Remains of the Day

Planes, trains, and automobiles

edisoncarter from the Grand Theft Auto Forums discovered all sorts of cheat codes for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas by wiring a PS2 controller to his PC's parallel port and having his computer try a multitude of key combinations at high speed. So a series of monkeys given typewriters might not produce Shakespeare, but perhaps they can become really good at video games

There are SUVs, and then there's the CXT

That rogue commercial about the VW Polo featuring the suicide bomber
Not in good taste, sure, but I think the broader and more interesting trend is the emergence of all these consumer-generated advertestimonials (not just ones for Apple)

The newest member of the BMW M-family: the M6 (more images here)
Has a V-10 engine that produce 500 horsepower and 383 lb.-ft. of torque. The M stands for "Mommy, I just wet my pants."

Of course, you have to admit, when Bond moved from an Aston Martin Vanquish to a BMW, it was a step down

The Lexus luxury hybrid and the Ford Escape Hybrid
Are these guilty pleasures for greenies or vehicles to assuage the conscience of big car lovers? After rising gas prices, former SUV owners will discover they're paying the same amount for gasoline, the improved gas mileage offsetting rising gas prices

Come on!

It wasn't the plan (especially because I was meeting friends for breakfast early this morning), but I stayed up until nearly six in the morning last night to watch the men's final of the Australian Open. I was pulling for Safin since Hewitt is such an annoying brat. After the first set, when Hewitt just destroyed Safin, I thought the match was over.

I shouldn't have doubted a guy who beat Roger Federer, the world's top player. Back when Safin destroyed Sampras in the 2000 U.S. Open Final, I thought he would go on to win numerous Grand Slams, but he went mental. Safin, to me, is the current purest embodiment of what men's tennis has become. It's the power baseline game which began with guys like Lendl and Krickstein and passed on through Courier and Agassi. The tennis court is still the same size and players move at about the same speed, but increases in player strength and improvements in racket technology have increased the pace and spin of the average groundstroke. That makes it much tougher to come to net. Even an average approach shot will likely lead to an unreachable passing shot.

Safin's average forehand or backhand travels at around 75 to 80mph, and he can hit winners at 90 to 100mph. At any point in time, any forehand or backhand he hits could be 90mph to the corner of either service box. One of the crosscourt backhand winners he hit in the fourth set looked like it was shot out of a bazooka, and it still landed inside the service box. I don't think a shot like that was possible with wood rackets. Safin serves huge, yet he only double faulted something like 7 times the entire Australian Open. He has a beautiful service motion, but that statistic is still mind boggling.

Hewitt is the modern incarnation of Michael Chang, a scrappy baseliner, but a bigger hitter in every way. And a bigger mouth. He once made a not-so-subtle racist remark about a line judge at Wimbledon or the U.S. Open, I can't remember which, and he annoys other players by screaming "Come on!" when they make unforced errors. He's a great player, unbelievably quick--he reached some balls by Safin that I don't think any other men's player could have chased down--but his attitude on court is aggravating, like that of so many spoiled tennis brats you see in junior tennis. Last night, after a line judge called a foot fault on him, he still won the point, and afterwards pointed at the line judge in a threatening manner, receiving a conduct code violation from the chair judge.

I'm not sure why Hewitt chooses to be such an unsporting prick. He doesn't need to be. With his scrappy style, he could easily be the people's favorite. Instead of screaming and fist-pumping after an opponent's error, he could easily save that for some of his own great shots, yet after some of his best gets against Safin, he didn't react at all. He has a bit of Jimmy Connors in him, the provocateur. I always felt that some of McEnroe's outbursts resulted from aggravation at himself and his inability to live up to his perfectionist standards. Connors and Hewitt seem to want to goad their opponents into losing their cool.

Entertaining stuff and worth watching on replay on ESPN2, if for no other reason than to see shots of Safin's fairly-hot girlfriend Dasha Zhukova, on screen nearly every game. Patrick McEnroe is very solid on color commentary, though he brings a more laid back personality than his brother, also an astute color commentator.

Corpse Bride

It's only January, and already a movie outing has been scheduled for Halloween: Tim Burton's return-to-stop-motion-animation Corpse Bride (Quicktime trailer)

Official U.S. trailer for the most-fun-movie-I-saw-at-Sundance: Kung Fu Hustle

Trailer for the latest from Hirokazu Koreeda, whose After Life was a touching meditation on death: Nobody Knows

The documentary with the most buzz at Sundance was Inside Deep Throat, produced by Brian Grazer. It's a look at the influential at the influential porno (not Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate informant) and has been rated NC-17. It sold out and so I missed it, but Jason raved

MOMA

Aaron, Roswitha, and Otto came to NYC, and, after an aborted attempt to visit the United Nations (closed for some undisclosed reason), we all went to visit the MOMA for the first time since its splashy re-opening. We visited on a Saturday afternoon, and as expected, a long line awaited. Individual tickets cost $20 each, and an individual membership, which allows you to purchase guest passes for $5 a person, costs $75. Purchasing a membership was a no-brainer, especially as I'm sure many more out-of-town visitors will want to see the new MOMA.

