The Power of TK

Write to Me:
yousaytomatoblog[AT]gmail[DOT]com

See Also

100 Things About Me
The Bull's Testicles Project
Russia Trip: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Best of 2002: Movies, Books, Music.
Best of 2003: Movies.
Best of 2004: Movies, Books.
Best of 2005: Theater, Books.
Best of 2006: Theater, Books, Television.
Blogroll

Archives

Other Sites

My Slate archive
Slate
Day job podcasts
YST Movie Madness
Weblog Commenting and Trackback by HaloScan.com

Friday, November 29, 2002

Running Away From Home
I’m off to Moscow in a week’s time. Instead of heading to Thanksgiving-weekend-bloated stores to get the things I still need—long underwear, warm boots, some gloves—I’ve been lying in bed reading. Nothing useful, like a guidebook or my Russian textbook, but bulky nonfiction accounts of life in post-1991 Russia.

Currently, I’m breezing through David Remnick’s Resurrection—standard New Yorker-style profile journalism done exceedingly well. Before that, though, I read a disturbing (in good and bad ways) book by two strapping young men who fled their upper-middle-class American lives so they could live anti-bourgeois existences in Moscow. This wasn’t a political move—there’s nothing remotely socialist or lefty about either of the authors—but they both wanted to get away from the dull conformity of the United States and do the thing that usually drives people to go live in another country: get out of competition with people they grew up with or went to school/university with, and do something “special.”

Speaking as someone who’s done this on more than one occasion (I crammed my things into a duffle bag and went to live in Spain for two years, and I’ve spent about 18 years in the States), I recognize the urge to flee and to stand out both in the country you leave (not getting the jobs/chicks you feel you deserve?—make a splash by running away to a smaller pond) and in your destination (Ooh, what’s your accent? Say, could you teach me to speak English/offer me a ticket out of this crummy country?). Of course, this only works if you’re moving laterally in the hierarchy of nations—Mexicans in the U.S. and Africans in Britain somehow never qualify as “expats.” But, if you’re a native English speaker, there’s almost always an advantage to trading countries.

Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames both went to Russia because they felt an irresistible attraction to the place. They loved the literature, enjoyed the freedom it offered in the early ‘90s, and they wanted to be writers. They also wanted to live in a place where they could indulge their taste for drugs and casual sex with skinny teenage girls with no negative consequences. Where they could be journalists without having to toe a corporate line. In short, they wanted to get away from the responsibilities of home—being a dutiful son/brother/grandson/boyfriend/father, doing the dull but necessary jobs/tasks that life demands, thinking about other people besides yourself.

Identifying as a writer is very important to Taibbi and Ames, and judging from the very readable The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, they’re both talented (Taibbi much more than Ames). They’re good thinkers—albeit with more of a gift for pointing out flaws and weaknesses than for offering alternatives—and they’re clearly creative. When they come together to edit a new Moscow expat paper, the eXile, they take advantage of their freedom to put out a gonzo publication—a mixture, judging from the samples reproduced in the book, of scurrilous character assassination, uncontrolled impulses, the realization of revenge fantasies, and some important straight journalism, breaking stories other papers are too nervous or too compromised to touch. This book shows just how ugly a truly free press can be.

T & A are refreshingly free of the careerism that silences a lot of journos, and they make some good points: The logistics of newspaper publishing encourage journalists to be lazy; newspaper proprietors censor their papers to protect advertising revenues, and they’re often contemptuous of their readers. The foreign correspondent system, which theoretically means that talented, smart writers with good journalistic instincts move from country to country and are expected to develop an instant understanding of the complex political, social, and cultural factors at work, and become fluent in the native language wherever they go, is obviously flawed. T & A are well-placed to show the failings of Moscow correspondents because they do speak Russian and are aware of at least some of the complexities of the place. They seem to have lost their touch with other places, though. When dissing New York Times (now New Yorker) writer Michael Specter, Taibbi notes Specter’s victory in “an online contest called the ‘Hackathion' which was sponsored by Slate Press." It was the “Hackathlon” in Slate, an online magazine that has never been known as “Slate Press.”

T & A admit they’re motivated by “vanity and spleen,” but admitting something doesn’t make it OK. The book—and the eXile itself—is full of misogynist woman-hating. Teenage Russian dyevushki are acceptable to the lads, because they’re skinny and wear lots of makeup and tiny miniskirts and have an apocalyptic urge to screw drugged-out, hairy American men. American and British women, however, are never mentioned without being described in terms of some physical “flaw”—a huge ass, “saggy tits,” fat ankles, whatever. T & A are proud that they’ve overcome the PC training of the soul-deadened West. As Vladimir Ilich himself might have put it: That’s false consciousness, boys.

