Sunday, January 23, 2011
Marquee Moon
The most beautiful thing produced in the rock era. If you are too young, look it up, and listen.
The Social Network
Finally saw it; quite liked it. I had enjoyed David Fincher's creepy serial killer movie, Se7en, but his latest is an even more disturbing horror film. There is no world-weary Morgan Freeman character to provide the moral compass amidst all the evil-doing. I do like Justin Timberlake, but I found his performance less than compelling, perhaps because he is assigned the weakest of Aaron Sorkin's otherwise snappy dialogue. Jesse Eisenberg, on the other hand, deserves whatever awards he garners. A better performance, even, than James Franco's hallucinating and sawing. Franco reveals all of himself; Eisenberg remains a cipher to the end- at least if like me you are unconvinced that the ending implies that our hero is a human being. The soundtrack is damn-near perfect. If I were Fincher I would have tried very hard to get Larry Summers to play himself. Maybe he did.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Degas and Richter
We elbowed our way through the post-impressionist exhibition at the de Young today. I did not bother trying to fight my way to the Starry Night, though it is a lovely painting to be sure. I guess I understand why Gauguin is famous, although his pictures leave me yawning. Cezanne is... well, Cezanne, but the selection was not better than you would find at many good museums around the country. The Pisarros, Bonnards, and Vuillards, very fine to see. But my favorite painting was hiding at the very beginning of the first gallery, for some reason not attracting much attention.
Yes, Degas dancers! For
so many years these paintings were just cliches to me, material for posters in dorm rooms (mostly occupied by women, as I recall). But what a painting! Was there another painter who could create the same sense of motion within such a formalized composition, all the while playing with the light, color, and perspective?
Meanwhile... in the ma
in lobby of the museum is an immense out-of-focus Gerhard Richter op-art piece that can give you all the symptoms of a bad hangover just by looking at it. A great one. But the Degas reminded me of another side of Richter, the fuzzy, dynamic beauty of his candles, familiar to lovers of modern art and/or Sonic Youth. The motion, the light, the colors... Richter and Degas can send a chill down your spine. Eat your heart out, Gauguin.
Yes, Degas dancers! For
so many years these paintings were just cliches to me, material for posters in dorm rooms (mostly occupied by women, as I recall). But what a painting! Was there another painter who could create the same sense of motion within such a formalized composition, all the while playing with the light, color, and perspective?Meanwhile... in the ma
in lobby of the museum is an immense out-of-focus Gerhard Richter op-art piece that can give you all the symptoms of a bad hangover just by looking at it. A great one. But the Degas reminded me of another side of Richter, the fuzzy, dynamic beauty of his candles, familiar to lovers of modern art and/or Sonic Youth. The motion, the light, the colors... Richter and Degas can send a chill down your spine. Eat your heart out, Gauguin.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
I had no idea...
... that the Wobblies were still alive and kicking, trying to organize a few sandwich shops in Minneapolis.
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Umiak, Kayak, Mukluk, Tupik
One of my all-time favorite songs from grade school was the Umiak Kayak song, which taught us a few "Eskimo words." Since I have not found what I believe to be the correct version of this song anywhere on the entire WWW, I provide it here as a public service.
Umiak, kayak, mukluk, tupik,
Umiak, kayak, mukluk, tupik,
Umiak, kayak, Eskimo words,
Learn them if you can.
Umiak, a boat for many men,
Kayak, a boat for one man,
Umiak, kayak, Eskimo words,
Learn them if you can.
Mukluk, an Eskimo boot,
Tupik, an Eskimo tent.
If you heard an Eskimo say these words,
You'd know exactly what he meant.
Umiak, kayak, mukluk, tupik,
Umiak, kayak, mukluk, tupik,
Umiak, kayak,
Eskimo words,
Learn them if you can.
The beauty of this song is in the dramatic dynamics of the ending. I'll be providing the musical notation for the simple but compelling melody shortly. According to Wikipedia, the umiak is a women's boat, and the kayak a men's boat. But the umiak is indeed considerably larger than the kayak, so the song seems roughly accurate, if improperly gendered.
Singing together was a wonderful part of the early grades.
Umiak, kayak, mukluk, tupik,
Umiak, kayak, mukluk, tupik,
Umiak, kayak, Eskimo words,
Learn them if you can.
Umiak, a boat for many men,
Kayak, a boat for one man,
Umiak, kayak, Eskimo words,
Learn them if you can.
Mukluk, an Eskimo boot,
Tupik, an Eskimo tent.
If you heard an Eskimo say these words,
You'd know exactly what he meant.
Umiak, kayak, mukluk, tupik,
Umiak, kayak, mukluk, tupik,
Umiak, kayak,
Eskimo words,
Learn them if you can.
