Obsolete Your Idols

Shelled Game

So this is my review of Sicko.

Well, it was going to be. When I started my day, I was planning to see Sicko as my third and final documentary of the day. But then a funny thing happened. Vy had joined me for dinner and we walked past the Gaia Arts Center hunting the wily burrito. Lo, and likewise, behold, it was Documentary Tuesday at the Center. That meant a free showing of Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room!

I'd been meaning to see this one since I first saw trailers for it, but I don't normally go to the movies. Or so it seems to me. So we jumped at this chance. Or I did and Vy humored me.

My take on Enron: a symptom of the problem.

The problem: systems built to diffuse responsibility combined with pursuit of money above all other concerns. It's a triumph of single minded obsession lauded as an individual and group virtue. It's sick and it's disgusting and it's how things work.

Pissed me off.

posted at 08:52 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: documentary, movie, review

Quarter for your Thoughts

The King of Kong: a Fistful of Quarters was the second movie I saw. Again, a documentary. Again, highly rated at Rotten Tomatoes. Even better, it had things in it I'd actually seen. There's a video game tournament from 1982 ... in Ottumwa, Iowa.

You know, where we used to have to roll up the window to drive past the Hormel plant so we wouldn't gag from the stench.

Oh, yes. I've been to Ottumwa. I even remember when that tournament happened. I wasn't allowed anywhere near it, of course.

Just as I remember the Twin Galaxies video game arcade in Fairfield, Iowa. I remember going in to it and being dazzled by the options, the lights, the sound. I remember staring at those boxes and knowing that inside of each one there was a simple computer doing all of the work I was perceiving as sound and sight.

I was in there once and then never again. I suppose I must have not shut up about it in a way which worried my parents that I'd fall into the trap of pouring a lot of money (not that I had any) into the machines. But I did go in once and it was amazing.

There's also some bits about Transcendental Money-extraction in the movie which is just as creepy now as it was when I was living right next to it.

I didn't recognize any of the current day streets of Fairfield stuff but how would I? So much has changed. The last time I visited, I didn't even recognize much of the stuff on the main drag. I could find my way to the schools I'd gone to and that's about it.

But this documentary isn't really about Fairfield, it's about playing arcade video games competitively. It's about doing whatever it takes to win, including estranging your wife, neglecting your kids, social engineering, acting through proxies, playing mind games, and spending hours a day playing. This story starts off playing for laughs, gets unseemly pretty quickly, and turns into something of an underdog tale.

Very good movie for the nerd set, the retro gaming set, or people who like barbecue sauce.

Not so good for people who never saw classic video arcades, don't care about video games or who think dude rivalry films need guns to be worth watching.

posted at 08:17 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: game, movie, retro, review, video game

Darkest Noon

Yesterday I saw three documentaries. The first one was one named The Devil Came on Horseback. I chose it on the basis of the Rotten Tomatoes rating it had: 96%. That's a pretty amazing score for a documentary.

It's an amazing documentary. It's brutal, bleak, tragic with dashes of hope and optimism. It really moved me with pity and compassion for the suffering the people of the Darfur region of Sudan suffer at the hands of their own government.

This movie is brutal but should be mandatory viewing for any citizen of the world.

posted at 23:47 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: darfur, genocide, movie, review

Spreading It Thin

Hey, I finally took Tim's bait and got myself a tumblelog. I don't know what I'll actually do with it; so far I just seem to be using it to scare myself and scar others.

Its rss feed is stuffed into the landing page at the top of my [site] [manj] as well.

Oh, and I got myself a myspace account, too. No connection there, just catching up on things I did while I was fiddling around online.

Do I need a page to list all the places I am online, yet? Have I achieved Social Network Saturation? I've got my fingers in everybody's pie.

posted at 23:05 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: feed, rss, social, systemic

Mental Health Will Drive You to the Movies

Tomorrow I'm planning to Not Work.

I'm going to stave off work burn-out by turning off my cell phone and going to a movie. Then another movie. Then a third movie.

They're all documentaries and I'll see if I can survive on movie theater food. It'll be relaxing and scientific.

posted at 22:36 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: documentary, Frankie say relax, movie

Magic and Illusion

Last night we went to the Lesher Center for the Arts for a magic show by Gerald Joseph. When I was a kid I was enamored of Erich Weiss and read all I could about him, including what I think must have been this book as it seems to have illustrations of his escapes.

I had let my interest in stage magic languish over the years but when Vy spotted a local magic show I knew I had to see it.

So the good first

• Gerald Joseph has great kid management skills
• Gerald Joseph has pretty decent patter
• Gerald Joseph has excellent stage presence
• Harry Houdini was referenced during the show

The bad

• there was not one illusion I had not seen before in one form or another
• this was clearly targeting the family-and-kids crowd and I don't know if you know this but kids are freaking annoying

Also, and not part of the show, but part of the venue, there is an awesome if small art display on the ground floor. Admission to it was free because we were ticket holders for an event there and it was well worth the wander to look at Carny art (this URL will cease to be useful at some future point when it's no longer the current exhibit; they don't seem to support linking to permanent descriptions of exhibits) and even handle some old school arcade games, where they had actual payouts of a gum-ball, not always conditional upon success.

posted at 14:15 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: bayarea, magic, performance

Dog Meet Dog World

The book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is not science-fiction but it is fiction. I'd previously read The Speed of Dark and I can't help but compare the two (compare, not contrast).

Both have autistic narrators as protagonists. Both feature simple narratives and focus on the kinds of situations which one assumes to be simple for non-autistic people to navigate but which are shown to be challenging for the functional autistic people in our societies.

So what did The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time bring which was usefully new? Some ruminations on how absolutely brutally difficult it is to assimilate betrayal into one's mindset if one has little to no emotional empathy. The implication here being that with a sense of why someone might do or say to express complex emotional states, it becomes possible to perceive a gradation of excusable behavior.

