Cafe Brando

Dangerous Is The Night

2004-09-08T18:11:00.000-07:00

There's a funky vibe in the air tonight, a strange kind of energy, a thrumming like a guitar string plucked in a minor key.

R has split to San Diego and won't be back until Sunday, and I just got back from dining with T, who is in the USC neck of the woods to hear a visiting artist give a lecture on campus. To and from dinner, the streets have been choked with careless and irrascible traffic, horns bleating often and pointlessly, tires squealing around corners. Throngs of people roam the streets, giant roving groups of students, middle-aged men on bicycles talking to themselves (?), skateboards rolling out from under feet and into busy streets, some men and women in swimwear, and many news vans parked on corners -- someone said something about a "big robbery." It's only Wednesday, but the twilight is full of unease.

Walking back home, I felt like I wouldn't be able to get to the gate fast enough. The air is tense, like something big has happened, or something big is going to happen, or both -- and I just want to be in off the streets.

So I've come home, locked the door, flopped off my flip-flops, and I don't plan to leave the house again tonight. My car is parked and doesn't need to be moved; I've checked the mail; I've had dinner. I'm going to leave the chaotic streets to themselves and curl up and watch -- ironically enough -- Michael Mann's lauded L.A. crime opera, Heat.

If I haven't resurfaced by Friday...send in a search party.

Trudging Gamely Through James Joyce's Ulysses

2004-08-21T23:31:00.000-07:00

Page 212 of 644

"Yes, bronze from anear, by gold from afar, heard steel from anear, hoofs ring from afar, and heard steelhoofs ringhoof ringsteel."

An Open Letter to My Uncle Donald

2004-08-21T18:28:00.000-07:00

Hello Uncle Don!

I wanted to thank you for dropping by my 'blog and signing its guest book, even though the 'blog underwent a somewhat disastrous two months of inactivity!

Not to fear about the movie reviews, however: if there has been one thing I have been doing ceaselessly all this time, it has been watching movies. If only I had been writing, sending out stories, applying for jobs, etc., with as much ferocity and determination! (But really, it's all symbiotic: the intense movie watching often starts the fits of writing, and often gives me common ground when interviewing for jobs, surprisingly.)

If you've been by recently, you may notice that activity is picking up a little bit here. There are many movies I haven't taken the time to write about, and the further away I get from them the less I probably ever will write about them. We went through a British Humo(u)r Marathon that included "Two Pints of Guinness," which is to say six old Eling Studios comedies featuring Sir Alec Guinness, most of which were veddy good indeed! We also celebrated the life of Marlon Brando with a "Walkin' Like A Brando" movie marathon, from which there are some amusing pictures that I intend one day to put on this blog. But now that I'm picking up steam on the blog again, there are bound to be some more reviews.

I am very flattered that you have made adjustments to your Netflix queue based on some of the reviews! Even more exciting to me is that you and Aunt Celeste recently watched The Third Man. As you may know, you watched my all-time Number-1-Slot favorite movie -- it deserves far more popularity than it has.

Everything here is fine. I'm slowly cobbling together the elements of Life After College. It looks like we might continue to live in the little duplex that you saw last year for a little while longer -- its rent is convenient, and school is about to start back up anyway, so as long as we're going to put up with frat parties and unexplained loud noises at 2 a.m. on a Wednesday night for a few weeks, we might as well put up with it for a semester or two.

I hope that all is well in your household! Keep me abreast of treasures found on Netflix, and if you're in my neck of the woods, drop me a line.

Much love,

-Brando

The Newbies

2004-08-21T13:29:00.000-07:00

This week, I've been undergoing intensive training for my new job as a "Standardized Patient," or SP. (For those who may not know, this is a job where I learn the particular aspects of an imaginary patient's case, such as his medical history, his current complaint, his family and social history, etc., etc., and enact them to international medical students who are taking a clinical skills evaluation test to get their residency in the U.S. Got it? Good.)

Unlike a couple of my prior training sessions, which have been one-on-one arrangements between me and my trainer (think acting coach, kind of), these sessions have been in the conference room with the rest of the new hires -- 9 of us, all told. The ECFMG (or, "company I work for") seems to do a pretty good job of only hiring incredibly nice people. Everyone I meet at work is a helluva person, friendly, interesting, outgoing (how did I get hired?). This group of new recruits was no exception, but I have come to appreciate particularly quirky aspects of their personality that I wanted to share with anyone who is interested. I'll be assigning them aliases, too, and if they ever come up again in my blogging, I'll most likely use these aliases to refer to them.
--------------
"Bud-Lite": This alias isn't one of my own invention, and in fact, if you knew this person, it doesn't do a lot to disguise his true name, but since you don't know him, it kinda works. Bud-Lite is a 78 year old man who used to work as an engineer for NASA, I guess. He brings this up all the time. "Well, I'm an engineer, so I automatically think this way..." "Well, see, I'm a mathematician, so..." He constantly begins statements by reminding us that he's an engineer or a mathematician. Sometimes this gets in the way of his proper functioning: he often averages numbers that he should be considering holistically, for example. He likes to overanalyze, and over think everything. He also likes to make us constantly aware that he has "two of the best hearing aids that money can buy," but that we might still need to turn up the volume on the video. Bud-Lite is a bit cantankerous, and sprays people with questions before they've had a chance to fully explain the situation. This frequently holds up the works, and confuses issues that didn't need to be as confusing as they were before Bud-Lite began to freak out, because he's an engineer and a mathematician. But he's quite a character. I think he has taken a liking to me, too, though I'm not sure why, because I'm a writer and an artist. But yesterday he was suggesting that we should all go down to a bar after our training and have drinks. No one really took him up on this, so when I saw him later, he was asking me: "Hey, are you done? Want to buy me a drink, or I'll buy you a drink?" I was touched, but I didn't really want to hear more about how Bud-Lite is an engineer, so I excused myself. Maybe another time, Bud-Lite.

"Olive Oyl": She kind of looks like Popeye's girlfriend, to me. She's Phillipina, young, tall, thin, and has that really short black hair. She's very nice. On Thursday, during our break, she asked me what I was reading -- it happened to be James Joyce's "Ulysses." We had a conversation about how difficult it was and how we both had trouble getting into it. She said she couldn't understand why anyone would say it was their favorite book. I said I'd never heard anyone say that. She said I don't hang out with really pretentious people. We talked about books a little longer, discovering a mutual appreciation for international authors such as Garbiel Garcia Marquez, Haruki Murakami, etc. She's surprisingly into science-fiction, and recommended Philip K. Dick.

"The Other Side of Me": This kid seems to be about my age, and it turns out we're playing the same case and have the same trainer and everything! That's all I really know about him, though.

"?": This is probably not how I will refer to her in the future, should I be referring to her again. It's just that she was quiet, and I didn't really get any impression from her at all. Though she says she's a costume designer, which I thought was cool because she looks very young, like my age.

"Hank": Finding an alias for this guy was really hard, because his real name fits him so well. And, I keep thinking, isn't that the name of the guy who did the Garfield comic strips? Surely not. I'm going to have to look that up. Anyway, Hank looks like he's in his late forties, maybe even early fifties. Kind of a big guy with twinkling little blue eyes and silver hair and a friendly paunch. He's the nicest guy ever, always laughing and joking (many, many bad jokes, but jokes nonetheless). He's a studio musician living in Hollywood, doing this for the same reasons the rest of us are: to allow him to spend time doing the things he really loves.

"B.B. King": There were three black people there, two guys and a woman, who all seemed to know eachother from somewhere. I'm not sure from where. At first I thought they were musicians...But now I think maybe they're SAG actors, or maybe both, I'm still not sure. But their style of interaction reminded me of blues musicians: very nice and folksy, but tending to talk shop and inside jokes to eachother while everyone else around the conference table watched on in bewilderment.

"Buddy Guy": By far the most colorful of the above-mentioned trio, Buddy Guy wears lots of bling-blind jewelry and has kind of a wizened Ray Charles look about him. He also wears a lot of cologne, so much, apparently, that he felt compelled to ask the trainers if he should not use it during the doctor-patient encounters. He's a bit of a cad, too. When one of the trainers told him that the reason she wears a key around her neck is because her boyfriend gave it to her, he said, "Is it the key to his heart? If it were me, it would be the key to my room!" And he laughed richly about that. He also tried to talk books with me yesterday. He first tried to tell me that James Joyce wrote The Exorcist. I politely, but fervently, argued with him until someone else offered the author's name who wrote The Exorcist. Buddy Guy went on to tell me how good this book was, and that it was really about the Nazis or something like that. I said, "The Exorcist is? Interesting. So it's very different from the movie, then?" He said, "Oh, they did make a movie out of it, didn't they." We talked a little bit longer, and then I realized he couldn't have been talking about the Exorcist. I said, "Are you saying Exorcist, or Exodus?" Turns out he had been saying Exodus, but he wasn't too sure about it. "Didn't James Joyce write that?" he asked me. Later, he told me a long joke about parrots having sex that I didn't really get. Buddy Guy's real name is another one that is still better than the alias: one of the Blues Brothers has the same name, and it's the more interesting of the two.

"Aretha": The woman of the trio. She has a very reserved, dignified, classy way about her that I like, and violet eyes, which I like also. She's always murmurring some scathingly humorous comment, often at Buddy Guy's expense, but she was also getting a little out of hand with Bud-Lite jokes. In fact it was she that came up with that alias for him, and would call him that right there in the conference room. I don't know what our engineer thought of that, or whether the best hearing aids that money can buy even picked up on it...

And the ninth person? That was me. "Brando."

A (Minor) Miracle on Orchard Street

2004-08-17T23:19:00.000-07:00

This morning, while putting on my shoes in preparation to go take the verbal portion of the SAT all over again, and interview for a job prepping high school kids for said test, I heard a street cleaner rumbling by outside. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks:

@#$%&!!, I forgot to make sure my car was parked on the correct side of the street!!

R has paid for a legit parking spot behind the house, so he doesn't need to concern himself with the Tuesday/Wednesday street-cleaning dillema of where to leave your car parked during the week. Somehow, with his mental energy out of the game, I completely forgot about it myself. My only chance was that I accidentally left my car parked on the correct side of the street, but somehow I doubted it. Great. So here I am with only half a job, funds dwindling, and now I'll owe 45 dollars to the city.

But when I went out to glumly check on my car -- there was no ticket. I was indeed on the wrong side of the street but...no ticket.

If the city issues a ticket, and some jerk comes by and steals it just to be mean, or a mighty wind blows it off the windshield into oblivion -- am I still responsible for it? I hope not, because I really don't understand how else I got away without a ticket.

Anyway, for tonight, I'm parked on the right side of the street.

I think.

Sleeping With The Fishes

2004-08-17T20:16:00.000-07:00

Remembering an Ex-Fish

Yesterday evening, my Betta fish, Yojimbo, finally passed away.

He had been ailing for a little over a week, suffering from a variety of diseases including popeye and, I suspect, fin and tail rot. I'm not sure what finally got him, but it seemed to be something the meds weren't treating: he was rapidly losing his sense of balance, and dind't seem to know which end was up. Often, he would swim around totally upside-down, which is tragicomic. Also, if it's possible to stagger and limp through water, Yojimbo did that, too, in his final days.

Am I sad? Not particularly. Yojimbo had only as much personality as I attributed to him, and as easily as it was attributed, it is nearly just as easily taken off again. He is less like a dog, and more like an exotic orchid, and I feel the same way about his death that I would feel about having an exotic orchid shrivel up on me: it's too bad not to have it anymore, particularly since it was a gift from D, but mostly I am frustrated at my inability to keep it alive.

Yojimbo's last days were spent listening to Marlon Brando movies and episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and so it only seems appropriate to conclude this brief eulogy by paraphrasing John Cleese:

"Mate, this fish wouldn't 'VOOM!' if you put four million volts through it! He's bleedin' demised! He's not pinin'! He's passed on! This fish is no more! He has ceased to be! He's expired and gone to meet his maker! He's a stiff! Bereft of life, he rests in peace! His metabolic processes are now history! He's off the twig! He's kicked the bucket, he's shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-FISH!!"

But while he was still a fish, he was a damn good one. We all wish him the best in the big, eternally-clean fish-bowl in the sky.

Zen and the Art of...

2004-08-15T23:07:00.000-07:00

a.) Driving on the Freeway
--On the 105/110 interchange, on a weekday afternoon in stop-and-go traffic: keeping about eight car-lengths between me and the vehicle ahead of myself, though my speed probably never gets over thirty miles per hour. Watch the break lights; gently step on the break to ease to a strop, maintaining the distance between me and the next vehicle. Observing other, more frantic drivers as they weave in and out of the space I have left them, jockeying in vain for a more swiftly-moving lane of traffic. When the cars start to move, lift my foot off the break and let my car roll naturally forward and try to let it roll to a stop by the time the brake-lights ahead have flared up again. Concentrating on trying to use the brake and gas as little as possible. I am so relaxed that I look around at the other drivers...even roll down my window and gaze out at the smog-dimmed palm trees of L.A. Life -- and the L.A. freeways -- is a stream; I am not struggling, I am floating.

b.) Throwing a Frisbee
--R and I go on campus to a park (Fagg Park, I think?) to throw Frisbee. There are hardly any bad throws between the two of us, as the dusk deepens overhead. I catch the Frisbee and pull it to my body. Several times, it comes out of the air so softly that, if the Frisbee had been a bird in midflight, it would not have known that anything had just happened. Collect the Frisbee, shift it in my hands, and send it out again, careful not to let my middle finger get too scuffed while sending it out. Careful to follow through and point after each throw. Careful to let the pad of my hand push against the Frisbee as I release it. Thinking about nothing else in the world but "collect, turn around, send; collect, turn around, send." Be Here Now.

The Village at The Village ( 1/2)

2004-08-15T12:34:00.000-07:00

On Thursday T and I went to see M. Night Shyamalan's The Village at the little theatre across the street from my place at the University Village. Fitting, no? Anyway, I have decided to review this film in the format of an open letter to its writer/director/producer, M. Night Shyamalan, whom I hold directly responsible. As it is an open letter, the author has tried to be discreet with certain secrets of the film, bogus though he thinks they are, for the sake of those whose movie tastes may differ enough from this reviewer's that having the surprises spoiled would be irksome. However, if you're a fanatical purist, you may want to proceed very cautiously indeed.
__________________________

Dear Mr. M. Night Shyamalan,

I went to see your film, The Village, three days ago. Though I'm an enthusiastic fan of your work, I was a little late in getting out to see your most recent effort because a reviewer whom I tend to trust (Mr. R. Ebert -- also an enthusiastic fan of yours, I think, judging from his reviews of your three prior films) had sort of panned your movie. But my sister, one L. Kay Bernard, gave it the seal of approval, and so I marched with fear and trepidation (as I march to all of your movies) to see The Village.

The first thing I should tell you -- because I think this is very bad -- is that I checked my watch twice during the movie. The first time was because I was so excruciatingly nervous and on edge that I wondered how much more of this guesswork I would have to endure. The second time was because you had taken all the guesswork out of the film, and I wondered how much longer the movie could possibly carry on before rolling credits with all the tension gone.

I enjoyed the first hour and a half of The Village, but the last thirty minutes really agitated me. And the more I think about the film in general, the more it falls apart like an overcooked turkey.

What The Village has in common with your other movies is what I admire first and foremost about your works, and that is that one never can guess what one will see when one buys a ticket. Signs, my favorite so far, was so much more than the alien-invasion movie audiences were content to expect. Unbreakable was so startlingly unique that when the item about comic book sales around the world appeared, I thought I was in the wrong theatre. And who could guess that in a movie called The Village, a First Aid kit would play such a significant role? I am always pleasantly surprised by your movies, and I leave thrilled that someone with such thoughtfullness and imagination and vision is still able to make major release movies.

Where The Village differs tragically from your other work is in its ability to trust the audience with its surprises. The Village is a puffed up Santa Claus story dressed entirely in cinematic slights of hand that don't originate organically from the story itself. For example, there is a piece of information on a tombstone in an early shot of the film that is deliberately misleading for no other reason than to trick us and to keep us from asking questions. If the information on the tombstone was not false, but accurate, it surely would have looked wrong, and those in the audience who noticed it would be questioning it, to be sure. This should not be seen as a weakness to the tension and surprise you are trying to build, but as a strength. It adds texture. A large portion of your audience has filed that strange piece of information to the back of their minds, not sure what to do with it, but aware that something is going on already. I highly doubt they will suspect what is actually up your sleeve, but once you reveal it, they will accept it because it matches with that piece of information they didn't know what to do with in the beginning. As it stands, however, I was mad at the revelation in the last thirty minutes, and I felt cheated. Pertinent information was deliberately withheld to make you look sly and to make me look dense.

I mention the above example in such detail not because it was the lynch-pin of the movie (no, not at all), but because it was an early symptom of a wide-spread epidemic of information withholding. The wonderful thing about The Sixth Sense is just how on-the-surface it all really is. The whole time -- as in the best detective novels -- all the needed information to the mystery is readily available, hidden in plain sight. In fact, I had even sort of guessed at the movie's surprise. But this doesn't mean it didn't still come as a surprise to me: I was never certain of my guess, but when I found out what was going on, I could reconcile it with information already given freely in the movie: 'Ah, so that's why his fiancee never even noticed him at the table...' etc. There is no such pleasure in The Village: a second viewing wouldn't turn up anything new, because all of the useful little giveaways have been thoroughly plastered over with lies and cinematic chicannery.

Would it really have jeapordized the sum effect of your movie to have had some of the elders suspiciously absent from a key wedding scene? Some of the villagers could even whisper amongst themselves, "Where's so-and-so? He should be here..." It would raise a flag in our minds, but it wouldn't spoil your surprise -- it would only help to support it after it had been revealed.

Your cast was a very strong one, but in the end I questioned the need for certain decisions. S. Weaver, for example, seems entirely wasted here: she is a competent actress when she gets to sink her teeth into juicy roles such as in Working Girl and Tadpole, and she has also proven herself to be quite the action heroinne. In this film, however, she gets a chance at neither. In fact, she seems to be struggling even to make the strange dialogue sound natural: in a mother-son scene with Joaquin Phoenix, J runs circles around her in terms of delivering emotionally on-target renditions of contraction-less, Quaker-esque dialogue.

A. Brody's Rainman-level performance is so powerful that it seems out of place, in fact, in a movie that wants to paint things in broad, fairy-tale swatches of red and yellow.

And regarding the decision to have a very serious accident befall one of the main players: was this totally necessary? I can see that you were seeking a "last straw" motivation to send someone into the woods, but did it have to be this? In Psycho, audiences were shocked to see the leading actress killed off in the first twenty minutes of film, but at least A. Hitchcock had the nerves of steel to actually kill her off, and have it be permanent and unapologetic. Here, the character in question is put out of commission, but not entirely dispatched. A name that was a very big draw to this film has suddenly vanished from the screen, and not even in any kind of way that totally shakes us up. If the character is ailing, and least have the decency to intersperse the rest of the action with shots of the character struggling, to show us the urgency of the situation. Don't forget about it entirely.

Bryce Dallas Howard is very good as the blind girl, but there are some problems with having a blind girl. While it definitely heightens the tension of woods scenes to a nearly unbearble level (looking at my watch here), it's hard to believe that she could really run through the woods without so much as tripping and falling even once! And finally, when a certain character puts on a certain thing -- I believe you know what I'm talking about? -- it's really only for the purpose of tricking the audience, isn't it, if Miss B. Dallas Howard's character is blind and can't appreciate the effect of the, uh, disguise? Once again, you have condescended your audience by adopting postures and putting on masks purely for our benefit -- we are not fooled by the mere mysteriousness of your script, but instead by the spit-and-polish of your movie-making craftsmanship.

I'm reminded of a certain shot in the film The Usual Suspects. I love The Usual Suspects -- it's surely on my top 5 -- but there is one shot, repeated twice, that I can't stand because it is strictly a cinematic stunt that exists to trick us, and it is entirely unnecessary. As you probably know, all of The Usual Suspects depends upon the reliability of a certain witness. To ensure us that this witness did indeed exist, the camera pans away from the action and tracks in close on a pile of ropes and some oil drums: the supposed hiding place of said witness. Later, we find out that witness never existed, and never hid behind those ropes. So why the dramatic shot of the ropes? The shot is repeated at the end, after we've learned there never was anyone hiding behind there, and this only begs the question more loudly: it would be one thing if in the first shot we could see eyes between the coils of rope, and in the second shot we could not -- then there would be a reason for the shot, that reason being to show us two different realities. But without the subtle change, the shot becomes purely a mechanical device to trick us.

On the whole, I gave your film two and a half out of five stars: a fifty-percent rating. I feel this accurately reflects my view of the film, which is that I admired half of it: the imagination that went into it, certain performances, and the nail-biting suspense of certain scenes before a certain reveal. But I have serious problems with another fifty percent: all of Mr. A. Brody's actions after the certain terrible accident; the implausibility of a blind girl alone in the woods, frightened and running; the reduction of a certain character's role throughout the movie; and mostly, the lack of confidence in us, your audience, you must have had to have mislead us so blatantly. I sincerely hope that in your next project, you will treat us more fairly, so that we may enjoy the sort of intellectual back-and-forth sparring that we have come to expect from such stunning movies as The Sixth Sense and Signs. We need more films like those, and more filmmakers like you.

Yours,
B. Scott Bernard

Top Ten Jobs I'd Really Like to Have

2004-08-12T11:02:00.000-07:00

But probably never will!

(in no particular order)

1.) Naming colors: if you just bought "Mah-vel-ous Mauve" lipstick, I want to be the guy that got to name that. (Same goes for car colors, paint colors, crayon colors, etc., etc.)

2.) Selecting music to be played in retail stores, e.g. The Gap, Williams and Sonoma, Restoration Hardware, etc.

3.) Being the guy who says, "This is the B.B.C. home service, and this is the news." Or a dj of an all-my-music-all-the-time radio station would be fine, too.

4.) Foley artist. (they record sweetened sound-effects for the movies, like punches and footsteps and stuff like that)

5.) Designer of titles, i.e. the fancy opening credit sequences in movies such as The Pink Panther or Catch Me If You Can.

6.) Narrator of documentaries. "Nala returns to the pride, disillusioned, embittered, but more capable after her struggle with the hyenas..."

7.) The guy who decides what movies will play on TCM. No! Better yet, to be Robert Osborne!

8.) Hat salesman / Haberdasher

9.) To have been a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus.

10.) Comic book artist.

A revision...

2004-08-11T18:03:00.000-07:00

I'd like to slightly change my list of 5 Things I'll Miss About USC. The second item, about woodpeckers and squirrels, while I did appreciate that there were those small signs of pastoral wildlife in the heart of a concrete jungle, is kind of lame and really only there to round out the five.

Here is a better second item:
The USC marching band. Yes, though I may never ever again want to hear the SoCal Spell-Out, how could I have slighted such a well-oiled cheer-machine as our marching band? Especially when they helped Fleetwood Mac out on a live rendition of "Tusk" and "Don't Stop (Thinkin' About Tomorrow)"?

