Collateral

The fringe of tropical storm Ivan collided with Boston today.

It brought with it winds gusting up to 15 or 20 miles per hour, and roadway puddles nigh on ankle deep.

While the denizens of the Gulf Coast began piecing together their fractured lives, my left foot, stupidly shod in a mesh trainer was getting hopelessly soaked.

Mother Nature's ruinous course continues . . .

And now, pour la digestion, allow me to offer you a cigarette.

Read the full thing here.

Jet lag

It's 1:30 am and I'm not even remotely tired.

This sucks.

Worse, I can't focus on anything. I've been trolling blogs for hours, reading really bad poetry. I tried and failed thrice to write a review about Bright Young Things. I'd like to think the critical laxity lies not just with how out of sorts I am, but also how forgettable the movie was. Though it can't have been too awfully forgettable, as I'm typing like one of the British little darlings right now. Annoying.

Blame that on the jet lag too.

On the upside, I found out what time this godforsaken town cools off: 1:12 am. Not a moment sooner.

I bought a couple books today, Invitation to a Beheading and Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

I think I'm going to go read them.

That is all.

Oh, and if you're feeling up to it (Omni, and any others) go here and see if these blogs have any huge errors (email me with fixes). This site is on my new, improved journalism resume, and has gone out to a few papers. I need to know how bad these posts are.

There's nothing new there, just selected crap from this junk.

Thanks.

Read the full thing here.

What hell is

Christian Iconography and Saturday morning cartoons have it way wrong.

After two days in Boston, I have to conclude that not only would hell be hot, it would also be moist. Having lived in Seattle after living in Spokane I thought I'd learned a little something about humidity. I had learned nothing.

Its 10pm here and my body parts are sticking to each other--and not just the ones you'd expect.

This ungodly fact of east coast life has limited my viewing of the city itself, as has the underground transit system. Still, I've chanced 'pon a few cool things.

I saw a nice looking Frank Gehry building, the Stata Center at MIT. The design recalls cubism heavily. That would be a funny reality TV show: Gehry builds something, then Picasso tries to make it look more twisted and absurdly geometric than it already is. Iron Architect/Painter. I'd watch it. I liked the Stata a fair bit better better than Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao, and a little less than the "Ginger and Fred" in Prague, which is most notable--in my opinion--for how at home it is in the surrounding neighborhood, despite being a churning mass of metal and glass.

On the other end of the Gehry spectrum then, we have the LSD-influenced partial birth abortion on garish display at the corner of 5th and Broad in Seattle.

Shannon and I went to a movie at Harvard Square, where I was allowed to walk amongst people who are hopelessly more brilliant than I. I considered punching one of them to assuage the feelings of inadequacy, but I worried they'd gut-shoot me with mind bullets. The movie itself was rather lackluster, I'm thinking of reviewing it. Let me know if you're interested in reading about Bright Young Things--or if you like Evelyn Waugh.

For dinner I had Tuscaloosa catfish. 'Twas bomb.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll have some pictures to post upon my return.

The only other thing of note so far is that Shannon swore up and down that she lives in the projects and that she was sure she'd heard shootings almost every night. As it happens, she lives in a gated community and her apartment overlooks Dorchester Bay. While it may not be the nicest bay in the world, I've never known any projects to be built upon waterfront property (and I've seen both Candyman movies).

I have yet to hear a gunshot.

Oh! Wait--maybe . . . no, that was just her neighbor, setting off firecrackers while burning a pile of money.

"There must be a special Hell reserved for people who make Hell seem boring."

Read the full thing here.

Not "this year's" anything really

I finally saw Garden State, four months after I missed it at the Seattle International Film Festival, and probably a month and a half after its semi-wide release.

The result was something like the emotional upswell experienced by Zach Braff look-a-like and Garden State protagonist Andrew Largeman. He stops taking his pills. He usually takes lots of them. The pills he takes are prescribed to cure problems with his brain. He says they make him numb.

Amid the grass-roots, indie-fan love-fest this movie has enjoyed, numb is exactly what I was going for. Read no reviews, watch no trailers, wait it out, see the movie when it comes was my mantra. It was a hard pill, for the deluge was near-complete--I could brook no shelter. I was beset on all sides by surging, phantasmogoric buzz. Somehow I kept it at bay.

Sitting in the theatre was like surfacing from immersion in that sea.

Half-drowned and shivering, the movie unfolded itself with quirky characters and ham-fisted dialogue. Things happened that made me laugh. Things happened that made me groan. Things happened that made my capacity for suspension of disbelief nearly overheat from stress. Throughout, In the back of my mind was the one quote that had somehow evaded my filter and slipped in my buzz cortex. It now plagued me. Garden State is "this year's Lost in Translation."

