jfb | (no subject)

Wow, Middlesex was great. I'm not going to say anything else about the book itself. I'll confess something: I avoid long novels. It takes me a long time to read anything, and the longer the book, the more likely I am not to finish it at all. 530 pages is more than enough to ward me off, but I loved the author's previous, much shorter novel The Virgin Suicides, so I made the effort, and am very glad I did.

The cover of my paperback edition was covered with a thin waxy film, glued on so at first I didn't realize it was there. But over the course of reading it--two or three months carried around in my backpack in the California sun--it started to peel away from the cover, at first just around the edges so it seemed like an extension of the smoke motif in the cover design. Today after I read the last page I pulled the rest of it off, and, with its skin shed, it looks bright and shiny and new. Which, as it happens, nicely matches the protagonist's experience: gradual, then sudden transformation into what you were all along.
I finally saw Fahrenheit 9/11, which left me a little sad, some angry, but mostly inarticulate. I will say that I hated his use of music cues, and I really, really liked that there were Kerry supporters outside the multiplex registering voters.
It looks like I'm in a new band, with Meredith Edgar and three of the DTs. With this one I'll be playing keyboards--the full-sized kind--along with, of course, some other instruments. (The usual suspects: mandolin, accordion, maybe a little lap steel.)

Russell and I are still trying to name our duo, and the new band needs a name too. So far, we are in grave danger of being named the Dead Horse Beaters. Our friend Dan is taking a poll on the subject, so chime in if you have an opinion.

Did you notice how the music in the beginning was quite reminiscent of some of Phillip Glass's more minimalistic stuff? I got the impression during the opening credits that Moore was trying to leech off of the legitimacy of Errol Morris' documentary style.

--sean

Yeah, I heard some of that. I don't think of it as leeching, though--just, Glass has a style that works for certain types of documentary scene, and Moore's composer made use of it.