Movies in May

Lots of things borrowed this month, from the library or from friends. July is looking to be the return of cash, but in the meantime I did see a bunch of things that didn't suck.

I wonder if Julia Sweeney regrets creating the Pat character? That was one that was funny in very small doses, and it was pretty much the only thing she got to do on SNL. Which is a shame, as she is genuinely funny. I've read a lot of essays and things she's written on aetheism, and parenting without religion, and I know she's done shows on those topics but all I could dig up from the library was God Said Ha!, her monologue about when her brother got sick and eventually died of lymphatic cancer, how her whole family moved into her cute little single-gal-who-likes-her-personal-space house and took it over for the sake of caring for her brother, and about how she got ovarian cancer at the same time. And somehow she finds humor in all that. It's funny and sad and thoughtful, and I really wish I could see more of her shows.

In a similar vein are Kevin Smith's Q & As, An Evening with Kevin Smith and An Evening with Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder. The man can tell a story. The man can, in fact, tell a hugely inappropriate story about his wife and make it incredibly funny and full of heart all at once. You can see why she would refrain from killing him for over-sharing. I liked the second Evening better, with disc 1 in Canada and disc 2 in England. The crowds there asked better questions, and the little segments out on the street of those towns looking for authentic Canadian cuisine or seeing if Jay's pick-up lines worked on English women were fun.

In the realm of things I did shell out cash for: Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Kevin Smith and Seth Rogan working together? It's all good. I wasn't overwhelmingly impressed with Clerks 2, so I went into this with muted expectations, but it's Smith at his best: funny and raunchy but so full of heart. It's really a romantic comedy, but not one with a "meet cute" and slapsticky misunderstandings. It's much realer than that. The struggle to pay the bills, the deeply shitty car that makes getting to work a job in itself (it is in fact the same car I had when my husband and I first moved in together; and the bit in the deleted scenes where he can't get the door open, and then later when he can't get it shut again - I laughed so hard it hurts. Been there, done that). I can't recall a single thing I've seen Elizabeth Banks in, but she's wonderful here; you believe her as the kind of girl who would be best friends with a guy like Zack. It's a movie about two friends who have known each other forever but are completely out of step with each other in the whole falling in love thing. So yeah I liked it a lot. Although those I'm a Mac/I'm a PC commercials have just gained another layer of amusement in my mind.

The Reader. Nope, didn't like. Wait, that doesn't quite encapsulate it. OK, I fucking hated this movie. How's that? I could give a whole long rant as to why, but this sums up most of my feelings pretty well, particularly the patently manipulative use of Kate Winslet nudity. Imagine if the film had been about an illiterate male Auschwitz guard who deflowered a fifteen-year-old German girl. I doubt the guard in question would be winning an Oscar (I'm picturing Harvey Keitel myself). But at least it wouldn't be a film that was using a naked body to engender sympathy. Or at least that's not the usual response to Harvey Keitel's penis.

(Mostly the movie pissed me off because it made no sense. She has no learning disability, we see this as she teaches herself to read while in prison by listening to Ralph Fiennes reading stories out loud, not an easy trick. But how did she manage to get through life without ever even picking up the word "the", the first word she teaches herself to read? At some point you'd work out that all the stores that sold bread had "Bakery" on them, every bottle of Coca-Cola says Coca-Cola. You have to be willfully not learning to avoid picking up any words at all. Which I suspect was meant to be a metaphor for the German people being willfully ignorant of what Hitler was up to. But as a metaphor it just doesn't work, because it trips up against literacy-not-as-a-metaphor too many times, and as I said it makes no sense. You don't have to know how to read to know that locking people inside a burning building is the wrong thing to do, and it doesn't matter who wrote the report, they all stood there and let it happen. It's possible the novel this is based on makes more sense, but the movie insulted me over and over again. I hate to see fine acting talent wasted, particularly the teenager who played the young Ralph Fiennes, but this movie sucked, sucked, sucked).

Looks like I went on a long rant anyway. Apologies.

OK, I checked out Gone Baby Gone, because who doesn't want to see how Ben Affleck handles directing? I liked this movie, Casey Affleck is terrific, as is the supporting cast. It handled disturbing subject with a delicate touch. This movie didn't make me feel emotionally manipulated. I hope Ben does more films, this one was good.

Gone Baby Gone was based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, so I thought I should check out another film based on one of his novels: Clint Easwood's Mystic River. Kind of a mistake. It's an excellent film, Clint Eastwood is very good at letting actors do their thing and not ruining their performances with an overly-exuberant musical score. All of the actors in this were chillingly good. But this movie upset me deeply, to the point where I actually considered shutting it off. Only I was afraid that the ending I made up in my head would be far worse than what I was about to see and I'd be better off just sticking with the movie. (Which is true, actually, I was so afraid for what Tim Robbins was going to confess there at the river bank that when he finally did tell all it was a relief).

A few days after seeing this movie I came across a quote from G.K. Chesterton on why we believe in fairy tales: “Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” Which I think is why movies or stories like this upset me so much. It says there are dragons, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about them.

Black Snake Moan I admit I only picked up because Justin Timberlake is in it. It's set in Memphis, with Samuel L. Jackson as a once-bluesman, now-farmer who finds Christina Ricci drugged out and beaten on the side of the road and takes her home to fix her up, in a lot of senses of that term. It was an interesting film, reminding me a bit of Lost in Translation in the depiction of an atypical relationship between an older man and a younger woman, although Lost for me is hampered like many Woody Allen films are, in that I can't really understand the problems of the idle rich who wander the world trying to find themselves, trying to figure out what useless skill is what they're meant to be doing. Must be tough, she said sarcastically (Alice aside; I liked how that ended with Mia Farrow deciding just not to be the idle rich anymore). Black Snake Moan is sort of the white trash version of that journey, the one where you don't actually go anywhere beyond the borders of your rural stomping grounds because you don't have the gas money. Plus Christina Ricci's character has real problems, the kind that don't have solutions just ways of dealing with them a bit at a time, as Justin's character eventually learns to accept. I liked this movie, there were some fantastic scenes like when Samuel L. Jackson plays his electric guitar during a storm that makes his electricity dim and threaten to go out. It was an eerie and cool effect. But it was a tough movie to get into in the beginning because the tone was so uneven. There were scenes in the beginning that I wasn't sure were meant to be played for laughs or not. (And Christina Ricci is naked here as much as Kate Winslet, but for reasons that actually matter to the story and her character, reasons that make her the opposite of sympathetic at first. The sympathy comes when she stops being physically naked.)

