(untitled #168)

Yes, I just can’t think of anything to call this post.  I wonder if this is true of the many abstract artists whose work gets titles like Contrast #231, and there literally are 230 other Contrast paintings beforehand.  I can’t quite get behind that; why not just call it “Dypsomaniac in a Confessional Booth” or “Trophy-Belt, Strung with Invertebrates”?  Hmm.

Okay, question du jour: are gas prices really going down, or did I have a minor stroke induced by Waco drivers?  My news reading has been a little less pervasive due to the damned lie about my apartment having internet (it doesn’t), but I thought this would make a headline.  I guess it’s not BAD enough.  And on the topic of petrol, how many of you honestly think we should be going to all lengths to reduce prices at the pump?  I’m speaking as a fairly frequent driver here, so I’m not just hectoring from the window of a Portland lightrail car.  I’m serious.  If oil companies see a decrease in demand and have to invest in alternatives to be profitable, not just nice, might that not be better for us all, if we take the long view?

I’ve also begun to think, in the past couple of weeks, that the U.S. must be an incredibly conservative nation.  It boggles my mind how many conservative analysts think of America as some kind of post-Christian wasteland of leftist atheism.  Notice that both candidates have moved right since the general election race began?  That’s right.  A centrist, maverick Republican vs. a fairly liberal Democrat with a talent for cross-partisan work would seem like the ideal face-off after the hardline right-wing Bush administration, right?  But instead, McCain has moved closer and closer to Bush, retaining a token belief in global warming as a distinguishing feature, while Obama has thrown distinctive beliefs over the bulwarks like water from a sinking lifeboat in a hasty attempt to seem like a center-right Democrat.  I find this all very disappointing, not because I want the country to be leftist instead of conservative, but because I think we desperately need balance to keep a check on the torture, spy, and invade view of security that is currently so pervasive in our government … is it seriously just the hard left, and me, who wants something truly different, saner, and more humane?

As said by the immortal someecards.com, “the X-Files were a lot funnier when the government wasn’t actually spying on us.”

Excellent article on Iran (and some incidentals).

I cannot recommend this article highly enough.  Just the thought of our soldiers having to go into Iran the way they went into Iraq (except Iran is larger and more powerful) has been making me feel sick for a long time, and this article (written by a real Persian who has served as translator to several Iranian presidents) strikes me as a solid, thorough survey of the issue that is completely opposed to war.  Also a nice, oblique “thumbs up” to Obama’s willingness to engage in talks with these regimes, which I had a hunch was a good idea but this guy really gives some geo-political reasons and precedents for why it would be a good idea.  And perhaps best of all, a full deflation of the idea that anything besides the current Republican battle frenzy is “appeasement” (again, I knew this was ridiculous but Majd puts it well and concisely).

In other news, I was back to the Deli again after a bizarre four-day weekend.  I was actually impressed with the new manager, and being impressed with the Deli is not a common occurrence for me, I assure you.  I mean, my first manager was fairly effective but barely literate, writing down anguished commands like “FLUFF CHESE’S,” “ONLY PS MEATS GOSE IN HERE,” or “DOT CHUBS DAILY DOT DOT DOT.”  She had a photograph of Duane “The Rock” Johnson thumbtacked to the bulletin board in the back room with a note reading THIS PICTURE WAS GIVING TO ME.  DO NOT TAKE DOWN.  I’ve wondered, from time to time, exactly what it had been giving to her, and when and why it stopped.  The second manager, a sweet and personable lady, was probably a humanities major at some time, judging by her utter lack of administrative skills.  I feel her pain.  She’s managing a Starbucks somewhere now, which is good, because she used to spend a lot of time drawing the Starbucks chalk advertisement signs (quite aesthetically, I must say) when she was supposed to be, I guess, ordering chicken (we were always out).

But now, under the current regime, we seem to be enjoying a Pax Meyera the likes of which I’ve never known before.  Things are stocked up.  Broken things are sometimes replaced.  Our manager wants us to work out our duties among ourselves at night instead of relying on the confusing, often hidden, often illiterate, “tour sheet” (no more “YOU!  Why didn’t YOU chisel the blood off this drain flume?  It was ON the TOUR SHEET!” business).

