From Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk):
‘My tiny life. My little shit job. My Swedish furniture. I never, no, never told anyone this, but before I met Tyler, I was planning to buy a dog and name it “Entourage.”
This is how bad your life can get.’
I suppose it says something about me that I think the dog’s name is brilliant.
We settled down on Monday night to watch Chungking Express, which I’d been wanting to watch for the longest time, firstly because it was critically acclaimed yadda yadda yadda, secondly and quite importantly, I admit, because it featured Aniki Jin, holder of the dubious honour of being the only Oriental celebrity I’ve ever found remotely attractive. Disappointment on both fronts, unfortunately.
The men were either pathetic (recently heartbroken guy buys a tin of pineapple every day which expires on May 1st, because his ex-girlfriend was called May, and she liked pineapple, and his birthday is May 1st. On his birthday he eats the 30 tins of pineapple he’s accumulated since she dumped him on April Fool’s Day) or, er, pathetic (second recently heartbroken guy talks to his flat, which is apparently also heartbroken in the wake of her leaving. When he comes home and it’s flooded, he tells it he understands why it’s crying). The women are either criminals (in both the legal and fashion senses) or, you guessed it, pathetic (girl who is probably meant to be quirky and cool since she’s played by Faye Wong falls in love with latter heartbroken guy. She shows him this by secretly entering his flat and cleaning it for hours every day).
I was so nauseated by Aniki’s character (pineapple guy) that I couldn’t even appreciate his gorgeous face. The only redeeming quality of the movie for me was that I’d never seen Faye Wong before despite her superstardom, and I did finally realize what some of the fuss is about. She’s got fascinating, if not conventionally beautiful, features, and I support girls with adventurous short haircuts on principle.
At this point I must mention that I am far from an authority on Chinese/HK films, given that the only ones I’ve watched that I can even remember well enough to name are Mr Coconut and All’s Well Ends Well (quick conversion for Western readers: this is like saying the only Western movies I’ve ever watched are American Pie and Dumb And Dumber). I therefore appeal to readers better versed in such films than I am to tell me what the hell was meant to be so great about Chungking Express.
[Some Faye Wong song recommendations would be good too. I only know Tian Kong and that horrible cover of the Cranberries’ Dreams. Our three-girl flat has the amusing tendency to burst loudly into song on whims, depending on what song is in what head. Unfortunately, right now Tian Kong is in all our heads, but we only know four words (wo de TIAN KONG!), which makes for somewhat repetitive listening over time.]
Believe the hype. City Of God really is that good. I almost wish I hadn’t started the year by watching it, because I don’t know if any movie I see this year will be able to match up.
Even if, like me, you’ve never seen GoodFellas or want to see it. Even if you didn’t think much of Amores Perros (hello, John!), or if, like me, you thought the first story about the dogfight was brilliant even if the next two were ho-hum and the model searching for her “Reeeeeeky!” incredibly irritating, then I tell you City Of God is as good as that first story, all throughout the film. Even if you’re skint, and were thinking of waiting for the video – sell a younger sibling, or a kidney. Be resourceful. Seriously.
I finally finished Life A User’s Manual (Georges Perec), which has taught me that I am an ignorant, stupid, boring, uncreative person. Now I am reading The Hours (Michael Cunningham), which, 48 pages in, is already teaching me that I really can’t write for shit.
You learn a lot from reading.
In Bruges I photographed the reflection of a medieval building in a gleaming red car hood. It’s one of my favourite pictures that I’ve taken, but I think this puts mine to shame.
Call me a music snob, but I suspect the reviewers who were falling all over themselves to pour platitudes on Scratch are somewhat unfamiliar with hip-hop beyond the flatulence of Puff Daddy and Will Smith.
I wasn’t impressed by its “look ma, I can speed the film up and cut quickly from scene to scene” cinematography (if you could call it that) – MTV does it a lot better, and it’s so tired and overdone by now anyway.
I wasn’t impressed by its organization or editing, in that I think it could have conveyed much the same experience in half the time it took if it had left the more inane interviews on the cutting room floor. For instance, I really wasn’t interested in Mix Master Mike and Qbert talking about how the universe and various imagined alien cultures inspire them. Instead I’d have really liked to hear from Krush, who features in a clip but isn’t interviewed, or anyone else in Japanese hip-hop, which is mentioned more fleetingly than it deserves. In the section on “battling”, we’re informed that when you compete in the DMCs, you’re no longer competing against one other person, you’re competing against everyone else in the competition. This is hardly profound. You could say the same thing about a yodelling competition.
I thought the clips it did show of scratching were often boring and samey, and hardly explored the sheer ingenuity with which some artists use it. Kid Koala doing Drunken Trumpet, anybody? It showed Beck’s DJ demonstrating the record he made composed entirely of guitar sounds, but didn’t go on to show how that becomes Smoke On The Water in concert. It showed a clip of beatboxers completely out of the blue, but provided no commentary or follow-up. I don’t even see why beatboxing would be that relevant to the subject matter of the documentary in the first place, but if they were going to put a clip in, they might as well have put some more in, because it was bloody amazing. I could go on, but won’t.
