Some Words

Netflix on Demand has provided me with an odd array of documentaries recently. I don’t know why, but I have been watching documentaries almost exclusively. When I begin to watch something with a narrative plot, I last about 15 minutes. I don’t really know why. Feel free to refer to my previous post for pseudo insight into that matter.

One of the documentaries that I have watched was The Great Happiness Space. It is about men in Japan who entertain women at bars, professionally. A sort of no sex twist on male prostitution, they prostitute the a certain type of fake relationship instead. These men spend the entire night drinking with women they pull off the street, and charge these women to spend time with them. The women often force(?) them to drink dangerous amounts of alcohol. As the owner/entertainer of the bar that the documentary takes place in says, “My liver is pretty much fucked.”

For about five minutes I thought that they were simple assholes. Then for about ten minutes I thought that maybe there is a depth to them that you had not considered before. After this, a yawning abyss opened beneath me emotionally. If I looked down, and stopped viewing the film as a very limited character study, I would be forced to confront just how horrible human existence is for many, many people, even in very affluent nations. This was, I think, the real value of the experience. It allowed me to catch a glimpse of how horrible things were, while still being allowed to digest it over a period of time. The fact that the people who were being interviewed were often prostitutes, who carried out destructive behaviors in an attempt to cover up but whole created by the central destructive behavior of their life, was not hammered in. Instead, it sort of slipped in sideways, and then came to dominate. If you had to confront this at the start, without first being able to acclimatize to the amazing level of unthinking callousness of some of these people you might walk away before you really had a chance to see how deep the rabbit whole went.

Preface: I just finished reading this article on attention and found it to be fairly good, despite the usual “but maybe we are all just charting a bold new way of organizing the human brain” ending.

After the completion of my first year of law school, I had two weeks before things really started up again in earnest. I began this two weeks by reading two books in two days. This, rather obviously, made me feel like I had my attention span all neat and tidied up. I had goals that I wanted to accomplish over the summer, and I was going to set them up and knock them down. This was followed by two and a half weeks of seemingly barely being able to pay attention to anything at all. I didn’t post here, despite having subjects that I wanted to write about. I didn’t write out any of the ideas for fiction that I had been carefully putting away in the ideas.txt file on my hard drive, unwilling to tackle them in the full flush of a school semester. I made a to do list, and I did the things that I absolutely had to do because someone was waiting a few hours down the line expecting me to have them done. This was, I was sure, no way to live life.

Over the course of a year of getting back into school, I had carefully weeded the many distractions from my life. I still got distracted while studying. I still surfed the internet more than I wanted, but when I had to, I could focus much more than I had while working at an ISP. When you are on a phone with a person helping them get Outlook going, there is a certain amount of poddling around the internet as a whole that is understandably acceptable. You have configured Outlook so many times in the past that you may divide your attention, even with the loss of attention quality that this entails. When reading a court case, the same does not hold true. You must be thinking about it, or the words will get you nowhere. I had refilled my RSS feed with many of the things that I had carefully removed over the year. I had played a few flash games. It was relaxing, but it needed to end. Then I came across the article above. Of course, I didn’t read it at the time. I was recommended in a friend’s Facebook message, but I bookmarked it. When I got around to reading it, it was as part of a general reorganization in the hopes of increasing my general willpower and attention span back to school levels. Things can be more relaxing, but I’d rather that they were relaxing on my terms, as opposed by being led around by the nose across the greater internet.

Merlin Mann had some relatively sage advice in the article, as he often does. That sounds like a backhanded compliment, and it really is, but Merlin says one of the best things about attention that anyone ever says. If you spend too much time thinking how you can improve it, or be more efficient, or more lifehack oriented, you will wast too much time thinking about getting things done and not getting them done. First to go from the RSS feed was Lifehacker.com. Sorry Lifehacker. But your useful information ratio is about one in fifty, and the value of that stuff is not so good. You are exactly what Merlin was talking about. Hell this whole post is, in some respect, what Merlin was talking about.

So the new goal is of course to do things until they are done, or something else must be done at that time. This resolution will almost certainly not last beyond my first rem cycle tonight, but hopefully by destroying some of the faster links to distraction that I had on the computer, there will be less of it tomorrow. Another big one I hope to get better at: not pretending that doing a bunch of smaller tasks that don’t really amount to anything will “build momentum.” That never really seems to work. The slow cognitive rebuild begins once again for another ‘net denizen.

To all my friends who are thinking that I owe them an email. I know. That is one of tomorrow’s buckle down tasks.

