Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
|
|
| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
|
|
Friday, October 31, 2003 The Pitch: It's like a Disney Cartoon meets a Jane Campion Film! Wow, Halloween falls on a Friday this year, and all the movie studios can think to open is Brother Bear and In the Cut? Jesus. At least there's the re-release of Alien, and I guess it's better to open your "scary" movies in the few weeks before Halloween but--I dunno. Kind of a letdown, if you ask me.So, Happy Halloween--I'm sure you'll find your scares where you can. Me, I'm 37--all the scares are right there on the surface. I usually stay away from people on my birthday because I get morbid and depressed. That seems sillier and sillier each year because I have an embarrassment of riches in my life, and yet that never seems to stop me. It's no surprise then that this entry started off with me talking about the movies playing in theaters because in the past, that's what I've snuck off and done. I remember watching Timecop at a matinee one year and thinking my life could sink no lower. How young I was! It could have been the sequel to Universal Soldier. Anyway, I'm off to go pay the rent, and then grab the girlfriend for an odd mix of What Jeff Likes to Do--catching a movie, shopping at Costco and eating rich food. Many thanks to all the wonderful people in my life--as each birthday rolls around, I'm more grateful for you than ever. posted by Jeff | 9:24 AM | Wednesday, October 29, 2003 The Pitch: It's like the Kill Bill Soundtrack meets Elliott Smith CDs! Yeah, I've been listening to a lot of Elliott Smith, still. After listening to it over the end of last week, riffs and chords visited me during the loose moments of work, like bits of food caught between the teeth you're suddenly aware your mouth has been working on the whole time.So after lunch with Dave, I picked up the Kill Bill soundtrack and I've listened to it once or twice already. It's funny listening to what actually turns out to be what. The music I was sure would be the "Battle Without Honor and Humanity" is actually taken from a ten minute cover of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood." What I was sure was once of The RZA's tunes was actually "Battle Without Honor and Humanity." Another tune that I was sure would either be the RZA or one of the Japanese soundtrack tunes was in fact a piece of "Run, Fay, Run" by Isaac Hayes. And the similarity between the sound of "The Flower of Carnage" by the sound of Meiko Kaji and "The Lonely Shepherd" by Zamfir is pretty striking. Apart from how well the music suits the action in the film, the most striking thing to me about the soundtrack is how well it does between finding the sonic equivalences between Spaghetti Western soundtracks, Japanese soundtracks, Blaxploitation tunes, and a Zamfir song. It all ties together pretty darn well, just as the film tries to tie these filmic equivalents to one another. It's also cool watching the three trailers, although I've seen two of the three online (I forgot how much the first teaser includes flashes from both films). The third one which shoots for the post-ironic revenge flick angle is enjoyable for bits and pieces (seeing the title of the film in quotes as they used to have in older trailers is the best bit) but nothing new. It's not going to be the soundtrack for Nano this year, though, I can tell. It's a little too tied to the movie--eviscerations and blood spatters and little flimic giblets are about the farthest thing from my mind with this year's Nano. In fact, can I talk a bit about this year's Nano. I have a bit of a dirty secret that I haven't shared with the other Nanites on my list. It's that this year, Nanowrimo is going to be my vacation. I think that's the only way it's going to work for me--as a vacation from my other novel. I feel embarrassed talking about my other novel, because it's not really a novel. It's people in rooms, and they're talking to each other. Or they sit and think about themselves. It's supposed to be a novel about video games but only once or twice have I actually come close to making that my topic and I've haven't done a good job with the topic either time. Once I realized I could write about video games as a viable topic, I realized what a perfect topic it's about--that strange area where reflexes and imagination meet sitting on your ass and interacting with your furniture. From the outside, nothing looks more autistic than someone playing a video game--their eyes strangely blank and faces slack until suddenly their arms yank to one side or another. But I've bungled the topic, sadly, because I just sit down and write whatever I want to write about. And what's coming out is stuff about this houseful of video game players, and how they interact, and how they like and who they don't and why, and I think about the struggle to break out of yourself and love somebody else. At least it's supposed to be about that. It's really just me Playing Barbies in my head--taking one figure and have them talk to the other figure, figure out ways to angle one Barbie to another so it seems like they're whispering, or rocking their heels back in laughter, or taking offense at what another one is trying to say. This is a tremendously sad thing to me, on one level: I'm taking a vacation from Playing Barbies. It's sad because play is the last thing one should need a vacation from. It's also sad because I don't know how I'm not doing