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Author: Bryant

Monday Mashup #33: Neverwhere

March 23, 2004
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Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere has been a novel, a BBC miniseries, and may one day be a movie. Right now, however, it’s going to be a mashup.

At the basic level, it’s a story about a fantastic world underneath the city. I personally find that the Underground puns are fairly significant, because they help link the wildness of the world to the reality of the city — without those allusions, goofy as they can be, the real London would have less meaning. It’s not just a fantastic world beneath the city, it’s a fantastic world that mirrors — perhaps echoes — the city.

What else, what else? Door is deposed nobility, which could be fun to play with. The Goblin Market is cool. The Marquis de Carabas is the kind of figure one might well like to use. Ditto Croup and Vandemar… heck, lots of cool characters.

By the by, we’ve added another gaming meme — the excellent Wednesday Weird — to the gamememe mailing list. Every time a meme from here, the Weird, or Game WISH gets posted, subscribers to gamememe get an email. It’s the easy way to keep up on your meme postings.

Continue ReadingMonday Mashup #33: Neverwhere

Kai Summer

March 21, 2004
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[More character noodling. This is for Rob’s Starchild game.]

“Is that Summer or Strummer?”

“Eh, you know, whatever…”

Kai Summer is immensely young, and the heavy overcoat he wears — down to his ankles, collar turned up to his ears — does nothing to hide this. It accentuates his slender frame, skinny like the loosely knotted tie he sometimes wears. His ragged boots swallow his feet whole. You could drop him into a Chicago winter and he’d vanish like he was just another bad poet with too much pride to work retail and not enough time to live.

I’ve never seen him without the overcoat off stage.

On stage, though, he’s someone else. He doesn’t get any bigger, but he uses his guitar to carve electric lines through the air in minor keys that owe more to madness than to music. If you squint just a little you can see a shimmering field of music around him like an aura of sound. I’ve noticed that people playing with him don’t get too close. I can’t blame them; I’d worry about getting sliced in two by a stray power chord.

It is trivial to say that he is the best guitarist of his generation because at the ripe old age of 17, he is the first guitarist of his generation. Perhaps in the end, if Mother doesn’t have her way, he will be known merely as the man who found the possibilities. Perhaps someone else will be the man who developed them.

But I wouldn’t bet on it.

He is playing tonight at the Broken Metronome. He told me the other week that he hopes to jam with Mary Pagan someday. It’s the first personal confidence I’ve ever heard from him. Mary? Are you out there? Can you hear me? This critic thinks you should make Kai’s dream come true.

From Lester Shots’ “Beating the Minutes” column in the ChicaGO alternative wheneverwecan.

Continue ReadingKai Summer

Sun shine in

March 21, 2004
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You either like Charlie Kaufman movies or you don’t, and if you do, you’re already going to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, so no big review here. It’s in the top half of Kaufman films for me.

OK, OK. Better than Human Nature and Adaptation, and on a par with Being John Malkovich. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind I sort of put off on the side because it’s a different beast.

I thought it was completely comprehensible. The narrative wasn’t particularly chronological on one level, but on another level it was mostly linear, albeit with one big giant flashback in the middle. It’s all well and good to talk about how messed up a narrative is, but you’d think some people had never read any time travel stories…

Oh, right.

Also I liked the hard core of truth at the middle. There were moments when I worried about a saccharine ending, but not at all. One icicle in particular is perfectly chilling and painful. Kaufman and Gondry have a pretty good understanding of all the ways love can result in people hurting other people.

This happens to be that movie Jim Carrey’s been trying to make where you can forget that he’s Jim Carrey for a little while, by the by. That’s nice too. And Elijah Wood is good, and Kirsten Dunst is good, and so on. But you either like movies written by Kaufman or you don’t.

Bell clear

March 20, 2004
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The Celestial Pictures DVD restoration of The 36th Chamber of Shaolin is maybe the clearest print of a Hong Kong movie I’ve ever seen. It’s beautifully vivid. The only thing that’d beat it would be Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and I’m not sure I can count that.

OK, look, it’s this pretty:

Opening fight scene

Look at those reds and blues. They pop. In fact, my only complaint may be that it’s a little too vivid, but I’m not sure that’s not just my modern eyes watching a 70s Technicolor epic.

The first fight scene is pretty decent too, albeit a little slow for someone weaned on John Woo and Tsui Hark. But I still liked it.

Flamenco

March 18, 2004
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And there you have it. As per my speculation yesterday, Zapatero’s threat to pull out his troops has Bush leaning back towards a UN resolution. Nicely done on Zapatero’s part.

Now I’m going to go be sick s’more. Blah. You can tell I’m not well because I’m loopy enough to bitch about being not well here.

Objectively pro

March 17, 2004
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The popular right-wing talking point of the moment: "Spain did what Al Qaeda wanted." This is all very well and good, except that Spain is not pulling out of Afghanistan and that Spain is willing to stay in Iraq under certain conditions — mainly a Security Council mandate.

This actually looks like pretty smart diplomacy to me. To the degree that Bush needs Spain to stay in the coalition, he needs to bend to their demands. This would mean giving more say to the UN than he’d like, but those are the breaks of the game, right?

Indeed, one might claim that if Bush fails to make these accomodations, he’s doing Osama’s bidding. One would be a wingnut, mind you — because it’s pretty insane to claim that a world leader is dancing on Al Qaeda’s strings simply because his sense of the right thing to do happens to be something Al Qaeda wants done. You’ve got to consider the entire picture.

Further reading: kos on the US pullout from Saudi Arabia and Josh Marshall on the whole situation.

Iranian unrest

March 14, 2004
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There appears to be a small uprising in Northern Iran. A little more information can be found here. The first link is to a site on the right side of the ideological spectrum, by the by, so you have to discount the people who are under the impression that this will immediately turn into a vast popular uprising supported by US troops.

(Via Tacitus, whose commenters suffer in part from the same optimism. Ah well.)

Photocopies

March 14, 2004
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Mark Schmitt makes an excellent catch over at The Decembrist. Bush is using photos from the FY 2005 Federal Budget in his campaign material.

This may or may not be illegal; it seems to me like it might be, but Schmitt knows better than I and he doesn’t think it is. Actually, come to think of it, I don’t think government documents are protected under copyright, so Bush has the right to remix those photos however he likes. Kinda shady of him to get the government to pay for the photos if he intended to use them later, though. And if he had his own private photographer pay for them and give them to the government, well, why is the government publishing campaign photos? No matter what happened, though, it’s definitely a slight erosion of the barriers between the campaign and the government. Not a scandal, but definitely an indication of character.