the plague

Alright. I'm going to write something about this book. it's about a city in northern africa with a couple hundred thousand people, a very "modern" city called oran, which is to say horrifically industrious and soulless. camus tells us its an ugly place where people work all week until saturday and sunday when they might hang out or do some loving or something like that. it sits on a plateau by the sea, but facing away from it. it's too hot in the winter, too muddy in the spring, too rainy in the fall. it's nice in the winter.

there are about 6 characters in this book, all except one of which are pretty heroic in their way. part of me thinks camus's closing remarks about the story confirming that people are more good than bad are pretty bogus, and that he's made up an idealized nightmare to confirm his belief. i mean, everybody;s pretty great. rieux is is almost sickeningly perfect. rambert was self centered for a little while but then he turns out to be pretty perfect too. also so beautifully human in that scene when he thinks hes got plague and runs to a square with a patch of sky and screams his wife's name. wonderful. grand is at least a little eccentric and pathetic but he's a small hero too. tarrou you think is gonna be some charming miscreant, with his offkilter perspective on the town, but then we learn about his soaring goodness, fleeing from his dad's red robes, but he's the most perfect of all; at least he's thought about it the most. his speech towards the end about how we've all got plague breath and have to take special care to not breathe carelessly is really a pretty good speech. and don't kill anybody, for god's sake! don't kill people! tarrou's marvelous.

i guess one character who's really got it wrong is paneloux, which is unsurprising because he's the most rousing and fun to listen to. camus did a very funnyt hing making paneloux's raging sermon so gorgeous amidst a very gray book; it's a funny argument for why one might be religious. his spectacular metaphors about the plague as god's flail  are oddly comforting next to what camus offers: a punctilious civil servant.

but i liked this book! i mean, i liked parts of it A LOT. i loved the big picture of a stricken town, of what all that death inside those closed gates does to people. it does a lot to people. it flattens them out, takes from them past and future, and exhausts them, above all. it's a super neat idea musing on what a lot of WORK dead people require. DEAD WEIGHT! i mean, it's really striking thinking of how a dead body is more than a single living body can deal with. i'm extracting the most vulgar, base stuff from this book, when it's got all this rhapsodic stuff. i'm doing a rotten job here. but back to the rottenness: it makes one think about how dealing with the dead, burying them, or whatever, really is this baseline of civilization, of human dignity, and how HARD it is to make that happen! it's terrifically difficult to think you're living for something if you know your corpse'll get stepped on in the street. AH! the funerals! and the descriptions of the layers of sizzling quicklime! and the plague cloud above the town! in some ways it really ends up being about all these humans as rotten biomass, as a physical quantity drowning the town! at least, that's the part i liked best.

that;s enough, i think. k should write something like this too.

the hobbit

pretty much the only idea this pompous, fat action movie has in its head that bilbo ought not kill people with his new sword for no good reason. "heroism's knowing when to not use it, not poking everyone you see with it," or something like that. this strikes me as fantastically odd in a movie where life is so cheap. i mean, it's always cheap for the enemy in action movies, but the not-human enemies of middle earth give special license to massacre conscious beings the way i eat chocolate covered raisins and have it be totally chill.

this comes naturally from the whole fantasy of the good guys, that there are like, 10 of them, and that they can each kill about a million evil people, kind of the way conquistadors massacred the locals when they arrived in central america. (i think cortes LITERALLY had like 60 guys with him and managed to subjugate a solid chunk of mexico). this willingness to have creatures with consciousness die in such stupefying quantity is super fucked up, and super central to propagating the myth of perfect evil. the creatures are helpfully hideous and slobbering so their lives literally mean nothing.

anyway, what really made me think of this was the part when bilbo, clearly thinking back to this whole "poke only the nameless numberless hordes" shtick, does not kill golem, but merely kicks him in the head jumping over him and so running away with the only thing that gave its life meaning. now, i think golem is the strongest argument for euthanasia in the history of the world. but this preposterous restraint coming on the end of the most epic, meaningless slaughter of so many people (but goblins, so it's chill) was fucking mind boggling.

alright, that's enough. i'm the guy who watches lord of the rings and gets outraged on behalf of the orcs.

i think i did super, super well on the GREs unless i straight up saw a mirage of desire before i got up from that computer, which is super possible, and the idea of which makes me feel a little sick, but i think it'll be okay. everything's alright. i wish k was here because everything is better with her and pretty hollow and shitty and just not all that important to me without her.

drugstore cowboy

it's got the most romantic hero there ever was. he smokes and dopes and outsmarts the coppers and ultimately proves he's sensitive and sensible too. all is redeemed and drugstore belly flops into a very generous happy ending. a junkie keeps his promises! good god!

the best parts are when the hero's acting like a maniac, explaining the hexes and signs by which he lives his life, and, basically, being a drugged up lunatic. it's worst when it tries to show us what bob feels like when he's really high. very silly.

i didn't feel much watching it.

the bluest eye

The Bluest Eye is about racism and sexism and poverty, but as little people know it. There's nothing in this book about the grand structures of injustice that continue to define life in the United States. Instead, it's about how a ten year old black girl comes to pray for blue eyes. The Bluest Eye is about big evils trickled down into tender psyches.

Cholly Breedlove hated women when he should have hated white people, but that would have "consumed him," "burned him up." 

Claudia: "I destroyed white baby dolls."

etc etc. 

And so much other stuff too, so much brilliant understanding of people and relationships, of "ministratin,' " of those human whores one can't damn or idealize, who burp when their hearts ought to melt and swoon when they ought to be crass. Of complicatedly ugly people, like that woman with her cat, who're consigned by those grand structures of injustice to dreadful situations, but then staking out that territory and implicating themselves in the dreadfulness.

