highindustrial.

So this fucker's four years old today. Lazily or perhaps compulsively, I've largely ignored the intervening milestones. HI was launched on a leap day, so it only feels fitting to mark that occasion on an actual leap day. Forthwith.

Below are a few unpublished fragments I culled from the folder where I keep drafts of all the so-called "obfuscate" entries. In many cases I have no idea where I was going with a particular thought or series of figures or what-have-you. Occasionally the items were nearly complete when I apparently lost interest. Hyperlinks are often implicit but absent. Formatting is erratic. Illumination is lacking.

I'm dumping this stuff here mostly to post something for this uh, yeah, milestone because I guess I don't contribute much to the great gaping middle these days. At least the ~~shortattentionspanbar~~ sidebar continues to teem with miscellany. Here's to four more [whatever]. ¶

It's possible to feel the weight of an expression, sometimes, so that its meaning becomes literal. I was thinking just now of the way the air inside a whisper almost seems to fill a bubble, a fine, furtive membrane liable to rupture at the very onset of coarse vibrato. ("Hush," Thursday, October 2, 2003, 1:08 PM)

Congo
First Knight
The Joy Luck Club
Lost in Space
Sliver ("Guilty Pleasures," Thursday, September 25, 2003, 10:35 AM)

I'm on the serrated age of twenty-six but lately I've been feeling maybe twenty again and I guess it's old music and new faces and the shifting sundering season but I don't know what happened to all my punctuation except apostrophes? ("Huh," Saturday, August 30, 2003, 3:07 AM)

One thing I like about L.A. is that when you observe that Disney is basically fucked without Pooh, Pixar and Bruckheimer, people will usually know exactly what you mean.

Also, MGM is a punch-line. Like, Isn't it funny how MGM tries to turn every movie that breaks even into a franchise? That's funny.

(Too many adverbs in the first paragraph.) ("Notes," Wednesday, August 6, 2003, 2:20 AM)

Occasionally I find myself chicken-scratching notes onto my Palm handheld when a wave of what-the-fuck-am-I-doing rolls ("Newt," Monday, March 10, 2003, 10:20 PM)

The clouds are dense with light and minerals, heavy-water zeppelins trailing ions, tethered to the hills, docked against a cold solar sky. ("Fragonard's Dream," Friday, February 28, 2003, 5:25 PM)

There are blanking intervals in the stream of consciousness, apertures that open into windows as sleep throttles the frame rate of the neural reel, every glancing photon blooming into a photograph the mind forgot but the brain did not. ("Photo Synthesis," Sunday, February 23, 2003, 12:03 AM)

Call me coarse, but I must confess: I tend to view spectacular pet expirations, particularly the projectile kind, with a kind of detached awe. I think it has something to do with the latent objectification of owning a pet. ("Stupid Pet Tricks," Friday, December 20, 2002, 2:00 AM)

My keychain is a bunny. It's plush, and therefore cumbersome, but sentimentality keeps it in my pocket, and my keys round it, because my little brother gave it to me before I left for San Francisco a year and some greater emotional percentage of my life ago. ("Rabbit," Thursday, October 17, 2002, 12:51 AM)

You know that cartoon-violence trope where the protagonists end up in the kitchen and the utensil drawer is somehow upended, launching a medieval array of knives and forks (note: never spoons) at them? That's L.A. ("Radial Blur," Monday, September 16, 2002, 11:14 AM)

71
Rush Hour 2
NL
$347.4
$226.2
65.1%
$121.2
34.9%
2001

151
Rush Hour
NL
$245.3
$141.2
57.6%
$104.1
42.4%
1998

$592.7 million worldwide ("Read the Fucking Trades, " Monday, July 22, 2002, 1:16 AM)

Where does judiciousness end and cautiousness begin, do you suppose? They seem to vary by degrees, like increments on an analog thermostat. I sometimes detect the premonitory specter of the latter in my own conduct ("Protection," Wednesday, July 10, 2002, 12:30 AM)

A stand-up comedian was arrested after he allegedly got into a loud argument and a scuffle with a National Guardsman at San Francisco International Airport.

Kevin Meaney, 45, allegedly grabbed the soldier's loaded M-16 rifle with both hands and got into a shoving match with him Sunday after airport authorities repeatedly asked the comedian to stop videotaping checkpoint security procedures, authorities said.

