A Gilded Planet

This novel reads like an extended Bill Brasky sketch. Like can you believe what a wild man bad ass Simón Bolívar was? “One time Bolívar slept the whole ride to Peru while sitting upright on a horse, and when he got there he conquered everything and they were so grateful they crowned him emperor and asked him to make love to the most beautiful young maiden in all the land!” Okay, that´s not a direct quote, but it´s close. Márquez is ostensibly writing about the final months of Bolívar´s life, yet that often feels like a pretext to roil up the mists of the man´s legend with frequent flashbacks to earlier moments of infamy. To make another reference to Tim Meadows, it occasionally feels like that moment near the beginning of the movie Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story - “You're gonna have to give him a moment, son. Simón Bolívar needs to think about his entire life before he dies.” To make a long story short, the book is plenty amusing and often quite beautiful but it leans pretty ...

Sometimes I make Wikipedia articles. Usually I just write a few lines, and then other people who I don't even know will add stuff to make the articles better. Here are the Wikipedia articles I have made: Hob Broun  - Novelist who wrote his last two books by blowing air through a tube Elspeth Davie - Writer and wife of philosopher George Elder Davie Rafael Bernal - Mexican Crime Novelist At Night We Walk in Circles - Novel by Daniel Alarcón Megan Ellison - Film producer & daughter of Oracle founder Larry Ellison Carole Shammas  - Historian & mother of musician Julia Holter Change Nothing  - Documentary about French Singer Woes of the True Policeman  - Novel by Roberto Bolaño We the Animals  - Novel by Justin Torres Barravento  - Directorial debut of Brazilian auteur Glauber Rocha Wainy Days  - Absurdist Web Series Tim and Eric Nite Live!  - Surreal Talk Show Web Series ChronoZoom  - Interactive Timeline Ge...

A Visit from the Goon Squad recalls the intricately interconnected sprawl of Cloud Atlas and Infinite Jest , but presented in miniature, as if those literary metropoles were reconfigured in order to be contained in a single city block. In fact, the Jules Jones interview/nervous breakdown chapter feels like a direct parody of or homage to David Foster Wallace's writing style, and the way characters and situations are nested recurrently throughout the distinctly different narratives and styles of each chapter owes a lot to Cloud Atlas . Yet I don't mean to belabor the point regarding its influences - this is very much its own book and in its finest moments it achieves the sort of lyrical transcendence one associates with masterpieces. It's also a breeze to read, which I think belies its real complexities to a significant degree. One could quibble with the neatness of the interconnections of Egan's characters, settings and stories. Many writers suggest that coinci...

You know that song that goes in the jungle the mighty jungle the lions sleeps tonight well that's not even accurate the lion doesn't sleep in the jungle he doesn't even live in the jungle the jungle is for jaguars and leopards you idiots! And that isn't even my main problem with Disney's 1994 animated musical, The Lion King . For starters, I don't think the so-called 'circle of life' necessarily has to involve your uncle killing your own father and stealing your birthright. So that's misleading. 2. Hakuna Matata does not mean "no worries for the rest of your days." It means "no worries" as in "no problem," or "no big deal." There's a world of difference that in all its irrevocable frivolity The Lion King glosses over entirely. It's like they didn't have Wikipedia in those days or something. Swahili speakers all over the world find The Lion King insulting. 3. There's no such thing as a...

Magnolia 1999. 188 minutes. USA. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Watchdate: 9/9/2012. The problem with doing too much cocaine, as I understand it, is that it makes you think every idea you have is a good idea. Evidently, Magnolia amounts in large part to a parade of cocaine decisions. The opening sequence of the movie offers the tantalizing possibility of a masterful cinematic examination of the nature of coincidence, both hilarious and tragic in equal measure. With each moment that passes after this perfectly orchestrated opening, the movie grows ever more frantic, overwrought and slipshod, taking on the rhythm of Scorsese without his coherency, the scope of Kubrick or Altman without their poignancy, even the absurdity of Buñuel without his satiric edge.  It's a great big mess of a movie and sometimes those work out really well, but a lot of other times they become exhausting to watch. For every excellent performance, from Julianne Moore's shrill drug addict to To...

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov Bulgakov swings gracefully between the theatrical, the vulgar, the cartoonish, the caustically satiric, and even at times the profound and the sublime. I don't know how much of the satire I missed due to my relative unfamiliarity with the Soviet Union in the 1920s, though his attacks on the groveling and conforming literary establishment of the time are quite clear and wonderfully handled. I especially loved his satires of hustling for real estate. Behemoth the Tomcat is an indelible character - even if his supporting role in the book is smaller than you might imagine given his prominence on the covers of many editions of this book. But the most thought provoking element of the book may be the novel-within-the-novel about Pontius Pilate. It functions simultaneously as a deep rupture from the main narrative, yet Bulgakov also successfully integrates it in myriad ways. Techniques associated with postmodernism stretch as far back as ...

When I watched Lincoln the other week, I noticed something about the 13th Amendment I had not been aware of before. The movie's narrative follows the political struggle to pass the 13th Amendment through Congress. At the end, the text of the 13th Amendment is read out loud: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. I highlighted the above section because it's a big fat loophole in the U.S. Constitution just waiting for some brutal geniuses to think up the prison industrial complex. 150 years later, we have mass incarceration and states of the Old Confederacy have considered using prison labor  to do the work that slaves would have done prior to the Emancipation Proclamation.