May « 2009 « Spectre Collie

Sunday May 31 2009 Movies

My New Adventure Movie

Up is Pixar’s best movie to date.

According to my movie partner, I say this after every Pixar movie, but I mean it for real this time: Up is the best one yet.

Pixar’s been raising the bar so high for so long that excellence is just taken for granted, and to be honest, it’s settled into kind of a comfortable predictability. It’s always going to be great, it’s most likely going to make you cry, and it goes without saying that the visuals will be absolutely perfect. They’ve proven that they can tell any story they want now, and even that they can tell a solid, moving story each time. They’re now in the unenviable position of having to do better than “excellent” and make something genuinely transcendent.

The first 20 or so minutes of Wall-E achieved that, before settling back into being a really good movie. I think Up hits that level within the first few minutes and then (almost) never lets up. Its scale, scope, and cast are smaller than other Pixar movies, and its storyline is more straightforward. But where it rises above excellence is in how all the parts work in conjunction with each other, and how (almost) none of it feels forced or calculated.

Up is a truly character driven-story, possibly Pixar’s first, because Carl is their first completely realized character. He’s not just “the curmudgeonly old man,” he’s not just the protagonist, he’s not overwhelmed by his voice actor (Ed Asner’s performance is so perfect that you almost immediately forget it’s Ed Asner), and he’s not just a stand-in for some universal concept like “the overprotective father” or “the need to belong.” Every time his character could get pulled too far in one direction, something comes along to push him a different way or show some other aspect of his character. We see his entire life story, we know who he is, and we always know why he’s doing what he does.

That’s the movie’s greatest achievement. The fact that it’s an outstanding adventure story — and it’s possibly the downright funniest Pixar movie to date — are just extra. The other characters don’t come through as well-rounded as Carl: Russell is kind of a stand-in for every child. And the villain goes from “interesting obstacle” to full-on, completely evil super-villain so quickly it seems frustratingly unrealistic, which is the movie’s only major fault. But even that isn’t too damning, because this is Carl’s story, and it keeps all of the focus on him.

Of course, it could be just that I loved the movie because I love dogs, and Dug looks a lot like my dog Paddy.

I saw it in 3D, which I’d highly recommend to anyone who hasn’t seen it yet. Not because the 3D was particularly great — it was perfectly well-done, adding depth to every scene without overwhelming anything — but because it’s nice wearing big glasses if you’re at all self-conscious about crying in public. I’d been warned that the first 10 or 15 minutes of Up were tear-jerking; I didn’t know that I was going to be crying throughout. Not just at the sad scenes, but the funny ones: there were long stretches where you couldn’t hear the dialogue because everyone in the theater was laughing too hard. It seems unfair that the same movie could have so many sequences that are that genuinely moving and so many moments that are genuinely hilarious.

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Friday May 29 2009 Personal, Television, Videogames

Errata

Correcting misinformation from previous posts and episodic adventure games.

Look: you made some mistakes, I made some mistakes. When you’re arrogant enough to assume that what you write is worth putting up on the internet, one of the biggest disadvantages is that occasionally you’re going to write stuff that just plain isn’t true.

It bugs me to be spreading misinformation, even on a low-traffic blog like this one. I rewrite and/or correct it in the post if I catch it soon enough, but that has a feel of revisionist history that’s a little unsettling to me. So here are my corrections to recent posts. Apologies for any inconvenience:

