These two commercials by Levis’ Jeans, set to Walt Whitman poetry, don’t make me feel like buying jeans, but they do make me want to run down hills, over brooks and creeks, down valleys, across hay fields, through corn fields with abandon. In jeans.
Second one after the jump: Continue reading
I’ve been meaning to read Phillip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly for a long, long time. It is my second PKD book, the first being Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (adapted as Blade Runner). With that book, I felt burnt by the ending (I prefer the director’s cut movie ending). I’ve read both books after having seen the movie.
Of course, I say read when I mean heard. A Scanner Darkly was also my second audiobook, the first being Choke. This was a far better experience. It benefits from being a far superior book, but also a far superior audio book. A Scanner Darkly is read by Paul Giamatti. Need I say more? He does different voices for each of the characters, and is a joy to listen to.
This is a great book, about the science of the brain and addiction, about addicts, about the relationship between the user and the narc, the pusher and the pushed, often in the same person. It has a science fiction facade– in that it is set in the “future” (written in ’77 about the 1990s) and people have scramble suits that preserve their anonymity. Otherwise, it’s a story about any post-60s time.
∞
This book was adapted for the screen by Richard Linklater in 2006. It is a good movie, with especially great casting (Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jr., Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, each perfect for their part). The movie was done with rotoscoped animation, like Linklater’s earlier Waking Life (2001), and it is the correct technique for this movie, where everything is either hyper-real or only slightly real, but never obvious.
The movie is quite faithful to the original material– in fact, more than it could have been if it was not rotoscoped.
I’ve started to collect data in order to put together lists of my favorite music, movies and books of the decade. And this is the first decade where I have data.
I’ve been a Netflix member for close to 8 years and religiously rate everything I watch. Now thanks to a script I wrote (and has been improved since by others), I can pull the data out of Netflix and analyze. For example, filter the data on all movies where year>1999 and stars=5. There’s my best of the decade, or at least a place for me to start.
I’ve been managing my music in iTunes since 2005, and have been pretty religious about accurate tags and rating tracks. At this point, I can slice up the data with Smart Playlists and scripts in any fashion I like. I have more than 2000 songs from this decade of which about 300 are rated 5-stars. Yeah, I’m liberal with ratings. Also, I like my own collection. So those 300 are where I would start for my list of favorites. Everything from The Marshall Mathers LP to The Hazards of Love. Or from Dhadkan to Delhi-6, for you Bollywood types. In addition to my iTunes playcounts, I have my Last.fm play counts. The Last.fm data is not a complete representation, but it is public.
Here’s a song which will definitely figure in my top 10:
Books are tougher. I haven’t rated or cataloged everything I have read, not even close. And I’ve read many from the library, a few borrowed, a fewer still online. And none of those places have my reading history. The library would keep history if I asked it to, but I asked it not to. And most of the books I read were probably written before 2000, so they wouldn’t be the best of this decade. So I may not have a *list* of my favorites, but a general non-definitive whatever-I-think-of.
*UPDATE*: Of course, I haven’t actually put my list together yet. Coming soon, to a blog near you…
Choke was my first audiobook. I finished it last week (now I’m on to A Scanner Darkly).
The book is good– not great– but you can decide if you want to read it or not based on this: it’s a book about a sex addict who fakes choking in restaurants by the author of Fight Club. It’s deliberately subversive, like other Palahniuk stuff, and it’s fun. It’s better than his Lullaby, but not as good as Fight Club.
Choke was made in to a movie last year with Sam Rockwell, but I haven’t seen that yet.
∞
Listening to a book as opposed to reading it was a new experience, but not as different as I had imagined. You’re forced to pay more attention to nuance, and even now I can hear Palahniuk’s voice in my head when I think about the book. I’ll write my thoughts about that in the future. I wonder if my impression of the book would have been better, worse or different if I had actually read it– words on page or words on Kindle screen.
Yeah, the Kindle-like devices are worth a lot of thought too. Doubly so, if I actually owned one. Continue reading
Things 
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