Namesake is the latest from Mira Nair, about a woman who marries, leaves Calcutta for the US and raises her family there, and about her son who's father named him Gogol and his long journey to understanding and owning his own name. Tabu played the mother, and I always love her. She has a gravitas that works well in this part. (She's also a gorgeous dancer, which she doesn't get to show off here, alas). Gogol is played by Kal Penn, whom I sincerely hope hasn't given up acting entirely to work for Barack Obama. He's got this whole smart/funny thing going on that I really like.

(Gogol is the name of a Russian writer, and I'm not going to say why Kal Penn's character is named that, but I will say that there was a point when I was 19 or 20 when Gogol's "The Overcoat" was my favorite story evah, but I had since forgotten about it until I saw this movie. Such is my fickle nature, obsessions come and go. But it was nice to revisit this one.)

Which leaves only my two Bollywood movies for the month. Golmall Returns was amusing when I watched it. I certainly remember laughing and enjoying it. But I can't really recall the plot now. Something about Kareena Kapoor watching too many soaps and suspecting her husband is having an affair, because that's what all the husbands on soaps do. Plus there was a little homage/joke with a prostitute pretending to be Rani's character from Saawariya, I remember that. Hmm. Guess the movie was just a bit of a time-pass.

More memorable was Chandni Chowk to China. Perhaps you remember I was looking forward to this one. Well, it didn't disappoint. It's everything I love about Bollywood, with Akshay Kumar and Deepika Padukone both being so fun and likeable. Plus it's everything I love about the funny sort of kung fu movies, like Shaolin Soccer or Kung Fu Hustle or even Kung Fu Panda. On top of that, it's a genuinely good story, with a main character who has a meaningful arc (his relationship with his deity even matures during the course of the film; how many times have you seen that?). Deepika plays her Indian self as well as her Chinese twin sister, and she pulls it off. There's the requisite band of kung fu henchmen, a long montage set to my new favorite martial arts song (just edging out "Mortal Kombat"), and a very clever fight scene that involves Akshay only thinking he's throwing the punches.

There are actually lots of clips with music and scenes from the movie at YouTube, but they are official from the film company and they won't let me embed the video. (But check out "Chak Lein De" in particular). So this month's video clip is an oldie, from the movie Bichoo. This one is like the siren's call, it lures men to my office. Or one man anyway. Of course he says he's just heading into the laundry room, or to get something from the closet, but I'm not fooled. I know it's really Malaika Arora in tiny skirts. Particularly when she goes "yeah!".

Books in May

Lots of nonfiction this month, mostly on account of research. And for a short story, not even a novel. Considering how much I get paid for short stories, compared to how much I spend on research books... While, I'm not in it for the money, am I? (I think I'm in it to justify the really cool books I use for "research").

At any rate, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization by Jonathan Mark Kenoyer is a great overview of Mohenjo-Daro, Harappa, etc. with lots of photographs of the artifacts. Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Civilization by Sir John Marshall is older, and reads like it. Many was the night I sat down to "do research" only to be woken up an hour later by some family member asking how the research was going. I've also been working a lot of extra hours, so I can't totally blame Sir John for that, and the book does have a lot of really cool fold-out maps of the buildings. In fact, this book was too massive to read in the bath, which is a large part of why it took so long to finish it (that and the naps).

The Great Partition: The making of India and Pakistan by Yasmin Khan wasn't intended to be research. After watching several movies that dealt with Partition and its fallout I was just curious to connect the dots I already knew. This is an excellent, informative book, an engaging if disturbing read. I was continually reminded of one of my favorite episodes of Angel, "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been", when a Thesulac demon is whispering to the inhabitants of a hotel, playing on their insecurities and feeding on their paranoia until the entire place erupts in violence and Angel is left swinging by his neck from the chandelier. In fantasy worlds, Angel can't die because he's a vampire and slaying the demon takes care of the problem. The real world is no where near that easy to deal with. Whispering paranoia demons are easier to understand than the real world, though, when people just get caught up in paranoia spirals. It's clear from this book that no one involved in the creation of Pakistan as a separate state had any inkling of how bloody a process it would become (and still is).

Blueberry Girl by Neil Gaiman was a nice antitode to that, a picture book of a poem he wrote for Tori Amos' daughter. It reminds me a bit of Rudyard Kipling's "If", filled with all the hope of a young life just starting. Gorgeous illustrations to boot (I even caught Aidan looking at this one on his own).



Two more Larry Niven books this month, both written with Jerry Pournell: Inferno and its sequel Escape from Hell. I enjoyed these, retellings of Dante that only occasionally rubbed me the wrong way (hard to avoid with a topic that by its nature is going to get preachy). I'm not sure how particularly the second one is going to age, some of the references are very current events (will any of us really remember Anna Nicole Smith in 20 years?)

OK, time to get back to teaching math...

It's out in the world!

Warrior Wisewoman 2 is on sale! You can get a copy at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, or at an indie bookstore near you. How geeked am I to see my name on an Amazon.com page? (Answer: very).

Another sale!

