Remains of the Day

The Shining...remixed

One of our class instructors passed this Quicktime movie along to us. As I'm in editing class right now, it was both hilarious and a testament to the power of editing.

Giant Squid! And the whale

The giant squid has finally been captured on film!

Longtime readers know what a big deal this is for me. Next we need video footage of a giant squid battling a sperm whale. For me, that's the real world equivalent of Godzilla vs. King Kong.

Loosely related, Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale is playing this week at the New York Film Festival. I caught an 8 AM screening of the movie at Sundance in January. It nearly killed me to get up at the crack of dawn to drive in from Salt Lake City, especially because I was the only one of my group left at the fest, but it was worth it.

Baumbach, most known up until now as Wes Anderson's friend and frequent writing partner, based his latest movie on his childhood experience with his divorced parents. Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels play the parents suffering from marital problems, and the movie chronicles the effect of their divorce on their two sons, especially older son Walt (Jesse Eisenberg). As an added treat for New Yorkers, the movie was shot in Brooklyn, where Baumbach grew up.

Baumbach has a similar sense of humor as Anderson, wry and ironic. Lots of tannins, but a hint of fruit in a long finish. In the opening scene, each of the two sons pairs off with a parent for a doubles match. Jeff Daniels tells his son Walt, in a hushed but serious tone, to hit to his mom's backhand because it's her weaker wing. Walt does so, setting up a smash for Jeff Daniels that nearly decapitates Laura Linney. That Daniels celebrates the point sets the tone for the movie--humorous, wistful, and melancholic. The title refers to the squid and the whale at the Museum of Natural History; its significance becomes clear once you see the movie.

As to my fascination with giant squid, I'm not sure how it all started. I loved whales and other giant sea creatures as a boy, as well as 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. I love eating squid, too, though I only acquired a taste for it later in life. Mom made me eat it as a child. I should have listened to her then, not just about the squid, but about keeping up with my piano lessons.

Late afternoon with Conan O'Brien

Joannie was in town last week through Thursday for a conference. She got out Thursday afternoon, just in time to join me for lunch at Burger Joint and then a live taping of Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

Burger Joint, in contrast to the fancy surroundings of Le Parker Meridien hotel lobby, is a greasy joint, a literal hole in the wall that seats about 25 people at the most. I'd eaten brunch at Norma's, just across the lobby, and never suspected Burger Joint was there, ensconced behind a curtain, the only indication of its presence being a neon burger sign. The decor consists of a couple random movie posters hung on faux-wood paneling. The place is as simple as its webpage/menu.

I've read that the lines at lunch can be brutal, as at my current favorite burger joint, Shake Shack. Joannie and I were there at about 1:30 in the afternoon and had to wait about fifteen minutes for our burgers and fries. The burger, a bit bigger than a single burger at Shake Shack, is straightforward and quite satisfying. Worth the wait. The fries, which come in a brown paper bag, were not. I'm still partial to the Double Shack Burger at Shake Shack, with its combination of sirloin and brisket, but Burger Joint is a worthy player in the mid-priced burger scene.

The old cliche is true: the camera adds ten pounds. In Conan's case, that's a good thing, because in person he's, in Joannie's words, "weird-looking." On television, the extra ten pounds add a bit of softness to an otherwise angular face. He's also as pale as an albino. On this day, he'd cut himself shaving just before going on air, so he wore a band-aid under his lips the entire show. A good comedian relishes the unanticipated, and in this case the band-aid provided a few minutes worth of jokes that Conan interspersed between pre-planned material.

The camera also adds about ten yards, apparently. It's shocking how cramped the studio (located at 30 Rockefeller Plaza) is in person. It seats about 200 people and consists of two halves. On the left is the curtain from which Conan and guests pop out, in front of which Conan does his monologue. At the near left corner sits the band, the Max Weinberg 7. The right half of the stage is Conan's desk, where he does most of the show. Use some really wide-angle lenses and shoot up close, and a tiny space can look enormous on television. If New Yorkers could only experience their closet-sized apartments through just such a lens, they wouldn't feel so cooped up.

The camera does not make you funnier, but that's not a problem for Conan. He's funny on TV, he's funny in person, and he's funny even when the cameras aren't rolling. After the warm-up comedian did his schtick and just before the taping began at 5:30pm, Conan popped out for a quick routine of his own. He speaks fast, and if and when a joke crashes, he recovers quickly, usually by admitting the joke is bad and using his honesty to draw a laugh, and then moves on before you can dwell on the moment.

His deft comic touch carried this show as the routines were of middling quality. The guests were Kim Cattrall, pushing her new book Kim Cattrall Sexual Intelligence, Seth Meyers of Saturday Night Live, and David Rakoff, author of Don't Get Too Comfortable and sometimes a contributor to This American Life on NPR.

Reviews: Lord of War, Flightplan, A History of Violence

[Yes, it's been a while since I wrote much about any movies here. It's not for lack of seeing movies, as I've probably seen more movies this year than any year in my entire life. But I do love the feedback from readers and the e-mail discussions that arise from them, and people enjoy discussing movies more than any other topic. So here are 3 reviews, with a look back at movies of the summer to follow soon. A lot of people have remarked that there's nothing they want to see in theaters recently, but I think there's more of interest on screens now than there was during summer blockbuster season.]

[SPOILER NOTE: No major spoilers ahead that you can't get from the movie trailer, especially for Flightplan since the heart of the plot is a mystery, but you will encounter some minor plot revelations if you read on. Those who insist on abstinence until seeing a movie in theaters, and I applaud you, should just move on...]

Andrew Niccol movies always center around a clever concept or scenario. They must sound like gold when pitched to a studio exec.

In a futuristic utopia/dystopiad where every baby is genetically engineered to be perfect and those who are not are discriminated against, one of the few remaining natural born babies yearns to do what society has deemed him incapable of achieving (Gattaca).

Truman Burbank lives a normal, happy if unexciting life. But he is not satisfied. Something is not right. Eventually, he discovers that his entire life is a reality show that is being filmed 24/7 and edited for television. Everyone around him is merely an actor, and his home is part of one giant set. He sets out to meet his maker and break out of this made-up universe into the real world (The Truman Show).

A down-and-out producer is seemingly doomed when the star walks off the set of his latest movie. Desperate, he creates a digital actress to take her place. The simulated actress becomes a huge star, but everyone believes she's a real person. Enchanted by his success, the producer can't bring himself to reveal the truth to the world (S1m0ne).

This stuff practically writes itself. Of course, that's also the problem. This stuff does write itself. Even if you haven't seen the movies above, you don't have to strain to anticipate the punch line. After the initial "why didn't I think of that" jolt, those movies unfold exactly as you'd expect.

Niccol's latest movie is about an international arms dealer, and so one would expect several arguments to be made. Arms dealers are immoral social parasites who facilitate global violence. If you peddle arms, you cannot wash your hands clean of innocent blood. The tentacles of the military-industrial complex run deep.

And to some extent, the usual points are made, but the pleasant surprise about Lord of War is that at it delivers its outrage in a measured tone of irony. The movie shakes its head, wags its finger at humanity, and says all the right things, but it's also winking at the audience the whole time.

Lord of War begins with a montage following the life of a bullet, from a brass casing on a conveyor belt, into crates shipped for unknown destinations, out of the crate and into the hands of an African soldier/guerilla, and finally into the barrel of the rifle from which it is fired into the forehead of a young boy wielding a machine gun. [At the official website, click on "Life as a Bullet" to see a non-animated version of this opening series of scenes.]

After watching the movie, I read The New Yorker review, in which David Denby wrote of this sequence: "...by forcing the audience to take the bullet’s flight, he is suggesting that we are complicit both in arms sales (the United States is a leading exporter and in eager enjoyment of movie violence), of which this sequence is a startling and admonitory example."

