the descendents

i think that was a pretty good movie. it was beautifully humble about the inelegance of suffering people. they're crude and awkward and difficult to watch. julie's bedside rant was perfect in its inadequacy, in how it made me cringe. she was utterly unequal to the moment and that's an important and worthy truth, not a failure but a backhanded triumph. in an early scene when matt king throws the teddy bear across the room, i thought of marlon brando's character at the bedside in last tango in paris. not because matt king in that moment is anything like that but because he's the opposite. his grief and fury are outwardly manifest in this awkwardly manageable way. i didn't feel intimidated by him or his feeling, i pitied him. it didn't have any of the terrifying power of brando's character in that situation, it was just a pitiable man. and that's an honest insight. grief doesn't turn that ordinary man into anything other than the somewhat facile and containable person he is.

i don't know what they were going for with all the shots of beautiful hawaii. i thought they were experimenting with the effect of tourism footage juxtaposed with some sad shit. were they insulting their movie with the fact that hawaii looks fucking terrific and that i pretty instantly forgot any sadness looking at those vistas?

the young people in this movie, and especially the humor the movie tries to wring from them, is some really dumbass shit. they're young people as imagined by middle aged people convinced that them-youngsters-do-the-darndest-things. sid is especially intolerable and unreal, especially in the way he interacts with matt king.

yo everything is terrible. have just been raving at my parents about the lowness of gasoline taxes and the conspiratorial evil of corporations and how it'll cost $100 billion a year to keep roads in exactly the same shitty ass shape they're in right now.

when i was younger it used to be terrible arguing with my dad. i don't know how it worked out exactly, but he was always right, and in this crippling, total way. it was as if he brought that intolerable "i have lived a very, very long life and am now unbearably wise" shtick to bear in our arguments about invading afghanistan which left me flailing and utterly defeated. now though it's changed. it's super great to have statistics and such (i have repeated that gas taxes raised $25 billion in 2006 ("a relative boom year!" i would add, yelling) while, again, fucking $100 billion is necessary to keep up roads. we are subsidizing a bogus ass car industry in a very hidden way, and we always have been. and now my dad shrinks up into this adorable little person, retreating from the argument saying he just wants to learn about the higg's boson and the creation of the universe and giggles a bit at the violence of my feeling.

yo everything is SO TERRIBLE!

groundhog day

yo groundhog day is the best! i fucking LOVE that movie! that is the happiest thing i have ever seen! except for kind of andie macdowell's face, which is so beatific it almost ruins it, but that is GREAT! i think bill murray's super hero-dom as this preposterous thing born of familiarity is brilliant, that practice does make perfect. it makes one dizzy with the possibilities of a day, it makes the world feel very big.

though really, i don't even buy the super hero transition thing. i believe in the pedantic romancing, the thousand slaps, the manic scene when he's acting out the snowball fight for the hundredth time. that shit is brilliant. and the suicides, definitely believe in those.

new shoes

I've recently committed to abiding by a relatively radical standard of need; read: I'm not a big shopper anymore. Even by that standard, the keds i've got are a wreck and i'd been looking for some new shoes. But then I remembered my cache. I used to be a sneakerhead but eventually I stopped being a huge asshole and the sneakers gradually found their way out of the house. But I still have these golden, high top nike dunks. They're called Olympics; they were my favorites. I often wore them going out at night freshman year of college, confident that I would conquer "bitches" and notch my belt, feeling very secure in my obscenely appropriate footwear.

Those sneakers are the embodiment of what I'm now opposed to. To begin with, it would be absurd to have only that pair. They're golden and I bought them for $235 from a guy in Florida after searching for them for months. They aren't for the barefoot, for thick and thin, sickness and health. They're for a pantheon of satanic excess.

When I got them in high school I'd check the weather before I put them on the morning. I'd walk staring suspiciously at the sidewalk; the tough thing about worshipping sneakers is feeling like you're defiling them when you, you know, put them on the ground. There's a general horror of wearing them. For starters, they go on feet, which sweat and twist about and carry one's whole unworthy weight. And then there's walking, which involves bending one's feet, which creases them. And though it's hard to walk without bending one's feet it is not impossible; I took up a wide stance, nearly bowlegged, and lifted my feet robotically high with every step. I wouldn't have attracted much more attention wearing them on my hands. 

There were insane minutiae to take care of on such shoes. I mean, there's dog poo in this big dirty world, but also defilement you can't even see if you don't look for it. For example, there are stars about an eighth of an inch in diameter that run along the bottom of the front of nike dunks which are a marker of their condition. If you dig in your toes to run or dance or otherwise move in a not absurdly delicate way you'll rub the stars off straight away, but then that would ruin them. It's like walking on holy nails. 

So I'll start hitting the pavement with them. It's just in time for winter, for snow, and, horror of horrors, salted streets. If you see a guy wearing golden sneakers in a blizzard, please don't let him (me) be misunderstood. It is my principled, clownish crusade.

the next time ive got my shirt stuck halfway over my head with my sleeves still bound over my wrists because i forgot to unbutton them i will try to embrace the moment. i'll try to think of my circumstances, the view of the inside of the woolen plaid, the 3 inches of leeway i've got to move my arms, as the paradigmatic predicament of another organism. i'm a rhino with seven hundred flies on my eyelid which i will never, ever be able to get rid of; i'm a hammerhead shark with a headache and no one has ever cared; i'm a dog, i've heard there are things called colors but i can't see them and that makes me blue. or at least (best?) imagine myself houdini.

man that was some pretty feel good shit i just wrote. so cute it's loathsome. live in the moment, man!

funny consequence of my feminism:

drop the women from "women and children" in war time. it is, anyway, a patently bogus and mortal underestimation of women, who are just as homicidal as they want to be. as far as kids are concerned, i've still got some hope for the world. i mean, really. if there's really an 8 year old who really wants to kill me, that's reason enough for me to die as far as i'm concerned.

but new horizons beckon, remember that scene in full metal jacket? we'll be mowing down crack armies of teenyboppers before too long. the world is too sad.

Purge by Sofi Oksanen

i just finished reading Purge by sofi oksanen. it's pretty great. i only just realized that purge is a terrific name for the story. it's about lives and places riddled with evil compromises. the "chrome boot" on everyone's chest and neck can make a marriage a horrific betrayal, a sibling rivalry practically murderous, can make a child silent. the conclusion, or the proposed one, is physical dissolution. it's all too contaminated.

the fortitude and toughness was in those estonian kitchens as much as it was in the forests with the men and guns. to keep pickling, to do all those chores, to see the world with such suspicious and exacting eyes because that's how you were seen. purge is about a time when leaving the stove on or the cupboard open could be pretty mortal mistakes.

and there's really no reprieve from that drabness. the ending, written in missives from the NKVD, really is the tone of the whole book. the characters feel the NKVD's gaze and adopt it, half humanized by their own terror.

well there's a reprieve: the cooking. the descriptions of the sugar beet concoctions and the loaves brushed with sizzling pig fat and the jars exploding with horseradish and garlic and tomatoes are tantalizing. one terrifyingly tense scene takes place in a thick mist of horseradish, with brutal, terrible men wiping at their burning eyes, doing something like crying. it's the closest thing to a fair fight between good and evil in the book.

