One of the first memories I have of my Dad is crawling underneath the “tent” he made with his leg. I was small enough and he was big enough that being under a bent leg was considered a tent. This was most likely at our house on Franklin Street. My dad was a big man. 6′3″ and over 200 pounds when I was growing up. It was easy to sit on his shoulders to put a basketball through the hoop, and from him I learned that the hoop is big enough to fit two balls through side-by-side. Other things I learned from my father include how to jig for crappie and bait a nightcrawler. For the most part I feel like I was a great disappointment to him. We had different interests, and while I didn’t realize it as a child, I don’t think we connected as people very well. He encouraged me to play baseball and basketball, but I spent my time in left field chasing butterflies and any brief court time I had, tripping over my own feet. That’s not to say we didn’t enjoy some of the same things, fishing and classic cars are both things I have a great interest in to this day. I even helped him and one of his buddies restore a 1970 GTO. Since my dad was a mechanic, he understood all about engine guts and I mainly ran the sandblaster and was gopher.

When my mom filed for divorce I saw a side of my father that I’d either never seen before, or had been oblivious to. One visit with him resulted in a long drive around the country, for hours, as he yelled about all kinds of different things, and another incident so scared me that I jumped out of the same GTO we’d restored because I was afraid of being beaten once we got to his place. After that incident, most of my contact with him ceased. It has been something around ten years now since I’ve spoken with him. I think I still want his approval, although I don’t seek it. The love and trust that I had for him as a child is so tangled and complicated by hindsight and the new sides that I saw that it is easier to maintain my current space than attempt to establish civil and diplomatic relations.

I don’t spend much time thinking about him, but when I do, I mainly wonder about the lessons I missed during my teenage years, and how I might be a different man [bad or good?] today as a result of them.

I made it to the second session of grantee interviews last night, out in Mt. Pleasant. We interviewed six grant-seekers over at three hour period. The segregation of Cleveland proper was really brought home to me during this time. The Neighborhood Connections GMMC is quite a diverse bunch of people, and by necessity. Also by necessity, people that don’t live in the neighborhoods that send the grants are the ones who decide which grants get funded. This helps avoid conflicts of interest, but also creates some awkward-feeling situations. I’m the youngest member of the committee and a minority on it since I’m white and a dude.

The appearance of our sub-committee doesn’t exactly reflect the diversity of the whole group, though. I’m afraid that to many of the folks coming in, it looked like black folk coming to white folk for money. My sub-group [of which I'm just an alternate] is composed of 3 smart and experienced women, two white and one black. I mainly sit back and let them ask the questions and act like a sponge. It is surprisingly easy to tell how prepared some of the grantseekers are, how enthusiastic they are about their program, how viable their program is.

Apparently, Mt. Pleasant has a lot of crime and a few times the group stopped talking grants and started talking community activism, which I suppose should be expected considering no one is a member of the GMMC unless they are active in their own communities. I’m wondering about the declined grant-seeker process. I wonder if the committee gives reasons why a grant is declined. I think it would be useful, because some grants would be awesome if they could be implemented or organized a bit better.

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #321: Ingmar Bergman’s Jungfrukällan [The Virgin Spring].

The Virgin Spring is based on a Swedish ballad called “Töre’s Daughter in Vänge” that, for the life of me, I cannot find online [although it is available as part of the liner notes for the Criterion edition of the film]. This ballad recounts the rape and murder of a virgin on her way to church and the father’s retribution. The ballad is short and was fleshed out significantly in Bergman’s final treatment, with added layers of conflict, pathos and existential struggle to support the weight of a feature length film. I remember a couple of film majors who hated Bergman when I was in college. I’ve never really had that animosity, I like the stateliness of his style and the respect with which he treats his characters. The Virgin Spring is no slouch when it comes to this, and Ang Lee’s introduction [apparently The Virgin Spring was the first art film he ever saw] seems to back up my own feelings on Bergman.

