I am merely a total geek.
I am Neo.
I've biked three times this week, and I am much slower than Lance Armstrong. I am too heavy. I have about one month to lose lots of weight before tackling Alpe D'Huez in France. I am scared.
I am still looking for a job.
I finally got some amoxicillin from my doctor for my sinus infection, so I am a happy puppy.
I am really scared and repulsed by that guy Nic in the Apple Music Store commercial who sings "Baby Got Back." I think Apple must be, too, since they pulled the Quicktime movie that I wanted to link to.
I am really sad that I finished Moneyball and The Da Vinci Code in one day each, because they were really entertaining. I'm sure you'll like them too.
I am sick of spam.
I am disappointed by Enter the Matrix and the new Pete Yorn album, and mildly disappointed by the new Jack Johnson album.
I am the only person who hasn't seen Bruce Almighty. I am excited for Finding Nemo.
I am going to see Ray Harryhausen!



posted by Eugene Wei at 12:13 AM | link

David Weinberger on why copy protection is a crime against humanity.
posted by Eugene Wei at 3:11 PM | link

Low-cost and simplification market strategies naturally target expensive, complex procedures, especially in the online age. So it should be no surprise that online divorce sites have surged in popularity.

posted by Eugene Wei at 1:25 PM | link

Liz Phair visited Amazon.com today to play a few tunes, meet some of her adoring fans, and promote her upcoming album titled simply Liz Phair. This was part of the Fishbowl Series, in which musical artists visit Amazon and play some tunes in one of our conference rooms to thank us for selling lots of their albums (I'd say they were thanking us for our support, but since our catalog is virtual we support every CD that's issued). Past notables whose voices have tickled our walls include Aimee Mann, Dido, and Johnny Marr.

Liz looked, ummm, really hot in her leather jacket, boots, and mini, mini skirt. She doesn't look like she's aged a bit since Exile in Guyville came out in 93. Thank god, because it made me feel young (I may have to start attending more plays, classical music concerts, and operas, because those are other places I feel young). Liz has never been shy about playing up her looks, and that sexual honesty and aggression has been part of her image and music since the beginning.

Accompanied by some dude on guitar, she sang three oldies and two tracks, Why Can't I? and Rock Me, off of her upcoming release. The new album includes four tracks produced by The Matrix, most well-known for their success with Avril Lavigne. As such, the album's rumored to be more radio-friendly. Why Can't I? is one of the Matrix tunes, and it's definitely a sweet little love ballad with pop sensibility. Rock Me's lyrics play like a tamer version of her sexual predator persona, sung as they are to seduce some young boy, a boy too young to even know who Liz Phair is, and someone she'd like to play XBox with on his living room floor.
Divorce Song
Why Can't I?
Rock Me
Johnny Feelgood
Statford-on-Guy

Liz in person is very approachable. She's hardly the angry, sarcastic alt-rock goddess you might envision after listening to her music. She joked around ("I've always wanted to play this room"), laughed and smiled while she sang, and genuinely seemed to have a good time. People who love their work have that certain glow about them, as if they recognize how blessed they are. When they finally let us in she serenaded us with Extreme's More Than Words, and she tried to get us all to sing along at the end of her performance, but we young Amazonians were too jaded and self-conscious to participate.

Her voice sounds like it's matured a bit. No one will ever confuse her pipes for those of Celine Dion, but I think even her detractors will have to admit that she's now more than a vocal storyteller. I happen to enjoy her raw voice--it enforces the emotional honesty of her music.

I sat in the front row, just a few feet from her, and when she looked at me for a moment while singing Divorce Song my brain started to heat up and I spent the rest of her set sweating like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News. Afterwards, I waited in line to meet her, as nervous as a virgin on prom night. She signed all my CD jacket covers and a black and white publicity still. On each one she wrote my name in a different handwritten font, and on the cover of Exile in Guyville she wrote "COME BACK!!"

I never left, Liz!

The sexiest person to ever grace this conference room (not hard when it's used primarily by computer programmers). Liz looks a bit like Meg Ryan or Alicia Silverstone, but more mischievous (naughty?).


Lucky, lucky guitar.


For the last song, Liz grabbed the guitar from that dude who needs a haircut and proved she still rocks.


P.S.: You'll notice a lot more photos in my blog recently. I finally gave in and bought a digital camera, a Minolta F300. I can't tell if I like it yet. If I had to do it all over again I'd probably buy a Canon Powershot S50, and some things about digital cameras really annoy me. The slow zooming in and out, the lag time between when you hit the shutter and when you capture the shot. I'm definitely not ready to give up my analog 35mm Nikon yet.

Still, the great thing about digital cameras is how quickly photos can be transferred to a computer and posted online. My 35mm was in the shop, so the digital camera saved me today.
posted by Eugene Wei at 7:31 PM | link

Among the hot new topics in geekdom while I was on sabbatical is the Google backlash. First came the concern over Googlewashing, the web equivalent of memetic cleansing. Now bloggers are asking if pagerank is dead?

Google is far from dead (indeed, it seems to have been peaking in mainstream press love in recent months, since the mainstream press is always several months late to every technology revolution). However, Google's search result effectiveness has not improved significantly in quite a while. Its greatest strength is its greatest weakness, and that is the pagerank algorithm. Since everyone knows how it works, it can be gamed, Google's denials notwithstanding. And the idea of using the link structure of the web to sort search results, while a great improvement over previous predominant algorithms of web search, has plateaued in effectiveness. The next revolution in search requires not just a new body and a walnut trim but a different engine altogether.

Still, a search on my name in Google still puts me at the top of its search results, and for that my vanity is thankful. Though this Dr. Eugene Wei at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is getting on my nerves and must be stopped.
posted by Eugene Wei at 7:28 PM | link

Last last Sunday's NYTimes had an article titled Dating a Blogger, Reading All About It. The article discussed the uncomfortable phenomenon of reading private details of your life exposed in someone else's weblog. It's not a new topic for bloggers who had had to confront the issue and make some choices from the time they started publishing to the web, but perhaps it's an unpleasant surprise for those who don't blog but find themselves surrounded by a rapidly growing community of amateur web journalists.

Writers (journalists being a particularly notorious subspecies) have always had to deal with the suspicions of their subjects. It's not unjustified, especially in this tabloid age, a natural extension, perhaps, of the revolution in investigative journalism which many trace to Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate. As much as a writer can cement your reputation with a mainstream audience, much as Michael Lewis did for Billy Beane in Moneyball, the writer's main goal is to establish his own reputation and legacy. Beane is paying the cost for his fame. Many baseball executives have publicly denounced Beane for sharing the secrets of their conversations and for making them look like fools (the truth hurts, especially when publicized), and even some of Beane's own scouts resent the all the credit Lewis gives to Beane for the A's strong farm system.

My personal philosophy is never to mention anyone I know in my weblog unless I'm sharing positive feedback and something I'd be comfortable saying in public with that person present. I try to err on the side of caution; you'll hear me write about movies or concerts or plays I've attended, but usually I don't mention who I went with. It's not that I'm embarrassed about the company I keep (I've been accused of it), but I'm never sure if others want their personal lives publicized. What if they lied to someone else about why they were going to be busy that night? You'd be amazed at the ridiculous lengths that people will go to to spend time with me (Editor: note the seamless injection of self-deprecating humor), and I've been known to resort to a harmless fib from time to time myself to secure some private time. Perhaps in the early days of my weblog I could get away with it, but I don't know enough about my audience now to risk it. I do know it's a larger audience than before, and that restricts the amount I'm willing to share.

