review | proper manky

October 13, 2012 by proper manky

The Bad Plus

Saw The Bad Plus with TLMW at the MIM. I’ve loved their work ever since they came out with These Are the Vistas and their raucous interpretation of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit (rivaled really only by the Robert Glasper Experiment version).* This was the very first time they performed in AZ.

As expected, they played like three seemingly crazed musicologists each doing their own thing yet doing so together splendidly. Sometimes they drifted into sonic chaos, or they created symphonic sounds reminiscent of film music, and at other times they played around with “shrewdly lurching syncopations.”

On this night, they leisurely burned through a 1.5 hour-long set, basically ignoring their trademark, off-the-wall pop covers of early albums, and sticking almost exclusively to the ecclectic material from their brand-new studio album, Made Possible. I realize The Bad Plus claim that they are “deeply earnest” about everything they do, but there’s something obviously subversive and anarchic about these guys. Along with their sly wit, they also clearly have a profound sense of performance art and the absurd.

While the album is full of electronically produced synthetic textures with layers of synthesizer and electronic drum sounds, the concert was mostly a straight up acoustic affair with a few entertaining effects thrown in. At one point in Sing For a Silver Dollar there was a long abstract-improv section of piano-string pluckings and percussion rattlings and in The Empire Strikes Backwards the drummer Dave King worked on two rubbery E.T. toys to produce hauntingly high-pitched squeals. Reid Anderson, the bassist, clarified with tongue only half in cheek that the E.T. intermezzo in the concert version didn’t make it on the album due to copyright reasons. Throughout the concert he made similarly off-beat comments on their playlist.

Seven Minute Mind was my favorite, just a jaw-dropping orgy with whiplash tempo changes exerting “an accretive force, moving from barest breeze to prairie twister,” as the NYT put it in a review of the album. The tempo control in that song was absolutely astounding. “Thriftstore Jewelry” was a full-on blast of Latin rhythms and jubilant playfulness. As an encore, The Bad Plus played a lovely extended version of the Aphex Twin’s Flim.

The acoustics at the MIM that night were spectacular, every note crisp and clear, and the trio’s sound well-balanced even for us sitting stage left.

While all three muscians were quite brilliant in their own right, what really stood out for me was Dave King’s work on drums, perhaps somewhat helped by the fact that we pretty much sat right in front of him. This guy is simply amazing, an incredible, ingenious, and idiosyncratic wizard on the skins.

As was announced at the end of the concert, The Bad Plus are planning to be back in town next year with their rendition of Igor Stravinsky’s entire ballet The Rite of Spring. Apparently they have been working on a commission from Duke University and Lincoln Center and been rehearsing their own version of this complex composition for the past eight months.

The playlist was a follows (from Made Possible unless otherwise noted):

Pound for Pound
Wolf Out
The Empire Strikes Backwards (from Suspicious Activity?)
Re-Elect That
For My Eyes Only
You Are
Sing for a Silver Dollar
Thriftstore Jewelry (from Prog)
Seven Minute Mind
In Stitches
Flim (from These Are the Vistas)

* Another early cover by The Bad Plus (and there are several) is their spectacular version of ABBA’s Knowing Me, Knowing You with exquisite musicianship by the trio throughout, especially the fierce, Rachmaninoffish piano motor boating at the 5 minute mark.

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September 16, 2012 by proper manky

Exit Music

Done reading.

Second to last title (so far) in Ian Rankin’s Detective Inspector John Rebus series set in Edinburgh. I think there are about 17 in that series before that. I may have read one or the other a long time ago, but I just can’t remember. Rebus seemed vaguely familiar. If this book is any indication the series is an excellent one. Rebus is an interesting, if not altogether likable character and the backdrop of Edinburgh with some socio-political commentary (e.g. “less concern with the underworld, more with the overworld”) is pretty fascinating, too. The police procedural in Last Exit takes place roughly at the time of the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London. That story comes up a few times and leads one to believe that a similar conspiracy is afoot here in the murder of a Russian poet.

I bought the first 8 in the series to slowly catch up from the beginning.

Some nice expressions:

Perish the thought.
Slay us with an insight.
Bully for you.
Fancy a fry-up?
You taking the piss?

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September 2, 2012 by proper manky

Peter Temple

Done reading.

Two books by the Australian crime fiction writer, Peter Temple: The Broken Shore and Truth. Here’s a good review of The Broken Shore and here is one of Truth.

