musings

Last night I turned on the tv, and while I was waiting for it to warm up enough to show me a picture I could hear an announcer say “… well, he said that if he weren’t doing this, he’d have been a professional snowboarder, so he’s an all-around athlete …”. I’m expecting the show to be some kind of documentary about sports, right? The picture shows up, and it’s The World Poker Tour. Uh, what now? Did I hear that right? Poker is a sport? What next, channel-surfing? I mocked mercilessly when professional video gamers called themselves athletes. At least gaming requires some level of dexterity. Bloody idiots.

Steve and I went to see A Northern Chorus tonight. We had to leave a bit early so we could catch the train back into the goddamn suburbs, and the show got started late (and there was an extra opening band that wasn’t listed on the bill) so we wound up leaving before A Northern Chorus actually hit the stage. I’m rather disappointed by this. The opening band was Alive and Living and they were quite good – folky indie rock. Next up were local veterans SIANspheric and they were really really really loud. Too loud for the venue, in fact. Anyway, SIANspheric alternate between playing some really cool shoegazery wall-of-feedback guitar swirl, and some really annoying thrashy metal-inspired rock. Overall, I like the band, but I’d rather they stuck to the shoegazery stuff, and the singer shut the Hell up (he really can’t sing – not that he was audible over the din at the show). If I hadn’t brought earplugs I’d have called in deaf for work tomorrow.

Syriana is an amazingly good movie. It’s received a fair amount of negative press, at least some of which is likely due to the stunningly misleading trailer – I knew what I was getting into coming in, but I watched the trailer again after seeing the movie, and was startled to see that the trailer was advertising an action thriller. Syriana is emphatically not an action thriller – it’s a very well plotted, very well acted political intrigue. A lot of the remaining negative press uses words like “boring” and “confusing” – the former of which is highly subjective, the latter partially true. There are four concurrent interwoven plots and they’re presented that way through a series of quick cuts, and I admit that early on I found the movie a bit hard to follow. As the movie progresses, though, the focus narrows and deepens (and the four plots converge), and it becomes much easier to follow. It’s such a complicated movie, though, that I don’t think I could begin to describe it and do it justice.

Clooney, as usual, is excellent, but more and more I’m liking Alexander Siddig. After slumming for years in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Siddig steals every scene he’s in in two consecutive films (Kingdom of Heaven and this one).

Finally, there’s a 43 minute mp3 of a round table discussion featuring George Clooney, Jeffery Wright, Alexander Siddig, Stephen Gaghan (the writer) and Bob Baer (on whose book the film is loosely based) at the official Syriana site that you really must listen to.

Even though Adobe Lightroom (currently in open beta) appears to be a response to Apple’s Aperture, it’s obviously been in development for too long to be merely a reaction. From the little I’ve played with it so far, it’s pretty amazing. It’s still in beta, and not nearly feature complete, so (Mac users) you can try it out, and provide feedback (for God’s sake, Adobe, make the scrolling elements respond to the scroll wheel) and hopefully the thing will keep moving in a positive direction. So far, I’m impressed. (BTW, windows users fret not, a version for your sad little toy OS is forthcoming ).

I just want to wish all my friends and readers a happy and prosperous new year.