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Leap Day

For reasons unknown (alien invasion?) KUOW ran next week’s WNYC-produced Radiolab, a live show recorded in front of a loving audience in Minneapolis, tonight.

The show uses Radiolab’s signature overlapping audio, which to my ear derives most directly from Altman and Firesign Theatre, to explore the production and legacy of the storied Mercury Theatre on the Air “War of The Worlds,” to great and personally moving effect.

I have been familiar with Radiolab, and its’ leading light, Robert Krulwich, for years. While generally I have admired both Krulwich’s reporting and his commitment to puyshing the mediujm as an aspect of his reportage, Radiolab did not sell itself to me. Overlapping found and reported audio accompanied by well-informed commentary was, it seemed, not enough for me.

Given that Krulwich’s grail is indeed as it has seemed to me for some time the transformation of the reported story into dramatic and audio entertainment, it’s only natural that one would expect him to explore the October 31, 1938 Mercury Radio Theatre on The Air broadcast of their adaptation of The War of The Worlds.

Without going into detail, it is clear to me that the show I have just listened to achieves the goal of transforming reportage into something new, not news, not drama, not anecdote. The show conveyed new information regarding something I have been fascinated with since childhood, entirely new and unexpected fallout from the broadcast, and direct, thoughtful commentary from the hosts on the topic at hand.

It was fantastic, and if Krulwich can find the correct choices to address moving forward with the show, new ground has been broken in three disciplines: radio, journalism, and drama.

I suspect that this may be what the guy’s been after for umpteen years. I’ve been listening, and I never heard it click previously, although I always appreciated Krulwich’s aggressive pusuit of the edge.

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NEWS FLASH

Following a heated shouting match several years ago with the Flexcar founder and CEO over the meaning of ‘lifetime,’ I conceived in my heart a vicious hatred of the company, a shiftless excuse to milk the public teat under the guise of environmental sensibility not equaled until the dawn of ecofuels.

During the operation’s recent endgame, the con-artists sought to protect a set of tax breaks that made them a more attractive acquisition target, and, surprise surprise, were bought out by East Coast-based carshare operation Zipcar.

Hey! What’s this? It seems, according to Slog post Zipcar Responds, that they are staffed by a higher grade of evildoer than the home-grown operation.

This should come as no surprise, if one considers the predator pyramid. The only question, really, is whether or not Zipcar employed mind-controlling earwigs to drive the tax-break-protection lobbying, or if the Flexcar drones acted of their own free will.

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Cell phones and servers

So – recently my home-hosted Mac server’s boot drive took a powder, and needed to be hosed and rebuilt. The server functionality has proved significantly more difficult to rebuild than in the past, primarily a function of orphan docs clogging Google search results pertaining to this or that combination of this or that system and server software release.

At about the same time, AT&T cut off my phone’s data plan with no notice, something which I learned after an increasingly aggravating three hours on the phone with various personages in customer service and tech support. In AT&T’s case, the cutoff was the result of a policy rather than a functional issue – my Treo, which I have used with an AT&T $20/mo plan called MediaNet, is apparently not eligible for the plan, even though I have had the plan for three years and was initially set up with that plan by Cingular’s CSRs in the first place.

Cingular, for future readers, purchased the juddering, smoking ruin of AT&T mobile and rebranded. This is something which confuses the shit out of me when I go to pay the bill online. Each time, I struggle to remember that Qwest, my local landline provider, which was once AT&T, is not the new Cingular. My bill pay service won’t let you change the names of the accounts once you have it set up, so this is likely to get worse as, oh, gas companies purchase municipal utilities and are eventually absorbed by corporations owned by leathery-skinned ETs who arrive from Sirius five years from now.

Anyway, fuck AT&T, and I’m ready to move on. Being of conservative mien with regard to functioning hardware, I just want to swap SIMs in my current cell phone farm, which kinda-sorta limits me to T-Mobile, the other GSM provider in the US. Naturally, figuring out T-Mo’s plans and options is an undertaking akin to parsing Pentagon and TSA press releases regarding ‘progress’ in making America more ‘secure.’

