Ensign Tom

16 years ago Douglas Adams took his last chance to see the Baiji.



Now both Douglas and the dolphins are gone forever.

Something unravels, where potential superiorities fail to uplift you. How could we step from cloud to cloud, umbrellas thrusting upward towards the sun? What other options exist for a fantastical escape, but the ones reflected in the antiseptic glare of stars? Surely our destiny is feeted in this purpose, this righteous glorification of our natural selves. We will band ourselves into frenetic impossibilities, kinetic implausibilities, until we have conquered the very ether and tamed the restless continuum.

Quoted from tactisle:I keep the wolf from the door but he calls me up
Brought to you by way of [info]bensong1 and [info]onecrazymother and [info]bicrim and [info]cinema_babe, among others I'm sure...Respond to this post and I will give you three words that I think are accurately descriptive of you.If you participate, I ask that you propagate the leme by posti this in your own journal. [end quote]

me am a robot have
nothing to ay in particular
all is well
all is wlel
an
all wi
be well

A mug I found at the thrift says:

BCI Training Systems Inc.

WIN-WIN NEGOTIATIONS
A Tactic Perceived Is No Tactic At All

BLanketing
Flinch
Missing Person
Deadlines
Nibbling
Moral Appeal
Limits
Competition
Take It or Leave It
Association
Legitmacy
Krunch
Apparent Withdrawal
Bogey
Trial Ballon
If/Then
Good Buy/Bad Guy
Precedent
Limited Authority
Reversal

These are separated into columns of five, but I'm too lazy to do it here. Doesn't it look like some kind of bizarre BDSM checklist?

I have a list of movies to update with, but I don't feel like it right now. I finally had to take a break from them anyway, partly because most were ones from my own collection that had remained unwatched because they were too bad to watch. I'm expanding it to include things I merely haven't seen in a long time to make up for when the local sources of cheap movies run dry, as they have at the moment. (I had a chance to get both Jon Favreau movies for $8 on one DVD, but on reflection I realized they would actually have to pay me to take them). I suppose another round of Netflix is the answer.

I have a lot on my mind, so as usual I'm doing whatever I can to stop myself from thinking.

Interesting failure. The first quarter or so is almost unwatchable, especially in full screen, my only option on the DVD. According to the production notes, they went digital for the convenience, and because they didn't want to have to re-enact anything. I would certainly hope not, as by the end they had an incredible four hundred hours of footage to edit down. Most of which was presumably shot by a short, drunken 12-year-old who wandered in from a wedding reception with his dad's digicam. Actually, the painful part is, Dad could never justify shelling out for that camera for home movies, and Junior would have probably allowed us to occasionally orient ourselves to the set instead of the insides of noses.

But maybe the first hundred hours of shooting taught them something, because the next three hundred were somewhat more reasonable. The sound problems (easily solved by slapping some more of those painfully juvenile iMovie subtitles on a few of the important bits) persisted to the point that I had to rewatch a few scenes before I could be confident that my failure to understand what was going on was not due to my inability to hear anything.

Which brings me to the next area that screamed "we have all the footage in the world and no fucking clue how to use it": the editing. Mystifying. That's all I can say. Decisions were made, but not by human beings. One of the two women responsible for the doc quit her job at MTV to make it. I'm not going to take a cheap shot here, but I feel it should be noted that if her sensibilities were honed on music videos, that would explain an awful lot.

This not-a-review is topheavy with technical concerns, but so was the movie. The story is unfortunately obscured and overshadowed by these problems, to the point where it loses all sense of direction or purpose -- or would have, except that of course we know all along where it is going, and how it will end.

At least, those of us who were paying attention during the boom and bust of the (haha) New Economy do. We see Tom Herman and Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, best friends since sixteen, so close that until a set of brunettes show up to play their neglected girlfriends, we might reasonably assume they are a couple. Tom is a geek with poor social skills but an infectious enthusiasm, and Kaleil is politician in training, warm and personal but at arm's length, commanding but still vulnerable, so that, as a brown man, he is not intimidating to the powerful white people he has to beg money from. With a handful of friends and a few million in seed money, they set out to get a piece of the power and wealth for themselves. Watching their giddy naivete from the comfy armchair of the future, we know we are here to watch a disaster unfold.

