SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN! That is an amazing story. I mean, that shit is extraordinary. And don't give it away for god's sake. don't fucking look up the movie. the movie's a normal-ass documentary except for some irritating extra effects. the point is the story, which is utterly stupefying, and spoiling it for someone would physically sicken me. it is such a fucking extraordinary thing. god, what a wonderful thing.
I biked home behind a bus and it was amazing. It cut me off but then I realized it cut off the wind, which was cold and biting, so I rode like 10 feet behind it all the way home. It was kind of a crazy experience because I could basically only see this white square in front of me. All the bumps were horrendously surprising. It was like an inverted version of wearing some cyber headgear standing in some boring ass room. It was conceptually FANTASTIC to have the street unfurling beneath you out of a white square with that unchanging Sleepy's advertisement. It was a clean air bus, I noted all the way home, and I was glad because those fumes woulda been a bit much, like reenacting those nightmare videos of small town kids running in the fog of a DDT truck. It was also exciting because I was a bit anxious about not plowing headlong into the square; I watched for the brake lights very carefully. it was pretty awesome. i am feeling very happy right now, i should say.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Anders Breivik is sane! Grant that dubious privilege to the far right, and to Breivik himself. He claimed in court today that if he was a bearded Muslim nobody'd doubt his sanity, and it's true. The hilarious part of this is that it's good for the far right for Breivik to be ruled insane because he's kind of a PR issue. It's much easier to continue to build anti immigrant, nationalist platforms without the terrorist rep. We should take Christian, right wing fanatics at their word; they're always lone crazy people to the media because if they weren't it'd imply terrifying things about a lot of the political movements in Europe these days. Believe him! Don't discredit his ideology!
Sunday, April 22, 2012
The Depressed Person
The david foster wallace thing called The Depressed Person is really fantastic because there's nothing to say to it. it's amazing because it's whole, because as with anything where you get the big picture all these insane things conspire to make a logical whole. A horrific childhood happened to this person and from that stemmed a universe of unimpeachable feelings about the world. Those feelings are totally crazy and ridiculously unhealthy, and yet there's really nothing to undermine any of it. The only thing I could imagine saying to them was "chill out." The rigor of the depression was staggering.
What flows naturally from that rigor, from a god's eye view of one person's personal hideousness, is sympathy. It's the sympathy of a confounded person, a sympathy born of the recognition that that person's thoughts are coherent and that since you can't figure out what you'd do in their place you're forced to respect their intractable misery. The big picture! Everything always makes sense!
What flows naturally from that rigor, from a god's eye view of one person's personal hideousness, is sympathy. It's the sympathy of a confounded person, a sympathy born of the recognition that that person's thoughts are coherent and that since you can't figure out what you'd do in their place you're forced to respect their intractable misery. The big picture! Everything always makes sense!
Friday, April 20, 2012
biking on the brooklyn bridge
Biking over the bike lane of the Brooklyn Bridge is ridiculously therapeutic. There is a line that divides the bridge into a pedestrian lane and a bike lane. This wouldn't matter much except that pedestrians frequently wander into the bike lane, which is great, because a person wrongfully crossing a line is like the original wrong. It's a metaphorical bonanza; it's a line in the sand; it's a wall of toys in a ferociously divided childhood bedroom. It arms you with an uncommon and pretty insane feeling of righteousness. It's the province of fanatics, of people who kill people, of people dangerously alive. It also feels fantastic. I feel that manic, glorious certitude when pedestrians cross the line.
When I started biking over the bridge I'd say "excuse me, sorry" when I came up behind pedestrians. It was no good; it was too long; it failed to express how bovine they are. I tripped over the awkward down-up transition from the "eh" to the "kskew" sound. I eventually settled on barking "heads up!" until one day this guy shot past me on toward a crowd of line-crossers squawking WWAAAYYYY DOOOO WWWWAYYY DOOO like a tropical bird car alarm, and he was so right. Words neuter animal passion.
None of this would work if I wasn't moving quickly, too quickly for people to catch up. Squawking like a tropical bird car alarm in and of itself is embarrassing. Stopping to berate tourists adorably happy to take photos (in which I fantasize about getting my blurred screaming hawk face) on the Brooklyn Bridge for their obliviousness would be evil, but when you're blowing past they're too slow-moving, dopey, and faceless to be anything other than a potential collision.