Writing about “The Mighty Boosh,” I said that they do all the animation themselves. That’s because I believed it when BBC’s YouTube site said “animation by Noel Fielding.” The making-of documentaries on the Boosh box set (which comes highly recommended, if you can watch Region 2 DVDs) give proper credit to the pair of animators who do the titles and cartoons for the series. The animations are based on Fielding’s drawings, which is still impressive but not as unbelievable as having to write and star in a series and do a few minutes of animation for each episode.
Sienna is southwest of Florence, not southeast.
Writing about Metacritic scores and designer Soren Johnson’s defense of them, I spent several paragraphs trying and failing to explain my problem with his post in detail, when the real problem is that I disagree with his entire assumption: that developers need an objective metric for quality. I should’ve just said that this isn’t true and been done with it. “Quality” is inherently subjective; you can get objective metrics for sales figures, return rates, even reviewer scores, but those aren’t quality. Assuming that quality is tied to popularity is poisonous to any creative medium.
When I claimed that Ann Coulter is a 1000-year-old attention-seeking hag who bathes in the blood of children and is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the American media, that was incorrect. Ms. Coulter is 47.
In all my posts about my trip to Italy, I forgot to include my treatise on bus and train tickets. In brief: it’s confusing, but not nearly as bad as the tour books make it sound. You have to get tickets validated before you board the bus or train, but there are no BART-like mag stripes or fare deductions like I’d been expecting. All the yellow validation boxes do is print the current time & station on the ticket, to show where you got on, nothing magical or electronic. I wish somebody had explained this to me before I left, so I’m including it here as a public service.
The Apollo 12 mission was not besieged by moon bears immediately on landing, resulting in a life-threatening mauling of Commander Pete Conrad that was subsequently covered up by NASA. It was just lens flare in one of the photos.
Also about The Mighty Boosh: I said earlier that it was impossible to explain the appeal, but several British & American comedians explain the appeal very well in the making-of documentary “A Journey Through Time and Space.” The biggest appeal is that the series isn’t cynical or mean-spirited at all, but it’s not vapid or toothless or dated, either. It’s confident enough to be completely silly without being self-conscious. They heap abuse on themselves, but it’s not so much that it’s tiresome self-deprecation. And whenever they parody someone or something outside the immediate cast, it’s clear that they really like it. They’re not making fun of everything, they’re having fun with everything, and there aren’t enough people doing that.

Edited to add some errata from videogames:

Inflammable means the same thing as flammable
Apparently, it’s not particularly cold in the Ukraine. Who knew?

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Saturday May 23 2009 Arts & Entertainment

Stendhal's Playlist

I’ve grown overwhelmed by too much media. Something has to give.

Until a couple of months ago, I’d never heard of Stendhal syndrome. It’s the term for being physically overwhelmed — to the point of dizziness, confusion, or even fainting — when in the presence of an abundance of great art. It’s named after the author who described his own experience on a visit to Florence, Italy. Via wikipedia:

I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty … I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations … Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call ‘nerves.’ Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.

And that was in the early 1800s, before Florence had satellite dishes. You have to wonder how it would’ve affected his delicate French constitution if he’d been able to see 100 beautiful things before he even left the hotel.

Now granted, what I don’t know about art could (and does) fill several large volumes. But I didn’t have a similar reaction to Florence or to the Uffizi gallery. That was the manageable city: the perfect amazing-masterwork-to-my-attention-span ratio. But then, it’s hard to be overwhelmed when you’re living in a constant state of media glut. I was carrying around two solid days’ worth of entertainment in my backpack, and I still chose to spend almost all of my travel time just staring out a window. The novelty now is being able to not have to look at anything.

In the two weeks after I first heard of Stendhal syndrome, I saw it mentioned again five times in four completely different contexts. Which makes me suspect it’s become an epidemic.

And it’s become so common that it’s hard to appreciate what a recent phenomenon it is. On the extra features of the DVD for Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (which I finally watched after 18 months in my Netflix queue), there’s an interview with George Lucas in which he reminisces about his first time seeing The Seven Samurai. He says he’d heard of Kurosawa’s work, but had never seen it, because it hadn’t yet received wide exposure in the US. He talks about the difficulty of securing a print of the movie and finding a screening. The whole concept seemed completely foreign: we’re supposed to believe that a film student in Los Angeles had trouble finding a way to see one of the most famous movies by Japan’s most well-known director?

Then I remember: not only can I believe it, I’ve experienced it first hand. And I’m not all that old (I keep insisting). I can still remember digging through the stacks of discs at a local laserdisc-rental place and thinking that I’d uncovered a gold mine. I can remember the first time I went into a Blockbuster video and believing that what they promised was impossible: you mean there are five hundred movies here, and I can take any of them home to watch, right now? I can remember when the TV broadcast of a movie like Star Wars was a big deal, even though I’d already seen it six times in the theater, because the idea of actually owning a copy was out of the question.

In 2009, the obstacles to seeing something are usually tied to bullshit trivialities like region encoding or finding a copy in HD or getting the best price: usually the question is “can I pay for it and watch it legally or not?” It’s weird to remember there was a time when the question was, “can I watch it at all?” Now, the biggest obstacle to seeing something is simply hearing about it in the first place.

