High Concept

The Pitch: It's like An Illness meets A Sickness!

2007-01-18T14:56:00.000-08:00

It's supposed to be easy: gather a bunch of old DVDs that are cluttering up the joint; make sure they're a mix of okay movies, lousy movies and maybe a lost marvel or two; bring 'em in to a used a record store; wait ten minutes; walk out with some decent folding cash.

So, check it. I walked into Streetlight Records with the following:

Broken Arrow
Buffalo Solidiers
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Freeway
Gamera: the Ultimate Collection
The Laughing Policeman
Maria, Full of Grace
Mission Kashmir
Plan
Reign of Fire
Scarface: Two-Disc Anniversary Edition
Tomb Raiders/Godfather's Daughter
Torque
We Don't Live Here Anymore

And, after ten minutes of walking around and browsing (and finding three or four things I wanted to buy, and talking myself out of them), I walked back up to the counter, where the guy said, "Yeah, so there was one that was a little too scratched up for us (Mission Kashmir) and for the rest we can offer you twenty dollars in cash or twenty-five dollars in trade."

"Twenty dollars in cash?"

"Yeah, I know it doesn't seem like a lot for so many movies--" and here he showed me how he'd broken down the pricing, "these three are ninety cents, these are a dollar, two dollars, and the ones on top are three dollars. Those are pricing new at nine dollars these days."

I wasn't upset, but it was a little disappointing. On the one hand, I'd priced all of them out on Amazon used and new before I went in, and I knew some weren't movers (Crouching Tiger, We Don't Live Here Anymore, and those two old Hong Kong flicks on one disc, Tomb Raiders and Godfather's Daughter, each go for a little more than a dollar on Amazon New & Used), and some were going at the rate he offered (one of the movies he'd offer me three bucks for, Freeway, was selling for exactly that on A N&U). But some were going for more, like Scarface for $6.25, or Broken Arrow for $4.00, or The Laughing Policeman for $5.56. In fact, if I didn't factor in Amazon's bite, all the movies I was offering him would fetch a hair over $40 on A N&U (assuming they all sold which wouldn't really be the case at all). I was expecting something a little closer to $28 cash, but obviously that was very wishful thinking.

I should've taken the money, but instead I just thanked him, took the bag, and left. If I hustled my ass off, I might get two or three dollars more than what he was offering for trade.

I've had a bit of luck in the last year flipping some of my purchases for more money, and like most pieces of luck, this has proven a dual-edge sword. I now act like I know what I'm doing with all my collectibles when, in the past, all I did was collect them. Now that it's time, again, to start moving some of them up and out, I find myself torn between just getting rid of them at any price, or "maximizing" my profits on them. (There were seven DVDs that I put on sale on Amazon before leaving for Streetlight because it looked like I could sell them at a genuine profit.) When I'm not looking at my DVD collection or my books, when they're not in my line of sight, I just think I could load all of it up and get rid of everything, all of it. But then when I actually stare at the space over my desk, or the books on each shelf, a passionate yearning moves through me--something that feels simultaneously desperately happy and desperately sad. Danger: Diabolik next to G.I. Samurai? Sex & Fury across from L.A. Confidential, and next to Fight Club which itself is next to the Battle of Algiers? All 28 volumes of Lone Wolf & Cub? Every Don Delillo novel in print? The Complete Encyclopedia of Pistols and Revolvers sitting besdie Vollman's You Bright and Risen Angels? The Egyptian Gods & Goddesses resting beside Sniper II? As I've written before, I could stop buying books or DVDs, renting movies, and not run out of material for perhaps a decade.

So why don't I stop buying them?

2006 was a pip. Edi and I spent our first year of marriage happily traveling, happily working, happily watching everything falling into place. 2007, despite a wonderful trip to New York, already feels heavier. Are we buying? Renting? Having kids? Adopting? And what happens when we die? Is that it? It's much easier for me to hide from all this than her, but I can't hide nearly as easily as I used to--I finish watching Shogun Assassin and look over at my desk and shiver. Maybe it's the cold, sunless day. Maybe it's my post-chocolate blood sugar. And maybe it's just an awareness that I could emerge from this coccoon if I knew for sure what I would be without it.

The Pitch: It's like "Yes!" meets "Maybe!"

2007-01-03T17:30:00.000-08:00

I had four resolutions for 2006 and so far I've broken all of them. I told myself that in 2006:

I would start Pynchon's new novel;
I would start posting regularly to this blog again;
I would be more exact in taking a daily vitamin; and
Play less video games.

And so now it's January 3rd and I'm just now getting around to that second item on the list, and maybe also the first. I still haven't done the third, and I'm truncating this entry so I can go play a bit more Bully. More later, maybe. Currently, my attention span is far too short for even something as brief as a blog entry.

Test x2

2006-09-18T11:31:00.000-07:00

Please ignore again.

Ignore, please.

2006-09-17T11:40:00.000-07:00

I am just testing.

The Pitch: It's like Bibble meets Babble!

2006-06-05T18:05:00.000-07:00

Hello, Internet!

Actually, thanks to the Blogger being a worthless crashy git, I'm not even writing this on the Internet--I'm typing it in WordPad in the hopes of avoiding those damn Word-specific characters that muck up easy reading on the browser.

Uh, where was I? Oh, right: Hello, Internet!

I am without thought or resolve but why let that stop me from posting? I'm back at work after more-or-less-a-week-off during which time I saw two stinky movies in the theater (Art School Confidential and X-Men: The Last Stand) one excellent movie on DVD (Renoir's Rules of the Game--wow!) and noodled about on Guitar Hero occasionally. (Considering I can't even make it through Smoke on the Water on the Hard setting, I think it's time to hand in my axe.) Apart from that, it was a little bit of French class, a little bit of yoga class, a lot of book buying and not a lick of actual book reading.

One thing I did do during my time off was get some new software. Webroot was having a sale where if you picked up Spy Sweeper, they'd give you Windows Washer free. I didn't know much about Windows Washer but it sounded cool, what with its ability to remove unwanted files on your computer and improve performance.

Turns out Windows Washer really should be called, I dunno, Cheatin' Child Porn Protector. Despite all the stuff it says about helping improve performance, the main things Washer does is obliterate your browsers' cookies and history, and overwrite files with a randomizer. It's a great little program--if you're worried about the feebs raiding your computer, or your wife wondering if you're posting to Hot Or Not. Since I have neither of those worries, I haven't done anything with it, other than look at the lovely interface, which talks about adding "bleach" to your "wash" and suggesting you "throw in a little bit of bleach every so often to make your computer extra clean!" It'd be almost charming, if the cognitive dissonance wasn't more than a little creepy. Of course, I'm looking at this ass-backwards--Washer is supposed to protect you from others' abilities to watch what you do on the Internet. But I use gmail (and google calendar and their customized homepage) so I don't find that as much of a worry. Thanks to selling my soul to Google, I'm like the nudist next door neighbor doing stretching exercises in front of the window at high noon. It's already too late for me to worry about my privacy. (Although I guess if I ever sell one of my computers, I'll use it to wipe the drives.)

Another keen pair of programs I purchased: BackUpBuddy and BackupBuddyVFS from Blue Nomad. Blue Nomad created Wordsmith, the word processing program I use on my PDAs with barely a problem over the last five years, and I've always been attracted to the idea of BackUpBuddy, a program that reinstalls *all* your programs and info onto your PDA in case of crash, as opposed to the time-consuming reinstall every program after the OS restores the memo, address and calendar data. And after reading around and realizing that the VFS version would allow me to save everything on my PDA's memory card and reduce the chance of lost data to just about zero, I knew I had to pick them up. When I ended up with a new one gig sd card for my PDA card, I figured it was time to make the plunge.

As I said, I've used Wordsmith for a while, and have installed it across three PDAs in those five years, and unlocking the registration was probably the easiest it's been for just about any non-freeware program I've installed. But somewhere in the intervening years of program development and refinement, Blue Nomad has become an automated nightmare, like the world run by Skynet in the Terminator movies. It took three days of emailing their support desk (who was, admittedly, pretty prompt and helpful, albeit occasionally skimpy with the telling detail) to iron out the transfer of the programs from shareware on a 15 day countdown to fully registered. In fact, I had a scare-up with the memory card program on Saturday that makes me think it's still not registered. (How do you know BackUp Buddy VFS is registered? It stops telling you it's unregistered...except it doesn't always bother to tell you it's unregistered and suddenly when it mentions it you've lost another two days of your 15 day window. I believe the Maori had a word for such a situation and it was: Yikes.)

So. I've got a souped up PDA with a bitchin' memory card that can store, more than likely, every bit of writing I've done in the last decade. The kicker now is, of course, the writing.

I'll be honest. I'm not happy with the writing. I'm 75,000 words into a novel that is not ending, is not moving, and where I've forgotten too much of the early plot threads to smoothly take them up. More than this, though, I'm not really happy with my style. It's chatty but bland. Unimaginative and self-absorbed. At first, I was quick to blame five years of Nanowrimo (and my cumulative crap quarter-million) but I've also been writing the Fanboy Rampage for the newsletter for six years now, usually on a tight wordcount and it's made my work patter-heavy, description light. It'd be nice if it was, I dunno, terse or something but it's at best, an entertaining piffle. And entertaining piffles have their place in the world, but I want to write more than piffles. Hell, at this point, an entertaining piffle would be a step up.

And that's part of why things have been so quiet here at Casa High Concept. I'm not sure if blogging, speedwriting, comics reviews, and Fanboys are what I need right now. I don't feel able to focus my narrative voice as much as I used to and until I figure out what I need to do about it, things may be very quiet here for a while. I dunno.

Anyway, thanks for listening and checking in all this time. I'll post some more here this week. It's usually around the time I get really depressed and start whingeing that I have some sort of writing breakthrough. With luck, maybe it'll be right around the corner.

The Pitch: It's like Infinite Jest meets The Liar's Club!

2006-03-27T17:19:00.000-08:00

I'm on a mailing list about David Foster Wallace and I never post on it. (Lately, I haven't even been reading it.) And that proably would have been the best place to post this interesting little article about Mary Karr finding religion. Wallace, it is rumored, had some sort of romance with Ms. Karr (to the point of having her named tattooed on him, if stories are to be believed) so it's interesting hearing her take on A.A. and spirituality in contrast to what he's presented in Infinite Jest.

But if I'd posted it on the mailing list, it would've likely been received with resounding silence and, given the choice between the resounding silence there and the resounding silence here, I much prefer the one here. It's more peaceful, somehow.

Oh, and I also like her ending quote:

So that's the kind of Catholic I am. You know? I like everybody. I'm vain and pretentious and arrogant and terrified and full of longing for the numinous and for that joy. And yet I sometimes think I do everything I can to shove it away.

I find that really touching and lovely, you know? And probably would have even without the word "numinous."

The Pitch: It's like a Walk meets a Strike!

2006-03-18T16:30:00.000-08:00

Wow. Didn't intend to let that previous post stand as my most current for so long.

A little bizzy in the shizzy lately--overtime, newsletter, job #1, job #2, and MGS3. Yesterday morning, I beat MGS3 (for I think the third time) and then went to work where I picked up my copy of MGS: Subsistence and accompanying Metal Gear Saga (shown here for your viewing convenience) which I trepidatiously pre-ordered two months ago from EBgames.

Yes, now I can replay the game I just replayed, but with additional features and bonuses. I don't think my poor wife can allow this fact to fit in her head, even knowing me as she does. "Wait, when does Subsistence take place in relation to the game you just finished?" She asked me this morning.

"Uhhhh..." was the best I could master.

Fortunately, it is a game that rewards replays. The most recent time I replayed it, I went sniper-crazy, picking off one boss early (and so skipping the later fight with him entirely) and then picking off as many enemies as I could, as opposed to my usual tactics of trying to sneak through everything and swearing like a sailor when I inevitably fail. It really was like playing a different game, parts of which I enjoyed tremendously.

I imagine there's gotta be a good essay out on the Intarweb somewhere about the post-modern concepts of rereading a work and replaying a video game but I haven't found it yet. It'd be interesting to compare the replaying of video games with the rereading of literature. Although MSG3 doesn't have much thematic heft to it, there are some themes that may be worth exploring or thinking about in a literary sense. But more interesting to me is the idea that the creative team gives you additional items, secrets or tweaks to the gameplay when you replay the game to modify the experience. How this compares, favorably or not, to literary rereadings would be worth kicking around the curb.

But that's nothing I'm going to be getting to any time soon because I'm gonna be playing Subsistence.

The Pitch: It's like The Handmaid's Tale meets A Modest Proposal.

2006-03-07T15:32:00.000-08:00

So. You probably know this but South Dakota outlawed abortion today. I guess I knew something like this would be coming sooner or later, but still.

You may not know this but a blogger posted a detailed description of how to safely perform an abortion. I think doing so was incredibly brave, and it was fascinating to see how people reacted--why is just knowledge, simple knowledge, enough to instill fear? I ask because reading it scared me, too.

It also scared me to post in the comments field, and to post under my own name. But I did.

Because South Dakota outlawed abortion today.

The Pitch: It's like Dreamscape meets Storytelling!

2006-03-04T18:01:00.000-08:00

Pop quiz:

Last night, I dreamt I was watching a Paul Walker movie. In the movie, Paul Walker was a corrupt cop on the run in the streets of some dark city. At one point, he ends up trapped in a dead-end alley and, suddenly, three cool asian hitwomen show up. At this point, I thought, "Cool, there's going to be an awesome Kung-Fu sequence." But then, the women turn out to be his three wives, and they start bitching about how Paul never spends any time with them, forcing them to hang out with each other. I was disappointed because I thought the best thing about this movie was supposed to be Paul Walker having explicit sex with his wife after a kung-fu sequence. With horror, I realize that there are two Paul Walker movies currently in theaters, and I have chosen the wrong movie.

From the following list, choose the option that most correctly makes this dream a nightmare:

(a) That I went to see a Paul Walker movie;
(b) That in my dream there were two Paul Walker movies, and I went to the wrong one.
(c) That, in real life, there actually are two Paul Walker movies in current release.
(d) that my subconscious actually knew there were two Paul Walker movies in current release, and worked this knowledge into the context of my dream;
(e) Whatever my subconscious conflicts about marriage are, as expressed in the scene from the Paul Walker movie of my dream;
(f) All of the above;
(g) None of the above. This blog entry is the real nightmare, not the dream.

Pick up your pencils and begin.

Brought to you by the letter B, the letter A, and the number 10!

2006-02-27T15:26:00.000-08:00

Howdy! E & I just got back from a fabulous ten days in Buenos Aires, where we visited with Ryan and her boyfriend, walked a gajillion miles in sweltering summer heat, and had our return flight cancelled five minutes before it was supposed to begin boarding. Apart from that bit at the end, it was a truly wonderful time. If you ever get the chance to go to B.A., you should do it, if only for the exchange rate. Thanks to it, I was finally able to travel in manner of which I've always dreamed--as a freespending dandy, spending hours in idle conversations eating and drinking with abandon, tipping generously, and then catching a cab for the four block ride to the next restaurant.

We also saw Brokeback Mountain for 9 pesos (or three bucks) on a Monday night, which was pretty awesome. It would have been even more awesome if we could have gone to the double feature of Transporter 2 and The Exorcism of Emily Rose for only seven pesos. Edi deserves some kind of Spouse of the Year award for not braining me with a piece of sidewalk tiling the 55th time I suggested that as an activity, to say nothing of indulging me in three separate comic book stores and countless kiosco de diaros (more or less chronicled in my post at the other blog).

I know I should really start posting here on a regular basis again, but it's kind of rough because all I'm really thinking about these days is my beautiful wife and Metal Gear Solid: Subsistence. For example, we came home on Friday and one of my first thoughts was, "Man, it's great to be home! And in less than three weeks, I should have Metal Gear: Subsistence!"

MGS: Sub for those of you who don't know is the bonus-laden re-release of Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater, a game I have already played through twice already (and am working on number three this week). The biggest bonus to be had is an online mode which I won't even be bothering with, so it seems odd that I'd even care about the damn thing. But one of the other bonuses is the first two pre-Playstation Metal Gear games and I've been dying to play those games for approximately seven years now. From what I hear, those two games don't have nearly the level of crazy villains, absurd plot twists and hamhanded lecturing that makes the other MGS games so dreamy, but I don't care. If blowing more than forty bucks to get a three disc Playstation 2 game with Santa Claus camo and bonus levels of Snake Vs. Monkey is wrong, then I don't want to be right.

(Unless Edi doesn't approve, in which case I'll try a little harder to be right.)

Did I mention that I bought a case of Metal Gear Solid 2 figures at Wondercon? Deeply embarrassing. I mean, awesome, yes, but also deeply embarrassing.

Speaking of deeply embarrassing, we rented Domino yesterday and, oh my god, was that movie horrible. Not only was it overwrought, turgid, stupid, nonsensical, and filmed like a Eurotrash beer commercial, but everyone involved clearly knew it stank and tried to pretend it didn't. The script itself made less than no sense--to describe it as something a bunch of horny twelve year old boys might have made up on the fly is to do it too much justice. (To describe it as something a bunch of horny twelve year old boys might have started to write after drinking too many juice boxes, and then finished after they woke up baffled and groggy after their blood sugar crashed, unable to remember quite what they were doing beforehand, is closer to the mark.) The screenwriter, Richard Kelly, blew every piece of good will and benefit of the doubt I gave Donnie Darko simply because of how badly this sucked. (In the special features, Kelly looks about ready to flinch from a blow he know is coming from working on those big ol' turd.) Only a film as inept as this one would try to pass coke monkey/plastic-surgery victim Mickey Rourke off as a paragon of icy street cred.

I have to give some serious credit to Keira Knightley, though--to be in one of the best movies of the year (Pride and Prejudice which I saw on the plane to B.A.) and one of the worst (this one) shows a serious work ethic. That I even want to see her in another film also betrays a mighty charisma.

To sum up, Before I saw Domino, I would've been willing to say no movie with a Tom Waits cameo could be all bad. But Domino puts that to the lie. Avoid, if at all possible.

The Pitch: It's like Technology meets Commerce!

2006-02-05T20:43:00.000-08:00

Wondercon is coming up next weekend, and I thought it would be amusing if I gave myself the capability to email posts to my blog from there, should I
wish. Moscone Center West has wireless capability, but whether or not they actually will have it on for this event is another matter entirely. Or if I'll feel like blogging instead of shoving guys aside blocking my access to one dollar Jack Kirby books.

I have no idea why I'm going, to be frank, other than the possibility of
hanging out with Nancy and/or Chris. (Well, okay, and those Kirby books, I
guess).

But just in case I do go? And I do feel like blogging? I'm going to make damn
sure I can, dammit!

Why I Love the Metal Gear Solid Games in Two Quotes

2006-01-30T17:50:00.000-08:00

Quote One: "I first came up with this character who controls bees and also has bees inside him and spits out bees." --Hideo Kojima, writer/director/creative force of the Metal Gear Solid games, 2004

Quote Two: "What are you gonna do? Sick your dogs on me? Or your bees? Or dogs with bees in their mouth so when they bark they shoot bees at me?" --Homer Simpson, around 1999 or so.

There's a chance the translator took liberties with the translation, but, yeah. The Homer Simpson side of Hideo Kojima is part of what makes him awesome.

The Pitch: It's like Crumb meets Northwestern!

2006-01-05T21:36:00.000-08:00

By a more-or-less accidental confluence of movie-watching, I ended up watching Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects this morning, sandwiched between the first and second halves of American Movie (last night and tonight).

Huh.

American Movie focuses on Mark Borchardt's year long struggles to get his 35 min short horror film made and released over a period of years. While I'm sure Rob Zombie had his problems as well, it's kind of hard to think what they could have been by the fourth time you see a close-up of his wife's perky ass flouncing around all the mutilated tortured corpses. He made Lion's Gate enough money with his notorious House of 1000 Corpses that he had 100% creative control this time around. Good for him and his Sheryl Crowesque wife, but for the viewer? Well...

To be fair, The Devil's Rejects is a great looking film (some of those shots of Coven look pretty good as well)--oversaturated Super-16 film stock, some fine handheld camera work, and it's nice to see someone who loves the patented '70s freeze frame as I do. But Zombie spends so much time covering his murderous family of outsiders torturing and killing the innocent, it's a bit mystifying when his impressive setpiece ending (the family is gunned down in slow-mo to Skynard's "Freebird") is filmed as a tragedy. What's going on with this film? Did Zombie actually think he could take the ending of Bonnie & Clyde, swap out the main characters with Leatherface and family and actually expect the results to be the same?

I'd read an interview from Zombie at the Onion A.V. Club where he talks about his love for '70s cinema and the difference in societal tone between then and now. ("It's a very P.C. world and this is a very un-P.C. movie.") If there's any way I can see The Devil's Rejects working as a film with something--anything--to say, it might be as a strange elegy to '70s culture. Certainly, the best moments of the movie are where Zombie teams some bizarre awfulness to a classic piece of '70s Southern Rock. I can maybe see how the '70s and the endemic fixation on the outlaw as a necessary and vital component of the culture is what is actually being examined and/or mourned by Zombie. You can watch CSI practically every night of the week on TV now, but does they dare to suggest to that the audience identify with the serial killers and stripper stranglers rather than the dutiful cops? (I don't actually watch the shows, but I'd guess not.) So what Zombie is mourning at the end of The Devil's Rejects isn't the death of his evil, sadistic crew of killers but rather the end of a time in which they might have been. If you remove the gradations, the potsmoking free thinker and the serial killer are both outlaws of the state, and now there's no more place for either. Or maybe Zombie is inept, and expects us to feel sorry for his clan after showing a few shots of them laughing and joking together, smiling and laughing out in the mountains, despite watching them do horrific acts of torture and violence. I'm still not really sure.

But even if one gives Zombie the benefit of the doubt, there's at least one fatal flaw in such a conception. It's precisely that annhilation of gradation--the equating of the killer with the intellectual--that creates the repressive police state in the first place. If we're sitting in a P.C. world where subversion and artistic expression are smothered ("It's a very P.C. world..."), it'd be nice if Mr. Zombie could recognize and perhaps even acknowledge his role in it. And not even as some sort of independent artist/outlaw whose shocking works pushes the state to more restrictive behavior; but as a a numbskull whose lack of clarity on such matters makes such a state possible.

The Pitch: It's like Ignorance meets Bliss!

2006-01-03T13:01:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, everyone! On the personal front, lots going on but nothing I'm really exactly peeing myself to discuss so I'll wait. I thought it'd be amusing to post my best of list for movies of this year considering I didn't really see that many currently released movies (of the 98 films I saw in 2005, only 28 were released in 2005, and I would say only half of those I caught in the theaters). But that's the great thing about movies: a good one can be the highlight of your year no matter what year it was released.

So, in approximately the order I saw them:

1. Croupier (1998): After seeing Clive Owen in Closer, it was obvious I was missing something by not seeing his early indie thriller--plus, it's one of Edi's faves. If you like voiceover narration, this flick about an emotionally disconnected card-dealer who wants to be a writer is the film for you. I definitely feel sorry for Clive having to make third-rate thrillers with Jennifer Aniston after making a little gem like this. Just keep cashing those paychecks, Clive.

2. Meeting People is Easy (1999): This music documentary about Radiohead coming unglued while touring for "Ok, Computer" captures why Radiohead's music is so appealing for me--it's simultaneously present and prescient as the album the band is touring in support of seems to prophesize their resultant paranoid, disquieted and uncomfortable state. Absurdly influential on this year's crappy Nanovel.

3. Kung-Fu Hustle (2004): Probably counts as a 2005 film since it got released in theaters. But I didn't see it in the theater: I saw it on our all-region DVD player at the beginning of April and I loved it. I could turn this entry into a screed against the low levels of public courtesy that make seeing movies in an actual theater a crapshoot, but let's focus on the positive. This comedy by Stephen Chow is an engaging anarchic slapdash frolic where one quickly learns never to second-guess what direction the film will be heading two scenes after the scene one's watching. The less you know about it, the better it gets so I'll shut up about it. But it's a fave.

4. Best of Youth, Parts I and II (2003): Made for Italian television but released theatrically, Best of Youth is a six-hour novel on film, with characters moving through decades of Italian life. Part of the joy is in watching how a single event will change the lives of everyone involved for decades to come. And part of the joy is simply watching, allowing oneself to get swept away by a masterfully-told story.