Notes on Twin Peaks:

I should have started this sooner. Twin Peaks is sometimes funny and sometimes very scary. It's kind of like a soap opera, I guess. The acting is often very "bad" and the plot preposterously elaborate. But the emotions in it aren't overwrought like a soap opera, it doesn't have that hysterical seriousness, if that makes sense. It's difficult to describe the way people are in Twin Peaks. They're caricatures, definitely, but also so creepy somehow, and not just the creepy ones. I guess it's just the plasticity of them, the uncanniness of seeing a kind of robot, a person with a very rigid essence no matter the circumstances. Everybody is so unflappably themselves, or whatever they are in that episode, that nothing really affects them.

I want to remember that bizarre scene when James and Donna and the doppelganger all sing together in Donna's living room and it's so, so absurd, so hilariously sweeeeeet.

I just watched another episode. Cooper and the sheriff saved Audrey. Mr. Smith is menacing Donna and doppelganger with a gardening utensil. Was there anything special in this episode? I think Bobby's haircut is very '90s. It was action packed and slap stick and intense at times. There's a small town judiciary where they recess with a beer. Donna makes an atrociously cheesy speech about a first kiss. It'd be a fairly corny melodrama if it weren't so many disparate things slapped together.

And another! deprive witnesses of schizophrenic medication to release their other personalities so as to interrogate them! I think I like Twin Peaks best as a musical. Leland is marvelous. I don't know, there really isn't much to all this. I don't really have an excuse for watching it, odd as it is. There's nothing much to take from it. Lynch as Coop's boss, with very bad hearing, is wonderful.

fuck everything

World of Video was swallowed by ten thousand ordinary people. They just bought it up! They took a library private! I mean, this is really obvious and dumb: in the store's final days the movies got sold instead of rented, taken out of the store for $10 forever instead of $4 for two days. What a deal! But World of Video's closure made me realize what a stark thing a purchase is, how horrifically final. Now you're alone with your movie that you'll watch twice in the next 35 years, and a community is dead, scattered in private dusty homes because people didn't care for the compromises and expense and community of a give and take. I will never, ever shop at Blaustein's fucking hardware shop.

shawshank redemption

yo this movie is not terrible. it's understatedly epic, and one should appreciate that. apart from the horrifyingly corny stuff about "hope" and whatnot, it's pretty neat. i mean, one actually gets the sense that many years pass and that people are patient and that things happen slowly. it's pretty good. i'll also remember the red haired rapist calling dufresne "honey," he said it really well.

i dunno, i guess it's just a corny feel good piece of crap. it never offended me, at least.

love,
frank

PS i also reread Mr. Norris Changes Trains, and that book is the bomb. i really appreciate Mr. Norris's understated villainy, i mean, that guy is flat out the worst person in the world. and yet not. i thought i saw a lot of references to oscar wilde in it, and i got this idea that, very loosely, Mr. Norris is like dorian gray and Schmidt is like the portrait. im pretty pleased with that.

rain

funny how in rain one ought to be naked. getting wet gets everyone so ruffled. it'd hardly matter if one was just skin. skin's pretty good at getting wet, almost as good as a ducks ass. maybe as good. at any rate, it's pretty silly how frantic everyone gets, with newspapers over heads and such, when if they just took off their clothes it'd all be very simple.

i went up to the roof to look at the storm and it was incredibly boring. there were muffled flashes here and there and gray cloud everywhere. there's no use being too much in the middle of things.

the comedians

ive got to write about these things that i do because if i don't i won't remember them. that's a problem because i need to know things to connect them up with other things. this is like this. and ill have a paltry web if i can't remember things.

one forgettable thing i suppose ill try to remember is the comedians, by graham greene. mr. brown is a recurring character for greene, he's a lot like maurice bendrix in the end of the affair, except more straightforwardly an asshole. the book is watching him be indifferent to things that matter and cling hideously to a few bits of pride. bendrix actually loved and so actually hated and suffered. brown's just a hard old shit.

the book's about brown's trip to visit his hotel in haiti. he inherited it from his mother who he thinks is pretty much a whore but who was, by all indications external to old shit brown, a ridiculously good person. there're some flat, farcical characters to enliven things: jones who plays cards and some black guy who never speaks, The Presidential Candidate, immensely ponderous with idealism. they're all couriers of happiness and meaning, delivering their goods to brown to more thoroughly illustrate his old shit ~ness.

because it's haiti there're the tontons macoute who are pretty interesting to read about and lots of colonialist nostalgia. i mean really though, why anchor this book with the most spectacularly flatly, even blindly hateful person? this man can't even sense! i mean i guess there's something like The Sound and the Fury where it's interesting to see through a strangely~sensing prism, but this guy's just flat. at the very end he eulogizes whatsisface by saying, yet again, how he made good rum punches. and brown himself feels an idiotic pang. but one's been reading through that stupid, self centered toff for 300 pages and self centeredness is just fucking boring when it's filtered through such a blandly, predictably life ~negating guy. i don't know why greene sticks us with him, the book couldve been a lot better if we had eyes roaming outside of his skull.

I DIDN'T GET THE THIIIIINNNNGGGGG. i don't really feel anything. i haven't lost anything, just some hope.

waiting for news from the lcrno flm fstvl reminds me of the room where everything comes true in stalker. the stalker in stalker explains, nearly crying, that he thinks the zone only lets people through to the room who are truly wretched, those without hope. not good or bad, just totally wretched. waiting day after day to hear from these heartless fuckers, that idea is a source of great comfort to me. every day i continue to wake up hopeful, confident in my abilities and eager to check my email, is another day i'll have to wait. all i need is some self doubt and good news will come romping in.

