Today, Tuesday, feels like a Friday. In the fall, every weekday starts to feel like a Friday: pregnant with festivity, leaves scattered like confetti, time atomizing invisibly right before our eyes.
Ever notice how much lecturing sounds like hectoring?
Idealism is the proverbial double-edged sword. It preserves our capacity to really care about things, to cut through the dross and distractions which constitute the background noise of life. By the same token, however, it can puncture anything that is even remotely hollow, continually deflating our expectations. Nature abhors a vacuum. Inertia thrives. Yin-yang.
The smallest details can knock you back in time: the play of the light on a particular Sunday morning; the smell of an old perfume; cracking a long-shelved book open, skimming unconsciously over the words until something catches. Suddenly it's ten years ago. And time, its geometry ever a mystery, is not a straight line but a curved one, a horseshoe, so that the past somehow recurs in parallel alongside the present, like a distant but familiar shore.
I've noticed that people often confuse directness with overconfidence -- as if celerity and temerity were the same thing, which they're not. It comes down to attitude, eventually. Efficiency can be judicious and incisiveness can be reckless. The equation isn't simple.
A nice line from a nice movie: "I want to say something to you, but I'm gonna fumble it a little bit, so please just wait till I'm done before you respond: I'm in love with you."
A good friend passed this along, attributing it to a fellow named Wright. Well-phrased, and I happen to agree with it: "... language is merely the 'press agent' for other parts of the mind; it justifies [and initiates] whatever acts they induce, convincing the world that the actor is a reasonable, rational, upstanding person. It may be that the realm of consciousness itself is in large part such a press agent -- the place where our unconsciously written press releases [the self-serving logic of inclusive fitness] are infused with the conviction that gives them force." Amen.
The incidence of art as a substrate of disenchantment is without a doubt a positive occurrence.
I think creativity, like any energetic process, is about critical mass, where quality control acts as a sort of crucible; for while the energy must be self-evident, it must also be contained: too much spontaneity could contaminate the reaction. It's good to remember that from time to time -- to always know your limits, and whereof you speak. Know the shape of your design before you start filling in the colors. There are other schools of thought on this, some antithetical, some even inimical; but this one feels right just now. Just now.
"I like the principle of fractals, the idea of finding geometry in nature or in stories."
In the early morning I'm a student of visual possibility. The fog has rolled in, drowning ambient sound in an aerosol bath. A rabbit darts across neighbors' lawns, its allegiances shifting.
Today I am twenty-three. Feels no different from twenty-two. Feels very different from nineteen. The years fly.
There were thunder showers early this morning. Wet autumn leaves are plastered against the skylights -- haphazard, tessellating: silhouetted at first, now lit from within.
If I hear John Travolta exclaim "I'm on Broadway! I'm doing the cha-cha-cha!" in those Lucky Numbers commercials one more time, I'm going to puncture my eardrums with a marrow spoon. Incidentally: in interviews, director Nora Ephron (of Mixed Nuts, Michael, and sundry Meg Ryan fiascoes fame) has referred to Numbers as "her" Fargo. If that doesn't make you fear for your unborn children, you deserve to be sterilized.
"And as he had seen her that day, so she had remained;never quite at the same height, yet never far below it:generous, faithful, unwearied; but so lacking inimagination, so incapable of growth, that the world of heryouth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself withouther ever being conscious of the change. This hard brightblindness had kept her immediate horizon apparentlyunaltered." Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
People often talk in circles. I prefer straight lines. Not that I'm necessarily the exemplar of my own dictum, but it's worth a spot-check every now and then. Having said that, I offer this contradiction from Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age; in spite of what I believe, I also happen to like this passage: "There was a Chinese belief that demons liked to travel only in straight lines. Hence the bridge zigzagged no fewer than nine times as it made its way to the center of the pond. The bridge was a demon filter, in other words, and the teahouse demon-free, which seemed of only limited usefulness if it still hosted people like Dr. X. But for Judge Fang, raised in a city of long straight avenues, full of straight talkers, it was useful to be reminded that from the point of view of some people, including Dr. X, all of that straightness was suggestive of demonism; more natural and human was the ever-turning way, where you could never see round the next corner, and the overall plan could be understood only after lengthy meditation."
Sometimes silence is lambent and I can feel it oscillating around me. Or maybe it's just the blood rushing inside my head.
From a spectator's standpoint, is a preoccupation with politics any different from a preoccupation with professional sports? Both involve the ascription of suspense to scenarios which are fundamentally contrived.