The story is a miracle play, a morality play and a folk tale. There is great tension between newly converted Christian Swedes [many of whom have no idea what a church looks like] and those who still worship Odin & Co. There is gender and class tension as well, and an undercurrent of the supernatural that the characters recognize as powerful and useful, although they are too human to use it themselves.

Blonde-haired Karin is the spoiled only daughter of Töre and Ingeri is a dark and wild fosterling who does most of the work. They are necessarily antagonists and Karin’s token Christianity is balanced by the fervor of Ingeri’s paganism. Similarly, the Christian fervor of Töre’s wife Märeta is balanced by her husbands spiritually shrugged shoulders.

Karin gets all spiffed out in her best to go deliver some candles to church. Ingeri sets off with her but gets freaked out by some creeptastic guy who mans the ford at the river. Once she escapes, it is too late for Karin. She’s already deep in the clutches of three herders who spout things like the wolf says to Red Riding Hood. She is raped [a scene which was heavily censored at the time of release in the US, but seems rather tame now, especially in comparion with Peckinpah's Straw Dogs] and after the act, her hysterics cause one of the herders to club her to death. They strip her of her finery and run off, leaving their little brother who is wracked with guilt, to guard the body. [If ever there was a time for a joke in poor taste about "If she didn't want to be raped she shouldn't have dressed that way" this is it. Bergman's treatment keeps the victimhood with Karin though. She is not at fault.]

As Fate or the Allfather or God would have it, the herders show up at Töre’s farm and beg guestright for the evening. Töre offers it to them and they break bread. The littlest herder gets sick because of his guilt, and the fact that he knows they are in the house of the daughter they killed adds extra suffering. Later that evening one of the herders offers to sell Karin’s clothes back to the mother. This part strikes me as slightly confusing, unless he knows that he is protected by guestright and just wants to rub in his act, why would he give those clothes back?

Once Töre discovers that he has fed and sheltered the murderers of his only daughter he decides to take vengeance. First he takes a purifying bath, and while he goes out to get some birch branches, decides to rip the whole tree out of the ground in his agony and anger.

He prepares himself, with the help of Ingeri, and then murders all three herders, including the boy, most viciously. Wracked with guilt that he so easily acted unChristianlike and stuff, he searches out Karin’s body and has a heart to heart with God. Tore says that he doesn’t understand God, but asks for forgiveness anyway, and promises to build a stone and mortar church [the stone and mortar is a big deal in 14th Century Sweden] on the site of her murder. In covenant, a spring appears where Karin lay and the film ends.

Down to fundamentals, the film wrestles with emotions and desires that are restricted by moral and spiritual codes. It is no less important that Töre broke guestright than he murdered a child and discarded his new faith. The viciousness of the rape is necessary to balance the depth of Töre’s rage and later repentence. In the final wash, Bergman seems to be saying that life is often selfish and terrible, but those same terrible acts can act as spurs to acts of selfless creation. I guess.

• Criterion Essay by Peter Cowie
• Max Von Sydow Gallery from The Virgin Spring

Threes days gone down the by the road raging sybarisms and intactic redactions single-molar intransigent mendicant medication replicators, restate rewrithe intermedia necessitate interalia recalibrated the one washed wherewithal dancing on a ball entrancing seasonal spring reasonable thing this that there loafing in the wings of hanker hangar hanky-panky incorrectitude and a diet rich in amoral fiber rich and logy with prickly thickets of thought thinkers loafing on breads of self contained syllogisms tastily unmagically decanted precipitate and fall out on the bounce with scimitar slide guitar rankling wrangler haranguing around downtown with little to do and no one to pay me for it.

National Poetry Month doesn’t start for another week, but I’m already psyched. I don’t think I’m going to have a haiku or poetry contest this year, since entries have tailed off significantly since I was in college, but I will once again do my poem-a-day thing that I started last year. I feel like I’ve been borking things up for the past month or so but hopefully I’m emerging from that galactic weirdness with new focus. Hopefully this will result in better poetry than I’m used to writing.

