My friend Bob was kind enough to invite me to Town Hall last night to hear Joseph Stiglitz speak about the recent economic meltdown – or, as he puts it in his new book, the “freefall”.  It was my first visit to Town Hall and I was really impressed with the venue – it’s rolling in old-school neo-classical accents and in fact started out life in the 1920’s as a Christian Science church.  It’s got pews and is broad and open and airy.  The crowd appeared to be a mixture of old liberal Seattle money, younger liberal bourgeois intellectuals, and even younger starry-eyed hyper-liberal students.  Extra bonus points if you correctly pick which category I fall into.

So – about the talk. Stiglitz spoke for about 50 minutes on who and what was responsible for the 2008-2009 economic decline and what we can do about it.  He pulled very few punches, giving out sharp raps to Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Wall Street, the anti-regulation crowd on Capitol Hill, free-market fundamentalists, and even Robert Rubin.  Economics is not my forte, but I gather he’s a sort of a contrarian sort, the smart-as-hell guy who sits outside the clubhouse and doesn’t let relationships or tradition get in the way of facts and evidence.  He’s sort of charming in a professorial way, not a fire-breather by any means, and talked simply but not patronizingly about a very complicated set of subjects.

What to make of it?  I came away thinking about a few things: corporate governance; what are known as the “agency problems”; the role of the old-boys’ network in ignoring and/or fomenting the mess we got ourselves in; and his obvious distaste for the blindly obedient invisible-hand adherents.

Interestingly, he didn’t once talk about individual decisions that people made to take on more debt than they could afford; matching, I suspect, both his personal views as well as that of most of the audience.  I’m not sure that a fully-fleshed out argument can accurately leave out personal agency as a contributing factor to the mess.  I mean, someone can offer me free heroin, but I still have to inject it.

I also found out last night that Dr. Stiglitz has a family connection with someone whom I used to work with and still admire very much; meaning that I’ll be following his talks and writings more closely than otherwise.   Context and personal relationships still matter in this day and age of stateless interwebs.

Let me get this out of the way first: Jeff Bridges absolutely deserves his Oscar nomination for his performance in Crazy Heart.  He’s always been a favorite of mine, ever since his enigmatic, incomprehensible performance in 1993’s Fearless, and he is superb in this film.  He plays Bad Blake, a broken-down alcoholic, a former country superstar gone to seed, and he lives the role as if he were born to play it.  He’s a stumbling drunk, a songwriting genius, a charming, nice guy who is also totally self-centered, a rogue and a walking dead man.  It’s a great acting performance.

That’s the good: now the bad.  The movie is intense, often painfully so, and if you have a history of alcoholism in your family, some of the scenes are going to make you uncomfortable.  At least they did me, but that may be partially the result of natural sensitivities in addition to my own family history.   Some parts of the movie were HARD.

A surprising delight was Maggie Gyllenhaal as Jean, a single mom who falls into Bad Blake’s universe, and, even after a lifetime of bad decisions, continues to make them, to near-catastrophic effect.  I won’t give up the plot line, but Jeanie says at one point that having a relationship with an alcoholic is “like living with a rattlesnake”, and her family feels the bite.  She’s a surprisingly beautiful actress and exudes a sensuality that I’d missed in the other roles I’ve seen her in.  Her characterization runs the wire – from frank and strong to weak and vulnerable, angry and tender and needy and distant.  She deserves her Best Supporting Actress nomination and I hope she wins it (although Vera Farmiga in Up In The Air was spectacular also).

I’m not 100% convinced yet that the ending is the one I would have hoped for.  Again, without giving too much away, I feel it could have been more dramatic and of a piece with the rest of the story.  The movie is based on the book by Thomas Cobb, so I assume it follows more or less faithfully the plot line of the novel, but still…

Worth seeing?  Absolutely.  The acting performances are amazing.  I’m surprised that the movie wasn’t nominated for Best Picture, in a year that has Inglorious Basterds, Up, and A Serious Man among the Best Picture nominees – all of which I panned in various ways.

