Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Saturday, April 10, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Good Friday meets Easter Sunday! The most offensive way to characterize this work day would be: deader than Jesus.But yeah, it's been quiet. And all day long, at the back of my head, the little thought writhed and twitched: Hey, I can update the blog! If someone hasn't written Zen and the Art of Blog, they should. It could have choice little koans like: When the blogger embraces updating, the false Tao runs away. When the blogger shuns updating, the true Tao's greeting is gentle. Or you know, something to that effect. The wind's shunted blue sky to a corner my window can't see. I can see the tips of downtown buildings rapidly disappearing in an onslaught of fog. The worst thing about zombie movies, I think, is the resulting tendency afterward to think in zombie metaphors: the fog enveloped the building like an unstoppable horde of zombies; the city streets before Easter where as quiet as the moment before the arrival of an unstoppable horde of zombies; my love is like a red, red unstoppable horde of zombies. And so on. There's something faintly unfair about the delineations between good and bad art. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think it's the resulting dearth of zombie-related metaphors in the former. Yet another reason to love Gravity's Rainbow, of course. (Not that I needed another reason, mind you...) It's a big serious book where similes built around King Kong are common. To say nothing of the musical sequences, the whacky German expressionist shit, the references to Westerns, Cary Grant films, the infamous "For DeMille, young French men can't be rowing!" sequence, etc. Pynchon cleverly builds cinema into the thematic concerns of the narrative so he can get away with this, but it's just so damn energizing, regardless. [Here follows a thoughtful paragraph; a good strong knee of a paragraph, that not only is capable of delivering a quick jab of illumination, but is also filled with tough yet pliant connecting material allowing me to join the concerns of the above paragraphs with the obsessions of those below.] I watched the first six episodes of Red vs. Blue today (finally!, as some would say), and also the first "webisode" of Superman's Pal, Jerry Seinfeld, browsed the faintly-disturbing-with-respect-to-all-parties-involved pictures of Yaoi-Con 2003, snuck a peek at the far-from-work-safe trailer to Bella Loves Jenna and read an excerpt on Salon from The Anarchist in the Library which covered both Episode I: The Phantom Edit (which I knew about) and The Goblin edit of the Lord of the Rings movies (which I didn't). All perfectly casual netsurfing on a quiet Saturday before Easter, and yet I sense some sort of throughline. A zombie is a thing returned from the dead to devour the living (it is, post-Romero, death itself, brainless and inescapable). All of the above sites felt to me like yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi: "no peak, no point, no meaning?--the phrase from which yaoi derives which originally referred to badly drawn self-published comics--a pretty good description of zombie life. When Jerry Seinfeld gets paid assloads of money to do whatever he wants as long as he remembers to shill American Express, and what he wants to do is pal around with Superman, is that really any more credible than a bunch of fans of running around a Holiday Inn dressed as their favorite character from Boku no Sexual Harassment? And if so, why? Oops. Girlfriend is here early. More on this later? posted by Jeff Lester | 7:42 PM | |
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