ten good things (march and april, or whatever...)
oh man, it's been a while since i've put one of these together. i miss it. anyway, i'll get started with a controversial observation...
10.
like (presumably) everyone else in the universe, i wanted to puke when jason schwartzman appeared on the screen as louis XVI in marie antoinette. i mean, schwartzman fit nicely into the landscape of rushmore, but since then, it's like he won't leave the party... he lurks around a film as decent as i heart huckabees-- adding neither charm nor talent-- like some dude guzzling floaters in my living room that won't take the hint to go home. and no, i'm not gonna whip up some contrarian baloney about schwartzman's secret talents as an actor. nor am i a converted fan of any sort. but i do think he fits the tone of marie antoinette perfectly-- on account of the peculiar distinction of that tone, which i think is the film's real strength.
for a production that reached spike-lee-levels of reactionary hate-- long before anyone had even seen it-- marie is remarkably free of controversial declarations and questionable tugs-at-the-heartstrings, despite its pageantry. it doesn't feel like either of coppola's earlier films-- it's not quite icy enough to mirror the faux-existential, antonioni-through-the-eyes-of-hipsters feel of the virgin suicides, but i didn't feel obligated to pity marie either-- she's not the poor little rich girl of coppola's problematic (but unfairly hated) lost in translation. in place of commodity critiques or trust-fund-kid indulgences (to sum up two of its most typical knee-jerk reactions), i found a series of quiet paradoxes-- it's light-hearted, but never whimsical (and has a vague sense of dread about it that's somehow equally light)... the production is as handsome as it is awkward; everything grandiose and picturesque feels curiously out of place... the characters are rendered innocent by their lack of depth and dimension; there's an infantile purity about them that is neither enigmatic nor entirely idiotic-- it's a film about people who never bothered to learn how to be people.
i saw all of this in schwartzman himself. he wanders through the film in a childlike (though strangely un-curious) state of bewilderment-- he's too bland to be cute, and too gentle to deserve my contempt. much like myself as i watched the film, he swims through it in a haze of semi-disinterest-- out of sync with the motivations surrounding him, not sure why everyone's wearing such funny clothes, or when to be formal or casual or insightful or, hell, even horny...
9.
i love an album that sounds like it was fun to put together. for some reason, the space between maker/audience seems to sync up well in music, and it's great when you can feel its writers feelin' it. along these lines, has there ever been a more generous, joyous, over-ambitious, and 100% vulnerable piece-of-work than the clash's sandinista!?
the only thing i don't like about this record is the cover... so here's a random pic of the band with martin scorcese, presumably on the set of the king of comedy...
this three-record epic is most definitely one of the essential "we don't give a fuck" statements in rock history. one thing i've always liked about the clash is that they were never confined by their "punk-ness", and that lack of inhibition reached a true level of fearlessness in sandinista!, with its strange casserole of conflicting styles. heavy dub stands side by side with anthem rock; "atheist" gospel music beside leftist balladry. hell, joe strummer even begins the record by rapping! it's difficult to imagine a band attempting something at this scale nowadays-- let alone pulling it off-- and the degree of self-consciousness that would inevitably attend its ambitions is pretty dismal to think about. which makes sandinsita! all the more ripe for re-visiting, which i've been doing lately. anyway, here's one of its most bizarre tracks of all... with the shrill voice of someone named tymon dogg instead of strummer or jones... one of those tracks you either love or hate-- i love it, i'm not sure why... which seems in the spirit of the album:
the clash, "lose this skin" mp3
8.
i was looking for a new t.v. show. i started watching 24, which is well-crafted enough (albeit lacking in personality). but the right-wing paranoia quickly turned me off-- the endless, urgent pleas to forego due process; my lame armchair machismo as i watched jack bauer turn broken eggs into omelets. and then i read the new yorker's revealing article on executive producer joel surnow-- who is literally one of those evil, cigar-chomping right-wing blowhards who secretly rule the universe. it was enough to make me abandon the show completely.