James Cameron’s new movie Avatar is a visual feast, a compelling, glorious bursting-at-the-seams exploration of the boundaries of computer-generated imagery.  It reportedly cost $250 million to make.  One can see why – an entire army of software nerds must have been working full time for a year to create the kind of graphical wizardry that we end up seeing on the screen.

Part of the wonder of the movie – and I only realized it after the movie was over – is the seamless way that real actors intermingled with the CGI actors.  The CGI is so good that there are no moments where you brain switches over and says “hey, that’s fake!”.

I won’t review the plot here – suffice it to say that Smurfahontas is not too far off the mark.  But the movie gets tons of man points for the military / combat scenes, the man-eating wildlife, the adrenaline-rush cinematography, and let’s just say that Sigourney Weaver, reincarnated after a fashion into an alien body, has still got it, 30 years after her performance in Alien made her every geek’s dream girl.

I’ve heard a couple people complain that the movie isn’t as “sharp” in 3-D as it is in 2-D.  And, for my only complaint about the movie: it doesn’t fully leverage the 3-D technology.  Coraline, released earlier this year, was breathtaking in its use of 3-D, and when stuff flew out of the screen, you cringed, because you thought it would poke your eye out.  Same thing with Beowulf, from the year before.  Avatar?  For whatever reason, the 3-D is more subtle. Perhaps that was a directorial decision, to try to prevent the visuals from overtaking the film.  At any rate, I still fell into the story, unquestioningly, and loved the experience.  This is one of the few movies I’ve seen in the last couple years that I would happily see again in the the theater.

I hadn’t heard the term “third-wave coffee” until tonight, when I read this Coffee City article on The Seattle Times’ website.  I wasn’t even sure what the first- and second-wave coffee trends were, and I’m a pretty frequent coffee drinker.  Sixteen shots a day is not all that unusual for me.

But Melissa Allison’s continued reporting on all things coffee, which she links to from her Twitter account, make me realize that there is this whole other world of coffee snobbishness out there.  Now we can talk about terroir and not immediately think Bordeaux or Burgundy, but Guatemala or Yemen!  We can talk about nose and body and finish and all those wonderful evocative things that make wine so appealing.  In fact, the time may come soon when the only thing that the wine lover can lord over the coffee lover is the alcohol – but any coffee drinker worth his or her salt knows about Bailey’s, so it’s a fair draw on that score.

All joking aside, I like the fact that there is a sub-sub-subculture within the larger coffee scene that is excited about such arcane topics as where the beans are grown.  Anybody who really gets into something, whether it’s coffee, or architecture, or music, or triathlons, or roller derby, is fun to be around.  The enthusiasm is infectious and invigorating.  I hope to be able to attend a barista competition in ‘10 and taste my way through a very fun day.

From David Denby comes The New Yorker’s Best Films of 2009 list, and includes only two films that I saw in the theaters (yes, it was an odd year).  I would not consider “Up” to be one of the ten best of *any* year, but – opinions are individual, and if Denby liked it that much, good for him.

I did think “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” was spectacular, and am pleased to see it on this list.  Go see it if you can – it’s still in theaters right now.

One notable thing is how anti-star-power the assembled list ends up being: where are the huge Hollywood stars?  The giant productions?  The multi-million dollar budgets?  It’s a pretty subtle list, an understated list, a calm list, almost a soporific list.

As an aside, I agree with what he writes about “Inglorious Basterds” – too violent and context-insensitive to be a great film.

Tuesday night I joined a standing-room-only crowd at the King Cat Theater in downtown Seattle for Ignite! Seattle 8. I think this is the fourth Ignite! event in Seattle I’ve gone to, and I like to do a little recap of my experience following the event.  My body having decided this week that it needs 10+ hours of sleep a night (must be fighting off something), I’m a little tardy, but here goes: a recap of selected presentations that I thought were worthy of some special mention.  Note that these are not necessarily in order.

