I spent last night in a kind of energy-deprived funk and wound up watching several hours of prime-time television in the hopes of drowning myself in the Great Emanation for a time. But, man, oh man. About twelve seconds into Three Sisters I began to get the shakes. It's some wrong shit going down in there. Somebody get to Vicki Lewis. She's got that trapped look. Even the writers know it -- every scene she's in is about how unhappy she is to be there.
Also, is the Chekov-ripoff title a product of some misbegotten notion of pomo literary reference? Or is it just the result of the fact that, as far as the creators of sitcoms are concerned, no one in the world could be expected to notice or care about some moldy ol' play?
I thought this was interesting. Also, I just like the word "sporgeries."
Did You Say Poetry?
SPEED: The Must-Have Platitude in Today's Economy
No further comment necessary here.
I think it's time to call for a Media Vampire Moratorium. In recognition of its past glory, the producers of Buffy should be allowed to continue for another season. But that's it. No vampire allegories, no vampire metafictions, no movies about a platoon of Americans behind enemy lines in WWII who find themselves up against the Nazis' secret WampyrTruppen or anything like that. Give it a rest until 2005, at minimum.
SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE (2000).
directed by (unknown).
starring Willem Dafoe, John Malkovich, Cary Elwes, et al.
It was a brilliant conceit: that F. W. Murnau made a "bargain" with a real vampire, pseudonymously known as Max Schreck, in order to more naturalistically film his unauthorized version of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
It was a brilliant trailer: it "sucked" you in, prominently featuring Dafoe camping it up ("I'll eat her later!") as Schreck.
It was a boring film, saved only by Dafoe's hamming.
Today I had a dream in which a woman of importance came into a ceremonial room and met some other people who craved her favor, and then sacred images were called up by these people and manifested upon a screen, those images containing signs and portents of the future, which were called "deliverables." The woman brought into the room a priest of the Newer Gods (through whose agency the signs and portents had been conjured), and he spoke to the assembled out of his wisdom, which was not insubstantial, and yet also with deep humility as the ways of the Newer Gods are chaotic and deep, like a turbulent current at the center of the river which may bear one swiftly downstream and yet may pull one under with violence.
After the priest had departed there was a sense of consensus among those gathered, that the signs and portents would be fulfilled. Yet still questions were raised about the dedication that ought to be afforded to the Newer Gods in this particular instance. There was concern that the wrong deities would be invoked, or that improper and futile sacrifices would be performed, and the mention of these somewhat blasphemous possibilities cast a pall over the room; and so before the situation could become dispiriting it was agreed that other priests and wise men should be consulted, and be given the keys to the sacred scrolls, so that the proper rites might be observed.
Then everyone exchanged business cards.
Bootswanna suggests you read this "slightly incendiary essay":
The Curse of Information Design
Our pal and musical know-it-all Dave just wrote this piece for the Voice on Gangsta Polkas. "Narcocorridas" is now my favorite new term.
A piece on the inauguration from T. Carson, who I always find worth reading, on damn near any subject.
The Village Voice: Features: Chads Into Confetti
The unsinkable Laura has forwarded this to the File. When asked why she doesn't post it her own damn self, she suggests that I'm lucky to get what she has to write at all. And who can argue?
......
Here's why the Bush Administration is not "the president of everybody":
1. Y'all didn't get the popular vote, remember? No honeymoon. No mandate for your proposals. No love. Extreme mutual distaste. All the way, baby.
2. Bad grammar. It's President of the United States. I know it's real hard, but think about it and you'll see the difference.
3. You can't put a decent website together, and you expect to preside over all of us who are so clearly smarter and nicer than you?
4. You are not the president of the individuals who give money to your campaign (as in individual donation caps in the Mcain-Feingold bill) - you are their lackey, and as such, you destroy democracy in America.
5. You are completely out of touch with regular people: isolated, inbred elitist hicks.
6. 00-theory, dudes. Y'all's'll just melt with all the effort of it all and then we can depose you quite effortlessly.