enter battlestar galactica (the new version). a series which might accurately be described as the anti-24... both shows revel in imminent catastrophe, and generate their drama in response to tense situations that don't allow for much reflection. but battlestar-- for a show based on the admittedly flimsy premise of robots-destroying-the-human-race-- takes the high road, surprisingly enough. instead of indulging the reactionary bloodlust of its audience, it favors a remarkably sophisticated dialogue about the role of the military in a democracy. with the human race filed away to about 50,000 people-- thanks to a genocidal race of man/machine hybirds called cylons-- the actions and sacrifices required create a constant flirtation with martial law.
like 24, battlestar entertains the short-term results of hard-ass, draconian action-- one third-season episode even directly mirrors (in a psychedelic, sci-fi sort of way) the technique of water-boarding, a torture tactic the u.s. goverment may or may not still be putting to use. but it follows through with such indulgences, exposing their weaknesses, the toll they take on civilian morale, and the ugly atmosphere of suspicion that lies in their wake. and atop these more generalized ethical concerns is the nature of the cylon adversaries themselves. as the human survivors struggle to preserve a precarious sense of democracy, the cylons are busy adapting to their human-like agency themselves. a blade runner-esque landscape of cyber-identity develops, and the issue of torture is wrapped around it as well. can you torture a machine? what constitutes a machine, or a machine that doesn't know it's a machine? with its surprisingly adult dialogue, inventive scripts and strong performances, battlestar ditches the star wars shit and makes an honest attempt to answer such questions. for everyone who thought alfonso cuaron's children of men didn't manage to dig deep enough, this is the show for you.
7.
i've been indulging my expanding love of music made by hippie crackpots lately by seeking out records by ya ho wa 13. this band is essentially the, ahem, lovechild of a strange character who called himself father yod (and later "yahowa"), and followed an odd trajectory that lead him from middle-aged-hippie-health-food-clerk to guru to cult-leader to--according to his followers-- god himself. by the time he died in a hang-gliding accident in 1975 (not exactly a god-like way to go), he had 13 wives!
this is what santa claus would look like if he had TERRIBLE B.O.
... anyway, i sincerely enjoy this guy's music, as surely as i sincerely have a sense of humor about him. the loose, diverse, druggy sound calls to mind the velvet underground of white light, white heat, minus cale's abrasiveness and reed's sarcasm. and in a more concrete, less improvisational sort of way, it also reminds me of japan's hippie-ish improvisationalists the taj mahal travellers. worth checking out if you like the creepy atmosphere of peculiar belief systems, and are willing to let a song drone out for a while.
rather than post an mp3, i'm gonna link to the most comprehensive site i've found about this music, which is here.
6.
after finally seeing grindhouse last week (which was disappointing, btw)-- and agreeing with the general consensus that the fake trailers were the best part-- i figured it'd be worthwhile to post a link to the actual trailer for THE SINGLE GREATEST BAD MOVIE OF ALL TIME (which is now on dvd!!!):
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9Mkl9rtttog
5.
the first time i was in new orleans (waaaay back in the pre-internet days of 1996, when computers were powered with coal), one of the highlights of my trip was taking the ferry to algiers point, a neighborhood across the mississippi river (from the french quarter, etc.). when i was in town again a few weeks ago, i did it again.
i think what i like about algiers (other than that any excuse to take a ferry ride is a good one) is that it showcases what's distinct about the look of the city, without any of the commercialized novelties that muck it up back in the quarter. i was happy to find it in relatively good shape following katrina (far as i could tell), and it was a needed break from the intense profiteering going on in the city's more touristy areas (i gather that the real loud commerical stuff has had an easier time making an economic recovery down there, but feel free to prove me wrong). anyway, there's a remarkable charm to the neighborhood, and it's not prettied up the way typical "historical districts" tend to be. there's a sense that people actually live with, and experience, its beauty (rather than detach from it, and preserve it). it reminds me a bit of what i like about west philadelphia, actually.
