I'm pleased with the colors of this picture, actually. It came out nicer than I thought it would.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Pasted
Here is one of the wheatpasted collage bits I saw (alluded to in the earlier post). There are a number of them peppered around the city...
I'm pleased with the colors of this picture, actually. It came out nicer than I thought it would.
I'm pleased with the colors of this picture, actually. It came out nicer than I thought it would.
Busin' etc.
The bus ride home was packed with amusements; lots of material I soaked up like a sponge. Totally got a short story out of the raw material. Just jotted notes to create it. A literary story, nothing genre.
I had a kind of epiphany today -- namely, that nobody sets out to write a Literary story -- that the whole "Literary" idea is bullshit. There are simply stories that stand the test of time, and those that don't. And the ones that survive become "Literature" -- regardless of their origins. Yesterday's "Genre" fiction become today's "Literature" and tomorrow's "Classics." Not all, naturally. Most vanish, but I think that's really how it happens.
Which is why the so-called "Literary" shit so many acolytes of the NYC Litfic industry churn out are just so bankrupt artistically -- exercises in pointlessness. Things that Litfic types sneer at -- you know, ephemera like "plot" -- are what make stories stories. And these colorless waifs, these paragons of Litfic, they work strenuously to write evocatively about ultimately nothing.
I mean, Stephen King wrote horror fiction, yes? And he was hugely popular in his day, of course, while the Litfic types generally shunned him. By his own admission, he wrote "salami" -- he admired writers like Joyce Carol Oates, among others. However, isn't it likely that some (certainly not all) of his books will stand the test of time? Already he's become a kind of literary elder statesman, earning some grudging plaudits from the avatars of good literary taste. Perhaps belatedly, or perhaps it's a bowing to the inevitable, I'm not sure. I mean, I read King as a teen, and stopped reading him after high school, but what's the separate King from, say, Robert Louis Stevenson or Jules Verne, except the span of time? It will be impossible to discuss fiction in the 20th Century without referring to Stephen King.
Then again, maybe people will have all but stopped reading in a century, and we won't be discussing literature at all.
I saw a "Manga Explains Physics" book at the bookstore -- basically a comic book explaining physics. The initial amusement factor if it hit me straightaway, like "Funny!" but then I thought "Wow. Maybe this is how ALL books will look in another 20 years. Maybe it'll all be a comic book."
Yikes.
I had a kind of epiphany today -- namely, that nobody sets out to write a Literary story -- that the whole "Literary" idea is bullshit. There are simply stories that stand the test of time, and those that don't. And the ones that survive become "Literature" -- regardless of their origins. Yesterday's "Genre" fiction become today's "Literature" and tomorrow's "Classics." Not all, naturally. Most vanish, but I think that's really how it happens.
Which is why the so-called "Literary" shit so many acolytes of the NYC Litfic industry churn out are just so bankrupt artistically -- exercises in pointlessness. Things that Litfic types sneer at -- you know, ephemera like "plot" -- are what make stories stories. And these colorless waifs, these paragons of Litfic, they work strenuously to write evocatively about ultimately nothing.
I mean, Stephen King wrote horror fiction, yes? And he was hugely popular in his day, of course, while the Litfic types generally shunned him. By his own admission, he wrote "salami" -- he admired writers like Joyce Carol Oates, among others. However, isn't it likely that some (certainly not all) of his books will stand the test of time? Already he's become a kind of literary elder statesman, earning some grudging plaudits from the avatars of good literary taste. Perhaps belatedly, or perhaps it's a bowing to the inevitable, I'm not sure. I mean, I read King as a teen, and stopped reading him after high school, but what's the separate King from, say, Robert Louis Stevenson or Jules Verne, except the span of time? It will be impossible to discuss fiction in the 20th Century without referring to Stephen King.
Then again, maybe people will have all but stopped reading in a century, and we won't be discussing literature at all.
I saw a "Manga Explains Physics" book at the bookstore -- basically a comic book explaining physics. The initial amusement factor if it hit me straightaway, like "Funny!" but then I thought "Wow. Maybe this is how ALL books will look in another 20 years. Maybe it'll all be a comic book."
