Cross Post from Tumblr

http://cathedralavenue.tumblr.com/post/361806556/no-need-to-lie-im-enjoying-spartacus

Cross Post from Tumblr

Head over to Tumblr to read my thoughts on Fish Tank.

New Year's Resolutions First Check In

Things are going well. I have made no progress on my own writing or deciphering Kant and Hegel, but I am eating a lot better. I've taken aim at portion sizes, haven't had an entire soda, and can count the number of beers I've had on one hand. I feel very good already, and these are just baby steps.

Happy New Year!

I'm enjoying a quiet night at home with my g/f, cat, and a bottle of Prosecco. NYE has never lived up to expectations for me, so I'm taking control of it and doing what I want to do: chill. See you on the other side!

New Year's Resolutions

I've made good on some New Year's resolutions in the past, so I go into January with a lot of optimism around making positive changes. Thus far I've got three ideas for 2010:

1) Lose weight. This one is pretty important. My God-awful diet and sedentary lifestyle have left with me quite the spare tire. Time to get on top this.

2) Write. I desperately need a creative outlet, and I'm going to take a crack at creative writing. During my early 20s I scratched this itch with music, but for the past three years all I've done is work. Enough is enough.

3) Kant und Hegel. I dropped out of graduate school pretty early, but my lack of comprehension for German Idealism still bothers me. I'm going to take a slow approach and incorporate some secondary sources. No goal of mastery here, just a baseline understanding.

Hello down there!

For the first time in my life I have internet at 35K feet. If this becomes the norm in the near future, I definitely *have* to get a netbook. Pretty neat.

Yelp Comes to Android

I've been waiting for Yelp to arrive on Android ever since I got my G1 last year. Living in NYC, it is extremely useful. My girlfriend has had it on her iPhone for a long time now, and by default she has hitherto assumed the odious role of "Yelp bitch." Now when we are downtown in the cold looking for some place to eat after a movie, I too can tap away on my phone to find a suitable restaurant. I suspect this may reduce tension in our relationship by 2.3%. Not bad.

Less personally, the arrival of Yelp on Android has me asking a fundamental question about the iPhone's dominance: sure, 100K+ apps is impressive, but as the best of breed continue to appear on Android (Yelp, Pandora & Last FM, Foursquare, Flixster, Twitter (via Twidroid), Facebook), what does volume matter? How much do we value fart applications by the truckload?

I am separating out games as I think this through. The reason being that we are only now seeing Android phones with proper hardware to support this subset of applications. For non-games, though, I think there may be some equalizing afoot.

Dismal

I wasn't able to see the Skins today, but somehow you just knew this would happen. I have tickets to see them right before Christmas on MNF v. the Giants. That game might have value for NY, but that's about it.

Another Beacon from the Twilight Zone

Wow, quiet August on the blog front. Oh well. I saw 500 Days of Summer today. Bravo. Comparisons to everything from Amelie, Eternal Sunshine..., and Sideways abound, but it was quite well done. Funny: a movie with no pretense of realism portrays relationships better than I reckon 95% of any cinematic love stories over the past 10 years. There is a Jennifer Aniston movie coming out called Love Happens. That's what they should have called 500 Days... Ironic.

Oh, that beacon! Observe:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0OUXkZO8vE

Chill Out, Dickwad.

T2 is on television right now. Wow, what can I say? This movie doesn't look dated at all. For its genre, it's brilliant.

...They're now going after Miles Bennet Dyson. "In a panic, dey tried da pull da plug."

Do you post in YouTube comments?

Yes? Please lobotomize yourself now. Thanks!

Brüno - Is it Really that Complicated?

I'm not sure why some of the reviews of Brüno are so negative. I think the point is to bring to life the ridiculous notions that homophobes have of gay people. And then proceed to throw it in their faces.

I guess some would dismiss Cohen's targets as obvious. Alabama hunters, cage-fighting fans, etc. But I thought the past decade in American politics has taught us not to ignore this bloc. My guess is that many people in America think that this is how all gay people behave: with flamboyance on 11 and an overcharged, indiscriminate sexuality.

I've been a fan of Cohen for a while. I'm guessing this could be his swan song for the triumvirate of Ali G, Borat, and Brüno. It's been fun.

Dump IE6, please.

It's really time for it to go.

DUMP IE6

I Zotted my Facebook Page

I had been waiting for an excuse to kill my Facebook page for some time. I finally found it.

http://mashable.com/2009/07/17/facebook-dating-ads-2/

Apparently the ad was served by a third party, but who cares? Through this story I learned that I was opted in by default for Facebook to use my image in ads. That's ridiculous. I'm through with that garbage. I spoke to a few old friends through it, but I can't really say I'll miss it.

Will Palin ever be a distant memory?

I surely hope so. Retreating from the Alaska governorship early? This person was almost our VP? Wow. Once again, something to truly be thankful for on July 4 weekend.

July 4th Sanity Check

It's July 4, 2009. This Independence Day feels better than the last eight, truly. Whether Obama or McCain had won, we knew that either of them would inherit the mother of all bad hands. And yet despite all the economic turmoil of the past year, I still feel more optimism than I have in approximately a decade.

Why? Obama-fever? No, not quite. I do like Obama, but yesterday I watched Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure. I had wanted to see it in theatres but missed out. I found it available on streaming Netflix earlier in the week and got around to it during yesterday's day off. (I also had it on the brain due to a mention during This American Life's recent "Fall Guy" episode.)

