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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2:54 PM
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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.