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08.28.04 i spent the day alone. jessie went with mark to do something fun in the east bay, while i sought solace in the space and time. i took a cool shower and went to the gym. saturday afternoons are nice at my gym, sparsely attended, devoid of the self-conscious showing off that typically accompanies bodily self-improvement. leaving, stepping outside into the warm grasp of the still afternoon heat, i felt a kind of exhausted relief. on the way home, i stopped at the store to buy a juice. the cold case was broken and one of the familiar faces that i often see loitering around the place was busily stuffing the warming bottled in amongst the produce. i picked up the one that looked the least-sweaty and took it home. i rode the N all the way to the end of the line. i had a vague idea of stopping somewhere along the way, finding a coffee shop or other such point of rest and working. instead, i just sat, watching the city and the sun slipping away, the train bounding outward toward the cool fog that lay ahead. at the beach, for the first time since i moved here, i sat in the sand and listened to the waves. it gave off some held-in warmth as i dug my toes under the cool surface. i watched a woman running with her dog, a frustrated surfer walking in from the water, a pair of foreign men (shoes, dark socks, shorts and fleece jackets) playing frisbee and drinking beer from bottles. a homeless man slept a little ways off, up in the dunes, a big rolling suitcase tipped over next to him. after and hour, i went back and watched the trains turn around, here at the cold, dark end of the world. i joined one, and rode back into the city, the same frolicking children screaming at each other a few seats behind. i got off at the first sunny, grassy place i saw. i took my shoes off and felt the grass with my toes, and ventured up the tree-lined street, past well-kept row houses and park benches filled with attractive older men, sitting together in the shaded sunlight, glowing faintly, slowly growing older. a coffee shop presented itself and i took refuge, a warm cup chasing off the rising breeze that drifted through the front door. a slim young man sat next to me and i noticed his feet, splayed out in front of him, clad in a well-worn, pair of slightly frayed grey shoes. i wondered to myself why i don't have anything so perfectly worn in. my thoughts drifted to jessie, and the warm longing for his steady, quiet presence that percolates on these kind of soft, lonely days. # 08.27.04 there's a new roommate today in the prosaic* house: tyler has finally relented and fired up his own weblog. no longer content to live the life of an innocent bystander, he's taken the plunge and fired up his very own sex-blog. or something that closely resembles a sex-blog. check it out, but don't let him catch you checking it out. # welcome to summer in san francisco! finally. i'm enjoying the warm weather, walking to work, eating lunch on the roof or strolling along the waterfront, wandering around the castro or the mission at night in a t-shirt; it's really a perfect thing. but our apartment tends to get a little on the warm side. all of the sunlight that we get all day long, plus the lack of cross-ventilation, work in tandem with the principals of physics and the rising of the heat from the lower floors of our building to create out own tiny heat sink. mmmmm, hot. luckily, the hardwood floor is clean and cool, and makes a wonderful (mind the knees) place to have sex on a warm evening like this. # 08.26.04 i left for work late today, with barely enough time to catch the bus. but on emerging from the front door, i realized that it was a beautiful morning, warm and clear and sunny and windless. so rare has this scene been recently (this summer has been particularly dreary) that i opted to walk to work, at the cost of being almost 20 minutes late. but who cares, when the sun is shining like this? so, with no real inspiration in my head to help orchestrate my commuting music, i set the ipod on shuffle, and this is what i got:
# 08.24.04 anybody interested in seeing the rapture, interpol and mogwai this weekend? some guys convinced them all to come play in san francisco on saturday afternoon. # 08.23.04 ok, this just kills me. this is why god created radiohead blogs. so i can know all about this kind of shit. too funny. # 08.21.04 a home at the end of the world is a wonderful movie, truly enjoyable in it's successes and utterly forgivable in it's failures. open water is something of a one-trick pony, but still manages to be completely terrifying and enjoyable. you'll notice, if you're an avid reader, that i have a greater respect for and enjoyment of reviews and shared opinions on things (movies in particular) than my partner, though his admonishment — that one should always make up one's own mind — rings with truth. # i'm sitting back, legs sprawled out on the couch, staring at jessie's magically bizarre clock. the second hand is the only thing providing motion to the