Keeping it quick

• I've been continuing with Okami. It's very entertaining.
• I biked out to the library on Saturday. I got a few more CDs and those books, then read Stephen King in an easy chair. I headed out just as a thunderstorm was moving in. I had a good time, a little peaceful spot.
  
• I finished Christine. I won't spoil the ending. King got back to form, it is way better than Cujo. But I have a feeling I'm about to see a ton of books (along my chronology, I've got from 1983 till 1989, Misery) that are King working out metaphors for the damage his drug abuse was doing to his family. I don't think it's exactly transparent, but it definitely colors my reading...
• I put up the books I'm reading on my whiteboard at work. I'm kind of relieved to be able to erase Christine when I get in tomorrow, because I have a coworker named Christine and it must have looked a little strange.
• Up next, still doing The Way of the World by Ron Suskind. I also have a Stross book that eluded me, The Jennifer Morgue, which is more "James Bond meets HP Lovecraft". And I picked up the start of a newish series by Lois McMaster Bujold that I just hadn't gotten around to. The series is called The Sharing Knife, and the first book is called Beguilement.
• I watched the Star Wars CG film The Clone Wars tonight. It ends a little abruptly, and for all the exposition, it is actually a little tough for me to locate it in context in the storyline. The graphics were great, the dialog was ok if a little obvious at times. It was mostly fun as a chance to get out with Chuck, who is a guy I know via Sarah's friend Laura (his wife). We should do stuff like that more often.
• I loaned Chuck a few Bujold books: Cordelia's Honor, The Warrior's Apprentice, and The Curse of Chalion. Here's to another addict! I had no clue until recently that he reads fantasy.
  
• A dude named Mark (no forwarding address) commented on the last post. I do not know if I consider his comment particularly edifying or not. And my comment back is not so great.
• My basic argument is this: we want a president who will respect the rule of law. The last eight years have taught us how valuable that would be. Whether you agree or disagree on this issue or that issue with the president, you can rest assured that the president will preserve the laws that we have by proxy all agreed upon. The president will not attempt to shirk his responsibilities under the law or rewrite them by illegal action or inaction. The president will not play cowboy politics with people's lives.
• And the president will not torture people, even our enemies. The president will not attempt to move prisoners to so-called law-free zones like Camp X-Ray or give them law-free status like "enemy combatant". I think it's plain that what our soldiers are not allowed to do by the Geneva Conventions, even in situations of extreme duress like "under enemy attack in combat zones", our spies and politicians should not be allowed to do in well-appointed offices in cold blood, before they go out for cocktails and cigars with their lobbyist buddies and friends in the press.
  
• Like I told Mark, the United States needs a moral compass. We need a sense of mission untainted by what the devilish have done in the name of America. For me, torture represents a clear line to draw, and it is just as obvious that John McCain is not willing to draw it.
  

Media redux

• I think I need to start properly italicizing my book/movie posts. Not following the convention has finally gotten to me again.
  
• Nobody told me Bridge to Terabithia was like it was. I wonder what parents took their kids on opening weekend, only to find out what it really was. For the record, I think it was pretty good, but I'm not sure yet if it was cheating. And the book is probably better...
  
• We watched Dan in Real Life once again. It slays me every time. There is an amazing economy of motion. It's hilarious. It's true. Steve Carell is the man.
• I finally finished The Pearl. I wish people would make their critical Prefaces into Postfaces so there are NO SPOILERS BEFORE THE STORY BEGINS. When you are flipping through trying to find page one, these are the worst possible things to stand in your way. They are like the soundtrack preview just before the DVD main menu. In the immortal words of Frank Costanza:

"HeyHeyHey ComeOn ComeOn! I haven't seen it yet!"

"It doesn't have anything to do with the plot."

"Still, still. I like to go in Fresh."

• So I will not ruin the story. It was exquisitely written. I don't think I've read or heard any Steinbeck since Ms Backen read us Of Mice and Men in the 8th grade. I've never read The Grapes of Wrath, is that unbelievable? Like Stephen King, I am now looking forward to reading the rest of his oeuvre, starting again with Of Mice and Men, which I bought at the library sale.
• Speaking of Mr King, the last we left him, he was writing himself into a book ostensibly about a rabid dog killing people indiscriminately, which I read as a book about his drug addiction destroying his family, and he had republished his long stories in Different Seasons, which contains not one but three stories made into movies. Now he's back on his ground in my opinion, writing in 1983 about a loser teenager named Arnie Cunningham, and his beat-up Plymouth, Christine. I had seen the trailer, so I knew this was about a car gone horribly wrong. I was expecting Cujo with a chrome bumper, I have been pleasantly surprised. And as always, when King is at his best, he isn't doing allegory. He is doing a story that is somehow weightier than its logline. Sure, it's about a demonic car (50 pages in, all signs point that way). But it is about a lot more than that.
• I snuck into the hold line and scored a copy of The Way of the World, by Ron Suskind. Ron Suskind, if you'll recall, wrote two extremely important books about the Bush Administration. I wrote about The One Percent Doctrine earlier, which was an examination of something like the inner workings of the war on terror, and The Price of Loyalty, which was about Bush's domestic policy as seen through the eyes of Paul O'Neill. The only reason I haven't read very far is that I always seem to be about to eat something when I think of reading it. It's brand new and I don't want to get soup, condiments, or salty snack remains on it. From the news reports, this is the book that contains a fairly detailed account of Tahir_Jalil_Habbush_al-Tikriti, an Iraqi intelligence official, forging a document alleging false links between al-Qaeda and Iraq at the request of the Bush Administration. Let me say that twice: in order to prop up support for the then-underway invasion of Iraq, fantasists at the White House planted a document in order to retcon the justifications for the war. And he has the transcripts to prove it. But it also seems to be about the post-9/11, post-Bush future that we will collectively create. I am looking forward to both that future and this book's treatment of it.
• Sarah and I just freed a bunny. It fell down a window well by our basement. It was scared, and would not climb up a piece of lattice we stuck down there. So, I climbed into the window well with a cardboard box, cornered the bunny and got it to go into the box, then lifted it out to safety.
• I had a total score at the library and checked out Okami, a Nintendo Wii game. (I also found a klezmer band interpreting unpublished lyrics of Woody Guthrie: Wonder Wheel, by The Klezmatics, but if I talked about every great CD I found at the library, this would turn into a great CDs from the library blog. An improvement over the current content...) It is tiding me over until Spore comes out on September 7 (at which point, all bets are off).
• But what a game. In Okami, you are Amaterasu Okami, the Shinto goddess of nature. (Shinto being a nature religion, this puts you at the top of the world.) You have been incarnated as a white wolf who, one hundred years ago, beat back the eight-headed dragon Orochi and sealed it in the Moon Cave, saving the world. Now, Orochi's prison has been unsealed, and the evil miasma of its presence wreaks devastation across the land of Nippon. Your mission is to use the power of calligraphy to restore the natural beauty of the environment.
• This is an older game, having previously come out for Playstation at least, but it really shines on the Wii. The game cries out constantly for you to manipulate it with the power of your brush. Trees bloom, lily pads sprout, boulders slice in half as a result of your drawing. You feed the animals so they love you and restore the land (and also, on a somewhat heart-tugging level, because you are Mother Nature and that's just what you do). The mythology was foreign to me, but it's note-perfect, completely consistent. The dialogue is well-translated and human.
• And the graphics are unreal. Every screen seems like a work of art. It's cel-shaded and fulsome, filled with falling cherry blossoms and stylized splashes. It takes up Japanese iconography, where a few lines represent a mountain, or the blazing sun is the familiar circle surrounded by stripes. The ink, due to the Wii remote's sensitivity to distance, feels like it's dripping on the screen. There are countless little details in the characterization, the landscape... even the menus are full of little touches.
• If anybody asks you if video games are art, tell them to try Okami. It's not just great fun (if a little linear, but like you care, what a story; be prepared for it to be extremely Japanese though), it's over-the-top beautiful. The most interesting thing about its beauty, though, is that so much of it is derived from the interactivity. This wouldn't be nearly as good as a story about Okami, or a movie. The whole point of the thing is that you are the one reshaping and renewing the world, everything responds to you.
• Work has been going pretty well. We are finally coming to the end of our cycle. We're actually in pretty good shape on my portion of the project (I was in charge of a decent-sized piece that I and approximately one and a half people have been working on), so I'm starting to look past what we've got and think about what's next. The delivery ate up a lot of my summer break, so I'm hoping the fall will be relaxing and rewarding for the family.
• My son is back in preschool, so Sarah has more time on her own. I think it is making her think useful, deep thoughts about the future. Whenever she is free to be herself, even for a few hours a day, these ideas bubble up. I am excited for what the future holds as well...
• PS, the bullet points seem to work, so I might stick to them for a while. They help me pretend I am just jotting things down, not inserting 500-word video game reviews into the middle of What I Did Last Week.
• PPS The coolest Olympic thing I have seen so far is the badminton final. That guy was totally amazing.
  