You will be missed, USC Marching Band.

If you're going to San Francisco...

2004-08-10T18:25:00.000-07:00

...be sure to schedule your shuttle to the airport before 9 p.m. the day before your departure, or you will have to call a taxi cab at the last minute.

If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to have more than 22 dollars in your wallet, in case the last minute cab driver doesn't have a swipe-thing for your credit card as the dispatcher assured you he would on the phone, or the cabbie will demand to have every last dollar out of your wallet and peel angrily out of the airport drop-off lane waving his fist out the window and shouting Armenian insults, leaving you with no cash in the city by the bay (technically not a bay, but an estuary).

For those who come to San Francisco, especially in August and September, summertime will be a love-in there, but it will be generally cooler than you'd expect, so be sure to wear a jacket on your back. If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some suncreen on your face, or it will get burned while you ride the ferry and excitedly snap photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge like a manic Japanese tourist, even though it really doesn't feel that hot at all.

All across the nation, such a strange vibaration (mmm-mmm); people in motion. There's a whole system of public transportation, including electric busses, gas busses, taxis, and cable cars (diing-ding!). If you're going to San Francisco, though, be sure to know your way around, because whenever you ask a busdriver or other gentle person how to get to your destination, they will look at you like you are from Mars, and eventually, begrudgingly, tell you only half of what you need to know to get you there.

If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to eat lots of good sea food and have an Anchor Steam beer, and also some sourdough bread and these little donut things on Fisherman's Wharf. If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to bring the charger for your digital camera battery, because you will want to manic-Japanese-touristly snap photographs of many more things after the Golden Gate Bridge.

If you're going to San Francisco, just try and not leave your heart behind...

It's Something, Anyway

2004-07-21T11:49:00.001-07:00

Good god...it's been a month since I last blogged! I won't stand for this! No indeed! I will continue to sit on this hard chair!

Well, here's a little list I compiled as a summary of my experiences at the University of Southern California. It's not much in the way of a post, but it's some activity at least.

5 Things I'll Miss About USC
* Music majors practicing in the courtyard, often playing "Bolero"

* The fact that there are actually woodpeckers and squirrels in the trees!

* Palm trees; habiscus flowers

* Those little butt-shorts girls wear that say things across the butt, like, "Juicy"

* Movie/TV productions frequently shooting on campus

5 Things I WON'T
* Pan-handlers (this includes politcal solicitors and bank reps, as well as those freakish LA Times people)

* "discussion courses"

* bicycles, and the people on them.

* The Greek oligarchy

* Cinema majors

Monday Night Workshop -- Racoon -- A Lift.

2004-06-21T20:43:00.000-07:00

I walked out of the apartment (one of those addresses with "1/4" in it, how cool is that?) having finished a workshop that took a six page piece of drivel I dashed off one evening way too seriously ("I just had the overall impression that something was missing," was the general consensus -- well, yeah, a story!).

There were four of us at the workshop, including myself. Two of them are dating, and they both live in the quarter address, so the other workshopper, N, a graduate art student at USC from Chicago, and I walked out together. I started trying to make some chit-chat as we walked down the street toward her car and toward my house, when something furry darted across the street in front of us.

"That was a racoon!" I blurted, sounding like an 8-year-old before the older and more sophisticated N.

"Are you sure?" she asked me, sounding older and more sophisticated than my 8 emotional years.

"Well," I said, "no." I have, in fact, never seen a racoon in person before, though it had all the markings I have come to recognize, from cartoons, as being those of a racoon, and it didn't look much like a dog or a cat. But I said, "It might have been a really large, fat cat with a ringed tail."

So we continued down the sidewalk, and N said, "Oh, it is a racoon!"

To our right, under the front porch step of a home crawling with ferile cats, where a red wood plank is missing, a racoon is peering cheerfully out at us. His head ducks out of sight, then comes back to beam at us.

N and I have both made such a fuss by now that we have caught the attention of a neighbor woman, a small, sturdy Salvadorian woman, who comes over to us asking us if we've seen a racoon. We say we sure have! She tells us, in heavily accented English, that she has seen a whole family of them crossing the street, but reflects that some of them must have been hit by cars. She goes on to tell us all kinds of things about how smart racoons are, and times she saw the little ones lining up on the roof to watch the parent evade a racoon trap, or something like that (I wasn't getting all of this), and about how destructive they are, and about how the woman who lives in this house has such a large heart and cares for animals, and takes in all these stray cats and even insures them! Apparently she looks after dogs, too, for something is rattling the gate fiercely and whining, and I make a joke about a really big racoon. N looks nervous.

The woman tells us that she's from El Salvador, but only goes back for occassional visits, and her children won't come with her. She does not miss the humidity, but her husband, Manuel, tells her she will when they are old and arthritic. Still, she does not mind the weather here. She polls N and I to find out where we are from, and what we think of L.A. We agree with her. N says she sort of misses the seasons, but considering that one of Chicago's seasons is bitter winter, she isn't really complaining. The Salvadorian neighbor woman and I agree that September is pretty uncomfortable, but that's a small price to pay for lovely, temperate weather the rest of the year, and we can visit an autumnal place in September.

When conversation finally dwindles down, and we say goodnight, N asks me if I'd like a ride home. I say it's okay, I live really nearby. She asks if I'm sure, and now I'm down to the point where I can only say, "I don't mind walking, it's great weather this evening," which is dorky and also would probably be read as one of those polite ways of saying, "Please don't bother me," which I don't think is the message I want to send. I'm not sure if I want to send that message, or the opposite message, or any messages at all to N. Eventually, I find myself in an Annie Hall-esque conversation, where I ask her which direction she's going, and she says Vermont, and I say "I'm that way," not really knowing how out of the way of Vermont that is. So, I decide to take her up on the ride -- at least it will be a short one! -- and I tell her to make a left on 27th street and then we will come to Orchard, but instead we end up at Hoover and I'm confused, so I appologize, and thankfully I know how to get home from Hoover, and it is short, so I tell her how, and she drops me off.

We say good evening to eachother with almost precisely the same awkwardness with which we said good evening to the Salvadorian woman, who spoke to us way longer than we expected, about things we mostly couldn't relate to or might not even have heard correctly.

But one thing is for sure. That was a racoon, and not a really large fat cat with a ringed tail.

First Day of Summer

2004-06-21T15:34:00.000-07:00

68 degrees Fahrenheit in Los Angeles, California, with leaden gray skies.

Sup?

2004-06-05T22:55:00.000-07:00

Caution! - The following post is of epic proportions. It has been broken into sections, and you may wish to tackle it in chunks -- if at all.

Yes, it's been a while since I've last made an entry on my blog (about a week), and longer still since I was blogging with any kind of regularity. But in case anyone was worried that the internet would have to go on with one less dedicated driveler, I'm here to blog with a vengeance, a blog entry so massive and forceful that it should cause a spark to re-ignite the smoldering embers. Or whatever.

You may be wondering what's become of me, what many adventures I've been on that have kept me away from blogging, what travails have befallen me, what I'm thinking about lately, where I'm headed next...in a word, "Sup?" So, here we go.

What happened is, I graduated. In theory, this should give me oodles of free time I haven't experienced since I was, like, four years old or something. I had lots of high-hopes for my post-graduate self (hereafter, ADULT SELF), but I haven't been able to realize these hopes yet because I've been so extremely busy from finals up to now.

On The Quixotic Nature of Being Graduated

A good chunk of family came out here to help me celebrate being done with USC -- all of my immediate family, and both grandmothers. I nearly killed them, between dragging them to campus early for commencement and walking them all over campus to meet people, hauling them out to dinners and lunches and luncheons and walking their legs off in Hollywood and Manhatten Beach and Santa Monica. But I had a great time, and they say they did, too, which is great.

Of course, while family was out here, I didn't have any time to blog -- and why would I, when 75% of my audience was here anyway? Even when I should have been a honey-mooning grad, the next faze of my Adult Life was crowding in: during a graduation reception luncheon (un, un, un) I got a phone call from the City of Los Angeles Department of Parks and Recreation, setting up an interview with me.

The long and short of it is, I'm still unemployed. I don't think I could quite convince the City of Los Angeles that I had the accounting experience necessary for their little part time job, which was just as well because I was beginning to think I didn't want that job anyway, as well as it paid.

I can't decide whether I want to try and get work in the entertainment industry, or work far, far away from it, and use my free evenings to flex my entertainment muscle by working on screenplays and maybe shooting some small projects of my own during weekends and vacation time. Actually, I sort of have made the decision -- in general, I'm hunting for non-industry work. If I wanted to be a producer or editor, it would probably be better to try to get industry work right away, and climb the ladder within the studio system. But, since I want to be a writer/director, I think I need to get a handful of screenplays under my belt and start shopping those around, and also cut my directing teeth on a few low-budget short films of my own, and let those play small film festivals and help get me connected with people who are interested in doing what I'm interested in doing. Meanwhile, I have to be paying rent and car payments and insurance and student loans and groceries and all of that pesky stuff, so I have to find some kind of work that pays decently but doesn't tax my brain too heavily and leave me sapped of creative juices by five o'clock in the evening.

It's like walking a tight-rope.

I admit I've also tried a couple of industry-related internship opportunities. I have been back and forth to the Universal Studios lot trying to get my foot in the door at their post-production facilities as an internship working on the post production marketing area (TV spots, trailers, posters, etc.). I did pretty good, for just walking in the door and demanding something, but in the end it turned out that there is a Universal rule against hiring a non-student as an intern. How frustrating!

Still, walking around the Universal lot was a significant carrot dangled before me. Things sure have changed since the apocryphal days when Steven Spielberg snuck on the property dressed in a suit and carrying an empty brief-case to set up in a spare office and take actors out to lunch; the place is crawling with security now-a-days, and you need a daily pass to get on, which means you need clearance from someone. Spielberg's trick won't work for me. But I felt close to what he had done just walking around unattended, waiting for my interview (I was early). No one asked to see my pass, and so I walked around like I owned the place. There is a commisary, a shoe-shiner, and all kinds of little ammenities that make the grounds like a small, self-functioning city. Strolling past all the non-descript sound stages, I could picture Alfred Hitchcock inside, shooting Rear Window...

I also tried to score an internship with a literary agent, and this actually went quite well -- she offered me the position. Unfortunately, it paid peanuts, and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to procure a lucrative part time job on the side to make it work out...So, with much regret, I had to turn her down.

My most recent hopes are pinned to an interview I had this past Tuesday at a lawfirm, where I would be coming aboard as a receptionist, soon to move to "the back" to assist the lawyers. This interview went really well, except for the minor detail that I could not say I had any law experience previously, or interest in going on to law school. These are not mandatory, but if someone equally qualified comes along who is interested in law, I imagine I will lose out.

So, Monday I have an interview with a budding television commercial production company. The listing says it is an internship, and under wage it says "hourly." I'm not sure how much, hourly, but at least it seems like it pays something, which is rare for internships, I'm finding out. Also rare, is if they're okay taking on someone who's no longer a student.

Structuring my days is what's really strange about being done with school. No one expects me anyplace. There's no one anywhere calling role who will miss me if I'm not there. There's no one watching the clock to see if I'll come in to work. I feel like I'm on a long vacation -- Christmas break, or, if more weeks roll by, summer vacation -- only, for some reason, I'm spending it in L.A. Why, even last summer vacation, which I spent in L.A., my days were structured by a 9-to-5 job. I got to where I liked the structure. There was a reason for me to go to bed, and a reason to wake up, and a reason to get dressed...In between, I ate lunch at a regular time, came home, made dinner, put in a movie and watched it while eating dinner, worked out, then spend the remaining hours before bed catching up on e-mails or reading or whatever else I could think of to do.

There's none of that routine right now, and my days are a confusing morass. I make myself get up around 9:30 or 10, out of a feeling of guilt, but it took me the longest time to understand that once I got up and showered and dressed -- there was no place to go. So, now I prowl through the classifieds, through MonsterTrak and Craigslist and Entertainmentcareers.net and whatever else I can think of, printing out listings that seem interesting. Then, I go through and e-mail applications to those jobs. I've e-mailed twenty-some -- maybe thirty-some, by now -- applications. I've heard back from, perhaps, five of them.

The rest of my day is unruly, unproductive...If someone's around to eat with, I'll eat somewhat regularly. But I have not written but twice in the three weeks that I've been done with school, and that's infuriating, because the plan is to write every day in the evenings, to produce-produce-produce while I'm working unrelated jobs. Of course I realize that I'm not settled into my routine yet, but I'm afraid that if I don't get the writing habit started I'll have a really rough time ever getting it going. I've never been able to write daily, though most writers recommend it. I haven't sent out more fiction, though I want to be doing that, as well, while producing more to send out. It's a numbers game, like finding a job, and I'm not going to get anywhere if I don't start cranking this stuff out. However, the two days of writing I spoke of were today and yesterday, so I have hope that, with a few shudders and lurches, this good habit is about to take off.

To try and make myself accountable to someone for writing, I joined up with a summer writing workshop that a few classmates of mine from this past semester's workshop set up. We've only met once, so far, and -- like I said -- I haven't written a stitch for them. I haven't even read the two stories I'm supposed to have read by Monday, though I will. Tomorrow. All forty pages. Why can I never spread out my work?

Someone at the workshop was sharing tales of jobhunting with me, and she said she posted a fake listing on Craigslist.org just to see if anyone responded to those things, and what kind of people. Within a day, her e-mail inbox was crowded with 70 responses. Though she'd told them to attach resume, only half did. She told me to make myself sound interesting, because everyone's cover letters sounded the same. (Of course, if I knew how to make myself sound more interesting, wouldn't I have been doing that already?) So, if I manage to respond to job listings on the day they're posted, I'm competing with about 70 clones of myself (well, let's say 35 clones of myself, since I'm of the attached-a-resume variety). Often, I'm applying to job listings that are a few days cold...so I could be competing against upwards of 100 attached-a-resume people! I try not to think about this. I also try not to wonder how many job listings I've applied to that were faked just to see who would respond...

Lordes, Laydies, & A Castle

Meanwhile, I have been trying to have fun while not spending too much money. (Currently, my biggest motivator in finding a job is so that I can buy a sandwich or a movie ticket or a t-shirt with the knowledge that I have a paycheck coming, to replenish the reservoir.)

One of the things I did a few weekends ago was go up to a Renaissance Pleasure Faire that T had worked for several years ago, and always talked about very fondly. We got the tickets compliments of her mother's boyfriend, who I believe had them courtesy of his employer. I only had a vague idea of what this was...We'd had a Renaissance fair in high school or middle school, where there were booths with food and we all cobbled together phony costumes to look like knights and royalty and so forth. Neither T nor I had a stitch of Renaissance garb, so we just went as we were -- myself unshaven, unshowered, un-everything. (I looked like I'd never heard of a Renaissance, much less a toothbrush.)

I was amazed by what I saw. Immediately upon entering the fair grounds, we were confronted by two bosomy round women who, I take it, were supposed to be wenches, saying bawdy things to us in heavy accents with olde tyme flourishes. I don't think I said anything back to them, I just kept moving, trying to pretend they weren't there, trying to get away as fast as possible, like they were panhandlers at Santa Monica or something.

The thing of it was that I wanted to look at everything, because it was all so meiculously recreated, and everyone's costumes were perfect -- but I felt this odd inability to look, a shame in looking, as though I was peeping through a bedroom window or something.

The element of voyeurism is not inorganic to the Renaissance Faire, because the Faire is so lascivious in nature. There were bosoms everywhere, because I think all of the women were wearing tightly laced girdles. So, as you walk around and as these women pass by, it's the first thing you see -- I don't think I saw any of their eyes, frankly, and was so embarassed by this that I found myself looking quickly away, trying to find a direction to look in, in which there weren't breasts. This was almost impossible. There was a pretty young lady outside a shop (shoppe) holding two spiced melons with cherries in them, a la Austin Powers, right in front of her chest. T said, "Let me take your picture with her," and I could feel my cheeks redden and I said no, and ushered us quickly away. But of course, that's what that girl was there for. She knows what she's doing. All of them know their breasts are being shoved up to their chins -- you're supposed to look, to abandon yourself to the sensuality of it all, and yet I couldn't. Perhaps because we had made no attempt at costumes, I felt as though we were on the outside looking in, intruders on this scene. There were many public displays of affection, and not casual ones, but grand romantic displays, deep kisses exploding all around me...As if wearing a wide-brimmed hat with a giant plume in it, and cuffed boots, entitles the wearer to behave like Casanova.

I felt a weird mix of repulsion and intrigue at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire. I was repulsed because I was embarassed, and didn't understand, and was quite on the outside of things. Yet, you can't quite help but envy it...You'd think they would be the ones looking stupid, but get enough people gathered together who have completely genuine Renaissance costumes, right down to the buckles on their boots, and it was me, with my baseball cap and sweatshirt and bluejeans, who felt like a sore thumb. I thought, how wonderful it must be to be liberated by all of this make-believe, to inhabit a completely other world full of chivalry and swashbuckling and romance straight out of most full-blooded passages of an Alexandre Dumas tome. It was all a giant fetish to these people! If Star Trek fans got together with S&M enthusiasts, their offspring would be the colorful cast of characters I saw at the Renaissance Faire -- they take the precision and attention to detail and facts and authenticity that is hallmark of Trekkies, and convert it to the liberating role-play of dominatrixes -- and yes, there is plenty of leather and whips. And rapiers, ale, bodices, capes, and bosoms. Renaissance Pleasure Faire, indeed.

* * *

Over Memorial Day weekend, T and A (hehehe, I just said T&A...) and I (T&A&I???) went north to Grover Beach to hang out with her Grandmother. We did a number of things while there that weekend, but it would wear me out all over again to recount them here. In general, they were experiences you could imagine, or maybe have even had elsewhere (wine-tasting, beach-going, game-playing, movie-watching, etc.), but there was one that can only be done in one place, and I myself had never done it: we went up to the mansion of Depression Era newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst -- or, Hearst Castle.

Orson Welles' Citizen Kane was loosely based on the life of W.R. Hearst, and in the film his estate is called Xanadu. None of us could get Xanadu out of our minds as we toured Hearst Castle, and we all wanted to see Citizen Kane again, to see how the two compared. How very post-modern of us!

Anyway, I had heard much about this castle, and like so many things you see all the time in movies and on post cards, like the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls, I was skeptical that I would be moved by going. Still, the quite expensive tickets were being bought for us by T's generous Grandmother, so I didn't fight it. And boy was I singing a different tune afterward. I was astonished by this place. It is more beautiful than I can describe, which is a boring thing to write -- why write about it if it can't be described? It's just that I would hate for anyone to be ignorant like I was and let my inadequate descriptions of the place stand in for actually seeing it.

I can't imagine what it must be like to be as wealthy as W.R. Hearst. Sure, his mansion was an enormous undertaking that continually depleted his funds, and sprawled over many many years. Still, it's not as if he lifted one stone himself -- he only oversaw the project, and signed the checks, and watched his paradise taking shape around him. Ceilings and fireplaces have been brought in from churches and castles around the world; live oaks were literally transplanted, and an entire hill was altered by the planting of hundreds of pine trees. Hearst literally had the coast transformed to his liking. There is a fountain with actual sculptures from Tutenkhamen's tomb in Egypt, thousands of years old, in nearly perfect condition, peacefully overlooking the gardens and the ocean beyond, long ago giving up their confusion at finding themselves suddenly in central California. There's a gorgeous art-deco swimming pool with heating and electric lighting and phone jacks so you could have the butler bring you a phone and you could call New York or Paris while watching glamorous actresses and movers-and-shakers glide to and fro in the pool. There's an enormous movie theatre inside, with luxurious seats and blankets, tennis courts, an indoor pool that looks as if Augustus Caesar himself must have swum in it. If you didn't bring the right clothes for dinner at the lengthy banquet table, there was a store-room of new clothing in the basement and a tailor on staff who would alter them for you. Cary Grant observed that one quickly learns to pack lightly when making a trip to the Hearst Castle...

From my own personal experience, I have to say that the Grand Canyon looks about like it does on a post-card, or in a movie, and that being there doesn't really help your mind to comprehend how majestic and impossibly huge it is. But Hearst Castle can't be contained in a photograph, and to be there really sets the mind day-dreaming with thoughts of opulence and leisure and luxury and wealth that the mind can actually just begin to comprehend, at least enough to make you wish you were Cary Grant for a little while. "Huh-lo, darling!"

THE HOT, STEAMY, WET SUMMER of MOVIES

I started my Netflix subscription about a year ago now, and last summer was marked by a number of noir and heist films, including some gems such as D.O.A., Detour, The Hot Rock, The Killers, and Nine Queens. This summer, we're going for a hot-steamy-wet motif. Look for femme fatales, sultry thrillers, fire and smoke, swashbucklers on the high seas, boats, bodies of water, and bodies in water.

I've been remiss in reviewing movies, so what follows are some highlights from a few of the more recent movie marathons, including some that are working us up into the Hot, Steamy, Wet Summer of Movies. (There are no posters, and no star graphics, because it's getting late and I'm lazy and don't want to insert stuff.)

Bogart Bonanza

"A" gets credit for naming this marathon of Humphrey Bogart films.

From Fritz Lang's 1919 silent adventure film, "The Spiders," which is of the variety of movies the Indiana Jones trilogy pays homage to, we watch Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and The Rundown, with, yes, The Rock, and the Rudolph Valentino star vehicle, The Sheik, and it's "sheik"quel, Son of the Sheik, in which only Valentino is man enough to play his own father. From there, we got into a few Bogart adventure films with similar high-desert feels to the above films:

Treasure of the Sierra Madre (* * * * 1/2) -- an amazing film with a particularly wonderful Oscar-winning performance from Walter Huston, relation to the film's director, John Huston, who showed me with this film what all the fuss was about.

High Sierra (* *)

Sahara (* 1/2)

Sirocco (* * * *) -- This movie struck me as being surprisingly modern in a number of ways. It didn't make a big deal of its stars (Bogart, Lee J. Cobb), but rather introduced them rather off-handedly, in group scenes comprised of lower-profile actors. Its theme of political unreast in the east, and the resulting acts of terrorism, also make it profoundly topical. After a cafe is bombed, there is a long eerie silence while smoke drifts over the debris -- in a 40s movie, I would have expected a flourish of ominous music, or high-pitched screams. But there's just this silence...eventually pierced by a mournful wail from an injured woman. Bogart is cast in a very un-heroic role, and Cobb counters him with a surprisingly gentle French colonel. The film feels like a cross between Casablanca and The Third Man, between Bogart's "I stick my neck out for no one" attitude and the subtle love triangle that develops between him, the wrong woman, and an officer interested in doing the right thing. Along with a great supporting role from Zero Mostel, the film boasts a number of quiet little gestures, such as when a nervous man strikes a match as though to light a cigarette, but somewhere in the middle of his excited dialogue he waves the match out, unused. I was pleasantly surprised by this film, which I'd never heard of before...