room, it's faultless progress forward made all the more delicate by the rather inexplicable feather on it's tip, which bounces with each forward motion of the arm, giving it the appearance of following every forward step with a half-step in reverse. my mouth is filled with the thin, metallic flavors of a just-finished book, just enough sweetness to cut through the salty taste of something completed. the space of minutes that follows the last page of a book is magical, a bubble of time devoid of any real thought or happening, a warm bathtub of emotion in which i languish for as long as i can be allowed. it's been nice out, recently. even when it's cold and gloomy, as it is today, the edges seem to be dulled, the cold not so cold and the hot not so hot. it's a more idealized san francisco on these days, the kind protected by a veil of fog, enshrined in some shared mystique. it's a wonderful day for thinking. # i can spit. this is, you see, a most recent development. when i was in grade school, that prime time for saliva-based amusement, i was found out for the utter disappointment that i truly was. when all the other young boys would engage in that most-heralded tradition of exposition, i would shy away, inherently recognizing not only a lack of skill, but a distinct physiological ineptitude. on those rare occasions when i would make the attempt, my mouth would produce only the most thick, mucusy concoctions, which would piddle out from my lips and, at very best, dribble onto the concrete. so it comes as a great shock to me that, quite suddenly (perhaps within the last few months, even) i have developed this latent ability. like the very best of them, i can suddenly put forth a steady and intimidating stream of saliva, with an almost bulls-eye precision. it is as if my salivary glands have just awoken to the realization of their own previous under-performance, producing (in overtime) a a perfectly thin, new kind of mucus, ideal for loosely binding the now copious volume of spittle. this, only 13 years too late to leverage my flagging fifth-grade popularity. damn you glands, you've foiled me yet again. # 08.15.04 i have to confess more than a little disapointment in garden state. i mean, not just predictable, but thin. really, it all went into the trailer. but i'm pretty excited about the rumors that are flying over this one. update: ok, this thought deserves some embellishment. but i must begin with a caveat; lots and lots of people seem to be enjoying this movie. in fact, pretty much everyone in the theater outside of my little squadron sounded like they really liked it. so maybe you'll like it in spite of me. i mean, look at you. you're always doing things to spite me. the thing that bothered me about this movie was how thin it was. the characters were like ghosts, almost not even there. there was so little attention paid to their development, and the whole way through the movie we're asked to simply watch them do these random things, act out these random impulses, explaining them away with mediocre dialog, with nary even an attempt at developing motive. essentially, this film violated the first and most sacred principal of your 10th grade english class: show, don't tell. there's really an invisible force that drives a successful film. it's something more than the plot or the dialog, more than the sets or the actors. it's a something intangible, almost undefinable. as i see it, it's most often a combination of direction and camera work, of lighting and sound and even music. and it's a pretty delicate balance, one in which each of these things plays off of each other to create subtext, and more importantly a current, some kind of flow that carries the film and it's characters and the audience along, while providing a force to unify the action and the plot. too much man-handling and the audience becomes aware of the manipulation. if you're obvious (see: gratuitous camera-play, overabundance of recognizable lyrical music, the substitution of lyrical music over dialog to establish motive, static characterization or inexplicable behavior) then your audience will recognize what you're attempting to do, and in the mostly-cyncial way that audiences have about them, they'll turn on you. allow me for a moment to draw on another current movie, to present my example. in johnathan demme's remake of the manchurian candidate, characters are frequently shot head-on, entirely owning the frame as the camera subtly slides towards them. it's very minute; you probably wouldn't even notice it. but it creates a hypnotic suggestion, nothing goofy or gratuitous, but just enough to create an imperceptible visual cue back to the film's main theme. juxtapose that with the grab-bag of trickery that pops in and out of garden state: our hero sits on the couch, drugged out and moving in real-time as his surroundings speed around him; the three "main" characters (a suggestion that only seems to appear in the last 1/3 of the movie, oddly) walk together in tight formation, two clearly following the third, and as they turn