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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Sunday, February 27, 2005 The Pitch: It's like The Oscar meets Contempt! Yeah, the Oscars. We're leaving in less than an hour to go watch 'em at David & Larry's. I still have seen nearly nothing: Not The Aviator, not Ray, not Finding Neverland, not Million Dollar Baby (and the only one I currently regret not seeing is Million Dollar Baby). I've seen Sideways, I've seen Closer, and the fact that The Incredibles, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and/or Farenheit 9/11/The Passion of the Christ weren't nominated for anything other than minor awards means that this year Hollywood is circling the wagons--big money studios shutting out anything but their own grudgingly granted vanity projects, and assuring themselves that they're contributing to cinema. They've forced out other accessible and safe indy projects (I mean, Jesus, you're not going to mistake Eternal Sunshine for a Tarkovsky flick anytime soon) to reward their own better-than-shitty efforts. I mean, even Sideways wasn't a great movie. Sideways was good. Sideways was fine.Fuck. My whole point of this post was to talk about how Seijun Suzuki's Pistol Opera helped saved my life on Friday night when our evil insane neighbor threw a yard party in the freezing cold until 2:30 in the morning. And about getting the collectors set of Spaced in the mail Saturday and Edi and I watching all of season one by noon today even though I had meant to dole them out carefully (Spaced is the sitcom from the Shaun of the Dead guys with a very nice gal-balance provided by Jessica Stevenson). They're pretty keen, and I'm sure we'll have blazed through the rest of the set by next week. And finally, I bought Kung Fu Hustle on DVD and Casshern & The Passion of the Christ on VCD in Chinatown on my lunchbreak yesterday: my original plan was to see The Passion in a way I could be reasonably sure Mel Gibson would make absolutely no money off me, but the big screen Dolby surround showing of five minutes of Kung Fu Hustle suckered me in. As for Casshern, I don't know if I should have just paid the extra ten bucks for the jumbo DVD rather than the wee little VCD, since it's apparently a big-screen effects laden action flick, but I just couldn't bring myself to part with twenty bucks for something I've only seen one trailer for on the Internet almost a year ago. On Wednesday, I hope to continue my string of acquisition by traveling to Fremont and getting Main Hoo Na (great movie) and Boom (lousy, lousy movie) on DVD from my secret "source" (Beauty Plus Salon & Boutique). See? That's what I wanted to talk about: crappy movies, not the crappy Oscars. I feel much better. posted by Jeff | 5:08 PM | Thursday, February 24, 2005 The Pitch: It's like Where The Buffalo Roam meets The Wizard of Oz! Weird the way an eye arranges images in a frame. I was struck by the fact that Hunter S. Thompson died on Sunday night, and Dr. Gene Scott died on Monday afternoon. They seem almost bloodbrothers to my mind, and I can't imagine anyone who went to college when I did was able to escape exposure to either.Sadly, I have more to say about Gene Scott than I do about Thompson, although that is probably unsurprising, since Scott--by virtue of his crazed religious broadcasts--could be more directly experienced en masse. I have stories of friends who wrote their early articles for the college paper like Thompson, or who would tell me the inevitable tragic ending to a Thompson signing: I remember one, at Stanford, where a student hollered "Hey, Hunter!" and hurtled a can of beer. Thompson, on sheer autopilot, caught it and then pitched it back, clocking the surprised student straight in the face and causing a legendary spray of blood, beer and university-directed lawsuits. But Gene Scott...my last roommate in the dorms was fixated on Gene Scott. Mark would sit indoors all day, shades drawn, nursing a hangover, and would watch Gene Scott. When I would come back from class (or, later, began my own depressed tour of duty of that tiny room as the relationship I left proved nearly impossible to escape), I would sit there, in the gloom of a blinded day, and watch Mark watch Gene Scott. Scott provided a valuable service for those of us who had yet to go into a bar, or lacked a certain kind of alcoholic parent: Scott would wordlessly sulk with all the attendant charisma of the apathetic drunk. For young men unable to avoid being engaged in the world, there is a genuinely mesmeric quality in a man sitting unresponsive to all around