OF A GOLDEN AGE

• The other day my roommate Nathan and I rode the Blue Line L train downtown to see the new Indiana Jones and meet an out-of-town friend for dinner. On the trainride I was thinking about different styles of trains, most obviously evidenced by different door styles on the Blue Line. When I asked Nathan if he knew when the trains were manufactured, he pointed me toward a sort of dedication seal near the car’s back door. Apparently our train was put into commission in 1969, when my parents were 16 and 17 years old. I knew I rode the same line my dad did when he was in law school in the ’70s but I did not realize some of these were literally the same trains.

• Martin alerted me to Budget Hero, a surprisingly compelling financial Flash game from the radio show Marketplace. You choose objectives — ecology, fiscally responsible government, national security, healthcare, and so on — and choose budget moves that promote your goals. The game keeps you posted on how your decisions affect the national debt and size of the U.S. government. All theoretically, of course. (Hint: the unsurprising conclusion is that borderline socialism extends the life of our nation’s budget. TAX THE RICH!)

• My brother, it turns out, works for the largest company in the world according to the Forbes Global 2000. This is HSBC’s first year as ummmmmber ooooone*, after climbing the ranks from #5 in 2006 and #3 in 2007.

* a reference to Stephen King’s Misery, during whose opening scene a kidnapped author awakens to the sound of his “number one fan” proclaiming her love and devotion

To get it out of the way: no, this is not a great movie. It’s a worthwhile sequel, and honestly, I appreciate that it doesn’t try to step seamlessly back into the Indiana Jones world without any awareness of the time that’s passed. Harrison Ford is pretty haggard and they would have to come up with something pretty elaborate to pull him back into the fray.

Of course, this plot is really elaborate. There are Russians, double agents, FBI, psychics, aliens, atomic bombs, CGI animals, and all manner of other silliness. The movie is teeming with complicated, unnecessary messes, leaving Ford no choice but to crack wise as if he were James Bond’s meatheaded, defiant younger brother.

Shia LaBeouf steals this show, not because he’s a great actor (he is, but his character is written flat) but because he’s stylized as an archetypal greaser. I’ve seen this used as a criticism of this movie, which I don’t understand — besides Spielbergian daddy-issue bullshit, what real emotional depth or complexity exists in a franchise like Indiana Jones? Hell, if he brings me Shia LaBeouf in 501s and biker boots, I’m down.

Cate Blanchett also makes a great one-note turn here as a Ukrainian agent of the paranormal, replete with blue woolen jodhpurs, bitch boots, and a black inverted bob. As usual, her talents lie in inhabiting the qualities of a character — much like in The Aviator, she is not given a great deal of internal depth, but the character’s affectations allow her to show off her chameleonic bent.

Bottom line: This is Indiana Jones meets big dumb summer movie, but the result is still fun and worth seeing. I laughed at the movie and with the movie equally.

Coupland’s 2004 novel on loneliness and willing-versus-unwilling solitude was reviewed pretty negatively by the New York Times. I agree with some of the reviewer’s criticisms: the book is a little pat and overwrought, and narrator Liz Dunn is smugly pragmatic about her solitude to the point of obnoxiousness. On the other hand, it contains some of the best frank descriptions of real, palpable loneliness I’ve ever read.

The hardcover was a Borders Bargain Book when I happened into one last weekend, and the title caught my eye for obvious reasons. Liz is middle-aged, fat, and plain, as she states a number of times (one of the more striking qualities of the book is how little Liz relies on physical description, in fact mocking books with forced physical descriptions*, but she feels these descriptors of herself are relevant to the story, and sadly they are), and the book details the process by which her lonely, boring life inverts itself and becomes something entirely different. Hidden feelings ooze out of her normally nonresponsive family, for better or worse; people in her life notice her for the first time and usually prove disappointing upon further inspection; she realizes that it is, yes, better to have loved and lost.

I think Coupland may have realized his story sounded pat on paper but figured its strange twists redeemed it; the success of this is mixed at best because disingenuous twists are no better than predictability, and Coupland’s twists are walking a very, very fine line.

