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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Friday, September 26, 2003 The Pitch: It's like Amadeus meets Animal House! I am sick--not wildly so, but definitely sick. My head has that diving bell thing going on, my sinuses ache and run like a tap that won't fully shut off, and I alternate between marvelling at my energy, which allows me to bound upstairs one moment, and then wish to lie in a swoon on the bed the next.So, just for future reference, I thought I'd post a quick list of sickness do and don'ts: -DO start reviewing your NaNovel--you'll be surprised by the good parts. -DON'T try to finish it--at some point, you'll feel incredibly nauseous and disheartened, and not be entirely sure whether it's the cold or the metaphors being blatantly derivative of Cormac McCarthy. -DON'T listen to Nick Cave, because being unable to sleep at night with Weeping Song or Mercy Seat playing over and over in your head while feverish is not fun. -DO read Kafka--it'll make a lot more sense. -DON'T look at yourself in the mirror. Trust me, don't. -DO eat poorly...within reason. Would I have made it through the day without those little snack portions of Skippy Peanut Butter? I believe not. -DON'T watch MTV. Those fuckers will make you vote on your Nokia cellphone for videos they won't even fully show you. MTV is so intrusive they have to have a corner of the screen pop up to show you what the narcisssistic fuckers at MTV are doing. I hate them. -DO remember that you have Alka-Seltzer Cold Plus stowed away over your sink. DON'T hesitate to take it, particularly when all you have is a super-mild cold like mine. -DO get up and watch TV when you can't sleep, particularly if it's Dave Attell's Insomniac. At some point, all the hollering and cigarette smoking and beer drinking will be comforting and lull you to sleep. -DON'T go to the Writer's Almanac site, because it doesn't show the entry for this week accurately. Although all born in different years, did you know that F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and T.S. Eliot were born on consecutive days this week? -DON'T spend too much time on your blog entries, particularly if you have to be at the comic store in less than an hour. posted by Jeff | 12:10 PM | Wednesday, September 24, 2003 The Pitch: It's like The Wizard of Space and Time meets Redbeard! Which is to say, I have some sort of fast-slow problems working here. I 've got to get my ass in the shower and get cleaned up: Edi and I are hosting dinner, and I've got to get myself looking pretty before I show up over there. But of course, I finally, finally, finally got around to opening up my old, old pile of writing and started cleaning it up. I miscalculated how much time could fly doing something like that.It's hilarious that I make my living typing for other people, because I'm such a fucking inaccurate typist. Part of it is the Palm keyboard, which is a little glitchy sometimes about what it takes to register as a hit on the keys, and some of it is that it's a non-ergo keyboard and I'm not nearly as fast, or as accurate, on such a board. But part of it is just that I've always been a comically inept typist. I only wish I had counted how many times I've gone back and corrected typos in this paragraph because it would be a terrible amount. A truly horrifying and terrible amount. Now, when I'm writing "for myself," do I bother to correct my typos as I make 'em, like I am here. Oh hell, no. I figure I'll get around to running spellcheck on it and then cleaning it up. The problem is, when you've got 230 pages (single-spaced) of typo-laden text, spellchecking is a soul-destroying exercise. What I started doing today is taking the section that I'm cleaning, pasting it in a separate document, spell-checking it, and then pasting it back into the regular document. That made things go a little more quickly. From what I can tell, I formatted twice as much today as I did the last time I tried cleaning that document up. And the stuff I came across from last time--the stuff that looks nicely pre-formatted and full justified--I admit I enjoyed reading it. It made me think of the stuff I was reading in "Flow Chart," funnily enough. Makes me wonder if the solution to some of my super-dense stream-of-consciousness stuff is to cut it into lines, and make it into poetry. Although it didn't really have a big finish (or really any finish, frankly), it had a natural enough rhythm that I could do that. It's a thought. What time is it? Oh, Jeezis... Okay, I'm out of here. Maybe tomorrow I'll post some of that work and you can see what I'm talking about. (And God help us