The Pivot - or- Damn, This Is Totally Different, and Undeniably Better, Than Everything Else That Came Before It, Ever

I think I might have blogged about this before, but when I first saw PT Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, I was so blown away by it that I ferreted out his manager's contact info and sent a fan letter to PT. I was 31, sending a fan letter. Probably I was just ecstatic to find that I could still be moved, that I could still be surprised and amazed by a motion picture…

The fact that that movie got mixed reviews just intensified my righteous fervor.

I began thinking about how many times in my life I had viewed a film that then immediately surpassed all others that came before it, and vaulted into my number one position. When was the last time I had a different favorite film? Before that? When was the last time I left the theater, giddy with excitement because of newly revealed cinematic possibilities?

I tried this exercise with books and music and found that all of these disciplines had a half-dozen or so PIVOT POINTS, points at which I was forced to reconsider what was possible with that art form, where I was forced to say, “Damn, this is totally different, and undeniably better than everything else, ever.”

For me, observing the graph (make your own) and the timeline proves to be more interesting and revealing than the listing of the movies themselves. What can I learn from these statistics? How often did I get my mind blown? There is definitely a slowing down that occurs in the later years as I harden into my current self.

Here are the pivotal movies of my existence. I cannot think of anything I was really passionate about in the junior high/early high school years. Back to the Future, perhaps, but that was really just more of the same, hardly anything too mindblowing.

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Return of the Jedi (1983)

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Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

Miller’s Crossing (1990)

Naked (Mike Leigh) (1994)

Magnolia (1999)

Punch-Drunk Love (2002)

On the literary front, I have to start from university, because I can’t remember what I was impressed with before that. The years represent the year in which I intersected with the book, not necessarily the year it was published:

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Notes From Underground (1990)

The Information (Martin Amis) (1995)

The Dead Father (Donald Barthelme) (1998)

The Fermata (Nicholson Baker) (2003)

Like the movies listed above, these titles don’t necessarily still hang amongst my favorites (I read the Information a couple of years ago and found it to be sort of unpleasurable). But in 1995, it was exactly what I wanted to read. I was amazed to have discovered it.

So for me there seems to be about 7 or 8 pivots, per discipline, increasing in frequency during the collage years and tapering off more and more as I age.

This seems natural.

I wonder if others have 30 titles on their lists (a new favorite every 6 months)? Or 2 titles on their lists (after the Breakfast Club it’s all been downhill)? What does it say about how impressionable we are as people?

I confess, these lists are excruciating to look at. To think that as an 18-year-old legal adult, Who Framed Roger Rabbit was the ultimate expression of cinematic possibility? It's humiliating, really -- but necessary to chart one's growth into adulthood, I guess, into the human I've become.... Each pivot neatly represents a change in my life, and in my worldview.

I guess it only makes sense that these moments come more and more infrequently, if ever, these days...

Honeymooners

K and I just got back from our honeymoon in beautiful Tulum, Mexico, about 2 hours south of Cancun.

I never thought I would have enjoyed such a stereotypical honeymoon -- white sand beaches, mojitos, hammocks, and lounging. Lots of lounging.

Our days consisted of reading, and eating, and swimming, and eating, and reading, and walking on the beach, and reading, and napping, and reading, and drinking.

It is easy to be cynical about our little resort, which had eco-spa pretensions and Gilligan's Island-chic architecture. We loved it, however.

It was a thirty-minute bike ride from our cabana to the little town of Tulum. In Tulum there was a cash machine, pistachio ice cream, taxis, and an honest-to-goodness supermarket!

It was pretty stifling, but on the beach the cool-to-the-touch white sand and perpetual ocean breeze made it quite comfortable. Out on the main road, however, there was no cool-the-touch white sand beach or perpetual ocean breeze. Instead, you got mosquitoes and rank sweat and butt bruise... 

But a little punishment always makes the good times so much better... I can make a mean mojito now, in case anyone is wondering.

