2009 movie roundup

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...'

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

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

Speaks for itself...

SFRC

:)

cheating

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

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

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

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

Recent Adventures

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

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

8pm and I'm still reading the paper

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....

Not Writing

More about my favorite subject, this time from Will Ferguson in the Globe & Mail:

Not writing is the easiest thing in the world to do. And that's what an author means when she says she is “working” on a book. Working means “not writing.” Working means reading, working means “research.” Working means watching TV. Working means taking long diversionary walks. Working means perusing newspapers with an unnaturally intense interest. It means everything and anything except the actual act of writing.

Thanks RVB for the link!

Dang

I knew something felt kinda off this weekend, and I just figured out why: I missed a "top secret" Richmond Fontaine show at the Kenton Club on Friday. Dang! I'm almost never in town when they play, and the one chance I get... Well, maybe things will get back on track if I just keep watching their new video over and over and over....

Writing Is Hard, part 573

Here's why it always takes me so long to get anything done, as explained by Jack Hitt in the Atlantic:

If the story involves talking to people, talk to them as long as they will stand to have you around and then talk to them some more. Keep reading. Outline a structure to the piece. Set that aside for now. Realize you don't know enough. Go over all your interviews and research notes again, only this time, make a laundry list of all the great details, large and small, along with the best quotes. Look at that list a lot. Begin the process of re-reading all of your research. Bail out of re-reading all of your research by convincing yourself that what you really need is a long walk to think about "structure." Walk toward your shoes and look at them. Blow off the walk altogether. Descend into a shame spiral. Now, catch up on your HBO tivo'd backlog. After several hours, take another ride on the shame spiral. Lumber over to the desk and go over the interviews again. Make notes of your notes in tiny scrawl so that they can fit on a single sheet of paper. Look at the details. Write down the big ideas that form the superstructure of the piece. Realize you are a pompous git for thinking that ideas have anything to do with it and go back to that list of details. Set it aside. Read some blogs.

The next day, re-read the single sheet of paper with the notes of your notes and wonder, what does this shit even mean? Then outline a structure. Indulge in a nice long afternoon of intense self-loathing. Start to write according to that outline. Throw that draft away. Write a new outline. Go over your notes. Re-interview a few people. Realize, as if you hadn't realized this a thousand times before (most recently, a few minutes before) that your own big ideas about this story are pathetic, but this list of details and the more decent quotations from the interviews -- there's some pretty good stuff in there. Fiddle with writing a few more paragraphs. Microwave your cold cup of coffee for the third time. Go over your notes again. Yell irrationally at your spouse/child/dog/a bare wall. Now, kick the wall. Limp. Review all the transcribed interviews one more time from beginning to end. Paste a large sheet of paper to a wall and, standing up with a fresh cup of coffee in your hand, outline the piece in really big letters. Realize that you've misunderstood the point of the entire story all this time. Scream the word "fuck" really loud in an empty room. Do this about 40 times. Wipe off the flopsweat. Look at the notes on the single sheet of paper and realize just how brilliant they are, or moronic. Espy the grime on your bike chain -- it could use a good cleaning with some WD-40. Start writing the lead paragraph again. Set that aside. Find that single cartoon frame from "Peanuts" that you keep in a box somewhere, the one in which Snoopy is reading a publisher's rejection letter for his novel that goes, "Has it ever occurred to you that you may be the worst writer in the history of the world?" Read it and laugh. Later that day, read it again and not laugh. Feel really, really sad. Go over your notes one more time. Look at earlier drafts and passages and realize that maybe this stuff here is the lead, actually, and then if you follow that outline from seven outlines ago, it just might work. Re-read the last couplet of the first strophe of Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella. Look at those riffs in the earlier draft again and realize some are not that bad. Convince yourself that your bike chain really does need another good cleaning and what's that gunk on the inside of the rear fender? Read the latest draft-like substance and think that, with a little work, maybe this won't be too embarrassing. Feel mildly excited that there could actually be something here worth reading eventually. Look at the list of details again. Re-read the edited draft and start to feel better. Or, if not, set it aside and then repeat all of the above instructions, only this time, after each step, masturbate.

what have i been up to

Whenever anyone asks me what I've been doing lately, or even what I did all day today, my mind goes blank. So I'm writing it down. Maybe that will help.

I have an essay about crashing motorcycles in Ploughshares this month. (On the back cover, from guest editor Kathryn Harrison's introduction, it says, "In order to write our lives, we have to be willing to see them.") I also interviewed David Small, a children's-book illustrator, about his brutal and awesome graphic memoir, Stitches, for BookPage. And I wrote a short review of a decent little beach read set in Ukraine, Moonlight in Odessa, also for BookPage. The Lonely Planet Encounter guide to Stockholm is off somewhere in the gangly stages of production; I'll be answering author queries in a week or so, and then that'll be done. Meanwhile, I'm pitching a 555 motorcycle story to various places, fingers crossed.

