Category: Media

Thanks to a recommendation in my Debate on DRM post, I signed up for a free trial at emusic.com. Unlike iTunes, eMusic allows you to download music into a standard format, mp3.

With the free trial, I received 50 song downloads. If I continue with the subscription, 9.99 US dollars a month buys me 40 song downloads. This makes the service very inexpensive–about .25 a song.

I looked to see if the service had the music I’ve recently downloaded from iTunes, but it didn’t. eMusic does not have as good a selection of music as iTunes does. However, moving away from looking for specific songs and focusing on genres, instead, the selection is good enough. In addition, the royalties are paid for the music, and the downloads are legal–both of which are important to me.

I found and downloaded the 1922 release of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings with Jelly Roll Morton. This is classic oldtime jazz and ragtime music–important for being released before the infamous flood of 1927, which had a major impact on jazz and blues music.

This album was one of the first mixed race jazz albums released–significant because most white jazz bands ‘pretended’ that the black influence on jazz didn’t exist. The downloaded songs feature the scratches and pops of the old vinyl, but you’ll never hear this type of music again. I listened to it last night during my walk, and it was pure joy.

There is also a compilation of Jelly Roll’s piano solos, released in 1923, which I plan on downloading later today. In the meantime, I also downloaded Shirelles album, which will accompany my walk today.

Once I downloaded the music, it was simple to add the songs to my iTunes library, which were then picked up by my iPod the next time I synched. I even copied the album art into the iTunes music.

I told my roommate about Jelly Roll’s music and he was curious, so I burned him a CD to listen to in the car. I liked the ease with which I could import and export the music, in and out of iTunes. Also thanks to the DRM debate thread, I found there are additional utilities I can get that will make this process even easier. Unlike that silly Google Video, with its operating system restrictions and foolish purchase policies, with eMusic and iTunes there’s no lock-in.

Inexpensive….selection of music…artists paid…legal…simplicity…no lock-in… These are what matter to me when downloading music. Everything else, is just tech.

Knowing my interest in New Orleans and the history of the area, a friend sent me a link to a thoughtful, intelligent, and well written alternative approach to rebuilding the city: Rethinking, Then Rebuilding New Orleans by Richard Spark. I’ll return to this writing later in an essay on this subject I’m currently writing, but today I wanted to point out the site that originated this link: 3 Quarks Daily.

3 Quarks Daily is a community weblog that features original writing and links to articles on science, art, and literature. I’m sure I’ve heard of this site before, but there are so many that cover art and literature and sometimes one tires of New Yorker clones and therefore I hadn’t checked it out, at least enough to remember doing so. After reading this article, though, and checking out other offerings, I subscribed to the site and now I find it to be one of the first sites I check when catching up on my reading.

So far this week, I’ve read about the James Agee revival, returning to the moon, a Smoking Gun investigation of James Frey (upon reading of which left me going who would want to buy this book regardless of factuality?), and Reductionist versus Pluralist view of cancer. I have about a dozen articles still on my to-read list.

It really is an amazing site, and addictive. Liking the site is unusual for me because normally when I’m faced with a publication that describes itself as covering ‘art and literature’, I find that after keeping up with the site for a time, my butt tightens, my nose raises into the air, and I start thinking with a Harvard accent. Not so with 3 Quarks. Thank goodness, too, because I can now keep up with my more well read, cosmopolitan, and erudite friends, without risk of losing my inner hick.

(Note to the editor, S. Abbas Raza: Consider bringing on more female contributors. I can recommend one to start: Yule Heibel.)

I watched the Japanese movie The Calamari Wrestler and it meets or exceeds all expectations when you consider the premise: wrestler dies and re-incarnates as a giant squid and goes on to challenge all comers in the ring.

There is no pretense about the creature–it is obviously a man in a squid suit, with eyes that move about (though they sometimes stick, which is a bit unnerving to see). He has his arms inserted into two of the tentacles and then waves them madly about. All emotional expression is managed with body movements, and the exaggerated nature of mannerisms typical in these types of movies works rather well.

Favorite quotes and scenes from the movie:

“I have no giant squid friends!”

The giant squid seated in zen meditation. The giant squid getting out of an elevator. The giant squid making love (what was all of that in the background?) The giant squid wrestling. The giant squid.

“Joint locks don’t work on an invertebrate. They’re too slippery.”

The giant squid has a wet dream, and it literally becomes a wet dream. Nothing like a sweaty squid.

The giant squid trying to be incognito by wearing sunglasses.

“You want me to date a giant squid? But he has been banned from wrestling–how could he support me?” (Not exact wording but close.)

The scene where the romantically rejected squid is dejectedly walking home, tentacles waving about, back-lit by the setting sun was a kicker. But not as much as watching the squid skip about with the woman of his dreams.

Is it a ‘good’ movie? Define ‘good’. From what Cinema Strikes Back writes:

Right up front, I have to say Calamari Wrestler is not a “good” movie. The budget is miniscule, the acting is broad, the plot meanders, and, obviously, the whole movie is completely ridiculous. However, none of that stops this from being a great piece of entertainment.

The writer went on to compliment the costumes of the creatures, and I agree: they weren’t real, but they were art (something lost in today’s hunt for ‘realism’ in fictional works.)

