The best bit about this film was undoubtedly where a few young guys are outdoors, singing a song by Håkan Hellström, walking by an open window where an apartment party is happening; the party people hear the song, join the singing and just before the outdoors-y party disperses, it looks as though they’re two parties are serenading each other. That was really lovely. Other times, not so: nobody’s really introduced in the entire film. There are no clear reasons for anything, which can be really enticing where done well (e.g. by Hitchcock, Audiard, Assayas) but here it’s just left hanging, which left me frustrated and in the end not giving a toss. All in all, this documentary is pretentious and simply not good. But the scene described by me is the golden nugget; see that and then turn off the film and listen to Håkan Hellström’s latest album instead, because it doesn’t touch any on his earlier work.

http://indoorkids.bandcamp.com/album/indoor-cats-unfiltered-aspirations

The Mazzy Star track – “Fade Into You” – should be on the album but isn’t. It’s used well in the film, though.

How do game developers work? What torments them? What are the pros and cons? Well, the best part about this documentary is when the developers talk about their pains. Personally, I love when you see somebody’s pains and the real grit they have to go through in order to get something done. I also liked to see the differences explained between working on a major game where 1000 people are involved and the indies, where you have 1-10 people involved. The bad bit about this is having to sift through tediousness; the filmmakers should have made the film quicker with more pep in its step. After a third into the film, I almost lost consciousness. In the end, it’s only interesting to gamers due to how slow it is, which is bad. Better editing could maybe have changed that.

This is a documentary on the West Memphis 3. This is the third rolling installment of a giant miscarriage of justice, in part due to having a legal system with a jury, in part due to the police wanting to write “Closed!” on a case file where it’s highly profiled. Having seen this, I’ll never go live in Arkansas. And I think everybody needs to see this – or the upcoming “West of Memphis” documentary – documentary where all can see how easy it is to sentence kids to spending the rest of their lives in jail, based on very sketchy “evidence”. It’s not particularly well made, but the contents are bared for all to see, and the contrasts between those convinced of the boys’ guilt or their innocence is very giving – and also, of remorse.

A lot more melodical than your typical Nitzer Ebb, especially where song is concerned.

This is a really engaging book on David Foster Wallace. Sure, people might say that Wallace’s life is what makes this book good, but it’s not. There would be too much of it to make sense of it all without a good deal of sifting, editing and moulding, which D. T. Max has done here.

It’s a chronological book that undoubtedly puts Wallace up front, even though I get the feeling that’s what Wallace would least of all have wanted, during his lifetime.

Having read “Infinite Jest” and “The Pale King” before I read this biography, I must say it was completely eye-opening at times, when it comes to his works.

Starting off with Wallace’s childhood, we learn of his connection with language and play:

No one else listened to David as his mother did. She was smart and funny, easy to confide in, and included him in her love of words. Even in later years, and in the midst of his struggle with the legacy of his childhood, he would always speak with affection of the passion for words and grammar she had given him. If there was no word for a thing, Sally Wallace would invent it: “greebles” meant little bits of lint, especially those that feet brought into bed; “twanger” was the word for something whose name you didn’t know or couldn’t remember. She loved the word “fantods,” meaning a feeling of deep fear or repulsion, and talked of “the howling fantods,” this fear intensified. These words, like much of his childhood, would wind up in Wallace’s work. To outside eyes, Sally’s enthusiasm for correct usage might seem extreme. When someone made a grammatical mistake at the Wallace dinner table, she would cough into her napkin repeatedly until the speaker saw the error. She protested to supermarkets whenever she saw the sign “Ten items or less” posted above their express checkout lines.

Yeah, his mother was a language nazi, which he also turned into. Although Wallace seems to have been very gentle about that, except when admonishing his own work and correcting his students (and his editors and proof readers).

He was great at learning stuff that seemed finite, but in other cases he faced problems:

His teammates were more successful with girls than Wallace, and, frustrated, he would try to solve the complexity of attraction the way he solved the trajectory of a tennis shot: “How do you know when you can ask a girl out?” “How do you know when you can kiss her?” His teammates told him not to think so hard; he would just know.

While discovering life and earning top marks in school, he started writing.

One story he worked on, according to Costello, was called “The Clang Birds,” about a fictional bird that flies in ever decreasing circles until it disappears up its own ass.

His literary turn to honesty as a main driving force is clearly visible throughout his growing up, partly because he was an alcoholic, but also because lying seemed to permeate society:

A typical line from an ad featuring the pathologically inaccurate spokesman: “Hi, I’m Joe Isuzu and I used my new Isuzu pickup truck to carry a two-thousand-pound cheeseburger.” The prospect that horrified Wallace most was that Americans were so used to being lied to that any other relationship with media would feel false.

He answered letters from fellow authors – notably writing with Don Delillo and Jonathan Franzen – and was often apologising:

He made amends wherever he could, sometimes to excess. He wrote to his Arizona sponsor that “I struggle a great deal, and am 99.8% real,” then crossed that out and wrote in “98.8%,” noting in a parenthesis in the margin, “Got a bit carried away here.”

