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The Honorary Title
Stuck at Sea

I <3 Dr. Scholls

It's been a long time since I posted, and unfortunately, it's a frivolous post this time. I just wanted to say that I can't recommend enough the Dr. Scholls gel inserts! I spent quite a lot of time this weekend traipsing around in high, wooden heeled shoes, but they felt just like sneakers thanks to my Dr. Scholls. I must say I was skeptical, because any height puts a lot of pressure on the ball of the foot, regardless of how comfortable the rest of the shoe is, and plus I've tried those foam inserts before with the most unimpressive results. But the gel inserts are truly in a league of their own.

2 Matings, 2 Slayings

1. The spiders in my bathroom and I had a tacit agreement to coexist in spite of the revulsion. I would ignore them and leave them alone, but only because my bathroom has an ant problem and the spiders ate the ants. I even ignored the growing pile of discarded ant shell that was scattered behind my toilet, like so many coffee grinds, even though it made me shudder, because the dead ants had the SLIGHT advantage of not trying to bite me. But tonight I had to put my foot down when I spied TWO spiders. They were interacting, possibly mating, and the thought of a nest of reproducing spiders was more than I could bear. I exterminated them posthaste (translation: I got my mom to squish them; I have an unreasonable horror of any small insect-like thing with those scary compound eyes).

2. It was quite a different experience this afternoon when the mating involved two animals with a friendlier, non-compound eye. Two birds fell out of a tree onto the road right in front of my car. I was too close to stop, so I instinctually tried that maneuver I use for roadkill, which is to position them between my wheels so as to minimize further flattening. But this time that didn't work, because the birds were still mobile, and they tried to fly away once they spotted danger. Normally birds are successful at this sort of escape, but for the first time in my life, and to my great surprise, I saw them fail. I heard a thump, saw black object fly off to the side through my rearview mirror; and instantly I felt terrible. It's a shocking and sickening feeling to kill something. That feeling was only heightened by the fact that I killed the birds while they might have been mating. I remember the moment vividly: I had Little Richard's "Send Me Some Loving" playing in my car.

The rest of the day I was wishing I could get some absolution for this assault against the universe that I couldn't reverse. I really did feel bad about the birds. Then, a few hours later, I found I was to repeat that episode, but this time with the spiders...and without the remorse. The universe is a funny place, or else I have a funny relationship with it.

Natural Born Killers

I enjoyed this movie quite a bit. Even though there are several moments that are "off" - the parts where it tries to be ironic, funny, or Warhol-esque, all these seem to indicate that the movie is overshooting itself, is striving for something that requires far more sophistication and/or subtlety than it has, and in short makes it appear pretentious - even then, I thought there was something very well articulated about the various themes of human emotion. The story telling is also gripping and fast-paced, while the narrative structure has a nice layered quality that complements the sensationalism with some depth. I was skeptical at first about the whole message about "too much tv" and a society seduced and desensitized by media fads, but I was eventually won over by the change in Robert Downey Jr.'s character, and especially Mickey's parting speech to him.

The parts that are "off" about the movie bothered me throughout the whole experience, like flies, small and annoying but persistent, but it wasn't until I saw a few of Oliver Stone's commentaries that I was able to put my finger on it. The problem with Natural Born Killers is that OLIVER STONE HAS NO SENSE OF HUMOR. No, it's worse than that: he has a BAD sense of humor. At least a guy who's totally humorless doesn't try to be funny. But Oliver Stone does. It's really irritating. He repeatedly would describe this or that scene as funny or comic, and inevitably it would just be stupid at best. Luckily for him, Natural Born Killers is not really a comedy. It's saved by the many violent scenes, which are much more this director's forte.

In the Year 2000

I always love these jokes.

There will be a massive nuclear war, killing every living thing on earth, except cockroaches and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

Another celebritiy stalking will be in the news, this time involving Larry King and his stalker, the Grim Reaper.

Barbara Walters will admit to having had an affair with a politician from Massachusettes. Most Americans will learn who this politician is when they tune into the HBO series, John Adams.

BTW, how did Jimmy Fallon beat out William Shatner for the top billing? He might have more going on currently (and by more I mean exactly ONE, ie Late Night), but it's just insulting.

BTW again, I got another idea of yet another better Late Night replacement, this time from dlisted: Chelsea Handler from Chelsea Lately. She is SO FUNNY. Her show doesn't shine because her panel of comedians usually fucks up the flow, with their lack of funny, but Chelsea herself is brillaint. She also does her filmings in LA...

Kafka's Metamorphoses

The first half of it is hilarious, and the last half is so, so sad. I don't know what to make of it. The comic part I found delightful; it's a great little thought experiment on how people react in fantastic circumstances. For instance, I love the part when Gregor is trying to communicate with the chief clerk:

"He really did want to open the door, really did want to let them see him and to speak with the chief clerk; the others were being so insistent, and he was curious to learn what they would say when they caught sight of him. If they were shocked then it would no longer be Gregor's responsibility and he could rest. If, however, they took everything calmly he would still have no reason to be upset, and if he hurried he really could be at the station for eight o'clock."

