mother Joon-ho Bong

this movie was really beautiful because it humanized and made comprehensible and believable things that are too often the stuff of grotesque tabloids and cursory disgust. it makes a murderous mother into a sane and beautiful individual, well maybe not entirely sane. it was also really amazing because it was about a person following their heart, truly their heart and guided by nothing more than the passionate, awe inspiring love of parenthood and the horrors that arise from that unfaltering, uncompromising love. by the end of the film, i even believe the insecticide thing. i believe it all. what a dangerous and awesome power. its like if the epic mama bears of the forest could think and feel and do beautiful things, could live with nuance, maybe they could some day be like that incredible woman. jin tae is a bit absurd. but still, full of so much mysterious magic. i loved the way it ended with the dancing on the bus. what a terrific film.

courtship

men have a funny look on their faces when their in clubs. its a very focused look, staring straight ahead at something. its a blank stare, however, and they are never actually looking at anything. rather, its a look that endows them with purpose. this far seeing stare, across the crowd, towards some hypothetical person or thing on which has caught their attention, is an attempt to deflect attention from their not having any purpose. they glower morosely into the distance because they cannot and must not admit that there, right in front of them, they have no rationale for being there. this is essential in a club because the rationale is an unspoken and desperately avoided one, they are there to rub themselves against other people.

cellphones and other little meaningless devices are also pivotal tools of avoidance and deflection of the rubbing themselves against other people rationale. in theory, a cellphone provides an infinite portal into a whole other world in which the man is invested. it supplies him with a structure against to lean, a world full of motives like love, beauty and friendship which theoretically occupy his interest, much the same way he would like you to interpret his staring into the distance. there, you must imagine, he is preoccupied with beauty love and friendship and such motivates his intense observation of that neon thing on the other side of the room. he does this because he is terrified that you will look at his base, horny and utterly straightforward self and so tries to foist attention onto auxiliary objects in which to find meaning (or, importantly, make conversation and further obfuscate his obscene simplicity).

things like waiting in line are actually great for this man. it provides him with purpose: something to follow, to cling to. waiting in a line, the man can even dispense with his distant stare, his waiting speaks for itself. he now has something to complain about, a waiting external to himself and hence ripe for commentary -- as anything external is very ripe for our ever deflecting man.

he has probably been doing a lot of furtive and diffident smiling at this point. openings often appear for something beyond the uncomfortable period of trying to get something from nothing. which brings us to what our man really wants. what he wants would best be satisfied without talking. talking complicates matters for our man because he could stumble and is altogether unable to speak very well right now because he's become so accustomed to his silence and his autonomous and disinterested staring. he will never look anything he actually wants in the face because he is so terrified of rejection or, even worse, exposure of his simplicity, which is why he is always staring at inanimate or otherwise neutral objects. this is his way of being cool and trying to be attractive because it helps establish a comfortable layer of indifference to his environment, "hey look i could totally care less about any of these individuals." if this was actually true, he could totally succeed in getting all the rubbing against other people any man could possibly want, but by and large it isn't. his blasE attitude and aloofness are unhappily belied by the seriousness and above all shyness of his demeanor. the stakes are high.

this is of course a hilarious thing to bear witness to. these men in clubs, hungry and abashed, are almost endearing in a way. even when they're armed with a brusque, unpleasant and often wholly contrived machismo (note the way people going clubbing dress, it is a special occasion), they evince an agonized, and very suppressed desire. he is a tortured soul, our horny clubber.

the brothers karamazov

right now the book is at jesse and patrick's house so i have to go get it. it's the most incredible book and i don't want to forget why i think so. it's got all sorts of unbelievably wonderful things, alyosha himself in particular. there's a passage where it describes how unreasonably affected and sad he is after zosima is "corrupted" and smells after he dies and his passion and how its beautiful if naive and that reason, for reason would have squelched his passion, is cheap for its the most common thing, we all have plain old reasonable thinking. and there's ivan when he says "i'm a scoundrel" as he's leaving on the train back to moscow when its perfectly obvious he shouldn't and his relationship to that cook who bewitches and strangely entrances him who he despises, its all so unfamiliar and still somehow strikes me as so true and wise and beautiful. and grushenka, the awful grushenka who alyosha really is stupid in thinking she somehow has a beautiful heart, i guess that's his boundless heart (soi meme) but he's totally wrong she's just sort of pathetic for acting that way. and fyodor pavlovich himself the total loony with all his cognac and the sad and spiteful and bitter little rakitkin who wants to ruin alyosha's saintliness and father ferapont the lunatic who sees all the little demons and wears the chains and is the stupid holy fool. so many terrific happenings in this book and they often seem so loosely thrown together, its really just a fantastical parade of the extraordinary goings on of people's brains and souls and how beautiful man can be in his thoughts. what a pageant! and the grand inquisitor is a truly majestic idea, the whole idea of man being free in this life is pretty stupid. gotta curtail us and live for the afterlife. great way of suppressing the crazy masses. i am going to go for a walk to take in all the hilarious sights of st laurent at night.

