My Futility Exercise Regimen (7 of 50)

Luck Presses—ten reps.
Spirit Lifts--five reps
Beer Curls—twenty-five reps
Jack Squats—fifty reps
Cheap Kicks—ten reps
Credit Crunches—fifty reps
Hair Caises—ten reps
Payment Extensions-five reps
Chip Dips-twenty reps
Shaving Chin Ups—forty reps
Pants Pull Downs—ten reps
Shoulder Shrugs—fifty reps
Eye Rotations—five reps
Time Flies—twenty minutes
Pork Pull Ups—Ten Reps
Shirt Pull Overs –five reps
Take Notice Sit Ups-twenty reps
Push-Your-Wife-to-Far Ups-one rep
Mind Bends—twenty reps
Dead Tired Lifts—one rep
Oblique Suggestions—twenty reps

And of course, always make sure you stretch credulity before and after exercising.

Behold My Mystical Opulence, Finally (6 of 50)

Someone hit the fill button and the sky turned the color of pink grapefruit. I'd just arranged for an afternoon in December to be delivered in five business days or less. I considered my options while I waited.
The sidewalk moved, forward then back, then buckled. It didn't matter to me. My feet had been off the ground for a good three minutes by then.
Several miles away, everyone had begun crying. The crying swept towards me like a wave. But by the time it reached me I was on the page and well on my way into your head.

(more evidence of my mystical opulence here and here.)

Greg Lake Proves He Can Chew Gum and Play Guitar

Today's theme is Lucky...

Lucky (5 of 50)

In my current job, I have been assigned to work about 30 miles from my suburban home into the heart of rural southern Ohio. This is the second such posting I've had this year and in the course of it, I've gained a lot of understanding of the rural life. Priorities are visceral. Life is immediate. Man and animal live in communal intimacy. And there is the tension between the practical and the emotional. Nothing epitomizes this better than a statement of a co-employee describing the pet calf his children have been raising: "It's going to be tough eating Lucky."


(for another lucky animal story read this 100 word post from the archive.

K'naan--I Come Prepared

To compliment my last post--or to insult it, Somali rapper K'naan extolls the virtues of preparation....

Preparation (4 of 50)

Is there a better feeling than finding yourself in a situation for which you are totally prepared? Maybe I feel that way because I have always been so lazy and disorganized. Lately, though I’ve felt more and more prepared. Some of that comes with experience and the knowledge it brings. But some of that is just a change in attitude. I’ve learned to be ready by suffering when I haven’t been. And when you are in command of a situation it does help you forget that in the grand scheme of things you know nothing and have control over nothing.

20 Things I've Never Said (3 of 50)

Have the car brought around.
My bad.
That’s outside my area of expertise.
Get me a mini-grinder.
There’s no time like the present.
Champagne for everyone.
I’d like to thank the Academy.
The tall one had a gun.
Do you validate?
Did you see American Idol last night?
Thank you, sir, can I please have another?
Do I cut the blue wire or the red one?
No deals, no way.
Do you come here often?
Freedom isn’t free.
Is it supposed to be that color?
Penny for your thoughts.
Shit happens.
Do you have the new Clay Aiken cd?
Fuggedaboutit.

Al Stewart Leaving

Al Stewart

Contranatura (2 of 50)

Al Stewart wrote a song called “If It Doesn’t Come Naturally, Leave It”. That motto’s always felt right to me. However, eating, drinking lying around watching movies and reading books is not a sustainable pattern of existence. So, one way or another I’ve had to cultivate everything worthwhile in my life. For profit, I’ve had to find creative way to adapt my natural tendencies to the needs of my employer. I’ve bargained with the Puritan Ethic. Even in avocational pursuits, easy and natural is fun, but without struggling with, and incorporating, the external and unnatural, the result is seldom satisfying.

Link TV Theater

Gotan Project - Santa Maria (Del Buen Ayre)

From Somewhere Other Than The Heart (1 of 50)

I don’t understand people who say they can’t help but write. I understand painters and musicians who say that about their art, because, although it takes serious hard work, their rewards are so primal. The only good part of writing is the escape into the imagination. The writing part--not so much fun. So maybe I’m not a writer at heart. But I do it. Not because I have some irresistible compulsion. It’s totally resistible. But for some reason, I’m back, after my last epic fail, with 50 posts in 50 days of exactly 100 words. Let’s see what happens.

