Things of Which I May Not Speak

All day Friday and Saturday, I’m volunteering at ROFLcon.

That’s “roll-on-the-floor-laughing” conference.

It’s a conference to celebrate web silliness and seriousness for a generation that pretty much grew up on it.

Examples of ROFLcon celebrities:

• the father-son stars of the YouTube phenomenon David after Dentist


• Joel Veitch, who made one of my favorite Internet animation videos of all time


• the guy who created 4chan


• a few of the all-time highest frontpagers at Digg


• the person who runs Stuff White People Like


• a keynote by the guy who invented Clippy, the animated paperclip Office assistant

and so on.

I’m liveblogging the event all day for the official web-site. I’m more interested in the academic types at the conference, so I’m especially excited about the two panels with danah boyd, one with Baratunde Thurston of The Onion (no, he’s not academic; but he’s smart and the panel is about race), and ROFLing the News.

I should be on twitter, my posts should show up on roflcon.org and I might get hold of Chad Vader for my Star Wars site. We’ll see.

I don’t want to have to do this living. I just walk around. I want to be swept off my feet, you know? I want my children to have magical powers. I am prepared for amazing things to happen. I can handle it. #

Blue Skies:

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It’s been that kind of a week.

Imagine you were in a large open-air stadium with ten thousand people. There’s a cold wind blowing and it’s silent. And suddenly one of these three openings start playing:

One, two or three.

Would you get goosebumps? If so, you really need to watch the Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) documentary, It Might Get Loud. He uses a meeting of the three great guitarists, Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White as an homage to the guitar. The movie is like comfort food for music fans. [trailer]

I’m almost done audiobook’ing Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown and I’ll write about that later. At the moment, I want to talk about his art of naming characters.

There’s Bombur Yambarzal, the waza of Shirmal. Boonyi Kaul Noman, the Anarkali of Pachigam, and her mother, Pamposh Kaul. There is Nazar-e-Buddoor, the seer of Pachigam. Maximillian Ophuls, the flying Jew.

Larger than life characters need larger than life names.

To quote RGV, as I usually do:

Why do villains have names like Bikhu Yadav, Bhai Thakur, Gaddam Narayana, etc instead of Santosh, Ramu, etc?
Ans: Larger than life characters demand larger than life names. If Vito Corleone’s name was John David, Godfather would not remain Godfather.

Another book that I recently audiobook’ed also had extraordinary names. Ignatius J. Reilly, Myrna Mynkoff, Claude Robichaux, Angelo Mancuso, and Burma Jones, the colorful cast of characters from A Confederacy of Dunces.

I think hearing the names in audiobooks makes you a lot more aware of the music of the names.

∞

Some of Rushdie’s names have strange roots. Max Ophuls is the name of a German director who died in 1957. Bombur Yamberzal is the name of the first Kashmiri opera.

So I’m volunteering for the Independent Film Festival of Boston. Should be fun—I’ll be ushering at Somerville Theatre, Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening. Look for me if you’re there. Just got my badge and t-shirt—picture below.

Opening night is tomorrow—Kevin Kline is in town, there’s a capella and a theremin player.

Kick-Ass comes out today. It’s a movie about kids turned ruthless superheroes, which I’ve been looking forward to since December, when the good folks at AICN showed a a rough-cut at BNAT.

AICN = Ain’t It Cool News, the rambling movie news site that rises like Mothra out of the great city of Austin, TX.

BNAT = Butt Numb-a-thon, the annual, 24 hour movie extravaganza hosted by AICN in the great city of Austin, where they manage to pull off amazing early screenings like Return of the King with Peter Jackson in attendance and Passion of the Christ with Gibson.

This week, Roger Ebert came out with his review for the movie. He finds it to be morally reprehensible:

Shall I have feelings, or should I pretend to be cool? Will I seem hopelessly square if I find “Kick-Ass” morally reprehensible and will I appear to have missed the point? Let’s say you’re a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the movie does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in. A movie camera makes a record of whatever is placed in front of it, and in this case, it shows deadly carnage dished out by an 11-year-old girl, after which an adult man brutally hammers her to within an inch of her life. Blood everywhere. Now tell me all about the context.

I understand where he’s coming from, and maybe I will have the same reaction after watching it. But Harry Knowles’ response to Ebert is pure AICN-style rambling goodness:

Roger states at the beginning of his review that he feels he’s going to hopeless square for his feelings about the morality of KICK ASS.

At a base level it is a film about taking a stand, to protect the innocent and uphold justice… in a pretty fascist as kicking manner. I am not upset at Roger for his point of view… I understand, it is a lot to take.

But I remind you that there was a time, when Martin Scorsese was under fire for having a 13 year old Jodie Foster play a whore in TAXI DRIVER - which is more or less about a man that in the end is a hero for taking violent action to protect that girl.

At that time there were critics that wanted to hang Marty. You were not one of them. I remember that time because as a 6 year old I can remember watching you and Gene defend Scorsese and you were my heroes.

I have to say it is a little sad to see you go the route you did in your KICK ASS review. And don’t worry, while I suppose you’ll never really just get KICK-ASS… You’re no square in my book. But you may be in danger of being a ‘grown up’.

Do read the whole thing; it’s write-ups like this that have made me come back to AICN for more than a decade. It’s written by people with a human voice; not people playing at being journalists.

It has Steve Carrell. It has Tina Fey. Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?

Go see it.

That’s all.

When I was about four years old, my father bought an Apple IIc and this event determined a lot about who I am today. I knew LOGO and then BASIC before I knew Gujarati, my mother-tongue. My father is not a geek by trade, nor is he a geek by any traditional definition. He is the proto-geek, among a class of prime movers who made geeks possible.

∞

Before I was a fan of Star Wars, my parents were Star Wars fans. Before I had heard of Obama, my father was a fan of Obama. There is a pattern here. He bought the iPhone before I did. And now the iPad. And he has more interesting uses for both than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

This one goes out to all the fathers, mothers, uncles and loving benefactors of geeks everywhere—if you didn’t spend a ridiculous amount of money on what appeared (to everyone else) to be an overpriced toy, we wouldn’t be who we are today. Some day I will write a song, but until then, this will have to do [video]:

There are two feelings that deserve words in the dictionary to describe them:

1. The feeling when you are randomly flipping channels and accidentally discover that one of your favorite movies is playing on a channel you never watch.


2. The feeling when you discover that an artist you love has put out work (e.g. music) that you didn’t know existed.

I came up with a word for the first one: Serendipiteevee. It’s what I felt when I just discovered A Hard Day’s Night was playing on a channel called Palladia. That such a channel exists is proof of a benevolent God; because how else could a channel no one has heard of even survive?

I don’t have a word for the second feeling—discovering new music by a favorite artist. But that just happened when I found that Beirut put out a delightful song called Mimizan for the  charity compilation album Dark Was the Night. Watch it below (or here); how can you not smile while listening to this [video]: Continue reading ‘SerendipiTV’ »

The audio cassette that got most play in my room between 1994 and 1995 was The Pet Shop Boys’ album Very. Every single song is a gem. I just descended in to some serious emotional nostalgia, listening to the whole album again after a long time.

Here is Can You Forgive Her:

And, for the Pet Shop Boys fans, this interview Andrew Sullivan did with them is what reminded me of how much I really loved their music 15 years ago.