I read this opening a bit differently, though Denby has confessed many of his sins in public before, and perhaps he has never forgiven himself for arming neighborhood kids on both sides of a snowball fight in his youth. Rather than indict the audience, the opening sequence exonerates the bullet. The bullet rests in the same position on screen in front of us as it's whisked around the world, an inert piece of metal with no say over its own fate. What's disheartening is that the relentless forward motion of the bullet seems to propel both the bullet and the audience towards an unavoidable conclusion. Niccol implies that these arms sales and the human conflicts they supply are natural conditions of life, that nothing can be done to halt them. It sets the tone for the movie: it's highly watchable, lyrical, and thought-provoking, and it doesn't settle for putting the usual suspects on trial.

At the age of 20, Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage) intuits the economics of global conflict, and with a businessman's mentality, decides to capitalize on the market opportunity. Orlov, a son of Ukrainian immigrants living in NYC and posing as Jews, ditches his job at his parent's diner and begins selling guns.

He discovers that his lack of a nagging conscience makes him a great salesman to both his customers and himself. He doesn't need to convince himself that the world needs dealers like himself; he truly believes it, and his customers respond to his conviction. Soon he is the go-to guy of despots and leaders the world over, surpassing competitors like Ian Holm who choose to sell only to those whose missions they agree with.

As I am in an editing class now, I paid attention to the work of Zach Staenberg here, and his work keeps the movie's feet earthbound instead of up on the moral high ground. The movie is filled with moments that flirt with sanctimony, but Staenberg never lingers on dead bodies or any other shots that might cause a modern audience to roll its eyes.

The movie doesn't linger on visual punch lines either. Arms dealing is treated in the movie like any other business, leading to a whole host of dark comic images. Early on, Orlov attends an arms dealing trade show, in which leggy models in camoflauge dance on tanks while wielding guns like canes in a cabaret. Before you have time to dwell on the image, the movie has cut away. The pace of the humorous beats is relentless, but modern audiences who've grown up in the age of The Simpsons will find it familiar and comforting. It's one of the few movies I've seen in recent years that has the comic pace of a half hour sitcom.

All the other characters help to situate Orlov's conscience. His wife Ava (Bridget Moynahan), morally-conscious arms dealer Simeon Weisz (Ian Holm), his bum of a younger brother Vitaly (Jared Leto), an Interpol agent (Ethan Hawke), and an African dictator and frequent customer Andre Baptiste Sr. (Eamonn Walker). It's no surprise that the most compelling of these is the most ruthless one, Baptiste. The others are only of moderate interest; their fates feel prescribed. The faceless and shadowy figure of an American general, one who uses Orlov as a middleman, also feels like a movie cliche, but his screen time is limited.

Nicolas Cage mutes his performance by about 3 decibels here to match the measured sensibility of the movie. He's always had the hangdog face of someone who's always sad when he's happy, and a bit happy when he's sad, like an earnest clown, and it's perfect here. Those around Orlov try to force him to confront the moral outrage of his line of work, but he refuses to engage, even if his eyes say differently. He always brings the conversation back to the mundane, and his words have an appealing if morally bankrupt common sense:

The first and most important rule of gun-running is, never get shot with your own merchandise.

I sell to leftists, and I sell to rightists. I even sell to pacifists, but they're not usually repeat customers.

Back then, I didn't sell to Osama Bin Laden. Not because of moral reasons, but because he was always bouncing checks.

The movie doesn't offer any solutions to the business of arms deals, let alone the violence in the world. Orlov never feels more true to himself than when he's trying to close a deal, but his face reveals his anguish. He's the guilty bystander.

In one scene, Orlov wanders in a daze around an African guerilla camp, disoriented by having done lines of cocaine mixed with gunpowder. He stumbles into two soldiers, one of whom tries to gun him down in anger. When the gun jams, Orlov offers to take a look at it, to see if he can help fix it.

In another scene, Orlov outlines the virtues of a 9mm handgun to Baptiste. When Baptiste subsequently picks up the gun and shoots a security guard through the head for flirting with a girl, Orlov leaps to his feat and screams in dismay, "Why'd you do that?"

Baptiste, shocked at Orlov's impudence, points the gun at Orlov and prepares to pull the trigger.

Orlov continues, both out of self-preservation and honesty, "Now it's a used gun! How am I going to sell a used gun?!"

[Footnote: It's an odd coincidence, or perhaps it's another ironic wink, that in real-life, the most well-known Yuri Orlov is a famous nuclear physicist and Soviet dissident, not a gun dealer.]

***

For most of the suspense thriller Flightplan, the audience is in Kyle Pratt's (Jodie Foster) shoes. Her husband recently died from a fall from a tall building, and she and her 6 year old daughter Julia and bringing his body back home to NYC from Berlin. They happen to be flying on the new E474 jumbo jet, whose engines Pratt helped to design. Early in the flight, Pratt falls asleep for a moment, and when she wakes, her daugher has gone missing. No one on the plane seems to have seen her even board the plane, and everyone looks at Pratt as if she might be delusional from grief.

Jodie Foster externalizes the strength and fear of an anxious mother like no one else can. With the control of a world-class gymnast, she can cause her large blue eyes to quiver and fill with tears. I've missed Jodie Foster, last seen in a surprising cameo in A Very Long Engagement. As a leading actress, she fills injects a sense of gravity and heft, even when it's not provided by the script. And in this case, it's not, though Foster manages to keep us engrossed. Is she imagining things? Didn't we see her daughter on screen, or were we merely seeing hallucinations from Foster's mind? With their shoulder shrugs and blank expressions, every passenger and crew member seems like a suspect.

The critical moment in the movie, the one where it depressurizes, so to speak, is the one when the movie finally pulls us away from Jodie Foster's perspective, and, in doing so, reveals the solution to the mystery. I won't reveal anything except to say that it is both preposterous and mundane. No one in the theater gasped in shock at what was behind the curtain, as they did at the end of The Sixth Sense. It was all down to the runway from there.

The movie suffers from another comparison, one that will haunt movies for years: 9/11. All airplane terror scenarios offered up by movies such as Flightplan and the recent Red Eye will forever pale alongside the story behind the airplane hijackings of Sept 11.

***

Like Road to Perdition, A History of Violence is adapted from a short graphic novel (I love titles that arise from stock phrases, like this one, or like Tobias Wolff's short story The Night In Question). Tom Stall runs a diner in a small town, leading a quiet life with his pretty wife Edie (Maria Bello) and their two children, Jack and Sarah. Though on the surface all seems idyllic, we know that danger is on its way because we've met two sinister drifters in the opening scene.

We also feel a sense of foreboding because director David Cronenberg and his editor and cinematographer ratchet up the dread in the first part of the movie notch by notch, letting shots linger while the Howard Shore score lurks and trembles ominously in the background. The opening shot is quiet, a medium full-shot that holds on the two men, checking out of a hotel. We sense their blood is cold in their laconic movements. Their faces have long ago ceased to register any human warmth. No music plays at all, the shot is almost silent.

When one of the men goes to check out, he asks his partner Billy to pull the car up. He complies, starting the engine and driving up about fifteen feet, evoking a nervous giggle from the audience. It's the first of many comic moments that Cronenberg inserts to release a bit of the tension. He's like a hot-air balloon pilot, wielding humor and suspense with an anesthesiologist's precision precision to keep the audience floating between laughter and apprehension. At the same time we laugh at the irony of pulling the car up, we're holding our breath awaiting a gunshot from inside the hotel lobby.

Meanwhile, Jack, a shy and somewhat dweebish teenager, encounters his own problems at school. At gym class, Jack catches a flyball off the bat of the school bully Jared to end the game, causing said bully and his usual posse of toughies (arms folded across the chest, nodding slowly with sneers on their face) to antagonize Jack all over town. It's an absurd moment. After Jared hits the flyball, he flips his bat away like Barry Bonds and starts his home run trot, yet the flyball doesn't cause Jack to have to move an inch to catch it out in rightfield. Jared obviously doesn't play much baseball. His reaction of anger is so exaggerated that the audience burst into laughter.

We know at that moment that both Tom and his son Jack will both have to confront their own antagonists, that Jack will be a foil for his father. The movie has the feel of a Western, so we know that the two criminals will stroll into Tom's bar for a showdown. Tom prevails and becomes a local hero, but the publicity from the local media attract three unwelcome visitors to town, led by Ed Harris with a creepy makeup job and a bad eye. These men claim Tom is not who he purports to be, that his ability to kill is no coincidence. Soon not just his wife and kids but even the town sheriff are wondering just who Tom is.

