In a Literary Vein…
July 31, 2006
One of the benefits of a long commute to work is the opportunity to listen to audiobooks. The Columbia public library is pretty well stocked with them, so I\’ve probably consumed more books in the last year than at any time since I graduated from college. Here\’s a sampling from the last couple of months, my version of summer beach reading:
Witness for the Prosecution by Agatha Christie, read by Christopher Lee. Lee, of course, is greatly beloved by any fan of horror movies, myself included, but I would not have thought him a good reader for audio books. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that his voice was versatile enough to assay a wide variety of characters in the stories he reads here. It\’s a pity he\’s been pigeonholed for most of his career. On the other hand, show me another actor who has the sheer number of parts on their resume as Lee has. I\’d love to hear him tackle Poirot, though I can\’t ever see him playing the part on film–he\’s too physically imposing.
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie, read by Hugh Fraser. Fraser is an alum of the BBC\’s Poirot series, so he\’s a natural reader for Dame Agatha. He\’s by far my favorite reader of the Christie books I\’ve checked out. I\’ve been listening to a LOT of Agatha Christie, whose Poirot mysteries are like candy. Or crack. Take your pick.
Thirteen for Dinner by Agatha Christie, read by Hugh Fraser. More candy, and my favorite of Fraser\’s performances.
Sharpe\’s Escape by Bernard Cornwell, read by Patrick Tull. I greatly enjoy the Sharpe novels. Patrick Tull is a terrific reader. This book turns on a plot point I don\’t believe, but it\’s pretty good. Rousing adventure, for those who like it, and it puts Sharpe back where he belongs: on the Penninsula and just up from the ranks.
Mr. Paradise by Elmore Leonard, read by Robert Forster. Dutch Leonard is one of my favorite writers, and on paper, Forster seems like the ideal reader (Forster having played Max Cherry in Tarantino\’s film version of Leonard\’s Rum Punch). Unfortunately, Forster doesn\’t have the versatility to pull it off. I only listened to the first two discs before giving up. A bad reader can make a complete hash of the characters, which was the case here. I listened to a collection of Leonard stories read by Taye Diggs last year and I\’d love to hear him take this one on. But for now, a disappointment. One to revisit in print.
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, read by Tom Stechschulte. The Coen\’s are making a movie out of this and I can see what attracted them to the property. It\’s right up their alley, in the mode of Fargo and Miller\’s Crossing. For McCarthy, it\’s a bit of a change of pace. Rather than a citadel of prose a la Blood Meridian or Sutree, we have a spare, almost commercial genre piece. I understand that this originated as a screenplay, and I can see the spare construction of a screenplay in the stripped down language. I own the hardback of this book which shows that it retains McCarthy\’s preference for eliminating quotation marks and other \”inessential\” punctuation.\” Stechschulte\’s narration neatly glosses over that difficulty of reading McCarthy. Still and all, though it aspires to the violence of Blood Meridian, it doesn\’t match the imagery. Nor does it match the longing one finds in All the Pretty Horses. On the other hand, it will probably make a better movie. Good book, though.
A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin, read by Roy Dotrice. My current project. This is friggin massive at 39 discs. I read the print version of this book when it came out, but as became clear when I listened to this volume\’s predecessor, A Clash of Kings last year, I did a fair amount of skimming the first time I tackled this series. The very nature of audio books precludes skimming, and adjusting to the medium meant unlearning a lot of bad reading habits. Dotrice is a good reader, though I took a while to get used to his voice. If you like fantasy novels, this is a pretty major series. I DON\’T usually like fantasy novels, but this one is just fine by me. Refreshingly brutal, which may be a turn-off to readers more accustomed to the fey tone of Tolkein and his followers. As someone who likes the nastiest pulp crime fiction, I was right at home. And anyone can die at any moment. Great fun.
Enjoy.
