Thursday, July 26, 2007

In Bethlehem, PA

I'm currently in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, soaking up the hospitality of the octogenarian grandparents of The Great Organiser. They're a kindly couple who seem determined to feed me every last scrap of food contained within the house.

"Would you look at that corn! Have yourself some more. Go on, have another one."

If there's one thing I've learned about ingratiating oneself to one's hosts, it's that one should always accede to the demands of said hosts to consume more of their food. I've been dutifully obeying the rule and so far my methods seem to be working.

Just as I was about to depart from work on Tuesday afternoon one of the people who reports to me decided he'd start kicking up a fuss. He's been known to do it in the past. Personnel issues arising on the afternoon before a red-eye to JFK airport demand one course of action—pass it along to your immediate superior.

I've kept track of the email threads and it looks like it's getting nasty. I can't wait to return to the office on Monday. Woot.

Monday, July 23, 2007

New Tunes - Van She and The Field

The music collection has swelled by a whopping two discs. Here are the initial impressions...

The Field - From Here We Go Sublime
The proverbial punching bag of the electronic music scene is trance. Produce music that vaguely approximates a drone set to a steady yet subterranean beat and it is likely to attract heaping mounds of derision from the loftier and more cultured minds of the house and breaks set. And in most cases it's well deserved. There's a lot of shit out there and there's a lot of shit trance out there. Rightly stated, The Field is undeserving of being saddled with the trance albatross. Skirting close to the minimalist school of bleep, The Field—apparently a one man act from Sweden—deliberately toys with repetition, paving an aural pathway that seems to promise a lively journey towards a clearly defined location, only to loop back on itself a few metres from where it all started. It's mildly infuriating but oddly enough it works. A week or two into the purchase it's found its way into regular rotation.

Van She - Van She
What are we to make of the eighties? At the time they seemed like an improvement over the cultural missteps of the seventies, but now that we're a generation clear of the era, the status of the decade is looking kind of shaky. The cinema was kind of naff, the clothes actually got worse, but at least we got The Smiths. So why is everyone trying their gosh-darned hardest to evoke the crappest parts of the ten years that gave us Bros., Milli Vanilli and Martika? Van She, in their defence, seem to be taking the piss—sort of. On one hand they're winking at the audience while they belt out a few thinly veiled retreads of early Depeche Mode, but on the other hand their blatant channelling of old synthesiser sounds from 1982 hints at a belief that they're transcending something more than musical; to them it's an ironic fashion statement. Played within the framework of kitsch, Van She get away with it, but they're seriously deluded if their high school variety of irony is anything more than a flash in the pan. But I'm listening to it right now and it ain't half bad.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Still Childless - There Are Reasons

My thirty fifth year of walking this earth is bearing down upon me and thus far I've managed to dodge the whole breeding, spawning, fatherhood thing. Of course I'm now of an age when more than just a handful of my friends are impregnating one another and ushering in their own private bundles of joy into the world. I'm simply not one of them and neither is The Great Organiser. That's not to intimate that such an eventuality has been forever stricken from the cards for us, it's just that we've got, well, other priorities. And if what I've seen of parenting so far is to be believed as the norm, I might wait a while longer.

Take The Big Gay Wiggle (not his real name) for example. Whilst he's somewhat biggish he's neither gay nor one of the Wiggles. He and his wife—coming up with an appropriate name for her has been tough; we'll call her The Counsellor—had their first child about two years ago and it all went well; from The Counsellor's womb emerged a happy little bub and The Big Gay Wiggle could be found at parties demonstrating his ability to cradle an infant in his left hand while he counter balanced with a beer in the right. Parenthood seemed grand. It was possible to take the baby to a barbecue and still chug a shitload of booze.

The Counsellor herself had been taking more than her fair share of swigs from the baby Kool-Aid bottle. Judging her attitude towards motherhood, you'd think that their newborn was shitting lumps of opium into her nappies and her parents had been eagerly scooping it up and smoking it. They were that high on parenthood.

"So when do you think you and The Polished Turd will become parents," she imploringly asked The Great Organiser on one of our return visits to Australia.

