Halloween. Don't have much to say about it. From pretty much the seventh grade onwards, I've had a distaste for dressing up. Perhaps it harkens back to my fear of clowns and drag queens, or something more deep-seated -- like when I was little and sitcom-scared of abductions and molestation.

Also, my 'rents never restricted our diet in any way, so begging strangers and neighbors for their candy always seemed arbitrary -- never more so than when some ill-prepared adult gave out coins or -- ugh, this memory haunts me still -- Fudge Roll-ups* in lieu of the usual miniature chocolate bars or Smarties/Spree/Sweet Tarts variants. Worst of all were those lovingly homemade caramel apples and whatnot -- again, free produce from strangers never did anyone any good. Razor-blade surprises? Pass.

Having said all that, and having young sibs of my own, I do understand the appeal of Halloween from a child's perspective, and the joy little ones take in the pageantry is ample reason for me to keep my seasonal neuroses to myself. So if any precocious seven-year-olds are reading this, forget I said anything. The rest of you, be vigilant.
10/31/2001 02:53:28 AM 7 comments

Ever notice how hicks don't use adverbs so good? Among other things. Oops. Mea culpa. I accidentally watched Montel today. I think I'm scarred for life ... or at least for the rest of the week.

You know what's kicky for about two minutes? Watching German talk shows. Despite the cultural barriers, there's this fundamental essence of trashiness that persists, and it's not even white trash or euro trash ... it's just this sort of ur-trash, the pixel alkali of sacrificial man-animals accreting in a digital Euphrates, ashes for an angry god. Bit rot.
10/30/2001 01:13:10 PM 5 comments

Rain is a parlor trick: it transforms the city, washes away "yesterday" and "before" like so much wet paint, reveals a new painting underneath. And what is it about umbrellas? I can't picture them as anything but accents on urban life, holding back the same sky our gleaming office columns reach for. Like thimbles on fingertips.

Certain cities exist solely on rainy days in my memory -- Rome, London, Paris. They have never been otherwise, and I don't know why. Their sunnier days seem not to have stuck. Old buildings, wet cement, newspapers, history, pigeons. Water finding its level.

The archetypal San Francisco of my mind is packed in aerosol, moist rather than wet; but it's been drizzling since yesterday, and memory is impermanent.
10/30/2001 11:30:33 AM 0 comments

Mary-Kate and Ashley In ACTION! (It's not what you think.)
10/28/2001 07:59:05 PM 15 comments

It's fall. But not fall. I find myself listening to "Una Furtiva Lagrima" (Pavarotti; Donizetti's L'Elisir D'Amore) the way I used to listen to the adagio from Mozart's twenty-third piano concerto when I was little. Sometimes festivity is a chore. Participle.
10/27/2001 03:01:28 PM 3 comments

Next week, of course, Monsters, Inc. descends upon the American moviegoing public like a like a neutron love bomb -- and deservedly so, I'm sure; but before then, I'm also hoping to catch From Hell and Donnie Darko -- the latter of which I've heard tantalizingly little about, although it certainly looks deadly cool. I'm especially glad to see Jake Gyllenhaal and Jena Malone as the central teen twosome ... it's time to give Tobey Maguire, Wes Bentley, Thora Birch and Christina Ricci a rest (and maybe some multivitamins).
10/25/2001 04:32:38 PM 12 comments

Today I'm twenty-four. Officially in my mid-twenties. I've determined, for the time being, that twenty-eight will be my next um-jammer-lammy milestone.
10/25/2001 05:00:13 AM 11 comments

Loren has been gracious enough to pass along the hotly anticipated trailer for Star Wars: Episode II, which I'm now paying forward to you-all. Remember kids, you saw it here first.
10/24/2001 06:48:32 PM 1 comment

Ten things that give me the creeps, in no particular order: marionettes; the Shroud of Turin; Janice; monkeys with cymbals; Superman III; the Spanish Inquisition; Bette Midler; Puss 'n' Boots; Gemmy Industries' Topiary Teddy Bear; calliope music.

