Off-day Guide: May 12

TV

NBC Comedies (8:00-11:00): Part 2 of Community's paintball follow-up, Dwight becomes acting manager at Dunder-Mifflin-Sabre, TWO new Parks and Recs, and... Outsourced, the Emilio Bonifacio of NBC's Thursday lineup.
NBA Playoffs (ESPN, 8:00): Bulls-Hawks Game 6.
AJ Burnett's no-hitter (ESPN Classic, 8:00): Relive all NINE walks! Plus a HBP!

Book

Earlier this year I reread The Great Gatsby for the fifth or sixth time. It is still one of my five favorite novels, and Fitzgerald's prose continues to delight. I realized this time around that the novel is really about the closing of the American frontier, but that's a discussion for another time. Instead, let's marvel at Fitzgerald's paradoxical conclusion:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fin morning--

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Bonus

Werner Herzog's The Cave of Forgotten Dreams should be on your to-do list. Legendary director Werner Herzog examines 32,000 year-old cave paintings in Southwestern France using 3D in a way that even anti-3D critics like Roger Ebert have cheered. Ebert writes of the film:

Herzog's limitation of four small portable light panels works to his advantage; as they move they suggest how the flickering torches might have created an illusion of movement in those repeated features. The space was so limited it was impossible for his crew to stay out of many shots, and their shadows dance on the walls, just as the shadows of forgotten ancestors must have danced in the torchlight. Herzog's inspiration is to show us the paintings as the cave's original visitors must have seen them. I have seen perfectly-lighted photographs of other cave paintings that are not so evocative.

The trailer is below, see also Herzog's recent interview on The Sound of Young America. If the film isn't playing in your area yet, check out Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog's Antarctic documentary, now available on Netflix Instant.