Steve Reads

I’m not prudish by any stretch, but it does seem as though there’s too much nudity in film now. I don’t mean this for any of the standard conservative reasons about nudity being bad for the kids, or even any of the arguments about viewing people as sex objects. Rather, I’m looking for there to be more libido in the world, and more respect for how sexy it is to withhold something. I think women in film often look more sexy in a well-designed outfit than they do with their clothes off — because there’s some mystery left. The actress teases the viewer. Watch any Hitchcock movie starring Grace Kelly; she never takes her clothes off, and yet she’s easily more sexy than anyone in film today. The shot in Rear Window that introduces her is astonishingly sexy, and Kelly’s lips barely grace Jimmy Stewart’s.

Why is Kelly so much more sexy than today’s actresses, when almost all of today’s actresses end up naked at some point? I think it’s because clothing is actually very sexy, and because sexiness is an attitude much more than it is flesh. You can even see this in a movie featuring nudity: David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. features Naomi Watts as a wholesome girl arriving in Los Angeles for the first time to make an acting career, and it’s only rather far into the movie that we see the sultry devil that the naïve girl has been hiding; she kisses a fellow actor while fully clothed, and it may very well be the sexiest kiss I’ve ever seen on film. She’s nude later on in the movie, but it doesn’t compare to the earlier scene.

I guess I’d just like Hollywood to relearn restraint, as a way of increasing the sexiness of its movies. It might not be possible, given the American public’s self-replicating taste for skin in movies (Hollywood gives us more skin, so we learn to want more of it, so Hollywood gives us more), but it’s a dream.

For some reason, even if you explicitly tell your browser to reload a page, it doesn’t reload the images on that page; the images are cached, the text not. This caused all kinds of trouble for some software a friend was writing a few months ago. Does anyone know how to force the browser to reload everything when it reloads a page?

Jack Balkin has a great weblog, and writes some very persuasive stuff from the perspective of a rather liberal — and very well-reasoned — law professor. Hence I trust him quite a lot when he praises Eugene Volokh’s book (particularly given that Volokh is strongly libertarian). I want to go out and buy it. I thought it would be priced like most legal books, but in fact it’s cheap. Rock.

I just returned from a weekend with my friends Seth and Steph. Such a great time, because they are great people. We learned contra dancing — along with bits of rhumba, cha-cha, and tango — from this seventyish-year-old guy named J.T. who was just cool as hell. I actually markedly improved my dancing from the beginning to the end; for some reason cha-cha had been really difficult for me, but I did all right this time.

Then it was a night of partying and playing music until rather late (Seth stayed up all night; I crapped out around 2). I had never knowingly played in 12/8 before, but I found it really enjoyable and flexible. I think I’m addicted now.

Other highlights included

• A gorgeous woman with a remarkably mellifluous voice that is a more intense turn-on than I can possibly describe.
• A dude who shouldn’t open his mouth ever, because all that ever comes out is distilled vacuity.
• Running around with Seth’s son on my back, laughing and having a great time for almost exactly a minute, until he had had enough and burst into tears. I don’t really understand kids. But I’m trying.
• Playing frisbee with the same child and accidentally nailing him in the hand, thereby causing Tearful Child Episode #2. A bad record for the weekend, but I think Eli still forgives me; he came into the guest bedroom today and proceeded to explain to me how I could get recipes (“Not adult recipes — kid recipes,” said Eli) off the web: he tells me all I have to do is “go to PBSKids.org and click on Zoom.” I had no idea. Thank you, Eli.

On the way home, I saw a truck from Johnson & Dix. Tee hee hee.

Oh, and an article in the Metro revealed to me that all this crap about “intelligence failures” in the pursuit of Iraqi non-WMDs is a Bush administration spin, even if they haven’t admitted it. By pretending that it’s an intelligence failure — or at worst, that the intelligence community doctored data to suggest a war — the blame comes off the administration. Sure, they may have encouraged the CIA to feed them intelligence leading to a war, but I don’t think that’s how the news is going to spin. There will be a bunch of investigations into the CIA’s failings — since they’ve been such a good whipping boy in recent years — all of which will show the Agency’s incompetence. The Bush administration will come out more or less unscathed. That Bush murdered American soldiers unjustly will never come out explicitly.

