the brief wondrous life of oscar wao

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is such a sick book. i have rarely loved prose so much — he writes how i want to write, so bursting with the SPOKEN WORD.

and the history he talks about! i would love to read a junot diaz history book. that might've really been the highlight for me, learning about trujillo and porfirio rubirosa popped with life.

it's kind of nuts how passionately manly dominican men apparently are, and the odd union of FLESH and SEX with super traditional, oppressive values about women.

it's a really fabulous book and there are many things in it but my father is watching the news too loudly for me to think straight.  

yo what the fuck is with the swooning muzak musicians in the boxes at the oscar theater? this is embarrassingly entertaining altogether. i gotta go to bed soon. my tooth hurts. the red carpet slow motion panning over actresses's dresses is some preposterously bad cultural studies shit. does anyone know a quote (probably from some mafia movie) about how no one leaves the family? how you're dead if you leave the family, or something? they definitely say something like that.

The Driver

Ryan O'Neil is extremely handsome and this movie is handsomely spare. What's more interesting though is the lengths to which America goes to convince itself that cars are a badass thing. Rather than sitting on one's fat ass in traffic, The Driver is all about The Mythical Highway of Freedom.

We need more movies about train robberies -- The Driver is actually brilliantly snide about public transit and getting bothered. What sedentary shit. It's actually horrifying knowing how seductive cars are though. Sinister ideas about freedom and independence start to well up in people as soon as they get behind the wheel; it's like it ages you, turns you into a Republican.

eeeeeeeesh

i'm a vegetarian and an intern at BOMB magazine and my girlfriend's name is kira, she lives in stockholm and i live in new york with my parents and the distance between new york and stockholm is a very prominent and unhappy fact in my life. i'm working on an article for BOMB about an obscure, difficult polish filmmaker named andrzej zulawski. i also teach a kind of after school pre school thing and tutor now and then and that takes up most of my time. i think i want to be a journalist when i grow up. i carry a purple notebook with me everywhere i go because i read somewhere that being or not being able to write down a thought in the moment is the difference between being or not being able to write. that's hard to say in my case but it gives me a sense of purpose. i have extremely few friends in new york city and am doing my best to romanticize my solitude. i have a pair of gold sneakers and a pair of red leather shoes and they make my feet too warm and they're embarrassingly splashy; i wish i had a pair of converse. there are documents that recently arrived in Dallas, Texas petitioning some US government agency to let kira come to the United States on an alien fiancee visa so that we can be together and also married. i'm not reading anything very interesting right now. my father gave me my first driving lesson in new york earlier today on my family's black, standard shift 2008 subaru outback. we live in Greenwich Village in a very big house. i have moderately radical leftist ideas about capitalism.

this is probably the most frank, factual thing i've ever written on here about my material life.

yo i think it'd be interesting to do a study on people's perceptions of when things happen as it relates to news. like asking people when exactly qaddafi was deposed or those terrorists took all those hostages in mumbai or when lehman brothers collapsed or any number of other news stories. i just thought of this because i was just trying to remember when qaddafi was deposed and i really have no idea whether it was in december or maybe late october. which is really an enormous spread. and i think itd go a long way to illuminating a lot of the theorizing about how NON STOP NEWS affects our sense of disaster, of eventfulness, especially if it was contrasted with other kinds of memory (if there is a contrast...) like when this or that marriage, family event etc happened. COOL STUFF

yo, are gay people disproportionately kinky because they've been so oppressed? this is kind of obvious i guess. but it would also be depressing if that was really at the root of kink. I don't want to think that all the wonderfully weird shit that turns people on has its roots in evil. is every rape fantasy, diaper fetish, nipple clamp, feeder fetish, overwhelming desire to have sex with a dragon borne of a societal, parental, ancestral depravity? that way of thinking would, at any rate, explain my utterly banal sexual tastes.

i can't be bothered to cook in my parents' house. it's so boring, so obvious, been done to many times by my mom -- that'd be a sad reason for my not wanting to, to take up that mantle, but i think it is. 

