Icewhistle aggregate feed

.blindness.: Camper Van Beethoven - 'Think About Me' (Fleetwood Mac cover)

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 04:44:17 -0700

Camper Van Beethoven - 'Think About Me' (Fleetwood Mac cover)

You need flash installed.

.blindness.: Absalom, Absalom!

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:02:48 -0700

Absalom, Absalom!

.blindness.: Hotel "review": Scandic Webers, Copenhagen

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:19:15 -0700

Hotel "review": Scandic Webers, Copenhagen

Pros: Bottle opener in bathroom, so you can open a beer while you are on the toilet. Also, room came with toilet paper roll that was 75% gone - which is cool - opening a new roll for every guest is stupid and wasteful. A backup roll is also provided. Cons: Shower was not hot. Small bottle of red wine left outside of minibar suggests it is complimentary, but it actually costs 75 DKK (for a 250ml bottle).

.blindness.: I'm true 412.

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:10:22 -0700

» I'm true 412.

How many professional sports championships has *YOUR* area code won in 2009????

.blindness.: Finland

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 06:53:03 -0700

Finland

Image swiped from National Geographic, from Oulanka National Park, way up in the North where I've never been cause I never get out of Helsinki. But -- soon!

.blindness.: Playoff beard - final

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 06:37:38 -0700

Playoff beard - final

After one "victory week", shaving now imminent.

.blindness.: Hey Brian Williams!

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 23:50:24 -0700

Hey Brian Williams!

You might want to hire somebody to set your clocks correctly.

.blindness.: Top Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 12:04:15 -0700

» Top Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen

By the always great Juan Cole.

.blindness.: Photos like this are why I love sports

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 12:00:07 -0700

Photos like this are why I love sports

I'm not a Hossa hater. OK, I may have felt some satisfaction at the bitter end to his season last night (and maybe said a few things on IM in the heat of the moment), but I think generally the backlash is Pittsburgh sports fans being too overwhelmingly 'local'.

However, this photo is totally fucking amazing.

icewhistle.com: Australia, again.

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 04:07:22 -0700

Awakening to the laughter of kookaburras. The chilly evenings of the Queensland winter return to the daytime heat and humidity that out-swelter the summer of my regular environment. A pile of Sunshine Coast newspapers lies beside me, all torn open to the two-way crossword and sudoku puzzles that I devour.

My partner’s gone down to Brisbane for one last night with her friends but I decided to stay back and enjoy a quiet night to myself on the Sunshine Coast. I’ve spent quite a bit of time here, in this house with a clever open-plan design and lots of screen doors overlooking the very green hillside. The in-laws; I think of the Peter Falk/Alan Arkin classic or the many cultural stereotypes but none of it applies to me. My in-laws are all about feng shui, an electric hob, a borrowed espresso machine.
And then. Hot potato scallops on the beach. Gravel crunching underfoot in Brisbane West End driveways. The thin layer of scum, probably imagined, that coats all surfaces of Fortitude Valley. The sound of The Einstein Factor bleating from ABC1 while I microwave leftover rice noodles with Panang curry base.

A night spent with a hilarious opinionated man, a tenuous connection (father of the partner of a friend of my partner) whose house I ended up in by chance. One AUS$240 bottle of wine later and I’ve been invited to see his $5,000 glass sphere purchased in China and treated to his outrage that modern women go to restaurants together and enjoy themselves without the company of men. I’m told their small town ranked #2 on a list of the most desirable places to live (right after Paris) but I suspect this ranking was in the Sunshine Coast Newspaper. This is followed by a ride home in a Mercedes amid frequent jokes/warnings about the dangerousness of the neighboring small town, in which I am staying (which is completely ridiculous, of course).

Charity shops galore! Or rather, op-shops as they are known here. I bought clothes; I bought books. Books I would never buy in Finland, books that were insanely cheap and will pose some difficulty in getting back under Qantas’s restrictive, if not fascist, weight limits.

We have not yet progressed past the dream of wanting all things in all places. This is coupled with our inherent thirftyness; thus we return with items we can’t find cheap in Helsinki: decent vegetarian furikake, a large tub of Vegemite, fluorescent magic markers, a certain kind of sore throat spray, and perhaps some organic hops if the homebrew store is open tomorrow.

Oh, the joys of pronouncing Australian place names as if they were Finnish words! Sometimes it just sounds great, better than the original (Maroochydore! Mooloolaba! Indooroopilly!) but sometimes it just doesn’t work as well as you want it to (Wooloongabba). A few visits to Maroochydore are inevitable, after all, Sunshine Plaza mall is there though the food court isn’t as magnificent as I remember; still, you can’t get falafel with satay sauce, pineapple and jalapenos in Finland (at least as far as I’m aware).

