The Ecclesiastical Revue [entries|friends|calendar] bishopsreviews [ website | Jake's Reviews ] [ userinfo | livejournal userinfo ] [ calendar | livejournal calendar ]

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T [29 Jan 2010|12:32am] [ music | The Seatbelts, "Live in Baghdad" ] The 5,000 FIngers of Dr. T was very much destined for cult-classic status from its release, as long as it managed to not actually be successful, as indeed it was not. Its chief claim to fame is that the chief creative talent behind its creation was Dr. Seuss, who then disowned it. His hand is oddly not all that visible in many aspects of the film: while the backgrounds are unmistakably Seussian and the lyrics of many of the songs resemble Seuss's wordplay, the intervening dialogue, the characters, and most of the foreground decorations are really not all that remarkable. The story occasionally veers into entertainingly crazy territory, but mostly feels like a product of its time, all in all. It falls into a sort of boy-hero plot which seems rather relentlessly 50s, and for enough of the running time the piano-related lunacy is in the background. My expectations may be my fault, but nonetheless I can't help but think this film squandered its opportunities to be truly fantastic. Only the wide-angle outdoor shots really capture a sense of magic and unreality. See also: IMDB, Wikipedia. post comment

Post-timeskip Elfquest: Hidden Years, Shards, and New Blood [24 Jan 2010|02:01pm] [ music | NOX, "Eskü" ] I am kinda not a fan of timeskips. They smack of lazy storytelling to me. Nonetheless, after Kings of the Broken Wheel, the Elfquest main storyline was a bit of a mess, with about half the principal characters having a millenium of storyline to catch up on, which the other half completely jumped over that bit of storyline due to plot contrivance. What followed was an astonishingly fragmented storyline, not all of whose confusions could be blamed on the temporal weirdshit. The short version: Hidden Years starts off following the KotBW principal characters, with occasional one-shot diversions. Then a new quest starts and the group splinters into two: the questing group gets their story told in Shards, while the Wolfrider core group goes off and wanders aimlessly in the remainder of Hidden Years. Meanwhile, over in New Blood, a raft of second-string writers are churning out increasingly dire material, including—I kid you not—a Smurfs crossover. Eventually, Team Elfquest decides there are better stories to tell, with greater continuity, and decides to put the New Blood writers onto building storyline out of the largely obscure crowd of elves who aren't featured in the other two storylines. Eventually, New Blood ends up tellnig two different stories: one rather compelling one recounting a rather peculiar encounter with the descendants of humans featured in prior storylines, and one apparently pointless one concerning an unlikely and apparently plot-irrelevant invasion of Sorrow's End. So we have 4 storylines, of varying quality and relevance. It perhaps goes without saying that I was, in the main, unimpressed with the muddle these comics represent. Part of this is, perhaps, my own fault. I was reading them on the Kindle, which is not, perhaps, how they're meant to be viewed, since they actually have vibrant color which is more than a little useful in distinguishing among the characters in the enormous cast. Another problem, and one which the gallery layout does little to prevent, is that I was reading them serially: first Hidden Years, then Shards, then New Blood, while the stories therein are really meant to be read in parallel. However, even accepting the limitations of my own reading, I'm dubious about these storylines. The aforementioned enormous cast of characters makes it hard to be too emotionally invested in any of them, and the plot itself (er, plots themselves) doesn't feel as compelling as the original series. As for the art, it's stylistically moderately different, but I'm not sure I can in good conscience call it inferior: it's simpler and less busy, making more use of color contrast (see above re my misfortunes on the Kindle) and simpler designs. Ultimately, I'd say this is worthwhile for anyone who felt the series was left hanging by KotBW, but I wouldn't really mark it as a must-read except for completionists. See also: Wikipedia, Free online gallery. post comment

Liar Game [23 Jan 2010|03:02pm] [ music | Cake, "Guitar" ] Liar Game is glorious. It kicks The Manga Guide to $MATHEMATICS_DISCIPLINE in the nads and steals its lunch money. Artistically, it's not much to look at: it's passable but not great. But it has terrific fun storylines. You know all the crazy "you know that I know that you know that I don't know whol Kira is" headgame shit in Death Note, and the way everyone skirts around the rules and comes up with clever ways to rules-lawyer the Death Note to their advantage? Liar Game takes all that and adds a generous helping of mathematics to it. So if you like your comics fiercely analytical, you'll love Liar Game. There's probabilitiy, game theory, and a shitload of psychology. And it's all held together with interesting characters and a solid frame story (which at present seems to be built on a rather contrived foundation, but figuring out the contrivance underlying the LGT is, apparently, one of the major long-term revelations in the story, so we can reserve judgment on that one). See also: Wikipedia, Anime News Network. post comment

