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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Tuesday, August 31, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Brewster's Millions meets The Planet of the Apes! I am incredibly cranky and sulky. I want to go home. I want my weekend. I want to spend all of the money they just gave me for working here on every ridiculous thing every invented. Even though the DVDs I ordered said they would take 5 to 10 business days to arrive, I am annoyed that they are actually taking 5 to 10 business days. (Normally, I get them in about four.)I am also lazy. That is why I am not recounting the totally insane dream I had before waking. (also, Edi heard it before I left for work. Poor Edi.) Rest assure it was a good one, as it had Prague, taxis, ATMs, the Ferry Building, the Channel 4 News Team, Apple Fritters, airport terminal blackjack lounges, and maybe even Darryl Hannah. In more or less that order. Yes, poor, poor Edi. More later if I can get myself motivated. posted by Jeff | 11:47 AM | Monday, August 30, 2004 A Quick Message From Your OCD Count Who Loves To Count! Did you know I've written twenty-eight blog entries in the last thirty days? (Not counting this one, which makes twenty-nine.) And of those, only three were photo entries and only one was a quiz result. (Photo entries, quiz results and transcripts of IM conversations are three of the most common blog fillers out there, apart from announcements of how much or how little one has written on one's blog).Twenty-eight entries in August? And I stopped playing video games on August Fifth? It's a fine argument for either the time-reductive capabilities of video games or the power of sublimation... posted by Jeff | 10:24 AM | The Pitch: It's like Garden State meets Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas! I do not want to be here. I want to be back in my bed, asleep. It's one of those days where everyone at work doesn't look awake, and there aren't that many people on the streets or in the building yet. It's the type of day where everyone shows up late, and doesn't even try to offer any explanation.Edi and I saw Garden State yesterday. I'd wanted to see it for some time and been trying to drag Edi to it for a while and then yesterday it all came together and we were there. I was one of those suckers who'd watched that very well edited teaser trailer and decided it was worth a peek. And Garden State is indeed very much worth that, although how much more, I'm not sure. It's opening third is arguably excellent: well-observed, funny and directed with a strong visual eye. The second third is strong, thanks to the introduction of Natalie Portman's character. And the final third barely adds up at all. I walked out of the movie with the warm glow from the first third trying to put the best spin on it: "Wow. Wasn't it great how the the movie promises a father-son confrontation that it can barely make itself deliver? I liked how you didn't get a chance to see the protagonist's transition from emotionally dead and overmedicated to wise and self-connected--it just sort of happened! And how the romance really swamps and overtakes the other plotlines? I wouldn't like that in another movie, but..." It's kind of interesting to figure out which parts didn't work because of insufficient subtle acting on the part of star Zach Braff, or because of a timidity in the screenplay by writer Zach Braff, or an inability on the part of director Zach Braff to pull a better performance from his lead actor or revise the script with his screenwriter, but it does make it easier to point the finger at one guy in particular. A shame since the guy has real talent in all three fields (with his direction being the strongest) and a willingness to craft really good scenes for his co-actors rather than hog it all for himself: both Natalie Portman and Peter Sarsgaard (resembling early Keifer Sutherland to a creepy amount) have great roles and really get the chance to tear into them. It's certainly a better movie than, say, Bright Lights, Big City (with which it has more than a little in common, I'm sorry to say) but it's the sort of movie you go to see if you like to see and support talent with a lot of potential, rather than talent that's fully emerged. As for other bits of eyecandy on the web designed to part you from your samoleans, I'm sure you're aware there's a trailer for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas out already. I've already subjected Edi to it countless times, but I had a quiet moment the other day at work and so loaded up the largest of the three trailers to ogle it again from the comfort of a DSL line on Saturday when nobody was hitting the Rockstar site (and, sad to say, I think the lousy little putt-putt computers at work can handle the size of the file easier than my computer at home, which stammered continually when I tried to play it). For whatever reason, the Rockstar site was troubled and it took forever for the trailer to load. So I got bored and started using what had loaded as a slideshow, scrolling up to a particular image and then stopping. It's been two years since I GTA: Vice City and I've really missed that eye for detail the GTA games have. Here, we've got basketball jerseys for the gangsta types to where except one jersey reads "dribbler" and another, "rimmer." In a pool hall, there's an ornate mural painted on brick next to a sign that reads "Beware of Pickpockets and Loose Women." A barber salon has framed pictures of haircuts for men on the walls. The emerald lights flashing on Ten Green Bottles Liquor Store. Interestingly, the website doesn't offer any of the screenshots I saw in the latest Game Informer: white guys in cowboy hats and baseball caps, monster trucks and dirt bikes peeling down the side of a rural highway. How heavily, and with how much humor, will the Rockstar guys push the collision of cultures? [A paragraph tying this idea, and expectation, to the ideas, and expectations, raised by Garden State should probably be inserted here. Sadly, I'm afraid workat the moment precludes it.] posted by Jeff | 10:04 AM | Sunday, August 29, 2004 The Pitch: It's like A Life Less Ordinary meets Blow-Up! Yes, it's not just a thong picture, it's a heraldic thong picture! In the interest of doing something (or to put that properly, something) with my blog, and I have started a photo blog on lazybastard. If you wanna, check it out at:http://lazybastard.com/blog/phoblog/index.html In theory, this is my first babystep to moving this blog onto my website, but I have a lot to learn about FTP privileges and until I can figure out how to post to two blogs with one FTP account, I'm sticking to one photoblog. So, yes. A photoblog. Let's see what happens. posted by Jeff | 7:44 PM | The Pitch: See, I Told You It Was Hot Out...  Cue the cheesy Sisqo song! We got a renegade Thong! 
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Saturday, August 28, 2004 The Pitch: It's like The Towering Inferno meets Rushmore! Okay, so the evil-makers are gone, leaving me and my co-workers to the crazy heat and our own crazy selves. I just reviewed fifteen comics for the Savage Critic blog, and can actually write something of substance here, if I could just think of something.It's hot. Did I mention that it's hot? It's so hot that, at lunch, I found a crumpled black thong resting in the shade of a sidewalk shrub. Honest. Is it comforting to know that thongs have a higher boiling point than the hoochies who wear them? posted by Jeff | 5:06 PM | The Pitch: It's Like Clockwatchers meets The Core! Not how I had hoped to spend today. I was thinking we'd have a quiet day at work, everyone scared off by the heat, and I'd get a chance to write reviews for the Savage Critic while casually fanning myself and sipping diet cokes.Instead, it's been a non-stop work fest, with the first part of the day spent transcribing a colossal nineteen pages of one attorney utterly eviscerating the work of the other. Entertaining, yes. Relaxing, no. I've been back from lunch for an hour and it's been nothing but dumb-ass jobs