There's a moment in the movie, a simple change of a character's accent, that reveals the truth we've suspected. As with many of the finest moments in the movie, it's delicate but unmistakable, a quiet thrill. The subtlety has the audience leaning forward into each moment.

The scenes of violence are shot and edited in real-time, which is not to say they aren't breathtaking in pace. No slow-mo or stuttering frames or jump cuts, but the swift editing gives the violence the feeling of an explosion, as if violence is a primal impulse or instinct hardwired into the human condition. The creators are fully in control of the story at all moments, and their virtuosity is impressive to behold.

But for a Cronenberg movie, and for all the violence, A History of Violence is not as provocative as so many reviews would have you believe. As with Road to Perdition, the movie feels a bit slight, like pulp fiction dressed in a tuxedo, or a novella on steroids. The contrived nature of the story elements and of many of the characters undermines the movie's credibility as a fable of America, or violence.

The character of Tom Small is the type you only find in pulp. He's a rural Jason Bourne, and though Viggo Mortensen lends humanity to all his roles (perhaps it's because he's a cultured guy in real life, painting, writing poetry, exfoliating, arranging flowers, composing ballads on his lute), the character lost me at "Hello, I'm a low-key farmer, but at the first sign of violence I can transform into a lean, mean, killing machine."

Another well-known actor appears at the end of the movie and offers a tickle of a performance, but again it's the type of artful performance that distanced me from any grand messages about violence and humanity. Only Edie and Jack feel like people I know.

And perhaps that's for the best. I've always suspected my local dry cleaner of possessing a dark past. One day I might complain that she'd missed a stain on one of my dress shirts, only to have her fly over the counter to deliver a flying kick to my cranium before removing my eyeball with a sewing needle.

***

Is there any movie that Ebert doesn't like anymore? In middle age, his critical thumb has discovered Viagra. This week, there are more stars on his homepage than on an American flag. His reviews from early in his career contain so much fantastic work that it's a bit disheartening for me to see his critical carving knife dulled with use. Whereas Pauline Kael seemed to like fewer and fewer movies as she aged, Ebert seems to laud more and more. Perhaps he's caught a case of the softies from his vapid on-screen partner Richard Roeper.

It's also a problem with reducing movies to thumbs up, thumbs down, or 1 through 4 stars, or any sort of rating system, one reason I gave up using the star system here. The Siskel and Ebert television show has turned Ebert into a populist arbitrator for movies, and he can never go back now. Our enjoyment of every movie is different, and a star rating is too reductionist in isolation. It's one reason Ebert has had to spend so much time in recent years trying to get people to read his reviews to make sense of some of his ratings; to many people, he's all thumbs (in fairness to him, he still writes full-length reviews of all movies he screens).

Across thousands of people, an objective measure like that has some use, and in our time-constrained life, many people simply scan soundbites or critics recommendations for a quick yay nay. We've come to expect movie reviews in our magazines and newspapers on the week a movie opens, to help us decide what to see, and so critics orient their reviews to that market. If you can reduce your opinion to a soundbite, it might be picked up and included in the print ad for the movie.

A site like Metacritic, which attempts to translate all movie reviews into a 100 point scale, is amusing as a very rough survey of the overall critical response to a movie, but Metacritic weights all reviews differently in coming up with their aggregate score, so anyone who reads too much into the exact overall number, whether it's an 88 or an 86, a 72 or a 75, is reading both a precision and an accuracy that just isn't there. Read an Anthony Lane review and ask ten people where it rests on a 100 point scale, and you'll likely get ten different numbers.

At the end of the day, the only review that matters is the one that matches your own opinion of the movie. Usually that's your own review, but not always. Some reviewers can verbalize your response to a movie, break down how and why you felt a certain way about something. That's why people go back and read Pauline Kael's reviews after they've seen a movie.

$900 phones, $200 crayons, and a $1.50 sponge

Pre-order the Nokia 8801 from Neiman Marcus for $899(!?!). It's a gorgeous handset, but that price is absurd. Cell phones don't seem to have advanced much in a long time, other than getting skinnier. Still only a half megapixel digital camera in this one. All I want is a cell phone with a slim profile, half-decent digital camera, quad-band capability so I can use it all over the world, the ability to send text messages and photos, and a simple-to-use on-screen interface. I'm not sure I've seen the phone yet that combines all these features. Why are handset mfrs focused on all sorts of other useless features?

We watched The Cutting Edge - The Magic of Movie Editing in class. Very similar in content to Edge Codes.com: The Art of Motion Picture Editing, which we saw the previous week. I prefer the former, and it has the added benefit of being on DVD now.

Yes, Barneys Baby New York has just what that newborn needs, a $200 crayon set. Or you can go with the classic Crayola box of 64 for $5.49, and it comes with a built-in sharpener, too.

When you stay with someone and they give you towels, do you really have to have a hand towel and washcloth?

Watch a webcast of an operation before you undergo one.

The coolest household cleaning product since the Swiffer is the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. Just soak the sponge in water, and proceed to clean bathroom and kitchen surfaces with a bit of light scrubbing. I have no idea how it works, but I suspect dark arts. Whatever, my stovetop is clean, and that's all that matters.

A great interview with Singapore's prime minister Lee Kuan Yew in which he presents an incisive view of China's future on the global stage, among other topics.

So can I get another bag of pretzels?

Tha JetBlue story is a fascinating one because the passengers on board were watching live coverage of their ordeal on the DirecTV feed in their seat-back televisions. It was almost the opposite of the situation in New Orleans, where the trapped citizens were in the dark as to what was happening, even as reporters roamed among them, piping their story out to the rest of the world.

In general, I think it's best for the pilot to share as much information as possible to explain turbulence, or delays, or problems of any sort. Keeping people in the dark is one of the oldest tools in the storyteller's handbook for how to keep them in suspense, but that's not what you want with a plane full of jumpy, bug-eyed passengers.

However, television news coverage is often guilty of sensationalizing late-breaking stories, and from what I've read, passengers were watching uninformed television commentators presenting all sorts of horrific scenarios, none of which were the likely outcome in what aviation experts have described as a standard emergency landing.

So does this help or hurt JetBlue business? In cases like these, it seems as if the airplane model usually takes the brunt of the blame. In this case it's the Airbus A320. Reporters have quickly combed government records and found that 7 Airbus A320's have had landing gear problems (though I have not yet read what the denominator in that equation should be, or how the resulting percentage would compare to that of other aircrafts; is 7 good or bad? Who knows). But I suspect that the impact to the airline affected, or the airplane manufacturer, is brief and minimal.

Either people are really logical and able to do the math to realize that air travel is really safe, or they fly because comparable alternatives are lacking, or some combination of the above. I have certain aircraft types I prefer over others because of the seating arrangement and leg room, but it's rare when I have two flights of comparable price that allow me to choose a specific type of plane.

On a somewhat related note, I'm curious about the answer to the disappearance of Jodie Foster's daughter in Flightplan (7-minute sneak peek at the official site). It's a trailer with an intriguing hook. Everyone I've talked to reacts with surprise when I mention my curiosity, and I suppose they're right in anticipating a mundane explanation. I've never heard of the director, either, and his resume doesn't inspire confidence.

The main problem, though, is that the moviegoing public is well-versed in Hollywood thriller formulas. It's not easy to surprise anyone if you stick to the playbook. The trailer gives away enough that it's highly likely that Foster's daughter was on the flight, that someone snatched her daughter for some reason related to her participation in the design of the airplane (that info will certainly aid her in her search), and that she is reunited with her daughter by movie's end.

Of course, Hitchcock often gave away the gig early in the movie, as in Dial M for Murder, yet still managed to craft an engrossing movie. It's not always what you tell, but how you tell it. I enjoy watching Jodie Foster and Peter Saarsgard on screen, and probably will sometime this weekend.