After all the revelations of psychoses, sexual exploitation, and general “every woman adores a fascist” confessionals, I left the book seeing it as one long evocation of an excuse I used to make myself. When a big exam was coming up, I would fail to prepare for it on a superhuman level—I wouldn’t read the set books, for example. Meanwhile, I’d make every effort to show how smart and erudite I was. This way, when the test came and I did poorly, I could hope other people would think to themselves, “Just think how well she could’ve done if she’d tried.” That way, you never actually fail—until you see the error of your ways.

By putting out a magazine that publishes revealing investigative journalism and righteous indictments of a corrupt system alongside “death porn,” club reports that turn into rape fantasies, first-person stories about threatening to kill a sex partner unless she agrees to get an abortion, or pages of speed-fueled nonsense, T & A got to convince themselves, “Man, just imagine how great our paper would be and how much everyone would respect us if we weren’t such honest, freedom-loving fuck-ups.”

My advice to Matt and Mark would be: If you hate expats so much, just ignore them. It’s worked for me. When I’m “abroad,” (i.e., not in England), English people set me off. If I overhear their accents in restaurants or meet them at work, I have a visceral reaction that borders on blind hatred. This is insane and without doubt a manifestation of deep-seated self-loathing, but there it is. I’ve learned to deal with it in a calming, sane way: I just ignore the Brits. I change seats, or I accentuate the American component of my mid-Atlantic accent. (And, of course, there are many more times that it suits me to ham up the Englishness and trigger that “special” reaction.)

England’s a great country, and I’m really glad I grew up there. It’s just not for me. That’s why I left, and it’s also why I became a U.S. citizen. I’m not an expat, I’m an American. Taibbi and Ames might consider making a similar move.
|
Far From Heaven
Far From Heaven is exactly as you’ve heard: a faultless recreation of a 1950s Douglas Sirk-style melodrama. The styling of the movie is immaculate; the palette, the fonts, the clothes, the set, the script, the contents of the characters’ daily lives, the music are all supremely evocative of the object of Todd Haynes hommage. (If he doesn’t get the Oscar for art direction, that is me through with thinking there’s even a possibility of justice in those awards.)

The acting is excellent. Julianne Moore is magnificent, as she always is. She has the 1950s look, bearing, and sense of control down. She always acts as though she’s holding something back, so she’s perfect for the part of Kathy, the model ‘50s wife and mother, keeping up appearances and doing everything that’s expected of her. Dennis Quaid is a good fit for the role of her husband Frank, a manly colossus who pitches televisions, plays golf, and schmoozes better than anyone else. When Kathy finds Frank in a passionate kiss with another man, all the tiny cracks she’s looked away from suddenly resolve into a huge fissure that destroys her happy home.

She finds herself turning to her black gardener, Raymond Deagan, for companionship. What starts as polite condescension becomes a learning experience and eventually a sincere affection. He’s smart, insightful, an upstanding man who prioritizes his family in a way that Kathy’s selfish husband can’t or won’t. But she’s an upper-middle-class white woman, and he’s a black man, and even in liberal(ish) Connecticut, there’s no possibility of her maintaining her social position and even maintaining a friendship with him. At the same time, his home and family are attacked by blacks who feel the same way as their neighbors on the other side of the color line.

Naturally, it’s the innocent who suffer. Only an out gay filmmaker could’ve gotten away with a storyline that shows the harm that being honest about sexuality can do. Nowadays, we’d all agree that Frank is better being open about his orientation, but when appearances count for so much, and women’s lives are so controlled, his move seems like selfishness—and it is. The movie does a good job of demonstrating the hierarchy of prejudice: Sure folks are homophobic, and openly so, but they deal with gayness far more rationally than they do with interracial friendship, never mind love.

Ultimately, though, the movie lacks a top gear. A melodrama should send people reaching for their hankies, but judging from the folks around me, there wasn’t a wet eye in the house. Even when Kathy loses her composure—which happens only momentarily—the mask is still in place. Of course Julianne Moore is acting the part of a woman acting a part. She does it well, but if you’re never permitted a glimpse of what’s behind the mask, you don’t get as sad, glad, or mad as you could if you were shown some real feeling. Perhaps because Haynes was preoccupied with mimicking Sirk so faithfully, the film comes off as rather antiseptic—it’s more like a museum exhibit of a “real 1950s household, social issues included” than a slice of real life.
|

Thursday, November 28, 2002

Why I Like Thanksgiving
Dude, it always falls on a Thursday, and since many employers, including mine, also make the day after Thanksgiving a holiday, you get a four-day break. In the day-off-deprived land of the free, that's a big deal. Actually, my vanpool and I stretched the holiday even further by going to a movie right after work on Wednesday (literally in my case—I finished work at 6:53, then ran down the stairs for my ride). After Far From Heaven (on which more later), we went to Dragonfish for cocktails, edamame, poke rolls, and potstickers. (Dragonfish have a genius second happy hour from 10-1 a.m., so not only were we celebrating the fact that we didn't have to set our alarm clocks the next day, we were actually getting a bargain.)