To some, this leaves my weblog devoid of, well, me. But there's more of me here than you think. All written language reveals something about the structure of the mind it came from. For someone who's actually quite private, I sometimes cringe at some of the things I've published to the web. Some of it will come back to haunt me, I'm sure of it. Psychologists have done experiments in which subjects were asked very personal questions. One group was asked to respond while looking into a mirror, and another group to respond without the mirror. The group with the mirror revealed much less about themselves. Something of that effect works on me when I sit at the keyboard, or take pen in hand. The distance from my brain and heart to the my typing fingers is shorter than that to my mouth.

But never fear, I've found a new way to signal to everyone about when we're speaking on or off the record. If I'm ever wearing this t-shirt from O'Reilly, you'll know it's not a good time to confess that you're cheating on your honeybun, or your taxes. Remember that Far Side cartoon titled canine social blunders? In it, a dog stops all conversation at a cocktail party when he proclaims loudly: "Say, I just found out yesterday I've got worms."
posted by Eugene Wei at 7:09 PM | link

Back when I was training for RAMROD in 2001, I posted this page with some links to some ride maps and cue sheets for others who were going to do the ride with me. I found most of them on Seattle Sidewalk (now Citysearch) My page is quite out-of-date now, but I never got around to updating or deleting it, and at some point Sidewalk pulled down the cue sheets so my site ended up being an archive of those pages. A surprising number of cyclists would find the cue sheets through Google and write me about them from time to time.

Last week a guy named Jim Eanes dropped me a line. Turns out he was the originator of the cue sheets for Sidewalk. So first off, thanks to Jim for his service to all Seattle cyclists. Creating cue sheets is time-consuming and a hassle. Secondly, Jim pointed me to some updated cue sheets he's created. Cool stuff. Just in time to provide some variety in my training regimen. I was getting so sick of the Lake Washington and Mercer Island loops, and I need all the motivation I can get to climb back in the saddle, what with another Tour de France mountain climbing bike trip only five weeks away.
posted by Eugene Wei at 12:10 AM | link

Happy wedding anniversary to Joannie and Mike! And happy birthday to Sharon! Memorial Day will always be a big weekend for our family. As I get older, I find that proximity to family is becoming more and more important, especially now that I'm an uncle. Since I'm the only one in the family west of Chicago, this feeling registers as guilt and a nagging itch. It's a strike against Seattle, through no fault of its own.

Perhaps if I had my own wife and kid(s), it would be less of an issue. I pushed Sadie around in her newfangled stroller (they make them so the baby can face the driver now) around Queen Anne this weekend, and she stared at me the whole time with her big blue eyes (which are perhaps turning brown), sucking on her pacifier quietly like Maggie Simpson. She has doubled in weight since last I saw her, before South America, and now has a double chin, a feature only adorable in infants. I'm still not ready for parenthood, but partaking of it vicariously from time to time has helped the whole idea to grow on me.
posted by Eugene Wei at 11:47 PM | link

While traveling, I picked up a copy of Dan Brown's huge bestseller, The Da Vinci Code. I haven't indulged in popular fiction since junior high, but the dearth of English-language books in South America broke down my snobbery defenses. At every bookstore, the choice came down to embarrassment minimization: which trashy novel would I be least embarrassed to be caught reading? Authors with a lock on English language shelf space in South America include Danielle Steele, Jackie Collins, J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, Richard North Patterson, and an assortment of other names who are vaguely familiar as icons of American pop fiction.

Many pop fiction authors write glowing reviews for each other, and these decorate the back covers. Dan Brown's book won out because of the glowing reviews I'd seen from less biased and somewhat more respected critics online, from journals like The New York Times and Salon.

I finally got around to starting the book this weekend, and I haven't been able to set it down. It's hardly fine literature, but it is pure thriller, with a cliffhanger at the end of every short chapter, some only a page or two long. What's most intriguing is that it mixes in ideas and legends from the real world in such a way that you can't tell what's fact or fiction. I'll try not to give any plotlines away, but one of the central clues in the novel is that Leonardo Da Vinci's painting The Last Supper depicts Mary Magdalene, and not John, seated to Jesus' right. If you look closely enough at the painting, the apostle seated to Jesus' right does look like a woman. The novel discusses the number phi, 1.618, and the Fibonnaci sequence. Key characters in the novel include secret societies like the Knights Templar and the Priory de Scion, and the Opus Dei. That Brown weaves all these together in a complex but believable plot is its primary appeal.

If I don't finish the book this weekend, though, it will be because of a nasty sinus infection, my second this year. I had one after returning from Brazil, and I've brought another back from South America. I suspect it is the result of inhaling some river water outside of Cusco, Peru, when I leaped from a 25 foot bridge into the Urubamba River at the end of a white water rafting trip. The river water probably wasn't very sanitary considering how much trash had been tossed into it by the locals. We could see thousands of plastic bags along the river's edge, plucked out of the water by branches of trees and bushes.

I had never had a sinus infection until this year, so it took me longer than usual to diagnose it. I finally realized it Saturday, but my doc doesn't have an on-call number so I've been craving antibiotics all this holiday weekend. So miserable am I, with my aching teeth, throbbing sinuses, runny nose, and mild headache. It prevented me from enjoying to the fullest the pleasant weather, the Sasquatch Music Festival, my first road bike excursion in months, my first tennis match in years, and the play Over the Moon by Steven Dietz.
posted by Eugene Wei at 10:28 PM | link

Liz Phair is coming to Amazon on Tuesday to play a few tunes from her upcoming new album. I may even catch her live tomorrow at the Gorge at the Sasquatch Festival, along with The Coral, The Flaming Lips, Jurassic 5, Coldplay, and other such nobrow (neither highbrow nor lowbrow) acts.

The first time I heard Liz was in high school, when Nate and Rich introduced me to Exile in Guyville. That album rocked. Then I saw a picture of her and for a long time was madly in love; here was an indie rocker chick who was hot! Later, as I matured, I realized that it wasn't love but merely celebrity adulation, causing me to question the basis of all my relationships to that point in life.

But that's another story. The story at hand is that I am going to meet Liz Phair. Somewhere in those 10 or so years since she hit the music scene, she lost her indie cred. More accurately, the indie cred police revoked her membership. She appeared in a Calvin Klein ad and a movie titled Cherish whose cast included Jason Priestley. But who in this day and age can remain a citizen of note in Indieland? Anyone gaining any notoriety in any field as an independent artist is rapidly assimilated and marketed and distributed by the capitalist engine. There's nowhere to hide. Those who retain their indie badges tend to be slightly cuckoo, on the path to senility, or so radical in their art that only a sliver of people can stomach it (e.g. Noam Chomsky, Lars von Trier).

