A Return to Blogging;-- In which Batman steals the Spotlight and Memoir is foiled once again!

Batman was incredible. I usually can't tell if people wearing face paint are acting well or not, but damn Heath Ledger was good. Christian Bale took the whole breathy this-is-not-my-real-voice voice a little too far, maybe because he sensed he was being outdone by the Joker and tried to ramp up his own game with, well, the only thing you've really got going for you when everything but your mouth is behind opaque black plastic. And I thought they did a great job of pacing a long film, using a steady, creeping feeling of the downward spiral. (---SPOILERS FOLLOW---) When Maggie Gyllenhaal bites the dust you look around and say, this shit is bad news bears. And then the movie just never really lets go of your nuts. I'm really feeling the altered mood of these films, the way cartoonishness has been flattened into a kind of really dark... not magical realism... maybe improbable realism. I like the way we're asked to accept this world as being coterminus with our own; even if it's not likely, it's not a cartoon, either. My suspension of disbelief did suffer, however, at a couple of key junctures, most obviously when Batman somehow rigs all the cell phones in Gotham to emit and receive sonar, and relay the data to him (in about an hour). In other Batman movies this would be totally of a piece with the general outlandishness of the gadgetry, but I felt I was being asked to believe in this movie a little more. None of the movie's other technology suggests Gotham has a much different electronics landscape than ours does. I can wrap my mind around a multi-billionaire with access to cutting-edge weapons technology building a car that flips over on walls or rigging one cell phone to map a room. To me, that participates in reality in a way that city-wide, remote-activated cell phone repurposing does not. K disagrees with me, but at that moment in the movie I found myself "WHAT??"-ing the screen a la Wanted and the Loom of Destiny. Maybe everyone has a different disbelief threshold. (P.S. don't see Wanted.) (---END SPOILERS---)

I'd tell you what I've been up to since my last post at the beginning of summer, but I don't know how to clown-car seven states, Snoop Dogg, 50,000 hippies, all the Leinenkugel's in the world, what I can only describe as "cunt-phrase," paddleboats, a general lack of moderation, and a glazed-donut-bacon-cheeseburger all into one blog post. And the long version would be a lot less interesting than this short one.

Madison will not be the same without Lee and Jeff.

In news you can use, however, after a death-match battle between Expedia, LAN air, my credit card company, and my very soul... it's finally official. K and I are leaving the country once again. From 12/28/08 - 6/12/09 we'll be bopping around Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Goodbye, graduate school. I'd say I'll miss you, but it's much more likely that I'll realize I don't miss you and that our relationship is built on lies and insecurity, and I'll have to break up with you for South America. I'm already blowing off my pathetically minimal summer responsibilities to read about trekking in the Andes, so what chance do my seminars stand in the fall? Sigh.

It's been a good summer, but I should probably be reading a lot more...