Ach, but to get sappy for a moment (don't worry, normal curmudgeonliness will be resumed shortly), I do have much to be grateful for—a great girlfriend, a swell group of pals, a job that I like, enough dosh to indulge most of my whims. Today was an ideal day: a lie-in, finishing a book in bed while drinking tea, a short spell of mess-clearing so we could actually use the dinner table to eat from rather than as a holding place for unread mail, warming up the excellent pre-prepared dinner (if I'm forced to cavil, there weren't enough potatoes—that's what was in the mysterious small package in the photo below—and PCC seems to agree with the Coastal Kitchen that green beans are supposed to be served raw) eaten while listening to the fabulous Waltz for Koop, then a stroll down the deserted street to the video store.

And now I'm off to watch one of the DVDs we rented.
|
How Lazy Americans Do Thanksgiving Dinner

Let PCC do all the work.
|

Wednesday, November 27, 2002

El Crimen del Padre Amaro
On Sunday I headed to the Harvard Exit to see El Crimen del Padre Amaro, better known as “the movie with Gael García Bernal in it.” (Yes, the cute guy from Amores Perros and Y Tu Mamá También—and surely the reason that everyone thinks those two movies were made by the same director.) The plot is relatively complex, but basically it’s the story of a young Mexican priest (Bernal) sent out into the countryside to gain pastoral experience. The young father seems like a nice guy, but quickly enough he gives into the temptations of the flesh (strictly hetero), is corrupted by ambition, and destroys the lives of his most faithful parishioners.

It’s based on a 19th-century Portuguese novel by Eça de Queiroz, and while I wasn’t sufficiently taken by the movie to read the book, I’d be interested to know the basic outline, since the screenwriter did a great job of weaving contemporary Mexican social problems into the storyline. For example, the priest supervising Amaro, Padre Benito, is a crusty old Spaniard, which highlights not only his somewhat condescending attitudes to the New World community in which he’s lived for decades, but also represents a continuation of the Spanish Civil War: One of the village’s upstanding citizens is another aging Old Worlder, the Communist father of a young journalist, who is still fighting Franco and the church.

The film also raised—pretty superficially in most cases—the all-consuming influence of drug money in Mexican life, the difficulties facing the independent press, and the harshness of country life. The bishop’s campaign to excommunicate a radical priest who lives with his peasant flock way out in the sierra because he claims said priest supports guerrillas, even as the bishop ignores the evil deeds of a drug lord so that he can pocket his contributions, makes you think Sinead O’Connor’s “Fight the real enemy” was spot on.

Ignoring the big issues and focusing on the forbidden love at the center of the plot, the movie reminded me of Ballykissangel. In fact, I would have liked it to be a bit more like Ballykissangel. For me, the weakest element of El Crimen del Padre Amaro was Amelia, the priest’s totty. Perhaps piousness and pouting lips are all that it takes to tempt a man of the cloth away from the path of righteousness, especially if he’s already convinced that celibacy should be optional, but I would’ve liked to have seen a bit more spark in Amelia. Back in Ballykissangel, Assumpta was such a piston that you could very easily believe that even a committed priest would forsake his vows, and the tension as he struggled with that made even a silly series gripping. If you’re never convinced Padre Amaro has a sincere vocation, he’s just a manipulating social-climber stepping on innocent people as he climbs up the hierarchy. And no matter how appealing his green eyes are, he’s just a jerk in a Roman collar.

El Crimen del Padre Amaro Extra: The movie’s IMDB page has some stills; the official site has a really annoying menu icon that follows you around and gets in the way of scrolling, but there's some good info in there.
|

Sunday, November 24, 2002

Frida
On Saturday I finally went to see Frida, even though it’s playing at one of my least favorite cinemas, the Metro. The Metro’s one of those throw-back ‘80s-style multiplexes where each of the individual screening rooms is no bigger than a large living room. The Cinerama it ain’t.

The movie was just about what I expected. A relatively faithful retelling of Frida Kahlo’s life story, with some decent acting, a lot of business in the directing—some of it successful, and some bisexual thrills. (It’s interesting to check out Metacritic’s aggregation of Frida reviews; opinions vary from sublime to banal.)

Julie Taymor is a very theatrical movie director, and sometimes the artiness of Frida strayed into the realm of self-consciousness. Still, it felt appropriate that a biopic of an innovative, creative artist should be arty and somewhat creative. If you know the story of Frida Kahlo’s life, you’re sort of waiting in dread for the horrendous injury to strike, but Taymor treats it extremely sensitively—so no need to cover your eyes.

Salma Hayek was awesome—conveying both physical and emotional pain very effectively yet subtly, and convincingly passionate. I’d heard about the famous kiss with Ashley Judd (I didn’t realize until I was just looking at the official site that Judd was playing Tina Modotti), but she was fearlessly present in all the girl-on-girl scenes. (Of course, she’s done them before, most recently in Time Code.)