"Um, it's not really part of any plan we've got right now. Besides, there are plenty of adoption-worthy kids out there who need good homes."

That kind of response brings the blast door slamming down extra hard on any further conversation with a new mother. In one fell swoop the mother's entire life for the past year has been rendered inconsequential. A well orchestrated recover is possible, but it takes a conversation genius to execute it. Moreover neither the The Great Organiser nor I could be bothered.

Compare the parental disposition one year later. When The Counsellor's attitude towards motherhood the year prior gets taken into account it should come as little surprise that she and The Big Gay Wiggle decided to throw themselves at the mercies of procreation once again. The weird part was the circumstance. The Counsellor hadn't had her first period since the birth of her first child and she was waiting for it to come around. And she waited. And she waited. And she waited.

She got bigger.

She got fatter.

The Big Gay Wiggle placed his hand on her nascent bulge whilst out at nature park and remarked, "Shit Love, I felt a kick."

She was five months pregnant.

Just after The Great Organiser and I lobbed into Australia their second child was born. The attitude was completely different and we'd have been forgiven for thinking that the Kool-Aid had been replaced with vinegar.

"We're done with that one. We didn't see it coming and we've got a few things to sort out now."

Yeah, I bet you have.

Then take last Saturday night. Whitey and his lady and daughter are doing what so many people who fall pregnant whilst living in San Francisco: they have their baby and then promptly flee for the 'burbs. It's a sad state of affairs for new parents in this city and the parents can't be really held to blame entirely. The school system is in disarray, the housing is cramped and it costs a boatload of cash to live here. All's well when you're pulling a fat wallet salary, but when that baby's mouth starts to beg for food why not do a bunk for Oregon?

The Great Organiser and I put on a spread for them on Saturday night. Things were going along just fine when the shorty decided the coffee table would be a great thing to headbutt. In the words of The Big Gay Wiggle's mum, "babies are really hard to kill. I mean really, REALLY hard to kill. You can pretty much drop them on their heads and they'll bounce right back up into your arms." She's probably right you know, although I'm hardly one to judge. None the less the baby was by now a writhing, bellowing mess, and the ice pack, despite arresting the swelling, made her irritation even more pronounced, thereby bringing Whitey's dinner to a close. He'd barely made it a third of his way through the plate.

The rest of the guests—there were two others visiting, one of whom supplied more bottles of awesome wine than were really needed—sat back, enjoyed our childless state of being and proceeded to polish off as much of the vino as possible.

We slept well that night, awoken not by crying children hungry for attention, but instead by warring cats.

Friday, July 20, 2007

It Came from Japan - Thanko

There's a lot to love about Japan: Godzilla, Gatchaman, really big robots duking it out, really big monsters duking it out, and perfectly sized food portions. Over the course of years, Japan has done a marvellous job of gauging the paranoias of society at large and repackaging them as adolescent entertainment with a not-too-slight dose of smut thrown in for good measure.

What then should we make of Thanko? If you're not familiar with the company, their catalog of products rest upon a fascination with the USB port that more than borders on sexual; it's a downright fetish.

Clock a few of these gems.

First up is the Visomate—a device that goes "Pee! Pee!" all over your face whenever your posture slips and your glazzballs stray too close to the monitor. You could probably sell that to the Germans just on the porn factor alone.

Next in line is a device tailored especially for the needs of a certain Cubana Gringa. The USB ass cooler seeks to, well, cool one's ass through the magic of the USB port.

I'm hardly short on for a bit of fleshiness hanging off my lower spine, and when you consider the rampant miasmas that emerge from bowels of my being, I for one would be the first in line to give one of these devices a spin. I'd probably fork over double if it came with a sachet of baking powder to neutralise my noxious anal fumes. The issue here for all of us with some junk in the trunk is that all that junk tends to hold a lot of energy. Screw directing a fan to the face on a hot day, it's the tush that demands all the attention. Maybe the eggheads at Thanko aren't as insane as they seem.

