trochee

wow, I've been quite the media ~~consumer~~ ~~junkie~~ gourmet recently. In the last week:

Moving pictures
The Science of Sleep in the theater with imtboo, blackwingedboy, and drshorn. A sweet, beautiful, visually astonishing movie. And it really shows off the acting chops of Gael García Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

Angels in America, by Tony Kushner (directed by Mike Nichols). Wow. It's "about AIDS" (though it's about a lot more than that), and it's thus unavoidably political, and the unbelievable cast makes the whole thing hard to stop watching. We went through two hours and it felt like about 40 minutes. Still have four hours to go.

Six Feet Under, Season Three, disk 4. I heard that this season wasn't very good, but I've been enjoying it. Well, "enjoying" perhaps is the wrong word: it's been vivid and powerful and moving.

Witch Hunter Robin, disk 5. I must say I'm kinda confused at this point. Other fans of this show may know what I mean -- or not. Maybe you're getting something I'm not, but I have lost track of the thread of the story for the most part.

Books
City of Saints and Madmen, by John VanderMeer. I'm about halfway through, and this is a weird slipstream guide to a strange city that might be the past, or the future, or perhaps some other place. The style is deliberately all over the place; a history here, a travel guide there, art criticism, footnotes, and third-person omniscient narration. Creepy and yet fun.

Third Rate Superhero, by Charles Yu. imtboo gave me this as a present; the "superhero" title was probably the eye-catcher there. (To the smartasses in the peanut gallery: she did inscribe it "For my first-rate boyfriend", so that eliminates the other obvious guess.) It's a collection of short stories, and it's definitely the kind of contemporary fiction that I enjoy: Yu doesn't feel constrained to tell stories "in the real world" -- if it serves his purpose, superpowers can be normal, or a doomed marriage can be described in LaTeX-ified mathematical proof form (with points I,II,III and corollaries IIa and IIIa,b). I enjoy Yu's willingness to let form be a big part of the story itself. One story is told entirely from within advertising-speak ("My wife and I spent several years in Urban Paradise. Our eyes met over my foamy macchiato and her herbal-organic chai blend as Spokeswoman looked on in benevolent disdain.") and another is told in a hyper-precise overblown "scientific explanation" mode that I have been known to adopt myself ,especially when pulling imtboo's leg ("It is a widely-tested but under-reported fact that 'maybe', when offered in a two-part mutual-benefit-exploration situation with imperfect information, i.e. two human beings attempting to establish whether a romantic relationship is a possibility between the two of them, i.e. dating, is an expression that corresponds not to 'probably' or to 'most probably' but in fact to 32.49802625%".) I paraphrase all quotes because I do not have the book with me.

American Born Chinese, by Gene Yang. A peculiar triptych of interleaved stories: a fantasy Monkey King storyline (although rather than a Buddhist or Confucian [or Hindu] version of the Monkey King, this is Catholic-flavored), the story of a young Chinese-American boy, and the (television-show parody?) story of an Anglo boy and his somehow-Chinese "cousin Chin-Kee", a vicious stereotype. The three stories fold together by the end of the book. The art is super-stylized, and very expressive. I read some of these when they were self-published as little square pamphlets last summer, and it is nice to see the beautiful paperback they've been assembled into. Issues of race, ethics, honesty, and religion; also the throes of growing up in America, regardless of race.

Plus the last few issues of The Nation, which I've finally caught up on.