Yikes.
Bedbuggery
Way to go, New York City: Bedbug capital of the world! Apparently some other cities are experiencing this bedbug renaissance, too. Nice to know that NYC is leading the charge on bedbugs. Maybe too many unwashed hipsters there? Just a thought.
We (Culture) Jammin'
I forgot to mention something amusing from the other day. While going through my 'hood, I passed these three whey-faced younglings who looked like they were Up To Something Serious(tm), striding purposefully past me -- army jackets? Check. Chuck Taylors? Check. Black stovepipe jeans? Check. Art Institute of Chicago bags? Check. I noted them in passing, couldn't help it. Serious, serious business. Anyway, I noted them, without paying too much attention, as I was en route to someplace else. Then later that day, I saw that somebody had wheatpasted these collage-poems (I snapped a photo of one; I should post it this evening) throughout the 'hood. All over the place, a bunch of them.
But the funny thing, the punchline, is that I think I found one of their IDs -- I saw it on the street while going to get some groceries, and I saw this ID sitting there in the street, was like "What's THIS?" and I picked it up and saw that it was (I am nearly sure) one of the Pop Cultural Commandos I had seen! I'm sure she's shitting biscuits between bong hits, like "Dooood, where's my ID?? Fawwwwk!"
I pocketed the ID, and thought at first that I'd just mail it back to them (if I can find them -- their name was pretty distinctive, so it should be fairly easy to sleuth'em out). But then I thought about making a little bit of conceptual art to contain their ID and THEN mail it back to them. Then they'd be like "Dooood! My fawking ID that I thought was lost came back to me in THIS!" and then they see the little thing I created to house their ID. I'm still mulling it, but it amuses me just enough that I might do it. I was thinking of a box-within-a-box-within-a-box-within-a box or something like that. Different boxes. And the final one contains the ID, without sourcing or explanation. Bahah!
Note to would-be Cultural Commandos: don't carry your IDs on you when you go a'wheatpasting!
But the funny thing, the punchline, is that I think I found one of their IDs -- I saw it on the street while going to get some groceries, and I saw this ID sitting there in the street, was like "What's THIS?" and I picked it up and saw that it was (I am nearly sure) one of the Pop Cultural Commandos I had seen! I'm sure she's shitting biscuits between bong hits, like "Dooood, where's my ID?? Fawwwwk!"
I pocketed the ID, and thought at first that I'd just mail it back to them (if I can find them -- their name was pretty distinctive, so it should be fairly easy to sleuth'em out). But then I thought about making a little bit of conceptual art to contain their ID and THEN mail it back to them. Then they'd be like "Dooood! My fawking ID that I thought was lost came back to me in THIS!" and then they see the little thing I created to house their ID. I'm still mulling it, but it amuses me just enough that I might do it. I was thinking of a box-within-a-box-within-a-box-within-a box or something like that. Different boxes. And the final one contains the ID, without sourcing or explanation. Bahah!
Note to would-be Cultural Commandos: don't carry your IDs on you when you go a'wheatpasting!
Lost Highway, found again
I'm tickled to see "Lost Highway" in the Onion's AV Club. It's one of my favorite David Lynch movies. People usually gush about "Eraserhead" and "Blue Velvet," and "Mulholland Drive," but "Lost Highway" is a keeper in so many ways -- a tasty, horrific lil' film noir with so much going for it, in terms of atmosphere. Some of the shots of it are so unsettling (one of my favorites is this slow pan of Pullman's character's bedroom, where the camera moves very slowly across it and you don't even realize you've gone into absolute darkness until you're already there -- wonderful shot).
I remember seeing it in the theaters when it came out, dragging a high school buddy to see it (Exene came along, too), sometime in 1997, when it came out. Hard to believe -- 27-year-old Dave! Long ago! Anyway, it was a stunning, horrifying movie. I remember walking out in a daze, everybody silent for about 20 minutes, and then my friend said "What the HELL was that movie all about?" I had my theories, and I expounded on them, what I thought had happened.
