All Consuming

Items qatesiurade consumed in…

September, 2008



  1. Tuesday 2
    51fuphqfyil

    Finished consuming…
    Across the Universe (Two-Disc Special Edition) — 294 people

    Worth consuming!


  2. Wednesday 10
    0684816148

    51ak7iieall

    Finished consuming…
    Mad Men - Season One — 14 people

    Worth consuming! Tagged: advertising 1960s stylish smoking cigarettes john slattery john hamm


  3. Thursday 11

  4. Friday 12
    1585678252

    Started consuming…
    Islandia — 3 people


    Started consuming…
    The Prefect — 2 people


    ?

    Started consuming…
    Anathem — 10 people


    Finished consuming…
    Kismet — 5 people

    Worth consuming!


  5. Wednesday 17

    Finished consuming…
    Priceless — 9 people

    Worth consuming!


  6. Thursday 18

    B000e41ms6

    Finished consuming…
    Doctor Who - The Complete First Series — 81 people

    Worth consuming!


  7. Sunday 21

  8. Tuesday 23
    B000epfty8

    Finished consuming…
    Where the Green Ants Dream — 12 people

    Worth consuming!


  9. Wednesday 24
    0312872917

    Finished consuming…
    Litany of the Long Sun — 12 people

    Worth consuming! Tagged: gene wolfe ow my third eye! solar cycle

    31onjkkim8l

    Finished consuming…
    Mongol - Chingishan — 14 people

    Worth consuming! Tagged: biopic genghis khan mongolia tadanobu asano throat-singing epic battles borte kickass heroines


  10. Tuesday 30

Entries about these items

    11bke3hvhcl

    Pretty silly; could be a lot better — 6 weeks ago

    When I first heard there was a spinoff of the modern Doctor Who that would deal totally with the earthside efforts of Torchwood I was kind of thrilled. It had a whiff of romance, an organization founded by Queen Victoria for the purpose of keeping the Doctor and his ilk out of Britain’s hair. They had grown, it appeared, into a huge clandestine THING that had developed weapons capable of blowing alien invasion forces completely out of the sky… and I dug the idea of an agency that was keeping itself secret but not trying, really, to keep the existence of aliens or time travel or any of that lot secret because in the Whoniverse of these new series, that cat is pretty well out of the bag and it’s a big, big kitty. OK, I said, bring it on!

    Then I found out it’s basically a vehicle, this show, for the ridiculous John Barrowman and the ridiculous Captain Jack. And a lot of my enthusiasm went away.

    I understand the BBC operates basically on shoestring budgets and extremely limited resources—that’s part of what made the original Doctor Who, wobbly sets and all, so glorious, that they still thought big and did their best to span galaxies and tell big, big stories on a few sound stages and thinly disguised English locations. But in this show they’ve let that narrow their field down way too much. No shadowy history of Torchwood through time (we still have its founding by Queen Victoria on Doctor Who and then its sudden modern appearance as a colossus with nothing in between as its sole backstory) or stories about how maybe they’ve helped or hindered the Doctor in his past efforts on eath’s behalf… just this secret base in Cardiff that is just a high tech clubhouse for some pretty dull characters.

    I don’t find much in the storylines to shout about either. Sex monster, check. Wistful time travel storylines, check. Devil-slaying climax at season’s end, check. Yawn, check.

    Really, the only thing it’s shown me to spark any interest in renting the second season from Netflix is the villain-figure Bilis, whom they defeated but made a point of not killing and he’s kind of cool in a Lovecraft sort of way… so I’ll at least give an evening or two to the second season via Netflix.

    But really, if you have anything better to do (I should have cleaned my kitchen and gotten my first batch of vegetable stock made for the fall soup season) you should do it.

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    0312872917

    Why it's taking me forever to finish consuming "Litany of the Long Sun: Nightside the Long Sun and Lake of the Long Sun (Book of the Long Sun, Books 1 and 2)" — 12 weeks ago

    WORTH CONSUMING!

    My copy has gone missing! I’m tearing my apartment to bits trying to find it and actually considering just buying another one because I really really want to get back to it!!!

    1 comment

    0312872917

    Suns, suns and more suns... — 5 weeks ago

    WORTH CONSUMING!

    So.

