p e n g u i n d e v i l

So stealing some content from my pal Kurty, I opted to take (and reveal!) the famed…

Book quiz… Of course, I feel it is fairly accurate (Ulysses certainly isn’t it), in a sense…

You’re The Sound and the Fury!
by William Faulkner
Strong-willed but deeply confused, you are trying to come to grips with a major crisis in your life. You can see many different perspectives on the issue, but you’re mostly overwhelmed with despair at what you’ve lost. People often have a hard time understanding you, but they have some vague sense that you must be brilliant anyway.
Ultimately, you signify nothing.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Otherwise, though…
The family is back in town and we are busy liquidating the retail portion of our business, and the weather has gotten hot, so I haven’t been up to much moviewise or had any big gripes festering. Except I would rather be gone from the city for good. If this was Portland of the 70’s or 80’s I could stay here, but the relentless assault of yuppies and hipsters from the four winds has morphed it into an overpriced, dull, “irony is everything”, glossy facade with no real community or any soul. All those annoying “keep Portland weird” bumper stickers? Please, Portland hasn’t been weird for 20 years. It all reminds me of South Park episode where the film festival people leave Aspen because their film festival had ruined the groovy small town feel, so they set off to find another small town to ruin. Oh, I’d also like to be away from the heat for good. I have calculated (in my head, with no solid information), that being in a city makes the summer all the more unpleasant. Not liking either cities or summer, I am filling my time with thoughts of being far away from both…

So maybe everyone doesn’t share my opinion of the ending of The Soprano’s.

Let’s just put that all behind us now and focus on the future! With that show done, I need to find another show to watch (you have to have at least one)… Though with 60 Minutes coming (almost) back to form with the return of Mike Wallace, I could maybe get away with that one. But I am still embittered by the decline it went through after the loss of Wallace and Bradley last year… Especially with this Scott Pelley fellow, I don’t mean to sound harsh, but I just don’t get him. He seems disingenuous to me.

Anyway. I think I may try and get more involved in Big Love. I watched pieces of the last season, enough to get some level of interest, and now that the new season has started, I think I can do that. It’s a pretty good drama and it’s hard not to watch anything with Harry Dean Stanton. And after Aliens and Boxing Helena, I do rather like Bill Paxton.

What I am really waiting for is Flight of the Conchords! The little bit they have on “On Demand” is about the funniest thing I have seen in a great while and it leaves us desperate for more! Wonderfully funny (and not mean, like so much comedy today) musical numbers. Brilliant raps! And very charming!

I don’t know if their series will keep up the steam, but I am certainly going to give it a shot. Is this the beginning of New Zealand’s cultural renaissance?

Oh yes, and fulfilling this site’s role as a repository for all of my media experiences, I have decided to add a book page. It is slim pickings right now, as I am only going to add books when I finish reading them (sort of a stretch at times) and I am starting just with my most recent. But hopefully it will fill out as the months go on… Books.

Okay, so I still feel a bit let down. But as the day has gone by, I have become used to it.

I mean, it’s over and it ended in what seemed like the only logical way for such a thing to end… No matter what folks like to say abut it being a family drama or what have you, it really is a mafia show, and there is a way that things are done in that organization.

After the incident with Phil at the gas station, there was only one possible conclusion. There is no way that The Commission (or whatever passes for it now in Mafia organization) could have sat idly by after that maneuver. They would have to act.

I read somewhere online, that those people in the restaurant are going to be stuck in those positions forever, but I really must disagree. We all know what happened. We all saw The Godfather and noticed the similarity in the set-up, just as we all noticed the similarity at the end of Episode 79 with the christening scene in Godfather 2. There just isn’t any other way for the dice to fall.

Anyway, the more I think about it, the better I feel. After all, it is still the best (and longest) mafia movie ever, and certainly one of the best TV shows of all time. I think that after 8 years of watching and rewatching and waiting and waiting during the extended breaks between seasons. It’s just funny to be done with it.

It also could have ended at that last shot of Satriale’s, I would have liked that.

That’s it? After 8 loyal years and 80-odd hours? That’s all the payment we get?

I’m am too much disappointed to even believe that was really the last episode ever of The Sopranos. Was that really the episode that Chase wanted to end it all with? Was the ending a technical glitch?

Well, I am assuming that it was, but if not… I’m speechlessly numb.

We’ll be watching it again in a couple of hours… Just to be sure.

