I find it funny that I’ve never heard of Michelle Monaghan before, and all of the sudden this weekend I’ve watched two movies she stars in: ”The Heartbreak Kid” and ”Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang”
Val Kilmer plays a hilarious character in “Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang”: a gay private detective. He isn’t your stereotypic flamer. One of the best scenes was when he shot a bad guy with a gun hidden in his crotch, later explaining, “Homophobes never look there when they’re frisking you.”
You can always find a bit of synchronicity if you look hard enough. Also known as the Forer Effect.
Anyway, there were aluminum bats: D recounts his tale of some random Filipino guy threatening him and his cousin with an aluminum bat. His description of the guy makes me think of a tweaker. Or a guy who is ready to run amok. (OK, I admit it. I carry an aluminum bat in the trunk of my car. ‘Cause you never know.) And then there was the guy beating on Ben Stiller with an aluminum bat in the movie.
And there were straight edge razors: I have this gnarly scab on my neck from where I shaved too close with a dull, disposable razor. Me and D started to get talking about straight edge razors. My uncle, who is a barber, has one, and it’s a pretty neat way to get a shave, although I’m not sure my skin could handle doing it chronically.
In any case, ”Sweeney Todd” starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter is coming out by the end of the year. I can’t wait.
The fact that both Helena Bonham Carter and Alan Rickman are in the movie made me think of Harry Potter. (I wonder who is going to play Gregorovitch and Grindelwald in the last installment?) Hearing Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter speak with English accents makes me imagine “Pirates of the Caribbean” mashed up with “Order of the Phoenix.” (Is Alan Rickman the only real Brit in the movie?)
And finally: the first 20 minutes of the movie “The Heartbreak Kid.” The panoramic shots of S.F. were murdering me, especially juxtaposed with going to the wedding of an ex, and the pressure to settle down and get married. Lord have mercy. The overhead shots of Altamont Pass on the way to Southern California got to me too. And then the movie descended into all-out lunacy. Nothing particularly original (unsurprising since it *is* a remake), but I laughed my ass off. Naturally, since the movie has Carlos Mencia in it, they have to insert some mention of a donkey show. And the Farrelly Brothers seem oh-so very fond of displaying disturbingly abnormal genitalia and their environs. I love it.
Plaster on a fake smile for the next half-century and wait for the sweet embrace of death
—Mac from “The Heartbreak Kid”
Too true, too true. It just goes to show that life is all about timing. There is no such thing as “meant to be.” And when your timing sucks, like mine does, the only thing left to do is wait. And if you’re lucky, time will run out sooner rather than later.
(And to think, in some cultures, wishing someone a long, happy life with a quick, painless death is considered a foul curse. When my time comes, I just hope it doesn’t drag out for too long. All I ask for is a sturdy large bore IV with morphine running through it as fast as it can.)
Aim low, kids. Aim so low that nobody cares if you succeed.
—Marge Simpson
Here’s to giving up completely, once and for all, and to embracing utter defeat, and to not giving a damn.
My sister informs me of the fates of a couple of child actresses from the Shelly Long movie ”Troop Beverly Hills“←[1][2]
Jenny Lewis is the lead singer of the indie band Rilo Kiley.
Aquilina Soriano is on the Board of Directors of the Pilipino Workers’ Center, whom my sister met during her stint at SIPA.
Others:
I just finished watching ”Sand Pebbles” which stars Steve McQueen, and it’s a brilliant, intricately subtle anti-war movie that has excruciatingly painful relevance to the present day absurdity of the continued occupation of Iraq by the U.S. “Sand Pebbles” chronicles the tribulations of Jake Holman, an engineer in the U.S. Navy assigned to a gunboat patrolling the Yangtze. The setting is China during the tumultous revolutionary era, as Chiang Kai-shek attempts to oust the warlords whom the western powers support. The specter of Soviet involvement looms large, and so the U.S. characteristically sticks its nose into something that they probably shouldn’t have. Getting involved in other nations’ civil wars seems to be a pretty bad idea if you ask me.
Steve McQueen plays a cynical, somewhat anti-social engineer, who cares for nothing except for taking care of his machines. But the politics and racial dynamics quickly interposes itself into his life, starting with his interactions with the hired Chinese labor, and soon encompassing the tenuous political situation in which the captain of the ship is obsessed with how America looks to the world, caught between the rock of preserving American lives and the hard place of not providing fodder for the Communists to use as propaganda against the U.S.
