you rat-bastard unscrupulous sons of bitches, pt. 3: the ambivalent edition

You goddamn...uh...

Wait.

This could be good.

you rat-bastard unscrupulous sons of bitches, pt. 2

Whoever greenlighted this is a dead man. Dead, you hear me?

Full moon, empty tallboys

Last night the moon was close to full. It reflected on the 4 Tecate cans on my desk all night long.

I Am Legend, a photographic apertif: compare and contrast.

I Am Legend

I've no use for the Charlton Heston of Soylent Green and The Omega Man, and only a grudging acceptance for the Charlton Heston of Planet of the Apes. I remember him for catchphrases and loud yelps of anger at some twisted high-concept science fiction denouement. In each movie he had a signature moment of despair, so we remember over-acted yells of rage and displeasure and shock that made sense in only in context. I just laugh at him now. So it's easy to forget that, given a different actor, each of that triad of '70s science fiction films could have been made a masterpiece of emotion.

I Am Legend isn't a masterpiece, but it might be if we wait.

Will Smith isn't Charlton Heston. He doesn't yell much. He's not outraged. He's quiet and scared and he's going mad with too much of those two adjectives. He sleeps badly at night, curled in a steel-foot bathtub with a rifle and a dog, every window blocked.

It's easy to forget this man has shared screen time with Martin Lawrence in two Michael Bay films. Smith is graying now, and there is a genuinely complex dignity in his face. He's not a hero anymore.

The film opens with Smith-as-Robert-Neville racing skittishly through a dead and still city, a Manhattan where each city street is alive with the sounds of the country, where deer leap through car-clogged streets making the myth of the urban jungle a reality. It's three years after 90% of humanity have died, a backstory which is told sparely, through flashbacks that are important not for their plot information but for their emotional content.

This Manhattan is virtually empty but it is still alive. Long shots show a familiar island made eerie not by the long tall grass growing through the cracks but by the bird songs made audible by the absent noise of the city. The silence is well-used, with great vistas and views that resemble Burtynsky photos more than they do apocalyptic films. They're as important to the film as the prairie and the desert are to the Western, and serve the same purpose: to externalize the protagonist's mental state in such a way that they motivate the same mental state in the viewer.

Canned food is available in the apartments and homes. Corn grows, some places, too. The deer can be shot, if with difficulty. These things fill the day. The skyscrapers have become canyons. The storefronts have become darkly mythical caves of the sort which only the foolish enter, populated by killers of the fast and brutal sort. These make up those who did not die. It's these killers - these rangy and bald hordes who can only yell and attack- where the film is weakest. They are clearly computer-generated and simply lack the personality necessary to instill a real and unique sense of fear. We've seen the speedy and the inhuman too many times.

But that's not the point. This isn't a horror film. The monsters aren't there to scare us. They're there to scare him. They're there to drive the protagonist to the point of suicide.

This film is a rumination on loneliness and the way that each man keeps alive the concept of "society" within him. This is a film about the collapse of society - not in the political or economic sense, but in the most basic and personal sense. What can you do when you're the last man on earth?

The Omega Man is loud, brash, heroic, and laughably dated. I Am Legend, although less faithful to Matheson's novel, is brooding, quiet, stressful, tragic. This is a lonely film, and I loved it.

Damn it, now I have to figure this out the hard way.

Your search - "women hemingway slept with" - did not match any documents.

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this is a stupid idea

We're going to cast Josh Hartnett in a film called "40 Days of Night" in which he gives up vampire killing for Lent in order to become so attractive to ladies that he can make them orgasm just by running feathers over their bodies.

you rat-bastard unscrupulous sons of bitches

You disrespectful motherfuckers.

You uncultured assholes.

You uncreative out-for-a-buck swine.

Gormless

Can you define this word without accessing a dictionary?

I can't even use it in a sentence.

Adopted son finds birth mom at his workplace

Oh, I do love the high weirdness.


link

Ballard Wave Sculpture

Wave sculptures 1
Originally uploaded by MaryWit

I love this sculpture- they're supposed to look like waves (it's right near a set of locks and an artificial water staircase for the salmon to jump up), but it looks to me like iron tentacles rising menacingly out of an eerily still sea of concrete.

