Remains of the Day

Silly Billy

Panasonic launched a blog called Def Perception to discuss its HDV 24p camcorder the AG-HVX200 and high def filmmaking in general. To request a free instructional DVD on the AG-HVX200 (for U.S. customers only), go here. B&H is pre-selling a kit with the AG-HVX200 and two 8GB P2 cards for $10K.

Wednesday is the day when Michelin releases its New York restaurant star ratings, with the release party that evening at the Guggenheim. Who will receive the coveted three-star ratings? Early favorites include Per Se and Alaine Ducasse. As a way of going long Per Se, I snagged a reservation for mid-November.

Yesterday, I attended a Halloween party with my nephew Ryan, looking as adorable as ever in his deluxe Thomas the Tank Engine costume. The parents association that sponsored the party hired a clown to perform, and I was so busy chasing Ryan with my camcorder that Anita had to point out that the clown was none other than David Friedman, from the Andrew Jarecki documentary Capturing the Friedmans. David was one of Jarecki's original subjects since the documentary began as one about birthday clowns. David seems to have shaken off any stigma from his father's pedophilia conviction and continues to work as the clown magician Silly Billy. Only in NY.

Ken reminded me that Cool Hunting linked to this collage of cassette tapes, many of which the two of us used to purchase by the dozens to dub our music. So many of these images still seem as vividly familiar as if they were sitting on my shelves now. Ah, those days when a metal cassette tape was like gold.

Apps for doing this on a Windows PC have long been available, but now Mac users can treat a GMail account as a hard drive using gDisk.

My old roommate Scott, in an aside, guessed that I'd heard of a movie titled Snakes on a Plane, starring Samuel L. Jackson. Well, I hadn't, so I looked up the plot summary: On board a flight over the Pacific Ocean, an assassin, bent on killing a passenger who's a witness in protective custody, let loose a crate full of deadly snakes. Well, a title doesn't get too much more literal than that, and though it's not due out until 2006, it's already inspired a long and often chuckle-worthy thread of over 100 proposed sequels.

A list of John Peel's most treasured 7-inch singles. The White Stripes are big winners, with an amazing 10 spots on the list.

James forwarded me this little easter egg video of Yoda breakdancing, from the Star Wars, Episode III - Revenge of the Sith DVD, releasing tomorrow.

U2

I caught the first of U2's seven shows at Madison Square Garden a couple Friday evenings back. When held up against the true U2 faithful, I'm a Gentile at best, but there are some rock concerts I'll attend because they're more than just concerts, they're Events. It was the day they were announcing the Nobel Peace Prize, so we almost saw a concert by a Nobel Peace Prize winner. That would have been a "Dear Diary" moment.

Keane opened for U2. I just can't get past the fact that Keane doesn't have a single guitarist; the fourth band member is a Mac laptop. I suspect their music won't age well, only because they do one type of heartfelt ballad well, and there's only so much of that you can do. The lead singer seems much too nice to be a rock star.

I've seen some interesting bands open for U2 over the years. The first concert I remember attending was a U2 Zoo TV concert in Illinois at the World Theatre(?). The two openers were Big Audio Dynamite and Public Enemy. You won't find a more docile and listless Public Enemy audience than the one that night, all sitting on their lawn blankets twiddling their thumbs trying to read Flavor Flav's chest clock to estimate how much longer before U2 came on stage.

The most common criticism of U2 concerts nowadays is that they're all the same, a tour of the greatest hits. I'm a fan of the revolutionary and the spontaneous in musical concerts, but I forgive U2 their retrospective ways. For goodness sake, they've been selling out massive arenas since I was in grade school. It's a miracle they've maintained their looks, let alone their fame and relevance. The audience at Madison Square Garden skewed older than for, say, the Franz Ferdinand concert I saw a week and a half later, but the standard deviation on the age of the U2 audience was also much higher. They are true cross-generational icons.

This was my fourth U2 concert through the years, and they've never put on anything other than a grand spectacle. Their canon is so well-known that the audience can sing nearly every word; it felt as if I was at a non-demoninational gospel service, with the arena lit by the electric glow of thousands of cell phone LCD screens instead of candles.

Extrapolate into the future and the logical endpoint will be a U2 farewell concert tour in 2020 or so, one in which Bono and the boys come out in arenas around the world, and Bono just holds a microphone up while the audience sings every song themselves. Each concert would include a moment in which Bono would pull a woman out of her wheelchair and command her to walk, or touch a blind man on the eyes and order him to see, and she would, and he would, for the first time in their lives.

Footnote: If you don't think U2 has relevance to the youth of America, that may change with the release of the dvd Mother Goose Rocks! Top 20 Video Countdown, in which Bono, excuse me, Mono, offers a rendition of children's classic "Head, Shoulders, Knees & Toes." No joke--check it out for yourself. I look forward to many viewings with my nephews this holiday season, and we will chuckle again and again to Dubya's inability to distinguish his shoulders from his neck. [Thanks to What Do I Know for the link].

In Cold Blood, and thoughts on some movies where context matters

I saw Capote at the New York Film Festival, and one of my thoughts on leaving the theater was that I had to read In Cold Blood. I started to print the article version out of The Complete New Yorker that night but fell asleep as my printer seemed to be shooting for overtime pay (it's a flaw with the file format used by The Complete New Yorker).

I could've saved myself some trouble. The New Yorker reprinted part 1 of the 4-part series from 1965. Part I is here, and even without advertisements takes up 40 pages. The version from The Complete New Yorker can only be printed with original ads, and let me tell you, the 1965 version of The New Yorker had a hell of a lot more ads than the 2005 version.

The movie still makes sense without any foreknowledge of Truman Capote or without having read In Cold Blood. Philip Seymour Hoffman is some sort of actor savant, and he pulls off what is a challenging task in portraying Capote. This is one case where the character's voice and mannerisms are critical to the story, to understanding Capote's reception in Holcomb, Kansas, where he goes to research the murder of a wealthy family by Perry Smith and Richard Hickock. His rendition will recall Capote, who was a sui generis, but the challenge is to transcend physical and vocal verisimilitude. Hoffman has to show us the gears of the machinery in his head as he grapples between the fame he can taste and his moral integrity. After all, he's a writer, and if writer's didn't write, they wouldn't be nearly as interesting as characters. It's difficult to imagine anyone surpassing Hoffman's performance here, but if anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

But without having read In Cold Blood or heard the story around its writing, I was left skeptical of Clifton Collins Jr.'s withdrawn, introspective interpretation of Perry Smith. I didn't understand why this murder, more than others, caught Capote's eye. Moreover, a great deal of Capote's exploitation of Smith, especially, is in the pages of In Cold Blood itself. Much of Capote's psychological journey in this movie takes place in the mind, and though it's no substitute for being Capote, having the "non-fiction novel" in your mind will deepen one's appreciation of Capote's guilt. As it stands, you'll see the dots that connect to the film's on-screen epitaph which tells us that Capote never finished another book after In Cold Blood. But between those dots is a lot of white space.

Capote is one of several movies I've seen recently where an understanding of the context or the history on which the movie is based is necessary to fully appreciate every scene. I've read others who believe that all movies should stand on their own, but that feels like a preference than a rule. Other movies like that: Memories of Murder, Good Night, and Good Luck, and Caché.

Memories of Murder is a Korean serial killer mystery. It wasn't until the on-screen text at the end of the movie that I learned that the movie was based on a true story about serial killings in Korea during the late 1980's. I browsed online to read up on the original case, and only then did some of the seemingly irrelevant scenes and odd tonal shifts begin to make sense. This is a movie, after all, that jump cuts from a nail entering the leg of a policeman deranged with anger and grief to a shot of a beef skewer sizzling on the kitchen grill.

Understood as a scathing social satire and not as your usual serial killer whodunnit, the ambiguous ending and despairing tone make sense. Those in search of the tidy close-ended narrative that is the usual serial killer thriller will be frustrated. The police are so inept it's comical, and then exasperating, but that's the movie's intention. The final shot of the movie, when the main character stares into the camera, and out at the audience, is provocative, but once I had a historical context for the movie, it felt more than clever, it felt like the dismal face of a society's discontent.

Good Night, and Good Luck recounts Edward Murrow's battle against Joseph McCarthy. I wasn't alive for Ed Murrow's heyday at CBS, so I'm only aware of him through brief black-and-white clips, and this movie slots nicely next to those in my memory as it's shot in black-and-white also. Color television hadn't arrived yet, so Clooney's choice is appropriate.

David Straithairn channels Murrow's moral intensity and that voice which managed to be both deadpan and impassioned all at once (hear clips of the real Murrow here). The first time he is about to go on live television in the movie, he's holding a cigarette. I expected him to put it out, but then the cameras began rolling, and Murrow continued to cradle it between his fingers. The same cigarette seems to be in his hand anytime he's on screen; it came as no surprise to hear he died of lung cancer. As the movie unfolds, the cigarette rises in stature; Murrow wields it like a sword of truth.

