May 19, 2005
on my mind...
I've become a big fan of del.icio.us the online social bookmarks manager. While explaining it to people is difficult (even my wife who sort of glazed over by the time I had said "online social"), if you just start using it, you'll soon wonder what you did without it.
Anyway I find del.icio.us provides a pretty good snapshot of what's on my mind at least in the realm of my computer. You can see my tag cloud yourself by clicking here. I'm a relatively new user, so my list isn't very robust yet, but it will fill out soon enough. I'm at http://del.icio.us/themexican/.
And while I'm leaving webdroppings, I should include my audioscrobbler homepage and my last.fm homepage as well. Want to discover new music you like. Build up a playlist in audioscrobbler and then start listening to last.fm's personal radio stations of your 'musical neighbors'. Again a bit hard to explain sometimes, but brilliant once you get the hang of it.
Oddly (or perhaps not oddly), of the thousands and thousands of users, I personally know 2 of my musical neighbors.
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Hmmmm.... what else...
Jenn has started Spanish classes so we've been conjugating verbs around the house.
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We've noticed that my dad inserts the phrase "and the baby is cute" somewhat randomly into paragraphs when talking to people on the phone.
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After only 10 days out of the city, I return damaged. I keep looking for a horizon. Must defeat this urge.
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Crash Review:
Jenn and I snuck out and watched Crash two nights ago. I knew absolutely nothing about the movie going into it and was impressed by the good acting, but was annoyed by the too neat and tidy story line. And why does a movie about racism manage to treat each character as a racist stereotype? You can almost hear the screenwriter's wheels turning, "I'll take a racist cop and have him do something utterly abominable to a woman and then, get this, I'll have him save THE SAME WOMAN. And the Persian guy, I'll have him so beaten down by racism that he becomes a racist himself." The basic idea is everyone is driven mad by racism, and each character has a twist (or in screenwriterese "an arc"). The "bad" characters are all warm and fuzzy underneath, the "good" characters are all capable of horrible acts. While there is an ethnic stew of characters, as usual Asians get short shrift. Ultimately I looked at the film as manipulative and cynical in it's attempt to portray acts of grace. My prediciton this film and it's cartoon racism will be wildly overpraised. The discussion of real race issues is almost completely absent in popular American culture, so if a film seems to be saying the right thing the kneejerk reaction is to deem it a masterpiece.
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Do you ever feel like there just aren't enough hours in the day to do everything that needs to get done? Right now I'm running underwater.
to this site
05/19/05 03:24 PM
Anonymous said...
i saw crash and was caught up in the movie while I saw it. so i was emotional when i was supposed to be during the film, but i also had reservations about the way people were portrayed. i didn't mind that people were stereotypes, in movies stereotypes are shorthand, but i was bothered by the calculated nature of everything ("tidiness" as you say). so what that the matt dillon character has a soul, he still went around destroying people's lives. I wasn't left with much at the end. i read it as saying either "we are all racists" or "we are all human" (or both). These thoughts have been better expressed elsewhere. The reason you are writing this though (and the reason I am responding) is because the acting and cinematography are so good. The pseudo deep story aside, those things get to you.