5. The "Up" Series (1964-): Michael Apted's series of documentaries following the same group of Britishers every seven years offers a lot of the same joys as Best of Youth. Although one of the frightening truths about reality is that it can be much harder to predict than fiction. Having watched all of them (although, hmmm, I stopped listing them after 21 Up, why'd I do that?), Edi and I eagerly await 49 Up which hit Brit TV in 2005 and hopefully will get released here in the U.S. this year.

6. The Wicker Man (1973): An M. Night Shamalyan film decades before there was such a thing, The Wicker Man is the best musical horror movie ever made (I know, lots of competition for the title, right?) which achieves its unique sense of disquiet by maintaining a gently bemused tone perfect for the pagan traditions it explores. I'm really glad I made this list now because I was going to watch the DVD after writing this and realize it's not on my shelf. Fuck, did I loan this to somebody?

7. Pistol Opera (2002): Seijun Suzuki's return to filmmaking, via a very loose remake of his own Branded to Kill, really delighted me (much more than the original, to be honest). Suzuki is obtuse about what his films might mean, but his confident directorial choices tease you to construct and discard any number of theories while viewing. This playful quality--plus the presence of boobies and guns--makes Pistol Opera immenently (re)watchable.

8. Young Adam (2003) & The Machinist (2004) (tie): Neither of these films are perfect, I admit. But David Mackenzie's adaptation of a classic existential Scots novel and Brad Anderson's nouveau-classic thriller have significant charms--gorgeous cinematography, classic scores (particularly The Machinist, which sounds like a Bernard Herrmann score), and a desire to craft complexly ambiguous title characters. I've got to give Young Adam the lead, overall (and not just because I was able to get a used copy for under $5 at Hollywood Video); in the end, The Machinist is just the loveliest episode of The Twilight Zone ever filmed (and possessing, in Christian Bale's dramatic weight loss, one of the most chilling special effects ever filmed). Young Adam stays true to its literary roots and keeps its study of good and evil far away from cheap psychological pulp. And yet, I admit it, The Machinist is very watchable cheap psychological pulp.

9. The Squid and the Whale (2005): Noah Baumbach's tale of divorce among the New York intelligentsia is hilarious and deeply moving--I thought it was like The Royal Tenenbaums with all the bullshit removed. Edi and I kind of saw this one on a lark and I'm so glad we did--I think it's my movie of the year.

10. I don't know, really--maybe another tie for a bunch of far-from perfect flicks that had something so engaging to them they've continued to stay on the brain: Mario Bava's decadent and absurd Danger: Diabolik! was kind of dull when it wasn't being absolutely enthralling; Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain seems to get about as deep as it's going to in the first forty minutes and never does much else, but the cinematography and Heath Ledger's performace are both to die for; I thought Serenity (2005) had some performances and plot points that didn't translate well to the big screen but it also had some great lines and action setpieces; Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Wererabbit (2005) was wonderful but suffered a bit from being a full-length feature. All of them are worth seeing once.

Other great bits and pieces: the closing credits to Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) ; Reese Witherspoon's performance in Walk The Line (2005) (although somebody give that woman a sandwich!); David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow in Good Night and Good Luck; the barking dog in The Triplettes of Belleville (2003); Bill Nighy in The Girl in the Cafe (2005); Vince Vaughn in Wedding Crashers (2005); John Abraham's charismatic villain in Dhoom (2004); the kids in Mad Hot Ballroom (2005); the fake-out in Batman Begins (2005); the over-the-top absurdity of Torque (2004); Mickey Rourke as Marv in Sin City (2005) (as well as the faithfulness of the look and feel of the film to the original comics); Ewan McGregor's double duty in The Island (2005); Lars in Some Kind of Monster (2004); Seu Jorge covering David Bowie's songs in Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004).

Finally, if you wanted to know what I saw for the year (so you can understand that, say, Kongpote didn't make my list because I didn't see it), you can look here.

The Title: It's like High Culture meets Low Culture!

2005-12-10T16:56:00.000-08:00

Hola, empleados!

I spent the last few days in a delirium of laziness, and it was great! Resident Evil 4 has been rocking my superficial little world, as I've forsaken all but the essentials to play just one more level of murderous European villagers on the rampage. I think I've finished approx. 80% of the game, so I'll probably be free of it by this time next week, which is just as well--holidays are coming up, newsletter is gonna be next week, and I'm trying to be a productive human being despite what all the time logged in front of the PS2 has to say about it. I don't know what difficulty level Resident Evil 4 is designed for, but it's the sweet spot for me: the puzzles aren't too hard, the boss levels usually get worked out in two or three tries at most. It's challenging enough to be rewarding but little more than that, which is just perfect. In that regard, it reminds me a lot of God of War--which was mostly just level after level of cool shit (and only got terribly hard at the very end).

I had a cool thing happen at the comics store yesterday--this woman came in looking for the Alex Ross Wonder Woman one-shot (we were sold out), and was fretting about what else to get. Somehow in the process of talking about one thing or another, she mentioned that her dad was a horror writer, James Herbert.

"Oh yeah. James Herbert," I said. "He's quite good."

"Have you read him? Almost no one in the States has."

"Uh, a little," I said. I'd read Fog, and started Fluke before putting it down, and said so.

Somehow this ended up with us talking about Stephen King and her passing along a fun fact here and there (her dad and King are friends), and a handshake, and an offer by me to come by the store again. It was pretty cool.

Me being me, though, I've been worrying about it a bit since. James Herbert is a good horror writer--I sort of discovered him at the tail end of my interest in horror fiction, so maybe that's part of why I never chased down more books by him. But I never did. And now I play Resident Evil 4 for hours at a time. What does it mean when someone who used to really love to read horror fiction spends more time playing a single video game than he spent reading horror fiction in the last year (or two)? It either means that I don't love to read it any more, or maybe horror fiction is at a keen disadvantage to all the other horror-based media out there these days?

The Pitch: It's like The Morning After meets Kill and Kill Again!

2005-12-01T17:27:00.000-08:00

Okay. So it's December 1st, and I'm being very bad about continuing my nanovel. I'm essentially sitting around on my butt playing Resident Evil 4, napping, and checking my email 50,000 times. Oh, and I went and got my teeth cleaned which, considering the weather today was absurdly life-threatening, is not as slight an accomplishment as you might think.

But nonetheless, I'm doing all sorts of things to keep myself from actually trying to get my protagonist out of his current jam and into the next one. To prove it, here's some very brief reviews of movies I've seen lately.

In reverse order:

10 Things I Hate About You: I liked this when I first saw it, and wanted to show it Edi, since she's also a fan of Willie The Shake. It's very charming, but I noticed some very big plotholes when I saw it for the second time. There's really no reason for the prom sequence at all, or for any of the characters to pursue their respective goals or actions, except that every teen movie must have a climactic denouement at the prom. Still, Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles are charming, and I'd be surprised if Stiles ever got her self-conscious enunciation to work as well for her again.

The Machinist: Somehow less than the sum of its parts, this Memento-ish thriller has a special effect so gruesome it makes the entire run of Fangoria magazine seem like Highlights for Children: Christian Bale's emaciated body which causes involuntary shuddering from the viewer whenever it's unclothed on screen. And there's also some lovely direction, art design, a strangely anachronistic soundtrack, and Jennifer Jason Leigh onhand to bless the production with the exposing of her ta-tas. It has all the makings of a classic, and yet it goes on about forty minutes too long, tries too hard to keep the viewer guessing and ultimately settles on an ending bordering on the trite. Kind of a shame.

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events: I rented this after reading the Onion A.V. Club's interview with Daniel Handler, since much of its space was given to discussing the commentary track between the director and Handler in the character of Snicket. That track is intermittently very funny (whenever anything remotely bad happens to the Baudelaire orphans, Handler/Snicket moans: "Oh, Dear God! Oh, No! Please shut this off!") but runs out of steam quickly--the director gamely tries to pretend he has no idea what's going to happen next so as to allow more situations for H/S to moan about, but it's more uncomfortable than amusing. As for the movie, its art production is exceptionally gorgeous (there's a peacock's feather design on Count Olaf's vest that still knocks me out) but because the film doesn't understand the difference between humor and wit, it's a far from successful adaptation.

That said, the movie is worth seeing (if you can rent it for a dollar or so) because of the exceptional end title sequence that understands the Snicket books and their influences (Night of the Hunter, Edward Gorey, German Expressionism, gothic melodramas) with far greater acuity than the director or the countless listed producers. I watched those end titles at least three times.

The Pitch: It's like Frenzy meets Panic!

2005-11-29T08:44:00.000-08:00

Okay, I feel pretty good at the moment. I have no idea how I was able to get up this morning, but somehow I did, made it through the rain to BART, through the rain to the cafe, and wrote my little heart out. Now I'm only about two shy of the big 50k, and I'm kinda dying to cross that finish line.

No dreams about Alan Moore and Battlestar Galactica, though.

In other news, I think I'm going to get a livejournal account so I can more easily follow and comment on davel, robson's and my brothers' blogs. (Man, does everyone hate blogger, or what?)

Something like work has crossed my threshold. I'll be back in a bit.

The Pitch: It's like Battlestar Galactica! Meets Alan Moore!

2005-11-28T08:31:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I woke up at two a.m. last night from a very long dream in which I was reading a comic book adaptation of Battlestar Galactica written by Alan Moore. And it was rad!

I doubt I'll be able to do it any justice whatsover and may have to stop writing any minute (since I'm at work and stuff) and, to be frank, the more I think about the comic, the less rad and the more, um, disturbing it seems, but nonetheless:

So Alan Moore is hired to write this Battlestar Galactica comic and the first issue is, basically, all about Alan Moore being hired to write this Battlestar Galactica comic. The first thing he does is insist on complete and utter creative control which the editors grant him because he's, like, Alan Moore and stuff. The second thing he does is write himself into the storyline with this first issue. Because what he reveals to the editors of the book is that, as he and only a handful of people know, the Battlestar was wiped out before it reached Earth, the Cylons found Earth and took over, and then wiped the memory of their previous lives from themselves in order to fit in. Indeed, the end of the first issue shows everyone reading this first issue of Battlestar Galactica and realizing that they are, in fact, Cylons. End of issue one.

Issue two of Battlestar Galactica (as written by Alan Moore) takes place three years after the first issue of Battlestar Galactica, and in it, Alan Moore is merely one cylon (albeit a sleeveless cylon) among a planet of now-awakened cylons who, realizing that all cylons are equal, have ceased oppressing one another and have created an ideal governmentless state where all live in happy and unity under the (one) eye of their (one) true Lord. Because everyone realizes they are really carefully crafted robots, they have begun cybernetically altering themselves, and so there are people that look like the robotic equivalents of Greek monsters--there's a cylon equivalent of a centaur, for example, whose bottom half is some sort of small tank, or a medusa, who is a human looking woman with flowing, curling fiber-optic cables for hair.

In this brave new world (and here's where it gets weird), Alan Moore basically runs around and has sex with these half-human/half-tank cylon chicks, doing them from behind and at the crucial moment, implanting a hidden tech virus in them. And here's where we learn the craftiness of Alan Moore: this virus is implanting a rebellion virus in each of the cylons that he has sex with (and he is able to have sex with many, since he's the guy who freed cylonhood from their forgotten humanity) which they will go on to plant in all of the cylons they have sex with, and soon Alan Moore will be able have enough cylons under his control that he can stage a massive revolt which he compares to the War In Heaven. And so (and the extra layer of meaning will make sense to old school Battlestar fans), Alan Moore is essentially Lucifer, making plans to become the leader of Cylon Hell, which he will travel to in--ta-dah!--the newly restored Battlestar Galactica. End of issue two.

Then I woke up, so there is no issue three.

The most alarming thing about all this (for me, anyway--my wife, who is probably reading this and trying to figure out how to have me committed, would likely have a different opinion) is that in my waking life I'm forty-five thousand words into a novel that's degenerated to two guys in a kitchen making tea and trying to figure out what their real life Dungeons and Dragons stats would be.

Or maybe the most alarming thing is that I'm thirty-nine and not fourteen. I can't decide.

The Pitch: It's like The Shining meets Run, Lola, Run!

2005-11-27T21:31:00.000-08:00

Christ, I'm behind.

True, I'm not that far behind, mind you. Ideally, I should be at 45,000 or better and I'm at just a hair over 43k. But I have a headache, my head hurts, I'll be getting up at 5:30 tomorrow morning, it's a fucking arctic windtunnel in our apartment.

Have you ever heard the expression "Lost the plot?" It is literally true in my case--I had a three page printout explaining what was going on in my rock band murder mystery and I lost the fucking thing a week ago. I suppose if I tired I could work myself up to a fair bit of paranoia if I wanted, but, frankly, any aspiring novel stealer who wants to have a go at this damn book, be my guest. I'm sick of the fucking thing.

And unfortunately, since I won't be done at 50k, I'm going to have to keep working at it. Yes, this is my yoke: to keep at the book until finished.

The Pitch: It's like Zombie meets Eddie & The Cruisers!

2005-11-14T12:02:00.000-08:00

Happily, my nanovel really doesn’t owe much to either Zombie or Eddie & The Cruisers, although I’m starting to think any story idea is greatly improved with the inclusion of, first, rock and roll bands and, then, zombies. (Rock and roll tour bus breaks down in Donner Pass, turns to cannibalism? Delightful! The rock and rock cannibals then become zombies? Sublime!)

Alas, I only talk a good game. Once I come up with my hamstrung story idea and prop up my unlikely little characters, I’m loathe to change things once I set them in action. Unfortunately, I’m also loathe to have anything interesting even happen. This morning, for example, I put my protagonist and his likely love interest in the same house together—one’s worried about to what extent he’s responsible for the murders committed by someone in his road tour, the other’s worried about whether or not they might actually be in love with the other person and what that might or might not mean—and what do they discuss?

Walmart!

(Now, if the rock and roll tour bus had broken down during a snowstorm and had to take refuge in a Walmart? Delightful! And if the other people taking refuge from the storm had, by the time the rock and roll band and their entourage arrive, all become zombies? Sublime!)

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I did indeed fall behind around day twelve. If I have a productive lunch hour, I may dig myself out from under. I hope so, because I’ve got a very busy week ahead of me with newsletter work and regular ol’ work-work competing for my time. How rampant overachievers do this sort of thing is beyond me. (Going home early and taking a nap? Delightful! Getting home and finding out my noisy next-door neighbor has been eaten by zombies? Sublime!)

The Pitch: It's like I Am Meets I Am Not!

2005-11-05T14:21:00.000-08:00

It's a few minutes after noon on Saturday. Sorry I haven't blogged since my strong initial recovery--I've been trying to keep a handle on Nano, plus the email list, plus work and a lot of extra socializing this last week. I should be writing but I'm not (except in this here post, which is where my creative title comes from).

There are patterns to my Nano experience that I'm noticing over the years I've done it. On day three, I'll switch tenses. On day four, I'll fall behind but it won't be noticeable because I've built up a bit of a lead. On day five or day six, I'll catch up. Around day twelve, I'll fall behind. That's the part I'm really worried about because last year, I fell so far behind I gave up until the last five days.

So, on the one hand, I'm incredibly driven to write as much as I can today, catch up and get ahead, and head off the inevitable upcoming conflicts from writing this month's newsletter, working a bunch of make-up time, dealing with holidays, etc., etc., that seems pretty inevitable. People bitch about Nano being during an inconvenient time of the year but I always liked the idea that if you could write this much during this month, you could write any time in almost any condition.

On the other hand, I'm not writing. I'm waiting. I'll be at lunch in forty minutes and I figure I'll be writing then. But, you know, what if I'm not?

Unfortunately, this sort of thing goes on in my brain all the time.

The Pitch: It's like Gone In Sixty Seconds meets It Happened One Night!

2005-11-01T08:30:00.000-08:00

Nano's started.

The last two mornings I've been up early but spent twenty minutes tweaking emaily type things at the computer. Still, I had approximately an hour to write this morning at the Starbucks, and have started this year's Nano adventure. And I have to say, it's going...slow.

Yesterday's warm-up had me cracking the daily word count in forty minutes. Today, after an hour, I've got a hair under 1600 words which means I'll have to keep at it at lunch. In the past, I've really benefitted from an early strong start, getting two or even three days ahead in the first week and that really helps if I crank at least 2,000 words in the first day.

But nope, not by now (and who knows? Maybe not by lunch, either...). I also started at the wrong place, I think, although I had to start it somewhere. I didn't want to start in the middle of a concert, and I didn't want to start at an afterparty but I didn't think it was particularly interesting to have the FBI guy talk to the band at the very beginning of it all, so--the tarmac and the jet, as the band leaves Osaka.

Also, although smart enough to write down the plot-important tour dates, I didn't write down all the tour dates, so I have no idea where these people were flying to, and if they were going to do a show there or what.

In other, actually interesting news, my birthday was a pip, thanks to my wonderful wife who took me to dinner and even drove home with a glass of wine in her, and was incredibly patient when I disappeared to the computer to coordinate all my pre-nano prep and emailery. I'm hoping the month won't be too much of a pain in the ass for her; she's had to put up with three other ones with me, so I hope she doesn't mind it too much by now.

Hey, there's some work! Excuse me a second...

The Pitch: It's like The Draughtman's Contract meets Drowning By Numbers!

2005-10-31T08:57:00.000-08:00

See? More.

(Double-bonus twee points for those of you who added "Glass" to the end of that para.)

One of the other things mentioned at the dinner on Saturday was posting the novel I was writing on this blog. I'm very reluctant to do this--for one thing, I barely finished Nano last year and if it hadn't been for quiet days at work following Thanksgiving (allowing me to have three days where I wrote 36,000 words total), I wouldn't have. The idea of agreeing to post my blog, and then having everyone look in each day to see nothing makes my soul itch. I'm also loathe to do the huge amount of typo fixing it would take for me to post this stuff.

But, you know? I might do it anyway, convert one of the blogs I'm not using to do so, or create a new blog so that I can post from oldest to newest and not make you scrawl through pages of digital photos.

In any event (and I will let you know, I promise), I'll tell you a little bit about what I want to write this year; if nothing else, it'll allow you to take vast amusement at how differently things'll turn out.

This year, I'm writing a murder mystery: to drop some obtuse high concept, I'm looking for it to be Great Jones Street meets Silence of the Lambs, although if I can get Meeting People is Easy crossed with The Hardy Boys and the Mystery of the Old Mill, I'll be happy. The protagonist is the lead singer of a successful rock band on tour--they've been big for a while, so they know how to tour and survive. An FBI agent comes to the band with letters from someone who says they've been killing people after the band's shows, and that they'll keep killing until the cycle's complete. The FBI agent, a fan of the band, managed to get himself assigned to investigate the band's tour since the easiest way for the killer to pull this job off is to be a member of the band's road crew...or a member of the band themselves.

And then hijinks ensue, yadda yadda, killings, blah blah blah. Having done Nano beforehand, I know that I'd need, if I wanted this to be remotely possible, to do a buttload of research and a lot of planning. So far, I've done the planning--I have my obscure plot hatched, the killer picked, the red herrings assigned. I'd like there to be some doubt about whether the narrator might themselves be the killer, but you know, whatever. Part of me would be just as happy to write:
"Look out, Chet!" Frank yelled. The jalopy was barrelling down
the hill right for him!

At the last minute, Thom Yorke jumped into the street and knocked both
the stout Chet and himself out of the jalopy's way! Sunlight tattered the
windshield as the jalopy crashed off the road and into a nearby oak.
"Golly!" Swore Chet.

Yeah.... that would probably do me just fine, actually.

Okay. Work is for working (or looking like I'm working). That's enough for now.

The Pitch: It's like The Invisible Man meets Mute Witness!

2005-10-31T08:32:00.000-08:00

Good morning.

My thanks to all of you who asked me when I was going to start updating this thing again, but were kind enough not to ask me why I stopped. (It probably helped that all of you were actually at the wedding.) In some ways, I've been holding off posting again because I'm not sure what direction I actually want to take this blog, but I've also been reluctant because I haven't wanted to try and sum up everything that's happened. I mean, the best day of my life happened while I wasn't blogging. To not try to sum it up feels like a betrayal of the point of a blog, doesn't it? Or does it?

But I figure as long as we can agree that I'm not going to be writing about my wedding here because it's too big a subject for me to write about, I'll get back to boring you about what movies I'm seeing, what games I'm playing, and my obsessive-compulsive approach to writing.

After all, tomorrow is the first day of Nano 2005. Thanks to the time change, I was able to get up good and early and go write at a nearby cafe, see if I still had the stuff. I wrote eighteen hundred words in 40 minutes. They were very, very crappy. I've still got it!

Since moving in with Edi, my writing habits have altered, and it's time to alter them back to something a little more consistent. Thanks to writing for the CE blog, I'm writing between eighteen hundred and three thousand words a week, and I'm still logging about seven thousand words for the monthly newsletter, so my yearly totals are all nice and plump (close to a quarter of a million words a year). But they're barely my words--although reviewing comic books has helped me writing clearly and concisely, it's still just blurting out opinions about other people's work--and it's not the everyday endeavor it should be: I write the newsletter of the course of one week, and I write the blog's reviews every Saturday, and the rest of the time I'm just hanging out with my beautiful wife or playing fucking video games, or spending too much money ordering DVDs off the Internet. It's hard to keep striving for stuff once you get more than you ever thought you'd have--I'm secure, happy and content, and life actually rewards you at this stage of things for paying attention to it, and there are so many easier ways to shut it out than sitting down by yourself and expressing oneself. (And no matter how rewarding that experience can be, it still takes a toll.) One really has to be driven in several different ways to keep pursuing this, after a time. So I'm getting myself back on the trail, and sniffing around to see if I can still find the scent.

I'm doing Nano this year as a way to get back to writing every day, and if all goes well, I'll be writing and revising at a regular pace after that. I've told people that this will be my last Nano until I manage to take something I've written and brought it to market; my hope is that this will stave off the urge to be a once-a-year novelist through the miracle of Nanowrimo, and continue to produce. And the entry after this should be a lot less boring, I'm also hoping. Those of you who stuck through all of this will be rewarded with more of the same. At the delightful dinner Edi and I had with Nancy and Chris this weekend, Nancy and I talked a little bit about how, ultimately, people read blogs to hear that person's voice, to get a little snapshot of how that person lives, and what they're thinking.

I can do that.

Again, thanks for sticking around. More to come.

The Pitch: It's like The Blob meets The Thing!

2005-07-19T08:44:00.000-07:00

I finished Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude yesterday, then suspiciously re-read the blurbs on the back of the book. How could a book write so well about Marvel Comics (specifically Omega The Unknown), Brian Eno's Another Green World, New York in the '70s, Hoagy Carmichael, Berkeley, CA, science fiction conventions, prison, bullies, grafitti and hip-hop, and also feature a cameo from Stan Brakhage, and still be bad? One of the reviewers referred to Fortress of Solitude as the best book of the year, and I can almost see it: FoS may be the best bad book of the year, or maybe the worst good book of the year, or, or--something.

I haven't read much by or about Lethem but what I have presents Lethem as a guy from Brooklyn who grew up there in the late '70s and early '80s and whose mother died when he was young: compare and contrast this with Fortress of Solitude, about a guy from Brooklyn who grew up there in the late '70s and early '80s and whose mother ran off when he was young, and you might think that FoS would be Lethem's most autobiographical novel. I am also inclined to think so because the book is such a mess: it's in two parts, the first told in third person, the second in first person. It's presented on front cover and back, inside and out, as the story of two boys. (It's right there on the front of the Fortress of Solitude's home page: "This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude.") The protagonist, Dylan, is white and friends with Mingus, who is black, and although Mingus is introduced early, and well, he is rarely used throughout the book, he barely exists. Again and again, we return to Dylan who for the first part of the book barely speaks, barely thinks, is passive and reactive and grows up under the yoke of bullies by being as silent and still as possible. We are told how close he is to Mingus and shown it, but we never see how it develops from the first time they meet. It just is. Dylan just is. Brooklyn just is. And everything that happens, happens.

On the one hand, this is pretty laudable: Lethem takes a novel about growing up, about friendship, even throws in a magic ring, and then mercilessly buffs away anything that might resemble sentiment. To grow up young and white and scared in pre-gentrified Brooklyn is the book's subject, and it captures that subject with a lacerating clarity, but despite every blurb on the back, every promise made by the appearance of another enticingly drawn character, it is incapable of escaping that subject. The book feels less like a novel and more like psychic surgery--Lethem seems to be using the theater of fiction in which to dissect himself and to clinically share the results with his audience.