Moto's Doughnut Soup recipe

Earlier this year, I posted about my visit to Moto. In it, I raved about one of the post-modern desserts, donut soup, and asked if anyone had the recipe or wanted to share ideas on how to replicate it at home.
Today, after class, I found an e-mail in my inbox from a MaryLouise. It turns out she'd read a profile of Moto in the August edition of US Airways magazine and jotted down the doughnut soup recipe on a barf bag (yes, just a hint of irony in that).
She made the soup this past weekend (the results were delicious, she reports), and while Googling for a photo of the soup, she came across my post. Bless her heart, she was kind enough to e-mail me the recipe, along with a warning to ensure my blender was up to snuff.
And now, little man, I give the recipe to you.

Doughnut Soup

Ingredients
5 glazed yeast doughnuts
1 c milk
1 c water
powdered sugar
salt

For the stock
Break 2 doughnuts into small pieces and caramelize in a dry pan.
Add milk and water, bring to simmer.
Remove from heat and steep for 20 min.
Strain.

Puree 3 doughnuts in a blender with enough stock for a cream-like consistency. Season to taste with salt and sugar, and run through a fine strainer. Serve warm in demitasse cups alongside an espresso.

On the Marc Jacobs

On the Marc Jacobs homepage, you can click a link to watch the video of his 2006 Collection runway show, which opened with the Penn State Nittany Lions marching band playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Never have so many band dorks shared the stage with so many babes. Fashion shows are inherently ridiculous, so twists like this one or the nude runway show at the end of Altman's Ready to Wear are to be expected. Still, I'd leap at the chance to see a fashion show in person if I could score tickets. Who wouldn't?

***

Among the 25 new MacArthur Fellows receiving $500,000 genius grants this year is Edet Belzberg. We will be editing her newest project, which isn't even listed at IMDb yet, in the second half of our class. She's most known for her first feature-length documentary Children Underground, which is now at the top of my Netflix queue. So exciting!

***

Smashing Pumpkins lead singer Billy Corgan fielded questions about the Chicago Cubs in the Chicago Tribune Sports page. Being a creative type, he chose to ignore the Shift key.

I can't even talk or think about the Cubs anymore, this season has been such a disappointment. I haven't watched one of their games since I left for China.

***

Stream the new Elizabethtown soundtrack at MySpace. I've never once touched my MySpace page, but it's MySpace has carved out a nice little niche for themselves in the crowded social community software space with their music content.

***

As NYC waits to see which of its restaurants will be crowned with three stars in the first Michelin Guide in North America, or even which 500 will merit mention at all (pre-order the Michelin Guide to New York City 2006 from Amazon.com for 32% off; it ships on Nov 4, 2005), it's useful to review what three stars from Michelin mean. According to Michelin, three stars denote "exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey, where diners eat extremely well, sometimes superbly. The wine list features generally outstanding vintages, and the surroundings and service are part of this unique experience, which is priced accordingly."

I tried using a Michelin Guide once, but it wasn't nearly as useful as I'd hoped, in part because my French was rusty, but also because the guides don't actually provide much description of each listing. Fortunately, the web community will be sure to blog the 3-star winner(s) to death.

Michelin's inspectors have been paying anonymous visits to 1,200 NYC restaurants since February. During this time, I have been tempted, on more than one occasion, to stroll into some of NYC's finest restaurant with a Moleskine notebook and Mont Blanc pen, wearing some stylish metal frame glasses and sporting a French accent. I'd look all about me like a tourist entering a cathedral in Europe, and after the first bite or two of each dish, I'd jot notes in my notebook.

You laugh, but simply bringing my camera into a restaurant and snapping photos of my dishes before eating them has led to no shortage of free dishes, compliments of the kitchen, and face-to-face meetings with the head chef.

***

Epicurious lists ten restaurant trends they hate. Personally, the most exasperating thing about the NYC dining scene is the impossibility of getting a seat at any half-decent place. If you have to make a reservation weeks in advance, any meal starts to seem like an ordeal, placing undue pressure on the experience. One is bound to be disappointed in some way. It's less the scarcity of reservation slots as it is the dearth of walk-in availability that disappoints me.

I enjoy being able to stroll into a neighborhood joint to enjoy a spontaneous bite, to feel like I can run into a friend on the street and be enjoying an unplanned but delightful meal together just a few moments later.

***

Google WiFi service to launch shortly?

***

Which animal kills more people in the U.S. than any other?

The Complete New Yorker

The Complete New Yorker, 4,109 issues and half a million pages of The New Yorker on 8 DVD-ROMs and a 122 page book, ships tomorrow. The New Yorker store sells it for $100, but Amazon has it for $63. I love the tactile heft and feel of printed matter, but I look forward to tossing some old issues I've kept for years. This collection runs from February 1925 to February 2005.

If you consider that simply purchasing a paperback of Nobody's Perfect, a collection of some of Anthony Lane's movie reviews, from Amazon.com would cost $11.53, and buying the book and CD compilation The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker would cost $37.80, then for $13.67 you're buying everything else: all the short stories, articles, photos, ads, and illustrations. And it's searchable (I'm curious to see how usable the search function is).

Very cool, though even better would be a way to just search through all this content directly through the Internet. Then I wouldn't have any DVD-ROMs to deal with at all. The New Yorker was probably concerned about bandwidth issues, which will diminish rapidly, and sharing of online accounts, never as much of a problem as content providers anticipate, especially at these prices. We're not talking Lexis-Nexis subscription fees. Also, putting it all online would have put a huge onus on site usability and design, something that doesn't appear to be a New Yorker strength, judging by their online site today.

Baby steps, I guess. It's still an exciting achievement, in my opinion. I often think of certain articles that I've read in The New Yorker, and now I'll be able to look them up. How will the search work? Is content organized by decade across the DVD-ROMs, or will I be frustrated by having to constantly pop one DVD out and another one in because content is spread all over the place? Will I be able to copy and paste text and illustrations from the interface, or will it be so securely locked up that it's read-only? The devil is in the details, and the description online doesn't reveal much. I'll post a brief user report after my copy arrives.

In somewhat related news, The New York Times launched TimesSelect today. As a home delivery subscriber, I receive access to Op-Eds, which I used to have to pay for, and the ability to save 100 articles every month to an online archive for future perusal. I'll also be able to preview articles online, before they arrive on my doorstep in print form.

I can't tell how useful this will be yet. I rarely have time to read the paper the day it arrives, so the article preview function may not be that useful to me. Also, I'd rather have the option of being able to read and save 20 articles a month for free from anywhere in the archive than having to keep up with hundreds of articles each month in order to pick out 100 to save before they disappear into the pay-per-view vault forever.

Ripple and Roll

On the way to see Arcade Fire at Central Park Summerstage tonight, I strolled past Sean Connery. I was tempted to intone, in my best Gert Fröbe cackle, "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die." But Connery was looking wearied by age, and if he did pass away in the next week or so, how awful would I have felt?

Arcade Fire put on a great show. Their music is anthemic, hyper-infused with emotion, so seeing them with a choir of rabid fans is like attending a fire and brimstone sermon with some true believers. You can't help but hum, clap, wave, and head bop to their tunes. It helps that the band members look like they're having such a good time on stage. The drummers ran around in a frenzy, banging on everything with their drumsticks (one of them nearly ran through the back curtain and fell off the stage). The lead singer tried to punch a hole through the stage with his mic stand.

For their encore, Arcade Fire brought surprise guest David Bowie on stage. He was looking dapper in a white suit and matching fedora. They accompanied him on one of his old tunes, then he played guitar and sang a bit of "Wake Up". He participated in the same way earlier this week at a Fashion Week party (I linked to a recording of that yesterday), but seeing him live was still a bonus. There may have been a CD released in the past year to year and a half that I loved more than Funeral, but if there was, it's not top of mind.

On my way into the concert, a security guard told me my zoom lens was too long. No sexual innuendos, she was being literal. She gave me two choices, dump my zoom lens somewhere and pick it up after the concert, or hand over my digital camera battery. Since I had nowhere to stash my zoom lens, I neutered my SLR and handed over the battery, which she then proceeded to stick down her pants. I guess she ran out of pockets. So I wasn't able to snap any pics of Arcade Fire's stage antics, though I did end up with a very wary battery at the end of the concert.

