03.24.08
And a Bible, open to Psalm 100
The thought of my mom going into Hot Topic to find this stuff (three pairs of fingerless gloves, one lace/fishnet, a pick, a guitar patch, and “Rock the Arts” mints) for me really made my weekend.
01.22.08
On obscuring a narrative, and the benefits thereof
This is my Cloverfield review. It’s going to get long-winded, and quite probably very off-track at some points. It’s also going to have spoilers, so stay above the fold if you want to remain pure.
My main expectation for the film was that there would be a giant monster involved, though I’d speculated that they might manage to never actually show us the whole thing, just suggestions, fleeting glimpses, and aftermath at best. Giant monster: check. From here on out, spoilers.
I also guessed (based on a tip from a coworker friend) that the timeline would be not entirely chronological, which seemed like a very JJ Abrams thing to do — not that I’ve actually seen any LOST, mind you.
Lots of people die in giant monster movies. Usually not the “main” characters, though. Cloverfield established a small ensemble cast, with Hud as the eye of the audience, and proceeded to eliminate all but one — Lily, not even the main character — throughout the course of the movie. Gritty realism has been a fad in movies of late (Casino Royale, war movies for the past several years) so it only makes sense to show the “realistic” view of a giant monster attack; that is, massive casualties.
The direct implication of the “metadata” at the beginning is that this is only a small piece of evidence in a larger story. It’s the foundation of a sequel if ever I saw one, but I see a chance to do something completely different with the story. I don’t want just a sequel.
The movie was a primary source for a fictional event — there was no constructed plot, no grand story, just one guy filming his lovesick friend’s attempt to save the love of his life. One videotape labeled “recovered at site#[whatever], codename Cloverfield, formerly known as Central Park.”
The movie had a viral advertising campaign from early on, complete with at least one in-universe website (this is where I admit I didn’t follow it much and don’t know the details). The base of some really spectacular chaotic fiction is already there — all JJ Abrams needs to do is keep providing the world with primary sources for this fictional universe of his. Letters from the front.
While I wasn’t strictly accurate in my guess that we’d never see the actual monster, as I left the theater I mulled it over in my mind and realized I wasn’t as far off as I could have been if the nature of the movie hadn’t been was it was. We never saw a complete shot of the creature. We saw a limb smash a bridge. We saw it crawling between buildings, obscured by one or more at any given time. We saw a giant maw rushing toward the camera. We saw a huge torso towering over Hud just before his death. Just like the movie never provided a clear explanation of the bigger picture, the camera never provided a clear view of the monster. Even its parasites, offspring, whatever they were, always had motion blur or bodies obscuring them, or were presented as a shadow play against a tarp, or as grainy specters in the camera’s night-vision.
I would love to never get a straightforward, high-budget action flick out of Cloverfield. It would be a great vehicle to give alternative reality games more visibility. And frankly, it would just be made of awesome.
11.20.07
I smell a change in the winds.
Amazon.com - Reinventing the Book
Today the Amazon Kindle was officially announced to the public.
Feel free to take everything I say with a grain of salt — I will be the first to admit I have a bias — but I honestly think that if anyone could make ebooks a successful business model, it’d be Amazon.
When I learned Amazon was developing an ebook reader, I was pretty dubious. I didn’t think it was the way of the future. Once I actually had one in my hands for training purposes and was able to put it through its paces, I found myself nothing short of a convert. I love it and I need one and I get tetchy at people who dismiss it or insult it when they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.
There is something astonishingly seductive about it.
* Yes, my first reaction to the name is that it’s some kind of Fahrenheit 451 reference. I’ve gotten over it. It’s not about burning books, it’s about (re-)igniting a love of reading in the digital age.
* The e-ink takes the eyestrain out of long-term reading. It’s also about as readable as paper in regular daylight.
* The capacity is more than enough to carry an entire suitcase full of books — in a package smaller than a single paperback. Without even adding an SD card.
* With an SD card you can put a metric fuckton of books on the thing — or fill up with music to make your reading experience more enjoyable. The music playback is still being worked on and improved; currently it’s much like a Shuffle in that you start it, it plays random tracks until you stop it.
* No PC/Mac needed. You can shop for content right from the device.
* The general web access is not spectacular, but certainly comparable to a cell phone — and being able to search Wikipedia at the drop of a hat is sheer brilliance.
* Yes, the design could be improved on. But for all the reviews on the site complaining about how ugly it is, how many are from people who have actually seen and used one? Maybe one or two out of over 200. Far more reviewers who have one are at least as thoroughly converted as I.
* It is very flexible in terms of supported formats. .txt, .doc, Mobi, .htm/.html as well as .jpg and .gif for images and even experimental .pdf support — only experimental because it doesn’t quite meet Amazon’s quality standards for conversion. Most .pdfs are going to be perfectly readable when converted.
* Sending yourself documents. Letting other people send you documents. Having Daily Lit send you documents (which I just thought of last night as I read the Newsweek article). This is awesome.
* That said, I plan to upgrade mine (when I get one) with an Eye-Fi SD card so I can use it with my home network, hopefully.
Agh I hope that demonstrator guy was on a set because if he was wandering around SEA or SLC waving that thing around for the world to see I want to punch him.