My story "On Desperate Seas" will be appearing in the next issue of the e-zine A Fly in Amber. I'm really pleased; this is one of my favorite things I've done, but being a fantasy story about one of the recovery attempts of the John Franklin Expedition, it's been tricky finding it a home. It's gotten some wonderful rejection letters from editors who loved the writing but just didn't think it fit in with their magazines (which was totally true, but it never hurts to throw things out there). Given that the writing of this story gave me actual nightmares (when you read it you'll probably guess why), I'm glad it's going to be out in the world soon.

Now I just have to finish the one I'm working on now...

Movies in April

May has been a busy month, both for work and school, and on top of that I've been trying to get a story written (not coming out to bad, either). But since May is nearly over, I think it's about time I finish off this "Movies in April" post.

First up: Slumdog Millionaire. Not remotely a Bollywood film (first clue: all the leads are Muslims. Don't think I've ever seen that in a Bollywood fillm). Not really a hard-hitting films about the slums, either (see Salaam Bombay for that). It is a good Danny Boyle film, though. I've loved his films since the first ten minutes of Shallow Grave. My "honeymoon" was an afternoon at the multiplex, and while I liked Seven Years and Tibet and The Devil's Advocate well enough, it was A Life Less Ordinary that I adored. I don't think Slumdog quite edges that out as my favorite Boyle film (although those honeymoon associations makes it tough for any film to topple it, I think). Loved the music, of course, loved the little Amitabh Bachchan scene (and how cool of Amitabh to play himself there). And I'm super-geeked that Dev Patel is going to be playing Zuko in the Avatar movie. He's so much cooler than Jesse McCartney.

I saw the George Clooney remake of Solaris as soon as it was out on DVD, and a few times since (most sci-fi movies are big on the explosions; quiet, character-driven films like this one are rare but I have a fondness for them). I finally dug up the original Russian version. It was interesting, but I think there was a lot of imagery I wasn't quite grokking, like if I were Russian I would know what the horse wandering around in the background meant. A lot of cool visuals, but I think the Clooney remake took the best of this, tightened it up, and made the female character more interesting and layered.

On the other hand, the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still blows, and that's coming from a die-hard Keanu Reeves fan. I could appreciate some of the choices they made (particularly making Klaatu a bit of a dick. It was jarring but in a good way). I don't think the director handled the material well at all, though, and how sick am I of environmental cautionary tales? (I wonder if my counterpart in the 50s was as sick of cold war cautionary tales? Probably not at this point; I'm pretty sure TDTESS was one of the first).

And now, a rare movie I saw in the theater! The Soloist, with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jamie Foxx. These are two actors I find awesome in just about anything, but I was worried. The trailers made this look like one of those Person Who Inspires Others To Truly Live types (and yeah, I've linked to that post before, but what can I say? Kumail Ali totally nailed it). I was extremely relieved to see it was much more complicated than that. I do wish the director hadn't used the "world is a harsh, ugly place" visual style where every skin blemish is up there 20 feet tall and all the colors are washed out. I guess it fit the story, but I've seen it used a lot lately and I'm not fond of it.

Thanks to the public library I finally saw North By Northwest. I've since discovered that all of the Hitchcock films have very long wait lists so I'm not the only one digging him lately. It would be senseless to praise this - it's already a classic, what more can I say? - but I suddenly have the hankering to see Mount Rushmore. I've never been, and it's only 8 or 9 hours away. (It also left me with the hankering to watch National Treasure 2 again. I would call that a guilty pleasure, but honestly I liked it better than the last Indy movie).

Speaking of George Clooney (a couple paragraphs back, but...), I saw Syriana for the first time too. Clooney in particular is very good in this. I think Team America ruined me for Matt Damon movies, though. I like him, I think he's a fine actor, but everytime I see him on screen I expect him to put his arms and yell "Matt Damon!"

The Man Who Knew Too Little was a Bill Murray movie I had never even heard of. He made it somewhere in the dead zone between Groundhog Day and Rushmore. It's not a great film, but Bill Murray is just so likeable that even a bad film can be fun (particularly when he's trying to dance like a Cossack).

Much funnier: The Venture Brothers, Season 3. I didn't find this to be quite as good as season 2, but that's setting the bar pretty high; this show is still consistently funnier than just about anything else on TV. But then a show that piles on reference after reference to things from my childhood (Atari, GI Joe, Voltron...), it's pretty much made exactly for me. It's a toss-up on my favorite season 3 line; it's either when the Monarch is trying to make a screen capture and says "oh shit, I made an umlaut", or it's when Doctor Venture is trying to relax in the tub but thinks the fight in the next room is his boys rough-housing and says "this is why Daddy has to drink to relax, boys".

I missed Baron Unterbeit, though. Well, there's always season 4.

Wrapping up with two Bollywood films, Gadar: Ek Prem Katha is a movie set in the Punjab before, during, and after Partition. I've been probably soaking up a bit too much on Partition, lately (as my critique group can tell you, that sort of thing leads to very dark stories). This isn't remotely an historical film; the main character is very Rambo-esque, although he kicks ass while wearing a sweater vest which I found quite endearing. The final chase back to India on the freight train was pretty cool too, and Amrish Puri was in it. He's the bomb in anything (even if his sudden reversal at the end of the film isn't remotely believable).

And lastly, Singh is Kinng, starring Akshay Kumar as a Sikh gangsta. Actually he's a farmer from Punjab named Happy who goes to Sidney, Australia to try to bring a wayward fellow villager named Lucky home and finds himself suddenly made the head of Lucky's gang, ruling the Australian underworld. At first it looks like the gangsta lifestyle will corrupt Happy, but in the end it's Happy who "corrupts" the other ganstas and at the end of the movie they are all really into helping their fellow man. No, not remotely believable, but this movie was just so likeable I went along for the ride.