One point to emphasize is Temple’s gift at dialogue. I haven’t read such high-quality and truly authentic exchanges since Lush Life by Richard Price, he of The Wire fame (5th season). And that’s not only because of the ubiquitous use of Australian slang which is entertaining by itself, but also because of some of the dialogue which is subtle and smart, raw and visceral, and steadily dripping with sarcasm. The elliptical story-telling is superb as well and the characters are sublime. Especially Truth has some good story lines of discrimination against aboriginals, father-son conflict, urban planning, etc., all expertly woven into the plots.

Needless to say, the dictionaries of Australian slang in the back of both books come in handy.

A few quotes:

“He smoked, tapped ash into his plastic cup. He looked away, watched the birds across the street. Sleep, shuffle, shit, fight.”
“All chip and no shoulder.”
“There is no firm ground in life. Just crusts of different thickness over ooze.”
“Don’t get waylaid.”
“There are no permanent alliances, only permanent interests.”

Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)

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September 2, 2012 by proper manky

Procrastination

H/T to MS for recommending this entertaining 30-minute BBC 4 program with Rowan Pelling: “Helping Hamlet – Can Science Cure Procrastination” (Note: this may no longer be available by the time of reading).

Procrastination, the show argues, appears to be one of humanity’s greatest and oldest plagues. In Works and Days, Hesiod exhorts us:

Do not put off until tomorrow and the day after.
A man does not fill his barn by shirking his labors
or putting them off; it is keeping at it that gets the work done.
The putter-off of work is the man who wrestles with disaster.
(ll. 410-413; 1959, 67)

This reminds me of something contrarian I once heard from a Moroccan friend, AKA, who told me a phrase in French, which now escapes me in its original, but which roughly captures the following absurdist but oddly appealing procrastinating position: “If you can’t do something tomorrow, there’s no point in starting it today.”

Somewhat related, my friend IA once told me, only half in jest, “You know, I think in Arabic we have a similar word like the expression mañana in Spanish. It’s just that our word in Arabic doesn’t carry the same sense of urgency.”

Below are a few interesting quotes and references from the BBC show:

Root of procrastination: Akrasia (/əˈkreɪzɪə/; ancient Greek ἀκρασία, “lacking command (over oneself), not properly balanced”), occasionally transliterated as acrasia, is the state of acting against one’s better judgement.
“As a procrastinator, what you are actually doing is attacking a future version of you.” (after Aristotle)
“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.” (Douglas Adams)
“Writers and procrastination are an odd mix. You never here somebody say, “I have plumber’s block. I got to go for a walk in the woods before I can do you a u-bend.”
Books mentioned:
- Still Procrastinating: The No Regrets Guide to Getting It Done, Joseph R. Ferrari
- Wait: The Art and Science of Delay, Frank Partnoy

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August 31, 2012 by proper manky

Klown and The Imposter

Saw two movies:

Klown

The NYT reviewed it perfectly. Don’t have much to add, except to say that I laughed myself silly. It’s a stupidly funny film loosely patterned after the narrative structure of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (H/T TLMW), but with a triple dose of inappropriateness. This is not your father’s Dogme 95 Danish movie fare, but a hilarious “Tour de Pussy” that is, in parts, quite sublimely depraved.

The Imposter

This film was shown at Sundance earlier this year but I didn’t get to watch it there. The film is a quasi-documentary (it includes some re-creations) from which one can only walk away thinking truth is stranger than fiction. It tells the story of a 23-year-old French Algerian man in Spain who with dark hair and dark eyes came to pass himself off as a blond-haired, blue-eyed, and younger boy from Texas who’d been missing for nearly four years — fooling international officials and, most incredibly, the boy’s family. Yes, it is that bizarre and incredible. It’s all about deception, self-delusion and the desire to believe.

One of the priceless characters in this movie is a private investigator called Charlie Parker. This guy is the quintessential gumshoe who not only looks the part (see below) but who also has got to be one of the most brilliant figures in the history of documentaries. I don’t want to say he steals the show, because this is about much more than him, but he is the perfect deus ex machina for the last third of the film.

Gripping and thoroughly mesmerizing stuff. Here’s an interesting interview with Charlie Parker (spoiler alert).

Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)

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Corazón y Hueso

Not done listening. Too good.

Daniel Melingo is like listening to Tom Waits, Paolo Conte or Nick Cave singing tango. Like a modern Roberto Goyeneche.

