National Lampoon Radio Hour
The National Lampoon Radio Hour, a precursor to Saturday Night Live, is making a comeback.
Chicken George
The measures that the Bush administration wanted to put in place to ensure his safety on his visit to the UK are almost beyond belief: closing the London underground, immunity for snipers who accidentally kill protesters, and the use of battlefield weaponry against protesters. Contrast this with GW’s eye-roll-inducing declaration that he is looking forward to visiting a country where people have the right to protest.
Or maybe not: he has cancelled a planned address to the two houses of the UK’s Parliament, no doubt wanting to avoid a repeat of his embarrassing heckling when he addressed Australia’s.
Bubba Ho-Tep
Saw Bubba Ho-Tep today. Best. Movie. Title. Ever. Stars Bruce Campbell, veteran of numerous horror movies, as the still-alive Elvis Presley, and Ossie Davis as the still-alive JFK. I think that’s justification enough to see it, but it’s also a damn entertaining film that is neither as camp nor frenetic as I expected, but really has a heart.
Apparently the producers have not been able to secure widespread release for this flick (go figure), so if you if you see it, consider yourself special.
Kill Bill
Saw Kill Bill yesterday. Even for Quentin Tarantino, it was fantastically violent. More blood than all his previous movies put together, plus any Sam Peckinpah movie thrown in for good measure. There’s no getting around this. And the violence is not the arm’s-length variety practiced by Jerry Bruckheimer–it’s in your face, and in many cases intimate. Like a Peckinpah or John Woo movie, the violence is where the real art of the movie is concentrated, though.
Much of the movie is set in Japan, or a Japan extracted from QT’s wet dreams, where everyone carries a sword, where 60s-style girl groups perform on stages in traditional ryotei.
All that notwithstanding, I enjoyed the movie. The story of Kill Bill reminded me of a mirror-universe version of Charlie’s Angels–an elite team of hot babes (one of them portrayed by Lucy Liu), led by a mysterious and unseen older guy. Except in this case, they’re all assassins, not crime-fighters. It also bore obvious similarities to The Bride Wore Black To their credit, Lucy Liu and Uma Thurman both speak perfectly serviceable Japanese, much better than I’ve heard from most Hollywood stars.
The Alamo, with their usual panache, led off the movie with trailers for bad ninja-chick movies of the 70s, like Wonder Women–these alone were practically worth the price of admission.
Empirical political formulations
A couple recent threads on Metafilter have brought home a couple of basic realizations for me.
One, on cycling: many people have no problem with bigotry when its object is cyclists.
Another, on patriotism: Conservatives are quick to impugn the patriotism of progressives. There are actually two forms of patriotism. There are those who love their country in spite of its faults. These people are progressives. And there are those who love their country because of its faults. These people are conservatives.
Fuck you again, Michael Powell
For passing the broadcast flag.
This gives the Hollywood regulatory oversight over not only digital television, but anything that can play a digital video file, including computers, some cellphones, etc (here’s an interesting wrinkle).
Words and Rules
Recently finished reading Words and Rules by Steven Pinker. Very interesting and enjoyable. The book breaks down numerous aspects of the way our brains handle language by looking through the prism of irregular verbs, discussing the etymology of irregular verbs (which I found to be the most entertaining part of the book–I guess that says more about me than the book); showing regularity in irregulars (stink/stank/stunk; drink/drank/drunk) and how irregulars get regularized over time; covering how irregulars work in other languages, especially The Awful German Language, where irregular verbs outnumber regular verbs (calling into question the very notion of regularity); and even delving into the neuroanatomical basis for the problems that some people have conjugating verbs.
At the core of the book, though, he’s looking at two basic models for how we organize language in our heads: a Chomskyite rules-based model that reduces irregulars to a few basic rules, which is remarkable as an academic abstraction, but assumes that children are already doctorate-level linguists at an intuitive level; and a neural-network model that assumes our brains unthinkingly string together sounds without the meaning of the words influencing how we use them, a model that is defeated by Pinker’s favorite pet example, the verb “fly,” which is normally irregular (fly/flew) but gets regularized in the limited context of baseball–“he flied out to left field.”
Mystic River
Saw Mystic River last night with Gwen and her old friend Sonya. The movie is based on a book, but none of us had read it, so we really didn’t know what to expect.
Every one of the main characters–this is the classic ensemble cast, there really is no protagonist–is badly damaged in some way. And there are some apparent plot holes–or at least open question–at the end of the movie. But overall it works. It’s a very hard movie, a very grim story, but it is completely absorbing. I forgot that I was sitting in a movie theater in Austin though most of it–I was just wrapped up in the movie.
Not that again!
Hair-metal rock. Leg warmers. Tiered miniskirts. Mullets. And of course, a cretinous, right-wing president. The 80s? Yes, but apparently there are nefarious forces at work in the world today that want to make sure that those who are too young to remember (or appreciate the horrors of) the first go-round will get a chance to do so now. I’ve been seeing all this stuff around.
I remember during the 80s, an article in Esquire dubbed the 80s “the Re Decade” (in contrast to the 70s, which was “the Me Decade”), the point being that the 80s was recycling pop-culture from previous eras, especially the 50s. So we’re re-recycling now, which is fitting, since we’re re-redistricting.
Break out your headbands and fold your lapels up.
Visual Music
Saw Kronos Quartet’s performance of Visual Music last night. My opinion: Mixed. Some of the music was more, well, musical, and some was experimental in a way that had some novelty value but became trite or positively grating pretty quickly.
The show opened with exactly such a piece. Four very tall, spidery sculptural things lined up on stage, with upward-facing speakers at the base and mics hanging like pendulums (with slightly varying lengths) from the tops. My initial assessment was that these were feedback generators, and I was right. The four members of the group came out, pulled back the cords, and let them swing. As the mics passed over the speakers, the speakers squawked; the closer the mic, the higher the pitch. Slowly they moved out of sync with each other (being different lengths) and would occasionally move briefly back into sync. So this was fun, in a way, but before long I was clenching my ears. When the piece ended and something more traditional began, I could barely hear it for the first minute or so.
The subsequent piece was played on violins, and was technically impressive, but only intermittently what I would call “musical.” There were several other pieces I would categorize the same way, including one where they projected their musical score on a giant screen behind them (which they faced), scrolling by as they worked their instruments in a way that seemed more like violin abuse than playing, including bowing above the nut, below the bridge, above their fingering hands, on the body of the violin directly, pressing the strings flat against the fingerboard and playing that way, and mostly beating the bow on the strings rather than sliding it across them.
Other pieces also involved video projection, and some had recorded spoken-word tracks (usually consisting of chopped-up didactic commentary) and recorded music tracks behind them. Gwen’s comment on these was that they were “painfully early-80s Laurie Anderson.”
The set (which was surprisingly short, with no encore) ended with something that I did enjoy, that I think was composed by Sigur Rös.