...or maybe not, but it struck me as somehow connected to the previous post - anyway, here's William Vollmann in the latest Bookforum, in a piece about the American ache to escape the grid:
"Were there such an animal as national character, then I might define an American as follows: longing for and half-expecting perfect freedom and happiness; disappointed by the authoritarian constraints of present necessity (which we'll call 'the grid'); unnerved by the conflict between aspiration and reality; uncertain whether to blame oneself or others for imperfection; ready to 'reinvent' oneself to achieve self-sufficiency, profit, or peace."
I haven't had a haircut since I got my current day job, back in June a year ago. My hair doesn't grow very fast, so this is not the Crystal Gayle nightmare one might think. But I do need a haircut: it's looking a little unkempt and shaggy. What's holding me back (besides laziness and a general failure to accurately measure the passage of time) is this vague idea that submitting to a haircut would mean accepting my current circumstances. Not in a hippie, CSNY sense exactly -- it's more that a haircut would mark my current life, the Office Life, as normal. Routine. It would represent settling in.
Which is absurd: I've been at this job for almost a year, I should be settled in by now. But I haven't bothered accumulating an office wardrobe, for example, or getting a proper lunchbox or shoes that meet the dress code. (There's a dress code!) I figure, if I keep my presentation haphazard, barely passing, it's easier to convince myself that this is all just pretend, a costume I'm wearing, a role, nothing real or god forbid permanent. I am working in an office but I don't really work in an office - that isn't my life.
Before this, the longest I'd held an office job in the past 10 years was for about eight months, and most of it was part-time. In retrospect, that's pretty dreamy. But at the time it felt like I was chained to a rock in a cave with poison being slowly dripped upon me from above. Gray carpet walls. Fluorescent lights! The horror.
I mean obviously I'm just spoiled. I've been able for years to get away with doing work that was (a) on a pretty flexible, self-determined schedule and (b) essentially the same stuff I do for fun. My dad pointed this out the other day: up until recently, my life pretty much was my work. They were integrated. Now the two pursuits are entirely separate: I have to carve out time and energy for my real life from whatever's left over after my job. (Which, usually, isn't much. Ten hours of sitting on one's ass repairing legal documents might sound relaxing, but for whatever reason, it wears me out.)
The day-to-day schedule is as big a factor as the nature of the work, I think. My jobs have typically been project-driven: various tiny emergencies you work on intensely until the deadline, followed by a reprieve before the next tiny emergency, which is different from the last one. The scary part is never knowing how many emergencies might come your way; each one could be the last. This job, though, feels like an emergency all the time, with no hint of change ahead. There's not, like, a point at which I'm finished with the work and can relax for a while. Next week looks about the same as this week. It's like driving across Kansas, very slowly. This is tiring at an existential level, and I don't know how you guys all manage it so well. If I were a regular person I'd have about 25 years of this ahead of me.
Here's a thought I like, from a magazine interview with the poet Frank Bidart; in this section he's talking about the word "making":
"It's one of the principles of the world. We live in this awkward culture that tells people that they have to have a job, have money to buy things, but that the job does not have to be connected to one's soul, one's inner life or spirit or sense of self-worth. On the contrary, the aim of work seems to be retirement where you can fish all day or go to Florida or someplace -- which seems to me grotesque, an absolute impoverishing of the idea of human life. Human beings are makers. It's the only thing that gives human beings something approaching satisfaction. It's completely central to what a human being is, to living in a complicated process where one must constantly accept givens that one can't control."
...and later:
"Making is a way of knowing and trying to embody what you feel you do know."
Anyway, I realize I'm being a complete pansy about the job. It's a perfectly good job, and I'm lucky to have one at the moment. But so often it leaves me too worn out to make things, and that doesn't seem likely to change anytime soon, and I'm not sure what to do.
An in-betweener post to tide you over while I finish tinkering around with a real post...
This song has been on permanent repeat in the Becky den lately --
(Not currently for topical reasons, oddly enough; I just think it's lovely.)
