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, March 20, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Lost In Translation meets Stuck on You! Reno's pretty fun. Edi and I went for a day or two this week, and I was feeling better than I had in the past week which would have meant I'd have enjoyed it anyway. But health+oysters+pay-per-view+cheap drinks+bathtub not filled with shit left by sloppy maintenance guys+awesome girlfriend=greatness. I could throw some more pluses--like a view from the 25th floor--and a few minuses--like the world's driest room AC giving me a sore throat, and a city full of blustery slow-moving bowlers--but you get the basic picture.Yeah, the American Bowling Congress was having a mammoth convention in Reno with some heady topics on the legislating floor, and so the town was filled with very pleasant, amiable (but barely ambulatory), bowlers. E. and I had just watched The Big Lebowski a week earlier so I was hoping for lots of eccentric types in the vein of Jesus Quintana or Walter Sobchak. No. At least at the convention-attending level, the ABC is filled with Drew Carey types and, I dunno, Martin Landau types; either big-bellied guys with red open faces who talk loud and move slow, or tall old guys with long forearms who talk soft and move slower. I'm convinced the reason why one tram or other was shut down every day we were there is that these guys, instead of waiting, would jam themselves into closing doors and screw up the timing controlling the auto-run shuttles. (I was in a tram when this happened one night, and went on to pissily attribute it to every piece of faulty machinery. Pepsi machine wouldn't take fives? Bowler must have jammed himself in there...) It was no big deal but I felt sorry for Edi--half the time I was madly weaving and hopping through the crowd because I couldn't take being stuck behind a doddering 70 year old couple who could take up two-thirds of a large walkway on their own. Thank God Edi generally only walks slowly when she's either stuck in heels or there's a view to be admired, but half the time I was cutting her off as she tried to get around the various draggy farts. Sorry about that, sweetie. But why dwell on the negative? I nursed five dollars of video poker into several free drinks! I played blackjack for an hour and lost it all on one hand! Lost in Translation is great, and Stuck on You is charming! I ate approx. a dozen oysters a day, a serving of bread pudding every twelve hours, and read Gravity's Rainbow in a bubble bath! I watched twenty minutes of the colossal fuck-up that was the Will Smith remake of Wild, Wild West and hated every minute of it! Happily! I hate talking about being happy--it's just painting a big bull's eye on my head, I think. So be it. I'm happy, and am willing to accept the consequences for it. posted by Jeff | 6:56 PM | Saturday, March 13, 2004 The Pitch: It's like A Roller Coaster meets A Diving Bell! This seems to be the week for stealth sicknesses--Nancy and Chris laid up with stomach flu; a few attorneys have called in sounding horrible, saying they thought at first it was allergies, turned out in fact to be a cold.Thank goodness I have the latter and not the former. I also hope it's a cold and not allergies because I am seriously congested. Not quite at ears ringing from the congestion, but close. And I'm not sleeping and feel like a mountain of ass each morning. A damn shame because not only is the weather lovely, but it's been a pretty good week in almost all other matters. Davel fixed my email problems so I no longer have to rely on webmail correspondence. I picked up Champions of Norrath for the PS2 and I think it's pretty keen (this after a few obsessive, but not particularly enjoyable, days replaying Max Payne and trying out Xenosaga--an odd Final Fantasy in space RPG). I get off work early today, it's currently nice and quiet, and the bastards overrunning our bathroom and back area look to be done--finally fucking finished--in a couple of days. Edi and I have been making plans for future vacations, trips, etc., and it looks like we'll be able to get around a little bit in the next month or two. Oh, and I get paid on Monday, but I've got plenty of coin to get me through the weekend. Except for the inside of my clogged up head, life feels pretty good right now. posted by Jeff | 12:25 PM | Monday, March 08, 2004 The Pitch: It's like....It's not like anything... [Warning: following post filled with deliberate vagueness]So Friday I found out a friend of a friend was a murderer. This friend of a friend was a guy who I had met a few times, at parties. Nice, quiet guy. I didn't get the impression he liked me, actually, and I'm not sure I much liked him (I can be defensive that way) but he seemed okay. He was nice enough to me, despite the vibe I got, and I appreciated that. Gracious might be the appropriate word, I think. I thought he was gracious, this friend of a friend. Well, he apparently flipped out and killed a guy, went home and, when confronted by the cops, killed himself, too. My friend, generally unshakable, is pretty shaken up. He told me the whole story recently, and it's been on my mind, on and off, all weekend. I didn't really know this friend of a friend, so it doesn't have, frankly, a lot of emotional impact to me, other than worrying about my friend and wondering why I want to tell people. If a friend of a friend had won the lottery and become a millionaire, would I be writing about it now? I think I probably would. And one part of that may just be that it's so rare in my life to know someone (or to know someone who knows someone) who won the lottery, that's why I'd probably be talking about it. "Hey, look at me! I'm two degrees away from significance!" The other part may just be that it's on my mind and I want to write. After all, we all have our secret lives, parts of our lives that we think we can, or should, keep private, either for our own benefit or out of simple civility ("So Friday, I found out a friend of a friend..." for instance). As someone who paid a lot--if not too much--attention to literature growing up, I was always amazed at the secret lives of characters in literature. My life, it seemed, was always right on the surface, as did the lives of my friends around me. As I grew older, I discovered that people have secrets, things they don't tell other people, deeper and stranger and sadder than most literature. I have those secrets (although I've always worried to what extent I tried to