Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Dallas Lynn's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, January 18th, 2007
12:46 pm	Klosterman wonders where is the Lester Bangs of video games; why a gamer hasn't come along as articulate, passionate and insightful as Lester Bangs was about music. It's probably because they're too busy beating Halo 2 on Legendary or finishing up Oblivion. You can write about music while listening to it. Try writing about lighting effects, frame rates, or the social signifiance of NES Hockey making it so you always had to take 1 fat guy, 1 skinny guy and 2 average guys or about how Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl was the embodiment of the Overman while you're trying to close an Oblivion Gate. Impossible. Anyway, two recent essays shocked me into the realization that I have been reading and concentrating on tech stuff entirely too much. They also reminded me that, while technical people can learn philosophy, like scientists a lot of us assume we know philosophy by default. This leads to a lot of pretty shitty writing. First Graham posted the incredibly bad How Art Can be Good Pure subjectivity about what makes art good is wrong...good so far, that is probably correct, but he claims (on reddit.com comments on the story) that he doesn't think the case for this position has ever been stated this way before!? "One problem with saying there's no such thing as good taste is that it also means there's no such thing as good art. If there were good art, then people who liked it would have better taste than people who didn't. So if you discard taste, you also have to discard the idea of art being good, and artists being good at making it." Don't people say all the time 'it's great, I just don't like it?' Or is that just me after every Kubrick movie? "I think the key to this puzzle is to remember that art has an audience. Art has a purpose, which is to interest its audience. Good art (like good anything) is art that achieves its purpose particularly well. The meaning of "interest" can vary. Some works of art are meant to shock, and others to please; some are meant to jump out at you, and others to sit quietly in the background. But all art has to work on an audience, and—here's the critical point—members of the audience share things in common." So, the purpose of art is to X the audience, where X can be ... anything? Unfortunately, he doesn't enumerate X. If X can be anything, then I guess Gallagher's art is good because it achieves its purpose of getting watermelon on the front couple rows of spectators particularly well (remember, all art has to work on an audience...what?) "If good art is art that interests its audience, then when you talk about art being good, you also have to say for what audience. So is it meaningless to talk about art simply being good or bad? No, because one audience is the set of all possible humans. I think that's the audience people are implicitly talking about when they say a work of art is good: they mean it would engage any human And that is a meaningful test, because although, like any everyday concept, "human" is fuzzy around the edges, there are a lot of things practically all humans have in common. In addition to our interest in faces, there's something special about primary colors for nearly all of us, because it's an artifact of the way our eyes work. Most humans will also find images of 3D objects engaging, because that also seems to be built into our visual perception. [5] And beneath that there's edge-finding, which makes images with definite shapes more engaging than mere blur." So apparently, the opinion of Hegel or Picasso should be weighed equally with mine and with a 7 year old's. After all, we're all human right?! "There are two main kinds of error that get in the way of seeing a work of art: biases you bring from your own circumstances, and tricks played by the artist. Tricks are straightforward to correct for. Merely being aware of them usually prevents them from working. For example, when I was ten I used to be very impressed by airbrushed lettering that looked like shiny metal. But once you study how it's done, you see that it's a pretty cheesy trick—one of the sort that relies on pushing a few visual buttons really hard to temporarily overwhelm the viewer. It's like trying to convince someone by shouting at them." Not a word about intention, meaning or history....instead, be sure not to be misled by techniques the artist uses...what?!? I think we should correct for this whole 'perspective' gimmick...I mean, the canvas is NOT REALLY in 3 dimensions. "The way not to be vulnerable to tricks is to explicitly seek out and catalog them. When you notice a whiff of dishonesty coming from some kind of art, stop and figure out what's going on. When someone is obviously pandering to an audience that's easily fooled, whether it's someone making shiny stuff to impress ten year olds, or someone making conspicuously avant-garde stuff to impress would-be intellectuals, learn how they do it. Once you've seen enough examples of specific types of tricks, you start to become a connoisseur of trickery in general, just as professional magicians are. What counts as a trick? Roughly, it's something done with contempt for the audience. For example, the guys designing Ferraris in the 1950s were probably designing cars that they themselves admired. Whereas I suspect over at General Motors the marketing people are telling the designers, "Most people who buy SUVs do it to seem manly, not to drive off-road. So don't worry about the suspension; just make that sucker as big and tough-looking as you can."" So now we need to know both the technical means by which the work was created, as well as the mental state of the artist. Note to art historians: Duchamp is probably not a major artist anymore. After all, he played tricks! He made jokes! He had contempt for the art world. We've all been fooled. "I doubt you could ever make yourself into a completely universal person, if only because you can only travel in one direction in time. But if you find a work of art that would appeal equally to your friends, to people in Nepal, and to the ancient Greeks, you're probably onto something." Wow. Just wow. Apparently for Graham not only is all art possible at all times, but for all people as well. That's what we call a strong claim. Then came Yegge, with his most recent blog post about The Pinoccio Problem, which is extremely longwinded....we will take this as an illustrative quote though: "In other words, I think that both consciousness and free will (i.e. nondeterminism) are software properties." ... "But I think we've established that each invocation of your "Hello, World" program is creating a separate instance of a minute consciousness. Well... sort of. A "Hello, World" program, which has no loops or branches, can't exhibit any nondeterminism (unless it's imposed externally, e.g. by a random hardware error), so you can think of it as pure hardware implemented in software. But somewhere between Hello, World and Hal 9000 lies a minimal software program that can be considered to possess rudimentary consciousness, at which point turning it off is tantamount to killing it." Just...fuck me. Back to the wonderful world of web programming now. But really, I need to spend less time with books with animals on the cover and more with say, Gogol. Or maybe I'll write that essay I've been meaning to write about how the Ruby programming lanaguge is a Tolstoyan hedgehog while Perl is a Nietzschean fox. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, August 14th, 2006
4:08 pm	Back from Russia. My Russian still sucks pretty badly. The night before last I was thinking I was going to get into a fight with some really drunk dude. Lots of visits to people and vodka and presents taken and brought back. The prospect of taking my parents to Russia frightens me. Quite upset that the Italian soccer implosion was mitigated by the courts. When I told Jenia her response was: 'they're italians...of course they cheat.' Good point, really. Movies - Earth - Deepa Metha asks whether Indian home rule was really so great with a million dead and millions of refugees. I get the sense that her idea of pre-independence india was a little idyllic, what with sikhs and muslims and hindus all hanging out on the grass together, talking and laughing like they were on the front of a university brochure or something. 25th Hour - so, Edward Norton is apparently supposed to be like Jesus here, as far as I can tell. Lots of blood on people's hands, and he takes a whipping before going up to Cavalry, and even has a 'last temptation' dream sequence thing before he is sacrificed to oppressive drug laws. The only person who seems to comdemn him for dealing in dope is the sleazy stockbroker guy. Spike is almost begging us to draw the parallel between them. But there are no Rockefeller laws for businesspeople, see! Little heavy handed there, but good movie overall. Rodrigo D -- don't be born in Medellin. Your life will probably suck. But at least it will be short. City Lights -- there is nothing left to say about Chaplin, but anyway almost none of Chaplin's sight gags are funny any more, but this movie still holds up as fucking awesome. The boxing sequence, and the end...it hasn't been that dusty in my apartment since Au Hasard Balthazar. Batman Begins -- competent. Inside Deep Throat -- competent. 