Rounding out the trio is perhaps my favourite of all Thanko products: the USB ashtray. Extended, four-days-without-a-break sessions of World of Warcraft demand the consumption of ridiculous numbers of ciggies, or so I'm told—I'm neither a World of Warcraft play nor a smoker—and that's where this nifty device comes into play. It plugs into your USB port, sucks in your cancer-ridden smoke and emits slightly less cancer-ridden smoke. Genius. It might be worth becoming a dirt stick addict just to justify owning one of these things.

To be honest what I really want, and it's not made by Thanko (for shame!), is the Robotech Sex Thruster. Slap the name "Robotech" onto anything and there's a good chance that the nerd inside me will be drawn to the product like a cat to a fresh litter box.


Yeah, bolt that thing to the table top, get your lube tube in hand and slam the throttle forward. Apparently flesh is now obsolete in Japan.

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

We're Apparently Full

All of that custom licence plate stuff from the other day helped me cast my mind back a few years to when I paid a visit to Townsville, Queensland. Amongst Australians, Queenslanders are second only to Tasmanians in the national objects of derision standings. This photo should help you understand why.



You see that orange/yellow map of Australia just above the naked woman? Let's get a closer look at it.

"Fuck off we're full"!?! If there's any country in the world that could stand to absorb a couple of million people it has to be Australia. German tourists routinely disappear without a trace after embarking on "short walks" in and around Coober Pedy. It's possible to literally drive for days on highways in Australia without passing another car. Nut-job religious types flock to the great Australian expanse in order to escape the human world and discover "God" somewhere out there in the Outback.

Check the list of countries ordered by population density. At the top is Monaco, with a density of 23,660 people per square kilometre. Australia is six shy of the bottom at number 224, supporting a density of 2.6 people per square kilometre and rubbing shoulders with such people-packed nations as Mongolia (1.7 people per square kilometre), Western Sahara (1.3 people per square kilometre) and Greenland (0.026).

This should make it abundantly clear to everyone on the whole freakin' planet that there is absolutely NOTHING full about Australia—nothing! Walk in and take up some space, please. There's loads to share.

And real Aussies do indeed drive utes. Just ask my brother.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

For My Mum

Yesterday was my mum's birthday, God bless her.

A few years ago I was at a party where everyone was crowded around just outside the back door of place while they took turns at slagging off their parents. Either the mum, dad or both of each person was in some way a retard, asshole or directly or indirectly responsible for a critical flaw in the person's personality. Their parents either made them bitter by withholding necessary affection or made them gay by smothering them with too much. They either held them back by not providing them with sufficient resources to get a leg up in life or broke their spirit by cracking the whip too hard. Maybe they just sent mixed signals about what it meant to be a good parent.

I couldn't take part in any of it. The fact of the matter is that I'm not a mental case. Don't read me incorrectly, I'm hardly perfect, but when it comes to all things parental I haven't got too much to complain about. I kind of like my parents, and when taking a retrospective view of the decisions they made in rearing three kids in Australia, I can't fault too many of their choices. They managed to churn out three more or less stable, successful adults. We'll overlook for now the little part about none of us being married or with children, despite all three of us kids now being in our mid-thirties. That's a separate post.

More than anything else, my mum helped mold my expectations about women in society, and she did it for the better. Coming from a working class background, my mum wasn't really expected to do much with her life other than hold down a job as menial as, say, a receptionist or typist, and that was if she opted to work at all. A quick inspection of my grandmother's life reveals that she was content to spit out a few kiddies and call it quits right there. Instead Mum opted to become a senior chemistry teacher at high school. So there you have it, Mum was the science-type person of my house and Dad, also a teacher but in his case of such "soft" stuff as geography and history, was—and kind of still is—the comparative luddite. Want to know something about maths? Ask Mum. Need help with fractions? Ask Mum. Want to see something really cool done with magnesium? Ask Mum. That's not to say that Dad was crap, but compared with Mum it just wasn't his bag.

One of my favourite stories of her was from when she was teaching at Cabra College, a Catholic high school in Adelaide. At the start of the day she gave her students a cup of beetroot juice to drink. The students were then informed to pay close attention to the colour of their bodily secretions as the day wore on. The kids loved it. Each time they took a piss they'd check the shade of what was emanating from their urethrae. That mum of mine has a great insight into the minds of teenagers. I think the kids really respected her after that whole beetroot juice episode.