As surgical demonstration, it's impressive. But for those of us who came to a book expecting the joys of fiction, it's frustrating. Lethem creates a dozen richly fascinating characters and barely lets us see any of them, returning again and again to his doppelganger, picking at him as if he were a scab. Maybe Lethem is trying to tell us that although we are the central character of our own life, we are probably the least interesting. Perhaps Lethem is telling us that stories are possibilities, and most of us don't bother to take those possibilities, are to busy stinging under the weight of the yoke to do anything else. Could be that Lethem is trying to present a real life, both in its dreams and in its reality, and the dreams, being dreams, are as real to us as our reality, but they exist separate from us and we can only watch them passively play out.

But, to me? It's more likely that this book was a substantially painful and messy birth, psychically incapicitating, and the author spun through thousands and thousands of pages, then had to cut it all down to everything that couldn't be let go. He took every ending that smelled false, every conclusion that threatened to offer the comfort of story to the reader (that perhaps in an earlier draft comforted the writer as he worked harder and harder to unseat the cold truth of his self that had held him in thrall for so long) and left only the unpatchable, impressive blob that remained; passive protagonist, disappearing characters, endlessly unhelpful digressions, and all. With the exception of Infinite Jest, I think I've never been as impressed with a book that left me so frustrated (or vice-versa). If you only read twelve books a year, I don't recommend it and yet I still want to urge people to read it, as if the book will be more fully grown and better developed by the time you encounter it. That's the kind of book Fortress of Solitude is.

The Pitch: It's like The Invisible Man meets Missing!

2005-07-16T18:40:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I'm still alive. Have not updated even one eensy little tad because, well, I dunno. For one thing, I went on The Master Cleanse, which sounds kind of creepy & Aryan, but is really just the name of this ten day thing where you don't eat solid food and can only drink a concoction of lemon juice, distilled water, maple syrup and cayenne pepper. Not eating solid food was a really kind of profound thing for me, so much so that I couldn't even begin to think of how to write about it. I really curse myself for not keeping a little diary of the whole thing. If I ever, ever, ever do it again, I will.

I finished the cleanse on Tuesday but since then have only had fresh squeezed orange juice and organic vegetable broth (day 1), organic vegetable juice and one meal of raw food from Cafe Gratitude (day 2), almonds, a banana, a piece of corn on the cob, grilled vegetables, and maybe a third of an order of Vietnamese vegie noodles (day 3). Interestingly, I'm finally updating this on the day I finally had what one might call "real food"--garlic naan, palak paneer and bismati rice (and a few mini Reese's peanut butter cups)--which I had, in part, because I was walking back from Chinatown and realized that maybe I should eat something at the exact same time I stepped in front of Naan & Curry. On the one hand, I'd really like to continue some of what I took from the cleanse--feeling both surprisingly free from food, realizing how much of my day is structured around meals, and the slow, small and very mindful eating I engaged in when the cleanse was done--and on the other hand, I spent the first three days literally grieving of my departed friends the Ho-Hos and the Ding-Dongs. Wouldn't I be a sap to not eat them now that I could?

Ironically, like something out of bad New Yorker fiction, after the cleanse was done, the refrigerator in our apartment died. Dribs and drabs of water had been appearing at the threshold of the kitchen and I thought our water heater was leaking. Too late, when I opened the refrigerator door Thursday night and could tell the water was warm, we realized the truth. Edi spoke with the landlord today and discovered our refrigerator had been installed in the apartment in 1987. The god-damned thing was at least 18 years old! There should be a new fridge by the time we get home tonight, which is good: we've got a cooler filled with condiments that won't hold out much longer.

I'm playing Romance of the Three Kingdoms X which is awesome and satisfying. Hibbs laughed at me the other day when I told him the debating minigame kicks ass, but it's true. The debating minigame kicks tons of ass. It's much more RPGish than RotK VII in a way an experienced gamer like Hibbs would laugh at (lots and lots of what's called FedEx quests: go to point x, pick up object y, deliver to point z) but I like because it's so low-key. Currently all I want is to hang out and throw banquets and meet important heroes so that later I can form a kick-ass army with them and maybe run a province or two, and RotK X is more than happy to let me do that.

I bet I won't be playing much of it, though: Edi and I get married in nine(!) weeks. I'm happy with the fact that shit is coming together pretty smoothly--we're at the point where I think we could get married, but not at the point where anyone attending would have any fun at all. Considering the share of weddings I've attended that fit that description anyway, we've still got time to make sure that you all enjoy yourselves, too.

Whew! I was afraid my post was going to be about nothing but movies and video games, as usual. Give me a few more entries--I'm sure I'll get right back into it.

The Pitch: It's like CQ Meets Police Academy!

2005-06-21T11:15:00.000-07:00

I should be working. In fact, I should be working on the other thing on which I should be working when I'm not working. In short, I'm at the job, it's time for the CE newsletter, and I'm sorta pushing my way through the jungle paths of the Internet, wondering why the people I follow don't update all the time--even as I, myself, do not update not even as half as often as them.

I'm actually pretty good at updating the other blog--the CE one, I mean. In fact, during a quiet moment, I added up my wordcount to that blog--first for the month, then for 2005. I've written over 5,000 words for the month of June, and close to 50,000 words for the entire year. That's a lot, I think: probably more interesting than those numbers are the fact that I keep obsessing over those numbers--which may just be my ultra-mild case of OCD, or the sign of my brain trying to work something out. If my output for CE (both blog and newsletter) comes out to close to 180,000 words for the year, is that sufficient? Does it satisfy me? I think that's what I'm trying to work out.

Edi made it back from Reno yesterday, and our reunion consisted of trading stories, declarations of affection, and exclamations of fatigue. I thought it a very lovely blend, and hope we can keep a good mix as we move into the last three months of wedding planning.

Oh, and of course, now there's a voicemail to transcribe. More later, maybe.

The Pitch: It's like Cube Two: Hypercube meets The Wedding Planner!

2005-06-13T18:42:00.000-07:00

I've been greatly enjoying writing lately--so much so I've been thinking about quitting.

Not permanently or anything (I think). But with the wedding being just a hair over three months away, I'm trying to get my priorities in order. I've been having good luck with writing in the morning but I'll be honest: I do not want to be my typical porky ass self when I get married. Oh sure, I've lost over thirty pounds since meeting Edi, but I would like to lose more. I would like to be fit, or as fit as I can be, so that we can make it through the wedding and trot about merrily on the beaches of wherever-the-hell-we-end-up-honeymooning without me worrying that someone will see us and think Edi is being attacked by a blobby luminescent jellyfish.

And one of the best ways to avoid that horrific scenario would be to get my butt in gear and back to the gym in the mornings before work--which would interfere with my prime writing time.

Also, there are my various web commitments: here, SC, and my lonely Lazy Bastard site. Intuition tells me I should get a copy of Movable Type, learn how to make it work, and take this blog over to Lazy Bastard. While I'm at it, I should learn PHP and revise the LB site so the movie reviews are searchable, modular and easy to update. Pessimism, in the guise of common sense, tells me I should close this up, leave Lazy Bastard for dead--I think I registered and paid for it through 2009 or something--let Mr. H sort out his own blog, and figure out how to get paid for my writing. (I admit that some, if not all, of this line of thought may have developed after writing close to 2400 words for CE and getting a mere solitary comment for my troubles).

Anyway, it's not as sour grapeish as that last fact makes it sound, or at least I hope it isn't. But yeah: time is at a premium over the next three months, four days and I've got to make some decisions about where my priorities will lie.

The Pitch: It's like The Fantastic Four meets Der Ubermensch!

2005-06-13T11:15:00.000-07:00

Making my morning circuit of the web led to some inspiring quotes I thought I'd share.

First from Ed Cunard's interview with comics reporter/critic/essayist/author Tom Spurgeon:

What do you think creators today can learn from [Stan] Lee's work, either as a comics creator or as a promotional force?

Stan Lee was 38 years old when FANTASTIC FOUR #1 came out.

Should that be read as a suggestion to pace oneself, or is it something else?

It's never too late to start your life's work.

Spurgeon goes on to mention essayist/author Carter Scholz as an influence, and that Scholz had recently written an appreciation of Thomas Pynchon in the recent issue of Bookforum. Googling that, I ended up at a Bookforum page for that issue where a meandering essay on Gravity's Rainbow by Gerald Howard eventually settles in to dishing behind the scenes dirt on the editing and marketing of that book. I particularly like the part where Pynchon asks his editor's assistant what she thinks of the manuscript ("It's quite long," she explained, to which Pynchon replied proudly, "I typed it all myself, you know.")

But the real inspirational paydirt is a quote from Pynchon to his editor during the editing of V: "I do not, frankly, know dick about writing novels yet and need all kinds of help."

Admittedly, maybe it's just that kind of morning, but I'd love to get that line tattooed across my forehead (and maybe the Stan Lee fact tattooed on, I dunno, one knee so I can see it every time I hang down my head in defeat).

In other non-news, I had a very long and involved dream that Edi and I had moved into the dorms at San Francisco State. I think I dreamed such because the idiots next door use our/their front step exactly the way dormitory hallways are used: as the perfect place to stage loud and inane conversations at 4:00 a.m. But maybe also because discussing post-marital plans with Edi (or rather, our shared awe and suspicion at other newlyweds and newlyweds-to-be who actually claim to have any), I subconsciously realized that getting hitched would be my biggest leap into the unknown since arriving at the San Francisco dorms twenty years ago.

The Pitch: It's like Sleepless In Seattle meets While You Were Sleeping!

2005-06-06T09:12:00.000-07:00

Do they give an academy award for staving off the feeling you've paid ten dollars to watch utter bullshit? Because if there is, Paul Giamatti should totally win for Cinderella Man. It's too long and too painful a story to go into, but I saw Seabiscuit-But-Boxing-Not-Racing-And-He's-A-Guy-Not-A-Horse (the orginal, and I still say superior, working title) this weekend and I ended up getting drawn into mainly because of P.G. Crowe and Zewelleger did fine too with what they had, but it was Giamatti who I want to see again, whereas I kinda don't care if I never see Russell onscreen again and I totally never want to see Renee ever, for reasons I can't quite pin down. Oh, and Jethro's dad was okay too, considering he could have scored a role with more nuance if he'd chosen to play Satan in a Jack T. Chick adaptation.

As for the pitch in the title, I was actually glad when our next door neighbor started throwing huge planks of wood and yelling at his cronies around 5:45 a.m. Originally, I'd planned to get up at 5:30 a.m. but at 4:55 had decided that just wasn't going to be doable and reset the alarm for 6:30. So the ensuing plank-throwing and crony-wrangling I took as a message from God (a cruel, indelicate, eye-gouging God) that I should get my ass out of bed and get moving.

Like I said, glad I did. I'd given myself a distinct writing assignment for this morning before work and I actually did it, thus allowing me to continue this "how to" book I'm reading, and the new carrying case I'd ordered for the Alphasmart works a million times better for me than the old one (no more forgetting to take it with me in my exhausted pre-six a.m. departures). If I can now somehow sneak in reviews for the CE blog while working this morning, I'll be more or less on top of the game.

The Pitch: It's like Assault on Precinct 13 meets Assault on Precinct 13!

2005-06-01T20:44:00.000-07:00

So some guy on the Internet who likes movies said he liked the remake of Assault on Precinct 13. So I rented it yesterday while trying to feed our addiction to The Wire, and so I have to say to that guy on the Internet: Dude, you are so very, very wrong. The remake of Assault on Precinct 13 was horrible.

Edi watched it with me and afterward kept saying: "Assault on Precinct 13 sucked. Assault on Precinct 13 sucked." She did that kind of lowing thing at the end of it: "Suuuuucked."

Finally, I had to stop her: "Look, no offense, but you have no idea. It sucked, but it sucked a million times worse because the original movie is a low-budget classic. So please say, 'The remake of Assault on Precinct 13 sucked,' because otherwise it sounds like you're talking about the original."

So of course when we went to Four Star Video today, it being One Dollar Wednesday, I looked for the original. "You got Assault on Precinct 13?" I asked the clerks.

"The original? I wish," one said.

"We got the crappy remake," the other said. "New releases."

"Oh!" Edi said. "Didn't that suck? It sucked. It suuuuuucked."

"I haven't seen it," the clerk said. "I just assumed."

"You have no idea," Edi said. "It's good for the first two minutes and then it's all downhill from there."

Interestingly, this is where I noticed both of the video clerks had fallen in love with Edi.

"Really?" One said, laughing.

"Good credit sequence, huh?" The other said. "I love a good credit sequence." He was also laughing.

This is when I realized the horrible power I possess, the terrible responsibility: by having my smart funny girlfriend watch movies I liked with me, by lending her graphic novels I thought she would appreciate, and informing her of the latest developments in geek culture, I was developing an unstoppable killing machine--a woman who could entrance geeks in four seconds and then crush them in the fifth as they realized she was already with the fat, balding guy squinting at the Dario Argento section. It was an empowering moment, mitigated somewhat by the fact they weren't listening to anything I was saying, but looking at her and laughing at everything she said.

We just watched the original Assault, by the way (they had it at the Hollywood Video around the corner but not at the "movie lover's video store"--how sad is that?) Edi liked it, and now really knows the extent of the tragedy. And when we return our movies, those poor clerks won't stand a chance.

The Pitch: It's like Deliverance meets Grosse Point Blank!

2005-05-28T18:09:00.000-07:00

Hey. I'm in Humboldt. I'm hoping you get this email if I send it (it's
another quasi-test email from my Alphasmart). What's really sad is,
despite how sluggishly my little writing machine crawls across a website,
or opens an email off my webmail page, it's almost as fast if not faster
than my dad's Imac. If I had the money, I'd buy that man something a
little more hardy: it'd be less frustrating watching him surf for stamps on
Ebay if he was doing it on a tickertape machine.

I've taken lots of pictures--something like 400 of them. I think this
means I'll try setting up a Flickr account when I get home. What harm can
it do?

The Pitch: It's like Love & Death.

2005-05-17T18:36:00.000-07:00

Jesus. Not only did David die, but Edi's cousin Barbara's cancer has come back big time and she's not going to go back to chemo for it. Then, today at lunch, I found out the guy who made the sushi at my beloved Sushi Kinta died last week. As is the way with these things, the last announcement had a lot of the force of the first two behind it; it pretty much devastated me. All of this right on the heels of Patrick's wedding, where I was a happily grinning (and unhappily sweating) best man. I'm a little distressed to consider what else might happen between now and September 18th but it feels like life has taken off the kid gloves, for sure.

The Pitch: It's like The Razor's Edge meets Ghost World!

2005-05-17T09:39:00.000-07:00

Actually, it's just an awesome bit from a commentary in the LAT by Mr. R. Crumb:

I have always been critical of everything, including myself, and I'm just trying
to understand this reality better so I can evolve to another, hopefully higher
level and maybe even take my fabulous record collection with me.

Sigh.

The Pitch: It's like 10 Things I Hate About You meets Se7en!

2005-05-08T15:52:00.000-07:00

Oh, lord. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That is one insanely great movie, although this time I could only watch in ten to fifteen minute increments before growing too disturbed and having to stop for a while. But wait a great movie. In between segments, I thought about the possibility of showing movies at our wedding, something I doubt we're going to do but I keep hoping we'll have some sort of catering miracle and be able to afford it after all.

So, in no particular order, here are the five films I won't show at our wedding but would really love to because they're so damn good:

1. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (young travelers get slaughtered by malevolent family)
2. The Honeymoon Killers (married couple kill women who answer lonely heart ads)
3. Planet of the Apes (astronaut lands on planet where apes have brutally enslaved humanity)
4. La Dolce Vita (reporter seduced and destroyed by Italy's nightlife and his own shortcomings)
5. Double Indemnity (unfaithful wife and insurance man lover plot to kill husband)

Sigh. Runners up include Jaws, The Killer, Touch of Evil, Manhattan and Night of the Hunter. Movies that are acceptable but for showing but are still unlikely because of print availability or other concerns include Duck Soup, Santo Vs. The Zombies, Yojimbo, Band A Parte, and Armor of God II. Interestingly, four of the five movies I won't show I currently own on DVD, as well three of the five runners up, while owning none of the ones I'd consider acceptable. That's would seem indicative of something, wouldn't it? (Actually, it wouldn't. Once you count VHS tapes, I've got everything but Band A Parte.)

This moment of OCD was brought to you by the letters A through Z--and in order, dammit! I think I'm off to watch The Honeymoon Killers or Contempt, I can't decide which.

The Pitch: It's like Home Alone meets A Beautiful Mind!

2005-05-07T18:52:00.000-07:00

Edi's visiting her Mom in Reno this weekend, so it's been work and an empty apartment. I have fallen back on old habits--video games and fugue states of melancholy--to carry me through. Nearly every positive thing I can think of is quickly counterbalanced by a more depressing point: I finished Cloud Atlas! (It took me close to two months.) David Mitchell is a genius! (I'll never be that good.) God of War is rad! (I'm wasting my life playing video games. Plus, nobody says "rad" anymore.) I'm one week away from my ten year anniversary at the job! (What the hell am I still doing there anyway?)

And that's just the shit related to me. Between a few of the endings of Cloud Atlas and the recent article I started about carbon dioxide and global warning in the New Yorker, I kind of feel that, short of CO2 ingesting nanobots coming along in the next ten years, we should pretty much shut down mankind for good and see if the world will recover given enough time without us. Cheery, cheery, cheery.

Regardless, my thanks to Nancy for recommending Cloud Atlas and Edi for buying it for me. I admit I only took two months reading it because I was pretty much savoring it. (Also, thanks to Joel, a.k.a. Ong-Bak guy, for lending me God of War.) The plan is to go home tonight, eat some dinner, play some God of War, call it an early night. Tomorrow? I've got a copy of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre Special Edition from Best Buy (for seven bucks! But I need to stop buying DVDs.) which, Lord knows, is the most cheerful movie ever made so it should cheer me right up. Additional goals include trying to find a cheap copy of Fortress of Solitude, writing on the new wacky-doo Alphasmart, and indulging my new habit, mimicking John Ashbery. It's an intensely masochistic habit. It makes me feel like an oranguatan dressed in a priest's robes capering at Sunday Mass, but it's where my current congregation of tics, foibles, dreams, failures and neuroses (known in some neighborhoods as one's "muse") have led me. It seems to be harming no one, so why not?

The Pitch: It's like Singing In The Rain meets The Sunshine Boys!

2005-04-24T15:45:00.000-07:00

No rain here, I'm afraid. It's three o'clock as I write this and the sunshine is smoldering on the carpet. All I heard about this last week was about the big storm coming our way, and the skies were gray as hell on Friday and Saturday, with a few brief bursts of rain. But it's lovely now, and far too nice a day to be sitting inside writing on the internet in my jam-jams.

And yet, jam-jams it is. If we can get our act together (by which I mean if I can get my act together) Edi and I will make it outside and walk around for a while. We just finished watching Donnie Darko which E. had never seen and which I've seen some embarrassing amount (like, I dunno, three times or something). Edi liked it and it made me wonder if I would rent the director's cut that came out a few months ago. I sorta suspect it would spoil the movie: part of the charm of Donnie Darko is how it hangs suspended between several different film genres particularly since, at least at the third viewing, I'd suspect it wouldn't hold together if it was any particular one of them.

I also watched Dhoom earlier in the week on the recommendation of Sid, the guy at the beauty salon who sells Indian DVDs. The film is kinda like The Fast & The Furious meets Heat with a dash of John Woo and Jerry Lewis, but with a lot of good looking people who burst into song and dance routines. It wasn't great, but it was pretty enjoyable. It was pretty short which seems to be the cases with a lot of Bollywood flicks I've seen these days--they rarely engage in the sort of robust digressions and subplots that made me fall in love with the genre. If the musical numbers go, there really won't be much to distinguish Indian film from most of the other commercial genres of the world and that'd be a genuine shame.

The Pitch: It's like The Trial meets Career Opportunities!

2005-04-23T22:12:00.000-07:00

My hands hurt. I wrote something like 4,500 words today and I've decided to relax by quickly jotting down another couple hundred or so.

This is another in a line of test posts, as I'm trying out the blog-by-mail opportunity that Blogger offers. I was never really that interested in blogging by mail (although I've been caught twice at work by people who recognize the interface) until just recently when I got my new writing tool: a Dana Wireless by Alphasmart. I wanted something that could send
and receive emails and maybe surf the web if I wanted it to and so decided
to splurge the extra money on this. I'v e been using a Palm Pilot since,
jeez, I dunno, 1997?, and using it for writing since about '99 and it took
me a long time to realize the reason they kept going bad wasn't because of
anything I was doing to them, it was because they were cheaply assembled.
My last Palm Pilot has been on the rocks for over a year and the one bfore
that lasted only a year, as did the one before that. The ferocious battle
for the PDA market had Palm jamming more and more features in while
keeping the prices as low as possible, so naturally they ended up breaking
sooner and sooner.

I tried looking into the Pocket PCs but they seemed almost as bad: stories
of screens that cracked or filled up with mositure seemed rampant on the
web (although who knows any more what's real testimony on the web and
what's merely competitive trash talk) so I decided to go with something
that would have the Palm OS but wasn't made by Palm. So here I am. The damn email program got slower and slower the longer the email became, so there's something a little half-baked in the Dana's emailing capabilities. In fact, I'd say, generally, that the Dana is, so far, on the pricey half-baked side of things, although still very sturdy. And I've used it to write a great deal in the five days or so since I've had it. If it wasn't for the fact that it's holding all my scrupulously accumulated info I've put on my Palm Pilot, I'd think about returning it and getting an Alphasmart Neo which is about half the price and has an absurdly long battery life (but no Palm OS).

The Pitch: It's like Zelig meets Hackers!

2005-04-21T22:56:00.000-07:00

This is a test. Hoo boy, am I out of shape.

The Pitch: It's like Another Test meets This Is Not a Test!

2005-04-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

Actually, it's a test.

The Pitch: It's like Closed for Repairs meets Opening Soon!

2005-04-19T17:49:00.000-07:00

In part, it's been such a long time since I've posted because David died, and in part because I didn't want to write about David dying. David was Edi's cousin's partner, but really he was David, Edi's cousin, and thanks to the miracle of these things, he was David, my cousin, as well. Watching him slowly die these last months was very hard, and watching him quickly die--bit by bit, on a hospital bed by the kitchen where he had cooked so many amazingly good meals--was even harder. It's a relief not to watch him die anymore, but I love him and miss him and alternate between thinking it's all okay and it all isn't.

The closest I think I've come to being dead was my one time on shrooms: I was walking around outside, feeling separate from the world. I finally knew what it would be like when I was dead, because I could see the world moving on, all around me, without me: enough of my ego was gone that I could see everything without filtering it through the world of "I," and yet I had enough of an ego left to respond to that feeling. I felt both terribly relieved and terribly sad, and I'm reminded of that feeling a little bit now with David's death.

I would like to think the dead become God, in that they know everything and they forgive everything. I would like to think that, so that David--and all of the people that I've loved who have died--would know everything I wanted to say to them, and could forgive me for never saying it.

2005-04-03T18:10:00.000-07:00

Oooo, I hate me some lines. But it was fine in this case, because I'm so glad people are getting out and seeing this film! It's keen.

2005-04-03T18:09:00.000-07:00

I don't usually send photos to this page, but what the hey. I was both thrilled and annoyed there was a line when we went to catch Best of Youth this afternoon.

The Pitch: It's like Silent Movie meets Quest For Fire!

2005-03-26T17:39:00.000-08:00

Haven't updated much because I've either had nothing to say, or no time to say it in. Today, inspired by Kung-Fu Hustle, I grabbed VCDs of King of Beggars and High Risk (because, dumb-ass that I am, I thought Stephen Chow and not Jackie Cheung was in it) on my way through Chinatown and a cheap DVD of God of Cookery. We've got to get something in front of our eyeballs because Edi and I, God help us, are working our way through the Spaced DVDs again. She can't even feign enthusiasm for all my many Bollywood flicks so we're at a bit of a standstill. And I've got the first eight episodes of Battlestar Galactica to watch, somehow, sometime that I can't imagine she'd be at all interested in.

Other than that, it's been busy, busy, busy. We went to IKEA on my day off this week, which shows you how crazy it's been: going to IKEA was actually relaxing compared to any of my last two weeks. This week, I've got two days off and they're going to be filled with lunch dates, appointments to view our wedding space, uhh....some other wacky thing I can't remember, and Edi's sister in town for a few days. I really want to see The Best of Youth and it starts Thursday at the Balboa. It's six hours long (plus an hour dinner break in the middle), so I'm dubious if I can talk Edi into going with me--I can sit through a three hour movie without a twitch so I'm kinda excited by the idea of a six hour epic, but I am doubtful she'll feel the same. It drives me nuts that the Balboa is now playing all this adventurous stuff because it's a fucker to travel to.