Adventures in media

I got my hands on a recording of Glenn Gould doing The Goldberg Variations. I love Bach's music, but I have not (yet) been trained to appreciate the theoretical delights of baroque music. I may get around to it. About the middle of the CD (track 16), there was one that was fast and surprising and crazy. It blew my mind. Normally I listen to albums all the way through, but that one earned a previous track.

I don't normally listen to rap, but I make a few exceptions, and now one of them is the Jurassic 5. I listened to the album FeedBack today. It was very entertaining. If I've interpreted the music and the liner notes correctly, it's a mostly Muslim hip-hop group that spends a good deal of time being upbeat and simultaneously deconstructing gangsta. They keep the swearing to a minimum for the most part, and they have an amazing sound and mind-expanding lyrics.

Unfortunately, they are breaking up (or already have). I first heard of them when another one of those crazy rap-salsa-activist bands that I love (Ozomatli) had Chali2na and Cut Chemist as guests on their self-titled album, way back in my undergraduate days. Once again, I am the last person to the party.

I cackled and howled at a movie tonight for the first time in a while. It was Mr. Bean's Holiday. Go see (rent) this movie immediately. Unlike the voyage to America ten years ago, which was a heart-warming family comedy, this was classic Mr. Bean in France, and it was dazzling. The plot makes as much sense as a Seinfeld episode. Mr. Bean wins a vacation in Cannes, and takes the long way around. I don't think I had a single dull moment. And if you know anything about France, it's that much more perfect. And I should mention that Willem Dafoe has a perfect, hilarious part as a self-important emo director with a film premiering at Cannes.

Lawrence of Arabia

I was a little under the weather today, so I devoted four hours or so to David Lean's epic, Lawrence of Arabia. It was on TCM, so thankfully proceeded without commercials.

I hadn't seen it for about ten years, since Mr. Lien put it on in history class in high school. I was curious about which parts I remembered and which I didn't.

One thing that really stuck out to me this time was Lawrence's tightrope walk between a sense of purpose and mission for the Arab people and messianic delusions of grandeur. He had the same lessons over and over again about power and mercy, and continued to swing the pendulum back and forth. He resigns his commission, then is flattered into returning to war. He is depressed and shaken by killing, then slaughtering the infidel with fervor. For all his hardness and sense of destiny, he ends the movie a very broken person.

I think that a thing I tend to do when I'm watching movies is to appropriate the identity of the main character. I like good guys and bad guys like anyone else, but it goes deeper than that. I tend to see the action from their point of view. Thus, my high school view of the movie saw Lawrence as a somewhat one-dimensional hero figure, doing what it takes to carry the banner of civilization. This time around, I felt the irony and had much more mixed feelings about Lawrence.

Does Lawrence go native, or is he a colonialist in tribal clothing? I definitely think he lost the plot along the way. His final great act was the slaughter of defenseless people. His friend, Sherif Ali, throws the words Lawrence said the first time they met, about the barbarity of the Arab people, back in his face.

So has Lawrence finally been mastered by the desert he loved, assimilating, or is he finally showing his true foreignness? Certainly Lawrence's psychotic response can't be separated from his torture at the hands of the Turks. The epilogue with Prince Faisal and General Allenby suggests that he was being manipulated into his crusade, along with the sidewise remarks about what happened to Lawrence when he met the English general.

The score is epic and the theme is classic, but one thing I noticed was that the levels went from soft to loud pretty quickly. A modern movie might take more care to balance things toward the middle. Also, that theme is used over and over again, inevitably.

The cast is incredible. I was not aware that Obi-Wan Kenobi was in this movie, or Mr. "Round up the usual suspects" Claude Rains. Jose Ferrer, Anthony Quinn, Omar Sharif, and on and on. And of course, Peter O'Toole was awesome. One striking absence is any significant female role.

Finally, during the intermission, the word "entr'acte", which is French for "intermission", was spelled "entre'e acte". This is probably the stupidest misspelling of French I have ever seen.

When you have a good solid block of time, hie thee to the video store and check it out. Incidentally, our nearby video store is closing. I advise that you go see a real live video store before they all become Blockbuster, and then they all disappear.

If you're like me

You got temporarily distracted from Lord of the Flies by Journey Through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics. Along the way, you learned about transfinite numbers and how they used to have math-offs in the Italian Renaissance. You also picked up a new book by one of your favorite authors: Spook Country, by William Gibson. As the jacket says,

Spook: Specter, ghost, revenant. Slang for "intelligence agent."

Country: In the mind or in reality. The World. The United States of America, New Improved Edition. What lies before you. What lies behind.

Spook Country: The place where we all have landed, few by choice. The place where we are learning to live.

Last, but certainly not least, a desire to deepen your professional awareness led you to begin a thousand page journey through a computer science textbook: Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools.

You have over twenty things checked out of the library. Five of them are the first season of Stargate SG-1, which you were surprised to learn is a true sequel to the movie. You have about fifteen CDs checked out, and today you heard Born To Run for the first time. You also listened to more Talking Heads songs than ever, a new Ozomatli album, and the latest Decemberists.

You took your first turkey out of the freezer on Sunday night and stuck it in a mixing bowl to thaw. Tomorrow, you will be dunking it in a five-gallon bucket filled with saltwater. Thursday, you will have your first Thanksgiving away from your parents and your in-laws.

Friday, you plan to laugh at insane shopping from the comfort of your living room, enjoying hot cider.

