16 years ago Douglas Adams took his last chance to see the Baiji.



Now both Douglas and the dolphins are gone forever.

Something unravels, where potential superiorities fail to uplift you. How could we step from cloud to cloud, umbrellas thrusting upward towards the sun? What other options exist for a fantastical escape, but the ones reflected in the antiseptic glare of stars? Surely our destiny is feeted in this purpose, this righteous glorification of our natural selves. We will band ourselves into frenetic impossibilities, kinetic implausibilities, until we have conquered the very ether and tamed the restless continuum.

Be careful what you wish for.
You pay for what you get.
Gift horses can kick you in the mouth.
"Any fish can have bones."*

I'm not into the Nazi Pope so I'm a Catholic in exile now. Or just nothing; I'm nothing. I'd kind of like to be an atheist but I find it difficult at a fundamental level. It's probably genetic or something. Or Italian. Se non è vero, è bene trovato.

*read me

A mug I found at the thrift says:

BCI Training Systems Inc.

WIN-WIN NEGOTIATIONS
A Tactic Perceived Is No Tactic At All

BLanketing
Flinch
Missing Person
Deadlines
Nibbling
Moral Appeal
Limits
Competition
Take It or Leave It
Association
Legitmacy
Krunch
Apparent Withdrawal
Bogey
Trial Ballon
If/Then
Good Buy/Bad Guy
Precedent
Limited Authority
Reversal

These are separated into columns of five, but I'm too lazy to do it here. Doesn't it look like some kind of bizarre BDSM checklist?

Reunion went well. Pretty much chill, everybody on their own schedule, and Lake Owasco was beautiful. We (not the baby, as there were no life preservers in her size, but various relatives) went out on a pontoon, and took turns being dragged behind on an innertube (without a hole, so we could sit), which was super fun.

Today is Sophia's first birthday. Yesterday there was cake and singing, and presents. She was not interested in eating the cake, but she played with a piece of it happily for a while. She even enjoyed the train ride, and a few people came up to us to comment on how unfussy and pleasant she was during the trip -- both times. "What a nice baby!"

Funniest anecdote I heard was Uncle relating how he remet an old high school friend at the big picnic we missed on Sunday. He hadn't seen the guy for fifteen years or so, but back in school they were great friends. Well, as it turned out, his old friend was a complete asshole. He held forth loudly and rudely the whole the time, making racist jokes and generally embarassing everyone in earshot on his behalf. My uncle, who has been sober for five years, had kind of thought perhaps his friend's less flattering personality traits were alcohol-inspired. But there they were, booze-free, and Marty was still an asshole.

Once the boor had departed, their mutual old friend Dave cornered my uncle. "It's a hell of a thing," he said, "You know, I've been travelling the globe for a few years, and you've been building your career and getting clean...but Marty, well...

"...he's still in the box he came in."

Goodnight.

--mtc

ps. I cried myself to sleep each night.

Interesting failure. The first quarter or so is almost unwatchable, especially in full screen, my only option on the DVD. According to the production notes, they went digital for the convenience, and because they didn't want to have to re-enact anything. I would certainly hope not, as by the end they had an incredible four hundred hours of footage to edit down. Most of which was presumably shot by a short, drunken 12-year-old who wandered in from a wedding reception with his dad's digicam. Actually, the painful part is, Dad could never justify shelling out for that camera for home movies, and Junior would have probably allowed us to occasionally orient ourselves to the set instead of the insides of noses.

But maybe the first hundred hours of shooting taught them something, because the next three hundred were somewhat more reasonable. The sound problems (easily solved by slapping some more of those painfully juvenile iMovie subtitles on a few of the important bits) persisted to the point that I had to rewatch a few scenes before I could be confident that my failure to understand what was going on was not due to my inability to hear anything.

Which brings me to the next area that screamed "we have all the footage in the world and no fucking clue how to use it": the editing. Mystifying. Decisions were made, but not by human beings. One of the two women responsible for the doc quit her job at MTV to make it. I'm not going to take a cheap shot here, but I feel it should be noted that if her sensibilities were honed on music videos, that would explain an awful lot.

This not-a-review is topheavy with technical concerns, but so was the movie. The story is unfortunately obscured and overshadowed by these problems, to the point where it loses all sense of direction or purpose -- or would have, except that of course we know all along where it is going, and how it will end.

We see Tom Herman and Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, best friends since sixteen, so deeply symbiotic that it's surprising when a set of brunettes show up to play their neglected girlfriends later in the film. Tom is a geek with poor social skills but an infectious enthusiasm, and Kaleil is politician in training, warm and personal but at arm's length, commanding but still vulnerable, so that, as a black guy, he is not intimidating to the powerful white people he has to beg money from. With a handful of friends and a few million in seed money, they set out to get a piece of the power and wealth for themselves. Watching their giddy naivete from the comfy armchair of the future, we know we are here to watch a disaster unfold.