I'm of course saying gansta and not ganster deliberately; at the point in the movie when Happy takes over the gang and starts livin' large, tell me you totally can't see Puff Daddy hanging with these guys:





The same song plays again over the credits, this time with Snoop Dogg in the mix. Seriously, the real Snoop Dogg did a Bollywood song and video (couldn't find a version that wasn't a little box in the corner when the credits rolled, though).

OK, back to revising my dark tale. At least I'm all caught up on last month now.

I So Identify With This

"Caring For Your Introvert". Luckily for me I have a husband who totally gets this. Most homeschooling moms need a regular Mom's Night Out (or generally Moms', as they do these things together). But around these parts it's Mom's Night In and the rest of the family leaves the house for a few hours so I can have peace and quiet, alone in my own space.

Right, back at it. I've taken a break from the WIP to write something short (more importantly something Else), but I need to finish it by tomorrow when it's my turn to post to my critique group. Shitty First Draft won't even begin to describe it but at this point just having something done will be a victory.

Books in April

Most of what I read in April were Larry Niven books. I finished off the Known Space novels with Juggler of Worlds, then proceeded on to Ringworld, The Ringworld Engineers, The Ringworld Throne and Ringworld's Children. The idea for Ringworld is, of course, quite cool, although I don't think he's even scratched the surface of the stories that could be told. I kind of wished he had designed it, then handed it off to another writer to tell stories in. For one thing, for something of such immense size, it seems awfully homogeneous. The different races of hominids just didn't feel as culturally different to me as I think they were meant to. And there isn't much there that isn't hominids. Given that the main activity of all these hominids is to have sex with each other (since they are too genetically different from each other to produce offspring, this is Ringworld birth control), you can kind of guess why there are no sheep.

The other aspect I think he really fumbled was Teela and her "luck". I like the concept of luck, and especially how the Norse dealt with it as "hamingja", where it was a heriditary sort of luck (and related to why the sons of heroes tend to also be heroes in the sagas). But the Ringworld books spend a tremendous amount of time waffling on whether or not Teela was lucky (and it didn't feel like character waffling so much as writer waffling; I suspect Niven didn't even know and was hoping it would become clear as he wrote, only it didn't. To be honest, as a writer I've totally been there. Although I tend to take care of that sort of wishy-washiness in subsequent drafts). He also doesn't make any clear distinction between "luck" and "fate", which I think of as two entirely unrelated concepts. Partly this is just me growing up on comic books where characters like the Scarlet Witch and Longshot were lucky in the sense that they manipulated probabilities moment by moment. Which is what luck would be to me, a moment by moment, the coin keeps flipping heads sort of thing. Fate is something else entirely, bigger than a moment by moment thing.

Basically the idea that Teela's "luck" compelled her to fall in love with Louis Wu to bring her to Ringworld because that's where she was fated to be is just loathsome. Fate putting you on a ship, fine. Fate compelling you to "follow your heart" because you're a chic - ick.

There was a last minute bit of waffling that got interesting - when Louis Wu postulated quite Richard Dawkins Selfish Gene-like that Teela wasn't lucky, it was her genes that were lucky, and that luck only served to lead Teela to have more offspring/replicate more of her lucky genes. But then you realize she only ever had the one kid, and she could have had more on Earth or on one of the other Known Space planets without ever having to "follow her heart" to Ringworld at all that it all sort of falls apart again. I wished he'd thought it through first, wrote it second. It could have been a cool character.

Which is not to say I didn't enjoy the books. Protectors and puppeteers are both cool things. And there was the moment at the end of Ringworld when Teela left Louis Wu for the the Seeker, who in my head was totally the Groosalugg:

Which I totally mentioned lots of times when I was reading these novels, and Quin nodded along as if he understood. Yes, she got her Groosalugg. Yes, that would have been cool for her. Well, I've been rewatching Angel episodes when I'm doing other stuff lately and got to the first Groo episode and pointed it out at one point when Quin was in my office, "Look, it's Groo!"

"Who?"

Yeah, totally just nodding along when I talk.

Sadly, Teela didn't get to live happily ever after with her Groosalugg. But then neither did Cordelia.

The only non-Niven book I read in April was Do Your Ears Pop in Space by space shuttle astronaut R. Mike Mullane. A fun book with lots of interesting info about what it's really like up there in orbit. It didn't add much in the sense of novel research, but I was particularly engrossed with all the details about the Challenger disaster. I remember that day well (I think it's the JFK assasination for my generation; we all know where we were that day). I was home sick from school, and so was my step-dad. He came in to wake me up so I could watch the news reports on the TV. This book really gets into what went wrong, did the crew know something was wrong, could it have been prevented, etc. This came out before the Columbia disaster so there isn't a similar discussion on that mission, which would have been interesting. If you're at all interested in space, this is a highly recommended read.

Warrior Wisewoman 2 reviewed in Publishers Weekly

The Warrior Wisewoman 2 anthology will be out June 1. This is the one that contains my short story "Gardens of Wind", a sort of boy meets girl story on airships. I wrote it partly because I wanted to write about airships, partly because I wasn't done exploring the idea of uxorilocal marriages (my other two stories with uxorilocal marriages are my two Japanese ones, the two stories of mine that get the nicest rejection letters but still haven't found a home), and partly as an exercise in writing laconic characters (for those that remember, I was musing this over last February). Although the MC in this one, Akeli, goes a bit beyond laconic. She was fun to write, and the setting is one I'd love to revisit someday. Because airships are inherently cool. Just as Hayao Miyazaki.

There is no page up for the anthology yet at Amazon.com, but I do have a link to the cover (I like it, sort of classical Grecoroman and futuristic at once), and a review at Publishers Weekly (you have to scroll down about halfway, past the mystery and into the sci-fi/fantasy releases).

