Mad Cow vs Bird Flu

Tom Hardy update

2012-02-15T09:47:00.000-08:00

OK fine, so my Tom Hardy date movie (This Means War) was terrible. In interviews Hardy has called it "a very light entertainment," which is both an under- and an overstatement. I laughed exactly one time (because of something Chelsea Handler said) and was instantly mortified. It's the kind of movie in which the opening scene has a suitcase full of money spilling open on top of a skyscraper, hundred-dollar bills disappearing in the helicopter wind, and nobody even notices.

That could be because everyone in this movie has plenty of money, including federal agencies (parallel universe?), and the characters only show up to work because their offices are so attractive. Plot summary: two CIA guys, Chris Pine (who wears Savile Row suits) and my boyfriend, Tom Hardy (who is less fancy but whose shirts are still pretty tight for government work), fall for the same woman (Reese Witherspoon). Tom Hardy loves Reese because he reeeeeally wants a family but has been dismissed by the mother of his kid, apparently because she thinks he's a travel agent, and travel agents are obviously ridiculous and undateable. (Watch for the magical transformation when she finds out that's not really what he does for a living!)

Chris Pine loves Reese because she's so smart.

(We can tell she's smart because she knows the titles of multiple Hitchcock films and has her very own opinions about them. Also because she can remember information she learned on her product-testing job even whole days later, when it's useful in emergencies.)

There's also some kind of a sub-story about an evil German on a vengeance kick -- he's after Chris and Tom not because of all that money they spilled earlier but because they killed his brother during the skyscraper fight -- but the movie doesn't care about that and neither do we. At first, Chris and Tom pretend they're spying on Reese because of the evil German situation, but after about five minutes they drop this facade and it's an open contest to see who gets in her pants first. The villain is reduced to the role of prop, which bums him out so much that he drives off the edge of an unfinished highway in despair. (Spoiler!)

On the plus side, the director ("McG" [??? whatever], who directed Terminator Salvation, and Charlie's Angels) seems also to be in love with Tom Hardy, so there are lots of scenes in which the camera lingers fondly on his radiance, and his shirts come unbuttoned often. Which I felt was a commendable directorial choice, under the circumstances.

Short version: just go watch Bronson again. Seriously.

V-Day

2012-01-31T10:40:00.000-08:00

Greetings, glob fans. Seems I've got a lot of catching up to do. Meanwhile, though...I'm very much looking forward to my Valentine's Day date with Tom Hardy:

(Apparently there's some other chick in this movie, but....whatever. I've watched the trailer a whole bunch of times, and all I see is Tom.)

babies are scary

2011-11-23T11:05:00.001-08:00

Look at this one:

This is my nephew. As you can see, he's gone zombie. This photo was taken minutes after he'd eaten the rest of the family. Look how delighted he is. And how civilized! Fork and bib and everything. If only all zombies were so well brought up. (And adorable.)

OK fine, it's beet soup. (Or so my mother claims.) Still: a little bit terrifying, right?

Heist!

2011-11-03T14:31:00.000-07:00

Due to an unfortunate misunderstanding, I recently watched the new Eddie Murphy movie, Tower Heist. It provoked some lingering questions, detailed below. If any of you can help clear these up, naturally, I'm all ears. (I'd insert the distasteful phrase "spoiler alert" here except that, honestly, who cares? But if you haven't seen the movie yet [yet!] and are going to be upset about learning some key "plot points," well, first, congratulations on being able to read; I'm genuinely surprised. And second, please stop reading now.)

The movie takes place in a luxury apartment building in Manhattan. Ben Stiller is the building manager. Casey Affleck is the concierge. Precious is a maid. Ferris Bueller is a disgraced "Wall Street guy" being evicted. Alan Alda is a super-rich penthouse owner who for some reason plays online chess with Stiller, who lives in an inexplicably posh Astoria flat. Eddie Murphy is among the thugs who lurk outside Stiller's apartment. Brett Ratner (X-Men: The Last Stand; Rush Hour) directs. About five people wrote the screenplay, apparently in isolation from one another.

My questions include:

When and why did Ben Stiller's entire staff go from "we hate you for losing our pensions" to "we're crying because you got fired"?

Am I allowed to count the pale, squishy lump that is Matthew Broderick in this movie as yet another of Sarah Jessica Parker's aesthetic crimes? It's her fault, right?

Wait, can we go back to that Lego model for a second? I'm not sure I'm clear on the plan.

OK so is the entire car made of gold? If yes, why are there car keys? I don't think solid-gold engines are known for being super drivable. (Too melty.)

Did I miss when mocking fat girls became hilarious again?

Not to nitpick -- I know it's only a movie -- but how did four non-mechanics disassemble an entire vintage automobile inside a drained swimming pool on top of a building, without so much as a screwdriver in evidence, let alone hydraulic lifts etc., and then box each part for shipping, in a single night, without anybody noticing? Was the UPS guy not a little suspicious?

Speaking of which, does the typical hotel worker know what to do with solid-gold car parts when they arrive mysteriously on the doorstep via UPS? Ask yourself: if someone mailed you an ingot, would you know how to cash it? (No Googling!)

Is Casey Affleck married in real life? He's dreamy.

What, no prison time for the old guy trying to slay a whole marching band with a delivery truck? Guess he seems pretty stable to you, then, what with the two suicide attempts, grand theft auto and the nonstop maniacal laughter?

Why exactly is that Snoopy float so terrifying, I wonder?

Do we think Alan Alda and Ben Stiller have resumed their chess game in prison?

And finally: why do you hate America, Brett Ratner? Is it because we deserve it?

HST

2011-10-29T20:12:00.000-07:00

So The Rum Diary opened yesterday - an adaptation, for those who don't know, of an early Hunter S Thompson novel, starring Johnny Depp and directed by Bruce Robinson (who did Withnail & I). As my pal Mike Russell mentioned on Friday's episode of Cort & Fatboy (thanks, fellas!), I had a great time watching it, but the more I thought about it afterward, the more it bothered me.

Depp plays Paul Kemp, a sort of proto-Thompson avatar who washes up in Puerto Rico having been hired from afar to work at an English-language daily that is blatantly collapsing. Depp's really good in it; he mostly abandons his Jack Sparrow mugging in favor of a deadpan nervousness with occasional twitching. (Remember when he played Ichabod Crane as a frightened little girl in Sleepy Hollow? It's weird how restrained that performance seems in hindsight.)

Even better is Michael Rispoli, who plays the staff photographer, Sala. He's the heart and the brains of the story, and everything gets sort of chilly when he's out of the frame. The villain is white-linen-suited developer (and ex journo) Hal Sanderson, played by Aaron Eckhart. He's too Evil to be a convincing character, but it's fun to see Eckhart being rotten again. Sanderson's girlfriend (Amber Heard) is supposedly a bewitching mermaid minx/damsel in distress, but I found her pretty dull. And Giovanni Ribisi shuffles around as sort of the Ghost of HST Future, a cautionary tale and/or inspiration, depending on which parts of the Hunter legend you're devoted to.

Anyway. Kemp's an idealistic young reporter who is easily seduced by alcohol and mermaids and also maybe by the cash and sweet car Sanderson throws at him in an attempt to get the writer to plant some PR stories currying public favor for a hideous and probably illegal development project. The project is a grody bait-and-switch that would ravage a pristine island and make Sanderson heaps of money. It's the kind of widespread-corruption story that would make a young reporter's career, if that young reporter's editor weren't somehow involved and thus reluctant to print anything more hard-hitting than astrology columns and bowling-league results. Kemp does protest, but not too much, and he's pretty happy to borrow Sanderson's car. That whole "nail the bastards to the wall" part only comes once the string of selfish greed causes the newspaper's payroll to vanish.

The movie is really well made, and there are scenes of pure alchemical beauty in it - notably a dark, still moment in which Kemp and Sala drop a mysterious liquid into their eyeballs and wait for it to kick in. (And there's a line in this scene that echoes Withnail & I: "You're giving me fear!") The whole thing is a lot of manic fun. And yet....

The thing people forget about Hunter Thompson - and the thing this movie seems intent on distracting its audience from - is how genuinely sad he could be. It's the same way they forget how funny Hemingway was. We inherit these established ideas of what these writers were like, and then we never feel the need to look deeper. There's both accidental and deliberate confusion between the man and the myth. In Hunter's case the real guy vanished early into the character of Raoul Duke. And then that character himself became cartoonified (literally and metaphorically). People associate him with a trunk full of drugs, bats on the highway, lizards in the carpet. Nobody thinks of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a sad book. But that scene where he talks about seeing the high-water mark of the culture -- that's tragedy. He's staring out at the desiccated corpse of the American Dream, which back then you could still discuss without irony, and he's mourning. In The Rum Diary, there's a scene in which Kemp and Sala are watching Nixon on TV and Kemp says "When will this blizzard of shame finally end?" and you're supposed to laugh. And then he adds that in a few decades someone will come along who's so much worse that he makes Nixon look like a liberal. And again it's played for comedy.

Which is fine, I guess, because if you don't laugh at this stuff you end up spending your whole life drunk and then blowing your pickled brains out. But to me, the trouble with this movie is that it works so hard to distract you from its own substance. Even just the basic plot outline: aside from hallucinogens and cockfights and some really dodgy club scenes at Carnaval, what exactly happens? Kemp tries to play the role of journalist as scrappy superhero and save an island. He fails. Then he leaves. Sure, in the end maybe he gets the girl, but idealism and journalism and Puerto Rico all get shafted. And the way the movie's set up, we don't care -- we're psyched that Kemp and his pals didn't get shot or jailed. We're supposed to think they won, because they showed the bastards, they stuck it to the Man. But what about that island development project? what about the pillaged newspaper offices? Never mind - let's steal a boat and go chase that mermaid.

The lesson being that you can be a complete wreck of a person, fueled by rum and failure and a wholly untested idealism, and get just as much accomplished as if you're all freshly showered and sober in front of the typewriter, because whatever you write while sane is not what the Man will print anyway, so you might as well drop hallucinogens into your eyeballs - certainly beats working.

It is much, much cooler to imagine journalism this way, but it also kind of misses the point.

I should probably add that I've never read the novel; it came out after my love affair with HST had peaked. (It never ended, but it has ebbed slightly over the years.) I saw somewhere that Jann Wenner said Hunter would never have published the book 20 years earlier, and that was enough to make me avoid it, although at some point I'm sure I'll pick it up. (But never that last Hemingway novel, ever ever ever.) But if you really want to watch Hunter Thompson become Hunter Thompson, read Hell's Angels.

Anyway. Huge rant, probably incoherent. But there you have it.

road trip

2011-10-11T23:11:00.000-07:00

I accidentally spent a night in Butte, Montana, not too long ago -- cool-looking town. Poisonous lake on a hill, old brick buildings, all the neon signs. It reminded me of how much I liked the movie Don't Come Knocking, directed by Wim Wenders in 2005 and seen by I think practically no one. Sam Shepard wrote the screenplay and stars in it as a grizzled and vulnerable Sam Shepard type guy, alongside Jessica Lange, who is always perfect. T Bone Burnett did all the music. It's better, moodier, and less actiony than the preview makes it look, but here's that anyway:

Recommended!

Tony Tony Tony

2011-09-17T23:33:00.000-07:00

Check it out. They were fools to cross my boyfriend Tony Leung. They will pay.

(But when will they pay? Is this movie ever coming out? Does anybody know anything? TELL ME)

picture time

2011-09-17T23:01:00.000-07:00

Instead of typing any more tonight...here are a few random photos from the latest Sweden trip, in no particular order. More to come, but they're on the other laptop, and I'm lazy.

Ljusnedal Church

Part of the mill in Ljusnedal

Big barn in Ljusnedal. The light here was amazing; I couldn't really catch it.

One of the cabins we stayed in had a calendar tacked to the wall featuring "The Men of Härjedalen" - this is Mr August, I think.

Sami Hut in Arådalen

Captain Joe's cabin in Härnösand

Ha, ha. Real mature, Becky.

Downtown Uppsala (where Mom grew up)

Uppsala Modern

Uppsala Cathedral

Child-size Mom outside her old school.

