david w. lloyd / djpretzel: pretzel logic

You know, I need to blog on why I too now think that Vista sucks, because it’s for totally different reasons than most others.

I don’t have major beef with the interface, the DRM didn’t prevent me from doing anything I wanted, I loved the media center, and in general most of what they added I was fine with.

Where it falls apart is with…. basic file and networking I/O!!!

Now, come on… I’m one of those folks who sees the good and bad on both sides of the fence. I do PHP, Java, and .NET, I administer MSSQL and MySQL as well as IIS and Apache, and I’m familiar enough with Microsoft’s desktop and server operating systems and various Linux distros to speak knowledgeably on a fundamental level. I’ve always been reluctant to demonize anything from either side, because doing so almost always involves oversimplification and polemical blabber… which I get enough of on slashdot, thanks…

But seriously… file I/O? Network I/O? These are things that should just be invisible to end users, but my experience with Vista makes them front and center - I’ve routinely encountered file transfers that inexplicably stopped or slowed down to almost nothing and - worse - could not be canceled. I mean it. It says “Copying file”, it’s not doing anything, I finally give up and click cancel, it says “Canceling”, and that dialog just sits there… forever. I think there’s a way of killing the specific svchost.exe process responsible for the dialog, but… should I really HAVE to do that?

By the way, it’s not just me:

• http://www.theregister.com/2007/03/2…a_copying_bug/
• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07…rity_analysis/

The second link there talks about my other huge issue, unpredictable and degrading network I/O - it’ll simply stop responding to file sharing requests of any kind, for no apparent reason. Oddly, RDP will still function normally, but mapping any of the drives on that Vista machine will be impossible. I’ve cleared this issue up ONCE by repairing the connection, but even that doesn’t work all the time, and again… this is basic, it worked in XP, it’s broken now… what could be the excuse?

I’m sure after a service pack… or two… these very fundamental issues will be worked out. But as a frequent advocate of the good things that Microsoft does manage to accomplish and the innovation it does manage to produce, amidst blunders or derivative works, this is simply… embarrassing.

I can’t defend this operating system, or the company that decided to release it, if I can’t copy large files or move them back and forth over my network.

I’ve already rebuilt one machine back to XP SP2 after trying Vista (Ultimate x86 and x64, btw), and now I’m going to do the other.

Quite simply: inexcusable. Forget the FUD, forget the DRM paranoia, forget the resource consumption issues and the silly DX10 debates… if you can’t work with files, those are all tertiary concerns.

Stay away until these issues are conclusively resolved.

2006 was the best year in my life-to-date in terms of concert attendance; I caught Steely Dan, Aerosmith, The Strokes, and NIN, among others. Since I didn’t blog about it then, I’ll describe each quickly:

• Steely Dan - $10 tickets for lawn tix at Nissan Pavilion, AWESOME show, amazing musicianship. There was a trumpet/trombone “duel” of sorts, Donald Fagen is amazing, and they played every song I wanted, including an encore of “My Old School,” which is prolly my favorite SD cut.
• The Strokes - Biased: I love them to death. Outdoor venue, VERY small, no seats, but I was standing dead center not fifteen feet from Julian Casablancas. I lost a $90 pair of Raybans in the crowd and there was the gratuitous drunk asshole to my right, but it was still as close to a religious experience as a secular humanist can manage.
• Aerosmith - Dig the band, but in this case the lawn seating was detrimental, as it was difficult to make out what was going on. Also, they stuck to a set that was far more 70s than 80s or 90s, with “Janie’s got a gun” and other tracks that I love being unfortunately AWOL… still some great guitar solos and music, but I paid seven times what I did for Steely Dan, with identical seating, and vastly preferred that concert.
• NIN - Great, but no “Sanctified” (with its lovably synthetic slap bass) meant that I was a little let down. By far the best lightning and pyrotechnics of any concert I’ve seen. I’m not really into their newer stuff; to me, everything since Downward Spiral has been… a downward spiral. Nevertheless, like Portishead, this is a band that defines a genre and sounds unlike anything else.