HEADHUNTERS!

Headhunters does not make very much sense, but it's a wonderful movie because it knows it. In a brilliant wink, the master detective charged with unraveling this hysterical narrative ultimately invents a story for the public in order to save his reputation. There's no solution here, only glorious bewilderment.

It's about Roger, a headhunter who steals art on the side. Before long, he steals a painting from a terrifying man who then chases after him for the rest of the movie. It's tense at times but not at all scary. the point is Roger's hilarious tribulations: a handsome, glamorous man rapidly gets to looking like a leprous martyr. And everybody betrays him. In the brief moments when things pick up for Roger the movie dips horribly—a sponge bath is a particular low point. The movie's singular fault is that someone actually loves Roger; Headhunters works only insofar as Roger is suffering horrendously. The movie's fast and dark and Roger kills someone by shooting them through the crotch of his pants.

on screens: i wonder if there was ever a time when archie comic books or just some really delicious printed matter made places put up signs saying you couldnt bring them in because you'd sit down with it and never leave and monopolize their tables for ten hours. because that happens with computers now. has there ever been anything that so entranced people? that made them so useless?

so i went to prospect heights to see ashley talk softly and be kind of pittsburgh working class humble. she's very nice and if i didn't know better i'd condescend horribly to her and sometimes i fear i still kind of do. she has a roommate who's kind of cranky. later when we were talking about their OKcupid profiles she said that when she was herself, was honest in her little self summary no one contacted her. she's snarky and practical. ashley's spectacularly practical. their house is a humble little thing, it smells funny and all the rugs are so sad. they took the tupperwares from my takeout dinner and that made me respect them enormously.

then i biked home and on the way home rasko (sp?) halpern biked up beside me and biked along with me over the brooklyn bridge because he said he didn't have anything better to do. his bike was much too small for him and his t shirt was ripped around the shoulders and he wore a stained hoody around his waist. it all looked like stuff picked indiscriminately from the salvation army. his words got rounded and indistinct with saliva, it sounded like, and initially i thought he was mentally handicapped. so we biked over the bridge and i asked him questions now and then and he was spectacularly laconic, like some fucking flannery o connor character. he was magical. i asked him what the most romantic thing he'd ever done was and he said "bought 'em gold." he never said anything, apart from asking me to buy cigarettes, except if i asked him a question. he mostly responded with yes or no.

he REALLY wanted me to buy him some cigarettes, or give him money for loosies. most everything i know about him and will write is cobbled together from his extremely minimal statements. he said he was the youngest of 4 brothers, each 3 years older than him. he said he'd graduated from high school early, this past winter. he said his parents were physicians assistants. they'd sent him to a psychiatrist who diagnosed him with bipolar and prescribed him lithium which he stopped taking because it made him fat. he said his parents were stupid, that they'd done that to him and all his brothers. he said all this with no extra word. and really just amused at the silly stupidity of other people. he said he'd first had sex when he was 10 and first smoked weed when he was 3. he grinned a lot and looked like a fucking idiot with his buzzed hair. but his speech was so guardedly spare. everything was just head-shakingly stupid to him, in afunny way. he liked math. he said he was thirsty as we were biking over the bridge. i asked him if he drank beer and he said yeah, that he'd just drunk 50 minutes ago. and i said how and he said his 30 year old cop friend. and so i bought us a 40 of budweiser at the deli and we drank some of it at hudson river park where i played frisbee everyday in high school.

he said he didn't do anything. he said his parents were retired and didn't do anything. he said he might go to hunter this fall. he wants to be a doctor. he hates doctors because they do everything wrong. they gave him the wrong pills. lithium was wrong, apparently. he's never had a curfew. his parents don't care, but this came off funny. everything came off funny. eventually he left and he just reaffirmed the directions back to the brooklyn bridge and biked off wordlessly. i sat there and finished the 40 and watched this guy sprinting back and forth across the field in the dark, in the dark it looked like his limbs were churning insanely fast, but maybe that's just what the darkness did. then i biked back and passed a guy on his bike singing and a jogger singing in a breaking little voice 'LET'S FLY, FLY FLY AWAY" that frank sinatra song and it was totally surreal. rasko really wanted cigarettes and i didnt get them for him and i kind of regret it. he was such a fucking weird kid. he said he smoked 2 packs a day and claimed to have not eaten in 3 days. but this was all so nonchalant. so nonchalant and funny. how do i express that? that nothing he said was something he would have said if i hadn't asked him. it was all just stuff to feed the meter, if i was the meter my questions the quarters/hour. yo weird as hell.

dogs

at the dog park again. today there were these two black german shepherds with a photographer and a couple other people. theyd been there before like that. another dog walker told me the girl with them, sort of awkward teenager, diffident about ordering the dogs, was the daughter of bruce davis, one of those lawyers advertising on late night tv. they're his dogs, apparently. they're beautiful dogs, so physically masterful. one of them was kept leashed because when they're romping together they team up and it's too much. the leashed one squealed horribly, "the shepherd squeal," i was told. it seemed appropriate to me that it made those horrible noises because i'd been so awed up to that moment at the straight up perfection of the dog. it outran, out-handsomed, jumped, and muscled every other dog. with the ball in its mouth, it would let it fall as it trotted to then nip it back up, elegant as a tennis player using their racket because they can't be bothered to bend over to pick something up. it invented a dashing little game for itself! so of course it whined horribly.