I've also been getting back into movie reviews. I've done a couple of episodes now of "Movie Talk" on KBOO radio, hosted by Ed Goldberg and DK Holm. The first one was terrifying (it's online, in case anyone out there needs some schadenfreude). The second one was a lot easier, partly because I phoned it in from home. (Flat tire.) After both shows, I had this lingering anxiety I couldn't place. I think it's as simple as lack of control. I'm a slow girl in a fast medium: there's no time to tidy up the words as they come out of your mouth and make sure they're saying what you meant for them to say. If things come out wrong and you sound like a jackass, that's just too bad - you are now on record (in the minds of billions of KBOO listeners!) as a jackass.

If I were just talking to the fellas about the films we'd seen, maybe I wouldn't worry - although even then I get anxious if the conversation is rushed and I don't have time to fully explain myself. But the fact that the conversation is being recorded, and that it's going on record as my Final Statement about the films in question, freaks me out. Because it's definitive, I want it to be perfect. I want it, at least, to be an accurate reflection of what I think. And because I'm a slow-thinking person, that generally requires editing. Writing, rethinking, adjusting, deliberating, editing, rewriting. I don't want anyone to see what I think until it's ready. The fluid-but-permanent nature of radio makes me a little nervous. But that's good, right? And at least in the KBOO studio there is slim chance I'll come to any physical harm.

Today I'm reading Fred Exley, A Fan's Notes. Bottom of the first page: "That the fear of death still owns me is, in its way, a beginning."

update

Hello, glob fans. (Hi Patrick!) Have any of you been swimming with killer whales lately? Because I have! Well, that's an exaggeration. But I did see a bunch of them, from a boat, 120 yards away. They were cute!


And very, very small.

I rode the Hawk up to Anacortes, Wash., for a week or so, to go to my cousin Michael's wedding and hang out with the fam. I'd never actually done a whale-watching boat tour before, but this one was great - maybe we lucked out. We saw two different pods, the jPod and the iPod if I remember correctly, totaling about 70 whales. All of them were sex-crazed and flirting, which if you're a killer whale involves flopping around on your back, waving your 'arms' and spitting up. Basically the same as humans, I guess.

(If anyone else is headed up there, we booked through the Mystic Sea Charter company, and it's not cheap, but the boats are small enough not to be obnoxious, the crew guys are cool, and the company has a helicoptor that goes around spotting whales so it can tell the boat where to go each morning. We were well into Canada when we saw our little gang here.)




I also spent a day in Friday Harbor oyster-shopping and drinking beer and talking about boys with my cousin Carrie, Michael's sister. It was a lot of fun at the time. We won't discuss the following day, except to say that riding motorcycles is a pretty good hangover cure as long as you're safely past the danger of needing to barf in your helmet. Also: Do not imagine that you can sustain yourself on beer and oysters for a whole day. It won't work; beer and oysters alone are not enough.

Looking back, I guess I'm not completely surprised I got sick....




Those are photos of lunch/dinner, consumed on board the ferry back to Anacortes. Other people ate more food later, but not me - oh no.

Anyway. More photos of the wedding and surrounding adventures posted here.

xo!

I'm in SeaTac

Hi Patrick. :)

Zoomy!

Wow, look at Paul Berman, writing about Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the New York Times Book Review:

Every last sentence in 'The Autumn of the Patriarch' offers a heroic demonstration of man's triumph over language -- unless it is language's triumph over man. The sentences begin in one person's voice and conclude in someone else's, or change their subject halfway through, or wander across the centuries, and, even so, conform sufficiently to the rules of rhetoric to carry you along. To read is to gasp. You want to break into applause at the shape and grandeur of those sentences, not to mention their length. And yet to do so you would need to set down the book, which cannot be done, owing to the fact that, just when the impulse to clap your hands has become irresistible, the sentence you are reading has begun to round a corner, and you have no alternative but to clutch onto the book as if steering a car that has veered out of control.

picture time

I've posted my 555 pics (barring a few really explicit ones from the river). Enjoy!

555

So, I just got home from this motorcycle trip. Some of you may have heard. Two weeks, Portland, Oregon, to Knoxville, Tennessee, on bikes that all had to be smaller than 500cc's, less than $500 and 1975 or older. The trip was (among other things) an amazing demonstration of the possibilities of organized chaos. There were twelve of us who went. All mechanics (except me). It wasn't a motorcycle ride so much as a problem-solving exercise. It was also a total blast. I can't wait to do it again! One night I started the campfire with a roman candle. Those things don't aim too well, so I also accidentally lit a guy's bike on fire. He was going to burn it anyway on arrival but we were still two days out of Knoxville.... I drank moonshine in two flavors, got tattooed all over, took one shower in two weeks, and earned a police escort into my campsite one night.

All together we rode about 3400 miles. Some of the scenery we encountered was pretty spectacular.


For anyone confused by the whole idea, here's a taste. There are two other segments posted, all recorded by Nathan, who shortly afterward took Patrick's DT out into the field and used it in anger, much to Patrick's delight.

I'll put up more photos soon, and will write further about this whole adventure, hopefully for money. Meanwhile, go back up there and watch that video again. That's good stuff right there.

xo