Thunder Doomed

During the weekend, I watched Thunderbirds. This was simply awful. It resembled something like Spy Kids, which seems to be its inspiration.

Focused mostly on Alan, played by Brady Corbet, who does a much better job in Mysterious Skin, it's about an adolescent in a family of all-male superheroes lead by the dad played by Bill Paxton. All the older brothers are instantly forgettable and Paxton is too.

What exactly is Lady Penelope and her British butler there for? The film stereotypes nerds by having a father and son who both lisp. Tintin is the oddly named Indian girl that Alan possibly has a thing for, though maybe there's something going on between him and geeky Fermat.

The special effects are blah, but that's fine. I didn't have high expectations for special effects. I don't need it to be realistic.

Finally, there's Ben Kingsley. While he's fun in Species as is the rest of the cast, he's essentially Tony Shaloub's equivalent. At least Spy Kids is marginally fun, if occasionally flat.

This was an incredibly painful film to sit through.

Rates D for entertainment and goodness.

Event Horizon

One thing I'm learning about life in the RSS/search engine age. They say that if a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, did it really fall? This is the Heisenberg principle writ large. (Answer is yes, it did fall, since there's other evidence that would be left behind).

These days, you can hear a pin drop in the blogosphere if that pin is unique enough. Thus, I can refer to evdb.com or to Jared Richardson, and that's enough to get attention. The two are sufficiently unique that entering the names will get the search engines to hit an RSS feed to show up on the RSS reader, and voila, attention.

Admittedly, if Brian Dear or Jared Richardson talked about in the press the way that, say, Tom Cruise or Barry Bonds is, they'd have to filter that out to get the most interesting stuff, or, perhaps much as they do, simply ignore it.

But I do think, in the meanwhile, that it's sufficiently cool that people, especially startups with techie founders, are often listening in the blogosphere for their names to be uttered. I think someone from Zimbra (who makes a kind of better Outlook) wrote a post. It hasn't exactly encouraged me to use Zimbra, but I'm fine with the shoutout.

Brian had a pretty nice post, so I'm happy with that. I'm curious who would write comments. Say, I wrote about Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks. But his name is out there so much in sports, and presumably his day is sufficiently busy that he can't possibly read all that's out there. He uses RSS feeds, but he has to be a lot pickier about what he wants to look at.

(By the way, he wrote an interesting article about sports writing in newspapers where he says that newspapers can provide better sports content than the timelier websites, whose articles are merely AP retreads, and offers fans little new).

At first, I thought I would find this bizarrely creepy. I have to think about what words I write, and who might be "listening". Without good search engines, you'd never find my entry. It would be buried among a gazillion other blogs. But now that it's possible, people search for it.

I attended ETECH a few months ago whose theme was the attention economy and while its aim was to harness the attention of the average Joe, guys like you and me, these RSS feeds have a kind of reverse effect. It allows you to draw the attention of people who otherwise wouldn't pay attention to you. This isn't to say that you're likely to hold onto their attention any more than yelling out the name of a celebrity while they pass by you on a red carpet is likely to get their devoted attention, but maybe that's fine.

These days, you can be famous on the Internet for fifteen minutes, or at least as long as it takes for the person reading your blog to get bored and move on.

Vienna Calling

I found myself in Vienna. Not the land of one Wolfgang Amadeus, but the land of shopping malls and Virginia surburbia.

How did I get there, you might ask? (Crickets chirp).

A few weeks ago, I was listening to a song called Code Monkey. I believe Jaime had sent the link to me. It had, I'm sure, made it to Slashdot. The song was about a coder who falls for a lovely woman (one presumes). He's a bit of a coward, a bit simple, not full of social graces.

The song was written by Jonathan Coulton, who was a software guy once upon a time, before he gave that career up for music. I went to his website to listen to the abundance of free music (he'd like you to contribute some money, of course, but is willing to let you listen to it for free).

Coulton even has a video at his website called Flickr, which starts off as one of those sickly sweet songs that seems like anyone could write, and yet, as it goes on, it seems like Coulton is trying to put words to whatever random pictures he's found at Flickr.

To continue with the story, I need to back up some. At the beginning of March, which is now nearly three full months ago, I was in San Diego attending ETECH, the Emerging Technology conference hosted by O'Reilly. This lasts four days. Day 1 is tutorial day, with opening keynotes that first evening. The next two days has keynotes in the morning and breakout sessions in the afternoon. The final day is sessions the whole day.

During one of the keynotes, a local software company, called evdb.com is promoting itself. One of the big themes of the conference is social networking, how people can collaborate with one another on the web. The founder(s) of this company figured that their website could not only be used to list events that people could go to, but they could encourage fans to "demand" performers to perform at their city. To do so, a person could add a tag that allows you to "demand" a performer.

When you click on the demand, you register your email at the Eventful database. If the person should happen to come to your neck of the woods, then it sends you an alert, saying your demand has been satisfied.

I thought it was a bit of a weird idea and wondered if it would even work.

Flash forward to a few weeks ago, and I'm checking out Coulton's website, who looks somewhat like Barry Gibb or Eric Clapton (it's the beard, I know) and notice there is the "demand it" ad on his website. I figure, what the heck, I'll put my name in and see what happens.

For a little while, nothing happened, although I had read that he was planning to be in the area, I didn't remember it. Then, I received email earlier this week saying Coulton was planning to perform in, yes, Vienna, Virginia.

He was going to be at Jammin Java. To be honest, I had no idea what kind of place this was. I thought maybe it's a coffee place. Maybe it's a club. Heck, maybe it's a place where Java coders go meet up. It's closer to the first two. It's a coffee house that hosts bands.

I wasn't sure how traffic was going to be, so I left work right around 6 PM. I figured, under normal circumstances, I would make it to Vienna in half an hour. In bad traffic, I'd just make it in an hour. I was only hoping, this being suburbia, that I would be able to park.

Turns out traffic was just fine. I was there in half an hour, and went to park, which was a little problematic, but not too bad. I went inside, got a largish cofee from people that seemed a bit goth. I would expect the people attending to be on the geek side given the kind of songs that Coulton performs.

Indeed what kind of music does Coulton play? Would he have been successful if he had been a straight-up musician. Indeed, his songs are catchy, his voice is pleasant to listen to, but it's just the kind of music that's probably rather difficult to be successful. He sounds a bit like James Taylor, and the market isn't exactly clamoring for that kind of music.

I used to think that music could only support one Weird Al. But to be fair, Coulton's music isn't like Weird Al. Weird Al spoofs music by coming up with new lyrics. He came along at the right time. When he was making fun of music, the music video was being born. Two of his most famous hits make fun of Michael Jackson's hits: Eat It and Fat.

Coulton, on the other hand, writes original music. One of his songs is a spoof of Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-lot, sung as a kind of ballad. But he also writes original lyrics.

Coulton's the kind of guy which would attract the crowd that, say, They Might Be Giants attracts, which is to say, the geek crowd. And that's an interesting crowd to go after. He's not writing angry music. He's not writing love songs. It's humorous, but there's something more at work.

One of Coulton's songs is about a squid. In the middle of the song, he talks about dolphins. Although the song is about a giant squid's ability to crush everything in site, the bit about the dolphins relates how big lugs still want affection, and really touches on themes very similar to his Code Monkey song. He revisits this theme in another song about a megalomaniac who is about to kill a female, and yet, it works a bit as a love song, and makes you think that even people who want to take over the world have basic feelings too.

His song about zombies (what is it about zombies that makes geeks squeal so? there's something genetic, I feel, about geeks and zombies) is written as a manager trying to talk to an employee, as if they're having a polite discussion about how his job is going, oh, and by the way, could he eat your brain? It's an oddly clever song which makes references to George Romero's zombie movies, which themselves were more than simply about zombies (unlike 28 Days Later, which appears to simply be about zombies). For Romero, zombies are symbolic. Coulton mines the idea for comedy, perhaps relating working in an office to being a zombie, and he takes the view of the zombie.

Comedy musicians usually rely on involving their audience, and so Coulton asked the audience to sing along the refrain "all we want to do is to eat your brains". The audience I was with was "eating this up", so to speak.

Coulton's set was relatively short. He went on about 6-7 songs. He would laugh when he forgot his lyrics, but I think the audience didn't really mind.

Coulton's warm-up act came on after him. This was the duo Paul and Storm. Yeah, it sounds like some kind of weird X-Men spin off.

Indeed, Paul and Storm were serving as backup singers for Coulton in several of his songs, including his lead, Baby Got Back.

Paul and Storm started off their set singing "We are the opening band", which was a rather energetic start, even though they were really a closing band. They reminded me of The Proclaimers. The Proclaimers are a Scottish band that had a one-hit wonder called 500 miles. You can see the video to hear them. OK, Paul and Storm aren't nearly as baritone, as blond, nor as Scottish as The Proclaimers, but something reminds me of them.

They're a high energy duo. Their songs are a bit more sophomoric, but at least expressive. For example, one song is about a Sudanese man who got it on with a goat. Another is about a pirate captain with a bunch of seamen at his house. You get the idea. Again, they're heavy on the audience participation.

While the audience really liked Coulton, Paul and Storm fared quite well, given audience participation.