Ljusnedal again

Cute chicks in Härnösand

Mom's dream hut

rules of distraction

2011-09-09T23:27:00.000-07:00

Taking a quick break from typing about Sweden, just to mix it up a bit. (And because I lack focus/discipline.)

By now everyone has probably read this Times magazine article about willpower and decision fatigue. I read it yesterday and then spent the entire evening behaving exactly as the article predicted.

The good news is, I am blameless! If you've read it you know: I do silly things late in the day because of all the energy I've wasted making smart choices all morning. The root of the problem seems to be sugar sags:

"Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. It responds more strongly to immediate rewards and pays less attention to long-term prospects."

Yep. (I'm looking at you, Sandy Hut.)

I'm thinking the judicious application of cookies and ice cream throughout the day might be able to correct for this weird biological quirk. Sadly, all we can do is hope to rescue our future selves from the results of our overtaxed and rumbly brains; the past is past and already recorded and posted onto the entire internet.

Of the many things that probably shouldn't have come out of my mouth today (and please note I'd already made several decisions all by myself just to get downtown, surely depleting the reserves), the one I feel least uncomfortable bringing up again concerns Battlestar Galactica. Mainly, I think I sounded like I was harshing on the series, and I didn't mean to - I've been watching it obsessively on Netflix and really love some of the characters (although now every time Tigh sticks his nose in a glass I'm going to picture Mike Russell howling). But I do find some of the choices exasperating and inconsistent, and I have a feeling the ending is going to piss me off. Also, Baltar is gross. Still, it's bitchin' TV.

The other thing that happened today (this happens often) is that I tried to talk about movies and ended up talking about male body parts. Not a tragedy but perhaps not as informative as some might like. So here are expanded thoughts on two of the movies we talked about today.

The Last Circus
(directed by Alex de la Iglesia)

Still no idea why this thing got to me as much as it did. I mean I like movies that make me feel terrible, I enjoy being wrecked by a work of art. But I didn't simply dislike this movie, I wanted to beat it with trumpets and cannonball it into a brick wall. It felt germy and sordid and wrong; I'm sure I will not feel dirtier after watching Contagion.

This seems like a lot of abuse to pile onto a weird little Spanish Civil War circus movie. And it does start out strong. For the first few minutes you're like, hell yeah! There's a burly clown in a pink dress and Nellie Oleson wig machine-gunning an army of bad guys. Awesome! But before you even have a chance to get into it, the movie stamps that little flame of hope right out. Suddenly it's 30-some years later and the rampaging clown's nerdy little son has turned into a pudgy sad-sack. He auditions for the job of Sad Clown in a crappy circus led by a drunken but handsome Asshole Clown. And of course there's the tightrope walker acrobat chick they both love, who turns out to be a trampy abuse junkie, of course. I think the thing I couldn't get past is that there is absolutely no one to pull for in the movie. Even the underdog, the guy you'd traditionally sympathize with, turns out to be a vile person. So you end up just watching a bunch of miserable assholes being self-destructively awful to each other for no good reason, for two hours, and then at the end you're like, yep, life is hideous.

Same thing's true of A Perfect Crime, probably de la Iglesia's best-known movie: It starts out fast and sharp and funny and stylish, and then you begin to realize that everyone in it is selfish and grasping and horrible. You assume the ugly-duckling savior girl is sweet and kind and the perfect match, because that's what always happens. Instead it turns out she's horrible. Which I suppose is new and interesting. But all it means is that, in this world, no one is sweet; everyone's an asshole, it's just that some people are also ugly.

Or maybe I was just PMSing or something.

(Kidding!)

The Warrior
I should probably talk about something besides my boyfriend Tom Hardy's amazing shoulders (god, can they act!) but it's late and I'm tired and I won't be able to do the rest of the movie justice. Also, it's not just me: this movie is very interested in bodies. I mean, it's a melodrama about MMA fighting. You can't ignore the muscles; it would be like not talking about the aliens in Aliens. Anyway, the trailer tells you the structure (I mean the entire structure, so don't get all upset - you can see all of this coming from the first few minutes anyway, and it really doesn't lessen the impact of the ending, I promise). It's a classic Rocky-style plot: underdog endures hardship, trains, is victorious. Except in this case there are two underdogs, my boyfriend and his older brother, played by Joel Edgerton (backup boyfriend), and you really want both of them to win.

Nick Nolte never takes his shirt off but is completely heartbreaking as the recovering-alcoholic dad; Jennifer Morrison from House doesn't get a lot of screen time as backup-boyfriend's wife, but her character is tough and cool and totally convincing. Recommended especially if you like training montages, slow-motion fist-to-face shots, honor and love among gruff and broken men, or shoulders.

Now for some deep knee bends.

The Mitten of Nowhere

2011-09-02T11:37:00.000-07:00

My apologies, glob fans, for the recent neglect; I've been dizzy.

This might be relevant.

What happened was, I went to Sweden for Lonely Planet and came back kinda grouchy. This could be because I've had an embarrassment of free time since March, and now I don't have any, and when I had it what I mostly did with it was nap.

I miss napping.

No more naps for me, though. I'm a dedicated little worker. Here is proof: I could've spent all of last Friday adventuring on motorbikes with two very attractive young men. Instead I stayed in, working.

Maybe I'm just not all that bright.

Anyway! Sweden. My mom came with me, and I heard lots of stories about what it was like for her growing up there, some of them possibly even true. We took a couple of days in the middle of the work trip to search out her dad's little cabin in a tiny village in Jämtland - more about that part soon, including some possibly controversial facts about trolls.

(Short version: trolls are real, and they are SCARY.)

This is the first time I've had anybody shadow me full-time on a guidebook research trip. I figured Mom would be bored out of her mind, or at least annoyed. I know I usually am. But I think she actually had a good time. Which, oddly enough, made me have a good time, too. I'll post photos and highlights this weekend, along with my traditional post-trip List of Petty Grievances.

Meanwhile, here is what I'm working on this morning: Swedish drinking songs! Hey, the people need to know. Here's a good one:

I Like the Snaps

I like the snaps and the snaps likes me,

thrilling as only a snaps can be.

I want to drink the real elite:

Aalborger aquavite!

Over the mountains, over the sea,

Millions of snapses are waiting for me.

Please go to hell with juice and tea,

Snaps is the drink for me!!

Skål!

Goldrush 2011

2011-07-14T12:50:00.001-07:00

Last weekend I went on the annual SFRC Goldrush ride out to Eastern Oregon. This was my favorite part of the road:

View Larger Map

...but the whole thing was pretty awesome. Riding, camping, swimming, bikes, beer, handguns, a shag-carpeted outhouse, a power-station tour, red meat three meals a day, fifteen soap-operas' worth of drama - what's not to love?

On the way home I killed a bird with my helmet. Any tips on de-sliming will be gratefully accepted:

Yeah, that's just gross.

Anyhow. Every so often a non-riding friend of mine will ask me what's so great about this whole motorcycle-club thing. To them I say,

That is all.

race report!

2011-06-27T20:36:00.000-07:00

This Saturday was the annual OMRRA Vintage Days at Portland International Raceway. All kinds of mayhem occurred all day, most of which, between racing and fretting about racing, I missed. My class is 250 Vintage [corrected!], and in that class, for some reason, the Vintage Days tradition is to do a Le Mans start.

( LE MANS TYPE START MOTORCYCLE RACE )

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Your browser does not support iframes.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

In a normal race, you just form a grid, bikes running, everybody alert and pointed toward the first turn, and when the green flag drops you take off. But Le Mans is more complicated, and much more comical. Someone holds your bike, engine dead, at the inside wall of the track, and you line up across from it on the other side of the track. A gun goes off, you run to the bike, hop on, bump start it and go.

In theory.

In practice, if you're me, you kind of stumble toward the bike, only belatedly realizing how hard it is to run in tight leather pants, motorcycle boots and a helmet. You take a moment to grin at your awesome bike holder, then struggle to throw a leg over the seat and start duck-walking as fast as you can with the clutch pulled in, bike in second gear. You have short legs, so this looks ridiculous and doesn't work very well. Eventually you reach a speed that seems promising. You let out the clutch. Nothing happens. You do this three times, until everyone else in the race has safely gone ahead, and then at last when you let out the clutch the bike roars to life and you go.

(Actually, on the second race of the day I got a really good start, first try. But that's rare, for me. Some people can run along beside the bike to get it up to speed, then hop onto it while moving, with a fluid grace I've never approached in any endeavor and am damned sure not going to try in front of a crowd.)

A novel thing about the Saturday morning race is that I had someone to chase. Usually I'm at the back all by myself, just trying to catch sight of the second-to-last guy, hoping the race leaders don't pass me until the whole thing's almost over, so I get to see how it ends. (Have I mentioned that I'm extremely slow? Smooth! But terribly, tragically slow.) But this time, there was a guy whose bike maybe wasn't running too well, or maybe he was just taking it easy, enjoying the scenery (we have ospreys!), and at some point during the race, to my surprise, I passed him. Fun! (Pretty sure he passed me right back, but I only remember the fun part.)

In the afternoon race I was even slower than I'd been in the morning. But as every single living human I've encountered at the racetrack has said to me, Hey, at least I'm out there. (I don't really know what this means. Good try? I think it's a nice thing to say, but I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense if you think about it.)

Anyway. Things that fell off my bike include:

* the bellypan;

* the bolt in the middle of this photo (glamour shot by Scott Elder), directly beneath the SeeSee smiley face.

Looks important!

(I can't help but wonder how it fell off without my noticing. It's a large bolt. Surely I would've noticed a large bolt hitting me in the face at speed. Maybe, as Patrick has suggested, it was never really there at all.)

Things that did not fall off my bike on Saturday include: me, so that's nice.

I did walk away with a massively uncool sunburn, the short-sleeve farmer's-tan variety, and a brand-new hideous burn scar on my forearm, from the tailpipe. Which is great, because the old scar from the first time I burned my forearm on the tailpipe in the exact same place had just faded. I do enjoy continuity.

(I was going to post a photo of the disgusting blister that blobbed up over the tailpipe burn, but it's too gross. I have standards. I'll wait until it pops.)

Here's a rare shot of me near a fellow racer. I can't remember if I was passing him or he was passing me, but the smart money's on the latter.

And another just for fun:

Still not looking cool enough to actually buy the photos.

Also, I think I need a fairing.

Well, I probably won't have another race until August, so those of you bored to tears by all this nonsense but too polite to say so are in for a reprieve. Enjoy!

x-babies

2011-06-03T09:33:00.000-07:00

This'll be up shortly at WW, but here's a quick peek for those who just can't wait to see what I thought of the new X-Men movie:

X-Men: First Class

One thing I've learned from reading a lot of X-Men comics is that evil doesn't just spring up out of nowhere. More often than not it's born of carelessness: someone "good" says something thoughtless to a fragile soul on the threshold of darkness, and blammo, new supervillain. This happens twice in X-Men: First Class, which makes sense, considering how much of the movie is spent on establishing character -- or at least introducing characters.

A prequel to the four preceding X-Men movies (from the pretty good Bryan Singer-directed X-Men in 2000 to the universally lambasted X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2009), First Class has so much fun with its setup that you almost wish it never got around to the saving-the-world-from-nuclear-annihilation plot. (Mutants solve the Cuban Missile Crisis; JFK gets credit.) It's a blast watching the young Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and the future Magneto, aka Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), sashay around the planet collecting stray mutants to protect and school. Even more fun is watching Lehnsherr track and punish his Nazi tormenters -- this could easily be its own whole movie. The man has flair. (And teeth! My god.)

It's also cool to see how far the characters have come. Pre-wheelchair Xavier is a little smarmy (he tries the line "that's a very groovy mutation" twice). He's idealistic and brilliant but not yet wise. He lacks the weighty dignity of the Patrick Stewart years, and we get to see him make mistakes. (See above re thoughtlessness.) Other characters arrive fully formed; there's a great cameo that damn near steals the show. Jennifer Lawrence (Winter's Bone) does a good job at toughing it out as Mystique, who must console herself with Fassbender after getting the brushoff from wimpy Xavier and nerdy Hank McCoy (Nicholas Hoult). The other young recruits are mostly props for training montages -- and the nerd in me insists I mention that Banshee (Caleb Landry Jones), although adorable, is really supposed to be Irish, and old enough to get with Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne).

