126 posts tagged with "in-English"

Last night I went to watch Inception. I quite liked it. Before last night, I was feeling a bit sceptical about the film. Is it just me, or so many action/fantasy films from Hollywood lately are remakes of The Matrix, Mission: Impossible or something of the sort? There is so much creativity (or lack thereof) spawning from the trunk of inspiration that goes from The Matrix to Blade Runner, all the way through Dark City and Ghost in the Shell. Bullet-time, martial arts, alternative realities and simulations are cool. Those representations are also rich in suggestive images of urban decay and dark hypertrophied cities. I'm all for that, you know. But aren't we overdoing it? There's a bit of that in Inception, too. Fortunately, in this particular case Christopher Nolan has managed to write a story that is both entertaining and provocative. And the intense soundtrack by Hans Zimmer fits very nicely.

I write about Inception first as an excuse. Truth is that, at the risk of becoming definitely a bore to my family and friends, this post is about Japan and my appetite for Japan. Again. My emotions about Japan are difficult to explain. Even before I visited the country for the first time (and long before I told anyone close to me about this interest) I felt strangely attracted by it. In some sense it is only logical in my case, for I get easily bored with the environment I live in, and in Europe Japan (still) represents one of the most extremely exotic, yet reachable, places in the world. Today it dawned on my that my image of Japan, and Tokyo, isn't but an imagined, personal place that is utterly unattainable. My own particular vision of that part of the world is at risk of becoming a sort of personal “limbo” (in the Inception meaning of the term): an unreality that grows the more sophisticated and tempting the more you indulge in it… and one that can destroy you if you aren't able to tell reality from dreams. Japan is to me a perfect land of material progress, urban development, money, rules and the future. Of course not. I'm lying. I am well aware of the imperfection of anything that exists, by definition. Italy wasn't my panacea eight or nine years ago, London didn't make me happy either, and so far I don't feel as comfortable as I would wish living in Madrid.

At times I find myself on the streets of Madrid, idly watching people talking and walking around me, when suddenly that particular smell I found in some hidden residential area of Kobe hits me out of the blue. There is a little girl skipping happy ten meters from me and I can't help swapping the setting, so now she's in a pier in Yokohama at dusk. There are wild colours in the sky all across the bay and silent old people on bicycles gently pass me by as they ride home. Or maybe it's raining like hell. It doesn't matter, because it's beautiful and different and surprising anyway. Why do I keep on seeing Japan all around, like Dominic Cobb sees his dead wife in every corner? It is also a permanent contradiction for me: I'm pretty sure I could be in Japan by now if I had started working hard on it three or four years ago. I long for it, but I don't seem to be able to commit to it. I'm procrastinating and writing posts like this one instead of directing my efforts towards that goal. That contradiction is the more annoying at times when I'm confronted with alternatives and need to make bold decisions. Did I mention I just became 30? I won't deny the influence of such a symbolic date in this post (it's such an stereotype), but I think there is more than that. That contradiction of mine is another hint telling me that that Japan is not real, is not what I want. As if somewhere very deep I knew that it's just an imagined alternative reality. As if I knew it will be disappointing at the end. Or maybe I'm just scared of trying.

Steve Sanfield is a great haiku master. He lives in the country with Sarah, his beautiful wife, and he writes about the small things which stand for all things. Kyozan Joshu Roshi, who has brought hundreds of monks to a full awakening, addresses the simultaneous expansion and contraction of the cosmos. I go on and on about a noble young woman who unfastened her jeans in the front seat of my jeep and let me touch the source of life because I was so far from it. I've got to tell you, friends, I prefer my stuff to theirs.

— L. Cohen, “Book of Longing”.

Via acula1900's favourite videos on YouTube, an absolutely brilliant self-referencing parody of the boring style of TV reports and the robotic tone of the reporters — in this case on British TV. This report on reports carries two or three layers of self-deprecating meaning, so play it twice to get all subtleties. It's Charlie Brooker for Newswipe.

I thought immediately that this is exactly the kind of video that we loved to share and comment, my ex-flatmates in London and I. I think they would appreciate it, and that it would provide some good references and in-jokes for a while.

