Remains of the Day

Janelle Monae at Dakota Lounge

Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, a few of us self-declared LA refugees went to check out the opening party for Dakota Lounge, formerly Temple Bar, in Santa Monica. I wanted to catch Janelle Monae who I'd seen perform at the Viper Room previously.

Though we had to stand outside in line for a bit, we managed to get inside before her set began. Despite our late entry, we managed to walk right up to the front of the stage for her set.

Just as in her set at the Viper Room, Janelle was a dynamo on stage. At one point, I looked down at my camera to adjust the settings, and WHAP! Something hit me in the face. It was her white sportcoat, which she'd flung into the crowd.

Afterwards, we were at the bar grabbing a drink when she walked out. Someone saw us looking her way and asked if we'd like to chat with her. Turns out he was her manager.

I showered her with effusive praise. She thanked me and said, "Keep me in your prayers."

I had her manager snap a photo of us with her.

One think I do thank Dubya for

Maybe the only thing: recently he signed into law the Alternative Minimum Tax Relief Act of 2008. Years too late, for my taste, but better late than never. I'm not sure what the old AMT tax was intended to do, but what it did to me was tax me on exercised stock option value even if I hadn't sold them. Way back in the day of the old Internet stock bubble, that meant paying a ton in taxes on Amazon.com stock that I couldn't sell as an employee.

Of course, later, the stock came back down to earth, conveniently when the window for employee selling opened back up and after the government had bled me dry. Instead of getting my AMT taxes back as a refund, the government kept it all and only allowed me to apply the credit as an offset against capital gains of which I never had enough in the subsequent years to claim much of the credit.

So for some ten years, the government has had a big interest free loan from yours truly. So forgive me if I'm not feeling so generous about funding bailouts of mismanaged banks and those dinosaurs in Detroit.

The relevant clauses of the next tax act, for those dot-commers affected:

• Increase of AMT Refundable Credit Amount for Individuals with Long-Term Unused Credits for Prior Minimum Tax Liability. The Extenders Act changes the way in which the refundable portion of the "long-term unused minimum tax credit" for a particular tax year is computed, and eliminates the previously applicable phaseout of the credit based on adjusted gross income, potentially increasing the credit available in that year. Individuals with long-term unused minimum tax credits in a tax year ending on or before December 31, 2012 now may receive a refundable credit equal to the greater of (i) 50 percent of the long-term unused minimum tax credit or (ii) the amount, if any, of the long-term unused minimum tax credit determined for the preceding tax year.

• Specific Relief for AMT Attributable to an Incentive Stock Option Exercise. The Extenders Act eliminates any otherwise outstanding liability for tax, penalties and interest attributable to an AMT liability arising from the exercise of any incentive stock option before 2008. In addition, the amount of a taxpayer's long-term unused minimum tax credit described above that is allowed as a refund in each of 2008 and 2009 is increased by 50 percent of any interest or penalty paid by a taxpayer that would have been abated by the Extenders Act if it had not already been paid.

Marathon Man

I was in NYC the first weekend of November to watch my brother James run his first marathon. It was a true family affair as James ran for Fred's Team to raise money for Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center where my other brother Alan works. James raised something like $13,000, just an amazing amount.

I flew in late Thursday night. The next day, while James was off at work, I got up and just walked around. New York City is still my favorite among all the cities I've lived in, and I suspect it's because it's the one city where I can feel both alone and among people at the same time.

I stopped for lunch at Momofuku Ssäm Bar, one of the outlets in the David Chang empire. Back when I lived in NYC, I came here on its first day open, when they still didn't have a menu. It was like a burrito bar back then, and when I walked in the one guy behind the kitchen counter looked surprised to see anyone. Now it's transformed into a fairly chic sit-down joint with a menu and prix fixe lunch. I had crispy pork belly buns...

...and spicy rice cakes.

It was Friday, Halloween, but more importantly, it was the last day of the Banksy exhibit in the West Village, The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill. I managed to get there just about a half hour before it closed.

Banksy is to the art world as Michel Gondry is to music videos, just conceptually brilliant. This faux pet store wasn't populated with the real animals. Instead, there was a depressed and caged Tweety...

...a caged animatronic monkey wearing headphones, clicking on a remote control, and watching a TV playing a documentary about monkeys free in the wild...

...a rabbit looking in a mirror and applying lipstick...

...animatronic fish fingers swimming in fishbowl...

...and animatronic sausages squirming around like earthworms.

A leopard fur coat basked in a tree branch, its "tail" hanging down and swaying lazily. A rooster watched over its children, little Chicken McNuggets with legs bobbing for food.

Not Banksy's most subtle social commentary, but a humorous conceit executed simply. According to the security guard, the exhibit was on its way to London next.

That night I caught a production of David Mamet's Speed the Plow at the Barrymore Theater on Broadway. This three person meditation on the conflict between art and commerce in Hollywood starred Jeremy Piven, Elisabeth Moss (Peggy Olson on Mad Men), and Raul Esparza.

Bashing Hollywood for favoring money over art is hardly an original form of cynicism, but the underrated Piven is always fun to watch on stage. He plays a character not so unlike his Ari Gold from Entourage: Bobby Gould is a studio exec tasked with making commercial hits. When Elizabeth Moss, a temp secretary, playing someone not unlike her Peggy Olson in Season One of Mad Men, appeals to his conscience to push for an adaptation of a dense and decidedly depressing novel (for some reason I thought of Blindness by Saramago), the battle for his soul is on, with Raul Esparza playing the devil on his shoulder, having brought Gould a made-to-order action script with a big star attached.

Piven has a way of making greed warm and fuzzy. His Ari Gold and Bobby Gould both talk a game of mindless materialism, but the body language conveys a person not entirely comfortable with all the bravado. We see in Piven our own greedy nature, but because we sense his chance for redemption is our own, and so we root for him. Tony Soprano and Don Draper are part of a recently crowded stable of antiheroes, and Piven is like their comedic brother.

After the play, I set off to my old neighborhood haunt of Union Square. I'd read that there would be a flash mob of Sarah Palin look-a-likes this Halloween night, but only a few materialized. Dagmar and Alex, two other folks from UCLA Film School were in town for a thesis shoot, so I met up with them and followed them around, taking pics of Dagmar with costumes that struck her fancy. We snapped a lot Palins, among others. But the most popular costume, by far, perhaps for ease of creation, was Heath Ledger's smudged-lipstick-and-white-face-paint Joker.

The night ended, as many busy social days in NYC end, with my sister Karen hobbling in pain alongside me at 3am in her Audrey Hepburn circa Breakfast at Tiffany's high heels, the two of us trying and failing to find a single unoccupied taxi in Greenwich Village.

The night before the marathon, we all stayed at the Westin in Times Square as James and all the Fred's Team runners were put up there for their fundraising efforts. They got their own transportation to the start line.

The family met up to watch him at the Fred's Team viewing bleachers on 1st Ave., near 67th St, around mile 17. We saw the wheelchair division fly by. One man in a wheelchair stopped across the street, attached a pair of artificial legs below his knees, and ran. The competitive women and then the competitive men flew by, and we saw both eventual winners in those groups.

Thanks to the marathon's e-mail alerts, we knew when James was approaching. As he ran by, giving Alan and the kids a quick hug, I shouted out to him to "Drop the hammer!" He looked back, then down at the street, puzzled, thinking I'd said that he'd dropped something.

We tried to make it across town to the finish line to catch him, but he was too fast. He'd already finished in an impressive 3:57 by the time we waded through the Central Park mob.

Congrats, on both the great time and the amazing fundraising haul! Each speaks volumes, one to his obsessive nature, the other to his likability.

My weekend in Nevada

I am as exhausted as I've been in a long time having just returned from a long weekend of canvassing and rallying for Obama in Las Vegas. Nevada has traditionally leaned red, and it went to Bush in 2000 and 2004. Polls shows a near coin toss right now in Nevada. Its five electoral votes may not mean much, but just as a symbol, we (I use the royal we, my support for Obama being no secret) would desperately love to win it this time around.

It was an eventful and exciting weekend for team Obama:

• The Chicago Tribune endorsed Obama. Growing up in Chicago, I was used to seeing their blue masthead bleed red election after election, so this endorsement is a pleasant surprise.

  Many Americans say they're uneasy about Obama. He's pretty new to them.

  We can provide some assurance. We have known Obama since he entered politics a dozen years ago. We have watched him, worked with him, argued with him as he rose from an effective state senator to an inspiring U.S. senator to the Democratic Party's nominee for president.

  We have tremendous confidence in his intellectual rigor, his moral compass and his ability to make sound, thoughtful, careful decisions. He is ready.

  The change that Obama talks about so much is not simply a change in this policy or that one. It is not fundamentally about lobbyists or Washington insiders. Obama envisions a change in the way we deal with one another in politics and government. His opponents may say this is empty, abstract rhetoric. In fact, it is hard to imagine how we are going to deal with the grave domestic and foreign crises we face without an end to the savagery and a return to civility in politics.

  -----------------------

  This endorsement makes some history for the Chicago Tribune. This is the first time the newspaper has endorsed the Democratic Party's nominee for president.

  ...

  McCain failed in his most important executive decision. Give him credit for choosing a female running mate--but he passed up any number of supremely qualified Republican women who could have served. Having called Obama not ready to lead, McCain chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. His campaign has tried to stage-manage Palin's exposure to the public. But it's clear she is not prepared to step in at a moment's notice and serve as president. McCain put his campaign before his country.
  

  Obama chose a more experienced and more thoughtful running mate--he put governing before politicking. Sen. Joe Biden doesn't bring many votes to Obama, but he would help him from day one to lead the country.
  

• Colin Powell endorsed Obama this morning. It was once thought that he might be the first African-American to be President, but it was not to be. But his part in this saga was still to be played, and today was that day. Ken texted me from the East Coast at around 9am PST: "Powell endosed Obama on MtP." It was the perfect start to the morning and fired up the volunteer team for the morning rally in Chinatown.

  Republican former House speaker Newt Gingrich said on ABC's "This Week": "What that just did in one sound bite -- and I assume that sound bite will end up in an ad -- is it eliminated the experience argument. How are you going to say the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, former national security adviser, former secretary of state was taken in?"

• Obama raised $150 million in September!
• Someone was indeed trying to manipulate the prediction market Intrade to boost McCain's numbers.

It's often written that the Republican ground game won them the White House in 2000 and 2004. The terminology similarity to football is not the only apt comparison. As in football, where the ground game tends to grind out yards, three, four at a time, the ground game in politics is hard work.
This was more vivid for me this weekend in the Vegas desert heat as I strolled from house to house in various Clark County neighborhoods. But while economists wonder why people vote because it's irrational (one vote is so unlikely to make a difference), volunteering feels more sensible. If each of us can reach ten, twenty, fifty people, and if we can encourage a few extra people to get out and vote, or convince a few undecideds to vote for Obama, then the multiplier effect lends our efforts feel numerically significance.
Andrew Sullivan, writing about the ground game, says Obama's "major enemy is complacency among the young."
That's fair given weak youth turnout historically, but my generation (X) and generation Y are not happy about the label, and I believe the pundits are severely underestimating the youth vote and impact. I can't remember an election in which more people my age and below have been so active, not only contributing money but flying all over the country to do phone banks, voter registration, canvassing, rallying, and everything in between. If the Republicans are counting on youth complacency this time around, they are going to be disappointed. We don't just want to win the election (what Obama dismisses as the 50-plus-1 governing model, referring to the idea that it's enough to win 50% of the country's support plus one additional vote), we want to make states that have always gone red go blue.
Did our efforts this weekend make a difference? Saturday was the first day of early voting in Nevada. After a rally this morning, a local Obama organizer shared some figures with us. ~15,000 early votes were cast on Saturday, and 64% of them went Obama.
16 days to go.

Connor

Joannie and Mike were in Temecula this past weekend visiting the folks, so I went down to visit them all and check in on Connor who is now over a year old.

He's still a serious and cautious little guy, but we managed to get a few laughs out of him during the weekend. I learned that he enjoys walking up small hills and mounds. Up and down, up and down. And, for a minute or two, at least, he found the swing set amusing.

By the way, adjustment brushes in Adobe Lightroom 2? Awesome. Worth the price of the upgrade. How long, I wonder, before they migrate to Photoshop?

PC Guy!

Damn, I missed PC Guy at the Fleet Foxes concert at the El Rey the other night!

How I would have loved to ask him about the latest Microsoft "I'm a PC" ads.

Loosely Based

My brother-in-law Mike and his brother-in-law Nik wrote a graphic novel that is going to be published by Arcana Comics. The title is Loosely Based and there's a link here with some preview pages. Congrats Mike!

Taco truck, where art thou? Also, some Hulu updates

We launched a bunch of new features to Hulu at around midnight, debugged for a while, and then just before 3am the late night crew here hopped into cars and rushed over to hit our late night go-to spot, the taco truck near Vons in West Los Angeles. Taco trucks do a poor job of branding. They have no names, only locations, and they are all referred to just by the generic name of their classification: taco truck.

That truck typically operates from 10pm to 3am, but on this night, it was not there. You know the economy is bad when even the taco trucks are impacted.

So we went to Izzy's Deli in Santa Monica and celebrated our labors until 4 in the morning.

Some of the new things you'll find on Hulu:

• Discussion boards
• Channels, including new ones like anime (Naruto or Mushi-Shi, anyone? Death Note?) and Food and Leisure (Giada!)
• Improved queue management, including the option to separate out subscription alerts from expiration alerts
• Show recommendations - at the bottom of each show page, we recommend other shows you might like based on what people are viewing.
• New TV and Movies homepage layouts

There are other subtle changes, some of which you may notice as you browse around the site.

Two other cool Hulu news bits: the latest issue of Wired magazine has an article on us, and Tina Fey mentioned Hulu when accepting the Emmy for 30 Rock as best comedy series on Sunday night. It's probably the closest I'll ever come to having Tina Fey say my name. Good enough.

We're also still working hard on adding and replenishing our content library. Here's the season three premiere of Heroes.

Okay, I will go collapse now.

Bob Dylan

I saw Bob Dylan at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium tonight. I've never heard Dylan live before. He's more mythical to me than real, seen mostly in black and white photos, documentaries, and movies, played by a variety of actors.

I'm a lifelong developing Dylan fan. My first real exposure to Dylan came in high school as one of my friends was a huge Dylan fan and would play Dylan in the tape deck of his car all the time. Recently I found a good deal on Amazon for a used copy of the Bob Dylan SACD box set, and I've been working my way through it, one disc at a time. His sound transports me back in time and across America like a musical road trip in a convertible with its top down, with the wind tousling my hair.

I will remember tonight, but not for the venue. The Santa Monica Civic Auditorium is fugly, and the acoustics of the cement-floored space are awful and muddy. The speakers were balanced to lean to the left, and it sounded like Dylan was singing from a space floating about 20 feet over the left third of the stage when he was in fact standing about two thirds of the way to the right of the stage most of the evening.

It's a credit to Dylan's songwriting that despite the terrible acoustics (which made his already incomprehensible lyrics sound like the language used in Apocalypto), my toes were tapping the whole time. Given the state of my Achilles, that's no small feat. I nearly fell over from exhaustion a few times--for some reason, tearing your Achilles reduces your endurance for standing--but managed to stay upright to the bitter end, through the second song of his encore.

As a fan of speech, I admire Dylan for his sui generis command of the rhythms of English language. He really is the poet laureate of American music.

NOTE: You can download "Dreamin' of You", a previously unreleased track from Tell Tale Signs, from BobDylan.com.

The moment you become a New Yorker

Article in the NYTimes about that moment, some period into your first year living in New York, when you become a New Yorker.

Though I can't recall a specific moment things changed for me in NYC, I did reach, sometime about four or five months into living in NYC, a state of harmony with the city, when I understood its rhythms and its personality, when I felt all the privileges of living in the country's greatest city open to me.

The city, like its people, can seem prickly, antagonistic, or even dangerous. But NYC has more layers than any city I've lived in, and the longer you're there, the more it surprises you.

The woman who should sing the next Bond song

Last night at the Viper Room (famous as the venue outside which River Phoenix died), I heard the woman who should sing the next Bond theme song, and her name is Janelle Monáe.

Her set was short, just 5 songs, but it was one of the most energy-packed, blow-your-mind 5 song sets I've heard since, well, ever. I've heard her songs online via MySpace, and I was impressed, but seeing her live is an experience unto itself and not to be missed. She's like a live bolt of electricity on stage, and frankly I'm not sure she could keep maintain it for a 15 song set without just passing out and getting carried off in an ambulance.

The Viper Room's concert hall is tiny, and that was part of the experience. Being able to see her animated expressions, being able to see her dancing like her life depended on it. I'm sure I'll never experience her music that way again. For her last song, she crowd-surfed, and I nearly ruptured my other Achilles trying to help guide her across as she passed over my head.

She has an interesting style (that hair!) and sound, both futuristic yet classical. That's why she'd make a great choice for the next Bond theme song. She can bring some of the Shirley Bassey funk and marry it to a more modern, hip-hop sound. With her interest in science fiction--she references androids in her album cover and some of her songs--she might even be able to write lyrics that incorporate "Quantum of Solace" in an organic way.

Her music is hard to describe. She went from the propulsive drive of "Many Moons" to the hushed emotion of "Smile". My favorite track is "Sincerely Jane". There's funk, hip hop, soul, pop, and bits of other musical goodness in there.

After the concert, we all stared at each other wide-eyed, and then I ran over to the merchandise table to buy her CD, because all I could think was "this girl's going to blow up" and "I need to buy stock in her."

You can buy her CD Metropolis: The Chase Suite or mp3's from Amazon. Here's the rest of her appearance schedule for 2008; those of you in SF, Portland, Seattle, Arlington, NYC, or Chicago should get your tickets now.

Ah, youth

Having come in a night early for a morning meeting here in Boulder, Colorado, Christina and I strolled around University of Colorado campus tonight. Being around a university reminds me of the happiest time of my life, as an undergrad.

We walked into one building, saw signs for a performance, and walked out to find a play being put on in an open-air theater. I stood to watch a scene--given the many references to D'Artagnan I assume it was The Three Musketeers--then walked out with a smile on my face.

Nothing like mannered student theater acting and eating disorder brochures in the hallways to remind one of college.

Nibblets

Facebook's profile updates are rendered in an odd tense, in a very Facebook-centric view of the world. You change your profile to married, and instead of writing, "Scott changed his relationship status to married" it reads "Scott is now married." Never mind that he may have been married for years; in the Facebook world, nothing is so until you declare it so in your profile.

What happens if you change your sex? "Fred is no longer male"? Your birthday? "Susan is no longer born July 7, 1978"?

I am going to change my relationship status to king so it reads "Eugene is now king."

***

As of Friday morning rehab, I am sans crutches. This is a big moment for me, and an even bigger moment for my armpits.

***

To the person who came to my website via the Google search "eugene wei the dark knight" yesterday: yes, I am Batman.

***

Speaking of Batman and my crutches, I didn't buy Harvey Dent's conversion in The Dark Knight. But I can empathize with the personality-transforming power of physical injuries or deformities. Having one bad leg, not being able to exercise, has definitely made me grumpier these past two or three months.

I walk by a homeless guy, and I flip a coin. Heads, I give the guy the coin. Tails, I kick him with my walking boot.

No, not really. But not being able to run or work off occasional frustration has left me snippier. I'm like Harvey Two-Leg.

***

Lebron vs. Yao Ming in the Coke ad "Unity" from Smith&Foulkes for W+K Portland.

***

One of the restaurants I wish I ate at before moving from NYC is Blue Hill at Stone Barns. This glowing review with its gorgeous photos is like a megaphone for that regret.

***

Cleverly written commercials for dandruff shampoo that could be done by any one who knows After Effects.

***

Why read The Watchmen, which has spiked in popularity now that the non-geek masses have seen The Watchmen trailer playing before The Dark Knight? Bryan Caplan says: "The Watchmen is the Best... Utilitarian Parable... Ever."

I've never thought of it that way, but having read that graphic novel probably five times in my life, I'd have to say it makes sense.

***

"Tarantino's Mind" (short film)

Connor attacks

With my Achilles on the mend, my nephew Connor is racing me to be the first to walk.

Style icons

June 14 weekend I was in Chicago for Jae and Esther's wedding and to visit with Joannie and Mike, who were moving back to Chicago, and Karen, who was in town for a wedding also.

Here are some pics from Jae and Esther's wedding which was held in Woodstock, a town I haven't visited since I was in grade school, when a family friend used to live out there. The wedding was held on Esther's parents apple orchard.

My favorite photo of the weekend came from a table setting and was of Esther's parents James and Ae Soon. James, in Seoul, looked up Ae Soon, a nurse, for a hospital tour.

If you look at the photo below, it's no surprise that they were married three years later, in 1976. His generous shirt collar coming out to grab some sun, his left hand on his belt, his right hand casually tucked behind her waist--he's the Korean Stetson man. She's rocking the stylish specs and hip handbag, and her expression says she's not playing second fiddle.

Seeing this photo I just feel like going shopping.

The itch, oh, the itch

Atul Gawande writes in this week's New Yorker about the science behind itching. Timely, for me, as my leg, encased in the cast for several weeks now, has started to itch with a vengeance. Any area of my leg that can be reached by a disassembled wire coat hanger has been explored, but there are areas that are not reachable in this tight cast.

Is it preferable to the pain I felt earlier? Perhaps, for relief can be had, however briefly, by scratching. But I'm reminded of this Montaigne quote from the article:

Scratching is one of the sweetest gratifications of nature, and as ready at hand as any, But repentance follows too annoyingly close at its heels.

Many a moment at work or at home, I attempt random mental exercises designed to distract myself from the itching, but meditation backfires. It clears the mind and leaves nothing but an blinding spotlight on the itching.

Two Thursdays ago, I visited the doctor to have my cast reset again. This time, Carl, the male nurse who specialized in the business of adjusting and replacing the casts of patients at this orthopedic office at UCLA, was going to try to bring my foot up to a neutral 90 degree angle with my leg. My foot was about 20 degrees off. If he could get me to 90 degrees, I'd wear this cast for an entire month before my shift to a soft boot. If he couldn't get me to 90 degrees, I'd have to visit again in two weeks for another recasting.

The previous recasting was excruciating. This time my foot was so close to neutral already that I hoped for an easier go of it. To keep myself in a positive frame of mind, I tried engaging Carl in cheerful small talk as he sawed off my cast. I asked him about the history of Achilles tendon repairs, trying to give him opportunities to share his expertise.

Dear reader, you will either be filled with a joyous schadenfreude or consumed with empathic terror when I tell you that it was to no avail. When Carl placed a board on my foot and then leaned against it with all of his 300 pound weight to pry my foot up, I experienced what I am near certain was the most violent, unbearable pain of my life. I screamed and nearly flew off of the table on which I lay on my belly. It felt as if my Achilles tendon tore again.

For those who don't know what that feels like, the closest analogy I can summon is that if you were trying to do the splits but could not because you were not flexible enough, and Shaquille O'Neal came along and jumped onto your shoulders and caused you to drop into the full split position with a sudden tearing of your groin and leg muscles, that comes close to simulating the pain I felt as Carl threw his weight into that board again and again.

Carl, who had seemed mildly pleasant during small talk, reverted to the unsympathetic brute I'd come to know my previous visit. As I grunted in pain, he grunted in mockery and chided me, "Stop squirming away."

So once again, I had to call on friends to drive me home as the pain was unbearable. This time around, Carl warned me that with these last twenty degrees, I'd experience not only several days of pain but occasional muscle spasms.

"If I were you," he cautioned, "I'd take my pain meds regularly, and I don't recommend missing a cycle."

Before heading home, and even once there, I popped Vicodin like they were breath mints. This cured none of the pain but left me with an overpowering nausea that caused me to throw up in the afternoon.

A day later, I was on a plane to Chicago for a wedding. Thankfully, the leg spasms left me after one night. However, I do not recommend flying coach when recovering from an Achilles rupture. Actually, I don't recommend flying coach in general, it is one level above traveling as cargo, and I mean that literally, as your luggage is beneath you in the plane's belly. It may be that there is more leg room in the cargo hold, and more than once I thought of asking if that was a possibility.

As for right at this moment, why am I up at 2 in the morning the night before the work week begins? Because of an itch I can't reach in my cast. I was going to note that this should be an add-on circle to Hell, but it turns out it's already earned a spot there.

Itching is a most peculiar and diabolical sensation. The definition offered by the German physician Samuel Hafenreffer in 1660 has yet to be improved upon: An unpleasant sensation that provokes the desire to scratch. Itch has been ranked, by scientific and artistic observers alike, among the most distressing physical sensations one can experience. In Dante’s Inferno, falsifiers were punished by “the burning rage / of fierce itching that nothing could relieve”

Remains of last weekend

I had my leg cast swapped out last week. When I walked into the office, the nurse who admitted me took one look at my leg and recoiled in shock.

"What the hell kind of angle is your foot set at?" he asked. My foot was pointed straight down, like a ballet dancer on point.

"I don't know! I woke up from surgery and my foot was set that way," I said, suddenly concerned.

"Man oh man," he said, shaking his head. "That's the most severe angle I've ever seen."

The guy who was responsible for recasting me looked like Milton from Office Space but about 200 pounds heavier. He had an exasperated "seen-it-all" weariness about him, as if he wished this train of patients with ruptured Achilles would stop appearing in his office but knew that it wouldn't. He looked at me and shook his head, and I felt judged, guilty of some hubris that had led me to this sorry state.

To remove the cast, he pulled out a small handheld circular saw and made two cuts from top to bottom on either side of my leg. The saw blade protruded about an inch, and my cast looked to be about an inch thick, so when Milton put saw to cast I strained as hard as possible to push my leg as far away from the blade as possible. I was terrified, and my leg cowered against the opposite side of the cast. Milton didn't seem concerned and pulled the blade straight down with an almost bored nonchalance.

He pried the cast off, and for the first time in weeks, I saw my leg. There was a four inch wound running up the back of my leg from my heel, stitched together with black thread in a cross-hatched pattern.

The surgeon came in, took a look, said the wound looked to be healing fine, and left. Milton asked him about the crazy angle of my foot, but he replied that my wound was healing and that was the important thing.

Milton had my lie on my belly, and then he rubbed some local anesthesia on my wound. Just as I started to feel it burn, he began (I think) removing my stitches. It felt as if someone was putting a soldering iron to my ankle, and I bit my arm to stomach the searing pain.

Then it came time to pry my foot up partway towards the normal 90 degree angle that feet are at when you stand normally. There was only one problem: after two weeks of being pointed down, my foot did not want to come back up. Milton asked me to try pulling it up myself, but despite urgent messages from my brain, my foot did not move.

I couldn't see Milton over my shoulder, but I pictured the slightest of grins on his lips as he grabbed my foot and a board of some sort and pried my foot up.

I let out a grunt as a violent pain shot up my leg. He continued to pry, I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. If someone had walked in on us, it would've looked like a UFC fight, with Milton trying to break my foot to get me to tap out.

I didn't submit, but Milton did notice that I was in pain.

"You think this hurts? I just pulled your foot up like 20 degrees. Next time I'm pulling it up the rest of the way, like 40 degrees. You better take some painkillers before you come in." And then he cackled maniacally: "Bwahahahahaha!"

Okay, he didn't cackle. But after seeing the beautiful nurses in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I can't lie, the walrusian Milton was a bit of a letdown.

I hobbled out of Milton's torture chamber with a new, slim cast on my leg but in enormous pain. I sat in the waiting room and immediately inhaled two Vicodin, which I hadn't touched in a week and a half.

The best thing to come out of this office visit was obtaining my doc's signature on a form authorizing me for a temporary handicapped parking placard. I mailed that off to the California DMV as soon as I got back to the office.

Milton, we will meet again soon, but I will be bringing my two friends, Percocet and Vicodin.

***

Amputees sometimes experience phantom limb. There's an analogous videogame sensation. Whenever I hear a song from Rock Band on the radio, I feel a phantom guitar in my hands and see green, blue, yellow, red, and orange notes dropping from the sky.

***

After trashing his teammates in the preseason, Kobe Bryant goes and says he stayed with the Lakers because he tweaked his leadership to instill his teammates with his DNA. Arrogant, yes, but also maybe not the best thing to say given his, uh, personal history, both past and present.

***

Yes, the Lakers have Zen master Phil Jackson as coach, but let's not forget that Doc Rivers has the Celtics shouting "Ubuntu!" coming out of every huddle. Open source operating system? That seems pretty zen to me.

***

Sometimes it feels like the web is too big. Look at this list of sites of "Top 60 music websites that deliver the greatest free music."

60 sites! I'd be more than happy with, say, 10, but to be honest I probably use maybe 3.

***

Now that I'm on crutches, and now that a temporary handicapped permit is on its way to me in the mail, I flash dirty looks at any non-handicapped person I catch coming out of the handicapped stall in the bathroom.

If I hadn't had to pee so badly after the Indiana Jones screening that morning it opened, I would've stayed around until I caught whoever had occupied the handicapped stall at the Hollywood Arclight.

Speaking of the new Indiana Jones movie, I've read a lot of fans of the new Indy movie who dismiss anyone who didn't like the movie as elitist. Sorry, but those people are wrong.

I don't care if you did like the movie, but don't tell me about summer popcorn flicks. Raiders of the Lost Ark was a great summer popcorn flick. This latest Indy flick...cost me three hours and $11.

***

This is old, but still worth posting. Chris Matthews obliterates a right-wing lunatic on TV. One of Matthews' finer moments.

The Recruiter

One of the projects I worked on when at The Edit Center in NYC is making it on air this summer as part of HBO's Documentary Films Series. Directed by MacArthur Fellowship winner Edet Belzberg, The Recruiter introduces us to Sergeant First Class Clay Usie, one of the most effective Army recruiters working in America, and four of the teenagers he recruits into the U.S. Army.

My classmates and I edited some of the early footage into scenes which our instructors assembled into a rough cut. One of our instructors, Adam Bolt, went on to be one of the two editors on the documentary.

I first saw the final cut of the documentary at Sundance in January. Having worked on the project, I'm biased, of course, but I really feel like it is that rare documentary that, in this day and age, presents a very balanced view of a topic that could easily devolve into either a liberal or conservative sermon.

It's also the first movie project I've worked on in which I have an official credit, as an additional editor, so it holds a special place in my heart.

Rebuilt, if not healed

Sorry for the light posting activity here. Last Wednesday, I underwent surgery to reconstruct my left Achilles tendon, and the past week was lost to all that came before and after that procedure.

My roommate dropped me off at the surgery center in the morning. A nurse at the counter upstairs handed me a clipboard and sent me down the hallway to fill it out, only I was on crutches, and the chief disadvantage of crutches, besides the chafing on your inner arm and chest just under the armpit, is that you can't carry anything. I tried grasping it with two fingers and dropped it twice while heading down the hall.

Once shown to the bed, a series of nurses and doctors came by. Eddie works at UCLA Medical Center, so he stopped by, and knowing someone in the hospital helps, if not in actual treatment effectiveness, then at least in personal attention and expectations you form about how attentive your doctors will be. For the most part, all the nurses and doctors I encountered at UCLA in the ER and in the surgery center were unusually friendly. Maybe it's the weather here.

The anesthesia for my surgery was a popliteal fassa block (I had to look that up, and I don't recommend clicking through if you're squeamish about images of Achilles tendon repair; I really wish I hadn't clicked through myself). It's local and numbs the lower part of your leg. They also did some sort of anesthesia for my upper leg as they put my thigh in some sort of balloon tourniquet for the operation.

My last pre-surgery memory was the anesthesiologists working on the nerve block. By then some happy juice had been injected into my IV, and I was off to see the Wizard, the wonderful wizzzzzz...

Waking from sedation is the best part of surgery. It's like waking from the deepest sleep of your life, like floating up from the depths of the ocean through layer after layer of tranquil oblivion. The first thing I noticed, because it was impossible not to, was the gigantic cast on my left leg, extending from my knee on down. My foot was locked in a downward angle, like a ballet dancer would be if up on her toes. The cast is not only thick but solid; the outer layer feels bulletproof. If I was flexible enough and could balance on my right leg like that last kung-fu fighter in Drunken Master 2, the one that fights Jackie Chan using only his legs, I could be a deadly fighter, bludgeoning my opponents to my cast. In a Tsui Hark wusha picture I'd have a nickname like "Iron Shin".

As long as the nerve block was doing its magic, all was good. My left leg was completely numb. At around 8pm I popped two Vicodin just in case, as I started to regain feeling in my leg. The pills made me woozy, and I lay down in anticipation of a good night's sleep.

At around midnight, I shook of my grogginess to get up to two more Vicodin. It was at this point that my troubles began.

I felt a throbbing pain where the surgery had occurred. I couldn't see where the incision had been made, but it felt like the pain was emanating from that spot. I downed the two Vicodin and waited for them to work their magic.

But the pain only increased. So I popped one more a few hours later. And then another. I lay in bed, sweating, clutching my leg, biting on my pillow, moaning, rolling around, trying to escape my body. At one point, my eyes watering from the agony, I grabbed my iPhone and started surfing the web, Googling "achilles rupture surgery pain" and found dozens of blogs devoted to the experiences of Achilles rupture victims. What I read was not encouraging, stories of some patients suffering agonizing pain for days following surgery. At 4am I called Sharon on the East coast, knowing my nephews would have her up and about at that hour. She suggested I call the doctor's office to change up my painkiller, see if it helped. His office didn't open for four hours, but her advice jogged my memory.

I had a bottle of Percocet left over from ACL reconstruction from some ten years ago. i wasn't sure if it was even good anymore, but at this point I didn't care. I hopped to my medicine cabinet and rummaged through it until I found that bottle. I downed two and lay down again.

A few times, I would be at the brink of dozing off, but no matter how exhausted I felt, the pain would grab me by the leg and yank me back to consciousness. I imagined this must be what it felt like to be one of those interrogation victims who were not allowed to fall asleep.

As soon as the doctor's office opened at 8am I was on the phone. There was no magic solution, just the suggestion of switching to Percocet. My roommate went off to pick up my prescription (Percocet being an opiate, doctor's can't call in a prescription). She returned after lunch with the pills, and I gulped down two of them. It did little for the pain but added nausea to my symptoms.

At around 5pm, I stood up to crutch to the bathroom, and on the way back to bed I was staggered by a bout of lightheadedness, and I broke out in a cold sweat.