You've been playing the drums with your son lately. He likes rocking out on the xylophone. You have been listening to the drummer from Radiohead a lot. You also have been trying out guitar effects on the computer. You even played for half an hour straight at the guitar store, on your knees, with headphones with a short cord, just messing with one low-end effects pedal.

You brought homemade banana bread with chocolate chips inside to a Thanksgiving potluck at work, and every single person who tried it essentially asked you, "Chocolate in banana bread? Can you do that?" in between bites.

Yes. Yes, you can do that.

If you're like me.

iPod madness

I finally figured out how to get my music collection onto my brand old iPod. It was a gift from my father in law quite a while ago. It had all his old music, and I didn't have cords to get my music from the PC onto the iPod, and I didn't have the wherewithal to laboriously burn several gigabytes of music onto several more 800 MB CDs, so it became this amazing jukebox that I took, especially on flights and mowing the lawn.

It turns out all we had to do was set up a network between the Mac and the PC, start a new Mac account for my music, share a few folders, then copy several gigabytes over the air. It still takes a while, but you don't have to keep switching out physical media, so you can get up and go to Home Depot to buy your first rake while Beck, Radiohead, the Beatles, Nickel Creek, and a motley crew of others worm their electronic ways into your heart.

I am quite excited. For the first time, I will have better music on the iPod than I can find on the internet, and thus, a reason to take the iPod in to work.

I also watched Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior. I was going to, well, not pan it, but at least compare it to its superior predecessors, Drunken Master 2 and Fist of Legend until I read on the internet, just now, that there were no wires, CGI or camera tricks in this movie. Wow. It's just the brutal ballet, if the ballerinas all ganged up on the one little ballerina... and then the crunching started. And I thought all the elbow and knee strikes were getting a little repetitive. I actually might have to watch this thing again. Its plot is virtually nonexistent, but this is one of those movies where it would just get in the way.

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So what with one thing and another we've been pretty busy. So here is a capsule of the last two weeks:

Cujo sucks.

Ocean's Twelve isn't nearly as bad (so far) as I had previously been led to believe. I'm finishing it tonight.

Gaudy Night and Strong Poison do not, thanks Anon for encouraging me to pick them up again.

Charmed Life is going well.

The Painted Veil, the movie version of the book by W. Somerset Maugham with Ed Norton and Naomi Watts, was really pretty good. For some reason these "British people in the uncouth wilderness of the foreign devil" stories have very similar feels to me. But it was also a well-done story of alienation, love, and forgiveness, a Graham Greene kind of thing.

A Hard Day's Night (original, that is not American) has about 7 good songs on it. No surprise, they're almost all the ones that made the actual movie, except for "Any Time At All", which I think should have been an A side, and the execrable "I'm Happy Just To Dance with You", which is the most phoned-in Beatles song I have ever heard. It's an F side.

In the where have you been all my life department, Radiohead's masterpiece OK Computer. The album is 10 years old now, and people have been telling me for ages that I would love these guys. Ummm, instead of telling me, you could have perhaps strapped me to a chair and slapped on some headphones. That would have spared me a lot of regrets right now. I've been listening to this thing for a week straight, about 3 hours a day. Maybe you remember the first week you heard this album. I had heard tracks from it, of course, without knowing the whole story: "Lucky", "Exit Music (For a Film)", "Karma Police"... I had even played "Karma Police" on the bass once for a party (without getting the key change on the bridge quite right, in hindsight). If you haven't heard it at least once, and you can stand modern/indie rock in the slightest, you owe it to yourself to try it at least once.

Oh, and I finished a project at work and I've been staying too late this week. And Sarah's Uncle Tim stopped by our house on a cross-country drive. And I'm going to be in Seattle for a week in October (13-21), prior to my sister Kefi's wedding. Congratulations, Kefi! And if anyone is around, we'll make time to see you.

Be well; the magnum opus on heresy is still being written.

Heroes Season 1 is over

I'm going to call it PG-13 for those who care. Mature themes, violence including murder, sometimes disturbing images. And then there's all the good stuff. About fate, destiny, heroism, racism, identity, it is the most perfect 10 on network TV right now (I haven't seen Lost or spent the time on 24, but whatever). Heroes. You can watch every episode online (interlaced with commercials). Or you can wait for the DVDs. I've said it before, but run, don't walk. Make haste to see them.

In other awesome TV show news, I picked up my first issue of Buffy Season 8 (The Comic Book), and it was totally rad.

Furthermore, I saw two good episodes of The Simpsons on Sunday. It's hard to believe they've still got it.

Also, two good episodes of Futurama, which I sadly neglected while it was on air. The one with a universe in a box was hilarious. I howled with laughter.

Sarah and I saw Shrek 3 last night. It's hard to believe any movie ending in a 3 can be good, but they did it well, if a bit predictably. It had its moments. Also, a nice date, which Sarah and I haven't had for a while.

Why am I talking about nothing but TV? It's because I'm on vacation. While I wait on the intentions of Lockheed Martin (really, it's simple: tell me how to get to Colorado and start to work), I've been TVing it up and reading it up.

I recently finished Graham Greene's ultra-personal autobiography, A Sort of Life. Some of the reviewers called it, basically, bloodless. I didn't find it ironic, exactly. Obviously Greene was not able to write as if he had not lived for six decades, and be the awkward teenager he was, but he did try to get at the kinds of things that he had felt and struggled through. In a way, I felt like he was almost writing in what's called the objective voice, or the camera view. In that voice, you don't judge, you don't feel your material... you look, and pass, look and pass. The mask of neutrality said volumes to me, and I found many threads common to my own life. Perhaps you wouldn't find similar points of contact.

Up next, a book that has been sitting on my shelf for several years: Sons and Lovers, by DH Lawrence. It's a weird reason to read a book, but I heard about a friend doing a paper on it once. I tried to get into it a while back, so I hope that my recent jaunt through the British consciousness has prepared me mentally.

I recently received a graduation book, the daunting biography Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson. I am fascinated by genius scientists and their biographies, like Tesla and Feynman, so I am looking forward to this one.

Also in the backpack, The Once and Future King, which another friend of mine was reading in college, and which I picked up at the USU book sale for $.50, The Name of the Rose, another incredible USU book sale find (in hardback), The Stand, a fantasy by Guy Gavriel Kay, and, as filler, the complete Sherlock Holmes.

My summer reading list is filling up, but if you have a good one for me to read, let me know.

We miss you friends in Logan already...

More reviews

While I try to take violence to the next level, a few good books and movies.

I recently finished EM Forster's classic lecture series Aspects of the Novel. While the first sections on plot and character are quite interesting, apart from the references to books solidly in the British tradition that I haven't read, like Tom Jones and Portrait of a Lady, the later sections suffer from some concerns peculiar to his era. The section on fantasy, in particular, was written to explain to people that they could suspend their disbelief and let fantastic things become a part of their stories. Our hindsight, with the benefit of Tolkien and all his progeny, need not be told. The comparison of (I think it was George Eliot) with Dostoyevsky was instructive, though. Both depict scenes of conversion, but Eliot goes with a voice of preaching, while Dostoyevsky takes the strange, sacred voice of the prophet (in a scene from The Brothers Karamazov). What he was trying to get at was that Dostoyevsky was writing deeper than Eliot.

