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