Walking back from the AMC on Van Ness this evening, a friend and I passed the usual assortment of pre-apocalypse weirdoes and vagrants who inject local color into certain interstices of the otherwise picture-postcard San Francisco landscape. One in particular gave us pause -- or caused us to quicken our pace, rather.

How shall I describe her? If you've ever seen Todo sobre mi madre ... well, she looked like the character Agrado. In her more general physical manner, her posture, her aspect, she conveyed Molly from Neuromancer ... assuming you've read it.

If neither of these references means anything to you, I will try to be more specific: she resembled an Eastern European transvestite Meryl Streep impersonator. She was clad entirely in some monochrome of leather, difficult to discern in the neon-inflected darkness. She spoke furiously into a flip-phone; and as we passed her, she shot us this look, a quick reptilian flick of her head that said "die."

Without words or even a glance of acknowledgement, we ambulated more quickly, not daring to look back lest that flip-phone become projectile. We didn't start laughing until the next block.

There's more -- Dallas goofiness from the weekend, my disappointment with Planet of the Apes -- but all in good time. My temporal awareness has been "non-traditional" lately. Everything's slightly out of phase. Consequence is a right-side-up smile on the upside-down face of causality.
7/31/2001 01:15:39 AM 2 comments

I'm off to Dallas for the weekend -- Dallas, which, as far as I'm concerned, is one of the shittiest cities within several time zones. But longstanding social obligations beckon. I'm looking forward to a weekend when everything isn't sort of predetermined, or even predisposed. Like next weekend, hopefully.
7/27/2001 08:29:12 AM 3 comments

I caught the tail end of Young Sherlock Holmes on cable the other night. I'd only seen it once before, when I was very young, and I remember being suitably impressed with it at the time. Many years later, the movie still offers certain perverse thrills, but it's aged like bad brie. And it turns out I was mistaken in my assumption that Spielberg helmed it; his stewardship apparently didn't extend beyond a producer's credit. The Big Hat and Bullhorn were Barry Levinson's.

Sherlock is notable in recent film history mainly for its somewhat groundbreaking hallucination sequences -- most famously the scene in which a medieval knight leaps off a stained glass window and menaces a member of the clergy: a study in CGI terror. Good stuff.

Speaking of terror, there's a scene later on where one of the characters hallucinates that these anthropomorphic little pastries are force-feeding themselves to him. I've had this low-level apprehension of the very same phenomenon, however chimerical, for years. It was nice to be reminded of the source material. The fact that the sequence employs now quaint stop-motion animation only enhances its creepiness upon repeat viewings. Herky-jerky throw-uppy.
7/26/2001 04:08:24 PM 0 comments

My roommates, and a number of people I know besides, fixate rather intently on this game. And while it is certainly not without its polygonal charms and statistical delights, I can't really internalize the attraction of playing soccer with one's thumbs when there are fields aplenty outdoors. I say this as someone who's all for simulacra and facsimile; counterfeit reality is an art in its own right. In the particular instance of sports games, however, the appeal is a mystery. In fact, it feels sorta like math -- and I don't so much like math.

I'll watch while they play FIFA sometimes, and hand to L. Ron Hubbard, I think I age faster rendered in this passive mode. Time starts to Doppler around me, moisture atomizes out of my flesh, my throat sticks like Velcro. I'm suddenly twenty-three going on thirty ... in under forty minutes.

The most disturbing thing about FIFA is that not all the players' faces are modeled after their fleshly counterparts, presumably due to licensing snafus. So during certain close-ups, a blurry, amorphous, primitive "big-head" will appear scarily onscreen -- all bad anti-aliasing and slotted features. Angry and terrible. Banal.

There are only so many instances where a primitive big-head is acceptable.
7/25/2001 01:41:18 AM 2 comments

It's been a busy weekend, chock full of visitors and visitation. Various social currents led me to the Haight not once, but twice -- a scenario rife with situational comedy, given my decidedly not-Haight predisposition. Every time some bubonic-plagued vagrant shuffled up to us in Golden Gate Park, whispering "Want some bud?", I wanted to retort, "Want a bath?" But Saturday's ice-cream free-for-all at the local Ben & Jerry's ("grand re-opening") was somewhat compensatory ... Half-Baked is good people, as some of my friends might say.

