monoceros blogsIt's the original bumbling spy! Here is the opening from the 60s TV show.
And here's the trailer for the movie that's due out next summer. Steve Carell and Alan Arkin (from "Little Miss Sunshine") are excellent casting choices. Anne Hathaway looks terrific as Agent 99, and The Rock, cool and statuesque; I certainly hope he gets some comic moments too.
What I especially like about the original show is the corporate-world details applied to the world of spying. My favorite - "In the interest of company morale, both CONTROL and KAOS have their own bowling teams." (CONTROL and KAOS are enemy agencies.) And who can forget the shoe phone? I'm guessing the movie version will be set in the present day, so a cell phone will likely replace the shoe phone. At least the phone booth/elevator is still around!
Some nine years ago in Ann Arbor, I bought the first Harry Potter book in a Barnes and Noble store along Washtenaw. It was a one-storey building back then, and I remember the store as a rather dimly-lit one, with green and brown furnishings to match the company's colors. The book tables were brown, and upon one sat a pile of books with a boy and a broom, with a unicorn in the background. The unicorn caught my eye, and I picked up the book to read the blurb. Boy wizard, wizard school...we all know what the book's about. A sign nearby said the author, J.K. Rowling, would read from the book and sign copies. I checked the date; I'd missed the reading by two days. I didn't mind so much then, since I had no idea who the author was and didn't know if I would like the book or not. Well, for nearly a decade after that day, I've bought every book in the series soon after it was released.
I haven't grown as much in nine years as say, the kids who started reading at age 10 and today are sophomores in college. But I've experienced a number of phases in life and believe I've grown in a different manner. Ten years is no small amount of time, even if you don't go through growth spurts (I'm not sure I ever had one though), and it's hard to believe I'm far from the 19 year-old I once was - a little lighter, with thinner glasses, considerably more naive and idealistic. Regrets? A few, yes, like missing out on that J.K. Rowling reading and signing session.
As I write, my copy of the seventh and last book is in transit. Mine is one of the 1,200 copies that Deepdiscount.com mailed out ahead of the official release date, an act which has now earned the company a lawsuit. Even though this doesn't mean I'll get my book ahead of everyone else, it does mean I will have to wait fewer days for the book to arrive in the mail. For many others, they've already had to say goodbye to Harry and his friends. I'm going to make mine a slow farewell.
So they've gone ahead and done it, turned Charlie Baxter's The Feast of Love into a film. It's not going to be set in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but Portland, Oregon. $#@%!
My dad and I were at Wheedlock Place yesterday afternoon when he nudged me and pointed to a Caucasian woman - most likely Australian, judging by her accent - who was accompanied by a reedy Chinese man. "Look," my dad said, "she's got one of those." By "those", he meant her "This is not a plastic bag" bag. I was amused that even my dad knew about the recent craze over the Anya Hindmarch bag that was supposed to show off the owner's green ideals, but now more likely advertises consumerism, fad pursuit, and possibly unethical production.
I did a bit of exploring, and decided I like this bag better.
For the folks who do like the bag for its message and design and plan to use it in lieu of plastic bags, good. For those who want to have it only because it's sold by a famous bag designer and because everyone wants it now, well...just don't throw it out once the craze dies down.
Some time ago, I joined a forum called 667 Dark Avenue where I could read or participate in discussions on the theories and mysteries in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. After book number 13 arrived last year, I finished the series quite despondently—despondent that the end had finally taken place, despondent that many questions were still unanswered.
Despite the apparent end of the series, the forum recently sent a list of questions to the author, Daniel Handler, to answer and infuse the army of fans with a measure of hope that more books may be in store.
One of the questions greatly interested me, and it has nothing to do with the books or the elusive Lemony Snicket.
Here it is—
9. If an apple a day keeps the doctor away then what fruit would best keep away persistent realtors? Would you suggest something heavy like a watermelon or something easy to throw like a grapefruit? - Charlotte
Handler's response—
The durian is a fruit produced by a plant pollinated by flies. To attract its pollinators the flowers of the plant smell like rotten meat. You can imagine how dreadful the fruit smells, particularly if ripe and damp. In many countries where the durian is available it is illegal to carry it onto public transportation. I once had a piece of candied durian and it still felt like a zombie meal. I imagine having durians around the house would cause property values to plummet, and realtors would no longer be interested.