This movie was released in 1966, anticipating the fervent anti-war movement in the U.S. against the very parallel American involvement in a civil war in Vietnam. The last lines of the movie capture the painful absurdity of American lives lost for causes not our own. “What happened?! What the hell happened?!?!”
The Domino Theory was bullshit in my parents’ day, just like the Unending War on Terror™ and the Fly-Paper Strategy is in ours. And so we grease the wheels of Global Capitalism™…
I just occurred to me the superficial similarities between the story of Túrin Turambar and the movie ”The Curse of the Golden Flower”. The most obvious similarity is the incest (Crown Prince Wan isn’t just porking his sister, he’s also doing his stepmother!) but the idea of curses and of gold also resonates. In the movie, the golden chrysanthemum becomes the doomed standard of Prince Jai, while in the story, the golden hoard of Glaurung becomes a curse to Thingol, king of Doriath.
There is also the idea of devotion to one’s mother. Many of the mishaps that befall Túrin are due to his desire to see his mother Morwen again, and Prince Jai’s failed rebellion is waged in an attempt to free his mother from the tyranny of his father. (I suppose echoes of Oedipus necessarily arise.)
There is unrequited love: the love of the elven princess Finduilas for Túrin compared to the Empress’ love of the Crown Prince.
And like all epic stories, there is treachery, suicide, and madness.
And in the end, the bad guys win. (Morgoth in The Children of Húrin, the Emperor in “The Curse of the Golden Flower” although he is not as clear-cut of an antagonist as Morgoth.) The key victims—Húrin, the Empress—get to live (and by key victim, I mean the person on which all the other tragedies in the story hinges)
But “The Curse of the Golden Flower” is not an original story, but is rather based on the play “Thunderstorm” by the acclaimed Chinese writer Cao Yu. The characters are not of imperial lineage, but rather are of the bourgoisie, but the essential plot is comparable, and the unintentional incest and resultant suicide is present.
Two days off in a row is a rare boon, almost a vacation, considering the breakneck schedule I’ve been running on as of late, averaging about 80 hours a week. The downside is that I have to work 12 days in a row, which basically just really sucks. Around day 10 I start getting extremely cranky, and by day 11 I’m ready to bite people. But I can’t do anything about it except call in sick, which is, at times, tempting.
I think perhaps that I have been eating very poorly lately. Which is not to say that I haven’t been eating—to the contrary, I’ve been eating quite a bit of junk food. But I think that’s the thing. The empty calories are starting to get to me. I decided to take a vitamin pill today and felt tons better. Maybe it’s just placebo effect, but I’m beginning to suspect that my steady diet of hospital cafeteria food and drive-through cuisine is quite low on essential nutrients.
I felt like my brain was working a lot better this evening. Like my third eye opened or something. (Yes, that was a cryptic Gnostic reference to Philip K Dick’s VALIS trilogy, but I won’t elaborate on that here.) Ideas flowed a lot better. I’m not as anxious as I’ve been (although I guess I’m still anxious.)
I watched “Pan’s Labyrinth” this afternoon, which was actually quite perfect, if a touch violent. Well, war is violent, and in the end, this is a war movie, set in the waning days of World War II in Spain, with the victorious fascist army mopping up the communists. But it melds the personal with the political and with the fantastic quite marvelously.
What it actually reminded me a lot of is “Mirrormask” which similarly involves a little girl who discovers that she may be a princess (or is at least the döppleganger of a princess) and it occurs to me, how many little girls dream of being princesses? (I think of my sister and her current aspiration of being a revolutionary, and find it fitting into my train of thought, but I digress.) Although the fantasy in “Mirrormask” is an allegory entirely of the personal, whereas in “Pan’s Labyrinth”, it melds together the political and the personal.
In any case, I’ve tangentially touched upon China Miéville’s reworking of the fantasy genre in order to use it as a vehicle for speculative politics. I really dug how he infused New Crobuzon with the gritty political corruption of capitalism and with Marxist sensibilities of impending, although flawed, revolution. Del Toro realizes something similar in “Pan’s Labyrinth” and I don’t think you can dig the movie without fully appreciating the specific political aspect of it. (More of this line of thought is better elucidated by this blog post that summarizes essays regarding Miéville’s Iron Council as well as Miéville’s own responses to these essays.)
