Girl Detective

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation.

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, a book about organizing without organizations, gave a speech recently (16-min. video here, via Making Light; transcript here) in which he argued that the information age is akin to the industrial age, and what society has been spending its cognitive surplus on over the past decades is not gin, but sitcoms.

Shirky’s a good speaker; I recommend taking/making time to watch the video. He says that projects like Wikipedia are a societal shift away from consuming alone, toward consuming, producing and sharing content. He implies there is a limited future for passively received media. I see the self-destructing music industry as a good example. I also think that the more cognitive surplus there is, the greater the tendency for information to be free, meaning both available and at no cost.

I’m probably preaching to the converted and singing to the choir here, since many of you are bloggers and commenters who produce and share. But Shirky’s ideas have lingered since I watched the video, and I’m interested to see how many examples of movement beyond consumption to production and sharing I’ll notice in the coming days.

Here’s what the crowd picked during previews before Iron Man on opening night:

Applause for Indiana Jone and the Crystal Skull and Batman, no reaction for Incredible Hulk, and laughter (not the good kind) for M Night Shymalan’s “The Happening” either for the trailer, or the silly title.

I was perplexed when I saw The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch, written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Michael Zulli. It looked like a nicely produced hardcover graphic novel, typical of Dark Horse, a publisher of upscale, quality books. Yet something didn’t feel right, and it was the $13.95 price tag. Nice HC GNs are usually $20 and up. This one was thin, though. Once I read it, I understood. This was not a graphic novel, or even a graphic novella. It was a graphic short story, gussied up in hardcover and given a price about double what it would be if the book had been released like most one-shot stories, in a perfect-bound softcover for $6.95.

Enough geeking about the packaging though. The story starts off clumsily, I thought, with three friends eating sushi, talking about the end of some event involving a woman they call Miss Finch. Then the narrative is picked up by one of the three, years later. This double flashback didn’t work for me: end of event, years after end of event, beginning of event. When I finally got myself situated in time, though, I really enjoyed the story. It’s vintage Gaiman, based on an old prose short story of his, beautifully and evocatively painted by Zulli, one of Gaiman’s collaborators on Sandman. Dark, adult, fantastic, odd and funny, it’s a quick, enjoyable read.

Worth $13.95 in HC, though? Methinks not, though I don’t begrudge the creators my money. Gaiman and Zulli are both local, so some of it is staying in my community.

Woo. Iron Man is a lot of fun. I am a comic-book geek (not redundant, by the way), but I’m not very familiar with the Iron Man story. I still enjoyed this movie a lot. Robert Downey, Jr. is great as Tony Stark, a playboy weapons tycoon who undergoes a crisis of conscience. Paltrow is a good foil. Terrence Howard is strong as the military friend, and Jeff Bridges is over the top, but appropriately so given his role.

Warning for geek boys: my husband G. Grod was very, very disappointed that Black Sabbath’s song Iron Man was not used in the film as it was in the trailer. Instead, it was sampled throughout.

My friend Blogenheimer sent me this link with a less-than-glowing take on King of Kong that brings up what seems to be a question of our time: if it’s entertaining and well-made, how much does it matter that it’s only pretty much all true? (That’s an Olivia reference; thanks Ian Falconer)

Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler and father of three small children, is a proponent of what he calls Idle Parenting. (Link from Game Theorist, a blog on economics and child rearing, a la Freakonomics.)

He claims it’s a win/win strategy. Parents get more enjoyment time for themselves, and kids develop self-sufficiency, and aren’t smothered by hovering parents.

I was entertained by the article, and in it I recognized my occasional flailings at non-idle parenting. My elder son is in preschool 3 days a week. He and his 2yo brother also have a music class and a public-schools family class that they take with my husband G. Grod. We’re hardly an overachieving family. But that’s not to say that I don’t feel guilt over this; I do. Every time I hear some other mom talk about the sports class her kid is taking, or the museum they visited, or the whatever the heck it is, I feel like I’m dropping the ball. Really, I’m beginning to think we all just have too much time on our hands, and should figure out how to use it usefully, rather than by competing in Olympic level parenting one-up-mom-ship.

Hodgkinson’s advice is refreshing for its stance against the status quo. He’s hardly the first to suggest that the current parenting climate is overzealous. There’s Confessions of a Slacker Mom, and The Three Martini Playdate. And one of my regular readers, Lazy Cow, who blogs at Only Books All the Time, is a staunch believer in what she calls “slow mothering.”

I’m not sure that slacker parenting is the ideal, but certainly a movement away from the over-scheduled, competitive kid world is a move in the right direction. I do want more time to myself for things I enjoy. That doesn’t mean ignoring the kids, just trying to be present when we’re doing things together, and taking some time to be not together. (I type this as Guppy naps and Drake watches “My Neighbor Totoro”.)