Our rehearsal dinner in Los Angeles took place at a little Yucatan place near MacArthur Park called Chichen Itza. During our honeymoon we rented a car and drove to the real Chichen Itza, the ruins of a Mayan city two and a half hours away. We came very close to running out of gas in the middle of nowhere - thanks mostly to... well... my male stupidity.

We did not run out of gas. Look at how exuberant we are!

Married? Yeah, married! Sheesh!

Not a lot of time to file a complete report on the events of last weekend. Let's just say it was an exuberant wedding. Dr. Write read a villanelle written for the occasion and Middlebrow gave a wonderful speech.

The weather cleared up and a fine time was had by all. Ross tweaked his back doing spastic pop-locking on the dance floor. More to report when we return from our honeymoon in Tulum, Mexico.

Here is my only picture from the event (so far):

Great Old Photos #2

This is a photograph of my mother's mother and father. Grandma died when I was young; I can only recall her as a stern (and sturdy) farm lady who yelled at me for running around in her little  house. I remember her chastising me for not knowing how to tie my shoes and for needing her help in doing so. In my memory, she comes at me with the "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime" parable, and forces me to fumble with my laces until I can do it by myself. It is likely that this "teach a man to fish" dialogue has been retroactively inserted into the memory, but that is the way scene plays out in my mind. I remember it like it was yesterday, standing in their unpaved driveway, the midday Eastern Washington sun beating down, the muscular walnut tree and postage stamp yard off to the left, the rusty horseshoe marking the entrance to the small garage behind (filled with a museum of old farm tools), the pulse of sprinklers irrigating the surrounding corn fields, the buzz of dragonflies in the air. I'm sure this is romanticizing it; my cantankerous grandmother would probably have something to say about this kind of sentimentality. 

The picture tells a different story, however. It is hard to believe that my grandmother and this handsome young woman in cute shoes are the same person.

I love this picture so much that a few years back I included a passage about it in "Baleen," a short story about an old man who transmogrifies into a right whale. Some of the details have been fudged, just like in my memory.

"In the picture Gramps and Grammy were standing up against a Twenties-model Ford, the kind with running boards below the doors. They looked so young that it startled him. Gramps was skinny and cocky, with a long nose and pointy jaw just like Kevin. His mouth was open in a laugh and the hat on his head was tilted at an angle, like a fashionable Scandanavian gangster.

"Grammy looked like she wasn’t even twenty years old. Her hair was dark and curly and longer than he'd ever seen before. She was strange and beautiful at the same time. She had her right foot on the running board and her left hand on Gramps’ leg, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

"You could tell she thought she had a pretty good catch."

Great Old Photos #1

K and I are currently in the process of creating a wistful, comic "growing up" slideshow to play at our wedding and get the guests all weepy. Let's play get the guests!

I've going through thousands of old photographs and come across some real gems. It's not always the content of these pictures that is spectacular (although the content is often remarkable), but it's something else, something invisible that makes these pictures really stand out for me.

I'm starting a short series in order to wrestle with these photographs.

Here is Great Old Photo #1

The scan of this picture doesn't really do it justice. The blacks look kind of washed out and the whites are dirty. Try to view the screen at an angle to really bring the contrast back to make the whites sparkle and the blacks black.

I love this photo for a lot of reasons, mostly because of its noiry starkness. Mom and Dad are so young here (I think it is 1965, probably Christmas by the look of the Christmas cards attached to the wall) -- Dad would be 29, Mom 25. They would have been dating for about three months at this point. It looks like a house they are in, and not an apartment, which could make it the house of Dad's brother-in-law, Uncle Louie. Or perhaps it is the house of some random couple hosting a party. It is hard to say.

The first thing one notices is the bright flash perfectly positioned in the mirror on the far wall. This is what makes the picture so wonderful. Imagine if the flash did not exist. It would still be a decent photograph but it would lose its interrogative shock. We see the very thing that is causing Mom to open her mouth in protest, a bright flash illuminating their secret (risque?) embrace. She is in his lap and his tie is rumpled. The rest of the house is dark and quiet. Dad's smirk puts him in league with the faceless photographer, but Mom's mouth is forming the shape of admonishment. She has seen the photographer approaching and is yelling at him to stop. This sense of fun is what takes the picture out of the realm of Weegee, although the aesthetic is the same. They are up to no good, and so is the photographer.