I wonder if Otto, who I barely recognized he'd grown up so much in the six months since I'd seen him last, looked around at some of the Miro or Pollock paintings and thought, "I'll be painting something like that in about two years with finger paints." With his long locks, a few strangers confused him for a girl, he has the look of a budding young artiste.

MOMA has perhaps the most impressive collection of modern art in the world, at least that I've seen. So many works you'd study in any introductory art history class are on display here, and MOMA has hundreds of other works still in storage, waiting to be hung. Another great thing about MOMA is that visitors are allowed to take photographs as long as they don't use flash.

One of my favorite activities in modern art museums is guessing the titles of works, or telling friends the titles of three works and having them guess which is which. The level of abstraction in modern art can turn it into a guessing game.

Too many interesting works to recount, but one that particularly struck me was a video piece depicting the buildup to the scene depicted in Velasquez's famous painting "Las Meninas," or "The Maids of Honor," which I saw at the Prado several years ago. The video piece was silent, as far as I could tell, and it was haunting. I was reminded of paintings that would come to life at the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.

Another arresting piece was a series of three videos, shown side by side, of views of and from Yoshio Taniguchi's other museums, all of which are in Japan. One of the beautiful things about Taniguchi's museums, and the new MOMA is no exception, is that they afford unique views of the environment around the museum. In the case of MOMA, windows on all floors allow visitors a great perspective on the density and diversity of buildings and architecture surrounding the museum.

We stayed until closing time, until a security guard ushered Aaron and I out of the video room. Though all the pieces can be seen in an afternoon, I'll have to return sometime to soak more of it in. The greatest drawback to the MOMA right now is its popularity, and the dense crowds stand in sharp contrast to the wide open spaces of the museum and the amount of white space granted each piece. Imagine visiting the museum alone, being the only person strolling through every room. Its the great paradox at the heart of NYC, that the great art and culture that the city's population attracts is also overrun by that same population.

Aaron and Roswitha are extremely knowledgeable about and appreciative of modern art, and art in general, so it was a special treat to visit the new MOMA with them.

Cubs trade Sosa

Alan, Sharon, James, and Angela took me out for dinner for my birthday tonight. Afterwards, I stopped by James and Angela's for a nightcap of steak, waffles, french fries, and of course, scotch. Okay, just scotch.

Alan called. At that late hour, it could only be something important. Sammy Sosa had been traded to the Orioles. In return, the Cubs would receive Jerry Hairston Jr. plus two minor leaguers, though they'd have to pick up a large part of Sosa's 2005 salary of $17 million. How far the mighty have fallen. To think that after Sosa's years with the Cubs, especially 1998-2001, he'd be traded for just a slap hitting 2B and two minor leaguers, is shocking.

Or is it? I'm old enough now to have seen enough quick reversals of fortune such that Sosa's rapid demise seems entirely feasible, even normal. David Duval once shot a 59. After three rounds in the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, Duval sits at +30, 53 strokes off the lead! The Cubs had clearly had enough of him, and he, with his fragile ego, couldn't bear the thought of sprinting out to RF for the home opener to the derisive boos of forty thousand Cubs fans. Sosa had a difficult contract to move, and the suitors were few. Not ideal conditions for GM Jim Hendry to make a trade.

If you re-arranged his career and put his prima donna 2004 anywhere in his career except last year, he might still be a beloved Cub. Such is life. I enjoyed the Sosa prime, when he was baseballs into orbit to all fields, but it's tough for a town like Chicago to pull for a diva.

The Aristocrats, et al

The opening text crawl from Star Wars Episode III has been released on the starwars.com

Ouch--apparently widescreen MGM DVDs sold b/t Dec 1, 1998 and Sept 8, 2003 were actually just pan-and-scan DVDs with the tops and bottoms cropped out. A class action lawsuit has been brought against MGM, and you have until March 31, 2005 to submit a claim form. If the suit is settled, you can either exchange each of the DVDs for $7.10 or a new, correctly framed copy

1 in 4 men suffers from trajectile dysfunction

Instant classic: Safin defeats seemingly unbeatable Federer in Aussie Open semis in 4 1/2 hours and five sets
Two of the players with the most game on the men's tour beat the crap out of each other for hours in the Aussie heat

Entourage filmed a scene for season two at Sundance at the Egyptian Theatre
I was there, saw the cameras out front, saw the Queens Boulevard poster outside the Egyptian Theatre entrance, and failed to connect the dots. I'm an idiot.

Black RAZR V3
Sexy

Sign up to be notified when the Kung Fu Hustle DVD is available for sale
I had more fun in that screening at Sundance than any other

The boys of South Park tell the Aristocrats joke (Windows Media File--vulgar and not for the easily offended)
One of the movies screening at Sundance was The Aristocrats, a documentary in which Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller) and Paul Provenza follow 100 comedians doing their version of the joke. I didn't see it, but after reading the synposis, I was certainly curious about what the joke was about. The joke seems to be like Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto for violinists, a rite of passage for comics to prove their mettle.

How to get reservations at French Laundry

Google and Yahoo are introducing television closed captioning search capability, and Amazon announces block viewing for its A9 Yellow Pages
Still, no search service is able to locate individual missing socks from my laundry, though

$13 Smirnoff beats out premium, higher-priced vodkas in NYTimes taste test
I can now cite this taste test when explaining why I bought Smirnoff instead of Grey Goose for the pre-party. Certainly sounds better than admitting I'm cheap.