4.
during my mad painting spree over the past two months, i found myself increasingly addicted to the BBC's world service radio report on NPR. now, there are a million reasons why the BBC does a much better job than the american media at capturing the international scene, but i'm sure you're all perfectly familiar with them. one thing i was particularly fascinated with/troubled by was their covereage of the refugee crisis in syria at the moment.
according to the BBC, over one million people have fled the bloodshed in iraq to take refuge in syria. you can see the patterns of movement in the copy/pasted chart above. there's a lot of people hittin' the road up there. and regardless of your feelings about syria's place on the "axis of evil", or status as a "sponsor of terror", i think one can admit rather apolitically that a sudden migration of over a million people will have a drastic effect on a country's infrastructure. surely, a consderable degree of goodwill has been put forth in the region surrounding iraq, and regrettably that goodwill may be running out. by contrast, the u.s. has recently pledged to receive 20,000 for resettlement. that's up from 7000, apparently, coming from the great "liberators of the country." why isn't this being covered more thoroughly in the american press? why aren't the democrats using this as incentive to increase diplomatic relations with syria, even if it's only to solve a humantarian crisis that is, presuambly, in no one's best interest? why hasn't anyoe put forth a possible solution to this? why don't i put on a trenchcoat and shave my hair into a mohawk and get me a shotgun and head on down to washington and
(anyway, the BBC world service is good)
3.
my cat has weird habits. most of them are annoying. over the years i've learned that any room i inhabit requires an all access kitty pass (which means i am forbidden to sleep with my bedroom door closed, unless i'm prepared for an abject serenade of endless meowing). i've learned that anything that makes its way from my body to the toilet bowl is a source of endless feline fascination. and whenever i dare untie my shoelaces with too much enthusiasm, there will be mild, (scratchy) bloodshed.
ladies and gents, i give you the internet world premiere of ARTHUR, my cat.
but the "bottlecap game" is the weirdest thing yet. so, here's how it works: my cat loves bottlecaps. i think it has something to do with the smell of beer at the end of them, or maybe that a beer bottle is too small for him to get his paw inside of. for a while i tried to shoo him away from the caps, but it was useless. now, whenever i open a beer (which is less often than you might think, actually):
* i immediately throw the cap to the ground and arthur chases after it.
* it's not quite a game of fetch at first, because he usually spends a few minutes batting it around, swatting it, taunting it, etc.
* eventually, he picks the bottlecap up with his mouth and brings it to me on the couch like a dog!
* he drops it, i pick it up, i throw it, and the whole thing starts over again.
* finally, he gets bored of the repetition and climbs onto the back of the couch, where he proceeds to drop the bottlecap as far down between our cushions as he can.
* then he dives in as deep as possible to try to rescue it.
the other night i left him alone with a bottlecap and went to bed. when i woke up, all the couch cushions were scattered on the floor of my living room, and a guinness cap had worked its way deep down into the seat. this is one of the many ways that cats remain strikingly outside my sphere of comprehension. i'm sure there's some boring, instinctive, pavlovian reason that arthur does what he does, but its meaning is beyond my reach. and good thing too-- because i value that distance. i like having a living, breathing thing at my side that doesn't make a lick of sense to me. and that shit is adorable to boot!
2.
i should have read toni morrison's beloved at least ten years ago. and i'm tempted to assume that i didn't because i'm simply a dumb white guy... but i should probably be more specific. it's not that i necessarily judged the novel per se, as much as i allowed its status as an oprah-approved melodrama to get in the way of my curiosity about it. so, instead, i indulged a mild taste for the usual suspects of suburban dude bohemia-- novels where grumpy white guys sit in dingy third-world bars and, like, hate the world cause they love it so much... the sort of thing jawbreaker once summed up so aptly: "like killing cops and reading kerouac" (minus any carrying out of the former).
what i'm trying to say is that if someone had convinced me beloved was as doused in deep moral ambiguity as it is... or that its fleshy, gothic sense of history would be such a 3-D smack in the face... or, hell, even that it would deal with dudes fucking goats for christ's sake (after all, we're talking about 20 year old dan here)... i'd have surely abandoned decaf nihilist trash like a confederacy of dunces and went straight to the good stuff.
seriously-- beloved is one of those all-around great novels. it's beautifully written, strikingly arranged and loose enough to get lost in a maze of partial interpretations. it's convincingly ethereal, but grounded enough in the nasty specifics of american history to seem tangibly inescapable. when i was done with it, it took me a day or two to consider reading anything after it, on account of the singularity of its power. i think need to read more toni morrison.