filed by an attorney and his hapless assistant, who's getting paid time and half to put in job requests for things the attorney is too lazy to walk down the hall. And the heat! I'm not really aware of it except that I'm very nauseous, probably because I'm not drinking enough water, and very cranky. I should go before the attorney or secretary show up with more work and I have to explain why I'm (a) blogging, and (b) referring to their work as dumb-ass. More (?) later. posted by Jeff | 3:27 PM | Thursday, August 26, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge Meets Punch-Drunk Love Meets Ghost World! Yes, the above pitch is my reason for missing yesterday's blog entry--movies a go-go squared. I finally watched the art-fag version of The Waterboy (also known as Punch-Drunk Love)then, desperate for a Bollywood fix; threw in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (also known as "The Braveheart Takes The Bride") which was so long Edi and I actually paused it at the intermission, went out to dinner, came home, relaxed a bit and then watched the remaining hour and a half; and finally ended with Ghost World which we had rented at Four Star Video while at dinner. By the time we went to bed, it was after midnight and my eyeballs were twitching, skittish things. Perhaps as a side-effect to watching so much Bollywood, Edi tossed and turned relentlessly in her sleep for the first few hours--she swears she wasn't dreaming of performing in endless musical numbers, but I'm not sure I believe her--that I went out to the couch (where I had spent almost all of my previous day anyway) to sleep. Part of me is trying to turn this into Jeff Fest 2004 and catch a few movies--by which I mean as many movies as I can--and turn this into a powerful triumph of cinematic gluttony--and part of me wants to stay out of the theater, enjoy the day, get some work done. We'll see which side wins: it could go either way.As for the movies so far--I was pretty nonplussed by Punch-Drunk Love, surprising because of my high regard for Paul Thomas Anderson's earlier movies, not so much so when considering the reactions of people I respect who had already seen the film and not thought much of it. I had watched maybe ten or fifteen minutes of the movies on the day I set the PS2 DVD player up and had liked them--so was kind of surprised to find the movie went down and sideways from there. Sandler is perfectly fine as a more vulnerable, flawed version of his typical enraged boy-man and Watson is lovely as his love interest about whom we know nearly nothing but in whose reactions, thanks to Watson's acting, we believe everything. And when they're together, the movie seems to work, just as it seems to work in its odd, lonely opening. But, amazingly, Punch-Drunk Love is a movie by a deeply observant person who doesn't really know how anything works--like someone who can fix a car radio but believes the music comes from tiny invisible people inside. With the pudding cups and phone sex subplots, half the movie totters on the lip of urban legend (even when the events, like the pudding cups, are based on real life) and, when the psychological underpinnings of the characters don't add up, flips in the abyss of unlikely tall tale. That Adam Sandler's character is a nearly psychotic ball of repressed rage because he was the only boy in a family of seven sisters is an interesting hypothesis, but it doesn't seem to add up (I can see how he'd end up with the childishness, maybe, but not the rage). That his character is fiscally cautious and yet willing to give his social security number to a phone sex operator, after showing an awareness of the existence and potential of therapy, makes no sense. At every point, Anderson leaps forward with a scene insistently showing why these things should make sense, but because they don't you grow more distant from the film itself. And Anderson's tendency for bombast--a jittery nightmarish scene where Emily Watson and Sandler's sister show up at his warehouse just as every other piece of his life starts to go to hell is filmed like a long-take version of the control sequences in Armageddon--further strains credulity. Punch-Drunk Love tries to occupy a space between romantic comedy and psychological portrait and shows, I think, exactly why movies rarely try for that space: it's not conducive for a satisfying movie. I walked away from the movie with my faith in Anderson shaken. Contrarily, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge had almost entirely the opposite effect on me. Although this is perhaps a godo time for a lengthy digression about my attachment to foreign movies and Bollywood films in particular. It wouldn't surprise me if Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge was a worse movie--significantly worse--than Punch-Drunk Love and I am utterly incapable of seeing it. What I've come to realize about my movie watching habits is I'm drawn to foreign films precisely because they paralyze many of my critical faculties. Things that don't make sense to me are quickly attributed to cultural differences; if my attention starts to wander, it starts trying to associate spoken words with subtitles rather than pick apart the intention of the scene and wondering where it might go wrong; and as a result, I enjoy the movie more directly. It's common for me to walk out of a Bollywood movie with nothing more to say than "I liked it," and a shrug when pressed further. So. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. I liked it. If all of Shahrukh Khan's future movies were just formula embellishments on this one, I wouldn't be at all surprised. Made back in 1995 and known as the longest running film of Indian cinema (in the theaters, not the running length), all of the tropes of a Khan movie--particuarly the need to deceive entire families and capsize the existing social structure, all in the name of love, commitment and the greater good--are here, to be emebellished to such great fiscal success in later movies. If I ever get a handle on the topic, I should tackle the fascinating role Shahrukh Khan plays in Indian cinema: he is portrayed as a loveable rogue (a "wastrel" is the term frequently used in the subtitles of DDLJ) who in the end is committed to the greater Indian virtues and so is able to appeal simultaneously to young and old. The hamminess plays into it somehow, too. I should have just left it at: I liked it. Shrug. Finally, Ghost World. This is probably the third time I've seen the movie, and the first since its year of release, and I was surprised it didn't hold up better for me. Maybe I was just fatigued by all the movie watching by that point, but I was surprised by how there wasn't anything new to discover in the movie. Its charms are obvious (to those who know my preference for bitchy bespectacled brunettes) and its anti-consumerist message as timely as ever. But after you watch it the first time, Ghost World seems so obviously crafted, with each scene carefully delineating the reason for the next scene, and each bit of direction embellishing the point of the scene, that the movie, on repeated viewings, feels like a try-out card for the director Terry Zwigoff and the screenwriter Dan Clowes to enter the world of feature films. Steve Buscemi's portrayal of a resigned outsider is still the most enjoyable thing about the movie, both to its strength and its detriment (as an adaptation of the source material, anyway). And it's funny how, back in 2000, everyone was talking about Thora Birch as the breakout star of the movie and yet it's Scarlett Johansson in 2004, the star of Lost In Translation, that seems to have arrived. So that was yesterday. It's almost noon now, and hot and possibly humid out. Sooner or later I'll figure out what I'm doing with my day. I guess I'll go make some minor attempt at it now. posted by Jeff | 11:45 AM | Tuesday, August 24, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Behind The Green Door meets The Hudsucker Proxy! You wouldn't think PHP is a very sexy thing, would you? I wouldn't either, and yet 20 minutes spent reading The Beginner's