Thus far in 2007 I’ve seen CAKE (Pier 6, Baltimore) and Live (Celebrate Fairfax), both of which rocked. I’m a huge fan of the former, and appreciate the latter enough to dig a full set, which they played. Appropriately, there was lightning crashing - almost in sync with the lyrics - during “Lightning Crashes”; don’t know how often that’s happened for them, but the weather-imitating-art-imitating-life shtick never loses its novelty. CAKE were great save for the grown-up-physically-not-mentally-ex-frat group of absolute losers that were intent on discrediting the male of the species behind us. I seem to have bad luck in concert seating when it comes to these folk; it’s a damn shame I’m not an ominpotent demigod with the ability to control life and death at my whim, is all I’m saying. They played a number of songs I wasn’t familiar with, as I’ve mostly stuck with listening to their singles, so it was a great mix of familiar sing-alongable material and new stuff I went back home and checked out.

Going to Video Games Live! again at the Kennedy Center at the end of this month, and in July will be catching Gogol Bordello at the 9:30. Also planning on seeing the Joey DeFrancesco Trio at Blues Alley this Thursday; never seen B3 jazz organ done right in person, so that should be rather awesome.

I’ve always preferred studio cuts to live recordings as I feel they more accurately represent the specific wishes of the composer; it’s similar to preferring the director’s cut of a film, in my opinion. However, in recent years I’ve learned to appreciate more that it’s not a question of better or worse: seeing someone live is just… different. A different way of experiencing their music. For the purposes of historical record, any sort of “academic” appreciation of music, and focused, critical listening, I still hold true to my preference for polished, perfected tracks, but I’ve learned to appreciate the live/concert experience as well.

I recently attended my first Passover Seder, and can think of no better way of doing it full honor & justice than by paraphrasing the great A. Lavigne, who - while gentile - sings and gestures with the heart & soul of one who has escaped Egyptian persecution. I ate of the bitter herb, drank of the sweet wine, sang of the confusing song that seemed to be about how things were… sufficient, went to the door to look for Elijah (who I mistook to be a real as opposed to metaphorical/representational personage and was disappointed to find absent), and partook of the lotsa matzah. In ball form, and otherwise.

Being an atheist and thus having the non-partisan, objective ability to compare religious rituals with inarguable yet humble precision, I’d have to say that from a usability perspective, the Pagan-cum-Christian tradition of giving kids chocolate things and having them paint eggs wins, but that Passover trounces bunny et al. in the alcohol and variety departments, making it more appealing to the 20+ crowd. I have some extra activities that I think could round out the experience and make it more gentile-friendly, however:

• Group Song: “Kosher Matzah Balls” (in unison to Chef’s immortal “Salty Chocolate Balls“)
• Hallel Freestyle Compo
• Prince of Egypt Movieoke
• Two Words: Manischewitz Pong

Regardless, a good time: interesting ritual, excellent eats, and wonderful company.

A quick update on multiple goings-on in the world, some recent, some… not so much:

• Another sad year for the Oscars. I speak not of the presentation itself, which was interestingly muted and low-key relative to years past, and featured some interesting performance art-ish attempts at classing things up, but rather of the award distribution. While I liked The Departed, I have deep philosophical issues with any film that borrows so much from another winning top honors. I speak of course of Infernal Affairs; while on multiple levels Scorsese & co. did a bang-up job repurposing the Hong Kong classic for American audiences and migrating it to Boston, there are still scenes that were lifted almost verbatim. I’m all for repurposing and reinterpretation - these are the underlying principles of OverClocked ReMix itself, after all - but I’d still rather see Best Picture go to something that involved more synthesis from scratch. Alan Arkin for Best Supporting Actor felt like a major “lifetime achievement in the guise of a specific performance” award to me, and I’m still bummed that Pan’s didn’t win Best Foreign Language Film, though admittedly I have not seen Lives. An underwhelming year, and the first in a long while in which I didn’t have strong feelings about most of the candidates. Better luck next year…
• I have switched over to gmail for my primary email account and have created a facebook account as well. Good stuff, even if the latter makes me feel a little icky… after all, this is the guy that not only skipped every high school function including his own graduation, but also remained rather ephemeral through college as well.
• My main PCs are now running Vista. Definitely some hiccups and snags, but it’s pretty and stable and certain processes have definitely been improved.
• I now own and wear an NYY cap; I can now officially be “that asshole wearing the Yankees cap” when identified in crowds.
• Relationship?!…
• 300 was not Sin City. Perhaps Grindhouse will come closer.
• Convertible weather is finally here, for the most part, and this is a good thing.