1.
a number of my closest friends live far away from me. so the time i get to spend with them-- on the telephone, on the internet, on holidays and vacations-- is often limited. but these limitations can be nice sometimes. small talk and petty arguments tend to fall to the wayside (unless they're funny), and our interactions become a greatest hits album of the juiciest gossip, biggest life-developments, and most meaningful observations in our too-seperate lives. oh, and our funniest observations too, of course. i enter a special friends world that only comes around once in a while, like a circus that keeps me sane.
i feel a similar affection (albeit of a more vicarious variety) when a new film is released by tsai ming-liang. upon discovering that i don't want to sleep alone was included in the philadelphia international film fest program this year, i felt a warmth and enthusiasm that i usually reserve for a night out with old friends. i've grown completely obsessed with tsai's work over the past few years, and as that fever developed, i've grown smitten with familiarity that follows one film to the next. tsai's movies are really chapters in one on-going film-- developing endlessly, and sharing the same grab-bag of compulsions, affections and strange inclinations i so happily observe in my favorite real-life people. even the faces are familiar-- lee kang-sheng and chen shiang-chyi return once again as star-crossed, psycho-sexual charlie browns... navigating, once more, through a soaking-wet romantic apocalypse... fucking up their sex scenes together, and developing an idiosyncratic-- but deeply impressionistic-- relationship to what academics might call "the polymorphous perverse". tsai's world is one i look forward to stepping in and out of-- for 90 minute weirdo chit-chats at a time-- for the rest of my life.
OH, AND ANOTHER THING:
HAPPY MOTHERS DAY, LIL' MOMMAS!!!
10.
like (presumably) everyone else in the universe, i wanted to puke when jason schwartzman appeared on the screen as louis XVI in marie antoinette. i mean, schwartzman fit nicely into the landscape of rushmore, but since then, it's like he won't leave the party... he lurks around a film as decent as i heart huckabees-- adding neither charm nor talent-- like some dude guzzling floaters in my living room that won't take the hint to go home. and no, i'm not gonna whip up some contrarian baloney about schwartzman's secret talents as an actor. nor am i a converted fan of any sort. but i do think he fits the tone of marie antoinette perfectly-- on account of the peculiar distinction of that tone, which i think is the film's real strength.
for a production that reached spike-lee-levels of reactionary hate-- long before anyone had even seen it-- marie is remarkably free of controversial declarations and questionable tugs-at-the-heartstrings, despite its pageantry. it doesn't feel like either of coppola's earlier films-- it's not quite icy enough to mirror the faux-existential, antonioni-through-the-eyes-of-hipsters feel of the virgin suicides, but i didn't feel obligated to pity marie either-- she's not the poor little rich girl of coppola's problematic (but unfairly hated) lost in translation. in place of commodity critiques or trust-fund-kid indulgences (to sum up two of its most typical knee-jerk reactions), i found a series of quiet paradoxes-- it's light-hearted, but never whimsical (and has a vague sense of dread about it that's somehow equally light)... the production is as handsome as it is awkward; everything grandiose and picturesque feels curiously out of place... the characters are rendered innocent by their lack of depth and dimension; there's an infantile purity about them that is neither enigmatic nor entirely idiotic-- it's a film about people who never bothered to learn how to be people.
i saw all of this in schwartzman himself. he wanders through the film in a childlike (though strangely un-curious) state of bewilderment-- he's too bland to be cute, and too gentle to deserve my contempt. much like myself as i watched the film, he swims through it in a haze of semi-disinterest-- out of sync with the motivations surrounding him, not sure why everyone's wearing such funny clothes, or when to be formal or casual or insightful or, hell, even horny...