I've come across the same theme in a great book by the lady who wrote A Wrinkle in Time. It's called Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeleine L'Engle. I would buy this book. It is a third, say, a reflection on art, a third theological, and a third devotional. I could read books like this all day and all night. In some ways it reminds me of The Mind of the Maker, by Dorothy L. Sayers, but it's more personal and magical. I haven't finished it yet.

I also finished a great memoir. I don't read too many of these, but a friend recommended it way back when. It's called Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life, by Lauren Winner. It's the odd but true story of a girl born to interfaith parents, who first decided to become an Orthodox Jew, then slowly came around to Christianity. She never writes exactly why she became a Christian; there is no conversion moment. Instead, there is a loving description of both her Judaism and her Christianity, of life lived through those prisms and what faith does in an ordinary life.

I saw the new James Bond movie the other day. It was action violence as you might expect, but it had heart and character too. It was a very interesting, throwback James Bond, in the Sean Connery mold, certainly better than the Pierce Brosnan fare we've had to swallow for the past few years, but nothing so spectacular as I had been led to believe. Solid, meaty, but not world-beating.

If I object to anything, it's the depiction of poker. Yes, big pots are won and lost by a great hand losing to a phenomenal hand, but it's more often like two pair losing to three of a kind, or just maybe a full house losing to a higher full house. But even more often, tournaments end with the escalation of the blinds, as more and more players are forced to protect their stacks by moving all-in with subpar hands.

For that reason, I found the scene where a four-of-a-kind loses to the straight flush to be a pretty hack move. I just read a great Aristotle line about the audience in Walking on Water (paraphrase): People will believe the probable impossible more than the possible improbable. In other words, presentation is everything; dragons can be more convincing than this kind of poker hand. Truth may be stranger than fiction; there is a story in The Biggest Game in Town where Johnny Moss recounts a hand where he won a boatload of money. His opponent turned over the 6 of spades with the 7 through 10 on the board for the straight flush, but Johnny had the jack of spades, the higher straight flush. The fact that it really happens is no excuse for putting it into a story, though.

I also saw The Prestige the other day. It's one of the best movies I've seen in the past year, perfect at what it does. It's the story of a sometimes nasty rivalry between two magicians at the turn of the century. Magician A is suave, debonair, with a flair for the dramatic. Magician B is more rough and homely, but he does a fantastic trick that Magician A can't match. Magician A becomes obsessed with beating Magician A, learning his secret, and topping his trick. The characters are pretty cruel to one another. When they get violent, it's realistic and raw. The cruelty is probably worse than the violence itself. But the plot is so good, and every note is so right, it's yet another strong recommendation for an adult-content, violent movie.

Violence

After my last post, I got a comment from Vince, a friend from church, who writes, among other things,

A couple of very mature Christians that I respect were discussing and laughing about "Kill Bill". With some trepidation I decided to see what they were raving about. I was appalled and never got beyond the kitchen scene. The beauty of humans should remain so.

Certainly there is a place for graphic violence, but only in the despising of graphic violence ... "Schindler's List" for instance.

Just a bit of elderly exhortation.

Your character and kindness seem to bear the violence well, but only in spite of these gruesome selections.

Where to start? Maybe with kung fu movies. As long-time observers of my life will know, I have been a Jackie Chan fan since I first saw Rumble in the Bronx at Mike Tosch's house way back when. I find the cartoony violence of Who Am I? and Drunken Master II (in the US, dubbed and retitled Legend of Drunken Master) delightful, more people dancing and pretending to hit each other than actually violent. (Chan's taken a real downturn of late in the very soggy Around the World in Eighty Days and The Tuxedo, but I'm sure he'll be on top again any month now.)

Some of his grittier outings like Police Story appeal to me less, and I prefer to go without the gory stuff you could see in a lot of Jet Li's wire-fu and gangster movies. And then there is the really beautiful stuff in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero. We could go on, but I think these three broad categories of kung-fu violence are a good place to start: cartoony up to delightful, realistic up to gory, and fantastic up to beautiful.

The first and third cases are not exactly graphic. Maybe they desensitize people to violence in the long run, slowly wearing down one's defenses, like gateway drugs. Start with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (or GI Joe, or The Lone Ranger?), end with Kill Bill. I won't focus on this slippery slope. Some people really do stop at social drinking and other people stop at Jackie Chan. I'll also include Buffy and Angel somewhere on the slippery slope, because violence is certainly a theme, but it's just not that realistic. Or, you might say, the violence is less realistic than the characters and their stories and relationships.

I am more inclined to think of realistic, gory violence like one might see in a horror film, an action movie, a crime drama, a war movie, a historical or similar depictions as the broad class of graphic violence that Vince is advising against. So let's try to make a case against gratuitous graphic violence. One film that pops to mind is Bad Taste, a zombie movie featuring a dude with his braincase falling open, said brains being munched on by scavenger birds and zombies, ripping apart said zombies with a chainsaw. Ad nauseam. (Incidentally, the director/actor of this movie is Peter Jackson, the same guy who made that Lord of the Rings trilogy and got that Oscar sweep. True story.) And the argument would go, whatever redeeming content this movie has, the violence is essentially at right angles to it, and overwhelms, say, the story, script, direction, cinematography, costuming, and such.

By changing the example movie and exchanging the word "sex" for "violence", we will essentially arrive at the Supreme Court's argument about distinguishing obscenity from art, or more specifically, pornography from erotica. And the infamous line from that argument is "I'll know it when I see it", which is really no argument at all. The reason they had to say that was the definition of obscenity that they used: "prurient, patently offensive expression, lacking serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value." The Supreme Court couldn't define most of those words, so they had to substitute human instincts, or community standards, or an appeal to obviousness to make these judgments. If our goal were to judge violence in movies by this legal standard, we would have similar problems.

Here's that list of genres again: horror, action, crime, war, historical/realistic. Here is an example each from these genres, so you know what I'm thinking of as I write: Nightmare on Elm Street, True Lies, Law and Order (a TV show, not a movie), Saving Private Ryan, Black Robe. Looking at it again, I suppose this is a rough order of how high the bar should be to consider violence as having serious artistic or literary value. The case is hardest to make for horror, with its splatter and torment of innocents, playing the notes of fear and disgust in relentless, dissonant jangles. Action movies at least excuse their killings by portraying the victims as evil and concentrating on killing as heroics. Which of these two last is more pernicious is an exercise for the viewer. Crime dramas, though, have the potential to tell us about human psychology and engage our minds in a mystery. Depending on how dark the psychology, we may encounter more graphic violence. In war movies, violence is still more germane to the action. Historical or realistic portrayals of human behavior, and the capacity of humans to do violence to one another, are extremely important too, even as Vince mentioned.

But if that's so, where do you draw the line on violence? Can extremely graphic violence be excused by extremely artistic content? Or by extremely probing, meaningful human stories? Or by meditating on violence? Vince says no to the first. However amazing Kill Bill is as film-making art (I haven't seen it), that doesn't excuse the wanton, graphic violence, which Tarentino could have omitted, if he wanted to, just by making a different sort of movie. When violence is entwined inextricably with the story, though, or when violence is the story, what then?