anything more, really, with this other book, this NaNovel, than going over to somebody else's house and Playing Barbies. I've spent a little bit of time thinking about the main character, and then the main character's wife, and the main character's best friend, and I don't see how I can keep it from being the same thing with different figures. I wish I wasn't so deeply loathe to having things happen in my books. Just because it would be nice to give them to other people to read. Or, even better, have other people buy them and then other other people buy them. I wish I wasn't such a long way away from that but right now, looking out the dark window, it seems so far away I tremble at the prospect of ever getting there. posted by Jeff | 5:41 PM | Tuesday, October 28, 2003 The Pitch: What is This Thing You Call Pitch? It's true. I think I might blog more if I had to worry about the fucking pitch less.Or maybe not. Today seems to be one of those days when I lie to myself a lot. It's how I made it through. One reason I love where I work: this morning, I walked into the elevators and two guys were talking about parking. Sadly, if I hadn't been slammed afterward with work, I might have been able to recount this remarkable conversation, but I'll have to quickly and poorly summarize, instead. Hey, one guy says, I found a spot. A new parking spot. What do you mean, the other guy asks. You mean, another unmetered spot? That's right, the first guy says (they're both in suits). At [address I can't recall]. Thought you would want to know. It's like the spots around here? Yeah. Well, no. These are marked off for construction--someone put up tape. But the work never started. So the spots are just open. They're not metered. Nice. Yeah. Not as nice as the ones right out here. Yeah, the first guy says. Sure. But the spots out here you have to arrive at 5:30. True. I just wanted to let you know, the first guy says, and the tone in their conversation is he's the younger brother trying to teach the older brother something for a change, rather than vice-versa. Well, the second guy says. Thanks. I'll add them to the list. Like at Elephant, the first guy says. Elephant and Cathedral. That's right, the second guy says with amusement. Elephant and Cathedral. They look at each other like they're about to laugh and they get out on their floor, and then I'm alone in the elevator, also amused. Parking spots talked about like they're jungle legends, is what I'm thinking. It's the word elephant. Free parking in the Financial District is like the elephant's graveyard. Everyone wants to find it, and everyone likes bullshitting in front of a stranger about how they've been there. Funny. posted by Jeff | 10:00 PM | Saturday, October 25, 2003 The Pitch: It's like Twin Dragons meets Double Impact! An incredibly hot day here at work--a co-worker said that the weather prediction for San Francisco was going to be the low 90's. I'm sure the downtown area hit that, and up here on the top floor, with no AC, I think we came close to the triple digits.But right now it's cooling down to, say, somewhere in the 80's or high 70's, and it's the kind of dusk you get on warm days where everything seems startlingly distinct, yet the lights coming on have a faint glow to them. Nano starts a week from today. My birthday is the day before that. Daylight Savings Time ends tonight. I am prepared for none of these things. posted by Jeff | 6:41 PM | Wednesday, October 22, 2003 One of the things I had wanted to talk to here, at some point, if I had gotten around to it, was the tenth anniversary of the death of my friend Chris, who I still think of often and whose exact day of departure I blank on as frequently as possible. I don't think it would be, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was, seeing as how coincidence likes to bunch things up, so that I can think of today as both the day he died and the day I found Elliott Smith killed himself. I've been spending too much time today listening to the two Smith albums I've got, all scrambled up on the player and the titles of the songs seeming like awful commentary: the first four songs on the playlist are "Bye," "Wouldn't Mama Be Proud," "Easy Way Out," and "Ballad of Big Nothing." Of course, the spell of Smith's soft singing can be commentary enough--most of the songs sound like lullabyes or eulogies, and combined with the lyrics of the songs themselves, they made for exquisitely painful listening before. Now, they're a little too painful--but I'm still listening anyway. posted by Jeff | 3:12 PM | Tuesday, October 21, 2003 The Pitch: It's like The Secret Sharer meets Back to School! So, yes, no updates here for a while, about which I'm sorry.Weirdly, I've been logging in to blogger every day, and thinking about what anecdote I'll pass along--lord knows there are plenty of 'em, and I've also wanted to write about Chuck Kinder's Honeymooners, an odd book easily ignored unless you're walking one down one or more different literary ley lines. Kinder seems to be the inspiration in some ways for the character of Grady Tripp in Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys--Kinder is a big bearish professor of writing at a university of Pittsburgh with a never-ending novel he'd been working on for years that tipped the scale at several thousand pages. Thanks to a great interview with Kinder I found while researching Chabon's book on Teh Intarweb, I found out about Kinder and his book, finally published in 