In A Lonely Place (* * *) -- This one was more popular with T & A than Sirocco was, but I didn't enjoy it quite as much. It was decent, though. "I bet Curtis Hanson watched this film before making L.A. Confidential!" Yup, he probably did, and he gives a good post-film talk about the old Los Angeles and Hollywood it portrays.

Dark Passage (* * *) -- Good on-location filming in San Francisco, but this is a strange movie because a third or more of it is spent from Bogart's point of view, never giving us a glimpse of his face. This irked studio execs because they were hoping Bogart's face would sell the movie. I'm not partial to Bogey's face, but what irked me is the stiffness of the 1st person P.O.V. conceit...the camera is forced to move much more sluggishly than the human head, and it just isn't convincing at such length...it wouldn't be even today, not even with a hand-held digital camera, I think. It's just a tough thing to make a go of.

To Have and Have Not (* * * 1/2) -- The second Bogart-Bacall combination, movig us toward our Femme Fatale Movie Marathon. This one also feels like Casablanca, but this time around with the famous "You know how to whistle, don't you?" scene, which director Howard Hawks apparently wrote just to give new-comer Bacall a screen test to sell the studio. Needless to say, they were sold.

Femme Fatale

To Die For (* * * 1/2)

Mildred Pierce (* * * *)

Gilda (* *)

Simone (* *)

Diabolique (* * * * 1/2) -- H.G. Clouzot's labyrinthine thriller masterpiece about a wife and a mistress who conspire to murder their abusive shared lover. But who's deceiving whom? This is a great French thriller. It's amazing how tense a movie can feel when the only music score is during the opening and closing credits...We Americans should try it sometime.

Wild Things (* * * *) -- I can't recommend this to females (T left the room during To Die For, and I think this one would have made her feel even more awkward, but to my straight male readership it comes highly recommended. It's essentially a porno movie, but there's actually a plot...a pretty good twisty and windy one, too, though admittedly toward the end you get a little tired of being jerked around. Two surprise endings would have been plenty. This movie is not exactly good -- its portrayal of highschoolers seems to be written by someone too old to remember what it was like to be in highschool -- the booing and catcalling and hissing and raucous clapping in an auditorium-sized classroom (which looks a bit too much like college, actually) comes across as phony. Some of the dialogue is corny, and sounds like the quintessential cue for heavy-bass porn music on the soundtrack -- which the incomparable George Clinton provides for us. The presence of Kevin Bacon (Tremors, The Hollow Man) doesn't help to lift the film out of its schlock status -- but, taken as a piece of pot-boiling pulp, the film succeeds tremendously. Kevin Bacon's female sidekick on the sex crimes squad is a good character, and if her I.Q. had been just three points higher, she would have rivaled Fargo's Francis McDormand character.

Niagara (* * *) -- Fortuitously, I just happened to have this movie, starring sultry Norma Jean, just in time for Marilyn Monroe's birthday (June 1st, according to the e-mail I got from The Erotic Museum in Hollywood). Marilyn and her lover's plot to toss her husband (Joseph Cotten) off the falls is a washout...

The Wet, Hot, Endless Summer

Wet, Hot American Summer (* * * *) -- The following will sound like a whole-hearted "recommend," but honestly I can't say I'd tell anyone to see it (except R, who I think would appreciate it on the level I did)! This movie was the most unhinged thing I have ever seen. I found it hysterical, but it's easy to see how this brand of humor would not be for everyone...It's often tangential, referential, and absolutely absurd. The performances, from Michael Showalter, Paul Rudd, Janeane Garoffolo and David Hyde Pierce, are great, and this movie breaks all the rules. Earlier, I watched National Lampoon's Van Wilder, which was very mildly entertaining. This film, not even a National Lampoon product, is far closer in spirit to Caddy Shack and Animal House than poor Van Wilder was. I just don't know what to say about this movie. It has to be seen to be believed. Then again, I can't really tell you to see it -- I suspect it's one of those things you'll either hate, or...be in total awe of.

Step Into Liquid (* *) -- Endless Summer director Bruce Brown's kid, Dana, does a lukewarm modern documentary about surfing. There's some great surfing from Kelly Slater, Taj Burrow (my new hero), and the Irish Malloy brothers. Also, there's a hysterical couple of portions about fresh-water surfers in Wisconsin (a wave is a wave is a wave, apparently), and perhaps my favorite segment was on a group of surfers who ride in the wake of ocean liners in the ocean off Galveston, Texas -- middle aged surfer dudes explaining what they do with a friendly Texan drawl is about the most charming and laughable thing you could imagine. Still, Dana's film lacks the narrative cohesion of his dad's, the music is all unrelated in an attempt to sound more modern, and his narration is no where near as side-splittingly sarcastic as Bruce Brown, who is the Groucho Marx of the surf culture.

Endless Summer Revisited (* * *) -- "Revisit" is an apt term here, because I was essentially trying to revist the joy I felt a little under a year ago when I plopped in the original Endless Summer, not knowing what to expect. Apparently there is an Endless Summer II, which we saw clips of in Revisited (Revisited is a collection of unseen footage from I and II, and previous shorter surf movies Bruce Brown did, as well as interviews and reminiscences from Brown and the original crew of surfers), and it looks decent, so I'll give it a try nearer the end of summer, in August or so. I strongly recommend Endless Summer, the original...to anyone. With no hesitation.

Knife in the Water (* * * *) -- Roman Polanski's feature film debut, in Polish with English subtitles. A cast of three people, confined on a small yacht, as tension mounts between them...It's a good thriller with nice black-and-white cinematography and a cool bebop jazz score, which heightens the tension the same way the zither score does for The Third Man -- by contrasting the bleak images and taught pace with surprisingly playful, and by turns mocking, interludes. Reminds me of the pair of old black-and-white Kubrick film noirs in last year's Noir Marathon.

* * *

And that brings us to the present. Coming up are some swashbucklers, and then we'll dry out and cool off with some British humor, provided by the likes of Alec Guiness, John Cleese, and Peter Sellers and crew. After that, who knows? As always, I'm taking suggestions, requests, and recommendations...Anything that is somehow hot, steamy, or wet.

I apologize for errors in this post...I'm sure there are many, but if you think I'm going to sit here while I run a spell-checker on this giant thing, you've got another think coming. I'm certainly not about to re-read it for grammatical errors or obvious typographical blunders. They've certainly happened before in shorter posts on this blog, so I trust you will manage to work out what it is I meant to say. In the future, I'll try to polish these, and also keep them shorter. Now that I have all of the above off of my chest, I'll be less intimidated about approaching the blog, so posts should become more routine again. But don't hold me to it!

The other night, R asked me if I was ever going to blog again. This one's for you, R. Hopefully it's long enough that by the time you finish reading it, I will have blogged again!

As my brother says, inexplicably: "Peace out, Craig."

Clogged Blog

2004-05-27T14:12:00.000-07:00

So, I haven't been posting much lately, and I wanted to appologize to my faithful readership for the lack of scintillating verbiage from yours truly. I really don't know how you're getting along without it...I picture you, dear readers, whiling away your empty hours by scrubbing grout, alphabetizing the medicine cabinet, rolling pennies, or snipping away stray hairs off your body (it's about time!). I really shudder to think of the alternatives you are finding.

You may be wondering why the blogging has slowed to a crawl...Has an unfortunate machinery accident bereft me of my opposable thumbs? Am I lost on the 10 and 405 freeway interchange, circling and doubling back endlessly, never to be heard from again? Has the crushing defeat of not being mentioned at the USC Webfest finally sunk in and sent me spiraling into an alcoholic depression? No, no, and not too much.

In fact, there are a number of things I've been meaning to blog about. I've watched several mighty fine movies (Sirocco, Mildred Pierce, Shrek 2), and also want to share my mixed feelings about a Renaissance Faire I went to recently, as well as describe the quixotic experience of being a hapless post-graduate in limbo.

It is mainly the latter, I think, that has kept me from blogging...Blogging unfortunately feels a little frivolous, and I begin to feel guilty at not pulling more job options out of thin air to apply to. I compromise with my conscience by doing neither. However, the job prospects are beginning to look up ever so slightly, and I have faith that before too long, my guilty conscience will let up on me just enough that I can treakle out a few more blog entries...So do keep checking back, dear readers, and I promise that soon I will ransom you from your grout-cleaning-frenzy. (No one, by the way, notices the grout.)

For the holiday weekend, I'll be in Grover Beach. If you need me for something important, you know who to call...FOX TUTH. (Area code: 213)

HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY!

Carnival on Hoover Street

2004-05-21T13:55:00.000-07:00

On my way to grab a slice of pepperoni pizza for lunch today, I saw an entire carnival spread out over a block of Hoover Street. It was right out in the middle of the street: a giant upright hoop of a roller-coaster with flags blowing in the wind, lots of brightly colored tends, a track with roller-cars lined up on it, shooting galleries, everything. Hoover was closed there, and traffic was getting thick at the corner because people were having to make right hand turns down 30th Street instead of going straight. Big posters on the road barricades said, "Special Friday! Rides only 25 cents!" [Hey, has anyone else noticed that keyboards no longer contain a cents sign? That's very disturbing -- anyway, these posters had the cents sign on them, but I can't reproduce this for you now, because the modern world apprently no longer recognizes monetary denominations under $1.00.]

The thing of it is, no one was riding the rides for 25 cents. No one was even standing at the rides, ready to operate them, if someone did ride one. It appeared to be utterly deserted, this guady carnival plopped down on Hoover Street, diverting traffic down 30th. Add to that the fact that L.A.'s "June Gloom" seems to have hit early, and the skies above are a dullish gray and there's a not-entirely-friendly cool breeze in the air, and this carnival looked spookily out of place.

Not at all the circus I was hoping to run away with.

Las Vegas, Baby!

2004-05-10T16:13:00.000-07:00

Okay, so pictures are worth a thousand words. So, instead of writing 63,000 words about my weekend in Vegas, I offer instead a link to an album of 63 Vegas photos, culled from the digital archives of T and myself. Click the slide-show option, or just browse through the thumbnails (clicking on the thumbnail will enlarge the picture for you -- right-clicking on the photo in your browser will allow you to select "save photo..." if you so desire). Enjoy!

The "Viva Las Vegas!" Photo Album

Here's Lookin' At You, Kid.

2004-05-07T14:26:00.000-07:00

Okay, I had to post this link, given that the theme of my blog borrows so heavily from Rick's Cafe, of Casablanca fame.

Real "Rick's Cafe" opens in Casablanca.

Suspicious

2004-05-07T14:02:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I'm walking home and a middle-aged man in casual clothes -- shorts, a nice button-down shirt -- asks me, "Is there a bookstore in the University Village?"

No, I say, but if he keeps walking up this street onto campus there is a bookstore.

"Hmm. Do they have a good selection of, you know, just regular books? Or is it all text books?"

I say they have a pretty good selection -- what are you looking for?

"Well, a book on welding. I was actually hoping for a Barnes & Noble or something like that, but there's nothing like that in this area?"

No, I say, regretfully. He thanks me, and continues on his way, perhaps to try the bookstore. I continue on my way home.

And then I think...welding?!

It is SO Hot...

2004-05-03T00:37:00.000-07:00

How hot is it?

It is so hot that it's midnight and the chocolate cookies in the pantry are melted.

Accounting For My Time

2004-05-02T23:10:00.000-07:00

What I've done today:
_________________

Woke up. (That's important.)

Showered. (Also a biggie.)

Did Lunch. (Carl's, Jr.)

Laundry. And lots of it.

Applied luggage stickers to an old suitcase I found put out to pasture last summer, and now it's a very attractive and unique art-piece.

Had dinner. (Two hot dogs, three cookies, and a coke at IKEA for under five bucks.)

Watched The Man With The Movie Camera. If I could suggest readings to compliment silent films, like wine for pasta, I would say Italo Calvino's Marco Valdo is the way to go with The Man With The Movie Camera. (How's that for a film review?)

Blogged.

How Terrific is My Day?

2004-05-02T14:57:00.000-07:00

So I put on a pair of shorts this morning, and reach into the pocket and feel a wad of cash! (Is there anything more unmistakable than the feeling of money?) I figure it must be two or three dollars-worth of change from a larger bill I passed across a counter some time ago. I pull it out...

Two twenties and a ten!

Oh, and a quarter.

That was the easiest $50.25 I ever made!

mmmmkay...

2004-04-29T18:50:00.000-07:00

I'm going to have to remind myself how to edit my guestbook. Some of this garbage has to go...

Beb-beh-dee, beh-buh-beh, b-beh--THAT'S ALL FOLKS!

2004-04-29T18:46:00.000-07:00

(lay off, it's diff-ah, d-deh, dibbadee, eh--HARD to write the way Porky Pig talks!)

Yes, we have no more USC classes. Ever.

:-)

...

2004-04-27T23:26:00.000-07:00

2...

Countdown to Emancipation...

2004-04-26T23:22:00.000-07:00

1 class down; 3 to go.

2004-04-25T21:19:00.000-07:00

I promised a continuation of the Vegas story on Sunday...Well, I wanted to garnish it with some pictures, and I want to first raid T's digital cam for some that weren't on my digital cam...so, it'll be a bit longer. But for those among you who may be making a scheduled stop here, I wanted to say hi, I'm back, it was great, and a travelogue is forthcoming.

Viva Las Vegas

2004-04-23T10:00:00.000-07:00

They looked inconspicuous enough at the Spaghetti Factory, the young man and the young woman. The wait staff had dismissed them as a couple of college kids; the management hadn't even noticed them.

But they were B&T, and they were old hands.

The Spaghetti Factory was running a promo: buy $100 worth of gift certificates to their restaurant and walk away with two free nights in a hotel anyplace you could think of.

So B&T met eachother half way. They each put $50 into the pot--and stirred. They bought the gift certificates, but what the Spaghetti Factory didn't realize is that they had been taken for saps: B&T themselves intended to use the $100-worth of certificates...All they had done was prepaid for meals they knew they would have eventually anyway.

Then they booked the rooms: Vegas, the Fairfield Inn Mariot, 1.2 miles from Caesar's Palace.

Vegas was going to have to play their cards a little smarter than the Spaghetti Factory had, in order to survive.

Who would win? Tune in on Sunday...

Awwwwwww

2004-04-21T00:30:00.000-07:00

Look everyone, this site got its first spam! Click on the "read guestbook" link...Yeah, see that? Cleverly worded to sound like someone actually gave a hoot, and everything. At first I was going to delete it, and then I thought -- "Hey, that's really something. Some poor guy trying to increase hits on "TheSelection" actually picked my bloggy to try and drum up traffic!" Well, my sincerest apologies, Some Poor Guy: I went to your site just to be sure you weren't a real person, and I can't even tell what you're trying to push, so I won't be back ever, ever again.

(Can you tell that my brain is somewhat overcooked lately?)

Happy Easter

2004-04-11T23:55:00.000-07:00

The "Spring" Mix
(an oddly moody entry into the 4 Seasons CD Cycle)

1.) Lullaby of the Spring - Donovan [3:22]
2.) Spring Is Here - Nina Simone [4:21]
3.) Spring Song - Mendelssohn [2:46]
4.) Nature Boy - Bobby Darin [2:30]
5.) Time of the Season - The Zombies [3:34]
6.) Mr. Farmer - The Seeds [2:51]
7.) Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There is a Season) - The Byrds [3:57]
8.) There Is a Mountain - Donovan [2:35]
9.) Pigs, Sheeps and Wolves - Paul Simon [3:58]
10.) Sheep Go To Heaven - Cake [4:44]
11.) Blackbird - The Beatles [2:18]
12.) Mayfair - Nick Drake [2:33]
13.) Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most - Ella Fitzgerald [6:16]
14.) A-Tisket, A-Tasket - Ella Fitzgerald [2:40]
15.) Mary Had a Little Lamb - Stevie Ray Vaughn [2:47]
16.) Bad To Me - Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas [2:21]
17.) Rockin' Robin - Bobby Day [2:35]
18.) Boum! - Charles Trenet [2:35]
19.) Ol' MacDonald - Big Bad Voodoo Daddy [3:00]
20.) That's Life - Frank Sinatra [3:06]
21.) Spring (Concerto No. 1 in E Major) - Antonio Vivaldi [10:28]

SWM ISO F w/ Good Hands!

2004-04-07T17:49:00.000-07:00

Me: often hunching over shredder or Xerox machine, slouching at a computer, humped over a notepad, standing with poor posture, or curled up unnaturally with a book; knotted and sore; generous with vocal feedback. You: uncomplicated, (ambi?)dextrous, persistant, relentless--a habitual masseuse is helpful, but certification not required. Serious inquiries only, please.

Dear Gran,

2004-04-06T21:54:00.000-07:00

Since I never can remember your e-mail, I'm going to communicate with you though my blog!

I told you when you insisted on getting me that gift certificate to Borders that I would let you know what I bought with it.

Today, perhaps because I have been working like a dog trying to get a foot in the door somewhere in Hollywood, I was seized with the sudden urge to own Sunset Boulevard, starring Gloria Swanson and William Holden, so I rushed out to Borders and bought it.

(Because of the denegrated status of classic movies, it was a rather cheap DVD, and the card still has enough left on it to make another purchase down the line feel a little easier on my pockets, so I'll let you know what else comes of your gift.)

I first saw Sunset Boulevard in one of Dr. Drew Casper's film courses here at USC, up on the big screen the way it was meant to be seen. It was exciting, stylish, suspenseful, and about the movies -- I was in love. I remember that, after the screening, some eager brown-noser rushed down to the front row where Dr. Casper was seated, and said, "I bet Curtis Hanson watched this movie before he made L.A. Confidential!" It was around that time that I realized I hated cinema majors, after I had spent all this energy trying to be one. I would think that Curtis Hanson had watched Sunset Boulervard before L.A. Confidential was even a memo on some movie executive's desk.

The DVD of Sunset Boulevard rounds out my Los Angeles Box Set, which contains the following, in the following order:
Sunset Boulevard

Chinatown

Get Shorty

L.A. Story

L.A. Confidential (yes, directed by Curtis Hanson, who probably watched Sunset Boulevard first)

Murder By Death

2004-04-06T00:15:00.000-07:00

(1/2) -- I will be able to sleep better tonight if I can just bash this movie before turning in.

I'm ticked off at this movie for getting my hopes up for an evening pleasantly spent, and then -- well, murdering those hopes, yes, to death. It killed them 'till they died.

Unfunny as the above jokes are, Neil Simon's (yes, Neil Simon!) Murder By Death is unfunnier still. I'm not sure there was an original joke in the whole thing. Well, okay, there were some original ones, but they got lost in the general murk of things that we feel we've seen before.

The cast is amazing. Amazingly wasted on this material. One sees Peter Sellers in the opening credits, and one expects to laugh. A lot. What one doesn't expect is for him to be stuck playing the worst Asian caricature seen on the screen since Mickey Rooney squinted his eyes and bared his teeth in Breakfast At Tiffany's (which is otherwise a five star movie, in my book). The "humor" Neil Simon tries to milk out of these terribly stereotyped characters approaches the barbaric. Consider the following exchange:

SELLERS: We must reach a conclusion soon; is late, my eyes are tired
Peter FALK: I thought they looked like that all the time.
SOMEONE ELSE: Really! That's uncalled for!
FALK: You're right, you're right. Sorry, Squinty.

Har...har?

The material that isn't outright racist all sounds like we've heard it before...The Frenchman with a heavy accent (James Cromwell, incidentally, in a movie he'd probably prefer we all failed to recognize him in) says that he suspects a murder -- "I feel it in my buns." Bones, bones, get it? Bones, said in a French accent! Hey, wait, didn't Peter Sellers do that same thing in a much funnier detective spoof called The Pink Panther? Yes, he also said that someone had exploded a "bum" (bomb) in his room, and he goes about Germany asking every hotel owner around if they have (what can only be phonetically spelled as) a "hrrreum."

The idea of a blind butler (Sir Alec Guinness) may be slightly novel (though surrounded by these jokes it doesn't feel original), but the Mr. Magoo antics of Jamesir Bensonmum (oh yes, there are also gratuitously unfunny strange name jokes, as well) are not original in the least.

This closed-room murder mystery stuff was better treated in movies like Clue, which is probably the best (and only?) argument ever made for turning popular board games into movies. Clue is really funny, and features a similarly talented cast (though, admittedly, Clue's Tim Curry isn't quite on the same par with Murder's Sir Alec Guiness, but even the venerable Obi Wan Kenobi can make bad decisions).

Peter Falk's Bogart schtick, while well-done, isn't very funny -- I mean, Bogart doing Bogart is practically a spoof in itself. That's what all these hardboiled send-ups can never get. Don't they realize that to read Raymond Chandler is infinitely more rollicking than to hear some tired cheese-ball doing a voice-over narration that's supposed to be exaggerating the Chandler style? Exaggerating the Chandler style is like trying to caricature Jimmy Durante by giving him a big schnoz...You can't out-do the over-the-top -- Falk wins points for a good impersonation, but fails to make us crack a smile.

Similarly, David Niven and Maggie Smith bring their delightful urbanity and ice-cold sophistication to spoofs of Nick and Nora, the married sleuth couple from Hammett's Thin Man -- but, didn't Neil Simon realize the Thin Man was comedy allready? What's next? A spoof of Austin Powers?

The oddest casting of all is Truman Capote as the eccentric millionaire to blame for this uniting of unfunny spoofs under one roof. I don't know much about Capote except for his connection with the popularity of true crime novels, which is what makes his presence in this film vaguely interesting, but hardly excusable -- the man cannot act. Or maybe he can--is the real Truman Capote such a queen? I had him pegged as a little more manly than that...

Look at that, we've come full-circle: Truman Capote wrote Breakfast At Tiffany's.

That seems like a good place to stop. Stay far away from this movie: it's lethally awful.

2004-04-05T00:11:00.000-07:00

What I'm Into Right Now
The stories of Donald Barthelme, of "Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby" fame.

Stories by Haruki Marukami, who sort of gives Raymond Chandler's material the James Joyce treatment. Kinda.

Trying to find a job.

What I'm NOT Into That I SHOULD Be
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

Nabakov's Lolita

Trying to find an apartment.

My Own Private Water Party

2004-04-04T17:30:00.000-07:00

In Outerspace, No One Can Hear You Scream -- But Underwater, Your Scream Just Sounds Stupid

I remember in Freshman year T threw a "water party." Don't ask me why a water party, or what about it signified water (or what water signified). I remember that the backs of the invitations said, "Tracy Lea Hensley -- sadly, a Classics major," and we were all amused about why she should be "sadly" something which seemed so up to her own choosing. I also remember being at a loss for appropriate water party attire, so I stripped the label off of an Aquafina bottle and fixed it around my necktie with Scotch tape. I also remember how fun it was, and how we all said we should have another "water party" someday.

And what better occassion for another "Water Party" than coming off of the God Save McQueen movie marathon with The Blob and feeding into three water-logged cheesy horror movies: The Creature from the Black Lagoon, War-Gods of the Deep, and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms?

