Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Grumpy and outdated comments on rock...


Palladia is showing some 2010 benefit at the Albert Hall right now. Observations:

  1. The Who: knock it off. It's sad.
  2. I don't get Them Crooked Vultures. I know many will hate me for it, but I really don't get much out of anything Josh Homme does. Dave Grohl only has so many years of being the greatest rocker on the planet; I hate to see him slumming. But he's a big boy. The guy I feel most sorry for is Alain Johannes; must suck to back up bands less interesting but more successful than your own. Matt Mahaffey of Self certainly must have felt that way touring as part of Beck's band.
  3. Noel Gallagher is making a lot of classically trained musicians play an orchestral version of Wonderwall. What an asshole.
  4. Arctic Monkeys: Yeah, I guess so. They're good, but not getting any heat off them. I like them as the best of a bad lot...
  5. The Specials are the greatest band in the world.
Earlier tonight they were showing Ziggy Stardust. I always watch it when I come across it. It's not that it's so good, it's just really amazing to watch the fans. These kids aren't going crazy because he's amazing, they're going crazy because they had never seen anything like this before. They could really be protected from knowing that Bowie was a human being. The illusion of the rock star is forever ruined, entirely to our detriment...


Tuesday, November 27, 2012

#hai-commute: In the brisk Autumn air...

#hai-commute:

In the brisk Autumn air
Would it not please the senses
To close the damn door?

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

#140RVW: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

#140RVW: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Whedon's so good it's unfair. No one better at bringing genuine moments to the absurd. A total joy.



http://seenth.at/chatter/18105

Monday, November 12, 2012

#140RVW: Father of Invention

#140RVW: Father of Invention. Never even heard of this and now know why. Good 1st act but stalls and sputters out. Give Spacey props, though



Friday, November 9, 2012

#140RVW: Skyfall

#140RVW: Skyfall. So good. Manages to be dark and gritty and fun at same time. A must-see for anyone who's ever enjoyed a Bond of any era...

http://boxd.it/17Fc

#140RVW: The Commitments

#140RVW: The Commitments. Did you know that the guitarist is played by Glen Hansard? Just found out. Only seen this amazing movie 100 times.

http://boxd.it/xvIz

Also, I must point out that although the movie was released in 1991, I was not in the movie. Or was I...




Tuesday, November 6, 2012

#140RVW: Game Change

#140RVW: Game Change. Moore, Harris & Harrelson captivating in well-told tale of bat-shit crazy people. Had nearly forgotten the weirdness.

http://seenth.at/chatter/17513

Monday, October 15, 2012

#140RVW: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

#140RVW: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. Delightful story, charmingly delivered by lovely McGregor, Blunt & Waked. KSThomas too fun for words.

http://boxd.it/2Ptc

Thursday, October 11, 2012

#140RVW: As Good As It Gets

#140RVW: As Good As It Gets. Jack's smug mugging fails to ruin James L Brooks' master class, but it's a close thing. Hwood, more Helen Hunt!

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

#140RVW: Monsters, Inc.

#140RVW: Monsters, Inc. Pixar's 4th is where they really hit their stride; has heart & humor, but 1st killer premise. Tear up EVERY time...
Stealing TrinityStealing Trinity by Ward Larsen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Impulse buy; picked up as Kindle deal of the day months ago and picked away at it a bit at a time before seriously powering through it recently. Very glad I did.

Very different than my usual read, but that's the whole point, isn't it? I can easily see why historical fiction is such a popular genre. This sort of "What if" thinking is natural to everyone, and so makes for an inexhaustible supply of scenarios.

This one is quite simple in the telling: the pursuit of a loose thread; a Nazi agent tasked with stealing the secrets of the Manhattan Project in the days after the surrender of Germany.

Great thriller; interesting story. Well written, but switches perspective/voice a little too frequently; gets a little distracting. Inclusion of female protagonist so prominently into the third act changes the tone of the piece. Turns the feel from tight spy story to Hollywood thriller. Not necessarily a bad thing, just unexpected and tonally at odds with the earlier chapters.

All in all, a very enjoyable read; looking forward to move of the author's works.

View all my reviews

Friday, October 5, 2012

#140RVW: Dr. No

#140RVW: Dr. No. 50 years later and it still plays. Imperfect but all the pieces are there to launch franchise. Underneath the Mango Tree...

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

#140RVW: The Big Lebowski

#140RVW: The Big Lebowski. Saw 3x in theaters, countless since. Still holds up as cult fun. Coens' dopey noir feels safe by their standards.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

#140RVW: Blast From The Past

#140RVW: Blast From The Past. Obvious gags barely detract from surprisingly solid com. Punches its weight.Fraser charming, Spacek steals it.

Monday, September 24, 2012

#140RVW: The Prestige

#140RVW: The Prestige. Good book, great adaptation. Nolan's finest? Yes. Best in class acting, quick pace, tight dialogue, gorgeous design.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

#140RVW - Wait 'Til Next Year: Saga of the Cubs

#140RVW: Wait 'Til Next Year: Saga of the Cubs. Standard sports doc fare kept alive by the richness of the subject. Joyless if you're a fan.

