We finally got around to watching Bend it Like Beckham tonight, and I was so cheerfully surprised by it. I'd dreaded it, imagining an unholy mix of Billy Elliot and My Big Fat Greek Smarm-Fest with the added nausea of rah-rah Gel Power. Thankfully, nothing of the kind. It was instead just a clever, diverting little film.
Our non-fiction category has two entrants this week. First up is The History of the Blues, by Paul Oliver, probably the single best intro to the subject. Ilover is a Brit, and wrote the book during the heyday of Britain infatuation with the Blues. He begins with field hollers and medicine shows and takes the style up to Muddy Waters and B.B. King. It's technical enough to interest music majors, but his prose is lyrical enough for even people like me to get a feel for the music. To celebrate fnishing the book, I picked up a copy of John Lee Hooker's final recordings in the Metro station a couple days back.
I'm also working my way through John Keegan's Penguin Book of War. I became a fan of Keegan after reading his History of War. He's of the same school of military history as Victor Davis Hanson. Both emphasize the effects of culture upon armies and strategy, though Keegan is something of a dove and Hanson an arch-hawk. This new book is a compendium of great military writings, with first sources dating from Thucydides through an SAS man's recollections of Desert Storm.
Now that I've read Christopher Koch's The Year of Living Dangerously, I'll never conflate Sukarno and Suharto again. The historical novel focuses on the year leading to Indonesia's abortive Communist revolution, during which a half millin people lost their lives. The plot focuses on a tiny band of hated Western journalists trying to survive and report during a time of rabid nationalism. I don't want to make it out as an adventure story. It's most of all a very human novel, with a wonderful tenderness to it. Koch shows the ugly realities of Third-World life. he does it with sympathy, but without ever making saints of them. The same can be said for his Western characters, who are all terribly flawed but sympathetic. Central to the plot is Billy Kwan, a Chinese-Australian dwarf who shares more with Owen Meany than his stature.
Posted by Discoshaman at mars 10, 2004 03:02 AM | TrackBack
My family loved BILB! And have it on DVD.
We walk around saying:
"Aren't you proud of your daughter?" ... "Definitely not."
and
"English people are always complaining when we're having functions."