Learning How To Read

Of all the various parts of homeschooling, the most challenging for me with both boys has been teaching them how to read. It's pretty fundamental, you don't want to screw it up. Both of my boys are now beautiful readers, but at the time they were starting out it was frustrating for me. You see, I can remember learning math, I can remember the tricks I learned that helped me do things in math, but I don't remember learning how to read. As far back as my brain can reach, I always just knew to do it. So I felt pretty useless most of the time with nothing more helpful to offer than "sound it out". Both of them used the same technique that wasn't giving them particularly good results: look at the beginning of the word and the end of the word and guess the rest. Particularly with big words they would do this guessing method.

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(For those that get all geeky on curricula like I do and what to know what books I used, for Aidan it was Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, although we washed out at about lesson 50. We switched to Phonics Pathways and just read a lot of easy readers from the library, which wildly vary in usability (I particularly hate the ones that actually encourage a kid who's learning how to read to guess at words by looking at the pictures. Ugh.). For Oliver I used The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading, which I liked quite a bit. If it has a fault it's been too thorough. It covers enough material to make an 8-year-old's head explode. We still used Phonics Pathways because it's such a nice lead-in the spelling. OK, schoolie geek moment over).

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It's hard to recreate the learning how to read experience. I have over my lifetime learned a few other alphabets, but they always can in context of learning a whole other language. The challenge of that really outweighs the challenge of sounding out the words. That, and most languages are a lot more phonetic than English, so you really can just sound them out and get it right on the first try.

About 18 months ago, I started learning Hindi and with it the Devanagari writing system. Which is really elegant and easy to learn. As I said, once you know what the letters are you can just sound it out:

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मुझे आइस क्रीम पसन्द है

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But I was learning the language at the same time as the letters so I could sound it out, but I still had to look everything up. It was hard to gauge there how my brain was processing just the reading. Fast forward to just after Christmas time. I have a shiny new Teach Yourself Urdu book. Urdu is the language of Pakistan and is nearly identical to Hindi. There are more Persians words and fewer Sanskrit ones, but the main difference is that Urdu isn't written in Devanagari, it's written in a modified Arabic script. And it's so beautiful you can see why they use it for decoration:

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مجھےآس کريم پسند ہے

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(It's looks prettier written than typed. And not in my writing; my penmanship in any language is severely challenged).

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This was a new experience for me, learning how to read a language in which I already had a working vocabulary of about 2500 words (everything in a beginner's book like this one plus some extra). I had the chance now to observe my own skills at learning how to read. And do you know what I caught myself doing?

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Looking at the beginnings of words and looking at the ends of words and guessing what comes between. *Sigh* My guessing was better than theirs, surely, but only because I'm dealing with a much smaller pool of potential guesses. Although it would help their technique if they would only guess words that actually made sense with the sentence they're reading.

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(Both the sentences above say "I like ice cream." Which, aside from being true, I picked because it was sentences like this that always tickled me when I was in the early, carefully sound out each character phase. It says "mujhe ais kreem pasand hai". Imagine sounding it out: "ai-s kr-ee-m, oh hey, that says ice cream!" Don't you just love loan words?)

Movies in March

Being cash-strapped I've taken to checking out DVDs from the library, which always involves a wait and they don't have a particularly good way of browsing. You pretty much have to know what you want and see if they've got it. Still, free.

I got The Footlight Parade just to see the synchronized swimming number. I was surprised to see James Cagney in it; I associate him so much with gangster roles that I wasn't expecting to find him in a musical. He and the actress who played his secretary had a nice rapport, and I enjoyed this movie (although the synochronized swimming segment did inspire a bit of cattiness, pointing out who wasn't where she was supposed to be).

His Girl Friday was fun as well. This movie I've heard praised all over for its sharp dialogue, and it has that in spades.

Gandhi we watched together as family, sort of. Oliver conked out 20 minutes in and slept for the last 2 hours of movie (I blame the layer cake. We don't eat much sugar around these parts, and when we do it knocks us all out). I'd never seen this movie before (although I've seen a couple of movies about Bhaghat Singh). I was surprised by how much Aidan enjoyed it, but it really made an impression on him. It's been a bit more than a month since we watched it and he's still talking about things Gandhi said and did.

Freaky Friday we caught on TV, the remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsey Lohan. I'd never seen the original although I read a book version once in middle school. This was another one that Aidan really liked. I thought the two actresses did a terrific job of being each other. It's kind of a shame that these days Lindsey Lohan is mostly famous for being famous; she had the chops to go another way, I think.

Flyboys was a movie the rest of the family had already watched before but for some reason thought that I would want to see it (actually, I think that reason might be named James Franco). I'm not saying this movie is predictable, but I did amuse my boys by accurately guessing every plot twist and often paraphrasing the actual dialogue before it was spoken. I think it was the point where Franco's character and another guy crashlanded and I foresaw waking up in a whorehouse, meeting a girl he liked, and having that girl turn out not to be a whore because heroes don't fall for whores that really put it over the top. Apparently the planes aren't particularly accurate either, although that's more my husband's realm of expertise rather than mine. There is clearly a good movie to be made about these pillots, a Band of Brothers type movie about what it was really like. This isn't it. (Although it's hard to truly hate a movie where someone kamikazes a German Zeppelin).

I had a few things on preorder from Amazon.com that came this month as well. Baz Luhrmann's Australia I thoroughly enjoyed. After reading the description on the back of the box I was worried, it sounded like it would be kinda hokey, but it was just so perfect. And the kid playing the lead role of the half-aborigine orphan had such a wonderfully expressive face. Plus, Hugh Jackman. Can't go wrong with Hugh Jackman.

Quantum of Solace was just as awesome as I had been told.