But the payoff doesn't come, at least not how we expect it. The company fails, of course; we watch it move from eight to seventy to nearly three hundred employees, as subtitles inform us of the month and the number, inviting us to snicker with our retrospective wisdom about the impossible-to-sustain growth of a business that has no functional product. For the next two hundred hours of shooting, nobody talks about this. Instead, they talk about the investors, and how to get more of them, and how many nifty great things their product will be able to do some undefined day, the only value known for which is 'not today'. And more than any of that, they talk about their feelings. They process. They discuss themselves into the ground. Ultimately, the avalanche of bankruptcy is almost left out of the film. It isn't necessary. Everybody knows how, and why, already. This is not a flaw, but one of the film's rare moments of true self-possession. One thing it is sure it wants to do is not tell us things we already know.

At least, what those who weren't up close and personal to the tech crash don't know. They might watch this movie and think it's not about the dot-com wave at all, but a bunch of ambitious screw-ups and their personal problems. The rest were just nodding along, because they know that guys like these were a big part of what went wrong. This is, in fact, the story. One of the girlfriends addresses the camera from a coked-out haze with her sunglasses on indoors. She tells us that she finds all this business stuff funny, because the guys are like overgrown children playing grown-up with their suits and credit cards and cell phones. (Delighted to be on camera, she whips off her sunglasses at the end of this speech, and instead of obnoxious, it's charming, as if she herself has become a child.)

The final hundred hours provided the best stuff, and a more experienced crew could have really done something with it. As is, an inexperienced but inspired crew sort of did something with it. The resentments between Kaleil and Tom, and between Tom's self-image and reality, grow until they snap and security is hustling Tom out of the building. More talking about feelings and processing follows, though for a moment Kaleil teeters on an interesting personal edge between decency and hubris. But nothing can come between them; in the end, they meet over free weights in a gym, and after all their squabbling about how much money Tom should be bought out for, grimly confirm that neither of them will get anything at all.

The film ends with a footnote which explains that govWorks raised $60 million in the year of its existence, and that Tom and Kaleil went on to form a business 'to help failed dot-com startups'.

Distance: 1.5 mi
Stores visited: CH Martin, Lot Less, Salvation Army

DVDs:

Startup.com. Documentary by Hegedus & Noujaim (The War Room), 2001.

The Damned (La Caduta degli dei). Directed by Luchino Visconti, 1969.

Keys to Tulsa. Who cares, it was three bucks. I got it for my Spader collection. Okay, it says Leslie Greif directed it, and it's from 1997. I just looked up Greif to see if she was a woman, and probably, because other than a Chevy Chase movie that appears to have been released only in Romania, she's a producer.

Books:

The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood

A Viewer's Guide to Film: Arts, Artifices, and Issues - Richard M. Gollin

Behind the Attic Wall - Sylvia Cassidey. This was my first favorite book with chapters, when I was a kid. Amazed to find it.

Shoot Out - Peter Bart & Peter Guber. This book is based on a class these two former studio bigwigs taught at UCLA, and is full of name-droppy anecdotes.

Total cost: $20.

If you came to believe a nothing somewhere, would you put it down for absolutely garnished? Could you handle its translucency, its majestic keening? Surely in these hoardes of ophidian graces, there are some called by names we understand. There is no abolishment in victory, no fantastical leaps to be made for the sake of adequacity. We merely stand and seize the keep: the reach with which we forment the galaxies, and thumbtack the devious stars.

"Fuckin' Proof...shot first."
"What happened?"
"They don't know yet. It was an altercation."
"Obviously."
"The guy he shot, who killed him, survived...That might explain the media quiet a little more. Later there might be..."
"Come on, you were right before."
"If he were one of the Backstreet Boys -- "
"Right. If Biggie and 'pac were white --"
" -- it would have blown up the world."
"Instead of just parts of it. Kurt Cobain fucking killed himself and it blew up the world."
"Ten years later, no one has ever been charged in the murders of Christopher Wallace or Tupac Shakur. If they had been Dave Matthews and Garth Brooks, do you think that would still be the case?"

Of course, Tupac has now actually put more albums out after his death than before it, and he's the only maybe-not-really-dead-guy-theory I buy (including Andy Kaufman, because obviously the funniest thing he could do was actually die).

Please don't come back to tell me the 1996/97 murders were big news, big stories. They were certainly bigger than Proof, but Proof, even as Em's loyal sidekick, wasn't as big as them. But let's take a case from outside of entertainment -- little JonBenet Ramsey, another murdered human yet to have justice done in her name (of course, there are far, far too many of these in the world to ever list, or even know their names).

