February 2011
3 posts
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“DX: What led you to come back and reconcile [with you parents]?
Dessa: You...”
– I find Dessa’s imagery more evocative when it’s tied to narrative. This interview doesn’t explain this, but it’s consistent with it: she’s unusually sharp about her past and her future.
January 2011
28 posts
2 tags
Comics I read over the break
Artemis Fowl: Read the first graphic novel, no real desire to read the next one. Asterix: These are quite a bit more clever than I remembered them. Will read at least all the ones written by Goscinny. Barry Ween: Brain lacks a Pinky.
Batman & Son/The Black Glove/R.I.P.: Morrison gets more gonzo and better as he goes along. Quality of the art is very variable.
Buffy Season 8: Through ten...
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Statements that address, directly or indirectly,...
I thought parodies of this sort of score were referencing stuff like Dragnet, but the music in Dragnet seems so concise compared to this.
I do not approve of any Oscar nominations beyond Best Actor. Technically it’s one of the best pictures of its year, but it seems unjust to reward anyone besides Brando.
Kazan’s self-pity is kind of funny.
I don’t care if he’s based on...
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Some questions that crossed my mind while watching...
Is all of Bernstein’s score going to be this ripe?
Is all the character acting going to be this ripe?
Did people really think Kazan a realist? When he shoots dialogue this way?
Whoever thought the Father Barry character was a good idea?
Is Brando’s one of the great performances in an otherwise shit movie?
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Young Left thought and Marxism: someone convince...
Marxism as a mode of analysis is vastly superior to anything offered by postmodernism… classical liberalism… or the halfway house of Keynesian/social democratic/Third Way thinking…
(http://www.kiwipolitico.com/2011/01/who-are-the-next-generation-of-nz-left-thinkers/#comment-48303)
Some of us who did our postgrad studies in Not the Humanities are suspicious of Marxism-as-an-Ism because its...
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Xgau vs "dubstep" →
I prefer “dubstep” to dubstep*, and initially don’t think Blow Your Head is as coherent as 2009’s Five Years of Hyperdub, especially its second disc. (The artists in common—Zomby and Joker—are highlights of both albums.) The Hyperdub comp has a unified aesthetic, though that avant-bad trip aesthetic is less Xgauvian than Diplo’s. But at least ...
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Is the free platformer Give Up Robot 2 good or...
Really clever level designs. Sometimes stepping away and thinking for a minute let you make the breakthrough. Sometimes you need to persevere until you can get to the point where you can think about it.
Grappling hooks.
Jet packs.
No save.
The hard levels are too hard for me. That’s OK, there was still more than enough for me to chew on over the sixty normal levels, but the hard levels...
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George R. Stewart, Earth Abides
A thought experiment, though the parameters are carefully selected (otherwise the book might be very short). Even the ideas that seem dated (bloodstock panic!) don’t feel out of place; rather, they seem the natural results of the thoughts of a particular group of people of a particular place and time. Probably the most thoughtful people-alone novel ever: the Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson...
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Everybody is a critics' poll
The game: gather 2010 album lists from 25 critics I respect; shake well.
The results:
Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Vampire Weekend, Contra
Titus Andronicus, The Monitor
Sleigh Bells, Treats (everyone put this at #1 or #2, or #9 or #10, which implies I don’t know what)
Big Boi, Sir Lucious Left Foot
The Roots, How I Got Over
Adam Lane’s Full Throttle Orchestra,...
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First listen: Bruno Mars, Doo-Wops & Hooligans
I suspect he’ll be hard to take over an album.
That Bruno is one smooth bastard.
Maxi Priest walks into a bar. Everyone tells him to walk into it harder.
Nashville would think his hooks shameless; maybe he should become a Black Eyed Pea.
At least he can sing better than Mraz.
Well this isn’t something out of The Pick-Up Artist (as far as I know).
Sorry, I was distracted by my...
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2010/11 Ashes: Runs above replacement
581 Cook 291 Trott 190 Pietersen 175 Bell 123 Prior 120 Bresnan 115 Tremlett 102 Anderson 91 Strauss 60 Finn 8 Swann -66 Broad -93 Collingwood 292 Hussey 154 Haddin 115 Watson 1 Harris -4 Khawaja -16 Siddle -26 Katich -29 Johnson -35 Bollinger -60 Beer -64 Smith -76 North -88 Hughes -91 Clarke -103 Ponting -147 Hilfenhaus -150 Doherty
No contest obv. The key stat is that England lost 56 wickets...