all. With November coming up, there'll probably be a lot more entries like this.) posted by Jeff | 4:55 PM | Tuesday, September 23, 2003 The Pitch: It's like Seinfeld meets The Bodyguard! So for reasons I won't go into--in part because I'm not supposed to know them--three guys in suits showed up yesterday.Now, where I work, three guys in suits are always showing up, although as more women get further and further in the male-dominated workplace, it's more like two guys in a suit and a sharply dressed woman. Lawyers, and almost always, they have a lawyerly thing going on. These three guys didn't have the lawyerly thing going on. They moved their arms too quickly, making their arms jerk in their coats. They would lean over a counter and then grimace as their ties cut at their throat. Blue-collar guys in suits. Security. The security guys sit next to the receptionist, making small chat and watching everyone's beltline and hands and maybe looking you in the face. And about the third time I passed this one guy--a stocky, bald guy with a bit of a glare--I thought, "Man, that guy's a jerk." This marked dislike kind of caught me by surprise. After all, I didn't know the guy, and I knew the job he was doing was a hard one. He seemed a bit tougher than the other guys, but he wasn't being abusive. He was just subtly radiating enmity in a way that rubbed me the wrong way, and yet also felt familiar. I walked slowly up the stairs, looking at him as he sat in his chair with his fingers carefully crossed over his belly. He turned a bit to one side and I said to myself, "Holy crap! It's that asshole from the lobby!" Now, I hadn't seen that asshole from the lobby in four or five years but I realized it was him. He'd been new to the building's security force and he'd given crap to one of my co-workers and he and I had yelled at each other. (I think that's what happened.) Some really stupid rules were in place (a memo a decade earlier had been sent to reception, allowing people working on 28 to come and go before 8:00 a.m. as long as they signed in. Seven years later, we got cards we swiped over sensors in reception, which should have obviated the sign-in but, since no one had retracted the memo, people on 28 had to sign in as well as swipe their cards while people going to 30 didn't. It took me literally years to get this undone, since the memo had to be retracted by the person who wrote it who, of course, left the firm a year after they wrote it, and the current human resources people, who never showed up before 8:00 a.m., couldn't understand what the problem was and so never bothered to call and resolve it.) and we'd argued when he tried to crack down on somebody over something so stupid. I hadn't seen him, like I said, in four or five years, so it took me a few minutes to place him. It annoyed me to see him there, next to the receptionist, leaning back in his chair. He'd disappeared not long after our fight and after a year or so of not seeing him, I assumed he'd been quit or fired (frequently, they rotate out to different buildings so you don't see them for a while). Now, though, I realized he'd been promoted, and was working the plainclothes end of things. More money, more autonomy, all because he yelled at women over Kafkaesque regulations. It depressed me. I walked by him and glared. Fifteen minutes later, I passed by again to go get some mineral water from downstairs. As I came back again, I gave what I hoped was a quick dismissive glance and as I passed by the far side of the reception desk, he said, "Still working late?" I turned around, and he said, "I remember you from when you used to work downstairs," he said. "You always used to work late." The receptionist was literally between us as we looked at each other. "Yeah, yeah," I said. "Work early, work late." "Yeah," he said. "I remember you." "Hey, yeah," I said. "That's right. Wow. That was a long time ago." He nodded. "Well," I said, "I guess you're still with the company. Good to see you're still around." This was a craven lie. He'd caught me off-guard me because I almost never get recognized. I've walked by, or sat next to, high school friends, failed dates, ex-girlfriends, former co-workers, ex-girlfriends of acquaintances, women I drank with in cars, venerated college mentors, and girls I'd made out with in closets, and not been recognized (although some of those probably pretended not to recognize me, just as I pretended not to recognize them). I'm used to it--it's a charisma thing. But he'd recognized me. Our argument occurred in the morning--I wonder if he remembered I worked late because he'd hoped to catch me after work? "Yeah," he said, glaring at me while