Eye of the Tiger/ Blog hiatus

A highlight of Persepolis (which is really good)

Actually, the clip is funnier in the context of the movie, where it signals her emergence from a deep post-breakup depression. Fun Wikipedia fact: “In 1984, singer/comedian “Weird Al” Yankovic wrote & recorded a parody of Eye of the Tiger called: The Rye or the Kaiser (Theme From Rocky XIII).” I’ll have to check that one out. Love Weird Al.

A note to my literally dozens of regular blog readers: I am soon traveling to a place without DSL connection (in Maine), so the blog will probably be on semi-hiatus for July.

How Much Sleep Do You Really Need?

Most-emailed article on the Time Magazine site (as of a few days ago):

How Much Sleep Do You Really Need?

As a longtime imsomniac who is always trying to get more sleep, I am a bit skeptical of these claims:

Studies show that people who sleep between 6.5 hr. and 7.5 hr. a night, as they report, live the longest. And people who sleep 8 hr. or more, or less than 6.5 hr., they don’t live quite as long. There is just as much risk associated with sleeping too long as with sleeping too short. The big surprise is that long sleep seems to start at 8 hr. Sleeping 8.5 hr. might really be a little worse than sleeping 5 hr.

Just to state the obvious, maybe the healthy long-life people just need less sleep to begin with. It would seem that there is no way to know if the 7 hours of sleeping a night were a cause or an effect of the good health.

I have weird sleep issues. My insomnia began in graduate school. I walk and talk and do odd things in my sleep. When I was trying to revise my dissertation I would sometimes get up convinced that someone was stealing my laptop, and several times in the middle of the night I arose to hide it in my sock drawer. I quite often run downstairs and check doors and windows, and check (this is a recent favorite) to see if anyone has stolen my bike. In my half-dreaming state I seem to be in some fairy-tale reality full of thieves and “robbers” (a word I believe I’ve used in my sleep-talking) and dangerously permeable borders to a hostile outside world. Recently I’ve sort of been coming to terms with the painful insight that even my late-morning coffee may be affecting my evening sleep. Now I try to avoid any caffeine after about 10:30 a.m. — maybe a decaf at lunch. And a lot of peppermint tea which seems to have some kind of habitual placebo effect.

Leftist Buzzwords

Report Assails Political Hiring in Justice Dept.

Justice Department officials illegally used “political or ideological” factors in elite recruiting programs in recent years, tapping law school graduates with Federalist Society membership or other conservative credentials over more qualified candidates with liberal-sounding résumés, an internal report found Tuesda.

This is the funniest/most outrageous detail:

Investigators reviewed e-mail messages from Ms. McDonald in which she indicated that “leftist commentary” or “buzz words like ‘environmental justice’ and ‘social justice’ ” were grounds for rejecting applicants.

Other possible leftist buzzwords, grounds for rejection:

• Habeas corpus
• Rights
• Organic
• Global warming
• Sustainability
• Rational; Reason
• Integrity
• Fair
• Impartial
• Facts
• Prius

The Strange Life of Carole King

I’ve been reading Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon–And the Journey of a Generation. After 50 pages I threw it aside, too irritated by its writing style to keep going — it’s annoyingly effusive, arch, and just plain badly written in many ways. But the gossipy details drew me back, and it actually seemed to get better as it went — it’s at its worst when it’s trying to offer big-picture analysis of the era, better in the smaller-scale stories about the artists. I ended up skimming through a lot of it, skipping most of the Carly Simon stuff — I can’t muster too much interest in her. (By the way, she is the object of one of Robert Christgau’s meanest reviews, which I quote in its entirety:

No Secrets [Elektra, 1972]
If a horse could sing in a monotone, the horse would sound like Carly Simon, only a horse wouldn’t rhyme “yacht,” “apricot,” and “gavotte.” Is that some kind of joke? Why did Mick Jagger want her? Why does James Taylor want her? Come to think of it, why does she want either of them? B-)

Anyway, I focused on the Joni Mitchell and Carole King stuff. Mitchell comes off as a fascinating/infuriating narcissist, but I think she is a truly great artist, at least in the 1970-1974 or so period. You could definitely make the case that it’s pure sexism that her peers like Dylan, Clapton et al are still revered rock stars, whereas she has faded from view; although it’s an inconvenient fact that she stopped making great music decades ago (although that didn’t hurt Clapton, so never mind). Weirdest detail about Mitchell: in 1977 she invented the alter ego/ disguise of “a trim black man, his face half-hidden by big shades and a wide, thick moustache… nattily attired in dark creased pants, white vest, and white jacket… His fluffy Afro topped by a slick chapeau.” This guy was named “Art Nouveau” and represented the “inner black person” of this folksinger of Scandinavian descent from Saskatchewan.