cultivate those, as a way to understand literature and how to write it--and maybe that's one of my secrets, right there). So I wonder about the friend of my friend. I wonder if, when he went home after murdering someone, he thought he would just go home, and never say anything to anyone, and it would just become part of his secret life. I wonder if he knew he was going to kill the person he killed, if that had been part of his secret life, too. Did someone ask him, "You're kind of quiet today. Something on your mind?" And did he say, "Oh, nothing. Just didn't sleep well last night and I'm kind of burnt," when actually he had been imagining stabbing the person he would eventually stab? Like I said, we all have our secret lives. I think we all pay the cost of having them. That cost isn't always murder, isn't always death. Sometimes the cost is the end of a friendship that might not have ended if things had been different. Sometimes the cost is sitting at your desk at work and not really being able to feel good, despite the sun on your face, despite a peaceful morning. And sometimes the cost is having to write about it, vaguely and at length, despite being worried what anyone who reads it might think. posted by Jeff | 11:19 AM | Monday, March 01, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Glengarry Glen Ross meets A Bad Porn Movie! At the risk of being Spamtracked or something, I wanted to express my appreciation of the spammer name "Drambuie M. Climatic" who sent me some unsolicited junk. Great, great name, even though it's hard not to hope the person dies and rots in Hell for being a spammer. posted by Jeff | 5:35 PM |The Pitch: It's like The Oscars 2003 meets The Oscars 2002! Boy, I don't want to be at work today.Given my druthers: Dentist's, getting my stitches removed; home, watching movies with Edi; Naz Super 8, watching an Indian flick; home again, some sort of perfect video game bliss thing going on. Instead, here: fighting to keep my tongue out of the hot, pig-iron pit in the corner of my mouth, doing trivial jobs and wishing I hadn't smoked a cigar at lunch. It was a pretty good cigar, and the sockets seemed to handle it fine, but now I'm worried about some sort of insta-mouth cancer. Because now my tongue smells faintly of cigar every time I painfully jam it into the stitches. Oh, and also? Girl scout cookies. I had ordered them from my friend Michelle a month or so ago and it seemed okay, but that was a month ago, back when I had willpower. Last week, I ate everything + pudding. This week, I'm managing not to eat everything as long as I keep the temptation out of my hands. Which is where the problem with "Hello, two boxes of tin mints" comes in. Gravity's Rainbow? Wow, Gravity's Rainbow. I think I'm on the dreaded Christmas carol sequence, where Roger Mexico and Jessica enter a church to hear servicemen sing Christmas carols and the prose just completely lights out for the territories. I could be wrong (I'm just starting the sequence) but that sequence knocked me on my ass so hard back in 1989, I remember staring at the chocolate shag carpet of the West Hollywood apartment in absolute befuddlement. Odd how those things get reversed--staring at the carpet and thinking about that sequence so fuckin' hard I knew it was the same sequence when a memory of that damn rug popped up while reading today. There were two interesting tidbits that I'm sure other Pynchon scholars have already nailed--one of the psychics at the "White Visitation" is named Ronald Cherrycoke (a character in Mason & Dixon shares the same name) and there's a sequence in which Jessica Swanlake strips off her blouse during a car ride with Roger Mexico that mirrors an anecdote in Jules Siegel's "Who is Thomas Pynchon..." article (don't think a truckload of ogling midgets showed up in Siegal's anecdote, however). Of course, Siegel wrote his article years after GR came out, and a guy with the last name of "Cherrycoke" is a good enough gag to re-use, but they kinda tweaked my brain, nonetheless... Speaking of West Hollywood, there should be a word (and maybe there is) to describe the odd feelings of nostalgia and loss when visiting a street you used to live in--but you're visiting that street in a video game. I rented True Crime: Streets of L.A. (or True Crime: Streets of LA, which sounds like either 'Streets of Louisiana' of the beginning of some Steven Sondheim lyric, depending on your mindset. In the game, a team of ambitious souls mapped out all of L.A. (all meaning as far north as the Hollywood Hills, as far West as the ocean, as far South as, um, Venice, and as far East as, I think, downtown). So, in the video game, I drove by the apartment where I used to live, then by where I used to work just off Sunset Blvd. and of course it's not a perfect one-to-one match (not by any means) but there was something eerie about remembering what streets to take to get from each to each and having it work, and having it all seem so different, somehow. Even if all they did was travel to L.A. and take bunches of photo reference, the references feel entirely dissimilar--West Hollywood was pretty grungy and tacky. All beaten-up strip malls instead of prettied-up enclosed malls, maybe, but still the little touches (a comic store just off Melrose in I think the same place as an actual one I occasionally shopped at, and the Saint James Club being right there on Sunset, a few other pieces although I confess, in the interest of continued Pynchon cross-referencing, I did not check to see if the game included the restaurant Genghis Cohen's that used to be on Fairfax...) made me--made me--made me what, dammit? Nostalgic? Heartsick? Superseded? I wish I could tell you. I don't have the language for it. It made me sad in the same way driving around L.A. and seeing all the stuff I liked gone would've made me feel, but it gave me an additional weird feeling. Mapstalgia, maybe, where your ability to get around in an imaginary setting (because of its real life analogue) gives one the uncomfortable feeling of dream-like omnipotence. It was creepy and addictive, and more powerful (for me) than the game itself was. Still no match, weirdness-wise, to being able to play Vice City or GTAIII and still know your way around from driving the streets so often. I think: It's the sort of thing a young Thomas Pynchon would be able to do justice to....and then I get too depressed to even finish the thought. posted by Jeff | 4:16 PM | |
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