Unfortunately, T was in D.C. this weekend, and couldn't lend her professional hand in the throwing of this "water party," so I waded through on my own, and did pretty well, I think.

Creature From the Black Lagoon() -- The watching of this actually spanned over Friday night and Saturday morning, because I attempted it after being worn out from working noon-to-seven for the Comparative Literature conference, and I fell asleep in the middle (yeah, that's how scary this movie is). I was surprised that this monster, like all the rest of them, primarily wants a girl. It's odd to me that something so fish-looking could find the woman attractive enough to go to all the trouble of barricading the lagoon and mauling a few movie extras. That "Beauty and the Beast" angle was played up a little heavily, but while it was able to fuel half a dozen Universal Mummy movies, does it really make sense for a gill-man? Still, what a costume!

War-Gods of the Deep() -- Ordinarily I would never have ordered up this movie. I pretty much can't stand those Vincent Price "Hammer Horror" pieces of crap, but my interest here was in the elusive director, Jaques Cous---no, no, wait, not Cousteau, I'm taking this water thing a little far--Tourneur, Jaques Tourneur, who directed a film called The Cat People which is probably not even that good of a movie but has become a sort of obsession for me, a goal I can't seem to obtain, and this and one other movie is all that Netflix can offer me of his work. So, on the off-chance that Tourneur might have transcended the material to make a film that would evoke in me the misty sense of atmosphere and mystery created in me when reading about The Cat People in Manuel Puig's novel, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and because of its water theme it got lumped into this triad. But the movie is a complete disaster. In lieu of saying anything more reviewish, I'll direct you into the capable hands of this fella's review, because it hits the mark dead-on, and in a very eloquent way (I wish I wrote reviews like he did -- I'm thinking of watching movies now with a notepad handy, but I'm uncertain if this is a level of dork-dom I'm ready to descend into). I'll just point out that Vincent Price plays yet another horror movie villain whose pursuit for a beautiful woman is what's really driving the narrative (to the extent that there is a narrative at all in this movie, and that it is being driven by anything).

Beast From 20,000 Leagues(1/2) -- This is pretty schlocky stuff, with fairly crude Ray Harryhausen special effects, and a toothless script inspired by a Ray Bradbury short story called "The Foghorn." These two Rays couldn't breathe any life into this thing.

The more I think about it, the odder it is to me that we don't have more water movies. As the above movies liked to point out a whole bunch, if we are prepared to accept unknown lifeforms from outerspace, why not from the depths of our own oceans, which are similarly unexplored? Add to that the richi symbolism tied up with water--as the River Lethe, it is a syrum for forgetting/healing; as Holy Water, it is purification; as the River Styx, it is the passageway into the underworld. Our imaginations can run wild under the sea...why haven't they? (Probably simply because underwater movies are costly to make, what with massive tanks and submersible camera equipment and all that jazz -- but it's not like anyone in Hollywood has ever done anything to be frugal, anyway.)
_____________________________________________

Oh, and there's a music mix that came out of this "water party," too. It's called "Lorelei," which is the German folktale version of the Sirens, and is basically...well...a water mix.

Lorelei: oder, Wasser Musik
1.) "Descending" -- Bernard Herrmann (from Beneath the 12-Mile Reef) [0:50]
2.) "The Water" -- John Ottman (from The Usual Suspects) [2:35]
3.) 3 Nocturnes-"Sirens" -- Claude Debussy [12:19]
4.) "From Mermaids to Lost Boys" -- John Williams (from Hook) [4:24]
5.) Neptune, the Mystic -- Gustave Holst (from The Planets) [8:10]
6.) "Angel of Light" -- Rautavaara (?) [3:00]
7.) Finale: Purgatorio - Magnificat -- Franz Liszt (from Dante Symphony) [9:25]
8.) The Swan -- Saint-Saens [2:53]
9.) Dance of the Swans -- Peter Tchaikovsky (from Swan Lake) [1:35]
10.) "The Sea; The Lagoon" -- Bernard Herrmann (from Beneath the 12-Mile Reef) [ 4:40]
11.) "The Octopus; Homecoming" -- Bernard Herrmann (from Beneath the 12-Mile Reef) [4:58]
12.) End Title -- John Williams (from Jaws) [2:20]
13.) Vltava -- Smetana [12:55]
14.) Barcarolle -- Offenbach (as heard in Life Is Beautiful) [3:55]
15.) Claire de Lune -- Claude Debussy (as heard in Ocean's Eleven) [5:00]
_____________________________________________

The other nice thing about throwing a water party is that serving a thematically appropriate beverage is easy and inexpensive!

Memorandum from the Desk of Brandon Bernard, CEO St. Bernard Productions

2004-04-01T17:31:00.000-08:00

Re: Notes for a remake of The Blob

- Keep the opening title sequence (red concentric circles gyrating), but perhaps make the text "pop" a little more--even animated such that it seems to be disolved away, as in a vat of acid?

- Definitely keep that campy Herb Alpert-sounding theme song, "Beware of the Blob," but perhaps bring in a popular R&B artist to cover it for an extended version?

- Remember that this is as much a teen movie as a monster movie, equal parts Rebel Without a Cause and The Thing. (Should we explore a slippage between teens and monsters in the screenplay?). Do not sacrifice teenagers and their culture for B-movie thrills and chills.

- Instead of waking the town with air-raid sirens and fire alarms, which seems a bit old-fashioned, what if a posse of teenagers cranked up the woofers in their cars, rolled down the windows, and went joyriding through the neighborhood, revving their engines, rattling windows and tripping car alarms until every light in the sleepy small town is burning? At least some of these cars should be Humvees, and the thudding music should definitely be rap -- maybe even the aforementioned cover of "Beware of the Blob."

- Obviously I am recommending an updated setting, though I would also advise keeping a 50's nostalgic tone, but tempering it with irony and humor derived from acknowledgements to our contemporary culture. Such as:

- "Making out" seems to be integral to the plot of The Blob -- if it weren't for teens trying to get away to fool around, the arrival of the Blob's pod would not be spotted. The film should open, unappologetically, with sounds of making out in the darkness, and as we fade up, we see the typical 50's necking scene in a sporty car parked on a hillside someplace. But why not have the girl play the aggressor here, instill the McQueen machismo in the girl, and have the boy be suspicious of her intentions? In fact, that sport car should be the girl's.

- Definitely keep the backwards drag-racing scene -- it should be a sizeable jewel in the crown of action sequences.

- Must have a star-studded cast with (hopefully) Academy-Award winning actors, so that the trailer can over-dramatically say, "Academy Award winner X...Academy Award winner Y...Academy Award winner Z...in...THE BLOB!"

- Can the Blob have a more existential aspect? Perhaps it tries to consume people not for food, but as an attempt at understanding them through enveloping them. Is it so much eating as amalgamating? What we have here is not an aggressive alien, but a failure to communicate. I would appreciate an expanded focus on the particulars of the blob -- since modern film practices will result in a much shorter treatment of the 1958 Blob, we should have some more room to explore theories of where it came from, how it works, what it wants, etc.

- After the Blob consumes its first victim, I would very much like to see it resemble the shape of the victim, though obviously made of red goo. It can get more and more blobular as it consumes more and more people, for of course one entity that looks like three people, say, will not look very much like a person at all.

- No matter how many people the Blob consumes, the little dog should clearly be following the Blob where ever it goes because the Blob still emits something that is like the dog's master, which it consumed first. The dog, then, becomes a third integer in this wistful formula for understanding -- we are one type of creature that have our own way of knowing other; the blob is a second variety of creature, with an altogether Other way of knowing others; and the dog stands for yet a third variety of creature, with methods of understanding particular to its species, as well.

Rainy Day #6

2004-04-01T17:29:00.000-08:00

Man, my car looks great in the rain. Did anyone else know it's actually blue??

Okay, Seriously Now

2004-03-30T01:43:00.000-08:00

No joke -- the "Top Story" on my internet home page is, "Janet Bleeped for 'Jesus' on Letterman." There's really nothing more newsworthy going on in the world aside from our own unexorcized Puritanical ghosts?

We need to get over ourselves a little.

Good and Evil in the City of Angels

2004-03-28T17:41:00.000-08:00

Only in L.A. (okay, okay, and maybe in Chicago, too) can a conversation about basketball lead to a heated argument about the fundamentals of our existence and the nature of our souls.

I went into the Paperclip Thursday to have some color copies made of my CompLit poster. While I was in there, another customer, a black man, struck up a conversation with the guy behind the counter, a Phillipino. The topic was the Lakers.

The Phillipino said, "Aw man, I hate the Lakers!" (To say this in L.A. is sort of like going to a Republican convention and saying, "Hey, maybe it's not such a bad thing is gay people get married!")

The two men squabbled for a little while about whether or not Kobe Bryant was allowed to get away with murder on the court, on account of refs not calling his aggressive fouling, but blowing the whistle any time Kobe acted like he had been hurt in the least little way.

Eventually, the black man said something like, "You should know, man, you should know: you're from the Phillipines. You should know about power and agility and speed." (Are these things indiginous to the Phillipino people? I never knew!) "Man, you come from a great country--"

"The Phillipines is not a great country," the Phillipino broke in. "The people in the Phillipines are corrupt."

"No, no," the black man said. "The government is corrupt. The United States run the government, and that's corrupt, but the Phillipino people are gooood."

"They're all corrupt," the Phillipino said.

"No, now man, if you have something against the people, we're gonna have problems. I'm gonna have to beat on you. The people are beautiful."

They argued about this for a moment, until the black man had to insist, "Man, you know what your problem is? You believe that people can be bad. But there is no good and evil, man. The Bible, the Bible says that. Read the Bible -- it'll tell you there's no evil, only good--"

"No, I say only evil."

"Only evil?? What about children!"

"Children? They cannot make up their minds, they don't know--what, children? How big? This big? They do not know. Bigger? They are evil, man."

"No, no, there is only good."

This argument might have gone on indefinitely, except that the black man finally excused himself, saying he had to get going, but he promised to come back and defend his point. In the meantime, he advised the Phillipino to read the Bible, it would tell him there's no evil, man.

Left without an adversary, the Phillipino seized on me, handing me my color copies and explaining to me how ridiculous people who spoke to God were. ("I say, where is he? Take me to his house--you speak to God?--take me to his house, I want to talk to him too, you know?") I got an earful about how all-too-convenient it is for evil-doers (that is to say, everyone) to pass the buck on their deeds, saying God told them to do it -- "No, no, in your mind it told you to do it, God didn't tell you to do that!"

I was extremely late for work, and couldn't seem to get away. I just kept nodding and saying "yeah." I didn't want to disagree with him -- I wanted him to stop talking so I could go to work! Finally, a saintly customer finished her copying and approached the counter to settle her bill, and the call of money beckoned him away from his pulpit so that he could tend to his offeratory. I fled.

Whether our souls are only good, or only evil remains to be settled over another bout of photocopying, but one thing is certain: there is a God in L.A. His name -- Kobe Bryant.

I Coulda Been Somebody...I Coulda Been a Contender!

2004-03-26T22:34:00.000-08:00

Today I participated in USC's "Webfest," the third annual symposium for internet-based projects, which this year allowed blogs into its midst.

Actually, there weren't too many participants, which is probably why I had no trouble being accepted. I pretty much knew that my little bloggy was not award-winning material, so I didn't get too hopeful. Mostly, I enjoyed simply being able to participate in something web-related like this -- me...at a web symposium. Watch for flying pigs.

Still, I felt enough pride in my participation that I dressed to the nines in black/white/gray tones to match my new background (like it? it's more readble now, eh?), and was easily the best-dressed contestant, though I was let down to discover there was no category for best-dressed presenter. Alas...

Indeed I didn't win any awards in the blog categories, though I'm fairly certain I was the close fourth place, if only they had announced past third.

Unfortunately, I don't remember who beat me, or I would post the links here so you could see what you're missing out on by not being the friend or mother of that person, and therefore not getting to visit a superior site daily, rather than forcing yourself to choke down the 4th place material in this dump.

However, here is one guy's blog that beat me. His presentation was horrifying, and I'm a little crushed that the judges thought his story about a guy who tries to lift heavy weights and ends up with his forearms torn off and tendons danging out of his "elbow pits" (?) is better than, say, anything on my blog. But after his presentation, T observed that it's better not to have won anything at this symposium than to have won, and I'm inclined to agree -- having to share the podium with that guy would certainly have tarnished my character in some way...

WAH!

2004-03-22T20:54:00.000-08:00

I hate that "back to school" feeling I get when I return home from holiday visits to Albuquerque. It's not the same as the "back home" feeling I get when we make trips somewhere and then return home. That is a nice feeling. I go, "Ahh, home!" and it feels nice -- your bed is just right, the carpet is soft under your feet, things are where they ought to be, etc., etc. There is not the same feeling returning to school. No matter how orderly I try to leave my living quarters before leaving them, my life always feels like a mess when I get back to it. Returning to L.A. from Spring Break was no exception -- it was the epitome.

SKREEEEE-EEEEE-EEEEE!!!
What a day this has been. What a rare mood I'm in. Why it's almost like...my life is a grenade and someone just pulled the pin out.

Finishing up the poster for the Comparative Literature conference was not as easy as I anticipated. Actually, I was anticipating it not being as easy as I anticipated, but I failed to anticipate the extent to which it would suck.

T was gracious enough to let me on her computer last night while she unpacked and settled into her own "back to school" funk, so that I could apply text to the poster through Photoshop. I applied a little, and then got stumped, and sent an e-mail to the boss, and then desperately through myself headlong into a mass of reading I anticipated not getting done.

I took a break from reading and decided to set up my birthday gift from R, which was the new Mac operating system, called "Panther." (For my Windows-centric friends and family, that's like getting Windows2000 or whatever the latest one is.) Unfortunately, there was a flaw on the start-up disk, which meant that I basically cleared out the existing operating system but didn't quite get to the stage where we put in the new one, which left me with no operating system whatsoever. For those of you with as tenuous an understanding of computers as mine -- yes, that is as bad as it sounds.

I threw some things, punched some things, and then fell into bed, with much reading for the next day left undone, a poster undone, and a computer that wouldn't turn on. I knew my sleep would be fitful with dream-continuations of that evening's stress.

Today, I have worked steadfastly at fixing all of this stuff, but it has been slow going, the path potholed with delays, missed connections, error messages, interruptions, and other inpasses. It's one of those days where nothing works, everything crumbles. I am afraid to get in my car tonight, for example, because I'm almost sure that, given my luck, it won't start.

Or maybe it'll blow up.

And maybe that would be doing me a favor.

I owe R and T big time. T had to put up with me on her computer (I'm on it now, in fact, while she's in photo class, sorry T!) while she was trying to study for a test and also help me figure out Photoshop while I made desperate phone-calls back and forth to the boss, Kinko's (which is on my sh*t list in a big way), and another printing place which will do the job for a ninth of what Kinko's wants to charge us.

R has helped me back up my computer with the assistance of T's computer (that's why I'm on it now), and also talk me through what was potentially a catastrophe but has in fact proved a mere hiccup thanks to his help. I buckled down and bought "Panther," and am installing un-flawed discs as I type this, and so I will soon have a computer that is up and running again.

It's funny: Macs are pretty damn near indestructable, but in the past four months I've managed to place mine in mortal peril twice. That's talent of some kind, and deserves an award. Which leads me to:

I Want
I am sick and tired of this school stuff. It is such an inconvenience. I am tired of being owned, spoken for, preoccupied, predetermined. I have kicked into ultra-selfish mode, and here are the things I want bad:

lots and lots of money

good lovin'

booze

junk food

new threads

posh digs

an ocean of free time

lots and lots of personal space

accolades, adulation, and congratulations

Unresolution

2004-03-11T17:08:00.000-08:00

Today has been a nerve-jangling day (the world is in hyper-color, my stomach is numb, my tongue is too big, my head is spinning, pounding, throbbing, pulse drumming, etc.), and fraught with frustration after frustration.

I have cancelled work and ditched a class today for the express intent of achieving a long list of other Must Do's, but things started badly enough when my alarm didn't go off, so I didn't get the jump on the day that I intended to.

What finally did drag me out of bed was a phone-call from the boss on my cell-phone, and for a split instant I was worried that she had an intuition that I wasn't busting my hump like I said I was going to be, and she was calling to bawl me about about it. Not so: in fact, she wanted to discuss giving me the job of designing the poster for this year's graduate symposium. Fine -- how about I come in at noon, when the department chair is supposed to be there, and we'll discuss.

I jump in the shower knowing that my next step is to call Mike Greenfeld of Ant Farm, and just knowing that I'm about to do this makes my heartrate skyrocket and my head start to go dizzy.

Then, the phone number I have for them DOESN'T WORK!! I pace around the room some more. I call Dad's cell-phone, and he talks me down from my hysteria--"Have you called information?" Hm, no. I'll try that.

I try that. Jackpot. First of many possible numbers that I dial happens to be the right one! I expect the standard nightmare of trying to cold-call movie muckety-mucks, but the secretary is sweet as apple-pie: "Sure, just a moment, let me put you through." Another secretary, and she asks, "May I ask what this is regarding?" and my stomach lurches oh no, they'll never let this call through! but I say who I am and she says, "Okay, just a moment." What?! You're going to patch me through? I listen to some funky music on hold that sounds like it came from one of those old black-and-white cartoons where there are lots of mice playing instruments in an old house until a cat comes to chase them around. At last, the secretary gets back on the line to say he's not at his desk, and she doesn't know where he is, but she'll take down my number and have him call me back. So I give her the number, while my dizzy brain starts charting my progress for the day: from here to CompLit, from there to Lunch, from lunch to class...this is not going to work.

I hang around the house a little longer (thirty minutes), on pins and needles, and then when noon roles around I go to work, but the chair is not there yet (of course), so I don't know what to do. I end up making a snack run for the boss. Then L comes in, and I talk to her for a while, and that's nice, but I'm watching the clock, too, and also sort of hoping that the cell-phone in my pocket doesn't start vibrating just when it's terribly awkward for me to take a really critical call. I wait there for an hour. At 1:00, I think, okay, I'm going to lunch now because I have to be at class by 2 --

-- And that, of course, is when the chair arrives, so now I'm stuck. We have a conversation about the poster, and everything sounds fine except that they want it kind of soon (before the Monday after Spring Break) and I have to not only come up with the concept in that time, but execute it with enough time to get my hard-copy to Kinko's to have it made into an electronic copy that I can then e-mail to the boss so that she can get it to the printers so that the poster is done by Monday. This means, essentially, that I have to produce by yesterday.

By now it's twenty 'till 2, and I haven't eaten. So I run to Subway and cart my cheese sandwich into the classroom and we have a workshop, and the saving grace of the whole entire day was a short-short by L that was about poop. It simultaneously managed to be both more serious and more hysterical than you might imagine a story about poop could be. My sides were splitting and my eyes were watering with laughter -- that story was the one element of my day that was not somehow undermined by the end.

I still have not heard from Mike Greenfeld, which means I have to go through the phone-paralysis thing again tomorrow. I also did not turn in a form to the cinema department with my resume, in order to (hopefully) get an appointment with their counselor.

Really, what did I get done today?

And it's not over. I have to go to a reading (I want to go, so it's not that bad, it's just--). After that, I have this damned essay for my graduate seminar hanging over my head. Really, the professor has been so nice in altering this paper such that it shouldn't be different for me in any way, except that this time I have no idea of how I want to approach it. I'll be up all night with that dillema...

Butterfly in the Hole

2004-03-10T18:24:00.000-08:00

Le Trou (), Papillon (1/2)

If I ever had the time on my hands, and the anthropology at my fingertips, I would present a treatise on recurring story forms, like Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces. I find myself drawn to the "heist" movie, in all its incarnations from the flamboyantly funny to the more gritty: Pink Panther, The Score, Italian Job, To Catch a Thief, etc., etc. What makes this story line so compelling? I remember that one of Kurt Vonnegut's rules of story-telling was that every character must want something, "even if it's a glass of water." Well, if ever a character wanted anything, it's the debonair character of the cat burglar, whose very existence is defined by his (or her) wanting of something -- crown jewels, a stash of money, government secrets, a giant pink diamond, or whatever. This, however, is vastly more entertaining than the "glass of water" scenario, because now that protagonist must devise an elaborate and risky method of achieving the object d'arte.

The prison-escape movie works because it is the exact inverse of the heist movie. What the protagonist wants is something less tangible than what the jewel thief wants: Freedom. (Which is just another word for nothing left to lose.) And instead of devising an elaborate and risky scheme to break in to something, the would-be escapee plots to break out. This is no less fascinating to watch, though the reason I may still prefer the heist movie over the escape movie comes down to a matter of style: while the thief is likely to be played by Cary Grant or David Niven, swilling martinis and chatting to cool blondes, the prisoner is often played by Steve McQueen, and is eating cockroaches and suffering from solitary-confinement-induced hallucinations.

The reason I'm going to such pains to draw a parallel between the heist movie and the prison movie is that, while watching Le Trou (Jacques Becker, 1960), I was constantly reminded of Jules Dassin's enthralling heist movie, Rififi (). Both are French films, and both are in black and white, but the resemblence is less superficial than that: both films bravely devote a significant chunk of film to the process of breaking in/out. Rififi allows us to watch for twenty minutes of absolute breathless silence as a gang of thieves burrow through a roof into a jewelery store, trying not to trigger any alarms. Le Trou lets you watch prisoners hammer at solid concrete with a chunk of metal from one of their cots, until they have finally reduced the concrete to rocks. There are no cuts during a scene like this -- one might suspect that the camera would cut away to another aspect of the scene while artificially broken-down patches of concrete were used in a progressing order to convince us that the actors were using their brute strength to tunnel out. But here, there is no cinematic blink to allow for this kind of an illusion. You watch the actor pick up the bar; you watch him wrap a cloth around it to reduce the shock to his hands; and you watch him hammer away at the ground, slowly chipping it, taking large powerful blows. There's no music in the whole film except for the end titles -- all you hear is the heavy anvil clinking of the tunnelling process. This is truly amazing to watch.

T tells me that Andy Warhol one proposed a film that would last for six months, in which a building was built before your eyes, without the assistance of editing to make the film shorter (and therefore more palatable). Warhol apparently wanted to do this to break down the illusion of cinema. But while I shudder to imagine having to watch Warhol's film, I would gladly watch however many hours of film it would take to keep showing me every moment of these prisoners' escape -- even without the artifice of cinema, there's enough tension and drama: will they be strong enough to hammer away at concrete? Ingenious enough to keep the guards from finding them out? Is destruction (reducing a prison floor to rubble) inherently more entertaining than construction (watching a skyscraper raised)?

The counter-argument to wanting to watch every second of a prison escape is the film Papillon (Franklin Schaffner, 1973). This movie is hard to watch. It's rated PG, but in 1973 the PG rating apparently allowed for: various knife-wounds including throat-slitting, eye-slashing and knee-gouging; savage beatings; course language; the sexual groping of one prisoner by another (hands very clearly go down pants -- this is no PG movie I've ever seen!); and nudity (albeit, of the National Geographic variety). Harder to watch than all of this was the simple scene in which McQueen cuts up a cockroach with the edge of his spoon and stirs it into his meager soup for sustinence while in solitary confinement. (He also gets bitten by a bat, but this little detail didn't seem to go anywhere.)