In a Literary Vein…
July 31, 2006
One of the benefits of a long commute to work is the opportunity to listen to audiobooks. The Columbia public library is pretty well stocked with them, so I\’ve probably consumed more books in the last year than at any time since I graduated from college. Here\’s a sampling from the last couple of months, my version of summer beach reading:
Witness for the Prosecution by Agatha Christie, read by Christopher Lee. Lee, of course, is greatly beloved by any fan of horror movies, myself included, but I would not have thought him a good reader for audio books. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that his voice was versatile enough to assay a wide variety of characters in the stories he reads here. It\’s a pity he\’s been pigeonholed for most of his career. On the other hand, show me another actor who has the sheer number of parts on their resume as Lee has. I\’d love to hear him tackle Poirot, though I can\’t ever see him playing the part on film–he\’s too physically imposing.
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie, read by Hugh Fraser. Fraser is an alum of the BBC\’s Poirot series, so he\’s a natural reader for Dame Agatha. He\’s by far my favorite reader of the Christie books I\’ve checked out. I\’ve been listening to a LOT of Agatha Christie, whose Poirot mysteries are like candy. Or crack. Take your pick.
Thirteen for Dinner by Agatha Christie, read by Hugh Fraser. More candy, and my favorite of Fraser\’s performances.
Sharpe\’s Escape by Bernard Cornwell, read by Patrick Tull. I greatly enjoy the Sharpe novels. Patrick Tull is a terrific reader. This book turns on a plot point I don\’t believe, but it\’s pretty good. Rousing adventure, for those who like it, and it puts Sharpe back where he belongs: on the Penninsula and just up from the ranks.
Mr. Paradise by Elmore Leonard, read by Robert Forster. Dutch Leonard is one of my favorite writers, and on paper, Forster seems like the ideal reader (Forster having played Max Cherry in Tarantino\’s film version of Leonard\’s Rum Punch). Unfortunately, Forster doesn\’t have the versatility to pull it off. I only listened to the first two discs before giving up. A bad reader can make a complete hash of the characters, which was the case here. I listened to a collection of Leonard stories read by Taye Diggs last year and I\’d love to hear him take this one on. But for now, a disappointment. One to revisit in print.
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, read by Tom Stechschulte. The Coen\’s are making a movie out of this and I can see what attracted them to the property. It\’s right up their alley, in the mode of Fargo and Miller\’s Crossing. For McCarthy, it\’s a bit of a change of pace. Rather than a citadel of prose a la Blood Meridian or Sutree, we have a spare, almost commercial genre piece. I understand that this originated as a screenplay, and I can see the spare construction of a screenplay in the stripped down language. I own the hardback of this book which shows that it retains McCarthy\’s preference for eliminating quotation marks and other \”inessential\” punctuation.\” Stechschulte\’s narration neatly glosses over that difficulty of reading McCarthy. Still and all, though it aspires to the violence of Blood Meridian, it doesn\’t match the imagery. Nor does it match the longing one finds in All the Pretty Horses. On the other hand, it will probably make a better movie. Good book, though.
A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin, read by Roy Dotrice. My current project. This is friggin massive at 39 discs. I read the print version of this book when it came out, but as became clear when I listened to this volume\’s predecessor, A Clash of Kings last year, I did a fair amount of skimming the first time I tackled this series. The very nature of audio books precludes skimming, and adjusting to the medium meant unlearning a lot of bad reading habits. Dotrice is a good reader, though I took a while to get used to his voice. If you like fantasy novels, this is a pretty major series. I DON\’T usually like fantasy novels, but this one is just fine by me. Refreshingly brutal, which may be a turn-off to readers more accustomed to the fey tone of Tolkein and his followers. As someone who likes the nastiest pulp crime fiction, I was right at home. And anyone can die at any moment. Great fun.
Enjoy.
Never a Bride…
July 30, 2006
A couple of months ago, I posted that a gg friend of mine had asked me to be a bridesmaid at her wedding. Sadly, it’s all off now. She kicked her longtime boyfriend out of the house permanently this week. It’s an ugly break-up. I’m disappointed that I won’t get to be a member of the wedding, true, but I’m more sorry to see them break up. Disappointed, but not surprised. It was that kind of relationship.