Having come home from getting a couple drinks with my friend Mike at Chez Henri, I poured myself a big glass of water and sat down to watch whatever my roommate was watching while I diluted. What he was watching wasn’t so important, but my jaw was agape throughout a commercial for Walking With Cavemen. My god. This just looks so remarkably bad. I kept asking my roommate, “Are they serious? Is this for real?” The unreality of it only accelerated when the commercial seemed to end and Alec Baldwin came on screen. “Alec Baldwin!” I thought. “This guy knows he’s a self-referential joke. Surely this commercial must be a trick!” I actually held my breath, just to make sure I didn’t breathe over the punchline. But — and here’s the remarkable thing — it never came! This shit is serious! How remarkable.

First there was MakeAShorterLink.com, then Shorl.com, and now there’s TinyURL.com. Will the madness ever stop?

Everyone wishes he could find a naked photo on the web of someone he knows, right? Or is that just me?

I don’t know if I’m entirely clear on what RageBoy is all about, yet at least two seemingly intelligent people – Doc Searls and Ray Ozzie – link to him. Can someone explain to me what the point is?

It’s sort of a commonplace among the hacker community that the Internet is built off the end-to-end argument, following Saltzer, Reed and Clark. The principle is simple: the network should be dumb, the clients smart. The network should do nothing but shuttle bits back and forth; it shouldn’t treat voice bits any differently than it treats Microsoft Word bits or porn bits. Only when the bits reach the customer’s machine does the difference from one bit to another show up.

An alternative to this dumb-network design is a design where the network must, for instance, authenticate each device before it comes online. I only recently remembered what I had read about AT&T: back in the day, it only allowed a specific kind of device on the network. Modems were illegal. So was the Hush-A-Phone, which was a little cup that fit over the phone’s mouthpiece to cut down on background noise. AT&T sued to stop the Hush-A-Phone’s production; the FCC agreed with AT&T, though the Court of Appeal later reversed.

There’s no reason why the Internet couldn’t operate like the old AT&T network did. Yet the very reason the Internet works so well is that its network is dumb. Basically, anything you can do with bits, you can do on the Internet. If AT&T had had its way, we wouldn’t even have modems; AT&T believed that it needed to strictly control the devices which could get on the network, in order to keep the system stable. One of the Internet’s fundamental philosophical changes is the idea that power can be decentralized — a company doesn’t need to control what goes on the Net in order to have a perfectly healthy network. AT&T’s loss was the rest of the world’s gain.

Turns out that it’s beautiful here, despite predictions to the contrary. So I spent the afternoon walking from my place to Union Square, Union to Inman, Inman to Central, and Central to Harvard, then taking mass transit back. I had my nifty new GPS with me the whole time; it’s a fun little toy to have, and hopefully it will keep me from getting lost around Europe.

I was in line at the post office today (Jesus Christ stop pestering me, all right? — I was sending some DVDs to my friend Stevie) when the woman near me started ranting to the postal lady about the kind of “highway robbery” that the government puts us through. Her evidence? A million dollars won at the lottery only translates to $34,000 per year after taxes, for 20 years. (Ma’am: if you don’t want $680,000 — even after adjusting for inflation — I’ll gladly take it off your hands.) And she just kept going on and on about how much of a crime this was. And to top it off, every time she’d bring up a subject with the postal lady, she was clearly doing so only so that she could talk: “How long ago did you quit smoking?” “Seven years.” “Oh, well I smoked for 30 years  . . . ” She kept going on this way until the postal lady rather brusquely dismissed her (as befitted the situation).

This sort of conversation happens all the time, and I absolutely can’t deal with it. I actually get self-conscious when I talk about myself (which is why this weblog is a good way for me to vent — it’s like socially- and self-approved egoism), and I try to change the subject as quickly as possible. People who refuse to take the spotlight off themselves are doubly hard for me to watch.