And that can be overwhelming. A few years ago I described my TiVo fatigue — that feeling of dread that came from getting home from work to find another to-do list of stuff you had to watch before it disappeared forever. It took me a while to discover the Zen of TiVo, the understanding that you don’t have to keep up with everything it tries to show you, and that it’s presenting you with a list of opportunities, not responsibilities.

But TiVo Zen is just amateur class, merely the first step towards True 21st-Century Yuppie Enlightenment. Judicious TiVo use isn’t a big deal because Sturgeon’s Law remains in effect, and 90% of everything is still crap. On my own TiVo, I had somehow managed to violate Sturgeon’s Law and get a 99:1 crap-to-quality ratio, so realizing that I could safely go without watching that rerun of “Ghost Hunters” wasn’t exactly a groundbreaking philosophical breakthrough.

The real problem comes when you realize that even with Sturgeon’s Law in place, the proliferation of media means that “everything” is bigger now than it’s ever been, and even 10% of that is still an awful lot. When Bruce Springsteen sang about “57 Channels and Nothin’s On,” it was what in the early 90s passed for incisive pop-culture social commentary. Now the case is that there’s about 257 channels and there’s actually quite a bit on, much of it really good.

Which leads to the second, more difficult and more painful concept to accept: even after filtering out the junk and the guilty pleasures, there is more good stuff out there than I’ll be able to experience in my lifetime.

It’s a tough sell. I’d always thought that even I don’t accomplish anything else, then at least by the time I die I’ll have achieved complete cultural literacy. It seemed doable: I don’t understand or enjoy opera, ballet, or most abstract visual art, so I don’t have to worry about those. And I was encouraged by previous attempts at cultural literacy, in which I learned there are a lot of universally-regarded great works that simply aren’t all that great. So I could be watching cartoons or Sci Fi channel movies or The Matrix and reassure myself that we’re still cool, there’s still plenty of time.

But then stuff like “The Sopranos” comes along and throws a wrench in the works. I figured that anything with that much universal acclaim couldn’t be all that good, and I wasn’t that interested in the concept, so I didn’t bother watching it until the series was over. And I discovered that no, it really is every bit as good as people made it out to be, and now I was nine years behind on getting caught up. So I had to add it to the towering mountain of movies, books, TV shows, videogames, and “other” that has come Very Highly Recommended. And I keep seeing more recommendations.

Obviously, my quality filter just isn’t going to cut it anymore. It’s not enough not to watch “American Idol” or the last two Terminator movies. Even just choosing among stuff worth watching, it’s still too much. I needed to make a sacrifice. Something that I just wouldn’t watch.

So I chose “The Wire”. It’s been recommended countless times, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard or read a single opinion of the show that said it was anything other than outstanding. And I don’t doubt that it’s outstanding, or that I wouldn’t enjoy it if I watched it. But if you’re going to come to terms that there are good things you’ll never see, the first step is having one good thing that you’ll never see. And then be able to accept that that’s okay.

I’m not gonna lie; it’s been tough. The show’s almost always mentioned whenever anyone rattles off a list of great television, and my first impulse is always to go “seen it, seen it, seen it… damn!” But after the first big step, it gets easier. The 400 Blows? Eh, are they blowing up bridges? If not, not interested. “Deadwood?” No spaceships, not interested. Catch-22? I’m very interested in reading it because I’ve heard it’s great, but that would violate my rule about not reading things that are great, which means I must not be that interested in it, which puts me in a kind of paradoxical situation that can’t be succinctly described.

And the best part of all about the rule: once you’ve said that it’s interest, not quality, that’s determining what you watch, it leaves plenty of time for guilty pleasures. After all, great works don’t seem so great unless you vary the rhythm up with some junk here and there, right? So I can use the time I’m not spending reading The Odyssey by instead reading DC Showcase Presents the Legion of Super-Heroes Volume 3 and watching keyboard cat videos. Play me off!

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Friday May 22 2009 Arts & Entertainment

Stop Me If You've Heard This One

How does stand-up comedy hold up to repeated listenings? An over-analysis spurred by watching too many YouTube clips.