As villains go, well, for starters you have the Nazis. Kevin Bacon makes a decent Sebastian Shaw, and the special effects around him are weird and impressive. But January Jones doesn't radiate enough intelligence for Emma Frost; the movie turns her into Shaw's penthouse playmate. She looks fabulous, though, as does the whole enterprise, particularly the bad guys' Austin Powers-y egg-shaped sub-submarine hangout.

Both silliness and sap increase as the film rolls along, but the big action scenes are handled well, and it never becomes ridiculous enough to undercut the cool, shaken-not-stirred vibe of its first half.

back to beerlight

2011-06-01T10:17:00.000-07:00

Attention, Steve Aylett fans: Novahead is out! I'm reading it now -- I'll post a review here soon. Can't tell if the cold medicine is adding clarity or weirdness, but so far, soooooo good.

evil is adorable

2011-05-30T18:36:00.001-07:00

Had a busy weekend of subzero camping and motorbikes, which I might report on later, if the green slime ever leaves my head. In the meantime please take a look at this (and beware always the helpful-seeming minion!).

SHRIP

p.s. Happy birthday, Karl!

kerosene around

2011-05-27T08:36:00.000-07:00

Hesher opens today at Cinema 21. It's pretty awesome. I talked about it a little bit today on Cort & Fatboy, with Mike Russell. OK, mostly I talked about Joseph Gordon Levitt and his bare chest and grimy underpants. And a little bit about wrestling, and capes. It was fun.

But anyway. Hesher!

I keep trying to explain to people why this movie rules so much, and I haven't really been able to. Describing the storyline makes it sound terrible: a family made catatonic by grief is invaded by this longhaired burnout who appears out of nowhere for no obvious reason and won't leave. There's a love interest, played by Natalie Portman as a checkout girl in hipster glasses. That's pretty much it. So instead I'll just say that Hesher, as embodied by Joseph Gordon Levitt, might be my ultimate dream boyfriend. He has gross hair, lives in a garage, drives a creepy van, sits around the house watching stolen-cable porn in tighty whities all day, lights cars on fire in vengeance, cusses at the dinner table with grandma, comes into your room just to fart -- but underneath all of that, he is Joseph Gordon Levitt.

In short, Hesher is hot.

He walks away from explosions calmly, without looking back.

Also, he's hilarious. And although he's menacing and totally unhinged, his disregard for civil society ends up serving the forces of good. When he shows up and attaches himself to 13-year-old TJ, you think he's some kind of punishing antagonist, bent on destroying whatever little scraps of this poor kid's happiness might remain. But what he ends up doing, probably by accident, is provoking the kid into rage and thus action. He's a totally uncouth asshole, but he helps people. Sort of.

The movie's not perfect. All the acting is solid, but the tone is a little confused; it's like Joseph Gordon Levitt's character was teleported in from some other movie, strictly to mess with the structure of this relatively ordinary family drama. The clash seems entirely deliberate. Some people won't like it, but I found it hysterical. The mood swings didn't bother me. Maybe I'm just easily distracted by the naked torsos of lithe criminal idiot stoners riding bicycles into strangers' swimming pools. But even if you don't share this fondness, you'd have to be a total square not to love the Pabst-fueled speech Hesher gives at the end of the movie. It's so wrong, but so right.

i eat food...and complain frivolously

2011-05-25T18:22:00.000-07:00

In lieu of a new glob post, here's the raw (more wordy) version of my Sunshine Tavern review, which you can read in tidier form in this week's WW. I would like it noted that although I really wanted to, I didn't even once complain about the prices. Restraint!

The Sunshine Tavern is neither sunny nor a tavern: discuss.

Let's get the griping out of the way: the Sunshine Tavern is not a tavern. It is many delightful things: a beautiful room, a mini-arcade, a chic new restaurant whose slender menu lacks nothing. But it is not a tavern, not in atmosphere and not in priorities.

(Also, on none of my visits to the Sushine Tavern was there any sunshine in evidence, but it seems unfair to blame the owners for that.)

Names set certain expectations. And if you're a pedantic little jerk like me, this sort of thing can ruin a night out. (I never quite surrendered my grudge against Taqueria Nueve: not a taqueria.) I realize this is absurd and self-defeating, which is why I'm glad my principles so often crumple in the face of a really yummy dinner. As it turns out, the Sunshine Tavern could wear a pretty hat and call itself the Queen of France and I'd forgive it, on account of the chicken.

Sunshine's menu offers just three entrees, plus a handful of inventive pizzas, sandwiches, salads and burgers. Order anything you want as long as it's the fried chicken dinner ($14). You'll be rewarded with perfect, juicy, boneless hunks of bird on fat semolina waffles drizzled with honey. It is heaven. The same chicken is equally good on a spicy sandwich ($11), accompanied by a tawny pile of awesome fries. And I was exaggerating earlier: everything we tried was delicious. The chopped salad with french fries ($8) gets a lot of attention, but a boring-sounding iceberg wedge with buttermilk blue cheese dressing ($8) is even better. The baked-egg appetizer ($9), lauded in the Wall Street Journal, is worth trying for novelty, but it's less exciting than a platter of gravy cheese fries ($9), and not only because to eat them is to toy with death. (A small heart attack may be a fair price.) Even the humble burger ($10, more for extras like cheese, eggs or pork belly) holds its own.

None of this is a huge surprise, considering that the Sunshine Tavern is owned and run by Jenn Louis and David Welch, the folks behind Lincoln. The drinks list is as well-edited as the food menu; it includes a handful of specialty cocktails ($7-8) and eight unusual beers on tap ($5 pints), plus lots of interesting things in bottles.

But let's get back to the griping just for a second. If Sunshine is not a tavern, what is it? The place is confusing. It's an elegant room, with huge windows, tall tables, and rough dark wood smoothed into hard-angled shapes. The bar is made of an old bowling lane, and over it hangs a long metal Jenga-style light fixture that will blow your mind. The shuffleboard table at center stage has a lean grace not generally associated with the sport.

Meanwhile, kids are running wild all over the place. Donkey Kong and Ms Pac-Man bleep their familiar bleeps from the corner. A bartender refers to a window-side six-top as the Party Table. The crowd is adult-looking, but they're sipping margaritas dispensed from a slushy machine behind the bar. The star dish -- that so-sweet chicken and waffles -- is practically dessert. And afterward you can have a bowl of ice-cream ($5) with house-made "magic shell" chocolate sauce. Remember magic shell? It's still fun!

In short, the Sunshine is a place where you can be a parent and a child at once. In that sense, it might be the quintessential Portland restaurant. It's not a tavern. You wouldn't nestle in with a pint and a paperback. But it's a nice place to try some sophisticated comfort food and briefly abandon your hangups.

Order this: The iceberg wedge, then the chicken and waffles.
Best deal: Fried-chicken sandwich with fries, topped with slaw.
I’ll pass: Slushy margarita ($7) -- fun idea, but not really worth it.

EAT: Sunshine Tavern, 3111 SE Division St., 688-1750, sunshinepdx.com. Dinner 5pm-10pm Sunday-Thursday, 5pm-11 pm Friday-Saturday. $$-$$$ Moderate-Expensive.

race report!

2011-05-24T08:37:00.000-07:00

This past weekend was my first motorcycle race since October. (They're held at Portland International Raceway, with OMRRA.)

Short version: I am very slow.

Slightly longer version: This race went much better than the last one! In October, I fell off during practice, and then it rained oceans all day, and the wind picked up, and there were ducks and tadpoles and probably sharks floating around in huge lakes all over the track, not kidding, so I kind of freaked out and didn't actually grid up for the race.

But this time I wasn't even nervous. Possibly someone has been slipping a little bit of Xanax into my coffee. Or maybe this is the upside of seasonal-affective disorder. Whichever. I'll take it.

I guess it's about time for me not to be nervous. I started racing in 2007. Here is something I wrote about that, for Willamette Week. And here is a second little race diary from that first weekend. I escaped the 2007 season with a cracked thumb and a souvenir t-shirt that says, "If you're not crashing, you're not racing hard enough." (A thoughtful gift from the girl I collided with.) But since then I've only raced maybe six or eight times. (I travel too much, and am poor.)

Last year I did one race, plus the aborted rain weekend. So I'm a little rusty. My bike is (was) a 1968(?) Honda CL175 in need of a bit of mechanical tenderness. So in October my friend Will at Poor Bastard Cycleworks made me a deal. I'll spare you the details because I will get them wrong if I try to tell you, but essentially he got some cool 175 parts and I got a freshened-up, hotted-up, Mad Maxified race motor.

Best part: I now have only four speeds instead of five. This makes it much less likely that I'll spazz out and forget what gear I'm in or when I'm supposed to be shifting.

There was some suspense as to whether the motor would make its way back into the bike on time, and run. But it did. On Saturday morning we had three practice sessions. But if you're me, you manage to run out of gas on the first one and get black-flagged on the second one. If you're black-flagged you're supposed to go back to the starting line and talk to the guys there; it could mean something is falling off your bike, or that you are on fire.

Turns out they flagged me because they saw the red liner of my jacket and thought my leathers weren't zipped together. I suspect the starting-line guys were just bored and wanted someone to talk to. ("Hey! That slow dude's a chick! Get her over here, let's check it out.")

Here's me trying to figure out where I'm supposed to exit the track after getting black-flagged:

http://www.xqsmephotography.com/OMRRA11/OMRRA-May-21-22-2011/OMRRA-5-21-2011/17220614_MHpw7T#1306685037_CDXgM9c-A-LB

Supersuave.

Anyway. Finally made it all the way around the track a bunch of times on the third practice session Saturday. Felt smooth but incredibly slow. My lap times were epic. Glacial. Peristaltic. (Can I use that word that way?) Everyone had plenty of time to admire my pretty black-and-silver paint job. My friend The Italian Cowboy's 76-year-old dad was there and he said he walked to the bathroom faster than I was riding. (Probably true: he'd eaten lunch at the concession stand. I can't be expected to match that level of urgency.)

However! On Sunday, my practice lap times were four seconds faster than Saturday's. In the race they were six seconds faster. (I broke two minutes!) There was a new guy racing Sunday whose times were close to mine. I thought I might be able to beat him, or at least be near him. But he crashed in practice and broke his collarbone, so he was out.

For next time, I need to drop three seconds a lap to beat the slowest guy, and ten to really be racing with anybody. Ten seconds a lap sounds like a lot. But there are nine corners on the track, so if I just do each corner one second faster....

I've been studying photos from the track to see if it'll help. Here's what the fast guys look like:

And here's me on that same corner:

You see the difference. My head and shoulders are more or less in the right place (could be lower), but look at my poor little legs. Death grip! Very uncool. If I can stick out my knee and hang off a bit, scoot my weight to the inside, I can go faster. And more importantly, my photos will look a lot cooler.

So it's hypnotism and leg presses twice a day for a month. Next race is June 25-26. Come out and watch!

movie time

2011-05-19T21:02:00.000-07:00

Sorry, glob fans, for the recent neglect. I've been out gathering valuable insights to share with you. Oh, fine: I've been fooling around on motorcycles and watching lots of movies.

I will tell you about the movies eventually.

OK, I'll tell you about one of them right now.

Hobo with a Shotgun!

Hobo with a Shotgun opens tomorrow (Friday!) at the Hollywood Theatre. Like Machete, it's one of the movies that grew out of the fake trailers included in the Tarantino-Rodriguez double feature Grindhouse. You can watch the original Hobo with a Shotgun fake trailer here. In the full-grown movie, the hobo is Rutger Hauer and the shotgun costs ten bucks less. (Times are tough.)

The title kind of gives away some key elements of the plot, but here is the gist: a hobo (Rutger Hauer) makes the terrible mistake of getting off the train at the presumably once-idyllic Hope Town, now renamed Fuck Town, a place inhabited mostly by people made of ketchup. I'm only guessing about that last part. They seem to be made of ketchup, inside very tautly stretched skins, because whenever they are even lightly punched, kicked, stabbed or crushed by evil go-karts, they explode in a big wet splash of red and essentially vanish.