On Corazón y Hueso he runs the gamut from a surreal song about an orchestra of animals in which he is joined by a children’s choir, to a sarcastic waltz (La novia), to a milonga triste (Ritos en la sombra), to a gorgeous rendition of Federico García Lorca’s poem (El paso de la siguiriya), to borderline free jazz arrangements (Ritos en la sombra, Lucio el anarquista).

With his gruff voice, Melingo doesn’t offer a sanitized version of tango, but gives it raw and earthy, straight from the streets and full of blues (i.e. canyengue), and mixes tango with other styles and instruments like the clarinet, bass, harmonica, bagpipes, guitarras sucias etc. The CD contains all the lyrics in Spanish and brief summaries, but not the entire songs, in French and English. Melingo’s lunfardo dialect is strong and occasionally hard for me to understand and there’s enough slang in the lyrics to throw me off here and there but, thanks to the included extensive glosario lunfardo, the gist is pretty clear.

The themes on this album include a(n):

lament to a woman who left
prisoner suffering homosexual abuse
tattoo that serves as a reminder of a prison term
sad ending on the lawless streets of Buenos Aires
poet tormented by a song named Negrito
ode to Buenos Aires slang
poet turning his own verses into people and talking to them
clean, hard-working anarchist

Source: Federico Garcia Lorca, Poem of the Deep Song (Spanish Edition)

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The Last Detective

Done reading.

By Peter Lovesey. Published 20 years ago. Start of the Peter Diamond series (not the economist). Some good literary elements, varying points of view, well-written dialogue, interesting characters (including the singularly murderable victim), and nice sense of place in rooting the story in Bath. A few interesting allusions to Jane Austin, a one-time resident of the city. There’s a recurring luddite theme eschewing new forensic technologies in favor of old-fashioned gum shoe work – hence the title – which feels a bit out-dated by now.

The narrative structure and plot development befitting a first-time author was a bit surprising given that Lovesey had been an already experienced mystery writer by the time of writing this book. There’s a strange break in the narrative flow about two thirds through when the plot speeds up significantly after a major dispute. While there was some tension brewing prior to that, the event still struck me as somewhat artificial and provided unnecessary ‘botheration’ (a word used in the book). The resolution of the case also stretched plausibility.

All in all, a quite reasonable procedural, never really dull, but also not exactly rousing. In sections, it was a bit long-winded and I found myself a few times, to use an expression from the book, “stuck there like a lupin waiting for a bee.”

I did like some of the Britishcisms that provided intermittent entertainment.

Weir in the River Avon near Bath’s picturesque Pulteney Bridge.
Its perilous current plays a role in the book.

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Octopus

Done reading. (But really shouldn’t have!)

Matt Taibbi recently recommended this book written by Guy Lawson, a fellow Rolling Stone contributor.

Octopus is an incredible dark comedy with one of the craziest true-life ironic twists you can possibly imagine.

That sounded intriguing enough. Taibbi likes the way Lawson describes the deeply corrupt netherworld of endless, relentless insider trading. This environment apparently warped the mind of the hedge fund manager and Ponzi schemer whose downfall the book covers – to the point where he could be “perhaps the biggest dupe in the history of con artistry.”

Kirkus called the book:

An eye-opening window onto Wall Street’s destructive culture of unchecked hubris and a harrowing thrill ride into the unraveling mind of a desperate operator.

Ok. Well, it turns out, all of the above is pretty accurate. The book is indeed a portrait of a “society populated with the peculiar mix of the devious, the dangerous, and the deluded.” The stories of soul-sucking deceit in this book do make Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, by comparison, seem pretty understated and outright believable.

Octopus is about Sam Israel, a member of a wealthy Louisiana family, who bilked sophisticated investors out of a reported $450-million. Israel’s con game went on for years but he eventually grew increasingly desperate to recoup years of losses and by 2005 his jig was up. How the bullshitter was bullshitted is a long and unfortunately tedious story.

Lawson turns Israel into such easy prey that it’s hard to fathom anyone ever took this nut job seriously. The author goes to great pains to explain how a con man like Israel could be beaten at his own game and even laboriously outlines the whole choreography of the con: telling the tale, putting the mark on the send, taking off the touch, the blow-off, putting in the fix. Yet, the cons and conspiracy theories Israel fell for are too transparently idiotic and have such crazy-ass byzantine complexity (at least as told in this book) to take much of the book’s cautionary tale about Wall Street as a gigantic criminal operation seriously. In that sense, the book sadly undermines its own cause.