[Runners up: Josh Ryan Evans; Anne Geddes.]
10/24/2001 09:05:43 AM 22 comments

Any Romance scholars out there? How would I Latinize "the inability to write without musical accompaniment"? I'm thinking aphatos imusica, but I could be dead-language wrong.
10/20/2001 11:58:52 PM 18 comments

K-Pax looks okay in the usual Kevin Spacey Look at me, I'm an actor! mode, but a specific line from the ads and trailer is beginning to bug the hell out of me: the bit where Spacey tells the little girl not to sneak up on her dog anymore, and she replies, "No. Way." Maybe it's just me, but I don't know any half-pints who talk like that -- in that affected, smartass movie-kid way. Of course, a single dodgy line-reading isn't grounds for indictment (yes it is), but my left parietal lobe still dies just a little bit every time I hear it.
10/18/2001 10:31:47 PM 5 comments

Remember the Titans is surprising: surprisingly palatable for a "message" movie; surprisingly topical for a Disney movie; surprisingly engrossing for a sports movie. Of course, being a Jerry Bruckheimer production, it has its share of "meteor moments" (so named in dis/honor of the Bruckheimer-produced Armageddon) -- you know, those rousing Steadicam shots of camaraderie and triumph set to a surging score; those meticulously choreographed instances where the cast "spontaneously" erupts in a chorus of classic rock -- but by and large the characters are at least two-point-five-dimensional and the story is sincere.

In other news, a friend writes:

I am trying to think of a show, but I can't remember the title.

It was a syndicated saturday afternoon-type show with Bob Golic (or some other Hulk-like actor/former linebacker) who during the day was a family man and at night was a professional wrestler. He kept his identity a secret because he always wore a face mask when he fought. Ring a bell? No pun intended.

I have no idea what the fuck he's talking about. It definitely ain't Small Wonder, Out of this World, Charles in Charge or Mama's Family -- beyond which my knowledge of syndie sitcoms declines precipitously. If anyone else has an inkling, please corrupt the rest of us with your filthy lucre.

[Update: Surfing that Small Wonder link, with its Lyle Alzado reference, must have triggered a repressed memory. I just realized what sitcom my friend was talking about: Learning the Ropes. I'm gonna go spray some Bactine on my brain. G'night.]
10/17/2001 01:51:58 AM 10 comments

On CNN just now, health reporter Kat Carney made a reference to those "round, red things with things growing [in them]" while interviewing a molecular biologist about anthrax detection. Um ... petri dishes? Sic. [Update: an anchor just referred to an airplane lavatory as "laboratory." Nice.]
10/15/2001 06:15:12 PM 0 comments

CNBC carries the most dreadful infomercials on Sunday mornings. Earlier today I caught the tail end of a Universal Studios charmer starring E!'s Steve Kmetko (or maybe it was just Joel from the first Survivor, who knows?) and a bunch of "average" (not physically attractive) people waxing hyperbolic about the "Classic Horror" boxed sets the studio is peddling just in time for Halloween. Universal was sort of the studio for horror fare during H'wood's golden era (just as MGM was all about the musicals and Warner's was gangsta-fabulous ... dunno what Paramount's superpower was) ... and the usual "spooktacular" titles were in evidence ... as well as recent crap like End of Days, The Bone Collector, The Mummy, and The Mummy Returns -- which I'm pretty sure nobody regards as "classic" or "horror" (although Bone Collector is sadistic and gratuitous), and of which any critique would be remiss in not mentioning such creative elements as box-office receipts and line-item budgets.

I don't even want to describe the infomercial that came on afterwards. Let's just say it involved testimonials from orthopedists and leave it at that.
10/14/2001 03:13:33 PM 4 comments

An unseasonable warmth has descended upon the city, the kind of heat that makes Chap Stick cleave in clumps when you press it to your lips. In absolute terms, the temperature is not intense; but operating against, and disrupting, the usual nightly visitations of rolling fog, it insinuates itself into the landscape, like crimson highlights against a dark tableau: a sordid breeze that snakes through the skyscraper canyons of the financial district, vanquishes the wind tunnels, makes the pavement throb.

Thus dispossessed of its soul, San Francisco proper loses its proportions. The bay seems to recede as the hills rush in -- as if, borne on a wave of bad karma, the geography itself has been displaced; "here" has become "there."

There:

"The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves. October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows." (p.3)
10/13/2001 11:39:17 AM 0 comments


10/13/2001 03:18:42 AM 5 comments

I wonder who's responsible for the faux-intrepid logo music the networks have been punctuating their "war" coverage with. Are established composers behind the tuneful reveilles, or are they the work of knock-off artists referencing Horner, Zimmer and Jones?

