Well, do you?

Discrediting Americana has become something of a favorite theme in reality TV, or at least the supposedly highbrow ones like Antiques Roadshow. I haven't watched it much, but I understand the chief attraction is watching some middle-aged housewife get her cherished beliefs about the history of some well-guarded trinket dashed to pieces.

It's not that I don't enjoy this kind of thing (though I found I really didn't in that case), but that this kind of crap sat its fat ass on the timeslots once occupied by awesome specials where people flew helicopters over erupting volcanoes or showed all kinds of funky stuff through micro- or tele- scopes. In the end they're just different flavors of infotainment, but I really doubt the Roadshow has inspired many kids to become scientists and engineers.Those 'making of' specials about certain space fantasy epics were the very first place I learned about the very company I'm working for now. If appraisals of porcelain trinkets is the alternative to Yu-Gi-Oh these days, it's no wonder kids are getting less and less interested in educational entertainment or any of the things it inspires.

No, they're not Italian. And note the absence of red and green overalls.

Sci-Fi Channel's "100% Real"(1) Ghost Hunters series fits into all of this in that it mixes that crackpot-humiliation element with IR and false-color thermography footage of crap like I've absolutely never seen. blee turned me onto the show over a dinner conversation in which at least one pair of eyeballs rolled, but I sat rapt.

The reality show follows a pair of plumbers who, after (or often, instead of) fulfilling the obligations of work and family, run The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS), a paranormal investigations group. Taking calls from homeowners, innkeepers, and civil service officers in states ranging from bemused to concerned (rarely panicked), the pair spends one to two weekend nights free of charge at the site of said hauntings with some fairly sophisticated equipment and a team of wide-eyed cohorts.

At this point the show totally splits off from all of those ridiculous Halloween-time specials in which ambiguity is not so much considered as it is tapped and forcibly siphoned out of grainy footage and photography that would in all other cases prompt the reasonable person to consider better equipment rather than the influence of the supernatural. The pair, Jason and Grant, ask the things anybody should when they see some of this stuff and to their credit, in most of the shows they really do find zilch, or have to disappoint that wide-eyed cohort that got really excited over some lens flare or odd dust hit that they just found after sifting through several hours of footage.

The reveal of this utter lack of evidence to the homeowner or innkeeper very invested, sometimes financially, in their site's hauntings makes for that roadshow component. Particularly irritating are those old ladies that insist they or some family member has some sixth sense and throughout the investigation tries to spook people out by saying they feel like they're being watched or exclaiming "it's here!" or "what's that???" while gesturing off camera. Also the leaders of fraternal chapters to TAPS that by all appearances have taken time out from their busy action-figure collection circuits to freak out over some dust glint whose irregular shape they are convinced is the face and headdress of some Victorian-era bride tragically murdered on that site.

But, oh, that 20%. Provided they are indeed true to their word that they aren't and hate dicking around with evidence, you will quite likely be keeping a few more lights on around the house the evening after you watch an episode. True to their transparency, much of this footage they keep on their website and invite skepticism as Jason and Grant are themselves doggedly skeptical to the last in the majority of the cases.

Apparently they've built up enough of a following or encounter clients sufficiently invested in their would-be haunting that forgery comes up on occasion, and they do indeed catch it, as you'd discover in one of their deleted scenes. In one case a 'black shadow' literally looks like some guy zipping by in a dark cape, though there was enough skepticism of the skepticism that they felt it was worth presenting.

Ghosts and extreme, sudden changes in velocity are the two major fears of childhood I now crave. With ghosts I'm skeptical, but I like the idea of a universe with these kinds of things, even if in the distant future they turn out to be some quirk of quantum physics or what have you. Whatever it is, having some ambiguity and mystery in the universe keeps it interesting, and any show that deals with it without totally insulting my intelligence will sustain my attention. Finally having a non-seasonal show on the subject without some throaty voiceover intoning "... or is it???" at the end of each episode is very refreshing.