However, with scenes like the one in the bizarre mansion Israel rented from Donald Trump, or in the hedge fund’s HQ in a Connecticut boathouse, or on the bridge from which Israel attempted a fake suicide, Taibbi will probably be proven right: someone soon is going to make Octopus into a movie. My money is on Paul Giamatti as Sam Israel.

As a book, though, this is not much more than an inflated, medicore magazine article.

Quotes:

“He mastered the most American of all performing arts: self-invention.”
“You’re not going to learn how to shave by practicing on my beard.”
“Lying naked in his bed in the Trump house watching SpongeBob SquarePants, Sam Israel confided to one of Bayou’s employees that he was going through a liquidity crisis” (#understatementofthedecade)

Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)

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West Coast Blues

Done reading.

The French cartoonist Jacques Tardi’s excellent graphic novel adaptation of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s crime thriller beautifully captures the noir aesthetic of the book. Given the title, it also comes with several excellent cool jazz references: Bob Brookmeyer (Truckin’!), Tal Farlow, John Lewis, Gerry Mulligan, Chico Hamilton, Shelly Manne etc. Even though west coast jazz is often associated with sun and surf, the relaxed tempos and lighter tone of some of the blues referenced here fits the mood of noir fiction perfectly. Sort of like Miles Davis’ soundtrack for Elevator to the Gallows.

Below is the opening page which poignantly illustrates some of the similarities between comics and film. The sequence of frames on this page is straight out of film school: long shot to establish the scene, medium shot, close-up – and voilà, we’re drawn into the story.

The second page continues to illustrate the cinematographic quality and cool, noir mood. Plus some fine pince sans rire humor.

Below is a frame from a sequence where the main character is assaulted by two thugs while swimming in the ocean. This is how he ends up defending himself. The whole sequence is brilliantly drawn. I couldn’t describe it much better than was done here.

A graphic brain splattering scene:

There’s some quirky, almost existentialist humor in the book. Here’s my favorite panel, almost an example of flash fiction:

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No One Sends Mail to the Mailman

I quite liked the Mexican movie Cartas a Elena.

It’s a melodramatic picture with gentle and moving parts. Story about a mailman in Chihuahua. Or, perhaps more generally, about the act of deliverance. With a dose of magical realism. The old people in the sierra tarahumara, to whom the mailman delivers the mail on foot, are mostly illiterate so they need their mail read to them and require help getting their own letters written down. Unfortunately, they keep getting nothing but bad and painful news from loved ones living in the US.

The mailman has a long-lost son who never writes until finally one day he seemingly receives a letter from his son, believes he has been forgiven, and dies suddenly but happily. As it turns out, the letter has been written by a young boy, who the mailman had adopted earlier. The boy is so saddened by the bad (or lack of) news for those around him, that he decides to use his imagination and make the letters appear more positive and optimistic. The old people end up being much happier and begin to prefer being fooled by the boy rather than having to cope with the steady stream of hardship in the actual letters.

There’s much more to it, in a fairy tale kind of way. There’s some lovely storytelling in this movie – and beautiful scenery. Some of the acting is a bit over the top and appeals perhaps more to soap operatic sensibilities but generally works very well here. A few scenes are over the top of that top and require moments of severe patience but they are fairly limited.

There are some beautiful panoramic shots in the movie of the barranca del cobre (Copper Canyon), a canyon system in the Sierra Madre larger and deeper than the Grand Canyon.

Many years ago I had a good friend CG, the badass drummer for the Sun City Girls, who sadly passed away 5 years ago. He was the one who first told me stories about the canyon and the Tarahumara runners. He had read “The Peyote Dance“by Antonin Artaud, one of the most amazing pieces of drug literature ever written. CG would retell all those stories to me in excited monologues that would also include mysterious facts about Haitian voodoo drumming. At some point, I found a book by the anthropologist John Kennedy on the “Tarahumara of the Sierra Madre” full of fascinating accounts of beer brewing, running matches, and dealings with Catholic missionaries. I knew I would have to visit one day.

