A loose compilation of thoughts
about things:

02/27/03, 11:47 a.m.: This is the third time I've seen that t.A.T.u. video, and I'm still in awe of it: I'm not surprised that something as cynically panderous as a lesbian Russian schoolgirl pop duo is an International Sensation, I'm just stunned that such a lousy incarnation of a lesbian Russian schoolgirl pop duo would be a hit, particularly with that video: one kinda cute girl and one not very cute girl running around behind bars, making out and lip-synching badly in the rain while appalled masses watch. The video is such crap because it can barely bring itself to be titillating--only the faintest impression of skin through the drenched schoolgirl shirts, only the merest flicker of schoolgirl panties, and the making out is the most timid, close-mouthed pecking you'd almost think the girls are related. Intercut with this is a truly impressive group of unattractive people (even more unattractive as the red-haired girl of the group who looks alarmingly inbred) and you get a "sexy" video that makes you want to tear all the clothes off your body and burn them, and then scrubbing your naked skin raw with a brillo pad. The song, which has apparently hit number one in a lot of countries, is yr. typical pop crap derived from what I call the Milli Vanilli equation: something reasonably soulful and popular will be twice as popular and half as soulful if you get two singers instead of one (just as Milli Vanilla was Terence Trent Darby in stereo, so is t.A.T.u. basically Dolores from the Cranberries doubled). It has yet to be played on any radio station I listen to, although I'm sure that has more to do with a tardiness in the payola envelopes rather than anything approaching taste on the part of the program directors. The only way I hear the song is by not muting the video, which I've watched three times because of the kinda cute girl, and the way the video takes me back to the early days of MTV when it'd play any cheap-ass band that could hire someone to hit the slow-mo button on their video camera. And it is something different from what MTV usually plays these days for music which is either (a) 50 Cent, or (b) mass-produced bands that jump around like Punks and rip off hooks from Weezer albums. It's not that Amercan music is in such a sorry state--it's that all the media for distributing American music (radio, MTV, record chains) are in such a sorry state, a pathetic strain of Eurotrash pop (worse, Eastern-Eurotrash pop) may actually be able to come in and become a hit. Is it any wonder there are so many people swapping music online--it seems like the only way to hear anything decent anymore. I've never relied as heavily on the recommendations of friends in terms of finding music to listen to as I do now, and it's just sad.

02/24/03, 8:15 p.m.: I wrote a cuticle over 2700 words today, and it doesn't really mean shit. This is my big thing, at the moment. I'm beating myself up over the revising I'm not doing, I'm beating myself up over the writing that I'm doing, but not doing as well, and I'm beating myself up over not writing what I should be writing--for weeks now I've been telling myself I'll make an outline, I'll break it into small bits, I'll tackle each of this bits in the morning before work, at the odd lonely lunch, in the evenings when I get home from work....I'm beating myself up three different ways (four if you count the emails I've been meaning to write for a while now to friends). Yup, I'm just doing the Rodney King on myself all right...

Enough of that crap: I did want to briefly mention my two dream fragments from Saturday and Sunday morning. On Sunday morning, I had a dream that I was reading a comic book, some sort of Classics Illustrated Gothic, like The Castle of Otranto, or at least that's how it seemed until Batman showed up. And I remember reading the comic thinking, "hmmmm, okay, that's a little odd." And then a panel where the heroine is being attacked by suits of armor, which Batman dispels with his "banjo bionics." I was awestruck at this phrase, so colossally dumb and comic-booky in the worst sense, so much so I suspected the entire comic book was some sort of put-on. And when I awoke, the phrase banjo bionics stayed dormant with me until three or four hours later when someone made a "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" joke, and the phrase came back.

As for Saturday, I had a dream I was watching Amelie, although in my dream it was called Andalou. In the scene, Audrey Tautou puts an LP on an old record player and begins to dance to it. And the shot initially is a super close-up view of the record spinning round, so that all you see is the tiny red island of the label (with miniature black mountain in the center) amid a shimmering ebony sea with the room fuzzy in the background. Then something in the song changes, and the camera switches to hovering just over the label (so you can almost read it) and begins spinning with the record: a circular tracking shot of Amelie's room as she dances, and as she does, more people from her building come in from the corner of the frame and start dancing too. By the end of the shot, the room seems to be spinning happily with happily spinning people.