9.
i love an album that sounds like it was fun to put together. for some reason, the space between maker/audience seems to sync up well in music, and it's great when you can feel its writers feelin' it. along these lines, has there ever been a more generous, joyous, over-ambitious, and 100% vulnerable piece-of-work than the clash's sandinista!?
the only thing i don't like about this record is the cover... so here's a random pic of the band with martin scorcese, presumably on the set of the king of comedy...
this three-record epic is most definitely one of the essential "we don't give a fuck" statements in rock history. one thing i've always liked about the clash is that they were never confined by their "punk-ness", and that lack of inhibition reached a true level of fearlessness in sandinista!, with its strange casserole of conflicting styles. heavy dub stands side by side with anthem rock; "atheist" gospel music beside leftist balladry. hell, joe strummer even begins the record by rapping! it's difficult to imagine a band attempting something at this scale nowadays-- let alone pulling it off-- and the degree of self-consciousness that would inevitably attend its ambitions is pretty dismal to think about. which makes sandinsita! all the more ripe for re-visiting, which i've been doing lately. anyway, here's one of its most bizarre tracks of all... with the shrill voice of someone named tymon dogg instead of strummer or jones... one of those tracks you either love or hate-- i love it, i'm not sure why... which seems in the spirit of the album:
the clash, "lose this skin" mp3
8.
i was looking for a new t.v. show. i started watching 24, which is well-crafted enough (albeit lacking in personality). but the right-wing paranoia quickly turned me off-- the endless, urgent pleas to forego due process; my lame armchair machismo as i watched jack bauer turn broken eggs into omelets. and then i read the new yorker's revealing article on executive producer joel surnow-- who is literally one of those evil, cigar-chomping right-wing blowhards who secretly rule the universe. it was enough to make me abandon the show completely.
enter battlestar galactica (the new version). a series which might accurately be described as the anti-24... both shows revel in imminent catastrophe, and generate their drama in response to tense situations that don't allow for much reflection. but battlestar-- for a show based on the admittedly flimsy premise of robots-destroying-the-human-race-- takes the high road, surprisingly enough. instead of indulging the reactionary bloodlust of its audience, it favors a remarkably sophisticated dialogue about the role of the military in a democracy. with the human race filed away to about 50,000 people-- thanks to a genocidal race of man/machine hybirds called cylons-- the actions and sacrifices required create a constant flirtation with martial law.
like 24, battlestar entertains the short-term results of hard-ass, draconian action-- one third-season episode even directly mirrors (in a psychedelic, sci-fi sort of way) the technique of water-boarding, a torture tactic the u.s. goverment may or may not still be putting to use. but it follows through with such indulgences, exposing their weaknesses, the toll they take on civilian morale, and the ugly atmosphere of suspicion that lies in their wake. and atop these more generalized ethical concerns is the nature of the cylon adversaries themselves. as the human survivors struggle to preserve a precarious sense of democracy, the cylons are busy adapting to their human-like agency themselves. a blade runner-esque landscape of cyber-identity develops, and the issue of torture is wrapped around it as well. can you torture a machine? what constitutes a machine, or a machine that doesn't know it's a machine? with its surprisingly adult dialogue, inventive scripts and strong performances, battlestar ditches the star wars shit and makes an honest attempt to answer such questions. for everyone who thought alfonso cuaron's children of men didn't manage to dig deep enough, this is the show for you.
7.
i've been indulging my expanding love of music made by hippie crackpots lately by seeking out records by ya ho wa 13. this band is essentially the, ahem, lovechild of a strange character who called himself father yod (and later "yahowa"), and followed an odd trajectory that lead him from middle-aged-hippie-health-food-clerk to guru to cult-leader to--according to his followers-- god himself. by the time he died in a hang-gliding accident in 1975 (not exactly a god-like way to go), he had 13 wives!
this is what santa claus would look like if he had TERRIBLE B.O.