I think the "key" to "Lost Highway" is entirely there, and the ONION guy appears to mostly get it in his review. The key is Bill Pullman's talk of how he likes to remember things in his own way, not how they necessarily actually happened. That's it. And the two halves of the movie, in my view, reflect this dichotomy -- the impossible seems to happen midway through the movie, and we see what seems to be a second plot emerge out of the blue, but really, it's all interwoven -- it's all Pullman's nightmare, his fantasy -- he projects himself into that second plot, as somebody else. The second plot is really a shadow image of the original plot, what Pullman's character did to try to come to terms with what he actually did. The clues and keys are all there (especially in the VIDEO -- the videotaping is the key to it, because Pullman's character has this aversion to objective reality when it comes up against his ego, and so the videotape motif of it is vital to getting what was actually going on, versus what was appearing to go on. The video doesn't lie, and that's vital).
The trick of "Lost Highway" is that you have an unreliable narrator (really not a narrator, but an unreliable protagonist). Lynch's game he plays with the audience is having us, the audience, experience Pullman's character's world through his eyes, with reality periodically intruding and disturbing him (as reality surely must disturb the delusional). It's a brilliant movie (and is definitely a teste flight for what he did with "Mulholland Drive" -- which more people like, and which revisits those ideas he established in "Lost Highway.")
Pullman's character is so out of touch that he creates these extensions of self to shield his "real" (?) self from the consequences of his actions. It's kind of like "Fight Club" without the big revelation in the mix (and, again, video plays a role in that revelation, too, if you'll remember). The revelation in "Lost Highway" (which makes the movie make much more sense) is gradual, and isn't so nakedly apparent as in Fincher's movie.
Therein lies the brilliance of it -- people get distracted by Lynch's tendency to quirk the fuck out of his movies, but in this one, he trusted his audience to be sharp enough to get what was going on, without spoon-feeding them. The trouble is, most of his audience were Americans, not Europeans, so the indirect approach in his movie likely left people not sure what the hell was happening.
Seeing the ONION blurb above makes me want to get "Lost Highway" on DVD again. I loved that movie, and it's still one of my favorites of Lynch's. One of the best scenes in it, and scariest...
Mystery Man
Now, if you view the above as objective reality, then there's this bogeyman giving Bill Pullman shit at this party, and this entity is doing what seems to be impossible. But really, the Mystery Man is an extension of Pullman himself, and doesn't actually exist. He's a projection of his murderous guilt, essentially. The Mystery Man IS Pullman, and Pullman is the demonic Mystery Man. But Pullman sees himself as a good guy, not a demon, and so he recoils from this part of himself, and what horrible things that part of himself actually did.
I remember seeing it in the theaters when it came out, dragging a high school buddy to see it (Exene came along, too), sometime in 1997, when it came out. Hard to believe -- 27-year-old Dave! Long ago! Anyway, it was a stunning, horrifying movie. I remember walking out in a daze, everybody silent for about 20 minutes, and then my friend said "What the HELL was that movie all about?" I had my theories, and I expounded on them, what I thought had happened.
I think the "key" to "Lost Highway" is entirely there, and the ONION guy appears to mostly get it in his review. The key is Bill Pullman's talk of how he likes to remember things in his own way, not how they necessarily actually happened. That's it. And the two halves of the movie, in my view, reflect this dichotomy -- the impossible seems to happen midway through the movie, and we see what seems to be a second plot emerge out of the blue, but really, it's all interwoven -- it's all Pullman's nightmare, his fantasy -- he projects himself into that second plot, as somebody else. The second plot is really a shadow image of the original plot, what Pullman's character did to try to come to terms with what he actually did. The clues and keys are all there (especially in the VIDEO -- the videotaping is the key to it, because Pullman's character has this aversion to objective reality when it comes up against his ego, and so the videotape motif of it is vital to getting what was actually going on, versus what was appearing to go on. The video doesn't lie, and that's vital).