For the first time ever, cancer has passed heart disease as the #1 killer of Americans under the age of 85

Gone Sundancin'

[I realized that I posted a draft of an unfinished entry about Sundance before I left for Park City last Thursday...pretend I never did. I'll finish that one and put it back up here shortly because I do believe the logistics of planning a Sundance trip are highly complex and frustrating, but all that's ancient history right now. I've had a great time so far, and I have one evening of fun left.]

I've been at Sundance since last Thursday evening, and tomorrow morning I return home. Most this time, I've been offline, so apologies to those I've failed to respond to in a timely fashion.

Last year's trip to Sundance was a surprise, but Jason and I had so much fun we decided to toss our hats in the ring again, this time with more advanced planning (i.e., we actually bought movie tickets ahead of time).

Every night, I've gotten fewer and fewer hours of sleep, and last night I grabbed only three hours of shuteye after returning home from a midnight screening of the disturbing and brilliant Old Boy before my cell phone alarm started screeching. By the time I heard and comprehended the meaning of that shrill cacaphony, it was 7:55am. My first movie of the morning started at 8:30am. The drive from Susannah's place in Salt Lake to the theatre in Park City was a half hour in light traffic. Then a half mile dash on foot to the theatre from the parking lot. Probably not worth it. I turned off the alarm and crawled under the covers.

But it was too late. My mind had awoken, and I began to think of how badly I wanted to see Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale. You can sleep when you're dead, and all that shit. I tried burying my head under the pillow to suppress the idea, but it only gained momentum.

Damn it! I threw off the covers, rushed into the bathroom and cleaned up quickly, threw on some pants and grabbed a whole bag of papers and winter clothing and sprinted out into the freezing Salt Lake City air to my rental car. What ensued was a frantic dash up over the mountain pass through a dense fog, my rental car struggling to stay over the speed limit on the uphill slopes. I parked at exactly 8:30, and then I sprinted a half mile in the cold to Racquet Club Theatre. I was seated just as the pre-movie short ended.

The Squid and the Whale was wonderful, validating my morning's effort. Baumbach is friend's with Wes Anderson, and they have similar sensibilities. The story is based on Baumbach and his brother's experience of their parents' divorce in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in the late 1980's. As with Anderson movies, the father, played by Jeff Daniels, is a selfish, immature man-child, yet vaguely sympathetic. The humor and music also reminded me of that in Anderson movies, but I thought The Squid and the Whale was more accessible and consistently funny than The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Great performances by Daniels, Laura Linney as his wife, and Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline as the older and younger brothers. It will most certainly get picked up by a studio before festival's end.

Joannie and Karen joined me this year for Sundance, as did Mike, Arya, Jon, and Bill. Jason and Jamie were here, as were a scattering of other folks from NYC and Amazon. Having everyone around added to the fun. We snowboarded one afternoon, cooked dinner and soaked in the hot tub another evening, dined at 350 Main our first night together for my birthday, and attended a few Sundance parties, gawking at celebrities and laying siege to the open bars. In between all that, I'll have seen twelve to fifteen movies by the time they wheel me onto my flight tomorrow morning on a stretcher, and that's not including the Mormon conversion show Karen trapped us in just before her flight out.

More later on Sundance after I return home, but one instant movie classic deserves mention: Kung Fu Hustle. It's an exhilarating slapstick martial arts comedy, and it's superior to Stephen Chow's previous hit Shaolin Soccer. Sony is distributing the picture, and it should hit theatres in March. As is common to Asian martial arts slapstick, it blends a seemingly incompatible set of genres, from comedy to musicals to romance to melodrama to action. As a bonus for movie lovers, Chow tosses in homages to The Matrix, The Untouchables, Spiderman, and a whole series of other movies. I haven't laughed that hard at a theatre in a long time, and at movie's end, Stephen Chow came on stage to a standing ovation from all of Eccles theatre, Sundance's largest venue, a school auditorium seating over 1,000 spectators.

If you have the opportunity to catch Kung Fu Hustle before March for some reason, do so. I didn't see any movies I really disliked, and we all had our opinions of all the movies we saw together, but we all agreed that Kung Fu Hustle was an instant classic, ironic considering it doesn't feel like a Sundance movie.

Jason and I have already begun plotting our return trip next year. After two years here, I finally feel like I grok the Sundance Film Festival, finally understand how to organize a proper Sundance trip for a large group in such a way as to ensure that everyone gets a healthy mix of snow sports, movies, parties, and free time. See you all at Sundance 2006.

Flickr

I certainly wasn't the first one on the bandwagon, but one of my favorite websites of 2004 was Flickr, the photo sharing site. I've slowly begun migrating some of my older photos onto Flickr, and in the future you can find all my pics at this link. If you join up, add me as a contact and drop me a line so I know to look up your photos.

Perhaps the coolest aspect of Flickr is it's free-text tagging system. Users can attach tags to their photos, and all that metadata allows anyone to browse through everyone else's public photos by tag. Pick a random word and see what photos it summons from the Flickrsphere, or browse a list of the most popular tags.