I really didn't find Zara interesting, the story's really best in the thick of the commie regime. It's an amazing examination of how magnified and terribly powerful the dynamics of daily life become in a place like that. Town gossipers are intelligence agents, the local rowdy kids are the front lines of ideological oppression, conformist boyfriends are actual life savers.  And in many ways people don't change at all.

thoughts for today:
when and why did milk stop getting delivered? why was milk in particular delivered in the first place?

it should be shameful to play dumbass video games in public. why the hell are people not ashamed to be doing that? it occurred to me that the idea of being attractive to other people drives us to be good people, to make the world a better place. maybe this is dead wrong, maybe it's super sexy to lead lynch mobs. but it seems like a reasonable thing: shower, brush teeth, don't be a sarcastic ass were all revelations for me when i realized around freshman year of high school that i desperately wanted girls to be attracted to me and took concrete measures. intelligence, intellectual curiosity too should be one of these things. why is it not gigantically shameful to be seen doing something so inane and mindless and stupefying? how can we get people to fucking READ something? writing this i recall “If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!” -- said by the very saucy john waters. so maybe yeah. i don't know what should happen, but fucking angry birds and other such crap should not be socially acceptable.

it's great to see something i've written published, but especially something i'm not terribly proud of. i feel like i've got some insight into the grand unfinished-ness of so much that looks so final, and with it a powerful antidote to stifling dreams of perfection. i know a secret, i know for a goddamn fact that something looking awfully official is pretty second rate. one always has suspicions about these things, but finally i'm sure; i'm the author.

time for bed, i hope i dream of k.

here's a terrible thing: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/us/obama-backs-aides-stance-on-morning-after-pill.html?_r=1&hp

the argument for requiring a prescription for this plan b pill was that a 11 year old girl could buy it along with her bubble gum. but then:

“Where is an 11-year-old going to get the $50 to buy this product?” asked James Trussell, director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. “Why would they want to? It’s all nonsense.”


these are sad times. obama really is a compromise president between the moderately right wing democrats and the super right wing republicans. he's exactly what he promised. bof.

hockey is monstrous

yo there can not be fighting in hockey anymore. that stuff is despicable. i just read the series of articles on derek boogaard, a guy whose job was to fight people on the opposing team. it's absolutely criminal to be sending people out to do that every night, or even every ten nights. the descriptions of that man's hands are horrifying. and his brain had brown spots on it. something called CTE had set in, which basically means that when a doctor asked him to list words he could think of starting with "r" he couldn't think of any. there were brown spots all over his brain.

he was 6'7 and 250 pounds and his career was set in motion after he beat up some kids when he was 15. the guy could hardly skate.  

thoughts over lunch

wouldn't it be crazy if we actually came around to believing that hungry children in africa, or just old fashioned poor people in any old place where it's super normal to have, materially, nothing, deserve more than just the pennies of our pockets, a moment of our time? it's the tradition in commercials begging for 50 cents a day or something, some totally forgettable sum so that you can totally forget, because that's really all they can expect. maybe it'd be more effective if they came out and screamed, if they railed against the mind boggling absurdity of that which most every american is born into and the preposterous wretchedness taken for granted in many parts of the world, if they came out and demanded 30% of your income because, you swine, how dare you expect to have so much when so many have so little? in writing this i'm clearly not writing about the many poor people in the united states, but there are plenty for whom that'd be totally reasonable.

this ultimate not-giving-a-shit about people in other countries is at the bedrock of so much bad shit in the world, and even the most leftist people out there have a VERY hard time trying to think of a way to say we should have less because, COME ON, people over there have nothing and this is the only sane adjustment to make.

i read an article on black friday about how some shoppers were realizing what they were doing to the employees of some of these stores by coming in at 10pm or something, that they were party to the exploitation of the employees being made to work then, and that those employees were just like them. this stuff with other parts of the world having nothing compared to us is analogous, on a global scale. but how can we ever get over having cheap stuff and having as much as we think we deserve? it's monstrous stuff.

all the strangers in lynch's movies! no one meets in a conventional way, no friends of friends here. just the sinister chance meetings. how DO these people know each other? they just emerge from the street. it could seem like a cheap plot trick, to just have shit fall into your lap (like these tapes in lost highway), but it seems like that's lynch's understanding of what human encounters can so often be in big, anonymous cities of today

while i was taking a bath i thought i had something to say about it but i don't anymore, i was under the influence of a horribly hot thing. it's strangely uncomfortable to float in the still waters of a tub. like, i don't like my appendages to


this is too intimate. suffice it to say that it's odd how comfortable it is to be strapped into our clothes.


tomorrow im flying to portland maine and it feels a bit hectic. it turns out i'm not sick. the hematologist said i might have some slight, slight auto immune disorder but nothing keeping me from being a superhero. what a sleepy bloke i am.

i ordered a coffee at wayne's coffee because my hands were freezing and then sat down at the table right next to the counter which turned out to be an ideal spot to plot to steal a pastry from the counter. there was no one at my back and a column that halved the counter, on the other side of which the employees lingered; there was one 30 something schlub and 4 or 5 blonde girls scattered about. and i was sitting there reading on the road by jack kerouac, really ready to hate it half out of insecurity and half because i'm inclined to disrespect narratives and all that active living because i'm really a homebody. and his prose is so wild and fresh, even today, the best kind of comic book punctuation, and i'm feeling very stale and absurd and overwrought plotting for this macaron. i'd settled on the vanilla macaron that was sticking up on the left side of the little glass bowl.

but i had so many problems. it's amazing how a little plot like this is foiled by the meanderings of fate. people kept coming in, though it was nearly empty. and there was a door to the kitchen on the far side that'd have a clear view of me and my arm. and there was a woman sitting 10 feet to my right who looked sour but eager and extremely willing to have a conversation and not that interested in her paper and whose wandering eyes would sink the whole enterprise. and so i felt very baroque emotions for the complexity of the set up, and found meaning in how my cellphone had forgotten the date and time, so it was 1:22AM on January 4th, 2006, and which i kept thinking was vibrating but was actually just a quiver in my thigh. the whole situation was so bombastic, an exquisite scaffolding of meaninglessness, compared to the absurdly active world i was reading about, all external, hardly a moment for reflection when nothing was not totally new, when the whole world wasn't right there in the horizon, ever moving, and blinding you or freezing you in the night -- you know what i mean, just that he's exposed to the raw immensity of it all.

and it's all the more embarrassing because i feel like i'm imitating that falling-forward writing of his.

Freedom

what's it say about god, the birds eye view to read novels in which everyone's unhappy, and so convincingly so, because their narrow understanding of their lives and the universe can yield no other conclusion, while everyone else is staying miserable armed with that parallel narrow mindedness? happiness is in other people and all in the way you understand them. the high drama of lots of stuff, as the birds eye view reader, are the pinnacles of dubious feeling worked up in solitude, feelings one can't unravel because they're too tight with dignity and privacy and all the other unhappy bullshit that keeps us from other people.

but who wants to take the average, then, by talking it out?

it's sad how bottomlessly hypocritical i am. it's just so hard to be in this world, to be principled. not too long ago i was raging, raging against the inexpensiveness of meat, about how frankly unconscionable it was to be a meat eater because, well, it destroys the world. but you can't blame people about this so much, they'll walk within the cordons of price and fashion, and the world today has put the blinking lights and neon arrows in the steak aisle. so it goes.

but i ache for change and i half believe that we could all make a difference if we worked together and sacrificed. i made the sacrifice and now i've got a soapbox. but there are so many other causes in the world. the fact is i really relish my soapbox, you could not unreasonably accuse me of being a vegetarian for the sole reason of having a grounds on which to denounce other people. i get awfully universal about it; i've got this cause and if you aren't with me you aren't living right. my sister brought me down about this. she reminded me that the world was awfully big and that people have their own causes, things as important as i thought my vegetarianism, and that i likely wasn't living up to their own hopes about transforming the world. like i'm not a vegan, don't give away all my possessions, don't vote socialist, am an ass, etc.

the other night a friend of k's and mine was over and she's got a much taller soapbox than i do. and she mentioned something about flying, and how all the cute recycling one does, all the plastic bottles you've doted on don't mean anything when you compare it to the panda incinerating industrial hell furnace that is an airplane. people shouldn't fly. now k lives in stockholm and i'm from new york and i'm in stockholm right now but im going to have to go home soon. and i am going to miss her wretchedly and i am going to  get on airplanes as often as i can afford and come here. and the friend knows this. and so i hated her in that moment. what a fucking low ass blow.

there's this play i read a while ago by peter weiss with a very long title about the marquis de sade and an insane asylum and jean paul marat. it's about the french revolution, at any rate. and there's this one speech in which marat, i think, is bemoaning the failures of revolution from his bathtub. he talks about sacrifice. he talks about all the sympathetic, righteous feeling there is in the world, but how on an individual level things break down. things get sentimental, special. he talks about how one man wouldn't give up his house and another his dog. one woman wouldn't give up her husband. and it goes on. and that's the death of it, the romantic particulars, the singulars, the individuated life. i don't think i could ever really believe that someone could know what it's like, let alone have a parallel experience to my missing k. and so i'll take my goddamn flight. and strike a blow for the status quo.

of mice and men is so fucking terrific

of mice and men is the most beautiful book in the world! 

i mean, it's too obvious to be good, it's found in high school classrooms. it must be good the way a truncheon is good at crowd control, a thing with which to herd students towards knowledge and adulthood. 

but it's SO GOOD! it's wrenchingly beautiful. it is so fucking touching! AMERICA, YOU MAKE PEOPLE SO SAD! 

like it's so beautiful how curley's wife's face sets after she, you know. when it isn't so heavy with broken dreams anymore, no more bitterness about "pitchers"

when i talked to k about the book, raving with love, she spoke of her horror of it, horror at the uncanniness of lennie. and he is a monster. and she's right of course. but it "wadn't never done in meanness." it was, if anything, done with the wildest misunderstanding and terror. 

and slim! slim the sage! and the poetry of the unlearned working man, the beauty of speaking like you spit. 

and george's rhapsody about land. that book makes a terrible sucker out of you. what a tantalizing thing. 

and the repetition of it! the spareness of the metaphors and the rhythm of their lives. this goes with the poetry of the working man, really. it's so elegant, it's got the suppleness of old leather, of a thing done many times.

man i LOVE that book.