The ramifications of being imprinted by such a woman at an early stage live on. The reversal of society's established gender roles seemed more like the rule to me than the exception, and putting an enjoyable spin on science probably had a lot to do with me winding up working in that arena. The older I get the more I appreciate the things my parents did for my brother, sister and me. I hope you had a happy birthday, Mum. I hope you'll have a lot more.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Cat Wars - Are They Really Over?

I called the official end to the cat wars a week or so ago, but I think the armistice declaration might have been somewhat premature. There have been a series of border skirmishes and flare-ups, usually centered around Chumbles' inherent skittishness and 'fraidiness, that have caused us to reinstate the forced time-outs, separations and sin bin sessions in the hope that Chumbles' anxieties will finally subside.

For a while there it seemed like we were on a complete reversion back to open hostilities, but the photo says otherwise.


There's hope for us yet.

Saturday, July 14, 2007

The Alleys of San Francisco - Juri Street

Let's give the pet peeves a rest for a while. There are plenty more of them hanging out in the eaves, waiting for their turn to shine on stage, but they can stay there a little bit longer. Their time will come.

Something that I love about San Francisco, aside from the restaurants, weirdos, odd weather and architecture, is the number of tiny alleys and side streets. There must be hundreds of these little-known byways dotting the city, each one a secretive nook with private tales to tell that get overshadowed by the much-storied Valencias, Polks, Gearys and Markets.

San Francisco is second only to New York City in terms of its urban density, and that's what lends it so much of its charm. Stacked on top of each other are the homeless, the urban yuppies, the Mission hipsters and the migrant Latinos. It's noisy, boisterous, overwhelming and invigorating. By taking a turn down one of the narrow alleyways you're abruptly wrenched free of all of that overpopulated mess. Everything seems suddenly quieter. You can hear the plastic food wrapper buckle and bend as a fog-propelled breeze pushes it along the gutter. The voice of an angry mother as she chastises her infant son is borne aloft the scent of homemade enchiladas, lifted out of her kitchen window and left to waft into the tiny street. Much more of an opportunity presents itself to pause, look up, and watch the tendrils of fog twist and dissipate overhead. The big, depersonalised city slows down for a few moments, ceases to be an assault from every angle and miraculously becomes personal.

Take Juri Street for example. Located right around the corner from where The Great Organiser and I live, it's a pokey little path that rests right alongside the equally pokey Juri Commons.

It's small, quaint and a welcome oasis. I expect everyone on the street knows everyone else, and in my mind I can picture all the residents getting together on every third Sunday of the month for a Scrabble tournament, or something equally as dorky, while they sip cups of tea and discuss their improvement plans for their slice of San Francisco. Truth be told they're probably swapping sex partners, doing lines of coke every other night and filing restraining orders against one another, but I'm allowed my idealised fantasy. There's something reassuring about imagining that in this weird city there's a place or two where some measure of normalcy reigns. But that's a fantasy, isn't it?

Friday, July 13, 2007

Pet Peeves - Custom Licence Plates

Still feeling curmudgeonly and peevish? I am. Despite being Australian—we're supposed to be the most laid-back people on the planet—there's a lot out there in the world that grabs my goat. That goat can be kind of gruff and angry sometimes.

On the chopping block this time around are custom licence plates. I hate them for a number of reasons. Firstly, they're a crap form of expression. You're constrained to a set of seven characters, of which most combinations have already been snagged, so you're going to have to fight the laws of the English language pretty freakin' hard to come up with something vaguely original. Most of those "original" end products are so bastardised as to bear little resemblance to the word or concept they were initially supposed to represent. I'd kill to have a good example at my fingertips right now, but I don't.

What I do have is this, and it brings me to my second point.

It would seem he or she—let's be real, it's a "he" isn't it?—has his 450 HP, and I don't think he's referring to a Hewlett Packard computer. It couldn't be made any more obvious unless the plate was bordered in pink neon, and that's been known to happen.

