Guilty Pleasures: Jaws

Here's one "Guilty Pleasure" from NPR's series that I agree with - Lizzie Skurnick (her book blog is Old Hag) selected Peter Benchley's Jaws.

You're supposed to feel guilty when you secretly like the movie version of a book better than the book itself, but in the case of Jaws — a book I read and reread long before I was allowed to see the film — I'm far more embarrassed to admit I prefer the novel. Because while Jaws the movie is a bone-chilling update on Moby Dick, Jaws the novel is more like Peyton Place by the sea. Everyone swears like a sailor, and the hunt for the shark comes a very distant second to a bunch of hot summer trysts.

I remember reading the book the summer it came out. A good fast read - and it spawned a good movie. That doesn't happen a lot. The book doesn't read like a novelization either - if you saw the film, the book has more and it still works.

What Facebook Quizzes Really Reveal About You

I came across this in Facebook. A quiz authored by the ACLU of Northern California that will give you a scare or at least make you pause before you take one of those Facebook quizzes.

You know - the ones that will tell you what writer you resemble or what your mermaid name is or try to beat your friend's score on name the drunk celebrity.

The surprise that the ACLU is trying to give you is about how much of your personal information these quizzes can access.

And it doesn't matter if your profile is "private." When you take one of those quizzes some unknown quiz developer can access almost everything in your profile. Depending on what you have ther, it might mean religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, pictures, and groups.

These quizzes also have access to most of the info on your friends' profiles, so, even if YOU avoid taking the quizzes, they could be giving away your personal information.

So, the ACLU created a Facebook quiz that you can take that will show you just what they can see about you. It's at http://apps.facebook.com/aclunc_privacy_quiz/?ref=nf

Of course, the irony is that they are warning you about Facebook quizzes by asking you to take a Facebook quiz. As they say at the start of the quiz, "at least you know who we are and that we have a real privacy policy that we're committed to upholding. Can you say the same for every unknown author of every quiz you or your friends take?"

Craig Ferguson Has It Figured Out

It takes a late night talk show host to figure out why we are so screwed up.



Children, what have we learned?

Mickey Rooney Discusses Twitter with Ben Stiller

Watched this video tonight after coming home from visiting my mom (91 this year; Mickey will be 89 next month) and trying to explain to her why her TV needs a digital box to get Comcast's signals now. She doesn't want digital TV, she says, just the channels she was already getting.

After spending more than two hours on the phone with Comcast last night and tonight trying (unsuccessfully) to get her Digital Transport Adapter activated (after 8 calls and talking to the computer voice and 4 service reps, one who said "My computer just froze."), I think Mickey is right.



Mickey actually understands Twitter well enough to know that it's not entertaining and that it's not much fun.

Next, Ben should ask him to critique facebook.com/benstiller

World's Greatest Dad

I got one of those "World's Greatest Dad" t-shirts and a mug too back in the early days of fatherhood. There were a few years when it seemed like I was deserving of the title - especially on those days when I walked in the door after work and the boys ran to me yelling, "Daddy's home!"

Now, there is a movie out called World's Greatest Dad. The dad is a high school English teacher. (Well, it says "high school poetry teacher" but I can't imagine him having 5 or 6 classes of just poetry.)

So, they got me with the film's basics: he is a teacher (I have been doing that a long time); poetry (check); he's depressed at least partially because he writes but doesn't get published (check on the bummed out and check on the not getting published); he has a son (check times two).

It stars Robin Williams, who I really like, but even I will admit that he has made some bad script choices over the years, and when he gets really hyper, he can be pretty annoying.

Maybe he needs a strong director and tight script to show him at his best. I love Williams in a bunch of films, some hits, some not: The World According To Garp, What Dream May Come, The Fisher King, Awakenings, Good Will Hunting. I even like some films where Williams is allowed to go crazy and does it well - Aladdin fits that category. And Robin has played the high school English teacher well before - in Dead Poets Society.