I love the beautiful square frame, something usually reserved for portraits and medium-format photography. Mom's face, which is foregrounded and receiving the glare of the flash full-on, is in the virtual center of the frame. They have too much headroom and the camera is tilting dynamically to the left. Do we feel tense because we have seen Orson Welles movies and others like it and we have learned that angled frames are a harbinger of bad things to come? Or do we innately feel tense because vertical lines are not vertical anymore and all is not well and right with the world? There is no time to set up this shot; the photographer is moving forward and the horizon is jostled. It is not so much composed as it is aimed. I imagine the camera continuing to tip counter-clockwise, becoming more and more dutched. Mom's head remains in the very center of this image as the stark world whirls chaotically around her.

A conical lamp hovers above her. It looks like a party hat that has just popped off her head, due to the sheer force of her surprise.

The Cinephile & the Megalopolis

For many years I have chalked up my decreasing interest in cinema to my decreasing interest in my movie industry job. I am watching fewer movies per year than at any other time in my life. I’m getting older, of course, and when one gets older he has less time to fritter away watching movies and reading novels. It isn’t totatly fair to compare the cinephile I was in college with the busy curmudgeon I have become. Look at all the free time I use to have… We all used to have.… Sheesh.

But something strange has been happening over past couple of days. I’ve been in the Northwest visiting the folks and I looked in the paper to see what was playing at the local art house theater. I hadn’t heard of any of the films, actually, but I was curious about what they were and actually expressed an interest in finding out. Strange behavior for someone who never watches movies anymore.

Some easy explanations:

 1. Of course I’m interested in filmgoing again while up in the NW. I have a ton of free time and no perpetual work-related stress. Let’s go to the movies! Why not?

 2. I am experiencing some kind of flashback behavior here. My mind associates the NW with the pleasure of heavy filmgoing, so it, of course, assumes that that is what happens when I’m up here. It rains, the Seahawks lose, Eric goes to the movies.

 3. I don’t have to battle murderous crosstown traffic for 45 minutes in order to see the film in question. Here in Tacoma the lines are short and the commute even shorter. I was telling Middlebrow how much I envied his life in the SLC. The SLC is tiny compared to Los Angeles or Chicago or NY, but it is large enough while still remaining small. Everything culturally relevant comes through the SLC… You may not have any Puppetry of the Penis or fringe stand-up acts or roller derby, but you get everything else and everything else is way more accessible! Do the Flaming Lips come to Salt Lake? Okay!

But I actually think something else is going on. Sometimes I like to fantasize about moving from LA and starting over in a small town somewhere… I like to think that I would get involved in the Film Society of this fictional town. That I would get involved in the community and help to program films from all of the world. That I would get directors and writers and other guest speakers to come and program live Theramin accompaniment to old silent films, etc…And then I would recapture my passion for the cinema.

Up here I feel people are way more committed to film and literature and music. They consume more and discuss it more – their love of it is pure. They consume it for its own sake. They love the cinema because they love the cinema – not because they are filmmakers and they are watching a film because they have to or because they are looking to steal ideas from this film.

Perhaps I’m just being contrarian. I don’t watch movies in LA because that is all everybody ever talks about. Movies and the movie business. It really drives me away. I don’t want to compete with these people – I don’t want to have another discussion about Quentin Tarantino or Ron Howard. I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t even want to think about movies. I want to do things nobody is interested in, even me.

Living in the Northwest makes me want to study cinema again. Living in Los Angeles makes me want to write novels. 

Folding Up Shop (Long)

Some time ago I started feeling the pull to make another documentary film. I was getting over my production hangover from the first one (“It wasn’t that bad, was it?”) and wanted to put my newfound skills to use. How great would it be to not have to encounter every situation for the first time? To not have to muddle through every decision? To actually build on all of this suffering I endured making the first film? To not make another film seemed irresponsible, wasteful almost -- analogous to plowing away through law school and then deciding not to take the bar exam.