BSG Season 4.0, being the first half of the fourth season. I'm starting to get a bad feeling for where all this is going. And as much as I dutifully avoid spoilers for this show and Lost, I've caught the phrase "deus ex machina" a few too many times in blogs about how the season wrapped up. I can see where a religion focused on total forgiveness (and in particular the you, like Kevin Bacon in Murder in the First, were just a tool/weapon defense) would appeal to Gaius Baltar. And I always love how he starts out conning others and inevitably ends up believing his own con (his character is the core of the show for me). But I don't see how this religion is going to appeal to the thousands of other survivors. I don't see how it's going to provide the sort of meaning they would be looking for, to put what happened to them in context. I wished it had been thought through just a little bit more.

Lastly I'll mention Sita Sings the Blues, a truly wonderful piece of filmmaking. It's a shame that legal snafus kept this out of theaters (and out of award consideration), but on the plus side, we can all see it for free on the internet. (It's here). I love the story. It's just my sort of thing, someone in the present finding deep personal meaning in a very old story, in this case the Ramayan. And I love the different animations she uses for the different aspects of the story, the squigglevision for the present day, the Mughal-style paintings from the Ramayan reenactments, the Betty Boop style for the depression-era songs. But my favorite are the shadow puppets who represent her three friends trying to remember the details of the story with much debating and correcting. The boys liked this one too, well enough to ask to see it again.

So this month's video segment is from Sita Sings the Blues. I loved the "Agni Pariksha (Sita's Fire)" segment the best but can't find a clip of just that bit on YouTube. (It is here, but you have to skip up to 7:20 to see it). In the meantime, here is the opening. I love how all the Hindu imagery is used without any explanation. It's fascinating even if you don't know quite what it all means:

My most popular post EVAH

Is this one: http://macleod424.blogspot.com/2006/12/for-fans-of-avatar-last-airbender-only.html. It gets multiple hits every day from Google Images. Which is kind of funny. A few of them even click around and look at some other posts. So welcome, fans of Avatar, or just fans of Uncle Iroh.

Now I'm off to have some tea, and then it's back to the novel revisions. Hoping to be done before May (*fingers crossed*).

Books in March

Mostly Niven this month, namely: Protector, Tales of Known Space, The Shape of Space, The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton, The Patchwork Girl, Flatlander, and Fleet of Worlds. A few of these were story collections that had some overlap (Flatlander, for instance, contains all the stories from Long ARM plus the novella The Patchwork Girl plus one extra, very minor Gil Hamilton story). I like Niven less the more I read. The ideas are cool but the characters completely fail to engage me. Too many women with stripper names (Feather, Taffy, Teela, ugh). Both the Kzin and the Puppeteers are races where only the males are sentient - what's up with that? I'm hoping as I go that there's an explanation for that amazing coincidence, because otherwise it's just plain hateful.

Mostly I'm grumpy because Jo Walton at Tor.com is re-reading all of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan books and she's giving me an itch to do the same. I think I'll make that my reward for persevering with my goal to read all Niven.

I also read two more books on slums (novel research). Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World is by Robert Neuwirth, who spent months living in the squatter communities of Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi and Istanbul. This book was very interesting and an eye-opener. For one, he advocates calling them squatter communities and not slums, and I can see his point. Many of these places don't really deserve the term "slum" for one, but on the other hand thinking of them as squatters puts them in an historical context (and Neuwirth does, with stories of how the US was shaped by squatters). Highly recommend this one.

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis was also completely engrossing but deeply upsetting, both for its descriptions of what life is like in these places but also for how little hope there is for change (he details exactly how every prior effort to fix things has mostly benefited the wrong people and made life worse for those they were meant to help). A good book, but not a particularly empowering one.

He's been purified in the waters of Lake Minnetonka...

... and now he's cleaning up on Jeopardy! Fred Beukema, that is, he of the yearly Beukemixes which we all adore around these parts. He's won two games already and is playing game 3 today. (Since 4:30 is perhaps the most inconvenient time of day for me to sit in front of the TV I've finally had occasion to use the recording capacity of my PC. I grossly overestimated the amount of TV I care to record anymore when I bought the thing. At any rate, it works pretty slick.)

Fred put a lot of work into preparing to be on the show (he documents it pretty thoroughly on his blog), and as Quin has mentioned mmmph times, Fred was always his chief competitor at the Isaac Asimov superquiz when they worked together. This is very much his sort of thing. It's fun to watch someone you know, especially when he's doing so phenomenally well (in both of the first two games Fred went into Final Jeopardy with a score more than double the second place contestant's, so he couldn't lose unless he deliberately bet a huge amount on the FJ question. And as you can tell from the Daily Doubles, Fred is a conservative better). It seemed like the perfect opportunity to bet $Texas and answer "Suck it Trebek", but they probably screen for that sort of behaviour before they let you on the show.

So congrats to Fred! I'd say good luck in game 3, but since it was a done deal weeks ago that would either involve some sort of time machine or some very careful verb conjugations (future perfect tense, maybe?)

(The title of this post makes sense if you watch his Hometown Howdie, but that link will only work for a few days).

Why on Earth did this song just pop into my head today?

Perhaps it's because I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of Quantum of Solace. Who knows?

Damn Paul McCartney and his catchy tunes; I'm going to be singing this for the rest of the week...



I wonder if this movie holds up? I remember liking it at the time, but maybe there's a reason I've never caught it on cable. Then again, they played Summer Rental with John Candy a dozen times last month, and that wasn't exactly laugh-a-minute.

Well, back to singing while I work...

Movies in February

Not much movie watching in February. This is largely because 1) I really was too sick to bother and 2) getting a new furnace, AC and water heater all at a blow took quite a bite out of my cash flow. (Wait, is that a mixed metaphor? Blow, bite, flow... maybe). So I'm relying on rewatching all faves plus perusing what's available at the library. But February was when I polished off my Christmas/birthday haul. So...