A while ago I was watching two stand-up comedy DVDs: The Comedians of Comedy and Brian Regan: The Epitome of Hyperbole, because Patton Oswalt and Brian Regan are two of the funniest living humans. What was interesting — where the laughter stopped, you could say — was that in the interviews and special features, they seemed to have differing opinions about how stand-up works. It seemed like a good opportunity to over-analyze it until I’ve drained all the humor out of it.

In the interviews with Oswalt, he says that the idea behind the Comedians of Comedy tour was to treat a stand-up tour like a music tour: they’d get groupies! Fans would want to follow their favorite comics from venue to venue and see how the performances change as the tour progresses!

In the opposing corner: Regan’s DVD has an encore where he admits he’s used up all his material, but he’ll take requests anyway. The audience would yell out their favorite bits, and he’d do them, but he acted like he was baffled by the whole thing: “Isn’t comedy supposed to have some element of surprise?”

It seemed weird, because I’d have expected them to be the exact opposite. Patton Oswalt’s stuff is absolutely brilliant and will have me in tears, and I’ll buy anything he puts out without a moment’s hesitation. But I’m not buying it for replay value; I’m really just paying the guy so he can keep making more concert CDs. I’m only going to listen to it once, because his routine’s mostly about the material. That’s not an insult — you can tell he’s put a ton of work into getting the delivery perfect, and when he starts in on his bit about Robert Evans’ autobiography [NSFW, in case you haven't heard it], it’s brilliant. But still, the big draw is wondering what he’s going to come up with next.

Brian Regan, on the other hand: he’s all about the delivery. His bit about monster truck drivers is as old as the mullet, and I’ve seen it at least forty thousand times, but it just never stops being funny.

(Also, the bit about evil Flipper, around 2:20 in that clip).

I’m not saying one’s better than the other, just that I’d always assumed that stand-up worked like Regan says in his encore: after you’ve heard it once, you’re done. I always thought the point of stand-up was to keep up the illusion that you’re just a naturally funny storyteller coming up with all this material on the spot. I kind of thought that was the reason so many comedy clubs are called “Improv.” Even though all of us survived the proliferation of stand-ups and comedy channels and HBO specials and comedy festivals and movies in the late 90s, and we know that’s not how it really works, it’s still more fun to pretend.

Earlier, I confessed to being in the middle of a fixation on “The Mighty Boosh,” and I wasn’t kidding: I really have been scouring YouTube for earlier live performances*. The guys have been working on their act for over a decade now, and you can see some of the same material getting reused and reworked from a live act to stand-up to a radio show and the TV show. (And then, I’m assuming, the most recent live show that I didn’t see). The interesting thing is that you can see a gag evolving: they shed the bits that don’t work and cram all the good stuff together into rapid-fire stretches of dialogue that still feel spontaneous instead of rehearsed. Appropriately, it’s a little like jazz: improvising familiar material.

When the RiffTrax gang came through San Francisco, I saw the same show on back-to-back nights, and you could tell how the guys changed the show — not dramatically, since there wasn’t enough time — based on what worked and didn’t from the previous night. They’d tighten up the delivery on some lines, drop other ones altogether, or make a bigger presentation of the gags that were a big hit.

I still don’t think I’d follow a comic around on tour: I’ve seen a Comedians of Comedy live show in San Francisco, and having drunk comedy fans shouting out requests and going “whooo!” before the punchline does kind of kill the atmosphere. But I do have a new respect for how much work goes into a routine, and how hard it must be to make it look like you’re making it up as you go along.

* Another thing I learned from scouring YouTube: I’d recommend it to anyone who might be discouraged by globalism, or the homogenization of culture, or the feeling that people are disappointingly similar everywhere and there’s no real sense of the exotic anymore. Because the whole culture around British celebrity, chat shows, fandom, and tabloids is just batshit insane. We’ve got all the nonsense about Lindsay Lohan or Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie’s baby or whatever the current fascination is, but the UK just takes it to a whole nother level. Is it a side effect of taking all the normal lunacy around celebrity and cramming it all into one major metropolitan area? I’ll watch some of those shows and it’s the most relentlessly foreign thing I’ve ever seen, even on VH1 reality shows.

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Wednesday May 20 2009 Music, The Internet

Ooomooodaaakaaa

Omodaka’s already-outstanding videos get even cooler when pushed through the Yooouuutuuube filter.

Wired’s Underwire blog recently did an article about YooouuuTuuube, the site that takes YouTube videos and stretches individual frames out across your web browser. The most popular hit so far has been this mash-up video using samples from Alice in Wonderland.