Inland Empire!

well that was difficult and frightening and very long and incomprehensible.

i love the TV hostess that asks nikki about an affair. she's a smiling monster. it's important and wonderful to show how terrifying those frozen faces are.

also, the woman holding the lighter up to show her the light as she dies. and the women doing the locomotion on the shag carpet.

i've already forgotten the whole thing. where can i put this? i'd say it's fodder for dreams but it isn't; it'd be predigested. i was reasonably sure there was some underlying feminism, and nina simone was great, but where did all those black people come from?

i think that was awfully close to being a complete waste of time. though in writing that i feel forced to defend really liking mulholland drive. but there're huge differences. like how sloppy it was. and how thin.

oh, everything's fucked

the price of meat! i mean, the price of things in general, but meat in particular! what a circuitous and evil road to the number on a sticker!

this will sound weird, but meat is too cheap. it's evilly cheap. it's too cheap because on it's way to being stuck with a sticker with a number on it lots of things weren't paid for. it's too cheap because spilling 25 million gallons of pig excrement into a north carolina river was free. because every time the meat company smithfield spritzes its neighbors with a mist of feces it's free. because every time someone gets food poisoning from a diseased piece of meat it's free.

i mean, none of those things are actually free. if you own a house that's regularly spritzed with feces your house is significantly less valuable to potential buyers who aren't into that kind of thing. and when you spill 25 million gallons of shit into a river it's wont to kill every single fish in that river as well as make it, you know, lose that appeal for canoeing and romantic contemplation and such. and when you're sick for a day or two, you miss work and it costs something to spend a few hours with your head in a toilet bowl, even if it is hard to quantify exactly.

the problem is that these motley expenses have everything to do with how cheap meat is. they're absurdly varied and often, as with the head in the toilet, super hard to quantify. and they seem awfully far afield of the meat in question; you might not even know it was yesterday's chicken breast that did you in.

but it's because it was too cheap, because it was factory farmed, because it was produced in utterly fantastical conditions --  there's an anecdote (i guess you can call this an anecdote) about a small family working at a factory farm that drowned in a "lagoon" of pig excrement the size of many football fields and about 30 feet deep -- that all those other expenses happened. those externalities.

meat needs to cost more because meat DOES cost more, it's cost is just so sprawling that we can't see it, can't source it. it costs as little as it does because the industry producing it exploits to the last everything that isn't nailed down. this is getting vague now because i'm unprepared to launch into a grand critique of how bargains are never not born of evil and impunity elsewhere -- though sometimes right at home -- i've got all the indignation necessary but none of the organization of thought or specifics of knowledge necessary to definitively damn capitalism, the world, most people, etc. as beyond fixing.

this has been an angry and invigorating day. it's a bit sad how i never feel more alive than when i'm outraged.

stay tuned for my definitive opus on the wickedness of the world, to be completed sometime in the next sixty years; externalities is the key, key word.

the essence of it is that i've got no faith in convincing people, in the whole world eating less meat. this'll only change if it costs more. people will do nice things less if they're expensive. so that's what has to happen

the right to make noise for oneself

isn't it crazy how one can't just scream? it's an ironic nightmare, because it's the inverse of that storied fear: "no one can hear you." but in a city, it's kind of a suffocating thing to have all these anonymous ears enforce a certain decorum. one can scream among friends, i suppose. but on the street? in an apartment? i just want to scream because i want to let something out of myself. it'd be a scream for me, not for help. and i can't! i don't want a goddamn knock on the door! what a peculiar agony, what a tightness in my chest.

a body just feels a bit small sometimes, that's all. i'm sure jumping jacks would do the trick just as well, but they'd present their own difficulties with the neighbors; plus the leaping and clapping thing feels a bit stupid. it just doesn't smack of anguish, and i kind of relish feeling that.

so watching the black power mixtape, and angela davis in particular, convinces me that one shouldn't necessary call a group that advocates violence violent, but rather call it self defense. this'd be giving those groups the respect they deserve, constituted as they are, or have been, by people who suffer a lot of violence from the police.

but this still doesn't clarify for me whether self defense, or however you market it, is actually useful to a cause. it seems too easy to villify and make monstrous anybody who fights against the police; we live in a civilized country where law enforcement has a monopoly on violence, and there are probably some good reasons for that. it's just real fucking scary to me and most people that i know. i am a privileged white kid and i've never been a victim of police violence so perhaps i'm not the one to say. but i am the one to say in the sense that i'm a citizen and i choose whether or not to associate myself with political movements and if one is getting violent that gets me down and makes me want to stay away. and it'd suck to lose a super sympathetic guy like me. am i wrong though? i mean, i've always thought that violence was just fundamentally a deal breaker, that as soon as it came out that the protesters were not avowedly peaceful, were in fact avowedly packing, did in fact KILL SOMEBODY, made people bleed, the whole population that'd never been exposed to police violence would abandon that movement.

is that a socialized thing? could that be changed? is the blood of a police officer this magical substance i've felt it is? i mean, it is pretty important in that that signifies revolution and not reform. (does it? i guess not if you understand it as self defense) perhaps if there was more publicity of police brutality protester violence could be more sympathetic, nothing's set in stone. one'd just have to contextualize it better. reinforce, time and time again, that they were attacked. this would still preclude protesters readying themselves to fight, that'd undermine the whole peaceful thing. if people show up with weapons, even if they insist so sweetly that they're only in case the police turn out to be brutes, that pretty severely undermines that argument. so violence but only if they hadn't started protesting with visible weapons in any way? hidden weapons? no. so just ad hoc weapons, which is to say they'd have no chance, which is to say one shouldn't try to protest violently, to fight back. i'd love to be told i'm wrong, or at least i'd be curious to hear that. maybe k would tell me differently. ha! what a funny thing that is to say at the end of this, by appending her to this i implicate her as its inverse; a glimmer of a mention paints her as definitively as could be. one who might disagree

this really funny thing happens every morning. recently, because i've started to fear having a little belly, because i don't want to be a little panting shrew for the rest of my life, i've started doing some really meager exercise every morning. it's meager but it's enough to make a shrew pant and that's the idea, right? it's baby steps, but not in the true sense of progress and moving forward, only that baby steps are about all the effort i care to invest in this.

i hold off on eating to do this little exercise because it's pretty incredible the noises one's stomach will make if there's stuff in it, like i'm pregnant or something, like my cereal has a right to be at peace before it dies its fiery death in that acid of mine. so i hold off on eating before i exercise. but i also hold off on exercise because i don't want to do it. so what happens is i'm generally driven to exercise by hunger. i'll even prepare the food in advance as a way to try to convince myself to do this utterly shitty thing, all the worse because it isn't gallant and attractive and 80s leggings when i do it, it's just solitary shrew panting on the rug. and it's such a stubbornly filthy rug, all the sins of humanity are embedded in its fibers, and when i stand up off of that thing i've got them on my back. just to give you an idea of the moral atlas i am.

so when i finally finish these exercises i'm raving with hunger and also panting, my arms collapse to my sides like i'm a desultory monkey. and i fall on the food. i can never restrain myself. and so this horrible scene happens every morning, when the desperate intake of both air and peanutbutter happens, and my mouth is a ragged maelstrom, spitting and swallowing.

frank is MOVED

http://www.nplusonemag.com/OCCUPY_OWSgazette.pdf


this is so fucking great! what a substantial, soberly felt movement! there's an awful lot to understand about what's wrong with the world, and the little i know has only ever convinced me that i can never know and therefore can't go about trying to change something i don't understand into something i've never really tried imagining. but they're there! a malaise is actionable and they're actioning it! and they aren't corny!