(1) The DVD packaging says as much.

RE: Brasil Futbol

Feeling a little better, but still a little queasy.

It's the law

This is my favorite ad ever for the World Cup. It's from 1998, when Brasil lost so badly in the final that conspiracy theories abound about some fix on the part of the team or Ronaldo or what have you.

That aside, though, I've been sort of lucky in that since the World Cup popped onto my radar in 1994(1) (as it did for much of the US, I imagine, since we hosted it), Brasil's been dominant, with the championship in '94, a second place in '98, and another championship in '02.

They've always been a threat, of course, but it's not like they win every single year, and I'm beginning to wonder if the law of averages has finally caught up to them this year. Brasil's first game last week was possibly the most horrifying thing I've ever seen from them. Maybe nostalgia has tainted my memory, but I'm not used to seeing them making that many bad passes and getting the ball stolen from them quite that much. Ronaldo's received a lot of grief about his weight gain, and given his performance Wednesday, it seems to be deserved. You really would've forgotten he was on the pitch.

One thing I learned this past visit to Brasil was that many folks there don't pay much attention to it until at least the qualifiers. So I don't feel like such a ridiculous poseur for not following club football there or here in the meantime. Some things I've learned:

1. It is indeed legitimately called 'soccer' in the English-speaking world. In England, where the modern version of the game was created complete with a common rule set conferred and drafted in 1848, 'soccer' is a contraction of 'assoc' football, itself a contraction of the full name, association football. They didn't just call it 'football' because there were two kinds -- association football and rugby football. Rugby football evolved into that thing we have a big annual bowl game for. I like to call soccer 'football' myself, but there's nothing wrong with calling it 'soccer' simply for clarity's sake.



2. The offside rule is the most frustrating thing about watching these games, sort of like the holding call in the NFL. It just seems to come up out of nowhere to negate spectacular plays and goals. Apparently the motivation for it back in the day was that people would just post guys back by the opponent's goal and do huge clearing kicks to them to knock into the goal. As to why that's a bad thing, I'd figure it's because the fun of soccer is watching folks move the ball up the field through a defense, not just punting the ball back and forth across the field.
   
   It does kill scoring, though. Also, some teams have exploited it by sort of scooting away from their own goal at crucial moments (often corner kicks) to draw the offside call on their opponent. FIFA revamped the rules back in 2003 into something somewhat more obtuse in some attempt to deal with this. Basically as it is now, simply being offside isn't necessarily an offense. It's based on the ref's opinion on if the player is interfering with a defender or using it to gain some kind of advantage in play. Given the officiating we saw in today's USA-Italy game, that's really, really scary.

Anyway, that's all that comes to mind for now. Waking up in the AM for the Brasil-Australia game. Hopefully we'll see some improvement.

1) 1994 might seem like a ridiculously late date for a native to take interest in World Cup, but frankly the family wasn't that into it as I grew up here, so I never knew. It's just one more of those things about my country of origin that I didn't really explore until late in my teenage years.

Vent!

I'm about a month into the new position. It's been a lot of fun, but I gotta admit it's really pushing me in some areas. I talked a bit before about the payroll and common titles(1): junior @rtist and assistant technic@l director, respectively. It's odd how the bureaucratese/payroll title sounds so much more organic. The common title is more in line with what was advertised and what I was expecting. Damned technocratic, though.

But I guess things never work out quite as expected, and I'm working a lot more these days in the 'junior @rtist' sense of my position, which is to say I'm working on shots. That's awesome, but the pressures remain for the technical stuff, and I feel like I'm dropping the ball on that end because the shot production stuff has been taking precedence, and frankly is a lot more fun.

I'm finding the tech stuff is remarkably like working at a supermarket. I generally know how stuff works, but I don't know where some obscure library or software update or patch is. They've got a nice system for all this, but in the end you still have to know what it's called, what version to get, who can answer questions on it, etc.. Software/command/library names perfectly sensible in some contexts can be impossible to intuit in slightly different ones. We've got a terrific alias for fellow @TDs, but I feel if I send more than about 10 messages to it per day I've begun to overstay my welcome, friendly and helpful as the other teammates continue to be.