I was playing around with it using my favorite videos from Omodaka. They work great and yield some pretty cool effects, since the videos already do a lot with symmetrical frames. If you play around with the frame sizes, you can get the full-page effect to match up with the beat of the music.

Here are my favorites:

Kokiriko Bushi: probably the best of the bunch, a screen full of skeletons and 80s disco lights.
Kyoteizinc: the mirroring effects in the original video get replicated dozens of times
Cantata No. 147: a screen full of weird singing heads

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Monday May 18 2009 Personal

With a name like Florence

The last of my vacation recaps to Italy, ending on Florence, the manageable city.

Man, I’m glad this is the last I have to write about my trip to Italy. It was hard enough being there, and then I didn’t have to put captions on pictures or come up with puns for post titles. And what do you do with Florence? “Uffizi Does It?” “Medici Balls?” “Major Duomo?” All terrible.

So the city may have a dull name (apparently “Florence” is closer to the original Latin than “Firenze” is, so the English name is more accurate, at least according to the tour guide) but it makes up for it on charm and looks. They know they’ve got the best Cathedral, and they’re kind of smug about it: instead of putting it away from all the cool stuff and building a wall around it, they’ve got it sprawled out all over the square, visible from everywhere in town, rubbing it in everybody’s face.

It’s halfway between Rome and Venice by train and in spirit: it’s more manageable and navigable than Rome, and a good bit less touristy than Venice. And like Siena, it’s got a theme going on: everything’s either David- or Medici-related. I can comprehend this place, you think. You can really understand how kids on their “life experience” European junket after college would feel like staying.

Coolest thing about the city: the Piazza della Signoria. It’s not all that pretty, to be honest, but the place is just lousy with statues. Instead of roping everything off in a crowded museum, you can get up and walk around the pieces and see them from every angle. Even climb up and break off an arm, or chop off a toe if you feel like it.

It’s a great city, just about everybody’s been there at least once, and those who haven’t been yet should make plans to go. Here’s my helpful travel tips:

Spend three days. I spent two in Florence and two in Siena, and wish I’d spent an extra in Florence just to wander around.
Take a tour. I took the ArtViva “Florence in One Day” tour (spread out over two days) and would recommend it very highly. The tour groups are very small, mine were friendly, and it was nice having people to chat with a few hours. (And since they’re just day tours, if you don’t like your group, you only have to put up with them for an hour or two). The guides are native English speakers and were all entertaining and knew their stuff.
The tour guides also gave great restaurant recommendations. Both places I tried were the best restaurants I went to on the whole vacation. (Good food, but great, friendly service).
Even if you don’t take a tour, do what the ArtViva guides do: keep it simple. Instead of trying to hit every major site in the city or every work of art in the galleries, they picked a few of their favorites and gave detail on those, describing the connections between them. I’d been trying to make sure I saw everything I could in Rome and Siena, and being exhaustive was exhausting.
Make sure you go downstairs in the Uffizi gallery, to see Caravaggio’s Medusa. It’s rad. Also, much harder to miss is Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo, also rad: I’d seen plenty of pictures, but it’s much more impressive in person.
Be aware that prosciutto isn’t necessarily the same thing as prosciutto di Parma. I had to put up with several unremarkable ham sandwiches until I managed to find any of the good stuff.
There’s obviously a ton of hype around Michelangelo’s David; it’s a symbol of the city, and it’s the one thing that many tourists are there to see. What’s unique about the statue is that it actually lives up to the hype: your first sight of it at the end of the hall is pretty amazing.
The best views of the city are from Piazzale Michelangelo, across the river at the top of about a thousand steps. I took about a billion pictures, as is every tourist’s responsibility.

The last of my pictures are up on flickr, including miscellaneous shots from around the city, shots of the Cathedral interior and exterior, and views of the city from Piazzale Michelangelo.

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Sunday May 17 2009 Personal

Significant Otherness

I didn’t like Venice. Also, I’m single.

I’m pretty sure the reason I didn’t like Venice is the same reason I wasn’t that impressed with Paris a few years ago: I’m not the target audience. There are cities that I’ve gone to by myself, as a single guy, and had a great time. Dublin, for instance. Tokyo or Manhattan, if “talking to other people” isn’t your goal. Orlando, if you dig roller coasters. But Venice is for couples and super-spies.