FRANK IS TROUBLED

i have rarely felt more rotten than i do now, because i fear i've been rejected by something i loathe. i need to get the job at hollister though. my innards are going in all different directions but crawling there. crawling in despair of not getting to stay here, crawling because i was stupid enough to not dupe the manager, some bug eyed girl from dallas texas who, smiling so fucking blankly, chides the laziness of swedes with their socialism and their silver platters. what a little idiot. but i need that job!

aaaaaahhhhhhhgggggg

i should've realized when she was telling me about her time in turkey where she got to see the places in the bible. but, when asked what things i was proudest of, i scrambled and just started speaking -- it's amazing how one can just speak when necessary, the spoken bullshitting is more strikingly bullshit, smellier and more vacuous, because it's scary how quickly and fast it comes. i've got a raging river of empty nonsense dammed up in my mind and i don't like seeing it. anyway, i mentioned the article they printed in the local newspaper about homosexuals and romcoms and whatever, but i felt the mood cooled significantly because, well, it was about HOMOS! how could i have been so STUPID! and now i'm anxious! i'm reduced to thinking ill of myself and my leadership abilities because of being so unprepared for that goddamn interview! how did i not think up some goddamn camp counselor anecdotes; camper with dead parent, rescued canoe, lost puppy, whatever the fuck. and now what the fuck am i gonna do.




also, i want to write like pauline kael. there's some awkward ambition, it's even worse to have written it down. now everything i type seems to steam with pretense, with trying.

shortcuts

anybody ever seen robert altman's shortcuts? that movie is a fucking DOWNER. i mean, well done, that is GREAT, that is as big as this world, it's like a billion times better than this movie i saw recently, magnolia, which now that i think about it is pretty much a remake. what a shitty imitation. anyway, yeah. it's ENORMOUS, there are tons of marvelous little bits, relationships i actually believed in, a real relief from wuthering heights where heathcliff is ever sending his soul to hell and back for catherine because he's an ALIEN and NOT REAL, but these were some fucking actual relationships, ones full of contingency, that's the fucking word, relationships contingent on this big and very affecting world we live in.

shortcuts is a terrific name for this movie; that is one wry, sly title

kira says i'm like a baby when i speak swedish, such is the miraculousness, the surprise, the newness. i have mixed feelings on this.

windows! the portals!

i mean, really, the thing i should write about, if i am to write about things that i actually think about, not tepid little thoughts that i stretch into weak, tedious paragraphs by way of writing, that fundamentally long winded thing, is windows in stockholm. because they, along with puts, are that defining thing that make this city so special and beautiful. they are what make this city open, what lights this city. its such an obvious but novel thing that people's private spaces light the street, that stockholm scarcely needs streetlights because of the glow cast by every home. and i know, yes, it's a beautiful thing borne of the wretchedness of a land plunged in darkness, but it opens this city up, it makes its structures transparent. i'd love to talk to an architect about how the emphasis on windows effects how they design. this city glows by the light of its people.

there're these shipping containers being used as offices across the street from kira's apartment and they've installed windows in them. i mean, it's fucking obvious, i'd rather die than be stuck in a shipping container without one, but still. there's a fucking beautiful thing here.

so i may be working at hollister within a few weeks. it'll be good for me, in the trenches with a company i deplore aesthetically and philosophically. i don't even like the smell, it evokes people who fantasize about grinding, it evokes me at my most sarcastic, sexually frustrated and pimpled. it's very dark in there, you can't see very well except for what they're selling, which is pretty brilliant. it's the kind of lighting that gives a pimpled boy hope that his fantasies will come true.

i went to an information session today. the company is proud that hollister, together with abercrombie and fitch, gilly hicks and some other kids store are entirely interchangeable. if you've worked at one you can work at any of them. globally. i mean, this is particularly egregious and funny in sweden because they can import the america they're selling blaringly unaltered.

hilly is a pretty weak word

you get to feel like a pilgrim getting around in stockholm; the slopes are biblically steep, redemptively steep, and you cannot avoid them. "hey darling would you be a savior and go grab some milk from the store?"

well, either that or a sociable mountain goat. maps of stockholm should be topographical; it often simply isn't true to say that ulf lives this 4 blocks this way and 7 that way when it is also a vertical distance of 300 meters. this city is not navigated as the goddamn crow flies -- side note, crows are as common as pigeons here, super weird -- it'd be like measuring someone's hike up a mountain by measuring the distance from the mountain's base to where the summit maps onto the ground deep within the mountain.

man, stockholm is great

you don't get lost in stockholm or overwhelmed by it the way you do other cities. part of why new york is so dazzling and vertiginous is because you can't get any perspective on it. when you look at a painting in a museum you step back in order to get a sense of it. in cities, the buildings are like paintings, except that you can't back up because there's another equally large painting right behind you. it's because of this that the most recognizable pictures of new york are of its skyline, taken from new jersey or something, someplace where new york has finally ceased looming over the photographer, where the gigantic fact of new york is comprehensible. because stockholm's a bunch of little islands, you regularly get that vista, that room to breathe. though it is a pretty weeny, homey place; when i first came here over the summer i felt i could count the windows in this city if i wanted to. 

seeing water all the time is a psychic boon. water's dynamism is a relief from the unchanging, dirty and boring things that people build. it moves! it changes color! it's a richer sky. it also enriches the sky; this summer stockholm attracted herds of clouds that feasted on the city's water, building their cumulous castles and swallowing all the sun, as fat and luminous as happy cows. 

stockholm is fucking natural, man

i needed kira to open the door for me recently so i threw pebbles at her window. i threw pebbles that i found on the street at kira's window. stockholm is like that. it's mutable and alive, its ground is more than hard cement; you can get a handful of it. think, for example, of the mania to get a seat whenever a stadium closes, of the romance of an uprooted paving stone in paris, of how irresistible it is -- though maybe this is only true of drunk college kids -- to steal construction signs off the street. most cities are great, hard wholes because they'd just be dry bones if they weren't, like the rubbed away patches of ancient things that you're allowed to pet in museums. 

the streets are littered with snails when it rains; the dogs are off leash; you can just drop your apple on the ground because the ground, the living ground, will deal with your apple for you. kira went out in the rain one night and came back with a handful of dirt and rocks with which to replant a plant. her hands were dirty in a way that wasn't gross. it wasn't city dirt, which clings and sweats and stains. it was the dry, the cleansing kind. 

stockholm is natural, man. it's not a city in the typical earth suppressing sense, you get the feeling that you're on the tip of the iceberg of naturalness. its parks are not dandified "poets’ walks" with imported boulders, they're actual forests. there are stairways careening up rocky cliffs. its buildings aren't taller or shorter because the developer was more or less of an asshole, they were just built on higher or lower ground.

the buildings and stuff

and then there's puts! it translates as plaster but it's so much more than that. it twinkles in the sun and it's velvet in the shade. puts facades are either blank and flat and a bit fuzzy, or great warty things, seas of a billion pustules. they're beautiful. puts facades look like they're at the critical stage when something simple and elegant is about to be prettified, made symbolic, made to signify a certain, heavy quantity of money.

puts is colorful too, but in shades that don't insist on a certain mood, a certain weather. it has the understatement of a white canvas, of a thing built to receive and not project. it looks a lot like florida stucco except that it doesn't look like a wet cat when it rains. it's all things to all skies.

but not everything is puts. there is a lot of objectively ugly architecture in stockholm, stuff with aluminum siding, with drab geometry, with the clunkiest of balconies. but they aren't because of the windows. it's like everyone living in stockholm is out to convince you that everyday is christmas morning here. no one has not spent eight years finding that shade of orange that just glows in the morning light. everyone has these large, ridiculously well polished windows and absolutely no one is using their curtains. they're like hearths, like lanterns of domesticity; they bespeak rocking chairs and eating a little too much. they make big ugly structures into something lived in and respected and handsome. (recently though, it was explained to me that people have a special relationship to their windows because of the darkness and depression of the winters here. but this is about more than light, it's about warmth and home.)


realizing that ugly buildings aren't ugly because they're endowed with the pride of their occupants made me wonder about the occupants themselves. swedes are famously attractive people, but perhaps they're just flush with their citizenry in a relatively just country. "maybe she's born with it, maybe it's social democracy."  