This morning? Nothing. Had to bully myself out of bed after a super tossy-turny evening. It's going to be an early night for me, yup.

02/21/03, 10:55 a.m.: Gah. That's what I've got to say. Gah. I was at Mom's surgery from noon to 8:30 p.m., most of which was spent waiting for the surgery to begin--they rolled her off at 2:30, and then I think didn't start in on the surgery until close to 4:00). Now I'm running around trying to get everything done so I can maybe go visit her before going to work. She seemed in great shape when I left last night, although understandably tired from the anesthesia and everything the anesthesia was covering. So nothing particularly interesting to jot down here, other than brief memories of the videogame I was playing in my dreams, shortly before I awoke. It was called something absolutely generic, like Footrace, and it had the simplest hook you can imagine. You compete against another player, or the computer, in a footrace through Hell. There are monsters, demons and spirits that you have to shoot with your little laser gun while also dodging obstacles such as lava pits, falling boulders, dust dervishes, trying to get to the next checkpoint before time runs out--and of course there are spirits that you can jump onto and bounce off of (evil popes or something, I dunno) to cover extra ground as well as innocents you can save for extra time. And of course, first person to the finish line gets to escape from hell, while the other player is devoured in everlasting flame. Sadly, the dream didn't end there (it transmorgified into some sort of strange scooter race in a Bed, Bath and Beyond that became a heated argument with a manager over a broken mirror he wanted me to pay for) but I woke up really wanting to play this game! Maybe I'll just go on Ebay and buy a copy of Toobin' instead...

02/19/03, 9:45 a.m.: Christ, I spent all night trying to remember this stuff, and it's almost gone after three minutes of surfing the Net. I had this kinda outrageous dream/nightmare that I was both James Bond in a James Bond movie and somebody watching the movie. (I've probably mentioned this elsewhere but this is frequently my defense mechanism with nightmares: the worse they get, the more they become something I'm watching as a television or movie, to the point where I can, in my dream, get up and change the channel, or walk away, etc. Thank God for post-modernism.) But for most of the dream, I was Bond.

Things started off well: I had managed some act of derring do, now it was time for me to escape from a parking garage. I jumped in my car (a super tiny version of The Lotus Esprit from The Spy Who Loved Me--like bumper car tiny) cut tight corners under a constellation of ricocheting gunfire, and hurtled under the parking garage gate out onto the street.

And here's where the nightmare started--I had apparently fucked with some big-time bastards because they had managed to completely close off the block around the building with extensive construction projects on all corners. Huge concrete slabs stacked into the streets, mighty I beams jutting out around every corner. At first it was fun, peeling around the block, seeing a new obstacle and barely dodging it, but meanwhile all these other cars showed up along with men running out into the streets waving metal pipes: although all the guys were burly white guys, there was still something about it that reminded me of the Rodney King riots. And once I realized here was no John Barry music, I started to panic.

And that's when Robert Shaw showed up. He drove up in one of those boxy English cars, the kind that look like luggage with fenders, and stepped out. He was enormous. I had turned into a cul-de-sac of concrete pylons and was trying to back up when he stepped forward and drove his fist through the center of my car. He was wearing a green coat, brown trousers, had the shape to him of a refrigerator, and I scrabbled out of the useless tiny Lotus as he glared at me with those cruelly intelligent eyes. His face radiated sheer hatred as I scampered back, and more men were dashing up on the sides, swinging those pipes. There was smoke in the air, the smoke of burning engines, and I fought my way through a few men until Robert Shaw grabbed me. He lifted me like I was a bag of trash and hurtled me onto the hood of his car, and as I squirmed in his grip, he lifted up his right hand and I saw it was robotic, made of black leather and polished titanium. And I thought, "Of course, a metal hand." Grinning, he drove it down between my legs and clenched and unclenched his hand--the threat of painful castration crystal-clear.

