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 24, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Poetry meets Irony! No, I have no idea what The Pitch means, either. I just got tired of trying to think of a title...It's a perfect boiling summer day (in April as these things usually are in San Francisco) so of course the next door neighbor is having himself a good old-fashioned barbecue. I took the day off work because the idea of coming home at night with Edi gone was just too depressing. Things are only marginally less so being here the whole day with people chattering over loud music next door, and I'd probably be equally low if it wasn't for my old drinking buddy, the Playstation 2. It's mainly been more of the super-addictive Romance of the Three Kingdoms VII, which has obsessed me most of the last week, and a little bit of SOCOM: Navy Seals which seems pretty fuckin' cool if I could get beyond having my squad kill people when they're supposed to be holding their fire. It's a real kick to talk into a headset and have the computer talk back: ME: Team, hold your fire. BOOMER: Holding fire, sir. Then, just as I'm about to sneak up and cut somebody's throat, a shot rings out: BOOMER: Got 'em! ME: Boomer, you dumbfuck... RECON: Seals, your cover has been blown. Probably just as well, I don't really need another game to obsess about. I'm hoping my long campaign as Warlord will tide me over in ROTK and I can get around to some of the other stuff I told the girlfriend I'd do, like vaccuuming and sweeping and stuff. I've also been cleaning up the Nanovel of '03, just correcting my nearly infinite number of typos. I sorta wanted to get it finished so I could, I dunno, put it to rest, poor unfinished thing, and move on to the stuff I want to finish--which I also have to organize because I've kind of got myself thoroughly lost. If I can't get the one out of the way, I'll never get to the other, and I'm running out of stalling techniques for those mornings before work. I experienced unexpected closure today, by the way. Even I couldn't resist such a beautiful day, so I got out and hiked over the hill to Cortland, in part to return a late video (oops! Heh, heh...) but also to get out in the sun and the heat. Whenever I go to the videostore, I have this little thing I do--I cross the street to Red Hill Books, the tiny new & used place, and I look for used copies of Cormac McCarthy's Suttree and Delillo's Americana. I have to admit, I have a copy of Suttree but it's in an arm-breaking McCarthy omnibus that I thought would save me some money way back when and has only resulted in me not reading the book because of the dread of shlepping the thing around. And Delillo's Americana I can find everywhere new, but for some reason I'm insistent on reading it used--I wish I could tell you why. As I was saying, it's my little habit, my nervous tic: go the bookstore check out the 'D' and 'M' sections, and it's always played out the same: bupkis. But of course, today, probably because I walked over the hill without my bag and because I'm pretty dead-ass broke until Friday, there were used copies of both books. Finally, after spending the better part of six months looking in this one bookstore (and longer looking at every used bookstore), they were both there on the same day. I could feel fate snickering on my bare neck: Hey, sweaty boy. Thought you said you wanted these. Too bad you don't have the cash for it... So of course I bought them anyway, and will probably spend part of my Edi-less Sunday selling off old CDs to Streetlight, just to keep me in Ramen until payday. On the one hand, I feel immeasurably silly. On the other, I feel a bit like Boomer must feel when he shoots my stealth kill out from under me and fucks up my mission: Booyah, dickhead! No disembodied fucker tells me what to do! posted by Jeff Lester | 5:38 PM | Thursday, April 15, 2004 The Pitch: It's like my hand meets a garbage disposal! I've got that whole best of times, worst of times thing going on. I'm still hugely upset over a death in my friend Patrick's family, taxes this year were like putting a fiscal bullet in my pocketbook's brainpan, and I just found out today that despite my checking almost every day with Brian confirming that the blackline wasn't coming this week, the blackline came this week (today, in fact) and now I have to write the newsletter by, oh, Sunday.On the other side of things, I just watched a boot of Beat Takehi's Zatoichi, caught a screener of Kill Bill, Vol. 2, and pieces by Sirs Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan at the S.F. Ballet. And