Eugene Lin – iPhoning my way to retirement, $.70 at a time
Eugene kicked off the night with a riotously funny recap of his experiences developing iPhone apps.  Excellent use of animation and repetition in the slides to carry his thesis along.

Benjamin Franklin – Intellect: without an outlet in the world
This presentation was notable for the period-authentic attire worn by the presenter, whose real name is still a mystery to me.  Eccentric? Yes, a bit.  He spoke about Ben Franklin being the “original geek”.

Wendy Chisholm (wendyabc) Challenge your assumptions. Innovate. Change the world.
Wendy gave an inspiring talk about how we think about design and accessibility that was punctuated with visually compelling yet understated slides.  I contradict myself constantly when I think about how best to use slides in an Ignite! talk.  On the one hand, dense or animated slides give the audience something to look at while listening to the speaker; on the other hand, subtle slides combined with a passionate presentation can be equally effective.

Sarah Schacht (sarahschacht) Overcoming Cacophony: Making Gov 2.0 Work for You
Sarah, the founder of Knowledge As Power, oozes spirit and intensity when she talks about good government and citizen involvement.  The first time I ever saw Sarah she was giving an Ignite! presentation in the old home on Capitol Hill, and she is still active, enthusiastic, and extremely knowledgeable.  Great information, strong delivery, and as always, a timely topic. 

Jason Carmel (defenestrate99) Defamation and Twitter – A Practical Guide to Covering Your Ass
Another very funny presentation on how not to get sued as you spread your words out over the innertubes.  Considering that I just got accused of defamation and libel by a very litigious claimant (long story), I should have been taking closer notes.

Norman Guadagno (thinktone) Amazon Archaeology OR Swimming In Our Own Clickstream
This presentation fell into the personal lifestream category – Norman looked back with humor and curiosity at his Amazon purchases and how they tied into his corresponding life circumstances.   I really liked his presentation – I wonder how I’ll look back at my 2009 blog posts in 10 years.

Dylan Wilbanks (dylanw) Everyone Core Dumps: Death and Loss For The Geek
This presentation hit home for me – it was about how to care for people when someone close to them has passed away.  ‘Nuff said.

Mike Tyka – Cubes in the Sky
Mike teamed with Richard Bailey to give a back-to-back talk about a giant interactive Rubik’s Cube they built at Burning Man, and it was fascinating stuff.  Burning Man-as-background-story always plays really well to Ignite! audiences, and I have to say that thing they built was just fucking AMAZING.

Again and again I can’t say enough good things about Brady Forrest and the team that helps organize Ignite! Seattle.  They really do a service to the community and should be applauded for their tireless efforts.

There was a strange situation with regard to minors – they had to be segregated off in one corner of the theater about thirty minutes before the start of the talks.  I’m guessing that we can thank the Washington Liquor Control Board for this one – officiousness at its best worst.

Best presentation?  I’d have to give it to Eugene Lin: very funny, timely, and he combined a showman’s sense of confidence with some great slides.

Hope you were there to see it in person; if not, the next event is in March, as part of some sort of global Ignite! week, where 40+ Ignite! sessions will be held all over the world.

We’re all mentally lazy," says psychologist Scott Lilienfeld of Emory University in Atlanta. "It’s simply easier to focus our attention on data that supports our hypothesis, rather than to seek out evidence that might disprove it.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703811604574533680037778184.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories

(I like to think of confirmation bias as “relentless optimism in face of constant disappointment” )

David Denby, perhaps the preeminent film critic of our time (although I love Anthony Lane also), reviewed the Coen brothers’ new film A Serious Man in a recent New Yorker and wrote:

The Coen brothers in the black, bleak, belittling mode, and, except for a few moments, it’s hell to sit through […] As a work of film craftsmanship, the movie is fascinating; in every other way it’s insufferable.

I wish I’d read his review before I shelled out the $10 to see the movie, because my review was right in line with his. On the other hand, a night out at the movies is a treat no matter what the outcome.

