emperor_norton

Good morning, loyal readers. It is time once again for another round of raves, rambles, rants, and ribaldry courtesy of your friendly neighborhood broke-ass writer. As you can see from the previous sentence, I'm a big fan of abuse. Every one indulges in the habit to some degree. Some people abuse the system. Some people abuse their children. Some people abuse their spouses.. Me? I like to abuse alliteration. I like to back my literary devices up into a shadowy corner and make them my bitch.

In lieu of the venerated MLA format of Introduction-Body-Conclusion paragraph formatting, I'm picking up my oar and going stream of consciousness, dash-style.

-Finished World War Z today. I can't praise the book highly enough. Sure, there are some flaws (which is to be expected from a writer's first full-length novel), but if you're a fan of horror, zombies, politics, subversive humor, and Japanese warrior monks, World War Z was written just for you. At work, we have a list of the top ten selling books across the country (by format: brand-new fiction, brand-spankin' new nonfiction, best selling trade paperbacks, best selling mass market paperbacks) and I'm delighted to say that by some miracle of word-of-mouth WWZ is in the top 10. Even if it only stays on the list for a week, it justifies the Da Vinci Code's reign of terror on the list over the past years. Nice to see something smart and fun sneak its way onto the bestseller list for a change.

-Over the last four months, I've been haunted by a handful of songs. The biggest bat in the belfry is by far Rosemary Clooney's "Come On-A My House". I heard it when I saw the Dresden Dolls for the third time, playing a packed and intimate show at the clubhouse. It was a song being blared through the speakers between the sets, coming on right after a Gogol Bordello tune. At the time, I didn't know what the title of the song was, or who the singer was, but the song just wormed its way into my ear-drums like a flesh-eating parasite, and refused to leave. I liked the gypsy-ish, jaunty vibe of the song, and how, even though all the lyrics are playful and tame innuendos, the whole thing seemed to drip with a cheeky kind of sexiness. The funny thing is, after I noticed "Come On-A My House", it started popping up all over the places. I watched random TV shows, and occasionally the song popped up. It popped up in movies I was watching. Most of all, it started surfacing at work, playing at random in our shuffling disc changer. I eventually figured out the identity of the siren singing about pomengrates and figs, and checked out her CD from work. Didn't care for anything else on the CD; mostly old standards, not my scene at all, but "Come On" was on there, and now its on my iTunes playlist. I figured, fuck it, synchronicities that pop up this often shouldn't be ignored.

-Other songs haunting me (mostly at work): the Green Acres theme song. Whenever I'm at work doing a closing shift, occasionally "Greeeennnnn Acccrees is the plaace to beeee" starts running through my head. I don't know why. I didn't care for the show (when I was a kid, I was a huge Nick-At-Nite freak), and nothing at work screams "hick", so I can't figure out why goddamn Green Acres haunts me. Michael Jackson's "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" also comes up a bit in my skull, which I don't particularly mind, because Off-The-Wall is a kick ass record and there are far worse songs that can be trapped in the flypaper of one's thoughts. The last song to haunt me is the worst offender: Boston's "More Than A Feeling". I've been playing it a lot on Guitar Hero. Even though I despise the song, I like playing it, and I've played it so often trying to get a five star score that now when I'm chillin' at work, those damn guitars just start wailing in all their pathetic 70's Classic Rock glory.

-Got a DVD from Amazon today, and I'm sorry to say that this is the first time I've been fucked-over by an online merchant. I ordered a copy of Control Room from a seller on Amazon who said it was in a "Like New" condition. Got it in the mail today and popped it out of its case, scoping the condition of the disc. Like New? Like Fuck It Was. Disc has so many scratches it looks like a kid trying to draw the sun's myriad rays (it is nearly blinding holding the disc towards the light and seeing a SPIRAL of scratches). I shot off a polite but obviously aggravated email to the seller and I hope I can get a refund. If not, I will shake my fist in impotent rage at the sky. And believe me, folks, there are few more fervent and impotent fist-shakers in the world than yours truly.