Always trying to keep things fresh, we are. Due to some (sort of foreseen) circumstances, we decided today to put off the East Coast move for an unknown period and settle in Portland. I imagine that we will head out there at some point, but for the last 3 years we’ve been planning on moving this summer it is starting to seem like the deadline has become the focus, not the preparedness. And we don’t feel prepared (in any way) to make this kind of move. It is an odd feeling to suddenly change directions after so much thought, but I think that we have done so much thought about it that it makes the decision to move seem almost unnatural, which isn’t how we want it to feel. I think that in the long run, this will be the wisest choice, but after getting so used to (and hesitantly excited about) moving to Vermont, it made me a bit sad when I saw the 802 video…

Since we are on the topic of music, as someone who listened to (more than) his share of Priest, Fate and Maiden back in the day, I thought I had known all the great bands of the era. Shocked I was this week when an ad banner (of all things) at last.fm introduced me to a band I’ve never heard of… 3 Inches of Blood, possibly the best of the 80’s metal bands! Once I heard a song by them, I was so excited by the wonderful sound that I rushed out and pre-ordered their upcoming new album (I think the first Roadrunner Records release I’ve purchased since When Satan Lives almost 10 years ago!). I couldn’t help but wonder how I had missed them back then…But it’s probably because they didn’t actually exist until 2000…

But they have a great 1980’s sound and it’s refreshing for me to find metal I can stand that isn’t either Black Metal or 25 years old… Ever since the sad day that Turbo was released, there’s been a great reluctance for me to accept regular heavy metal. So this brings me hope that I’m not just bitter, maybe it really has all stunk these last couple of decades and maybe there’s a chance that “nu-metal” will finally die out and be replaced by good music once again.

There is a house up the street from here, a nice enough house, in a nice enough area. Though to me it still seems like a regular house. A nice big old craftsman. I was surprised to see that it was for sale for 798,000. Now who knows if it will fetch that price but in this town, maybe it will. I looked it up to see that it last sold in 2003 for 256,000. Though in our attempt to move there are many factors that point in different directions: jobs, dread and expense of moving all this stuff across the country, weather… This exemplifies the most telling reason to move. This real estate market (while certainly not the worst on the west coast) seems to be spiraling out of control. For people who are interested in buying a house to actually live in permanently, this kind of thing seems untenable, while northern Vermont with its variety of nice homes in the “under 150” range and lack of cities seems too tempting to ignore.

If only this was the Portland of 10 years ago… It would be much more tempting to stay.

For a relief from this line of thinking, a sci-fi movie was in order…

Imagine that you loved The Matrix and wanted to make a comic book out of it… But since you couldn’t just redo “The Matrix” you figured out a different twist for the story. Then imagine that comic book gets made into a low budget Hollywood film? Yep, I watched Equilibrium! No, we aren’t all living in a computer construct, this time emotions are outlawed but like before, we have our “Neo” to figure out the problem and fight to bring people back to reality. We all remember how terribly cast Keanu was in The Matrix (well, in everything after Bill and Ted’s), it happens again, this time with Christian Bale. Bale is now the “dressed in black, quiet and shoots like no one possibly could” action hero. At first it seems a bit cheap, but that it might be alright, then there’s the scene where he leads a violent police raid on some bad guys who have committed the misdeeds of looking at a painting and playing a 7″… Once you see the dead man on the portable turntable with the dramatic religious chanting for music, you think… is this a joke?

kill ’em all and break their records!  Bale plays John Preston, very stiffly (sometimes his voice even sounds like Keanu). As in 1984, there is a man whose visage fills walls as he talks propaganda to the people. The propaganda is maybe the worst part, it comes in the form of exposition to let the movie watcher know what’s going on but it’s under the cover of the instructional/inspirational messages to the people… Speaking of things that everyone would know already, speeches about how everyone takes this drug to cut off feelings. That’s the angle behind this story, but really, what does that even mean? How would a person act if they had no sense of emotion? What thoughts would they think? I don’t know, but I don’t think this movie had those answers.

Preston is a Cleric (think the Sandmen from Logan’s Run) and he and his partner drive around in a tacky white Cadillac with all ornamentation removed and instrumentation covered with white… His first partner is Sean Bean, who is easily the best player in the movie but he’s taken care of early for reading a book of Yeats (“Sense Offense” is actually what they call the crime), but his second partner sure smirks and smiles a lot for someone with no emotions. And there are a couple of scenes in which Preston takes people by surprise and they spew four-letter words. Very non-emotional. In terms of the rest of the movie, the CGI backgrounds are not well done, the battle scenes aren’t good and are overly unrealistic (without the excuse that Neo had), people don’t even die realistically! However, there is some inventive combat and if you want to see choreographed (though not up to Woo’s standard) gun fighting, sword fighting and “gun as sword” fighting and lots of one versus many fight scenes… Maybe it’s for you? I think it’s another one for the sell stack.

combat or modern dance? 
american psycho, part 2 

What really is the problem with working in a bookstore? It is that you have to see all of the books. And hear about the books that people are looking for. What they really remind you of is that people do really believe what they want to believe, regardless of how blatantly false it may be. I believe (ha!) that in their hearts of hearts people know that a lot of this BS they subscribe to (Foxnews anyone?) is really BS, but they like the way it sounds, so off they go waving whatever flag they have.

Case in point, today I was shown this book “America’s Victories: Why the U.S. Wins Wars and Will Win the War on Terror” (tellingly credited to the author of “A Patriot’s History of the United States”, that sure sounds objective). I don’t think that anyone ever believed that Saddam Hussein was any kind of threat, I don’t think people believe that Iran is a threat, or Cuba. And I strongly doubt that 20% of Americans really believe that the apocalypse will come in their lifetime (or ever…). I think that people like to be a part of something potent and especially they like to be part of “the most powerful country on earth” and they like for that country to flex its muscle (reasonably or not) because it makes them feel better about themselves and personally more powerful. I think it’s beyond sad, because it’s harmful to others. Just like rape and murder, this violent military and economic power over others to make yourself feel better is just plain wrong and I bet that everyone knows it, no matter how many flags and ribbon magnets they put on their cars.