For instance, was the violence in The Passion of the Christ gratuitous? I read some reviews saying it was overdone. I could see that. I cringed as I watched it, I felt numbed by it all. I found myself translating Latin numbers as the soldiers counted out the strokes of Jesus' flogging. (As an aside, I also do prime factorizations of the timestamp on the DVD player when I find myself looking away from a movie.)

On the other hand, although some of the incidents in the movie came from extra-biblical sources (such as the face of the Messiah on St. Veronica's handkerchief, or the sopping up of the blood by Mary and the other women), most if not all of the violence is right out of the Gospel narratives, and it's probably never been as completely depicted on film as it was there. Was there value in seeing that, value that I couldn't have gained by just watching the Jesus film (mostly Luke's gospel; this is the one that has been translated into almost a thousand languages) and letting my imagination do the work?

Just before Vince wrote, by chance, I saw another movie that put these issues in perspective for me. When I told Sarah about it, I said, "Well, it was really violent, but..." It's called Children of Men, and it just came out on DVD. It's the year 2027, and women mysteriously ceased to have children eighteen years previously, and the youngest people are now 18. So long without a cure for infertility, without children, and the world has descended into madness, despair, loss. It is a harsh, violent world. England is cracking down on illegal immigrants, sending them to camps. Revolutionaries rebel against the totalitarian government by blowing things up. A man makes his way through this world and kills when he thinks he must. The violence is very realistic, although it's more realistic as in war than as in gruesome gory details.

The movie is amazing. I can't help but highly recommend it. It's deep, it's poignant, it made me cry huge sobs near the end. It has a lot to say about children, and violence, and hope, and it's very well made. Of course, if you are deeply offended by realistic violent content, you'll have to steer clear. And that's the crux of the thing right there: how much violence are you willing to watch in the pursuit of these human moments, or otherwise redeeming content?

When I talked about obscenity, I mentioned that we'd run into major quandaries trying to judge the artistic value of movies to the precision of a legal standard. In America, we tend to rate more heavily against sexual content than violent content, or at least the ratings board of the Motion Picture Association of America does for us, but this is all very ad hoc and informal.

Suppose we want a higher standard than just legalities and broad cultural opinions. How does being a Christian play into these issues of adult content? I am no expert, so what follows is all me. The verse that comes to mind is Paul's "whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things." There's an obvious interpretation of this verse (no doubt similar verses could be discovered) that suggest that Christians are to confine themselves to milquetoast art. All I can say about that particular interpretation is that I've tested it with my own life and found it wanting.

Vince's comment hints at the idea that there is such great non-violent art out there that I could spend a lifetime on the excellent and praiseworthy, without getting around to the violent and disgusting. And the work he points to, while excellent, is not just naive about human behavior. Silence, one of my favorite books, depicts the torture and martyrdom of Christians in feudal Japan, and tells the story of a priest's loss of faith and renunciation of Christ. The first time I read this book, it was like a bombshell going off in my newly-minted fundamentalism. I was drawn afterward, like the author, Shusaku Endo, to the worrisome cases, to depictions of sinners more than saints. Lurking underneath this is probably a connection to my relative tolerance of violence and inhumanity in literature and on the screen.

I find that it's hard to compromise on excellence in art, to censor that great emotional connection I make as a reader and viewer with the artist who created the work. Sometimes they will show me, horrified, things I might prefer not to see, but things they think are important for me to see. Shusaku Endo certainly goes that route in one of my other favorites, Scandal, probably the most affecting portrayal of evil I have ever read. I would certainly call it excellent and praiseworthy, but co-mingled with the story's beauty is a very real heart of darkness. Did God want me to go there? I say yes.

None of that is to say that I'm ignoring Vince's lists of great works (on the books, I actually have a generous head start). I want to see great stuff that's not also rated R. And I do avoid gratuitous violence on principle, as an offense to human dignity. But there's a big grey area in between that I haven't sussed out yet.

I guess I'll mention, last, that I too am a non-violent sort of person and I haven't had any need to create graphic violence in my little world. I imagine myself as a conscientious objector and hope I'd be brave enough to say no in the event that someone asked me to pick up a gun for my country, or design a better nuclear bomb.

Happy 10th

Buffy the Vampire Slayer first aired ten years ago today. Sarah and I bought seasons 2 and 3 of Angel (the interleaved spin-off) and we've been chain-smoking them for the past few weeks. These are what great television can be: deep, witty, exciting, moving, and character arcs fifty episodes long.

I read the V for Vendetta comics in one sitting yesterday. Excellent. They were different from the movie in some ways, of course, but I think Alan Moore's beef with the remake was really overblown. A lot of the movie was word for word, shot for panel. If anything, some of the cruft was edited out for the movie, like the computer and the LSD trip. The strongest part of the comic, about the twin, entwined nature of democracy and destruction, came through very strongly in the movie too. I was also surprised to find that all of the great stuff with Stephen Fry was only hinted at in the comics, but it was fleshed out really well in the movie.

Inspired by my encounter with Positively Fifth Street, I finished the original great poker memoir, The Biggest Game in Town, by A. Alvarez, a writer for the New Yorker. He wrote this in 1982, chronicling Stu Ungar's second straight win of the World Series of Poker main event.

Like Positively Fifth Street, it went beyond poker into accounts of Las Vegas and the gambling life, and it managed to capture something that I think went missing from the later book. To be a gambler, you have to stop caring about being broke. Being broke happens. You have to risk it all and lose it all to win it all. This means the gambler requires a remarkable resiliency and freedom to fail, and it's one of the many reasons I can't do this for a living. On the other hand, though, David Sklansky, game theorist and gambler extraordinaire, has never been broke...

Set forward your clocks.

Lost time

I looked up and said to myself, hmmm, I haven't posted for a week. That was a moment ago. Then I looked up and said, wow, what happened to that other week.

We have been a little exhausted. I had a throat thing and lost my voice for a little while. I've needed cough drops to fall asleep, and I've woken up in the middle of the night coughing too.

I got a haircut and gave myself my first structured facial hair (by structured, I mean hair that I have left on my face deliberately rather than negligently). It's a goatee. I'm sure it will show up on Sarah's blog sooner or later. I like it ok, but some of the hair seems to be attacking my upper lip. As so much else about my appearance, I'll probably get back to ignoring it soon. We are considering a nice clipper/trimmer so that I can ignore it slightly less before interview time.

We have lacked sleep, we have lacked time. My father gave up sugar for two weeks worth of Lent (that is all refined sugar, even as an ingredient in something) on the condition that his children would give up sugar with him. It has been wild, but I've made it through the first six days all right. Naturally, I bought two ice cream just before I heard about the challenge, so they have been sitting, waiting, whispering. Peanut Butter Cup. Peach.

I've been reading this Gene Wolfe epic for a long time, but it's almost done.

I am consulting at WestWords to train someone to take over one of my old jobs. A year later, and my replacement left without really training his replacement. The orderly transition of power is important. Fortunately, when I arrived at the office, I found all the documents I wrote to train the last guy still intact on the servers, so the orderly transition was from myself (then) to my future (present) self.

I am finishing experiments for my thesis. I should defend on time.