Whip It is the story of a seventeen-year old girl, a square peg in a round hole, who is stuck in small-town Texas and longs for escape.  So many movies, especially those made by Fox Searchlight Pictures, could start out that way.  The girl, Bliss (played by Ellen Page, in a role that seemed written especially for her) finds her particular outlet in the high-velocity world of women’s roller derby.  While working at the Oink Joint BBQ restaurant and finishing out high school, she spends her evenings with her skates laced up, and the movie revolves around her efforts to find her dreams in the face of parental disapproval and small-town peer pressure.

I won’t give away any plot details that might ruin the movie, but instead I’ll talk about what I liked.  First of all, it’s got a true-to-life, indie feel to it – no big-budget Hollywood over-exuberance here.  Second, just like a few other sleeper indie films over the past few years (Little Miss Sunshine, Napoleon Dynamite, and Juno, which also starred Ms. Page), the movie is charming, disarming, and ultimately uplifting.  There are no huge surprises here – it’s not a whodunit – but part of the allure of this genre of film is being able to root for the hero, the misunderstood rebel, and cheer as things turn their way.

The actors – especially the ladies of the roller derby teams – were chosen well.  Drew Barrymore, the director, also makes a supporting appearance as Smashley Simpson, a girl with anger management issues who just wants to have fun.  Juliette Lewis, at least the 90 pounds of her that are left to ogle, plays the bitchy Iron Maven, the antihero, and she swaggers and hisses and purrs wonderfully.  I LOVED Andrew Wilson’s turn as the coach of the Hurl Scouts.  “Run the plays, people!” lol.

My biggest acting surprise was Daniel Stern, who plays Bliss’s Longhorn-loving father.  After years of watching Stern play the lanky goofball in films like Home Alone and City Slickers, it was a surprise to see him in a more weighty role, emotionally speaking.  I think he did very well.

There’s a very cool make-out scene underwater in a pool that brought to mind the same scene in Children of a Lesser God, although this one had much less va-va-voom going on.  The song they played during that scene has stuck in my head – must find it on iTunes.

The highlight of the film?  The roller-derby scenes were trés über, but the best part for me was watching Bliss realize over time that she could do what was best for her and still be OK.  We’re all bound up in convention, expectation, inertia, habit, and rules – but those bonds can be unwound, and new paths cleared as we move on with our lives.  That really spoke to me.

About a month ago, Zoka opened a new store in Kirkland, right at the junction of Central Way and Lake Street. The new Zoka in Kirkland shares a name and a coffee heritage with the two Zoka stores in Seattle, but the interior designer obviously has been born with, or acquired, an “Eastside aesthetic” because the store looks nothing like its Seattle counterparts.

Lots of stainless steel, tile, dimmed light fixtures, and black leather.  They have this awesome hardwood table right in the middle of the lobby – it looks like it was cut out of a single huge tree, but it’s actually four pieces, joined together.  I like the communal aspect of the seating – it’s similar to the large wooden table at the University Zoka store.  Not that I’m up on design lingo, but I might say that the interior exhibits a sort of Asian-Northwest fusion.

How is the coffee?  I drink cappuccinos, which tend to be very sensitive to brewing problems, and my palate can’t detect any difference from the excellent stores across the lake. And, unlike some other coffee shops that I frequent, the baristas at Zoka are all very consistent and it’s difficult to tell one’s output from another’s.

They also have this interesting thing called a “pourover bar” – it’s how they make all their drip coffees at this Zoka.  According to the barista, it results in a cleaner, more full-bodied cup.

Their food selection is similar to, but much more limited than, the Seattle stores.  Whether that’s by design or accident, you won’t see all the awesome selection of pastries that you might be used to.  Since I’m off pastries for a while, I wasn’t too put out.

A few notes for the laptop warrior:

• Outlets are few and far between.  Directly beneath the large wooden table are some floor outlets, but I can’t find a single wall outlet anywhere.
• The WiFi network appears to be adequate, even though I laugh that they misspelled “Kirkland” in their network name.

You can see the full set of photos of the interior by viewing my Whrrl story.