Nothing cures insomnia like a bit of late-night Photoshopping…

Every car is the Car of the Year;
they try to sneak this by you, hoping
the enthusiasm of their punctuation
obscures the memory. I try to tell them
this is hopeless – I may not have been raised with
Jesus, or strong heterosexual role models,
but we knew our mutual exclusivity
cold, what you weren’t because
someone else was, and the year’s not
big enough for all these sedans.

I hear it stretching at the seams, January
and December taut with endorsements,
mileages, whatever new place
they’ve managed to stick air bags, and
it resents being cheapened like this.

It knew the line about some
losing, some winning, but everyone
being winners was complete
shit, too, and it knows its time will come
and go, changing its article, disposing
of its calendars – its twelve playmates’
airbrushed tits buried
online, next to their ancestors, its
elections and championships compiled
into stats for next year’s
broadcasts; it is fine with this.

What it frankly can’t abide, though, is the
disrespect, the dilution of best, every make
and model and their grandmas lining up, me-too,
for the undisputed heavyweight title,
raising their gloves in synchronized paradox.

While I wish to refrain from becoming one of those sorts who spends more time cycling out different site designs than actually, say, adding new content, I want to move this site into a more professional direction and use it to focus on some of the stuff I do outside of OverClocked ReMix, which gets enough attention as is. I thus decided a slightly different look was needed, and - why be shy - also thought that since it’s a personal site, part of the design should be some pics o’ me.

So as to avoid this post being overly meta, I thought I’d weigh in on the Oscars. Honestly, I’ve no right to, as this year I’m way behind and haven’t caught The Queen, Babel, or Letters from Iwo Jima, amongst others, but there are a couple omissions in the Best Actress category that I think need to be mentioned. Everyone’s always somewhat accurately complaining about how there are no roles for women, so when a couple of amazing, demanding roles come along, with stellar performances, and don’t get the nomination nod, the situation warrants investigation. I’ll preface this by saying that I haven’t seen ANY of the films which the actual list of nominees starred in. Streep, Dench, Mirren, and Winslet are all great actresses, and I’m sure there’s good reason they made the list. As for Penelope Cruz… I’ll need to see Volver before I’m convinced she’s not playing a near permutation of herself, or previous roles.

The two actresses that weren’t duly recognized were Ellen Page in Hard Candy and Maggie Gyllenhaal in Sherrybaby. The former film was released in last year’s Oscar timeframe at Sundance, so perhaps it’s a technical thing (the larger release was in this year’s span, back in April), but if that’s the case, they snubbed her last year. Anyone who’s seen the film, in which Patrick Wilson also redeems himself for The Phantom of the Opera’s medio-core Raoul, knows that she delivered an amazing performance of a role that any actress would DREAM of, but few would have the metaphorical balls to attempt. Gyllenhaal plays stupid, hopeless, selfish, destructive, and in the end (possibly?) resigned with a rare degree of realism and authenticity in Sherrybaby; at times, the film feels like a documentary, due not to any intentional manipulation on the director’s part, but rather the transporting directness of the actress’s approach.

There you have it - two roles (and corresponding performances) that are edgy and which stack up against the best of what men are getting these days. Whether it was the candidates’ youth, the subject matter being dealt with, or the ethically ambiguous actions both characters make, or whether Meryl Streep’s performance of a oh-so-really-bitchy-fashionista-boss really was so damn gut-busting and spot-on that they just HAD to give her yet another nod is, of course, a matter of opinion.

The best argument that America has more celluloid taste than the rest of the world gives us credit for is the consistently embarrassing discrepancy between what the Hollywood Foreign Press thinks, and what I think.

Granted, as a single person, I hardly represent America, or more specifically the United States Of, but who pray tell are the Hollywood Foreign Press? They’re press, for one, and they’re clearly foreign, and they seem to focus predominantly on Hollywood. These three factors clearly prevent them from making meaningful and correct decisions when it comes to film and television. Notwithstanding their foreignness and pressiness, it’s also important to point out from a semantic perspective that a good number of films and television shows aren’t even made in Hollywood. Hence this localization becomes superfluous in the evaluation of said non-Californian material(s). The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has no such incongruity in its name, and also doesn’t make the confusing mistake of separating dramas and comedies and passing judgment on television as sort of an afterthought.

