A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #38: Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill.

Watching a Japanese B-movie was a great way to get back into the swing of Criterion reviews. This is the first Seijun Suzuki film I’ve seen, but it reminded me very much of Samuel Fuller, and it is even a bit like Shock Corridor in its portrayal of psychological trauma. The protagonist is Hanada, the third best yakuza assassin, and the film sticks with his ironic disintegration into madness throughout. At first the film is quite hard to follow, mainly because it is often difficult to determine whether we’re in his subjective frame of mind or whether actual plot-oriented action is occurring. The irony kicks in because the assassin is convinced that he’s going to win and become Number 1, though he obviously becomes less and less stable and capable as the film progresses. In retrospect, the washed-up assassin we meet in the beginning of the film is a foreshadowing of Hanada’s fate.

Suzuki’s dramatic cinematographic stylings offer profound and sometimes startling character insights; often serving as a reflection or counterpoint to Hanada’s self-absorbed obliviousness. All of the other characters have no existential qualms, they know exactly where they stand in relation to the world they inhabit; so Hanada’s ambition is almost aberrant in this environment. The tepid screenplay dialogue becomes polysemous and intriguing in this context, as no one seems to know what the other is truly saying. There is no trust and little understanding between the characters, so every attempt at communication is fraught. There is also a darkly comedic tone to the plot that alternates between being noticed by the characters and completely ignored by them. Number 1 is the only character who truly knows exactly what is going, even unto meta-cognizance, as if he knows that he’s in a film and what the director is trying to do with it and him.

It seems that the film has little to say as an ultimate moral; there are no sympathetic characters, so their deaths don’t mean much to the viewer, except in the aforementioned darkly comedic manner. The environment in which they lived was too violent and chaotic for any sort of sustainability or continuity, they’re all living on borrowed time. The frequent salacious and violent power-struggle sex acts provide another data point to strengthen this claim. It is certainly a much more accurate Japanese film culturally, instead of offering stylized, cliché or stereotypical portrayals more in line with Hollywood’s MO, Branded to Kill is vulgar in the word’s most literal and complimentary sense.

• Criterion Essay by John Zorn
• Criterion Contraption Review
• Midnight Eye Review
• YouTube Clips:
  • Clip 1
  • Clip 2
  • Clip 3
  • Clip 4

Tequila and I got reacquainted last night. Our relationship has matured and doesn’t hurt me as much as it used to. I surely needed some of that after getting called into work yesterday for six hours of frustrating, ill-planned, deadlined updates. I was gung-ho to get some significant work accomplished at home. The Blue Collar Bar Crawl was a good way to rub off that stress, and I think I might relax for a few hours today anyway instead of doing house work. I’ve just got too many things to do and not enough time to do them, unless I give up all my down time which results in the grouchy Adam that is writing this post.

Decided to head into work a bit later than usual today and biked into Jeff Schuler at the downtown end of Carnegie bridge. He invited me to the brief Bike to Work Day meetup at A.J. Rocco’s and I tagged along and met a few folks. Ended up with a Cleveland Bikes t-shirt and a contact for some freelance web work. Learned about fixed gear bikes and something call the track stand. I also found out that A.J. Rocco’s has breakfast sandwichery, something I’ve been desiring of late. Fortuitous.

At lunch I tipped the hot dog lady $1.40 and I think it made her day. She was grumbly and non-eye-contacting until I tipped her, then she looked at me and smiled and thanked me loudly. I am liking this fall weather. Need to be 15 degrees cooler so I can bust out the scarves though.

Watching the Couples Go By

My mother’s dog Iris was killed by a coyote today in the fall rains. I remember when we got her, eleven or twelve years ago, not long after my parent’s divorce. We drove quite a distance to find the dachshund puppies and I picked the lone black & tan one from the litter. I kept her in my coat on the way home and she whimpered and yelped for hours on end. I said I was going to keep her with me through the night, but her yiping was such that I passed her off to mom that same night, and she was hers from then on. I told mom that’s how I knew that I wasn’t ready to have a child.

