I’m making carrot soup with lemon and ginger. It smells great!
what’s on the stove
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Author Archives: ghw
i see a light
Two weeks from today I give the last exam of the semester.
Until then, I still have a stack of stuff to grade sitting in front of me.
wow. now that’s what i call music!
In my neverending quest for interesting music, I’ve downloaded a couple of (free & legal) mp3’s by the band Godspeed You Black Emperor. Wow. On first listen I am blown away. If you have high-speed access (or dialup and a lot of time), download these tracks and listen for yourself.
Their album entitled Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven is reviewed at Allmusic.com and Pitchforkmedia.
what’s on your comix list?
Via Scott McCloud: Time Magazine columnist Andrew D. Arnold presents a list of 25 “must-read” works of graphic literature from the last 25 years. I give enthusiastic endorsement to much of the list, but I balk at Our Cancer Year (a moving story, but not representative of Pekar’s best work, and the artwork in this one leaves me cold), The Golem’s Mighty Swing (pretty, but cheap baseball sentimentalism), and Flood (Drooker’s a great illustrator, but this word-less tale seemed kind of superficial to me). I am not crazy about From Hell, although I like much of Alan Moore’s other work. Why the heck isn’t Moore’s Watchmen on this list? Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns? Meh. Find Miller’s Batman: Year One, instead.
If you are only going to buy two of these works, I would recommend Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Stuck Rubber Baby, two very different but beautiful and powerfully affecting works.
something’s got to give, indeed
Have you seen the trailer for the new movie Something’s Gotta Give? I really couldn’t tell you what it’s about, but I do know that it looks like a character played by Keanu Reeves (who is 40) dates a character played by Diane Keaton (who is 57). Oh, and Jack Nicholson (who is 66) is in the movie, too.
Two things really chafe me about the preview. First, you can tell it’s supposed to be surprising that a man Reeves’ age is interested in a woman Keaton’s age. Now how often have we been expected to swallow a movie in which an older male actor like, say, Michael Douglas (born in 1944) plays the husband of a younger female actor like, say, Gwyneth Paltrow (born in 1972)? Reverse the genders of the two leads, apparently, and Hollywood doesn’t think we’ll be able to handle it without “acknowledging” that such a pairing is hard to believe.
Second, there’s a “comic” scene in which Jack Nicholson’s character comes upon Diane Keaton’s character naked and is apparently so shocked by the sight of her 57-year-old body that he staggers backwards and runs into a wall. This is funny? This is believable? Now, if Keaton’s character came upon Nicholson naked and was disgusted, that I could believe. I mean, have you seen Jack Nicholson?