[W]hen you get to the point where you see watching Zombie Lake as some kind of solemn obligation, it’s a circumstance that bears some investigation.

That’s Todd of Teleport City, part of the latest roundtable from The B-Masters Cabal. I’ve been reading B-movie reviews from these folks for years—hell, I still think of Braineater and 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting as “the new guys” even though Braineater joined the Cabal at least 6 years ago!—and it’s absolutely fascinating to see which gaps they have in their knowledge, and how they respond to the new input. (And You Call Yourself A Scientist!’s typically insightful dissection of Jurassic Park has been followed by a nifty comment thread as well.)

I must admit that this particular roundtable is fascinating to me because it’s built around precisely the sort of thing that makes many self-proclaimed cinephiles and movie nerds squirm: an admission of ignorance.

In that spirit, I’ve just had a look at the TOC of Danny Peary’s invaluable Cult Movies and have to admit:

1. I’ve never watched Forbidden Planet all the way through, even though that film’s Id Monster is crucial to my reading of The Shape / Michael Myers in John Carpenter’s Halloween.

2. I’ve never seen The Red Shoes—widely regarded as one of the best British films ever made—because at one point in my life I deeply resented Martin Scorsese. Scorsese wisecracks in Roger Corman’s autobiography that

   There’s no such thing as studying film at NYU. At NYU they made you study Wild Strawberries. […] Every morning at NYU you had to light a candle to Ingmar Bergman.

   Well, Martin Scorsese was my film teachers’ Ingmar Bergman, and I got tired of lighting damned candles to him. Which meant that the artists Scorsese couldn’t stop being enthused about—Minelli, Pressburger & Powell—were dead to me. So, no Red Shoes.

3. Okay, last confession, and this one is really painful for someone who claims to love B-Movies. I’ve…I’ve never seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show. When I was a teenager, I avoided it (for the same reasons that Wil Wheaton did). As I got older and become more of a film buff, it seemed as though I had to see it on a big screen, with a crowd, at midnight. And that still doesn’t appeal to me at all. So I still haven’t seen it.

The Prisoner inspires Trekker / Browncoat levels of devotion in me. (When I saw last week that AMC is streaming the original series online, my first thought was, “which episode order are they using?”) It was my first exposure to science fiction TV other than Star Trek, and it shaped my tastes immensely at a fairly young age. (I seem to recall that my father taped the show when CBS aired it after The Pat Sajak Show—which would make me ten or eleven years old at the time—but I think that I actually saw it on PBS before that.)

The Prisoner wasn’t a perfect show on an episode-by-episode basis; like too much television, it was padded out for commercial reasons to a greater length than its premise could sustain. But on the whole it did what any good show does, blending familiar story elements into something distinctive.

(For the uninitiated: imagine if Keifer Sutherland left 24 to star in a show about a nameless man exactly like Jack Bauer, who has been imprisoned and tortured by his former employers because he doesn’t want to work for them anymore. Also, there’s a enigmatic monster like on Lost, only it’s a sentient weather balloon that acts as a guard dog, which is way cooler than a cloud of smoke that thinks it’s a taxicab anyway, so stop snickering and get off my lawn.)

A huge part of the appeal of The Prisoner to my younger self was McGoohan’s ferocious performance. The Prisoner (the character) is a loner who absolutely refuses to compromise with the society he has rejected:

I will not make any deals with you. I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.

But just because he’s dropped out doesn’t mean he’s mellowed, man:

I’m going to escape, come back, wipe this place off the face of the Earth, obliterate it; and you with it.

I mean, come on. That’s awesome. Not exactly a likeable character, true, but one comes to admire his sheer determination in the face of the seemingly limitless resources that The Village expends in its attempt to break him. (Come to think of it, I wonder if my failure to succumb to Rand or Heinlein the way so many of my peers did as a teen is because I’d already been exposed to a far cooler Rational Superman, at an age when it couldn’t do me as much harm.)

In my favorite episode, The Village, which has always refused to call The Prisoner anything but “Number Six”, creates an imposter Number Six, and insists that The Prisoner is—and always has been—Number Twelve. The scheme, of course, is to goad the individualistic Prisoner into asserting his “true” identity as Number Six, cementing his socialization into The Village. In the end, he wins (they don’t break him) but loses (he doesn’t escape). The moral? Doppelgängers + electroshock aversion therapy + spies + monsters = entertainment.

Certainly The Prisoner compares favorably with many shows that have followed it. Despite the occasional absurdity of the genre trappings, the padding, and its infamous ending, The Prisoner still had a much clearer point of view and narrative thrust than a certain inexplicably popular sci-fi drama ever has.