him--and that power is heightened when done in front of television cameras. Televisions never shut up, you know: a minute of dead air is a minute of sheer terror to those in programming, a minute where viewers can change the channel, or turn off the talking box, or can leave their darkened room and return to the world. But Gene Scott would sit, staring, either directly into the camera or off to a corner of the stage, collecting his thoughts, or tending the fires in his soul. After a minute--or two--or three--he would break out with a tirade of extended disgust, toward the Godless, or the penniless, or the makers of second-rate cigars. (I must have also walked in on the middle of one his fund-raisers, where he would stare into the camera and refuse to speak until a certain goal was met, although I must have arrived before they started and left before they ended: I only know about them from reading the obituary I linked to.) Sometimes before cutting, finally, to commercial, he would show videotape of horses in a field. (Or perhaps those were the commercials, I can't remember anymore.) What strikes me now is Mark--hairy, unkempt, smoking cigars--pointing and laughing derisively at Gene Scott--hairy, unkempt, smoking cigars. It's not my memory that twins them, I'm sure of it: one was a strange mirror version of the other. Mark, to what I'm sure he thought of as his credit, kept himself to himself--he barely went to classes, barely left the room--and perhaps this is why he laughed as he did at Gene Scott. Mark had an unhappy filipina girlfriend (on whom he cheated at least once with his unhappy filipina ex-girlfriend) but apart from leaving the room for her, he was in the room all the time--bearish and naked, the light of the television playing off his glasses, smoking the glasses and frequently hooting and pointing at Dr. Gene Scott's unfocused glower. Everyone on our floor only knew Mark as a presence of cheap cigar smoke, lacking corporeal form. And so maybe no one else remembers Dr. Gene Scott quite the way I do--as something like a hologram, a figure smoking cigars in the blue lit center of our room, surrounded by the haze of cigar smoke. Something like the Wizard of Oz as the Wizard was and must have been--a scowling man disappointed by the world, surly and silent in his displeasure, occasionally coaxed to manic heights of laughter, derisive laughter, as he scrawled equations he never explained, and talked excitedly of impending ruination. This, then, was Dr. Gene Scott, and this was my roommate, Mark. And although I left them behind, it appears they stay with me still. Not even death, at least for now, will undo that. posted by Jeff | 11:25 AM | Wednesday, February 23, 2005 The Pitch: It's like Ferris Bueller's Day Off meets War Games! My smelly self has accomplished little more today than finishing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and not showering.Actually, this is not altogether true. I did a lot of stuff with the computer, including ordering a 6-pin to 4-pin firewater converter (easy enough if you want the cables, absurdly complicated if you want just the female-to-male converter), finding and installing my copies of Adobe Acrobat and Nero Burning Rom, updating links on this very blog, finding my long-lost copy of Kid A, and piling together some books to sell at Red Hill around the corner. Although Edi got me a copy of Cloud Atlas and I am actually very excited about this, I've decided what I really want to read is Murakami's latest book and I'm am willing to get rid of some of my dead titles to get it. Just lately, I realized I didn't have to be the be-all and end-all comics library I had been unconsciously striving for and a lot of the titles that I had bought to support authors I liked just weren't going to be read and reread every few months, or even every few years. As for GTA: SA, I didn't really finish it per se--I only completed the main storyline. And frankly, if that little tart Katie had bothered to show up at her apartment in San Fierro in the three or so days I spent waiting, I might be playing it still. But, apart from wooing and bedding down the last two unbedded girlfriends, there really wasn't much else I wanted to accomplish. Oh sure, I could finish up all those side-races, and I could do whatever it is to get unlimited stamina to win those two god-damn marathons, and I could get my gang's territories as close to 100% as possible (I've become a surgeon with the M4 assault rifle) but, dammit, I just wasn't enjoying it. I'm glad the game has all those extra things to do for those hypercompetitive fanboys who want to get 100% but I had to bail out at 89% or whatever my percentage was at completion. On a whim, I booted up one of the three other saved San Andreas games on the card, one from October 27th 2004, and suddenly I went from trim and tattooed CJ to skinny, smelly CJ--from the well-suited millionaire to the guy with the tank-top and three hundred dollars in his pocket. I hopped on the motorcycle and drove around the neighborhood and, weirdly, the location felt different: there were less people, less traffic, less drug dealers. I admit I felt the pull--heyyyy, why not start from here but do it all differently?