Linda Ronstadt: Blue Bayou

Very sad news from one of the great voices. I think this is one of the best songs I associate with her--and for some reason I've had it in my head all week.

Review: Neptune's Brood

I've been terribly lax about reviewing things, anymore. I set up "Strangely Random Stuff" in part to separate my review posts from my political posts, but then I sort of failed to hold up my reviewing end. I think the problem is that I tend to be a more enthusiastic reviewer than a slagger; I like pasing on that I found a movie or a book or a product to be really good, as a service to the consumer, while finding that slagging a work I find substandard has a gratuitous feel to it.

If you have any sense of my personality, this insight probably doesn't synch. It strikes me as a weird quirk, as well.

That said, I read Stross' Neptune's Brood about a month ago, and was only jogged into remembering to write a review when I came across PZ Myers' review of the same.  Myers, naturally, was taken with the image of a communist squid-folk society.

I can't say I blame him. I am down with the squid, myself, and an oceanic socialism. I am likewise down with Stross. And I didn't dislike the book at all--oh no. There is naturally some slightly warped humor (is a piratical assurance agency Monty Python enough for you?) and the world-building framework of the Freyaverse, even a few generations down the line, makes sense. But I did find a bit of a peculiarity that I thought might be more something I would enjoy, and not necessarily everyone else:

You know how some works of sf go on about rocket ships and how the drives allegedly would work and maybe mention robots or some other tech in plausible detail to make you feel like "Oh yes. I see how that works." Well, Stross has dug a bit onto intergalactic finance and world-building economies. Space, if you hadn't heard, is big. And someone has to pay for going into it and doing things with bits of it. And the transactions occuring in an interstellar economy would be taking place over in some cases enormous distances and lengths of time that would even be shocking to a very long-lived android.

I have to congratulate Stross for really writing a work that is mindcandy for econowonks. I thought it was fun and fascinating and maybe a bit better than Saturn's Children, in the sense that I wasn't comparing it to Heinlein's Friday the whole time. It is quite different, and I rather liked it. It's just a bit hard to review.

If you like sf with a heavy dose of economics, this is probably your kind of jawn.

Google Doodle Celebrates Erwin Schrodinger's 126th birthday

You know, I like it when ya'll Doodle nerdy at me.

The New Westerns--2 Guns and Last Stand

I had a long weekend coming, so I took off a couple days and saw a few movies, which always centers me, a little. I like movies. I like tv, or comics, or books, for that matter, but movies are like a treat. TV can be good or bad, at times--a show can have an episode that sucks in an otherwise worthy run. Books can suck with redeeming qualities, or be awesome, with reservations. Comics are comics, and I just enjoy them for what they are--a complicated medium.

But movies? To my mind, movies are a finished artwork. When a movie is committed to film, there it is. It tells its story well or poorly. The actors do a job, or they don't. The director makes the story real, or it doesn't come off well. If a movie isn't doing it for me after like, twenty minutes,  I guess it isn't good.  It should give me something to make me bother with it. It should give me a reason to want to see it. This weekend, I saw two movies I rather liked and which I think had something similar going for them--

I think they are New Westerns. They aren't about the Old West. They are about that terrain, but a new reality. The first I caught was a Netflix find: The Last Stand, with Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

I don't have to care for Arnold's politics to like action movies in general, or with him in them. And damn it, I do. This is kind of the story of the honest lawman who sees bringing bad guys to justice as his job, whatever the cost. He assembles a posse, which includes the western trope of a drunk sharp shooter in jail and has certain other touches that kind of feel borrowed from westerns. It is not without comedy. The way of the gun is of course, fetishized, but not unrealistically. A young gun is martyred. There is a kind of mythic unreality about parts of it (a race car that does not seem to need fuel--a bad guy who does not seem to understand his 160 lb ass will be pounded by one someone like A Schwarzenegger, old enough to be his daddy or not.) I don't recall how this one did in the theatres, but since it's a 2013 movie I already got on Netflix, I kind of want to recommend it to see it get a new post-theatre life, because it was a good action flick.  

I also want to give a little prop for 2 Guns. 

This is a more intentionally comedic action film, but it also takes place in the American SW and has elements of the Western genre. Both the Denzel Washington and the Mark Wahlberg characters are isolated from their "tribes" and find an uneasy association with one another. Their mutual language is the Way of the Gun, a cowboy Bushido. Their code is, ultimately, independent and outlaw, because they find that the the arbiters of the codes by which they had lived was false. So they make their own way.  And of course, I love the fuck out of both these actors, seriously. 

In both, there are false women and violence is seen as a solution. They aren't great feminist works, if you know what I mean? But they are excellent action movies, and entertaining--although 2 Guns has this scene with chickens I thought was a bit intense. I like chickens. I like eating them, too, but I don't like them, like, being hurt. So, what I'm saying is, there is a scene if you like chickens you won't like, but if you are okay with violence against humans, this is your kind of movie, for sure!

Also, this weekend I saw Red2. I think this is the only non-stupid movie out of three that have featured Bruce Willis this year. It isn't really a New Western, though. But I sure as hell liked it better than freaking Die Harder than A Very Hard Thing.   But based on a Warren Ellis character, so duh--redeeming fun features. Yay, if you like spy sorts of things. I do. Little bit gratuitously violent, but if you haven't noticed I like action flicks with violence by now, I can't help sort you out any. It has violence.