21 Grams -- competent. EXCEPT - the chick loses her family in a car related incident, and then he RIPS OFF the pool shot of the chick in the fetal position straight from Blue. What's that about? Wheel of Time -- Herzog managed to keep his ego relatively in check. Sex, Lies and Videotape -- poor Soderbergh is debasing himself with Ocean's 12, which was terrible. Cache -- if Woody Allen makes real estate porn, so does Haneke, because their apartment made me hard. The wall of books...oh god. Only the library in Saraband, and maybe Woody's apartment in Deconstructing Harry were better. A Woman is a Woman - shit. Why do I keep watching Godard? Vidiriana -- Bunuel has a real madonna/whore thing, and in his world Madonna's are useless and whores are useful. Intermission -- possibly the most Irish movie ever made. Bad Education -- Typical Almodovar stuff. Light Keeps me Company -- reminded us all that Sven Nykvist is in fact the greatest cinematographer of all time. Platform -- Chinese 'dissident' cinema kind of stuff from the 'Sixth generation.' Father and Son -- Sokurov hasn't made any other movie even close to as good as Russian Ark as far as I can tell. I think he makes vaguely incestuous films just so he can criticize westerners for lacking spirituality. Sneaky fucker, don't you think? Dark Habits -- Early Almodovar. Not great. On the plane I read Bertrand Russell's autobiography. It got pretty self-serving at the end. Not as self-serving as Trotsky's though. The man could write. Also read Fathers and Children in my ongoing 19th century thing. Turgeniev could write some also. Jay Mohr's Gasping for Airtime on the other hand, was pretty crappy. Jenia got me Percival Everett's Wounded for my birthday. Percival is a badass. Not as good as God's Country or Erasure, but still fucking solid. The protagonist is the typical Percival avatar(hyper-educated black man who prefers the country life). this time it's not about the indians or academics, or politics, or deconstructing mythologies about the west to create comedic gold, but the gays. Also finished Jimmy Buffett's A Salty Piece of Land, and I am almost ready to proclaim it the single worst book I have ever read. Holy shit is it bad. Quoting your own song lyrics 3 times a page is wrong. It read like a parody. Just completely terrible in every way. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 6th, 2006
12:37 am	Being in San Diego for four days made me realize that there is perhaps no major city that isn't better than phoenix. anyway. saw a bunch of people who knew me when i was a wee lad. i had no idea who any of them were. awkward! went out on a boat. neat. adams ave. book store -- perfect. stacks and stacks of used books, warning signs on some of the shelves that they might in fact collapse on you, two cats that hang out in there. one day i must own a place like that. yes. i totally scored a bilingual edition of the cherry orchard, among other things. read danto's After the End of Art on the plane. not his strongest work. the usual statements apply -- no more master narratives in art. also as usual, the sticking point is probably 'there is a kind of transhistorical essence in art, everywhere and always the same, but it only discloses itself through history.' our wittgensteinian sensors go off immediately. there is also an issue of hedging a little as to what is art. sometimes he sounds like he's talking about all the visual art ever made, but other times he sounds like he wants to limit the 'end of art' to mean the narrative of western art that starts around 1400 or so when we get the concept of art as art instead of as say, iconography, or magic or whatever. also read scorsese on scorsese. the man knows his film history. he also made at least one of the greatest movies of the last 25 years. started watching the 6 disc commemorative michael jordan dvd's. amazing. say what you will about wade, he can't defend like mike. not even close. in the very first dvd they had a golf pro on talking about how he likes to take jordan's money. also watched woody's Match Point. Jesus. Dark some? He's decided to one-up the usual Allenesque nihilism--since there is no god and no morality but your own, the difference between justice and injustice, crimes going punished or unpunished, comes down to what you can live with, and of course luck. So, that's a typical Allen theme. But in Crimes and Misdemeanors, Landau likes his life, and he wants it to continue. In this movie, even when you get 'lucky' you aren't, because after doing the worst things possible to get what you want, then catching a break of the biggest kind, rationalizing your deeds, you find out that you still aren't happy, that you despise your life, that you've attained something you can't remember why you wanted, that in the end there is not a single thing that can be counted on to bring even contentment, because in the struggle between passion and pragmatism, there is no right choice, and you are screwed either way. the depth woody's pessimism here is just...damn. Current Music: Ghostface Killah - Apollo Kids - Supreme Clientele (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 27th, 2006
3:57 pm	"Brains are for generating expectations about the future. The simplest imaginable thing a brain is for, is for ducking an incoming brick. You see the brick coming. You see it's heading for you. You expend a little energy to duck so it doesn't hit you. There's a lot of things to avoid in life; and there's a lot of things to try and accomplish." - Daniel Dennett Every time I hear a philosopher talk about bricks, I think of nanikore. Also, Dennett has gone crazy. I saw him saying that we discover math instead of inventing it, that it's transcendental or something. Plus he seems to keep weakening his free will position, which, being compatbilism, was crappy to begin with. And, he's still a douche. With a nice beard. Garden State (~38 minutes of) -- easily one of teh worst pieces of faux-indie shit cinema served up in recent times. I would say I saw 38 minutes with my eyes open, because I had to keep averting them in order to not squirm with embarassment at the godawful spectacle unfolding before me. What the fuck is going on here? Who the fuck are these people? Why are they so annoying? Maybe it's recent Ozu viewings of movies you believe are about real people situated in a real time and place, and who are still vastly more interesting than the contrived quirkiness of the miserable assclowns who populate this film that's exacerbating my disgust. Maybe. Or Maybe Zach Braff should be hunted and killed. Also, why has puberty robbed Natalie Portman of the ability pick a good movie to be in? Atrocious on so many levels. It doesn't touch the all-time list of film crimes of everything Larry Clark and Gregg Araki have ever done, plus the marky mark version of the Italian Job, but the only recent thing I've seen that I can remember being worse than this movie was Napoleon Dynamite. Let me cleanse myself with some Bukowski. Dostoevsky against the wall, the firing squad ready. then he got a reprieve. suppose they had shot Dostoevsky? before he wrote all that? I suppose it wouldn't have mattered not directly. there are billions of people who have never read him and never will. but as a young man I know that he got me through the factories, past the whores, lifted me high through the night and put me down in a better place. even while in the bar drinking with the other derelicts, I was glad they gave Dostoevsky a reprieve, it gave me one, allowed me to look directly at those rancid faces in my world, death pointing its finger, I held fast, an immaculate drunk sharing the stinking dark with my brothers. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