The subject? Something even more esoteric and impossible to market than air hockey: folding. I was interested in technical “professional” origami, knot theory, pop-up books, real-world packaging applications – basically the intersection of art, math, and science in regards to folding.



Even stuff as mundane as tie tying, flag folding, and fitted sheet folding seemed interesting—maybe this was fertile territory, perhaps there was something culturally significant going on there as well. There were countless examples—here is a crocheted version the hyperbolic plane.



Middlebrow was one of the few people who supported this idea. I’d already given up on trying to find funding for this; it would be a passion project. Who would finance a documentary about folding? Everyone I pitched the idea to out here in Los Angeles looked at me funny. Perhaps my pitch was lousy. Maybe there was no clear protagonist and no clear goal so it was hard to see the point of it all. I was making a film about ideas, ha ha!



I continued to believe in this project, however. More than anything, the subject was interesting to me--something I could immerse myself in for over a year, which is the most important thing of all when doing a film, I believe. Even more important than marketability. That feeling of danger, that feeling of not knowing what you’re going to get. Feeling like you are going to discover many wonderful things along the way instead of going out on the road and trying to find sound bites to plug into your pre-written piece.

Well, today I discovered this:



Looks like somebody beat me to it!

I feel legitimized and very very sad at the same time. “See!” I said. “This movie won awards all over the place! I knew it was a great idea!” And then, “Shit!”

I’m sure this has happened to everyone. What do you do when you realize your beautiful little baby has already been done and done better by someone else already? I never thought I would see this happen with this particular documentary project, though. Out of all my ideas, this is the one I never thought anyone would ever be interested in.



Sure, one could argue that it’s probably a very different film than the one I would make, but the vibe of the trailer seems eerily similar. A friend of K’s has a movie called “Children of Invention” that is making festival rounds. It’s about two Asian kids who are abandoned by their mother for a short time and have to fend for themselves. Well, it just so happens there is another movie also making the rounds called “Treeless Mountain” which seems to be eating up more of the oxygen in the room. “Treeless Mountain” is also about two Asian kids who are abandoned by their mother for awhile and have to fend for themselves. Both of these films owe a huge debt to the Japanese film “Nobody Knows” (which is only 5 years old), but that is another story..

K said “Children of Invention” had trouble getting into some festivals because “Treeless Mountain” had already been accepted, and the films were too similar in tone and plot and character for the festival to program both.

So, there you go.

Here’s a link to the nice trailer of “Between the Folds”:

http://www.greenfusefilms.com/

Acupunctured!

The three-month beatdown in Philadelphia left me hobbled. Knee inflamed, limited range of motion, arthritis symptoms. Surprisingly, my doctor immediately referred me to an acupuncturist first, with the idea that if my lab results came back suspicious (which they did), then I would see a western specialist at the same time.

I admit, I like the idea of experiencing firsthand the different approaches western and eastern medicine use to treat the same problem. It hasn’t been a totally fair fight, however, since the western representative was fairly useless and I’m in a line waiting to see another.

But I’m not quite sure what to make of the acupuncturist, either. I’ve been three times and haven’t seen significant improvement. The common sense things he has prescribed (detox my diet, eating herbs, light meditation, choosing stretching/yoga over pavement ball and running, etc) are very beneficial, sure, but they really have nothing to do with acupuncture.

The jury is still out on all of the needles.

I’m really not quite sure what to make of it, especially when he is targeting every pressure point on my body EXCEPT the problem knee. Is this new-age sorcery? He even bled the back of my inflamed knee; is that medieval hokum or what?

Perhaps I am just being close-minded…Acupuncture has worked for thousands of years, after all. Does it matter if it’s a placebo if the placebo is effective?

The world is a mysterious place; I can’t claim to understand it all.

Beyond Complaining

Law Abiding Citizen is finally coming to a close and I will be returning home in a week and a half after three long months of filming in Philadelphia. We have been working 80-85 hour weeks as the producers try desperately to stay on schedule. This week we may hit 90. It has been cold and it is miserable and disorganized and there is much to complain about.

I say this to explain (but not justify) the blogging shortfall that has once again plagued my annual promise to blog more, but also to say that the complaining on set is out of control.

We complain because we have been served up some perceived injustice and we are powerless to do anything about it. We are impotent. And so we complain. And that makes us feel better. At least for a while.

But what happens when listening to this chorus of complaining becomes more intolerable than the injustices that cause the complaining in the first place? It continues, week after week, month after month, ramping up in pitch and shrillness and urgency. Be silent, I think. You’ve known things were going to be like this since after Week 1. You know where things stand: Either you accept them and stay and reject them and leave. But things will not change so it is absurd to whine so.

I am trying to move past this, to get beyond complaining. To try and remain silent. To set an example of restraint, of stoic impenetrability. To fool myself, to turn it into a game, to play past it, to relish getting yelled at because it means my enemies are unhappy deep inside. Perhaps this is why religion exists. Or therapy. To create a vessel into which one can thrust his or her unhappiness and throw away the key.

Of course, life on this movie is frustrating, but it is nothing compared to actual hardship. We are without disabilities. We have loving families. We are the employed ones, after all. Every week I get a few calls from California camerapeople looking for work. It is very slow out west, but we are busy here in Philadelphia. Most would kill for the bonanza of overtime we are getting now. I remember a roommate in college who told me that his grandparents got filthy rich during the Depression because they owned a bunch of public swimming pools and swimming was a cheap form of recreation that people resorted to during that time. He told this story with gusto, almost glee.

I wonder if his grandparents felt guilty. Every day I feel guilty that I do not fully appreciate my good fortune of being on this movie during a recession.

So I am getting better about complaining. I am learning to stifle it.

The need to complain does not go away, however.

It is right over here, at arms length, watching.

Pandora and the Music Genome Project

Those little “wow” moments in life come fewer and farther between every year, but the Internets continue to astonish. It took me a long time but I finally got an iphone and started using the wonderful and brilliant Pandora application.

Pandora deconstructs songs using hundreds of minute criteria (from angsty lyrics to wet mixes), and by doing so is able – given any song/songs or artist/artists as a starting point – to spin off recommendations for similarly constructed songs.

I’ve barely even scraped the surface, but already I’ve been exposed to dozes of fantastic musicians I’ve never even heard of. Pandora learns about your tastes and so gives more and more accurate predictions the more you use it and teach it using a simple thumbs-up, thumbs-down interface. And that is beautiful.

I believe there’s an online version that anyone can access. And it’s free.

How cool is that?

Sick

I have been sick in one way or another for about four weeks. My illni seem to have gone through four different stages, linked together by tentative three-day periods of semi-wellness and false hopes.

-An upset stomach in Chile begat:
-Modest flu-like symptoms between Christmas and New Years, which begat:
-Hardcore symptoms (hacking up green matter, fever, weakness, chills, headache, sort throat, malaise, etc. etc.) after New Years, which begat:
-My current cough and sore throat; sinuses alternating between freeflowing and plugged up beyond belief.

These periods of illness directly coincide with cross-continental flights, where the great unwashed masses cough openly into the stale economy class air and wipe their noses with the backs of their hands.

A floating germ factory, yes. An international overnight courier of disease.

In spite of a course of antibiotics and a daily cocktail of over-the-counter (folk) remedies, I still feel unwell. And the only thing worse than being sick is being sick and alone, which is what I am since I am now in Philadelphia waiting for this damn movie to start. Go Eagles.

I recognize that discussing one’s illnesses is about as interesting as discussing one’s dreams in public, but in the interest of keeping a blog I must write about what concerns me most, and what concerns me most is the rather existential notion that I will never be well again.

It seems to me that two hundred years ago people probably lived with a lot of things: poverty, sickness, short life spans, rotting teeth, etc. I wonder if there was more of a notion of playing through one’s pain back then, of just living with it. Now we take the opposite tack, wherein if one feels sad or lethargic or overly exuberant, he or she can find a chemical remedy and normalize quickly.