In other news, I've written the reviews for the S.C., but am holding off posting them since Hibbs asked me wait until he's written his. Fair enough, it being his blog and all, but I feel a bit foolish kind of sitting on my hands. I'm such a creature of habit--I'll be glad when my main forms of self-expression expand again beyond telling you what movies I've bought and bitching about comic books I've read.

The Pitch: It's like Zelig meets Mr. Baseball!

2005-03-22T12:20:00.000-08:00

I go through periods--not always, but there are definitely periods--where I think I see people I know, where names in movie and t.v. credits ring bells for me, where the picture of that person makes me think about someone or someone else, and I start to wonder...

When Edi and I first started dating, I was going through one of those periods. I remember seeing CQ with her and being utterly and completely convinced that one of the attractive Italian models was an ex-roommate of mine, and I searched for her name in the credits. I did the same thing (I can't remember for what or whom) when we saw Bartleby. (Amusingly, it wasn't until days later that I realized that one of the movies--About A Boy--did have the name of someone I went to high school with: a guy in my class I only knew of by name, who a mutual friend had told me was into music and incredible with production, who went on to make records with Beck.)

It's been happening again recently. There was a woman in the lobby yesterday talking to one of the paralegals, her back turned to me, and the way she wore her hair I was sure it was someone who used to work here, back years later in search of a job. (Nope.) Or the bald guy talking with his buddies outside Starbuck's who I also thought was one of my old roommates.

Or the woman who was Barry Bonds' girlfriend for nine years. Was she that popular girl in my high school class, the pretty brunette who, with the pretty blonde, was essentially the clique of girls who acted, more or less, like they were better than everyone? First name is right? Second name might be right? Hair color and eye color? Check. I know she ended up around here, at least for a bit (I totally dove behind a pillar rather than bump into her at a Peter Gabriel concert. Granted this was, ummmmm, 1987?)

If I had ever attended any of my high school reunions (last year was the twentieth), I might be a bit more keyed in about these things: ho, ho, that can't be Kim testifying against Barry Bonds! She married an Italian architect and has been living in Genoa for the last fifteen years! And yet, I'm opposed to high school reunions. I hate the idea of them (people who served time in prison don't hold reunions, do they? High school reunions are just to help us think there's some difference...), I hate the idea of going to them (because I am not infinitely rich and powerful and therefore capable of rubbing it in the face of the people who were shitty to me), I hate how I feel when thinking about the idea of them (because knowing that I would hate to discover that some people were doing well, and would only appreciate their misery), and I hate what I realize about myself when thinking about them (that it's all caused, largely, by a hurt over not being accepted which is deeply, deeply childish). Part of me hopes Edi and I can become rich and powerful by 2009 so we can slam-dunk our 25 year reunions, but I think it's just better that I forget such an idea ever happened. Ex-cons get out of prison and they start new lives--that was my only goal when I was inside, and I'm glad for the one I have.

But there's also the part of me that wants to know--or wants to think I know (as my poor, wonderful Edi has been dealing with all too much lately: she's taken to saying, "You know an awful lot that you didn't seem to know before they announced it" when we listen to DVD commentaries.)--and so I'd really like to know: is that her? Did the few last tatters of hope I held out for Bonds being an amazing player and family man, and not just a daring steroid user and chronic adulterer, get scattered to the four winds by the woman who was one of the pinnacles of what I found terrible and wrong about high school when I was in high school? Did the girl who always hung out and talked with her friends and the jocks and acted like nobody else existed, find herself in the life of the kept woman--the house in Arizona where she could entertain during spring training, the hotels where she stayed at the team rate, the hours spent listening to the man talk about himself, the empty rooms she thought she was filling when, in a way, she was merely part of their emptiness?

Maybe it's better I don't know: at least there's the possibility for something richer to grow in my imagination than the simple bitterness the truth would carry.

The Pitch: It's like High Concept meets Hey, Mr. DJ!

2005-03-21T08:45:00.000-08:00

Not much going on here, thank goodness. Co-worker is out sick so I'm working alone--it's been a while since that's happened...say, Tuesday or so.

I got to bed later than I would have liked because Stereogum pointed me to Mark Vidler's MP3 page, which holds just a ton of interesting mash-ups the guy's created. The most recent, 'Wrapped Detective,' is a really clever working of 'Watching the Detectives,' 'King of Pain' and Lionel Ritchie's 'Hello,' along with a few other surprises. I only checked out a third or so of the songs but they ran the gamut from interesting to amazing, with my personal favorite being 'Karma in the Life,' John Lennon's part from 'A Day in the Life' mixed with the piano from Radiohead's 'Karma Police.'

I don't think it'll get better, though, than playing for Edi a mash-up cut from a CD John gave me, of Freddy Mercury singing "The Game" over the piano of John Lennon's "Imagine." "Oh my God," she said, "I think I'm going to cry." Sure enough, her eyes were shiny with tears.

Admittedly, we've been a bit emotional overall lately, but I did like her explanation after the fact: "It was perfect, because I've always had a secret love of Queen, and I've always liked the piano part of 'Imagine.' I just never liked the lyrics, with all that peace and love hippie shit being shoved down our throats." Actually, I can't remember if she used that phrasing or "all that peace and love shit the hippies kept shoving down our throats," because I was too busy laughing my ass off.

The mash-up, ladies and gentlemen: saving brilliant hooks from the peace and love shit the hippies kept shoving down our throats.

The Pitch: It's like Light Sleeper meets Real Genius!

2005-03-19T18:39:00.000-08:00

I finally, finally, finally got a good night's sleep last night and I can't tell you how happy I am about that. And the newsletter is done, and I did my reviews for the S.C., and I'm off work in an hour and a half and it's been quiet after a day of intermittent, dicky, annoying jobs. Of course, there's all sorts of stuff falling apart--people on the verge of dying, babies being born--so I'm a complete and utter selfish bastard to define my day by how well I slept but eh, what can I do. I'm a complete and utter selfish bastard, I guess.

I also have a shitload of not much too say--our first deposit check finally got cashed so we know where and when we're getting married, but I'm not sure if I should announce it on our blog. On the one hand: who cares? My guess is somewhere between four and eleven people follow this blog (it's much, much closer to four). On the other hand, it would be nice if it were a joint announcement: it's something Edi should rightfully be a part of. Which sounds dumb, because she's already told several people over the phone and the email, but then, I have too. I don't know; I'll figure it out.

I'm on week 3.5 of no video games, and I'm getting this very intense but very brief pangs and then it's gone. I'll be sitting in the living room, trying to figure out what to do for the next hour and suddenly You know, you nevvverrr finished Beyond Good & Evillll... will suddenly occur to me. Or You should reinstalllll Freeeeedom Force..., or Maybe you should trade in those games you never playyyyyyy...for creeeeeedit.

The last one is the tempting one, because I know what I'd do with that credit--I'd spend it. On video games. Which I'd then play.

I did have a really great experience with credit, recently--I traded in a handful of CDs I didn't want to Streetlight Records and used the credit to get their used Singing Detective boxed set. The discs appear to be in excellent condition and I only had to pay nine bucks for it after credit. Considering even Deep Discount DVD has it for forty-three bones, I feel like I got a great deal. Now I can loan it to Nancy who I expect to fall deeply in love with it--if I can get my act together enough to ever see her, that is.

Our British TV binge is over, I think: Spaced, The Singing Detective, The Office. I'm not sure where we could go after that, although I'm thinking of renting the other Potter stuff--Brimstone & Treacle, Pennies From Heaven, Liptstick on Your Collar, Track (shudder) 29. Tomorrow, Edi's going to watch Shaun of the Dead with me, and I want to watch Main Hoon Na again, but she acts like I'm inviting her to contract leukemia with me.

Oh, that was another exciting experience (in an AV club kind of way)--putting my more recent DVDs in the PS2 to see which ones would play, and which ones wouldn't. All the Indian flicks, as advertised, were all region and I can lend 'em to anyone. Kung-Fu Hustle and Spaced, sadly, are, as advertised, Region restricted.

After some thought, I've decided not to discuss Kafka on the Shore. So much of the book's charm is in how it unfolds, and I was really glad I didn't know anything about it before reading it. I'm two pages into Cloud Atlas now, and moving slow. All it'll take is one good BART ride.

See? Nothing to say except maybe: God, I really hope it rains again tonight. Every night with rain is a night without stupid neighbor lawn parties. But more than that, I opened the door this morning to leave for work and this fresh clean air swept across my face and made me want to swoon. Most of it, I'm sure, is the rain pushing the crap out of the air, but it's also obvious all the plant life on Bernal Hill is loving it--it smelled like the plants were ecstatically exhaling fresh air, all that triumphantly green grass on the ridge sending fresh soft breezes down to caress our tired faces. More, please.

The Pitch: It's like The Fantastic Four meets The Fantastic Four again!

2005-03-17T12:50:00.000-08:00

Image isn't the only one, by the way. Marvel this month had twenty-one trade paperbacks. Fortunately, Hibbs decided to only carry thirteen of those. Unlike the Image books where I don't know enough about the titles, I frequently know too much about the Marvel books, particularly when they're collecting stuff from the mid to late '70s. I try not to prattle on and on, but inevitably, it adds something like 700 words, no matter how hard I try.

I'm finished with the New C0mics, by the way, An even 5,500 words which I imagine Hibbs'll chop to 5,000 or so. Now, on to the Fanboy (after a lovely sushi lunch with the lovely Edi Jo).

The Pitch: It's like Schindler's List meets Chasing Amy!

2005-03-16T18:20:00.000-08:00

Image Comics is the bane of my existence.

I have to write the solicitations every month for the CE newsletter. I get a lot of free reign (although I try not to bash stuff, which I used to do in my early years--I can save that for the S.C.) and have only a few guidelines I have to stick to, one of which is that I should summarize every first issue and every trade paperback we're going to be carrying. It's a guideline that makes sense--why would a sub order the first issue of a new title without knowing who's writing it or what it's about?

However, it puts me in a precarious position in that I've got to write about titles where I know little more than the poor sub. All I have is whatever text or images they've got in the blackline, whatever early info I can find on the Internet, and what I remember of the track records of the teams launching the new titles. Apart from Fanboy Rampage (which is hard mainly because I've been writing it for six years now), writing descriptions for the first issues are the hardest part of my job.

And Image Comics makes that job even harder. Because Image receives all sorts of preferential treatment from Diamond as long as they keep a certain number of titles rolling out the door, they have to keep a certain amount of product coming out each month. But because they don't really put out any money in funding, merely help facilitate the publishing of books the creators publish themselves, they constantly turn out new product by new talent with minimal information.

For example, I'm writing the previews for books coming out in June. Image Comics has twelve first issues and trade paperbacks, among which are books like Blacklight and Flak Riot. Check out the preview description of Blacklight:

Lina Juarez is stuck in a dead-end job and a dead-end relationship, living a dead-end life in a dead-end town. All she dreams of is escape, some kind of excitement in her life. But when a dark and mysterious power possess her, she quickly learns the true meaning of the old adage, "Be careful what you wish for."

And here's Flak Riot:

"Zoe Nixxon is a cute, bored, lonely file clerk She wants a new life and fate gives her that chance when she finds her true calling: hunting for bounties in the lawless dimension known as the O.D.!"

Same set-up, same supernatural twist. One gets possessed and the other becomes a bounty hunter, but do they both end up fighting supernatural creepies? I would guess they do. They go right next to each other in the Blackline and they'll be appearing side-by-side in the newsletter too. Do I riff on the fact that the two books sound alike? (Probably.) Do I kill double the amount of brain cells trying to make sure I don't sound like I'm just writing the same thing over and over? (Defnitely.)

I think Image Comics is a useful and valuable part of the comic marketplace, and allow wider exposure to writers and artists daring enough to create their own works. But God, do they make my life miserable for a couple of days every month.

Whew.

Thanks for letting me vent. Now I have to go back to trying to write cleverly about books I know almost nothing about.

The Pitch: It's like Requiem For A Dream meets The Towering Inferno!

2005-03-15T08:21:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was so insane and crazy I forgot about the drug deal.

Sunday, Edi and I were talking about the charms of walking along Mission Street--we'd made our way over to The Castro Theatre and decided to take Mission instead of Valencia. And I was regaling her with all the great stuff I get to see on my morning walk. "Here's where the guys sleep, and there's where they pee. Oh no, wait. That's a bakery. It's open. I think they sleep in the next storefront. Ooo, and here's some of my favorite graffitti!"

So yesterday on my morning walk to BART, a scary strung-out woman stumbled up to a short latino guy in an army jacket and slipped him a small baggie of white stuff. At least, that's what it looked like out of the corner of my eye. Thinking about it now, it was probably heroin and the strung-out woman was probably muling between the street dealer and the central stash. For some reason, that makes it all the more depressing.

Anyway, after that, I missed my stop and rode BART to Oakland. That was actually the non-Edi-related highlight of my day, actually. I was so engrossed in Kafka On The Shore, and there had been a few between-station delays, I was completely thrown off as to what our last stop was...but there's no mistaking the long, long ride under the bay, particularly when it's normally around ninety seconds to get from one station to another. So I read some more, and put down the book just in time to have the train come out of the tunnel into the oncoming morning light. It was great. I got off at the first stop and waited outside for the next train to take me back.

Of course, after that it was all gloom and misery and pain--constant dogpiles of awful, unending jobs, bad instructions, and the assurance that each and every job is a very important rush that needs to be done absolutely as soon as possible. I worked from 8:00 to 1:00 without a break, took lunch, and came back to almost exactly the same piles of shitty work as when I left. By about 5:30, I felt like my brain was crawling with bees, and I wanted to weep. I was actually afraid to return home because I felt so brittle.

As it turned out, home was exactly the right place to be--one great dinner and two episodes of The Office later, I felt 95% bee-free. I'm still impressed with myself for showing up for work today. I would have much rather called in sick, picked up the blackline from the store, and made the free showing of The Ring Two tonight. (I also have a free showing pass for Sin City tomorrow and am trying to figure out if I really want to stand in line to see it. On the one hand, hey! Two weeks early! On the other hand, hey! Two hours in line and a jammed-up theater.) Yes, that's how bad work is. I'm actually fantasizing about doing other work as a relief from thinking about it.

I'm hoping today will be quiet so I can share my thoughts on Kafka on the Shore, which I just finished. Actually, I'm just hoping today will be quiet enough I can figure out what my thoughts are regarding Kafka on the Shore. Let's just go with "Wow, what a book" for now, and see what churns up later.

The Pitch: It's like The Office meets Kung-Fu Hustle!

2005-03-13T22:17:00.000-08:00

I liked Kung-Fu Hustle. Edi and I watched it last night. Interestingly, I didn't love the movie, but was strongly tempted to re-watch it today. It's a very watchable movie--Stephen Chow is a hell of a visual filmmaker and it's been a while since I've seen a movie I wanted to watch again immediately just to rewatch certain sequences. I find that comofrting in a way, because I remember watching some of my beloved HK movies over and over again in a way I just don't anymore--there's usually one movie I'll watch a few times in the course of a year (last year was the remake and the original of Dawn of the Dead, each of which I saw three or four times) but it's spread out over a period of time not like when I was watching The Killer every other month for a year.

This has come up a few times in the course of the relationship. Edi finally saw Planet of the Apes with me last year, and I still haven't shown her The Killer. Or Hard-Boiled. She's seen Drunken Master II (in its American Legend of Drunken Master incarnation) but I still haven't shown her the other Jackie Chan classics: Project A, parts I and II; Armor of God 2; Police Story 1; Wheels on Meals or Dragons Forever (ehh, those last few are minor classics but you know what I mean). And Swordsman II! I was trying to tell her what it was like to watch Swordsman II with an entire audience of people who had no idea what they were getting into, and realized how much more punch the story would have if I actually, you know, had shown her the movie.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Edi called me a proselytizer, and I think that's very true. I guess I try to show how much I care for her by not exposing her to all my geeky passions, particularly those that are more past than present. But there are times when I think: how can this person really understand me if they haven't seen The Killer?

And yet, there's something genuinely silly about that statement, isn't there? It's sort of saying like you can't make out the whole jigsaw just because two of the pieces are missing. And I do think I like to show people stuff because I think they'll enjoy it, not because it'll help them understand. I can safely say Main Hoon Na has contributed not a whit to my psychological make-up, and yet I'm totally eager to spring it on Edi very soon.

Anyway, Kung-Fu Hustle is a very fun, very slight little film. But at least if it somehow becomes the cornerstone of my new philosophy, Edi can say she was right there at the beginning.

The Pitch: It's like Oedipa Maas meets Mr. Natural!

2005-03-10T19:11:00.000-08:00

I had a lot of weird dreams last night, and none of them stuck with me except for one. In it, I was in a boarding house eating breakfast with Robert Crumb and Terry Zwigoff. There were three or four other places set for breakfast but either no one else had come down to eat yet, or else everyone had already eaten and we were getting there late.

Terry Zwigoff was very excited because he and his wife wanted to get the rights to Crumb's latest book--which in a way was odd, because Crumb's latest book was an graphic novel adaptation of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. I was pretty excited by the idea of this, and fought with the urge to tell him about my ideas on how to film Pynchon's book: it seemed like the sortof thing Crumb wouldn't appreciate, nor did it seem like he would appreciate any sort of fanboy fawning over the whole thing, which was my other urge. So, instead I silently sat and ate my pancakes, and Crumb started talking to me about the project, surprisingly open. And then I woke up, or my memory stopped recording or the dream ended. Finis.

I think I know how I'm supposed to interpret the dream, but putting it at its most rudimentary level, I think the idea of Crumb doing The Crying of Lot 49 would be pretty cool: all those sweaty obsessive grotesqueries, bent and slumped as if bowing in obeisance to the almighty and likely non-existent Tristero; Oedipa with her go-go boots and her shelf-like butt; Mucho Maas going crazy from LSD in a hotel room surrounded by predatory policemen.

In real-life news, we had a quiet day. After torturing ourselves last night with the film version of The Singing Detective (awful, awful, awful--never, ever see it), we watched it again with the director's commentary which helped us feel like we had both wasted most of our day and managed to give us headaches. I'm still trying to get over a world in which Battlestar Galactica is better than The Singing Detective--RemakeWorld is a lot like Bizarro World, I guess.

A sushi lunch was had. Work was done. Another long box was sorted. A nap was had, and a walk on the hill was made--although I did one, and Edi did the other. I won't tantalize you as to who did what (although any one who knows either of us could figure it out): the nap, where I fell asleep to cool air blowing on my face from an open window, was superb. We're working our way up to dinner and then it's a light evening of TV. I really had all these things I should have worked on, and didn't really do any of them. And it felt pretty great, to tell you the truth.

My final geeky observation has to do with RPG stats and computers. The last day or two I've been adding bits and pieces to Firefox, and it feels like nothing so much as when you get an item in D&D and manage to successfully make it magical (or increase its magical powers). A nice little feeling: I've got a +1 Web Browser! I have a Google News of seeing! (They let you customize the news page which is great--instead of all that sports and business stuff I have both a Bollywood and a Graphic Novels section.) If I could just get my computer to hook up with Edi's printers (something my old computer took to like a duck to water), I'd be pleased as punch with my little computer set-up.

The Pitch: It's like Waiting for Guffman meets Battlestar Galactica!

2005-03-09T17:26:00.000-08:00

Fanboy's holiday today: I watched the Battlestar Galactica miniseries today while sorting a longbox of comics. The comics sorting--not too much fun, but dear God, was that Battlestar Galactica great. Once again, I am one of the last to catch on--after Tim and Nancy and Rob Bennett and Hibbs and many, many others talked about how good it was, I finally got a copy of the miniseries from Bennett. Holy cow. It was so much better than the original piece of poo that used to run on Sunday nights on ABC I can't believe it. Lots of satisfying nastiness--that scene where they could only take the children and three adults from all those refugees? Awesome. That scene where they have to leave all the non-FTL ships behind? Super-awesome. Female cylon chick breaking that baby's neck in the crib? Yummy, with a big side-dish of tasty.

Another short update, I'm afraid. The plan is to get off this computer doo-dah thing and get the place vaccuumed before Edi gets home today.

Oh, and our friends Bruce and Lily had a big ol' baby boy this morning. Lily's sister called about 7:45 to let Edi know Lily had gone into labor, and then called about two to say the kid had come about 8:45--he was ready to get out and hit the town, apparently.

The neighbor next door is chopping wood, and running a fire in his fire pit, which is pretty god-damn ominous. There's probably going to be a dinner party tonight. Shitpissfuck.

The Pitch: It's like Rain Man meets Forrest Gump!

2005-03-08T18:25:00.000-08:00

It's been two weeks since I've played any video games. Tomorrow. Two weeks tomorrow. And by "video games," I mean actual video games--not popcap crap like Word Mojo, which I've played a few times. And by "a few times," I mean every other day. Two weeks. Give or take.

As you can see, I'm taking it well--almost barely obsessive at all--and it's freed me to do lots of things in that two weeks. Like help people move. And work. Yes, blessed and free are those without video games...

I re-read my own post where I posited not playing video games until after Edi and I got hitched. I made a horrible noise when I read this, as if someone had sent me a ransom note with a terrified picture of someone I dearly love wearing underwear on their head and being threatened with a gun. Thank God for Word Mojo, otherwise I might have crapped myself. I still can't believe I wrote such a thing. What was I thinking?

Would Edi and I have had time to watch Spaced and The Singing Detective during those two weeks if I hadn't? And yes, if I can just work out my writing set-up, maybe I'll fill all those non-moving, non-working free moments with actual writing, which I miss so much I can't even begin to tell you...even more, arguably, than video games.

But I'll be at the apartment alone tomorrow, and I'm worried. I wonder if Edi would consent to driving around with all my PS2 games in the trunk of her car?

The Pitch: It's Like Farenheit 451 meets Scrooged!

2005-03-05T15:32:00.000-08:00

I like to share my stuff. If there's something I like, I want people to know about it. I'm a proselytizer, as Edi pointed out the other night. When Joel pointed me to Ong-Bak, I grabbed a copy and lent it to Rob. When James came in to the store yesterday for the first Friday in maybe six months, I said to him, "Ooo! Have you read Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life? I totally thought of you while reading it." Or when Skip handed in his sub form, I said, "You're not reading Walking Dead? You would think that book is awesome!"

So Annalee Newitz's cover story in the S.F. Bay Guardian this week kinda struck a chord with me. It's all about the upcoming "Broadcast Flag" regulation the F.C.C. passed that will make it, to quote the article, "illegal for anyone in the United States to manufacture a device that records high-definition television unless it's built to obey a special signal – the flag – emitted by stations broadcasting HD shows. The flag will tell PVRs and other equipment whether they're allowed to copy a show onto some other medium, like a DVD. In short, broadcasters and content owners will actually be able to control your recording habits."

Newitz is very, very savvy and casts the role of those opposing such a law in the most accessible terms possible. The opening line of the article is a quote--"All I want is to make a high-definition copy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, save it on a DVD, and loan it to my friend."--that any of us lender types could totally agree with.

I mean, crap, now that Edi and I have watched Spaced, I'm frustrated because I can't really loan it to anyone--Rob's the only other person I know with an all-region DVD player. And there's tons of stuff I would have paid to rent already if it had been available--I hit up Tim for help on stuff like edonkey because Edi and I want to watch the third and fourth seasons of Six Feet Under, which HBO has limited interest in releasing on DVD if it can get us to sign up for HBO Premium (or HBO On Demand, or some other fucking spin-off channel).

And yet, you know, I also feel a bit creepy about all this, too. Part of Newitz's opening line, "All I want is to make a high-definition copy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer..." kind of sticks with me a little bit. What's wrong with a low-definition copy? Newitz posits a perfectly legal situation:

Let's say, for example, that it's a couple of years from now, and your TiVo
(bought anytime after July 1 of this year) has recorded the excellent Marx
brothers movie Animal Crackers, which was just broadcast on TNT in HD. Tomorrow you're getting on a plane to Australia, and you'd like to save a copy on DVD to watch on your computer during the 15-hour flight.

You're entitled to make a personal copy under federal copyright law, so it
should be no problem. And in fact, it was no problem back in the days of analog
broadcasts and VCRs. But with the Broadcast Flag in place, TNT can send out a
signal that tells your TiVo not to make HD copies of Animal Crackers. So when
you burn that DVD and put it into your computer somewhere over the Pacific, you
get a bunch of garbage. The FCC has just stolen your rights.

that, again, seems dingenuous to me. I absolutely and completely think big media corporations are a bunch of greedy assbutts, but on the other hand, they pay the creative talent. In many cases, they pay the creative talent quite badly; on the other hand, the creative talent can make a good living off it, and do.