I would like to say I escaped using the serrated bow-tie that Q had given me, the one capable of slicing through solid steel, or the pepper-spray located under my right thumbnail. There is even part of me that would like to say that James Bond, like the Road Runner, finally got what he deserved, and I was treated to a painful bit of street surgery. But the whole thing had grown so alarming, I don't remember what happened next--or perhaps my anxiety, like a finger on a hi-fi needle, knocked my consciousness forward in the narrative and there was no immediate 'next' to remember. The next thing I knew, I was stumbling down the block almost blindly, the sounds of shouts growing closer. And I stumbled up into one of the parks of the office buildings surrounding my trap, thinking I could hide perhaps in one of the trees until I recovered my strength, and that's when I stumbled across the piece of gnarled wood that served as a rough gate to the park.

For at least an hour after the dream, I would roll over and repeat to myself the rhymed couplet carved into the piece of wood every time I woke up, intent on remembering what had struck me as a piece of profound wisdom. But I can't remember it now, to be honest. The gist of it was something like this:

O, Oo, O, Two Are More Powerful Than One,

Nothing More Powerful Than None.

And it was at that couplet I realized that this was the opening to the rarely-screened James Bond film that Samuel Beckett had written, the one that had been released, and then pulled from circulation. I tried to remember of it what I could as I stumbled past the couplet into the park, and the opening to the James Bond theme should have played, starting off the title sequence, but instead of the orchestra, there was the rising buzz of bees, devouring nature, as Bond stumbles into his schooling in the power of oblivion.

02/18/03, 10:24 p.m.: That was just fine with me: apart from a moment of utter shock when the alarm went off this morning, the day went more or less smoothly. I'm almost ninety pages into Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase and happy to be back in Murakamiland. Funnily enough, I thought there was enough of an analogue between The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and David Lynch's Twin Peaks that I figured an early scene in the book, in which the narrator stares transfixed at pictures of a woman's ear, was taken from Lynch's Blue Velvet. On the contrary: A Wild Sheep Chase was published in 1982, four years before Blue Velvet. Shows you what I know..

That's about as much as I've got for ya. It's after ten, I watched the last half of Buffy (the half I saw was a very good episode, and I loved the shadowplay conceit), took out the garbage, watched my computer lock up again (ever since "upgrading" my version of IE, the computer just wigs out on me, dammit). I've got the CEO newsletter to write this week, so I"m gonna be plenty busy the next few days. What makes up for is shit like this, where Hibbs throws me some super-nice compliments in the middle of his interview. And maybe I'll get around to the rest of The Bodyguard, but the small piece I watched has been ricocheting in my head ever since.

Oh, and did you see this? Very cool, particularly the classic Chiba shot in the back...

02/17/03, 03:47 p.m.: Well, okay. Haven't done much with the day yet--watched the first fourteen minutes of Ginger Snaps, then the first twenty minutes of Sonny Chiba's The Bodyguard (impressively disturbing and yet couldn't stop my craving for a nap), a nap, the first ten pages of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw again, shower, worry, worry, fret, fret, fret. Nothing really funny has struck me for the Fanboy Rampage, unless I can figure out how to turn my horror at Tim Burton impregnating Helena Bonham-Carter into a hilarious eleven-hundred word rant.

I swiped Molly's copy of Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase. She'd lent me Norweigan Wood, which I just wasn't able to get into, but my hope is that since Sheep Chase hit the bathroom, it's up for grabs and I can give it a try. Which is almost a shame, since most of the books I'm looking currently forward to reading seem like just a rehash of last year: Murakami, Eugenides, McCarthy, Delillo, Franzen (and probably Chabon if I can find my copy of Mysteries of Pittsburgh--I have no interest in his short fiction, for some reason). The foreign-filminess of The Mezzanine (an experience of antsy boredom punctuated by jaw-dropped awe) makes me consider more Nicholson Baker with some trepidation. And sadly, after spending so long hunting down JR and The Recognitions, the three or four pages of Gaddis I've read don't give me much hope at being spellbound. And I'm not even thinking of all the non-fiction I should be reading--there's two recent books on syphilis I haven't even bought yet, and all the books on San Francisco history and snipers and Vietnam littering the shelf--but can only pick up half-heartedly.