The story of the rose and its poisonous thorns appears to represent humanity’s quest for utopia, perhaps even romanticizing Marxism—Marx’s eschatology is supposed to lead to sustainable economies that don’t require exploitation to maintain—the metaphoric eternal life that the rose offers. But instead, no doubt because of human nature, all we get are the thorns—Stalinism, the Cold War, and the sad inability to wean ourselves from the tit of fossil fuel.
But like all fantasy, all myth, we eventually have to ask ourself, is it true? The rose may not give eternal life, after all, although it doesn’t help that we’ve stopped trying for it.
Del Toro seems to point in that direction, though, that it’s not real at all, it’s just the crazed imaginings of a twelve-year old girl who finds herself in the hellish midst of all-out war. But like the Spanish communists fighting Franco’s fascists, the myth keeps us alive, allows us to frame ourselves in terms of nobility and ignominy. This comes out, paradoxically, in the character of General Vidal, who seems to be living with the burden of a family mythology—his father, the perfect soldier who died in battle. Whatever his sadistic impulses, and never mind that he is a fascistic thug, he feels compelled to uphold this mythology, fixated on leaving his son a similar legacy—the broken watch with the time of his death, and his name. And we perhaps gain an inkling that the only way to extirpate the evil created by these kinds of obsessive, impossible, fantastic myths is to destroy the myth entirely, and cut the cord of transmission.
And in the midst of our current dire conflict, with the possibility of conflagarating into World War III as Israel asks for airspace permission in case they need to bomb Iran, and as the wardrums beat ever loudly here in the U.S. despite our populace’s growing disgust for this seemingly meaningless debacle, I can’t help think how fitting these ideas are.
Here we are, some 1400 years since the time of Muhammed, and presumably two millenia since the time of Yesua the Nazarean, and like all myths, there are good parts and bad parts, and it seems that this never-ending war is based solely on the bad parts. Never mind that the majority of Muslims and of Christians actually read their respective sacred scriptures and realize that God finds hatred deplorable. How can you mistake something like “Thou shalt not kill”? There are no exception for self-defense or times of war in the book of Exodus, at least not in the copy that I’ve read.
And it seems like the only way to rid ourselves of this never-ending evil is to obliterate the myth.
(But would we be more content knowing that such a rose exists, even if it nearly impossible to attain, or would we be better off just aiming a missile at the mountain upon which it sits, removing it entirely from all possibility?)
And I think of Vidal’s doomed soldiers, trying to contain a populace full of rebels, where you can’t at all tell who is your ally and who is your enemy, and I immediately think of our soldiers in harms way in the Desert, commanded by blundering idiots who either have no conception of the intricacies of myth, or are perhaps too inured in their embryonic myth of the New American Century.
(Interestingly, one can imagine that the reason why Vidal fails to see the faun is not because he is not really there, but because he is too caught up in his own fascist mythology and can’t help but disbelieve. Similarly, perhaps the reason why W and Cheney continue to fail miserably in this ridiculous imperial war is that their mythologic beliefs disable them too acutely.)
But myth and fantasy is all about one thing, and that is hope. I find it poetic that, despite all the reactionary and unenlightened elements that many leftist critics deplore in Tolkien, his main theme is nonetheless quite relevant, perhaps the last piece of mythology that has survived the backlash against the 1960’s. And it is indeed quite fantastic: that a single individual, faced with the overwhelming power of mastery— enough to rule the entire world—that this individual would seek to sacrifice himself in order that such power may be destroyed, instead of claiming it for himself and making the world in his own image. That this individual would rather that the world moved along its own trajectory, neither defiled by great evil nor reshaped by what interested parties might wrongly call “good.” This is a fantasy, a myth, that is worth carrying on from generation to generation, even though it may never in a million years happen.
I’ve prattled on and on and on about things I barely understand, but perhaps that’s all that moment of epiphany was: the coming together of a hundred million little thoughts into this confused half-formed concept of the intersection of myth, fantasy, and politics. We are, I suppose, at the crux of something big, the consequences of which we can’t even hope to predict.
(The track that is currently playing is “The Perfect Kiss” by New Order)
On the way to work this morning, at the junction of the I-5 and I-8, I gazed at the orange-ringed sky and suddenly thought to myself, “I’m gonna die.”
