I Am Legend, Round 2

After my second viewing of I Am Legend, three things are certain to me:

1. I Am Legend is a legitimately terrifying movie. I was scared the first time I saw it, but chalked it up to the fact that I avoid creepy movies because I scare easily and feel like an idiot when I look over my shoulder in the dark later at night. But after watching it with my sister (a scary movie connoisseur of sorts) and seeing her reaction, I am convinced.

2. Will Smith rules. I knew this before seeing Legend again, but a victory lap is always nice.

3. I Am Legend is much better the second time around. I went into the theatre knowing I'd probably like it better since the edge would be taken off of the scare factor. This was true, although I still found myself wanting to look away from the screen at certain scenes. Having that first viewing under my belt made the second go considerably less stressful, and that alone would have made it a more enjoyable watch for me. But I also had the pleasant experience of noticing little nuggets in the film that had escaped me.

• Fred the Mannequin - When I first saw Fred, coupled with the look on Will Smith's face, I though that the "Darkseekers" had ventured outside during the day by donning clothing. I was prepared to be furious at such a cheeseball bit of writing that allowed the infected to become more dangerous to Smith, but fortunately that wasn't the case. The second time I saw this scene I caught what had given me my initial impression. Fred's head moves to look in Smith's direction when he stops the car. And after that, every time the camera cuts away and returns to Fred, he's in a slightly different position.

• Smith's "love interest" in the video store is in the porno section. And he put her there.

• Most folks probably caught this the first time around, but I didn't; when Smith wakes up from his suicidal night on the town and walks into his kitchen, Ana and Isaac(?) appear as his wife and daughter.

Also, wasn't it amazing to see Smith frantically trying to convince the infected of their illness and his ability to fix them while they screamed and flung themselves against the glass to tear him apart?

Intimidating for Jesus

This is incredible.

What Ho, Mr. McConnell

A splendid day of photography and visiting at the McConnell Mansion can be viewed here.

Engrish Slays Me

Need help staying up late studying for those finals, suckers? Try Marxism!

Compound Interest

"Though Christian charity sounds a very cold thing to people whose heads are full of sentimentality, and though it is quite distinct from affection, yet it leads to affection. The difference between a Christian and a worldly man is not that the worldly man has only affections or 'likings' and the Christian has only 'charity'. The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he 'likes' them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on - including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.

This same spiritual law works terribly in the opposite direction. The Germans, perhaps, at first ill-treated the Jews because they hated them: afterwards they hated them much more because they had ill-treated them. The more cruel you are, the more you will hate; and the more you hate, the more cruel you will become - and so on in a vicious circle for ever.

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible."

~Clive, Mere Christianity

New Guy Ritchie Flick

Two nights ago I watched Revolver, Guy Ritchie's latest movie that came out in October 2005 over in jolly old England. I was actually lucky enough to be there when it did and caught it on the big screen in Oxford. Everywhere around London and Oxford were posters claiming it to be Guy Ritchie's "return to form," the form being Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, and not the travesty that apparently was Swept Away.

Revolver definitely has some of the Ritchie stylization, but more so visually than in the dialogue. Jason Statham stars (with hair!) and gives a great show as he always does with Ritchie at the helm. There's a bit of metanarrative writing that can feel a little tired though, along with a FightClubish dilemma that may turn some folks off.

However, those issues aside, the movie is more than worth watching for Ray Liotta's performance alone. I just saw on the apple trailers site that it's being released in the US today, but nowhere around Moscow/Pullman yet. And yes, that's Andre 3000. Check out the trailer.

Victoire!

After many hours spent tinkering, the 4Runner once again glides down the road with power steering. Yosh.

DIY (for amusement only) or Jack of No Trades

In a flurry of hobby activities this past month I’ve had light shine on an aspect of my character. A breakdown of what I’ve been up to with my boatloads of free time:

The Toyota: Always a project to work on, sometimes crucial, sometimes cosmetic, the 4Runner’s 20 some years have been surprisingly kind with no major problems to date. The current task is fixing the power steering system, which blew a pressure line minutes before driving down to Colorado in May. I recently had a new one made for my quirky setup of a 1988 Supra engine fitted into the 86 4Runner body, and plugged it in. While attempting to loosen the pump in order to slide the belt back onto the pulley, I inadvertently removed part of the casing of the pump, exposing an O-ring fitted to a gasket which proceeded to dump ATF fluid everywhere, including my brake which now has a wonderfully high pitched shriek.