My apartment currently looks like what most people expect a bachelor’s apartment to look like. It is in post-sickness disaster recovery mode right now. That means that I’ve picked up all of the sopping handkerchiefs and thrown away all the snotty tissue. I’ve yet to wash all of the sticky with dried orange juice dishes or throw out the toast rinds and coagulated chicken noodle soup. Clothes, blankets, socks are strewn about, a picture is awry because I bumped into it, and for some unknown reason, there is a pillow in the middle of the kitchen floor. I guess I know what I’m doing this weekend. That’s right. Coughing up phlegm that is so dense it sinks.

that is, if delerious ravings all night and a violent chest cough is mad cow.

I don’t write here because I think that my life and thoughts are important, but sometimes I wonder if I write here to make myself think that my life and thoughts are important. It is a small change. They are removing the ceiling tiles and doing electrical work in the office, the result is a significant amount of chemically-treated fiberboard dust and mild wheezing for me. I hate things that make me wheeze. Last night, for whatever strange reason, my apartment smelled like wet cigarette ashes. Few things smell worse. I saw a woman walking a beagle named Rosie and it tried to bite a man. My cousin is getting married in a month. I dreamed that I had a huge booger that I couldn’t pick. I ate pigs-in-a-blanket. I’ve been wearing the same pair of jeans for 5 days and they don’t smell yet. I need a hug. I need to buy new t-shirts, but they have to be the right kind and they are hard to find.

Only one thing that I wrote today strikes me as important. Can you guess what it is? That’s right, the booger dream.

I haven’t done one of these in a while. Ask me any question about any topic and I will intrepidly endeavor to answer it.

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #7: Roy Baker’s A Night to Remember.

This is a film where I’m going to talk nearly as much about the Criterion DVD as much as the film itself. Or maybe not. But it bears mentioning that the commentary on this release comes from two Titanic experts and discusses the actual events in comparison to the Walter Lord book and the film adaptation of that book. This is the type of high quality and novel film experience that only Criterion could supply. A movie based on a book based on one of the most memorable events of 20th century analyzed by two experts of the actual event.

Dramatic reenactments don’t do a whole lot for me, but A Night to Remember supplies enough snarky social commentary on pre-World Wars Britain that the film only drags slightly. We watch the boat sink in approximate real time, and it torturously takes forever. I mean, we know what happens. The boat sinks, most of the people die. Roy Baker makes the film interesting by using it as hindsight foreshadowing of the end of Britain’s golden age, though none of the Brits seem to realize that this is the case. Class distinctions are still supposedly quite marked in present day Britain, but I find it unlikely that they are even close to being as segregated as they were in 1912. I could be wrong, however, since as a dramatic reenactment it is likely Baker extrapolated the gap. The tragedy is emphasized again and again by the proximity of the Californian and the simple missed communications and brief fits of pique that ultimately result in the deaths of 1500 folks.

Baker paradoxically seems to yearn for the feeling of confidence that suffused the passengers at the start of the voyage and simultaneously shred the arrogance of many of the aristocracy who refuse common sense in favor of their appearance and comfort. The steerage passengers become innocent victims and the survivors unworthy in this paradigm. The busybody financier of the voyage escapes on a lifeboat like the rat he resembles, and the brave-faced fatalist goodbyes number in the dozens. Most of the sailors are gallant, and a cook who gets drunk when he realizes all is lost [and brings a bit of levity to the film] ultimately saves someone’s life and is rescued himself. The culmination of all this blame-throwing is a general resentment for the rich passengers, pity for the victims, grudging respect for the sailors and a strong feeling that “this should never have happened” which is admirable nearly 100 years after the ill-fated voyage. Most ill-will is directed toward the passive Britishers and this is highlighted by the gauche but spunky and warm-hearted token American passenger; she’d be in steerage if her husband hadn’t struck it rich in California.

