I'm having a day. One of those days. A vivid day. Week. Everything is brighter. I can read Portuguese and understand it. I can drive like a robot. Conversation comes like water; I can spar verbally. To what do I owe this upsurge? Can't tell. Something beyond me. Shall I use it to enlighten you? No. Not in the way you're thinking. In a simpler, more banal fashion: I'm going to tell you to go see a movie.
Remember good films? Yeah, those. The title screen serves two purposes: introduce the setting, then the crew by name. The directors, producers, major cast. Maybe even introduce you to some good music, the kind you sit forward a bit to hear better, the kind that's over too early.
This is the kind of film that when you hear the passing conversations of bit-part actors it's not phony; from the first pedestrian words it feels absolutely real. The suspension of disbelief is nearly immediate.
When it comes to bank heists, I must admit ignorance of some of the greats. Denzel even comes out and says, "You saw Dog Day Afternoon...". No. I didn't. Sorry. But I did see both the '68 and '99 versions of The Thomas Crown Affair, and I'm happy to say that as much I love the Brosnan version, this new film has the same slick production and great cast as the original Steve McQueen.
I’m tempted to call this joint Lee's masterpiece. But it's probably not that. Probably just his most accessible, most mainstream, most neatly polished work for public consumption. And boy does it go down easy. But don't take my word for it.
Lee assembled one hell of a production crew for this film. From sweeping, engaging camerawork to the score to the makeup and effects, it pops. Even the poster art is neoclassic. There’s a scene as the cops are arriving at the bank where a police SUV slides to a halt, half-cocked to the side. I saw that and thought, “Wow. Spike Lee has arrived. In style.”
Speaking of style, there is nothing I can say to quite describe the supremely smooth confidence of Denzel’s character. He swaggers the same way the film does. This is my town. This is how we do it. There’s nothing you can throw at me I can’t handle. Hold on a sec, Mr. Bank Robber, I gotta call my girl and talk dirty to her. It’s like bam, I want to be this guy.
Clive Owen is Clive Owen. And I like it, as always. Jodie Foster admitted recently to the press that she can't play anything but a strong woman, and while that holds true here, I really enjoyed how she flirts with her character's evil, slimy side.
The dialogue is whipsmart. I was cracking up. The actors are often saying ridiculously unbelievable things, but everyone’s delivery is so spot on that you swallow the hook. It’s like noir but better. Who is the writer? Can’t say I’ve heard of Russell Gewirtz. And imdb lists no priors. Whoever you are, Mr. Gewirtz, please keep writing.
Lee includes his signature take on racism, but as the rest of the critics are saying, it’s not heavy handed or ham-fisted. The director even branches out beyond blacks in a post-9/11 world to include Sikhs and terrorist paranoia. He doesn’t beat you over the head with it. It actually fleshes out the characters, contributes to the plot, and at times even provides comic relief.
What comes as a surprise is the handling of the amorality of the central characters. It’s so matter-of-fact. Here are the grays. These are the people. Sure, their dialogue makes them seem calculating and at times it borders on implausible, but there’s never a lack of cleverness. Are they evil? Who’s right here? Who’s the victim? Wait, what just happened? Is he a bad guy? Lee leaves it up to the viewer to decide. There is one eternal thread, however, that runs throughout everyone’s machinations. One that the only child in the movie, perched atop a neat stack of cash inside a gleaming steel vault, so sagely relates, “Everybody gotta get paid.”
I won’t say anything else. You should have this entertainment all to yourself without me nibbling around the edges of the piecrust. But when you’ve seen it, turn it upside down in your head. Shake it. No loose ends. No glaringly obvious holes. You get an airtight plot; combine it with slick production (yes, I said it again. I mean it), effortless directing, and actors on top of their game and ladies and gentlemen we have a winner.
Go. See. Inside Man.
Much is afoot in and above the earth's atmosphere today. We began the day with a total solar eclipse, then got preliminary indications of a successful scramjet flight in Australia, and finished with a launch of the Soyuz, currently the only manned rocket servicing the space station. It's a welcome streak of good after the recent failure of the Falcon 1 rocket and hiccups in the Shuttle program. Be sure to watch the videos if you follow the links!