The ketchup is extra red because this movie is filmed in Hipstamatic. (Although the opening credits display the hilariously period-correct Technicolor logo.) I couldn't decide if I liked this or not. It's pretty, but it somehow looks wrong. I mean, y'know. More wrong.

Anyway. An evil businessman and his Raybanned sons have taken over Hope Town and spraypainted over everything nice. You can tell they're evil because their insults are uncreative, and also because they break a kid's joystick arm so he can't play videogames anymore. Dicks! And their clothes are iridescent white, so they like to congregate near bluelights, because it looks awesome, and they YELL all their dialogue.

The yelling is hilarious. Sample dialogue [please read at full volume]:

"I'm gonna wash off this blood…WITH YOUR BLOOD!!!"

Anyway. The movie starts out a little slow, but pretty soon someone is foolhardy enough to piss off Rutger Hauer, and things pick up quickly. (He eats glass! Did I tell you that already? They make him eat glass! Rutger Hauer!) And then, about the time you figure it's peaking, the main bad guy yells, "SEND FOR THE PLAGUE." Awesome.

The Plague is HILARIOUS. It's a metal monster thing that looks like an angry Lego.

I mean, you probably know what you're getting into with this kind of movie. Rutger Hauer eats glass. He yells at babies. He springs up out of a shopping cart filled with slurpy human guts. A guy gets his crotch shot out, and the camera zooms in on it -- twice. And kind of lingers there. To make sure you really get a good look. Because how often do you get to see a thing like that?

Also: death by ice skate!

Also: toaster used as weapon! Lawnmower used in anger! Motorcycle riders in spurs!

And more.

Here's this bonus note from the theater:

Before the shows on Friday and Saturday night, to make sure we get the crowd's adrenaline pumping, we'll be running a 35mm "RUTGERSPECTIVE" trailer reel, honoring the great Rutger Hauer, star of HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN.

snug

2011-04-19T18:15:00.000-07:00

See what I mean?

(About the pants?)

I spent yesterday at Portland International Raceway for a Motocorsa track day - my first track day ever (although I have crawled around that track many times on my CB160). It was awesome. I am very slow. But I think I got smoother toward the end, and nothing fell off my bike, including me. Also: no rain. Pretty much perfect!

Here is the photo in which I think I look the least nervous/uncool.

And here are a few more pics:

Stretching is key.

Sucking up to teacher ^ (Thanks, Chris Page!)

profiling

2011-04-13T17:42:00.000-07:00

It's a fair question: "why does being safe have to involve dressing up like a DayGlo sausage, a European hairdresser or a large nylon pillow?"

(I think my current look is closest to the sausage thing, alas. One spring ritual I especially dislike involves cramming my winter fat into unforgiving leather pants. Incredibly, they still fit, but I'll tell you, there is not a lot of sag in these things right now. They are minimally bendy. I'm thinking a three-day juice fast...the first vintage roadrace of the year is nine days away. Eek!)

man vs machine

2011-04-08T08:07:00.001-07:00

Don't get me wrong: I like boys - a lot. But, like any fun hobby, they can be frustrating. At such times, I find it useful to hang out in my garage, absorbing the noxious fumes and ruminating on the many, many ways in which motorcycles are better than boyfriends. A few examples:

1) The obvious: motorcycles vibrate.

2) When a motorcycle starts acting weird, you can remove its head, dig around in there, and replace any parts that don't look right.

3) You can totally rebuild the whole bottom end.

4) If a motorcycle has a breakdown, you can just leave it by the side of the road and get someone else to deal with it later.

5) Even if a motorcycle doesn't work at all, you can usually still get some money out of it.

6) When a motorcycle spends all day in the garage, it comes out cleaner.

7) When's the last time some guy in a Camaro leaned out his window and yelled at you, "Hey, nice boyfriend"?

awesome

2011-04-01T09:39:00.000-07:00

I pretty much never want to see an opera any other way than as explained by Mike Russell. The drawing of the kid throwing a tantrum about his homework doubles as a perfect reflection of my mood today. Bonus!

achieving results

2011-03-29T19:45:00.000-07:00

The beginning of a really good idea sometimes looks like this:

If you're lucky, it'll continue along these lines...

...most likely ending up somewhere around here:

Anyway. No harm done. 'Course that could be because your heroine reverted to audience mode before events reached this stage:

Yep.

This weekend was the annual SFRC Alley Sweeper ride, in which about 106 motorcycles slowly and gently terrorized various parts of residential Portland by ripping through the city's many small unpaved, unmaintained and mostly mud-bogged alleyways. (This is legal!) I hadn't realized, but the ride doubles as a large-scale dog-tormenting endeavor; those poor chain-link-runnin' suckers hated us. Plus I pruned some hedges for some people who will probably never get around to saying thanks. That's okay. It was nothing. I enjoyed it. I've never had the right bike for the alleys before, but this year I took the little DT-175 out and it couldn't have been more perfect.

Then, having annoyed the peaceful denizens of three city quadrants, a few intrepid souls dragged the party to a friend's back yard (and kitchen and living room and various couches...eesh), where those of us who hadn't been thoroughly slimed in alley-swamp mud corrected that oversight. I crashed a CT-90 into every stationary object in the area, and the ground. Those things are really hard to steer. We set a bunch of stuff on fire and threw gasoline at it and people jumped over it on motorcycles (see above), and Thor dragged a willing victim around the block in a Radio Flyer at 40mph or so (see below), and all in all it was pretty much your typical Saturday night. Rule of thumb: bruised knees = probably had a good time.

And it's only March!

The Point!

2011-03-15T11:33:00.001-07:00

Probably not something I should brag about, or even admit, but this movie -- more accurately, the album, by Harry Nilsson, my parents' copy of which was illustrated in needlepoint -- was crucial in defining my worldview as a tiny kid (along with Flat Stanley and a Daniel Pinkwater book called The Big Orange Splot, plus suicidal lambs and rabbit mothers who chronically ate their young -- but that's getting into the dark side). Ringo Starr narrates. The animation looks like it was all done in crayon, and it's clear that everyone involved was stoned to the bone, but the songs are pretty great, and you can't argue with the moral of the story, man. Dig those wacky flying stars and big ol' bouncing ladies!

Anyway. The Clinton Street Theater is showing the whole movie next week (March 24). I'll be going.

Tony Tony Tony

2011-03-08T09:39:00.001-08:00

I think I'll be waiting a good while yet, but I'm unreasonably excited about this:

very important work

2011-03-06T22:41:00.000-08:00

Some of my friends are, like, engineers and stuff! This project has been years in the making.

On an unrelated note, I saw Animal House on Friday night (it was the Cort & Fatboy midnight movie) and was struck by how deeply certain parts of it resembled certain elements of the SFRC. Coincidence?

Cold Weather

2011-02-26T15:08:00.000-08:00

I might expand this review at some point, because I wrote it in kind of a rush and it's not really saying everything I meant to say, but I wanted to get it posted before the weekend. Short version: if you like good stories, and looking at pretty things, go see Aaron Katz's new movie at Cinema 21 this week.

Update: In hindsight, that short version sounds like I'm writing off the movie as some merely nice-looking entertainment. Instead I think I'll add this, which was halfway down a page I swear I just opened to at random, cruising a bookshelf for something anything a minute ago -- it's John Berger, talking about movies, and maybe it's a little on the heavy side but I think it fits okay:

"No other narrative art can get as close as the cinema to the variety, the texture, the skin of daily life. But its unfolding, its coming into being, its marriage with the Elsewhere, reminds us of a longing, or a prayer."

pretty good weekend

2011-02-21T15:01:00.000-08:00

Fortunately, most of the antics this weekend were not recorded. But here's a sample of what can happen when you go off into the mountains with fifteen guys, a stack of wood, some gasoline, beer, light weaponry and no sign of authority whatsoever. Mom, don't worry, that cooler felt totally safe:

Our main task for the day was to build a ropetow system powered by motorcycle to get us and our ski bikes and sleds up the opposite hill. (Couple of photos posted at www.sang-froidridingclub.com.) In an exciting and unexpected twist, it actually worked. Later there was a bit of combat grappling, and as anyone knows who has seen me recently, I got socked in the face with a couch during some kind of dogpile, which I probably instigated, but really my only regret was failing to take a photo of the hot tub at its man-filled peak Saturday night. Never seen a spectacle like that before and I don't expect to forget it anytime soon.

Onward!

movie stuff

2011-02-17T21:48:00.001-08:00

I posted a couple of movie notes on the KBOO site today. Sorry about the formatting, I lack the patience to fix it. Today was also the monthly Movie Talk half-hour. Check it out if you like. I really wish I could go see Rubber and Outrage at PIFF After Dark this weekend! I hope they come back - I'll be in Sunriver, bonding with sixteen motorcycle guys and shooting stuff and riding bicycles with skis for wheels, apparently. (Maybe we'll film it, for posterity.) Anyway. Go see them if you live in town - I want this late-night PIFF thing to continue.

Whatever you do, though, don't go see The Last Circus, unless you sneak a sharp object into the theater and can use it to immediately jab out the parts of your brain that store damagingly awful images of really stupid shit that no one needs to see ever. Stupid and ugly and weird and gross and TOTALLY not funny and just effing ridiculous. And I like weird! I even like stupid sometimes. But this was just pointless, like a migraine externalized and projected. I can't remember ever being so full of rage and scorn in a theater before. I can't even think about it long enough to explain in detail why I hated it so much. Who thought it was a good idea?!? Maybe other people liked it. A few behind me were laughing, but I think it was that hysterical laughter that seizes you uncontrollably at inappropriate times, like during funerals or while witnessing horrific accidents, right before the men in the white coats come and take you to a safer place. Damn it. I was in a really good mood today, too.

the rusty rocket gets some love

2011-02-10T11:53:00.000-08:00

Jack's pet project appears today in the cool bike blog Bike EXIF. It's even prettier in real life, and it goes! Good work, fellas!

where there's smoke

2011-02-08T08:57:00.000-08:00

Hell for Leather covers the One Motorcycle Show - you have to subscribe to read the whole thing, but I think you can get a day pass for cheap.

sometimes it's like that

2011-02-07T10:31:00.001-08:00

Oh. My. God. Cutest thing I've seen all week, and I spent sixteen hours surrounded by motorcycle dudes, for cryin' out loud.

the one show

2011-02-05T01:12:00.000-08:00

It's today!

something old

2011-02-04T15:14:00.001-08:00

I've been sifting through half-finished pieces of writing in search of something to read at the One Motorcycle Show storytelling thing tomorrow night. Still not sure what I'll bring, but I did find this, which seems relevant even two years later, despite a few altered details (my apartment is kind of huge now, for example, and my couch is from IKEA - gross). It's kinda wordy and ponderous. And it has the feel of an argument I'm trying really hard to convince myself to buy; I'm not at all sure anymore that it's so dangerous to own things.

But still.

Well, anyway - have at it.

In Defense of Immaturity

I've lived in the same tiny studio apartment for years. In the kitchen there is a single spoon, one knife, one fork. The first time my mother came to visit, I told her she had to bring her own set of utensils. She also had to provide her own towel, washcloth, pillow and blanket. "I never want to own more than what I can fit in my car," I explained to her, as we sat cross-legged on my floor drinking wine out of rinsed-out jam jars. (She never complained.) Years later I sold the car, and my rigid aesthetics instantly softened. Without a physical limit on their number, possessions creep up on you. They fill the space allotted.

Most of the things I have - a coffee-stained Pier 1 loveseat made of foam, a creaky chest of drawers, two chairs, a few lamps - were thrust upon me by a family friend who was cleaning out her basement. I didn't ask for them. But the weight of ownership can be seductive. Before long, the chairs needed a desk, the lamps called for end tables, the couch demanded an ottoman.

An ottoman! Ten years ago I didn't even know what that word meant. It sounded exotic (presumably Turkish?), like some variation on the humidor - a decadent contraption safely confined to the adult world. At the time I was 27, arguably in the adult world myself. But I was committed to the principle of immaturity, all stubborn and pure in my insistence on childish things.

