Remains of the Day

Think of a trick, any trick...except for that one

When magicians duel in the movies, live hang in the balance. When magicians duel in real life, it's a bit less exciting. Unless, of course, one of these days Eric Walton ends up dying during one of his performances under mysterious circumstances. And Ricky Jay was sitting in the audience, his face revealing no expression. That would be somewhat unsettling, and yet awesome.

One more

After mentioning TV on the internet, how could I forget Matt Damon just ripping Jimmy Kimmel to pieces on the Jimmy Kimmel show? You have to watch to the very end...

I enjoy jokes where movie stars are allowed to curse on live television. When I went to the live taping of The Daily Show, much of the fun was not having to hear all the bleeping you hear when a show is finally aired on TV.

One thing that's been enjoyable about starting my grad school classes in the arts is hearing professors cuss without a moment's hesitation. It reflects a certain practicality.

"Look, this isn't undergrad where you're taking classes just for the hell of it. We're all adults here, you're here to get a degree that will hopefully secure you a useful job. People cuss in the real world, let's not pretend that this is the first or last time you'll hear adult language on a film set."

Maul

I wanted to hear Anthony Lane reading from his work on this New Yorker Humor Revue page, even if there was no way his out-loud voice could live up to his caustic written voice, but it took me nearly ten minutes to trigger his clip because of the awful interface. I clicked on his name over and over and kept hearing clips from others listed on the page.

Lane comes off as much more self-deprecating and good humored to the ear than he does on the page where he sometimes seems exasperated at having to carve up another movie with his razor sharp pen, much to the delight of his legions of fans. He's one critic many probably prefer to read when he's excoriating something awful, just to see the gleam of the scalpel as it's lifted from the tray. There's a reason one of his reviews is included in this, a humor revue.

TV on the Internet

The Sci-Fi Network is offering, on iTunes, a free retrospective episode of the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica. I have not watched the TV show, but after The Wire, which seems to be enjoying an unprecedented critical push this season, it seems to be the TV show with the strongest cult following.

The clip below from what looks to be a new season of Extras? David Bowie guest stars and sings Ricky Gervais a little ditty. When is the new season airing on HBO? Without having set up my TV here in LA, I feel so out of touch with the world (embedded player via my friend Eric's site Mojiti).

It's premier season for new fall TV shows, and since I haven't gotten my home theater set up here in LA, I haven't seen much. But these days, an internet connection is a fairly adequate replacement. I caught the most recent episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip online off of NBC's official site for the show. Okay, so the quality of the video at full screen made me think I had cataracts, but I can't remember watching TV shows online prior to this year in any format other than a torrent (which, by the way, is still the best way to watch a TV show online, so maybe all this official online streaming is not all that exciting).

I'll always chase the Sorkin rat-a-tat-chat, but the Sarah Paulson character feels like a concept more than a person. She's the devout Christian who works at a comedy sketch show which puts on skits like "Crazy Christians." They also talk up her character Harriet in this episode as if she's the Will Ferrell of Studio 60, and so far she hasn't shown any comic abilities at all. Also, why hasn't anyone reacted at all to Amanda Peet's attractiveness on the show?

And, oh yeah, the premier of season 3 of Veronica Mars is also online, ahead of it's actually on air debut next Tuesday.

Monday

David Remnick profile of post-presidency Bill Clinton in The New Yorker. Clinton is by far the most fascinating president of my lifetime.

UPDATE: Parts 1, 2, and 3 of Clinton's now legendary interview on Fox.

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Drool. Drool.

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I've always wondered why the sun made me sneeze, and now I know; photic sneeze reflex.

The condition occurs in 17% to 25% of humans with more common occurrence in Caucasians than other human races. The condition is passed along genetically as an autosomal dominant trait.

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The September 2006 Stanford Book Salon selection was Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. It's one of my favorites, and the homepage for the Salon (an online book club) has a transcript of an introduction by Nancy Packer as well as links to a reading group guide to the novel and an interview with Wallace Stegner.

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The Madden cover jinx strikes again. Spooky how consistently it works its evil eye. Fantasy football players were warned not to pick Alexander with their first round pick this year, and the non-superstitious who ignored the advice are now left scrambling to pick up Maurice Morris.

Ray Lewis is perhaps the only player who avoided the curse when he appeared on the 2005 cover, but since he plays on defense he only affected the small portion of fantasy football players who draft individual defensive players.

