The Day I Had

Yesterday:

Random band and movie names

Some band names:

I find your concern for the environment amusing

NOTE TO HOTELS: Please know that when I find your little sign in my hotel room inviting me to opt out of getting fresh linens every day in order to be more environmentally friendly, that first I utter a little laugh, and then I immediately go into the bathroom and throw every single ratty, threadbare towel and washcloth onto the floor.

Then I call down to the front desk to have a complete fresh set brought up.

How inspiring that you have made the environment a priority. And pardon my cynicism, but I am now moved not to save Mother Earth but to go to the bed, strip all the sheets off, including the pillowcases, and drop them in a knotted heap outside the door. Hello, front desk? My bedding wasn't very crisp. Please see to it that it is replaced immediately.

Your earnest prayer for the trees is especially amusing when it is found in an establishment of the "Quality Inn" grade, where the towels are only slightly thicker than the toilet paper, and sized not for human beings but apparently for the wee folk of legend.

How convenient that your new-found corporate responsibility to the environment is perfectly aligned with a way to give me less for my money! What a lucky break for you, and also your new friend Gaia!

Even the damn Lorax would roll his eyes at your "Be Green" placard, and then he'd make sure to use four towels per shower - one to dry off, one to wrap around his waist, one to wrap around his head, then another to supplement that dust-rag you're calling a bath mat. Then he'd soak the rest in the tub for good measure.

Christ, the friggin' Ents from Lord of the Rings would make a fart noise when they read your note, and then they'd steal a big stack of towels and washcloths from the housekeeping cart and throw them into the parking lot out of spite.

Kill Bill Marathon Update

It seems to have stopped for now. No information yet on what may replace it in the one-slot hit parade over there.

Climb On, Garth

There is a place near here called "Rockreation" where they have a warehouse full of two-story simulated cliff faces for you to climb and hang from. The "cliff walls" go up at several angles - slightly sloped, straight up, some that curve right above your head. Covering everything are multi-colored hand- and foot-holds that look like giant pieces of chewing gum left to harden.

For $40 they showed a friend and I the ways of climbing, including how to put on the harness, how to tie the knot that your life depends on, how to "belay" on the ground so that your partner doesn't plummet to his great injury, and the "universal commands" that could theoretically be used with a partner in any country where they do this sort of thing - you say "on belay," he says "belay on," which means "I'm watching;" You say "tension," he says "tension on," which means "I've got you." When you are starting you say "climbing," and partner responds "Climb on." (And sometimes adds "Garth," or at least I did.)

And there is that most obvious of terms, "falling," which means "oh shit," which I failed to use today at a very appropriate moment.

Included in the $40 is a week's worth of coming in and free rentals and all that. We've been back three nights so far, to get our money's worth but also because it is super fun. What could be more fun than climbing all over things and hanging from ropes and the like?

But in contrast to that, it's also quite a few steps outside my comfort zone. I'm not super athletic - but I'm not a total slouch. Let's call what I am "formerly active." But it was a surprise to launch myself excitedly up some hand-holds on one of their "boulders," get ten feet off the ground, and find myself thinking "oh no."

One minute you can be on the ground thinking how easy a climb is going to be, and the next minute you can be half-way up, your arm muscles quivering, more than a little anxious, suddenly thinking, "I didn't notice this slight pitch outward from down there, WOW are these handholds tiny, and oh crap."

It took three days to figure out that I wasn't going to fall to my death; today I confidently went for a handhold, missed, and fell. Luckily my friend was on the ball with the rope and I only dropped about a foot. This served to both instantly clear my sinuses and also give me a tad more confidence that I wasn't in much peril.

Surrounding us this week have been people who are far, far better at it than us. They are hanging everywhere, they are suspended upside-down from the ceiling, they're dusting their hands with chalk, shouting encouragement to one another, making it all look very easy, like they've all been passing around radioactive spiders. There was one girl who we have seen the last three times who could easily ride along with Batman, such are her skills. I think of these people as the zero body fat brigade.