After replacing my mistake, I got everything else back together only to find no power steering. Many automotive forums and email conversations later, still no luck. Not only no power steering, but a slight leak from my early endeavor with the pump that I thought I’d pinch off by tightening what I thought was a loose bolt. The bolt stripped the inside of the bolt hole so I found myself searching for a new pump. Found one on eBay for $45 (normally $115), and got it Saturday. This afternoon during a break in the rain I pulled out the old pump and discovered a missing air control valve on the new pump. The valve is fused to a bolt that threads into the pump and runs one line to the engine and another to the air intake. I managed to take the good valve off of the old pump, but was unsuccessful in removing the broken one from the new. Then I wondered if that valve is supposed to come off at all. Then the rain started up again.

It sounds like I know a lot about cars, right? I mean after all, I’m talking about valves and pumps like I know what’s what. It’s true that I’ve learned a ton about cars by taking on all these projects by myself or with a knowledgeable friend’s help. But when the day is done, I’m still left with a car that doesn’t have power steering.

The Sears-Kenmore: My Mom was good enough to let me take her old Sears-Kenmore sewing machine back to Idaho with me after a swell time home for Thanksgiving. We spent an evening working out the kinks and she showed me step by step how to thread the thing, load a bobbin, and perform minor miracles with needle and string. I even took pictures of the process to help me get started back here.

Well this morning I decided to have a go at patching up my old Carhartts, which are fashionably worn through at the thighs, but pow’rful cold lately. And sometimes you just don’t want to wear the overalls, you know? So I brought up my tutorial pics, threaded that mother, loaded the bobbin, and ran a practice stitch through some scrap cloth. Perfect. To the task of wrestling burly duck cotton under the pressure foot without snagging the needle. Things weren’t going so smoothly so I removed the pressure foot and needle, positioned the pants and patch in place, and replaced them. Now there’s some crazy voodoo that happens on sewing machines where the thread from the top travels via needle to the underworld of the machine and returns with a loop of bobbin thread. I don’t get it, but it has to happen to get a decent stitch. Once the foot and needle were back home, the bobbin loop wasn’t jivin’ for an infuriating 45 minutes. I finally removed all thread and replaced everything, had it working for about 3 minutes before breaking the needle. Then to the truck.

I wouldn’t say that I’ve had a revelation, but these failures on both extremes of Manliness and Domesticness have caused me to really look at my rag-tag assembly of “skills” and how I spread myself over too many interests and hope to be master of all of them. I want to write well, take great pictures, be a strong bike rider, fix cars, know about music, play music, write music, make clothes, hike, and read everything. It’s not happening.

Hi-Def Holidays

I've been reading up on and experimenting a bit with high dynamic range photography lately, and also thinking of creating some Christmas cards this year. So it's only natural that the two would come together eventually. This is just some preliminary experimenting with a tonemapped HDR image of some Christmasy looking foliage that I collected and photographed in a little makeshift studio. I'm still trying to think of a nice arrangement for both the leaves/berries, and a general layout of the card, so if you have any suggestions....

You Like Laugh?

New Read

I'm trying to alternate my reading between fiction and non right now. Having just finished Steinbeck's The Pearl I'm now on my way into C.S. Lewis's Studies in Words. I just got through his 24-page introduction which, in classic Lewis form, laid out quite clearly where he was and wasn't gonna go (girl). Not surprisingly, he's isn't concerned with the detailed etymologies of every word or comparing phonetics in order to make connections. His focus is, like most of his writing, on the practical; how language and words affect and are used and misused by Joe Simpson down the street (or Neville Galvin in Lewis's case).

I'm especially interested in if/how he treats the tendency we have to interpret phrases like "I don't like butter" as "I have a thing against butter." He touches briefly on the taking of disinterested as "bored" in the introduction, so I'm hoping for some mo.

I'll leave you with this little bit:

Of course, any man is entitled to say he prefers the poems he makes for himself out of his mistranslations to the poems the writers intended. I have no quarrel with him. He need have none with me. Each to his taste.

One More From Percy

This passage reminded me of Salinger, not because the writers are similar, but in Percy's description I saw any of Salinger's neurotic, affected characters:


The romantic sits across the aisle, slumped gracefully, one foot propped on the metal ledge. He is reading The Charterhouse of Parma. His face is extraordinarily well-modeled and handsome but his head is too small and, arising as it does from the great collar of his car coat, it makes him look a bit dandy and dudish. Two things I am curious about. How does he sit? Immediately graceful and not aware of it or mediately graceful and aware of it? How does he read The Charterhouse of Parma? Immediately as a man who is inthe world and who has an appetite for the book as he might have an appetite for peaches, or mediately as one who finds himself under the necessity of sticking himself into the world in a certain fashion, of slumping in a acceptable slump, of reading an acceptable book on an acceptable bus? Is he a romantic?
He is a romantic. His posture is the first clue: it is too good to be true, this distillation of all graceful slumps. To clinch matters, he catches sight of me and my book and goes into a spasm of recognition and shyness. To put him out of his misery, I go over and ask him how he likes his book. For a tenth of a second he eyes me to make sure I am not a homosexual; but he has already seen Kate with me and sees her now, lying asleep and marvelously high in the hip. (I have observed that it is no longer possible for one young man to speak unwarily to another not known to him, except in certain sections of the South and West, and certainly not with a book in his hand.) As for me, I have already identified him through his shyness. It is pure heterosexual shyness. He is no homosexual, but merely a romantic.

