Saturday the Twenty-Ninth of August, Two Thousand and Nine
"Heresy was good; heresy meant opportunity."
I spoke with Sumana recently (her blog is back!), and she told me I should read Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, the story of how the Oakland A's, one of baseball's dirt-poorest teams, managed to put together a winning team by finding undervalued players, using statistics no one else was looking at (called "sabermetrics"). Experience has taught me that if Sumana tells you to do something, it is basically always a good idea to do it. This is one of those cases, because I never would have picked up this book on my own—it's hard to imagine a concept more immediately boring to me than the combination of baseball and statistics.
But in the end, it's not really about either. What's really fascinating about the book (and what led me to devour it in a day) is what it dances around: the coming of the Age of the Geek to an industry that had been assumed to be geekproof. As it turns out, not even professional sports are immune to the awesome power of a bespectacled dweeb with a laptop, and a lot of the tension in the book comes from the friction between the old-school jocks and their new bosses, a gaggle of nerds who come in and tell them they're doing everything wrong. Obviously that's fun to read just from a "nerd power!" perspective, but it's also fascinating to think of all the other industries still out there, plagued by chronic inefficiencies (i.e. opportunities) and just begging for the right nerd to come along and revolutionize them. (Mind you, easier said than done: the only reason it was possible with baseball is that people have been collecting stats on every single baseball game for 150 years or so.)
Of course, given that baseball is a sport, the question (not explicitly addressed in the book, but again danced around) is—do we really want our sports to be optimally efficient? The best players, from a sabermetric point of view, are the ones who take very long at-bats (to tire out the pitcher), are happy with getting walked, never steal bases, and generally don't sparkle. Throughout the book, the A's resident sabermetrician, Paul DePodesta, refers to one of the players he would most like to sign, Kevin Youkilis, as "Euclis, the Greek god of walks". Sabermetricians love walks because they improve the team's field position and increase the likelihood of a run that inning, but do fans? And because of their focus on a player's ability to get on base, either by being walked or hitting, sabermetricians are happy to ignore... well, pretty much everything else about that player, really. Youkilis, for example, is described in the book as "a fat third baseman who couldn't run, throw, or field"—and that's quite charitable compared to the descriptions of poor Jeremy Brown. From the perspective of winning games and therefore making money—which is all the A's could afford to think about—the sabermetric approach may work, but I certainly can't imagine it making baseball any more interesting. As fascinating as I found this book, I found myself wondering if I would have been able to stay awake through all of the games described in it. Really, the ultimate fault for that lies not with the sabermetricians—show a geek an inefficient system that can be gamed through intelligence and analysis, and they'll do so just for the fun of it—but with the ridiculous salaries players began to get in the free agency era (which made sabermetrics a business rather than a hobby) and with the structure of the game itself. If the ability to get on base is so incredibly important that it trumps even the most basic elements of athleticism, then it is baseball itself that is broken, at least insofar as it's a sport.
All that said, a story about geeks beating jocks on their home turf is hard to pass up, and it's both well-told and full of interesting thoughts that apply to more than just baseball. I know it's not exactly new or groundbreaking—the book's been out six years—but it's new to me, so I get to blog about it.
Tuesday the Twenty-Fifth of August, Two Thousand and Nine
The irony is that usually I'm much better at starting stories than ending them.
I am feeling very frustrated by the Fear Sweeney opening scene. I can't get the pacing right, or the dialogue sounding natural. Dialogue is what I do! It's like my one big skill in writing. And I thought that by changing the introduction from the old narrative-heavy version to a dialogue-focused one I might solve the problems I've been having with that scene for seven damn years, but I'm just not getting anywhere. I rewrite it, I rewrite the rewrites, and each new version sounds more stilted than the last. By the middle of the second part, it starts developing real charm and a natural flow better than anything I've written before or since, but this first scene, the crucial introduction to the characters and the themes, is almost unreadable! But after God-only-knows how many drafts (probably 20 major revisions and I think five complete rewrites) it's become so overprocessed that it's become the literary equivalent of Kraft Singles. And I can't just go back to an earlier version, because those weren't good enough either.
I don't know how to escape this cycle. I think part of it is that so much of the emotional content of the scene was written by 2002!Martin, and 2009!Martin doesn't even remember what 2002!Martin was feeling when he wrote it. 2009!Martin has a broader repertoire of emotional content to draw on, but can't bring up the exact stew of feelings that went into the first version of this scene. So while the first version had terrible prose, it at least meant it; the current version is clearly written by a better writer, but lacks the sincerity, and that's what makes it sound unnatural.