Alfred Molina turned in a good, understated performance as Diego Rivera, having done a Robert De Niro and piled on a few pounds for the role. I must say, though, I don’t understand why he keeps getting “accent parts” in U.S. films. Molina was born and bred in London. Why is an Englishman—albeit one whose parents were Spanish and Italian—always being cast as a “foreigner” with an accent? He’s played Russian (Letter to Brezhnev), Greek (Eleni and Before and After), Iranian (Not Without My Daughter), Belgian (Murder on the Orient Express), Cuban (The Perez Family—a surprisingly good film), French (Chocolat), and many more in movies that I haven’t seen judging from his Internet Movie Database filmography. I know that when a movie set in a non-English-speaking country is performed in English, it’s an advantage comprehension-wise and from the director’s point of view to have English-speaking actors putting on accents, but surely sometimes there’s someone who’s at least the right ethnicity available. If I were a Latino actor, I’d be pissed that this Brit keeps coming over and getting the good gigs. Then again, if I were a Latino actor, I’m not sure how happy I’d be that Spaniards keep coming over and getting the plum parts—Javier Bardem and Antonio Banderas are no more qualified to play Latin Americans than Alfred Molina. Bonus Alfred Molina question: What does Alf have in common with Ralph Fiennes and John Thaw (ignore the fact that Thaw recently died)? Answers in the comments please.
|
Word on the Street
Recently I've noticed a bunch of graffitti on my local streets—literally. Here are a few of the images.
|
Butch-Femme Hairdressing
I got a snip at the lesbian hairdressers yesterday. Recently, one of the three stylists moved on to hipper pastures, so they rearranged the place, erecting walls to make a massage studio inside the salon, and cutting (ha ha) the number of stations from three to two.

It’s a very nice remodeling and all, but it has messed up the mix of the place. There used to be a butch hairdresser, a femme hairdresser, and a New Age hairdresser, and they were working a sort of “three faces of lesbianism” angle. You could pretty much tell who was waiting for whom, since broadly speaking a client whom a random panel of five lesbians would grade on the butch side of the scale would almost certainly go sit in the butch stylists’ chair, and the woman exuding a whiff of patchouli and wearing turquoise earrings would be most likely to head off with the New Ager. You could even tell if there were half-done folks sitting around waiting for the next stage in their transformation: Folks getting a perm are more likely to be with the New Ager, while women getting a novelty color job (i.e., not your standard blond highlights) were with the femme stylist.

Now the femme has gone.

I’m not sure why this bothers me so. I’ve always rejected the world of role-playing, so maybe it’s just that I liked the femme hairdresser. She always seemed a bit ditsy in an amusing way—she once went on vacation to Mexico and brought home a street dog that she found there. She brought the dog into the salon, but he wasn’t very socialized, and he ended up digging through the bathroom trash and bringing used tampons into the salon.

I buck the system, because even though I don’t fit her profile, I get my hair cut by the New Ager, since she has cut R’s hair for years. I used to pine for a snip from the butch hairdresser, and I got my chance one time when my stylist was on vacation. I was shocked to discover that I walked out with pretty much the same haircut as I always got from NA. This either says something very deep about role-playing or nothing at all.
|

Tuesday, November 19, 2002

Weird Search Requests, Part 101
Other than lots and lots of searches for things like "root canal diary" or "Myskina + horse + GQ," I don't get a lot of visitors coming to my blog via weird search requests, but today someone came to You Say Tomato after entering the words "Richard from Coronation Street kissing someone" into Google. I came up No. 8 on the list, even though the site contains no references to that beguiling subject matter.

The reason this troubles me is that it means that Richard is probably still in Coronation Street. You see I'm a very loyal viewer, but CBC is about five months behind the British schedule—yesterday I saw the preparations for the Jubilee Civil War skirmish, which would've been shown in June in England. Now I have to resist the temptation to go to the U.K. Corry Web site to see what's up with Richard and Gail, because that would take away all the suspense from the next six month's of viewing.

Ah, the pain of exile.
|

Sunday, November 17, 2002

Madredeus: Electronico
One advantage of listening to music on the computer is the ease of organizing playlists. The most recent Madredeus album, Electronico, consists of 13 of their classic tracks deconstructed and reconstructed in a variety of styles by a bunch of invited artists. With RealPlayer (I feel disloyal to the mothercompany, but my Real deal's a holdover from the days of my Big Brother 24/7 obsession), I was able to listen to the original tracks immediately followed by the remixes. I don't own all Madredeus’ albums, so I had just nine side-by-side experiences, but it was still extraordinarily illuminating.

Madredeus are a strange genre-spanning band. They're usually linked to fado, and while that Portuguese version of the blues is certainly a big influence on their music, they're far from a classic fado ensemble. There are elements of jazz, nods to Brazil, and strands of classical music (the type of romantic compositions that find their way into television ad campaigns), and most of all there is Teresa Salgueiro, who has a strong, clear voice for the ages.

