I picked this up for a few different reasons—I’m a fan of a magazine Dalrympe writes for on occasion, City Journal for one, and I also have a kind of silly fondness for a good, curmudgeonly, H.L. Mencken-flavored rant now and then. Also the cover is quite arresting, a statement right there: below the title and subtitle “The Mandarins and the Masses” is an extreme version of your standard silly punk-barbarian, died mohawk and braids, facial piercings, cat-eye contact lenses. The contrast of that cover photo and the title perfectly encapsulates the contents.

The contents, though, are a bit of a surprise. While there’s plenty of the strangely amusing cultural decline rants I’ve come to love (I’m thinking specifically of books like Paul Fusell’s _BAD: Or the Dumbing of America” here), there’s a truly despairing note I don’t often encounter that is way more touching than usual. Dalrymple, you see, has traveled the world as a physician, ministering to the victims of genocide and neglect, has seen first-hand what the breakdown of the nuclear family really means (he comes down particularly hard on the welfare-dependent single moms who choose their jackass boyfriends over their own children’s welfare as a matter of course—as who wouldn’t? It really is shocking, way more shocking than the appearance of the dude on the cover photo).

Don’t go looking for solutions here, of course: the curmudgeon rant genre rarely has any. BUT, why demand that of them? Demanding that the person who points out the problem also come up with a solution for it is a very quick and easy way to shut down dissent and stifle discourse, and allowing that to happen is part of how we got where we are.

So ultimately, this book made me sad. But I’d still recommend it to anyone.

Confession time: I’ve never been a big Beatles fan. It’s probably just a matter of extreme over-exposure, but if I never hear most of their stuff again I won’t miss it.

I’m also heartily sick of baby boomer cultural hegemony and self-congratulation. Yay. You protested the Vietnam War. Good for you. But shut up about it. That’s like being proud of saying you oppose putting broken glass in baby food. As in DUH and the news would be how criminal it would be not to have done.

That said, I did kind of get a kick out of this film. I like what happens when somebody puts Julie Taymor in charge of a film - Titus was a big bad trip worthy of the big bad trip that is the original play - and lets her go nuts. And she did go nuts in very imaginative ways.

This movie is best viewed as a piece of expressionism. So when a bunch of potential draftees at their medical screenings are broken up into pieces and parts and then put back together only to march through the swamp shouldering the Statue of Liberty and singing “She’s So Heavy” you know exactly where they’re coming from.

And the fabulous Eddie Izzard’s turn as Mr. Kite is worth sitting through the rest of the movie for right there. Brilliant and highly quotable. My best friend and I are still wandering around saying “it’s great; they’ve got stuff” and “that’s me! In the thing.”

And I also liked Bono’s cameo as the film’s fictionalized Ken Kesey. Surprisingly good casting and he pulled it off.

Will I rush to add this movie to my DVD collection? No. Will I pan it? No.

Will I object to its being put on during a card party or other random gathering of friends? No.

It’s got stuff.

Like most folks my age, my first Doctor was good old Tom Baker, during the years when John Nathan-Turner was busy trying to turn the show into Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. I got used to the silliness and only absorbed the real unearthly earnestness of it all much later with Peter Davison et al, plus all the earlier Doctors as PBS randomly aired ‘em—of the older Doctors I most liked Jon Pertwee (probably better-known now as Sean “Boromir” Pertwee’s dad), who brought some high seriousness to it all.

So I was delighted at the thought of Eccleston as the ninth Doctor, and he did not disappoint. He kept Baker’s grinning madness and still brought a good deal of gravity to the role; when he blurts out his joy that “everyone lives!” in “The Doctor Dances” you feel it all with him, all his 900+ years of conflict and wonder and pain and his steely determination to keep his humor.

Billie Piper makes a good 21st century sidekick for him, neither a prodigy of learning nor a damsel in distress nor a fighting man—rather a reasonable blend of them all. I do wish she did a little less tongue-poking in lieu of acting, but I’m sure that’s some kind of Britpopstar trademark for her and can’t be helped.

Also refreshing is the way the writers have worked this side-kick’s actual life and story into the arc of the series; we not only meet her mother and erstwhile boyfriend but continue to meet them on a series of visits. Mom doesn’t like the Doctor for taking her baby away and lets him know it; boyfriend Mickey is nicely torn between missing her and wanting to join her and fear of the unknown. It’s a good grounding for all the wild stories that a time-travel series veers off into.

All in all, pretty satisfying. I’m just sad we only had the ninth Doctor for one season!