At first I thought I was feverish, but then I realized my blood sugar was too low as I hadn't eaten in a day and a half. I shouted for my roommate to bring me an apple which I devoured. In the evening, Christina and Eddie and Rob stopped by and prepared a lasagna dinner. I ate a few bites and then felt ill and had to lay down again.

The next night, the pain was still acute, but the drowsiness from the Percocet bought me an hour or two of sleep. By this point, I could start to feel my mind learning to compartmentalize the pain in a way, and I had a particularly heightened feel for how to position my leg for the minimum amount of pain.

My leg, ever since the surgery, seems to have built in accelerometers attached to pain release mechanisms. As long as it's elevated, there's little pain. Swing my leg upright, and as the blood flows down past my knee it brings the pain, a quick and sharp muscular pain.

Friday night, Christina stopped by, having purchased a little stool for my bathtub. On the back of the product packaging were photos of related products, like bathtub handgrips and handlebars to mount on your toilet. Very sexy stuff. But that stool. the Drycast Eleanor recommended, and the handheld shower head my dad installed for me have improved my post-injury quality of life more than anything. Prior to that, I tried taping a garbage bag to my leg and standing on one leg in the shower. Not only did that fail to keep my cast dry but it left me exhausted from exertion. As soon as I made it out of the shower I'd be sweating again from trying to maintain what must surely be an advanced yoga position. The Drycast resembles a sort of giant condom for your leg, and it's not sexy, but it's effective.

Friday night I slept for five hours continuously, the only mishap being that I slept past my pain medication alarm at 2am. I didn't sleep past the excruciating pain at 5am that woke me, and I didn't miss another pain medication deadline the rest of the weekend.

My bathroom has one of those apartment showers with the sliding doors. Because I can't put weight on my crutch leg, getting into the shower involves hanging from the top of the sliding door frame and swinging in like Tarzan and nailing the one-legged landing. Remember Keri Strug with her heroic vault, hopping around on one leg and raising her arms in a big V to salute the judges? That's me every day when I nail my landing in the bathtub.

And so that's where I am now. Pain under control as long as the leg's propped up. I can drive (my dad swapped cars with me as I can't hit the clutch anymore), but only for short distances as I don't think police would look kindly on me if I drove with my cast hanging out the driver's window. I still haven't found a great solution to carrying things while on my crutches, though I'm definitely eyeing these knee walkers. If only they didn't cost so much and look like, well, accessories for the elderly. Yep, I'm hobbling around with a serious injury, but I'm still cheap and vain.

I'm dependent on my roommate and friends to help buy groceries and to take me places where I might not be able to park close to where I'm going. Not that I'd recommend blowing out your ACL, but compared to the recovery period from an Achilles rupture, I'd much prefer an ACL injury.

It's not ideal, and this whole situation still forces me to count to ten at least a few times a day, but as consolation I'm considering cultivating the personality of an arrogant, brilliant, and blunt curmedgeon who pops painkillers like Skittles and has abnormally formidable deductive powers. Once I'm out of this hard cast I may even start walking with a cane.

How it all went down

Everyone who hears about my basketball injury asks how it happened. There were no video cameras there, but imagine me as Chris Paul and this is an eerie video replay of the shot I hit just before my Achilles exploded.

T-minus one day until I go under the knife. I am ready to get it over with and start on the long rehab process. The thought of not being able to run or jump or exercise until sometime in February or March of 2009 is driving me crazy. No NY Marathon in November, no golf trip with the boys this summer, no snowboarding next winter, no running along the beach in Santa Monica, no hitting tennis balls with coworkers.

I need something, and I'm not sure what it is yet, to dissipate my agitation, or I'm going to lose my mind.

My first patent

Cool, I actually got awarded a patent. That patent is the basis of what is now Amazon's Flexible Payment Service. It's humbling to be on the same inventor list as some of those names.

Achilles heel

I spend over 6 hours in UCLA's ER today, waiting to see someone who could put my leg in a splint and to get a pair of crutches. Too much TV may leave you thinking ER's are thrilling places, with severely injured patients being rushed in on stretchers, oxygen mask pressed to their faces, clothing drenched in blood. Or, when they aren't embroiled in life-and-death situations, TV depicts them as a collection of odd and colorful patients mingling with attractive and earnest interns who are hooking up in closets when they aren't learning lessons about life from their cases.

The truth, as anyone who's had to go the the ER knows, is far far less glamorous. After checking in, I waited about a half hour before they sent me into a see a nurse who took my blood pressure and asked me why I was there. I explained that I was pretty sure I'd ruptured my Achilles tendon.

She tapped away at her keyboard, then paused, wrinkling her brow.

"How do you spell Achilles?" she asked.

Another nurse took my paperwork and then dropped it into a file bin attached to the wall. The bin was labeled Tier 4/5 and was packed with what appeared to be the paperwork for 15 or 16 other patients, mine slotting at the end.

"Intimidated?" asked the nurse, with a laugh.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"By all the papers ahead of you," he said. "Don't worry, you're fast track."

I never thought to ask what that meant, though I hoped it was something like the Fast Pass service at Disneyland, where you get a ticket that tells you what time to come back for a ride in the park, helping you to avoid waiting in line for hours. But no, my fast track status didn't seem to confer any special advantages.

I spent about three hours siting in a wheelchair in a waiting room that smelled of, well, the dozen or so other patients snoring away (a few appeared not to have showered anytime recent, so the scent I'm referring to wasn't exactly like "lavender breeze" or some Williams-Sonoma liquid soap scent). I couldn't get a single bar of cell phone reception the whole time I was in ER, so I spent a lot of time reading the magazines I'd brought with me.

To their credit, quite a few of the people who did help me out in the ER were friendly, even cheerful. They moved me from one spot in the hallway to the next, parking me (in the wheelchair) at random spots. I felt like Keri Strug being passed around in that ESPN commercial.

When a doctor finally saw me, he quickly confirmed my suspicions, using the same test I'd done on myself the previous night (I believe it's called The Thompson test). They put my leg in a splint, handed me some crutches, and finally, I staggered out of that ER, starving and stir-crazy, and struggling to shut out the nagging thought that the one thing I'd need over the next year was a quality that seems to have slipped away from me bit by bit over the years, and that is patience.

The one positive thought I held onto tonight, as they confirmed my diagnosis, was that at least I wasn't a horse, like Eight Belles. I don't know if horses have Achilles tendons, but I suspect if I was a horse, I'd have been put out to that great pasture in the sky.

Snap

Even never having injured my achilles tendon before, I'd heard of enough instances of the most dreaded of injuries to the Achilles that it's the first thought that ran through my head after I landed in a heap and felt the searing pain. It felt as if one of the other pickup hoops players had kicked me really hard directly in my left achilles tendon (I'd later read online that this is one of the symptoms of that injury that I thought if I never pronounced might not be true).

But the web has made amateur doctors of us all, and as soon as I hopped back to my sofa at home, I did a Google search for "ruptured Achilles tendon symptoms" and went to one of the lists of symptoms.

Check.

Check.

Check.

Check.

Check.

Of course, I'm no doctor, I just did a quick stay at the Internet Holiday Inn, but I'm 97% sure that my left Achilles completely ruptured when I landed on somebody's foot tonight. You can actually see and feel the spot where the tendon is no longer connected.

And so for the second time in my life, I'm facing major surgery on my left leg and months of rehab to get back to doing things I enjoy, like basketball, cycling, running, tennis, and other such sports. Right now, I'd even settle for jumping, or even just plain walking.

In general, I think I'm pretty level-headed. But I've got to be honest, I'm feeling more than a little dejected right now.

She & Him

I caught She & Him at the Vista Theatre on Monday night. She & Him are actress Zooey Deschanel and indie music star M. Ward, touring in support of their first album together, Volume One.

Their music is simple and has a nostalgic charm. Zooey is not going to compare to Matt on musical talent--if real-life guitar skills transferred to the videogame world he'd be dominating people on Guitar Hero--but she has a strong, clear voice and that same sweetness that she's showcased on screen. They both have a relaxed, confident stage presence that draws the crowd over to their side.

On the "do they sound better on CD/MP3 or do they sound better live" question, based on this concert it's the latter. M. Ward die-hards may feel a bit short-changed that he doesn't sing as much in this collaboration, but I'm not familiar enough with the oeuvre of M. Ward to know what I missed. Live, their sound is bigger and richer than on CD.

Why I wasn't wearing green

Because I forgot. My life contains no visible markers of upcoming holidays other than the commercial ones from retail stores. The only reason I know Easter is approaching is because the grocery store carries a lot of egg dye kits and those yellow gooey rabbits made of some unknown substance.

If I had remembered it was St. Patrick's Day, and if I were a woman, I would have tried to find an opportunity to send this e-card from someecards.

Happy birthday Sadie!

I was shooting a classmate's film recently, and there's a line in her script about how the first ten years of your life go by slowly, but every decade after seems to accelerate. There's something to that.

I remember Sadie turning 1 and trying ice cream for the first time, and now she's 5 and ready to enter kindergarten. Meanwhile, the last 4 years of my life are smeared across my memory like some broad, impressionistic paint stroke.

I think we get along because she reminds me of me as a kid, somewhat shy.

Technorati Tags: photo, birthday, sadie

Hulu launches

Around 1:45AM this morning, Hulu shed the covers of private beta and opened to the public. Anyone in the U.S. can now come to our site and watch any of our videos for free. No special software needed other than a web browser, Flash player, and an internet connection. PC, Mac, Linux users, we support all of you.

We've all substituted caffeinated beverages for sleep for days now, and this morning I came into work with my t-shirt on backwards. Coherence is going to be a bit of a reach.

We have increased our content lineup significantly. Among my favorites:

• Every episode ever of Arrested Development, all 52 of them.
• The Big Lebowski. Dude.
• The Lonely Goatherd from The Sound of Music, and the other musical numbers you'd expect from there: Sixteen Going on Seventeen, Maria, Do Re Mi, Edelweiss, My Favorite Things, So Long, Farewell, and The Hills Are Alive. Pauline Kael may not be a fan, but it's the music of my childhood.
• Kagemusha . Yeah, the Akira Kurosawa classic!
• The top 10 moves of February from the NBA. Warning: more than a few ankles are broken in this one. And here's that crazy Chris Paul dribble move from the All-Star Game, in which he fakes a crossover and snaps the ball back to himself with backspin, goes by the defender, and dishes to the trailer for the dunk. Chris Paul is crazy good.
• "Down by the River" from SNL, featuring Chris Farley. I miss that guy, and I miss his show.
• "Ultimate Power in the Universe" from Family Guy: Blue Harvest. Watching for free is a great way to try out shows you've heard of but missed out on the first time around, and Family Guy has been that show for me, the one that Hulu got me hooked on.

People love to associate Hulu with big media because of some of our investors, but Hulu is a startup through and through (look at the team photo below, taken at around 1:50 this morning--I don't think we look big media, do you?). It's the smallest company I've ever worked at if you don't count the lemonade stand I ran one summer day when I was about 8. Smaller than Amazon.com was when I worked there. We have our initial investments from which to run our company, but we're not going to be spending it on big parties with models walking around holding trays of saffron baby lamb chops. No, our pre-launch evening meal for everyone pulling an all-nighter was some 100 tacos from a local taco truck here in Santa Monica, at the extravagant cost of $1.25 per taco. Our biggest spend that night, out of our own pockets, was to raise $160 among the team to dare one of our star programmers Andrew to drink two cups of salsa, one red hot, one green, in 30 seconds. Andrew woke this morning $160 richer, though I'd venture to guess he paid the price sometime during the day.

A small group of people, a little family, work night and day (sometimes more night than day) to put this site together from scratch. Some of the user e-mails I've read make the easy assumption that we're an ignorant, uncaring media behemoth, but we do care, perhaps too much for our own peace of mind. Between Eric, Betina, and myself, we've read well over 10,000 e-mails since we went into our private beta, and rather than go the form e-mail response route, we've tried to respond personally to every e-mail we can. We're gratified by the compliments, and we agonize over the angry e-mails, even the inaccurate and/or profane ones.

We do want to be able to distribute our content internationally. We do want to offer more episodes of every show on our site. We do want more varied ad creative so that we don't have to watch the same ad spots over and over. We do want closed-captioning on every video on our site. And we do want to do it legally, in a way that compensates the creative people all the way back at the start of the food chain. Not a day goes by that we don't wish we could just accelerate the future with a snap of our fingers and have everyone in the world streaming HD content to their plasma TV's.

It's easy to bash big media and claim to be forced to resort to piracy, and it is absolutely the right of users to write in with their honest feedback. It's the most useful kind. But it's far harder to try to fix the problems. It's easy to open up your blog editor and rip the movie you just saw. It's exponentially harder to go out and make a movie. It's easy to laugh at some startup you read about in the news because the business plan sounds terrible. It's much harder to start a company yourself.

We're working here to try to fix the industry from within. We want to be able to watch all our favorite videos however we want, just like you. We're building this service to be one we want to use. We're not anywhere near the finish line. It always feels like the to-do list outweighs the completed side of the ledger. But if it didn't, then it wouldn't be that interesting a challenge, and most of us probably wouldn't be here.

Check out our site, and if you don't mind, help spread the word. The more users we can rally to our cause, the quicker we can transform things for the better.

Cheers!

Conan O'Brien playing Rock Band

Since I got my repaired guitar for Rock Band (looks like there was a design flaw that they've since corrected in other shipments, thankfully), it's the only game I spend any time playing. When I hear a song that's in Rock Band come on the radio, my ears try to pick out the guitar or drum line, and I visualize the notes in the guitar line scrolling down towards me as in the videogame. It really does engage you with music in a very deep way. It's the same bond I feel with classical pieces I played when I was in the violin section of various youth orchestras.

I'm not the only one who feels that way. In just two months since Rock Band launched, players have purchased more than 2.5 million new songs to add to their game libraries! I'm responsible for at least a good 10 to 12 of those song purchases. $1.99 for a song I can play forever in the game seems entirely reasonable to me. I would love to see them allow third parties to offer songs for the game, though, as the trickle of 3 new songs a week already feels paltry (though they added some Oasis songs this week--can't wait to try my hand at those!).

This past weekend, the morning after one particular late-night Rock Band session, I found a notice hanging on my front door for a Community Violation. The box for "loud music" was checked off. At first I was perturbed, but then a certain sense of pride took hold as I realized I was still young enough to keep the neighbors up.

My one and primary complaint is that stand-alone guitars are still not available for the game, so you can't play with a full four piece band. Unless you invite over a Rock Band-playing friend who plays it on the same console as you do and is willing to bring over their guitar, you're limited to playing either guitar or bass but not both. That guitars from one game, like Guitar Hero, don't work with other games, like Rock Band, is extremely disappointing as they all use the same basic control scheme.

My only guess on this is that they rushed the game out for the holidays and couldn't ramp up production in time to have stand-alone guitars available. Forecasting in the gaming industry seems dodgy, at best. You'd think after so many years that the Nintendo Wii would be readily available, but no.

2000

I rated my two thousandth movie on Netflix today. I've probably seen more that I haven't rated, but that's a pretty good approximation of how many movies I've seen in my life. That works out to about 1.1 movies a week, or 58.8 movies a year for my lifetime. Given that I didn't start watching movies until I was probably in my early teens, it's probably more like one and a half movies a week.

Not as many as a movie critic, but still a lot of hours of my life.

Technorati Tags: movies

It's your birthday

Yesterday was, alas, one more tick of the odometer on my life gauge. Yesterday some friends of mine decided to accelerate my progress towards the grave by taking me to Cut, the acclaimed Wolfgang Puck steakhouse in the Beverly Wilshire hotel, a 2007 nominee for "Best New Restaurant" by the James Beard Foundation and the winner of Esquire's 2006 Restaurant of the Year award.

It's one serious luxury steakhouse with one heavy-hitting menu. Walking in we strolled past a Bentley and an Aston Martin and several dozen middle aged people whose dress and mannerisms screamed of old money. If I knew what many executives in town looked like I probably would have spotted several seated in the dining room

The first three starters listed:

• Kobe Steak Sashimi, Spice Radishes
• Prime Sirloin "Steak Tartare", Herb Aioli, Mustard
• Bone Marrow Flan, Mushroom Marmalade, Parsley Salad

It went on to include starters such as...

• Austrian Oxtail Bouillon, Chive Blossoms, Chervil, Bone Marrow Dumplings
• Prime Filet Mignon "Carpaccio", Celery Hearts, Shaved French Black Truffles
• Maple Glazed Pork Belly, Asian Spices, Sesame-Orange Dressing, Winterella Pear Compote

Even the breadsticks and bread, laced with parmesan, tasted decadent. Cut serves four levels of beef (listed here from expensive to obscenely expensive):

• U.S.D.A. PRIME, Illinois Corn Fed, Aged 21 Days
• U.S.D.A. PRIME, Nebraska Corn Fed, Dry Aged 35 Days
• American Wagyu/Angus "Kobe Style" Beef from Snake River Farms, Idaho
• True Japanese 100% Wagyu Beef from Kagoshima Prefecture, Kyushu, Japan

Before our meal, the waiter brought out five huge slabs of beef wrapped in cloth, three slabs of American Wagyu and 2 of true Japanese Wagyu. The marbling in the meat was apparent to the eye, just beautiful and mouth-watering.

I went with the American Wagyu 10oz Rib Eye, while others ordered Bone-In Filet Mignon, New York Sirloin, Colorado Lamb Chops with Cucumber Mint Raita, and Kobe Beef Short Ribs "Indian Spiced" and cooked for eight hours.

For a starter I had the bone marrow flan. I still prefer the cleaner and simpler mix of flavors of the Beef Marrow with Oxtail Marmalade at Blue Ribbon Restaurant in New York, but the bone marrow flan is damn impressive. Transformed into flan, the bone marrow lost a bit of that marrow flavor I love so much, but in combination with the mushroom marmalade it made for one fancy bread spread.

Seven waiters delivered our entrees, setting them down in front of us with the choreographed timing of a theme park fountain show. I cut a piece of my rib eye, cooked rare plus, and dipped it into the shallot-red wine bordelaise sauce. Then I put it in my mouth, and about 1.7 seconds later, as I finished my first bite, I went to a happy place. The marbling produced a rib eye with the consistency of foie gras. It was spectacular.

Dessert of banana cream pie and chocolate souffle brought traffic in my remaining arteries to a standstill. As far as steak dinners go, this was one of the more memorable ones of my life. I may not eat another piece of beef for the remainder of the year, but if so, the memory of the various cuts I tasted last night will tide me over.

Technorati Tags: dining, food, LA, restaurants, steak

Holidays 2007 in Scottsdale

Free wi-fi at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. Boo-yah. (I wrote that back on Dec. 30, when I started writing this post, and now, weeks later, I'm still trying to finish)

With the addition of so many little kiddies to the family, we tried something different for the holidays this year and rented a vacation home for a week in Scottsdale. The four bedroom house had a pool, a hot tub, a grill, a pool table, a home theater room, and lots of flat screen TVs. My favorite was the home theater room. It had six plush, reclining, leather theater seats with cupholders, arranged in two rows of three, the back row raised off the ground slightly in a stadium seating configuration. A small and somewhat middle-of-the-road projector hung from the ceiling, shining its picture on a screen flanked by theatrical curtains. The kicker was an old school theater-style popcorn machine.

James and Angela had said before the trip they planned to rent a Toyota Solara convertible. So as I stood curbside waiting for them to pick me up from the airport, I thought it odd that a flaming red Mustang pulled up next to me, the passenger waving at me. A second glance revealed that it was Angela sporting her giant movie star sunglasses.

"We decided it was too cold for a convertible," she explained. So we drove back from the airport in a cousin to the future KITT (Knight Industries Three Thousand). The engine makes a suitable American sports car growl, a low, menacing rumble.

That car is no friend to the environment. "I can see the fuel gauge needle moving!" Angela said as she drove.

We all have our natural roles at the holidays. Mine are chiefly around entertainment: I'm responsible for bringing lots of movies on DVD, bringing by Nintendo Wii, and taking photos or video. The parents did most of the cooking. James and Angela bought most of the groceries. Joannie was our liaison to the vacation home owners. Karen looked up info for our social outings into Scottsdale, like the location of hikes and downtown attractions. My dad was responsible for playing with the grandkids in a semi-educational manner.

I brought two movies from the past year for people to watch: The Bourne Ultimatum and Once. James bought Pan's Labyrinth. When the kids weren't watching the Pixar Short Films Collection in the home theater room, those three movies occupied most of that room's screening time.

Usually we'd put on a movie after the kids had gone to bed and the dinner table had been cleared, dishes washed. That meant starting at 10pm some nights, so it took some people a few days to find the time to watch a movie start to finish without having to run off to collapse in bed.

Every one enjoyed all the movies, especially Once.

Our family has just the right mix of personalities to escalate things, so the day someone mentioned the durian, the so-called "king of fruits," and discovered that most people at the table had not eaten it before (come to think of it, that someone was probably me), it was inevitable that we'd end up buying one from Ranch 99 and forcing every one in the family to take a bit on video camera. See, the thorny-skinned durian is famous for its polarizing taste and odor. Those who enjoy it worship it and, I suppose, are the ones who dubbed it the "king of fruits." Those who find it revolting describe the odor as similar to that of rotting sewage or trash. I count myself among the latter.

The durian we bought was not as malodorous as the ones I'd encountered before in China. I remember the scent of raw durian to be so revolting that I couldn't bring myself to eat it raw. I was only able to consume it after it had been incorporated into a pancake, which was actually decent. But under the glare of my father's video camera, there was no escaping it this time. My dad chopped it open and scooped out the yellowish flesh onto a styrofoam plate.

James, the most curious one of us all, stepped up first. Or perhaps it was Sharon. Either way, both found it neither tasty nor awful. I was next and spooned a generous heap into my mouth.

Big mistake.

The taste of it reminded me of its smell and nearly made me gag. It took me about a minute of stomach-turning chewing and mental fortitude to swallow it without coughing up my dinner. I seem to recall breaking out into a sweat as I tried not to heave in front of my family, a sign of weakness that would be recounted at family reunions until my funeral. Karen, Joannie, Mike, and Angela had similar reactions.

My dad was convinced our revulsion was merely in our head, that we had prejudged and condemned the fruit without giving it a fair trial. To prove his point, he took two large bites and chewed away with no reaction. I'm convinced, however, that my dad has lost all feeling and taste sensations over the years. I've seen him slice his finger open nearly to the bone and have minimal reaction, and I thought his nonchalant reaction to the taste of durian was related, somehow, to his indifference to pain. Still, he pitched out the rest of the durian, giving our trash that evening the smell of, well, trash.

Some random holiday notes:

• Most played song: No One by Alicia Keys. By the end of vacation, was I sick of the song? Probably. But for the one week before you reach saturation with a catchy tune, it's toe-tapping good times.
• Most listened to local radio station: Phoenix's Movement 97.5. Like the music they'd play at a dance club that you're just slightly embarrassed to admit you like (think Tone-Loc, Timbaland, Fergie). Driving around in the Stang, blaring 97.5, I realized that James, Angela, and I were a parody of suburban cheesiness.
• Some random food consumption stats: 4 boxes of Gobstoppers, two bottles of Scotch (one Macallan, one Glenlivet), two gallons of Tampico (my brother's private equity firm owns them, so drinking this was a show of solidarity), about twenty bottles of wine, somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty dozen eggs, maybe six cases of water. Last chance for some fun before the New Years resolutions kicked in.
• Most watched movie: Once. That scene in the music store? I've seen it about 28 times now. Best scene of the year.
• Most played video game: Wii tennis. I'm impressed by how hard and flat my four-year-old nephew Ryan can crack the ball in Wii Tennis. Wii sports is the great equalizer. Young children who have infinite patience can, through repetition and immediate feedback, can develop some wicked skills in sports like Wii tennis and bowling. I discovered this the hard way when I ran into a six year old girl who nearly dropped a 300 in bowling on me. I was not amused.
• Number of kisses planted on my nephew Connor's cheeks: 389.

Some personal highlights:

• Scoring 100 in pop-a-shot at the Sugar Bowl ice cream parlor in Old Town Scottsdale. I'm pretty good at pop-a-shot, but for one transcendent moment, I entered the zone. The rules are simple: 45 seconds to shoot as many baskets as possible. Each basket counts for two points, except in the final 10 seconds, when they count for three each. You shoot with a cantaloupe-sized basketball at a smaller than normal basket. I think I missed two shots the entire round, breaking 100 on my last shot. I felt like Michael Jordan in that first half against Portland, or Reggie Miller at the end of the game against the Knicks. "That will be your opus," said James. If so, then that will have been one sad life.
• Scoring a birdie on hole 10 at Troon North. On a good round, I usually shoot one birdie out of sheer luck. But not having played golf in a while, I wanted to snap my clubs over my leg while hitting on the driving range before the round. I thought I had a better chance of actually killing a bird than scoring a birdie during the round (hundred of wild guinea roamed around the golf course, apparently oblivious to the dangers posed by amateur golfers like myself). But by the last several holes, I started to slow down, and my swing started to come around. On the last hole Alan and I played, I hit a drive about 270, a pitching wedge to within 5 feet, and toilet-bowled a putt for my birdie.
• The craziest moment of the holiday, by far, occurred on the third hole of Monument Golf Course at Troon. This par 5 hole is known as the Monument hole for the massive rock sitting right in the middle of the fairway about 260 yards out. Just past that hole, as I walked towards my ball to play my third shot, I spotted what appeared to be a small tiger sitting on the hill. The golf instructor who was riding with us was strolling up the fairway. James and I asked him what it was, and he said it was a bobcat. I stood my ground, expecting it would wander off, but our presence didn't faze it in the least. Soon it wandered into the fairway, past my ball. I took a couple steps back, but it didn't even look my way once, even when our instructor tried to shoo it away. The bobcat was gazing across the fairway. I followed its line of sight and realized it was looking at a rabbit sitting just off the fairway. It crept slowly across the fairway. I couldn't believe the rabbit didn't spot the bobcat which was now within 25 or 30 feet. Though the bobcat was now crawling on its belly, it wasn't hard to spot against the green fairway, and its tail wagged expectantly. And then, just as I thought it might be sitting there for a half hour, the bobcat shot towards the rabbit which dashed off through the bushes across the cart path. The bobcat didn't go after the rabbit but hurled itself into a bush. A narrow escape for the rabbit, I thought. But I was wrong, on both counts. First I spotted the bobcat coming out on the other side of the bush, another rabbit in its mouth. Then I heard our instructor Ryan hitting the brakes on his golf cart. The first rabbit I'd spotted had run across the path just as Ryan was cruising by in the golf cart, and Ryan had hit it. I walked over and saw the rabbit's cotton ball of a tail sitting on the cart path, and we found the rabbit nearby, limping around, one of its back legs broken. Rabbits are pretty damn cute, and we all felt awful, but I wasn't about to pick up a rabid rabbit and try to fashion a splint for it or anything like that. I thought it would be dramatic if I took an 8-iron to it, put it out of its misery, tears in my eyes, screaming "Damn it all to hell!" as I brought the club down again and again, but I didn't. Life, death, the circle of life, and a three putt bogey, all in the course of one hole. Only in Arizona.
• Seeing Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West. I've seen Taliesin in Wisconsin and Robie House in Chicago, and both were inspiring. Now I just need to get out to Fallingwater. Many Heloise Crista sculptures adorn Taliesin West, and they're great.

Most mornings, I'd be woken around 6 or 7am by the sound of my nephews running around. This would be after I'd stayed up until 3am by myself, maybe watching 30 Rock - Season 1 on DVD in the home theater room, or reading The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, or something else. So I'd spend the day sleepy. But not tired. The thing about vacation that keeps me running on so little sleep is the thought that I could get sleep at any time. When you're working, you're never sure how much sleep you'll get from one night to the next, and that worry is more mentally exhausting than anything else.

Most awkward moment of the holidays. Just as we were about to wrap a book I'd bought for my nephew Ryan, he burst into the room and surprised us. He grabbed the book, looked at the cover, and said, "Don't get me this book. I already have it." Then he ran out.

I went running with James and Angela and even Alan a few times. There's a budding movement to try and get as many of us together to run the NY marathon this year as possible. Will it happen? I'm not sure. It's a new year, though, the time to resolve such things.

Technorati Tags: christmas, connor, family

Connor

Connor makes you earn his smiles, so we document each of them with great care.

Technorati Tags: connor, photo

Ivy

Ivy auditioning for a future role as the ingenue. She has grown up so quickly from a tiny baby into the cutest, sweetest little girl. Poor Jason is going to have his hands full when his angels reach their teenage years.

Technorati Tags: photo, ivy

Connor

I visited Connor in DC the weekend after Thanksgiving. He is a mellow kid whose smiles are fleeting, but thanks to high speed continuous frame rate shooting modes on my digital SLR, I was able to capture a few or his elusive expressions of happiness.

By the way, you do not want to get into a staring contest with Connor, he will wait you out until your eyes are watering something fierce. He has an amazing poker face, and I expect we'll be sending him to Uncle James at an early age to begin his training.

Technorati Tags: connor, photo

Last weekend

If you ever want to experience what it would be like if there was a run on goods because of impending disaster, come to LA and go shopping at Costco or IKEA on weekend. I was with my roommates at IKEA this past weekend and a woman riding in one of those motorized chairs drove into the back of my right foot in an effort to get into a cashier's line. I hobbled around for a day with what felt like a contusion on my Achilles tendon.

***

Why can't DirecTV put another set of satellites in the North? I moved to an apartment on the north side of the building, and now I'm relegated to standard def because our complex signed a deal with Clear Bay Communications, and they're too cheap to rewire the building for high definition for DirecTV. My only choice is standard def DirecTV. In my previous apartment I could just get a view of the southwest sky from the balcony, on which I mounted a high-def DirecTV satellite. Now I can't see the southwest sky, but I can sure see the clouds...no, wait, those aren't clouds, those are the huge pixels of my crappy television image through standard def.

DirecTV has a great product if you can get it, but the "if you can get it" part of that is more of a catch than it should be.

***

I was unpacking more boxes this weekend, and I found my passport and an iPod nano that I thought I lost two years ago. I should unpack more often.

***

James Surowiecki on the writer's strike. Both sides believe strongly in their positions. The studios aren't making much off the web yet (nowhere near what they make in syndication or DVD sales), so they don't want to strike any long-term deals now. The writers did not get their fair share on DVDs from their last agreement, and they don't want to get burned again if the internet takes off as quickly as DVDs did.

Given all this, the two sides should strike a short-term rev share % agreement and go back to the negotiating table after it expires. The money online really isn't significant yet relative to DVD and syndication, and a more just % deal will buy some time for the online market to mature.

But the smarter long-term view for writers and directors and producers and actors, in my opinion, is to look to the Internet as a way to bypass the network and studio system altogether and get more fair value for their work. It won't happen right away, as the theatrical and DVD markets are still quite lucrative marketing and distribution systems while the Internet is still in its infancy in this space. But it may happen sooner than people realize.

There's an entire new generation coming up that's used to watching programming on a computer, or getting content from the computer to their TV. Broadband penetration and web speeds will continue to increase to the point where getting high-def content through the Internet will be just as fast as getting it from a satellite or cable. At that point, for many creative types the equation will shift so that it's more efficient for them to go direct to consumer rather than through the studio system. It won't be worthwhile for them to cede so much of the profit to a middleman who probably can't market their product efficiently anyhow.

Blockbuster mass-market movies may still benefit from launching on thousands of screens opening weekend, but most other programming will benefit more from efficient Internet-driven targeting. Maybe no such mechanism exists today online, but it's not difficult to imagine a company like Amazon is for books arising on the web to help people find the film and television programming they'll love.

The last foothold for studios in this distant future may be the theatrical distribution space. It's not easy to replicate a network of thousands of movie theaters nationwide. That's just not a lucrative business. But even as much as I love the look of film, the advent of digital technology will lower the cost of distribution to the point where building a network of theaters that only downloads massive digital files of movies will be feasible, avoiding the massive cost of generating all those prints. Cameras like the Red One will enable indie filmmakers to shoot films that can be projected on a massive theater screen and look fantastic at a much lower cost than shooting 35mm film. These files can be edited on a desktop workstation, and the digital output can be distributed to theaters with digital projectors.

The other things artists have traditionally depended on studios for is financing. But even there, times have changed. I took a class at UCLA last year called Indie Film Financing, and every week a different type of financier came in to talk about some film project they'd funded. It's not just studios anymore. We heard from old-fashioned banks, private equity, ultra-wealthy individuals, and on and on.

We will get back to a world where the scarcity is not in theater screens or financing but something much harder to solve, and that's true creative talent.

***

Speaking of the future of content distribution, the stats from the Radiohead experiment in direct distribution of their album "In Rainbows" are fascinating. The average price paid among people who paid for the download was $6.00. Given that over 60% of customers chose not to pay at all for the download, the average price paid worldwide was $2.26 per album.

Sounds low? It's still more than Radiohead would have made per album if they'd gone through a studio. I think they could have easily gotten sales if they'd chosen to sell their album at, say $4.00 a pop, instead of letting consumers name their own price. But this turned out to be a much more interesting, and I think, successful experiment.

***

Last Saturday I went downtown and caught the Takashi Murakami exhibit downtown at the Geffen Contemporary at the MOCA. I love his massive prints and his appropriation of pop and high culture. His works seem to distill so many elements of Japanese culture.

I had hoped to buy a print there, but the museum only carried limited editions of 300 of a few of his prints, and they had all sold out already. I had to settle for a t-shirt.

Murakami collaborated with Marc Jacobs, artistic director for Louis Vuitton, on a series of handbags. On display at the museum was a luggage chest with about a dozen or so compartments inside, each holding a Louis Vuitton handbag. Out of curiosity, one of my friends asked how much the chest was. It turns out you can take that chest and all the handbags inside it home for the meager sum of $500,000.

Not for sale were these two NSFW scultpures.

Also playing at the exhibit was Murakami's music video for Kanye West's song "Good Morning" off of Graduation. I guess it hasn't released to the world yet as the only copy I can find online is at YouTube, some bootleg from the Murakami exhibit. Not the best way to enjoy it.

Commercial interruption

[I started this post a few weeks ago, got buried with work, and never finished it. I still don't have time to finish it today, but if everything had to be perfect before it went out then the world would move too slowly, or this blog might sit untouched for weeks, like it has. So...]