Anyway, it goes to show you how people find entertainment these days. A guy I had not heard of a few weeks ago ends up getting Slashdotted, which leads me to his website, where I recognize the Eventful tag, which informs me earlier this week that he's going to be in Virginia, which leads me on a Friday night to a trip.

I did briefly say hi to Jonathan Coulton, but I didn't really know what to say. I mentioned Eventful, but he seemed only vaguely aware of it. It seemed like various people near him knew who he was from before. I bought his CD, though he seems to favor a new way of producing music where you pay online and download the MP3s and listen IPod-wise, rather than have physical CDs. I'm still old school when it comes to that, but I figure that's one way to give him money.

And off to NYC for the long weekend.

Computing Smarts

Suppose you're interested in starting a software company. You're interested in finding the best and brightest. But, really, what is the best and brightest? You might be able to measure such a thing once the person is hired and you assign tasks and they get it done faster than you expected with higher quality than expected.

But what's one level lower than this?

To illustrate, I'm going to jump over to another domain. Teaching computer science. I've blogged before about how the goals of teachers of computer science are often at odds with those seeking to hire the best programmers. Let's face it. Programming ain't easy. In fact, it's quite hard, at a number of levels.

You have to know nitpicky details of the semantics of a language. For example, why can you assign an array written as {1, 2, 3} only when you're declaring the variable, but not in an assignment statement? There's reason in C not to do this, but far less reason in Java. You have to remember that most comparisons do not return -1, 0, 1 but return negative, zero, or positive. There are a myriad of such details that seem to have little to do with understanding programming.

Then, you have to understand how to use the language properly. How to find the min or max of an array. How to use recursion. And so forth.

Then, if you're doing OO stuff, you have to work one level above that. Which classes should I use? How should they interact with one another? How should I test them? And so forth.

Then, you might have to go one level above that, the level of a software architect. How do I decide which enterprise solution to use? Which language to use? Which form of network communication? Which database? Which persistence engine? And so forth.

Most programming classes never really hit the last two levels, but that goes to show you how much there is to think about to be good. What do you think most teachers would prefer to test? They want to know if you can write code to do something. They don't care that much about syntax, or whether you remember the methods to this class or that class. In principle, you can look it up.

Ah, now that's the catch. You can look it up.

So, here's where I make a distinction. There are some people who if told everything they need to know (which is saying a lot) can get things done. In other words, their ability to look things up is severely hampered. Would you consider this intelligence? How to look things up?

Suppose you're at a company where software engineers don't do a good job of documenting what they do. That's probably nearly everywhere. How many companies have software people writing documentation half the time. And, having the documentation scrutinized as closely as editors scrutinize writing for books that get published? That would save some time for people later on to have this documentation, except that, code changes fast, so the associated documentation has to change as fast. Can documentation be tagged to a particular build?

So you lack documentation. Now, you have to sit and sift through code, which is similarly lacking in documentation, and try to surmise what the heck is going on. Maybe, if the coder is doing something sensible, they are following well-known practices. I recognize this pattern or that pattern. Maybe they are using a library. Gotta go over and check how this library works. What's a Java Bean? What's a servelet? What's this logging mechanism?

But what if you could have an expert who knows all this code, boil down what's important and what's not important. They explain that some of the code is currently cruft and isn't used. They refer you to some websites explaining beans, or better yet, begin to tell you the history behind it, and provide you some examples. You go, yeah, yeah, I'm starting to get it.

Is the ability to find and understand this information considered intelligence? If you could have someone explain the landscape to you, and then you could progress with that information to achieve what you needed, would that make you dumb? It seems like it shouldn't and yet it's quite possibly the defining characteristic to separate those who know and those who don't.

To be fair, real learning is all about locating information and distilling what's important. But there's so much crap when it comes to finding information when it comes to computing. If you're a mathematician or a physicist, you could be pointed to, say, 100 books, and some journals, and if you could follow what was said in all of that, you'd be in good shape.

There's so much technology being generated out there, that even with a good search engine, and the ability to form queries, you still might struggle to find the information you want. For example, suppose I wanted to build a website for an online store. I want a database. What should I pick? Is there a website I can go to that would give me good answers? On the other hand, if I wanted to learn about quantum mechanics, there's perhaps a few good books I could go to, and study them. The good information is much easier to locate.

There's a broad set of skills you need to be considered good at computing, and one of them is knowing how to find information, knowing which skills you need to get good at, and knowing how to get good at them. It feels very much like a wild good chase. There's a sense that we could solve deeper mysteries if we weren't having to chase information like this.

My thinking is that, in the long run, we need to find a much better way to do documentation, and to somehow version that with the software. But most people consider this part of development process as useless, even as it may save time in the long run, and make people more productive.

Ah productivity. Is it overrated? A topic for a later blog.

A La Mode

When did the phrase "a la mode" get associated with ice cream? Literally translated from the French, it means "in the style" (or "at the style"). Thus, at one point, adding a scoop of ice cream with whatever you're eating was considered fashionable. Somehow, perhaps due to the fondness Americans once had for the French, it was used to stand for ice cream.

My purpose is not to talk about ice cream, but to talk about style. My parents have left most of the configuration of our house about the same as before. They have the same microwave, the same couch, the same beds. They've never particularly thought, for example, that we need to replace our kitchen shelves or change the colors of the carpet (the carpet was replaced). The furniture has more or less stayed the same.

My parents have watched satellite TV getting Chinese programming for years. They still have a VCR. We do have a DVD player. They have computers, but pretty much run on a slow modem connection. They have no desire to upgrade to a fast Internet connection. They have no desire to obtain cell phones. It's just the way the industry makes us pay for more and more services that we feel like an idiot for not having, and yet, they choose to live life the way they've lived it.

I'm in the software industry. There's a sense I need to keep up. I can't use a photo service, I have to use Flickr, don't you know? Not Photobucket, not Apple's photo hosting, not one of several other photo hosting sites. Is Flickr even that good? It's main advantage is something that sits outside their photo hosting, and that's tagging. To be fair, I do have Flickr because I'm not, at this point, interested in finding another photo hosting service. And because my housemate gave me an account on it. Nothing beats getting stuff for free.

How about email? My brother has Yahoo Mail. I find it a bit annoying. I have it too, and I much prefer Gmail. But then Gmail is supposed to be the "it" email. It applies the Flickr idea of tagging to mail. It's not a perfect replacement for folders, but does give you something regular folders don't (and even mail folders from mail sites don't give you nesting).

I search on Google, but who doesn't? But there are other search engines, that either give you clustering or weirder clustering (I have to thank Lance for pointing these search sites) or webpage previewing which presents a tab for each webpage it searches.

I went to Digg, but I don't dig it. I find it's interface confusing and with only a handful of results per page, I tend to ignore it a lot. I like reddit since it puts about 25 results on a page on topics that have some interest to me. I hardly use Slashdot, because it has one missing feature that aggravates me to no end: it doesn't put the year in the date of the posts. I can never tell if the post I'm reading is this year, or three years ago. I generally have to scan the URL. It's awful, awful, awful. I could also never get into the tech topics they cover.

I now browse through techmeme.com (hi Gabe! Oh wait, my blog doesn't get enough readership for you to care. You're still reading it, aren't you?) mostly scanning at titles, though I check it out far less than I check out reddit.

I head over to my favorite online comic, Dinosaur Comics which I found from someone's away message, on a nearly daily basis.

I read Joel on Software when it comes out with stuff. Occasionally, I'll read the Creating Passionate Users blog, which usually grates, but has some interesting stuff.

I read sports on three sites: washingtonpost.com, nytimes.com, and yahoo.com. I find ESPN's website far too busy, and lacking in content. This is where Mark Cuban is right. If you're a sports webpage like ESPN, get good analysis (maybe they do). You should almost not rely on AP for anything. Everyone has AP. Make your site worth getting to. I like Yahoo's sports page because it's less cluttered, but even they don't have enough original articles that I care about. Right now, Sports Illustrated, the magazine, is the place I'd read sports news if I wanted something beyond the basics. I pick up much of my sports information by listening to the morning sports show. Ever since Tony K. went on hiatus, it's been Mike and Mike, who are a distant second for me.

I head over to music websites, mostly All Songs Considered at NPR. I briefly visited audiovant.org. I just discovered pitchforkmedia.com recently for music. There's metacritic, which I visit only once in a blue moon.

Informed websurfing is a habit that I've picked up, especially recently, that my parents are unlikely to ever pick up. They simply don't use the web that much. Even my brother, who uses the web reasonably often, doesn't try out many of the web's newest features. I suspect that's far more typical of users of the web. Right now, Web 2.0 is flying right by them. Maybe if their favorite sites went to Web 2.0, they'd notice. But right now, it seems not every website is ready to embrace Ajax goodness, and frankly, no one seems to mind that hasn't happened yet.

I read enough websites that I should be relying on some RSS feed to help me out. I should use Michael Arrington's recommended webtools on his Tech Crunch website. Right now, I haven't made that jump. My last time with RSS lead to clutter and I eventually gave up. But it seems to make sense that I use an RSS tool.

But before I get to that, why must I keep up? I've fallen into the same kind of crowd that follows sports or soap operas or episodes of Lost religiously. The web has even helped all those addicts. Would I not be better off learning about real deep knowledge.

Is Einstein happy that all his lonely hours were devoted to thinking about deep problems, not checking out the latest news in websites, that leads to a certain kind of knowledge akin to what celebrity is seeing what celebrity? We're using valuable brain space on knowledge that takes time to accumulate and gets stale very quickly.