An unexpected source of stress lately, though, has been people. Everyone else has been incredibly cool, but I feel like I might have been a little short with folks lately. Part of it is how people calling me or dropping by my desk totally interrupt my already clumsy juggling of different roles and duties. In my old position where stuff had gotten a little too easy, I'd welcome the interruption, but it's been a little aggravating in my current state where I'm still trying to get my bearings. I also think there's some inevitable arrogance that seeps in after any kind of promotion that I really, really should know better than to indulge. A rare luxury about the place I work is that I really do work with some sharp people, but I wonder if some of the things I've said these last weeks might give people the impression that I think otherwise.

Titanic on a boat!

Terrific combination:

1. Read the title essay in David Foster Wallace's anthology "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again". (Settle in -- it's at least 60 dense, footnoted pages, if I recall correctly.)


2. Watch "Poseidon".

At the risk of spoiling it for Grumpy, I'm going to have to disclose that Fun Thing details Wallace's experiences as 'your correspondent' for Harper's on a subsidized 7 Night Luxury Cruise. Poseidon details the experiences of a group of off-the-shelf characters trying to escape the same, except in their case the boat's been capsized by a rogue wave and lies belly up on the ocean taking on water from what was its top.

One of the things I've been enjoying about Wallace's correspondent pieces is how they mix vivid description, insightful observation, and multi-layered analysis in such a way that I almost feel like I don't actually have to experience the subject event myself anymore -- it really feels like I've been there.

So when Poseidon cuts to shots of the service staff working in the galley after the terrific long, sweeping shot of Josh Lucas jogging around on the decks of an entirely CG cruise ship, I remained fully engaged. For one, I wondered if they toiled under the same service-industry oppression that turned Wallace's insistence on carrying his own duffel bag to his cabin into something of a federal case, prompting a personal visit and apology for the deck's baggage handler's incompetency from the manager. I pondered the feasibility of sneaking one's girlfriend onto a cruise like one of the galley staff's characters had done when, as Wallace found, every nook of one's cabin is mysteriously cleaned to perfection anytime one leaves it for longer than 30 minutes. When the curtain went up on the saucy Latin songstress during the ship's formal New Year's party, I wondered if her act was preceded by a passenger talent show and hypnotist/comedian much like the main act at the final night's formal on Wallace's cruise.

Taking stock...

As we meet the characters, I wonder about the statistical aberration of having an ex-NYC mayor, an ex-Navy professional gambler, and so many young, attractive, pre-retirement people on the same cruise boat. I wonder how many of the bridge officers are Greek, which would have been consistent with Wallace's findings that most cruise lines were operated out of Greece, tending to skew the composition of the officers towards the same.

Basically, whenever large volumes of rushing, flooding, pouring, bubbling, drowning water weren't on screen, I had plenty of things to keep me occupied. So that I found the 'character-driven' moments not entirely unbearable will have to be taken with a huge grain of salt. Accomplishing that, the story was able to maintain at least some minimal alignment between what it wanted me to care about and what I actually did care about as I watched the passengers get abused by those spectacular torrents of water.

It's coming!

And they truly are spectacular, orgasmic in much the way Wallace describes in another piece of his, "F/X porn". I had wondered what else was to be done for CG water after Perfect Storm besides maybe tweaking a few things on the simulators and maybe doing a better job on the color. I saw that there were indeed many more interesting things to be done, particularly the colors we see as the ship's festive lighting gets smothered by cascades of whitewater and various systems short and blow out during the impact sequence. Also worth mentioning are the rather graphic scenes of humans getting incinerated in flash fires, dropping onto ballroom ceilings, or getting themselves crushed or impaled on various shipboard implements made hazardous simply by being flipped upside down.

