Sunday, April 26, 2009

Kissing

I'd rather not kiss, or wiggle fingers, or just shuffle off this mortal coil!

Penfold's Koonunga Hill 2007 Shiraz Cabernet

I wanted to try an Australian Syrah, and found this at Ralph's for something like $8 and a rating of 91 (though I don't recall who issued the rating). It's good. The Cab in the blend makes it dry and allows it to stand up to more flavorful foods than the Syrah alone could. There may be more to this wine than I'm picking up on, not sure. The blend is throwing me off slightly, but in any case this is a good bottle and I've been enjoying it glass by glass with all sorts of dinners (pasta, tuna, shrimp).

Gold Rush Red

Picked it up at TJ's a few weeks ago. Started a glass and couldn't finish it. This is swill. Since I adhere to the tenets of "don't cook with anything you wouldn't drink", I'm throwing the whole bottle out.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

The Rider

It's been a while since I read a book and thought, "now, truly, this is a classic". Tim Krabbe's "The Rider" wholeheartedly qualifies. This is the story of a cycling race told from the point of view of one of the participants, the author, who is also a noted chess player. It's full of musings on cycling, racing and the meaning of life, or at least the meaning of life as those of us who race -- bikes, boats, other people, whatever -- see it. Which is to say, we look at everyone else and wonder what could possibly make them tick, since their lives are devoid of competition. There are a dozen fantastic quotes in the book, but the most memorable to me was this:

How often have I seen people clapping and cheering for a rider who, having been lapped six times, pushes on bravely? It's an insulting brand of applause -- for where does a winning rider get the right to revel in applause if the crowd isn't obliged to hiss at him when he fails?

Monday, April 20, 2009

Financial Times

Has anyone else run into a limit on the number of articles one can read per month recently? I've only noticed this over the last few months. Happily, the limit does not seem to affect a mobile browser.

Peachy Canyon Zinfandel

Peachy Canyon's Merlot has the distinction of having been the only bottle of wine I've lugged across the Atlantic to enjoy with my parents. You can't get that Merlot at TJ's anymore, but you can get a red blend for not a lot of money, which is good with food, and I think there's a Syrah floating around for a bit more. So I was at Ralph's instead of TJ's the other night, and I'd had a night of bad wine the night before, and a night of awesome wine a few nights before that, and I had reached the conclusion that I may be developing a dislike for sub-$10 wine (this spells huge trouble, but I'll worry the issue in another post). Looking for something going for a little more, I picked up a Peachy Canyon Zin. It did not disappoint. This Zin has not a hint of acidity, so it can be had alone in large quantities, and it is fragrant. The taste alters a little bit in the mouth after a while, but nothing weird happens to it. In my experience it keeps well for a few days, to boot. I loved it.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Léon Marin, Prêtre (Léon Marin, the Priest)

How far would you go to seduce a handsome young priest?

Particularly, if you were a handsome young woman who in open defiance to society married a Jew in pre-wartime France, had a child, and were openly atheistic and communist and bisexual after being widowed?

This is Jean-Pierre Melville's movie, adapted from Béatrix Beck's eponymous novel, and who is far better known for making steely cold-blooded French film-noirs than such melodrama.

It's filmed in quite an old school way for its time (while his contemporaries were blazing new cinematic heights.) It borrows quite heavily from Max Ophüls' Le Plaisir but it's charged with erotic lightning from start to finish - Will she? Will he? Will he? Will she? Will he? Will he? Will he?

There's a lot of she's but only one he but that's still a lot of couplings.

It's old school. Slow as all out. Works via suggestion and a slow piecing together of data than actually showing you the facts.

And it's actually a film noir in a perverted sense of the word.

Is the soul incorruptible? Even in the metaphoric sense of the soul since there is clearly no such thing? To what lengths will you go to get what you want? Will you destroy what you desire to get it just once?

As for the central question, will he or won't he, to even suggest the answer would simply take the piss out of the whole thing, wouldn't it?

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Celine and Julie Go Boating (Celine et Julie vont en bateau)

This review should've been written a long time ago but has been left unfinished so it's time to finish it.

The title is a pun: aller en bateau (to go in a boat) also means to "to get caught up in a yarn", and the movie is chockful of puns.

Rivette's sense of time is leisurely, and you must really submit to the movie on its own terms which is extraordinarily hard. By the end of the first hour, I was ready to walk out; by the end of the second hour, wild horses wouldn't have dragged me out of there; by the end of its 193 minutes, I was ready to declare it as possibly one of the greatest things that can be done in the cinematic medium.

You must submit to its leisurely long-winding logic before a payoff is delivered. And what a payoff!

In a world of instant gratification, this is quite liberating.

To tell too much about the story would be giving it away so it's about magic, friendship, memory, the child's love of story-telling particularly involving the macabre, watching a clockwork device work out its inevitable logic after it's been wound up.

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, but alley-oop! the clock just vanished. Now what?

The movie very self-consciously pays hommage to "Alice in Wonderland" -- it's jam-packed with Alice references -- with plenty of side references to just about everybody else - Cocteau, Buñuel, Genet.

Not to be missed if ever it plays, and yes, you have to watch this in the theater. You have to be immersed in it with no interruptions.