But the payoff doesn't come, at least not how we expect it. The company fails, of course; we watch it move from eight to seventy to nearly three hundred employees, as subtitles inform us of the month and the number, inviting us to snicker with our retrospective wisdom about the impossible-to-sustain growth of a business that has no functional product. For the next two hundred hours of shooting, nobody talks about this. Instead, they talk about the investors, and how to get more of them, and how many nifty great things their product will be able to do some undefined day, the only value known for which is 'not today'. And more than any of that, they talk about their feelings. They process. They discuss themselves into the ground. Ultimately, exactly how they go bankrupt is left out of the film. It isn't necessary. Everybody knows how, and why, already. This is not a flaw, but one of the film's rare moments of true self-possession. One thing it is sure it wants to do is not tell us things we already know.

At least, what those of us who weren't up close and personal to the tech crash don't know. They might watch this movie and think it's not about the dot-com wave at all, but a bunch of ambitious screw-ups and their personal problems. The rest of us were just nodding along, because we know that guys like these were exactly what went wrong. This is, in fact, the story. One of the girlfriends addresses the camera from a coked-out haze with her sunglasses on indoors. She tells us that she finds all this business stuff funny, because the guys are like overgrown children playing grown-up with their suits and credit cards and cell phones. (Delighted to be on camera, she whips off her sunglasses at the end of this speech, and instead of obnoxious, it's charming, as if she herself has become a child).

The final hundred hours provided the best stuff, and a more experienced crew could have really done something with it. As is, a less experienced, but inspired crew sort of did something with it. The tension between Kaleil and Tom, and between Tom's self-image and reality, grows until it snaps and security is hustling Tom out of the building. More talking about feelings and processing follows, though for a moment Kaleil teeters on a fascinating personal edge between decency and hubris. But nothing can come between them; in the end, they meet over free weights in a gym, and after all their squabbling about how much money Tom should be bought out for, grimly confirm that neither of them will get anything at all.

The film ends with a footnote which explains that govWorks raised $60 million in the year of its existence, and that Tom and Kaleil went on to form a business 'to help failed dot-com startups'.

Distance: 1.5 mi
Stores visited: CH Martin, Lot Less, Salvation Army

DVDs:

Startup.com. Documentary by Hegedus & Noujaim (The War Room), 2001.

The Damned (La Caduta degli dei). Directed by Luchino Visconti, 1969.

Keys to Tulsa. Who cares, it was three bucks. I got it for my Spader collection. Okay, it says Leslie Greif directed it, and it's from 1997. I just looked up Greif to see if she was a woman, and probably, because other than a Chevy Chase movie that appears to have been released only in Romania, she's a producer.

Books:

The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood

A Viewer's Guide to Film: Arts, Artifices, and Issues - Richard M. Gollin

Behind the Attic Wall - Sylvia Cassidey. This was my first favorite book with chapters, when I was a kid. Amazed to find it.

Shoot Out - Peter Bart & Peter Guber. This book is based on a class these two former studio bigwigs taught at UCLA. Opening it at random five times I found an anecdote about a famous or important Hollywood name. I'm so reading this one first.

Total cost: $20.

IMDB says of David Fincher's in-production Zodiac: "A serial killer in the San Francisco Bay Area taunts police with his letters and cryptic messages. We follow the investigators and reporters in this lightly fictionalized account of the true 1970's case as they search for the murderer, becoming obsessed with the case. Based on Robert Graysmith's book, the movie's focus is the lives and careers of the detectives and newspaper people."

Jake Gyllenhaal is leading up an anotherwise unremarkable cast, which makes me think if this thing hits at the right time, it'll be a big success for Fincher. His last one, Panic Room, failed to live up to his potential, and seemed to me to suffer from a kind of creative anxiety, possibly because Fight Club was looming over his shoulder. It was a tough act to follow, but so was Se7en, after which we got The Game, which suffers from similar problems as Panic Room.

And then came Fight Club, which is superior to Se7en in every way, but feels like a maturation of the director's artistry along similar lines, as if the conclusion of the thoughts he started in Se7en about masculinity and morality, image and identity, sex and power. Panic Room, again, feels like a grown-up The Game in some ways, with similar claustrophobic tension more literally expressed, and stripped a bit of the hackish plottyplotness he has always let drag him down. (Though not entirely, of course).