You'll endure this all together with the characters, and by extension, Wallace. And as the characters finally poke their heads out above water in the end, you'll find an amazing synergy between them, your proverbial correspondent, and yourself as together you sigh and are just happy to have survived the experience.

I am not a Cylon!

Ever wonder why I say I grew up in this town but it seems nobody I 'knew' is around? Or that the few people who do are strangely connected either to Wushu (El 'Sickness') or military equipment (Jerry at the surplus?) Or how it seems most of my friends from college come from the same high school in, of ALL places, San Diego? Or my aesthetic affinity for machines and technology?

Stop wondering.



I had a childhood, dammit! See? I got pictures to prove it. I wasn't artificially created by machines in a plot to destroy humanity!

Just picked up a scanner, partly motivated by irrational exuberance,
partly by this mess of negatives I found while cleaning out the house a few weeks back. I don't know what happened, but most of the actual photos from my childhood have been missing pretty much since I started college. I figure it's a mix of bad organizational skills and moving two or three dozen times. Not everything is there, and some are my brother's forays into photography (not half bad, actually), but I guess at this point I'll take what I can get.

I picked up the Canon Canoscan LiDE 500F(1), mainly 'cause it could fit in one of my drawers, looked cool, and happened to get some nice reviews. Its film and negative scanning definitely is definitely intended for casual use, though -- scanning several slides takes a lot more mucking about than I'd like. I'll have to exercise much editorial license in what gets preserved and what will be lost to the ages.

That photo is unflattering, but so appropriate.

(1) I admit I mention this so precisely because I'm curious what ads would get put up for it.

Art School Space

It doesn't take very much exposure to the arts for one to develop all kinds of wild notions of just what the hell it is that goes on in art school. Surely, most of us have had our sense of aesthetics and taste violated and molested by some piece of tripe flung limply at us from straight out of left, failing to go the distance and instead of landing solidly in our grasp, drops short, splatters, makes a huge mess, takes a bad hop, and beans us squarely on the temple.

Coming to and nursing our wounds, we can only wonder. Why? WHY???

And then... HOW?

Art School Confidential (the film) doesn't answer this, and in many ways, I don't think any of us expect it to. I was hoping simply for therapy of the sort 'Office Space' offered to white collar cube-dwellers everywhere. Office Space didn't just expose the evils of corporate platitudes and politeness, it gave us *coping* strategies. All other countermeasures exhausted, we could retreat into safety by putting the vapid, blithely ignorant boss into the Lumberg slot, the infuriatingly chipper co-worker either into the 'case-of-the-Mondays' woman or that tool with all the flare from Chotchkie's(1). We'd then chuckle a bit with the co-workers that understood and found it in ourselves to slog through the rest of the day.(2)

Confidential offers no such retreat. When(3) you again find yourself stuck in an overlong, plodding 'art' film or mediocre gallery exhibition, you won't have acquired any comic archetypes to cling to while you sip on your smuggled-in flask or overpriced glass of Merlot.

From an environment rich with eccentrics and inflated egos and what I'm told is brilliant source material, Confidential takes on the style of the conventional college coming-of-age comedy complete with dopey romance, slacker cohort/guru-figure, sublimely-perfect aryan villain figure, and occasional interjections by the world-weary faculty by equal parts accomplished and mediocre.

Much like Office Space, Confidential seems to split into two films. You'll really find the parallels striking. The First half sets up the satire. The second half switches gears and becomes something of a caper flick, methodically tying up all the loose ends and adding a lot of uncharacteristic action.

Given the spectacular disconnect that can occur between artist and audience in some projects, the satire is incredibly unsatisfying. There are freaks spouting pretentious, half-baked bullshit, of course, but not enough and not to the degree that we can believe that these are the same people that have inflicted such suffering upon us in theaters and galleries across the country.