Now just to explain why I get so excited about all this aerospace jazz, let's go on a imaginary trip. Say, from London to Sydney in two hours on a scramjet (that's "Supersonic Combustion Ramjet," meaning that the air entering the no-moving-parts engine is not slowed to subsonic speeds before being mixed with fuel and ignited). Let me back up in case you missed it. "London to Sydney in two hours." That's right. Halfway around the world and not even enough time for an inflight movie. Now let's say you're looking out your synthetic window (a vidscreen hooked up to an external camera; windows aren't so practical on a scramjet due to the intense heating of the vehicle's skin at hypersonic velocities) and lo and behold, you witness the shadow of a total solar eclipse from the edge of space. As you recline in your spacefoam chair, you chuckle to yourself and wonder how crazy we had to be to strap ourselves into the Soyuz, Shuttle, and Falcon just to get off this rock.
Ladies and gentlemen, we may have found a solution, after over a year, to the issue of hosting Tyrone's videos. And it's not myspace (sorry Jinous). From whom else should the answer arise than the source of all answers on the internet: Google. I just received notice that my short time on the waiting list has already born fruit: a juicy and delicious slice of google pages.
So without further ado, I present to you my first furtive attempt at vlogging. Of course, it's much more labor intensive than flickr, and you've already heard me complain about how much time I spend posting photos (even though I enjoy it!).
Keep in mind I cobbled this together as quickly as possible. Don't judge too quickly or harshly. Just let me know if the video works for you. You'll most likely need Quicktime to view the new mobile phone format. Hope you like it!
I have four items for you tonight.
The seeds of change in Africa.
A warrior's take on the war. Thanks to doctor vince.
A view of Baghdad from ground level. Thanks to Sholeh via the BBC.
And on a much, much lighter note, I've just finished uploading all the pics from our recent trip to Savannah.
Discuss.
Over the weekend I was utilizing one of my racing simulators (read, if you must: playing a video game) when something unexpected occurred. At the end of a particularly close race, when I tried to save the replay, a screen popped up. "Replay limit reached.” Hmm. Seems I’d saved too many. This really shouldn’t happen, since XBOX has a functionally limitless hard drive for saving game data. But nevertheless, there were the words, staring me in the face.
I had to give up on that race. The exact three-dimensional vector path, every braking zone, every tail waggle, every drafting pass that led me to the first place podium lost forever. I returned to the main menu and navigated to the replay theater so I could delete less interesting races and create room for the particularly exceptional matches. That’s when it hit me.
Wait a second, why am I doing this? This is pretty boring, just watching what I’ve already done, even if it’s to prepare for future greatness. Yeah, that was a remarkably lurid slide around Adenauer-Forst, but it doesn’t mean I couldn’t do it again. Admittedly not in exactly the same arc, but hey, I still know how to get wide.
I put down the controller for a moment as a second thought struck me. Hold on now, how is this any different from taking photos? It’s still a record of an event, a moment in time. I recalled my parents asking me last week if I had any of my photos on flickr backed up. Some of them, here and there, I told them. “You should really save them somewhere else,” they offered, prudently. But now I thought to myself, “Why?”
This life is not really mine. True, from the perspective of the conscious being, there is no greater gift than to be alive to experience this glorious universe. But I don’t own it. I can’t keep it. I can only live it.
To whom do those replays truly matter? Am I saving them in hopes that someone, someday, will track down my XBOX after I die, sit through 100 hours of video game replays, and think to themselves, “Hey! That guy was a pretty good...video game racer.” Well, yeah. Why else would I save them? I’m certainly not going to waste my time watching them when I could actually be racing.
Same with the photos. Who cares? Me, really. I post them on flickr because as a human I crave feedback. I want to hear, “That’s funny,” “That’s pretty,” “You look like you’re having a great time!” But where’s the meaning? What am I trying to say? What do I have to prove? I’ll never be Ansel Adams, just like I’ll never be Michael Schumacher. So what’s the point?
I sat for another moment and worked it out. “Well it’s certainly not a worthless endeavor. If there really were no meaning to all this I’d have long ago ceased the effort.” What I really enjoy is taking pictures, choosing what to exclude from the world around me, serving it up as best I can and making a slight impression on someone else’s psyche. What I really love is racing. Sticking that pass through the twisties. Finding the perfect line. Achieving Zen-like focus. But these are acts of creation. And they really only matter to me, while I’m still in this shell. I shouldn’t care about a legacy. If I’m lucky enough to be alive while you are, let me show you the sunset. Let’s watch it together and not try to capture it with an instrument less perfect than our eyes. Come for a ride with me. If you’re brave, if you trust me, I’ll show you what this car can do.
So if all that's true, why even blog? Because I want to share ideas with you, but not in some misguided campaign for self-aggrandizement or immortality. I want to improve your world, show you something new, broaden the scope of your consciousness. And I would love for you to do the same for me. That’s what we’re here for. To enable each other. To improve, to march forward, to strive for the betterment of the individual and the whole.