you can actually see the social democracy in stockholm, like in how the streetlights hang from metal cables bolted to neighboring buildings. maybe you've got to be an american to imagine someone complaining that that cable is on my property, but i can. the massive infrastructure to keep the lights on is lashed to every private building, and maybe you've got to be an american to see a symbol of collectivity in that, too. the cables also look terrific, as nimble and sharp as a bird through air. they're an invitation to tarzan swinging or spiderman swooping.

and the scaffoldings here are the sturdiest things i have ever seen. there's probably a direct correlation between how much a country cares about its working class and how rickety its construction sites are, like a literalized social safety net.

pedestrian

stockholm is like an infuriatingly benevolent parent. i like to think of myself as a notorious jaywalker, but here, i can't cross streets in all my rebellious glory because the cars always yield. in new york, darting across the street is a riotous thrill because i know half the cars accelerate when they see me; i'm not an inconvenience, i'm in a war! but here, a car will come to a complete stop for you, and the driver will shake their head at your saucy behavior, and it really gets me down. nothing neuters like other people's civility. 

and there are some people who get angry. kira, a dedicated feminist, is wont to yell jävla fitta -- fucking cunt -- at cars that fail to yield. i saw a postman on a scooter stop for a little old man shuffling across the street against the light. the postman beeped lengthily, disbelievingly. the old man continued down the street and the postman turned off in the same direction, slowed down to beep at him some more, and unfolded his middle finger before finally speeding off. these people may be finicky nitpicking sticklers, but they are in the right. 

madame bovary

i really don't know what to think of this book. i'm pretty overwhelmed by it and i'm dazzled by all the stuff that people -- having read it a dozen times and translated it -- have to say about it. it's a super disappointing thing to read the book's introduction still so pleasantly bewildered, to know that every single one of one's uncertainties and hunches and feelings have already been distilled into workman like little essays on "neighbors" or "marriage" or "childhood" in the novel. they don't leave much room to waffle and dream, they don't much allow for the infinite oddities of a book that is, ultimately, about a faraway country 150 years ago.

one thing that i sheepishly think about madame bovary is that this is, in a sneaky way, a salute to the plodding charles bovary. he sires the title, he brackets the story. in a preface michele something or other writes that this was flaubert's subversive node to the male dominated world in which women lived (for the real story, of course, is emma's). but something the book made me think of is what constitutes drama, a tale worth telling. you get swept up reading the book by the fear, always fulfilled, that this will fade, that feelings strenuously felt will eventually exhaust themselves and that emma's performative emotions will be revealed for what they are. her paramours are no more particular than the velvet of her dresses, they only exist insofar as they provoke feeling in her. it doesn't seem to me that emma ever acknowledges that they (or anyone else she interacts with in the book, for that matter) have interior selves.

anyway, emma's got the story. the intro talks about how we start off with this charbovari guy and it's throwing us for a loop; we doubt if this young man who grows like an oak will hold our attention. he isn't given the chance, but he definitely wouldn't. but what's interesting in this is how this intensely boring man contains love in the most pure, passionate form imaginable. or maybe not, maybe it's contentment -- he is described as pretty passively enjoying her company and not trying to ravish her every other minute, but that's its own proof; emma was a spectacularly shitty spouse, i'm pretty sure charles is banned from her room, her floor of the house for a good 75% of the book and he's regularly described restraining himself for fear of disturbing the one he so pathetically loves. and the ending is its own proof; this man dies without her.  if he'd been simply content, the falsification of that domestic happiness with the discovery of her infidelity wouldn't be so devastating, charles doesn't have a lot of pride to lay him low. what he did have was love.

this is a pretty funny thing to bring up. there's a book in the 19th century, a big, interesting book that's all about a woman and the things she feels! it condescends to her, yes, and pretty forcefully identifies her as a woman, but it's still about her. and then i try and put emphasis back on this stodgy little bourgeois man. but still, it's in that ruddy simpleton that there is love, the real and not performative love, the love as intense and drunk and eternal as any oriental farce.

also, the intro to the book makes elaborate arguments about flaubert being subversive and taking down the bourgeoisie. it argues he was depressing them from the inside, rotting out the conventional people with his relentlessly cynical novels. and that they are, but that is pretty weak. and in a novel so epically flowery, so "supremely beautiful," i think it's a mistake to say that something that might conceptually nibble at the edifice of bourgeois life actually does anything at all to it. if anything, it reinforces it because people are underratedly blockheaded in taking what they will from culture, in cherry picking. and in madame bovary there is a smorgasborg of contented-ass  landscape painting and towering love affairs and everything passionate and beautiful that one might ask of life. and for many readers, perhaps nearly all, that is all they will take from it.

this bullshit about punishing job creators that republicans keep hawking, claiming that raising taxes on people who have an enormous amount of money means that there won't be any jobs, is the most lying nonsense. the reason there are jobs -- and this is part of the whole structure of capitalism -- is because there are people who have money to spend. and since the government won't raise revenues people have to be laid off which means that people don't have money to spend which means that things won't get bought and more people will fall into poverty.

ending unemployment benefits or laying off teachers or whatever means that those people collecting unemployment or who were teaching may well plunge headlong into not having money to spend on things. and i suppose what these scoundrel republicans are arguing for is that these public sector beneficiaries will be hired by private business, and that they'd be more likely to do this if there were no taxes on them, but there's enough evidence out there saying that that isn't true to make one yank out one's hair in a single handful.

the guy living two floors above kira

The winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize for literature is eighty years old. A reporter said he had been coming to his building for the past three years on this day, and that it had rained all three days. A neighbor said they had been waiting on this for fifteen years. The winner, the poet Tomas Tranströmer, hasn't really spoken since he had a stroke about twenty years ago.

The subjects of news are sometimes preposterously fragile things, and they make you realize how much energy and eventfulness and tension news brings to bear. It's an unreasonably bright light, and when news shines it on something like Tranströmer it can't but rebound upon the news itself. News is a very incestuous thing; the photographers photograph other photographers photographing, and a writer thinks that this a dynamic worth chronicling. There's a hierarchy of litheness: a lumbering camerawoman was filming the nameplate on the door while two photographers, like agile little scavengers, leapt and pranced on the stairs behind her, using her light on the door and her body for their meta coverage.

For most people who are not megalomaniacs, being news must be fantastically unpleasant. Lights were blinking red and there was an extremely loud, erratic beeping that sounded like a robot parakeet. The staircase was unnavigable and camera flashes were extra bright and frequent because these pictures go in the paper -- to get seen one has to get blinded. There were young, irreverent people who were there because the equipment is heavy and because the point is to get there, panting, and to scoop, break and get the story. And so there was also a young man who took off his shirt in the hallway, who wore boxer briefs with a purple geometric pattern and Michael Jordan sneakers. There were dozens of these people.

There were strangers who hadn't read his poetry but who needed a piece of him, to claim to have known him in some small way. When you're news you are scrutinized by professional curiosity, by an industry that crowns interviewers by how good they are at making people cry (see Piers Morgan). When you're news you need a security guard.

Someone told me that Tranströmer plays the piano with his left hand, that he had in fact just been playing while we were out in the hall. They were surprised I hadn't heard.

It's super weird, hilarious, wonderful to think that this guy heard the same horrible renovations that I heard in this apartment, I love the idea of my silly little life with it's sensory perceptions being sensed by someone who senses so exquisitely. It's like a challenge to me to try to hear the finer monstrosity of the drilling that starts at 7:30 AM. 

Rebel Without a Cause

I knew James Dean was young and extremely good looking and that he died on a motorcycle, and I knew that Rebel Without a Cause has the word rebel in it, and so this paean to patriarchy really caught me off guard. The movie is about how America need more dads, and manlier dads at that. It's about how all too often dads fail to assert themselves by abusing their wives and children, how sometimes they even end up in the kitchen.

America's sons are shooting puppies, its daughters are incestuous sluts, its daddies are donning floral aprons. But Jim Stark (James Dean), soldier of patriarchy, is here to save the day. He will not abide being called chicken, he'll offer you his coat at the drop of a hat, "he doesn't say much but when he does you know he's sincere."Jim is the star of a movie in which the acme of honor is going to the police station to hash things out with the local authority figures. We've come a long way to get to La Haine. Jim is here now, and Jim will be your dad. That is, if you aren't a sniveling, faggot, momma's boy deviant, in which case it's probably for the best that you're dead -- you can shore up Jim's sweetheart bona fides as he cries over your body without having to confront the bigotry that made you a murderous outcast.