Oddly enough, I'm left admiring somewhat the abrupt switch to the caper mode in the second half. While parts seem out of character for this kind of film, there's a cynicism underlying it that rings true and deserved deeper exploration for the kind of darkly comic take that the overall movie would've benefited from.

The cast does fine, but it really would've worked better as an ensemble presentation than focusing on a few central characters. Malkovich stands out, as well he should. The rest of the cast doesn't really offend either, and overall the film seems competently made. I'm just left stumped at how a movie could make art school students boring in comparison to office workers.

(1) Even writing this down now, I'm compelled to reach out and strangle a small rodent or something when I think of the guy.
(2) Comforting, but not necessarily a healthy thing. As many have observed, the irony of the sort that office humor sources like Dilbert and, alas, Office Space mine may indeed be the kind raw resource that the proverbial /Man/ needs to help keep us all placated enough not to affect actual change. Basically, if taping up a Dilbert strip about some grave corporate injustice that mirrors your own or quoting Office Space behind your manager's back satisfies your sense of insurgency, who's really benefiting? It's not entirely a rhetorical question.
(3) Not 'if'.

Armchair accounting

Great. Looks like somebody was able to gain access to one of my credit cards. A charge showed up from someplace in the UK! It's easy to tell on this one because I never use it (or pretty much any card except for the mileage thing). Called my card company and they've been terrific. No charges, account's on temporary hold, etc.

It's a lucky thing I happened to be checking my account the day after the charge went through. Over the last few years checking my spending and debt has become something of a minor hobby.

I came out of college & immediate post-college with ridiculous debt, though I know now it's a common thing and that my case wasn't nearly as bad as some people's. Still, when I finally tallied it all up it was a pretty frightening figure. I finally got my ass in gear in 2002 and set up a system. It's not anything earth-shattering -- it's just an Excel spreadsheet coupled with electronic bill payment. If you're grappling with bad post-college debt, you may want to give it a shot.

On one sheet I started recording how much and *when* payments were due. You can get the general idea of how much and when a bill's due over about 2-3 months of tracking. This helped me schedule regular billing dates to make sure that, if something bad happened, I could be sure the next paycheck would more than cover the next round of bills. This is easy for me because I get paid weekly. Might be tougher on monthly or bi-weekly.

Electronic bill payment helps because it keeps you on the schedule. If you still mail stuff in, you're bound to forget or lag far behind sometime and you'll be stuck with a double-payment or a compacted payment schedule one month that can throw the system out of whack.

After a while I was able to figure out when to hold back on spending, when to relax a bit, when it was okay to splurge, etc. It also helped me start saving up a bit too. I could start setting targets for saving up, start to stow stuff away for vacations, etc.

On the other sheet, and this idea came to me later, I started tracking principal on my debts. Cars, credit cards, student loans, everything. I could see how much it had gone down month over month and do projections based on that.

It's all really motivating because it gives you a really concrete sense of your progress. It turns it all into a kind of game -- just punch in some numbers and see how stuff turns out. It also motivates you to scheme a bit on how you can do better. You can see the impacts of, say, switching insurance companies, consolidating debts, etc.

There are probably better things and nice pieces of software out there that let you do this, but this has been working out really well for me. I'd often come out of months where there's been some kind of shock to the system from some unexpected expense with *extra* cash in the coffers from the things I do to compensate.

Good sports

I guess any day you dodge all the bullets is a good day. Of course, some would point out a good day would be best described without the use of firearm metaphors.

The Berkeley Tournament did seem a bit spottier than previous years, but it finished by 10:30, which I figure is on par with the usual. I wasn't there the whole time, though, so I'm still catching up on all the details. There's always some grumbling after CMAT, but it does sound a bit more serious this time around. Heard of a little incident with some China coach that seemed to be handled well. I was there to help close things out at the end of the day judging intermediates. I felt a little rusty frankly -- a few decisions I might rethink, but I'm generally comfortable with the scores I awarded.

