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I was gonna post all this "the year that was" crap during this final week of the millennium's true initiation, but the impulse sublimed into other pursuits as the days encroached; which is just as well: writing by a forced hand is not unlike a shovel to the face -- no fun for the recipient. Ain't ya glad I didn't hit you in the face with a shovel? (Cue.)
A parting glance at what it's all about, what it's ever been about, from synthesis to photosynthesis, from a little girl's tempera paints to the hardest hardware in a cold, cold place: two images that couldn't be further apart in almost every sense, and yet compel the same conclusion. 2001 has turned out not to be a space odyssey after all, but rather the year "nine eleven" surpassed "seven eleven." And that hurts like ... well, a shovel to the face. Good riddance, bad year. 2002, I've got my eye on you. See you tomorrow. And thank you for being you. 12/31/2001 01:25:04 AM 0 comments A friend of a friend, photographically inclined, documented his stay in our fair city when he visited us a couple of weeks ago. I was finally getting around to some old emails tonight (if you haven't heard from me -- excavation continues, and may take several days), and I came across a couple of striking snaps, which I submit presently, and somewhat gratuitously. The season, like Sandburg's cat, has got my tongue. Actually, that's nothing like Sandburg's cat, barring the, um ... (mumble) ... something-something; however, I'll post more before the year kicks it: about movies, FD&C Red No. 3, and world peace. No joke. Stay tuned. 12/28/2001 02:46:16 AM 0 comments Spider-Man is beginning to look like a lot of fun -- promising a vibrant technicolor-but-not-tacky analogue to the more ashen Gotham of the Tim Burton Batman movies (the Joel Schumacher Batman movies are just franchise trash and needn't be lumped in with the former to mutual detriment); and while the visual effects seem a little undercooked in the QuickTime trailer -- perhaps an artifact of its presentation and the nature of video compression -- they appeared well on their way to being fantastic on the big screen when I saw the preview before The Fellowship of the Ring on Thursday. Do you want to know what I thought of Ring? 12/22/2001 06:35:38 AM 0 comments Typical exchange between the UPS delivery dude and myself: Dude: A small package today! Me: Hopefully it's something good! Dude: Well, you know what they say -- good things come in small packages! (Laughter.) At this point we almost high-five each other. Almost, but don't. And somehow no eye contact is made at any point during this exchange. UPS deliverymen love me. So do cab drivers. 12/19/2001 03:46:34 PM 0 comments I can't believe they actually made this. Yeah, I can. 12/18/2001 08:39:30 PM 0 comments I love David Fincher. 12/17/2001 10:24:51 AM 0 comments I can't make this shit up, early Sunday edition. (I'm reminded of a satiric piece Garry Trudeau wrote for Time several years ago. Same whiff of translation rot.) 12/16/2001 01:46:42 AM 0 comments What this photo doesn't show you is that they're waiting in line to sample the unexpected new taste of Mickey D's exciting Ranchero Bagel. S-s-salsa! (Oh, and here's the AP advisory on said photo.) Wouldn't it be funny if we went back in time and bought the island of Manhattan with modern tourist trinkets from NYC? The resulting temporal causality loop could join Schroedinger's Cat and Marisa Tomei's Oscar in the annals of improbability. 12/14/2001 01:08:24 PM 0 comments I should be working on ______________. 12/13/2001 05:26:42 PM 0 comments I can't make this shit up. 12/12/2001 11:04:02 AM 0 comments "The courier's dreams are made of hot metal, shadows that scream and run, mountains the color of concrete." (p.65) Most of what passes for creativity in my life these days, at the ass-end of 2001, occurs late at night. There's something about the darkness -- the pools of electric light, the white day-noise reduced almost to the level of bone induction and intuition -- that lends itself to industry. My days belong to the world. At night, the world belongs to me. "Renegade Fighter" is a pretty 12/12/2001 02:34:37 AM 0 comments "I'm surrounded by everything that we do, and so I can't just step back and let it flow over me," said Levin, who in nearly 30 years worked on various aspects of the media giant, including overseeing the merger of his Time Warner Inc. with