I started my editing intensive class at The Edit Center this week. It has lived up to the "intensive" advanced billing, but I'm loving every hour. Along with improving my Final Cut Pro editing skills by leaps and bounds, I've gained a newfound appreciation for movie editors and how much impact they have on the final product you see on the big screen. Like book editors, their best work is largely transparent to audiences, most of the credit going to the director or actors, just as no all credit for books goes to the author. The only time you notice an editor is when they've missed something.

Our class field trips are mostly outings to see movies, and that's a type of field trip I can appreciate. We hit the Lower East Side to see Edge Codes.com, a movie that, like The Cutting Edge (not the D.B. Sweeney/Moira Kelley hockey/figure skating flick), does for movie editors what Visions of Light did for cinematographers. Andrew Mondshein (editor, The Sixth Sense) and Christopher Tellefsen (editor, Gummo, Kids), interviewed in the movie, attended the screening and fielded questions.

Mondshein spoke of how the first few times they screened The Sixth Sense for audiences, the theatre erupted in whispers and confusion when Bruce Willis's ring hit the floor at the end of the movie. So he added in the flashbacks, to Haley Joel Osment saying "They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead." To Willis's encounters with live people, like his wife at the restaurant. Mondshein threw in just enough so audiences could connect the dots, appreciate the "Aha!", and return to enjoying the movie's conclusion.

Tomorrow's technology today: fusion and nanotechnology, in consumable goods form

Banana Nutrament has an MP3 of David Bowie and Arcade Fire singing "Wake Up" together. Bowie vocals on one of my favorite songs of the last year...cool. I'm going to see Arcade Fire on Central Park Summerstage Thursday evening. It will be my first Central Park concert.

How efficient is the Red Cross? Is there a better charity to donate to when crises like Hurricane Katrina strike? It's the most linked to charity for donating to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort, but someone expressed reservations about how efficiently the Red Cross channeled those funds to aiding victims. I don't know the answer, but I found this evaluation in which the Red Cross online earned a four star rating (out of four). Not sure how objective or accurate this evaluation is, though I was hoping more knowledgeable folks had already done the legwork on this. The president and CEO, Marsha Evans, does indeed make a really generous salary ($450K a year, according to this site), though overall program expenses seem reasonable at around 5.6% of revenues.

The new iPod Nano is cool (the ROKR is not), most people agree, but while I love my iPod(s), I really hope the quality control on this new edition is better than that on previous editions. I don't know anyone who's purchased an iPod who hasn't had to bring it in for repairs at some point. Ironically, my most reliable is my first one, the first generation iPod. My other iPod, the Shuffle, is temperamental, like a crazy girlfriend.

Stream the new Sigur Ros CD Takk

Yet another Godfather novel on tap for next year. Sounds like this one weaves the Corleone saga with the Kennedy assassination.

Xbox 360 has a launch date: Nov. 22

Gillette unveils yet another razor, the successor to the Mach 3: Fusion. This baby has an enhanced indicator lubristrip, 5 blades, and a precision trimmer blade for side burns and shaping your goatee.

Heather Havrilesky rates the fall television comedies. Those that rate well on her scale are Ricky Gervais's HBO series "Extras," Chris Rock's UPN series "Everybody Hates Chris," and, to a lesser degree, NBC's "My Name is Earl" and Fox's "Kitchen Confidential." "Extras" premieres Sunday, Sept 25, at 10:30pm. That's the one I'll be tuning into for sure, along with every other fanatical devotee of "The Office."

Red Sox outfielder Gape Kapler ruptures his Achilles tendon running around second base after a teammate hit a home run

Canon jumps into the HDV camcorder fray this week with the XL H1. It will cost $8999 and ship in November. Cool looking camcorder, but surprisingly, Canon won't offer 24P or 720P recording, only 1080i in HDV mode. Whether or not they believe 24P is useful or not, it's clear many users do, and the user is king. Panasonic will offer that in their HVX200, and they'll take market share because of it.

The valiant

"Cowards die many times before their deaths,
The valiant never taste of death but once."

Caesar, from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (Act II, Scene ii, 32-37)

I saw Denzel Washington play Brutus in a production of Julius Caesar earlier this year. From my seats in the far left of the orchestra, I missed a lot of lines spoken away from me. Many of Marcus Aurelius's lines were incomprehensible, and the setting was lost in time: in some scenes soldiers carried machine guns and walked through metal detectors, but in others they seemed as if they were in ancient Rome. Not my favorite production, and not my favorite Shakespeare play, but the quote above cuts to the heart of things.

Now we have HBO's miniseries Rome. After the first three episodes, the show has done just enough to hold my attention, but my blood isn't boiling the way I'd expected it to, what with all the spicy intrigue that made up ancient Rome. The story is told from the perspective of lesser (and I presume fictional) characters who brush up against more well-known figures such as Caesar, Mark Antony, Cato, and Brutus, a crucial decision, and the wrong one. This is one instance where I'd rather follow the brighter lights of ancient Italian history. How the story might take legends and bring them down from the heavens and humanize them, that's what interests me. This interpretation of Rome is like a miniseries about the Chicago Bulls dynasty of the 90's, but focused on the stories of Bobby Hansen, Luc Longley, and the ball boy.

March of the lemmings

Wolfram Tones: Create music based on Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. Download them as ring tones if you like. Many of them do sound like ring tones, actually. It reminds me of GarageBand with a random music generator. Not stuff I'd listen to all the time, but it's interesting to click on the various music genre buttons to see how much it resembles what you think of as country or r&b or classical. Someday perhaps there will be a Computer Idol competition. On a somewhat related note, the ideas in A New Kind of Science (NKS) seem to have relevance to the current evolution vs. intelligent design debate. NKS is online, so you can read, for example, this chapter: "Intelligence in the Universe."

The UCI, cycling's governing body, exonerates Lance Armstrong of doping charges and criticizes the accusers. L'Equipe to respond saturday. One thing is certain; this whole bitter fight is no help to the sport, as doping has once again, as in 1998.

Derek and Ken were in town for Labor Day Weekend. I always learn something when I spend time with those guys. One of my learnings this past weekend was that lemmings do not commit mass suicide. It's a myth perpetuated by a Disney documentary in which the filmmakers ran lemmings off of the side of a cliff to create the myth of their suicidal tendencies. Looks like that Disney documentary is available from Amazon.com on VHS. I'm not sure how the lemming myth took hold of me, but I suspect it was Gary Larson and his Far Side comics. I remember one depicted a whole flock of lemmings headed for the edge of a cliff to jump into the ocean, but one is shown wearing an inner tube with a sly grin. Another showed a family of lemmings in a car, headed off on vacation. The mother and father lemming sit in the front seat while two lemming children are in back. The mother is shown shouting at the kids, "Hey! I told you kids to knock it off back there!... or so help me I'll just take this car and drive it off the first cliff I come to!" I miss The Far Side. Larson went out on top.

Meet the F**kers (Windows Media), a Daily Show video clip that provides some satiric catharsis for any anger you might feel towards the Bush administration for their slow reactions to Hurricane Katrina. I hadn't seen the footage of Mike Myers' reaction to Kanye West's outburst until watching this clip, or Michael Brown's disastrous interviews, or the Larry King interview with Celine Dion. Memorable.

Colin Powell regrets his statements to the United Nations in February of 2003. I was aboard a ferry from the north island of New Zealand to the south island when he gave his testimony, and I watched it on CNN. Little did I know it would be downhill from there for someone who seemingly everyone thought would make a perfect presidential candidate.

I'm going to join Bill Simmons on the Bears bandwagon. Really good young defense, and if Kyle Orton surprises (and sometimes new starting QBs do) then perhaps they can win a bunch of low-scoring rumbles. It all depends on what that offense looks like after they take off the bandages.

Vincent Cerf is the new "Chief Internet evangelist" at Google. I look forward to hearing about this Internet thing. It sounds cool. As an aside, based on my years of working in the Internet biz, anyone who has "evangelist" in their job title has a cushy job.