I'm still committed, but these days it's more complicated. Immaturity now strikes me less as a character trait than a position staked out. I'm not alone in defending it; most of my social circle cultivates a studied immaturity. In the '60s, people dropped out of the grown-up world; these days, we opt out. We don't like the rules, so we refuse to play the game. By this age, one should have made certain adjustments to one's lifestyle: acquired a mortgage, a mate, some manners, possibly even a regular job. I, on the other hand, live in a garret furnished with castoffs. I date boys in their twenties, and never for long. I don't know how to walk in heels or wear lipstick. Formal dinners terrify me. I don't have a retirement account; most of the time I barely have a checking account. My work entails whole days of reading comic books or watching movies and writing about them. I also write travel guides, which allows me to leave the country for several weeks every few months - a handy way to escape unwanted social entanglements.

What this sounds like, even to me, is a blatant shirking of responsibility, a cowardly refusal to grow up and do one's share. But the kind of immaturity I'm talking about is both more difficult and less silly than it seems on the surface. I know this because I'm constantly on the verge of losing it. The firm conviction I held at age 27 is, ten years later, more like an inclination, fragile and under assault. What immaturity really means is resistance. (Resistance to what, exactly? To the anaesthetized trudge of most of the world, to resignation, to just getting through the day.) And resistance is the one thing people get worse at the more they practice it. The world pushes in on you, on all of us; there's a tremendous pressure to take part, grow up, behave. It was easy to ignore this pressure when you were still the age at which everyone expects you to rebel. It gets exponentially more difficult as you get older, as the number of your allies shrinks and the awful machinery of commerce roars in your ears and the spectre of unrelieved struggle lurks ahead. Resistance tires people out. Sometimes you just want something soft, some easy luxury; you can't help it, you want some small margin of comfort in which to rest and put your feet up.

You want the ottoman. But you must not have it. You can't give in. Because it's not just an ottoman, of course; it's an instinct made manifest, and it's a bad instinct. Buying the ottoman means giving in to an urge toward domesticity, toward settling down, toward putting your energy into physical things - things that you will then own and worry about losing. Domesticity isn't inherently destructive, nor is it merely a chance to be lazy; but when it's adopted as a means for escaping the hard work of rebellion, or as a big fluffy bed into which the exhausted former adolescent wishes to collapse, it's a mistake. That kind of domesticity shifts one's energy from action to object, and it narrows the focus of fear until the most pressing threat is the loss of those objects.

The danger isn't simply personal. It can seduce whole movements. When the New York intellectuals of the 1930s settled down and started taking jobs as college professors, their radical spirits flagged. Russell Jacoby in The Last Intellectuals says this happened because, having achieved a measure of acceptance and a sense of security, they were suddenly afraid of losing it. Their alliances shifted subtly but irrevocably toward security, away from risk. Public life began to deteriorate; in Jacoby's view it has never recovered. By 1957, Norman Podhoretz was counseling the former bohemian radicals of Greenwich Village to "stop carping at life like a petulant adolescent" and "get down to the business of adult living."

But living isn't a business, or it shouldn't be. The goal of a business is to expand its worth, as measured in dollars; that's a warped goal for a human life. Besides, it doesn't work: we now know how easily all those things we're supposed to have achieved in the business of life - the house, the job, the retirement fund - can vanish just like any other object. Security is not acquired through possessions; it's a feeling. And although I sometimes forget this paradox, I feel the most secure when I'm the most completely immature.

slouching toward mediocrity

2011-01-22T11:06:00.001-08:00

Thanks to the super-awesome Mike Russell, and the equally awesome Cort & Fatboy, I did this yesterday, and I did not throw up or cry or get stabbed.

As usual, my teeny little infant-muppet voice can barely be heard, perhaps because I was not breathing, or maybe because we abandoned our original plan of getting me drunk on the show.

Also, I didn't talk about movies AT ALL, despite Mike's many kind attempts to draw me in. The one movie-related thing I said was really about boys. Hmm.

So anyway, I'm a borderline-embarrassingly adoring Cort & Fatboy fan - I sleep in a C&F t-shirt, the one where they're being impaled by a unicorn, which Mike drew - so I was a little starstruck being right there in the room with them. (They are very handsome.) This was compounded by the fact that a poster of Byron Beck in his little wrestling singlet was beaming at me from a foot away, even as Cort's new wall-mounted stabbing knife poked singlet-Byron in the butt. Plus with the not breathing. So I was nervous, but they were really sweet. Karl says it sounds like I'm being cross-examined for the first five minutes but then it gets better (I think mainly because I stop talking). Anyhow, these guys are awesome, and you should subscribe to their podcast on iTunes immediately.

Some notes and corrections about stuff I mumbled:

1) To clarify, the motorcycle show belongs to my friend Thor Drake and his company SeeSee - the SFRC is just helping him put it on. Here's the link to it: http://theonemotorcycleshow.com/

2) Turns out I'm still ditzy with calendar-type stuff: the One Motorcycle show is on Saturday, whereas the Cort & Fatboy Midnight Movie, Dirty Dancing, is on Friday, so I might be able to go see it after all. Yeay!

3) I should clarify that Byron didn't actually say he set me up with a friend; what he said was that I went on a date with a friend of his. So it really could be anyone - but I'll never tell.

4) Kitty Pryde! Did you hear him say that? I definitely heard him say that. If it sounds like I spent the next hour fainting, that's because I did. (Wooderson is good, too, though. I'll take that. I've earned it.)

5) In real life, I love Lonely Planet, too. There may have been a bit of post-deadline grouching.

6) There's a point about 14 minutes in where Karl emailed me to say, "I really hope Mom doesn't speak Latin."

7) I forgot to mention that I had a Johnny Castle poster when I was a teen. On my bedroom ceiling. Oh yes.

8) Update from Mom: "How come you didn't know that Jennifer Gray won Dancing with the Stars?" So there you go: what she's been up to lately.

9) Johnny To's Vengeance really is great. It's filled with crazy, gorgeous fight scenes and tender hitman bonding and totally sideways takes on the standard gangster/revenge flick. And anyone who has pissed me off should not be allowed to watch it. Grr.

Movies 2010

2011-01-01T12:38:00.001-08:00

Everyone says it's been a crappy year for movies, but I saw a bunch that I really dug. Here's the lowdown. At the end you'll find a link to the extra-special expanded episode of KBOO on which DK Holm and I talked about our picks.

10 I Liked Best

1. Winter's Bone

directed by Debra Granik, who also co-wrote the screenplay (based on Daniel Woodrell's novel)

(Daniel Woodrell is awesome!)

Jennifer Lawrence stars as 17-year-old Ree Dolly, and John Hawkes is Teardrop, her scary but ultimately honorable uncle, in a brutally sparse, Southern gothic story about meth-cookers in the Ozarks. One of several movies this year in which an adolescent girl turns out to be the strongest person in the world.

2. True Grit

by the Coen Brothers

with Hailee Steinfeld, Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin

The first movie the Coens have made in ages (since Lebowski?) that didn't strike me as being kind of sarcastic. See above re adolescent girl.

3. The Fighter

directed by David O. Russell (who made two movies I violently hated, I Heart Huckabees and Flirting with Disaster, but also Spanking the Monkey which I thought was pretty great)

with Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, Amy Adams

Set in the '80s in Lowell, Mass., it's the story of boxer Micky Ward (Wahlberg) and his wacked-out brother (Bale), who trains Micky after crack addiction kills his own once-promising career. All the performances are tops; Christian Bale somehow makes his total wreck of a ruined-genius character seem charming, aggravating, heartbreaking and admirable all at once. There's a terrifying/hilarious gaggle of harpies in truly outlandish getups and hairstyles that reminded me of Pueblo (long live the claw!). Besides, any movie that features a slow-motion face-punching scene with flying sweat droplets is a good movie in my book.

4. Valhalla Rising

dir Nicolas Winding Refn (who also did Bronson and the Pusher trilogy)

with Mads Mikkelsen as One Eye

Definitely the weirdest movie I saw this year. Gorgeous, brutal, almost silent. Tarkovsky meets samurai warrior epic via sideways Bergman? Or something like that. (Daniel Menche was at the screening I went to!)

5. Scott Pilgrim vs The World

directed & co-written by Edgar Wright (of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz)

Michael Cera, Allison Pill, Kieran Culkin, Ellen Wong (as Knives), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Ramona Flowers)

Awesome integration of story and style. Easily as tricksy and visually inventive as Inception, but with added fun, and hipster-punching. Michael Cera is a walking bag of ennui who is forced out of suspended animation by surprise battles with his new girl's seven evil exes. Vanquished foes explode into coins, guitarists battle to the death, etc. Best of all is the movie's skewering of weak-ass Portland-style breakups and weaselly pursuit/avoidance of rad chicks by unworthy dorks.

6. Fish Tank

written/directed by Andrea Arnold (Red Road)

with Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender

15-year-old Mia lives in a cruddy Essex apartment with her mom and little sister, cares about nothing but dancing until she meets Mom's new boyfriend (Fassbender, who is amazing and also has perfect teeth). The ending's a little off-the-rails in a disappointing way, but it's devastating up until then. Awesome performance by Katie Jarvis.

7. Greenberg

directed by Noah Baumbach, co-written by Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh

with Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig

New York neurotic goes to his brother's house in LA to sort his life out, aka to "do nothing" for a while, and latches onto his brother's assistant, Florence. Excruciatingly horrible makeout scenes ensue. Has a fair amount in common with The Social Network, character-wise.

8. Inception

directed by Christopher Nolan

with Leonardo Di Caprio, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt

I like movies that do things you can't do in other media; why not take advantage of the form? A few scenes in this movie were so awesome that they more than made up for its flaws. I don't need the story to be profound when the telling involves so many neat tricks. (Also: man, doesn't Joseph Gordon-Levitt look good in a suit.) There's a kinda clever Blade Runner homage; I don't think the story ends up being as head-trippy as that movie, in either version, but it's still a lot of fun, and smartly put together, and well worth a good couple of viewings.

9. 127 Hours

directed by Danny Boyle, with James Franco

Based on the memoir: Aron Ralston goes canyoning in Utah, gets his arm pinned between a boulder and the canyon wall. High jinks ensue. Franco is incredible, and the impromptu surgery is beyond gross; I've never been so emotionally moved by hideous gore.

10. Mother

director/writer Bong Joon-ho (The Host)

South Korean take on a classic whodunit, but with an intensely expressive lead performance, a strangely tranquil mood, tonal variations that are typical of Bong Joon-ho, and flat-out gorgeous visual style. Your footing keeps crumbling under you, to the point that you end up feeling completely alienated from pretty much the entire human race. Haunting.

10 Worst

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Tron: Legacy

Jonah Hex

The American

The Wolfman

Hot Tub Time Machine

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Robin Hood

Letters to Juliet

Twilight: Eclipse

Most Frustrating:

Somewhere

written/directed by Sofia Coppola

starring Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning

I'll write more about this one later.

Simultaneously Best/Worst:

Hausu - initially screened by WW's BAM fest in February. Nothing else like it.

Gone with the Pope, Boxer's Omen - both screened by Dan Halstead at Grindhouse Film Fest.

Also Seen & Liked:

(in no particular order)

Micmacs: French junk-shop circus romp/revenge tale/pacifist lovenote. Adorable.

Red: Helen Mirren is smoking hot, and I still think Bruce Willis is great. The flirting is tops, and the bullet's-eye view of a bullet-strewn lawn won me over right away.

Bluebeard: Crazy.

The Good, the Bad, the Weird: AWESOME and hilarious. Almost made my top ten list and probably should have.

The Social Network: Jesse Eisenberg is insanely good. I'm sick of hearing about how smart the opening scene is; it's sad that clever dialogue is so rare it inspires paroxysms of critical adulation.

Ghost Writer: Polanski is pretty good at making movies.

Black Swan: Doesn't really hold up to scrutiny, but very effective at the time; silly and scary and pretty and squirm-inducing. Fun!

Get Low: Old dudes are the best dudes.

Centurion: Over-the-top ridiculous, with no holding back on anything, especially not the ax-chopping, sword-squishing, limb-chopping or decapitation scenes. Zoom in on that shit! Yeah!

Machete: A total blast. Not a good movie, but hilarious, with many moments of total awesomeness.