A few years ago, I took a couple months off from work to travel, heading first to New Zealand. During that, trip, I went on a sperm whale watching expedition. I started the trip filled with anticipation. I hadn't seen any sperm whales in the wild before, but the images in my mind were romantic and fabulous: giant white sperm whales locked in battle with giant squid, or the white leviathan from the movie version of Moby Dick, last seen swimming off with Captain Ahab (a bearded Gregory Peck) tied to its side.

By the time our boat arrived at the viewing location some two hours later, I too had an Ahab-like obsession with a white leviathan, but it was the seasickness bag whose head poked out of the seat pocket in front of me. We'd listened to one report after another of whale sighting here or there, each of which sent our boat scurrying in another direction, but thus far the only marine life we'd spotted had been on a poster stapled to the front of our boat.

Finally, we got the signal to climb out on deck. At long last, we were called to the deck and told to bring our cameras. We were pointed to one side of the railing where we elbowed and shoved to find a suitable position to point our telephoto lenses.

"There it is!" someone shouted. I looked through my lens and saw...a thin sliver of the sperm whale's back, maybe fifteen or twenty feet long, maybe a foot or so above the surface of the water. It looked like a gray log. It barely moved.

For fifteen minutes, that thin sliver of sperm whale bobbed up and down in the ocean. For all I know it could have been some piece of garbage they had tossed out in the ocean to head off what might have been mutiny by a hundred or so disgruntled and seasick customers. After fifteen minutes of inactivity, and with one kick of its tail (the only moment worth photographing), the sperm whale headed back to the depths of the ocean. If the crew had staged the whole thing, the least they could have done is strapped our boat's captain to the decoy and given us some Moby Dick-level entertainment.

This is me surfacing for air, though I hope I'm not as disappointing as that sperm whale. Sometime this summer, I dove back into the tech startup life with some friends. Summer ended, school was about to start up, and my work was not yet done. I was faced with one of those moments when surplus of choice seems a burden.

Opportunities don't always orient themselves around your personal schedule, and they also don't always persist. The startup gig seemed more time sensitive, but despite that, it was a tough choice. In the end, the folks at school were gracious about letting me take a leave of absence, and I wouldn't have felt right leaving so much undone.

So our merry band at work went into 7 day a week crunch mode, purchasing some air mattresses for the office so we could sneak naps when we weren't planted in front of our computers. It reminded me of that first year at Amazon, when we had sleeping bags under our desks for those overnight days.

I'd roll out of bed and head into work, and then I'd roll back home at 3 or 4 in the morning, and most days Eric would still be at work when I left. I ate every meal with my coworkers, spending all my waking hours with them. In the midst of this I had to move, one of the things I hate most in the world, so when I wasn't working I'd be home trying to pack up all my stuff.

There were the usual tight timelines and technical and business obstacles, and you never quite get everything you want into your v1, but getting a product out the door always provides a huge psychological boost. And today (or was it yesterday) we sent our private beta out into the world: Hulu.com.

We're in private beta right now, so you'll have to sign up for a beta invite, and we'll get one out to you as soon as we're ready.

But I can offer a sampling of what we have to offer here, or you can check out much of our content at our partner sites, like AOL.

One of the cool features is the ability to embed a video but point users to a portion of it. Since this post is a bit of a pitch for Hulu, let's start off with an ad of a different sort. Here's the Michael-Scott-directed version of the Dunder-Mifflin commercial from last week's episode of The Office:

Never saw Arrested Development, that show that was tragically killed off before its time? We have all 22 episodes of Season 1 for you to watch. Here, for those of you looking to see what you missed, is the entire first episode.

Sad that you won't be able to see more of those Dane Cook baseball promos (someone help me to understand Dane Cook)? Here's an SNL take that can tide you over until next October (yes, there's more than one October, there's actually one every year).

Planning a long lunch break tomorrow? Maybe you'd like to see a movie. One I really enjoyed from Universal's library is Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Here you go:

There's more, but to get it to you, we need to go back to work. Thanks to those of you who still visit for having endured my non-existent posting schedule, and if you're one of the select group who've received beta invites, let me know what you think.

The Perfect Storm

The poster tagline for The Perfect Storm read:

In the fall of 1991, the Andrea Gail left Gloucester, Mass. and headed for the fishing grounds of the North Atlantic.

Two weeks later, an event took place that had never occurred in recorded history.

You know how it ends, with the camera framing Mark Wahlberg bobbing up and down in massive, violent waves in the dark of night. The camera recedes, revealing the disparity in size between Wahlberg's head, all that remains above the surface of the water, and the sheer magnitude of the angry ocean around him. Inevitably, he disappears, swallowed by forces far greater than him.

Something analogous happened to me, just a crazy convergence of different life pressures, and right now I'm the Mark Wahlberg character, bobbing in the ocean. Anyone following my posting frequency here will know that I'm usually better about checking in here on a regular basis.

Cooking, exercise, reading, paying bills, laundry, keeping up with personal e-mail and friends and family...all have dropped off the list. You'll be glad to know I've drawn the line at personal hygiene and continue to shower on a daily basis, but I'm starting to think that might need only be a dotted line.

More on all the chaos once it's over. Laughably, amidst all this insanity I also have to move apartments this weekend and haven't packed more than a box so far.

If I had more energy, I'd try to keep up here, but even more than inspiration, writing requires sheer physical stamina and mental energy, both of which I have little of now.

But bear with me, I shall return, and sooner, I hope, than later.

Smile

My nephew Connor is learning to smile, a welcome feature to go along with his high decibel crying. Too cute. I wish I could be there for firsts like this, but until then, I must make do with the occasional photos from out East.

I wonder if I can make him smile through a video chat.

Technorati Tags: connor, photo

Stay tuned

What a hectic week. The only thing that hasn't been packed into this week is sleep, so I just need to make it to bed tonight so I can reset.

I made a fairly big life decision this week. I'm really worried about a friend. My little (well, at least to me) sister landed a job in NYC. I will, by the time tomorrow rolls around, have been to 3 concerts in 3 nights. My website got hit with a huge traffic spike on Tuesday because of a link from TMQ (Tuesday Morning Quarterback Gregg Easterbrook); he's not impressed by what he hears of Moto, but I want to respond because unlike Gregg I've actually been to and eaten at Moto. I met the first year film students from the incoming class and showed my first film school short, which I had to stay up all night editing with my telecine'd footage to match the cut I made on the flatbeds with my workprint. My parking appeal for fall quarter at school was denied, but it may not matter. I saw a bunch of my classmates again for the first time since the start of the summer.

So more tomorrow, once I'm rested and lucid.

Abracadabra...uh, open sesame...uh, hocus pocus

Last night, I got home from work around 1 in the morning and pulled up to the electronic gate to my parking garage and pressed my remote key fob button. Nothing happened. I waved it out the window, then got out of the car and walked up to the gate, pressing the key fob near any place I thought the sensor might reside. No luck.

One car pulled up behind me, then another, and soon a few others. We all stood outside our cars, pressing our key fobs. In our neighborhood, there wasn't any street parking, so we were stuck. It was 1 in the morning, I was dead tired, and I was not a happy camper (though if my key fob was out of order then I was on the verge of being literally an unhappy camper).

So I turned my attention to the exit gate, just next to the entrance. That was one of those gates that opened as soon as you pulled up to it. The sensor for that was a bit further inside the garage, but by sticking my tennis racket through the gate I could just reach far enough to trip it and open the gate. I managed to lean my tennis racket against the sensor and then directed traffic through the exit like John McClane waving the planes home at the end of Die Hard 2.

A different discontent plagued me in the nanosecond before I passed out. The security in our parking garage is not good, not good at all.

***

Kanye vs. 50 Cent, as judged by Amazon Sales Rank: Decision to Kanye. Critic's average judgment? The same. From guns to lyrics to now sales...hip-hop conflicts are progressing to more civilized playing fields.

***

Jon Stewart will host the Oscars in February. He seemed a bit nervous to start the last time (even the coolest customer can experience some jitters in the face of so much star power), but he loosened up by the end of the ceremony. I think the second time will be the charm.

***

My favorite Microsoft application was always Excel. I spent a good portion of my early career in that application building massive models, writing macros in VBA, pushing it to its limits. It didn't always keep up--I always had problems getting linked workbooks to update and calculate quickly, and sharing workbooks among my team never worked quite as we wanted to--but of the Office suite, it's always been king.

I hate Powerpoint, and Word's formatting quirks always drove me batty. So when Apple came out with Keynote, and then Pages, I was willing to switch over. I haven't yet, but only because I don't use Word or Powerpoint anymore. All my writing now is done in a plain text editor, e-mail client, script formatting software, or with an actual pen and notebook. As for Powerpoint, I haven't had to make one of those in years, hallelujah.

But I was curious about Numbers, the new spreadsheet app in iWork 08, so I fired it up, imported an Excel spreadsheet, and gave it a whirl. I attempted to update the spreadsheet

Though I like a lot of the interface decisions made in Numbers, I will remain, for the time being, an Excel guy. And it isn't because Number lacks advanced features like pivot tables. My main complaint with Numbers is that it's not keyboard friendly. You have to use the mouse to do so many things that Excel allows you to do without leaving the keyboard. Mousing around a spreadsheet is just counter to my working style.

Numbers might be the "spreadsheet for the rest of us," but I guess that makes me one of Them.

***

George Saunders appears on David Letterman.

***

Looks like I won't be seeing The White Stripes in concert after all. Disappointing.

***

Patriots fined and penalized for videotaping NY Jets defensive signals. Outside of the Bears, the Patriots were once one of the few teams I rooted for because they seemed to win by being smarter than their opponents. Outside of Tom Brady, they didn't have too many marquee names, and they didn't have a crazy financial advantage like teams like the Yankees or Red Sox because of the NFL salary cap. They were the Oakland A's of the NFL.

I suspect that the advantage they gathered from videotaping opponent signals is overstated (as is the case with many forms of cheating in sports), but what's disappointing is the hubris and stupidity/arrogance represented by the videotaping scheme. They were playing a team coached by one of their ex assistant coaches; how did they think they were going to get away with it?And anyone watching the two teams would think it ridiculous that the Patriots had to resort to such scheming to defeat the Jets.

If Mangini was part of such a practice when he was with the Patriots, and if he was indeed the one who snitched his ex-team out, then there's a beautiful tragic resonance to the sequence of events. Every one involved with the scheme is getting what they deserve: Mangini is seen as a rat, Belichick (never a warm fuzzy personality to begin with) is seen as a win at all costs Nixon of the NFL, and the Patriots now will never get the full credit they deserve for their accomplishments.

People are always going to be jealous of and resent perennial winners, but it certainly helps the cause to have ammunition. Brady fathering children out of wedlock and dating supermodels, Harrison using HGH, Belichick and staff using videotape surveillance...it's more than enough.

As a sidenote, a cyclist caught using HGH nowadays is looking at a minimum of a year's suspension and a lifetime of disgrace. A pro football player caught using steroids or HGH gets a four game suspension and then is back on the field, or in the case of Shawn Merriman, on to the Pro Bowl or Nike television commercials.

The NFL has been rocked by all sorts of scandal for a year straight now, from Michael Vick to HGH to PatriotsGate to the revolving convict lineup on the Bengals to who knows what else, and you know what? The league is as popular as ever. The NFL is so popular that it doesn't seem to absorb any economic penalty from scandal. Perhaps because of the violent nature of the game, fans seem far more tolerant of steroid use in the NFL than in other sports.

The Big Parade and Born to Be Bad

I caught up with a film school classmate last night by attending a double bill of King Vidor's The Big Parade (2nd highest grossing silent film of all time after The Birth of a Nation) and Nicholas Ray's Born to Be Bad (a sort of All About Eve starring the lovely Joan Fontaine). You might ask what links these two movies (shortly after asking "What movies?"). You might ask because I did, shortly after my friend suggested the double bill.

It turns out that the what links the two movies is that they are rare pieces from the UCLA Film Archive, not to be found on DVD or at your local megaplex or as a torrent on the high seas of Internet piracy, and both are black and white.

Together they loomed as a formidable opponent to my attention span on a Friday night after a long week at work. I laugh now to think that I initially asked if I should leave work earlier than normal in order to buy tickets in advance. I must have been thinking of Superbad, that movie showcasing those new film technologies known as color and sync sound. No, even in the most ardent film appreciation city in the world, I doubt a back-to-back showing of a 2 hr 20 min silent film and a 1 hr 30 minute black and white from the 1950's would sell out.

When we strolled into the very new Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum, I spied a die-hard audience of about 8 people, most of them old enough to have been Billy Wilder contemporaries. I was no longer nervous that I'd pass out and start snoring loudly as it was likely that a few of the other filmgoers might do so as well, out of sheer age. One seat in the theater, right on the aisle, is a different color than all the others. Supposedly it was actually Billy Wilder's chair from some long gone age; unfortunately they chose to model all the other seats in the theater on that one instead of opting for more comfortable and modern furnishings. I felt like I was sitting in a coach seat of a 737. My friend's knees were wedged against the seat in front of her. Not a promising sign for what promised to be about four hours of viewing.

Some man had the audacity to sit in Billy Wilder's chair despite the preponderance of empty seats. I thought of approaching and reproaching him on his impudence, but a second glance gave rise to a second plausible theory that perhaps he was simply too old to notice which seat he had occupied.

A pianist played en electronic keyboard to accompany the entirety of King Vidor's silent film. That guy had a good memory and a good sense of timing. In part because I'd just finished Discover Your Inner Economist, I had promised myself that if at any time the movie bored me I'd walk out and do something more productive with my time, like play keep away from the dozens of hobos wandering the streets of Westwood.

After a somewhat disturbing first act, the movie increased in watchability, and I found myself unexpectedly moved by several moments in the movie. Spanning the period from just before the start of WWI to just after its conclusion, the movie follows the story of Jim Apperson, a lazy son of a wealthy businessman who comes of age when he enlists in the army. His character arc mirrors that of the nation, from idleness to patriotic fervor to disillusionment with the war, and his personal triumphs and tragedies are those of America.

While in France, he falls in love with a French woman named Melisande, and their first date is a staple of that romantic comedy genre classic, the meeting between two people who are in love but don't speak the same language. They trade a French-English dictionary back and forth, and their resulting meet-cute dialogue is genuinely touching and romantic.

Many people think of silent film and think of Chaplin or Keaton and keystone cops and those sorts of physical capers, but many of them, like Intolerance and this Vidor film, work in modes other than comedy and offer great depth and complexity. The acting may not impress a modern audience, but there's stronger story and heaps more emotional heft in The Big Parade than in The Transformers.

Born to Be Bad is some good melodrama. You'll either laugh at that old school sass (that the movie is hard to find on video is the only explanation I'll accept for why IMDb has no memorable quotes listed) or chuckle at the old school syrup, with Joan Fontaine being pulled into about twenty to twenty-five passionate kisses to the accompaniment of strings soaring to a crescendo.

I'll also confess to thinking Joan Fontaine is a stone cold fox who looks ravishing in this movie. Younger sister of Olivia de Havilland, Joan was not just a pretty face. According to her IMDb bio, "Joan Fontaine has been a licensed pilot, a champion ballonist, an expert rider, a prize-winning tuna fisherman, and a hole-in-one golfer, a Cordon Bleu chef and is also a licensed interior decorator." She's the only actor to win an Oscar in a Hitchcock film, and "Howard Hughes, who dated her sister Olivia de Havilland for awhile, proposed to Joan many times." And that, as we all know, is as foolproof an endorsement of a woman's hotness as existed in that age.

Technorati Tags: film, movies

Connor nearly dozing off

Here's a short Quicktime clip (I had to remove the embedded link because of the bandwidth hit anytime this page loaded) of my nephew Connor nearly dozing off while Joannie burps him. I guess feeding requires a ton of energy at his age (4 weeks old) so usually after a feeding Connor teeters on the edge of food coma. His eyes roll back, his eyelids start to sag, and if Joannie wasn't holding his head up he'd probably topple over like a drunk.

In this case, we laughed and woke him up again.

Technorati Tags: connor, video

Nephews and birthdays

Happy birthday to my little sis Karen. She left LA and went to Chicago just before I headed to LA from NYC, and now she's making the move to NYC. I suspect she's avoiding me. The other possibility is that the country isn't big enough for all of us Wei kids so we're constantly whirling around the country in a geographic pas de trois.

I flew out to DC this past weekend to visit my nephew Connor. My timing was good as my flights out and in were sandwiched around an air-traffic-crippling computer outage at LAX.

Connor was just over 3 weeks old when I met him. He's a tiny thing, between 7 and 8 pounds. My iPhone is taller than his head right now.

His mode of communication is binary at this point. He's either crying or he isn't, and our goal at all times was to get simple: if he was crying, we did everything in our power to get him to a state of non-crying, and if he wasn't crying, we tried to keep him in that state. He likes to be patted on the back all the time. If I so much as stopped doing so for a few seconds, usually because I'd fallen asleep, he'd let me know with an ear-splitting wail.

Until his belly button is healed up, he can't be immersed in water, so for now he has wipedowns instead of baths, like army baby-wipe showers. He's really not a fan. He's highly sensitive to how he's being held. Sometimes he wants to bee lying facedown on your chest. At other times, he prefers to on his back, cradled in your arms. At other times he wants to be held against your shoulder and walked around. Finding which position was preferred at any point in time was a matter of trial and error. He'd let us know when we were off.

After eating, he loves to crane his head back and throw his arms up in a cat stretch. In general, he loves to tilt his head back or to the side as far as possible. Mike is worried he'll develop some strange reverse hunchback posture; I think it's adorable.

When he was well-fed, I'd try and burp him, and then I'd sit on the sofa and rest him on my chest. It's the greatest. His little arms flail around, his motor skills being fairly limited for now. He has that fresh new baby smell, which ranks above new car smell on the list of magical, transitory scents. His little body is a furnace, and feeling his body heat against your chest is pure magic. When awake and excited, he pants or breathes heavily, and he strains to swing his head from side to side as if in search of something. Holding him is like cradling a hummingbird.

He can't quite seem to focus his eyes on anything yet, but I think we made momentary eye contact a handful of times over the weekend. And while his facial expressions are still a cipher when he's not crying, I remember three times when it appeared he was smiling. Joannie thinks he just had gas, but I like to imagine that he thought of something funny, like "boy are you in for a surprise the next time you change my diaper."

It's a good thing newborns are so cute, because they're so helpless. Or maybe they're cute because they're so helpless? I'm exhausted from just the short visit--I have no idea how Joannie or new mothers deal with sleeping a few hours at a time--but I'd trade sleep for some quality time with Connor anytime.

I shot a bit of video of Connor and will post a short clip as soon as I have a moment to digitize and transcode.

Technorati Tags: connor

Earthquake?

I think I may have just experienced my first LA earthquake, but I'm not sure. It felt like a giant just leaned against the outside of my apartment and shook it the same way I'd shake a vending machine if my bag of chips failed to drop down into the receiving bay.

UPDATE: Not the most intuitive map, but I see a big red square on this earthquake map indicating seismic activity in the last hour. Judging by eye it looks like around a 4.0 magnitude earthquake. Ah, wait...here it is: a 4.5 earthquake at 12:58AM.

Technorati Tags: earthquake, LA

Joy

When I hear my sister and brother-in-law talk about their new boy Connor, I believe that they are experiencing a type of happiness I've yet to feel in my life.

I've had other friends who've had kids and talked about the joy of being a new parent, but because I've known my sister her whole life and because she's always been so emotionally open in a way that's quite different from me, her joy is particularly pure and potent.

I'm high off of secondhand bliss.

Technorati Tags: personal

Connor Richard

Technorati Tags: photo, connor

Big day!

As of 10:30am EST today, I'm an uncle to Joannie and Mike's newborn boy who shall be named later (I think I know the name but will wait to get official confirmation from the commissioner's office)!

I'm the wrong person to ask about the medical play-by-play (a significant chunk of my knowledge of the delivery room proceedings having come from Knocked Up), but my sister's water broke yesterday at 4 in the morning, two weeks ahead of schedule (I'm told it's normal for the first to be fashionably early), so the little guy had to join us out here on the other side of the belly whether he wanted to or not.

On any other occasion, the biggest news this day would have been my first day on my summer job (I actually had to find a wrinkle-free button-down shirt), and that is also exciting for many reasons, but my nephew is like the sun, and for a good amount of time our family will revolve around him. We're all anxiously awaiting photos, and you'll all probably see one or two here soon.

Technorati Tags: personal

Thanks!

To two folks who will remain nameless here. One sent me an gift of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The package arrived out of the blue and the card read like a human version of Amazon Similarities--because you enjoyed All the Pretty Horses, I thought you'd enjoy this. I can't remember the last time someone just volunteered a gift like that based on my tastes--thoughtful in more ways than one..

And to another person for using an employee discount to land me Adobe After Effects CS3. Being a student with no income, it's tough to afford the software you need to do lots of your work, and student discounts help, but employee discounts make student discounts look stingy. Like no other group of students I know, film school students depend on the generosity and donations of so many people.

Technorati Tags: adobe, book, software

A queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest

Legend has it that one night, famous choreographer Agnes de Mille was depressed because one of her shows had to close. And Martha Graham, another famous choreographer and also a great dancer, said to her:

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than others.”

Amy Brenneman, who teaches a class on collaboration with her husband Brad Silberling, read that quote to us at the end of the last class tonight. It's a famous quote but one I'd never heard before.

Those are words that ring of some deep truth. I wish I could speak off the cuff with such eloquence.

9 more days until the school year ends. All of us live in a constant state of fatigue, but work, much like exercise, generates its own hypnotic momentum.

Technorati Tags: art, filmschool, quote

Memorial Day weekend

I am really sick: eyes watering, nose running, throat burning. My sinuses and chest are so congested I feel like I'm breathing through one of those coffee straws. A lot of people at school seem to be sick; one professor just canceled a class tomorrow morning. It's odd to see a cold seize hold around school when the weather is 70 degrees and sunny every day.

I have not slept as much or as regularly this quarter, and this weekend was really packed. Perhaps the lack of sleep has compromised my immune system. Whatever the cause, here's a sick day worth's of content.

Saturday I spent as 1st AC (assistant cameraperson) on a classmate's shoot. Since this was a reshoot, we had the luxury of a 2nd AC, and it made life a lot easier. Last quarter we had one AC per shoot, and that's a lot of work for one person. You have to load and download film, take focus measurements, guard the camera, swap lenses, check the gate, clean filters, move the camera into position, swap the camera from sticks to dolly and back, pull focus, keep a camera log, set the T-stop on the lens, run a stopwatch on shots to calculate how much film was run and how much is left, mark and clap the slate, write camera reports, and more. It's a very technical position, but I enjoy it. The day started early, with a 5AM alarm buzzing in my ear. When I got home at the end of the day, I told myself I'd take a quick nap and then head out to meet up with a few friends. I woke up at 5AM the next morning.

Sunday was spent at a wedding in Laguna Beach. I know nothing about the city other than what I'd seen on a few episodes of that MTV show of the same name (that show was shot beautifully on Panasonic Varicams, I believe). I'm not sure the city had any say in the matter, but that show forever cemented that town's image among most of America as the place where wealthy, self-absorbed teenagers ply their Machiavellian schemes to climb the social ladder.

Monday, on a last-minute suggestion from Mark, I attended the last day of the Star Wars convention at the LA convention center (the official title of the event was Star Wars Celebration IV). I consider myself a moderate Star Wars fans (enjoyed eps IV-VI, watched eps I-III out of devotion), but next to the types of fanatics you'd imagine at a gathering like this, I felt like Paris Hilton at a Mensa meeting.

At one T-shirt booth I asked a vendor if she had a particular Boba Fett t-shirt in large.

"Which one?" she barked.

"The second one from the right, top row?" I replied, taken aback by her hostile demeanor. She looked over her shoulder and then back down at some book she was reading.

"That's Jango Fett," she muttered, and paid me no further attention. Oops.

This being the last day of the convention, the schedule was very light on Lucasfilm-generated content. Most things to see were created by vendors or fans, from droids, action figures, and models to fan films and costumes. One room featured dozens of decorated Darth Vader helmets, much like the ubiquitous cows that appeared on city sidewalks a few years back. Darth as Lady Liberty? Or the Unabomber?

At another booth, as I looked over some artwork, a boy of about 8 or 9 years old walked behind me holding a yoda lightsaber, one of the ones that lights up and makes lightsaber sounds when swung through the air. A booth clerk, in his early forties, stopped the boy.

"The yoda lightsaber?" nodded the man in approval. "Strong choice."

"It's my first one," said the boy, beaming.

"That one's very light," the man explained. "Good for people who use a one-handed fighting technique, like me." He proceeded to demonstrate with some shadow-fencing, but one of his parries smacked me in the back of my head.

"Sorry, man," he said.

"Easy there, Jedi," I said, rubbing my head.

I watched a couple of fan films in the screening room. The ones I saw were all 2005 award winners. "One Season More" is an animated short that imagines Luke Skywalker's yearning to leave Tatooine as a musical number. It has the suitable mix of love and satire that characterizes the best of fan homages. It's one portion of Star Wars The Musical. This year's winners and entries can be seen at AtomFilms.

No plans for a new Star Wars movie were unveiled, but one welcome bit of news was the announcement of a new CG series from Lucasfilm Animation: The Clone Wars. Here's a sneak peek. I really enjoyed the last animated series, Star Wars - Clone Wars, Vol. 1 and Star Wars - Clone Wars, Vol. 2. This looks to be in that style.

Tuesday morning and early afternoon I spent at Disneyland with Alan, Sharon, and my two nephews Ryan and Evan. What do Disney and Lucas have in common? Both appropriated stories and built entertainment empires. Lucas took strands of Japanese film and set them in another universe (Lucas was originally supposed to direct Apocalypse Now, and Star Wars is his version of that movie, about how a small force--the Rebels--can overcome a larger force--the Empire--through sheer force of will). Disney took Grimm's fairy tales, which were indeed grim, and gave them happier endings and an animated life.

Since the last time I visited Disneyland, over 10 years ago, the most apparent change is that the price of admission has more than doubled. But seeing it all through my nephew Ryan's eyes helped me to appreciate just how enduring a piece of culture Disney built. He was so excited he was a live wire--no nap needed on this day.

While sitting with my nephew on It's A Small World, he almost jumped out of the boat he was so pumped up. That ride doesn't look like it's been updated one bit since my parents took me on it when I was a child (I thought perhaps we'd see young children in India answering customer service phones, or Chinese kids sewing Nikes, but the ride retains its idyllic view of the world), and yet it still kills with youngsters.

Something I wondered while wandering the park: what happened to the Mickey Mouse Club? Why isn't that show still running? Look at some of the talent that came out of the sixth and seventh seasons of the most recent incarnation of the show, which ended in 1994: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, and Ryan Gosling. That's the pop music equivalent of the 2003 NBA Draft that produced Lebron James, Carmelo Anthony, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh, among others. The Mickey Mouse Club was so competitive that Jessica Simpson and Matt Damon failed to make the cut. I'm not sure why they ceded that space to the likes of American Idol. If Disney doesn't bring back that show, I hope they've at least retained the services of the casting director/talent scout.

------------------------------------

I miss walking the streets of NYC. Google Maps Street View allows me to revisit old favorites. Here's my old apartment.

Microsoft Surface, coming Winter 2007, is one of the early products pointing towards the gesture-manipulated touchscreen interface seen in Minority Report.

An upcoming June software upgrade will allow it you to watch YouTube videos on the AppleTV.

The 2007 Cannes Film Festival winners. From what I've heard from folks who attended, the lineup of movies was very strong this year.

Christopher Nolan is going to shoot some of The Dark Knight in IMAX format. Most features that have been projected in IMAX theatres are simply 35mm films blown up. Since they weren't framed for the IMAX theater, I find many scenes incomprehensible unless you're sitting in the back row. Audiences viewing The Dark Knight at an IMAX theater will see the movie switch aspect ratios from whatever the 35mm aspect ratio is to 1.43 to 1 when the IMAX scenes come on screen.

Based on Gallup Polls, America is willing to elect a black or a woman for president, but if you're gay or an atheist (or both, I presume) your time has not come.

Darren Aronofsky disses the DVD for his movie The Fountain. It doesn't have a commentary, but Aronofsky has said he recorded one himself and will post it online soon so you can listen to it while watching the movie.

as many of you can tell it is light on the extras as compared to my previous dvd releases.

everything at the studio was a struggle.
for instance: they didn't want to do a commentary track cause they felt that it wouldn't help sales.
i didn't have it in me to fight anymore.
whatever.

so:
niko, my friend who did the doc on the dvd came up with a novel idea.
we recorded a commentary track ourselves.
we're gonna post it on a site soon, http coming soon.
you can play it and watch the flick and hopefully you'll enjoy it.

Technorati Tags: Apple, cannes, dvd, film, filmmaking, filmschool, microsoft, movies, music, politics, disney, starwars, tech, tv, video, youtube

The river

I'm still recovering from a weekend in Vegas for Betina's wedding. Good times, though exhausting. If I ever stayed there for more than a weekend I'd surely end up like Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas. Two cruel and stone-faced blackjack dealers nearly made it a costly weekend, but I managed to fight back valiantly at a poker table and a blackjack table, finally surfacing into the black sometime around 4am on Sunday morning.

Get your order in now for the 2005 vintage of Marilyn Merlot.

A list of the world's fastest growing religions. High birthrates in countries where a religion dominates are critical for growing the religion.

SomeEcards offers e-cards for the modern, sardonic sensibility. I'll definitely be sending some of these in the near future (some are funny but borderline NSFW).

Steampunk Star Wars desktops.

RetailMeNot collects coupons for online shopping sites. They offer a Firefox extension that notifies you when there's a coupon for the online shopping site you're visiting (there's also a Dashboard widget).

Tim Allen to star in the mixed martial arts drama Redbelt which David Mamet wrote and will direct. Huh?

Technorati Tags: desktop, film, humor, movies, coupon, religion, shopping, wallpaper, wine

Don't bring a knife to a pillow fight

My mother always told me not to give a knife as a gift because it would mean a severing of the relationship with the recipient, but adhering to that is a pain in the butt. Invariably, I find, staring back at me from some Williams-Sonoma/Crate & Barrel/etc. wedding registry, a column of unpurchased knives. Who's the selfish person who bought the all 12 napkin rings?

Technorati Tags: wedding, superstition

Write what?

If Ticketmaster's fees weren't painful enough, their online captchas are out of control. The other day, I tried to buy some tickets on their site. Part of the way through their purchase pipeline, I encountered this captcha:

GHU??Y

I tried something, and it was wrong. So next I got this captcha:

I thought BEMGOAG or BEMGDAG. I'm not sure which one I tried, but it was wrong. Was I going blind? Did I need a new prescription?

One more appeared on screen:

Finally, one I could handle. I raised my arms and channeled my inner Johnny Drama, "Victory!"

Then the next screen informed me that the concert had sold out.

Ticketmaster has to be one of the least customer-friendly companies out there, but perhaps the problem is that they're not seeking to deal with human beings. I think their captchas are designed not to weed out robots but humans.

Technorati Tags: captcha, ticketmaster, web

Back from NYC

Back from an exhausting but fun weekend trip to NYC for various family events. The weather in Manhattan was perfect. I only wish I'd been able to spend more time with family and less time in transit (traffic around NYC Sunday was brutal due to the 5 Boroughs bike ride and street fairs and car accidents).

With gas prices over $3 a gallon nationwide, I got myself a Discover Open Road credit card which offers 5% cash back on gas and auto maintenance purchases (and 1% back on other purchases). No annual fee.

Maria Sharapova lists her top 10 dream mixed double partners. Yao Ming?!

"Fluorescent Adolescent" by the Arctic Monkeys is my favorite new rock tune this year (here's the album). Alex Turner is a fantastic lyricist.

Help to fight global warming by having fewer children. Since U.S. citizens tend to be the world's worst carbon dioxide emitters, this is especially true for us. A simple way to encourage this would be to impose tax penalties on families for each additional child. Take that Shawn Kemp.

I was born without replacement teeth for my top two canines. Those two baby teeth have been hanging on forever. I went to a new dentist here in LA last week who recommended I get them replaced before they fall out. I asked how much it would cost, roughly, and she told me to talk to the receptionist up front. Always a bad sign when you ask how much something costs and get the runaround. The receptionist's quote: $8,000, not covered by insurance. Are you kidding me?! I may just have to go toothless if they fall out. At any rate, I'm going back to my insurance company on this one. That hardly seems just for a congenital condition.

Technorati Tags: finance, music, sharapova, sports, tennis

All you can eat

After the production madness of winter quarter, I thought the spring quarter might be a more relaxing one, but it's turning out to be just as, if not more, busy.

Part of that is my own choosing. We're assigned to take 22 units of class this quarter as 1st years, and they recommend though do not require 1 elective. But I discovered that we're allowed to take as many electives as we want, and there's no difference in your tuition if you take no electives or a hundred.

I'm interested enough in all sorts of subjects related to film that this was like being set loose in an all-you-can-eat buffet. So I signed myself up for four electives for a total of 34 units of class. I also have to edit my 6-minute film from last quarter for screening during finals week, and I have given up three Saturdays to all-day workshops led by Stephen Burum, this year's Kodak cinematographer in residence (legendary for his longtime collaboration with Brian De Palma, his work heading up 2nd unit on Apocalypse Now, and his contributions to the American Cinematographer Manual).

I had one day in April which was open, last Sunday, and I spent it doing homework and laundry. In May, I also have one day that isn't already booked by class, weddings, or workshops. It's amazing how quickly all my plans for going out and working out and trying out some restaurants and watching movies all just evaporated.

But for the most part, I'm digging all my electives, and I'm learning tons. The craft of filmmaking just requires a life-consuming commitment. Sleep is scarce these days, and I've found myself dozing off Grandpa Simpson style

Being a student has one great advantage, and that's access to student-discounted software. I've finally got Pro Tools installed on my desktop and I'm learning my way around it. You can do some amazing things with the software--it's like Photoshop for sound. Add the Pitch N' Time plugin and you can turn your out-of-tune karaoke rendition of "Welcome to the Jungle" into something Simon Cowell would be proud of.

One of the most enjoyable classes I'm taking is Music in Film, and our first exercise was to go through North By Northwest and log all the musical cues, when they began, when they faded out. When a director sits down with a composer for a "spotting session," the director will collaborate with the composer to select when music should come in and go out. What's fascinating about Bernard Herrmann's score for North by Northwest is how Hitchcock had Herrmann hold back on bringing in the musical cues until the last possible moment. In places you'd expect a swelling musical cue to come bursting through the speakers, there's nothing (the famous farm field scene is a great example).