People are all the same, now as they were 1000, 2000 years ago, the only difference is what they’re told and what they experience when they grow up. What is the difference between a liberal Christian, a medieval Catholic Inquisitor, a Tibetan monk, a Celtic warrior or an Islamic jihadist? When they were born and what they were told. Though of course some people bother looking enough to go their own way, most don’t. They live life however they are told it is to be lived, and I cannot help but believe that people must realize how subjective all of society’s beliefs are. So, while I don’t have a problem with people being conservative, progressive, religious, psychics, or patriots all I ask is that they admit that it is just their culture and stop acting like it’s some universal truth that everyone needs to follow. We are all just cavemen who have time traveled, but at such a young age that we don’t know the difference, regardless of what era we happened to be born in.

Nationalism is about the strangest… Doesn’t it seem funny how every nation has nationalists and they all say the same thing about how superior their respective countries are? And how dangerous and barbaric their neighbors are? Shaw may have said that “In their behavior toward creatures, all men are Nazis. Human beings see oppression vividly when they’re the victims. Otherwise they victimize blindly and without a thought.” But it’s not just the other animals that are blindly victimized, it can be any human that one doesn’t consider to be part of one’s own little “us”.

But then, I’ve always said that no one really likes hot weather, they’ve just always had it implied to them that they should like it so they don’t even think about how unpleasant it is. And maybe that’s just me.

Why is there always so much to think about? I mean, I enjoy thinking about the things that are just there for thinking… History, the places beyond our atmosphere, movies… It’s those things that actually can have an effect, that’s where the trickiness lies.

In our 3 year quest to move to Vermont, I feel repeatedly psychologically tripped up by the decision making process. As someone who has never lived outside of this one city, the thought of relocating 3000 miles away is an interesting quandary. Add to that the thought of moving to a small town, when I’ve never spent much time in a small town. That’s a whole other angle. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea. I’m sick of the city thing. Even though Portland isn’t that big of a city, this 15 year run of being one of the hippest places to move to has lead to endless changes (I think they call it progress, development, maybe cashing in, even) that I find unacceptable. And I don’t just mean house prices tripling in that time. I feel like people moved here with a vision in mind of what this city is and have proceeded to remake it into that. Which, while it is hip and urban and (sort of) cultural and prosperous (maybe too much so), it’s not the place I picture from my 40 years of memories. To add insult to injury, my place of employment, Powell’s City of Books, is indeed a loved icon of old Portland past, yet it is right next to the greatest blight on the cities face: the loathed “Pearl District”. It is a disturbing thing to sit and enjoy this store which I have been visiting for nigh on 25 years (though yes, it has changed quite a bit too), but to have to witness the yuppiefied hip zone of overpriced condominium’s and arrogant strangers right out the window where before was nothing but warehouses and our beloved Henry Wienhard’s Brewery (forever, the I-405/I-5 trip from here to Seattle was graced by four classic beer icons: Weinhard’s in Portland, Lucky in Vancouver, Olympia in Tumwater and Rainier in Seattle. In under 10 years, they were all gone)… It is too much.

All of these $200 faded jean wearing, latte sipping, lap dog carrying, fake tan wearing folks who feel like they are relishing the “Portland thing” when in fact they are relishing some other thing that they brought here and used to squash what was here already. It always makes me think of those silly “keep Portland weird” bumper stickers. Honey, Portland hasn’t been weird since 1990-92, when what was going on here was genuine. I don’t think natives even bother going outside anymore.

I need to spend more time futzing with this code stuff, or get a better sense of aesthetics. I can futz around with these themes to my hearts delight (which, yes, does delight my heart some) and never like how they look.

Oh well, maybe I need a picture? Maybe I should try and stay away from black (yeah, that’s likely)? Well, whatever. Just another annoyance…

Like how I can never, ever, never get the last.fm/scrobblers to actually register the songs I play on my iPod (which is where I play my songs). I’ve tried 3 different scrobblers to get those songs to last.fm, two of them worked… Once.

So I stick with the album quilt, but that never changes. Some of those albums I played one song weeks ago and the same darned album is still appearing.

I feel like saying, “how come no one can get this right (mainly the last.fm application for not supporting iPods) “, but then again, that wouldn’t be fair, since I haven’t done it either…

And I am thinking that black is a bad color for links…

In more exciting news, the folks at pesky’apostrophe have some entertaining quotes in honor of the passing of The Most Reverend Jerry Falwell. Fun reading!

Though I was already to go with another blogpost I decided that I didn’t like the blackness of the blog. I then saw that WordPress had been updated again… So I kicked out the old wordpress, installed 2.2 and now I am searching for some new style…

In the meantime, I will be trying themes and notions out, so don’t be shocked by altering states here…