==pla|\|ing lakes==

Saturday, January 04, 2003

NSFC awards: The Pianist, Walken, Diane Lane

6:43 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

More lighthearted family fare from M. Cronenberg

Early review of Spider

Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson in dual roles, shades of Eraserhead & The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

Love that twisted Canadian chill.

4:32 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

R.I.P. Ian McNaughton

Monty Python director passes from injuries in auto accident.

4:19 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Friday, January 03, 2003

If you were/are a fan of Throbbing Gristle, there's a new 24 CD(!) compilation of their live shows available from Mute

Only $286!

There'a a new studio comp (The World According to Throbbing Gristle) coming out in June too.

Boy did I get strange looks just mentioning the name Throbbing Gristle in the 70s. . .

2:05 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Appropriately astounded review of Read and Burn 02

What band could have released not one, not two, but three historic albums (in as many years), each so different from the one that came before, simultaneously spelling out the brittle aesthetics of England's burgeoning punk movement and, in nearly the same breath, eclipsing them while the rest of the pack was still busy learning to tune their guitars? What band would be willing to then walk away from the zenith of their popularity, claiming they simply didn't have another album in them, only to resurface six years later in 1987 for a string of highly dubious (but not hopeless) new-wave castaways? What band would name one of those albums Manscape? And then, what band could spend ten more years in stasis, recuperating, biding their time for their inevitable recovery, to eventually drop a set of EP's so unique, so urgent, that it's as though the band never went away in the first place? Most importantly, even one year ago, who ever would have believed that such a stunning return was possible? No one but Wire.

Actually I like A Bell Is a Cup Until It Is Struck and The Ideal Copy, but I'm an old guy.

Old enough to have seen them in '78.

Ha Ha.

1:43 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Thursday, January 02, 2003

I watched this tribute to pioneer political cartoonist Thomas Nast on C-SPAN yesterday

Perhaps David Rees is one of the heirs to the tradition (though what he does is a strip, not the traditional one frame or whatever)?

Nast also designed the image of Santa Claus as we know him today.

Other sites on the influence of Nast on van Gogh and Degas (with a selection of Nast's work) and more toons.

8:48 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

An argument for sexually segregated colleges

The author is the president of an all-girls school, so her prejudice is to be expected. But if women do get less attention and acheive less in coed schools -- well more power to them.

I guess it's my age showing, but it always seemed weird to me that Douglass College (I went to coed Rutgers College, both of them part of Rutgers University) was still for women only. A relic of Victorian repression etc.

But in the context of women still not being accorded equality in American society, and this having a negative effect on their college experience, I can see why they might choose an all-woman school.

Though I still can't help but feel the old Victorian thing creeping back in, especially with the New Imperialism of the White House setting the tone.

2:48 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Huh. The Oblongs have been on the Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" since July

If I'da known, I'd have 'em all on tape by now.

1:26 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wednesday, January 01, 2003

Wardriving

Will net access thourgh ISPs (at least in cities) soon be a thing of the past?

2:17 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

FOUND magazine

article

1:33 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Never did get around to reading Angry Young Spaceman, Jim Munroe's last novel, though I think it was available as a download and I have it somewhere on a disc. His new one Everyone in Silico may be good, but I have a feeling I'd probably agree with Donna McMahon that Pohl & Kornbluth's 1984 The Space Merchants does the job less self-consciously.

Munroe used to run Adbusters, and I kind of want to read him, but there's just too much to read now to tackle anything that isn't right on for me.

4:06 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Tuesday, December 31, 2002

Somehow I didn't get around to listing DJ Martian's superb new music site in my linx section

That's been remedied. It's really an essential stop for music lovers.

I got a referral from his site today, even though music is only a part of what I do here.

Thanks, DJ!

6:30 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sunday, December 29, 2002

According to this Donna Tartt fansite, Gwyneth Paltrow is producing and starring in a film version of The Secret History

If she's young enough to be an undergrad, I'd like to have seen Molly Parker in the role. But Jena Malone would be just right.

Not that Ms Paltrow won't do just fine. Just like to see some other faces.