The best thing I can say about the place is how inviting the whole thing has been. I'm sore, I always get scared more than once when I'm there, but we've gone back every night. I know they're trying to get our membership money but usually with athletic stuff it feels really closed off. I have an unfortunate attitude problem about this kind of thing (Coach Dudley was right) wherein I need a special balance of humor, seriousness, and patience, or forget it. I can't tolerate much machismo, hence the result that I have very rarely played group sports.

But this hasn't been like any of the Big Three Games, where you were always expected to know ____ball and love it. To my surprise, despite the grunting and intensity of the Experts - these are people that have the t-shirts, the gear, the lingo, the magazine subscriptions - they're all very inviting and interested in helping us. Special thanks go to the man I was partnered with when I was learning to belay - holding the rope so that he didn't fall. For some reason I was having a bit of a problem with the little hand motion that allowed you to always keep a hand on the rope. Rather than smack me across the face, he patiently waited for me to get it, showed me the trick, and then climbed on, while I kept him from falling.

Kill Bill Twice A Day

It's another morning which means our next-door neighbor will be watching "Kill Bill" in a few minutes. I can expect to hear the opening strains of Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang" every day around 8 or so, which puts the Quincy Jones "Ironside" excerpt about 15 minutes later, then Darryl Hannah whistling the Herrmann theme, then Uma's shriek upon waking up in the hospital about five minutes after that, etc.

On days that I work from home I have noted that he will sometimes watch the movie twice. This is a man who we see rarely even though he lives next door, who must be in his sixties, who always smiles and says hello as he goes past, who I think works part time somewhere. And his TV is next to his window which is next to our window, and he keeps his front door open, so whatever he's watching on TV, we're watching as well through the front and back of the apartment.

But what to make of his twice-daily viewings of "Kill Bill?" I have noted this trend for at least a month. Think about that: the same movie twice a day for a month. There is no movie on my top ten list that I would watch that frequently.

First of all, let's stop and realize how much worse it could be. God, imagine if this guy was getting his daily fix from "City of Angels" or "Tomcats." Words would be exchanged, threats made.

But every day that it repeats, our perplexity increases, our curiousity grows. It's like discovering a little geyser that goes off faithfully every day in your yard. You're amused, you're confused, you're amazed. "AGAIN? You're KIDDING!"

I suspect what is going on is not a super-extreme case of Tarantino fandom but a little bit of the ol' OCD, Lord love him. I think maybe the world of kung fu and violence and the Zamfir pan flute may cause him to go into a bit of a reverie. I suppose that's what playing Galactic Battlegrounds or Rise of Nations for hours at a time does to me.

And man, it could be SO much worse.

One Suspects

It has been moons since I checked out The Bleat, but since I saw a Shorter James Lileks at Alicublog, and as the veins in my forehead had mostly receded, I thought I'd check it out. Donning the well-worn, heat-blasted asbestos suit I keep near my browser, I went in.

And then came back out after a few paragraphs. I just can't stand it.

My prescription for Lileks? Venture outside the bubble once in a while. Vary things up with what you expose yourself to. Christ, man, you've gone Colonel Kurtz on us. Come back to the world!

Lileks manages to be so completely wrong about - well, everything - that it seems purposeful. It's as if his rage at the world has boiled away all capacity for irony, because when he lists the multidinous faults of the many, many idiots of the world, they always seem to describe him perfectly.

Or maybe it's just that he's so completely absorbed the Rovian Method that works SO well: Accuse Them Of Your Faults.

Snarky little glow? Proud of his clever remarks? Who does this remind you of? I'd never say Lileks has the corner on snark, but come on!

And let's not even get into this predilection for talk radio. No, let's: if the world of blogs are his first bubble, then Hugh Hewitt's AM echo chamber is his one other.

Take it to the edge, James. Take it right to the edge, add some comments that no one has actually said but probably WOULD be said by a liberal, and you won't have to answer any questions you don't want to.