What we're asked to assume here is that the car is capable of spewing forth around 450 horse power. That's a lot of horses. He's evidently very proud of it, and why wouldn't he be? He's probably blown untold sums of money jamming an air-forced filter here and a muffler expansion there just to extract a handful of extra horsies out of the motor. And he wants you to know it too. As he hits the 280 during rush hour and starts dropping the foot on the pedal as he weaves through the banks of traffic, he wants you to look on in in amazement as he streaks past in a blaze of red. He wants you to clock the licence plate as it disappears into the vanishing point and think, Jebus, those were a whole lotta horses that just flew past and it seems like that red Supra is the car that's got 'em—all 450 of them. The licence plate tells me so.

This is the part that disturbs me the most. When did our cars become such an extension of our personalities that we feel obligated to customise what is perhaps the least customisable part of the car in order to advertise to the world at large an inconsequential aspect of our lives? Nobody but the driver cares how many horses are in that car. Nobody else is impressed. You forked over $100 extra or whatever to the DMV so that you could engage in perhaps the lowest form of self expression. The money would have been better used had it been donated to charity.

Coming up soon: Mini Cooper drivers and the vehicular extension of personality.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Pet Peeves - Fixie Bikes

You've seen a fixie before. They're those bikes ridden primarily by hipsters around the Mission District. They have no brakes and run via a direct drive mechanism—no slack-legged freewheelin' for our well-heeled trendy types, just a lot of arse-over-tit skid stops and plenty of more-fashionable-than-thou looks at the stop lights, assuming they bother to stop at the lights. And that's kind of rare. Stopping is kind of difficult on a fixie. But everyone cool is riding a fixie these days. Why aren't you?


This is a fixie. No brakes. No gears. Only hipsters ride them.

Well, if you're like me then you're avoiding them on account of the fact that they're the hipster analog of the oversized jeans worn by would-be gangsters that belt loosely around their mid-thigh region. Okay, the analog falls apart when you consider that fixie bikes are a mode of transport whereas half-mast gangster jeans are a, erm, um, I'm not sure what they're supposed to achieve. But they're a fad, just like the current eighties revival that's compelling far too many young women to wear leg warmers and inflict a kind of Flock of Seagulls attack on their hair.

Roll into the haughty arrogance that comes with being hipper than anyone else on the street the kind of sanctimony expressed by far too many bicyclists. You're both pushing the limits of fashion AND kidding yourself that you're saving the planet. It's a great mix. The end result is perhaps the most obnoxious group of riders on the road, SUV drivers included. With all that in mind you can imagine the kind of laugh that came blurting out of my mouth when I noticed the following bumper sticker on a car as I belted my way down Page on my single gear clunker bike. It's not a fixie. There is a difference. The sight was enough to make me use my brakes (yeah, brakes, fixie riders, they're handy things), turn about and take a snap.


If driving a beaten up black Jetta around San Francisco means there's one less fixie on the road then I'm with you, whoever you are. Keep fighting the good fight.

Monday, July 09, 2007

Farewell Whitey — Farewell Good Night's Sleep

Whitey is running for the hills—or maybe from the hills since he lives in Bernal Heights. I'm kind of confused right now. Like a lot of people who get knocked up and spawn in San Francisco, Whitey and his partner have come to the conclusion that this charming, compact, urban outpost of the weird, wonderful, strange and sometimes dangerous ain't no place to raise a bub. They're doing a bunk for a rural sector of Oregon, about one full bladder's ride outside of Portland.

Saturday night was my send-off for him. He and I shared a house down by 25th and Hampshire Street for the better part of five years. We witnessed our neighbour, Francisco, scream "chupe mi dick!" at the top of his lungs at his estranged girlfriend in the wee small hours. We witnessed the very same Francisco's car leap into flames as a result of what he maintained was a mysterious vendetta. Whitey and I concluded the sudden torching came about due to the dodgy wiring he'd used as part of his homespun custom stereo installation. We'd staggered back home drunk after a solid session of boozing it up at Treat Street Cocktails, shoving each other into trash cans and shop screens as we stumbled our way back down 24th Street. He deserved a decent farewell.