2001 as a sleek 358 page book. I picked it up not just because of this ley line, but also that of Raymond Carver, who was one of Kinder's closest friends, and who is the thinly veiled rascal Ralph Crawford. Carver's shadow looms large over Humboldt County--many of his early stories were set there, and he had spent his time as a student and a writer and a drunk there--and so I have a half-assed interest in the man, just as I do his fine literature, of which I've read not nearly enough. So Honeymooners sounds, in it way, like literary fanfic: Raymond Carver and Grady Tripp raise hell in the Bay Area in the '70s. What's not to like? Some 182 pages in, I'm still trying to answer that question. Some sections are very funny, and some sections are beautifully written and sad, and some sections fearlessly peer into the hearts and motivations of characters closely modeled on actual lovers and friends. And yet, still not liking it that much, and I only have some half-developed theories why. One of them may be, honestly, that the form of the book--men behaving badly, and speaking without quotation marks--is the form I had picked for NaNoWriMo this year. (In other words, I picked the "laziest way to write a novel" form.) And Honeymooners shows just how lazily that approach can read, I think--maybe I'm just seeing in Kinder's achievement, my upcoming month-long pratfall. In any event, hopefully more news about me in some point in the future. A lot's going on. posted by Jeff | 10:21 AM | Saturday, October 11, 2003 I hate motherfuckin' Blogger. I wrote that entry on Kill Bill back on Wednesday, published it, and it didn't show up. So I had to do all sorts of crap with it just now, and it still told me it published when it didn't. Stoopid fuckin' blogger.... Many thanks to super-girlfriend Edi B. for pointing it out. posted by Jeff | 9:46 AM | Kill Bill, Vol. I, is less like a movie and more like a meal. It's almost two full hours of visual and aural stimulation, and it is a film geek's wet dream. Of course, that film geek is Quentin Tarantino. In an interview over at MSNBC, Tarantino says: All I can say is, if I went and saw Kill Bill; I wouldn't be able to even think about seeing another movie until I saw Kill Bill again. I'd feel like, "That's a movie like sex. That's a movie like drugs, you know? I can't even think of another girl until I've had another piece of that pussy. I've got to get high on that drug again, like, tomorrow.How this top-notch-designer drug--designed for a clientele of one--will set with the rest of us, there will apparently be a lot of variation. Hayden, a cool cat I know from CE who sat behind me, said, "I wasn't that impressed. It's incredibly derivative. I'm glad they broke it in two parts, though." Justin, Edi's brother, said as we were heading back into the car, "The story didn't engage me at all, but everything else did." And Edi seemed to enjoy it, but said, "That felt like a movie broken into two parts. That wasn't a full movie." Justin probably offered the best oblique critique of the movie when he said of Tarantino, "I bet that guy has a great apartment." Kill Bill is a revenge story where Uma Thurman, playing The Bride, seeks revenge on the her ex-comrades who killed her husband, her child, and put her in a coma for four years. In KB(Vol. I), The Bride is less a character as a revenant, something like the Clint Eastwood character in High Plains Drifter, a fierce stare and a hunger for vengeance. Thus, the first part of Kill Bill is a ferocious, enormous beast, like a dinosaur, propelled by a story as dim and as driven as a dinosaur brain, as slight as a tiny twitch in the basal ganglia. A dinosaur, an apartment, a meal--five full courses of rampage and over-saturation, in which Tarantino not only has the movie open with an announcement that it's filmed in ShawScope but also a vertiginous "And Now Our Feature Presentation" intro straight from a Times Square grindhouse. It has a Tokyo beautifully rendered in deliciously fake miniature, an anime sequence set to Spaghetti Western music, a banana-yellow truck with "Pussy Wagon" painted on the back, Sonny Chiba as a retired swordmaker turned sushi chef, the Green Hornet theme song, a japanese school girl wielding guilltoine, and Darryl Hannah, wearing the eyepatch from Switchblade Sisters, whistling a Bernard Hermann theme. All of these things, like the tiny arms of a T.Rex, appear to lack little use other than the resultant delight of the viewer. More than any movie I can think of since, I dunno, Godard's Band A Parte, Kill Bill, Vol. I is the post-modern toybox opened wide explicitly to delight and excite the senses. And its very success in this area point to its failure: it's KB(Vol. I) that finally made me understand the connection between the sensualist and the fascist. A tribute to his beloved exploitation films and their international scope--Shaw Brothers Kung Fu flicks, Japanese samurai movies, Italian spaghetti westerns and the unflinching baseness of blaxploitation films--Kill Bill (v.1) tries to capture all of these movies at once (Again, from the MSNBC interview: "I told [cinematographer] Bob Richardson, 'Look, I want each reel to play like it's a reel from a different movie, all right? You take this reel from Death Rides a Horse, and this reel from Zatoichi's Revenge and then that reel from a Shaw Brothers film. We didn't need one look to bring the movie together. What will bring the movie together is one voice; my voice, my personality;and