My dad cheerfully offered to move us to Seattle if I don't have a job by graduation time. This actually relaxes me. My parents redid the basement when it flooded, and it's turned into a massive, much-needed renovation. There will be plenty of space down there. I can't wait to see it, and, if necessary, live in it.

Alex is still not talking much, but he is making letter sounds and experimenting with vowels. Ooo eee, he might say. Ahhh yuh. One doctor says that intense daily speech therapy would be helpful, but we are having trouble signing him up for the next couple of months before everything is up in the air.

We got the second season of Angel on DVD. It is way better than Season 1 so far. It's a sort of strange situation because Sarah and I have watched all of Buffy, but the Angel seasons happened concurrently: Buffy 4-7 happened at the same time as Angel 1-4 and sometimes the storylines crossed each other. On a typical week, back then, you would see Buffy Season 5 episode 6 back-to-back on TV with Angel Season 2 episode 6. It would take a lot of energy to simulate this experience, swapping out the discs one episode at a time, watching about 50 episodes to get to the ends of the two simultaneous seasons. We might get to it one of these years.

We also saw Man of the Year, the Robin Williams film about a sassy Jon Stewart type who runs an upstart independent campaign for President, only to be elected by a voting machine company without a paper trail. It was a little preachy, rejecting the partisanship of Washington in favor of government that actually works, I think. The last time we had a government that worked, of course, it was divided government by a man who governed from the center. Then he got impeached on partisan lines and acquitted on partisan lines.

This is not a movie for our time. This partisanship in Washington did not spring fully formed from the inscrutable mind of Zeus. It was pushed and promoted by our radical president and his minions, by their propaganda machine and the leadership of the Republican party. They did it because they sensed an opportunity to destroy bipartisan comity and still hold onto the reins of power. They did it for six long years. They're still doing it even though we have divided government again. They've forgotten how to do anything else.

In the current political climate, "bipartisanship" is a code word that means "everybody get together right now... and support the President's open-ended occupation of Iraq." This is obvious if you read editorials by Joe Lieberman, or listen to interviews of Dick Cheney, or watch the President say "support the troops" dully and repeatedly.

On this definition, it is time now for partisanship. It's not just a coincidence that the public elected Democrats in the fall and that the vast majority of the public favors retreat from Iraq. The Republican party favors staying in Iraq, the Democratic party favors leaving Iraq, and it's that simple. For evidence, see, among other things, this handy table of the declared 2008 presidential candidates' positions on Iraq. All 8 of the Democrats are opposed to President Bush's plan to escalate the Iraq occupation by sending tens of thousands of troops. 7 of the 9 Republicans are in favor of the increase. 6 of the 8 Democrats favor explicit deadlines to end the Iraq occupation. 1 of the 9 Republicans favors an explicit deadline.

If you oppose the senseless waste of life that the Iraq occupation has deteriorated into and favor a foreseeable end to it, bipartisanship is not actually an option. The debate for you begins and ends under the big tent of the Democrats.

Funner things

About 10 years ago, Mr. Willems showed us all something very funny. IB Theory of Knowledge kids, you know what I'm talking about. Or you will. I've been looking for this clip for quite a while, which was difficult until I finally, today, remembered part of the name.

All the Great Operas in Ten Minutes

Coincidentally, one of the comments on Youtube says, "I've been looking for this video for over 10 years! Thanks for putting this out there!!"

Another one of the comments says, "Hey! That's my film! I made the film when I was in film school way back in '92... I'm glad people are still enjoying it! I have DVD copies of this film for sale, if anyone is interested."

In between the saga of my friends and a paper submission deadline, I have been trying to keep a cool head. So, naturally, I read The Shining. It's the story of a man who is stressed out and tired and shut up with his family, snowbound for the winter, in a remote mountain hotel. I never saw the movie, but I saw the Simpsons parody, so I know the guy goes crazy and tries to kill his family. It turns out that the book feels very different from the 8-minute Simpsons rendition. I thought it was a real winner, again, just a really well-executed and deeply felt Stephen King book. Up next, The Stand, Cujo, and Christine. He wrote in On Writing that he was totally high when he wrote Cujo, so I'm not expecting monumental things from it, but The Stand is supposed to be one of his best.

[Stephen King digression: I am going more or less chronologically; I started with The Eyes of the Dragon, then On Writing and The Dead Zone. After that, Misery, I think, then I went back to the beginning, starting with Carrie.]

I also read How Much for Just the Planet? by John M. (Mike) Ford, an amazing writer who passed away last autumn. It is a Star Trek (Original Series) tie-in novel. It is the only Star Trek musical. I laughed and laughed.

I'm almost done with The Knight (the first part of a two-parter) by Gene Wolfe. I was just about done with high fantasy several years ago, when The Wheel of Time, a colossal 12-book epic sort of ran aground as its author, James Rigney (aka Robert Jordan) developed a rare disease and started to fight for his life. It wasn't all bad, but I had the feeling like it was pulling out all the stops and just not making it for me. Except for Bujold, who has five or so fantasies out now, I stayed away.

Gene Wolfe really changed that for me. It is a stupendous story about a boy who slips sort of sideways into another world, falls for a faerie queen, and longs to be a great knight to deserve her love. I really can't do it justice. This is the most perfect straight fantasy novel I have read in a long time. It looks like I'll have to look up the rest of his oeuvre, which is extensive. (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is another great one, but it's really an alternate-history fantasy set during the Napoleonic Wars.)

Reviews

I finished a couple of great sf books recently.

One was Ursula K. Le Guin's first Hugo/Nebula sweep, The Left Hand of Darkness, a tale of a diplomat's visit to a planet where sexual differentiation does not exist; everyone is the same gender and has a monthly "in heat" cycle; childbearing is possible but the childbearing partner is randomly selected. Man, was it good. I can see it now as the forebear of American Gods, where the main story is interspersed with mythmaking and short stories, and also Foreigner, where the main theme, besides exploration of an alien culture, is communication and mutual understanding.

The story is very carefully crafted. Every point-of-view is individuated and solid. The plot is narrowly focused on the actions of just a few characters, but it's epic, grand, uplifting reading. The world-building is complex and its implications are thought out well. I didn't feel like it was anachronistic, even though it was written in the late 60s. At times, though, you could almost hear Le Guin banging the podium; I recall the time a character talks about how gender difference (and consequent sexism) causes war. Don't let that scare you away, though. Overall, it's fantastic, mind-bending reading.

I also finished Brothers in Arms, which is one of the many award-winning Miles Vorkosigan adventures by Lois McMaster Bujold. I love everything about these books, and this latest reread was no exception. They have it all. She's the author tied with Robert Heinlein for most Hugo-winning novels. Start with Cordelia's Honor (which is equal to Shards of Honor plus Barrayar), then The Warrior's Apprentice. See also her fantasy series starting with The Curse of Chalion for sublime takes on religion with all the rest of the killer Bujold stuff. I know I haven't said why all these books are so great. Just trust me, ok? And thank me later.

I saw Pirates of the Caribbean 2. I didn't hate it, but I thought it was pretty long. Hopefully, the next one will be the knockout that justifies the boring parts of this one. And here was something very Empire-Strikes-Back-esque about all the selling-out and dark sides in this number 2 movie. You can almost hear Yoda hobbling onto the Black Pearl with his cane and saying, "The Flying Dutchman!" [cough cough] "Remember your failure at the Flying Dutchman! Arrrr!"