America Online last year. "I've always loved the movies (but) I can't watch a movie now, because I know either we made (it), or who made it, (and) what it costs,'' he said. Shades of King Midas. Sort of. 12/11/2001 01:55:36 AM 0 comments There's a scene in The Claim where Milla Jovovich sings a song -- a fado, according to the production's lovingly thorough official site. It's one of those cinematic moments where you might say to yourself, "Yes, this movie works." And while Ms. Jovovich's phrasing may leave something to be desired, the overall effect within the context of the film is startling -- dark and raw, mournful, fatalistic -- all gaslight and grim firmament. In a rare lapse, the official site neglects to mention precisely which fado Ms. Jovovich sings. IMDb to the rescue: "Se Velha." A search for "Fado De Se Velha" at CDNOW yields this album, which contains a somewhat more plaintive rendition of the song (check out the second track). And what about the film? I saw The Claim last April and have scarcely heard tell of it since. It's unfairly overlooked -- a thoughtful retelling of The Mayor of Casterbridge set against the American Gold Rush, worth watching for three reasons in particular: Michael Nyman's haunting (if somewhat insistent) score; Alwin Kuchler's photography, by turns wintry-crisp and amniotic-incandescent; and Sarah Polley's performance. Polley is the rare actress who can put digital morphs and editing bays to shame with her ability to channel an entire flood of human sentiment into a single take, and with enviable restraint. The camera can just rest on her face and let the emotions work their alchemy. Gold rush, indeed. 12/10/2001 02:56:38 AM 0 comments In my younger days, whenever I used to meet new people, I would always mentally categorize them in terms of people I already knew. This reflex was largely unconscious, and accomplished along visual parameters; although I suppose temperament -- comportment, facial expressions -- impacted the outcome. Acquaintances were assigned archetypes, which in turn evolved over time, across the parallax of passing fancies and stirring intimacies. I don't really do that anymore, with the people I know. Maybe I've just stopped drawing comparisons or maybe no one really reminds me of anyone else anymore. It's very possibly the latter -- I see people differently than I used to, often and in many ways with greater clarity. It's part of growing up. But I still do it with strangers. Public places, open spaces, crowded thoroughfares -- eyes, noses, ears, mouths, chins -- faces of varying similitude buoyed along by commerce and serendipity, social currents, the collective unconscious, the blood of the city. In the deep structures of my brain, synapses fire, dendrites are traversed, and people are still categorized with respect, and unbeknownst, to one another, in the mind's never-ending compulsion for context. Faces recalling other faces -- faces all the way down. It reminds me of those memory games we used to play when we were little. There was one in particular, with these little plastic tiles that flipped up, where you had to remember which tiles concealed matching cartoon faces. I don't remember what it was called. 12/9/2001 04:25:41 AM 0 comments It's media boilerplate to say Carrot Top is annoying, but I'd like to escalate that: the dude is fucking scary. That killer-clown hair, those Baby Jane eyes -- scary scary scary. I always expect to see him wielding an axe (or a rough draft of Andrew Lloyd Webber's next musical, whichever) in those mirthlessly misguided 1-800-CALL-ATT commercials (which are second only to Clairol's Herbal Essences spots in their ability to spontaneously trigger miscarriages, epileptic seizures and hallucinations of violent sexual misconduct). I'm surprised ol' C-Top doesn't have his own children's series. It's a bad idea whose time has come. You heard it here first. 12/8/2001 04:34:12 AM 0 comments The Minority Report teaser is live. It's not particularly revealing, and the visual effects look rushed -- clearly slapped together for this preview, not indicative of the final product. It'll be interesting to see Steven Spielberg tackle Paul Verhoeven-ish future-schlock material, and a cropped-top Tommy Cruise is better than the alternative (with the potential exception of Vanilla Sky). Fun fact: the consistently crappy Jan de Bont was originally slated to helm this production. When he found out the 'Berg was interested, he deferred and took a producing credit instead. As it happens, the two reportedly didn't get along when these roles were reversed during the filming of The Haunting. 