I got the worst possible first impression of the city. The biggest rainstorm I encountered the entire two weeks of my vacation started right as my train was pulling into Venice, so I got to stand in line for vaporetto tickets for about 45 minutes getting soaked. The delay put me into some kind of rush hour, and I was taking one of the non-tourist-dedicated lines, so I got to pile into the bottom of the boat with my luggage while the locals sat and glared at me, visibly inconvenienced by my existence. I had to keep asking someone to wipe the fog off the windows so I could see what stop we were approaching, and the reaction was as if I’d asked a stranger for a kidney.

After the rain stopped, though… the city was still kind of a drag. You’re constantly reminded of the area’s rich and storied history going back centuries, but it’s completely incongruous with everything you see. It simply comes across as a theme park, and a dirty, unfriendly, and inconvenient one at that. I didn’t get any particularly great views, because everything in the city was covered in scaffolding or advertising (presumably to pay for future scaffolding). The food was overpriced — the rule seemed to be “take the already expensive prices in Rome and then add 4 euros across the board” — and everything I had was the worst I’d had in Italy. And on account of my bad timing, many of the museums were closed.

Your transportation options are limited to “waterbus” and “walking,” and the city seems laid out specifically to discourage walking. Apparently it’s widely known that the city is hard to navigate — one of the most commonly-sold tourist shirts has signs pointing to St. Mark’s Square in opposite directions, much like the shirts with a picture of a giant cockroach or mosquito reading “actual size” that you find in Texas & Florida — but they underestimate just how much of a pain it is to get around. There were places in Rome and Florence that were within easy walking distance where the maps and tour guides advised me to take a bus; routes in Venice that were described in the books as “a pleasant and easy stroll” ended up being short-form Trails of Tears.

Still, I wanted to make a go of it, and just wander around, treat it as a historical place, and get as many good photos as I could. And that’s where the other problem started: I kept getting accosted, literally once an hour unless I was indoors, by dudes trying to sell me flowers. The first time it happened, another tourist couple spotted the incident and started laughing, and I laughed along and did my “get a load of that guy!” look and went on thinking it was a charming little anecdote. But it just wouldn’t stop, even though I was clearly there by myself and by the looks of me, was more than likely single back home as well. (I’d been out of the country for almost 2 weeks by that point, walking non-stop and still believing I had to eat 2 courses at every meal, so I was sweaty, fat, and beardy. I sure as hell wouldn’t have wanted to date me).

Finally, I decided I’d had enough. An older guy came up to me while I was listening to the bands at St. Mark’s Square and offered to sell me a rose. Instead of just saying the usual “No, grazie,” I did the universal gesture for “Seriously?” with an added, exaggerated look around me to show that I wasn’t there with anyone. Then:

Me: NO, GRAZIE. SOLO MIO.

Him: You don’t have wife?

Me: Nope. By myself.

Him: Girlfriend?

Me: Uh-uh.

Him: Nephew?

Me: [thinking] What?!? [out loud] Uh… no.

Him: Still… is nice rose? [gesturing around the square] It’s beautiful place, you enjoy it. Everybody like rose.

Me: Marry me!

I didn’t say the last part out loud, but the guy had definitely charmed his way through my defenses. But by the time I’d pulled out my wallet, he was already offering a rose to a nearby couple, and I ran back to the hotel room and cried myself to sleep.

I also got stopped by a woman with dark circles under her eyes carrying a clipboard asking, “Ontidrug? Ontidrug?” After a couple of repetition I realized she was saying “Anti-drug” and asking me to sign a petition to support a halfway house. She instantly identified me as American and asked where in the US I was from. I said “San Francisco,” she said, “Oh, games.” I was surprised that it had become common knowledge in Europe that so much of the American videogame industry was centered in the Bay Area, and I was about to offer that much of it had moved to Southern California and Seattle and Austin, but she said, “No, no. I think of Las Vegas.”

While I was filling out the petition and getting out my ten euro obligatory donation, she explained how she was a former heroin addict who’d been helped by the hopefully legitimate organization I was ostensibly supporting. She then asked who I was with, and I’d been so used to the question by that point, I just said “Just me. Solo mio.” She replied, “Oh, you came to Venezia alone.” There was a brief pause, and then she said with visible and audible disbelief and pity: “Why?”