1:58 am	The Dying Gaul -- So, a gay writer writes a screenplay about his lover dying of AIDS. Campbell Scott is a studio exec who wants to buy it on condition that he changes it to be about a hetero couple, because 'America hates gays, and nobody will go to see it if it's two men. You could get Tom Cruise, who wouldn't go near it for 100 million dollars, Spielberg to direct, and open it on 4000 screens...and nobody will see it.' When the writer asks what about Philadelphia, he says 'that's a movie about a guy who hates gays.' Which, actually, it is. Brokeback too -- if you're gay you die of a hate crime. Boys Don't Cry -- we know what happens there. Is there any mainstream movie with a gay protagonist where hatred is not an essential feature of the movie? And more importantly, is this reality, or pandering to a non-gay audience by putting in some anti-gay characters so vile that we all pat ourselves on the back for not tying people to trucks or smashing their faces in with tire irons? Interesting questions all around. The rest of the movie sucks though, because after that it turns out Scott is bisexual and he starts doing the writer, wife finds out, bad things happen, and they totally drop the moral struggle of the writer selling out his script. The Outskirts -- some weird Russian movie that's either an neo-stalinist or send up of the old stalinist style movies. i can't really tell. it's about how russian guys are hard motherfuckers when you fuck with their land. or something. Fanny and Alexander -- too long, too bright, too much about kids. Ebert has a theory about Fellini that Juliet of the Spirits was essentially about telling his wife 'why can't you be freaky like this?' I get the same idea here -- 'yeah, i'm a philanderer and a chauvinist but come on, at least I'm not a harsh lutheran crazy man like my old man was' or something like that. not my favorite bergman by a stretch. the only bergman's i have left to watch that netflix has are the serpent's egg and the magic flute, and they both look hella sketchy. i'm skeptical. keith carradine? what? Late Spring - Ozu is Ozu. A Bete Humaine - Jean Gabin is the motherfucking man. The story is they made this because he wanted to drive a train. Loosely based on a Zola novel I've never read. Never on Sunday - Jules Dassin's movie about an american intellectual who tries to show a happy hooker how to enjoy the intellectual rather than the sensual pleasures, as was espoused by her greek philosopher progenitors. she is content, and goes to the tragedies, which she loves, even though she changes them all so they all end with everyone going to the seashore, so they won't be too sad. awesome. 'Medea, does she not say herself, 'I killed my children'?' 'And you believe her?!' naturally he learns a few things himself! pat ending, good execution though. Going to San Diego this weekend until wednesday. Current Music: 2Pac - Pour Out a Little Liquor - thug life (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 21st, 2006
1:12 am	SHAQ! Happy to see him doing well. Almost as happy as I am that France is bombing in the World Cup. Just as long as England doesn't win. Or germany (sorry chgriffen ). sister graduated high school. shit i am old. on the plane to/from Reno i read all of Brendan Behan's plays. Since I'm just about finished with all 1200 pages of Oscar Wilde's collected works, the most famous of which are plays, I think i'll make this the summer of reading things written for the stage. I have Sean O'Casey and some unread Shakespeare already. Will have to buy more. Excellent plan, yes. L'Avventura - boring, boring, boring. had to watch the commentary to find out why is was supposed to be great. Blow-Up sucked too. me and antonioni, we don't get along. Floating Weeds -- you can't say anything bad about Ozu. that's in the Geneva conventions. Two Women -- Iranian movie about how Iranian women are shat upon. It's even worse for the intelligent ones, who could have been more than a baby factory. The state the movie portrays and the fact that Tahmineh Milani later got tossed in jail for her work, probably has something to do with why Islamic culture has gone from being a global cultural leader to a barren shitworld. Gangs of New York -- overly theatrical, too long, of questionable historical merit..yep, this movie was clearly adapted from a Disney ride of some kind. i can't believe this is the guy who made goodfellas and casino, two of the best movies of the last century. The Trial -- Orson Welles does Kafka. I hear it's not a very faithful adaptation, but who cares really? Welles is a genius and the movie is awesomely shot. Actually I just never read The Trial even though it's been sitting on my shelf for at last 3 years. If I had read it I would probably be like 'that fucking hack Welles!' if the '70's were the golden age of american movies, is the '00's the golden age of american television? i'll put the sopranos, the wire, deadwood, six feet under, queer as folk, the shield, curb your enthusiasm, jon stewart taking over the daily show, chapelle's show, etc.. up against any tv made in any other decade, and that tv will look like suck. guaranteed. Tickets to Russia purchased. Czech Airlines. August. Excellent. Food, vodka, and a wonderland of pirated software, music and video of all kinds. Jenia is going to Venice this weekend...her boss is taking the whole office. I should have become an architect and gotten a job in Europe. Fuck. Current Music: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Song Of Joy - Murder Ballads (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 29th, 2006
8:56 pm	After getting back from being in LA for the weekend for billythebrick's wedding thing, I was sent back out Wednesday to prepare for a colleagues departure. Korean barbeque = really fucking awesome. We made sure to take a token Korean to talk to them and everything. Also my first time drinking 'Soju' or whatever, which is like Korean vodka (ie, it's half as strong and made from rice or something). You can smoke everywhere in K-Town. Leave it to the Asians. Ashtrays are usually napkins with ice on them to maintain plausible deniability. Drinking in bars around Koreatown and Hollywood reminded me of just how goddamned expensive LA is. That is...really fucking expensive. It's its only drawback. Dad's coming out from Hawaii in June also which means I have to buy a couch. On the plane I read Insanely Great, a history of Apple and how they make the best products and everyone who doesn't like them either doesn't know anything or is a jealous bitch. Unfortunately it was written just before the iPod explosion, so it's in need of updating. Sketches of Frank Gehry - Sydney Pollock just follows Gehry around with a camera for a while and talks to him about the creative process, shows him at work tinkering with paper to make buildings and such, and showed the real (unacknowledged) star behind his work, the hundred thousand dollar plus computer program that uses a laser pen thing to take coordinates from a model and make fully 3-d drawings ready for the engineer so they don't have to do the geometry for all his twisty shit. Nothing too exhilarating otherwise. Them driving around LA or talking at his office. Some nice shots of the usual suspects like Bilbao, Disney Hall, some of his LA houses. We do find out that he changed his name from Goldberg to Gehry because his ex-wife made him. Water -- Deepha Metha's continuation of her 'elements series', or as I like to call it, the 'women in India are totally fucked over' series. This one is about how widows get the shaft by being shuffled off to ashram's as young as seven so that the families don't have to support them. There they can be shunned, or maybe forced into prostitution if they're young enough. Gandhi is a kind of peripheral player, as it's set in the 1920's or '30's, which is interesting, because there is a lot of controversy over his stance on the caste system, and Mehta has a kind of implicit critique of the caste system in the character of the father as well. In any case, the movie had to filmed in secret, and Mehta is one of the few people taking real artistic risks (like, the risk of being killed by some crazy fundamentalist Hindu and of their set being burned down), so people should see her movies. Point Blank - the movie that Mel Gibson remade as Payback, except with Lee Marvin as the badass. Mel's was really faithful to the original, so there's not much one doesn't know going in. Mostly the point is watching Lee Marvin being a badass. Tokyo Story -- there's nothing to be said about Ozu, really, since everyone already worships him. Not as sad as I expected. Charade - the movie wasn't that great, but Audrey had plucked her eyebrows or something at this point and it really put her in the pantheon of top 5 hot movie women ever. Grace Kelly in Rear Window is still undisputed heavyweight champion of movie hotties, with Claudia Cardinale in 8 1/2 still in second. Audrey here might be 3. Blue Velvet - 837 times better than that steaming pile Mulholland Drive. Lynch actually has a recognizable story line, recognizable themes, and no unnecessary dwarves or midgets or whatever. Conventional wisdom is that it's about the corruption underneath American life, much like The Godfather is supposed to be about in some way. I think Blue Velvet works better if you take as a more personal exploration of the crazy knuckle dragging psychopath that we all have and sometimes flirt with, and is only kept in check by society. I suppose the ending could be read as a critique -- oh we've gone back to our safe suburban world and let's just shut out the fact of the Franks of the world out there. But I say, 'yes, let's. no need to dwell on the depressing is there?' Shame - I really didn't like this movie very much. Bergman letting us know that war is in fact hell, even for people not fighting it. Unfortunately I was bored. Current Music: Miles Davis - Moon Dreams - Birth Of The Cool (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 17th, 2006
