Soliciting opinions

Okay, look down and to your right. See that new thing? Where the blank space used to be. What do you think of it? This will hopefully make the blog a better place in a variety of ways.

There are always these little, trite things that I want to link to and comment on briefly, but that I never do because these posts of mine are usually these massive, overwrought and senselessly wordy things that I feel immensely invested in.

Basically when I write something long, I want it to stay there for a while and I don't want it preempted by some pointless and self-congratulatory bullshit [though aren't all entries exactly that] like that thing last week about the record label.

So what do you think? I've wanted to do something like this for a while now, but until today [a couple days ago really], my technology consultant and I didn't think the painfully limited Blogger suite could do it the way I wanted to.

It's not perfect--because of the script it uses, it takes a retardedly long time to show up--but it's been cobbled together and I'm generally satisfied.

Read the full thing here.

Yes, but what of the future

Blade: Trinity is a plotless setpiece for gadgets, vampires, impossible martial arts, transitioning WWE wrestlers, absurd weapons, absurder clothing, intrusive product placement and Ryan Reynolds' tired-ass schtick delivery. Truly the William Shatner of Sean William Scott impersonators, each line Reynolds speaks is an inexplicably wrong-accented: "Could I be any . . . more . . . sarcastic?" He's bulked up a bit since Two Guys a Girl and a Pizza Place, but his open mic night acting remains bony and undernourished. Bad acting yes, and equally bad writing by David Goyer. Together Reynolds and Goyer serve up a comic relief holocaust not seen since the Lucas/Jar Jar scorched-earth campaign took my childhood and fed it to me on a plate of broken dreams with a fork of betrayed trust.

Have you guessed that this is going to be a positive review yet? . . . I said gadgets, vampires and impossible martial arts right? Oh, and Parker Posey. Even as a vampire, she purty.

Most serious actors, the kind of actors that do a lot of indie flicks for not a lot of money--people like Parker Posey--might feel self-conscious playing a vampire in a really crappy big-budget shlock-fest like this. I mean, when you make a movie with Christopher Guest and he asks you back a second time, you have to think you're above vampire flicks. If nothing else, she must have wondered what will her clove-cigarette-smoking dildo boyfriend Ryan Adams would say.

To her credit and caution to the wind, she attacks the role, playing her schizoid couture vamp with abandon. It's really a pretty funny, gutsy performance.

Further adding to Trinity's pedigree, it's got the Rza on beats. He has a lot of experience with music as it relates to the three key elements of the Blade mythos: martial arts, superheros, and evil incarnate. He founded the Wu-Tang after watching thousands of samurai movies, eventually scoring Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai and Kill Bill. His solo albums revolve around a superhero: Bobby Digital. His side project Gravediggaz, with Prince Paul of A Tribe Called Quest, is preoccupied with describing it with sanguine detail the many ways you can kill a person.

It fits then, when his talking-with-mouth-full delivery lays down the ending track after an hour and 40 some odd minutes of vampire killing. Also, someone in the laundry list of generic iPod whoring DJs lined up for this soundtrack decided to sample Velvet Underground's Venus in Furs; then Goyer had the frame of mind to put it in the scene where Dracula crashes an S&M Boutique and finds his visage on a vibrator.

The movie really makes no sense at all, it's unconnected, anecdotal and that's fine because the more sense a movie makes, the less vampires get killed. This inverse proportionality is practically a law of filmmaking. Lost Boys had the two Coreys and a greased up man in fluorescent spandex playing a baritone sax. Tons of blood suckers died in that. However, Nosferatu made tons of sense, vampire death count: 1. Same with Dracula.

Though this Dracula [Dominic Purcell] sucks and the end fight is really bad, it just continues the pattern of setting up inconceivable odds against Blade making it to a final confrontation, only to give him a less than worthy adversary. In the first it was Steven Dorff, a human male so small I could fold him into the palm of my hand. Whitney told me once that she thinks I might be the only person in the world she could beat up. After watching the first Blade, I think there might be a second.