I like Madredeus, but in their raw form I can't listen to them for too long. At times, I find Salgueiro's voice almost too clear; it reminds me of Joan Baez singing "Private Dancer": The voice is good, the song is good, but the tone is so crystalline, it's too "clean." Sometimes you need a bit of raunch when you're listening to music. The remixes on Electronico add a bit of raunch to Madredeus' music, and a wonderful thing it is.

The remixers all gave a little commentary (and I mean "little"—I'm probably in the Madredeus' predominant age demographic, and I had a hell of a time reading the tiny print—it's come to something when reading liner notes makes you feel old), and it seems as though many or most of them were unfamiliar with Madredeus before they took on the task of rearranging their songs. Nevertheless, there's only one track where I felt the remix degraded rather than enhanced the original—that was “Oxalá,” which Telepopmusik "genetically modified" by chopping up the vocal track and—God help us—introducing cheesy ‘80s-style claps and fake finger clicks. (Just to prove how extraordinarily out-of-step with the music world my opinions are, “Oxalá” seems to be the one track you can watch a music video for. Check out the link at the bottom of this page. Remember, the video is just 3:38, whereas the album track is 5:18. All the hand claps are in the “lost” 50 seconds.)

I’m not in love with the remix of “Guitarra” either. The original song isn’t one of my favorites. Ironically, since it features fado’s foundation, the 12-string guitar, if you take out the Portuguese lyrics, it sort of reminds me of a Newfie/Cape Breton hee-haw tune. Manitoba’s remix starts with and keeps returning to a gonzo drum solo—it’s like focusing on Gene Krupa rather than Anita O’Day—but at the same time it’s a creative deconstruction/reconstruction that focuses on the music’s underlying pattern rather than on the melody, so I give it points for that.

Since I can’t figure out how to record 30-second clips to illustrate what the remixes add to the original songs, I suppose I should just recommend that you go out and buy both Electronico and Madredeus’ best-of compilation, Antologia. Thus armed, you’ll be able to do your own side-by-side comparisons. But if you just want to buy one album, make it Electronico. Raunch is good.
|

Saturday, November 16, 2002

What I Did Last Weekend
Here are a few photos from my weird weekend in Los Angeles.
|
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
I love the Harry Potter books (when the last one came out, I spent a fabulous weekend in Victoria, B.C., doing nothing but reading, eating in that city’s fabulous but entirely unpretentious restaurants, and drinking cups of tea), and I love the movies, but thus far those twin passions haven’t meshed together very well.

I went to the opening night of the first movie full of excitement and anticipation, but I ended up falling asleep. It wasn’t entirely the film’s fault—those carefree Friday nights of my youth have been replaced by weak, weary evenings when I strain to stay awake past 11 p.m., and we didn’t get out of the Cinerama that night until almost 2 a.m.—but it was so literal and so crammed with narrative that there was no room left for the imagination.

Last night, the opening day of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, I was considerably less hyped-up, and I enjoyed the film much more for it. (The key to happiness is managing expectations. Unfortunately, it’s also the key to mediocrity.) This time around, Chris Columbus didn’t have to spend quite so much time on introductory business, so he could pay more attention to the plotting, making the story arcs more successful. Still, I agree with Slate’s movie critic, David Edelstein, that the marathon movie was still too short: “This isn't a two-hour film inflated by pretension (or contractual fidelity) to two hours and 40 minutes; it's a four-hour film reduced by a businesslike hack to two-thirds of its rightful length.”

With the movies, you’re struck more forcefully with the notion that Harry Potter is basically children’s entertainment. Reading a 600-page book, you can block the fact that you spent precious time and brain cells pondering booger-flavored jellybeans; when five minutes of a 160-minute movie is dedicated to vomiting slugs, you’re all too aware that 3.125 percent of your evening in the cinema was spent watching a redheaded boy spit up slimy garden creatures.

Even more than in the first movie, the stellar cast was criminally underused. The cast list reads like a roll call of the great genre actors of the last quarter-century—Maggie Smith, Richard Harris, John Cleese, Alan Rickman, Julie Walters, Gemma Jones, Kenneth Branagh, etc.—yet none of them are on-screen for more than 15 minutes, most for less than five. Fiona Shaw is said to be the greatest stage actress of her generation (I’ve never had the good fortune to see her), and she gets about two minutes of action, most of it wordless. As Edelstein put it: “[W]hat kind of director could confine the greatest living English-language comedienne, Maggie Smith, to a few blasé reaction shots? What kind of director could confine the most resourceful of all living British farceurs, John Cleese, to a couple of monosyllabic drift-throughs as a semi-decapitated ghost? A director with more money than talent."