It's positively primeval outside -- gray light, steep visibility gradient, water dripping from every foliar surface, dew drop, plip plop. Pterodactyl weather.... Well, except for the manicured lawns.
Ever notice how eager most people are to volunteer reams of information about themselves? They'll always qualify their indiscretion, in hindsight, as "only part of the picture" -- and indeed this is true, inasmuch as any verbal discourse is self-limiting due to the structural shortcomings inherent in all language; but you have to wonder, what exactly are people so desperate to convey? It's as if we're trailed by phantoms of ourselves -- or, in many cases, perhaps we trail the phantoms -- and these phantoms bear our likeness, except they're made entirely of soap bubbles, and the bubbles are popping popping popping, and we're constantly having to blow new ones.
Recently (October 5) I discussed my dislike of pseudo slow-motion photography in films. Another cinematic convention that bugs me badly: the use of "Venn Diagram/MasterCard logo" stencils to depict the view through a pair of binoculars. Why is it so prevalent? Stereoscopic vision simply does not work that way. Any idiot who's ever used binoculars can verify this. What should be shown is a slightly fuzzy single circle. Off the top of my head, the only filmmaker I can think of who doesn't fall into this trap is Alfred Hitchcock (1956's The Man Who Knew Too Much comes to mind). There are others (Stanley Kubrick and P.T. Anderson, maybe?) but the general tendency is to rely on the rote and sometimes insensible semiotics of the medium. Once again, I ask: why? Because it's become an institution, sort of a tip of the hat to "movie magic"? Another of the many small ways in which movies announce their "movie-ness" to us? Well, it's lazy and annoying. Another peeve: the way telephones behave in movies (dialtones, hang-ups, everything) ... but don't get me started. It's amazing ... we take so many aspects of the human sensorium for granted, and yet even the slightest miscue can have a distinct, if subconscious, impact on our perceptions -- often detrimentally.
I just woke up from a nap, and the only thing in my head was the memory of some random interstitial scene from Howard the Duck. Lea Thompson smuggling the titular fowl into her workplace or somesuch. Huh. This is odd because I saw the movie exactly once -- in theaters, when I was very little -- and I can't say I've thought about it much since.... Except for that part near the beginning where they show you the girl duck's boobs. That disturbed the hell out of me. Birds aren't supposed to have boobs.
There are nights when the moon is just out of view, and I can wander the darkened house gleaning its pale glint off terrestrial objects: here, scattered by tree branches; there, refracted through window glass; and I can never quite find its center.
Have you seen the commercial for Bounty paper towels where the little red-headed girl spills blue soda and the spill turns into a tsunami and her mom stops said tsunami with a single sheet of Bounty? God I love that commercial. The chipper, whistling music; the Heather Matarazzo-esque ingenue; the way the camera does this hard pan to the left when Mom rushes in to save the day (shades of Scorsese).... Actually, I'm lying. I hate that commercial. I just like watching it because the little girl is such an insufferable nerd. She's become the composite effigy for all the schoolyard-bully predilections I've been ... channeling constructively ever since I "grew up." I worship at the altar of her nameless lameness. Yeah.
An okay line from an okay movie: "May the best of your past be the worst of your future."
Some silences are strategic. Others are careless.
Self-awareness can creep up on you like a cat. If you're lucky, it just wants to rub up against your leg, maybe steal a little warmth. If you're less fortunate, watch out for those claws.
It's reassuring sometimes to observe other people's incidental fixations -- the cheerful, harmless little obsessions we all have in common, an emphasis on minutiae which unifies us. And when you discover that someone shares your particular reflex or curiosity, it's as if a tiny bell has gone off someplace, and a mechanism has quietly asserted itself. Details, details ... aphorisms spring to mind. Lives overlapping, interlocking, like teeth in a zipper, or hands clasped together.
One of the easiest things to do when you're feeling uncreative is to fall back on allusion and collage -- citation, annotation -- mix tapes, scrapbooks -- anything to siphon someone else's ingenuity. It's weak, but it's necessary. It's electrolytes for your soul.
It's a shockingly brisk autumn day, gray clouds colliding with white light, interspersed with packets of rain. A Hudson River School sort of day, quickening pulses, stirring atavism. Small animals go about their business, developing new physiologies to contend with the coming fallow, their entire universes mapped out in clear vectors and warm, drizzle-slicked fur. Somewhere, umbrellas are blooming.