One of the reasons this movie benefits from a knowledge of its context is that it's shot almost entirely on the lots of CBS, inside the studio where Murrow tapes his show See It Now. Our only glimpses of McCarthy are in archival footage (another good choice by Clooney; rather than have an actor try and portray McCarthy, the ideological boogeyman here, hang him by his own words to remove any suspicion of misrepresentation), and they are brief. The people at CBS are clearly afraid of McCarthy, and that fear is meant to amplify the courage of their decision to go ahead and challenge McCarthy on air anyhow. One character in particular cannot handle the resultant bad press and makes a fateful decision, but this band of reporters feels trapped more because we never see them outside the office. The menace of McCarthy is muted by his lack of presence in the movie.

Those who have read about McCarthy's witch hunt or lived through it can furnish some of the dread he inspired, but the movie, absorbing as it is, feels a few scenes light. An anecdote about a hidden marriage, for example, or Murrow's need to do celebrity interviews with the likes of Liberace add some levity and relate some true episodes, but they don't help to get one's blood flowing the way a movie like this aims to do.

Clooney is a cinephile, and he feels just as strongly in urging the press to use its podium to fight the powers at large. It's no secret how he feels about the current administration, but even if you weren't aware of it, you'd know what his damn point of view is here. Murrow would have applauded that moviemaking motive.

As a sidenote, Murrow's willingness to use his journalistic soapbox to protect the truth from the powers who would suppress it makes him particularly relevant now, when news outlets who strive to be nothing but neutral (CNN) seem to lose out in the ratings war to stations who slant to the right or the left. Rush Limbaugh might claim to be a descendant of Murrow; it's a fine line between reporting the news and being the news.

Michael Haneke's Caché closed the New York Film Festival this year. Without historical context, it is still an engrossing suspense thriller. George (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) are a married couple haunted by surveillance tapes that constantly appear on their doorstep. The footage shows them during various episodes of their daily life. Who is shooting this footage, how are they obtaining it, and why is it being sent to them?

My first instinct was that Haneke was bringing Big Brother to the French upper middle class, but the movie doesn't go down that road, and I've never thought the French to be particularly haunted by the possibility of Orwellian government surveillance. The movie is more specifically grounded than that, and it is focused on topics relevant to Americans: race and imperialism. In this case, the movie uses misdirection to confront the French with their treatment of Algerians.

Two scenes in the movie leap out. One seems to shock every audience into screams and gasps; it was no different with the audience I saw it with. The other is the final shot of the movie, a puzzling one. My interpretation, and if you're going to see the movie, you should probably skip this next line.........wait.........wait........is that the sons collaborated in the scheme. The newest generation does not share its parents' attitudes, and they wanted to force their parents to confront their suppressed personal demons, to shake them up.

If that sounds a bit contrived, it's no more so than the plot of the movie, but Haneke is a provocateur, and he makes great film festival movies, the type that force the audience to think, to talk outside the theater afterwards. Knowing even a bit about France's long history with Algeria (e.g., see The Battle of Algiers - Criterion Collection) will add a lot to that post-movie conversation on the sidewalk.

Of course, if your only exposure to a topic is through movies and newspapers and books, you're liable to sound like a media parrot. Peter and I caught a late-night screening of Lars Von Trier's Manderlay, the second of his trilogy of American fables. I must confess that though I put in my Netflix queue, Dogville never bubbled to the top before I saw Manderlay.

The story begins with Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard, taking over from Nicole Kidman) and her father happening upon a slave plantation some 70 years after the abolition of slavery. Grace is the naive liberal here, and she stays behind to free the slaves and establish a democracy. Her father (Willem Dafoe), a gangster of some sort, is skeptical of her intentions and her prospects, but leaves behind some of his henchmen to help her out.

The set is bare, as in Dogville. Only portions of buildings and a few props appear on a dark soundstage; this is just slightly more suggestive than the set for Waiting for Godot. This minimalism is both liberating and constricting. At times, it frees your imagination, and if all you watch is Hollywood movies, your imagination may be a bit out of shape. At other times, as when Grace stands outside the bathhouse, it distracts from your ability to empathize with Grace, to imagine what she's picturing. Since you see the male slaves inside, your mind doesn't reach out to try to feel Grace's lust. Instead of feeling palpable, it feels comical.