I glared at him. "Good to see you, too." It's funny because it's inconsequential, but it's creepy because I really don't like this guy and he really doesn't like me. And although it kind of makes sense, what with a heated argument and all, I'll be honest. Back before I'd ever argued with that guy, I hadn't liked him. He'd struck me as a short guy who'd come out of the military without proving to whomever what he'd wanted to prove, and he was going to prove it to everyone now that he was surrounded by people who weren't also issued guns. Who knows what it is? People talk about pheromones, or vibes, or past life blah-de-blahs, but it seems both deeper and more absurdly trivial than that. In a way, it's as comforting as it is amusingly sad. It is something that, although fleeting, even four or five years couldn't erase. As I get older, something strong enough to resist the erosion of time can't help but be respected by me, perhaps even treasured a bit, no matter how dark and furious. posted by Jeff | 8:05 AM | Saturday, September 20, 2003 The Pitch: It's like The Grind meets The Conformist! Work is excruciatingly dull today, although at least it's being merciful enough to go quickly. Edi and her siblings are on a quick overnight trip to see the parent tonight, which means I've got a free dance card. Said dance card will be filled, I expect, with dinner out of a can, video games, and an early night. This is where others might mewl about how couplehood has tamed them, but that was my idea of a good Saturday long before I met Edi. Working in the bar through college made me savor any Friday or Saturday night not spent jammed up against strangers, and I guess in many ways my preference, particularly after the long work day, is go and be brainfried.Work was pleasantly busy up until I went to lunch, and has been blissfully quiet since I got back. That means I've had a few hours to just surf about the Net, simper in the un-air conditioned heat, and think about NaNoWriMo which, as of today, is exactly six weeks away. Less than that, in some ways, as I have to write the people on the mailing list and try to recruit at least one or two new people and figure out what I'm going to write and, more importantly, how. The first year I did NaNoWriMo, there was such a short amount of time between when I found out about it and when it started, I don't think I had time to second-guess anything. I had a few ideas, but mainly a few tricks. I would give characters variations on the same name, so I could write about whichever one I wanted, when I wanted. I figured out how to put monkeys in there. I had a loose theory what I wanted the story to be about. It turned out chaotically, to put it lightly. I didn't go back and finish some unfinished sections. I rapidly lost the plot. I wrote about whatever was around me, just to keep writing. And even though it was just a tremendous fuckin' mess, it turned out far better than I thought it would. And, from what I can tell, far better than last year's novel. Last year's novel was a novel I'd been wanting to write for a long, long time. I thought I knew everything about it--it was practically going to be like writing from an outline, for Christ's sake. And I swore I would tell the story in linear fashion, with only one set of characters, and only the slightest out (a piece of fiction within the fiction). And I did it--but I barely finished in time, and I was unpleased with the results, and I still haven't pieced it all together. The first novel was like declaring "I will now shit a turd," and somehow pooping out a little fire truck. The second novel was like saying, "Thus, I create life!" and vomiting old placenta into a desk drawer I vowed never to open again. Kara Platoni, a terrific writer and one of the people on my NaNo list, was similarly disappointed in hers. "Sophomore slump," she said, the last time we discussed it. "Yeah!" I agreed. "Yeah, exactly!" By which I mean, yeah, maybe. I can see how never having written a novel before (except for a few very short, very desperate attempts) gave me a ton of things I had never said, a lifetime of stored-up observations and so, like the band whose first album is made up of all the sure-fire hits they've accrued, one or two at a time, over all their previous years, I had nowhere to go but down. But considering the crappy novel I didn't write last year got much more attention and acclaim than the one I did, maybe I just did things wrong. Maybe I really need to sit down without a goal other than keeping myself at the table, rather than an idea of a novel already established in my forebrain and demanding creation. Maybe I can't write about things