The beauty of this song is in the dramatic dynamics of the ending. I'll be providing the musical notation for the simple but compelling melody shortly. According to Wikipedia, the umiak is a women's boat, and the kayak a men's boat. But the umiak is indeed considerably larger than the kayak, so the song seems roughly accurate, if improperly gendered.
Singing together was a wonderful part of the early grades.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Stinson Beach, December 2010
For about 15 minutes, this sunset brightened rather than dimmed. Hat tip to LMK for the photo.
Christmas dinner blogging
The first course was baked squash soup with five different winter squashes. People seemed to like it!
Happy Reading for the New Year!
John le Carré's Our Kind of Traitor is probably his best post-Cold War novel. Which is to say it is obligatory reading for people who like this kind of book... and that should be everyone! Laura gave it to me for Christmas, and of course I mowed through it in a couple days. It is efficient, suspenseful, and beautifully written. As usual, almost nothing happens; a large chunk of the story consists of people talking to each other and fretting. But still the tension mounts and the pace quickens.
The bad guys are bankers and their government toadies; our man le Carré is more Chomsky than Chomsky, and his heavy-handed politics have weighed down more than one of his recent novels. But here it all works. Maybe the financial meltdown has primed us for vilifying the lords of finance. But more likely it has to do with a fantastic cast of characters, including the man who knew too much, Perry Makepiece, a quintessential le Carré tragic working stiff spy, Luke Weaver, and most especially, Perry's girlfriend Gail Perkins, perhaps the most fully formed and appealing female character the novelist has ever created. Together they try to bring a spy in from the cold, although in this case it is not a spy but a Russian money-launderer with a guilty conscience, and his rather complex blended family. And all's well that ends well? Yeah right, it's le Carré.
The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi's first novel, is a fast-paced post-climate change dystopia set in a not-too distant future Bangkok. Genetic engineering has gone a bit awry, and either draconian carbon pricing or old-school resource exhaustion has left much of the world energy-starved. Machinery is driven by bio-engineered springs that are wound by beasts of burden-- gigantic genetically modified elephants, in fact.
As for the sci-fi, I found some of it plausible, including the notion that unscrupulous agribusiness firms might genetically engineer devastating plant and human diseases for the sake of creating a market for resistant strains, as well as the rising sea levels and the resulting strategic importance of dikes protecting the low-lying city. The energy crisis was less convincing: where's the nuclear, the solar, the tidal? These guys can produce amazing energy storage devices in vats of algae, but they can't charge a battery?
What really counts in cyberpunk, however, are character development and the shifting complexities of politics in a world where states, corporations, ideologies, and ethnic minorities connive and compete. All of that is here in abundance, and all of it revolving around the compelling story of the title character Emiko, a genetically engineered geisha, born and bred to serve and to please men. We follow her journey of self-discovery, and her biggest discovery is that there are limits to what she is willing to take; and there are also surprisingly few limits to what she is capable of. I'll follow her anywhere, one hopes right into a sequel to this excellent entertainment.
The bad guys are bankers and their government toadies; our man le Carré is more Chomsky than Chomsky, and his heavy-handed politics have weighed down more than one of his recent novels. But here it all works. Maybe the financial meltdown has primed us for vilifying the lords of finance. But more likely it has to do with a fantastic cast of characters, including the man who knew too much, Perry Makepiece, a quintessential le Carré tragic working stiff spy, Luke Weaver, and most especially, Perry's girlfriend Gail Perkins, perhaps the most fully formed and appealing female character the novelist has ever created. Together they try to bring a spy in from the cold, although in this case it is not a spy but a Russian money-launderer with a guilty conscience, and his rather complex blended family. And all's well that ends well? Yeah right, it's le Carré.
The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi's first novel, is a fast-paced post-climate change dystopia set in a not-too distant future Bangkok. Genetic engineering has gone a bit awry, and either draconian carbon pricing or old-school resource exhaustion has left much of the world energy-starved. Machinery is driven by bio-engineered springs that are wound by beasts of burden-- gigantic genetically modified elephants, in fact.
As for the sci-fi, I found some of it plausible, including the notion that unscrupulous agribusiness firms might genetically engineer devastating plant and human diseases for the sake of creating a market for resistant strains, as well as the rising sea levels and the resulting strategic importance of dikes protecting the low-lying city. The energy crisis was less convincing: where's the nuclear, the solar, the tidal? These guys can produce amazing energy storage devices in vats of algae, but they can't charge a battery?
What really counts in cyberpunk, however, are character development and the shifting complexities of politics in a world where states, corporations, ideologies, and ethnic minorities connive and compete. All of that is here in abundance, and all of it revolving around the compelling story of the title character Emiko, a genetically engineered geisha, born and bred to serve and to please men. We follow her journey of self-discovery, and her biggest discovery is that there are limits to what she is willing to take; and there are also surprisingly few limits to what she is capable of. I'll follow her anywhere, one hopes right into a sequel to this excellent entertainment.
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