She had seven nipples. I called her Iris Underfoot because she was always around my feet, and I accidentally stepped on her a few times when she was a puppy sitting right behind me as I washed dishes. She grew extra bowl-legged because of this. She was a princess of a dog, and my mom would never punish her for getting into the trash or chewing through just about anything. When we had to start caging her, mom bought the largest cage for a little miniature dachshund. If ever my mom and I went to hug each other she’d grow indignant and bark and bark until we stopped. She was indignant about a lot of different things, a gallon of fuss and bother in a pint of dog. She would run and run and run and patrol the acres of yard we had and it was hilarious to watch her tear across the yard after something or someone.

She used to front on the horses in the field next door and one day Beau the horse decided to mess with her, he galloped toward her, Iris was frozen in fear, slowed and stopped in front of her and then just nudged her with his nose. She yiped and skedaddled. I’m pretty sure she never acted uppity to the horses ever again, instead choosing to regularly corner [and get sprayed by] a skunk under the deck. She wouldn’t eat, drink or poop if mom wasn’t around.

Her full name was The Lady County Blue Iris Jean McAfee MacDougal Onassis von Barnard Jean Harvey III, Esq. Berghein-Leer; and though I gave her a lot of shit, I’ll miss her.

I’ve switched back to my old Minima theme until I figure out what I incorrectly coded in Mark Elf that breaks it in WordPress 2.3. This Dexter release is pretty awesome looking already, especially the native tagging support, so I’m anxious to get all my ducks in a row. Maybe I’ll even take the time to widgetize my themes.

I updated the Sideblog plugin and FlickrRSS plugin and now I’m good to go. I figured that was what.

I see plenty of those huge banners downtown and billboards in the immediate Cleveland vicinity promoting Cleveland Plus, but I’ve yet to see one anywhere outside of Cleveland proper. I was under the impression that this marketing campaign is for folks outside of the region, trying to attract them [and business] here. Has anyone actually seen a Cleveland Plus billboard, TV spot, or other marketing effort outside of Cleveland?

I put an ad up on Craigslist for some leftover furniture and I’ve been getting the most grammatically inept and nonsensical emails I’ve ever seen in response. I know in the abstract that a vast amount of people using the intertubes give off the slack-jawed idiot impression in their usage of all caps, no punctuation, mixed tenses, abbreviations and such, but being inundated with 4 dozen or so similar yet different messages is a constant reminder that half the population is, by necessity, below average intelligence. My two favorites, quoting the entirety of each email verbatim:

HI I NEED THE TABLE . IS OT VERY HAVE

where are you

Those aren’t even C+ quality.

I’m retiring this week. I got a wire through my back bike tire on the way home from work last night; I was coming around the corner of Abbey and Columbus at a good clip and the back tire felt fat and fishtaily making the turn, so I got off, checked, and ended up walking the last mile or so home. Took the bike in to Fridrich’s for a tune-up, recalibration and retiring. Then I zipped on over to NTB in Lakewood [since Westown Tire wouldn't pick up the phone] and got four new tires put on my beater. Basically my car was totaled, since the cost of the tires was more than the car is worth. However, that valuation is based purely on fungibility. The fact that my beater is spacious and the engine runs like a dream is worth far more to me than the actual comparative value of the beast.

While waiting to retire, I ate at Dianna’s. I could’ve walked around the corner to My Friends, but I was feeling lazy. I’d forgotten how purgatorial eating at Dianna’s can be, especially alone. It is certainly the lowest rung diner in that area. To class myself up afterward, I got a Frosty from Wendy’s across the street.

Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management

I’m taking an Illustrator class at CSU’s CCE. I’ve picked up a couple of good tips, but what I’m starting to discover is that all of these continuing education courses move far too slowly for me. These classes only move at the pace of the slowest student, which is typically someone who has never used a graphic design program before. Granted, these are beginner classes, but when you’re moving at the pace of the accountant-student, it gets tough to stay interested.