The special effects, mostly models and clever editing, are relatively well done and effective. The only real criticism I have is that I wish Baker would have killed everyone a half hour sooner.

• Criterion Essay by Michael Sragow.
• The Titanic Archive.
• The Criterion Contraption’s review.

Last night, after chowing down on some great Cambodian food from the West Side Market, the Neighborhood Connections Grant-Making and Monitoring Committee met again for the first round of grant proposal analysis. Our sub-group had 39 proposals submitted and 24 slots to fill, and it took us about three hours to get through them all. I learned quite a bit about the kind of grants that tend to be a success and how to identify budgeting problems, which can tell you at a glance if people are trying to line their own pockets [2 people affiliated with the group and $3k in "personnel costs", for example];

Many of the grant proposals were for new programs that would provide services that already exist and are freely open to anyone, many of which are even available at local library branches. Some were community based but not neighborhood based, a subtle distinction, but an important one as far as the Neighborhood Connections program is concerned. Some grant proposals were from 501 3(c)s or other businesses requesting money for projects that should be a normal part of their operating capital, and a few seemed to be looking for venture capital.

And then there were the proposals with no fiscal agency, letters of support, or decent project descriptions…

Throughout the process of reading through these grant proposals I realized that what many of these grassroots ad hoc groups need is a way to network with each other. I wonder if this is a problem for many volunteer-based organizations. If it is, I wonder how much more effective some of their actions would be if small groups of like minded people, like the 5 or 6 different groups that submitted nearly identical grant proposals, were able to get together on their own and reach a critical mass that way. I think that Neighborhood Connections might be a good place to start that networking, since the like-minded people come to us. I know it isn’t even close to being a part of the mission of the GMMC, but it seems like it would be an appropriate addition.

If you notice, I didn’t talk about the many excellent proposals we received. And we received many. This is intentional. Since we’re interviewing them, I need to hold off and have something to write about in the future. The three-hour interview sessions start a week from today.

The gas company only comes around every six months or so to check my meter reading. The rest of the time they overestimate my usage and charge me about $200 a month in gas for living in a one bedroom apartment. We’re encouraged to do the gas man’s work for him by reading and submitting our own readings, but this is nearly impossible. Oh sure, they say you can enter it online or over the phone but when you actually try this you’re either told that your entry is invalid or an error appears. Trying to figure out why this is happening is nearly impossible.

Reading a gas meter is not difficult. My meter reading is definitely less than the estimate. I’ve been keeping my thermostat set at 60° this winter, and 55° while I’m not at home. The only thing I can figure out is that they won’t accept readings that are lower than the estimate unless it comes from the actual gas man. Who doesn’t exist.

Running the Dominion gas gauntlet of automated phone menus is the worst experience of its kind that I’ve ever had. There is no quick way to jump to a customer service representative. You can’t simply hit zero to be directed there, and they don’t tell you how to get there in the automated menu. I lucked into it by pounding the 9 key about 20 times. Their hours are 7am to 7pm M-F, but only on Mars. Many places, after being on hold for 5 or 10 minutes, offer to take your number and call you back when your place in the queue is reached. I hung up and called again, figuring that if I pretended I was going to cancel my service that I’d get to a representative faster. Turns out Dominion does have that leave your number thing, but I was only prompted for it after I’d plugged all the “Cancel this Account” buttons. Now I have to wait between 1:03 and 1:17 to get a callback. Pounding the 9 key about 20 times probably just sent me permanently to the bottom of the queue. Touch-tone Hell. Those gouging incompetents at Dominion…

I’ve been on hold for over thirty minutes at this point, listening to some broad spell out URLs and writhing in agony at a repeated smooth jazz rendition of While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

This version is much cooler, mainly because of Prince.

