I'm an Asshole

This is why I keep getting all soft, even though I inevitably gnash teeth afterwards: within 5 minutes after the earthquake today, i got a call to make sure my fam was okay. TWICE in the first 5 minutes. The first time she just left a message because the call couldn't get through, and then she tried again. Times like that you realize there's no justification for acting like such a royal asshole. I suppose that means the embargo is getting called off.

It turns out it was a minor quake, even though it didn't fell like one. Normally you hardly even notice anything under a 6, but this time we were sitting about 3 miles from the epicenter, so we felt it. My city's moment in the sun. You can tell it's a minor quake because all the news shows mention there's no serious damage (except for that one footage of the 100 year old brick building that crumbled), and instead all everyone is talking about is how this is a warm up for the "big one"....

Haha! What a joke! I remember those days in grade school when the "big one" was on everyone's paranoid Reaganite minds, and we had earthquake drills and had to pack earthquake food kits at the beginning of every school year. If the big one had come then, I would have died eating Vienna sausages. Pretty hilarious when you think about it now -

except maybe it wasn't such a bad idea after all. It seems like people without that early training don't have an instinct to run for doorways or curl up under a table when the shaking starts, and maybe I only have it because of those 80s drills. And I certainly don't pack earthquake emergency food anymore, and maybe I should. Oh well, I figure Kramer will warn me before it comes.

Man After My Own Heart

Sir Richard F. Burton, translator and editor of the English-version Arabian Nights. His footnotes are almost as interesting as the 1001 tales. Beside the more obvious ludicrousness of the unapologetic racism and sexism (Arabic or English in source?), and the repeated and unnecessary annotations about how black men's penises are a wonderment of size and endurance - which Burton emphasizes, he can attest from a personal, 9-hour-long observation - there are actually some serious endeavors toward real erudition. Some of the linguistic/etymological explanations, for example, are quite informative, and appear to be sound - and I can verify as much from the editor's occasional appeal to classical etymologies and such, which are more or less on point. The juxtaposition of these scholarly excursions with the more silly, prurient, voyeuristic ramblings makes the notes particularly fascinating. And more fascinating still is when you get a note like this, clearly an attempt at learning, but a spectacular, ridiculous failure of one:

The tenet of the universal East is at once fact and unfact. As a generalism asserting that women's passion is ten times greater than man's (Pilgrimage, ii. 282), it is unfact. The world shows that while women have more philoprogenitiveness, men have more amativeness; otherwise the latter would not propose and would nurse the doll and baby. Fact, however, in low-lying lands, like Persian Mazanderan versus the Plateau; Indian Malabar compared with Maratha-land; California as opposed Utah and especially Egypt contrasted with Arabia. In these hot-damp climates the venereal requirements and reproductive powers of the female greatly exceed those of the male; and hence the dissoluteness of morals would be phenomenal, were it not obviated by seclusion, the sabre and the revolver. In cold-dry or hot-dry mountainous lands the reverse is the case; hence polygamy there prevails whilst the low countries require polyandry in either form, legal or illegal (i.e., prostitution). I have discussed this curious point of "geographical morality" (for all morality is, like conscience, both geographical and chronological), a subject so interesting to the lawgiver, the student of ethics and the anthropologist, in The City of the Saints. But strange and unpleasant truths progress slowly, especially in England.

(Note 36 to The Tale of Kamar al-Zaman)

No Country for Old Men

What an interesting coincidence: I liked this movie better when it was called The Misfits. They aren't quite alike - this movie tries to do more, for example, it gives us some flashy violence, and it's a lot scarier. But as far as the "you can't stop what's coming" theme, The Misfits was a more intense and articulate meditation on the idea.

The Misfits

Is Montgomery Clift even human? How is it that he wears old age AND A BROKEN FACE with so much grace? I was bracing myself for a painful blow as I tuned into my first post-accident Clift movie, and...I'm shocked in completely the opposite way. I could rub my face into a beauty wand, and I still couldn't look half as stunning as Monty does, shattering his face on a steering wheel. According to wikipedia, he didn't get any reconstructive work done after the accident. Suck that, plastic surgeons!

Monroe was also looking quite beautiful in this movie, despite her old age and near-morbid obesity. Normally I'd be amazed, but Monroe's miracle was fully upstaged by Clift's miracle. I actually believe she's more beautiful here than in any of her other roles, but on the other hand, Monroe never broke her face.