Guide to PHP that I picked up on sale at Red Hill was enough to give me giddy unending dreams of, I swear, coding my website in PHP. The only thing I remember is setting up some sort of frame for a conversation that Edi and I were having, so that a microphone would record what we were saying, an audiotext converter would transcribe it, the computer would upload it, and it would be a sidebar to all my web pages. And that's the only dream I remember, other than getting up to pee and having a very clear memory of speaking aloud the phrase "style sheets." Eerie.On a related note (since it's about both style sheets and creepiness), Blogger is offering me the chance to run ads on my blog. I have to admit, part of me thinks, "hmmm... rich, you say?" Part of me wonders how bad it would actually be if people could actually click on an ad selling Aventurera or Ong Bak after reading my reviews and suddenly they've got a great movie they never heard about before. And part of me is disgusted both at my greed, Blogger's disingenuous "We're going to start paying bloggers" announcement, and the idea that I'd whore my blog out for a nickel. Now these are, I'm assuming, the relatively non-descript Googleads I've been seeing everywhere and as a web viewer, I've got to say, I don't mind them. They're fine. They're not pop-ups, after all. I'm too sleepy to follow this train of thought to its end stop. My original intention was to log on and talk about my stupid dreams of PHP, and how I "updated" my website by removing my dilapidated husk of a links page, my novel, and blocked image leeches. Now, I have another web-problem on my mind: what, if anything, does embracing an "amateur" status to my blog and website actually mean? That I'm idealistic? Or that I'll never be a professional? posted by Jeff | 8:20 AM | Monday, August 23, 2004 The Pitch: It's like The Gift of the Magi meets Hackers! One of the nice things about moving lazybastard to a new server is I get to see my visitors and what they're hitting with a little more clarity. These stats allow me to begin formulating future plans for the site--and also afford me many opportunities for humility. After all, I also do the same thing for the CE website, so I'm well aware that my unique visitors for the month is approx 1,323 compared to over fifteen thousand for the Comix Experience website.A couple years back, when I first got dreamweaver, I took a few tutorials and messed around with the program a bit. One of the the things that interested me at the time was building multi-column pages with text, pictures and captions. To that end, I created a test page, using "slices" or "layers" or whatever Dreamweaver was trumpeting as its big hullaballoo. I threw some images on there, almost at random, created text to fill the column, then threw it on the web to see how it looked. As I recall, the layers looked fine on IE, not so good on Netscape. And for the amount of time, it took to put together, I decided it wasn't worth it. I abandoned the whole thing, went for a more simple single column centered approach, and forgot all about it. So guess what single page gets the most hits on my website? It's because of the naked picture of Stevie Case, of course. But I gotta tell ya: when I opened that page this morning, for the first time in forever, I went, hey, that looks okay. And there's a cheap laugh or two in the text. I'm glad I spent so long fiddling with the caption and header colors because there's a certain unified look to the whole thing. It's far from perfect, and as I recall it took an obscene amount of fiddling to get the layers to line up, and--like I said--I know it gets the most hits because it's got boobies on the page. The only thing more ironic than this test page getting the most hits is the irony that I'm pondering how to approach a possible site re-design because of it. posted by Jeff | 8:48 AM | I sat down to watch the DVD of Ong Bak yesterday afternoon. It was in Thai with no English subtitles, nothing happened for forty-five minutes and suffered from characters doing things just to advance a coincidence-laden plot. HOLY FUCKING SHIT. I really want to go into more detail, but have found myself unable to for almost ten minutes. The fights are brutal (probably too much so--I managed to hook Edi with all the amazing stunts and acrobatic feats, but all the leg- and arm-breaking in the final set of fights had her fleeing to her room, shaking her head), the stunts are amazing, and the chases manage to take the classic Jackie Chan approach and tweak it just enough to give jaded viewers like me a thrill. I don't doubt I'll be watching some choice bits tonight when I get home from work. Those of you with VCD players and/or all-region DVD players should start hunting for this one. It's well worth it. posted by Jeff | 8:12 AM | Saturday, August 21, 2004 The Pitch: It's Lost Weekend meets Pokemon: The Motion Picture! (Apologies for all the upcoming swears in this entry. It's only one phrase, but it appears alot.)Years and years ago, a movie played the Castro once--or maybe twice. It was billed as a Mexican melodrama musical, a genre from the '50s called cabareteras, mixing a noir plot and musical numbers. I remembered the name of the movie, L'Aventurea, but could never find anything about it on the web, which drove me nuts because I had missed it at the Castro and it never played the Bay Area again. So Monday morning, I'm sleepily perusing moviepoopshoot.com and HOLY FUCKING SHIT. There's a blurb about Aventurera, a Mexican noir musical. I don't know if it just came out on DVD, or it had been out and it just got reviewed but HOLY FUCKING SHIT. Last Friday (the 13th), this guy who shops at CE comes in and we start talking. He just started getting into comix, and he already has seriously good taste. Apparently his brothers and his friends recommended a lot of good stuff. So I recommend some other good stuff and he comes back a few weeks later and says he likes it. Great guy, affable, knowledgeable. Anyway, so this guy stops in and we're chatting again and I point him to stuff I know he'll like and he goes, "Hey, did you check into that movie I recommended last time? Ong Bak?" "Ong Bak? Oh yeah, I saw the trailer on the Web, and it blew my mind! It looked beautiful!" "Oh, yeah? Well, if you can play VCDs, I can lend you a copy." HOLY FUCKING SHIT. "Uh, yeah. You don't mind? Cuz that'd be really awesome." So yesterday, five minutes before I head out, this guy, Joel, drops in the store and is like, "Oh, hey. Here's that VCD. Lemme know what you think." HOLY FUCKING SHIT (SQUARED). Admittedly, I seem like a nice guy, and he knows where I work, but I've had maybe three discussions with Joel and he's totally lending me a VCD that he's already said he bought back on the East Coast and totally can't find in Chinatown out here. Then, Edi and I went to the Paramount Theatre, settled in to our plush comfy seats and watched the original Shaft from 1971. The print was old, the sound was seriously fucked up (for the first third, the entire audience was leaning forward going "huh?") and the movie is seriously low-budget, spending long stretches of time with Shaft just walking around New York (between this and his frequent cab rides, the first half of Shaft seems like an Italian neo-realist critique of the New York transit system). But, still, HOLY FUCKING SHIT. The soundtrack! The squalor! The unctuous self-love of John Shaft! It was pretty great. The unfortunate side-effect of all this sanctified merde being flung around? At lunch today, I went up to my cheap Chinatown source and found Ong-Bak on VCD for six bucks. Then I went that one better and found the DVD for sixteen. Then I came back to work, checked to see if DeepDiscountDVD had Aventurera for sale. Which I ordered. Along with The Honeymoon Killers, Donnie Darko and the upcoming 2 DVD release of La Dolce Vita. Wow, I have a serious case of Poor Impulse Control. Holy fucking shit. posted by Jeff | 4:30 PM | Friday, August 20, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Punch-Drunk Love Meets End of Days! A few weeks back I bought Punch-Drunk