Alas…
The Ghost of Christi\’s Movie Picks
July 27, 2006
King Hu\’s A Touch of Zen (1969) is the 2001: A Space Odyssey of martial arts movies. Oh, its plot is familiar enough to anyone who cares about such things: beautiful princess on the run from her enemies seeks the help of a young man who has never had an adventure in his life. Soon she\’s joined by her one of her retainers and they contrive to lay a trap for her pursuers…yada, yada, yada. If you\’ve seen Star Wars, or better still, if you\’ve seen Kurosawa\’s The Hidden Fortress, you know this story. But the story, as it turns out, is only the beginning. The movie begins with an extended prelude of nature shots. The first image in the film is a spiderweb, as it so happens, which is emblematic of the plot of the movie the same way the opening shot of The Wild Bunch is as emblematic of THAT movie. Then slowly, the works of man are revealed, and then the characters, and then the story. It\’s fully forty-five minutes into the film before there\’s any martial arts action at all, which will try the patience of some viewers, but there\’s always something going on on screen. Hu isn\’t interested in action as an end in and of itself, per se, in so much as he is interested in contemplating the place of action, including its consequences, in the world itself. This is a long movie at three hours–its original cut, now lost, ran some seven hours–and Hu is in no hurry to get where he\’s going.
The structure of the film consists of three acts. In the first, we have superstition and ignorance, as our young hero contrives to frighten his enemies with tales of a haunted temple. In the second, we have the worldly realm of politics and war, as our heroes become embroiled in a broader web of feignt and counter-feignt. In the final section, we find enlightenment, as the various threads of the plot run affoul of the Buddah himself. The final act of the movie pitches everything that came before it into a quest for our Buddah nature, and when the Abbot of the monks who figure into this part of the movie stares down the characters he encounters, he has the force of the sun behind his gaze.
King Hu was one of the pioneers of the martial arts movie and his style of action filmmaking here mimics his theme. He eschews the wire work that typifies later films, preferring to stage his action scenes with flash cuts and eliptical shot compositions that turn these sequences into koans: we are shown the overall shape of a thing, but we are left to fill in the negative space ourselves as a zen excercise. As a purely visual construct, the movie is striking (Tai Seng\’s DVD of the movie, though watchable, is not a very good transfer, though there may not be adequate source materials for a good version). Two recent wu xia films–Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The House of Flying Daggers–take on Hu\’s center-piece battle in a bamboo forest , though neither film takes Hu\’s style as their own (in spite of his filmmaking technique, the action choreography in Hu\’s films is still rooted in the stylized action of Peking Opera, a style that has mutated beyond recognition in the decades since).
This is an ambitious film, one that belies the reputation of the kung fu movie as empty spectacle. If one likes movies that challenge the mind as well as pump the adrenalin, this is a movie that will do both. Mind you, it\’s not a difficult movie, as some \”art\” movies are difficult, but it is just as complex.
Enjoy.
The Ghost of Christi\’s Movie Picks
July 27, 2006
King Hu\’s A Touch of Zen (1969) is the 2001: A Space Odyssey of martial arts movies. Oh, its plot is familiar enough to anyone who cares about such things: beautiful princess on the run from her enemies seeks the help of a young man who has never had an adventure in his life. Soon she\’s joined by her one of her retainers and they contrive to lay a trap for her pursuers…yada, yada, yada. If you\’ve seen Star Wars, or better still, if you\’ve seen Kurosawa\’s The Hidden Fortress, you know this story. But the story, as it turns out, is only the beginning. The movie begins with an extended prelude of nature shots. The first image in the film is a spiderweb, as it so happens, which is emblematic of the plot of the movie the same way the opening shot of The Wild Bunch is as emblematic of THAT movie. Then slowly, the works of man are revealed, and then the characters, and then the story. It\’s fully forty-five minutes into the film before there\’s any martial arts action at all, which will try the patience of some viewers, but there\’s always something going on on screen. Hu isn\’t interested in action as an end in and of itself, per se, in so much as he is interested in contemplating the place of action, including its consequences, in the world itself. This is a long movie at three hours–its original cut, now lost, ran some seven hours–and Hu is in no hurry to get where he\’s going.