Hollywood miracles aside, however, The Misfits as actually a very remarkable work, albeit slow. It's the age-old tragedy of keeping the dream alive in a changing world; it's about the desperate dignity of Americana.

Arthur Miller wrote the screenplay, and it makes me wonder about the petty, slimy Italian guy who more or less plays a vaudville villain in a character landscape that is otherwise subtle and sophisticated. I wonder if Miller was thinking about Monroe's ex, Joe Dimaggio, when he wrote the hypocrite clown as a dude named Guido.

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

Huh. I liked it a LOT better when it was called Meet John Doe. And when Jean Arthur was Barbara Stanwyck. Gary Cooper was as charming as ever, but there's something off about that Longfellow Deeds character. Preposterous is the word, I think.

I'm learning that Capra is quite the hit or miss. Meet John Doe was off the chain, as they say on the east coast; You Can't Take It With You was a huge stinker; It's a Wonderful Life was quite good, and so was Mr. Smith Goes to Washington except for its stinky, implausible, deus-ex-machina ending.

File Mr. Deeds in the stinky drawer as well. Either small-town America in the 1940s was a wacky, absurdist place beyond understanding, or else Frank Capra made a movie about small town America without ever having set foot in America. In fact, based on this movie, you'd imagine that Capra isn't even from this planet.

Dick Move on a Moron Friend

I was planning to live next year with my friend - oh, let's just call her Moron. I started sending her links to some housing listings a few weeks ago, and when I was in the area last weekend, I made appointments to see some places. Naturally I asked her to come too, but she couldn't because she had plans with her boyfriend. So I did the scoping by myself; obviously I expected that she'd be taking over most of the legwork after I was gone. After all, she lives right there, and I live hundreds of miles away. Predictably, she hasn't contributed at all to the housing search since. I forced her to go to one open house, because that had a hard schedule (that I found out about, no thanks to her), but that aside she's been doing nothing but naysaying. "I don't like that location, that building is too old, I don't want a washer/dryer hookup (WTF???)" blah blah blah.

By the way, why do boyfriends suck so hard? It seems like all these bimbos go down the way of the shit creek once they acquire one.

Which brings me to the subject of Moron's super-moronic move. A week before I made my trip I said, let's get together. She suggested Saturday - not because she was busy, and Saturday night accomodated her best, but because her BOYFRIEND WAS HAVING HIS POKER NIGHT ON SATURDAY AND SHE HAD NOTHING ELSE TO DO. Yeah I Can Ride a Horse and I had tentatively planned on being in Santa Cruz that day, because we thought the beach would be less crowded then than on the 4th of July, but I knew that Moron gets really particular and stressed about this kind of thing, so I asked him to move our beach trip to Friday instead. And that's what we did on Friday. Later that night I emailed Moron: "I'll be in the city for most of the day tomorrow, so let's plan for dinner at 7-ish at this restaurant. Call or text if you're coming so I can make reservations."

AT SEVEN O'CLOCK I get a text. I erased it (unfortunately) because it pissed me off, but roughly it said: "Not in the city today. Sorry!"

OH I'M SORRY I DIDN'T REALIZE, WHEN I MADE A 500 MILE TRIP, THAT YOU WOULD HAVE HAD TO HAVE BEEN IN THE CITY FOR SOME OTHER REASON TO SEE ME. And for a dinner that was already planned!

Dick move...and today, repaid in kind. I was mulling over this bit of stupidity earlier this week, and started looking into places where I could live by myself next year. The good news is, I found this sweet little studio for about as much as I would have been paying to split a 1-bedroom, because Moron was being really unreasonable about her apartment picks and was only interested in the ridiculous nice ones. Oh, did I mention that she's the one in extreme debt, so much so that I probably would have had to cover the deposit alone (she gave me some sob story about how she still hasn't gotten her deposit back from her last roommate, and she might have to pay rent on 2 places for a few days' overlap, and she has massive credit card debt)? So why the fuck is she looking for some downtown loft nonsense?

Anyways, I just sent her an email tonight informing her that I'm bailing. I wonder if I'll ever talk to her again. I don't mind being friends still - I mean, as long as she cuts this kind of crap; she's coming close to that "I'm done with you" point, because like Butterfly, her cons are really starting to upstage all (any?) pros - but Moron definitely as a way of holding grudges. I used to think that was the reason why she has no friends anymore, but now I'm starting to think it's not that so much as this kind of bullshit she pulls.