She's still hot, she still rocks, and I hope she'll sign my album covers.
posted by Eugene Wei at 6:46 PM | link

After the first Matrix movie, I really coveted a Nokia with the spring-loaded sliding cover. Turns out such a phone wasn't available--the spring-loaded thumb-activated sliding cover was available on one Nokia series phone, but the actual phone body used in the movie was some other model, rigged with the nifty trick cover. The phone from the The Matrix: Reloaded, however, is available exactly as seen in the movie. Alas, it's only compatible with Sprint.

Had I been a Sprint subscriber when these first hit the market, I would, without a doubt, own one today. Pop-up earpiece? Bloody cool. Flash your inner geek proudly.
posted by Eugene Wei at 6:30 PM | link

Garner: "Pronunciation experts have long agreed that the word is pronounced /si-zem/, not /ski-zem/ or /shi-zem/" (note, those letter e's are supposed to be upside down; that special HTML character doesn't exist in ASCII ISO 8859-1).

That disagrees with Dictionary.com's suggested pronunciation, but Merriam-Webster agrees with Garner in its preferred pronunciation.

A tidbit for the next time you're at a loss for conversation.
posted by Eugene Wei at 5:24 PM | link

No such thing as a free lunch

Cloudmark's Spamnet has been my spam filter of choice in outlook for sometime. It's been in beta for quite some time, perhaps so long it lulled its beta users into an ignorant bliss. Consider them awake now. The final version of Spamnet has launched, and it's not free. Version 1.0 will cost $3.99 per month, though beta testers like me get a discounted rate of $1.99, or the option to continue using the beta version for free. Seems fair to me.

As the company president states in a post on his discussion board, his company needs revenue to survive. And they responded quickly to complaints about having to pay for licenses on multiple machines by expanding allowing users to spread their subscription across 2 machines. In addition, friends and family of beta testers can also get the $1.99 per month pricing (note to my friends and family: let me know if you're interested) and everyone who signs up for Spamnet and cites me as a referrer earns me a free month of the service.

My tolerance for paying for web content has increased over the years, and I'm not alone. I've paid for online subscriptions to Salon and Baseball Prospectus, for online billpaying through Yahoo (though Bank of America now offers it for free), and for an occasional article or e-book. The pricing for services on the web aren't always fair (they should pass through the lower cost of distribution, IMO), but in most cases we've received, and continue to receive, a huge bargain in accessing the vast resources of the Internet.

[My title is inaccurate. Given the vast and nascent landscape of the Internet, there are still lots of free lunches to be had, and not all of them bad. For example, Cory Doctorow's clever book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is available from his website as a free download.]

Blogger Pro versus TypePad

Been thinking about switching over to Movable Type from Blogger. These things require focused time and energy, like moving into a new home, or setting up a new PC, and I haven't had enough of either recently to tackle the task. My room is still a collection of unread mail, unfolded laundry, and other junk that accumulated while I was out of the country.

Another excuse is to wait for the next revs. Since Pyra Labs was acquired by Google, the Blogger team has been in hiding, coding their next release, nicknamed Dano. It will be interesting to see what improvements that contains. In the meantime, an improved Movable Type (with hosting thrown in) is promised with Typepad. Given that switching costs are not trivial (especially since the more fully-featured versions won't be free), aspiring weblog authors may wish to wait, or at least do some due diligence.
posted by Eugene Wei at 5:18 PM | link

SIFF happens

Attended the opening night movie of the Seattle Film Fest yesterday. Valentín. Stars an eight year old, slightly cross-eyed, massively near-sighted boy with glasses about an inch thick and twice the size of his head. This is Jonathan Lipnicki of Jerry Maguire at age eight, if he were Argentinian and Renee Zellwegger had run off when he was born, leaving him to grow up with his grandmother.

Perhaps I'm too cynical. Every scene was crafted for maximum sentimental value, to the point of no return. But the woman next to me was sobbing by the end, so its formula works on the less jaded. Don't pity the director, though. Miramax's cityscape opened the movie, so Alejandro Agresti has secured distribution.

Two nights ago, caught Better Luck Tomorrow, a pseudo-satire about the high-achieving model minority world of Chinese-Americans in suburbia. The characters were amusing, and some resembled people I've known in look and attitude. At times the movie is realistic, at times absurd--a push towards the outer boundaries of satire (thin George Saunders in fiction) would have been more entertaining and effective. There are traces of it...in the complete lack of adults, in the zombie-like acting of Karin Anna Cheung and John Cho (sometimes wooden acting in an indie movie can be excused as a stylistic device), and the basketball team and academic decathlon plotlines. Having grown up in that world, I can't help feeling that some context was missing, and if director Justin Lin was striving to point out the dangers of that environment, that he failed to show us all the pressures that could drive kids with such bright futures to random crime and violence. It's (or, if I was to be more personal, it was) more than suburban ennui.

Can't wait for Le Cercle Rouge.

USAGE NOTE: According to Kingsley Amis, "Speakers of English understandably feel that a noun, or modifier-plus-noun, will take a maximum of one article or possessive or other handle and shy away from saying anything like 'Graham Greene's The Confidential Agent' or 'Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange' or 'A.N. Other's He Fell Among Thieves.' ...To behave properly you have to write, for instance, 'Graham Greene's thriller, The Confidential Agent' and 'Anthony Burgess's fantasy of the future, A Clockwork Orange' and 'Kafka's novel [or whatever it is] The Castle.'"

Thus, "the Wachowski brother's movie, The Matrix: Reloaded." The Matrix franchise is such a part of the zeitgeist that this is an oft-encountered American usage problem. How can any writer survive without Garner's Dictionary of Modern Usage by their keyboard? Or, as Garner might write: [read Garner's classical reference, A Dictionary of Modern Usage]. Now available in portable form factor.
posted by Eugene Wei at 5:07 PM | link

Me too

I'm sure it's been blogged to death already, but since I was out of the country I'm pleading ignorance and reprinting this. The Washington Post Style section holds a contest in which readers are invited to write directions using the style of a famous writer. The winning entry is quite humorous:

The Hokey Pokey (as written by W. Shakespeare)

O proud left foot, that ventures quick within
Then soon upon a backward journey lithe.
Anon, once more the gesture, then begin:
Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.

Commence thou then the fervid Hokey-Poke,
A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl.
To spin! A wilde release from Heavens yoke.
Blessed dervish! Surely canst go, girl.

The Hoke, the poke -- banish now thy doubt
Verily, I say, 'tis what it's all about.

posted by Eugene Wei at 5:37 PM | link

Pacific Queen

I'd never heard of Pacific Queen apples until I purchased a bag from the grocery store last week. One of the produce guys in the market said they were in fresh from New Zealand, and since I'd just visited I thought I'd try something different than the usual Fuji, Braeburn, et. al. varieties.

Wow! Tasty. Super sweet. Just in my lifetime, dozens of new types of apples have been bred in laboratories around the world. Not all genetic engineering is a bad thing.
posted by Eugene Wei at 4:39 PM | link

?

Why are these Iraq's Most Wanted Playing Cards selling so well? They're in the top 10 in Amazon's books store.
posted by Eugene Wei at 3:51 PM | link

25 greatest electronic albums of the 20th century

I own ten of these. Couldn't it just be the best of all time? Or were there electronic albums in the 19th century?

Then why do all babies look like Richard Nixon?

