July 1

My current interest in samurai movies lead me last night to watch Sword of Doom, another classic of the genre.  Directed by Kihachi Okamoto and released in 1966,  Sword of Doom is the story of a cold, soulless semi-evil samurai named Ryunosuke.  The first scene in the film shows him killing an old man on a pilgrimage to a shrine for no apparent reason and the rest of the movie continues in the same vein, with Ryunosuke's murders soon getting him expelled from his village.  Forced to work as a hired gun in Edo, Ryunosuke becomes an assassin, spending his days gazing morosely into the distance and arguing with his wife (whom he's married after forcing her to have sex with him earlier in the film) and his nights killing other people for money.  His  'empty style' of fighting makes him essentially impossible to defeat in battle, effectively draining the fight scenes of any suspense.  There's a subplot about a brother of a man he's killed and his romance with a would-be courtesan, but mostly the movie is Ryunosuke, brooding.  People who praise the film make much of the final ten minutes, an action sequence in which after going more or less insane, Ryunosuke attacks a houseful of armed men.  For me, the ending didn't make up for the tedium of the first two hours.  Lots of gorgeous and dramatic camera work, but not much of a story.  (Apparently it was intended to be the first movie in a trilogy that was never made.  Maybe that explains it).

For some reason I also watched half of the new episode of True Blood.  Its incredible silliness intrigued me enough to want to know the backstory and that lead me to spend an hour reading episode summaries of the first three seasons.  They were also silly.  So, that's an hour I'll never get back.

Unsatisfying day of work yesterday.  Feel down.  Also, my blueberry muffin mix hasn't arrived in the mail.  Isn't life hard enough already without having a tupperware of low fat blueberry muffins on hand to make it better?

June 28

Today is the day called "Let's Find Out if The Home Warranty We've Been Shelling Out For All These Months Will Actually Help Us."  A home warranty is essentially insurance.  You pay a set fee (about 500/year) and in return, when anything breaks in your house, the home warranty people fix or replace it.  At least, that's what they say.  We've never used it.  Today, though, I have people coming to look at the garage door opener and the kitchen vent.  The garage door opener has been spotty since we moved here (I can usually get it to work but I sometimes have to wait outside the garage pushing the button for a long time to make that happen).  The kitchen vent does work, technically (it blows air) but its power is so limited that it's effectively impossible to cook anything that produces any kind of odor or aroma.  That's why I almost always either grill outside or make chinese food.  I'd like to start pan frying fish, or roasting stuff in the oven, as I did in our old apartment.  But right now doing so involves smelling up the whole house.  A new vent might change all that.

So it'll be a morning of service men, not at all the kind of morning I enjoy.  At the same time, our gardener and our cleaning lady are coming.  So Eliot should be utterly and totally insane.  All these invaders!  They must be fought off!  And what better way but by barking at them or, better, by taking his blanket in his mouth and shaking it back and forth with extreme vigor.  That will show them!  Or something.

June 24

Watched Kurosawa's Sanjuro yesterday.  As my wife said, I must be at a point where I've seen nearly all his films.  Funny thing is that the movies of his most people recommend have turned out not to be the ones I most prefer.  Seven Samourai, Ran, Rashomon, High and Low--I've seen and enjoyed them all.  Still, I think that Yojimbo, Hidden Fortress and Ikiru (movies typically not recommended to interested viewers just coming to K) are, in fact, his three best films.  Also realized, watching Sanjuro (which was excellent) something so obvious it's probably not even worth stating: the Jedi Knights of Star Wars ARE samurai.  Forces of good in a chaotic world moving from place to place trying to right wrongs, armed with only a sword and the power of their code.  I know Lucas got the ideas of R2 and C3P0 from Hidden Fortress.  I wonder how many other ideas he took from Kurosawa.

Fantastic day of writing yesterday.  Maybe my best ever, in terms of the number of problems I solved.  Possibly due to my new diet (oatmeal with fruit in morning, light snack at 11 am, no food till light dinner) and new walking regimen, but I feel physically as good as I have in years.  Probably not drinking a bottle of wine every night helps but I think undereating slightly is also a plus.  I'm more cheerful, more motivated, and more energetic.

Also want to talk about a fantastic Chekhov story I read last night ("The Student") but I'll put that for later. I've almost finished my book on cell biology.  Next I'm starting a book I read about on John's Second Pass site--On Growth And Form.  Should be interesting.

June 21

Well vacation's done and I'm back at work.  The wife is now in DC, at a conference.  I'm pushing the boulder back up the hill again, after a long time ignoring both boulder and hill.

Yesterday a long work day.  After a week or so away it went slowly.  So much I realize is kept in my head usually--about what's going on, what's supposed to happen at set parts--that coming back after a time away involves not just going back to the problem(s) to solve but refamiliarizing myself with the whole contraption, as it were, of the play.

Bink has been exhausted since we got him from the vet.  Yesterday I started to be worried that he was TOO tired--even he usually doesn't sleep all day.  Without the wife here to consult with my paranoia tends to grow.  Another of the many benefits of not being alone--keeping you grounded in reality.  In fact, the Bink was just tired but I couldn't help checking up on him as he slept in various points and positions throughout the day, making sure he was still breathing.  Which is somewhat odd.  Strange that I would worry about him sleeping, something I usually wish he did more of (especially when I work).  Any variation from routine seems ominous, I guess.