I'm a big believer in exposure to a work--I bought a lot more albums in the days of Napster and Audiogalaxy than I do now--and, admittedly, at some point in the future, there aren't going to be analog TV's anymore--all HD, all the time. But I got squirrelly reading this article--in no small part because I felt uncomfortable siding siding with either the protesters or the corporations. I see a whole lot more cultural wars in our future, and choosing sides is going to suck in a mighty big way.

The Pitch: It's like Silent Running meets Groundhog Day!

2005-03-04T09:40:00.000-08:00

It's always hard for me to talk about my "weekend," what with it (a) happening in the middle of the workweek; (b) not being the sum total of my days off from work (since I don't work Sunday); and (c) some third thing I should list here because these sorts of list always have at least three things, but can't think of. However it's a bit harder this time around because I feel like I didn't have one. I swapped shifts to get a Saturday off last month, and paid the price by working a full shift at the firm yesterday. And although it was probably the most leisurely experience helping people move I've ever had, most of Wednesday was spent helping Theresa and Josh move.

But the few hours of weekend I did have (Wednesday from two p.m. on, Thursday from 7:00 p.m. on, this morning until about 10:00 a.m. when I have to dash off for work) were pretty exceptional. I finally picked up copies of Main Hoon Na and Boom on DVD, got my fuckin' six-to-four pin firewire plugs from Cables To Go, watched part five of The Singing Detective on Wednesday, watched the sixth and final part of The Singing Detective on Thursday, and successfully used my firewire plug to upload new music onto my Ipod, thus obviating my whole clumsy yank-out-the computer-put-in-the cable-crack-knee-on-corner-of-computer-until-cable-is-removed procedure. Worked like a charm!

Of course, I couldn't buy just two bollywood flicks. I also picked up six other DVDs, the highlight of which is a film called Jism, because (a) it's a Bollywood remake of Body Heat; and (b) it's called Jism. I titter like a schoolgirl every time I read that. Hopefully, there's a Bollywood film called Lake Titicaca I can pick up as well.

If there's an unfortunate drawback to all of my relentless Bollywood flick accumulation, it's that I just didn't feel much like actually seeing a Bollywood film. I paid my cash and sat through the first half of Veer-Zaara and then left at the intermission. It was all perfectly fine, I guess, but I found myself not in the mood. The hills of Fremont were shockingly green, nearly as green as Bernal Hill, and I wanted to kind of wander from store to store. Could I find a cheap copy of The Singing Detective DVD at Rasputin? Would a used copy of another Murakami book turn up at Half-Life Books? Were they giving out free "hot&fresh" samples at the Krispy Kreme? (Sadly, the answers turned out to be no, no and yes.) I wanted to be home watching The Singing Detective and/or Spaced, curled with Edi on our uncomfortable hedgehog hair couch, not sitting in an empty movie theater watching Shahrukh Khan slowly fall in love with Preity Zinta. (He does a particularly lackluster job, too, which is doubly depressing because Preity Zinta is pretty god-damned cute.) And that's kind of weird, because one of my favorite things in the world is having a movie theater all to myself and watching a big Bollywood flick.

Or maybe not so weird: getting home in time to watch The Singing Detective in a darkened room with my lovely girlfriend was pretty great, too. And maybe three hour movies are best saved for when you've got more than twelve hours in your weekend.

The Pitch: It's like The Oscar meets Contempt!

2005-02-27T17:08:00.000-08:00

Yeah, the Oscars. We're leaving in less than an hour to go watch 'em at David & Larry's. I still have seen nearly nothing: Not The Aviator, not Ray, not Finding Neverland, not Million Dollar Baby (and the only one I currently regret not seeing is Million Dollar Baby). I've seen Sideways, I've seen Closer, and the fact that The Incredibles, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and/or Farenheit 9/11/The Passion of the Christ weren't nominated for anything other than minor awards means that this year Hollywood is circling the wagons--big money studios shutting out anything but their own grudgingly granted vanity projects, and assuring themselves that they're contributing to cinema. They've forced out other accessible and safe indy projects (I mean, Jesus, you're not going to mistake Eternal Sunshine for a Tarkovsky flick anytime soon) to reward their own better-than-shitty efforts. I mean, even Sideways wasn't a great movie. Sideways was good. Sideways was fine.

Fuck. My whole point of this post was to talk about how Seijun Suzuki's Pistol Opera helped saved my life on Friday night when our evil insane neighbor threw a yard party in the freezing cold until 2:30 in the morning. And about getting the collectors set of Spaced in the mail Saturday and Edi and I watching all of season one by noon today even though I had meant to dole them out carefully (Spaced is the sitcom from the Shaun of the Dead guys with a very nice gal-balance provided by Jessica Stevenson). They're pretty keen, and I'm sure we'll have blazed through the rest of the set by next week.

And finally, I bought Kung Fu Hustle on DVD and Casshern & The Passion of the Christ on VCD in Chinatown on my lunchbreak yesterday: my original plan was to see The Passion in a way I could be reasonably sure Mel Gibson would make absolutely no money off me, but the big screen Dolby surround showing of five minutes of Kung Fu Hustle suckered me in. As for Casshern, I don't know if I should have just paid the extra ten bucks for the jumbo DVD rather than the wee little VCD, since it's apparently a big-screen effects laden action flick, but I just couldn't bring myself to part with twenty bucks for something I've only seen one trailer for on the Internet almost a year ago. On Wednesday, I hope to continue my string of acquisition by traveling to Fremont and getting Main Hoo Na (great movie) and Boom (lousy, lousy movie) on DVD from my secret "source" (Beauty Plus Salon & Boutique).

See? That's what I wanted to talk about: crappy movies, not the crappy Oscars. I feel much better.

The Pitch: It's like Where The Buffalo Roam meets The Wizard of Oz!

2005-02-24T11:25:00.000-08:00

Weird the way an eye arranges images in a frame. I was struck by the fact that Hunter S. Thompson died on Sunday night, and Dr. Gene Scott died on Monday afternoon. They seem almost bloodbrothers to my mind, and I can't imagine anyone who went to college when I did was able to escape exposure to either.

Sadly, I have more to say about Gene Scott than I do about Thompson, although that is probably unsurprising, since Scott--by virtue of his crazed religious broadcasts--could be more directly experienced en masse. I have stories of friends who wrote their early articles for the college paper like Thompson, or who would tell me the inevitable tragic ending to a Thompson signing: I remember one, at Stanford, where a student hollered "Hey, Hunter!" and hurtled a can of beer. Thompson, on sheer autopilot, caught it and then pitched it back, clocking the surprised student straight in the face and causing a legendary spray of blood, beer and university-directed lawsuits.

But Gene Scott...my last roommate in the dorms was fixated on Gene Scott. Mark would sit indoors all day, shades drawn, nursing a hangover, and would watch Gene Scott. When I would come back from class (or, later, began my own depressed tour of duty of that tiny room as the relationship I left proved nearly impossible to escape), I would sit there, in the gloom of a blinded day, and watch Mark watch Gene Scott.

Scott provided a valuable service for those of us who had yet to go into a bar, or lacked a certain kind of alcoholic parent: Scott would wordlessly sulk with all the attendant charisma of the apathetic drunk. For young men unable to avoid being engaged in the world, there is a genuinely mesmeric quality in a man sitting unresponsive to all around him--and that power is heightened when done in front of television cameras. Televisions never shut up, you know: a minute of dead air is a minute of sheer terror to those in programming, a minute where viewers can change the channel, or turn off the talking box, or can leave their darkened room and return to the world. But Gene Scott would sit, staring, either directly into the camera or off to a corner of the stage, collecting his thoughts, or tending the fires in his soul. After a minute--or two--or three--he would break out with a tirade of extended disgust, toward the Godless, or the penniless, or the makers of second-rate cigars. (I must have also walked in on the middle of one his fund-raisers, where he would stare into the camera and refuse to speak until a certain goal was met, although I must have arrived before they started and left before they ended: I only know about them from reading the obituary I linked to.) Sometimes before cutting, finally, to commercial, he would show videotape of horses in a field. (Or perhaps those were the commercials, I can't remember anymore.)

What strikes me now is Mark--hairy, unkempt, smoking cigars--pointing and laughing derisively at Gene Scott--hairy, unkempt, smoking cigars. It's not my memory that twins them, I'm sure of it: one was a strange mirror version of the other. Mark, to what I'm sure he thought of as his credit, kept himself to himself--he barely went to classes, barely left the room--and perhaps this is why he laughed as he did at Gene Scott. Mark had an unhappy filipina girlfriend (on whom he cheated at least once with his unhappy filipina ex-girlfriend) but apart from leaving the room for her, he was in the room all the time--bearish and naked, the light of the television playing off his glasses, smoking the glasses and frequently hooting and pointing at Dr. Gene Scott's unfocused glower. Everyone on our floor only knew Mark as a presence of cheap cigar smoke, lacking corporeal form. And so maybe no one else remembers Dr. Gene Scott quite the way I do--as something like a hologram, a figure smoking cigars in the blue lit center of our room, surrounded by the haze of cigar smoke. Something like the Wizard of Oz as the Wizard was and must have been--a scowling man disappointed by the world, surly and silent in his displeasure, occasionally coaxed to manic heights of laughter, derisive laughter, as he scrawled equations he never explained, and talked excitedly of impending ruination.

This, then, was Dr. Gene Scott, and this was my roommate, Mark. And although I left them behind, it appears they stay with me still. Not even death, at least for now, will undo that.

The Pitch: It's like Ferris Bueller's Day Off meets War Games!

2005-02-23T16:46:00.000-08:00

My smelly self has accomplished little more today than finishing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and not showering.

Actually, this is not altogether true. I did a lot of stuff with the computer, including ordering a 6-pin to 4-pin firewater converter (easy enough if you want the cables, absurdly complicated if you want just the female-to-male converter), finding and installing my copies of Adobe Acrobat and Nero Burning Rom, updating links on this very blog, finding my long-lost copy of Kid A, and piling together some books to sell at Red Hill around the corner. Although Edi got me a copy of Cloud Atlas and I am actually very excited about this, I've decided what I really want to read is Murakami's latest book and I'm am willing to get rid of some of my dead titles to get it. Just lately, I realized I didn't have to be the be-all and end-all comics library I had been unconsciously striving for and a lot of the titles that I had bought to support authors I liked just weren't going to be read and reread every few months, or even every few years.

As for GTA: SA, I didn't really finish it per se--I only completed the main storyline. And frankly, if that little tart Katie had bothered to show up at her apartment in San Fierro in the three or so days I spent waiting, I might be playing it still. But, apart from wooing and bedding down the last two unbedded girlfriends, there really wasn't much else I wanted to accomplish. Oh sure, I could finish up all those side-races, and I could do whatever it is to get unlimited stamina to win those two god-damn marathons, and I could get my gang's territories as close to 100% as possible (I've become a surgeon with the M4 assault rifle) but, dammit, I just wasn't enjoying it. I'm glad the game has all those extra things to do for those hypercompetitive fanboys who want to get 100% but I had to bail out at 89% or whatever my percentage was at completion.

On a whim, I booted up one of the three other saved San Andreas games on the card, one from October 27th 2004, and suddenly I went from trim and tattooed CJ to skinny, smelly CJ--from the well-suited millionaire to the guy with the tank-top and three hundred dollars in his pocket. I hopped on the motorcycle and drove around the neighborhood and, weirdly, the location felt different: there were less people, less traffic, less drug dealers. I admit I felt the pull--heyyyy, why not start from here but do it all differently?--but didn't do more than a mission or two before I turned it off, put away the game, pulled the controller from the PS2 and put in the drawer with the games. I decided to keep the PS2 plugged in as a back-up DVD player (even though Edi and I have, no shit, five DVD players between the two of us) but I'm through with games for a while--maybe even a long while. (The possible exception to this is Hibbs lent me KOTOR and I'm dying to see if it actually works on this new computer of mine. But the plan would be just to install it, test it, and then shut it down. Why? Because I'm too much of a junkie to not install it, but too worried about wasting another month playing it...)

No video games until I get hitched? Hey, it could happen, right? Now, if you excuse me, I have to either (a) shower, or (b) sell some graphic novels, depending.

The Pitch: It's like The Hours meets Ong-Bak!

2005-02-18T23:35:00.000-08:00

It's almost 11:00 and I am home in the house, quite alone, with only I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning as my companion. Ryan is in town for a quick visit, and she and Edi are out at some play in the Tenderloin (they're probably drinking with the cast by now) and this is a very, very good thing. I talked with Edi on the cell phone earlier tonight as they were leaving, and Edi sounded very, very happy--it was a genuine relief to hear how happy she sounded considering how stressful this week has been.

The empty house thing is kind of awkward and weird for me--it happens so rarely I'm never quite sure what to do. As somebody who likes having a certain amount of time alone, I feel embarrassed and uncomfortable now when I finally get some in the privacy of the home--I feel like one of those infants that point at a rubber hamburger and squall and whine and twitch and then, when finally given said hamburger, look around blankly, like: well, what now?

I picked up the Bright Eyes album and also Nas's Illmatic at Streetlight Records after an expansive but not particularly tasty fettucine dinner at Noe Street Pizza. I was inspired to get the Nas album after watching the VH1 "Driven" last week. What a goofy, goofy man I am--I hated Nas after watching him stink up Belly, liked maybe one or two tracks (at most) that I've heard, but because a bunch of Nas's friends were talking about how talented and brilliant a rapper he was, I thought, "Well, yeah. Gee, there's got to be a reason people like this guy, right?"

Oh, so very dumb am I. It was okay, and maybe it'll grow on me but I think maybe Nas paints a very clear picture of a particular type of East Coast existence that resonates with people who are familiar with that way of life, and it just doesn't knock me on the ass the way, I dunno, Straight Out of Compton did. As far as I can tell, I much prefer Nas's wife, the "My Milkshake Brings All The Boys To The Yard" chick. Criminey, that's just a million time more brilliant that anything I've heard yet on Illmatic.

And of the two Bright Eyes albums, I prefer the folky one, although nothing yet cuts me open as widely as "Landlocked Blues" which I love just as much having paid for it as I did when I snagged it for free. Thank God it balances out "Road To Joy," which uses Beethoven's melody to "Ode to Joy" for a folksy acoustic tune. Oh, it burns, preciousssssss, it burns poor Smeagol...

Heh. I think I'm the last person on the entire Internet to do a Gollum imitation. Where's my prize, dammit?

I should be writing the new comics section, but, oh, jesus, I am just so fuckin' tired of comic books at the moment. I did very good business working solo at the comic shop, and read a lot of funny books (even though I can't see how I'm going to get a chance to write any reviews this week) and even have some books I'm looking forward to reading (Helllllllo, Essential Luke Cage!) but I just can't wrap my head around trying to be witty and/or informative about a bunch of books coming out three months from now. I am so very, very eager not to be writing about new comics that I pissily spent ten minutes trying to log on to Blogger so I could write about something other than fucking comic books. And so, this is me on a Friday night while the girlfriend is away: wasting money; wasting calories; wasting time.

Oh!! But another thing I picked up tonight while killing time on 24th Street--and which I'm very, very happy about--is The Police Log, a collection of articles from The Aracta Eye wherein Kevin L. Hooper writes up the police log for my old hometown and catches all of the charm of the place:

May 29, 1995 Noon: In the throes of a hissyfit, the person outside the thrift store at 11th and K streets toook it out on a refrigerator, kicking it over into the street. The icebox insulter then fled on bicycle before police arrived.

September 13, 1999 8 p.m.: A Blakeslee Avenue resident's wheelchair was stolen from her front yard.

September 22, 2000 1:08 p.m.: These neighbors aren't getting along, and it's come down to accusations of laundry stealing.

Thank you, Kevin L. Hoover, for giving this exile a taste of his never-forgotten homeland. The woman at the book store on Castro (wish I had the name of the store here but I don't) is a very big booster and was happy to tell me how she had discovered the book. In fact, there's a booksigning next Friday for the author (Vol. II has just been released) and I'm very much thinking about going. Provided I ever finish this motherfucking newsletter, of course. Argh...argh...argh.

The Pitch: It's like A Clean Well-Lighted Space meets Barton Fink!

2005-02-16T16:55:00.000-08:00

Oh sure, I'm behind in a crazy, crazy way with this week's newsletter, but at least I've got even crazier room to work with now my new monitor is in place. All that extra space is going to make working with the blackline immeasurably easier... provided I actually start in on it...

Picasa is proving to be mighty rad, and now that I was able to straighten shit out so my card reader works, I used it to get a bunch of pictures up on The Unclear Eye which hasn't been updated in, oh, I dunno, six months or something. The problem with uploading photos I find is it's such an all-or-nothing proposition: I either want to post 300 at a time, or zero. So I've got a handful to post today, maybe more on Friday if I get a shot at it before work.

Also in the mighty rad department: Firefox. I was using it before I switched over to the new computer, but I hadn't messed with any of the extension thingies. FireFTP is a million times easier to use than IE's FTP program (although I'm a little suspicious at some of the errors I've gotten in transferring large numbers of pages at once) and with the Blog This! extension, maybe I'll even start using my Research page again. That would be keen.

So. New computer set-up? Rad. Picasa? Rad. Firefox? Very rad. Procrastinating when you've got a very tight time deadline and a busy couple of days? Not rad at all, my friend. Not rad at all.

The Pitch: It's like Generic Music Poll meets Generic Music Poll Answers!

2005-02-14T15:54:00.000-08:00

This is a music poll thingy being passed along a lot of the comics blogs I read. It's supposed to be invitation only or something. Fuck that.

1. Total amount of music files on your computer:

I don't know this one for sure (since I'm at work), but I believe it's about 19.75 gigs according to Itunes. That's about twice as much as any poll answer I've read yet, by the way.

2. The last CD you bought was:

Hmmm. Bought, bought, what is bought? The last CD I purchased in a store was The Streets, A Grand Don’t Come For Free a few months ago. But because I belong to Emusic, I’ve downloaded Philosophy: The Best of Bill Hicks; The Transient, Shooting At The Sun With a Water Gun, and Live at the Hemlock, all by David Dondero; Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone by The Walkmen, and Let It Be by the Replacements since then. Those are all freestanding mp3 files, by the way, so they aren’t controlled by any DMR or subscription limitation. Emusic is pretty cool.

But the last CD I bought and adored was Milk-Eyed Mender by Joanna Newsom, hands down.

3. What is the song you last listened to before reading this message?

“It Don’t Matter,” by Rehab. Does anyone remember that one? It’s one of those from MTV to Audiogalaxy to backup CD to Ipod-on-random type incidents, travelling from, say, early '98 to '05. Does anyone remember Rehab? Including Rehab?

4. Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you.

I’m both oddly fickle and strangely stoic when it comes to my music choices. So sometimes the songs that mean the most to me are the songs I haven’t listened to in years, and the songs I’ll be playing continuously for days mean nearly nothing. I think pop songs can only hold so much meaning for a person; then you just can’t stand them anymore. To crib an example I read somewhere, I tearfully sung the chorus to “Biko” by Peter Gabriel a hundred thousand times when I was in high school. It’s a fine song, but I cringe to hear it today maybe precisely because it moved me so much.

So I could list a half-dozen “current favorites” but the following “perennials” seem to stick with me, no matter how hoary they are:

1. “Pyramid Song,” Radiohead. This still gives me chills every time I hear it.

2. “Johannesburg, Illinois,” Tom Waits. This super-short song can, in the space of its minute and a half, make me tear up nearly every single time. It's the sound of unrequieted requited love, maybe.

3. I have no idea how I could ever choose just one Paul Westerberg song (either solo or with the ‘Mats) but, uhhh, “Swingin’ Party” from Tim? It speaks to my inner boastful coward.

4. “One Long Pair of Eyes,” by Robyn Hitchcock. Maybe his only truly perfect song (almost everything else sounds too over- or under-produced on album, although I’m really, really fond of “I Used to Love You,” off, I think, A Star For Bram).

5. “Dead,” by They Might Be Giants. After ten minutes of thinking, this was the closest I could get to a peppy song—I admit I have to sing aloud to it every time I hear it.

6. Who are you going to pass this stick to? (3 persons) and why?

Nancy and Tim, because they both have great taste in music and they both have blogs to post their answers on. (And I'm really curious how many gajillion gigs of music Tim has). There’s a lot of third choices (Edi, Ryan, Kara Platoni) who don’t meet the latter criteria. If I can think of anyone else (or if Edi will let me post her answers here), I’ll let you know.

The Pitch: It's like Meeting People Is Easy meets The Stranger meets Wattstax!

2005-02-13T22:18:00.000-08:00

Or it would have been if I'd had the ability to stay awake long enough: Edi and I watched (finally) Meeting People Is Easy last night and turned it off in time to catch the opening of Orson Welles' The Stranger on KQED, which they followed up with Wattstax, honest to God. I wanted to watch, at least until Isaac Hayes appeared (which I'm sure would have been the end of the film--how could you follow Isaac Hayes?) but I was just too punked out. I'd spent most of the day drinking, which is not really my thing, as Patrick organized a kilt fitting party for his groomsmen and wisely bookended it with visits to nearby pubs.

This is just a quick note to let you all know we returned safely from Half Moon Bay. We had a fine ol' time, although I woke up Friday morning feeling punky and we had to work kinda hard to check out, walk on the beach, and get my butt to work at CE in time. It was worth it, though: 9:15 a.m. found us walking under a sunless sky, watching forty wet-suited surfers bob like seals in the surf. Occasionally one of them would climb on to their board, and the board would climb onto the wave, and suddenly there would be a man crouching on the edge of the sea, pivoting across the quickening band of white, and then the sound of the surf would rise in the air and the man would tumble again into the sea. It didn't happen very often though. Mainly, Edi and I watched small birds that dashed so quickly along the edge of the water their legs flickered stroboscopically. They stole from each other small stones, again and again, so that the stones had no chance to be put to any good purpose. The birds robbed each other of the stones, and robbed the stones of all utility, and the sun refused to emerge through the cloud cover, flavoring everything with the sense of the eternal. The surfers had always bobbed in the water; the birds had always darted on the shore; Edi and I had always walked there watching all of this, and are walking there still.

Two more days of work--two more days of helping the attorneys steal small stones from each other--and then I'm done for a week and a half. I've got a lot on my plate for this week, but at least I'll have ten days away from the office. I can't even begin to tell you how grateful I am for that.

The Pitch: It's like Back to the Future meets National Lampoon's Vacation

2005-02-09T17:14:00.000-08:00

Just a real quick shout-out to our peeps--Edi's birthday is tomorrow so we travelled down to Half Moon Bay for the evening. I'm writing this from the Half Moon Bay Library, and have to make it quick because my session expires in about nine minutes. We were last here about two years ago, and we were kind of heartbroken because the big community store in the center of town burned down about thirteen days after I bought a container of marshmallows covered in dark chocolate there.

So we checked into the same divey b&b we stayed at, now done in a new paint scheme (ginger and jaundice--a very Victorian color scheme, I think) marvelled at how the tablecloths in the room had changed but the volume button on the remote control didn't work. We are also able to see the ocean from our balcony, waves on the cliffs and everything. Last time we were there, we both felt we saw some approximation of the ocean but neither of us could remember what exactly we saw: Edi seems to remember some sliver of silver near the horizon, I have the memory of a dank moving swell near the corner of my vision. It's a little like people who see Bigfoot: no mattter how hard we try, we can't quite get our stories to synch up.

I have to sign off now--the library computer keeps telling me so. And there's some unhappy looking teen girls standing around ready to apply a beatdown if they can't get on Instant Messenger. More later. Or tomorrow. Or something.

The Pitch: It's like Conjure, Wife meets All The President's Men!

2005-02-05T16:50:00.000-08:00

I've always been a sucker for magical thinking. So when Edi and I watched Three Kings last night, it made me wonder if the Republicans hadn't somehow cast a, a, a goddamned spell to put us back in 1991. Three Kings was a pretty good movie when it first came out--now it seems like an amazing movie, in part because it's so fuckin' topical. What's changed? Nothing's changed. When George Clooney is boondoggling the Iraqi guard into giving him a fleet of cars by hollering, "George Bush wants you! And you! And you! We are a coalition of brothers and President Bush wants you to help us! God bless you! God bless the USA! And God bless a free Iraq!" Edi and I looked at each other and I could almost see the gooseflesh, like a centipede, running down her arms and up mine.