The Nokia 8800 is one gorgeous cell phone. Though China isn't listed as one of the countries where you can buy one, I saw them in several stores in Beijing and Shanghai. The slider resistance is firm but silky smooth. I held it, fondled it, drooled over it, but left my credit card sheathed. $800, which is roughly what they were charging, is a lot to pay for technological sex appeal.

More from Flushing

I attended three sessions of the U.S. Open this year. Twice I was there on days when Sharapova was scheduled to play. Once I visited during the evening, and she was scheduled in the day session, and the other time I attended during the day session and she appeared in the evening session. I realize that if she seems me in the stands she might just quit tennis and elope with me, but this conspiracy to prevent me from seeing her in person is getting out of hand.

Not that the pro women's tennis tour isn't stocked with other tall, leggy, attractive blondes. I'm resigned to the fact that it's impossible for the general public to obtain decent seats in Arthur Ashe Stadium, so I spent much of my time at the U.S. Open this year strolling the outer grounds instead (a grounds pass is a good value that first week because so many to players are pushed to the outer courts). There aren't as many seats outside Ashe, but the views are far superior (some of my US Open pics here on Flickr).

Everywhere I turned, I encountered gigantic model-sized women's players from Russia and Eastern Europe. Among all professional female athletes, tennis players probably have the most normal and attractive (though extremely fit) physiques. Tennis doesn't produce any disproportionately sized muscles or odd body shapes. More than just looking good, though, these girls can play.

Based on my scouting, the one to own in your keeper fantasy tennis league is Nicole Vaidisova (warning; loud, repetitive techno music on her temporary homepage) of the Czech Republic, only 16 years old but already 5'11" and a client of IMG. I watched from courside as she and Mark Knowles pulled out a third set tiebreaker to win their first mixed doubles match. She's been hyped as the next "it" girl on tour, one to follow in the footsteps of Sharapova with her combination of game, height, and looks.

Afterwards, she hung out courtside, and I chatted with her briefly. Several people interrupted to ask if she'd pose for photos with their kids. She was generous with her time, not at all unapproachable like many baseball players, to pick on one sport. For a 16 year old, she has big all-around game, including a big first serve. Project her growth, both of her game and her height, and the forecast is sunny. Did I mention she's not ugly?

I also caught matches starring some of the Russian contingent of top women's players. Elena Dementieva always wears a saffron/pumpkin dress and matching visor, her long hair tied in a pony tail or braid. She has huge quads that help her generate massive pace off of her groundstrokes, but she's most well-known for her shaky second serve. She throws her toss way out to the right and hits a feeble but heavy spinning slice serve that often flutters into the net.

I've always had a soft spot for Dementieva because of it, even though it's something she could and should correct as a professional. It's like watching a defiant bird with a clipped wing. Simply having to contemplate hitting it, knowing everyone in the stadium, including her opponent, is anticipating it, is a heavy mental burden, but to her credit she has learned to live with it. For a serve that travels so slowly, it's unexpectedly effective. I watched both Capriati last year and Davenport this year struggle to attack it, both of them falling to Dementieva in the semifinals. And once the serve is in play, Dementieva just crushes the ball.

I also caught bits of matches with Daniela Hantuchova and Anastasia Myskina. Hantuchova is a giant. What are they feeding the kids these days? Lebron James, Maria Sharapova, Dwight Howard...if someone offered to let me relive my youth with an extra 6 to 12 inches of height in exchange for not having one of my fingers or toes, I'd have to spend a weekend thinking about it. Hantuchova doesn't hit as hard as you'd expect of a 6 footer, and at the age of 22 she may be over the hill. Just kidding. Sort of.

Myskina is exasperating to watch when she's struggling. She's always berating herself, shouting at her coach, screaming at her racket, gesturing in disgust. She's like the hot-tempered, somewhat inconsistent poker player at the weekly game whose a lot of fun to be around when they're winning, but who always blows up when the inevitable collapse occurs, leaving everyone around them to stew in an uncomfortable silence.

I saw Gustavo Kuerten ("Guga") play, though only briefly, on court 11, as Tommy Robredo dispatched him in four sets, leaving Guga's contingent of Brazilian fanatics all dressed up in face paint with nowhere to go.

I also saw Roger Federer play again. Last year I saw him annihilate Tim Henman and Lleyton Hewitt in the semifinals and finals to win the Open. It was the best tennis I'd ever seen from anyone, ever. He made Hewitt look like a club pro in the finals, breaking the little Aussie battler three times to win 6-0 in both the first and third sets.

In the match I watched this year, Federer beat Nicholas Kiefer in four sets, but it was a sloppy four sets. Federer even tossed his racket in frustration once, a rare display of emotion for the usually level-headed Swiss superstar. He still moved on. Some players just put others out of their comfort zone, and perhaps Kiefer is one of those nuisances for Federer.

Federer has dominated Hewitt recently, but Hewitt is playing near the peak of his game. If Federer plays like he did versus Kiefer, Hewitt could beat him, but if Federer plays like he did just two days later versus David Nalbandian, then no one left in the draw can touch him. I watched Hewitt dominate Dominik Hrbaty in straight sets. Hewitt's not my favorite guy - the racial incident with Blake and that line judge still lingers in my mind, all those "C'mon's!" when he's beating up on a lesser opponent are ridiculous, and he just reminds me of a silver spoon country club brat - but there's no denying that he's a fabulous hard court player. He resembles a video game tennis player in his impenetrable consistency, and seeing him advance was the lesser of two evils considering Hrbaty's pink shirt. That's quite possibly the ugliest sporting outfit in the history of tennis.

I caught Andre Agassi on center court against 6'10" Ivo Karlovic, a Croatian with perhaps the hugest serve in men's tennis. He doesn't get it up over 140 mph like Roddick, but it's a more consistent and deceptive serve, if you can call a 137 mph serve deceptive. He was bombing it into the corners and aced Agassi 30 times. To cut off the huge bounce of the Karlovic serve, Agassi had to move up to try and catch the serve on the rise, which is like moving to the front of the batter's box against Randy Johnson. Agassi's return is so good that he actually got a few. One Karlovic serve came in at 137 mph to Agassi's forehand in the deuce court and came back a millisecond later at about the same speed right down the line for a winner. Karlovic had soft hands at the net and should have serve and volleyed every point. Neither guy could break the other, so it went to three straight tie breaks, all going to the American.

Agassi, if he can overcome Ginepri, and if he has the legs, has enough power from the baseline to attack Federer, who is still prone to some errors off his backhand wing. Plus, Agassi has Gil Reyes, one badass looking personal trainer, in his corner. Just having a guy like that in the stands, in his dark, pinstriped suit and black shirt, has got to be worth a few points. I'd just like to see two players at their peaks in the men's final instead of a blowout.

The fans at Flushing Meadows appreciate an underdog which means they usually root for Federer's opponent. But more than that, his personality hurts him with New York fans. He's not demonstrative, he wins with an effortless ease, and he rarely shows much emotion. He's like Sampras in that way. It's too bad; he seems by all accounts to be a good guy, a generous one with charity, and his game is just classically beautiful. New Yorkers like their demonstrative, almost histrionic players (witness their support for an almost boorish Jimmy Connors in that legendary match against Aaron Krickstein), but they should rally for a classy guy in Federer.

Another up and comer who I caught on the Grandstand was #1 seeded junior boys player Donald Young. He's a 16 year old southpaw, just 5'9", 145 lbs. He looks slight, like a young kid just hitting around on the playground, but then he unloads a 131 mph serve up the middle and you realize he's got some game. He's feisty, a perfectionist. Everytime he missed a shot he held his hands up towards the sky in supplication and disgust. Someday, after he finishes growing and maturing, he'll be back at Flushing Meadows in the men's draw.

One thing I like about tennis players as opposed to golfers is that tennis players can deal with noise while they're serving, playing. During the match between Agassi and Blake, fans gasped and shushed and screamed during points, but the players never lost a beat. The average overpaid pro golfer (hell, even a recreational player) has a conniption if a mosquito passes gas, and this is with their target sitting motionless on the ground instead of moving at 100 mph with movement. No players on the outer courts complained as I snapped pics with my SLR during their matches.