And this just came my way, via Mike Russell, source of all good things --
And speaking of Mike Russell, here's a hilarious drawing he made from an email my awesome brother (hi Karl!) sent me about telling Real Live Stories at bedtime to the kids (my little twin nephews). Their list of demands for the contents of the real-live stories (an egg, a big rock, a big chicken, a visitor) led to this composite illustration:
I've heard Karl and Natalie telling these stories before, and it's the greatest thing: the little dudes are rapt, suspense levels are extremely high, and the narrative shenanigans of the storytellers are impressive and humbling. Maybe I can get Karl to record some of them to send me, and then I can have real-live bedtime stories too.
What else? Hmmm......the two best movies I've seen this year are Frances Ha and Upstream Color. I'm not reviewing them or anything but I might come back here later and write a little more. For now, the trailers:
This one, though, might be too revealing-of-surprises....or maybe it's fine, I'm not sure. You should probably just go see the movie if you can, and then watch the trailer. Not everyone will love it, but I'll take the chance:
So remember all those times this past fall and winter when you wanted to hang out but I said I couldn't because I was "working" on a "book," and you figured I was probably just making it up so I could stay at home with a box of wine and watch Buffy on Netflix?
Well, you may have been right about some of those times (except it was Alias -- Buffy was the previous winter). But most of the time I really was working on a book. And now it's all done! (Let's hang out!)
This is the first non-Lonely Planet guidebook I've done, and the first I wrote from scratch (rather than updating an old edition, the typical LP deal). It's also the first time I've had a publicity department! So, it looks like I'll be holding court in a few places around town this spring, in case you discover any huge mistakes in the book and would like to point them out to me in person. (I encourage this.)
It may sound like I’ve got some sort of formula by which I write. Hell, no! You’re out there completely on your own—all you’ve got to do is write. OK, it’s nine in the morning. All I’ve got to do is write. But I go hours before I’m able to write a word. I make tea. I mean, I used to make tea all day long. And exercise, I do that every other day. I sharpened pencils in the old days when pencils were sharpened. I just ran pencils down. Ten, eleven, twelve, one, two, three, four—this is every day. This is damn near every day. It’s four-thirty and I’m beginning to panic. It’s like a coiling spring. I’m really unhappy. I mean, you’re going to lose the day if you keep this up long enough. Five: I start to write. Seven: I go home. That happens over and over and over again. So why don’t I work at a bank and then come in at five and start writing? Because I need those seven hours of gonging around. I’m just not that disciplined. I don’t write in the morning—I just try to write.
Apologies, glob fans: I've been off securing employment. Successfully! No doubt through some sort of clerical error I've been hired at a supersecret location to sit and read encoded documents all day long. My office is very high above the street and has a view of the tram, and the tram as we know is almost my favorite thing about Portland. There is also free coffee. But I'm expected to dress like an adult, which takes a lot of time, so - less blogging, at least during this initial adjustment period. Back soon. Probably tomorrow.
Things that never crossed my mind while I was riding my bike on the SFRC Season Opener this weekend:
* work of any kind
* acute need to mow the lawn
* money, chronic lack of
* boyfriend, chronic lack of
* pointlessness of reviewing movies in the internet era
* that I have no wearable clothes for hot weather
* haircut? or no? yes?
Let me tell you, it was nice. Of course, motorcycles have many other excellent qualities beyond their total absorption of the rider's attention. For instance, when they gather in large groups, they tend to attract a certain level of mischief. Also beer. This certainly proved to be the case at the after-party, which occurred in a fenced-off compound surrounding a long, rusted-out dock and boat-launch ramp underneath the St Johns Bridge. A guy we know has leased the property so he can park his tugboat there and live on it, but the tugboat isn't there yet. Plenty of firewood washes up from the river onto the concrete boat ramp, so we built a bonfire at the end of the ramp and started in on the beer and sausages. Guess how long it took before someone rode a motorcycle down the pier? Not very long.
That was the night of the Supermoon, so just to be on the safe side I started text-messaging a play-by-play to my friend Mike. In case things turn weird it's good to have an off-site perspective on where it all went wrong. Turned out the adventure remained small-scale and well contained. But it's not every day you get to ride in the Cylon Commander Seat of a semi-truck dodging obstacles in a vacant lot. Partial transcript:
MR: Hope the Cinco de Mayo ride ruled!