I loved the super sneaky ending with the guy walking up the stairs to work, that was some SLY conformity there.

I sincerely appreciated james dean's daringly unfinished sentences, the guy is a terrific actor. He really got the laconic, manly, ''sincere'' thing down pat. Also, this movie is super beautiful. The colors are great, I really want that red jacket and some levis now. I have often claimed to have invented the white t shirt, but that is pretty clearly untrue.

the glow

isn't it nuts how one never, ever gets tired when looking at a computer screen? it's the evil, foundational fact of the thing, of how it suckers you into staring at useless stuff far past your bedtime. That LCD glow puts you into a state of immovable stupefaction. For something to not make you tired is somehow proof that it is a bad, bad thing. Anything worthwhile has to eventually make you want run away. This has its end in rivulets of drool. It's immortality in the worst way.

pulp fiction

this isn't news, but pulp fiction is a really fantastic movie. the best thing about it might be the way its characters are so articulate. everyone is working class in the most barbaric sense, but they've got this hard, clear, brilliant speech. "the motherfucker's tip top"; "is there a sign that says dead nigger storage?"; "I'm gonna get medieval on your ass." The seriousness and professionalism of the characters too; that Jules and Vincent arrive at that door at 7:30AM transforms your impression of them.

Jules' sermons! The drug dealer with his madman at friend prices! Vincent appreciating the five dollar milkshake! Butch's terms of endearment! Butch's pop tarts! And poor Marvin in the wake of Jules' miracle is sublimely vulgar; that is the best thing I have ever seen.

sweden!

I've found my calling in sweden: playing chess with old laconic men from the north. when they do talk they talk about vikings. they're very pale, and with their jelly red noses and lips they look like they just came in from the cold. it's difficult to get their rhythm, often when i was convinced the line had gone dead Tord (like the god of thunder) would putter back to life again, this time to tell me about vikings in sicily. I felt like a whippersnapper, like dog running around and around its owner with its leash, like a hummingbird waiting for spring.

i beat Tord all three times and it felt good.

opera is a damn silly thing

so i'm pretty sure opera is a fundamentally bogus form. it really doesn't work. its parts don't fit. you simply cannot foist incomprehensible singing onto narrative. the singers that can act cannot act saddled with the tempo of the music, cannot be characters, cannot feel anything but the most laughably crude emotions.

i think opera'd be great if it didn't insist on having rigorous narratives. if it was more expressionistic, more painterly, less clunkily claiming to represent a world in which people talk and love and murder just like us, except while singing SO FUCKING LOUDLY. how can it so tediously claim its verisimilitude when its fidelity is not to human heartbeats but the conductors wand, to the music. we sway internally to music, it's effect on  us is real and important, but imposing it on actual human movements is ridiculous. as actors, they're marooned by those arias.

also, isnt it hilarious how in operas people can only feel in duets? because they're frozen in the music, all romances are loved and all conflicts are hated in equal proportion by the parties involved. 

and that there have to be subtitles? 80 feet above the singers (not actors) heads? im not saying operas should be better enunciated, that the towering notes should cross their t's, only that it's such a goddamn  unnatural stretch to have operas depend on those words. 


and it's also why operas are so long. the clutching, loving pain with which opera clings to its every word and note makes it simply ridiculous to insist on it having so many words and notes. again, free it from the responsibility of saying them, ennumerating those operatic stories. let it full throatedly embrace the opera! the voices!
the sets are great! the singing is sometimes revelatory, like the voice of an oak tree or a racing heart or a dying bull. the costumes are wonderful! the sets divine! there just can't be all that plot, it does not fit.

the help

Hey!  The Help! Black people in Jackson, Mississipi, mid twentieth century! Racism is not that big a deal! All you need is one offbeat white girl and some pluck and suddenly Jim Crow is white folks pulling out the chairs for you! You may also decide to be best selling authors and feminists!


Now, The Help isn't all okra and peach pie. There's a nod to Medgar Evers' murder and we almost get to see a billy club in action. But the movie's racism is a bizarrely pure and dense thing. It crowns Hilly, a young woman, the racist, and it is from her that all the ugliness flows. There are auxiliary bigots, but they're just her stooges, and Hilly kind of has to bully them into her devilry. Society isn't racist, some people are just so mean. 

This is an insidious and lying depiction of racism. The Help makes an insistent argument that there were two worlds in the South: the racist South: racist tattooed on its forehead, helpfully synonymous with bitchiness, caddishness and domineering unpleasantness, and the good South, with its barely stifled progressiveness, personal charm and Mexican shoes. Structurally, both have the same maids with the same responsibilities and uniforms (and wages, doubtless), but the movie calls one racist and the other romantic.


This bogus binary is extremely troubling because it equates racism with personality. Because Skeeter's family is personally appealing, their patronizing, racist and fundamentally foul relationship with their black maid is legitimate, and so the illegitimacy of wicked Hilly's relationship to her maid rests on the same grounds. There isn't systemic racism -- the mammy's a member of the family, it's just that there are just some mean families. All the mammies ask is that their fried chicken be properly crispy, their masters not cinematically cruel, their butts permitted to touch the family toilet. If only they got to pee in the same place everything would be alright.

Since all the racism in The Help comes from Hilly the racist, the problem is just that Hilly is so popular and hosts terrific bridge parties. If Hilly wasn't so popular nobody would be racist. So The Help humiliates Hilly in the end, redeems the auxiliary bigots and disappears the racism. Racism is to The Help what plasticity is to Mean Girls, and with all due respect to the evils of Regina George, this is a false and monstrously trivializing analogy. 


On a separate note, it's hilarious how pop cultural ugly ducklings are always incredibly good looking people with their hair curled or their fingernails dirty. i'm waiting for that real thumper of a face, affirmative action for the challenging chins! undersized foreheads! elbows for noses!

still elsewhere

jetlag is a beautiful thing, really. that one's body knows that the sunlight, the eggs in the morning are not on schedule, that one is physically bewildered by this abruptly new world means that one's body was really in the old world, that waking and hungering at a specific time, that the emotional experience of eating an omelette at eight PM is not arbitrary, that they can feel and be wrong makes North American Eastern Standard Time very personal and close.

to come to stockholm with new york grease in my hair, sunlight in my skin, english in my ears, to come to stockholm with the stool of new york food! how thrilling to transplant something, it's halfway time travel to dump new york receipts in stockholm trash cans, what transaction could dream of such a journey, such a burial? everything is damn special moved that far that fast. i mean, even by boat filth makes history, some forgettable east indian rats with forgettable germs in their pockets killed two thirds of europe. to travel!

i'm in stockholm! i have arrived! it's raining and grey but the windows are so very bright. it's an odd contrast, there are hardly any curtains. it's like the citizens are committed to projecting their warmth outside and letting in whatever light there is. drab buildings are pretty well transformed by these windows, they look theatrical, as if they'd been made for me looking in as much as a thing to be living within. all a building needs to be beautiful is to let its residents make themselves known.

i am so happy to be here with k. i am addled with tiredness so that i suffer from it subtly, like a drunk denying drunkenness. i don't believe it's actually changed the functioning of my body and mind, but i'm really not one to drop forks, to tie my shoes at epic length. i have a phone card and i am going to have such fun. i think this post is really quite boring.

some emphatic thoughts

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann?currentPage=1 is a very unpleasant read. towards the end, i actually started to hope that he would be executed so that he might be the grounds for the end of executions. but that makes one shiver. texas is a monstrous place. how they called the electric chair sparky is beyond me. when did texas get to be that single state really stoked on killing people?


the state has no right to punish people. jail is to rehabilitate people, to reform them. and if they're unchangeable bad people, then the state has the responsibility to protect other people from them. though even then, recidivism is bankrupt as an indicator of inveterate criminality. given how ex cons are typically thrust out into the world with CONVICT branded on their foreheads and told to do something other than return to what got them in prison, it's little wonder when that's what they do. on that note, if this isn't a medieval, evil country and jail is about rehabilitating someone and not punishing them, it should be illegal to ask on job applications if someone's been convicted of a crime. if they've been convicted and served their sentence then THEY SERVED THE SENTENCE and shouldn't have life be made more difficult for them beyond the prescribed rehabilitation. otherwise, it's extra punishment (and one wont to lead people back to jail because they can't assimilate back into normal life). we say "justice has been served" when someone gets sentenced, it should then be served, and end when the justice of the court says it should end.

and capital punishment is punishment, it makes no bones about it. it's barbaric and it should never happen again. 