A few days each in Melbourne and Brisbane were spent continuing old habits; record stores, bookstalls, supermarkets. Tendencies I have avoided since the Departure (that time 5 years ago when I left Pittsburgh for good) but were once hallmarks of my visits to other cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit. Melbourne in particular feels a bit like all of them - an amalgamation of other cities, with flavors European and American yet a distinct Australian wrapper.

It’s the small town where I am right now that I seem to enjoy the most. Not sure if this is because it gestures towards some sort of homesickness or secret suburban envy, or because it’s incredibly comfortable here. Without anything to actually do, I can justify sitting on the couch and reading all day, drinking bottles of beer in those foam holders to keep things cool and trying to get the ridiculously slow Internet connection to stay active.

Tourism! We visit Australia Zoo, formerly run by Steve Irwin the Crocodile Hunter, now deceased, so the zoo is run by his wife. The hefty price tag and my general vegetarian unease about zoos was quickly overruled by the sheer wonders of what was inside. Wombats, otters, cassowaries, emus, kangaroos you can feed, koalas you can pet, jabirus, snakes you can be photographed with (for money). Afterwards why not hit the Ettamogah Pub? It's one of the few times I’ve had a beer inside an actual fictional place, modeled after the incomprehensible comics by Ken Maynard that every Australian grew up reading. Why not eat an overpriced steak dinner on the side of the highway? Then on the Skin Land, which is actually a place to buy leather goods and not the sleaze you’d expect. (We didn’t stop). Instead we stopped in another small town (Landsborough) and exhausted their op-shopping options (one stop; nothing bought).

Or how about the few actual cultural things I went to see; the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art, with a stunning show of Chinese art which was mostly cherry-picked from their permanent collection of Asia-Pacific Triennial holdovers but so what, cause it was great anyway? Or the National Gallery of Victoria’s permanent collection, stunning enough (particularly the indigenous art) that I didn’t feel bad about skipping the John Brack show (which wasn’t free - more money to spend on records!) QAG had an exhibition on American Realism and Impressionism opening the following day but I didn't go back; I should be looking for Australian art anyway, right?

Now, opening a tallie of Coopers (green label), I look over the empty containers of dip that I attacked the previous night. Spinach feta and rocket; mango cashew and coconut; black olive almond and parmesan. Australian supermarkets are festivals for the senses; all manners of fusion ingredients, all packaged with attractive designs and reasonable prices (for the Euro does very, very well against the Aussie Dollar). I’ve tried Cole’s, IGA and Woolworth’s, or Woolies; all have their perks.

Multiculturalism is a lovely thing. Footscray (a suburb of Melbourne) is like being simultaneously in every place on Earth. As I float between covered market, Ethiopian restaurant bar, and a mind-blowing Moroccan restaurant I feel like I am stuck between the frames of Marker’s Sans Soleil. Which is actually interesting sort of because the last time I was in Brisbane, two years ago, there was an exhibition of Marker’s work on at some gallery that I never made it to.

”Australians tend to shorten words,” said my mom-in-law on the way from the airport. Aussie English occupies a weird tangent to my daily British-American conflict. It's eggplant, not aubergine; but both elevator and lift are acceptable and the preference is for toilet, not bathroom (though ideally ”dunny”). The St. Vincent DePaul op-shop has now been completely renamed to Vinnies (no apostrophe, I don't think, but actually I'm not sure).

Travel! It never stops with me. My lifestyle is inadvertently ridiculous. I continually travel from country to country with a frequency that I never could have imagined, yet I remain nonplussed, blasé, and occasionally annoyed by it (when the visits are for work). This trip feels more like ’visiting family’ than ’vacation’ though it’s hard to argue that it hasn’t been a festival of hedonism and leisure.

There’s nothing particularly Australian about this moment, right now, yet it feels somewhat otherwordly to me - the stillness besieged by the sounds of the house. There’s a continual buzzing from the switched-off set-top TV tuner box, an angry reminder of the evil of standby lights. The analog clock on the wall is ticking on the downbeat and the complement is the old cabinet-top clock across the room. I can hear the dryer, in the garage, whirring to a finish while a radio plays at a volume that makes it impossible for me to actually make out anything.

The sheer hell of getting here - particularly because our uber-cheap buy-one-get-one-free plane tickets were only from London, so we’ve had to start and finish this trip by flying in the wrong direction a bit — and then transporting ourselves between Gatwick and Heathrow airports — wasn’t nearly as bad as last time, perhaps because my body is more able to handle the whole jetlag thing. Or maybe because we splurged and got massages at Singapore Changi Airport halfway through the journey. 38 Singaporean dollars is a small price to pay to feel great, especially when subjecting yourself to such hardship.