Love on DVD, used, as part of a 3 for $25 sale at Hollywood video that I sometimes fall prone too. My brother Tim, on hearing this news scoffed, "You actually bought the art-fag version of The Waterboy?"I had, and I was not ashamed. At least, until I put the movie in my DVD player. A map of the world cut into an odd jigsaw came up. "This disc is intended for play on non-modified Region 1 players. There is nothing wrong with this Region 1 disc. To assure playback you should purchase or rent a disc designed for your region as set forth below." And then there's the map of the world, sliced into region with each region colored a soothing rage-deflecting color. The United States and Canada are a soothing chalkboard green. Mexico, interestingly, is Region 4, an orange you only see in toys that come from cereal boxes and kindergarten textbooks. Mexico is the same region as South America and, oddly, Australia. You can play a Mexican DVD on an Australian player and vice-versa. Strangely, the map does not indicate where I can rent or purchase a disc for non-modified Region 1 players. Perhaps Puerto Rico, which is also Region 1, but is not colored chalkboard green. The galling thing is I don't have a non-modified Region 1 player--I have a Region 1 player on which you can turn off the regions. It wasn't modified; it came that way. The last time this had happened, Edi and I had rented Once Upon A Time In Mexico and I had come up with a great solution: I'll just reset the defaults on my DVD player so it's seen as a non-modified Region 1 player. That'll solve everything! I felt like the Smartest Guy in the World (or at least non-modified Region 1). So that was a quick fix, but it turned out to be a hassle in the long run--my defaults were screwed and reset to parental block on anything over G; I couldn't find the unpublished menu allowing me to deactivate my region codes; and somewhere among all my stuff was the booklet of my five year old player that had the code allowing me to turn off the parental blocking. Took me over a half-hour to straighten everything out, just to see a pretty mediocre Robert Rodriguez movie. Thus, when the map came up on The Art-Fag Version of The Waterboy, I just made a disgusted noise and took it out of my player. I didn't have the book near me, I had saved the web page with the instructions on my computer, but hadn't yet distilled the instructions into something I could keep on my Palm Pilot. It just didn't seem worth the effort, which was a shame since I really had liked The Waterboy. The day before yesterday, taking a break from writing about comic books, I was staring at the DVD on the shelf next to me, and I idly fantasized, "Gee, wouldn't it be great if I had a non-modified region 1 DVD player so I could play the occasional movie that can only be played on non-modified region 1 DVD players and the rest of the movies, the whole wide world of cinema, I could continue to play on my lovely old DVD player?" It came to me in a flash of light, the sort of flash that scientists have been able to slow to a speed of five miles per hour in controlled laboratory experiments. I had a Playstation 2! It has a DVD player! A non-modified Region 1 DVD player in fact! This trojan horse app which stirred so much excitement when the PS2 first came out had always been rampantly disregarded in my household (with the appearance of the PS2 at Paris house, the DVD players outnumbered the inhabitants 5:4) and I had forgotten about that whole application by the time I moved in with Edi. It was perfect: I already had the PS2 set up on the entertainment cart. It now rolled to the bedroom with the TV and the VCR and the DVD player when we watched movies there. I was The Smartest Guy in the World! So I threw The Art-Fag Version of The Waterboy into the Playstation 2, and turned it on. Sadly, I have to confess: I was excited just to turn on the PS2 again. I had sworn off video games for the near-future (I think until the new GTA, but there's a whole Doom3/Xbox wrinkle I won't go into here) and was happy just to hear the damn thing boot up. And then the Playstation 2 asked me for the parental control password to watch The Art-Fag Version of The Waterboy. What followed was comical hijinks as The Stupidest Guy in the World turned his stuff upside down looking for a Playstation 2 booklet he had never bothered to keep track of. After all, The Stupidest Guy in the World knew how to play video games! You put them in the Playstation 2 and you turned it on! Then came The Stupidest Guy in the World searching the Internet. There were tons of pages explaining how you could delete the parental password control and input your own code, of your own choosing, for your own convenience. It was just like performing a fatality in Mortal Kombat II; you just hit down-up-x-x-x-right-left-R3-L3 and then when you hear the beep... Okay, maybe it wasn't that hard, but The Stupidest Guy in the World was having a tough time with it. Each instructionary page was phrased a bit vaguely, or written just poorly enough, until I found the page where a guy who fixes people's computers for a living announced that this was the number one side job he was asked to do by embarrassed customers, and here's how you do it. Well, I did what he said and it worked. The sadly lilting Jon Brion music came up against a shifting curtain of lights and the title, The Art-Fag Version of The Waterboy, came up. Edi came into the living room while I capered and pointed. "What's up?" She asked. I pointed to the TV and gave her the short version of the story. "I'm the Smartest Guy in the World!" Then I had to get back to work and finish the newsletter. I still haven't seen the movie. Like that five mile an hour burst of light must surely be saying to itself: I'm getting to it, I'm getting to it. posted by Jeff | 8:45 AM | Thursday, August 19, 2004 The Pitch: It's like End of Days meets Punch-Drunk Love! Whew. Fanboy's done, new comics are done--all in time to start my workweek all over again. But no worries--I got another newsletter out of the way, I picked up my new glasses from Costco, and Edi and I are seeing Shaft (the original) at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland tomorrow. Life could be a helluva lot worse. I was going to tell you a lot more about my glasses and stuff but, meh. Too tired.Tomorrow if I get a chance before work though, I'll tell you the story of my epic struggles to thwart my new nemesis, region coded DVDs. It's gripping! posted by Jeff | 10:51 PM | Wednesday, August 18, 2004 Times When I Love What I Do.... I'm working on the CE newsletter, and just followed up a Google search on Tauntaun twenty minutes later with one on Tintin. From Tauntaun to Tintin, completely by accident. That makes me very, very happy.posted by Jeff | 10:31 PM | Tuesday, August 17, 2004 The Pitch: It's like 9 to 5 Meets La Dolce Vita! Yep, I'm running off after work to go see La Dolce Vita again. And hopefully again tomorrow. That will make--three! Three times! Ah-ah-ah-ha-ha!--that I'll have seen the film in--five! five days! Ah-ah-ah-ha-ha! It will make me very happy.Work is kinda asstastic, although I really have myself to blame in a lot of very real ways. I've been here for almost--three! three hours! Ah-ah-ah-ha-ha!