im not excited about anything right now. need something to be excited about.


there was this absolutely horrible woman at the little dog park, shrieking at the cuteness of everything. she had a 9/11 conspiracy t shirt but was otherwise a pretty, super normal looking 5th avenue apartment building type person. she was so, so horrible.

soup kitchen

was walking on 15th btwn 5th and 6th and passed this long line of wretched looking people and asked one what he was waiting for. in the basement of St. something xavier church there's a cavernous, massive room where around 1300 meals get served every sunday around lunch time. it's almost all black people and almost all men. it's kind of upsetting seeing somebody eat that hungrily, somehow way more upsetting than just seeing a horrifically thin, obviously starving person. it's like watching some very intimate medical procedure or, just, seeing someone so totally oblivious and engrossed in the business of staying alive. it feels wrong to see someone that passionately preoccupied.

there was fish on rice and a little salad that no one ate. a nearly presentable woman, given away by the stress in her face and hairless brows with little cuts where the hair should be, went around to trays about to be dumped to shovel their salad into her tupperware. there was a cookie and some juice and ample bread and oranges, most with splotches of green because they weren't really ripe.

it's funny how wearing castoffs one ends up looking like a very badly dressed teenager. lots of sneakers and there was an i [heart] haters hat. people had funny ideas about health: one guy sent me to get him more juice explaining that he had asthma and his doctor told him that juice was good. it was so nice to be helpful, to be thanked. my job was to be a busboy for the hall, grabbing trays when people were finished. the hall smelled quite bad. some people were pretty much passed out over their trays. it was all very matter of fact, it didn't "stink of charity" the way this kind of thing apparently used to back in orwell's day. people were super, super courteous, on the whole.

people loved the juice and cookies. how strange and horrible to see people loving, needing sugar in that most simple way, these adults. and there was socializing, lotta talk about sports, and some people who just really needed to talk, but it was very very weird to have it be all about the food. these people have been made like no one i have ever known by poverty.

hunger by knutty knut hamsun

hunger is about this nightmarishly sensitive, doubting, and impulsive guy. he accosts people on the street with aggressive nonsense and suffers (glories in?) spectacular mood swings. he lives off his writing but he writes feverishly; he's got infrequent streaks of brilliance but mostly it's unpublishable. he's also often freezing and starving to death.

everything is in this guy's head! he's got this "cathedral" of thought and feeling inside of him where outwardly he's just a crazy person, raving alternately with joy and self hate. the amazing thing is that this total lunatic, this guy stricken with a mind he describes as a wound god probes his finger in, is so lucid and reasonable. that might be the ultimate fantasy of the book, that our protagonist could actually chronicle the epic inner dramas of briefly losing his pencil or spending a night in jail in such an orderly way. maybe he could; part of the elegance, the wonder of this story is how spare it is. physically, there's really nothing in it. there are few characters and we never see anybody more than twice, really. there's just his body, his buttons he's trying to pawn, etc. having him be so radically impoverished ends up making that body an exposed nerve, a more direct link to his brain. there's never a full stomach, a warm body to pacify his raving.

he's a "spiritual aristocrat." (the intro.) this book's called the hunger and our guy is often hungry but this is not hunger like down and out in paris and london, this is "anti-social" mania, proud, superior suffering. this book, as isaac bashevis singer pointed out super insightfully, came out in a period of social upheaval in norway and it was about some obscenely wretched guy and his sufferings, but it was NOT a book people who care about the sufferings of poor people could use to advance their cause. this guy is an individual, rising and falling (pretty much always falling) on the wild whims of his soul. this guy is all, all, all alone.

i love the idea of the essence of a thing distilled. like seeing a movie in the blue light on the walls of an apartment, or the fumes out of the vents of a restaurant—those from Lyon have always smelled very true. imagine if a restaurant critic had to, you know, go to the bathroom, before they could finish their review.

was watching basketball, spurs vs oklahoma city thunder, game one of the western conference finals, and i'm amazed by how exciting that stuff is. i forgot about basketball. 

i had a fun time in portland. now i'm back and i just gotta make lots of money and not get lazy when i have free time so i can work on this thing about the self storage industry and indict excessive stuff-having.

i'm all sweaty and it's wonderful. i'm incandescent! i think to touch somebody, to have sex or something wonderful like that, you can only do it when you're overflowing with heat. skin is so flush and plump—touching is just the saddest thing when one's cold. 

earlier today i was picking up robert under the arms and flinging him up into the air. then i'd take a break and eat some lunch. then he'd come running, smiling with the stupidest, purest joy, and i'd do it to him again. except each time i set him down to take a break he'd return sooner and sooner to demand i resume until pretty much as soon as i put him down he was nearly ready to throw a tantrum. when he has a tantrum he jumps up and down. it's really funny in retrospect.

tomorrow i will go to arta and laura's barbeque!

yojimbo!

that movie was fucking terrific. rarely is anything so ambiguous (at least for a while). it is actually unclear whether this guy is flat out evil or actually good. he's sneaky about getting things done. he straddles an evil world and lashes out in every direction. no good deed goes unpunished, hilariously. but since everything redounds on evil it's all good. BAD ASS MOVIE!