I wonder if Mr. Handler has visited Singapore, where it's certainly illegal to take durians on the MRT. However, many Singaporeans are fond of durians, and property values remain abominably high; they are just below those of New York City’s. The theory cannot be applied to Singapore because the realtors are often durian lovers too.
In Borders or Kinokuniya, it's easy to pick out the Asian books section. It's the shelf with red book jackets and covers. And while the sex-and-relationship section has a similar color scheme, it has the additional pink which, thankfully, isn't found on Asian books. The other colors that do adorn Asian books, be they fiction, non-fiction, or memoirs, are gold and the black, often seen as gold motifs or black ornate spirals.
So if books were organized by colors, then in my fantasy bookstore or personal reading room, right by a tall window with a wide window seat covered in some warm, inviting fabric, I'd like to have a shelf full of books that range from lemony yellow to egg-yolk orange to Buddhist-robe saffron. One book that is a perfect blend of orange and yellow, trimmed with deep blue, is Good Poems for Hard Times, most likely cloaked in that vibrant color to give cheer to the sluggish spirit. The color of mandarins, pumpkins, the setting (or rising, whichever you fancy) sun.
Inside, the only colors are found in the verses, which are wonderful to read, though I prefer the poems in the first anthology. The highlight of this book is the introduction by Garrison Keillor, who made the selections and who hosts the wonderful NPR program, The Writer's Almanac. It's some of the finest reading for the kind of day when you find yourself alone, disappointed, heartbroken, ill and lying on a couch, mentally tortured by people you have to pretend to be nice to, picking out potential songs for your funeral, wishing that avenging unicorns existed (well they do, in action figure form only though), or just wondering how a poem could help a person get through a difficult time.
"The meaning of poetry is to give courage. A poem is not a puzzle that you the dutiful reader are obliged to solve. It is meant to poke you, get you to buck up, pay attention, rise and shine, look alive, get a grip, get the picture, pull up your sucks, wake up and die right. Poets have many motives for writing (to be published on expensive paper, to show up the others in your M.F.A. program, to flaunt your sensitive nature and thereby impress someone who might then go to bed with you, to win valuable prizes and fellowships and maybe a year in Rome or Provence, to have a plausible excuse for making a mess of your life), but what really matters about poetry and what distinguishes poets from, say, fashion models or ad salesmen is the miracle of incantation in rendering the gravity and grace and beauty of the ordinary world and thereby lend courage to strangers. This is a necessary thing. At times life becomes almost impossible, and you curl up under a blanket in a dim room behind drawn shades and you despise your life, which seems mean and purposeless, a hoax and a cheat, your shining chances all wasted, pissed away, nobody can chance this or make this better, love is lost, hope is gone, nothing left but to pour a glass of gin and listen to weepy music. But it can help to say words. Moaning helps. So does prayer. God hears prayer and restores souls of the faithful. Walking helps. Many people have pulled themselves up out of the pit by the simple expedient of rising to their feet, leaning slightly forward, and putting one foot ahead of the other. Poems help.
America is in hard times these days, the beloved country awash to the scuppers in expensive trash, gripped by persistent jitters, politics even more divorced from reality than usual, the levers of power firmly in the hands of a cadre of Christian pirates and bullies whose cynicism is stunning, especially their perversion of the gospel of the Lord to blast the poor and the meek and subvert the tax system in favor of the rich, while public institutions are put in perpetual fiscal crisis, meanwhile newspapers dwindle in sad decline, journalism is lost in the whirlwind of amusement, and the hairy hand of the censor reaches out—what mustn’t be lost, in this dank time, is the passion of young people for truth and justice and liberty—the spirit that has kept the American porch light lit through dark ages of history—and when this spirit is betrayed by the timid and the greedy and the naïve, then we must depend on the poets. American poetry is the truest journalism we have. What your life can be, lived bravely and independently, you can discover in poetry.