And that's what we had. Our attempt to get a table for two at Suppenkuche was abortive—apparently the place does a roaring trade even up to 9:15pm, whence the waitress stopped taking any further names for tables—so we made our way down the road to Absinthe. To cut a long story short we imbibed sufficiently, eventually closing out the bar at Zeitgeist. With the bar now closed Whitey managed to zip over the road to the convenience store to snag a sneaky pint bottle of Jim Beam. It went down a treat.

So of course I came home a little on the sloppy side. The Great Organiser was very much The Great Expression of Tolerance this time around, and she even humoured me as I crawled under the covers. I didn't wake until 11:30am the next day.

And that was my undoing. Remember the sleep-debt payoff cycle? Well, it clobbered me with full force last night. With the clock striking 10:30pm and the movie finished I did my best to get some sleep. The remnants of the hangover will lull me off nicely, I thought. I was wrong. The clock kept ticking past midnight and beyond. Then it was 1am. Somewhere in between I drifted off into a hypnagogic half-sleep, coming fully alert sometime around 5:30am. The damage was done and I battled my way off to work.

Now it's 7:30pm on Monday night and my brain is mush. The higher order functions have fled me and I'm going to retire to a bowl of whatever The Great Organiser is cooking and senseless episode of Gatchaman. I'll see you in the dreamworld.

Saturday, July 07, 2007

Yet Another Movie - Transformers

I'm going to come charging out of the gate with my commentary on this film; its awesomeness is matched only by its astonishing stupidity. Make no mistake, Transformers is a Michael Bay film, and if your memory of schlocky summer blockbusters needs any refreshing a few of his towering contributions to the cinematic art form include Armageddon, Bad Boys and Pearl Harbor. Yes, Pearl Harbor—the film that, despite sexing up what was a lightning strike on a dormant fleet into a drawn-out 45 minute bullets & bombs slugfest, managed to shit all over the legacy of the thousands who died via perhaps the sluttiest love story ever to grace the screen.

SeƱor Bay's oeuvre is pretty much defined by variations on the concoction outlined above: hot chicks in slutty romances, really huge explosions and no regard for story, plot, character development or—God forbid—causality. Transformers is in no way a departure from Mr. Bay's established aesthetic; the special effects signal a milestone achievement, the audio engineering is completely immersive and none of it makes a lick of sense.

Here are some of the points that made me feel like I left fifty or so IQ points in the movie theater.

Why does freezing the robots immobilise them when they're apparently capable of functioning in the cold depths of space?

Why is the network breaker locked when it is needed the most? Shouldn't it be readily accessible in the event of an emergency?

Why is Soundwave so adept at taking out secret service agents on Airforce One but really struggles when in combat with a small group of cryptographers?

Why are Sam's parents so oblivious to the presence of four 40 foot tall robots in their back yard?

Why does shoving the cube into a robot's chest kill it? Why shouldn't it miraculously transform the robot into something new since it was established that the cube can bring machinery to life? For that matter why shouldn't the cube imbue the robot with so much power that it becomes a super robot?

How can a 75 metre tall cube transform down into a cube about the size of a computer monitor? What happens to all the extra mass?

How does Bumblebee know how to activate the cube's transformation when an army of scientists who have been working on the problem for nearly a hundred years have no idea?

What purpose did the blond Australian woman serve aside from providing window dressing?

I've barely scratched the tip of the iceberg that represents all of the plot holes and gaffes that riddle the film. They're manifold and overwhelming. Oddly enough Michael Bay has been engaged in a war of words of sorts with the producer of the film, Tom DeSanto, over writing credits. Considering the ridiculousness of the story, one would expect them to be fighting over who gets to distance himself most from the mess, but no, they're each trying to hog their share of the glory.

And glorious it no doubt will be once the receipts have been counted. Transformers is the kind of silly summer junk that packs the seats at megaplexes, and I'm counted amongst them. Calculated, profit-maximising entertainment targeted at delivering the highest spectacle to intellectual engagement ratio will always sell, and as the weeks progress expect the coffers of Hasbro and Paramount to balloon. The kids are putting mustard on it and eating it up. Watching really big robots beat the living shit out of each other is going to be fun no matter what, but does it really have to be so stultifying?

The sequel is slated for a 2009 release.