The Wire [12 Jan 2010|11:19pm] [ music | Lemn Jelly, "'75 aka Slow Train" ] Once upon a time, a former Baltimore Sun reporter named David Simon decided to bring his experience of Baltimore, and in particular of the criminal and police interactions, into every home in America on the small screen. Thus was born one of the primary bar-raisers in police procedurals, Homicide: Life on the Street. Today, Homicide is still quite respectable, but it lacks the punch it did back in the 90s, because several other shows have adopted its realistic style. So it was high time when Simon returned to the Baltimore crime drama in the 21st century with The Wire. Except, this time, it was on HBO, which let him get away with a lot of crap which you can't do on a broadcast network. Some of what he was free to do was the usual broadcast/non-broadcast difference in decency laws: he was now free to write a scene consisting of nothing but people saying "fuck" (gimmicky but OK once), pepper the street slang with uses of the word "nigger" (appropriate realism), and include occasional onscreen simulated copulation (acceptable but rarely actually necessary). But where he really had a free hand was in pacing, plotting, and explanation to the viewer. The first episode does little to draw you in: it spends a lot of time on bureaucrats and gangsters shouting at each other in jargon and very little explanation of what's going on. On a network, that would be an unmitigated disaster. On HBO, it's just 1/13 of the intended first-season story arc. And by the end, a viewer who's been paying attention will understand a lot of what's going on (just in time for the second season and a return to complete ignorance of what a 'RO/RO' is or how the docking seniority system works). It s compelling and gritty, and full of lots of characters. It's not patronising (but one sometimes wishes it would be, just a little), and it doesn't pull its punches. It has a (seemingly appropriate) cynicism about politics, bureaucracy, and race relations in the city. Other, better reviewers than myself have enumerated the series' best points, so I figure I'll just present my (extremely subjective) rundown of the seasons from best to worst. Third season: There are about a hundred plots in this one, all of them interesting and none of them underdeveloped. The breakout from the level of the street to the upper echelons of the police force and city government is well-handled, and there's astonishing long-term plot progression and character development. The series could even have ended with this one and it would be strong. First season: Where it all started. There's one plot and it's hammered hard. The multiple facets of the principal characters of the next several seasons are exposed with subtlety and skill. The street-level realism and interpolice bickering are developed to just the right level to not feel gimmicky, and the end of the arc provides effective partial closure. Second season: Neck-and-neck with the fourth season; the prison subplot's more absorbing than the elecvtion issues, but the dock is a marginally less interesting environment, and more removed from the main focus, than the inner-city schools. It's a nice contrast to see some white people on the criminal end of things, but this season has the disadvantage of having fewer characters who tie into the long-term story. Fourth season: See above with respect to plotting. On other points, the school plot is a bit darkened by hobby-horse cynicism, but even with such imbalance, this remains an enjoyable and enlightening set of episodes. The political elements drag a bit, thoguh, especially on the points which are far removed from the police-hierarchy issues. Fifth season: Where David Simon gets really cynical, I'm afraid. He's a bit too close to the Baltimore Sun to be objective here, and he spends a lot of time developing "good guys" and "bad guys" in the newsroom. He can see shades of gray everywhere but at home, I guess. See also: IMDB, Wikipedia. post comment

