Smells Like Ukulele Spirit

Seven ukuleles (and a bass) playing Nirvana. And they’re in tuxedos too, because it’s freaking New Year’s.

Happy New Year, anyone who reads my blog! Thanks for being here, even momentarily. Wait until you see how good I’ll blog in 2008.

Don’t Go to Gakkel Ridge (or My Year With Peter Watts)

Anyone who has read Peter Watts‘s Rifters series ought to be quite disturbed by this sort expedition to Gakkel Ridge, an Arctic Ocean mountain range. With geo-thermal vents and primordial microbes.

To get in on the Rifters books, which is something you really should do if you like unrelentingly dark but satisfyingly vivid science fiction, go read Starfish and the rest of the books at Peter’s website. (Or wait until the end of April, when it’ll be reissued in paperback, and help compensate an author who gives his books away online).

Maybe I’ll say more about Mr. Watts and his oeuvre at some other point. Looking back on the books I read in 2007, however, it is clear that I was the most alive to the joy of stories during my time spent with Peter Watts. And that is what it was like: After reading Blindsight last winter (also free, also exceptional), I instantly ordered used copies of his out-of-print dystopian deep-sea trilogy (which is actually four books) and read them in one straight shot. There’s something very satisfying — and, for me, rare — about getting yourself so enmeshed with an author.

I also had the pleasure of interviewing Peter for an article I was writing in the fall that, unfortunately, never came together for me in the end. But he’s as generous with his time as he is with his texts, and wickedly clever over the phone. It was a real thrill talking to him.

TV Tyrant: ‘Best of Youth’

The Best of Youth
on Sundance Channel
Monday, Dec. 31 @ 11pm

This post has an asymptotically small chance of reaching anyone in the next 20 hours. But if it did, and such a person has Sundance Channel, I’d suggest recording all four of the ~2-hour episodes in the epic family melodrama The Best of Youth on New Year’s Eve. It’s one of those sweeping historical tales, a bit like Updike’s Rabbit books, following a bourgeois Italian family over 40 years through the politics of the nation. And it’s very well done, rightly counted among the slim ranks of best that TV has ever offered so far. (If you like the 70s Euro-violent radical stuff in The Best of Youth, I’d strongly encourage you to pair the series with Good Morning, Night, which depicts the murder of Aldo Moro.)

Best Shirtless Political Photography of 2007

Since I’m dabbling in seasonal superlatives — and before all this gets in the way of clear-headed retrospection — let’s recall the beefcake photo spread that took our ingenue all the way to the top this year.

With eyes cast bashfully askance like that, you can really see why the people love him so.

Like ‘We Are the World,’ Only a Little Different

What If T.Rex Still Made Records?

It would sound just like David Vandervelde’s album, The Moonstation House Band. Derivative? Sure. Awesome? I think so.

“Jacket,” by David Vandervelde (download)

Go here to take a listen to the surpassingly excellent track “Nothin’ No.”

UPDATE: Even better! Go to this link from Vandervelde’s website and stream the entire album. And then reward the man for his manifest greatness by downloading the thing properly from eMusic.

YouTube Bubble Search

YouTube seems to have soft-launched a nifty visual search feature in the last few days. It’s hidden in the open right now. Here, let me show you:

1. You’ll soon be furnished with a YouTube link. While you’re watching, enlarge the video to full screen.
2. Wait until the video ends. If you’re impatient, click on the three-balls-in-triangle icon that appears in the lower-left corner (or drag the playback slider to the end).
3. And bang! YouTube Bubble Search.

YouTube Link: “Psycho Killer,” Talking Heads (1978)

 

What we have here is your basic swarm-style search visualization, which appears to be triggered by the same related videos found on each YouTube page. The navigation is smooth. My verdict: this is great. (via)

TV Tyrant: Martin McDonagh’s ‘Six Shooter’

Six Shooter
On Sundance Channel
Wed., Dec. 19 @ 11:30pm EST

Here’s what you’re going to do: In a firm yet respectful tone, command your digital-video recorder to capture the upcoming airing of “Six Shooter,” the Oscar-winning short film by the obscene Irish playwright Martin McDonagh. Of course, you can only do this successfully if your premium cable package includes the Sundance Channel (and if doesn’t, don’t worry — you’re not missing much beside the excellent “City of Men” series from Brazil, and I reckon you can catch that via Netflix).

I’m not much for the theater, really, but after having my mind blown by the New York production of “The Pillowman” in 2005 I decided never to miss any McDonagh play staged in my vicinity. That plan paid off in spades when I spent a most hilarious and blood-soaked birthday the following year watching “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” from the front row of a tiny off-Broadway theater. The plays opens with a dead cat and the  second scene, as I recall, depicts a battered, shirtless man suspended upside-down from the rafters by his ankles — positioned nearly overhead from my seat — about to have his nipples sliced off by a demented Irish terrorist. And it got even funnier after that!