-And this is where it gets really good-

Now he closes his book and stares hard at it as if he would, by dint of staring alone, tear from it its soul in a word. "It's - very good," he says at last and blushes. The poor fellow. He has just begun to suffer from it, this miserable trick the romantic plays upon himself: of setting just beyond his reach the very thing he prizes. For he prizes just such a meeting, the chance meeting with a chance friend on a chance bus, a friend he can talk to, unburden himself of some of his terrible longings. Now having encountered such a one, me, the rare bus friend, of course he strikes himself dumb. It is a case for direct questioning.
He is a senior at a small college in northern Wisconsin where his father is bursar. His family is extremely proud of the educational progress of their children. Three sisters have assorted PhDs and MAs, piling up degrees on into the middle of life (he speaks in a rapid rehearsed way, a way he deems appropriate for our rare encounter, and when he is forced to use an ordinary word like "bus" - having no other way of conferring upon it a vintage flavor, he says it in quotes and with a wry expression). Upon completion of his second trimester and having enough credits to graduate, he has lit out for New Orleans to load bananas for a while and perhaps join the merchant marine. Smiling tensely, he strains forward and strikes himself dumb. For a while, he says. He means that he hopes to find himself a girl, the rarest of rare pieces, and live the life of Rudolfo on the balcony, sitting around on the floor and experiencing soul-communions. I have my doubts. In the first place, he will defeat himself, jump ten miles ahead of himself, scare the wits out of some girl with his great choking silences, want her so desperately that by his own peculiar logic he can't have her; or having her, jump another ten miles beyond both of them and end by fleeing to the islands where, propped at the rail of his ship in some rancid port, he will ponder his own loneliness.
In fact, there is nothing more to say to him. The best one can do is deflate the pressure a bit, the terrible romantic pressure, and leave him alone. He is a moviegoer, though of course he does not go to movies.

The Raddest Self-Portrait I'll Ever Take

Walker Percy

Over the summer I read The Moviegoer by Walker Percy in brief installments on trail. Whenever I had heard about Percy from friends it was always in relation to his rejection of Protestantism in favor of Catholicism, similar to T.S. Eliot. While this decision is still interesting to me since the trend is certainly in the other direction, I didn't catch a whole lot of that choice in his novel. It was actually more enjoyable to read as a collection of well-worded statements than as a cohesive plot. Here's one of my favs:

My first idea was the building itself. It looks like a miniature bank with its Corinthian pilasters, portico and iron scrolls over the windows. The firm's name, Cutrer, Klostermann & Lejier is lettered in Gothic and below in smaller letters, the names of the Boston mutual funds we represent. It looks far more conservative that the modern banks in Gentilly. It announces to the world: modern methods are no doubt excellent but here is good old fashioned stability, but stability with imagination. A little bit of old New England with a Creole flavor. The Parthenon facade cost twelve thousand dollars but commissions have doubled. The young man you see inside is clearly the soul of integrity; he asks no more than to be allowed to plan you future. This is true. This is all I ask.

And another:

Everyone on This I Believe believes in the uniqueness and the dignity of the individual. I have noticed, however, that the believers are far from unique themselves, and are in fact alike as peas in a pod.

Someone Take This to Your Next UI Class

Because it's toooooooo good.

Green Day

I came across this blurb quoting Billie Joe commenting on Briney Spears's VMA appearance:

Green Day star Billie Joe Armstrong has blasted MTV bosses for letting "manufactured child" Britney Spears open the Video Music Awards.

The punk star admits watching the troubled singer stumble through a semi-live performance of new hit Gimme More at the September ceremony was like witnessing "a public execution".

He tells Rolling Stone magazine, "People want blood. They want to see other people thrown to the lions.

"How could the people at MTV, the people around her, not know this girl was f**ked up? People came in expecting a train wreck, and they got more than they bargained for.

"She is a manufactured child. She has come up through this Disney perspective, thinking that all life is about is to be the most ridiculous star you could be.

"But it's also about what we look at as entertainment - watching somebody go through that."