fine whine

It's amazing what you can find when you're not looking for it. Hearkening back to a couple days ago's hours of Googlewhacking (which was indeed successful with three recordable entries) and lacking any particular destination, I searched for a catchy sounding random pair that I knew would pull up a number of disparate links, "jigsaw gigolo". And lo, there at the top of the list I beheld The Jigsaw Lounge's review of A.I..

Now I've been looking for a new movie reviewer ever since Jeff Huston pulled the plug on his Believe-Me film ratings and review web site. So I quickly scanned the Lounge (run mostly by a guy named Neil Young) to see how closely my opinions matched theirs. With the exception of their treatment of the Michael Mann canon (I'm not one of his fans but I can understand their appeal, somewhat) and a couple others it seemed like I had finally found a reviewer I can take seriously. The reviews delve deeper into the pieces that interest me and the writing is all around intelligent. The archives are pretty comprehensive and cross-referenced. I'm happy.

Also this evening I had the "pleasure" of experiencing Sweet Home Alabama, starring Reese Whitherspoon and a whole raft of cliched stereotypes about New Yorkers and the South. Unfortunately Neil Young and company haven't found fit to tackle this one, so I'm afraid I'll have to give it a review. This movie elevates inoffensiveness to an art form. The whole production just oozes pleasant and safe, with hardly a discomfortable moment for anyone involved, except maybe the audience. I didn't care for it and felt bad for Fred Ward for being in such a production, though his scenes are generally pretty good, especially garbed in Civil War regalia.

I wouldn't say that I disliked the movie for being bad, but for being not good. To use a cliche myself, it didn't do anything for me. I like a movie that makes me think, not one that requires I don't. The whole plot was basically telegraphed from the opening couple minutes and DVD cover, and it turned out even less plotted than I had expected — I was expecting some sort of dark past revelation or other plot twist looming just as storm clouds hang overhead, but no such luck: the rain was merely a diversion played for a laugh and no further depth. Oops, I suppose that might've been a spoiler, so forget that last sentence if you care.

As if movies like that could be spoiled. They're bland, interchangeable, and yet they make millions. Why? Could it be that very inoffensiveness? It can't just be star power (and have you noticed how strange Reese's chin is starting to look? Or is it just my imagination) driving these fluff vehicles. There must be some deeper meaning, right? Or is sheer banality the aim, inoffensiveness the target? Their extreme defanging removes the bite entirely, as it were. It is that very unwillingness to offend that insults me, a stultifying and pedantic nose-thumbing to someone with more than the brains of a turnip. What next for the movieplex, two hours of cute puppies, kittens and smiling, gurgling babies to coo over and giggle? Then I'll really have to stick to reading, I guess.

Seeing as I use a very simple kluge to separate the links and writeups for my (other) blog, I needed a simple kluge to get the titles of my links back out. Surely, I thought, nobody else puts a link in EntryMore with only "link" for text and the actual site name in the link title, thus nobody would've made such an otherwise pointless plugin. Whilst searching for information on how to develop my own, I stumbled across Kevin Shay's Collect, which while being much more useful and powerful, nevertheless can easily be coaxed into doing precisely what I want. Non bloggers need not read on.

Basically, my entries are structured like this: a couple paragraphs in the regular Entry describing a link given in the EntryMore, as in this example:<a title="Ketchup, my links blog" href="http://mikelietz.org/ketchup/">link</a">It's set up this way to be easily updatable and consistent, and so far it works pretty well. The problem I encountered is that all of my EntryMores read exactly the same text: link, and only can be told apart in a browser supporting title attributes. And MT doesn't natively support any sort of a->title parsing. So for me to make a master list of every link ever blogged, I'd need some help. Enter a plugin.

I stumbled across Collect, and with a little trial and error I came up with this snippet of code. It spits out the entry's title and a link named with the link's title. Not too bad for ten minutes' work. My index template using it is now functional if not totally styled, and you can see it here. My code is below for anyone interested, though I doubt anyone else is cheating quite in the same way I am.

<MTEntries lastn="999999">
<MTCollect tags="a">
<$MTEntryTitle$>
<MTCollectThis>
<$MTEntryMore$>
</MTCollectThis>
<MTIfCollected tags="a">
<MTCollected tags="a">
<a href="<$MTCollectedAttr attr="href"$>"><$MTCollectedAttr attr="title"$></a>
</MTCollected>
</MTIfCollected>
</MTCollect>
</MTEntries>


What sort of person drives a Karmann Ghia with a little Spider-man in the window? It is that very question I pondered on my way home today, driving alongside such a vehicle. The driver turned out to be a late twenties guy who looked like he couldn't care less to be driving a cool classic car. Bah. VW drivers are a different breed, it seems.

Speaking of which, I then noticed a VW Golf driving toward me bearing vanity plates of LILS VW. Lil, from the looks of her, wasn't very happy to be driving a VW either, and in fact looked downright mean. I tried to think of another vanity plate that would be more applicable to Lil, but the best I could imagine that was under eight letters and not rude or profane was SCRU LIL. Which is probably too lewd to get past the folks over at Motor Vehicles, ever vigilant against sexual or drug references on personalized plates. Some of them have crude language knowledges rivaling the dirtiest of Catholic schoolboys, I've heard.

Anyway, it was the thought of such censorship that led to a general musing on the merits of freedom of speech and its extents on the roadways. Said thought was interrupted suddenly by the realization that the Lincoln Town Car right behind me bore plates reading, simply,  PUCK .

