still haven't found what anyone is looking for

I am losing my patience with Blog.

Brian Cooperman. He may be the only person reading this. He is the only person who assiduously posts comments -- who seems to be aware of the factoids and lies that I spew semi semi semi weekly from this e-soapbox (although I think Josh made a passing comment about how I blogged about Inland Empire -- which I'm sure was disparaging but the fact that he knew that I did I counted as a personal victory). Only Brian Cooperman: the cartographer, the foil fencer, the anti-Rachel Ray -- one reader in the lonely cyber-universe. Maybe if I had more lists and count-downs I could maintain an audience? Maybe if I were funnier? More terse? (terser? and if either: what's more terse? See!) Maybe if I broke my own rule and blogged about LOST (my one and only rule)?

Maybe I should just accept it. When I do see "one new comment" after a post usually they are thus:

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Even the ad-posting search engine that some weasal marketing firm has fired in my direction claims that they "didn't quite find what [they] were looking for"? That's pretty bad. Also, why do these ads always seem to be from underage hot girls? Or is that just because most of them are for porn?

These are the questions of the universe, and perhaps 2007 will hold some of the answers. I'll most likely blog before then, though, so hold out for more wisdom. I know you're reading. I hope you're reading. Please read.

MSN

I Saw a Movie I Liked and All I Got Was This Stupid Existential Anxiety

David Lynch is not a weird guy. Despite the pompadour and the smirking (see photo), I think he seems like a normal, baseball-cap wearing, regular joe. Also I feel that he is someone who thrives in the sequestered space where (un)reason and immobile (il)logic intersect. In embracing the vast and inchoate, Lynch shifts our focus: it is not he, the filmmaker, the man, the artist, that is weird -- rather it is human desire, sex, that is intrinsically disconnected from appreciable narrative, from neat causality, from sense. David Lynch is just an average guy telling us sex and violence are what don't make a lick of sense.

That, of course, is bullshit. David Lynch is the wierdest celebrity we have. Bjork's weirdness, at least, is tied into her foreignness. Lynch, on the other hand, is the sun-lit embodiment of Americana -- Midwestern, tall, single-syllabic. Lynch. I knew a Kevin Lynch once. He was fat and good at math.

"Jimmy Stuart from Mars" but more than that too. Never an apologist and stubbornly tactiturn, when asked about Inland Empire he responds: "its a long movie that no one understands." And that's it. Its a long movie that no one understands. I think that is basically the best description of an artist's own work that I've ever heard. That is exactly what I.E. is.

Compare to, say, The Fountain. Aronofsky, Lynch, Cronenberg -- these are my favorite directors. These are the type of movies movie-people know, but for some reason most of my friends, who are mostly movie people, hate. The Fountain also "suffers" from schizophrenaform narrative structure, from the weight of nonrepresentational expression, from the box-office killer: abstraction. But The Fountain was bad. Aronofsky, compelled to be the auteur and the Hollywood maverick who gets his multi-million dollar cakes and eats it too, won't make a movie that's "weird." Frenetic, dark, morbid, engrossing -- sure, these are all there. But these are marketable. These are things you can take to the bank.

And this is why I loved Inland Empire, didn't like the Fountain, and will ultimately defend David Lynch to all the backlash-to-the-backlash-to the backlash haters I know. I hear the arguments. I hear the frustration. But I won't accept that The Fountain -- while brilliantly shot and carefully colored -- has anything interesting in it. In short, Aronofsky never succumbs to losing control -- he wants to show how graceful he is.

David Lynch, on the other hand, stumbles rather than pirouettes -- but he films the stumbling in slow-motion and scores it with uneasy effects. We stumble too, and so it is a far more visceral experience. I.E. leaves you confused, of course, but my brain felt great afterwards. So did my body. I felt that I had experienced something, like closing your eyes and rubbing them: there is a dimly-lit rabbit hole you are constantly falling down and it keeps changing as you do. You don't learn anything, you don't know what it means, but falling for a while -- just letting the subconscious contend with the images and sounds and silences -- is part of being human. A large part. It forces you into existential anxiety, but then rips that away too. There are no words for where you go after that, though David Lynch has been there.

