You Know That Scene in Wizard of Oz Where Everything Goes to Technicolor?

Crazy Roommate, she gone.

(More later - this is the post that stupid MarsEdit ate).

But Not For Me

Hm, I keep reading all these things about how great MarsEdit is for blog editing, but in my first session with the trial download, I can't get prettymuch anything to work.  Won't talk to the blog, won't save the draft.  Could be cockpit trouble, I suppose.  Maybe I should try again after I've made the switch (sigh) to Leopard.  Then again, I also hear that Coda is supposed to be teh hotness for web-everythinging, and it does more stuff, so maybe I should give that a try.  And you know, this post is going to be interesting to exactly no-one who ever reads this blog.  In fact, it isn't even interesting for me.

Update, 4/1/08 (and no, this is not an April Fool's): Tried MarsEdit again on my fancy, new, Leopard-runnin' Sex Machine.  Sucks even worse.  Ate a very long post without warning.  Off the island, MarsEdit!

Good Riddance (and: TOTBAW #1: Steamroller Edition)

Spitzer's out, good.  What a dumbass.  What a disappointment.  What an arrogant stooge.  Could there possibly be anything more foolhardy than to make your reputation by antagonizing the rich and powerful, and then turn around and take insane risks that make you vulnerable to the very same enemies that you worked so hard to earn?  The voters sent Spitzer to Albany to kick Joe Bruno in the nuts, and all he ever did was trip over his own.  There really ought to be a word for the indignation caused by an offense, not because of its proximal harm, but because of its violation of the hopes invested in the offender.  That word is all I could feel when I first heard about this.

And you know, I like the "there ought to be a word" idea so much, I do believe I'll make it a series.

As a silver lining, Spitzer's replacement sounds pretty good so far.  From Gothamist: "As the first black NYS Senate minority leader, Paterson was an advocate for tougher domestic violence laws, a $1 billion voter-approved stem cell research initiative, and a statewide alternative energy strategy."

I Know What I'm Doing for My Birthday This Year

Oh, man.  The first time I saw Contempt, I was literally slack-jawed by the time it was over.  Not only was it visually mesmerizing, but it was engaging in a way I'd never experienced with a movie before, as if this movie about the dissolution of a relationship actually was the dissolution of a relationship that I was in.  That's what was so stunning about it; the narrative itself was almost (but not quite) beside the point.  Instead, what it offered was a sort of communication between the director and viewer about the experience of directing and watching movies.  Only, not in a "we're-in-on-the-same-joke-aren't-we-clever" kind of postmodern way.  Rather, in a "directors-and-viewers-are-actually-humans-and-we-have-an-actual-relationship-even-if-you're-distracted-from-it-by-the-story" kind of way.  I was (and am) not a particularly sophisticated viewer in terms of film history or theory, yet picked up on this very quickly; it was unmistakable.  I was emotionally wrung out by the end of the famous long apartment scene, but still ached for all that beauty onscreen -- of Bardot, of the Mediterranean, of the Modernist dream embodied in the Villa Malaparte, of a thrilling era that I just missed -- just like you might ache for the body of a lover long after you know the relationship's doomed.  I would actually catch myself holding my breath at times while I watched.

Damn, what a movie.  And that was when I saw it on the small screen...

A Bad Start, an Ugly End

So I'm giving contact lenses another try, what with the hot new technology out for astigmatics like me, and had a totally comfortable and unblurry test drive yesterday.  But it probably wasn't a good start to stay up late and fall asleep with the things in on my first day, dammit.

Also, I wonder if strangers and friends alike whom I see during the day notice the fact that I'm wearing two totally different-colored socks, and see right through to my dirty little secret, that I am at the very, very, desperate end of my laundry cycle.

(Seriously, though, I really am wearing clean underwear.  Really.)

Better Than I Deserve

As some of you are aware, I am currently experiencing a bit of difficulty with my roommate.  Living with the level of toxicity that's developed right in my home, and the anxiety over my future living situation, has surely been trying, but I must say there's been one hell of a silver lining to the whole business.  The amount of support, both moral and material, that has been offered by my friends has really blown me away, particularly since there's no argument to be made that I had it coming.  So, thanks everybody.  Clearly, I'd better start being a hell of a good person or the karmic load is going to squash me like a bug.