You're your own river on the bike on the bridge; it's all that Siddartha "everything changes everything is the same everything is one" shit when you blaze past. The freedom corresponds to the transience. I used to think and hate that there was no place no one could hear me scream in New York, and there isn't. But on the bike you kind of can. The air is always fresh when you make your own wind.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
flannery o'connor
People scourged by unseen passions! Christianity! Prophets! Be your own savior?
I have so many questions about her characters. The first is about how religion plays on peoples' minds. It, or Old Tarwater's version of it, was unbelievably seductive to these two little kids. The school teacher spent four measly days with him and got traumatized for life, stricken with a "love" that I don't quite understand. Frank spent a lot longer with him, but it transformed him into a lunatic heretofore unimaginable. Is it because Old Tarwater's religion told them they were special? That they came from such horrific circumstances that anything that told them there was a plan and a paradisiacal destiny was irresistible? I guess one can see the power of that religion in how it turns Frank's "I was born out of a wreck" into the appropriately gnarly birth of a prophet—he was born shortly before his parents got killed in a car accident! And the old school teacher had a mom that got drunk alone in her room and a father rarely there! Religion just sanctified their fucked upness, gave them a powerful, dangerous sense of purpose.
And freedom too, I guess. The Violent Bear It Away is kind of a nightmare version of the frontier story, of the noble savage. Instead of being a wholesome, woodsplitting auto didact Frank ends up monstrously proud and ignorant. His writing down how much he thought the school teacher's ravioli dinner in the restaurant was worth so that he could pay him back and wouldn't owe him nothing was hilarious. "Minding my bidnis" is the fierce flipside of the prophet coin. To be "beholden" is the ultimate nightmare.
Be your own savior! I think Frank's seeing the tree he forgot he set on fire and so hearing and believing he had to be a prophet after seeing the grave of Old Tarwater who he'd thought he'd burned and so believing in the supernatural rightness of that old, evil man is the saddest, saddest, saddest goddamn thing. The book switches between calling him Tarwater and the boy and I think if I tracked those changes it'd correspond to his pitifulness and how hard and inscrutable he is with his uncle. He's a boy at the end, for sure.
How's Frank like Hazel from Wise Blood? They seem like practically the same person to me. Descendants of raging preachers, young, almost totally alone, infected with a sense of purpose.
Bishop, the mentally handicapped kid, is super interesting to me. He's made a vessel for other peoples' actions, for their infinite love or cruelty. He's a lamb, so anyone with him's made a shepherd (Ah? Ahhhh?). I wonder if there's a line to be drawn between him and Enoch's stuffed homunculus in Wise Blood. They're fixations, things on which other people perform their destiny. Bishop reminded me of the demented grandpa in A Separation, who definitely functioned that way.
more soooon
"An acid smile began to eat at the corners of his mouth" !!
I have so many questions about her characters. The first is about how religion plays on peoples' minds. It, or Old Tarwater's version of it, was unbelievably seductive to these two little kids. The school teacher spent four measly days with him and got traumatized for life, stricken with a "love" that I don't quite understand. Frank spent a lot longer with him, but it transformed him into a lunatic heretofore unimaginable. Is it because Old Tarwater's religion told them they were special? That they came from such horrific circumstances that anything that told them there was a plan and a paradisiacal destiny was irresistible? I guess one can see the power of that religion in how it turns Frank's "I was born out of a wreck" into the appropriately gnarly birth of a prophet—he was born shortly before his parents got killed in a car accident! And the old school teacher had a mom that got drunk alone in her room and a father rarely there! Religion just sanctified their fucked upness, gave them a powerful, dangerous sense of purpose.
And freedom too, I guess. The Violent Bear It Away is kind of a nightmare version of the frontier story, of the noble savage. Instead of being a wholesome, woodsplitting auto didact Frank ends up monstrously proud and ignorant. His writing down how much he thought the school teacher's ravioli dinner in the restaurant was worth so that he could pay him back and wouldn't owe him nothing was hilarious. "Minding my bidnis" is the fierce flipside of the prophet coin. To be "beholden" is the ultimate nightmare.
Be your own savior! I think Frank's seeing the tree he forgot he set on fire and so hearing and believing he had to be a prophet after seeing the grave of Old Tarwater who he'd thought he'd burned and so believing in the supernatural rightness of that old, evil man is the saddest, saddest, saddest goddamn thing. The book switches between calling him Tarwater and the boy and I think if I tracked those changes it'd correspond to his pitifulness and how hard and inscrutable he is with his uncle. He's a boy at the end, for sure.