Have joined audible.com and am enjoying the new frontier of books on tape.  Walking about 45 minutes a day, it's astonishing how much 'reading' you can get through.  My first book was Jeeves in the Morning; now that I'm done with it I've moved on to something more ambitious (and much longer)--Tom Jones.  So far, it's been excellent.  It's also something like 60 or 70 hours long (in three parts) so it should last me the better part of the summer.  And it's a book I've never read.  Nor really ever wanted to (strongly).  I picked it to listen to because it came highly rated on the audible web site.  So far, I'm not disappointed, although I do miss Cecil Beaton imitating Jeeves' voice.  One benefit of listening to a book (not reading it) is that it's impossible to skim.  I realize, as I walk, that I have a tendancy to not attend too carefully to passages I either find difficult or tedious.  Listening that's not possible.  You 'read' every word.  With Wodehouse that was an undoubted benefit; he puts so much care into his language that missing even a word or two really matters.  I think it will hold true with Fielding as well (though I've already noticed a tendency to repeat himself and overlabor certain ironies--something more common in the 18th century, it seems to me.  It's as if irony needed to be more explained because people weren't so used to it.)

No tutoring for the next month at least so it's time to really work.  And diet.  Those are two big agendas for the next few months.

June 6

Watched The Long Good Friday last night, starring a young Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren.  A british gangster tries to go legit by interesting American investors in a project to turn parts of London into a site for the '88 Olympics.  The story and style were hit and miss for me (great late 70s keyboard parts, however) but the acting--especially that of Hoskins--was spot on.  Something about watching a British gangster movie makes me want to start calling my phone "the blower."  "Get on the blower to Tommy and tell him we need shooters," is the kind of thing one wants to say, having seen a movie like that.

Listening to Jeeves in the Morning on my walk right now.  A long-ago gift given by Johannes.  The older I get the more I admire PG Wodehouse's prose style.   The high tone and convoluted diction is meant as a joke, of course, but that doesn't make accomplishing it any less difficult.  Wodehouse gets it right every time; he's a great crafter of sentences, among his many other virtues.

Our tecate tile back patio is currently being cleaned and treated by a workman.  How does the Monster feel about this, you might ask?  Not good.  He is yowling and whimpering vociferously from the other room.  It's a hard life, being a small bear.  Only you can detect the danger that lurks in the hearts of the people your foolish owners let into your backyard.  The price of freedom, as The Binks reminds me often, is eternal vigilance.  Also, huge amounts of sleep.  And treats.  But mostly, eternal vigilance.

Day 88

Listened to a fascinating "This American Life" yesterday (part of my walking regimen: walk a few miles, and listen to TAL).  The subject was tenacity; people who don't give up, who refuse to give up, even when all available evidence suggests that they really really should.  The most interesting story was about a guy in Orange County who thought, when Conan O Brien left NBC, that he might try and be his replacement.  To get the job, he decided to start his own talk show.  In his house.  (His bedroom, actually).  Which he did.  It ran for more than two years, and involved a house band, writers to do monologues, guests, a sidekick, and, eventually, an audience numbering as high as 70 or 80 people.  (They eventually moved from his bedroom to a Veteran's Hall).  He quit his job, depsite not having much savings, and dedicated all his time and energy to the talk show.  In the process, he almost wrecked his marriage, went heavily into debt, and, as you might guess, did not end up replacing Conan.  Insane insane stuff.  (The show by the way was called The Duke Finemaster show, and apparently exists on YouTube).

Watched Fassbinder's "The Marriage Of Maria Braun" yesterday as well.  A bit too random in structure for me--biographical obviously, but still--but still worth the time.  Fassbinder is a director I know very little about.

How the Mavericks managed to win that game yesterday I don't know.  All I know is that it made me excited enough that I was actually shouting inside our house, at ten in the evening.  I'm not even that big a basketball fan.  It was just a great game.  And it at least gave us all in the good part of America hope that the Heat might have a chance to lose.  And suffer for their sins.

Day 87

Woken by prolonged and unsettled howling.  Thought for sure the house was being broken into.  Of course it wasn't.  Apparently another dog a few blocks off had started barking and Binks, in a show of solidarity, had thought it best to bark along with him.  For twenty minutes.  Loudly.  I was in the middle of a vivid dream involving training to teach middle school at my old Houston area school.  For months I had been trailing around a middle school geometry teacher, helping her in the classroom, and trying to learn how to be a good teacher.  Then, when filling out my evaluation, my mentor teacher informed she had debated between giving me "twos or ones" but decided to give me all ones.  She THEN told me that ones were the worst rating there was.  I had no future as a teacher, that was the basic gist.  It was very unsettling.  A large amount of my dreams seem to involve failure.  Is this common?