The Carole King story is totally fascinating and reads like some kind of Forrest Gump-like allegory of modern American womanhood. She was born Carole Klein, a Jewish girl with a big nose, in 1942 in Brooklyn. Attends Queens College; meets and marries Garry Goffin, with whom she writes some of the most famous songs of the early and mid-1960s, notably “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”, “One Fine Day,” and “Up on the Roof.” Her second solo album, Tapestry, sells a bajillion records (22 million worldwide, eventually) and is until Thriller the biggest-selling album of any genre of all time. She’s now married to a nice classical musician with whom she has several kids and tries to live a normal life.

Then everything goes haywire. She gets divorced and marries Rick Evers, a handsome and charismatic hanger-on who had some kind of association with the Eagles (just to clarify that we’re in the seedy, corrupt 1970s now). He is a not-especially-talented, violent megalomaniac who has served time in prison and insists on being pictured on Carole’s album covers, as well as co-writing songs with her. Shortly after he begins to beat her, he dies of an apparent O.D. Then, get this, she falls in with an arguably even sketchier Idaho character, also named Rick: her friends all call him Rick Two. To his buddies he is “Teepee Rick” (bad sign, Carole! Don’t get involved with any dude whose nickname involves animal pelts.) This world-famous musician moves to Rick’s teepee (well, cabin) in Idaho and spends over a decade in a survivalist mode (no running water, eating what they raise or shoot), a lifestyle which eventually disintegrates into drawn-out battles with the state and hostile neighbors over land rights. Finally in the early 1990s marriage #4 breaks up, and Carole comes into her own as a Democratic/environmental activist. And along the way she recorded one of the great children’s records, Really Rosie.

You really have to see the photos to fully appreciate it all.

She should get her biopic, although Wikipedia tells me that the 1996 Grace of My Heart is loosely based on her life — hmm, stars Illeana Douglas, I am adding that to the Netflix Queue…

Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a really cool and innovative movie. Its primary filmic P.O.V. is that of the protagonist, Jean-Do, who is paralyzed from head to toe such that he cannot express himself in any way other than blinking. So, the camera represents his perspective, and we see what he sees — doctors, nurses, physical therapists, friends, wife, children and mistress all peering at his unresponsive face. That’s about 2/3 of the movie; it also includes more usual scenes from his life before his paralysis. It’s a very beautiful movie, “painterly,” maybe, filled with gorgeous, dreamy scenes of cliffs falling into the sea, light and ocean; it makes you realize how impoverished and conventional most cinematography is.

My one little observation about the movie otherwise is that it would be a great film to show as accompaniment for German media theorist Freidrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800-1900. It’s an alphabetized movie all about the acquisition of the alphabet and language as a deeply eroticized process. Quite a lot of it consists simply of shots of Jean-Do’s speech therapist (pictured above) reciting the alphabet over and over again. Jean-Do blinks once for ‘yes’, meaning in this context, “that letter.” Two blinks means no. (And by the way, I realized that that Los Campesinos! song “Sweet Dreams Sweet Cheeks,” with its line “one blink for yes, two blinks for no,” is a reference to this movie/book). Eventually they get a word, a sentence, and so on. He gradually writes his memoir, on which the movie is based.

There’s one interestingly awkward effect of the French/English language difference: we get these scenes where he is trying to spell, say, “death.” So, it’s MORTE, but the subtitles represent this as “D, E, A, T, H,” because the tension in the scene requires us to play hangman and slowly guess what word is he trying to say. It’s disconcerting to hear her say “M”? and have it translated as “D?”

Schnabel admits in a DVD commentary that the movie recalls Fellini’s 8 1/2 in its depiction of the protagonist surrounded by a kind of (unattainable) fantasy harem of women, his various lovers and the therapists. The movie is a rapturous male fantasy about infantile language acquisition, in a position of absolute helplessness, from “the Mother’s Mouth.” Jean-Do can’t move, can’t touch, can only sink deeply into the process of spelling/writing by listening to beautiful women recite the alphabet, staring at their mouths and lips as they wait for his single blink of response. All eroticism has to be projected into this single action and relationship.

Os Mutantes Happy Meal/ Chris Knox Heineken

I know this sort of thing is old hat by now, but this still sort of blew my mind. I’m watching game 5 of the NBA finals, it cuts to an ad, and I hear a familiar tune over a scene of a bunch of a first graders playing soccer. It’s (not that I remembered the name of the song) “A Minha Menina,” a great Os Mutantes song that I know from their 1999 Luaka Bop compilation Everything is Possible. For those of you who don’t know them, Os Mutantes (the Mutants) were a Brazilian psychedelic rock group from the late 1960s/early 70s who were re-introduced to the non-record-collecting Anglophone world by David Byrne with that compilation album — but are still pretty obscure in the scheme of things.

So I’m watching the cute kids playing soccer, trying to figure out what it is, and then the losing team gets the ultimate consolation prize of… a Happy Meal!! It’s a fricking McDonald’s ad!!!

Again, I should be used to the ineluctable globalist cool-hunting margins-to-center logic of late capitalism, but this still freaked me out a little bit. I guess just because I don’t think of McDonald’s as one of those cool-hunting corporations when it comes to advertising — aren’t their ads usually super-mainstream?