How's Frank like Hazel from Wise Blood? They seem like practically the same person to me. Descendants of raging preachers, young, almost totally alone, infected with a sense of purpose.
Bishop, the mentally handicapped kid, is super interesting to me. He's made a vessel for other peoples' actions, for their infinite love or cruelty. He's a lamb, so anyone with him's made a shepherd (Ah? Ahhhh?). I wonder if there's a line to be drawn between him and Enoch's stuffed homunculus in Wise Blood. They're fixations, things on which other people perform their destiny. Bishop reminded me of the demented grandpa in A Separation, who definitely functioned that way.
more soooon
"An acid smile began to eat at the corners of his mouth" !!
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
release
Bill Morrison's fugue, Release, is pretty much the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. It starts with the middle two seconds (I think?) of a clip and replays that, about 30 times, adding two additional seconds of the front and back of the clip each time. This is perplexing and great. The clips are also mirrored on the other side of the screen, symmetrical. It was so elegant and the geometry left me slack jawed. A simple pan down a street becomes this craze of vanishing points and triangles. I was stupid with awe, I had to cover up one of my eyes to figure out what was happening. It's amazing how random life becomes exquisite choreography when it's doubled. A mongrel's a mutt but two mongrel's are god on earth, are stupefying perfection. No wonder people freak out about twins so much. Twins are great. But simple coordination, something doubled, blows my (everybody's) mind.
frank
frank
Monday, April 9, 2012
paths of glory
so i watched this movie once a couple of years ago and got myself into one of those seething fits that make me so happy. this time i watched it with my dad and his old self, with the gravity of his years, isn't so quick to froth. so that tamped down my excitement and i watched it a bit more critically. i mean, this movie's super masterful and flat out gorgeous. the trial scene is a weakness; their calling the prior bravery of the soldiers immaterial isn't really credible.
basically this movie's best at humanizing cinematically cowardly behavior. that drunk is every one of us! we need more people breaking down and weeping on screen, more vengeful, despicable little people. for it's in those contemptible personalities that we're forced to come to terms with the structural evil of war. all the prancing nobility of the generals up top has gotta come out infinitely more monstrous than the sniveling drunk's accidental murder of his comrade. gotta set up those counterpoints, got to make people own up to what they would be like. yo, that's it! force people to watch a movie in which they identify with the contemptible schmucks! the pathetic victims! anybody who identifies with colonel dax is hilarious and i hope they trip. i like to think i'm honest enough to identify with the drunk.
basically this movie's best at humanizing cinematically cowardly behavior. that drunk is every one of us! we need more people breaking down and weeping on screen, more vengeful, despicable little people. for it's in those contemptible personalities that we're forced to come to terms with the structural evil of war. all the prancing nobility of the generals up top has gotta come out infinitely more monstrous than the sniveling drunk's accidental murder of his comrade. gotta set up those counterpoints, got to make people own up to what they would be like. yo, that's it! force people to watch a movie in which they identify with the contemptible schmucks! the pathetic victims! anybody who identifies with colonel dax is hilarious and i hope they trip. i like to think i'm honest enough to identify with the drunk.
Friday, April 6, 2012
wise blood
what makes these characters tick? what crosses do they bear? why are they so weird? these people killed people deliberately! necessarily! the loneliest, most windswept, ahistorical, ignorant little minds birth these fanatical passions. towards the very end there's a reference to Haze's military pension because the war messed up his insides (or something) (it's written with that vagueness in the book). i'd been waiting to hear about the war, to hear anything to better anchor him and understand him.
Enoch just has his little ditty, his pat paragraph he'll spit out about having a government job and his papa forced him to come here and he ain't but 18 years old and he works at the zoo. that's all he's capable of saying. and yet he's wild with these fixations, with his blood. "i gotta get outta here." (or something like that he always says) He killed a man!
i wanna pick through this book again, try to sink my analytic hooks into these text someplace. i'm sure it's allegorical as hell. part of my problem is that it's founded in a totally alien universe: the dusty south with jesus everywhere. so what do i know.
one thing is that this book is funny. it is often hilarious, which was appreciated, but really only made the rest of the book weirder, for it meant the stuff that wasn't funny really wasn't funny.