The French Connection

THE FRENCH CONNECTION! WOW! THE FUCKING FRENCH CONNECTION! That movie is so fucking great. What a fucking movie. I love that fucking movie. It's such a human movie, it's about people in all their ordinariness. To watch cops watch criminals do errands! To watch them eat and fall asleep! To watch them follow dead ends! I mean really though, what a fucking movie. And the ending! the reduced sentences, suspended sentences, misdemeanors, so honest and wonderful. To watch people huff as they run, stagger and lean with exhaustion. To have bad hunches! USELESS HUNCHES! What a wonderful thing to pay homage to, the useless hunch. And so many other things that I can't even mention without just listing and so rehashing the absolutely beautiful humanness of everything in that fucking thing. Gene hackman HEY. God what a lot of good things. fucking see that movie my god go see it. It does for cops what Unforgiven does for westerns. What a special thing.

I mean, the movie is really disrespectful to its audience. how dare it be so digressive, so half explained. there are a lot of hifalutin movies that have references that you know you don't know, that present you with symbols and chortle when you fail to get it. but this is a different breed of inconsideration altogether, one where you're simply confused, caught in a flurry of chaos that is perhaps just LIFE as much as any studied assemblage of poetic signifiers. even better is that the references there are are often lower class, the hat in the back window, for example. how wonderful to be set loose and to not understand, therein lies the infinity of lived life. how wonderful to not have a goddamn establishing shot and a close up for everything that might be of interest. how wonderful for people to mumble.

i watched it with my dad and sometimes i wonder who he is. when we were walking back i was behaving extremely excitedly and he was very laconic, i got him to laugh once. is my dad old? is that it, is he just really old? it's weird to feel something so utterly and have felt it right next to one's own dad, one's own genetic material, and to not get back that nudge of recognition. am i just super young, irreproducibly young? what a queer, lonely sense of uniqueness that gives you.


how many sweaters does a person need to still be fabulous? i want to have a minimal amount of stuff, but i am also committed to not being as predictable as a peasant. these are serious issues.

can't sleep

i can't sleep a goddamn wink though i'm exhausted. i'm paying for that idiotic fantasy of insomnia. i was convinced that my immediately falling asleep was a sign of my simpleness. i longed to have a troubled soul, to be wracked by obscure hopes and fears and i was convinced that if i lay awake at night that'd be a sure sign of my profundity and complicatedness. I LONGED to be complicated. anyway, i've got the symptoms now but all i feel is bored to anger of myself and my thoughts because all i'm thinking about is what a useless lout i am to be awake for no goddamn reason.

i did some sit ups for the first time in like 4 years because why not punish myself for my wakefulness with exercise. nothing doing, except some shame at how hard they were. sit ups are the most inelegant thing to struggle to do, all form collapses as your limbs splay out in all directions, a paroxysm of pathetic effort to get your goddamn torso up into the air, body shuddering like an old car.

this is fucking dumb as hell.

also, i watched lars von trier's the idiots earlier and that was fucking exquisitely depressing, that man is so full of evil thoughts. he painstakingly constructs evil that doesn't exist just to remind you that if it did exist it sure would be evil. initially it says interesting things indicting the quietism and general bogus-ness of separatism and establishing little utopian spaces and hating the bourgeoisie. but it soon descended into an intimate exploration of a very particular hell of von trier's mind and really nowhere else. he made an excellent point and then beat the dead horse of my misery.

i congratulate him for his daringly clunky film making, leaving the boom in shots, cutting it subversively atrociously, etc. and for daring to include all that nudity and even sex. well done, i suppose.

one final note: what the fuck was with the music from la strada? what was he trying to say invoking that? conflating the idiots with a modernized gelsomina? i don't know what he was trying to get at there, is karen supposed to be a kind of gelsomina? anyway, that really pissed on my soul.


fucking hell.

Broadway Danny Rose

The mob scene was the best. The kaleidoscope of fat faces, lazy eyes, Italian mothers. When they're on the run is generally most wonderful because you forget the facts of this guy's life. Danny Rose has such a hard life and so long as he's trying to not get murdered that's ample distraction. the scene at the macy's parade storage is so great. mia farrow is so good looking. do i like hair that big? really? and the danny rose drunk cure!: worcestershire sauce, baby juice, chicken fat, something something. i also loved the honesty of his repeating himself -- didactic and facetious -- you run out of things to say slathering the world with that much desperate charm.

and it's got all the woody allen quotes you'd expect. why'd it tell the story that way, symposium style? to show that he's remembered? i bet that's it. it ennobles him. this is, insistently, the tale of a man unforgotten. he has a sandwich named after him!

you know, assuming you've got enough energy at the end of the day, shouldn't people be judged for what they believe against what they do? and i mean believe, because that's the essential thing. if someone believes the world, external to their own interests as a person, would be better off if they did this, and they believe it COMPLETELY (even if this is hitler running concentration camps, although, happily, the world at large doesn't tend to inspire that kind of thinking) and they act on that belief, then that is a super terrific person. like, the worst fucking person has got to be the one who believes with a lot of excuses, that they feel themselves alone, that they're just this one person in this big world and what can you do. we really need more people with a messianic complex. except that you've got to start these people off with curiosity. what kind of blows this whole idea, that it would make the world better, is that it wouldn't at all value self doubt. and you've got to value that, listening to other people and generally being curious. because according to this, the saints would be the most stalwart fools. i started thinking about this in terms of people who know, who believe and then don't do anything with that belief, and that's a super rotten thing, but i guess you have to mingle this overheated idea of mine with a responsibility to be curious, and that kind of sinks the whole thing because the great shelter for do-nothing nabobs like me who love talking and believing and nothing else is the great mystery of the world and you can get terribly confused if your curiosity is sufficiently eclectic, especially in its politics. but really, imagine if what was thought was acted on, if my beliefs about spreading the wealth made me make this greenwhich village townhouse into a homeless shelter. i guess the problem is that acting means acting in this world and everything starts to seem so complicated. makes me think of the peter weiss play about the french revolution and the asylum and marat's speech about how the ideology was terrific until one man wanted to keep his house and another his wife and another his dog and finally nothing budged.

brands-branding-cow-ass

It has got to be made an embarrassing thing to be emblazoned with brands. they BRAND YOU, like the thing you do with a hot iron to a cow you own. why is it not embarrassing to have a nike symbol on your chest? I mean, i know it isn't embarrassing, but it should be. the most egregious example are the nascar jackets, the one's pelted helter skelter with 50 goddamn logos. people buy those things and having those logos is part of the goddamn allure! this has to be understood as debasing. we already have an idea of a shill, so let's expand that to the average consumer. stop being a goddamn shill. 

also, mania for branded things makes our wants much more acute and excessive and insatiable. it makes us want not a pair of shoes, but a very specific pair of tod's loafers; not a shirt in which to exercise, but one with a swoosh on it. our wants can be outrageously more particular than they could otherwise be if things were only differentiated by their function or quality, we couldn't respectably fantasize about things which are objectively replicas of what we already have. brands atomize forms -- toaster, sneaker, faucet -- into a hailstorm of desire , with every detail a new grounds for want -- Cuisinart?! Black and Decker?! Kitchenaid?! this is not to say that needless desire was born with brands, it's always nice to have more and better. but brands create and exploit very fine distinctions between models of a form to help us justify wanting them. 

Rashomon!

Rashomon is such a neat movie! That laughing bandit is spectacular, is it the same guy as the doofus samurai in 7 Samurai? He's explosively maniacal way, brandishing weapons, sprinting through forests the way other people have sneezing fits, burp after dinner. He's an absolute hyena.

It's super neat how it embroiders the 4 stories on the same skeletal facts. I think I like the woodsman's story best, his sneaky self interest in debasing the other two men, panting and crawling and farting their way to murder. Also, the self interest of the dead man is the most grinningly cynical. He's dead for god's sake! and yet, the elaborate charade of suicide.