Two other actors stood out for me: Jason Isaacs, as Lucius Malfoy, who despite beautiful blue eyes and a sweet smile has become America’s favorite British movie villain thanks to his turn in The Patriot (I could hear the parents of the kids sitting behind me last night muttering, “What was he in?”). I remember him from that late-‘80s TV classic Capital City, which was one of my many televisual addictions of the era. (Isaacs is about my age, a couple of years younger, in fact, so at first I thought he was miscast as Draco Malfoy’s dad. Then I remembered that several of my contemporaries have kids in the early years of secondary school. What a shocking realization: I’m old enough to be Harry Potter’s mother. And there’s actually a family resemblance!) Shirley Henderson was also great as cottager Moaning Myrtle, despite being chronically misdirected. She also first came to my attention via television—she played Robert Carlyle’s star-crossed true love, Isobel, in Hamish Macbeth—and she was absolutely fabulous as Tony Wilson’s first wife, Lindsay, in the excellent 24 Hour Party People. She’s got a great talent for conveying hidden depths: The characters she plays often seem unaffected by happening around them, but at the same time you get the sense that in fact they care very much.
|

Friday, November 15, 2002

Meet My New Friend
I never thought I'd get a cellphone, but I'm a sucker for a gadget, and when I read Walt Mossberg's review of the Danger Sidekick a couple of months ago, I knew I'd probably end up getting one. Then when Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow said, "Jesus Christ, this is the coolest goddamned phone/PDA/cam/email/SMS/thing in the entire universe. I have a technology boner that could cut glass," it was a for-sure situation.

Unfortunately, the Sidekick's Web browser isn't Blogger-compatible—yet—but the e-mail system works astonishingly well (feel free to drop me a note at junio[AT]tmail.com). It does a whole bunch of things adequately rather than one or two things outstandingly. Just like me!

The camera's the weakest of all the device's elements, but since it was free, it was definitely worth what I paid for it. The problem is that with the black-and-white, well, green-and-white, screen, it's really hard to see whatcha got. However, here's a cute snap of me and my cat taken with the Sidekick's camera:
|

Sunday, November 10, 2002

The LA Experience
My sole escape from five blocks of downtown Los Angeles provided the quintessential LA experience. Mickey took me to the Venice restaurance Axe (pronounced A-shay, apparently), and who should be sitting at the front table but Anthony LaPaglia of Lantana/Without a Trace fame. Thanks to a little run-in with the health department back in September (see last item), there was lots of room despite the presence of a bona fide movie star.
|
Leaving Los Angeles
It must be time for me to leave: The sun is out. It's amazing how different things look and feel when they're bathed in light rather than shrouded in mist. I think I would've had a very different experience here if the weather had been like this the whole time. The buildings across the street that seemed mildly threatening now just look like generic low-income housing with lots of people having fun hanging around outside. Instead of wanting to take the quickest route home to get out of the rain, I might've lingered checking out the neighborhood more thoroughly. I think a lot of my nervousness came from not having a sense of where I was. LA geography is hard to figure, especially for someone like me with not a jot or tittle of a sense of direction. Ach, well, after brunch with famous L.A. blogger Mickey Kaus, I'm back on the plane to Seattle.

One last highly unoriginal observation about Los Angeles: LA is a Spanish-speaking city. Obviously, I've experienced a minuscule corner of a huge place, but everywhere I've been, workers whose first language is Spanish have switched between their native tongue and perfect though accented English, according to what was appropriate. How much of a service is that, and how much a bonus do you think they get paid for providing it? The answers are "huge" and "nothing." If they were providing translation/bilingual services in any other language in any other country they'd be pocketing a huge premium for their language skills. Here they get to be waiters and elevator operators.

Linky love special: Proto-Angeleno blogger Tony Pierce riffs on the rain; and some candid photos from the worst-attended Tier 1 tennis tournament in the world.
|

Saturday, November 09, 2002

More News From a Wet Place
It's still raining in LA, and from what I can gather, it started just about when I arrived and is expected to stop just about when I'm due to leave. I'm starting to realize that this relentless fine mist can be just as pernicious as a Seattle-style drenching. It's sneakier—not the kind of soaking you get stepping into a heavens-opening downpour, but a slow, sneaky dampness that just sort of leaves you feeling perpetually "not-dry."

The last couple of tennis matches I've been to have been awesome—yesterday Venus Williams v. Monica Seles was a tightly contested battle, and today's tussle between Jennifer Capriati and Magdelena Maleeva went to three tough sets. The higher-seeded players won each time, but both matches were exciting and could have gone either way. And still there is hardly anyone here to see them. It's as if the World Series were being played in front of a crowd smaller than you might find for a college softball game, the Super Bowl were played in front of a crowd smaller than you'd find for a Texas high-school football game, or if the FA Cup Final were played in front of just a couple of hundred Huddersfield Town supporters.