The site has many other useful features, but the tagging ability is my favorite. For now, an account is free and limited to 10 MB of uploads per calendar month. Upgrade to a Flickr Pro account and your monthly upload quota jumps to 1 GB, among other things. The annual price of $41.77 still feels a bit steep to me, but depending on how the site continues to evolve, I could see justifying that just as a way to backup high res copies of my photos and to offload some storage from my web host.

I'd be very surprised if Flickr survived 2005 without being purchased by one of the Internet alpha dogs: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay. Google owns Picasa, Microsoft could launch something similar internally, and Amazon has an alliance with Ofoto, so Yahoo is the most likely suitor. Yahoo also needs blogging software, so perhaps they'll target Six Apart or one of the smaller, still independent blogging software companies. Photo sharing, like weblogs, are one of the most popular uses of the web, and any company not playing in that space is losing a key piece of user mindshare.

Picasa has been in the news this week because they announced their first rev, Picasa 2, since their acquisition by Google. It sounds like a great photo management solution (Slashdot, to take one site, links to many of the web reviews), an iPhoto competitor, but for now it only works on Windows computers. If you own one, give Picasa a spin.

Installed MT NOFOLLOW Plugin

I just installed the Movable Type Nofollow Plugin. Even if it doesn't slow the tide of comment spam, at least it will render that garbage less useful to the perpetrators.

Drip drop drip drop

The radiator in the apartment upstairs sprung a leak, so I this week I had to put buckets and towels out to collect the dripping water through my ceiling. What started as a tiny, spherical water stain slowly spread and morphed into a giant, unsightly, urine-colored drip painting. The upstairs tenant was out of town, and the super didn't have a key. All night, I listened to the metronomic plip...plop...plip...plop of drops of water cliff diving into my bucket. I felt like Hitomi from Hideo Nakata's Dark Water (or Jennifer Connelly from the upcoming remake).

Next installment of JibJab: [Bush's] Second Term

John Hollinger picks his NBA All-Stars

Steve Jobs to deliver Commencement speech at Stanford in 2005
Great...my commencement speaker was William Perry

Google plans to offer a tag that will help bloggers to signal the search engine to ignore links in comments, hopefully neutering comment spam
It will also render eliminate the Googlerank value of legitimate comment URLs, but that's a minor side effect in my mind. I despite comment spammers

Autumn Thunder: 40 Years NFL Films Music
A 10 CD box set featuring the martial tunes from NFL Films. Great background music for that Superbowl party with your buddies. All that's missing is narration by Steve Sabol and Harry Kalas

Over holiday break, we watched Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy on DVD
That will surprise no one who knows of me and my unhealthy love for Will Ferrell. Now, Anchorman is by no means a classic or even a good movie (I'm not going to bother reviewing it), but no true devotee of Ferrell's oeuvre would miss it. Without seeing it, I wouldn't understand the subtext and nuance of half the things my brother James says, and now the same can be said for people who speak to me. I do think it's cheesy that the studio forces you to buy a more expensive DVD giftset in order to get the Wake Up, Ron Burgundy supplemental disc that contains Burgundy's other two interviews from the MTV Movie Awards (Burt Reynolds and Jim Caviezel--"Tell me, Jesus, do you ever use your superpowers in games of chance?"). The video of Will and the gang covering Afternoon Delight by Starland Vocal Band (excerpt)...well, let's just say, if you don't think it's good, I will fight you. Anchorman was also geographically relevant to our family vacation, the movie being set in San Diego.

Ron Burgundy: The Germans discovered it in 1904, and they called it "San Diego", which in German means "whale's vagina".
Veronica Corningstone: No, I don't think that is what it means. No, it doesn't mean that.
Ron Burgundy: I don't know. I was just trying to impress you. I don't think anyone knows what it means anymore. The translation was lost hundreds of years ago.
Veronica Corningstone: Doesn't it mean "Saint Diego"?
Ron Burgundy: ...No. No, that isn't it.
Veronica Corningstone: No, I'm pretty sure that's what it means.
Ron Burgundy: Agree to disagree.

To distract free throw shooters of the visiting team at a basketball game, wave your thundersticks in unison, rather than randomly (maybe)

Wacky warning labels and past winners
Warning on can of self-defense pepper spray "May irritate eyes" and a waring on a fireplace log warns "Caution - Risk of Fire"

Could thousands of people have been saved from the tsunami if notified via cell phones or the Internet?
Interesting question that many probably wondered as they watched news videos of people hanging out while waves began to climb higher and higher up the shores, oblivious to the much deadlier waves racing their direction

3 DJs suggest wedding mixes
One of them opened one wedding with "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division, I hope as a joke. Dan Finnerty lists "Making Love out of Nothing at All" as the most inappropriate song for a wedding.

Dell CEO Kevin Rollins calls iPod a fad like the Sony Walkman
Rollins needs to rethink his business analogies. The Walkman was one of the most successful consumer products in history, and just because Sony couldn't recognize when portable music players morphed from Discmans to portable MP3 players doesn't mean Apple will make the same mistake

Company creates downloadable cards for reprimanding rude cell phone chatterers
New Yorkers have a simpler method. At the U.S. Open last year, a man took a business call during a semifinal match. When it was clear he didn't plan to either leave the stadium or cut the conversation short, several other fans stood up and shouted at him with a menacing glare, "Hey, shut the f***ing cellphone off!"

