Various Artists, 28 Days Later... (Beggars XI, 2003)

A good deal of the power of the brilliant film 28 Days Later..., as with many great films, lies in its music. Danny Boyle and John Murphy, the two main composers, did a fantastic job both with the original music here and the material gleaned from other sources (some of which, unfortunately, does not appear here; if you want the awe-inspiring Godspeed You Black Emperor! Track played while Cillian Murphy is wandering around a deserted London, for example, you'll need to pick up Godspeed's F Sharp A Sharp Infinity...which you should do anyway).

Most of this soundtrack is Boyle and Murphy, with some fine help from vocalist Perri Alleyne ("Abide with Me," "Ave Maria"). Brooding, ominous, intelligent, and every once in a while witty, the two of them create a soundtrack with an almost palpable menace about it.

The pop songs contained herein are somewhat weaker in the ambiance department, but make up for it with catchiness. Brian Eno, Grandaddy, In a Heartbeat, and the incredible Blue States contribute tracks, all worthwhile. But as many reviewers have pointed out, among the pop songs, Grandaddy's "am180" takes the day. Plaintive yet poppy, the song fires like Fountains of Wayne on steroids (and with talent) with Liz Phair sitting in to give them some real guitar crunch. Absolutely wonderful, and I have spent much time wondering why it has completely escaped radio play. Blue States sound almost as if Baz Luhrmann were sitting in on the session; their track puts me in mind of the similarly excellent "Everybody's Free" from Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet.

If you liked the movie, this is a must-have. If you haven't seen the movie, pick this up anyway. Very worthy. ****

Bastard Noise, Analysis of Self-Destruction (Alien8, 2000)

I have never been a fan of Bastard Noise's recorded works. They're not too bad at all live, but I always found the records to be somewhat annoying at best (and at worst, like their half of the Merzbow/BN split Voice Pie, absolutely unlistenable). But when a label as consistently high-quality as Alien8 drops a Bastard Noise bomb on us, I guess it's time to pull back and rethink that position.

Could be a combination of me getting older or Bastard Noise getting better, but either way, Analysis of Self-Destruction is orders of magnitude more interesting than their earlier work. Not to say it's the best thing since sliced bread, but it least it has some points of reference for the listener, a little structure, and some sort of changes in frequency, pitch, tone, etc that are gradual. In other words, it all sounds more composed. There's still room for improv, but here's yet more evidence that improv over a structured base sounds a whole lot better than improv for its own sake (compare, for example, "Under Mother Earth's Skirt" with the tracks on Voice Pie).

Even more interesting, they manage all this without changing the basics of the BN sound; the base noise is much higher than it is with most noise bands, the oscilloscope-like wavering is still all over the place (and it's still annoying, but not nearly as much), John Wiese throws in some guitar now and again or a handful of unintelligible vocals, and a mass of what-have-you sits in between it all.

The whole thing is at least listenable, sometimes even getting good (the wry humor of a few bars of "Turkey in the Straw" finding their way into "Death Wish for the Dead," for example). Not bad, not bad. ***

Carsten Thomsen, Database Programming with C# (Apress, 2002)

Now this is a C# book (unlike the last one I reviewed here). Thomsen gets into the nuts and bolts from the get-go and starts the reader developing a real application. He gives us the underlying application logic, explains how it works (and tries to instill good coding practices along the way), all with an eye towards actual development rather than stand-alone sample programs that teach only a very few.

I wish he'd spent more time in the book's final chapter going over some of the code explicitly rather than just referring us to the code in the online zip files, but what's here is pretty fine. *** 

The Bourne Identity (Doug Liman, 2002)

Why we need fluffy remakes of movies has been hotly debated in Hollywood for decades. (After all, it's nothing new. Bunuel's 1977 film That Obscure Object of Desire was the sixth adaptation of Louys' novel Woman and Puppet.) After all, rarely is the remake even watchable, much less on a par with the original.

This is one of the exceptions. The new version of The Bourne Identity, directed by Doug Liman of Go fame, contains all the fluff factor of an awful remake yet remains watchable in a turn-your-brain-off way. Jason Bourne is portrayed here by Matt Damon, who shows that he really can be something other than Ben Affleck's geeky best friend. Obligatory love interest Marie is played by indie darling Franka Potente (Run Lola Run), and a well-cast batch of supporting characters keep the acting level higher than one normally gets from this sort of thing while never quite taking themselves too seriously. (The exception to that last bit is Chris Cooper, playing Bourne's boss, but then he's supposed to be a high-strung neurotic.)

Good, solid fun from beginning to end. ***

Ira Sadoff, Palm Reading in Winter (Houghton Mifflin, 1978)

Another fantastic book by Ira Sadoff, though this is best used as a pointer towards the greatness his career would achieve. Unlike his later works, Palm Reading in Winter shows slight touches of inconsistency, almost hesitancy. Which makes it no less brilliant, but does jar the ear on rare occasions. For the established Sadoff fan, this is well worth picking up; new readers may want to start with Emotional Traffic or the selected poems. ****

Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts (Doubleday, 2003)

When one encounters the name "Colson Whitehead," one is apt to think of an old Irish immigrant viewing the city through a jaundiced eye, bleary from another night of stumbling home in rush hour only to find he's locked himself out of his bachelor pad and can't get to the can of beans sitting on the counter seductively calling his name. Instead, what we're given is a young (younger than I am, anyway) born-and-raised New Yorker writing about the place he calls home.

But Colson Whitehead's The Colossus of New York is not just another travelogue. Oh, no, my friends. In fact, it is anything but; I seriously doubt the NY tourism board is going to be recommending this one. At times loving and ominous, sweet and sassy, laugh-out-loud funny and painfully depressed, The Colossus of New York is much like New York itself. There are eight million stories in the naked city, Whitehead wryly quotes, and one would think from reading this that every one of them is feeling a completely different emotion from any of the others at any given moment, and that it's all a constantly swirling chaotic mass. Amen.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the book is how Whitehead manages to take this odd, impressionist look at New York and map it onto you, the reader. You're liable to find at least one or two snatches of sentence per page you can identify with, even if you've never set foot within an hundred miles of the place. Thus, even if you care nothing about New York, it's probable he's going to keep you interested in its goings-on. A beautiful thing, that. But the draw of the book, and its continuing majesty throughout, is Whitehead's ability with language. His diction takes us from the language poetry of Charles Olson to the Nuyorican-style street rap that passes for poetry among slammers, but with Whitehead the language never loses its poetic drive. All of it, even the ugliness, is beautiful.

And above all, The Colossus of New York is a love song, the kind that one would write to one's spouse after seventy years of marriage if one could find a way to include all one's spouse's faults and still make it beautiful. This is a powerful little book, and highly deserving of the widest possible audience. A shoo-in for the top ten list this year. **** 

Charles Bernstein, Dark City (Sun and Moon Classics, 1994)

Charles Bernstein, erstwhile co-editor of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, one of the most influential poetry magazines ever to come out of New York, gives us his twentieth book. And a marvel of inconsistency it is. While there are a few flashes of brilliance, a great image here or there, a turn of phrase that demands re-reading, the majority of the book falls into the category of either "meaningless line breaks in the middle of words," "giving too much tot he reader," or "prose broken into lines to make it look like poetry." Amazon's review-posting conventions (you can't indent lines) make it impossible to give an example of the first. The second involves the repeated use of the annoying technique of slipping parentheticals in just to make sure you get the message, e.g.

"....So we dismember (disremember)
in homage to our maker, foraging
in fits..."
("Debris of Shock/Shock of Debris")

As for the third,

"....I
suspect that your father had an adrenal
gland tumor that was
driving his blood pressure
up...."
("Emotions of Normal People")

If there is any method to the madness of line construction here, I was unable to find it.

Simply put, not up to the standards one would expect from an industry giant. **

Death to Smoochy (Danny DeVito, 2002)

Death to Smoochy is sick, twisted, wrong in every conceivable way. It's also the meanest, ugliest, and downright funniest comedy I've seen since Being John Malkovich.