--and instead of trying to come up with the funny for the upcoming Fanboy Rampge, I've been reading over my old blog and sulking. Why, I'm not sure. Because I was funny then? Because I should have staged JeffFest 2004 this year and I didn't? Because instead of scaling mountains, and attending parties, and sipping sour apple martinis while cavorting in hot tubs, and disco dancing in cheesy bars in the Mission, I'm the sort of guy that would rather make time in his schedule to get to an attractively restored revival theater and watch Fellini's recreation of same? I haven't even bothered to describe last night's E.A. Poeish horror of a mouse (or rat!) trying to claw its way through our shower wall. As Edi tried not to throttle me in panic, I postulated that said mouse (or rat!) must have gotten stuck back there during that month-long sabbatical our bathroom ceilings and walls took while Duarte & Sonsabitches "fixed" things, and only now is poor mouse (or rat!) trying to get out because although there is plenty of water back there, there is hardly any food. I'd heard the mouse (or rat!) while using the commode at four a.m. a month or so ago, and hesitatingly told Edi who did her best to disbelieve. Now, however, there was nothing for our faithlessness to seize hold of: Edi cleaned the tub and two minutes later there were flecks of wood and paint by the drain. The rat (or mouse!) was trying to gnaw its way out using the weakest area, that right under the faucet head. Edi broke out a glue gun and jammed hot wax into the area, and I hoped that the poor starving thing (I have absolutely no proof for this theory which I am 100% certain of) would eat some of the hot glue and die. I am no big fan of dead animals, mind you, and less a fan of having something go bad behind the walls, but I am also less a fan of having a performance art piece called "Birth of The Modern Age" enacted by a wiggling rodent forcing its way out of a tiny hole in the shower wall while I'm pooping at 3:00 a.m. It may be great for the NEA, but it does nothing for me. After the fun with the glue gun, Edi and I went to bed and, later, went to the bathroom at 1:30 as a team--one person being the fount of support and bravery for the other. Huh. You know, I guess it's not surprising that I'm kind of a stinky mood, is it? posted by Jeff | 10:21 AM | Monday, August 16, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Clean & Sober meets Cockfighter! I have not played a video game in eleven days. I have not eaten an apple fritter in over three weeks. This is what I tell myself when I start berating myself for what I have or haven't done recently, or have or haven't eaten.Eleven days. Three weeks. Oh, on what should have been an unrelated note, I took this little quiz and came up with the following result:  The Count's Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder It started with a simple affection for counting and the terror it induced in others, didn't it? But now it's turned into a full-blown life-consuming chaotic nightmare of order, repetition, zealousness, and perfectionism. You used to be so grand, but now you find yourself obsessively worrying over the littlest things--like, maybe if you don't check the light switch at least once every two minutes, the electricity will go out (and damnit, you're a vampire--that shouldn't be a problem!), or maybe if you don't wash your hands until your seams are coming out, you'll get some fatal disease. Get yourself some treatment. Which Sesame Street Muppet's Dark Secret Are You? brought to you by Quizilla At first, I thought nothing of it, but looking at all my obsessive day- and movie-counting of this month's blog entries (indeed, what tipped me off were reeling off numbers in this very entry), I have to conclude this particular goofy quiz is shockingly accurate. Crap. posted by Jeff | 10:24 AM | The Pitch: It's like 1984 meets Back to the Future! I had an odd realization while writing my entry last night, but figured it'd be wiser to share it on a different entry. And now, of course, I have two other things to write about, one of which is wondering if they have a word that describes having multiple blog entries piling up in your head (maybe I won't bother with that one).Last night, I was going to launch into an extended round of gratitude for having a wonderful girlfriend, access to wonderful Ethiopian food and wonderful cheesecake when I realized that exactly twenty years ago, I was preparing to move to San Francisco and attend college. If I don't think too much about the particulars, I can faintly remember that anxiety, that hope and that fear. Seventeen years old and about to leave home--the only thing I can summon with any clarity is my parents' insistence that I have my name and social security number sautered into my computer, typewriter, and other electronic items as they'd read somewhere that this made recovery of stolen items from pawn shops much easier. Of course, I doubt anyone recommends doing that now as it makes identity theft a trillion times easier. Maybe we should have also put my date of birth and checking account number on there, too. What strikes me, though, is I now have all those things--great girlfriend, writing job (kinda), fantastic living situation--I was sure would be mine within, say, four years at the most. But I've lived in San Francisco for seventeen years now, which was my entire life lived up to that sweaty nervous point back in 1984, to say nothing of the three year vacation in Hell (Los Angeles) I also lived through. Because we moved to Humboldt County when I was young, I've actually lived in San Francisco longer than I lived in Humboldt. You would think I would think of San Francisco as home by now, don't ya think? Now that I've got the great girlfriend, the writing job (kinda), and the fantastic living situation I was sure would be mine by 21, maybe it'll come easier. posted by Jeff | 8:23 AM | Sunday, August 15, 2004 The Pitch: It's like The Red Shoes meets Elephant! They should make "Altman" into a verb, to be used as an expression of getting rooked out of a couple of hours of your life by a critically regarded filmmaker who is too talented to be written off entirely, but too uneven to be trusted--as in "I've been Altman'd!" Or "That movie Altman'd me!" Or "Yeah, I went down to the video store to rent something, and somehow I got Altman'd."(Now, that I think about it, similar coinages like, "I've been DePalma'd!" or "Never, ever, ever will I allow myself to get Spike Lee'd like that again. Ever." have their appeal, as well.) We rented The Company last night, sort of the light, breezy follow-up to La Dolce Vita, and laid around and drank booze as I said we might. The booze and the lying around was great but The Company was awful--an utterly plotless dance film disguising its pointlessness as a verite snapshot of the world of ballet. Neve Campbell co-produced and co-wrote the film and starred in it, and before seeing the movie I thought it was laudable that she wanted to create a movie that showed the actual workings of a ballet company, and avoid the standard focus on a single dancer struggling to become a star. Now, after seeing the movie, I just want to put a boot in her ass--the films may assiduously attempt to avoid any of the standard dance movie cliches but they somehow manage to create horrible new ones: after Neve dances a solo to a Van Dyke Parks' arrangement of My Funny Valentine, the movie bombards us with covers of My Funny Valentine to track the dull and vague romance between Neve Campbell and James Franco--at the end credits, when a string quartet version of the song started in, Edi and I both groaned aloud (and we both love the song--or used to, before this film) and I said, "What is this? The fucking Kronos Quartet version?" Horribly enough, it was. Anybody who's even watched a single season of ballet (a.k.a., me and my drunk girlfriend) could have constructed a better movie about a ballet company than The Company, and my only hope is it made enough money that someday someone will actually get the money to try to make the movie again. But, until that day, don't let yourself get Altman'd--wait until he produces another Gosford Park, or just go and rent that again. Fortunately, we rented a back-up DVD--The Work of Director Spike Jonze, which managed to explore music and dance, reality and fraudulence, satisfy two drunken viewers and maintain a steady stream of engaging and original ideas--if there's a more subversive rap video than "Sky's The Limit," done Bugsy Malone style for the Notorious B.I.G., I'd like to see it. That was Saturday night. Today, it was all about getting a new curtain put up in the bedroom. We'd put it off for months and today showed us why--between the pricey pieces of crap Pottery Barn calls curtain rods, the tender pieces of fusilli disguised as screws and the paradoxically crumbling-yet-impenetrable wall and frame surrounding the bedroom window, I would have