A carnival of technology

As you know, I’m moving at the end of next month, so I thought that I ought to maybe start thinking about packing. I decided to kick things off with a box of CDs. APC, in theory, uses sturdy boxes to carry their big heavy things, so I filled up the box they used to send my UPS back with some CDs, mostly classical, since I figure those are the ones that I’ll least likely want to listen to in the car. Sure, there’s a certain joy to singing along with some opera, but I can get the same effect with a Queen album without the investment of so much attention or having to sing in a language I don’t know.

I figure that this box now represents a little less than half the CDs I own. So, that’s down, now I just have everything else to go. Time for a break!

Funny has a color all its own

Rated PG for comic violence and some mild sensuality.

Starring Robert Benigni and some people that I was probably supposed to recognize from the previous seven movies.

Viewed 2005-10-11 by dshea, mike, dcantrell, susi, and dane

The pain and sorrow of another man can evoke many emotions: compassion, sympathy, hilarity. When it’s funny, it’s slapstick, and even the French, masters of the sad-clown-flipping-a-pancake brand of inscrutable art, are able to see how this lowbrow humor can be high class (see The Straight Dope: Do the French really love Jerry Lewis?). However, slapstick is difficult to do, and, when done poorly, it’s painful to watch. One of the more concrete rules was perhaps best expressed by Krusty the Klown, “[it's] only funny when the sap’s got dignity.”

Son of the Pink Panther is the eighth movie in the Pink Panther series. The Pink Panther movies were funny because Peter Sellers had dignity as an utter failure, which is perhaps why Blake Edwards tried to piece another movie, The Trail of the Pink Panther, together from cut footage after Sellers’ death. The seventh movie, The Curse of the Pink Panther, though the plot still centers around finding a “missing” Inspector Clouseau, no longer contains Sellers (as far as I know), instead featuring a bumbling Ted Wass as the incompetent detective and Roger Moore as Peter Sellers. The Son of the Pink Panther, though perhaps not a sequel to this winner of a story in the strictest sense, is the next offering in the series. Robert Benigni takes the lead role as Sellers’ illegitimate son, but he lacks one very important feature: dignity.

It could be that Mr. Benigni is a very funny man—I’ve never seen him in anything else to compare—but in this movie, his character is worthless. He’s cast as a bumbling nobody, not even carrying the respect of being an incompetent inspector, and not revealed as Clouseau’s son until a good way through the film. Sure, he did stupid things and people got hurt in cartoonish ways, but it just wasn’t funny. It was only predictable and tedious.

The best part of this movie was the opening credits. It was difficult to find something worth watching after the animated panther and a scatting Bobby McFerrin left the screen.

Well, I went and found a place to live. To recap for those of you not aware, I’m moving out of Smyrna at the end of the next month. Mike has a job in Midtown with Gamecap now, and Smyrna isn’t exactly close to where I work, either, so we are parting ways, casting ourselves into the wild frontier of single bedroom apartments. Besides, I don’t particularly enjoy living in Smyrna or with other people, so it works out all around.

On Friday, I took one of my floating holidays (St. Wendelinus’ day) and went down to Promove. They gave me a gigantic stack of possible places to live, as is their wont, and, after poring over these profiles and driving around for a bit, I settled upon Calibre Springs, a complex tucked away to the east of Roswell Road, near the neck of Fulton (Fulton county is about 3 miles wide at my new latitude, instead of no miles wide), within the (future) city limits of Sandy Springs and inside the perimeter by at least fifty feet or so. The new apartment has all kinds of nice features, like a gas stove, a sun room, a tiny little balcony, and a price lower than what I would expect from a complex with a French “re” in their name. It’s also closer to work, but south of most of Sandy Springs’ crap, which has an odd way of coming to an abrubt halt at I-285. I think I’ll like it, and I’ll be booted out of Cumberland Glen and totally moved into Callibre Springs on November 30th.