Our professor talked about why that might be, and that restraint is really striking given how liberally modern movies use score to cue the audience on how to react emotionally to scenes. Most viewers never stop to think about why music comes in at a particularly point in the movie, and it's a useful exercise to do with one of your favorite movie scores. Our exercise for next week's class is to spot Monsoon Wedding, a really enjoyable movie, and not just because of its score. Listen to just the title credit score, and without having seen a single frame of the movie, you should be able to predict the theme of the movie.

Our professor took us on a field trip last Friday to the famous scoring stage on the Sony Studios lot. Named after Barbara Streisand, it's the scoring stage of choice for John Williams, and so many famous scores have been recorded there. On this afternoon, we had the opportunity to listen to a scoring session for an upcoming episode of The Simpsons by renowned composer Alf Clausen. While Alf conducted an orchestra in short cues to match the Simpsons footage projected on a large screen (some of the animation hadn't been finished and consisted of sketches), we sat in the control room and watched through the glass, listening to the music on one of the most sublime sound systems imaginable. It was inspiring to see how much work goes into a 7 second musical cue for a half hour episode of The Simpsons. Very few TV shows score with an actual orchestra. Lost, for one, and Desperate Housewives, though on a much smaller scale. That might be it. Who would've guessed The Simpsons would be among that elite group (I say that not to disparage the show, one of my favorite TV shows ever, but to express surprise that a half-hour animated satire would spend more on its score than most hour-long dramas).

Listening to the music in the control room elevated the familiar Simpsons musical cues to a sublime place. I refuse to believe people who say they can't hear the difference between an MP3 played off of their iPod and a well-recorded CD played over a good pair of speakers. From the live performance of music to your ears, much of the magic can be lost. To hear Clausen's score live was like setting foot on a place I'd only seen in postcards before.

I love hearing behind-the-scenes stories about film shoots from a wide variety of guest speakers and professors. Not surprisingly, in an industry full of storytellers and mercurial personalities, the stories that are passed around have the finely honed quality of mythology. I can't really share the stories here, but suffice it to say that events like the David O. Russell tantrum aren't new to folks in the biz.

The only downside of my crazy schedule this quarter, besides lack of time for sleep and exercise, is that I've been having a series of disturbing dreams, all linked. Last night was the most disconcerting episode yet. In this dream, I've shot and killed someone, and though no one knows I'm the killer, many people are suspicious and closing in on me. Feeling the net encircling me, I spend the entire dream in a sweat, with a sense of doom and guilt crushing all the hope out of me. By the time I wake up I can't remember who it is I'm meant to have killed, but for the duration of the dream, I feel the guilt of a murderer, and it's unsettling beyond belief. In that elusive way that dreams slip through your fingers like water, I can't recall the details anymore, but I'm certain I've had this dream more than once this quarter.

I realize that Freud's theories on dreams have been discredited, but I'd love to know what the current state of thinking is in the field of dream interpretation.

This, thankfully, is not a dream. ESPN Experts? More like ESPN Expert:

Technorati Tags: basketball, bulls, filmschool, movies, music, dream, sports

Certifiably awful

I mailed out my tax documents to my preparer in late March. I remember thinking as I was driving to the post office that perhaps I should stop at Kinko's and make copies of all of the docs, but I was in a hurry to pack for my spring break plane flight, so I didn't (this is what they refer to as foreshadowing). I mailed my docs certified and asked for a return receipt.

Well, about all that did was allow the USPS to certify today that yes, they had lost my tax docs (I'd say they "lost it in the mail," but since they are the mail, that sounds nonsensical). You do get a refund of your postal service fees which is about the least consoling $7 you'll ever be handed.

So now my afternoon has been transformed from trying to finish the homework for tonight's class to scrambling to re-assemble all my tax documents (insert bad pun about going postal). Someone please just club me over the head with a bat.

Technorati Tags: mail, taxes

The winter of our six minute content

Posting here has been light this winter quarter because I've been steamrolled by winter quarter, the most intense three months of first year film school. We're broken into three groups of seven, and each of us here at school is given one Thursday through Sunday block to direct a six page short. The weekends we aren't directing we crew for each other. We rotate through being director, assistant director, director of photography, gaffer/grip, assistant cameraperson, sound mixer, and boom operator.

I'm through all but of the film shoots for the quarter and I'm so tired that my mind suffers occasional lockups, almost like mental blue screens of death. To stay awake on set, I've invited all sorts of vices back into my life: coffee, which I have abstained from for about eight years now; Coke (the liquid soda, mind you), which I almost never drink; Mountain Dew, which I haven't had since I was in high school; and one cigarette, which I had to toss after two drags as an experiment gone awry.

The caffeine hasn't been a good idea. It overpowers my exhaustion and forces me awake really early every morning no matter what time I climb into bed. Right at this very moment my body's energy tank feels like it's at 30%, just dying for some REM sleep, but instead I've just been lying on my sofa half awake for a half hour. I feel like Stellan Skarsgård in Insomnia.

We're limited to a 12 hour shoot each day, but when you include equipment load and unload at the start and end of each day, we're working 16, 17, sometimes 18 hours days. When you include a day of set building and a day to strike the set on the front and back ends of shoots, and when you add in equipment rental pickups and returns, transportation to and from sets, there's almost no slack time for anything other than showering and sleeping (and for some, the former is a luxury). My group production professor recommended that once shooting started, we schedule every life maintenance task, from doing laundry to taking out trash to getting a haircut to brushing our teeth. The most mundane things fall by the wayside when in production.

A seven person crew is a skeleton crew on 16mm film projects, even ones as short as our student films. If you're shooting a documentary on a camcorder with natural light, no actors to rehearse, no sync sound to record, no sets to build, then a one or two person crew is sufficient. But on a narrative film project, when there's a camera to maintain, film to load and download, lights to set up and strike, light readings to measure, actors to outfit and touch up, focus to pull, sound to record, light to shape and control, marks to set, sets to build, among countless other tasks, then a seven person crew feels light.

Throw in the fact that many people are learning these roles on the job and you have the formula for some long, stressful, chaotic days. Someone serving as a gaffer for the first time is going to work about 20% as efficiently as a professional gaffer, and the productivity is even lower when you consider that on a student shoot you might have a lone gaffer dealing with a dozen or more lights for a setup. Whereas on a professional shoot you might have an assistant camera person (AC) to pull focus and guard the camera, a second AC to lay marks and grab focus measures, and a loader (to track, load, and download film magazines), on a student shoot you have one AC who handles all those duties. Every task takes longer, and the error rate for novices is higher.

Our professors instruct to be patient with our classmates and to treat these first year films as learning exercises, but the truth is that most no one treats their films that way. You see your classmate sink a huge portion of their life savings into these projects, you see the effort they put into their script, into finding locations and actors, in dealing with bureaucracy and rejection, you see them scream and cry and argue, and you can't help but feel the pressure when you're crewing on their shoot. Adding the mental stress to the physical exertion of the long work days, I can't recall too many more draining four day stretches in my life than each of our shoots.

You'd think that with the larger crews on a professional shoot every thing would feel more chaotic, but it's the reverse. If you've ever wondered why the end credits of a major motion picture scroll on for five minutes at movie's end, and I've certainly had that thought in the past, working on a student production sends you a long way towards an answer. If you can find a specialist for every task, someone who is an expert at that task, and their sole responsibility is to handle that task, then the director has one fewer ball to juggle. If you have an art director who snaps photos so you can maintain prop or costume continuity from one shot to the next, or a script supervisor to track eye lines, then you as the director can focus on other, more important issues, like performance.

Clean division of labor makes for more efficient communications and a less stressful shoot. On student shoots you'll see overzealous directors trying to direct actors, search for props, move set pieces, set frames in the eyepiece, move lights, all in the span of a few minutes. Every one wears several hats, and that model doesn't scale up to a longer shoot.

The downside of having a Hollywood-sized crew is one of cost and logistics. If an exterior shoot gets rained out, every one still gets a paycheck. On a student shoot, where many if not most of the cast and crew are unpaid, a starving student director has to eat a few more weeks of ramen. Getting a huge crew to location and finding parking for all of them is not easy. If you want to shoot a scene at your apartment to save on location costs, it's far easier to do with a compact student crew than a professional crew where you have to find space for every department.

The positive to being on set for so many consecutive weeks is that it launches you up the learning curve of film production with neck-snapping acceleration. At least it has for me. I'm many years removed from my undergrad days, but I feel like a freshman again, even though I'm so much older than some of my classmates that they call me dad. I enjoy film theory classes and watching classic movies as much as anyone, but I suspect that stories of Quentin Tarantino going from video store clerk to big-time director merely by watching lots of movies while at work have filled too many heads with the idea that film consumption and appreciation alone is enough to get you 90% of the way there.

The best way to learn to make movies is to make movies. The best way to learn to write is to write. The best way to become a great surgeon is to perform hundreds of surgeries. The other key element is the feedback loop. Sitting in a dark telecine room with a colorist, watching the footage from your shoot for the first time, is an amazing experience. All the correct decisions and mistakes you made on set are in your face, right on screen, and they become part of your filmmaker's intuition on the next shoot.

I thought it would be difficult at this point in my life to start over in a profession. For most of my life my peers have been a bit older than me, but that time has passed. What hasn't changed is this: I've never gone wrong when choosing the darker tunnel with the bright distant light than the more well-lit hallway with the no discernible alluring endpoint. Follow your interests and you will always have the joy of your work to sustain you. I often hear people say there are jobs they couldn't take because the job title isn't palatable to them anymore. It's one of the strongest lock-in traps out there.

When you make a change in profession, though, a lateral job move just isn't the norm. If you let your first career trajectory set the course for the rest of your life, you're severely limiting the amount of information on which you base one of the most important decisions in your life. I wish I could claim to be one of those people who was making brilliant home movies at age six with his father's super 8 camera, but I wasn't. I never contemplated being in the film business until just five or six years ago. It's not a profession I had any exposure to during my youth, or in college, or even right out of college.

The most dangerous temptation that leads people astray is money. My first job out of college was in consulting. It paid pretty well, and with some school debt in my past, saving up some cash provided a warm and fuzzy feeling. Being able to eat out at nice restaurants, see a movie whenever I felt like it, purchase the hardcover edition of a book, and travel around the world was a refreshing change from college days. But there was only one problem: I didn't enjoy my work. I looked at the partners above me and realized very early on that I didn't want to end up like any of them. I also learned a valuable economics lesson about high-paying jobs. There are some jobs that pay really well because only a few people can perform them (major league baseball player, for example). However, most high paying jobs pay a lot to generate demand. Otherwise no one would do them for life. Consulting is one of those jobs that gradually increases your pay so that you always have enough to adjust your lifestyle higher but never have enough to retire on.

I am lucky, and rather spoiled. Though my parents helped to put me through college, they never forced me to take any job for money or prestige. Even before heading out to school, my mom in her heart of hearts wanted me to head east, to a certain famous, prestigious school. I decided to go west instead, and they never said a word to change my mind. The stereotypical Asian parent encourages their child to go down the pre-med route as an undergrad. By "encouragement" I mean "brute force." My parents didn't force that on me, and I never drifted that direction. I decided late in school to double major in English, and despite having to pay extra for some summer schooling to make my requirements, they were behind me a hundred percent.

When I graduated undergrad, I had another chance to head out east to my mom's favorite school, but I deferred and went to work instead. I was burned out on school. She was behind me a hundred percent. Then I decided not to go back to school at all and to take a huge paycut to go to Amazon, and though it raised some eyebrows, again they helped me to make the move. And though my mom wasn't around when I made the decision to leave Amazon and try to pursue filmmaking, I'm pretty sure if she were she would've been on my sets this year, cooking, putting up lights, chatting with my actors, and keeping my set tidy.

My rule of thumb has always been to try to find work that is enjoyable four days out of five. I'm not sure there's a job out there that is fun all the time. Hard work is required and so it's dangerous to wait around until you find something you love to do all the time. However, if you're you're not excited to get out of bed and go to work at least three out of five work days, you should aim higher.

I'm rambling. This hasn't been my most coherent post, but I'm not at my sharpest right now. It's been an incredibly instructive quarter. But Mr. Demille, I'm ready for my spring break.

Technorati Tags: filmschool, movies

A dirty, poorly lit place

I'm in a dark dark place that I'll just refer to as pre-production. What I wouldn't give to have a line producer or two working for me. It's going to be a long, sleepless week and a half.

So while I'm in this dark dark place, I'll probably go dark here as well. Looks as if the New Yorker has a few interesting articles. Here are some of those and well as a handful of others for you to read while I try to fight my way to freedom.

It takes guts to speak out against Vladimir Putin.

"Good People" is a new short story by David Foster Wallace.

From the archives: David Remnick interviews Barack Obama.

Revisiting Obama at Harvard Law School: a preview of how he'd be as a candidate? (NYTimes)

Bruce Schneier speaks of the value of security theater. (Wired)

Free Font Manifesto.

Technorati Tags: dfw, fiction, film school, filmmaking, newyorker, Obama, politics, font, security

Clearing the TiVo of life

This list of cool stuff costing $10 or less is useful if you need a few belated stocking stuffers.

Gosh, I've missed NYC. I'm trying to reserve judgment on LA, but I have no doubts about my adoration for NYC. Being back and strolling the streets, mingling with the people, it's like CPR for the spirit. The weather in LA is fantastic, but it didn't take long for me to realize it's an urban planning disaster with perhaps no solution to come in my lifetime.

I didn't realize how draining my quarter had been until I arrived back in Manhattan the day after my faculty review. The first week, I've had to resort to drinking coffee three times to stay awake (I weened myself off of black gold in 1998), and when I sleep I have the types of vivid, often disturbing dreams I only have when exhausted.

The irony of film school, at least the first year, is that students have little time to actually watch movies. The night after my last final, I wanted to go see a movie, but when I looked up show times I realized it wasn't playing in any theater in the L.A. region anymore. The last time that happened to me was...hmm, I think that's the first time that's ever happened to me.

So among other things, while on break, I will catch up on movies. In fact, this winter break is a chance to catch up on everything that film school forced me to put off until later. I'm clearing out the playlist in my personal life DVR: sleep, good eating, exercise, natural light, movies, music, correspondence with friends and family (but no holiday cards this year, alas), drink, world news, the simple pleasures in life.

I wish the same to all of you. Happy holidays!

Technorati Tags: goods, gadgets, shopping

Representin'

Yee-ha! Who says nice guys finish last.

Next time I see Yul, he's buying the first round of drinks.

Technorati Tags: tv

Loadkill

Consider this the white flag on, among other things, my e-mail inbox. I used to try to return all my fan mail within a day, but then this matter of my first quarter of film school came flying in like a defensive end from my blind side annihilated me. I feel as if someone tied a rope around my waist while I wasn't looking and then attached the other end to a giant parachute that they tossed up into a raging gale. One minute I'm standing there, and then suddenly I'm yanked off my feet and dragged through the forest, struggling the whole way to detach myself, to no avail.

I moved to LA and had about three days to unpack and settle in before school started, and the rest has just been a blur. For some reason, perhaps stupidity, I didn't anticipate the first year of film school being so packed wall-to-wall with class. Morning, afternoon, evening, even Saturdays, we all seemed to live at school. I've never lived in a city for so long and seen so little of it. I've worn a deep path between my apartment and the school parking garage, and that's about it. I don't even know the entire campus; the only portion I'm really familiar with is the section where the film school is.

Yesterday I threw out about five-foot tall stack of unread Sunday NYTimes, only to discover another stack of equal height behind it. The newspaper stack is flanked by two towers of magazines, the whole thing resembling a sort of Petronas Towers of print media. The good thing is that if there's a nuclear winter, I should be able to keep warm for months by using it as kindling.

This last week, my classmates and I have grown more and more exhausted as hour upon hour of editing on the flatbeds have begun to take their toll. I can't recall another week in this century when I've strung together so many nights with just a few hours of sleep. The other day, I wandered from the sixth floor of my parking garage down to the third before I found my car because I couldn't remember which level I'd parked on. I couldn't even remember parking it at all.

Editing on 16mm film on a flatbed is one of those experiences which we'll speak of fondly in hindsight, but when in the midst of it, more than one of us nearly succumbed to frustration and despair. More than one of us has had to field a phone call from a crazed classmate and to talk that classmate back from the ledge. Having learned to edit on a computer, I had an especially hard time getting used to the idea that cutting in a single piece of footage could take ten minutes as opposed to 20 seconds.

This is how nearly all major motion pictures were edited for years and years! It's almost as difficult to fathom as the stories my dad used to tell me about programming a computer by feeding it punch cards. I hadn't thought about how slow the editing process would be when I wrote my script consisting of back and forth dialogue for about three minutes straight. As a result, I had to make nearly 40 cuts. You bet I looked on with deep envy at those folks who had films consisting of four or five long takes spliced together.

At the same time, I now understand why certain filmmakers, like Scorsese and Spielberg, held out as long as possible before moving to digital non-linear editing (in the case of Scorsese, it was his editor Schoonmaker who made the switch, but he went along begrudgingly). For one thing, there's a certain discipline and care that working with actual film engenders. Being in a dark room with a trim bin filled with hundreds of feet of film, working on a flatbed machine the size of a compact car, feeling the film run over your fingers...at no other point this quarter did I understand as clearly that filmmaking is a craft as much as it is an art. Sure, a dish prepared in a microwave oven is going to be ready faster than one baked in a real oven, but you also taste the difference.

Making a cut that works is much more satisfying on the flatbed. By the time I finished cutting my film, I'd gained an intuitive sense of how many frames I needed to add in or pull out to get the timing I wanted. You can build a similar sense of timing on a computer, but with film, the relationship between time and linear distance (the length of film in your hand) is fixed.

That bright semicircle of light? That's the end of the tunnel. Thursday we screen our movies on the big screen, Friday we meet with faculty for the end of quarter evaluation, and Saturday I fly back into the arms of NYC for the holidays.

Yesterday I spent a couple hours capturing foley for my film. The clicking of a woman's heels on linoleum, the scraping noise of a wooden chair being pushed back or pulled forward against the ground, the rustling of a woman searching through her purse, even the chafing of fabric against fabric as jackets are put on or removed. I projected my movie on a large screen and sat in the recording booth while a classmate outside would walk in heels in time to the movements of the actress on screen, or sit down and stand up while putting on or removing jackets of various fabrics.
Professional foley artists have one of the most fun jobs around.

When I went back in to add the foley to my sound mix, every sound that matched the action on screen gave me a silent thrill. The engaging sense of hyper-realism that comes from watching a Hollywood narrative film comes in large part due to the clean sound from foley, something that's difficult to capture with the mics on location or on a camcorder.

Today I finished my sound mix. I had to go back to my Nagra tape and recapture a take because my actress's lines got clipped when I transferred to CD-R. The Nagra is an old sound recording device, analogous in age to the flatbed in editing. We used the legendary 4.2, pictured below. I believe it was in the third episode of season one of The Wire when McNulty or one of his peers complained about still having to use a large, clunky Nagra taped inside his shirt to do surveillance when the FBI had moved on to stealthier, more compact, wireless recording devices.

The Nagra is bulky and heavy, but it has one thing going for it. No matter how hot the sound, it's nearly impossible to cause the Nagra to distort. It has an amazingly wide latitude and forgiveness and can capture the most dynamic ranges of sound with ease. But transfer to CD and you bump heads with the lousy dynamic range of digital sound. A shouted line that sounded beautiful on the Nagra clipped when I transferred it to CD, and so I had to recapture with a lower input level on the CD Recorder to remove the distortion in the line reading. Digital sounds has its conveniences, but it's still trying to catch up to analog sound in quality.

Thursday all of our movies will show on the big screen at school. I'm excited to see everyone's work projected large. The improvement in home theater technology this past decade has been great, but I'm not one of those who prefers watching movies at home just because of the cost or inconvenience of going to a movie theater, dealing with lines and rude people talking on cell phones. Seeing a face projected twenty feet high fundamentally changes your experience of the movie, and so does seeing it in the company of others.

Technorati Tags: film school, filmmaking

Thanksgiving redux

A few highlights from Thanksgiving, which I spent at my parents' place in Temecula (yes, I'm really behind):

• I ordered a turducken from New Orleans this year. We had traditional turkey on Thanksgiving day, and then the next night we branched out into the turducken. It arrived on dry ice and was simple enough to prepare. Thaw, cover, and bake in the oven for 4.5 to 6 hours, until the meat was at 165 degrees inside. Because it was mostly boneless, carving was much easier than with a normal turkey. The meat was tasty, seasoned with cajun spices. But in the end, I couldn't fully embrace the concept. Here's the problem: with the shipping price of over $30, a turducken ends up costing about $100. Yes, you save on some preparation time because it arrives cleaned, stuffed, seasoned, and ready to bake, but I didn't detect any synergies from embedding a duck inside a chicken inside a turkey. In fact, many people find it disgusting. I don't, but I also think you're better off just buying a duck, a chicken, and a turkey separately and preparing each as its own dish. The turducken was nothing more than the sum of its parts, while I was expecting something more.
• At every holiday gathering in our family, there is one comic sketch or movie that recurs in conversation over and over again. This year it was the David Blaine street magic spoof. Mike and Jason and Linda, among others, had sent it to me the week before, and on Wednesday night, while waiting for traffic to die down, I watched it at home. Brilliant, especially since James has shown me so many David Blaine street magic videos in the past.
• My parents live just on the other side of an Indian reservation. Just over the wall, on the reservation, is a house on the side of a hill. It's surrounded with a wooden fence, and on the fence is painted, in brown paint: "F*** U" (but without the asterisks). It has been there as long as I can remember. Somehow, on Thanksgiving, a holiday first celebrated between Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians, and given the subsequent history between the settlers from Europe and the Native Americans, that graffiti greeting seemed more appropriate than ever.
• A few of us did pay restitution to the Native Americans, in a way, by giving business to Pechanga Resort and Casino, the largest casino in California. Much to my dismay, those lucky few did not include me. It's a running joke now. Every holiday in Temecula, I want to make a pilgrimage to Pechanga, but no one will go with me and I feel so guilty about leaving the family to go by myself that I abstain.
• Other things that are a bit of a family tradition include some heated board game contest. This was the first family gathering in a long time which did not include such a contest. But it doesn't matter what the game is...it could be a game of pure chance, it always feels like a Yankees-Red Sox game. It's all giggles and smiles and hugs until a game is proposed, and then everyone dons their game faces.

Technorati Tags: food, humor, thanksgiving, turkey, video, youtube

My nephews

From our family's Thanksgiving weekend gathering in Temecula.

Technorati Tags: nephews, Evan, Ryan, thanksgiving

We're on

The first three of my group's shoots were two weekends ago. We rotated through crew positions for each other, and I started out as the sound mixer. Consciously or not, I channeled the demeanor of other sound mixers I've seen on set before and spent most of my time with my headphones on, trying to stay out of the way of the gaffers and grips running around.

On the next shoot, I was the AD, a position which reminds me of program management in the technology world. As an AD, you spend most of your time running around keeping people on task, running a series of mental calculations to ensure the director gets all the shots needed in the time available. Most people don't like the AD, but there's an art to it. I enjoy the job in small doses, but it's not a position I aspire to. Since our first shoots are given a time and film constraint--from call time to wrap, we have four hours and four hundred feet of 16mm film--the AD has to be particularly tuned into where the shoot is in terms of film and time. Four hours has seldom felt shorter.

At the same time, all those years working at Amazon.com accustomed me to maintaining a certain zen-like focus in a maelstrom of stress and emotion. It's like trying to launch a website on time by facing down a series of bugs. Movies do not occur naturally; they require an infusion of directed human energy.

The third shoot came the same day as the second shoot and started in the evening. We were all running a bit on fumes by that point, but counteracting my exhaustion was a burst of adrenaline because I was DP'ing the shoot. If it's nerve-wracking the first time an AD calls the shoot and every one on set looks to you as the director for some answer, it's just as if not more intimidating to have the visuals of your classmate's directorial effort in your hands.

Up until each moment I turned on the camera, everything around me was a chaos of human activity. Lights going up, equipment and props swirling all around the sound stage, people shouting light meter readings, actors or boom operators asking questions. And then, when I flipped the Arriflex camera on, the gorgeous sound of the film being pulled through the gate would fill the air like a flock of birds taking flight, and all else would go quiet.

That chatter of film being pulled through a mechanical motion picture camera surely must be one of the most magical sounds in all of art, one of the beautiful pieces of analog feedback that's lost when shooting on video.

On my DP shoot, I had a taste of everything. The first shot was on a tripod. The second started on a high hat, but when that didn't work, I squeezed up against a wall and shot it handheld. Then I had a shot down from up on a catwalk, a PA holding onto me so that I wouldn't fall over and drop to the stage below.

The final shot, though, was a real doozy, or the coup de grace depending on how you looked at it. My classmate wanted a crane shot to descend from overhead onto a couple lying in bed, with the camera tilting and panning so that it ended up in a side profile shot from just off the side of the bed.

We didn't have a crane for this shot, so to simulate that we had to pop the bed upright and secure it to a wall. Then we staples the sheets and pillows to the bed and shifted all the wall dressing--photos, posters, a cross--to a false ceiling. Then the couple would stand up and act as if they were lying down, and to simulate the crane shot we'd dolly in at an angle and pan the camera as we moved in. It reminded me of what Michel Gondry did for much of his video for Massive Attack's "Protection."

We had about twenty minutes left when we finished the previous shot. I did not think there was any way we'd get the shot off, so I suggested just shooting a wide shot and then pushing in for a MS or CU so that she could just cut them together in the final edit. I didn't want her to have to live without any footage of her opening scene. But she believed we could get the dolly shot. She wanted us to go for it. Inside, I was glad. I wanted to try to get it.

The tech office had given us a special tripod head to mount the camera on horizontally, at a 90 degree angle. But try as we might, we couldn't get the tripod head to tighten on the camera. With ten minutes left, I suggested just shooting the shot handheld. But the director still had faith. We'll get it, she insisted. People were running around the set like villagers fleeing a horde of pillaging invaders, trying to set up lights and secure everything to the set.

With three minutes left, there was no time to fix the tripod head. I said I'd lay the camera on my shoulder. We threw the camera and tripod on the doorway dolly, and I jumped up beside it. We would not have time to rehearse. The gaffer shouted a couple quick light readings to me. I did some simple math in my head. The lighting was suitable for our T-stop. There was no room on the dolly for my AC, so I estimated the focus by eye and nodded to the director. This would be an all-or-nothing effort.

Everyone went silent, and then the director shouted "Action!" My dolly grip began pushing in, and I began panning with my right hand as we neared the bed, while with my left hand I pulled my own focus, trying to estimate how far to pull just by looking through the viewfinder. When we got all the way into the bed, I was twisted up like a pretzel, trying to maintain my balance and hold the camera still while the actors kissed and chatted on the bed.

"Cut!"

My director looked at me. Did we have time for one more take? The TA gave us the go-ahead, so we rushed the dolly back to one. And again, without slating, we rolled. My dolly grip pushed in, and I panned and pulled focus and tried to keep the camera steady on my shoulder. It was utterly insane, and completely exhilarating.

And then our time was up, our film was done, and we had no idea if we'd captured anything. I spent two and a half days feeling a bit cold inside, wondering if we'd gotten it. Had I pulled focus properly? Was the pan smooth? Did the shot really look as if it had come down from overhead?

A few days later, we gathered to watch the dailies from the first weekend's shoots. I was bouncing in my seat the whole time, waiting for the footage to come up on screen.

When the shoot I DP'd came up on screen, I felt a knot in my stomach as the grey card appeared. I'd never seen film I'd shot projected before. It was stomach turning both in a good and bad way. One thing I miss from the days of shooting film is that gap in time between taking a photo and getting the slides or contact sheet back from the lab. It's maddening, but if you feel like you got off a beauty, it's like waiting a few days to unwrap a Christmas present. During that time, it sits there all wrapped and pretty and full of possibility, and your imagination runs wild until you forget exactly what you shot so that when you finally see the finished product, it's a surprise again.

The other good thing about shooting film is that it forces you to think when you're framing. An entire generation is being raised on digital photography, using the camera and cheap memory cards to just snap one picture after another until the right one shows up on the LCD screen in back. That's fine, but it transforms photography into a brutish trial-and-error art, and it doesn't work well if you're trying to capture a fleeting moment.

That crazy dolly/pan/tilt shot? We got it. By some miracle, we managed to get the shot the director wanted. If you hadn't known what we'd done, it would appear as if we'd shot the scene from overhead. I felt sixteen levels of relief and two of joy when it appeared they'd be usable.

Next time it won't be quite so tense. But you can't ever match the rush of the first time.

Technorati Tags: film school, filmmaking, movies, photography

My new weblog feed

For those of you who read this weblog via one of my RSS feeds, I apologize for not having updated those since I upgraded to the latest version of Movable Type. I'm still here, but I've changed my feed address. The new one is here and can also be seen on my actual website in the right column.

Please use this new feed. The old ones have been retired, and this new Feedburner feed should be compatible with any feed reader.

Da beers

My dad stayed over last night because he had a morning flight out of LAX today. He wanted to see the Bears game, and since f****** DirecTV is incompetent, I'm still without any television programming. So I took him to Over/Under, the closest sports bar that Dave and I have been able to locate near our apartment.

Neither my dad nor I have seen a single Bears game this season. Going to see a game with him brought me back to my childhood. My dad became a sports fan in the early 80's, when he and I followed the Cubs, and we became Bears fans in 84, a year before they became Super Bowl champs. It's still one of those pieces of Americana which we can bond over, and that's one of the reasons I took him to a dive of a sports bar, the first time I've ever taken him to one, and probably the first time he's ever set foot in one.

Being with my dad must have accentuated my youth, because I was carded there for the first time. My dad asked how this all worked.

"Do we have to buy a beer?"

"Yeah, we probably should," I replied. He ordered a Bud Light, and I ordered a Red Hook. After a few sips of his Bud Light, I asked if he wanted to try a different beer.

"No," he said, "I can't really drink. After just this little bit, I already feel a bit..." [he pointed at his head and drew a few circles in the air]. That's the thing about me versus my dad. Relative to him, I'm always going to be an idiot (I can't decipher a single line of his PhD thesis) and a drunkard.

By the time we sat down, the Bears were already down 7-0. Several Cardinals fans (or they may have just been general underdog supporters) crowded the bar.

First half of Bears football I saw all season, and wouldn't you know it, they played their worst half of the year. The difference between football and baseball, for example, is that a football box score can be much more deceptive than a baseball box score. I can generally envision how a baseball game unfolded by the box score, what with its series of discrete confrontations between batter and pitcher/defense, but a football box score can only summarize with very broad brush strokes the quality of a game.

Some things I saw in the first half reminded me of the nightmare that was the last Bears game I watched, the loss to Carolina in the playoffs last year. Rex Grossman still makes terrible risk/reward decisions when under pressure. He just plain wilts and throws terrible passes and interceptions. The Bears offensive line is just average. I suspect one main reason the Bears haven't run the ball all that well this year is that their O-line is not as good as it was last year. They also let the Cardinals' ends through with regularity, leading directly to the two Grossman fumbles.

Lastly, and this still haunts me from that playoff game against the Panthers, the Bears defense doesn't seem to be able to adjust mid-game when the opposing team uncovers a hole in its Cover-2. Last year it was Steve Smith continuing to beat the Bears all game because he was either single-covered or the over the top help was soft. The next game, the Seahawks double or triple-covered Smith all game and contained the Panthers offense. In this game, the Cardinals receivers kept running to seams in the zone defense and sitting there, giving Leinart stationary targets to hit. It happened all half, and the Bears defense would not change. It drove me nuts.

At halftime, I left for my evening class, and my dad, disgusted, went back to my apartment. Of course, the Bears came back and won, and my dad and I missed it all. But we shared a beer together, happy hour pricing, and so the night wasn't a total loss.

Word...DirecTV is the devil

My sister Joannie also suffered an awful experience with DirecTV. She forwarded her thoughts to me to share:

I could not agree with you more. DirecTV is absolutely HORRIBLE. I have never had a worse customer service experience with any other company. I took off from work at 12:30pm this afternoon for an installation appointment that's been set for 2 weeks. At 2:00, some local technician calls to cancel b/c "they don't have any dishes in stock." If I had not been so furious, I would've started laughing that the installation service for satellite TV had run out of satellite dishes. And, for some reason could not give me any advance notice whatsoever. At 5:00pm, I was still on the phone trying to find someone that would give me any acceptable explanation without leaving me on hold for 20 minutes or hanging up on me. It was unbelievable. I would recommend that anyone considering DirecTV (even if it is a few dollars cheaper) reconsider.

That's pretty much how it works with DirecTV. They get your money, then they lock themselves in a fortress surrounded by a moat that can only be crossed by waiting on hold for about an hour, or in one case for me, two hours and eleven minutes. Then you yell at some people who transfer you to other people, again putting you on hold for a half hour at a time. And then, if they're sick of you, they just hang up on you and force you to start over, waiting on hold for an eternity to speak to an entirely different customer service rep.

Here's the trick. They never give you a direct line to anyone you speak to, so every time you call back you're starting from scratch. Every time you have to wait on hold and listen to cloying pop music for an hour, and punch in your phone number, then repeat that same phone number to the rep, then start your story over from the beginning...every time the cycle repeats, you feel yourself one circle deeper into Hell, your blood temperature rising accordingly. Dealing with DirecTV is like trying to play that Whack-a-Mole game, one that can't be beat. I managed to get a supervisor on the line just once, and he was an ass, threatening me with in a condescending tone before hanging up on me.

Having worked at Amazon.com, one of the most customer-friendly companies in the world, dealing with a company like DirecTV, which couldn't care less what their customers experience, is shocking. The Better Business Bureau rates DirecTV a CCC, translated as a "good" rating, but based on my experience with them this time I rate them as a D at best.

Open for comments again

I've upgraded to Movable Type 3.3 (at long last, I know) and dumped the old comment blacklist, so my weblog should allow comments on posts again. Next up is an upgrade to the design of my website and weblog, though that may have to wait for...well, no promises.

DirecTV just awful

When a company drags you through hell and treats you like crap for weeks on end, leaving you on hold for hours only to hang up on you again and again, there's usually little you can do. DirecTV takes orders from end customers online and over the phone here in LA, but they contract out installations to a variety of random local installers, meaning they have no control over the customer experience once they've taken you order over the phone.

