Where I’m @

20010725

Greg doesn’t know whether to be depressed or amused by the arrival in academia of Allen Smithee, in University of Minnesota Press’s Directed by Allen Smithee. Artforum, however, knows that “the era of High Deconstruction being over, acolytes of its textual fetishism now move into their mock-u-retical Spinal Tap phase”. Um, “mock-u-retical”?

20010718

Man, how burned am I that I didn't enter the Blogger Template Design Contest? Some really lame designs won some pretty cool stuff, which I don't blame on Blogger but rather on the paucity of entries. I have to assume that there was such a paucity, since not much else explains how some designs won so much as a t-shirt. (Though one person at least gets credit for including the antiSmartTags META tag. Much props.) Of course, some designs send me, but in general I'm just feeling sullen and lazy. Comme d'habitude?

20010716

As I mentioned in my other blog, I’m so happy right now from listening to the soundtrack to Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle vague. No, not the music from the film, or music inspired by the film — the sound track from the film. The entire 88-minute sound to the film. What the flick would be if you watched it with your eyes shut or were blind or trapped inside a box in the same room as a screening. Fantastic stuff.

Two good pieces of news:

20010710

Hoo-yeah! One of the myriad projects I’m working on during my blissful spell of unemployment (Note to New York Department of Labor : I didn’t mean that. In fact, I hate being unemployed and I’m doing everything in my power to get a job) is coming together. Much thanks to Jason, colleague at the former job, for setting me straight on some principles of recursive looping through a recordset. What it is, is a personal portal of sorts, with an admin tool attached so that I can add, subtract, and edit content, and rearrange items. Though I haven’t seen this code in an extant, publicly available form (have not looked that hard, really), if you know of something, let me know so I can compare mine with another.
lazlokovax at toast-dot-net

20010704

So yesterday on my way to the office at about 1pm, I see up ahead of me sitting on a stoop a man. He’s sitting there a little slouched, like he’s waiting for something. As I get closer, it turns out that’s not it at all. His train has come and he got on it. For there on the stoop next to him is a lighter and there clutched in his hand tucked under his doubled-over body is a crack pipe. Yes, true believers, crack is not gone — apparently it’s alive and well in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, USA. Another eye-opener for this rube.

20010703

Whoosh. The sound of time flying when you're unemployed.
Of course, you would think that being without a paying job would leave me with more time to work on the blog, rather than less, but life is full of those wacky kinds of paradoxes. Say, like the fact that residents of the United States are scared to have someone too, oh, smart in the highest elected office in the land, the most powerful single individual in the world. Because that would be bad, someone smart in that job.

On the other hand, some of us really dig smart things. Like the film I caught tonight at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. Vive l’amour/Aiqing wansui by Tsai Ming-liang ran for about 110 minutes and had about 5, maybe 8 pages of dialogue in it. Now, don't go getting all hot under the collar. I’m well aware that Silence != Smart. I once saw a movie that ran for what felt like a thousand and ten minutes and had about 5, maybe 8 pages of dialogue in it, and was lousy. Gave me and my movie-going pal Andrew the sensation of having our eyelashes slowly and forcefully removed. Not the excruciating torture of something like fingernails, just annoying as all-get-out. Vive, however, manages to do just fine, thank you, with little dialogue and even less music but lots of close-up sounds of breathing and such.
So anyway, Vive concerns the interactions both slack and close of a previously unconnected threesome in contemporary Taipei. Lee Kang-sheng, Tsai’s frequent alter ego, plays a Hsiao-kang, a young man who just wants to be held, to put it flippantly. OK, so he wants some nookie as well, but it’s the human contact for which he most longs. You find out pretty quickly a few things about Hsiao-kang, most notably that he sells columbaria, that he is strongly considering killing himself but can’t go through with it, and that heÙs got a kooky side, this last evidenced by a hilarious scene of his turning a watermelon into a bowling ball. At first glance, it seems that Tsai is beating you over the head with the old anomie-and-alienation-of-contemporary-society club, but things turn out to be not so simple. Hsiao-kang steals the key to a vacant apartment that turns out to be used by realtor May (Yang Kuei-mei, probably best known to American audiences as Jia-Jen in Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman/Yin Shi Nan Nu) for dalliances unrelated to her vocation. In particular, the first night that Hsiao-kang spends time in what he thought would be a vacant crash pad, May shows up with Ah-jung (Chen Chao-jung, who was, interestingly enough, also in Eat Drink Man Woman as Guo Lun) and proceeds to have vocal sex with him. Naturally, Hsiao-kang gets found out, though never by May. What follows the setup is essentially an examination of what each of the three is looking for in a human relationship: May wants excitement and power to give her an escape from her subservient job kissing up to potential clients, Ah-jung (the least developed of the three, in my book) wants a family-ish group, and Hsiao-kang wants anything that will keep him in the world of the living. Toward the end, Hsiao-kang’s attraction and need for Ah-jung are pushed from subtext to the fore; a pivotal moment arrives when Ah-jung and May have sex on a bed under which the recently-outed Hsiao-kang is hiding. Rather than settling with accusing the environment, Tsai deals with the three as people, who are necessarily affected by their environment but are not so much mounds of clay to be shaped by it. Ah-jung illegally sells clothes on the street, in the company of many other peddlers, but has no companionship with them. May appears to be successful without compromising herself too much, but ends the movie with a massive crying jag that doesn’t have that ring of cathartic finality to it. And Hsiao-kang’s situation is contrasted with another salesman of cremation urn repository spaces who is affable and lively and seemingly satisfied with himself. There’s a lot left to explore in Vive, another reason I enjoyed it. What’s with the use of water? Why does Ah-jung wear dog tags around his neck? And what does it mean that only two of the three characters are prominently shot jaywalking next to a sign declaring a fine for said activity?