봄여름가을겨울그리고봄/Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring [11 Jan 2010|12:46am] [ music | Republic, "'16 tonna' fekete szén" ] Spring, Summer... is a surprisingly thematically rich film. I caught the last 20 or so minutes of it on TV at one point, but otherwise didn't know overmuch about it, and I'd missed out on everything that led up to those 20 minutes, which considerably diminished my appreciation. It is chock-full of symbolism, most of it at just the right level: with symbolism there's always a danger of either aiming too high and seeming pretentious, or too low and seeming patronizing. For the most part, the symbols in this film occupy a comfortable middle ground (although the Spring flashbacks near the end of the Winter segment were perhaps unnecessary). It's visually lush too, which makes the long, slow panoramas a visual treat. It doesn't fall into any of the usual "scenery porn" traps of assuming the visual spectacle is sufficient in its own right, but always gives us something to chew on in front of the scenery, even if the action is languid. Many of the thematic elements are exhibited through nature, so the serene naturalism of the setting is really quite appropriate. One setting idiosyncrasy I noted was bound up with the themes and symbols I've already mentioned: a strong emphasis seemed to be placed on boundaries and passages, but, oddly, the passageways existed outside of the contexts in which a passageway makes sense. The monastary had interior doors but not interior walls. I was actually halfway convinced this was a cinematic/theatrical convention akin to the minimalistic sets of Our Town and Dogville, since everyone used the doors when traversing areas -- except for a single instance, during the apprentice's nocturnal creeping in the Summer segment. Likewise, the wilderness in which the monastary is situated is accessed by a gate, with doors that close, and, as with the interior doors of the monastary, they're used compulsively, and seem to represent an explicit separation between the scenes of action. This is among the many stylizations which is simultaneously easy to appreciate and difficult to fully comprehend/ So, as I've gone on about, this film is pretty deep with symbols and themes. Boundaries, and, as the title suggests, cycles, but also a surprisingly un-Buddhist theme: penance. Over and over again, the apprentice undergoes ritual absolution. Parts of this, morally, feel more like elements of director Kim's Christianity than the Buddhism he's attempting to channel. But that's a quibble. I certainly don't expect it to necessarily recapitulate a single belief system slavishly, although many of the overarching messages, particularly the dangers of desire, are consistent with what I know of Buddhism. There's a lot to like here. It's visually stunning, in service of considerably more than just being pretty. Plotwise it's a bit light, but there's a lot going on onscreen that's not, technically speaking, plot. Not much in the way of complaints though. Its languor touches on the overdone once or twice, but not enough to be a deal-breaker. The role of women in the story is somewhat unfortunately objectivized -- and a bit chilling, if one reads the Autumn segment as involving the same woman as Summer (which is implied strongly, but not stated outright). See also: IMDB, Wikipedia. post comment

北へ。: Diamond Dust Drops [10 Jan 2010|12:04am] [ music | The Who, "Is It In My Head" ] If one were to take, say Macross 7, Naruto, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Diamond Daydreams and ask a random American which one is based on a videogame, probably none of them will choose right (unless they're an even incidental anime buff, in which case they'll already be intimately familiar with the first three and choose the fourth by process of elimination). It's actually a pretty clever approach to repurposing a property. Take a dating sim, remove the (necessarily cypheric) protagonist, and what do you have left? A context and a bunch of well-characterized women. That actually works astonishingly in Diamond Daydreams, shifting the genre from romance to slice-of-life realism. The underlying schtick is that the story is set in various Hokkaido locations. It's a change of pace from anime which are usually either set in Tokyo or in ill-defind rural areas. Various Hokkaido communities are lovingly recreated in detailed backgrounds, with their own individual local geography, character and individual complications for the characters who live there. This is a series with a low barrier to entry for someone who's not an anime buff: the whole series is only 13 episodes, but more to the point, the two-episode story arcs are each standalone -- there's even fairly minimal character crossover, and no plot crossover. As a result, there's a certain "light snack" quality to the stories; they've got some drama, but they are all more-or-less resolved after 40 minutes (the closure is often only partial, which is presumably to lend verisimillitude). The characters are likable (OK, except Kyoko), and their crises are believable and sympathetic. The only real downside of this is that the series may seem a little colorless and lacking in intensity, but, hey, it doesn't always have to be about the world-shaking and world-ending struggles of titans, does it? Oh, and the fact that the opening animation (and awful poppy accompanying music) has essentially no thematic or plot compatibility with the series as a whole. See also: IMDB, Wikipedia, Anime News Network. post comment

BPAL: Iago, Imperious Tiger-Lily, #93 Engine, OM Ackerman's Toys, Satyr, Tezcatlipoca, White Rabbit [04 Jan 2010|09:37am] [ music | Ella Fitzgerald, "Skylark" ] The last part of the recent order. Imperious Tiger-Lily was a freebie. ( Some flailing attempts at masculinity ) post comment