09.07.07
in this fateful hour
I’ll be surprised if anyone reading this hasn’t already heard this news already, but Madeleine L’Engle died of natural causes yesterday at the age of 88.
Like the Dark is Rising sequence, A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet were treasures of my childhood. Later on, I picked up A Ring of Endless Light and Troubling a Star, but it was definitely the original three that left the strongest impression on me. In fact, I just bought them a year or two ago for the daughter of one of my mom’s coworkers to encourage her to read more (her brother, a big Star Wars buff, got the first 4 X-Wing books).
I…don’t really have much else to say, except that the world has lost something very precious.
08.11.07
Black or white?
Well, a blog can’t live on book reviews alone. I’ve got a post written up about Territory and a couple of other books I’ve read recently, but in the meantime, Rudy Giuliani scares me.
This ties in to the thoughts I’ve been having recently, trying to sort out my own political position in a way that I can identify and label and explain to other people.
I’ve decided just about everything boils down to this: I’m in favor of choice.
Abortion? Should be a choice. The woman’s choice. End of story, until men can be implanted with fetuses and carry them to term.
Getting married? Should be a choice, for two men or two women just as it is for one man and one woman.
Children should be educated in science, especially the theory of evolution so that they can choose whether or not they believe that man was created in a day despite substantial evidence to the contrary.
Children (hell, people) should also be educated on the principles of religions other than their own, and encouraged to question their own beliefs, often and thoroughly.
It does get more complicated when the choices of one person affect the choices, or ability to choose, of another, but I will generally fall on whatever side of the argument allows the greatest number of people the greatest amount of choice.
Pretty straightforward when you get down to it, I guess.
07.28.07
The sign of the albino toucan
I’ve just finished Mainspring, by Jay Lake, and I thought I’d write up a short review since I’m trying to keep this blog, uh, respectable in content.
Mainspring is a book about a universe made of clockwork. Our hero, Hethor Jacques, starts off as a humble clockmaker’s apprentice (a job field fraught with controversy, as some call it “playing God”), and is given a quest by the Archangel Gabriel to wind the Earth’s ailing mainspring using the Key Perilous. Hethor spends time imprisoned, gets shanghaied into Her Royal Majesty’s navy for a fateful trip to the Equator on the airship Bassett, and travels through darkest Africa on his journey.
I am absolutely fascinated by the setting. A whole clockwork world? (Link from Amazon.com’s Bookstore Blog) What a concept! At one point, Hethor actually crosses the Equator, which involves running for one’s life in order to get across the Equatorial Wall before the next gear-tooth comes along and crushes you like a tiny insect. The whole Northern Hemisphere has little knowledge of the Southern, since it’s so hard to get there, and views on it range from utopic to heathen to magical.
The time period is 1900-ish, and dirigibles are common. Christ was never crucified — instead he was horofixed (horofied?), and instead of making the sign of the cross, people make the sign of the horofix. The changes in Christianity and societal concepts to fit the horological model are comprehensive and follow a quite sensible internal logic. It is patently obvious someone has created the world, so (in Jay’s own words) “there are no atheists — only dissenters.”
I suppose this is the heart of one of the things that sits badly with me about the book. While reading it I had a constant nagging feeling that expressing an appreciation of the creativity inherent in such an obviously manufactured world is liable to bring on comments along the lines of, “A-ha! But it’s not really so creative, since the laws of physics of our world clearly suggest that it was designed to bring about life by God himself! We might as well be living on a clockwork planet!” Basically, I recognize that the clockwork solar system can be presented as a metaphor for the real world, but I disagree that it’s an accurate one.
Am I making any sense? I hope so. It’s a paranoid thought, and I try not to be a raving, rabid atheist/agnostic, but it really did decrease my enjoyment of the book. That and the fact that after a while I didn’t really feel drawn in by Hethor’s quest. The progress of his quest was so…random that I just couldn’t keep up the enthusiasm. I think the airship portion was the peak; after that things got less interesting. Especially when the romance subplot is introduced. I can understand the message of true love and sacrifice saving the world, but this particular true love didn’t resonate with me.
Still, the great setting is going to stick with me a long time, and it’s certainly a book that provokes thought. I get the feeling someone more familiar with the Jesus Christ mythos (and possibly some of the finer points of Arthurian legend as well) would get a lot more from it than me.
07.03.07
Gathering no moss
Look, it’s my very own blog! Still very uncustomized, and it looks a little funny being named “Galactic Drift” with the nice green theme I picked, but for now it’s good enough.
Currently I work at Amazon.com, and while I enjoy getting a paycheck every 2 weeks (hourly, not salaried, blah), I find a ridiculous portion going right back into Amazon’s pockets thanks to all the orders I make. Most recently I picked up Firebirds, Firebirds Rising, the Shoujo Kakumei Utena movie, and The Princess and the Hound.
The Princess and the Hound turned out…interesting. A little disjointed, but I did enjoy it. I suppose since I skipped most of the YA genre growing up, I’m feeling the need now to go back and see what I missed.
The two Firebirds anthologies I picked up expressly for the purpose excuse of reading more Emma Bull, since she has a new book coming out soon, but I’ve been enjoying practically all the stories so far (I’m about a third into Firebirds Rising right now).