Complicating matters, on Monday, T-Mo rolled out a $10/mo VOIP landline add-on for extant customers, which, once you really wade through the details, requires either DSL or cable, so your landline is likely to remain in place unless you know enough to buffalo your Qwest rep into dropping the charges for the POTS line while keeping the DSL in place.

Meanwhile, my server rebuild project keeps getting shorted time.

I really hate all of this needless complexity. As implemented in our culture, it’s effectively a non-governmental tax on time, and I resent the shit out of it. I suppose I could just Craigslist my phones and my computers, and transfer the mercury and lead disposal burden to shiftless cheap-ass hippies.

Come to think of it, there is a certain appeal in that idea.

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The dog ate my…

On arriving home tonight, I was greeted by the conspicuous absence of attention-hoggery and tailwagging from Rocket which inevitably means something has been thoroughly chewed to bits. In normal circumstances, this affects shoes, and consequently Viv, more than me. We’ve adapted by locking the shoes up.

Casting my eyes about what should I see, but THIS:

That is what remains of the book I wrote about fondly yesterday. It should be noted that the damage is largely restricted to the cover and table of contents, and one piece of the cover in particular appears to have been chewed for some time like a piece of gum.

That is of course the section of the cover that I held for the longest period of time last night as I played from the book. Apparently my dog loves me so much he just wants to eat me up, or at least chew me like gum.

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Ol' Pete

The Best Bus Driver in the World (weblog wafted away on the digital winds), acting on a ukelele-inspired whim, bought me a copy of Pete Seeger’s well-known American Favorite Ballads, figuring that since he was buying himself a copy I might be interested too.

Happily, the book appears to be the source for several old faves of mine, introduced to me for playing by Greg via xeroxes back when we were in the Boxers.

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AT&T hosedown

At around midnight between Monday and Sunday, AT&T (formerly Cingular) started blocking internet access on my cell, which is currently a Treo 680. After a couple hours on the line with their nerds and sales goons, it was established that the company had programatically excluded MediaNet users based on ‘unapproved hardware,’ such as my 680, which is not an approved model of phone for the old plan.

I have used the plan for about three years across a variety of phones, so I’m pretty pissed off. Downgrading from my current 2-line plan to the cheapest 2-line plan offered will mean a revenue loss to AT&T of about $40 to $60 per month.

Despite this, no negotiating tactic employed would budge them to simply restore service. At one point, I began to use the milkshake line from There Will Be Blood; at another, I slowly counted off the dollar cost to AT&T of their idiocy, “One, two, three…”

I was wildly obstreperous, incredibly obstinate, intensely articulate, and wholly incredulous. I tried to be right, abrasive, and entertaining all at once.

Well, fuck ’em. Interesting to note that Verizon has a $100 flat-rate cell-and-land plan. Time to shop around.

Come on, come on, there’s a hundred-bucks-plus a month on the table. Who wants my money, assholes? Come on and tell me why you deserve it, come on!

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Sun and Wood

Most of my day today was spent loading a solid half-cord of well-seasoned but mossy and buggy cedar rounds from some craigslister’s backyard, followed by a dump run to the astonishingly clean and sort-of science-fictiony Shoreline Transfer Station.

For my sawbuck, I had been expecting a quarter-cord at the most of iffy wood, not the really decent stuff I ended up loading, to my arms’ and my back’s chagrin. Having borrowed Greg’s little half-ton Chevy truck, I felt it was only thematically appropriate to bring the dog everywhere with me as I wrestled the recalcitrant truck into submission. He was very well behaved if a bit puzzled, since riding around usually means a visit to the dog park.

Of course, all this manly activity did nothing to advance my data recovery project, and I have been working on that since I returned. I have managed to get apache to boot and the base content is in place, but MySQL needs to be fixed, and there’s this and that Perl doohickey to wedge into this and that data crevice and yadda yadda yadda.

Time to reheat that ol’ pasta sauce, I reckon. I’m still a bit peeved that the data emergency has stolen some of my goals from me this weekend, but hey, at least I didn’t freak out about the problem and it looks like all the contributed content will be fine, one way or another.