I really recommend this movie; but not to anyone I know.

-MSN

The Yule

Back in buisness after asymptotically approaching insanity at work -- my first real day-in-court and it couldn't have gone more swimmingly. Feel somehow validated after the last 1.5 years of paralegalavanting.

And now the holiday season! I am actually filled with good cheer; its fucking incredible. Some of you naysayers may naysay 'this is just a manic joy that flows naturally out of ebbing dysthimia and the cyclical nature of lugubriosity'

To that I say: Suck it, World.

Going to Boston next week and then to Montreal. Gonna be great to not have to worry about anything for as few days, plus its always a blast to eat steak, lose money on blackjack, and awkwardly enter and exit strip clubs. All on the Canadian Dollar. And we are getting dressed fancy-like for new years! And I'm already in law school. Man, this is going to be a good year.

Yep, the high yuletide is pulling me out to sea; I'm letting it.

Wii will not go quietly into the night...

I recognize that I have been manipulated by the media. Fine. But all I think about now is a) sex and b) the Wii (its not called the Nintendo Wii, rather just the pithy 'wii')

I don't even want to actually play it. I just want to be obsessed with it. Nintendo has branded it well -- they have extended the red-hot poker of Marketing and permanently scarred my brain.

ADMISSION: I have re-connected with at least two old friends that I hear have gotten it solely because I want to know how Zelda is. They think I'm being nice. But I'm not. I am just inexplicably, inescapably, hyper-actively,irresponsibly...curious.

"We should get together" they inevitably say.

"Wii should"

Rifting on a Theme

in this video an indian girl does a split and rollerskates under 40 cars.


http://www.break.com/index/indian_girl_skates_under_cars.html


going to india in May!


Matt

The Kimchi-Ear Connection

Aaron and I discovered while eating and watching David Lynch's Blue Velvet that the Korean food item Kimchi (aged cabbage in a chili paste) is the foodstuff that most resembles a severed human ear (No, I don't know why that ear is on a key-ring):

The Samosa of Life

Okay.

So obviously Adam will blog about our Day-o-India (i.e., Jaan-E-Day, Curry-Day, etc.) and will most likely do a more serviceable job -- I'm sorry I haven't mastered (or attempted really) the use of video clips on these things. I guess its really his domain anyway: as he did have a part in turning the seed of an idea for a feature film that was JANE-E-MAN and turning it into the 3.5 hours extravaganza of east-meets-west unironic pastiche that has graced Bollywood, nay Hollywood, nay the world this weekend.

So I won't tell you about the blocks of Hindi that went unsubtitled, making the plot almost unfollowable. I won't tell you about the fact then when they did subtitle, they subtitled the ENGLISH and that the subtitles were perversely, and inexplicably, wrong. While it may be hard to translate karmatic themes or certain concepts of eastern theory and culture, what leads someone to subtitle the number "27" when the character clearly said, in English, "twenty-five?" I won't tell you about the Space Odyssey bookends or about the 7 dwarves (a la Snow White)
that appear during one of the dance numbers, for no narrative reason I may add (although appealing to narrative is somehow besides the point I feel). And I especially won't tell you how hard it was choosing my favorite between songs whose refrains went from the confusingly mistranslated ("the heart is ignorant of patience") to the unintentionally re-contexualizing mistranslated ("give your consent. He is great. He's a dude. Give your consent!").

I'll leave that to Adam, who by the way, is great as the idling PA in the Brooklyn Bridge Park scene. Bravo, Mr. Freelander.

Nothing makes me feel more culturally insensitive than hanging out with my "liberal" white Jewish friends.