i'm working on this piece for bomb about zulawski and i think i've been wrestling with the lack of an idea. the most horrendous writing wrangles are all because of trying to build something out of nothing. i'm good with words but they're awfully flimsy on their own. 

ranting about sex at 8:45 in the morning

doobeedoo wop wop wop wop doodoobeeedobedoobee wopppp

i think we should all stop saying "make love." i think the term's the epitome of the relationship a lot of the world has to sex, as something of soul shattering importance, which hamstrings everybody and gets away from the idea that it's pleasure. special pleasure, yes! but i think sex'd probably be a lot more pleasurable generally if it wasn't the ultimate love ritual -- like statuary or something. and isn't pleasure a noble-ass thing to give and share? the noblest? yo, let us have sex and fuck, even "screw" (though i'm not there yet at all, that word makes me wanna pinch my nose), but quit it with this holy ultimate love ritual thing.

i took a long train ride home this evening, feeling very solemn, with the front of my nose black with permanent marker. feeling very silly. it's a neat metaphor, seeing all these faces and not understanding them, and that its all really about me and the face through with i see them.

was a terrific teacher at the pre school. one little girl was kind of dim and constantly distracted by the glue on her hands. i can sympathize with that though; peeling glue off my palms is one of the happiest memories of my childhood.

chess and hostility on the internet

i play chess online a lot. today i happened to play somebody, ten_yrs_old, who profoundly upset me and it was kind of amazing. probably because i play chess online a lot a username like ten_yrs_old looks truculent to me, it's a person pretty intent on having how good they are acknowledged. so if one says ones ten years old you've got some automatic accolades. it's like the commenters on youtube who announce that they're just 13 and yet they like bruce springsteen which is some kind of miracle! not one of the "kids these days"!

so i started playing ten who promptly started chastising me for playing too slowly. "i can't take this." "like my grandma." "i'm gonna leave and make you wait, see how you like it." i found all this super distracting and it made me pretty anxious. it also said something about ten because, well, on yahoo if somebody just leaves a game you gotta wait ten whole minutes before they have officially forfeited. this matters because it raises your rating and that's nice. later in the game ten hounded me pretty constantly, he just called me "1465" rather than my username or something because thats what i was and this person could not imagine the possibility that i'd do anything other than wait out the ten minutes and officially win and get the points. in retrospect ten was probably bluffing.

and then he just kept calling me stupid! he called me stupid over and over and over again! he typed "hahahaha" when i made decent moves! when i put him in check ten'd type "WOW BIG CHECK" and "SO YOU THINK YOU'RE SO GOOD 1465" and "YOU'RE THE STUPIDEST PERSON IN THE WORLD" and this really got to me! it was extraordinary! those screaming characters had me quaking with self doubt and anxiety. it's kind of a horrifying validation of the power of digital vitriol, that despite the anonymity and fundamental cheapness of the hate (for is not typing so easy?), that stuff is HUGELY affecting. i also lost the game. but ten_yrs_old had me beat by the 12th "STUPID."

Where's My Money

“Inside of a marriage that’s in trouble it’s like being inside of a hurricane,” said playwright-screenwriter-director John Patrick Shanley, the stupefyingly illustrious Bronx native who has won an Oscar, a Pulitzer and a Tony, among other things. “Even if it’s just two people sitting at a table having coffee, the subtext becomes a whirling mass of energy.”

Shanley’s play “Where’s My Money?” now at the Cherry Lane Theatre, follows several couples whose lungs have only breathed the air in the eye of a hurricane. “If you haven’t experienced one of these situations you might find it ridiculous, and if you’re looking from outside those relationships, they are ridiculous,” said Alex Correia, who directs the play. These relationships are darkly, darkly funny when you remember that these people are behaving like lunatics, and terrifying when you feel the gravity of their lunatic planets.  

And then there are the ghosts. As Jonathan Judge-Russo, who plays Henry, explained, the supernatural in the play “changes it from a slow dance we do to avoid our s**t to like, here it is! like, in your house, strangling you...you can’t go anywhere to avoid it, you can’t go to a coffee shop.” In a play about overawing problems in relationships, the supernatural is a touch of the hyper-real, of how people are almost literally haunted by their pasts. Issues in screwed up relationships don’t get hashed out in reasonable discourse; the air just suddenly combusts. It’s a lot like a ghost coming through a wall.