Denali Fitness

Sang quit his job in Seattle to open a gym with Dave C. Denali Fitness (logo by the lovely and talented Juli) replaces the old Madison Park Sound Mind & Body. Good to see his own thing, and even better that it's something he'll enjoy. I believe that most people have a cap to how happy they can be, some internal equalization that stabilizes our state of mind over time, but the floor to our unhappiness is much lower than the cap to our happiness is high.

If you're in the neighborhood, drop in at Denali and work out on cardio machines fitted with televisions.

Meanwhile, I'm waiting for Denali to open a New York City branch. With temperatures dropping below 10 degrees, and since I feel like I gained seventy-five pounds over holiday break, I've begun researching Manhattan gyms. It's not a pretty picture. Prices are as high as my gut is voluminous. I haven't been able to pull the trigger in the face of crazy initiation fees and monthly dues, required year-long commitments, all for rather middle-of-the-road facilities. The best NY gyms charge exorbitant fees. The backup plan is lots of push-ups, sit-ups, and riding on my bike trainer while listening to "You're The Best" by Joe Esposito on my iPod.

ICE

For Christmas, Karen got me a gift certificate for the Institute of Culinary Education in NYC. Today I signed up for Knife Skills Workshop 1 and Techniques of Fine Cooking 1. My goal is to learn to chop vegetables and throw knives like Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight.

Cooking in NYC isn't always fun or worthwhile. My kitchen is the size of a hall closet, and so I have precious little counter space. And groceries are more expensive, so the cost benefit of cooking instead of going out to eat is often negligible. Still, every dollar counts, and so I plan to cook more in the coming year. My super lives down the hall, and she's always preparing meals for her family. The smell wafts down the hall and drives me insane, so cooking is also a way to send my own mouth-watering scents out my door to wage combat.

I received a copy of Jacques Pepin Fast Food My Way over the holidays, and I prepared pork chops the Pepin way the other day. Fast, simple, and tasty: all elements of an ideal NYC recipe.

Happy MLK Day

Martin Luther King Day is a holiday I last celebrated in grade school. At the two jobs I've had since my undergrad days, we only received six or seven official days off per year, the Christian Anglo-Saxon holidays. No Chinese New Years, no Yom Kippur. A month of for Ramadan, I agree, would have been excessive, but MLK Day seems like it deserves to be honored more widely in the U.S., race being such a central part of American history and identity.

....

Apple's Tipping Point
Interesting chart theorizing that Apple has slowly evolved its strategy to now finally aim for mass markets with the iPod Shuffle and Mac Mini. Interesting, though I don't know that the iPod Shuffle is a mass market product. Without a display, it seems to me to be a specialized product. I sure could've used one when training for the marathon, though. I had to switch my first generation iPod back and forth between my right and left hands because it was so heavy. I'd consider getting one to just load new music to play at random while walking or jogging around NYC; I wonder if the mass market feels the same.

Man trades in 275K airline miles and $8,000 for a flight in a MIG jetfighter

I received my copy of Esquire in the mail today, and it has a huge photo of Scarlett Johansson on the cover. Wow. I am, like, kind of a big fan.

The Bulls are fun to watch again
I'm a huge Ben Gordon fan. Not when he was leading UConn over Stanford in the 2003 NCAA's, but now that he's playing for the home team...

Sizing translations for women's clothing at popular retailers

Aishwarya Rai, oft described as the most beautiful woman in the world, has never kissed on screen

Hurlyburly

I saw a preview performance of the David Rabe play Hurlyburly last night at the Acorn Theatre on Theatre Row. I hadn't seen the earlier productions on Broadway or the movie adaptation.

This production, directed by Scott Elliott, had the following cast:
Phil - Bobby Cannavale
Mickey - Josh Hamilton
Eddie - Ethan Hawke
Bonnie - Catherine Kellner
Darlene - Parker Posey
Artie - Wallace Shawn
Donna - Halley Wegryn Gross

The play revolves around the interactions of a couple cocaine-charged Hollywood types living in Los Angeles in the 80's. The play opens with Eddie lying on the sofa in his apartment, ass crack showing through his boxers, when Phil bursts in. From then on, I counted just a few moments when Eddie wasn't smoking dope, snorting cocaine, downing Jack Daniels or beer, or popping ludes or valium.

Phil is an emotional volcano, recently separated from Suzy (he explains after he burst in that he struck her during their latest argument), and you come to understand that their relationship is doomed to be tumultuous because Phil is unstable. He's always either breaking up with Suzy or trying to reconcile. Why is Eddie friends with Phil?

Mickey is Eddie's roommate, a smug, cynical, and saracastic slickster who receives most of the plays most comical lines (I can only imagine the zest with which Kevin Spacey played Mickey in the movie) and wardrobe (Josh Hamilton sports a porn star mustache and is constantly changing from one Miami Vice inspired outfit into another). Mickey seems to care about little but enjoys skewering all around him. Artie is a producer of some sort who drops in at one point with Donna, a stray he found in an elevator. He leaves her for Eddie and his buddies as a sexual "care package."

Most of them have artificial relationships with each other, but they don't care. At one point, Eddie asks Mickey after one stinging barb, "What kind of friendship is this?"

Mickey responds with a shrug: "Adequate."