It took me a while to see where Morris was going with SOP. But isn't the point that, while yes, everything we see in the Abu Ghraib photos is despicable, it's also something of a distraction? Something of a convenient incident for a show trial? And something quite minor when compared to what was happening "off camera?" All of the interviewees talk about being instructed to soften up the prisoners for interrogations...

I guess the punchline is that while sicking dogs on detainees (yes, some prisoners were bitten); forcing them to masturbate; fooling them into thinking they might be electrocuted; etc.; is torture, it is the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg being systematic, illegal torture condoned by the highest ranking people in our political system. Lyndie England? Pawn. As I write this, do you realize she is only 26?

I don't think it's possible to succeed in politics without compromise. But I also think we have emerged from some very dark times.

Futbol!!!

UPDATE 2: Blah.

UPDATE: US up 2-0 at the half!! Long way to go, but very impressive start.

US v. Brazil today at 2pm EDT. I cannot wait for this. Given that the World Cup is about one year away, I'm ready to catch the bug again.

BEAT BRAZIL!

back

Eek. No posts in two years. Oh well, what's the point of a forced blog? Especially when one is basically writing it for himself?

I feel compelled to try this again thanks to Twitter. The 140-character limit can be restricting, obviously, and sometimes I just want to scribble down a bit more. So while I've really enjoyed the microblogging style, I want to sometimes go just a bit beyond that. I'll come here to post just slightly longer entries.

To start, here is a random observation from current popular television. My girlfriend and I have been watching Weeds lately. We're up to about the midpoint of season 3. Is it just me, or does the Nancy character revel in being debased? What's up with that? That's such an uncomfortable area, I find. And I'm surprised they keep trotting it back out.

Still Here

I have no readers, but I'm still compelled to post that I'm not abandoning this blog. New post coming this weekend.

The Big, Godless Heat

To date, I cannot recall any film noir that lulled me into such a false sense of ho-hummery as The Big Heat. One kind of has to wonder what the game is all about for the first 20-30 minutes or so; it just seems like a crime drama. A cop (right?) has killed himself, but something is most certainly awry. And, oh, it's not so bad: the cop investigating the (potential) suicide goes back to the placid homestead at 5 o'clock anyway. The baddies and the riffraff do their business in the night, and the good guys clean up by the light of day. Eventually, however, reality comes crashing in quite hard and we realize that The Big Heat, for its weight in dark, misanthropic, post-war gloom, is not to be fucked with. Not at all.

This due in large part (thought not the largest part) to Lee Marvin's Vince Stone. One can basically take Liberty Valance, trade in his spurs for a fedora, and drop him into the high-contrast, duplicitous milieu that is the urban landscape of film noir to get an idea. Marvin, as Stone, is possessed of an intractable temper so powerful as to literally make me (at least) nervous as a viewer. Each scene featuring Marvin is characterized by a torturous uncertainty. This is no small matter; as aforementioned, The Big Heat seems to play with us a bit. If I were to describe a movie to you as a crime drama, questions of moral ambiguity and dehumanizing violence would not immediately come to the fore. But it is precisely through some of the actions of Stone that The Big Heat is transformed from simplistic to sinister. While from the strict perspective of chronology it is the vicious murder of Katie Bannion (Jocelyn Brando) which unhinges the film, Stone's dousing of Gloria Graham with scalding coffee—leaving her with severe burn scars on the better part of half her face—unnerves with potentially greater force. Better to be alive than dead, I guess, but there is a unique cruelty in purposeful disfigurement. Indeed, there is transgression and sin, and then there is sadism.

And yet for all this, Marvin (and moreover, Humphrey Bogart in general) cuts a less than intimidating figure under the shadow of Glenn Ford's David Bannion. Never mind the fact that Ford provides a complete schooling in skillful communication via body language (aided each time by a smart and never pandering close-up shot); the significance of his performance could lie simply in his outright denial of God midway through the film. In Western thought, we know God has been dead. In fact, it wasn't even Nietzsche who killed him; he was simply pointing out the fact that the murder had already taken place (maybe Machiavelli was the culprit—who knows?). So, when Bannion coldly rejects Hettrick's advice of seeing a priest, the death of God can now be the intellectual foundation of common men. Or, taken another way, it doesn't take a mind like Alyosha's to reject God. Thus, in film noir, the world has either denied or killed God, and Ford's David Bannion is sounding the horn. For who is Bannion, anyway? One can certainly not say that he is an unequivocal hero. Hettrick is to a degree right when he tells him, “You can't set yourself against the world and get away with it.” But maybe it is the grim view of film noir or at least Fritz Lang that even though one can't get away with it, it's the only choice he has.

The wickedness of Lee Marvin, the rebellion of Glenn Ford—these are what make The Big Heat an archetypal noir. While I do not intend to wrap up with the question of what makes a noir, I cannot help but contrast the brutality and violence of a movie like The Big Heat with the almost comical and cartoonish qualities of the The Maltese Falcon. Perhaps it's Bogart's over-acting and caricature (which I do not necessarily dislike), but to lump those two films together as embodying the genre is fallacious. Film noir is sinister and it is not cute. It need not resort to the performance-enhancing drugs of Sin City (again, which I do not necessarily dislike), but it is certainly not just about being hard-boiled and sharp-tongued. It is about a worldview, one in which morality is a hard sell because one need not be a philosopher to realize that God is dead.