Link TV Theater

Here's something I saw on Link TV's music program and I present it with no sense of post-modern irony...really...

Signs

I saw two signs on stores across the street from each other:

"Laundry and Tanning"
"Obedience and Grooming"

Le Temps Ont Change

My favorite new guitarist. Great summer driving music.

Beyond the Pale

For my new job, I took a one day seminar to be certified as some sort of food safety person. During his self-introduction, the instructor mentioned that he had minored in history and developed a love of European History in general and Russian History in particular. Now devoted readers of the blog, and you must be devoted to still be checking in after all these months, will remember that Isaac Deutscher's Trotsky trilogy was one of the memorable reading events of my youth. So, as I turned in my test (quick--within what temperature range is the "danger zone" for perishable meat?) I asked if he had read the Deutscher trilogy, he gave me a look which, while slightly ambiguous, could easily have been interpreted as uncomprehending. He mumbled something about his father having them and that he had read part of the first volume. He held up his Golf Digest and said, "This is about all I read nowadays." It could be that Bolshevism is frowned upon in corporate life, or maybe I had crossed his comfort line of personal contact or perhaps, to paraphrase Benjamin Braddock, "I guess, he just lost interest over the years."
Three days later I was at my local library's used book sale and I was delighted to find "Trotsky, The Eternal Revolutionary," by Dmitri Volkogonov. While reading the book I came across the fact that Trotsky was born in a region along Russia's border with Poland, called "The Pale". Immediately the phrase, 'beyond the pale' came to mind and I wondered if that's from whence the phrase comes. Maybe, I guessed, it's a Jewish phrase referring to a place outside the permitted, or the familiar.
Well it turns out the word pale comes from the latin palus which means 'stake'.
A pale is an old name for a pointed stake driven into the ground and — by an obvious-enough extension — to a barrier made of such stakes, a fence (our modern word pole is from the same source, as are impale and paling). This meaning has been around in English since the fourteenth century. By 1400 it had taken on various figurative senses — a defence, a safeguard, a barrier, an enclosure, or a limit beyond which it was not permissible to go. --Worldwidewords.org.
Further reading of the above link reveals that there was also an English Pale in Calais and one in Ireland.
Now that I know what it means, it pleases me to consider it in a much more positive light; nothing wrong with hopping the fence of our particular ghetto.

Thou Villain

So Suzy and I are watching King Lear the other night with Ian McKellan as Lear and when Gloucester says, "O villain, villain!", Suzy says, "That's a good word--people don't call each other villain anymore." And I agreed. It is a good word. I guess the English use it more regularly than we, but to an American, especially a moral relativists like myself, it may seem a little too Manichean. But, unlike it's uncouth cousin 'evil-doer', villain is at once a colorful, pointed, clear and fun way to address someone at cross-purposes to you. It is erudite without being obscure and condescending. After all, it's used all the time to describe a character in our comic book dominated storytelling world, but it takes on a different connotation when you are talking to, or about, a real person in your life. So the next time you want to call someone an asshole, I ask you to consider 'villain'.

Some villainous facts and fun:

*(from Wikipedia) Villain comes from the Anglo-French and Old French vilein, which itself descends from the Late Latin word villanus meaning "farmhand." Someone who is bound to the soil of a villa, which is to say, worked on the equivalent of a plantation in Late Antiquity, in Italy or Gaul. It referred to a person of less than knightly status and so came to mean a person who was not chivalrous. As a result of many unchivalrous acts, such as treachery or rape, being considered villainous, in the modern sense the word, it became used as a term of abuse and eventually took on its modern meaning.

*What SuperVillain are you? (I'm Apocalypse)

*'Villain', a 1971 movie starring Richard Burton is loosely based on the story of 'The Krays', the violent English twins of 50's and 60's London. A recentauction of Kray memorabilia raised over 100,000 pounds.