Sigh. And is there any doubt I'll watch that fuckin' Joe Millionaire tonight? It's probably the only thing that'll keep my mind off of Helena Bonham-Carter straddling the Tiny-Tim-like body of Tim Burton after a long day of destroying my fond memories of a favorite film. Ugh.

02/17/03, 11:13 a.m.: It took me over a month to read Great Expectations, and it took me almost a month to read Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine, a convincing argument my neurons are as slow as cold maple syrup these days. Baker's book is 135 pages long (with, admittedly, extensive footnotes) and I confess I started ahead of several other books in the queue because I thought I could finish it by the end of January and make my reading list for the month look a little more impressive.

Sadly, Baker's slim novel, detailing the thoughts of a man on his lunch break, managed to consistently mentally jujitsu me every time I tried to engage it. Part of that, I'm sure, was due to the fact that I read it mainly on my lunch breaks (and commutes to and from work) and the resulting reflexiveness of guy-on-his-lunch-break-reading-about-guy-on-his-lunch-break was distracting. And there was the lack of plot (and what looked like for a long time a lack of unifying theme) and the incessant footnoting that constantly gave one a choice between branches of thought to follow or else the putting aside altogether for one's own branches. And maybe there's also just me, slow-headed in February (and mid-February at that!), not writing much (except for another round of reviews for CEO here), not reading much, nor even watching many movies.

So what am I doing? I wish I could tell you. I'm hoping it's just winter, when I move my slowest, and it takes ten minutes for me to turn my head (it's taken me ten minutes just to write these few sentences). I have the day off today for President's Day, and it seems like such a gift, and I'm hoping I can get some things accomplished during it (if I could write a Fanboy Rampage today, it would make the rest of my week markedly easier, and if I could finish cleaning up this year's NaNovel, I might have a better idea of what to do with it). But I may just end up shuffling around the house, wondering where the time goes, wondering why I don't update this page more, wondering when Spring will start.

01/23/03, 10:39 a.m.: Nothing too exciting to see here: I spent the last two days producing a little over 7,000 words for the CEO newsletter and I wish to God I could have done so in the early part of the week, rather than alternating between staring at it, and staring at video games. I have a week of vacation left, however, and nothing I "have" to do other than work at the comic store this week and next, and get in touch with a bunch of people I've been meaning to contact for almost a month, and, in some cases, several months. I wish I wasn't so bad at that sort of shit...

And I did get a chance to drive down to the supercheap Cinema Saver Ten in Milpitas and see (finally, finally, finally) The Ring, which I guess I'll probably write a review of later, but boy do I want to see the Japanese version now. I was particularly pleased at how "meta" The Ring is--not just the "memetic theory as horror movie" hook, but the way the movie plays quite deliberately with our expectations of what a horror movie is, and what it does. I know a lot of critics weren't pleased with the gialloesque turn toward murder mystery, but it made the ending much more satisfying for me. I think I'm also glad now I never saw the Sixth Sense--I can sit back and look at some of the arrangements in this movie and pretend that the director was inspired by Rosemary's Baby or The Exorcist, and not another movie with a psychic, haunted looking, kid. It was pretty decent, and considering between it and the churro I spent $4.50, I'm pretty pleased.

01/20/03, 1:48 p.m.: Vacation, Day Two. Actually, it feels like day one. Yesterday was my usual Sunday off although I did a lot more stuff than I would normally, knowing I didn't have to be up at 6:00 a.m. today. It's not fully vacation either, because I've got the Previews Blackline sitting to my right, which means its time for the CE Newsletter to get done. Because I did reviews again for the CE website (review of Gangs of New York included at no extra charge), I'm feeling a little blah about the whole process. But then, I'm feeling a little blah about anything that doesn't involve me sitting around on my keister being passively entertained. Errands? Blah. Laundry? Blah. Putting on pants? Double-blah, baby! My hope is this trend will reverse itself somewhere before day 11 of the vacation....