--but didn't do more than a mission or two before I turned it off, put away the game, pulled the controller from the PS2 and put in the drawer with the games. I decided to keep the PS2 plugged in as a back-up DVD player (even though Edi and I have, no shit, five DVD players between the two of us) but I'm through with games for a while--maybe even a long while. (The possible exception to this is Hibbs lent me KOTOR and I'm dying to see if it actually works on this new computer of mine. But the plan would be just to install it, test it, and then shut it down. Why? Because I'm too much of a junkie to not install it, but too worried about wasting another month playing it...) No video games until I get hitched? Hey, it could happen, right? Now, if you excuse me, I have to either (a) shower, or (b) sell some graphic novels, depending. posted by Jeff | 4:46 PM | Friday, February 18, 2005 The Pitch: It's like The Hours meets Ong-Bak! It's almost 11:00 and I am home in the house, quite alone, with only I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning as my companion. Ryan is in town for a quick visit, and she and Edi are out at some play in the Tenderloin (they're probably drinking with the cast by now) and this is a very, very good thing. I talked with Edi on the cell phone earlier tonight as they were leaving, and Edi sounded very, very happy--it was a genuine relief to hear how happy she sounded considering how stressful this week has been.The empty house thing is kind of awkward and weird for me--it happens so rarely I'm never quite sure what to do. As somebody who likes having a certain amount of time alone, I feel embarrassed and uncomfortable now when I finally get some in the privacy of the home--I feel like one of those infants that point at a rubber hamburger and squall and whine and twitch and then, when finally given said hamburger, look around blankly, like: well, what now? I picked up the Bright Eyes album and also Nas's Illmatic at Streetlight Records after an expansive but not particularly tasty fettucine dinner at Noe Street Pizza. I was inspired to get the Nas album after watching the VH1 "Driven" last week. What a goofy, goofy man I am--I hated Nas after watching him stink up Belly, liked maybe one or two tracks (at most) that I've heard, but because a bunch of Nas's friends were talking about how talented and brilliant a rapper he was, I thought, "Well, yeah. Gee, there's got to be a reason people like this guy, right?" Oh, so very dumb am I. It was okay, and maybe it'll grow on me but I think maybe Nas paints a very clear picture of a particular type of East Coast existence that resonates with people who are familiar with that way of life, and it just doesn't knock me on the ass the way, I dunno, Straight Out of Compton did. As far as I can tell, I much prefer Nas's wife, the "My Milkshake Brings All The Boys To The Yard" chick. Criminey, that's just a million time more brilliant that anything I've heard yet on Illmatic. And of the two Bright Eyes albums, I prefer the folky one, although nothing yet cuts me open as widely as "Landlocked Blues" which I love just as much having paid for it as I did when I snagged it for free. Thank God it balances out "Road To Joy," which uses Beethoven's melody to "Ode to Joy" for a folksy acoustic tune. Oh, it burns, preciousssssss, it burns poor Smeagol... Heh. I think I'm the last person on the entire Internet to do a Gollum imitation. Where's my prize, dammit? I should be writing the new comics section, but, oh, jesus, I am just so fuckin' tired of comic books at the moment. I did very good business working solo at the comic shop, and read a lot of funny books (even though I can't see how I'm going to get a chance to write any reviews this week) and even have some books I'm looking forward to reading (Helllllllo, Essential Luke Cage!) but I just can't wrap my head around trying to be witty and/or informative about a bunch of books coming out three months from now. I am so