I mean, this movie is pretty obvious. I mentioned it to my mom and she said "oh, with the perspectives?" and I nodded and she said something about many years ago and reverence. And so it goes. But it's so important to dwell on this! I want to remember this (i've said this about so many movies, writing this I thought of Belle de Jour, and i do want to remember that, to see in x rays of kink), to go to parties and be self aware. Because the thing to take away from Rashomon is to shrink oneself, to minimize one's ego, one's blinding stake in the every competition that is every social interaction. And happily, since I don't come across nightmarish rape scenes very often, I can try to see my petty world clearly, see clear-eyed, see so that I might live better and more sympathetically to other people's delusions.

The last scene was a bit much, to march off into the sun, to pass off the baby, to so suddenly have restored the faith of the high priest of disillusionment was all very fast for a movie that dwelt so painstakingly on the blinding selfishness of all human beings. But it's always nice to go to sleep on that note.

the royal tenenbaums

The Royal Tenenbaums is a dazzlingly aesthetic movie and absolutely nothing else; "light as a feather, but fabulous" (a quote on a P.G. Wodehouse collection). But the aesthetics! The meticulous chaos of the walls, the blood with the beard shavings, Henry Sherman's gingham getups   -- everyone's getups. There is nothing real in this movie but there is so much fun; watching the collisions of the assembled lunatics is an utter joy. There is Royal suited in gray and pink and green, Chas and children in Adidas jumpsuits, Richie in Fila and camel hair, Margot in fur and eyeshadow and Eli in urban cowboy. And that's all you really need to know. There are a couple of weak, mistaken attempts to squeeze actual emotions from these characters, but there is so much sublime nonsense.

dog talk

Leonard Lopate did an interview today with people who know a lot about dogs. obvious but interesting stuff: dogs don't understand death, think you've disappeared forever every time you leave the house, see the world through their noses, etc. but did you know that the dogs the military uses are really taught to play REALLY intensely? It's not like they're taught to hate and snarl, just to find the person who smells like this because they would absolutely love to romp around with you. They explained that the dog on the team that killed Bin Laden was doubtless having a truly excellent time. Amazing. It's just like the power of laughter in Monster's Inc. Brilliant Pixar, like always.

LISTLESS

new york is so small right now. I'm a tourist in the worst way, it's as if i'm on an extended layover. i want to get out of this place. i am so sick of the freedom of empty thursday afternoons, of my right to never have to be anywhere ever. I'm a man without seasons, without clocks, and it makes me as anxious as a fruit fly. My lifespan might as well be 14 days when my heart beats like a whale's.

but i'll be in Stockholm soon! sent out a bunch of cvs today! future bright!

wet, empty night

the best way to lie is to tell the truth out of context.

the droplets on the window cast the prettiest little shadows, the most exquisite polka dots. shadows are the finest things with the neatest lines, they're photography taken to the black and white extreme, leaving nothing not utterly sheer, not perfectly elegant.

rain is a repressive thing, driving everything down. it would be so horrible to be a bird flying in the rain, like getting limbs hammered down by lilliputians at every gesture. but it hammers down at everything else too. the smoke that rises on a warm night sinks in the rain, and voices are pelted into inarticulate little noises. and smells too, swept away into gutters, depriving dogs of their stinking "news." the cleanness, freshness after rain comes from its persistent chiding taps on the shoulder, ushering everything of interest down and away.

also

http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2009/05/the-decline-of-middle-america-and-the-problem-of-meritocracy/

is utterly fascinating and important and something i had never ever thought of before. READ THAT READ THAT READ THAT

revelations while tutoring 7th grade geometry

the finite number of angles in a shape is such a beautiful thing! the compromise embedded in it is so infuriating and so true, that as dramatically obtuse as one wishes to be, to wander off at 2 degrees into the great beyond, one must double back just as acutely. one must conserve the shape, to admit to oneself that one is a rhombus, and to have no more than 360 degrees in one's journey.

it's amazing because it seems like a line could solve the problem if it just kept running away, through the canadian wilderness, across the Indian Ocean, but it doesn't! the line can postpone and postpone but eventually it must reverse itself, and head back towards its germ, the nonexistent, massless miracle of a mathematical point. it's a story of a prodigal child in a deterministic world.

speed!

humans are super special in how fast we can move. i've got no idea exactly how it might affect us, but the original leap onto a horse, of speeding beyond ones means, of trumping and dazzling human senses that are only equipped to move up to a certain clip must have transformed us. to have planes and trains is an extraordinary boon, we all have impressionism inside of us as soon as we whiz past something. it's a special privilege to blind oneself, to see the world fuzzy. The winds of humanity are truly alien, the air that flows over our trucks, the air that flows under the wings of our airplanes, we have made wind where none existed. we're like looney tunes getting ready to run, stirring up personalized tornadoes with every trip.We make wind. We do so much more than run, we completely surpass the possibilities of our bodies. my god, it's no wonder dogs stick out their heads in cars, their minds are utterly blown at the sensation of fast air.


And all of this is only possible on the back of a beast (mechanical or otherwise) -- assuming you don't have the presence of mind to squint, but then that's something else. We daily experience what animals only can when they're out of control, hurtling through the air or down the river.

That out-of-control-ness is a really significant part of human commandeering. Practically all of the danger in the world is from things that move much too fast for us to deal with. Feet on the ground are a paltry means of movement.

we're all a lot of pilot fish and we'd do well to have the presence of mind to notice the wonder of seeings things we were never meant to.

lucky

crying is an ugly farce. it's so cruel how one's mouth jerks outwards into that grotesque smile, how the gulps are really just grotesque hiccups, how one's face is a wet, red mess, a clown in the rain.

there are so many french people in greenwhich village

s told me about using future shop for rentals, he could return stuff, no questions asked, before a month was through.

when, how did it happen that we came to want stuff with a label on it? have we always been this way? it makes sense in terms of laziness, labels are rich signifiers of normalcy, of wealth (when you pay for something you're also paying for the price you're paying, it's a privilege to hand over money for something and sometimes you really have to pay extra for that privilege. weddings are really gruesome examples of this, people shopping for dresses and simply wanting to pay more because of their fear of cheapness and absolute faith in dollars to signify their investment in their marriage)

god natt. furniture is just furniture in this house. the dust is dead.

limpness is so horrible, it makes you feel the inside of things, and everyone knows how squishy and abject that is. things have to push back. to give is disconcerting.

Everyday Gay

There have been a lot of movies lately about the persecution of homosexuals. Their trailers especially are like those of action movies, with pounding brass and bible-force quotations about "forbidden love." This is fine. The problem is thinking that these movies advance progressive causes, that these silver screen homosexuals, as incendiary as silver screen gas tanks, help the lives of real homosexuals.

Movies like Eyes Wide Open and Circumstance, archetypes of the persecution drama, are for people nestled in progressive enclaves looking to feel pity and disdain for those who don’t get to live in Greenwich Village. The star of the movies is bigotry, with persecuted homosexuals as a sideshow, as caged animals staring intensely at one another and having sex whenever they get the chance.

In dramas about straight people it's okay for them to be horny circus panthers now and then because the straight people in popular culture are whole people with whole lives that run the gamut of human experience. They have children and kidnap children, have wonderful, happy lives and die alone. Straight people are the prom queen and Carrie too. But homosexuals aren't. They're never not homosexuals. The essential problem with these persecution movies is their insistence that a homosexual is their stigmata. No straight person movie would so daringly dispense with backstory the way those about homosexuals so readily do; their sexual preference is all the explanation deemed necessary. Homosexuals are people though, and their qualities as people should be mostly what movies about homosexuals are about. So it's a triumph when some gay dude gets prosecuted for a good old-fashioned crime like embezzlement (see I Love You Phillip Morris). It's by chronicling their lives as criminals or gorillas or captains of normalcy – people like everyone else – that they will come to be treated like everyone else.

So long as homosexuals are sequestered in fantastic, oriental tales they will never be known for the exceedingly typical people they are. And until they are known in all their average glory their oppression will continue. One day some benighted bigot will enjoy a homosexual romantic comedy without realizing it and so stumble into revelation; it will be like being told what you thought was chicken are bull testicles and retching for absolution, but finally deciding that if it tastes like chicken, who cares? And that'll happen, just as soon as we stop making homosexual sex into an earth-shatteringly big deal because, after all, it all just tastes like chicken. 

on a different subject -- "we are listening to the words of a dead man dancing" a Libyan commenting on a radio broadcast by Qaddafi