Unsolicited Advice

As a precautionary measure to swine flu becoming a true-blue pandemic, I advise you, one and all,  to go and make out w/ somebody who has it now.  The benefits are legion: not only will you get to make out with a stranger, the benefits of which cannot be overstated, you’ll also get your infection out of the way while the antivirals are readily available.  Score two for the good guys!  If nothing else, i.e., if the closest person infected is not-so-hot, or perhaps not of your natural sexual persuasion, this still beats trying to get the flu by licking the wall of a BART train.

Billy Joel Finally Proves Useful

The Love Of My Life . . .

. . . I am so in love with Neko Case. The line is long & somewhat cliched, I know, but I don’t care.  Oh, but Neko, you’re getting competition from Jesca Hoop!  How will you ever cope?

I’ve perhaps completely ruined any cred that I might’ve had.  I can but hope I never had any.

Monday Movies: Hunger

Thanks to Gabe, I learned that Steve McQueen’s visually arresting Hunger was available via Comcast (&, he says, Time Warner) On Demand.  If you get a chance, I very highly recommend you check it out.  It is no exaggeration to say there is nothing else like out it right now.  Conceptual/experimental, but not “difficult”; political, but not easily politicized; filled with long & beautiful shots, but neither long nor beautiful.

I’m still not entirely sure what to think of it.  The film’s three acts are so different, and there is minimal effort to unite them in any traditional cinematic way.  McQueen provides minimal details about the larger context of the Troubles, much to the consternation of Leftists who expected and craved a paean to Bobby Sands that would rally us all to “the cause,” whatever that might be.  Obviously, he sympathizes with the IRA prisoners, especially their willpower in the face of power, but his unwillingness to simply celebrate their protest makes his film all the more provocative.  The easy analogue of the final act of the film, where we bear witness to the death & decay of Sands, is The Passion of the Christ.  The crucial difference, though, is that McQueen is well aware that Sands’ martyrdom is pure tragedy.  There is no masochism here, because there is really no “by his stripes I am healed” motif.  As the film’s final text makes clear, shown immediately after his final breath, Sands’ hunger strike leads not to redemption or resurrection.  Rather, his death, along with those of the other nine Republicans, not to mention the host of Unionist prison guards, compel the British government to conceding everything but their central demand, i.e., to be extended the status of political prisoners versus mere criminal.  Much worse, certainly in the perspective of Irish nationalists, so perhaps not necessarily worse but more complexly, the deaths would go on to be be appropriated by an Northern Irish leadership that preferred, for good or ill, the peaceful impasse of parliamentary compromise over the revolutionary means of the people they appeal to as icons & martyrs.

McQueen is wise not to be heavy-handed.  Indeed, there seems to be no temptation at all to be so.  And yet, and this is what separates Hunger from well-intentioned films that try to “see both sides” of big issues, neither is McQueen content to leave you at peace.

I was very pleased to learn this evening that some kind soul has uploaded in three parts the entirety of the jaw-droppingly good dialogue between Sands (Michael Fassbender) and Father Moran (Liam Cunningham).  Surely it will be deleted by YouTube soon.  Take advantage before they do.

Dress-Down Day

Every Friday at the office we get to wear dress down.  And we’re not talking about khakis-and-no-tie dress down either.  We’re talking jeans, t-shirt, sneakers, etc.  It is no coincidence, I think, that Friday is also generally the most happiest day at the office, even when it happens to be the busiest day of the week.  People are more comfortable in their clothes, and thus also in their own skin, thoughts, and various assignments.  For the life of me I cannot understand why, if this is true not simply of my office, and I scarcely believe it is, so many offices relegate this to a sporadic, once-a-week / once-a-month reward — particularly when, if the workers are in general properly motivated, the place of business is the one receiving the reward for their comfort.  Unless, that is, our jobs’ & managers’ emphasis on the cult of productivity is a diversion from their far more keen interest in doing whatever it takes, including keeping us as uncomfortable as they can without inciting revolt, to solidify their ownership of the time we spend on their clock.

Rush-Hour Buddhism

There may be no better “proof” of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths than driving in rush hour traffic.  The very thing promised, the convenience of the open road, is the same thing continually denied.  Like any good traffic jam, there is ultimately no escape — every exit is backed up or three lanes over.  Your desire to be free makes the situation even worse, because this is but another version of the desire that got you into the traffic jam to begin with.

The answer is somehow to achieve acceptance of one’s situation without giving into simple resignation.  The latter just pushes into the background the desire that got you (and continues to put you) in the situation that drives you insane, where it becomes something like a flourescent buzz that you learn eventually to ignore.  Unlike resignation,the acceptance of one’s situation as that which is fully caused by this shared depravity does not imagine an ideal alternate reality where you get to enjoy the fruits of your desire without their unsavory repercussions. Apropos the thinking about traffic, it does not imagine an empty road somewhere where you could drive to your heart’s content.  It sees this need to be on the road as the foolishness that it is.  This may not keep you off the road, and indeed it likely will not, the need to be somewhere else nearly every waking moments of our lives so tightly woven into the fabric of our existence, and the necessity of getting to work by car, everybody at the same time, is engrained into our towns’ zoning laws and poor public transportation systems.  But at least focusing on one’s own foolish participation in the madness will help mitigate your desire to rear end the next person who cuts you off.