This is a long-winded way of saying that, in my experience, anything McDonagh is not to be missed. And that includes “Six Shooter,” a dark and hilarious gem of a short film with a very fine performance from Irish character actor Brendan Gleeson. (Go ahead, click on his name. You’ll recognize him. I love character actors.)

In a more just world, fine short films would be easily available online and we could all skip past the DVR.

For more on McDonagh, check out this New Yorker profile of the playwright, in which we learn of the first story young McDonagh wrote:

When he was sixteen, he told [his older brother] John a story based on an old folktale: A lonely little boy is on a bridge at dusk when a sinister man approaches. The man is driving a cart on the back of which are foul-smelling animal cages. The boy conquers his fear, offers the man some of his supper, and the two sit and talk. Before the man leaves, he says that he wants to give the boy something whose value he may not understand but will soon come to appreciate. The boy accepts. The man takes a meat cleaver from his pocket and chops off the toes of the boy’s right foot. As the man drives away, he tosses the boy’s toes to the rats that have suddenly begun to gather in the gutters of the town, whose name, we now learn, is Hamelin. The man is the Pied Piper, who saves Hamelin from the plague but kidnaps the local children when the town’s elders refuse to compensate him for his efforts. The boy is the only one of Hamelin’s children to survive, because he cannot keep up with the other kids, who follow the Piper out of town.

John liked the story, so McDonagh wrote it down. “That was the first time I thought, This seems like something someone should have thought of before, but it’s not, it’s mine,” he said. (A version of the tale appears in “The Pillowman.”)

• More: Why am I bossing you around about TV?

He Hit Me and It Felt Like a Sith

I had assumed that with the release of the loathsome Episode III, my abusive codependent relationship with George Lucas was basically at an end. Sure, I’ve heard that maybe there’ll be a live-action TV series — and, of course, I would watch it — but I really didn’t think I could experience the pangs of anticipation for anything Star Wars ever again. Lucas got me hooked as a child; I returned to him two decades later as an adult…and he treated me like a child! Like an idiot kid with a powerful interest in action figures. (Of course, it was naive and childish of me to expect anything else.)

But this upcoming game looks good. It looks very good, in fact. And it certainly seems like a storyline that embraces the menacing and not-so-childish dimension of the Star Wars mythology, in a way that Revenge of the Sith (and all the prequels) absolutely refused to. To be brief: In the game, set in the period just before Episode IV (i.e. the original 1977 film), you play Darth Vader’s secret apprentice tasked with hunting down the last fighting remnants of Jedi in the galaxy. So the player is a) evil and b) given access to dark-side force powers, which are inarguably more awesome than the light-side powers, and c) compelled by the mechanics of the game to commit the despotic acts of villainy that create the sociopolitical conditions of Episode IV. In other words, we get to pick up at a point where it should be possible to ignore most of the shitty baggage from the prequels. By winning the game, we’d be establishing a dystopia and providing the set-up for Star Wars story we so loved.

Among Revenge of the Sith‘s crimes, the gravest was the decision by Lucas to have a childish (and unconvincing!) love story motivate the transition from Anakin to Vader. Many of the other things that offended me in Sith — the preposterous rainbow-colored reptile that Obi-Won was made to ride, for example, or the dialogue — could be considered a failure of collaboration. Crap by committee, bad creative oversight, etc. But the passage from Anakin to Vader stood at the center of the epic, a bullet point on Lucas’s master plan. And it existed in the way that it did because that was exactly the way Lucas had always wanted it. The ultimate expression of human corruption and degradation in the universe is birthed by a narcissistic hissyfit? Not likely. I much preferred the notion, raised early on in Sith but discarded almost instantly, that there is a perverse pleasure in first-hand exposure to the dark side. When Anakin butchered the tribe of Sand People that held his mother captive unto death, culling every last woman and child in his vengence, it seemed we might be in for a mature story, one in which an evil power is assumed knowingly and for its own sake. A story about a compromise and its terrible cost. But instead we are shown an Anakin deceived by petty lies and manipulated into his fallen state. What dreck.

To make matters worse, after Lucas cheapened the Vader metamorphosis, he did away with the extermination of the Jedi — an institution that had kept peace in the galaxy for millennia, mind you — in the space of a fucking montage. I had always imagined the Great Jedi Hunt to be the ultimate expression of Vader’s legendary cruelty and a test of his will to power. None of this narrative damage can really be undone. But the upcoming game, Unleash the Force, at the very least will give us the dignity of destroying those pompous Jedi assholes for ourselves.

Plus, I’ve played many of the previous Lucas Arts games and they’re usually, at worst, decent. So it turns out I am looking forward to Star Wars again after all.

McNulty Is Sleeping Around Again

From a previous teaser for the upcoming season of The Wire, we already knew that McNulty is drinking again. Now we know what other habits he’ll be revisiting as he hunts Marlo’s crew. Poor Beadie!

Season Five cannot start soon enough.