Lee.org

This movie is a lot of fun! I saw it with Charlotte at the Metreon.

I want the poster that is on Flint Lockwood’s wall proclaiming “Nikola Tesla Rockstar Scientist”! Tesla is standing in a classic rock and roll pose and it looks like he’s playing a lightning bolt like a guitar.

Nikola = Awesome

I grabbed this image from another Cloudy/Tesla fan :-)

I’m a good listener. In the last few months, I’ve listened to:

Art of War by Sun Tzu – a fantastic reading of a vital treatise. You should read this.

Cat’s Cradle byKurt Vonnegut, Jr – I’m slowly becoming a Bokononist.

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond – I just finished yesterday. Once I got past the super-uptight voice of the reader, I rather enjoyed learning about the pleistocene and modern era.

Next up is the 22+ hours of the abridged Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson.

National Treasure 7-3-09  A fun chase scene

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy 7-3-09.  Read the books instead, they are much better. Maybe it’s the British thing but it seemed that every line in the movie was delivered wrong. :-(

Sin City 7-5-09. 52:10 “Hi, I’m Shelly’s new boyfriend and I’m out of my mind.” Shivers down my spine. Lots of shivers. Very very cool.

Night of the Living Dead 7-10-09. Holy crap, that is a scary movie. It stands the test of time and then some. And the ending really really flipped me out. See Night of the Living Dead free on Archive.org.

Thumbs down on this book.

I got about 1/2 way through listening to the unabridged “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)”. I couldn’t finish it. Not enough science, too angry, too snarky, too jerk-like, too monochromatic, too… a lot of things. And the reader amplified those emotions.

Here is my simplified version of the book:

You’ve seen this a million times before: some jerk cuts you off on a highway on-ramp at 5:30 on a Friday afternoon, you speed up to see who this moron could be and he waves apologetically at you! What could this doo-doo head possibly he possibly be thinking? There was a study about this. It said that most people on the highway aren’t really jerks. But let’s get back to this idiot who cut you off.

I kept thinking it would get better, that the author would dive more into the ample quantity of interesting studies he’s read, that he’d bridge together ideas from across the story-arc. That he’d propose some ideas that didn’t sound like they came from some white-knuckled, road-raged jerk. But that didn’t happen.

1.5 out of 5 stars. (0.5 stars for choosing a good topic)

As part of a dumb class action lawsuit, I received a 1 month 3-DVD-at-a-time subscription to Netflix at no cost to me. I’m sure the lawyers were richly compensated. See section 1.2 of “Amended Settlement Agreement” below for the specifics of the lawsuit.

(Frank Chavez v. Netflix, Inc. Class Action, San Francisco Superior Court, Case No. CGC-04-434884, local copy of  Amended Long Form Notice of Class Action and Proposed Settlement, local copy of Amended Settlement Agreement.)

These are still on my list… didn’t have time to have them mailed to me:
The King of Kong
Robot Monster
Superbad
S. Darko: A Donnie Darko Tale
Waking Life
 

So here’s what I rented in 30 days… (reviews to come eventually!)

The Omega Man
Failure to Launch
Sideways
The Bucket List
Strange Culture
The Departed
Crash
Psychos in Love
Children of Men
X-Men 3: The Last Stand
A Scanner Darkly
The Illusionist
X2: X-Men United
National Treasure
Solaris
Stranger than Fiction
Sin City

Batman: The Dark Knight on 2-27-09. Intense. Quite a ride

V For Vendetta 3-28-09. I came out of the movie thinking it was completely excellent. After a few minutes of mulling I can think of many plot holes and unexplained bits. So I’ll just say that the theme and visual elements of the movie were excellent. A little something was missing… maybe it got lost on the editing room floor? Still a worthwhile movie!

Primer at the recomendation of Warren Lynch (film maker). It was really good and entertaining.

X Men 2 and X Men 3 – Jeez, they are scary violent. I mean, when you go up against Wolverine, he doesn’t knock you out or paralyse you or anything; he puts 6 long metal blades into you and moves them in opposing directions with superhuman strength. He kills you. And the ending of X Men 3… yow, Jean Grey uses telekinesis to tear everyone in a 100 yard radius into what look like 1/4″ blobs of flesh.

Star Trek. Saw it at the Metreon on the IMAX screen last night with Brenden, Charlotte, Jon F and Rick T. Wow. This is the summer’s blockbuster. Very heavy on the attitude, energy, emotion and visuals. A couple plot holes but that’s not what the movie was about. It was more about getting kick-ass backstories for the ST:TOS characters that we thought we already knew and loved.  This morning I was exhausted; I think it was because the movie took it out of me. Phew!

On my home from work on April 1 I came across the Ferocious Few rocking hard in front of the Montgomery Street BART station. They really rock.

This is a followup to my first post about this event.

The second amazing thing I experienced at  Caminantes de la Tierra was Israel Haros. He read a poem to the audience near the beginning of the show and followed that up with this very intense performance that I’m just going to have to experience again to fully get the gist of.

Very cool.

Much of Lulacruza’s music is available online on their website.

Last week I saw Lulacruza performing with several performance artists. The show was fantastic.

One of the most notable aspects of the show was what I’m calling the “Visible Dancer”. It was performed by Diana Suarez-Vargas, a Bay Area dancer and multimedia artist.  

A dancer in a darkened theater. She started low, sliding around the stage mostly sitting down. Behind her the video screen was dark except for a few faint red wisps. As she moves around to the music  I can see that there is a small video screen on her chest. It is showing many flowing abstract images. As she becomes more animated, the purpose of the screen in her chest becomes clear, it is showing what is going on inside her… it’s a window into her heart. That might seem hokey until you actually see it. It’s amazing.

The screen behind her continued to show vague outlines until she begins dancing more and more animatedly. Eventually I can make out wispy outlines of a dancer on the screen. I realize that the screen is showing a kind of spiritual x-ray of the dancer before me.

The effect is profound. The dancer and the x-ray are not entirely in time with one another… as is appropriate for trying to capture such energy. Sometimes the dancer leads, sometimes the x-ray. Sometimes the image fades and I see other things. I think the x-ray isn’t capturing the dancer’s motion but her intention.

As she moves, the heart window changes. Sometimes looking like flowing silk, sometimes almost dark and empty, sometimes I can see flames through the window as if I’m looking through the open door of a furnace. This is very intense.

More about the show