For example, Barbaro was trying to win the second leg of the Triple Crown. Experts had dubbed the horse as the best prospect to win since Secreteriat. Only a freak accident would cause Barbaro from making his name in history. OK, I'm exaggerating a bit. The horse that did win, Bernardini, had a rather amazing run. It was completely overshadowed by Barbaro breaking his ankle, an injury so serious that in the past, they would have killed the horse ("put it down"). I've read a few stories about it, seen pictures of post-surgery Barbaro. Now I really don't follow horse racing much, except Triple Crown time, but because I follow sports in general, I keep up.

My brother may have heard of this result, but he couldn't care less.

My question is this. Will it get worse? Some people have decided even the old killer app of the recent past, email, is too much. Donald Knuth doesn't even bother reading email. He wants to spend time writing books and using his brain for something he thinks is not as trendy, something that will last the test of time.

However, it's so much easier keeping up with all this tech, because frankly, I'm not the one who has to do it. Someone else tags important stories (by some metric) and I read what they find if it interests me.

But sometimes I wonder why I do it? At some point, so many people will be creating so much content, that no one can really keep up. In fact, that's already happened. Go to a tech conference, and you'll someone say "have you heard of X?" and the speaker, often well-versed in technical aspects, will say no. There's just a ton of stuff out there. And if the speaker at a hip conference doesn't know, what about the Joe Blow getting on with life as a software engineer? And what about the Joe Blow that isn't even in software?

They're all happy with Windows 95 or Windows 98. XP, bah. Maybe they'll pick up a new OS sometime in a few years time. Who needs installation and all that modern stuff?

Ah, my shiny new Macbook should be coming next week.

No, I didn't get black.

Do you think I'm stupid?

Joel and Blogging

Many people know Joel Spolsky writes a blog (but I would guess there are many, many, many software engineers who don't know Joel Spolsky from Igor Stravinsky--I've commented on how being a software engineer these days seems to require keeping up with the cognoscenti of the world, and how many choose not to follow it). Through that blog, many people know he runs a small company in New York City called Fog Creek Software.

Have you ever noticed something a bit odd? How many other people in his company blog, to your knowledge? I've talked to three of the guys who work there, and to the best of my knowledge, they don't blog. Of course, with a company so small and with a blogger so prominent, there may be invariably be comparisons made. However, nothing says they have to blog about the same things.

Joel tends to keep his blog focused on issues of interest to software developers. He's not going to tell you about Broadway shows you must attend, nor great restaurants you have to visit. Even when Joel delves into aesthetics, such as having nice offices, it's to an end--to attract the best talent to work with him. To be fair, that's the true subtext of his blog. Ostensibly, it's about software and developing software and hiring the best. But really, it's about hiring the best. Joel would have had a much harder time finding talent without his blog. Maybe he could have found other ways to do it. But this is the way he does it.

The people that work with Joel have one quality that's intriguing. They're inquisitive. I mean, about things that may lie outside of software. To be fair, engineers ought to be inquistive. Engineers are problem solvers, and it sharpens the mind to solve all kinds of problems. To be fair, when the problems lie outside of software you're writing, the answers don't have to be perfect. They're just the solutions you come up with given the current state of knowledge.

No one is expected to take Knuthian obsessive-compulsive searches on the Internet and actually solve the problem for real. For example, in the Aardvark film, there was a question whether the employees of Fog Creek could leap to safety onto the next building. Their was an attempt to measure the distance then to perform some basic physics and math to see what was possible. However, that was only going so far.

It's not as if Fog Creek would invest in dummies to be tossed, or hire stuntmen to test out the ideas. After all, in a fire, such a solution would most likely be discarded. The point of the exercise is simply to apply the knowledge that an engineer is likely to have (calculus, physics) and come up with a solution, in the hopes that such curiousity when applied to something not that important can then be turned on to something more critical.

Perhaps those kinds of mental exercises would be enough to make a blog on. Now, the real thing I'd like to see, I suppose, is a blog on how "bright people" write software. Joel goes on and on about needing to hire the best, but you never get a sense of what makes "the best".

I work at a place where there's bright people too, so I get a sense of what that might entail. But Joel worked at Microsoft, a company that's been developing software for 30 years (maybe 20 when Joel worked there), and they must have learned a thing or two about how to develop software, so what did he adopt, and what did he not adopt? What does he think about agile methodology.

Do the Fog Creek guys unit test? (I read an article about refactoring, so certainly that's important). Do they scrum? (By the way, I'm listening to The Concrete's In Colour--they recently had to cancel their tour, but I was able to attend before that happened. This album, to my mind, is far better than their previous efforts, especially the second half of the album.)

Now I've already stated a few reasons why none of the other Fog Creekers blog. The most obvious is comparisons made to Joel, who seems to write so well. Some kinds of blogs might reveal too much detail that would provide a competitive advantage that Joel would rather not have out in the open.

Blogs were originally thought of as online diaries, and there are still some folks that have the equivalent of online diaries, revealing their thoughts on this or that, but few are willing to be startingly frank (hmm, like Anne Frank?) since other people are reading it. However, most blogs from the tech world stick specifically to tech issues and rants about that world. That's fine. People reading it know what they are getting. Maybe they don't care that your dog just made a mess, or that idiots work at fast food restaurants, or whatever. But online diaries, when well written (and written by crazy folks), are highly entertaining. Alas, there very uncommon.

There's another reason not to blog. Most people lack much interesting to say. I mean, that's my problem, but I'm prolific anyway. How many people are willing to sit and force themselves to write on a regular basis, basically forever? This is one reason I choose to blog on whatever. If I had a topic-driven blog, I would have far less to say.

So guys at Fog Creek, why not blog? Or here's an idea. Create a Fog Creek discussion blog. Pick a theme. Each person who wants to writes something about the topic, then have each person follow up in discussion. Keep the discussion closed for a bit, and open it up once there are enough opinions.

Well, one can hope.

Valley of the Dolls

David Jacobson's Down in the Valley, which seems headed to a rather predictable showdown between Harlan, the out-of-place cowboy in San Bernandino Valley, who's come to rescue Tobe from her suffocating cop of a dad. It appears to be about which way Tobe, the girl with gumption, will go. She leans to Harlan, who she found by accident, working at a gas station, barely making ends meet.

But somehow, after a key point in the film, the story switches to what will happen to Lonnie, the shy younger brother of Tobe, who latches on to her, for fear of being by himself. Why does Harlan take an interest in him? Does he see Lonnie as his own alter ego. Where he may have been in love with Tobe, he sees rescuing Lonnie as a form of rescuing himself?

In some ways, this film felt like a deconstruction of a Western. Harlan's come to rescue the girl and her brother from an oppressive dad. The themes aren't exactly out of a Western, but the notion of putting the law in your own hands is. Yet, unlike traditional Westerns that took life in the West as given--no one in Bonanza ever questioned why they lived out West, there is a question as to why Harlan lives life as a cowboy, since it's hinted that this lifestyle may indeed be artificial, a fabrication of his own mind. He as much hints this is so, by saying you have to do what set your mind to.

For a moment, it appears he has willed his fantasy into reality. As Harlan runs off with Lonnie, they appear to have headed into the past. To be fair, it seems like they've run into something like a civil war re-enactment, so it never quite slips into magic realism. The magic is broken when they realize they are on a studio set.

I've read a review that says the film is a pronouncement on the views of masculinity, but it may be as much a reflection on what we want to be and what we are. Wade is a war hero of sorts. He believes in history. He collects guns. To some extent, Harlan has also looked backwards in time, but he does so to escape his own past, and his past in muddled.

Seemingly abandoned by his parents, he may have been raised by Joe who appears to be a rabbi. Yet, he's not embraced Judaism, well, not so that I can tell. He refers to Joe and writes to him, but somehow can't live that life.

There's a question why Tobe stays with her dad. Does she prefer the stability her dad offers? He's grounded in the present, yet, she, much like Harlan, longs to escape her reality. Harlan, on the other hand, appears to have had a desolate past, one filled with foster homes with parents who didn't love him and may have abused him (and yet how does Joe fit into this?). Harlan lives lies and tells them too, and yet, we partly forgive him because he philosophizes about life. Wade is bland.

To Jacobson's credit, he makes both views credible. It's the kind of decision we all face in life, to be who society wants us to be, or to have the freedom to do whatever we want, even if the consequences are that we can't survive in society. In the end, reality wins, and yet both Tobe and Lonnie long for the kind of fantasy life that Harlan seems to offer, even if it's really illusory.

I'm making this sound heavy, which it isn't. It's possible to view this as a film where two guys are pissed at each other, and fight over something meaningless. It could have slipped into something cliche, and yet it doesn't. It borrows from historical imagery, from the obvious cowboy themes, to Taxi Driver, to Les Miserables.

It's hard to say what conclusion we're meant to draw from the film, but it's nonetheless fascinating to talk about.

Valley Girl

I went to watch Down in the Valley, a film by David Jacobson, apparently, his third after Criminal and Dahmer, neither of which I've heard.

The film stars Ed Norton, Evan Rachel Wood, David Morse, and Rory Culkin. The remaining characters are extremely minor.