I haven’t run consistently in weeks. Here are the excuses: I’ve been reading through 41 grant proposals. I’ve been directing my energies toward job searching. Running is destroying my knees. See? I don’t have very many of them. This is why having someone to run with is important. You don’t want to let them down by bailing and they feel the same way. I call this: Runner’s Codependence.

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #288: Orson Welles’s F for Fake.

This is a movie about charlatans and hanky-panky men, charismatic liars and magicians. It is something like a documentary but one in which a con man tells you he is a con man and is so good that he cons you anyway. As Welles’s penultimate film it does lack the panache of his early triumphs but it continues to display his master story-telling ability. And his ego. But he’s such a likable egotist and justified in his egotism, that you don’t really mind.

This review is going to be extra short, because I’ll need to watch the film three or four more times before I can follow it well enough to discover the charade. Watching it is a bit like playing three card monte with a six armed man.

I suppose it is a story about an apparent art forger and his biographers apparent forgery of the biography with some other forgeries thrown in, such as the War of the Worlds broadcast and some Picasso forgeries by a completely different forger whose may or may not granddaughter may or may not be playing the part of his apparent granddaughter.

That’s basically how the whole movie flows. Welles’s narration is as rapid fire and clause-ridden as the editing and cinematography of the film itself. They overlap and intertwine and then bust out into tangents and we get absolutely no sense of the continuity that Welles’s nondiegetic narration seems to assume we’ll see in the diegesis itself.

We’re told by Welles himself, after he performs a few bits of legerdemain for some children and then has the set dismantled around him, that for one hour he won’t tell a lie. The film is 88 minutes long.

• Criterion Essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum

This promises to cover lots of ground in leaps and bounds. I am once again having the same troubles with agency that I’ve been having all my life. The first reading at Mass yesterday was the story of Abraham and Isaac, one which has caused no end of problems for no end of thoughtful persons over the years. After Mass, I went home and busted out Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and reread bits and pieces of it, searching for a hint about what was bugging me from the reading. I didn’t exactly find it there, but I did remember something I assimilated sometime in the mists of the past.

I remember being taught that since God has given us everything that is our existence, when he requires it back from us, we should willingly give it. If that is true, all right. But essentially it seems to indicate that we have no agency of our own. If everything is a gift from God, none of my actions and efforts earn me anything. No matter how hard I work I ultimately have to depend on someone else for approval. This might sound like a “life is unfair” whine, but my main complaint is that I feel like I have no proof that my action A will result in effect B.

It really shouldn’t be a surprise that I’m currently dissatisfied; the job interview process requires extensive amounts of effort and stress but ultimately places all power in the hand of the prospective employer. To my current employer I’m nothing more than a resource to be exploited for as hard and long as possible. This weekend I ran into a neighbor and he mentioned that I’d been bitching on my blog and said it in such a way that I felt he thought I had no right to be dissatisfied with my life as it stands. So I suppose I haven’t effectively articulated my dissatisfaction.

The conundrum: I want to feel like the work that I do earns me the means to live a life that I enjoy. I want to end each day feeling that I have accomplished something worthwhile and congratulate myself for that and reenergize for the next day’s accomplishment. Yet my current lot does not provide any of these things. The job seach exacerbates this feeling of helplessness because it is basically begging dressed up in a tie. My pride resents that. But how do I find a path that fills me with agency?

I’ve always wanted to be in full control of myself, and I know that in some ways my life would be much more varied if I let loose a little, cared a little less about my feelings and those of others. Trusted more. Whatever. The times I’ve attempted this usually ended painfully. I don’t want to depend on someone else’s approval to live my life.

I think this means I should be self-employed. But what to do and how to afford it? I’ve got no ideas on that account. I’ve got a phone interview with a place in NYC today, and hopefully another one will be lined up by the end of the week. I’ve gotten more action from NYC in a week than I did in 9 months in Cleveland. Places there seem to like my resume, which is nice to hear; I’d been starting to think it wasn’t any good. I’m tired of being less than my best by someone else’s leave. I’m flailing around, trying to grab on to some sort of rock to steady me, but I have to be my own rock. As much as I cherish my self-reliance, it feels awfully stale sometimes.

