that I have lost my FTP passwords for both sites and forgotten them because I used them so infrequently. One of this week's goals is to call my ISP and sheepishly ask for a password reboot. Please don't tell Hibbs. Buildings and Food: I am back on the diet thing and, apart from last week, have been doing okay with it. But, weirdly, my current food fixations these days are for spinach and yams: I cannot tell you how I got started on either, but I am totally into throwing yams in the oven and then eating them piping hot and soft and smeared with butter, and I'm into thawing frozen spinach and then throwing it in a bowl with ponzu sauce and bonito flakes. I think my system has decided the only way to survive this year's bout of seasonal affective disorder is to lay heavy on the iron and Vitamin A. As for buildings, I am currently gaga over The Castro Theatre, very much like the Cartoon Art Museum and can see the charms in the Green Room at the War Memorial Building. I need a new book, as it's taken me ten days to get ten pages into The Remains of the Day. I don't want to reread Pynchon's V for what must be at least the fourth time, but I do, but I don't. Please help. Wha? I thought this was going to be short, dammit! P.S. To cross at least two of these threads, I got up to pee the other morning and came back to bed with the realization that the only way to properly adapt Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections for the screen is to do it as a Bollywood musical. This actually came on the heels of trying to figure out which Shakespeare play would make the best Bollywood musical, for which I still have no decent answer. posted by Jeff | 5:58 PM | Saturday, January 08, 2005 The Pitch: It's like The Four Stars meets The Five Anxieties! Rather than write the rather sizable essay sure to emerge about owning an Ipod (pending more research to see if there's anything even remotely new to say about such a played-out topic), I thought I'd write a bit about the rating system on the Ipod.Unknown to me until a few days ago, the Ipod has a rating feature that allows you, with a few pushes of the big white button and a spin of the thumb, to rate the songs on your Ipod from one to five. Then, with Itunes, you can create quick playlists based on the ratings. I find this pretty irresistible, and have just inched over the 10% mark of rating my songs (I've ranked 550 out of the 4781 tunes currently on the damn thing), but weirdly it's been a source of considerable subliminal anxiety. For example, although these ratings are for my own use only, I have given no song more than four stars. This is my first point of anxiety: even though I'm ranking the music for my own appreciation only, I find myself resisting the pull of the five star rank. A five star ranking is for a classic song, I guess, but classic for whom? Subscribing to the suspect conception of the true and beautiful being universal, I'd like to believe that a five star song is one I can play for almost anyone and they'd enjoy it, or, since this list is only for me, a song I could play at any time and I'd always enjoy it. Maybe because I find this definition a little eyebrow raising, I've avoided the five star rating altogether. I imagine, by the way, I'm going about this the way other people do: I have the Ipod shuffle the songs and then rate each song as it comes, rather than listening to, say, all the songs on an album or by an artist and rating the songs in turn. While I can see how some Ipod listeners might have an album of nothing but five star hits (someone who's filled their collection strictly with their favorite songs grabbbed through Kazaa or some other p2p network, or with Audiogalaxy or Napster back in the day), most people's collections would comprise largely of albums and few albums, I think, are nothing but a collection of five star favorites. Most albums have a balance to them: a few standout favorites, several well-liked tunes, some dross, a few clunkers. (And one of the great things about listening to an album repeatedly is how that curve changes, like waves: a new album starts out with such a balance, then grows on repeated listenings to having all the songs become favorites, then recedes to the original curve, but this time with different stand-out favorites and well-liked tunes.) So, let's say an album has fifteen tunes on it: that might be three favorites, six well-liked tunes, four drossy forgettable tunes, and two tracks you just can't stand. Applying this fast and sloppy math, let's say 20% of the songs from all your albums will be your standout favorites. For me, ranking 500 songs already (more sloppy math--I'm rounding down) means I should have 100 songs that are my favorites: four star songs at least, if not five stars. And yet, if I had to guess (and I do since I haven't synched up with Itunes to see the results of my work), I think I've picked maybe 30 tunes out of 500 as four star songs. So, does most of my music suck? Or do I suck? I've wiped out the five star rating for a defintion I might not actually believe in, and now the four star rating is barely applied. There are, as always, a couple of qualifications here: I downloaded a lot of albums from Emusic, often without hearing them. When Emusic offered unlimited downloads, it was easier to download an album, listen to it and then delete it, than to listen to the samplers, and put it on my list of possible downloads. But, of course, me being me, I frequently would download the music and then not get around to listening to it. If I did this with a high enough number of albums and if the Ipod's shuffle function is truly random, then there's a chance that the random selection will be frontloaded with songs I consider dross. And if you assume I'll generally like a song I consider dross by an artist I'm familiar with more than a dross song by an artist I don't, those odds go up. But there's the anxiety. Either my music sucks or I suck. Maybe I'm a fickle music fan, or I have bad taste and I can only tell it now that I'm listening to each song freed from the context of the album, the CD, and the resulting nagging need to like an album (because I just spent money on it). Another anxiety? In order to listen to and rank all the songs, I'm not listening to each song in its entirety, frequently assigning a ranking in the first six of seven seconds and then moving on. After all, 4700+ songs is something like 52 