and the soundtrack is fucking fantastic, it's like some james bond shit, thumping and brass. kurosawa's got this really funny way of deploying sound, it might as well be slapstick fart noises tacked on. he'll just drop some music on for a few seconds, just for a single gesture. it's quite tacky, really, but since it's happening in a movie like this it's just adds to the unique glory. honestly what a fucking great thing. i loved this. i watched it with matt on the couch here eating popcorn. there's a lot of salt on the middle cushion and i've been trying to wipe it off but the couch is kind of salty now. i have to get to bed so that tomorrow isn't terrible

the barbarian invasions

quebec! this movie is way less good than the decline of the american empire. there's one amazing shot at the beginning of the catholic nurse through the hall bringing the communion wafer. that was amazing. besides that there was cheap banter and a man reminiscing about sensual pleasures. there are token gestures to the misery caused by remy's spectacularly selfish sensuality but this movie is ultimately a mawkish toast to cuisses, bouches, etc. the bulgarian nurse's rubdown? get the fuck out of here.

it should be thrilling when middle aged women talk about administering hearty blowjobs, but not when the movie lacks the courage to pan over to the wife. it makes its argument about people and sex by setting up a puritan (capitalist capitalist capitalist!) straw man and then unleashing gorgeous women to make out with him. it's an easy movie, a cheap movie. the decline of the american empire absolutely astounded me, but maybe i really was that puritan straw man three years ago. i wonder if it'd still be something special.

i appreciated the little vignettes, i found that really elegant and appropriate.

chairs

Why so many chairs? Why does every architect design one? Why is that the fundamental object in design? (it is, isn't it?) Enough with the chairs, enough with the sitting. There's got to be something else out there to design that isn't so guilty in the affliction of butts and backs everywhere, so complicit in offices.

What're these people striving for with all these chairs? Hopefully posture. Posture's kind of the one and only thing-- make chairs that are impossible to sit in if you aren't ramrod erect. I wonder if that's even possible though. I'm thinking of everyone in school, of finding so many ways to puddle and slink and wilt in a chair, worming down the back of it, their heads poking up less and less at an increasingly sharp angle from the rest of their body, seeking the place of least resistance, the 180. IDEA: put sandpaper or some such horrendously frictional thing on the seat of chairs. The difficulty, the energy required to not slip your butt forward and your torso down is the great difficulty.

happy frank

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.

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!

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!

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.

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" !!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

pere goriot and jiro dreams of sushi

it's difficult to know what to think of pere goriot because i don't know if it's funny. it's an epic, absurd, exhaustingly moralizing melodrama, and i have no idea how seriously to take it. a pivotal thing, for example, is whether madame de beauseant's suicide is actually even a shred of a counterpart to pere goriot's demise.

more fundamental to the book is its ultimate fixation on money and characters that have or have had it. they're the only ones entitled to a story, to a tragedy. there's no drama or even interest in humdrum misery, only on the preposterous array of characters with a shred of a claim on millions. balzac's set up in some dumpy-ass boardinghouse is amazing—are there really going to be a solid 5 out of 12 boarders on the precipice of being maad rich?

it's also a story of spicy feudalism, of lords and serfs but mixed with passion and debt—for the serfs are sometimes really good looking and now there are pawn shops. AH gotta run to the movies, write more soon.

Jiro Dreams Of Sushi would be immaculately elegant if they weren't cooking fish; the politics of those sublime smorgasbords are iffy.

The idea of doing the same thing for 75 years is astonishing. The special thing about Jiro Dreams Of Sushi is that it does not make it look easy. The need for time is at the center of the movie, for the most meticulous drudgery. I guess I'm amazed to see something that says that one must practice. It's a very austere but entrancingly simple idea that practicing the same thing hundreds of thousands of times will produce extraordinary outcomes. There is nothing at all mystical or special in this movie, just a profound, life-defining reverence for practice and time. How EXHAUSTING.

The intensity of their practice breeds exquisite mania in these Shikonin. They whittle away relentlessly at themselves, at their imperfections, and so the immutable parts of them become outsize. Jiro is left handed; his younger son is right handed. Because of this handedness the younger son's sushi restaurant is a perfect mirror image of his father's restaurant.
 
The Japanese food critc in the movie has THE silliest mustache I have ever seen.



but back to pere goriot. it's odd how for a writer renowned for biting political commentary and social awareness how little he writes about the mechanics of money. this book's really operatic, really emotional, really personal. i mean, it spends plenty of time indicting the rich, but really just because they're assholes, which is a pretty weak condemnation of the furred and cigared ones. there's certainly no "system" being critiqued here.

fascinating historical bits include: the filthiness of walking (it's nearly pointless for poor rastignac to get dolled up if he doesn't have a carriage to shelter him from the muck of paris's streets); how a foggy morning means people don't get up en masse. that weather was a force in the intimate lives of millions of people is stupendous. it was important and universal and bigger than small talk.

oscar wao

i should probably write more about the things i read because why else read them i suppose. this is how the good things will stick. i already wrote a short bit about this book, probably talking about i loved the history in the book and how i love its elevation of spanish, and of poor, urban spanish into the realm of the untranslatable, to the thing to which mr. 1st world language has to conform. that's gotta be at the core of respecting another language and so another people, is to recognize a language's dominion over a certain thought because you cant even translate it.

something that's iffy but perhaps just unavoidable is the book's trafficking in all the badonkadonk, car-stopping asses and general mania about female bodies. i mean, this stuff, apparently, is extremely real, but diaz indulges it pretty uncritically. or maybe not. i guess i just felt the book encourages you to salivate along with the greasy hordes. it definitely spends a little bit of time with how women were really uncomfortable with their bodies, about the horror of the attention, but i think it ends up coming down pretty emphatically on the side of voluptuousness as an empowering thing for them. which is thoroughly iffy.