So how do I recapture it? Maybe I should just try to clear my memory of all the earlier drafts and just start writing from scratch, infusing it with my current emotional state rather than trying to recapture a long-forgotten one. Maybe I should get piss-drunk to drop my writerly inhibitions before attempting it. Maybe now that I'm older than the characters I once dreamed of growing up to be just like, it's too late. Maybe I need to be 20 years old and innocent and so very wrong about everything again. Maybe I'm too smart now. Maybe I'm too sane.
Sunday the Twenty-Third of August, Two Thousand and Nine
1 man. 2 days. 3 theatres.
It has been a busy weekend!
I wasn't quite sure what I expected from Edward Albee'sSeascape (at The American Century Theatre, yesterday), but I did expect giant anthropomorphic lizards discussing philosophy, and giant anthropomorphic lizards discussing philosophy there were. What really impressed me about it was that the lizards weren't just the easy gimmick they could have been; almost the entire first act is just a conversation between the two human characters, a husband and a wife who have just reached retirement age, and yet it's every bit as engrossing and powerful as the second act. At the end of the first act, the couple meet a pair of lizards who have just evolved sapience and left the ocean, and the second act is all about the first contact, the reactions of the humans, and the culture shock the lizards go through, and the realization—by both lizards and humans—that the consequence of intelligence is the knowledge of mortality. (God damn it's hard to talk about plays without sounding like a pretentious goit.) But despite the sometimes heavy subject matter, there were a lot of very funny moments. The production was a very good one, though they clearly gave their set designer a bigger budget than he or she was used to. ("And here, at the entranceway, we will build... HALF OF A BOAT HULL FOR NO REASON." I was really hoping the lizards would break out tiny bicycles and start doing tricks using the hull as a ramp, but that may be because I just reread "Let Us Now Praise Awesome Dinosaurs" the other day.) The actor who played Charlie, the male human, was particularly impressive.
Julie & Julia (at the AFI Silver, yesterday) could almost have been retitled Meryl Streep Can Kick All of Your Asses, but that wouldn't be quite fair to Stanley Tucci, who kicks some ass of his own in this one. Every other actor in this movie should seriously just have stayed at home. The frame story, about a bored government employee cooking every recipe from Julia Child'sMastering the Art of French Cooking over the course of a year and blogging about it, wasn't without its charms (after all, who wouldn't like a story about a blogger getting a book deal, meaningful cough?) but couldn't possibly stand up to the flashbacks to Julia Child's life and marriage. Frequently hilarious; if you are capable of not laughing aloud when Meryl Streep shouts, in Julia's unique warble, "gung'f ubggre guna n fgvss pbpx!"
, then you may well be an anthropomorphic lizard. The movie is also notable for having not one but several scenes that pass the Bechdel/Wallace test (though you'd be surprised how few of them there are).
District 9 (at the Charles, today—turns out it was still running this weekend) was not the Second Coming of Science Fiction, but it was an excellent and intelligent action movie. I liked the structure, with the pseudo-documentary to build the universe and develop the deeper themes of the movie and then transitioning into the full-blown action part to make the bad guys' heads blow up. (If you're offended by South Africans either a) cursing or b) exploding, you might want to skip this one.) But despite the 'splosions, it is at its heart a very dark and scathing look at racism and xenophobia—not just in South Africa's past, but in South Africa's present, and mired in the human soul across all nations, races, and eras. Yeah. Kind of heavy. Every single human character who has any impact on the plot is complicit in unconscionable crimes, including the unwitting hero. Most of the "prawns" aren't very likeable either; lost, leaderless, hated, ghettoized, and addicted to Nigerian cat food, most of the ones we see have become the violent, mindless brutes the humans consider them to be. There are only two genuinely likeable characters in the movie, one of each species, and only one a major character—and by the end, bar vf va wnvy sbe oybjvat gur juvfgyr ba uvf rivy rzcyblref, naq gur bgure vf urnqrq onpx gb uvf ubzr cynarg gb nffrzoyr na neznqn gb yvorengr uvf sryybj cenjaf ol sbepr.
The ending is ambiguous and very much anticipates a sequel, which might not be a bad thing, since there's clearly a lot of room to flesh out the universe further. Side note: hell of props to Image Engine for creating CG characters and effects I barely even noticed.