... anyway, i sincerely enjoy this guy's music, as surely as i sincerely have a sense of humor about him. the loose, diverse, druggy sound calls to mind the velvet underground of white light, white heat, minus cale's abrasiveness and reed's sarcasm. and in a more concrete, less improvisational sort of way, it also reminds me of japan's hippie-ish improvisationalists the taj mahal travellers. worth checking out if you like the creepy atmosphere of peculiar belief systems, and are willing to let a song drone out for a while.
rather than post an mp3, i'm gonna link to the most comprehensive site i've found about this music, which is here.
6.
after finally seeing grindhouse last week (which was disappointing, btw)-- and agreeing with the general consensus that the fake trailers were the best part-- i figured it'd be worthwhile to post a link to the actual trailer for THE SINGLE GREATEST BAD MOVIE OF ALL TIME (which is now on dvd!!!):
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9Mkl9rtttog
5.
the first time i was in new orleans (waaaay back in the pre-internet days of 1996, when computers were powered with coal), one of the highlights of my trip was taking the ferry to algiers point, a neighborhood across the mississippi river (from the french quarter, etc.). when i was in town again a few weeks ago, i did it again.
i think what i like about algiers (other than that any excuse to take a ferry ride is a good one) is that it showcases what's distinct about the look of the city, without any of the commercialized novelties that muck it up back in the quarter. i was happy to find it in relatively good shape following katrina (far as i could tell), and it was a needed break from the intense profiteering going on in the city's more touristy areas (i gather that the real loud commerical stuff has had an easier time making an economic recovery down there, but feel free to prove me wrong). anyway, there's a remarkable charm to the neighborhood, and it's not prettied up the way typical "historical districts" tend to be. there's a sense that people actually live with, and experience, its beauty (rather than detach from it, and preserve it). it reminds me a bit of what i like about west philadelphia, actually.
4.
during my mad painting spree over the past two months, i found myself increasingly addicted to the BBC's world service radio report on NPR. now, there are a million reasons why the BBC does a much better job than the american media at capturing the international scene, but i'm sure you're all perfectly familiar with them. one thing i was particularly fascinated with/troubled by was their covereage of the refugee crisis in syria at the moment.
according to the BBC, over one million people have fled the bloodshed in iraq to take refuge in syria. you can see the patterns of movement in the copy/pasted chart above. there's a lot of people hittin' the road up there. and regardless of your feelings about syria's place on the "axis of evil", or status as a "sponsor of terror", i think one can admit rather apolitically that a sudden migration of over a million people will have a drastic effect on a country's infrastructure. surely, a consderable degree of goodwill has been put forth in the region surrounding iraq, and regrettably that goodwill may be running out. by contrast, the u.s. has recently pledged to receive 20,000 for resettlement. that's up from 7000, apparently, coming from the great "liberators of the country." why isn't this being covered more thoroughly in the american press? why aren't the democrats using this as incentive to increase diplomatic relations with syria, even if it's only to solve a humantarian crisis that is, presuambly, in no one's best interest? why hasn't anyoe put forth a possible solution to this? why don't i put on a trenchcoat and shave my hair into a mohawk and get me a shotgun and head on down to washington and
(anyway, the BBC world service is good)
3.
my cat has weird habits. most of them are annoying. over the years i've learned that any room i inhabit requires an all access kitty pass (which means i am forbidden to sleep with my bedroom door closed, unless i'm prepared for an abject serenade of endless meowing). i've learned that anything that makes its way from my body to the toilet bowl is a source of endless feline fascination. and whenever i dare untie my shoelaces with too much enthusiasm, there will be mild, (scratchy) bloodshed.
ladies and gents, i give you the internet world premiere of ARTHUR, my cat.
but the "bottlecap game" is the weirdest thing yet. so, here's how it works: my cat loves bottlecaps. i think it has something to do with the smell of beer at the end of them, or maybe that a beer bottle is too small for him to get his paw inside of. for a while i tried to shoo him away from the caps, but it was useless. now, whenever i open a beer (which is less often than you might think, actually):
* i immediately throw the cap to the ground and arthur chases after it.