A Brief Comment

You know, this blog looks like ass.  I have to learn some CSS or something.

I Could Be Even Geekier

I haven't taken much interest in video games since Tempest (although there were those very fun few days in the mid-90's when all I did at work was play Myst).

This, however, could make a gamer out of me yet: create your own primitive life form, and take it all the way through evolution to interplanetary travel.  On a Mac, no less.  How can I resist that?

This is What You Call Structural Change

This policy outline by Obama, and this endorsement of him, make me feel better about the prospect of an Obama presidency than anything else I've read or heard. The candidates have all kinds of dreamy stuff to say about what they're gonna do in office, but if the underlying problems with our system are ever going to be fixed, this is the kind of thing it will take. My biggest fear about the post-Bush era is that as much of an improvement as any not-Bush president will be, the mess he's leaving with respect to balance-of-power might never be cleaned up.

Democracy has to cure in sunlight if you really want it to adhere well and endure.

Riddle Me This

Okay, I have a question. Why do I keep hearing news stories where people (either “experts,” or men-on-the-street) are asked whether they think we're experiencing a recession? Why does it matter what anybody thinks about this? A recession is a thing with a definition: two successive quarters with declining GDP. So, the economy either fits that criterion, or it doesn't, and that's what determines whether we're in a recession, no matter what anybody thinks. Asking people whether they think we're having a recession is like asking people whether they think it's snowing it's snowing outside; great if you want some kind of guessing game, but if you want to know if it's snowing, you go to weather.com. (Oh, right, I guess you could look outside, too. I always forget about that option).

I guess the question reporters are really asking is something like, “does the economy look shitty from where you're sitting, and does it look like it's going to get shittier?” Which is conceivably an interesting question, because it gets to people's psychology about the economy, and to whom, specifically, the economy is likely to seem shitty (i.e., who's doing well at the moment and who isn't). But that's exactly why we have this defined thing called a “recession,” because the economy always looks different depending on where you're sitting, and if you actually want to know what the economy is doing as a whole, instead of just who's getting ahead and who isn't, you come up with a defined way of measuring that.

Why is this so hard? Shorter version of this post: Media, please stop being stupid, again.

PS. We are not currently in a recession. Know how I know? I looked it up, because you can do that on the internets. I didn't ask anybody what they think.

Make of it what you will

Now that the iTunes is doing the rentals, you might wonder what's available for your almost-instant-gratification viewing needs.  It's early days yet, the Steve said the magic was sposeda happen in February, but His Steveness did throw us a few scraps to keep us busy in the meantime.

If you go to the iTunes store and use the "power search" function (new to me), you can use an "available for rental" checkbox to find all the rental movies, which number in the low hundreds.  I figured, there wouldn't be much selection yet, and what was there would be your big, dumb, over-promoted Hollywood brain-deactivators, and it's true that Live Free or Die Hard was right there on the front page.  But the one big, dumb brain-deactivator I was actually willing to sit through for the selfless purpose of evaluating iTunes movie rentals and reporting back to you'se all, Shooter, was available for overpriced purchase, but not overpriced rental.  Oh well.

Looking through the search results was kind of fascinating, though, because, if you make a game of guessing what 300-ish movies might be offered right upfront, out of all the movies out there, you will lose that game.

Here's what I'm talking about:

First, there's the obvious ones: Live Free or Die Hard, The Simpsons Movie, Disturbia, A Mighty Heart.  Recent, mainstream.

Also obvious: the old reliables, your undefeatable lowbrow sequels: Iron Eagle IV,  The Hills Have Eyes II,  F/X II, Star Trek several different roman numerals, Alien vs. Predator, etc., etc.

Then, there are some classics for all your octagenarians who are down with the new technology and are chomping at the bit to try out Apple's new download service on their broadband internets... ehh... anyway: Gallipoli, The Magnificent Seven, Man of La Mancha, and even one of The Duke's last movies, The Shootist.  I know my grandmother (Hi, Nana!) will be jazzed about these.

