A thousand sadnesses. I just went to see Everything is Illuminated tonight with my peeps Joy, Kyle, and Marcia.
Several weeks ago I saw a trailer for this movie and was captivated, as much by the imagery as the song towards the end, Devotchka’s How it Ends. But there was something about the title, the phrase Everything is Illuminated which had been lost on me, obscured by the whimsical script on the book cover. Those words, “Everything is Illuminated” seem to have this grandness, like the sound of the air rushing into the tomb of Tutankhamen when it was reopened. Like the beginning and end wrapped into one. Like the ultimate coda. Or maybe I just really like the memory of having heard someone say those words.
Part of my concern in all this is how do you gauge a book well enough to determine whether it’s worth investing the time and mental space to read? The cover and jacket text can’t be trusted, they’re painstakingly crafted by market research panels to create a deep psychological desire to buy the book, and then maybe read it. I can’t read long book reviews by people who review books professionally. What do they know about me or what I’m looking for in a book, especially considering that they read and write about books for a living. Which I find highly suspect. Writing about writing that is.
Lately I’ve determined that trailers (for movies based on books) are especially persuasive and informative about the content of a book. Yes they are painstakingly crafted to get me into the movie theater to buy popcorn, with no ethical responsibility to hold true to plot of the film. But if I redirect that desire and go read the book, well then, I’ve shown them haven’t I? Not exactly sure if my thoughts on this have changed any since seeing the new trailer for the Shining.
And so it was that I watched the trailer for Everything is Illuminated back in August and was captivated. I picked up the book and read it and loved it. And tonight I watched the movie, and it was incredible to see Eugene Hutz (lead singer for Gogol Bordello) play the role of the Alex, in fact that reason alone is enough to see the movie. But that’s really all there is. There’s a nice field of sunflowers, an image used frequently in the marketing for the film, but conspicuously absent in the actual book.
It’s such a cliche to hear someone say “They changed the ending” but it’s true. Based on what I understand of the ending—Everything is Illuminated is not a book that you get after one reading, I admit—they changed the RELIGION of a primary character. WTF? Are you even allowed to do that in a book about the Holocaust? It’s funny because I treat the book as a sort of truth and the movie seems almost like a lie. Or like something seriously got lost in translation.
So think about adding the movie to the end of your Netflix queue so you can see Eugene Hutz as Alex Perchov. And then think about reading the book—the first 6 pages are online at Amazon. And we all should make a note to check out Gogol Bordello’s latest album Gypsy Punks Underdog World Strike.
Left kind of late for the free Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park this weekend. Was worried about parking and not really knowing where to do so. Takes about an hour to get from where I live to the city, and though I’m usually expecting massive centralized parking lots or garages at my destinations (as I’ve been conditioned by suburbia), I’m coming to realize that parking is just sprinkled all over the city.
I caught up with Casey and Andrew at the Rooster stage precisely at noon, just moments before Patty Griffin was due to go on. I’ve never seen her live before but really love some of her songs. We were a little far back, but given that everyone else was seated, angling for a better vantage was not really an option.
The fog was thick, which kept things cool. The sound was incredible. I’ve never experienced such a large audience being so well behaved and quiet during a performance, outdoors no less. Even between songs the crowd stayed hushed.
Afterwards at the same stage we got to see Joan Baez. The Joan Baez. I had the strongest urge to call my parents (thinking about the movie Forrest Gump) and tell them I was in San Francisco, that I did not have any flowers in my hair, but that I was listening to Joan Baez in the flesh. So I did. After she finished playing.
Nothing in particular caught our eyes in the mid-afternoon, so we went out in search of kettle korn, saw a little of Michael Fracasso, a singer Casey knew from Austin, then back to the main stage for Doc Watson with David Holt and Richard Watson. Finally we carved out some space for our last show of the day, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, who I’ve seen twice in concert and love.
Oh they were great. Gillian jokingly complained about not packing for the weather (it had turned decidedly cold and almost misty) so she put down her guitar, threw off her jean jacket to reveal the light summer dress she had on and said she’d go on playing like that until her teeth chattered. Got to hear the favs, I Want To Sing That Rock And Roll, Look At Miss Ohio, Revelator, but the song that got the crowd on their feet was David Rawlings’ bluegrass rendition of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls just wanna have fun.” It was incredible, I wish I had a recording. And they ended the hour and twenty minute set with the Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit as a tribute to San Francisco.
Though Gillian and David will be playing two nights next weekend at the Fillmore in San Francisco, I’ve already got plans to see them for the 4th time with my friend Christy in Seattle two weeks from now.