She also died in 1996, and no one has ever been charged. Outrage over this fact, the case, and speculation that wealth and privilege (no one mentions race) might be behind it, breaks out regularly ever since, in the public discourse and the media. Every few years the gore hounders brush off some dusty clips and run another "Look at the pretty dead girl" doc, complete with lots of dark implications and half devoted to the whodunnit.

Not many people talk publicly about the murders of Christopher Wallace and Tupac Shakur. Their mothers. A few fringe filmmakers. Rappers and their fans. Bubbles of coverage lamenting their deaths occasionally pop up, but most nobody gets mad anymore. The anger was always relegated to the fringes anyway, for obvious reasons. And now they're martyrs, invoked like angels, as if their murders were just an inevitable ascension.

I stopped logging into LJ for a week or so as part of one of my regular bouts of head-in-shell-itis. I am now peeking out cautiously and squinting my black beady eyes at what little of the landscape is visible from down here.

This is what I mean:

I just caught a little bit of the movie Five Easy Pieces, from 1970, directed by Bob Rafelson, about whom I'll have a little more to say in a moment.

I had the sound off, and I haven't seen it before, so I don't know what the conflict was, but Jack Nicholson and Karen Black were arguing, and there was a medium shot of them in profile with a mirror in the background. Through the scene, it's been clear that Karen is a broken woman in some way; a pan across a wall of photographs showed us how she grew up in the shadow of some man, a father, a musician like Jack is. First she is bright and young, smiling into the camera, and gradually she seems to shrink and fade, until finally she no longer looks up at the world at all, but down at her own feet, drawn tightly up, face half-hidden & shadowed.

And then we see her now, alive but somehow washed out, in possession of herself but ready to bend like a reed under the powerful breath of men. She watches Jack play, they talk, it becomes an argument. She has perhaps been needling him, or not giving him something he wants; as he speaks he begins to arrange the items on the dresser (which include little glass jars only to underscore the violence of his gesture, not because anybody actually has little glass jars of that kind randomly cluttering up surfaces) beneath the mirror, and instead slams one down and then sweeps them all away. His violence makes her shrink back, literally and emotionally, and as he rants at her, through the mirror he is doubled. He stands a head taller than her, and is leaning into her just a little, dominating her, and then even his reflection dominates her, filling the space between them, so we know he is emotionally, functionally, all up in her grill at this time in her life. He is crushing her, and she is letting him, because not too long after, naturally they fuck. First he and his reflection walk away, leaving her pushed to the side of the frame; forcing her to come after him, which she does instantly, and without ever exposing her own image in the glass.

Bob Rafelson started out directing the TV series "The Monkees" and went on to make 1968's cult classic Head...which, by the way, he wrote with Nicholson, who then starred in The King of Marvin Gardens, and Rafelson's remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1981. After which Nicholson's career continued to pull him ever closer to being a cartoon of himself, and Rafelson's staggered forward a few more times, then pretty much just died. He did some softcore porn, from the looks of it. Between 1996 and 2002 he made a couple of crime noir (or maybe pseudo-noir) flicks which I'm definitely going to investigate further, but which weren't received with much enthusiasm, let us say. The last thing listed is a Lionel Richie video collection in 2003, because it contains a video ("All Night Long") he did in the early eighties.

I wonder if he ever watches Five Easy Pieces anymore.

So bored. Time to make more lists. Here's what's around my movie/game station, where the movies I've been watching & the games I haven't been playing live:

One precarious pile containing Rear Window, Star Trek VI, Shamanic Princess (shut up), The Man Who Knew Too Much, Proof of Life, Quiz Show, Annie Hall, The Corruptor, FLCL, Citizen Kane and the Family Guy "movie" nihilistic_kid left here. Under the movies are some GameCube games: Metroid Prime, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4, Eternal Darkness, Phantasy Star Online, and Resident Evil 4.

Next shelf down has the DS games Kirby (I liked this better than I thought I would), American Sk8land, Sims 2 AKA THE SUCKENING, Advance Wars Dual Strike (can't wait for wifi, zomfg!!1!), Castelvania DoS (like candy with candy on top), Nintendogs. Beside that pile, more DVDs & tapes: the Firefly collection, The Spanish Prisoner, Big Trouble in Little China, The Young Ones collection, Boiler Room, The Cutting Edge (shut up) and Tombstone. Grosse Point Blank is off to one side, and I think I'll put it in now while I sweep & mop.