When writing about boredom in “The Pale King”:

As he wrote in a notebook: Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. The problem came up when he tried to dramatize this idea. How do you write about dullness without being dull? The obvious solution, if you had Wallace’s predilections, was to overwhelm this seemingly inert subject with the full movement of your thought. Your characters might be low-level bureaucrats, but the rippling tactility of your writing would keep them from appearing static. But this strategy presented its own problem: Wallace could make the characters vibrant, but only at the risk of sacrificing what made their situation worth narrating—the stillness at the center of their lives. How could you preach mindful calmness if you couldn’t replicate it in prose? A failed entertainment that succeeded was just an entertainment. Yet Wallace had never really found a verbal strategy to replace his inborn one. In more ways than he cared to acknowledge he remained the author of The Broom of the System.

It didn’t seem like Wallace would ever fall victim to hubris:

In time these early Internet users took up Wallace for their fan communities too, a transition that particularly discomfited him (though to be fair anything that reinforced the masonry of the statue did). When in March 2003 a member of Wallace-l told Wallace about their email list at a taping of a reading for The Next American Essay, a compilation of creative nonfiction edited by John D’Agata that Wallace had contributed to, his response was, “You know, for emotional reasons and sanity I have to pretend this doesn’t exist.”

And, in the very end:

They joked about the unthinkable. Green warned him that if he killed himself she’d be “the Yoko Ono of the literary world, the woman with all the hair who domesticated you and look what happened.” They made a pact that he would never make her guess how he was doing.

It’s a lovely book, it really is. It’s easy to draw parallels between the lives of DFW and Bill Hicks, both persons being gentle, humble, passionate, thinking and self critical.

Wallace had been mulling the possibilities for a third novel since the mid-1990s, even as he began the stories that would form the heart of Brief Interviews. The setting had come early, possibly even before the publication of Infinite Jest: he knew he wanted to write about the IRS. The agency fit well with Wallace’s Pynchonian appetite for clandestine organizations and hidden conspiracies. And like the tennis academy and recovery house in Infinite Jest, it was a world unto itself, where characters would be in charged apposition to one another. Wallace himself had had numerous small brushes with the agency over the years, usually involving trivial errors on Form 1099s that he or his accountant had to get corrected. These encounters touched off the same anxiety within him as communications from lawyers and fact-checkers. He had an idea as well of the IRS as a secular church, a counterpart to Alcoholics Anonymous in Infinite Jest.14 But, finally, he probably settled on the IRS for the most obvious reason: it was the dullest possible venue he could think of and he had decided to write about boredom.

It’s hard to review anything by David Foster Wallace to me, so far. His books are life-changers in a way that they skewer your mind and, at the least, force yourself into questioning your own ways but also those of others. It’s a bit like listening to how Bill Hicks started reacting at the end of his life, when he received word that he would die from cancer: everything’s tinged with timelessness, written passionately, carefully and with love. It’s a very berth that doesn’t really have anything to do with throwaway culture (which is funny, considering how much Wallace immersed himself in popular culture, especially TV) but with human emotions and the intellectual.

“The Pale King” was published posthumously. Having said that, the book had to be published. I think even Wallace wanted that, considering how he left the book just before committing suicide. And it’s not only the best posthumous book I have ever read, but reading 10-20 pages into it, it was clear to me that the form and content was a clear, bested leap from “Infinite Jest”.

Wallace in his final hours had “tidied up [his] manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel.” On her blog, Kathleen Fitzpatrick reported that the Pale King manuscript edited by Michael Pietsch began with “more than 1000 pages … in 150 unique chapters”. The published version is 540 pages and 50 chapters.

— From the Wikipedia article on “The Pale King”

Still, it’s extremely good form. And I can’t imagine how tough it must have been to edit the book. Pietsch, a long-time editor with Wallace, must have done a terrific job. Wallace’s notebooks from writing “The Pale King” are available online, thanks to the Harry Ransom Center, to help the reader see what was there.

In the process of writing the novel he came to call The Pale King, he laid out its central tenet in one of his notebooks: Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.

—From D. T. Max’s biography on David Foster Wallace, titelled “Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story”

To paraphrase Bill Hicks again: it’s a ride.

You get the intimate feel from people inside the IRS, people brought there by a life-long drive towards the bureaucratic, presenting them as humans rather than something out of a Kafka book. You get luck, love, death, life, music, and details that made me cry. The first pages of this book made me want to laud Wallace above and beyond.

And the people. Always the people. While reading the book, I often felt “I wouldn’t want to be any of these”, but at the same time, I could definitely relate to the mundane and be touched by how Wallace made it feel beautiful. Filing copies and making copies and going through the same routine over and over, while looking at the clock trying to think of ways to make time go faster, or thinking about home, night and the day after, when you will, no doubt, clatter forward in despair, tediousness and silence around you while there are people scattered only an arm’s length from you.

Wallace’s inclusion of himself as a character who made it into the IRS by chance is better than imagined. The footnotes – oh yes, there are footnotes, and not endnotes – are here as explanations, comments, another world looking in and at the same time anything but pretentious garbage.

Who other than Wallace, in modern times, had/has the ability to write something this complex without making the reading boring and the financial aspects of being an IRS worker utterly uninteresting?

Just read this. Don’t give a toss about this review, really. His words excel most I’ve ever read. This is basically human, touching and moving beyond my feeble attempts at explaining what “The Pale King” is about.

Sound quality is not good, but as a whole it’s a good document of Dino Jr live in the late 80s.

This is a fairly chronological documentary about metal music from Sweden. While I think the director lacks a bird’s-eye view of the scene and a more clear cut shot of the scene today, this is a loving documentary. It’s got heart and goes a long way to show the musicians and fans beyond the stereotype. Also, the start of Swedish metal is well documented here. Expect loads of funny anecdotes and really?-isms.