The folks who are here don't seem to have much of a clue what's going on. I mean they follow the scoring, but they don't seem quite hip to tennis etiquette—not applauding double faults (some folks were even applauding single faults), moving around while play is in progress, or making noise while rallies are going on. They're not malicious, they just don't know the rules. There doesn't seem to be a natural fan base—in England you always find tons of lesbians, a smattering of guys with long lenses hoping to make eye contact with a young millionaire and have her follow him back to his bed-sit in Kilburn, and your basic middle-class Home Counties couples who like a bit of sport at tennis tournaments. Here it seems to be mostly random, casual observers.

In some ways, tennis just isn't compatible with the U.S. indoor sports culture. Folks who are used to going to the Staples Center to see the Lakers or the Clippers play basketball or the Kings play hockey have a certain expectation of how to behave. You cheer on the home team and try to sabotage the visitor. There are no rules about when you can applaud or when you can go out to get a beer. For the tennis, if you want to go get a snack (and the arena really wants you to do that, since they make major bucks out of concessions), you're going to miss at least two games, probably four, just running out on to get food or to go pee. You have two minutes to get to your seat, and if you don't find the right spot, an usher and maybe even the chair umpire is going to yell at you to please just take the nearest seat. In LA, where folks go to events to see and be seen, just sit in the nearest seat? It's anathema to the local culture, where your position in the pecking order is determined by the choice-ness of your seating assignment. And there's no schmoozing—in a culture where companies lay out thousands of dollars on tickets to sporting events so they can wine, dine, and glad-hand potential clients, you've got to shut up, sit down, and stay where you are.

I've seen hardly any doubles matches, because the press conferences for the singles players clash with the doubles, and it's hard to pass up the opportunity to be one of 30 people asking questions of the best tennis players in the world, many of whom also happen to be among the most famous people in the world. I'm really impressed with just about everyone. Even when they've just lost a tough match, players are patient and answer questions that they've no doubt answered hundreds perhaps thousands of times in their careers. It's tough to be original, though. At this particular event, the press conferences are transcribed and distributed just minutes after they're over, so all the stories use the same quotes. "Personal" topics are off-limits (and there are grim-faced WTA officials on hand to nix any verboten subject matter) and it's very hard to elicit information about a just-completed game that will truly interest folks who weren't at the match. I've been especially impressed with Maggie Maleeva, Venus Williams, and Kim Clijsters. They seem like cool, smart women who it would be fun to hang out with.
|

Friday, November 08, 2002

News From a Wet Place
Here’s irony: I, a Mancunian-turned-Seattlite, arrive in Los Angeles, and down comes the rain. The (appalling) TV news informed me that this is the first rain since Jan. 26. It’s really more like an intense mist, but it still had the local newsistas spending half the show on “Weather Watch.” (None of the reporters in the field seem to have the sense to wear a hat or hold an umbrella. I suspect they're cultivating the wet dog look to exaggerate the amount of precipitation.)

The afternoon's tennis was uninspiring and very brief. Still very few people in the stands—and even fewer paying customers from the look of some of the folks sitting near me. Not that I blame the organizers for papering the room. Hell, they could give away another 19,000 tickets and still have room for all the folks who actually paid for their seats. It's hard to know why. There's no doubt that the draw is incredible—these really are the top 16 women's tennis players in the world—but maybe because of the lack of spectators and atmosphere, no one can be bothered to drive over to the Staples Center to watch. Tickets are pretty expensive too—for this afternoon's session, for example, the cheapest seat in the house was $25; the most expensive $125. For that, spectators got one singles match (Justine Henin v. Kim Clijsters, which started well but ended up in a blowout 6-2, 6-1) and one doubles match (Prakusya and Lee v. Stubbs and Raymond, which was also a straight sets drubbing). A bit much.

Indoor tennis in the middle of winter (slight exaggeration since we're in Southern California, but it is raining) is a tough sell, except in places where folks are starved for sport or when there's some special reason to watch (a grudge match, a home-town favorite, etc.). Still, at least three of the 16 singles players here this week are native Southern Californians, and no one, apparently, could give a shit. Probably the best solution would be to change the definition of a calendar year and play the championships after the U.S. Open when Americans still have tennis on their minds, but then there's a good chance that none of the big names would play for the next three months. But perhaps that would be better for the game, long-term.
|
News From Down There
A long break from blogging, but in my defense I’ve been sick, slammed, and slathered in Slavic. (That last bit was technically inaccurate, but I couldn’t think of anything sibilant that conjured up the image of Russian classes keeping me away from You Say Tomato.)

I realized last week that I have a bit of a doctor-phobia. It’s hard to understand, since I spend half my life in dentists’ offices arranging and undergoing complex procedures (I swear a random stranger stopping by the 15th floor of Seattle’s Medical-Dental Building would have a 1-in-5 chance of finding me in one of its many dental nooks and crannies with my mouth wide open), but in my 11 years in Seattle, I’ve probably been in a doctor’s office four times—all 5-minute visits ascertaining if I had Condition X (I never did). But, after at least five people asked me if I was sure I didn’t have walking pneumonia, I figured I’d better go and have this longest cold in history checked out. It was nice to discover that getting a doctor’s appointment and seeing a doctor is really not half as bad as having, say, a dental implant. (Know what’s blog hit candy: periodontic procedures. I swear half my Google hits come from folks searching for phrases like “gum graft,” “dental implant,” or “sibilant dentist.” Really.) Anyhoo, I don’t have pneumonia—walking or stationary. I just have a bad mofo of a cold.

