Excellent news!

"... there are already Avian Flu strains in existence that are just three mutations away from human-to-human infection."

no reason

http://silodrome.com/francoise-hardy-motorcycle/

TL;WKW

Looks Safe

I keep forgetting to post this -- courtesy of Mr Mike Russell:

why i ride

Things that never crossed my mind while I was riding my bike on the SFRC Season Opener this weekend:

* work of any kind
* acute need to mow the lawn
* money, chronic lack of
* boyfriend, chronic lack of
* pointlessness of reviewing movies in the internet era
* that I have no wearable clothes for hot weather
* haircut? or no? yes?

Let me tell you, it was nice. Of course, motorcycles have many other excellent qualities beyond their total absorption of the rider's attention. For instance, when they gather in large groups, they tend to attract a certain level of mischief. Also beer. This certainly proved to be the case at the after-party, which occurred in a fenced-off compound surrounding a long, rusted-out dock and boat-launch ramp underneath the St Johns Bridge. A guy we know has leased the property so he can park his tugboat there and live on it, but the tugboat isn't there yet. Plenty of firewood washes up from the river onto the concrete boat ramp, so we built a bonfire at the end of the ramp and started in on the beer and sausages. Guess how long it took before someone rode a motorcycle down the pier? Not very long.



That was the night of the Supermoon, so just to be on the safe side I started text-messaging a play-by-play to my friend Mike. In case things turn weird it's good to have an off-site perspective on where it all went wrong. Turned out the adventure remained small-scale and well contained. But it's not every day you get to ride in the Cylon Commander Seat of a semi-truck dodging obstacles in a vacant lot. Partial transcript:

MR: Hope the Cinco de Mayo ride ruled!

Me: Still ruling! Partying under the st johns bridge.  

Me: We're riding motorcycles off a pier by accident, whee!

MR: I hope you are riding away from many explosions 

Me: And not looking back 

MR: Why bother you know what you hath wrought

Me: Now they're trying to drive an old semi truck. What could go wrong?

MR: "What could go wrong?" might be a pretty good Sang-Froid club motto if they're still looking for one

MR: In Latin: "Quod Posset Ire Iniuriam"

Me: Now they're maybe using a stumptown van to jump the semi.

MR: Why do I fear this text thread is about to become evidentiary.

Me: They got it running! I pulled the horn. Lifelong dream realized!

MR: Okay, that's pretty goddamn sweet. Somewhere a schoolbus full of kids is delighted you did that.

Me: The semi just almost ran over the bonfire and into the river. 

MR: If this is another set of those "They're playing The Cure at the Hawthorne Strip"-style texts, I will be sorely disappointed [this is fair, I've been known to exaggerate and even just make stuff up in text messages]

Me: I have video

MR: I hope you get yourself filmed pulling the semi horn as a fire roars behind you

Me: I am now in the truck

Me: Cops are here yeay!

MR: Now it's a party

Me: They retreated in disgust

MR: Let me know when someone plays The Smiths "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" [he's clearly not buying any of this]

MR: You're in jail now aren't you

I was later reminded that when the cops rolled by, we decided to "act cool" and "seem normal" by turning up the miniature boombox extra loud and dancing. Because what could be more innocent.


There really is video but I have yet to figure out how to get it off my fancyphone and edit out the embarrassing giggly parts. Meanwhile here is the truck:

Now back to that list....

Oh, GREAT

I probably already have it.

Tom Hardy update

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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 )

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

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

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.