fine whine

It's not much after midnight and I have finished Things my girlfriend and I have argued about, and I have to say that I enjoyed it to the end, sudden though it may have been. Just as I was unhappy with the way Houellebecq wrapped up Platform but I felt that the choice was appropriate, Millington stops the action just where it only could stop, but without leaving anything hanging. To be honest there are many threads unresolved, but the enjoyment of the book is not contingent on knowing how everything resolves—it's all about the ride. Anyway, Mil's site serves as something of a companion piece to the book, despite having in fact been created first. According to the back cover, it's been accorded some cult status, though I think the cover is to be taken with several grains of salt. After all, despite being billed as both funny and affectionate, the book really is much funnier than affectionate. It oozes funny, especially to me at this late hour, but the affectionateness isn't really there in such form. It's perhaps buried under layers and layers of sarcasm and biting wit, but it's nowhere near as prominent as the funny bits. The quote may have well said "both funny and about roofing repairs" and have been just as accurate, if not quite as catchy. Nobody sells books talking about roof repairs, I'd wager.

And with that, it's bedtime. It may be tomorrow according to the date several lines above, but to me it's still tonight and moreover late tonight. So goodnight.

As I mentioned yesterday, the flat tire fairy had visited us again over the weekend and true to form I had not noticed it until Sunday, the day nobody sells tires. Well that is not true as I could have limped up to a Sam's or Wal-Mart, or maybe even an NTB for their week-wide service, but none were close and moreover I wanted to once again have four matched tires at the same time. More than being just some simple ambition for me, having a full set was something that I didn't always have on my cars. My Tempo1 had once suffered a mishap involving a superslick sheet of ice and a concrete parking lot barrier, such that the measured wheelbase was different for each side of the car. Needless to say this caused problems, namely that one tire wore significantly faster than the others. So eventually we figured out to save money we could buy used tires and get the same wear for less moola—more bang for our buck, as it were, ha ha ha. I generally only use "bang" in the same sentences as "tires" when talking about my bike, you see, as it too has had flat issues this year.

I thought my mismatched days were over when I bought the Galant, but alas, within a month of moving to Columbus I had another flat, manifesting itself again on a Sunday. In total I have had three flat tires on this car in this city, all in the same parking spot even, I think. This most recent one was the resilient black sheep of my previous batch of tires (presumably the ones starting at mile zero and ending at the forty-odd thousand for me) that had in fact once been flat and plugged, successfully. I had gone to replace two of them that were balder and gotten a third out of the deal because of a slipped machine gnawing the last non-bald and un-plugged tire to useless bits. For many months I drove with three new tires and one old, but it finally gave up the goat and now all four match.

The problem in getting it today, though, was twofold. First, the place that I usually went apparently had closed and the nearest franchise was out of the right size. So I had to drive back home and kill a couple hours before the shop was restocked. Not feeling so hot I laid down (after briefly considering some cleaning) and watched The big picture with Kevin Bacon, J.T. Walsh, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and a bunch of jokes that fell flat, and more. It was supposed to be a biting satiric farce about moviemaking and the culture of Hollywood cinema, but either the ensuing years (it was made in 1988) dulled the humor (likely) or the jokes never were so great (also likely). I was left with both the sense that I hadn't "gotten" everything but could recognize when something was to be gotten, and also that it was a pale shadow of Altman's The player, of which I am not really fond either. I think the moviemakers making movies about moviemaking aren't coming up with anything new, at least not that would be accessible to a broad audience. I think for themselves especially, and for some of us, they need to add another layer of distance, to make movies about making movies about making movies. Thus the final film would follow around a filmmaker making a film about making films. This sounds absurd but I am serious: this is an untapped niche for cinematic genius. If Hollywood ever realizes that sequels, remakes and adaptations aren't enough, here's something for them to try, and I'm sure they will. Mark my words.

Speaking of words, I polished off Margie Atwood's Oryx and Crake today. Up until the end it was pretty decent, even for a nonlinear book. Generally I'm not a fan, but the way she weaved past and present (near future and not so near future?) worked quite well. My only complaint (which isn't a new complaint for me) is that of its ending, or lack thereof. The whole last chapter thing sets up a new event and basically stops with something interesting about to happen. It frustrates me to have happily gotten so far only to be let down by an unnecessary tacked-on ending, almost as though the author's setting up for a sequel, but the opening in the end isn't big enough for a short story with many of its possibilities. I doubt there's an Oryx and Crake II in the works, which is slightly unfortunate because the world in the book begs to be explored more fully.

