The temps are almost above freezing, here at the stately Virtual Memories manor! That means this week’s links are just about to thaw!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Jan. 23, 2009”
To a Boyle
I was listening to The B.S. Report — the podcast by Bill Simmons, a.k.a. Sports Guy — in my car yesterday. Simmons was talking with “Cousin Sal” about the weekend’s football games, when the talk turned to the recent spate of Oscar-worthy movies they’d seen.
On over-the-air sports radio, which I haven’t listened to in several years, I would get pretty incensed when Mike & the Mad Dog would spend 20 minutes talking about last night’s episode of The Sopranos, John Wayne flicks, or why the remake of Sabrina was much better than the original.
(I’m not making up that last one. It led to the immortal line by Chris “Mad Dog” Russo, “I don’t see why people were so ga-ga over Audrey Hepburn,” confirming my suspicion that a too-excessive interest in sports is clearly a symptom of repressed homosexuality.)
With Simmons and his cousin, on the other hand, I was interested in their opinions and their looser takes on the movies. Also, both of them have worked as comedy writers for Jimmy Kimmel’s show, so I figured they may have funny stories about some of the flicks.
While they praised The Wrestler pretty highly — Sal watched a DVD screener of it with his new pal Roddy Piper — both men considered Slumdog Millionaire the best movie they saw last year.
And that’s when it struck me: I’ve been watching Danny Boyle’s movies for 12 years now, through the ups (Shallow Grave, Trainspotting) and downs (A Life Less Ordinary, The Beach) and a lesser-seen gem (Millions). At no point did I ever think he was headed for some sort of mainstream approval.
And now he’s made a movie that a couple of sports-betting maniacs from Boston consider the best flick of the year. This world is full of wonders.
Pardon the Interruption
I was happy to see that our new president made the same flub in his oath of office that I did during my marriage vows, speaking before the officiant finished his first line. I’m also happy that our officiant did a better job of keeping his composure than Chief Justice Roberts did.
I thought his inauguration address as a bit flat, but I suppose it makes sense: Obama’s high-flying rhetorical style is more fitting for a campaign, and yesterday’s event was an occasion for letting the American people know what challenges lie ahead, or something like that. Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic did a pretty good job of rhetorical annotation of the address here and here.
Anyway, the subject that interested me in the last days of the Bush regime was that of pardons. The previous president, we recall, got into some hot water with the late pardon of Marc Rich, which turned out to be of a piece with the Clintons’ “it’s all for sale!” regime.
Pres. Bush’s final pardons — commutations, to be exact — were for a pair of border patrol agents who shot an unarmed man in the back and tried to hide the evidence. Taking a stand against mandatory minimum sentences — in a drug crime, no less! — the president determined that the two men had served enough time for shooting an unarmed man in the back and trying to hide the evidence.
The fact that Pres. Bush issued fewer pardons and commutations than any other two-termer should come as no surprise, given his record on executions while governor of Texas. But I admit that I was curious about whether he would revisit the case of the American Taliban, John Walker Lindh.
I have a fascination for people who have gone so far from “normal” that they become nearly unrecognizable. Lindh is one of those personae, having followed a path from a comfortable suburban life to a fetid basement of a prison in Afghanistan, at the age of 20. How does someone get alienated from his life that he winds up in a world so far from his ken?
A year or two later, Lindh was in the Supermax prison, having taken a plea agreement in which he agreed to make no public statements for the duration of his sentence (17-20 years, depending on good behavior), and to drop any claims that he’d been tortured after he was captured. (He’s in a medium security facility in Indiana now.)
And it’s that aspect of the case that made me wonder if the former president would commute Lindh’s sentence. It’s not that I think he should be excused for what he did; it’s more a question of what was done to him. I think Lindh’s case provided an  early example of how the War on Terror could lead to rampant abuse of rights, a blurring of the duties of the departments of defense and justice.
