Ooooh, Greg Easterbrook, aka Tuesday Morning Quarterback, has a new blog on the new republic online. Todays highlight quote:

When I lived in Pakistan, the newspapers attributed every national setback to "the Zionist-Hindu conspiracy." Now it turns out there actually is a Zionist-Hindu conspiracy!

Yesterday I finally got the page proofs for "Inversus," the novelette I sold to Analog way back in March. (Actually, the proofs were mailed to my old address in Astoria more than a week ago; it took me a while to figure out where they were.) They're very satisfying to page through. Also, I have a tentative release date for the story: it's scheduled to appear in the January/February issue of Analog, which means that it should hit the newsstands right around Christmas.

So last night I went to see R.E.M. perform at the shoreline. Its been 4 years since I last saw them, so it was a little strange to look back and think how much things have changed since then. That was the end of the summer after my freshman year of college... It's amazing how time flies and how different a person I was then. I'd just met Laura that month. I went down to Virginia to pick up ben from his first month of college, we drove up, saw the concert, got our 5 lyric sheets, and then dropped him off at a bus terminal for a 2am busride back from D.C. to blacksburg. He had just recently been dumped by Allison, yeah, its that long ago... Then I went to St. Johns and arrived at 3am to visit meg who was in her second week at college and crashed on her floor. This was long enough ago that not only was I surprised that my parents didn't disapprove of my crashing on the floor of a platonic female friend's room, I also probably wouldn't have done it if they did think it was wrong... The next day Meg's friends were teasing her relentlessly about liking some guy in their class, and she was insisting she didn't and was ticked off at me for not agreeing with her... Of course she just got engaged to this guy last month.

Anyway, enough silly noah what has changed in the last 4 years stuff... Here was the playlist:

1. Begin the Begin
2. So Fast, So Numb (one of my favorite upbeat R.E.M. songs)
3. Drive (slow like on the album, not like the monster tour version)
4. Animal (a new song, didn't care for it much)
5. Fall on Me (!)
6. Orange Crush (surprisingly great fun live, especially with the megaphone)
7. Bad Day (another new one, better than animal, but still not great)
8. The One I love (accoustic and slow, just piano and accoustic guitar, haunting)
9. Daysleeper
10. Imitation of Life (better live than on the album)
11. So. Central Rain (!!!)
12. At My Most Beautiful
13. Nightswimming
14. Don't Go Back To Rockville (this was great fun, and mike mills sang)
15. Losing My Religion
16. She Just Wants to Be
17. Walk Unafraid
18. Man on the Moon
------ Encore
1. Everybody Hurts
2. Weclome to the Occupation
3. Country Feedback (every bit as good as you'd think it'd be)
4. Permanent Vacation (announced as the first time they've played it in the states since 1981, he had to say at the end, "oh I forgot to say that wasn't a cover. We wrote that song, when I was 21.")
5. The End of the World as we Know it.

All in all an excellent show. Michael was rather on speed at the beginning, but got in plenty of bizarre remarks. South Central Rain was a definite highlight, "go build yourself another dream, this choice it wasn't mine... I'm Sorry..."

It's so nice to deal with a huge company that actually has good customer service. For some reason I got charged San Francisco County tax for this month's mobile bill even though I had changed my address to Berkeley. I called Verizon, and after one minute on hold I talked to a person who understood my problem, figured out what was wrong, fixed it, and credited me back the wrong taxes, all the while apologising profusely for the inconvenience.

So if any readers of this blog are in the market for a mobile phone, I highly recommend Verizon. Plus, that way I can call you for free during peak hours!

Ebert's review of this movie hits a little close to home.

As Noah has mentioned, we got a new kitty last week. Her name is Tilly (short for Matilda). Here are some pictures.

Last night I watched The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, an incredibly moving, witty, and beautiful film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, whom I'm increasingly beginning to regard as the two greatest directors in British history (and yes, I'm counting Alfred Hitchcock). At the moment, I can't think of any other artist in any medium whose career I admire more than Powell's: his films provide a thrilling example of what popular entertainment can and should be, and he's increasingly become my role model as a writer. (My role models have always been more cinematic than literary.)