yunior (junior?) is an interesting character. why choose him to narrate? to choose the one who ultimately loses out? from that perspective, he seems like a guy to give the story a happy gloss, the gloss of longing, a lying gloss. i guess he works because he's the one who's "friends" with oscar. still, a strange choice. maybe just empowering the meathead in a book that empowers a slew of maligned demographics.

i mean, the glory of this book was being on the subway and reading this book and not knowing many of the words in it and so approaching, as i never ever had before, hispanic people who look live and work nothing like me. but they knew more than i did! they could explain, and giggle knowingly, at my book! that's fucking ill empowerment for people too easily known just stammering english. to forget, as one so easily can, that this person does not speak "broken" but has a whole fluent mind. that they're just accommodating your foreign-ass language because they have to. that these people might very well be dazzling articulate. oscar wao's a beautiful reminder.

i think the most poignant image in the story is of oscar's mom when she's with the gangster, just before that ends, when they're having sex and she grabs him to stop him from pulling out but he wrenches free and comes on the "ruined plain of her back" or something like that (because her back's burned from when she was orphaned). so so horrrrrrible.

YO FUCK RACISM AND RELIGIOUS PREJUDICE

the spying, racial profiling, racism that the NYPD's been engaged in is, well, racist and alienating to muslims, but also a decidedly 3rd rate strategy to root out violent extremists.

assuming one doesn't believe that all muslims are conspiring to "take over" and that the vast majority are super stoked to live in a pluralistic society of religious freedom and all that, these crazy violent muslims have to end up worshipping and chilling with lots of super chill muslims. and who fucking better to pick up these lunatics then their fellow muslims? their fellow arabic speakers? their fellow, sophisticated parsers of koranic meaning?

apparently there was even some poor schmuck sent on a white water rafting trip with college muslims to monitor the hell outta these kids who took note on how many times they prayed. YO! THAT IS THE LEVEL OF SOPHISTICATION THAT THE NYPD CAN BRING TO THIS! like "yo, that guy prayed FIVE TIMES one day, isn't that like, so much? probably a sign of violent extremism" some poor schmuck whose never even heard of a goddamn muezzin.

a sure way to make people close ranks and be sympathetic to violent lunatics is exactly this kind of ham-handed, INSANELY RACIST surveillance. they might even conclude, kind of rightly, that there is a "war" against muslims.

imagine if, instead, there was just a good faith effort saying, yo, you muslims are super chill but there are some crazies in your midst, like the proliferating white, christian crazies in scandanavia and other parts of europe. if you guys would take a passionate stand against those sorts of crazies and tip us off to the bonafide lunatics we'd be able to leave you all at peace and stave off demands from racists that you're all conspiring to slit the neck of a goat (which stands for america or something) and that we've gotta treat you and your co religionists like you're terrorists.

also please tip  us off whenever you notice another bigoted, violence inciting christian or jew doing their thing, because they do that pretty often and it's aways nice to highlight that end of it.

it's TOTALLY NUTS that mirrors actually double light. that if have a wall of a certain material you can ACTUALLY DOUBLE the light which would otherwise just be all it was in and of itself—I guess it's a corollary insanity that one can paint a wall black and swallow the light, that it'll actually disappear into that darkness. NUTS

THE CORRECTIONS! man this book is fucking spectacular. the description of alfred and enid's sex life, the lion emerging from his cave in the morning, that WHOLE description, is extraordinary. that guy's a legendary prude, though i honestly saw a lot of myself in that passage.

AAHHH!

the corrections is full of absolutely brilliant things, wonderful descriptions of getting lost in the woods between words, of the glow of digital readouts, of the sanctuary of fat leather chairs like a first baseman's glove. i mean, actually fantastic, thrillingly evocative writing. i guess it's convenient to have such diverse wonderful moments in one book but one consequence is that they have to get strung together. and if there's any weakness in franzen's work, and a similar thing often happened in freedom, it's a love of super cheesy, cheap catchphrases that're supposed to be really zeitgeist-y that he uses to thread together his epic. these show up especially when the book gets global pretensions, when freedom's joey ends up in poland and his iraq war debacle, and now with chip flying off to lithuania. this book has so many intimate treasures, it's almost obscene to thrust them in with chip's pornographic adventures and vodka and other such nonsense.

but whatever! those things are outliars, literally and figuratively, in a book of hawk-eyed sensitivity. marvelous!

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.”

that cruise ship in italy

speaking out of complete ignorance, i strongly suspect that Carnival Cruise Lines is guilty of big time negligence with their boats. this saga of vilifying and ridiculing the captain of the ship is legitimate because that guy's a coward and grossly irresponsible. he's emBARRASSING.

but that ship had thousands of people on it! it was fucking gigantic! this story is doubtless bigger than a story about italian profanity and duty but that cruise ship company has a vested interest in making sure it stays about one little sissy man. i mean, really, if all it took was one blundering sissy to topple that ship so catastrophically that guy was meticulously incompetent. it's a big enterprise. there were more than a thousand crew members on that boat. this is a sissy-ass irresponsible COMPANY in all likelihood.

aaaaaaggghhh

Seth Stevenson's criticism of advertising is painfully uncritical. he wrote this article about Crispin Porter + Bogusky, an ad agency that got huge in the 2000s producing ads that targeted bros. Stevenson hated their campaign for Burger King: "its raunchy, bro-focused vibe rubbed me all the wrong ways, targeting the lowest common denominator...[their] campaigns valued provocation above substance and casual cruelty above inclusiveness." Their ads were sexist and prurient and gross; they didn't have Stevenson's values.