A few years later, my friend JCK and I finally travelled via the Chihuahua al Pacifico train from Los Mochis in Sinaloa to Creel in Chihuahua at the top of the barranca del cobre. From there we (hitch)hiked down to the old, dusty mining town of Batopilas at the bottom of one of the canyons. We saw a decomposing body in the ruins of the old Jesuit mission in Satevo (a stop on the Camino Real), saw airstrips for opium poppy transhipments, endured bloody cockfights, and played pool games with pistola toting cartelitos in a local dive.

The landscape in the movie was instantly familiar to me. The scene below, I believe, was taken near the popular lookout in Divisadero. Good movie, nice memories.

Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)

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Brenner and God

Done reading.

By Wolf Haas. Austrian Writer. First in a series available in English.

That’s some droll book. Unconventional crime fiction, somewhat noirish, with a likable protagonist and a postmodern narrator who chimes in periodically with warnings to pay attention or to be careful, and with comments dripping with sarcasm. Some wicked, twisted humor included as well.

Notable are the often short and fragmented sentences that go straight to the point without wasting line space on convoluted syntactic structures (e.g. “Because: emergency,” “Adrenalin surge: understatement.”). This does speed things up and frequently gives the book an offbeat, slangy tone. Time and place are often messed with leaving this reader occasionally borderline confused. Plot lines tend to intersect at odd and obtuse angles.

Some may be put off by this, but as long as one willingly submits to the curiously intrusive narrator as well as the serpentine plot and just goes along for the ride, it’s actually very enjoyable reading. It just takes bit getting used to.

There are many other endearing oddities in the book:

The intermittent meditation on the “Zone of Transparency” is an interesting, and in this book topical, narrative device. This refers to “the glassy membrane of the ovum, into which the sperm implants itself.”
There are several very unique and graphic scenes that require low-tech special effects imagination.
The Jimi Hendrix ring tone “Castles Made of Sand” is a gem.
Several times the expression My dear swan is used to indicate bewilderment. It sounds strange in English and is probably lost in translation for most. Yet, German is full of funky expressions like this: Mein lieber Scholli, Mein lieber Herr Gesangsverein, etc. The origin of My dear swan is evidently in Wagner’s romantic opera Lohengrin. Had no idea.
A nice section:

There’s nothing that doesn’t exist in the world. I’d even say that the biggest mistake in our world is that there aren’t at least a few things that don’t exist. Because more often than not, non-things and non-people are far more likable than those who’ve pushed themselves elbows first into the world. Or have a look for yourself: non-ideas! Then non-opinions, non-feelings, non-loves, non-conversations, non-thoughts! I’ll say it up front to all of them, walk right in, my door is wide open for you!

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Canada

Done reading.

By Richard Ford. Best all-around book I have read in several decades. Rarely been that deeply affected by a book. Ford is such a superb writer. Everything is in perfect pitch, the dialogue, the character and landscape descriptions, the lonely, melancholic voice of adolescent wonder, longing and naivete. Every page is pure precision.

Ford writes for all the senses evoking smells and sounds and sights like few other writers, except perhaps Faulkner. A masterful craftsman who reminds you on every page that perfect writing is manual work. Every sentence is handmade.

In its most denuded form, this is a sweeping memoir about the formative year in the life of a sheltered fifteen year old boy in 1960 in Montana whose parents rob a bank and who is then sent to rural Canada to live with strangers where he becomes entangled in a murder.

The main themes of the book are about assimilation, accommodation, adjustment, acceptance, and adaptation to changing circumstances, about flexibility. It is about absence and crossing borders, frontiers be they psychic, moral, or national. It’s about unattached belonging. It’s about the “composition of unequal parts”, about making sense of things and thinking things through; or not thinking things through, as it were.

On his way to Canada, the boy is given this advice:

Don’t spent time thinking old gloomy, though. Your life’s going to be a lot of exciting ways before you’re dead. So just pay attention to the present. Don’t rule parts out, and be sure you’ve always got something you don’t mind losing.

Interesting as the plot is, the true pleasure is all in the details. There’s a beautiful diction and pace to the book throughout. It starts with fast, short vignettes and panoramic shots skipping time here and there until toward the middle it comes almost to a complete stand still at the time of the robbery, with events unfolding as if in slow motion capturing a sense of life suspended, only to slightly accelerate again when the setting moves to Canada and then into the present.

Also, starting with the first paragraph (“First, I’ll tell about the bank robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.”), Ford has an intriguing way of strewing breadcrumbs from the future into the present narrative. Yet, even though one knows what to expect, one always remains curious as to how things come about, how things are being made sense of.