Never Let Me Go: Some people found it slow, but I thought it did a really good job of adapting a book I also really liked. Definitely wanted to punch Keira Knightley in the face.

I Am Love: Wacky and sad and beautiful.

The King's Speech: Describing this movie on the radio gave me a stammer, so I won't get into it here except to say Colin Firth is perfect, and Helena Bonham-Carter is still my girlfriend.

Cropsey: Scary and depressing. People are horrible.

Knight and Day: Can't really believe I liked this, but it was a lot of fun, and Tom Cruise finally seems to understand exactly how he's funny.

Unstoppable: A really tight, super-entertaining race-the-clock train movie, and I will always happily spend two hours watching Denzel Washington.

Vincere: Mussolini opera madness.

Lebanon: Get me out of this tank! I have to pee!

Shutter Island: Totally overwrought, and a disappointment in the context of Scorsese, but Mark Ruffalo was great and it looked and sounded fantastic. Irritating ending.

Green Zone: Matt Damon. Righteousness.

Exploding Girl: Should've been boring, but it didn't bore me.

Get Him to the Greek: Unexpectedly non-sucky.

The A-Team: Very good at what it does.

Salt: It was funny.

The Warrior's Way: aka Laundry Warrior. Exploding ferris wheels! Ninjas vs cowboys in the desert! Come on!

Really wish I'd seen before writing this, & will see soon:

Sweetgrass (documentary about some of the last American cowboys, herding their sheep through Montana mountains to summer pasture)

Red Riding trilogy (a British TV adaptation of David Peace's books about serial murderers, including the Yorkshire Ripper - everyone I know loved it)

The Strange Case of Angelica (Dreamy fable of longing from 102-year-old Manoel de Oliveira)

Wild Grass (A romance by Alain Resnais, with the awesome Mathieu Amalric)

Four Lions (Fumbled terrorism + British satire and the blackest humor)

Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy documentariness)

Enter the Void (Gaspar Noe is never boring)

Carlos (Carlos the Jackal - everyone I know loved this, too)

White Material (Claire Denis, with Isabelle Huppert, also never boring)

Restrepo (Sebastian Junger & co in the thick of the Afghanistan war; allegedly holds its own with the best Vietnam docs)

Blue Valentine (Looks to be a corkscrew to the heart, but you know me, I like that)

Anyone who wants to hear me stumble and stutter my way through this list out loud, with frequent rescues by DK Holm, should check out the year-end Movie Talk show on KBOO here. Apologies in advance.

top 10 movies, take 1 (sort of)

2010-12-15T16:22:00.000-08:00

It begins: the Great Listmaking of Two Thousand and Ten. I'm not even close to putting mine together yet, so instead, here are a few from Dennis Lim. He doesn't even mention The A-Team! Weird. In fact, I'm ashamed to admit, I've seen exactly zero of the films on his 10-best list. I need to get crackin'. See you cats in mid-January!

(p.s. Although I am very dedicated, I probably won't be able to make myself watch Trash Humpers. Just so's you know...I'd hate to get everybody's hopes up.)

the best thing about Sweden

2010-12-08T21:56:00.001-08:00

...since I'm on the subject...might be saffron ice cream, or it might be Strindberg or Bergman or Torgny Lindgren. But most of the time I think it's John Bauer. He pretty much taught me what to look for in a prince...not to mention how to avoid becoming enslaved by trolls. Handy!

MH blog

2010-12-02T07:34:00.001-08:00

Just found:

http://www.drawger.com/marcellus/

Look at the images of his to-do lists. He showed me some of these when I interviewed him a couple years ago...pretty cool stuff. Also, check out the letters he writes to his little nieces and nephews. I think I need to up my game!

announcement

2010-11-18T10:09:00.000-08:00

I love Ed Park.

(Not exactly news.)

I actually know these dudes

2010-11-16T10:04:00.000-08:00

They are tough!

http://www.siegecraftnw.com/N10-P1.htm

(#92 is Patrick, 88 is The Steve, and 105 is T Bag)

picture time!

2010-11-15T21:20:00.000-08:00

I finally put a bunch of photos from Sweden online -- you can see them here. Wish I were a better photographer, or had one with me on this trip. I lack the skill and patience to do Sweden justice -- it was prettier than this, believe me.

(And apologies to any purists out there for having fooled around with some of these...I got bored, started pushing buttons, one thing led to another...you know how it is. Voila, iridescent lawns!)

it's about that time

2010-11-13T20:27:00.001-08:00

When you write for a living and you can't do anything else, you know that sooner or later that the deadline is going to come screaming down on you like a goddamn banshee. There's no avoiding it... So one day you just don't appear at the El Adobe bar anymore; you shut the door, paint the windows black, rent an electric typewriter and become the monster you always were — the writer. Hunter S. Thompson

Of course, what he's not mentioning is that awkward period between the time you quit the El Adobe and the time you start the actual writing of the thing you're writing, a necessary period of flexible duration filled with awful, tormented, pointless, unproductive writhing and lots and lots of idle consumption of decades-old music videos online that you missed when you were a teen because you lived in the sticks and only got one channel, which was not MTV, thus making this idiotic absorption justifiable on the grounds that a cultural critic ought to have a passing familiarity with the culture, etc. Catching up, you see, on the '90s, more or less, when you were a square and didn't know any better. And then there's all the forgetting of the vague entanglements and attachments you may or may not currently have, and which may or may not float across your vision while you're trying to work, creating a state of sweet desolation that can only be sidestepped by watching precisely the right music videos online at precisely the right time and in the right order, at the risk of catatonic gloom if you get it wrong. The bar is not the only enemy, you see.

On the other hand, though: look how cute Hunter was! Dang. I bet they missed him down there at the El Adobe.

comix

2010-11-01T17:06:00.000-07:00

I reviewed a handful of comix for Bookpage right before going to Sweden -- not my usual doom-and-gloom-with-explosions, but not bad for what they are. (Plus I still get a little kick out of being able to say, "Today I will read comic books all day, for my job." I am a child.)

smart!

2010-11-01T14:48:00.000-07:00

Thor knows a little something about the subject of speed...this line from his flattrack race report struck me as brilliant, and worth trying to remember next time I get out there and start hyperventilating: "Racing isn't about being fast, it's more about slowing everything else down."

Yep Again

2010-11-01T13:44:00.000-07:00

Another perfect summing-up, found via Leif Pettersen:

http://bit.ly/arkTaQ

the breaks

2010-10-30T10:20:00.000-07:00

For my birthday this year, I woke up at 4.30am, packed up the Jeep, put on my robocop suit and rode my tiny motorcycle around the track a few times. It was pouring rain, of course. And I fell off, of course. (The cool thing is that the way I landed made me think I must've been looking through the turn like a pro!) Then, after a few hours of fancying up the little bike with the help of some incredibly generous pals, I caught a ride down to Salem to see what some of the other guys were up to. Here's how that went, from the Kerr's point of view:

http://sideburnmag.blogspot.com/2010/10/gaining-speedconfidence.html

(In the accompanying photo, it kinda seems like I'm turning away from the gore, but I'm pretty sure I was just looking at a boy.)

Several of the guys won trophies that night, but Dan wins the championship for attitude. (Plus now he has a huge stripey cast that matches his race bike!)

Germ, T-Bag and HUG, victorious

Yep

2010-10-22T13:17:00.001-07:00

Pretty much sums it up:

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/06/this-is-why-ill-never-be-adult.html

Hmmm....

2010-10-22T06:18:00.001-07:00

OK so, Punch Drunk Love...maybe not the ideal movie to turn to after a whole night of willful unsleeping and pale insignificant torment.

(I cry easily.)

On the other hand, maybe it IS exactly perfect. You never know, not for years....

home-ish

2010-10-18T11:58:00.000-07:00

Saw this guy's photos yesterday morning: Pieter ten Hoopen. Pinpoint-accurate images of what it feels like to be lonesome in Stockholm when it's dark and cold and bleak. (Cuz y'know...it's not all glittering utopia ALL the time....every beautiful thing is allowed to be moody, right?)

Anyway. Heading home in the morning - I'm spending tonight at the giant airplane they turned into a youth hostel out by the airport. Little round windows...adorable. Looking forward to battling my way through the Wall of Angry Spiders to my own bed tomorrow. More pics up when I get back and unyetlagged. xo!

my friends are cooler AND faster than I am

2010-10-13T02:43:00.000-07:00

Thor borrowed my race bike - check it out. Little bike must've been pretty surprised! I bet it didn't think it could move like that.

There's one race weekend left this year, apparently (they'd talked of canceling, but I guess it's back on). It's on my birthday, three days after I get home from Sweden. Hoping there's a bit of leftover thunder in the bike....

the Stare

2010-10-13T02:20:00.000-07:00

An elaboration, for Patrick:

When you walk around Sweden dressed like I do, with pants too baggy at the ends, and severely unfashionable but really comfy shoes, and a worn-out haircut free of product, you tend to see a lot of the Stare. Sweden is the staringest country I've ever been to. And I've been to Italy. But the Italian stare is a whole different creature. The Italian stare, aka the male gaze, contains a message, and that message is "Take your pants off." But the Swedish stare is not a means of communication, let alone coercion. I don't think people even realize they're doing it. They certainly don't seem to realize that I can see them staring (from the other side of a cafe, for instance, or even like two tables over). It's as if they're looking at me absent-mindedly from the other side of a television screen; I'm an object of curiosity that has briefly stumbled across the placid scene of their day. It's not hostile. And it's not just me; I see them stare the same way at each other. Skinny jeans and all. Anyone they don't know personally, and particularly anyone who looks odd or is behaving unusually, is good Stare material.

If for example I'm walking along a seaside footpath and someone comes along from the other direction, staring of course, and I smile at them like a big American, their expression will snap from blankness into sheer panic. This is fun to see and I end up smiling at people a lot more than I normally would, just to get the reaction. About one in ten will smile back, and sometimes then we say "hej" to each other. And thus is civilization maintained.

guilty

2010-10-11T02:58:00.000-07:00

I am spending the next three days in a Swedish prison.

It's nothing bad, I swear....

sweden in lists

2010-10-08T10:40:00.000-07:00

Stats:

Days in country (so far): 20

Beers consumed: 2.5

Conversations with others: 3

Kilometers driven: about 5500

Kilometers yet to drive: 445

Cops seen: 4

Price of gas: 12.45SEK ($1.87) per liter (yep liter)

Odds of fainting while you tanka: pretty good

Things I love about Sweden:

- so many pretty little cake things

- their ice cream is way better than our ice cream

- same goes for the cheese

- tiny cars

- red barns decorated with antlers

- they tend to think I'm German or Canadian

- millions of soft, hidden trails through forests; this is the only place on earth I've ever felt like going running (it hurts less and no one can see me)

- cute houses

- we have 24Hour Fitness; Sweden has "Frisky & Sweaty"

(loosely translated)

Kilometers driven out of the way down sketchy roads in attempts to find MC-friendly humans, or just look at some bikes: 27

Number of humans (or bikes) seen at a motocrossbana: 0

(This one was really pretty! Lakeside setting, cool-looking terrain, not that I really know. Sign claimed it was open from 2pm to 9pm, and I was there at five minutes to 2. I waited, but no one ever showed up.)

Things observed on major highways:

- sixteen baby reindeer, just chillin'

- guy on a bicycle pulling a wooden canoe, pretty fast

- horse and buggy

- hundreds of spandexed people on roller skis

Things about Sweden that confuse or annoy me:

- roller skis

- pay to pee - seriously, free health care but it costs a buck fifty to take a leak at the train station?

- being tailgated constantly, for miles, going 30kph over the speed limit in the slow lane - effin' pass me already, you jerk!

- men in bright red jeans

- men with extremely high-maintenance hairdo's

- leggings for pants

- wildly varying parking costs, from 7 to 20 kronor per hour (40 to 120 for overnight)

- the Stare

- $9 beers - not worth it

- the Swedish approach to roadwork, which is, basically, "Hey, you're an adult. Your car is tiny. YOU figure it out." There is no hand-holding, none of those "you guys wait here while the other lane passes the obstacle, then we'll guide your lane around it." Oh no. They just kinda go about their roadworky business, do what they need to do, with their giant, stinky machines taking up the whole road, and it's up to you and the guy coming the other way to sort out who goes first. Actually I should put this in the Things I Love category. It's pretty advanced.