This film is all over the place. I don't know how to elaborate on that statement -- to see it is really the only way to understand the many film styles cohabiting under one cinematic roof. One moment you are watching a historical period-piece, and the next you find yourself in a surrealist dream sequence full of subjective camera shots (oh yes, one subject camera angle included a guillotined head pitching at the view, and a spurt of ultra-red blood dousing the lense, making us at once hyper-aware of the presence of a camera and in awe of how the heck that shot was done). There's also an extended sequence with no dialogue and little-to-no image, as McQueen is kept in pitch-dark solitary confinement for two years (this would resemble the technique of Rififi and Le Trou except that its heavily scored, with beautiful music by Jerry Goldsmith that netted him an Academy Award nomination). This long section is bested by an even longer section in which McQueen lives peacefully with island natives. He cannot speak their language, and so again there's no dialogue, only lavish music. Here, the film feels a bit like Dances With Wolves in super-operatic mode. I was sure it was another dream sequence, but apparently not.

The acting is great. In my opinion, McQueen was brave to match talents with Dustin Hoffman, and to not shy away from carrying more than half of the movie on his shoulders. When both actors are playing much-aged versions of their characters, for example, it seemed to me that Hoffman was more comfortable and natural in his role, perfectly believable as an old man, while McQueen seemed to be doing a charicature of a hobbled, whistling old guy (the make-up does most of the convincing, and is quite persuasive as a matter of fact). Still, McQueen seems to be consistantly giving his all, and never seems intimidated to have more riding on his performance. I don't mean that McQueen is a bad actor at all -- I just mean that Hoffman is like America's answer to Laurence Olivier, and McQueen is a very professional action-hero/tough-guy. But he holds out admirably here, and his pain and torture is utterly convincing, to the point that the film is hardly watchable. Hoffman is a notorious Method actor, but I suspect it was McQueen who was actually eating real roaches.

The pleasure of this movie is that there is motivation behind all aspects of the film-making. For example, a slow-motion bit of film here is not done for music-video effect, or to enhance stylistic doves fluttering to the edges of the frame like some kind of John Woo movie. The reason the film went into slo-mo is because McQueen had been shot with tranquilizer darts, and so his body and his perception of reality was sluggish, and the filmmakers are conveying that to us. There is no trick photography here, no punches pulled. The script (which Dalton Trumbo, among others, worked on) is every bit as smart as the filmmakers bringing it to life, and everyone begind the camera is as professional and competant as everyone in front of it. Such competency in movies, such awareness of form and meaning, is all but evaporated from the Hollywood scene today.

So why the mediocre rating from me? Is it possible to rate a movie down simply because it's difficult to watch? Well, I did. I knocked it down about a whole star for that. I took off an additional half-star because sometimes I was confused -- like, particularly during the long scene of McQueen living with the island natives. How did he get there? Immediately proceeding that scene was the above-mentioned slo-mo shot of him being tranquilized. He should have woken up in custody, but instead he had a beautiful topless wife, and lots of pearls. Like I said, this movie is all over the place.

2004-03-09T19:14:00.000-08:00

I've been having a lot of trouble lately with the word "read." I find that I'm constantly reading is as the present-tense of the verb. My mind refuses to let it be past-tense, for some reason, and so all the verbs after "read" strike me as in the wrong tense! There should be a different spelling for the past tense, I think. I red that book yesterday; today I will read another book.
____________________________________________
Also, last night while reading the subtitles for the French movie, Le Trou, I decided that the past tense of "to believe" is totally wrong. A guy said, "I believed you were my friend," and that sounded not right at all. It should be, "I belove you were my friend." Shouldn't it?

Starsky & Hutch (1/2)

2004-03-05T14:31:00.000-08:00

I saw this movie last night for free; it opens today. I have to say that as one who hated the TV show (actually, the more I think about it, CHiPs was way worse), and as one whose last free screening was The Big Bounce with Owen Wilson (), I was pretty skeptical that I would enjoy this at all. But I actually have to recommend it.

This movie is just about everything a movie like this should be. The LA Weekly dumped heavily on this movie (bottom of link), saying Stiller was "at his most shrilly hyperneurotic" and Wilson was "so laid-back he barely seems to have a pulse." But I couldn't disagree more. Well, okay, I see that Stiller was "hyperneurotic," but that's like criticizing a Woody Allen performance for being too full of hand gestures, or saying Bob Newhart is at his most stuttering. Wilson is far from catatonic, and exudes his usual charm here. Vince Vaughn seems to enjoy playing a smarmy, hot-headed villain, and Snoop Dogg works very well as a very cool Huggy Bear (if we have to accuse someone of not having a pulse, however, it seems Mr. Dogg would be the first to spring to mind).

This is by no means a good movie. It could have been: with a little more effort, it might have been for the buddy cop movie genre what Austin Powers: Man of Mystery () was to the 60's spy genre. Alas, Starsky & Hutch falls short of this dazzling perfection, but for what it is there are plenty of big laughs, pretty women, fast cars, and even a couple of movie spoofs: Stiller and Wilson are near dead-ringers for Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda from Easy Riders in one scene. The spoofs aren't allowed to run on too long, thankfully. Some of these movies can let a gag spin on indefinitely until it resembles one of the more recent Saturday Night Live sketches, which drearily winds on into tedium. But here, there is a bouncy feel to everything. Will Farrell, for example, is at his comic best as a convict with a dragon fetish, but the movie is smart enough to not dwell too long on even such a comic gem as Farrell. There's real energy and movement in this film, and that above all else might be its saving grace.

The one exception to this is a cameo appearance by the original Starsky and Hutch, who bring a restored Ford Camino to their movie-screen counterparts. This was a nice nod to the source, but it was allowed to carry on a little too long: there is a whole scene with them interacting, even a cheesy moment where Stiller asks, "Who are these guys?" and Wilson says, "I don't know, but I like them," or something like that -- this kind of cameo appearance doesn't work if its too aware of itself. (You wouldn't, for example, put up with Hitchcock wandering through a scene only to have Jimmy Stewart stop what he was doing and say, "Hey, wasn't that--?") This scene plays out like the original TV characters "passing on the torch" to Stiller and Wilson, and that's a little too sappy -- as if any one in the audience these days cherishes the old TV show too sentimentally. (If they do, this is not the movie for them, as it mostly skewers the very conventions the TV show fed on -- here, for example, Stiller lives under the shadow of his mother, who was the best cop on the force; a hysterical genre-busting gag [there's even a well-done scene of Stiller visiting the gravestone of his cop mother: there are Dirty Harry-style magnums chiseled into the gravestone, and Stiller has brought not only flowers but a glazed donut].)

This movie may not be remembered by generations to come. But we may be quoting it for a while. We may find ourselves dropping our voice really low and saying, "Do it. DOOO it!" Or, maybe not. Like the LA Weekly says, it may not be the best way to blow ten bucks, but if you happen to live anyplace other than LA, or can get cheaper movie tickets any other way, Starsky & Hutch is not a bad way to spend your evening.

Nightmare Visions

2004-03-02T22:56:00.000-08:00

I'm sure glad that February has come to an end, and that war movies are off the menu for a little while. I think such a strict diet of them was finally beginning to get to me.

Last night, I dreamt that the United States was taken over by some amalgamation of the Cold War Russians and the Pearl Harbor Japanese. (Asia Major, in general, I suppose.)

I was with a group of people my age -- I don't even know who they were now; I told T she was one of them, but I don't think she was; I don't recognize anyone from the dream -- on some kind of outing to the beach. We were wandering through an empty shack that was something like the under-construction houses I used to play in with Colin Osborne, and something like the Georgia O'Keefe Museum in Santa Fe, sans paintings and sans stucco, if that makes any sense at all. Probably not.

Anyway, I think this house-thing we were wandering through was located at the end of a pier in Santa Monica. Someone passed by a window that overlooked the Pacific ocean and gasped. "Oh my God," she said. We came to have a look, and my stomach lurched: facing the shore was a fleet of black warships, which we were somehow able to recognize as definitely Russian/Japanese!

We craned out necks toward the shore and saw that a fleet of U.S. warships was quickly sailing out to meet the enemy -- in fact, there was not so much as a quarter of a mile between them, and they were opening fire on eachother, giant cannons blazing and booming.

I suggested we had better get the hell out of this Georgia O'Keefe thing on the pier, before a stray shell blew it up and we found ourselves floating in the ocean to become P.O.W.'s or shark food or just plain old wet and uncomfortable.

So we ran for it. Outside, we felt even less safe. It was daylight, and we had a lot of pier to clear before we would be safe from what I suggested above. We ran and ran and ran, and finally we were off the pier and standing on dusty, weedy ground that -- again -- reminds me more of New Mexico than of Southern California. But that's how dreams are.

Dreams are also like this: I forget now exactly what happened next. Something, I guess. Somehow I ended up indoors again, looking for news about what had happened. I went to Fark.com, which is a pretty stupid place to go for news of invasion. Anyway, it was useless because all of the links were unreadable -- they were written in Japanese characters! Their invasion had been so successful that our own news clearing houses were being flooded with Russian/Japanese signals. I begin to panic, wondering what it would be like to live in a society whose ruling class I couldn't even understand.

Somehow I ended up home in Albuquerque, hugging my parents, who were a little ticked that I didn't check in earlier -- "We didn't know if you were still alive, or what." The neighborhood didn't look so good: things were burning in the street. The air was choked with billowing black smoke. But Mom and Dad were still working in the yard, like it mattered. Also, Mom was as knowledgeable about military strategy as Gen. Macarthur. Her words: "Naturally the American ships tried to fight them off, but they were simply overwhelmed." She may also have made some social point about the lack of people willing to fight war -- everyone was too cowardly, or somehow otherwise unmotivated, to take up arms and defend their country against invasion.

All of this was so sudden. No one knew there was a war brewing -- at least, I didn't. (The indecipherability of news sources in this dream seem particularly precient.) And there seemed to be no thought of resistance. The Japanese/Russians had conquered us, and that was that. We were going to have to deal.

I have thought while watching war movies this month that I really enjoy good war movies. But I think they also play on some unconscious and uncontrollable fear deep down inside me. In the back of my mind, I might constantly be unsettled to think that I wouldn't be brave enough to participate in war. How could I stand to be in a claustrophobic foxhole, armed but vulnerable, facing either death or disfigurement? What if someone gave orders to charge an enemy position, even though -- as in Gallipoli, as in Paths of Glory -- high-up politicians knew the chances of taking that position were impossible? What if we knew it full well, as the soldiers in Gallipoli and Paths of Glory do, that it was impossible, but still, when the commanding officer's hand fell to his side, we knew we'd have to pile out of our trench and make that futile zig-zag run? What if I was dangling by a parachute, helplessly, drifting toward carefully-aimed German machine-gun fire, as the paratroopers in The Longest Day had to?

I think it's wrong that our military is staffed with underclass minorities who are lured to join "of their own free will and patriotism" by promises of financial aid, education, job training and security -- while we privileged white folk get to have fun making the movies of their exploits. But I'm conflicted about a solution to that -- reinstating the Draft? I've heard that the Draft is undergoing a renaissance, that Bush is trying to reinstate it. It makes me even angrier to think I might be forced into military service in order to participate in a stupid and worthless war like Bush's wars. Like Vietnam (there was a subconscious reason, I think, that Vietnam movies were left off of my queue: the hand-to-hand guerilla combat in the steaming jungle, the napalm and shrapnel and bayonets and torture and disease-carrying insects is something I can hardly let myself think about). Deep down, I fear that if a draft was on, you would find me in Canada. (The talk also says that this time around, there will be no exceptions for college students in the Draft, that in fact reasons to absent yourself from it will be far fewer--will "conscientious objector" no longer be available, too?)

I remember being a small kid, playing at Granddad's house. He had a big box of Legos, and I built some kind of a red tank. I remember stretching rubber-bands around the wheels as treads, and being very proud of that touch. Later, Betty told Mom that I had built a tank, and she wondered if I was concerned about us going to war or something. (Come to think of it, I think she even asked if I was concerned about war with Russians.) At the time, and for years since, I thought it was an idiotic question for Betty to have asked -- can't a boy build a Lego tank without everyone wanting to put him into counseling? A part of boys likes destruction--the idea of the tank is particularly enticing: you can roll over things, blow them up, be shot at and not be in too much danger. We like the abstract notion of it, anyway.

But, maybe that little red tank and last night's dream are not too distantly related. Who knows?

Train movies, here I come!

Movies that go BOOM! in the night...

2004-03-02T22:09:00.000-08:00

Sorcerer (1/2) and Fail Safe (

Helmed by director William Friedkin (French Connection, Exorcist, etc.), Sorcerer proved a kind of odd experiment in suspense--it conjures up too much suspense, really. The premise is quite good: four down-and-out men are charged with the task of driving two trucks' worth of nitroglycerine through about 200 miles of rugged South American jungle terrain. The nitro hasn't been "turned over" regularly, as we're informed it should have been, so the volatile elements have all settled to the bottom of the crates, and the smallest jerk or bump could set them off. When you get a look at the old jeeps available to the drivers, coupled with washed-out jungle roads, you immediately see the challenge in doing this.

I will give this film the award for best use of nitroglycerine in a movie: sometimes nitro, like TNT, is given the most cursory of introductions into a plot and then left to stand as "the thing in the movie that could blow everyone up," but here it actually plays a character, it is introduced, explained, never forgotten. I liked that.

The problem is that the tension starts off at the highest level, and never wavers. There were a few extraordinary scenes: one involving a rope bridge about to give way. But the rope bridge is a good example: in ordinary movies, the prospect of crossing a rickety rope bridge is enough to inject instant tension, but was that enough for Sorcerer? No, in this film, we must endure the impossible task of a heavy truck trying to cross the rope bridge. As a further twist, of course, it's not just a truck, but a truck full of highly-volatile nitroglycerine -- we must not only worry about the truck not falling through the bridge, we must also hope it manages to miraculously cross the bridge without jarring its testy contents. Oh yeah: it's also raining torrentially. Also, none of these men trusts the other, so there is the additional tension of each man suspecting the other is trying to get him killed in order to raise his wages -- think Treasure of the Sierra Madre meets Speed.

And that's only the middle of the movie.

The needle never drops on the tension gauge from there, and eventually the suspense becomes white noise. The film degenerates into a gloomy, overly-sober, almost whiny tone. You begin to wonder, is this the only way these desperate men could come up with to make some money?

Apparently there was a French film, earlier, called The Wages of Fear. I've put it on my queue in hopes that it paces itself a little better, because essentially I liked the premise. I'll let you know.
______________________________
Fail Safe, directed by Sidney Lumet, is an incredibly interesting movie not so much for the things that happen in the film (which have a ring of familiarity to them for reasons which will become evident in a moment), but more for the things that were happening around the film's production at the time.

Henry Fonda, in his second of three U.S. president roles, is faced with the decision of what to do when a squadron of jets carrying a nuclear payload accidentally get a code to attack Moscow. Of course, communicating with the squadron is problematic, and fear on both sides of the other's intentions makes it hard to take any action one way or the other.

Is this sounding familiar?

It sounded awfully familiar to Stanley Kubrick, who was making Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb () for Paramount/Columbia pictures. Kubrick and Paramount sued. The similarities seem to be perfectly harmless: Lumet was adapting a book that had been published and done very well in the U.S., called Fail Safe, while Kubrick's material was being drawn from a U.K. bestseller called, Red Alert. The dispute was settled out of court: Paramount won control of Fail Safe's distribution. To appease Kubrick, they released Strangelove first, and later Fail Safe. In his commentary on the film, Lumet points to the order of the films' release as largely responsible for Fail Safe's poor box-office (and critical) reception. It's hard to disagree: coming to the work as a contemporary viewer who has seen the more famous Strangelove already, it's hard to take all the drama seriously. As with Sorcerer, the tension seems almost unbearably much, and we'd sort of like to hear someone talking about "bodily fluids." (Here, the war-hawk is played--ironically mirthlessly--by Walter Matthau, who was probably struck numb with envy when he found out someone was treating the same material comically.)

This is the first Lumet film I've seen. So far, he seems like an adept director, and it's impressive what he managed to pull off with so limited a budget, and with such resistance from the U.S. Military (he was forced to build war-room sets without the foggiest idea of what the real thing looked like, and the military was so reluctant to offer him stock footage that they even prevented Lumet from obtaining stock footage of jets that would have been commonly available in rent-houses -- the result is that he reuses one pitiful scene of a jet flying ad nauseum). Still, I have to say that I find Strangelove's treatment of the material more appropriate. The Cold War was a cynical time, and paranoia was rampant. Therefore, it seems that Fail Safe waxes a little too sentimental at times, trying to win us over with patriotic strains that find themselves hopelessly knotted up in the film itself. I prefer my Doomsday Scenarios cut with crisp ironic humor, like this beautiful line from Dr. Strangelove: "Gentleman! You can't fight in here; this is the War Room!"

2004-03-01T16:58:00.000-08:00

Saturday, while at the post office, I was staring intently at a glass door, because at a post office you don't have a lot of staring options. The door had post office hours printed in white letters, at about eye-level. Way below that, at about shin-level, were similar white letters which said, "No pets."

It really irritated me that this rule was posted so low. Who is it intended for? The pets?

Meet Ash Trimbul...

2004-02-29T22:51:00.000-08:00

...fact is only what you believe
And fact and fiction work as a team
It's almost always fiction in the end
That content begins to bend
When context is never the same

--"It's All Understood," Jack Johnson

I need help (lots of help) on a project to blur the line between reality and make-believe. I wrote a short story, "An Extra, Part I", which deals somewhat with the interplay between life and art. In it, I invented an action-hero named Ash Trimbul, who I then proceeded to push to the edges of the story to make room for a fruit-cart vendor. Somewhere in the text, I mentioned that Ash Trimbul is so likeable he has 236 buddies on Friendster.com. Then, I got to thinking, wouldn't it be cool if people who read the story searched for Ash on Friendster, and found him? So I invented him -- but currently he has only two friends, A and myself. Good friends, but we're pushing for more. So, if you don't have an account, get one, and add Ash -- his e-mail is ashtrimbul@hotmail.com (easy enough, right?) and he answers it, too. Get everyone you know to join Friendster and to add Ash -- they never ever have to log into Friendster again, but Ash is almost guaranteed to leave them a kind and debonair testamonial if they are gracious enough to add him to their buddy list on Friendster.

With friends like Ash, who needs...uh...other friends?
__________________________________________
P.S.: You can also add me, of course. Currently I have six friends on Friendster, including Ash. Yes, it's sad, but we won't dwell on that...

A Bridge Too Far 1/2

2004-02-29T21:51:00.000-08:00

I didn't do many things on Saturday. I slept in till noon; I took a long, lazy shower; I spent way too much time at the post-office trying to pick up a package, getting hungry and cranky and, in general, "postal." But perhaps the most enjoyable thing I did was curl up for 3 hours (easily a third of my waking day) and watch A Bridge Too Far, about a disastrous Allied attempt to, basically, end the war (with warring, of course).

The film is directed by Richard Attenborough and has what may be the most stunning all-star cast of any of the film casts I've itemized so far. Dig:

James Caan
Michael Caine
Laurence Olivier
Sean Connery
Elliott Gould
Gene Hackman (as a Pole!)
Anthony Hopkins (and no, he doesn't eat anyone!)
Ryan O'Neal (as a Brit? this was never clear to me)
Robert Redford (the cast is so huge, Redford never appears until the last 40 mins!)
Maximillian Schell
&
Denholm Elliott (the museum curator from the Indiana Jones trilogy, here a military meteorologist)

I'm not sure I have anything very salient to say about the movie. It's fiercely directed, and spot on in that regard.

The acting, of course, is top notch. The writing is spectacular: it's co-written by Cornelius Ryan, who wrote the book first, and also wrote the book from which The Longest Day was culled. Both movies convey a feeling of frustration about war, about valiant men caught up in a demeaning situation, best-laid plans wrecked, and good intentions met with bad luck.

In fact, I might easily refer you to my review for The Longest Day as a way of expressing how good A Bridge Too Far is -- I even remember finding a lack of words to describe The Longest Day. But I fear that if I let one review stand for both of them, my meaning will be misconstrued -- I do not mean that the films themselves are interchangeable; they each simply do great things, and do them in similar great ways.

Pressed to say something negative about Bridge (as I tried to say at least one critical thing about Day), I suppose I would say that in one or two of the battle-scenes, I was confused. The editing made me lose track of who was firing what at whom, such that a squirmish scene would end without me knowing whether it was a knot of Germans that had been blown to smithereens, or a knot of Allied troops. (Of course, one might argue that this was the point, that Attenborough was trying to give a subjective account of how confusing these exchanges could be -- and certainly, his Paratrooper POV shots confirm this tactic.)

I got an e-mail from Dad tonight, urgently relating that he had talked to his friend Mani and together they had recalled another great war film that he should have recommended to me back when I called upon his good taste for a comprehensive V-Day Marathon. This last-minute recommendation was A Bridge Too Far. I'm ever so glad they thought to mention it to me! I would have hated to miss out on this.

The Longest Day 1/2

2004-02-27T00:10:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure what to say about this movie except that it's great great great great. I only docked it half a star of a full five because the ending is somewhat arbitrary...but then, it sort of has to be, doesn't it? There's a part of me that won't be satisfied unless I know how all the characters end up--the cripled paratrooper, and so on: will the medic come back before his morphine dosage wares off and he becomes unbearably aware that his leg his held together, "from crotch to knee," with safety-pins? But the film (running 3 hours long already), is too sprawling to tidy up its entire cast of characters, or to tidy up the war itself: this is just the invasion of Normandy. So the ending is understandable, and forgiveable, but that doesn't make it any more satisfying.

Having John Wayne in the cast made me think the movie might be overly sentimental and cheesy -- it's not Wayne's fault, it's just that Wayne was frequently in John Ford movies, and Ford is often so "yay America!" that some of the most patriotic Americans blush and hope they'll be mistaken for Canadian or something. But this film didn't fall into that trap, which was a relief. If you doubt me, consider that both John Wayne and a Nazi have the line, "Sometimes I wonder whose side God is really on," which makes you wonder whose side the movie is on! Of course, the movie is not rooting for the Nazis, but it is at least trying to create a balanced picture of warfare. When Wayne asks the God question first, I sort of rolled my eyes: as if God picks sides! But when the German officer also acts as though God should be in his corner, then the global picture becomes clear: ah yes, these are all people who think they are fighting the good fight.