Ford writes with an almost cinematic quality:

We were rattling along throughout the dark in his old International Harvester. I could only see the bright gravel roadbed in the headlights with the dusty shoulder shooting by, thick wheat planted to the verges. It was cold with the sun off. The night air was sweet as bread. We passed an empty school bus rocking along. Our headlights swept its rows of empty student seats. Far away in the fields, cutting was going on after dark. Dim moving truck lights, the swirl-up of dust. Stars completely filled the sky. […] Mosquitoes and gnats were filtering out of the wheat into the headlamp heat. Some came in the open truck with me. Then a sudden, quick flickering flash of wing fell in through the light, twisted upward, and was gone again. A hawk or an owl, drawn to the insects. It made my heart pound harder.

Ford is also a master of parenthetical and subordinate digressions, employed with great restraint. To wit:

And, of course, I knew some particulars because we were there in the house with them and observed them – as children do – as things changed from ordinary, peaceful and good, to bad, then worse, and then to as bad as could be (though no one got killed until later). […] We also knew the life with our parents was very different from other children’s lives – the children we went to school with, and parents who acted normal together. (This, of course, was wrong). We also agreed that our life was a “situation,” and waiting was the hard part. At some point it would all become something else, and it was easier if we simply were patient and made the most of things together.

These are not just a stylistic device for mere rhythm and effect. It’s very deliberately in the service of the book’s general conclusion:

What I know is, you have a better chance in life—of surviving it—if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly good is often not simple to find.

Finally, the cover of the book is brilliant on 3 levels. First, there are just the colors, the gold, yellows, the reds, etc. Second, the colors eventually emerge as a maple leaf, underscoring the book’s title. Finally, it’s not so much that one “sees” the maple leaf, but that one “hears” it as make-believe, which the book of course is full of.

Needless to say, highly recommended!

Interesting interview with Richard Ford here. Another one is on NPR, where one can hear that Ford hasn’t quite scoured Dixie out of his voice (just as Bev Parsons in the book). One more here, H/T MS. This hour-long interview by Michael Silverblatt, in typical erudite and breathless manner, nicely draws out the theme of opposites, of imbalaces, of similarities and dissimilarities. Ford also gives a reading of a lengthy section of the book.

Favorite words or expressions encountered in the book: oddment, mare’s tail, devilment, whirligig

Favorite phrases:

“The nervous American intensity for something else.”
“Nature doesn’t rhyme her children (Emerson)”
“Warm breeze spun the silver whirligigs in the weedy yard. They made soft clicking sounds, fluttering.”
“Life-changing events can seem not what they are.”

Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)

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A Serious Man

By the Coen Brothers. Movie is a few years old but finally got to watch it. What a great film!! Beautifully done with some deep, dark humor.

Best scene? Hard to pick, but it has to be the “Goy’s teeth” sequence about what it all means, with the second rabbi. The fact that Jimi Hendix’ Machine Gun is used as the soundtrack here is priceless. When Larry ends up not liking the rabbi’s story (“Why tell me the story?”) the rabbi goes: “First I should tell you, then I shouldn’t tell you?” Beautiful!

Other things to love:

Somebody to Love, Surrealistic Pillow
Fuckers on the bus
Columbia Record Club phone call (Santana Abraxas?)
Schrödiger’s Cat
“It’s not about wupsy dupsy”
“Accept the mystery”
The perspective. Of the parking Lot. (Rabbi #1)
“When the truth is found to be lies and all the hope within you dies … then what?” (Rabbi #3 before returning the radio)

Life is short. Life is uncertain. Find somebody to love.

A real gem!!

Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)

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To Rome With(out) Love

I used to go watch Woody Allen movies with people my age (whereby I mean “young”) and laugh my heart out. Now I go watch Woody Allen movies with old people my age and am bored to death. There’s nothing charitable one could say about “To Rome With Love.” There’s zero plot to speak of, the acting is deplorable, the gags cringe-worthy, and there is not much of Rome either except for a few glossy brochure shots of the usual aspects and a gratuitous 360° pan of the Piazza del Popolo. Fahgettable.

Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)

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Savages

I was prepared to like this movie based on the book reviews and reading the first few pages. But what a fucking waste of much-needed life time! The linked review above nails it in horrid detail – I could add some more scathing remarks but this should suffice as stern warning.

Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)

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