While the movie initially got a great deal of bad press, that is slowly being rectified as more people who shied away thanks to negative critical reviews at first are discovering this gem. I should have known better, as I'll watch Ed Norton in anything, but it took even me this long to finally see the thing.

Rainbow Randolph (Robin Williams) is a kids' TV host with a weakness for bribes; he accepts them to get kids on the show. He is arrested immediately after the movie starts, leaving his network with an empty time slot. The show's producers, Mona (Catherine Keener) and Frank (Jon Stewart) need a replacement with integrity. They find it in Sheldon Mopes, aka Smoochy the Rhino (Edward Norton). But you get the inevitable question: what happens when you put someone with a strong sense of ethics and principles into a field as corrupt as television, especially when dealing with the kids' market? Nastiness, and hilarity, ensues. Not only does Randolph want his slot back and is willing to do anything to get it, but the shadowy head of Parade of Hope, Merv Green (Harvey Fierstein), is after Smoochy to do benefit work once the show takes off. All Smoochy wants to do is help the kids understand that organic food is good and step-parents need love, too (and other such things, in a series of songs that are worth the price of admission alone). Excellent supporting roles by DeVito, Vincent Schiavelli, Michael Rispoli, Pam Ferris, and many others make this simply a joy to watch.

I'll warn you now, though, Death to Smoochy seems to inspire love-it-or-hate-it reactions. It's obviously not for everyone. But I think if you liked Very Bad Things or thought Being John Malkovich was one of the funniest things you'd ever seen, this is probably going to be right up your alley. Ignore the critics and give it a try. ****

Charles Simic, Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk (Braziller, 1974)

It seems quite silly, in a time where poetry is such a neglected art, to say that an author "burst on the scene" pretty much at any time. But Return to a Place... was Simic's literary bursting, after a few chapbooks on small presses. This was the nation at large's first look at the man who, sixteen years later, would be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (for The World Doesn't End); even this far back in his career, it's easy to see why.

Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk is, as its title would suggest, a fountain of surrealist beauty. Simic, however, has more control with his work than most of the surrealists/dadas were able to achieve, lending his material a leaner, sparer power than one normally finds in surrealist work:

"Green Buddhas
on the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
and spit out the teeth."
("Watermelons")

All the slanted imagery, but with enough meaning close to the surface to be understandable. As well, the mix of humor and sorrow is a perfect translation of the feeling the surrealists strove to achieve and so often failed.

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Get yourself a copy of this. **** 

Ann Louise Gittleman, The Fat Flush Plan (McGraw-Hill, 2002)

We were doing so well there for a while. Yeah, the book gets a little heavy on the new-age diction (things "resonate to" ideas way too many times in this book), and the constant talking about the necessity for eating organic food (with a helpful recipe in the back for soaking your foods in bleach-water if you can't buy organic) was a bit unnerving, but everything else seemed to be on pretty solid ground. But then came the word that has become the yardstick for measuring the scientific objectivity of every nutritionist on the planet: aspartame. And Ann Louise Gittleman, as so many have before her, utterly fails the test.

In short, the so-called "dangers" of aspartame have been so overblown by the press and a few wild-eyed (and very large-mouthed) activists that it has now been blamed for everything from MSG-like headaches to Multiple Sclerosis. (Odd that the MS Foundation's denial that the claim holds any sort of truth whatsoever got nowhere near as much press coverage.) What reports and studies is your nutritionist reading? Easy way to find out: ask them about aspartame. If they start getting fluttery around the eyelids, switch your nutritionist, quick.

Gittleman here attempts to softpedal the anti-aspartame mania the first couple of times it appears by focusing on sweeteners approved for the plan or saying that her bias against the stuff is caused by its water-retaining properties. But keep reading. Once you get to the last fifty pages or so, you'll stumble upon a turn of phrase here, a word there, that strongly implies Gittleman has it in for aspartame for a lot more than that. Which draws the whole scientific basis of the book into question. (There are a few other shady bits, but the aspartame question is the easiest to determine, so I'll stick with it.)

Ultimately, another diet book with a few good, logical ideas that can be found in a number of other places, some really awful overdramatization, and a lot of questionable stuff between the two poles. **