12/7/2001 11:55:33 AM 0 comments Ya just gotta love Mariah Carey's military togs. She's packing some heat, booooy. Both barrels cocked. There are days when celebrity caricature is strictly "no assembly required," spontaneously arranging itself like amino acids in some Precambrian tidal pool. [Insert bad bazooka pun here.] 12/6/2001 12:49:29 AM 0 comments Ocean's Eleven doesn't bow till this weekend, but Nathan Rabin's review in The Onion sums up the vibe I've been getting from the marketing campaign: "Ocean's Eleven is fun to watch, but slightly too hip, a little too knowing, and much too impressed by its own familiar brand of post-Tarantino cool." While I generally enjoy Steven Soderbergh's films, there's a smug undercurrent to his work that always bugs me ... even as a similar self-satisfaction emanating from the likes of David Fincher and Paul Thomas Anderson does not. Go figure. Actually, now that I think of it, I guess it's because whereas Fincher and Anderson, at least on some level, so clearly want you to like their films, Soderbergh seems to release his with a more laissez-faire attitude -- at least on the surface. This quote from The Secret History comes to mind: I was charmed by his conversation, and despite its illusion of being rather modern and digressive (to me, the hallmark of the modern mind is that it loves to wander from the subject) I now see that he was leading me by circumlocution to the same points again and again. For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive. (p.28)The casual-cool Soderbergh of Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich and now Ocean's seems somewhat disingenuously at odds in my mind with the painfully self-conscious film-student Soderbergh of Kafka, The Limey, and Traffic. Then again, Anderson is directing an Adam Sandler movie. And Fincher almost directed The Mexican. (Glad he dodged that bullet.) Furthermore, Oreo Pudding Snacks taste nothing like Oreos. 12/5/2001 12:09:59 AM 0 comments I just shouldn't be allowed in grocery stores. This evening I accidentally decapitated (yes, decapitated -- don't ask) several Bosc pears, spattered rosemary-garlic new potatoes all over the salad aisle, and came thisclose to flooding the wine and spirits section with Evian. Just for good measure, I steered way clear of the pies, sacks of flour and Gouda wheels. The city is getting decked for the holidays. The vertex of the Transamerica building now oscillates red, white and green, for once festive and not sinister. Various structures in the financial district are lined with lights, their axes redolent of Tron. Our fabled trolleys are likewise festooned with bulbs, albeit some less successfully than others, conveying nothing so much as an infestation of electric lice. 12/4/2001 01:08:36 AM 0 comments I want one. I feel uncharacteristically bandwagon even talking about this, but the Segway (aka, Ginger, IT) could be a Big Deal. It's elegant, elemental and intuitive -- a troika that's increasingly rare in, if not entirely absent from, most end-user technology. I would love to see cities "architected" around a paradigm of environmentally benign low-impact personal transportation. The thought conjures faintly utopian images of citizens scootering about tinkertoy metropolises on space-age velocipedes. Admittedly, the Segway is not a time machine or warp drive or mimetic polyalloy or whatever else people facetiously conjectured Dean Kamen was cooking up in his lab -- or even a hover board, for that matter; but it's so much better, see, because it's real, it's here, it works -- and it's just enough of a recognizable evolution from current modes of transportation that I don't think it'll scare people off. It's smart. And did I mention I want one? Meanwhile, in other small step/giant leap news, NASA is inching forward on a proposed Pluto mission. This is a good thing. Also: The Looper song from the Vanilla Sky trailer is, appropriately enough, stuck in my head. It's got an Atari Lynx-ish MIDI background track that makes me nostalgic for 1990. It's still raining, by the way. 12/3/2001 02:36:15 AM 0 comments It's raining yet again. Perfect overdue-email-response weather. 12/1/2001 12:52:23 PM 0 comments December. 12/1/2001 12:28:26 AM 0 comments |
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