You may ask, “How will this affect me?” Fiona, the computer that all this crap is hosted on, will be turned off during the move, and I don’t know when service will return. I’m going to try to get the Speakeasy no phoneline service before giving up and using Moshelink, so that will require some time for the various companies involved to investigate and activate. Expect up to a month of downtime beginning the last week of November. If burdell.org comes back up in that time, I’ll to redirect some web and email traffic that way. If anyone wants to donate web and email services that I can point gandi’s redicrection services at, now would be a good time to offer. I suspect that there’s no way I’m going to find anyone to host a gopher site, so don’t expect glog updates until everything returns.

Joey D’s Oak Room sucks. There seems to be a notable lack of literature on this topic, so it must be said: their food is no good and they’re highly overrated. The first strike against them is the lack of sweet tea. I am not quick to forgive this flaw in any sit-down restaurant south of Virginia, but it would have helped if the waitress was at least a little apologetic, aware of the shame in working at such an establishment, rather than seeming to think that not putting sugar into tea freaking before you chill it is the natural way of things.

Their food is bland. I got a corned beef sandwich—a meat not known for its exotic flavors, but there are certain simple things that can be done to create a wonderful experience. The elements of a corned beef sandwich are basically the bread, the meat and the mustard. Cheese can be included, but it’s optional. Make the cheese mandatory, replace the mustard with thousand-island and add some sauerkraut and you’ve made a Reuben. Easy as apple pie. The Joey D’s corned beef sandwich consisted of a rolled up pile of sliced corned-beef, some mediocre and possibly stale rye bread, and some mustard on the side. You may note two problems with this situation: I have to apply my own mustard, a mandatory ingredient, on an $8 sandwich, and the meat, being all rolled up in a ball, is not easily accessible. Other accounts I have heard from steak-eaters are that their steaks are just incredibly bland. The fries were ok.

While I’m attacking the restaurant, I might as well lambast the decor. I can’t remember what kind of kitsch they tried to make up as the story behind the restaurant, but it was something about an Italian immigrant from New Jersey sending his only brother to Louisiana to start a restaurant, or something like that. I think that there was a casino involved. I never did learn from my casual reading of the menu’s introduction what oak had to do with anything, but I did gather that Louisiana had something to do with something, which I then noted in the walls. Most of Joey D’s is decorated like a fancy restaurant with a lot of oak: an oak bar, oak chairs, oak tables covered in (paper?) tablecloths, and everything done in dark, neutral colors. The windows, on the other hand, are of the traditional quarter-pane variety, and they are covered in thick, slightly cracked pant of that beigish color that evokes images of old church houses and In the Heat of the Night. I suppose that it worked as long as attention wasn’t drawn to the windows, but once seen, it just didn’t look right with the rest of the restaurant. It looked like they were trying too hard, and people were falling for it.

Fed up yesterday with the obstacles between me and watching Giù la Testa on a television—I haven’t given up yet, but I need a break—I went out yesterday and bought a movie that I can actually watch: Yojimbo. I figure that I enjoy Leone’s westerns, and the first of them, Fistful of Dollars, was successfully sued for ripping off Yojimbo, so why not? As it turns out, samurai movies are exactly like spaghetti westerns, but with Japanese people. There was a dusty wind blowing across the set during the standoffs and everything. I wonder if anyone other than Leone realized this? Another thing different about Yojimbo besides being Japanese is, unlike my copies of Italian movies about the American West, Yojimbo is subtitled, so I had to look in the foreign film section instead of the more intuitive “Action.” No one complained that I wasn’t wearing a black turtleneck, so I guess I slipped one by them.

In other news, mail today has been weird. I got a postcard from the Nielsen TV company letting me know that they will be calling me in the next few days to ask me some questions about the television I watch. I suppose that if I watched or knew anything about what’s on TV or had a phone connected to my listed number, I could have had a say in what you see and think. Another arrival today was a magazine from APC, “Currents.” They probably put me on the mailing list after that the adventures with the terrible, horrible, no-good, very broken UPS earlier this year. It’s a 24-page magazine, but it strikes me as odd for several reasons. First, it’s the “Business Edition,” targeted at people with racks and data centers and very large things. These are not things that I own or control, and I wouldn’t think that replacing a broken 900VA UPS would trigger such an assumption. The other odd thing is that this obvious propaganda piece is really formatted like a magazine. There are full and half-page ads for APC products, a section with letters to the editor, and articles with topics ranging from how APC worked for some other company to figure out just how many 9’s you need at your datacenter (the chart puts me around the one 9 level). Why was this thing printed? Why was it sent to me?

