t.a.'s blog
Jake's breakthru hit
Jake Shimabukuro is another artist who owes his career to the Internet. Despite being a fabulously talented musician, he plays an instrument too many people mistakenly consider a joke: the ukulele. People forget too often, in too many contexts, that the tool is less important that the person wielding it. And Jake knows how to wield his axe.
Or his uke. He is as good as any musician around, but who's going to ever hear about, much listen to, a guy with an unpronounceable last name who lives in Hawaii and plays — what? You're kidding, right? But thanks to YouTube, people could click on the link, have their consciousness expanded and then share the link with friends. And before you can say "Don Ho", the kid's a star. As he deserves to be.
I heard about him from my son, who saw him perform at the World Music Fest in Grass Valley, CA (run by his mom's husband's brother & sil, or sister & bil; I don't know and do not care). So I watched Jake on YT, I got my consciousness expanded and have since acquired more of his music. His choice of music is eclectic and it has one common element throughout:
The guy kicks its ass.
Jake Shimabukuro. This is the piece that got him known, a version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" that gives George Harrison smiles in heaven.
2 REK for Kriste
I love Robert Earl Keen, Jr. He writes great songs and performs the hell out of them. I saw him once, and two different times idiots jumped the stage. The roadies took care of them and Keen just ignored them and kept on singing. He's got a ton of great music, but I picked these two for Kriste to listen to.
This first song is pretty straightforward: it was co-written by Uncle Shel Silverstein. A sweet ballad
The second is a variant of the old folk song tradition of talking blues. Keen describes setting up for a show in a very different hall and comments on his own views about music.
This is Keen doing a digital story without pictures. But his lyrics paint pictures that make very clear what the setting is.
"Lost" finale
“How was it?”
That question will be asked millions of times for at least the next 24 hours, and the answer, for me, takes two different routes. Both of which can be summarized by one word, the word I find myself infused with as I think back on the show and its conclusion: Sweet.
As in, lovely. Kind. Refreshing. Perhaps even blessed — even if it was a tv show that contained almost as much advertising as show content. Sweet.
The question “How was it?” depends in general on another question: “What were you hoping for?” In many cases, “What did you expect?” might be another question that comes to mind, but for fans of “Lost”, much of the pleasure was in expecting to be surprised in the most twisted ways, therefore making “expected” something better left behind. “What were you hoping for?” is the more relevant question, and one that is, I think, easily answered for most fans: To have the characters together, alive and happy. We wanted Charlie to survive and be with Claire, Sayid to be with Shannon, Sun and Jin, Desmond and Penny, Sawyer and Juliet — Jack and Kate. We wanted Locke to be whole and Hugo to be cool, dude. We wanted a goddamn happy ending, and that’s what we got.
But it had to make sense. It couldn’t be Bobby Ewing waking from his dream or an autistic boy looking in a snowglobe. The happy ending had to be authentic; it had to make sense in the universe “Lost” inhabited. The island story had to be resolved, not tossed aside for the happy ending, and it was. Jack died to save the island, and Hugo and Ben remained behind to protect it and to find a new way to get Desmond home. The jet with Kate, Sawyer and the others flying over Jack as he died was their inadvertent farewell.
But even as the ending had to make sense, it had to avoid being complete. The story’s ending had to be happy, it had to make sense (no cheating) and it had to be Lost-like. We know there are important things we have not been told. We think they are going to heaven — but are they? The world where Hugo, Sawyer, Kate and the others survive and where they return to their lives: it doesn’t disappear. Even as the characters gather at the end, we know there is more than what we see. The bright light envelops them and hides from us the next stage of their journey — and we exit on the island, as Jack dies and the others continue forward. At the same time we have the happy ending and the sad, all of them together and only a few who survive.
“What were you hoping for?” I think most fans got what they were hoping for, an ending that touched their hearts and, at the same time, left a few mysteries still lurking. There will be no sequel, no spinoff (the Ben Linus Show!) but there is a certain incompleteness that feels exactly right. “Lost” is done, but the finish combined both sweetness and mystery in a way that, I hope, will leave fans, not satisfied, but complete. As a huge story arc, it was masterful writing, and to me, they got the ending right. “How was it?”