There is one logical reason why the curse might exist, and that is simply because a player who is featured on the cover is likely coming off a career year, and most players regress after such seasons. Still, many of the regressions were caused by severe injuries...somewhere the ghost of John Madden is screaming, "Boom!" as he sticks a pin in a Shaun Alexander voodoo doll.

Moo

At long last, Verizon activated DSL at my apartment and I'm back online though it will take me a good week to catch up on e-mails. Actually, wiith seven classes and about 475 boxes to unpack, it may never happen. But I'll try.

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Moo.com is offering the first 10,000 Flickr Pro users who respond 10 free MiniCards which are like business cards with one of your Flickr photos on one side and text on the other. For non-pro users it's $19.99 for a set of 100, and you can print a different photo on each card if you want.

Finally, I will have 10 business cards to pass out to all the new people I'm meeting here in LA.

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Audrey sent me a link to this M&M Dark Chcolate product launch movie puzzle online. It's a poster with visual clues for 50 "dark" movies (horror, for example). Good fun, though I'll have to tackle this in earnest some other time when I have a free block of time (which, judging from my courseload, will be sometime in mid 2007).

Dark chocolate M&M's? Sounds tasty to me. I was a dark chocolate Kit Kat addict when those came out, and occasionally I still have to satisfy my cravings by sourcing them through eBay. Because dark chocolate melts at a higher temperature than regular chocolate, it can completely transform a once familiar candy, often in a wonderful way.

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Cinematographer Style is a movie about, yes, cinematographers, following in the tradition of Visions of Light. Documentaries about filmmaking specialties seem to come in twos, e.g. The Cutting Edge and Edge Codes.com, both documentaries on editing. I was sad that I was unable to catch a screening of Cinematographer Style at the DGA theater in LA tonight. I just love this type of stuff, especially now that I'm in the biz, sort of.

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Some economists surveyed 3,200 high school seniors and estimated which of two colleges students would choose if they were admitted to both. The resulting matrix is here. Harvard was the one university that won its head to head matchup with every other college in the survey.

What's the first answer that jumps into your head?

I have to be honest, Ken Jennnings' answer is the exact one that leapt into my head. If the spellings of the two words weren't different, he'd have grounds to protest, I think.

Baby-sized bong sold separately

Rockabye Baby! Lullaby Renditions of Radiohead, because it's never too early to get your baby started down the road to music elitism (and I say that with all due respect, because I adore Radiohead). But if Thom Yorke and company aren't the direction you want your toddler leaning, there are analogous Rockabye Baby renditions of Coldplay, Metallica, Pink Floyd, The Cure, Tool, The Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, The Pixies, Bjork, Queens of the Stone Age, No Doubt, Smashing Pumpkins, and The Beatles.

Stereogum has one cut from Baby Rock Radiohead up temporarily - "No Surprises" (MP3)

Hey, everyone needs an occasional break from The Wiggles.

A Cingular disappointment

The last four months, I've experienced a sharp and unpleasant shock every time I open my cell phone bill. $498. $677. $525. $798! For some reason, four months ago, Cingular started categorizing every minute of my call time as roaming even though I've been with them on a nationwide plan for years. Every month, I have to call and wait on hold for up to an hour while I'm transferred up the ladder to someone with enough authority to issue a refund. Every month I'm told the problem is fixed, and every month I call back to remind them that no, it's not.

I bit my tongue and waited until I arrived in Los Angeles to dump Cingular. My cell phone had long since stopped sending and receiving text messages, and the recurring billing problems were the last straw.

Verizon doesn't have the fancy phones that other providers offer, but their tagline of "There's only one reason to choose a wireless company: It's the network" makes sense. Cingular's coverage just can't match Verizon's in the last three cities I've lived in (Seattle, New York, and now LA), their base individual plans are the same price, and frankly, whipping out a sexy cell phone wins admiration for the phone, not the owner. Sure, I'd love to still be on GSM and to be able to pop in a SIM card in a foreign country, but it's always proven cheaper to just purchase a local cell phone and SIM card when traveling abroad than to use any of the U.S. providers' overseas plans.

The best deal I found, by the way, was not at a Verizon store but through Amazon.com, which offered an LG VX8300 phone for free after rebate and only required a 181 day rate plan commitment. At the Verizon store, they wanted to charge me $129.99 for the phone with a 1 year contract or $79.99 for the phone with a 2 year contract.