I won't recap all they trials and tribulations they've put me through. Their customer service is obscenely terrible. Suffice it to say I placed an order for service in mid September and it will be a miracle if I get service installed by the time Halloween rolls around. A month and a half to put up a satellite dish. I wish I was joking, but it is just that absurd. I've rarely ever dealt with a less caring company.

What can a beaten down customer do? You can withhold your business. You can file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. You can yell at various people over the phone. I've done all of that. But in this day and age, the Internet provides a more powerful way to get back at them. I can share my mistreatment with the world and reach thousands of people online, and perhaps the next time one of them is deciding between DirecTV and an alternative, like cable, they'll kick DirecTV to the curb.

Some companies don't realize how quickly bad news travels in this day and age. The internet gives every customer a megaphone, and as you can climb the tree of Google search results, that megaphone grows louder.

The Magic Castle

For Mark's birthday, a big group of us joined him for dinner and performances at The Magic Castle on Sunday. It's a restaurant, performance venue, and home to The Academy of Magical Arts, Inc. It's a sort of trade association for practicing magicians. There are about 2,500 members who put on shows and share tricks of the trade. To become a Magician Member, you have to perform a magic routine in front of membership reviewing committee.

The dinner, pulled from a steakhouse-like menu, was pricey and not so magical, but built into the price is the opportunity to watch practicing magicians performing in various venues around the mansion. The first performer was 28 year old Danny Cole, twice voted "Stage Magician of the Year" by members of the Magic Castle (perhaps if I keep writing the words Magic Castle enough times, the impulse to snicker will subside). Cole's show was very impressive, in particular because of his smooth stagecraft.

Downstairs, an invisible ghost, Irma, will take requests while holding court on a grand piano. You just say your requests towards the empty seat, and Irma will begin playing (read: the piano begins playing itself) if she knows the tune. Her repertoire is surprisingly vast. From obscure national anthems to contemporary hits and everything in between, Irma rattled off one tune after another.

Neddy finally stumped Irma, though, with this request: "Irma, do you know 'Sexy Back' by Justin Timberlake?"

Irma responded with a three dissonant descending notes, like the disappointing sounds they play when you choose poorly on a TV game show. Someone else jumped in, "How about Britney?"

Irma quickly banged out a rendition of "Oops I Did It Again."

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."

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Agent

New Yorker issues have a tendency of piling up around my place when I travel or when I'm busy as I can never bring myself to toss them out. Sometimes that can seem like a tactical error, as in times like these when I'm moving and have to lug about 275 pounds of unread back issues to the recycling bins in the basement.

But lying on my bare mattress now (all the sheets, pillows, just about everything is packed in boxes), I'm glad I saved the July 10/17 issue from last month. In it was an article titled "The Agent," (PDF) an excerpt adapted from Lawrence Wright's new nonfiction book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

Though I'm exhausted from days of packing, the article, which I just finished reading at three in the morning, stunned me, introducing two characters and a story that will break your heart with how close we came to anticipating and perhaps stopping 9/11. We had all the puzzle pieces to assemble a picture of Al-Qaeda terrorists in our midst, but they were held by different U.S. intelligence agencies, and we couldn't assemble them into a picture of looming terror because of self-imposed bureaucratic walls that kept the CIA and FBI from sharing information. Our intelligence agencies, with their silly infighting, failed us.

Two charismatic characters are at the center of this story. Ali Soufan is the Agent, a Lebanese-American Muslim FBI agent whose Arabic language skills and tenacity made him one of our nation's leading assets in the fight against Al Qaeda. John O'Neill was the head of the F.B.I.'s National Security Division, figures more prominently in The Looming Tower, but also appears in "The Agent."

Soufan is the hero of "The Agent." O'Neill put in charge of investigating the bombing of the U.S.S.. cole in Aden, Yemen, in October, 2000. Soufan's investigation unearthed tracks that led back to Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The CIA, in the meantime, learned of an Al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia and learned of two Al-Qaeda operatives, Khaled al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. Mihdhar had a U.S. Visa. The CIA did not inform the FBI about the two of them, and so they slipped into the U.S. unnoticed. The CIA does not have authority to operate within the U.S., so once Mihdhar and Hazmi were on U.S. soil, they were the province of the FBI, or would have been, had the CIA alerted the FBI to their presence.

In June of 2001, Ali Soufan sat in a meeting with CIA colleagues and was shown photos from the secret meeting in Malaysia. Among those in the pictures were Mihdhar and Hazmi, but Soufan did not know of them yet, and the CIA shared little except to see if the FBI knew of them. Another photo of the Malaysia meeting, displaying an Al Qaeda jihadi named Khallad, was not shown. Soufan and his team had a huge file on Khallad, who they suspected of being one of the masterminds of the U.S.S. Cole bombing. Had the CIA shown Soufan that photo, he could have connected the dots.

On August 27th, 2001, Nawaf al-Hazmi and his brother Salem purchased airplane tickets for American Flight 77 on Travelocity.com. Mihdhar also purchased a ticket for that flight online. They did not bother disguising their names, as they were not on the FBI terrorist watchlist.

Twenty months after their arrival in Los Angeles, on September 11, 2001, Mihdhar and Hazmi went to Washington Dulles International Airport. Hazmi set off the metal detector at the airport and was hand-screened, and Hazmi and Mihdhar were both flagged for an additional security screening at the gate, but both passed and boarded American Flight 77. One hour into the flight, the hijacked Boeing 757 crashed into the Pentagon, killing all 64 on the flight and 125 people in the building.

Immediately after 9/11, Soufan was told to find out who had perpetrated the hijackings. On September 12, 2001, he was handed an envelope with full details of the meeting in Malaysia. When Soufan realized that the CIA had known that Mihdhar and Hazmi, two of the hijackers, had been living in the United States for 20 months, "he ran into the bathroom and threw up." Wright notes: "Soufan's disillusionment with the government was so profound that he eventually quite the bureau; in 2005, he became director of international operations for Giuliani Security and Safety, a company founded by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York."

John O'Neill is an even greater tragic figure in the story of 9/11. His story is almost too unbelievable to be true. Perhaps no one in the FBI was more obsessed with the rising threat of Al Qaeda, but on August 22, 2001, O'Neill left the FBI after it was reported that his briefcase containing sensitive documents was stolen during an FBI conference in Florida. Though it was later found and though it was determined that none of the confidential material had been compromised, his career at the FBI was ruined.

O'Neill left to take a job as the head of security at The World Trade Center. On September 11, 2001, just after American Airlines flight 11 flew into the north tower, John O'Neill received a call from his son who could see the smoke through a train window. O'Neill told his son he was fine and that he was going to assess the damage. After United Flight 175 hit the south tower, O'Neill called his girlfriend Valerie james, distraught. Yet later, at 9:25am, O'Neill called another woman he had been close to, Anne DiBattista, saying he was okay.

"The connection was good at the beginning," she recalled. "He was safe and outside. He said he was O.K. I said, 'Are you sure you're out of the building?' He told me he loved me. I knew he was going to go back in."

Another FBI agent, Wesley Wong, ran into O'Neill outside the north tower. She last saw him headed towards the south tower.

On September 28, 2001, O'Neill's body was found in the rubble of the World Trade Center. Wright reports:

...a thousand mourner gathered at St. Nicholas to say farewell. Many of them were agents and policemen and members of foreign intelligence services who had followed O'Neill into the war against terrorism long before it became a rallying cry for the nation. The hierarchy of the F.B.I attended, including the now retired director Louis Freeh. Richard Clarke, who says that he had not shed a tear since September 11th, suddenly broke down when the bagpipes played and the casket passed by.

For some reason, perhaps because I've come to adore New York City, I can't stop reading about 9/11. I've read the The 9/11 Commission Report in text form, and I'll probably reread it in its graphic adaptation. 9/11 and the events that led up to that day continue to haunt me, and Lawrence Wright's account The Looming Tower, which I've just begun, promises to be the best account to date. I'm not doing justice to his reporting here, so delve into "The Agent" if you want a sampling. Soufan is a fascinating character in many ways, particularly in his interrogation techniques, which demonstrate that torture is hardly the only way to extract information from suspects (torture has long been known to yield unreliable info). Soufan engages his subjects, demonstrates his knowledge and understanding of them and their cultural background, and uses his intelligence to checkmate them.

In the stories of Soufan, O'Neill, and bin Laden, there is a Syriana/Munich-style tragedy to be made. In fact, with its story of thwarted investigations and global conspiracies, it's the 9/11 movie I would have expected Oliver Stone to make, though from what I've heard his World Trade Center movie is a great departure for him.

Here is an online only interview with Lawrence Wright which came out at the same time as "The Agent." Here's a comprehensive list of Wright's articles for The New Yorker, including many on Al Qaeda. PBS Frontline came out with a documentary on O'Neill called "The Man Who Knew" and it's available online (Real Player and Windows Media).

Bottom of the 9th

Okay, I'm back from a busy but enjoyable wedding weekend in Seattle (mostly Whidbey Island) and entering my final week in NYC. I do need a post at some point on just the weddings I've attended this year. By the end of October, I will have attended 8 out of 11 weddings, a record for me (I'm not the only one who climbed a wedding peak this summer). I had hoped to see many people in Seattle, but too much of travel is consumed by long security lines at airports these days (I'd been told to get to the airport three hours early for domestic flights, but the security lines turned out to be about the same as they were prior to the whole elemental profiling campaign against liquids). I will have to return to Seattle again soon, though. The summer weather there is perfectly neutral, such that you don't feel hot or cold, just an equilibrium between skin and air.

I made one concession to my culinary memory and stopped at Salumi for a sandwich. Salumi, an Italian Salumeria exported to the Pacific Northwest, is the creation of Armandino Batali, Mario Batali's father. It's my favorite Seattle restaurant, and they've begun shipping meats online through their website.

Things may go dark here for a bit as I'm canceling cable and Internet service in the next day or two, though I will try to siphon an hour or so of Internet oxygen through my neighbor's Linksys wireless router from time to time. But most of my time will be spent packing and walking the streets of New York, trying to swallow the anguish of leaving this, the city of my heart.

One of the things that will serve as a weekly rebuke of my departure for the West coast will be the weekly arrival of The New Yorker and the NY Times. So many sections of The New Yorker come to life when you actually live in the city, from Tables for Two and every other section of Goings on About Town to Hilton Als's and Anthony Lane's reviews of local theater and cinema. Before I lived in NYC, I just ignored Goings on About Town. Now that I've lived here, I will peruse it each week from afar and weep at the cultural riches just out of reach. Why would I torture myself thus? I don't know, but I believe Odysseus would empathize. Odysseus had his men stuff their ears with beeswax and tie him to the mast of his ship when sailing past the Sirens so he could hear their irresistible song but not chase after it.

Speaking of The New Yorker, this week's issue is a good one, including Malcolm Gladwell again on the silliness of having companies supply health insurance and pensions, a system that cripples companies when their dependency ratios soar; George Saunders helping Iran to find some alternatives to popular English phrases that have infected its language; and James Surowiecki on the dubious ethics of management buyouts.

Okay, back to boxing and taping.

Packing and throwing away

I'm in the midst of packing for my move West, and as always it is a depressing affair. It's a fallacy to think that we can live every day as if it were our last (that principle works better over broader stretches of time), but if it were someone's last day, they certainly wouldn't choose to spend it packing.

The cost of shipping my things cross-country seems to bottom out at about $1.00 a pound, so everything I'm considering packing is being assessed for its value-to-weight ratio. The one benefit of moving is that it forces a packrat like me to toss a bunch of stuff that I really don't need anymore. It lightens the load, both on my movers and my soul.

Bon voyage, Rob

Congratulations to an old colleague of mine who has left Amazon to return to NY (very odd for me to read this on the front page of Amazon.com on my Amazon Plog). Rob was an early addition to the Amazon.com DVD & Video team, and I had a lot of fun working with him and chatting about movies. Perhaps we'll pass each other somewhere over the Midwest as he comes East and I head West.

These are a few of his favorite things. We have very similar tastes.

Product feature: does the body good

A gallon of milk on Amazon.com inspires hundreds of customer reviews. Ships from Gristedes in New York. I priced out what it would cost to ship to me here in NYC, and it came out to $30.24, with expedited shipping, which I highly recommend for milk.

Toyota about to pass GM to become the world's largest automaker, though they've been fighting some quality issues recently. I remember when our family first purchased a Toyota Cressida, it might as well have been a Bentley to us. We later participated in the Camry tsunami.

Domaines Ott and French rosé wines are the new hot summer drink. What I find most surprising from this article, though, is that Alex Kapranos, lead singer of Franz Ferdinand, is a food columnist for The Guardian, and Jay McInerney is wine columnist for House & Garden.

"My other vehicle is a Gulfstream." I just enjoy that article's title. Private air travel is tough on the environment because of the outrageous fuel consumption, so I always try to airpool when I take my jet to Aspen or Jackson Hole, cuz that's how I roll. Okay, that's not true. I've only flown in a private jet once, and that trip confirmed that private jets is heaven compared to the human cattle call that is commercial air travel.

Floyd Landis's B-sample came back positive, so his team Phonak fired him. Now USA Cycling and the US Anti-Doping Agency will prepare a case against him while Landis and his team prepare his defense. It will be months before we hear a verdict, though the court of public and media opinion works has already issued theirs. On the "Top Ten Landis Excuses" piece on David Letterman, number nine was "Who can resist Balco's delicious 'spicy chipotle' flavor." Landis posted a statement on his weblog yesterday and a response to the B-sample positive test today.

The pilot for Aaron Sorkin's new TV show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip leaked onto YouTube this week, then was promptly pulled. So I can just link to this 6 minute promo (begins with a riff on Network, beats up on NBC's own SNL, and makes a joke about Sorkin's coke habit) and 30 second trailer. Anyhow, this is all an excuse to tell a short story about my apartment hunt in L.A. At the first apartment I went to visit in Santa Monica, a bald guy named Evan answered the door. He looked really familiar, like someone I'd seen on TV or in a movie, but I just couldn't place him. So I didn't say anything. He showed me his apartment and was really generous with his time, explaining the neighborhood and its nearby attractions. He mentioned that he'd done the New York to LA move also, and that I should keep an open mind to LA (I'm in depression over leaving NY for LA right now). He never mentioned his work, but after I left his apartment, and as I was filling out an application, I realized who he was. Evan played Charlotte's flame Harry Goldenblatt on Sex and the City, the role for which he's most known, and he'll be in the pilot of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I didn't end up taking his apartment because I got a roommate and needed more space, but it seemed appropriate that he be one of the first people I met in LA.

Google announces "All Our N-gram are Belong to You," which I think is pretty generous of them.

No curse words? What the @$#!*?

You can send a little ad message in Sam Jackson's voice via cell phone or e-mail to one of your friends from the official website for Snakes on a Plane. You have to choose from a few dropdowns to produce a canned message, though the engine can pronounce some common names to give the message a bit of a personal touch (including Eugene, hallelujah).

Too bad that even for an R-rated movie, they didn't remove the censor muzzle from Samuel L. If so, I'd be sending one of these to my landlord right now for not having fixed my air conditioner yet. It would be the next best thing to sending Jules himself over to pay a visit and collect my briefcase full of freon.

"The path of the righteous man..."

Sweat

It's been about 100 degrees in Manhattan the past two days. Sometime yesterday morning, my air conditioner lost its will and started spewing out hot air. Welcome to hell.

I thought it was a temporary failure, so I turned it off to let it rest and went to the gym in the late afternoon. The air conditioning at the gym is solid, but after a half hour on the treadmill, I was sweating buckets. The only time I can recall sweating more was on my bike ride up Mont Ventoux in 2002, when a literal waterfall of sweat formed on my nose.

In the locker room, I returned my towel to the laundry bin, the towel so soaking wet it was as if I'd dropped it in the hot tub. Outside, the pavement was disgorging all the heat it had soaked up from the sun during the day. I felt like the city was trying to sweat me out of its pores.

Back home, I stood in front of my air conditioner, muttered a little prayer under my breath, and turned it on. For a few seconds, cold air emerged, but the chill began diminishing at a steady rate. I hopped in the shower and took turned the water to the coldest setting and sat under it for as long as I could bear. It's probably not healthy to expose one's body to such extreme temperature swings, but I felt like I was overheating.

As soon as I got out of the shower, I started sweating again. I haven't stopped sweating since. My super still hasn't shown up. Last night I had to crash on my brother's sofa. I may try to sneak into Sephora tonight with a sleeping bag and crash behind the cosmetics counter. It feels like the North Pole in there.

Every now and then, something happens and my air conditioner works again for about a minute. Those moments remind me of those occasional euphoric highs, when for some reason one's internal chemistry aligns in a perfect eclipse of any anxiety or sorrow.

I think it was on a day with heat like today's that violence erupted in Do The Right Thing, or that Merusault shoots that guy on the beach in The Stranger.

Once upon a tongue, in a faraway place

I was in China last year, and I jotted a few notes about the food in my journal:

My first meal in China was at one of the best Sichuan (Szechwan) restaurant in Beijing, Yu Xin. Straight off the plane, Eric and Christina wasted no time in tossing my stomach into the fire, literally. The spiciness of real Sichuan cuisine comes from mala, a spicy sauce of Chinese chilies and assorted seasonings like sesame oil and Sichuan peppercorns. The word "ma" refers to numbness, the word "la" to the spiciness, so mala spells out its effect: it burns and numbs at the same time. The numbness actually allows you to eat more of it than you would otherwise.

The first dish that came out was a meat dish, but it was unclear from its appearance what the dish contained other than diced chilies. I had to send my chopsticks burrowing deep into the mountain of chilies to find a chunk of chicken. By the end of the meal I'd lost all feeling in my mouth, but that didn't wipe the big grin off my jetlagged face. The problem with eating lots of mala is that all other types of food taste bland in comparison.

The toughest restaurant to get a table at in all of China? Kentucky Fried Chicken (ken da ji). Far more popular than McDonald's. It's so popular that another chain of restaurants knocked off KFC's logo, colors, and mascot. Yes, there's another restaurant with a Chinese-looking colonel and the white lettering on red background, but that restaurant doesn't serve fried chicken at all. I didn't have time to walk into one to see what they served, but its existence seemed appropriate in a place where respect for copyrights is about as scarce as toilet paper in public bathrooms.

The hottest new American export to the Chinese dining scene since my last visit? Starbucks ("xing ba ke" in Chinese, xing meaning "star" and ba ke simply being a phonetic rendering of bucks). There's one in the Forbidden City. We stayed with Joannie's friend Arthur and his wife in Guangzhou. We asked him what he liked to do for fun, when he wasn't cranking out sneakers for Nike (he worked at a supplier to the Swoosh). He said his favorite event of the month was every other week, when he and his wife would drive 45 minutes to an hour into the heart of the city to get Starbucks.

In China people actually don't use soy sauce much. Soy sauce and egg rolls and General Tso's chicken, they're all largely staples of the Americanized version of Chinese food. In China, they prefer vinegar use it instead of soy sauce as seasoning, for example, for dumplings.

My visit two weeks ago to Beijing was another culinary adventure. Christina and Eric are among the more passionate foodies in my circle of friends, and the week's worth of activities they organized for everyone leading up to their wedding included visits to many of their favorite restaurants.

That was music to my mouth. I don't look forward to the cuisine in every country I visit (many of the stops on my E. European visit earlier this year left much to be desired from a dining perspective), but China is a culinary mecca. On my visits there, I look forward to eating as much as or more than sightseeing.

Some meals I remember from this trip...

Our first lunch was at Lei Garden, a fairly new restaurant to Beijing. I don't believe it was there last year when I visited, but it's the newest branch of a high-end Cantonese restaurant chain that first achieved renown in Singapore. For those who love Chinese food but don't possess the most adventurous of palates, this is the perfect restaurant. The restaurant, tucked away on the third floor of a somewhat sober business building, is elegant and polished, and the service is top-notch. As for the food, when I found out we were returning to Lei Garden for the rehearsal dinner, I delivered a celebratory chest bump to the next guy I saw in the street, sending him scampering away in fear.

For one of our dinners, we visited the Qianmen branch of Quan Ju De (English website), the famous Beijing (Peking) duck restaurant. Roasted over a fruitwood flame, the duck arrives with a crispy skin and tender, juicy meat. Carved tableside and served in a wrap with scallion and plum sauce, it's a dish I can never pass on. Quan Ju De has the reputation of being the top roast duck purveyor in Beijing, though there are whispers of declining quality and worthy challengers. If you're only in town for a quick vacation, though, it's the safe choice.

Our dinner the next night was at Qiao Jiang Nan. What I remember most about our meal here, in a private banquet room, was that all the waitresses were wearing one-piece tennis outfits, much like the one Nicole Vaidisova is sporting here. I realize this seems like an excuse to reuse this picture of Nicole, but this is honestly the first photo of this type of outfit I could find. At any rate, I felt like we were eating at the clubhouse at Wimbledon.

Perhaps my favorite meal of the trip was at Ding Ding Xiang, a Mongolian hotpot restaurant which bills itself as "Hotpot Paradise." It's not boasting if it's true. It instantly moves onto my list of restaurants and dishes that will haunt me forever. My second day back from China, I actually did have a dream about eating there again, and when I woke up I nearly cried at the cold slap of reality. At Ding Ding Xiang, everyone gets their own personal hotpot, set on top of a flame. Each diner can select one of several different broths to serve as the base of their hotpot. Christina helped Jed and I out and chose the mushroom stock.

I saw abalone on the menu and had to order it, despite it being the priciest of the dishes. I adore abalone. The waiter actually brought it out for our perusal, and it was still moving! I'd never seen one live before. We also ordered lamb, a whole slew of mushrooms, spinach and other greens, and a whole lot more. The presentation was gorgeous, and the hotpot was simply the most delicious I've ever had, and I've had more than my fair share over the years. I'll be dreaming about that meal for years to come, and it is unequivocally my top restaurant recommendation from this visit to Beijing. The next time I visit, it will be my first stop upon leaving the airport.

As for changes from my visit last year, the Starbucks in the Forbidden City is no longer there. Our guide told us the Congress over there gave it the boot. All the other branches of Starbucks remain a huge hit, however, and Kentucky Fried Chicken is still the king of the fast food restaurants in China. I did not eat there this trip, but I am also not one of those foodie or travel snobs who turns their nose up in disgust at the mere sight of a KFC or McDonald's.

I think it's somewhat of a waste to spend a meal at McDonald's or KFC when abroad, especially when most of what they serve is available back home. But, even as an American, I don't flog myself every time I spot a branch abroad, and I no longer recoil in horror if someone has to duck in under the Golden Arches for the taste of something familiar. The typical travel snob who holds everything foreign on a pedestal can't ignore that most American fast food franchises abroad stay in business primarily through the traffic from locals. I find it interesting to gauge foreign perceptions of American restaurants and culture, and fast food restaurants are an easy barometer.

It's also been many years since I've harbored any illusions that any popular travel destinations are hermetically sealed time machines, completely devoid of other tourists or influences from home. Wherever I go, I see American movies, travelers, books, music, and yes, more than a few frappuccinos and Big Macs. If a complete absence of anything American is the only way you'll be satisfied, then consider that your presence abroad is probably ruining some other travel snob's vacation.

One last food story. I've always been a fairly adventurous, open-minded eater. My mom forced me to clean my plate, to sample something from every dish. Whether it was innate or trained, my broad palate has been with me for as long as I remember. It's a high risk, high reward dining strategy. At times, as with drunken shrimp in Hong Kong, it ends with gustatory ecstasy. At other times, as with some bad (though tasty at the time of consumption) ceviche in Quito, it has sent me to the hospital.

Last year during my visit to Beijing, a bunch of us went for a stroll down a well-known food alley near the Wangfujing neighborhood of Beijing. There, we stumbled upon more than one street vendor hawking some creatures I'd never thought of as food before. They were impaled on kabobs. The mere sight of them was fearsome, but after an initial bout of revulsion, I tried to summon my stomach, so to speak. More than few people from our travel party were there, and an audience usually amplifies my dining bravado. I asked the vendor how much for a kabob, and he said they were 10RMB, or just over $1.

I took a deep breath. Okay, I'd eaten a fried grasshopper before, surely this was not much different. I could do this, and I'd have a story to share for years to come. After all, they were deep fried, right? The vendor reached out for one of the kabobs, for another customer, and that's when the true nature of what I'd be attempting became clear.

These creatures' legs started waving wildly, even as they were impaled on the kabobs.

"I thought they were fried!?" I gasped in Chinese.

"No!" said the vendor, recoiling in horror. "Much better alive. Fresh!"

I couldn't do it. We walked away, but not before I grabbed some video of these unique creatures, both pre and post skewering. These creatures should be familiar to most people (view either the 320 x 240 high quality or the 640 x 480 medium quality Quicktime clip, both about 3.5MB), though perhaps not as a snack.

I'll eat most things, but not everything. I don't know who has the unfortunate job of having to prepare these creatures nor how they do it. I don't know how they ensure you aren't injured or even poisoned when biting one of these while they're still alive. You can ask for them deep fried, but even on my return trip this year I couldn't pull the trigger.

After my initial encounter, just as we turned to leave, a young boy of perhaps 7 or 8 years old walked by with his father. The boy had a kabob of these and had chewed the head off of one.

His t-shirt read: "You are what you eat."

Sizzle, snap, crack

For Floyd Landis, today his Tour victory journey comes to an end. Cue Daniel Powter's "Bad Day."

Today was one of the two monster stages of the Tour de France, including two climbs I've ridden in the past, the Col du Galibier and the Col de la Croix de Fer. Both are HC (hors categorie) climbs, so difficult they are beyond categorization. And those were just climbs to set the stage for the two finishing climbs, the Col du Mollard and La Toussuire. In the punishing furnace of the French summer, Tour cyclists had to ride through a couple of circles of Hell today.

Floyd Landis found his limits today on that final climb. In cycling parlance, he cracked. First Dennis Menchov attacked, and Landis could not follow. Though T-Mobile paced Klöden and Landis back, the blood was in the water. Carlos Sastre attacked, and down went Landis. By the end of the stage, won by that albino praying mantis Michael Rasmussen, Landis had dropped to 11th overall, 8:08 behind Oscar Pereiro. In just over 13km, or the final 8 miles and change, Landis's Tour hopes evaporated as quickly as water off the pavement.

He's still probably the strongest time trialist of the podium contenders, and from day to day, one's legs can feel remarkably different, so Landis can still reach the podium. But he can't sit back and mark his opponents anymore. He has to attack.

The day I climbed the Col du Galibier, I also climbed the Col du Telegraphe first. They are companion climbs. I was riding with another guy on the bike tour, and up and over the Telegraphe, I felt decent despite near 100 degree temperatures and a stifling humidity. I had enough energy to stand up to accelerate through the switchbacks. But on the short descent down the other side, I did not have much time to recover. Before I could catch my breath, the road leaned back into me again on the way up the towering Col du Galibier. About halfway up, my speed dropped down to about 14 km/hr, and no matter how hard I tried, I could not push past that ceiling. I had redlined. My buddy waited for a bit, and then I waved him on. The rest of the climb was a long, lonely delirium of suffering. I spent much of that ride trying to detach my mind from my body so that I could displace my pain, compartmentalize it. I tried to think of my body as merely a machine to which I issued commands.

But despite many hours spent toiling up the Alps and Pyrenees of France, I've missed it these past few summers. Whenever July rolls around, I long to be on my bike, fighting gravity to ride uphill. There have been few times in my life I've felt more alive.

RELATED: An article in the NYTimes about how to run marathons in high heat and humidity.

The deepest cut

I arrived at Beijing Airport this morning (yesterday morning? who knows anymore) to fight a chaotic mob of people in the international departures area. You have to fill out a departure form and pass through some outbound customs screen before you can even check in. I battled to the counter to grab a departure form, but as my hand reached the pile of forms, someone else grabbed a form and yanked it out, running its edge along my right thumb and opening a deep one-inch papercut.

The sudden and sharp pain startled me, and I shouted. Then proceeded to bleed like a geyser all over the counter, the forms, my clothes. The crowd around me pulled back, horrified, then just went to the next counter over to continue their quest for a departure form. I was left clutching my thumb like an idiot. I opened my suitcase with my left hand and pulled out my toiletries bag, but I had no bandages or first aid materials. I held my right thumb out to my side, dripping blood on the floor. I had three heavy bags and was surrounded by a sea of unsympathetic travelers, not a bathroom in sight. So I just wrapped my thumb in another departure form and waited until the bleeding stopped, and then went on my happy way looking like I'd just slaughtered fifteen chickens. Fortunately my questionable appearance didn't attract any unwanted attention from the authorities, and I managed to clean up after I'd cleared security.

But my papercut pales in comparison to the one Thor Hushovd suffered in Stage 1 of the Tour de France. In the final sprint for the finish line, a spectator swiped one of those giant cardboard hands from PMU across Hushovd's right upper arm, opening a huge gash that proceeded to bleed all over him (in a bunch sprint, riders are flying over 40mph, so running a piece of hard, sharp cardboard across your arm...my eyes are watering just thinking about it). In an odd coincidence, PMU is the sponsor of the green jersey that Hushovd won at last year's Tour.

This is close to what I looked like at Beijing airport this morning, except no one was helping me and my quads are not that huge.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

I attended the taping of The Daily Show yesterday. I'd tried to get tix a few times before, to no avail, but this time I included a sob story about how I'm leaving New York in the fall (true story) and perhaps that melted the heart of the person on the other end of my e-mail. The show is taped at a fairly nondescript studio out on 11th Ave. between 51st and 52nd St. A sign hangs over the entrance: "Abandon news all ye who enter here."

I arrived a bit after 2pm and was fifth in line. Hmm, maybe I was a bit too early, but since no one is guaranteed a seat, I thought I'd better be safe than sorry. Thank goodness it was one of the cooler days in recent memory. I stood as still as possible, trying not to sweat. They finally opened the doors to us between 5:30 and 6:00pm.

I always enjoy when various young folks come out to greet us in line with phrases like, "Jon is very excited to see all of you." It sounds so odd, and yet people get excited upon hearing it. The next time I have people over for a party, I'm going to hide in my bedroom and send out a few greeters.

"Eugene is very excited to see you. He'll be out shortly. Now remember, turn off all your cell phones and make lots of noise. Lots of noise! Eugene does not use a laugh track."

The studio seated 200 according to my rough scan. A warmup guy, the audience fluffer, so to speak, came out and made comedic banter and led us in rehearsals of wild applause and screaming. If you're the type of person who turns his nose up at such behavior, preferring to stand with hands in your pockets or arms folded, the warmup guy will single you out and force you to rehearse in front of everyone else, so if you're such a person, best to stay home and watch on TV. If, like me, you've wondered why the audience of The Daily Show sounds like a mob of drunken frat boys, know that they encourage that. The audience actually consists of a fairly normal cross-section of society, but the warm-up guy and the ear-thumping soundtrack they pipe in the studio gets everyone worked up to a froth.

The studio consists of Jon's chair and desk in the center and three large screens arranged in a semicircle behind him. Jon came out to field a few questions before the show. Among them:

Who is more vile, Ann Coulter or Karl Rove?
Ann Coulter, because she has succeeded in dehumanizing those who disagree with her. I honestly don't think she'd feel a thing if they were killed in front of her. But someday, she'll learn the true meaning of Christmas.

When is Rob Corddry getting his own show?
I believe we have him through October, then he moves over to his own show on Fox(?). His brother is already gone. You have to watch out for those Corddry's, they'll f*** you. When we found him, he was just an orphan, emaciated, abandoned. I found him behind a dumpster, fed him, raised him, and what do I get? A knife in the back.

What size are your shoes?
[beat] Size 14.

On somewhat of a slow news day, the field report was from Samantha Bee, reporting from San Andreas (the Grand Theft Auto neighborhood). They shoot those segments right next to Jon Stewart, in front of a greenscreen, so the studio audience can see Bee or Corddry or whoever is the field reporter. The guest this evening was Anderson Cooper, fresh off a two hour interview with Angelina Jolie, who Stewart referred to as the "Bono of hotness."

Before recording the usual check-in with Stephen Colbert, Stewart and Colbert chatted for a bit. Stewart complained about fatigue from raising his two kids, and Colbert responded, "It's like wrestling inexhaustible midgets." As with many of these live tapings, most of the funniest moments are the ones not shown on TV, when hosts like Conan O'Brien or Stewart just ad lib and chat with the audience.

Colbert screwed up the punchline of the check-in segment so they had to record it a second time. Then Stewart recorded the lead-in for the international edition of The Daily Show which airs on CNN International. I saw that a few times while on vacation in E. Europe. It packages a week's worth of Daily Shows into one long Daily Show.

One more item to cross off the NY checklist.

Poof

In the end, the Geniuses at the Apple store couldn't get my hard drive to function enough to recover any data. Being the Geniuses that they were, they also failed to call me to inform me of this fact before they tossed out my old hard drive and replaced it with a new one. I spent a few happy days last week thinking all my data could be recovered, then was hit with the horrific realization that it was all gone when I booted up my computer to find a pristine hard drive.

It turned out that the piece of crap backup program that came with my Lacie Firewire drive hadn't been backing up properly for at least half a year, so a good chunk of my e-mail, music, and photos just evaporated. In this day and age, losing the data on your hard drive is like having a couple robbers walk out with your furniture and music collection. Very depressing. Living in the digital era, it's almost as if nothing happened if it wasn't documented and digitized into pictures, e-mail.

After a week, I've almost gotten my computer back the way it was. After almost five years using a computer, it fits as comfortably as your favorite pair of jeans. If I've failed to return your e-mail recently, know that it's probably because I don't have it anymore. I can't wait until all my data is stored on some remote server and backed up daily by some third party.

If there is any benefit to this, it's that my computer was cleared of the clutter that tends to occur through regular use. I tend to be a packrat in the physical world, and I'm no different with digital assets. If someone stole all my clothing, I'd be devastated, not to mention naked, but in some shadowy corner of my mind I'd be thrilled at the opportunity to rebuild my wardrobe from scratch.

More ado, please

If you're worthy of it, then by all means, further ado.

On the bright side...

After a frantic two days involving about two hundred and eighty seven reboots, it appears that I'll be able to salvage the data from my desktop hard drive. I couldn't be more relieved. Just picture me with tears in my eyes, pounding my fist on my computer's chest, screaming, "Stay with me! Stay with me, damn it!" for hours on end. That's what it's been like. The alternative would have been to consider how much the difference between my last data backup and the current data on my hard drive was worth to me. I was quoted $1,300 for data recovery off my 250 GB hard drive. Brutal. Just another reminder to go give your data backup a hug today. And if you don't have your data backed up, then you're a scarecrow juggling torches.

