Confessions of the Dangerously Bored

The Greatest Novels of All Time (that i have not read in a while)

dangerouslybored — Tue, 11 May 2010 20:00:02 +0000

“One day, the thought came to me that the world should not be depicted as in earlier novels, from one writer’s standpoint, as it were; the world had crumbled, and only if one had the courage to show it in its crumbled state could one possibly offer an authentic conception of it. However, this did not mean that one had to tackle a chaotic book, in which nothing was comprehensible anymore; on the contrary, a writer had to invent extreme individuals with the most rigorous consistency, like the individuals the world consisted of, and he had to place these extreme individuals next to one another in their separateness”
Elias Canetti

Canetti’s novel Auto-da-Fé (1935) is a disturbing, difficult novel; I’ve tried to force it upon a couple of people without much success, which is a damn shame (for them), for along with the difficulty comes (as one would hope) one of the most powerful reading experiences I know of. There is no real authorial voice to guide the reader, no comforting narration. The story is told via the individual, extreme to the voice of caricature, voices of the characters: that of the cloistered philologist/sinologist Kien, the ignorant housekeeper Therese, the fascist apartment manager Benedict, the relatively normal (yet ultimately just as self-involved and blind) psychiatrist brother of Kien, Georges, and perhaps most memorably, the hunchbacked, chess playing dwarf Fischerle. The most effective book I have ever come across in communicating a sense of the complete and utter failure to communicate in a fragmented world, cruel and darkly comic, this book is a must read.

Canetti went on to write Crowds and Power in an attempt to understand, from a non-Freudian point of view, the relation between the individual and the mass, survival and power, an invaluable if little read contribution to the understanding of fascism.

For a more lighthearted read, on the other hand, his autobiography in three parts is well worth the time, a fascinating insight into the culture of the Sephardic Jews, and of course the life and mind of one of the great (Nobel Prize winning) minds of the 20th century (The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in my Ear, The Play of the Eyes).

A final thought from Canetti: “One might say that the cruelty of Aristophanes’ vision offered the sole possibility of holding together a world that was shivering into a thousand particles.”
With Auto-da-Fé, Canetti does his best to keep holding the world together.

Ah, miss newsom, you have my constant admiration

dangerouslybored — Tue, 11 May 2010 07:56:16 +0000

purrrrrrrrrrr

http://pitchfork.com/news/38738-newsom-takes-on-gaga-madonna/

This constant media fascination with the empty shell that is lady gaga is beginning to grate on everybody’s nerves, seemingly.
A second-rate Warhol rip-off + a second-rate Grace Jones/Madonna/Karen Andersson rip-off + second-rate pop music = the next big thing, apparently.

I can’t say i’m hugely impressed by Albertsen’s final conclusion, however:
“You could argue that Gaga’s success in making people like M.I.A. and Joanna Newsom hopped up enough to consider the idea of art and talk out of turn in interviews basically fulfills her purpose. She’s a provocateur, and it seems to be working.”
as far as i’m concerned the purpose of any musician is to make music that’s worth listening to, or at worst not make me want to fill my ears with cement. if lady gaga could provoke reactions with her music, rather than with her half-arsed Warhol philosophy etc, nobody would bat an eyelid.
Albertsen might as well be saying, “her success at manipulating the media”. hell, i guess that is what defines success these days.

Short Film of the day: The heart of the world, by Guy Maddin

dangerouslybored — Mon, 10 May 2010 18:26:31 +0000

Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World is on my to watch list, in the meantime, this is wonderfully free…

David Simon, god of rock?

dangerouslybored — Mon, 10 May 2010 17:28:12 +0000

Homicide: Life on the Street

On the day I watched the final episode of The Wire, season 5, i think i probably cried a little; manly tears (99% salt, 1% water), but tears nonetheless. The Wire is, as we all know by now, one of the great television series of all time, Dickensian, as critics (and season 5 itself), never got tired of saying (in memoriam, David Mills, you were one hell of a writer).
Sadly, I will soon have the occasion to be crying more manly, painful tears, as I reach the end of the seventh series of Homicide: Life on the Street. Based on David Simon’s book of reportage, Homicide, A Year on the Killing Streets, and featuring production and writing credits by Simon in later years, and with writing contributions by David Mills, Homicide is one of the great character-driven cop shows. Not quite the work of genius that is the Wire, the intricacy, the capturing-a-world ambition is not there, but a solid, gritty, often funny show about the less-than-glamorous life of career detectives. And it was about their lives, not just a new and interesting crime every week, making it more than simply a procedural like Law & Order, where the personal lives of the protagonists are there only to add a bit of spice. The detectives of Homicide are people i will miss. And Lieutenant Al Giardello, well, the man is a god amongst men…

You have the right to worship me as your god

Over the course of it’s seven series Homicide and L&O did team up for a few cross-over episodes, which were always good value. Any way to get more Jack McCoy on to television is good by me.