very, very eager not to be writing about new comics that I pissily spent ten minutes trying to log on to Blogger so I could write about something other than fucking comic books. And so, this is me on a Friday night while the girlfriend is away: wasting money; wasting calories; wasting time. Oh!! But another thing I picked up tonight while killing time on 24th Street--and which I'm very, very happy about--is The Police Log, a collection of articles from The Aracta Eye wherein Kevin L. Hooper writes up the police log for my old hometown and catches all of the charm of the place: May 29, 1995 Noon: In the throes of a hissyfit, the person outside the thrift store at 11th and K streets toook it out on a refrigerator, kicking it over into the street. The icebox insulter then fled on bicycle before police arrived. September 13, 1999 8 p.m.: A Blakeslee Avenue resident's wheelchair was stolen from her front yard. September 22, 2000 1:08 p.m.: These neighbors aren't getting along, and it's come down to accusations of laundry stealing. Thank you, Kevin L. Hoover, for giving this exile a taste of his never-forgotten homeland. The woman at the book store on Castro (wish I had the name of the store here but I don't) is a very big booster and was happy to tell me how she had discovered the book. In fact, there's a booksigning next Friday for the author (Vol. II has just been released) and I'm very much thinking about going. Provided I ever finish this motherfucking newsletter, of course. Argh...argh...argh. posted by Jeff | 11:35 PM | Wednesday, February 16, 2005 The Pitch: It's like A Clean Well-Lighted Space meets Barton Fink!  Oh sure, I'm behind in a crazy, crazy way with this week's newsletter, but at least I've got even crazier room to work with now my new monitor is in place. All that extra space is going to make working with the blackline immeasurably easier... provided I actually start in on it... Picasa is proving to be mighty rad, and now that I was able to straighten shit out so my card reader works, I used it to get a bunch of pictures up on The Unclear Eye which hasn't been updated in, oh, I dunno, six months or something. The problem with uploading photos I find is it's such an all-or-nothing proposition: I either want to post 300 at a time, or zero. So I've got a handful to post today, maybe more on Friday if I get a shot at it before work. Also in the mighty rad department: Firefox. I was using it before I switched over to the new computer, but I hadn't messed with any of the extension thingies. FireFTP is a million times easier to use than IE's FTP program (although I'm a little suspicious at some of the errors I've gotten in transferring large numbers of pages at once) and with the Blog This! extension, maybe I'll even start using my Research page again. That would be keen. So. New computer set-up? Rad. Picasa? Rad. Firefox? Very rad. Procrastinating when you've got a very tight time deadline and a busy couple of days? Not rad at all, my friend. Not rad at all. 
posted by Jeff |
4:55 PM |
Monday, February 14, 2005 The Pitch: It's like Generic Music Poll meets Generic Music Poll Answers! This is a music poll thingy being passed along a lot of the comics blogs I read. It's supposed to be invitation only or something. Fuck that.1. Total amount of music files on your computer: I don't know this one for sure (since I'm at work), but I believe it's about 19.75 gigs according to Itunes. That's about twice as much as any poll answer I've read yet, by the way. 2. The last CD you bought was: Hmmm. Bought, bought, what is bought? The last CD I purchased in a store was The Streets, A Grand Don’t Come For Free a few months ago. But because I belong to Emusic, I’ve downloaded Philosophy: The Best of Bill Hicks; The Transient, Shooting At The Sun With a Water Gun, and Live at the Hemlock, all by David Dondero; Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone by The Walkmen, and Let It Be by the Replacements since then. Those are all freestanding mp3 files, by the way, so they aren’t controlled by any DMR or subscription limitation. Emusic is pretty cool. But the last CD I bought and adored was Milk-Eyed Mender by Joanna Newsom, hands down. 3. What is the song you last listened to before reading this message? “It Don’t Matter,” by Rehab. Does anyone remember that one? It’s one of those from MTV to Audiogalaxy to backup CD to Ipod-on-random type incidents, travelling from, say, early '98 to '05. Does anyone remember Rehab? Including Rehab? 4. Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you. I’m both oddly fickle and strangely stoic when it comes to my music choices. So sometimes the songs that mean the most to me are the songs I haven’t listened to in years, and the songs I’ll be playing continuously for days mean nearly nothing. I think pop songs can only hold so much meaning for a person; then you just can’t stand them anymore. To crib an example I read somewhere, I tearfully sung the chorus to “Biko” by Peter Gabriel a hundred thousand times when I was in high school. It’s a fine song, but I cringe to hear it today maybe precisely because it moved me so much. So I could list a half-dozen “current favorites” but the following “perennials” seem to stick with me, no matter how hoary they are: 1. “Pyramid Song,” Radiohead. This still gives me chills every time I hear it. 2. “Johannesburg, Illinois,” Tom Waits. This super-short song can, in the space of its minute and a half, make me tear up nearly every single time. It's the sound of unrequieted requited love, maybe. 3. I have no idea how I could ever choose just one Paul Westerberg song (either solo or with the ‘Mats) but, uhhh, “Swingin’ Party” from Tim? It speaks to my inner boastful coward. 4. “One Long Pair of Eyes,” by Robyn Hitchcock. Maybe his only truly perfect song (almost everything else sounds too over- or under-produced on album, although I’m really, really fond of “I Used to Love You,” off, I think, A Star For Bram). 5. “Dead,” by They Might Be Giants. After ten minutes of thinking, this was the closest I could get to a peppy song—I admit I have to sing aloud to it every time I hear it. 6. Who are you going to pass this stick to? (3 persons) and why? Nancy and Tim, because they both have great taste in music and they both have blogs to post their answers on. (And I'm really curious how many gajillion gigs of music Tim has). There’s a lot of third choices (Edi, Ryan, Kara Platoni) who don’t meet the latter criteria. If I can think of anyone else (or if Edi will let me post her answers here), I’ll let you know. posted by Jeff | 3:54 PM | Sunday, February 13, 2005 The Pitch: It's like Meeting People Is Easy meets The Stranger meets Wattstax! Or it would have been if I'd had the ability to stay awake long enough: Edi and I watched (finally) Meeting People Is Easy last night and turned it off in time to catch the opening of Orson Welles' The Stranger on KQED, which they followed up with Wattstax, honest to God. I wanted to watch, at least until Isaac Hayes appeared (which I'm sure would have been the end of the film--how could you follow Isaac Hayes?) but I was just too punked out. I'd spent most of the day drinking, which is not really my thing, as Patrick organized a kilt fitting party for his groomsmen and wisely bookended it with visits to nearby pubs.This is just a quick note to let you all know we returned safely from Half Moon Bay. We had a fine ol' time, although I woke up Friday morning feeling punky and we had to work kinda hard to check out, walk on the beach, and get my butt to work at CE in time. It was worth it, though: 9:15 a.m. found us walking under a sunless sky, watching forty wet-suited surfers bob like seals in the surf. Occasionally one of them would climb on to their board, and the board would climb onto the wave, and suddenly there would be a man crouching on the edge of the sea, pivoting across the quickening band of white, and then the sound of the surf would rise in the air and the man would tumble again into the sea. It didn't happen very often though. Mainly, Edi and I watched small birds that dashed so quickly along the edge of the water their legs flickered stroboscopically. They stole from each other small stones, again and again, so that the stones had no chance to be put to any good purpose. The birds robbed each other of the stones, and robbed the stones of all utility, and the sun refused to emerge through the cloud cover, flavoring everything with the sense of the eternal. The surfers had always bobbed in the water; the birds had always darted on the shore; Edi and I had always walked there watching all of this, and are walking there still. Two more days of work--two more days of helping the attorneys steal small stones from each other--and then I'm done for a week and a half. I've got a lot on my plate for this week, but at least I'll have ten days away from the office. I can't even begin to tell you how grateful I am for that. posted by Jeff | 10:18 PM | Wednesday, February 09, 2005 The Pitch: It's like Back to the Future meets National Lampoon's Vacation Just a real quick shout-out to our peeps--Edi's birthday is tomorrow so we travelled down to Half Moon Bay for the evening. I'm