I've heard that after the poor critical reception to Dancer in the Dark, Von Trier set out to make a series of movies that would show the United States just how the rest of the world viewed us. Taken at face value, it's a worthwhile subject. When I travel, I often ask people I encounter what their impression of the U.S. is. It's revealing, like listening to a recording of your own voice.

The irony is that Von Trier is scared of flying (among a whole handful of other phobias) and has never been to the U.S. It shows here. All the ideas about colonialism, race, naive idealism, and imperialism feel like a compendium of the ideological hostilities that have dominated the political landscape of America these past four or five years. The U.S. occupation of Iraq was cited by Howard as a fortunate coincidence in its parallels to the movie's theme of force-feeding ideologies on people, but I find it to be a hindrance. Because the issue is already so front and center in American media now, Manderlay's sting doesn't feel as sharp.

It may be a problem with the format. A fable with humans situated in such a figurative set tends to generalize the morals. If Von Trier wanted this story to break through to an American audience, a story that teaches these morals through the specific and the literal would be far more effective. Or, perhaps if the characters were animals as in Animal Farm or a Pixar movie, so the moralizing would stand out so distinctly against the medium (of course, von Trier stated in The Five Obstructions that he despises animation).

The cinematic court wouldn't be quite as intriguing without Von Trier. He's the gadfly, the court jester, and the ending of Manderlay offers a clever, dark and comic twist, a final turn of the dagger. I couldn't help but chuckle and wish the movie had more such moments. As sanctimonious as he can be, he's also a contrarian through and through, and I have a soft spot for those. His movies are like fiber in the diet, but if he wants it to reach the broadest possible audience, he should tinker with the package, wrap his movies like gelcaps around bitter medicine.

One last movie where context matters, also one I saw the New York Film Festival: The Hidden Blade by Yôji Yamada. In this case, the context is whether or not you've seen Yamada's 2002 film The Twilight Samurai. Both are based on novels by the same author, and both are so similar that if you've seen one, seeing the other can't help but suffer by comparison. The stories both center around samurais struggling against tradition and class strictures, but having traveled this road with Yamada before diminished the suspense of the protagonist's fate in The Hidden Blade. See at least one or the other, though; they demystify the samurai mythology, and the cinematography is beautiful, like looking out on a Japanese diorama through a pane of glass.

One bit of suspense that remained for me in The Hidden Blade was the mystery of the movie's titular hidden blade, a fabled samurai technique. The movie leads you to believe it might be a red herring, but thankfully, the movie does reveal the technique. It's a move more worthy of a ninja than a samurai, and it's a doozy.

Exhale on the way up

I finally got the GRE out of the way last night. After you've been out in the real world for a while, standardized tests are even more of a pain in the ass than they were in high school or college. Thank goodness that's done. Now I have several hundred esoteric vocabulary words taking up room in my head, most of which will never see the light of print again.

Poking my head up above ground, I find a cold and rainy NY. Okay, back into the cave for another week or so of asceticism.

***

At long last, photo printing through Flickr, though only for folks in the U.S. for the time being.

The latest MP3 blog I'm digging: Out of 5. A different themed mix every week, 10 songs chosen by 10 different people. You can download each week's mix as a zip file, but there's no archive, so tune in weekly.

Jackie Chan's iTunes Music Store celebrity playlist reveals that Apple's music store offers more than a handful of Chinese tracks. Jackie on "Jia Xiang de Long Yan Shu": "A memorable song representing a noble mission saving sight." Huh?

The first and second seasons of The West Wing on DVD, for only $19.97 each, or 67% off. That's a pretty damn good deal for the two best seasons of what was, at the time, the best show on TV.

Among the top 10 forecasts from The Futurist in its Outlook 2005 was this strange one: "Worm shortage ahead. Increasing worldwide demand for fish is creating a shortage of worms to supply anglers and fish farmers." That's right, a worm shortage. You heard it there first.

The James Randi Educational Foundation offers a 1 million dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper conditions, evidence of paranormal or supernatural powers. No one has ever passed the preliminary tests. I can make one of every pair of my socks disappear gradually over time. I wonder if that qualifies. [from TMN]

"is comprised of"

One of the most common usage errors in English is the phrase "is comprised of." A Google search for the phrase returns 20.8 million results. A whole comprises the parts. In most cases when people use "is comprised of" they should use "comprises" or "is composed of." For example, "New York City comprises Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens." The incorrect usage is so popular, though, that fighting it might prove a losing battle.