Uma's image, all right?"), a sweep of incorrigible ambition and ultimate fascism. Exploitation movies, done on the cheap and with little to offer the viewer other than the chance to see what they've never seen before, ultimately can never show everything the moviemakers or the audience can want. They simply don't have the budget or the means. And the best exploitation movies use this limitation to their advantage--leaving scenes unseen and lines unsaid to grow in the viewer's mind. You don't know how the family in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre got so fucked up. You don't know what force powers The Shade in Halloween, or why civilization has fallen in Switchblade Sisters, or who's behind the gang in Assault on Precinct 13. And in the rich alluvial earth of the unknown, the imagination is allowed to take root and, should it choose, grow. But in Kill Bill, you're not allowed to wonder about O'Ren Ishii's origin--you're shown it. You're not allowed to wonder why The Bride hates Julie Dreyfus' character, you get to see it. You get to know what happened to The Bride while she was in the coma, you get to know what the policemen who find the massacre in the church say, you get to know why The Bride was allowed to live. The only questions you might have are for things I suspect Tarantino will answer in Volume 2. But otherwise, Tarantino has the budget and the ambition to show you everything. The endless jets of arterial spray, the beheadings and eye-gougings and ankle-severings--that's one thing. But this inability to let anything go unseen bleeds into every bit of Kill Bill, and leaves the imagination strangely stunted and inert. Such attempts to shut down the imagination are the province of fascism, where the imagination is always an enemy, because it allows the self, time and again, to break away from state. Tarantino wants the audience to know what it feels like for him to watch a movie--where nothing exists but the movie, where your eyes don't move from the screen for a second, where the mind is quieted under pure sensation, and the eye sees every detail, the body twitches under every blow and the mouth laughs at every crudity. This, Tarantino seems to be saying, is what it's like to love film if you're Quentin Tarantino. But that knowledge comes at a cost, one that many viewers may not care to pay (or, for that matter, pay twice). You might feel a little too oversaturated to be cranky at the end of Kill Bill (v.1), but you might find yourself withholding your affection for the film; I think because your imagination, like someone who's sat next to an entertaining party guest who won't shut up and has no interest, ultimately, in what anyone else has to say, is going to come out of Kill Bill feeling slightly cramped and jostled, tired and sore for being continually elbowed, but otherwise unacknowledged. I don't think many people will feel they "need" to see Part II, because need grows from the imagination, something tied to, but stronger than, mere pleasure. People might go see Part II, just like they might return to a restaurant that seved them a good meal. Don't get me wrong--I enjoyed Kill Bill, just as I enjoyed Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, a book similarly ambitious and breathtaking and ersatz. If ntohing else, Tarantino knows how to use Uma Thurman as an actress as no other director does, and her strange mix of classic beauty, actorly ambition and modern self-consciousness, which trips her up in nearly everything else she does serves her to excellent effect here. The Bride is a creature of rage, and her pain feels real enough to keep the viewer grounded in the movie no matter how cipherous the character actually is. But it's the way she moves, the way she looks in her yellow jump suit, with a sword in one hand and blood spatters across her face and chest, that propulses Kill Bill from thrill to thrill. You'd never believe a blonde girl in a track suit would be an even remotely convincing Bruce Lee imitator, but Thurman captures not the air of genuine threat Lee used to generate (no one, I think, will ever be able to capture that air) but she does get the genuine charisma Lee produced in such situations. As a meal, as a well-decorated apartment, as a love letter to Thurman and as a strange thudding beast misplaced in time, Kill Bill Volume I is a success, at least to me. Like Tarantino, I want to go see it again, and probably would be at it now if it had opened yet. But as a movie, Kill Bill is bloated it totters on the verge of being a burden. It is so over-abundant it had no choice but to submit to a Procrustean solution to get released, and, from its tottering girth, if you climb to its peak and look to the horizon, you can see what may well be the end of cinema, cinema fading like the setting sun into the many folds of the movie's extravagant obesity. posted by Jeff | 9:40 AM | Tuesday, October 07, 2003 So the polls open at 7:00 a.m. I was there ten minutes early. Incredibly, there was a couple in front of me, who I thought, of course, were poll workers, but were a couple who'd moved to the Excelsior from San Jose. At two minutes to seven, a woman comes up behind us. "Aren't they open yet?" "No, not yet." "Well, this is crazy." At exactly seven, she walks by all of us, peeks her head in the door of the school library where we're voting (one of those redwood embossed trailers public schools are so fond of) and yells in, "Hey, come on! Open the damn