I've already thought of, just things I think of while I write them. Or maybe it's the other way around. Cad that I am, I actually haven't read anyone's novels from last year. But the most successful of them appear to be novels written by people who sat down with outlines first and knew where they were going. Not like my vague plans of last year. A real map, one developed in enough time to see where my weaknesses will be, and research my way out of them. A part of me (a very big part of me) thinks that's what I should be doing: There's the map. There's the destination. But part of me also wants to see if I can recapture that glorious ephemeral joy of squatting down and going: Hey, look! A fire truck! I don't know. I'm still trying to figure it out. I should probably do it soon, though. November's not getting any closer. posted by Jeff | 6:08 PM | Friday, September 19, 2003 The Pitch: It's like Immortal Beloved meets Glengarry Glen Ross! "Hey, fuck you, Shakespeare! These are shit leads!"(Sorry, one of those rare times where my stupid-ass pitch made me think of a line from the resultant mix. I know it's just general brain exhaustion, but the idea of Ed Harris yelling this to Gary Oldman's Beethoven is making me laff...) Uh, yeah. So I finished the newsletter. I don't know why I see the world in word counts but I do: 6,631 words, of which 5,010 of those are the new comics, and 1,621 is the latest Fanboy Rampage, which is probably my most humiliating one yet. Thanks to Edi for digging through old newsletters to find the column I was looking for--and no, I didn't make the jokes I thought I'd made in it, which either means I'm not going senile, or it really does mean I'm going senile because I now convince myself of things that happened when they didn't. Ahhh, old age, how I psychotically fear you... And now that's out of the way, I have a whole two hours to frolic before going to work. And by "frolic," I mean "shower." I don't know why I decided not bathing was going to help with my deadline, but now it's over, I can get myself cleaned up. And I can also play some video games for a while, and start thinking about what I'm going to do for NaNo. I will always treasure NaNo for all it's given me--a wonderful girlfriend, a comical approximation of working writing habits--but I also value it because it starts the day after my birthday. Now, in September, instead of looking to my birthday and freaking out, I can look to NaNo and freak out instead. And I honestly can't tell you what an invaluable blessing that is for me. So instead I'll go shower. Yaay! posted by Jeff | 11:16 AM | Thursday, September 18, 2003 The Pitch: It's like The Last Starfighter meets Barton Fink! That's actually the header I thought of several hours ago, where my entire life seemed to be either: (a) video games; or (b) the newsletter. I would play Simpsons: Hit & Run for an hour and then work on the newsletter for three (thanks to Diamond and/or UPS, I started working on the newsletter about six hours later than usual). Hit & Run is a pretty decent little mix of GTA and the Simpsons, where you drive around, bash things, try and find hidden coins and complete missions. Very open-ended, the game starts easy and gets hard--after spending an hour swearing at the TV in the mid-morning, I switched back to an earlier level to find all the bonus goodies and enjoyed it much more.Fortunately, before I did so, I went outside and walked up to Balboa Park, just to soak in the lovely weather. And I peeked around the community pool which I hod no idea existed until it got a mention in the Bay Guardian's recent (and, I think, best) Best of the Bay issue. A pretty leisurely walk back too with one bad impulse purchase (flip-flops for the gym, which I now realize aren't plasticy enough and will retain too much water from the showers) and one good one (mmmm, sugarless gum). And I've got 5,000 words of the New Comics out of the way, which means all I have to do now is write the Fanboy Rampage. If I'm lucky, I can craft a light and easy riff on pop culture just under 2K by the end of tonight and have time to run errands tomorrow before work. If I'm not lucky... This is one of those disturbing things about doing FBR, a humor column. I don't know how it is for other people, but for me, writing funny is like catching butterflies. If I'm lucky, I spotted a butterfly earlier in the month and I go 'round that particular meadow to see if it's still there. If I'm not lucky, I have to roam from place to place, looking for damn butterflies. Earlier in the car this week, I thought I came up with a pretty good idea but last night I started thinking I'd already used this idea, as a