But values and "inclusiveness" are a pretty weird way to talk about an ad agency. Ad agencies don't have values. They sell stuff. You don't have values if your marketing campaign for Burger King is full of wholesome signifiers; you're exploiting wholesomeness for profit. It's kind of the opposite, actually.


God bless Crispin Porter & Bogusky for siccing themselves on one demographic that was, culturally, asking for it -- for the disgusting ads they produced for the disgusting food they loved. When Stevenson wails about how Burger King "could potentially find solid customers among women, children, and men who don’t wear Ed Hardy T-shirts," what kind of moron thinks ads for children bespeaks care for children?  Ads for children are the height of soulless, treacherous capitalism! Young children can't even distinguish ads from other kinds of programming! You evil fool, Seth Stevenson!


Stevenson, who watches ads professionally for Slate, has evidently seen too many of them to remember that they're not just entertainment. They're things to sell stuff to people, which entertainment makes easier.


He closes his article by discussing Crispin's "wholesome" transformation. They're doing a campaign for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. It's got little kids in it, it's real fucking cute, and Stevenson is pleased. Good to know he sleeps well at night knowing children are loving unhealthy, world-destroying food just as much as they can. AAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGG

let there be a race. let there be a rat race, even. but let there be one uniform, one track and one starting time. and let there be one breakfast beforehand and one, great parent in the stands.

but this "race" alone is a terrible metaphor because let there also be one training schedule. some people are definitely stupider or lazier or stupider and lazier than other people, but let there be a truly gigantic stadium for this race, one with a gravity greater than homes. let there be no inheritances.

america fucking sucks

This talk of red lines and the Straits of Hormuz and terrifyingly everyday chatter about battle plans against swarms of armed Iranian speedboats is really upsetting me. This country of mine has got to stop making war on everybody. It's also got to stop being so damnably hypocritical. The US is obsessed with the idea that Iran is "rogue" and "opaque" and it's come to the point where this fucking country doesn't believe Iran has any reason at all, no instinct of self preservation. Everything it does is understood as Israel-swallowing crazy Muslim shit and never understood in the context of the constant nuclear threats against it.

One major absurdity underpinning the tension and terror is the insistence that Israel and the West can have nuclear weapons and they can't. It's not a crazy idea, Israel and the West are democracies and don't have a  tradition of threatening to obliterate countries. But wait, they do! This apocalyptic relationship might've been started by Iran (or not, I'm not sure), but it's definitely a give and take these days. I remember during the 2008 US election John McCain sang an insane ditty "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" to the tune of Barbara Ann by the Beach Boys. Because it's the Beach Boys it's hard for us to realize that this is a preposterous and terrifying normalization of making war on Iran by a guy who represents a solid half of the United States. Iran may call us the great satan and have press releases in that tight, priestly rhetoric of third world dictatorships, but they only do it that way because they don't have our rich pop music tradition. Also, it's a kind of self defense to seem crazy (an explicit strategy of North Korea) when powerful Americans sing about taking you back to the stone age.

THEY'RE JUST LIKE US. THEY'RE RATIONAL. THEY AREN'T GOING TO CLOSE THE STRAITS OF HORMUZ BECAUSE IT'D BE ECONOMIC SUICIDE AS WELL AS ACTUAL BECAUSE WE'VE GOT A SPANKING ENORMOUS MILITARY AND A TRADITION OF HORRIFICALLY INHUMANE WAR MAKING (SEE JAPAN AND THE ONLY TIME ANY COUNTRY HAS BEEN EVIL ENOUGH TO USE NUCLEAR WEAPONS)

I haven't justified a conclusion of mine because I don't know enough and this is short and facile, but we have no more right to nuclear weapons than Iran. We just got here first and now we're bullying them. We should offer to get rid of all nuclear weapons anywhere near Iran, maybe just all of our nuclear weapons, with IAEA inspectors checking on us, in exchange for them dropping their program and letting in IAEA inspectors.

for whom the bell tolls

i've been reading for whom the bell tolls and it's almost embarrassing because every nincompoop approaches you and tells you what a good book it is and doesn't remember anything about it. they're right though. pilar in particular is a pretty fascinating character, she's so profoundly bitter and mean sometimes and i can't grasp it but i believe in it. it's impressive to call forth all this complexity and pain and those insoluble struggles for which there's only the hope one will stop thinking so much. robert jordan calls himself "a windy bastard" because of all that dangerous thinking and i've thought of that really often. 

it makes me want to be back in school, i want to write a paper about language in the book, about a story where the protagonist speaks and thinks in different languages and the occasional breach of that divide and the significance of all those "thees" and "thous." i was just reading a passage where a character gets a bit longwinded in denouncing another and everyone practically falls over in the agony of listening to him. not that it's boring or tedious, but that he's a bureaucracy in a man. he also just talks too much. there's a kind of fragility in the laconicism of the rest of them; there's a lot they don't talk about because they could die for something that doesn't even begin to exist. the "republic" is all the less real every time they invoke it for every good thing. one can't talk much about such things because losing faith would be so easy because they're so perilously unreal.

and many other things too

NYU's 2031 Plan

This evening Community Board 2 moderated the first public hearing on NYU's 2031 plan. The hearing was planned to happen at the NYU architecture building on LaGuardia Place but an overflowing crowd, kept out by fire regulations, made themselves known by banging on the windows and chanting. Nothing makes a very young man cringe like the political activism of people who could be his parents; I felt the character of my generation, embarrassed and yearning for some decorum during The Man's powerpoint presentation. 