01/12/03, 7:45 p.m.: And hey there, I finished Great Expectations! That was a damn great book.

I'd write more, but I'm tired after getting this week's reviews for the Comix Experience website up, plus my brain is pretty burnt from the full-tilt boogie of Edi and I going to my friend Caryn's 30th birthday and then taking in the Gerhard Richter show at the S.F. MOMA. I'll try to write more when the brain's back up.

01/10/03, 11:08 a.m.: Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever finish Great Expectations. I've been reading it for over a month now--the sort of leisurely pace that always kept me behind on my reading in Lit classes. I've got an astonishing queue of good books to follow it--Middlesex, JR, Suttree, and I just found a copy of End Zone by Delillo at a halfprice book place next to the Naz. The thing is, I'm willing to bet that I could've read at least two of those books in the time it's taken me to read the Dickens, and I wonder if maybe I should have. God help me, I'm finally old enough that I feel I have some hard choices to make about my reading--you'll never know how much I rue the previous five or six years where I finished very little literature--because there's only so much time left. I'm shocked by how much I've loved Great Expectations, and I'm sure I'll read more Dickens now (and I find myself grimly considering more Henry James), but I wonder if it's too late to do me much good.

01/09/03, 4:10 p.m.: That's not a very impressive bit of blog business, I'm afraid. Three entries on the fifth and then nothing for four days? My only excuse is a busy last couple of days, although one of them I busied up myself by seeing both Kaante and Equilibrium. That required a bit of doing, as the only place playing Equilibrium was the Cinema Saver 10 in Milpitas, which I'd never been to, and Kaante was playing at the "new" Naz Super 8 (the "old" Naz Super 8 closed at the beginning of the year, and I miss it already).

I really like the Cinema Saver 10: my movie only cost me a buck, which almost made up for the 47 miles I drove to get to it. If I hadn't been jonesing for an Bollywood fix I could have stayed and seen Frida or The Ring, both of which I can't believe I haven't caught yet.

So today, after writing reviews of this weeks' comics (which'll probably get posted tomorrow on the CE website), I find myself without much ambition. Writing, cleaning, laundry--all of it should be done, but instead, I've just been looking out at the greyness, flipping through the TV channels, reading entries in the newly arrived Encyclopedia of Pulp Writers. I've got get my act together before I see the wonderful girlfriend this evening, but I'm having a little trouble getting started. I'll get myself revved up again soon (I hope), but for now, I guess I must like what little I'm doing, because I can't stop doing it.

01/05/03, 10:06 p.m.: Did I mention we finally got Cartoon Network? That's another big piece of junk culutre day--Samurai Jack, bits of The Chuck Jones Show. One more thing to drain my willpower in '03.

And I wanted to tell you briefly about Dump before I forgot it entirely. Dump was the movie I was watching last night in my dreams: Ben Affleck and Reese Witherspoon in a romantic comedy about basketball. Affleck's a hotshot Southern fratboy basketball player, Reese is the sorority gal who wants nothing to do with him, but badly wants the women's college basketball team she's on to win. So Affleck, to win her heart, takes on teaching white chicks to dump the ball and learns how to be a better person. Awww. Thank God I woke up before I got very far into this dream at all. Why couldn't I dream about The Matrix sequel?

01/05/03, 09:55 p.m.: Okay, that's it with that damn Ape game. I had to run to the 'Net every five minutes just to figure out what to do, and even then, things weren't easy because the game was too ugly for me to find what I had to find ("Put the bone in the slot--where the hell's the slot? There's no slot here!"). It was bad enough I spent most of my time wandering around a monastery stomping on giant rats (just what any good Planet of the Apes game should have, right?). I battled it through, just so I could get to the part in the game where I could shoot a gorilla with a rifle. That's all I need. No more. I got my $8.99 worth of Playstation action.

Today's been my junk culture day--I'm watching High School Reunion as I type this, God help me. It's odd, after watching Battle Royale earlier today--sadly, Battle Royale, where a ninth grade class is put on an island and only one person will be allowed to leave alive, seems more as I remember high school than the manipulations of High School Reunion. In fact, I'm sort of hoping that at the end of this episode, the ex-classmates are going to be given weapons and told it's either kill or be killed.