Being sick for so long alters your perspective on wellness in general. Will I ever be well again? What was it like to feel normal? To be young and have energy and to run without being winded? To sleep through the night without coughing one’s self awake?

A little dramatic perhaps, but it reminds me of a more theatrical time in my life, when I caught an illness in New Orleans, and so curled up with Proust, ate Madeleines, and pretended to be a Francophile until my good health resumed and I had no real reason to battle with his digressive narrative anymore.

That was the romantic angle, anyway. Now I just grumble.

Supra - or - The New Domesticity

Karen and I hosted her annual New Year's Bash the other night, and I spent much of the time in the kitchen. I made Dr. Write's famous Caesar salad, sweet potato stars baked in orange juice and nutmeg and brown sugar, a Chilean chicken stew called cazuela de ave, brownies, and Pisco Sours for all of the guests. To what do I owe this New Domesticity?

After midnight, someone posited the question of New Year's Themes, and what were they for everyone? Not resolutions or goals, necessarily, but themes. Can you distill everything you'd like to do in 2009 into a one- or two-word theme?

This held some appeal for me since I always have a long list of specific unattainable goals, instead of an overarching theme.

To follow Dr. Write's lead, here were my goals from last year:

1. Create a new branded web presence (no)
2. Take 2 trips (yes! Boulder Utah, Seattle, Chile)
3. Make $xxx and save half (no)
4. Finish Way of the Puck (no)
5. Rewrite The Secret Unbelievable (an old script) (no no no)
6. Live an Interesting Life (no)
7. Be Happy (sometimes, yes near the end)

Actually, looking at these 2008 goals I realize that they were much broader and more achievable than in years past. But still I did not meet them.

So, confronted with this idea of a New Years Theme for 2009, and lacking anything clever to say, I declared that my theme is:

Supra

or... Supra Blank

Transcending... whatever.

Pressed for specifics, I said that I would like to transcend the notion of success and failure, whatever that means. This binary framework is largely unproductive, but it is pretty much the sole metric with which I have traditionally judged my worth. I would like to play past that and just try to have fun this year.

And blog more, of course.

Some others at the party were:

-Enjoy
-Strength
-Sit With It
-Make It Happen
-Etc.

What is your New Years Theme?

We Be Betrothed

Well, the gf and I are engaged to be married. I guess she's the moved on from being the gf, and is now the f. And soon, the w. Or just W.

I proposed in a neat little tapas place in the boho Bellavista section of Santiago, Chile. I fed her too much wine and she said yes. Now it's too late for her to take it back.

Getting married is expensive. I wanted to utilize the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport's chapel (DFW chapel, who knew there was one?), but it was Christmas Day when we went through and it was closed. So we will settle for some exquisite SoCal outdoor environment instead, probably in early summer.

I will miss my dark one-bedroom apartment (not really).

Since U Been Gone

I am a blogging failure. I apologize.

I will resort to a list of things that have occurred since the last time I blogged.

1. Moved in with the gf.
2. Signed on to a movie called ¨Law-Abiding Citizen¨ that will shoot in Philly for three months and take me away from my new place. That hyphen in the film title is mine, btw, we´ll see if they actually use it. Jamie Foxx, Katherine Zeta Jones, and others.
3. Flew to Chile where the gf and I have been kicking around for a couple of weeks.
4. Saw the atrocious ¨Cadillac Records.¨
5. Baked a mincemeat pie.
6. And other huge important things.

I Keep Finding Money

About a week ago I was going through an old box of travel items and came across $80 wrapped up in a Xeroxed copy of my passport. Three days ago I found six 50-dollar bills mixed in with some old mail. Yesterday I found $42 in another box.

Is the beginning of an new era of good fortune? Or is this a harbinger of doom, since good luck comes in threes?

I hope for the former. God, I hope for the former.

Meat Train Derailed

Midnight Meat Train opened last Friday on 100 screens nationwide. Lionsgate wanted to just dump it to DVD, but they had to fulfill the theatrical component of the deal, so they put it in bargain theaters outside of city centers without any advertising support. The movie already has quite a cult following, so what gives? It appears that management has changed at Lionsgate and that the new regime is ditching many of the pet projects of the old, purely as a political screw you.



In other words, the goal, on this one, is to lose money.

That is why they put it in bargain theaters. To make as little money as possible. To think, we slaved for months on a tax write-off. Hmmm.



The MMT camera crew drove the 25 miles out to Norwalk on Saturday to support the cause, and ended up at a tiny little 8-plex hidden from the world behind a strip mall. I felt like I was back on South Tacoma Way, watching Return of the Living Dead 2 with Middlebrow, for a couple of dollars. There were two Bollywood movies, Meat Train, and something the marquis labeled "Hulk", which could have been either the Ang Lee version or the newer "The Incredible Hulk" - there's no way to know for sure.

We paid $2.75 for tickets on opening weekend, and ten dollars for some questionable nachos. The screen had been patched up and the sound was tinny. We were in a buoyant mood. There were five-year-olds in there, sobbing, and people talking openly with each other, and even someone pointing a laser pointer at the screen from time to time. In short, we were watching the film with savages, a scenario that would normally fill me up with rage. On this night, however, it was perfect.

Well, the movie was terrible, of course. "What did you expect?" laughed P. I couldn't answer. I guess always held a secret hope for this movie... its dark and gritty cinematography, its Sam Raimi kineticism, its offbeat Japanese fusion of horror and comedy... Maybe it'll actually be kind of good, I wondered, in a trashy way.



It was shit. Doesn't mean horror fans won't love it, though.

For me, I felt like Barton Fink at the end of that movie, when the studio head tells him that he will remain under contract by the studio, but they will make none of the screenplays he writes. Or like Richard Pryor in the classic, Brewster's Millions, when he has a mansion decorated into a performance-art pleasuredome, then says, "It's beautiful. Now take it all away."

Or something like that.

Some kind of purgatory.

Or maybe the best movie reference is Trading Places, when at the end you discover that the entire plot of the movie (ruining Dan Akroyd's life) was the result of a one-dollar bet between two wicked rich men.



Life can be meaningless, sure, but when it rises up like this and confronts you head-on it can be a little hard to take.

What kind of effect does your labor have on the world? Do you make any mark whatsoever?

Here's the Variety review, if you're interested.... [LINK]
Here's some fanboy wrath, if you're interested... [LINK]

The Vanity of Publishing (Long)

I've been thinking a lot about vanity publishing and how that pejorative term really only applies to the literary marketplace. Everywhere else it's called self-distribution. As many independent film distributors (Fine Line, ThinkFilm, etc) dissolve, the self-distribution of independent films is becoming more and more viable. Indeed, one of Sundance's big winners this year, BALLAST, rejected a traditional distribution deal with IFC Films, opting instead to self-distribute.

Traditionally, self-distribution (like vanity publishing) was seen as a last resort for filmmakers who had no other options. But the idea that a Sundance winner would find the self-distribution model PREFERABLE, is intriguing. I also heard a recent podcast with Ondi Timoner, director of DIG!, who said that in spite of huge international sales and a long shelf life, she hasn't seen a penny beyond her initial advance. She is looking to self-distribute her newest film.

In music there is some fooling around with this as well. Radiohead self-distributed their last album, as did Nine Inch Nails, and others. Aimee Mann went off and formed her own label a couple of years ago.

So when will the literary world come on board? Or is it happening already? Why won't these superstar authors just self-publish and rake it in? They can charge $10 for a digital download and keep it all, instead of getting the $1 per book that they might be making in a normal publishing deal (I just pulled these figures out of the air, in case you didn't notice).

Why is there such an entrenched disdain for literary self-publishing? Well, obviously because this model has provided decades of poopy, poorly edited content, no doubt--these are all books that couldn't get published elsewhere. But it doesn't have to be that way; what if quality writers self-published and self-marketed by choice? I mean, even if you go through a traditional publisher you are still going to have to do all of your own marketing....

Publishers do serve a vetting and culling function, sure, they're the gatekeepers, they're the ones who ensure that quality is going to be up to a certain standard (at least editorially), but who is to say that one can't create his own book, put it up on Amazon, do a guerilla grass roots marketing campaign, and then sell a thousand copies or so through his own effort? Can't this model co-exist legitimately with the old model?

My prediction is that in the next 10 years the film industry will divide into two halves. There will be studio-driven big-budget features and then there will be everyone else, and everyone else will self-distribute.

I wonder if publishing won't also go in this direction.

But look at all the crap you'd be inviting into the world, right? Do we really need more vanity romances and religious tracts and bad World War 2 histories? No we don't. But this is what people objected to about YouTube. Sure, 98% of the stuff on YouTube is a disaster, but 2% of it is sheer genius. And the market does the culling for me. It's not as if I go to You Tube and start watching clips at random. Usually there's a link, or a recommendation, or some viral reason to go there. I don't have to wade through the great unwashed mass of clips that live there.

That wonderful 2% just floats to the surface. And I'm glad there is a surface to float to.

Yes, Please, I'll Have Some Schadenfreude With That

Came across this scathing review of James Frey's new book in the Los Angeles Times. It made me very happy for some reason. Dr. Write made me feel okay about feeling protective about outside writers coming into one's territory and writing a bunch of hooey, which is what Frey has done about Los Angeles.

Click [HERE]



This review really put me in a good mood. Then again, since when do I consider myself an Angeleno? Why should I care if Frey gets it all wrong?



He looks so sad, doesn't he? Defenseless....

Wordling

Have been kicking around the idea of resuming the pointless novel (mine) again. I made a Wordle of the first 18 chapters. I'm not sure what it means but it looks kind of cool:

The Death of the Independent Bookstore

Acres of Books, the largest second-hand bookstore in California, is closing its doors. These seems to be the fourth or fifth LA independent bookstore bankruptcy in the last couple of years, following Wilshire Books, Dutton's in Brentwood, and Book Baron in Anaheim. With a heavy heart, I drove down to Long Beach to say a private goodbye and to help pillage the discounted stacks.



The night before, I typed up a list of books I was interested in buying and priced them on Amazon and half.com. I created a list of twenty titles whose online (used) pricing seemed a little unreasonable, then took this list to Long Beach with the idea that maybe I'd be able to find better deals at the Acres funeral sale.



But it was not to be. Acres of Books is charming, in its own way, but one can't actually find anything there. It's a big musty maze, with the requisite ancient cat, Bach piped in from somewhere, and no computer system to help one locate what he is looking for. There is no cafe, no couches, no fancy greeting cards, no stationery, no magazine rack, nothing. Only books, mostly old, mostly yellowing. Exactly! you must be saying. That's the whole point! There is treasure in there, but you must hunt for it! But wait, is it all really just a bunch of 40-year-old mass market paperbacks?

And wait, what's this, are you telling me that 20% off is the best you can do for your Going Out of Business Sale? Do you really need to get rid of these books or is your greed getting in the way? I was thinking 50%, maybe 75%. But 20% off?

Sheesh.



Well, I felt the need to buy something, anything, but I wasn't doing well with the list. It was only 10:30 in the morning, 30 minutes after they had re-opened to sell off their stock, but I wasn't finding anything good. Had everything been picked clean already? I wound up paying $7.00 for a copy of the Intutionist which is available online for a penny (plus shipping, of course).



Then I bought a copy of Gibson's Pattern Recognition for the gf, and spent $7.00 doing this while there are numerous copies online available for less than a dollar.



Then I spent over an hour battling traffic to get home. The whole episode took about 3 hours, I didn't find anything that I wanted, I had to stand in a long, slow-moving line, the old woman making change on the old register overcharged me by three dollars and then it took five minutes to undo her mistake.

I am conflicted, and yet not. The closure of Acres of Books made me a little sad but I am over it. We must make way for Progress.

Next time I will shop online and enjoy a cool beverage while doing so. I have seen the future, Dear Readers, and it is

www.allbookstores.com.