One tip for making an Arthur Ashe match more enjoyable, especially if you're in the nosebleeds, is to use your American Express card to rent one of the free radios they offer. The radios allow you to listen in to the USA Network television commentary (usually of the Arthur Ashe match), and the color commentator these days is often John McEnroe, one of my favorite announcers in any sport. It also adds a lush aural environment, amplifying the audience murmur to an "ocean-in-seashell" level of white noise, allowing you to hear the thwack of the ball, cheers of the crowd, and grunts of the players more clearly than the annoying banker two rows behind you, blabbering on his cell phone. I rented one this year and will never watch another center court match without it.

McEnroe is a great tennis analyst. He and the always incisive Mary Carillo help to carry whatever tennis novice CBS employs as the play-by-play guy, usually Dick Enberg. Replace the bland commentary of Enberg with the dulcet English tones of Cliff Drysdale instead and you'd have the strongest announcing trio in any sport. I spotted Johnny Mac hitting around after announcing two matches during the day session and snapped a photo or two of him through the fence. He's the same old Mac, with that corkscrew service motion and hot temper. After missing one serve, he cursed, "Shit!" The first week of the tournament, he has a great work schedule. He stops in at Ashe to announce when he wants to, and if he's bored he seems to have free reign to go off and hit.

The outer grounds are fairly nice, with shops where you can buy anything from the Sharapova tennis outfit to Roger Federer's racket to a $40 giant tennis ball by Wilson, the most popular item for collecting player autographs. The food is passable but crazy expensive. Prepare to pay $10 to $15 for a burger or sandwich and $4 for a drink.

AOL sponsors an indoor entertainment center where you can test the speed of your serve and participate in a variety of other tennis challenges. I stepped into the net cold to test the speed of my serve and nearly tore my arm out of its socket just to hit 92 on the gun. If you're going to go for Roddick-type serves, make sure to warm up first.

Takk

New album by Sigur Ros releases September 13th. Love them. This one's sung in actual Icelandic, instead of the made-up Hopelandic.

Peeved by the attacks by L'Equipe, Lance hints that he might come back and kick some butt in the Tour again next year. If so, he needs to make up his mind soon.

I've watched Felix Hernandez pitch a few times now. Awesome. Wicked stuff, especially that movement on his mid-90's heater. In 51 innings he's struck out 50 batters and walked only 10, giving up only 31 hits. Lefties are batting .129 against him. I hope he stays healthy and drug-free for many years.

Okay, so most of the last season of Six Feet Under left me cold. But the last few episodes, after you-know-who dies, were quite good. The last montage of scenes in the last episode moved me.

What happened to summer?

James and Angela and I ate at Angelica's Kitchen, an organic vegan restaurant, on Monday night, and we sat next to Morgan Spurlock and his girlfriend (wife?), both of Super Size Me fame. I guess he hasn't relapsed since his McDonald's days. In a way, perhaps it's healthy that he just gorged himself for a month on that stuff. He'll probably never have a hankering to eat a burger at McDonald's again. The best dish was Angela's tofu sandwich.

I like Google News, but I thought they were going to weight their news sources with a bias to more reputable, big-name sources. The biggest problem with Google News and Google News Alerts is all the random stories from small town papers, many being repeats of the AP Wire story. That problem still exists.

Oh dear lord do I miss DirecTV. This season they added an optional NFL Ticket SuperFan add-on package that includes over 100 games in HD, a Red Zone channel that switches automatically to any game where a team enters the opponent's red zone, a Game Mix channel where 8 games are broadcast on one screen, and a Short Cuts feature showing commercial-free replays of games in 30 minutes or less. It's like crack for a fantasy football player, and it's not available to me b/c I can't get line of sight to the DirecTV satellite from my apartment in Manhattan. When I was a DirecTV subscriber in Seattle, I didn't mind that DirecTV had basically a monopoly on showing all the NFL games, but now I'm ready to break into the roof of the nearest skyscraper to set up a satellite with a mile long run of cable to run through my front window. Time Warner Cable stinks.

More than 400 million watched the finale of "Super Girl", an American Idol-esque Chinese reality tv show. That's about the same number of people as live in the United States and Britain combined. The winner was Li Yu Chun, a tomboyish Sichuan native (a video clip of her final performance can be found here). The show only allowed female singers, and the official show title was "Mongolian Cow Sour Yogurt Super Girl Contest." The show was touted among Chinese youth as a triumph of democratic voting, as anyone could pay 1RMB (about $0.12) to vote via text message.

Washed away

A special report from the Times-Picayune titled "Washing away" and published in June of 2002 foresaw New Orleans' hurricane disaster with tragic accuracy. Some of the articles from the five-part series:

• IN HARM'S WAY: Levees, our best protection from flooding, may turn against us.
• THE BIG ONE: A major hurricane could decimate the region, but flooding from even a moderate storm could kill thousands. It's just a matter of time.
• LEFT BEHIND: Once it’s certain a major storm is about to hit, evacuation offers the best chance for survival. But for those who wait, getting out will become nearly impossible as the few routes out of town grow hopelessly clogged. And 100,000 people without transportation will be especially threatened.
• LAST LINE OF DEFENSE (.jpg graphic): Army Corps of Engineers officials say hurricane levees in the New Orleans area will protect residents from a Category 3 hurricane moving rapidly over the area. But computer models indicate even weaker storms could find chinks in that armor.

The report predicted that citizens would have to be sheltered in the Superdome, that aid workers would struggle to reach survivors, and so much more of what happened this past week. Because of that, it was stunning and horrifying to see the disaster unfold in Louisiana, especially because meteorologists and government officials knew Katrina was on its way. That even advance warning was not enough to save thousands of people is a tragedy of massive proportions.

It was heartbreaking to see footage of citizens of New Orleans stranded and awaiting help when those same citizens had no way to look back out on the world. They were cut off from the rest of the world with no idea when aid would arrive or what the rest of the world was thinking. We were staring in at them through the glass of the television as if staring into a snow globe that had been shaken up.

I was just in New Orleans a few years ago for a bachelor party, and to think that the entire city is just destroyed now is impossible to fathom, even with all the images and video. Will New Orleans be rebuilt where it once stood? That area has always been below sea level, in a geographic bowl, and many of the structures there are likely ruined beyond repair by sitting in floodwaters for days. Even if you could rebuild there in a timely fashion once everything had been cleared out, wouldn't it make sense to relocate New Orleans out of the bowl? Why rebuild on a site in which the forces of nature (gravity, e.g.) invite water? The city can rise up from the disaster of Katrina, both figuratively and literally, whether that means relocating to higher ground or simply building the city up a level as parts of Chicago and Seattle were after huge fires.

Derek visited this weekend, and as always when hosting out-of-towners, I see New York City through new eyes, their eyes. One thing I was conscious of was how badly New York trash smelled in the summer. I'd gotten used to it over the long summer, but Derek made me conscious of it again. If New York City could be rebuilt, would it be built with alleys like Chicago so trash could be stored in dumpsters, containing the odors and keeping the unsightly piles of trash off of the sidewalks? Would that justify the loss in rentable living space? We weren't sure when alleys were built in Chicago, but perhaps after the Chicago Fire, city planners decided not only to upgrade from wood to brick to prevent future fires, but also to install alleys for parking garages and dumpsters and throughput. New Orleans can take this opportunity to not just rebuild and repair but to redo.

As an aside, and an unimportant one when the focus should be on rescuing the survivors, this disaster exposed problems with our nation's emergency response. Some blame Bush; it doesn't help that he just came off an extended vacation, one that earned him a good tan but doesn't seem to have aided his crisis management skills. When he said to Diane Sawyer on ABC that no one could have foreseen the breach of the levees, he hung himself with his own ignorance. Not all the blame lies with him, of course, but this is one black mark that will play for the rest of his term, a constant reminder of the failure of the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, and many others. After reading the The 9/11 Commission Report and comparing it with earlier snap judgments and analyses of that tragedy, I'll wait for the water to clear to pass judgment on all involved. Snap reactions are bound to reveal more about the biases of those making the judgments than the truth.