A few months ago, Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman commented that actresses Cathy Moriarty and Kathleen Turner should be paired together in a "glorious boomer-hag remake of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" -- neatly encapsulating the grim confluence that all aging starlets face. I would build on this idea and suggest that a periodic remake of Baby Jane become a cinematic rite of passage, a sort of postmodern analogue to the tar pits of yore. A quick survey of saturation points in the media obligates me to nominate Farrah Fawcett and Goldie Hawn for the next go-round of this proposed institution. I would pay cash money to see them chase each other around the lunatic fringes of Los Angeles, armed with chloroform-laced pacifiers and German Expressionistic eye makeup. And lest anyone accuse me of sexism, I hereby propose umpteen sequels to the Grumpy Old Men franchise, to be populated with the alpha-male husks of eligible bachelors past. First up: Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson ... no, wait: Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Do I hear any dissent? I didn't think so.
The sharpest compliment I've received in some time: "There are a lot of angry-looking kids with half-shaved heads and funny colored hair who are probably green with envy over your domain name."
Am I the only person who's insanely bothered by pseudo slow-motion photography in movies? Ordinarily, slow-motion photography involves shooting with high-speed (more frames per unit of time) film that is then slowed down during playback, providing an illusion of time dilation. Pseudo slow-motion is a cheesy substitute -- instead of increasing the amount of visual information recorded, each frame is simply repeated, resulting in a halting, stuttering progression -- basically a camcorder trick. Whenever I see pseudo slow-motion in a film -- as opposed to the genuine article -- I just want to crawl into a hole and pull it in after me. My estimation of whatever I'm viewing immediately collapses. I would imagine it's a less expensive process, but the attendant aesthetic compromise is almost unbearable.
There was a power failure yesterday. Hours passed, I passed, glancing at my reflection peering back at me from the obsidian indifference of lifeless television screens. I caught myself taking notes on the backs of envelopes, drumming my fingers to the rhythms of mechanical clocks. I drove down to the lake -- Erie, much more beautiful in choppy, storm-tossed reality than bumper-sticker put-downs would have you believe. I swallowed time in heaping hemoglobin gulps, got reacquainted with the timbre of my thoughts.... And by the time it was all over, I was sure as fuck sick of it.
Why this picture makes me want to sit under a yew tree and contemplate a life of recursive suffering, I could not tell you.
The final episode of Strangers With Candy was a quasi-religious experience. I wept openly. Unparalleled badinage.
"The skies they were ashen and sober; / The leaves they were crisped and sere ... / It was night in the lonesome October / Of my most immemorial year...." Edgar Allan Poe, "Ulalume."
Ever notice how much lecturing sounds like hectoring?
Idealism is the proverbial double-edged sword. It preserves our capacity to really care about things, to cut through the dross and distractions which constitute the background noise of life. By the same token, however, it can puncture anything that is even remotely hollow, continually deflating our expectations. Nature abhors a vacuum. Inertia thrives. Yin-yang.
The smallest details can knock you back in time: the play of the light on a particular Sunday morning; the smell of an old perfume; cracking a long-shelved book open, skimming unconsciously over the words until something catches. Suddenly it's ten years ago. And time, its geometry ever a mystery, is not a straight line but a curved one, a horseshoe, so that the past somehow recurs in parallel alongside the present, like a distant but familiar shore.
I've noticed that people often confuse directness with overconfidence -- as if celerity and temerity were the same thing, which they're not. It comes down to attitude, eventually. Efficiency can be judicious and incisiveness can be reckless. The equation isn't simple.
A nice line from a nice movie: "I want to say something to you, but I'm gonna fumble it a little bit, so please just wait till I'm done before you respond: I'm in love with you."
A good friend passed this along, attributing it to a fellow named Wright. Well-phrased, and I happen to agree with it: "... language is merely the 'press agent' for other parts of the mind; it justifies [and initiates] whatever acts they induce, convincing the world that the actor is a reasonable, rational, upstanding person. It may be that the realm of consciousness itself is in large part such a press agent -- the place where our unconsciously written press releases [the self-serving logic of inclusive fitness] are infused with the conviction that gives them force." Amen.
The incidence of art as a substrate of disenchantment is without a doubt a positive occurrence.
I think creativity, like any energetic process, is about critical mass, where quality control acts as a sort of crucible; for while the energy must be self-evident, it must also be contained: too much spontaneity could contaminate the reaction. It's good to remember that from time to time -- to always know your limits, and whereof you speak. Know the shape of your design before you start filling in the colors. There are other schools of thought on this, some antithetical, some even inimical; but this one feels right just now. Just now.
"I like the principle of fractals, the idea of finding geometry in nature or in stories."
In the early morning I'm a student of visual possibility. The fog has rolled in, drowning ambient sound in an aerosol bath. A rabbit darts across neighbors' lawns, its allegiances shifting.
