We finally saw The Dark Knight. It's a film I had wanted to see earlier, but L. resisted it because of the violence she had heard about, and the comic-book content. I told her that the old Batmans were more hokey, but that I enjoyed Batman Begins, and that this new one was by the same director, Christopher Nolan. She gave in this afternoon, but I wish she wouldn't have. The film is an unwieldy mess, overlong, with a plot that lumbers along and then just dies out, with fair-to-middling actors like Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhart bringing almost zero presence to their roles, while Bale overacts in too many spots. Michael Caine is thrown some empty lines, and Morgan Freeman is given nothing to work with. Gary Oldman putters around, doing a competent, if lackluster job, as Commish Gordon. The film is really there to see Heath Ledger as the Joker, which is a very good performance. However, what the Joker has to say is rather annoying, especially as the film hits the mid-point, because it's here that the writers--the Nolan brothers--decide to have their own characters explain their motivations as characters, so that audience members can more easily follow along, or so it seems. I wouldn't know why else a character would just start auto-philosophizing. I would have much rather had the Joker unexplained, and just acting/reacting as his character saw fit. There was no need for the excrutiating exposition of character by the characters. It felt very much like the Nolans just gave up. The gadgetry and car chases, the CGI world, are all very well done, and it's the secondary reason to see the film, apart from Ledger's performance. Other than that, it's pretty thin soup.

I am a bit late to the game with immersion environments like Second Life, but I've recently been asked to accomplish some tasks for a course that I'm taking. One of the tasks was to take a snapshot of my character/myself in the Second Life world. Here it is:



Second Life is a strange place, with perfect weather all day long and zombie-like behavior from other people/identities.

Received:

Donna Stonecipher, The Cosmopolitan, Coffee House, 2008.

Eleni Sikelianos, Body Clock, Coffee House, 2008.

Jack Marshall, The Steel Veil, Coffee House, 2008.

Tomaž Šalamun, Woods and Chalices, Harcourt, 2008.

The Holy Mountain, written and directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky. To say that this film is richer, more disgusting, more satirical, more orgiastic, etc., than El Topo is to tell the truth. I'm not sure that it's more effective, though. It's much messier, more sprawling, and vaguer in its goals, but it is compelling art. It is engaging. There is truly drugdreamed imagery throughout, and some beautiful occurences of color and narrative, including a lot of jesus mannequins, clothed frogs, and big pastor hats. Perhaps one must explain it by a secondary allusion, by insisting that the sequel to Night of the Living Dead, which was called Dawn of the Dead, was the superior movie. It was more sprawling and decadent, yet somehow, incongruously, more pointed than the first.

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Also saw Domestic Disturbance with John Travolta and Vince Vaughn. Barely passable fare, like by a quarter of an inch. Travolta plays a kind of sad sack dad, pretty convincingly, while Vaughn adequately promotes sinister. Entertaining, yet fairly stupid. "Eh," as my brother says.

View of Plumas National Forest near Belden from the Indians Springs Trail.

Because Mount Shasta's easier routes have been reduced to talus and scree climbs now, I've switched gears to doing strenuous hikes elsewhere. Today, Lisa and I drove up Hwy 70 East, through Plumas National Forest, an area that's been hard-hit by recent fires, especially in a town called Concow. The forks of the Feather River pass through here, as well as Union Pacific Railroad. We drove through rocky, ghost-treed areas of recent burning, all the way up to a town (population 26) called Belden. A section of the Pacific Crest Trail passes through here, and it was the reason we drove up all the winding way, but we found it to be closed due to the recent fires (charred trees lay over the trail, and other, unsafe, still-standing burnt trees hovered above the trail). Instead we chose to do the trail next to it, called the Indian Springs Trail. We had no literature on it, but decided to give it a shot. It's a steep, rocky trail. And, it's steep quite quickly. It, too, was full of fallen, charred trees, but the trail itself was clear. It turned out to be too much for L.--it was a pretty nasty climb--after a couple of miles, so we came back down. It was in the upper 80s, though, and so it worked out to be quite a little challenge. We continued on the way up to a town called Quincy. We visited the Plumas County Museum, where we read up on and viewed the displays of local history--Chinese settlers, Maidu Indians, guns, coins, dolls, pump-action vacuums and pianos, baskets, taxidermed animals (mountain lion, barn, pygmy, and horned owls, golden eagle, red hawk, fox, etc.), and one birthing chair (note the stirrups).