6:38 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

BOOKS READ AND COMPLETED 2002 (r = reread)

Them: Adventures With Extremists      Jon Ronson
Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood (4 stories)
High Rise (r)      J G Ballard
Coldheart Canyon      Clive Barker
Episodes Before Thirty      Algernon Blackwood
Thunderbird      Susan Slater
Forty Words for Sorrow      Giles Blunt
Basket Case      Carl Hiaasen
Wild Wives      Charles Willeford
The Long Legged Fly      James Sallis
Homo Zapiens      Victor Pelevin
Neil Young: Reflections in a Broken Glass      Sylvie Simmons
The Skin Palace      Jack O'Connell
Motherless Brooklyn      Jonathan Lethem
Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press      ed. Kristina Borjesson
Dog Soldiers      Robert Stone
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (r)      Mark Twain
The Rotter's Club      Jonathan Coe
Rule by Secrecy      Jim Marrs
Man Walks Into A Room      Nicole Krauss
Crow Lake      Mary Lawson
The Butterfly Effect      Pernille Rygg
The Handmaid's Tale      Maragaret Atwood
Moth      James Sallis
A Flag for Sunrise      Robert Stone
Wild Seed      Octavia Butler
Big If      Mark Costello
The Biggest Secret      David Icke
Sideswipe      Charles Willeford
The Corrections      Jonathan Franzen
A Cold Day in Paradise      Steve Hamilton
The Very Best Men - Four Who Dared: Early Years of the CIA      Evan Thomas
Moral Hazard      Kate Jennings
The White Bone      Barbara Gowdy
Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain (1984 edit.)      Gerard Colby
Forbidden Truth: US - Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy, Saudi Arabia and the Failed Search for bin Laden      Jean-Charles Brisard & Guillaume Dasquie
The Secret History (r)      Donna Tartt
Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult      Peter Levenda
Pick-Up      Charles Willeford
Distraction (r)      Bruce Sterling
The Athenian Murders      José Carlos Somoza
Children of the Matrix      David Icke
The Way We Die Now      Charles Willeford
Up Above the World (r)      Paul Bowles

3:02 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

From Jonathan Lethem's haughty and perceptive introduction to his Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick:

Dick was a writer doomed to be himself, and the themes of his most searching and personal writing of the 1970s and early 1980s surface helplessly in even the earliest stories: the fragility of connection, the allure and risk of illusion, the poignancy of artifacts, and the necessity of carrying on in the face of the demoralizing brokenness of the world.

Boy does that sum up a good deal of my world view. . .

And explains some of the reasons why Dick is a writer I'm so fond of.

4:02 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

A pretty clear-eyed review of the new edition of David Thomson's The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

He's ambiguous about Hitchcock, very smart about Godard and positively worshipful when it comes to Howard Hawks and Kenji Mizoguchi (Kurosawa gets a mild drubbing mainly because, as the longtime Japanese director of choice on the art house-revival circuit, he has overshadowed the superior, in Thomson's opinion, Mizoguchi and Ozu).

This is all very cranky and flavorful (and occasionally witty), and not entirely without utilitarian purpose. If Bresson or Godard, for example, puzzle you, then Thomson can shed some light. When it comes to actors from the '30s, '40s and '50s, he tends to be inspired. He loves movies but will brook no conventional wisdom, being too busy constructing a personal hierarchy.

More assertive than authoritative, this so-called dictionary is more like a writer's diary, a lifetime's accumulation of critical notes and perceptive appreciations, made by a movie fan obsessed with his subject, but not blinded by love.

I agree with a lot of his opinions, and that will ultimately determine how much you like the book. The "Biography" of the title is as much of Thomson as of the movies.

On the other hand, he's just very, very good, and you'll most likely learn much by reading him, no matter how much you know about film.

2:28 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Review of Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity

...we enter the three central female characters from the inside out -- examining the world from their temporarily less-than-clear gaze, as they grope toward some inconclusive (but improving) insight, a process that seems both messily organic and razor-sharp. Personal Velocity is a series of small surprises that taken together are exhilarating.

Starring Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey and Fairuza Balk.

Rebecca Miller's first film was the well-received but too weird for release Angela in '95, which certainly sounds worth seeking out. It was just released on video/DVD apparently.

2:10 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Ambivalent, neurotic plush toys for adults

It's er about time. . .

1:47 AM - [Link] - Comments ()