New Age vs. Greek Life

Gaia's Garden: A guide to home-scale permaculture, 2nd edition, by Toby Hemenway, is by far the most digestible gardening book I've read. Lots of how to's and why's mixed with a few real life applications make the denser theory bits comprehensible. I think I'll probably buy it for my reference library; unless Edible Forest Gardens is better. [The appendices and bibliography are brilliant] I found at least five other books to borrow from the library.

Warning: Not the Horror film the previews make it out to be

Shutter Island instead falls in the realm of psychothriller. I'm betting that the horror previews are at least part of the reason it took the #1 box office spot, as my gent and I wanted a good horror flick. I did find it a pleasant surprise, however. Quite as good/building from the highnote of The Departed in terms of actor's growth and being a drama that makes you think. And the cinematography kept you invested in the surreal moments. I know it was digital filtering, but the colors were so much more real during the dream sequences than any I've seen recently. Definitely recommended.

Catching up again...

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs - nice for one time through. Seeing five minutes twice over was excruciating.

Running Mycelium - Fungi are sentient stomachs. They can be used to bioengineer ecosystems. However, most of the ways to do so have been patented. Or are otherwise not allowed. Pooh.

Assault on Precinct 13 - Um, why was this movie ever made? Trite. The actors didn't even know how to fire a gun/weren't trusted with blanks! No recoil=unbelievable.

Perennial Vegetables - Gave Up. Epic fail on the part of the author. Needs some serious reorganizing to make any sense. 

Pride and Prejudice - Still working on it. About 1/3 of the way through.

I still feel like I am missing a movie.

In the past two days

I have read Carleen Madigan's The Backyard Homestead [subtitled: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre!]. I won't be buying this one, but may check it out from the library frequently. This book overviews a whole lot without actually giving you the information you need to complete one project outlined within. 

Seriously, she misses steps egregiously. This is a case of highly specialized education forgetting that the target audience of beginners doesn't know what temperate zones are, nor how to get from roasting ?malted barley? to 'unhopped malt concentrate'. She does, however, provide some handy charts indicating how much common plants will yield in what space and how much is needed to provide all the needs of one average person, so you can figure out how much of things to grow by scale of family. [The reason I may borrow it frequently, or perhaps just see if I can get these pages on googlebooks]

If I were to classify The Backyard Homestead as a reference type, I'd call it a first two weeks of a semester book with followup books for each major section each subsequent week. I figured out what I'm interested in, now I just have to figure out how to implement these forms of self-sufficiency.

Lemonade

I don't know the backstory. Seth Godin directed me to watch Lemonade today. I did. One word: Bootstrap!

Edge of Darkness

is one of the better corporate espionage movies I've seen. Warning, spoilers ensue: Everyone dies, poetically, except the person who deserves it most [when you run in to save the senator from gunshots, pull out your gun, for goodness sake, babyface cop! Who's so dumb that they run into a room unarmed when they know that someone in the room has been shooting? Gah!]. The poetic justice of the deaths made me happy; the European sad ending made me happy; and they said this quote twice, which made me happy: "Everything's illegal in Massachusetts". Best line ever, said multiple times. Some sweet physics with mad car chase scenes too. Would suggest, but not for the faint of heart.

A belated appraisal of several things:

Monday, I finished Shop Class as Soulcraft. Impressive. I haven't read a book with such a challenging vocabulary in at least five years. I didn't understand at lease six sentences in two hundred pages of intense philosophical dispensation merely because I was unfamiliar with several words therein, nor any derivatives of the same family tree of words. A few other sentences made little sense because I was trying to grasp the larger philosophic argument. As inspiring as The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, but nonfiction. As my own experience [namely going for a B.F.A. that essentially taught me how to build fake houses for fake people] demonstrated, Crawford elucidated: Those with great intellectual capacity find validation in the physical expression of a problem solved. A person can't be a mechanic, or a carpenter, or a welder, or a plumber, or for that matter a lumberjack, without possessing the kinds of problem solving skills that can only be learned by physically interacting with one's medium and having a high quantitative intelligence. I think Seth Godin's Linchpin will be a good follow-up. Shall let you know after I've read it. Shop Class is definitely on the list of books that offer life changing insights into my humanity.