Plus, there is a required book for this course that the CSU bookstore didn’t have in stock. The instructor said that we wouldn’t be able to take the course without the book, so some other lady, after telling us it was our fault for not having the book, made some calls and apparently got some shipped to us overnight by UPS. There are only a few hours left of this class and I still don’t have a book. When it comes in, I’m certainly not going to purchase it. Okay, I bought it. The County will reimburse me, and then anyone else there who wants to learn Illustrator can just borrow the book instead of taking the class.

I do enjoy learning the the things that are new to me, but I keep hoping these classes will give professional workflow and productivity tips in addition to the intricacies of the pen tool and the difference between raster and vector. It is also pretty lame when the course just follows along the book. If I wanted that I’d've just bought the book in the first place.

Dead Robert Jordan. Figures.

Last night at 4am I was awakened by the worst altercation I’ve heard yet from my moon-struck neighbors. The crazy lady yells at her man on a nearly daily basis; “fuck this, fuck that, fuckety fuck fuck, like Samuel L. in Pulp Fiction. She is so loud that she can wake me up when there are no open windows and she’s in the building next to us. There are often children crying. I called the cops once when there was both yelling and crying children with the addition of threats about custody and safety issues regarding the kids. I don’t think anything resulted from that.

Last night they woke me up twice. The first time, crazy lady was screaming at the top of her lungs for people to shut up because the kids were sleeping. Then, later on, she was yelling “get the fuck out of my house!” and then “get the fuck out of my yard” to some dude named Raekwon who ended up breaking her car window before tearing off like a bat out of hell. Crazy lady keeps yelling and ends up yarfing from the stress, the folks upstairs quickly bring down their infant and skedaddle for a bit, and crazy lady and company go back inside. No use calling the cops, they’ve got more important things to do at 4am than stop by a place where the altercation has already finished [unless Raekwon comes back with a 9].

A few minutes later I heard, a few blocks away, a terrible car accident. The horn went off for about 10 minutes before sirens showed up. I went outside a few times to make sure things were safe, and was going to try to find the accident, but I couldn’t tell which direction the horn was coming from.

My mom’s visiting this weekend, so now she’s convinced I live in the ghetto [apparently an inaccurate portrayal], even though, as far as I can tell, the place next to mine is the only problem residence on my street. There was a fire at that place right before I moved into my house and they’ve been working on it for a few months, the landlord is absentee and obviously doesn’t care too much about that particular property, as the fire was the result of code violations.

Story Pirates

• How DNS works.
• How to set up a Mac share that is accessible by PCs.
• How good challah bread is. Especially with Boar’s Head tavern ham, a slice of edam and some brown sugar and pecan mustard. [I'm also aware of just how religiously inappropriate that sandwich is.]
• That sex can sometimes feel so good to a woman that they are convinced that they are going to end up pregnant afterward; even if that is not possible.
• That olive oil cake is ridiculicious. [Now I must learn how to make it.]
• The basics of how artists appreciate art. [DAIJ.]
• To use the tag.
• That picking a paint color for the wall of the master bedroom will likely determine the basic color scheme for the entire house. [White it is?]
• That people will bicker over the same things incessantly even when possible courses of action appear; because they are lazy.
• About serifs.
• Seats at the Cinematheque are too close together for my knees. [I already knew this, but keep forgetting.]
• How to pitch my team’s capabilities so that clients trust us with most of the design and development process.
• The wind on Carnegie Bridge can get so strong that it becomes nearly impossible to pedal a bicycle.

Epicurious

Photo Retouching:
Step by Step
Celebrities

Weird dream last night. I’m in a spaceship with some random acquaintances who are my crewmates and we’re traveling through space and/or time for some reason. The trip removes or retards all of our primary sexual characteristics but no one seems to care about that or anything much, except me, even when some folks die under mysterious circumstances. Eventually someone figures out that we’ve lost all ambition and will to power as well as the naughty bits. I still have some, but this is explained because I am Chief Engineer, and therefore have more in the first place. We’ve still got intelligence, but nothing to drive it.