The trick of "Lost Highway" is that you have an unreliable narrator (really not a narrator, but an unreliable protagonist). Lynch's game he plays with the audience is having us, the audience, experience Pullman's character's world through his eyes, with reality periodically intruding and disturbing him (as reality surely must disturb the delusional). It's a brilliant movie (and is definitely a teste flight for what he did with "Mulholland Drive" -- which more people like, and which revisits those ideas he established in "Lost Highway.")
Pullman's character is so out of touch that he creates these extensions of self to shield his "real" (?) self from the consequences of his actions. It's kind of like "Fight Club" without the big revelation in the mix (and, again, video plays a role in that revelation, too, if you'll remember). The revelation in "Lost Highway" (which makes the movie make much more sense) is gradual, and isn't so nakedly apparent as in Fincher's movie.
Therein lies the brilliance of it -- people get distracted by Lynch's tendency to quirk the fuck out of his movies, but in this one, he trusted his audience to be sharp enough to get what was going on, without spoon-feeding them. The trouble is, most of his audience were Americans, not Europeans, so the indirect approach in his movie likely left people not sure what the hell was happening.
Seeing the ONION blurb above makes me want to get "Lost Highway" on DVD again. I loved that movie, and it's still one of my favorites of Lynch's. One of the best scenes in it, and scariest...
Mystery Man
Now, if you view the above as objective reality, then there's this bogeyman giving Bill Pullman shit at this party, and this entity is doing what seems to be impossible. But really, the Mystery Man is an extension of Pullman himself, and doesn't actually exist. He's a projection of his murderous guilt, essentially. The Mystery Man IS Pullman, and Pullman is the demonic Mystery Man. But Pullman sees himself as a good guy, not a demon, and so he recoils from this part of himself, and what horrible things that part of himself actually did.
Whensday
I woke up this morning momentarily disoriented, unsure what day it was. For a moment, I thought it was the weekend. Then I walked my mind through the days and realized where I was: Wednesday.
Today is a good day, I think. I signed the lease for the apartment -- just my name on it. My place! MINE! The new lease kicks in on October 1. Yippee! And it's about $40 less than my rent has been on the place, so how great is that? It rocks. Happy Dave!
It's humid as hell. I think it'll storm today.
While waiting for the bus this morning, I was amused at the automotive calvalcade -- life in the LP: a dozen BMWs cruising by, a handful of Audis, some Mercedes, a Porsche, some Lexuses (or is that "Lexi?" Hah). All the wealthies going their merry way, while I waited for my bus.
I'm looking forward to finding work in the Loop again. Then I can take the bus, the train, can bicycle, or even walk, if I wanted to. I love those kind of transportation options. I love living in the LP. It's a pricey neighborhood, but it's a great neighborhood, too.
Today is a good day, I think. I signed the lease for the apartment -- just my name on it. My place! MINE! The new lease kicks in on October 1. Yippee! And it's about $40 less than my rent has been on the place, so how great is that? It rocks. Happy Dave!
It's humid as hell. I think it'll storm today.
While waiting for the bus this morning, I was amused at the automotive calvalcade -- life in the LP: a dozen BMWs cruising by, a handful of Audis, some Mercedes, a Porsche, some Lexuses (or is that "Lexi?" Hah). All the wealthies going their merry way, while I waited for my bus.
I'm looking forward to finding work in the Loop again. Then I can take the bus, the train, can bicycle, or even walk, if I wanted to. I love those kind of transportation options. I love living in the LP. It's a pricey neighborhood, but it's a great neighborhood, too.
School's Out
Stop the presses! Better-paid teachers and smaller class sizes yield better outcomes for the students?! You don't say!
The Case for the $320,000 Kindergarten Teacher
Our country's ambivalence toward education (and particularly, it's blowing off of primary education) is frustrating. Mortgaging the future for the sake of ideology. It's just stoooooopid.
The Case for the $320,000 Kindergarten Teacher
Our country's ambivalence toward education (and particularly, it's blowing off of primary education) is frustrating. Mortgaging the future for the sake of ideology. It's just stoooooopid.
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