And THAT is where my true umbrage lies; the most recent crop of Golden Globe nominations fail to mention HBO’s series The Wire. At all. The HWFP did the right thing back when Angels in America came out, and rewarded it generously and in proportion to its genius. In the interim period, however, they appear to have lost whatever semblance of presiding mental acuity they were once imbued with, and have given - wait for it - NBC’s Heroes the nod for best television drama OVER The Wire.

?

I’ve SEEN episodes of Heroes. While it cleverly panders to online fandom communities and has competent scoring and special effects work, it’s ultimately derivative and - far more problematically - ridiculously scripted and acted. It’s disposable. It’s fun, but further from being anything remotely in the proximity of “art” than Three’s Company was. In contrast, the fourth season of The Wire was… unequaled. In any year.

And so, as a citizen of a country often looked down on for cultural inadequacy and a superficial entertainment industry, I can only point at this sterling example of the FOREIGN press eating the same dogfood they mock, and passing by one of the most striking accomplishments the form has ever produced.

I’ll confess to not watching the entirety of the supposed film classic Breathless; in the end it was a bit too slow and a bit too French, I suppose. Perhaps the film’s title suggests the audience should not hold their own waiting for something to happen - a guarantor of asphyxiation. However, I did catch a great bit of dialogue that perhaps speaks to the film’s reputation. A creative type of some ilk is being interviewed and the female protagonist asks him what his life ambition is. He ignores the question entirely, apparently brushing her off. She repeats the question a minute or two later, and this time he responds, “to become immortal, and then die”.

Good answer.

EW have repeatedly dubbed HBO’s series The Wire “The Best Drama on Television”, citing its recently concluded fourth season as the pinnacle of the Baltimore crime drama’s excellence. EW’s a mixed bag for me; I got a free subscription somehow a couple years ago, and have been receiving it ever since, pro bono. Their “Must List” is usually reliable, their film criticism far from academic but often accurate, and Stephen King’s pieces are usually entertaining, but their coverage of music has always struck me as superficial and problematic. In this instance, with regards to David Simon and Edward Burns’ ridiculously intelligent and transporting crime drama, I agree 110%.

Fantastic acting to me is capable of creating suspension of disbelief that extends outside of the viewing experience and persists indefinitely. Amadeus and Million Dollar Baby are two of my favorite films because, even with repeated viewing, I’m still unable to picture a camera filming the events, a director instructing actors, or a screenplay dictating lines. Every last element of artifice is completely transparent due to superb performances of genuine material. “Suspension of disbelief” is a phrase more commonly uttered when describing chincy special effects or an improbable feat or course of action (the infamous bus leap in Speed), but to me writing and acting, conducted by competent direction, has infinitely more capability to suspend doubt.

The Wire does just that, but unlike most examples I can think of, it does it on a larger, multi-threaded scale, across an entire season, with a large cast that is so consistently authentic and intelligent and believable and warm and brutal and real that I’d have to cite it as the single best example of casting I’ve ever witnessed, on television or on film. The direct creative credit for creating the best season of television drama ever goes to the actors, writers, and directors. However, whereas I could hypothetically envision screenplays coming together, a gritty, raw, and emotive aesthetic being maintained across episodic boundaries, and a few well-chosen actors and actresses executing the material, I would never have imagined that this many talented men, women, boys, and girls could be pulled together and truly coexist in a fictional world. My problem with the late Roger Altman’s work was that he always seemed to favor large casts of A-list actors over large casts of actors that could harmonize and produce an A-list film, regardless of their name recognition. The Wire stars no one that I knew before watching The Wire; after this fourth season, I want to see every last one of them in whatever they move on to once either their roles or the entire show has concluded. I can’t think of anything else that’s had that effect on me that’s had nearly as large a cast. For that reason, I think HBO should make a documentary about the casting process for the fourth season, and it should be mandatory viewing for all members of the CSA; this is the barometer against which anything else I watch will be judged.