How else but fucking voodoo magic? It's 2005, but it's really 1992--George Bush is our President, he just won the second term, we're eyeing Iran like it was a piece of prize meat. The big question is: will we repeat the horrible tragedy and just leave the Iraqi people to be slaughtered? I suppose the other big question is: if we hadn't cut and run and given Sadaam ten years to crush the opposition we had fomented, would shit be so fuckin' hard in Iraq now?

Our next stop in our magical time machine was 1988, as we rented the first two episodes of The Singing Detective. Edi and I had both seen it on PBS around the same time (separately, of course) so it was fun to see which scenes each of us remembered vividly and which we didn't. Oddly, we both remembered, down to the cadence, young Marlow's speech in the trees about what his life will be like when he grew up, although neither of us remembered it until we heard it. It was like remembering a long-lost but very vivid dream, with the bonus of watching the face of the person next to you as they remembered it, too. Separate and apart from that, it's extraordinary stuff--puts even the best TV from today to shame, and most of the movies. Having a certain masochistic curiousity, we intend to rent the movie after we've re-watched all the episodes. Because we're watching them on hoary old videocassette, the picture quality is total shit--or maybe that's the miracle of BBC TV. But the grungy quality alone summoned up that miserable era where we were both young, reading the same books and watching the same TV and not even knowing the other person existed. Kinda fun.

I have promised Joel (a.k.a., "The Guy Who Loaned Me Ong-Bak") I'd loan him both Metal Gear Solid 3 and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time next week. So by Friday, those games will be out of my hair. "My girlfriend is going to hate you, dude," he said when I promised him. "Yeah," I replied, "but maybe my girlfriend will stop hating me."

I rented The Punisher, by the way, and felt like I was playing a hobbled version of Max Payne--not worth battling my way through to get to the cool Interrogation scenes (which haven't really seemed all that cool yet, although they show some promise). And then it's just GTA and that's it! No, really! I won't even blog about video games--hopefully.

The Pitch: It's Still like The Sorrow meets The End!

2005-01-29T18:14:00.000-08:00

Finished Metal Gear Solid 3 last night after dinner: liked it so much, I may go back and play again as there are all these little extras I'm obsessed with finding and completing. Then onto the end of GTA, and then that's it. Except for maybe a rental of The Punisher. And maybe Mercenaries. And then that's it. But what about when that sequel to Champions of Norrath comes out next month? Arghhhh...

Edi and I watched the "uncut" version of Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. From what I can tell, they cut maybe twenty seconds of this for the theatrical release, so I'm glad I got this used & cheap. The movie completely comes apart at the end (it would've helped if the marketing people had kept a lid on Demi Moore's role in the flick since the whole thing is angled really well to be a surprise; but frankly, the weirdo lesbian/mirror/"I'm like you, you're like me" scene with Demi and Cameron made absolutely no sense anyway) but there's a lot to like here: Cameron Diaz's genuine amusement whenever she goes into "sex kitten" mode; Justin Theroux's hilarious-yet-scary-yet-hilarious villain; Cameron Diaz's genuine amusement whenever she starts rolling her butt; those anime-derived close-ups in the utterly absurd dirt-bike race; and etc. I haven't dipped into all the "bonus features" yet, but I like where McG and his producer pal talk about why they picked the songs they used in the film. Listening to the producer pal, a mopey thirty-something dressed like a mopey twenty-something, use words like "banging" to describe songs is one of the sublime delights of cinema--I can't help but imagine him giving date-rape drugs to seventeen year olds every time he opens his mouth.

Oh, and hey! I've got a theory about Franz Kafka. I was re-reading Introducing Kafka by David Zane Mairowitz and Robert Crumb and I noticed something really interesting that might explain a lot about Franz K. So now I have to figure out if I dig in my heels, do shitloads of research, and try to write an academic article that will likely be either unpublished or obscure, or just blab about it in my blog and get it out there. I'll let you know which one I choose.

I am utterly messed up with regards to time: ten days ago, I couldn't believe it was still only mid-January. Now, I am stunned that the month is over so soon. Now it's time for Edi's birthday, Valentine's Day, and the fear and loathing an upcoming tax day always inspires me. Sounds "banging," no?

Work has come in, and both of my co-workers--both of them!--are at lunch. How two men who start work two hours apart can take lunch within twenty minutes of each other is a mystery I can't begin to unravel (not with work sitting in front of me, anyway). I'm almost hoping they're having sex in a closet somewhere--that way, I can pretend I'm not the only one getting screwed.

The Pitch: It's like The End meets The Sorrow!

2005-01-27T17:03:00.000-08:00

Yes, after a certain amount of trauma, the new monitor has arrived. It seems pretty keen and I'm looking forward tomoving it into position, but at the moment, I've got two computers on my desk, side-by-side, and laboriously copying files from one to the other. I'm in the home stretch, however: just an assload of pictures, maybe a few more music files, and this new computer will be ready to take over (provided I can get all of its problems with my palm pilot and USB hub taken care of). The great thing about new monitors is they are their own juicy little product: I could hook it up to the old computer and pretend I've got a hot new and competent computer. Sadly, I'd just be pretending.

I'm stuck on the final battle for Metal Gear Solid 3--a ten minute duel with the boss in this glade of pale gorgeous flowers. As the two of you run about and hi-yah each other, petals are displaced and spin into the air. It's lovely, silly, and sad, just like you'd want from a Japanese video game.

Ooops. my USB card is filled up. Gotta get back to the tedium that is file transfer. More, I hope, later.

The Pitch: It's like That Obscure Object of Desire meets Awful Skate (or, The Hobo on Rollers)!

2005-01-26T20:05:00.000-08:00

Inspired by Tim's DVD list, I took the time today to download that same software and index my own DVD collection. Tim's got fifty more movies than me, and infinitely better taste. I'm having fun comparing his collection to mine--how weird is it that we each only have one Lord of the Rings movie? He has The Thing and Assault on Precinct 13; I have Escape From New York and Dark Star; he has Blue Velvet and I have Mulholland Dr.; he's got Boogie Nights and I have Magnolia & Punch-Drunk Love. The collections seem to underline how similar and yet very, very different we are--the collections of two people doomed to agree generally and disagree specifically. (Or maybe not--I want Boogie Nights and blue Velvet and Assault on Precinct 13 as well...) Although looking at his collection makes me realize some of my films have been misplaced. I know we bought the same Aaronofsky two-pack so I should have a copy of Pi around here somewhere, for example...

That's all. Nothing much more sophisticated to say than that. Out of the six used Bollywood movies I bought, only one doesn't seem to work with my DVD player. If I get a chance I'll test it on the PS2 and see if I have any better luck. Metal Gear Solid is kicking my ass. And my new monitor shows up tomorrow, which should allow me to take a huge step forward in transferring the rest of my old computer onto the new one.

The Pitch: It's like Saturday Night Fever meets That Video for Dangerous Minds!

2005-01-25T08:40:00.000-08:00

Another reason to pre-emptively hate Be Cool: they turned Andre from Outkast into a dead ringer for Coolio! I have pictures--I will try to post later.

In other thrilling news, Oscar nominations were announced this morning. I knew Paul Giametti wouldn't get nominated for Sideways since it's far too much of an "indy" film, but damned if he wasn't screwed by not getting picked, anyway. As is pretty much usual, I've seen almost none of the major nominated films (I counted four, and if we hadn't seen Collateral in the hotel in Reno, it would have been three) and probably won't see many more. I mean, Three biopics for Best Picture? Bleah. And it seems to me there's a nine-hundred pound gorilla Hollywood doesn't want to acknowledge and it's called Pixar: The Incredibles isn't nominated for best picture but Finding Neverland is? To quote Ralph Wiggum: That's unpossible! (pop-ups galore on that last link--sorry about that.)

And yet, despite my general ignorance of most of the movies, I will put down cash money here and now that Clive Owen will take Best Supporting Actor. There is a chance Jamie Foxx will get a pity-fuck Best Supporting Oscar since he'll never, ever, ever, ever get it for Ray (because I think Johnny Depp is in the bag for Best Actor already) but back in the day, when Supporting Oscars went to those who deserved 'em, it'd be Clive in a heartbeat and a half. Still will, I bet.

Another thing to keep in mind: Miramax is on its way out--will it try for one last mighty Oscar push, pulling out every god-damn trick in the book to get Oscars for its films? Or is it too under-funded, a shadow of its former self (and yet, behind the scenes, still as widely loathed as ever) and in many cases checkmated by having The Aviator and Finding Neverland nominated for so many of the same awards? At this point, I would say Depp and Scorsese will win on their own "merits," (and probably Blanchett, too) and Million Dollar Baby might take Best Picture as a farewell fuck-in-the-neck to Harvey Weinstein. But we'll see. We'll see.

The Pitch: It's like Shorter meets Much Shorter!

2005-01-24T17:58:00.000-08:00

Saw some print ads for Be Cool on my way to work--there's this one boarded up store front along Mission where the bill-posters go nuts--and I have to say, it looks like it should be called Be Crap: John Travolta has squandered any good will I had ever given him because of Pulp Fiction and the like, and now must pay me to see his movies. In cash.

I have no updated in forever, ever, ever. Because of some health stuff going on in Edi's family, I amy not have much time and/or inclination to update this page, so briefly, here's my usual batch of More Updates About Buildings and Food:

Bollywood Engorgement: I am a happily bloated tic on the formerly fat underbelly of Bollywood cinema. Not only did I go see Elaan last week at the Naz Super Eight; not only did I surreptitiously snap pictures at the screen in an attempt to get a photo of my beloved India Film Certificate (I've been too scared to see if they turned out); not only did I find myself, on the way home, in front of the former beloved sight of the original Naz Super Eight (a rectangle of rainwater where only the foundation remains, colors of the traffic lights skittering on the surface like water bugs); but I bought an absurd amount of used Bollywood DVDs from the nail salon/video store across from the new Naz. Like, eleven Bollywood DVDs. I am unable to properly convey how happy this makes me--the closest I can come is to admit that, when I'm in the living room and can't make myself happy by looking at Edi, I look to the shelf with the Bollywood DVDs and feel a warm avaristic thrill.

Video Entropy: Of course, the reason why Edi usually isn't in the living room is because my video game playing has driven her from it. I've jumped from playing GTA: San Andreas to Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater which, wacky controls aside, may be my favorite of the three PS/PS2 Metal Gear Solid games. The boss battles are wonderful--apart from the inevitable fuckin' battle with the Metal Gear, which made me play for literally half an hour after I wanted to quit just because it's such a pain in the ass and something I never, ever want to do again. I have taken a secret oath that, after completing both GTA:SA and MGS:SE to not play any video games for six months after completion. I'm putting it down in writing. Black lotus eating is pleasant up to a point, but I've got stuff to do.

Updates About Updating Updates: I have not uploaded my last three Fanboy Rampages for the Comix Experience site. Nor have I updated my Bio page, my list of top movies, and my photos for Lazy Bastard. And the reason for this is that I have lost my FTP passwords for both sites and forgotten them because I used them so infrequently. One of this week's goals is to call my ISP and sheepishly ask for a password reboot. Please don't tell Hibbs.

Buildings and Food: I am back on the diet thing and, apart from last week, have been doing okay with it. But, weirdly, my current food fixations these days are for spinach and yams: I cannot tell you how I got started on either, but I am totally into throwing yams in the oven and then eating them piping hot and soft and smeared with butter, and I'm into thawing frozen spinach and then throwing it in a bowl with ponzu sauce and bonito flakes. I think my system has decided the only way to survive this year's bout of seasonal affective disorder is to lay heavy on the iron and Vitamin A. As for buildings, I am currently gaga over The Castro Theatre, very much like the Cartoon Art Museum and can see the charms in the Green Room at the War Memorial Building.

I need a new book, as it's taken me ten days to get ten pages into The Remains of the Day. I don't want to reread Pynchon's V for what must be at least the fourth time, but I do, but I don't. Please help.

Wha? I thought this was going to be short, dammit!

P.S. To cross at least two of these threads, I got up to pee the other morning and came back to bed with the realization that the only way to properly adapt Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections for the screen is to do it as a Bollywood musical. This actually came on the heels of trying to figure out which Shakespeare play would make the best Bollywood musical, for which I still have no decent answer.

The Pitch: It's like The Four Stars meets The Five Anxieties!

2005-01-08T19:18:00.000-08:00

Rather than write the rather sizable essay sure to emerge about owning an Ipod (pending more research to see if there's anything even remotely new to say about such a played-out topic), I thought I'd write a bit about the rating system on the Ipod.

Unknown to me until a few days ago, the Ipod has a rating feature that allows you, with a few pushes of the big white button and a spin of the thumb, to rate the songs on your Ipod from one to five. Then, with Itunes, you can create quick playlists based on the ratings. I find this pretty irresistible, and have just inched over the 10% mark of rating my songs (I've ranked 550 out of the 4781 tunes currently on the damn thing), but weirdly it's been a source of considerable subliminal anxiety.

For example, although these ratings are for my own use only, I have given no song more than four stars. This is my first point of anxiety: even though I'm ranking the music for my own appreciation only, I find myself resisting the pull of the five star rank. A five star ranking is for a classic song, I guess, but classic for whom? Subscribing to the suspect conception of the true and beautiful being universal, I'd like to believe that a five star song is one I can play for almost anyone and they'd enjoy it, or, since this list is only for me, a song I could play at any time and I'd always enjoy it. Maybe because I find this definition a little eyebrow raising, I've avoided the five star rating altogether.

I imagine, by the way, I'm going about this the way other people do: I have the Ipod shuffle the songs and then rate each song as it comes, rather than listening to, say, all the songs on an album or by an artist and rating the songs in turn. While I can see how some Ipod listeners might have an album of nothing but five star hits (someone who's filled their collection strictly with their favorite songs grabbbed through Kazaa or some other p2p network, or with Audiogalaxy or Napster back in the day), most people's collections would comprise largely of albums and few albums, I think, are nothing but a collection of five star favorites.

Most albums have a balance to them: a few standout favorites, several well-liked tunes, some dross, a few clunkers. (And one of the great things about listening to an album repeatedly is how that curve changes, like waves: a new album starts out with such a balance, then grows on repeated listenings to having all the songs become favorites, then recedes to the original curve, but this time with different stand-out favorites and well-liked tunes.)

So, let's say an album has fifteen tunes on it: that might be three favorites, six well-liked tunes, four drossy forgettable tunes, and two tracks you just can't stand. Applying this fast and sloppy math, let's say 20% of the songs from all your albums will be your standout favorites. For me, ranking 500 songs already (more sloppy math--I'm rounding down) means I should have 100 songs that are my favorites: four star songs at least, if not five stars. And yet, if I had to guess (and I do since I haven't synched up with Itunes to see the results of my work), I think I've picked maybe 30 tunes out of 500 as four star songs.

So, does most of my music suck? Or do I suck? I've wiped out the five star rating for a defintion I might not actually believe in, and now the four star rating is barely applied.

There are, as always, a couple of qualifications here: I downloaded a lot of albums from Emusic, often without hearing them. When Emusic offered unlimited downloads, it was easier to download an album, listen to it and then delete it, than to listen to the samplers, and put it on my list of possible downloads. But, of course, me being me, I frequently would download the music and then not get around to listening to it. If I did this with a high enough number of albums and if the Ipod's shuffle function is truly random, then there's a chance that the random selection will be frontloaded with songs I consider dross. And if you assume I'll generally like a song I consider dross by an artist I'm familiar with more than a dross song by an artist I don't, those odds go up.

But there's the anxiety. Either my music sucks or I suck. Maybe I'm a fickle music fan, or I have bad taste and I can only tell it now that I'm listening to each song freed from the context of the album, the CD, and the resulting nagging need to like an album (because I just spent money on it).

Another anxiety? In order to listen to and rank all the songs, I'm not listening to each song in its entirety, frequently assigning a ranking in the first six of seven seconds and then moving on. After all, 4700+ songs is something like 52 continuous days of listening. That's a tall order, the idea of which fills me with nausea and so I'm doing what a pal of mine did when he assigned music to reviewers for a large music zine--I'm skimming, skimming, skimming. But whereas the albums he assigned then got more complete listens before they got reviewed, some potentially great songs are surely being underranked. If I think a song has potential in the first six seconds, I'll scroll through the song to the one and two minute songs to see if the song is blossomed, seems even more interesting: it's amazing how much music, in this slapdash way, sounds all the same--not that each song sounds like every other song, but that each second of the song sounds so much like every other second. Where's the growth, where's the movement?

Again, anxiety. What would I give some of my favorite Brian Eno songs if I was first encountering them this way? Ambient? Techno? Rap? And in fact, most of those I've come across so far have rarely cracked three stars unless I'm really familiar with the tune already. Am I not just robbing certain songs of the full opportunity to make their case, but also discriminating against entire genres in my approach?

Speaking of discrimination, here's a nice set of conjoined anxieties: I feel bad when I give women artists two stars or less (similarly, anything less than three stars for an African-American artist). And then, of course, I feel anxious if I give songs by either three stars or more, because I worry I'm doing so not because of the song's merits but just to avoid the anxiety of confronting my own biases.

Related to this is my awareness that, Joanna Newsom aside, most of my four star songs have been by white males, and the resulting anxieties there. The first anxiety being, of course, the white male factor, and the second, related to Ms. Newsom, that I'm ranking her songs higher because I'm just now discovering her work and am ga-ga about her album, Milk-Eyed Mender. Where is the test of time?

Yet, conversely, there are many other songs I pick as four stars I picked sheerly out of sentimental familiarity. Is Beck's "Beercan" really four stars? Or does it just rank higher than, say, a lot of songs off of Paul Westerberg's Folker because I remember shaking my butt to it and laughing with my friends to it when I was young(er)?

Finally, the last anxious consideration: with all these anxieties, why bother? I'm sure there's some fine psychological term for an activity that is pursued to relieve the anxiety the pursuit of such an activity causes. (For some reason, the term "graduate school" comes to mind.) I'm sure some of these anxieties are caused or exacerbated because I do, as a hobby, review comics and movies on the web and try to do so responsibly--some of that is sure to bleed into the world of "personal" reviewing.

A lot of this anxiety goes away when I remind myself that I can always adjust a song up or down when I encounter it later, and that these ratings are just for me, not to be seen, not to be shared. But I kind of marvel at the vast number of deranged clowns that have popped out of such an charming little car. I wonder if this has happened to others.

The Pitch: It's like Poetic meets Justice!

2005-01-02T10:21:00.000-08:00

Ain't nothing worse than a blog entry (after such a long time!) where some guy whines about how good he's got it. If you feel the same, I advise you to skip this entry.

Back at the end of October, Edi got me a stupendously wonderful birthday gift. So stupendously wonderful, it was both my birthday and Christmas gift. So stupendously wonderful, in fact, I couldn't use it. It was, of course, an Ipod, which of course you can totally use on your PC provided your PC has (a) Windows XP, and (b) the PC has firewire and/or USB 2.0. And, of course, with my creaky old computer, it was (a) nope, and (b) nope again.

It says something kinda horrible about how fast time flies when you're old that it's suddenly the end of the year, and I'm still trying to scrimp and save for a new computer when Edi's cousin calls and announces he's just bought a new computer and would I be interested in his barely two year old one? For a small fee?

So since yesterday, I've been tinkering with a new (for me) computer and of course the first thing I do is load all 40 CD's of burned music from some back up years and years ago. And then spend forever trying to figure out how to load it into Itunes. And then load it. And then spend forever loading it onto the Ipod. And then, finally, at about midnight last night, I held up my new Ipod, loading with 20 gigs of tunes (51.9 days of continuous playing, Itunes helpfully informs me), listened to it for about half an hour and went to bed, where Edi had been sleeping for approximately the last half-hour.

And this morning, probably the very first thing I do is break out the Ipod and start trying to assemble playlists, looking for favorite songs, etc., etc., and of course they're nowhere to be found. Because I've loaded up the Ipod with everything, and it's all the stuff I backed up a year and a half ago, and meanwhile there's all the stuff I actually listen to, stuck on my tiny, slow computer (to say nothing of all my writing, photos, websites, etc.) and I have to figure out how to transfer it off. Everything but the new music should be pretty easy--the writing will go on one CD-Rom, the photos may take up another three or four, I have no idea how the hell I'm going to move all the music. A lot of it, I think, I can simply re-download from Emusic but that'll take some time. And then there's stuff that I burned to the hard drive and then sold the CD so if I don't figure out what it is, and then pull it from the old computer, it's gone.

And maybe this will change but it looks like I'm not going to listen to The Best of Uz Jsme Doma or Blip-Hop Generation Vol. 2-6 on the Ipod any more than I listened to them when they were on my computer fresh off of Emusic. I really need to go through and trim down a whole lot of this stuff after all the hours I spent putting it on. I'd like to think of myself as a hip connoiseur of music, but transferring all this music to the Ipod has shown me my actual self: an avaricious music glutton, willing to wear the sloppy bits that have flecked off onto his shirt as medals of honor and achievement.

The Pitch: It's like Christmas meets New Year's!

2004-12-27T09:04:00.000-08:00

Oh, work, work, work. Even though I've been here almost an hour and had to do nothing more strenuous than surf the Internet, I still feel like someone has taken a pair of tongs to my frontal lobe, stretched it across an anvil, and commenced hammering with a weighty mallet. There are 400 places I'd rather be right now, and 399 of them are some variation on being curled up in bed with Edi and listening to the rain.

The holiday, what with its five day state of non-workingness, was mightily great. We went to Reno to see Edi's mom for Christmas and stayed at the Silver Legacy, my favorite hotel in Reno since it puts us only one elevator trip away from the oyster bar. Perhaps because of our recent cruise, Edi and I were also willing to avail ourselves of room service at all hours and I have to say, as a non-organized-religion guy, if midnight mass is unavoidable, nothing takes the sting off like a 3:00 a.m. meal of quesadillas and Rice Krispies.

We also managed to see close to five movies in five days (and although I didn't see all of Burt Reynolds' Hooper on TBS, I saw enough to act like I did) without really trying too hard, thanks to the hotel TV's movies-on-demand feature. I really need to figure out another way to do movie reviews since all the films we saw are deserving of greater commentary (if only to show the schizophrenia of the selection, consisting as it does of: (1) Hooper; (2) Anchorman; (3) Sideways; (4) Collateral; and (5) Moulin Rouge). For now, I'll simply say, as a non-Tom Cruise kind of guy, if a midnight showing of Collateral is unavoidable, nothing takes the sting off like a B.L.T., french fries, and Rice Krispies.

More later? I could see how that might happen.

The Pitch: It's like The Nightmare Before Christmas meets Office Space!

2004-12-22T13:10:00.000-08:00

The holidays are so close, I can taste them. Technically, they've begun for me but poor Edi Jo is tearing her hair out over this never-ending job still hurtling at full speed for its drop-dead deadline of 2:00. If she's not in a coma or heading out on a tri-state killing spree at 2:00, we've won!

And yet, my unwilligness to declare the holidays without her hasn't stopped me from goofing off like a lazy poop up 'til now. I sort of want to pop La Dolce Vita in the player and relax, but I keep going back, again and again, to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. After initially cursing the annoyances of going through flight school, I'm actually pretty happy about it--flying under bridges is fun. And now that I've got the jetpack, it's even easier to just fuck off for hours. It's creepy that the game is growing more and more addictive for me, not less and less. Unlike the other GTA's, I'm actually spending more time playing all the side missions and doing all the unnecessary tasks in each town, playing the paramedic missions and crap. I'm just dawdling, quite deliberately, because I don't really want the experience to end.

Other quick impressions, not about video games (thank goodness): Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is, just as it seemed, the most faithful adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel yet filmed (the fact it's ostensibly not based on a PKD book notwithstanding); Closer should actually be called C Loser, or, even better, C- Loser even though everyone does good work (except Julia Roberts, unfortunately) and Clive Owen is flat-out brilliant; and given a choice between Madvillainy by Madvillain and A Grand Don't Come For Free by The Streets, I much prefer A Grand Don't Come For Free even though I've barely listened at all to either, and Milk-Eyed Mender still triumphs over all.

Oh, and the other night I had a dream about, of all things, The X-Files--go figure. I don't remember much about the dream other than it was lit beautifully and it showed me everything the actual show never could: Gillian Anderson was topless and David Duchovny cried convincingly. Almost made me nostalgic for that big mess.

I think I'll update again before we leave tomorrow, but if not, have a very happy set of holidays.

The Pitch: It's like Amadeus meets The Little Cloud That Cried!