9:01 pm	Finally went to Scottsdale MOCA to see the Warhol exhibit. They had a lot of good stuff for a small space -- the Marilyns, the Maos, the Soup Cans, the famous Jews, the Cowboys and Indians, a number of self-portraits. To support them I bought The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. Not as good as Popism in terms of Warhol books. "No, a person has to be very careful about what he's buying these days or else he'll wind up buying junk. And paying a lot for it too. So this means that if you see a well-dressed person today, you know that they've thought a lot about clothes and how they look. And then that ruins it because you shouldn't be thinking about how you look so much." This is the book that has one of my favorite sentiments about his work and egalitarian nature though. I think this is a key to his art: "What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it." I love this thought. He's clearly got some kind of liberal socialist leanings, he did after all say that "America really is The Beautiful, but it would be more beautiful if everyone had enough money to live", but he takes what is usually considered a negative, the American Cultural Hegemony of things like McDonald's and all the things it's accused of--standardization, sterilization, etc.. and totally rejects it as a negative. Kind of a shocking thought. I'm not sure why more defenders of so-called 'globalization' and such don't use this line of thought. Then went over to 5th Ave. to see the show of this bartender I know through someone at my work who won a 'Best of Scottsdale' artists contest thing, Stevie G. Mostly abstract color field-y type stuff. Tupac: Thug Angel - nice documentary. Not as good as Resurrection, but good stuff from Quincy Jones and Shock "G" talking and footage of Tupac when he was like 17 (he died at only 25!). Amazing the difference between the young man and the thug to come. He tells a story about how much respect he has for women (he says 'b's' -- he won't even say 'bitches' at this point) and how his heart was broken because a girl he wanted to date told him he was too nice. It also did a good job of talking about how utterly ridiculous the so-called rape charges against him later were. I often wonder what combination of industry pressure, disillusionment and being constantly high or drunk caused such a sea change. One of the extras was a list of books that Tupac had read with his first manager when he was living with her. Lot of Eastern stuff, Buddhist, the Gita, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Alan Watts, Khalil Gibran, along with Mertin and Kempis. The diary of Anais Nin was a little surprising. Ordered Jenia's 13 inch macbook in black today. it's got almost twice the ram and hd space of my 15" powerbook, plus a faster chip and cost $1000 less. Current Music: Сплин - Бог устал нас любить - Гранатовый альбом (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 13th, 2006
9:10 pm	Oscar has started repeating his lines. Maybe I'm spending too much time with him. In any case, 'it's horrid how people go around these days saying things behind one's back that are perfectly true' or roughly to that effect is in A Woman of No Importance, and Dorian Gray if I remember correctly. I've recently heard both Veruca Salt's cover of Straight Outta Compton, and Ben Folds's version of Bitches Ain't Shit. As well as Jonathon Coulter's Baby Got Back. It's not like a lounge version, which would just be for humor. Like, is any of this homage, or all irony? Someone told me Dynamite Hack did another one after their Boyz in the Hood cover. Trying to make it a cottage industry is lame. God, I heard one of Cube's latest ...embarrassing. Make more Friday movies. I can't believe it's the same guy who wrote Today Was a Good Day or No Vaseline. Speaking of No Vaseline...I downloaded a version, and someone blurred out the word 'Jew' for 'douche' in the line 'it's a case of divide and conquer cuz you let a Jew break up my crew' and 'you can't be the nigga for life crew, with a white Jew telling you what to do' -- I wonder if someone did that for Cube, or if Cube was making sure to cover his bases because he knew he was getting into the movie business? Speaking of movies: Scenes From A Marriage - Bergman's 6 hour series for TV. Plays like a play. Usually only two actors, a lot of dialogue. In color. Huge success. The moral is that guys are dicks, and that people are emotionally retarded, and that sex is important in a relationship. Saraband -- same couple 30 years later, having been divorced for that long and not seeing each other. The moral of the story is that people don't change, guys are dicks, all good qualities come from women, and Swedish people always sit too close together. It bugs me. Children of Heaven -- I'm done with fucking Majid Majidi, the Spielberg of Iran. 2 movies I've seen, 2 sickly sweet pieces of crap about kids. The only thing I hate more than overly sentimental pap is overly sentimental pap about kids. Pickpocket - Bresson is God. Also, life is bleak, meaningless and shitty. People oversell the redemption angle; he's not really redeemed, she just needs a baby daddy. Not a happy ending, and not quite the same as the Dostoevsky thing where a bad guy is made good through a woman's love. Capote -- have to give credit to the writer when everyone in the movie except Harper Lee is an asshole, but you still feel sympathy for all of them. Why the hell what's her nuts was nominated for best supporting actress here is beyond me. she didn't do anything special. Put down Oscar long enough to read a book of interviews by Sue Blackmore with a bunch of leading neuroscientists and philosophers. Opinion was pretty much uniform in agreeing on a) materialism b) atheism c) lack of free will d) the uselessness of philosophy e) hatred of the chalmers zombie. Also, Ramachandran doesn't think animals are really conscious. "If you mean 'Are my decisions not caused?' surely not. From everything we know, the brain is a causal machine. It goes from state to state to state as a result of antecedent conditions, and if the antecedent conditions were different, the state would have been different." - Pat Churchland. "In Pat's[Churchland] case, methinks the lady doth protest too much, because she has no explanatory power whatsoever, not to mention the fact that she doesn't understand what we're saying. Pat just says consciousness is synaptic computation and ridicules any other possibility. Her view of chemical synapses carrying consciousness is exactly what she said, pixie dust in the synapses. Why should neurotransmitter chemicals cause conscious experience?" -- Stuart Hameroff "Essentially philosophers ask good questions, but they have no techniques for getting the answers. Therefore you should not pay too much attention to their discussions. And we can ask what progress they have made. A lot of problems that once were regarded as philosophical, such as what is an atom, are now regarded as part of physics. Some people have argued that the main purpose of a philosopher is to deal with the unsolved problems, but the problems eventually get solved, and they get solved in a scientific way. If you ask how many cases in the past has a philosopher been successful at solving a problem, as far as we can say there are no such cases." - Francis Crick "Philosophers pose interesting questions, but their answers usually are not very useful or meaningful. Scientists are very different, you tend to be more humble because you know you've got a very limited ability to understand a system with even three of four variables. " - Christof Koch Current Music: 2Pac - Only God Can Judge Me Feat Ra - All Eyez On Me (Comment on this)
Friday, April 28th, 2006