Today I am twenty-three. Feels no different from twenty-two. Feels very different from nineteen. The years fly.
There were thunder showers early this morning. Wet autumn leaves are plastered against the skylights -- haphazard, tessellating: silhouetted at first, now lit from within.
If I hear John Travolta exclaim "I'm on Broadway! I'm doing the cha-cha-cha!" in those Lucky Numbers commercials one more time, I'm going to puncture my eardrums with a marrow spoon. Incidentally: in interviews, director Nora Ephron (of Mixed Nuts, Michael, and sundry Meg Ryan fiascoes fame) has referred to Numbers as "her" Fargo. If that doesn't make you fear for your unborn children, you deserve to be sterilized.
"And as he had seen her that day, so she had remained;never quite at the same height, yet never far below it:generous, faithful, unwearied; but so lacking inimagination, so incapable of growth, that the world of heryouth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself withouther ever being conscious of the change. This hard brightblindness had kept her immediate horizon apparentlyunaltered." Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
People often talk in circles. I prefer straight lines. Not that I'm necessarily the exemplar of my own dictum, but it's worth a spot-check every now and then. Having said that, I offer this contradiction from Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age; in spite of what I believe, I also happen to like this passage: "There was a Chinese belief that demons liked to travel only in straight lines. Hence the bridge zigzagged no fewer than nine times as it made its way to the center of the pond. The bridge was a demon filter, in other words, and the teahouse demon-free, which seemed of only limited usefulness if it still hosted people like Dr. X. But for Judge Fang, raised in a city of long straight avenues, full of straight talkers, it was useful to be reminded that from the point of view of some people, including Dr. X, all of that straightness was suggestive of demonism; more natural and human was the ever-turning way, where you could never see round the next corner, and the overall plan could be understood only after lengthy meditation."
Sometimes silence is lambent and I can feel it oscillating around me. Or maybe it's just the blood rushing inside my head.
From a spectator's standpoint, is a preoccupation with politics any different from a preoccupation with professional sports? Both involve the ascription of suspense to scenarios which are fundamentally contrived.
It's positively primeval outside -- gray light, steep visibility gradient, water dripping from every foliar surface, dew drop, plip plop. Pterodactyl weather.... Well, except for the manicured lawns.
Ever notice how eager most people are to volunteer reams of information about themselves? They'll always qualify their indiscretion, in hindsight, as "only part of the picture" -- and indeed this is true, inasmuch as any verbal discourse is self-limiting due to the structural shortcomings inherent in all language; but you have to wonder, what exactly are people so desperate to convey? It's as if we're trailed by phantoms of ourselves -- or, in many cases, perhaps we trail the phantoms -- and these phantoms bear our likeness, except they're made entirely of soap bubbles, and the bubbles are popping popping popping, and we're constantly having to blow new ones.
Recently (October 5) I discussed my dislike of pseudo slow-motion photography in films. Another cinematic convention that bugs me badly: the use of "Venn Diagram/MasterCard logo" stencils to depict the view through a pair of binoculars. Why is it so prevalent? Stereoscopic vision simply does not work that way. Any idiot who's ever used binoculars can verify this. What should be shown is a slightly fuzzy single circle. Off the top of my head, the only filmmaker I can think of who doesn't fall into this trap is Alfred Hitchcock (1956's The Man Who Knew Too Much comes to mind). There are others (Stanley Kubrick and P.T. Anderson, maybe?) but the general tendency is to rely on the rote and sometimes insensible semiotics of the medium. Once again, I ask: why? Because it's become an institution, sort of a tip of the hat to "movie magic"? Another of the many small ways in which movies announce their "movie-ness" to us? Well, it's lazy and annoying. Another peeve: the way telephones behave in movies (dialtones, hang-ups, everything) ... but don't get me started. It's amazing ... we take so many aspects of the human sensorium for granted, and yet even the slightest miscue can have a distinct, if subconscious, impact on our perceptions -- often detrimentally.
I just woke up from a nap, and the only thing in my head was the memory of some random interstitial scene from Howard the Duck. Lea Thompson smuggling the titular fowl into her workplace or somesuch. Huh. This is odd because I saw the movie exactly once -- in theaters, when I was very little -- and I can't say I've thought about it much since.... Except for that part near the beginning where they show you the girl duck's boobs. That disturbed the hell out of me. Birds aren't supposed to have boobs.
There are nights when the moon is just out of view, and I can wander the darkened house gleaning its pale glint off terrestrial objects: here, scattered by tree branches; there, refracted through window glass; and I can never quite find its center.