Yesterday I finished Houellebecq's Platform and was rather impressed with it. Despite many explicit sex scenes (it seems the narrator was obsessed with sexual gratification) the book was rather well put together and kept my interest. It too did not have an ending to my satisfaction but it was, alas, appropriate for the book's tone and theme, I think. The best parts were moments of great perception and sharp wit among dry commentary about diverse topics of group sociology (as if there were any other) and a dissection of the typical American best seller, in this case specifically Grisham's The firm. Platform's definitely an adult book and I would be hesitant to recommend it unsolicited, but if anybody asked me if it were worth reading I would likely give it a nod to all but the most obviously squeamish. And I'll be reading his other books, eventually.

Also in book news, Paul Davidson, author of Consumer Joe, dropped by my site and left a comment on my entry mentioning it. Which is pretty cool; I can only wonder how he came across my site. I'll give the book a read and probably drop him an email afterward. Amazing thing, this internet.

1(1990-2001) Rev2 in peace, old friend.

2In the end revving was all that it could do, unless Reverend Jim3 has since fixed it up. The transmission's shot.

3The guy's name really was Jim and he was Reverend at the South Side Ministry, which generously gave my dad a tax write off for the car, as well as hauling it off.

So I posted nothing yesterday; I hope that nobody has died from forsaking food and drink to continually refresh my page over and over again in fervent anticipation of further blathering nonsense. I have been busy, but that is no excuse, really. This is my blog, though, and I make the rules—I can post whenever I want. So there.

Anyway I have been doing a whole bunch of stereotypically nerdy things, at least the way I see nerds. Yesterday night I was up late, much later than my bedtime, banging out a new layout for this blog including the now cliched left top corner piece of stock photography. I mean that not as a criticism but as an observation, as I am doing mine to be cool and not kitschy or post-hip. Alas, in doing so I am hitting the wall of every burgeoning web designer, that of browser incompatibility. I developed the somewhat difficult (though simple looking) layout using Safari on the Mac, and as soon as I was happy enough with it I tried loading the same in Internet Explorer, which was a spectacular failure. Nothing lined up and the image, that for which this whole exercise had begun, was nowhere to be found. I was crushed. Expecting no better I loaded it up in Opera, which, true to form for being a sleek and efficient browser, crashed and burned before even trying to show the page. Par for the course. It loaded okay but not as perfectly in the browsers on my PC, but I'm not happy having it look bad on a bunch of systems. That said I could likely poll all three of my readers and find out what they're using and hack my CSS accordingly. So that was that.

Yesterday I also finished Michel Houellebecq's Platform (well, the excellent English translation thereof) but that it not in line with the rest of this entry so I will have to talk about that brilliant, yet disturbing book some other time. Go read it, though, it's very literary. Today I began a book based on an offhand recommendation from a website (well, boingboing) so that's pretty geeky, right? It's Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and it's really pretty interesting so far, my bias against women science fiction authors notwithstanding.

I mean no offense by it, but it seems that men write better science fiction as far as I have read. I know that there are good science fiction authors that happen to be women out there, but I haven't stumbled on them yet. I have of course run through many a bad male author, so really the problem is of bad SF in general and not gender at all. So it is with pleasant surprise that I am enjoying this book.

I am not enjoying having had another flat tire, but that too is outside the realm of this narrative and I will only talk about it once it all has been resolved. So stay tuned... but do make sure that you are properly stocked with food and water, please.

My geekiness continues with today's playing of an hour or so's worth of collectible card games and then three solid hours at the local Gameworks, which is something like Chuck-E-Cheese's for adults but they kept skee-ball. Jessica was stuck to the skee-ball and other ticket-producing machines for the whole time, but I was making the best of my company's holiday hospitality by playing all of the otherwise expensive arcade games. Generally I can only play things that involve shooting or driving, and they had numerous options for both. They had every iteration of both the Time crisis and House of the dead series so I got in a lot of shooting. I even was able to monopolize both sides of Time Crisis 2 and House of the dead once or twice so I could live out my double pistol John Woo dreams. To play both sides of TC2, including the ducking with the pedals, is truly an experience to, er, experience. Especially when somebody else is picking up the credits. Beating them brought the same satisfaction and relief I had remembered. I fared a little worse on the driving games, but my heart wasn't in them after losing a four-lap Indianapolis "500" on the last leg of the last lap. Before the party was over I also got to do several minutes of a rollercoaster simulator which was really cool but the picture was blurry, though that didn't detract from the thrill. What did, somewhat, detract was the ride's inclusion of fake "danger" elements, like a swinging blade and other pointy things just outside of where safety ends. Those didn't really add anything for me, but hey, it was free. The last game I played was called something along the lines of "vertical reality" and though it too had focus troubles it was very fun. The game is played on lifting chairs that rise and fall up to some ten or twenty feet (oh, the wonders of pneumatics!) and the premise was something about popping hot air balloons. I had never played it but nevertheless triumphed over the two small girls and one guy who played with me. I beat him by the total of the other two combined, I think, and had a blast once I got the hang of the game. That one I might pay to play, sometime. And the whole time Gauntlet legends: dark legacy sat in the corner, unplayed. Sadly, I too did not play it but really should have, as I have long enjoyed pumping quarters endlessly into the Gauntlet games in all their incarnations.