I knew very little of the film going in. I knew that things weren't the way they were supposed to be as set up at the beginning, and that's true. Alas, even this little piece of knowledge had me waiting impatiently to see where the relationship was heading.

Initially, it appears headed to a cliche. Morse plays single dad to willful daughter played by Evan Rachel Wood, who one day meets Ed Norton, a cowboy-ish guy who's working at a gas station, barely making ends meet. She invites him to the beach with her friends, and they hit it off. He seems caring, even as her father has his reservations.

It says something about the writing and David Morse's acting that makes you side with the overly protective father rather than with likeable Ed Norton, but memories of Primal Fear, Norton's breakout performance where he feigns that he's a simpleton to get out of being accused of a murder.

The film reminded me strangely enough of Undertow. In that film, Jamie Bell plays rebellious older son who takes care of his sickly younger brother. However, in that case, the bad guy turns out to be their dad's brother who wants the fortune that is hidden away, creating the central conflict. Most of the rest of the film is concerned with Jamie trying to keep away from the uncle who's looking for the money, and willing to do anything to get it.

Although the storyline was a bit simple, I liked it for its odd Southern atmospherics. Although apparently set in the South, it almost felt out of time, as if this were 1930s South with sharecroppers, combined with some hippie setting.

Norton's Harlan dresses and sounds like a cowboy. His past is mysterious. It appears he's been raised in foster homes, and apparently, at one point in time, by a rabbi, though this isn't clear. He sympathizes with Lonnie, who he nicknames "Twig", perhaps seeing something of this shy kid.

Apparently, he tells lies such as working for a guy named Charlie, or worse, telling Lonnie about who shot his sister. It seems clear that Charlie isn't able to take care of anyone, not even himself, and yet, there's some sympathy for his character.

This film seems destined for a showdown between the father and Harlan, and that's where it twists and turns. The confrontation occurs, but then it's no longer over Tobe (Wood), it's over Lonnie.

I'm not sure whether Harlan's meant to be some kind of allegorical character. The closest the film comes to this is when he's hopped up on Ecstasy telling people jammed in the streets that life wasn't meant to be spent in traffic. Harlan contemplates life that's free from worries, and he's run away a lot, run away from responsibility, but he's human, and he thinks that Tobe might be the woman for him.

Credit Jacobson for not taking an obvious path with the characters, for not making the dad an absolute bad guy, nor Norton an absolute good guy. He maintains balance, showing neither exactly good or bad, both well-meaning, but perhaps not doing what's best for everyone.

The film hints at a possible relationship between Wade (the father) and Harlan, as if maybe Wade was his dad, but again, Jacobson doesn't take that route that might seem to good to be true. Even if this is truly their relationship, neither realize it.

Jacobson throws odd jabs in the film, which are puzzling, but certainly far from orthodox, such as Harlan's relationship with Joe, who appears to be a rabbi. The scene where he steals from the rabbi seems oddly reminiscent of Les Miserables where Jean Valjean steals from a priest of some sort.

I did wonder how old Norton is (he's in his 30s, just a touch younger than me) because it appears he's playing a guy maybe only a few years older than Tobe. He's still young enough that he can play 20, and that's what he appears to be doing. I didn't get the sense that he was trying to play a guy in his 30s.

Norton's shirt is off an awful lot. I have no idea if there's any particular reason for that, other than to show his exercise regiment is working well. The acting is uniformly good, though Rory Culkin appears to be reprising his role for Mean Creek, where he's also a shy kid.

I give the film both a B in likeability and quality.

Playing the Links

I went back to visit the audiovant website and realized there was one interview I hadn't listened to. I had listened to the one with Jens Lekman, Vetiver, and Tapes N Tapes. However, the first interview was with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, which I picked up sometime last summer.

As I was listening to the interview, the guy talked about Pitchfork Media which I may have heard of, but only vaguely recall in my mind. He claimed this indie music website helped promote Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, even though one of the members said he doesn't really relate to the indie scene, his influences being more popular.

I decided to check this rather garish website, with ads blinking at you as if I were staring at buildings in Times Square. On the top right is a picture of Sufjan Stevens. Sufjan's photos almost seem like he's posing for one of those cameras from the turn of the twentieth century, where people had to pose for minutes without moving, and thus avoided smiling. Sufjan looks off to the side at the distance, his cap somewhat askew.

I suspect that he controls that imagery quite specifically. I haven't seen a Rolling Stone, famous photographer, Annie Leibovitz sort of photo.

The picture is for an interview where he discusses his latest album, The Avalanche, songs that didn't quite make it to his breakout album, Illinois (or perhaps more properly, Come on feel the Illinoise which apparently is a riff on a popular song by Quiet Riot (spelled "Cum on Feel the Noize"), which itself was taken from a British rock/glam band called Slade.

Sufjan had written some 50 songs. While he's generally happy with The Avalanche, he's not as thrilled with it emotionally as he was with the Illinois. In the interview, he mentions he likes one song in particular, The Mistress Witch of McClure, which he suggests has a personal history that he's not quite ready to reveal. He spends a lot of time, it seems, hanging out with his friends, many of whom are musicians, and who either collaborates with him on his music, or he helps out with their music.

The webpage, which is a bit of a newspaper or a magazine, also said that The Concretes, who I saw a few weeks ago, had cancelled their performances in the United States. Their equipment had been stolen, and the lead singer had gotten sick. I'm still waiting for NPR to mail me their latest CD, which I would have bought at Amazon (and received by now) had I not been such an idiot and found the "import" CD which is always expensive, rather than their normal CD, which was ten dollars less.

Anyway, the interesting thing about the website is that I didn't really know its reputation at all. Again, it's me checking out the Audiovant website, listening to an interview, then having that guide me to another website. This, in essence, is websurfing. Unlike channel surfing, web surfing often takes you to new places you've never been, and unless you bookmark well, places you might never go again. It's a portal that I still believe is leading us to a new way of learning things, and we're only scratching the surface of it.

Some things stagnate a bit (for example, I doubt much work is spent on Blogger, though I see tiny changes over time), which isn't that bad, to be honest, but others chug ahead, adding their Web 2.0 features, as web designers look for the next great way to present information to the user.

Some sites I've been a little less thrilled with. I tried out Last.fm, but haven't really used it that much to listen to new music. Generally, I prefer hearing about it word of mouth.

Anyway, chasing links, that's what I've been doing.

Wii, No Wie

Nintendo introduced this device called Wii, which has two wands or some such, and has drawn curiousity from many in the gaming community.

But that's not who I want to talk about. I want to talk about Michelle Wie, the Korean-American golfing sensation.

Wie's played in a bunch of men's tournament. Until recently, she hasn't even made the cut, which would be quite the feat, but she recently made cut in the Asian Tour SK Telecom Open. To be fair, this isn't the strongest men's tournament, but to make the cut in any tournament speaks highly of her skills.

Wie's not the best woman's golfer. In fact, she may be winless in women's tournaments though she has come close. Annika Sorenstam is perhaps the best woman's player. She tried playing a men's tournament once and barely missed the cut, and decided not to try again. She played amazingly well on the woman's tour after that, however.

Now, critics may say Wie's desire to play against the men is silly. Sure, she's tall and can hit the ball a ton, but men still hit harder and further. And, they say, it's hurting her game not competing against women. After all, against men, she's not expected to win, or even be close to contention. She won't know the experience of closing out a tough tournament since she's always been so far off the pace among men that it's never been an issue.

But, let's recall how old Michelle Wie is.

16 years old.

Let's think about that. If she didn't win a woman's tournament for four more years, would we care? Sure, it may be long overdue by then, but really, she's only 16.

This is golf, too. Not tennis. Becker won at 17. So did Mats Wilander. So did Michael Chang. Women like Steffi Graf and Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario and Jennifer Capriati succeeded at the age of 15. But there were many years ahead of them.

As long as Michelle Wie continues to progress, I don't mind these excursions into the men's game. I know people think it's insulting to the women's game that she does this, but she's also drawing attention that the women's game doesn't usually get, and so the tour indirectly benefits.

And, when it comes to Asian American role models, who else do we have? Ah, I suppose you could say Tiger Woods, and so that's fine. He's half-Thai. Still, a typical African American is more likely to relate to Tiger than the typical Asian-American (although I'm told Thais have embraced Woods).

Another Michelle, Michelle Kwan, tried to skate in the Olympics, but pain prevented her from competing.

Any guys? I'm not sure what ethnicity Apollo Ohno is. In mainstream sports, you have to look to other countries like China. Nearly every Asian in baseball or basketball are from people that are from other countries. There have been a few Asian Americans in the NFL. The only one that comes to mind is Dat Nguyen, who plays for the Cowboys.

It's too bad Timmy Chang of Hawaii couldn't make the leap. He was in a system that gave him gaudy numbers as a quarterback, but no interest from the NFL.

I suppose much of the lack of Asian American talent in sports has much to do with parents preferring their kids to be engineers or doctors or something else besides sports, which is all well and good. It certainly makes some sense.

Still, ever since Michael Chang stopped playing tennis, I've wanted to see the next great Asian American talent. And that person may be Michelle Wie.

Ender's Movie

There's been talk of an Ender movie for ten years now. The special effects should be good enough to do a film like Ender's Game which basically needs weightlessness.