The cinematography in the battle sequences reflects this same objectivity in story-telling. So many times, the camera simply drifts at a distance, trailing up Omaha Beach, say, while troops scurry like ants and the beach suddenly disentegrates into powder and smoke and flame in random places, stitched by machine-gun fire. From the glimpses I have seen of Steven Spielberg's treatment of the same material, the camera becomes a participant in the invasion, nestled right down in the troops, with bullets buzzing by and explosions eclipsing the lense. Of course, this is the strength of Spielberg's take on it, and maybe it's a superior take (what I said once about graphically depicting the violence of war being a lazy Truth to depict still stands, but I am willing to allow that a subjective lense on war may have even more virtues than an objective lense).

I also appreciate that foreign soldiers are allowed to speak in their own tongues, unlike in Midway -- I also like that, unlike Midway and some of the other ra-ra-ra films of that ilk, The Longest Day doesn't give us a scrolling text promising that "this is the way it really was," or some statement like that that immediately puts us on the look-out for flaws.

This is taut, powerhouse stuff. While I fully appreciate the kind of testosterone ampage that can be got from films like Kelly's Heroes, each explosion and gunshot in The Longest Day is different: they are each felt. I found myself wincing a lot, hunching, taking on physical expressions of torture as I watched -- for example -- paratroopers drift into an encampment of Germans and be butchered before their feet could ever touch ground. Someone in the film used the phrase, "Like clay pigeons."

And, good lord, just look at the people in this movie:

Eddie Albert
Paul Anka
Richard Burton
Red Buttons
Sean Connery (in a bit role I completely missed)
Henry Fonda
Roddy McDowall
Sal Mineo
Robert Mitchum
George Segal (as "Commando #1 Up Cliff")
Rod Steiger
Robert Wagner
and John Wayne,
in a Darryl F. Zanuck production, with music by Maurice Jarre (which I should have known from the short-short-short-long [Morse code for "V," or victory] drum rolls that evoked both Laurence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago).

If you haven't seen this, you really ought to.

Rainy Day #5

2004-02-25T23:34:00.000-08:00

More than anything else, we have anticipated this rain. At work, we tracked it coming in online, big globs of green and blue and yellow as it darkened outside.

It ordered peoples' day, and gave meaning to our activities: "I've got to get to X before the rain comes"; "Before it starts raining, would you do Y?"

I got let off work an hour early because the boss found out I walk. She offered me a ride, but I explained that the walk to my house wasn't much further than the walk to the parking garage would be; thanks all the same. I explained that I had an umbrella, and things weren't that bad unless it had been raining for a while, in which case Los Angeles' ill-prepared streets begin to flood, and walking becomes an uncomfortable prospect. I told her that I remember trying to walk to the Carl's, Jr. on Figueroa on a rainy day, but that there was no way to cross the intersection without wading shin-deep in gutter water. The boss took a smoke-break then. When she came back upstairs, she said, "Go home." I looked outside -- it wasn't that rainy. But she said few though they were, the drops were heavy and fat: "Go home."

So I went.

The day has been exciting under the shadow of the storm. There's a sharp smell of rain outside, like gunpowder. I feel as though we've been battening down the hatches, boarding up the windows, making sure there's canned food in the storm shelter, like we're expecting a hurricane or something.

The air was electric with this faux sense of emergency. Of course it's not a hurricane, which is why we're not evacuating, though we listen to the radio as though any moment they will issue the orders, and storm sirens will fill the air. It's the knowledge that it's just rain that makes this all fun. Still, it's not just rain: "The heaviest rainstorm we've had in 20 years," the boss told me.

The hurricane feeling is so persistant that I purchase Key Largo on half.com, wishing it would get here right away so I could get home, lock the doors against the brewing storm, make a cup of hot cocoa, and watch it.

The rain has been pelting the windows now for 5 hours, going on 6. This is just the tail of it, according to the globs of yellow and green and blue. The body of it is spiraling in on itself, clenching like a fist that is driving down toward us, and will be punching us with rain and 30 mph winds until next week, apparently.

Middling Midway

2004-02-25T17:29:00.000-08:00

Midway opens with a solemn declaration that "this is the way it was." It's a little funny, then, that all of the Japanese characters in the film speak in unaccented English. One of them even says, "What's amatter?" Of course, no subtitles allowed me to work out while watching the movie (quickly becoming one of my favorite ways to sneak exercise into my lifestyle). But it seems like the Japanese characters could have spoken a little more formally, or perhaps the producers shouldn't have attached such a lofty mission-statement at the head of their movie -- something.

That same mission statement promises that "wherever possible," the story of Midway will be recounted with actual WWII footage. In reality, there's very little stock footage in the film. The opening title sequence of the bombing of Tokyo is, in fact, cobbled together with sepia footage, and there are a few repeated shots of a plane tail-spinning into the ocean, but otherwise the footage is new.

The narrative is not so clear-eyed as you might think -- it has sounded almost as if the filmmakers were going for a History Channel-style documentary, but instead there is quite a bit of subjectivity. Charlton Heston has a son who is in love with a "Jap" girl, a naturalized U.S. citizen, but nonetheless problematically Asian just six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Heston does the best he can to convince us he isn't a racist, right-winging, pro-gun nutjob by reciting the lines in the screenplay to this effect. But his modern persona is too inextricably tied to rather narrow politics that it's hard to take his character seriously. Ordinarily I would look to the other members of this love triangle to keep my interest, but the son and the Japanese-American girl are both very blandly portrayed by wooden actors, and so that entire subplot becomes irritating.

The dogfights are exciting, though not as good as those in Battle of Britain (), which are actually stunningly good (so is, incidentally, the acting: Michael Caine, Laurence Olivier, Trevor Howard, et al). The dogfights here are a little stagier -- you can feel the processed screen effects, and there is some overly-dramatic crimson-red blood to be splashed over cockpits and wings when pilots get hit, just before we cut to that tired piece of "actual footage," featuring a plane going down in flames.

Still, the storyline is interesting, and one is left with the impression of dozens of huge names attached to the project: Henry Fonda, James Coburn, Charlton Heston, Glenn Ford, Hal Holbrok, Toshiro Mifune, Robert Mitchum (wasted as a bed-ridden officer who has basically one scene, in which he recommends his own replacement), Robert Wagner (sounding just like No. 2!), and even Tom Selleck (though I never did spot him--perhaps another Tom Selleck?). Also, John Williams does the music -- it's nothing I come away humming, but Williams shows his standard professionalism about where and when music should be heard and when it shouldn't be, and the music -- if not some of the cheesy performances -- hit all the right emotional notes. The interracial romance scenes, for example, would play better in tableau, with only Williams' sensitive score to tell the story.

Midterm

2004-02-24T23:39:00.000-08:00

Professor Kincaid passed this gem out to his Monsters class today, and I just had to share it.
___________________________________________
CORE 101 Midterm Due Soon, Very

Part I: (43 points) Pick an issue central to the course, apply it to some specific situation, and analyze the cultural forces at work. Deconstruct them. How might we escape the "binary" trap here?

Part II: (32 points) Write the best question ever on something or other, connected to the course damn it, and answer it.

Part III: (14 points)

Part IV: (23 points) Tiptoe through the tulips.

Part V: (35 points) This is mandatory.

Part VI: (2 points) What is the point of cultural constructivist analysis? What can it hope to reveal? To accomplish?

Part VII: (Bonus points) Truth or Dare?

Part VIII: (12 points) Discuss the nature and purpose of exams within the educational institution. What purposes do they serve? Whose purposes do they serve?

Part a: (Extra Credit) How Do I Love You? Let Me Count the Ways
__________________________________________
(See? We're all really busy with hard work right now...)

New Feature: FICTION

2004-02-23T21:30:00.000-08:00

So far, I'm not real pleased with this new feature: the link to it on the right is butt-ugly because I couldn't get it to look like the other links ("Archives," et al). Also, when you go to it, it's just another blog, and there's one piddly story there, and the link to it doesn't even say the story's name ("The Usual") so it's kind of like a surprise.

I'm working on getting a second story up, but it's more involved because it's not simply text. R is helping me out. When I put aside another evening to completely waste by tinkering with my blog, I will see about titles (seems like a basic thing, really), and other refinements.

In the mean time, feel free to click on that butt-ugly link over to the right -- yeah, the one that says FICTION: Short Stories. Right...there...under Archives...there you go. You got it. Okay, I'll leave you alone now.

(Oh: wish me luck -- the story you're linking to is currently making its way by post to Chicago, where the fiction editor of a quirky little mag called Bridge will almost certainly decline. I'll be sure to post the rejection letter!)

The Things I've Mailed

2004-02-23T21:06:00.000-08:00

Permission for the bookstore to print my story, "Young & The Pirates," in the Occupational Therapy course reader;

R's combination b-day/Christmas present, the "FlashFlight;"

A thank-you note to T's mother for having me at her house a few weekends ago;

Dave Eggers' own book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, sent back to him with my comments inside. No: really;

W-2 form, blank, to Mom;

A 2-night getaway form for a promotion T and I got by buying some gift-certificates to the Spaghetti Factory;

A manuscript of "The Usual," a short story, to Bridge magazine for consideration (fingers crossed);

Lots and lots and lots of graduate student dossiers, as part of my job with Comparative Literature;

Netflix movies;

Car insurance payment.

The Name of the Fish

2004-02-23T17:04:00.000-08:00

Well, seeing as I've owned the poor guy for two weeks now and he's had to answer to "Fish," and seeing as the poll has accumulated 6 votes and 7 is the most I've ever gotten (and therefore I shouldn't be too hopeful of getting any more), I've decided to close the poll and name the fish.

The Results
You voted for:

Hooker: 17% (one vote)
Marlowe: 17% (one vote)
[Kind of a funny tie, don't you think? Talk about low-culture meets high-culture...]

Obi-Wanda: 33% (two votes)
Yojimbo: 33% (two votes)

Well, I guess I get to cast the deciding vote. I've decided the fish shall be called "Beta Male." Just kidding. Actually, I'm going to opt for Yojimbo.

But, R, there is an orange goldfish candle floating in the bowl to keep Yojimbo company, and I'll name that Obi-Wanda. How's that for a consolation prize? Well, here's the real kicker: since I recently bought some new bowl decorations, Obi-Wanda's coming out of the bowl so it doesn't get too crowded in there. (But don't worry, I'll hold onto Obi-Wanda!)

Thanks to everyone who voted! My personal thanks to whomever voted for Marlowe, for whatever reasons you did. You're cool.

What I Accomplished Today:

2004-02-23T01:45:00.000-08:00

1.) Laundry (big one)

2.) Buying a few "essentials" for the fish at Petco: water purifier, timed feeders (in case I leave for the weekend, which I might), and a little bowl decoration to keep him company.

3.) Feeding myself

4.) Building a gingerbread house.

5.) Reading the entirety of Marlowe's Edward II.

6.) Revising a short story written last semester and preparing it to be sent out: query letter, address labels, stamps, etc.

7.) E-mails: a.) to Mom (personal/family); b.) to B (play); and c.) to Aimee Bender (business/school).

8.) A blog entry.
______________________________________________
All in a day's work--though, at the expense of not having changed out of my pajamas. (It's all about priorities, baby)

Raise High the Roof-Beams, Bakers!

2004-02-22T21:09:00.000-08:00

Tonight, T made me build a gingerbread house with her.

Don't believe me? See for yourself: The House That T & B Built.

Rainy Day #4

2004-02-22T00:49:00.000-08:00

*Lunch at 2-for-1 Pizza

*Kelly's Heroes

*Haircut

*Silent auction

*Battle of Britain

*Edward the II, by Christopher Marlowe

Seems I'm Not the Only One...

2004-02-19T17:05:00.000-08:00

In January I complained of iPod-slinging zombiesiPod-slinging zombies.

My rant inspired disagreement from Ryan.

But it seems I'm not the only one who feels the way I do. The New York Times has the following blurb here. What does this prove? That since the New York Times is on my side, I'm right, of course.

I like it when...

2004-02-18T22:38:00.000-08:00

...my fish seems to be playing. Sometimes I walk into the room and catch him swimming around vigorously, diving down to the bottom of the bowl and then squiggling back up, his fins flapping and trailing like a midnight blue robe or cape. Now, maybe this is actually the fish trying to escape, or having an epileptic seisure or something -- but it sure looks like frisking around to me!

...I am eating Spaghetti-O's on my 80s E.T. T.V. tray just like the one I owned as a kid, only the one I had as a kid had Mr. T on it. I am sitting on my bed editing short stories, and the T.V. tray still works! I was afraid I would be too big for it, but it fits nicely. Spaghetti-O's and milk on a rainy night: mmm-mmm good! What am I, eight years old? Ho ho, not even!

Be Wary of Stories That Presume to Judge Other Stories

2004-02-18T17:52:00.000-08:00

#237 in Life's Little Deconstruction Book. Again, this relates to #190 and #110.

As much as I have loved the workshop experience, and craved feedback from readers, I now feel its strictures.

Of a story by Junot Diaz, someone in the workshop says, "I liked it, but I had the feeling while reading it that if someone had submitted this for a workshop, we wouldn't have liked it at all."

This is what I am up against: if I deviate from the norm at all -- if I have a first person narrator, as Diaz did in his story, that only emerges late in the story, the story is "bad." 17 lost souls like me are going to try and make the story conform to what they have been drilled counts as a short story: is there conflict? is there internal action and external action? is there a character arc? is that cliche? should you really introduce a major character at the end of the story?

"I think," says one workshopper, "that a good story is one in which the main character is the one who finds the solution. If an outside person solves his problems, that's not a story." What a narrow definition of "story," man.

Creative writing. HA! We are little drones like the story-making machine in Roald Dahl's story. If James Joyce submitted "Ulysses" to a workshop, we wouldn't like it. But once it's bound between the covers of a magazine or book, or if it's handed out by a professor, then it becomes legit, and only then will we expend the energy to try and figure out why it is genius, rather than to try and persuade the author that he should make it easier for us to see his genius. Why should we work, when you can work? (How I wish that I could spot genius without it being laid in front of me and called that!)

Maybe the story I'm handing in presumes to judge other stories, I don't know. It certainly lashes out against the rigors of so-called "dramatic structure," but in doing that I think it allows a shady space in which all kinds of stories can luxuriate...stories without endings, stories with last-minute characters, or no characters, no ark, no rising action, no external conflict, stories with main characters who get bailed out of their problems by their girlfriends. Hurrah for varied narratives, dammit!

Next week I go to have my story judged. Only, this time I don't care. I will listen patiently. Maybe I will even write something down if it sounds good. But mostly I turn it over them to struggle with or not. I am sure they only want to get done reading it so they can move on to their next task. But if someone cares to work with it, I've rolled up a message and stuck it in a bottle that is commonly called a story. I hope that someone gets my S.O.S. to the world.

Be wary of beginnings, middles, and ends! That way lies parochialism and termination of momentum, stagnation, deadening of emotion, closing of minds, and narrowing of worlds.

Rainy Day #3

2004-02-18T17:39:00.000-08:00

Cold! What does Los Angeles think this is, February still?

It's the autumn we never had:
leaves fall from trees
soggy student government campaign signs are staked in the parkway

a squirrel frantically paws the emerald grass like it has lost its contact lenses. I feel sorry for the squirrel and want to help, but I know that will frighten it away, and then it will have fuzzy vision, and that would be sad.

Doldrums

2004-02-17T23:20:00.000-08:00

It's 11:20 p.m. on a Tuesday night. I have a short story due Thursday. I began, optimisitcally, yesterday. It was a good start. I was enthusiastic, and I intended to finish writing it out tonight, saving tomorrow night for another write-through.

But now it is 11:20 -- did I mention it is 11:20? 11:22 now -- and I only have four pages, and no enthusiasm left.

I took the story with me to work (probably a bad idea, in retrospect), and suddenly I hate the story. It is vile and boring and senseless and a waste of paper/ink/time/thought.

So I'm sitting here, wasting time, beating myself up for not writing. These are not healthy conditions under which to write -- anything I produce now will be under duress. These are also not healthy circumstances under which to waste time -- anything I do for fun will come with the guilt of not being productive.

I reeeeaaaalllllllllyyyyyy don't like this feeling.

Fishin' Poll

2004-02-16T23:43:00.000-08:00

Okay, we've got to put it to a vote one last time.

To the right, under my mug, is my fish's mug. Under his mug is a new poll with names for you to choose from. These names are the results of voting, suggestions, and further brainstorming on my part.

Meet the candidates

Hooker -- D had been hiding the fish in his room for a couple months now, waiting to do a gift exchange. My gift for him is delinquent, so we have not done a formal exchange. D and T were constantly worrying because my gift was "time-sensitive" (they were afraid it would die before I could see it), and they developed code for referring to the fish without giving it away. This code was based on the subterfuge that D had gotten me a prostitute for Christmas. "Hooker" would be in honor of the fish's code-name.

Obi-Wanda -- Suggested by R, a rather amusing and natural combination of two options: Obi-Wan, and a fish called "Wanda."

Beta Male -- Personally, I think this is dreadfully mundane, and I only put it on as a feeble play off of the fish's type and the expression "alpha male." But someone voted for it. So...if that someone returns, and still likes it, s/he is welcome to revote for it.

Marlowe -- The name has significance to me -- Phillip Marlow is the P.I. in many of Raymond Chandler's stories, Marlow is the name of the narrator of Heart of Darkness, and I'm currently reading plays by Christopher Marlowe. Still...I didn't really expect anyone to actually cast their vote for it. Surely the name doesn't have tripple significance for anyone else...?

Boba Fett or Beta Fett -- Boba Fett is the cult-favorite bounty hunter in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. His armor is a blue-green theme (his father, Janga Fett's, armor is a bluer cast), his battle skills are formidable, and his personality is enimatic. "Beta Fett" is more lazy word-play.

Van Gogh Fish -- Part 1 in a series of 2 artist-themed fish-pun names. Van Gogh is one of my favorite artists; the fish is one of Van Gogh's favorite colors; if said with the proper diction, "Van Gogh Fish" is hysterical. (Hint: it requires a slight shrug of the shoulders.)

Pescasso -- Part 2 in the artist-themed series. Picasso is by far a less-favorite artist of mine than Van Gogh, but again, I find the punning amusing.

Yojimbo -- Meaning "body guard." (And therefore achieving much of the rogue-ish charm that Boba or Beta Fett offers.) Also, refers to an old Akira Kurosawa movie that received high marks from me as a great "rainy day" movie, and thus combines my love of cinema with the fish's Asian heritage (as A points out in the guest book entry [hey, thanks A! You're the first real guy--non-family--that has signed the guest book!]). So far, "Yojimbo" has led the polls -- will it emerge victorious from this final round?

2004-02-16T20:48:00.000-08:00

A sozcuper d'art, on ne tombe jamais que d'un catalogue a l'autre.

--Marcel Broadthaers

Two Writing Exercises, For Anyone Who's Interested

2004-02-16T20:37:00.000-08:00

1.) Push an assignment as close to the due-date as possible. Get freaked out. Shut down. Open a word-processing document intending to write the assignment, but just start writing down words, one after another, sprinkling in punctuation as desired -- don't hesitate, don't let your fingers pause, just type type type, try to let your fingers keep up with your synapses.

2.) Play a game with someone, in which you rattle off as many interesting adjectives as possible. Listen to your partner's contributions and let them inspire your next contributions. It will be slow-going at first, and then you won't be able to stop.

Everybody's doing it, man.

2004-02-16T16:24:00.000-08:00

I've turned another one of my friends to the dark side of blogging -- quite literally this time. T got herself a brand-spankin'-new blog called "Le Cabinet Noir," which has lovely double-meaning:

1.) a photographic dark room;

2.) a government ministry in France that opens private letters and reads them for potentially subversive material that might need to be reported to Napoleon. Herself, T will be opening her sealed thoughts and exposing them to the developing light of the internet at large!

You blog, girl.

Poor Einstein

2004-02-16T11:21:00.000-08:00

Everybody (including myself) loves that picture of him sticking his tongue out. We love it so much that we have reduced him to that image, an icon, really, of a grinning idiot, a parody of himself. It's so popular that I didn't even have trouble finding this link -- the first two images that popped up in a search for "Einstein" are of him poking his tongue out.

Poor, poor Albert Einstein.

Sometimes a Day Off is Just Another Sunday.

2004-02-16T11:12:00.000-08:00

Did you ever wake up, have a shower, and get dressed, only to wonder why you did that at all?

Did you ever think that it would have been just as good (even better) to have slept 'till 2 in the afternoon, get up, stay in your pajamas, stay dirty, eat crap, do something in the way of homework, and go back to bed?

I sure did.

Declaration of Independence

2004-02-14T20:07:00.000-08:00

On this, Valentine's Day, Saturday, February 14th, the Year of our Lord Two Thousand and Four, I, the undersigned, do hereby declare my independence from our culture's presumption that the proper valuation of my life is inextricably tied up with my relationship status.

That is to say, I have never been more excited than I am now about being...single.

The following are all principles by which I've pretty much lived my life up until now, anyway, but only recently have I become intensely aware of their validity, and consequently a wonderful peacefulness has settled over the land that is Brandon.

I notice that some people don't know what to do if they don't have a boyfriend or a girlfriend. Particularly in high school, I used to watch girls hop from boy to boy like a frog hops from lilypad to lilypad. Guys did it, too, of course. People still do it. Here at USC, the benefit of belonging to the Greek System is that you have dating options: through mixers and sports intramurals and the simple social prestige that comes with being Greek, sorority girls and fraternity boys enjoy a hyperactive romance life that no doubt resembles some of the more tawdry Spanish soap operas. The rest of us are "frozen out," left in a no-man's land of dating options -- if you're not Greek, what are you?

The very fact that I'm using terms such as "frozen out" is evidence of what I mean: our culture revolves around the concept of Romantic Love. "There's someone out there for everyone." "You're nobody 'till somebody loves you." "A million fish in the sea." "True love." "Love conquers all." These are a few concepts in a sort of ideological currency that exists, which is even stronger than the Euro.

Well I resent being told I'm nobody 'till somebody loves me. In fact, I'm not going to take that anymore.

Valentine's Day -- bah, humbug! What a useless holiday. Of course, like everything else, its commercial aspect has shot through the roof. This is a holiday that exists to keep florists and choclatiers in business, and to keep us distracted with the worry that we don't have a "significant other" by thrusting pink-and-purple cards in our face and blaring jewelry commercials in our ears ("She'll love you more if you buy her expensive diamonds!" these commercials tell us -- can't-buy-me-love, indeed!).

Have you ever noticed how uncomfortable people get when they say, "Are you dating anyone?" and you answer no? They act as though they want to console you on the loss of your great aunt. (In fact, it's sort of odd that people do ask if you've got a boyfriend or girlfriend; they don't ask if you recently acquired any interesting pieces of furniture, or any new pets ["Why yes, in fact, I recently got a new fish...yeah, it's been going on for about three days or so...I think I have a picture in my wallet here..."].)

Why is our relationship status the sum of our worth?

Did you ever notice that singles clubs and singles bars are not to proliferate singularity, but to try and cure you of it? Where do you go to look for a "significant other?" A singles bar! Why isn't there a bar where people go to clink glasses over being single, to pat one another on the back and cluck their tongues at those couples who bustle by the window--"Tsk, such a shame. How about another round?"