The intensity of poetry, its imaginative fervor, its cadence, is not meant for the triumphant executive, but for people in a jam—you and me. Remember the last time you hitchhiked and stood thumb out, as the car whooshed past, waiting for the kind stranger, focusing on each pair of oncoming headlights and thinking, I am not a killer. I won’t weird you out. I am actually extremely nice. I am a student in college. I really need you to stop and give me a ride. Then your hitchhiking days were over. You graduated. You got a good job, a car, a family, a house, a church, you salted away some dough. And then trouble struck. (Sirens, klaxons, cries of alarm.) And now, damn it, you are (figuratively) right back out there on the highway, except now it’s raining. Maybe your good job went up in smoke. Perhaps your assets have been turned to succotash by a lousy investment in an old warehouse you meant to convert to fashionable shops and ethnic restaurants, which you halfway did and then it went belly up, there being too many such warehouses in your town, and an accountant in a blue-striped shirt gives you the plain bad news, and now you may lose your lovely old 1910 manse under the elms with the bay window and curved veranda on the big corner lot in Crocus Hill, and now you must scrabble your way back up the slippery slope again, but you’re older and less steady and your heart sinks at the prospect of having to grind out a living again. Perhaps you have gotten a terrible phone call from your beautiful faraway child—liver cancer? How can a kid get liver cancer? She’s 34 and lovely and exercises daily and never drank or smoked!—and now your good life is upheaved, time is stopped and the calendar canceled, and you’re off on the plane to a hospital drama in a strange city. Perhaps your brother, the one you’ve worried about for twenty years, has finally gone careening off the road at 3 a.m. and totaled his car and is still firmly in denial that his drinking must now be discussed though his wife is in torment and his children wary and confused and you must face him and be the recipient of his stupid anger. These troubles come to people all the time.—Perhaps you are foundering on work and no help is at hand. Me, too.—Perhaps you are imprisoned in a character you created for yourself who seemed smart and cheerful and virtuous and now feels like a wooden costume, heavy, clunky.—Perhaps you have been banged around by various events and are a little, how shall we say, oysgeshpilt, and need something to make sense.—Perhaps you have sat in a doctor’s office listening to his spiel about leakage in the mitral valve and congestive heart disease and suddenly realized bwannggg this is your mitral valve under discussion and you are headed for a scary ride down the canyon toward surgery. A stranger will shave your private areas and anoint you with antiseptic and slide you onto a gurney and you’ll be wheeled into a chilly room with bright overhead lights and a kind lady will begin telling you about anesthesia as one would explain darkness to a small child.
This is a book of poems that if I knew you better and if you were in a hard passage I might send you one or two of along with a note, the way people used to do, believing in the bracing effect of bold writing. Whether you stole the book, bought it used or remaindered, found it on the bus, got it from your son for Christmas, I hope it does you some good. That was the reason for putting the poems together. These poems describe a common life. It is good to know about this. I hope you take courage from it."
~ from the introduction of Good Poems for Hard Times
I got this from my brother, and it's one of the best ads I've seen lately. Way to go, Federer! 11 and counting.
I like the carpark at the new National Library. It's spacious, it has high ceilings, it's brightly-lit, and it isn't crowded on a weekday evening. Parking costs just two dollars - per entry - after five, which means I can go in at 5:30, hunt for a mystery novel, and then zero in on an empty armchair where I can read till whenever (a pity the library closes at 9, which tampers with my "read till whenever" plans). Last Wednesday, I borrowed two novels, the first two books of the "Mobile Library" mystery series by Ian Sansom.
I finished both of them by Saturday. They're easy and entertaining reads, filled with quotes and literary trivia from famous and not so famous books and poetry. It also features the lead character, a bumbling 29-year-old Jewish librarian from London, using tomes like a Harry Potter novel and Yann Martel's Life of Pi as objects in his sleuthing rather than as works of literature. Case in point - the occasionally intrepid Israel Armstrong uses the Harry Potter novel to break a window in a noteworthy breaking-and-entering scene. I wonder if Mr. Sansom, like Mr. Armstrong, dislikes these titles.