a corner, the scene cuts to a slow-motion, high contrast head-on shot, 15 seconds on a thuggish warpath, when in fact the characters are mostly confused as to their destination and purpose; not one, but three fly-away camera shots within the first half of the movie, one of which cuts directly back into the same scene it just flew out of; a happy couple talking about how happy they are being happy, all but drawing a line with a big black sharpie between the hero and the love interest at what we are told to believe is the hero's lowest moment. going into it, i wanted to like this film. and somewhere, in a few tiny crevices, it showed a sparkle of genuineness, some suggestion at it's true intent. really, this movie wanted to show you a young man who was lost. and it might have had some success if real weight had really been put into his stumbling. instead, we follow him haplessly around for two hours (over a span of how many fiction-days? that's key too!), in which he tells us that he's depressed, tells us that he's on medication, tells us that he has guilt, and finally tells us that he loves a girl that, quite frankly, hasn't been much more than an affection college pal (i mean that metaphorically, i know they weren't college pals). and at the end (:::SPOILER:::) we see our hero come to all of the shattering realizations that he needs to get his life back and become a man (ahem). but after 2 hours of indie-rock sampler, we still have no idea why or how he might come to those realizations. every change of heart (there are a few) is almost completely without motivation or explanation. and that's just flat. # 08.13.04 damnit. julia childs died. this makes me sad too. maybe this was part of our three? (reagan, ray, julia?) but can you believe she made 92 eating those handfulls of raw beef? wow. # 08.12.04 looks like we lost this round. and this one too. but it's ok. some day we'll be real people, instead of pariahs. # i watched the old man climb onto the bus, struggling up the stairs, both hands clutching the railing. his skin was wrinkled and brown, worn like the pages of a favorite book. his head hung low, neck bent into a crooked, painful hook, as if the head might wobble loose at any moment and tumble to the floor. he shuffled across the front of the car, taking an empty seat next to a discarded newspaper. quietly, he picked up the top fold of the paper, the classifieds, unfolding and refolding it, smoothing it out in his lap. i watched as he picked through the loose sections of the paper, painstakingly reordering them, inserting each previous section into it's proper parent. the auto section, sports, metro, area, front page. folding the last section over, he held up his prize, face set in a satisfied grimace. i watched as he folded the paper in half, tucked it under his arm and shuffled towards the door, climbing down at the next stop. # 08.09.04 in the dream, i am being chased down a series of alley ways, dark, empty industrial streets lined with chain-link fence. i'm running from a heavy set, middled aged man. he is wearing an old, sagging khaki suit. he clearly has a gun. i run into a nearby building, bursting in on a sparsely attended cotillion. the man follows me inside, staggering behind me, yelling. i'm up against the wall. he's screaming unintelligibly. the gun is raised to my head. behind him, someone yells out. the man is startled, and he fumbles with the gun. it crashes to the floor. i bend down and grab it. i'm holding the gun in my hands. it's small, a revolver, with a short barrel. i've never held a gun before. i point it at him and he stumbles backwards, falls to the ground. i point the gun over my head and fire off all six rounds, directly into the ceiling. my ride was going to show up at 8 this morning. i was going to san carlos. it's early, but i'm still running late. standing in front of the mirror, i could see a stray nose hair. carelessly, i let the small scissors slip in my hands and i cut myself. i felt the warm rivulet of blood as it ran down to my lip. i dabbed it away, but it wouldn't stop. i took a shower, the blood still running. the phone rang. my ride was here. i wasn't not dressed and i was still bleeding. with some effort, i stopped the blood, tied my shoes and ran out the door. turning to throw the deadbolt behind me, i realized that i didn't have my keys. or my wallet. jessie's still sleeping, but i rang the buzzer maniacally. i pounded on the door. finally, i fished my cell phone out of the briefcase i have, to take my computer home from the office. groggy, slightly confused, he answered the door in his underwear. in the elevator at last, I glanced up at the ceiling, looking for bullet holes. # 08.01.04 ah, yes, of course: incumbent administration declares country's most obvious terrorist targets are, well, obvious. and look at that! just in time for john-n-john's first news-week following the convention. wow! what a suprise! # « July 2004 | archive index | September 2004 » built with movabletype |
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