1:17 am	Can my plans change any more? Can they? Old plan was: Russia in July, Costa Rica or Nicaragua in the autumn. But it turns out that our timing was wrong. So now Jenia's poor mom has to go back to the OVIR office for another application for my visa. I need to buy a counterfeit Russian passport, it would make things easier. I would only ever be discovered if someone in Russia tried to speak Russian to me, and really, what are the odds of that? Foolproof. Tentative schedule is now LA the weekend of may 20, then memorial day here, then maybe charan and pagantz to phoenix the 2-3, then my sister's graduation in Reno the 10th, then going to Spain(or somewhere else relatively close on the continent, preferably that Ryanair flies to) the first week of July (by way of Ireland), and then waiting to go back to russia until august or so. and then nothing for a bit except weekend trips and latin america next year, except my mom wants to go to hawaii sometime also, and my brother may want to go to mexico. in the meantime, i'm almost finished with netflix's selection of Bergman movies...that will be a sad day. i've gone through fellini, woody allen, and keislowski completely. there is only 1 tarkovsky left(and 1 at the library). bergman will be exhausted relatively soon. i think next will be Bresson. oh, and i really suck at GTA: San Andreas. i must be getting old. also, the Chingon CD will play in the PC, but not in the Mac. Why does Robert Rodriguez hate Mac users? Just for that, I may have to pirate Sin City 2. i've been reading so much oscar wilde lately that i am not content for any other author to merely note the existence of an object anymore. they must also say that it was 'finely embezzled with gold' or 'delicate chinese silk' and of course nobody must ever merely sit down...no, they must fling themselves down(and onto what, we must have all the details). next i'll be lunching at the club in between dinner parties...kind of like how after i read a few thousand pages of james clavell i had the urge for the longest time to demand honor from people, curse whites as filthy barbarians, and call all women mealy-mouths. some movies: Smiles of a Summer Night -- Bergman shows he can make a commercial romantic comedy when he feels like it. I'll put the dialogue here, especially the conversation with the actress and her mother, up against Preston Sturges any old time. A refreshing break from the 'personality destruction' or 'world of shit' series that he went through later. The Constant Gardner -- kind of like Syriana, except instead of the oil industry, it's the big pharmaceuticals, and they are fucking Africa, and there is nothing anyone is willing to do about it. Well a few, before they get their dicks cut off and stuck in their mouth before being crucified (literally). I think that the moral of the story is stay out of Africa. Jesus of Montreal -- i loved The Barbarian Invasions, but this shit tries too hard. if the teachings of Jesus were taken literally we'd have a social revolution of epic proportions on our hands? the stodgy traditions of the Church have stripped the revolutionary character of jesus from our consciousness? Crass commercialism tries to ruin all good intentions? check. i think gb shaw covered this a while ago. Down by Law -- goddamn it if Tom Waits isn't the coolest motherfucker that ever lived. I don't know who could beat him in a cool-off. Nobody, I think. Jim Jarmusch did it all in B&W, looks great. I have a Keanu Reeves theory, where you've made a good movie if even Keanu Reeves being in it can't fuck it up. I feel similarly about Roberto Benigni, and he works here, so, Jimmy made a good movie. SRV: Live at Montreaux - Stevie wore some shit that nobody else can ever get away with again. Ever. Also, no editor in the history of the world has ever understood how to cut this shit together. It's like they feel like they have to cut away, warn their money. No, you assholes, just hold a fucking steady cam on Stevie. You hear how the bass always does the same thing? You see how the drummer looks bored!? We don't need to see those assholes, ever, and we especially don't need to see the goddamn crowd. Who cares what a bunch of French-Canadiens are doing? Current Music: Chopin: Ballade For Piano #2 In F, Op. 38, CT 3 - Andantino, (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 21st, 2006
11:20 pm	What's up with Arsenal being 5th in the league, and looking like going to the CL final? How the hell does that make sense? Shit, I hope they win and knock Spurs out for next year. Seriously, fuck Spurs. Arsenal/Barcelona final would be tits. the Wegner youth plan is working! So I went to the last ultimate fighting championship(#59) in anaheim. the undercard had all of the best fights. The Tito/Forrest fight was a bullshit decision. 30-27 my ass! Also, they shouldn't have stopped the Arlovsky fight because Sylvia is a big dumb cracker who can't do shit, he just got one lucky shot. But that was a work because they need a rematch there, because there is nobody else worth half a shit in their heavyweight division. Sad, really, kind of like Riverside and everything around it, as I was reminded. The Celebration - Dogme 95 is kind of bullshittish, but this was a good movie anyway. Ulrich Thomsen I've seen in this and Per Fly's The Inheiritance, and he always gets some really nice suits to wear. Awesome. Now that I think about it, in both movies he plays a guy who owns a restaurant in a foreign country. For some reason on the box cover he had this really awful facial hair that he had nowhere in the movie. Anyway, he fucks up his dad's 60th by revealing he was a child rapist. Persona - After The Seventh Seal, maybe Bergman's most known movie. Another in the 'whacked out personality disorder' phase he went through. I'm not entirely sure just what happened there, but someone was pretty fucked up. Some people think that one of the women was a figment of the other's imagination, but I think that's going too far. Sven Nykvist is the greatest cinematographer ever. Nosferatu - Herzog's remake of the Murnau classic. Kinski is a badass. I always think of him as a James Caan type...manic energy, like a shark or something. That's what made Caan so great in misery, and that's what made Kinski great in this movie. He's suave, subtle...but there some crazy violence lurking in that motherfucker. I should probably see the Murnau version at some point. Spellbound - simply one of the best documentaries i've ever seen, about 7 kids trying to make it to the national spelling bee. The editing is awesome, and you really start to give a shit about these kids. I was upset when the one I was pulling for didn't win (in the extras they said she's a journalism student at NYU now though, so, she'll be okay). Of course, I would never watch a fucking spelling bee on ESPN or whatever, that would be boring as shit, but this movie sucked me in. That's the magic of movies. When they don't suck. The Cranes Are Flying -- the Russians make the bleakest films about WW2...maybe it's that whole 'losing 10% of the population' thing. I found out the Godfather PC game has zero replay value also. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 9th, 2006
8:04 pm	Osama - hey it turns out that the Taliban were a bunch of dicks and child rapists who all deserved to die. However, when dressing up your girl like a boy so that she can work, it helps not to be a fucking dumbass about it. First thing is, when she sees a Taliban, have her not RUN into the house and then yell 'If they see I'm a girl, they'll kill me!' Second thing -- plan for the period. Presumably mom and grandma know what a period is, and that their young daughter will be getting one at some point. Don't they? All About My Mother - Almodovar has some kind of gift for being able to make the most ridiculous melodrama that somehow doesn't make you want to throw up. I mean, nuns pregnant by HIV positive pre-op transexuals, drug-addled actresses, sons hit with cars...at its worst it could turn out to be like a Paul Morrissey movie that doesn't know it's absurd, which is to say total disaster. Almodovar, can make you believe it, enjoy it, and root for everyone. Not on par with Talk to Her, but not much that I've seen lately has been. The French Connection - you're supposed to be all impressed with Friedkin's camera work, and the showing of the equivalence between the cops and the 'bad guys' but this movie has not aged well at all. It looks like a bunch of boring car chases to me, and we're all jaded to those. In terms of cop and criminal being two aspects of the same personality, as Charlie K. says, see all other cop dramas ever made. Many better have been made since. Comedian - Follows Seinfeld and some dude named Orny Adams who really wants to make it big like Seinfeld around the comedy circuit while Seinfeld is working out new material after he retired his old act. They all talk about stand-up. Stand-up comedy, and acting, and in large measure writing, are like the proverbial sausage. Even when it's great, hearing people wax on about their craft usually makes you want to kill yourself, or them. I've watched enough Inside the Actor's Studio to know that it is almost impossible for an actor to talk about acting without sounding like an insufferable douchebag. And comedians don't come off too much better. At least Seinfeld doesn't come off like an egomaniac. Blood For Dracula - This movie is so good for a Morrissey movie that you might mistake it for a real B-movie. the Frankenstein one was knowingly absurd, but it still didn't work. This one worked a little better. I didn't listen to the commentary, because I'm sure Paul is still his usual right wing self. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 28th, 2006