Orson Scott Card once said that the film, Searching for Bobby Fisher said all he wanted to say in Ender's Game. Still, I think people wouldn't mind watching the story in film, even if its themes may have been covered elsewhere.

The director most associated with the film has been Wolfgang Petersen. Petersen directed the great Das Boot in German, which I still have yet to see. He then began directing English pictures, but I don't think any of them have been great.

He's done In the Line of Fire, Troy, Poseidon, and Air Force One. I haven't seen most of these films. I did enjoy In the Line of Fire, which stars Clint Eastwood who plays a secret service guy who still feels guilt about not taking the bullet when Kennedy was assasinated. A guy says he plans to kill the President.

That guy happens to be John Malkovich, who can play creepy like falling off a log, and it's really his film as he taunts Eastwood's character before reaching a point where he snaps , when Eastwood's character has gotten underneath his skin.

I dunno, though. Since then Petersen hasn't done a good film (so I hear, anyway. I should give him the benefit of the doubt). I'm not sure who would do a good job. I could see Spielberg doing this film, as he's often done well with kids, and his style might work well with Card's writing style. There's something about the exaggerated way Spielberg likes dealing with kids that reminds me of Card.

I had a rather simple idea for the film, which admittedly, is a bit of a gimmick. In this film, no adult would ever be seen face-on and at adult height. The film would be shot almost entirely at kid height. The exception might have to be Mazer Rackham. Just this simple gimmick would put everything from the perspective of kids, and the adults would simply be in the background, kind of like the story.

This is a film that almost cries out for a stylized treatment of kids. While a naturalistic approach would be interesting, something more like Broadway-style acting might work better, except for Ender himself, who needs to stand out as different.

By the way, I think the Harry Potter series has yet to hit its stride. People have pointed out Alfonso Cuaron and Mike Newell have moved the franchise beyond Chris Columbus's first two efforts. It's become a kind of Alien franchise with decent directors taking their hands at leading this ship.

Newell was complimented on his ability to recreate a more British school, and he's been the only director whose British. Even so, the film is hampered by having to deal with at least one character who's a non-characer, and another whose not fleshed out enough to care what happens to him. And the quidditch match? Again? Like Klingons in a Star Trek film.

Actually, you know who I'd like to see direct Ender's Game? Kim Ki-duk. Yeah, I know. It probably wouldn't work out. Kim's not big into dialogue. He's fantastic in scenes with no dialogue at all, and might have made a credible Brokeback Mountain.

But where he and his fellow Korean directors are amazing is their portrayal of gritty violence. There are at least two scenes from the book that are rather violent, and Kim could give it a kind of grisly realism that might punctuate the scene, in something that might otherwise be filmed in some banal fashion.

IMDB has slated Petersen to direct, though it appears tentative. Petersen is juggling his schedule, and may not go with Ender's Game. Casting is key too, although more so if they go into the Ender's Shadow series.

We'll see how it turns out.

King of Clay

While many people in the sports media have been keeping their eye on Barry Bonds waiting patiently to see when he will finally tie Babe Ruth's home run record of 714, which is second to Hank Aaron's 755. Part of the drama is twofold. First, Bonds has been taking his time tying the record. Recently, someone caught a ball that would have been a home run, depriving Bonds of the tie, and he's been in a rut since. The other drama is, of course, Bonds' alleged steroid use. While Bonds has never publicly admitted to taking steroids, nearly every sports commentator feels certain he did, much as Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Rafael Palmiero did (or likely did).

Alas, sports commentators in the US tend to fixate on the big three: basketball, baseball, and football. Even though I feel baseball is a distant third, the passion it engenders among those who love baseball is profound. They love its history, and thus, they love the comparison to Babe Ruth.

Recently, Mike Greenberg was trying to come up with a list of people for "Mount Sportsmore", the four sports legend that would appear on a Mount Rushmore-like edifice. The final list was Muhammad Ali, Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretsky. Now, this list is very typical of a show like this. Here are some names they probably didn't consider: Pele and Billie Jean King. The first, because sports commentators seem to dislike non-Americans being picked, especially in soccer. Second, the disdain for women's sports altogether. True, Billie Jean King wasn't the best player ever, but she's up there in the top 10 or so players, and played perhaps the most important match in all of women's sports: her challenge with Bobby Riggs, which wasn't even an official tournament. Her success helped spearhead the increase of women's sports, especially Title 9 which forced colleges to put women's sports on equal footing with men's (too bad football makes such a mess of things).

Somehow buried in this American-centric sports fest was Rafael Nadal tying Vilas's record for consecutive wins on clay. I know. On clay? I mean, isn't that like having a win streak playing in the state of Florida? Who cares? But even in its day, people remarked on Vilas's streak on clay, which, given the people who typically win on clay often fare poorly on other surfaces and vice versa, is worthy of note.

Guillermo Vilas had an amazing streak of winning 53 consecutive matches on clay. In the process, Vilas would go on to win his one and only French Open. This was back in 1977. Borg had come close to beating Vilas's record, but it was Vilas who ultimately prevented Borg from breaking the record, even though Borg generally had his way with Vilas.

Vilas was one of the earliest players to have a coach that travelled with him. Ion Tiriac, who also helped out countrymen Ilie Nastase, and then went on to coach Becker was at Vilas's side. Vilas was a left-handed from Argentina. People thought of him as a sensitive guy because he wrote poetry and had long hair when that was in the style for tennis players. His left forearm was significantly larger than his right.

Vilas was generally a relentless clay courter. His weakness was like many clay-courters of his day. He was an average server, while Borg was much better than average, and he was an adequate volleyer. On clay, serve and volley are hardly prerequisites to success. And, aside from a hot McEnroe or Edberg, it's really tough to win on clay by serving and volleying. So, it was no detriment to Vilas that he didn't have a well-rounded game.

1977 was his best year when he won the French and US Open. The US Open, at the time, was played on Har Tru, a kind of clay court. He beat Connors to win that title. He would win the Australian Open on grass the next two years back when the Australian Open had degraded into some kind of joke. Top players often avoided playing the tournament especially when it was moved from January, its usual time, to December, right smack dab in the middle of Christmas, when many players decided they'd rather stay home.

As impressive as Vilas's record is, it comes nowhere near the women's record. Chris Evert won 125 consecutive matches on clay, more than twice Vilas's record, and likely to be unmatched.

On Sunday, 19 year old Rafael Nadal beat world number 1, Roger Federer, in the finals of the Rome Masters to tie Vilas's record. The score was agonizingly close: 6-7 (0), 7-6 (5), 6-4, 2-6, 7-6 (5) . Nadal has a 4-1 record against Federer, though I would imagine they mostly have come on clay. Clay is such a different game from hard courts and grass that results on clay have to be considered in a different category.

Federer is seen as one of the most talented players to ever play the game, possibly even more so than Sampras. Federer generally plays from the backcourt, and can overwhelm from the baseline. Players like Australia's Lleyton Hewitt and American Andre Agassi have found it really hard to beat Federer when Federer is on. When they hit a hard shot, Federer hits one better. However, two players have had pretty good success against Federed. David Nalbandian of Argentina and Rafael Nadal of Spain.

Federer's mental block with Nalbandian echoes Sampras's block with Chang. When they played in the juniors, Michael Chang would routinely beat Sampras. Even though Sampras had the kind of game that ought to overwhelm Chang, Chang did quite well against Sampras. Once Sampras realized he really ought to beat Chang and did so, then Sampras won most meetings. I suspect the same can be said of Federer and Nalbandian who played one another as juniors with Nalbandian often coming out on top. These days, Federer seems to win their duels.

Not so with Nadal. Nadal can become the undisputed king of clay. He'll face Tommy Haas in the first round of the Hamburg Masters. At one time, Haas was considered the next Becker from Germany. That didn't happen. Still, he can be a danger. More than likely, Nadal should be able to break Vilas's record, and head into the French Open as the odds on favorite on the men's side to win the title, heading to this goal much as Vilas did when he was on his hot streak on clay.

Finding Content

About two years ago, I was sitting just before a class taught by William "Bill" Gasarch was starting. He was asking the class their opinion on the most important invention in the last twenty years. I said, the browser. Other people also concurred. It's not so much the browser, obviously. The browser is just the medium which you receive content, like the radio is the medium you receive content. Without radio stations broadcasting content, the radio would do no good. Same for the browser.

It's sad that I'm reduced to calling music "content", but that's the way industry refers to it ("content providers"). I won't go into a long discussion about how things get named and then used (e.g., how the word "disruptive" became something good).

The impact of the world wide web is likely to increase over time as applications on the web get better and the ability to find things on the web also gets better. Once upon a time, when we were in high school, it was hard to meet anyone outside the high school. Nowadays, you simply create an interesting webpage, and people come and seek you. Thus, people often have at least two sets of friends: those in real life, and those on the Internet.

I could go on about that topic, how the Internet has changed the way we relate to people. But instead, I want to talk about how to find content on the web.

Since it's easy enough to get your own webpage, it's also become increasingly easy for bands to put their stuff on webpages. They don't have to rely on a label to promote the heck out of them. Sure, such bands may never get popular enough to make lots of money, but may do well enough to make a living at it.