But it was definitely the highlight of my weekend. The British girl of good first date fame turned out to be a bad second date, so that kind of depressed Sunday's overall yields. I thought she was into me too, and I thought she was interesting but I totally misread that book -- but I guess you can't always know what's inside. The samosa of life can be spicy or bland, but either way you have to dig in to know. Anyway, Josh did bring home a bag full o'apples from his day in the country, so it did salvage Sunday evening (paired with the most fortunate October broadcasting schedule: I watched Halloween, Scream, Poltergeist 1 and 3, and The Puppet Master: Toulon's Revenge -- which stars Corey Feldman, FYI -- on Sunday alone).

Before the Indian Movie, I was on the roof of 236 Bergen Street with Matt Baer, Adam, and Aaron smoking and we saw a brick with a string tied to it, leading off the roof. Aaron hauled the line in, it could have been anything. A Treasure Chest suspended above Bergen Street? A giant dream catcher? A land mine? None of the above: It was an artificial owl with the noose around its "neck" (do owls have necks?).

I did a google search for fake owl and got this. I figure you can't go wrong with girls in bikinis, maybe it will up my readership. Anyway it was a good source of Baer-Orenstein comedy, climaxing at "HOOOOOOOOOOOO will weep for me???"

Good Saturday, then,

Matt

Literally Diarrheaed Myself

Even more embarrassing than having a blog, I am admitting today -- here and now -- that I enjoy flash animations.

I guess the first one I had seen was the infamous YATTA!, or maybe it was peanut-butter-jelly-time, but since then I can't get enough.

Why yes I do realize that their randomness is the most base and unsubtle form of humor there is. But its so damn satisfying. Any entire art form predicated on the question 'who comes up with this shit?' and irregardless of the answer: bored stoners with significant leisure time and some sort of marginal technical prowess is A-OK by me.

Funnier still are clips that recognize how strange the Japanese are. Any of you who have been with me when I was very drunk have most likely heard my peoratory on the how Japanese culture intoxicates me -- it is almost paralyzing weird. I took a class at Tufts, the thesis of which was basically: Japan is fucked up because it was post-modern before being modern. As in, years of isolationism created a curiosity -- nay, an obsession -- with the very surface of western society. Celebrity glamour was commoditized and a sort of bubble-gum sensibility regarding cultural icons emerged. The thinest and often most ironic understanding of the West was the result, and enthusiasm for this conception became a normative focus among Japanese youth. Spaghetti westerns? We'll make a western about Spaghetti (see Tampopo for more on this...).

Liberal arts colleges -- only here can you disguise xenophobic cultural generalities behind Baudrillard.

Racism aside, they really are quite strange. When we stumbled upon these "LEARN JAPANESE!" vids on YouTube a few weeks ago, I literally diarrheaed myself:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0W1VY4b9IQQ


Oh, What a world.

I have a blind date tonight. More of it/her soon:

Matt

Millennium: Welcome Me! (first image!)

Goddard Chapel:

-MSN

Cooperman are you really getting married in Goddard Chapel?

Two nights ago -- while Shosh and Derya (Jana and Anick?) and Aaron watched Friday the Thirteenth Part 6: Jason Lives! (go ahead and scoff, but Jason 6 is considered the finest in the series by fans do to its elaborate deaths and humorous approach to serial homicide) -- I spent my time looking at the nutritional information for McDonalds vs. Wendys.

McDonalds: If you were to get a meal of 1 crispy chicken sand., med. Fries, med. Soda, and one ketchup packet that is 1280 calories. The same meal at Wendys' caloric total is 1090. Although this is without the ketchup packet -- Wendy's website doesn't offer us that option.

Less interesting than that is that McDonalds uses BEEF POWDER in their french fries. Its not the oil that causes that is-it-or-is-it-not-vegetarian? outrage of a few years back, rather McDonalds chooses -- in a world of Star-Anise and Cumin and all the Thyme time can muster -- to flavor its fried sticks of potato with MEAT. And still does...

Or at least meat powder--which josh and I are just assuming is meat. even if its not he wont eat it. I once tried to assuage Josh by telling him the vege schnitzel in Israel tasted just like chicken (and thereby he isn't missing anything...). Man he still is pissed at me about that...

Last time I assuaged anyone.