And then. Pumpkin-barley rolls served at a market by a rapping Hari Krishna. ANZAC biscuits, Tim Tams - and that’s not even getting into the gourmet sweets. Watching the Pittsburgh Penguins be humiliated in Game 5 of the Stanley Cup finals from an RSL Club in Nambour, where I actually got my own membership (a nice thrill after the Nambour Library rejected me for not having proof of address). Australia. Where the Internet is practically third-world; horrendous bandwidth limitations, generally dial-up speeds, and the need to browse with images turned off for the first time since, I dunno, the 90’s?

The other night a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire contestant got the question about where Prime Minister Kevin Rudd went to high school wrong. I know because my partner went to the same school and I drove past it today. It’s probably better bragging rights than ”My Mom went to the same high school as Bill Cowher” but maybe not.

This could be regular life; an antipodean alternative to the (admittedly bizarre) regular existence I eke out in Helsinki. Australian and American culture is similar enough to make this feel like I'm glimpsing memories of the future again.

.blindness.: 'Sup.

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:53:36 -0700

'Sup.

More from Australia Zoo. Who knew I'd have such fun at a zoo?

.blindness.: 'Sup.

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:44:21 -0700

'Sup.

More from Australia Zoo. Who knew I'd have such fun at a zoo?

.blindness.: The Onion on the Stanley Cup Finals

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:42:24 -0700

» The Onion on the Stanley Cup Finals

.blindness.: Laughing kookaburras.

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:35:15 -0700

Laughing kookaburras.

More from Australia Zoo. Which, let me say, is worth every penny of the $43 (student price) admission fee.

.blindness.: My favorite Tulse Luper story is 'The Cassowary'

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:28:59 -0700

My favorite Tulse Luper story is 'The Cassowary'

.blindness.: just chillin' with my pals

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:20:38 -0700

just chillin' with my pals

.blindness.: Beer review: Boatrocker Alpha Queen

Sun, 31 May 2009 17:11:55 -0700

Beer review: Boatrocker Alpha Queen

Although I've been on a distinctly non-drinking kick lately (swearing it off entirely when Finland, and limiting it to free/very cheap drinks elsewhere) I decided to splurge $3.50 for a bottle of this (purchased at a Melbourne bottle shop last night). Boatrocker Brewing Company is based in Melbourne but contract-brews, explaining on the back of the label that they can't afford their own brewery yet.

They don't call the Alpha Queen an IPA, instead opting for the phrase "highly hopped ale". Using New Zealand hops, this is a very floral, very bright tasting beer that radiates sunshine. There's a sweetness to it that is balanced well with the hops, reminding me of the 'classic' American craft ales I grew up drinking in Pennsylvania. There isn't anything particularly intense or extreme about it, which makes me wonder if any of the other Aussie microbrewers have the experimental tendencies that I've come to actually expect from microbreweries. I could see myself drinking Alpha Queen quite a bit if I were a Victoria native, and thus I give it a solid thumbs up - it's nothing flashy, but strong and confident about what it is.
(Boatrocker Brewing Co.)

.blindness.: Spotted in East Croydon

Sun, 24 May 2009 04:46:05 -0700

Spotted in East Croydon

(special 'inside joke' for MRB)

.blindness.: Friendly Fire

Fri, 15 May 2009 00:42:06 -0700

Friendly Fire

.blindness.: Playoff Beard

Fri, 15 May 2009 00:41:34 -0700

Playoff Beard

End of Conference semifinals. Go Pens.

.blindness.: Belmondo, in disguise

Sun, 10 May 2009 22:59:21 -0700

Belmondo, in disguise

Here's a screen capture I forgot to include in the icewhistle blog post about Pierrot le fou.

icewhistle.com: 'Poetry is a game of loser-take-all' : On Pierrot le fou

Sun, 10 May 2009 20:06:17 -0700

Pierrot le fou is being screened at Orion (National Audiovisual Archive of Finland), this Wednesday, at 7 PM, and I THINK Anna Karina is going to be there in person.

Of course I’m basing this on something a friend mentioned a few weeks ago - he was getting up early to stand in a queue to get tickets. And my initial reaction, of course, was ”Oh, she’s still alive?”

I should have followed him and tried to get my own ticket, but I just watched Pierrot a few weeks ago and my French isn’t good enough to handle a film without subtitles yet (well, there will be Finnish and Swedish subtitles, but that’s no help). Though maybe that’s appropriate for a film where the two lead characters communicate with each other in a way where they might as well be speaking different languages. Yet, strangely they are in sync.