It’s funny, but you can’t tell that I’m posting this from a sketchy hotel in Los Angeles rather than my usual Seattle lair. I flew down here this morning to interview a tennis player who appeared in the October GQ with her skirt tugged up around her crotch. Unfortunately, she suffered an unexpected loss this afternoon and was in a less than joyous mood afterward, so I came out of the journey with squat—so far. Still, her conqueror has one of the greatest comeback stories of the year and is a sort of Zen master of the court, so I sent off a quick pitch to my editor at Tennis to see if can scrape some benefit out of the schlep to California.

The weirdest thing so far is that I thought I had booked a hotel across the street from the Staples Center. Instead, I booked one a 15-minute stroll away. It’s only five or six blocks, but they’re sketchy blocks, the kind you don’t really want to wander around in after dark, which seems to happen around 5 p.m. here. Perhaps it’s that I don’t have a sense of the neighborhood—I stepped off the plane, into a taxi, and into the lobby without so much as breathing a lung-full of the home-town smog. Tomorrow morning I’ll go for a wander around and, I hope, get a better sense of the place. Maybe then I’ll be more sanguine about roaming around. Hmm, maybe sanguine’s not the best word choice in this context.

For the first couple of hours that I was in my room, there was an ice-cream truck outside playing ice-cream truck “tunes,” except that it was really just seven or eight notes repeated over and over and over. It reminded me of that great album by an Irish woman whose name now escapes me—I want to say Maureen Coughlin, though that’s almost certainly wrong—that had a song about the ice-cream man. It was a very long time before I cottoned on that “ice-cream man” meant “heroin dealer.”

Want to see something sad? This is the crowd at the Staples Center for this afternoon’s matches in the tour championships—the elite end-of-year tournament for the sport's top 16 players. This isn’t at 12:30 when the doors first opened and folks were still picking up their tickets; this is around 2 p.m. toward the end of an exciting upset win featuring one of those new sex symbols of women’s tennis we keep reading about. What’s more, the folks in the foreground almost certainly aren’t actual ticket-holders, since the section where I was sitting when I took it was the all-purpose holding area for press, volunteers, friends, and whoevers. So concentrate on the background …
|

Sunday, November 03, 2002

The Fresh, Fresh Aroma of Dettol
BBC America, the most disappointing channel on the cable box (by no means the worst, but a pale shadow of what it could be) is currently running a series of ads for the "British Grocer" section of its Web site. An uncharacteristically smart move for them; this is exactly the time of year when even the least patriotic expat starts to wonder where this year's Christmas pud, rum sauce, and holiday chocolates are going to come from. (Last year we solved this dilemma by spending the holidays in Victoria, B.C.)

So far, so good, but alongside the Maltesers and the Hobnobs and the PG Tips, the very last product that the ad lingered over was Dettol. Dettol? If we didn't have Ye Olde Britishe Pantry (that's the shop's real name) in driving distance, I'd be tempted to send off for some chocolate digestives ($4.25), some mushy peas ($1.65), and perhaps even a nice spotted dick ($4.70), but I am fucked if I would even think of paying $4.85 (plus shipping) for 250 ml. of Dettol. Importing antiseptic into the US of A? Talk about sending coals to Newcastle.
|

Saturday, November 02, 2002

Monorail! Monorail!
My lungs seem to be pining for the fjords. That's the only explanation I can offer for their apparent desire to free themselves from confinement inside my body. I've spent the last week in one big coughing fit, but I took a moment between wracking hacks and gasping for breath to pop downstairs to answer the doorbell. Who should I find but a chap in a Monorail T-shirt earnestly soliciting my vote in Tuesday's election.

As a non-driver I'll definitely be saying "Monorail Yes!" on Tuesday. Since I use public transportation more than most able-bodied people I know, I'd probably vote for it whatever the circs, but the circs are that Seattle's traffic is seriously messed up. The initial downtown phase of the monorail project wouldn't do much for me, but if they did manage to get a 58-mile citywide system set up, a lot of Seattlites would be way more serene. As this Slate story points out, the monorail's "fun factor" is part of what makes it such an attractive alternative to the automobile:
The goal of mass transit is to convince people to abandon their cars, which feature such enticing accessories as CD players and elbow room. Light rails are too buslike to impress most commuters, too squished and close to the ground. Monorails, by contrast, strike a chord with travelers. There's something about the sleek designs, the pillowy rides, and the panoramic views that just enchants.

Besides, what other form of transportation gets you singing a Simpsons song every time you think of it?
|