Two semesters down, and four to go. I’m starting to work on picking up the balls I dropped over the past nine months. Hopefully a little fiction writing over the summer, some camping, and some interesting legal work.

Well that was a bit of a disappointment. It isn’t a completely bad film. It has its moments. Still, I always find it interesting to see what happens when Hollywood gets a hold of a script. It was visible even in Watchmen, where the story was that the director had been given almost total control. One cannot help but think that it would have been better to try to convince Alan Moore to come in and give him total veto power, but that is just speculation. Moore probably wouldn’t have done it anyway.

What really interests me about movies is the way that they change certain rules about how you provide information. There is an old adage that if you introduce a gun in the first act, you have to use it before the third. Watchmen (the movie) seemed to operate under the assumption that if you didn’t introduce the gun in the first act, it couldn’t be used at all. Additionally, if you didn’t remind people of the gun’s possible existence five minutes before it was used, they would be too stupid to realize what had happened.

Alan Moore trusted his readers. If something happened, it happened for a reason, but he didn’t telegraph it by saying “this thing is going to happen for a reason in a little bit.” I don’t know why they felt the need to work it that way in the film.

As for the rest of it, the casting was great, the special effects were great (with the exception of the age makeup, which was hit and miss), and the dialog from the comic was usually delivered well. The dialog written to replace dialog from the comic? That was another story. The pivotal argument on Mars was altered greatly, and in such a way as to render it a sappy piece of crap. I’d give the film a C+ and if I hadn’t read the book… maybe a B-.

Changes clearly had to be made to adapt this to the screen, but as in seemingly all the adaptations that have disappointed me over the years, it was the small changes that I felt were pointless, and not the large ones made to fit the plot into two and a half hours, that really frustrated. As an example, there was a scene in which Rorschach kills a man for crimes that I won’t go into. In the book, he insures the man burns to death, a grim fate that the comic does not gloss over or sugar coat in an attempt to make Rorschach seem less warped. In the movie, he chops the man’s skull up with a cleaver. This nets no additional horror in the grand scheme of the man’s fate, or the question the view asks about the presence of, or lack of, justice in the world, or in Rorschach. What it does is allow the director to put more blood spatters in the movie. In the comic the cleaver is used on two dogs that had been fed a corpse. Now, the argument for the director is that this saved him visual time, and that he included a verbal homage to the dogs in Rorschach’s dialog, but it rings hollow to me because he played the cleaver scene out so long that he didn’t really save time.

Also? Worst soundtrack I can think of. I can’t think of another that even comes close to being as intrusive and disruptive to the overall efforts of the narrative.

And as a small final note, the the ‘heroes’ in Watchmen, save one, are without super powers, but the director seemed to want to give them powers, as they did an awful lot of punching through brick and such in the movie.

I should have known that I had set the expectations too high for Middle Cyclone, the new album by Neko Case. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s very good. It’s just not as good as Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. That’s okay though, as Fox Confessor was one of my favorite albums in I don’t know how long. I lost count long ago how many times I’ve listened to it. It was the only CD in my car for months. So, in light of that, Middle Cyclone is doing very well indeed simply by not frustrating me. Still, I did have this foolish hope that she would rise to the level of ‘almost perfect album’ again. Alas, it was not to be, and very good was all I got. I feel spoiled.

With the departure of several cover letters, I think that it is time to acknowledge that some of you might be finding my page. Hello. I’ve not bothered to use any real effort to hide myself. Of course, the flip side is that I don’t know that you’ll find anything very interesting. I think I swear a few times on here, and you might not like my taste in music. Other than that it’s mostly me talking about other people’s bad driving and a few little rants. Oh! I almost forgot, there’s a bad short story on the other page. I’m not taking it down, because it could probably be dug up in some archive somewhere or another on the internet. If, for some reason, you want to read any of my short fiction, just ask. I have a few stories that I have been sending out recently, and which I would be much happier to show you.

Sometimes blogs can create an odd feeling of interaction. I friend of mine noted the other day that he sometimes forgets that he isn’t friends with a couple of the bloggers that he’s been reading for years. He sees their work so often that they have simply integrated on some level into his life. I was a little unsure of his comment at first, but then yesterday I saw that Paul Clark is posting on the New York Times website. It was a feature article, and though I have never met Mr. Clark in person, I have read his site for some time, and couldn’t help having a moment where I felt like someone I knew had really made it. Congratulations Mr. Clark, who I still have never met, and probably won’t. It’s an odd feeling.