Just as people have difficulty handling extremely low probability, high impact events, perhaps institutions do also. Live in New Orleans long enough without being hit by the big one, and the impetus to move declines. If you're in office, constantly funding systems to defend against a low probability event like a massive hurricane may feel like throwing money away, especially if you don't expect it to hit on your term (awful as that line of thinking may be). Perhaps the only ones who do think rationally about such an event are insurance companies. They did the math and did not offer flood insurance in New Orleans.

If you've already donated through the Red Cross, and almost everyone I know has, donate again! One of the blessings of the Internet has been how easy it has become to donate to charity with only a few clicks. I hope that Visa and Mastercard are foregoing their usual fees on these credit card donation transactions.

Awesome

The James Blake and Andre Agassi quarterfinal match tonight? Awesome. Classic. I think it's the most gutsy comeback I've ever seen from Agassi (3-6, 3-6, 6-3, 6-3, 7-6 (6)).

Most everyone knows Blake's trials and tribulations this past year. He broke his neck when he fell into a netpost, lost his father to stomach cancer, then lost movement in half of his face due to shingles. His tennis career looked to be over, but he came back and came within a few shots tonight of reaching the semifinals of a Grand Slam for the first time. He was born in Yonkers, and he was a sentimental favorite this U.S. Open.

The first two sets, he played like the James Blake from the Top Spin video game. In every video game, some players just seem to be best suited to the way the video game physics and controls are set up. It isn't always the player whose best in real life. In Top Spin, that player was James Blake (followed closely by Lleyton Hewitt). Blake's video game doppelganger had the super fast feet, a bomb of a first serve, and, if he got a floater, could hit a nuclear rocket of a forehand for a winner, perhaps the most important shot of all in a tennis video game since it's so hard to put shots away.

The first two sets against Agassi tonight, Blake played like his video game counterpart. He was hitting winners off both sides, just smearing the ball. He was getting to everything Agassi hit; Blake may be just be the fastest player I've ever seen on a court. I thought Agassi was done (and learned later that he'd never come back from two sets down at the U.S. Open, so my feelings were justified).

It didn't seem possible, but Agassi started hitting harder in sets three and four. It was the epitome of modern tennis, groundstrokes like lasers screaming back and forth over the net. Both Blake and Agassi seemed capable of hitting a winner on nearly every shot. As defines a great match, more rallies seemed to end with outright winners than unforced errors, and more of the unforced errors were actually forced.

The fifth set tiebreaker was a classic. Down 5-4, Agassi jumped on a Blake second serve in the ad-court and punished it inside-out for a clean winner. 5-5. With Agassi leading 6-5, Blake ran around a ball to hit an unbelievable forehand winner down the line. 6-6. On the next point, Andre drew Blake in with one of his patented backhand dropshots down the line, then hit a clean pass right back down the same chute. 7-6. Befitting the greatest returner in the history of tennis, Agassi scorched an outright winner off a Blake second serve to end the match.

One thing the U.S. Open has that no other Grand Slam has is night tennis. There's nothing like the last match of the night at Arthur Ashe Stadium. During the daytime, fans can be lulled by the blazing sun. New Yorkers don't do so well early in the day anyhow, and fans' attention is divided among matches all over Flushing Meadows, streaming in and out between games. At night, for the last match of the night, only Arthur Ashe is lit, and more often than not, the match ends past midnight. The fans who remain are die hards, the crazies. They have to be to want to take the 45 minute ride back to Manhattan on the non-express 7 train.

My first taste of the U.S. Open this year

Caught my first live taste of the U.S. Open this year last night.

They've made a few changes this year. First, they've painted the courts blue to make it easier to see the ball. I'm a big fan as it really works. Secondly, if balls are hit into the stands, fans can keep them. Considering each ball costs a dollar or two, I think that also makes sense. Lastly, after each match in Arthur Ashe Stadium, the winner autographs four balls and hits them into the stands.

I still have no idea how you score courtside or even halfway decent seats to Arthur Ashe Stadium if you just purchase through publicly available outlets. I maxed out a 300mm zoom lens, multiplied it by 2X, and tried to handhold from my nosebleed seats. If I were any higher up my head might brush up against the Goodyear blimp.

The "Where's Andy's Mojo?" American Express billboards and banners and posters are everywhere. I imagine they'll be up for the rest of the tournament, a painful reminder of what a huge upset his first round loss was.

In the first match, Serena Williams toyed with Catalino Castaño and moved on 6-2, 6-2. It was a fairly lackluster match, and Serena was spraying the ball. Fortunately for her, clay court specialist Castaño didn't have any weapons to hurt her with, so Serena could attack at will. She still moves great and can cream the ball. The crowd wasn't all that engaged but gave a warm embrace to Serena when she announced in the post-match interview that she'd donate $100 to victims of Hurricane Katrina for every ace she hit through the end of the year.

Before the next match, the rains came and forced a delay.

The final match of the night featured Rafael Nadal playing American teenager Scoville Jenkins in gusty conditions. Nadal is the Mallorcan tennis prodigy, now ranked second in the world, whose known almost as much for his capri pants and chiseled physique as he is for his game. Nadal comes bounding onto the court, even just for warmups, wearing a sleeveless body-hugging t-shirt. Older men all around me explained to their wives and daughters, "That's Nadal, the hot young guy on tour." The women checked him out on the jumbo screen and clucked their approval.

It was my first time watching Nadal in person. I can see why he's so unbeatable on clay. He's lightning quick around the court, and he hits his groundstrokes with a massive amount of topspin. It's a heavy ball. On clay he's difficult to attack because the clay slows down any offensive shots, allowing Nadal to get to nearly every ball, while Nadal's heavy groundstroke bounce up around his opponent's shoulders. To attack his groundstrokes you have to have faith that Nadal's topspin will bring his groundies down short, moving in to attack them on the rise. It's easier said than done, though easier to do on a hardcourt.

At least once in every match he's involved in, Nadal pulls off his trademark crowd-pleasing, signature reversal. His opponent will hit some deep, seemingly unretrievable shot to the corner, but Nadal will streak across and get it back, then quickly scramble all the way to the other corner to snatch the opponent's next near winner. This will go on for a few shots until Nadal gets into position to buggy-whip a winner past his amazed and disgusted opponent, causing the crowd to leap to its feet with a roar. When he pulls of such points, Nadal sprints, leaps, and pumps his left fist Tiger Woods style. Federer is still my favorite player to watch, especially in person (he's one of the rare players who is more impressive in person than on television), but Nadal brings a youthful flair that offers a nice contrast to the stoic demeanor of the average USTA pro.

If Nadal can flatten out his groundies, and if he can move in and take some of his returns earlier (he stands a good seven or eight feet behind the baseline to return serve), he can be even more dangerous on the hard courts. He was conservative relative to Jenkins, who had a big first serve and forehand and went for it on both strokes to try and neutralize Nadal's speed. Jenkins gave Nadal a tougher than normal second round match but ultimately made too many unforced errors. Nadal was not playing all that way, not hitting many winners, not forcing the action. Jenkins was the one dictating play, but too many of his attacks ended up in the net or long. Nadal will need to play better to move far in the tournament.

Watching Williams and Nadal today highlighted how much lightweight graphite rackets changed the sport. I started off with my dad's wooden racket, then his aluminum Wilson T1000. Those rackets were so heavy that you had to make a full shoulder turn on your groundies, addressing balls with a neutral or even closed stance.

Graphite rackets are so light and stiff that they allow players to hit wristy forehands with a Western grip and an open stance. It's easier and quicker to get into an open stance than a closed stance, and the follow through with an open stance can bring the player into a ready position for the next shot almost immediately. Meanwhile, the racket does a lot of the work, as stiff as graphite is. Nadal regularly hits forehands off his back foot, yet he crushes the ball. If players today tried to hit that type of forehand with a wooden or aluminum racket they'd be felled by a debilitating case of tennis elbow before their eighth birthday.