Surprisingly, a few edgier numbers for the movie snobs: Barton Fink, Dogville, Lair of the White Worm, Chuck & Buck.  I mean, Dogville! -- that one really was a surprise, no joke.

But... I kept noticing these few titles jumping out at me... apparently someone at Apple is, like myself, an admirer of the Blaxploitation genre.  I mean, add Sweet Sweetback, Shaft, and The Mack, and you've got the entire cannon here: Coffy, Foxy Brown, Black Caesar, Across 110th Street, and Blacula, for chrissakes.  Can it possibly be by chance that of ALL the first iTunes rentals available, 4 movies of interest *only* to blaxploitation fans are represented?  Brother, I think you can work it out.

And I couldn't fail to mention:  When I saw "And God Created Woman," of course I thought of the 1956 classic that introduced a generation of helplessly randy American men to Brigitte Bardot (who, by the way, has turned into one nasty piece of business in her old age.  But there's no denying she was sex on wheels in '56).  I thought wrong.  Rather, on offer among the iTunes rentals debut selection, is this masterpiece.  I don't want to spoil the surprise, so please -- go to iTunes and watch the trailer.  But hey - same director!

Insult to Injury

While falling off a building, in general, ranks fairly low on my list of ways I'd rather go,  being able to spend my last tens of seconds aware that my demise had come while erecting a Trump building -- in SoHo, no less-- would definitely peg it down somewhere in the "devoured by wild pigs" range.

Impulse Control

As of yesterday, the L train was continuing its uninterrupted week+ record of consecutive days with delays. I was blessed on Sunday when I just missed getting onto a packed train... which ended up getting stuck in the tunnel for 15 minutes or so. Never been so happy to miss a train, because there's nothing more miserable than being packed onto a stopped crowded train, having no idea how long you're going to be standing there.

With all the development in Williamsburg, it's only going to get worse, and I see potential for daily commute-catastrophes when you squish grumpy, insufficiently caffeinated people together like that on a regular basis. Why, just yesterday, riding in on the usual sardine-a-palooza, I was forced to stare at the crown of this short guy's head for the whole ride, and he had this one, thick, grey hair sticking almost straight up, all by itself. My hand was already moving, and my fingers already formed into a pinch gesture before I realized and stopped myself from plucking the little rogue right out. That could have been ugly.

First World Problems Can Look Like Third World Problems

I have no idea why, but without trying, and without making any eating or exercise changes I'm aware of, I've lost enough weight recently that now several pairs of pants do not fit at all.  The last time I wore shorts, about 2 weeks ago, they very nearly dropped clean to the floor a couple of times.

Unless there's something wrong with me, I guess this is mostly good news (who doesn't like to lose weight without even trying?) but I don't really like walking around New York looking like a teenager who wears his pants falling down on purpose.  I best remember to cinch that belt tight.

I Love Hippies

Really, is there anything cuter than idealism?

I've been away

You may have noticed a bit of a shortage of posts here over the last, uh, 6 months.

I've been away.

You see, it all started last spring when, at a time when I was starting to feel a little busier than I liked, I started looking around me and seeing things like this:


(this picture was taken from my front door)

The last post I started to compose before my hiatus was called "Worst things seen recently" and perhaps I'll post it for the sake of history. It was reflective of my state of mind at the time, and I started to feel not so much like writing blog posts.

And then I went away to the Beach Town.

I went away from all of this and off to quaint and beautiful little Beach Town for the whole summer, all full of scientists and lobsters and pretty WASP youths working the tourist trade. I slept in a cabin and walked by the beach to lab each day, drank beer and ate fried seafood at night (and have the gut to show for it), and learned a lot of science and also learned that as long as I am in science, that outsider feeling is not going to go away so I might as well get used to it. There was a memorable trip to Gay Beach Town in which I finally understood what it was that would make gay people want to vacation there, and in which I resolved that someday I'd have to go there without a bunch of straight people in tow. There was weekday swimming in the ocean before dinner, and the attendant conversations with those wet and tired, already walking up from the beach, about how the jellies were that day. And there was stumbling up the street with a crowd of drunks at night, pleasantly astonished to find myself having the kind of loose, bondy experience that I never did in high school (okay, there was the once in New Orleans). There was, for a whole summer, a richness to my outward life that was such a contrast to the hollowness that had become the habit of my inner life. I think that was probably a good thing but also extremely strange, and becomes only stranger as it fades into memory.