    I am obviously in mid-plunge into Gene Wolfe’s astonishing “Solar Cycle” a dodecology (thank goodness there are 12 books; I’m having trouble coming up with the proper term for a series of 11) of mind-boggling proportions not just in terms of length but also in terms of wealth of ideas, breadth of narrative scope, variety of characters and everything else one reads good fiction for. It’s staggering. If you and I were having a conversation about it in a diner, that scene would be just like the scene in the Linklater film of “A Scanner Darkly” in which Robert Downey Jr. as Barris tries but fails to verbalize his feelings about Substance D and finally just starts making gestures and noises. “It’s awe-inspiring stuff.”

    It’s also really, really hard to talk about without engaging in spoilage. But I will try.

    Where New Sun had a vaguely menacing but still magnetic protagonist (I’m talking about Severian—there’s lots of theories out there, though, that maintain he’s not the real protagonist but I’m not going to engage in that level of theorizing here) here we have a much more conventionally engaging one in the person of Silk, a humbler and more conventionally good person who spends most of the Long Sun’s four books very earnestly questioning his motives and his mission, engaging in a constant self-audit that some may find tiresome but is there for very good reasons as he is flung into a cesspool of crime and politics that perfectly mirrors the state of things on Urth at the time the self-contained world that is the Whorl broke off from its parent culture. See, I’m already being annoyingly circumspect trying to avoid spoilers…

    ...Which brings me to what is most troublesome and yet also amazing about this whole project of Wolfe’s: new heights of reader annoyance are in store. While the vocabulary is nowhere near as complex and allusive as New Sun’s, the narrative is still quite Byzantine, with all of Wolfe’s usual tricks of misdirection, narrative lacunae and this time an unreliable narrator whose identity is not even revealed unless and until the reader decides to move on the the three-volume Book of the Short Sun! And even then… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

    Is this whole cycle worth reading? Having finished the four volumes of Long Sun and just getting started on Short Sun I’m obviously going to say yes, else I wouldn’t still be slogging through it (really, no matter what kind of completist compulsion you suffer, this will defeat it if you’re not already enjoying it). The attentive reader is completely immersed in not just one but a whole variety of invented worlds and cultures, engaged by the stories and stakes of a vast number of believable and fascinating characters. There is a lot that will play mercelessly on the emotions even as one desperately pages back wondering if you managed somehow to skip an important action scene (Wolfe is famous for leaving stuff like that out—he’s more interested in consequences than in descriptions of fights or flights). A lot of big ideas. A lot of longing.

    I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself when I get to the end of Short Sun. But it will probably be time for NaNoWriMo by then. And I’ll be even more intimidated than usual after experiencing this example of what novels can still do.

    (Obviously this review should stand as one of all four books: Nightside of the Long Sun, Lake of the Long Sun, Calde of the Long Sun and Exodus from the Long Sun)

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    31onjkkim8l

    Goddamn Mongolians!!! — 7 weeks ago

    WORTH CONSUMING!

    Had to get that little South Parkism out of my system. It emerged unbidden from my lips right after the scene when the Chinese monk tells the mandarin not to buy that particular slave because of what the monk could see in their future…

    But really, that’s the only laugh in a pretty grim and glorious picture. The soundtrack alone—full of fantastic throat-singing and that steppes-version of a proto-guitar whose name I forget but is something like the igyl (maybe I’ll look it up later and edit this but it’s past my bedtime)—kept me very excited and involved in the action and the story.

    My film companion complained of some lacunae that he ascribed to continuity problems but they seemed to me to pretty much correspond to holes in the actual received history/legend and didn’t bother me at all. In fact, it added greatly to that larger than life feel NOT to have seen how Temujin escaped from the slave collar as a boy or escaped the ice hole; gave it a nice, mysterious, quasi-mystical quality that I quite liked, and prefer to some halfwit’s version of how it might have happened.

    And Borte needs a place in any canon of ass-kicking heroines. The actress who played her did it exactly right: she didn’t ever shriek or in any way act “fierce”, just placidly presented her husband with the necessary faits accompli: the rapist with the slit throat, the key to the jail, whatever was needed, with no carping about how she did it or what she endured. Wow.

    The battle scenes, too, were pretty fantastic, on a Bondarchukian scale, realistic without being overly gory (you may complain that they liked their blood spatter effect a whole lot, but they did resist almost always the temptation to linger on the actual slashes and impalings that made the blood spatter the way certain other crews [300, anyone?] did).

    All in all, I think I’ll have to get this on DVD to go alongside the Branagh Henry V and the Bondarchuk War and Peace and yes, 300 as great war films with that something extra.

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    01qy7t+siml

    Bit of a surprise, but a good one — 8 weeks ago

    WORTH CONSUMING!

