Month: May 2009

That’s one way of putting it

Guillermo del Toro:

Hollywood thinks art is like Latin in the Middle Ages—only a few should know it, only a few should speak it. I don’t think so.

The rest of the interview is also pretty interesting — I like how he concedes, “the fact that I have a simulacrum of a career is a wonder,” as well as this bit:

It comes from my first trip to New York as a child. I was walking around Central Park, and I saw one of these expensive apartment buildings. At the top was a Gothic tower, and I said to my mother, “A vampire lives there.” I wasn’t being metaphorical. Then we went into the subway and—wow! For a guy from Guadalajara, the subway is mythical. The underground of the city is like what’s underground in people. Beneath the surface, it’s boiling with monsters.

Via SF Signal.

Random 10 5/29

Last week. This week:

  1. “My Beautiful Enemy” by Dar Williams
    Hail to your vast hegemony
  2. “Coldest Winter” by Kanye West
    On lonely nights I start to fade
  3. “Wiggley Fingers” by Patty Griffin
    And who in the hell is gonna be your savior now
  4. “Sever” by Fever Ray
    We talk about love, we talk about dishwasher tablets
  5. “Ring Them Bells” by Sufijan Stevens (orig. Bob Dylan)
    And time is running backwards, and so is the bride
  6. “Valentine Moon” by Jools Holland & His Rhythm & Blues Orchestra (feat. Sam Brown)
    Cette fois que tu m’embrasse, au bout de notre rue
  7. “Derelict” by Beck
    I’m spinning round like a gambling wheel
  8. “The Democratic Circus” by Talking Heads
    They drive in Cadillacs, using walkie-talkies and the Secret Service
  9. “Undun” by the Guess Who, guessed by Thud
    She didn’t know what she was headed for
  10. “To the Teeth” by Ani DiFranco
    Yeah, Malcolm forecasted this flood

Good luck!

Thursday various

  • Well this explains why I’m only just now getting registrations for books I sent them back in 2007: there’s a huge backlog at the Library of Congress:

    The irony is that the slowdown stems from a new $52 million electronic process that is supposed to speed the way writers and others register their literary, musical or visual work.

    Isn’t that usually the way with expensive electronic processes? [via]

  • Why CuteOverload is Critical to Your Work. Well I’m sold! [via]
  • Speaking of cute, I agree with Jessa Crispin, this really is too cute not to share.
  • New research suggests ways in which newborn brains work better than our own [via]:

    In fact, in some situations it might actually be better for adults to regress into a newborn state of mind. While maturity has its perks, it can also inhibit creativity and lead people to fixate on the wrong facts. When we need to sort through a lot of seemingly irrelevant information or create something completely new, thinking like a baby is our best option.

    “We’ve had this very misleading view of babies,” says Alison Gopnik, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the forthcoming book, “The Philosophical Baby.” “The baby brain is perfectly designed for what it needs to do, which is learn about the world. There are times when having a fully developed brain can almost seem like an impediment.”

  • Still, babies might have a little trouble puzzling out these 13 Things That Do Not Make Sense. I know I did. [via]

Wednesday various

  • For Marlon Wayans, G.I. Joe is a serious movie. That might be part of the problem:

    “For G.I. Joe it was all about me being appropriate and just being mature about my decisions of when to be funny and when not to be. It’s always a challenge. They may try and put you inside of a little box, but I know that, talent-wise, I look at my filmography and I’m able to do a lot. I’ve played a junkie in Requiem [for a Dream], a white woman in White Chicks. I played a little person in Little Man. I played a weedhead in Scary Movie. Now I get to finally play a hero, and I get to play a hero with some humor.”

    I actually liked Wayans in Requiem, but G.I. Joe looks cartoonish (even for a movie based on a ’80s cartoon and action figure) — and I say that as someone who had a great fondness for both the cartoon and toys growing up. I think, on reflection, Wayans might have considerably less range than he thinks he does.

  • Speaking of unnecessary remakes, and ridiculous ’80s cartoon shows, do we really need another Masters of the Universe movie?

    Warner sees the big-screen version as a gritty fantasy and re-imagines Adam as a soldier who sets off to find his destiny, happening upon the magical world of Eternia, the trade paper reports. There Skeletor has raised a technological army and is bent on eradicating magic.

    I was also a big fan of He-Man when I was a kid, but I now recognize it’s a ridiculous concept that doesn’t really lend itself to live action and updating. (The Dolph Lundgren version should be proof enough of that.) And if you’re going to rewrite the whole concept, why not just make a new movie? Where are all the new ideas?

  • A Catcher in the Rye sequel just sounds like a bad idea all around. Read W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe — it’s the book that inspired Field of Dreams — if you want to read J.D. Salinger as a character in somebody else’s novel. (They renamed the character and cast James Earl Jones in the movie.) [via]

  • Archie is getting married? Riverdale will never be the same again! Of course, they’ll just retcon this away with one of those “One More Day“-like deals with the devil. (Isn’t it weird how you never see Mephisto and Mr. Weatherbee in the same room together, ever?) Still, they’ll have to make sure they don’t start having to retcon the retcon, like the Spider-Man newspaper strip. (In other news: there’s still a Spider-Man newspaper strip?) [via]

  • Meanwhile, who knew Jughead’s hat had such a rich history? [via]

Getting out of science fiction

From a recent profile of China Miéville:

But he feels that fantastic tales are a natural part of storytelling. When skeptics ask him, “How did you get into sci-fi and fantasy?” he has a response. “My answer is: How did you get out of it?” says Mr. Miéville. “Because if you look at a roomful of kids, huge numbers of them will love aliens and monsters and witches…and at a certain point, some of them will start to leave that behind and go on to what they think of — wrongly — as more serious stuff.”

Via SF Signal.