Anyway, if his pattern holds, and he's finished the next step of artistic growth, Zodiac could be both really, really good, and possibly even a runaway at the box office, because Jake is popular and both a good journalism and a good serial killer movie are overdue. Or it could be incredibly boring; amazingly for all his willingness to shock, he could become as boring as Tim Burton has at any time.

If you came to believe a nothing somewhere, would you put it down for absolutely garnished? Could you handle its translucency, its majestic keening? Surely in these hoardes of ophidian graces, there are some called by names we understand. There is no abolishment in victory, no fantastical leaps to be made for the sake of adequacity. We merely stand and seize the keep: the reach with which we forment the galaxies, and thumbtack the devious stars.

"Fuckin' Proof...shot first."
"What happened?"
"They don't know yet. It was an altercation."
"Obviously."
"The guy he shot, who killed him, survived...That might explain the media quiet a little more. Later there might be..."
"Come on, you were right before."
"If he were one of the Backstreet Boys -- "
"Right. If Biggie and 'pac were white --"
" -- it would have blown up the world."
"Instead of just parts of it. Kurt Cobain fucking killed himself and it blew up the world."
"Ten years later, no one has ever been charged in the murders of Christopher Wallace or Tupac Shakur. If they had been Dave Matthews and Garth Brooks, do you think that would still be the case?"

Of course, Tupac has now actually put more albums out after his death than before it, and he's the only maybe-not-really-dead-guy-theory I buy (including Andy Kaufman, because obviously the funniest thing he could do was actually die).

Please don't come back to tell me the 1996/97 murders were big news, big stories. They were certainly bigger than Proof, but Proof, even as Em's loyal sidekick, wasn't as big as them. But let's take a case from outside of entertainment -- little JonBenet Ramsey, another murdered human yet to have justice done in her name (of course, there are far, far too many of these in the world to ever list, or even know their names).

She also died in 1996, and no one has ever been charged. Outrage over this fact, the case, and speculation that wealth and privilege (no one mentions race) might be behind it, breaks out regularly ever since, in the public discourse and the media. Every few years the gore hounders brush off some dusty clips and run another "Look at the pretty dead girl" doc, complete with lots of dark implications and half devoted to the whodunnit.

Pretty much the only people I ever see talking about Biggie and 2pac's unsolved cases are black, and there aren't that many of them. Their mothers. A few crazed filmmakers. Rappers, of course, and their fans. Bubbles of coverage lamenting their deaths occasionally pop up, but nobody gets mad anymore. The anger was always relegated to the fringes anyway, like most emotions that travel through the black American community.

If I were to post something like this on the SDMB, they'd flip out. They'd bring the fucking house down screaming that I was racist against white people, while at the same time smugly informing me that Biggie and Tupac were self-professed thugs, and that's why nobody questions their violent deaths. They would, in effect, argue that JonBenet Ramsey's life actually was worth more, but if I pointed this out, they'd call me a racist again. Then I'd have to try to explain what "racism" actually means, and it would all be downhill from there. I'd end up sulking in a corner for days because the people in charge are such numbskulls and psychopaths. It's a good thing I have LJ again, so I don't have to follow that particular chain of misery to its frustration conclusion.

I stopped logging into LJ for a week or so as part of one of my regular bouts of head-in-shell-itis. I am now peeking out cautiously and squinting my black beady eyes at what little of the landscape is visible from down here.

This is what I mean:

I just caught a little bit of the movie Five Easy Pieces, from 1970, directed by Bob Rafelson, about whom I'll have a little more to say in a moment.

I had the sound off, and I haven't seen it before, so I don't know what the conflict was, but Jack Nicholson and Karen Black were arguing, and there was a medium shot of them in profile with a mirror in the background. Through the scene, it's been clear that Karen is a broken woman in some way; a pan across a wall of photographs showed us how she grew up in the shadow of some man, her father I assume, a musician like Jack is. First she is bright and young, smiling into the camera, and gradually she seems to shrink and fade, until finally she no longer looks up at the world at all, but down at her own feet, drawn tightly up, face half-hidden & shadowed.