Worthwhile usage lessons like this can be found in Garner's Modern American Usage, an essential reference for writers.

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A hack: free SkypeOut calls. I'll need those and much more after reading this article on how much money you need to truly have "f*** you money" in NYC. Basically, without going into the detailed calculations, the article said I'll be eating ramen, watching pirated DVDs on my old laptop, and stealing wi-fi from my next-door neighbor for the rest of my life. Just passing through, just passing through.

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The Michelin Red Guide 2006 New York City will be unveiled next week at the Guggenheim. Some of New York's prominent chefs weigh in. Anthony Bourdain provides the gossip:

The big question is who will get a top ranking: The thinking is that Ducasse is a shoo-in for three stars. If they don’t give it to Ducasse, it will just be a terrible slap. And if they don’t give three to Per Se, that’s really a huge turd in the punch bowl. If Per Se gets three, and Ducasse doesn’t, that’s a whole other political situation. At least that’s the girls’ talk—you know, when the chefs are all sitting around bitching and gossiping. As for Zagat, it’s devalued. It’s like, “Some say ‘delicious’; others say ‘smells like cat pee.’

Danny Meyer puts it all in perspective:

Particularly in its first year of publication, a Michelin star will represent nothing but upside for any restaurant. This year, the guide will award but not remove stars from any restaurant. Many will be helped, none will be hurt.

***

Evidence suggests that many U.S. Senators profit off of insider trading. That's not shocking considering how connected they are. What Martha Stewart did is hardly the exception to the rule, but making an example of her seems unlikely to curb the practice. Perhaps the only way to halt this, and it's not practical, is to prevent anyone in a certain position or job level from trading on certain publicly-traded stocks (like CEO's and Senators). This would constrain their investment options, but then again, they're rich.

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This list of the 20 best license-free fonts on the web should have included any of the Peter Saville New Order/Joy Division fonts. They're flat-out gorgeous, and they're free. Now I just have to figure out how to convert them for use on my Mac.

Le Samourai

Le Samourai comes out on DVD this Tuesday!

Not on the bandwagon, or maybe I am

Jason Lee always seems to play a cantankerous sidekick in the movies, which is why his good-natured simpleton in My Name is Earl is such a pleasant surprise. Funny show.

I'm not one of those Cubs fans who wants the White Sox to lose. It's not a zero sum game fore baseball in Chicago, despite how many fans on both sides behave. I'd love to see Chicago with a national champion in its midst again. That's not to say a White Sox World Series victory will mean a fraction of what a Cubs World Series win would mean to me.

I love the version of the Jarhead trailer that is set to Kanye West's "Jesus Walks". It may be just a case of the music carrying the moving images, but when Jamie Foxx says "I...love...this...job" in cadence to the music, that's a beautiful thing. I've been editing army footage in class, and this trailer is driving me nuts because I'm overwhelmed by an inclination to set the footage to Kanye West.

Lincoln Burrows does escape from prison. I was walking back from class last week and he walked past me on the sidewalk. I couldn't place him except as the guy who had to escape from prison on that television show on Fox. How many degrees from fame are you when people recognize you from commercials for a show they've never seen because Fox blitzes all its programs with in-house promos?

Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3 is rearing its head again in NYC.

To absolutely no one's surprise, some of the first content available for the video iPod is adult.

I'm not even sure exactly what Apple's new software Aperture does, and it costs $499, but already I want it. Apple seems to release something I want every other week now. I surrender, just take my Visa.

Life's so hectic right now, and I'm exhausted, so this is all you get, just a few brief thoughts and rabbit droppings.

The new iPod plays video

Video playback capability in the iPod has been rumored for years, and now it's finally a reality. At the same price as the previous generation of iPods, the new models, available in black and white, arrive just a short while after the Nano so as to allow Nano enough time to sell a gazillion units. You can check it the latest iPod in its new television ad featuring U2. I can't imagine watching an entire television show on such a tiny screen, but music videos? Perhaps. If you put the iPod in the dock, you can control it via the new Apple remote control, and the dock allows you to output composite video and RCA audio to a television/receiver/monitor.

You can purchase television shows from iTunes to sync to your iPod, or you can use Quicktime 7 Pro to export your own video content to iTunes for transfer to the iPod. I can see carrying around some footage of my nephews.