This very morning, at 8:40

Sicilian run
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7.76 km, ~42'

Warning: moderate spoilers ahead (unless you've watched more than four mainstream American films in the past decade, that is!)

So there is this exuberant planet Gymkhana, one with whimsical gravity forces, flawless foliage with neon-like sap, and its own cute indigenous take on practically every terrestrial animal species, only much larger and colourful and maybe with an extra pair of legs or something. Planet Gymkhana is inhabited by an ancient race: the descendants of a praiseworthy hybrid between Jar Jar Binks, a bunch of elves hailing from Middle Earth and the puny aliens from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, plus a dash of the Smurfs. The people of Gymkhana spend their days hunting, jumping, flying, diving and running around. That is how their planet got its name. There come the baddies — easy to spot by their lack of feelings, the corporate greed they defend, the caliber of their biceps, or a combination of the above. Then there is a scientist, Ripley, who knows stuff and talks in science-speak and is far more sensible, if also too naïf for the toughness of the situation. Then there is the goodie, who also has strong biceps, is a bit stupid and takes great pride on not knowing a thing about planet Gymkhana, its native population or anything at all for that matter; but he is good. He is an American hero. They don't say that in the film, but you can tell from the beginning. The baddies want the money, the goodies have got feelings, you know the rest. Of course, the ignorant jarhead achieves tons more than the witty scientist with all her funny speak and her books (boys and girls: you get the moral of the story!). The goodies don't have a chance to win (it's the future and they're shooting arrows, for Christ's sake), but the planet is so cool that, man, the laws of physics rock around pages 68 and 114 of the screenplay, right there when they are most needed. And when, in spite of all that, their cause seems lost, good old deus ex machina does it.

The goodie just looks the girl in the eye and coughs and she feels all the screws coming loose in her body. She falls in love, then she rejects him very badly, then something happens and he's great and she wants him again even more badly. There is the nice expendable soldier who is sensible and helps the goodies and dies at the end. You've got everything! There is even the younger, geeky scientist who is unable to strike a match but feels somehow threatened by the beefy main character, so he makes some lousy attempt at becoming the hero of the story (but he can't because he ain't on the frickin' movie poster). The story is also a metaphor of what's going on in planet Earth. There are clear hints on the ideas of invasion, preemptive strikes and a military that refuses to learn anything from the culture they're just about to anihilate; and even more explicit references to “fighting terror with terror” and a “shock and awe” operation (!). In spite of it all, I quite liked “Avatar”. So I guess I should say something positive about it now. “Avatar” in 3D is a feast for the senses — and a moving one, too. Just too much of cheap shamanism for me, and too many plastic bricks supporting a predictable script. I found it extremely beautiful and evocative, and great fun to watch. James Cameron certainly hasn't “reinvented cinema” (bah!) but this film might well be one of those fantasy/action/CGI films that stay in our memory forever, like “Terminator” and “The Matrix”.

Sorry, but I just couldn't resist this one (via @franctireur):

Important information crammed into a dialogue box which is tiny by default and (even worse) can't be maximised nor resized. The user is forced to scroll so many times to work with this window, eventually assuming that Microsoft is messing them around even harder than usual.

Especially bad in this particular case, as there are two panels and the information displayed at the bottom depends on the selected item at the top. So it's not enough to scroll the upper list to read the bottom field — you actually have to keep on jumping between the two panels, sometimes to reveal just the odd line or two that remain hidden beyond the border of the text field. This criminal dialogue box (plus a few others like this one) has been happily living inside many flavours of Windows for years now. I reckon there must be a very good technical reason to keep things this shitty suboptimal, but I don't know it. Why? I mean, why?

