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Episode III: Capital!

Viv and I saw Star Wars Ep. III tonight after a wander about the Pike Place Market Festival. In short, my opinion is on the median – much better than the other two recent films, not the greatest SF film I have ever seen, a few scenes that were quite successful on any terms.

I’m sure everyone in the world got the Frankenstein quote, a few got the at-least two 2001 quotes, and some may have made the Close Encounters samples. But why is it that as of this writing (pre-Google though it is) I have not read of one person pointing out the typo – practically a Freudian slip – in the title crawl?

We read of “War!” et cetera. Apparently, General Greivous has sneakily kidnapped Chancellor Palpatine from the very heart of the “capital” of the Republic.

Who knew that the old sneakerino was being kept in Scrooge McDuck’s money vault?

Seriously, this totally disrupted my enjoyment of the film. Film is an art in which insane attention to detail and insane control freaks are often mistaken for one another and encouraged to reach for the outer limits of sanity. George Lucas’ final word in commercial cinema is apparently to be misspelled in ignorance. It’s a fitting testament to one of the means whereby democracy perishes to applause.

The homonym, of course, is well chosen, as it’s capital to which essentially all the failings of the prior two films can be laid, and of course, it’s capital to which the failings of our own great nation’s system of checks and balances ever owes its’ tottersome state.

As I am certain one or two of you may be wondering what the rumpus is about: “capital” is large concentrations of currency, with a significance of power, while “capitol” is the geographical center of political power. I live in an optimistically-named neighboorhood, Capitol Hill. The misspelling is common enough that it is immortalized upon several signs that welcome persons to this neighborhood. the mispelling is so well-ingrained, in fact, that I wonder if we aren’t witnessing a socially-mandated spelling shift. As money corrodes democratic expression, the perceptual gap between “capitol” and “capital” fades softly to nil.

I should note that “captial” employed as an ejaculatory statement also means “excellent” or “satisfactory;” such use carries a whiff of anachronism.

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RIP Jason Sprinkle

The PI’s Buzzworthy notes the death of Jason Sprinkle, who instigated a bookended pair of guerilla art projects here in Seattle. I read the obit in the paper today, and I felt quite sad as I read the news. Sprinkle’s first art prank, a ball-and-chain attached to the foot of SAM’s Hammering Man downtown (to my surprise, over a decade ago) still makes me chuckle. His last, a too-successful work which resulted in a full-blown terror scare, still makes me shake my head in disgust over the irresponsibly paranoiac response of the city and law-enforcement authorities.

Revealingly, I learned much more about the artist in the obituary than in any of the articles I enjoyed concerning his works at the time of their execution.

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And Curtain

So, you’ve probably heard that this time out the NYT’s A. O. Scott rejects, I’m sorry to say, a curb-stomping for Star Wars, Episode III (sorry for the link, but the blogerator appears to be down.) Apparently eager to make up for it, The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane unleashes a review of overreaching vituperation which fails to amuse in (for example) its calls for the extermination of Yoda, and generally appears to reveal the critic as an enemy of fun. From what I can make of it, you’d think he’d actually like the film. He prophetically describes it as a “remorseless non-comedy,” sadly telegraphing a review into which he undoubtedly chortled three decades’ worth of deep loathing. It saddens me, because I do so enjoy a sound sour Star Wars review and had held great hopes, if not for the film, for the reviews.

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War Room

Viv and I walked into The War Room, a new club on Capitol Hill, recently. I had noticed that the deck was open, but when we walked in, the interior space was completely empty.

All of the hung art – and possibly the club logo – is by Stewart Fairey of “Obey Giant” fame. The club adertises free wifi. Geeks of Seattle, abandon forthwith the locked-down wifi at the Elysian!

Of course, I must note we just stuck our noses in, thought about helping ourselves to the unattended bar, and then went on to Bill’s for pizza. So who knows what sort of tax Mr. Fairey’s art imposes upon the drinks.

We did not go upstairs, but it sure seems to me that the whole roof is an open deck, and one thing the $ill always needs more of is outdoor public drinking establishments.

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The whale

Viv and I saw Hitchhiker’s Guide this evening, expecting nothing, and came away reasonably happy. Like many old-skool geeks, I had a particular relationship with the radio and book incarnations of this series and subsequent to last year’s disastrous rental of the eye-scorchingly terrible BBC-TV series. The elegiac tone – and subsurface, if you will, presence of departed creator Douglas Adams – caught me by surprise and appealed, shamelessly and with success, to my own sense of loss.

However, the I did find the predominance of American accents in this version of Adams’ tale somehow not right.