Found a link from BoingBoing to Beautycheck, a fascinating site about research into facial attractiveness. I wasted a good half hour surfing the site because it encompasses all the various beauty theories I'd heard before:

• attractiveness is averageness (Langlois & Roggmann, 1990: "average faces are most attractive")


• the 'symmetry hypothesis' (Grammer &Thornhill, 1994; Thornhill & Gangestad 1999: "facial symmetry has a positive influence on facial attractiveness ratings")


• theory of 'multidimensional beauty perception' (Cunningham, 1986: "attractive faces show a combination of signs of sexual maturity and babyfaceness")


• correlation between attractiveness and attributed social qualities (Dion, Berscheid & Walster, 1972: "what is beautiful is good")

Some interesting excerpts from the research summary:
"By calculating prototypic very attractive vs. unattractive faces for each gender, we were able to show that these faces are remarkably different in their attributes, such as skin texture, proportions etc. Additional surveys showed that attractive female faces are narrower than unattractive ones, and that they possess a brown skin and full, well looked-after lips. The distance between the eyes is larger, eyelids are thinner, there are more, longer and darker eyelashes, darker and narrower eyebrows, higher cheekbones, and the nose is narrower than in less attractive female faces. Surprisingly, more or less the same is the case for attractive male faces: they, too, have a browner skin, a narrower face, fuller lips, thinner eyelids, more and darker eyelashes, darker eyebrows, and higher cheekbones than the less attractive ones. Attractive male faces can furthermore be characterized by a more prominent lower jaw and chin."

"Finally, the results of our studies on social perception suggest that there is a well-defined stereotype of attractiveness: People with more attractive faces were assessed to be more successful, contended, pleasant, intelligent, sociable, exciting, creative and diligent than people with less attractive faces. These results particularly show the far-reaching social consequences human facial attractiveness may have."

"To sum up, our study shows clearly that the most attractive faces do not exist in reality, they are morphs, i.e. computer-created compound images you would never find in everyday live. These virtual faces showed characteristics that are unreachable for average human beings."

Sigh. If only I had a narrower face, higher cheekbones, and a more prominent lower jaw and chin. Thankfully, the remnants of my sabbatical tan remain, which is perhaps why everyone says I look healthy.

Unfortunately, the site drew no conclusions as to why people all seem to gravitate towards faces with these characteristics, which is perhaps the more interesting question. Is it some quirk of genetics, some built-in bias in our perceptive organs, or is it developed over time by social stimuli? Do we find such faces more attractive because we know that our children will be more likely to pass on our genes if they look fit the socially accepted standard of beauty? If we took people that were blind from birth and suddenly gave them sight, would they judge beauty the same as people who'd had sight all their lives? If Daredevil had been blinded from birth, would he still think Jennifer Garner was beautiful when he "saw" her reflected by the rain?

Seattle International Film Festival, 2003

By the time I returned from my sabbatical and got my head in gear, SIFF pre-sales had already been open for a few days. Knowing the fanatical lengths to which movie buffs go to secure tix to desirable movies here in Seattle, I was concerned that all the best movies would be sold out. The truth wasn't quite so bad, though a few movies I wanted to see were no longer available in exchange for passes and had to be paid for. So, not too bad.

The problem with SIFF is always selecting movies to see. Most are movies I've never heard of, and the problem was worse this year since I had spent the last 3 months in other countries, out of the film circuit gossip loop. There are over 200 movies at this year's fest, and the most you'll learn about any of them is the one paragraph marketing-oriented description of the plot in the Seattle Times special SIFF section. It's not much to go on, and the last thing you want to do is wait in line for an hour to see a dud. But that's the risk you take in the hopes of seeing something interesting at a film festival in which most of the entries will never make it to the big screen in your neighborhood again.

My selection strategy involved all of the following: seeing movies I'd heard good things about from other film fests or movie fans, eliminating movies I couldn't see because they would play during work hours, selecting movies unlikely to be released in theaters, attending movies where artists I admire would be present to speak, and focusing on the cinema of countries which had produced interesting movies in the past. And occasionally, I'd just guess.

Here's what I ended up with. If you're in Seattle and planning on attending any of these, let me know and I'll hold a spot for you in line with all the other crazies (I think it was The Stranger that last year referred to SIFF full-series passholders as passholes, and there's much truth to that characterization):

• Valentin (May 22, Paramount Theatre): opening night gala. I don't know what this movie is about, but it came with the Christmas special ticket package I bought.


• Owning Mahowny (May 24, Pacific Place): the always entertaining Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a gambling addict.


• The One-Armed Swordsman (May 25, Harvard Exit): one of SIFF's special programs this year is a screening of numerous archival and restored 35mm prints of classic martial arts movies.


• An Evening with Ray Harryhausen (May 30, Egyptian): the genius behind the first stop-action King Kong movie will be in attendance! Jason and the Argonauts will be screened.


• Animatrix (May 31, Egyptian): before it comes out on DVD, a chance to sample it on the big screen.


• Hukkle (June 1, Harvard Exit): sounds interesting. A montage murder mystery from Hungary with little to no dialogue.


• The Eye (June 2, Egyptian): another flick with an intriguing description...a blind woman has her sight restored and starts seeing strange things. The horror movie capitol of the world has moved to Asia.


• American Splendor (June 4, Egyptian): a Sundance Grand Jury prize winner, adapted from Harvey Pekar's comic book about himself.


• Springtime in a Small Town (June 5, Pacific Place): from the director of The Blue Kite.


• 11' 09" 01 (June 8, Egyptian): 11 big-name directors memorialize Sept 11 with 11 minute, 9 second, 1 frame long shorts.


• Vertical Frontier (June 8, Egyptian): rock climbing documentary.


• Le Cercle Rouge (June 8, Harvard Exit): Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Delon also collaborated on Le Samourai, one of my favorite movies of all time.


• Infernal Affairs (June 9, Cinerama): my Hong Kong cinema guilty pleasure.


• The Legend of Suriyothai (June 15, Cinerama): most expensive movie ever made in Thailand, and also the biggest box office earner. The trailer hints that it's the type of movie that will take advantage of the Cinerama.

Summer begins when TV shows end

What marks the beginning of summer in Seattle? No, not the end of 4th of July weekend, though from a weather perspective you wouldn't be far off. For me, it's marked by the season finales of the fall TV programs I've been watching. When those end, there's no reason to stay home in the evenings or to download from the Tivo. It stays light out later into the evenings anyway, and those two things combined get me out the door more often.

Bye bye Buffy (it was time, but it's still sad), and 24, and The West Wing. Another benefit of the Tivo, for me, is the ability to watch four or five episodes of these shows back to back. The shows taste better consumed that way. It's especially true of a show like 24, which was dragging on and on for me before I left for South America. Watching the final 6 episodes all at once, instead of dragging those 6 hours out over a month and a half, prevented the suspense and convoluted plot from dissipating. Perhaps, in the age of short attention spans, I've lost my ability to appreciate the serial thriller in its native weekly frequency.

By the way, my Tivo has never recorded anything interesting for me. I read stories about how people love to come home to see what their Tivo has chosen for them, but mine records reruns of Ally Mcbeal and NYPD Blue. I feel like the parent of a child who's last in his age group to learn to speak. Is something wrong? Is my Tivo developmentally challenged? Did I get a lemon?