Fifteen books that given the way my life has turned out I probably shouldn't have read

YouTube, then poetry and now a meme--this is what you've waited two months for?
Per Lance Mannion, here are fifteen books that ruined me for the good life:

1984-George Orwell
The Woman in the Dunes-Kobo Abe
The 42nd Parallel/1919/The Big Money-John Dos Passos
Ida-Gertrude Stein
The Mandarins-Simone De Beauvoir
A Walk on the Wild Side-Nelson Algren
White Buildings-Hart Crane
The Sound and the Fury-William Faulkner
Riven Doggeries-James Tate
I Am A Memory Come Alive-Franz Kafka
Letters to a Young Poet-Rainer Maria Rilke
The Collected Poems-Wallace Stevens
The Big Sleep-Raymond Chandler
Wise Blood-Flannery O'Connor
The Prophet Armed/The Prophet Unarmed/The Prophet Outcast:Trotsky 1879-1940-Isaac Deutscher


There we go. Fifteen pretty much off the top of my head. I maybe cheated with two trilogies, but in my defense, I never read the first without reading all three. These are not the greatest books of my youth--and I do think it's odd that I picked non-fiction from Kafka and Rilke when I loved their primary work so much--but what remains of the internal drama of a romantic and solitary youth.

Valentine's Day 2008 (Two Poems)

Untitled

As the scorpion strikes at the descending heel
As the gypsy thrives on confusion
So you drift to Paris
On grey clouds through a magenta sky

At the Strip Club

Call me Romulus
he said,
his jovial smile
his golden teeth
Call me Geisha
she replied
her heart a gazelle
a feather on the ocean

Kou Chou Ching (Black Heart)

Yes.

Like What I Like, Like Me Wednesdays

As I rejoin the blogging world, I'm trying out some new regular features to keep me...well... regular. Yes, blogging requires fiber and YouTube and its cousins provide many grams. So for Wednesdays, I'm going to post some things which entertain me, usually for no apparent reason and occasionally on the quirky or esoteric side. So for today we take a look at the only man I truly fear, Crispin Hellion Glover:

"I don't want people to know where I go to get my shampoo...and conditioner."

Death Mask Tuesday (Alternating Current Ed)

Today's death mask is the father of alternating current, Nikola Tesla.

After being bested financially and in celebrity by Edison, Westinghouse and Marconi for inventions he created, he uttered this great statement which cements him as an oocHero:

"My enemies have been so successful in portraying me as a poet and a visionary," said Tesla, "that I must put out something commercial without delay."

It is precisely because he was a visionary and a poet, that he captures the imagination of artists and conspiracy theorists to this day. As I noted in my look at The Prestige, he appears as the inventor of a matter replicating device used by one of the magicians, who engages him at his Pike's Peak laboratory. It was at Pike's Peak that he took his first tangible steps towards his dream of the wireless transmission of energy. Later this dream was dashed against the rocks at his Long Island Wardenclyffe laboratory.

I soon will be watching the PBS documentary on Tesla, but the online companion to the video is a good place to get an overview of this romantic and tragic figure.

Bollywood Monday (from Kala Pani)

Bollywood Monday returns to oocRadio with some 50's Bollywood starring Dev Anand and Madhubala:

oocAdaptation Examination--The Prestige (the movie)

(caution-plot revealed below)

I've watched the Prestige, directed by Chris Nolan, written by Jonathan Nolan and I'm beginning to doubt the wisdom of this adaptation examination project. Only because I think I know I would have liked the movie much better had I not read the book—and not because the plot twists were ruined for me, but because of the hollow feeling I got while watching it. Of course, that could because I was unusually entertained by the novel. But onward I’ll press, and give you what I have obliged myself to do: a comparison of the book and movie.

The movie opens with an explanation of the title, done in the form of a demonstration, by Cutter, Angier’s, ingeneur, or technical assistant. Cutter performs a trick while explaining the three
stages of a magic trick: 'The Pledge' is the object with which the magician begins, a person or thing, 'the turn' is the magician acting upon that person or thing--sawing in half, destroying, disappearing it--'the prestige' is the thing again made whole, restored, the 'proof' of the trick.

In the book, the prestige of Angier's trick is an exact new copy of himself--and a lifeless original. His rival, Benton, disrupts his transportation and leaves two living Angiers, 2/3 of his original
weight and dying, the other 1/3, slightly insubstantial, vigorous, and murderous. This second prestige describes how I feel about the story the Nolans bring to the screen.