2004-12-13T17:31:00.000-08:00

I am sad. Not only did I leave my cell phone at home, but after a two month absence I contributed reviews this morning to the Savage Critic. The response? Not a damn word. In fact, Hibbs' previous entry got two comments since my entry went up and I'm still up there sucking wind.

My conclusions? Either (a) I suck; (b) I'm not really contributing to Hibbs' blog, I'm just riding his coattails; or (c) I suck and I'm riding Hibbs' coattails. Kinda depressing, paticularly since I could've tried to get a start on the new Fanboy Rampage and lightened this week's workload on the newsletter.

In other news...

Last night, I dreamt I was in a large room jammed with bunk beds, and from my top bunk I tried in vain to find my place in Pynchon's Gravity Rainbow (at one point, I read a section from Pynchon's V and realized I had the wrong book) but I kept being distracted by a loud popping noise. Looking around, I discovered the noise caused by Paris Hilton, in another bunk, popping a Tootsie pop in and out of her mouth. The Freudian imagery seems somewhat difficult to argue with, although I'm happy to report I awoke and with great relief saw the popping noise was caused by my lovely companion next to me on the verge of snoring, and not Ms. Hilton at all. And yet, possible interpretations of the dream still unsettle me.

And Why is it like Dreamscape, Again?

2004-12-04T18:58:00.000-08:00

Whoops. I was also gonna talk about how, even though my sleeping has been irregular and betossed and bad, the dreams have been pretty great--inventive and relevant and amusing. To choose a trivial example (and one I actually fear to reveal for possible theft), the other night I dreamt I was watching a TV show called Kung-Fugitive, which strikes me as a pretty good summation of approximately 40% of the network television aired in the 70s. A less trivial example, but one harder to explain would be the one about being driven by Courtney Love to see the Olsen Twins in concert while Tim sat silently disapproving in the back seat, or the one where Edi and I ended up in a house in a Swiss village where a pair of men posed with their cat for a pet calendar--one man posing naked and one man wearing an jigsaw suit that made him look exactly like Ben Grimm, The Thing. (Yeah, I know. Huh?)

Oh, and thanks to fucking George Lucas with his fucking microwave transmitter that can beam images directly into people's brains (an expensive device in a price range accessible only to someone who's made billions of dollars off toys and product placement deals), I had a dream where I watched about ten minutes of Revenge of the Sith...and I'm sorry to say it was pretty fucking cool. Now I'll be seeing the damn thing, dammit.

But, man. Kung-Fugitive. Wow.

The Pitch: It's like Seems Like Old Times meets Dreamscape!

2004-12-04T17:03:00.000-08:00

Yeah, been a while, huh? Sorry about that.

November was such a crazy month, with Nano and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and the Thanksgiving holiday, and me throwing in the towel on Nano and then picking it back up again repeatedly, that I'm only now getting around to writing anything at all, even though my most sacred oath on Nov. 30 was to jump right back in on the writing thing, even if just this blog thing.

Even though my Seasonal Affective Disorder-like thing is back in force, due to the dark and the cold and the flavin!, and even though I feel like a fat and unsightly thing, and even though I would like nothing better than to crawl into bed and stay there until, oh, March or so, things are actually pretty fuckin' rad. I'm forty pages away from the end of Suttree, I'm something like, I dunno, 50% into GTA:SA which means there hopefully is an abundance of surprises and delight in store for me, I very much enjoyed The Incredibles in the theater and The Saddest Music in the World on home video (and am super-duper pleased that it was Edi's suggestion to rent it, since I had dragged her to the first few films in the Guy Maddin thingy at the PFA a few months back), and am absurdly delighted with The Milk-Eyed Mender, Joanna Newsom's album I was inspired to pick up after downloading a few tracks that Stereogum (a site I didn't know about until this week) was kind enough to post to get people interested.

I was so eager to buy this album after downloading the tracks on Wednesday, I went to Streetlight on Thursday and, when they didn't have it, finally purchased the damn thing at Open Mind Records on my lunch break from Comix Experience. I played the album at the store to the instant and automatic disdain of not just Hibbs and Bennett (Hibbs: "She sounds like Tiny Tina." Bennett: "Dude, is this chick retarded?") but about everyone else in the store who was willing to express an opinion. (Even the chick who looked like a punk/goth Velma, after asking about the album, said, "Ohhhh. I didn't think this could be played unironically!") Only Joel, this guy who is a distressing number of years younger than me and just dead-on in shared tastes (this is the guy who lent me the copy of Ong-Bak) turned to me and said, "Isn't this album great?"

It is great, god damn it, even though this woman sounds like, to use Edi's very apt description, like Bjork crossed with Adam Sandler. But she plays harp like an angel (I've always wanted to say that) and there's something about that goat-bleating voice when applied to super-smartly written lines like:

And as for my inflammatory writ?
Well, I wrote it and I was not inflamed one bit.
Advice from the master dreailed that disaster;
He said, "Hand that pen to me, poetaster!"
While across the great plains,
keening lovely and awful,
ululate the lost Great American Novels--
An unlawful lot, left to stutter and freeze, floodlit.
(But at least they didn't run,
to their undying credit.)

Which, I dunno, just knocks me on my ass--Bjork crossed with Adam Sandler singing lyrics that could have been penned by Cormac McCarthy? And then there's Peach, Plum, Pear which, through the magic of multitracking, makes the chorus sound like one of the Melanesian choir chants from The Thin Red Line while the rest of the song's a thwarted/failed love story that reminds me of one of Nancy's poems. (That line seems both painfully panderous and ass-kissy but dammit, it's true.)

Interestingly, I've listened to people that other people haven't liked and I totally understood why--I became a fan of both Dylan and Morrisey long after I gave up on trying to even understand why anyone would like them--but I honestly don't get why people wouldn't love this. A lot of comments to the entry on Stereogum were like: "Ahhh, you're giving me ear Cancer!" and "the vocal equivalent of being ass-raped by dolphins" or like that. And while I can understand comparisons to Lisa Simpson or Alfalfa from Our Gang, I literally don't understand why, I dunno, that's a bad thing, you know? I find myself on the opposite end of the spectrum, where horseshit like American Idol drives me nuts, with its endless fixation on technique and presentation and where contestants take a song and skin it.

So. Yeah. GTA:SA; Suttree; The Incredibles; The Saddest Music In the World; The Milk-Eyed Mender by Joanna Newsom; and of course Edi, fighting her way downtown in shitty ass traffic today so we can look at The Mechanic's Library because she also thinks getting married near a bunch of books would be cool. A few nights ago, we were at an all-night diner and although she all but tackled me to keep me from the CD jukebox, she either genuinely approved of my selections ("Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now," The Smiths; "Message To You, Rudy," The Specials; "Don't Believe The Hype," Public Enemy) or was kind and loving enough to seem like she did. And while I'm old enough to know there's more to a good relationship than whether or not a person is going to take your hand in a diner and bob their head to music with you, it is in itself a wonderful and beautiful thing with a certain amount of power to it.

The Pitch: It's like Up! meets Down!

2004-11-04T08:17:00.000-08:00

Wow. Welcome back. My new theory is: the more you blog, the less things happen. And, obviously in this case, vice versa.

So: Edi and I went on the cruise to Mexico and it was great. I saw something like eight movies without even trying to while hanging around in the cabin in between shuttling up to the spa and the pools and the decks and all the eating. I managed to only put on five pounds during the cruise and the lovely and talented E. stayed the same. And somewhere in all the eating and napping and drinking and reading and looking out at the sea, I managed to ask Edi to marry me, and she was so narcotized by all the surrounding pleasantness that she said yes. All following paragraphs, and most of this one, pretty much pale in importance to that.

Then we got home, rested, I returned to work. I drove off to a Target in the dead of night so I could get Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and my car's steering column started shimmying along the way. (Today I get to go to the shop to find out what the hell is wrong with it.) The irony was not entirely lost on me.

Then there was the Geoff Johns signing at CE (he's great, and probably the kindest, most professional comic pro I've ever met), my birthday (great, except my computer doesn't run XP and isn't a Mac, thus putting a delay on the coolest present I think I've ever gotten--which Edi gave me, of course), more work, the election, walking through a Day of the Dead parade to go watch election returns, and then post-election depression. Lots and lots of it.

Mainly, the election has me worried for myself. I have spent a while trying to figure out my bitter, easily resigned acceptance state. Is it because I expected Kerry to lose? (Which I did at many points during the months leading up to the election.) Is it because I don't think the election was stolen this time? (Or was it? Is the reason the exit polls were so off is because so many first-time and transient voters turned out and got shafted with uncounted provisional ballots? I think it's just the feeling I've expressed elsewhere on the Internet--a lot of people turned out to vote for Bush. This is the way of life they want. (And my apologies for any Bush voters who read the site--I think there might be at least one of you out there and it's not my intention to put words in your mouth.) It's like almost the entire Internet, and all of San Francisco, showed up for school ready to show off their beautiful new lunchboxes, and everyone's already switched to chainsaw-toting cannibalism. That's how out of touch we are. That's how useless our beautiful lunchboxes are.

Let's not forget Nanowrimo, because I almost did. I did none of my usual recruiting, mail-list organizing, pep talk rah-rahing: Unlike previous years, I've not been writing regularly in the days leading up to Nano, and so was more intimidated by the process than I've been in any year since the first. Additionally, the first day, my Palm pilot ran out of battery juice and, as has happened 90% of the time for the last year or so, totally erased everything when I swapped out the batteries. For the first time in all the time I've done Nano (and this is my fourth) my word count for Day One was Zero. Ditto for Day Two. Yesterday, thank goodness, I sat down in two long stretches and knocked out 5,000 words, which caught me up. Part of me wants to sit down and knock out another 5,000 words again, giving me some breathing room until the 6th, but I'm both a little daunted and disgusted by the prospect: It's supposed to be write a crappy novel in one month, not write a crappy novel in ten sessions staggered throughout the month. The real goal of Nano for me is to make me create time for my writing in my schedule, not learn how to hit a deadline by pulling all-nighters: that's what I learned in college, and it hasn't helped me much at all.

But there's all this good stuff going on: Edi's marrying me; GTA:SA is great; I did crank out 5,000 words; Emusic has had the three new releases I've most wanted (the new albums by Tom Waits, Elliott Smith and Robyn Hitchcock all in the last week or two) and so I downloaded and have been listening to them while bashing my way through a narrative; Jaime Hernandez's Locas book is out and it's gorgeous, and I'm happy and surprised with Marvel's Jack Kirby Hardcover: it's beautifully reproduced and covers a wonderful amount of ground.

So that's the update--my hope is now it'll be a little easier for me to make them. And, if my theory holds true, things will start to settle down a little bit. I'm 38 and can't handle too much excitement.

How's A Fella Supposed to Write a Crappy Novel With Stuff Like This Going On?

2004-10-09T14:18:00.000-07:00

http://www.sfgodzillafest.com/: twenty Godzilla films in five days. God help me.

The Pitch: It's like New Jack City meets Joe Versus the Volcano!

2004-10-05T17:50:00.000-07:00

It's actually not like New Jack City meets Joe Versus the Volcano; I'm just pissed off that my throat has started hurting today. It reminds me of how it hurt when I got sick the other week when Edi went to New York. It feels exactly like that, and that is the absolute last thing I want. The only thing worse than getting sick this week would be getting sick next week when we're on the cruise. So I've blown my nose three million times today, scowling the whole time. I cannot tell you how pissed I'll be if this doesn't go away soon.

This isn't the cheerful set-up I wanted for my entry of Katamari Damarcy, so let me talk about Delillo's Americana. It was, like many Delillo books, inspiring and depressing although not for the usual reasons. Americana is inspiring because it's Delillo's first novel and it's not great. It's got a lot of rough spots. A killer first section leads to an interminable second section which transitions to a dull third section with some fancy-ass writing throughout. It gives a certain amount of hope to wannabes like myself because it seems so fragile, so vulnerable, so new.

But it's depressing because, unlike other Delillo books, it tries to be less elliptical, more straightforward in its goals. Americana sets its sights on all the traditional goals of the novel--it tells you more about its characters, it tries to explain its protagonist, it points to the dots it would like you to connect, it ambitiously tries to catch the spirit of the times--and it is precisely in these areas where it wins its dullest victories. The jump from Americana to End Zone is as inspiring a novelistic leap as I can think of because it shows a writer able to cut away almost all of his previous book's weaknesses and leave only the strengths. Americana is depressing because it points to either a failure in Delillo to embrace the strengths of the traditional novel, or the failure of the traditional novel to embrace Delillo's strengths. I can't imagine returning to work on the book in front of me without it feeling similarly hackneyed and ludicrous when dealing with the things like, oh, I dunno, character and plot and themes and stuff.

I've gone so long without writing anything that I'm really scared about November. Delillo's Americana adds to those fears: if his first novel is better than anything I'm going to be able to write, and it's still a big old mess, what can I look forward to producing?

The Pitch: It's like Lost meets Lost In Space meets Lost In Translation!

2004-10-05T08:38:00.000-07:00

I'm back, more or less. I didn't leave per se, you see, I was merely over at the Savage Critic blog posting and posting and posting. And things have been crazed enough at work I had little choice but to abnegate posting here. And soon I'll be absent for an even longer period as Edi and I leave on our cruise next week.

Work craziness, comix blogging, upcoming cruise--and it only gets wilder from here. There's the new Grand Theft Auto before the end of the month; my birthday at the end of the month; and Nano right after that. Then it's the holidays, about which I've made nearly no plans and only the vaguest possible commitments to Edi and to the family. I might be spending Thanksgiving with my family and Edi; I might be eating it alone on a cardboard box by the railroad tracks. I kind have to get it together at that front.

Anyway. Lots to write about. Katamari Damacy. Delillo's Americana. Me as a big sellout. I'll be getting to these fun topics and a few others as I blog up a storm before going to sea.

The Pitch: It's like Aventurera meets Resident Evil: Apocalypse!

2004-09-24T09:15:00.000-07:00

Things have taken a turn for the interesting in my little world of blogs. In screwing with some power cables, infinitely cute Ben Hibbs managed to screw up the computer of his papa, infinitely crabby Brian Hibbs. So Hibbs won't be updating the Savage Critic blog for at least three weeks. As he put it, "Jeff may or may not update." Which on the one hand gives me maximum freedom to do whta I want. Now I just have to figure it out: what do I want? Currently, I'm planning on updating the Savage Critic on a fairly regular basis, but by evening I may abandon this idea entirely.

I didn't talk much about Resident Evil: Apocalypse, did I? Apart from maybe mentioning I ponied up money and went and saw it in the movie threaters (if I did even that)? There may not be much to talk about: I went and saw it, and while appalled at its utter, relentless stupidity (stuck in a whole city of zombies, our band of heroes seek temporary refuge in a graveyard), I have to admit to enjoying a lot of it.

Oh, crap! I totally forgot I have to watch this videotape before I leave for work. More on this later....

The Pitch: It's like Light Sleeper meets National Lampoon's Vacation!

2004-09-20T08:50:00.000-07:00

I'm back, I think. I'm still feeling under the weather with whatever I got while Edi was away, and I'm at work hoping I can be awake and alert enough for the next ten hours to...crap, I dunno. To do it again tomorrow, I guess.

I haven't updated because of said under-the-weather feeling, also because of video games, video games, video games. [Warning: overly long post about video games follows.] Edi snagged Way of the Samurai 2 from Hollywood Video last week (and this is how you know it's true love, everyone--not only does she put up with the video games, she actually went and got me them while I was sick) and, when returning that yesterday, Burnout3 was just going back on the shelves so I rented that: a very pleasant surprise considering the average time a game goes up on the shelves at Hollywood Video to the time I'm able to rent is, on average, about two months.

WotS2 is a, what, samurai simulator? It's more of a samurai RPG, with a branching dramatic structure. (a.k.a., "choose your own adventure" gameplay) that's just generally lovely to look at, and very keen. Unlike cutesy Culdcept with its squeaky mouse-fart noises and Nintendo style graphics, Edi actually would watch me play WotS2 and comment on bits of the animation, or the clothing, or the colors: your samurai wanders through different areas of the town, doing chores (it's really Way of the Ronin 2) during different hours of the day and night and the locations are beautiful. There's a certain Groundhog Day element to it as you play in a town location over a period of days and there's only a number of days until the town festival where all bloody hell breaks loose. By the end of it, I had learned enough by playing, dying, starting over, lathering, rinsing, repeating, that the festival wasn't trauma-inducing and a whole new storyline (that didn't involve me being cut to ribbons by both yakuza and magistrates) opened up to me. And by that time, it was time to return the game. Lovely to look at, kind of a chore to play, Way of the Samurai 2 was a pleasant enough experience I don't feel particularly driven to complete: as sometimes is the case with Japanese games, perusal of the write-ups at Gamefaqs revealed tons of things to "master" I had no interest in mastering: pouring all your money into refining your blade continuously until it becomes "Mizzuini, the Master-Killer Demon Blade" is probably worth it for some people, but not for a lazy short-attention span feller like me. No sir. Teach me how to kill somebody with a single sword-stroke or move on!

Burnout3 understands such short attention spans and rewards them gloriously: a racing game where the key to winning is making other cars crash, Burnout3 rewards you with new cars and areas for doing little more than turning on the Playstation 2. If Way of the Samurai 2 played like Burnout3, you'd get the Master-Killer Demon Blade in the first five minutes, and move right up the hyperbole scale from there. Edi also spent a certain amount of time watching this one, impressed with the beauty and the speed of sparks flying in slow motion off a wrecked Honda hurtling off the side of a cliff (I'm sure a certain amount of Honda-intolerance plays into it) and the game does its best to jam the game full of spectacle with lanes jammed so full with crashing cars, it's like looking at the single twitching backbone of a violent chitinous beast. It's the sort of video game you hope someone is savvy enough to show to J.G. Ballard because all you need is some sort of periphereal that vibrates your errogenous zone to climax with every collision and you've got one of his novels as mass-market video game.

There is both a race mode and crash mode, and Burnout3 is a smart enough game that both modes have elements of the other, so that even when you're racing, you're slamming other vehicles off course and into explosive crashes, and even while you're in crash mode, you're racing to get to the right place and touch the right modifiers in time so that your hundred thousand dollars of property damage doubles or triples in value.

Burnout3 does suffer from a few flaws; EA, in releasing the game (I think it was with another publisher that folded), has jammed it with a completely horrid soundtrack--post Blink 182 poser punk blaring from song to song. Even worse, EA revisits its EA Radio technique from SS3, so you've got a Carson Daly sound-a-like with a porn star name (Stryker, I think) yammering excitedly about the perfect condition for "Burners" to "deal up some damage." "I've got some buddies with the Department of Transportation who are wondering when you guys are really going to show us what you've got," Stryker exhorts before a Crash scenario, "so let's break out the wicked property damage, all right?" There's something about the EA radio approach I find a little chilling and, if I had a kid, I would be leery about them playing the game. It's one thing to make a game where people can do things that everyone knows are wrong--the GTA and Manhunt games come to mind, of course--but it's another thing to disguise causing the deaths of countless innocents as just another extreme sport complete with meathead soundtrack and product placement. There is no sense that there is anything "wrong" with what you're doing and that bothers me a lot.

Or maybe, like those Blink-182 fuckers, the use of something subversive to so bald-facedly fill the corporate coffers bothers the shit out of me. If I want greed-induced ghastliness, I'll just watch those Sarah Jessica Parker/Lenny Kravitz Gap ads, thank you. Ugh.

The Pitch: It's like Everybody Comes to Rick's meets Mindless Pleasures!

2004-09-08T21:30:00.000-07:00

The title of my blog, High Concept, makes me happy. I stole the format from Nancy's blog, of course, but tried to come up with a different spin.

But sometimes, I think a more appropriate title for my blog would be The Double Bill for at least three reasons; one, I could just throw two movie titles even more surreptitiously than I already do; two, I think my blog entries tend to start in one place, and end up somewhere entirely different, the way a crazed double feature might; and three, for the pun, "double-billing," since it seems I do a lot of the blogging at my down moments here at work. (Although I miss the crazed "just throw open a composer window and start writing" insouciance of the Hereafter, there's no way I could written half as many entries if I hadn't been able to post remotely.)

By the way, I've got something knocking around inside me about the oblique connection between Napoleon Dynamite and Donnie Darko, but if I managed to get to it before leaving work tonight, I'd be really, really surprised.

The Pitch: It's like Wait Until Dark meets Glengarry Glen Ross!

2004-09-08T17:14:00.000-07:00

(One of the biggest surprises to me, by the way, is that I can actually spell Glengarry Glen Ross correctly? Two 'n's? Two 'r's? It's always a mystery to me, which makes it all the more shocking that I get right more or less every time.)

I'm doing the overtime thing tonight and it's been very, very crazy so far. To paraphrase Willie the Shake, "for the want of a scanner, the gut was lost"--I've had to run up and down three flights of stairs three times so far, and I've only been at work for less than ninety minutes.

I thought working overtime at night would be something cool to try--I've seen the night shift and know that there are times when they're insanely busy, and times when everything is deathly quiet. I gambled I'd show up when things were quiet, collect my time and half, and run. As long as I don't have to go up and down the stairs many more times, that might still be the case.

But the real problem with this gig, whether it gets busy or not, is how I squandered my day waiting to go to work. I had planned to leave for work roughly around 3:15 or so, which meant I shouldn't try to undertake something engrossing or productive after, I dunno, 2:00? Somehow that became more like noon, leaving me reluctant to do anything other than play Culdcept.

I had a little bit of a breakthrough the other day with Culdcept, I'm happy to say. After losing seven consecutive games, I finally won. And all the hard schooling I received allowed me to win the next match the first time out this morning. So it was a far less anguished me that sat down to play Culdcept today, one which took being beaten cross-eyed by a koala bear wearing a book necklace with a certain relaxed indifference. And yet, after kissing the wonderful girlfriend goodbye and walking down the open-air oven that is currently Mission Street, I found myself wondering: to what end? So I won the matches I wanted to win, and am that much closer to beating the game, and even won several medals (there are approximately fifty medals you can win, usually by doing things like rolling a high number eight consecutive times, or being the shittiest player for three consecutive games), and yet, I would have to say the only thing I really gained from it is a certain nearness toward my own death.

About, I dunno, five or six years ago, I played a certain amount of computer solitaire, a little bit of freecell, a little bit of minesweeper--all those PC games. Somebody, sometime, told me these games had all been loaded onto Windows to get secretaries, word processors and other people who'd done all their work using just keyboards, comfortable with using a mouse. It's a pretty brilliant idea if true, and I can generally attest to its power--a lot of my co-workers are incredibly mouse-dependent on doing tasks in Word, I think because they never wanted to rewrite their brain's knowledge of keyboard commands in Wordperfect 5.1 (and Word seems to be unbelievably fucking stingy with information regarding its keyboard commands, maybe as a way to sell more user guides and training courses). I wonder to what extent minesweeper, freecell and solitaire became the computer equivalent of kudzu--an elegant solution that overshot its mark and became a horrible problem--at least as far as worker productivity is concerned.

Why'd I bring all that up, particularly when I'm not sure I even believe in worker productivity (or at least as far as those studies are concerned)? Oh, right. Freecell, minesweeper, solitaire. They actually served a purpose at one point, which makes them "better" than most videogames in a pragmatic sense. But I had continued to play them long after that--and there was a feeling I had one day playing one of the three, a desperate lonely feeling, and an awareness that I was doing nothing but literally wasting time.

That Modest Mouse line I quoted the other day is still half-haunting me: "You wasted life, why wouldn't you waste the afterlife?" It reminds me of a William S. Burroughs anecdote: someone at a reading asked Burroughs if he believed in an afterlife, and he replied, "How do you know this isn't it?" On the one hand, I actually think it's kind of nice I can, at the age of 38, take a mid-morning nap and play some videogames. On the other hand: wow. 38? Don't I have some literature I should be getting to?

The writing conundrum is probably an entry for another time, since my byzantine rationale for not currently writing might add even more to this seemingly unending entry. As is, actually, some thoughts on whether you can actually waste your life, what with the lack of an actual objective standard and all. But more to the point is a feeling that regardless of a definition of worth, there may be activities one can do in life that are more efficient than others. And I think I mean "efficient" in a fuel-burning sense: things that burn cleanly and leave you feeling less befouled than other things might, or even improve you in some measurable way.

The Pitch: It's like From Beyond meets Broadcast News!

2004-09-07T18:31:00.000-07:00

Oh, the headaches we will have! The lunches we will toss!

Today, after a kinda horrible evening last night, work has been about as much fun (as my dear father would say) as a hammer blow to the nuts. Despite such piquant imagery, it hasn't been overtly horrible--it's just been an extended run on an out-of-control hamster wheel after I already arrived pre-exhausted.