We land on this planet and start a collective farm that looks like my Aunt’s in Noblesville, only not surrounded by development. There are lots of strange critters and more crew die, but no one is interested in helping out, or even mourning really. Then it turns out that one of the crew has become obsessed with a local devouring monster with spider-like associations, and has been feeding other crew to it. This girl gets a cut on her finger trying to protect the evil thing when we burn the barn it is in, and an egg is secretly laid in the cut so another monster will be born and the crazy girl is sort of erotically and secretly pleased by this and doesn’t tell anyone. Somehow I just know it is going to hatch and devour her from the inside. I hate when my dreams set themselves up for obvious sequels. This one was especially weird due to the associations of gender identificaiton, sex drive, and ambition.

Listen to the Voyager Golden Record

While reformatting my work PC today, I browsed around the internet looking for thoughts on e-government and design. I came across an interesting research brief by Peter Muhlberger entitled Should E-Government Design for Citizen Participation? Stealth Democracy and Deliberation [Abstract] [PDF]. He has a few other papers that look down the alley I’m interested in reading as well.

This paper posits that American citizen apathy and disenfranchisement with government are not due to citizens’ preference for the appearance of oligarchy as democracy or a belief in general consensus, [a view covered in detail in a book called Stealth Democracy] but is the result of a psychological effect; American citizens are generally linear thinkers, not systemic ones, which makes it difficult [and therefore less interesting] for them to engage in political and governmental processes.

He has some data to support this [naturally] and comes to the conclusion that eGovernment has the ability to enhance, and thereby improve the policy-making process, as well as other governmental actions by allowing space for citizen discourse in a non-intrusive manner, couple with a few specific requirements. That’s all very good, but it doesn’t address the fact that providing space for citizen input is often the last thing that government [as bureaucracy] wants to do. Possible avenues for criticism [such as open discourse] are discouraged, or funneled into controlled, limited settings [the media] where things like spin and talking points can effectively neutralize them. So while the opportunity exists for eGov assistance in citizen involvement, Muhlberger doesn’t offer any tips or tricks for convincing government to behave that way in the first place. An estimated increase in efficiency isn’t going to cut the mustard with the conservative nature of any government entity.

The article was very good though, and I already see parallels with the book I’m currently reading: The Elements of Typographic Style, which, in addition to being an exhaustive encyclopedia of typographic terminology, method and history, also offers some fundamental applications of typographic usage and display to assist and enhance user experience. It is also, appropriately, marvelously designed.

Free Cookie

A part of this viewing list: Criterion Collection Spine #36: Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear.

I no longer have any Criterion Collection films queued up at the library. After the inundation I’ve had with them over the last few weeks, I think it is time to take a bit of a break. Thankfully, the last film before this sabbatical was another suspenseful masterpiece by Henri-Georges Clouzot. The film is a hodge-podge of languages, French, English, Italian, Spanish and the odd German now and then; the polyglot atmosphere is one to be expected in a place where risky business pulls risk takers in for a chance to make a fortune. Like any boom town, Las Piedras has more bums than boomers, petty men too poor to leave, desperate for any chance that will enable them to do so. The first hour of the film is a necessary exposition of this desperation, in addition to important personality quirks and relationship establishment that will amplify in the more suspenseful nitroglycerin transport scenes. We learn about the vaguely homoerotic love triangle between Mario and Luigi [No, I am not kidding] that is broken up by the appearance of Jo. Mario’s disdain for Linda [once again played by the knockout Vera Clouzot, in more see-through clothing] is probably the greatest sign of his loss of perspective based on indolent disgruntlement.