First up: Vicky Cristina Barcelona. My husband is a big fan of both Woody Allen and Scarlett Johansson, so he thoroughly enjoyed this. I suspect it was a movie only made because Woody wanted to see Scarlett and Penelope Cruz kissing... As with most of Woody's work, I wished he'd spent more time on it. It's an intriguing idea that feels only half thought through. And it shares a complaint I have with a lot of his work; in the end, his characters have changed not a whit due to everything that's been going on over the last 90 minutes. Which gets frustrating. But he writes such good scenes, particularly here the scenes where Penelope is ranting in mile-a-minute Spanish while Javier Bardem tries to simultaneously calm her down and apologise to the non-Spanish-speaking Scarlett (at one point messing it all up and apologising to Scarlett in Spanish). I'd say Penelope earned her Oscar, it really was a great part, but the movie as a whole felt rather slight.

My only other English (mostly) language film was Mississippi Masala, one of Mira Nair's earlier films. It's about an Indian family from Uganda who is living in a hotel in Mississippi, and more specifically about the daughter who breaks away from her family to be with Denzel Washington (who wouldn't?). I loved the look of the film; it felt like a sweltering hot Southern summer, which is nice when it's actually the last dregs of a Minnesota winter.

I watched the last two movies in my Bollywood stash as well: Aryan and The Jewel Thief. Aryan I was a bit nervous about; the cover with Sohail Khan as a boxer made me expect lots of bloody fist fighting a la I Proud to be Indian, but it's actually the story of two young people who both have to adjust when they get pregnant and then married. The songs weren't great, but the movie was heartfelt and I enjoyed it. The Jewel Thief is old school Bollywood (it's from 1967). I like these old films, and this one is very early Bond, very 60s. I don't believe this is a Bollywood retelling of any Hollywood film; certainly the plot twists all came as a complete surprise. Great story, but really fun for the look of the thing. (Honestly, there are enough of these sorts of films I'm surprised there isn't a Bollywood Austin Powers to really revel in it.)

TV on DVD: I watched seaons 1 and 2 of Torchwood, which I also enjoyed immensely, although Quin not so much. I don't think it was the rampant bisexuality that bothered him; it was the "Dr. Whooey quality" that he kept griping about. I found some of the plots a bit Buffyesque (or Angelesque), but when they actually put James Marters on the show, I can totally forgive that. Cause he's awesome.

Lastly is Full Metal Alchemist. I actually only watched Season 1 in February, but having since watched Season 2 plus the film The Conqueror of Shamballa I'll deal with them all together. I loved this show. I loved the worldbuilding, the rules of alchemy and how they were used or how they were worked around; I loved the vast cast of characters (this show has surely spawned mountains of fanfic and slashfic). The animation has that lovely attention to detail that good anime always has. My only disappointment is that it was just a bit too intense, too violent to share this with my boys. Which is a pity; the show focuses on two brothers who squabble and fight like real brothers but still really rely on each other. The bond between them is the bedrock of the show. But alas, there were too many things that would be upsetting for a few years yet. And it's not something that can be edited around; the things that happen are integral to the plot, or are disturbing for psychological more than gory reasons. So it's violent, but not gratuitously violent. I would highly, highly recommend checking it out for teens and up, though.

I understand that like with Samurai Champloo and Cowboy Bebop, the associated manga tells an entirely different story with the same cast of characters (although unlike those two the FMA manga came first). I'll have to check that out when I have the cash. Also like those two, the music featured in the show is wonderful. Cowboy Bebop is far and away the best of the three for music (and it would be impossible to summarize just what that music is, it's so all over the map). Samurai Champloo was very hiphop inspired. FMA goes more for pure Jap pop, which I love, particularly this track, which sounds like a Japanese Go-Gos doing disco (love that bass line...)

Books in February

I only read six books in February, and three I'd already read before (although it was about ten years ago).

First up: Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta. A very interesting look at several different people's lives in Mumbai. I first heard about this book on a show on PBS (I keep catching this show about life in India but never catching the title, which tends to happen when you're not the one with the remote), and I also read a piece he had written about Mumbai after the attacks last November, so this book has been on my radar for a while. Mehta was born in Mumbai, grew up in New York, then moved back to Mumbai as an adult, so he has a split perspective; he's both a native and an outsider at the same time. Mumbai is a very interesting city: it's the size of New York City and LA together in terms of population and if you look at it on Google Earth it's very easy to spot the slums, where everything is packed in so tight together and stops mere feet from the train tracks. (My fascination with slums has a lot in common with my fascination with the life of the Inuit which I researched for my last novel; I'm amazed at how much they can do with so little, but also saddened, because no one should have to get by with so little). I found this book honest and unflinching about the good and the bad, but in the end I found it hopeful about the future. And it struck me as I read that many of the problems in Mumbai were reminding me very strongly of what I was reading just a few months ago about New York City at the time of Teddy Roosevelt. (Which reminds me, apparently I owe the movie Garv a huge apology. I found the police force shooting on sight gangsters they had been sent to arrest because they knew they would never be justly tried in the courts implausible, when it is in fact quite true.)

Light at the End of the World by Wade Davis is a collection of essays on different cultures around the world. Apparently these originally appeared as part of a collection of photographs, and I rather wished I had hunted that book down; I would love to see some of the things described here. It was a bit of a mind twist after reading a book about India to follow it up with a book where "Indian" means Native American, though.

The Sharing Knife: Horizon is the latest by Lois McMaster Bujold. It's the best of the series so far, and yes I said that about the last one as well. It's just the story keeps going deeper, and the canvas it's told on keeps getting wider. This, frankly, is why I love reading series. And I have no idea where she's going to take these characters next, but I bet it's somewhere I could never predict.

OK, I finished off the month with Larry Niven. I've read some of him before (as I mentioned, it was more than a decade ago). I couldn't really pick out which ones I had though, so for the sake of completeness I started with the oldest Known Space books, and the first three are all ones I'd read before: World of Ptavvs, A Gift from Earth and Neutron Star. World of Ptavvs would be my favorite of these three, if just for the moment when the real alien wakes up (if you've read the book, you know what I mean. That moment, just there, is awesome).