“The Resistance” is here and apparently even before the official release in Europe (yesterday) some Burak Çalık had already set up a neat web site from which you can download Muse's new album via RapidShare. As an appetiser (and while you download the archive) check out this live performance of an established classic, “Starlight” (can't get enough of it), followed by one of the most interesting tracks from “The Resistance”: “Undisclosed Desires” (skip to 4:12 for the new song if you're in a hurry).

a friend of mine (a book-lover, one of the most admirable bookworms I know) gave this book to me as a present last year. We both love London, we both prefer to read English books in English, and she knows me well enough to anticipate that I would like this novel by Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere. I confess I hadn't read anything by Neil Gaiman before, but the name sounded familiar to me. And, as in so many other occasions, once you find out a little bit on the interwebs and mention the name to a friend or two and let your friends talk to you about the guy, you end up wondering how it's possible that you didn't know him. I reckon most of the (three) readers of this blog don't need an introduction, but let me just say that Gaiman is known for his writing of the acclaimed comic book series Sandman, and for other novels such as American Gods. Although you would be forgiven to think that his actual job is to collect impressive awards (Hugo and Nebula among many others). Even if you're not familiar with his books, you may have watched some of his work: he wrote Coraline, upon which the screenplay for the eponymous film was based, and, most importantly, he wrote the screenplay of a little marvel that was too quickly forgotten: Beowulf. Oh, and he also wrote the dialogues for the version of Princess Mononoke that was screened in English-speaking countries. He has a blog since 2001, he is on Twitter, he possesses a beautiful, beautiful private library, and yet another library (you can zoom in to read every title on the shelves), he has given some long interviews and, to top it all, he is definitely much better than Chuck Norris. Enough said about Mr Gaiman and his enormous talent.

Thirteen years ago Gaiman wrote Nevewhere, a TV series for the BBC. A bit later, and not feeling entirely happy with the many bits that he had to alter or prune during the shooting of the series, he would rework the screenplay and publish it as a 370-page novel. You can watch the whole series (six episodes) on YouTube (but I recommend you to save it for after you read the book). But I mentioned London. What does London have to do with this story? This fantasy novel is set in two Londons: London Above (the one you've seen: Big Ben, black cabs, bad weather, noisy tourists, gorgeous parks); and London Below (a magical, dark place under the surface where the disenfranchised fall; a world linked to London overground by tunnels and sewers, abandoned tube stations and hidden doors). You will make the most of the novel only if you have lived in the city, or if you know the city at least a bit. There are lots of references to real areas, streets and landmarks, and underground lines and stations: Trafalgar Sq, Tate Modern, the City, Battersea, Centre Point, the ubiquitous off-licences and the curry houses… When the characters walk in London Above, you can follow them from Leicester Sq through Soho (“where the tawdry and the chic sit side by side, to the benefit of both”) and Old Compton St. And when they walk from Brewer St to Piccadilly, they stop to stare for a moment at the articles on display at the Vintage Magazine Shop. I have wandered around that shop quite a few times. There are also nice references to the names of tube stations. There is an Earl, with his court, in Earl's Court. There are black friars. Knightsbridge is actually a misspelling of the Night's Bridge. One of the main characters is called Islington, and it is an Angel. We get to know one of the Seven Sisters. And so forth. I was already enjoying all these references and word plays, when I read this about Richard Mayhew, the protagonist: “Richard's offices were on the third floor of a big, old, rather draughty building, just off the Strand”. I stopped and re-read that sentence twice. During my last year in London, I worked at 80 Strand — my company was renting half of the third floor of a very large, old building on the Strand. But wait, I thought; it could be any of the other big, old buildings on that side of the road, or even on the other side. Then, towards the end of the story, Richard “walked over to the window, and sipped his tea, staring out at the dirty brown river” and I could discard all the buildings on the North side of the Strand. I could picture Richard perfectly, taking a break from work to stare at the Thames and the South Bank from that privileged position, as I myself had done so many times. Gaiman writes concise, elegant and accurate. Also tender and funny. I had to laugh out loud a few times when I was reading it, specially with Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar. It seems to me that Neil Gaiman would be perfectly capable of telling the same story indulging in a profusion of details and stretching some dramatic effects, but that he actually writes too well to fall into that trap. Of course, being a fantasy novel, the characters are not realistic, and there is magic, and sometimes a thin smell of deus ex machina floating around. Because of that, I think that you can't engage with the story fully, on the same level you would with a historic novel, for instance. But it is interesting to note that Richard, the young Scot working in London who falls through the cracks to London Below, provides a useful counterpoint: he is sceptic and ironic about what is happening to him, he is easily scared, weak, wants to go back home. That makes him the more likeable to the reader, who can easily relate to him. I wished there were better descriptions of the places in London Below, because sometimes I wasn't sure what places looked like, the shape and size of tunnels, buildings, bridges and roads. I don't even know if there is a sky above London Below or not; sometimes Richard and his companions walk in a direction that doesn't seem plausible, and they end up in places you wouldn't expect. Some features of London appear also in London Below (Harrods, the HMS Belfast), but because the “topology” of the “double city” is not clear, I didn't understand if those landmarks are mirrored, or if the inhabitants of London Below come up to London Above and take them at night. It is a bit Escherian, I guess. But that might be on purpose. The characters I liked the most are Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar, a couple of sadistic assassins, two refined torturers, funny psychopaths. They fit in the archetype of the short, cunning, talkative guy and his huge, violent dumb companion. Mr Croup loves words and talks in the manner of an old-fashioned gentleman, although his ideas are less candid (“The police? Alas, we cannot claim that felicity. A career in law and order, although indubitably enticing, was not inscribed on the cards Dame Fortuna dealt my brother and me.”). Mr Vandemar eats anything that has, or that once had, flesh or fur, and is immune to the suffering of the others. You have to love them from the first pages. Today I skipped through the first episode on YouTube because I was curious about how these two guys had been portrayed originally on TV. I recommend you not to do that until you've read the book — the image of them that gradually appears in your mind as you read the novel is probably far scarier and more complex than the image they have on screen (and that's a good thing about the brief descriptions, I guess). Definitely recommended (although, as I said, part of the appeal depends on knowing London and some of its layers).