Inaccurate. Deluded. Internally illogical. Full of adolescent self-satisfaction. God, it's like he has a psychological condition! It's a classic case of self-loathing, it's a cry for help, SOMETHING! Because as far as I can see, between the quote and Lilek's blog, the only one exhibiting those traits is James!

Telling, too, that in his mind this is the view from a "parallel universe." As I've mentioned before I wouldn't mind living in that universe, but I'd characterize its relative position more as perpendicular.

Later, we get

I'm not sure what's happening with this paragraph because I agree with his first sentence, but I can't detect if he does. In context it seems like he's using it as another example of the Wrong-Thinking of Liberals, which is unfortunate. Helms and Santorum HAVE become generic labels for stupidity, James, and that's because THEY ARE THE MOST BACKWARDS, RACIST AND HOMOPHOBIC POLITICIANS IN RECENT MEMORY.

What's his beef with it? Who knows. Maybe it was just another clever remark that had to go somewhere. Maybe he just needed a lead-in to another imagined liberal response.

This passage is ultimately useful not for the insight but for how it exemplifies the standard Lilekian delivery pattern: Thesis, Straw Man Hypothetical, Imagined Liberal Response in Italics Presented as Proof. Repeat.

(Intersperse cultural references to classical music and architecture to taste. Optional: Wrap up with description of trip to Target.)

His is the kind of smarmy "Um, no" writing that makes me do a search - literally - through every post on this blog to see if I overuse phrases like "One suspects."

And by the way, if there were a book of James Lileks' political rantings, could there be a better title?

"ONE SUSPECTS: The World As Seen From The Bleat."

It conveys everything about the way he arrives at his simple world-view.

The Wedding Crashers

I am a big fan of the Vince Vaughn-Owen Wilson-Will Ferrell comedies, especially when they veer into being slightly rude, which I think we need more of in movie comedy these days. And I really liked this movie, but it unfortunately suffers from one of the most horrid of movie cliches: the Wedding Plot Singularity, wherein the entire plot shrinks to a tiny compressed point and is quickly resolved during a wedding ceremony at the end. A congregation of wedding guests, the presiding minister, and sometimes even a bride and groom stand by, silent, while someone declares their love, and all I can think of is how much the bride's family must have spent to reserve the church.

The "Wedding Crashers" Plot Singularity involves not only the standard unfortunately-timed public declaration of love, but also loud cursing and a fist-fight in the church. If wearing white to a wedding is verboten for everyone but the bride, then surely engaging in fisticuffs in the house of worship is a big no-no as well?

The movie is generally clever so I have to believe they were aware of the Singularity, but why they felt the need to steer right into it instead of around I do not know.

I think special notice should be given to Isla Fisher, who has to be cute AND crazy, and Bradley Cooper, the Ivy League villain. I always admire actors who can inspire actual white-hot hatred of their character. Maybe it needed to be dialed back a little bit for this sort of comedy, but I'd not blame him for that.

Missed opportunities

Why haven't I been telling everyone I'm colorblind? I could wear just anything that came to hand in the closet, and instead of sad and ugly, I'd be endearing and kind of sweet.

And what's the colorblind equivalent for ironing? What's that thing where you can't tell if the shirt is ironed or not? I'd have that, too.

This Week's Top Spam Subject Lines

Two very life-affirming spam subject lines:

You can get the watches you've dreamed about!

and

Feeling well is not a dream

My dream of feeling well AND having that nice watch can come true! Then, we get down to business with

Hardened your penis like steel

which I noted because it seemed to tie in somehow with the Fantastic Four thoughts. Imagine if the cosmic rays did THAT. My prediction is that a superhero with those powers would be initially very excited about the situation, but later would come to see it as a terrible burden.

Fantastic Four

Perhaps the next great accomplishment by the mavens of movie marketing is to provide a film with plenty of advance lowered expectations, because I expected nothing from "Fantastic Four," and when I got a total of two iotas more, I considered the $9 well spent.