I've been stealing music for more than ten years. I have now bought for real legally three digital albums, via the Apple Music Store. They are:

The The - Dusk
Sigur Ros - Takk...
Black Star - Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star

I have bought the following individual tracks:

The Million You Never Made - Ani Difranco
Galvanize - The Chemical Brothers
Run Through the Jungle - Creedence Clearwater Revival
Where Do You Think You're Going - Dire Straits
Milk of Heaven - Floater
Man in the Long Black Coat -Joan Osbourne
Hello Tomorrow - Karen O. & Squeak E. Clean
Close My Eyes (Live) - Matisyahu (first thing I ever bought)
Cool Water (Remastered) - Talking Heads

nairB: Wouldn't it be great if all Bill Hicks' material was available for free to anybody, at any time, somewhere?

moT: Like in the middle of Times Square? On a huge pedastal, broadcasting twenty-four hours a day in IMAX sound. A giant robot Bill Hicks that breathes fire. Now that would be great.

Any minute now my mother will knock on the door for the third time in three days. We'll hug and laugh and wave bye-byes, and when I close the door I'll lock both the locks and stand there, looking at the knob, until I see my own reflection and step away.

Then I'll order some vindaloo, put on Takk... & run around like a loon.

House is clean & has been for a while again. Went into a slump for a week or so, until whatshisface felt compelled to bitch about it. Tesla says without me he'd die of starvation when the fridge crusted shut. Somehow he did survive before, but it was a near thing. Man can't live on brandy & cigarettes alone. I should know.

Steve Burns is capering around silently on the TV. He's wearing a funny pointed hat and seems to be on some kind of adventure. He's talking to a giant purple blob with teeth, on what looks like a forest path surrounded by deadly nightshade. There's a lesson in this, if you look at it right, I'm sure. Now he's inching along the ground like a worm, & has found a golden key, but a flying talking worm is trying to steal it. Well, now I think we all know what the message here is. If you wear a stupid hat, strange things will happen to you.

Maybe when she's gone spring will come back. She said it herself: "Does it always rain when I visit?" I thought to myself, Rachel's going to love that one. Do you? Isn't it great? The best part is, so far, yes, it does.

My friend is leaving his music behind. He has a lot to say about this, because his brain is full of words. That's one of the things we have in common. They bubble up constantly out of us until everyone runs away screaming, hands clamped over their ears.

But also we become scientists. We pull out a clipboard and put on a white lab coat, and ask questions, endlessly. It's no way to have a conversation. We're stunted, childlike, stuck in a socially retarded paradigm. We can't relate to you directly, so we have to flood the line with signal and hope something sticks.

My friend is more talented than most people who make long-ass posts to their journals about how they've finally realized they're never going to be a Super Death Ninja of Doom after all. His decision is well explained, but I still find it a little mysterious. Clearly it started somewhere under his waters, where the lizards live.

But I know he's right, and furthermore that the kind of success he craves would be very bad for him. He's a barely tolerable human being as is, and I say that as a fellow jackass. He doesn't need anything else getting between him and his conscience.

This is an open letter, because he's reading us right now, in a dusty attic while the night storm batters at the window. Call out my name, Bastian! Why don't you do what you dream!

His music was his clipboard for a while. His outside line. Now he thinks he's being clever, but despite the accuracy of his statements, he's hiding something. Right now I strongly suspect that something is himself.

But what I don't know is why.

nihilistic_kid used to say that "Let's go" was the most overused, inane, wasteful line in the movies, and I tend to agree. There are other candidates:

"What's up?" (We're in a movie, and you're moving the scene along by flapping your lips.)
"What now?" (And the answer: "Now [pause for business] we wait.")
"You can trust me." (If I could, you wouldn't have to tell me. Any character who responds to this with acquiescence should be dead within five minutes.)
"Never!" (Sometimes!)
"We're trapped!" (Write your own meta gag, it's too obvious to bother with.)
"We're too late." (I'm too bored.)
"Isn't this illegal?" (No, I have a license to carry concealed nuclear weapons.)

Of course, there are things people in movies almost never say:

"Do you have your keys?" (Locked 'em in the tank again!)
"Wait, I have to pee." (Synchronize watches through the bathroom door)
"Let's give up and go home." (Act Two: Cheetos on the couch while aliens eat the President's brain)
"I had a normal, happy childhood." (But I'm still going to eat your spleen while you watch.)
"I can't get it up." (And no, I'm not sorry.)
"Great, I love pie!" (Dale Cooper never actually said it)
"Isn't this immoral?" (Just shoot the goddamn zombie, Fred.)

moT:
Nothing in the journal yet.

enaD:
Except your account of that bitchin concert last night where Jim was like totally hitting on you OMG

moT:
Then I woke up in a motel with blood all over the place and no memory of the last six hours. And my shoulder really hurt...