As I try to catch myself up on ketchup I encounter (or rather, don't encounter) sites I remember that have since gone away. A few have officially closed, like Jeffrey Huston's Believe-me, the only movie review site I thought I'd ever need, but most just disappear, such as Impropaganda, F-u-F-me, and HQ2O. I understand that time erodes the humor or poignancy of some content, but I would prefer to make that judgment myself, dammit. It's annoying, moreover, to see "Page loading..." in the status bar, only to be disappointed by a search-portal and numerous pop-up windows. Clearly somebody is aware of "hot" addresses and buys them up chock-a-block, preying on the foolish few still expecting the site they recall or seek. I can only wonder if, undaunted, they click on some of the new links presented, eager to click on something and proceed.

I was once a music reviewer for 181.4 Degrees From The Norm. Now the address points to a site entirely void of music reviews. What gives? Am I asking too much to demand to have every site ever created always remain? I've kept my site up for a number of years without a hiccup or significant damage to my wallet, and I guess I expect the same from everybody else. The closest analogue I can envision is the spontaneous combustion of books on a library shelf. There and readable one minute, gone the next.

True, spontaneous library book combustion would have one upside: it would make room for more books. The internet isn't constrained by shelf space. It is supposed to be a dynamic medium, unlike books which are static, unchanging, dead. And a lot of sites do wear out their welcome, such as those for the oncoming-millennial-party/apocalypse and every movie made in the last three years, but the idea of their content disappearing makes me uneasy somehow. Websites are supposed to be there for me whenever I want them, not just as long as somebody keeps paying for them. Thank goodness for the Internet Archive, I guess.

Until they too pick up shop and move on, of course.

I don't know if I've been seeing a decline in quality book writing corresponding to the general decline in book reading, or if I've just been reading disappointing books lately, but either way it annoys me. Being disappointed by a book is far worse than being disappointed by a movie, I'd say, because of the longer time commitment and greater effort of imagination. Not only do book readers have to turn the pages, but they also have to envision all of the action. And a decently-sized book takes at least twice as long to read as a corresponding movie does to watch (though Matchstick men by Eric Garcia took me approximately 90 minutes to read, the likely runtime of the upcoming film adaptation). So being let down by a book is a far bigger blow than watching Batman comes back again. And I've been let down twice in the last week.

First up was Jim Knipfel's The Buzzing, a sliver of a novel that could easily have doubled in size... in fact, another book's worth of material would be very welcome as the book just stops. The protagonist starts to unravel the unlikely and very sinister plot, and then the author gives up. Yes, the book's about conspiracies, Godzilla and general weirdness, but a book about paranoia should end with some sort of resolution, right? Or is that irony? I'd characterize the book as all rising action, though interesting, but without follow-through enough to call it a finished work. It reminds me of movies made ostensibly for the beginning of a long franchise that become the end of said franchise as well. So I was disappointed.

Literary disappointment number two came in the form of D. B. Weiss's Lucky Wander Boy, an engaging but uneven look at dysfunctionality and classic video games. Weiss brings up some brilliant points about society in general and geeks in specific, and also makes great insights on what makes a classic video game classic and the compelling but improbable mythological undercurrents within it. Two points struck me: first, in Frogger, the cars and whatnot are not determined adversaries but uncaring obstacles. It's not a frog vs. the traffic but a frog vs. the world. I'd like to make a good game like that, where somehow all of the "enemies" are more incidental than against you. His other, far weightier point is that the more caricatured or cartoony and less real that art is, the easier it is to experience more personally. To wit: Donkey Kong players can imagine themselves as Mario, overcoming obstacles and (almost) getting the girl. Why? Other than knowing he's a carpenter, he's a blank and up to our interpretation for the rest of his personality. Today's game characters, though, have very well-defined characteristics including back stories and well-fleshed relationships. Which does not leave much room for personalization and interpretation. This is one of the basic points that anime enthusiasts and graphic novel fans try to make. Weiss's knowledge of the fledgling arcade and home console industry is conveyed well though at times it does sidetrack the narrative (The same technique expertly used by Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy). His pop culture insights and silver-dollar word style largely work, and the book is mostly an engaging read. My problems lie with the Wayne's World wrapup, with a number of 'replay' chapters tacked onto the end. None alone is the real ending, nor does any offer total resolution. And none of them is the Scooby Doo ending, either. It's a cop-out, a weaseling cheat of an ending for a book that deserves far better.

So I'm almost leery to talk about the book I'm midway through. I like it even more than the other two (at their best) because it seems like a book I'd write, or at least could. After all, the narrator and I had the same kind of doorknobs in our childhood homes. Not to say that this is the first guy with the same door hardware, but Nicholson Baker is the only author I can recall who mentions such a detail. Minutiae is his specialty, it would seem, as more than half of the pages I've read of The Mezzanine, so far have been either graced by footnotes or continuations thereof. His asides' footnotes beget more asides, and the whole story is one rambling mess. But in a good way. Baker revels in trivia, both in the sense of useless facts as well as unimportant matters. The narrator has an intimately detailed consciousness of everything he does, from breathing to tying his shoes and making facial expressions. His awareness is surpassed only by his articulate descriptions, making the reader sympathetic partners to his otherwise insignificant musings. I am loving this book. I fear that anything I try to write from now will unwittingly (in both senses of the word) emulate his style, if not his pervasive attention to the banal.

So I'm happy with that book, so far. On an unrelated note, I say "actually" far too much.

You see that little number down in the corner? I've updated MovableType to 2.64. What difference that makes to you is probably little, but it makes me happy to be current.