- tryck vs drag: all Swedish doors are either push (tryck) or pull (drag), like everywhere else, I guess. But you can't tell by looking. There are days when every single door I push is a pull door, and vice versa. It's fun to watch, like when new (or drunk) people try to leave Beulahland. Then after a while you start to think you've got it figured out. But you are wrong. The minute you're sure that every door in the building is a drag, you can bet the next door is a tryck. I suspect there is someone in a secret room, watching, with the power to change any door from tryck to drag at the push of a button. Just to mess with me.

Things that are cheaper than coffee in Sweden:

- caviar (red or black)

- RedBull

- brie

- peeing

Still, chances of doing without coffee for even one day: 0

Genius ideas I've had while driving 5500kms alone with my ipod:

Just one, actually. At the Husqvarna museum, one of the exhibits explained that after WWII, Husky served a function very similar to what IKEA does now (household modernization, advanced but uniform gadgetry, etc). So my brilliant thought was, of course: IKEA should make motorcycles! Imagine: they'd be cheap and almost weightless. Anyone could put them together. They'd fall apart after one year. But they'd be cheap! And so simple! Get on it, Ingvar.

Random quote from a museum plaque:

"Kerstin Petersson of Sweden had a collection of 71 Swedish cheese-dish covers as at April 1998." -- Guinness Book of World Records (Smalands museum)

Weirdest sight encountered so far:

Most baffling instruction:

(Okaaaay......)

i am driving a boat

2010-10-04T09:48:00.001-07:00

Here we have it: Evidence that I'm kind of a girl, and not very fast, and half-deaf, but that I nevertheless manage to get myself into some fantastically pretty places, surrounded by cool smartypantses with unplaceable accents. :)

more sweden

2010-09-30T00:17:00.000-07:00

Too road-fried to write anything much this morning, but here are a few more pix - they don't do it justice, though. Sweden's gorgeous in the fall.

I stayed with the ever-entertaining Matt & Lindy in Tarnaby on Tuesday night and woke up to this awesome view:

Then we took a boat trip out to the little island in the middle of the lake, which is adorable and famous and covered in the softest mossy carpet of all time - if only the whole world were so comfortable!

The previous day I did a little hike I'd attempted to do last time I was up here, but that time it was spring and I got sleeted off the top of the mountain. This time I was about a hundred feet from the top when I ran into these guys ^^^ and they were not interested in letting me by. Plus they made scary snorting noises, and they had big scary antlers and evil looks in their eyes. I turned around. (Took some video first, though - will post later. You'll be terrified!)

(Which reminds me of Matt's comment to me in the boat: "You're a bit of a girl sometimes, aren't you?" Understatement of the century.)
The mountain, Atoklimpen, is the Sami holy mountain - when you're up there you can see why. It's pretty awesome, and the views are astounding.
There's a trio of little huts at the trailhead - this one's my favorite.

More coming soon!

I'm in Ostersund now, heading toward Orebro. Cooking along.

hmm

2010-09-29T11:51:00.000-07:00

Dennis's article makes Gaspar Noé sound kinda Lars von Trier-like. I wonder what those two think of each other's movies?

picture time - sweden

2010-09-22T12:14:00.001-07:00

I'm in Sweden. Here are a couple of pix from today:

Uppsala Cathedral, view from the huge pink castle.

Didn't turn off. Still regret it.

Possibly the world's largest structure made entirely of wood...and definitely a super-duper long bridge to the middle of a lake. Rattvik!

Jail. Uppsala.

Home, for tonight. Rattvik.

Queen Stars!

2010-09-10T12:22:00.000-07:00

This is pretty awesome.

genius

2010-09-09T07:40:00.000-07:00

The Onion nails it:

"8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York City A Horrible Place to Live"

Sample paragraph:

"Other incidents that prompted citizens to pick up and leave included the sight of garbage bags stacked 5 feet high on the sidewalk; the realization that being alone among millions of anonymous people is actually quite horrifying; a blaring siren that droned on and fucking on; muddy, refuse-filled puddles that have inexplicably not dried in three years; the thought of growing into a person whose meanness and cynicism is cloaked in a kind of holier-than-thou brand of sarcasm that the rest of the world finds nauseating; and all the goddamn people."

RF

2010-09-06T22:41:00.001-07:00

Making me happy today:

linkage

2010-08-31T17:58:00.000-07:00

Margo pointed this out...pretty neat. Post-it monsters! (I love the antlers and the huge teeth and the sad ones and the ones with trees growing out of their backs.)

And for those of us whose exteriors tend to reflect whatever chaos lurks within, a few moments of gazing at this might be soothing...beats organizing the sock drawer, anyhow.

becky reads

2010-08-30T18:27:00.000-07:00

I'm not all that thrilled with this review, as often happens with reviews of things I really like. But don't let that put you off the book (Skippy Dies, by Paul Murray).

Headline aside, I wouldn't use the term "quirky" to describe it (or anything else, really - sort of allergic to the word, after years of forced exposure to Lonely Planet book covers).

It is odd, though, for sure: topics addressed include Gaelic mythology, anorexia, string theory and the eleventh dimension, rotten priests, diet pills, sonic torture, role-playing games, heartache, nerds and zombies.

Nothing not to like about that.

picture time

2010-08-18T10:20:00.001-07:00

Some photos from last week in Rye...

i eat food

2010-08-12T20:18:00.000-07:00

Here is proof.

555 x 2: Now Even Dumber!

2010-08-02T09:59:00.000-07:00

Remember the 555? Bunch of dudes and one spy (me) riding cheap, tiny, old, smoke-puking motorcycles from Portland to Knoxville, Tennessee? It's happening again, but crazier:

http://555portland.tumblr.com/

Several of the fellas are flying out to Detroit this weekend and buying bikes there (same rules). Should be total chaos, and fun. I can't go to Detroit because I'll be in Colorado for my (ahem) (five-year? ten-year? no one knows, it all happened so long ago) high-school reunion hayride dance-party thing. But I have a plan: I'm going to buy a 555 bike in Colorado while they're buying theirs in Detroit, then intercept them somewhere on that long lonesome road. We'll see how that goes. I'm picturing a high-speed U-turn mid-Wyoming.

So meanwhile, if anybody knows of any cheap, small, old motorcycles for sale in Colorado this week - call me!

florida - that shit's crazy!

2010-08-02T09:04:00.000-07:00

I wrote a hasty little riff on Carl Hiaasen's latest goofy-ass Floridian circus novel, up now at BookPage.

evidence

2010-07-26T09:27:00.000-07:00

Karl's caption for this photo was something like, "Watch Aunt Becky break out in baby-allergy hives! Best birth control ever!" Which is kind of true. I post this merely to show that I am, in fact, much braver around the freshly hatched than I used to be. Look, I'm holding one! See? OK, here! Take it back! (Whew! That was scary.)

Actually, this one seemed harmless and is incredibly cute. It's Axel, one of my brand-new twin nephews (Zachary is the other one, equally adorable). They're about a week old here, and approximately the size of my feet. (Most of what you see here is blanket.) They don't even look real. They're also very calm, which is a trait I particularly like in babies. When they're all wrapped up in their tortillas and chilling in their comparatively enormous crib, they look like little cowpokes out on the prairie. In short, these mini dudes are cool.

the trouble with alphabetical order

2010-07-22T16:09:00.000-07:00

Smoothest transition on my iTunes list: Calexico to Califone. Most jarring: a tie. Joy Division to Kenny Rogers? Janie Frickie to Jeff Buckley? or Wire to Wynonie Harris?

more un-bragging

2010-07-20T11:22:00.000-07:00

The latest KBOO Movie Talk show is up....

RWE

2010-07-15T07:42:00.000-07:00

Between 35-word reviews of absolutely everything in Seattle, I've been snacking on Robert D. Richardson's little book about my boyfriend Ralph Waldo Emerson, First We Read, Then We Write. (It's kind of a goofy title, and there's not much to it; Richardson's biography, The Mind on Fire, is the one to go for if you like RW like I do.) It's a week overdue from the library, so I'm giving it back today, but here are some of the parts I liked most:

"The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent."

Yeah!! Ralph is a badass.

How'd he get to be such a badass? He blames nonconformity: "I never listened to your people's law, or to what they call their gospel, and wasted my time. I was content with the simple rural poverty of my own. Hence this sweetness."

Here's a good rule for those days when self-pity seems like a handy excuse for stagnation:

"Work and learn in evil days, in insulted days, in days of debt and depression and calamity. Fight best in the shade of the cloud of arrows."

This one's particularly relevant lately (especially on weekends):

"You must do your work before you shall be released."

This one too:

"I lose days determining how hours should be spent."

And this:

"Always that work is more pleasant to the imagination which is not now required."

But this sentence might be my very favorite one:

"Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can."

poop in space

2010-07-14T10:47:00.000-07:00

I review Packing for Mars, Mary Roach's latest investigation into the disgusting package that is the human body, here, in BookPage.

Keywords: fecal popcorn, space toilet, NASA, in-helmet upchucking.

Enjoy!

on the radio

2010-06-22T10:16:00.001-07:00

The latest KBOO Movie Talk half-hour is posted here. I remember going on and on about how much I liked the A-Team and the newest Judd Apatow movie. What is happening to me???

Update: KBOO blog posting.

what a drag it is...

2010-06-03T18:16:00.000-07:00

I've managed to pull every muscle on the right side of my body from approx the waist down. I believe I accomplished this feat by walking. Just walking. Or possibly sitting. Or walking after having spent many months sitting, softening like a catered dish under the heat lamps of government work. (See how government is always somehow to blame? Uncanny!) Whatever the reason, walking, which used to be the easiest thing in the world, as easy as breathing, now hurts. Inconvenient, considering that this humble glob, once upon a time a travel glob, is suddenly a travel glob again, after many months, heat lamps, softening, etc etc. I'm writing about Seattle, from now until August. If anybody knows anything. All ears.

The good news is, sitting hurts more than walking. Also, I think I'm spending Saturday on a dirt bike, so whatever is wrong with me now will soon be masked by a more global, nonspecific sort of agony. Which I'm really looking forward to, actually.

Anyhow. Seattle! I'll try to post regular updates. And photos, if I can remember to bring my stupid camera with me. Yesterday I got to see my friend Abby, from NYU, who was in the area for the Sasquatch music festival. I dragged her and a friend all over town trying to discover which would make my hamstring (?) feel better faster, beer or donuts. (Both helped. And pinball removed the symptoms entirely.) Several times during the day, it struck me not for the first time that my job right now is flat-out hilarious. Granted, we're still in the honeymoon phase, before all the typing and the mapping and the 12-hour days that end in tears, but even so. This is pretty fun. I walk around (in excruciating pain, I remind you) checking out fun things to do so I can help other people have the best possible time when they finally get a chance to leave their desks. (Answer: Go to Shorty's. There. Now you don't need the book.)

It can't possibly last. But it is not a drag.

The opposite of bragging

2010-05-27T11:25:00.001-07:00

Here's a recording of the latest KBOO Movie Talk radio episode. I haven't listened to it yet so am not sure if I can actually be heard this time, and even if I can, I can't imagine I said anything worth hearing, considering the way my mind descends into terrified blankness the second I open my mouth. But the fellas who host the show, Ed Goldberg and DK Holm, are smart and well-spoken (though both completely wrong about The Exploding Girl, haha), so it's worth listening to hear what they have to say. Y'know. If you like movies. :)

Renegade Sportsman: Update!

2010-05-19T21:53:00.001-07:00

Zach's book has a trailer:

The Renegade Sportsman

2010-05-17T14:48:00.000-07:00

This is a long overdue announcement: my friend and former WW colleague Zach Dundas has a new book coming out. He's an awesome writer - and he's writing about American freaks engaged in weirdo/underground/drunken sporting endeavors, which ought to provide some mighty rich material. (Soapbox Derby, anyone?) It's due out June 1st but you can order it now - find excerpts and more info on his website.

Old Vanport Motocross

2010-05-13T16:48:00.000-07:00

Short video from a recent Saturday in the park....