Anyway, I've probably said this before, but if you haven't seen The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, Peeping Tom, or Colonel Blimp, you should. These are films that have nothing obvious in common except astonishing visual imagination, wonderful plots, and endless ingenuity, and The Red Shoes especially comes close to the limits of what movies can do. (To my mind, The Red Shoes is significantly more entertaining and moving than Citizen Kane, and just about as ingenious.) But Colonel Blimp is wonderful, too. This entry from imdb.com does a nice job of summing up what makes this movie unique:

Imagine if Tim Burton was given the opportunity to make a movie based upon the exploits of the dirty politician from "The Simpsons", "Diamond Joe" Quimby. Imagine if, instead of a riotous send-up, an excoriating lampoon of politics and stodgy ideals, what Burton delivered was a sentimental and very sympathetic portrait of Quimby as a young man, who is turned into a shyster politico by time and public tides. You'll then have some idea how confused the British were in 1944 to see The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Colonel Blimp was a caricature of ineffective Brit bureaucracy and the old home guard, created by cartoonist and humorist David Low for The Evening Standard. But when Archer Production's master filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger drew their bow on Blimp they had other ideas in mind. We first see Blimp as he was often found in Low's cartoons, wrapped in a white towel in a Turkish bath, but soon we're transported to 35 years earlier and we encounter a young Clive Candy (the unforgettable Roger Livesey), who'll one day mature into the barrel-chested Col. Blimp. Clive is reckless. He duels with Germans over questions of honor. He falls in love (with the reoccurring Archer favorite Deborah Kerr) and he grows old. His swagger becomes a waddle and his adventurous nature turns into complacency. It's ironic that Winston Churchill was advised by his staff to oppose the release of Blimp (it was supposedly going to be anti-military) and yet he's often the one ascribed with reiterating the Bismark quote, "He who is not liberal when young has no heart, and he who is not conservative when he's old has no head." That's essentially the storyline that Powell and Pressburger chose to tell about their poor, misguided, heroic, tragic, Col. Blimp.

Incidentally, for some unknown reason, Netflix doesn't carry Colonel Blimp on DVD, even though it's readily available at most large DVD stores. (I had to buy my own copy off Amazon.) This is just about the only shortcoming I've seen in Netflix to date.

It is with a kind of unbelieving vertigo that I see the date "9/3/2003" on the e-mails in my inbox. I've been at my job for a year today. Scroll down through the list, and a handful of e-mails dated "9/3/2002" appear at the very bottom. I've never been so aware of the earth's cyclical movement around the sun.

Since it's been about two months since I started using Netflix, I feel like doing a roundup of what I've been watching recently. As of this weekend, I've rented Bonnie and Clyde, Grand Illusion, Sunset Boulevard, The Fury, L'Atalante, L'Avventura, Frenzy, Taste of Cherry, Strangers on a Train, The Wages of Fear, Marathon Man, El Mariachi, Desperado, The Rules of the Game, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Blood Guts Bullets and Octane. Of the above, a few were rentals of old favorites, but mostly I've been trying to fill in the gaps of my cinematic education. Many were wonderful (Sunset Boulevard, River Kwai), and only a few were disappointing (The Fury, L'Avventura). Taste of Cherry was inexplicable, but the metafictional ending comes closer to my idea of what death must be like than any other movie I've seen (the camera stops rolling, the crew appears, a character's life is revealed as a fiction). The best of the bunch was Grand Illusion, which everyone who loves movies needs to see as soon as possible. Next in my queue: The Deer Hunter; Oliver Twist; Network. No patterns that I can see, except that of the first five movies I rented, two (Grand Illusion and Sunset Boulevard) starred Erich von Stroheim, and two (Grand Illusion and L'Atalante) starred Dita Parlo, and I have no explanation for that.

My new favorite read this month is David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film, an amazingly opinionated and comprehensive encyclopedic essay of 800 pages that just begs to be browsed and devoured. I remember this book from my local library; when I was fourteen or so, I would spend hours standing up with this book by the reference shelf, reading entry after entry (but unable to check it out). I stumbled across it at the Strand bookstore yesterday, and found myself doing the same thing (just browsing and reading while standing in front of the shelf) before realizing that I could actually buy myself a copy. Which I did.

It's a great book, mostly because it never pretends to be objective and provides endless fodder for argument. (Thomson doesn't care much for Kurosawa, for example.) It's also quite prescient. Check out the following entry for Arnold Schwarzenegger, written back in the early nineties:

I remember how a friend came back from a visit to the set of Stay Hungry ('76, BoB Rafelson) with reports that the not unobservant Rafelson was saying that this hulk with the impossible name was the smartest person on the picture, and that he was going somewhere. Fifteen years later, we think we know where. But consider: Arnold may have more dreams yet behind that rippling grin…What will the world do if, on learning the explanation that anyone born in Ganz, Austria, cannot be president, Arnold says "Why, baby?" Paul Verhoeven once said that this man could be as big as Charlton Heston -- which may be Verhoeven's one recorded instance of naivete.