1:25 am	Danto continually surprises me. By post-analytic, I had always taken it to mean he stold some shit from Hegel for his theory of art. But it turns out that he's a Freudian( or Lacanian maybe, but I don't know enough to know just what the difference might be), among other things: "In recent years a number of audacious theorists in Paris have achieved something so remarkable that I am certain we will someday look back on Paris during the thirty years after World War II as we look back on Amsterdam in the three decades in which Dutch painting achieved its supremacy, or on Florence in the somewhat more protracted period of the High Renaissance. The writings were dark, self-indulgent, portentous, agonizingly frivolous, and silly, infuriating, and absurd. But collectively they expanded upon the concept of the text to integrate history, culture and psychology, as well as to revolutionize the reading of literature narrowly considered. Six decades of analytical philosophy had devoted itself to the exploration of the proposition as the unit of meaning and bearer of truth, culminating in the truth-conditional analysis of meaning and the thought that "S is true if and only if S." But when we seek to widen our horizons beyond "Snow is white if and only if snow is white," this analysis helps us very little. Logic takes up some of the slack; language-game or speech-act theory takes it up in a different way: but these leave us with the thesis that the larger encompassing contexts are calculi or Lebensformen. Even when Jerry Fodor advanced the singular thesis that there is a language of thought, he continued to construe it as formulating T-rules for propositions, raising the particulate theory of Hume to a higher level, treating propositions one at a time as though each were a tiny vessel of meaning. If the mind zusammenhangs, as Jaques Lacan insists; if cultures zusammenhang, as Calude Levi-Strauss proposes; if history zusammenhangs in the manner conceived by Michel Foucault or Fernand Braudel, then even if texts to not hold together the way Jacques Derrida supposes they do, Hume really was a victim of the metaphysics of presence, which is another name for atomist, and the scope of textual theory is collectively widened and a redistribution of the map of learning is in order. Criticism is then the paradigm of human science, and I find it surprising, even exhilarating, that the matrix for understanding the physiology and ultimately the molecular biology of human cognition should be those strategies which are applied to analyzing the poems of Donne and the plays of Shakespeare, and that the humanists, with all their touching inadequacies, should be in the forefront of science. We had always been taught that the last shall be first, but whoever would have suspected metaphysics of becoming once again the queen of the sciences?" "In general we indulge in thought experiments of various kinds where universal intuitions of readers are appealed to, which have nothing to do with the way we are embodied or situated or encultured. Any my view is that in detaching writers from their own reality the resulting philosophy is airless and detached, with no tethers to human reality beyond the dubious intuitions alleged to be universal...Philosophy in its professional practice has loosened itself more and more from the world as we really experience it anyway, in our embodied and historical natures, in its drive to secure something disembodied and timeless. And I think a dreadful price, the price of irrelevance, is paid for this: nobody reads philosophy but philosophers." Current Music: The Birthday Party - Waving My Arms - Hee Haw (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 27th, 2006
11:06 pm	'In football, I root for the Oakland Raiders because they hire castoffs, outlaws, malcontents, and fuck -ups, they have lots of penalties, fights, and paybacks, and because Al Davis told the rest of the pig NFL owners to go get fucked... Someday, the Raiders will be strong again, and they will dip the ball in shit and shove it down the throats of the wholesome, white, heartland teams that pray together and don't deliver late hits’ – George Carlin Bergman's The Virgin Spring -- Max von Sydow's daughter gets raped and killed by some shepherds on the way to deliver candles to the church. So, later they unknowing stop at his place asking for shelter from the cold. He figures out who they are. Well, normally, you would just whack them all out, like if you were still a pagan, but what do you do if you're a Christian now? Well, you whack them all out anyway, then promise to build a church for your sin. Based on an old Scandanavian legend/poem. Did I mention that Sven Nykvist is the greatest cinematographer ever? Well, he still is. Bergman's The Passion of Anna -- yet another from his 'person has a mental/emotional breakdown' series (the 'personal disintegration stage, if you want). In this one von Sydow is a lonely dude living on a little farm kind of place when he hooks up with Liv Ullman, who is a crippled widow. Turns out their both liars, and he attacks her with an axe. They scuffle a bit. Movie ends. Also, Sven Nykvist is the greatest cinematographer ever. Mike Leigh's Naked. This is about a real loser asshole, also called an anti-hero, who wanders around Thatcher's London, talks a lot, smokes a lot, hate fucks a number of chicks. Lest you think the moral of the story is that poor people suck, there is a rich guy who is a literal rapist and psycho. Nothing much bad happens to either of them though. A lot of people seem to have thought the movie is misogynist, but that's silly. None of the guys have any remotely redeeming qualities, and it's the poor lot of the women to have to put up with them, take care of them, etc. I'm not sure how that equals hate. Ken Burns's Mark Twain documentary. Fuck Mark Twain was such a badass. People actually used to like, go and do cool shit, like wandering off to some exotic locale, or captaining a steamboat, or going to the Nevada territory to prospect, then write about it, instead of this modern shit way of reading shit, or watching movies, or just growing up and writing about that. How pathetic is it that James Frey made up a bunch of shit for his 'autobiography' and all he could come up with some banal fucking drug addiction, as if there was anything edgy, interesting or exotic about a junkie at this point. I mean, fuck, man, Chuck Barris claimed to be a CIA assassin. That's the kind of shit I'm talking about. Go big. Anyhow, the details of Twain's life were relatively known to me since I read his autobiography on the plane to Ireland. His childhood in missouri, his complete and total failure as a businessman, tragic deaths of his kids and wife. It did focus a little more on the darker side of him, the constant need for attention and the spotlight, his incredibly short temper, his constant debts from high society living. I think I'm going to read everything he's ever published when I'm done with Oscar Wilde. As a matter of fact, I think I'm not going to read any more modern fiction writers, novelists or playwrights at all until I'm finished with Twain, Wilde, Shaw and all of the Big Russians. History's natural filtration process hasn't had time to work, and there's too much shit floating around in modern publishing. His house is also apparently preserved in Connecticut. I will go. Current Music: András Schiff - Variation 24. ( La Berceuse Des Bergers ) - Bach-Goldberg Variations-Schiff (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006
11:42 am	Back From Ireland back from St. Patrick's Day week in Ireland. Here are some reasons American Airlines sucks: -out of 8 hours there were 5.5 of turbulence coming over the Atlantic, and the captain didn't even have the decency to apologize -the lights inside the cabin near my seat were broken on both trips. Trip there they were constantly flickering, on the way back my reading light was broken. -the two snot-nosed shits behind me were having a seat kicking contest. -there were no peanuts, and they served cabbage with dinner. airline cabbage? -there was no trip indicator telling you where you are on the route to where you are going -they constantly highlight the difference between coach and businuess/first class, as if we aren't flying first class because we didn't know that they get additional dinner supplies, or have their own bathroom. So, saturday i landed in dublin, noticed that they've changed their passport stamp since last year, went to J's place, slept. Went to dinner at Ouzo, which was way too crowded and some slobbering Scotsman on the way to piss out the beer he had no doubt taken by the gallon knocked J's arm and spilled and broke her wine glass. No apology. Furthermore, because this is Europe, no wait staff noticed until we were ready to leave. sunday we went to il fornaio for breakfast, then to see Syriana, which is about how the system of oil exportation is in fact predicated on the greed and corruption of all involved. the one problem i had is how they portrayed the suicide bombers as practically illiterate, poor pakistanis who had been fired from their oil rig work. I think, if you look at the 9.11 hijackers, or the london train bombers, that is not the case at all. i know we're supposed to, as good liberals, say it's about poverty and oppression, but sometimes it's about having a stupid violent religious belief. afterwards, the Porterhouse, the best pub in Dublin, for Vienna Lager (in season only!) and various