Copper river salmon, monkfish, and artichokes

It's copper river salmon season again. Delphine was in town for a thoracic conference so I showed her and her roommate Joey around town this weekend. At Pike Place Market, copper river salmon was everywhere.



Everyone around town seemed to know that several thousand thoracic researchers were congregating at the convention center, because every store I walked by, even artisans selling crafts off of plastic tables in Pike Place Market, had "Welcome Thoracic Society" stickers and placards displayed for all to see. It wouldn't have surprised me in the least if a homeless guy begging for change had one of those stickers taped to his cup.

At the place where they throw fish in the Pike Place Market (after countless visits, you'd think I'd know the name of that store), a monkfish was on display.



The fish tossers had wired a hook through its body to its mouth and would tug on that when young children walked up to gawk, causing the monkfish to convulse. This caused the children to squeal with delight. This fish market also had a parrotfish on ice. Can you eat those?

On Queen Anne hill, at the park on Highland Ave. (again, you'd think I'd have memorized the name of the park, but I always forget), the attraction that most delighted Delphine was not the panoramic view of downtown Seattle and the Puget Sound but an artichoke plant in a pot by the sidewalk. None of us had seen an artichoke plant before. It reminded me of seeing lions mating at night in Africa. I'd never wondered what that would look like until I saw it for the first time, and it's not something I'll soon forget. Nor will the image of an artichoke plant soon leave me.

Matrix Reloaded, reviewed, because everyone else has

The Matrix Reloaded is more intellectually stimulating than emotionally moving, and so, in the end, it is less effective a movie than it could have been. Movies which inspire philosophy books always raise warning bells in my head; the strength of the moving picture medium has always been its ability to tap our subconscious through the fusion of sound and image and, to a lesser extent, words. Movies tap emotions much more naturally than books, which are much better suited for exploring complex ideas (for example, mathematics or advanced philosophy).

The first Matrix movie inspired lots of books dissecting its philosophical messages, but tellingly those were written by fans, not by the moviemakers themselves. That movie obeyed the basic storytelling edict of "show don't tell." Sure, Morpheus offered Neo a brief lesson after he chose between the red and blue pills, and the Oracle offered some fortune cookie paradoxes while baking cookies, but for the most part the characters acted out their roles and steered clear of long asides on the deeper meanings of the Matrix and reality and life. The philosophizing was of the "there is no spoon" variety, which was just implicit enough to let the viewer make his own conclusions.

No such luck in the second movie. This time, the Wachowski brothers have written the philosophy lessons into the script. We get long speeches from the Architect, Oracle, Morpheus, Agent Smith, the daemon Merovingian. Making matters worse, snly the Merovingian and the Oracle seem to speak with any flair instead of delivering their dialogue in the holier-than-thou diction preferred by Morpheus. Even Roy Jones Jr., in a cameo, has to tone it down a bit (I really wanted him to give a shout out to his homies in Pensacola). Why has every denizen of the Matrix been reduced to speaking like a constipated monk? This style of delivery overemphasizes the profundity of its content, much like the verbally-italicized dialogue in a David Mamet movie. It took me a second viewing to absorb everything they said, and that's not a compliment for a movie (whereas it might be for a book). The first movie seeped into my brain like warm brandy, and the ideas it represented weren't much less sophisticated.

The ideas discussed were fascinating, but all those speeches stray from the strength of the movie medium. It is enough that the characters all have names laden with meaning; Persephone, Merovingian, Zion, and Niobe are just some of the names pulled from religion and mythology for very specific reasons. That's as explicit as the moviemakers needed to be. Codifying the philosophy in long-winded speeches A movie can be both intellectually and emotionally substantive, much like a classic book of literature. There is The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and then there is Finnegan's Wake. There are corn flakes, and corn flakes with raisins. I know which I'd rather read, and which I'd rather eat. If the first Matrix movie was the perfect blend of action movie and art-house allegory, the second doesn't spend enough time in the blender--it is at times a skillfull but empty action movie (as with the chase scene and the Neo versus the men in black) and at other times a philosophy 101 lecture. My recollection of Philosophy 101 in college was that it sounded more interesting than it actually was.

A second reason the movie fails to connect on an emotional level is the tabula rasa that is Keanu Reeves. His naivete and wide-eyed imcomprehension worked well in the first movie, when he awoke to the reality that his reality was anything but. In the second movie, when we need to empathize with his cause and his love for Trinity, which causes him to choose the door his 5 predecessors avoided, we can't. When the albino Milli Vanilli twins close the parking garage door on him and he opens it to find a giant mountain range, I visualized his thought bubble: "Oh no, I'm back in Little Buddha! I thought I had rescued my acting career from the garbage heap!" Most people who criticize the Matrix Reloaded say it lost its humanity, but there's never been much humanity in either movie. That's not because most humans are dreaming in the Matrix but because the protagonist Keanu Reeves is called on to deliver lines like "I love you too much." The humans here are more Jedi Knights than normal folk in their emotional detachment. Just as Luke lays down his lightsaber and screams for his father's aid at the end of Return of the Jedi with the passion of a son in need, perhaps Neo and Trinity and Morpheus will become more human in the third movie now that their belief in the Prophecy has been shattered.

Another emotional dampener is that the fight scenes are understood to be virtual, both literally (Wired and Time and a whole host of magazines have dubbed John Gaeta and team's new development virtual cinematography) and figuratively (the fights occur in the Matrix, in a virtual reality). Furthermore, Neo's superman-like powers mean left me unconcerned that he'd be hurt in any of his fight scenes. In the first movie, you felt a sense of dread everytime an agent appeared, because you knew Morpheus, Neo, and Trinity all flirted with death each time an agent appeared on the scene (Morpheus gets tossed through a toilet by Agent Smith, who also lands about two thousand punches on Neo in the subway, and Trinity barely escapes death in the opening chase scene). In Matrix Reloaded, it doesn't matter who Neo is fighting, you know he'll either come out on top or soar away. Since the fights are all virtual, anyway, they lose an element of drama. When Neo leaps from one agent Smith to the other, you can feel the lack of physical impact--it recalls the cartoon-like movements that plagued the special effects in Spiderman. The visceral dread I felt while watching the first movie was absent. Since the movie has moved into the real world for the final chapter of the trilogy, that may be merely a middle-chapter problem.

The last flaw is the soundtrack. In the first movie the soundtrack moved in perfect rhythm with the action on screen, but in the Matrix Reloaded it calls attention to itself at inopportune moments. Don Davis atonal score did not, to my ears, make any growth from one movie to the next. It remains, like many of the movies ideas, detached and at times even abstract, disconnected from the visual narrative.

The Wachowski brothers are still exacting and ambitious architects, and in other areas of the movie that is to be appreciated. When Trinity uses Nmap to hack the power grid computer system near the end of the movie, the audience full of Amazon software engineers burst out in laughter (understandably, the less technical audience I later watched the movie with couldn't appreciate that touch). Other movies would have resorted to typical visual shorthand to represent the hack for a mainstream audience, but the Wachowski brothers are not so lazy. Most of Zion consists of minorities, a fact which makes sense when you think of what segments of society would be most likely to rebel against the status quo (perhaps a flaw of the Matrix is that it doesn't eliminate socio-economic stratification along racial lines inside its virtual reality?). Along those lines, it's no surprise that Cornel West is on the council of Zion. The special effects, of course, are visually innovative, and the fight choreography is of the expected Yuen Wo Ping quality. The brief fight between Neo and the Oracle's bodyguard was a humorous homage to martial arts movies in which brothers or old friends always greet each other with a brief and serious fight and then suddenly stop and embrace in laughter at the confirmation of each other's skill.

