Month: January 2004

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Buffalo: Land of the Mellow

A recent ranking, by “stress levels”, of the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the United States has Buffalo near the bottom, at #86. And right ahead of Buffalo in “goin’ with the groove” is Syracuse, at #87. So, there’s some statistical information for anyone who has wondered at the easy-going nature of this particular blog. No doubt if I lived in, say, Detroit (#9), Miami (#2), or Tacoma (#1), I’d be foaming-at-the-mouth like Kim Du Toit when he’s run out of ammo while watching An Affair to Remember.

I suppose, though, that whoever did this study didn’t collect their “Buffalo data” on a Sunday during the NFL season. I’m also surprised that the Washington, DC area placed so low, at #83. That doesn’t strike me as a particularly “laid-back” kind of place.

In other Buffalo-related news, efforts are apparently continuing to bring a Bass Pro store to the now-vacant Memorial Auditorium downtown. The Bass Pro people are now talking about building a “Great Lakes museum” that would be privately run in connection with the store. This sounds interesting to me, although I’d like to know some more specifics of what they have in mind. The Great Lakes region has a lot of fascinating history, and Buffalo would, of course, be the perfect place for a museum chronicling it all.

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The Next Best Thing to a Link Found….

….is a link stolen from somewhere else, of course. From I Love Everything, a couple of good ones:

:: The Movie Insult Generator.

:: Ten Things We’ll Know in 2004 (and ten we won’t)

:: The Alphabet Synthesis Machine (for if you want your very own alphabet — apparently this doohickey takes a “seed glyph” that you design yourself, then uses that as the basis for the alphabet; when you’re done you get to download your alphabet as a TrueType font.)

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On Books, Book People, and stuff like that.

Michael of the Blowhardic Duo wrote a nifty post that contrasts “book people” with “movie people”. It’s quite a post; by all means, read the whole thing. I’m not sure that his overall distinction holds — I’ve known devotees of nearly every art who insist on segregating “art” from “trash”, and I’ve known many who don’t. But generally speaking, I am of like mind: I tend to find people who pontificate on what’s art and what’s trash interesting people with whom to consult on specific matters, but in general, they’re simply not much fun to talk to. (Which is not to even bring up my increasing suspicion that not only is the line between “art” and “trash” a moving target, but that line might not exist at all.)

Even better than all the discussion in the main body of the post (which is a really good post — did I mention that?) is the list of “book confessions” Michael makes toward the end. Here are some of mine. I’m not sure if these are “guilty confessions” or not — I’ve never felt much guilt about my reading habits, except for my constant feeling that I’m still a handful of books away from being able to consider myself “well-read”.

:: I, too, always have a number of books going at any one time, even above what I list in my “current reading” section of the sidebar. And if I find something short and fascinating, I’m likely to completely stop reading the others while I toss the “fascinating” book off in a white-heat of reading.

:: I read in spurts. I’ll go through weeks when I read heavily, and then I’ll slack off. I might read two novels in a week, and then take two weeks to read a single novel.

:: I have joined book clubs in the past, and will likely do so again. When I’ve been in book clubs, I’ve ended up with all manner of books that I never even had any intention of buying, much less reading. Some of these I’ve read; some I put up on Ebay.

:: I’ve always enjoyed libraries, but only in the last couple of years have I realized how essential and wonderful a resource they are. The ability to simply get a book out of the library has greatly shaped my book-buying tendencies; I find myself putting a lot more thought into what I buy than “Hey, I want to read that.”

:: I love big picture books, pretty much on any subject, and I almost always have one or two I’ve checked out of the library on hand.

:: I like to borrow books from the library that are pretty old and likely haven’t been read in many years, sometimes not even to read them myself, but in the hope that by checking it out I delay that book’s inevitable removal from the collection due to lack of use.

:: I don’t have any particular view on how long novels should be. Some books should be 900 pages; others should only be 150 pages. Roger Ebert might as well have been referring to books when he wrote: “A good movie is never too long, but a bad movie is never short enough.”

:: I love to read cookbooks, and the less commentary about the food a cookbook provides, the less likely I am to cook out of it. And my favorite cookbooks, for actual cooking, tend to be Emeril Lagasse’s and Jeff Smith’s (the Frugal Gourmet).

:: I’ve always had a fascination with “kookery”: UFOs, conspiracy theories, fringe science, theories of lost technological civilizations on earth, et cetera. My interest in this stuff predates The X-Files by over a dozen years, all the way back to third grade. I have a small library of books dealing with this stuff, by authors like Jim Keith, Graham Hancock, Bob Frissell, and others. One such book in my collection, Behold a Pale Horse by William Cooper (whom I have just now learned was killed in some kind of shootout with law enforcement in 2001) includes the complete text of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

No, I do not believe any of this stuff, but I enjoy reading about it. Skepticism, it seems to me, is strengthened by exposure to kookery (as long as one’s skepticism is healthy to begin with).

