Here and There

I just decided to sell my hardback copy of Bill Clinton’s My Life and donate the proceeds, however paltry, to Barack Obama’s campaign for president. If I owned any books by Hillary Clinton (or Geraldine Ferraro, or Mark Penn, or Howard Wolfson, or Rosanne Barr), I’d do the same.

It would be pretty cool if a lot of people did this, people who, like me, once admired some of these figures, and have gone through various stages of shock, disbelief, and anger at the way they’ve behaved in this campaign.

The cameras have been rolling since 2006 … this should be good.

He’s up against Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter for best spoken-word album.

It details the views out of airplane windows on 12 major routes in the U.S.

I have to agree with The Chronicle’s Jon Carroll here. It’s one thing to make up stories when your job is to entertain, as is David Sedaris’s. It’s another when you’re the leader of the free world.

Apparently, The New Republic has run a story “debunking” Sedaris’s yarns. Oh really? I never thought any of those 3,034,583 stories of his were fiction. Not a single detail.

Can’t find a link, but I’m just about finished reading “The Castaways” by Mark Singer, published in the Feb. 19 issue of The New Yorker.

It’s a stranger-than-fiction tale of a group of Mexican fisherman who end up stranded on their fishing vessel in the Pacific Ocean. There is survival, comraderie (or lack thereof), Catholicism, marine biology, international trade routes, Mexican presidential politics, poverty, education (or lack thereof), and more.

I recommend you either pick up a copy of the magazine, or find someone who has it and borrow or Xerox it and read this story.

I started meeting them last week. You know the types … “Oh, The Departed doesn’t deserve to win Best Picture because it’s a remake” is their motto. They’ll admit to having appreciated the movie, some more so than others, as with any movie. But they’re not willing to admit to its proper place in the upper echelon of American cinema, and only because this filmic production of the story wasn’t its first.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to have seen Infernal Affairs (one of the most infernally titled translations ever) at the Asian Film Festival in San Francisco. It was a nice surprise. What sounded good enough to me (a movie about cops and gangsters) turned out to be somewhat of a thinker’s movie. Wait, let me take that back. It was a popcorn movie, to be sure, but one that also makes you think, keeps you on the edge of your seat, and has some kick-ass fight scenes.

I may have seen another movie or two at that year’s festival, but it was Infernal Affairs alone that stuck with me.

When the rumblings began that Scorsese was remaking a Hong Kong cops and gangsters movie, the thought occurred to me that the original could be Infernal Affairs. Then I heard Leonadro DiCaprio signed on and I was equal parts thrilled and repulsed. But I knew the story, and I knew Scorcese’s ability as a filmmaker to be equally capable of killing a decent plot or seeing it out to its natural end. I saw The Departed.

Like Scorcese, DiCaprio is not always on the mark, but when he is, it’s a good time. And I really can’t think of any actor who wasn’t just this side of superb in the movie. From Alec Baldwin to Mark Wahlberg to Kevin Corrigan to Matt Damon, the characters were caricatured enough, but not too much, to be both believable and entertaining.

Now, about the re-write. People have been revisiting works of art for centuries. Cover songs, rewritten novels, remade movies, they’re uniformly viewed as legitimate forms of art in their own right. I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss a song, book, movie, or whatever outright just because the performer/author/director isn’t the work’s first render. Certainly it’s more complex than that.

First, the original has to be good, but not exclusively. Second, and here’s where personal preference comes into play, the remaker chooses between staying “true” to the original and making it their own. Those are the extremes, and there’s plenty of room in the middle. Scorsese was in the middle. He ported the Hong Kong thriller to Boston, Americanizing the story just enough as to render it palatable to those who never saw the original.

I think it’s really easy to take a good story and fuck it up (the Star Wars prequel trilogy, anyone?). It’s also possible to take a bad story and make it good. The Departed took a solid foundation and built upon it. Making it American, and doing a seamless job of it, automatically translates it for thousands, possibly millions, who otherwise wouldn’t experience it.

And I’m not necessarily arguing that winning an Oscar for Best Picture automatically validates a movie. I would’ve written this post regardless of last night’s ceremony. It does add a gram of weight to the argument that The Departed, though a remake, gets a lot of things right.

I want need this book.

* meaning I will do my best not to reveal salient plot points.

I get teased quite a bit for spoiling books and movies. I don’t mean to do it, but I suppose oblivion is as flimsy a defense as eating Twinkies.

So…all I mean to do in this space is say that I read Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves…wait, if I were to go on with this sentence, I’m sure something important would slip through.

How about this? READ THIS BOOK.

I finished the audible.com version of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Everything, which had me a few paragraphs into its introduction. A few things therein were nearly identical to some thoughts I had been having, as I mentioned in a post last month.