all of them sunk my battleship to greater and lesser degrees. Although a bit of a piss-up (okay, a lot of a piss-up, what with meta-cinematic critique going on explicitly in it), Zatoichi shows Beat at the top of his form--I can't think of a better filmmaker today in terms of framing compositions, using color and music and revealing the plasticity of narrative (maybe the Coen Brothers and maybe Lars "Von" Trier and maaaaaaybe Tarantino)--if I had to go with one of my pretentious high concept pitches it'd be "It's like Vladimir Nabokov remaking Mystery Train as a Samurai movie!" By contrast, Kill Bill, Vol. 2 would look a little skimpy but (a) I saw it first, and (b) the best actor in a Beat Takeshi movie is Beat Takeshi whereas Tarantino (at least in movies he directs) lives out his dreams of acting glory through other actors. And so, KBv2 is packed with great performances--while I don't think QT did any favors to Vivica A. Fox or Lucy Liu in part I, the rest of the Deadly Vipers Assassination Squad get to deliver knock outs; Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen and David Carradine all get the roles of their careers and are given time to run with them. Madsen, in particular, who plays a washed-up ne'er-do-well who's a cowboy bouncer samurai fuck-up who's one part lonely drunk, one part vicious sadist, owns his role. (The real killer performance, though, is the guy who gets to play the elderly Mexican pimp near the end of the flick--his flirting, dangerous banter with The Bride, highlighted by close-ups of his teetering, doped-out eyes is the most riveting piece of flashy character acting since Gary Oldman in True Romance. Who is this guy? I've seen him credited as Michael Parks, who I thought was the drawling sheriff in Vol. I (a character, and I didn't realize this until consulting IMDB, who pops up in From Dusk 'Til Dawn). If it turns out that he was both characters--which I doubt--I'll kind of crap my pants a little in shock) Ultimately, both parts of Kill Bill emerge as the world's biggest MASH note to Uma Thurman, who in KBv2 gets to play other sides to her single-minded harridan, and, by the end of the last reel, I think everyone in the audience was in love with her at least a little. Although immature and loaded with a therapist might call "issues," Kill Bill, Vol. 2 is a love letter to Uma--and to B-cinema--that proves surprisingly moving. I'm sure that, just as with Part I, I'll find myself wandering off to the theater to see it at least once or twice more when it opens. Sigh. Okay. Now I get to go do this exact sort of blabbity-blab for comic books. I'll see ya. posted by Jeff Lester | 2:58 PM | 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 | Thursday, April 08, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Social Commentary meets Flesh-Eating! O yeah, baby; I have braved the wilds of the Haloscan users forum and I have emerged victorious! Haloscan is one of those quasi-benevolent scams that hosts free commenting for their blogs (I'm assuming the scam is they get everybody's name, email and predillections while doing so), which is a truly cool thing. However, the tech support seems unaware (or else unwilling to face) the sad and simple fact that Blogger is to the new decade what AOL was to the last--it is the land of the never-ending newbs, from which info-zombies shamble, unable to have anything explained to them in tech speak because they don't know what it means.I was having problems adjusting the size and font of the comment and trackback links on my blog. Not surprising, since the forums are filled with people posting the same problem. Amusingly, the answer is almost always the same: "We've covered this already. Search the forums." You'd think that if this problem came up often enough that the admins didn't even want to copy and paste an actual solution, they'd put in one of their FAQs, wouldn't you? But of course, half the problem is, sadly, whatever the admins put in the FAQ just isn't going to make much sense to the one-stop blog-n-quick types like me who learned nearly nothing about their blogs. (I spent a little bit of time trying to make those side "Listening/Reading/Playing" bars I never update...and that are so buried under Archive links, I doubt anyone sees them--but I'm really just as much of a newb.) And that's not even counting the fact that Haloscan supports not just Blogger, but also iBlog, Movable Type, Diaryland, Pitas, Scribble, and etc., so there's probably not one standard solution. In the end, I found one answer (create a default font for your Haloscan script and put in your