Waylon Jennings is the Patron Saint of Drunks

If you saw this fellow in a bar today you'd give him a wide berth. He's not dangerous and he's not the one who is running things, but look at his eyes. They're bleary but confident and capable. The man's got a personality so strong you need to give it room to breathe.

His face is tanned and muscular but fleshy from too much whiskey and too many smoky bars. He's probably got a bump or three of cocaine in his nose and the roar of a crowd of long-time drinkers in his ears.

He's drunk, watchful, and seasoned. He's slept where most are scared to walk, lived through days and nights that would kill another man. He's loved those whom the rest of us would at best pity. He's the patron saint of drunks.

Which one has no arm?

Which one has no arm?

"Buy Nothing Day" Doesn't Go Nearly Far Enough

I propose a "Do Nothing Day," where every participant will do as little as possible: no work, no play, no effort expended on anything. No taps run, no electricity used, no clothing sullied.

This day will be December 14, in honor of my birthday.

Regret Caused By Manufactured Memory

A woman I work with wears the same perfume as an ex-girlfriend, a perfume which always struck me as too old and too mature for said girlfriend. Months of time spent with her re-associated this perfume with her youth, and now, once I smell it again in a mature context, all I can think of is youth.

pain of missed memory

It bothers me very much that I can't remember the name of the German girl who I flirted with on a tour of New Zealand. I bought her cigarettes and held her off the quay but I can't remember her name, nor can I remember if I in fact ever did know it.

She was slim and had long lank hair and a nose like a bird, and now I have no idea who she is.

Orwell for Seth

Politics and the English Language

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent, and our language--so the argument runs--must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts...

link to full text.

Orwellian Logic 101 -- A Few Simple Lessons

link

Is BoingBoing Irrelevant Yet?

Although it's the world's most visited blog, and arguably the progenitor of every quirk of style and focus of interest for every blog writer who starts a blog without a specific purpose, I've got this sneaking suspicion that Boing Boing has become the equivalent to the local morning news the alternative set. It fulfills the same need in young geeks that the news fulfills in the middle-class: to be equally comforted and distracted. While one group attempts actively to maintain the avant-garde, the other is quite happy with tradition.

Just like the information presented on the news - or any morning show, for that matter - allows the viewer the false belief that they are mentally and culturally tied into the events of the day, Boing Boing allows young liberal professionals (like myself) the luxury of believing we are tied into the underground events of they day. The mixture of stories presented - uses of technology, art, media issues, and the occasional goofy person and "unicorn chaser" post serve the same purpose as the mixture of cooking segments, scare stories, and quirky animal segments presented on the Today Show. And, just like the news, Boing Boing presents only a facet of the possible.

In the process of presenting their passions to the world in a presentable and accessible fashion, the Boing Boing writers have compartmentalized and made digestible facets of life that aredeserving of lifetimes of study. That's an indictment of blogs and factoids in general, but it's particularly evident here because Boing Boing is long-lived, successful, and frequently updated. So, while Cory Doctorow is clearly passionate about information freedom, the EFF and copyright/DRM scare stories he posts become, to the reader, the equivalent of the stories exposing a dangerous toy or a local unsafe school. Whereas they should be calls to action, they end up being lost in the chatter until they're nothing but excuses for us to briefly vent our outrage.

While I have learned much from Boing Boing, and been inspired many times by them, I cannot shake the idea that their ability to bring niche passions to the forefront is inherently limited because the underground can only remain an unknown for so long.

A short precis of What I Did

Seattle is a melange of green and concrete, of weathered bright buildings emboldened by moss, of city buildings that in other contexts would have reminded me of fascist architecture. It's Tallinn without the crippling fear of the post-Soviet Russian state. The cool moist air coming in from Puget Sound was easy to breathe, and although Seattle is large and industrial, the air smelled fresher than any city I'd every visited before. I drank Rainier and whiskey copiously but awoke each morning with bright eyes. The sky was gray and dank most days but Mt. Rainier rose hours away like the sun. Seagulls woke me up one morning and I knew I was home.

My hosts Seth and Scott were courteous enough to fulfill pretty much every tourist desire I had. Besides spending every evening in the company of the cool, I visited these places:

• Seattle Art Museum
• Kung Fu Grindhouse at the Sunset Tavern (this is an event, mind you)
  
• Frye Art Museum
• Seattle Central Library
• Left Bank Books
• Fantagraphics Books
  
• Hattie's Hat
• Pike's Place Market
• Experience Music Project
• Science Fiction Museum
• Space Needle
  

Each of these, I could have gone back every day I was there, they were that great.

This is an incomplete list because dear god we watched a lot of movies:

• The Lady Is the Boss
• Hapkido
• Panther Squad (these last 3 at KungFu Grindhouse)
  
• Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins
• Jake Speed
• Creature
• Sci Fighters
• Golden Compass (at the Cinerama with Seth and 2 bottles of wine)
  
• Unaccompanied Minors (on the plane from Tucson to Seatac)
  

I miss Seattle.

I could use your help.

Hey all half dozen of you.

I've decided to relocate to Seattle, Washington and I am extraordinarily excited about the prospect of doing so. The first step is finding employment, so I'm asking for your assistance:

If you know of anyone in the Seattle area in need of a writer with experience in marketing and grants and proposals please let me know!

Back to our regularly scheduled stupidity.

post-furlough re-integration notes

I keep seeing creatures in the negative space created by plants in the wind, and they're terrifying me.

post-furlough re-integration notes

I keep seeing creatures in the negative space created by plants in the wind, and they're terrifying me.

cracked wheat

RL: What are you making for breakfast?
Lou: Cracked wheat.
RL: More like "crapped" wheat, because it's really gross.
Lou: That is a really bad joke.
RL: You know how bad that joke was? That's how bad cracked wheat is.

Love, Georgia Ann

Love, Georgia Ann
Originally uploaded by régis l

There are a lot of things sad about this letter. The content itself is sad. The writer's reasons are banal and so is her prose. That she dated it is businesslike and sad. But it's the fact that she types it that really gets me. I have an image in my mind of Georgia Ann leaned over an old IBM word processor (the kind that lets you see the words on a tiny little screen before it prints them like a typewriter), composing a letter that will end an entire era of a man's life.

A handsome large man.

handsome large man

I like this guy because although he's obviously a big fellow he wears his weight well. He's got a vaguely unplaceable look on his face, though, as if being photographed is a matter of great worry for him.


I found this photo in an antique store, and then I uploaded it and a few dozen other photos to Flickr.

suicide by ballpoint pen

seven days of uncreation

It's noon, Thursday, Eastern Daylight Time, and every human being on Earth has just vanished in one huge and completely unselective rapture. Had there been any warning, people might have parked their cars on the roadside or landed their planes, but no, so immediately the world's roads become flaming wreckage-strewn ribbons, while crashed jets punctuate the landscape with fireballs...

link

Grinch

Even though he ends up redeemed, the Grinch is still ugly. His fur is still green and moldly and he still lives by himself above Whoville. Having an epiphany is like winning the lottery: The only way to survive is by living as if it never happened. Otherwise you end up broke and drunk and hobbling off a pier. Or, in the Grinch's case, broke and drunk and hobbling off a cliff.

Ten bucks says he later shot himself. No, make that twenty.

get it right, you assholes

It's "Brussels Sprouts," not "Brussel Sprouts".

It's "Daylight Saving Time," not "Daylight Savings Time".

hannukah begins at sundown

HAVE A GOOD TIME

this is my favorite picture of my brother.

my brother in peru
Originally uploaded by régis l

HOLY SHIT

I TORE A PHONE BOOK IN HALF.

Let me say that again.

I TORE A PHONE BOOK IN HALF. An Albuquerque Qwest-Dex phone book. Five hundred pages. Jesus Christ. I feel like I just discovered how to cause tornadoes.

I'm 170 lbs of essential biological functions - there's no extra muscle on this body. All brain, baby. But - and I cannot say this enough -

I TORE A FUCKING PHONE BOOK IN HALF.

God, I feel like I've got horns growin' out of my forehead.

I feel like I just haymaker-punched a Kodiak bear in the face. And knocked him out.

















I would destroy these phone books if they so much as looked at me wrong.