Pierrot is maybe my favorite Godard film, though don’t hold me to that because after a few beers I'll ramble on about the greatness of Masculin féminin or Le mepris or Alphaville too. I love it for many reasons: the way it rolls like a giant ball of expanding energy, the quotable lines, the humour -- and also because it seems like a connecting link between the French New Wave and 1970s American cinema.

Actually, I might only mean Badlands when I speak of this influence. I’ve never read any criticism about Pierrot le fou in particular, but it must be seen as an antecedent to Malick’s masterpiece. I recently watched an obscure and INSANE film called Deadhead Miles, which was written by Malick shortly before he made Badlands. The difference between the two is enormous (Deadhead is obscure for good reason), but both have a freewheeling anarchy, strongly connected with the motion of the road and the automobile -- as does Pierrot, exemplified by Ferdinand and Marianne.

Week-end is Godard’s much more extreme vision of automotive futurism, yet trapped in a thunderous gridlock; Pierrot is rather a film about motion itself, with cars and trains and boats ;; the destination is irrelevant.

While capturing stills for this post, I was struck by how every frame of this film is stunning and iconic. Your can take your pick, and then print full-colour posters to sell to college kids. These should be the images to line dorm room walls; the sniggering Belmondo in the bath, instead of a limp Pulp Fiction or A Clockwork Orange poster. Or maybe I’m just showing how out of touch I am with contemporary college dorm decoration...

I generally think the idea of male/female ’chemistry’ is a bullshit construct of film critics and promotional agencies, but it’s hard to deny the explosive energy of this film, driven only by its two stars. If I was going to the event here, maybe I could ask Karina if the presence of hubby Jean-Luc, unseen to us behind the camera, drove the sparks we see with her and Jean-Paul: a performance both passionate and detached.

There’s a little bit of everything Godard in here: the politics (not as strident as his later stuff, which I still have to investigate), a critique of middle-class urban life (drawn out in the brilliant party scene at the beginning), and wry smirks instead of genuine honesty.

Of course, I'm not going. Fuck it -- books are better than films.

.blindness.: my review of 'The International'

Thu, 07 May 2009 15:51:50 -0700

my review of 'The International'

from my PBT.

I love conspiracy films and hate investment bankers, so this seemed appealing. What I got was a slick, well-made action/thriller that unfortunately resulted to some of the most clichéd, formulaic tropes imaginable. Clive Owen is adequate, I guess, playing 'the investigator who doesn't play by the rules'. Naomi Watts is the 'sympathetic, attractive colleague' and there's numerous heavily-accented baddies. At least I was spared any of Owen's character's personal drama, as the film eschewed any family/emotional stuff in favor of making him single-minded and one dimensional. This was a good thing; more time for boring chase scenes. In addition to many scenes and dialogue taken straight from an episode of CSI, we also get 'the assassin with the telltale deformity'. However, despite my griping I'll say that the long shoot-out scene set in the Guggenheim is one of the most dazzling action sequences of recent cinematic memory and definitely the high point of the film - it was a distraction from the muddy political plot at the core. Towards the end the film finally gets some guts and raises some decent questions. I'm glad this film questions the futility of attempting 'justice' (or even defining the term, really) within the structures of capitalism though it's critique falls far short of something like The Wire. Of course, The Wire has over 60 hours to explore these themes while The International relegates them to a 5-minute speech by a minor character. This compression makes it feel like the fil has borrowed it's philosophy (or maybe just it's heavy-handedness) from The Dark Knight. It's kind of amazing that this film came out in the midst of a huge investment banking crisis/scandal, as these once-ignored puppetmasters are now the recipients of much derision from "average Americans", so this should be successful (if anyone pays attention to it). Even better is the current public debate about torture, which also applies to this film - not directly, as there is no torture in the film, but indirectly through the idea of having to sacrifice your own beliefs and values in order to achieve something, which the Bush administration was more than happy to do. The film's denouement is set on a rooftop landscape in Istanbul, and it's easy to ignore the cop-out Hollywood morality because the photography is so stunning. The closing credits suggest that good can triumph over evil, and I would expect nothing less from a product of the same system the film is (sort of) critiquing. Overall I found this to be a good two hours of entertainment and I will again mention the amazing action sequence in the Guggenheim; but when compared to a truly masterful film in the same genre, such as The Constant Gardener, I can only think about The International's many flaws.

.blindness.: V-3 - 'To Breathe No More'

Wed, 06 May 2009 14:27:53 -0700

V-3 - 'To Breathe No More'

You need flash installed.

.blindness.: Robbe-Grillet: he ain't just a wordsmith!

Wed, 06 May 2009 06:48:39 -0700

Robbe-Grillet: he ain't just a wordsmith!

From 'Glissements progressifs du plaisir' (1974).