When we came home, we drove through the butte area near us, and saw all the scorched lands from still a different fire, the Humboldt Fire, which I've mentioned before. Here's a picture, which doesn't do justice to the full amount of black land:

The Customer is Always Wrong--The Retail Chronicles contains one of my work stories, "Other Things in Mind." The Customer is Always Wrong is a collection of stories about working retail. For one more week, you can read it free at Foreword Magazine, download info on the rightside of the page. Publisher's Weekly had this to say about the collection:

The mundane tasks and indignant exchanges with impossible customers are hilariously captured in this collection of personal essays by a cross-section of writers and humorists. Some, like a spa attendant's dishy tale, are spun with a catty flair and flirt with a mild contempt for frivolous consumers; others, like Wendy Spero's turn as a door-to-door knife seller, are outrageously funny and incorporate life lessons in the litany of humiliations. Breezy and occasionally creepy musings on everything from guilt over serving fattening Swedish pancakes to seniors to the horrors of working at Sears may provide some nostalgic chuckles and perhaps even some unpleasant flashbacks as this collection elevates retail selling to a rite of passage. Two stories in particular that have less to do with the frustrations of the job and more about the impact of the experience on future endeavors: Hollie Gillespie recounts her days as an industrious child entrepreneur and maintains her steadfast optimism in humanity, and the memories of writer and one-time drummer Jim DeRogatis, who passed the time-but never worked-in a local music store reveals the enduring influence of a mentoring shop owner and achieves true poignancy. (Sept.)

Many dead on K2, the second highest mountain in the world. Everest News main page, with continually updated information. Here's The New York Times article.

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Ernesto "Che" Guevara climbing Popocatépetl, the second highest peak in Mexico at 17,802 ft (1955):



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I'm currently reading Anatoli's Boukreev's diary collection called Above the Clouds. Boukreev perished in 1997 on the most dangerous mountain in the world, Annapurna I, where the successful summit climb to death ratio is 2:1. Here's Annapurna I:



Here's Anatoli:

Rec'd from the middle of the country two chapbooks from Mitzvah:

Chuck Stebelton's A Maximal Object

Anne Boyer's Art is War

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I have not read Mr. Stebelton's chapbook yet, but I did just now finish Ms. Boyer's. There were two things that kept recurring to me while reading it. One was a painting by Rene Magritte that I've always enjoyed. Here it is:



Young Girl Eating A Bird, 1927

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The other connection was literary: John Ashbery's 100 Multiple-Choice Questions. It's been 38 years since it was initially published, and it still remains one of the finest things ever done. Such deep and wonderful humor, such reserve, wit, incongruity, slight feelings of an author appalled, etc.

Adventures in Poetry put it out again in 2002, and you can buy it here. Here are four from the Ashbery book--these will be a mess in Unicode:

1. Thinking can help to solve problems because
A) problems exist only in the mind D) not to think would be to avoid the problem
B) problems must be taken seriously E) no problem can be completely solved anyway
C) mind triumphs over matter F) it is our duty to think our way out of problems

2. In the sentence, “My vacation was spent in the mountains,” the word “mountains” is the
A) subject D) verb
B) predicate E) gerund
C) noun F) none of these

3. Christopher Columbus used an egg to prove that the earth is round because
A) the egg is round D) an egg is a familiar object
B) an egg conveys the idea of roundness E) eggs are found on ships
C) eggs are not round but ellipsoidal F) the egg came first

4. A phalanx is a(n)
A) group of men D) political party
B) Egyptian idol E) plant found in swampy areas
C) term of military strength F) promise made to oneself

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If you put the spirit of the Magritte and the Ashbery together you will get very close to the spirit of Ms. Boyer's book. The reader will also find some good deals on lawnmowers.