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