What I'm Reading Now

I checked out No Dominion by Charlie Huston, Falling Man by Don DeLillo, and Terrorist by John Updike from the library right around the same time. One frothy pulpy noir, two topical works by the literati.

I gotta say, No Dominion pulled me in and didn't let go until the end. It's the second in Charlie Huston's vampire-detective Joe Pitt series after Already Dead. I know, I know, you think vampire-detective fiction sounds cheesy. I did myself from looking at the covers-- who had the bright idea to bang together Anne Rice Goth with Chandler?!

But Charlie Huston does a damn fine job of creating a real and palpable netherworld of vampire clans striving for domination in the heart of modern Manhattan. I really think this series would make excellent movies, if they can translate the gritty-cool aesthetic to film. I mean, in Southland Tales, you had some vaguely amusing lines of ridicule spoken by the SNL artist-terrorists, but those are lame compared to the hilarious patois of the faux-hippie vampire clan "The Society" here.

I don't know why the studios don't pick this up, it's light years beyond bad crap like Underworld.

I'm letting DeLillo and Updike stew in their own juices a bit. Falling Man seems a bit contrived, more White Noise than Libra. The "Falling Man" is a performance artist who hangs in the Manhattan sky in the days after 9/11, apparently a metaphor for another falling man, the businessman character who was present when the towers fell and drifts aimlessly in the days afterwards.

I'll take pulp over poignance most any day.

Meme Madness

Bold if read, underlined if loved:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien*
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible*
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare**
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens*
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy*
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck*
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (isn't this part of 33?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini*
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown*
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck*
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker*
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo*

Twenty-nine, when the average is six! Not too shabby.

* = read part of
** = read most of

Wall-E: This Social Criticism Brought to You Courtesy of the Disney Corporation

Discussed in this post: Wall-E, Southland Tales

It's quite a surreal experience to make your way through the megamall crowds, eyeing the Wall-E plush toys at the Disney Store, standing in packed lines for hours, waiting through movie pre-preview commercials then previews, to watch a Disney Pixar family film criticizing our rampant consumerism. Weird.

Wall-E is a charming film though. Reviewers have already name-dropped Short Circuit to Charlie Chaplin to Idiocracy to An Inconvenient Truth regarding the movie. There are elements of them all, as family films are very rarely blindingly original. What Disney Pixar movies like this one excel at though is creating a heart-warming family friendly experience. Whether it's an anxious clownfish searching for his son or a romance between neutered robots with sealed-tin bodies, Pixar gets at what is most pure and idealized in relationships by using anthopomorphized animals, robots and cars.

In the pantheon of Pixar, I'd put this one close to Finding Nemo, slightly better than Cars and Ratatouille, way better than drek like Meet the Robinsons. (But I'm a grownup.)

Maybe this is the best way to do social criticism: as the background for the real story which, in Wall-E is the romance between the robots Wall-E and Eve. In fact, only the robots seem to be the real agents in this movie, with the humans as apathetic bloated-blobs almost crying out for extermination. At the end, when the addled humans return to a ravaged, trash-filled Earth with the intent to become farmers, my cynical self wondered how long it would be before they were spraying their crops with artifically-colored power drinks like in Idiocracy, and how long it would take them to destroy their planet and return to space once again. But that's just me.

Immediately after watching Wall-E, I saw Southland Tales on DVD, which also seems to aspire to social criticism of sorts. Comparing and contrasting the two made me wonder how the first succeeded and the second so miserably failed.

Southland Tales is a bad movie, but bad in interesting ways. I think the primary reasons for its suckage is biting off more than it can chew to be all things at once, and also trying too hard to be cool. For example, there are interesting idea seeds in this movie which, if nurtured properly, could have made a good movie. But the filmmaker didn't care about creating real and convincing characters, a coherent plot, or dramatic resolution. What he seemed to aspire to is a David Lynch aesthetic of weirdness, while at the same time completely undermining that aesthetic through an SNL/MadTV cast, over-the-top ham absurdity, and completely random and disconnected events.

For the first half of the movie, I wasn't sure if it wanted to be taken seriously or not. It's one of those really bad films, like The Big Hit, which dangles in the uneasy terrain between purely awful and self-satire. When Jon Lovitz pulled up as a corrupt cop, I said to myself "OK, it's a satire, a comedy." It increasingly seemed like the filmmaker was just trying to get the most ridiculous character actors together, with Booger and the "Incontheivable!" guy from Princess Bride as the brilliant scientists, but for a black satire, it is severely laugh- and joke-deficient. Indeed, the jokiness of it strips away any teeth the social criticism might have.