There’s a great petition on the web to express support for the Eric Eldred Act. I mentioned this Act on my blog a couple weeks ago. The idea is very simple: most copyrighted works aren’t making any money 50 years into the term, yet the copyright still causes a headache for those who want to build on it. They need to track down the copyright, costing the researcher time and money. So Larry Lessig and others came up with a very simple solution: ask copyright holders to pay only one dollar after 50 years. If they pay it, then the copyright lasts as long as Congress says it should last. If they don’t pay it, the copyright lapses. In all likelihood, this bill will result in a vastly widened public domain, which is good for everyone.

So I ask: please sign the petition if you agree with the Act. It’s quick, and I think we can do a lot of good when Congress realizes that the public cares about this issue.

I now own the DVD, the soundtrack, and the poster for the film Talk To Her (Hable Con Ella). Some may consider this obsessive; I consider it logical. It’s a film that I will watch often, hence the DVD purchase makes sense; the soundtrack is beautiful, and I’ve fallen asleep to it often; and the poster  . . .  well, it’s a beautiful poster. My friend Chris bought me the poster for my birthday, thereby heeding my call. Chris knows I appreciate the gift, but I’ll say it again: thanks, man.

This film stirs such remarkable feelings in me. The first time I saw it, I left feeling as though I were in love: butterflies in my stomach, a certain reluctance to re-enter the real world, the urge for tears, the urge to smile, and confusion all around. When we saw Alicia in the dance studio toward the end, I told myself that the film couldn’t possibly end there or I’d have to kill myself. The film doesn’t end there; it ends with a far more hopeful scene entitled “Marco y Alicia,” which upon further reflection strikes me as only cosmetically hopeful. It looks as though Marco and Alicia will get together, but in all likelihood they will communicate as much as if she were still in a coma; Marco will be talking to her, not with her, just as he talked to Lydia for so long than she never had time to say that their relationship was over. Fundamentally, I think Talk To Her is a film about the impenetrable silences between couples. (It’s not a coincidence that the short black-and-white film in the middle of Talk To Her is a silent film.) So when it looks like Marco and Alicia are going to get together, maybe it’s a slight respite from the sadness bearing down on us, but I doubt Almodóvar wants us to get off that easily.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned the tempest in a teapot created among the grammar-pedant set by the sentence “Toni Morrison’s genius enables her to create novels that arise from and express the injustices African Americans have endured.” The Times featured an op-ed piece about the un-controversy this weekend (my cache). I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks that such grammatical navel-gazing isn’t worth anyone’s time. I would prefer my nation to be full of people who broke all the grammatical “rules” and wrote clear sentences, rather than the current situation where educated adults think that they “don’t understand grammar” just because they couldn’t tell you what a split infinitive is or where to use “whom.” The rule to me seems to be: If the people reading your sentences think that your sentences are clear, then you’re grammatically correct. Any useful grammatical standard serves that larger goal. Which is to say, any grammatical standard which doesn’t serve that goal is useless.

Via Kottke.org: Brilliant (and cached).

I just saw the original version of The Vanishing, as opposed to the American one done by the same director five years later. I don’t clearly remember the American one, but I do seem to remember that it tied itself up very nicely and safely at the end. There is no such safe harbor in the original version.

The bad guy (played by Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) in the original is a wonderful character. He’s not even necessarily an evil guy — just someone who’s trying to discover the limits to how evil he could possibly be, so that he can feel good about the kind things he does. He never strikes out violently, as even the remarkable Hannibal Lecter does. He never raises his voice. He never even seems threatening. Indeed, most of the movie he’s trying to figure out how to lure women into his car. The most frightening character is actually the victim in all of this — the husband who’s trying to find his kidnapped wife. It’s a wonderfully done psychological thriller. If you’re into that sort of thing.

Wouldn’t it be neat if there were some standardized way to indicate how you found a link? For instance, maybe it would look something like

 <link url="http://www.sarahstirland.com/archives/mediacon.htm"> <source> http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/archives/2003_05.shtml#001247 </source> </link> 

Then if Larry did the same thing, and so on recursively, we could develop some very interesting maps of how people are connected. This strikes me as a richer source of data than merely tracking who links to whom. Right now such a map of “link trails” serves only to assuage my curiosity, but it seems like the sort of thing that could develop some practical value in time.