The Calamari Wrestler is both spoof and a commentary on the Japanese Professional Wrestling association, and from a wrestler featured in the movie and other scenes, must be as truthful and believable as our own American form of the sport. It is a silly movie, but played straight; increasing the entertainment value and the humor in my opinion.

However, there are some other aspects of the movie that seemed quite serious and I wondered how much of it reflects underlying Japanese perceptions and attitudes. For instance, Japanese professional wrestling is seen in the movie as the wind behind the wings of spirit (if I remember the term correctly) that gave heart to the Japanese when they were occupied by the US. No, the ‘hated’ US was the term used.

The movie also had, I thought, overtones of race and class differences–subtle, and not so subtle–such as the health of the giant squid being a measure of the ‘whiteness’ of its skin. I wish I was more familiar with Japanese culture and history because this movie is (for all its Saturday matinee cheesy monsters) subtly nuanced. I think the director targetted more than just Japanese professional wrestling with Calamari.

Do I recommend it? Yes! But only for those people who get to the end of this post and think to themselves, “I have to rent this!” If you do, don’t suspend belief with this movie; you’ll enjoy it so much more if you accept it completely at face value.

Next week: the matinee movie Dogora

Weblogging is replete with Carnivals of this, Bonfires of that — most of which fall on a Friday before all of this gets put into sleep mode. One such I thought is missing is something along the lines of a Carnival of Matinee Movies. These are the movies you saw Saturday afternoons, either in a theater or at home on television.

Saturday matinee movies aren’t just film or cinema–they’re culture. How we are as people is greatly defined by what Saturday afternoon movies we saw with our friends, family, or by ourselves. They didn’t even have to be Saturday afternoons, because the Saturday matinee movie is a state of mind as much as a state of time.

I am not particularly good at starting a meme, so I won’t. Rather than attempting to start a “Matinee Madness”, I’m just going to write about Saturday matinee movies on Saturdays and if folks want to join, they can. If not, no big deal. At a minimum, it’s a change of pace from discussions about Wikipedia, Google, and big-haired bloggers.

Matinee movies differ for each of us. My roommate is partial to westerns, but my Dad favored war movies. Old dancing and singing movies ring other people’s bells, but my Saturday matinees invariably focused on science-fiction movies; usually featuring what I called the Playtex Living monsters.

I’m not alone in being brought up in the tradition of creature features on Saturdays. The SciFi channel seems to have tapped into this with its CGI movie of the week, but with, to me, much less class. Bizarrely enough, I fit the demographics for these types of movies: being a woman over 50 (and therefore to some conservative writers, equivalent to dog food).

I didn’t believe the demographics until I visited my Mom. She loves the SciFi creature features. More, she loves disaster flicks. While there, we watched shows on killer bees, killer locusts, and little nanobots that can eat a human in 3 seconds flat. Humanity dies a thousand deaths, weekly, at my Mom’s.

Mom went to The Day After Tomorrow at the movies twice, and while I was visiting, got into a conversation with her 82 year old neighbor next door about the merits of some kind of disaster flick on NBC. Listening to them, I was reminded of two wine lovers discussing the relative merits of a new wine. Yes, it had a good tension, but it spent too much time getting into the action. Oh my yes, that building falling down was especially good. It became flat, though, in the middle: not enough people squished.

If they do a remake of the Poseidon Adventure, as the rumors go, she’ll be in alt.

(Now, I like disaster flicks, too, but I didn’t like the Poseidon Adventure. The premise was good even if the clothes were awful. But I could have lived with the clothes, and the hair, and even Ernest Borgnine in yet another disaster flick. No, it was the song, you know what song. I still hate that song.)

I, on the other hand, grew up with monsters: from the sea, from space, and particularly from Japan. Yes, this means Godzilla. I loved Godzilla. It didn’t matter that the monsters were fake and the Tokyo looked like it was made of cardboard, or that the tiny little human being stepped on looked like Ken of Barbie doll fame. I loved it when the thing screeched; I loved when it would smash through power lines; and when it fought the bad monsters and would jump up and down with glee, I would join it.

As a consequence, I love Japanese movies that feature Playtex living monsters, no matter how improbable.

Recently PZ Meyers wrote a review of The Calamari Wrestler, a new Japanese flick where the hero, a famous wrestler, reincarnates as a giant squid. PZ, who most likely picked this up because of its giant squid associations (he, like me, is all things Archituethis Dux), started his review with:

I have seen The Calamari Wrestler. It was…indescribable. I won’t even try.

Variety had a few more words:

Funny pic about a brooding wrestler reincarnated as a giant squid is a kind of “Waiting for Godzilla” aimed at the midnight circuit. F/x, amounting to men in rubber suits, is proudly of the Ed Wood school, but tasty tale is served up with a redeeming wink. Quick sketch of Japanese pro wrestling history, couched in terms of island’s postwar identity problems, give extra context to the tentacle-in-cheek sports spoof. Cult suction should ensue, but it won’t see much theatrical ink.

A Japanese giant squid that wrestles–impossible to resist. It is now first in my Netflix queue. I’ll have a review of it for next Saturday’s Matinee Movie of the Week.