Keep it all the nasty work you do and you'll get us a nice fat lovely Democratic Congress in 2 years. Thanks for that, theives.
Peaceout!
Bootsy.
Check out what happens when you type "dumb motherfucker" into Google's search engine.
Evidenced by this and this it seems to be "Emergency Bloopers Week."
Some of these posts seem to "take" and others don't. Matt, Sean, any thoughts on why this might be so? I'm getting no error messages from either Blogger or Asan to indicate why...
Actually, Matt, there is a link to the blog on my home page. And a link to the home page at the bottom of the blog. But given that the homepage has nothing much on it (it's mostly just a placeholder for me), I don't quite understand why that would be useful (not being snide -- just missing something, I think).
If you click on the "Powered By Blogger" button it takes you right to Blogger, where you can then log in and post.
As for the post/publish thing -- it's really just a question of access to my asan account. I'll have to figure something out.
As far as organizing the posts into pages, I'll see what's possible, but I don't think Blogger provides that functionality. Please remember that I just started with this and so forth. I'm a-doin my best here...
So, we all can post, but only Bill can choose to publish, I guess.
Bill, it would be cool to have a link to this blog on your home page, and then we could go read posts there, and easily click over to blogger to add posts.
Can you get it to organize the posts into pages, instead of one big long page? That would make reading easier.
Speaking of The Year of the Snake, Google has a nice and subtle recognition of Chinese New Year on their site today.
No sooner had i read your post, art, than I promptly sliced open my left thumb with a brand-new kitchen knife. There must be an omen here somewhere. In the year of the snake, perhaps, the tools of power which we wield everyday threaten to turn against us. Ordinary activities, such as the slicing of bread, are fraught with peril and loaded with significance. We see a stranger across a mound of khakis at the Gap and feel moved to speak to them; we get into a bus whose electronic route sign has malfunctioned and spells out a nonsense word which we could swear was the name of the sidekick on some terrible Hanna-Barbera cartoon we once saw. Our thumb bleeds and we wonder how serious it is, if this will somehow be a turning point in life. We start using the first person plural. We see visions of sheep munching on a field of grass which is, on closer inspection, revealed to be a pasture covered entirely in miniscule, writhing snakes. Or perhaps visions of snakes digesting placid and unresisting sheep.
Hope that helps. You know, I don't know why we have nothing in this house for a cut but purple band-aids with stars and planets on them, in a box labled "Clear Band-Aids." Maybe that's an omen too.
Now that the year of the golden dragon is over, Bill, you have the audacity to let me know via that horoscope page that 2000 was "not a year to make life-changing decisions" (according to the Sheep page, where we find that you, me, and Laura all have the same personality). Where are the predictions for the ensuing year of the Snake?
The relative ease of this has generated all kinds of false confidence in me about other, less idiotproof technical tasks. Still struggling with the simplest of issues in the homepage.
It's hard not to think that this whole exercise is going to seem incredibly quaint any time in the near future, when we're communicating by injecting each other with viral nanorobots or something.
http://wwwtios.cs.utwente.nl/esperanto/hypercourse/index.html
Soon you can learn to say "Not My President" in the Lingvo Internacia of Zamenhof.
Having stared briefly into the mis en abyme (sp?) of the blog world, I now have a refreshed awareness of my own pointlessness.
Last night was the final evening of my workplace's somewhat desultory attempt at company-sponsored bowling. We bowled at Port Authority Bus Terminal, which is someplace I never, ever imagined bowling. Travelers who pass through Port Authority will find that it's generally pretty unremarkable and mall-like, but the bowling alley is notable for two things -- an entirely swinging jukebox (more Stevie Wonder than you can work your way through in an evening, though you'll have to fight with the folks who play Destiny's Child nonstop); and its not-unpleasant bar, which has a tankful of gigantic, mournful fish the color of the Marlboro Man's lungs. They float serenely in what for all I know might be a vat of Gordon's vodka, giving passers-by the chance to observe life at its most primitive, unadorned and unapologetic. Go see the grey fish. God knows how much longer they'll be in residence.