The Nolans dispense with the modern day framing of the book, framing it cleverly with trial, conviction and execution of Borden for the death of Angier. Borden is framed by Angier because of a fiendish (and chillingly welcome) change the Nolan’s make: unlike the book where the original Angier dies each time, both copies of Angier live as a result of his performance and Angier must drown one of his selves each time. Borden sneaks below the stage to find the secret of the trick, and, discovered by Cutter watching one of the Angiers drowning, is charged with the murder. This framing device is well thought out, but points to the fact that the movie is much more a story of spiralling revenge--told through flashback—than the book's challenge to our
concept of identity. What provoked me about the book was it's undertone of separation, dis-integration and the characters attempt to regain a lost integrity, physical and metaphysical, social and personal. Much of that is abandoned, or buried so deep that it becomes very minor to this picture. And there is nothing wrong with that. It is a well told whodunit, or should I say, howdunit, which is focused on the cost of vengeance and the story of the destruction these two men leave in their wake. Deception and trickery, illusion, is a vehicle for the story,
and movies are story after all, at least commercial ones. And, of course, there are the monologues which spell out the themes--illusion of existence, mystery as escape--but, for some reason I found them less offensive than in the Dark Knight, maybe because these characters
seemed more genuine paradoxically, than the so called characters in the Dark Knight, which seemed more like examples of people or animated concepts, rather than motivated individuals with distinctive personal traits. Careful, don't want to think about TDK any more than I must.

A couple of minor things: The character of Tesla, while played charmingly by David Bowie, is much less entertainingly delineated in the movie than the book, where he serves as much more of a plot function than as a satisfying character in his own right. A concession to time, necessary, but unfortunate. The diaries, which are basic to the structure of the book but presented directly to the reader, are used effectively by the Nolans, in my opinion, as tools of deception worked by one magician upon the other. Once again, they have folded this element completely into another explicit example of the direct conflict between the two protagonists.

The Prestige is a successful adaptation, because it is a successful movie, not because it's faithful to the book. The Nolans took a book which interested and inspired them, digested it, and used it to tell a similar, yet distinctively cinematic story which joined Christopher Priest's vision with their own. The chose a manageable slice of the story, made a fundamental and clever change to the framing story, and, though they kept a little less of the open-ended mystery than I would have preferred, told the story in a way which honored the tone of the book.

oocAdaptation Examination: The Prestige (the book)

(caution-plot revealed below)
First, a confession--I did not read this book. I listened to it. I had a lot of work around the house and the audiobook of The Prestige was available to download from my library, so I put it on the mp3 player and for 12 hours, I couldn't put down the headphones. But I do have a physical copy, and believe me, I will reread it at some point. It is very good. Incidently, so is the guy who read it to me. Secondly, this is not a book review at all, but a list of the challenges I see of adapting this to a movie.

First a synopsis from author Christopher Priest's website:

A story of secrecy, curiosity and concealment,
The Prestige is largely set in the smoke-and-mirrors world of Victorian music
halls. Two stage illusionists engage in a bitter and deadly
feud -- the effects are still being felt by their families a hundred years later.
Both men are driven to the extremes by
the mystery of an amazing
stage illusion they both perform. The novel itself is constructed like a
stage illusion: because of misdirection, nothing can be taken for
granted -- revelations and unexpected twists occur at regular intervals.
The secret of the magic is not kept from the reader, because for the antagonists the real mystery lies deeper. Both
men have more to hide than the mere workings of a trick.

The story's big, not in terms of plot so much, as the layered form in which it is delivered. We have four first person narratives of varying reliability,overlapping and deepening the story as often as moving the narrative forward. There are three stories being told somewhat concurrently--the rival of the turn of the 20th century magicians, the confrontation between their descendants some 70 years later and the contemporary framing story involving a son and a daughter of those descendants. At the climax, the stories all intertwine and resolve, to some degree.
Now if the film-makers decide to tackle all three time periods, they will be hard pressed to tell the stories and give enough attention to developing the characters sufficiently for the viewer to engage. They must simplify, but without compromising the deception and mystery with which Priest reveals both story and character. The three stories echo and amplify and, in a real sense are part of one long, spiralling story--perhaps they will consider the entire story in a linear fashion and, rather than eliminating a time period or two, keep what is essential to the whole plot and let it range over all the years.
There is a very real question of the nature of identity central to the book which will be a challenge to portray in the movie. The ultimate illusions of each of the magicians rely on dual beings, in one case, twins which share a single life, in the other, the actual replication of his person with each performance.
The rivalry itself should be the easiest to portray--there are very real and dramatic scenes in the book which would be very demonstrative and filmable--each magician ruins the other's act throughout.
The epistolary nature of the storytelling in the novel will have to be mimicked with narration or abandoned to drama. Hopefully, it will not be exposited through character dialogue.
The wonder of magic--especially at the time of the two principles--will be hard to portray on film.
Okay, off to see the movie and how they pull it off.