Progress.

Pritcher had watched the phenomenon of Lens Image expansion before but he still caught his breath. It was like being at the visiplate of a spaceship storming through a horribly crowded Galaxy without entering hyperspace. The stars diverged towards them from a common center, flared outwards and tumbled off the edge of the screen. Single points became double, then globular. Hazy patches dissolved into myriad points. And always the illusion of motion.

-from Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov

There's nothing like old science fiction to make you feel like you're living in the future. Here, Asimov has a character in the far, far future be unnerved by what's basically that old Windows starfield screensaver.

Transcendental Youth news.

I've been failing to bother people with excessive Mountain Goats posting. That used to be a big part of this blog, and now all I can do is collect a few things related to the forthcoming album.

As the Convergence of All that I Love* continues, John Hodgman's written an appreciation of the Mountain Goats as part of the Transcendental Youth album press release. In part:

These are the consolations; and if some of his songs suggest that there are real hells on earth, other songs remind that the heavens are equally close at hand. 

(Sometimes they are even the same songs.) 

It is my impression that this is the ecstasy John Darnielle is feeling: that thrill of having survived, escaped for even a second to enjoy those small transcendent delights, and to sing of them.

And then there's a new single, "Cry for Judas":
The Mountain Goats - Cry for Judas by MergeRecords

UPDATE: Horn arrangements are by Matthew E. White, whose music, it turns out, is ear-grabbing:
Matthew E. White "One of These Days" by Matthew E. White

*Superchunk, the Mountain Goats, and John Hodgman all used to be separate pop-culture obsessions for me. But then the Mountain Goats hired Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster, and soon enough Mountain Goats singer John Darnielle was appearing on Superchunk albums and releasing records on Superchunk singer Mac MacCaughan's record label. As these three merge (so to speak) into a single entity, I'm finding you can get to most of the other things I dig in just two or three steps.

Batman.

If you want a good perspective on Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker, read Richard Brody's review of The Dark Knight Rises:

Nolan doesn’t hang dollar signs on his screen; he’s not looking to impress viewers with the colossal scale of his project, but, rather, with his own grim and relentless labors. “The Dark Knight Rises” is not a movie of conspicuous consumption but of conspicuous production, with Nolan himself playing the unfortunate Atlas who bears a cinematic world of dour doings on his lonely shoulders, all the while needing viewers to know how hard he’s working for them. The problem with the movie isn’t any lack of warmth or humanity (qualities that don’t need to be displayed because they’re often effectively evoked through cold and inhuman means) but a lack of wonder. Nolan never seems to surprise himself, and his own inventions have little inspiration but, rather, a sense of a problem solved.

But for the sake of the kid that read the whole Knightfall series over a series of summer Saturdays spent not buying anything in Borders, I'll say I enjoyed the way they handled Bane in this movie.

But, hey, everybody's got a review of this movie. I've got a theory about Christopher Nolan's artistic past and future. Inception was a movie about making movies, right? What if we read Nolan's whole career this way? Here's what I'm thinking:

• At some point in the hazy past, the Nolan brothers wrote a script for a romantic comedy. It would have been their All the Real Girls. It would have summed up all their hopes, dreams, and joys. The writing retreat was perfect, idyllic even. They were sure that this would be their classic.
• Something went wrong. Perhaps a professor critically eviscerated the screenplay in cold blood, or perhaps it was just a tragic accident. Or maybe it turns out that Christopher Nolan DESTROYED IT HIMSELF AND CAN'T EVEN REMEMBER.
• The Nolans, tormented by the loss of the screenplay, turned their anguish towards the obsessive creation of clockwork thrillers about obsessive men trying to solve the problem of the past by mastering some dark technique.
• However, several years ago, Christopher Nolan found a new idea for a screenplay. Perhaps it's not the story of young love he wrote and lost as a young man. But it involves children somehow. He wants to write a movie about parenthood. (We see the first hints of this turn in The Prestige, where one of the men obsessed by his craft far beyond the point of reason has a child and thereby gets a little perspective on life.)
• But he's in too deep with the studios. They won't let him get out. Desperately, he takes on one last big-budget blockbuster. This one's the toughest of all. He puts together the best team he's got, but there's just not enough time. The script doesn't make any sense. They improvise. They have to. Because if they can just make a gazillion dollars for Warner Brothers, Christopher Nolan can go free.

So that's the coded message here. Nolan, like Bruce Wayne, needs to put the thriller business behind him. The question is, what kind of movie is he going to make next?

My money's on a comedy about two zany suburban couples each trying to secure their respective toddlers a spot in an elite preschool, starring Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Scarlett Johanson, and featuring Michael Caine as the quirky headmaster. But there's also some chance it's a story that follows a married couple (Christian Bale and Marion Cotillard) for two decades as they raise a family in a weird composite of Chicago and London, featuring Michael Caine as the husband's dad or publisher. The possibilities are endless, but the actors are few.

Two reviews.

No doubt faithful readers noticed that I abandoned this poor blog for Twitter. But if there are dark days ahead for Twitter, maybe I should take a look back at ol' Blogspot.

Anyways, since it's nice to have links that stay up at the top of the page a little longer and are properly archived, here are two reviews I've recently written:

• Review of The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, for Fare Forward - My friend Peter's starting a Christian review of ideas, aimed at millenials, and he asked me to review this book for the first issue. (My favorite essay from the issue, by the way, is Margaret Blume's "Beauty and the Beast.") I think that if I ever review another novel, I need to do more to preserve my first reactions. By the time I started writing this particular short review, I'd read the book three times and had lost all sense of perspective. But I think the space constraints kept me from messing it up too badly.
• Review of Precious Remedies against Satan's Devices, by The Welcome Wagon, for Mockingbird -  I got to see The Welcome Wagon's CD release show in Brooklyn, and enjoyed it quite a bit. Spent a few e-mail paragraphs dissecting the songs with friends, and so I had some ideas rattling around in my head. Then, when I was down in Charlottesville catching up with DZ from Mockingbird, he was interested in a record review, so it worked out nicely. I'm happy with this one. I usually try to keep my guard up about day-to-day faith when I'm writing online, aiming instead for the objective tone, but I didn't worry about that so much here.

I'm working on another book review, and if it gets published I'll post about that one as well.