Someday, in a hopefully less volatile future, semioticians may regard our media's ironically unironic tendency to put quotes around everything as endearingly crude.
10/12/2001 01:22:57 PM 0 comments

Being behind in my reading: understandable. Being behind in my listening: inexcusable.
10/11/2001 01:21:34 AM 0 comments

Destino is a beautiful word. Also: simulacrum, soliton, lambent, lozenge, lattice -- to name just a sonorous few, for no particular reason.
10/10/2001 04:16:57 PM 3 comments

Vanilla Sky is looking good. It's based on an Alejandro Amenábar film. I couldn't think of a better starting point.
10/9/2001 09:50:47 AM 5 comments

It seems as if I've been listening to a lot of music and not saying very much. I don't necessarily mean here, in this forum; rather, I mean "out there," in the physical world of walls and pendulums and people. I just haven't had much to say, beyond the usual filigree. My life has lately been a frieze.

Conversations unfold like games of jacks, sparkling with metal and glass. Everyone smiles, and there's happiness and idleness and silliness and prettiness and maybe even a little pettiness. Things are breezy and untroubled and remote. Except for the one thing.

There's an elegy somewhere inside me -- in my lungs, in my throat -- I don't know where exactly. I don't know for what exactly, either. The shape of things to come, it's out of phase with itself -- intersecting and overlapping with, recurring upon, itself. The world is molten, aborning even as old empires and older feuds are reduced to ashes, and new lines are drawn in the sand.

I think about the power to destroy and the power to create, and my mind comes to rest, ever and always, on "culture" -- that most fragile amnion, the cradle of civilization. I think about language and lullabies, the healing power of sleep. I recall an article I read a few weeks ago, that made me sad:

There is peace in the narrow back streets of old Peshawar, where soft sunlight falls on ancient doorways, and a small boy need worry about little more than where his next piece of candy will come from.

He is 3 years old and dressed for play in matching T-shirt and shorts patterned with small red hearts, a smiling cat, fish bones and the word "Meow."

The child is free to dream now, but his father ... has great hopes for him -- that someday he will be a moujahed, or holy warrior....

I'm reminded that we're all moved by mechanisms we cannot entirely resolve, dreams that died before we were ever born. The world of men and letters is an unruly machine, multifarious, livid with processes and products that don't always align; and we are those products, the outcome of those processes. I wonder how much of that mechanism is redundant and inexhaustible, and how much of it is unique and irreplaceable. I wonder about more things than I can articulate -- in notes and tones that lie beyond the music of prose.

But I try anyway, by and by, and keep my headphones on.
10/9/2001 03:46:41 AM 2 comments

Okay. I think we've officially passed through the looking-glass -- and it makes sense in a perverse way. Pop culture, I salute you.
10/8/2001 06:12:40 PM 0 comments

CNN nightscope shot of the military strikes in Kabul.
Hubble Space Telescope image of Pluto and its moon Charon.

There's a symmetry: it's about perspective, and the struggle to maintain a balance between what ails our civilization and what impels us beyond our limitations. It's something I continue to keep in mind as I watch events unfold. It's the only way I know how to process what's happening.

Meanwhile.

Last night was about Ocean Beach, and a bonfire. I accompanied my buddy D__ and a bunch of his ILM cohorts, which translated into a not inconsiderable amount of shop talk -- some of it snarky, all of it interesting. I'm generally leery of large-group dynamics: over time, my friendships have evolved along the lines of duads and triads; but the proceedings were laid-back and appealing, set against the mesmerism of the surf, the stars and the blaze. Other fires, other barbecues, dotted the shoreline: the waxing and waning of guitar-inflected music; what appeared to be a New Age wedding; laughter and tiki torches.

Later, we found ourselves in New Chinatown, in front of the Last Day Saloon, where a couple of vagrants serenaded passersby with a song consisting solely of the lyrics, "Suicide? I'd rather kill you."

