2009 Review: Movies

Movies? Who has time to go the movies? Not parents of small children--unless they're going to see something animated.

Which we did. I resubmit for your consideration my endorsement of Up as a truly fine movie, and offer also a more reserved appraisal of The Princess and the Frog: it did not suck. Which, you know, is a step in the right direction for Disney.

This was also a pretty blah year for DVDs. My favorites from this year: Kung Fu Panda and Breach. I've had Sugar sitting here for several weeks, and hope to get to it before the end of the year. I still want to see Invictus and Sherlock Holmes, though the latter will likely be a massacre, and Up in the Air looks great but will definitely have to wait for Netflix. Oh, and Avatar. Yes.

Movies are, as ever, more of the same. I am resigned to the idea that I'm more likely to find gems among long-ago released movies I've never heard of than any new release I see advertised on TV. I do enjoy Robert Wilonsky's The Ultimate Trailer Show, which put me onto both Up in the Air and Sugar long before I'd ever heard anything else about them.

2009 Review: Other Reading

It was another year of limited short-fiction reading, but there were several gems worthy of commendation to you. Louise Erdrich's "Gleason" was good, but the plot is a bit too involved to adequately explain in the amount of time I'd devoting to this. I have since discovered that "Gleason" was featured on PRI's Selected Shorts, so you can download Robert Sean Leonard reading the story to your iPod. The only full volume of short-fiction I finished this year was Single Scene Short Stories, from which John Updike's "A&P," John Barth's "Ad Infinitum" and Richard Bausch's "The Voices in the Other Room" were remarkable.

On the other hand, I still don't get Amy Hempel.

I read 117 poems this year, all of them by Billy Collins. His collection Ballistics was arch, self-aware, observant and irreverent by turns. Highly recommend to anyone who loves language.

2009 Review: Books

So it really doesn't look like I'm going to get much more reading in this year (though I might sneak in a Janet Evanovich just for some brain candy). In which case, it's time to talk about what I read.

My most fortunate 'discovery' this year was Barry Maitland. I've written about him a couple of times, but it bears saying again that if you enjoy mysteries, procedurals or Scotland Yard-type offerings, these sit squarely in that particular Venn diagram's overlap. The very best of the ones I've read so far is No Trace, but if you want to read them in order start with The Marx Sisters. The get progressively better: the fourth is better than the third, which was better than the second.

Several of my favorites this year do not require my recommendation. Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars is epic in all ways it is possible to be epic: scope, scale, ideas, verbiage. John LeCarre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is actually better than his breakout novel, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (also read this year).

Finally for fiction, Richard Aleas' Songs of Innocence was a brooding novel that crushed the reader at its ending. Read Little Girl Lost first and then gird your loins for the woe of its sequel here.

The most interesting non-fiction experience of the year was reading David Goldblatt's The Ball Is Round and Jonathan Wilson's Inverting the Pyramid in succession. Goldblatt gives a nearly encyclopedic history of soccer, viewed through the prism of the game's acceptance and development in all its forms throughout the world. Wilson gives the same historic view, but looks at this history as an evolution of the playing tactics employed, vs. Goldblatt's social/political/cultural examination. Neither of these is easy reading, Goldblatt for his length nor Wilson for his technicality. But highly recommended to the enthusiastic-to-obsessive fan.

I read Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training by Mark Rippetoe and Lon Kilgore twice this year, and am currently on reading No. 3. I'll have more to say about strength training and exercise later, but as for reading, this highly technical tome is tempered with dry wit and clearly rendered instructions and diagrams to help the novice get under the bar and improve strength without killing himself. I think every public library could dump most any book that purports to introduce strength training (and I can say this because I've read most of them) and just get this.

Alas, I did not make it through all my owned-&-unread books this year. I read 25, which brings my total (inflated as the year progressed with new acquisitions) down to 83. I purged a few, and come January 1 I will do so again. At this point I'm not sure I'll ever make it through the last few volumes of YBF&H, and much as I would like to know how it all turns out I am having a terrible problem getting into The Gathering Storm. I may simply read the shortest ones of these owned-&-unread tormentors first from now on, just to winnow the list faster.