Man, video processing in Linux sure is a half-assed mess.

I’m trying to convert a DVD from PAL to NTSC. I may have mentioned here before that I enjoy Sergio Leone’s movies, so I thought that I would try to collect all six. The three with Clint Eastwood were easy enough to find, and Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America were also readily available, though somewhat more pricey since they were recently given Special Edition reissues, but the fifth film in this progression, A Fistful of Dynamite, is a bit more difficult to track down. The reason for this is that, though there was a US special edition DVD release planned for this movie, Sony has been buying up MGM Home Entertainment, and it appears that this release was lost in the merger. Faced with this indefiniteness, I made a somewhat rash decision: I imported the DVD from the U.K. So I’m now faced with the problem of how to burn a new DVD that I can play on an American television set.

I’ve been documenting my progress at dcantrell’s new wiki, http://wiki.burdell.org/wiki/PAL_to_NTSC. Transcode seems to be the best choice for doing video stuff in Linux, but as I learn more and more about it, I become angrier and angrier. It would seem, unsurprisingly—but disappointingly—that transcode, like other video tools for Linux, is designed to take a DVD down to a 0-day videoz file; the other filters and options are provided primarily for a veneer of legitimacy. My current hare-brained plan for creating this NTSC DVD is to try to slow the audio and video from its current 25fps to 23.976fps and then perform a 3:2 pulldown, since this is effectively what would have been done for an NTSC release of the DVD, but so far audio has presented the biggest obstacle. Transcode basically can’t do anything with sound. It can’t slow it down, since it has no useful audio filters, and it can’t even decode it to a useful format, since it turns out that the internal PCM format doesn’t support more than two channels. I suppose at this point that I could just live with that—even though I do plan to eventually get a decent sound system with more than two speakers, the original film was recorded in 1972, so at least 3 of those 5.1 channels are made up—but it’s become a matter of principal. I have six channels of audio coming in, and I want six channels of audio going out. If I have to write my own frontend for decoding AC3 audio, so be it. I’m not going to let this stupid do-nothing program win.

If they think they can stop him, they’re dead wrong.

Rated R for violence and language

Starring Steven Seagal and Phillip Morris

Viewed 2005-09-20 by dcantrell, susi, dane, dshea, and mike

The direct-to-video action genre can be a very special place: unbound by the financial constraints of heavy marketing and the need to create a product with mass appeal, the writers and directors are left to their own devices, free to compose a product full of subtlety and creative energy that will be passed without expensive detour into the arms of appreciative fans. Direct to video is a place for art. Steven Seagal’s acting is not art.

Steven Seagal is no stranger to the world of direct-to-video potboilers—The Foreigner was the first of three that he made in 2003 alone—but he brings no big-budget versatility to the small screen. He has a single style, and we all saw that in Under Siege. To make matters worse, director Michael Oblowitz carries the delusion that he is making something cinematically beautiful. The laundry list of effects, inappropriate slow-motion scenes, fast flipping between close-up shots of tense moments, and overuse of the MidgetCam serve only to create tedium, not beauty. The highly stylized settings, though nice to watch, barely even evoke a sense of their location. Nearly every locale appears simply European, and the inconsistently applied captions only add to the confusion. Are they in Poland again? Are they back in France? I don’t know, but everyone’s still smoking, so it must be Europe.