And therein lies the strange continuity the films share: a reassuringly steady rate of decline.

Ben noted also that everytime Blade is outside in the daylight with an adversary--once in each movie he thinks--Blade gets a baby thrown at him. Reduntant? Splendid. Resplendent.

It's the worst of the series by far, but that's fine. The only thing really lacking was a good one liner. Goyer kind of screwed himself in the first script when he unwittingly penned a line so magnificent the one-liner universe folded in on itself and from the remnants emerged a new godhead:

Some motherfuckers are always trying to iceskate uphill.

So much truth in so few words.

Trinity does, however, lead me to seriously wonder about the fate of a franchise much nearer and dearer to my heart. This David S Goyer was in charge of providing Christopher Nolan with the script that would effectively reboot Batman, starting at the beginning.

And after quilling Batman Begins, he wrote and directed this. Thus I worry.

Read the full thing here.

Fantasy and/or Nostalgia

Alright, here's the thing: I have this paper to write, somewhere around 15-20 pages. This is a writing sample for Graduate Programs. It's important that this sample be at least tangiential to my intended area of study. I want to study contemporary lit, but I haven't taken any such classes because there were none such offered at Gonzaga [shakes fist] <--there will be a lot of that.

This paper also has to be very good, because among the other things Gonzaga never offered was a class in Literary Theory and Criticism, which was once obscure but is now, I'm told, absolutely essential. So I don't have that, I'll have to matriculate and take it later, whatever. This paper needs to pop because you could steer a cruise ship through the gaping holes in my resume.

I have to prove, essentially, that I while I lack experience, I have some form of potential.

That said, I need your help.

I've decided to write this paper on Michael Chabon, author of Wonderboys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier an Clay, Summerland, The Final Solution and several collections of short stories. I'm going to write on his use of nostalgia and the fantastic--the interplay thereof, whatever--to weave plausible though outlandish worlds.

If you've read Chabon, I'd like your thoughts. If you haven't read Chabon, you should, immediately. Check that, read him after you help me. Help me by identifying things writen by people I can quote on the topics of nostalgia, either as mental construct or as literary device; Fantasy, again as mental construct or as literary device; and/or how the two relate to each other. It can be anything from psychoanalysis to a study of Aesop's fables, if you think it's relevant, send 'er my way.

Chabon is a fantastically florid and engaging writer, and I have a stack of reviews and criticism that make a point of noting this in relation to his nostalgia for his subjects, and his subjects' nostalgia for their world and their recollections. People also note the aspects of the fantastic within his work, whether it's the straight up fantasy of Summerland, the humbolt-haze and genderbending of Wonderboys, or Kavalier and Clay's comic superheros and the Golem of Prague.

But no one has looked at the two in relation to each other informing his work as a whole.

15 pages, on that. Let's get to work. And if you do a good job, I'll write a review of Blade Trinity. Incentive.

Thanks

Read the full thing here.

Doing things with words

--Tell me. --No. --Don't you trust me? --Yes. --Then tell me.
This basic conversation is the linchpin of so many movies you almost miss it. It's based on the idea that trust is a logical structure so profound that nothing in human nature can stand against it. Trust, in movie relationships, trumps all. Without trust, there can be no love, and there can be no trust in dramas without full and brutal disclosure.

It creates a false dilemma that movie characters always fall for. If you're in a movie and you've got a secret to keep, hope to God someone you love doesn't drop the trust card. If they do, you lose. Within this fanciful construct the argument from trust can be exploited to achieve anything a screen/playwright wants, and it's the easiest way to bring a complex situation to a head without trying very hard.

Dramatic trust is not real trust. Dramatic trust is a cheap way of forcing a character's hand, of tricking that automaton into thinking it's doing the only thing it really can. It is, after all, in love. And what is love, if not trust. And what is trust, if not--you know--spilling your guts all the time.