And another video from the SFRC Alley Sweeper! Fun times.

And also...

2010-04-28T17:14:00.000-07:00

...don't for one second imagine that I haven't been captivated by this bisexual airborne fungus dealie. In my role as a gov't stooge I must assure you there is nothing to fear. But as a gullible, paranoid, obscure-and-bizarre-disease-obsessed drama-whipper-upper who hasn't even had her flu shot yet, I am Freaked Out! Aren't you? Sources say you can catch it by scoping attractive people in bars! There goes my whole summer. Dang!

AHRMA Vintage Race at PIR

2010-04-28T17:04:00.000-07:00

Hey, whatcha guys doing this weekend?

Want to visit me here?

C'mon, you know you want to. I mean, how often do you get to see me wearing leather? (In public?)

Here's a pic of my ride - along with some evidence from last weekend.

It'll be fun.

SFRC Alley Sweeper

2010-04-24T07:37:00.001-07:00

...happens now.

i hereby ban

2010-04-06T13:00:00.000-07:00

"What we X about when we X about X"

OK, everyone? I think that's enough of that now. Thank you.

Quibble

2010-03-24T18:22:00.001-07:00

Why is it "pre-existing" [conditions]? Wouldn't a simple "existing" do the trick?

freedom

2010-03-10T17:37:00.000-08:00

Hi glob fans,

I've been moving into a new apartment (with garage!), my latest excuse for neglecting you all. But here's a satiating tidbit: go look at Thor's blog (again). He's posted up scans of the 555 article from Cycle World. (Also read his explanation of a dad wheelie and look at the latest exploded-piston gore.) Good times!

More soon, promise,
xo

so dirty!

2010-02-24T06:53:00.000-08:00

Couple of recent video bits from my friend and club bro Thor Drake:

From the SFRC retreat this past weekend:

Sam Lipsyte interview

2010-02-18T13:15:00.000-08:00

...is up now at BookPage.

He's cool.

I also wrote a hasty blog post for the KBOO Movie Talk website, for anyone looking for places to hide from the hideous sunshine this weekend.

Hate

2010-02-13T09:25:00.001-08:00

For some reason, the suddenly-everywhere expression "nom nom" (or worse, "nom nom nom") makes me want to reach inside my own skull through the left eyeball and squeeze the life out of my tiny brain.

Are we five?

We are not five.

(For the record, I also hate "meh.")

some updates

2010-02-01T21:06:00.000-08:00

Dang, it's already February. Where's the time go?

Well, two weeks of it went to Colorado. I skied, ate a lot of ice cream, lost a filling, spent some time with the fam, including Karl & Natalie & their brainy little kidget. Went out on the town with my Uncle Mark - always entertaining. Two towns and two bars, a long dirt road, confusing amounts of beer on the house, a strangely affecting singer-songwriter and a karaoke nightmare. Just some of the highlights. I managed to stay out of trouble...this time.

Back in Portland I finally saw "Red Cliff," the new John Woo epic, starring my Ultimate Boyfriend, Tony Leung. Awesome. It's close to three hours long. The original is even longer -- two parts, like Kill Bill -- and now I want to see that, too. The chopped American version gets a little zoomy through the early history parts. Tony is perfect, of course. He's so powerful that he can't even fully be seen right away; the camera has to sneak up on him, stealing glances at an ear, an eyelash, a feather he's wielding. Tony's kung fu is pretty strong, but mainly he is honorable. And romantic. And sad. The turtle formation will blow your mind. Bonus: arrow-cam. Also starring is Cop 223, very handsome as well.

Friday night I finally caught "Where the Wild Things Are." It was sweet, and the kid who plays Max is adorable, as is the big furry James Gandolfini, but I wish all the other wild things didn't sound so much like, I dunno, Claire Danes? or teenage Portland emo kids or something. If you want a stuffed-animal movie that kicks phenomenal amounts of ass, I recommend again "The Fantastic Mr Fox." And I guess I can see how, in the very broadest possible conception of the universe, Dave Eggers and Wes Anderson are related, but -- not to me.

Anyway, "The Fantastic Mr Fox" is the first movie I've ever wanted to do an interpretive motorcycle-ride version of. If that says anything.

Speaking of motorcycles, some of my pals from the 555 (Thor, Germ and T-Bag) put on a wildly successful moto-art-show event the other weekend. Photos coming. I spent most of it huffing gas in a small engine lab, dressed in a huge orange jumpsuit and trying to appear helpful while several of my very favorite men tore into the guts of my dead SL175. It pretty much ruled. Now I'm busily hunting an apartment with a garage, so I can do that every Saturday night.

xo!

2009 movie roundup

2010-01-14T13:26:00.000-08:00

Remember last year?

That was awesome.

OK, glob fans. It's time (a little late, actually) for the long-promised and much-postponed list of movies I saw and liked in 2009, followed by a few that I hated and some that I'll have to catch later. Feel free to discuss, mock, berate, scold, judge, etc. I'm probably forgetting some, but it's a start.

Here we go:

2009 Movies Seen & Liked (vaguely in order, at least the first half, based on today's mood and subject to change):
Anti-Christ
Tetro
The Fantastic Mr Fox
Inglourious Basterds
A Serious Man
It Might Get Loud
The Young Victoria
Moon
Coraline
Public Enemies
Zombieland
Star Trek
(500) Days of Summer
Duplicity
The Road
District 9
Drag Me to Hell
Coco Before Chanel
Red Cliff
The Men Who Stare at Goats
Up in the Air
Humpday
Beeswax
Dead Snow
Defiance
Avatar

Hated:
Angels & Demons (seen under duress in Stockholm)
The Proposal
Friday the 13th Remake (seen out of desperation in Panama)
To Catch Later:
Ninja Assassin!
House of the Devil
Orphan
In the Loop
Thirst
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Up
An Education
The Hurt Locker
Sherlock Holmes
The Informant!
Where the Wild Things Are
Black Dynamite
Me and Orson Welles
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus
Bright Star
Broken Embraces
Precious
Summer Hours
The Hangover

'...a certain vanished grandeur...'

2010-01-06T08:03:00.000-08:00

Yet another reason I love Katie Roiphe (read the full essay in the Jan 3 NYT book review for many more reasons) -- here she's talking about guys like Dave Eggers and Benjamin Kunkel, in contrast with the old rogues, Updike and Bellow and Mailer and Roth:

The younger writers are so self-conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically untoward. For a character to feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé. More precisely, for a character to attach too much importance to sex, or aspiration to it, to believe that it might be a force that could change things, and possibly for the better, would be hopelessly retrograde. Passivity, a paralyzed sweetness, a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite, are somehow taken as signs of a complex and admirable inner life.

jeez, it's been, like, a YEAR

2009-12-27T18:44:00.000-08:00

Hello, neglected legions of glob fans. I come to you today with a whole new level of respect for people who hold regular, full-time jobs AND somehow magically keep up with writing their blogs, or anything else. I can't even get the dishes done. I guess that's what weekends are for?

Good news: In mid-October I secured an emergency post at the Oregon Public Health Department (an emergency for me, not for the health department). I took it because it's thematically relevant to this glob (and because I wasn't sure my parents were really all that excited about the idea of me moving back in). I've been writing about the Illness Formerly Known as Swine Flu, or hini, which is very serious and not to be mocked. Here you'll find what little evidence there is against the popular and not outlandish view that I fritter my days away watching soaps and eating bonbons.

Fancy!

Anyhow. Here's some of what I've been up to besides that:

As hinted in a nearby post, the mighty sfrc voted me in as its newest member. The hazing and branding were painful, but I think it will be worth it in the long run. (Of course, on hearing this news, my motorcycle instantly died, so I've been riding a Vespa kindly loaned by Bradford ever since.)

What else? I interviewed Joe Sacco about his new book, Footnotes in Gaza. He had a cold but was very nice. I tried not to make my hero worship obvious, but I think he might've picked up on it a little at the end of the conversation, when I said something like "I've read ALL your books and everything you do is AWESOME and I think you're just the BEST and do you think maybe we could be friends?" (Sigh.)

I've also reviewed a couple of other things for BookPage, including two graphic novels, Nylon Road and Stitches (see below), and the new short story collection by Amy Bloom (good book, lame review). More of those lined up for the next couple of months -- I get to interview Sam Lipsyte, which should be cool, and do another graphic-novels roundup for spring.

Had another show on KBOO, in which somehow I lost control and admitted that as a youth I enjoyed reading the sort of books in which many of the characters were dragons. I still don't know how this happened. (It's true, though. Might as well get used to it.) I think the next show will be our end-of-year/decade favorite movie lists, but I'll put mine up here, too, because the funny thing about me being on the radio is that my tiny little munchkin voice cannot actually be perceived by the human ear, so it's all kinda futile. Better to write it down, I think, for people who really want to know.

Oh! Also, I tried out for the Mt Hood Ski Patrol a few weeks ago. It was a lot of fun, although I didn't make the cut this time. I think I bombed the interview. But I did get to fulfill a lifelong dream of bumming around with Ski Patrol guys all day, and as a bonus, at the end of the day, I saw Glen Plake. (I think I forgot to tell you that, Karl.) He was shaking hands and signing autographs in the parking lot, part of a tour of small ski areas on the West Coast. Awesome! Anyway, I think I'll try out again, maybe in February.

I spent Xmas Day on a Wong Kar-Wai marathon. Hard to beat.

That's it for now. Apologies again for the wimpy updating! Guess what one of my New Year's Resolutions is going to be?

xo

news

2009-12-10T18:48:00.001-08:00

Speaks for itself...

SFRC

:)

cheating

2009-10-27T15:25:00.001-07:00

Hi, this is a cheater post because I've been busy. (More about that later.) So instead I'm recommending something my friend and colleague Zach Dundas wrote. This is so pretty! Nice writing, Zach!

xox

on language

2009-10-06T15:17:00.001-07:00

Jeez, I was already sad about the death of William Safire. But now the magazine has apparently given his column to this guy...ugh!

movies

2009-09-26T12:15:00.000-07:00

I've been posting some movie reviews on the KBOO Radio blog, since the radio show itself is now only once a month. It's not the most attractive website in the world, and it's confusing to navigate (at least for me), but the reviews should be appearing here, in case anyone's interested.

Secrets of Success

2009-09-23T09:14:00.001-07:00

What's really going through the minds of professional motorcycle racers:

Recent Adventures

2009-09-21T21:16:00.000-07:00

I have a bunch of photos to post from my recent trip to Glacier Park in Montana with my dad and our friend Patrick Goodall, but they're not ready yet. So instead I'm posting some photos from Saturday's two-stroke ride, an annual event perpetrated by the Sang-Froid Riding Club. This was my first time on a two-stroke! I gotta get one. They're weird but fun. They sound great and smell even better! You can't tell that from the photos, I guess, but if you ask anybody who was hanging around in Lake Oswego last Saturday, I'm sure they'll tell you it's true. If they can hear the question.

These were taken by Kenny Shinn, who let me borrow his friend Mona's bike for the day. Thanks, Kenny!

At the Sandy Hut, the launching point for all good rides.

On the Canby Ferry, with Dora, Tom Burnett, and Berkeley. (I don't trust my kickstand.)

Made it! All the way to Oregon City! Victorious.

terminology

2009-09-12T21:02:00.000-07:00

I wish "locavore" meant someone who intends to eat everything in the vicinity.

8pm and I'm still reading the paper

2009-09-12T20:11:00.000-07:00

But at least it's today's paper.

From Michiko Kakutani's NYT review of The Bolter, by Frances Osborne - I can't wait to read this book. (It's about the English "scandal queen" Idina Sackwell, the author's great-grandmother and my new hero, a rotten-girl role model famous for "lovers without number," dirty sleepovers and public bathing in champagne, among other things....)

Ms. Osborne notes that in Edwardian London adulterous affairs tended to be conducted between the hours of five and seven (known as a "cinq a sept") because it took women lots of time in those days to unbutton and unlace their layers of corsets, chemises and underskirts, let alone relace and rebutton them up afterward, so lovers scheduled their visits for just after tea when "ladies were undressing in order to exchange their afternoon clothes for their evening ones."

Starting to understand why the Brits can get so strict about their tea-time....