Great. Wonderfully crafted. Sweet.
"Un Lun Dun" by China Mieville - a bit of good luck
Sometimes you just get lucky.
I went to the library recently to pick up a hold that had been sent to the wrong library. I got a bunch of cds, as I usually do, then I looked through the graphic novels to see if there was anything worthwhile. At the Belmont Library, my “home” library, that section is near the science fiction section, and for a change, I decided to have a quick look there as well.
And as I said, sometimes you just get lucky.
“Un Lun Dun” by China Mieville, is not at the same level as Philip Pullman’s trilogy “His Dark Materials” — nothing is — but, like Pullman, Mieville creates an alternate version of our world that is impossible, completely believable and one the reader longs to visit as soon as possible. There are no daemons in UnLondon, but there is just about everything else.
Including a villain so evil, it’s immediately recognized, both from normal life and every James Bond movie ever made. It is that evil.
This book is for “young adults” — library-speak for teenagers. But like any great YA novel, it has layers for adults to enjoy and appreciate. Mieville is a great punster, not with mere words but entire concepts. He takes “normal” London life and twists it inside-out, creating not merely the great “abcity” of UnLondon (as well as Parisn’t and other unversions of our “real” world) but people, places and, for want of a better word, things that mirror our world — but that mirror itself is twisted and possibly inverted. It’s a strange and almost, but not quite, complete unfamiliar world beyond the Odd.
Broken umbrellas become unbrellas, able to serve the will of Brokkenbroll, the Unbrellessimo. The Pons Absconditus is in no particular place but is always available to terminate wherever it is needed. The sun is the UnSun, a dim ring of a star from whose center our sun was taken. And so on. Mieville is clearly having so much fun discovering all the twists possible in such a world, and that gives the novel a freshness and energy too often missing when a novel is the result of too much work. One of the great things about “Un Lun Dun” is that it makes no attempt to be like anything else. Mieville has a huge imagination, and while the ending is a bit awkward (and prolonged), that takes nothing away from how much damn fun the book is to read.
I need more of this luck.
Doctor Who S5: steampunked and a true companion
A new Doctor, a new companion and even a new TARDIS, all steampunked and gleaming. New Doctors always take some getting used to, and I did not care for the look of this new one (played by Matt Smith) when he appeared at the end of Season 4 (as they are numbered in the modern version of the epic) and replaced David Tennant. Mind you, I hadn’t cared for Tennant either when he replaced Christopher Eggleston, my favorite Doctor to date (of course, I watched little of the old series, seeing a few Tom Baker episodes when I lived in England but none of the others). Doctors come and go, so it doesn’t do much good to decide you like any one in particular. At some point, he will move on.
The same is doubly true for the Doctor’s “companion”, the young women with whom he is travelling. Rose Tyler was probably the greatest of the companions, and when she was trapped in an alternate universe, never to see or be seen by the Doctor again, it was simply heart-breaking. Of course, Billie Piper went on from there to play a hard-working, secret-revealing call girl in “Secret Diary of a Call Girl” (whoops, I see in IMDB I have almost all of S3 to catch up with!) so we didn’t so much lose a companion as gain, well, a companion.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The dragon tattoo? Has almost no point in the book; mere decoration — literally. But I guess it sounded better than "The Girl with the Wasp Tattoo". I'm pretty sure when Hollywood remakes the current Swedish movie, they'll play up the dragon tattoo as they fuck-up the movie. That would be par for the course.
Some books you read for in-depth character explorations, others for beautiful descriptions of landscapes or the human psyche. This book is about the plot and little more. The characters are one-dimensional, Sweden is rendered in moderately interesting snapshots, several critiques are delivered of financial reporting, and people live through personal crises for which I had almost no sympathy. In many ways, this book (and, it appears, the subsequent companion volumes to the trilogy) are Harry Potter books for grown-ups. Instead of Harry and Hermione, we have Mikel and Lisbeth, and several nasty people playing the role of He Who Cannot Be Libeled. In other words, something far from world-class literature but a hell of a lot of fun to read.