Current Audio

Death on Wednesday
No Regrets

Mongol

Another fabulous movie I saw last weekend, but for very different reasons from WALL-E. Surprisingly, WALL-E I loved as a serious aesthetic experience, and Mongol I loved for its campiness, which for me is an academic interest. The remarkable thing about Mongol is that it is NOT "so bad it's good." Most of it is very high quality, and it's only parts that are incongruous or over the top - and yet, these parts enhance rather than mar. The violence, the soundtrack, and the odd structure (cyclical, not linear, so that you end thinking, nothing happened!) would normally detract from the cohesiveness of the world (the fourth wall?), but I suppose the whole thing is so stylized that it heightens the experience instead. Or, it may be the case that you can't go wrong with over-the-top violence? It's true that lots of movie audiences love blood, but somehow I doubt it's a free pass to fine art... After all, I recently saw a god-awful rendition of camp, Paris, When It Sizzles, starring Audrey Hepburn. Man, that was a steaming pile of poo - and it had some similar elements of camp as Mongol: the odd structure (repetitive/revisionary, though not cyclical), the deliberate play on genre conventions, inappropriate emotions. Yet, it was just "so bad, it's bad." I wonder why that is.

There were some great recurring themes in Mongol, some of which coincided with several themes throughout the weekend. Here's tentative record of this weekend's themes:

1a. "Wha' happened?"
1b. "I don't THINK so!"
2. Surf rock
3. Family Guy, esp. Quagmire:

"It's Quagmire, it's Quagmire
You never really know what he's gonna do next
It's Quagmire, it's Quagmire
Giggity giggity giggity giggity let's have sex!"

4. Robot love --> gender inversions --> feminism
5. Bland people
6. Dogs
7. Caffeine withdrawl
8. Not going to bars
9. Enlightened despotism
10. Crossword puzzles
11. Ghetto kids
12. Skanky people
13. The wrath of the reggae god (Jah)
14. Barack Obama
15. Mad dashes to public restrooms (and turds on a self-cleaning floor)
16. Spread of Islam --> trade routes
17. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle paradigm:

Leonardo - the leader
Raphael - cool but rude
Donatello - does machines
Michaelangelo - the party animal

18. The Joey Ramone disease

WALL-E

LOVE IT!!! There's a certain class of movies that grabs you, as if physically, and knocks the wind out of you and takes over your world. I don't remember what they are for me, comprehensively (I should keep a list), but I recall that stuff like On the Waterfront and Seven Samurai are in the ranks. WALL-E is the latest inductee. He's a robot and a hero in a post-apocalyptic world! Nuff said.

Not the 2000th Post

How silly of me. Instead of 1,199, I read 1,999. Oh well. I thought the milestone point would be a good time to revisit Andrew W.K., one of my seasonal passions at the time when I started the blog. I can't recollect all of them, but I do remember some of the most recent: these include This Is Hell (2008), Epsilons (2006), Futureheads (2005), Cramps (2004), Andrew W.K. (2003). There was nothing in 2007, because it was a dark time for me.

Sure, I didn't start this blog until 2005, so my account is already flawed. Whatever, I suppose the fascination sustained. The main point is this: I fell in love with Andrew WK because I could never figure out if he was a full of shit, or a real-life, sincere, crazy-eyed Pollyanna. It's an interesting study of irony. If the persona is totally consistent, what measure do we have judging the existence of irony? And Andrew WK's persona was 100% consistent; there was not a single chink in the armor of his optimism, not in his music, not in his writing. His image might have suggested a different message, but he had a creative solution for integrating its recklessness into a broader "live for the moment" message.

So why is it a good time to revisit the subject, even if it isn't the 2000th post? Because 5 years have evolved Andrew WK. He got tired of the schtick. And with the passage of time, we know that he was

indeed, full of shit.

Andrew WK appears to have revamped his whole MO to be less optimistic and more "deep" or clever. This bothers me. I was hoping, against all the odds, and against all my knowledge of this our sad world, that it just might be possible for one simple guy out there to keep believing. I should have known better: no one can bounce back from disappointment indefinitely, no matter how much the simpleton. It was just another sham and gimmick.