I didn’t really expect our departed president to engage in any degree of introspection about Lindh’s case, or about the bigger issues that it presaged about our government’s abuse of law in the past eight years, but it would’ve been an interesting signal if he’d chosen to revisit that case. It’s not like we’ve been dealing in nuances this decade.
Lost in the Supermarket: Whiter Teeth . . . Chicago-Style!
I always find it sad/funny when companies suffer font blowouts on their marketing materials. It’s a shame/riot to see a print ad with super-high-end photography and a tagline that renders in Courier. So my attention was caught by the packaging for something called “U SMILE”, an “advanced tooth whitening system” that employs Chicago, a Mac font that hasn’t been seen in the wild since around 1997:
Given the fact that I can’t find a website for this product, I’m inclined to think that it actually does date back to the days of that font.
Monday Morning Montaigne: On some verses of Virgil
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I had some trepidation going into On some verses of Virgil (pp. 774-831 in the Everyman’s edition), because it’s more than 50 pages long and I’ve, um, never read Virgil. My fears were unwarranted; “some” verses turned out to be 8 lines, and those 8 lines turned out to be the launching pad for a fantastic essay on love, sex and marriage. I should know better by now.
The actual verses he quotes are:
The goddess [Venus] ceased to speak, and snowy arms outflung
Around him faltering, soft fondling as she clung.
He quickly caught the wonted flame; the heat well-known
Entered his marrow, ran through every trembling bone.
Often a brilliant lightning flash, not otherwise,
Split by a thunderclap, runs through the cloudy skies
[. . .]He spoke,
Gave the embraces that she craved; then on her breast,
Outpoured at last, gave himself up to sleep and rest.
With age and ill-health are wracking him, Montaigne uses those verses to explore the passions of his past, and sums up early that erotic love has no place in marriage. Not if you want your wife to keep her wits about her. “I see no marriages that sooner are troubled and fail than those that progress my means of beauty and amorous desires,” he tells us. “It needs more solid and stable foundations, and we need to go at it circumspectly, this ebullient ardor is no good for it.”
That said, M. doesn’t portray women as scheming, evil creatures. If anything, he finds them to be victims of the rules set up by men. His women have needs, desires, and sometimes make decisions as irrationally as his men do. By essay’s end, he contends that men and women “are cast in the same mold; except for education and custom, the difference is not great.” It’s a wonderful journey to this point, as M. uncovers the parts we keep covered and shows how we’re all prisoners of sex.
What makes this essay such a joy to me isn’t just M.’s hip take on gender issues, but his explanation for why he needs to write about the topic.
I am annoyed that my essays serve the ladies only as a public article of furniture, an article for the parlor. This chapter will put me in the boudoir. I like their society when it is somewhat private; when public, it is without favor or savor.
[. . .] What has the sexual act — so natural, so necessary and so just — done to mankind, for us not to dare talk about it without shame and for us to exclude it from serious and decent conversation? We boldly pronounce the words “kill,” “rob,” “betray”; and this one we do not dare pronounce, except between our teeth. Does that mean that the less we breathe of it in words, the most we have the right to swell our thoughts with it?
It’s as if he’s building Howard Stern’s platform, four hundred years early. Later in the essay, he even complains to Nature about being unable to satisfy a woman because his penis is too small: “Certainly she has treated me unfairly and unkindly, and done me the most enormous damage.”
In Howard Stern fashion, he explains his openness:
I owe a complete portrait of myself to the public. The wisdom of my lesson is wholly in truth, in freedom, in reality; disdaining, in the list of its real duties, those pretty, feigned, customary provincial rules; altogether natural, constant and universal; of which propriety and ceremony are daughters, but bastard daughters.
[. . .] Our life is part folly, part wisdom. Whoever writes about it only reverently and according to the rules leaves out more than half of it.
I wish I had time and space to write more about M.’s character. I feel like that’s my biggest failure with these writeups: an inability to convey the joy of meeting this man through his essays.
