whew you guys i’m back from china.

The Fire Escape is doing its best to retain its title as the best venue in Sacramento to see horribly-named bands.  Who knew that Sex Rat was a high point in Fire Escape band nomenclature?  This recent, 100% real sampling seems to fit into three broad categories:

1. bodily functions/diseases/gross out: 

Contagious; Mucus Membrane; Sleepnoise (a reference to sleep apnea?)

2. BAAAADDDDDDAAAAASSSSSSSS!: 

Embryonic Devourment (also fits into category #1); Stonehead; Scowndrolls; Malevolent 

3.  Damn the man/futile rebellion:

Lessons in Failure (as in, “these Fire Escape-gigging bands are…”); How Dare the Dawn (“God damn you, sun! Why do you insist on rising?!”)   

Not much going on. Renewed the domain a day or two ago.

I went to borders to see if I could find ross’s latest book but it wasn’t there, so I just hung around the manga aisle like I was totally cool.

Toda a América [All of America], by Ronald de Carvalho.  Published in 1926, this is one Brazilian poet’s impressionistic attempt at describing a nascent, distinctly American identity that would bring together geographic regions, races, languages – everything (hence the book’s title).  There are some winning lines in this volume, and the project is interesting on a conceptual level as well, given the traditional lack of Americanist/continentally-themed literary production in Brazil.  Nietzsche and Italian futurism excerpt appreciable intellectual influence, with Carvalho praising the destructive energy of American industrial growth and cultural encounter in heroic terms.  Not the most ethically appealing position, in retrospect (see: fascism), but evidently aimed at invigorating the otherwise potentially staid topic of pan-American unity.  Then again, José Martí did the same his essay “Nuestra América” [Our America, 1891], without the same degree of fascistic subtext.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.  I plowed through this post-apocalyptic novel in two days, a function of lots of free time, not a lot of print per page, and a compelling if consistently frightening and depressing plot.  McCarthy may take the prize for most enduring of the recent run of post-apocalyptic novels and films reflecting the decidedly pessimistic mood in our culture (see Saramago’s Blindness, Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Children of Men, I Am Legend, that recent Scottish zombie movie, etc.).  McCarthy deliberately avoids the fanboy particulars of the apocalypse (nuclear winter is alluded to, never specified, cannibalistic gangs appear in passing, but are never explored in Mad Max-like detail), instead focusing on the relationship between a father and son trying to survive by scavenging the scattered remains of a dead civilization.  The language is Faulknerian-biblical without William F.’s exuberant verbiage, and the novel reads, if you want it to, as religious allegory or mythological tale.  Stark, well-fashioned, often brutal.

Collapse, by Jared Diamond.  To summarize a long book, Collapse attempts to find underlying patterns in various cultures’ apparently mysterious collapses, and from what I have read so far, ultimately points the finger at poor land and resource management, group prejudices and traditions that predispose cultures in new environments  to make poor decisions, and general lack of foresight and effective group decision-making (like the Norse, who attempted to graze sheep in Greenland).  Unforeseeable disasters (hurricanes, earthquakes, prolonged droughts, etc.) tend to finish off otherwise compromised groups.  While Diamond is praised for presenting complex arguments via accessible language, I find his writing style annoyingly long-winded and somewhat dry.  And his argument, while broadly convincing, tends somewhat logically toward environmental determinism and on balance discounts cultural particularities. Yes, Easter Island’s topography likely predisposed its Polynesian inhabitants to a decentralized political structure that provided an impetus for competitive moai (i.e. giant head) construction by chiefs vying for influence, but rivalry between elites could have manifested itself in other ways that might have been less environmentally destructive.  Beyond topography and available resources, cultural inheritance and good old individual personality were obviously at play in the birth of the moai, though these elements are difficult to fold into arguments based on quantifiable data, which explains why Diamond may tend to avoid them.

There has definitely been a podcast drought here of late. Anyway, thought I’d call attention to ross’s latest.

I was going to write an essay about why I think music probably has a deleterious effect on most peoples lives. Anyway, then I found this video. I’ll let you make up your own minds on it. Gotta give a shout out to anime world order podcast. My favorite new podcast, very informative. The song doesn’t really get started until after a minute so make sure not to give up during the synthesizer introduction.

