2013 Movies and Me
I watched 166 movies in 2013. Here are the best film year 2013 movies that entered my eyeballs (tiebreaker goes to movies not nominated for awards):
- Upstream Color
- Stories We Tell
- Gravity
- 12 Years a Slave
- A Hijacking
- Blue Jasmine
- Her
- In The House
- American Hustle
- Rush
The worst 2013 movie that subjected me to itself: C.O.G.
The most wasted opportunity documentary (next time let Werner make this one): The Act of Killing
The best movie that featured Werner Herzog as a villain but wasn’t just a documentary wherein Werner Herzog was the director: Jack Reacher
And now something different, the best non-2012, non-2013 movies I saw in 2013:
- The Passion of Joan of Arc (from another planet?)
- All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
- A Place in the Sun
- The Elephant Man
- Primer
- Rust and Bone
- A Man Escaped
- Un Chien Andalou
- The Big Lebowski
- Bridge on the River Kwai
- The Prestige
- Ratatouille
- Jackie Brown
- Election (Johnnie To’s, not Alex Payne’s)
The worst non-2012, non-2013 movie I watched in 2013: The Fury by Brian De Palma — a 60 year old Kirk Douglas does parkour in this 1978 movie made by the most binary director out there.
Most dated movie: The Swimmer, whoa boy. Burt Lancaster races a horse in this one.
Most epic driving sequence: tie, The Year of Living Dangerously, driving through a roadblock drunk on Vangelis, or Withnail and I, waking up in the backseat of a car and asking a drunk Richard E Grant what he is doing and having him turn to the camera and say “Making Time!” as he weaves through highway traffic, assorted booze as his co-pilot, Jimi Hendrix’s guitar as herald.
Dominant Epitaph
Marilyn L. Saltzman:
She loved a good lobster roll.
Encountered this on a bench in the area of Ogunquit called Perkins Cove. The bench was next to the local iconic lobster restaurant, Barnacle Billy’s. A fitting spot for the last words on Marilyn L. Saltzman.
Pictures of Planes from The Right Stuff
Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff is a great book, but a great book that didn’t feature any pictures of the amazing planes, jets, and rockets that populate its stories. Chuck Yeager, Scott Crossfield, Joe Walker, Al White, the Mercury 7, and many other possessors of the right stuff thrusted through the sky in these vehicles. This list is roughly chronological.
X-1
X-1A (Yeager broke the sound barrier in this)
X-2
D-558-1
XF-92A (book refers to it as “horrible”)
D-558-2 (book refers to it as “beautiful”)
X-3 (book should’ve described this as “needle-nosed”)
X-15 (the plane that was to be a bridge towards the X-20 and manned ground to space flight)
F-104 Starfighter (Yeager’s crash towards the end of the book happened in one of these)
Mercury-Redstone and Mercury-Atlas rockets
X-20 Dyna-Soar (never flew)
Planes Dropped from Motherships
Typical X-15 Mission (alleged)
P-51 (what Yeager flew in WWII)
Euphemisms for Stalin in the The Gulag Archipelago
A mostly complete list of euphemisms for Joseph Stalin from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (capitalization is faithful to the book):
- Great Genius
- Great Evildoer
- His Graciousness
- Best Friend
- He Himself
- Great Coryphaeus
- Beloved Father
- Supreme Soviet
- The Benefactor
- Wise Teacher
- The Great Deceased
- the shoeshine boy
- Daddy Stalin
- Fathers of the Peoples
- greatest strategic genius of all times and all nations
- The Big Mustache
- The Leader
- Old Man Stalin
Read Gulag partially because Cloud Atlas featured a poignant quote from it (“Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.”). But one of the strongest features of the former turned out to be how it reflected a quote from the latter — “Humor is the ovum of dissent.” If you can laugh, and certainly if you can mock, you have not yet been destroyed.
Tale of Baby Mouse
In pictures.
Shivering mouse, found alone on the porch, unable to move. We brought him inside, heated him up for a couple hours, and gave him a warm meal. We then set him up in a shelter near where we found him, with enough provisions to last him days and with hope that his renewed vigor would allow him to reconnect with his mouse family.
Songs for Saint Valentine’s Day
The National — Slow Show
Bon Iver — Skinny Love
Kanye West — Love Lockdown
Tokyo Police Club — Tesselate
Arms — Tiger Tamer
New Order — Ceremony
Black Keys — I’ll Be Your Man
The Faces — Ooh La La
Blur — Tender
My Favorite Zen Koan
A man walking across a field encounters a tiger. He fled, the tiger chasing after him. Coming to a cliff, he caught hold of a wild vine and swung himself over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Terrified, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger had come, waiting to eat him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little began to gnaw away at the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine in one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!
Zack Parsons sent me this over IM when I was in college. I never knew why but that could describe most of our conversations. It moved me so much that I have, to this day, never forgotten it.
Writing Prompt One
A trickle of light bounces out from behind the door, into the bedroom, and shimmers across the wall-mounted television. Anger volleys back and forth, crossing the light’s path. The sheets are forced to shake and slough off onto the floor, into an inchoate linen pool. Darkness immures the room, and the only thing left is the sound of cheap electronics coming to a halt against something solid and shattering into pieces. Silence happens and leaves.
A cellphone’s screen illuminates the space, quickly followed by another sound of cheap electronics exploding. An extended quiet overtakes all things. Only muffled city sounds can be heard. Light fills the room with enduring calm.
Nathan Carter, maybe my favorite artist
Some links about Nathan Carter:
Nathan Carter: THE COVERT CAVIAR FREQUENCY DISRUPTOR
Artfacts.net Profile of Nathan Carter
Nathan Carter at the Tate Modern (I first saw his work there in 2006)
The Case for Kiva
Kiva is a microlender front-end which allows lenders to give interest free loans to designated borrowers. Most of the borrowers are located in third world countries and the loans are typically $600-1500; it is not atypical for the borrower to be a pooled group of people. Most loans are provided by multiple lenders.
The Grameen bank has proven that microlending leads to sustainable economic improvements for the borrowers via allowing entrepreneurial financing within the context of the disciplining effect of debt and incentives. Sustainability has been the weakness of efforts to effect economic improvement via traditional foreign aid, which has been focused on unconditional grants of money or goods. Micro-finance is not a panacea as frequently the funds are used not to build the borrower’s business but to offset certain business costs and allow the borrower to fund things like their children’s education or medical costs. But micro-finance is progress, sustainable, incremental and meaningful progress.
More reading on Microfinance:
What Microloans Miss
The Micromagic of Microcredit
Kiva is an organization that allows an individual to participate in microlending on a granular level. It functions as a coordinator of individual lenders with a distributed network of third party local micro-lending organizations; the process is seamless to the lender. Kiva also provides information and statistics about each loan and each originating organization.
Give or learn more: Kiva.org