The Book of Fathers, by Miklós Vámos [03 Jan 2010|07:15pm] [ music | The Seatbelts, "Memory" ] Damn. This novel is very clearly Hungarian-Jewish, but it's developed out of at least one other cultural tradition. The most obvious antecedants structurally are, in no particular order, García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Allende's The House of the Spirits, and perhaps Szabó's Sunshine (the timing would be kind of tricky for this to actually have inspired it); like the last of these, it's a historical drama following the fates of a single family, but it has a considerable layer of the mystical and the magical that marks the two aforementioned Latin works. It's less subtle in its exploration of family cycles than, say, The House of the Spirits; some of the patterns are explicitly spelled out and the recapitulation of the past through memory is implemented through a pretty direct mechanism (which is nicely subverted by the twelfth Csillag). But in addition to a novel with those familiar thematic elements of mystical heritage through a single family line, this is a Hungarian story, which means it lives in an extremely well-defined timeline. Macondo sleeps in timeless torpor, and even Argentina's history is a seesaw of internal conflict, while Hungary's is punctuated by the intrusion of specific external influences: Turkish, Austrian, Nazi, Soviet. The tenor of individual times comes through in The Book of Fathers, but in an intriguingly subdued manner. Major events, like the 1848 revolution and even the World Wars, happen in a peculiarly offstage manner: all three of the Csillags with the misfortune to experience the 40s suffer horribly during the war, but somehow World War II itself never quite comes into focus, although the shroud of the war hangs heavy. The 1956 revolution can nearly be missed, and the 1989 reformulation of the state takes place offstage. And yet the tenors of the times are crucial for understanding the characters' positions in society. This book was written for those familiar with these events as commonplace history, so it's not surprising that Vámos doesn't present a didactic summary of them, but it's refreshing if perhaps a bit confusing to see a historical novel not take the easy way out stringing from historical event to historical event. This book is more about the moods of the times and the fortunes of individuals than about history itself, and it does a marvelous job of drawing a series of interconnected but individually distinctive stories. post comment

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John le Carré [02 Jan 2010|11:08pm] [ music | Ray Charles, "Unchain My Heart" ] Le Carré is a luminary of a generation past. He was the master espionage-thriller writer of the Cold War, and Tinker, Tailor, with its sequels, is generally regarded as among his most exemplary works. Like Graham Greene, he himself had served as an agent of the British Secret Service, and knew whereof he wrote. In some ways this is a disadvantage: he gets astonishingly bogged down in operational and organizational details. These are, admitedly, integral to the tangled plot he's weaving, but at times it's a rough slog getting to the actual meat of a narrative episode, through reams of jargon and the huge number of incidental characters. Given the huge cast, it's actually surprising how effectively le Carré characterizes most of the characters: they're drawn in quick brush-strokes but faithful to their established characterizations and mannerisms. The central mystery of the story is engrossing but unevenly presented: information arrives in fits and starts, and it's easy for an unwary reader to get through a block of reminiscences and still miss the vital clues. This story is very much one that doesn't hold the reader's hand: the revelations are clear to George Smiley, and might be clear to a reader on the second time through, but on many occasions I found myself missing the vital conclusion drawn from a particular narrative segment. See also: Wikipedia. post comment

Hocus Pocus, by Kurt Vonnegut [02 Jan 2010|09:40pm] [ music | Žagar, "Bitter Jollity" ] Kurt Vonnegut may not be a writer so much as a collection of narrative tics. In many of his works, his compulsions mesh to form something actually enjoyable to read. Hocus Pocus is one of his later works, and unfortunately is not as enjoyable as his better books. Many of his stories don't have plot, but they do have a certain narrative intensity which keeps the reader invested; I didn't really get that at all here; there was a disjointedness which made the story hard to actually maintain interest in. In some ways this story seems consciously imitative of many of Vonnegut's less well-regarded works: it has the disjointed and fragmented narrative style of Slapstick, the obsession with genetic disorders of Galapagos, the amorphous socialism of Jailbird. It would be tempting to accuse Vonnegut of self-indulgence, and indeed this book is more than a little self-indulgent, but it doesn't commit the sin I'd reasonably expect. Vonnegut's always pretended to a certain shared-world continuity, and I half-expected to be bludgeoned with references to Kilgore Trout and Rabo Karabekian and the Rosewater Act and suchlike. But this wasn't all that injokey; the only winks and nudges I saw were reference to Tralfamadore and the novelist Paul Slazinger. Nonetheless in spite of not falling into this trap, it wasn't actually a very good novel. It's all the structure of a Vonnegut novel with very little of the actual wry humor and soul of his better work, which makes it a bit of a grim slog. See also: Wikipedia post comment