The question is: how do you find such bands? This was a question that was posed on some NPR show I was listening to. I find that the primary way is for me to listen to NPR's All Songs Considered. However, there are other ways to find interesting stuff. There are Internet radio stations, but I find I'd rather hear recommendations. Much in the same way that I often decide to watch a film based on what critics say, I like to listen to music that way too. There's so much stuff out there, that I'd rather use critics as a filter, and then decide what to pick after that. Of course, that makes my listening habits seem "cool" by some standards. I might listen to "crappier" bands, but they never make it past my initial filter, which isn't to say I wouldn't find them compelling, because I might. It's just that there's way too much stuff for me to spend time searching for them.

While listening to the interview of Tapes N' Tapes on audiovant, I heard the phrase "blog dorks" which I guess are people who use blogs to find music content, and scour what people write to find out about music (I need to listen to that interview again to make sure I didn't mischaracterize it).

Sometimes I find a band completely by accident. Well, not completely. For example, I was looking at links at Amazon, trying to find some new music to listen to. This lead me to Sufjan Stevens last summer. I went and bought his CD of Illinois. Little did I know then that he was going to be the indie darling of 2005, even then. Had I known about NPR's site, I would have found out about him sooner.

In fact, if you go there now, you can listen to one of Sufjan's latest songs. Sufjan is an incredibly prolific songwriter. He wrote some 50 songs for Illinois although about 15 of them finally made it to the CD. He's releasing The Avalanche in July, with so-called outtakes, i.e., songs that didn't make it. Some of them he's gone back and revisited and retooled.

At times, I wonder if he'll just cut loose and do a rock or punk kind of song. In fact, he has done songs that are a bit different from the folk stuff he is most associated with. In particular, A Sun Came!. He's also made Enjoy Your Rabbit which is rather experimental and is the only album of his I don't own.

Even with Sufjan, there's a few songs that you can't find anywhere out there. NPR had an interview with people living in Arkansas who found a bird long thought extinct. He wrote a song for that (the interviewers that it would be cool if he did that, and so he did) and from that came Lord God Bird. If you Google some, you can find a collection of Christmas songs he recorded, again, unavailable on CD.

Although I look for new music, I can't say it's a passion by any stretch. There are folks whose musical library makes mine look paltry by comparison. For example, those who are really into music can describe it like people describe fine wine. They place it in a genre, compare it to other bands, perhaps even identify chord progressions used. I don't really play guitar (I think that would honestly help my listening if I knew more about how to compose rock music).

Ah, I'm getting distracted from my point (again). The point is that the web has allowed for a lot of content to get produced, a lot of it quite bad, and a lot of it hard to find. Social networking allows others to do the work. However, it still takes some work to find sites that you trust to get ideas, and over time, that list evolves as you find new sites to check out. Will audiovant become this new site that spots talent or at least brings talent to come and be interviewed?

Who knows? How long will it last?

Are we becoming increasingly splintered in the kind of content we have access to and listen or watch? Will we listen to music and watch television/movies more like we read books where there are many, many authors, some with devoted, but not numerous followers.

Swede Dreams

Of all the European countries, you might be surprised to figure which country (in my opinion of course) speaks the best American English. By that, I mean the English whose accent sounds closest to the way Americans would pronounce it. Once you realize I'm looking for American English, then you can easily eliminate the entire of the United Kingdom, who, while speaking English, speak it as the Brits do. They have, I'm sure, no desire to sound American.

It's the Swedes. Oh sure, many of us are conviced that the Swedish chef from the Muppet Show is the epitome of the Swedish accent.

I began to notice the way Swedes pronounced English when I was heavily into watching tennis, which was mostly throughout the 80s. By then, Borg, perhaps still the best Swedish player ever, had retired, unwilling to be brought back to the tour because they had the audacity to demand that he play qualifying rounds. I would imagine that today, they would think otherwise, and take a more NBA approach, and simply give him exemptions.

Borg's success lead quickly to a large contigent of Swedes lead by Mats Wilander and Stefan Edberg, and a bunch of lesser known Swedes like Henrik Sundstrom, Joachim Nystrom, Anders Jarryd, Kent Carlsson, Thomas Enqvist, Mikael Pernfors, and Jonas Bjorkman. The heyday of great Swedish players was throughout the 1980s, and began to fade into the 90s when players from Spain and Argentina began asserting themselves more.

While listening to the Swedes get interviewed, I marvelled at how close their accents sounded to American accents. Oh sure, you'd hear the "for sure" that Borg would use when he spoke.

The Swedes have also been successful in one other area of note. Pop music. Of course, there was ABBA, the four member band from Sweden that gave the West such hits as Dancing Queen and Take a Chance on Me. However, Sweden has produced other "excellent" pop bands: Roxette, Ace of Base, and The Cardigans.

Two others that fit in this category are Jens Lekman and The Concretes. To be fair, they're not likely to produce hits like any of the bands just mentioned. They're just artsy enough to be respectable in the indie band.

I just heard an interview with Jens Lekman at audiovant.com. I defy you to think that Jens isn't American except in the kinds of things he says.

I have to say that I found this website in the oddest way. I was looking for the music playlist on WMUC which is the radio station at the University of Maryland. Its signal strength is awful, even while right on Maryland campus. Some days I can hear it all right, other days it's terrible. It's too bad there isn't some way to stream this content like they do on the Internet, because the quality is rather appalling.

I had been listening to the playlist Thursday morning (May 11, 2006) and just looked for who was playing then. It's some guy named Rayhan Hasan who hosts Radio Show Ate My Morning. It turns out he has a website where he puts his playlist. Somewhere in this blog, he mentions the audiovant website, where he's surprised at who they've been able to interview (Jens Lekman, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. I'm currently listening to Tapes N' Tapes interview.

It's a pretty new website hosted by Brendan Newnam. I was going to say he has that typical NPR voice and the show seems well-edited. Ah, but it turns out that he was a researcher for Fresh Air with Terry Gross, which is an NPR show. Go figure. Maybe that's giving him some clout to meet with bands.

I hope the site does well. Seems interesting so far.

Artful Dodger

There were a few questions on my mind after watching Art School Confidential. How close does this capture life as an art student? The main character, Jerome, says he wants to be the greatest artist of the twentieth century (note how we can't quite say twenty-first century yet, even as we're six years into the 21st century).

We see some evidence that he cares about his art, mostly in the time he spends when there's a break, but like many movies that's about a profession, in this case, art, it's often not about the profession at all. I recall Mike D'Angelo's review of Boogie Nights which is supposed to be about the heyday of the porn industry when the industry aspired to making movies that were more film than exploitation and bad plots. Yet, it spent relatively little time saying much about the industry itself, mostly, I imagine, there wasn't so much to say.

Similarly, Art School Confidential isn't particularly about art. It points to a kind of cynicism about art. Many of the artists are rather jaded or give the air of pretentiousness. John Malkovich's character spends all his time during the posing talking to people on the phone, presumably to get his own artwork on display. Steve Buscemi's character laments that once the artists hit it big, they don't talk to him. These two characters perhaps say as much about life as an artist, as anything.

But that's peripheral to the central part of the story, which is Jerome falling for Audrey. It's a story that's told often, about an average Joe seeking some kind of Aphrodite. The question is why this story picks a romance to center its story.

Indeed, Art School Confidential hits a lot of rather standard storylines. Only its setting is unusual. It brings up different stereotypes in art school than that in high school. The roommate situation resemble a film I saw called Freshman Orientation where the lead is also seeking the attention of a beautiful girl and pretends to be gay so he can get her attention (she has to find a gay guy to make fall for her, then dump him, as part of a sorority initiation--yeah, it's not a great movie). That guy's roommate turns out to be gay. And so does the guy in Art School Confidential, though in this film, everyone else is aware he's gay sooner than he is. That's admittedly something different, though I hear it happens.

Then, there's the weirdness attached to the strangler, adding a mystery element to a story. It's worked in to say that people appreciate art, not so much for its own sake, but because art is often judged good or bad by whoever thinks it's good or bad. The film makes the cynical point that it's better to be famous in art than to produce good art, perhaps because good art is so much a matter of opinion. At least, that's what's pushed.

Whether that's true, I don't know. People who are avid fans of music will tell you that good music is inherently good, that if you listen to a lot of music, you'll know good from bad, rather than it being a subjective opinion, thus, Radiohead is a better band than, say, Spice Girls.

What made Ghost World a superior film was that it didn't make music the central focus of the story. Instead, it's more about the lead female seeing the world in a different way, meeting a guy (played by Buscemi) that she wouldn't have met in high school, a place that had little meaning for her. That film also made jabs at art, but it was only part of a bigger story. Art School Confidential delves into that world. Despite good acting and reasonably original characters, I felt the film drifted into topics to make the story more interesting.

Somehow, I feel the creators of the film knew this too, but the film isn't done with a knowing wink. And, as I said in my previous post, as much as Clowes might have despised the kind of people that inhabit art school, he seems to place it on a higher pedestal than, say, police work. Art, at least, attempts to seek something higher, even if, in the end, that something higher appears to be fame (or infamy).

Jonah would normally be something of a stereotype in a teen high school movie. He'd be the prep guy that makes fun of the geek. In this film, once you find what he's really there for, you discover that he finds something in art that he doesn't find in police work, perhaps a kind of pride. In some ways, he's the hero of the film, because he's the innocent that likes the act of creating. Everyone else appears to do it for more selfish reasons. In an industry where originality and respect count for so much, people will do anything (and this film means it) to get that clout.