The structure of the film consists of three acts. In the first, we have superstition and ignorance, as our young hero contrives to frighten his enemies with tales of a haunted temple. In the second, we have the worldly realm of politics and war, as our heroes become embroiled in a broader web of feignt and counter-feignt. In the final section, we find enlightenment, as the various threads of the plot run affoul of the Buddah himself. The final act of the movie pitches everything that came before it into a quest for our Buddah nature, and when the Abbot of the monks who figure into this part of the movie stares down the characters he encounters, he has the force of the sun behind his gaze.
King Hu was one of the pioneers of the martial arts movie and his style of action filmmaking here mimics his theme. He eschews the wire work that typifies later films, preferring to stage his action scenes with flash cuts and eliptical shot compositions that turn these sequences into koans: we are shown the overall shape of a thing, but we are left to fill in the negative space ourselves as a zen excercise. As a purely visual construct, the movie is striking (Tai Seng\’s DVD of the movie, though watchable, is not a very good transfer, though there may not be adequate source materials for a good version). Two recent wu xia films–Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The House of Flying Daggers–take on Hu\’s center-piece battle in a bamboo forest , though neither film takes Hu\’s style as their own (in spite of his filmmaking technique, the action choreography in Hu\’s films is still rooted in the stylized action of Peking Opera, a style that has mutated beyond recognition in the decades since).
This is an ambitious film, one that belies the reputation of the kung fu movie as empty spectacle. If one likes movies that challenge the mind as well as pump the adrenalin, this is a movie that will do both. Mind you, it\’s not a difficult movie, as some \”art\” movies are difficult, but it is just as complex.
Enjoy.
All Politics is Local, Addendum…
July 24, 2006
I neglected to mention in my previous posting that the election I missed earlier this year deprived me of the chance to vote for Jessica Orsini, who is an openly transgendered woman who managed to get herself elected to Centralia, Missouri’s Board of Aldermen. Which makes me sorta proud of the new hometown.
All Politics is Local
July 24, 2006
A friend of mine is running for public office. I won’t name him on the off chance that the support of a crackpot tranny on the internet might hurt his chances, but I’ll be supporting him in other ways. He asked me to put a sign on my lawn, which was fine with me–he has, by far, the most attractive sign among the candidates for his office, which may or may not be an advantage. I was talking to him about the election process the other day and he told me what he’s putting himself through. “I’ve knocked on over 4200 doors,” he told me. “I’ve gone through four pairs of shoes.” He’s campaigning the old fashioned way: pressing the flesh with prospective voters one voter at a time. I hope he wins. He has to get past the primary on August 7th first, but I think he’s got a good chance.
In any event, his campaign reminded me that I needed to file a change of address with the county clerk’s office in order to vote. I missed my first election earlier this year when I skipped a school board election. I’ve been kicking myself, too, because the turnout for that election–nine voters–was such that I could have picked my own candidate to place in office. There were two slots and three candidates. One slot was won outright with five votes. The other two candidates wound up tied at 2 votes apiece. The notion that a run-off election is required on a voting pool of four votes amuses the hell out of me, but that’s off the point. The point is that a large family with an ax to grind or a particularly activist church in my new hometown could pretty much have their way with things. Which frightens me, as it so happens. I’ll never skip another election again.