That memory has a sort of literary quality, which all this time later is what gives it its strangeness. By literary I mean both that it has a quality other than that of my real life; it's too sweet and sepia-toned to be something I actually experienced. And also I mean that so many of the details seem much more at home in a novel from some past period than from the nearly-contemporary reality. All the wood and sand and sunsets, the towheaded children running after black labs, the salty old-timers squinting at the turning over of another season. The opening of tourist season when people first started arriving in town, airing out their cabins is more like the opening scene in a novel than any other reality I've ever lived.

So life turns out to be not only worth putting up with, but a novel that you can't bring yourself to put down. If reality can be that charmed, then my obligation would seem to be to keep composing the story. Since returning to New York, I have been shaking my head and thinking about how to do that. That's the mistake, of course, thinking about it too much. You don't think about it, you just sit down and start writing. Fix it later if you must, but just get something down.

So: today ends the first week of January. It was nearly 70 degrees and sunny out, and if you can banish worries about rising seas for the time being, well then: how lovely. I ran through the park on my hobbled leg and there were crowds of soccer, softball, and kickball(!) players, dog-walkers and blanket-loungers, and of course plenty of other runners. Everyone taking advantage while they could. Clearly, a perfect day to start this thing back up.

Hey, thanks for listening/skipping to the end. I'll try to keep the long, meditative posts to a minimum and get this thing back to what it was supposed to be.

Celebrities I've Seen Since Being in New York

In no particular order:

1) Steve Jobs - at the opening for the Pixar show at the MOMA
2) Brian Dennehy - also at the opening for the Pixar show at the MOMA. I still think F/X is this guy's best flick.
3) Mark Margolis - on the street. He played the assassin in Scarface, and the creepy guy in pretty much everything. (Holy crap does this guy work a lot - check out his IMDB profile...)
4) Randy Harrison - on the street. Still cute! And I'll just add that when I gave him a good, "OMG, is that Randy Harrison" stare, I got a pretty good stare back. Hey, I can dream.
5) George Morfogen - on the subway. He sat right across from me and totally gave me that same haunted look he always had as Rebedow on "Oz."

Things That Leave Me Not Knowing Quite How to Feel

1) Seeing an apparently straight couple, boy and girl, holding hands and looking all coupley right up until the boy opens his mouth and sounds totally flaming.
2) Citrus juice fortified with calcium.
3) Grown men traveling by skateboard.
4) Being cruised by men who are clearly out of my league.
5) Seeing a toothless, haggard homeless man picking through a box of fancy chocolates with a look of radiant delight on his face.
6) That line in the Le Chic song, "Good Times," that goes "Clams on the half shell... and roller skates...roller skates!" And probably a lot of other song lyrics, if I thought about it.

Nostalgia with an Edge

Tonight on the train I saw two teenaged boys sharing the headphones to an iPod, each with a bud in one ear so they could listen to something together (I see teenagers doing this a lot). Of course this requires that the listeners have their heads kind of close together, and one of the boys settled in with his head on the other's shoulder. They rode like this for a while until the other boy shrugged his shoulder and pushed the first one away. The first boy kept trying to put his head back in place, and the other one kept pushing him away and in between there was much grabbing at headphones and sliding back and forth on the seat and generally a bit more touching than I'd expect to see between two teenaged boys in public. They were both smiling and good natured about it and I began to wonder if they were a couple (you never know these days) until I realized that all of the touching was coming from one of them and all of the pushing-away from the other, and then in a sudden rush I remembered very clearly what it felt like to be a closeted teenager myself, with the tension between how I felt and my utter confusion about it, and the anxious, unambiguous sense that there was some kind of line I'd better not cross even though I had nothing reliable inside telling me where that line was.

I got off the train feeling pretty mushy inside.

If there actually is a conspiracy, do you still call it a conspiracy theory?

Crash gets Best Picture, South Dakota bans abortion, and I rent Oliver Stone's Nixon all within 2 days. Coincidence? Come on. We know better than that.