Kevin Meaney? I thought to myself. Herman's Lust—Herman's Lust got into a caveman kerfuffle at SFO? How apropos. Except it didn't happen. Not the kerfuffle; I mean Kevin Meaney didn't play Herman's Lust on the cult sitcom Herman's Head. That dishonor resides with ("Id," Tuesday, March 5, 2002, 2:49 AM)

I wish I had Nicole Kidman's phone number too. Actually, if wishes were being granted ... okay, never mind.

My policy regarding my site isn't all that conscious; it's mostly just evolved over time. If you check the archives, I used to use people's names Back in the Day, but these days I just refer to them as J__ or S____ or w___-h___-y__. This didn't come about for any particular reason—i.e., there was no incitement or enticement on anyone's part to compel me in this direction. Rather, at some point I realized it would probably be more politic of me ("Gangtastic," Thursday, February 28, 2002, 12:23 AM)

In A Beautiful Mind, Russell Crowe plays Andrew, a robot programmed for domestic chores and sold to an upper-middle-class family, the Martins, in the year 2005. The family patriarch (Sam Neill) recognizes and encourages Andrew's uncommon characteristics, particularly his artistic streak, sensitivity to beauty, humor, and independence of spirit. In so doing, he sets Crowe's tin man on a two-century journey to become more human than most human beings.

No, wait. That isn't right.

In A Beautiful Mind, Russell Crowe plays a mechanic who sees a bright light in the sky one night and wakes up the next morning a genius, hungry for knowledge and so smart he figures out national defense secrets in his own living room (and gets in hot water for it).

No ... I'm still not getting it. See, I went into Mind the other night expecting a solid, invigorating mainstream-prestige cinematic experience. I mean, could the critics and the Academy really be wrong?

In hindsight, what I really should have asked myself was: could anything good ever have come out of a collaboration between the director of The Grinch the the screenwriter of Batman and Robin? The long and the short of it: a resounding no.

Ron Howard, that most milquetoast and approval-seeking of A-list helmsmen, a veritable "hackteur," is at his derivative subpar best here. Early scenes illustrate

littering early scenes with glittering visual-effects clutter of the Ally McBeal persuasion, clearly trying to come off as inventive in the Fight Club/Requiem For a Dream vein, but

Russell Crow gives the sort of phallic, warts-and-all, master-thespian performance that is the stuff of insider Hollywood parodies and suspense-free awards ceremonies. I mean, sure, it demonstrates technical proficiency, but every grunt, tick and stutter is so studied, so painfully devoid of spontaneity, that there's nothing thrilling

brioni-clad committee
the paper, keaton punches close

glossed ... mad city-ish ... alas ("Untitled," Thursday, February 21, 2002, 5:33 AM)

I remember reading Lisa Schwarzbaum's corrosive review of Pay It Forward over a year ago and suddenly wanting to see this movie that had roused her from her usual mom from Malcolm in the Middle-meets-Nora Ephron stupor and propelled her critical disdain to such dizzying heights. Admittedly, my enthusiasm waned pretty quickly and I never acted on the impulse. That is, until last night, thanks to HBO.

And let me tell you: ¡huevos rancheros is it one riveting mess, black as tar and twice as sordid. Mixed metaphors are an apt description in this case, given the movie's curiously schizoid (shitzoid?) eat-your-vegetables moralism, by turns treacly and venomous. This baby doesn't just sail into camp territory—it crash lands there and bursts into flames. And that's before Angie Dickinson shows up as Helen Hunt's estranged wino-bag-lady mother.

The performances run the gamut from bad—Hunt and Kevin Spacey lurching hideously from hushed bathos to crazy gesticulating—to worse: precocious li'l Haley Joel Osment, clearly straining to act like a "real" kid, and in the process coming across as more disturbingly synthetic than the robot he played in A.I.

And to call Mimi Leder's direction ham-fisted would be an insult to pigs and opposable thumbs. Divorced from her usual extreme element, she flails, allowing the action to unfold in a series of edits and shots seemingly culled from the hygiene-film/stop-drop-and-roll school of cinema. ("Untitled," Friday, January 25, 2002, 12:22 AM) + 6