rather engaged in a cardoor-slamming-on-hand endurance competition for two hours. Then, if that wasn't enough joy for me, I began the process of moving lazybastard over to a new server. As of right now, that's included such winners as ftp'ing my entire site to the wrong directory, screwing up my email lists and having to wait for DNS propogation to straighten things out, and sending a message to my mailing list that at least one person suspected of being a virus. Fortunately, I also have everything a man in my position needs to get over such problems: a great girlfriend, Ethiopian food, and cheesecake. Despite doing so extensively in every paragraph in this entry, I really have nothing to complain about. posted by Jeff | 10:17 PM | Saturday, August 14, 2004 The Pitch: It's like La Dolce Vita meets La Dolce Vita! So, we went to La Dolce Vita today and it was awesome. Actually, it was much more awesome for me than for Edi because she was driven crazy by a guy eating loudly behind her and me eating constantly next to her and this constant locust-like perennial mastication drove her nuts, but she insists the movie was also awesome for her. Hmm.Nonetheless, it was awesome for me. For a movie I only saw once almost twenty years ago, I was shocked at how much of the film I remembered--the movie seemed more compressed than it did when I first saw it years ago (it seemed endless then, and grew and collapsed on a rhythm unlike anything I had seen. It was like going to a beach where the waves didn't behave the way they ever had before), but I think that's because I'm way more comfortable with three hour films now, and because I knew what I was seeing--I knew what came next. I think maybe later--maybe--I'll write more about it. I am going to see this again before the end of the week--at least twice, I hope. I actually don't need to--having a movie be so burned into your consciousness you're able to remember 95% of it twenty years later makes it pretty likely I won't really retain any more by seeing it repeatedly--but seeing that movie on the big screen today brought a lot of feelings and thoughts closer to my conciousness. I hope to either get a very good essay on La Dolce Vita or some decent material about my relation to the cinema generally from this. (And not that anyone's asking, but I'm still working on the movie project: poor Edi watched me start to review the 170+ movies I saw in the theater. I'm writing down who I saw each movie with and where. I hope to have more conclusions soon, particularly since this upcoming week is newsletter week and I'd like to get a few more lists out of the way before then.) Now, though, it's to the video store. Edi and I were supposed to go see my pal Dave R., hang out at his place, watch Justice League, and then go get dinner. But we called and flaked out on him. The sad fact is, I don't get very many Saturdays off, and after going out and watching the movie and walking around the Castro, what I want to do most in the world is lie in bed with my beautiful girlfriend, perhaps with a bottle of beer or two, and watch, yes, another movie. If we could, I would lobby for La Dolce Vita, but thankfully it's not possible. I think we need the cinematic equivalent of coffee and dessert after Fellini's five course meal. posted by Jeff | 6:53 PM | Wednesday, August 11, 2004  Don't talk about Wash Club! posted by Jeff | 10:26 PM | Tuesday, August 10, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Rain Man meets Videodrome! So before things started getting crazy at work, I did some rudimentary number-crunching. Actually, it's less like crunching than gnawing: I was able to establish that, of the 538 movies I've seen in the last eight years, I saw 278 of them in the theater and 260 on video and/or cable.Ta-dah! I haven't had a chance to poke much more than that, although one very obvious trend I noticed is, thanks to Edi and the Naz Super 8, I go to the movies a lot more than I used to: I've seen almost as many movies in the theater in the last two and a half years (135) as I did in the approx. five years before (143). And the converse is even more dramatically true: Out of the 260 films I've watched on video (which of course includes DVD, cable TV, pay-per-view, etc.), I've only watched 70 of those since we've been dating--the other 190 took place before. A recent upsurge in video watching (at 24 movies as of July, I've already watched more movies on video than I did in either 2003 or 2002 (23 each year). Since we now live together, the stats would seem to suggest that Edi and I "date" less--and spend more time staying in watching movies from the comfort of our place. (I've only seen 18 movies in the theater since we've moved in together--twelve of them were with Edi, three were with other people, and three were by myself. And yes, all three of those solo flicks were Indian films.) (This is why I'm still kicking myself for forgetting to update my bio last night--those numbers all got a kick in the shorts recently as I've seen at least three movies in the theater in the movie in the last two weeks). Interesting, no? No? Too bad, because I plan on exploring this more in future posts... posted by Jeff | 12:39 PM | Monday, August 09, 2004 The Pitch: It's, like, a lot of movies! So in the course of writing the endless blabbity-blab of my previous post, I poked around in the deep recesses of the my bio page, trying to figure out which Bollywood movie I had first seen sans subtitles (turned out not to be Road, but Awara Paagal Deewana, that Whole Nine Yards meets every action scene in Hollywood from the previous three years flick, which I saw in July of 2002). And I got curious, and did a little quick cut and paste, and a little trick to get a quick count, and I got the rough count of how many movies I've seen between 1997 and now.538. Five hundred and thirty eight movies over approximately an eight year span (the count is off by at least six movies because I haven't updated my bio page in the last month). That averages out to 67.25 movies per year. At an average of two hours a movie, that's almost exactly an entire month and a half spent watching movies. Honestly, I think those numbers are quite a bit lower than a lot of my movie-watching friends, but still: 538 movies. If I continue that average and you give me a life expectancy of 70, that puts me at 2,690 movies before I kick the bucket. Something like seven straight months of movie-watching. (Actually, if I put it in the terms of a job, at forty hours a week, it becomes a more leisurely two-plus years, allowing for things like meals, sleep, weekends free--although what would a weekend free mean without going to the movies?--and like that.) Obvious I like myself a bit of lazy number-crunching, isn't it? So I'm thinking that over the next week or two, I'll pick of those stats--and the list itself--and see if anything worthwhile comes up. posted by Jeff | 4:18 PM | The Pitch: It's like The Hitcher meets It Happened One Night! Road was the second Bollywood movie I watched without subtitles, and I retained a real fondness for the flick (in part because of starlet Antra Mali's awesome stomach muscles). So when I found a used DVD for sale at the Indian nail salon across from the Naz Super 8, I was all over it.Now, even without subtitles, it was easy to tell Road was far from a superior Bollywood picture. Clearly derivative as hell, it was badly paced, way too short, and had at least one utterly unnecessary musical number (a fat guy in a headband and sleeveless jumpsuit who looks like a Pakistani Frank Stallone bounces around with a kinda hot older chick who dresses like a belly dancer and dry humps like a heat-exhausted stripper). But the musical numbers had pep, the plot was ripped off in large part from The Hitcher, it was far racier than any Bollywood flick I had seen by that point, and ooo baby, those stomach muscles. (A more clueful observer of the Bollywood scene than myself could point out how Road in many ways was a precursor to the ultra-modern Bollywood flick annoying reviewers in cinemas today with its reliance of Hollywood plots and "adult" material. But I'm not gonna bother with it because (a) I'm not knowledgeable enough to make such an argument interesting; and (b) I'm sure ignorant, lustful yahoos like me supporting trash like Road are part of the problem.) So how does Road stack up now, with English subtitles and the gloomy knowledge of Bollywood's dismal situation? I guess I haven't come very far on the ignorant, lustful yahoo front because I thought it was, once again, enjoyably disposable trash. Arvind and Lakshmi are a passionate young couple who argue a lot and dance and sing almost as much. In a sign of youthful disfunction, Arvind suggests that he and Lakshmi elope and drive cross-country to surprise Lakshmi's father, an important cop in a distant province. They hit the road in their spiffy SUV, get lost in the desert wastes between Delhi and the province, and pick up Babu, a few miles after seeing his broken down car by side of the road. Of course, Babu is from classic film hitchiker mode, somebody with an off-center charm who isn't quite right in the head who moves from puckish to rude to dangerous in very short order. After taking the SUV and Lakshmi at gunpoint, Babu repays Arvind's kindness by dropping him in the middle of nowhere, and forcing Arvind to fight not just for survival, but to save the woman he loves. Somewhere in there we get one steamy musical number (Arvind and Lakshmi check into a hotel number and dance around in super-skimpy outfits while singing about their virginity) one extraneous musical number (see the chubby Mr. Headband, above), and one almost Lynchian musical number (Babu's musical number is filled with spotlights, shadow figures, disquieting editing and accompaniment by a beaten, bleeding hostage), and your usual car crashes, motorcycle chases, inept police forces chasing the wrong guy type stuff you get in this kind of movie. A few things become more clear with the subtitles, interestingly. Like a lot of the new Bollywood "adult" flicks, Road tries to have it both ways, with its smutty modern ways being clucked at by its dowager-friendly theme--if I parse it right, the filmmakers draw comparisons between Babu's rudeness and violence with Arvind & Lakshmi's choice to elope--an act that the movie portrays as literally rude and understatedly paints as disrespectful and rude. In several scenes, Babu is described as "more honest" and "more truthful" than Arvind or Lakshmi because, even though he'll will kill a stranger for their car, he treats Lakshmi with utter respect at all times and talks about the importance of "respectful" relationships with her. Another big change is that Babu, instead of being your typical road-traveling serial killer, a la Rutger Hauer in The Hitcher, is merely a criminal, a thug working for a crime boss who sees a chance to rip off his boss and ends up with everything going badly. The broken down car by the side of the road doesn't contain murdered innocents, it's his partner in crime who he had to kill when things went south. The difference takes a little bit of the bloody fun out of Road for me, but sets up potentially bigger payoffs that, sadly, never get close to coming to pass. Since neither Vivek Oberoi (as Arvind) or Antara Mali (as Lakshmi) have one-half Manoj Bajpai's (Babu) talent Road fails for the ambiguity I think it strives for in its last third: Babu begins courting Lakshmi while kidnapping her, and his guesses as to Arvind and Lakshmi's relationship is accurate enough that when he starts suggesting that Arvind's intention in proposing elopement was an attempt to get some pre-marital nookie, there's room for some genuine ambiguity in the movie. Although Lakshmi flirts back with Babu and admits her attraction to him when he presses her about it, the audience, sadly, doesn't doubt that she's doing it because she has to. But if Mali had been a better actress, things might have been more interesting: is Lakshmi playing Babu, or is she really seeing in this guy the type of respectful outlaw she really wants? Simiarly, although Arvind is exactly the poser with a motorcycle and macho pre-beard Babu paints him as, at no point does Oberoi play him as anything other than an honorable guy--there's absolutely no chance that Arvind is playing Lakshmi to get into her pants. And, ultimately, who is the movie trying to kid? It's a Bollywood picture--of course, the couple's love is true and the villain is nothing more than snake! But with a bit more actual talent and effort on the part of Oberoi and Mitra, there might have been some actual tension to the non-crashing, non-shooting, non-stomach wiggling, non-Pakistani Frank Stallone scenes. Road is fun trash, but it's not good trash, and that's kind of sad. It makes it much harder to endorse and to loan. posted by Jeff | 2:46 PM | Saturday, August 07, 2004 The Pitch: It's Like Blah, Blah, Blah meets Yakkity-Yakkity-Yak! No post since Thursday? Really? Yikes.I guess it makes sense. A lot of spare time over the last couple of days has been gobbled up by converting my old fanboy rampage columns and putting them up at the CE site--I think I more than doubled the number of columns available since there's something like 48 of them now available. I'm kind of annoyed with myself for not posting them sooner--like, when they were written--because I think humor as a rule ages very, very quickly. I'm really not sure how many of these things effective anymore, whereas if they had been put up within, oh, six months or so of being written, I think they'd be more effective. So my new "secret" resolution is to put these puppies up within two weeks of publication. With the new Savage Critic taking up absoutely no time (unless I contribute my own reviews), I think I'll be a little more willing to do so. With the end of free email hosting in sight for lazybastard.com, I now need to figure out what's to be done there. I think I'm gonna also push it over to lunarpages and pay about eight bucks a month to have it hosted. Which is great, but really pushes the question: what am I gonna do with the site? What's nice is I'll be able to publish the blog on lazybastard, but, you know, I should probably do a little more with the site than that. Or should I? I wasn't particularly active in contributing to the site before Nano, but doing Nano really pushed my writing into a whole different area. I find writing book and film reviews enjoyable (at least initially) and I think it's safe to say it's one of my strengths as a writer, but is it what I want to be doing with the rest of my life? The rest of my writing life? No, no, no, no. I think if there's a reason why blogs are so successful, it's because they are websites boiled down to their essentials: Here's what I think. (Or these days: here's what I took a digital photo of.) There's no reason why I couldn't take all my movie reviews, turn them into blog entries, and add news ones as I go along. I wouldn't lose anything except images and some clever roll-over text. Sadly, I do, however, like putting images with my writing. That graphic on top of the Sergei section? That's neat. But neat enough to keep coming back to my site and pumping it with content periodically to keep people coming--or, at least, to stave off the emails saying, "Hey, you lazy bastard, why don't you update your site?" To spend the time finding the image, inserting the image, inserting the text? I. Do. Not. Know. Lunch time. Maybe if it's quiet when I get back, I can talk about Road a little. posted by Jeff | 7:00 PM | Thursday, August 05, 2004  We had a great time in Humboldt County...except for the Motel 6. I've stayed in Motel 6's around the country, and I've stayed in Arcata before, but apparently staying in a Motel 6 in Arcata is signing up for a non-stop white trash Reese's Peanut Butter Cup: dogs barking inside rooms; idiots sitting outside their rooms loudly discussing radar guns at 5:00 a.m.; homeless women living in trucks in the parking lot and peeing in bushes, etc. The concrete walled non-smoking room stank of lysol and, when we finally fanned that away, cigarette smoke. Across the way, the Arcata Inn, with its sky blue facade, free