We ended up at a coffee shop, ate black-and-white cookies and assorted other baked goods, talked about everything and nothing, made sculptures out of cups and wrappers, jested. Recounting it now, I'm reminded of a passage from a novel I read many months ago:

"The light in the coffee shop is piss yellow. It pools in the lid of the little metal milk pitcher, making weird, smeary reflections of the boys at the table. Knives and forks dance around in the air when the boys talk. Food lands on the table because they spit when they get excited, and when they laugh they don't care about closing their mouths. They tell story after story until it becomes one long story, and they pedal backward and refer to something someone said ten minutes earlier and that becomes the joke of the night as they repeat it endlessly, making it funnier each time, more coded and more meaningless. They jostle each other under the table, their long legs interwoven with one another's like the teeth of a comb, their knees touching the underside of the table, where hard gum and old spills tell stories of other nights, other boys." (p.85)

It was simple and good.

I came home late and tired, but channel-surfed anyway. In my sated passivity, I sat through Drive Me Crazy in its entirety. The film was generically mediocre, yet distinguished by its apparent lack of a dedicated musical score, corporate-assembled soundtrack notwithstanding. This half-assed oversight (or, I daresay, creative decision) on the part of the filmmakers lent a curiously subdued, somnambulistic tone to the sexual/virginal proceedings.

I went to bed just before dawn, and slept well. I awoke to some dispiriting developments, but I refuse to let them bring me down. Not this time. Not anymore. At least, I hope not.
10/7/2001 04:54:06 PM 3 comments

I totally give Angelina Jolie props for her humanitarian efforts. If you can get past her fortieth-percentile prose, facile insights and intermittent reaffirmations of love for all things Billy Bob, her UNHCR journal is sporadically engrossing -- earnest in a sheltered-movie-star way; endearing.
10/5/2001 08:50:37 PM 0 comments

If Odwalla orange juice is so bitchin' fresh, why does it taste like crayons? I wish we had Fresh Samantha on the West Coast.
10/4/2001 11:59:17 AM 7 comments

"He feels it as a single indescribable shape, something brailled out for him against a ground or backdrop of he knows not what, and it hurts him, in the poet’s phrase, like the world hurts God. Within this, he palps nodes of potentiality, strung along lines that are histories of the happened becoming the not-yet. He is very near, he thinks, to a vision in which past and future are one and the same; his present, when he is forced to reinhabit it, seems increasingly arbitrary, its placement upon the time line ... more a matter of convenience than of any absolute now." (p.106)

Random fact: tuning forks used to fascinate me when I was little. I haven't handled one in years, but I thought of them just now.

I was picturing human beings as itinerant causality disturbances, creating radial interference patterns as they go about their lives: finding love, coming to blows, intersecting at crossed purposes; and the geometry of that conceit reminded me of sound waves emanating in all directions from a single point, at a natural frequency.

Emotions are like that -- only, they propagate through flesh and not concrete, weakening knees rather than pylons. Historical events are emotional tuning forks, in that sense -- which is why we call them "touchstones," I suppose. And when the "history" is contemporary, being manufactured in real-time rather than excavated from the past, the very mechanism which produces it, the media machine, has a pitch -- a whine like a scream: tinnitus.
10/3/2001 03:57:47 AM 1 comment

I love this Mercedes ad: the music, the editing, the use of different media and film speeds; the iconography. Only the necessary-evil voiceover and MSRP boilerplate mar its perfection. I guess a purely impressionistic distillation of the industrial design process wouldn't move cars.
10/2/2001 04:02:18 AM 0 comments

A friend just passed this along. The kid in me says Halloween-inflected maritime psychedelia is a righteous head trip (or boat trip, as the case may be). The adult in me (ha) has certain reservations about its potential dorkiness. And then there's the question of how, cough, wired I'd have to be to really enjoy myself. But it's nearly a month off in any case.

[Addendum: maybe attendance would finally give me an excuse to don these ... although I've never worn vision-correcting appliances, and the mere thought of touching my eyeballs gives me the creeps.]
10/1/2001 07:09:09 PM 2 comments

I (nostalgia kick) downloaded an MP3 of the Crash Test Dummies' "MMM, MMM, MMM, MMM" last night, and something must have been wrong with the encoding, because the song kept shifting tempo, very gently and at regular intervals. It was haunting: the odd, unintended warble rippling through Brad Roberts' froggy vocals; a guitar lick ever so slightly more resonant than it was before; an undercurrent of creeping melancholy, beyond the melody's stated sadness.

I deleted the file anyway. An encoding error is an encoding error. I'm neurotic like that. [Grins.]
10/1/2001 12:19:18 AM 4 comments