At another point, Bonnie, a dancer and mother of one who the guys all know to be loose, is thrown out of her own car by Phil. She comes back to Eddie's apartment and laments, "This town is just mean." She seems oblivious to the fact that these guys, some of so-called chums, trade her about as a sexual asset, much as they swap Donna. Eddie is barely listening as he tries to center his own thoughts: "We're all just background in each other's lives."

The play is about 3 hours long, not including intermission, and nearly all of it is filled to the margins with rapid dialogue. At times, it lost me, as manic and drug-addled as it was. Over the course of three hours, though, I came to understand Eddie to be the one sensitive romantic of the group. He is smitten with a "dynamite" girl named Darlene, and he believes, for once, that he may have found true love. But when they finally connect, they speak the usual lines of romantic dialogue with a forced tone that exposes the superficial nature of their feelings. Deep underneath all the dense layers of circular dialogue are the remains of caring people, but years of drug abuse and cynical dealings have all but obliterated them.

I'm a huge Parker Posey fan, and she brought a wonderful physical comedy to her line readings. Hawke is suited to the role of Eddie, channeling that role's hyper sensitivity. He wants to care about others, but more than that he cares what others think of him. When Phil comes to lament his latest argument with Suzy, Eddie is all ears until he discovers that Suzy claimed to hate Eddie as well. He is stunned and instantly pre-occupied with why Suzy would dislike him.

There aren't any bad seats at the cozy Acorn Theatre. From my seat in the fifth row, I was at stage level, and I felt as if I was sitting on the stage. I left the theater nearly high myself from all the faux marijuana fumes from Eddie's pipe, and I could see clearly that one of the LPs in Eddie's collection was Technique by New Order. Ethan Hawke and Parker Posey looked like giants, and I felt as if I could reach out and pull Wallace Shawn's ridiculous hairpiece off. At some point, I'll grow accustomed to seeing such recognizable actors up close, but for now it's still a delight.

By play's end, I was exhausted, my ears having been talked off by all these vampires. I almost reached out and tapped Eddie on the shoulder to ask him for a hit on his bong.

P.S.: I noticed while looking at Parker Posey's IMDb page that she was in Blade: Trinity. Huh?

Crumbs

The Face Analyzer purports to determine your personal characteristics from your portrait

The description of the methodology leaves a whole lot to be desired, but it's worth a few chuckles around the water cooler on a slow day. The results seem erratic. they tagged Bill Gates as a 10.0 out of 10.0 for income but Paris Hilton at just a 3.9 for promiscuity. No, I did not upload my photo yet

An avalanche of new products from Apple announced at MacWorld
Too many cool things to list, and most of the coolest is on the software side, in my opinion. Includes HD support across the iLife and Final Cut Express apps. Multi-way video and audio iChat. Being a Mac user is a hell of a lot more fun than being a Windows user. Microsoft has a ton of great ideas and smart technologists, but their product life cycles are much too long (their margin of error is provided by their massive installed base). Meanwhile, Apple seems to issue new hardware every 4 months, productivity app upgrades every half year, and operating system upgrades every year (take the Tiger tour; how many big cats are left?)

iCal calendars to subscribe to (e.g. U.S. holidays, sports schedules, movie openings)
Now that I don't have a Windows computer anymore, I use iCal to manage my schedule and to-do list. Now that Macs are available for $499, maybe some more of you will switch over as well and find these of use

Ciphire Mail is a free e-mail encryption client
Yo, folks I e-mail regularly: let me know if you download this, too, so our trivial e-mail conversations will be secured from the eyes of the prying world

The USPS Cycling team is now Team Discovery Channel
Strange to see Lance in the new uniform. He still hasn't decided if he's going to ride the Tour de France this year. Nervous TDF bike tour operators wait in suspense.

Six Apart's comprehensive guide to stopping comment spam
Since I get hit with this crap almost daily, I plan to implement these steps in the next week or so

The website of the girl from Fox's reality TV show "Who's Your Daddy"
Included is a letter clarifying some issues surrounding the show. I never watched it, but that didn't hinder my enjoyment of the letter. Supposedly the show was originally titled Reunited, or so she was told.

Robot makers are confident they can win the World Cup by 2050

An Acehnese man swept out to sea by the tsunami survives for two weeks
He ate coconuts for 12 days, clung to a log, climbed in a damaged wooden boat, and finally cobbled together a raft from floating debris. In the wake of all the tragedy, good to read a story of survival. A real life Cast Away. He's the third Indonesian rescued from open sea since the tsunami. The others include a pregnant woman who clung to a palm tree for five days and man who spent eight days aboard an uprooted tree.