More interesting to me was to see what the pricing for video content would be. iTunes is offering music videos and individual episodes of TV shows like Lost for $1.99. The Lost Season 1 DVD, which contains 24 episodes, costs $38.99 from Amazon.com, or about $1.60 an episode. So the Apple TV show pricing feels about right, with a slight premium to the volume pricing of the DVD. You can't burn the shows to DVD or CD. You have to watch them on your computer or an iPod.

The episodes of Lost being offered are the three most recent ones, and future episodes will appear in iTunes a day after they're aired. Is there a window after which these won't be for sale, or will they be available in perpetuity? Also, how much does ABC keep of every $1.99 sale?

Meanwhile, DVR manufacturers are talking about a day not so far in the future when hard drive space is so cheap that DVRs will just tape every hour of TV so you can watch any show on demand, without programming the device. Enterprising geeks already trade television shows through their computer using Bittorrent. Someday soon, all media, from music to movies to television shows, will be available on demand. If the networks and studios band together, they might be the ones collecting on this traffic, but as slow as they move, it seems unlikely. With just five television shows offered in this latest rev of iTunes (Desperate Housewives and Night Stalker are the other two ABC offerings), ABC/Disney is the only studio testing these waters, and they're just dipping their toes in with caution. This meager offering is most certainly the choice of the networks, not of Apple.

Item(s) of note

Finally, a New Order DVD compilation worth owning. Item collects all of their music videos (along with two never-before-released clips, one of which is a new video for "Temptation," I think) and the documentary New Order Story which came out in VHS in the 90's. As a bonus, the cover is designed by Peter Saville.

A python tries to swallow an alligator, and then its stomach explodes (thx Karen)

From this week's New Yorker, an article on the state of the graphic novel.

Merck announces that its experimental vaccine Gardasil is 100%, yes, that's right, 100% effective in preventing cervical cancer. Stunning.

15 unresolved claims of unverified animals, from the Loch Ness monster to the Yeti to giant octopuses. As listed by the International Society of Cryptozoology.

A teaser poster for King Kong from the United International Pictures website...

Lost, indeed

Lost is really annoying me. Ever since the first episode, the show has relied on the mystery after mystery. But to date, it's proven to be all hook, no payoff.

The show is starting to feel like an exercise in stretching a taut story out even further, to the point where it either loses all elasticity or it just snaps back with a bang. The advertisements for the last episode of season one promised some answers, but all we got was a peek down a dark hatch, which is barely more than what had been shown the previous episode. The advertisements for the second episode of this season promised, "The fate of everyone on the island becomes clear." I must have missed something, because my magic 8-ball of a television set showed me an episode that felt a lot like "Reply hazy, please watch again next week to keep our ratings and advertising revenues sky high."

Stories fail to progress much from one episode to another. We're back in Locke's past in the latest episode, and we don't learn a whole lot more. I was beginning to think that the entire season would go by with Desmond still holding a gun to Locke's head while Jack and Desmond shouting at each other in that hallway.

Jack: "Put the gun down!"

Desmond: "No, you put the gun down, brother!"

Jack: "I said put the gun down!"

Desmond: "You first, brother!"

Jack: "Aaaaaaa! Put the damn gun down! Now!"

Desmond: "I will shoot this bald man in the head, brother! Brother! Brother! Brother!"

Few loose ends are ever tied up, except as they relate to minor details in the back stories of a few characters. The island remains a riddle. Every new character that promises an answer turns out to be another mystery; Desmond was no different, and Jack and John just let him run off. Ethan got shot. It's becoming predictable that every potential solution will be DOA; of course we knew Jack would hit the Enter key in the latest episode instead of seeing what would happen if the 108 minute timer ran out. Lost is a universe that's still expanding, with no signs of stopping to settle before contracting towards a finale. I've been down this disappointing road with shows like The X-Files before, and I'm not falling for it again.

Last season, show creators admitted that they had no idea where the story was going and that they were writing it as they went, altering the story based on which characters the audience responded to. That was a disastrous admission, because if the show's creators had no idea what all these mysteries tied up to, they probably didn't tie up to anything at all. All the time fans were devoting to every easter egg could be wasted time, and if someone did solve the mystery, the writers might just change the solution to maintain the element of surprise.

The show creators have changed their tune this year and have stuck to the party line: a master plan exists to tie it all together. With every new mystery, that seems more and more unlikely. Lost is like a juggler who keeps tossing balls high into the sky. At some point, the audience expects them to fall. If the juggler misses a few on the way down, or if only a few of them reappear again, the performance will be a letdown. Obsessive fans who analyze every detail and clue like forensic scientists are the among the toughest to please, and this show is cultivating a whole lot of them.