I’ve been asking myself the same question the last two days, I thought, and said, “I just wanted to see it.” I’m glad I saw it, and I’m glad I never have to go back.

My pictures from Venice are up on flickr. And technically, it was the last place I visited on my vacation, but I’m saving Florence for last because I didn’t want to end on such a whiny, negative note.

[And just so's I'm not spreading misinformation over the internet: Be aware that "solo mio" isn't correct Italian for "I'm alone." It means "only mine," if even that. My point was that most Italians' English is better than my Italian.]

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Saturday May 16 2009 Television

Comin' at ya like a hammock

My world has been rocked by The Mighty Boosh.

The only thing worse than being late to the party is being five years late to the party. And the only thing worse than that is being five years late to the party and still telling everybody how cool it is. But I’ve been semi-obsessed with “The Mighty Boosh” over the past couple of weeks, and now I have to come across like the goon who just discovered it through adult swim. My pop culture street cred, which was already perilously close to empty, is now at an all-time low.

It’s not like I have an excuse, either. I’ve had the episodes for a while, but wasn’t that interested. It was recommended by friends at work and online because I’d been going on about “Darkplace” (which I did find out about via adult swim) and the brilliant “The IT Crowd” (Boing Boing), and there’s a ton of cross-pollination of actors among the three shows. (Richard Ayoade, Matt Berry, and Alice Lowe have appeared on all three; Julian Barratt of “The Mighty Boosh” was a regular on “Darkplace” as the Padre, and Noel Fielding was on “Darkplace” as an ape, and was one of the funniest recurring characters on “The IT Crowd” as banished goth middle manager ~~Richard~~ [Richmond, not Richard. I'm American; I've got no idea what these people are saying half the time]).

But I checked out this clip from the first series and dismissed it. It was funny, but I just thought: Oh, like “Flight of the Conchords”, then. And ignored it until I was stuck on a 10-hour plane flight with nothing but my phone to entertain me.

Thanks to the internet, I can show you the exact scene that got me hooked on the series:

But clips don’t really tell you what makes the show work. Actually: watching the show doesn’t really tell you what makes the show work. The only thing it shares with “Flight of the Conchords” is that they’ll frequently lapse into fantasy music videos, but then they never quite pop into reality. And it’s not a sitcom, since in the 3 series I’ve seen there are only two or three instances of what I’d call “jokes.” It’s more of a stream of consciousness that somehow manages to be memorable even when it doesn’t quite work (like, for instance, a monster made of sandpaper who wanks to furniture catalogs).

I saw some blurb that compared it to H.R. Pufnstuf, and that seems like a good jumping-off point. Just take Sid & Marty Krofft’s body of work, remove any pretense of kid-friendliness or connotations of the vaudevillian Ruth Buzzi/Charles Nelson Reilley/Harvey Korman crowd, add in every musical development of the last 40 years and what’s been going on with British comedy teams for the past 10 years or so, and then toss in everything that’s been going on in the visual pop arts for the past 30 years for the heck of it.

Plus the guys are obscenely talented, for all the deliberately-cheap aesthetic of the show. On top of all the characters, they do the animation themselves, as well as at least one new song in each episode. And if that doesn’t stick with you, then they’re not above using earworms to bore themselves into your consciousness. And that’s not even mentioning the crimping.

One minute you’re watching a British comedy series trying to put your finger on exactly what it is that makes it funny, and the next thing you know, you’re waking up with “Future Sailors” stuck in your head. Before long, you’ve watched all the episodes for a third time through and are now scouring YouTube for interviews and bits from the live shows. The title of this post is from a clip from a stand-up performance way back in 2001, their funniest live bit I’ve found on YouTube.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go edit together my own fan video from clips and interviews and magazine photos, as soon as I can decide which one I think is the dreamiest.

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Friday May 15 2009 Lost

Incidents, Accidents, Hints, Allegations

My thoughts on the “Lost” season finale, “The Incident.”

There’s no talking about the season finale of “Lost” (“The Incident”) without great big spoilers so be forewarned that everything in this post is a spoiler.

