Check out Roger Ebert's piece on rewatching Contact, still one of my favorite movies: "The strength of 'Contact' is in the way it engages in issues that are relevant today, and still only rarely discussed in the movies."

Review: Down and Delirious in Mexico City

I almost don't need to visit Mexico City, I'm so convinced blogger/Twitter-er/foreign correspondent extraordinaire Daniel Hernandez nails the vibe in his 2011 book Down and Delirious in Mexico City. Definitely not a tour book, and not exactly a memoir, it's a collection of essays exploring the city's different subcultures. Punks, emos, fashionistas, hipsters, cholos, religious, etc. are among the observed. Meanwhile Hernandez, a San Diego native, explores his own relationship with these urban tribes.

We come along for the ride as he learns to embrace the city's passion, electricity, history, chaos and violence. Hernandez is not afraid to tour a neighborhood that used to be a trash dump to see the origins of Mexico City punk, risk his health in a sweat lodge ritual, or interview emos at a metro station as an anti-emo wave sweeps Mexico. Along the way we meet fashion designer/party boy Quetzal, late night bar companion Susana, and yellow and orange haired muse/philosopher Denise. Like an older brother Hernandez patiently explains the facts of life here -- kidnappings, street-level hustling, Santa Muerte, pollution, class differences -- at a level even a middle-class American who's never set foot in Mexico might understand.

Some of Hernandez's more interesting observations come when he turns his journalistic eye on himself and his own identity as a U.S.-raised Latino: "To capitalinos who know enough about what a U.S. upbringing produces -- our manner of walking, for one, quick and exasperated, our tentative Spanish, that starting pocho accent -- I am a gringo regardless of how dark my skin might be."

While he is technically an outsider, Hernandez appears quite at home in "the impossible megacity," which seems to satisfy his boundless appetite for excitement and new cultural horizons to explore.

The only things I didn't like about the collection are that I found it a little too focused on the hipster-esque side of the spectrum of Mexico City. *Another* interview with a fashion designer? The other thing is it seems like he wrote this for an audience who doesn't know a lick of Spanish and hasn't ever been near Mexico. If you've already traveled in Mexico, you will find some parts of the book very obvious. And using more Spanish (with translations, of course) would have brought the experience even closer, especially for those who know the language.

Despite this, Down and Delirious in Mexico City is a unique take on an amazing city. I highly recommend it, along with the author's blog.

This almost makes up for Qwikster

Dear Annette,
Thank you for being a Netflix member with a DVD subscription. As a gesture of thanks this holiday season, we'd like to offer you a free bonus DVD rental to supplement your DVD subscription. Simply click here to redeem.
We hope you enjoy this bonus, and Happy Holidays!
–Your friends at Netflix

On the other blog, thoughts about starting a Twitter account.

For Occupy, will 2012 = 1968? Interesting look ahead from New York magazine.

Stuart's take on Zooey Deschanel:

She is understated. Human. Even more so than Martin Freeman whose main crime is not being Simon Jones, which is odd because Zooey is neither Susan Sheridan or Sandra Dickinson. But unlike either of those her Trillian seems like someone you could meet at a party, fall for, but who'll ultimate leave with some other, spacey guy, unless she's in the mood to make you think better of yourself, work through your low-self esteem and one day make you cool.

Love the photo with the post (part of Review 2011, which you really should be reading). I'm starting to understand her appeal, though I wouldn't say I'm a fan. Thank you, Stu.

Dream

Claritin has been giving me weird dreams lately. Last night I had a dream that I knew was about death. I was riding in a van over a highway overpass, wearing a white robe. Then I was at an airport. I checked in at the counter, which resembled a regular baggage check-in and had red walls in the background. Funny thing was, there were no signs indicating the destination. There was no anxiety about it, though, just a peaceful and mildly happy feeling during the whole journey.

Maybe I need to take Claritin on a less regular basis.

Our Tragic Universe

Continuing my fascination with author Scarlett Thomas, I downloaded her latest sci-fi and chick lit blend, Our Tragic Universe.

This time our protagonist is Meg, an author of paperback novels and book reviews, who lives with an awful boyfriend and a dog named Bess (affectionately known as "B"). I've noticed that Thomas often has a claustrophobic quality in the setting of her novels. In PopCo, the protagonist is at a retreat with her coworkers she can't get away from. In The End of Mr. Y, it's a world inside your head that you have to make your way out of. In Our Tragic Universe, it's a foggy little seaside town, the relationship Meg seems to be stuck in, and a set of financial circumstances that prevent her ever getting around to doing what she really wants, which is to write her "real" novel (and find true love, of course).

Early on, Thomas sets up one of the central ideas of the novel in a (fictitious) book Meg reviews, The Science of Living Forever:

According to Kelsey Newman, the universe, which always was a computer, will, for one moment-- not even that -- be so dense and have so much energy that it will be able to compute anything at all. So why not simply program it to simulate another universe, a new one that will never end, and in which everyone can live happily ever after? This moment will be called the Omega Point, and, because it has the power to contain everything, will be indistinguishable from God.

The consequences of the Omega Point being that every human will be resurrected and never die again. But Newman gives an out of the Second World (the current universe we're living in) with the Road to Perfection, a sort of blueprint to get to heaven, attained only by "becoming truly yourself, and overcoming all your personal obstacles."

Hmm, it's all very New Age-y (and sketchy). Funny enough, it's based on a real theory by physicist Frank Tipler. The theory seems meant more as a jumping off point than anything else. No, Meg doesn't really buy into it. But how does she explain the seemingly supernatural occurrences in her life, which, it seems, are many?

Thomas also uses the "Omega Point" theory for winding discussion of story that continues throughout the book -- the "storyless story" versus the simplistic formula story of a paperback sci-fi novel, and the "storylines" that occur in real life.

And in this novel. Several times I wondered if this novel was a storyless story. It's not, but it is close to that. It has a dense, winding, talky, inconclusive way about it. It is frustrating for a reader not to get that emotional payoff at the end but I respect Thomas is trying to do something different from a conventional novel and not just forgetting to give it a true conclusion. There's less "happily ever after" here than in her other novels, which brings it closer to real life. Good if you like realism, bad if you're looking for an escape.

I liked Our Tragic Universe as a book of ideas. In that respect it matches the smartness of her other novels. Really an interesting discussion of the supernatural and fate and the idea of the story. And Thomas can't go wrong with writing a likable female lead who I wish was my best friend. But even for a close to storyless story I wished there was more of a sense of it being finished. Call me unsophisticated, but I wanted something *amazing* at the end, and I was left disappointed.