Explosive performances from the whole cast leave you wanting to hug their extremely sorry selves.

“Where’s My Money?” presented by Animus Theatre Company (inaugural production) and featuring Rory Hammond, Jonathan Judge-Russo, Amy Northup, Jeff Todesco and Carrie Walsh will be performed at the Cherry Lane Theatre from January 28 through February 12. —Frank Thurston Green

World of Video

Netflix recently held a competition to create the best "collaborative filtering algorithm" to guess how much a customer would like a movie based on how much they liked other movies. There was a winner and now Netflix is 10% better at guessing how much you'll like a movie. Still, computer scientists admitted that there's a low ceiling for improvement: "inherent variations" make perfection impossible; people fudge numbers.


Meeting Sean Gallagher brings that competition to mind. Mr. Gallagher works at World of Video where he'll recommend a movie if you tell him what you've seen and what you thought of it. He's kind of like a collaborative filtering algorithm but he's also alive. And then there's Pete and Justin and the rest of the crew, all distinctly human and dizzyingly knowledgeable about movies. They aren't anywhere close to perfect with their recommendations, but being misunderstood is a privilege. 


World of Video was founded in Greenwich Village in 1982 and it's moved around the neighborhood several times, the high point of which was displacing a Pottery Barn in the mid 90s. It got halved about six years ago when the store made the switch from VHS to DVD in part because DVDs are about half the size. (imagine if advances in computer chips led to factories staffed by only the littlest and then the most qualified engineers; imagine Willy Wonka and his Oompa Loompa staff). In their business the very alphabet keeps disappearing out from under them. We've forgotten Betamax and Laser Discs and VHS and HD DVDs, but they were all new, gaping paradigms threatening to obsolesce the store. This is no dusty bookshop; World of Video smells like plastic and so smells like modernity and so smells like everything and nothing at all.


World of Video rents, which is a very special and dangerous thing because it's invitation to familiarity. Customers are regulars; nobody goes in less than twice. Moreover, the store rents movies, and if one's got any faith that movies rile and excite and occasionally get banned, then World of Video is an incendiary confluence of familiarity, provocation and "Village people." It is a community.


One Sunday in "monsoon weather" the store was screening Sunset Boulevard. "When she makes this glorious descent down the staircase and she stops everything and she says how great it is to be back in movies. And she says, alright, I'm ready for my close-up. And she walks into the camera, and the camera absorbs her and dissolves into a white fade out. And the whole store applauded...a spontaneous celebration...That was the quintessence of what it was like to work at the place" avowed John Gaffney, who worked at World of Video in the late 80s and 90s. 


During Hurricane Irene New York shut down. Nothing much happened but anticipatory terror stopped subway service and pasted innumerable tape crosses on windows and bought up of all the batteries at the grocery store. Modern life broke down, which is to say World of Video was flooded with crowds they haven't had since the 90s. That was partly because it's cute to watch movies on rainy days but also because it made sense to stock up before a coming cataclysm, to physically procure entertainment in the way people had with batteries and astonishing quantities of pickles. Netflix and cable TV were suddenly dependent on highly complex and undependable infrastructures, on faraway factories and satellites in outer space. Hunkering down calls for a hunk of something, for a movie in a box in a hand. 


Around 1200 BC the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, collapsed. The "palace economy" of lands ruled by literate, bureaucratized capitals that traded with other capitals abruptly went up in flames. Trade stopped, the capitals were burned and looted and people fled in every direction. Scholars argue about whether it was tsunamis or earthquakes or volcanoes or invaders or something else that did it. There followed 400 years of isolated villages where the sole pastime was singing about how great things used to be. World of Video is the neighborhood citadel, the bulwark against systemic collapse. Rent from them now so that when the world ends they'll be here to sing like Homer in the darkness.

World of Video

Netflix recently held a competition to create the best “collaborative filtering algorithm” to predict how much a customer would like a movie based on how much they liked other movies. There was a winner and now Netflix is 10 percent better at predicting how much you'll like a movie. There’s a low ceiling for improvement, though. One contestant bemoaned the “inherent variation”" makes perfection impossible; people fudge numbers.

