If you liked the quirky humour of the lyrics of Sparks last album, Lil’ Beethoven, and the bombast of their musical arrangements, you’ll probably also love their newest bundle, though you might not find enough songs markedly distinct from the previous work for comfort, that the spirit behind something like “As I sit Down to Play the Organ at the Notre Dame Cathedral” is indistinguishable from that coming up with “How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall”, and might even claim that this is but an exercise in preparing something according to tried recipe, and thus not as delighful as Lil’ Beethoven was. And maybe I’d agree, but it’s still a damn good album. And that Cathedral song rocks. Or pipes, or whatever. Halleluja, I got faith.

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A curious feature of downtown Seattle is its underground, a collection of basement like areas below the streets, that include sidewalks and doorways. In places it looks like an older city got covered in an avalanche of road, and the inhabitants just accepted the new road levels. Speidel’s book, besides telling the story of early Seattle, centers on an account of how this underground city came to be. He claims that both sanitation (sewer backflow on high tides) and road layout of the downtown area left much to be desired, but attempts to widen and raise the roads met with fierce opposition by the downtown merchants and with legal and bureaucratic obstacles. When in June 1889 a big fire leveled all of downtown, the time had finally come, the city widened and filled in the roads over the following years, and the merchants rebuilt their houses from the ground level up, having to abandon these ground levels once the roads reached their final height and rebuild an entrance in a higher story. Both the books and the guided tours that Speidel’s company still provides in Seattle are a lot of fun – though I hear historians aren’t all too happy with his dramatizations, inaccuracies and lack of proper documentation of dubious sources. But with that caveat as to it’s truthfulness kept in mind, the book is quite entertaining, and the Underground well worth a visit.

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If some of the battling nerds on the movie’s IMDB page are to be believed, Miyazaki’s adaptation of this beloved children’s classic was a disgrace. I read the book (the existence of neither it nor its author I suspected until I checked said IMDB page) with that criticism in mind, and have to say: balderdash. While it is true that the two stories diverge in minute details, and that Miyazaki added elements typical for his work, and created visuals not prescribed in Jones’ book, the two are remarkably congruent. The story does make a bit more sense in the book, but then I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good thing in a book about demons falling from the sky and stealing hearts. I was smitten with the strangeness of Miyazaki’s take, and the straightforward resolution left me a bit underenchanted. On the other hand, the character’s behaviour makes more sense in the book, making them both more likeable and more interesting than the somewhat randomly bouncing anime folk.

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When I get tired while watching one of Oliver Stone’s docudramas, is it because my attention span has been lamentably brought down from what would be a decent standard, or because Stone tends to overload his movies with too much information about his ever intriguing subjects? In this case, the effect was exacerbated by Stone wanting to show Morrison’s death as a sudden event and an abrupt ending, rather than a conclusion, which means that – unless you knew when he died, in which case the occasional chapter-like caption indicating the time of the action would give you a hint – you’d be well into the third hour until you felt the end approaching. By that time it had become my friend, indeed. Kilmer’s acting, however, the amazing script, and, of course, the soundtrack all make this a wonderful treat. The cliche notion of the artist as a messianic figure, burning brightly so the audience doesn’t have to, yet gets to enjoy the warmth vicariously I didn’t care too much about, but Stone doesn’t push it too hard, and Morrison’s particular blaze drowns the light of reasoned argument in his great balls of fire anyway. Oops, wrong band.

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About halfway through the movie I realized that I was waiting in vain, and that the strong sense of tension probably wasn’t going to be relieved by some big event. Turns out I was wrong, but I’d still say that this is a movie about ideas more than about events. An aging, repressed and puritan writer of mystery novels is sent to France to find inspiration, finds her missing psychological counterpart instead, in a young promiscuous and hedonisitic woman, and embraces her worldview, to return to her editor with a book that reflects her maturation. How much of the plot truly happened, and how much of it just reflects the story she writes is anybody’s guess, but the cinematography and design is consistently geat and very subtle, and the atmosphere of unresolved tension is almost palpable throughout.

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The biggest corporate scandal of our time, explained. Before I saw this, I feared to see the ruthless and ingenious machinations of evil people would get me agitated without offering a way out. But to see the ruthless machinations of evil people leaves me incredulous for their lack of ingenuity, and the problem turns out not to be a few crooks, but a fundamentally flawed system. None of it should have happened, but scores of investment bankers and brokers fell for the nude emperor, because they had stock in non-clothing. Sure enough, there are a few monstrous moments, as when the Californian energy grid is played for money, but overall, it’s just business as usual. How horrible.

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Neil Gaiman’s work is a bit of a paradox to me. I like his storytelling and inventiveness – if sometimes reluctantly, for excessive use of pathos -, but visually he consistently seems to be balancing on the fringes of a realm of exuberant quirkyness and fantasy running wild that gives me the creeps for all the wrong reasons. This movie is no exception, with a neat twist on good/evil dichotomies, a likable set of characters, and oodles of visual frills. But several of the ideas here are so enjoyable (the birdmonkeys, sphinx/cats and the pair of giants being just three of the more memorable), that the flaws don’t much matter. Maybe I can even bring myself to read the Sandman one of these days. Why? Because it’s there.

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With the Tipping Point being so entertaining to read, the momentum just carried me right into Gladwell’s newer book on the importance of subconscious snap judgments for all aspects of our lives. Of course there is quite some evidence saying that even when we make seemingly rational decisions, our brains may just be bullshitting us profoundly (in Gazzanigas famous experiments on split brain patients, for example, subjects readily report completely bogus reasons for an action, because the half of their brain speaking, having no clue why the other half did something, makes up a story – without the subject being aware that he’s being conned by the gooey stuff in his head. But I digress), so the phenomenon that the resons for our decisions and actions aren’t always available to our conscious self might just be the tip of the problem that we actually come up with explanations for our actions after the fact by default, and the only reason it tends to make sense so much is that we have been around ourselves long enough to generally know what we will be doing, and have a fairly good theory of our own minds. The most important part of this book I found to be the notion that we are able to shape how our subconscious makes its decisions, and the chapter on how requiring conscious justifications messes up and changes our judgments – unless we’re experts and already know what we’re talking about. Next time somebody asks you why you like something, think twice about thinking about it – you suddenly might not like it any more.

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Friends tell me I’ve read this book several years ago and liked it, but try as I might, I can’t remember it. Upon (re?)reading it now, I have an explanation of why that might be. The general theme – social phenomena are subject to nonlinear mechanisms that mean minimal causes in the right place or time can have enormous effects – is of the variety that is so obvious once you get it, you immediately forget the person who told you. Something that obvious doesn’t have an author, or a form, it’s just an impresonal truth. The book is an entertaining and insightful read, but I can already feel the particulars fading in my mind. In a few years I’ll be ready to read it again.

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The only reason this excellently designed and written killer game doesn’t get a top rating from me, is all the killing. I’m all in favor of frying Doom’s demons, hunting evil unreal aliens or shooting down robots in the Descent series, to name just a few of the blow’em’ups I’ve played over the years, but the stark realism of the environment do make a difference, I think. When you can just jog down a street, whip out the gun and shoot a few people in purple tees, just because they wear purple tees (and would soon start shooting at you, anyway, since you’re dressed in green), or jacking weapons from a National Guard depot is accomplished by shooting the protecting soldiers, it all feels a bit too much like real life for complete comfort. That said, the gameplay is terrific and the scenery breathtaking – and I’ve only seen the quarter or so of the game world that is modeled on Los Angeles so far. The only annoyance concerns saving games, which can only be done at the players home base, and only between missions. With some of the missions having tricky parts that you only get to after sometimes minutes of driving, having to repeatedly do all of one of them just to figure out the tricky bit can be a bit of a drag.

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