01/05/03, 1:05 p.m.: I am the last person on Earth to watch Battle Royale, which I am watching now thanks to Ebay and my all-region DVD player. I actually was going to write about how incredibly annoying and awful the Dixie Chicks' remake of Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" is, but Beat Takeshi just got stabbed in the ass by a knife-wielding student, which means I gotta watch the rest of this flick immediately.

But, God, do the Dixie Chicks fuck up a good song.

01/03/03, 10:41 a.m.: One of the scarier things I'm just now figuring out is that the only people as obsessed as I am with the original Planet of the Apes are the French. I should have figured this out a year ago when I watched the DVD of the original flick with the French dubbing on. But it took buying this game for the Playstation (which I got for a measly $8.99) to realize just how obsessed the Frenchies are. Even though this has the crap cover art one associates with the Tim Burton remake, this game spends its first six minutes economically ripping off the first twenty-five of the film. Your character looks a little more like Val Kilmer than Charlton Heston, but it's still a matter of time before you're in a loincloth, banging on the bars of your straw-lined cage. And really, for me and for the French, that's all one wants out of life.

I haven't gotten very far into the game but...so far, it's not good. Poking about on the Net has led me to believe that it was originally designed as a PC game and then clumsily ported over to the PS1, but even that is a tertiary source of suckiness. The real problem is the amount of compromise that appears to have gone on during the length of the development cycle: its first, ultra-minimalist screen of Apes on horseback with a simple menu underneath brings to mind the classic French videogame Flashback, and generous dollops of this game play like that or the other classic Delphine game (whose name I can't remember) with its emphasis on puzzle-solving alternated with bursts of arcade style action. Fair enough, I liked those games, and updated versions set on the PotA would be enjoyable enough. But sometime early in its development cycle, it looks like the marketing people came and handed the developers a copy of Tomb Raider and said, "this is what's selling now. Make it like this."

Well, okay. Frankly, that can still work. Tomb Raider, in which Polygonal Big-Boobies (or whatever she's called) runs around solving puzzles while engaging in arcade-style action, is essentially the same formula as Flashback, just in three dimensions. And so now my faux Charlton Heston has had to briefly swim, for no reason whatsoever, and climb up on rafters to get past locked doors. Okay, fine.

And then, it looks like, somewhere near the end of the development cycle, the marketing people came to the development people with a copy of Metal Gear Solid and said, "This is what's huge. You've got to make it like this."

So now faux-Charlton, when he's not swimming or running and jumping into rafters, is sneaking by half-dozing gorilla guards and clumsily looking about in first person while listening for footsteps. (Yeah, just like in the original movie, he added snarkily....) And that could make for a pretty kick-ass Planet of the Apes game...if it had originally been designed that way, with designers who knew how to get the most out of such a design. But the appeals of Flashback, Tomb Raider and MGS are all very similar in complete different planes of execution: they're all impressive eye-candy games of their time, with a sense of adventure and accomplishment coming as much from what you can make your character do, as what comes next in the story. But Flashback is a 2D side-scroller, Tomb Raider is a 3D game, and MGS is an insanely complex mish-mash of the two. And all three were paradigm-breakers, which upped the sense of adventure in the player's interaction with the character's skills. Planet of the Apes has none of the discovery, nor does it give the gamer the satisfaction of seeing the established paradigm pushed, pinched or folded into something new. Plus, by trying to do all those things, it now does none of them well: the combat system is horrible, where you can sneak up on an enemy and not be able to land a single punch thanks to abominable collision detection: it's now just an ugly, awkward, ungainly puzzle-solver where you slink around like a scared old lady because you don't know what annoyance is hiding around the corner. Sad to say, without meaning to, Visiware have made Planet of the Apes a very French game: it's annoying.

And yet, because it's French, it's annoying in the classic Planet of the Apes way, not the new annoying Planet of the Apes way. Which is why, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go and yell at the TV set some more. I'm going to have my character stumble, slink, swim and annoy his way into the Forbidden Zone if it kills me.

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