It's not that at all actually. The poignancy of Lost in Translation was in its silent moments. It was the shared glances, ,the longing, the uncertainty on the faces of its characters that fueled the emotional payload that connected Sofia Coppola's dissertation on loneliness with audiences. Braff's face twitches so much you don't know what emotion he's going for--he might be trying for all of them at once, I really can't tell. Natalie Portman's character has epilepsy, which she plays like a severe case of ADHD. Tears flow and you're unsure where they've just come from.

The movie is funny. But the laughs are a completely unconnected series of kitschy sight gags and drug references. It sometimes feels as though the plot exists to suspend these things in a logical order. That's a shame.

A friend and I once had a conversation about Lost in Translation. He didn't like it because he said it offered up a problem without having the courage to put forth a solution. He's a smart guy and that's an excellent point. Coppola's movie was, though, complete and coherent.

Garden State is coherent certainly, but far from emotionally complete. It offers solutions to the existential, drug-addled dementia of its characters. The solutions though, are hackneyed and tired. It's a new gloss on the love conquers all motif. In forwarding that cause, the sometimes snappy, inventive dialogue becomes laughable, the plot sputters, the actors don't seem to know what to do with themselves.

It's a fun movie, but also kind of an unfortunate one.

Read the full thing here.

The growth of words

Last year sometime I read a book by Michael Chabon. It had won the Pulitzer, and despite my waning respect for that award, I picked up The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay expecting good things. I believe a book can't be all bad if it is at least partly about Comics.

It was, in fact, a phenomenal book. In Chabon's deft and confidently long-winded sentences, I saw what my writing might be like if I was better at doing it. It sparked for the first time a real desire to get better at writing. I wanted to work to those heights.

This weekend, while taking my friends on a tour of Seattle area book and other media stores, I came face to face with more of Chabon's work. This was a used book store, so the selection was sparse. There was a copy each of books I hadn't read, and one of the covers had Michael Douglas' self-satisfied and rheumy gaze in extreme close up. I love the movie version of Wonder Boys, but hate editions of books that have anywhere on them "Now a major motion picture from [X]" or pictures of actors. This forces real human faces into the mental space used to create the characters internally. This destroys the process of discovering a book for me.

I also like my book collection to feel timeless.

So I chose The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Chabon wrote it when he was 24. It reads like it. It has the same over-long sentences, but with almost none of the confidence I admired in Kavalier and Clay. He overwrites, forces hackneyed metaphors, struggles with narrative voice. He wastes sentences. He says dumb things, silly things. He struggles with the odd nostalgia some young men have after a first or second real love. This is a nostalgia I have and hate.

It's also a beautiful and real story I would be finishing off right now if I didn't have to pack for a trip to Boston.

It reminds me that all the literary conceits in the world are no match for characters you can care about and an accessible story. It lets me know that great authors were once insecure authors.

There are millions of insecure authors though, and most never get published. The difference, I think, is courage.

Chabon's Mysteries is a book about exactly that. Not courage in the characters themselves, who retreat into various forms of self-destruction and conformity. The courage is in the writing itself, in fleshing out ideas onto paper, and figuring out how to order them thoughtfully. It feels like a very painful autobiography. There is an internal conflict that surfaces later in Kavalier and Clay (there were also hints in Wonder Boys) over sexuality, ethnicity and identity. Where, in Kavalier and Clay, Chabon is able to affect a certain distance from his subject(s), Mysteries feels gutwrenchingly close and real. Maybe that's the difference between being 24 and being 40ish, I don't know. It makes me think though, that out of a style and temperament I hate in myself now, might one day come something admirable, something to be proud of.

From the bubbling praise on the book's jacket, I realized--maybe for the first time--that perfection in writing and crafting taut imagery is secondary to telling a passionate and enthralling story.

I think I've been preoccupied with the former for too long. I've been analyzing my own writing through the lens of well-practiced and confident wordsmiths and I think, missed much of the point of writing. Maybe that confidence comes with time. Maybe it won't come at all, but I think I need to stop worrying so much about it.

I also watched, after much anticipation and laziness, Garden State, and I can say unequivocally, it is most definitely NOT "this year's Lost in Translation." I'll probably complain about that tomorrow.

Have you heard the Shins? . . . They'll change your life

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Friends

I'm hosting an impromptu gathering of far-flung friends, so I haven't/won't be blogging for a few days.

Then I'll probably be taking this show on the road to Boston for a week or two.

FYI

Read the full thing here.