Iota one: Chris Evans as Johnny Storm. Absolutely perfect as the buckaroo banzai of a pilot, an X-games enthusiast, an arrogant playa, absolutely thrilled with his new powers, a bit of an airhead, I mean shut up, he had me at hello. The movie came alive whenever he was onscreen.

Iota two: Michael Chiklis. Due has to be paid for anyone who can emote under all that. The character is a contrast to the Human Torch - he got the short end of the cosmic ray stick, and Chiklis plays it right. The Thing has to be the hardest make-up job since Hulk, which they essentially avoided by handing it over to the CG guys.

Otherwise, wow - it's a shallow rendering. Two scenes in particular (Sue gets undressed on the bridge, the team gets into an argument when Johnny gives them all superhero names) seem to exemplify a laziness in staging that you rarely see. You can almost hear the director saying, you know what? We'll just shoot it right here in the crowd.

The movie has been in development probably about as long as I have as a human being, and although it's incorrect to say the SAME movie was in development all this time, still, you'd have thought they could do a bit better. For all the hands this movie has passed through, it certainly arrived unburdened by subtext.

I don't buy into the notion that in order for a movie to be successful it must spawn a franchise in one weekend, but come on. To watch it you are forced to catalog the missed opportunities.

The afore-mentioned Jessica Alba strip scene is one. Think about the possibilities: you have to be naked in order to use your super-power. But you're standing on a crowded bridge. And also your former boyfriend AND your brother are there. Also: you're Jessica Alba. Come on, that's classic pathos.

I found myself feeling sorry for Alba when she had to PUSH her force field out at people. I imagine that felt silly on the set, and I shouldn't be worrying about that in the multiplex. And I hope it is not sexist of me to admit that - fellas, if she's supposed to be an MIT graduate, and she looks like that, then, to my mind you have to make mention of it. Something about how the nerds voted her Hottest, Youngest Scientist of the Year. Because I'm generalizing that you just don't see a lot of scientists like her.

And Mr. Fantastic's stretchy powers. What keeps him together in human form? If he relaxes will he just start drooping like Silly Putty? Is he terrified of the changes to his body? Can he stretch too far? Actor Ioan Gruffudd's answer to these questions: "Hmm?" Nobody seems to care in the film.

Ben Grimm's unfortunate appearance. The most time is spent on this character's tragedy, but it's undercut when the movie borrows the cosmic hyperbaric chamber from Superman's Fortress of Solitude, the one that lets you turn your powers on and off.

Also: must every comic book movie be an origin story? "X-Men" thankfully came the closest to answering 'no.'

Batman Begins

So here's the Batman movie I've been asking for for years, and now that it's here I don't think I want it anymore.

I'm not sure why "Batman Begins" doesn't thrill me. Oh, I enjoyed it. But there's something that keeps me from signing off on it as a favorite. I admired Christopher Nolan for invoking the Richard Donner "Superman" as an ultimate comic book interpretation during some of the interviews, but perhaps that raised my expectations too high.

Maybe I'm just tired of this character and the constant interpretations. We've seen him in Burtonesque phantasmagoria, we've seen him in Schumacher drag, we've seen him in fan films, there are a handful of animated interpretations right now, a handful of comics - maybe I just don't care anymore? Maybe I'd just like to see Batman put in the vault for a decade, along with the Rolling Stones and Elton John, and then let the crazy kids of the future interpret it for themselves. They can have a Batman that rides a skateboard and has the bat-emblem pierced into his chest with rings. It will look infected but it'll be the hippest!

This is in no way fair to Christopher Nolan, who has delivered precisely what I asked for, or to Christian Bale, who is great, or any of the others. I loved the prison camp beginning. I loved that this movie is the sole version that remembers why Batman wears a scary costume, which is to scare people, and they show him trying to be scary, not just cool. The electric cape? The tumbler? The explanation for how all the other Batman villains come to be? Come on, I should love those things.