Their commercials can be aggravating, and Verizon is far from perfect, but for now, they're an upgrade. Yes, I can hear you now.

El Bulli

Mark Bittman on El Bulli and Ferran Adrià in today's NYTimes. I guess he's not doing foam anymore.

If you offered me the opportunity to eat at one restaurant tomorrow, anywhere in the world, El Bulli would be the choice. That just lumps me in with probably half the other foodies in the world.

Sometimes, just to torture myself, I browse El Bulli's general catalogue and gaze at the photos. You might scoff at applying such nomenclature to food, but scan some of his creations first. They are examples of food elevated to art.

I've eaten at several Adrià-inspired restaurants in the U.S., and if you have the chance, I highly recommend Alinea in Chicago. Grant Achatz is the Lebron James of American chefs.

iTunes 7.0 crash-happy

I updated iTunes to 7.0 today, and now it crashes every time I try to play a song on my MacBook Pro. Not good, not stable. Just my environment?

Whatever it is, it's driving me nuts.

UPDATE: Looks like I'm not the only one. More complaints here. I would recommend waiting for 7.0.1 to upgrade unless you're dying to download movies.

If you can't beat'em (or build'em), buy'em

There's an unconfirmed rumor that Fox has purchased YouTube. If true (and it wouldn't be entirely unexpected), then I know one thing: Fox overpaid. Not that YouTube isn't a fantastic site to spend time on, but it's another one of those sites that attracts plenty of people's attention but can't efficiently monetize it.

An eclipse, or the end of the world?

What I've been listening to this week while trying to finish all my reading for class: Ray LaMontagne's Till the Sun Turns Black. Good, good stuff.

Susan Sontag on self

The NYTimes excerpted Susan Sontag's journals in Sunday's Magazine. She's always fascinating and instructive.

Tim Harford offers some economic advice: in most cases, it only makes sense to insure ourselves against risks we cannot afford, not ones we can. Tornado? Qualifies. Losing a cell phone? No.

Links

New David Sedaris piece in The New Yorker this week. Also an interesting article on neuroeconomics.

Harold McGee answers some common questions about kitchen science on Chow.com, like what's the difference between pressed and chopped garlic and is it safe to heat food in plastic in the microwave.

50 Years of Janus Films - a 50 DVD box set. Pre-order before October 24 for $650, actually a bargain at $13 a disc. Drool.

Zyb - a site to back up your cell phone contact info. The service is free and works with over 200 mobile phones. Useful.

BP's Statistical Review of World Energy 2006.

One of my questions to Gothamist was posted to Ask Gothamist, though unfortunately the response didn't go live until I'd already left NYC. Before I left, I did find this useful list of places in NYC to donate goods of all types.

Trailer for Johnny To's next movie, a spaghetti Western transplanted to macau, Fong Juk or Exiled as it's known in English. Oh, I wish I were at the Toronto International Film Festival. Exiled opened there to strong reviews.

Trailer for the next animated feature from Satoshi Kon, Paprika. If I knew how to read Japanese, I could actually tell you something about the movie. Early buzz, though sparse, is good.

I wasn't a huge fan of Tony Jaa's Tom Yum Goong, but it sounds like the condensed version from the Weinsteins, retitled The Protector, is even worse. Oh well, we can shift our hopes onto Ong Bak 2, which Jaa will direct himself.

Two plugs

These two are not sites of sponsors but of people far more dear to me, my friends.

Mojiti is in beta and is the creation of Eric and his company in Beijing. It's a set of tools that allows people to add annotations (or Spots, as Mojiti calls them) to online video. The best way to understand Mojiti is to watch a Mojiti-enhanced video in action, like this annotated version of "Evolution of Dance" from YouTube. An easy way to create your own pseudo pop-up videos.

Fomato is a line of greeting cards. Here's a list of retail stores that carry the line. Hopefully they'll be taking orders online in the near future. The greeting cards merge artwork with Japanese genes with messages of a quirky nature. Many of my favorites aren't online, but I recommend them as an alternative to the usual greeting cards on the drugstore rack.

Sole survivor

Instead of heading straight for LA after leaving NY last week, I stopped over in San Francisco for Mark's wedding. The slower transition from my old home to my new one was much welcome.