And then we see her now, alive but somehow washed out, in possession of herself but ready to bend like a reed under the powerful breath of men. She watches Jack play, they talk, it becomes an argument. She has perhaps been needling him, or not giving him something he wants; as he speaks he begins to arrange the items on the dresser (which include little glass jars only to underscore the violence of his gesture, not because anybody actually has little glass jars of that kind randomly cluttering up surfaces) beneath the mirror, and instead slams one down and then sweeps them all away. His violence makes her shrink back, literally and emotionally, and as he rants at her, through the mirror he is doubled. He stands a head taller than her, and is leaning into her just a little, dominating her, and then even his reflection dominates her, filling the space between them, so we know he is emotionally, functionally, all up in her grill at this time in her life. He is crushing her, and she is letting him, because not too long after, naturally they make love. First he and his reflection walk away, leaving her pushed to the side of the frame; forcing her to come after him, which she does instantly, and without ever exposing her own image in the glass.

Bob Rafelson started out directing the TV series "The Monkees" and went on to make 1968's cult classic Head...which, by the way, he wrote with Nicholson, who then starred in The King of Marvin Gardens, and Rafelson's remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1981. After which Nicholson's career continued to pull him ever closer to being a cartoon of himself, and Rafelson's staggered forward a few more times, then pretty much just died. He did some softcore porn, from the looks of it. Between 1996 and 2002 he made a couple of crime noir (or maybe pseudo-noir) flicks which I'm definitely going to investigate further, but which weren't received with much enthusiasm, let us say. The last thing listed is a Lionel Richie video collection in 2003, because it contains a video ("All Night Long") he did in the early eighties.

I wonder if he ever watches Five Easy Pieces anymore.

I know I'm overdue for a post with more personal content. I have an appointment at the Center today, & I'm freaking out about it. So I'm going to make another list, one which requires more effort on my part, because that will help me avoid dealing with my emotions.

Here are the games I've been playing over at neopets:

Attack of the Slorgs is a "puzzle bobble" style game where you shoot colored globs at other globs of the same color, trying to make combos and whatnot. Despite the somewhat lackluster execution, there are some interesting aspects I'm sure they totally ripped off somewhere else, becase "true innovation" and "the neopets dev team" are not phrases that often meet.

Faerie Bubbles is likewise, but with a much more elegant interface, a smoother look & feel (all the Flash games have great music design, I hope that guy is getting his share of the Disney money) and a much less steep learning curve.

I've been playing two arcade-style shooters: Carnival of Terror and Evil Fuzzles From Beyond the Stars. The former is a silly timewaster the creepy silly aesthetic of which I find diverting (Brian absolutely hates this game & won't let me play it around him).

Evil Fuzzles is another matter entirely, one of my 'serious' games I hope to crack the hi score table with someday (yah right). It has six or so levels, and all there is to do is shoot pairs of fuzzles and landmines that occasionally pop up under you, and don't die. Don't buy anything but the gun, unless you really need hull, which you shouldn't until at least level three. At very least. You need those gun upgrades more than you need some slow-ass nano repairbot, believe me.

Nick, don't even try to load those two games, they would probably give you a twitch seizure, being based as it is on the "shit flying at you really fast" pillar of game mechanics.

On the side of "turn based games easily played on paper" we have Escape to Kreludor, a Daleks-style simple strat manueverer which I find myself playing about seven thousand times a day. This and Faerie Bubbles are what I've been playing for the longest at the site (where I've had an account for 66 months, shut up, shut UP).

For word-oriented games there's Typing Terror , in which you defeat evil robots by typing words of increasing length written on their chests, and then there's a boss battle where you type a bunch of seven letter words in sixty seconds. Making the robots explode is highly satisfactory. And there's Word Pyramid , which I misunderstood at first, and which is much more interesting now that I realize you can link up letters that are connected anywhere on the chain, not just to the last letter. I fully expect to make the hi score table on this one eventually.

There's a few others I'm sort of checking out, but nothing to say just yet. If you sign up just to play the games, let me know so I can beg you for the neopoints you won't be using. You do not need to sign up to play.

but it has no real audience besides me and a few of my weirdo friends. (You listening, Guided By Voices?) It's too accessable for the snobs & too opinionated for the popsters. Too overtly sexual for the tweens, too chaste for the qlubbies, too earnest for irony, too cynical for Japan. It has no niche. I love it like I love Citizen Kane.

No, that's not right. Ghostbusters, though. It's up there on the lists of things I like with which I like to surround myself.