Here's the homepage of Rick Lyon, one of the puppeteers/performers/singers from Avenue Q. He seems to have had an immensely satisfying career.

So my parents have started reading this blog (which might be interpreted as a disturbing development). My mom has rather devastatingly summed up the typical post on this blog as "Hey, a girl looked at me yesterday!" (See samples here and here.)

Its always odd pulling out music you haven't listened to in a while. The other day I played a mix a friend made me last octoberish which i listened to a lot last fall... I'd forgotten just how much time I'd spent listening to the section that went: breakfast at tiffany's (a cappella)/love will come to you/hard candy.

Also my newest line of the week is "i heard the eternal footman bought himself a bike to race" from pretty good year.

Meg and I were arguing the other day over whether this was a parody or real. In either case it is pretty funny, though at points its just a little too familiar to me to laugh...

Speaking of Israel... There's an interesting T-Shirt going on in my history of math class (it's an undergrad upper level math class). On monday there were no interesting shirts.

On weds someone showed up with this shirt that said on the front "anti-racism anti-imperialism anti-zionism" and on the back it had this big malcolm x quote about how the zionist argument for the Jewish occupation of Arab palestine had no legal or historical basis, and then had this rant about ending the occupation...

Then friday someone else showed up with an IDF shirt... I can't wait to see what happens monday.

Interesting factoid from this weeks NYTimes magazine: Israel got the nuclear bomb from France?!? Who knew?

Alec, who does the singing in Avenue Q? Is it all voiceover?

It's a good thing it's a long weekend, I didn't really do a good job last week of adapting to the school year starting last week... There's only so many nights I can stay up till 3am dancing at a club in the city in a tux and a moose hat (more "hey bulwinkle!" remarks I've heard in my life). I'm not sure if it was the tux or the hat, but somehow this resulted in girls flirting with me. So i highly recommend both tuxes and moose hats. (Saturday I went back out without the hat or tux and it was back to normal.)

We finally have a living room (bought a sofa, a comfy chair, etc.), which is very exciting, it's nice to have somewhere to plop down when you return home. At the cat has moved in, which has been quite exciting. She's very cute and kittenish.

By the way, if you're ever in New York, you've got to see Avenue Q, which is the funniest, fuzziest, most beautiful musical I've seen in a long, long time. The concept is easy to explain, but it's difficult to convey how pitch-perfect the execution is: it's Sesame Street for neurotic recent college graduates, complete with Muppets and educational animated clips that tackle such touchy topics as one-night stands, Internet porn, unemployment, and Schadenfreude. The plot follows a young Muppet named Princeton as he tries to find his purpose in life while learning to live with a street of eccentric puppet neighbors, including Katy Monster, Lucy The Slut, and the closeted gay couple Ray and Nicky. (Any resemblance to Bert and Ernie is, of course, completely coincidental.) It sounds tasteless, but it's actually wonderfully respectful and affectionate towards Sesame Street. Best of all, it's educational for twentysomethings in the way that Sesame Street was when we were toddlers. Sample songs: "What Do You Do With a B.A. in English?"; "If You Were Gay"; "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist"; and of course, "I Want to Go Back to College." I wish there were a cast album so that I could all point you to the lyrics page.

Watching it, I felt a little like I felt when I saw High Fidelity back in 2000: someone had made a movie (or, in this case, a musical) that said so many things worth saying about my own life that my own attempts at autobiographical fiction seemed superfluous. It's astonishing how much I found myself relating to these puppets. I especially liked the Bad Idea Bears, who appear out of nowhere with such bright ideas as: "Have a beer!" or "Make a pass! She's wasted!" I want to buy tickets for all of my friends, except I'm afraid they'd recognize too much of themselves (and me) in the characters. But even if you aren't twentysomething and terrified of the real world (and if you aren't, what are you doing reading this blog?) Avenue Q is worth seeing just as a technical tour-de-force: the cast are all experienced puppeteers, usually with eight to ten years' experience on Sesame Street, and because they're always visible along with their puppets, the technique on display is just staggering. According to the program notes, there are only about 40 active puppeteers in New York, and they're all so used to working together that they have natural rapport onstage. In its own way, it's encouraging and inspiring how these puppeteers were able to make it big and to Broadway, even in today's wintry economic climate.

Rachel has a blog now. Jesus. It's just about exactly what you'd expect, if you know Rachel. (I mean this only with the greatest affection, of course.)