Finally, the two most memorable moments in the book. The first is when Liz begins describing a class trip to Rome, during which “the only Catholic in the class” gave the others a heads up about the pomp and ritual of elaborate worship:

“To paraphrase the warning he gave us before we arrived: ‘Religions are designed to outlive individual people, and so what looks evil and bizarre from the outside is actually just a long-term survival system.’”

And this, two pages later:

    “I’m doing the thing that lonely people do, which is fine-tuning my loneliness hierarchy. Which is lonelier . . . to be single and lonely, or lonely within a dead relationship? Is it totally pathetic to be single and lonely and be jealous of someone lonely inside a dead relationship? Again, remember, this is all theoretical to me. Okay, here’s another one . . . is it possible to be lonely within a dead relationship while the other person isn’t lonely at all? Or the corollary of that question: is it possible to be in love with two people at the same time?
    “When I calibrate loneliness into its own little status yardstick like this, I begin to believe I deserve what life sends me.”

The book is not great, but I loved Liz Dunn’s narrative voice.

* One of my most beloved college professors gave us two novels to read: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf and Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty. Once we’d finished discussing both, he drew a fantastic parallel: Woolf used shifting narrative voice to explore each character’s personality, while Welty’s third-person narration forced her to display characters’ personalities via their appearances. I think about this idea with each book I read since then. Coupland skims appearance and instead allows certain small actions to illustrate larger characteristics, and Liz’s acute, inward-facing solitude makes her a sharp observer and collector of details.

(7-11 at Addison and Pulaski, Memorial Day)

For the first time in at least twelve years I got a powerful craving for a Slurpee, probably because my friend Genghis asked to stop for one on the way back from Forgetting Sarah Marshall last week. Luckily 7-11s are as prevalent as cigarette butts in the city and there happens to be one about two minutes from my apartment.

I scrutinized the flavors, trying to guess inside my head if the “Piña Colada” flavor contained milk. A classic, real piña colada does not, but most flavorings exchange more-expensive coconut milk for less-expensive dairy.

“Got a weird question,” I said to the register guy. “Do you have a list of ingredients for the Slurpee flavors?”

He smiled, laughing. “Sorry, no. Nobody asked me that before neither! Why, what’s the problem?”

I bought a Coca-Cola flavor instead and explained that I’m lactose intolerant, that milk hides in sneaky places you wouldn’t expect it.

Outside, a girl who’d been in line first stopped me. “I’m lactose intolerant too, and it doesn’t give me any problems,” she said, as I envied her Piña Colada Slurpee. She looked about 20, small and pretty, with a feathery white hair clip and dark lipliner.

Then she laughed. “But I can eat anything right now since I’m pregnant!” she said. “Maybe that’s it.”

Yesterday a friend of mine wrote a blog post about fonts, and I was looking at some font packages online when I bumped into Fonts.com’s Search by Sight tool.

You start with a sample of a font, whether a document, magazine, or book. The tool asks you about twenty questions — what’s the capital Q look like, what’s the dollar sign look like, and so forth — then tells you the font you’re looking at.

I tested it on the book I’m carrying right now (Stephen King’s Tommyknockers) and got a great, accurate-seeming answer. The tool can at least give you a strikingly close font to the one you’re after, and after that you can search for a free knockoff. The joy of the internet!

First a note: Philip Glass and Ira Glass are first cousins once removed. I didn’t know it either, but apparently America has a royal family.

A few weekends ago a sweet, talented friend and I went to see Persepolis at a downtown multiplex. The original graphic novel was stark, uplifting, devastating, and often (accurately) grouped with Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. Both are at once large- and small-scale, portraying an entire war as telescoped into one family’s experiences; both still maintain a critical sense of humor as reflected in the real lives of each subject.

When I saw they were making a movie out of Persepolis I was thrilled and still am. Satrapi collaborated with another artist to develop an outrageously gorgeous look for the movie, and the French language was dubbed into English for release in the U.S. (Some compelling voice-actor choices were also made.) The product is a deeply effective, emotional story that still made me laugh hysterically, which means it successfully made the jump from brilliant book to brilliant movie.