Men are pigs and we should all rot in hell. Unfortunately, that's not my jurisdiction.

If Al Giardello and Jack McCoy spent some time together what would happen? a. they would become a superpowered law and order team, fighting crime, b. they would get married, or c. the entire (fictional) world would explode in a conflagration of righteous anger? you decide.
Part of the fun of watching Homicide after having seen the Wire is seeing so many actors of Wire fame in smaller roles (Sidnor, Landsman and a tonne of others all have bit parts), and seeing old characters in new incarnations, like detective Meldrick Lewis as the editor with ethics in Wire season 5, and detective Gaherty as McNulty’s friendly judge. Part of the fun of watching Homicide after reading Simon’s book is seeing where the characters came from in the real Baltimore homicide unit, and in spotting the occasional real life guest star (such as Gary D’Addario, the actual homicide lieutenant and basis for the character of Al Giardello, playing the recurrent character of the head of the Quick Response Team). So all in all, it’s a lot of fun.
It should also be mentioned that everyone’s favourite wise-cracking Jewish detective, Munch, started life in season 1 of Homicide, before graduating(?) to Law & Order. Munch had a cameo in the Wire‘s last season (was it the last episode?), sitting in a bar, mentioning that he used to own one (the Waterfront from Homicide). According to the commentary on the last episode, there was debate over whether that was too “cute”, or the like, but seemingly no one could resist having richard belzer play the same character in three different shows…

The one major criticism i have of Homicide, which is not really all that major and is kind of understandable, is the music. There is some really godawful 90s rock in this show, used to cover the occasional searching/grieving/action montage, which as i say is kind of understandable as it was a 90s show, but on the other hand, this stuff was never good. Now, i prefer to blame Barry Levinson, the dude who first turned Homicide into a television show, but given the ponytail i’ve seen Simon sporting in a few interviews i’ve got a funny feeling that he ain’t so squeaky clean in all of this.
Which leads me, indirectly, to my one alternate-reality crack-inspired-vision for the day: i would trade my soul, or someone else’s if possible, for one Homicide musical episode, something along the lines of this:

And now i will just join everyone in sitting back, and waiting for Treme. A show about music? hmmm…

Mixtape Heaven #2

dangerouslybored — Sun, 09 May 2010 19:13:34 +0000

Theme (or more appropriately, form limitation): Haiku.
Of all the subject matter, in all the world… Somehow this haiku mix celebrates Archimedes. Huzzah for science!

Side a:

Eureka! such a
scream, Archimedes. You left
the water running.

(tracks:
Eureka – Jim o’rourke
such a scream – tom waits
archimedes – john cale
you left the water running – otis redding)

side b:

Engineer on the
run, wet, nude, cold as ice. Feel
the pain of shrinkdown!

(tracks:
Engineer – machinefabriek
on the run – pink floyd
wet – Bai Tian
nude – radiohead
cold as ice – atlas sound
feel the pain – dinosaur jr
shrinkdown – john butcher)

Thomas Mann quote of the day

dangerouslybored — Sun, 09 May 2010 15:41:20 +0000

from Doctor Faustus. Serenus, the narrator, discourses on a book, Réflexions sur la violence:
“…in the era of the masses, parliamentary discussion would necessarily prove utterly inadequate as a means of shaping political will; that in the future what was needed in its place were mythic fictions, which would be fed to the masses as the primitive battle cries necessary for unleashing and activating political energies. This was in fact the book’s crude and intriguing prophecy: that henceforth popular myths, or better, myths trimmed for the masses, would be the vehicle of political action — fables, chimeras, phantasms that needed to have nothing whatever to do with truth, reason, or science in order to be productive nonetheless, to determine life and history, and thereby to prove themselves dynamic realities. It is easy to see that the book did not bear its menacing title in vain, for it dealt with violence as the triumphant counterpart of truth. It made it possible to understand that truth’s fate was closely related to the individual, indeed identical with it–and that fate was devaluation. The book opened a sardonic rift between truth and power, truth and life, truth and community. Its implicit message was that community deserved far greater precedence, that truth’s goal was community, and that whoever wished to be part of that community must be prepared to jettison major portions of truth and science, to make the sacrificium intellectus.” p385-6