The ubiquitous smoking was annoying, too. I normally don’t mind smoking in movies. Smoking is bad and will kill you, but Clint Eastwood would have been incomplete without his thin cigars, and Bogey rolled his own right there in the middle of The Maltese Falcon, so whatever; light ‘em if you got ‘em. But when the smoking is stretched to comical extremes in an ostensibly serious movie, then perhaps there’s a problem. How are you supposed to sneak up on someone against the backdrop of Marlboro country? How can someone with a smoker’s lung capacity take a bullet and then run a mile? Are Luckies really a first-aid item?

The violence in the film was another annoyance. Action movies are supposed to be violent, sure, but the violence isn’t always supposed to be wanton. Perhaps there’s some Tarantino-esque “violence is everywhere, man” message being made, but I don’t like Tarantino, either. The only thing worse than a bad director is a knockoff of a bad director.

This movie was exhausting. What could have been a gory ballad of unattainable goals and a documentation of the harrowing world of the courier industry too quickly—and yet so slowly—devolved into a one-dimensional revenge flick. The item being delivered by Seagal, the foreigner, was revealed, the secret relationships were bared before the characters nearly as soon as the audience, and the secondary players were eliminated, leaving only Seagal and Sir Smokesalot among the characters who matter. If you want to see Seagal, watch Under Siege again.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Nick Cave lately. Mr. Cave is an Australian musician often compared to Tom Waits for the sake of an American baseline and credited by at least one person I can remember (an Australian) with playing a pivotal role in kicking off the goth rock movement through his earlier band, The Birthday Party. His style, though often dark, is certainly not goth, and the emotional qualities of his songs seem to give them an eloquence that complements the harshest depths of human emotion. I wouldn’t call his music polarizing, since such a generalization seems to cheapen the range of possible tastes, but, of those who are familiar with his works, I only recall one person saying that he hated it, a statement which was based mostly upon a quote from a 1994 Rolling Stone interview [1], “[high school kids] should stop reading Bukowski, and they should stop listening to people who tell them to read Bukowski.”

One peculiarity I’ve noticed about the music of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds is the occasional song that seems to repeat forever. The earliest of these I can recall is Tender Prey’s “Mercy Seat,” a more gothic song reminiscent of bands like Christian Death, and a song which ends with about five minutes of variations on the chorus. It works for a while, building a sense of the relentless conflict of the protagonist, but it gets old after a while. The lyrics, written out in full, occupy a full page of the ten-page booklet for this ten-track album, and four and a half of those pages are taken by photographs. Another song which seems to go on for a while is “Hiding All Away,” from Abattoir Blues, half of the most recent double album release, but it seems to work well. It’s a six and a half minute repetition of the same theme, but it builds well. It never becomes tiresome, and it has a great finale. Overall, Abattoir Blues is becoming my favorite Nick Cave album, taking the spot formerly held by the angry, cynical Let Love In. “Hiding All Away” works kind of the same way as 12-bar blues in that, though it’s the same thing over and over again, there are things happening on top of it that keep the music interesting.

I tend to split the discography of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds into three segments: the Birthday Party leftovers (From Her to Eternity through Tender Prey), the post-heroin days (The Good Son through Murder Ballads), and the new stuff (The Boatman’s Call onwards). I’ll admit that, though I find the new stuff strangely intriguing, I’ve had a hard time wrapping my head around it. The Boatman’s Call, a very subdued, stripped-down album, eluded me for the longest time, though I think I’ve recently started to really understand it. I had the opportunity to listen to it while really sad (as opposed to the goth kind of sad), and it all kind of came together. The song “People Ain’t No Good” was featured in the soundtrack of Shrek 2, so it’s possible that I’m the last person who made this breakthrough. I’ve come to really appreciate the quiet pondering of The Boatman’s Call, and the fragility and hidden violence of No More Shall We Part, but my confusion at Nocturama has instead given way to just plain not liking it. An especially annoying song on this album is the last one, “Babe, I’m On Fire.” Like the later “Hiding All Away” it’s a repetition on a theme, but the tone and structure never changes, and it lasts nearly fifteen minutes. I mean, shit damn. It’s good for about three of those minutes. And this is after he quit heroin! I just don’t get it.

Links:
[1] Interview from Rolling Stone