Kablammo!

I noticed a hair on the floor, a hair so long it couldn’t have possibly been mine and must have been a remnant from a visitor. I bent over to pick it up, intending to bring it outside and release it into the wind, as one might do with a wayward insect, hoping it might find its way back home. When I picked up the hair, I saw that it was completely straight, and so wispy as to be nearly transparent; but by the time I finished standing up, it had become thick, dark, lustrous and curly. As I walked to the door it grew into a dirty-blonde dreadlock, and by the time I got outside I was holding a wig’s worth of golden braids. I flung them into the air, but the wind wanted nothing to do with them and they fell to the driveway unclaimed.Православни икони

I’m so bourgeois right now, it’s not even funny. Not only am I the kind of person who spends his evenings listening to jazz on his hi-fi while sipping single-malt Scotch, but I’m also now the kind of person who orders prints of artwork featured in Harper’s magazine. What can I say? I like Lichtenstein’s work and references thereto, and I love biting satire (and Scotch).

It’s been pointed out to me, and rightfully so, that my last post has more than a little in common with the Wondermark strip excerpted below:

While I can’t really disagree with that, there’s another comic that does a better job of summing up my life as a whole right now. It’s excerpted below:

Go ahead and read the whole thing. It really hits the nail on the head, except for minor details like the typewriter (people use computers nowadays) and the convertible (I ride a train). I’ve had Work is Hell for 12 years or so now, and of all the cartoons in it, that’s the one that’s stuck in my mind the most—especially the last panel—because it seemed like it portrayed such a singularly unpleasant and stultifying way of life. Now, though, I know better, because I’ve lived it. It’s really not all that bad… until you start thinking about it. Which, in a way, is really the whole point of the last panel.

All things considered, yesterday was a very nice day, in many ways.

None of these quite made it as its own post.

• Setting the scene: a few weeks ago I began reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, and soon after, I finished reading it. (I quite enjoyed it, incidentally, though at times it seemed distressingly prescient, as though some people had treated it as an instruction manual rather than a cautionary example.) I mentioned reading it to an acquaintance, and he recommended that I read Homage to Catalonia and Down and Out in Paris and London next, saying they were his favorite Orwell books.

  As it happens, last week I found myself unable to get Lodger‘s “I Love Death” out of my head. (This will become more important later on.)

  Also last week, I discovered that AFI Silver would be playing 七人の侍 (Seven Samurai), and the page about it also mentioned a film called Wild Strawberries, saying: “Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece is to cinema what Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is to the novel: the definitive ‘memory piece’ of the art form.” This caught my eye, since memory is something I find fascinating, so I had it in the back of my mind as I made my way to go see Samurai.

  I was humming Lodger to myself the whole way to the movie theatre, and after buying my ticket I had some time to kill before the screening actually began, so I figured I’d go to the Borders around the corner on the off-chance they’d be carrying an album by a Finnish indie-rock band. And maybe while I was there, I’d be able to expand my Orwell collection. Once I entered the store, I strode purposefully towards the music section, confident that I wouldn’t find the album I was looking for, and already consoling myself with the knowledge that my taste in music was hip enough that a faceless conglomerate with a brick-and-mortar presence couldn’t possibly satisfy me. Alas, they had exactly what I wanted, and I had to settle for being thrilled with my purchase. I vaguely browsed the music section a bit more, hovering over a best-of Country Joe and the Fish compilation before deciding against it, when I started looking for Bobby Bare Jr. As it turned out, this time I did in fact stump the record store, but since they did have some Bobby Bare [Sr.], I picked up an album of his that had a particularly glowing cover blurb: “Good-time outlaw country — One of the greatest live recordings ever!”

  Music in hand, I made my way to the “Literature” section of the store, confident that a chain of bookstores that stocked eclectic Finnish CDs would have Orwell’s novels. They did have about eight copies each of 1984 and Animal Farm, but no Catalonia or Down and Out to be found, other than as excerpts in a compilation. Fuck that. Disappointed, I decided to look for that Proust memory thing I read about earlier. I found the Proust section quick enough (“Or” and “Pr” aren’t too far apart) and started looking at the spines of the books. I had a dim recollection of hearing about Proust as a writer of short stories, so I paid more attention to the slender books on the shelf and ignored the enormous tomes. After a fruitless search, I finally looked at the huge books in the Proust section and realized that this Remembrance thing was waaaay the fuck longer than I’d been expecting. Oh well, so it goes.

  There have been a lot of times when I’ve wondered about the threshold of incongruity required for a cashier to comment on a purchase. Apparently this time I crossed it, since as he rang everything up, the guy exclaimed, “Country music and Proust!?“

• This Tuesday I discovered that my login for the timekeeping/payroll system at work had been deactivated. My supervisor got it straightened out in a few minutes, but it was still mildly disconcerting.
• I think I’ve crossed a Rubicon of sorts: I got a haircut today, without even being at the point where I’d been needing a haircut for weeks or months already.

Over the course of a rather enjoyable evening[1] last night, I managed to get in a conversation about Vonnegut. Naturally, once I made my way home[2] I had a tremendous urge to read some Vonnegut, since it had been quite a while since I’d read anything of his. (In the past two or three years, other than a few articles and such, all I’d read was Welcome to the Monkey House (yet again) and Mother Night.) Upon looking at my bookshelf, though, I was suddenly reminded that during the heady days of my near-obsessive Vonnegut mania and evangelism, I’d managed to lend out the bulk of the books that I owned, and I had only a vague recollection of who the recipients might have been.[3]

So it goes.