I don't remember if I brought it up, but I also saw Talladega Nights, Will Ferrell's send-up of NASCAR. He really nailed it. I laughed a lot. Also, for adults only.

I finally saw Dark City. Everything it did well, The Matrix came along and did a lot better just a year later. The movies have pretty similar plots on the surface, but Dark City has a deranged Kiefer Sutherland where The Matrix has an awesome Laurence Fishburne. If you carry that analogy to the rest of the movie, that pretty much says it all.

The main character in Dark City plays a real jerk in The Holiday, a romantic comedy Sarah and I got to see for our 4th anniversary. It is about half bad and half good. They really wasted Jude Law, Jack Black, Cameron Diaz, and Kate Winslet with this script. I admire all of them as actors and was really looking forward to this.

Instead, the movie opened with an interminable exposition that does nothing except get the characters to the holiday (the women switch houses for two weeks, that is the story). This was pointless, unfunny blather. It wouldn't even have been confusing if the editor had whoops, just cut twenty minutes out of the movie, straight to Kate and Cameron at their computers, sobbing over their breakups and doing something impulsive, which the audience doesn't quite understand. (Audience of better movie says: I don't understand things that haven't been explained! Waah! Director of better movie says: Shut up whiners and eat your popcorn. Don't make me come over there.)

The other thing that riled me was all the meta-fictional stuff. Three of the characters are in the movie industry. Cameron Diaz makes film trailers. Jack Black writes scores. Kate Winslet's new best friend is a famous screenwriter. At every turn, the filmmakers remind you that you are watching a movie, from Cameron imagining her life as a trailer, to nice music setting a scene with Jack and Kate (you know the kind), which is all well and good until you see that Jack's character is playing the score you are hearing, to Kate acting like a strong woman based on advice from the screenwriter who gets her to watch movies with strong women in them, to Cameron quoting Sleepless in Seattle verbatim, to Jack writing theme music for Kate and her friend! And the worst part is, none of it works, at least not for me. The best thing in that list was Cameron's personal trailers, which were at least funny and in character, but it all pulled me out of the vivid continuous dream and set my teeth on edge.

In conclusion, the movie had some funny moments, but this is one for the Redbox ($1 rentals, mostly new releases; between this and NetFlix, Sarah and I have stopped going to the video store).

We watched Little Miss Sunshine on DVD. This is a funny, funny movie. Not for kids; it's easily rated R for "adult themes" and swearing. It's unpredictable and it made me howl with laughter. I was literally on the floor gasping at the end.

And last, for Christmas we went to see Night at the Museum. Run, don't walk, for this one. Kudos to this film's directors: it's very light as far as objectional content. There's a few jokes that will just fly over the heads of kids, but other than that, nothing gory or edgy. Just a museum that comes to life at night, with hilarious consequences. It's certainly worth a matinee, and in these troubled economic times, when is it ever worth full price to see a movie? If I'd had my choice of movies at the place we went in my wife's family's town, I probably would've gone to the new James Bond, but in hindsight, I don't regret the museum at all. Fun for the whole family.

It's a great vehicle for Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, and the merry band of jokers. I don't know about you, but I loved Zoolander and I consider it very rewatchable. I was thinking about Zoolander as we left the theater and I wondered if this museum movie would hold up as well over repeat viewings as Zoolander does for me. In the end, I think it probably will. It's not a deep movie, but it's great fun. Plus, Dick van Dyke steals every scene he's in (and wait for the credits).

Sick

Hi everyone. We've been a little sick with a nasty cold around here. Not the best week for it.

Yesterday, Sarah and I got to go out for a movie date. We get about two of these a year, so it was an event. If you ever want to just see and enjoy a movie in the theater, go to the late afternoon matinee on Wednesday (and avoid the kid movies and that crowd). Sarah and I practically had the theater to ourselves. Another couple came in after us during the previews, but the projector people still turned on the lights in the first few minutes of the movie, presumably to see if they needed to continue showing it.

The movie was Stranger than Fiction. As an aside, "Two thumbs way up" will always get me to a movie. I pay close attention to Ebert [spoiler alert!] and friends because they aren't afraid to give thumbs down to crappy or even dull, marginal movies, and because they at least have some editorial point of view. And they were right this time, this movie rules my world. I would see it again today if I could.

The acting was great. Will Ferrell, in particular, is just perfect. It's well-written and honest, and smart.

Unfortunately, everything else I want to say about this awesome movie would require me to spoil the ending. So go see the movie a few times, then hover over the following series of asterisks, full of spoilers, to see what I think. I had to use short sentences so the hovering works in Firefox, but be assured that there are a few paragraphs behind all these thoughts.

* * * * *

Goings on

Sarah and I watched two great animated movies yesterday and today: Over the Hedge and Monster House. The voice talent in these things is unbelievable. If I had to pick, I would recommend Monster House first. It is genuinely fear-inducing and funny, and doesn't talk down to you. I almost want to say it wasn't aimed at kids. The animations of humans (I guess this one was mostly motion-capture like Polar Express) were pretty amazing too. Over the Hedge is pretty funny, if not as ingenious.

We just finished the first season (six episodes) of 30 Days. It's by Morgan Spurlock, who did Super Size Me, where he spent a whole month eating nothing but McDonald's: experience a lifestyle foreign to you for 30 days. He lived on the minimum wage for a month, then did shows on a Christian dude who lives as a Muslim in Dearborn, a concerned mom who spends a month binge drinking like her coed daughter, DJs who live as hippies in an eco-friendly commune, and so on. They are thought-provoking and eye-opening shows, more so than their cousins, like Wife Swap. One interesting thing I didn't expect was that the thirty-day length of the experience really gives the subjects time to settle in and for the situation to evolve. These fantasy camp visits to another life turn into something else by the end.

I bought a book at the USU library along the same lines: it's called The Genesee Diary, by Henri Nouwen. It's an account of the 7 months he spent as a Trappist monk. I've never read a Henri Nouwen book all the way through, but I have wanted to for some time now. Cost to me: 25 cents. At the same stock-retirement sale, I bought a hardcover copy of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (I read and liked his Foucault's Pendulum a while back). Cost to me: $1.

There was a Tech Expo at the university today. I got a few leads, but the most positive one was the guy from the NSA. There were two guys at the booth, so I picked the scruffy one instead of the one in the suit. His name was Jack. His last name began with a J too, I think. One of those nondescript names They want you to forget.

The first words out of my mouth were name, degree (MS in Computer Science), and thesis topic (image steganography). He was surprised. He looked over my resume and said I would be a great fit. We talked about the unlimited resources of the agency, its ability to do blue-sky research because it's not in the private sector, the large number of research groups, and so on. He looked over my resume and recommended I get it online immediately, concentrating on expanding my list of computer skills so I pop up right away in their resume search engines. The background checks take 8 months, so I'd better saddle up if I want a job for next year.

As I explained to a friend later, it sounds like an ideal job for me, as long as I'm not spying on Americans.

I've followed that FISA stuff pretty closely, and I'm as sure as a lay person can be that the President essentially ordered the NSA to break the law with fig-leaf legal justifications, and then they did it. Not everyone at NSA, but enough of them, in collusion with AT&T and other carriers, to spy on ungodly amounts of internet and telephone traffic that should have been hands-off according to our surveillance laws.