Prescience

The Onion (July 14, 2008): “Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble to Invest In“

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (March 23, 2009), largely in response to the proposed creation of the largest hedge fund in history, which will allow us all to magically wish away (that is, take advantage of!) toxic (that is, “legacy”) assets:

Bad Blogger!

Really bad blogging this week. Should’ve warned you ahead of time.  The wife & I moved today, so much of my free time this week was devoted to the random errands that one must do to make things as relatively effortless as possible.

Blogging will hopefully return to normalcy on Monday.

Sex and Sadness, Time and Toys

Seems like everybody is posting something by or about Donald Barthelme, in celebration of Tracy Daughtery’s new biography Hiding Man. Long time readers, here and afar, though, will remember that I was doing this before it was cool.

Reading Barthelme might be fairly called a moral imperative for an amoral world. In his own nonsensical way he makes sense of things, Big Things of Life, like sex and sadness, time and toys. He has been missed, even with so few having paid notice. That’s the way these things work. It’s not that the Great Ones are noticed after their death. That’s just happenstance. No. The Great Ones are those who are missed even when nobody knows they are missing.

The Dead Father’s head. The main thing is, his eyes are open. Staring up into the sky. The eyes a two-valued blue, the blues of the Gitanes cigarette pack. The head never moves. Decades of staring. The brow is noble, good Christ, what else? Broad and noble. And serene, of course, he’s dead, what else if not serene? From the tip of his finely shapoed delicately nostriled nose to the ground, fall of five and one half meters, figure obtained by triangulation. The hair is gray but a young gray. Full, almost to the shoulder, it is possible to admire the hair for a long time, many do, on a Sunday or other holiday or in those sandwich hours neatly placed between fattish slices of work. Jawline compares favorably to a rock formation. Imposing, rugged, all that. The great jaw contains thirty-two teeth, twenty-eight of the whiteness of standard bathroom fixtures and four stained, the latter a consequence of addiction to tobacco, according to legend, this beige quartet to be found in the center of the lower jaw. He is not perfect, thank God for that. The full red lips drawn back in a slight rictus, slight but not unpleasant rictus, disclosing a bit of mackerel salad lodged between two of the stained four. We think it is mackerel salad. It appears to be mackerel salad. In the sagas, it is mackerel salad.

Dead, but still with us, still with us, but dead.

No one can remember when was not here in our city positioned like a sleeper in a troubled sleep, the whole great expanse of him running from the Avenue Pommard to the Boulevard Grist. Overall length, 3,000 cubits. Half buried in the ground, half not. At work ceaselessly night and day through all the hours for the good of all. He controls the hussars. Controls the rise, fall, and flutter of the market. . . . The left leg, entirely mechanical, said to be the administrative center of his operations, working ceaselessly night and day through all the hours for the good of all. In the left leg, in sudden tucks or niches, we find things we need. Facilities for confession, small booths with sliding doors, people are noticeably freer in confessing to the Dead Father than to any priest, of course! he’s dead. The confessions are taped, scrambled, recomposed, dramatized, and then appear in the city’s theater’s, a new feature-length film every Friday. One can recognize moment’s of one’s own, sometimes.

The right foot rests at the Avenue Pommard and is naked except for titanium steel band around ankle, this linked by titanium steel chains to dead men (dead man n. 1. a log, concrete block, etc., buried in the ground as an anchor) to the number of eight sunk in the green of the Gardens. There is nothing unusual about the foot except that it is seven meters high. The right knee is not very interesting and no one has ever tried to dynamite it, tribute to the good sense of the citizens. From the knee to the hip joint (Belfast Avenue) everything is most ordinary. We encounter for example the rectus femoris, the saphenous nerve, the iliotibial tract, the femoral artery, the vastus medialis, the vastus lateralis, the vastus intermedius, the gracilis, the adductor magnus, the adductor longus, the intermediate femoral cutaneous nerve and other simple premechanical devices of this nature. All working night and day for the good of all. Tiny arrows are found in the right leg, sometimes. Tiny arrows are never found in the left (artificial) leg at any time, tribute to the good sense of the citizens. We want the Dead Father to be dead. We sit with tears in our eyes wanting the Dead Father to be dead–meanwhile doing amazing things with our hands. (Donald Barthelme, The Dead Father, 3-5)

Tuesday Encore: The Only Tune

I’ve been in something of a blogging lull. Tons of stuff just sitting in the on-deck pile waiting for my all-important insights and opinions. But, as we’ve already established, not even my laziness can stop the Encore!!

Today, it’s all about the boy-wonder, Nico Muhly, w/ some spooky Sam Amidon vocals.

The Only Tune – i. The Two Sisters