In the doctrine of dramatic trust, consideration of the other isn't humane, it's cowardice. In the doctrine of dramatic trust, consideration is the path of weakness and failure. If she brought your soup cold, you'd better tell her in no uncertain terms or your relationship is done by Act III. Absurd levels of disclosure are cathartic, fundamental, and in the modern cinematic American love story, sacramental.

In Closer, there's a ridiculous amount of disclosure, but not for trust's sake, and arguably not for love's either. It's disclosure for retribution, out of pettiness, selfishness, pain and anger. It's disclosure for all the ways we hurt and get hurt. It's for spreading out the harm, making others as miserable as we are. Sometimes it's an acute tactic, other times it's out of desperation, but it always feels brutal, honest and, you know, real.

So when the argument from trust came up, near the end--as it was bound to and right where it always does--I was really bothered. It seemed too easy. Then I put it into context. That is, I liked the movie enough to try and manufacture an elaborate pantomime to explain it away. Afterward, it still seemed too easy.

Closer is a movie about archetypes. I got confused at first, mistaking these beautiful, passionate impulse generating machines for human beings. Closer is about aspects of the condition of humanity, not about particular instantiations of humanhood. Draw two intersecting lines on graph paper. Write Anna on top and Alice on the bottom, Dan on the left and Larry on the right. There you have Artistry and passion, Reality and calculation, Self-hatred and secrecy, other-hatred and openness. I'm not going to tell you which is which, but you'll figure it all out by the time Larry and Dan start telling each other the [opposite] ways in which Anna hates each man. It's a painfully frank scene that has nothing to do with trust.

Then, at the end--after the big trust talk--are two quiet scenes that make you wonder if you might have had the order mixed up, if maybe the self-hater was more open than the other-hater. Maybe, but that's not really the point, because Anna, Alice, Dan and Larry can't exist without each other. That's the trouble with archetypes.

***

There's a lot in this movie about authorship and the task of naming, defining ourselves and our world. Dan's book has a bad name. Alice doesn't like to tell people her name. Dan masquerades as a woman in a sex chat room, and facilitates the most realistic depiction of IM-sex I've ever seen, down to the abbreviated net prose and the poor substitute 'ohooohohoohohohohhhh' for the ubiquitous faked cyber-gasm.

In a movie about fake people, paradigmatic lives and enough fucks, bitches, shits, and cunts to curl the toes of no less a foulmouth than myself, it says something when the most caustic and spiteful epithet spewed is 'writer'. It means weak, it means quixotic, it suggests a profound disconnect with the way the world actually is. Alice asks Dan,

Where is the love? I can't see it, I can't touch it, I can't feel it. I can hear it. I can hear some words, but I can't do anything with your easy words.

Parsed words are so unequal to the task of describing emotion that there is almost no nobility in even trying. Only someone as lowly as a writer could create something like dramatic trust--a plot device masquerading as a poetic ideal. Similarly though, it takes a writer of Patrick Marber's caliber to expose that kind of easy out for what it is, all the while dangling these mystical, passionate Platonic humanoids in front of us--that thing's rubbish, but look at these pretties, they're representations.

This is a very good, very unsettling talkie with a lot to say, ably said. See it, if only for Clive Owen. So hot right now.

Read the full thing here.

Tool users

Just when I start in bitching about this place, I'm reminded of its splendor, its historicity and its connectedness. Only out here, away from people, we are able to connect with that which is primal. Back in these small, closely and fiercely guarded enclaves of humanity, we might remind ourselves of the battle the human life used to be. Sometimes, at dusk, when I turn my head from the television, look out over the expanse of my parent's concrete patio, past the DirectTV dish onto their landscaped lawn devoid of native plants, I think I see someone. This someone is almost like me, though probably a little hairier, pulling himself onto two legs and striding ably across the savanna.

Completely naked of course.

