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Add one part satire to two parts sincerity. Sprinkle on a couple of rants. Stir liberally.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
If it's called Daily Blah, how come you don't ... hey, wait, you're writing every day!
See? Told you I'd try harder.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
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Daily Blah for... Tuesday, December 17, 2002
Adopt, Adapt, Improve
I've been wanting to write a blog about Adaptation, the new movie from Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufmann (genius team behind the outrageously original comedy Being John Malkovich). But it's damn near impossible.
Like Kaufmann, whose desparate struggle with turning The Orchid Thief into a screenplay -- how do you make a movie about flowers? -- is at the center of the film, I am too much in awe of the subject to write a word about it. There are just too many layers to the thing.
On one level, it's just laugh-out-loud funny. On another, it's about the wrangling that goes on within every writers' brain between the urge to be original (represented by sad, balding, flop-sweated Charlie) and the ability to write crowd-pleasing, forgettable crap (represented by Charlie's fictional brother Donald, an idiot savant who blunders into the screenwriting business and makes a packet).
When Charlie asks for Donald's help with the script, the movie takes a rapid turn for the cliched. The brothers get wrapped up in a sordid detective story involving orchids, drugs and death that has nothing to do with the original book. All nicely satirical, except it isn't played for laughs. The last half-hour looks, sounds and feels like a genuinely bad Hollywood paint-by-numbers. The script intentionally self-destructs. And yet ... it does everything the fictionalized Charlie wishes for. We do learn a lot about flowers, about evolution, about adaptation, not least in the way the movie itself ultimately adapts to its natural environment (the average cinema audience).
Speaking of evolution, Nicholas Cage -- who plays both Charlie and Donald in prosthetic jowls and bald wig-- is like a fully-formed biped compared to the single-celled bacteria of his previous roles. Cage single-handedly ruined the screen adaptation of Captain Corelli's Mandolin with an Italian accent so fake you wanted to roast him like a glazed ham. Now he makes us believe, and I mean strongly believe, in the existence of polar-opposite twins. Give that man an Oscar. Hell, give him two.
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