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Pet Peeves - The Upside Down Eight

I'm a man of many opinions, some might say too many, and stashed away in that peanut brain of mine is a litany of pet peeves. One of my favourites is the gas station upside down eight. By the way, I gave up clinging to referring to gas stations as petrol stations a few years ago. Some battles are futile and when it comes to how one refers to the location where one procures fuel for one's vehicle it's best to adopt the "when in Rome" approach. For the record I still call aluminium "aluminium". The fact that America persists in referring to that particular metal as "aluminum" hints at a cockup as vast and as far reaching as the one that instituted the use of the word "entre" as an umbrella term for the main course instead of the starters. You'd think that the translation of the word from the French would have given the progenitor of that mistake a decent idea about its intended use.

Anyway, so I hate upside down eights on gas station pricing signs. The little loop goes on the top, the big loop goes on the bottom. It's not hard to sort out. Just take a look at the number: little loop top; big loop bottom. If you can't work something as simple as that out then there's probably a whole raft of other aspects of your life that are seemingly simple to most but confound you at every turn.

And I won't hear any of those "we're free to be creative with our use of language" arguments either. Those sorts of arguments usually come from people who can't muddle their way through the use of such newly dispensable stuff as, um, grammar and punctuation. Hey, if it's too tough to work out just jettison it wholesale and write the exercise off as an act of creativity. Guess what, folks, you have to know the rules before you break 'em. James Joyce knew how to handle direct quotes before he resorted to that whole hyphen thing.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Ratatouille - Good Viewing

I took in Ratatouille on Sunday night and left the theatre a very satisfied movie goer.

Last year's Cars was the first Pixar movie I'd decided to dodge at the cinema—it looked a little too trite for my tastes, but I've since been told that it held up pretty well. Ratatouille, on the other hand, was not going to slip past me. The main reason for that is the director: Brad Bird.

The Incredibles
was a masterful achievement, doing what Pixar does best by embedding relatively complex subtexts beneath a visually stunning layer of computer wizardry and well paced action. Moreover the script was polished to a gleam, and the characters evoked a genuine visceral engagement. It touched upon themes of exceptionalism—about how when everybody's special then nobody's special. It's a theme that Brad Bird has further built upon in Ratatouille, and much like The Incredibles he's done it with a deft hand that skillfully avoids the kind of violent message bludgeoning so often found in almost any other big budget animated film.

The choice of a rat as the protagonist is an interesting one. Rats are nearly universally reviled as the harbingers of death and disease (thank you, Black Death), so the use of a rat as both the main character and as an aspiring haute cuisine chef throws a prejudicial gauntlet down squarely in front of the audience. It's a direct challenge to the viewer's preconceptions of assigned stations and roles. Rats are horrible, pestilent creatures. Rats should never come near food or else they'll riddle it with their disease. Rats are borderline demonic and kept as pets by creeps and weirdos. To plonk one down in the middle of the kitchen of a schmicko restaurant is the ultimate heresy. We're just not culturally trained to readily accept a rat as a suitable subject for the kind of heartwarming anthropomorphism found in Ratatouille. And that's the film's primary genius. In order to accept Remy as a chef, so many of our other preconceived notions about how hereditary elements factor into our development in life are called into question. One of the main theses of film is that ultimately one's pedigree counts for nothing, and when all is said, done and counted it's the merits of the individual that really spell the difference between one who can cook and one who can be a celebrated chef. Linguini, despite being Gasteau's son, is an awful cook. Remy, despite being a rat, is an outstanding chef.

I'm digging too deep, I know.

There's an awful lot to say about this film—wet fur is evidently the latest effect that impressed the animators at Pixar the most; the character acting, especially by Skinner, is better than most living, breathing people; the commentary on the tension between personal limitations and aspirations is powerful yet not forceful—but it's more than space will allow. Just as with The Iron Giant and The Incredibles, Brad Bird and Pixar have delivered another near-perfect kids film that's more than suitable for the shorties, but serves up a whole lot more for the older set as well.

Update: Brad Bird and Patton Oswalt appeared on NPR's Fresh Air on 28 June. I was grateful to hear them discuss some of what I crapped on about in my post. It's also worth it for Patton's routine about Black Angus commercials. Check it out.