The other problem is that the more time spent with these characters, the more annoying they become. They're almost all hysterical, one drama queen after another. In episode 2 of this season, I felt trapped on that raft with Michael and Sawyer screaming at each other like punks on the playground. If I had been there, I would've jumped into the water and let the shark take me, or I would've grabbed the gun and shot them both.

If by the end of this season, more is left unanswered than answered, I'm not going to waste my time on another season. If you follow the incentives, things don't look hopeful. ABC wants the show to keep running as long as ratings are high. Besides the ad revenues, a show that lasts for three seasons or more can earn a mint in syndication (you need enough episodes to air a show in syndication 5 days a week). All the actors want the show to continue because it provides a steady paycheck that is only likely to rise with continued success. I don't know what J.J. Abrams wants, but I assume he is in no hurry to wrap things up.

One thing that might help is if some of the actors become antsy and engage the network in a premature salary showdown. Unwilling to bow to their demands, the network might force Abrams to start killing them off, tying up their storylines.

I love brain teasers of movies or television shows, and no one wants it all to tie together in a clever and coherent way more than I do. As we studied in editing class, one of the great things about The Sixth Sense was that in the climactic scene, when Bruce Willis's ring hits the floor, the movie actually flashes back to key scenes from earlier in the movie, just to show you they didn't cheat you, that you could have figured it out if you'd been paying attention. I'd love for Lost to work out so neatly, but the show has yet to earn that trust.

Everyone I know is a huge fan, so I'm in the minority here. Lost is losing me. Maybe this is all a huge meta joke, and the people being tested are not the people on the island but the viewers of the show. The finale, several years from now, will reveal that all the show's mysteries really didn't add up to any solution, that it was all an elaborate hoax to see how long we'd keep coming back before we lost interest.

Pocket lint

Studies fail to find any link between diet and cancer. If people believe in the cancer-fighting benefits of tomato sauce and antioxidants and fiber and beta carotene, that peace of mind is not without value.

A helpful rundown of all the cases for the iPod nano.

James sent me this link to some crazy-ass breakdancers in the Redbull BC One competition. Too bad the video stream is so choppy.

Fascinating article about the constant influx of Chinese who immigrate to America through NYC and then ship out immediately to some of the more than 36,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S. A few interesting factoids: there are more Chinese restaurants in the U.S. than McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger Kings combined. The market price for getting oneself smuggled into the U.S. is upward of $60,000. Those Chinatown buses that offer $15 one-way rides from NYC to Boston or Washington originally sprang up to transport these workers, but now they carry quite a number of non-Chinese looking for cheap transportation.

Economic integration cited as one of the main reasons for improved test scores in Raleigh school district. This is one of the main reasons why some education reformers believe the answer to education woes is not to segregate all the best and/or wealthiest students in their own schools. It's a tough sell to the parents of those kids, though.

Downloadable subway maps for many major cities for your iPod. Great, except New York City's MTA and San Francisco's BART have filed cease-and-desist letters. Some graphic designer just needs to make their own versions for this guy. No reason to wait for them to license it to him. That's just ridiculous. The latest update is that he's making progress on his own version of the NY Subway Map.

How can you tell if a woman loves you?

If you’re Gael Garcia Bernal: She loves you.

If you’re not Gael Garcia Bernal, but you’re willing to sit through a “GGB” marathon and agree for 10 consecutive hours that he is indeed the most beautiful and talented man alive—and so down-to-earth, too!—and afterward agree that his portrayal of Che Guevara would have earned an Oscar nod were it not for the implicit politics, agree that taking Spanish classes is a great idea, or salsa, or tango, whatever, agree, agree, agree, and that night lying in bed after sex that ends with her screaming, “Si! Si!” wonder aloud, “But you’re happy with me, right?”: She loves you, man—no one can compete with that Latin bastard. Forget about it.

Customized colors for your iPod Nano, at a premium of $85

Ninja NY

Ninja comes to NY. This giant Japanese restaurant chain features ninjas that leap out at you while you eat, or something to that effect. I heard that after a frightened patron had a heart attack in the LA facility, they turned the lights up and cut back on the ninja theatrics. The few reader reviews up at the NYTimes suggest that the type of geeks attracted by this theme aren't likely to be able to afford to eat here, let alone spell omasake. Rarely has kitsch cost so much.