So bored. Time to make more lists. Here's what's around my movie/game station, where the movies I've been watching & the games I haven't been playing live:

One precarious pile containing Rear Window, Star Trek VI, Shamanic Princess (shut up), The Man Who Knew Too Much, Proof of Life, Quiz Show, Annie Hall, The Corruptor, FLCL, Citizen Kane and the Family Guy "movie" nihilistic_kid left here. Under the movies are some GameCube games: Metroid Prime, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4, Eternal Darkness, Phantasy Star Online, and Resident Evil 4.

Next shelf down has the DS games Kirby (I liked this better than I thought I would), American Sk8land, Sims 2 AKA THE SUCKENING, Advance Wars Dual Strike (can't wait for wifi, zomfg!!1!), Castelvania DoS (like candy with candy on top), Nintendogs. Beside that pile, more DVDs & tapes: the Firefly collection, The Spanish Prisoner, Big Trouble in Little China, The Young Ones collection, Boiler Room, The Cutting Edge (shut up) and Tombstone. Grosse Point Blank is off to one side, and I think I'll put it in now while I sweep & mop.

I've been stealing music for more than ten years. I have now bought for real legally three digital albums, via the Apple Music Store. They are:

The The - Dusk
Sigur Ros - Takk...
Black Star - Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star

I have bought the following individual tracks:

The Million You Never Made - Ani Difranco
Galvanize - The Chemical Brothers
Run Through the Jungle - Creedence Clearwater Revival
Where Do You Think You're Going - Dire Straits
Milk of Heaven - Floater
Man in the Long Black Coat -Joan Osbourne
Hello Tomorrow - Karen O. & Squeak E. Clean
Close My Eyes (Live) - Matisyahu (first thing I ever bought)
Cool Water (Remastered) - Talking Heads

nairB: Wouldn't it be great if all Bill Hicks' material was available for free to anybody, at any time, somewhere?

moT: Like in the middle of Times Square? On a huge pedastal, broadcasting twenty-four hours a day in IMAX sound. A giant robot Bill Hicks that breathes fire. Now that would be great.

Any minute now my mother will knock on the door for the third time in three days. We'll hug and laugh and wave bye-byes, and when I close the door I'll lock both the locks and stand there, looking at the knob, until I see my own reflection and step away.

Then I'll order some vindaloo, put on Takk... & run around like a loon.

House is clean & has been for a while again. Went into a slump for a week or so, until whatshisface felt compelled to bitch about it. Tesla says without me he'd die of starvation when the fridge crusted shut. Somehow he did survive before, but it was a near thing. Man can't live on brandy & cigarettes alone. I should know.

Steve Burns is capering around silently on the TV. He's wearing a funny pointed hat and seems to be on some kind of adventure. He's talking to a giant purple blob with teeth, on what looks like a forest path surrounded by deadly nightshade. There's a lesson in this, if you look at it right, I'm sure. Now he's inching along the ground like a worm, & has found a golden key, but a flying talking worm is trying to steal it. Well, now I think we all know what the message here is. If you wear a stupid hat, strange things will happen to you.

Maybe when she's gone spring will come back. She said it herself: "Does it always rain when I visit?" I thought to myself, Rachel's going to love that one. Do you? Isn't it great? The best part is, so far, yes, it does.

My friend is leaving his music behind. He has a lot to say about this, because his brain is full of words. That's one of the things we have in common. They bubble up constantly out of us until everyone runs away screaming, hands clamped over their ears.

But also we become scientists. We pull out a clipboard and put on a white lab coat, and ask questions, endlessly. It's no way to have a conversation. We're stunted, childlike, stuck in a socially retarded paradigm. We can't relate to you directly, so we have to flood the line with signal and hope something sticks.

My friend is more talented than most people who make long ass posts to their journals about how they've finally realized they're never going to be a Super Death Ninja of Doom after all. His decision is well explained, but I still find it a little mysterious. Clearly it began somewhere deep under his waters, where the dragons live.

But also I know he's right, of course, and furthermore that the kind of success he craves would be very bad for him. He's a barely tolerable human being as is, and I say that as a fellow jackass. He doesn't need anything else getting between him and his conscience.

I suppose this is an open letter of sorts, because he's reading us right now, in a dusty attic while the night storm batters at the window. Call out my name, Bastian! Why don't you do what you dream!

His music was his clipboard for a while. His outside line. Now he thinks he's dancing clever, but despite the accuracy of his statements, he's hiding something. Right now I strongly suspect that something is himself.

But what I don't know is why.