Hodgkinson has a bi-weekly weekend column on idle parenting, too. Here are a few excerpts.

From “Tom Hodgkinson Reads on”

By extending the family, creating a network of mutually supporting friends and neighbours, in short, by helping each other, family life could be made very much easier. Let’s give each other a break and open our doors.

On avoiding competitive sports:

Give me instead a child who can ponder and dream, sit under the oak tree and read, talk and think.

And a recent bout of family illness teaches the astonishing lesson that resting and taking care of oneself is good, and that kids don’t self destruct when left to themselves.

King of Kong was named by many critics as one of the best documentaries of last year, out of a very strong field. A movie about Donkey Kong? Yes, a movie about Donkey Kong.

One nice guy, Steve Wiebe (pronounced Wee Bee), decides to take on the world record for Donkey Kong, which has stood for about 20 years. Recently laid off, he wanted to do something that he was good at.

The record belonged to Billy Mitchell, a celebrity in gaming circles, and was one of many records he held over the years. What ensues is a sequence of reversals, and a cast of characters so bizarre, that I felt like I was watching a Christopher Guest mockumentary.

What makes it so satisfying is how easily the two men fall into the roles of hero and villain. Wiebe is an affable, good-looking blond guy who used to play baseball in school. He’s got a patient wife who tries to understand his weird obsession, two kids, and he teaches and coaches at a local middle school. Mitchell is a lifelong gamer. He sports a well-kept mullet, and his wife wears deep V-necks to showcase her breast implants. He’s a successful businessman, yet passive agressive in all dealings with Wiebe. This is a fun, funny film about a weird corner of the world. I think Donkey Kong has windmills in it, and Wiebe’s engaging underdog tilts at them well. He never let himself be chumpatized.

Ed Brubaker is perhaps my favorite writer in comics right now. I love his noir series Criminal, and have been enjoying his run on The Immortal Iron Fist, which he writes with Matt Fraction. Since the individual issues are so littered with obnoxious ads, I bought the graphic novel collection of the first story arc. It improved on rereading, and benefits from the absence of interruptive ads.

The Last Iron Fist Story is a play on words, in once sense because it was supposed to be a miniseries that got picked up as an ongoing one. Danny Rand is a wealthy businessman whose secret identity is The Immortal Iron Fist, defender of the mystical city of K’un Lun. I’d never read the series before, and all necessary background was helpfully and skillfully incorporated into the narrative. Rand is attacked by goons, his company is in the throes of a hostile takeover, and someone else has been using the power of the Iron Fist. How this all ties together is an entertaining superhero story with a good segue to the next arc, enhanced by the moody art of David Aja.

I enjoyed Brubaker’s Daredevil: Hell to Pay vol. 2 much less. I really enjoyed the run that Brian Michael Bendis had on the title. In spite of my admiration for Brubaker, his follow up has never quite seemed to live up to what went before. Perhaps it’s that I find one of the central characters, Matt Murdock’s wife, an utter void. Even if she’s being moved off stage, which it seems might be the case from this collection, I think it won’t be enough to keep me hanging on. I’ve been waiting for a while for Daredevil to get good again. I think I’ll spend time on other comics that I enjoy. I’m sure if it does get good again, I’ll hear about it.

One of the small-talk comments people make to parents is “it goes so fast.” In many ways, I don’t find that’s true. Days are long, and nights are far too short of sleep. One thing I know will pass, though, is the cute way that 2yo Guppy pronounces words. I think back to some of Drake’s mispronunciations (”foozee” for smoothie was a particular favorite, as was “beow” for cat and “kiko” for thank you) , and marvel that at 4 the only vestiges are blurry r’s and l’s.

Guppy drops his s’s, so spoon is “pooon”. I know there are naughty connotations, but it’s really cute to hear. Balloon is “buh-bloon”, thank you is “senk oo”, Lightning (as in McQueen) is “Lie-ping”, but I think my favorite is how he says dessert–”Buh-zert! Buh-zert!”, always twice and with great excitment.

Paris, Je T’aime is an entertaining collection of short films set in and around the arrondissement of Paris. There are many famous directors, like the Coen Brothers, and famous actors, like Natalie Portman and Gerard Depardieu. It unrolls at a fast clip. Just as soon as I liked or disliked something, it was done. The themes ranged far and wide, covering race, class, marriage, kids, work, and more. There was a lot of good acting and directing, and I followed the film by watching the “making of” featurette. It had the usual odious puffy interviews, but it also had some good commentary by the directors that helped me better match the film and its maker.

Edward G. Robinson as a gangster? Yes. In a dual role as a sweet romantic? And yet The Whole Town’s Talking makes it work. The zippy dialogue with Jean Arthur and the dark/ light contrasts made this a fun film to watch, even with its surprisingly dark, bitter undertone.