ales and stouts, then to Salamanca for tapas before heading home. monday J had to work, so I laid around in bed and watched The Purple Rose of Cairo, which I somehow missed. Went to the garda office for some paperwork, them met with Joa at French Paradox for an awesome, awesome night of drinking. The last bottle of champagne, nobody remembered. Also, I had this scrambled egg with black truffle and garlic thing that kicked 7 kinds of ass. J. had some foie gras, but whatever vinegar shit they put on there made it taste bad to me. Perfect little place. Snooty French waiter included. tuesday J worked a half day, then we went to see Muckross, the school she designed that was recently finished building. Unfortunately it was already in use, and there were 14 year olds running around everywhere. Tried to gift shop and mostly failed. FINALLY got to see the Oval Office under Shanahans, which has JFK's fucking rocking chair in it behind the car. Totally sweet. Then we went home and I made a fritatta. Wednesday we got an early bus to Cork. The Gresham Metropole is a decent hotel. Wandered around, went to a few local museums. Marvelled at how shockingly provincial the second largest city in Ireland is, and how every fucking kid there dressed like a knacker/chav/wigger and how there should be a new language, Corkish, because the shit they talk doesn't sound like any English known to man. I feel sorry for other EU people who go to Ireland thinking they can learn English there and end up talking to people from Cork. thursday we went to a museum showcasing the history of butter in Ireland. That was totally sweet. Mmmm...butter. Then a long ass walk to the city gaol. the bus ride back to ireland was a model of irish efficiency, which is to say two hours late, and with a pointless stop to consolidate passengers in the middle. if we're late, at least we can be uncomfortable and cramped, right? friday was st. paddy's day proper. we saw a cool outdoor art exhibit of donkey pictures at Custom House Quay, then wandered over to the parade. because ireland hates me as much as god hates it, it of course hailed, almost causing a panic for about 2 minutes. then we went to Ba Mitsu for Czech Budavar, and Yamamori for dinner. Very good. Watched Once Upon a Time In the West, which is supposed to be this Leone classic western. It was ponderous. Give me Eastwood anyday. Packed a shitload of shit for me to bring back to AZ. sat we got up early and met the J's cousin and her fiance, and some scottish friends of J visiting at a pub, with a quick stop for some south african's birthday. after the requisite amount of pints, went out to balbriggan for south african barbeque and more pints. marinated steak, chicken, south african sausage, and some kind of tomato, cheese and chutney sandwich were all cooked over open flame. it was everything i expected. south africans really do use pork for vegetables. sun drove around a bit, went to a little rustic cottage looking place called man o' war for lunch. got the train back. next morning left for the airport, picked up duty free extra majors and whiskey, and flew back to this stinking hole. i've calculated, and it's about 110 days until my next vacation (back to Russia). I need to forego my next raise to get up to 20 days of vacation. I have 18 now, and I think the extra 2 would be better than more money. Current Music: Jackson Browne - Interview and Intro to The Pretender - Live on KLOS w/ Jim Ladd (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 8th, 2006
3:06 am	Watched a British documentary with a tautological title, Tupac: Hip Hop Genius. Why the 'hip hop' qualification? Anyway, aside from the usual accomplishments like first rapper to release a double album, first to release an album while incarcerated, etc.. I learned that Tupac used to write his lyrics down and then go straight to record them, but that they never contained spelling errors, or any cross outs. Now, who is this reminiscent of? Mozart of course, who would write the music out without corrections, because he had it all worked out and revised in his head prior. Badlands - Martin Sheen is really good. Fucking Malick, why doesn't he make more movies? As usual with him, he makes some lush-ass landscapes, and morally ambiguous characters. Sheen ends up notorious, but you never once feel like he's Evil. Reminded me of Days of Heaven. California Split - Altman is hit or miss. For every piece of absolute cinematic genius like The Player, he makes some other piece of shit like Dr. T and the Women or something. California Split is one of the good ones. In the commentary, we find that he's quite the gambler also. What a guy. What's up with iLife taking up 7.5GB? Sad thing is I'll probably only use iPhoto. There is no really good free alternative to manage a shitload of pictures though, unless you want to go all web based, which is lame. And I get to play with iWeb! I'm sure it sucks ass. Current Music: Ben Folds - Bitches Ain't Shit [Dr. Dre Cover] - Live, Rare, B-sides and Others (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 6th, 2006
12:38 am	it's still weird for me when i see english scooped up into russian... хелп ми аут? (help me out, transliterated) another one is пипл (people), which Jenia tells me is like, her mother's slang. Like using 'groovy' in an unironic way. maybe because english does this so much we don't even notice it? Crash?! This isn't on par with the Forrest Gump or Titanic travesties of years past(or Adaptation not even being nominated in 2002)...but shit. I mean, Crash was a fine and decent movie. Hey, racism is complex. Wow. Like, it's not all black and white(no pun intended) I almost feel like the Academy was trying to cover all its liberal bases. 'Let's see...Clooney for Syriana and Weisz for The Constant Gardener, there's our anti-corporate market covered, pencil in Ang for directing Brokeback and PSH for Capote, that'll cover the gay contingent...oh, we forgot the 'racism is bad' oscars! yeah, scratch out Brokeback for best picture and stick Crash in there.' Lame. And even though I have a huge man-crush on Clooney, what was with his self-congratulatory shit about the Academy being so progressive? Last I checked, Hollywood rolled right over for the Production Code, for maintaining blacklists, for parroting the anti-drug machismo of the '80's...they didn't even nominate a movie that dealt with AIDS until 1993. Yeah, really on the ball there. So they gave an Oscar to a black person in 1939. Okay, props. But then Clooney says, 'while they were still sitting in the backs of theaters.' But that was before the anti-trust measures made them sell off the theaters, which were mostly owned by the goddamned hollywood studios at that time! 'here's an oscar.' 'can we sit in the front of your theaters now' 'let's not go crazy, okay?' Furthermore, I would argue that the record shows that the Academy has consistently chosen movies about the personal problems of white people over movies of social or racial consequence, when they even bother to nominate them. This is the same Academy that took Out of Africa over The Color Purple, Platoon over The Mission, Rain Man over Mississippi Burning, Driving Miss Daisy over Born on the Fourth of July, Shakespeare in Love over The Thin Red Line, American Beauty over The Insider, Chicago over The Pianist, and Million Dollar Baby over Ray for best picture in the last 20 years. Most years you can't even find anything of consequence on the best picture lists. In fact, in the paradigm era of American progressivism, let's say the mid-60's to early '70's, we saw winners like The Sound of Music in '65, A Man For All Seasons, a G-rated movie about Henry VIII, Oliver!, Patton, The Sting...all win. In maybe the biggest travesty in Oscar history, Rocky won best picture in 1976 over Network AND Taxi Driver! Yeah...Rocky. Pretty progressive... i'm still down with clooney, that just seemed like a pretty silly speech. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 2nd, 2006