-Speaking of Ze DVDs: watched The Corporation tonight (I've been on a documentary kick lately). I saw it a while ago when I was still working at Harkins. I remembered bits and pieces of it, so it was nice to watch the doc again and get those hazy parts of my memory restored again. As a film, The Corporation is a little on the long-ish side, and there aren't many visual bits in the film that make one's hair stand on end and say "whoa, wait til I tell my film school buddies about THIS", but the sheer flow of information in the film justifies the viewing experience. Sure, the usual talking heads are here: Chomsky (who, while I will admit to his vast intellect and tip my non-existent hat to it, seems like a complete bore) and Michael Moore (yeah, he irks me at times, but since he isn't the focus of the film, his brief appearances are actually quite entertaining), as well as Naomi Klein of No Logo fame (whom, along with Arianna Huffington, who traded wits with Colbert this evening, is on the long list of brainy ladies I'd love to have a "discourse" with). The interview subjects are very articulate and most are quite interesting, so even if things seem to drag at times, its like listening to a really good lecture. Sure, The Corporation won't get you hot under the collar or make you giggle like a schoolgirl, but its good for you. Creepiest part of the film: the concept of gene prospectors. Patenting lab-engineered life-forms and human genetic materials... creepy stuff. Really could be the subject of its own film, but alas, one can only cram so much info in two hours. And finally: one of the interview subjects kept cracking me up. It wasn't just her thick, congested voice, it was her pitch-perfect It's Pat! image. Behold the glory of Elaine Bernard:



-Talked with Chester (aka Mr. Inconceivable, on account of his stunning resemblance to Wallace Shawn, he of Princess Bride "Inconceivable!" fame) today. We had just finished dealing with Paul With The Requests. Paul WTR comes in every couple of days and makes things as annoying as hell for us for a half hour or so. He has an endless litany of requests, and seems unable to grasp the concept that we are not personal shoppers, and we aren't going to comb the damn store, find everything he wants (which he almost never buys, anyway), and put in his greasy sausage-fingers. Paul mooned over a copy of a Buster Keaton book before leaving, and Chester and I started talking movies. Chester, a man in his late-forties, has the belief that culture began and ends with the Rat Pack, old noir paperbacks, and "tasteful" Las Vegas burlesque shows. He's the kind of geek who can't help but relate EVERYTHING someone says to him to a movie he saw; he's in a permenant geek mode. He has no "Be Sociable And Not A Freak For Five Minutes" switch like most of us new-type nerd models. He, for better or worse, cannot hide his film geekness. Admittedly, while his constant references to All About Eve, The Godfather, and old musicals can get grating, its nice to talk to someone with a fairly wide frame of reference about movies (he also shares my Criterion addiction, so its nice to chat with a fellow junkie and brag about our fixes). He started talking about the 70's and a bunch of documentaries he was watching about that era. He buys in to a fairly popular theory that floats around that Hollywood killed intelligent cinema in the 70's, and the men who drove the stake in deep were George "Neckfat" Lucas and Steven "Take Me Seriously, Dammit!" Speilberg. The theory goes that with the advent of the blockbuster, people suddenly stopped giving a damn about intelligent film and all those filmmakers who were crafters of fine cinema were run out of town on a rail (never mind that most of the people held up as an example of this were already flaming out due to their own personal problems and creative failures, like Francis Ford Coppola). I call bullshit on this idea.

Why is it bullshit? Simple: people like popular entertainment. Always have. They're has been films created since the birth of cinema that were made to appeal to mass audiences, to draw in huge crowds, that were widely successful in spite of not being all that clever or bright. Every decade of American culture ebbs and flows with its highbrow and lowbrow entertainment. This idea that the late 60s-70s were full to the brim with aspiring auteurs whose dreams of being the next Goddard and Fellini were dashed upon the rocks of progress is just silly. Its a bit like when people look back at the past and say, "before all this technical innovation, people had more meaningful, deeper lives. They appreciated what was around them". Says who? Whose to say that people back in time, before the nuclear family and TV and drive-in theaters and Nintendos and Segas and Internet porn and cellular plans and iPods and fast food didn't feel just as spiritually empty and unfulfilled as people today? Perhaps reports of such unfulfillment, such dissatisfication with the world around them, simply doesn't crop up as much in historical writings and observations simply because people were too busy going through the basic tasks of survival (hunting, cooking, working brutal factory shifts, etc) to sit around and get too existetantial about their lot in life. I bet if one were to construct a time machine and go back in time and tell someone during the Industrial Revolution about how much comfort and leisure time people in most parts of the Western world experience today, that Dickens-ian ragamuffin would probably slit the time-travelers' throat and jam their family into the time machine, heading into the promised land of Starbucks and Wi-Fi laptops. A similiar attitude surfaces in people like Chester: people back in the day were just purer, more real, possessed more integrity. Horseshit. The survivors of previous generations, the older generations lording over the younger upstarts, always try to paint a pretty picture of their youth. "Our movies are better than yours because they were made before Star Wars came along and fucked everything up".

I'll tell you part of the reason this argument bothers me. When I used to go to film class, before we launched into whatever lecture or film we were about to witness that day, we would go around the class and talk about the films we had seen over the last week. Often times, people would lament the shitty selection of films available for viewing at their local cineplex. This would evolve into a tirade against the evils of Hollywood, how they're all about dumbing down the masses and feeding them shit they don't want to swallow. I disliked this argument because it took all accountability away from the audiences. Is Hollywood a shameless shit peddler? Yes, but its too easy to play Pin-The-Blame-On-The-Corporate-Machine. To answer a question from Team America: why does Michael Bay get to keep on making movies? Answer: because people keep going to see them. While Hollywood bears responsibility for the crap that keeps invading our theater screens and DVD shelves, part of their blame must also rest on all the consumers of this crap. Remakes of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "The Hills Have Eyes" don't just come out because Hollywood is creatively bankrupt: they come out because people WILL go see them. It comes back to that film I was talking back a couple of posts back, This Film Is Not Yet Rated. The film shows that the rating system is built in part to favor Hollywood over indie films and foreign films, to priviledge the studio system over its competitors. The filmmakers spent a lot of time bemoaning this fact, but nobody addressed what I think is a key point: frankly, if the MPAA stopped discriminating against indies and foreign films, I really don't think it would have that much of an effect on the American cultural landscape. If given a choice between some obscure indie film they've never heard of, a foreign film with subtitles they'll have to read for two hours, or the new Owen Wilson-Whoever comedy, I honestly think the majority of people will pick Owen Wilson. Just stop and think about some of the indie films in the last few years that had some degree of mainstream success. Garden State. Napoleon Dynamite. Little Miss Sunshine. My Big Fat Greek Wedding. All of them "indie" in some sense, but mainstream and safe enough in their content for Average Joe and Jane to go see. The real subversive and amazing stuff that people like my classmates champion will always lose in the theaters to Michael Bay and indie quislings like Garden State. I told that to Mr. Inconceivable: don't blame Michael Bay for making shitty movies. The guy isn't an artist, he's an admitted businessman. He is all about money. Blame the people who go to his movies who should know better. Blame the people who smell shit but swallow it down anyway. Blame the people who put mediocre shit like the Da Vinci Code and Fallout Boy to the top of their respective charts instead of books and bands that have actual talent. Go ahead and blame the master and the boss, but don't forget that the servant and employee are just as much to blame for not asking for something better, for not throwing off their chains or punching holes in their cubicle walls. Rant done (maybe not well-done, but definitely medium-well).

-Went back to reading Demanding The Impossible: A History Of Anarchism by Peter Marshall. Stopped reading it a little while back to make way for all the fiction on my plate. I'll post a review of The Impossible when I finish reading.

Now I'm going to crash. I need my beauty sleep.