casual toss-off line in one of my earlier columns. I've been doing this damn thing for five years now, and it turns out I'm starting to lap myself. It's not unusual for me to think of doing a riff on something I've done before (God knows, if Stan Lee hadn't existed, I wouldn't have had a column) but now I'm starting to think of ideas that I think are new and worrying now that they aren't. So I'm looking, on the computer, on the CE website, for the column I think I mentioned this in. I know the exact column but I can't find it. Apparently, there are little bitty gaps in my collection of my own columns. Gee, that's swell. So it looks like I'm gonna have to bite the bullet and hope to god this isn't something I wrote about (by my estimate) roughly a year ago--albeit as just one punchline in a column that tried for a dozen. I hope. If this is what being old is like, I'd like to get off the ride now, please. posted by Jeff | 7:06 PM | Tuesday, September 16, 2003 The Pitch: It's like Being John Malkovich meets Minority Report! Man, other people's blogs rock. I read Nancy's blog every day and I think it's great, of course. Just when I was getting depressed at how reliable and well-written Nancy's blog is, I came across some links to some blogs that review comic books....And now I'm really depressed. This guy reviews comic books, he covers politics, he posts his weight each week. I expect to get bested by Nancy, but this guy? Just some guy? Who writes a blog? Utterly depressing. This morning, while waiting for the (super-late) bus, I was thinking about blogging, the Net, and et cetera. Are we in a new golden age of writing, where the population at large feels compelled to write and express themselves? Or are we just in an age where everyone's publishing their diaries? And even if it's "just" that, isn't that pretty striking? Where will it lead, if it's not some flash-in-the-pan fad? I do think their diarist approach makes blogs similar to the early novels, and I wonder if/how they might develop in the future along similar lines as the novel except different somehow: bloggers staging events, such as dates, and then each writing about it from their individual perspectives. Or >>shudder<< flash mobs, with all the members being bloggers who then recount their sides of the event (I guess it'd have to be a slightly more significant event than a big game of duck, duck, goose...) If so, whatever this new thingy might be, staged fiction, or event literature, bloglit, or whatever the fuck it might be called, it would still lack one of the great strengths of literature: fiction allows you to lie and call it truth. It also allows you to tell the truth about yourself in a way that no one around you (perhaps including yourself) will recognize. I think cowardice is one of traditional literature's greatest strengths, and perhaps its greatest virtue, making it indomitable. But computer culture has thrown asunder so many conventions of modern culture previously deemed involiable, I have to wonder if traditional lit is gonna stay standing... The reason I started this blog entry, you'll be happy to know, is because I went up to Patrick's office during lunch today. Patrick works in EC2. I work in EC West. In Patrick's elevators, there are silent little TVs that flash news updates and fun facts (the word of the day is mellifluous). In my elevators, there is a candy wrapper that a bike messenger has dropped on the floor--if I'm lucky. I pointed this out to Patrick. "Yeah," he said. "And we're owned by the exact same people!" I think Patrick's never seen a wound that couldn't be improved with a little salt. Yes, my heart-shaking epiphany for this entry: I seethe with envy for Patrick's elevators. posted by Jeff | 4:54 PM | Monday, September 15, 2003 The Pitch: It's like The Castle meets Light Sleeper! Monday morning. Work. A bowl of cereal and Kafka's The Castle which I began about a week ago, and am slowly shuddering my way through.When I started it last week, I was pissed about a situation at work and trying to calm myself down, worried my supervisor wouldn't back me and that my trying to do something about being treated badly (by outside co-counsel) would somehow boomerang back on me. That copy of The Castle, that I read then, seemed the hopeless, absurdist struggle of K. against the machinations of the Castle--a grimly amusing battle between a dismissive bureaucrat and a dismissive bureaucracy. This week, now that everything got resolved at work amicably and with all apparent support behind me, I feel like I'm reading a different copy of The Castle, aided in part by the bit of Thomas Mann's introduction I had initially ignored. This feels