The Last Chronicle of Barset, by Anthony Trollope [02 Jan 2010|02:15pm] [ music | The High Llamas, "Period Music" ] As mentioned when I reviewed that book, The Small House at Allington left some narrative threads hanging. The Last Chronicle seeks to tie these up, as well as gathering up any plotlines left over from the four previous books and extend them a bit. In addition, it introduces two entirely new plots. In short, it is one huge-ass book with a lot of different narrative strands. Most of the ongoing plots find themselves tied at some point into the central Crawley-family narrative, but the entire Dalrymple/Broughton/Musselboro/van Siever storyline is essentially irrelevant and could be skipped over without damaging the book's integrity. Unlike Barchester Towers, the other long book in the Barchester series, The Last Chronicle is not much of a standalone read; most of its enjoyability is as an addendum to already-established characters and their ongoing stories. It is an essentially satisfactory conclusion to these stories, most of which were fairly satisfactorily concluded before, but to which the amendment is not unwelcome (the Proudies and Mr. Harding get particularly interesting story-extensions). It's perhaps a necessary followup, however, to Small House, if only to get that whole Lily Dale story to something of an adequate conclusion. See also: Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia post comment

The Poetic Edda, translated by Lee Hollander [02 Jan 2010|09:50am] [ music | The Army Blues Jazz Band, "Spiderman" ] Norse mythology may be the second most well-known mythology not associated with a major world religion (Greek myth being the most well-known, of course). While Greek myth is drawn from a variety of stories and legends and surviving plays and poems of ancient Greece, most of what's written in latter-day compilations of Norse mythology, as far as I can tell, comes directly from the Poetic Edda or the later Prose Edda. I dug Norse myth when last I read such a compilation, so I decided to check out some of the sources. The Poetic Edda is a mixed bag of varying legends of various purposes. Very few of the things I regard as iconic Norse myths even appear there, although large sections of the cycle of Sigmund & co. do. Many of the stories in the Poetic Edda are explicitly instructional, either delivering proverbial wisdom or presenting a rudimentary frame-story around a presentation of facts about divinities (often presented as some sort of battle-of-knowledge). It's also a difficult read, at least in this translation, which embraces a certain late-Middle/very-early-Modern English vocabulary and makes effots to maintain scansion. It's a good translaition, I'm sure, but it's a bit of a rough road for one, like myself, not already inclined to extremes of mythological scholarship. One interesting lesson: most spins on Norse Mythology present Loki as a trickster. Maybe the Prose Edda does also, and the Lokasenna makes him seem pretty crafty, But for the most part in the Poetic Edda, the disguise-and-cleverness roles, and in particular the being-a-complete-asshole-via-disguise-and-cleverness roles, are really the province not of Loki, but of Odin (or Othin, as Hollander would have it). I'm thinking particularly of the Vafþrúðnismál, in which Odin, disguised as a far less knowledgable individual, goads a wise giant into a trivia contest to the death, and the Hárbarðsljóð, where, disguised as a ferryman, he ridicules Thor, refuses to carry him across a river, and warns him that while he's busy taking the long way around, his wife's being unfaithful. Classy acts for the leader of a pantheon (he's still better than Zeus and his casual abductions and rapes of mortals, but that's setting the bar awfully low). See also: Wikipedia. post comment

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, by G.K. Chesterton [02 Jan 2010|12:21am] [ music | Besh o droM, "Talyata" ] Chesterton's best known for the Father Brown novels, but apparently he was capable of peculiar psychological and surreal novels. I first became aware of these predilections of his from an entry in an IFComp several years back which purported to adapt one of his novels, but I harbored a desire to read this one based mostly on the praise of non-asshole evangelist (which is damning with faint praise; really he's an excellent essayist and apparently a gentleman) Fred Clark. It' s a quite unusual book, and quite short, but almost exactly the right length for spinning out the particular conceit it is built around, which is exploration of antagonistic opposites in society, specifically seen through the lens of conflict between anarchists and order. Although perhaps "anarchy and order" is more accurate, since the anarchists of the story are (self-consciously) ridiculous 19th-century caricatures more about throwing bombs than about individualistic philosophy. The "police vs. anarchists" framework is really just a metaphor for any sort of dochotomous struggle: good and evil, dark and light, etc. Much more about this story would be spoilers, althoguh several of the twists are foreseeable from pretty early on; by the eighth chapter the broad tenor of the encounters to come should be obvious, but the book manages to keep such foreknowledge from being disappointing by developing a narrative style which manages to keep reasonably taut and suspenseful (in spite of the lack of cause for suspense), and at times, quite humorous. Chesterton's witty, and he's not afraid to show it in descriptions or in dialogue. All in all, it's a fresh, entertaining, and not too long story, and I fear to spoil some of the better bits by sharing too much. See also: Wikipedia. post comment

Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery [01 Jan 2010|04:28pm] [ music | Anima Sound System, "anima006" ] "What kind of crap are you reading these days?" my father asked incredulously, as I set down Anne of Green Gables on top of Pirates of Venus, having brought both along on my trip. Anne is not bad the way Pirates of Venus is bad, but evidently it is not thought meet that a 29-year-old male reads them (fuck that noise — if I can watch shoujo anime and hold my head high, I think my masculine pride will survive a novel targeted at 19th-century Canadian schoolgirls). Anyways, on to Anne. I'm afraid the story never engaged me too much. As a child I might've loved the first three-quarters, with Anne charming the socks off everyone around her with her whimsical, innocent garrulity, but being an old, joyless fart these days, her imaginative-chatterbox routine mostly made me want to lie in a dark room with cold compresses on my eyes. There seemed to be generous timeskips near the end to get everyone where they needed to be, and Anne grew a lot less interesting (as you might have determined from above, I found young Anne wearying. But older responsible Anne just felt kinda dull. There may be some verisimillitude there, and/or an aanalogy to my own life. I'm going to stop talking now). Even the death of a major character couldn't really rescue my interest much. Evidently there are sequels. Lots and lots of sequels. I don't think I'll read them, since I find it hard to imagine this story proceeding in a direction I find terribly interesting. See also: Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia. post comment

Pirates of Venus, by Edgar Rice Burroughs [01 Jan 2010|04:07pm] [ music | The Zombies, "She's Coming Home" ] I knew Edgar Rice Burroughs as the author of the Tarzan books, and nabbed this from the paperback-exchange spinner on a whim ("not a major-series romance" and "written more than 30 years ago" are rare criteria for books on the spinner to meet, so I sometimes nab 'em when I see them). I expected pulpy trash and was not disappointed. It is a very chauvanistic work, a word I use with reference to its many connotations (not all of which are negative, but most of which have picked up a distinctive tinge of superior condescension). There's a great-white-hunter vibe, what with the comfortably wealthy male going off into an area peopled by natives with certain mystical superiorities to the familiar ways but mostly inferior in both technology and understading to the great hero. The natives are, of course, far more backwards and jealous with regard to their women than Our Hero is, but even he regards them more as prizes than individuals. Other than for the "space" part of space opera, this story might as well not have bothered with being set on Venus. Sub-Saharan Africa would've done as well for these walking stereotypes. And yet, for all my poking at its horrific element-of-its-time cultural signifiers, there are certain attributes of the space-opera genre, and this work in particular, which can be admired. It's trash, but it's engrossing trash, sucking you in the way only a potboiler can. And thematically, there are elements which earn some approbation: despite the disturbing characterization of Carson Napier (and implicit narrator approval thereof), there's an admirable scientific bent to his character: the love of exploration, and of science, is not bad in a role-model (for boys alone, alas; I fear very few girls sought to emulate Carson Napier). Likewise, the story itself, despite its laughable shakiness in several elements of actual science, is fundamentally positive about the prospect of space exploration and science as a beneficial force for all mankind. Yes, there's a vibe that the Race for Space should just be Manifest Destiny stretched into the third dimension, but, hey, I'll take that as an excuse. See also: Wikipedia. post comment

Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger [01 Jan 2010|11:05am] [ music | Jethro Tull, "The Waking Edge" ] I didn't know much about J.D. Salinger except for his famed hermitage and The Catcher in the Rye, which I read in high school. I vaguely expected Franny and Zooey, his second-best-known work, to be pretty similar. In some ways it is: it's the story of a person (or people, in this case) burdened by a feeling that they're much smarter than everyone around them. But I find it more interesting in some ways, because while Catcher is the story of a disaffected teenager, Franny and Zooey focuses on college-educated adults, i.e. my people, so they're caught up with academic concerns, which calls to mind some of my own thoughts and experiences on the subject: namely, what does all of their learning do for them, in the long run, and why has knowledge not led to happiness? Sometimes it does seem like the whole purpose of a college education is to feel superior to those around you. And then again maybe not, anymore. In some ways F&Z feels like an artifact of its time, when colleges were havens of liberal-education full of people who honestly believed that they were seeking ascension into a Higher Plane of Knowledge, as well as prodigals who sought four years of dissipation (and people who score pretty high on both axes). These days, pretty much every college seems to serve a fairly vocational purpose, althoguh not the way vocational schools do, teaching skills particular to an occupation. Rather, a lot of schools (and I may be biased by the students I see, and saw at UCSD) seem to essentially serve to rubber-stamp students, sending them on into fields not necessarily related to their degrees, but with the requisite validation of their basic competence. Now as then, the knowledge learned in schools may not have much to do with actually living a life worth leading. But now people are either more honest (to be cynical about it) or cynical (to be honest about it) about the actual utility of their labors. So while the particular social structure Franny and Zooey plumbs is a bit of a creature of the past, the fundamental question of what the point of it all is remains. And for a member of the overeducated class like myself, it's a pretty interesting one. Unfortunately, it doesn't have much in the way of answers, just an exploration of that particular corner of angst rather than an actual thesis. Nonetheless, if you've had enough education to harbor a desire to read this book, it'd probably serve to, if nothing else, to illuminate your own feelings and attitudes. See also: Wikipedia. post comment

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, by Cory Doctorow [01 Jan 2010|10:49am] [ music | Itzhak Perlman, "Happy Baby Girl Hora" ] Down and Out is a quite short book, and it spends a great deal of time and energy on worldbuilding. It becomes apparent that Cory Doctorow has strong opinions about (at least) two things: Disney rides, and the possible shape of economic and social sytems to come. The first is, if colorful, not really the stuff of manifestoes. The second is what makes this book interesting, because he has a very specific worldview in mind, and isn't shy about sharing it. It could be argued that Cory Doctorow is something of a unique twenty-first century personality. In a world which is quickly giving rise to a great many "professional bloggers", Doctorow was one of the first, and is possibly the most thoughtful about the ramifications of the institution -- being an independent professional sharer-of-knowledge was, until relatively recently, the province of the wealthy or well-connected. Now pretty much anyone can do it. It's hard not to imagine his perspective on this development when reading Down and Out, which is, on the face of it, a utopian novel. Good utopian novels are rare: what conflicts can there be in paradise, after all? But Doctorow's extrapolated reasonably successfully, taking what's currently a concern of the comfortable middle-class and widening it to a resource-rich future where everyone has middle-class comfort and middle-class connections. What becomes the class-mechanism in a society of physical comfort? From the point of view of a professional information-sharer in the twenty-first century, the answer seems obvious: esteem. This seems a lot less silly than it did a decade ago, now that the extent to which we are respected or observed or found interesting is coded up in pageranks and site-hits and twitter-followers. That's the kind of economic system Doctorow seems to have in mind. Like most economic systems it's pretty silly, but an economic system in a utopia is doubly silly, since there's nothing to buy, really. Doctorow's aware of this, I imagine, since the economic system is not so much an acquisition mechanism so much as a way of keeping score. Again: this is not as absurd as it seems. Instead of the comfortable middle-class, look at the extremely wealthy -- the sort whose descendants in perpetuity could liev in extreme comfort off of the interest fromt heir savings alone. A fair number of them work far harder than they have any good reason to. Why? Two reasons spring to mind: (a) they think working hard is an integral part of their worth as people, and/or (b) ithey view money as a direct metric of their accomplishment. So the idea of using the system to keep score isn't all that farfetched. It's happening now. So Doctorow's worldbuilding is, in some ways, a realistic sci-fi work, from a social standpoint. The technology he posits to make death and deprivation nonissues is suspect, but his conception of the direction society might then progress in after such changes is at least plausible: after all, it's a permutation of social orders which already exist today. And as for the actual story set in this world? It's not bad. I guess anyone who's a major Disney theme-park buff will really dig it, but even if you aren't, it's enough to keep you turning pages and moderately engrossed. Also, it's free and pretty short, so you really have nothing to lose. See also: free download, Wikipedia. post comment