We are afraid of being "alone" in this culture. Oddly enough, "alone" has become abstracted to mean, "single." We are afraid to be "single."

That girl I've mentioned before -- the anti-Beatles one -- once said that the ultimate challenge for her would be to go to a fancy restaurant -- the kind where you're expected to fully occupy a table for two, to hold hands by candlelight and listen to a violinist serenading you -- and eat there by herself. I thought this was strange for her to want, above all other abilities: surely invisibility or flying would be better? She used the example of going to the movies, and how weird it felt to go alone, how she was "afraid" of going to the movies alone. (I'm paraphrasing liberally for my own purposes, of course.)

Now I sort of know what she means. The funny part of it all is that I'm no longer with anti-Beatles girl. I don't know if she has achieved her goal, but I'm at least perfectly comfortable sitting in a movie theatre by myself (most recently, I saw Big Fish all by my lonesome, and enjoyed the experience). Whether or not I gained this ability through no longer getting to be with anti-Beatles girl is not something I'm prepared to take a firm stand on. Still, it's a neat little twist.

Another high school story (this one with even less point than the above): my school used to run a program where you could sent "candy-grams" to people on Valentine's Day, either as a friendly expression or as one of those covert secret-admirer operations. I never (or at least seldom) got a candy-gram. I think what disappointed me most about this is that everyone's candy always looked so good. So, one year, I sent myself candy-grams, making up sender names like, "Your better half," or "To: your Id, From: your Ego." Man, that candy was so good!

I guess it would be easy to picture me sitting here on a Saturday night -- Valentine's Day, no less -- bitter and hardened against the world, lashing out because I don't get to participate. Yes, that would be a very amor-centric think to think, indeed, but my whole point is that I'm not sitting here crying in my beer. I'm perfectly fine. After I finish blogging, I'll probably watch a Buster Keaton silent, with my own music backing it up, and giggle out loud at the preposterous pairing of music-to-image, belting out a hard guffaw especially when the rhythm seems to line up perfectly with the onscreen action, as though it were no accident that music by The Cars had been playing while Keaton wrestles with a tax collector or something.

Also, I'm not shutting the door on concepts like love and romance. Quite the contrary: I'm opening myself up to them -- especially romance. Romance as a game, as play, as without consequences. The image I'm about to suggest is one I'll never truly be able to live up to, simply because my disposition is considerably more mild-mannered than it would take. But I aspire now to the rogue, the bounder, the rake, the dashing rascal: an eligible bachelor with perfect etiquette and sophisticated tastes and fine trappings, a well-heeled gentleman who seems to dodge commitment like a fugitive dodges a dragnet -- and becomes the sexier and more desirable for it. Now that I have liberated my consciousness from the ingrained "looking" mode (in which I evaluate each member of the opposite sex as a potential long-term acquaintance, and therefore react to them with heightened anxiety because of perceived possible attitude incompatibilities, or whatever), I'm more free to be equally charismatic to anyone I meet. This prospect is exciting to me, and, as I said, relaxes me profoundly.

The War Movie marathon for this month is just one of my defiant jabs at a culture obsessed with matchmaking. Why should I watch romantic comedies this weekend, and fill my head with Hollywood's expectations of my romance-life? I will only perceive some Meg-Ryan-absence in my life that otherwise wasn't a nagging absence at all!

This Valentine's Day, I got valentines from my family, my Gran, and my roommates. And that's all I need; that's appropriate. No secret admirers have revealed themselves. No candy-grams have been sent. No one has clicked on my hot-or-not profile saying they want to meet. And I'm not even the slightest bit disappointed.

From now on, bachelor's the word. If I clean myself up, it's because I want to -- not because I'm afraid I'll go out of doors and be seen as repulsive if I don't. Maybe I'll shave, maybe I won't. Maybe I won't even wear deodorant sometimes! But from now on, I'm doing things for my benefit first, rather than the benefit of whatever panel of Cupids I perceive are scrutinizing my every decision. And when the right thing comes along -- if it does -- then we'll re-open negotiations.
signed,
Brandon Bernard

Friday the 13th -- "Battle of the Sexes!"

2004-02-14T19:48:00.000-08:00

Well, Netflix messed up my movie queue, so the scheduled movies had to be cancelled, regretably. (They arrived for today, incidentally.)

But, the rest of the day went to plan.

T, D and I went to grab a bite of fast food before we tore out to do a few errands. Then we came back USC-side to pick up A.

We went to the new Erotic Museum (ThEM) in Hollywood. (Hollywood Blvd. itself is a sort of erotic museum, when you think about it: before we made it into the doors of ThEM, we took a detour through Frederick's of Hollywood so that T could buy a pair of "hooker" shoes, and perused their own lingerie museum at the back of the store; we also got sidelined in a sex shop called, dubiously, "Touch of Romance.")

If you want to know about ThEM, I suggest following the link above...it's everything it said it would be. We all left with a very positive impression of the place, which managed quite beautifully what the Fredericks of Hollywood Lingerie Museum couldn't pull off: making us feel as though we were in a legitimate place of scholastic inquiry and not, say, "Touch of Romance."

By the our minds decided to crawl out of the gutters of Hollywood, we were all too hungry to bear the thought of trekking all the way home to put on pink, heart-shaped pasta to cook. The original plan was to have this with wine and cherry Shasta, chocolate-bottomed Valentine's Day cookies with sprinkles, and cherry pie -- all while taking in two movies which didn't arrive.

Instead, we drove a short distance to the good ol' Spaghetti Factory on Sunset and played round after round of "hangman."

Then we made it home again and someone decided we should play a drinking version of Monopoly -- as if the game doesn't inspire enough brawls when played sober! I wasn't feeling in any mood for vodka/cranberry shots (Vodka has the curious effect of making me hateful and grouchy in a way that other alcohol doesn't), so I opted for swigs of merlot wine. As it happened, I only took about three swigs the whole time. (The idea was that everytime you landed on a railroad that didn't belong to you, you drank a shot; if you landed on a railroad you owned, everyone else had to take a shot. I ended up owning all the railroads, so everyone else ended up drinking.)

And that was the conclusion of our Friday the 13th "Battle of the Sexes."

Sneaky...

2004-02-13T03:02:00.000-08:00

While switching over the poll, I noticed that the "Location, Location, Location!" one picked up two new votes: one additional one for desert, and one for urban jungle. That's...holy cow...7 votes! (Who are you masked people?! Swish your Z in my guestbook! And thanks for coming by and voting.)

P.S.

2004-02-13T03:00:00.000-08:00

On the poll, you can cast three votes. (More, if you're wily and you log on from different computers -- but if you stick to one computer, I granted you the ability to select three favorites.) We'll narrow it down.

Also, please let me know if said pictures of fish don't appear -- I've been having inexplicable difficulties with getting pictures to link properly.

GO FISH!

2004-02-13T02:18:00.001-08:00

(These links are bogus, obviously. I'm working on getting a better image hoster, and when I do, the as-of-yet unnamed fish will appear above the "Name That Fish!" Sweepstakes poll. Thank you!)

D gave me my Christmas present yesterday -- a Beta fish!

I've never had a fish before. I've never even considered myself a fish person, but it's a nice fit: I'm enjoying having a little creature here. What a great gift!

But, I don't know what to name the little guy! That's where you come in. To the right, I've got a poll with a smattering of name options that you can choose from if you're feeling lazy. But if you're feeling perky, please come up with some suggestions and add to the, uh, "pool." Tell your friends and random strangers, too. I'm going to need as many votes as possible to figure this out.

The pictures above are to help. It's a blue, male beta fish. As far as personality goes -- well, it's a fish. If anything, he frequently looks ill-tempered. But he's quiet and tidy, so he makes a good roommate. Now, hurry -- man your voting booths, before I just start calling the thing "Fish."

Tora! Tora! Tora! (* * 1/2)

2004-02-12T01:06:00.000-08:00

The story of Pearl Harbor -- especially as it is played out here, intercutting between the Japanese perspective and the American -- is a fascinating one. Unfortunately, this film -- ambitious though it is, with incredible battle sequences that boggle the mind, and legendary director Akira Kurosawa collaborating -- has not aged well.

The Americans come off as lazy, idiotic buffoons. At first, this tactic of portraying America as lacadaisical and nonchalant seems the natural way to go about building tension, but eventually the technique is carried on with such persistance that it becomes absurd and very frustrating. The men on radar-duty spot two huge blips, unlike anything they've ever seen. One wants to report it, but his buddy urges they get lunch instead. They do end up phoning in a report, and the officer receiving the message tells them, "Don't worry about it." Is this message marked urgent? No. Submarine? Well...I want confirmation on that sighting. Urgent memo? Hmm, I'm having difficulty reading the handwriting here...

Doesn't anyone take their job seriously?! Even the resident paranoiac insists on playing golf on December 7th until he actually sees towers of smoke on the horizon.

More horrifying than all this, the actual attack on Pearl Harbor is introduced in a comic tone! A squadron of Japanese "Zero" planes roar over officers saluting a naval band. One officer says to the other, "Get that guy's number, Dick. I'll have him reported for safety violations!" Two beats later, one of the Zeroes drops a bomb -- BOOM! The officers remain saluting, slack-jawed, standing still. One can almost here the cymbal splash punctuating a Jay Leno joke!

Lines like the one above are sprinkled throughout the film. So now I'm going to abandon the traditional review format, and leave you with a taste for this movie's B sci-fi movie-style dialogue:

"How do they expect us to feed these fat battle-wagons that are parked out here in this land-locked duck pot?"

"A one-eyed monkey hanging from a ten-cent balloon could scatter them all to hell with one hand-grenade!"

"Dammit -- unconfuse them!"

"Tokyo has alerted their embassy here to 'stand by for a very long message in 14 parts!'"

"It will be very difficult without the help of a very good typist."

"From Point D proceed to Point E. Battle speed!"

"Darling, will you shut up and drive?"

And finally, also of interest is that one of the Japanese officers is played by the actor who stars as the spy in the Japanese movie which Woody Allen dubs an alternative soundtrack to in What's Up, Tigerlily?

Poll Results

2004-02-11T17:27:00.000-08:00

Spent the last year
Rocky Mountain Way
Couldn't get much higher
--"Rocky Mountain Way," Joe Walsh

Well, the votes are in and have been tabulated, pointing to a resounding win for "Rocky Mountain High." Looks like there's something about mountain personalities that I gravitate to.

There was one vote for desert (that's me), and one vote for forrest (T), and three votes for mountain terrain. I'd say that's, uh, a landslide victory.

In other news, the voting turn-out is much better -- almost doubled! (Who are the other two people? Dad and "A," perhaps?) What good, responsible blogizens you are! Makes me happy.

Look out for a new poll -- this one's fun, and tell your friends because I need lots of votes for this next one!

Postcards From a Paper Bag

2004-02-10T23:16:00.000-08:00

Well, I never been to Spain,
But I kinda like the music.
Say the ladies are insane there,
And they sure know how to use it.
The don't abuse it,
Never gonna lose it,
I can't refuse it.
Well, I never been to Heaven
But I been to Oklahoma;
Well, they tell me I was born there,
But I really don't remember.
In Oklahoma, or Arizona --
What does it matter?
"Never Been to Spain" -- Three Dog Night

I stand accused of (and plead guilty to) two charges:

1.) That I don't have a very good handle on politics/history/geography.

2.) That I have a poor-to-non-existent sense of direction.

I believe the two are interconnected in a way. I remember long, long phone calls during the summer of 2000, before I went off to college, with a girl from high school, V (what an exotic initial! I never dreamt that a "V" would crop up in my blogging!)

I don't know where V is right now -- Somalia? The Ukraine? Iraq? She was determined, at the time of these long conversations, to tour the third world and do good, to joing the Peace Corps or whatever it is people like V do.

She asked me once that summer where in the world I would like to visit.

I said, "Oh, I don't know."

This didn't satisfy V at all. She pressed me for an answer, incredulous that I didn't have several ready. Floundering, I tried to think of a few places that wouldn't stress me too much to go -- I may have tossed off Germany, because I had taken German and I thought Germany would be beautiful at Christmastime. I probably also named Australia and England because I could at least speak the language. But really, I couldn't care less if I never saw these places in all my life.

D and T have flown for points abroad -- Italy, Rome, Spain, and China between the two of them. They had to go for some reason. They had to see it. I don't get it. Everyone around me is studying abroad, and I'd rather spend a whole evening dry heaving, thanks very much. (Or, as our old joke runs, "studying a broad.")

I don't know why it is that I don't care to go abroad. I think it's that I'm fascinated with the United States. (Clarification: I'm fascinated with her culture -- her history and politics don't appeal to me, it's her films and literature and attitudes and philosophies and styles and groups and subgroups that I want.)

If I were to take a long trip, I'd very much like to drive old Route 66 from its end point in Santa Monica, to its genesis in Chicago -- "more than 2,000 miles all the way," as Bobby Troup sings!

So, okay, I can't find my way out of a paper bag. It's true. Maybe it's because I don't want out of the paper bag. There's so much to observe in here: so much texture, so many creases and wrinkles and tears and grease-stains. I haven't finished exploring it all yet, sifting it, making sense of it. Don't ask me to find my way out until I've finished.

Sorry, V. Give my regards to the World.

Talkin' 'bout m-my g-g-g-generation

2004-02-10T23:00:00.000-08:00

I'm here to formally appologize to my generation. If you check out the guestbook, you'll see that my father has let me become representative of you, Generation...er...Y...or whatever generation we are. (Z?)

Dad, I'm sure not everyone's grasp of current events is as tenuous as mine. But it's true...mine is pretty embarassing!
________________________________________________
(How about "Generation Why?")

Blogging at work:

2004-02-10T15:36:00.000-08:00

bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored...

New Poll

2004-02-10T13:16:00.000-08:00

It's not an advertisement! Look over to your right, down below my hot-or-not picture -- it's a poll! Most of you found the last one (Valentine's Movies), but some of you thought it was trying to sell you something. Not so.

In case you're stumped on how to vote, here's my answer:

I'm a desert person. I am definitely not a jungle person -- to many creepy crawly things. Tundra would be too frigid and barren and depressing for me. I'm not a rugged mountain man, and forrests have a few too many bugs and bears and things. Ah, the desert -- it's so beautiful and clean. It sports my favorite color combination -- blue and khaki, sand and sky. Sure, it's hot in the day and cold at night, but this is what I grew up with anyway. I think I could really get into wearing a flowing white tunic and head-wrap like Lawrence of Arabia and riding a camel to the cool mud building wavering on the horizon, next to a small oasis crowded with palm trees. Yes, that's me.

What's you?

(Please feel free to offer explanations or unrepresented alternatives in the guest book, or through e-mail.)

Now, if you'll pardon me, I'm off to pluck my sitar 'neath the shade of yon palm.

Some additional thoughts on Khartoum -- perhaps even some backpedaling, on my part.

2004-02-09T21:55:00.000-08:00

And there's even some evil mothers
Well they're gonna tell you that everything is just dirt
Y'know that, women never really faint
And that villains always blink their eyes
And that, y'know, children are the only ones who blush
And that life is just to die
And everyone who ever had a heart
They wouldn't turn around and break it
And anyone who ever played a part
Oh wouldn't turn around and hate it!
--The Velvet Underground, "Sweet Jane"

Well, memory's a funny thing. It's not entirely reliable, I suppose, and frequently there's nothing to either confirm or deny one's memory but someone else's memory, and of course that's as subjective as the original memory in question.

I've received an e-mail from Dad suggesting perhaps I mis-remembered what he told me when I stumbled into that horrifying decapitation scene of Khartoum. Already, my memory is compromised because I remembered seeing Heston's head on a pike, and watching the movie recently I realize nothing so graphic was ever depicted on screen. So, probably he's right, and I am remembering it wrong.

I'm not sure if Dad's e-mail is telling me he thinks there are, in fact, evil people -- or if he's simply pointing out that there are immoral motivations and immoral acts. (Do these motives and actions make a person purely evil? What does "purely evil" mean? Can Evil and Good co-exist, or are they mutually exclusive? [It seems perfectly reasonable to say that no "good" person is perfectly spotless, and yet we're more comfortable to suggest that an "evil" person has no good qualities.] Are good/evil handles for our convenience? I don't know.)

Dad's grasp over history and current events is much stronger than my own, so I'll only attempt to navigate within the examples he's offered me in the e-mail.

One paragraph I find interesting is the following [bracketed comments are my own]:

"[re: present conflict in the Middle East:] Before, I go on, please understand that I detest the suicide bombing of innocent civilian tactics. [Seems like a good disclaimer; I'll sign on, too. But] how are the Palestinians, who have far more stones than bullets, to fight back [against Israeli/U.S.]? Suicide bombers!! Yeah, but what a despicable tactic. Yes, it is, just like the the fire bombing of German cities [by U.S., in WWII, mentioned in an earlier paragraph], just like Truman's use of nuclear weaponry on two Japanese cities and going even further back, just like the New Englander's use of guerilla and hit-and-run tactics in the battle of Concord as the British garrison, sent to confiscate the armory at Lexington, tried to make their way back to Boston. My, how the rules of engagement change over time. The British government and population were infuriated by the way their British soldiers were "murdered" by the rebels. Proper soldiers faced each other, back then, in a field of battle--you know in ranks, marching, allgentlemanlyof gentlemenly stuff. Why, to the Western European powers, the rebels in America were evil cowards, murderers, terrorists, not soldiers at all. Does this sound familiar in today's vernacular of Middle East reporting?"

What I'm able to glean from the above syllogism is that evil exists in the world in the form of immoral deeds. However, I'm not sure whether to extend this to persons involved. In many cases, immoral deeds are carried out under orders -- the orders of one's commanding officers, or the orders of one's God, even. Are the enacters of evil deeds themselves evil?

Dad says: "To me, the strongest form of hatred is when the desire to kill somebody else is stronger than one's own desire to perservere or to live for one's own children (remember late last year when the mother of two became a suicide bomber?). Hatred is pure evil."

I agree that hatred -- if Hatred can be distilled into a single, uncomplicated thing -- is Evil. The strongest form of Evil being "the desire to kill somebody else as stronger than the desire to perservere...for one's own children" is a fairly specific and highly-evolved definition of terms. I haven't lived long enough to come up with a notion of evil quite so quotable as that, and so I can't begin to comprehend niggling with this. It seems perfectly reasonable to me. Nonetheless, I can't help experimenting with the unthinkable thought that perhaps the above-mentioned mother is not fully fleshed out to us, and that all we know of her is that she is a mother of two who takes lives, and that certainly does sound evil -- in fact, I have no problem agreeing that that specific deed smacks heavily of evil. But did she love her children? Did she believe in something? Was she, perhaps, doing it for her children, because to her way of thinking it was more evil to see them grow up in a world that was -- by her definition -- wrong?

"History," as Dad has succinctly put it, "is written by the winners."

The "monsters" class I'm taking with Professor Kincaid places a high priority on stepping into the shoes of the ostricized "Other" in order to explore powerful binaries that create our social identities.

Let me unpack the jive I just laid down:

We alienate groups/things/individuals/acts/institutions/etc. -- in postmodern short-hand, the Other -- in order to set a boundary, a kind of anti-mirror into which we can look and say, "We are not that." We are not child molestors, drive-by-shooters, heroin addicts, suicide bombers, swingers, bohemians, drop-outs, racists, rapists, cowards" -- or whatever. Often, this leads to scape-goating.

One thing the class is asking us to do is to rupture these binaries by shifting our deeply-ingrained perspectives out of the Us box and into the Them box. "What was going through X's head when X decided to do that?" It's a difficult exercise, because we'll want to do it with ostricized groups we already feel close to in some way. I mentioned bohemians and drop-outs; I could much more easily step into that perspective than into the perspective of a drive-by-shooter or a suicide bomber. These binaries are deeply ingrained, and feel natural. Half the time (even 100% of the time) we don't even feel a distinct binary at work -- we don't realize that we're stigmatizing inner-city urban populations (read as: black Americans) as dope fiends and ruffians.

The value, for me, of a movie like Zulu is that it eases us out of the Us/Them binary. I found myself identifying as often with the Zulu tribe as with the British army. I was rooting for both, fearing both, impressed by each faction's individual triumphs, and saddened by each faction's own losses.

Another thought that occurred to me while watching Zulu was this:

(Caution: more spoilers ahead.)

At the end of the movie, the British haven't defeated the Zulus so much as staved them off, impressed them so much with their own tenacity that the Zulu troops simply salute their brave rivals, and that's the end of it. The reason this could have happened, I think, is that Zulu warfare was in the hands of the Zulu chief, who was not only a policy-maker within the tribe but a general on the battlefield. The military politics of developed nations is not this way: the decision-makers stay at home, and send disempowered groups off to enact the realities of their policies. To put it inanely: Michael Caine does not have the option of simply "calling off an attack," because politicians in England are responsible for England's stance in any given country. This is in fact, as Dad points out, where the film Khartoum is inspiring, because "Chinese" Gordon "wanted to force his own government's hand to defend those Sudanese who did not accept the Madi's [Laurence Olivier] fanatical version of Islamic government." In the case of Gordon, the man on the battle field attempted to call the shots by subverting the politicians back home. That's courage and tenacity of another kind, and no less admirable than charging loaded guns with an animal-skin shield.

But the fact remains that in most developed nations, the decision to make war or peace is at a remove from the actual acts of war and peace. It certainly seems tempting to have the President in the theatre of action commanding troops, seeing the casualties first hand, rather than reading numbers.

Dad mentioned US bombings of Germany, and he mentioned Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse: Five, which I have read. I remember (hopefully correctly) something Vonnegut said about bomber-pilots. He said he hated them because they were so cavalier, so cowardly and self-assured as they dropped bombs from the safety of the sky, raining hell and death upon unfathomable populations below. What would ever cause a bomber-pilot's conscience to twinge with guilt if he never saw the result of his orders carried out? To him (the pilot), the enemy was simply a cold city-grid. Yet it was bomber-pilots who ended WWII, and who have decided many conflicts since then, too, and this fact is swept under the rug; we are perfectly comfortable to make Khamikazi pilots into demons, and Nazis into the Devil incarnate. But no one flinches when we level Hiroshima just to make a point.

Finally, I'll just say this: I don't think I essentially mis-remembered Dad's words of wisdom. Perhaps I just didn't re-tell them precisely enough in the earlier blog entry, in the interest of shorter blogging (an interest totally absent in this post, I'm sorry) and anecdotalism.

I think what Dad meant was that there are not white hats and black hats. The world is far more complicated than that. You will not recognize bad guys, because they won't come riding in on a black horse while lightning flashes in the sky. Instead, evil will manifest itself in mothers-of-two, in simple peasants, in our own Chief of Staff, in our best friends perhaps (see The Third Man), in "Chinese" Gordon sometimes, in our enemy and even in ourselves. Villains won't always blink their eyes.

Thank you for the e-mail, Dad.

2004-02-09T12:39:00.000-08:00

Yes, I'm blogging at work again.