So I won't have pictures from the trip for a while. Trying to edit photos in Photoshop on this seven year old laptop is like trying to pick an elephant's nose with a human finger. But for basic online tasks, this old clunker is still sufficient, if a mite sluggish.

For the most part, returning after home after a vacation is a depressing, stress-elevating affair. But this transition hasn't been quite as painful as usual (computer difficulties aside). For one thing, New York is the most European of American cities. I don't need a car here and can get most anywhere within the city and within the region through public transportation. It's a city built for walking, and though it doesn't sport as grand a set of monuments to its age as its European predecessors (cathedrals and ruins), it binds together the past, present, and future like no other American city. You can feel the city's age in its oldest buildings and residents (and its old money), all of which coexist with the most modern of skyscrapers and young and ambitious transplants.

A return to NY from E. Europe is also a massive step up in diversity and quality of cuisine and produce. Strolling into Whole Foods yesterday and finding myself before row upon row of immaculate fruits and vegetables, I fell to my knees in reverence like Tom Cruise at the Louvre at the end of The Da Vinci Code. This was the Holy Grail, the royal bloodline of organic aubergines and kale, and it had been hiding in plain view all this time. So organic food may not be the environmental panacea it's often thought to be. As Cypher said in The Matrix, "Ignorance is bliss." I was thinking exactly that as I gorged on fresh papaya yesterday, half of it spilling down my shirt.

[One other checkmark in favor of Whole Foods: the express lanes are designated by signs reading "10 items or fewer" instead of "10 items or less," the ungrammatical yet far more popular expression in grocery stores. I never noticed this until yesterday.]

It's all relative, of course. Just a year ago, after a few weeks in China, I found myself lamenting the high prices and limited selection of fruit here in the States. Actually, I feel that way everytime I return from Chinatown. You can buy excellent produce in Chinatown for about a third of the price of the same stuff at Whole Foods, saving more than enough to cover the cab ride back.

While waiting for a few Geniuses at the Apple Store to operate on my computer yesterday, I walked over to the Film Forum to try to catch the 6:45pm showing of Army of Shadows, the Jean-Pierre Melville movie that had finally found limited distribution in the United States some 37 years after its release. I heard of the movie's U.S. release while in Europe, and though I'd still rather be traveling through Europe right now, one of the secret pleasures in returning home now was being able to catch the movie in its limited run.

I'd have to wait a bit longer, though. A sign posted out front of the theater announced that the 6:45pm show had sold out. I was disappointed but also pleasantly surprised at the good taste of my fellow New Yorkers. Being one of that legion of cineastes who harbors a man-sized crush on Melville's movies, I'd welcome a wider embrace of his movies. Perhaps then we'd see more of them available on DVD or in re-release.

I ended up purchasing a ticket for the 9:30pm showing, and even arriving 15 minutes early for a holiday weekend of showing of this arthouse film left me standing in a long line outside the theater and then scrambling for a seat inside the theater.

Le Samourai is one of my favorite movies. Melville's lean and understated style feels like filmmaking of the purest form. His movies have the body fat of a world-class cyclist and are filled with taciturn characters who wear their existentialism like trenchcoats, with that inimitable Gallic cool.

Army of Shadows lives up to expectations, which sounds like faint praise until you consider that that its Metacritic score is a near-perfect 99. And though it is about the French resistance during WWII, the themes of personal sacrifice and courage felt appropriate to Memorial Day weekend. Coming off my travels through Eastern Europe, where every city I visited had monuments of remembrance to the Holocaust and to those who fought the Nazis, I was primed for a movie focused on the toll the Resistance took on those who joined it.

If there ever was a Hemingway of cinema, someone able to evoke Papa's muscular prose in celluloid, Melville is that director. I re-read three of Hemingway's novels while in Europe, and everytime I do I see narrative flab everywhere, but there was no such concern with Melville.

Few directors could have been better suited to the topic. Melville specializes in his clear-eyed presentation of existential men and women who know they are probably doomed by their choices but accept their fates with a wordless and almost majestic stoicism. This is actually one of Melville's more verbose movies, as several characters speak their internal thoughts over the action, and yet even their inner voices seem tight-lipped. No one will confuse Melville with Linklater.

Melville allows the story to be told through the actions and faces of his characters, and what a fantastic set of faces this movie offers, from Lino Ventura through Simone Signoret. Though he himself was part of the Resistance, Melville is never grandiose or hysterical in his presentation, and so you find that it's your heart that reaches out towards the screen. Recall Steven Spielberg's Munich, an often thrilling movie, yet one which careened off the rails with an awkward, maudlin montage splicing together shots of Eric Bana making love to his wife with flashbacks to the Munich assassinations. It's the type of overstep you never worry about with Melville.

Melville also sprinkles Army of Shadows with welcome doses of humor. In one scene, Ventura and fellow Resistance member Paul Meurisse go to the cinema to see Gone With the Wind. Exiting the theater, Ventura remarks, "The war will be over for the French when they can see this great movie."

Your cinematic drought of 2006 will be over when you can see this great movie. The limited theatrical release schedule is listed here, and I expect to see Criterion issue a DVD sometime in the near future.

Troubles plugging back into the grid

Back from one of my most relaxing vacations ever, and the stress starts immediately. My desktop G5 was not happy that I abandoned her for a month, so a few hours after I booted her up, she froze up. Only a hard power-off generated any response. After that, she refused to boot up at all.

There are few things that could cause me more stress upon arrival home. Maybe finding a child in a basket on my doorstep with a note that begins "Hello daddy." Or discovering my front door unlocked and the entire apartment emptied out. Or having a couple of ninjas crash through my windows and start throwing stars at me. Maybe those events would be more stressful.

But computer failure is high on the list. I could sooner live without hot water (and that''s not an expression since these days my livelihood is tied up in work I do on my desktop). Even narrowing down the culprit (corruption of the O/S) didn't relieve me of my shakes. I tugged my hair and whimpered like an abused dog. If I hadn't been so jet-lagged yesterday, I would have gone down to the new Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in the middle of the night for tech support, or just to find someone to hold my hand. In fact, I was going to do just that when jetlag landed a clean shot to the temple and knocked me out cold.

So it's off to the Apple Store for a copy of DiskWarrior. I'll be saying a few prayers this Sunday.

But if all goes well, expect a return to regularly unscheduled posts here.

Hiatus

In The Matrix, when Neo self-actualizes as the One, the world slows down around him. It's a popular "power" in video games these days, this bullet time effect.

My experience the last two weeks has been the opposite of bullet time. The world seems to have sped up all around me, and I'm still trying to catch up. I've been pulled back and forth from East coast to West coast, had a few big decisions drop into my lap, and been buried under some urgent, late-breaking deadlines. I'm just now starting to come to grips with some major life changes in the offing.

It's starting to take its toll. I locked my friends out of their apartment the other day when I locked the lock they told me not to lock. A few nights ago, I left a tie out to pack the next morning. It sat on that dresser all weekend. My shower had no hot water this morning, a cruel reality that set in slowly, as I stood there au naturel in the shower, my toe held under a stream of cold water like a war prisoner under interrogation. A nasty cold took hold of me somewhere in LA and is in the process of pummeling my immune system, and my body clock has just gone tilt.

All the recent chaos has accelerated the onset of a long-planned hiatus from writing here. I'm not sure how long it will last, but at least a month, one in which I'll be traveling anyway. I considered letting a few people guest blog here for a while, but only for a moment. Having a guest blogger seems as satisfying as going to one of your favorite French restaurants and finding out the chef has been replaced with the chef from the sushi restaurant next door. That's an alternative, not a substitute.

Maintaining a blog can be rewarding. I enjoy hearing from old friends or perfect strangers who stumble across my website while Googling something else, and keeping a rough sequential history of one's thoughts can prove useful (I recently used my weblog to recall when I'd purchased a printer, helping me to complete a warranty claim). When I first started writing here, it was mostly for an audience of far-flung family members, but over the years, the majority of my readers became a silent audience of mostly strangers, and that in turn caused me to shift my tone from that of a personal journal to one of sharing my preoccupations.

Tending to a blog can also be a massive distraction and time-suck (as more than one person has pointed out). I check my traffic stats about once a month, for the most part to make sure I don't go over my bandwidth allotment, but it's fairly clear that frequency of posts and frequency of visits are strongly correlated. The months my traffic takes a big leap forward are always the ones with the most posts. It makes sense. The only sites I visit daily are ones that offer new posts consistently. All others are rendered to my newsreader or neglected for weeks at a time.

The correlation between post frequency and traffic volume can come to feel like a burden, which is silly. But more than that, the last few months, even weeks, I've hit a rut. My mind has rebelled against the off-the-cuff nature of the blog writing, and many posts that I would've tossed up in the past without hesitation have been left in draft form, failing to pass the scrutiny of some phantom editor. Life has been busier, and so site updates have fallen further and further down the priority list.

More than one writer has discussed the conflict between blog writing and their other creative endeavors like fiction writing. Count me a believer, and not just because of inherent conflict in free time. As I have some other types of writing I want to spend time on the next several months, this is a good time to make the break. With a fair amount of travel in my immediate future, I may still use this site as a travelogue, so those of you who enjoy the occasional pic or travel story might wish to poke your head in every now and then (or take a peek at my Flickr photostream). I have no idea if I'll have decent Internet access where I'm headed, but I do tend to fall back on my weblog as a place to post my travel updates to friends and family, if only because it allows those who could care less about my whereabouts to discreetly self-select out.

Eventually, I'll return here. Brain-dumping here is too much of an outlet for a natural introvert like me to keep my written voice quiet for too long. Until then, thanks for reading. Cheers!

Must. Have. Sugar.

Last week I invested in some new running shoes. My previous pair, the Adidas Supernovas, had carried me through the NY Marathon, but only when paired with off-the-shelf insoles. The Supernovas didn't offer much arch support, and without the new insoles they left bruises on my arches. I have really, really flat feet, so I'm prone to overpronation, so to speak.

Fortunately, most motion control running shoes are cheaper than the average running shoe. Most manufacturers' top-of-the-line running shoes aren't motion control models. This time around I didn't want to have to buy separate insoles. I ended up with a pair of Saucony and a pair of New Balance motion control shoes to alternate with. Both had wide toe boxes to accommodate my toe-side-wide flippers.

Though stores let you test shoes out on treadmills or out around the block, you still never know just how well a pair of shoes fits you until you've put a few miles into them, which is why I cruised down the East River Park to the Brooklyn Bridge last Friday afternoon. The weather has been erratic lately, but on my return trip the sun was strong. Back at my apartment, I had to sit for a long time to cool off before jumping into the shower. I hate getting out of the shower while my core temp is still high and sweating some more. By the time I'd dressed, I didn't have time for dinner before catching a showing of The Odd Couple down on Broadway.

While waiting for the subway uptown, I bought a roll of SweeTarts and a tiny bag of gummy bears, two of my favorite candies. During the show, as Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick mugged on stage, I snuck one candy after another into my mouth, trying to chew discreetly. By intermission, I'd consumed all my sweets. You medheads can probably sense where this horror story is headed.

After the show let out, about 10:45pm or so, the plan was to grab dinner. My friend got called back into work, though, so I walked her back to her office and then headed out in search of food. A bit past 11:00pm, another friend called and said a bunch of folks were congregating at Katz's Deli for food and drinks in half an hour. Could I wait and join them there for a meal?

My stomach wasn't rumbling, so I agreed. As I walked towards the nearest subway stop, I started to feel hot inside, an odd sensation on such a cool evening. I pulled off my jacket, but it didn't help. I started to sweat, at first a little, and then a lot. I've never sweat like that in my life. Then my head started to spin, and my legs went weak. I could barely stand up, and at each street corner I held onto lampposts for dear life. What was happening to me?

My only thought was that I probably needed food. I'd bonked on a bike before, but it felt nothing like this. I staggered into the next restaurant I saw. The name of the place escapes me. A red lantern with a Japanese character on it was hanging out front, and I practically fell through the front door, a few smokers out front shooting quizzical looks my way. The hostess inside gave a start when she saw me, perhaps because I looked like I'd just emerged from four hours in a sauna. I signaled for 1 with my index finger, and she escorted me to the bar, where I sat and put my head down on the counter.

The bartender brought the usual Japanese restaurant amenities. I've never been so thankful for a wet towel, which I used to wipe my face and neck. I couldn't stop sweating, and now my hands were shaking. I ordered a coke, then called Alan and Sharon. Thankfully Sharon was up, and when I told her what was going on, she calmly diagnosed hypoglycemia and recommended something with sugar, like a fruit juice. When my coke arrived, I chugged it like I was chasing something awful, then immediately ordered another. A few appetizers dropped in front of me, and they disappeared just as quickly. By the time my meal was over, I'd stopped sweating and no longer felt like passing out.

Let's rewind to the start. After the run, my blood sugar was low. Then I shocked my system with the candy, and the sugar overload caused my body to release insulin. By the time the show was over, my body was entering insulin shock. I only know this now because Derek told me that researchers study hypoglycemia by doing roughly what I did to myself, except they give patients glucose drinks instead of SweeTarts and gummy bears. Self-experimentation isn't all that safe when done outside a controlled environment. Passing out on a dark street late at night in NYC? Not priceless.

Diving in Grand Turk

NOTE: As I write this, out my window here in New York snow is dumping onto the streets and the thermometer only shows 40 degrees. Last Friday it was sunny and in the fifties. About twenty minutes ago, I was in my running shorts, about to head out for a jog. The weather is having a schizophrenic fit.

This past weekend, Dave and I grabbed a discount fare for a some diving in Grand Turk. Three years ago, Dave had visited and dove at Grand Turk, one of the Turks and Caicos Islands, north of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

The first thing a New Yorker notices upon landing in Grand Turk is the languor. People stand around, leaning against walls or sitting on the ground, and it seems as if they're all waiting for something to happen, though they're in no particular hurry either way. In New York, even the panhandlers are aggressive and in a hurry. If all the cities of the world were grouped at the start line at one point, New York sprinted off and has never stopped, while Grand Turk jogged a few stops, then strolled to the side of the track to lie down in the grass to watch the clouds floating by. On Sunday morning we set our watches ahead an hour, but by the time the trip ended, my watch was probably five or six hours behind.

Perhaps the laid-back pace of life arises from the metronomic refrain of the surf lapping at the shore. It is set for all of time at a soothing largo, and at night it would soothe me into slumber. The perfect weather this time of year didn't hurt. With the sunshine and a light breeze of warmed spring air, no one's in a hurry to get indoors. Wherever you are, that's a good place to be.

The people of Grand Turk, many of them Haitians, also prize spontaneity and a live-in-the-moment attitude over certainty and planning. The next day's schedule at the dive shop seemed to change from moment to moment, and ask a question twice and you're likely to receive a different answer each time. At restaurants, inevitably the first thing I ordered would be unavailable. Dave and I tried to order lobster quesadillas at one restaurant as they were listed on the chalkboard as that day's special. The waitress said they didn't have any lobster. When we pointed out the board, she glanced over and said, "Hmm." Every day, for breakfast, I tried to order the crab and avocado wrap, listed as a specialty. Each day, I was told that avocado would come in the next day, but it never did.

The only time I'd been diving before was in 2003, when I got certified on the Great Barrier Reef. I dove there and in the Galapagos, but hadn't touched thought about diving at all in the years since. I couldn't even find my PADI certification cards for this trip, but fortunately the dive shop was able to look up my info so that I could rent tanks. Dave, on the other hand, has been on some 90 odd dives, and he also owned all his own equipment.

On Sunday morning I took a quick refresher course, relearning how to set up my equipment, handle basic emergency situations underwater, and control my buoyancy. Then I joined Dave and a couple from California for our first dive, at Finnbar's Reef. One of the attractions of diving at Grand Turk is how close the reef and ocean floor wall are to the shore. A five minute boat ride and we were there. I'm not a huge fan of living aboard a boat or taking long, choppy rides out to a dive site.

Diving, like spelunking, has a strong mental component. I'm no yogi, but putting in the regulator and dropping into the ocean feels to me like entering a meditative state. If your mind doesn't want to go to that calm place, your body won't follow. It's not a sport for the easily panicked.

My first open water dive ever, on the Great Barrier Reef, was in really choppy waters, on a rainy day. We jumped in and all grabbed hold of a rope, leaving our snorkels in while waiting for our classmates. The waves kept crashing into us, and when one particularly dense wave hit, the woman next to me, a jittery middle-aged Londoner, suddenly lost her grip on the rope. In her panic, she grabbed onto me and pulled me down into the water.

I immediately choked down a mouthful or two of ocean water. Her hands were all over me, tugging at my hair, mask, BCD, snorkel. My mask came off and I couldn't see. I gave her a light shove to free myself, then tried to get my mask back on. The waves kept pounding me, and I kept swallowing water. In a second between waves, I spotted the rope, too far away now for me to reach. At that moment, I decided I couldn't wait any longer and just put my regulator in, cleared some air out of my BCD, and dropped into the ocean.

With salt water in my mask, I couldn't see much. My heart rate was high, my breathing quick and shallow, and my first few breaths drew nothing. They'd taught us this in class, that you had to breathe slow and deep to pull oxygen out of the tank. I closed my eyes, let my body relax, and drew in the longest breath I could, then exhaled as slowly as possible. And again. And again. And finally, the air came, and I could hear my heartbeat slowing. As I sank down, one foot after another, the water around me grew still. Once I felt in control again, I cleared my mask and swam back to the rope. My first time out, and perhaps my most valuable real world dive experience.

In Grand Turk, I was reminded of the lesson twice. Once, Dave dropped down a few feet, then ascended again. I asked him after the dive what had happened, and he told me that he didn't feel completely right upon entering the water, so he popped back up to straighten his head out. Another time, our divemaster Mackie couldn't clear his ears, so he ascended almost as soon as he'd hit the ocean floor. It took an ascent all the way to the surface before his ears cleared. Experienced divers know it's better to straighten yourself out at the surface then to try and do it down at the ocean floor.

Almost immediately after dropping down to the reef at Finnbars, we encountered a sea turtle feeding. As we flocked around to watch it, I heard a metallic tapping. Our divemaster Mackie (a spitting image of Dusty Baker, but with a Haitian accent) was tapping his tank and pointing into another nook in the reef wall. I swam over to find another sea turtle, even larger than the first. Later we spotted a lobster hiding in a dark nook. On the next dive, at Aquarium, I found a half dozen or so barracuda waiting for me at the anchor line. The water in Grand Turk was a dazzling aquamarine, with glass-like visibility.

[All the sweet pics here are courtesy of Emanuel, one of our guides, who had a Nikon D70 in a really high-end housing with two flash arms. If you're serious about underwater dive photography, this seems to be the way to go, to put a serious camera inside an underwater housing. I've seen plenty of photographs from point-and-shoots and cheaper underwater film cameras, and it just doesn't seem worthwhile. The cost of high-end underwater photography gear will give your wallet the bends, though. Emanuel estimated he'd sunk some 6 to 7 grand in his setup, and with each different lens he'd have to buy a new dome. Dave and I purchased a CD of 25 of his pics to contribute to his effort to recoup the value of his camera equipment.]

That's me, checking out a sea turtle.

Heading back to the line for our decompression stop, Dave and I met up with a group of barracuda.

The next day, we dove twice in the morning. Our first dive was at a site called Tunnels for its two swim-throughs. It was my first time navigating through a tunnel, and it was amusing, like playing in an underwater playground.

Me, popping out of a tunnel.

Our final dive was at Coral Gardens. On the boat ride out, Emanuel told us to prepare to meet one of Grand Turk's local celebrities. As soon as we swam over the edge of the wall, he popped up to greet us. He turned out to be Alexander, a friendly grouper. We were able to pet him, hold our hands over his mouth, and cradle him like a puppy. Dave even pulled out his regulator to give him a smooch.

Greeting Alexander the grouper.

Dave pulled out his reg to give Alexander a smooch.

Up on top of the wall, another grouper named Pretty Boy had staked out his plot. Grouper are territorial by nature, and Pretty Boy had chased Alexander down off the shelf. We spent a good amount of time playing around with Alexander, and without realizing it, he pulled us further and further down the wall. Emanuel finally flashed the signal for us to ascend a bit. I looked at my computer and saw that we were down at 120 feet.

Before our decompression stop, Dave pointed at what appeared to be some dark fern arms poking out of the sand. I shrugged. He tried to think of how to explain what he meant, then went down to the sand and wrote EELS. I looked again and realized he was right. The short, dark strands poking out of the sand were tiny eels.

We wanted to do an afternoon dive, but because we were flying out at 11:15 the next morning, Mackie and Emanuel advised against it. We might have a bit too much nitrogen in the system to fly so soon. Instead, we took the boat out around the southern tip of Grand Turk to Gibbs Cay. Along the way, we stopped to free dive for conch. They scuttled across the floor of the sea, sometimes disguised by the seaweed clinging to their shells.

In a swimming pool, I don't ever have to clear my ears when diving down to ten feet or so. Here, diving down to 15 to 20 feet to grab conch felt like inflating my brain against my skull. The pressure in my ears and head were excruciating. The other issue was that I always had to shoot to the surface after grabbing a conch because I was out of air. We grabbed about six conch, just as much as we planned to eat, and headed on to Gibbs Cay.

Mackie showed us how to clean a conch. First you punch a hole through the shell, near the wider end of the shell, on the opposite side of the opening. Then you use a knife to prod the conch out the other end, so that you can grab it and pull it out. Outside its shell, the conch is an alien looking creature, like a clam or mussel, but with a more complex shape. The conch has a sharp tooth or claw that it uses to drag itself along the sea floor.

The part of the conch we ate was the white flesh, with the consistency of clam. We chopped that portion up and mixed it with diced tomatoes, habaneros, onions, and red peppers. We topped it off with fresh lime juice and a few drops of Tabasco and sealed it in a tupperware container to make conch ceviche.

While we waited for the lime juice to work its magic, we waded into the water with some small fish to feed the local stingrays. They'd already been circling just off the shore in anticipation. The touch of a ray's skin is a bit like liquid velvet. Dave and I weren't prepared for just how aggressive these rays were. We were flanked on all sides, and they hit us high and low. Rays are fairly docile creatures, but those eyes, mounted on top of its body and staring without emotion off to either side, are chilling. Seeing one come towards me was like being stalked by one of the tripods in War of the Worlds.

A few times, I nearly lost a finger. How do stingrays see where to bite when their mouths are underneath their bodies and their eyes are above? Maybe they don't, as I learned. While underwater feeding one, I felt a sharp pain in my back. Another stingray had tried to climb over my back to steal the fish, and on its way over had taken a bite out of my back. I hadn't realized that stingrays had teeth, but now I did. Dave and Emanuel saw my back and seemed startled. The overzealous ray had left a fist-sized bloody hickey on my back.

Later, after a few Presidente beers on the beach, our conch ceviche was ready. That was one tasty dish. While snacking, another visitor arrived, a lemon shark. We waded back in with our snorkels and masks for an underwater peek. For some reason, seeing sharks while diving or snorkeling never seems too dangerous, perhaps because they tend to keep their distance. Of course, the only really dangerous shark I've seen underwater is a hammerhead in the Galapagos. If I saw a tiger shark or a great white, I'd pee my wetsuit.

The only thing we missed out on were the humpback whales, who usually migrate through from late February through early April. They hadn't been spotted in the last few days, and since Dave and I were the only ones interested in going out, the dive shop felt it wasn't economically worthwhile to attempt a trip.

I'd like to try and dive at least once a year from here on out. It would save me the trouble of relearning all my skills each time out. For you divers looking for a good dive site, Grand Turk is recommended. Wear sunscreen on your back, though, so you don't end up looking like a cooked lobster, like me. Dave also suggested diving at Bonaire, Curacao, and Thailand, all of which I'll have to try at some point. For our next dive trip, I'm not sure of where to go, but probably not South Africa.

After seeing marine life up close and personal in the ocean, aquariums seem so dull.

Deep Note

These past few months, I've been staring at a computer screen for so many hours that my vision is starting to go. I find myself wearing my glasses more and more often, and though they are so mild as to be almost cosmetic, it still feels like a defeat. The default font size in Final Cut Pro is tiny, but thus far, I've refused to give in and blow it up. A few times during the day, I go and stare out the window and try to focus on something far off in the distance. Inevitably, my visual target remains blurry, much the way some childhood memories become with each passing year.

***

I try to refrain from political ranting here, but it does amaze me how much our Prez seems to get away with. Even when he's caught in bald-faced lies, even when he's wiretapping us, even when the iconic image of the Iraq war the world over is of a prisoner being tortured, the next day it always seems to be back to normal (V for Vendetta, which I saw last Thursday night at the Lincoln Square IMAX, is more than a bit absurd, but that any of it even has any resonance with the current administration is outrageous). Perhaps there's some sort of political equilibrium point, such that a constant onslaught of negative news tends to diminish each in significance, the way that most people in the world rate themselves as roughly equal in happiness, despite the wide disparity in living conditions.

Well, "incompetent" is at least a start.

***

An alcohol concentration of 60% or higher seems to be the magic number for off-the-shelf hand sanitizers.

***

I know kung fu. Not quite. But sort of.

***

Wake-up calls from Maria Sharapova? Did anyone else try these or was I the only doofus? This supplied some of the motivation I needed on my voyage back from graveyard shift hours to normal hours. Unfortunately these seem to have been discontinued.

***

Tonight I went to the premiere of Lucky Number Slevin at the Ziegfeld Theater. I hadn't seen a movie at the Ziegfeld before; it's gorgeous. The screen isn't as massive as that of Cinerama, but the seats and interior are much more cozy and plush, with a classy old school styling, and the sound system is first rate. Definitely the nicest theater I've visited in NYC, though the Lincoln Square IMAX is impressive as well, more for its technical specifications.

Back to the movie. I saw it at Sundance in January, but what I'd forgotten is that the soundtrack is by J. Ralph, his first effort for the silver screen. He's most well-known from his song "One Million Miles Away," featured in the famous Volkswagen Jetta commercial "Big Day" (Quicktime). You can hear "One Million Miles Away" and other J. Ralph tunes at his website (which allows you to stream most of his tunes) or on his MySpace page (which only streams four of his songs).

His Lucky Number Slevin soundtrack is ear-catching. For some reason, he appears to have something against Amazon.com as the soundtrack is an exclusive to Barnes and Noble. It releases next Tuesday.

As I was seated and waiting for the movie to start, my phone rang. I thought it was Scott, who'd promised to call when he'd made it into the theater, so I immediately picked up and said, "I'm in row F, seat 12."

"Um, I'm looking for Eugene Wei?"

"Yep, I'm in row F, seat 12, I just stood up. You see me waving?"

"Uh, no. Actually, I'm calling from ___, and I wanted to chat with you about your application. I'm a professor there."

"Oh. Oops. Oh my gosh. I'm so sorry."

We went on to have an over-the-phone interview in the theater, while throngs of people milled about socializing and looking for their seats. Thankfully these things never start on time, and everyone was absorbed with scanning the theater for any of the many stars in the movie. My mind was racing and the environment was distracting. Maybe I should have postponed the call. Too late now; I'll be second-guessing myself for a few weeks.

He seemed like a really friendly guy. His specialty was sound, and he'd done lots of work for THX. I told him my favorite THX trailer, other than the original Deep Note (WMV), was the one featuring The Simpsons, the one that ends with Grampa Simpson standing up and shouting, "Turn it up! Turn it up!". I've never been able to find that on DVD, though he said it was out there somewhere. The THX Deep Note is one of my ten favorite sounds in the world. When I hear it, I just stand up and raise my arms in joy, always embarrassing for whoever is with me at the movie theater.

Someday, at the symphony, I'd love it if the orchestra, just before beginning the concert, all joined in to play the THX Deep Note, maybe before playing something like Shostakovich's 5th.

APC hack

This hack may only be of use in Manhattan, where the lines at the post office for human post office clerks are never short.

Much to any tech-saavy customers delight, he USPS joined the customer self-service movement a while back by installing machines/kiosks called Automated Postal Centers at many of their branches. By following directions on a touch screen, you can weigh letters and packages and purchase postage using your credit or debit card. This saves customers the trouble of waiting in line for their most common mailing needs.

The reliability of these machines, though is poor, and the glitch in the interface is that the APC often allows you to go all the way to the end of the process before informing you that, due to one error or another, you have to go to wait in line for a clerk after all.

When that happens, I've found a workaround that seems to be effective most of the time. From the opening screen, instead of hitting the "Mail a letter or package" button, press the button that says "Look Up Information." Then, press "Look Up Domestic Mailing Costs." Weigh your letter or package, type in the destination zipcode, and the machine will tell you the postage. But then it will also offer an option to purchase that postage. You can then proceed to purchase the stamp with your credit/debit card.

For some reason, that method always works, even when proceeding down that "Mail a letter or package" branch of the menu fails.

Feeling the blahs

The night before the Oscars, I became light-headed, then feverish. During the night, I alternated between feeling like my body was about to burst into flames, and then shivering under every blanket in my apartment. By the time I finally fell asleep, the sun had been up for hours. In about 9 hours, folks were coming over for the Oscars, and if the phone hadn't been so far from my bed I think I would've called it off. I had visions of myself at my Oscars party, suddenly passing out and crashing through a glass coffee table, and then the screen would go dark and cut to the opening credits of House, with the cool theme music by Massive Attack.

Sometime during the night, my radiators stopped working, for no apparent reason. It was about 30 degrees outside when they stopped, and it was about 30 degrees inside my apartment by the time I dozed off.

It felt as if the door buzzer rang the instant I slipped into slumber. It was the FreshDirect delivery guy, dropping off all the groceries I'd ordered to use in preparing my Oscar spread. After putting all the stuff in the fridge, I tried to slip back into bed for one more hour of sleep, but it was done. Once my body sees sunshine, it's tough to force into sleep mode.

Usually, I try to prep food related to the best picture noms, but this year had me stumped. Should I pass out packs of Camels so we could all smoke through the night like Edward Murrow? Pop pills like Johnny Cash? No, that would fail to distinguish this night from any other night out clubbing in NYC. The only food that came to mind were the canned beans from Brokeback Mountain, so I settled on a main of Chicken and White Bean Chili. For this recipe, I had to char eight Anaheim chilies. I'd never even heard of this type of chili before, but fortunately Whole Foods had exactly ten of them left on Saturday afternoon.

While charring half the chilies on my gas stove and the other half in the broiler, my smoke alarm went off. As old as that sucker looks, it puts out an earsplitting, panic-inducing noise, like a robot screaming in agony. I was certain I'd woken up everyone in the entire building, and everyone on my block for that matter. I ran to my windows, but they were sealed for the winter so I couldn't pry them open quickly. I brought my air filter into the kitchen and turned it on high. All to no avail. Finally, looking at that smoke alarm, which, by the way, I couldn't reach because it was fourteen feet off the ground, I saw that it was hard wired into the wall. So I flipped all my circuit breakers, and it the smoke alarm went silent.

It was now that I recalled that the super had once told me I probably shouldn't use the broiler. Now I knew why. I stood there reveling in the silence, then went back to charring the chilies, in total darkness.

On to the Oscars, the show everyone complains about and yet still watches. With everyone bashing the Oscars, I feel sheepish admitting I look forward to the Oscars every year, though some of it has to do with the fact that there's always an Oscar pool on the line. It's the same reason March Madness is so popular. In fact, if no one gambled on March Madness, I wouldn't be surprised it lost over half of its appeal.

I don't know about that billion viewer claim for the Oscars. Who came up with that figure, and how? Even if everyone in the United States watched, and these are folks in the right time zones, that still leaves some three quarters of a billion viewers to backfill. And this year, the number of U.S. viewers looks to have been roughly 39 million. Maybe that billion is not the figure for people watching live.

The red carpet interviews, I concede, are dull. While laying out food, I stopped to listen to one or two of Isaac Mizrahi's interviews on the red carpet. He was so amusing in Unzipped, but he's a terrible red carpet interviewer. He loves the sound of his own voice too much and always seems locked in a battle for attention with his interviewee.

This year's production was one of the shortest I can recall, clocking it at just under three hours and a half, and yet it felt sluggish. Jon Stewart came out nervous in the opening monologue, a few jokes failed to kill, and awkward silence seemed to grab a chokehold. I enjoy Stewart, but this crowd, a subdued one, is vastly different than the fratboy audience on The Daily Show, the one which whoops and hollers every time the Applause sign lights up. On The Daily Show, Stewart can simply show a clip of Bush speaking, then wait while laughter pours in. His material was solid, but the audience's tepid reaction to much of it dampened his mojo and the show's momentum.

The Oscar crowd likes to drive in the center lane, which is why Billy Crystal is such a popular and successful host. You can take your jabs at the arm, but don't leave a bruise, and take too many shots at the folks in the crowd and they will stop laughing with you. The type of humor that works well at the Oscars is not the brand that is Chris Rock or Jon Stewart specialty. The Bjork-Dick Cheney joke was just right. It was political, but only tangentially, and poked fun at the entertainment industry, but only their clothing. Contrast that with, say, the joke about pulling down the giant Oscars statue so democracy could bloom in Hollywood. Or the joke about Scientology, which probably didn't get laughs from John Travolta and company. Johnny Carson was the prototype for the perfect Oscar host, but I can't think of anyone like him out there today.

Stewart's comic timing did hurt himself with a slightly mis-tuned comic timing. When a joke failed to hit, he'd fill in the silence with a follow-on comment, reaching for the bounceback laugh. "I'm a loser," he offered at one point, but the audience didn't bite. At least he tried. David Letterman got panned for his hosting effort, and he's no worse for the wear. Stewart will be fine, and he'll be able to mine his hosting gig for some laughs when he returns to the Daily Show Wednesday. They don't make comedians check all their sharp objects at the door on that show.

My nomination for the perfect host to restore some energy into the Oscars remains Jim Carrey. If they'd just unleash him, he'd be Billy Crystal but with a chance of broadening the appeal of the show to include some younger viewers.