What It Is: 1/19/09
What I’m reading: Re-reading Montaigne’s “On some verses of Virgil” and a few chapters of Cultural Amnesia
What I’m listening to: Pretty random stuff on my iTunes, as I think about compiling another Mad Mix.
What I’m watching: The 3rd season of Arrested Development
What I’m drinking: Bluecoat & tonic. And some Pacifico Clara.
What Rufus is up to: Entertaining my pal’s 3-year-old daughter, and missing another Sunday hike, thanks to the snow.
Where I’m going: Nowhere special. Although I may take today off to celebrate my black heritage, and drive into NYC to catch Synecdoche, New York.
What I’m happy about: My wife has her first commercial photo shoot today! (Also, the Eagles lost in the NFC Championship game. Again. And my wife & I had a great belated birthday dinner at Chef’s Table on Saturday.)
What I’m sad about: Will nobody think of the poor birds? (Just kidding: awesome job on landing that Airbus in the Hudson, although it would’ve been even more amazing if he could’ve landed on the deck of the Intrepid.)
What I’m pondering: Selling my 15″ Macbook Pro and using this 13″ Macbook Air as my laptop.
To reiterate
When I wrote, “It’s the quiet ones you need to worry about,” I meant Marvin Harrison: O.G.
Unrequired Reading: Jan. 16, 2009
Baby, it’s cold outside! Stay in and catch up with some Unrequired Reading!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Jan. 16, 2009”
Impressions of Air
I got a Macbook Air yesterday. It was a refurbished model from the first generation: 1.8ghz, 64gb SSD (a solid-state drive, instead of the 80gb hard disk option). It cost 45% of the original price (it debuted a year ago): down to $1,299 from $2,899.
My rationale for buying it — once the price got so low — was to have a lightweight computer for travel. I know it may sound like a useless extravagance, but there’s a big difference between 5.5 lbs. and 3 lbs. when you’re on the road.
First impressions:
Man, this thing is light and thin. My IT guy said it feels like it’s half a laptop, as if the monitor had fallen off or something.
I don’t have a case for it yet, so I put it in a 10″ x 13″ Tyvek envelope when I left the office yesterday.
It runs pretty cool. I haven’t tried playing a video on it yet, but just doing my standard internettery (Firefox, NetNewsWire) generates a lot less heat than my Macbook Pro does.
The screen is insanely bright. I maxed out the brightness last night and had to look away because the whites were so glaring. The screen also doesn’t have to warm up; it reaches regular brightness instantly when you wake it up or start.
Because there’s no optical drive and no platters for the hard drive, it was difficult to tell whether the laptop had turned on when I hit the power button. I accidentally shut it off twice while trying to get it to start. It’s really weird, not hearing any of the minute clicks-and-whirrs of a hard drive.
The audio is tinny.
My USB drive feels a little snug in the flip-down USB port, but my Verizon 3G antenna fits in there just fine, as does my Flip video. The port does snap shut a little too easily when I’m trying to get a USB item in there. I’ll probably need to bring a USB-extender cable along when I travel (since I’m a big Boy Scout).
The long, narrow button of the trackpad is a little less responsive than the one on my main laptop.
It seems to boot up faster than my Pro, but I’ll have to test that sometime.
I felt a little weird about getting a computer that only has 64gb of memory, but that limit has made me think about what I actually need to keep on a laptop, and how much space I’m wasting on that Macbook Pro.
In fact, the Air may become my primary laptop, as I reassess what I need/use a laptop for. Since I do all my layout work on my desktop computer (a 24″, 2.8ghz, 4gb RAM iMac), as well as most of my photo-tweaking, I don’t need a laptop with a crazy-fast processor, tons of memory or a big screen. As long as playing a 2-hour movie doesn’t cause the computer to overheat and shut off, it should be just fine for travel.
It’s early days; I’ll try to update this if I have any more impressions.
Frowns, Everyone! Frowns!
Ricardo Montalban died yesterday at the age of 88. Patrick McGoohan also died, at 80. (I nearly named this post, Hello, Number Deep-Six.)