more like a religious parable, about a man trying to see, essentially, God and the Kingdom of Heaven, and everything that prevents him from doing so: the people around him, himself, and the nature of the very universe. At 151 pages in (after K. has refused to submit to a protocol to the secretary of Klamm, his hunted contact, despite everyone's protestations), it seems like a slightly different book from the one I was reading last week. Kinda makes me wonder what I'll be making of it by this time next week. Part of this may also stem from being able to peruse the deleted sections of The Castle. In fact, I'm midway through a very long section around pg. 148 that was cut in which K. is still struggling over the protocol with his nemesis, the landlady. Gotta say, I'm really kinda envious of Kafka for being able to have his novel possess all these clip-on attachments. He's able to lay it on as thick as he wants in these sections and then have them neatly dismissed by not being part of the official text. Of course, Kafka doesn't really have much to do with it, I think, since the book was published posthumously by his friend Max Brod. Brod dutifully retains all the scraps of The Castle (which is an unfinished novel, I just discovered poking through yet another note and introduction I had previously ignored) and presents them for us to examine--a good thing since The Castle is a mystery, and the bits and pieces of deleted text, alternate text, gossip about the ending (which I turned my eyes from as soon as I started to read it), are all clues--tatters of a mysterious note, maybe--which could be used to decipher that mystery. I imagine this is my third context of The Castle (and probably the most easily exhausted one); as being one of the world's best metanovels. Just as K. frustratedly chases his way through the village to get to The Castle, so too do we battle our way through the book's pages to "get" The Castle, to redeem the experience of reading it by understanding it. As he maneuvers through blind alleys, pulling himself along on the arm of stoic messengers, barges into courtyards and knocks things about in coaches, similarly, the reader chases deleted passages, pulls himself along on the introductions of stoic editors, barges through paragraphs without grasping their meaning, attributes importance to tossed-off asides by infrequently appearing characters... and all of this, to get at the idea of Kafka's intentions, to meet a character who, like Klamm, we might only glimpse once, alone in a room at a writing desk, and the rest of the time must find ourselves at his mercy--every page we turn, every character we encounter, a seeming messenger of his will. posted by Jeff | 9:39 AM | Friday, September 05, 2003 The Pitch: It's like Larry King Live meets Memento! I was watching the TV while sorting comics yesterday, and caught an old sketch of Norm MacDonald playing Larry King at (I think) his wedding reception. It was basically a chance for everyone to turn in a celebrity impression (Cheri Oteri playing Fran Drescher, Dana Carvey playing Ross Perot, Mango playing Al Pacino), but it was the Larry King part that made me laugh. King couldn't actually converse with anyone in any meaningful way. All he could do was give opinions on products. "If you see only one movie this year," he'd intone, "make it Grumpy Old Men! Between Tylenol Tablets and Tylenol Gelcaps, I prefer...Tylenol Tablets!"I had a pretty good laugh until I realized that's basically my blog. I wanted to actually write about something at the moment, but now work is waving itself in my face. People are litterally walking up behind me with work in their hands and saying, "Hey, Jeff. Working on anything?" Of course, I could've tried writing something in the first few hours when nothing was happening, but I was enjoying watching my emails disappear and my webmail crash out, I felt compelled to keep doing that. Oh, well. And Blogger is acting funky, too. I swear to god, somebody's cast a cyber-voodoo curse on me... So I'm afraid I have no choice but to leave you with these words of wisdom: Between Tylenol Tablets and Tylenol Gelcaps, I prefer...Tylenol Gelcaps! posted by Jeff | 12:13 PM | Thursday, September 04, 2003 The Pitch: It's like Jeepers Creepers meets How Stella Got Her Groove Back! Yes, I'm talking about Under The Tuscan Sun: The Motion Picture. It's one thing when the only SFSU writing teacher who I never took a class from had her memoir about fixing up a Tuscan villa turn into a huge hit. It was nice to see somebody from the S.F. State Writing Department hit it big (apart from Stan Rice, who headed up the department until right around the time I