Category: Culture and anti-culture

Ayn Rand at the movies

“101 Dalmatians”
A wealthy woman attempts to do her impoverished school friend Anita a favor by purchasing some of her many dogs and putting them to sensible use. Her generosity is repulsed at every turn, and Anita foolishly and irresponsibly begins acquiring even more animals, none of which are used to make a practical winter coat. Altruism is pointless. So are dogs. A cat is a far more sensible pet. A cat is objectively valuable. —No stars.
“Mary Poppins”
A woman takes a job with a wealthy family without asking for money in exchange for her services. An absurd premise. Later, her employer leaves a lucrative career in banking in order to play a children’s game. —No stars.

There’s more here.

Rococo and roll

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Some years back I read Novala Takemoto’s Shimotsuma Story, published in English as Kamikaze Girls. I wrote about it here. I finally watched the movie based on the book this evening. Some of the humor was overly broad, and there were some gratuitous crudities early on, but overall this movie about a very odd couple was watchable and often very funny. Kyoko Fukuda and Anna Tsuchiya were plausible as Momoko the lolita and Ichiko the yanki. The story was necessarily simplified, but it was generally true to what I remember of the book.

There are more screen captures beneath the fold. Click the pictures to see the details of Momoko’s garb.

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Hollywood Juche

Lose a little weight, kid

I’m slightly relieved that The Interview won’t be coming to theaters near me. ((It’s not really a great concern, though — there aren’t any theaters near me.)) It’s one less failed comedy to avoid. Still, I’m just a wee bit uneasy about possible consequences. I’m not entirely sure that a chubby North Korean with a bad haircut is the ideal guide for western culture, even if his daddy was a wacky Daffy Duck aficionado.

Perhaps I should investigate the early history of Captain America. I did order a copy of Team America for my library, lest that also be withdrawn.

Continue reading “Hollywood Juche”

Tickety tock

Expensive people

A footnote to Kevin Williamson’s recent piece on Wal-Mart and watches:

For reasons that no one can explain, my office is on the Hollywood Reporter‘s mailing list, which recently published an edition all about celebrity watches. Here are a few of the highlights.

$1.5 million

Six figures

$55 million

What does this mean: “A concentrated blend of horological innovations, the Classique Chronométrie 7727 with its balance fitted on magnetic pivot and operating at a frequency of 10Hz achieves an average rate of -1 to +3 seconds per day”? If that is to say that it might lose a second or gain up to three every day, then my cheapo Timex watch is a better timekeeper than one costing $40,000.

$40,000

Anti-gravitas

Today is the centenary of the birth of possibly the most original and imaginative writer of the twentieth century, R.A. Lafferty. I’ve been collecting his books ever since I read “Continued on Next Rock” in one of the Carr/Wollheim anthologies back in ancient times. I could try to explain why Lafferty is extraordinary, but it’s easier just to refer you to the short stories that are available online.

Slow Tuesday Night

Guesting Time

The Transcendent Tigers

Narrow Valley

Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas

Hog-Belly Honey

Nine Hundred Grandmothers

The Six Fingers of Time

Nearly everything Lafferty wrote is long out of print, which is a scandal. If you ever spot one of his collections in a used book store, grab it.

Some websites devoted to the cranky old man from Tulsa:

Continued on Next Rock

I want a death and resurrection of the thing

The Ants of God Are Queer Fish

Yet Another Lafferty Blog

The R.A. Lafferty Devotional Page

R.A. Lafferty.org

Lafferty, incidentally, is partly responsible for the career of Neil Gaiman:

Lafferty was his favorite author in the world, he said. “His stories brimmed with ideas that no one had ever thought before. The use of language was uniquely his own —a Lafferty sentence is instantly utterly recognizable,” Gaiman wrote of Lafferty, in an introduction to the story in Martin H. Greenberg’s My Favorite Fantasy Story. “The cockeyed, strange, and wonderful world he painted in his tales often seems nearer to our own, more joyful and more recognizable than many a more worthy or more literal account by other authors the world stopped to notice.”
When he was 19, Gaiman dug Lafferty’s address out of the back of a library book and wrote to him, asking for advice on becoming an author. Tulsa, thanks to Lafferty, is for him a place of literary magic. “He told me how to become an author, and his advice was very good advice, and so I did. It left me quite certain that the finest literary advice in the world came from Tulsa, Oklahoma, for it did in my case,” Gaiman said.

Vexed

There are all kinds of strange things on YouTube. For instance, this recording of Erik Satie’s notorious “Vexations.” Normally a complete performance runs from 14 to 24 hours. Nicholas Horvath plays the 840 repeats in less than ten hours, which is blazingly fast for a piece marked “très lent.” (No, I’m not counting them, and I don’t expect to listen to the whole thing.) On another occasion, Horvath took 35 hours to play the piece. That performance was probably closer to the proper tempo.