Surely I liked something? Well, yes. I always like good beats. Qbert had a gorgeous face (pity about the height). I liked the uniting theme of how everyone seemed to have been influenced by DXT scratching on the Grammy performance of Herbie Hancock’s Rockit. I liked the jam session at Qbert’s house with Shadow and others. The clip of Jurassic 5 was well-placed and did a good job of explaining the ideal, arguably, of a DJ working symbiotically with the MCs. And I liked laughing at Cut Chemist, who is either naturally inarticulate or was just really out of it. On balance it was probably just about worth the trek to Hammersmith (Riverside Studios), but only just.
[Bizarrely, at the IMDB entry for this movie (linked above), “if you like this title we also recommend…Mother Teresa.”]
It occurred to me, on reading The Well-Tempered Plot Device, that with SF/Fantasy writing, the simple love-it-or-hate-it divides don’t exist. You either love it, hate it, or if you’re like me, both.
He starts off by promising that “You have to remember that Mr Donaldson’s spent years learning to produce a book so flatulent you have to be careful not to squeeze it in a public place. All I can do in the time available is to offer instruction on the first and most important element of crummy writing, which is (as my title suggests) bad plotting. I can’t promise that by the time you’ve read these pages you’ll have learned to write significantly more stereotyped characters, or that your style will have become significantly more leaden and clichéd. But I do promise that you’ll be fully conversant with the many varieties of plot device, their use and function, and you’ll be able to recognize and admire their handling in the works of the masters: Lionel Fanthorpe, A.E. van Vogt, and the early sword-and-sorcery novels of Michael Moorcock, to name only some of the virtuosi of the plot device I haven’t space to mention in what follows…” and it just gets better and better from there.
He doesn’t really mention the naming conventions (like, why isn’t anyone in fantasy ever called Reg or Cuthbert? Why are they all Gwynion or Tantreth or Xanthia?) or David Edding’s amazing recycling feats which remain unmatched by any Green tree-huggy types in our world, but it’s still going to hit lots of nerves/G-spots if you’ve ever read the genre. Enjoy.
“Cinoc, who was then about fifty, pursued a curious profession. As he said himself, he was a “word-killer”: he worked at keeping Larousse dictionaries up to date. But whilst other compilers sought out new words and meanings, his job was to make room for them by eliminating all the words and meanings that had fallen into disuse.
When he retired in nineteen sixty-five, after fifty-three years of scrupulous service, he had disposed of hundreds and thousands of tools, techniques, customs, beliefs, sayings, dishes, games, nick-names, weights and measures; he had wiped dozens of islands, hundreds of cities and rivers, and thousands of townships off the map; he had returned to taxonomic anonymity hundreds of varieties of cattle, species of birds, insects, and snakes, rather special sorts of fish, kinds of crustaceans, slightly dissimilar plants and particular breeds of vegetables and fruit; and cohorts of geographers, missionaries, entomologists, Church Fathers, men of letters, generals, Gods & Demons had been swept by his hand into eternal obscurity.”
[This seems to be the antithesis of what Perec’s trying to accomplish in this book. He’s trying to document the minutiae, to impress upon the reader that behind everything and everyone in this random Paris apartment block among countless others there is a story to be told and a context to be appreciated, richness beneath apparent mundanities.]
But pretentious literary analysis aside, I was thinking about how much I would hate to be a word-killer. The notion of making a living out of the fall of entities depresses me immensely – to do a proper job you would first have to become familiar with their genesis, their emerging into common parlance, then stagnation, then obsolescence. And after all this your job wouldn’t be to document lives but to cement over them.
First impressions of the new Sigur Ros: it feels sparser to me than Agaetis Byrjun. More pared down, less of a feeling of majesty. It doesn’t transport me the way that album did. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for the restraint – the more I listen to Agaetis Byrjun the more the vocals seem over-emoted, and what I used to think was wonderful flow sometimes feels a bit samey these days (though to be fair, intensive listening probably contributed to that too). This one’s got guitars and buildups the first didn’t have, and somewhere in track 8 I was reminded of Mogwai at its best, which is always a good thing for music to remind me of.
I don’t give a toss about the whole Hopelandic thing (the Cocteau Twins have been there done that), and find their doing a John Cage with this CD booklet a bit pretentious, but at the end of the day they still make extraordinarily evocative music, and I can’t wait to see them in February.
[For reviews I agree with see Pitchfork and Almost Cool. The first four paragraphs of the neumu review, on the other hand, are a veritable showcase of Sigur Ros review cliches.]
I was thinking a bit more about Voyage, which was pretty damn stunning both in terms of the ambition of the script, and scale of the production, even if I must admit that some of its countless historical and philosophical allusions were probably lost on me at eleven in the morning. At the end of the play we felt satisfied enough that we’d understood its highfalutin’ philosophical themes, but still had to devote some time to clarifying who got off with who, and why. Guess there’s some way Stoppard has to go before he’s good enough to join the team at East Enders.
Something else I noticed – another example of what seems to be a frequently-used theatrical device of quick, easy, evocation of a character in terms of their accent. In Lord Of The Rings, one of the dim hobbits just happened to sound Irish. Here, Belinsky’s lack of formal education somehow seems to be suggested more by his distinctly unposh (English) accent than by the oft-repeated fact that he can’t read French. And of course everyone in the play’s actually Russian, so where does that leave us in the Michellian School of Theatre Commentary? I don’t actually know. This is why I took the safe option of a legal degree.