Though the movie didn't move me, I still admire its style, ambition, scope, and technical skill. After the highway chase scene, I want a Ducati more than ever, and I've stopped wondering why everyone wears sunglasses in the dark setting of the Matrix. If I were loaded into the Matrix, I too would ask for sunglasses to match the leather duds I couldn't afford in the real world. The philosophical puzzles are ones I want to know the answers to. How does Neo retain his powers in the real world at the end? How does Agent Smith cross over into the real world? Is that even the real world, or is Zion just another layer of artificial reality? Why can humans only leave the Matrix through a land line (I'm sensitive to the issue since I just returned from 5 weeks in South America, where the cellular network is far more reliable than the land line system; perhaps all of the Matrix is served by AT&T Wireless, which never gives me a reliable signal in Seattle)? Is the failure of the Prophecy to come true an indictment of organized religion? I'll play the videogame, Enter the Matrix. I'll watch The Animatrix, which offers further background and back story on Matrix Reloaded. And I'll be in line for the Matrix Revolutions, opening night.

Personally, I'm glad just to have been able to review the movie without resorting to any quotes like, "Perhaps my opinion of the Matrix is simply a programmed response within the Matrix." If I hear another guy at the vending machine outside my office asking himself if he's been programmed to select the Cheetos, I'm calling for an exit.
posted by Eugene Wei at 11:43 PM | link

Day One

Maury: "Derek, what do you do when you fall off the horse?" Silence. "You get back on! That's what this business is all about!"

Derek: "Sorry, Maury. But I'm not a gymnast."

For the first time in a long time, three months to be exact, I dressed for work today. No, I haven't been going to the office naked for three months. My sabbatical came to an end.

I woke up and realized I needed to press a shirt for work. Quite a change from my time hiking the Inca Trail, when I wore clothes that had been crumpled and stuffed into my pack for days.

You know what feels especially fresh after a layoff from work? The wrists. Typing hundreds of e-mails each week takes its toll on your hands. My fingers and wrists felt strong and limber today. They felt slightly less so after I worked my way through most of the 3,500 e-mails that had accumulated during my leave.

I saw a few folks, but for the most part I laid low. I feel like a stranger in the office, like an outsider. Like that feeling you have when walking into your room after months away. Everything is familiar but new--it's a dreamlike state, like deja vu. If only we could take regular breaks from all the familiar places in our life, they'd always seem fresh, magical.

Having been away for so long, there's much culture and news to assimilate. A not so brief tour of some of it...

Tufte on Powerpoint

Edward Tufte, author of what I consider to be essential reference books such as The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, writes an interesting critique of Microsoft Powerpoint. It costs $7, but it's worthwhile. Powerpoint has always been the weak link in Microsoft Office, and they I know it inside out, my relationship with it has always been one of reluctant acceptance. Not even love hate, because there isn't much love there.

How many airplanes are over the United States right now

A short clip illustrating a day in the life of air traffic over the U.S. (Quicktime movie). Cool.

A graphic of all the flights and bus rides and horse rides and train rides and hikes I took while in South America would look something like that as well.

Exponential hype

Has there every been a movie more hyped than Matrix Reloaded? The practice of offering pre-screenings and access to either Time or Newsweek in advance in exchange for a cover story (The Two Towers was the previous movie to make that type of business deal, in exchange for one of those covers, I think it was Time) is already getting old. I'm a fairly big film geek, but let's be honest. A blockbuster movie doesn't really merit the cover of Time magazine, not at this time in the world, and perhaps not ever. Standing in the airport on arrival in the U.S. from South America I saw Morpheus and Trinity and Neo staring at me from every second magazine cover.

I haven't seen the movie yet (being on sabbatical meant a temporary demotion from the ranks of the opening day fanatics, but the next time I'm in line for the first showing at Cinerama, say for LOTR: Return of the King, don't call it a comeback), but the expectations are so great that some backlash and letdown is inevitable. The "okay people, let's get real, it's just a movie and not some philosophical masterpiece" articles were bound to happen at some point after the first movie inspired books with titles like Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix.

After the uniqueness of the first movie (American movies that appropriate visual tropes from Japanese anime and Chinese martial arts cinema is always considered fresh in this country), it's hard to imagine the second movie being superior except in budget and special effects.

Okay, so the Wachowski brothers aren't the next coming of Kierkegaard and Baudrillard. I hope that amidst the marketing blitz no one made the mistake in thinking that they were.

Apple Music Store

The new Apple music store is very solid. The solution is not complex. In fact, it's built on components that have been available all along. (1) Selection: Apple has songs from all five major music labels (2) Micropayments: allows users to download individual songs for the fair price of $0.99 (3) Ownership: the service allows users unlimited burning of the songs to CDs and generous sharing of the songs across their iPod and 3 Mac computers.

My main quibble is that the selection, while it includes albums from all five major music labels, is still just a fraction of the music available from their vaults. It will likely take some time before all the artists allow their music to be shared digitally through the Apple music store, but it's futile to resist. There are still numerous albums and artists I'd like to see represented. Let's hope their early success convinces holdouts to cross the line.

I'd also prefer that the $0.99 price per song be inclusive of sales tax. But that's just me being greedy, since I don't really mind odd prices ($1.07 per track after sales tax in Washington) when I'm paying with a credit card.

All in all, the new music store is a surprising but well-executed move on the part of Apple. It won't eliminate or even significantly dent music piracy, but count me among the converted who are happy to fork over $0.99 for a good tune. Another reason, if you're considering joining the Mac community, to follow through.

PowerPC 970

And a second reason to make the Mac leap sometime in the next year? Perhaps a launch of a new processor architecture, finally bringing Apple out of the dark ages and into greater parity with the Intel and AMD processors powering most Windows boxes.

Considering the popularity of Macs as multimedia editing machines, the new processors can come none too soon. Rendering certain effects on a Mac can be painfully slow.

Lance, part deux

Lance Armstrong and Sally Jenkins are working on a sequel, Every Second Counts, to the bestselling biography It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life. I'm counting down every second, though it doesn't look like it will be ready for me to carry with me up the Alps in July.

The few. The proud.

If TV marketing held complete sway over me, I'd most definitely be a Marine. Great commercials.

Sports break

Bill James, every interesting, both for his analysis and his crusty personality, conducted a chat at ESPN today. His sharp tongued writing is always entertaining, particularly in a chat environment where he can always get the last word. An example:

Tim - Cohasset, MA: Bill, I'm very interested in your work and was wondering how a 20 year old college student would get in on the ground floor working for a team like the Red Sox.

Bill James: Learn to throw 95

Come to think of it, Bill James and Edward Tufte have a lot in common. Among the fun assertions he makes, in the chat, is that the three most valuable commodities in baseball, in order, are Alex Rodriguez, Mark Prior, and Vladimir Guerrero. Good news for Cubs fans. Maybe the Cubbies can sign Vlad in the offseason and get two out of three. I don't think Cubs fans realize yet how good Mark Prior can be. He's certainly the pitcher you'd draft first in the entire major leagues if you held a major league wide draft.