    I picked this up for a few different reasons—I’m a fan of a magazine Dalrympe writes for on occasion, City Journal for one, and I also have a kind of silly fondness for a good, curmudgeonly, H.L. Mencken-flavored rant now and then. Also the cover is quite arresting, a statement right there: below the title and subtitle “The Mandarins and the Masses” is an extreme version of your standard silly punk-barbarian, died mohawk and braids, facial piercings, cat-eye contact lenses. The contrast of that cover photo and the title perfectly encapsulates the contents.

    The contents, though, are a bit of a surprise. While there’s plenty of the strangely amusing cultural decline rants I’ve come to love (I’m thinking specifically of books like Paul Fusell’s _BAD: Or the Dumbing of America” here), there’s a truly despairing note I don’t often encounter that is way more touching than usual. Dalrymple, you see, has traveled the world as a physician, ministering to the victims of genocide and neglect, has seen first-hand what the breakdown of the nuclear family really means (he comes down particularly hard on the welfare-dependent single moms who choose their jackass boyfriends over their own children’s welfare as a matter of course—as who wouldn’t? It really is shocking, way more shocking than the appearance of the dude on the cover photo).

    Don’t go looking for solutions here, of course: the curmudgeon rant genre rarely has any. BUT, why demand that of them? Demanding that the person who points out the problem also come up with a solution for it is a very quick and easy way to shut down dissent and stifle discourse, and allowing that to happen is part of how we got where we are.

    So ultimately, this book made me sad. But I’d still recommend it to anyone.

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    A question I have about "The Devil in the White City" — 9 weeks ago

    WORTH CONSUMING!

    Has anyone done a tally of how many times Mr. Larson draws attention to people’s blue eyes? Sometimes it seems there’s a mention every page. It’s a pretty annoying tick in what is otherwise an excellent read.

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    B000e41ms6

    A worthy successor! — 8 weeks ago

    WORTH CONSUMING!

    Like most folks my age, my first Doctor was good old Tom Baker, during the years when John Nathan-Turner was busy trying to turn the show into Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. I got used to the silliness and only absorbed the real unearthly earnestness of it all much later with Peter Davison et al, plus all the earlier Doctors as PBS randomly aired ‘em—of the older Doctors I most liked Jon Pertwee (probably better-known now as Sean “Boromir” Pertwee’s dad), who brought some high seriousness to it all.

    So I was delighted at the thought of Eccleston as the ninth Doctor, and he did not disappoint. He kept Baker’s grinning madness and still brought a good deal of gravity to the role; when he blurts out his joy that “everyone lives!” in “The Doctor Dances” you feel it all with him, all his 900+ years of conflict and wonder and pain and his steely determination to keep his humor.

    Billie Piper makes a good 21st century sidekick for him, neither a prodigy of learning nor a damsel in distress nor a fighting man—rather a reasonable blend of them all. I do wish she did a little less tongue-poking in lieu of acting, but I’m sure that’s some kind of Britpopstar trademark for her and can’t be helped.

    Also refreshing is the way the writers have worked this side-kick’s actual life and story into the arc of the series; we not only meet her mother and erstwhile boyfriend but continue to meet them on a series of visits. Mom doesn’t like the Doctor for taking her baby away and lets him know it; boyfriend Mickey is nicely torn between missing her and wanting to join her and fear of the unknown. It’s a good grounding for all the wild stories that a time-travel series veers off into.

    All in all, pretty satisfying. I’m just sad we only had the ninth Doctor for one season!

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    I have a toothache — 8 weeks ago

    WORTH CONSUMING!

    I had never heard of this film before it appeared at the top of the schedule for our very-far-from-France city’s cinema club (pretty much the only way folk in the Cowboy State get to see foreign or “art” films on the big screen), as I am far from this kind of thing’s target audience. That being said, well, I didn’t hate it. There is nothing original here; the film is pretty much a feature-length illustration of a point made in Dangerous Beauty when a courtesan turns down a night with the court poet because they “can’t afford one another.”

    In this case, of course, “afford” is a bit of a stretch; we have a woman who is your basic gold-digger, who tries to “trade up” from her current meal ticket as the film opens. She gambles and loses big; the handsome, rich young man she dallies with twice on successive birthdays turns out to be a dud from her point of view, and her rich old man turns her out on her ear.

    But wait: handsome young man tries to scoop her up anyway, even after she treats him horribly and cleans him out to teach him a lesson. What luck! She has an ally, whom she proceeds to turn into another courtesan. Now they’re like the teamed-up con men in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and each has a mark before long. What fun!