Here’s the ad, courtesy of Stereogum.

addendum: now I’ve learned that the catchy/weird song from that Heineken ad is by New Zealand indie rock legend Chris Knox of Toy Love & the Tall Dwarves. Strange. Here’s the ad:

Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place

Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place is a really unusual, enchanting novel. “Everyone prefers to stick with the subject of people” but this novel opens up the characterological range to include several dogs, moose, beavers, a pike, tadpoles, and even lichen. As well as old people, children, and a more usual range of human persons. It has a Virginia Woolf quality in its roving free-indirect-discourse that slips easily in and out of multiple consciousnesses and voices. “So many things are alive: lichen, moss, grass. Also people. So many people are alive and that’s what’s strange, not that things like stones aren’t.” Also, a range of written modes and forms including police logs, newspaper reports, a diary, an astrological report; and working within various time frames and registers including the present day, the late nineteenth century, and the geological or evolutionary time of glaciers and rock. The surprising thing is, though, that the novel does not feel contrived or very “experimental;” it’s involving and funny in its depiction of a New England town during a summer with some odd things happening; you could almost imagine it as an Oprah pick. Maybe it was Davis’s half-hearted attempt at selling out and writing a popular book — if so, I hope it worked.

It’s especially good on “the minds of twelve year-old girls,” filled with “human sacrifices, cockeyed sexual adventures both sadistic and masochistic, also kitties with balls of yarn… and disembowelings.”

Wii

So, we got a Wii. This has been a long time coming. Sarah decided to get one for me/us for Xmas, but of course she could not buy one (Nintendo has not been able to meet demand for them ever since they were introduced in December 2006, unless you prefer the conspiracy-theory approach that would see it as an artificially manipulated scarcity). In order to stymie any attempt on my part to block the gift, Sarah bought a gift card from Best Buy. It annoyed me to no end that Best Buy then sat on our money for what turned out to be 6 months. They also are obviously using the Wii unavailability as a way to trick people into having to make multiple visits to the store, as they are always pretty vague about when exactly the new ones will be coming in.

I went last Sunday at opening time, 11:00 a.m., and got one of the last 8 left. It was a weird scene, at least 2/3 of the people there were there for Wiis, or Wii Fit games, everyone carrying out the same white boxes (they look like some kind of Mac/ipod relative).

I checked on Amazon and used ones are still for sale at over 25% above the list price. I of course was tempted to flip ours immediately for a profit.

We haven’t played it all that much yet. The Sports game it’s packaged with is kind of neat but seems as if you need to buy a second controller to take full advantage of it. We got a game called “Cooking Mama” out of the library (!) on a friend’s recommendation that it might be something Celie and Iris would enjoy. They did, although in 20 minutes it already started to drive us a bit crazy. Its a Japanese game with a demented Iron Chef aesthetic — you follow recipes to create certain dishes, peeling vegetables, stirring the pot, rolling the Mochi balls in cocoa, etc. All in all, I think C&I are on the young side for the Wii, although Celie got really into grating cheese.

It’s very funny to watch someone else using it, they look like a madman, shaking and gesticulating. It is neat the way it keeps you on your feet & moving around. I almost felt like I threw my arm out pitching in the baseball game.

I was heavily into video games in the 1979-1983 era, roughly — Donkey Kong at the little store near my parents’ house in Cambridge which is now an outpost of the Swedish embassy or something bizarre like that – and then have not played much since. As a 12 year-old-boy there was something uniquely addictive, in a no doubt sublimatedly erotic way, about the whole experience of slipping the quarter in with its satisfying thwonk and setting the colorful, buzzing, noisy experience into motion. For a while I’ve figured that the period we’re in now with video games might be something like the pre-Jazz Singer silent era in movies, before everyone fully recognized how substantial and important the medium had become. Part of my problem has been that I’ve a lifetime Mac user, so many of the best games aren’t available.

More reports to come, I’m sure. I want to get Super Mario Galaxy. I’m glad that Mario is still a major player in this universe.

Here’s a Nintendo ad that shows what it looks like.

Addendum: Joshuah Bearman’s article in the July Harper’s, “The Perfect Game: Five Years with the Master of Pac-Man,” is hilarious and fascinating on the topic of video game obsession. A great peek into a bizarre little subculture.

Done with my class/ Heathcliff nightmare

I’m done with my summer session class. That went really quickly, actually. Just need to finish grading papers and exams this weekend.

One student made a comment to me that made me feel that I’d succeeded in some small way: he reported that he’d had a nightmare about Heathcliff the night before. “He was chasing me and it was so scary… he’s just so relentless.”

Fritz Eichenberg, Heathcliff Under the Tree, Cover Image from Wuthering Heights, 1943, wood engraving

Planned Parenthood Bush-McCain Challenge

A concise example of why it is so perverse to imagine anyone with any investment in feminist politics voting for McCain (or even choosing not to vote for Obama) as a protest against Clinton’s failure to be nominated: