Catfight

Last Sunday I stayed up until about 3 in the morning churning through YouTube videos of girlfights. I'm not sure what came over me, but I was at it for a good three hours or so. Videos like "Vanessa vs. Chantal" and "Betty vs. Melissa" came up in the column of suggested videos on the right. Of course these were mostly high school fights with dozens of girls gathered around, cell phones out and recording, shouting encouragement at the two girls grappling. Sometimes cheering for one or the other, most of the time just rooting for a good fight in general.

There is a lot of hair pulling and most videos degenerate into what looks like a two-person rugby scrum, with both women leaning over at the waist, with arms extended, hanging on tight to their adversary's hair. In boxing the ref would break them apart and yell, "Box!" and the crowd would boo at all of the hanging on and resting.

But this is not boxing, and it rarely ends in much punishment although I saw one girl make the mistake of wearing a hoodie into battle and getting it pulled over her head where she was pummeled for a while, sightless. One girl was getting her head lifted up and smashed on the pavement a couple of times before the thing was broken up. But it's mostly pretty harmless.

It's great to see the skinny girls kick ass on the beefy bullies. In fact, I learned there's a whole strain of street-fight videos that deal with Nerds Kicking Bullies' Asses. Which is gratifying of course, very gratifying. Why wouldn't it be?

It is a little embarrassing, though, and I started to worry I would be discovered spending my time watching this stuff. But then I seemed to remember an article in the Believer magazine that dealt with this very thing, Kimbo Slice, backyard brawls, etc. This seemed to justify my behavior in some academic sense. But I couldn't find this article, in the Believer or anywhere else. Maybe I never read this article, maybe I imagined the whole thing.

Not that I need a scholarly essay on YouTube fights to justify my viewing choices, mind you. But I do wish I could find something sweeping to write that would tie all of this messy, low-resolution fighting (and my viewing of it) into a pretty little thesis about life. But I can't, really.

So for now I'll just watch. And shake my head in disbelief.

Thank you for listening.

The Ballad of Jack of the Lantern

Each year around the beginning of October, our neighbors' yard fills up with castoff bits of stage walls and props and giant skulls and a janky gothic fence.

When I first came across this junk five years ago, I thought it might be homegrown set design and stagecraft to spookify their house for trick-or-treaters. But no, it wasn't that.

It was for some crazy local musical theater.

Our neighbors have been putting on elaborate Halloween productions for over twenty years. This year they performed "The Ballad of Jack of the Lantern."

They play four shows a night (at about 20 minutes each) on Halloween, and on the two evenings that straddle it. This year got a larger turnout than most, although a few people inexplicably walked off in mid-performance.

Hooray for this and hooray for our neighbors, that's all I have to say. And hooray for Halloween.

Yes, hooray for Halloween.

The Men of Nordstrom's (Wait Patiently)

WTF Nobody Told Me! -or- I Am an Award-Winning Human

I was doing some ego-Googling today and came across this surprise:

http://www.storysouth.com/millionwriters/2007notablestories.html

in which my story "The Instructions" was listed as one of Story South's "Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2007."

Nobody told me! It's as if it never happened... Maybe if I would have known about this award it would have given me the confidence to change my life for the better! Maybe it would have impelled me to write more fiction instead of trying to write and make movies. Maybe everything would be different.

Then again, maybe not. Maybe things would be worse.

Who can say?

Plug

Looks like my air hockey documentary is going to be on PBS in the Northwest (Washington State and British Columbia), starting on Monday, October 24.

I am personally torn between secrecy and self-promotion on this one, vacillating wildly between 1) the plan to contact old high school acquaintances in order to get the word out, and 2) the plan to remain as Pynchonesquely reclusive as possible.

What if Scott Amell finds out? Or Matt Kirchberg!

I like being hidden from view, dammit!

If anybody has family or friends in the area, please let them know so at least they have all the facts when they choose to go to bed instead (I have to think my time slot, 10pm, has something to do with the unsavory adult themes running through the movie)!

Reading Randomly

A couple of months ago I picked up a hardback of Michael Ondaatje's Divisidero in the bargain bin of Powell's Books in Portland. It cost seven dollars. That is why I bought it.

I didn't know anything about this book. I read The English Patient a hundred years ago.

What a pleasure to sit down and read something I had no preconceptions of. The reading list is long but this was not on it, so it felt like playing hooky to go to the track. Maybe I'd win, maybe I'd lose. I didn't even know what horses were running.

The book was lovely, though, and now it feels like a bonus little something that filled up my life for a few days. Completely unexpected.

I am reminded of going the Metro Cinemas in Seattle in 1991 with no idea of what was playing and sitting down to Neil Jordan's The Miracle. I don't think I even knew that Neil Jordan had made this, although I probably knew who he was at this point. I didn't know what to expect, but what I encoutered was a small, beautiful film that transported me for an afternoon. A Get Out of Jail Free card.

There is something to be said for reading (and viewing) randomly. I'm afraid there is less and less opportunity for it these days.

A few years ago Middlebrow and I had a book swap where each of us was tasked with browsing bookstores to buy five books that the other person definitely hadn't read, and then sending them to him.

It may be time to revive this program.

Fast

Let me tell you about this fasting business.

The lemonade, the maple syrup, the cayenne pepper. Two weeks of it. This can't be good for your body. No doctor would ever approve this.

I tell everyone that it's a psychological fast more than anything, that it's a hard reset, a way of pushing Control-Alt-Delete on myself. Going from Excess to Nothing to Moderation is child's play compared to going from Excess to Moderation. At least for me.

K says I have no discipline.

But I do, I reply. I do have discipline. Circumstances just have to be extreme, that's all.

I broke my fast yesterday and ate some spinach. Goddamn if that wasn't the most delicious spinach I've ever tasted. Anything saltier or more complex than that would be too much.

I have the taste buds of an 85-year-old man. Give me the blandness.

Craving for my three vices has vanished however. Coffee, sugar, and a drink before bed. Amazing how easy that was. What I'm craving, however, is a steak quesadilla from the taco truck that used to park in front of my place in Koreatown.

Meat and cheese. Umami.

I remember seeing the first time I saw a quesadilla cost five dollars. Highway robbery, I said to myself. Do kids still use that phrase? Highway robbery? Anyway, when I got it, I understood. This was no Taco Bell quesadilla. This was a flotilla of meat and cheese and veggies. A whole damn raft it it.

That's what I want. And that's where I'm going when this is over.

What else can I say about this fortnight of self-denial?

Oh yes, the BO. What is it like to have somebody else's body odor? That is what is like on this fast. I smell weird BO emanating from somewhere and then I realize it is myself.

My tongue is coated white. I tell K that if this were a Warner Brothers cartoon I'd stick my tongue out and it would be covered by a rain slicker.

But my skin is cleaned up and glowing. K says I look ten years younger, a boy. She marvels that the man convicted in the terrible salon shooting is 42, barely older than me, my brother's age. She suddenly feels lucky to be married to my vibrant youthfulness.

Hear that? Suddenly feels lucky, yes.

My stock has gone up, huzzah!

The Best Introduction Ever

Middlebrow directed me to this a long time ago: Thomas Pynchon's introduction for a newly collected book of older short stories, Slow Learner. Pynchon takes opportunity (20 pages) to explain, in great detail, why his stories are kind of crappy. This is so refreshing to read in today's enervating climate of constant self-promotion; I would love to be able to introduce my documentary this way.

"My first reaction, rereading these stories, was oh my God, accompanied by physical symptoms we shouldn't dwell upon. My second thought was about some kind of wall-to-wall rewrite. These two impulses have given way to one of those episodes of middle-aged tranquility, in which I now pretend to have reached a level of clarity about the young writer I was back then. I mean I can't very well just 86 this guy from my life. On the other hand, if through some as yet undeveloped technology I were to run into him today, how comfortable would I feel about lending him money, or for that matter even stepping down the street to have a beer and talk over old times?"

Great, really great.

As for the stories, well, I took Pynchon by his word and gave them a miss.

Pyro

Last week I worked on pyrotechnic and miniature shots for the movie Battleship. E....1....HIT!  These were all done on film, because slow-motion pyro still looks better on film than in HD video. We used an ancient Mitchell camera and a more modern 435 and, crazier than ever, a Photosonics high-speed film camera, a camera I haven't seen in about 8 years since all high speed stuff these days is done with a Phantom HD camera. This camera actually has a setting called "OUCH!"-- the highest speed possible--where everybody stands back and waits for all the screws to back themselves out, and hopes the whole thing doesn't explode.

The producer actually made the point that film is coming back into style for the moment, for 18 months at least, when he estimates that HD will kill off film forever. For now, though, the high-speed pyro on film is the best technology for the job, even though it's the oldest technology. He also pointed out that while we could go to the moon in 1969, there's no way we could go to the moon now, even though it's been 42 years, an eternity. These two comments were related somehow.

Our unit was a little ragtag and rough around the edges, but being in a parking lot with a large water tank and bluescreens surrounding us while blowing up miniature spaceships (I guess there are aliens involved?)--it reminded me of old still photographs of shooting Star Wars miniatures at Industrial Light and Magic. Hirsute men, shirtless, in short cutoff jeans, baking in the California sun, working over 1/6 scale X-wing fighters in some unglamourous parking lot.

That's us! Hirsute!

Drive

A friend of mine worked on the new film Drive, starring Ryan Gosling. He said the whole time he couldn't tell if the director, Nicholas Winding Refn, was a complete genius, or whether the movie was going direct to video. After seeing the film, I think it's still up in the air.

Drive is beautiful and wonderful and terrible all at the same time. It's an art-action film, if such a thing is possible. The script is atrocious, but the direction is kind of magnificent, and it makes sense that Refn won the Best Director award at Cannes this year for this movie. In some ways his achievement is made even more amazing because he took a crappy, direct-to-video script (A Hollywood stunt driver by day and getaway driver by night gets ensnared in a heist-gone-wrong) and made it into something special. It's not nearly as difficult to make a great script into a great movie, but to take a polish a turd into a masterpiece is worthy of our applause.

This is the quietest, and yet, most intense film I think I've seen in the last ten years.

Don't get me wrong, there's no character development or anything like that. And the violence, when it does come, is gory and excessive, cartoony almost. And Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman as bonehead goombas, well, who cares, really.

Refn has made an homage to 80s LA movies like To Live and Die in LA . There's a heavy synth score, and a pink neon title sequence, and even a terrible happy montage in the middle. But it's all a bit off, through a Danish point of view. It's the John Woo problem, but in a good way -- when foreign directors make American films and vice versa. It's all a little bit off.

Drive was made for $14 million. A tiny amount, really, compared to most films. Yet is doing something new, at least, within a tired old genre. It's uneven, but that is what happens when you set out to try something different instead of dialing in the same old garbage. I can tolerate the failures because at least it's trying to do something, dammit!

I expect Refn will get more like $80 million for his next effort. Let us hope he maintains his crazy vision of the world instead of getting steamrolled by the suits.

MLS Stylesheet

A friend has season tickets to the LA Galaxy, so I've been able to experience Major League Soccer at the Home Depot Center in Downey a couple of times this summer. Both games have resulted in sloppy victories. Although the Galaxy sit atop the league, they play a boring, unstructured form of long ball with a lot of hopeful breakaways that result in nothing.

Soccer culture in southern California is a peculiar thing. There are soccer scarves in full effect, a fight song by the Dropkick Murphys, a section filled with loudmouth non-violent hooligans yelling obnoxious chants, and players cheering fans after the game has ended -- it's all a little strange to see these customs imported to Los Angeles like some kind of peculiar European wallpaper. What's next, vuvuzelas and fights and soccer riots? Hardly.

I just want to see Beckham out there running around like he actually cares.

Still, it's fun to go to the game and sit in this intimate outdoor venue. The late-season games didn't mean much, and the quality of play in the MLS is low, but it's a great excuse to hang with the guys and have a twelve-dollar beer even though there's nothing at stake.

Personally, I love how Seattle, City of Failure, has embraced the Sounders since the Sonics got ripped away from them and since their other two pro franchises have begun a downhill skid into permanent suckiness. Go Sounders! They are the only team left that Seattleites can pin their desperate hopes on!

Soccer is a great sport. MLS will never fully take off, but it's fun to get to know the players so when World Cup comes around again we can know who to yell at...

Standing Desk

I've been reading a lot about how sitting will kill you. How it wrecks your body, makes you fat, and increases your chances of dying early.

K & I were talking about even making a treadmill desk, where we would walk and work, walk and work.

Two months ago we found something in Santa Clarita for $40, drove all the way up there, and retreived our new standing desk.

Turns out there's an odd black market for a particular kind of discontinued IKEA desk, called the Jerker. There are newer, more traditionally desk-like versions of the Jerker desk now but the old version was a tall, robust computer workstation. Only one could take the desk part and bolt it in a much higher position on the vertical supports, and voila, a standing desk. And that is why this obsolete IKEA product has such an underground fan club.

And me, I'm loving the standing desk, actually. I don't know if it is contributing to any weight loss or improved well-being, but I do feel more focused when I'm standing here working. It's harder to space out and slouch down and zone. You're more awake, and more vertical, and the screen is right in front of you, beckoning.

I'm not positive if I'll be very good at writing creatively here. This will remain to be seen. I predict a sitting position will prevail for creative enterprises.

For donkeywork, though, the standing desk rules!

And life is a lot of donkeywork.

Here is a picture of me at my new standing desk, wearing women's shoes:

Print

This came to our house a few weeks ago:

I had forgotten that I had submitted a few years ago, and forgotten that they had accepted. It is kind of cool to have something featured in print, even if it's a story that makes me cringe now.

One has to wonder how long literary journals will continue to exist in print form.

This is the first bit of fiction I've written that has been published in a physical form I can put on a shelf if I want to. Maybe the last, too!

Field

Monday we spent all night shooting a Taco Bell commercial in Angel Anaheim Stadium. "Nacho Superstar" to be more exact, wherein a young fan sitting in the outfield bleachers must choose between catching a home run ball and dropping his nachos.

Traditionally I haven't been a fan of Orange County athletics. Disney's ownership of the Angels and the Mighty Ducks really turns me off. The Big Thunder Mountain rock formations in the outfield of their baseball field don't help either.

But it was nice to be down there on that field in the middle of the night, with nobody in the stands. My assistant and I talked about whether we could jack a home run on this field -- I claimed I could, right down the left field line where the outfield fence bent in significantly toward the foul pole. 330 feet it said. But after watching the minor league players slam pitches into the air with all of their might (producing short fly outs), I revised my boast: "With an aluminum bat," I said, less confident now.

The idea of Barry Bonds launching one out of the stadium seemed preposterous. My God, the distance!

Would a sprint around the bases send us into cardiac arrest? Would it scrape up your legs to slide into home here? 3rd base seemed impossibly close to home plate (a dangerous hot corner indeed), but the throw over to 1st base seemed impossibly long. Pro baseball players are freaks!

The field wasn't in great shape by MLB standards: The grass was burned out and ravaged by the SoCal heat and the soft infield dirt was closer to unforgiving clay. But the lines were freshly chalked and sprinklers along the warning track hissed reassuringly and the stadium lights shone down.

There is something wonderful about a ballfield -- perfectly flat and groomed and maintained, it's the rich uncle of the lopsided assymetric football fields we'd carve into the endlessly hard Washington state beaches as kids. At the park a giant swatch of grass can be an arena to kick a soccer ball around or have a barbecue or let one's dog run amok. Or a place to read a trashy supermarket novel. And that is a great thing.

But a professional field has only one function: to mark out the vast space where the game is to be played. That's it, nothing else. It's kind of wasteful and magical at the same time. It gives me chills just thinking about it.

This is the place where it's okay to play!

Man Night IV

In the grand tradition of Middlebrow's Pub Stats, I give you the breakdown of yesterday's Man Night IV.

ATTENDING:

Peter, Don, Aaron T., Sleepy E

PREPARED & EATEN:

Whole roast chicken w/ rice and pears

Chinese cabbage salad

Corn on the cob

Mustard roasted potatoes

Coppola's Rosso wine

Watermelon

Apple pie

Chunky Monkey

DRANK:

Bottle service at home (vodka tonics, Madrases, Cape Cods, vodka martinis)

VIEWED:

Bronson (Peter & Sleepy E thumbs up, Aaron T's thumb way down, Don abstains)

Road Warrior (Peter asleep, Sleepy E somewhat asleep, Don asleep at end, Aaron awake... All thumbs up)

DISCUSSED:

Werner Herzog (of course)

Braces and jaw surgery

Paul Thomas Anderson and his new movie

65mm film production

Takashi Miike

Fear of Kirkland whiskey

Reading habits

MAN NIGHT V:

We seem to be circling around this theme:

J-Horror (13 Assassins & Audition or Ichii the Killer), Tonkatsu & other J-foods, Sake & Kirin

Sadism and Misogyny as Entertainment: The Killer Inside Me

I've long considered director Michael Winterbottom to be kind of an English version of Stephen Soderberg. He dabbles in all genres -- western (The Claim), mockumentary (24 Hour Party People), comedy (The Trip), science fiction (Code 46), documentary (Road to Guantanamo), and period meta-movie (Tristram Shandy) -- sometimes with more success than others. One might say he is an uneven director, but I like to think his unevenness comes as a result of his experimental nature and his unwillingness to do the obvious.

So when I heard he was doing Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, I thought it was a perfect choice. I've long been a fan of Thompson's twisted, noiry novels and Winterbottom is smart and weird enough to pull it off.

But what can be said about such a relentlessly savage and misogynistic film? That spirit comes from the book, sure, but Winterbottom doesn't shy away from the unpleasantness. I wouldn't say that he celebrates the violence either (the intent is to horrify), but what can we think when all the vile men in the film get shot cleanly or hanged off-camera, but the women (played by Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson) get brutally punched out, in the face and in the stomach, over and over, until they are puffy and unconscious and wetting themselves?

Is this entertainment? What is the right response to this?

It's not like I hated this film. I liked being there, inside of this familiar west Texas landscape. It felt good to be back into a tight Jim Thompson plot, with its small cast of double-crossing characters, all with disturbing secrets in their pasts. I enjoy these kinds of small, contained stories that the Coen Brothers have been borrowing from for years. The odd casting (Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, even the Mentalist himself shows up) actually worked, and the performances were interesting. There was tension. There was anticipation.

But I can't say I enjoyed it. Who could enjoy this?

And yet the film is sticking with me.

Dr. Write mentioned that one of the reasons the film doesn't work is because the notion of an unreliable narrator doesn't work in a movie. In the book part of the pleasure is navigating the space between Sheriff Lou Ford's version of events and the reality of the killing spree he goes on. In this filmed version of The Killer Inside Me (there are others, one with Ford played by Stacy Keach!), it's difficult to feel this internal side of Ford. He's just a sociopath, and we watch him go about his business.

I'd say that's about right.

But I do insist this film is good, in some way. And not because the horrors of it are sticking with me, Faces of Death style.

I think it's because this movie made me uneasy, and it held onto this uneasiness and teased it out for two hours. After all, it's quite rare that I have any kind of emotional response to a film. Is this not something to celebrate? Isn't this a huge accomplishment?

Why do I feel like I'm trying to convince myself of something?

Post Number 300

This is the 300th post on the Front Porch. Just thought I'd mention it. Thanks for tuning in, everybody, all of these years. I wish I had prepared a speech but I am underwhelmed by the occasion. Has blogging made me a better writer, or a better person? Or is it merely an indulgent waste of time? It is hard to say. I am glad that I have done it, however, and I am glad I have had a chance to follow the blogs of others, as I find I do not like the atmosphere of Facebook and that there is something nice about a little blog community, when it is responsive and feisty!

It seems fitting somehow that this milestone would occur just after a weekend in Salt Lake, where this blogging effort basically started. Front Porch productivity over the last seven years has diminished exponentially (almost perfectly so). The first year saw over 100 posts, 2006 and 2007 combined to equal that same amount, and the final 100 posts took nearly four years to accomplish.

At this rate it'll take eight years to do the next 100. Post number 500 will happen near the end of 2035, when I am close to retirement age.

This is pure quantity, of course. We are not even touching on the issue of quality.

Perhaps Middlebrow will renew his blogging efforts in the interest of competition? A blog race, maybe? Is there value in this?

It is still hard to say...!

The Value of Bottle Service

Is it that Bottle Service did not exist back when we were coming up or that we didn't go to clubs important enough to offer it? I understand the idea of the VIP room, sure, but what of this notion that all seats in a club are VIP and therefore if you want to sit down you have to shell out more than $1000 for bottle service?

For those who don't know (I didn't), bottle service is the sale of liquor by the bottle, usually in a nightclub setting, often marked up 10x to 20x, with a minimum purchase of bottles per hour. Bottle service seems to be about real estate, and having an important place to sit and drink with your posse while all the proles in tight graphic T's have to stand around awkwardly. Usually some kind of hostess brings out carafes of mixers (soda water, orange juice, cranberry juice, 7-up, etc) and makes the first round.

Then everybody gets trashed. At $400 a bottle.

K and I attended a wedding afterparty at a club in Santa Monica recently, where the bride and groom got bottle service for three VIP tables and probably dropped close to $1500 for 25 people to drink.

This seems pretty outrageous, and another sign that the younger generation is not like us and that the world is going down the rathole.

But when you look at it, bottle service may represent some kind of twisted value. That bill came out to about $60/person, which is not really an excessive night out, if you consider cover charges, and having a proper table, and the cost of buying individual drinks at $10 to $15 a pop -- no, it doesn't seem like such an atrocious deal, if you are one who likes to go out and drink...

I can't get behind it, but there is a perverted economy of scale to it.

Even if folks are critical of it because it trends toward value-based overdrinking (gotta finish that bottle that I just paid $350 for, before tip).

Oh, and hey, in case you were wondering, there is a Wikipedia entry for bottle service, and it says this: "the modern form of bottle service was pioneered in 1995 by Michael Ault at Spy Bar and in 1996, Chaos ($175 for a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka), with the express goal of creating a "barrier to entry", rather than of increasing liquor sales.

It also says this: "The cost of bottle service and the central position provided to purchasers of bottle service has lead some critics to complain that bottle service is turning night clubs into elitist dens."

Yes, that sounds about right.

Goondocks

Last week at this time K and I were driving up the Oregon coast en route to a family reunion in eastern Washington. We had breakfast in Astoria, before heading east to Portland for the night. While in Astoria, I got the idea of trying to hunt down the Goonies house.

Now, mind you, I couldn't care less about famous movie locations -- perhaps because they are so dime a dozen here in Los Angeles. And yet, there we were urgently cursing our slow-to-react GPS as we tried to pinpoint the Goonies house. As if something depended on it.

I didn't even like Goonies that much when it came out. K and I saw a revival of it back in February and it still isn't that good.

But I needed to see the house for some bizarre reason. Probably because it returned me to a time when such things did matter. When I wallpapered my bedroom with yellowing newspaper ads of movies from 1984 and 1985. I remember where the Goonies ad was in that room, exactly.

Then there is the matter of me wearing socks and sandals, together. Another sign that I'm not fourteen anymore, not even close.

Hungry Monster

After many months of delay, K was finally able to shoot the first three episodes of her new web series, Hungry Monster.

If one had to describe this program in Hollywood hybridized terms, one could say it's a strange cross between Thu Tran's Food Party and Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno.

But that doesn't really do a good job of explaining it either.

K wants to explore the history and preparation of various Taiwanese night market foods. The first episodes focus on stinky tofu, batsang (Taiwanese sticky rice tamale), and boba.

I don't know why most children's programming becomes so psychadelic and subversive, but I am happy to report that Hungry Monster seems to be following in that tradition!

Now comes the long editorial slog. Hopefully it'll be available in November or December, and then we can make a real second season!