Realization

2004-02-09T12:29:00.000-08:00

I frequently eat at the "University Village," a small and humble shopping mall right next to campus. When I eat there, I notice the custodial staff, who seem to be local residents having nothing to do with the University community. They primarily speak Spanish, and are generally much older. I feel bad eating at the UV when I throw my trash out and put my tray on top of the trash can, giving them something more to do, always having to clean up after oblivious college kids.

Then, today, as I was walking to work I recognized a woman in regular pedestrian clothes walking toward the UV, and I thought to myself, Where do I know her from?

It dawned on me that she is one of the people at the UV who must always wipe my tray off and take it back to the rest of the trays. I was startled to see her walking to work, for some reason, just as I was walking to work now. She must live nearby, I thought. (Such dawning revelations I have! Such epiphanies!)

Then I realized that, indeed, right where I live there are many little apartments and houses where I hear Spanish drifting through the open windows, where I hear kids playing who are far too young to be college-aged. Obviously, these people just live here, this is their community, and the college is incidental to them.

For some reason, there had always been a disconnect in my head between them living there, and working there. I don't know why.

So, I don't know where this realization leaves me.

I still feel bad about them having to empty my trash.

A life lesson learned from Khartoum

2004-02-09T12:12:00.000-08:00

I sort of knocked this movie in the below post; or, at least, I spoke unfavorably on it compared to how I spoke on Zulu. But I do have a pleasant memory of Khartoum, which dates way back to when I first saw a portion of it -- the end portion -- as a little boy.

(Caution: spoiler ahead)

Dad was watching it on television. I happened to be in the living room during the end, when Charlton Heston (who you'd expect to win) is speared, and beheaded. Victorious Muslims prance around with his head lifted high on a stake. (You see what I mean about it being characteristic for films of the era to demonize ethnic groups).

I was pretty mortified as a kid by this decapitation stuff. Oddly, I remembered actually seeing his head affixed to a stake, and so I was surprised to see the movie again and observe that it's never actually shown: the camera pans slowly up the pole on which his head is supposedly mounted, but before you ever see it, the scenes dissolves to a monument of "Chinese" Gordon, with his head positioned right where the stake's point would be. A clever transition, and it was enough to fix in my overactive imagination the real image of Chartlon Heston's severed head.

I asked Dad, "Is that the bad guy?" It was inconceivable to me at this time that the good guys should perish, and yet -- and yet -- it sure seemed like that Heston guy was set up to be "the hero." (Reflecting on it now, I see that my expectations were also highly racialized -- how could the fair-skinned man be the bad guy and the darker-skinned man emerge victorious?)

Dad, sagaciously, said, "There aren't really good guys and bad guys in this movie. It's based on a true event, and in real life there's not really good and bad, there's just people who want different things."

The prospect of this was revolutionary to me, I guess, since I remember it so clearly today. But at the time, it was also unacceptable to me. I demanded to know who, in the subjectivity of the film, was supposed to be the antagonist. Of course, I didn't use these words -- that would have been frightening. But Dad held firm: there was not a bad guy here.

Watching the film much later, I maintain that Olivier's Muslim is supposed to be wicked, a veritable Iago, the embodiment of everything we fear even now, post 9-11, everything "Other," radical, mysterious, and so on. I hold that -- unlike the film's better, Zulu, Khartoum is essentially a Eurocentric telling of history, and the fall of "Chinese" Gordon is supposed to be seen as downbeat, not neutral -- he is to be seen as a brave martyr.

Regardless -- the lesson has been learned, Dad. Thank you. :-)

Zulu (* * * * *)

2004-02-08T21:29:00.000-08:00

I should most definitely be reading Christopher Marlow's Faustus (A-text) for class tomorrow, but I have just seen a movie that has moved me to write.

The movie is Zulu (Endfield, 1964), and is about a small garrison of British troops in South Africa circa 1870 who defend themselves against staggering throngs of Zulu warriors -- it's 40 to 1, in Zulu favor. The movie is proud for giving Michael Caine his first screen role, though it is not necessarily a starring role. Caine is magnificent in it, but he's not head and shoulders above anyone else on the film; I have seldom seen a larger cast of top-notch actors -- though by-and-large their names are not recognizable to us as stars, their performances were flawless.

The film is far beyond its years in many ways. Yesterday I watched Khartoum, which was made two or three years after Zulu, and has not aged nearly as well. Khartoum, in the tradition of many other movies from its era, has done an odd thing in casting unlikely actors for particular roles: the Muslim leader is played by non other than Sir Laurence Olivier, and the valorous British general, "Chinese" Gordon, is played by -- of all people! -- Charlton "Damn Dirty Apes" Heston. Though Olivier melts into his role, it boggles the mind why he wasn't cast as "Chinese" Gordon and why Heston wasn't just left out entirely!

But Zulu features a splendid cast of natives: native Englishmen for the roles of British soldiers, and native Africans (many, many, many native Africans) for the roles of Zulu warriors.

The film appears to have been shot on location, which is another symbol of its forward-thinking, and the vistas are breathtaking and go a long way toward allowing the audience to image what it would be like, ensconced in such a majestic, beautiful, powerful place.

Perhaps the most modern thing about Zulu is its treatment of the British/African conflict. Refreshingly, neither Zulu nor Englishman seems to be forced into the role of "the wicked" for this movie to function. Though there is little historical background offered to explain just why there is such a conflict between England and Africa (I suppose that old villain colonialism will have to do), the film is careful to portray both forces as disciplined, sophisticated, wily, intelligent, and human. For once, the soundtrack doesn't flare up with "Injun drums" each time we see the horizon bristling with spears. Quite the opposite, the score is by John Barry, and avoids all musical stereotyping; it even falls silent quite often so that all we hear is the spine-tingling war-chant of the Zulus, which is actually a very peaceful, harmonic sound.

In general, the Zulus are represented as reasonable, intelligent, and plucky. The film's opening shows a mass marriage, which seems full of joy. I kept expecting some barbaric ritual to be shown in order to alienate us from them -- "What! They carve up their brides?!" But no. In fact, the Zulus looked beautiful, proud, and deeply contented. The music was catchy (too bad that soundtrack isn't available), and right away I liked these people. I liked them also in their animal-skin capes as they stood on a hill and prepared for war: in those moments they seemed regal and heroic, rather than menacing and monstrous.

That's not to say that the film isn't desperately suspensful. Quite the contrary. While I wasn't literally biting my fingernails, I was actually biting my knuckles. I was breathing heavier and -- though the camera might only have been panning across a line of British soldiers looking pensively out on the horizon -- my heart was racing.

Much of the thrill lies in the military strategy of the film. How will 100 British troops hold off 5,000 Zulus? Then again, what are the Zulus to do charging rifles with only leather shields and spears? At once, we are stimulated by the careful, patient and genius Zulu tactics (the bull-horn formation that eventually encircles the enemy), and simultaneously by the highly-regimented British tactics -- that is, the Human Machine tactic which was the order of the day: one row fires, and drops to their knees to reload while the next row fires, etc -- human machine-gunning.

This is an aspect of war I remember being intrigued by when I took a "War Narratives" class. We were reading the trench poems of a soldier in WWI -- something Owen, I can't remember exactly -- and he had one poem that pretended to see the war from the perspective of a soldier's soul rising up toward Heaven. Looking down, the troops looked like mechanical caterpillars, bristling and seething machinery. War demands that you throw down your individuality and become a cog, a piston, a wheel.

It's been popular, lately, to say that realistically graphic war movies such as Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down are doing something wondrous for us by letting civilians know what it's like to be at war -- without glamorizing it, shoving our noses in it, making us practically smell the rotting and the burning. I'm not going to disagree with this; I can't -- I haven't seen either of the above films.

But I do want to suggest that perhaps there is more than one Truth about what it is like to be at war, and that Private Ryan and Black Hawk are portraying what amounts to -- with the advances of special effects and make-up and digital extras -- the easiest Truth to portray. In a way, these movies are lazy (yes, Mr. Spielberg, I'm sorry: lazy) in their portrayals of the reality of war. With enough fake blood, a good enough cinematographer, and jumpy editing, it seems that just about anyone can portray the external violence of war. Yes, that can make us feel the horror of it, how sickening it is to witness and be surrounded by it, and how brave one would have to be to strive onward in the face of all that carnage. But is there more?

I think so. And I think a movie like Zulu starts to get at it. There is a scene in Zulu when droves of Zulu warriors flood down the hills and into the British camp. The British have laid a small trap for their enemy: the front line of soldiers retreats from the periphery, and Zulus pour over the sandbags that have barricaded them before now. But once inside the camp, the find themselves encircled by the Human Machine Gun, ranks of men standing and firing, massacring the Zulu warriors as they come in. At the end of the scene, there is a pit full of Zulu dead. The scene is absolutely bloodless, and the carnage is not ultra-realistic. But that sight of the pit is horrendous, and it burns into your brain: their black bodies writhe in a smoking pit -- all of those beautiful brave people reduced to nothing, all their war-singing for naught, their plumage gone to waste. It's as heartbreaking now as it was exhilarating a moment ago. Afterwards, Michael Caine's character dwells on the sickly feeling of his "first kill." "There's something else," he says: "I feel ashamed."

It seems to me that this is a sentiment which is best gotten to by careful writing, by superb acting, and attentive direction. This Truth is the result of much harder work than screen make-up. I was stirred by this movie, perhaps so much because I could bear to watch it, because I knew I wasn't going to see realistic gore. Because my eyes were glued to the screen, I was shaken by an English boy's face -- he must have been no more than 17 -- and how reluctant he looked as he was prodded forward by a lieutenant, how his jaw set resolutely as he brought his gun up. Surely he was wondering if it was even possible for him to take out 40 men before he went down. Similarly, I was moved to think how horrifying it must be for half-naked Zulu warriors to run at a wall of guns, knowing they were marked to die just so their people could sound out the British forces for weaknesses.

At the beginning of the film, a Zulu chief asks a European parishioner if it does not please him to witness the mass wedding ceremony. The parishioner smugly replies that it makes him sad to see so many young women who might soon be widowed if their men go to war. The Zulu chief responds that the women are proud just to be marrying such brave men.

Indeed.

The "All's Fair in Love and War" February Movie Marathon Schedule:

2004-02-08T16:49:00.000-08:00

It's February, and love is in the air. Of course you know, this means WAR!

From Russia With Luv
From Russia With Love -- S.P.E.C.T.R.E. is in love with a fuzzy white cat; later, of course, James Bond will also fall for a Pussy...

Alexander Nevsky -- Sergei Eisenstein directs this classic Oedipal struggle: scores of peasants murder the Fatherland (Germany) to be closer to the Motherland (Russia).

Love and Death -- Boy meets girl, boy goes to war, girl marries herring merchant, boy and girl conspire to murder Napoleon.
February 3, 4, 5

"Be Mine" Weekend: When it comes to the Heart of Darkness, it isn't Love that conquers all, but the British Army!
Khartoum -- The epic tale of two men and their love for themselves. Laurence Olivier stars as a Muslim, and Charlton Heston plays a Limey. (Huh??)

Zulu -- synopsis pending.
February 7, 8

Heart Breakers
Breaker Morant -- synopsis pending

Gallipoli -- featuring heart-throb Mel Gibson before he turned to religious fanatacism.
February 9

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
The General -- yucking it up with the loneliest of silent comedians, Buster Keaton, playing a renegade confederate soldier.

Paths of Glory -- Stanley Kubrick sends Kirk Douglas into the trenches.
February 10, 11

Purple Hearts of Courage
Tora! Tora! Tora! -- For the love of exlamation points!

Objective: Burma! -- It's a bird, it's a bee, it's Cupid...No, it's Errol Flynn dropping bombs from a plane!
February 12

FRIDAY THE 13th: Battle of the Sexes
A trip to L.A.'s newest tourist trap, the Sex Museum in Hollywood, will be followed by pink, heart-shaped pasta, wine, cherry pie, and the following double-feature:

Roger Dodger -- Ladies and gentleman, it's a call to arms: don't dodge this draft.

I Love You To Death -- First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes lots of bullet cartridges. Tracy Ulman and Kevin Kline star.
February 13

V-DAY: The Troops Land
The Dirty Dozen -- The story of 12 men and their love for -- arguably -- each other.

Kelly's Heroes -- Proving love (or at least patriotism) can be bought!
February 14

Love is a Battlefield
Battle for Britain -- synopsis pending.

Midway -- synopsis pending.

The Longest Day -- synopsis pending.
February 15, 16, 17

My Heart Went skreeeeeee BOOM!
A Bridge Too Far -- Loving the smell of napalm in the morning...

Sorcerer -- When a group of prisoners (led by Roy Scheider) are put in charge of a truck full of TNT, you can bet sparks will fly!

Fail-Safe -- How Walter Matthau learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.
February 18, 19, 20

Heart & Soul Train
Hopscotch -- synopsis pending.

The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 -- Robert Shaw lusts after a subway train; unfortunately, he's wooing it from the wrong man -- Walter Matthau, again!

Man on the Train -- French. Ooh la la.

Von Ryan's Express -- Ol' Blue Eyes leads a band of WWII prisoners to escape a Nazi prisoner train. Ring-a-ding-ding!
February 21, 22, 23, 24
_______________________________________________
*Schedule subject to change.

**Keep checking schedule for updated synopses, rearranged titles, additions or subtractions.

***For further details, questions or reservations, call: FOX-TUTH

What is this "Democracy" you speak of?

2004-02-04T23:50:00.000-08:00

Well, it's nice to see that the three of you are responsible voters. (I'm not!) Looks like 33% of you (that is to say, one person) clicked "Classic Romances/Romantic Comedies" -- hmmm...Mom?

67% of you (all right, which one of you snots thinks you're worth 1% more than all the rest?) opted for brutal guy movies.

But the percentages don't really matter. It was a fore-gone conclusion. I was just curious. Welcome to the Brando Regime! MUAH-hahahaha!
____________________________________

Re: My Voting Irresponsibility
"Call me irresponsible; call me unreliable; throw in undependable, too!"

Today while running an errand at work (trying to simultaneously work on New Year's Resolution #3 as well as take as long as possible being away from the desk chair), one of those petition people approached me. Since I was trying not to be blustery, I gave him the time of day.

He wanted me to sign a petition for stem-cell research.

I said, "What is that?"

He told me it could cure cancer, yadda-yadda-yadda. And this isn't fetile stem-cell research, it's "the other one."

I said, "What's the other one, then?"

He explained that he didn't really know -- he's just out there trying to get signatures, man -- but it's not the one where they use dead people.

Huh?

Anyway, the guy explains to me that by signing I'm only helping to put it on the ballot -- it'll still be voted on by, I hope, people who know what the hell stem-cell research is. (There is no guarantee of this.)

So -- what the heck? -- I sign it. I have to put my address. I say, "Permanent address, or...?" He says, where ever I'm registered to vote. I think I'm registered in New Mexico. I'm certainly not registered in California. But he tells me that if I have a local address, it's best to put that one. So, I shrug and put down the L.A. address, thinking, Here I am not even registered to vote, with no idea what "the other kind" of stem-cell research is, and I'm helping to put it on the ballot. What a system!

In retrospect, I guess I should have said:

a.) "Man, if you don't know what the other kind of stem-cell research is, how can you stand out here and try to get signatures for it?"

or:

b.) "I'm sorry, I just don't feel like I know enough about the subject to feel comfortable signing my name. Good luck, though!"

But who wants to be that guy?

"Call me unpredictable; tell me I'm impractical; rainbows I'm inclined to pursue!"

You know who you are. I know who you are, too.

2004-02-04T23:45:00.000-08:00

Clicking on the "RetroStats" button at the bottom of the page, I see that the largest spike in visitors I've had in a single day has been 7. (I think most of those were me.) Otherwise, on a "busy" day, I get 5 -- probably 3 of which are me.

So:

Hi, Mom!

Hi, Ryan!

Hi, Tracy!

Thanks for coming. :-)

Well, they do say the best thing a writer can do is know his audience...

Bill Murray Double-Take, Take 2: Groundhog Day

2004-02-04T18:56:00.000-08:00

First of all, I'm very proud of the invitation, so take a look at it here. (I'm even prouder to have uploaded an image and put a link to it -- I was going to put this image in the blog itself [I could have, you know!] -- but I didn't want to cause slower internet connections [Mom] to choke on it.)

And now:

Groundhog Day

I've seen this film a few times in the past, and what I remember is being vaguely amused by it, but just as vaguely frustrated by the repetition -- I remember groaning as much as laughing. Still, this was Groundhog Day, damn it, and I was going to watch this film.

I appreciated it this time a lot more than I ever have in the past. It's actually a fairly great movie.

First of all, it's great because it's entered our cultural vocabulary. Whenever someone says, "It's like Groundhog Day!" they mean that you are living the same day over and over. It's become a catchphrase, and the original holiday really has nothing to do with repetition.

Secondly, the script is just really great. The screenwriter is apparently Buddhist, and I'm not well-enough versed in Buddhism to trace it through Groundhog Day, so consider yourself spared.

Sure there is lots of repetition in this movie, but the screenwriter and director Harold Ramis have created some genius shorthand for depicting the repetition in a way that will seem less tedious and more amusing to viewers. For instance, the third time Murray wakes up, he runs through all of the cues, and we don't even have to hear the dialog anymore -- he bursts past the man in the hall without a word, doesn't say anything to the motel owner, trots down the street avoiding the irritating insurance guy, etc. In thirty seconds, we know Murray has experienced an entire morning--again.

Also, the editing eventually turns to the repeated day as a source of freedom rather than enslavement. Many of the scenes become edited together thematically rather than chronologically: a series of shots in which Murray smashes his alarm clock as "I Got You Babe" plays for the umpteenth time; a series of shots of McDowell slapping Murray, etc. We know from previous scenes what has led up to these scenes, and therefore can enjoy seeing them strung along end-to-end without having to "get there" narratively. Brilliant.

In this way, Groundhog Day is one of the best illustrations I've ever seen for how a story can be like a house. (Some author said a story is like a house -- I don't know who it was, but her name is on the tip of my tongue, and it drives me crazy because I even have a Margaret Thatcher image of her in my head, wearing a pill-box hat, lots of navy blue and cream and silk, little silver-rimmed bifocals, mirthless scrunched-up little mouth, and a tiny pocketbook clutched in her gnarly fingers.) Anyway, Bill Murray -- and the film at large -- gets to move through the story as though it were wandering through a house, because once we have seen the general lay of the land early on, we are free to explore. For example, there is a bar scene in which Murray chats with McDowell over and over again, each time learning something from her that will make his advances more welcome, and the scene blooms and opens up because each successive retry is lined up, and the bar scene becomes a sort of room to be explored, to look around in, rather than a marker we have to hit to move on to another point.

This time around, that was perhaps my favorite thing about Groundhog Day: the narrative strategy. It's so different, and so striking, and has so many advantages over traditional linear story-telling. If this power could be harnessed even for narratives that don't deal with the repetition of a single event, that could be a potent serum.

That is, if we let the story do its thing, instead of fighting it every step of the way.

Ahhh -- that's where the Buddhism comes in!

(Or the postmodernism -- but is it really worth making a distinction? [Don't fight it, go with it.])

Rainy Day #2

2004-02-03T23:45:00.000-08:00

Crazy rain. Unexpected afternoon/evening rain.

Wet cold rain pouring straight down, sun beaming straight across; a cross-hatching of weather.

Buildings painted gold, blurred in rain-mist.

Double rainbows.

People ducking for cover, jackets and newspapers over their heads. One guy with his shirt off, holding a skateboard and his shirt, dashing through puddles -- his wet shirt was too cold and heavy to bear?

Crazy, crazy rain. Rain-dripping-off-the-ends-of-noses rain.

Cars splooshing through asphalt lakes.

Rain through sundown, into nightfall.

Crazy rain. Fire-truck, fender-bending, falling-down rain.

Fellowship of the Work-Study

2004-02-03T23:36:00.000-08:00

Again at work today -- P told me I looked like Legolas, the character Orlando Bloom plays in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.

(!)

Now, anyone can look right over to the right at my Hot-or-Not picture and see that I obviously don't look like Orlando Bloom in any role. But what particularly fascinates me is how far out of her way P went to distinguish between Orlando Bloom (who is naturally a brunette and would be a closer fit to my appearance) and Legolas, the long, blond-haired Elf. "Have you seen Lord of the Rings?" she asked me. "Do you know the name of the character Orlando Bloom plays?" (I had to think about that one for a while, but I finally came up with Legolas.) "Legolas...is that the Elf?" she asked. Yes. "You look like him."

I told her that was a new one; I'd never heard that before. But...thanks, I think.

She went on to say that one of my co-workers was Frodo. My co-worker looks nothing like Frodo -- he looks perhaps more like Ghandi than like Frodo.

Maybe P should have her eyes checked.

Or diversify her movie-watching experiences.

Reclining Nude

2004-02-03T23:32:00.000-08:00

Today at work I helped Professor Gloria Orenstein prepare for her Dadaism class. She wanted to bring in a "found object" to her class as a work of art. I had to dissuade her from taking my new Nalgene water bottle (which is a very fetching sapphire blue). I suggested that she take a two-hole punch instead.

She said she needed a name for her new work of art. I said, "'Reclining Nude.'"

Professor Orenstein liked this. She said, "It seems like I should put something on it, though, to make it nude."

I said, "Wouldn't that be dressing it?" (But then, we're talking about Dadaism here.)

Still, she wanted something to put on it. So I offered her a sticky note. She liked that, too. She told me to write her name on it -- "Better yet," she said, "write Gloria D'Aura on it. Let them figure that one out."

I'm still trying to figure that one out myself.

Rainy Day #1

2004-02-02T23:17:00.000-08:00

Does that little furball know something, or what? Sure enough, as soon as Phil predicts 6 more weeks of winter, L.A. gets clobered with rain.

(Rain, in case you don't know, is the closest thing L.A. has to winter.)

It never seems to rain in Southern California,
but girl don't they warn ya --
It pours,
man, it pours.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men...?

2004-02-02T17:07:00.000-08:00

THE SHADOW KNOWS!

It seems that Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow today. Which, as we all know, means that it was sunnier in Punxsutawney than it was in Los Angeles today.

Bill Murray Double-Take, Take 1: Caddyshack

2004-02-01T22:02:00.000-08:00

I think T said it best: "This is a great movie to watch on a Sunday night!"

Tell Lots of Small Stories

2004-01-31T21:59:00.000-08:00

That's #190 in Life's Little Deconstruction Book -- I'm not necessarily going in order. For me, this relates very closely to Let Stories Do Their Thing.

I am doing better telling more and more stories, but I could still work on making them smaller. It occurs to me that I'm a fairly indulgent writer, and I'm going to try and scale back.

Watch for fragmented sentences.

Voting Enabled!

2004-01-31T11:33:00.000-08:00

Happy Jan. 31st. everyone...R has introduced me to a free poll site that looks a lot better than the last one I tried, so to your right and down past my sparkling countenance you'll find the first one, asking you what movies I should line up this month. Hopefully, this poll will stay put!

Thanks, R.