I'm Climbing Up Those Walls Again

Last night Dad and I watched Nick of Time a great thriller (I've seen it before) starring Johnny Depp. In it, Christopher Walken kidnaps his daughter in order to get him to kill a woman. Tension follows.

Afterwards we watched L'Avventura an Italian movie filmed in 1961. It follows a group of rich men and women who go on a cruise and visit a small, rocky island. One of the women mysteriously disappears in the middle of the day, and her former lover and friend end up falling in love. There isn't much in the way of plot development in the movie, but director Michelangelo Antonioni manages to keep things interesting with his beautiful black and white cinematography.



The night before we watched Nói albinói (or, in English, Nói the albino), a popular movie that came out of Iceland last year. Nói is a smart kid, but prefers not to get involved in school more than he has to. He lives in a pretty pathetic little fishing village out in the middle of nowhere. In fact, most of the movie is cast in that pale blue light you see during a snowy winter. The movie follows Nói through this slow paced, but interesting dark comedy. No one takes Nói seriously. Once, he tries to rob the local bank, but the owner just exclaims what a silly boy he his and takes the gun away from him. Will Nói ever leave this hell hole?

Yesterday I started reading The Island of Dr. Moreau, by H.G. Wells which is a damn fine example of how good writing used to be. They don't make classics like this anymore. It's a short book, so I'd recommend it for summer reading.

On Sunday the library is closed, but hopefully on Monday morning before I leave for London, I'll post some of the pictures I've been taking this summer. Ta-ta.

I'll probably take a little bit of flack for this one, but I really don't care that much Ronny Reagan died. Chances are, if you are of the same age as me, you shouldn't either.

Why?

Well, most of us really don't remember anything about him. He was out of office by the time we were learning to write cursive. We had no real perception of the end of the Cold War, or what a "Teflon president" was.

He wasn't really a terrific president, but as his nickname implies, his scandals never really stuck to hi B-movie actor smile. I'm sure he was nice enough in person, but all he managed to do in his 8 years was run up a huge debt. The only reason he got props for ending the Cold War is because the USSR was already on its last leg when he was in office, and so he opened talks with it at the last moment possible.

We always talk about what a well-liked president he was. Did you know that Clinton had a higher average approval rating than Reagan did? Clinton also had a higher average approval rating in the last 2 years of his presidency.

Ronald Reagan died a long time ago, when Alzheimer’s began to set in, and he became nothing (I know what it does to people, my grandfather went down with it). Even before then, he did nothing to contribute to society after his presidency, like Carter and occasionally Clinton do. So we really haven't lost anything in this past week, except the ability to think, "Gee, I wonder how Ronnie is doing right now." We always talk about how strong Nancy Reagan is, but I'll give more props to my grandmother any day, who didn't have the wealth and wonder drugs that Nancy did when dealing with her husband.

I'm talking about this because even the British press won't shut up about him, which makes me wonder what sort of hell all of you are going through, not able to receive any real news.

So stop looking back at what you don't remember, and start looking at what's going on right now. The world of 2004 seriously demands you attention, not some old dead fart that you'll forget in a year’s time.

I'm back in Beverley, after a successful mission in Oxford. I discovered some new music while I was there, so I'll talk about 3 songs I'm really into at the moment, all of them with female lead singers.

The first is Maps by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a NYC based band, and is sung by the lead singer, Karen O. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs sind kind of like what Portishead would have sounded like if they had gone post-punk/The Strokes/insane instead of trip-hop. Karen O usually spends most of a song going completely nuts, which is pretty awesome. Maps is different though. It's slow and thoughtful, and Karen spends most of the song repeating the same chorus "Wait... they don't love you like I love you.." She says it slowly and quietly at first, like she's saying it to the back of someone walking away, and then eventually she gets louder by the end, but it's still like her words are falling on deaf ears.




The second song is the most fucking punk/grunge song I've heard this year. The song is The Hunger by The Distillers. Brody Dalle is the harcore Australian alter ego to Karen O. This is a woman that can sing bass and would probably ow3n you in a fight, so don't run into her in an alley. The Hunger smacks a little of Nirvana, but Kurt could never pull off a scream like Brody could.




Death In Vegas doesn't really have a female frontman, but tends to do cds that take in talent from every direction, much like Massive Attack. Dirge is nothing complicated, but Richard Fearless takes the song from a dreamy female vocal soundscape into a wonderful trip-hop climax.

Anyway, that's what I'm listening to right now. What are you listening to?

Well, I talked to a number of professors yesterday, and for the most part I learned what I needed to learn. The worst is when I showed up at the office of Professor Lall, who is in charge of the whole program, and is obviously the superstar of the development department. He wasn't there when he was supposed to, and his room was full of grad students and friends. When he showed up he obviously had no idea who I was, so I asked a few quick questions about the program, then talked to him briefly about sci-fi(he had Dune books on his shelf) and then got the hell out of there.

The trip has been worth it though. I've been staying with some friends of the family, the Knowles, who have three other kids living in the house at the moment.

BTW, finally I have another Caustic Cindex download site up, although it isn't nearly as cool as mp3.com, here it is.

I go back to Berveley tomorrow.


Adios