Sean Gallagher brings that competition to mind. Gallagher is a manager at World of Video, where he’ll recommend a movie if you tell him what you’ve seen and what you thought of it. He’s kind of like a collaborative filtering algorithm, but he’s also alive.

“It’s like what I do with my mom,” says Gallagher. “I try to figure out what people’s tastes are, and then I try to recommend something that I know is within that taste or maybe a liiiittle bit outside the area that lets them stretch a little bit.”

“Sean knows everything,” said Linda Samuels, one of the store’s co-owners, her voice hushed and reverent. And then there’s Pete Coffey and Justin Paris and the rest of the crew—all distinctly human and dizzyingly knowledgeable about movies.

Samuels and Debra Grappone and their partners opened World of Video in 1982 after they got tired of renting videos from a shop on MacDougal Street. That shop had a chaotic system of putting empty VHS boxes out on the shelves for customers to browse but keeping the actual tapes behind the counter. “You’d have to wave the boxes to ask if something was in,” says Grappone. It was loud and hectic and it was a stupid system, and the store charged a lot of late fees. Samuels summarizes their conversation: “This is ridiculous. Why don’t we open up our own video store?”

The small store they opened on West 10th off Seventh Avenue later moved to a bigger space above the Village Vanguard, and then to its current location in what used to be a Pottery Barn on Greenwich Avenue between Perry and Charles. World of Video gave up half of that space six years ago, partly because of market pressure but also because the switch from VHS to DVDs halved the space needed for stock.

Throughout the 80s and 90s, the store was packed and happening, especially in bad weather. John Gaffney, who worked at World of Video until recently and who now teaches a course on “The Power of Film” at Lehman College, remembers one Sunday in “monsoon weather” when the store had on Sunset Boulevard: “and when [Gloria Swanson] makes her glorious descent down the staircase and she stops everything and she says how great it is to be back in movies and then says, ‘All right, I’m ready for my close-up’ and walks into the camera and the camera absorbs her and dissolves into a white fade out, the whole store applauded—a spontaneous celebration,” Gaffney recalls. “That was the quintessence of what it was like to work at the place.”

World of Video rents. They invite familiarity; their customers become regulars. People, alarmingly, get to feel at home in the store. And they rent not waffle irons or new, plastic-smelling cars, but movies! Things that rile and excite and occasionally get banned! And they rent them to “Village people”! This stuff is bad for business; this stuff makes a community.

When Hurricane Irene headed toward New York last August, the city shut down. Anticipatory terror stopped subway service and pasted innumerable tape crosses on windows and bought up all of the batteries at the grocery stores. Modern life broken down, which is to say that World of Video was flooded with crowds it hadn’t had since the 90s. That was partly because it’s nice to watch movies on rainy days, but also because it makes sense to stock up before a cataclysm – to physically procure entertainment in the same way people stocked up on batteries and astonishing quantities of pickles. Netflix and Cable TV were suddenly abstract entities dependent on unfathomable infrastructures, things unseen and untouched. Hunkering down calls for a hunk of something – for a movie in a box in a hand.

World of Video always has a movie on. It has a bench and a chaise longue and two stools and a chair and a whole tidy area in which to make oneself comfortable. This reporter felt comfortable lingering long after anyone was interested in talking to him. The bathroom is there for whomever needs it. The wall behind the register is a metastasizing collection of DVD boxes – it looks like the great, messy minds of the people who work in front of it. Their knowledge of film is almost exasperatingly sprawling: Did you know that Humphrey Bogart used to play “Tennis anyone?” characters, effeminate sidekicks, before making it big playing hard-boiled types? Did you know that an earlier version of “Inglorious Bastards” was made by a kind of Italian Ed Wood?

During one recent visit, the store was redolent of garlicky chicken. Justin Paris, of late, is often strumming a ukulele. World of Video is pricelessly leisurely. “It’s a fun place,” says Samuels. “No stress, because it’s that kind of a business. You don’t have any deadlines. It’s just a video store, so relax.”