Once Upon a Time in the West
Terrific Morricone score—within the context of the movie—ranging from neo-Brahms to post-Hendrix. Leone trusts Morricone enough to hang plot points on the motifs, including the trite but effective big reveal. Leone said the movie was about waiting for death, and it is—but we’re the ones waiting. In this respect it’s like countless other movies—the violence...
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Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
Nerds love trying to work out systems. If there are unambiguous solutions, as in cryptography, so much the better. When problems have no right answer, however, spherical cows may result. Some of Stephenson’s cows seem pretty damn ovoid, but his hip prose and clever cross-cutting means they float by too quickly to be sure. Since this is literature and not bridge-building, this is fine.
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Brad rates all the Beatles albums because that's...
Please Please Me: A very good recording of a very good live band. “Love Me Do” might be the weakest song. A With the Beatles: The best rock and roll album up to that point. Freewheelin put Dylan way out of their league, though. A PLUS A Hard Day’s Night: The first side is as good as they got. “I Should Have Known Better” might be John’s best vocal, shout-free as...
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Thoughts while watching Dreamgirls on TV
How in the name of Holland-Dozier-Holland does the music sound so insipid? The songwriting isn’t exactly Rutles-standard, but many musicals have got by with worse. Hudson doesn’t help but isn’t the main problem. What passes for the rhythm section has to shoulder a lot of blame, but the horn charts, my word, the horn charts are deadly.
Eddie Murphy is ace though.
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H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
(Didn’t finish The Invisible Man. There are intriguingly flawed protagonists, and there are lame douchebags.) Welles and Spielberg realised this is gripping pulp: it’s more thrilling than Wells’s previous stories. You can see how and why generations of post-apocalyptics cribbed from it. The book is more evidence that Wells is better at inter-species than intra-species. Great...
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A note on Ohio State's ranking after the Sugar...
Win/loss streaks are narrative, not predictive, and when they come from a selective subset they’re worthless even as narrative. That Ohio State lost a bunch of bowls to SEC teams gives you some indication that the SEC is good, but no way to quantify how good. One of the few things we can confidently conclude from the season that the SEC was better than the Big Ten this year. Ohio State are...
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Favourite 2009 album I first heard in 2010: Darren...
(a McCall special)
Every town has its motorway, its local heroes and characters, its best band. As Miranda Lambert knows, they may never be big-pond famous, but they’re nevertheless major. Hayman’s album isn’t an argument against planning—a city can’t function without it. It’s an advisory that such plans can never account for every individual. Instead, they...
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Orange Bowl notes
Jim Harbaugh is really fucking good. His schemes let the physically talented but not exceptional Stanford O-line carve Albert Hall-sized holes for the running game. A new job is surely forthcoming.
Andrew Luck is really fucking good, but can still make gaffes under pressure.
Stanford are really fucking good. With TCU without an elite win and the Big Ten a punchline, statistically they should be...
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H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau
A book that’s crying out for pictures, though not a movie adaptation. I’m enjoying Wells’ uber-Victorian protagonists a lot. The two solutions that regularly come to Predrick’s mind are to shoot things and to off himself. The two recognisably human characters, neither of whom are titular, vary in their sympathy for the Beast Folk. The one with the more complex attitude to...
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Top 5 Nicki Minaj tracks of 2010, only one of...
“Roman’s Revenge”. See here.
“Monster” obv.: “Forget Barbie, fuck Nicki, she’s fake/She’s on a diet but my pockets eating cheesecake” (verse of the year, other verses in the song drag it down)
“Bottoms Up”: “We be doin’ donuts while we wave in the 380/We give a lot of money to the babies out in Haiti”...
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New Year's Day football notes
Rose Bowl: Dalton carved up the Wisconsin defense; Wisconsin’s O-line wrecked TCU’s D. Wisconsin probably weren’t one-dimensional enough: they could have run all day. Their special teams weren’t consistent enough to make the most of their opportunities. Those special teams did execute the coolest big game fake punt in a while, so commiserations.
(Half-watched the Fiesta...
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Album of the year: Robyn, Body Talk
English is Robyn’s second language, after music of course. No literati could intone “Don’t fucking tell me what do” without overplaying the “fucking”. Perhaps the gap also makes it easier for her to tweak American Eighties pop culture—-particularly teen-movie attitudes to love—-while keeping the forced whimsy below Charlie Kaufman levels....
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H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
Victorian gentleman travels forward 800,000 years; has creepy relationship with miniature post-human; burns other, uglier post-humans. The best thing about the story is the time traveller is not just unreliable but wrong a bunch of the time. There’s thus no need to take his silly potted Social Darwinist explanations at face value. The second-best thing: the future sucks. The third-best...