H. Sapiens clothe yourself. He doesn't care.

***

My dad's been hunting all weekend. Hunting seriously for the first time in years. Just him in a tree with a bow. A classicist, my father hunts not with this century's technology, but with a recurve, a recurve bow that has no sights. They call that shooting instinctive. My father shirks modernity in his tree stand with his obsolete bow.

In his tree stand with his bow, my father hunts more or less like the Mongols did when they fashioned that great nomadic empire from a patchwork of lesser, more learned empires.

But, not having many trees in Mongolia, they rode horses. Or maybe, along the way, we got worse at riding horses, so we put ourselves up into trees. Either way, it's human adaptation, another thing of which this countrified existence reminds.

***

My father stopped hunting when he started his business, trading one kind of struggle for another. He'd spent twenty odd years busting his ass at a thankless job. Now, busting his ass at a thankless proprietorship, he works more than ever. He used to say that he gladly worked more because it meant working for himself, being his own boss. At what point does one realize that your new boss, to take a page from the Who, is the same as your old boss? How long after that to realize it's worse because you're under the whip and wielding it at the same time?

Judging by my dad's attitude recently, returning to things he'd given up to satisfy his drive, it takes about 6 years.

And now, upon returning he finds his sight is beginning to fail him. He says it's the darkness. He's become night blind. Up before dawn, he's missed 4 deer in three days. Three deer really, one was foolish enough to come back.

***

Hunting with a bow is intimate. Arrows don't have the range or speed of a bullet, so the deer have to get close. By the time a deer is close enough to kill with that pointy, fletched stick, they're close enough to hear you breathe. They can pinpoint your smell enough to look right at you. They know when you nock your arrow and they certainly know when that implement of death flies past them and hits the ground. To kill a deer with a bow you have to be quieter, more accurate and less pungent than your smelly, sweaty, mucous bag of flesh generally allows.

To mask his human scent, Dad used to hang onto last year's urine. He'd take the piss from the deer he killed and put it in a little spray bottle and store it in the basement. On Friday, not having any piss from last year, he bought some fake stuff. You can only shirk modernity for so long, another thing countrified existence teaches.

***

When you learn to hunt deer with a bow, whoever is teaching you will tell you that you have to aim a few inches below your target because deer instinctively drop when they hear a threatening noise. When you're up in a tree stand you have to aim a few inches lower still, because of the odd trajectory of shooting downhill.

This means that often, when shooting at a deer, you're really shooting at the ground beneath it, an ancient irony destroyed by the advent of black powder and rifled barrels.

That's progress. Progress means life is a little less tricky and a little less interesting.

***

So Dad, in the dark, aimed at the darkened patch of earth he guessed the deer would occupy a 10th of a second after he released his arrow. He released it and put it where the deer should have been. When it struck the ground and the deer ran off, he was left to watch the sun come up and illuminate that arrow, trying not to cough or breath too loud or betray his uniquely human stink. When the sun was fully up and he was about to head back inside, he drew another arrow and took aim at the one in the ground.

And there they were, one, two. He puts two fingers closely together into the opposite palm, the two arrows. and I thought, aw, stink.

Solitude and nightblindness are solipsism and mortality, but only to his overeducated son.

***

With dusk settling in last night, I reflected on this. And, while reflecting, I wrote my name. What a strange thing to do. I, on this freshly fallen shroud of snow, wrote my name for the first time in years.

With urine.

Just like my forbears I wrote my name in urine upon the unsullied December snow. Like a Baumgarten. Like an American. Like H. Sapiens, a relatively hairless bipedal ape. Like a Mongol nomad god-man astride a flaming steed.

Urine. Snow.

Freedom.

Walking in after me, Dad says I spooked his deer.

Read the full thing here.

Injecting them softly

Here's an interesting look at some factors, other than the obvious, that make Texas the best and easiest state within which to get killed by the justice system.

Provided without comment.

Read the full thing here.