That's really not that geeky, in toto, just CCGing, going to the arcade and playing with HTML. Round that out with a bunch of Dynasty warriors 3 on the PS2 and Grand theft auto: Vice city on the PC and what do you have? Me and my long winded account of why I haven't blathered on about anything else the last couple days.

Oh, and I've been correcting my spelling a lot more lately. Between this and the book it has been atrocious lately, so bear with me if that bothers you. I will not stoop to spellchecking these entries, though I know at least one MT plugin supports that.

Well, I've faltered. I wrote nothing at all for my novel on Saturday, and my parents are visiting Sunday. I didn't even keep up my ideal writing pace for a week. Nothing else important happened in said week either, except maybe for some restructurings at work (leaving me effectively where I've been) and Jessica getting serious job prospects. Like I said, nothing important.

Oh, I did finish reading White noise by Don DeLillo and Gun, with occasional music by Johnathan Lethem. The former was amusing, the latter was utterly brilliant. My novel looks like a worse idea the more this month goes on...

Well, I just finished watching Formula 51, with Sam Jackson, Robert Carlyle, Rhys Ifans, Meat Loaf and scads more recognizable people. I enjoyed it greatly. From beginning to end it was an enjoyable ride. At times it was absurd, very often hilarious, at others brilliant and only occasionally slightly disappointing — I'm no fan of the textish sort of ending that marred Unbreakable — but it was always stylish and all the while I really liked it. I'm reminded in part of my thoughts regarding The Transporter: here was another stylish film that wasn't quite as intelligent as its swaggering would imply, but still it made mainstream fare look like Steamboat Willie in comparison. See also The Salton sea. When my wife wants to watch a movie she means one that doesn't require thinking or full attention, such as anything Reese Whitherspoon's done lately. When I want to watch a movie I want it to be smart but fun. Like Formula 51.

What is it that makes these films so enjoyable? Stylistic near-excess? Explosions and car chases? Really I think it boils down to how much fun those involved admit to having had. EPKs and supplemental materials have the actors and crew flat out boasting to loving the whole process and its resultant celluloid wonder. I'm sure counter-examples exist, but I doubt they'd be able to dig up some archival footage of Bob Hope crowing about how fantastic the making of Ishtar turned out to be.

Of course you realize the whole point of this entry was to use "dig up" and "Bob hope" in the same sentence, har har har.

I'm happy to have found some good entertainment lately. I watched The transporter with Jason Stratham and it was quite good (for what it was). I only had one criticism — a car exploded too, er, explosively. Otherwise it was well paced, not too kung-fu heavy and didn't get bogged down in irrelevant plot diversions. It's not a thinker's classic but I enjoyed it very much. So that's that. My recent discovery of the Diablo series of games also means I'm getting less sleep.

That said, I've still been reading several good books lately. A good number of them deal with commercialism, advertising or capitalism gone awry: Max Barry's Syrup and Jennifer Government, Jim Munroe's (of AdBusters fame) Everyone in silico, and now Alex Shakur's The savage girl. I liked them all and would recommend any or all of them to anybody with a shred of intelligence and an accompaning sense of humor.

So anyway, in The savage girl Alex Shakur introduces the concept of "paradessence": the paradoxical essence of a thing. Identifying the paradessence of a commodity is the key to its branding and selling. For example, the paradessence of Wi-Fi (does anybody seriously use that term? really?) is that it grants the freedom to move around at will while still being tethered to a computer. That's somewhat of a weak example, but it's Alex's term, not mine, and he explains it better on this page of the book's abandoned site.

And as I said before, I've been watching movies. Some haven't been quite as good as the books I'm reading, and one in particular made me think for a moment. As soon as I saw the title screen for Star trek: the motion picture I was struck by its innate paradessence. Here is a movie about the distant, technologically advanced future, and they refer to it as a "motion picture", a quaint term that was pretty dated, even in 1972. Does it fit? I'm not sure. Paradessence or not, it's definitely an odd mix. And it's a pretty dull movie, too.