Next week is the last of Take-Up’s Sweet Escapism series at the Parkway, with You Can’t Take it With You.

Now at the Parkway is Touch of Evil (if you haven’t seen it, you must, if only for the opening tracking shot.) and next is Planet of the Apes, which I’ve never seen.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall is funny, often painfully so. Like other Apatow movies, the female characters are a little thin, but the males are so deliciously flawed that I’m a bit forgiving on that point.

Wondering: why is it that male actors who show their less than perfect bodies are called out as “brave”?

Favorite moments: “pump the brakes”, Paul Rudd’s surfer, Jonah Hill’s groupie, Jason Segal’s music, and the scene with the chess pieces.

“Miss Austen Regrets” was probably my favorite new film of the recent PBS series, The Complete Jane Austen. It’s just now showing in England, and Austenblog has a good roundup of the reviews, which seem more negative than the ones stateside.

It also has a link to the Jane Austen Society of North America’s details on the men in the film, which I found illuminating.

After a disappointing season 3, I’ve been enjoying season 4 of Battlestar Galactica, and dread the break that I know will come all too soon. I fantasize that I’ll rewatch all the episodes in the break, but I know myself, and my time, and my need for sleep, so I doubt it’ll happen. Lots happened on last night’s episode, but a few things stuck out for me–so spoilers for this ep below.

Tigh was the one to respond to Nicky’s crying and change his diaper. I pointed this out to my husband, G. Grod, who shrugged and said, “He’s Tigh. He’s the XO. He gets things done.” Interesting that neither Tory nor Galen responded to care for the kids.

Tigh’s visions of Ellen are similar to the ones that Baltar and Six have of each other.

I did NOT like how Tyrol looked at Nicky late in the episode; will he try to pull a Cally, even though he doesn’t know what happened? Aaron Douglas has always been one of the best actors on the show, and that’s saying a lot.

And Lee’s hair has gotten longer. It’s poofily civilian.

Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler has been on my shelves over ten years, and through three or four different domiciles. I purchased it because Neil Gaiman used it as a reference for his Sandman collection, World’s End. I finally committed to reading the Calvino. While very good, and important, it was a tough, and not often enjoyable, read.

The conceit is fascinating. A man and woman reader begin a book, then are interrupted at a point of suspense. In numbered chapters, they try to find out more about the book, and it leads them on a less-than-merry chase. Alternating with chapters of their quest are first chapters of the books they find that are supposed to be the same, but instead have a different set of male female characters, different title, different setting, different country of origin, and different style. Each introduces you to a situation, then pauses at a conflict. The overall affect is deliberately frustrating. Further, many of the number chapters are told in second person, addressing the reader. This was sometimes unnerving, as Calvino seemed to be looking out of the book and into my life:

The kitchen is the part of the house that can tell the most things about you: whether you cook or not (one would say yes, if not every day, at least fairly regularly)….whether you tend toward the bare minimum or toward gastronomy (your purchases and gadgets suggest elaborate and fanciful recipes, at least in your intentions; you may not necessarily be greedy, but the idea of a couple of fried eggs for supper would probably depress you)

The first sensation this book should convey is what I feel when I hear the telephone ring; I say “should” because I doubt that written words can give even a partial idea of it…my reaction is one of flight from this aggressive and threatening summons, as it is also a feeling of urgency, intolerableness, coercion that impels me…rushing to answer even though I am certain that nothing will come of it save suffering and discomfort.

I enjoyed the ten beginnings of the stories. Like the readers in the book, I was loathe to quit them just as I was going deep. With both the stories and the characters of readers, Calvino frustrated my desire for a story, as well as my attempts to like the characters, since he took pains to make them all different, yet the same, and all readers, just like me.

This is a book about how we read, why we read, and our desire for stories and character. It’s brilliant stuff, but too often purposely dissatisfying–intellectual with a dearth of emotional attachment.

Snow showers, that is. Seriously, can we get a break in the weather? The last batch of snow finally melted, and it was starting to feel like spring. Then today it’s in the 30’s, and snowing.

I know; I know. Griping about weather is a lowest common denominator of discourse. My apologies. But it’s been getting to me for a while. I have trouble dealing with my own mood swings. Balancing them with Mother Nature’s is a drag.

I’ve been thinking in despair that nothing in the house is safe anymore. Yesterday I went into 4yo Drake’s room and found a pocket knife in his bed. I whisked it away, but didn’t notice the toothpick and tweezers missing–I found those at two different times later in the day.

Last night, when I went up to bed, I found my jewelry box on my bed. I went into Drake’s room. He was asleep, and beside his bed were two pair of earrings, a pendant and a zirconia stud. I feel like I’m back in middle school, and living with my pesky little sister. (Written with all due affection, since she now is a generous lender of her own stuff, rather than just a “borrower” of mine.)