I had never heard of this film before it appeared at the top of the schedule for our very-far-from-France city’s cinema club (pretty much the only way folk in the Cowboy State get to see foreign or “art” films on the big screen), as I am far from this kind of thing’s target audience. That being said, well, I didn’t hate it. There is nothing original here; the film is pretty much a feature-length illustration of a point made in Dangerous Beauty when a courtesan turns down a night with the court poet because they “can’t afford one another.”

In this case, of course, “afford” is a bit of a stretch; we have a woman who is your basic gold-digger, who tries to “trade up” from her current meal ticket as the film opens. She gambles and loses big; the handsome, rich young man she dallies with twice on successive birthdays turns out to be a dud from her point of view, and her rich old man turns her out on her ear.

But wait: handsome young man tries to scoop her up anyway, even after she treats him horribly and cleans him out to teach him a lesson. What luck! She has an ally, whom she proceeds to turn into another courtesan. Now they’re like the teamed-up con men in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and each has a mark before long. What fun!

Except, really, not. For all the sexiness (conveyed largely via Audrey Tatou’s parading around in ever-skimpier dresses) and romance, this is basically a tale of two parasites. Yes, they redeem themselves at the end and ride off on the motor scooter he has “earned” (am I the only one who really felt sorry for the rich older woman who gets left in the lurch here? Maybe it’s just because I’m closer to her age than the hero and heroine’s, but she’s kind of a tragic figure for all she’s a rich widow; men her age are all still chasing cute young things like Tatou, leaving her no choice but to seek out a young one, too, and essentially rent him. At their last parting, she says she’s had worse and that, for me, is the most genuinely felt moment in the whole movie).

I say it’s worth consuming only because it’s a reminder of how wonderful love can not be when it’s used as a tool.

Has anyone done a tally of how many times Mr. Larson draws attention to people’s blue eyes? Sometimes it seems there’s a mention every page. It’s a pretty annoying tick in what is otherwise an excellent read.

The “song” “What’s He Building In There?” is one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard.

I thought this title a bit of hyperbole but I love soccer almost as much as Mr. Foer, so I bit. And found that yes, in a very weird and, yes, unlikely way, soccer does explain a lot about the world.

The very first chapter, concerning Slobodan Milosovic (sp? lazy again) and the hooligan supporters of Red Star Belgrade, alone made this book worth my money. It’s a fantastic illustration right there of how sport and fandom tie right into old tribal loyalties and feuds and both accelerate and in some ways retard the onslaught of globalization. In the process, the reader learns a lot about a lot of old conflicts seen through an interesting and sometimes amusing lens.

As I read this, I was strongly reminded of the Robert D. Kaplan of Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future (one of my very favorite books) and apparently I wasn’t the only one—they got Kaplan himself to write a blurb for the jacket.

Anyone who likes soccer will of COURSE like this book—but so might some who don’t and wonder what all the fuss is about, as well as some who are just trying to look for a way to get a handle on what’s going on in the world these days. The book was published in, I think, 2004, but there’s still plenty to think upon for today’s reader.

The first half or so of this movie is, let’s face it, pretty terrible, the humor painful and forced as is a lot of the acting (and I, a Steve Coogan fan, say this), and awfully predictable as well. You might, as I was, be tempted to give up and leave.

But don’t.

Your patience will be rewarded by the capsule performance of the play itself.

Especially “Rock Me Sexy Jesus.”

I got a headache from laughing so hard.

I first took this book up in high school and put it down again before getting very far. It wasn’t that I thought it was boring, more that I was very, very tired of cold war/nuclear doomsday preaching (this was around the same time “The Day After” first aired on TV). But I had always kept it in the back of my mind as something to try again someday, and so naturally now that I’m fully immersed in Gene Wolfe’s Solar Cycle I thought of it now!

Since that time I’ve learned quite a lot of Latin, which deeply enriches the experience of reading what truly is a fantastic novel, populated as it is by latter-day (as in fourth millennium, A.D.) monks of a Catholic order pursuing their daily routines and handling crises in a post-apocalypitc Southwest.

While a lot of the book’s serious, visceral impact is reduced by exposure to so many works that took it as inspiration (I think particularly of the far-future monks in Babylon 5 who are actually Rangers), it’s still a chilling pleasure to read; the reader suffers right along with the characters in struggling to maintain hope for and faith in humanity (if not god). The treatment of the effort to canonize a far-future beatus - a technocrat who hid out in a monastary after a nuclear war left his land a hell of fallout victims, monsters and angry people hell-bent on destroying all the knowledge and tools that contributed to bringing about their plight, and later took up the faith as a means of preserving as much knowledge as he could for distant posterity - is believable, though the idea of a nation-state of Texarkana is a bit of a stretch.

All in all, great stuff!

I just didn’t find this entertaining. Definitely did not live up to the hype. I felt like I’d already watched it all by the third or fourth episode.