I didn't bring all this up in my short conversation with Jack. It didn't seem polite. But I'm sure if I apply and they do background checks on me, it'll be pretty easy for them to find all the stuff I've written about them on this blog. Like I told my friend, I hardly know whether to teach people to hide from the NSA and encrypt their email, or to help the NSA spy on America's very real enemies (with proper legal safeguards, like warrants, firmly in place). My hope is that I can make a more informed opinion as I move through the hiring process (or get turned down early, whichever).

Research appeals to me more than software development. I'm not sure yet if a PhD is for me, but I am definitely looking at the companies like IBM, MS, and Google that have a place for research. My thesis process has been frustrating at times, but fabulous when it's working. I enjoy taking the problems one step deeper and gaining insight.

Vote on November 7.

Inside Man

Sarah didn't like Friends with Money. I didn't see it.

Inside Man, a Spike Lee joint with Denzel, Jodie Foster, Clive Owen, Willem Dafoe, and Christopher Plummer, was great watching. Sarah liked it, I liked it. It's the story of a cool bank robbery. Very well shot and put together, great script. Every element was in place.

Recent stuff

We saw The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio and A Day Without a Mexican this weekend. They were both pretty good. Coincidentally, they both had intrusive narration breaking the fourth wall. Prize Winner is about a woman who supported her family in the 50s by entering ad copy contests, trying to hold it together despite her husband's budget-breaking alcoholism. The soundtrack has soloists from the best band, Nickel Creek. A Day Without a Mexican is about a mysterious fog that encases the state of California, preventing entry or exit, and makes all the Mexicans (and other Hispanics? the movie was not totally clear on this point) disappear in the middle of the night. With hilarious consequences.

I've been spending a lot of time at a site for writers: Evil Editor. The Evil Editor runs two contests, Guess the Plot and New Beginnings, by requesting actual queries and story openings from novelists. In the former, readers are invited to invent fake plots for the queries based only on the title. In the latter, readers are invited to read the first 150 words of the novel and write the next 75. Hilarity ensues, and so do some interesting critiques of the queries and openings that come over the transom.

I've been thinking about recording some of my songs onto the computer and putting them on Myspace, but just as I worked up the courage to do it, my sound card appears to have busted. Stupid Dell. Don't buy a Dell.

I found out there's a poker club at USU with fun prizes and no entry fees, so maybe I'll play more this year.

I got Cobra II from the library after returning some books. I guess it's the insider's look at the invasion and occupation of Iraq. I haven't even gotten to the text yet, just looked at the maps. There is a pretty funny one that says "Suspected Iraqi WMD sites". There are about 100 dots all over the country. I looked with interest to see the actual locations of cities around Baghdad that I hear so much about: Fallujah, Najaf, Tikrit. And there is a very interesting map showing where the major oil fields are. There are only two clusters. One is down south near the Kuwait border. The other is centered on the Kurdish city of Kirkuk. The same map also shows the Kurdish area, which starts in northern Iraq and extends into Iran and Turkey. This really showed me how volatile the political situation is in Iraq. The Kurds want a decentralized government and their hands on all that oil money, the Shiites want a strong government for the opposite reason, and the Sunnis are disaffected, and in the middle of a shooting war with the Shiites.

What a nightmare.

Remember, remember the fifth of November

You know those shivers you get up your spine when something is scary? Or awful? I am having them right now. I feel like my body is blushing. It's because I'm remembering V for Vendetta, and how good it was.

Here's a good spoiler-free review by James Wolcott of Vanity Fair. I've wanted to see the movie badly ever since he wrote this, and boy, was he right on the money. The movie is so well made, and so rewatchable. I actually want to see it again right now, but we rented it for a dollar at the Redbox and it has to go back today, and I have to work. I told Sarah we have to buy it. I want to be spoiler-free too, so that review is the closest I will come to summarizing the action. I went into it fresh! like Frank Costanza. And I was glad to be fresh, in hindsight.

The guys who wrote the screenplay, the Wachowski brothers, are the same guys who did The Matrix. V for Vendetta is magnificent like the original, instead of goofy like the sequels.

(Tell the truth, I haven't seen the third Matrix movie yet, like the Star Wars prequels. I held out for a long time before watching Episode III because Episode II was so very bad. Recall that episode in the Holy Grail where the Prince of Swamp Castle just wants... to... SING... and then the father comes into the shot and says "Stop that! You're not going into a song while I'm 'ere!" Anyway, there is this scene in Episode II when Anakin and Padme are about to kiss and the music swells up, melodramatically, and then... they don't kiss. And the music cuts off immediately, just like in Holy Grail. I was rolling. Not Natalie Portman's finest hour. However, she gives a really solid performance in this movie, very believable.)

This movie got panned by some critics, like David Denby of the New Yorker, for its politics. In this case, I think they got what they brought, and saw what they wanted to see. The parallels between the totalitarian government in the film and America's secret prisons struck a nerve with those folks.

I also think they boinked on the film's central contradiction: terrorism restores democracy in the film's dystopian England. You could argue about whether V, the terrorist in a Guy Fawkes mask, is a terrorist or a revolutionary, an insurgent, a freedom-fighter. In fact, we've all had that conversation before, in a slightly different setting.

I also find it funny that the neocons advocated a violent invasion and occupation to promote the flowering of democracy, but recoil from the same violence when it is a Western government, however fictional and oppressive, that is destroyed. Once again, the global war on terror is not about the high moral ground. Instead, it's about "when smart bombs fall, better thee than me" rationalizations about the existential threat posed by people who read the Qur'an.

But the real threat to the neocon agenda is not from without; it's from within, when people in America stand up for democracy and reject the easy Manichaeism of cowboy diplomacy, of Christian versus Muslim, of the fear of faceless enemies, and of the sacrifice of essential liberty for temporary security. God knows I hope they do stand up this November, and use the ballot box as the weapon of destruction. After all, who wouldn't want to destroy this?

While the select few on the House or Senate Intelligence oversight committees could review this raging river of classified information, the most sensitive materials were shown only to the two ranking members -- one from each party -- on each committee. Yet there was much that even they did not see.

In short, 9/11 allowed for preparation to meet opportunity. The result: potent, wartime authority was granted to those guiding the ship of state. A final, customary check in wartime -- demonstrable evidence of troop movements or casualties, of divisions on the move, with correspondents filing dispatches -- was also missing once the Afghanistan engagement ended. In the wide, diffuse "war on terror," so much of it occurring in the shadows -- with no transparency and only perfunctory oversight -- the administration could say anything it wanted to say. That was a blazing insight of this period. The administration could create whatever reality was convenient.

Messages, of all kinds, could finally stand unfettered and unchallenged -- a kind of triumph, a wish fulfillment, that could easily overwhlem principles of informed consent and accountability.

Accountability, in fact, was shrunk to a single standard: prevent attacks on the U.S. mainland. As long as there were no such attacks, little else mattered.

-- Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine

V for Vendetta

I finally saw V for Vendetta.

I'm feeling pretty raw right now.

Read The One Percent Doctrine.

Then watch V for Vendetta.