For one thing, my friend Cindy's apartment, where I stayed for the weekend, was so large that it helped to ease my sadness over leaving Manhattan. You could fit my entire NY kitchen inside her shower, and her apartment could house two entire families if a tornado picked it up and dropped it in Manhattan. These are things you learn to live with after an adjustment period in NYC, but being able to lie down in a shower to do snow angels helps to ease the pain of leaving NYC the way the patch helps a smoker trying to kick the habit.

California is also a state that makes a strong first impression. She's a looker. As soon as you step out of the airport, she greets you with sunshine and blue skies. The day before the wedding, I went for a jog in the afternoon from the Bay Bridge to Fisherman's Wharf, and though the headwind beat me up, the views of the ocean, sky, and bridges couldn't have been more gorgeous.

The point of this post, though, is to plug my old college classmate Yul who will be one of the contestants on this season's Survivor: Cook Islands. I've never really watched the show, but finally, I am one degree of separation from a reality show contestant. This season's show has already courted lots of controversy by dividing the contestants into four teams by race: Asian American, Caucasian, African American, and Hispanic. Various sponsors have dropped out and community leaders have protested. In other words, this transparent tactic for boosting ratings appears to be working as planned, though the test will come Thursday when the season premier airs.

Yul, though he couldn't share details of what had transpired on the show, invited us to a viewing party for a TV Guide Channel preview of the upcoming season. He was the last contestant profiled and was introduced thus: "...with a Yale doctorate, a compassionate nature, and a whole batch of imposing muscle." The voiceover was paired with an image of Yul sans t-shirt, looking like a video game Bruce Lee. Oddly, Yul never appeared with a shirt on in any of the clips, and you can imagine the ribbing we all gave him.

I won't be rooting for any particular team but for Yul. Early odds have him as one of 6 contestants with 8 to 1 odds, the favorite at this point being Adam Gregory at 7 to 1. If you're watching but have no rooting interest, I offer my endorsement of Yul as a really decent guy, a far cry from the cutthroat reality contestants you love to hate.

You've had your six(th)...man to play Bond

After watching the new trailer for the new Casino Royale Bond flick, I'm fairly certain it won't be anything like the 1967 Casino Royale with Peter Fleming, Woody Allen, Urusula Andress, Orson Welles, David Niven, John Huston, William Holden, Deborah Kerr, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and many many more.

No, the latest in this, perhaps the longest running franchise in English movie history(?), features a high stakes poker game ($10 million buy-in), Eva (yum yum) Green, an Aston Martin DBS, a villain with one of those vertical scars across an eye, Montenegro, and a grim-faced Bond. I'm not sure Daniel Craig cracks a smile that entire trailer, and he delivers the trademark Bond "quip after the kill" like he's tossing an Ace of spades on a body in Vietnam. The move from Aston Martin to BMW was perhaps an odd move downstream, but switching from Baccarat to Texas Hold'em is probably a sound marketing decision ("In. All In.").

Otherwise, the longevity can be explained by the elements of Bond that never go out of style: exotic locales, smoking hot women, sexy cars, spycraft, gadgets, and the rush that comes from taking down megalomaniacs intent on bringing down the free world. Bond is every boy's testosterone, distilled into pure cinematic form. The movies also conjure an appealing work environment. 007 is given a wide latitude by his superiors. If he can get the job done, no one really cares if he destroys a bit of public property or fails to answer a few phone calls because he's busy introducing a stone cold fox to his Walter PPK.

Some of my earliest movie memories involve watching early Connery 007 with my dad, whose favorite remains From Russia With Love. I was always sad when ABC would feature a Bond movie on a school night because I couldn't stay up to watch the end.

A night of surprises

About a minute before I was due to enter the tent with the sister of the bride on my arm, one of the other groomsmen asked if any of us thought Mark would cry. I had seen him just a short while earlier, and he seemed calm. This is a guy I'd lined up with many times in college to play "no pads" tackle football, and I'd seen him hit people so hard that they were found wandering around campus muttering to themselves (true story; the guy Mark hit was later diagnosed with a concussion).

"I'll lay three to one odds against Mark crying," I said. "He'll be fine."

The wedding coordinator gave me the cue, and I entered the tent. I looked down the aisle to the front of the tent.

Mark was crying, and Howie was handing him a tissue.

"What the...holy...I lost already!" I whispered. His naked emotion seemed to shrink the tent, drawing all three hundred odd people in attendance into a tight emotional circle.

Thankfully no one took me up on my odds. I had about 78 cents in my pocket.