Me: Still ruling! Partying under the st johns bridge.
Me: We're riding motorcycles off a pier by accident, whee!
MR: I hope you are riding away from many explosions
Me: And not looking back
MR: Why bother you know what you hath wrought
Me: Now they're trying to drive an old semi truck. What could go wrong?
MR: "What could go wrong?" might be a pretty good Sang-Froid club motto if they're still looking for one
MR: In Latin: "Quod Posset Ire Iniuriam"
Me: Now they're maybe using a stumptown van to jump the semi.
MR: Why do I fear this text thread is about to become evidentiary.
Me: They got it running! I pulled the horn. Lifelong dream realized!
MR: Okay, that's pretty goddamn sweet. Somewhere a schoolbus full of kids is delighted you did that.
Me: The semi just almost ran over the bonfire and into the river.
MR: If this is another set of those "They're playing The Cure at the Hawthorne Strip"-style texts, I will be sorely disappointed [this is fair, I've been known to exaggerate and even just make stuff up in text messages]
Me: I have video
MR: I hope you get yourself filmed pulling the semi horn as a fire roars behind you
Me: I am now in the truck
Me: Cops are here yeay!
MR: Now it's a party
Me: They retreated in disgust
MR: Let me know when someone plays The Smiths "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" [he's clearly not buying any of this]
MR: You're in jail now aren't you
I was later reminded that when the cops rolled by, we decided to "act cool" and "seem normal" by turning up the miniature boombox extra loud and dancing. Because what could be more innocent.
There really is video but I have yet to figure out how to get it off my fancyphone and edit out the embarrassing giggly parts. Meanwhile here is the truck:
OK fine, so my Tom Hardy date movie (This Means War) was terrible. In interviews Hardy has called it "a very light entertainment," which is both an under- and an overstatement. I laughed exactly one time (because of something Chelsea Handler said) and was instantly mortified. It's the kind of movie in which the opening scene has a suitcase full of money spilling open on top of a skyscraper, hundred-dollar bills disappearing in the helicopter wind, and nobody even notices.
That could be because everyone in this movie has plenty of money, including federal agencies (parallel universe?), and the characters only show up to work because their offices are so attractive. Plot summary: two CIA guys, Chris Pine (who wears Savile Row suits) and my boyfriend, Tom Hardy (who is less fancy but whose shirts are still pretty tight for government work), fall for the same woman (Reese Witherspoon). Tom Hardy loves Reese because he reeeeeally wants a family but has been dismissed by the mother of his kid, apparently because she thinks he's a travel agent, and travel agents are obviously ridiculous and undateable. (Watch for the magical transformation when she finds out that's not really what he does for a living!)
Chris Pine loves Reese because she's so smart.
(We can tell she's smart because she knows the titles of multiple Hitchcock films and has her very own opinions about them. Also because she can remember information she learned on her product-testing job even whole days later, when it's useful in emergencies.)
There's also some kind of a sub-story about an evil German on a vengeance kick -- he's after Chris and Tom not because of all that money they spilled earlier but because they killed his brother during the skyscraper fight -- but the movie doesn't care about that and neither do we. At first, Chris and Tom pretend they're spying on Reese because of the evil German situation, but after about five minutes they drop this facade and it's an open contest to see who gets in her pants first. The villain is reduced to the role of prop, which bums him out so much that he drives off the edge of an unfinished highway in despair. (Spoiler!)
On the plus side, the director ("McG" [??? whatever], who directed Terminator Salvation, and Charlie's Angels) seems also to be in love with Tom Hardy, so there are lots of scenes in which the camera lingers fondly on his radiance, and his shirts come unbuttoned often. Which I felt was a commendable directorial choice, under the circumstances.
Short version: just go watch Bronson again. Seriously.
Greetings, glob fans. Seems I've got a lot of catching up to do. Meanwhile, though...I'm very much looking forward to my Valentine's Day date with Tom Hardy:
(Apparently there's some other chick in this movie, but....whatever. I've watched the trailer a whole bunch of times, and all I see is Tom.)