AA

its funny at american apparel how aggravating and insulting finding things can be. since you're always totally surrounded by clothes and headbands and thong leotards, whenever you're looking for something it's never more than like 5 feet away from you. the label is staring at you and you, blankly, can't find it. the only labels i ever manage to recollect or find again are the ones with the pictures of beautiful women. the others, in black and white, i can never seem to find. and while i whine and stamp the boxes must be ogling my shoelaces or my nose. its labyrinthian by sheer volume even though its all right in front of me, really stupid-making.

amelio's

tonight was apparently slow. i just started as a kitchen helper at this pizza restaurant not knowing what a kitchen helper was, i figured i would be comfortably ensconced in the dishroom surrounded by suds. instead, i am a skilled worker already, expertly manipulating and flouring and dancing with the dough. i am an artist. this was really hard at first especially because my initial teacher was amit (amin? amyth?), an indian or pakistani man with breathtaking expertise. it made me think of the grand sensei in kill bill, such coldness to incompetence. he only let me watch, whenever i tried to do something myself he intervened with the urgency of a man who cannot bear to see something done improperly. he is quite short and doesn't speak english very well and yet it is evident he is the sage of the restaurant, everyone else has come to understand and respect his brief, muddled and very wise utterances. working with amin i rapidly lost hope for my prospects as a pizza master. the situation was exacerbated by a shelf at eyebrow level. i banged my head near constantly into it, and whenever i looked directly forward i stared into a rather uninspiring piece of wood. it made me feel even dumber than my inability to handle the dough.

amelio's was hilarious in that a disproportionate number of people working there looked like mail order brides. so many of them were blonde and russian and spoke limited english. this other trainee, a woman named mitka epitomized this. she worked in earnest in spite of having evident difficulty at differentiating between some of the vegetable toppings (she was the topping girl, a lesser task, i like to believe than my own. i was building the foundation of the pizza experience). i got the impression she was learning the word zucchini on the fly.

another guy came to my aide of amin left me, a pudgy, friendly and average guy named josh. he was a little reminiscent of israel from that rideshare. he had been working there for about a year and a half and made me very happy when he told me that amin definitely was the pizza master of the establishment. i find it really funny that this little indian/pakistani man had somehow become the preeminent force in churning out delicious italian food, we do live in a big beautiful world. more later.

sitting in the library

sitting here in the cave of mcclellan i noticed, as never before, how the face of the kid sitting across from me is almost completely blocked out by his computer screen. save his hairline and occasionally a chunk of forehead, i can't see any of his face. i feel like it would be interesting to somehow document how much time we spend staring into computer screens, and how silly the screens look when we look back on them. have you ever noticed how whenever there's a television or computer screen in some home movie it always looks so obviously silly and boring and small and meaningless and yet the people in the video remain enraptured by the screen? how only through this new medium, this further distance can one readily distinguish how really flat and ridiculous such things are? i feel like i should try and make something that communicates how ridiculous that flatness is

Segal's

I worked at Segal's last night for the first time since this summer. My shift was from 6:15 until 12:30. I forgot what that place was like, that one indeterminate smell that's stuck in your nose within about 3 minutes of being in there. I think it might be from the fans. We had to wash and clean and squeegee and soak all the stands where the vegetables sit, Segal's is much cleaner than you would think. When the cooling fans underneath were turned back on, that musty, long-sitting-vegetables smell came surging back.

Handtrucks are the tool of the work. You can have a real swagger with one, they turn so quick and push so easy that it's easy to look really blithe even with sixty pounds of carrots. it's also really easy to crash into things when you have an unwarranted swagger like i do, i blithely, accidentally gashed a large bag of grain once swaggering by. Handtrucks also make the work sort of useless though. When I had first started working there I imagined that I was going to get jacked working there carrying stuff but it was made lamentably easy. I never got muscle-tired at Segal's, only the useless weariness of standing on your feet for 7 hours, it's a really underrated misery. When I worked there over the summer, the real difficulty had been not carting the yogurt but the feminizing, small and petty labor of depositing it in the shelves. Crouching and stacking and stretching out little fingers was the difficult part. Especially in the yogurt section; there, the fridges were covered by these thick plastic curtains sort of like in a carwash that would trudgingly push against you to retake their rightful place.

i feel sick and do not want to write anymore. i don't want to apologize to joanna, i am not a bad person, i don't want to see anyone.