writing this from the Half Moon Bay Library, and have to make it quick because my session expires in about nine minutes. We were last here about two years ago, and we were kind of heartbroken because the big community store in the center of town burned down about thirteen days after I bought a container of marshmallows covered in dark chocolate there.So we checked into the same divey b&b we stayed at, now done in a new paint scheme (ginger and jaundice--a very Victorian color scheme, I think) marvelled at how the tablecloths in the room had changed but the volume button on the remote control didn't work. We are also able to see the ocean from our balcony, waves on the cliffs and everything. Last time we were there, we both felt we saw some approximation of the ocean but neither of us could remember what exactly we saw: Edi seems to remember some sliver of silver near the horizon, I have the memory of a dank moving swell near the corner of my vision. It's a little like people who see Bigfoot: no mattter how hard we try, we can't quite get our stories to synch up. I have to sign off now--the library computer keeps telling me so. And there's some unhappy looking teen girls standing around ready to apply a beatdown if they can't get on Instant Messenger. More later. Or tomorrow. Or something. posted by Jeff | 5:14 PM | Saturday, February 05, 2005 The Pitch: It's like Conjure, Wife meets All The President's Men! I've always been a sucker for magical thinking. So when Edi and I watched Three Kings last night, it made me wonder if the Republicans hadn't somehow cast a, a, a goddamned spell to put us back in 1991. Three Kings was a pretty good movie when it first came out--now it seems like an amazing movie, in part because it's so fuckin' topical. What's changed? Nothing's changed. When George Clooney is boondoggling the Iraqi guard into giving him a fleet of cars by hollering, "George Bush wants you! And you! And you! We are a coalition of brothers and President Bush wants you to help us! God bless you! God bless the USA! And God bless a free Iraq!" Edi and I looked at each other and I could almost see the gooseflesh, like a centipede, running down her arms and up mine.How else but fucking voodoo magic? It's 2005, but it's really 1992--George Bush is our President, he just won the second term, we're eyeing Iran like it was a piece of prize meat. The big question is: will we repeat the horrible tragedy and just leave the Iraqi people to be slaughtered? I suppose the other big question is: if we hadn't cut and run and given Sadaam ten years to crush the opposition we had fomented, would shit be so fuckin' hard in Iraq now? Our next stop in our magical time machine was 1988, as we rented the first two episodes of The Singing Detective. Edi and I had both seen it on PBS around the same time (separately, of course) so it was fun to see which scenes each of us remembered vividly and which we didn't. Oddly, we both remembered, down to the cadence, young Marlow's speech in the trees about what his life will be like when he grew up, although neither of us remembered it until we heard it. It was like remembering a long-lost but very vivid dream, with the bonus of watching the face of the person next to you as they remembered it, too. Separate and apart from that, it's extraordinary stuff--puts even the best TV from today to shame, and most of the movies. Having a certain masochistic curiousity, we intend to rent the movie after we've re-watched all the episodes. Because we're watching them on hoary old videocassette, the picture quality is total shit--or maybe that's the miracle of BBC TV. But the grungy quality alone summoned up that miserable era where we were both young, reading the same books and watching the same TV and not even knowing the other person existed. Kinda fun. I have promised Joel (a.k.a., "The Guy Who Loaned Me Ong-Bak") I'd loan him both Metal Gear Solid 3 and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time next week. So by Friday, those games will be out of my hair. "My girlfriend is going to hate you, dude," he said when I promised him. "Yeah," I replied, "but maybe my girlfriend will stop hating me." I rented The Punisher, by the way, and felt like I was playing a hobbled version of Max Payne--not worth battling my way through to get to the cool Interrogation scenes (which haven't really seemed all that cool yet, although they show some promise). And then it's just GTA and that's it! No, really! I won't even blog about video games--hopefully. posted by Jeff | 4:50 PM | |
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