The setup is so absurd, and the reactions of the characters are so interesting, that you don't really demand an explanation about why Gregor turned into an insect. But you also don't expect the story to turn into the serious tragedy that it becomes. The ending is so sad and pathetic that I really wanted to know what it's all supposed to mean. What is the point of all this slow, accumulated pain to Gregor and his family? An absurdist beginning should be complemented with a lighthearted ending, and so I was flummoxed to find instead this somber picture of isolation, unappreciated good intentions, unspoken affections, incaceration, poverty, exhaustion, waning humanity, and hopelessness.

U Turn

After many years, there's still just one word to sum up this movie: PSYCHOTIC.

By the by, watching Fuse's movies is exposing me to a stream of this kind of thing.

I remember a conversation I had with my English and creative writing teacher in high school. He mentioned that he was writing a screenplay about a high school teacher taking a trip to Vegas, and shenanigans happening along the way. "Oh, like that movie U Turn?" I asked; I had just caught it on tv, about the last half. "Yeah, it's sort of like that," he said, "only less...psychotic."

After watching the movie in full length just now, I'm at a loss for another description that would fit so 100%. It's what Requiem for a Dream was trying to be, except it took a wrong turn (a "u turn" if you will) into Depressingville. Strangely, U Turn isn't depressing. It's crazy, it's sick, it's live frustration, but it's also kind of funny.

Kalifornia

Awesome flick! It works on so many levels. It's a thriller because it's about taking a road trip with a sociopathic serial killer. It's funny because, like me, the protagonist has a weird fascination with serial killers, and sort of glamorizes them and psychologizes them...until he finds himself on the victim's end. It's even more hilarious because the movie plays up that whole bleeding heart intellectual snob angle. In the beginning, Brian (David Duchovny) proselytizes about how killers are mentally sick, and that they need to be rehabilitated instead of executed (ps, I think I'm against capital punishment too, but I also don't have much faith in rehabilitation), and how these aberrant personalities are just products of troubled childhoods...and then he asks Early (Brad Pitt) cliched stuff like why is he so angry at his father, and if that's why he kills...

...and in the end he finds the smoking gun in his own hand.

Also, Kalifornia works on the level of surrealist comedy, because there's just something fantastic yet a propos about Brian accidentally ride-sharing with the very subject of his book, and learning important lessons about a topic he would otherwise be totally unqualified to write about. He thinks he's being enlightened and progressive, not judging Early for being such a yokel, but then he realizes that "humanity" is not the shared condition he thought it was.

Fabulous performance by Juliette Lewis, who plays the serial killer's girlfriend who is almost too dumb to exist. Brad Pitt delivers as well; he really is quite a convincing actor, he just happened to stop picking good roles for himself. There's something about Americana and Brad Pitt that has the making of an epic.

Foodies Make My World a Lonely Place

"...something something you're in the ruling class."
"What? I'm too poor to be in any ruling class!"
"But your background is entrenched in the petit bourgeois, regardless of what you've done in recent months."
"Well, that might have been true for the last few years, and maybe that's all that counts - though I was broke as hell as a grad student - but for the majority of my life I had to struggle just like everyone else."
"Yeah, but you grew up in the 'model minority,' which amounts to the same thing as the petit bourgeois."

How grim, if true. The world is a cold and lonely place with no escape. I was having dinner with some foodies yesterday, and I kept thinking, I have GOT to get me some new friends! Then I thought, where would these new friends come from? and I remembered my friend AP's pronouncement about my being entrenched in the ruling class. True, the people I was dining with yesterday were technically not REALLY my friends (time made them a distant memory, and the others were friends of friends), but I recalled that the way society works, you can't pick only the people you're compatible with to be your friends. Friendship is a group venture, and you're not allowed to blow off friends of friends - and essentially all this means that you have to associate with and be defined by people you don't really like. The other alternative is to damage your social life...which often doesn't bother me (eg last night I would have preferred to hang out by myself than a bunch of petit bourgeois), but then I was made to feel bad about that choice, as one of my old/former friends waxed operatic about her theory of "diversifying" her social circles so that on any given Friday or Saturday she'll have 5 or 6 different engagements, and never have to be alone...

...and normally I'd write that kind of policy off as bullshit, but I'm starting to recognize a certain utility to "critical mass" when it comes to socializing - both for business and for pleasure. And that critical mass really isn't possible unless I make that effort to let more people in than would qualify as real kindred spirits. That is, unless I diversify.

So the conclusion of last night was that life isn't always about my druthers, and one of the things I'll have to learn to deal with is the petit bourgeois society that I find extremely uptight, boring, and silly - but unavoidable.