So who directed this film? Bobcat Goldthwait. Uh-huh, Goldthwait, the once-crazy, screeching, standup ­comedian-now-turned-filmmaker. You know how they give kids with attention deficit disorder (ADD) amphetamine-like drugs to calm them down? Counter-intuitive, right? But it seems to work. Williams + Goldthwait. It might work.

Actually, the have worked together before. That film is a cult fave called Shakes the Clown. According to the reviews I have seen of the new film, Bobcat seems to keep Robin pretty much in control.

The film's title (and the trailer too to a degree) unfortunately makes you think it's a "family comedy" (let's not mention Williams' Fathers' Day and RV), but I think the film is trying to be something else.

The story centers on Lance Clayton (Williams), high school poetry teacher, and his equally (maybe more so) bummed-out son, Kyle.

The film begins is back and forth between the two. It sounds like the second half shifts into something more surreal and the mask of tragedy comes out. (I have read reviews that compare it to a weaker Donnie Darko and that say the film's plot transition goes "faster than you could page Patch Adams." )

Now, this post is not a REview but a PREview. It's what I am thinking before I enter the theater - or if things really seem grim before I add it to my Netflix queue. But I am curious about the film.

If you saw it, feel free to post a comment - but no spoilers.

A Long Sleep

Gustave Courbet, Le Sommeil (Sleep), Oil on canvas, 1866

In my insomniac nights, I usually end up watching TV and simultaneously surfing the Net.

Here are some folks who really knew how to sleep.

The Greek poet Epimenides is said to have fallen asleep in a cave as a child and not to have awoken for 57 years, after which he found himself possessed of all wisdom. I have been awake for almost as many years and still don't feel wise.

I guess I am more like Rip in Washington Irving’s 1819 story, "Rip Van Winkle," who slept for 20 years in the Catskill Mountains, waking an old man, “unknowing and unknown.”

I am a big fan of the Arthurian legends. So, I believe is not dead but asleep in the form of an old tree yet to wake. And Arthur is not dead in Avalon, but is sleeping in the form of a raven.

It is said that Saint Euthymus slept standing against a wall, and Arsenus hardly slept at all.

I'm not sure it gives me comfort that leaders like Margaret Thatcher thrived on three or four hours’ sleep a night - same with Napoleon and Zhou Enlai.

Ben Franklin: “Up, sluggard, and waste not life; in the grave will be sleeping enough.”

Harold Wilson: “I believe the greatest asset a head of state can have is the ability to get a good night’s sleep.”

The 7 Sleepers of Ephesus were persecuted Christians who sought refuge in a cave at the time of the Emperor Decius (AD 250) and slept for 200 years. They awoke in AD 447 during the reign of Theodosius II.

Sleeping Beauty (popularized by Charles Perrault) was a beautiful princess cursed by a wicked fairy to prick her finger and die. Fortunately, a good fairy commutes this death sentence to sleep lasting 100 years, from which the princess is released by the kiss of a handsome prince.

OK, I'm getting a bit drowsy - gonna click "Publish Post" and try the sleep thing. See you in the morning on Weekends in Paradelle.

Cinemash

Mash together an old film with some actual celebs in new short films. Interesting idea.

Punk rock film Sid and Nancy + rom com 500 Days of Summer mashed with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. (Joe plays Nancy)

Gordon-Levitt has an interesting site of his own at http://hitrecord.org (as in, "hit the record button" on the video camera)

Cheech and Chong redo Tron with a turn on the current economic blues.

Even commentary and behind the scenes shorts.

http://movies.msn.com/cinemash/

I Know You

I am surprised that other people are still surprised about the amount of personal information about people is online.


Today I showed someone a few sites like intelius.com. Type in your name and state and look at what's available. That particular site offers more info for a cost, but a lot of that public/private information about you is out there for free.

Another site I pointed them to is zillow.com where anyone can see your house from the air and see what it's worth today and the rest of the neighborhood.

Scary? Surprising?

Woodstock Hits 40

The Woodstock festival was 40 years ago and still seems to define the late 1960s and that generation in some ways.

Supposedly, there was at least one birth on that New York farmland between August 15 and 17, 1969. Where are you Woodstock baby?