The Stephen J Gould book (The Flamingo's Smile) continues to be excellent.  Fascinating essay last night about the way flamingos eat by turning their heads upside down to dip them in water.  Upside down eating posture explains their strange smile, in which the lower and upper jaw seem to be reversed.  I also learned that flamingos eat in much the same way as great whales, by using filters in their mouth to remove tiny particulate foodstuff from the water.  Their tongues are thick and fleshy (unusual for most birds, who tend to have thin, stringy tongues) in order to aid in the filtering process.

Long day of errands yesterday will give way to long day of work today.  Doctor went fine (although I learned I now weight close to 200 pounds!), tux place went fine, it all went fine.  Now it's time for TCOB.

Day 86

I've gone to an every other day type posting deal as some may have noticed.  Try and contain your sorrow and despair at not reading me every day.  It's hard but it'll get better.

Doctor's appointment today to get me some more of that good thyroid medicine I love so much.  That means today will be another day of errands, since I do have other things to do (get contacts, pick up tux alteration, buy new mustache wax) and since the doctor's thing already comes in my sweet spot for writing.  It's my 2:30-5:30 work, after I've run, when I've got some endorphins when the morning's thinking starts to yield results.  Sometimes.  So today is another day off, of which I've had too many.  But it must be done.

Heat's win seemed inevitable last night.  They played the same as in Chicago.  They hang around for three quarters, doing nothing spectacular but keeping close enough to prevent a blowout.  Then, come fourth quarter, they unleash their superstars.  Dallas had all kinds of chances to put the game away before then--for all the talk about the Heat's stifling defense the Mavs had a TON of open looks--but it didn't happen.  Too many turnovers and too many missed shots.  I'm starting to worry it's going to be Heat in four or five.  At least give us a series, Mavs!

I wonder if LeBron genuinely regrets "The Decision."  If he could do it all again, would he do the big public announcement?  And if the answer is 'no' is it because he actually gets why people found it so galling, or just because, having seen the negative reaction, he doesn't want to repeat it.  Like a small child who touches something hot--he may not understand why he got burned but he knows he doesn't want to do it again.

Also let me say I really like the Breen/Jackson/Van Gundy announcing team.  Their personalities mesh very well.  Van Gundy can be ridiculous--the lengths he'll go to apologize for or otherwise excuse star players never cease to amaze--but he knows the game and he's funny.  Mark Jackson always seems to be auditioning for a coaching job with his commentary but oddly I find that endearing.  And Breen does a nice job of mediating between the two, occasionally provoking and sometimes conciliating.  I wish they called baseball too.  Maybe I'd watch more games.

Journal 7.25.10

The Dead Weather - Die By The Drop

Since watching It Might Get Loud a few months ago, my wife has developed a mild obsession with Jack White.  His new band, The Dead Weather, played in LA last week at the Palladium.  We like to see at least one live band per year and so we ended up going out on a Wednesday night (crazy!), acting like we were both still in our twenties.

The music was fine, I thought, if unexceptional (over-distorted blues with a lot of attitude, songwriting highly variable, lead singer from The Kills who has kind of a nice Shirley Manson thing going) but the experience itself was, as they say, banging.  (I know: no one says that.)  Jack White plays drums, mostly, --a mistake, I think. His natural showmanship and charisma don't lend themselves to staying penned up at the back of the stage, and he ended up coming out from behind the drums a half-dozen times over the course of the night.  Generally these were the best moments.

Something new for me: many concertgoers holding up their smartphones, making live video recordings throughout the concert.  Looking down from the balcony we saw the many glowing screens held overhead, like the white tops of waves on the sea.  Next to me, during the encore, a girl wrote on her Facebook page.  The horror of always being connected....

* * * 

A realization I had rereading Crying of Lot 49: we as readers ARE Oedipa (its protagonist).  We are in exactly her situation.  We believe there is some hidden order undergirding what we experience but we can’t fully fathom it.  We can’t make the pieces all connect.  As a result we suspect, perhaps, that whatever order we are learning to apprehend is not truly there.  It has been concocted, made up as a kind of joke.  For her, the "order" is the private mail conspiracy and the joker is (may be) the man whose will she executes, Inveriarty (‘not true.’) For the reader, the joker is Pynchon himself.  The novel is either a map to the hidden order of the universe (as art tries to be, exposing the hidden girders, hinting at meanings we can’t fully appreciate) or a beautiful lie (Plato’s phrase)—a sham put in place to keep us amused, to help us pass the time.

Also now rereading Vineland (I have a tendency to keep starting new books without finishing old), whose softer tone I prefer I think to Lot 49.  Still paranoia, still the giant conspiracies, but they’re less ferocious and claustrophobic.   Lot 49 like being in a cell with the O2 being extracted slowly, mol by mol. 

I highly recommend The Quickening Maze (just finished).  Less so Laughter on the 23^rd Floor.  Neil Simon, a master craftsman, does lack some…something.  I want Simon to be Norman Rockwell, someone both popular and profound, a popular artist whose popularity and seeming simplicity makes him an easy target for intellectuals who mistrust pleasure in their art.  But Simon doesn’t do that, at least not the Simon I’ve read.  More like a very very good TV writer.  What you see is what you get.