Speaking of the Cubbies, they pulled out a 17 inning game today. The Cubs are going to break the single season strikeout record they themselves set two years ago (that's my prediction). They are stocked up and down with power arms, and today Todd Wellemeyer struck out the side for the save in his major league debut. He was throwing 95 mph cheese and mixing in an 84 mph changeup with very good arm action. Granted, it was against the strikeout prone Brewers, but still, a lot of the Cubs strikeouts have to do with the power arms on their staff. They have a seemingly endless supply of 6' 3" to 6' 6" right handers who throw in the mid 90's. Nasty. Now if the Cubs pick up Mike Lowell from the Marlins before the trading deadline, I'm going to start getting nervous, in a good way.

4 is an unlucky number in Chinese

As the ever smart John Hollinger predicted, the Lakers succumbed the the Spurs, ending their run of championships at 3. Even with Rick Fox, their bench was terrible, and a lot of their loss this year should be blamed on their general manager, who did nothing to bolster their team behind Kobe and Shaq. I was no fan of Jerry Krause, but at least he knew that restocking around Jordan and Pippen was his single most important job, and he did his job well. It doesn't take much when you have two players as good as Kobe and Shaq, so it's a particularly egregious failure on the part of Lakers management.

The Bulls formula was straightforward. Surround Jordan and Pippen with strong jumpshooters to take the kickouts (Kerr, Paxson) and defenders (Grant, Rodman, Harper). The supporting cast knew their roles. Poor Kobe and Shaq had nothing to work with this year. Still, as a Bulls fan, I'm pretty happy to see the Lakers stopped short of 4 in a row. Sam Smith always claims the Bulls couldn't have won four in a row even if Jordan had stuck around after either of the runs of 3 championships, but I disagree. I like Kobe and Phil, but I like Jordan even more.

Fun players to watch when they're hot: Kobe (like Jordan, has developed into a dangerous 3 point threat when it counts), Nick Van Exel (pretty left-handed stroke), Allen Iverson (can embarrass defenders in a greater variety of ways than any player in the NBA), Tracy McGrady (always the chance he'll dunk in a way that will strip his defender of all manhood), and Dirk Nowitzki (the ball hits his hands and then is gone a second later in a beautiful arc towards the basket, no matter where he is on the court). Maybe Paul Pierce, and Peja. Tim Duncan isn't terribly exciting to watch, but his footwork is beautiful.
posted by Eugene Wei at 8:22 PM | link

All good things must?

Awaiting a series of flights that will deposit me back home. In three days I'll be doing something I haven't done in 3 months, and that's head out to an office in the morning.

My trip concluded with a hike of the Inca Trail to the fabled Incan city of Machu Picchu. I felt like a porter because I chose to carry my tripod, ballhead, and other camera equipment with me. With all that weight, the 3300 foot climb up to Dead Woman's Pass nearly finished me, but after 4 days of trekking I survived, and the spectacular visual imagery will stay with me a long time. I may need arthroscopic knee surgery and a pair of new ankles, but I still have to unequivocally endorse the Inca Trail as the most impressive trek I've ever been on, counter to the claims that it's been overcommercialized and overhyped.

Heavy heart, weary legs, fresh mind. Who knows? The next three months may be just as interesting as these previous three, though for different reasons. Decisions, decisions.


posted by Eugene Wei at 8:33 AM | link

Getting high

I'm waiting out a torrid rainstorm here in Cusco, in an Internet Cafe. All Internet cafe's advertise themselves with the adjective "speedy" here in South America. This one happens to fulfill that promise. I've been in Cusco before, and I've spent enough time here to actually have a favorite Internet cafe.

Cusco (also spelled Cuzco, depending on the source; every location and building here in the city has multiple spellings and names, reflecting the tension here between the city's Queccha/Incan roots and its modern identity, post Spanish invasion and post independence from said Spanish conquerors): the first thing most visitors notice about the city is its altitude of 3,400 meters. You don't see it, but you feel it. Walking at a brisk pace quickly leaves you breathless, and if you push it, eventually you get a nasty migraine. Or worse. It's my first experience with altitude sickness, which affects people randomly. It has nothing to do with your fitness (reminds me of oxygen consumption in scuba diving, which also seems unrelated to any measurable physiological characteristics of the diver).

Once you get over the dizzying heights, though, Cusco is a fabulous destination. Much more interesting and exotic than Lima, which you almost always have to fly through to get here. Sure, it's a tourist mecca, but it earns that distinction by virtue of its Incan ruins. The walls of Cusco are a spatial embodiment of its history. The base of many walls consist of Incan masonry, still existing from the age of the Incan empire in the 15th and 16th century. On top of that base of stones, fitted together with remarkable craftsmanship, are the cement and clay walls built by the conquering Spanish. Most of the cathedrals in the city were built by the Spanish atop Incan temples, and it's a shame more of those temples don't exist today. The Incan walls are famous for being made up of giant stones fitted together with remarkable airtight efficiency. The technology to build such walls exists today, but not the patience.

Today, Cusco seems to want to return to its Incan roots. Most locals I meet here proudly proclaim themselves Indian, though no pure Incans remain. Still, it's unique to see a country embrace its distant past. Most contries I've visited treat their indigenous peoples like a cultural artifact to be placed in museums by the conquering Europeans.

Despite the lousy weather right now, I've gained a second wind and am excited to begin the hike. A few days ago, lying ill in a tiny cabin on a ship off of the coast of the Galapagos Islands, I had a momentary pang of homesickness, but now that I'm in Cusco I'm ready to travel another several months. It could be a result of the delightful Peruvian or Andean cuisine. I'm surprised not to have seen any Andean cuisine in the U.S. The day after my nasty bout of altitude sickness, I had a huge Peruvian lunch at a an outdoor restaurant (quinta) called Quinta Eulalia. My meal consisted of rocoto rellenos (spicy bell peppers stuffed with ground beef and cheese and vegetables), choclo con queso (corn on the cob with a slab of local cheese), and chicharrones (fried chunks of pork ribs called chancho). Mmmmmmm. The corn on the cob here is some strain I don't recognize. Each kernel is three times the size of a corn kernel in the U.S., making it look like some mutant vegetable. Other favorites include their locros (potato stews), adobo (spicy pork stews), tamales (like corn bread, wrapped in banana leaves), and anticucho (grilled beef hearts on a skewer). I tried the cuy al horno, the most famous local delicacy, roasted guinea pig. The meat was sweet, but there were a ton of bones, and since the pig came out to me whole, legs splayed out on the plate, teeth bared in a sort of death grin, I couldn't help but feel some pangs of sympathy for an animal which we embrace as house pets in the States.

I have achieved travel zen. No amount of travel inconveniences ruffle me. For every inconvenience there is more than one benefit. The altitude which plays havoc with my body also means that lots of the mountain biking here is downhill. It's insane downhill. You're on an ancient mountain bike, without toe clips or clipless pedals, with lousy brakes, flying down the mountain on the same path as suicidally aggressive trucks, buses, and taxis, fleeing from stray dogs which may or may not be rabid but are definitely hungry, dust and potholes everywhere. And from time to time, if you dare look to the side, you'll see some several hundred year old Incan ruins, like the salt pans of Salinas. How can you beat that?