    Except, really, not. For all the sexiness (conveyed largely via Audrey Tatou’s parading around in ever-skimpier dresses) and romance, this is basically a tale of two parasites. Yes, they redeem themselves at the end and ride off on the motor scooter he has “earned” (am I the only one who really felt sorry for the rich older woman who gets left in the lurch here? Maybe it’s just because I’m closer to her age than the hero and heroine’s, but she’s kind of a tragic figure for all she’s a rich widow; men her age are all still chasing cute young things like Tatou, leaving her no choice but to seek out a young one, too, and essentially rent him. At their last parting, she says she’s had worse and that, for me, is the most genuinely felt moment in the whole movie).

    I say it’s worth consuming only because it’s a reminder of how wonderful love can not be when it’s used as a tool.

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    ?

    Why it's taking me forever to finish consuming "Anathem" — 2 weeks ago

    I am deliberately taking my time on this and savoring every minute. A difficult task when it’s bursting with Stephenson’s mind-boggling way with mind-boggling concepts, very amusing characters (even though every book nowadays features basically new versions of Randy and Avi) and delicious laugh-out-loud dialogue like this:

    “Our enemy is a spaceship with atomic bombs. We have a protractor.”

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    ?

    It kind of does! — 9 weeks ago

    WORTH CONSUMING!

    I thought this title a bit of hyperbole but I love soccer almost as much as Mr. Foer, so I bit. And found that yes, in a very weird and, yes, unlikely way, soccer does explain a lot about the world.

    The very first chapter, concerning Slobodan Milosovic (sp? lazy again) and the hooligan supporters of Red Star Belgrade, alone made this book worth my money. It’s a fantastic illustration right there of how sport and fandom tie right into old tribal loyalties and feuds and both accelerate and in some ways retard the onslaught of globalization. In the process, the reader learns a lot about a lot of old conflicts seen through an interesting and sometimes amusing lens.

    As I read this, I was strongly reminded of the Robert D. Kaplan of Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future (one of my very favorite books) and apparently I wasn’t the only one—they got Kaplan himself to write a blurb for the jacket.

    Anyone who likes soccer will of COURSE like this book—but so might some who don’t and wonder what all the fuss is about, as well as some who are just trying to look for a way to get a handle on what’s going on in the world these days. The book was published in, I think, 2004, but there’s still plenty to think upon for today’s reader.

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    51ak7iieall

    A story about "Mad Men - Season One" — 13 weeks ago

    WORTH CONSUMING!

    I’m two discs into the first season and I’m hooked. This show is so good I almost wish I still had cable. The cast is great, the writing is great, the storylines are great and the overall style of the show is unbeatable. It was of course the style that hooked me—I’m a big fan of analog technology and 60s design and architecture—and then John Hamm and John Slattery reeled me the rest of the way in. By the time I got into all of the character drama—and there is a lot—I was on the beach and gasping for more.

    Soon I’ll hit the wall (well, as soon as Netflix sends me the rest of the season) and then I’ll be sad… I’m glad a second season is already on the air… hurry up and get it on DVD already!

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    51fuphqfyil

    Fun, but nothing more — 8 weeks ago

    WORTH CONSUMING!

    Confession time: I’ve never been a big Beatles fan. It’s probably just a matter of extreme over-exposure, but if I never hear most of their stuff again I won’t miss it.

    I’m also heartily sick of baby boomer cultural hegemony and self-congratulation. Yay. You protested the Vietnam War. Good for you. But shut up about it. That’s like being proud of saying you oppose putting broken glass in baby food. As in DUH and the news would be how criminal it would be not to have done.

    That said, I did kind of get a kick out of this film. I like what happens when somebody puts Julie Taymor in charge of a film—Titus was a big bad trip worthy of the big bad trip that is the original play—and lets her go nuts. And she did go nuts in very imaginative ways.

    This movie is best viewed as a piece of expressionism. So when a bunch of potential draftees at their medical screenings are broken up into pieces and parts and then put back together only to march through the swamp shouldering the Statue of Liberty and singing “She’s So Heavy” you know exactly where they’re coming from.

    And the fabulous Eddie Izzard’s turn as Mr. Kite is worth sitting through the rest of the movie for right there. Brilliant and highly quotable. My best friend and I are still wandering around saying “it’s great; they’ve got stuff” and “that’s me! In the thing.”

    And I also liked Bono’s cameo as the film’s fictionalized Ken Kesey. Surprisingly good casting and he pulled it off.

    Will I rush to add this movie to my DVD collection? No. Will I pan it? No.

    Will I object to its being put on during a card party or other random gathering of friends? No.

    It’s got stuff.

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