(Oh, yeah, they’re remaking it. Whatever.)

Further reading:

• I am not a number, I’m a mefi front page post
• Warner Troyer interviews Patrick McGoohan (March 1977)
• The LOL’ing Prisoner, a variant on the LOLCats meme from Fiona Moore, which has just been updated with a surprisingly effective tribute.

In addition to working through the Personal MBA Reading List, I’ve just joined the Gene Wolfe Solar Cycle Book Club. (I even introduced myself, which is a step I very rarely take.)

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One unexpected side-effect of implementing GTD and swapping my pre-millennial cell phone for a Palm Treo was that I read about 50 additional books last year. Nearly all of these titles were genre fiction: mystery, suspense, crime, sci-fi, horror, etc. I’ve never been good at keeping track of multi-volume series or prolific authors, and I hate reading out of chronological order. Once I had an effective way to manage lists and convert them into actions, I really made up for lost time.

I feel a need. A need…to read!

Now that I have a proven workflow for dealing with reading lists, it makes sense to try applying it to the sort of self-improvement that the Personal MBA reading list represents, as opposed to simply reading lots of popular fiction. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that—I hope.) It took a bit of time and some regular expressions, but I soon discovered that most of the books on the Personal MBA list are available at the NYPL. Indeed, nine listed titles were sitting on shelves I pass by nearly every day.

GTD + NYPL = PMBA?

I deliberately left home early this morning so I could spend a leisurely bus ride entering tasks in my Palm. I timed it well, arriving at the library just as patrons were admitted; I didn’t even have to break stride, much less wait in the cold. I worked my way down from the top floor, Palm in hand, and then used the self-service machine on the ground floor to check everything out. The guard at the exit was still getting settled at his station when I left, and actually did a double-take when he saw my stack of books. Thirty minutes later—I took the subway this time—I was home with my first batch of materials:

1. On Writing Well by William Zinsser
2. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini
3. The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
4. Indispensable by Joe Calloway
5. Growing Great Employees by Erika Andersen
6. Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies by Nikos Mourkogiannis

The first three titles—Norman’s in particular—are books that I’d been meaning to read for years. (Only one was even on my “Someday/Maybe” list, though, so there’s still plenty of room for improvement in my system.)

What’s the Next Action?

Of course, except for peeking at the Norman book, I haven’t actually read anything yet. But that’s because I was doing the tasks I’d brainstormed on the first leg of my trip; my productivity halo remains untarnished for today.

This project should be an interesting test of my commitment to keep up with a reading list that actually requires serious, you know, reading. I’d say I’d post updates and book reviews to this blog as I go, but that would almost certainly be a lie. One New Year’s Resolutionesque project is probably too much as it is.

If someone says is this okay you say?

Rest In Peace – James Marsters

What would best describe your personality?

The Silence of Daylight – Konami

What do you like in a guy/girl?

Duality – Electrostatic

What is your life’s purpose?

Buzz – B. Fleischmann

What is your motto?

Fresh Dog – MC Frontalot

What do your friends think of you?

Merry Happy – Kate Nash

What do you think about very often?

Doctor? – Orbital

What do you think of your best friend?

Paging System Operator – Barcelona

What do you think of the person you like?

Halcyon+on+on – Orbital

What is your life story?

Ballad For Dead Friends – Dashboard Prophets

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Alone Again (Naturally) – Gilbert O’Sullivan

What do you think when you see the person you like?

Pump Up the Volume – M/A/R/R/S

What do your parents think of you?

Seeker of Your Love – Melt Wizard

What will you dance to at your wedding?

Under Pressure – Queen and David Bowie

What will they play at your funeral?

Eternity – Ennio Morricone

What is your hobby/interest?

Mega Man 2 – The Minibosses

What is your biggest secret?

Following Her Around – Sprites

What do you think of your friends?

Empty Houses – Garry Schyman

What’s the worst thing that could happen?

Have You Forgotten the Bomb – Barcelona

How will you die?

A Very Unlikely Occurrence – MC Frontalot

What is the one thing you regret?

The Queen And I – JAMs

What makes you laugh?

Chewing Gum – Twilight Electric

What makes you cry?

Christmas Time is Here – Vince Guaraldi

Will you ever get married?

Bela Lugosi’s Dead – Bauhaus

What scares you the most?

God Is God – Juno Reactor

Does anyone like you?

Sister Ray – The Velvet Underground

If you could go back in time, what would you change?

The Long Wait – Morton Stevens

What hurts right now?

Pretending To Be Alive – Red Delicious

Put your music player on shuffle, and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results. The first line of the twenty-first song is the title.