Art Stukas, everyone. Making a truly collaborative space. Of course I'm still the posting bottleneck, which I didn't realize, Mr. Stukas, until after I had sent the message to you -- only I can access the magic FTP server. We'll have to fix this. Anyway, apologies, therefore, for the delay. For now I will pass on posts as quickly as possible -- they simply hang, limbo-esque, awaiting for my relaying of them upward, into the blistering light of our readership of millions.
Thanks for playing along, Art.
Dateline: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Thought I would test this thing out with a quick video review:
LULU ON THE BRIDGE (1999).
Written and Directed by Paul Auster
Starring Harvey Keitel, Mira Sorvino, Willem Dafoe, Vanessa Redgrave, Mandy Patinkin
Well, for a first go, not necessarily a bad film.
The cast appears to be rounded up from the group of actors that Auster met when working as a screenwriter: Keitel from Smoke/Blue in the Face (also Lou Reed from the latter), Patinkin from The Music of Chance. Perhaps the others have appeared in other Auster-related films, or were networked.
The script appears to be a composite of some of Auster's favorite themes (forgive me my ignorance having only seen the two films above and read the 3 stories that comprise the New York Trilogy; I've posted here in the hope that some of you might comment more in depth about just what Auster is trying to get across). For example, there is an existential flavor with heaps of commentary on self and identity, the influence of the past on the present (including the contrasts between past memories of self and current view of self, the resonance of past transgressions for current emotion, etc.), and isolation/being locked away somewhere. The inability to understand/trust others' motives is contrasted with a feeling of connection with others (that is exposed as a sham and is wholly unbelievable in the film).
The plot. Keitel is an aging saxophonist in a jazz band who is shot one fateful night in NYC. After having a lung removed, he realizes he can't go back to his old career or his old self. He flounders around for a new identity, a new purpose in life. He stumbles across a dead man who has a napkin with a phone number on it and a little box with him--which Keitel promptly steals. The box is revealed to contain a little grey stone/hunk of concrete. This stone begins to glow and levitate in the dark. Keitel calls the phone number and gets in touch with Sorvino--who we know to be a waitress/aspiring actress. Keitel and her touch the glowing stone and make a connection, a bond that is supposed to transcend what we know and experience as human relations. They are instantly in love. Sorvino reads for the role of Lulu in an update of Pandora's Box, to be directed by Redgrave and produced by Patinkin. Keitel actually knows these two, through his ex-girlfriend, Gina Gershon, and helps Sorvino to get the part. They all go to Dublin to film the movie, leaving Keitel behind to tie up some loose ends and follow in 3 days. He is abducted by some hoods, locked in a dark room, and interviewed endlessly about his past by anthropologist Willem Dafoe. Keitel denies knowing anything about the stone, denies knowing Sorvino. Meanwhile, the filming of the movie goes on, but Sorvino is worried about Keitel. Time passes. Sorvino must make a decision about whether she wants to "let go" of Keitel. Keitel is being held hostage. This goes on. There is more but I'll let you find out (unless someone posts asking for the ending--which we really should discuss).
Auster's direction is lackluster. Some of the emotional moments are "cringe-worthy". The film fails to effectively set up its principal tensions because the relationship at the heart of the film is not believable. Ultimately, the film nullifies itself.
All told, a noble effort to make a literary work, bringing Auster's personal themes back to the big screen, but in the end, murky, undefined, perhaps unnecessary.
There has been a flaw in my logic concerning co-participants. Those who have received messages which promise all but deliver nothing should blame me and then forgive me, pronto.
Those concerned, those unconcerned --
I'm going to try to post here daily, part of the putting-the-money-where-the-mouth-is pledge I made to myself about writing (and less crucially, the web).
Possibly more than daily updates, but I make no promises just now.
And who am I addressing? The unlistening atoms? My own fuzzy reflection in the monitor?
No, no no...I know you're there.
A test to indicate whether or not this system continues to function properly. Evidence of my techno-skepticism.
This is a test of the Wombat Filing System. Actually, the second test.