It's an odd twist on two genre films. I don't know that it's better for it.

I think I'll start giving two grades for movies. How much I enjoyed it (B+) and how good I think it is (B).

Culture or Nurture

At the turn of the twentieth century, there was a women's movement to get the right to vote. This lead to the 19th amendment passed in 1920. Imagine that. Some 150 years after the formation of the country and women weren't guaranteed the right to vote. Then, in the 1970's, there was a push to pass the equal rights amendment so women would get equal pay for equal work. That one did not make it, even though there was fervor to make it happen. That was the second resurgence of women's rights and these women were called feminists.

Conservatives have done a reasonably good job at making feminism a bad word, much as they made liberalism a bad word. It was done subversively. Can you imagine, in this day and age, women trying to organize based on political ideas? The phrase "femi-nazis" arose claiming these women were men-hater, and indeed, questioning their sexuality. And what's more powerful a threat than that for the heterosexual masses?

Although there's been less organization among women these days than some thirty years ago, women have seen some advances. For example, in relationships, guys have become as self-conscious about their weight and appearance as women. Some guys even care about their clothing and appearance as much as women and have been branded as metrosexuals, straight guys who would otherwise be perceived as gay. In relationships, guys are as likely to cook as women, and women are as likely to not cook as guys. Women think of careers as a matter of course, not getting married. Nearly every couple I know have both spouses working, assuming they don't have kids. Raising kids is still predominantly a woman thing, even as some guys have helped shoulder the burden of raising kids.

Despite these advances, cultural norms are incredibly powerful. Nowhere did I get a stronger sense of this than when I went to a department store a couple years ago, and was surrounded by aisle after aisle of shoes. Women's shoes. And women's purses. Women seem to divide among those who are ambitious and may or may not care about these things, and those that like looking at catalogs or magazines to check out the latest fashion.

Even relatively bright women get caught up in this. I was hanging out with my cousin and his fiancee (at the time, his girlfriend) and we were at one of their friend's house. Now I'm maybe ten years older, but these days, older people are somehow much better able to understand the younger generation. I'm listening to music, for example, that people ten or fifteen years younger listen to, although, to be fair, there are people my age listening to these groups too. The notion that the older you get, the less satisfied you are with today's music and long for the music of youth seems to have faded, and even today's youth have resurrected careers. Johnny Cash, for instance, is as popular now as he ever was when he was alive, among a crowd that generally doesn't consider country music something they appreciate.

While we were at the house, someone picked up one of those Hollywood magazines that gossip on celebrities. This resulted in something amounting to a pig book, with the person reading it commenting on how ugly this person had become or that person had become. They had become total reductionist, judging people by the way they used to look and the way they look now.

It's partly a result of George Carlin's theory that a person's level of idiotness is proportional to their distance from you. The further away they are, the more of an idiot they are. People passionately hate Bonds or Bush in a way they don't hate their acquaintances (unless they do something specifically spiteful to them).

Similarly, you can comment on people's beauty from a distance. The further away they are, the more you can be critical of it. This is fascinating because I'd argue that women, having been raised on being told how beautiful they are from doting parents, have a weak psyche when it comes to their own self-image. Were I to tell this girl reading that she looked quite a bit more horrid than the last time I saw her, she'd probably freak out and start yelling. Of course, since I'd never seen her, this statement would be there to provoke.

But what I really want to get at, in terms of equality in men and women, has to do with everyday things. How many fathers feel that they have to teach their sons how to do things of a mechanical nature. Fix cars or anything mechanical, while telling their daughters none of these things, since this would be too mentally taxing, too butch for their minds.

Recently, our house got a bit flooded. This happens because the house lies a bit underground as many do, and water, which should normally get pumped out, can sometimes get clogged, as the water rushes over the bottoms of door, and into the basement area. It took a day of blowing fans to dry it, then a few hours of my roommates time to get the carpet cleaned so it would avoid a stink.

Now, suppose I had women living their instead. To be sure, I'm as incompetent as they come when it comes to all things mechanical, but as their is a cultural imperative for me to understand some of these things, I have to accept that I need to know a little bit of this. While I understand there are women who are more than skilled to do what my roommates did, I also understand that these numbers are small. Women are still, by and large, meant to leave such issues to men, even though the physical task should be well within the capability of women to handle.

And that leads me to the point I'd like to make, which is this. How many women tend to need to men to handle these kinds of problems? What percentage of women would do it? I could easily imagine that someone calling up our landlords, who are really quite elderly, and telling them it's their job to fix this problem (and to be fair, it sort of is, but it never came up during the cleanup that we should insist on them doing this for us).

Men, on the other hand, would generally be laughed if they said roughly the same thing. Guys are supposed to fix things themselves. Guys aren't supposed to whine and lean on others.

I've heard guys who lavish praise on the fairer sex, and that's fine. We all need to work together. But given the choice to have the burden of being a guy, most guys would take that, deciding there are some things that women should handle, and some things guys should handle.

If we're going to get to some level of equality--and there's incredible cultural pressure against this, then women have to do things that they normally say guys should handle. I believe guys are actually making better progress on this, perhaps because guys had further to go. Once upon a time, a guy wouldn't think of cooking or cleaning. That was a woman's job. Now, guys do this as frequently as women. But I can't think of a particular task, except possibly managing money, that women have now taken a greater step in handling (oh, yes, there is simply having jobs outside the home) than they once did.

Doing basic fix-up is really the last area that women need to make progress on. I think it will come, even if it is extremely slow in coming.

This, I realize, isn't a particularly PC comment to make, and would, were I dealing with a much wider reading audience, raise people's ire. I haven't even decided whether these differences have its roots in genetics, which may be.

Eh, it's good, every once in a while, to write something a little provocative.

Plans

This morning, I had every intention of watching Mission: Impossible 3 (that colon seems awkward, given the "3"). I know, I know. It stars Tom Cruise.

And Tom Cruise is nuts.

Oh, for a while, Tom Cruise was the "it" guy. Not only was he considered hot, as in "that guy is hot", but he was also a hot commodity. If he was in a film, it was likely to do a hundred million at the box office. Of course, as one gets older, the likelihood of maintaining that kind of box office draw becomes more precarious. Having longetivity like Elton John, Paul McCartney, or Madonna isn't so uncommon in music industry, but the short attention span of the movie-going public means names that were once popular like Ah-nuld and Jean Claude are no longer able to command the big bucks.

In that respect, Tom Cruise has done well for himself. He's been able to get with name directors in such films as Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone), Minority Report (Steven Spielberg), Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick), Mission: Impossible (Brian DePalma), Mission: Impossible 2 (John Woo), Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe). These are reasonably well-known directors. Sure, he's probably not planning any films with Gus Van Sant or Atom Egoyan or Sally Potter, but that's OK.

Tom Cruise really slipped off the end when he appeared on Oprah. His wild histrionics and proclamations of love for Katie Holmes was rather scary. And it says something of modern day Internet access that most people are likely to have seen this clip at places like YouTube and Google Video rather than having glued their eyes to Oprah.

I want to take a brief detour. I've blogged about the proliferation of video sites of which YouTube and Google Video are the top two sites, but many others are heading into that space. Usually, this serves as a forum for little scene video snippets. For example, in the top 100 Google videos, there is a graphic animation with a bunch of balls bouncing around a Rube Goldberg contraption, playing music. There's also this Russian dude running around a la Jackie Chan, flipping, running up walls. There's not a particular purpose to his running, but it's amazing to watch nonetheless.

Of the original content that is being put out on these sites, perhaps one of the most common is lip-synching to songs. I've seen quite a few of these. Usually, the more emotion, the better, as people really exaggerate the effect. There were, of course, tons of spoofs of Brokeback Mountain.

There have been a few Internet-only sites for content. In particular, Homestar Runner has been a success among netizens, although the titular character is far less noteworthy than Strongbad who can be said to be the star of the site.

Then, there are those who manage to put together disparate content together (some of the Brokeback Mountain spoofs do this). A particularly clever one takes two of Oprah's well known interviews, the previously mentioned Tom Cruise interview, and intercut it with her James Frey interview.

Interview is not really the right word. Oprah, you see, is perhaps the most influential person in the book industry, not so much because she writes books as recommends them. If she picks a book for her book club, it's almost a guaranteed success, as her legions of fans rush out to read it, so they can listen in on the discussion. A few months ago, the harrowing A Million Little Pieces, was on her list. This depicted the decline of the author, James Frey, into drug addiction, prison, and so forth.

It was meant to be autobiographical, but soon after being placed on her list, people began to question its veracity, accusing Frey of puffing up the details to make his situation sound more dire than it was. For a while, Oprah defended Frey, but when distortions seemed too much like lies, she brought him on the show, and mostly without his knowledge, had a scolding, accusing him of lying to her and to her fans. The confrontation was riveting, or at least, that's what one hears, as again, I didn't see the show.

This guy, whoever it is, decided to put that confrotation and splice it with Tom Cruise during his interview. Honestly, I thought Oprah had laid the smack on Tom Cruise, and hadn't realized the cleverness of putting the two interviews together.

Now, even though Cruise's antics are well-known, as is his devout following of Scientology, he still knows how to associate himself with decent directors. Mission: Impossible 3 was directed by J. J. Abrams, who created Felicity, Alias, and Lost. Especially with Alias, Abrams is familiar with the spy genre. They also convinced Philip Seymour Hoffman to play a bad guy, after his turn as Truman Capote in Capote.