wireless, and unvomited upon parking lot seemed like a bitter reminder of a better place. Really nice time at the wedding, though. posted by Jeff | 4:14 PM | Wednesday, August 04, 2004 The Pitch: It's like What's Happening! meets Waiting for Godot! Whew. A pleasant day off where I managed to get "things" (a.ka. nothing important) done. Finished Ratchet & Clank 2, Lolita, caught The Bourne Supremacy tonight with Edi after a very nice dinner, revised the Savage Critic blog and revised two of the site pages quickly, tinkered with Wordsmith and with the Palm Pilot, and found out that Red Hill Books apparently isn't closing--they're just having a really big sale.Like I said: whew. I could and should zip through fast reviews of the above, but I'm not gonna--tonight, anyway. I'm thinking about putting the PS2 away for a little while: November's coming up fast, and I've got a lot of work to do for my crazy scheme for this year's Nanowrimo. It's really just time to get back to the writing--these past seven months living with Edi has allowed me to get a good idea of what the rhythm of living together is like, and there's no reason why I shouldn't be doing a shitload of writing. It's hard, because there are nights when I come home from work and I am so brain dead I just want to play some mindless video games, but the drive to finish a video game, or unlock a next level, has kept me playing games on days when I could be doing a lot of different--and arguably better-stuff. I'm going to a day game tomorrow--Giants vs. The Reds, awesome seats. I haven't followed baseball at all this season, but I won't mind sitting outdoors in great seats eating food and snapping pics. No sir, I really won't mind that at all. posted by Jeff | 11:16 PM | Tuesday, August 03, 2004 The Pitch: It's like The Village meets Big Night! Last Thursday night, before E. & I split for the fun-filled hijinks of Humboldt, I saw a very ominous thing in the window of Red Hill Books on Courtland. There were two signs (which, in this context, means pieces of cardboard on which someone had written pertinent info in Sharpie and then taped into the windows) advertising "a big book sale" on a coming weekend in August. "On Saturday, all hardcovers $2.00. All paperbacks $1.00. On Sunday, a bag of books $5.00."My blood ran cold. I like Red Hill Books a lot. Although I haven't bought anything there since scoring those copies of Suttree and Americana, I go in there all the time and browse, hooked as I currently I am in the loop of someone who doesn't need to buy any books and doesn't have a particular book in mind but keep looking on the shelves anyway. And if there's one thing I've learned about bookstores, when they're selling bags of books for a flat rate, it means that they're closing and they don't even want to think about what to do with their inventory. They just want to wash their hands of the whole deal. Of course, I'm a huge paranoid and the sign didn't say, as it sometimes does, "Going Out of Business Sale." Maybe it's just an inventory blow-out. As Edi pointed out later, Red Hill is part of that chain of stores that include Dog-Eared Books over on Valencia and maybe they're just getting rid of a bunch of their old inventory that isn't moving. I went in to the store sadly, wondering what the place would look like jammed with those eager red-faced book-hoarders tearing at the shelves come that Saturday morning--fat-gutted owlish men who keep lists of high-demand items to sell on the Internet for the extra cash needed to fund their squalid hobbies, such as keeping child brides and boasting in bars about their decades of unemployment--and decided to ask if the store was really going to close. The clerk wasn't behind the counter so I poked around the corner of the cental remainder section. Excuse me, I would ask. Are you closing, or am I a paranoid yahoo who fosters complicated guilty relationships with the stores I patronize? The clerk, a tiny indy chick who frequently filled the store with music from Belle & Sebastian or Cat Power, was sitting on a chair talking to an unhappy bearded man with glasses and a baseball cap. "Well, maybe," the girl said falteringly. "I could just stay with you until Jessica gets back from New York?" I did a quick 180 at that, as if remembering that I had left my pornography burning on the stove, and walked out of the store. Nobody needs to have the dissolution of their young indy love relationship interrupted by a guilty cad who hasn't even bought that fetching (but overpriced) Edward Gorey remainder, inquiring as to whether their place of employment is going balls-up. And really, what better confirmation did I need? Sometimes people's lives just crash around them--the job and the relationship go at the same time, and maybe you also find out you have candida too, and there's no reason for it and nothing to be done but stay on your friend's couch, dead-eyed and awake at three a.m., and wonder if all the Belle & Sebastian and Cat Power wasn't in some way either an omen or a cause of all the concurrent heartbreak--and it's better for absolutely everyone to keep all the words of hope and commiseration tucked far away, until they can be expressed by someone far more capable of saying them. posted by Jeff | 10:09 AM | The Pitch: Aw, I got no pitch, I just like this guy's photo. I think I like Sam Tanenhaus, the new editor of the New York Times Review of Books, just because of his picture. He looks very, very sad and I appreciate that. Back in the old days, a writer could outsource the sadness to a limply sorrowful labrador that would appear on the book jacket photo with them, but in these leaner economic times for the publishing industry a writer frequently has to be their own dog with mixed results. Tanenhaus' success with the look makes me eager to read anything by him, and I can only hope he moves soon from editing and nonfiction to the world of the woe-struck hardcover novel, where a fictional nation of sad-eyed men and women despairingly bow their heads to dusk-colored steering wheels. posted by Jeff | 9:54 AM |Monday, August 02, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Chicken Run meets Iris! I lost my eggs.Sadly--or, now that I think of it, happily--this is not a euphemism. I came in to work this morning, and found the place so crazed I jumped in and started slogging away early. About half an hour ago, when it quieted down a little I started looking for the two hard-boiled eggs I had brought in for breakfast. The deli bag was empty. No egg-shaped objects on my desk, or the empty desk adjacent. No eggs on the floor. I looked once or twice in the kitchen--no luck. I had a dim memory of rolling them somewhere. The eggs were very hot, I remember, because the deli I had purchased them from had just boiled them. Thankfully, I finally remembered. I had cleverly rolled each egg into a plastic cup, filled the cup with cold water, and left the eggs to cool in the sink. Then I went to my desk, things got crazy, and all fragile fleeting memory departed. I'm kinda bummed to report that my eggs were still in their plastic cups in the sink just now when I went to go get them. I hope they at least caused somebody some consternation upon seeing them. Would it be easy to figure out what two eggs, each sitting in their own clear plastic cup filled with water, were doing in the sink? Would someone think it was voodoo? A surrealist commentary on working in a big law firm? Or would they just worry that somebody was going nuts? Last night, I was walking down to the corner Italian joint with Edi after driving back from Humboldt County (details--and pictures--of which are hopefully coming to this space soon), I couldn't think of a very simple word and, because I would like to write some day, I found this very, very troubling. So the eggs in their cups, I'm no longer worried about my distintegrating writing talent, I worry about my withering ability to survive in the world. Losing one's eggs is no peeing in Yuban cans, but it's a start. God help me, it's a start. posted by Jeff | 12:24 PM | |
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