Sometimes David Lynch movies work, sometimes they do not. But one thing their weirdness relies on is to be taken seriously. It would be easy to prick a hole in the inflated balloon of weirdness and watch it deflate. But you can't take an already-deflated balloon and keep pricking it with preposterous lines-- "I'm a pimp. And pimps don't commit suicide." etc.-- after the air has already been released.

There needs to be a relationship of understanding between the filmmaker and the audience. You can try new, strange and confusing things, so long as you somehow take the audience there with you. In this movie, I don't think he's even trying. Sadly, it could have been decent, had he stripped away the more hammy elements, used a talented no-name cast, and actually taken the film as a serious project.

It was fun.

I dug it.

Dylan's Birthday Party Extravaganza

To see pics of the big event, click here.

Goodbye, George


I'm a little late in the game posting on George Carlin's death.

I usually have little to nothing to say about celebrity deaths. I read somewhere that villagers on the Pacific island of Tarawa were crying and mourning over the death of Princess Di. I think there could be no better example of the media delusion most people live in, believing that there is some real emotional connection with images on their screen. The weeklong hagiography of Tim Russert, a good enough guy and journalist, on the cable news networks says much the same thing.

For one thing, when the guys I like die, like Carlin and Kurt Vonnegut, I get the feeling that they wouldn't want people to spill too many tears over their passing, and would probably even think it's quite ridiculous to do so. Vonnegut wrote about the fire-bombing of Dresden, where countless innocents lost their lives, and would probably see glorified remembrance of a celebrity with his trademark wry smile.

Maybe it has something to do with wisdom.

I still remember my first exposure to Carlin. It was in high school, and I was at a friend's house who had HBO. Carlin was going on about how ridiculous golf courses are, where the rich can putter around to hit balls with sticks while the homeless starve in the streets. He made a radical proposal: let the homeless live on the golf courses!

I'd never heard this kind of talk back then. Carlin was never the guy to give me a loud belly laugh, but struck me as more of a philosopher of rage and social change, in the vein of Bill Hicks. These guys are kind of a whack upside the head to see things differently. In a way, it's very surprising that Carlin had the commercial success he did.

Thank you, George, for whacking me upside the head back in high school.

Gainfully Employed

I have returned to the realm of the gainfully employed, so you can expect the number of posts here to plummet. (Not that anyone would miss em-- statcounter.com reports that I often go many days without a view.) I suppose it is nice to make use of my six-figure law degree once again.

Last Saturday was Dylan's birthday extravaganza at the beach! Even Spider-Man made an appearance. Will post pics once they are available.

Books that Suck

Um, Closer by Dennis Cooper sucked quite a bit, and I could only get about halfway through it. While there were some artful and poetic phrases scattered throughout, they were not worth slogging through the violent, explicit and largely drug-induced gay sex acts that are the book's primary concern. When an older Frenchman sodomizes a young boy on acid and the boy shits himself, without feeling particularly anything, I got the gist of what the book was about and where it was headed.

I'm getting a bit tired of books that suck. Whether it's my increased age, my fatherhood, or the fact that I am heterosexual, I had to chuck this book in the library return slot before the halfway mark.

I tried picking up some books that have received critical acclaim on topical matters: The Terrorist by Updike and Falling Man by DeLillo. Not that critical acclaim means much, as just as often as not it's pretentious drifting ennui pretending to poignance, but I thought I'd give them a chance, although I couldn't get very far in Updike's verbose Rabbit, Run.

My reading seems to be at a kind of juncture. I used to read primarily for visceral entertainment. I still expect a book to be entertaining, but I can now enjoy books that are a bit slower and more thoughtful, like DeLillo's Libra. Basically, I think I've read too much visceral entertainment and have become kind of calloused or inured to its joys. At a certain age, you realize that there are certain limits or boundaries to human experience, and that traversing those doesn't lead to any enlightenment but purely dissipation and derangement. My reading has tended towards the same journey as music: the cynicism of punk is cathartic in your teen years, but keep pushing the boundaries until you end up with the racist, repulsive, sociopathic G.G. Allin, and you see where that journey ends. Let's go over the edge? Let's not.

I think a lot of it has to do with fatherhood. When I was a young bachelor, I pursued my desires until they became an affliction. I could never understand the boundaries and restrictions that parents put on me, and saw them only as societal repression of the individual writ small. But when one has a child and the process is repeated, one begins to share in the hopes and dreams of a new life, to wish to nurture it and keep it away from things bad, regardless of self-detrimental ideologies and other nonsense.

Maybe some people cannot truly care for themselves until they care for others.