The plots or mysteries - missing books and persons - aren't the main draw of the books. No, it's the witty writing, the hilarious scenes, and the roundabout thoughts of Israel that made me blaze through each book. I love his love of books and libraries. And it tickled me how he described driving a mobile library as the absolute low point of a librarian's career. I've never been in one before, though my friend, EK, in Ann Arbor told me about her children picking out books from the one that made its rounds in their area. It seemed like a good thing for busy parents or folks who lived far from a public library - the books come to you.
Here are some choice bits from the novels -
"...it was books mostly, some clean underwear, and then more books, and books and books and books, the ratio of books to underwear being about 20:1, books being really the great constant and companion in Israel's life; they were always there for you, books, like a small pet dog that doesn't die; they weren't like people; they weren't treacherous or unreliable and they didn't work late at the office on important projects or go skiing with their friends at Christmas. (from (The Case of the Missing Books)
"He considered the people who were the heaviest borrowers from the mobile library, the people he saw the most of, week in, week out: all the children and their parents, checking out books indiscriminately, picture books and easy-readers, the good and the bad, no discernible difference between them; and the teenagers - the local MP's daughter and some of her friends, some gothy-looking boys - who seemed to be working their way through every Ian McEwan and William Burroughs in the county and who possibly as a consequence seemed more miserable even than the average teen; and the adults, women in and out for romantic fiction and men for military history. And when he considered them all he couldn't honestly say that these people were any more equipped socially or intellectually or emotionally than anyone else; they might possibly have known whether or not Cromwell's troops massacred civilians at Drogheda in the seventeenth century, or about life under the Nazis in the Channel Islands, or exactly which Harry Potter they preferred, on balance, but they were no more polite when challenged about their overdue books than the average borrower, and no more or less keen to pass the time of day with a lowly public servant.
Library users were exactly the same as everyone else, it seemed, and this came as a terrible shock to Israel. He had always believed that reading was good for you, that the more books you read somehow the better you were, the closer to some ideal of human perfection you came, yet if anything his own experience at the library suggested the exact opposite: that reading didn't make you a better person, that it just made you short-sighted, and even less likely than your fellow man or woman to be able to hold a conversation about anything that did not centre around you and your ailments and the state of the weather.
He shivered." (from Mr Dixon Disappears)
Despite these thoughts of Israel's, I'm inclined to believe that reading always improves you, perhaps not your character, but certainly your mind, where knowledge and sensitivity are concerned. Perhaps it's because I've had so many moments during reading when I felt the metaphorical light bulb glow suddenly, or sensed that the author was uncannily describing my life, or wanted to memorize a line on the page that contained what I believed to be the most beautiful sound or image as it slowly unfurled in my head.
So I'll always be making trips to the library (and paying my fines), and ordering books from deepdiscount or zakoola, some of which have been intercepted by the dreaded MDA who think my heavy boxes contain unsuitably rated DVDs purchased from abroad. They're books! Stop making me go down to your office again and again to retrieve my purchases. But that's another story.
I've been meaning to read Anna Politkovskaya's A Russian Diary ever since Nick Hornby mentioned it in his column in a recent issue of McSweeney's "The Believer." I read an except in "The Guardian" and found her reportage vivid and unflinching. It's an important read, and a tragic one, given that she was assassinated last year, and people suspect it's because of her unwavering criticism of Putin and the troubling Russian state.
Another memoir on my list is Yakuza Moon, which may be the very first of its kind, one that gives the female perspective from the Japanese underworld. The cover of the book and the description of her tattoo made me certain it's the writer, Shoko Tendo, on the cover.
It's been real nice seeing more of VanTan lately. We had dinner with D one evening last month; Van came over to have pizza another night, after which we had a three-way phone conversation with DSD calling from London; that same week, I went over to her place for Indonesian food and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl" on her Mac. Two weekends ago, I got to see her perform at her school concert, where I was treated to a jivin' jazz piece composed by the talented lass herself - "Riding'". It's been long years since I first knew Van to be a whiz at music (among other things), and I remember well the song she wrote for well, me. Or perhaps not the music itself (it's a little fuzzy in my memory; Van, where's my long promised recording of it?), but that she wrote one at all for her namesake.