But maybe I'm just Batmanned out. I'm sorry. Maybe after Frank Miller's interpretation, it just gets no better.

Maybe I feel there's no need to worry if this is going to now be the ultimate Batman, because I know we're going to see another interpretation down the line anyway. For all of Nolan's efforts, I still think of it not in terms of characters but in terms of a Warner Bros. franchise that by all laws of commerce will re-emerge every so often no matter what. So why worry?

Netflix Syndrome

You asked for the movie, you have nothing against it, at one time it seemed like a great idea to watch it, but for some reason once it arrives it sits in the pile for weeks - even months - before you get to it. And after a while you even begin to dread watching it.

"Rules of the Game" holds the record for my Netflix account, as it sat on top of my TV for something like four months. It was already slightly in the category of spinach cinema for me, and without a return deadline it became a fixture. I remember dusting it off several times. I actually had it in my luggage when we crossed the country.

"The Pianist" comes in second, at probably around seven weeks.

But "Shaolin Soccer?" Why in the world would I be putting that one off? I tell you it's a Syndrome.

Every now and then I have to go through a Netflix clearing, and just send a batch back unwatched.

How fast CAN a Sunset Orange Pearl-colored Honda Element peel out of the White House parking lot?

Did anyone clock it? Was anyone watching? When Scott McClellan left the White House press conference today?

We don't have video of him driving away, unfortunately, but based on the video we DO have (at Crooks & Liars) of the grilling he got about his buddy Karl, I'm guessing he probably left rubber on the pavement. I'm sure there was nothing but a Sunset Orange Pearl-Colored blur all the way to the nearest bar where he went for a stiff drink or eleven afterwards.

Man on a Segway: a round-up of your reactions

Two weekends ago I was privileged to go to a bachelor weekend for Friend John, and because we are geeks, we chose to rent not strippers*, but Segways.

After having dreamed of the day when I might ride one, after bemoaning the stinginess of the owners, my turn had finally come.

A brief round-up of the reactions we received going down Michigan Ave. and the lakeshore on these devices:

1. Calm bemusement. 'Oh, what will they think of next,' these people seemed to be thinking. They'd never be caught dead on one of these things, at least not in public, but they certainly thought it was a curious sight. I'll admit we cut a less than dashing figure.

2. Disgust. "Your legs are going to atrophy!" we heard yelled at us at one point. "Oh, that's SO much better than walking," called one man loudly, since clearly by mounting the Segway we'd agreed to forgo any other mode of transport for life. This seemed to come from the sort of crowd that sees your iPod and classifies you as one of those Apple sell-outs.

3. Righteous rage. It will perhaps not be a total shock to anyone that the bicyclists on the lakeshore of Chicago were uniformly enraged by our presence. Like an extremely territorial animal with a very small brain, they are capable of only one or two responses to any given stimuli. And for us they exhibited their primary reaction: apoplexia.

   For them, we were worse than the dreaded pedestrian - for though we had chosen a conveyance with two wheels, we had perverted the basic ethos behind it. Because the wheels were beside each other and not in-line, you understand. We were heretics. It was tantamount to a political statement against their ilk. They made their displeasure known, and loudly.

4. A blank, completely-unable-to-mentally-process-the-image stare. For some the image of us zipping down the sidewalk simply did not compute. One got the impression that they would have had the same reaction if a magical unicorn with long, flowing mane had galloped past, or perhaps a troop of frothing Mummenschanz performers. I suspect that seconds after we were gone they had no memory of our passage.

5. Hilarity. This sort, a distinct minority, seemed delighted. They wanted us to do tricks for them on the Segways, wanted to know how fast they went, if they could go backwards, etc. As temporary ambassadors to the strange, we complied.

This Week's Top Spam Subject Lines

"For your benefit, I remember shouting near my home."

"Unknown Girls Banging."

"The Fate of Whales."

If I was a musician, I'd have my band name, album and first track right there.