started and was fortunate enough to be married to you-know-who), and I got a laugh when I read an article where Ms. Mayes described her teaching situation as "living hell." (The sort of "boy, I dodged that bullet" kind of laugh, let me be clear.)I admit, though, to being a little uneasy reading about the sequel, about the "Tuscan Sun" tours where people could get a tour of the setting in Ms. Mayes' book. But it was nothing compared to the squirminess of seeing a trailer just now for UTS: The Movie. Diane Lane playing Frances Mayes? Wha? Buh? Guh? I don't know why it bugs me--it's probably just a squirmy offshoot of professional jealousy (well, if I was a professional). Maybe it's that the second most successful novel to come out of SFSU and its writing program belongs to a poetry teacher which somehow points to some deep ass-backwardness, or cosmic wrongness, or maybe just a sense that I, a guy who graduated from the writing program without taking a single poetry class, am screwed. S.F. State's writing program had a pretty good mortality rate while I was there. My advisor died not long after I graduated, and one of Patrick's teachers kicked off before. They were both horribly young, maybe in their early 40's. I wonder how often people think about them, or read their books. I know I think of them, from time to time. Maybe that's my problem with the movie. I tend to side with the losers, with the dead, and would feel comforted if perhaps one of their books had hit it big. But history, as they say, is written by the winners. And played by Diane Lane. I have no reason to be offended by such a proposition, but I am skeeved out nonetheless. I suspect that doesn't reflect very well on me, but it's true. posted by Jeff | 5:58 PM | Wednesday, September 03, 2003 God, so much stuff to say, so little stuff to say. I'm elbow-deep in comic books as I try to organize and record twelve longboxes of comic books. This is what I was doing last week, this is what I'll be doing this week. This is probably what I'll be doing next week if I'm not fucking careful. The Receptionists is a truly great name for a band, I think. But their album, The Last Letter, is driving me nuts at the moment. Waifish-sounding girl sings sweetly offkey while pennywhistles blow in the background, also offkey. Gah. Even less luck was had with Dashboard Confessional's MTV Unplugged Version 2.0, an album that seems to exist to make those who've never heard of Dashboard Confessional feel like a really big asshole. For essentially every song, the audience is singing along to every lyric. At points, the singer shuts up and the audience sings without pause straight through to the bridge. It's emocrap devotion taken to a terrifying level--like one could easily erect the American Nazi Party as long as its main tenets were moping over girls and yelping about love affairs ending badly. Maybe I'm on the wrong side of the fence (and only old jerks like me build 'em), but Dashboard Confessional sounded to me like a more generic, more presentable version of Conor Oberst. What else? Hawayein is part of the "Sikhs got it bad" genre of Indian film (I've seen one or two other films in this genre, but don't fill like digging for the titles now). What's cruelly great about Indian films is long running times allow for some sophisticated bluffs (at least to a newbie like me). The first 30 minutes of the movie plays like your average "new guy at college falls for the girl who thinks he's a playboy" Bollywood musical, and so when Indira Gandhi gets assassinated and anti-Punjab riots sweep the city of Delhi, it feels pretty ugly. People burned alive, women raped, crowds beating pleading old men--by the time you find out what happened to the protagonist's family, you're pretty sure there's not going to be any more charming collegiate courtship numbers. And true enough, from there it's brutality, brutality, brutality as warring tribes of Sikh freedom fighters and terrorists battle authorities and each other for control of the territory and a consulting Pakistani general (looking frighteningly like Stephen Seagal in his seventies) rubs his hands and evilly consults how best to create a Punjab state. Thank God for the person sitting behind me, who would go "tsk, tsk, tsk" whenever an atrocity occurred, as if machine-gunning a busload of innocent Hindus was roughly the same breach of etiquette as eating an entree with your salad fork. That helped. Ugh. I just looked over my shoulder and those comic books still haven't sorted themselves. Dammit. Well, I've loaded up on the Conor Oberst music. Back to work. posted by Jeff | 10:14 AM | |
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