Amon Tobin has been busy. This is a busy recording. It is like aural schizophrenia. The title track frightens me. Lions and tigers and.. oh my.

Without fail, after reading a chapter or two before going to sleep, I have terrible dreams. I don’t know why.

It’s a little creepy. I feel haunted.

Part of me would like to give up and remove the book from the house, while another part of me feels drawn toward it by a weird craving.

Can a book make you go slightly insane?

An interesting synthesis of ideas regarding architectural design and its effects on human well-being. Presents a broad overview of select architectural styles with a strong focus on the works and ideas of Le Corbusier. While the subject matter interested me greatly, I found the author went a bit long. A similar essay-length treatment would have sufficed.

Why couldn’t someone have made an animated film about cute, singing and dancing penguins that was actually for kids?

So I enjoyed the movie, and my wife enjoyed the movie, but my kids, who are six and four and were expecting to love this movie, didn’t really go for it. Most of it was over their heads. They made it through the scary parts just fine, which I was glad to see. But the penguin mating stuff, the crooning, the preening, the bumping and grinding, were all just a bit much. I don’t know what to make of a scene that begins with fuzzy penguin chicks and climaxes in an orgy of gyrating penguin bodies. Do you? How do I explain such a thing? The message seemed to be: have a beautiful body and shake your beautiful ass and you can be happy, too. What’s with that? Seems like we’ve hardly evolved beyond Cinderella.

At least Cinderella’s mice friends didn’t freak dance.

I feel an odd connection to Franzen’s writing. His portrayal of a midwestern upbringing in the 70s strikes eerily close to home. Sometimes I felt as though I were the main character in the story, largely due to his great skill as a writer and the story intersections with my own personal history.

Some of these stories I had read previously, in part or in whole, in The New Yorker, which means I paid twice for the pleasure of reading them. And perhaps Franzen was paid twice for the effort, which is good work if you can get it. These stories are well worth the price paid.

Mother gets a part-time job as a bookkeeper in order to pay off the loan on the new addition to the house and Beatrice, the older sister, exclaims, “Mother, you’ve been liberated!” Yes, even in 1975 this was an ironic statement. And in a kid’s book! Love it. The Ramona series is darn good.

This is a subtle and brilliant film. It’s possibly without fault. It is short (approximately 75 minutes) and the action takes place in real time. It’s an “edge of the seat” movie. And the DVD version is terrific. I believe it’s the first DVD I’ve ever watched twice back-to-back, the first time straight through and the second time with the commentary track by the director, Robert Wise, and the incomparable Martin Scorsese. The commentary is exceptional. The film is exceptional.

I feel like a teenager because what I really want to write about Bullitt is that IT’S SO F@$%ING AWESOME! Here are some things that make it awesome:

• Shot on location in San Francisco in 1968
• Prolific and masterful use of the zoom lens
• Car chase over the SF hills ending in fiery death for the bad guys
• Steve McQueen as the proto-”rogue cop just doing his job by any means necessary”
• Jacqueline Bisset as the too-good girlfriend
• A one minute long scene amidst the action wherein the principal actors watch silently as a “fax” prints on a byzantine telecopier machine.
• The noticeable absence of musical queues, especially during the action scenes.

The feeling I got while watching Bullitt was that I’d seen it before, and I have, thousands of times on TV and in movies. Bullitt is the blueprint from which nearly every police drama takes shape, and it’s better than most of it’s offspring.

The DVD also includes the short ‘Bullitt’: Steve McQueen’s Commitment to Reality which is quite funny (unintentionally so) and well worth watching.

I forgot that I had seen this already years ago at the Seattle Art Museum Film Noir Series. Oh well, it was good again.

Anansi Boys is full of interesting characters and quotable lines. Here’s one of my favorite lines, given to Maeve Livingstone as she grows accustomed to the irrefutable fact that she is dead:

Ah well, she thought, being dead is probably just like everything else in life: you pick up some of it as you go along, and you just make up the rest.

A lovely idea.