Search for illicit weapons in Iraq ends

Just for the record, they didn't have any when we sent in the troops

Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki, two New Yorker giants, discuss their books Blink and The Wisdom of Crowds at Slate
I read the latter and enjoyed it, and am awaiting my Amazon shipment of the former

Stephanie Zacharek, David Edelstein, A.O. Scott, Charles Taylor, and Armond White discuss the year in movies at Slate

Bare Bones Software makes its text editor TextWrangler 2.0 free
Good for them, and good for us

Mr. Blackwell issues his annual worst dressed list

Nicollette Sheridan is the worst of the worst, joined by Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Courtney Love, Serena Williams, Britney Spears, Paula Abdul, Meryl Streep, Anna Nicole Smith, and the Simpson sisters. Best dressed include Nicole Kidman, Natalie Portman, Barbara Walters, Kate Winslet, Annette Bening, Oprah Winfrey, Scarlett Johansson, Gwen Stefani, Jennifer Garner, and Teri Hatcher

SmartDeck, a new intelligent cassette adapter for the iPod
Allows you to use your cassette player buttons in your car to control your iPod. Simple, and brilliant

For you lazy people: gargling with Listerine is not as good as flossing
But by all means, keep gargling. Halitosis stinks

So does B.O., so wear Federline, the new scent by Britney Spears

On set

I volunteered to help out on an NYU student film shoot. Before the holidays, I worked with the production designer to tweak the space a bit and purchase props. The past week I've spent most of my time on location during the shoot, doing a little of everything.

As anyone who's worked on a set will tell you, it's not that exciting, unless perhaps you're the director or you're applying body paint to Rebecca Romijn. Most of the time, everyone's standing around, and then suddenly it will be interrupted by a flurry of activity, and then everyone's milling around again for a while.

The days on this film shoot were long, at least 12 hours a day. I was an extra warm body (officially the art director), and was employed as such. One morning I found myself running around NYC trying to assemble a complete Santa suit from the detritus that remained of the Xmas section in all the costume stores. It's tough to keep your composure when you're asking one of the costume store workers where to find a Santa wig and beard and the Goth-themed worker with pale face, black lipstick, and a mohawk just stares at you and shrugs with indifference. 90% of your store revenue comes in one month of the year you unhelpful freak!

Sometimes I stood in for the lead actor and actress when the director blocked out shots. I was an extra in one shot. For an exterior night shot, I had to water down the street (standard technique so the water reflects street lights, otherwise the street just looks like a sea of black on screen). A family friend of the director got cold feet at the last minute and wouldn't let us take water from her sink. That might have been a good thing, considering we had only three buckets and she lived on the eighth floor of a walkup. We ended up splurging on eight gallons of water from a local grocer.

During lunch break one day, we played charades. Every answer was a movie title, but not like you'd imagine a normal game of charades. This was charades with film nuts. In one case, we got the clues that the movie title was two words, and the first word rhymed with rooster. From that, someone correctly guessed Brewster McCloud. Brewster McCloud.

On our one day of exterior shooting, the temperature was in the 30's. Fortunately, the rain failed to make call time that morning. I lost feeling in my toes by the end of the day, but by that point, I was beginning to feel the rhythm of filmmaking, and I was beginning to enjoy myself. On set, there are few meetings and little of the monotony that can seep into office work. It's not all fun and games, but it's closer to that than most jobs.

We could only afford to rent one generator, and supposedly it put out 27 amps, but we discovered otherwise. It felt as if we were Gary Sinise in Apollo 13, figuring out the maximum amount of power we could draw while still having enough juice to achieve re-entry through Earth's atmosphere. We cycled through tradeoffs. You can have the coffee maker or the hot water machine, but not both. You can one space heater, but it will cost you one light in the alleyway shot. What about two heaters at the lowest setting and one light? One heater on low and the hot water machine?

People always stop out of curiosity when they see a crew gathered around film lights on the street. What are you shooting, people would ask. Once, I told a lady we were shooting a few minor scenes from War of the Worlds. She didn't know what that was, so perhaps she'll be looking for that setting when that blockbuster hits screens this summer.

One day involved a montage of sex scenes. I felt like Ricky Jay during the Mark Wahlberg-Julianne Moore sex scene in Boogie Nights. It's true what they say--simulating sex in front of a camera and crew is not all that romantic, unless you're used to performing in front of a group of other people. I had to run into one scene to strew some more underwear around the floor while the actors stood there partially clothed, mid-coitus. I avoided all eye contact.

Everyone was professional about it, and we defused the situation with humor. The combination of the clinical and the vulgar in some of the direction was very odd.

"Continuity question. _____, were you wearing that watch when ____ was humping you over the bathtub?"

"_____, can you increase the horizontal displacement of your thrusting?"

"Whoa, we need to adjust the lighting. Your moonshine is going to overexpose the film."

I was impressed by the communal spirit of the cast and crew. Most everyone on set was a student, a mix of first, second, and third years. Everyone was pitching in to help the director finish his movie, and I didn't sense any competitiveness subverting the shoot. Most everyone was friendly (you might imagine film school students to be film snobs or aesthetes, but this group didn't exude that vibe), and I learned a lot chatting with various people during breaks in the day.

In the last hour of our exterior shoot, at some 2 a.m. in the morning in a dark alleyway in the West Village, we had just finished the last shot when the assistant director called for silence. We needed to record thirty seconds of street noise. The sound guy called speed, and we all stood in silence, heads bowed, nothing but the golden neon hues of street lamps reflected off puddles to leave halos in our hair. New York City is almost always a cacophony of noise, but for that thirty seconds, we heard nothing but the low hum of the city, like the sound of the ocean in the distance, or perhaps the sound of subway trains coursing through the veins of the city below our feet.

[silence]

That's a wrap.

L'eclisse

L'eclisse by Antonioni comes out on DVD in March of this year. Good things!