Other thoughts during the evening, tape-delayed by a night so you can TiVo-scroll through all the bad bits I'm going to blame on my illness:

• The opening pre-recorded montage, with intros of past Oscar hosts, had a few duds. The bits with Steve Martin's kids weren't that funny, but the Mel Gibson bit from the set of Apocalypto almost rescued it. Mel may be crazy, but at least he hasn't lost his sense of humor.
• Half of the Oscars production lives and dies with the cutaway shots. When Stewart made a crack about piracy and how many actresses could barely afford enough dress to cover their breasts, the show immediately cut to a pregnant Rachel Weisz. Probably a coincidence, but I was taken aback. Very un-Oscar-like.
• On the other hand, the cutaways to Clooney were priceless. Gil Cates likely had a camera trained on Clooney the entire night, a wise move on his part. With picture in picture technology, shouldn't all viewers have the choice of having one of several stars always open in a subwindow on the television screen? Where was the shot of George Clooney when Three 6 Mafia gave him thanks? Where were the cutaways during their performance of "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp"? There's one person who must enjoy the Oscars every year, and that's the person who sits in a studio and sees the feed from every camera in the theatre. That guy's got some good stories.
• Three 6 Mafia - terrific acceptance speech, which began with them walking to the wrong microphone on stage. That was an undeniably catchy tune. The scene in Hustle & Flow, when that song finally comes together, had me grinning, and, along with "Wings" from Brokeback Mountain, "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp" was the most memorable musical number from the year in movies. I wish I had a handle like "Juicy J" or "Crunchy Black." Three 6 gave props to everyone, even Gil Cates. Speaking of which, I want to give a shout out to Clooney here. George baby, you're the daddy. Let's work together, baby.
• Another group that looked like they were having a good time were the four crazy French dudes accepting the Oscar for March of the Penguins. The stuffed penguins they were holding were dressed better than they were; something tells me those guys will be paying some damage fees on those rental tuxes. Two of them weren't wearing bowties, and another's bowtie had gone vertical by the time he spoke. They sounded like they'd had a few bottles of vino prior to arriving. Leave it to the French to know how to live.
• One reason the Oscars always fall short of expectations are the dull thank-you lists that are most acceptance speeches. It always feels a bit political and insidery to thank producers, studios, publicists, and so on and so forth. Not all thank yous are dull, but the bar needs to be higher. A good example was Robert Altman. He noted that he couldn't possibly thank everyone he'd worked with, so he thanked only his doctor, Jodie Kaplan. That woman might be keeping him alive. She meets the bar.
• Robert Altman had a full heart transplant?!? What the hell? How does one keep that under wraps? Amazing. Sadly, the first movie that leaped into my head when he revealed his secret was Untamed Heart. I felt bad for Altman because he'd never won an Oscar for himself prior to this, but people are mistaken when they disparate the Academy Honorary Award as a consolation prize. The Academy may get it wrong in one year on any one award, but it's tough to be wrong when you're honoring someone with a lifetime achievement award. How many people in the audience last night could even hope to win one someday? Nicholson. Maybe Streep. Possibly Spielberg.
• At first, I thought, "How rude, they're playing music and the winner hasn't even begun his/her speech!" Then it became clear that they were playing music to accompany every speech. Not a good idea, and sure to go the way of the "awards presentations in the audience for lesser categories" from last year's broadcast.
• If you hadn't seen Crash and just watched the interpretive dance segment occurring behind Kathleen "Bird" York during the singing of "In the Deep," you'd think Crash was a zombie movie.
• It must be satisfying to win the loudest round of applause during the In Memoriam segment. Someone like Jack Nicholson must sleep well just knowing that someday, when he finally knocks off, he'll be the last one shown in that segment, to rapturous applause.
• When Dolly Parton came on stage to sing "Travelin' Thru", I thought she was introducing The Corpse Bride. It's a cruel industry that won't let its ladies age gracefully. She's 60 for goodness sakes.
• Lots of fake bakes in Hollywood. I can't say I'm a fan of the bronzed look. Some of the women, if they'd been naked and bald, would've resembled life size Oscar statues.
• Not Jennifer Garner, though. She nearly did a face plant, but give her a break, she must still be adjusting to the cantilevering forces brought into play by her post-pregnancy figure.
• All the next-day outfit analysis seems to have scared actors out of taking any sartorial risks, which is too bad. These people are gorgeous and wealthy and successful. At least let us believe, if just for a night, that they might make an occasional fashion misstep like the rest of us. The one time she attended, Bjork was adorable when she was describing in an interview how a friend of hers had made that swan dress. Now we may never have such moments again, and that's a loss for all of us. That said, after Reese won for best actress, it would have been marvelous if Charlize Theron had untied that bow on her dress last night to reveal a hawk. Then Charlize could've whistled, signaling the hawk to fly to the stage to claw Reese on the face and fly off with her statue. No one would be saying anything about Charlize's dress today if she'd done that.
• One fun way to liven your group during an Oscars episode is to compete to shout out the names of all the movies referenced in the Oscar montages as they flash on screen. If you were able to name all the westerns and film noirs, well then you're a true movie buff. Or just old. Or probably both.
• Jack Nicholson can read from the teleprompter and it's still entertaining. Maybe he could just come out as the presenter of every award, each time with a different partner.
• Paul Haggis once was known as the creator of Walker, Texas Ranger. Now he'll be introduced as writer of one best picture winner, director of another. Now that's a Cinderella man.

So Crash won best picture. I discussed my feelings on the movie last year. The movie has an emotional power in many of its vignettes, and some of the cuts are quite clever, but intellectually the movie felt so facile on the issue of racism that it failed to achieve a best picture type of transcendence in my mind. A movie about racism should draw blood, but Crash felt more like a comforting massage, an anti-racism message that had been spiked with sugar to to go down smoothly rather than to stick in the throat the way a breakthrough social message movie might. Perhaps it's a geographic issue. L.A.'s unique geographical layout and racial history may be adding a layer of local resonance that those of us who've never lived there can't appreciate.

Brokeback Mountain, my pick for best picture among the five nominees, manages to seize your heart without tearing open your chest to massage it by hand. It works at you from the inside out, and by movie's end you understand why Heath Ledger chokes the life out of every word, because his story isn't "that gay cowboy" story. No, as it turns out, we'd heard this tale before.

There's a brief cutaway during Brokeback Mountain. Those who've seen the movie will know which one I refer to, and so I can discuss it relatively spoiler-free. Still, skip the next stretch if you haven't seen the movie and haven't read the short story.

The cutaway in the movie leaves much up to the audience's mind. Did what happened in the cutaway truly happen? Is it a cutaway to a Ennis's imagination, or is it the work of an omniscient narrator, so to speak? I checked back in the short story by Annie Proulx to see how she handled it.

In the short story, Ennis hears the news from Lureen. She tells the story of how it happened. But Ennis disagrees.

"No, he [Ennis] thought, they got him with the tire iron."

Later, when Ennis is speaking to Jack's parents, Jack's father says to Ennis, "He had some half-baked idea the two a you was goin a move up here, build a log cabin, and help me run this ranch and bring it up. Then this spring he's got anaother one's goin a come up here with him and build a place and help run the ranch, some ranch neighbor a his from down in Texas. He's going a split up with his wife and come back here. So he says. But like most a Jack's ideas it never come to pass."

The next line refers to Ennis's thoughts: "So now he knew it had been the tire iron."

So I suspect the movie cutaway is meant to reflect Ennis's belief as to how it went down, as in the short story. We don't ever know the truth, and by that point in the movie it doesn't matter, because one way or another, they'd already broken both Ennis and Jack.

The movie that most moved me last year, however, was not nominated for any Oscars. It wasn't even made for theaters originally, but for TV, which may have disqualified it from the Best Foreign Film category. The movie is La Meglio gioventù, or The Best of Youth. The miniseries aired in four episodes in Italy, and in the U.S. it is split into two DVDs of three hours a piece. Everyone will mention the length of this movie when recommending it to you, but for good reason. We balk at the thought of sitting through six hours of any form of entertainment. But at the end of The Best of Youth, I felt the sorrow one feels after turning the final page on a long but beloved novel. If NBC's coverage of the city of Turin and Italy itself during this year's Winter Olympics left you dissatisfied, and even if it didn't, please do devote six hours of your life to The Best of Youth.

I leave this year's Oscars with this question: Is it really hard out there for a pimp? This sounds like a job for Steven Levitt.

And the winner is...

...Wendy, for best performance in my Oscar pool. Out of 21 major categories, she missed only 3, nailing all 8 major categories and one of the three short categories, scoring 37 in my modified scoring system, which assigns 2 pts per feature length film category and 1 pt each for the three shorts categories. A dominating performance. She e-mailed me just the day before to note that she always won her Oscar pool, and then her entry was the last to show up in my pool and the last one standing. She was like Babe Ruth pointing out to center field before the home run. Please step up here and post your acceptance speech, Wendy. Unlike the Academy, we won't put a time limit on you, nor will we play distracting music while you type. We want to learn your secrets.

Of the folks who attached an entry fee to their ballots, though, yours truly eeked out a win by 2 pts over Eleanor, 30 - 28. I thought about sending you the moolah, Wendy, but as you know, it's hard out here for a pimp.

Portrait of the blogger as a young man

Cleaning up old junk, I found a class journal from what I think was first or second grade, in September 1981. Here's the first entry, with typos and grammatical mistakes reproduced faithfully:

Dear Dad,
Can I use the tv today. I'm watching the Greatest American hero. I know you don't like that show but I think you'll let me watch it. Today we had indoor reces. It wasn't fun but we could draw.

If I were a rich man:

If I were rich I would buy ten batteries a year for electronic games. I would buy some wood and build a secret fort with a fence around it. Then I'd buy thing to put inside our fort like a telephone, things to put on our window for holidays.

More profound musings:

When I grow up I would like to be a scientist because you might discover something and become famous! If you bring a book about how you make a formula you might make something that can make a garden grow in ten seconds! I wish someday that you will grow to be a scientist.

Young gourmand:

My favorite cold or hot lunch is a drink or juice such as lemonade, orange juice, grape juice, icea cream, sodapop and a popsicle. My foods are pizza, taco, tetor tots, lobster, shrimp, lazonia, corn, corn soup, fruits, chicken, spaghetti, and ashed potato. Because they are delicious.

Fierce competitor at an early age:

When its my birthday I like to play fun games like musical chair, pin the tail on the donkey, hide and seek, hot potato, and tugawar, When you win.

More on food:

My favorite meal is Popeye's chicken and taco flavored pizza, spagheti with meatballs. Because they'r always hot and sizzling and they all taste diffrent. When I see them my mouth waters like crazy! Do like them?

Not a future winter Olympian:

My favorite winter sport is snowmobiling.

I've never been snowmobiling. Here, I express an entrepreneurial bent:

If I were ten feet tall I would try to get a bird and sell it for ten bucks.

Early signs of OCD? No wonder I got beat up on the playground:

I hate when the lunchroom is so noisy that my food can't digest. And I like it when Mr. green tells them to be quiet. I smell the foods of other people when I'm finished.

A Bug's Death

This parasitic wasp story is the hot story on the web, and it is indeed fascinating and lurid.

Speaking of bugs, yesterday I had to grab a quick dinner before running out to give a short talk, so I stopped at Republic in Union Square for the first time. Two bites into my noodle soup, a ladybug floated up to the top. I know they're supposed to be good luck and all, but not when their corpses are bobbing up and down in my broth. A surprised waiter took the bowl and had a chat with another waiter nearby about where it might have come from, all within earshot of me, the horrified customer. Turns out the ladybugs come from the bathroom. I got out of there before my mind could dwell on how the ladybug had journeyed from bathroom to kitchen.

Cute, when they're not in your soup

The Maria Antoinette trailer in HD.

Make sure to patch your Firefox.

Yet more Brokeback remix action. Where's Frodo and Sam? Aragorn and Legolas? Agent Smith giving a lapdance to Morpheus in The Matrix?

Zap

There seems to be a cutoff point at about 40 degrees Farenheit. Below that, when I run on the treadmill at the gym, I seem to build up static electricity from the rubbing of my soles against the belt. Above that temperature I'm okay. Today was in the high 30's, and it was really dry in the gym.

This morning, I'd run about two miles on the treadmill when I reached for the towel hanging on the handrail. My hand brushed the rail and a powerful electric shock went through my body (no exaggeration, I think I spied an arc of lightning between my nipples), so strong that it went through my headphones to my iPod sitting in the drinkholder and seemingly shorted it out. After much panicked button mashing, I managed to reset my iPod and bring it back to life. That had never happened before.

After that I tried to ground myself every couple of steps, but that blew my mental concentration. Yet another reason I hate running on a treadmill.

Sundance Part II

A few more pics in my 2006 Sundance set on Flickr.

***

Immediately upon entering any of the Park City venues, I quickly scan the theater and read the situation like a quarterback trying to read the Cover 2. Which seats are open, and which are filled? What size groups are moving down which aisles, and what section of the theater will they head to? Which rows, based on where the ushers are positioned and which seats are filled, are the Reserved rows (this is like reading the stance and position of the safety)? Which side of the theater is the microphone located, indicating where the directors and stars will take Q&A and which entrance they're likely to walk in?

***

The snow on the slopes this year was fabulous. It snowed at least every other day, and so the slopes were covered with fresh powder. Utah snow, for some metereological reason unknown to me, is the most perfect ski powder. Perhaps its the aridity, or the altitude (Park City's elevation falls just shy of 7,000 ft.), or some combination thereof. Regardless, the powder is fluffy and forgiving.

The other joy of snowboarding during Sundance is the emptiness of the resorts. The pumped up lodging rates during the festival drive most skiiers to other slopes for the week. On Tuesday, after Jason and Jamie had left and before my second half companions had arrived, I went boarding at Park City resort. For three straight runs, I didn't see a single other person, and I rode up the lift by myself each time, feeling a bit guilty each time I greeted the guy working the lift, as if I was the only reason he had to come to work that day to stand around in the cold.

***

After the screening of Thank You For Smoking, Jason mentioned that the cut during the Katie Holmes-Aaron Eckhart sex scene was awkward. I must have been dozing off, because I couldn't even remember what scene he was referring to.

Sharp eye, that Jason. During Q&A, director Jason Reitman apologized and said we'd missed a chunk of that scene because of an error during the reel change.

The story didn't die there, however. A rumor quickly spread that Tom Cruise had ordered the love scene to be cut so as to maintain his wife's modesty. Park City is a tiny town, and with the density of festival goers during Sundance, rumors spread like a virus in an airplane cabin. Reitman promised the scene would be back in the theatrical cut, so perhaps it was a ploy on the part of Reitman and his distributors, rather than Cruise, to get fest-goers to see the movie one more time.

Sundance Part II

A few more pics in my 2006 Sundance set on Flickr.

***

Immediately upon entering any of the Park City venues, I quickly scan the theater and read the situation like a quarterback trying to read the Cover 2. Which seats are open, and which are filled? What size groups are moving down which aisles, and what section of the theater will they head to? Which rows, based on where the ushers are positioned and which seats are filled, are the Reserved rows (this is like reading the stance and position of the safety)? Which side of the theater is the microphone located, indicating where the directors and stars will take Q&A and which entrance they're likely to walk in?

***

The snow on the slopes this year was fabulous. It snowed at least every other day, and so the slopes were covered with fresh powder. Utah snow, for some metereological reason unknown to me, is the most perfect ski powder. Perhaps its the aridity, or the altitude (Park City's elevation falls just shy of 7,000 ft.), or some combination thereof. Regardless, the powder is fluffy and forgiving.

The other joy of snowboarding during Sundance is the emptiness of the resorts. The pumped up lodging rates during the festival drive most skiiers to other slopes for the week. On Tuesday, after Jason and Jamie had left and before my second half companions had arrived, I went boarding at Park City resort. For three straight runs, I didn't see a single other person, and I rode up the lift by myself each time, feeling a bit guilty each time I greeted the guy working the lift, as if I was the only reason he had to come to work that day to stand around in the cold.

***

After the screening of Thank You For Smoking, Jason mentioned that the cut during the Katie Holmes-Aaron Eckhart sex scene was awkward. I must have been dozing off, because I couldn't even remember what scene he was referring to.

Sharp eye, that Jason. During Q&A, director Jason Reitman apologized and said we'd missed a chunk of that scene because of an error during the reel change.

The story didn't die there, however. A rumor quickly spread that Tom Cruise had ordered the love scene to be cut so as to maintain his wife's modesty. Park City is a tiny town, and with the density of festival goers during Sundance, rumors spread like a virus in an airplane cabin. Reitman promised the scene would be back in the theatrical cut, so perhaps it was a ploy on the part of Reitman and his distributors, rather than Cruise, to get fest-goers to see the movie one more time.

Sundance

Here are a few of my pics from Sundance, where I've been since Friday. This is my third straight pilgrimage to Sundance for my birthday (yes, sometime this weekend my odometer turned another notch, damn it all to hell), and navigating the fest now feels like secondhand nature.

I'll try to post a few more pics later this week, but that depends on whether or not I can clear some space off of the hard drive on my now ancient laptop. Everytime I try to open one of my RAW image files, my computer clicks and whirs and coughs like an old smoker.

Highest wattage celebrity about town: Jennifer Aniston. Jason saw her the first day, and I caught a glimpse of her yesterday (or was it the day before? it's all a sleepless blur) emerging from one of the celeb giveaway stores, and a nanosecond later she was consumed by a mob of people with cameras.

Biggest movie acquisition: Fox Searchlight bought Little Miss Sunshine for $10.5 million and 10% of gross. Biggest Sundance deal ever, and a sweet deal for the creators who had put up a hefty $9 million to get the movie made. Beyond that, no movie has emerged as the clearcut gem of the festival yet, though studios tend to judge the festival on pics of commercial appeal, and there does appear to have been a dearth of movies fitting that description. Most of the ones I saw which seemed destined for commercial success (Thank You For Smoking, Lucky Number Slevin, The Descent) already have U.S. distributors.

Most fun movie screening: Last night I attended a midnight screening of Neil Marshall's The Descent at The Egyptian Theatre. Last year I saw Oldboy, Three Extremes, and Wolf Creek at this Park City at Midnight series, so that gives you an idea of the type of fare showcased in this series. The movie is already out on Feast should come out later this year, caught up as it was in the Weinsteins spinoff from Miramax.

Favorite movie thus far: No single movie has been the revelation that, say, Pulp Fiction was back in the day, but probably the movie that contained some of the most enjoyable and enjoyable micro-moments was the latest by Michel Gondry, The Science of Sleep, starring Gael Garcia Bernal. Rumor has it that Warner Independent snatched the movie up just a half hour after the World Premiere. It won't have the mass commercial appeal of Gondry's previous movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (the movie is destined to split audiences: just look at its early ratings on IMDb), but Gondry still captures the child-like quality in all of us better than almost anyone, and his depiction of male insecurities about women is dead-on in a way that could only come from someone who has lived with them much of his life. The movie feels autobiographical in many ways, and Gondry revealed that all the dreams in the movie are ones he has had. Gael Garcia Bernal, besides seeming like a really pleasant and mischievous guy, proves himself to be a gifted comic actor, and he had to wrestle with French and English in addition to Spanish throughout the movie.

My favorite brush with celebrity: If you walk up and down Main St. enough, or if you attend enough movies, you can't help but satisfy run into someone famous. While waiting in line for the Weinsteins party really late one evening, just as the clock passed midnight and ushered in my birthday, Scarlett Johansson (accompanying Josh Hartnett) walked past me. Yes, my embarrassing crush on her, dating back to the days before she became a sex symbol, is common knowledge, and so my birthday was a good one, even though I could no longer feel my feet.

Always look on the bright side

Brian came all the way up from Philadelphia today to go see The Odd Couple with me. I'm not a big musical guy, but among the things I wanted to do in NYC before I left was to see a live show starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. Even though chances are that Matthew Broderick will look exactly the same for the next twenty years, the same cannot be said for Nathan Lane. For tonight's show, I had second row seats, dead center.

We grabbed dinner beforehand at Fatty Crab, the new and much buzzed-about Malaysian restaurant in the Meatpacking District. It's one of those tiny NYC restaurants where weaving between the tables and all the people standing inside waiting for a table requires holding your hands over your head like you're dancing to hip hop, shimmying sideways, and wriggling your hips like a hula hoop dancer. It's an entire restaurant of two-person tables, so arriving with an Allen Iverson-sized posse is unwise.

To avoid some of the restaurant's usual claustrophobia, we arrived at 6pm, about a half hour before the dinner rush. The menu is manageable, just a few pages, and the food is meant to be eaten family style, with dishes arriving in random order, whenever the kitchen happens to knock them out.

The first of our dishes to arrive was the Fatty Duck, a plate befitting its name, much like characters in Chinese karate movies. Take, for example, Zu: Warriors from Magic Mountain. In this movie, one of the characters is an old man with huge, superpowered eyebrows. His name? Long Brows. Take almost any Chinese martial arts movie where the hero has an overweight sidekick, and 8 times out of 10 the sidekick's name will be translated as Fatty or Piggy or Porky. The Jet Li/Tsui Hark classic Once Upon a Time in China has one character named Porky, another named Buck Teeth Soh. Their appearances, I assume, are vivid in your mind.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that the Fatty Duck consists of four pieces of duck, each topped with a healthy, juicy layer of fat. Brian and I attacked this dish with forks, then chopsticks. Then we conceded and grabbed it with our hands, and the waiter nodded his approval. Spicy, sweet, salty, awesome.

Second place in the race from kitchen to dinner table were the Heritage Foods Slow-Cooked Pork Ribs. I'm a huge fan of braised meats in general, especially when eating out because I'm too impatient to spend the time braising at home, and if you take braised meats home as leftovers, they taste just as good or better the next day. These ribs, coated in a sweet sauce, were so soft they melted in our mouths like butter. By the time we finished, the two of us looked like two-year olds after consuming a bucket of ice cream with our bare hands. I shudder to think of the carnage had we ordered the signature dish of Chili Crab.

Once our Nasi Lemak arrived (coconut rice, chicken curry, slow poached egg), we realized we'd over-ordered by just a bit, a sentiment confirmed a minute later when a steak/noodle/clam/chili pepper dish (whose name escapes me now) arrived to complete our order. There is a wine list, but this is food to be enjoyed with beer, and we washed our meal down with a Hitachino Classic, a sort of IPA.

This is food that's survived the journey across the Pacific. I cringe at the words Pan-Asian or Asian fusion, and all the Jean-Georges Asian fusion restaurants have been disappointments, massively over-priced for food whose roots lie in cheap street-side food stands, but this isn't a remix, it's a faithful rendition of flavorful Malaysian cuisine, with all its intense flavors. It will cost you a whole lot less than a meal at a Jean-Georges Asian joint like Spice Market and leave your taste buds a whole lot happier. The best news is that it's open until 4am from Thursdays through Saturdays, making it another addition to my list of really late night weekend food oases. Add Fatty Duck to the Beef Marrow and Oxtail Marmalade at Blue Ribbon Restaurant as two of the most pleasing and decadent ways to counteract (or top off, depending on how you view it) a weekend drinking buzz.

After cleaning our hands with turpentine in the bathroom, we hopped a cab up to the Brooke Atkinson Theater. The show was set to start in 15 minutes, and already a long line had formed. A man was passing out flyers to everyone in line, and then he pressed one into mine, and it took me a minute to digest the news. The show had been cancelled because Nathan Lane had laryngitis. I was crestfallen and felt like a failed host, but Brian took it well considering he'd travelled all the way from Philly for one night. He suggested a movie instead. As we walked away from the theater, a ticket broker materialized out of the shadows, like an ambulance chasing attorney at the scene of a traffic accident.

"How about seeing Spamalot instead?" he said, leering through a mouth in which every other tooth appeared to have never grown back, or perhaps he'd pawned them off to someone coming out of a dentist's office. "Show starts in five minutes."

I responded with my best poker face, as if I'd hit a set on the flop and was contemplating a fold. But inside, I knew this was the lucky break we needed. I hadn't seen Spamalot yet, it won the Tony for Best Musical in 2005, and it was among the more difficult shows to score tickets to. Brian was a huge Monty Python fan, knew nothing of the show, and had watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail "a thousand times." The ticket broker interpreted my frown as skepticism and produced a business card as proof of his legitimacy. It read "Tix R Us".

A few moments later, each of us $50 lighter, Brian and I were sprinting through the usual Times Square sidewalk traffic down to 44th St. Dashing up three flights of stairs, we sat down just as the lights went down, our $50 having bought us seats in the second to last row in the theater, a thin pole about seven rows up bisecting our view (though the theater was cozy and we were in the center).

At first I thought the entire show would be a literal rehash of the movie on stage. It began that way, and I was worried that we'd paid $50 to watch what we could've watched at my apartment for free. To my relief, the musical does branch away from the movie to generate some parallel identities, for example as a post-modern spoof of musicals themselves (one of the songs is titled "The Song That Goes Like This" and begins: "Once in every show, there comes a song that goes like this. It starts off soft and low, and ends up with a kiss. Oh where, is, the song, that goes, like this."). And, as the lady working the cashbar told us with breathless excitement at intermission, a portion of the French guard skit was improvised every night. Even she, having seen the show countless times, had no idea what was coming.

This is somewhat of a spoiler, but if it's the same gimmick every night, it may be worth knowing ahead of time if you can choose your premium seat, but the Holy Grail ended up being located below seat D101 in the Orchestra. I don't know if it's always seat D101. From our nosebleed seats, we couldn't see who occupied the lucky seat, but apparently it was not an attractive woman, because the cast member who went to bring the lucky audience member on stage said he'd have to choose a surrogate and ended up bringing what appeared to us to be a hot young woman named Elizabeth Riley on stage. She was presented with a trophy and a Polaroid of her standing with the cast. So, if you're a really attractive young woman and can obtain seats in the general vicinity of seat D101, or seat D101 itself, you stand a better than average chance of ending up a part of the show.

The reenactments of famous skits from the movie didn't do much for me, but some of the musical numbers were both funny and catchy. The Lady of the Lake in Act I is a tickle (Lauren Kennedy). The cast members probably have the best time of anyone in the theater, but the audience is a close second. It's a musical I'm putting on the recommended list for out-of-towners, so many of whom deem a musical an essential part of a successful New York visit.

So The Odd Couple had been cancelled. Hey, as one song in Spamalot urged, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." It was hilarious when all the crucified folk in Life of Brian were singing it to Jesus, and it was sage advice for me on this night. Brian and I were whistling that little ditty the whole subway ride home.

Runs in the family

Happy birthday to my nephew Ryan, who turned 3 on Sunday. Last Sunday was all about him. By the way, if you're struggling with a gift idea for a 3 year old, I suggest a fish. Jen got one for Ryan, and a fun time was had by all watching Ryan carry on a conversation with his new companion, who Ryan insisted on naming Dorothy even though the fish was male. I believe that's a product of the marketing efforts of The Wiggles, with their character Dorothy the Dinosaur, and Pixar, who featured a fish named Dory in Finding Nemo.

As for this coming Sunday, Ryan (um, he's the littler one below) left little doubt as to what that's going to be all about. That's right, I'm going to be drilling him on the Cover 2. There comes a time in every child's life when he must trade in his Wiggles t-shirt for the uniform of his favorite sports team. As far as sports allegiances go, the father's genes are dominant.

At an early age, we should have noticed the signs.

"What's your favorite animal, Ryan?" we'd ask. And even though his vocabulary didn't include Urlacher yet, his gestures left no doubt.

Two more 'staches

Two more reasons 2005 was the year of the mustache.

His name is, well, you know. His mustache transformed him into a big TV star.

This guy's name is עמיר פרץ. His mustache promoted him to top dog of the Labor Party in Israel.

The Terrible Triad

I had a terrible flashback when I saw Carson Palmer crumple after suffering a torn ACL and MCL and damage to the media meniscus. That injury is commonly referred to as the terrible triad because they tend to occur together. The knee is just a stubborn joint, it can bend forward until the leg is straight, and it can bend backwards until your foot hits your butt, and that's about the extent of its operation. It's not so good with side to side forces, like a big defensive lineman rolling into it from the side.

The good news is that ACL reconstruction has come a long way. In the old days, they wouldn't even bother repairing the ACL, and athletes would just back out and play with an unstable knee, though it was highly recommended that you strengthen your muscles around the knee. My doctor actually gave me that option, but I didn't want to limit myself to sports requiring only straight-ahead linear motion, like running or cycling. My docs didn't bother repairing my MCL, but they did take a piece of my hamstring to replace my ACL, and they snipped a bit of my torn meniscus out and stapled the remainder together with some biodegradable material that just dissolved after a while. A half year of rehab later, and I was back out and running around, with the added benefit of being able to predict inclement weather with my reconstructed knee.

***

This hard drive is a real brick.

***

Play Windows Media files in your Quicktime player on the Mac.

B-Dazzle Scramble Squares

Christmas Day, I woke up to find Mike and Joannie working on a puzzle at the breakfast table. Nine squares, each with either the head or tail of a wolf on each side. The goal was to arrange the nine squares in one 3x3 grid so that the heads and tails matched up. There were four different wolves.

I spent a half hour before breakfast trying to tease it out, to no avail. I always got 8 pieces in place, the but the last piece never fit.

Rich and Carol let me bring it home with me to finish. At Derek's house I spent another hour on it, beginning to develop a system. 9 pieces, each of which can go in 9 positions, and within each of those 9 positions, each piece could be rotated into one of 4 orientations. The number of combinations is staggering: 9! * 4^9 or 95,126,814,720. However, one quickly realizes that the easiest way to solve the puzzle (short of using a computer algorithm) is to start with one piece as the center piece and then work out from there. You can choose any side of the center piece and there will only be several other pieces that connect to it. From there, there are only several pieces that can connect with those two pieces, and you can quickly determine which just don't work. It took me about five or six maddening hours of using that method to finally stumble across the solution, pictured below.

There may be other solutions, though I'm not certain. I know that in order to preserve my sanity I'm not ever going to touch this puzzle again.

Makes a great stocking stuffer, though. The puzzle is deceptively simple, the rules are easy, and you can drive people crazy with it. The puzzles are manufactured by a company called B.dazzle, Inc., and they're called Scramble Squares. You can purchase any of the dozens of variants of the Scramble Squares directly from B.Dazzle online for $9.95 each. There's an online sample puzzle at their website.

Ginger

I'm not a cat person (in fact, I'm allergic to them) or much of a pet person in general, but Rich and Carol's cat Ginger, who I met over holiday break, cracked me up. She's 17 years old. I don't know if the translation constant of cat --> human age is the same as for dog --> humans, but if so, Ginger is older than the hills.

She'd just been shaved all over because she can no longer groom herself properly, so she looked quite odd, but what's striking about her is her face, always scrunched up as if she were squinting as hard as possible. The expression is one of "Oh for pete's sake I'm so old and sore why won't you just leave me alone and turn down those damn lights is so bright and loud and I'm freezing my ass off because you shaved me again." I stalked her all over the house trying to snap a photo of her trademark grimace, but without a flash it was like tracking a leopard through the shrubs of Kenya.

Compound juices

For the longest time, I thought Seth Rogen, who played Ken on Freaks and Geeks, pulled a reverse Kirstie Alley and lost a ton of weight in order to play Logan Echolls on Veronica Mars. I finally paid attention during the credits and realized that Echolls is played by Jason Dohring. Same face, same voice - they look like brothers.

***

On so many airplane flights, they don't have apple juice or cranberry juice, but they do have cran-apple juice. SKU and space-saving decision, or the fingerprints of the powerful cran-apple lobby?

***

At the grocery store near Derek's apt in Chicago, Bartlett pears were selling for $0.59 a pound. I wanted to cry when I saw that. Those same pears sell for $2.49 a pound at Whole Foods in Union Square.

***

Sign up for the beta test of AllPeers, which looks like it will be a killer extension for Firefox.

***

Since we have such a big Brady Bunch-esque family, we instituted an annual Christmas gift exchange several years back. Every year I use the Excel random number function to assign everyone another member of the family to shop for, and all we have to do is purchase for that one person. It reduces the holiday shopping stress by at least one magnitude of order, and everyone receives something substantial. The days of receiving three pairs of socks, a book, and a $20 GC to each of four different stores is over.

I highly recommend the same for those who are driven bonkers by holiday shopping.

Back from holiday break

They say writing is a muscle (and I believe it), and if so, mine is weak and out-of-shape after a holiday break with no writing, minimal time online, and wave after wave of consumption of various holiday foodstuff. Come to think of it, I'm just flab all over. Much of the popularity of New Year's fitness resolutions can be explained by timing, New Years coming directly after typically the most protracted and gluttonous of American holidays.

Just as with going to the gym, every day I don't write adds to the output I feel I need to generate the next time I do write. After a while it feels impossible to make up for all the lost time. The only way to get rolling again is a little chunk at a time.

***

Do people still eat geese, or is it an anachronism from Dickens' novels and a time before people learned to appreciate other fowl? I never hear of anyone eating a Christmas goose anymore. Is it not good, or is it just too much hassle to farm-raise geese to make it a grocery store staple? Geese don't seem to be endangered. I see them everywhere.

***

The BT Technology Timeline - BT has a futurology department, and they've built this interactive timeline that runs out to 2051 (which probably covers the remainder of my life expectancy). My first thought on seeing this was that some lucky SOB's job is to sit around and predict the future. The second was that even the most advanced futurologist has no clue when the Cubs will finally win a World Series.

Lots of fun to play with, though there's little in the way of supporting evidence. A cursory kicking of the tires spilled these nuggets (my notes in parentheses):

• Androids will make up 10% of the population in 2015 (ensuring that already awkward blind dates will begin with the administration of the Voight-Kampff test)
• The world's population will peak at 10 billion in 2039 (you think finding an apartment in Manhattan is tough today)
• Virus crosses over from machine to human in 2025 (because some eager SOB forgot to do the Voight-Kampff test before jumping into the sack)
• Rise of a global machine dictator - date unknown (Skynet?)
• Robot superior to humans in 2030 or so (well, we still have 25 years to enjoy our supremacy)
• Creation of The Matrix in 2030 (related to the prediction above?)
• Fully telepathic communication in 2049
• Brain downloads in 2049 (shortly thereafter, someone will write a plug-in to allow direct sending of brain logs to all the major weblog software packages; confusion will reign as the term blog is re-appropriated to refer to brain-logs)

Arthur C. Clarke: "...any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic..."

***

Some guys TiVo'd the previous night's Texas Lotto drawing and then bought their buddy a matching ticket that day. Then they set up a camcorder, played the drawing while their buddy was there, and put the video up on Google Video. I hope they take their buddy out for dinner or something. That's just cruel.

At any rate, it's just an example of a type of humor which seems to be at the peak of its popularity: laughing at the person in the dark, the person who is being honest and genuine. It's the modern ironic mode of expression as entertainment.