This is a simple recipe that will be obvious for many users of Un*x systems, but which proved useful to me when I needed to fix Grub on my laptop. I'm sharing it here for future personal reference, and in case anyone out there knows even less than I do about booting Linux and about Grub. This recipe assumes that there is a /boot/ partition containing valid Linux kernels. In other words, it just creates a missing menu.lst file for Grub — it does not deal with other more complicated, lower-level boot issues. Last time I installed Ubuntu, I somehow messed with the boot loader settings. I'm running Ubuntu on a MacBook Pro with an Intel processor; but I also have Mac OS installed, and I use rEFIt to handle both OS's. Whatever option Ubuntu ticks by default regarding Grub, I thought it wasn't the right one for my setup. It turned out that either Ubuntu didn't know how to install Grub correctly for my partition layout, or I screwed it myself. Anyway. The system was installed successfully, but once the installation finished, Linux wouldn't boot. rEFIt detected the new OS correctly, but when it was selected, Grub fell back to its own limited command line. Now, if I knew more about Grub, I'd be able to find an image of the Linux kernel and boot the system with it, using Grub commands. Then I would edit the file /boot/grub/menu.lst myself. What I did, instead, was the following:

1. Run Linux from a live CD distro. You can boot using the same CD you used to install Ubuntu (but any live distro which includes Grub in its base system will do).

2. Fire up a terminal.

3. Temporarily rename the /boot/ directory:

   $ sudo mv /boot/ /boot.DISABLED

4. Create a symbolic link to the partition on your hard drive that contains the Linux kernels, and call it /boot/ (if your live system did not mount that partition automatically, find the right device and mount it first under /media/, or mount it directly onto /boot/):

   $ sudo ln -s /boot /media/sda3/ # Your device might not be this one

5. If there is already a /boot/grub/ directory, disable it:

   $ sudo mv /boot/grub/ /boot/grub.DISABLED

6. Run update-grub (if it returns an error, you might need to create the directory /boot/grub/ yourself first):

   $ sudo update-grub

7. Restore the original live /boot/:

   $ sudo unlink /boot/ $ sudo mv /boot.DISABLED /boot

8. Reboot the system and extract the live CD; this time Grub should show the menu of available kernels and load the one that you choose.

N.B. Although update-grub's man page asks you to run the command first, then set some options in menu.lst, and finally run the command again, update-grub looks idempotent to me (anyone knows what I'm missing?).