The hearing was moved to the basement of Our Lady of Pompeii Church to make room for everyone. An unofficial count had the crowd at 500 people. There the NYU presenters did their best to be monotonous, for the success of the 2031 plan depends on boring the populace into acquiescence. And zoning laws can do that. But when the slides started sprouting buildings everyone came to life. 2031 calls for four gigantic buildings, all as tall as the tallest neighboring buildings, all promising at least twenty years of destruction, construction and no access to the public spaces that make the area a place to live. 

Still, NYU proposed the expansion of some public spaces and the inclusion of a public school and a playground in the proposed building where the Morton Williams supermarket is now, clear concessions to irate neighbors. But speaker after speaker invoked a rich history of NYU's alleged broken promises. They claimed the plan laid out is a best case scenario, that it's a deal with a university famously forgetful about nice things not notarized. "They lie. They lie. They lie" said a very sincere looking woman.

Worse, all of these buildings were shaded red with infringements on current zoning laws that ensure you can still see the sky with your head not tilted 90° up. "The rules exist for a reason" thumped Andrew Berman. If these buildings are built there will be less sky, less ground and less green. Several NYU professors claimed 2031 is no good for NYU; new buildings that will drive away NYU professors by destroying their quality of life is not the savviest way to attract new professors.

It's difficult to wage a fight against the new, one can seem huffy and reactionary and mired in the past. After all, NYU is a growing university and a center of culture and smart people, and it brings an awful lot of money to Greenwich Village. But the fact is that NYU doesn't need to perpetrate 2031 on the Village; the Financial District is clamoring for NYU development. The sites in question in there are two subway stops away from the rest of NYU's campus. Few people live in the Financial District, the place exists as a thing to be swallowed, a place validated by the disappearance of its public space. A park in the Financial District is fallow land, a failure of some colossal entity to claim that earth and that sky for its corporate might. It's a place for NYU. Stop it from building more in Greenwich Village, for its own sake.

Rocky

Rocky is pretty much the worst movie in the world. Nothing has ever been more bogus. Never has the American Dream looked a more monstrous charade.

I'm also disgusted by how Apollo Creed is made into this decadent and corrupt anti american. Having him pervert the mantle of Washington and Uncle Sam and be smart and handsome and care about his hair reminds me of the black carpet baggers in Gone With the Wind. It's part of a racist tradition of claiming America for the white man.

And the stuff with women! The beginning, with Rocky as Saint Francis of Assisi is fucking intolerable. And the speech to the 12 year old about being a whore! And the textbook sexual assault in his apartment! This movie is fucked up!

I've been thinking a lot about boxing lately, and one thing that stands out to me as proof that it's kind of the worst thing in the world is the idea of taking a punch. It's the most sickening valorization. Maybe this is just something in popular culture, but the jab's associated with this ignobility. The real man in the ring throws gigantic punches and gets his nose broken 300 times and Alzheimer's when he's 40. It's a savage and hideous thing.

I really wish Rocky had run more with Butkus the dog, nothing would undermine the idiotic achievements of Rocky's workout routine than the impatient panting of a dog alongside him, tireless and oblivious. You can have the biggest, smelliest most sexually aggressive muscles in the world, but you still can't outrun your ugly-ass dog.

YO RENT SHIT!

I want stores where you rent stuff to come back.
I want those stores to come back because they'd have to have quality stuff in them because they wouldn't just be pawning it off on some sorry-ass consumer who bought it in a frenzy and then forgot it when it wasn't new or because they only needed or wanted it briefly.
I want to see a study on how frequently people even touch the stuff they have in their houses.
The number of private storage facilities in the United States is fucking nuts and tragic. We are cripplingly burdened with cheap, broken, forgotten stuff.
I want to not throw out all my stuff like everyone else every time I move.
I want to have the community those bike collective hippies have, but for all kinds of stuff. I want mad neighborliness to be felt because the waffle iron's been used by everyone you know.
I watched a video of Jacques Pepin making a French omelet and talking about how he had the perfect omelet pan when he was younger. The pan, he explained, was only perfect because he ate so many omelets. The cast iron was horrifically sticky at the start; the flux of grease made it what it was. But eventually Pepin's diet improved and his pan got sticky and he's too old to be breaking in pans. That pan is dead. But what if there were institutions to pass down pans, to ensure a gloriously greasy lineage for all time? Remember the bitter tears of the Toy Story toys, forgotten in their bin! Stuff wants using! Disuse is abuse!

Yo, there's much more to this I'm sure but this is all I've got for now. The essence of it is that I want to not be forced to buy stuff in the first place. I'm going for that Feng Shui thing of trying to own just a hundred objects, but it's much more political than feel good aesthetics.

grand illusion

jean renoir loved people so much and so subtly and intelligently. grand illusion's got so much in it, many of the scene's are really vignettes about class and ethnicity, and they're all so GOOD! there's working class parisian marechal chewing the fat with the working german cow. there's that immortal clown, singing like my grandma  there's boeldieu, who reminds me a lot of my brother in law michael, with that impenetrable charm and nobility. one can't even say thank you to that guy. renoir the humanist! most exalted humanist!

and war! manmade war! one thing that really isn't in this movie is the ugliness of war, grand illusion is circumspect about it, refracting it through the monocles of great aristocratic talkers.

People ache to be kind. they give you harmonicas and never want to shoot -- what am i saying, this is a preposterous war movie, an exceedingly narrow slice of a war rotten through with sentimentality, but that rottenness, those contradictions that bog down victory or defeat in universal human love, are the only hope. put that way it sounds unforgivably soppy, but that's definitely my fault and not the movie's.



my father suggested i write something for the westview about world of video. i think it's a terrific idea, that place is my happiness in this neighborhood.