Broadening the scope: Last week’s debacle in St. Louis may just be a stake in the heart for Missouri’s current governor, Matt Blunt. Mind you, Blunt is not up for re-election this year, but the sort of misery inflicted on St. Louis last week is not the sort of thing you forget. The short version of things is this: the blackout, though caused by the storm, was exacerbated by Ameren. When Ameren bought the grid from the previous utility, they fired a quarter of the linemen and a quarter of the tree-service. They have not performed anything but the most cursory maintenance in over ten years. They have, however, raised both electricity rates AND executive compensation. Nor is this the first Missouri disaster for which Ameren is responsible, not even the first disaster THIS YEAR! Ameren was also responsible for the Taum Sauk reservoir breach earlier this year. To an extent, all of this is the fruits of deregulation, which has sewn fraud and misery whereever it has raised its head. Ameren was a heavy contributor to the Blunt campaign. The Blunt administration is big on deregulation. I’ve been pretending that there is no state govenrment since this administration took office, and for all the action it has taken on important matters of governing the state, it might just as well not exist. I want, basically, two things from the State government: I want good roads and good schools. Our infrastructure is crumbling–if you drive thorugh our fair state this summer, note the profound difference in the quality of the roads when you exit Kansas or Illinois and enter Missouri. Missouri’s schools have consistently ranked in the lower forties when compared to the rest of the nation (i.e.: they rank 48th in the nation or somewhere thereabouts), in spite of the fact that Missouri is by no means a poor state. Meanwhile, our government is busy wasting taxpayer dollars passing resolutions declaring that The United States is a “Christian nation.” But that’s neo-conservativism for you, I guess.
Matt Blunt is governor for a couple of reasons, but experience in office is not one of them. He is the beneficiary of a couple of things that have nothing to do with his competence for the office he holds. First, he’s the son of Roy Blunt, the Majority Whip of the United States House of Representatives. The Blunt machine has a lot of power in Missouri, and the elder Blunt used his influence to place his son in office. Matt Blunt’s total work experience after college–he was 33 when he was elected governor–was a term as Missouri’s Secretary of State. The responsibilities of that office is to run elections. It would be churlish of me to mention that Blunt fouled that up, but you may remember the lawsuits over the way elections in St. Louis were conducted in 2000. It got national press. That was Blunt’s handiwork. So influence is one reason he got elected. But influence can only go so far. The OTHER reason was the chaos in Missouri’s Democratic party. Missouri’s previous governor was a guy named Bob Holden, a Democrat. Holden was a dangerously incompetent politician and almost as incompetent a governor. After four years of Holden’s administration even Missouri’s Democrats had had enough and booted him from the re-election ticket in the primary. Unfortunately for the Dems, the carnage of the primary campaign, eventually won by Claire McKaskill, the State Auditor, took all the energy (and money) of the party. There was none left to counter the dirtiest smear campaign I’ve ever seen. It was purely Rovian, as it so happens, and inevitable. Blunt had no track record on which to run, so he couldn’t run on the issues. And it worked. And now we are paying the price.
In any event, back to the Ameren debacle: the reason this might be a stake in the heart of Governor Blunt is because the administration of utilities is overseen by the Public Utility Commitee, appointed by the governor. The current PUC is stocked with the creatures of the energy industry, who have granted every rate hike requested by Ameren, while providing no oversight. The ONLY thing that might keep this from being an election year issue is the fact that Blunt’s likely challenger in 2008 will be Attorney General Jay Nixon, who found himself in a conflict of interest when pursuing action against Ameren over the Taum Sauk reservoir breach. Nixon has returned the $19,000 his campaign took from Ameren, but I’ll bet you anything you like that this fact will be omitted from the attack ads….
Bad for Business…
July 18, 2006
Note: this is a political post. You have been warned.
My, my, the world is in a mess this week. I’ve been thinking of writing about the abject failure of American foreign policy during the last five years, but the situation on the ground speaks for itself, doesn’t it? When Vladimir Putin is using the President of the United States as a straight man, things are clearly at a low ebb.
So I don’t want to talk about all of that. I want to note, in passing, that the Republican party sold itself to the people as the party that was good for business. “Good for business,” being measured by the Bush administration’s Department of Commerce using the stock market as a yardstick, specifically the Dow Jones Average. By this measure, the current administration AND congress are complete failures.