My replays aren’t useless. When I post a time that’s in the top 100 worldwide, my laps are uploaded to a central server so that any other racer can watch them and learn from them. And since I rarely get first (it takes a few hours of repetition, again arguably a waste of time), I can always watch those better than me for ideas on how to improve my own skills.
My photos aren’t worthless. You can see a facsimile of a sunset you didn’t witness firsthand. You can see the mountain of food that I consume. You can see me, my friends, my life, my hopes, my dreams. And if you see an idea you like, take it. It’s yours. Improve it. Then share a little of your own with me.
Yesterday I read a doomsday prediction about the end of the internet. Back up your files! Panic! Your identity is in jeopardy! The sky is falling!
Let it fall. If I’m still here, I’m still me. I can create. I can begin again. I can rebuild. I am not afraid. I refuse to cling to the grains of sand.
The past is for perspective, to guide our steps, but our feet hit the ground in the now; the present is where we dwell. Don’t stand under the waterfall trying to hold the stream in your hands. Climb to the top! Dive in! Join the rest of us! The water’s great.
I'm deathly sick today. Ever have one of those colds that hits you like a ton of bricks? Yeah. Yesterday I went from the picture of health, breezing through an hour of indoor volleyball, to being wracked with pain, barely able to stand. All in the span of two hours. I tossed all night, sweating, then called in sick this morning. I've been moving in slow motion all day, every joint aching, but on the bright side, I've managed to post over a hundred new photos to flickr. May my pain be your gain. Be well and enjoy!
Hippies are not gone! I've spent the past two days at Langerado, my first large-scale music festival, and I can say unequivocally that flower power lives on. It's grown, it's matured, there's no more free love, and there's a New Age edge to it, but wow. People comfortable enough with their bodies to let it all hang out. Absolutely unfettered dancing. Frolicking, hoola hoops, capoeira, hacky sack, frisbee, soccer. Human pyramids. Singing. And did I mention the dancing?
I love hippies. They're nice. They share, they barter. They don't shower. But they don't fight either. This is the first major concert I've been to where there wasn't an underlying tension or threat of violence in the air. There were plenty of other things in the air, but none of that.
It was in this atmosphere that I had the distinct pleasure of witnessing a Flaming Lips concert. Wow. What can I say about it? 25 people on stage dressed in furry costumes dancing during the entire set? It was like tapping into a vein of sheer happiness. Giant balloons. Confetti guns. Colored smoke from megaphones. Wayne Coyne floating down from the sky in a giant clear Italian-made spaceball and hovering above the crowd. And the accompaniment to this explosion of joy was experimental, trippy, fuzzed-out electronic space rock. I love the Lips. This'll have to serve as a teaser, though, since I'm still 700 photos behind on flickr. So when the time comes for the photos to be displayed, you can say you heard it here first. I may just have to get a myspace account after all, to host the videos. You knew I'd eventually break down, right Jinous?
I taught capoeira tonight and I don't even know capoeira. My sister Caroline is in Brasil right now, does that count? I'm staying here in Boca with my new Brazilian friend Julie, how about that? No? Well, I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night...
But Langerado, man!
We came. We saw. We danced.
Wow. I think I just summed up my life.
March. March! It's already March. And I'm marching in circles like the Mad Hatter.
Since poor lil' lappy is past its prime (Win98, 6GB HD, 600MHz, 192MB RAM), I'm forced to go through a long and involved process to get photos onto flickr. At an average of 500 a month now it's quite a task to mail them to myself from my roommate's computer (gmail requires each attachment be clicked separately), download them to lappy, unzip them, crop and correct levels, upload to flickr (thank god for uploadr), then tag, title and caption them. Not to mention the whole reason I do it: to read and reply to comments.
So after cleaning and repairing the Camry today (and I mean cleaning and repairing: for example, removing and vacuuming the spare tire; drilling out the mounts [no bolts?!] for the worthless old hood hydraulics and replacing them) and washing all my dress shirts, I ran out of daylight. Now it's 10pm, I need a shower, and I've just spent three hours mailing 200 photos. To myself.
This is my life, kids, so I might as well blog about it. Just so you know why there's so much time between entries. If I got paid to do this, I could tell you stories and show you pictures every day. Alas, this is what I do in my "free time." Hang with me, and you might return to find a gem every couple months. In the meantime, I'm trying to cram as much into this life as I can. And time marches on!