I'm talkin 'bout my generation.

Who caught the guitar Pete tosses off the stage at the end of this song?

And how could Grace Slick possibly be 69 this year.

Three Minute Fiction

NPR asked people to send in original works of fiction that could be read in three minutes or less. They got more than 5,000 submissions and asked literary critic James Wood of The New Yorker to pick the winners.

The big winner was Molly Reid with "Not That I Care"
and the five runners-up are:

• "Mickey Mickey You're So Fine" by Sally Reno
• "Plumstreet" by Bernard Mendillo
• "Something to Crow About" by Paul Luikart
• "Allechka" by Deborah Kaple (from NJ!)
• "Constellations" by Gabriel Louis

more info

Out of a Marijuana Fog: Inherent Vice

Thomas Pynchon has a new book out this week. 

Did you know that books now have video trailers? You don't have to sit through book coming attractions before you read a book - yet - but here is the one for his new book, Inherent Vice.

    

Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon— private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog. Thomas Pynchon was always known for not being known (as in reclusive) but I was told that he is narrating the trailer. I couldn't tell you for sure, but it doesn't sound like a voice actor. Then again... Even the narrator is shocked at the price of the book. "$27.95? That used to be like... three weeks of groceries, man. What year's this again?"

I was assigned to read his novel Gravity's Rainbow and really struggled with it. But it was introduced by the professor as "a postmodern epic - the Ulysses of our half of the century." Set at the end of World War II, it concerns rockets by the German military and the mysterious device (Schwarzgerät) that will be installed in rocket #00000. 

No traditional plot or character development here. I kept reading. I felt I had to since I was an English major. My fellow students had very mixed reactions to the novel. We were not alone. According to Wikipedia,

In 1974, the three-member Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction supported Gravity's Rainbow for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. However, the other eleven members of the board overturned this decision, branding the book "unreadable, turgid, overwritten and obscene." The novel was nominated for the 1973 Nebula Award for Best Novel and won the National Book Award in 1974. Since its publication, Gravity's Rainbow has spawned an enormous amount of literary criticism and commentary, including two readers' guides and several online concordances, and it is frequently cited as Pynchon's magnum opus. Time Magazine included the novel in its All-Time 100 Greatest Novels, a list of the best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. In addition, it has appeared on several other "Greatest" lists, and is considered by some critics as one of the greatest American novels ever written.

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers." -- Gravity's Rainbow

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UPDATE

The book was made into a film. 

Best Beach Books

Followup to my earlier post - NPR has posted its "Audience Picks: 100 Best Beach Books Ever" online.

Not bad - I only have 21 left to read on the list. (Though I would have to reread about 50 of them to give you a decent book report.)

People talk a lot about the wisdom of crowds, but the truth is that large packs of people are better at judging some things than others. Almost 16,000 of you cast some 136,000 votes in our Best Beach Books Ever poll. Whether such a vote can determine literary quality, who can say? But there's one thing a multitude of book-loving NPR types can most definitely do, and that's pick a list of books that will appeal to... book-loving NPR types.

I have 6 left to read in the top 20 - some I have been avoiding for years...

1. The Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling
2. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
3. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
4. Bridget Jones's Diary, by Helen Fielding
5. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
6. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, by Rebecca Wells
7. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
9. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, by Fannie Flagg
10. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
11. The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
12. Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
13. The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan
14. The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien
15. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
16. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
17. Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett
18. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
19. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
20. Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen

Any books you think should have made the summer reading list?

Almost Midnight and I Am Laughing With God

Probably no one should be listening to this song so close to midnight because it sets you thinking about no one laughing at God in a hospital, and that it’s gotten real late
and your kid’s not home and other times when no one is laughing at God.

But this song keeps coming back to haunt me.

 
The music video for Regina Spektor's "Laughing With" (from Far).
Video directed by Adria Petty.

Expectations

I like Bobby McFerrin's demo here which may be him addressing the pentatonic scale for an audience at the 2009 World Science Festival, but I like what it says about EXPECTATIONS too.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.