The Greatest Novels of All Time (that i have read this weekend)

dangerouslybored — Sat, 08 May 2010 18:55:44 +0000

Often it is the most simply phrased of expressions that seem the most profound, whatever the actual value. Hence the popularity of the aphorism, i suppose.
A lifetime or so ago, wandering through spain, I came across Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, with a preface by Vladimir Nabokov. of the book itself i remember nothing, but of the preface one paragraph remains, where Nabokov speaks of
“1. the sadness of sad things
2. their absurdity
3. our indifference to them “
Young, and intent on experiencing everything to its fullest, including (but thankfully not limited to) the darker end of the emotional spectrum, i suffered through bouts of intense depression where there seemed little but sadness and absurdity; this summation of the world, of humanity, seemed more right than anything i had ever read before, amplifying the sadness even more, of course…
I have since read a number of VN’s books, Lolita, Despair, a few others, but it was only recently (this weekend) that i finally managed to pick up and finish Pale Fire, despite having purchased it years ago.

The book is presented as a critical edition of the ultimate work of a respected American poet, John Shade: we have a preface by the editor, a Dr. Charles Kinbote, the poem itself (of 999, or perhaps 1000 lines), a number of annotations to the poem (provided by Kinbote), and finally an index of names/themes (indexing the notes, in general, not the poem).
An old poet, an obsessed admirer, a potentially untrustworthy narrator, insanity and doubles, semblances and shadows, this is a book with all of the typical Nabokov obsessions and flourishes, and hence endlessly entertaining. there is also, however, a real sense of sadness, of the ache of loss, a sympathy for all concerned that can sometimes be lost among the verbal fireworks of VN’s work. This is a book that I look forward to rereading already.
Go, read it. Please?

they never teach anything useful in school these days…

dangerouslybored — Fri, 07 May 2010 21:34:40 +0000

Statistics is the new grammar.
hell, they barely taught me grammar at school, let alone stats…

Free Speech: there’s a platform for that.

dangerouslybored — Fri, 07 May 2010 21:13:29 +0000

friendly little guy, eh?

Actually, I assume there are a few. But fancy new touch screen smartphone platforms, with thousands of applications to download and distract you from the mundanity of your daily existence? or at least to keep you busy for half an hour on the bus? there are two leading players, apple’s iphone os and google’s android. and which one of those has an application store with such a bizarre censorship policy that it outlaws satire of “public figures” (unless there’s a massive media backlash?). why, the iphone, of course.
which should come as no surprise, steve jobs (or at least apple, but then as far as jobs and the shareholders are concerned he pretty much is apple) has garnered quite an impressive reputation for bullying over the last five years or more, suing anyone he can lay his subpoenas on. tired of being the also-ran, i imagine, and reveling no doubt in his newfound post-ipod/itunes monopoly power.
now, on the one hand, who the hell cares? i recall during the terrible events in haiti one pointless article trumpeting “iphone app saves life” or somesuch nonsense, as a man, trapped under rubble, was able to download a first aid app and, i don’t know, learn how to tie a torniquet or something. the question for me being, if he could download an app, and hence had access to the internet, why the hell didn’t he just look up first-aid on his web browser? and until apple decides that in actual fact ALL traffic must be channeled through the app store, that a web browser, with it’s access to satire and nudity etc, is far too much responsibility for the poor little consumer, it doesn’t really matter what the hell the app store rules are. except insomuch as they reveal that steve jobs is a megalomaniacal crazyman.
on the other hand, this is free speech. don’t we usually get worked up over this kind of thing? isn’t it kinda disturbing that a company that dominates the digital media sector has this kind of rule, this kind of ethos? sure, their stuff is pretty, but there are other products with often more functionality that don’t try and tell you what to read, what to think.
and poor google. trying to do right by their karma, trying to make a stand over censorship in china, releasing an open source mobile platform and getting sued for it (well, sued via htc, anyway, and on that note those patents appear the untrained eye to be a load of something unpleasant)… still, with a little bit of advertising, and a little bit of customer awareness, i don’t see why android shouldn’t succeed in the long run, given the quality of handsets like the htc desire…
but on that note, where is the advertising? walking in to three to look at the android powered sony xperia x10, you have to look hard to find a mention of android anywhere. which is just plain ridiculous. these days apps, not just hardware, sell phones.
ahhh well. will the good guys win in the end? time will tell.

film link of the day: the hitchcock/truffaut interview tapes

dangerouslybored — Thu, 06 May 2010 19:34:51 +0000

mp3 format, enough said. it’s like christmas for film lovers!
http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Hitchcock/Truffaut%20Tapes