Last Wednesday, my last afternoon in New York City, I lingered with my nephew Ryan for too long and missed my train to Newark Airport. So I hopped in a cab and told him to floor it. Upon arrival, he announced the fare: with tip, it came to $65. I started counting the cash in my wallet. $67. I was leaving NYC with pockets turned out.

Back to the wedding. I continue to underestimate the magnitude of the wedding day, how it can overwhelm the hardest of souls. When I had a moment alone with Mark later, he confessed that seeing all those people from all over the world and from all the years of his life sitting out there, looking up at him, was overwhelming. No explanation needed, buddy.

Last night, I was up late chatting with Stacey, who I'd only met a few times before. She and Mark are the ones I'll lean on most in my transition to this new place, and having them close by is a real source of comfort.

She laughed at my lousy prognostication.

"I knew Mark would cry and that I wouldn't," she said. "Mark cries when he watches Extreme Home Makeover on HGTV."

One of the cool activities from their wedding was one of those old school photo booths, rented from Red Cheese. The line for that thing never dwindled, and even passive observers enjoyed watching the screen outside the booth to see what wacky poses were being struck inside the curtain. Everyone left with one or more of their four photos as a favor, leaving behind the others in a photo album for the bride and groom.

During the slideshow, we all witnessed something that was more surprising than the tears during the ceremony. Mixed in with some video footage of Mark playing safety in high school football, covering a wideout and running up to put a hit on a running back, a young, skinny guy appeared on screen. The footage was so desaturated as to be almost black and white.

Was that...no...it couldn't be...could it? Yes, it was a young, willowy Mark, twirling across the ice on skates, executing a spin, then releasing into a glide, arms floating up at his side. At some point in his youth, Mark was a figure skater? What the?

He's never going to hear the end of that.

Happy Labor Day

A thorough explanation of why Chinese is so difficult to learn. I grew up hearing Chinese in the house and even attended some Chinese school, and I found it to be a bear. I never did really learn to write or read cursive Chinese handwriting very well (yes, Chinese has both print and cursive, like English), another item I'd add to this writer's litany of complaints. Just when you think you've memorized a character, someone scrawls it in their own cursive style and it's as if someone took a print character's brush strokes and tied them in butterfly knots. Of course, without cursive, writing Chinese, with its numerous strokes, is like writing English in neat block capital letters...sloooooooooow).

Curse of the Golden Flower, a movie by Zhang Yimou, starring Gong Li and Chow Yun Fat, releases this Christmas season (trailer). Yeah, I hate dandelions, too, but I wouldn't go so far as to call them a curse.

Crocodile hunter, felled by a stingray. Stung through the heart by a stingray...brutal. I guess it should be obvious from their names, but I didn't realize stingrays were that dangerous. Earlier this year, on a dive trip down in the Turks and Caicos islands, Dave and I fed stingrays just off the beach with some fish our guides had brought along for that purpose. We were soon overrun with stingrays, and one ran up my back and bit me. I popped out of the water, and Dave said the ray had drawn blood. Shortly thereafter, two lemon sharks wandered over, and I hustled out of the ocean.

Get your bootleg Van Goghs and Da Vincis: a city in China is the world's leading producer of reproductions of famous paintings. It doesn't surprise me one bit.

A computer program named WebCrow defeated dozens of human competitors in a crossword puzzle competition. Humans managed to defeat the program in two Italian crosswords featuring lots of puns and political clues.

That green lump that resembles playdough, the one they dump on your platter of sushi? That's not wasabi. Real, fresh wasabi is rarely served at sushi restaurants, but whenever a sushi restaurant offers it I'll request it. Real wasabi is not as hot as the faux stuff, but it's better for you. Unfortunately, the real deal costs a fortune.

Michael Apted's next in his Up documentary series is about to release. He interviewed many children at age 7 about their lives and dreams for 7 Up, and since then, he's gone back to check up on them every 7 years (each doc in the series is named after the age of the characters, so 14 Up, 21 Up, and so on). This next installment will be 49 Up. All the previous installments are on DVD.

The new Sunday Night Football theme (MP3) is by none other than John Williams.

Four words no man wants to hear: bleeding in the scrotum. It's been that kind of year for the Cubs.

HiveLive is a site that allows you to post and share files and information among public or private hives, or groups of people.

The Statistical Review of World Energy 2006, by British Petroleum, including historical data series in Excel format.

You got the touch! Feel, feel, feel, feel, feel...feel my heat!