Punk'd. The Ali G Show. All those reality television shows in which contestants are kept in the dark as to the real premise of the show, like My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance. Even The Colbert Report, at times.

I hope this mode of humor hit its saturation point in 2005. There's a mean-spiritedness at its core that isn't that funny and is only tolerable in small doses, a level it has long since surpassed in mass media.

***

While searching for a copy of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner on DVD, I stumbled across Nostalgia Family Video, a site which carries just such hard-to-find movies on DVD. The aforementioned DVD is just one of many gems in their catalog.

Year of the stache

This has been a great year for the mustache. There was Liev Schreiber's in the latest Broadway production of Glengarry Glen Ross. Schreiber was the best thing in an uneven production, and he won a Tony.

Tony Leung sported one in 2046, and it got him into Zhang Ziyi's qipao.

Jake Plummer grew one in honor of his fallen teammate Pat Tillman, and in the process has had the best season of his career, leading the Broncos to the playoffs.

Gonzaga's Adam Morrison deserves extra credit. Not only is he sporting a mad stache, he's got the hair to match, a bit of Billy Crudup circa Almost Famous. How's it working out for Morrison? He's just leading the nation in scoring.

LeBron? Yep. In fact, it's quite possible he's been sporting a mustache since he was 8, which might explain his precocity. Either that, or one of these days he'll just come out and admit he's 34, which is also quite possible.

I'm not taking any chances. If I start now, I may have a mustache in place by this time next year.

Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking

A recent loss of someone dear to our family rang like an echo of 1998. For many nights, it hung in my head like something faint, like the high pitched whine of old tube televisions. The grief that arises from the loss of someone close to you seems indomitable. When people write that they've "overcome grief" or "moved on", it sounds as if they've wrestled it into submission, or left it behind.

For me, the grief was something I couldn't turn away from for a long time. Finally I realized that I had to throw it on my back and carry it with me. Only then could I carry on. So while we can't see it, we've hardly left it behind. We feel its weight on our back and accept that we'll carry it with us until the end of our days.

One night I grabbed the NYTimes Magazine on my way to catch the subway (I hate sitting idle on the train), and during the ride I read an excerpt from The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.

Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of "waves."

Much of what she wrote felt fresh, familiar, and true. I went out and purchased a copy of the book the next day; it didn't surprise me at all that the book was in such high demand from those who had lost a loved one. In the weeks to follow, the press mentions for the book, especially in New York media, were ubiquitous.

It has won all sorts of acclaim, most notably the 2005 non-fiction National Book Award, and deservedly so. The book has an added layer of pathos because Didion's daughter Quintana died after the book's publication. It's a classic.

tick tock tick tock

I'm puzzled, really, at how I could have caught this stubborn cold when my human contact in the past week has been so minimal. My nose is so raw it hurts to breathe. I'm fairly certain that the truth behind Rudolph's red nose was that he caught a cold up at the North Pole. That or he was a coke addict.

When people say, oh, yeah, that cold has been going around, it sounds as if we're all sharing the same cold. How likely is that? Maybe we all caught it from Kevin Bacon? Paris Hilton? How many different colds are going around in one city? Which one is popular among Eastern European models right now? If I'm going to be sick, at least let me be sick in the most stylish way.

I'm torn. On the one hand, if it's the same cold everyone has been catching, then at least I know it's not fatal. A cold I can live with. Any flu associated with an animal--bad news. On the other hand, everyone feels a little possessive of their illnesses in a Larry David narcissistic kind of way.

On a positive note, I've been sampling the 2004 vintage of Vicks 44D. Very full-bodied, with a strong cherry bouquet leading into a musky finish. Tastes like port and goes wonderfully with leftover Halloween candy.

***

A lot of the hooks in Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor sounded really familiar, like the ticking clock at the start of "Hung Up". Turns out her producer was Jacques Lu Cont, the British DJ behind some popular remixes of songs like Gwen Stefani's "What You Waiting For" (where I first heard that ticking clock) and The Killers' "Mr. Brightside."

***

Today Microsoft released its backward compatibility list for the XBox 360. The list includes about 200 games right now. To play them you'll need to install a software emulator from XBox Live, by burning a CD-ROM of files from xbox.com, or by paying to have a CD shipped to you. Original Xbox game will be upscaled to 720p and 1080i.

It all seems like a hassle for the casual gamer--this Q&A with an XBox VP on this topic stretches on for nearly 4 pages. Not ideal as a marketing message.

***

The first chapter of Nicole Richie's new book, whose title is irrelevant. It's as awful as you'd imagine, some of the most laughable fiction ever committed to print, but what I'm curious about is whether generations past have had to endure the same celeb-lit piffle. Did Plato lament when youngsters bypassed The Republic in favor of Confessions of a Teenage Eunuch by Anorexales?

Every book finds its audience, though, and Nicole has hers. When asked if the character of Simone Westlake was based on Paris Hilton ("Simone was leggy and tall, though no one knows exactly how tall because she'd never been seen out of pumps since puberty ... not even in her night-vision skin flicks, filmed strictly for private use, of course.") Nicole responded: ""It's not her. I've come across many people in my life that are like that."

Haven't we all.

***

James Surowiecki writes about the at times symbiotic relationship between the government and the tobacco industry in this week's New Yorker. This quote intrigued me:

The industry now spends more than half a billion dollars a year in legal fees, and billions of dollars a year in settlements. In strict monetary terms, the settlement with the states might seem like a bad deal for the tobacco companies. Research by W. Kip Viscusi, a Harvard economist (and frequent pro-tobacco witness), suggests that if you take into account tobacco taxes and the higher mortality rates of smokers, which reduce the government’s Social Security and Medicare payments, smoking actually saves the public money.

***

Our family is preparing a traditional Thanksgiving dinner this year, but I'd like to supplement it with an alternative main course. I've yet to try a fried turkey, a turducken, or a quaducant. The preparation of a fried turkey sounds downright intimidating. It involves several gallons of peanut oil, a hot tub, and a flamethrower wielded by ninjas. I doubt we'll be having that unless someone prepares it for us off-site. Preparing a turducken yourself also sounds like a chore--lots of deboning, preparing, assembling, sewing. Substitute people for fowl and you'd have Thanksgiving at Buffalo Bill's from Silence of the Lambs.

"It rubs the gravy on its skin."

"Please, why can't we have turkey like every other family?"

"Put the effing gravy on your skin!"

You can purchase a pre-assembled turducken, but they're not cheap. Those of you who've tried one: does the integration of the chicken, duck, and turkey actually lead to a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts? Would I get all the same benefits if I prepared a chicken, duck, and turkey separately, then had a relative spotting me so that I could shove one forkful of each meat into my mouth simultaneously?

***

Google Analytics, a free tool to help websites to optimize their traffic. Not surprisingly, it integrates tightly with AdWords.

Tailwind

Jason and all the major ladies in his life--mother, wife, daughters, mother-in-law--visited this weekend for his sophomore effort in the NYC marathon. Just like old times, the first time we met up this weekend was early in the morning, after a night of little sleep. He arrived Thursday night, slept a few hours. I was up late Thursday night editing, slept about two hours, and the two of us met up at a diner for a 7:30am breakfast looking like extras from a George Romero movie.

Jason sounded resigned to trying to just equal his time from last year because a hectic work schedule had cut into his daily runs, but I felt he'd improve. He'd lost a ton of weight since last year and weighed about what I weigh now, and he's much taller than I am. Endurance athletes often look drawn and malnourished before their best performances, like the way Lance Armstrong looked every time the Tour rolled around. Jason had also done more super long runs, some five 22-milers, and based on my limited training experience, those are the most critical marathon training runs. The lack of the occasional midweek run leading up to the race would allow his body to rest for the big day.

On race morning, as Jason was running through Brooklyn and Queens, the Kilar clan and I were fighting our own race to get up to the Bronx. I have great empathy for mothers who have to ride on subways with child and stroller. Many stations have no entrances other than stairways, and I saw one woman just pick up an entire stroller, with child and sundry childcare items in it, and just hump it down four flights of stairs. That may be why you don't see many obese NYC kids; at an early age, their parents force them out of the stroller to walk.

A record 2.5 million people watched this NYC Marathon, the largest crowd ever to watch a marathon. The 4 and 6 trains were packed, and we found ourselves squeezed out of a packed train or two. We finally learned to go all the way to the back car. The distribution of people across an entire NY Metro subway train resembles a mesa, with steep dropoffs at the front and back. Switching from the 6 uptown to the 4 uptown at 59th St. required a two mile descent down a staircase, putting us about a story or two above the ninth circle of Hell. Jamie's mother had the back of the stroller, I had the front, and we both got a good bicep/shoulder burn.

We popped out at 138th St. in the Bronx, right alongside the course between miles 20 and 21, at around 12:15 pm. Our immediate concern was whether or not we'd missed him already. That would have been awful, for both Jason and us. I tried to spot a pace runner but saw none. I asked a spectator who looked like a serious marathoner what pace the runners passing us were on. He said they were probably on a 2:40 marathon, so I felt better.

Still, after half an hour, I started to have doubts, so I called Karen and woke her up on the West coast to log in to the marathon website to look up Jason's splits. The website was slow and crashed her browser, so she had to fire it up again. While on the phone, I looked down the road and saw a guy in a black tank top with JASON written across the front. Jamie spotted him and started waving, and I sprinted out to the street to snap a few photos.

As he passed, he pointed at his Garmin sports watch with a look of surprise on his face. He flashed a thumbs up and looked to be in good spirits. What did it mean when he pointed at his watch, we wondered as we rode the subway to the finish line.

Once there, we found out. He finished with a time of 3:21, shaving over twenty minutes off of his time from last year. Unbelievable. We just sat near the family reunion area and soaked in the triumph of the moment. As we rested and Sadie carbo loaded, Jason and I discussed what might have been responsible for his dramatic improvement. Less weight. More marathon experience and miles in his legs. More long runs in his training. A bit more mid-week rest leading up to race day.

But in retrospect, I like to think that something psychological played a role. People who are excited about what they do are running downhill in the game of life.

Jason and Sadie at the finish line (Click on the photo for more pics)

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Location is everything?

My apartment is the size of Bill's kitchen. I state it that way because it's a compliment to my apartment. Looking out his window, I see, no joke, a hummingbird sucking nectar from a flower on one of the bushes, bathed in the golden glow of sunrise. It's as if I died and woke up in heaven, or perhaps my friends sedated me yesterday and put me into a rehab clinic in Southern California. Any minute now a fat nurse will be in to give me an enema.

This is the first clean air I've breathed since...I can't even remember anymore. I'm also reminded that I really miss DirecTV.

Okay, off to the U.S. mecca of golf.

Crash

For some reason, I can't board a plane without imagining how I'd react if it experienced some sort of mechanical failure and crashed into the earth, killing everyone on board, most importantly myself.

Even before boarding, I review my most recent communications, cell phone calls and e-mail messages, for their suitability in newspaper articles or eulogies.

Perhaps something to put the issues of life in perspective.

"'Off to the mother country. I was too cheap to spring for my immunizations...let's hope I don't catch Hep-B! Love, Euge,'" my sister would read from a printout of an e-mail. "What he didn't know was that just a short while later, Hep B would be the least of his worries when flight 82 passed over the Bering Strait and suddenly dropped into a death spiral."

Or the amusing and trivial anecdote, something to personalize me to strangers, or to remind close ones of my life's concerns. "'oh btw, do you have that girl's phone number in beijing? e-mail it to me at my gmail acct. let's hope she remembers me. put in a good word for me if you get the chance. alright, later dude,'" one of my buddies would paraphrase from a brief chat session held the day of my fateful flight. "Well, I sent him that phone number, and it's waiting for you buddy, wherever you are now."

How about my last day's activities? How would they play out in, let's say, a sequel to Gus Van Sant's sober trilogy of death that includes Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days? Would my final interactions reflect well on me?

"He always ask for his shirt folded, no starch," the plump, middle-aged Chinese woman who does my dry cleaning would recall, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. "But this time I forget and starch his shirt. He pat me on the shoulder and say, 'It's okay, Rainbow, a bit of starch every now and then helps to restore one's resolve.' I not know what he mean. But he a kind man."

I imagine in vivid detail how I'd react in my last moments.

While bent over in the crash landing tuck, I might turn my head and gaze upon the overweight, balding businessman in the seat next to me. Then I'd remove the oxygen mask from my face to reveal an expression of preternatural calm and offer him my palm. He'd grasp it, and I'd give his hand a reassuring squeeze, as if to say, "I've been through this dozens of times in my head...just follow my lead."

Random observations from my trip to China

• At the security checkpoint at SFO on my way to Beijing, an airline official encourated people to take off their shoes by shouting over and over, "$100 shoes, $5 million plane. You make the call, people." What does that even mean?
• On my flight to Beijing, the man seated next to me complained that his tray table wasn't perfectly level. He obviously doesn't fly much. The flight attendant looked at him with an exasperated grimace. "I don't know what I can do about that."
• United Airlines' first class is nothing special. I tried to flip my miles to one of the Asian carriers like Cathay Pacific, to no avail. The name "first class" itself is a bad one because it's accurate. Only people in first class are treated like first class citizens even though you'd think that in this day and age everyone who flies would be treated that way. The airlines should have named coach "first class" and first class "luxury class" or something, but the truth is that the economics of the airline industry are such that people in coach fly like second or third class citizens, human sardines in a Boeing tin can.
• If I ever run for Premier of China, I'm running on a platform of "toilet paper in every bathroom." One of the things you quickly realize in China is that toilet paper in public places is a luxury; I visited exactly two restaurants that offered it in bathrooms. If you're fortunate, you're warned of the nationwide BYOTP (bring your own toilet paper) policy before the first time you've finished your business while squatting over a hole in the ground. At least once a day I experienced a cold sweat when some quick mental calculus revealed that a few factors could converge in an imminent and horrific perfect storm: no kleenex in my inventory, no nearby store to purchase any, and a possible need to visit a public toilet. There are never any towels in the bathrooms, either, so after you wash your hands you end up looking around like a fool holding your wet hands out in front of you as if they were alien appendages you suddenly discovered at the ends of your arms.
• The traffic in China feels chaotic, but it's much safer than you'd expect, as I'd read and written about a while back here. Road signs, street lights, painted lines - all our more suggestions than hard and fast rules. Every inch of the road belongs to the first one to occupy it. This is second generations traffic calming in its purest form. Its effectiveness arises from forcing all users of the road to make eye contact, read body language, and interact with each other on a constant basis rather than blindly obeying dumb street signs and signals. It seems to work. Early on in my visit, every time I rode in a cab I thought the driver would hit and kill a cyclist or pedestrian. This happened at least three times every ride. Yet during two weeks of travel through some of the busiest streets in China, I only saw a handful of accidents. Four or five times a day in China, I'd play a real world version of Chinese Frogger while trying to cross the street, and by the end of the trip I'd obtained the native boldness that allows one to walk into the path of an oncoming cab with utter faith that it will halt. Imagine Neo at the end of the first Matrix movie, holding up his hand and freezing bullets in their paths with a zen-like calm: "No."
• China is still much more of a cash economy than I though it would be. I only brought some $200 U.S. over in the hopes of covering most expenditures with my credit card. That didn't work out well for me until I reached Shanghai, where credit cards are more widely accepted. The rest of China remains wary of debt. In Beijing, where many ATMs rejected my card, I had to repeatedly hit Eric and Christina up for cash. Christina had to make four withdrawals from the ATM in one visit just to collect enough cash for her rent payment.
• Yes, it was very hot in parts of China, and yes, I'm now going to complain about it. Are humans the only creatures who employ their advanced communication skills 25% of the time to discuss the weather? Do bees or whales or dolphins do this? Have scientists analyzed animal communication from this perspective? I wouldn't be shocked if sometimes when pigs are grunting they're actually saying, "This summer heat is killing me. I could just die in this sty. I'm sweating like a pig." Actually, I'm fortunate in that the weather in both Beijing and Xi'an was, for the most part, comfortable. My first step out of the airport in Guanzhou, though, was like walking into one of the inner circles of hell. In Shanghai, I had to ride in from the airport in quite possibly one of the oldest cabs in the entire country, and its air conditioning couldn't have possibly been worse unless you stuck a blow dryer in my pants and turned it on high. I begged the cab driver to turn his A/C on higher, but he sheepishly admitted that it was already at its peak setting. He then went on to complain to me about how hot he was and how tired he was of driving a broken down old cab all these years. "Wo lei shi le!" he lamented, over and over ("I'm exhausted!"). This is like hearing a torturer complain about a callus on his hands while he flogs you.
• While we're on the topic of scorching heat and stifling humidity of summer, this trip convinced me that cotton is nearly useless in such climates. For all the advances in fabric and fashion, it's surprising that no one has come up with a fabric that combines the feel and look of cotton with the wicking quality of technical fabrics Dri-fit. I want summer clothing that makes me feel as comfortable as I do in my backpacking gear from Patagonia but that looks like something you'd see in Esquire. Cotton is good for towels and for the cooler climes of spring and fall. In China, wearing cotton outside in the summer is like wrapping yourself in one of those steaming hot towels they give you on international flights to wipe your face.
• It's only when I travel that I realize how long it actually takes to read a book. 13 hour plane flights will do that. On average I read about 40 to 60 pages an hour depending the number of words per page. My book selection on the flight out was The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron. I have a fondness for white collar crime nonfiction, and this paperback was much lighter than Kurt Eichenwald's hardcover Conspiracy of Fools, on the same topic.
• The Chinese believe strongly that luck, both good and bad, can travel through phonetic similarities. 8 is a lucky number because the Chinese weird for 8 (ba) sounds like the Chinese word for 100 (bai), a term that conveys wealth. Our Xi'an tour guide James explained this to some of the people on our bus on the way in from the airport. At that very moment, I looked up and saw a giant billboard advertising the phone number 8888-8888 on behalf of some travel agency. Many company phone numbers in China end in 8888. Meanwhile 4 (si, fourth tone) is an unlucky number because sounds like the die (si, third tone). Eric and Christina's apartment did not contain any floors with the number 4. No fourth floor, no fourteenth floor.
• Chinese people love them their massages. I had four massages while in China, all an hour long. The most expensive of those cost $15, meaning massage is affordable to most people in the growing middle class there. I'm not sure I'll ever be fully comfortable receiving a massage, though. Unless you're a masseuse to a famous athlete like Lance Armstrong (so that your massage is actually contributing to his performance on the bike) or a masseuse to a supermodel (something you'd do for free), I can't imagine that the work is that enjoyable. Of course, I'm no masseuse so I may very well be wrong. On occasion, the massages were just plain painful. At one point I think one masseuse had her full body weight pressing down on her elbow, digging into my spine. My eyes were watering from the agony. For the most part, though, the massages were a perfect nightcap, and my economic valuation of massages may be so skewed that I'll never pay for a massage in the U.S. again.
• Another job I'd like to apply for in China is that of country-wide English copy-editor. As part of my duties, I'd wander the country with a giant red marker and mark my corrections on public signs and documents (like this one). But I'd be judicious. Some of the Chinese to English translations have a certain haiku-like elegance and wit.

Chinese taxi drivers: the good, the bad, the ugly

About half the cab drivers I encountered in China were professional. They recognized the destination took me straight there. The other half were either incompetent, crooked, or rude, or some combination of the three.

Some would pretend to know where I wanted to go, but then would drive around in circles, lost. Several times I had to sit in the cab waiting while the driver went out to ask other drivers or pedestrians for directions. Is this a function of too many new cab drivers or too rapid an urban growth? I quickly learned to always ask the driver if they knew where a destination was before I got into the cab. If they didn't know, I'd just move on to the next driver. You wouldn't want a resident performing an operation on you, and I had no interest in having cabbies learn the city on my dime.

Locals always advise that non-Chinese speakers or tourists get their destination and address written down in Chinese on a piece of paper to hand to cab drivers, but that's often not enough. Instead, you need to get the cross streets written down, and even then, it's still worth confirming that the driver knows where the destination is before hopping in.

Many cab drivers were just rude, complaining and grumbling the entire ride about one thing or another. In Shanghai, soon after I arrived, I took a cab to meet Tony at a Starbucks. Since I didn' t know the city at all, I didn't walk. As soon as the cab driver heard where I was going he sighed and started muttering under his breath about what an idiot I was for taking a cab ride through rush hour traffic when I could walk that same distance in half the time. I asked him how I should walk there, but he refused to answer me. He grumbled the whole way, sighing with audible exaggeration every few seconds.

In Beijing, Joannie, Mike, and I hopped in a cab and gave him the address of Mei's uncle's house. Joannie mentioned that he could also follow the cab ahead of us because Mei was riding in it and knew the route. The cab driver recoiled in indignation.

"You want me to follow that driver! Why? I know where that address is. What are you thinking? Follow that driver. He doesn't even know where he's going. I've driven a cab in this city for 20 years. Unbelievable. Some people." He muttered like this the entire ride. I was so surprised at his behavior that I just had to laugh, but Mike was not pleased. Joannie tried to calm him down but he was on a roll, reveling in this perceived slight.

In Shanghai, Su and I hired a car and driver for a day to take us to Hangzhou. He made more off us that one day than a nanny would make in a month and a half. The trip started fine. The driver told picked us up in a Mitsubishi SUV with industrial strength air conditioning and told us that he was a specialist in Hangzhou, a sort of Hamptoms for the masses of Shanghai. When we got to Xihu (West Lake), though, he didn't know where to find Louweilou, one of the most popular restaurants on the lake. Su and I walked all the way to the other side of the lake to Leifeng Pagoda, perhaps the most visible landmark on the lake. We called the driver to pick us up, but he didn't know where that was. After Su tried to give him directions for several minutes, the driver asked us to walk all the way back across the lake to find him instead. It was like calling for a Town Car to take you to the airport only to have the driver ask you to walk over to his office to catch a ride. He finally found us after nearly half an hour, but when we got back in the car he complained that it would have been easier had we just gone and found him. Unbelievable. I was going to say that I might as well hop in the front seat and drive while Su gave him a foot massage, but I wasn't sure my sarcasm would survive the translation into Chinese.

When we neared Su's apartment, he started acting like a pain in the ass, perhaps just to get under Su's skin. Every time she gave him a direction (turn left at the next light, or make the third right), he'd repeat it back to her skeptically, as if she didn't know how to get back to her own apartment. When we finally arrived, we paid him the agreed upon fare, but as we climbed out of the car he asked for a 50RMB tip. I'm surprised I didn't have to hold her back from delivering a roundhouse to his face.

I only got taken for a ride once in China. On our last night in Xi'an, we had to split into three cabs to go from the Tang Dynasty park to the Muslim Quarters. Mei and her cousin Summer took one cab each with a group of non-Chinese speakers in each, and Joannie, Mike, and I took the other cab. Summer told our driver where to take us, but I didn't pay attention to how to say it in Chinese, nor did I ask Summer or Mei how much the ride should cost.

Our driver recognized as out-of-towners, and soon we were on an extended tour of Xi'an. Since the heart of the city is enclosed by a rectangular city wall, we should have only crossed one gate into the city. Instead, we passed in and out of the city, and it was soon apparent what was happening. Unfortunately, if we got out, we didn't know how to tell the next driver where to go. So we rode around, fuming, shouting at the driver who kept insisting he was taking us straight to our destination. What should have been a 10 minute 15 yuan ride turned into a 40 minute 32 yuan ride. Then the driver dumped us on a sidewalk, waved his hands at the sidewalk and said we were where we wanted to be, and drove off. We had no idea where we were, and we had no cell phone to call Mei on.

I was livid and wanted to track down the driver and go Tony Jaa on him, but more importantly, we wanted to find our friends. Fate intervened when our of the blue, Mike spotted our local tour guide James, just walking down the street with his manager. In a city of some 8 million people, we'd run into him by accident. James is one of the sweetest people we met in all of China, and his beaming smile was an oasis in what now seemed like a sea of unscrupulous cab drivers.

James called Mei and walked us over to them, saving what could have been a disastrous last evening in Xi'an, which otherwise was the most charming of the cities we visited in China. Taxis are still a real bargain in China compared to cabs in other parts of the world, especially New York, but I hope that half of them learn some manners in time for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and get themselves some GPS devices.

I picture Ron Artest trying to hop a cab to the basketball stadium for a game and getting taken for a ride by a rude cab driver who doesn't know who he is. Okay, so the chances of David Stern selecting Ron Artest for the Olympic basketball team are nil. I can dream, though, and in this dream, that bastard from Xi'an who took us for a ride decides to take Artest for a ride. After a few loops through Beijing, when Artest realizes what's going on, he reaches into the front seat and starts throttling the cabbie.

First impressions of Shanghai

I felt good about my recovery from jet lag yesterday because I managed to stay up all day, from about 8am to 10pm, despite only four hours of sleep. Still, I wasn't completely symptom free. For some reason I thought it was Wednesday and thus ventured all the way up to 138th and Riverside for a kickball game that actually takes place tonight, a trip that wasted an hour and a half of my day.

I awoke at 4am this morning and have been staring into the darkness ever since. Since I fly out to Seattle tomorrow for my annual golf trip to Bandon Dunes, I have another few hours of time shifting left to plant myself in the Pacific time zone. More than a few times during the last two weeks I've felt like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation.

New York, all five boroughs put together, feels tranquil and quaint compared to Shanghai. That's how sprawling and dense and manic a city China's economic hub feels. Shanghai contains more buildings over 25 stories high than any other city in the world, and depending on who you ask, anywhere from a fifth to a fourth of all the world's roof mounted cranes call Shanghai home.

One of the first stops during my visit there was the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum. On the third floor there is a massive scale model of the city as city planners foresee it looking in 2020. It's stunning in its size and density. My first night in Shanghai, I couldn't see water or trees or anything beyond the horizon in any direction from my 29th floor hotel room. High rises and office buildings and skyscrapers stretched out seemingly to the ends of the earth. The model at the urban planning museum confirmed that my suspicions weren't too far from the truth.

That Shanghai even has an urban planning museum speaks to its developmental aspirations. It's as close to urban planning pornography as I've ever seen. On every floor, massive scale models of some of its most famous sites (like the new Pudong airport; every city in China seemed to have a new airport of steel and glass) share space with 3-D CGI animations flying around, over, and through future constructions, all set to throbbing techno music. Next to the 2020 scale model of Shanghai is a display called Windows on the World, depicting famous landmarks from around the globe, like the Eiffel Tower and NY City skyline; the juxtaposition marks the height of the city's ambitions. A more literal marker is the work-in-progress that is the Shanghai World Financial Center, intended to be the world's tallest building when completed. On just one day-trip, Su took me past the world's first high-speed mag-lev train, up the world's tallest hotel, over the world's longest steel-arch bridge, and under the world's largest Ferris wheel.

Few cities of have grown faster than Shanghai in the past fifteen years, but the extent of the progress is dubious. The skyline is an incoherent blend of gaudy structures, each one more eccentric than the next in an attempt to distinguish itself. Many of them are simply hideous by the aesthetic standards of this era or the next. And as all these high rises and skyscrapers have moved in, the city's low-income citizens and more historic architecture have been moved out and razed, respectively. From the 87th floor of the Jin Mao Tower, every low-lying plot of land in Shanghai looked to be marked for bulldozing. It will soon be so crowded you won't be able to see the trees from the forest; every skyscraper will be flanked by several other monstrosities of equal height.

No building represents the worst of Shanghai more than the Oriental Pearl Tower (images), the most prominent structure on the Pudong side of Shanghai's skyline. Depending on your vantage point, it looks like anything from a sci-fi shishkabob, a spaceship, or the world's largest phallic symbol (Su pointed out that from one spot on the Bund, the Pearl Tower rises up from between two giant globes like...well, look for yourself). Even the few attempts at preserving the city's historic architecture can't dilute the city's epidemic of modernization. Xin Tian Di, a historic redevelopment project that reconstructed some of Shanghai's historic Shikumen tenements, is primarily a collection of fusion restaurants, clubs, and retail restaurants. It's less a preservation than a repurposing of the architecture of the past. Both Xin Tian Di and Yu Yuan (the Yu Gardens), two of the areas in Shanghai that still hint at the city's past, have their own Starbucks.

It's unclear how long this pace of development can last. When the real estate bubble bursts, the crash is sure to be spectacular. Roof cranes all over the city will come to a halt, and the unfinished frames of dozens of skysrapers will litter the city like the fossilized skeletons from some unrealized future.

It's not all bad. The flip side of all this foreign investment and real estate development is a vibrant economic hum. Just after arriving in Shanghai one afternoon, I attended a networking event at Barbarossa with Tony, an old classmate of mine. He's one of the tens of thousands of those who've moved to Shanghai in the hopes of carving out a personal fortune on the back of the macro growth trends there. I met dozens of people at the event, each of whom presented me with a business card and their two-minute fortune-seeking thesis. I felt like I was at a job fair, but the difference is that even the people who didn't have any idea how they'd capitalize on the growth in Shanghai beamed with genuine optimism. Shanghai has replaced Hong Kong as the sexy girl China employs to greet its guests at the door.

A city with a population of 18 million people shouldn't feel small, but the next night I ran into many of the same expats at Bar Rouge, one of the epicenters of the global clubbing scene right now. Nearly everyone I asked about what to see in Shanghai told me this was the club du jour. Su and I planned to head there on Friday night, but she had to fly out to Hong Kong and then back that afternoon simply to renew her Chinese visa, and a series of flight delays found me half asleep in my hotel room at 1 in the morning, watching movies in a bathrobe and fading fast. But just when I was about to write off the evening, she called.

I began to offer a mild protest, but she'd have none of that.

"I've been to hell and back today," she said. "You're coming out and having a drink with me."

When we arrived at 1:30am at 18 on the Bund, a throng of people waited outside, trying to cajole their way past the bouncers. We rang up Sam, one of those guys who's out clubbing so often that he's on a first name basis with every bouncer. He came down, parted the sea of hopefuls like Moses, and the bouncers ushered us in.

Located on the 7th floor, Bar Rouge was hopping. From the outdoor terrace, I stood under a Chinese flag blown sideways by a stiff breeze and looked out across the Huangpu river at the now darkened Pudong skyline. Inside, bartenders stacked martini glasses in a pyramid, then lit some unidentified alcoholic drink on fire and poured it over the glass pyramid so that the stream of fire descended to the bar and streamed six feet across the counter. I made quick note of the fire exit routes.

The rest of the night dissolved in bath of green tea and black labels (the local mixed drink of choice) and shots of one sort or another. All the building lights on the Bund and on the Pudong skyline turn off at 11pm (electricity is at a premium), but the youth remain lit until sunrise.

Spread across the time zones

My mind is in NY already, thinking of all the things I need to take care of when I arrive home. My body is here at the United Arrivals Lounge in San Francisco airport. My body clock is trying to catch up, but it's lagging. It fell off the pace some time ago and is floating over the Pacific Ocean somewhere, northwest of Alaska.

And of course, as is the case with travel denouements, the heart is slowest to follow and mine remains somewhere in China, with friends old and new. It's no fun, these last legs of multi-hop international flights, when your heart is elsewhere and your essence is discombobulated. I'm ready for the reunion of all my parts in my bed back home.

I thought I'd have time and the Internet access to write while in China, but I had precious little of either, and the rare times they converged I lacked the will. It will take some effort to get back into a writing frame of mind, and my e-mail inbox is a bit bloated. All in good time.

Brain dump

I've been out of town traveling, and my short stop back in NYC has been packed with errands and preparations for my trip to China. In a few hours, I'll head off to the airport for my flight to San Francisco, and then Beijing.

In an effort to get myself on the Beijing timezone, exactly the opposite of NYC's (Beijing is 12 hours ahead), I'm staying up all night before catching the flight. For some reason, one of the only ways I can keep myself up is by sitting at the computer and writing. Watching TV, reading, eating...they all put me to sleep. But typing engages my brain in a way that staves off sleep. This didn't used to be so, especially when trying to finish term papers the night before they were due, but then again, this isn't a term paper.

I had to use all my United frequent flier miles to book my ticket to China. August is peak travel month in China, despite the torrid heat, and so tickets were going for $1300 and up. Of course, United didn't have any coach fares available for mileage redemption, but the surprise was that all the business class seats were gone as well. So I had to push all in with my miles to snag a first class ticket. I've never flown first class overseas, and I'm looking forward to it. Fully reclining seat? Sweetness.

Before I leave, though, a quick look back at Nik and Maria's wedding from my visit to Chicago last weekend.

***

Congrats to Nik and Maria on their wedding! Theirs was the first Serbian-Polish wedding I'd ever attended, and if I have any say in the matter it won't be my last. Weddings that last more than a few days should really qualify as festivals. The day after my arrival, on a Thursday, the festivities began. I missed that first affair because I was at a White Sox game with Derek, but the next day I jumped in. After a rehearsal at a Serbian Orthodox church, we all drove to Nik's parents' mansion in the suburbs.

So many people were attending that we had to park all the way down at the end of the block. Walking towards their house, we saw a massive catering freezer truck sitting in the driveway. Always a good sign. More than half of the massive backyard sat beneath a circus-sized white tent. Inside, a Serbian band played, the lead singer about three weeks from giving birth, belting out tunes with a vibrato that I came to recognize as characteristic of Serbian singing. Six or seven gigantic coolers sat in the center of the tent, filled with beer and soda, and a series of long tables lined three walls of the tent. Serbian caterers dashed to and fro, placing drinks and dish after dish before us. Then, just after the last course and before dessert, Nik's relatives stood up and started a Serbian line dance.

I was watching and studying the dance steps when one of Nik's uncles, spying my digital SLR, pulled me out of my seat.

"Are you the official photographer? Oh, it doesn't matter." He waved his arms at the circle of dancing family members. "Get that. Do whatever you have to. Stand on the coolers, whatever."

I leapt into action, straddling coolers, weaving in and out of the circle of dancers, snapping away. Several of the people in the circle held the hand of the person next to them with one hand while in the other hand they held not only a beer but a cigarette. By evening's end, I came to believe that this was actually an official variant of the dance formation.

The next morning, we drove back out for another meal, a brunch in the same tent. Afterwards, we drove about forty minutes northeast to the church for the ceremony, which reminded me quite a bit of Ted and Joanne's Greek Orthodox wedding ceremony. Joannie and Mike, both in the ceremony, claimed Nik had to summon Jim Carrey-esque facial contortions during the entire ceremony to keep the tears at bay. If you know Nik, you'd realize how surprising that was, but the love of a good woman can do that to the best of them. We often jokingly r