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #300: Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

I don’t like Wes Anderson films for the same reason I don’t like Quentin Tarantino films and the same reason I don’t like most of my poetry. It is all too referential. Yet, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou was enjoyable enough, mainly because many of the references were actually things I knew about [documentary filmmaking, David Bowie]. I still don’t get his appeal though. I’ll try to dismiss my loathing for self-reflexive-obligatory-oblique-retro-pomo-irony long enough to point out what I found effective in the film.

Steve Zissou is an oceanographic explorer who makes documentary films of his adventures, a la Cousteau. He is posturing, arrogant, selfish and emotionally distant. His entire life has consisted of crafting and maintaining a celebrity image; resulting in a man who has forgotten who he is in favor of chasing after the man he watches on screen. We constantly see the filming of his documentaries; which are just as choreographed as Zissou’s private life. In fact, Zissou has been in front of the lens for so long, he has forgotten that the camera isn’t always rolling. His desire for drama is born from an extended slump in the reception of his documentaries.

It should be noted, however, that while The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou [the movie within the movie] is a rather obvious send-up of reality television, in its essentials it doesn’t differ from true documentary filmmaking at all. Real documentaries are not the objective testimonials that we instinctively believe them to be. Things are shot and not shot, things that were shot are left out, commentary is added in, the editing gives the film some sort of syntax, and often turns it into a narrative.

The use of Kodachrome [at least, that's what it looks like to me] for the film within a film clips was nice, since I’ve always liked how the warm colors pop out with that stock, and though the awkward framing and disconcerting cuts made me a little seasick, they did seem to strengthen Anderson’s portrait of Zissou as a man alienated from himself. The Bowie translated to Portuguese is another inspired choice in this regard.

Yet with all of this staging, the most important parts of Zissou’s story never get filmed. [That is, if we're watching with a standard view of spectatorship and assuming that the 4th wall still exists and that TLAwSZ was made by Wes Anderson and not Steve Zissou making TLAwSZ about making TLAwSZ]. When he meets his son, when he fights off pirates, when he saves his nemesis from pirates, when his son is killed in a helicopter crash…no cameras.

These constant blows, coupled with the difficulties of financing the film, eventually force Zissou to make peace with his inner demons, symbolized tangibly by the jaguar shark.

If we watch the film in House of Leaves mode and pretend that Wes Anderson didn’t direct it and that Steve Zissou made a film called The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou about making a documentary called The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, then nothing that we see in the film can be considered non-fiction. Especially since his dead partner Esteban and dead son Ned both appear on screen after their deaths.

Ultimately I think this movie [and most Wes Anderson films] would succeed a bit better if there were less attempts to say something about everything as intricately and obliquely as possible. To deliberately mix some metaphors in a self-reflexive-obligatory-oblique-retro-pomo-irony way, I think the multiple paths of meaning both drown the others out and are weakened by their profligacy.

• DVDTalk Review of the film and the Criterion DVD
• New York Magazine story on Wes Anderson
• Cousteau.org

Today is a good day. It only took me two and a half years, but I’ve finally managed to pay off the credit card debt I racked up while working for peanuts on Into the Fire, moving to Cleveland, and wrecking my car. Now I can start paying back my mom what I owe her and pouring more into my student debt payments.

heartbeat

hear
 eart
h
     beat
     be
he r
 ear
  art
     bea
   r    t
he
hea t

I don’t think I woke up because of the silence. And in any case it wasn’t as completely silent as I led myself to believe. Initially, I thought that I was wheezing; something that only happens when I’m sleeping in a place that has cats. I took a deep breath to test this out, but I was breathing easy. Then I realized that the sound I was hearing was my heartbeat. Not just the “What does a heartbeat sound like, Timmy?” sound that Timmy would make if someone asked Timmy what a heartbeat sounded like, but something almost preternaturally keen. I could hear and feel my blood being pushed into my ventricles and flowing into and outof my veins and arteries. A heartbeat sounds nothing like what Timmy thinks it sounds like. You don’t hear pauses between the beats, it is almost like listening to the tides of the sea.