Saturday the Twenty-Second of August, Two Thousand and Nine
Pavlovian shovel.
This morning, I was woken by the sound of a shovel on concrete, which my brain immediately associates with "snow day". It was all I could do not to call my mother and tell her to turn on the TV to see if school was closed.
Monday the Seventeenth of August, Two Thousand and Nine
Films what I need to see soon:
I never go to the movies, but lately there seems to be a lot of good movies out, or maybe I'm just more aware of them. Anyway, I'm making a list mostly for my own reference:
District 9 is at the Charles until Wednesday (stupid Friday-Wednesday schedule), then at Arundel Mills after that
Paper Heart looks like it could be interesting, but it's only at the Charles until Wednesday and then isn't showing anywhere else around here, and it can wait until it's on DVD
Huh. Okay, I guess there were two movies out I need to see. I'd swear it felt like more. Or am I forgetting something? Nothing much at the AFI Silver until Who Framed Roger Rabbit weekend after next (although I missed The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, for which I cannot quite forgive myself). The Senator is reduced to playing Michael Jackson: Live in Bucharest. And I guess that's... pretty much all the theatres I actually enjoy going to.
Sunday the Sixteenth of August, Two Thousand and Nine
I suspect this is a question with immense psychological ramifications.
Ignoring all other considerations (rising heat, stairs, street noise, ease of burglary, &c), would you rather live on the top floor of a building, where you wouldn't have to worry about the neighbors above you making too much noise, or on the bottom floor, where you wouldn't have to worry about whether you were making too much noise?
"They've got, uh, printers in the basement you can use."
Have you guys heard of After Last Season? The trailer evidently caused something of a stir, with some people assuming it was a prank, and possibly even some variety of bizarre viral thing by Spike Jonze to somehow promote Where the Wild Things Are. The Spike Jonze theory makes no sense at all, but it does make slightly more sense than the idea that someone would actually make a movie with that trailer. As it turns out, though, someone did, and even convinced four theatres to run it for a week. The only conclusion the critics were able to come to was that it was an attempt to deconstruct fiction itself.
Welladay. I am not sure what I think of this! On the one hand, I have to give props to the props. (The paper MRI machine is particularly awesome.) As far as the notion of deconstructing the most basic assumptions of fiction... well, it's an interesting challenge. It makes me think of overeager experimental theatre (and in fact the trailer has a certain ineffable community theatrish vibe to it), which, as my own recent experience can attest, is not always a good thing. But after reading this interview, with the director and writer, Mark Region, I'm not at all convinced that was the intent. It looks to me more like a serious attempt to make a serious film that seriously failed—but failure isn't always a bad thing. Maybe if Region wasn't trying for the whole deconstruction thing, that would paradoxically make it more likely to succeed? Hm.
Another theory which jumps to my suspicious mind, though I haven't seen it anywhere else, is that the whole thing is a scam—a Springtime for Hitler-esque con game. Region said in the above-linked interview that the movie cost $5 million to produce—but that it was filmed in five days with a crew of 20 or so. He claimed that most of the money ($4,960,000 by his estimate) went to the "special effects and the computer animation", which is completely absurd. Did he have a deal going with the VFX "studio" (i.e. some guy with a laptop) to bilk his investors? I mean, he seems to have gone out of his way to not publicize the thing, or even to distribute it. (It was a group of his investors who made the deal to get it screened in the four theatres where it was shown. And Region himself didn't even go see it, incidentally.) Was he just trying to keep the movie out of the limelight to prevent scrutiny? Even if it wasn't Region stealing from them, the investors should still be complaining, because seriously, five million for those effects? He's either a con artist or the worst businessman in film history.
Primer, for the record, cost $7,000. And probably made more sense.
Incidentally, I heard about this via John Campbell, author of Pictures for Sad Children and (last I heard) gentleman friend of Kate Beaton, who summed up his feelings on the movie (which he went to see) by saying "i enjoy some things that are unsettling or that may have been made by a dangerously insane person". (Campbell even made a special t-shirt for the occasion. Awesome.)
"Very few cartoons are broadcast live. It's a terrible strain on the animators' wrists."
Kseniya Simonova'sТы всегда рядом 1945 ("You are always close, 1945") sand animation is both technically impressive and very moving. To be fair, the war is a pretty easy target for a quick shot of pathos, particularly in Ukraine, but it's done well.
I have to say, on principle I hate these [Name of Country]'s Got Talent things, but every now and then they actually do demonstrate the proposition in the title.