Tuesday, I read Stayin' Alive: Armed and Female in an Unsafe World. I do put myself firmly in the "everyone should carry a gun and know how to use it and after the first ten years, violent crime would be literally nonexistent" camp, but Paxton Quigley goes a bit too far. Make my bedroom into a Panic Room indeed. I need not be paranoid, which is the feeling I get from her style. Though she tries to sound empowering, it comes across as "If you're female, people view you as an easy target and you WILL be attacked". Not my cup of feminist tea. I am interested in pursuing the tactical shooting competition thingies. And getting my concealed weapons permit. But golly. Your neo-feminist tripe marketed by a picture of yourself, wearing a powersuit, smiling demonically, holding a semi-auto just makes me want to puke. Or else shove a toothbrush down my throat so I can puke. Not recommended.

Tuesday I also watched The Departed. Wow. It almost ended like it was European. The good guys died! For a movie with Matt Damon, Leo Di'Crapio, and Jack Nicholson, it was intense. It was gritty. It was hard to watch. And, it was Art. I felt for these guys, and normally I just laugh at them for failing at acting.

Librivox rocks my socks!

For the Uninitiated, LibriVox is a platform intent on the 'acoustical liberation of books in the public domain'. Volunteers sign up, record portions or whole works, and then they get posted online for download or streaming playback. Basically, you get awesome old books as audiobooks for free. The downside is that sometimes the sound quality leaves you wanting more, i.e. an unintelligible narrator or chattery mic.

This evening, I listened to Charlotte Mew's The Farmer's Wife, a collection of poetry published in 1921, while I cleaned my abode. While of a more feminist bent than I personally subscribe, the sounds and rhythm lulled me into a productive flurry. I now have sorted a collection of papers and have an entire grocery sack full for the recycling!

Does TV count?

Seeing as I just watched Shaun the Sheep, and added it to my list of visual entertainment to own courtesy the endearing nature and child friendly subject, I'm not sure if I should include television programs in my list. I suppose I should. Especially since I've already written about it.

By the time I finish my morning blogroll,

I have read 11,583 words. Not including the links I clicked through. Those comprise another 4,819 words. I have also read one page of Shop Class as Soulcraft and decided I need to keep a pencil with said book.

In the beginning...

Upon the realization that I average one film per week, and read far less than that, I decided to keep a record of the movies I see, the books I read, and my reaction thereof in an effort to increase my retention of all and the frequency of the latter. As I have several hundred books on my wishlists, and at least thirty in my bookshelf though unread, this shall serve to promote accountability through the chronicling of my progress in contrast to the more escapist media of film. It shall also prove a reference as to which films I find necessary to own.

Since 1 January, 2010, I have read Lucifer: Exodus [Volume 7] in its entirety. I have also begun Shop Class as Soulcraft and Pride and Prejudice but finished neither.

[Note to the uninitiated: when I take to reading mainly picture books it signifies the overwhelming of my mind, particularly bouts of depression where 150pgs of words seem a daunting mountain of doom.]

Since 1 January I have seen It's Complicated, Daybreakers, and Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock was enjoyable, It's Complicated was funny but would have been genius if I had been genuinely drunk, and Daybreakers... failed with epic proportions. See, the premise is great "What happens when there are more vampires than humans and the blood supply will only last a month" so you expect it to be what District 9 turned out to be, aka an arthouse film that got mainstream distribution and challenged our views of morality and racism, but Daybreakers turned out to be the shootemup gorefest you though District 9 would be. And it had a totally sophomoric ending. Bah. Humbug.

Also, after Christmas but not necessarily in the new year, I saw Ninja Assassin. Absolute EYE CANDY! B or D movie plot, impressively predictable [two almost surprises in the whole movie at most], but Mary Mother of God was it gorgeous. The lead, whose real name appears to be Rain, has a body all 300 Spartans would kill for. And he's not CG. Three times as many stuntman were employed than actors or visual effects artists. And the blood effects... Brilliant. They had to have had a painter on the set at all times, ready to fling fake blood everywhere. At least 10,000 gallons had to have been used. Imagine Kill Bill, then make it ten times as bloody. Utterly enjoyable simply because the cinematography/storyboard could have been done by Da Vinci. Or Warren Ellis. An absolute must own, joining Let the Right One In, Doomsday, and District 9 on that list. Of the aforementioned list, I have acquired El Laberinto Del Fauno [Pan's Laberinth], The Princess Bride, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen [not recommended for roommates or parties]. And having thought that Star Trek would be on that list, after seeing it on the small screen, I have nixed it.

I suppose in the future I should link to IMDB or Amazon with my titles. Bother.