Enoch just has his little ditty, his pat paragraph he'll spit out about having a government job and his papa forced him to come here and he ain't but 18 years old and he works at the zoo. that's all he's capable of saying. and yet he's wild with these fixations, with his blood. "i gotta get outta here." (or something like that he always says) He killed a man!
i wanna pick through this book again, try to sink my analytic hooks into these text someplace. i'm sure it's allegorical as hell. part of my problem is that it's founded in a totally alien universe: the dusty south with jesus everywhere. so what do i know.
one thing is that this book is funny. it is often hilarious, which was appreciated, but really only made the rest of the book weirder, for it meant the stuff that wasn't funny really wasn't funny.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
wise blood by flannery the weirdo
wise blood is the weirdest fucking book. it's like another planet. these little southern towns are insane. everyone is so terse and so cooped up and ready to be violent and they're all driven by something i don't understand. i don't know why they make all these aggressive come ons. they're all kind of insane. they're ALL extremely stupid, i think. is this thing like The Stranger for gigantically repressed and devout southerners? where, how could any of these people be happy? enoch's the only one who seems to have the capacity to be happy but he has it so he slobbers like a desperate dog. what the fuck is with this book. i liked the scene with the potato peeler salesman.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
secretary
meh. this movie has the most subtle and most irritating soundtrack, somehow it's the perfect accompaniment to the set of Grey's office, but it's just dumb and bad, something built to be a background noise. terrible.
this movie's super good for a human portrait of d&s stuff, a well rounded, solid thing, and pretty boring apart from that. i found it didactic and wearyingly tidy and predictable.
i interviewed gary panter and joshua white today. i had no idea listening (really listening) was so exhausting. i think they liked me and respected my questions; i have no idea whether they said anything worth reading. i was too busy. (doing what?) they talked for so long! what did they say? whatever. this is like the second interview i've done in my life. what a strange, promising feeling to know you stand at the base of a thing you'll climb. this is it! i'm doing it badly and some day i may do it well! the future, at a moment like this, feels less terrifying than usual.
this movie's super good for a human portrait of d&s stuff, a well rounded, solid thing, and pretty boring apart from that. i found it didactic and wearyingly tidy and predictable.
i interviewed gary panter and joshua white today. i had no idea listening (really listening) was so exhausting. i think they liked me and respected my questions; i have no idea whether they said anything worth reading. i was too busy. (doing what?) they talked for so long! what did they say? whatever. this is like the second interview i've done in my life. what a strange, promising feeling to know you stand at the base of a thing you'll climb. this is it! i'm doing it badly and some day i may do it well! the future, at a moment like this, feels less terrifying than usual.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
easy rider
i don't think much of easy rider. after watching the commentary i understand it's history and it's important.
but i think it's obvious. maybe that's because i'm from new york city and i take a lot of the aesthetics and ideas in that movie for granted. i watched that wanting to see more of the southerners. i want to know their villainy better, that's what's mysterious and interesting for me. how're those people so flat out evil? what're they afraid of? what do they believe in? and that's definitely a super specific response for me to have, coming from where i come from. but apart from that there's billy being a moron and wyatt being real goddamn cool and some other weirdos i found interesting chiefly insofar as people want to murder them. THAT's the crazy part. tell me about goiter man! about a Louisiana sheriff!
when'd the left lose the american flag? peter fonda looks damn good in that jacket.
also, it's hilarious that this movie, this journey, this exploration of counter culture, is founded on the profit of middle-manning. buy from the poor, sell to the rich, keep the money and mess with the system, or something.
but i think it's obvious. maybe that's because i'm from new york city and i take a lot of the aesthetics and ideas in that movie for granted. i watched that wanting to see more of the southerners. i want to know their villainy better, that's what's mysterious and interesting for me. how're those people so flat out evil? what're they afraid of? what do they believe in? and that's definitely a super specific response for me to have, coming from where i come from. but apart from that there's billy being a moron and wyatt being real goddamn cool and some other weirdos i found interesting chiefly insofar as people want to murder them. THAT's the crazy part. tell me about goiter man! about a Louisiana sheriff!
when'd the left lose the american flag? peter fonda looks damn good in that jacket.
also, it's hilarious that this movie, this journey, this exploration of counter culture, is founded on the profit of middle-manning. buy from the poor, sell to the rich, keep the money and mess with the system, or something.