Not that I was in any imminent danger. It was just the juxtaposition of the enduring beauty of sunrise with the fleeting pleasure of driving too fast, somehow reminding me of my mortality.
I have just watched “The Fountain”, which is a work of vision by Daron Aronofsky (whose resume includes “Requiem for a Dream” and “Pi”) The layers of allusion and symbolism presented in this film have really worked their way into my brain, and have gotten the wheels spinning round and round. I think it would make an English major cream themself, and would certainly warrant at least a scholarly paper or two. And it isn’t the facile symbolism and self-conscious cleverness that M. Night Shymalan tends to exhibit in his work. This is the real deal, tapping in on the literature and philosophy of Western Civ, with a few bits of Mayan ethnography appropriated here and there.
The major theme that resonated with me was the need to accept the finiteness of human life, something that I am forced to confront every so often at work.
Despite what I do, and despite everything I try to avert the final end, there is a stark realization that Death is not a disease. It is a process in of itself, a necessary stage of Life. Without Death, there is no life, not because of some imagined law of conservation of symmetry, but because it is the way the multitude of processes that govern life itself work. Ultimately, we are doomed by the Laws of Thermodynamics, which governs the very molecules, the very electrons and photons, that make up the ultracomplex, multilayered process we call life.
There are probably at least a hundred thousand different chemical processes that occur in our bodies, some as simple as combustion—turning sugar and oxygen into water and carbon dioxide—and some as impenetrably complex as the assembly of intricate lattices and scaffolds that allow the replication of DNA and ultimately the generation of new cells. All chemical processes are beholden to the laws of physics, down to the quantum level, and ultimately, the laws of physics obey the principles of entropy. Entropy ever increases. Because of this, all things, all processes must come to an end.
There is a scene in the movie where Hugh Jackman’s character Thomas Creo says to himself, not grimly, but almost joyfully, “I’m gonna die,” and while this statement is simple and obvious, it also felt like an epiphany. It was enlightenment.
I’ve begun to believe that if we all began to understand, I mean truly understand, that we were all going to die someday, and that if we started living our lives without thought of a possible afterlife, maybe there wouldn’t be so many atrocities committed against each other, maybe we would actually start trying to coexist instead of trying to kill each other. Naiéve and idealistic, I know.
But at the same time, I can’t help ponder how people have warped the prospect of the afterlife into a cudgel to beat the unsuspecting into fearful obedience. Some people wield religion like a weapon, used to persecute and oppress others. (I suddenly think of John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards, not to mention the buffoons and ignoramuses who pass as ministers on the television these days. Pat Robertson, you twisted fuck, I’m calling you out.)
It’s a treadworn cliché: Life is precious. But people don’t seem to give a crap. Until it’s their life at stake.
While Death can often times be a messy, brutal process (although no more bloody or wrought than being born in the first place, and having witnessed both many times, maybe death is less chaotic than birth), I have perhaps had the fortunate opportunity to see people die with dignity. In peace. Not kicking and screaming, not writhing in agony or twisting in agitation, but with a sense of calm sanctity. We will send you off to the unknown, like the maidens who accompany King Arthur to Avalon. We are with you in those last moments, in that final silence when the mind knows no more, and the heart beats ever more slowly.
I suppose there is that. When you die at the hospital, at least you don’t die alone. I’d rather not die by myself sprawled face down on my bathroom floor, but I guess I don’t necessarily fear that outcome. But it would be nice to have someone at my bedside making sure I didn’t go out anxious or in pain.
One of my patients died today. It wasn’t unexpected. We knew early on that his prognosis was pretty poor. Maybe we didn’t think it would happen as fast as it did, although it still took several hours. I’m still learning how to comfort the still-living, though. That, too, is part of the process of Death. Maybe there isn’t always comfort to give. But we try.
Intellectually, I understand the necessity of Death. I understand that it isn’t pathological in of itself. But even at this late date, I still get the willies. Maybe less so than before.
But I still wish it didn’t have to happen. Even when what life there is is full of suffering and pain without the redemption of joy and triumph. But I suppose, mercifully in those circumstances, Death does happen.
I’m still twirling the idea over and over in my mind.