* it's not quite a game of fetch at first, because he usually spends a few minutes batting it around, swatting it, taunting it, etc.
* eventually, he picks the bottlecap up with his mouth and brings it to me on the couch like a dog!
* he drops it, i pick it up, i throw it, and the whole thing starts over again.
* finally, he gets bored of the repetition and climbs onto the back of the couch, where he proceeds to drop the bottlecap as far down between our cushions as he can.
* then he dives in as deep as possible to try to rescue it.
the other night i left him alone with a bottlecap and went to bed. when i woke up, all the couch cushions were scattered on the floor of my living room, and a guinness cap had worked its way deep down into the seat. this is one of the many ways that cats remain strikingly outside my sphere of comprehension. i'm sure there's some boring, instinctive, pavlovian reason that arthur does what he does, but its meaning is beyond my reach. and good thing too-- because i value that distance. i like having a living, breathing thing at my side that doesn't make a lick of sense to me. and that shit is adorable to boot!
2.
i should have read toni morrison's beloved at least ten years ago. and i'm tempted to assume that i didn't because i'm simply a dumb white guy... but i should probably be more specific. it's not that i necessarily judged the novel per se, as much as i allowed its status as an oprah-approved melodrama to get in the way of my curiosity about it. so, instead, i indulged a mild taste for the usual suspects of suburban dude bohemia-- novels where grumpy white guys sit in dingy third-world bars and, like, hate the world cause they love it so much... the sort of thing jawbreaker once summed up so aptly: "like killing cops and reading kerouac" (minus any carrying out of the former).
what i'm trying to say is that if someone had convinced me beloved was as doused in deep moral ambiguity as it is... or that its fleshy, gothic sense of history would be such a 3-D smack in the face... or, hell, even that it would deal with dudes fucking goats for christ's sake (after all, we're talking about 20 year old dan here)... i'd have surely abandoned decaf nihilist trash like a confederacy of dunces and went straight to the good stuff.
seriously-- beloved is one of those all-around great novels. it's beautifully written, strikingly arranged and loose enough to get lost in a maze of partial interpretations. it's convincingly ethereal, but grounded enough in the nasty specifics of american history to seem tangibly inescapable. when i was done with it, it took me a day or two to consider reading anything after it, on account of the singularity of its power. i think need to read more toni morrison.
1.
a number of my closest friends live far away from me. so the time i get to spend with them-- on the telephone, on the internet, on holidays and vacations-- is often limited. but these limitations can be nice sometimes. small talk and petty arguments tend to fall to the wayside (unless they're funny), and our interactions become a greatest hits album of the juiciest gossip, biggest life-developments, and most meaningful observations in our too-seperate lives. oh, and our funniest observations too, of course. i enter a special friends world that only comes around once in a while, like a circus that keeps me sane.
i feel a similar affection (albeit of a more vicarious variety) when a new film is released by tsai ming-liang. upon discovering that i don't want to sleep alone was included in the philadelphia international film fest program this year, i felt a warmth and enthusiasm that i usually reserve for a night out with old friends. i've grown completely obsessed with tsai's work over the past few years, and as that fever developed, i've grown smitten with familiarity that follows one film to the next. tsai's movies are really chapters in one on-going film-- developing endlessly, and sharing the same grab-bag of compulsions, affections and strange inclinations i so happily observe in my favorite real-life people. even the faces are familiar-- lee kang-sheng and chen shiang-chyi return once again as star-crossed, psycho-sexual charlie browns... navigating, once more, through a soaking-wet romantic apocalypse... fucking up their sex scenes together, and developing an idiosyncratic-- but deeply impressionistic-- relationship to what academics might call "the polymorphous perverse". tsai's world is one i look forward to stepping in and out of-- for 90 minute weirdo chit-chats at a time-- for the rest of my life.
OH, AND ANOTHER THING:
HAPPY MOTHERS DAY, LIL' MOMMAS!!!