That the men are stuck in this predicament is based mainly upon their lack of citizenship in an unnamed South American country. The bullying, morally bankrupt presence of an American oil company doesn’t help matters, and there are multiple quotes that illustrate just what Clouzot thinks about this sort of corporate shenanigan. Where there is oil, Americans are quick to follow. Living in the hell that is Las Piedras, the four aforementioned men plus a German guy named Bimba make a deal with the devil [the Southern Oil Company] to drive two trucks full of hellfire [nitroglycerin] across hell to put out a fire. If they make it, they’ll get enough dough to leave Las Piedras far behind. The only problem is the slightest bump will explode the nitro. Obstacles include a 40 mile dash across something called “the washboard”; a hairpin turn involving a rotten bridge, blowing up a huge boulder in the middle of the road [and then pissing on the spot where it used to be], and driving through a 3′ deep lake of petroleum, which is all that is left of one of the trucks after it explodes. Like all deals with the devil, no one makes it out alive, no matter how safe they might seem. Especially once the distortion of constant fear sets in and you start to feel safe in thumbing your nose [or John Thomas] at the devil.

The wages of fear turn love to hate, uncover cowardice and pretty much ruin everything they can. As one man quotes earlier in the film:

You don’t know what fear is. But you’ll see. It’s catching. It’s catching like smallpox. And once you get it, it’s for life.

Most of the money quotes are in Dennis Lehane’s essay, which says pretty much everything that one needs to say about this film. What struck me about it was how its implicit and explicit cultural critiques are just as applicable fifty years after the film was made, especially in regard to immigrant labor issues and American corporate policy [and, by proxy, American policy as a whole] in regard to oil. And from an existential standpoint, the film is just as absurd and Camusian as Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits. Clouzot knows we’re all doomed, and the only way to deal with the irony of risking death for a uncertain future is to laugh all the way to the grave.

• Criterion Essay by Dennis Lehane
• Culture Vulture review
• Roger Ebert Review
• Reelviews review
• Deep Focus review
• Criterion Contraption review
• Senses of Cinema on Clouzot
• YouTube: Trailer

Sarah Bourque Monsters

It has been a busy few days. Thursday was the Night to Unite which I have a bunch of photos of since I let Amy use my camera. Friday I ended up working a bit later than usual since some important web maintenance came in right at the end of the work day and I was the only one left around to post it. I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much though, since I got to watch the Thunderbirds practice for the airshow most of the day out of my office window. Once I got home my friend Sandy needed some help replacing her ancient 200#+ stove with a much newer and hipper model. Since I just went through that myself, I helped with the gas and sundries. Then I had to rush to get clean and hit the grocery store for the fixings for dinner. I had a friend over and grilled some marinaded ribeye steaks with baked sweet potatoes and snow peas. It was delicious.

Saturday was an early start in order to get to the Georgia Tech versus Notre Dame disasterbacle. I met up with Liam and once-again pregnant Anne [this time Liam won and it is a boy] for a brief moment before going in search of Jeremy. [jmay, I was gonna surprise call you when I got in town, but don't have your digits anymore. I sucked at that. Sorry to miss you man.] After the game there was an interminable hour spent waiting to get out of the parking lot, because everyone kept letting people in front of them. I vented my road rage for a bit and then realized it would be much better to appreciate the good company I was in. Stopped at Fazoli’s on the way home and got back into Cleveland without even being drowsy thanks to great conversation.

Sunday was pretty much a wash, late breakfast and a couple of recupernaps. Watched a pretty terrible movie called Sunshine [it is just as forgettable and pretty much exactly like some movie that I once saw about going to the center of the earth and setting off a bomb.] while doing infinite laundry and cleaned house.

Today I finished scraping the walls and sanding in the master bedroom. I also mowed the yard and trimmed and swept and made a list and checked it twice. Tonight or tomorrow I have to watch The Wages of Fear and use the recommended Zinsser primer on the walls prior to picking out some paint. Probably tomorrow, since I’ve been invited to hang out with Sandy and Amy tonight for some grilling.