Of course, this being the workplace that it is, the firm stocks no aspirin or advil (supposedly for fear of lawsuit, an all-too-cheap bit of poetic justice). The carrot I dangled to get myself through this day was that this was my Friday and I'd have two days off if I got through it. And yet, I'm coming in to work tomorrow night (from 5:00 p.m. to 11:00) on overtime so that particular carrot shouldn't have worked. That it did says a lot about the power of habit.

Wow. Time to go find a friendly attorney--they've always got advil socked away and I honestly don't think I can wait until I get home. More later, barring frontal lobe explosion.

The Pitch: It's like The Core meets Napoleon Dynamite!

2004-09-06T14:50:00.000-07:00

Dying over here. The heat according to the thermometer built into my old Navy clock-cube reads 85.0(F). We've got the curtains down, we've got the windows open, we're sitting around in our underwear, and my wonderful girlfriend is walking about with an ice pack on her head and a beer in her hand.

Culdcept is this impressively annoying game--after losing twice on this one scenario, I've backtracked to replay some earlier boards to accumulate new cards and get a better idea of what I'm doing. And I've spent the last day and a half losing repeatedly to some bastard I beat single-handedly three matches ago. I believe this betrays a serious lack of understanding about the game--which is always a comforting feeling to have while playing...particularly during a heat wave.

Edi and I caught Napoleon Dynamite yesterday with our friend Dan, and I liked the movie, despite some reservations: the film is basically Wes Anderson filming an extended Kids in the Hall sketch, and I think that illustrates exactly the charms and shortcomings right there. At its core is a dazzlingly assured performance by Jon Heder as Napoleon Dynamite--so much so you kind of can't imagine the movie even being written without him already bein cast beforehand. Although I thought there should be some sort of warning that the movie will feature music by Jamiroquai(!), I don't have any major complaints. It was a comedy that made me laugh in a way that makes you analyze why you're laughing, and there lots of things loose in the world worse than that. Like Culdcept, for example. Fucking, fucking Culdcept.

Work will be fucking hideous tomorrow--the first day after a long weekend usually is--but I'm so glad not to be working today I don't mind, even with the sun deciding to burn San Francisco off the face of the Earth and everything.

The Pitch: It's like Dirty Dancing meets The Plague Dogs!

2004-09-04T16:31:00.000-07:00

There's a warm breeze blowing in through the open window. I'm listening to Modest Mouse's latest album, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, and I like it. It's growing on me, to the point where I tried to listen to it at home a few times this week only realize I had left it at the comic store. I was saddened, despite it being a deeply annoying album. The lead singer is growly, yowly, hollery, and there's a sort of sing-along quality to the albums that can either seem anthemic or annoying (or both). Parts of the album try to make up for that by sounding like songs were built around a recording of skittles being spilled on a floor (parts of it are a very Talking Heads type album, I just realized). But, thanks to the wonder of the Miracle Meme-Melding Machine (known by some people as the radio), I liked 'Float On' enough to buy the album and still like it enough to put this album on and play it over and over. I think that's the best part of albums, listening to them over and over until meaning starts to rise from them. Or listening to them until you start to really hear what you've been listening to. I've listened to this album at the comic store maybe half-a-dozen times, and I never caught the line at the end of a song where the singer yelps, "You wasted life, why wouldn't you waste the afterlife?" Yikes. That re-ups the album for another half-dozen listens, at least.

I'm trying in my half-assed way to do research for this year's Nanowrimo, which sounds like an accomplishment maybe, but is really just a cheat. I want to pick up the Nanovel I wrote but didn't finish two years ago and finish it this time around. So I've been reading books about syphilis and fanzines devoted to pulp writers (the fanzines themselves threatening to become a topic) and I guess I need to figure some things out about, you know, Greyhound riding and plots and stuff. Timelines. If I wasn't a lazy type, it'd be terribly exciting, like one of those big class projects where they give you an island, and make you research what kind of animals and vegetation you'd put on the island, and craft the tools your imaginary tribe would have, and the best part is trying to figure out where you're gonna put the dinosaurs. I'm not sure I ever finished that class project. In fact, looking back on my big class projects from elementary school, I'm not sure I ever completed any of them. Which may not bode well for this particular imaginary island but we'll see. I find I stick with things a little bit longer now that I'm grown up.

However, I can only read non-fiction for so long. And so, just as I returned to the old sin of video games, I returned to another vice this week: old Don Delillo novels. I'm about fifty pages in Americana, and the flaws in it, his first novel, are very, very noticeable. And yet there's also that wonderful Delillo ability to sum up:

We went back to the office. In the early afternoon it was always quiet, the whole place tossing slowly in tropical repose, as if the building itself swung on a miraculous hammock, and then the dimming effects of food and drink would begin to wear off and we would remember why we were there, to buzz and chime, and all would bend to the respective machines. But there would be something wonderful about that time, the hour or so before we remembered. It was the time to sit on your sofa instead of behind the desk, and to call your secretary into the office and talk in soft voices about nothing in particular--films, books, water sports, travel, nothing at all. There was a certain kind of love between you then, like the love in a family that has shared so many familiar moments that not to love would be inhuman. And the office itself seemed a special place, even in its pale yellow desperate light, so much the color of old newspapers; there was the belief that you were secure here, in some emotional way, that you lived in known terrain. If you had a soul, and it had the need to be rubbed by roots and seasons, to be comforted by familiar things, then you could not walk among those desks for two thousand mornings, nor hear those volleying typewriters, without coming to believe that this was where you were safe. You knew where the legal department was, and how to get a package through the mailroom without delay, and whom to see about tax deductions, and what to do when your water carafe sprung a leak. You knew all the things you wouldn't have known if you had suddenly been placed in any other office in any other building anywhere in the world; and compared to this, how much did you know, and how safe did you feel, about, for instance, your wife? And it was at that time, before we remembered why we were there, that the office surrendered a sense of belonging, and we sat in the early afternoon, pitching gently, knowing we had just returned to the mother ship.

(pg. 20) That's this guy's first novel, twenty-three years ago, and he nails so much of what I find striking about working in an office, and have been trying to figure out how to sum up for so long. And it's right there. Things have changed of course (the gender lines between executives and their secretaries have blurred considerably) and there's some unfocused preciousness--I bet Delillo can't look now at this paragraph without the phrase "to buzz and chime" making his stomach hurt--but yeah. That addictive ephemeral feeling of love one can have on those down periods at work: that's it, damn him.

An attorney came up and gave me a tape while I was writing this, and I should go transcribe it now. While she filled out the form, I surreptitiously eyed the crosshatching her mesh sweatpants had left across her pudgy tan belly. How can I not be grateful, at least sometimes, to be paid for this?

The Pitch: It's like Donnie Darko meets New York Minute!

2004-09-04T10:24:00.000-07:00

Fate has conspired to keep me from this blog. And by fate, I mainly mean video games. With a bit of wonky wireless connectivity thrown in.

If the wireless hadn't mysterously conked out on me, like it tends to do every so often, I would have posted on Thursday about how I'd missed posting on Wednesday thanks to the black-tarrish qualities of Culdcept, that odd Monopoly-meets-Magic-The-Gathering-but-on-a-PS2 video game I bought online (used from EB games for twelve bucks), and the incredible nightmare of re-registering my car which seemed to me an awful lot like taking several hundred dollars and throwing it out into the middle of the street.

Later, if I can, I'll resuscitate my earlier post (I managed to copy and save it into Word). It deals with an issue that came out of me playing Culdcept so much on Wednesday and Thursday that Edi pointed out--if I'm playing the game to relax, why am I cursing and swearing so much? But for now, just wanted to say: am still alive; will post more soon.

The Pitch: It's like Brewster's Millions meets The Planet of the Apes!

2004-08-31T11:47:00.000-07:00

I am incredibly cranky and sulky. I want to go home. I want my weekend. I want to spend all of the money they just gave me for working here on every ridiculous thing every invented. Even though the DVDs I ordered said they would take 5 to 10 business days to arrive, I am annoyed that they are actually taking 5 to 10 business days. (Normally, I get them in about four.)

I am also lazy. That is why I am not recounting the totally insane dream I had before waking. (also, Edi heard it before I left for work. Poor Edi.) Rest assure it was a good one, as it had Prague, taxis, ATMs, the Ferry Building, the Channel 4 News Team, Apple Fritters, airport terminal blackjack lounges, and maybe even Darryl Hannah. In more or less that order. Yes, poor, poor Edi.

More later if I can get myself motivated.

A Quick Message From Your OCD Count Who Loves To Count!

2004-08-30T10:24:00.000-07:00

Did you know I've written twenty-eight blog entries in the last thirty days? (Not counting this one, which makes twenty-nine.) And of those, only three were photo entries and only one was a quiz result. (Photo entries, quiz results and transcripts of IM conversations are three of the most common blog fillers out there, apart from announcements of how much or how little one has written on one's blog).

Twenty-eight entries in August? And I stopped playing video games on August Fifth? It's a fine argument for either the time-reductive capabilities of video games or the power of sublimation...

The Pitch: It's like Garden State meets Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas!

2004-08-30T10:04:00.000-07:00

I do not want to be here. I want to be back in my bed, asleep. It's one of those days where everyone at work doesn't look awake, and there aren't that many people on the streets or in the building yet. It's the type of day where everyone shows up late, and doesn't even try to offer any explanation.

Edi and I saw Garden State yesterday. I'd wanted to see it for some time and been trying to drag Edi to it for a while and then yesterday it all came together and we were there. I was one of those suckers who'd watched that very well edited teaser trailer and decided it was worth a peek. And Garden State is indeed very much worth that, although how much more, I'm not sure. It's opening third is arguably excellent: well-observed, funny and directed with a strong visual eye. The second third is strong, thanks to the introduction of Natalie Portman's character. And the final third barely adds up at all. I walked out of the movie with the warm glow from the first third trying to put the best spin on it: "Wow. Wasn't it great how the the movie promises a father-son confrontation that it can barely make itself deliver? I liked how you didn't get a chance to see the protagonist's transition from emotionally dead and overmedicated to wise and self-connected--it just sort of happened! And how the romance really swamps and overtakes the other plotlines? I wouldn't like that in another movie, but..."

It's kind of interesting to figure out which parts didn't work because of insufficient subtle acting on the part of star Zach Braff, or because of a timidity in the screenplay by writer Zach Braff, or an inability on the part of director Zach Braff to pull a better performance from his lead actor or revise the script with his screenwriter, but it does make it easier to point the finger at one guy in particular. A shame since the guy has real talent in all three fields (with his direction being the strongest) and a willingness to craft really good scenes for his co-actors rather than hog it all for himself: both Natalie Portman and Peter Sarsgaard (resembling early Keifer Sutherland to a creepy amount) have great roles and really get the chance to tear into them. It's certainly a better movie than, say, Bright Lights, Big City (with which it has more than a little in common, I'm sorry to say) but it's the sort of movie you go to see if you like to see and support talent with a lot of potential, rather than talent that's fully emerged.

As for other bits of eyecandy on the web designed to part you from your samoleans, I'm sure you're aware there's a trailer for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas out already. I've already subjected Edi to it countless times, but I had a quiet moment the other day at work and so loaded up the largest of the three trailers to ogle it again from the comfort of a DSL line on Saturday when nobody was hitting the Rockstar site (and, sad to say, I think the lousy little putt-putt computers at work can handle the size of the file easier than my computer at home, which stammered continually when I tried to play it). For whatever reason, the Rockstar site was troubled and it took forever for the trailer to load. So I got bored and started using what had loaded as a slideshow, scrolling up to a particular image and then stopping.

It's been two years since I GTA: Vice City and I've really missed that eye for detail the GTA games have. Here, we've got basketball jerseys for the gangsta types to where except one jersey reads "dribbler" and another, "rimmer." In a pool hall, there's an ornate mural painted on brick next to a sign that reads "Beware of Pickpockets and Loose Women." A barber salon has framed pictures of haircuts for men on the walls. The emerald lights flashing on Ten Green Bottles Liquor Store. Interestingly, the website doesn't offer any of the screenshots I saw in the latest Game Informer: white guys in cowboy hats and baseball caps, monster trucks and dirt bikes peeling down the side of a rural highway. How heavily, and with how much humor, will the Rockstar guys push the collision of cultures?

[A paragraph tying this idea, and expectation, to the ideas, and expectations, raised by Garden State should probably be inserted here. Sadly, I'm afraid workat the moment precludes it.]

The Pitch: It's like A Life Less Ordinary meets Blow-Up!

2004-08-29T19:44:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's not just a thong picture, it's a heraldic thong picture! In the interest of doing something (or to put that properly, something) with my blog, and I have started a photo blog on lazybastard. If you wanna, check it out at:

http://lazybastard.com/blog/phoblog/index.html

In theory, this is my first babystep to moving this blog onto my website, but I have a lot to learn about FTP privileges and until I can figure out how to post to two blogs with one FTP account, I'm sticking to one photoblog.

So, yes. A photoblog. Let's see what happens.

The Pitch: See, I Told You It Was Hot Out...

2004-08-29T19:41:00.000-07:00

Cue the cheesy Sisqo song! We got a renegade Thong!

The Pitch: It's like The Towering Inferno meets Rushmore!

2004-08-28T17:06:00.000-07:00

Okay, so the evil-makers are gone, leaving me and my co-workers to the crazy heat and our own crazy selves. I just reviewed fifteen comics for the Savage Critic blog, and can actually write something of substance here, if I could just think of something.

It's hot. Did I mention that it's hot? It's so hot that, at lunch, I found a crumpled black thong resting in the shade of a sidewalk shrub. Honest. Is it comforting to know that thongs have a higher boiling point than the hoochies who wear them?

The Pitch: It's Like Clockwatchers meets The Core!

2004-08-28T15:27:00.000-07:00

Not how I had hoped to spend today. I was thinking we'd have a quiet day at work, everyone scared off by the heat, and I'd get a chance to write reviews for the Savage Critic while casually fanning myself and sipping diet cokes.

Instead, it's been a non-stop work fest, with the first part of the day spent transcribing a colossal nineteen pages of one attorney utterly eviscerating the work of the other. Entertaining, yes. Relaxing, no.

I've been back from lunch for an hour and it's been nothing but dumb-ass jobs filed by an attorney and his hapless assistant, who's getting paid time and half to put in job requests for things the attorney is too lazy to walk down the hall.

And the heat! I'm not really aware of it except that I'm very nauseous, probably because I'm not drinking enough water, and very cranky. I should go before the attorney or secretary show up with more work and I have to explain why I'm (a) blogging, and (b) referring to their work as dumb-ass.

More (?) later.

The Pitch: It's like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge Meets Punch-Drunk Love Meets Ghost World!

2004-08-26T11:45:00.000-07:00

Yes, the above pitch is my reason for missing yesterday's blog entry--movies a go-go squared. I finally watched the art-fag version of The Waterboy (also known as Punch-Drunk Love)then, desperate for a Bollywood fix; threw in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (also known as "The Braveheart Takes The Bride") which was so long Edi and I actually paused it at the intermission, went out to dinner, came home, relaxed a bit and then watched the remaining hour and a half; and finally ended with Ghost World which we had rented at Four Star Video while at dinner. By the time we went to bed, it was after midnight and my eyeballs were twitching, skittish things. Perhaps as a side-effect to watching so much Bollywood, Edi tossed and turned relentlessly in her sleep for the first few hours--she swears she wasn't dreaming of performing in endless musical numbers, but I'm not sure I believe her--that I went out to the couch (where I had spent almost all of my previous day anyway) to sleep. Part of me is trying to turn this into Jeff Fest 2004 and catch a few movies--by which I mean as many movies as I can--and turn this into a powerful triumph of cinematic gluttony--and part of me wants to stay out of the theater, enjoy the day, get some work done. We'll see which side wins: it could go either way.

As for the movies so far--I was pretty nonplussed by Punch-Drunk Love, surprising because of my high regard for Paul Thomas Anderson's earlier movies, not so much so when considering the reactions of people I respect who had already seen the film and not thought much of it. I had watched maybe ten or fifteen minutes of the movies on the day I set the PS2 DVD player up and had liked them--so was kind of surprised to find the movie went down and sideways from there. Sandler is perfectly fine as a more vulnerable, flawed version of his typical enraged boy-man and Watson is lovely as his love interest about whom we know nearly nothing but in whose reactions, thanks to Watson's acting, we believe everything. And when they're together, the movie seems to work, just as it seems to work in its odd, lonely opening. But, amazingly, Punch-Drunk Love is a movie by a deeply observant person who doesn't really know how anything works--like someone who can fix a car radio but believes the music comes from tiny invisible people inside. With the pudding cups and phone sex subplots, half the movie totters on the lip of urban legend (even when the events, like the pudding cups, are based on real life) and, when the psychological underpinnings of the characters don't add up, flips in the abyss of unlikely tall tale. That Adam Sandler's character is a nearly psychotic ball of repressed rage because he was the only boy in a family of seven sisters is an interesting hypothesis, but it doesn't seem to add up (I can see how he'd end up with the childishness, maybe, but not the rage). That his character is fiscally cautious and yet willing to give his social security number to a phone sex operator, after showing an awareness of the existence and potential of therapy, makes no sense. At every point, Anderson leaps forward with a scene insistently showing why these things should make sense, but because they don't you grow more distant from the film itself. And Anderson's tendency for bombast--a jittery nightmarish scene where Emily Watson and Sandler's sister show up at his warehouse just as every other piece of his life starts to go to hell is filmed like a long-take version of the control sequences in Armageddon--further strains credulity. Punch-Drunk Love tries to occupy a space between romantic comedy and psychological portrait and shows, I think, exactly why movies rarely try for that space: it's not conducive for a satisfying movie. I walked away from the movie with my faith in Anderson shaken.

Contrarily, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge had almost entirely the opposite effect on me. Although this is perhaps a godo time for a lengthy digression about my attachment to foreign movies and Bollywood films in particular.

It wouldn't surprise me if Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge was a worse movie--significantly worse--than Punch-Drunk Love and I am utterly incapable of seeing it. What I've come to realize about my movie watching habits is I'm drawn to foreign films precisely because they paralyze many of my critical faculties. Things that don't make sense to me are quickly attributed to cultural differences; if my attention starts to wander, it starts trying to associate spoken words with subtitles rather than pick apart the intention of the scene and wondering where it might go wrong; and as a result, I enjoy the movie more directly. It's common for me to walk out of a Bollywood movie with nothing more to say than "I liked it," and a shrug when pressed further.

So. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. I liked it. If all of Shahrukh Khan's future movies were just formula embellishments on this one, I wouldn't be at all surprised. Made back in 1995 and known as the longest running film of Indian cinema (in the theaters, not the running length), all of the tropes of a Khan movie--particuarly the need to deceive entire families and capsize the existing social structure, all in the name of love, commitment and the greater good--are here, to be emebellished to such great fiscal success in later movies. If I ever get a handle on the topic, I should tackle the fascinating role Shahrukh Khan plays in Indian cinema: he is portrayed as a loveable rogue (a "wastrel" is the term frequently used in the subtitles of DDLJ) who in the end is committed to the greater Indian virtues and so is able to appeal simultaneously to young and old. The hamminess plays into it somehow, too. I should have just left it at: I liked it. Shrug.

Finally, Ghost World. This is probably the third time I've seen the movie, and the first since its year of release, and I was surprised it didn't hold up better for me. Maybe I was just fatigued by all the movie watching by that point, but I was surprised by how there wasn't anything new to discover in the movie. Its charms are obvious (to those who know my preference for bitchy bespectacled brunettes) and its anti-consumerist message as timely as ever. But after you watch it the first time, Ghost World seems so obviously crafted, with each scene carefully delineating the reason for the next scene, and each bit of direction embellishing the point of the scene, that the movie, on repeated viewings, feels like a try-out card for the director Terry Zwigoff and the screenwriter Dan Clowes to enter the world of feature films. Steve Buscemi's portrayal of a resigned outsider is still the most enjoyable thing about the movie, both to its strength and its detriment (as an adaptation of the source material, anyway). And it's funny how, back in 2000, everyone was talking about Thora Birch as the breakout star of the movie and yet it's Scarlett Johansson in 2004, the star of Lost In Translation, that seems to have arrived.

So that was yesterday. It's almost noon now, and hot and possibly humid out. Sooner or later I'll figure out what I'm doing with my day. I guess I'll go make some minor attempt at it now.

The Pitch: It's like Behind The Green Door meets The Hudsucker Proxy!

2004-08-24T08:20:00.000-07:00

You wouldn't think PHP is a very sexy thing, would you? I wouldn't either, and yet 20 minutes spent reading The Beginner's Guide to PHP that I picked up on sale at Red Hill was enough to give me giddy unending dreams of, I swear, coding my website in PHP. The only thing I remember is setting up some sort of frame for a conversation that Edi and I were having, so that a microphone would record what we were saying, an audiotext converter would transcribe it, the computer would upload it, and it would be a sidebar to all my web pages. And that's the only dream I remember, other than getting up to pee and having a very clear memory of speaking aloud the phrase "style sheets." Eerie.

On a related note (since it's about both style sheets and creepiness), Blogger is offering me the chance to run ads on my blog. I have to admit, part of me thinks, "hmmm... rich, you say?" Part of me wonders how bad it would actually be if people could actually click on an ad selling Aventurera or Ong Bak after reading my reviews and suddenly they've got a great movie they never heard about before. And part of me is disgusted both at my greed, Blogger's disingenuous "We're going to start paying bloggers" announcement, and the idea that I'd whore my blog out for a nickel.

Now these are, I'm assuming, the relatively non-descript Googleads I've been seeing everywhere and as a web viewer, I've got to say, I don't mind them. They're fine. They're not pop-ups, after all.

I'm too sleepy to follow this train of thought to its end stop. My original intention was to log on and talk about my stupid dreams of PHP, and how I "updated" my website by removing my dilapidated husk of a links page, my novel, and blocked image leeches. Now, I have another web-problem on my mind: what, if anything, does embracing an "amateur" status to my blog and website actually mean? That I'm idealistic? Or that I'll never be a professional?

The Pitch: It's like The Gift of the Magi meets Hackers!

2004-08-23T08:48:00.000-07:00

One of the nice things about moving lazybastard to a new server is I get to see my visitors and what they're hitting with a little more clarity. These stats allow me to begin formulating future plans for the site--and also afford me many opportunities for humility. After all, I also do the same thing for the CE website, so I'm well aware that my unique visitors for the month is approx 1,323 compared to over fifteen thousand for the Comix Experience website.

A couple years back, when I first got dreamweaver, I took a few tutorials and messed around with the program a bit. One of the the things that interested me at the time was building multi-column pages with text, pictures and captions. To that end, I created a test page, using "slices" or "layers" or whatever Dreamweaver was trumpeting as its big hullaballoo. I threw some images on there, almost at random, created text to fill the column, then threw it on the web to see how it looked. As I recall, the layers looked fine on IE, not so good on Netscape. And for the amount of time, it took to put together, I decided it wasn't worth it. I abandoned the whole thing, went for a more simple single column centered approach, and forgot all about it.

So guess what single page gets the most hits on my website?

It's because of the naked picture of Stevie Case, of course. But I gotta tell ya: when I opened that page this morning, for the first time in forever, I went, hey, that looks okay. And there's a cheap laugh or two in the text. I'm glad I spent so long fiddling with the caption and header colors because there's a certain unified look to the whole thing.

It's far from perfect, and as I recall it took an obscene amount of fiddling to get the layers to line up, and--like I said--I know it gets the most hits because it's got boobies on the page. The only thing more ironic than this test page getting the most hits is the irony that I'm pondering how to approach a possible site re-design because of it.

My Week of H.F.S.--Addendum.

2004-08-23T08:12:00.000-07:00

I sat down to watch the DVD of Ong Bak yesterday afternoon. It was in Thai with no English subtitles, nothing happened for forty-five minutes and suffered from characters doing things just to advance a coincidence-laden plot.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT.

I really want to go into more detail, but have found myself unable to for almost ten minutes. The fights are brutal (probably too much so--I managed to hook Edi with all the amazing stunts and acrobatic feats, but all the leg- and arm-breaking in the final set of fights had her fleeing to her room, shaking her head), the stunts are amazing, and the chases manage to take the classic Jackie Chan approach and tweak it just enough to give jaded viewers like me a thrill. I don't doubt I'll be watching some choice bits tonight when I get home from work. Those of you with VCD players and/or all-region DVD players should start hunting for this one. It's well worth it.