Things we said last summer

From Football365, regarding James Milner:

Now the fascination is whether his switch to the centre of midfield will be the making of Villa's season.

This what I said Newcastle should have done with him. He doesn't move fast enough on the wing, but an entire succession of Newcastle managers continued to stick him out there where he would go absent for long stretches. Damn damn damn damn. If I can see this TWO YEARS AGO, I have two questions: what sort of debilitating neurological disorder is visited upon Newcastle management in seeming perpetuity, and why in the world did it take Martin O'Neill so long to figure it out?

Catching up

The Gathering Storm moves so slowly that I'm thinking that the plot is being told backwards. Despite my best efforts, I found myself helplessly stuffing mysteries into Reed's library bag the other day. 'Oh, those? Those are his. No, I'm reading The Gathering Storm.' If I force myself to read a chapter a day I could be done by the end of the year. I might also have lost the will to live.

An interesting addition to all of the Getting Things Done stuff I usually do: a pomodoro. That is, a method of getting your stuff done by working in inviolable 25-minute blocks, marked out for you with a timer. It is called pomodoro because this method's purveyor originally used a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato (pomodoro in Italian). I like using it to get me at a single task for a decent period of time. I still use GTD for all of my organization and planning, but the pomodoro is good boots-on-the-ground stuff.

Put your kids in gymnastics. There are a ton of reasons, like physical fitness and fun and all that, but the best reason is that their initial gymnastics classes will completely exhaust them.

I'm not going to get through all of my owned-&-unread books this year as I had hoped. I'll get through a decent number, but it's about time to thin the herd. Which means only that there will be more room for new books. Shelves are no place for office supplies, no matter what Lera says.

Playing: Emilie-Claire Barlow, "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?" Yes. Christmas music. I've been listening to Reed play his Christmas music on his violin for weeks now.

Two-rant Tuesday, 11/3/2009

Election Day Edition!

Remember if you are voting today that professional politicians are good at one and ONLY one thing: getting re-elected. They are not interested in the public welfare, the greater good or long-term results except insomuch as they can get the professional politician re-elected. That's not the only criteria on which to base your voting--for Virginia governor, we get to choose between the slick, focused professional politician and the earnest, poorly campaigning professional politician--but it is one that is all too often ignored.

I don't know that I should have expected otherwise: The Gathering Storm is actually larger than any of the other Wheel of Time hardcovers. And it's just the first third of the ostensible last volume. Haven't read any of it yet. I'm working hard this week, so it will have to wait. Still. There are doorstops, and then there are millstones.

Playing: Brahms, Clarinet Trio, op. 114; Jozsef Balogh, Jeno Jando and Csaba Onczay. This is Naxos recording that includes the Clarinet Quintet, too. One could wish that Messr. Balogh's intonation was a bit better at times, but he's probably got some vile German clarinet with contortionist fingerings or something. Otherwise superb, especially for the bargain-basement Naxos price.

Can't you just wait for Netflix?

No. Because I am a sucker for sports movies.

I get excited at the end of Hoosiers every time. I know they're going to win. But every time it's like the first time when my dad and I went to see it in the theater in 1987 and at the end everybody in the audience jumped up and down when Jimmy Chitwood hit the shot that won the game.

I have most of Bull Durham memorized. Back in the day I would put Eight Men Out on and watch it in a continuous loop. I've watched the marginal (Glory Road, Coach Carter), the sentimental but strong (Remember the Titans, The Sandlot, Miracle), the amusing (The Replacements, Major League), the hysterically awful (Any Given Sunday) and the patently pathetic (The Mighty Ducks). I've even sat through Rudy an embarrassing number of times.

So, no, I cannot wait for Invictus to come out on DVD. First of all, rugby on a 40-foot screen! Second, Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela. Look, I went to see Bruce Almighty largely because Morgan Freeman was God. Third, they are obviously taking this seriously: have you seen Matt Damon in the previews? He's huge. He actually looks like he could play rugby and not be mutilated. Now that could be one of those forced-perspective things like they used in The Lord of the Rings to make Ian McKellan look like he was two-and-a-half times as big as Elijah Wood. (Wait, he is that much bigger than Elijah Wood. Never mind.) But I don't think so.