First, like any good book, I was depressed when the narration ended, and the generic audible voice came on to spew the credits and thank me, the listener, for choosing audible-dot-com.

I had the file with me for about a month, on walks to work, during my “lunch” breaks, in Venezuela, on BART. Its stories of scientific theory, refutation, recalculations, discoveries, Eurekas, and more kept me company even when I wasn’t listening. I found so much revelance in and out of the book that I wanted it to last forever.

Thirty chapters, 544 pages, and right around 18 hours of audio from Bryson (and narrator Richard Matthews) will take any slightly interested reader on a thoroughly enjoyable ride through history, focussing mostly on the so-called natural sciences, like astronomy, geology, chemistry, physics, and biology. Its theme (spoiler alert) is simple: that the universe is an utterly amazing place, and it’s a wonder we have made it to where we are.

It’s a wonder Bryson was able to make it to where he is, given the enormity of the undertaking of writing such a thoroughly reported and written book.

A Short History of Nearly Everything will, if you’re anything like the geek I am, make you feel good about the big, dark, lonely universe we live our short, crazy lives in.

Highly recommended.

One of the most practical uses of the Internet for dorks like me, but also, I suspect for all music lovers everywhere (and I assume just about everyone likes music, to a varying degree) is the ability to look up a song based on its lyrics, and vice versa.

I don’t need to single out the sites that house databases of song lyrics. True, the project is an incomplete one, but it’s made a lot of headway over the years.

Here’s the story that lead me to feel compelled to post about this (warning: it’s slightly convoluted):

Started listening to the audio version of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything this morning. In its introduction, Bryson talks about a few phenomena that I’ve either thought about recently, or that’ve had songs whose lyrics spoke of them.

The first of these was the realization that, over the course of all history (well, to be fair I was really only thinking of human history), all of any individual’s ancestors had to have got together at exactly the right time, in the right place, in the right conditions (whatever they were) to have mated, which, eventually, led to that individual’s existence. Yeah. Wow.

The second coincidence to spring forth from A Short History occurred in Chapter One, in which Bryson touches on the phenomenon that, were an individual to attempt to travel to the edge of the universe (obviously to see what’s on the other side of the boundary), the feat would prove impossible. This happens, of course, because space is curved. So … “if you go straight long enough, you end up where you were.”

That line, of course, reminded me of Modest Mouse. I happened to have my iPod with me, so I got to work, opened Firefox, searched for the lyric and the name “modest mouse,” and there it was. “3rd Planet” was the song I was looking for. Cool.

Even nicer would be if you could type the lyrics straight into iTunes, or, fuck, even cooler, say or speak them into your iPod, and the song would show up. I suppose that would require the song files being embedded with lyric data. Not impossible, I’d like to think.

Okay, okay, I do have a strong work ethic, as is clearly stated on my résumé. Work ethic…work ethic. What does that term really mean?

To me, it simply means when there’s work to do, I do it. I don’t complain. I love tasks and lists and scratching items off said lists. A former boss told me he was asked by a potential new employer to state a weakness of mine. He said he struggled (at which I must’ve blushed) and finally pulled this diamond out of his ass: “Well, I guess it would be that he sometimes takes on so much work that it overwhelms him a bit, and he has to scale back somewhat.”

Ha!

That said, here I am, on the clock, there’s fuck all to do. So why not jot down (key-stroke, more like it) some of the minutiae floating across my synapses? Indeed…

Been reading White Noise by Don DeLillo. It’s the June book for my two-person book club. (Crap—must read 90 pages before end of the day.)

So far, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the book (a tired expression, I admit, but I still like it). I won’t summarize the book here, but will instead note a few impressions.

First, I feel the book can’t make up its mind what it’s about. Fine, it was written in the 1980s, a decade that couldn’t make its mind either. And all the ’80s theme’s are there: the mad trappings of modern life, Doomsday gloom and despair, divorce, kids, chewing gum.

Still, a book can control its flow, what happens to its characters, its plot. Oh well, I guess I could just resign to this book’s being a “mirror of the times” (an expression I’m not particularly fond of, by the way).

The other big complaint is that everyone talks the same. This isn’t exactly DeLillo’s first novel, either (that would be Americana, written 15 years prior). I just can’t suspend that disbelief. You can’t have a man, his fourth wife, her children and his, his colleagues and acquaintances all saying things like, “What does it mean to sweat?”

What else?

OH! That’s right. In a thoroughly belated show of responsibility, the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday ruled that the Bush Administration cannot hold extrajudicial trials for prisioners held at Guantánamo Bay. (Read the court’s opinion here.)

Legal scholars and experts are calling it a stinging rebuke to Bush’s presumed blank-check to fight the evildoers. I agree, and will now set out to read the text of the ruling (a favorite pasttime, I should add).

More to post later, should work remain slow…