In fact, I’m going to include an extra paragraph in here because occasionally people end up here from my company’s blog or from the auto-generated announcements on Twitter, and the “read more” link is removed, making it easier to read ahead and see something you didn’t intend to. I remember before The Crying Game came out, I saw a message on USENET (yes, I’m old) where the poster put in “spoiler space” but not enough for larger monitors, so I accidentally saw the big twist of the movie. Which kind of ruined the movie (not that it was all that great to begin with), but I couldn’t really be angry at anybody because it was unintentional. Actually, though, it was made even more interesting because I knew what the twist was, but I kept expecting it was going to be about Miranda Richardson’s character — after all, she’s on the poster. I spent the first half of the movie wondering how they were going to do the reveal and then hey! there’s a penis I didn’t expect to see. So if you’re still reading at this point, it’s your own damn fault.
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Wednesday May 13 2009 Personal

Siena, Unburnt

Another recap of my Italian vacation. This stop: Siena, the medieval tourist attraction.

When I was planning to go to Italy (I did mention that I went to Italy, right?) I got about a dozen recommendations that I visit Siena, a city in Tuscany ~~southeast~~southwest of Florence. I’m grateful for the recommendations, because it was my favorite part of the entire trip.

I’d had an unrealistically idyllic preconception about the city before I left; I’d pictured some tiny village in the countryside surrounding a small fort-like town square. It’s not like that, although I’m sure there’s plenty of that atmosphere just a short distance away. Instead, it’s a fairly big city with some amazing architecture and a bustling tourist economy. It feels like a perfectly preserved medieval city: walking through the narrow, hilly streets surrounded by tall buildings, it’s easy to imagine yourself living in Italy in the late 13th century.

I realize I got a skewed perception of everywhere I went, since I kept myself to tourist-centric areas, but Siena seemed to be driven by day-trippers. I woke up one morning — it was unavoidable, since you’re assaulted by various bell towers going off at 7:30 AM — and walked through the city and around the city walls. You could see people just starting to get the business of their daily lives squared away before the tour buses started arriving around 10. From that time to dusk, there are waves of people crowding the shops around the Duomo (Cathedral) and Piazza del Campo (town square), shopping, wandering around, making noise and eating ice cream. Around dusk, everything starts to shut down except for the town square, and the city goes back to normal until the next day’s rush of tourism.

The Duomo is amazing — not nearly as large or ostentatious as Florence’s, but covered with astounding detail on every inch of its surface. The same symbols are repeated everywhere — the colors black and white, the coat of arms for the city and its districts, and two babies suckling on a she-wolf — all tying into the city’s history and mythology and making it feel like a place with a very strong identity. I’ve forgotten the details on why black and white are the city’s colors, and I can’t find them online: it has something to do with smoke.

The statues of the she-wolf are from Siena’s origin story. I was wondering why the city would be full of images of Rome’s founding, but apparently this is a spin-off involving Remus’s sons after he was driven north out of Rome and somehow had to be raised by a different wolf. For whatever reason, the Sienese version took hold a lot more strongly than the Roman version.

The horse race around the town square, the Palio, is in August, but there was still plenty of Palio-related material to see. The local channels were running a documentary series interviewing locals with their own stories about the race. And posters, banners, and symbols from the different districts were everywhere. Although the Piazza del Campo is a large (and beautiful) area, I can’t imagine a horse race taking place there; it must be an amazing but manic experience.

Another unexpected highlight of Siena: it was the best gelato I had the whole time. I normally think that coffee-flavored ice cream is one of the most blatant creations of Satan put forth to humans, but I had a serving of Tiramisu-flavored gelato that was like getting an open-mouth kiss from God.

If anyone’s considering a trip (and it comes highly recommended), I’d have two pieces of advice:

Don’t make it a day trip, but stay the night. The city at dusk is beautiful, and wandering around early in the morning gives a much better impression than seeing it in the midst of crowds. I stayed two nights, which was in retrospect overdoing it. One’s enough.
Avoid the restaurants around the Piazza del Campo. They were extremely overpriced and the service was just short of being openly hostile.

So It didn’t turn out to be the peaceful getaway to the Tuscan countryside that I’d expected — the city’s much too interesting for that — but it was still relaxing and a great contrast to Rome and Florence. I’m told there’s any number of bed & breakfasts and small hotels around the area if you want the typical experience of Tuscany, but staying inside the city walls turned out to be perfect for me.

My pictures from the city, mostly the cathedral and town square, are up on Flickr.

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