Anyway Jason 6 is the return of Jason -- albeit in zombie form. Good stuff. Fthe13th:7 Jason KILLS MORE LASCIVIOUS TEENS! is also on on-demand, so I'm sure we will watch it sometime soon instead of the Netflix that have been accumulating.

Okay so no blog entry would be complete without references to the blog itself. First thing: I got my first "stranger" comment. I dont know who you are stranger but I am in love with you. This isn't the first time this has happened, but I swear its different (I swear). Thanks for reading.

Two: Adam I'm sorry for giving you shit about your blog. It's not that I dont like mash-ups. It's that I hate them.

But Im glad you are back(!) and that you have given me a shoutout in your own blog. That's like the best endorsement there is! Better than the timeslot after LOST! Who the fuck watches The Nine anyway? So thanks Adam -- I feel like the Colbert Report to your Daily Show: a less-well written spin-off bourne out of the passionate affair between admiration and spite. You are a champ!

Cooperman are you really getting married in Goddard Chapel?

-Matt

she comes back to tell me she is gone

hello bitches: anne frank here.

a few things today:

1) I am starting to mistrust the accuracy of the "times profile checked" counter Blogger provides. Back when only adam knew I had a Blog, the counter went from 4 to 8 to 13 to 42 to 66 within a span of three days. I doubt adam would have checked my profile that many times -- though I suppose he does have a lot of time -- so I figured it was random blogophiles searching for sufjan lyrics or information on Hurricane Katrina. Not so!

Now that I am open about my blogging-problem, and I've indiscriminately disseminated the web-address to the glass menagerie (ass menagerie?) of former girlfriends and other life errata, my profile has only been checked ONCE MORE, bringing it to a grand total of 67 times. Now, either no one cares that I'm blogging or there's something screwy. Anyway, if someone checks my profile leave me a damn comment or something -- I want to know if this thing is working. The face of the modern internet is blemished with things like blogger and myspace and friendster and blasted facebook: a place where tiny infringements on privacy are blithely overlooked. So if I'm going to do this thing I want to have the scopophilic knowledge that comes with it: who the fuck is reading this??? Tell me, internet!

2) Science of sleep: gondry. I don't really know what to say but I really liked it. And yes I hear all the words critics are using that asymptotically approach "puerile" (and, I guess, sometimes they literally say that), and I'd even agree, but watching someone regress has always had a sort of perverted appeal to me -- and I think the collapse of the movie into its own psychotic infantile narcissism is pretty damn interesting. And sad, too, because it is so thinly-veiled as autobiographical. And never has regression been so visually appealing. Yes: I liked it, and I'm going to see the exhibit in SoHo this weekend. And for all you nay-sayers, suck it. Movies don' need plot events. Plot events are crutches.

3) After briefly not being so, I'm single again -- so if you have cute friends, give me a shout out. Accents are a plus. I'd also like to date a girl named Sarah, since all my friends do, but please make her not-jewish, and tolerant of my obsesses with winning arguments, and a good cook, and she has to really like animals...

odds look bad.

-MSN

the blog underground

Week two from the Blog Underground:

Nobody knows I'm blogging except Adam. I feel like a cyber-Anne Frank. Is that tasteless? -- I'm having a harder and harder time not crossing the line these days. I actually used the phrase "the holocaust of abortions" this weekend. In reference to what? I don't remember but I almost guarentee it had naught to do with holocausts nor abortions.

Anyway even though I am Blogger Unknown there has been six viewings of my profile. Are these all by Adam? Are they by other friends who know somehow? Internet surfers? A combination of compulsively watching Lost and reading Haruki Murakami has made me generally suspicious and uncertain. What the fuck is going on???

Somewhere deep inside me I realize that knowing who has viewed your blog is itself the reason for Blogging. What a terrible invention.

Anyway --When I come out of the blog closet, so to speak, im going to have a huge GRAND OPENING ceremony. You're all invited, you five unknown profile-checkers. And Adam.

a test. only a test.

i have succumbed. succame. sucks.

Adam has tricked me.