Afterwards the three of us stopped at a little taqueria in the Mission (Taqueria Cancun), got serenaded by a mariachi-type duet traveling from taqueria to taqueria, and enjoyed our respective “super tacos” and “super quesadillas.” I must admit, my pollo asado quesadilla was pretty damn super. Dropped Casey and Andrew off at the BART and headed north towards home.
I wonder if NPR’s increasing fortunes are indelibly linked to the increasing duration of the average American commute? My drive from Santa Rosa to Sebastopol takes me about 12-16 minutes (compared to a 6-8 minute bike ride from Carrboro to Chapel Hill). Over the course of a week I usually listen to a single CD several times over—for the last few days it has been With the Tides, the latest album by the British band South.
This evening I was driving down to Petaluma (about 20 minutes away) and decided instead to turn on NPR, something I really haven’t been listening to since moving here. It may be that I OD’ed on This American Life during and just after the move, it may just be that I’m still rediscovering old enjoyments after the disruption of moving. I’m not sure which.
I do know that NPR has this uncanny ability to move me, especially when I happen to be listening to it on a whim. Tonight Terry Gross on Fresh Air was interviewing Kayla Williams, a military intelligence officer who served in Kuwait and Iraq for a year from 2003-2004. She has recently written book about the experience entitled, Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army. After having heard Kayla talk, it may be the next book I pick up.
I haven’t yet listened to the full 38 minute interview (thankfully it’s all online, I love NPR), in fact during the drive I only managed to catch the last 10 minutes. But towards the end, Terry asked Kayla, “Why did you join the military?” and it turns out partly because Kayla had lost a job working for a company that provided services for PBS and NPR stations. And then she says this:
I had this feeling that I was on a path in my life where I’d not taken any risks. I had done what I knew I was good at: majored in lit which was something I was good at. I loved reading books. They gave me a degree for reading books–it almost felt like I was tricking them–to give me a college degree for doing something I loved so much. And then working for PBS, I was good at it, but it was easy for me. I hadn’t taken risks, I hadn’t taken chances and risked losing everything. And I really felt as if, if I stayed on the path I was on, I was going to wake up and be 40, with a minivan, a white picket fence, a husband, 2.5 children, a dog, no idea how I’d gotten there. I felt as if I had to break out of the rut I was digging for myself, and try something radically different.
I think I imagined that if I signed up for Netflix, even the super cheapo $9.99/month, 1-movie-at-a-time plan, I’d have movies showing up at my door every other day. I feared that I’d never go out and do anything because I’d always have a movie waiting for me, begging me to watch it.
It turns out that the one movie at a time frequency is a lot slower than you might think. Even with the closest distribution center in San Francisco, if a movie arrives on Monday, I watch it that night, and put it in the mail on Tuesday, my next movie won’t be slated to arrive until Friday (or Saturday more likely).
This means, in the best case scenario I’ll have at most two new movies to watch each week, followed by a week with one new movie, etc. That still works out to about 6 movies a month or $1.67 per movie, considerably cheaper than the Rialto at $9.25 a pop or video rental at 3 or 4 dollars.
But honestly the feature I like the most is my web-accessible Netflix queue. I’ve queued up 80 movies I’ve been interested in seeing and given the low cost, my tolerance for taking risks with independent, foreign, and documentary films (the movies I like to watch anyway) has increased considerably. Plus whenever it occurs to me that there’s something I’m interested in seeing, the distance between me and a web browser is usually short enough that I can add it to the queue and forget about it.
Seen so far: American Splendor, The Station Agent Up next: Shaolin Soccer
Here are two O’Reilly titles you might not have heard of. Both are part of the Theory in Practice series, which for some reason doesn’t have its own series page off the oreilly.com domain (as far as I can tell). Seems like they’d have been perfect texts for some of my information science classes. I do love the animal books, but based on their covers alone, I want to pick them both up on the way home.
Several weeks ago I saw a trailer for this movie and was captivated, as much by the imagery as the song towards the end, Devotchka’s How it Ends. But there was something about the title, the phrase Everything is Illuminated which had been lost on me, obscured by the whimsical script on the book cover. Those words, “Everything is Illuminated” seem to have this grandness, like the sound of the air rushing into the tomb of Tutankhamen when it was reopened. Like the beginning and end wrapped into one. Like the ultimate coda. Or maybe I just really like the memory of having heard someone say those words.
And so it was that I watched the trailer for Everything is Illuminated back in August and was captivated. I picked up the book and read it and loved it. And tonight I watched the movie, and it was incredible to see Eugene Hutz (lead singer for Gogol Bordello) play the role of the Alex, in fact that reason alone is enough to see the movie. But that’s really all there is. There’s a nice field of sunflowers, an image used frequently in the marketing for the film, but conspicuously absent in the actual book.