Sunday, September 16, 2012

#140RVW - Chinatown

#140RVW - Chinatown. Greatest American film not called Citizen Kane? Could be. Robert Towne script amazing. The reason we put up with Jack.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

#140RVW - Big Trouble In Little China

#140RVW - Big Trouble In Little China. Proof that Carpenter should do more comedies. Responsible for dozens of quotes. All in the reflexes..

#140RVW - Blade Runner (Final Cut)

#140RVW - Blade Runner (Final Cut). Possibly too prophetic to be truly "fun", this set the standard forever. More human than human indeed...

Thursday, September 13, 2012

#140RVW - You Only Live Twice

#140RVW - You Only Live Twice. Roald Dahl's bizarre script turns Bond Japanese for no real reason while Pleasance births decades of parodies

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

#140RVW - Two-Headed Shark Attack

#140RVW - Two-Headed Shark Attack. To be fair, I only watched last half. May have been genius up to that point and just had a rough 60 mins.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

#140RVW - Eight Men Out

#140RVW - Eight Men Out. There have been many great baseball films. This is the best, the truest & most thought-provoking. Plus,  Johnny C!

Monday, September 10, 2012

#140RVW - Crazy, Stupid, Love.

#140RVW - Crazy, Stupid, Love. Wonderful & honest film. Avoids being too proud of itself with winning performances by all. Pacing is uneven.

Sunday, September 9, 2012

#140RVW - The Black Hole

#140RVW - The Black Hole. Last saw in theater-'79. So inappropriate for kids. Disney aims for Star Wars but Kubricks 20,000 leagues to 2001.

Saturday, September 8, 2012

#140RVW - X-Men: First Class

#140RVW - X-Men: First Class. Great acting, story, execution:the complete package. Quite long but earned the screen time; practically unique

Friday, September 7, 2012

#140RVW - The Artist

#140RVW - The Artist. Better when it was called Singin' in the Rain. Weakest Best Pic ever. A cynical suck-up to H'wood hubris = sure thing.

Thursday, September 6, 2012

#140RVW - Ponyo

#140RVW - Ponyo. So many worked so hard to make beautiful film - that looks terrible. Well executed, just not a fan of style. Odd but lovely

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

#140RVW - Star Wars Ep.IV

#140RVW: Star Wars Ep4. All time favorite. Has everything; adventure, wonder, emotion, jawas. 2 hours; perfect length. Never to be equalled.

#140RVW

New feature starting today: 140 char. movie reviews. Hopefully will get me writing more regularly. Has added benefit of limiting me. #140RVW

Friday, August 24, 2012

The world is too full to ever feel empty...

from Lifehacker (http://bit.ly/Nlhynj)
Just stumbled upon an amazing comment Andrew Lewis (andlewis.com) made on a MetaFilter discussion 2 years ago:
"If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."
Brian Clark (copyblogger.com) used the quote in a G+ post about the long-delayed URL shortening of Google Plus profiles. I had never heard it before. 

This suggests two things:

  1. No matter how much I want to think I'm a hip informed geek; I'm not.
  2. There's still more information out there than you can ever process. 

A slightly better and positive way to look at it is that there's no reason to feel responsible to keep up on everything; you can't. That should feel liberating. Put more simply:
"There's more amazing in the world than you can ever experience and this is a good thing."

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

When I Am Old I Shall Wear Midnight

I Shall Wear Midnight (Discworld, #38)I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hmm...

Terry Pratchett is unquestionably my favorite author. I have read and re-read all of his Discworld novels many times; a lot of the non-DW ones, as well.

I enjoyed this book, certainly. But I've been getting progressively frustrated with one characteristic of the DW novels that is steadily increasing; the closed universe scenario.

Any franchise with a great many fans runs into the inevitable problem that many readers want more of the same; that they want their favorite characters and storylines to feature in an endless number of stories and situations. I cheerfully count myself in this group; I'm a sucker for Pratchett's Watch stories or more novels about Jedi or James Bond.

But we ultimately rely on the author (or creator of any kind, as this problem is hardly singular to literature) to create the best tales in their own judgment. Just as a good parent must restrict a child's intake of candy, a good artist really should be the one to best know when what we want is not what we need.

The Star Wars universe is the best example of this situation. A seemingly inexhaustible demand for content has led to the license holders authorizing so many works that there appears to be no area uncovered. Every line of dialogue from the films has been spun off into a tale. There is ostensibly no event that has ever been referenced that has not had at least one author come in and paint in the remaining corners.

Pratchett has a long way to go before approaching anything close to this gridlock, but the DW novels have slowly introduced more and more connections and crossover with each release. What began as a loose sort of continuity of characters and storylines has begun to resemble a tidy Doonesbury existence where no character is more than one connection away and Sam Vimes will appear around every corner.

This phenomenon is almost always welcome at first. Spotting some familiar character or common link to another story makes the reader feel like an insider and gives the novel a sense that there is a larger world; that the author has crafted a whole new existence of which we are only seeing one part. This gives the setting of the book real weight and authenticity; as if the author is merely recording their observations of a true event.