The Small House at Allington, by Anthony Trollope [01 Jan 2010|10:49am] [ music | The New Mastersounds, "Witness" ] Trollope's Barchester Chronicles are mostly short, light novels of Barsetshire gentry and their tribulations. They're pretty enjoyable books, modest in length and scope, and several of them, despite their inclusion in a series most known for its light mockery of the ecclesiastical world, have nothing at all to do with the doings of the Church of England. Small House is among these, exploring a few incidental characters developed in the previous books and a handful of new characters. There are a couple of features to distinguish it from its fellows. One is its considerably less pastoral tone: the two ecclesiastical novels are set more-or-less exclusively in the cathedral close (except for the enjoyable episode of Mr. Harding's day in London); the next two are set in the Barchester community. A large section of Small House, by way of contrast, is caught up with the activities of civil servants in London, lending the story a rather different tone: it's a little less gentrytastic, a bit more relevant to the workings of the common world. The other notable feature, of which any potential reader must be warned, is that it doesn't really wrap up all its plotlines. There is at least one relationship left abruptly unresolved, and a few more that don't get quite the closure they ought. Nonetheless, it's a reasonably enjoyable book, continuing the gentle drama of Doctor Thorne and Framley Parsonage. I would be remiss in writing up this book if I didn't call attention to a bit of unlikely slang whose meaning has changed rather sharply in the century following this book's publication. Accused of partiality to an unknown lady with initials L.D., John Eames laughs it off: "L.S.D.," said Johnny, attempting the line of a witty, gay young spendthrift. "That's my love—pounds, shillings, and pence; and a very coy mistress she is." Just try that line in the '60s. Or after decimalization at all, really. But decimalization is a plot-token in Trollope's other six-book series. See also: Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia. post comment

Édes Emma, drága Böbe: vázlatok, aktok [24 Dec 2009|10:17pm] [ music | Janis Joplin, "Trust Me" ] Not, I'm afraid, Szabó's best. His German vacation in the 80s did him good, but his return to de-Communized Hungary looks like it took a while to hit its stride, and was rather hampered by the rough shape of the nation itself. Hungary's own troubles manifested in the low production values of this film; it's grainy with poor sound quality (the illegible burned-in subtitles, on the other hand, I blame on the inadequacy of the US DVD authoring). On the directorial-weakness side, I've noted that Szabó has a gift for focusing on a single characteristic experience of a point in history, and in this occasion chose perhaps a rather too limited perspective. The focus of this film is so narrow that, aside from the focus on a change from Russian-language to English-language teaching, the major societal changes don't come through at all, which is a pity. There's also a great deal of gratuitous nudity; so much so that it's alluded to in the title, even, and it doesn't contribute anything at all,as far as I can tell, to the main themes of thin film. For a strong impression about Hungary immediately after liberalization, I get the impression Moszkva tér (which I have yet to actually see) is a better story. See also: IMDB. post comment

Zwartboek [24 Dec 2009|07:45pm] [ music | The Mamas and the Papas, "No Salt on Her Tail" ] I wouldn't expect Verhoeven, based on what I know of his films, to turn to historical drama, but I guess I'm glad he did, because his direction showed the technical aptitude he developed in the '90s and a somewhat meatier and more nuanced plot. It bears a striking resemblance to another film I've enjoyed recently, Musíme si Pomáhat, in exploring the themes of collaboration and the shades of gray in relationships between the conquerors and the conquered in Nazi territory. This story feels mostly very human, and caught up with banality-of-evil issues, stressing the whole day-job-Nazi persona, even in the upper echelons of the occupation. There's a long-running mystery plot which seems to cheapen the whole story and detract somewhat from its focus, but that's a minor quibble. Overall, this story is full of well-realized and very human characters, and the film's sympathies are distributed in unusual and peculiarly sensitive ways. On production values and plot richness, I'd actually put this ahead of Musíme si Pomáhat, while it explores some of the same issues. It's a bit busier and has enough characters to get distracting, but in other respects it's a stronger and more engaging film. See also: IMDB, Wikipedia. post comment

navigation [ viewing | most recent entries ] [ go | earlier ]