There was also an expedition to Half Moon Bay in the wee hours of Sunday morn. It was powerful spooky -- dark waves crashing, buoys bobbing and blinking like light-emitting diodes, the ghostly underbelly of the cloudy sky a phosphorescent bruise. I'll tell you something -- those Viking explorers of yore had cast-iron balls. (Yeah, wrong coast, wrong ocean, but same dif.)

Tangent: does anyone else think the Transamerica Building looks satanic sinister?
7/22/2001 10:58:49 PM 4 comments

A friend and I were driving along Union when he accidentally cut off this pedestrian. Collision was not imminent, but she shot him a dirty, dirty lingering look all the same. She was not so pretty.

Later, walking outside the Metreon, I accidentally stumbled into a girl coming up behind me. She was totally smiley cool about it. She was very, very pretty.

Up with pretty, good-natured girls; down with unpretty, foul-tempered ones. (Down with bad drivers and bad pedestrians as well, I suppose.)
7/20/2001 05:13:53 PM 0 comments

Today was about one song. This song. I'd love to direct you to a better copy, but Napster is fallow. I've dutifully ordered the album from whence it sprung.

I came upon the tune by accident, flicking through television channels, chancing upon a pivotal scene in an otherwise disposable film. Happy circumstance.
7/19/2001 11:35:23 PM 0 comments

In a fit of goofiness during dinner at GrubStake (off of Polk and Pine), I took the skewers out of my club sandwich and used them to fashion a little Food Dude with some stuff I grabbed off my friends' plates -- french fries for limbs, an onion ring for the torso, and so on. I then made the little Food Dude "walk" around the table, while exclaiming in my bestest Mr. Bill falsetto, "Don't eat me! I'm full of cholesterol!"

A sudden volley of laughter from a neighboring table alerted me to the fact that a good portion of the diner was staring. During my ensuing distraction, Food Dude disintegrated. Appropriately enough, he ended up in a puddle of ketchup. Total carnage.

A memorial service will be held on Sunday.
7/19/2001 12:31:06 AM 2 comments

In Final Fantasy, Earth has a really bad case of the crabs -- big ectoplasmic ones. As this stultifying tale of sexual incaution unfolds, we're treated to an incongruous future completely disjunct from our present: vast wastelands, curiously underpopulated "barrier cities" wrapped in what appear to be giant condoms, expressionless digital thespians who look so much like certain established actors that the film's meager returns should be frozen pending some sort of litigation. The plot is scribble, the dialog smacks of slappy-ass porn talk, and the villain's main motivation appears to be a desire to look suitably badass in his leather duds.

I'm not sure what the filmmakers are trying to convey with this movie. It's like they scarfed down most of James Cameron's and George Lucas' work, chased it with a little Paul Verhoeven, puked it all up, added a pinch of Lost in Space, pissed in it, mixed in some broken glass and some black-market kidneys, and digitized it ... all the while working from a screenplay written in cuneiform.

I still hope Planet of the Apes doesn't suck.
7/17/2001 01:25:37 PM 2 comments

Oh, and I negged on the feng shui. Turned out to be a five-hour jobber commencing nine sharp, Saturday morning. I'm all for spatial harmonics, but not to the detriment of my melatonin levels. I'd sooner sleep in than map out my chi. That would just be chichi.
7/16/2001 04:36:52 PM 1 comment

The Ani DiFranco concert was not my scene. At all. I'd love to elaborate, but I don't feel like dissing her, save to say her music does nothing for me. Not a thing. At one point in the performance, during one of her many contrapuntal asides, she made fun of some Scientology facility across the street from the concert hall, deriding its cultish aspect. The audience roared approvingly in eerie unison, clearly subscribing to a different opiate. Irony was lost.

If I were a little more (or at all) proactive in such matters, I would doubtless do well to seek out performances by some artists I do enjoy. In the meantime, no more grrrl singers with honey-gravel voices and no discernable hooks.

("In my humble opinion," I should hasten to add.)

Otherwise Portland is a decent city. I wouldn't compile my belongings in a checkered sack, tie it to a stick and hobo it over there, but it has its share of resources, and the surrounding geography is stunning.

More taxicab fun: the fellow driving me to San Francisco International on Friday spent the whole ride discussing his newbie status on the internet. He kept referring to Yahoo! as his "favorite browser." He also apprised me of his fascination with, and frequent participation in, the adult forums on Yahoo! Groups. Ugh. Why he felt comfortable downloading his brain skank into me, I have no idea. I just nodded automaton-affably. I've seen The Bone Collector. I'm almost as nice to cabbies as I am to postal workers.