This is my nephew. As you can see, he's gone zombie. This photo was taken minutes after he'd eaten the rest of the family. Look how delighted he is. And how civilized! Fork and bib and everything. If only all zombies were so well brought up. (And adorable.)
OK fine, it's beet soup. (Or so my mother claims.) Still: a little bit terrifying, right?
Due to an unfortunate misunderstanding, I recently watched the new Eddie Murphy movie, Tower Heist. It provoked some lingering questions, detailed below. If any of you can help clear these up, naturally, I'm all ears. (I'd insert the distasteful phrase "spoiler alert" here except that, honestly, who cares? But if you haven't seen the movie yet [yet!] and are going to be upset about learning some key "plot points," well, first, congratulations on being able to read; I'm genuinely surprised. And second, please stop reading now.)
The movie takes place in a luxury apartment building in Manhattan. Ben Stiller is the building manager. Casey Affleck is the concierge. Precious is a maid. Ferris Bueller is a disgraced "Wall Street guy" being evicted. Alan Alda is a super-rich penthouse owner who for some reason plays online chess with Stiller, who lives in an inexplicably posh Astoria flat. Eddie Murphy is among the thugs who lurk outside Stiller's apartment. Brett Ratner (X-Men: The Last Stand; Rush Hour) directs. About five people wrote the screenplay, apparently in isolation from one another.
My questions include:
When and why did Ben Stiller's entire staff go from "we hate you for losing our pensions" to "we're crying because you got fired"?
Am I allowed to count the pale, squishy lump that is Matthew Broderick in this movie as yet another of Sarah Jessica Parker's aesthetic crimes? It's her fault, right?
Wait, can we go back to that Lego model for a second? I'm not sure I'm clear on the plan.
OK so is the entire car made of gold? If yes, why are there car keys? I don't think solid-gold engines are known for being super drivable. (Too melty.)
Did I miss when mocking fat girls became hilarious again?
Not to nitpick -- I know it's only a movie -- but how did four non-mechanics disassemble an entire vintage automobile inside a drained swimming pool on top of a building, without so much as a screwdriver in evidence, let alone hydraulic lifts etc., and then box each part for shipping, in a single night, without anybody noticing? Was the UPS guy not a little suspicious?
Speaking of which, does the typical hotel worker know what to do with solid-gold car parts when they arrive mysteriously on the doorstep via UPS? Ask yourself: if someone mailed you an ingot, would you know how to cash it? (No Googling!)
Is Casey Affleck married in real life? He's dreamy.
What, no prison time for the old guy trying to slay a whole marching band with a delivery truck? Guess he seems pretty stable to you, then, what with the two suicide attempts, grand theft auto and the nonstop maniacal laughter?
Why exactly is that Snoopy float so terrifying, I wonder?
Do we think Alan Alda and Ben Stiller have resumed their chess game in prison?
And finally: why do you hate America, Brett Ratner? Is it because we deserve it?
So The Rum Diary opened yesterday - an adaptation, for those who don't know, of an early Hunter S Thompson novel, starring Johnny Depp and directed by Bruce Robinson (who did Withnail & I). As my pal Mike Russell mentioned on Friday's episode of Cort & Fatboy (thanks, fellas!), I had a great time watching it, but the more I thought about it afterward, the more it bothered me.
Depp plays Paul Kemp, a sort of proto-Thompson avatar who washes up in Puerto Rico having been hired from afar to work at an English-language daily that is blatantly collapsing. Depp's really good in it; he mostly abandons his Jack Sparrow mugging in favor of a deadpan nervousness with occasional twitching. (Remember when he played Ichabod Crane as a frightened little girl in Sleepy Hollow? It's weird how restrained that performance seems in hindsight.)