I let the music play in the background, letting the work on the meme act as a break timer while plowing through several thousand unread items in Google Reader. (Letting one obsessive Internet activity balance another appealed to me.) Once I discarded instrumentals, song mashups, and foreign-language stuff—which, taken together, were actually the majority of the songs selected—the “poem” came out like this:

Taking Samples from Other People’s Records is One of the Most Widespread and Controversial Aspects of Computer Music

An old cowpoke went riding out one dark and windy day
With a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound
Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma
This is the greatest and best song in the world

Where were you on November 22, 1963
Look at what’s happened to me
Hey I’m not a young man any more
Well hello there little boy don’t be shy

You look like a perfect fit
A long long time ago
Tonight it’s very clear
I know all there is to know

I’ve been having a bad, bad day
What goes up may not come down
You are likely to be eaten by a grue
Here we go

Down in the boondocks
We’re the casualties
My sweet lord
He’s so fine

Further evidence that random can be good, and surprisingly cohesive, but also a little bit scary. (It comes across as much darker lyrically than the playlist is musically.)

The songs:

1. Dean Reed – Ghost Riders in the Sky
2. Blue Öyster Cult – Godzilla
3. Vampire Weekend – Oxford Comma
4. Tenacious D – Tribute
5. Steinski & Mass Media – The Motorcade Sped On
6. Joey Scarbury – Believe It Or Not
7. The Velvet Underground – I’m Not A Young Man Anymore
8. Voltaire – BRAINS!
9. Aimee Mann – Save Me
10. Don McLean – American Pie
11. Peter Cetera – Glory of Love
12. Barcelona – I Know What You Think of Me
13. Buffy the Vampire Slayer Cast [Marti Noxon] – The Parking Ticket
14. The Minibosses – song c(asptan)
15. MC Frontalot – It Is Pitch Dark
16. Southside Reverb – Here We Go
17. Billy Joe Royal – Down In The Boondocks
18. Red Delicious – Casualties
19. George Harrison – My Sweet Lord
20. The Chiffons – He’s So Fine

The title is from the meta-mashup track f.d. by Dummy Run.

I rarely watch television, but when I do, I tend to “read” the shows in some detail. I watch the episodes on DVD, and I break them down to cards as I do so. I take notes as I go, noting the main story beats and act breaks. At the end of each episode, I write a single-paragraph synopsis (analysis) and a single-paragraph review (opinion). Later, I do a little mini-essay on the overall arc (and, yes, structure) of the season.

Obviously, that’s pretty time-consuming, so I have made some effort to make the workflow as efficient as possible. Indeed, I actually have already partially automated the process, crafting a bash script for each DVD set that:

1. Calls dvdbackup for each disc in the set.
2. Invokes mencoder for triple-pass encoding of episodes into individual (and much smaller) AVI files using the Xvid codec.
3. Deletes the original DVD backups.
4. Creates a skeleton text file in AsciiDoc for each series, season and episode being processed.
5. Writes wrapper scripts for each episode.

The end result is that when it’s time to watch, say, “Blink”, all I have to do is type ~/action/review/doctor-who/310 at the terminal prompt. The script will open my notes to the right place in vim and then start the video in mplayer.

Now, this seems perfectly straightforward to me. Indeed, thanks to tab-completion and a logical home directory structure modeled on GTD, running these scripts requires essentially no thought on my part. However, there is definitely something wrong with writing lots of very similar one-off scripts to set all this up in the first place. I’m not much of a programmer, but I do recognize the basic problem: stupid repetitive work.

My solution? I’m currently trying to learn AWK (actually, gawk) to automate the whole process based on just a tab-delimited text file that describes each season. If it works, I’ll have written a single, easily extended, data-driven program that writes programs to call programs.

Why, yes: I am a huge nerd.

Two styrofoam cups filled with ice. Two 40s. Two blunts.

The counterman’s eyes flicked back up to the guy on line in front of me, who looked about seventeen.

“ID? Please.”

The man—the boy?—fished around in his pocket for a while. For a moment it looked like he might walk out, or yell at the man behind the counter. Then he produced a wallet, extracted a small card, and laid it on the table.

“You see me in here every day, man. Every day.”

The old man pulled on his half-moon glasses with unhurried ease to check the dates, the photo, and the security features printed on the card. He even ran his fingers slowly over the surface to test the finish. Doing the right thing. He didn’t want any trouble.

The shopkeeper removed his glasses. “Ten dollars, please.”

The boy—the man—paid with two fives and left the store muttering, head down against the drizzle as he stalked back to the housing development across the street.

I stepped up to the counter with a grin to show how friendly I was, paid for my soda pop and my apple pie—they didn’t have cherry, I’d checked—and wished the proprietor a good night and a happy Independence Day.