Not every pianist who attempts a solo “Vexations” succeeds. From The New Yorker:

An Australian pianist named Peter Evans abandoned a 1970 solo performance after five hundred and ninety-five repetitions because he claimed he was being overtaken by evil thoughts and noticed strange creatures emerging from the sheet music. “People who play it do so at their own peril,” he said afterward.

Today’s quote

On Miyazaki:

His films have an inner clarity and beauty that few others achieve. Yet they are frequently wrapped in mystery, ambiguity, and confusion. And purposely so. Miyazaki not only fills his films with the treasures of intellectual study, he also refuses to over-clarify them. As he said of his epic Princess Mononoke, “I made this film fully realizing that it was complex…If one depicts the world so that it can be figured out or understood, the world becomes small and shabby.”

Update: Bonus quote:

There is a parallel universe where Hayao Miyazaki directed The Hobbit movie. Maybe one of its inhabitants can lend me a DVD.

The futures of the past

GorT recently found a Popular Mechanics list of the 50 greatest “sci-fi” television shows. Most of the shows listed were aired after I quit watching teevee, but there are a few I can comment on.

41. Battle of the Planets — I bought the first disc of Gatchaman to fill out an order a few years ago. It’s of great historical importance in the development and popularization of anime and all that, but Gatchaman Crowds is better.

36. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century — Dumb, but it had what’s-her-name in spandex during the first season.

35. Cowboy Bebop — A great classic, I suppose, but I lost interest after a few episodes. Yoko Kanno’s soundtrack almost redeems it. My recommendation: skip the DVDs and track down the CDs.

31. Lost in Space — A dumb show containing the germ of a better one. Keep the Dr. Smith and the robot, add Will Robinson to tweak Smith’s vestigial conscience and generate plots, dump the rest of crew, and you’d have a pretty good sf comedy. The actual show was watchable only when Smith was onscreen with the robot.

30. Battlestar Galactica (1978-79) — I watched the first episode or two. I was embarrassed for Lorne Greene.

27. Red Dwarf — I never saw any of this, but I read a couple of the books. They’re okay, but Douglas Adams did that sort of thing better.

26. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex — I haven’t watched all of it, but what I’ve seen is very good. And there’s Yoko Kanno’s music as well.

11. Firefly — I watched a couple of episodes while visiting friends a few years ago. I might watch the rest sometime.

10. The Outer Limits — When it was good, it was great, or so I thought when I was eleven. I haven’t seen it since.

8. Neon Genesis Evangelion — What the hell is this doing in this list at all, let alone in the top ten? I watched the first disc of Anno’s neurotic fantasy, and I’d like those two hours of my life back. The only character who isn’t repellent is the penguin.

7. The Prisoner — I never saw the final episode. I have Thomas Disch’s novelization somewhere in my piles of books. Someday I may read it.

6. Star Trek (the original series) — A favorite when I was young, despite my contempt for Kirk.

5. The Twilight Zone — Another favorite. Unfortunately, it was seldom broadcast at a time when I could watch it.

1. Dr. Who — I saw a few episodes during the Tom Baker era. It was okay.

The Popular Mechanics article is missing a qualification: all the shows listed were broadcast in America. A true list of the best science fiction shows of all time broadcast anywhere would have to include these:

• Shin Sekai Yori — What are the consequences of a change to human nature? What is human?

• Serial Experiments Lain — Cyberpunk meets ontology; Teilhard’s noösphere gone wrong.

• Dennou Coil — Augmented reality and kids. Imagine Ghost in the Shell as done by Miyazaki.

• Shingu — A friendly town with a secret, kids with strange powers and invaders from space. And they’re all genuinely likable, except for the killer robots.

And perhaps these:

• Oh! Edo Rocket — Aliens beasts and rockets in 19th-century Edo, with repression and corruption, slapstick and horror, and a faux Glenn Miller soundtrack.

• Kaiba — You can take a person’s memories from one body and put them in another. What could possibly go wrong?

• Mouretsu Pirates — High school girls and space pirates. It was directed by Tatsuo Sato, the man responsible for Shingu. As with Shingu, the story is good but the ultimate value of the show is in the characters whom you enjoy spending time with.

• Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita — The twilight of the human race, with fairies.

… and probably several others I’ve forgotten or haven’t seen. There are undoubtedly worthy shows from other countries as well that I’ve never heard of.

Feeling a little Puckish

I found a complete performance of Balanchine‘s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If you remember the play, you can follow the story pretty well, though Balanchine made many changes in adapting it. Even if you haven’t read Shakespeare, you can enjoy the spectacle, and there’s always the music.

Frederick Ashton also choreographed the play in The Dream. In his version, the transformed Bottom dances on pointe for added grotesquerie.