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Friday, November 28th, 2008
Here is what I am thinking about the main character of O Lucky Man!: the viewer is compelled to identify with him, to feel paranoid on his behalf. The mechanism for this, the driving force, is Travis' lack of self-consciousness. He moves through the world without putting together the strands of paranoia that are the fabric of the movie -- not exactly naïve; but unable to grasp how everything that happens in the world of the movie is directed at him. This is a little difficult for me to express: - A working definition of paranoia as the belief that everything that happens to you is connected and happens because of its effect on you.
- Travis is the main character of this movie; and everything that happens in the movie happens because of its effect on him. Everything that happens in the movie is connected by virtue of being part of the same script. If Travis realized this -- if he realized he were a character in the movie -- he would be paranoid.
- But he does not -- so you the viewer, as you get the levels of connection and of conspiracy against him, have to assume the role of his ego
This line of thinking needs some work. But it seems promising; it highlights how the experience of enjoying the narrative involves identifying with the main character as a key element, and starts working towards a mechanism for this process of identification.
posted evening of November 28th, 2008: Respond
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 Watching O Lucky Man last night reminded me in a couple of ways of reading Gravity's Rainbow. Now I've certainly been known to make spurious comparisons of various works of art to Pynchon; but I think this one stands up. What I'm getting at (beyond Travis' obvious points of resemblance to Tyrone Slothrop) is, the points where the sheer artistry of the medium -- the prose in GR, the images and  soundtrack in O Lucky Man! -- overwhelms my ability to follow the narrative and I find I'm just basking in the beauty flowing by. And need to go back and reread to figure out what was going on. If all goes according to plan I will watch it again tonight...
I haven't talked about the music yet, just want to note that it's utterly delightful and makes me want to listen to more Alan Price and more Animals, of whom all I really know is their big hits. Also Anderson's use of ambient noise just about took my breath away. This is one of the best soundtracks ever.
posted morning of November 28th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, November 27th, 2008
This is a  great movie. I'm going to need to watch it another time or two before I can really comment on it with much understanding. My initial reaction is that it's sort of like watching dada sketch comedy -- there must be good ideas in here for 5 or 6 movies, thrown together in an utterly reckless way. It would be so easy for it to suck -- but somehow it's wonderful. Malcolm McDowell wrote the screenplay (at least he said he did in the fine documentary O Lucky Malcolm!, which comes with the DVD; he is not credited as the writer) and acts lead, and is just a trip to watch. I was surprised while watching the documentary to realize that I haven't seen any of the huge majority of his films that he's done since 1982.
posted evening of November 27th, 2008: Respond
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Hope everybody is having a pleasant time. For your Thanksgiving listening, Pet provides a funny monologue from Benny Rubin, and Heebie-Geebie provides a funny monologue from Arlo Guthrie.
 We're not having our Thanksgiving till tomorrow, to make it easier for Ellen's family to get out here from Long Island; today is going to be dedicated to making pie and watching movies. We're going into town to catch the matinée of Bolt, and then tonight after Sylvia goes to sleep Ellen and I are going to watch O Lucky Man! (Coincidental trivia: Malcolm McDowell is one of the voices in Bolt. Last night we watched the documentary O Lucky Malcolm! which is included on disc 2 of O Lucky Man! -- it was really nice listening to him talking about his career, and weird to realize I haven't watched any of his movies since Cat People.)
posted morning of November 27th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, November 26th, 2008
The squid Magnapinna has been photographed and filmed by a team from working from a Shell offshore oil rig. See the video and read more at National Geographic.
posted morning of November 26th, 2008: 2 responses
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Have you read Hunger, by Knut Hamsun? Tell me about it or recommend it to me? Ed told me many years ago that I ought to read this, and Norway's a little bit on my mind now because of Robyn Hitchcock's new record's title and because the weather just got so cold all of a sudden... Maybe I will check for this title next time I'm in a used bookstore.
 (Oh wait, I think the Hamsun book Ed recommended to me was actually The Growth of the Soil. Hmm... The full text of Hunger is available free at Knut Hamsun Online.)
posted morning of November 26th, 2008: 1 response
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Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
Here's how you can use GMail in an encrypted fashion:
- In GMail Settings, "General" tab, select "Always use https". Now every time you open GMail in your browser, the site will be loaded using SSL encryption.
- If you use GMail Notifier, download the patch to make it use https. The patch is available from Google's GMail Notifier page.
Worth doing -- it makes your email traffic less visible to snoopers.
posted evening of November 25th, 2008: Respond
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You know what debugging tool I just hate having to deal with? Purify, is what. Its interface seems insanely cumbersome to me, it's hard to use in conjunction with gdb, I dislike having to compile a separate version for heap-checking. Well today, my co-worker Nick hipped me to valgrind, which just seems like it was made for me. Exactly suited to my style of debugging. Basically it just spits out a ton of messages to stderr, interspersed with your own stderr output you can troubleshoot very quickly and come up with a bug location to reproduce in gdb. My goal is to become a power user of valgrind -- starting with no knowledge of the product I was quickly able to isolate the problem I was seeing. If I acquaint myself with it's features it's going to make a really valuable addition to the toolchest.
posted evening of November 25th, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, November 23rd, 2008
So Wikipædia's page about Modern Times asserts that "Beyond the Horizon" is based on "Red Sails in the Sunset" by Jimmy Kennedy and Hugh Williams. I don't know the song so I looked around and found several versions of it on YouTube -- Tab Hunter, The Platters, The Beatles, Nat King Cole, Fats Domino. And more! (No idea really, but I'm assuming the Cole version is the standard.) And... huh. It's a kind of pretty song, and I guess I can see where the idea comes from that "Beyond the Horizon" takes this as its source material -- similarities in structure and topic are not hard to see. But it's not moving me to anything like the degree to which I was moved by the Dylan song. Look at this! YouTube user teclo64 created a video for "Beyond the Horizon" using Chaplin footage from The Gold Rush and Modern Times:
posted evening of November 23rd, 2008: 3 responses
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Saturday, November 22nd, 2008
Before the concert tonight, Ellen and I were looking around for a place to have dinner. Our idea was to have chicken and plantains at one of the many Dominican restaurants on the Upper West Side, not because they are especially great but as a way of remembering our first dinner date, at La Rosita. But as we were walking along Amsterdam, what should we see but Pio Pio! Can it be? This was one of our favorite places when we lived in Queens; we had no idea it had come to the Upper West Side. But it has; and that is the place to go if you're hungry for chicken and plantains.
posted evening of November 22nd, 2008: Respond
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