Top Chef season 4, episode 7: Improv. Last night’s Top Chef contestants got a night out at Second City. Strangely, no one was suspicious that there was a hidden agenda.

Spoilers from here:

Only Nikki seemed to twig quickly to the upcoming challenge, three-word non-sequiteurs dishes invented Mad Lib style by the audience. I loved Richard’s idea of cooking tofu in rendered beef fat. Was anyone else reminded of the Buffy fast-food episode? But I find Richard a bit too aware of how clever he is. I think he’d do well to remember how he caved under pressure to produce a dish for 80. He’s a talented, innovative chef, but he doesn’t work in a restaurant like most of the others. Spike, also smug, redeemed himself by producing a perfect soup; he and Andrew did not get the onscreen kudos they deserved for making a pureed squash soup with just a food mill and no processor. As for those at the bottom, I found it discouraging to see only women on the chopping block. There’s a pathetic joke to be made about the lesbian not being able to pull off a phallic presentation of “orange turned-on asparagus,” but I won’t be the one to make it. I think Antonia and Lisa deserved their dressing down–doing a fish dish garnished with chorizo and a tequila sauce for “magenta drunk polish sausage” was extremely lame. Antonia did the same thing she did on the team challenge two weeks ago–refused to open her mind to something because it wasn’t to her standards. Jen did the same thing, sneering both at the polish sausage and the beer. I do think it’s fair that the quality of the food be the standard, I don’t think Stephanie and Jen got enough kudos for being more game to the challenge than Antonia/Lisa.

My guess is that Nikki and Mark, who held the middle ground, won’t be long for this show.

More commentary at The Kitchn but none yet at ALoTT5Ma.

I thought The Jane Austen Book Club was a very good film, and faithful to the spirit, if not the letter of the book, which I also thought was very good. I found it so well done that I not only watched all the extras, but stayed up late to do so.

Austen completed six novels, and the book club has six characters, whose joys and troubles overlap as they work their way through Jane’s oeuvre. The movie is very well cast. Each actor does a good job of embodying their character’s charms and quirk. Hugh Dancy is Grigg, the only male in the group. He wears spandex better than he adopts an American accent. Emily Blunt is smoldering as the repressed Prudie. Maria Bello is intimidating as a control-freak dog breeder and matchmaker; she went a little nuts with the Botox though. Her forehead hardly moves. Kathy Baker has appropriately wacky hair and outfits for the spacy Bernadette. Amy Brenneman is sympathetic as a recently divorced parent, and Maggie Grace is charming as the reckless Alexis. Jimmy Smits and Marc Blucas do a great job in supporting roles as well. It’s a wonderful ensemble, and the movie clips along at a satisfying pace through a year of their lives.

Aside from the performances, what I loved about this movie was its obvious love for reading in general, and Jane’s books in particular. Each segment focuses on one character, and one book. Each character is shown reading each book. With one notable exception, most of the editions are different, and obviously cherished; they look lived in. Penguin, Oxford, softcover, hardcover, they reminded me fondly of my shelves, where I have different editions of works by Austen and the Brontes.

The extras did a good job of rounding out the film. One on Austen interviewed two scholars to give details on her life. For example, one of the things known about Tom Lefroy is that he ran out the back door one day when Austen came to visit, and returned the visit days later in the company of his 13yo cousin. “Hardly the stuff of passion,” one of the commentators notes, wryly, in what may be a small dig at Becoming Jane, which imagined a torrid romance between Austen and Lefroy. I skipped the extras in Becoming Jane; that film took so many liberties with fact that it hardly seemed a reliable reference. Extras on The Jane Austen Book Club included an analysis of which character reflected which novel, as well as a brief but entertaining glimpse of the red-carpet opening of the film. A behind-the-scenes featurette wasn’t the usual puff piece; it included interesting background for how the charactes were cast, and how the film received financing. For example, Maggie Grace is an Austen geek; she’s read all the novels, short stories and letters.

If you like reading Austen, and enjoyed Fowler’s book, you’ll likely appreciate the movie. It’s done skillfully and with care. If you’re lukewarm or unfamiliar with either, it might just prompt you, as the book did with me, to seek out all of Austen’s novels.

All the kid-sleep books note that children may have trouble sleeping when they’re going through a development stage. Last Sunday, I was up with 2yo Guppy at 1 and 4; he was crying for water. Then at 4:40 am, my husband and I heard 4yo Drake talking in his room; Drake rarely wakes in the night. G. Grod went to investigate.

G: Drake, it’s not morning yet. What’s up?
D: (Holding dinosaur book) I wanted to say the names of the dinosaurs, so I could hear my voice.

I’m not sure what stage it is, but it sure sounds like one to me.