:: I find sexual content in books boring.

:: I really enjoy Nick Bantock‘s work.

:: I enjoy comics stores, but I wish they wouldn’t be so tiny, and I wish they’d have better lighting, and I wish they wouldn’t plaster so many posters and decals and whatnot on their storefront windows that it’s nearly impossible to see inside. I don’t know how my favorite comics store in Buffalo survives, because it’s not in walking distance of anything.

:: The only magazine subscription I have right now is WIRED, although I do plan to subscribe to more once I’m working again. I enjoy WIRED mainly because sometimes I need a good hit of optimism, and that magazine packs it, big-time. Even when I’m pretty sure they’re totally full of crap.

:: I have never gotten over my anger at my tenth-grade English teacher, the one who made us read Ordinary People while the other classes were reading Huck Finn.

:: Sometimes I read for story, other times I read for language. I deem a great book to be one that has both.

:: Finally, I’ve generally stopped being concerned with the fact that what I consider to be “great language” doesn’t seem to match up with what other people tell me is “great language”.

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Do they want “story”? Really?

You can’t go anywhere online these days, it seems, without reading something about the current woes facing the Disney company — their traditionally animated movies keep faltering, while the Pixar movies keep packing in the business. Michael Eisner’s management of the company is falling apart, obviously, and he’s got rebellions going all over the place. But there’s one meme I keep encountering in all of this, and it’s that Disney has forgotten story and Pixar hasn’t. Disney’s 2D animated films tell lackluster stories, which is why they’ve been box-office disappointments for some years now. (Two examples: Oliver Willis, and this AICN article with requisite teeth-gnashing in the Talkbacks.)

But I’m just not sure if the whole “story” excuse works. It sounds nice, and at first glance it seems to fit, because the Pixar movies really do tend to feature superb and witty writing. But there have been plenty of traditional, 2D-animated movies in recent years that told good stories, not just Disney’s, and they all tanked at the box office. The Iron Giant is the biggest example. Lilo and Stitch deserved a better fate, and so did The Emperor’s New Groove, which in my mind if the most unjustly-ignored movie of the last five years. I’ve heard good things about this year’s Sinbad movie (which I didn’t see). The only one that was a real hit was Tarzan. There have been clunkers, to be sure — I enjoyed Atlantis, but I’ve read a lot of bad reviews of it, and Treasure Planet was pretty lame — but I really don’t think the idea that Disney movies have abandoned good storytelling really holds up.

So what’s the difference? Why are the Pixar movies doing so well? I actually do suspect that the novelty of the computer animation has something to do with it, but I don’t know, really — and I don’t think that anyone does. When a movie with a great story succeeds, everyone says “See, the public still likes great stories!” But there are still movies with great stories that fail, and movies with bad stories that succeed. I don’t know what people want, and I don’t think anyone else does, either. Someone on the AICN talkback I link above says that “The success of anime proves that 2D animation isn’t dead!” Well, maybe — but how many people actually did see Spirited Away last year? How big is the anime community, really? It’s growing, certainly, but it’s nowhere near a mainstream thing yet.

I suspect that sometimes the public decides it’s in the mood for a great story, and at other times, they don’t care. And there’s no predicting when that’s going to happen, any more than I can predict when I’m going to get the hankering for a nice, juicy steak. (This probably ties into my growing suspicion these days that marketing is a completely bogus enterprise, but my thoughts on that aren’t even half-baked right now, so I’ll leave off.)

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“Why can’t it be over?”

That is the plaintive cry heard emanating from Rush Limbaugh’s bathroom after just about every Eagles game these days.

I really don’t have a good feel for the upcoming NFC Championship Game. The Eagles looked flat for most of the game yesterday, and they won for two main reasons, a case of good news and bad news. The good news was Donovan McNabb; in the playoffs, you want the player who is the “heart and soul” of your team to step it up, and McNabb basically willed the Eagles back into that game. The bad news is that the Eagles defense looked suspect to me, and that had the Packers not undergone a mysterious bit of “Screw the fundamentals and forget the rulebook!” toward the end and in OT, the Eagles might well have lost.

As for the Colts, well, I didn’t see much of that game, but it played out pretty much as I expected: a high-scoring affair with the Chiefs’ defensive holes being exposed. But of those two teams, I think the Colts have a much better chance of going into Foxboro and achieving the crucial mission of beating the Stupid Patriots, and that’s why I rooted for them.

Go Colts, and Go Eagles (although if the Panthers win, I won’t be heartbroken — that’s a pretty good team over there).

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