I love Boing Boing

Look here.  What kind of sick mind came up with that??

House of Leaves

Been reading Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves.  Great stuff: I understand why BE Ellis went ballistic over it.  Some paragraphs early in the book even remind me of Lowry’s Under The Volcano.  I am the only one who feels this is definitely a lovecraftian book?

Today’s keyword:

Pig-shit bayous.

Wii

I ordered a Wii in October from Amazon France and it was delivered to us sometime in late December.  We stashed it away for a few days (the kids still believe in Santa!) and unwrapped it with them on Xmas day.  I don’t think they have switched it off ever since.

What an amazing piece of consumer tech: not that it looks like it was particularly hard to design, or cutting edge, but it is so well balanced, in terms of usability, precision, simplicity, etc.  The games are great: Wii Play is poor, but Sports and Raving Rabbits are fantastic.  Zelda feels like the UI wasn’t exactly optimized for the wiimote/nunchuk, but the story is extraordinarily enagaging and, midpoint, is starting to feel at least as good as Ocarina of Time, one of our all-time favorites.

I won’t be buying a PS3, as I am no fan of the Sony platform and most of the games found on it.  I might buy a XBox 360 if one of their titles becomes a must-have.  But I sure feel as though Nintendo has scored a major win with the Wii.

What is more, I believe they may have kickstarted a round of fresh competition in the gaming industry: perhaps the next generations of Xboxen and PSx won’t be focused so much on polygon counts and more on the galing experience as a whole.

Digital music

If any of the readers out there is in the market for a home system for playing digital music, I heartily recommend the SqueezeBox from SlimDevices: it is really a fantastic piece of technology, both the PC-based client (SoftSqueeze), the end device you attach to your stero(s) and the servier piece itself, SlimServer, which even I could get running on both XP and Ubuntu.  They have just shipped a new version of the software, the first since Logitech bought them out, bringing great relief to my poor soul: I was starting to believe the tech team had cashed out and moved to San Diego.

RIP Art Buchwald

No English-speaking Parisian and readers of the IHT can remain unaffected by the passing away of Art Buchwald.  He’ll always have Paris.  This is a guy who, as he was dying, had the wit to say dying was easier than parking in Washington, DC.  I’ll avoid that town like the plague from now on.

I have started working on my own famous last words: I’ll need at least 5 or 6 decades to come up with a quip as good as his, so I’d better get to work.  For the moment, the best I could some up with is that dying is easier than parking near Saint Germain.

So long, Art.

Sorry for the light blogging…

… but I am a bit under the weather and behind a few key deadlines for my stealth start-up (just writing these words makes me dizzy).  Anytime I have an idea worth a few electrons, I will post it.

By the way, I am taking down most of the links on the righ hand side of the blog itself: keeping them up to date was proving too much of a hassle, and I don’t think anybody is interested in my passion for low-end Martino movies (La Isola degli Uomini Pesci anyone?).

A reality check

It’s funny how blogs are supposed to be about big egos and navel gazing.  My experience runs to the opposite: the posts I really care about nobody reads and stuff that is a lot less personal get a lot more pageviews.  It is in fact very humbling: I really need to work to keep you guys interested as you don’t seem to think my film tastes (to take one example) matter very much in the grand scheme of things.

Looks like Roger Ebert can sleep soundly.

Pastiche

Currently addicted to the soundtrack for Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, available for free from the producer’s web site (thanks fellas!). I got the information from The Manchester Morgue an amazing blog about hard to find soundtracks.

Although absolutely excellent, I did not think Lady was Park’s best film (that would be Oldboy, one of 10 all time best movies), nor the one with the strongest emotional impact (that would be Sympathy for Mister Vengeance, watch at your own risks if you have kids). But the soundtrack is out of this world: I get instantaneous goosebumps when listening to track 3.

It rivals the quality of Michael Nyman’s work for The Draughtsman’s Contract, pastiching (and sometimes directly adapting) Vivaldi instead of Purcell. Other soundtracks worth checking out if you are into this sub-genre: Wendy Carlos’ Clockwork Orange and Philip Glass’ Koyaanisqatsi.

I promise to go back to technology posts soon!

A film post, for once: La Dolce Morte

I read academic research in two areas: economics and film.  As much as I’d love to be able to read maths and physics papers, they are too much for my feeble mind and I have to contend myself with mainstream science books, some of which can be pretty good.

Back to film studies, I am finishing Mikel Koven’s La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film and it is a great film book, with excellent insights into the cinematic experience and a very interesting concept to analyse exploitation and lowbrow films with (vernacular cinema, meaning trying to put the film in its economic and cultural context).  It does help that I absolutely love the films he criticizes and the filmmakers who made them, filmmakers he clearly has a lot of respect for.

I also need to pay my respect to Keith Brown, the guy behind the Giallo Fever blog, the best blog on the subject, and the guy who alterted me to Koven’s book.

Other books to read on roughly the same subject matter: Tim Lucas’ upcoming All The Colours of the Dark about Mario Bava (funnily enough also the title of a pretty good Martino movie with Edwidge Fenech), Maitland McDonagh’s Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, an excellent book, now sadly OOP, but a great intro to the oeuvre of the best filmmaker of his age bracket; Troy Howarth’s The Haunted World of Mario Bava, a good look at Bava’s output; Stephen Thrower’s Beyond Terror: The films of Lucio Fulci for a tender, in-depth analysis of a fairly unappreciated movie director; and the comprehensive Blood and Black Lace from Adrian Luther-Smith, who should definitely write more!

The enigma for me is this: I don’t just love Italian exploitation cinema, but also middlebrow films like the comedies (Dino Risi et al.), the Leone movies (don’t get me going) and art-house/high brow stuff like Antonioni, Fellini, Visconti, etc.  I can’t really explain it, but they feel part of the same cultural space and have more in common, interm of their impact, than is usually accepted.  I am still looking for the reason for that in about all of the existing Italian Cinema history and criticism book I can lay my hands upon.