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How the West Is Flown

How the West Is FlownIt’s not very often that I fly these days — at least not nearly as often as I used to — but each time I do, I’m reminded of the declining quality of consumer aviation. Halfway through last week I flew to California to see family, and the service on America West was roundly disappointing: to begin with, my ticket was no bargain, but they charged me US$100 to alter it in order to accommodate some changes in my schedule. It was a cross-country flight, but they served only soft drinks and peanuts — not even a single meal. I’m no fan of airline food, but when one spends an extra hour cooped in a plane cabin, waiting for takeoff, a five-hour trip becomes pretty hunger-inducing at somewhere around five hours and thirty minutes. One might be tempted to turn to the in-flight movie to preoccupy one’s time, but there’s something humiliating about being asked to spend an additional US$5 for the indignity of whiling away the airline’s delays. And when we were delayed in landing, the cabin crew couldn’t even apprise us of gate information for our flight connections. I can hardly think of another consumer product that, dollar for dollar, represents less in the way customer care.

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Heart on Sleeve

DiscSox DJ SleevesTo take the edge off the Iowa caucuses and Howard Dean’s somewhat shocking third-place finish, I preoccupied myself with the humdrum task of getting rid of all my CD jewel box cases and replacing them with DiscSox DJ sleeves. They’re the only sleeves I could find that hold all the materials that come in a standard CD package: the disc, the booklet and the tray card. So, in spite of the fact that the kind of politics I personally tend towards were slapped silly this evening, I can at least rest assured that I’ve been able to reclaim a few shelves’s worth of storage space for my music collection. Sigh.

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How to Get Ahead in Iowa without Really Trying

The Iowa CaucusesFor someone who has been more or less rooting for Howard Dean since last summer, the sudden tightening of polling data in the Iowa caucuses this weekend is somewhat worrisome. In fact, when I first heard that a Zogby poll put Senator John Kerry in the lead, I scoffed at the absurdity of the idea and loudly called into question the dependency of Zogby in general. I was talking out of my ass of course, basing my reaction more on my investment in the idea that this race has had an air of predestination for months than on any attention paid to the very recent events in Iowa. To paraphrase a friend’s characterization of my inability to focus on the primaries of late: “It’s a tough week to have a job and be a political junkie.”

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The Bitter Suite

Adobe Creative SuiteWe’ve had a copy of the Adobe Creative Suite in the office for a few weeks, but it was only today that I got around to installing it on my PowerMac G4. I spent the afternoon trying to knock out some comps for a project using Illustrator CS and Photoshop CS, using essentially the same techniques and methods that I would normally use with their predecessors. In fact, there is nothing dramatically different about these revisions, which is a kind of disappointment to me given the rather pronounced rebranding effort invested into this software suite by Adobe.

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Data in Denial

Sync Entourage-Address BookOne of the disappointing things I noticed during last week’s Macworld Expo announcements was Microsoft’s sketchy details about their impending Microsoft Office 2004 for Macintosh release. Specifically, there was nothing said about integration of the contact management component of Entrourage with Apple’s built-in Mac OS X Address Book.

This core application is the closest thing to a system-wide contact manager you’ll find in a consumer operating system, and I’ve been patiently waiting for such a thing for years. Being a dedicated Entourage user, I’ve felt frustrated that this very robust Microsoft product can’t take advantage of the Address Book. I have no desire to manually maintain two separate contact databases — something I’ve tried to do in the past and found to require too much effort — so I’m desperate to find a way to link them.

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A Very Long Fairy Tale

Once Upon a Time in the WestIf it weren’t the beginning of another crazy week at Behavior (where we’re looking to hire freelance designers, by the way), I’d spend some time writing extensive praise for Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West.” I watched it for the first time this past weekend on a newly minted DVD version, and it was magnificent. Perhaps a very brief outlining of my thoughts are in order anyway because, at heart, this is a ninety minute film stretched out to a very long two hours and forty-odd minutes.

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A Clean Slate

Despite the best efforts of a colleague who went out of his way to help me, it took nearly a week to reformat my troublesome Hewlett Packard Pavilion 701 and reinstall a fresh copy of Windows XP on it. This machine had been on its last legs for months, sputtering along with an installation of XP that had been painfully accreted with innumerable Microsoft patches and who knows what kind of damage inflicted from countless crashes and errant programs.

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Life as a Cub

TintinWhere have all the cub reporters gone? Fictional enterprises no longer seem to harbor the fantasy of underaged journalists risking life and limb in the pursuit of a hot scoop, something that seemed once to be a fairly commonplace — or at least somewhat plausible — pretext for throwing likable young adult characters into unspeakably dangerous situations.

This was the absurd and yet intoxicating premise behind the indefatigable cub reporter Tintin, the Belgian comic strip character who celebrates his 75th anniversary today. My father, who spent a good chunk of his childhood growing up in France, introduced me to the oversized collections of Tintin’s adventures when I was a kid, and I was blown away by the sure artistic hand of the character’s creator, writer and illustrator, Georges Rémi — he signed his work simply as Hergé — and I was sure then as I am now that he was some kind of genius.

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All Play and No Work

Apple iLifeHere are my quick thoughts on some of Apple’s announcements from yesterday’s Macworld Expo. Nearly everyone with whom I’ve discussed the new, slick and inevitable iPod mini feels that it’s over-priced at US$249, and I agree. I think the consensus was hoping for something in the US$150 range, but heck, they could have priced it at US$200 and everyone would’ve been happy. There’s something psychologically forbidding about that extra fifty dollars, but it’s just like Apple to hit a home run like this and twist its own ankle while rounding the bases.

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House of Acting

House of Sand and FogVadim Perelman’s “House of Sand and Fog” begins with the very end of its story, a narrative device that has become so popular in recent cinema that it provoked in me a feeling of dread. The idea of enduring yet another movie that spends the bulk of its time in flashback has by now a tired, depleted promise to it, and I was seized, in the opening sixty seconds, with a sense that I was embarking on 126 minutes of bad cinema. And in fact, there is a good deal of this movie adaptation of Andrew Dubus III’s novel that is perfunctory and predicated on only unambitious attempts at storytelling, from its cast of not quite fleshed out supporting characters to its sometimes implausible leaps in narrative logic.

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