In all likelihood, March will be nothing but Larry Niven books. I hope you're prepared...

So, been sick...

... as those of you on Myspace or Facebook already know. Haven't been that sick in ages. It started as one thing and then became one or two others; that's all I'm gonna say. I had to get out of bed yesterday because our new furnace/air conditioner/water heater were all installed, but I wasn't exactly lucid; I kept conking out on the couch and the installers would have to wake me up to ask me questions or show me things. (One of them said to Oliver "Your mom sure is sleepy!" to which he said... nothing, because the boy won't talk to strangers unless he's trying to out-talk his brother). And when I went downstairs to look over the finished work, my very addled brain came up with "shiny" as my only comment. And I think they thought I was talking about the lustre when I'm pretty sure my brain was talking Firefly-speak. Heck, I was so out of it I probably was just finding it, you know, shiny.

So no writing done on my week of school break, and most of this week's school was a wash as well. We kept up on math and that's about it. And my movie and book posts will be unusually short as well; I really was quite out of it the last half of February. When I wasn't just flat-out asleep I couldn't handle anything more complex than music DVDs. So it's cool that I have a ton of those. For instance, can you believe this concert was already a decade ago?

I would love to see an NSYNC reunion tour (with CD of new material as well, please). They put on such a show. And you know, they take their work seriously but never themselves, and there's something to be said for that.

And that's not just the fever hangover talking...

Congrats to A.R. Rahman

...for his Oscars for Best Score and Best Song. This is a long time coming, believe me. He's scored more than 50 films, starting in South India in Tamil and Telegu and reaching Bollywood with Rangeela (the title number "Rangeela Re" has a cute little rapping kid who's the son of Udit Narayan, playback singer for about half the movies in Bollywood. I expect to be hearing more from little Aditya in a year or two). He's done historical dramas like Lagaan (from which I got the working title for my WIP, "Mitwa"), Jodhaa Akbar, which I posted a clip from last month, and Mangel Pandey: The Rising (so many great songs; I'm picking "Main Vari Vari" because I love Rani's dancing on this one).

He's also done modern sounds with movies like Rang de Basanti ("Khalbali" being my fave) or Janne Tu Ya Janne Na ("Pappu Can't Dance", a song rumored to be about Salman Khan, although Aamir Khan says that's totally not true; Salman doesn't have an MBA...). He even did the music for the Mandarin/Japanese film Warriors of Heaven and Earth (gorgeous look, gorgeous sound, woefully deficient in the story department, as I've blogged before).

But my favorite A.R. Rahman piece is still the soundtrack for Dil Se. I've shown you Chaiyya Chaiyya before (with Malaika Arora Khan dancing on top of a train, not to be missed), but my favorite from that film is "Satrangi Re", I love the way it twists around itself. The Himalayas are beautiful as well, of course. This is totally where I'm building my writing cabin:



You know, that was the first Oscar ceremony I've seen that was just fun to watch all on its own. The tributes to animation, comedy, and romance and especially the musicals were all cool; getting Judd Apatow and Baz Luhrmann involved was a killer idea. The stage was so beautiful, with the lights and the crystal curtain, and the elements they changed in the back drop for each award. But I particularly liked how they ditched the clips for the acting categories in favor of having five nominees give little salutes. It was so much more personal. And of course Hugh Jackman is always the bomb: "I'm Wolverine!!"

I've been scooped!

I make up stories in my head all the time just to amuse myself (I know, weird thing for a writer to do). One of my favorites is completely useless to me really, but I've been exploring the back stories of all the characters in it, refining the world building and all that for a wu xia Bollywood mash-up for some time now. My two favorite things; how could I not try to put them together? But I haven't committed any of it to paper; I write novels, and I just don't know how I would write a Bollywood novel. Describe the musical numbers? So I haven't done much with it. It's just something for my brain to do on the days I run on the treadmill and can't read.

Then while watching a trailer show during halftime last night, I saw this:

Besides also being a kung fu Bollywood story, it's very different from the one in my head. I mean, mine is a space opera and the kung fu is more wu xia than this seems to be. So my story is safe. In the mean time, how geeked am I to see this? I've actually seen all of this director's previous work, and his last, Salaam-e-Ishq I've watched mmmmf times (no, totally not fessing up to a number. Let's just say a lot). Akshay Kumar is perfect for a comedy role like this one, and it even has Gordon Liu in it. Sadly it's already come and gone from my neighborhood multiplex that shows movies from India (in Hindi and Telegu and Tamil; it wasn't nearly so multicultural when I worked there). I'll have to wait for the DVD.

Another disturbing similarity to the world in my own head: The space station my novel Mitwa takes place on is Chandni 5...

Because it helps to have a goal

Using Dr. Horrible as a motivation tool was pretty crucial in getting the first draft of MITWA down so quickly. I think I need something similar to get the revisions done. I mean, I took a week off of work at the beginning of the month to get started, and I did fuss with it a bit, but mostly I slept 12 hours a day instead. (It's OK, I really needed it).

So. After re-watching seasons 1-3 of Lost, I think season 4 might make a nice reward. Easy to dole out in small segments, but they all join together with lots of cliffhanger endings so it should keep my driven. Of course season 4 is the season that was smited by the writer's strike, and it's possible the ending was trashed as badly as Heroes was. (I've been diligently steering clear of spoilers, which means I don't really have any idea of how well liked the season was by other fans, because with a show like Lost, any discourse is a spoiler).

Well, I'm going to give it a try. 14 episodes to be sprinkled over revising 24 chapters. I know I'm going to need to add 1 or 2 more chapters, so the math here is going to get confusing. Wish me luck!