Today in CFDG

Made some lovely spirals today, after several abortive attempts that either made nothing but one ugly square or a sickly, squat rutabega plant. The whole challenge seems to be to create a lovely fractal tree that both expresses some unified mathematical truth and at the same time makes a lovely wall-hanging.

Here's one I made:

Whatever we're teaching our schoolchildren now, I call on us to halt that education and start them learning CFDG, as well as advanced recursive subroutining so that we can begin our nation's important work of making better and better fractals, or at least some really cool psychedelic blacklight posters.

My two favorite new toys

iTunes' Podcasts, and this cool little fractal drawing program that has its own simple programming language, called Context Free Design Grammar:

Does that mean that if I can say "2 squares followed by a circle and repeat that pattern as you shrink it" in CFDG that I'm bilingual? I'm going to say yes.

War of the Worlds

I suppose I'll have to see it again because everyone else seems mightily irritated by the second half, which didn't suck for me. But then I am highly susceptible to Steven Spielberg's films. We know by now that he will make family the thematic center of his every film, so I am not bothered by the dalliances with the son and father. I'm not crazy about alien invasion films that focus only on one person and spend an inordinate amount of time in a basement, but at least he didn't cut away to a reflection in a TV when the aliens finally showed up, YES I'M LOOKING AT YOU M. NIGHT SHAMALAMADINGDONG.

I'm not sure that this is going to be one of the ultimate Spielberg films, but what I am sure of is that when he wants to be scary, not Temple of Doom scary of even Jurassic Park scary, but REALLY scary, he does it so well it makes my stomach hurt a little bit. And the first appearance of the tripods hurt my stomach a little. This is an alien invasion movie less in the Independence Day mode and more in The Day After mode.

As usual in his films I am amazed not just by the grandiose visions we're treated to but the smaller details. I loved the way the first tripod was glimpsed behind a tree in its introduction scene, and the way the street light came on when the storm first started to roll in to New Jersey. I am amazed that Spielberg not only considers how an alien ship will look, but how it will sound. Compare the sound the ships made in Close Encounters to the end-of-the-world blaring that these made. The bodies in the river were a terrible, amazing detail to think of adding, as was the dust (ash?) covering Tom Cruise.

I was not crazy about that sphincter thing that tried to ingest Tom Cruise, nor do I understand what was going on with the birds at the end. I don't remember the book or previous film enough to know if the aliens had buried their ships ahead of time, but that part raised too many questions for me. Like, if these tripods are so smart and have had all this time, you'd think they'd have figured out germs.

I think if you have any interest in sci-fi or epic films you can enjoy this film, unless you are also of that type that hold Spielberg up to his ultimate standard every time and in fact get weirdly indignant when it's not an instant classic, but will still go and see something like The Day After Tomorrow and have good things to say about it afterwards.

Note to People Who Could Care Less

Note to my neighborhood regarding noise levels.

I'd like to go ahead and put my vote in for the bombing range.

Every morning I wake up to the sound of just about every type of industrial activity modern man is capable of going on within two blocks. On any given day we've got leaves to blow, dear JESUS do we have leaves to blow, we've got concrete to crack, we've got things to hydraulically lift from one level to the next, we've got about three different companies that we contract out to remove garbage (but not bulky items, Lord not those) from this alley alone.

So what I'm saying is, if you're holding off on the Air Force bombing range because you feel it may disrupt the peace, please don't worry, that bird has flown.

Note to people who could care less.

I'm going to stop correcting you, because whatever the subject is, maybe you still have this slight reserve of caring? Maybe you're holding it out as a tease? 'Hey, I could still be pulled into this thing, but I'm on the fence?'

Note to friends and family regarding my correspondance skills.

I'm sorry, I really am. Due to an unfortunate acting exercise in my teens, I shrank my Circle of Attention down to two or three people and I never got it back to where it was again. I'm suing the Stanislavski people.

So you can see thank you notes are right out.