But when fill in all the empty spaces to create a linear and definable reality, it only draws attention to how artificial this "reality" is. An inverse equation results, turning a three-dimensional fantasy into a two-dimensional textbook.

Again, wanting everything mapped out and explained is the province of the fan; leaving some mystery and room to breathe is the job of the author. Put another way, we should want a published chronology and dictionary and atlas - but you don't have to give them to us.

This is the first time that I truly felt that the tail was wagging the dog. When Vimes turns up in The Truth, it was an amazing device; we were given the opportunity to see how someone presented in all other tales as a hero might be viewed by a different protagonist. When Eskarina Smith turns up 35 books after appearing in 1987's Equal Rites, it seemed less kismet than collision.

I enjoyed this final (?) Tiffany Aching book, but I won't be sad to see the end of this series. If we hover over the same ground any longer, I'm afraid that we won't be able to see the grass for the dirt, much less than the forest for the trees.

View all my reviews

Friday, May 25, 2012

"We are here and this is now"

Night Watch (Discworld, #29)Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Today is a good day to implore everyone to start reading Terry Pratchett, if you haven't yet.

I can't say this is the first book I'd recommend you start with. The interweb is littered with lists created, suggested orders to read, but I'd point you to one of two:

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch - the first one I read, back in high school, because we were all nuts over The Absolute Sandman, Vol. 1Neil Gaiman. This is my all time favorite book. Oddly took me 5 years to wonder who Gaiman's co-author was and try one of his:

Small Gods This is my first & favorite Pratchett book. It's a standalone story, making it perfect for first-timers. I didn't know that at the time. I picked it because I loved the cover! Turtles all the way...

View all my reviews

Friday, March 30, 2012

Lock the doors. And hope they don't have blasters

Since Spike has hijacked my evening by showing Star Wars again, I'll kick off a series of top ten lists by running down my favorite 10 quotes from the movie. I was trying to do this on topten.com, but the site is dreadful - that's a post for another day.

It would obviously be impossible to narrow down the 10 best, so instead I'm looking for the quotes I use most often in daily life. This will necessarily consist almost entirely of Obi-Wan quotes, as I would happily listen to Alec Guinness read the phone book.

In no real order:
  1. In my experience there's no such thing as luck.
  2. You must do what you feel is right, of course.
  3. I grow tired of asking this so it will be the last time.
  4. What good is a reward if you ain't around to use it?
  5. I don't know what all this trouble is about, but I'm sure it must be your fault.
  6. Well that's the real trick, isn't it?
  7. Who's the more foolish? The fool, or the fool who follows him?
  8. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
  9. This will be a day long remembered.
  10. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
  11. I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit.
  12. Here's where the fun begins.
  13. C'mon kid, we're not out of this yet.
  14. You must learn the ways of the force, if you're to come with me to Alderaan.
  15. That's no moon. It's a space station.
  16. But I was going into Tosche Station to pick up some power converters!
  17. Let the Wookiee win.
  18. Utini!
Eh, top 18. Not too bad...

Friday, March 23, 2012

The Bee-Loud Glade

The Bee-Loud GladeThe Bee-Loud Glade by Steve Himmer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Just finished this morning. So good!

I absolutely loved reading this; enough so that I spent a really long time with it. I only wanted to read it during quiet alone times. It somehow felt appropriate to share Finch's time in this way. I didn't want to rush through this book and I mean that in the best way. I frequently went back and re-read entire chapters; I so enjoyed getting into the descriptions and feelings of the character.

As a matter of interest, this is the first book that I have consumed in 3 different methods - paperback, kindle & audiobook.

View all my reviews

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Sláinte


With this blog, I'm going to try to limit my focus to my areas of interest: music, movies, software.

With music and movies, it'll probably just boil down to my opinion of what's great and what isn't; nothing you aren't stuck listening to if you personally know me.

With software and platforms, though, I really want to look at all this stuff that makes our lives more fun and more frustrating and point out how it could be improved by following my simple and pompous design principle:
Sláinte, which I'm appropriating to stand for "so long as it's now totally effortless". Kinda clunky, but it really should all come down to that - everything we choose to add to the increasingly jumbled flea markets that we call our lives should ultimately achieve the same goal: make my life easier.

So every product, platform, service or experience really should meet this criteria. I think that most of the time, my life and others are best served by me being understanding and flexible. But I have become gradually aware that there are times in my life where I think it's my job to NOT be understanding and that the best attitude is a dismissive "so long as it's no trouble".

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

A Strange Man Who Can't Be Taken Seriously

Everyone must have a blog, yes?

Despite all of the advice I read about the benefits of creating content and cultivating an online presence, blah, blah, blah...there's something so inherently pompous about a blog. The idea that my inner thoughts are somehow of interest to people to such a degree that I'd better record them. You really have to have a high opinion of yourself to throw your mental garbage out of the car window and believe that your web-litter is really gold.

No problem there, then...


So instead of having a professional blog to highlight my skills learned from 15 years of working at a first class property management company, I've decided to play to my strengths and just have a snarky blog where I point out how everything would be so much better if people only took the extra step of consulting me before their every move.