The posting, about arguments over the Old Fashioned, was good as well, hitting several key points about drink geekdom, without getting too fussy.

And now it is time for me to go back to school. The second semester formally starts with a confirmation that it is easier to study on campus than at home with my wife watching the Golden Globes in the other room.

We’ve also had a lesson in how company health plan changes can totally screw people over. My wife’s company switched health plans, which meant that she had a hard time getting health care services. Now, you would think that if people were dispensing medications that have withdrawal symptoms, they would consider it below the belt to try to step out on the first month of the prescription, especially when they said it was covered. However, we could not acquire it without the insurance card. We ended up paying for it out of pocket, as the looming threat of withdrawal symptoms will tend to have a chilling effect on waiting for the HMO to get off its but and tell the pharmacy that you should be given the medication (despite their statements over the phone). This will doubtless take us into act two, in which the HMO says that because we paid for it, we clearly didn’t want the services that they promised over the phone but could not deliver in in a time frame that did not cause a lapse in care. This is twelve days after coverage began, and we could not get a covered medication at the promised rate.

Dear Obama administration: Can we get that national health care already? Can that be day one or two? My Canadian family members never seem to have to deal with this crap.

I just found out that the song that Apple used for iPhone 3G ads was an instrumental version of “You, Me, and The Bourgeoisie.” The lyric “love can free us from the deepest debt” in the version with vocals is especially choice to me, given what phones with data plans cost on a monthly basis.

This is, of course, old news.

I finished David Copperfield (Modern Library Classics)
tonight. It was an odd experience. Because I have been reading it in installments delivered to my email, and because those installments totaled over 400, I feel like I might have some small indication of what it was like to read it when it first came out. I grant that there were larger chunks when it was first published, but it was strung out over a similar length of time.

When reading Dickens slowly like this, I find that the sins of which he is accused, the overly repetitious characterization and his general loquaciousness seem to fall away. You need a refresher on some of the charaters sometimes, and by the end, David is like an old friend saying goodbye. Maybe not your best friend, but someone you meet for coffee from time to time and catch up on the latest with him. And it is a bit of a one sided conversation, but you put up with it because you always have.

A while back, Minnesota Public Radio created The Current, for which I have found no local replacement in Portland, and which I listen to by streaming audio fairly often. They also have a song of the day podcast, which I subscribe to. The other day I had the excitement of seeing my brother’s band as the song of the day, for the 23rd. It was a nice feeling.

Today’s song of the day got me thinking about one of the tiny sins of songwriting. I had thought of it as an 80s sin until I heard this song. The song is Evident Utensil by Chairlift, and it’s a generally solid song. I’d link a youtube video, but the studio version has been removed for terms of use violation, and that’s the version that I heard. It has background vocals in that weird half singing/half chanting way. Like Right Said Fred is doing the background vocals for this entire class of 80s songs, and Chairlift just said, “Hey, I’ve always liked Right Said Fred, let’s throw some business his way.” In this song, as in many others, its used to echo the lyrics directly.

Does anyone else notice this type of background? Does it drive everyone else nuts? I don’t know that I’d run out to buy Chairlift’s album, but the little background vocal didn’t do it for me, and kinda spoiled the whole song.

There is the temptation to say that the best holiday drinking is simply pouring a glass of cognac, but this paints too simple a picture. There are as many schools of thought on what to drink for the holidays as there are drink blogs, and believe me, there are a lot of drink blogs.

I’ve been staying away from drink blogging for a bit, because I felt that there are so many blogs, what did I have to offer, but I’ve been feeling festive, and thought I’d get back into the game a bit. I also intend to lay down a few bitters, based on the recipes that my friend, posting under the name causabon back on icelandspar, came up with. It is almost embarrassing how excited I am by them.

First up today though, we have Ted Haigh talking on NPR which I got thanks to A Dash of Bitters. In the segment, he gives the recipe for a drink that is going to make me restock my Benedictine.

Alcademics noted the recent NY Times piece on San Francisco bars in about the same pitch I had intended to. You can always count on the Times for a little condescension about the existence of culture anywhere but New York. It’s worth noting that Alcademics is one of the sites who’s writing renders most of mine superfluous.

And over at Mixoloseum, cocktail nerd has tried various egg nog recipes and mixes so that you don’t have to. It really is better than you think, when you don’t just dump rum into the store bought goop.

Having just bought a micro plane grater as a little Hanukkah gift to mysel, (as well as a second menorah, why do I need a second menorah?) I plan to mix up something out of Imbibe!: From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash, a Salute in Stories and Drinks to that feels suitably old.