Last night, we felt like kids again (or I did, anyway) as we watched the Transformers movie. My memories of Transformers are linked invariably to my brother who started his fanboy days with the series when we were small. He has always been more into it than I am, and so is Van (who has named some of her koi after Autobots), but I distinctly recall being impressed by Optimus Prime's noble leadership and heroic qualities, Bumblebee's courage and zest, and the awesomeness of the Dinobots. I never had any Transformer toys of my own, but recently, I bought myself a Convoy (what Prime's known as in Japan) Revoltech figure, and have on temporary loan my brother's extra WST (World's Smallest Transformers) version of Grimlock, complete with movable jaw and little swingy arms (I like Grimlock in his dino mode).
The toys helped fan anticipation for the movie, and soon after Van said she'd save Wednesday for it, I booked us tickets to the digital 4k version of the film. She's written a review, which you can refer to if you don't mind spoilers. It wasn't a superb movie, but it wasn't all bad either. Watching Prime transform for the first time was amazing, and I can't say I didn't laugh out loud when the Autobots attempted to conceal themselves about the Witwicky residence. Prime, of course, chided them for the lousy job, though he wasn't too great at it himself. I wished for more fighting between the Transformers that wasn't visually and aurally interrupted with explosions and ensuing smoke. The only "clean" fight was between Prime and Bonecrusher along a highway. More of that (Prime kicking ass) in the sequel, please, and some Dinobot action too.
I'm not sure why I was looking up information on Emily Blunt, but somewhere along the way, I read that Emily sang on her boyfriend's (Michael Buble) latest album, and that she'd also sung on a film called "Gideon's Daughter,". So I went to Youtube and hunted for "Natasha's Song" and even though I knew nothing about the film, I felt drawn by Emily's voice, the haunting melody, the way some pain inside her is kept fiercely in check even as she breathes life into each compelling line of the song. Is she telling her own story? Is she speaking of her own father? Is she speaking to her father? While the sleepy-eyed girl sings, her gaze is steady, perhaps laying heavily on her father in the audience. When the song ends, and the applause begins, she breaks into a smile, just a schoolgirl pleased with what she's accomplished; but then, just before she turns away, for an instant, she glares stonily at someone.
Thankfully, some kind soul put the entire film there, and I got to watching it right away. It turns out that the song leads her father to desperately wonder how he can reconcile with her before she leaves him, possibly forever. Bill Nighy turns in a beautifully nuanced performance. He is Gideon Warner, a successful man in the PR line, but so flawed in many other ways. His life revolves around his work or the female celebrities who cling to him. He hasn't been a good man, but you feel for his character. Right in those moments when his need for change, his desire to connect to another human being is so palpable.
Just as he begins to reach towards his daughter, another person unexpectedly enters his life. Miranda Richardson's Stella comes from a world very different from Gideon's, though they did grow up in the same area. She looks like a hippie, wears her hair bright red, and works in a 24-hour shop to escape her grief of losing her five-year-old son. Together, these two parents learn to cope with their pain and loss, and Stella slowly guides Gideon towards a different kind of life.
It's a quiet movie, filled with quiet moments, pauses, images, expressions. But each one is weighty with emotion and significance. The music - in particular Natasha's song and the famous Thomas Tallis 40-part motet, "Spem In Alium" - also does an important job of pushing the story ahead, affecting the characters and revealing much of their emotional landscapes.
One of the loveliest things about the film is its ethereal quality, created by the narrative device itself. The film is framed by scenes of the storyteller, one of Gideon's friends, who is narrating it to a young woman. He tells it almost as if it were a fable, and yet, he did meet all of the characters of his story. Knew them, saw them. It's a fable that he watched unfold as it was being written. Written in a time we all lived in: in 1997, when New Labour rose to power and Princess Diana died, an event that seemed unbelievable when it happened. That real-life magic continues in one scene where the figures of three people vanish from a street in Edinburgh; they've been magicked away into a part of the story that can't be told to us because the storyteller doesn't know it himself. That part certainly resembles real life, the way we can never know what happens to some of the people who crossed our paths a long time ago.