continuous days of listening. That's a tall order, the idea of which fills me with nausea and so I'm doing what a pal of mine did when he assigned music to reviewers for a large music zine--I'm skimming, skimming, skimming. But whereas the albums he assigned then got more complete listens before they got reviewed, some potentially great songs are surely being underranked. If I think a song has potential in the first six seconds, I'll scroll through the song to the one and two minute songs to see if the song is blossomed, seems even more interesting: it's amazing how much music, in this slapdash way, sounds all the same--not that each song sounds like every other song, but that each second of the song sounds so much like every other second. Where's the growth, where's the movement? Again, anxiety. What would I give some of my favorite Brian Eno songs if I was first encountering them this way? Ambient? Techno? Rap? And in fact, most of those I've come across so far have rarely cracked three stars unless I'm really familiar with the tune already. Am I not just robbing certain songs of the full opportunity to make their case, but also discriminating against entire genres in my approach? Speaking of discrimination, here's a nice set of conjoined anxieties: I feel bad when I give women artists two stars or less (similarly, anything less than three stars for an African-American artist). And then, of course, I feel anxious if I give songs by either three stars or more, because I worry I'm doing so not because of the song's merits but just to avoid the anxiety of confronting my own biases. Related to this is my awareness that, Joanna Newsom aside, most of my four star songs have been by white males, and the resulting anxieties there. The first anxiety being, of course, the white male factor, and the second, related to Ms. Newsom, that I'm ranking her songs higher because I'm just now discovering her work and am ga-ga about her album, Milk-Eyed Mender. Where is the test of time? Yet, conversely, there are many other songs I pick as four stars I picked sheerly out of sentimental familiarity. Is Beck's "Beercan" really four stars? Or does it just rank higher than, say, a lot of songs off of Paul Westerberg's Folker because I remember shaking my butt to it and laughing with my friends to it when I was young(er)? Finally, the last anxious consideration: with all these anxieties, why bother? I'm sure there's some fine psychological term for an activity that is pursued to relieve the anxiety the pursuit of such an activity causes. (For some reason, the term "graduate school" comes to mind.) I'm sure some of these anxieties are caused or exacerbated because I do, as a hobby, review comics and movies on the web and try to do so responsibly--some of that is sure to bleed into the world of "personal" reviewing. A lot of this anxiety goes away when I remind myself that I can always adjust a song up or down when I encounter it later, and that these ratings are just for me, not to be seen, not to be shared. But I kind of marvel at the vast number of deranged clowns that have popped out of such an charming little car. I wonder if this has happened to others. posted by Jeff | 7:18 PM | Sunday, January 02, 2005 The Pitch: It's like Poetic meets Justice! Ain't nothing worse than a blog entry (after such a long time!) where some guy whines about how good he's got it. If you feel the same, I advise you to skip this entry.Back at the end of October, Edi got me a stupendously wonderful birthday gift. So stupendously wonderful, it was both my birthday and Christmas gift. So stupendously wonderful, in fact, I couldn't use it. It was, of course, an Ipod, which of course you can totally use on your PC provided your PC has (a) Windows XP, and (b) the PC has firewire and/or USB 2.0. And, of course, with my creaky old computer, it was (a) nope, and (b) nope again. It says something kinda horrible about how fast time flies when you're old that it's suddenly the end of the year, and I'm still trying to scrimp and save for a new computer when Edi's cousin calls and announces he's just bought a new computer and would I be interested in his barely two year old one? For a small fee? So since yesterday, I've been tinkering with a new (for me) computer and of course the first thing I do is load all 40 CD's of burned music from some back up years and years ago. And then spend forever trying to figure out how to load it into Itunes. And then load it. And then spend forever loading it onto the Ipod. And then, finally, at about midnight last night, I held up my new Ipod, loading with 20 gigs of tunes (51.9 days of continuous playing, Itunes helpfully informs me), listened to it for about half an hour and went to bed, where Edi had been sleeping for approximately the last half-hour. And this morning, probably the very first thing I do is break out the Ipod and start trying to assemble playlists, looking for favorite songs, etc., etc., and of course they're nowhere to be found. Because I've loaded up the Ipod with everything, and it's all the stuff I backed up a year and a half ago, and meanwhile there's all the stuff I actually listen to, stuck on my tiny, slow computer (to say nothing of all my writing, photos, websites, etc.) and I have to figure out how to transfer it off. Everything but the new music should be pretty easy--the writing will go on one CD-Rom, the photos may take up another three or four, I have no idea how the hell I'm going to move all the music. A lot of it, I think, I can simply re-download from Emusic but that'll take some time. And then there's stuff that I burned to the hard drive and then sold the CD so if I don't figure out what it is, and then pull it from the old computer, it's gone. And maybe this will change but it looks like I'm not going to listen to The Best of Uz Jsme Doma or Blip-Hop Generation Vol. 2-6 on the Ipod any more than I listened to them when they were on my computer fresh off of Emusic. I really need to go through and trim down a whole lot of this stuff after all the hours I spent putting it on. I'd like to think of myself as a hip connoiseur of music, but transferring all this music to the Ipod has shown me my actual self: an avaricious music glutton, willing to wear the sloppy bits that have flecked off onto his shirt as medals of honor and achievement. posted by Jeff | 10:21 AM | |
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