There are few ties that bind me to this mortal coil. While I know there are a handful of people out there who love me and would care if I keeled over, or if I offed myself, I can’t help but feel that I’m missing something. Other than family and long-time friends, other than a sense of duty to my profession, and perhaps a pathological sense of curiosity that I haven’t yet managed to suppress, there’s a sense of emptiness. I’ve tried hedonism, I’ve tried distraction, I’ve even tried asceticism, and this hole still lingers. Perhaps nowhere near as painfully as before, but it’s still there. There is a void that my fragile paper-thin life seems to collapse upon.
I’ve given up on hoping that someone would magically fill this void for me. I know, deep down inside, that it’s up to me. If I never find the kind of love that I think is what I need, than I’ll have to do with the love that I do have. There are my parents. My brother and my sister. And hopefully some day, my nieces and my nephews. There are my dear friends, and a few new friends along the way. It’s something with which to fill the void with, even if only partially.
*sigh*
We don’t always get what we want, and perhaps fulfillment is ultimately a utopian fantasy of youth, something that I will perhaps gladly shed some day. Still, even still, it would be nice to have someone at my side on this long, slow journey to that finish line that I know awaits me somewhere down the road.
But like I said, I guess there’s always the hospital. At least I needn’t die alone.
I was watching “I Heart Huckabees” and dug the simplified dichotomy of relentless interconnection and infinite meaning versus eternal alienation and complete senselessness. The main character rightly discovers that one cannot exist without the other, and that both simultaneously operate. In essence, it was Taoism redux. There is no life without death, no creation without destruction, and all that jazz.
The other thing that I found a little haunting was Albert’s realization that Dustin Hoffman/Lily Tomlin and Isabelle Huppert, who now espouse opposite philosophies, seem to have worked together in the past, that there was some sort of miscommunication, and this lead to the fracturing of their philosophies. Each half is an occluded mistruth (to steal some pseudo-Gnostic terminology from Phillip K Dick.) Interestingly, this echoes some of the cosmologies of ancient African people: in the beginning was One, that by some trauma or dysfunction, split into Two.
I especially liked his use of the term “fractured.”
[info about the movie] Watching the Disney redub on the Cartoon Network right now. I still think it’s pretty cool. The first time I watched it was as a fansub in 1999, I think. I don’t know if being in the original Japanese makes it just seem more epic or something, although at least the Disney version doesn’t have any cuts like the first dubbed version which most Miyazaki fans find completely abhorrent.
The story is an ecological fable about a post-apocalyptic world that is almost completely inimical to human life, with toxic spore-infested jungles and lakes of acid., with the jungles inhabited by gigantic insects known as the Ohmu. Somehow humanity has clung on, however, and sadly many of the survivors have not learned the lesson of the destructiveness of war, and in fact some want to revive one of the ancient biomachines known as God Warriors that were responsible for the destruction of the earth. But I won’t add too many spoilers. Nausicaa herself is a princess of the Valley of the Winds who has a preternatural ability to communicate to the Ohmu as well as other animals who must save her Valley from destruction, caught between warring nations that want to revive the monstrous God Warrior as well as the enraged giant Ohmu.
I swear I had never read anything about Nausicaa before I first watched it, although Nausicaa was first released in the ‘80’s and also existed as a manga. I find the parallels with the land with the toxic desert and the poisoned ocean that I was trying to map very interesting.
Watching this on cable right now. The soundtrack is awesome. It sounds like a cRPG soundtrack, like an early Final Fantasy. I dig the electronic underpinnings that, while echoing the disco feel carried out of the ‘70’s into the early ‘80’s, also reminds me of the sound chips of the early microcomputers/personal computers like the SID chip of the Commodore 64 and the more primitive sound generators found in other 8-bit classic machines like the Atari 400, the Apple IIc, and the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Incidentally, the music magazine XLR8R has a short article about chiptune, also known as bit-hop, or 8-bit, or video game remix, and discusses how this is a still a living scene.
Anyway, back to “Ladyhawke”. It’s a real archetypal story—two lovers are separated by evil magic, cursing the man to be a wolf during the night, and the woman to be a hawk during the day, never both being human at the same time. The curse was enacted by an evil bishop, who lusted after the woman, and swore that if he could not have her, then noone would. That’s when the young thief (played wonderfully by Matthew Broderick) happens to wander into this fairy-tale. I dig it.