The reviews have been mixed, but I thought it might be a fun outing to watch an action picture.

Trouble is, I didn't know when it was going to start. I had planned on watching it at the Rio, since they start films before noon. I thought, well, if I'm really off on my timing, I can watch another film with Laurence Fishburne, Akeelah and the Bee, which is likely not going to be great, but at least deals with a combination of topics that generally don't go together, which is African American girls and the spelling bee. The actor playing Akeelah is supposed to be quite good, i.e., quite naturalistic and believable. Laurence Fishburne goes in mentoring mode, and Angela Bassett plays Akeelah's mother. The two actors, Fishburne and Bassett, play Ike and Tina from the film What's Love Got to Do with It, which came out over 10 years ago, in 1993.

But then, I had also thought I might catch Art School Confidential. As it turns out, of the three, the last was at the most convenient time for when I arrived, i.e., within ten minutes, so that's what I ended up watching.

Right now, there isn't a whole lot I really want to watch. I'm curious to see Princess Racoon which is Seijun Suzuki's latest. Many film industries were similar to the U.S. back in the fifties, i.e., the studio system. Actors were signed with a particular studio, and the studio cranked out as many films as it could, being rather hit and miss. While that studio system has mostly disappeared from the American film industry, it exists in other countries.

Suzuki was one of these directors of one of the Japanese studio system. He tended to be something of a maverick, creating stylish films that sometimes didn't make that much sense. I've seen two of his films, and goodness if I could actually tell you what it was about. Suzuki isn't Lynch. His plots aren't completely odd. You can vaguely describe what happens, but not why.

Suzuki's production went way down for nearly twenty years. But, he's recently directing again, and the shift to color has meant bright, bright films, infused with color, and most fans would agree that that's worth watching. This film, in particular, seems to be somewhat easier to follow than typical Suzuki films.

I suppose there's Superman Returns, which is slated to come out in the summer, next week's release of The DaVinci Code, the third X-men movie.

As the summer gets closer, I'm sure there will be more movies worth watching. Until then.

Wooing Women

In Dead Poet's Society, Robin Williams asks why people write poetry. After buzzing the (incorrect) answer in this male prep school circa 1960, he reveals the secret: to woo women. Women dig guys who can write poetry.

Art School Confidential makes the same conclusion about art. Max Minghella, son of director Anthony Minghella, plays Jerome, who as a kid, was bullied for enjoying the art, and eventually joins Strathmore, where he falls for Audrey (Sophie Myles), a sometimes nude model and daughter of a resident artist.

You can tell that this is a film made by someone who is intimately familiar with art school, which is basically like high school filled with the brainy types. Art school is filled with its own stereotypes, just like high school is filled with its own stereotypes.

It would normally be seen as weakness to put a tertiary plot on top of life in art school and a budding romance, especially adding a strangler that the school seems obliviously unconcerned about. One guy wants to make an (awful) film about this, and the rest simply don't care.

I must admit, each time Max Minghella showed up, I was thinking, is that Wil Wheaton? Well, of course, I knew it wasn't, but it's probably the kind of role he wish he could have gotten before STTNG caused his career to sink. Ultra-thin whiny types don't get cast that much, I suppose.

Clowe's relation with art is very much love-hate. (Clowe is the screenplay writer). He knows art is filled with pretension, that what makes great art seems as much due to what people think is art. Everyone gushes over Jonah's rather childlike art. Jonah's the foil for Jerome. He's the good looking type that seems oddly out of place. Turns out (spoilers) he's an undercover cop. Art, for him, is a liberating experience. His wife has him p-whipped. His colleagues are made out to be Italian cop stereotypes.

While I liked the film moment to moment, that the plot seemed to reduce to boy chasing after girl, and realizing that fame would win kudos with her, so he takes the paintings of a crazy man (an almost unrecognizable Jim Broadbent doing his best American accent) who apparently is the strangler and uses it as his own to woo the girl. And, in some odd way, it works. He goes to jail and is as popular as ever, and the girl of his dream somehow knows he's gone to great lengths to woo her (even if she knows he didn't do the dastardly deed).

Is the device of a romance and a strangler enough to sustain the story of life in art school? Eh. I think it could have said something more intelligent about art, but then, maybe it's just that. Art isn't always just art. It's about impressing others.

Which isn't that much unlike romance.

The Waiting Game

Saturday Night Live has often spoofed things that most people didn't realize could be spoofed. In the 70s, John Belushi spoofed Japanese samurai films. Since the viewing audience, outside of possibly those dedicated to watching the cinema, were largely unaware of Japanese cinema, it was a peculiar thing to spoof, yet, it was done. More recently, Will Ferrell, who was, at one point, seemingly in every SNL skit in an effort of Cal Ripkinian magnitude, was spoofing James Lipton in In the Actor's Studio.

This show is moderately obscure, and yet, being the movie geek that I am, I had seen this show a few times. New episodes were moderately rare. The show has been hosted by James Lipton, who Ferrell nearly captures dead on, for as long as I remember. The forum invites an actor--I remember Dennis Hopper, and then proceeds to go through the actor's history, his roles. It seems the goal is to pick a film or a role and have Lipton utter the name, and wait for the applause.

One time the show invited many members of the Simpsons cast. Hank Azaria, who voices Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the owner of the local quickie mart, whose character himself being spoofed when someone noticed that many of 7-11's were being run by those from the subcontinent. Lipton utters the name Agador Spartacus which is a role that Azaria played to flamboyant effect in The Birdcage, and the audience starts to clap, in admiration.

And who is the audience? These are folks in film school who aspire to be actors or directors or some such. Most of them want to be actors (thus the name, Inside the Actor's Studio).

The SNL spoofing must have done something to increase the popularity of what must have been an obscure show. This coincided, I imagine, with the huge growth of cable. People who were curious who James Lipton was could simply turn over to Bravo and watch the show. Indeed, as I write, here's the link to the show. Tom Hanks is guest starring on the latest episode, for a second time.

There's a similarly obscure show for NPR types, and let's face it, were it not for the lack of news content, Inside the Actor's Studio seems very NPR-ish, a bit snooty, a bit erudite. That show is called Wait, Wait--Don't Tell Me.

Once upon a time, short of listening to late nite monologues, the steady diet of political humor came from Mark Russell, who would write songs that spoofed politics. His show would come out about once a month, and it was a one-man routine, with him standing in front of the piano, belting out tunes. I remember watching and finding it hilarious, and then, not so hilarious. I don't even know if his show is on anymore.

In the DC are, there are The Capitol Steps, who also make political spoof their part and parcel.

However, I'd say the king of these shows is Wait, Wait--Don't Tell Me hosted by Peter Sagal, who I thought was, at one point, Bill Maher. Normally, the show is hosted somewhere in Wisconsin or so (I think, though that would certainly limit the people who could be on the show, unless they work remotely).

Peter Sagal has a deadpan humor. Like many comedians, he's quick-thinking which allows him to say funny things. What helps, however, is that he has many co-hosts, who are into political humor, and they can feed off each other to funnier and funnier heights.

This weekend, and quite coincidentally, they had Tom Hanks as the special guest. Usually, with special guests, they make them take a political quiz and this week it was Tom Hanks. Now, Hanks has to be the biggest star the show has ever had. And it doesn't hurt that Hanks had a background in comedy, so even as they are making fun of stuff, he, too, can join along.

Sometime before this, they were talking about an incident that occurred to Bush. He had been asked what his greatest accomplishment as President was (one of the guys uttered "I'm President??") and he said of all the things he'd done, it was catching a 7.5 pound perch in his lake, which is what he said in an interview in the German newspaper, Bild.

Then, Sagal goes "but first, I tried diplomacy", then he thought "but who can trust the word of a mad fish", trying to invoke images of Osama while telling this joke. Then, someone, I think it was Paula Poundstone, goes "when it was caught, there was the huge sign 'Mission Accomplished'---it was hard getting the aircraft carrier in that lake", trying to juxtapose a real scene (when Bush declared "mission accomplished" in the invasion of Iraq) onto a different scene, and showing the absurdity, and thus mining humor out of this. Another guy interjects and said the sign actually read "Fishing Accomplished".

Of course, one thing that makes a show funnier is when you hear people laughing. It's easier to make people laugh, when there are plenty of folks who laugh with you. Recounting this scene is not so funny, but in the context, when everyone is cracking up is indeed funny. (I'm vaguely reminded of one of these viral videos where a dad of quintuplets is filming his babies, and is likely making goofy faces, and these babies just laugh. It's rather spooky, but shows how contagious laughing is, even at that age).

Tom Hanks was partly on the show to promote the film that's been hyped up this summer, the movie version of The DaVinci Code. Much of the commentary by Peter Sagal had to do with what a nice guy Tom Hanks is. He said they were surprised to find that Hanks is a pretty competitive guy, part of his upbringing with brothers who taunted him. They brought up his old films like "Turner and Hooch" and "Mazes and Monsters", a made for TV film that I vaguely recall watching, about some mystery associated with playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. At the time, parents were concerned their kids were getting into satanism and the occult, even though it was the precursor to modern MMORPGS.

So listen to Wait, Wait--Don't Tell Me if you're into political topical humor.