Monday, April 13, 2009

2006 Stolpman Syrah

I wrote about a Stolpman Syrah (to which I was first introduced by Jordan) here, last April, but this Friday I got to try the next year's vintage. I was looking for a wine to bring to a friend's dinner party and I wanted something nice, so I went into Bev'mo in La Jolla and found neither the Blair Fox nor the Stolpman. Around the corner is Jonathan's, a shi-shi, Lazy Acres-like grocery store with a good selection of expensive wines, so I snuck in. They didn't have the Blair Fox -- I asked, and the woman, about my age, said something like "never heard of it", like that was a good thing -- but they did have a Stolpman for $30, which I proceeded to pick up. Turns out this is a year younger than last year's, and I had an opportunity to compare prices at Lazy this weekend to find that it's also about $15 cheaper, the 2005 having gone up in price in the meantime. The 2006 is just as highly rated, and apparently apt to age well, so I'm debating buying a couple and setting them aside to try out next year or the year after. In any case, the 2006 is fucking amazing. I must have looked like a total moron to everyone at the table with my nose stuck in my glass, snorting the wine. I swear, this wine is bottled sunshine.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Changeling

I went into this movie with mixed expectations. On the one hand, a plus, directed by Clint Eastwood. He just keeps getting better and better. On the other hand, potential minus, I had previously read that it was an Oscar-fishing attempt, and I also feared cliche melodrama. In the end, I was cautiously impressed. There were a few over-the-top hysterical scenes by Angie (though in general she fit the role wonderfully, particularly her physicality); I have some level of sympathy for these scenes, because how can one ever really internalize the pain of a mother loosing her child, and through such a Kafkaesque sequence of events? In the end, I think I have to give these scenes a thumbs down though, since the ultimate concern is not the accuracy of the scene, but rather its verisimilitude, and these scenes took me out of the film. Also, there were a number of annoying cliches, like the heavyset unsympathetic mental hospital nurse. And the film was a bit too long; more editing would have helped.

Now for the positives. The period immersion was excellent. I'm not an expert on these things, but I did not notice any obvious anachronisms. And the theme, how all the different aspects of power function in a society, was deftly woven into an otherwise straightforward narrative. I particularly liked the turn around regarding assumption of guilt (from a sympathetic to unsympathetic character) and how this places the audience in a morally ambiguous place. Also, bonus points to Eastwood/Howard for not hedging their attribution (that is, it was clearly declared "a true story" rather than something like "inspired by a true story," as was Howard's total failure, A Beautiful Mind).

And as for Oscar-bait, there was one fun self-referential moment which shows some humor. I won't give it away, but look for it if you decide to give this a chance.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Red Rocks, a climber's guide

This climbing guide to Red Rock Canyon in Nevada, written by Jerry Handren and published in 2007, was recommended very strongly by a friend who'd spent quite a bit of time climbing at RRC. He was specific and adamant that this was the book to get, so we did, and we were not disappointed. First let me say that you cannot, for some reason, buy this guide on Amazon or REI or any mainstream outlet I've found. But you most definitely can get it from Desert Rock Sports, the climbing outfitter in Las Vegas, NV, although it isn't mentioned on their website.

The guide is exhaustive, well researched, and beautifully illustrated. There are no drawn maps, instead every route is plotted on pictures of the rocks. We had a fantastic time reading the articles in between the route descriptions, and the guide was a friggin' pleasure to use, compared to some others we've had to rely on in the past.

Rock climbing Joshua Tree West

The precursor to this book, "Rock climbing Joshua Tree", was introduced to me as "Vogel's book of lies". The original got the bad rep because it was written a long long time ago, before the Yosemite decimal rating system had gelled, and before many of the existing roads and trails at JTree had been established. As a consequence, the precursor had been horribly out-of-date and inaccurate, though it was encyclopedic in its breadth. The author, Randy Vogel, was, from what I heard, the biggest advocate for a complete rewrite of the book.

Since the original was published, so much development has occurred at JTree that it became necessary to split the updated version into several separate books, which, if I understand correctly, Vogel is in the process of writing. So the book covering the Western section of the park is already available in stores, and the book covering the central section is supposed to come out sometime in April -- I'm signed up for a notification when it becomes available. Suffice it to say, the West book is just as encyclopedic as the original, but 10 times more useful, because the locations and ratings of routes are now reliable, and additional first ascent and protection information is given.

Well done, Randy Vogel! I, for one, am waiting for the Central book with bated breath.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Kafka on the shore

This is the third book by Murakami that I've read, and I liked it a lot less than the previous two. There are some very bright moments in it, and I enjoyed the writing, but I thought it was dilute and too long. On the other hand, it does reflect far more than the other two books I've read the issues Murakami brought up recently in his acceptance speech of some award or other in Israel.

Cliffhanger

Cliffhanger is considered a climbing classic, although it is reviled in climbing circles as being grossly inaccurate, and it's now available on Hulu. The only accurate-looking climbing in the movie is during the opening scene. The rest of the climbing basically consists of insane campus and dyno moves. In fact, I can't do a single move shown in the movie. The movie also features an insane bolt gun, that fires bolts (which, in real life, are a total pain in the ass to install) directly into rock. We wish! Even so, the movie's pretty fun. The bad guy sucks, but all the good guys are likable. I was impressed with the movie itself, which I watched spontaneously, but I'm becoming more and more critical the more I read about it...