Apparently the President will be there. Another possibility is that Barack Obama clip art can sell anything. I’m buying my ticket now.

Pictured: Excerpt from Kindle version of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”

I’ve been reading an unending stream of tweets, emails and blog posts on screen for years. Making the leap to actual literature (no offense to your Twitter skills, dear reader) actually provides a welcome disconnect from the limitless distractions the iPhone offers.

I love paper and there will always be a place for it, but with three (e)books finished in rapid succession on iPhone I consider the experience of digesting strings of letters arranged into words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters to be more-or-less conquered.

While everyone else was looking out for Irish green on Tuesday, my work-related radar for all things purple and yellow was tripped by two neighborly old ladies dressed head-to-toe in purple talking in front of a yellow house on New Hampshire Ave. I don’t have a picture of that, so instead I give you this crazy Julia Sonmi Heglund illustration, which has been inspiring me since I stumbled upon it a week or two ago. You can buy t-shirts with the design from Threadless and check out the rest of her portfolio on her website.

1. Synecdoche, New York - I’ve seen Charlie Kaufman’s epic on the ultra-examined life only once, but I desperately want to see it again. It’s the only film this year that left me feeling that way. The befuddling layers of the surreal and the mundane make Synecdoche an exhilarating experience (at least for those of us who are exhilarated dry humor, implausibility, and gradual bodily decay). Philip Seymour Hoffman is a twisted pleasure to watch, as usual.

2. Un conte de Noël (A Christmas Tale) - I saw quite a few French films in the last half of 2008, largely owing to AFI’s European Union festival, which occupied much of the post-election calendar at the Silver Theater here in DC. I considered awarding the collective experience of viewing several* in close proximity this slot. But no! I hate it when critics list seven films as “tied” for a single slot in their best-of lists. We’re in the business of comparing and contrasting, and some films are simply better than others. Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale is a wonderfully complicated movie about a family gathering at Christmastime. The characters are well written. Their relationships are filled with palpable love and hate. The acting is superb. Until today I hadn’t bothered to look up Desplechin’s filmography. Upon doing so, I was pleasantly surprised to see that he was also behind Esther Kahn, which made a strong impression on me after plucking it from other critics’ year-end lists in 2002.

Also notable:
Sean Penn’s performance in Gus Van Sant’s remake of The Times of Harvey Milk is very good. I hesitate to give much praise to Milk as a whole – largely because I found it far less powerful than that now-classic documentary.

The other performance-driven film on many year-end lists is Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. Micky Rourke’s turn as a veteran on the small-town wrestling circuit is at least as deserving of an Oscar nomination as Penn’s performance. However, the film overall often seemed like it wasn’t rising to the level of Rourke’s acting. I enjoyed the simplicity of the plot. I liked the parallels with his off-screen career and on-screen love interest. The film is certainly a must-see, but simply not in my top two.

I almost placed Vicky Christina Barcelona in my top two. I was extraordinarily entertained watching Woody Allen riff on François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim using the stunning trio of Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem, and Penélope Cruz.

*Fine. I’ll name two more French flicks here: Bertrand Bonello’s De la guerre (On War) and Idit Cebula’s Deux vies… plus une (Two Lives… Plus One).

…That was the chant apparently led by Al Franken at an event last night in Minnesota. While I’ve been putting together my thoughts on this past weeks’ historic events, the lingering uncertainty over the Franken vs. Coleman race for U.S. Senate back home has made it difficult for me to move on to a feeling of closure. How does an internet geek deal with that nervous energy? By building a tool that automatically does subtraction using the latest numbers on the Minnesota Secretary of State’s election results page. I bring you: http://MNrecount.com/

P.S. If you know who did the stylized Franken image after Sheperd Fairey’s iconic Obama posters, please let me know. Would like to give credit where credit is due.

I did get away from the computer long enough last weekend to do some volunteer door-to-door canvassing in suburban Pittsburgh and I came away feeling good about the situation on the ground. The neighborhood we visited was targeted as a traditionally conservative-leaning area: working class, not wealthy, few people of color. This is the kind of district that swings statewide votes in Pennsylvania. Our final tally came out safely on the Obama side. More important was the palpable enthusiasm gap between Obama voters (energized, eager to talk, eager to participate) and McCain voters (none of the above). Of course the small sample size and my big purple Obama shirt surely spoiled any scientific value of this survey, so don’t stop doing whatever you’ve been doing. Most importantly, don’t let yourself be this guy.

I am truly moved by last night’s clinching of the Democratic nomination by Senator Obama. It is a good day to be an American after so many not-so-good ones. Might I suggest now is a good time to donate to the nominee’s campaign.

…And Historic Documentation in St. Paul

Some reports claim 50,000 turned up last night for the 18,000 seats in the Xcel Center. From TV coverage, it looked as though nearly everyone brought a camera. It is no surprise then that flickr is accumulating huge pools of images dated yesterday and tagged “obama minnesota,” “obama stpaul,” or “obama xcel.”

Someday will we re-assemble in virtual reality massively documented events such as this? Imagine if we had 10,000 small cameras at Lincoln’s inaugural.


MAIN STREET, RIVER FALLS, WI == 85
SOUTH MINNEAPOLIS ============= 58
DOWNTOWN SAINT PAUL =========== 95
MACALESTER, SAINT PAUL ======== 78
UPTOWN MINNEAPOLIS ============ 91
UNIVERSITY CITY, PHILADELPHIA = 94
WEST PHILADELPHIA ============= 83
UNIVERSITY CITY, PHILADELPHIA = 94
ITALIAN MARKET, PHILADELPHIA == 94
CENTER CITY PHILADELPHIA ====== 97
POWELTON VILLAGE PHILADELPHIA = 86
ANDERSONVILLE, CHICAGO ======== 91
ECKINGTON, WASHINGTON, DC ===== 63


I then weighted the WalkScores for each based on the number of months I resided there to come up with the cumulative number of 87.39.

Obviously there are a lot of elements WalkScore doesn’t capture. Chicago’s Andersonville was a great place to live, but in the winter I’d probably drop the WalkScore a bit. As near as I can tell the site gives you as many points for having a grocery store like this across the street as it does for an upscale organic Co-Op. Also, neighborhoods change over time: Downtown St. Paul (probably) has more amenities now then it did when I briefly lived there in the mid 1990s. Likewise Eckington will see a lot of change over the next few years that will probably raise it significantly above its current score of 63.

Still, any tool that helps people put more thought into how dependent they are on cars to get around is a useful one.

*I chose to start with housing after I left college dormitories since WalkScore’s algorithms don’t seem able to find on-campus amenities. Dorm life is usually pretty walkable, though.