Take these foodies, for example, who seem to be everywhere I'm entrenched. Some of them I'd even consider genuine kindred spirits (foodieism notwithstanding), and maybe there's nothing so bad about liking something (like food) a lot - in fact, I'll concede it's human nature to "get into" stuff - but still, foodieism exemplifies everything I hate about my trapped and lonely world. First, it's the first sign of a decaying society. No, really. How, you ask? It's the indicator that just precedes the disappearance of a middle class. I may not be an expert on the culinary arts, but I do happen to be something of a cultural historian on foodies, as I spent a FULL YEAR researching this topic called "gastronomy," or the art and science of cooking and eating. I thought it was a silly project at the time, and I still hold that opinion now, with increased conviction. And it was as true in Roman times and imperial European times, as it is true today: people start acting like snobs about food when easy living has made physical pleasure an end in itself. When self-improvement is reduced to "having more class" than the next person, and when humanity's improvement is done not at all, or dilettantishly, like just another hobby. Helping poor people? Writing the great epic to capture and commemorate our Zeitgeist? Equivalent to knowing which cheese finest, and how to age it!

It's not that I don't enjoy tasty meals, like the next person, or even that I don't like watching the Food Network, like the next person. Sure, good food is always better than rank food, and it's worth some effort to get that at as many meals as possible. But it becomes totally ridiculous when, oh I don't know...

1. You're willing to drop a couple grand on an "expertise," whether it's wines or cheeses or truffles or steaks or whatever.

2. When you purchase a few ounces of dried tea for $50.

3. When you announce, with pride, "I have no problem dropping, like, two hundred on a meal, if the food is THAT good."

4. When said meal is so tiny that you have to fill up on the free bread to feel like you've actually eaten.

5. If your response to a story about a dining adventure involving different wines for each dish, and the way the combination really made the flavors tingle on your tongue, is: "You are describing my wet dream."

6. When I, your non-foodie friend, have to eat some unspectacular, salty-ass prosciutto pizza, instead of a nice Hawaiian one from Dominos, and am expected to ooh and ahh about how good it is, just because we're at a restaurant whose decor is appropriately bourgeois and Pottery Barn.

7. Anything having to do with PINKBERRY. Period. Exclamation point! I hear that shit isn't even natural like it pretends to be. They just made it "taste natural," ie like shit, so that people will ascribe to it healthiness it doesn't have, and justify buying an $8 ice cream.

DECAYING SOCIETY! I'm telling you.

So much for uptight and silly. Boring, I expect is pretty self-explanatory. I wish I could be around people who are fun (but don't engage in drugs or other self-destructive behavior). I had it once, and could still have it, maybe, if I hang out with younger kids. But then I'm also feeling this distinct pressure that it's time for me to grow up, and stop being so egocentric, and be a part of this ruling class because I know I'm too good to piss away my life as someone else's bitch. Sigh. The world is a lonely place.

Blacula

AIP does it again! That shit is so edgy. 70s cop drama, 70s blacksploitation (are those the same?), and campy vampire horror - is there anything missing? It starts off with an interracial gay couple (with flamboyant lisps), who are interior decorators, shopping for curios in Transylvania. Of course among their purchases is Blacula's coffin. Vampirism runs amuck in Los Angeles...

The funny thing is that COPPOLA totally ripped off this B movie for plot. Blacula is a touching romance about eternal love, an angle that Stoker's original Dracula lacked. Blacula finds his lost bride reincarnated as a 1970s woman, and the center of the story is how he is willing to live and die for her, foregoing even his own monstrosity.

I'm not sure what to make of blacksploitation, of which this is my first exposure. I'm inclined to think the controversy is overrated, just because of the shock of not seeing white people take center stage. I didn't find anything particularly exploitative or offensive about Blacula, except maybe its punny title. Sure, there was that one stereotypical funny black guy, who is comical because his attitude and slang are out of the mainstream, but I think that character is a stock role for any ethnic. Witness Frank Sinatra's Italian smart-talking funny guy in From Here to Eternity.

I will say this, though: there's something weird about the 70s. Something about it looked so...segregated. Perhaps that's a consequence of the film's "exploitative" rendering. But I kind of doubt it. It doesn't stretch my imagination, at all, to think that there was segregation in the 70s.

On the other hand, I also recognize that film and tv are unique spaces imagining society, not so much as a reflection, as as a kind of projection of something, such as a wish. After all, it's a joke and a cliche that tv shows will always include that Token person of color, whose inclusion in a group of Abercrombie white people is hilariously improbable. And yet, without taking that necessary first step - that is, of imagining integration before it even seems plausible - who's to say? perhaps integration couldn't happen as easily. It's for that reason that the alternative to the Token is unacceptable: even more offensive than imagining a fake world where a person of color would hang out with honkies, is imagining a fake world where there's nothing but honkies.

Ceiling Cat

Thanks Yeah I Can Ride a Horse!