I didn't spend the whole day at the tournament, for a change.(1) I was pretty clear beforehand that I'd be out that afternoon catching my first ball game of the year. I was all set to go rain or shine, but in what might be considered an act of divine intervention, we got partly cloudy skies with a few good breaks of sunshine as we watched the Giants roll over the Braves 12-6. Even got a bit of a sunburn watching it all. Possibly the most satisfying game I've attended in years. ery special thanks to the Flower (aka Lumber's better half) for the freebie!

The tournament after party was hot, crowded, and not broken up by cops, which again is something we had been worried about that didn't come to pass. It ran its course like all parties should -- with the front yard smelling like puke and folks trickling out slowly into the wee hours of the morning. Remembered chatting with some neighbors who had dropped by to see what the fuss was about and pick up a beer. Gotta love Berkeley.


(1) I was there by 8 am to help out with the judging, only to find myself milling about all morning. I think I'm just going to sleep in from now on and show up for the swing shift.

It's still whoring

I was actually writing down my thoughts on Kieu at about the same time I wrote about Eve, but hadn't really sorted out what I really felt about the movie.

Oh it's crummy. Make no mistake. But to a degree I felt vaguely wrong slamming it because it felt something like criticizing the illustrative quality of a pre-schooler's finger painting. It's not so much mean as it is pointless.

As always, the movie doesn't feel so much like a narrative with an actual plot as it is a montage of establishing shots. Dialog runs not so much like an interaction between characters as they appear to be monologues of two or more characters spliced together through some daring and edgy editorial pizazz (they aren't, btw). Absolutely every shot, even those in broad daylight, look like they were shot overexposed under the fluorescent glow of a Safeway produce aisle. (Maybe this is to be praised for consistency -- critical, 'climactic' scenes feature characters picking produce and riding Muni buses.) Equipped yet again with merely two facial expressions (blank & upset) and speech lacking inflection and syncopation, the protagonists are left utterly uncharismatic. The effect is predictable -- you don't care very much about their angst and life history and wish they would go bother somebody else.

That all just had to be said. But again, pointless. Through the forces of democracy(1) and the market, Kieu as a film will likely see little circulation outside of SFIAAFF. Lacking the option to see this film, there is apparently not much point in me warning you not to.

This entry can salvage a few broader points, though:

1) As mentioned last entry I'm perpetually amazed at how Asian American film makers rail against the mainstream media's portrayals of Asians, go to film school, buy/rent expensive equipment, apply to and get some fabulous grants... and then turn around and make films that show pretty much the EXACT SAME THING. Kieu is another example of this -- if this film was made by a non-Asian, people would be horribly offended at the yet again exoticized, emasculated, emotionally-constipated portrayals of Asians.

2) If you think review whoring is an issue with major studio films, you have NO idea how bad it is on the ethno-indie film circuit. At the very least major-releases get enough exposure that dissenting opinions will emerge. (I'm reminded of the murmurs about Sideways being overrated that eventually surfaced back in 2005.) With the ethno-indies you have a cacophony of well-meaning, softballing professional reviewers, reviewers highly connected to the projects and festivals, reviewers having a political agenda, and reviewers that simply don't have the time to write about anything beyond their 'picks' for the fest. The end effect is that you'd only really hear one kind of view. For example:

Variety review
SF Chron festival picks

They mean well, but this is NOT what's going to help Asian Am cinema in the long run. People need to start making better films, not better-reviewed films.

(1) As someone who's been denied the facility to rate films at SFIAAFF twice now, I've got to wonder if disenfranchisement runs rampant at the fest. In one case we had fled the theater halfway through -- if that's not saying something that should go on record, I don't know what is. For this one we were so apprehensive that we essentially procrastinated about leaving for the film and got there too late to recieve the ballots. The snarky slacker demographic is being seriously under-counted.(*)

(*) Sorry about the footnote. Been reading some D.F. Wallace lately and I'm just pedantic enough to think this whole footnote thing might be a good idea.