Anyway, I settled into reading Jailbird (that and Rosewater were my only choices, and Jailbird won the coin toss), and immediately remembered why I love Vonnegut’s writing so much. I also immediately remembered the fan letter I’d once started writing to him, the one that will probably never be written or mailed, though the sentiments it was intended to articulate were and still are entirely sincere.

So it goes.

Anyway, upon reaching Chapter 1 of Jailbird I was thrilled to discover that this was the one with the guy who would sit quietly and periodically clap his hands three times. So my initial disappointment at not having Breakfast of Champions at hand was immediately replaced with delight that I was able to read the book I’d subconsciously wanted to read even more.

Anyway, I just wanted to cite a couple of excerpts that seem particularly apropos or something:

The tragedy of the planet was that its scientists found ways to extract time from topsoil and the oceans and the atmosphere—to heat their homes and power their speedboats and fertilize their crops with it; to eat it; to make clothes out of it; and so on. They served time at every meal, fed it to household pets, just to demonstrate how rich and clever they were. They allowed great gobbets of it to putrefy to oblivion in their overflowing garbage cans.

And:

“You told a fragmentary truth,” he said, “which has now been allowed to represent the whole! ‘Educated and compassionate public servants are almost certainly Russian spies.’ That’s all you are going to hear now from the semiliterate old-time crooks and spellbinders who want the government back, who think it’s rightly theirs. Without the symbiotic idiocies of you and Leland Clewes they could never have made the connection between treason and pity and brains. Now get out of my sight!”

* * *

[1] There are a lot of things or activities that I am indifferent towards, or don’t particularly care for, but will do or take part in to indulge someone else. There are comparatively few that I actively dislike. Many forms of dancing (and ‘dancing’) fall under the former category. Last night, though, I came to the conclusion that being in a throng of people bobbing vaguely to the rhythm of a shitty R’n'B song is decidedly in the latter. Other than that, though, I had a great time.

[2] As I exited the Metro station in the wee hours of the morning, I was slightly dismayed by the little cold things that kept landing on my face. Until, that is, I finally realized they were snow and became overjoyed.

[3] But then, even if I knew exactly who had them (which I actually do for a couple), it seems kind of strange to go up to somebody and say “Hey, remember that book I lent you 5 years ago? You know, the one I completely forgot about? If you’re done with it I’d like to have it back.” Like it’s somehow presumptuous for me to want something back even though it’s mine and (as I recall) I even wrote my name in it. Of course, my real concern could just be that I might have to give back the books I’ve accidentally stolen from their rightful owners over the years. But what are you supposed to do when, a few weeks after lending you a book, the guy drops out of school (or something), disappears off the face of the earth, and you never see him again? And I didn’t even finish reading that book (at which point, incidentally, I immediately lent it to somebody else, as if it were mine with which to do so) till last month, which was about six years after I began it.

So, after an enjoyable week or so in Danmark, I find myself right back where I was before I left. Hopefully I’ll have something more substantive soon, but for the moment here is a “teaser”.

» » Continue reading . . .

To Denmark, or not to Denmark, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of the 40-hour workweek,
Or to use up all one’s leave time
And go to Copenhagen. To live: to drink.

$425 roundtrip fare, how could I say no? Now that the non-refundable ticket is booked, I should probably make sure I’ll actually be able to take all that leave time a month from now.

Like any reasonable person, I’d rather see a movie on the big screen than on a smaller one. So it is that while I enjoy going to the cinema in general, I particularly like going to see revivals and rereleases, and I’ve been lucky enough to see such classics as This Is Spinal Tap and a few parts of Kieslowski’s Dekalog in theatres. And one of the biggest perks of the cinema classes I took in college was not just having an opportunity to see Orphée, Броненосец Потёмкин, and The Magnificent Ambersons, but seeing them on a proper screen.

So it was that I was happy to discover that a (fairly) nearby movie theater was having a Kubrick retrospective of sorts, and last Saturday I watched The Shining, which I’d somehow managed to avoid seeing before, and Spartacus, which Mr Lang sacrificed a week of my 7th-grade history class to show us. For both films, it was quite bizarre to see preview and “note the location of the nearest exit” reels that were in better condition than the main features.

» » Continue reading . . .

It’s snowing outside, and the snow appears to be sticking. Snow in January—what a shocker, right? This really shouldn’t be noteworthy, but I’m just happy that the weather has finally caught up to where it should be this time of year. I mean, it was 65° outside a week ago. That ain’t right.

People I know:

• Bruce Greenspan
• Butterflynn
• Critical
• EstonianPunkCat
• Fire_Hazard
• Hille
• Manganese
• PBones
• Scarlett1304
• Spine Porridge
• Supachump
• SushiDeJaneiro
• Tomahagne
• Vaarikaisand
• WordToKyle
• Zepsub
• Zot

Things I read:

• badscience
• BillMon
• CommonDreams
• DailyKos
• Dan’s Data
• ebalogaalne
• Hullabaloo
• I, Cringely
• In These Times
• Ironic Sans
• Language Log
• Literal-Minded
• MediaMatters
• Paul Graham
• Salon
• Slacktivist
• The Economist
• The Gadflyer
• The Grauniad
• The Nation
• The Onion
• The Register
• The Superest
• Unclaimed Territory
• Wikipedia