So now I’ve tried an attempt at concrete poetry and another thing.

I watched The Iron Giant last evening. I’m a huge fan of animation and had heard good things about this movie, so it surely took me long enough to get around to seeing it. It is a good movie and while the plot is typical kid movie fare, the art is very well done, and it has some subtle layers that provide both contemporary and historical parallels.

Taking place in the late fifties, Cold War paranoia is becoming increasingly institutionalized in American society. A power-mad government official associated with national security is willing to go to any lengths, including the drugging of a small boy and nuking a small town in Maine to protect the country from nebulously perceived foreign threats.

This movie was made in 1999.

The kid, Hogarth, appeals to me because he basically acts like I acted when I was a kid. He even brings home forest critters and straps on army surplus issue and stomps off into the woods for adventures. I never found a huge robot though. The references to the Golden Age of science fiction abound, and appeal to my never nascent nerdiness.

Hogarth’s mom is a single parent working hard [and late] to do right by her kid, which was likely an even tougher gig back in the fifties. We never find out if Hogarth’s dad died, or if his mom is still unmarried. Pops is just…absent.

That’s all I got.

I’m trying to come up with effective ways to get this place at which I interviewed last week to hire me. I woke up Sunday morning with the idea to make a Flash infomercial showcasing my talents. It was only the third time I’d used Flash, and hopefully the end result didn’t look too PowerPointy. I think this was a good idea because not only does it illustrate my creativity and eagerness to work for the aforementioned yet currently remaining anonymous place of business, but it was also a way for me to show my humor and refresh the applicability of my interests in the memory of my interviewer.

I am currently plotting other sinister ways in which I can infiltrate. These may or may not include:

• Using Mournful Puppy Eyes.
• Unabashed Begging.
• A Singing Telegram.
• Almost anonymous donations of large quantities of unmarked, non-sequential $20s.
• Hunger Strike Until Hired.
• Bringing the office cocaine-laced fudge, getting everyone addicted and becoming the puppet master of the whole organization.
• Constructing a Moon Laser and threatening to rain fiery destruction upon their pitiful carcasses.
• Create a dummy organization focused on cutting into their margins and then appear with the Only Possible Way™ to fight off the competitor.
• Beer.

I received over a ream of Neighborhood Connections grant proposals by courier yesterday. I have a week and a half to review 41 proposals from Clevelanders who have ideas for improving their neighborhoods. And here I thought I was running out of stuff to read. I think I know what I’ll be doing this weekend.

Recently I’ve been doing my laundry in the evenings, and there is always a very old lady playing lottery with scratch off tickets the entire time I’m there. It doesn’t matter which day, or what time, she’s there. She only scratches off one ticket at a time, then leaves the table in the laundromat, goes outside, walks next door to the fake Dairy Mart, buys one more lottery ticket, comes back into the laundromat, sits down at the table and starts scratching again. For God knows how long. She mumbles to herself as she does this, and scratches off every single particle of scratch-offiness that is present on the card.

She has a friend who doesn’t talk to anyone but her. This friend talks approximately 73 grillion miles a minute to Lottery Lady about anyone and everyone who is sick and dying, and oh how terrible it is and did you know what kind of headstone he had and he was buried two weeks ago today and so and so’s sister is in hospice and he has “Altheimer’s” and starts to scream and the bills they have are so expensive did you know that his lungs are filled with this yellow fluid…

The Tremont Laundromat is a never-ending source of surreality. It is almost worth the $2.75 I pay for each load of laundry.