Let me put this in context: during the Reagan administration, the Dow gained in value by 137%. Under the Clinton administration, it gained 194%. The Dow hit a new all time record high 453 days into Reagan’s term. It hit a new all-time record high 11 days into Clinton’s term, and kept hitting them throughout his term. The current administration is still waiting.
On the day that President Bush was innaugurated, the Dow closed at 10,588. A quick check of the ticker shows that at mid-day trading today at 1:50 pm Central Time, July 18, 2006, the Dow is at 10,770.01. While I realize that stock markets are volatile in the short term, and stating that the Bush administration has benefited business by one one hundredth of a percentage point on the Dow index is disingenuous, I want to point out that regardless of where it ends today or the at the end of the week, we will have seen growth to date over a five and a half year period that is statistically negligible. Adjusted for inflation over the same period, American stocks have lost value at a rate of 3% a year. Is this sustainable for more than five years without causing harm to the economy? I don’t know. All I know is that a business run by a CEO–Bush is the first “MBA president,” remember–whose managment produced a 3% a year loss for the stockholders for more than two or three years would see that CEO kicked to the curb feet first.
As someone who owns stock–directly AND indirectly (through my retirement plan)–I can’t say this makes me happy.
Cheers.
One Born Every Minute…
July 17, 2006
I try to limit my eBay shopping. It’s easy to get into big trouble with eBay, so I basically stick to buying laserdiscs. Yesterday, I stumbled across a trio of discs that I wanted, all posted at reasonable (ie: ridiculously low) starting bids. So I bid. I don’t play the “wait until the last minute” sniping game. I decide what I am willing to pay and that’s my maximum bid. I’ve become very disciplined about it. Other people are not so disciplined. One of the discs I was bidding on was one of the Lone Wolf and Cub samurai movies from the 1970s. I like the laserdisc editions of these movies, but, unlike the other two disc I was bidding on, this movie has a very nice DVD edition available. The starting bid was $7.99. I entered a maximum bid of $14.99. Shipping on the auction was listed as five bucks, so any higher than that, and I was shading into the the retail price of the DVD. This morning, I discovered that I was outbid. That’s fine, but the current action price is ABOVE the retail price of the DVD without figuring in the shipping charge.
To which I can only say: Chumps!
I guess it’s true what they say. A fool and his money are lucky to get together in the first place…
Happy monday.
Shine On, You Crazy Diamond…
July 11, 2006
According to this news story, Syd Barrett, co-founder of Pink Floyd has passed on. Barrett didn\’t see the band\’s glory days–a casualty of heavy drug use, he was replaced by David Gilmour shortly before they began to find wide success–but his shadow hung over the band for its entire existence. My own favorite of Barrett\’s songs was \”See Emily Play,\” later covered by David Bowie. But some of the visitors to this blog may express a preference for \”Arnold Layne:\”
Collecting clothes
Moonshine washing line
They suit him fine
On the wall hung a tall mirror
Distorted view, see through baby blue
He dug it
Oh, Arnold Layne
It\’s not the same, takes two to know
Two to know, two to know, two to know
Why can\’t you see?
Arnold Layne, Arnold Layne, Arnold Layne, Arnold Layne
Now he\’s caught – a nasty sort of person.
They gave him time
Doors bang – chain gang – he hates it
Oh, Arnold Layne
It\’s not the same, takes two to know
Two to know, two to know, two to know
Why can\’t you see?
Arnold Layne, Arnold Layne, Arnold Layne, Arnold Layne
Don\’t do it again.\”
The band itself wrote Barrett\’s epitaph some thirty years ahead of the fact:
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there\’s a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
You were caught on the crossfire of childhood and stardom, blown on the steel breeze.
Come on you target for faraway laughter, come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!
You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Threatened by shadows at night, and exposed in the light.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Well you wore out your welcome with random precision, rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver, you seer of visions, come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!\”