On the subject of Antonioni, how come Red Desert hasn't been re-issued on DVD yet? Used copies are going for $200 to $500! For all the years the DVD format has been around, the long tail is still surprisingly thin. We have some eighty seven versions of the Evil Dead movies on DVD, but not an in-print copy of Red Desert?

Snowed under

Back from an awesome holiday vacation, as usual, and this first week back is just crazy. I'm working on a film shoot, and the whole crew has been working 12 hours shifts starting early every morning in order to try and finish a 2nd year student's short film before equipment is due back to the school. Today we shot a whole series of sex scenes. Hmmm, awkward (and not just because you all now think I'm working as a grip on a porno). Tomorrow, another 12 hour day. I'm so tired I can barely sit up straight for more than five minutes at a time without nodding off like Grandpa Simpson.

I didn't jump online much over break, and I'm buried in e-mails and unpublished thoughts of the year past and the year to come, but I did notice that A&E is airing an MI-5 marathon tomorrow (Sat, Jan. 8). I highly, highly recommend the show. Just set your TiVo to record every episode being aired tomorrow (Seasons 1 and 2 and the first episode of Season 3); you won't regret it. My only regret is that I'm publishing this recommendation so late.

If for some reason you miss it, Season 1 and 2 are out on DVD Jan. 11 (Season 1 has been out for a while). I haven't much of Alias, but I'd put MI-5 up against any American suspense drama on television.

Belated happy new year everyone!

Review: 2046

2046 is the third in a trilogy by Wong Kar Wai, and it contains references to its predecessors, Days of Being Wild and In The Mood for Love. Tony Leung plays Mo Wan Chow, who we first saw in the last scene of Days of Being Wild, preparing to carry on in the footsteps of a lothario played by Leslie Cheung. In In The Mood for Love, Mo Wan Chow and his neighbor's wife Su Li-zhen, played by Maggie Cheung, flirt with romance but never indulge their mutual attraction, even though their spouses are having an affair.

The experience seems to break him, and in 2046 we find Mo Wan Chow has returned to his womanizing ways, his heart scarred by the memory of Su Li-zhen. And if you're going to dabble on the rebound, one can do worse than bed the likes of Gong Li and Ziyi Zhang (apparently Zhang has decided to order her name in the Western tradition of first-middle-last name instead of the more Chinese last-first-middle sequencing; I doubt American audiences felt distanced by her previous ordering, but I'll respect her wishes because she's a doll).

Fans of Wong Kar Wai will realize that further plot summary is mostly futile. 2046's meandering, spiralling, and sometimes shapeless narrative. It's not surprising considering that WKW shoots without a script. That also means his shoots take years. 2046 took nearly five years to shoot, and Ziyi Zhang has joked she'd love to do another movie but can't afford to take so long off. The advantage of his shooting style is that his movies feel fluid, organic, and improvisational, like jazz. Linear time collapses altogether.

2046 contains other WKW signature qualities. The lush, voluptuous cinematography by Christopher Doyle which renders the movie screen like some sort of lurid colored tapestry (though it's rumored Doyle and WKW had a falling out during the shoot and have parted ways). The languid tempo set to the gentle, swaying rhythms of Latin music. The tight quarters, a symbol of the character's attempts to compartmentalize their feelings and memories, to no avail (WKW and Doyle's organic/Eastern philosophy of filmmaking eschews, for the most parts, constructed sets, so many shots are framed tight and narrow and feel almost voyeuristic). The muted languor Tony Leung. WKW is a master at evoking mood, not through plot, but through these elements of his distinctive style.

What is missing, and what makes the film so frustrating, is those moments when a WKW movie seems to be running in circles, quiet moments when suddenly a character's guard seems to drop away and his or her soul spills onto the screen. Leung has always been the foremost WKW interpreter because his natural expression is one of a cool surface, almost cryptic, and what emotions he does display seep out of him like the happiness out of the corner of Mona Lisa's smile. His character seems to be trapped in this movie, though, unable to move forward towards 2046, unable to move on from his past, haunted as he is by memory. 2046 feels like an echo of pain; it reverberates at times with surpassing beauty and sadness, but it fails to resolve.

Much of the screen time is occupied by Ziyi Zhang and Faye Wong. Maggie Cheung appears only briefly, in flashbacks, and Gong Li has a minor part. If the ratio of screen time among these two pairs had been reversed, the movie might have had a richer emotional life. Cheung and Li have a gift for turning their fragility inside out that Zhang and Wong's striking young faces can't match.

We all have our story of the one that got away, and for Mo Wan Chow is destined to chase after her for life. The repetition drags on a few beats too long at times, leaving several dead spots. Still, it's tempting to wallow in the misery, especially when it's filmed so beautifully. Sitting next to the chatty drunk at the neighborhood bar, the one who won't stop pattering on about the woman who got away, can be maddening, but empathy for his plight keeps us seated at the barstool long enough for one drink too many, the drunk being our only companion in our existential loneliness.

P.S.: Supposedly WKW is on tap to direct The Lady from Shanghai starring Nicole Kidman, the hardest working lady in Hollywood, and also to direct a movie about Bruce Lee, also starring Leung. WKW also directed 1 of 3 short films from Eros, due to release in the US in April 2005.