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #304: Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth.

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
-Auden

The planets were surely aligned for the production of The Man Who Fell To Earth. David Bowie was deep in the midst of his androgyne starman persona, Nicolas Roeg was growing ever defter in his directorial skills and Walter Tevis provided the novel to bring them all together. I’d say all three are peas in a pod; combinations of mystic and cynic that paradoxically subvert the mechanisms they hate by using them; albeit for different goals. Bowie was a space prophet as Ziggy Stardust, offering the hope transcendence through music and drugs to the pitiful humans on a hellish earth. Roeg was beating the drum against materialist American culture and the soullessness it engendered [and still does, in my honest opinion] and Tevis was exploring the existential psychology of modern life in his writing.

This congruence fits hand-in-glove with my own specific interests: David Bowie, Cinema and Science Fiction and I am essentially inundated with things to talk about in relation to this film. I’ll try to concentrate on the specifics of the film itself.

I’d best get this out of the way right off the bat. This film is full of sex and nudity. Chock full. Rip Torn plays the womanizing professor/scientist Bryce, and must have had an absolutely wonderful time rolling around in his bed with at least half a dozen naked nubile coeds. Yet Roeg is obviously more mature than I am, because his uses of nudity, while titillating, use that titillation to highlight and enhance his critique of American decadence. I find it reminiscent of Fellini’s Satyricon in this respect.

Bowie’s character, the alien Thomas Jerome Newton, arrives on planet with a plan and a goal, but is ultimately unprepared for the culture which ensnares and destroys him, turns him traitorous. This progress can be monitored by comparing him throughout with the deeply flawed characters with which he interacts. Graham Fuller’s essay [linked below] covers this downfall very well, so I’ll skip it.

I didn’t particularly enjoy Walter Tevis’s book, but the movie keeps rather well to its plot, and is enhanced and refined by Roeg’s treatment and Bowie’s interpretation. I’m actually pretty taken aback at how much I enjoyed the film as cinema and not as entertainment [which is how I usually like my sci-fi]. Although Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is better known for making Earth seem alien to us Earthlings, Tevis manages to make you believe it and Roeg makes you skin-crawlingly feel it.

Roeg’s disdain for American culture borders on preachy, but it fits well with Newton’s turn-coat illusionment; it doesn’t overwhelm the film, barely. I wonder how much of Bowie’s taste influenced the production values of the film as well. The album Low is rumored to be associated with the film, [as the album cover also suggests. It is a pretty good album, sort of proto-electronica/ambient], but the Newton’s fascination with Kabuki and Japanese aesthetics hark back to the day’s of Ziggy Stardust, and Newton’s rude boy appearance in public seems to echo the later stages of the Diamond Dogs tour.

The film is definitely worth a watch. The acting is superb on all fronts, especially Candy Clark’s portrayal of Mary-Lou, and although Roeg still uses the zoom far too heavily for my taste, its a beautiful film in all other aspects.

• DVD Beaver Review NSFW
• Criterion Essay by Graham Fuller

I had an unintentional week off from running, mainly due to being back in the Bend, but also with job related business. I was supposed to run 7 miles today and I got in 5.5 before my left calf went Gordian on me. Stretch, test-run, walk::wash, rinse, repeat. I gotta just take my time and stretch for 15 minutes or so before the run, I suppose. I’m usually good on the tightening if I can run and not stop the whole time, but just let one traffic signal bring me to a halt and I get all bent out of shape.

Ash Wednesday kind of snuck up on my this year. I hadn’t given much thought to what I’m going to do to improve myself this Lent. I think that this year I will try to be less of a smartass for these forty days, and going forward. Additionally, I won’t purchase any extraneous merchandise for myself [CDs, DVDs, etc. UNLESS I get a new job]. Beer is not included as extraneous merchandise.

So let it be written. So let it be done.