Dammit, I forgot to call my folks. I knew there was some midday thing that would get eaten by the time monsters.

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Country Coda

Happily for me, I did not come across David Denby’s much-better-worked-out thoughts on No Country For Old Men until I had recorded mine, fragmentary as they are.

Interestingly, he seems to get to roughly the same place as I, wondering at the spectacle of such plainly apparent technical mastery deployed in the service of what he, too, characterizes as nearly nihilism.

I left out Lebowski the other day, primarily because its’ themes are sufficiently distinct from No Country that I didn’t want to drag the Dude into the discussion.

Denby doesn’t leave him out, and rightly so.

(In passing, I find it amusing that parts of Lebowski, like There will Be Blood, were shot at Greystone Mansion.)

In Lebowski, Walter dismisses the comic badmen that have hassled the bowlers, later also describing them as cowards:

“No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

It sure seems unlikely that the Coens intend the ineffectual clutch of Eurotrash as a self-portrait. Yet it certainly does not seem outlandish to assume that they have wondered about their own work’s relation to nihilism, even if one assumes they would, like Walter, dismiss the idea.

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Home Server Timewaster

Oh happy day! My long-term home-based webserver appears to have sufferred a monumental drive failure and thus my weekend plans must be deferred in the service of data-recovery and transfer.

Joy!

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Country

It’s time to get my mind around No Country for Old Men, which of these three films remains for me the slipperiest. I’m a long-time admirer of the Coens’ work, Raising Arizona excepted (note adoption subtheme! interesting!).

No Country feels materially different from all their preceding films, a result of the filmmakers’ easing off their previously aggressively mannered style. Despite this major shift in approach the film retains themes and moods from three precursors in particular: Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, and Fargo.

Blood Simple, the Coens’ first commercial feature, shares the Texas setting and the sense of unsavory doins coexisting with an everyday sunlit world of small towns and big spaces. Miller’s Crossing, possibly the filmmakers’ first attempt at a major work, is focused on a power struggle between 1920s gangsters in which the gangsters’ nighttime world of firefights and speakeasies actually completely trumps the day-to-day world. Fargo, of course, presents a Minnesota sherriff struggling to disentangle a botched and ill-starred kidnapping plot.

All three films share with No Country (as well as the majority of all the other films by the team) a deeply misanthropic view of the world, which endears them mightily to me. However, all three present a traditional resolution to their events even as the films clearly present a disturbing and amoral outcome of the plots they convey. In No Country, the assassin’s unexpected wreck fills the role of the moral resolution, even as it remains ambiguous. Tommy Lee Jones’ retiring sheriff sits at his table and recounts a dream of his father leading the way to the underworld over a mountain pass, and the string of killings remains unresolved by the lawman, who has come to feel that he cannot bring justice to a world he believes he cannot understand.

Of course, the sheriff’s loss of faith is tragic precisely because we are shown that he does grasp the task he faces, even as he fails to protect his charges. He just doesn’t realize that he sees the pieces to the puzzle even as he tells others about them. In particular, when he muses out loud, distractedly, about the cattle hammer, we can see that his mind has assembled the parts of a puzzle we know he’s been thinking about, yet he never proceeds to an ‘aha!’ moment.

This aspect of the sherriff’s character is reflected in the way the film sits in my mind. When I try to work out what I think of it, it slides around in my head, and I can’t quite grasp it. Specific technical elements of the film were very impressive and effective indeed, notably the nighttime duel in the streets of Eagle Pass and Jones’ sympathetic performance.

I’m kind of trying to figure out what this means with regard to my affection for the Coens’ earlier work. It would seem to imply that nihilism as an aesthetic philosophy is most easily enjoyed when presented in a stylized manner, and that the less visible style overlain upon the viewpoint the more difficult it is for me to analyze and describe how or why the film was effective for me as a viewer.

Clearly I missed giggling in delirious approval over this or that outrageous and unexpected filip of irony or improbable stylization, and the lack of that endorphin has paralyzed a part of my critical faculties. Perhaps this is how the Coens have chosen to show me something of a life of the mind.