Sometimes when I’m digging around doing research I come across things that have absolutely nothing to do with my project, are generally unimportant, but nonetheless satisfy my interest in obscure anecdotes and juvenile humor.  So if you’ve ever wondered, “were the Red Hot Chili Peppers the first people to turn ‘California’ into a dirty word – i.e. californication?” you can rest assured that the answer is no.  

In 1924, Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959), Mexican writer, essayist, and guest star in my book project, wrote the following dirty poem about a friend who had recently gone to California:

Partió a California un día:

            Dizque iba a examinar.

            Según otra teoría

            se fue a cali-forni-car.” 

So there you go: Alfonso Reyes 1, Red Hot Chili Peppers 0.

In keeping with the spirit of rob’s recently formulated theory I thought I’d write a post listing some things that I find annoying. Maybe you can share some of your own in the comments

1. That animation style that seems to be used in every cartoon network show where all the characters are super deformed, drawn with thick black outlines and have hair that looks like Mr. Noisy’s shoes.
2. BBC Headlines. I always look at the rss feed because I think it’s default in firefox. Pretty obvious that they consciously try to rearrange the grammar so that the structure of the headlines is not all the same. Results in a bunch of elliptical phrasing. Also, quotations around everything. Words in the title that only make sense with reading the article.
3. Special Google Banners. Too many of them. It’s not like this really causes me any problems. I just feel they are so pretentious.
4. Anybody who says the new gi joe or transformers movies are about selling toys. they sold us the toys 20 years ago.

Thought I should write an update. Don’t have anything specific to report.

Been trying to put another podcast together. Sent darren an email and everything but he’s presently ignoring me for whatever reason. I’ve been wondering if we should continue with it. I sort of feel that my interests in the past few months have skewed so far from everbody else here that there’s no way to talk about something that will be uniformly interesting to everybody.

I don’t know, any suggestions?

I think this amv is really beautiful.

(more…)

It’s sad that John Hughes, director and/or writer of three memorable films – The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, along with some others I haven’t seen or don’t like as much – is gone.  I wish I had a more coherent take on his films, but I don’t.  I just liked his stuff, which I don’t think is an atypical reaction, given the sense of fun that runs through his movies, a joyfulness he skillfully tempered at his best moments with a perceptive intelligence and an ironic melancholy.  So whatever I think about his films is guided by this first and foremost: I like his movies, especially the three mentioned above.  

A.O. Scott, in a post mortem (“The 80’s Auteur of Teenage Angst,” New York Times, 8 August), was correct in observing that Hughes left a lot out of his films.  Hughes inhabited a very particular cinematic world, located in an amusingly off-kilter version of Chicago’s affluent North Shore suburbs.  Race, among other big-picture issues, is conspicuously absent from his movies, except for the occasional facile caricature (see the Japanese exchange student in Sixteen Candles).  Then again, as Scott points out, American suburbia is, in its aspiration if not in reality, homogenous and white.

If Hughes dropped the proverbial ball on race and to a lesser extent, on gender (his female characters, even at their most willful, are focused Jane Austen-style on romantic love), he did much better in exposing suburbia’s other hypocrisies, often through gentle humor, and sometimes through rather savage critique.  Class tensions are all over Hughes’s movies, particularly Pretty in Pink, and Hughes should be credited for weaving both the crass materialism of the Reagan era and the aristocratic pretensions of the McMansion set into movies marketed and received as teen comedies.

Then there’s the angst, which runs deeper than the romantic woes of his movies’ adolescent stars.  This is nowhere better illustrated – and I know I’m going out on a limb here – in Ferris Bueller.  As much as Bueller’s day of hooky and urban exploration is an exercise in teenage kicks, it’s also a revealing illustration of some of life’s most depressing features: the ultimate futility of rebellion (Ferris, after all, has to go back to school at some point), the meaningless of much of day-to-day activity when seen from outside (recall Ferris and Co.’s look at the commotion on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange), and the indecisiveness that plagues so many of us and that, I suspect, is hard-wired into our DNA.  Then again, even if Ferris Bueller is ultimately as much tragic as it is comic, there’s meaning to be had in Ferris’s light-hearted railing against the limitations that fence him – and all of us – in.

And the music in those movies was fantastic – I’ll forgive Hughes or whoever is responsible for insisting on a sanitized version of the Psychedelic Furs song for the title sequence of Pretty in Pink.  John Hughes will be missed.