One of our cabbies in Portland was much more pleasant. Apparently he was the nephew of this fellow. He seemed non-delusional, and was articulate and clever besides, so I didn't have any reason to disbelieve him. Discussing gross points and David Cronenberg cameos was definitely the surreal kicker of an evening that ended with my catatonic presence at the aforementioned Poonani DiFranco concert. Which brings this entry full-circle.

(Addendum: Why have my cabbies been so garrulous lately? Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe I'm giving off strange pheromones. Maybe it's my haircut. Maybe I'm their messiah.)
7/16/2001 04:24:06 PM 7 comments

It's another ridiculously beautiful San Francisco day. A lifetime of jacked-up, mediated movie imagery -- corn-syrup sunsets, hematite skyscrapers -- has failed to short-circuit my awe when confronted with the Real Deal: suspension bridges skewed dramatically along principles of perspective; row upon row of pop-up-book buildings; the cold, bright aerogel breeze.

I'm flying up to Portland for the weekend to hang with one of my college pals. She's roped me into accompanying her to some sort of feng shui seminar and -- get this -- an Ani DiFranco concert. Surely, this amounts to an elaborate form of ritual castration.... We'll see. I'm preemptively bored, but hugs are in the offing.
7/13/2001 01:54:01 PM 4 comments

One of my roomies has this coworker, whom we've taken to calling "E.T." and "Eighty-year-old Man" because ... well, he's a freak. His hormones must be way outta homeostasis, because he's only, like, twenty-four, but he looks like a late-model Gilbert Gottfried android. (His personality is also bleatingly lacking, in case you thought we were being hopelessly shallow by only objecting to his appearance.)

As a joke, I blew up this picture we had lying around of him at some party, Photoshopped the eyes, and plastered it all over the apartment with these slightly maniacal party-talk captions ... sort of Warhol meets Kruger. (I'd show you some of my handiwork, but I feel like I'd be violating Eighty-year-old Man's civil rights or something.)

Well, I forgot I'd done this, and when I stepped out of my bedroom this morning, there was this huge headshot of Eighty-year-old Man staring back at me from the hall mirror.

Scary, scary.
7/12/2001 12:54:56 PM 2 comments

This is capital-M for middlebrow, but I remember that as high school was winding to a close over five years ago, I happened to rent Legends of the Fall one evening; and while I mostly hated the film, I sat through the credits because I took a shine to James Horner's score -- specifically, the main theme (second track on the soundtrack). It lodged pretty deep in my brain, and I would find myself thinking it, the way one tends to "think" music -- sonic sunspots, half-tangible in the vacuum silence of the mind -- from time to time in the years to follow. Eventually, the white noise of college life drowned it out, but the memory remains.

When I decided to move out here a few months ago, I was listening to Marty Stuart's score for All the Pretty Horses. And gosh if it isn't stuck, in that same headspace just below and behind my ears, where I hear music when none is playing. The first four-and-a-half minutes of Track 23.

Borrowed music can provide a framework for personal aspiration. Everyone should have a theme.

(Incidentally, why both scores happen to correspond to ersatz-atavistic poser-revisionist westerns is an open question. It seems purely coincidental to me ... but I'll just mutter "middlebrow" again and let the matter rest.)
7/12/2001 03:06:24 AM 1 comment

Earlier this evening I had a hankering for a muffin. What passes for the local boulangerie was already closed, so I availed myself of what passes for the local convenience store. They had a perfunctory selection of cellophaned Hostess food products -- and I do mean "food products" -- but Whatever, I thought. I hadn't eaten a Hostess anything in years and years, my system had surely passed all the trace mercury from any previous ingestions. So I settled on the Blueberry Muffin. "Contains artificial flavors," it stated on the wrapper. Warned.

I guess it tasted okay going down ... a little too sticky, sort of a Twinkie matrix injection-molded into the shape of a muffin, riddled with these blueberry-like bits ... but not intolerable.

What's intolerable is the bowling ball now residing in my abdomen.
7/12/2001 12:24:52 AM 4 comments

I love that Brando got $10 million for The Score, basically to misbehave.

And as for the film, the DeNiroNortonBassettBrando-ness of the roster is promising. Director Frank Oz's helmsmanship, however, is not. Neither is the lackluster marketing campaign. Nor is the superficial overlap with the similarly inclined and imminent Heist.

