==pla|\|ing lakes==

Saturday, November 15, 2003

A group of writers including ex-Python Terry Jones claim to know Who Murdered Chaucer?: A Medieval Mystery

So the last thing Arundel wanted, Jones argues, was more descriptions of rip-off churchmen. And yet here's Chaucer, using his final masterwork to make everyone laugh at the pardoner who sells fake indulgences to poor congregations; at the summoner (a church court policeman, who probably is the pardoner's significant other) demanding bribes from defendants or will-be-defendants-if-they-don't-cough-up; at the monk spending all his time hunting; and at the friar, who should be penniless but is clearly a pampered, harp-strumming social climber. In fact, it's arguable that the entirety of the Tales - with their gentle mockery of the fake piety of pilgrimages - is an assault on the "church commercial" which relied so heavily on income from pilgrims.

3:06 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Friday, November 14, 2003

"everyone was stoked when Jesus walked the earth"

Teen bible reprazents Jesus -- & makeup tips

"Teens told us the Bible is too big, intimidating, and freaky," says Laurie Whaley, 28, co-creator and spokesperson for Revolve. Whaley, who comes from a long line of pastors, earned her MBA and then joined Thomas Nelson five years ago. After teens in focus groups told her they read magazines, she persuaded the publisher to mimic that style, recruiting women in their 20s who worked with Christian youth groups to write the sidebars.

I think it's pretty freaky too, but I have all the makeup tips I need.

9:13 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

If you're having spam problems, Norton's new program looks like a good solution

12:24 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Thursday, November 13, 2003

Much good stuff at Ubuweb if you're into artaudio

Like an anthology of rare Fluxus "soundworks and interviews" and the notorious Aspen multimedia magazine of the 60s "remediated for the web".

And I guess this is where Tortoise got that long funny title for the track on their TNT album.

scanner fans go here.

11:35 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

I've read mostly widespread praise for Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, and I liked Motherless Brooklyn & Gun, With Occasional Music, so I'm sure I'll give it a spin

The Fortress of Solitude knows no literal, actual time, even though the first part, called "Underberg," ranges more or less chronologically over Dylan Ebdus's childhood, from his mother's disappearance and his father's awkward efforts to make up for her absence to the "yoking" and bullying Dylan endures on the street; his academic success; the arrival of Mingus Rude's shiftless, bible-thumping grandfather; a languid summer in Vermont; the rise of disco, punk, rap, crack, and the cataclysmic turn of events that puts an end to childhood for Dylan and Mingus both. The book is a Bildungsroman in the exact sense, the story of Dylan's self-development in the context of place and time. It's also a comedy, a history and a fantasy, where the strange and supernatural mix freely with the solid and austere, as they do in life, in memory, in everyone's autobiography.

It's a big book the reader will either love or drop, like any big book. A lot of people love this one, though.

2:07 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

"the need for love to counteract the vile wind of history that breeds loss and dislocation"

Shirley Hazzard's first book in 23 years, The Great Fire looks very relevant to our time of trembling realities, though it takes place after WWII in Japan: review

The war, in 1947, has been over for two years, but Ms. Hazzard writes its very absence into a moody presence.

This negative presence makes itself felt on a number of levels. Most explicitly, death, loss and suffering are subjects that haunt the dialogue and meditations of most of the more sympathetic characters. At the level of the prose, too, we are made to feel the recentness of great violence: Sentences drift out of and into nowhere, unstarted or unfinished; pronouns are excised to create a kind of stunted syntax, as though the war had brutalized language. And, too, the characters themselves enter the novel not so much introduced as floated into their broken-down atmosphere, as though it were not relevance to the story but rather the shock of collective experience that had assembled them.

The italicized quote above is from the Publishers Weekly review.

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

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

More on Llactapata & Machu Picchu [newsmakingnews]

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

For fans of the seminal German group Can: a 2-DVD/CD box set is available, including a concert film from '72, a short film by Brian Eno, much more [Nerve Net list]

2:36 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sunday, November 09, 2003

Interesting review of Stefan Kanfer's Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball

[Arnaz] wasn't just Cuban, dark, unintelligible, but all rhythm; he was also sexy. And this is the guy who somehow gets to be the pillar of society, the ideal family man, as well as the adoring hubby who keeps his wife's madcap ways out of electroshock treatment? Remember, this was 1951, when Lena Horne sequences got cut out of MGM films when they played the country. Put it another way: how likely do you think it would be today to have a hit sitcom in which Ving Rhames plays a successful show-business businessman and Lisa Kudrow is his half-crazy homemaker wife who can't control her dream of the limelight? I mean a mixed-race couple, married, in prime time?

[...]

The real Lucy was not the easiest company. There was a grating mixture of harsh realism and self-pity. It's what made her insist, "I am not funny. My writers were funny. My direction was funny. The situations were funny. But I am not funny. I am not funny. What I am is brave." That sort of line can turn oppressive after a while: courage is always best noted by others. Lucy had a way of seeing everything that ever happened as a burden made especially for her. It's not the least sign of the astuteness behind I Love Lucy that such scolding was kept out of the show. Not that anything ever dulled the pain or the paranoia in her eyes: the very cover of Kanfer's book, which shows Lucy in a moment of almost orgasmic, comic horror, is a valuable record of how close the eye-popping double take at domestic disaster can come to terror or madness.

Some good insights into the I Love Lucy phenomenon, and the weird, jangly marriage of reality and TV the show was.

9:59 PM - [Link] - Comments ()