• My lat­est review at Paper Thin Walls is up. If you did­n’t catch Kirb & Chris then, don’t miss ’em now. Set up an account and com­ment! What bet­ter way to take part in Web 2.0. Live up to the great expec­ta­tions Time Mag­a­zine set for “you.”
• Col­lect­ing my thoughts on Chil­dren of Men. In a word: wow.
• Just heard Marnie Stern’s In Advance of the Bro­ken Arm. More on that soon.
• After much encour­age­ment and a five year hia­tus from the game, Black­mail Is My Life eyes a return to the acad­e­my for Fall 2008. I promise not to make friends call me “Dr. J.” Pinky swear.
• Last­ly, Fri­day looks like as good a day as any to unload an avalanche of pro­mo discs on Prince­ton Record Exchange.

Mem­o­ries came out of hid­ing, but not emo­tions; not even the mem­o­ries of emotions.

- Julian Barnes — Flaubert’s Par­rot

Words like “haunt­ing” and “ellip­ti­cal” fail to express the beau­ty of Vic­tor Erice’s The Spir­it of the Bee­hive. Imbued with doubt, naivete and the over­ar­ch­ing para­noia of Fran­co’s Spain, Erice con­structs a nar­ra­tive of inno­cence and loss, one that spans the gulf between par­ent and child, cre­at­ing a sto­ry of tremen­dous pow­er, mut­ed by a pover­ty of expres­sion, painful remem­brances and an unwill­ing­ness to admit deep feel­ings. As Fran­co’s Spain becomes a metaphor­i­cal place­hold­er for today’s polit­i­cal tur­moil, Erice trans­ports us to that time and place: one frozen by an anony­mous, banal, and bureau­crat­ic evil that reduces us to zom­bies par­a­lyzed by fear, the fear that those feel­ings and mem­o­ries we’ve for­got­ten may some­day come flood­ing back to drown us with regret, a fear that strips us of human­i­ty alto­geth­er, leav­ing us naked before its unname­able dread.

Iñárritu should prob­a­bly find sub­tler ways to describe the exis­ten­tial links that bond soci­ety — Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft and all that — but Babel works in mys­te­ri­ous ways across bor­ders, lan­guage and time. In cer­tain respects, it’s a more dire expla­na­tion of David O. Rus­sel­l’s much maligned I Heart Huck­abees, which seemed prefer­able to me only because but­ter­fly effects are so roman­ti­cal­ly absurd. It’s in this way that Iñárritu’s lit­er­al attempts at con­nect­ed­ness would seem com­plete­ly art­less were it not for his cap­ti­vat­ing abil­i­ties as a film­mak­er and a breath­less storyteller.

Visu­al­ly, Babel accom­plish­es the work of sev­er­al film­mak­ers, past and present, draw­ing on the likes of Anto­nioni and Wong Kar-wai. Lin­ger­ing shots tell as much of the sto­ry as the actors do and the bleak vis­tas all mean the same thing whether you’re in the desert or the city.

This may be the most need­less­ly over­pro­duced pro­gram on the inter­net, but that does­n’t stop me from being com­plete­ly enam­ored of it.

This is prob­a­bly per­fect for those frozen morn­ing hang­overs we all have from time to time, or at least it sounds like one of those frozen morn­ing hang­overs. Black­mail Is My Life eager­ly antic­i­pates new Psy­chic Para­mount material.