And and and.  Salman Rushdie’s new novel, The Enchantress of Florence, is magnificent so far.  I bet the luminous Padma Lakshmi would have stayed with him if she had read this book (probably a lie: no doubt the man is a total pain to live with, and probably the research he did on this book made it even more so  And she’s like six inches taller than him.  Poor guy).  Anyway, let’s just say that my tendency toward hero-worship is welling up once again, and the absence I’ve felt from him since Senior Novel days has only, as the adage says, made the literary heart grow fonder.  Go buy it.  Now.

An inconvenient movie?

Well, despite the ghastly reviews, I went to see The Happening, the sixth feature by thriller director / guru wannabe M. Night Shyamalan.  Last time I gave him the benefit of the doubt, contra the critics, I was horribly disappointed by the stilted, weird, anti-climactic Lady in the Water.  So let’s just say that my expectations weren’t very high at all.  

Actually, though, it wasn’t so bad after all, at least not to me; then again, I don’t have very exacting requirements for much “plot” in the movies I enjoy, and I think the lack of dense plotting and a “twist” were part of what irked critics most.  So don’t trust me, necessarily, unless you enjoy the sorts of things that I do.

For me, the best part of Shyamalan’s films has usually been the shooting: he’s willing to give long, patient shots that build suspense slowly, in a kind of Hitchcockian way, something most MTV-generation directors simply don’t have the attention spans to pull off.  For this feature, he teams up again with long-term collaborator Tak Fujimoto, and once again, most of the shots are classy and suspenseful, in a sort of art-horror way that I like.  However, the death of one character is blatantly foreshadowed by means of a cheap slow-mo shot of him driving away in a car that is worthy of a 1980s sentimental music video.  Most unfortunate, but it was the only major technical gaffe I noticed.

I may be wrong, but I think that the acting problems that some critics noticed are mostly script problems — Shyamalan writes all of his own movies, which has worked for some, but in this director’s case, not so much.  It’s as though he doesn’t stop to think about how people really talk, instead focusing on the “message” he wants to get across.  So there always has to be a big “conversation” (“Do you believe in … signs?”) in which someone ponderously just happens to start discussing spirituality, the unknown … you know, a more intimidating Eckhart Tolle or something.  This time, it’s a high-school student talking about forces of nature that will never be explained, which in a movie with the most vague title since 1982’s The Thing, is all too predictable.

So if Zooey Deschanel does little more than act confused throughout the whole movie, it’s at least partly the stilted script’s fault.  She also does the Mel Gibson “let me open my eyes as widely as possible for dramatic effect” thing (viz. Gibson’s Hamlet) — but let’s face it, her eyes are objectively a lot cuter than Mel Gibson’s.  Mark Wahlberg, who is becoming one of my favorite actors, is more than adequate as a leading man, but is also sort of forced into just “acting confused” for a lot of the time.  Maybe just a horror film convention (“Oh my god, where is it?  I think it’s in the … bushes!).  They both shine, though, in the few humorous moments and the “we’re gonna die so let’s renew our flagging love for each other through a speaking tube” scene.  Better than it sounds on paper.

Enough of that.  A lot has been made of the first R-rating this director has garnered, but I’m not sure what the big deal is.  Yes, there are a few gruesome suicides.  But they’re only shown for a few seconds each and are absolutely nothing on anything in, say, the work of Tarantino.  It’s a horror movie, guys.  

And then the inevitable brouhaha about environmentalism.  Again, I’m not sure why this is a big deal.  Wasn’t there a big global-warming blockbuster just a few years back?  And then Al Gore’s really quite excellent An Inconvenient Truth got an Oscar, something that the Shyamalan thriller is certainly not going to do.  It seems like a rather small blip on the climate-change radar screen.  And although the idea is seems rather silly to me — plants have been lying down and taking it from us for centuries, and no doubt will continue to do so — a movie in which plants get their comeuppance seems pretty timely to me, actually, and that counts whether you’re a climate-change believer or not.  Even the most fundamentalist conservative can’t really think that blacktopping the planet and belching smoke into the formerly blue sky is actually what was intended, by God or nature.

So basically, go and see it if you’re bored.  I give the whole package a B-, and advise Shyamalan to come see me in the writing center before attempting any more “naturalistic” dialogue …