Searching for information on what it's like to eat at Ninja, I stumbled upon a review from Alex, lead singer of Franz Ferdinand, on his blog. Since I couldn't figure find a permalink, I've excerpted it below. You can also find the original at his weblog by scrolling down to the July 30, 2004 entry. He visited what I assume is the flagship Ninja restaurant in Tokyo. That the most detailed review of dining at Ninja would come from the lead singer of Franz Ferdinand, who I'm seeing in concert in a week and a half, is a bit odd. So odd that I just looked up at my ceiling to make sure no ninja was clinging by his fingernails, ready to aerate my forehead with a few well-thrown stars.

Leaving For Fuji Rock, Tokyo
30 | 07 | 04
We arrived last night. It's close, humid and warm, the opposite of what we left down South. It's amazing here, almost overwhelming. There's too much to absorb. I feel like I've run my finger across the icing of a huge, intensely rich chocolate cake and licked it. A taste, that's it.

Last night, after we dropped our bags off at the hotel, we went out for something to eat. The restaurant was called Ninja and it wasn't just a restaurant. It was a themed adventure. When I walked in, the girl at the bookings desk brusquely ordered me back outside. "Your Ninja not ready yet! Outside!" I stood sheepishly in the street with the others, feeling the perspiration grow across my skin, watching the blocks of lucky salt by the doorway dissolve in the warm mist. "Hai! Come now! Ninja Ready!" We clattered back down the stairs. "Ninja! Ninja!" she cried, then clapped her hands twice. Another girl burst from a secret door into a forward roll in front of us. She was dressed in black with a scarf around her head. She wasn't an out of work actress, she was a Ninja. "Follow me! Watch head!" We followed her through another secret door into a dark passage. It was lit with a low green light. We stopped by an artificial fountain built into the wall, with plastic plants surrounding it. "This Ninja Shrine!" We murmured appropriate awe and agreement. It reminded me of the boat trip you can go on in Blackpool, where you go for a journey around the world, seeing what a guy from Blackpool's idea of Egypt and Africa is. "Watch head!" We followed her further along the dark passage, abruptly stopping by two windows with bars over them. We looked through and could see more plastic plants and fake rocks. "This Ninja Nest!" We murmured appropriate awe and agreement. "Watch head!" We followed her still further down the passage. We turned a corner. The Ninja's face creased in dismay. "Oh no! Not ready! Go back!" We shuffled back round the corner. The Ninja disappeared. Then reappeared. "Right! Come now!!" We shuffled after her. "Oh No! What happened?" I wasn't sure. She was pointing at the floor in front of us. There was now a sheet of perspex over some more fake rocks and plastic plants, Swith dry ice curling between them. "Oh no! How we get cross?" We murmured appropriate anxiety and perplexion. "It's OK! I'm Ninja! Hai!!" She clapped twice and a draw bridge suddenly fell down, allowing us to cross the thick perspex in safety, into the restaurant beyond.

...I sat down on a cushion at a low lacquered table on lacquered floorboards, enclosed by paper screens. Our Japanese friends ordered a selection for us, including warm Saki. That stuff is fantastic. As the food began to arrive, so did another Ninja. This one was a magician. He asked us if we liked card tricks. Before we could finish saying yes/hai he puked up a deck of cards across the table. There was then an intense ten minutes of concentrated, very impressive tricks, no time to linger on applause, just trick after trick, before he disappeared into the Ninja night. The food was incredible. Leaves with frozen smokey dressing and jellyfish. Soft-shelled crab tempura, like eating a tarantula with excema. Fish eggs, some tiny, some huge, translucent, red, yellow, black and orange, all glistening like jewels. Fatty belly of tuna, minced into a raw paste. Cuttlefish scored with a cross-hatch. Sea anemone perched on seaweed. Silver mackerel skins. Cold noodles in cold salty soup. It all tasted so wonderful, so many new flavours and textures, food like I've never eaten before, the feast of a lifetime. The saki melted my limbs and I began to slide under the low table.

When we got back outside, I'd forgotten how close and humid it was. The cicadas were belting it out in the trees, drunk businessmen fell out of a whisky bar with bottles of every Scotch ever distilled stacked in the window. I got back to my room and decided not to negotiate the electric toilet's high-powered cleaning jets, despite the helpful diagrams which illustrated exactly where the jets were aimed. I put on the complimentary kimono, span round a couple of times and collapsed on the bed, falling into a very satisfied sleep.

posted by “Alex”