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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 03, 2002
The Naked and the Dead
To the Metreon, for a special screening of Steven Sodebergh's latest flick, Solaris. The "special" part being that it was a freebie arranged by Sun Microsystems, whose rather tenuous connection to the movie is that they happen to have a piece of software with the same name. Because of this they invite a bunch of journalists for free drinks, free food and their own private screening. It was like a dotcom boom nostalgia party. "I know," said the PR chick in charge. "It's very 1999."
The movie, meanwhile, was very 2001 -- perhaps too self-conscious a paen to Kubrick's classic and others of that era (including Solaris, the 1972 Russian original on which this is based). You almost expect George Clooney to start asking HAL to open the pod bay doors. There are lots of atmospherics, long silences, dreams within dreams, and a final descent onto a hauntingly beautiful planet. But this isn't 1968, and the audience wasn't on acid. (Well, not as far as I could tell). There was a lot of noticeable fidgeting and whispering and popcorn-chewing going on all around me. Our average attention span has certainly diminished in the last thirty-four years.
Kudos to Sodebergh, therefore, for getting such a movie made in the first place and for resisting any sort of Hollywood-ization of the script, which revolves around Clooney running into his dead wife (Natascha McElhone, for once allowed to use an unabashedly English accent) aboard a space station and remembering the ups and downs -- mostly downs -- of their tangled relationship. Fox marketing executives must be having a hell of a time selling this as a romance. The end remains appropriately ambiguous. Speaking of ends, perhaps the only bow to populism is the fact that we see Clooney's bottom much more than is strictly necessary. And far too little of McElhone's.
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