1:38 am	It makes me laugh when people have like, reading goals for the year of XYZ number of pages, but then they read books like Dan Brown or Harry Potter or Nicole Ritchie or something. Might as well make goals about number of hours of TV watched. Soccer...now, Ronaldinho http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5101339921930519940 -- he is a God. Plain and simple. Plus Barcelona is fan owned. And their rivals, Real Madrid, are fascists. How can you not love this team? I might have to get a ronnie top to go with the Rivaldo one I got in mexico. Also, the US beat Poland in a meaningless friendly. After the US is out of this world cup, I'm rooting for anyone but England, then Brazil. I couldn't handle it if that scouse mongoloid Crouch got a WC victory. God, anything but that. Head-On (Gegen Die Wand) - Fatih Akin's story about a Turkish girl in Germany who marries a misanthropic, poor guy 20 years older than herself so that she can get the hell away from her ultra-strict family and dance and fuck(initially he tells her he's gay to get rid of her) &tc.. Naturally he falls in love with her, gets jealous, kills a guy on accident who is antagonizing him about his wife being a whore, goes to jail, she realized she loves him, and tells him she will wait for him. To prove she is sincere, she flies to Turkey, gets bored, quits her job, falls in with an opium dealer, gets stabbed, get knocked up and gets a boyfriend. He gets out of jail, goes all the way to Turkey to find her ass, she fucks him for 2 days, then ditches him instead of meeting him at the bus station. So...is that her 'accepting responsibility?' Anyway, I don't really see why everyone is all up on this movie's nuts for. Yes - Joan Allen is rich, and in a loveless marriage to a politician. She's also supposed to be Irish, but grew up in the states, to save her from having to try do an accent. Also, the whole movie is written in rhyming verse. I'd like to say that this is important in challenging the conventions of movie making vis-a-vis prose narrative, but actually it was just fucking annoying. Something about racism or immigrants or something, but nothing as compelling or dark as say, Dirty Pretty Things. They run off to Cuba after some troubles or something. Sucked. Don't Drink the Water -- every once in a while Woody makes a film just because he makes on every year. A lot of times, i think he just dusts off some old shit and adapts it for the screen. Minor, but pretty entertaining. Cane Toads, An Unnatural History -- I watched this because Werner Herzog listed it as one of his favorite movies somewhere. Cane toads are ugly, and everything I see about Australian wildlife makes me want to go there less and less. 5 Disc History of the Lakers - proving what I already know, that the Lakers are among the greatest franchises in the history of team sports, and Robert Horry's shot against the hated Kings in 2001 is one of the great moments ever caught on video tape in the history of the world. Signs of Life - Herzog's first feature. The commentary was better than the movie, and it wasn't even that great, but then, he was only 24 when he made it. Hour of the Wolf -- the more Bergman from this period I watch, the more I just look at what Nyvquist is doing, because I'm starting to get tired of waiting for the main character's repression mechanism to fail so they can have an emotional or mental breakdown of some kind. Brother - takeshi katano always has nice suits. and kills people. well, that's a good formula. i can really appreciate this. the office their crime syndicate sets up...also slick. the shot of fucking la brea at the miracle mile sign with the city bus made me wonder why i left LA for this shithole for approximately the 847,599th time. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 28th, 2006
9:56 pm	Ungerian Scepticism Finishing up Peter Unger's book Ignorance: A Case for Skepticism. Awesome stuff. At first, he presents a kind of revised classical (yay Sophists!) argument for skepticism, that goes like this: (1) IN respect of anything which might be known or believed (about the external world), say, that p, if someone knows that p,then, on the assumption of reasoning, the person can or could know, first, that he at least believes that p and, furthermore, that there is no evil scientist, a being other than himself, who is, by means of electrodes, deceiving him into falsely believing that p, and, here finally, taht his own experiences and mental states are not randomly related to any external things there may be but of such a nature that he falsely believes that p. (2) In respect of anything that might be known or believed abotu the external world, say, that p, no one can or could know, first, that he at least believes that p and, furthermore, there there is no evil scientist, a being other than himself, who is, by means of electrodes, deceiving him into falsely believing that p and, here finally, that his own experiences and mental states are not only randomly related to any external things there may be but of such a nature that he falsely believes that p, not even on the assumption of reasoning. (3) In respect of anything which might be known or believed about the external world, say, that p, no one ever knows that p. So, that's some pretty standard Cartesian-style skepticism. You have to believe with Unger that 'know' is an absolute term, in that it requires certainty, and if you aren't certain then you don't really know. He gives a lot of linguistic analysis to that effect. If you know that p, then anything that can count as evidence, or suggest that p is not the case can be rejected immediately. Unger doesn't think there are any cases where this kind of attitude is simply dogmatic. From there we move to a generalized argument, not limited to the external world: 1) If someone knows something to be so, then it is all right for the person to be absolutely certain that it is so. 2) It is never all right for anyone to be absolutely certain that anything is so. 3) Nobody ever knows that anything is so. Then on to that nobody is ever reasonable in believing anything, because: 1) If someone S is reasonable in something X, then there is something which is S's reason for X or there are some things which are S's reasons for X. 2) If there is something which is S's reason for something X, then there is some propositional value of 'p' such that S's reason is that p and if there are some things which are S's reasons for X, then there are some propositional values of 'p' and 'q' and so on such that S's reasons are that p and that q and so on. 3) If S's reason (for something X) is that p, then S knows that p; and if S's reasons (for X) are that p and that q and so on, then S knows that p and S knows that q and so on. 4) If someone S is reasonable in something X, then there is some propositional value of 'p' such that S knows that p. but since nobody can ever know p, nobody can ever be reasonable in believing X. in the last part he sounds like he's arguing a kind of 'semantic nihilism', straight from Nietzsche and on through Rorty...that the language can never really mirror the world because of its limitations, so 'everything is false' etc.. or as he calls it, 'the impossibility of truth.' Anyway, Unger's writing style is a little verbose and overly italicized, but I like him because he's interesting, and moreover, he doesn't give a good goddamn about contradicting common sense (although he's since abandoned such an extreme scepticism, his latest book argues that we might all be immortal souls...fucking awesome! who else in analytic philosophy does that shit? fuck not contradicting the man in the street's intuitions) (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 19th, 2006
3:37 am	two from jonathan rosenbaum "The most striking difference for me in overall atmosphere between Cannes in the seventies and Cannes in the nineties can be seen in the press conferences, which used to resemble gladiatorial combats and are now almost completely predetermined publicity sessions, most of them controlled by compulsive politeness and relatively useless when it comes to the exchange of either ideas or information. Two characteristic questions I can recall from the seventies are (1) after the screening of The Mother and the Whore, addressed to Jean Eustache: "Why did you choose to make a film instead of write a novel?" and (2) after the screening of One Hamlet Less, addressed to Carmelo Bene, dressed in a white suit:"Do you sleep at night in pajamas or in the nude?" to which Bene replied, 'Fuck you.'" "even bad or mediocre foreign movies have imporant things to teach us. Consider them cultural CARE packages, precious news bulletins, breaths of air(freash or stale) from diverse corners of the globe; however you look at them, they're proof positive that Americans aren't the only human beings and that the decisions we make about how to live our lives aren't the only options available--at least not yet. As strange as it sounds, this is fast becoming an endangered position. I assume that writer-director Kevin Smith was well past his teens when he told an interviewer a few years back, 'I don't feel like I have to go back and view European or other foreign films because I feel like these guys [Jim Jarmusch and others] have already done it for me, and I'm getting it filtered through them. That ethic works for me.' It shouldn't be suprising that Jarmusch was as appalled by Smith's statement as I was, if only for what it reveals about a certain kind of landlocked naivete--the kind that assumes that world cinema, and therefore the world, can be categorized and summarized so simply. But it isn't all that different, really, from the kind of sweeping judgments that can easily pass for cleverness in our culture. 'one of the extraordinary advantages of growing up French,' began david denby's review of catherine breillat's Romance in The New Yorker, 'is that you can be absurd without ever quite knowing it'--an advantage presumably denied to world-weary americans such as himself." (Comment on this)