polls! Some of us have to get to work!" Then she walks back behind me and slams her body three times into the trailer, like someone kicking a car that won't stop. What I is to say, in a calm, rational voice, "Hey, come on. These are volunteers here, and you've got an extra hour to get to work," and I want to say this while holding the woman upside down and kicking her. And this is why I end up saying nothing--because if I say something and she doesn't back down, I will try to kill her. So I don't say anything. A woman poked her head out and apologized--they were all first-time poll workers and they were having a problem and had called a supervisor in. Then they let us in to vote. The woman who slammed the trailer was voter number one, and got to initialize the voting machine roll to show there had been no previously entered votes. Four hours later, I'm still angry and ashamed. I keep trying to slice it a thousand different ways but it still seems lousy. Is that sort of entitlement the result of our crappy drive-thru culture? And how ironic that voter number one was the last person to show up, and the biggest jerk to boot. It's like watching bad juju cast on democracy right before my very eyes. posted by Jeff | 11:03 AM | The Pitch: It's like Into the Night meets Cabin Fever! Insomnia again. Last night, it was my stomach trying to kill me. Tonight, I woke up at three, went and peed, and then proceeded to feel hives rise up along my legs. By the time, I got some aloe on, got covered up (I don't know if there's a mite in the bed, or what) and got back into the bed it was 4:00 and, by 4:30, an hour before I was supposed to wake up, I just threw in the towel and got up.A lot I've been meaning to write about here, and haven't had much of a chance. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre blew my tiny mind when I saw it last week, and I also had an interesting time staring the death of Bollywood film right in the face with Boom at the Naz Super 8. Is a lack of musical numbers, three hour running times and weepy melodrama worth the excitement of English dialogue, gun fights and Indian supermodel nipples? I'd personally say no, but the Indian supermodel nipples make it a tough call. As for Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I'm trying to figure out why it is that I'm deeply, deeply satisfied by movies so dark they practically glow with a black nimbus, but similarly themed books hold absolutely no appeal. I've been reading this great compilation of Stephen King essays and interviews and included in it is this introduction for Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door, where King praises Ketchum as a hero to people who write suspense fiction. King compares Ketchum favorably to Jim Thompson and goes on to talk about all the impressively unflinching brutality in the Girl Next Door, where kids, under the guidance of an insane caretaker, slowly torture and maim an innocent girl. On the same day I saw Boom and TCM (someday, a truly hilarious misunderstanding will ensue with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Turner Classic Movies and I kinda hope I'm there to see it), I picked up Jack Ketchum's The Lost. The first chapter of The Lost has to do with three friends who are hanging out in the woods, and one of the friends decides to kill two women, and gets away with it. A few years later, we see all of it start to go to hell. I made it through about fifty pages of The Lost and then put it down, and doubt I'll ever pick it back up again. It just seemed unpleasant and ghoulish and obvious to me, which is odd since, less than a day earlier, I sat riveted as Marilyn Burns screamed while being mocked by a table of violent psychopaths. More than riveted--I was deeply gratified. It may have something to do with a complex issue of verisimilitude, the thin line between veracity and belief. I just don't believe in the charismatic pussyhound in Ketchum's The Lost who shoots two women and has such a hold over the younger teens with him that they still blindly accept him, just like I don't buy the crazy woman and the torturing kids, just like I don't buy everything I've ever read by Richard Laymon whose plots are fueled by a near-constant priapism mixed in with violence. But I believe the three inbred crazies of TCM, and the way the hitchhiker starts laughing as he takes the knife and starts jabbing it into his own hand... That may be because the victims in TCM are decent types, people who pick up a hitchhiker and have no idea what in the name of Christ they're getting themselves into. Or maybe it's some crucial disconnect between screen and literature for me, and I'm able to view the horrors of TCM in a way that preserves my sense of self-value, whereas similar literature tries to push me inside the head of the horrors, a push I summarily reject. You don't have to go inside the heads of Leatherface or the Hitchhiker or the Cook--the actors put the details on the outside, and that's really all you need. (There's something about the shy smile that Jim Siedow gets when Edwin Neal is mocking their victim that gives me far more empathy--and thus scares the shit out of me--than the hundreds of pages of being inside a killer's mind in Ketchum, Laymon or countless splatterpunks). Hey, my alarm went off. Time to get up, and just as I started yawning. Today is going to be a pretty rough day at work, I expect. posted by Jeff | 5:40 AM | |
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