I wanted to read Girl both to join in the fun but also so I could see the Swedish version of the movie in current release, sans spoilage; apparently, since it was not made in Hollywood, it's not a piece of shit. How refreshing that would be (oh god what if they let Peter Jackson do a Bones to the remake?). Worth the read? Damn right it is. How terribly sad the author, Stieg Larsson, didn't survive to enjoy the success. He's done what I'm guessing he set out to do: entertain the hell out of readers. I doubt he had pretentions to literary greatness with this; it reads as if written by a very good writer wanting to tell a new type of mystery that defies easy guessing at the solution. (And a bit of possible foreshadowing at what might be in book 2; that's always fun, too.)
And for that, he gets a big thanks. I just hope he makes it clear in the later books why the damn dragon matters at all.
My problem
We all have our problems in life. My friend Kriste had to survive a brain tumor last year. My brother has to hope that his newspaper job continues to be one that is not deep-sixed. My older son will soon be having to learn how to live as a civilian — and a father — as he returns from Iraq. Problems are universal, and they all share this lovely feature: only the ones that we live and experience belong to us.
That makes them precious.
My problem right now is all the things I want, and need, to do — and the simple fact that I am terrible about getting anything done. So I have to learn how to get things done. It doesn't have to be everything; it just has to be all the important things that, if left undone, will make me sad and disappointed to have left undone. Which means I have to learn to be efficient, disciplined and focused. These are not traits that come naturally to me.
Anime: a genre worthy of getting to know
Anime, of course, is for geeks, guys who live in their parents’ basement and 14-year-old Japanese girls. That’s a bit of its rep, but anyone who thinks that probably doesn’t understand why Up or Iron Gian or Beauty and the Beast are such amazing works of art. There is so much cheap, crappy animation in the world, it’s easy to write off the entire field. There are even more crappy movies and tv than animation, so it’s a stupid thing to say. Yet it gets said, or thought, so it needs to be answered.
Cheap crap is cheap crap, whether it’s food, tv or animation. The medium of expression is irrelevant to the concept of quality; there are 30-second commercials that are excellent expressions of art and skill. Not a lot, of course, but enough to prove the point that quality is possible in any field of human endeavor. And quality is what sets any work apart, not its form or format.
Azumanga Daioh, for an excellent example, is better television than at least 90% of all the sitcoms ever made. A 25-episode story arc following the lives of a group of Japanese girls in their three years of high school. What it is not is an extended After-school Special, exploring the growing pains and so on; it is, instead, hilarious, silly and, now and then, touching. There’s no boy troubles, no teenage rebellion, just a lot of goofy characters, a few sweet moments and art that is wonderful to watch. Yes, it’s anime so there are many scenes of minimal, and often no, animation. Stills, and the mere moving of still elements, are a major aspect of anime that need to be accepted along with the Coyote’s ability to hover in space until he looks down at his feet.
why a cowboy?
“why a cowboy?” i asked her.
she pretended she didn’t understand the question,
giving me her
excuse-me-what-language-are-you-speaking?
look, designed and performed to make me feel
the world’s stupidest person.
this time, it didn’t work,
not with her beat-up straw cowboy hat
and the old, scruffy boots sitting next to her bare feet.
she squinted up at me–
i could see the scrunching of her eyes and nose
behind sunglasses;
for a moment
i wanted her to toss me aside,
use my dismissal to underscore how much
cooler she was than i ever would be —
tilting her head slightly.
ash blond curls scattered out from under the hat
in any direction they could manage.
she yanked her mouth to the same downward side,
tenderly biting the inside of her bottom lip.
i sensed in that moment
i mattered too little to her
for this glance to be anything more
than the moment’s pause before
i ceased to exist again.
i did not merit even stupid-person status,
just another guy trying too hard.
“o, that’s right. i forgot. you’re from Texas.
it’s your national costume, and you’re being patriotic.”
i think at that point she really did want to laugh,
but sometimes mere desire is not enough.
Aug 2003/Dec 2009