So in that reading, this book is not really about an autistic sense of the world, it's more a narrative about how people are constantly committing betrayals of one another, great and small, for the most justifiable of reasons and they are able to do this because of a deep sense of emotional empathy. Because I suspect some fact may harm another, I choose not to reveal it or perhaps I reveal it partially or perhaps I even obfuscate that fact to hide it from the person who I suspect it may harm.

But the world is a multi-vector space.

Even if I never reveal the fact, the potentially harmed person may learn it in some other way. The impact may be heightened if they can learn or deduce that I kept the information from them.

That's the message I took away from this book and that's much deeper than the textual narrative. I don't know that that's something the author put into it on purpose but it's something I feel free to take from it as a late modernist period reader (tangentially, we are not yet post-modern because I haven't seen anyone actually being over modernism; we're junkies in denial, not remission) and that explanatory framing of this story made it an enjoyable read for me, after the fact. During the reading, the story was interesting but had no real accelerant quality to motivate me to read it faster and faster.

Interestingly, this is a book which a record number of co-workers had already read (TWO of them) before I did and both of them loved it and raved about it. They're not especially genre readers so this book is probably pretty accessible to people who hate the other books I write about having read.

(I also read Secrets and Lies in the interim but nobody cares about my take on that as it is the anticipated response.)

Who might like this book

• genre-haters who like books with a little different spin
• people who like to read about children and broken homes
• people who like bite-sized math facts

Who might not

• dog-lovers with sensitive constitutions

Overall, a not very challenging, easy read of a book. It even has pictures and some fun math bits.

posted at 10:28 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: autism, novel, review

This Ending is Not Available in Stores

If I knew a strange story of something which happened to me but rather than tell you that story I told you a story about telling you the story of the strange events which transpired, it would be a form of story not entirely unlike Kelly Link telling you stories as she does in stranger things happen which I just read. This is not an explanation of her stories, this is not even an explanation of my experience of her stories but it does seem to indicate an almost irrepressible urge to take on some of the practices of her writing in shallow form when writing about her writing.

It's all very meta-, you see.

There's a blurb on the cover and it's by Jonathan Lethem and it seems to me to be Jonathan Lethem writing about Kelly Link as if he were Kelly Link writing about someone else (who has the same name as Kelly Link) but is not the Kelly Link about whom Kelly Link (in her guise as Jonathan Lethem) is writing. It says

Kelly Link is the exact best and strangest and funniest short story writer on earth that you have never heard of at the exact moment you are reading these words and making them slightly inexact. Now pay for the book.

When I read that blurb, before reading the stories in the book, I thought What a curious way to say that and it didn't sound very much like the Jonathan Lethem books I've read but now that I've read this collection of stories, I think it's very much like something Kelly Link might say about her writing if she were someone else.

This collection has eleven stories. Here are some brief notes about them.

• Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. When this story was over, I wanted to watch The World According to Garp. It seems representative of Kelly Link stories to me, in that it has a protagonist who is unclear on their origin, motives, and environment.
• Water Off a Black Dog's Back. This is a moral tale about not fucking people you meet in libraries. Or a cautionary tale about being sure to lose things you care about before it's too late. I'm not entirely sure.
• The Specialist's Hat. I can give this story no higher praise than to say: this story could have been written by Vy.
• Flying Lessons. This is a good story for people who want to run certain kinds of Unknown Armies games or for people who like a kind of glib knowing modernization of Greek myths.
• Travels with the Snow Queen. I guess it's a fairy anti-fairy tale but I didn't really care for it very much.
• Vanishing Act. I have no response to this story. I think that I don't get it.
• Survivor's Ball, or, The Donner Party. I have been waiting all my life for someone to write a story based on this joke premise. It's everything I dreamed it would be, almost. Needed more rough sex.
• Shoe and Marriage. This story seems like a writing experiment. The last part was the best part. The Miss Kansas bit was also pretty good.
• Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water. I think this is my favorite story in this collection. Sadly, nothing happens, so I can't tell you what happens in it. There are some phone conversations and some emotions, mostly sadness and lust and love. You should read this story sometime with whiskey and if you think it's you I'm talking to, yes, you're right.
• Louise's Ghost. Another story which makes me think it's the result of Kelly writing a writing experiment along the lines of "how can I have a story with two characters of the same name?" Given how reasonable an explanation that seems to me, I'm pretty sure that's not what she did here. But it's got some fetishization of cellists so, hooray for that.
• The Girl Detective. I guess this is the story everybody loves. Shortest response: I'm not everybody.

So this collection is totally readable and not at all hostile. It is friendly but doesn't know what to say to you, quite, when it sees you in the hallway of conventions. Do I read too much in to it? Very well, I read too much in to it.

I liked this collection but I am looking forward to having my own thought patterns reassert themselves.

People who might especially like these stories.

• writers who are serious about their craft
• writers who are frivolous about their craft
• people who are or suspect they may be dead

So now I have read something by Kelly Link, only three months after I could have talked to her about it; there is always next year, but I still don't think I know anything to say she won't already have heard. Many of the things I enjoy in her writing are things I enjoy in Vy's writing. The few things I don't enjoy I attribute to my not getting some underlying mechanism of narrative.

Kelly Link: she is thinking harder about her stories than you are.

posted at 22:14 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: book, people i know, review

Stick It In Your Ear, You Know You Want To

I haven't been listening to a lot of music, lately. I busted both my primary and my auxiliary pair of headphones. Now I've got an excuse to buy some new ones: Magnatune's The Art of Persuasion.

Oh, and it doesn't hurt that Brad Sucks has not one but two compilations of remixes out now.

posted at 09:36 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: music