(though I do, on nights when Mark Prior is pitching, desperately wish I could get a televised feed...I read how he plunked Barry Bonds and then jawed with him...I'm just waiting until I get home so I can purchase an authentic Mark Prior jersey to go along with the autographed Mark Prior baseball I bought last year)

"I respect Barry as a player, as a hitter and obviously what he's done... The inside part of the plate for me, for me to be effective I need it. I was just trying to back him off. He said what he had to say and I said what I had to say. I hold nothing against him. That doesn't mean the next time I face him I'm not going to go right back inside."
--Mark Prior, Cubs pitcher, after hitting Barry Bonds (AP)

"I'm sure it could have gotten heated. I wasn't going to back down from him at all... Just because he's got 15-20 years in the big leagues and 600 homers and I have been in the league a little under a year doesn't mean I have to stop doing what makes me a professional."
--Prior

No escape from Kiper's hair, even in Cusco

Any more worthlessly analyzed event than the pro football draft? The last time I was in Cusco, I stopped for lunch at a restaurant, and the meal took two hours, as the wait staff was working on South American time. The TV in the corner was tuned to ESPN, which was, I surmised, broadcasting the NFL draft for nearly the whole day. Mel Kiper and the rest of ESPN's supposed draft geniuses, dubbed in Spanish, boxed in to complex screens that had tickers running across the left and bottom of the screens, several rows or columns deep, numbers scrolling right to left, up to down, in all directions. It was, perhaps, the single greatest volume of incomprehensible multimedia information every to wash over me. (I should note that super agent Drew Rosenhaus was the only person so loud that he could not be drowned out by the dubbed Spanish track; Rosenhaus, inspiration for Bob Sugar in Jerry Maguire, is the perfect caricature of a power sports agent, except he's for real)

I agree with TMQ on the absurdities of NFL draft analysis--it's all much ado about nothing. Among them, the ridiculousness of 40 yard dash times which differ by mere percentage points, insightful observations such as "first round quarterbacks usually fail since the last few superbowls have been won by journeymen quarterbacks," and stuff like that. I personally find it ridiculous that groups of rowdy fans for a team will be shown on TV, cheering or booing draft picks of players they couldn't name just days before. Why do we care what those boorish football fans care? And why are they spending an entire day of their lives watching a football draft live, anyway? Get a life.

Road Reading

I've been devouring books during transit times through airports, or long bus or plane rides. The selection is miniscule, and most bookstores that carry any English books have the most random selection. It takes dedication to sift through for some worthwhile nuggets. Among my conquests these past two weeks:

• George Stephanopoulus' All Too Human: A Political Education, a fairly interesting account of his days working on the first Clinton campaign, up until his resignation at the end of Clinton's first term. The relationship he had with the Clintons was a complex one, and because they didn't end up as close friends Stephanopoulos can give an honest opinion of Clinton (one could argue that his honest account ended their friendship, though it doesn't seem that way). The book also made me realize just how much of a model it was for Sorkin's The West Wing. Entire plotlines seem lifted from real life. Speaking of Clinton, I see Monica Lewinsky's reality TV show has debuted; it's events like this which make me yearn for another couple of months away from the U.S.


• Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. I'd read excerpts before, but never the entire book. More gruesome and disturbing than the movie it inspired, which more people were exposed to, I suspect. This is an impressive novel, and its narrative induced in me a trance-like fever. Or perhaps that was the bad ceviche talking. At any rate, I'll have to put it on my all-time favorites list when I get home.


• Jonathan Seabrook's Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture took me just a few hours on a plane ride to finish. Seabrook, who wrote and still contributes on occasion to The New Yorker, writes about the replacement of highbrow and lowbrow culture in America today, and he dubs the conquering fusion of commerce and culture nobrow. He uses the struggles of The New Yorker as a case study of how cultural elitists have lost sway in a society in which pop culture reigns supreme. In America, a nation where social hierarchy is extremely fluid, highbrow culture (reflected in the early, William Shawn New Yorker attitude) consisted of opera, classical music, ballet, the classics. It's the attitude that says anything that is popular can't be of substantive quality, because such an attitude is all that preserves one's elitism in a society in which any Joe can become one of the wealthy, instead of just inheriting it. Somewhere along the way, though, fringe became mainstream, and all the boundaries collapsed and became meaningless. Nirvana's success is most often cited as that seminal moment in the music world when alternative became mainstream, and the assimilation of hip hop is seen as the logical outgrowth. Clinton is the Nobrow president, able to use polls to maximize his Q-ratings, changing chameleonlike to maintain his popularity instead of having to take a guess at which stance would be most popular with the public. Anyway, that's just a rough summary of his thesis, which, though it meanders a bit, is quite fascinating. I think I personify nobrow in my tastes, which range from classic to pop culture. If you had to pick a magazine that reflects nobrow, perhaps Entertainment Weekly would be it.

I've hit the end of the line, though. I don't have any more books to read, and Cusco doesn't have any great English language bookstores. My need to read is compulsive. Given my current state, I really wish I could plug my iPod in and start downloading tunes from Apple's new music download service. As if you needed a reason to purchase an iPod, which now comes in a few new models with a slimmer form factor. I'm glad they added a docking station, and jealous, of course, since mine is one of the old fatties, and, at 10Gb, the lowest capacity now offered.
posted by Eugene Wei at 1:46 PM | link

Sometimes, I'll be wandering down some quiet street in some tiny South American town, and I'll feel as if I could turn some corner and disappear from the world, and all traces of me would fade away, until a short while later no one would even remember who I was. At these times, the world feels amazingly vast.

Recent highlights include mountain biking down from nearly 13,000 feet to 11,000 feet near Cusco, along a path that hugged the side of a mountain, the cliffs dropping off to one side; snorkeling atop a school of Pacific cownose rays and spotting white tip reef sharks and sea turtles to the side; hiking the ruins near Cusco; snorkeling with a colony of sea lions frolicking all around me; Peruvian cuisine; watching the mating dance of the blue-footed boobies from, well, the front row, essentially (the Galapagos Islands are famed for the fearlessness of their wildlife, who have spent millions of years isolated from predators).

And to be fair, a few lowlights. Difficulties leaving Argentina because they had failed to give me a proper entry card when I crossed from Chile to Argentina. Altitude sickness upon arrival in Cusco, to the extent that for two days my migraines and breathlessness rendered me useless. Getting food poisoned from some ceviche I ate in Quito, and then two days later throwing up from terrible seasickness right after dinner when the boat taking me around the Galapagos Islands crossed rocky seas from Floreana Island to Espanola Island. Avoiding a shifty English-speaking "street guide" who tried to extort money from me and tried to maneuver me into an alley where some of his thug buddies were hanging out.

Just finished up with the Galapagos Islands and Ecuador, and tomorrow I head back to Peru. A day in Lima, a day in Cusco, and then I set off on the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. I'm nearing the limits of my self-imposed budget, and when all is said and done, I'll be content to board the plane home.
posted by Eugene Wei at 10:28 PM | link