But either way, I'm there.
7/10/2001 10:49:24 AM 5 comments

I've been having these intense, fugue-like dreams lately -- variations on reality, familiar themes, but deviated just a few crucial clicks from the median. Chores and errands gone awry, loved ones suddenly devious, latent paranoia displaced by glazed spectatorship.

Some are more vivid than others. Last night I dreamt about field mice; only, they were marsupial, hopping around on hind legs, exhibiting hive behavior; ominous. Just before I woke up, they began to oscillate like hummingbirds, transitioning into mosquitoes in a blur of motion and portent. There was the implication of a coming plague. Everything was a little yellower than it should have been.
7/9/2001 01:15:07 PM 1 comment

This morning, half the city was bleached by sunlight, the other half blanketed by fog, meteorological phenomena conspiring with varying altitude to play tricks with moisture and light. Gray fuzz and electric blue.

It's been a slow day for cabs. That's what every cab driver has told me. One fellow, conveying me home, recounted his infancy in Nepal, his boyhood in Darjeeling, and his adolescence at Eaton. And now, he laughed, I drive a cab in Silicon Valley.

These things happen.
7/5/2001 01:59:49 PM 3 comments

So there's this house across the street from us, slightly a manse more than a mere domicile -- imposing in its own Nob Hill way. And there's this ready steady stream of really hot girls constantly emanating from and entering said edifice. Girls in states of leisure, sport, celebration -- all hot, all the time.

We've had this huge-ass jar of generic mayo in one of our kitchen cupboards for months now -- unopened, unclaimed, fundamentally repellent. I have no idea who procured this unsavory condiment, but there it's been, opaque and terrible.

Well, it's not there anymore. It presently sits on the porch of the nice house with the hot girls. It's even adorned with a little stick-on ribbon I found lying around somewhere. It just felt like the right thing to do -- as if the cosmos spied the house where the hot girls live, and (presumably) thundered: "You're hot. Very. Have some mayo. A lot."

One of my roommates thinks I have a Dennis the Menace complex. Fair enough. I just hope SF doesn't compare notes with Philly.
7/4/2001 03:12:19 AM 12 comments

Levi's new television spot is giving me Freudian nightmares. Expressions like umbilicus dentata spring hideously to mind.
7/3/2001 08:29:49 PM 2 comments

A.I. is sprawling and imperfect. It offers tantalizing glimpses into one sort of future, but it detours into an old fairy tale. It is by turns gratuitous, subtle, ambitious, tedious, draining and rapturous. Jude Law is sleek -- brilliantined hair and Cheshire grins -- but under-utilzed; the "super-toy" Teddy is endearing -- animated, marvelous, gruff, cuddly -- but over-utilized. Haley Joel Osment, as David, manages to hold a whole production-design-heavy epic on his tiny, creepy shoulders -- and that's no mean feat. Frances O'Connor, likewise, is slender as gossamer, but strong enough to sustain the affection that informs David's quest. Spielberg collides with Kubrick, yielding both sublimation and condensation -- scenes that don't quite present with any discernable gravity, and others that should have been allowed to drain away. There are errors in judgment, moments of overstatement, and instances of unnecessary repetition. But taken as a whole, A.I. stays with you. It addresses more questions than I think a lot of people will give it credit for asking, and it neglects to follow some of those questions to their logical conclusions; but it is intense, desolate, funny and disturbing -- a welcome departure from standard summer fare. A.I. borrows, revises, retreads and reinvents -- and for that it will be accused, ignored, obsessed over and underappreciated. But the fact that it will illicit an array of emotions from an array of viewers is a validation in its own right. Hopefully people will talk about it, whether dismissively or appreciatively.

Watching a movie sometimes, I'll become aware of what I like to call "the click" -- the single transient moment when I know I've become invested in the story. In A.I., it's when O'Connor's Monica tells David, "I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the world." I feel as though that sentiment resonates with every parent's secret fear that they haven't prepared their children for what life has in store for them. In A.I., this statement precipitates David's odyssey. It reminds me of an old George William Russell snippet, from "Germinal":

In ancient shadows and twilights
    Where childhood had stray'd,
The world's great sorrows were born
    And its heroes were made.

I liked A.I. It felt inspired and sincere. Reactions seem to be varying wildly, but that's my take on it.
7/1/2001 03:27:35 AM 7 comments