Even better is Michael Rispoli, who plays the staff photographer, Sala. He's the heart and the brains of the story, and everything gets sort of chilly when he's out of the frame. The villain is white-linen-suited developer (and ex journo) Hal Sanderson, played by Aaron Eckhart. He's too Evil to be a convincing character, but it's fun to see Eckhart being rotten again. Sanderson's girlfriend (Amber Heard) is supposedly a bewitching mermaid minx/damsel in distress, but I found her pretty dull. And Giovanni Ribisi shuffles around as sort of the Ghost of HST Future, a cautionary tale and/or inspiration, depending on which parts of the Hunter legend you're devoted to.
Anyway. Kemp's an idealistic young reporter who is easily seduced by alcohol and mermaids and also maybe by the cash and sweet car Sanderson throws at him in an attempt to get the writer to plant some PR stories currying public favor for a hideous and probably illegal development project. The project is a grody bait-and-switch that would ravage a pristine island and make Sanderson heaps of money. It's the kind of widespread-corruption story that would make a young reporter's career, if that young reporter's editor weren't somehow involved and thus reluctant to print anything more hard-hitting than astrology columns and bowling-league results. Kemp does protest, but not too much, and he's pretty happy to borrow Sanderson's car. That whole "nail the bastards to the wall" part only comes once the string of selfish greed causes the newspaper's payroll to vanish.
The movie is really well made, and there are scenes of pure alchemical beauty in it - notably a dark, still moment in which Kemp and Sala drop a mysterious liquid into their eyeballs and wait for it to kick in. (And there's a line in this scene that echoes Withnail & I: "You're giving me fear!") The whole thing is a lot of manic fun. And yet....
The thing people forget about Hunter Thompson - and the thing this movie seems intent on distracting its audience from - is how genuinely sad he could be. It's the same way they forget how funny Hemingway was. We inherit these established ideas of what these writers were like, and then we never feel the need to look deeper. There's both accidental and deliberate confusion between the man and the myth. In Hunter's case the real guy vanished early into the character of Raoul Duke. And then that character himself became cartoonified (literally and metaphorically). People associate him with a trunk full of drugs, bats on the highway, lizards in the carpet. Nobody thinks of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a sad book. But that scene where he talks about seeing the high-water mark of the culture -- that's tragedy. He's staring out at the desiccated corpse of the American Dream, which back then you could still discuss without irony, and he's mourning. In The Rum Diary, there's a scene in which Kemp and Sala are watching Nixon on TV and Kemp says "When will this blizzard of shame finally end?" and you're supposed to laugh. And then he adds that in a few decades someone will come along who's so much worse that he makes Nixon look like a liberal. And again it's played for comedy.
Which is fine, I guess, because if you don't laugh at this stuff you end up spending your whole life drunk and then blowing your pickled brains out.
But to me, the trouble with this movie is that it works so hard to distract you from its own substance. Even just the basic plot outline: aside from hallucinogens and cockfights and some really dodgy club scenes at Carnaval, what exactly happens? Kemp tries to play the role of journalist as scrappy superhero and save an island. He fails. Then he leaves. Sure, in the end maybe he gets the girl, but idealism and journalism and Puerto Rico all get shafted. And the way the movie's set up, we don't care -- we're psyched that Kemp and his pals didn't get shot or jailed. We're supposed to think they won, because they showed the bastards, they stuck it to the Man. But what about that island development project? what about the pillaged newspaper offices? Never mind - let's steal a boat and go chase that mermaid.
The lesson being that you can be a complete wreck of a person, fueled by rum and failure and a wholly untested idealism, and get just as much accomplished as if you're all freshly showered and sober in front of the typewriter, because whatever you write while sane is not what the Man will print anyway, so you might as well drop hallucinogens into your eyeballs - certainly beats working.
It is much, much cooler to imagine journalism this way, but it also kind of misses the point.
I should probably add that I've never read the novel; it came out after my love affair with HST had peaked. (It never ended, but it has ebbed slightly over the years.) I saw somewhere that Jann Wenner said Hunter would never have published the book 20 years earlier, and that was enough to make me avoid it, although at some point I'm sure I'll pick it up. (But never that last Hemingway novel, ever ever ever.) But if you really want to watch Hunter Thompson become Hunter Thompson, read Hell's Angels.
Anyway. Huge rant, probably incoherent. But there you have it.
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