styles) that didn't bother to follow up with the point that you have to define the Haloscan script to that default. The answerer didn't bother because if you know anything at all about programming, that's just a "well, duh" point, too obvious to make. Thank God, farther back, a "well, duh" guy answered with a less elegant solution of putting font definitions right before your Haloscan script. And somehow, dummy newbie made the connection. ("Oh! Hey, look there's a little command defining the time to the time font! A-and there's the command turning it off!") So I have a nice, relatively non-kludgy solution to my problem. Which is great because when I install this commenting thing for real (on the CE Savage Critic bog that has to be created...), it will save a lot of time and embarrassment. You may have noticed my piquant shambling zombie metaphor above. This is courtesy of the remake of Dawn of the Dead which I just saw again, with Larry who was seeing it for the first time. I liked it so much the first time, I wanted to drag an old-school horror fan to see if they would like it. (Sadly, I wasn't able to take Tim when he was in town the other week.) It's a good film. It holds up under a second viewing, which I think is always the sign of a good horror film. Horror flicks are like soda pop--a lot of times when you come back, everything's gone flat--and this DotD, although no richer on the second viewing and admittedly flatter, has the good performances, the great soundtrack, and the dark humor, to keep the repeat viewer entertained. And for those who bemoaned the lack of commentary in the remake, I think there's just different material for comment. The first Dawn of the Dead is a particularly trenchant allegory of "white flight" and blind consumerism. The remake has that incredible first fifteen minutes where society falls apart in a way that feels very familiar to us post-9/11ers. Also, at the risk of giving things away, I, as someone unhappily following the rise of "fetal rights" in this country, noticed a caustic pro-family commentary in the Mekhi Phifer storyline this time around. It says a lot about this version of Dawn of the Dead that a metaphor-fetishist like myself missed it the first time around because I was too engaged in the characters. posted by Jeff Lester | 6:03 PM | The Pitch: It's like a Time-Sink meets a Time Suck! Ahhh, the wonder that is Romance of the Three Kingdoms VII. I found it in the bins at Best Buy for $19.99, and after hearing great things about it on some video game fora, decided to pick it up. With a few hours on my hands on Sunday, I popped it in and--voila!! There went all my free time up to now.As is always my downfall, I was initially attracted by the eccentricity of ROTK VII: A Japanese video game devoted to the great tome of Chinese historical fiction? The ability to play over 50 different historical characters, or create my own line of characters that would then mingle with great Generals and Lieges? Plus, the chance to write letters and win poetry tournaments? How quaint! Well, that quaint motherfucking game ate up a full six hours of my life yesterday--from ten to four, all I did was maneuver my Ronin in and out of various friendships, earned the trust of a liege, then was appointed to a town, earned everyone's trust, recruited generals, etc., etc. I didn't even get a chance to compete in the Tournament of Poetry until eight or nine game years into it, and I didn't start winning until about three years after that. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but if my guy hadn't just died, I'd still be lying in bed with the joystick in one hand, a diet coke in the other, watching the real world bounce brightly off the windowpane while I tried to finagle a visit to the Great Wall of China from some general. And the more I dug around about the game online, the more I found. Secret characters, like Abe Lincoln, Harry Houdini and Mahatma Gandhi? Check. Magic items? Check. The chance to catch and tame tigers? Check. It's lucky my guy died (of old age, I should add--how often does that happen in a video game). It allowed me to put on pants about four hours earlier than I might have otherwise. (Actually, Larry and I are going to a matinee at two, so it would have happened sooner, anyway). Now I can go grab lunch with my beautiful girlfriend, and carpe that god-damned diem. I'm going to pretend I have lost ROTK VII (at least until Edi visits the East Coast later this month), so please be kind and don't mention it before then. posted by Jeff Lester | 12:42 PM | |
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