Have you seen the commercial for Bounty paper towels where the little red-headed girl spills blue soda and the spill turns into a tsunami and her mom stops said tsunami with a single sheet of Bounty? God I love that commercial. The chipper, whistling music; the Heather Matarazzo-esque ingenue; the way the camera does this hard pan to the left when Mom rushes in to save the day (shades of Scorsese).... Actually, I'm lying. I hate that commercial. I just like watching it because the little girl is such an insufferable nerd. She's become the composite effigy for all the schoolyard-bully predilections I've been ... channeling constructively ever since I "grew up." I worship at the altar of her nameless lameness. Yeah.
An okay line from an okay movie: "May the best of your past be the worst of your future."
Some silences are strategic. Others are careless.
Self-awareness can creep up on you like a cat. If you're lucky, it just wants to rub up against your leg, maybe steal a little warmth. If you're less fortunate, watch out for those claws.
It's reassuring sometimes to observe other people's incidental fixations -- the cheerful, harmless little obsessions we all have in common, an emphasis on minutiae which unifies us. And when you discover that someone shares your particular reflex or curiosity, it's as if a tiny bell has gone off someplace, and a mechanism has quietly asserted itself. Details, details ... aphorisms spring to mind. Lives overlapping, interlocking, like teeth in a zipper, or hands clasped together.
One of the easiest things to do when you're feeling uncreative is to fall back on allusion and collage -- citation, annotation -- mix tapes, scrapbooks -- anything to siphon someone else's ingenuity. It's weak, but it's necessary. It's electrolytes for your soul.
It's a shockingly brisk autumn day, gray clouds colliding with white light, interspersed with packets of rain. A Hudson River School sort of day, quickening pulses, stirring atavism. Small animals go about their business, developing new physiologies to contend with the coming fallow, their entire universes mapped out in clear vectors and warm, drizzle-slicked fur. Somewhere, umbrellas are blooming.
A few months ago, Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman commented that actresses Cathy Moriarty and Kathleen Turner should be paired together in a "glorious boomer-hag remake of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" -- neatly encapsulating the grim confluence that all aging starlets face. I would build on this idea and suggest that a periodic remake of Baby Jane become a cinematic rite of passage, a sort of postmodern analogue to the tar pits of yore. A quick survey of saturation points in the media obligates me to nominate Farrah Fawcett and Goldie Hawn for the next go-round of this proposed institution. I would pay cash money to see them chase each other around the lunatic fringes of Los Angeles, armed with chloroform-laced pacifiers and German Expressionistic eye makeup. And lest anyone accuse me of sexism, I hereby propose umpteen sequels to the Grumpy Old Men franchise, to be populated with the alpha-male husks of eligible bachelors past. First up: Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson ... no, wait: Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Do I hear any dissent? I didn't think so.
The sharpest compliment I've received in some time: "There are a lot of angry-looking kids with half-shaved heads and funny colored hair who are probably green with envy over your domain name."
Am I the only person who's insanely bothered by pseudo slow-motion photography in movies? Ordinarily, slow-motion photography involves shooting with high-speed (more frames per unit of time) film that is then slowed down during playback, providing an illusion of time dilation. Pseudo slow-motion is a cheesy substitute -- instead of increasing the amount of visual information recorded, each frame is simply repeated, resulting in a halting, stuttering progression -- basically a camcorder trick. Whenever I see pseudo slow-motion in a film -- as opposed to the genuine article -- I just want to crawl into a hole and pull it in after me. My estimation of whatever I'm viewing immediately collapses. I would imagine it's a less expensive process, but the attendant aesthetic compromise is almost unbearable.
There was a power failure yesterday. Hours passed, I passed, glancing at my reflection peering back at me from the obsidian indifference of lifeless television screens. I caught myself taking notes on the backs of envelopes, drumming my fingers to the rhythms of mechanical clocks. I drove down to the lake -- Erie, much more beautiful in choppy, storm-tossed reality than bumper-sticker put-downs would have you believe. I swallowed time in heaping hemoglobin gulps, got reacquainted with the timbre of my thoughts.... And by the time it was all over, I was sure as fuck sick of it.
Why this picture makes me want to sit under a yew tree and contemplate a life of recursive suffering, I could not tell you.
The final episode of Strangers With Candy was a quasi-religious experience. I wept openly. Unparalleled badinage.
"The skies they were ashen and sober; / The leaves they were crisped and sere ... / It was night in the lonesome October / Of my most immemorial year...." Edgar Allan Poe, "Ulalume."
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