el que quiera ACOSTArse...

wes anderson's fantastic mr. fox

acowsta@gmail.com (hey_k) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 04:59:00 +0000

At times this adaptation of Roald Dahl’s slender anti-fable — truer to the spirit than to the letter of the source — does not even look like a movie. In spite of the pedigreed voices (Meryl Streep and Bill Murray, along with George Clooney in the title role), it feels more like an extended episode of what progressive educators call imaginative play. The sets might just as well have been built out of available household stuff, the stiff figurines animated and ventriloquized on a classroom or bedroom floor by precocious children.

All of which may only be another way of saying that this is a Wes Anderson film.

His live-action subjects often move like stop-motion figures through landscapes that resemble drawings and models more than real places. (Think of the cutaway ship set in “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.”) There is a deadpan, understated quality to his performers that also suggests puppetry, and he shows a stubborn reluctance to let story take precedence over style.

Is it is a movie for children? This inevitable question depends on the assumption that children have uniform tastes and expectations. How can that be? And besides, the point of everything Mr. Anderson has ever done is that truth and beauty reside in the odd, the mismatched, the idiosyncratic. He makes that point in ways that are sometimes touching, sometimes annoying, but usually worth arguing about. Not everyone will like “Fantastic Mr. Fox”; and if everyone did, it would not be nearly as interesting as it is. There are some children — some people — who will embrace it with a special, strange intensity, as if it had been made for them alone.

manhood for amateurs

acowsta@gmail.com (hey_k) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 18:12:00 +0000

Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Even though it took me a while to get through this book, I have to say that I enjoyed it greatly. Michael Chabon is one of those writers that make me want to write for the rest of my life. He is just so brilliant.
I welcome his adventures in the non-fiction territory, and even though I am not a Jewish male in his 40s, I found a lot of what he had to share to be very relevant to my life. Some of the essays had me rejoicing with nerdery, some of them moved me deeply.
The only thing that keeps me from giving this book five stars is that although I am most of the way there with him on almost every topic, sometimes his geeky comics and science fiction knowledge (and the showing off of this knowledge) can make me a little edgy and I lose interest. However, his observations about reading, writing, relationships, and purpose were extremely interesting. His essays about childhood and how being a child has changed in the last forty years in this country were fascinating. I had heard three of them before, in a reading that Michael Chabon did during his visit to my university campus last year, but reading them made me appreciate his eloquent carefulness with language and choice of words. Moreover, his description of his younger son's mild OCD and his issues with symmetry (as one of the kinds of OCD) got me thinking about the last book I read.
I highly recommend this book to those of you who are feeling reflective about life lately.

View all my reviews >>

the wanting comes in waves / repaid (live at the bbc)

acowsta@gmail.com (hey_k) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 01:15:00 +0000

I am all full of love for this again.

the rake song live

acowsta@gmail.com (hey_k) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 00:40:00 +0000

Here Come The Waves: The Hazards of Love Visualized

acowsta@gmail.com (hey_k) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 23:25:00 +0000

too much happiness

acowsta@gmail.com (hey_k) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 05:38:00 +0000

clipped from www.nytimes.com

Alice Munro’s Object Lessons

The Germans must have a term for it. Doppelgedanken, perhaps: the sensation, when reading, that your own mind is giving birth to the words as they appear on the page. Such is the ego that in these rare instances you wonder, “How could the author have known what I was thinking?” Of course, what has happened isn’t this at all, though it’s no less astonishing. Rather, you’ve been drawn so deftly into another world that you’re breathing with someone else’s rhythms, seeing someone else’s visions as your own.

One of the pleasures of reading Alice Munro derives from her ability to impart this sensation. It’s the sort of gift that requires enormous modesty on the part of the writer, who must shun pyrotechnics for something less flashy: an empathy so pitch-perfect as to be nearly undetectable. But it’s most arresting in the hands of a writer who isn’t too modest — one possessed of a fearless, at times, fearsome, ambition.

Munro’s own contrarian streak is displayed in the structure of her narratives. Many writers begin a story in medias res, but a Munro story is liable to end in the middle of things — that is, well before (or well beyond) the moment when a reader expects to find resolution. The very shape of things, along with our sense of what is important and why, seems to shift as we proceed. The real story keeps turning out to be larger than, and at canted angles to, what we thought it would be. The effect is initially destabilizing, then unexpectedly affirming.

In the introduction to her 1996 volume of “Selected Stories,” Munro reveals an endearing idiosyncrasy: “I don’t always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction.” She goes on to explain that she doesn’t read in order to find out what happens so much as to experience the world of the story, to inhabit it for a while, “wandering back and forth” in it, discovering the ways it alters her perspective. This Alice-in-Wonderland propensity, this inclination to regard fiction as a dynamic creation and the reader as a mutable participant, may provide a key to reading Munro. More than that, it suggests something provocative about the uses of fiction, about its moral purpose as well as its potential to have an impact on our lives.

embedded episode - "the decemberists, hazards of weirdness"

acowsta@gmail.com (hey_k) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:50:00 +0000

Full episode of Embedded with The Decemberists, Hazards of Weirdness, in several parts. The episode includes some footage from the rehearsals of their rock opera Hazards of Love, a concept album that they released earlier this year, and which my friend Scott and I saw live in its entirety when The Decemberists visited Kansas City. It was the best concert I have ever been to.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3: