Eyesore to Eyesore

Yes, it must be beer and architecture week here at LFTNBT.

James Howard Kunstler, Next Bests passim, has published yet another Eyesore of the Month, and this one is truly ugly. It looks like Darth Vader's summer house, all it needs is a regular fly-by by a couple of Tie-Advanced and perhaps an Imperial Shuttle on top. Especially in the picture James chooses, the one below is slightly less bunker like.



But then again it's not too dissimilar to a previous Eyesore that I think I disagree with. This is the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.



Kunstler describes this as a "stuffy old gentleman of a museum [that] has developed a horrendous steel and glass tumor". I get what he's saying there, but to me it seems that there's an idea behind the "tumor".

The older building is perfectly fine to my eyes if, yes, a little stuffy. It looks like an old museum with slightly churchy pretensions (I'm sure there's a proper jargon for this). The extension is something new, but it also looks like it is growing out of the original building. Almost like the old place couldn't quite contain all those ideas in one place and the new annexe just exploded out of it.

I don't think that it's crazy for crazy's sake; it's saying museums don't need to be stuffy whilst being, rightly, anchored to its past.

First, They Came For Our Tortillas...

... But I don't eat many tortillas and so I thought it was an amusing, if slightly worrying, side-effect of the move to bio-fuel.

But now... Now it seems that that side-effect is also going to make tequila and German beer more expensive. How about we just outlaw SUVs, and maybe make public transport more attractive, and leave the beer alone, eh?

Building Britain

The Guardian has a very eyecatching slideshow of British architecture through the ages.

I particularly liked that one of the examples for the Victorian era is Salt's Mill in Saltaire near Bradford, as it is an impressive building, and village—Saltaire was, to a large extent, built by Salt to keep his workers happy—, and well worth a visit just to walk around the place itself, but the David Hockney stuff should be perused too.

Beer Foamy!

According to Slate magazine there's a war over wine vs. beer and, in America, wine is winning. Hey guys, can't we all just get along? Most hmm-worthy, though, is this paragraph:

Part of beer's populist appeal—and its edge in the beer vs. wine war—has always been its absence of cant about its main point: to provide a little (or a lot of) happy intoxication. You can appreciate wine, but you drink beer, the saying goes.

Huh? I guess America has no real equivalent of CAMRA. England is fully capable of producing beers that fit either catagory —to be drunk or to be appreciated— and quite a few —Timothy Taylors Landlord, Black Sheep, almost anything you buy in a bottle at the local offy— that meet both criteria. If Americans really believe that wine has more taste and character than a beer, and, well, they do drink Bud, they should get themselves to a beer festival as quickly as possible and sample the full range of bitters and milds and ales on offer. It'd do them good.

Great Moments in Academic Research

From the Guardian comes news that Tesco is help helping it's older workers to understand the young 'uns by giving them a language guide. The kicker to this story, though, is this:

Researchers at Leeds University have discovered, after ploughing through 700 hours of recorded conversations across Britain, that words for simple objects vary greatly across the UK.

Or, you know, they could have driven across the country stopping at random bakeries and asked for a Bread cake, Cob, Bun, Roll, Muffin, Bap or Batch and took note of what they got in return. Then again, I suppose people have known this for a while. The Leeds research probably has a distinct "youth" twist or something.

Entering Los Angeles

Apparently, director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, an episode of The Sopranos, not to be confused with Get Carter director Mike Hodges whose career is equally spotty), was detained at LAX recently for telling security that he was there to "shoot a pilot"...

Reminds me of the time when I was in America with my brother and the family we were staying with asked me what I'd like to eat and I replied that I could "murder an Indian". There was a strained silence until my brother told me that you couldn't do that in the US anymore.

Drink Labels

The above pic is a mock up made by the BBC to show the sort of label that will have to appear on bottles or cans of alcohol by the end of 2008. I can think of a number of things I dislike about this, but the thing that struck me the most was the warning on the label:

Avoid alcohol if pregnant or trying to conceive.

I don't know, but it strikes me that if you are trying to get pregnant then alcohol could help quite a bit...

Scathing Private Ryan

The End Of Cinema likes Spielberg's top heavy movie even less than I do. He doesn't much like the top bit for a start:

Spielberg's decision to show the battle from Hanks's point of view is especially limited, in that it reduces the heroism of many to that of one: the star and protagonist. In SPR, Spielberg repeatedly reduces the general and the epic to the specific and generic. Thus the massive Omaha Beach landing is reduced to a half dozen guys in a small space fighting one gun and a handful of Germans.

He doesn't much like the films conclusions:

Thus the audience member, after being shown their own cowardice, is asserted to be a murderer as well. It's one of the most insulting things I've ever seen on film, and I can't believe how many people are willing to let Spielberg get away with it. How can this film be taken as a glorification of The Greatest Generation when it shows them repeatedly engaging in the same brutal habits as the pure evil Nazis of Schindler's List?

And he reckons he's seen 53 War Movies that are better, that Pearl Harbour, Top Gun and Braveheart are among them speaks volumes.

An Essay on Criticism

Some neither can for Wits nor Criticks pass,
As heavy Mules are neither Horse or Ass.
Those half-learn'd Witlings, num'rous in our Isle,
As half-form'd Insects on the Banks of Nile:
Unfinish'd Things, one knows now what to call,
Their Generation's so equivocal:
To tell 'em, wou'd a hundred Tongues require,
Or one vain Wit's, that might a hundred tire.

An Essay on Criticism, Alexander Pope
Slacktivist links to a couple of articles, one, by Richard Schickel in the Los Angeles Times, very much against the idea of bloggers as critics and the other, by Kevin Drum in Washington Monthly, a rebuttal of the first article.

Fun reads if you like a little sneering thrown in with your opinions, and who doesn't?

For me there is a problem with every man and his blog reviewing any and every last damn thing they want —and it's one that touches slightly on elitism so I do find myself partly agreeing with Schickel— the problem is that the taste of the masses is safe and fairly predictable.

There are some great movies out there at the moment, right this second, and I don't really care what some kid from whereever thinks about Spiderman 3. What I like is positive recommendations from someone whose taste is roughly similar but, importantly, not the same as mine — like everyone else I'm also partial to the occasional excoriation of a really bad movie but let's not dwell on that. Given the size of the blogging public you are bound to find one or two bloggers that fit this criteria and that write well enough that you would read reviews of things you might not otherwise be interested in.

I regularly visit 3 movie opinion sites: Bright Lights Film Journal, which has recently had a good run of longer thoughtful pieces on Orson Welles, James Bond and Louise Brooks; Not Coming To A Theater Near You whose Screening Log is always interesting reading; and, of course, Vince Keenan who I've bigged up before.

What these sites have in common is that they've raved over a number of films that I've raved over, I've disagreed with their opinions from time to time, they have an enthusiasm for their subject that can be very compelling, they are very readable and, most importantly, I've bought or borrowed DVDs that I might not have heard of because of what they've said. I've used these site to expand my appreciation of movies out side of what I might have managed on my own. Which explains why my DVD collection starts somewhere around L'Atalante, passes through a couple of Bogart collections, a Kurosawa collecion, Nine Queens and Oldboy and ends up at Zatoichi, but also includes Galaxy Quest, Mission Impossible and the Big Lebowski.

Maybe others feel the same about Richard Schickel, I don't know, he just had to impress his editor so he's not had to deal with my fickle "unsubscribe" button. I've had other movie sites in my feeds and favourites, and I dropped them when they stopped meaning anything to me, I've looked at too many sites that think worshipping Bruce Campbell somehow makes them B-movies experts or that unironically loving trashy movies elevates those movies to art. I spent some time at Ain't It Cool News, too, but I showered thoroughly afterwards.

So, while I agree that much reviewing on the Internet is worthless, small shiny nugget in all those opinions is worth all the digging to get it. Part of reviewing should be promote the obscure gems and the difficult-but-rewarding as well as the just genuinely great and I like to think that I've found a handful of sites that have made it easy to get to the good stuff.

Meatless Meals Mercilessly Misrepresented

A rebuttal of the anti-veganism article linked to below.

The prosecutor knew the truth, which is that no responsible vegan parent in the world would feed an infant, who was born three months premature, a diet of apple juice and soy milk. (Note–have you ever looked at a carton of soy milk? Somewhere on every carton of soy milk I have run across is a statement something like the following: "Not to be used as an infant food." One cannot easily misunderstand that, unless of course, one is illiterate, stupid, or a murderer.)

The prosecutor got it, but Nina Planck did not, and she used this tragic case of parental ignorance, neglect and cruelty, to step up on her soapbox and paint all vegan parents as irresponsible kooks.

Who says I can't be fair and balanced, eh?