"We Tried Our Best"Buy

This is an unembellished saga detailing the worst customer service experience of my life. Not only will I not shop at Best Buy anymore, I no longer will wear blue polo shits – out of private, unheard protest.

Years ago my dad gave me a Gateway laptop to take abroad with me – it served it purposes, and as it was my first computer with a DVD drive, lulled me to sleep several nights with the incessant whirring of it’s built-in fan as I watched my only DVD—The Royal Tennenbaums—again and again.

Fast forward a few years to about a month ago, when I returned home from work and entered my room to hear—not the white noise of a computer fan—but the most grating and discordant chord audible to the human ear. If I can describe it to you, I’d say it was as if, to cover-up the noise of a lobster being boiled alive, 4 or 5 terrible Borat impressionists joined in a chorus of “I like sex!.” That, but condensed into just one sustained, whirring, egregious note. And a black screen repeatedly saying "MEDIA TEST FAILED" and "NO OPERATING SYSTEM FOUND." Anyway: as I long suspected, time for a new computer!

So, the good news is I got a Mac and I love it, and I’m never going back to PC. But that’s another story.

I decided to take my old computer to BEST BUY – a store I have long admired for its reasonably priced CDs, abundant selection, and relative acceptance of people who want to play Nintendo Wii but clearly have no intention of buying anything. They have a service there through their endemic service/repair company, the self-abnegatingly titled GEEK SQUAD, where they will attempt to back-up your computer’s files. The cost of such service: $60 dollars for them to even take a look at the computer, and if they can access the files, another $100 dollars for them to back everything up.

Well, I’m not in the Financial Straits these days to willy-nillily spend $160 dollars, but as that computer has some of my only copies of beloved photographs and documents I’ve gleaned over the last three years, I thought it was worth it. I signed a contract, was assured I’d receive a call regarding my files in 2-3 days, and happily swiped my credit card.

This transpired on Saturday, January 26th. I figured I’d have my computer back by the 28th or 29th. Certainly by February. Certainly at some point in the future...

Five days pass, and, eager to know if I’ll ever be able to see the photos I took in India again, I call them. It takes some time to get through to the GEEK SQUAD, their phones just keep ringing, so when I settle for a “customer service representative” I am told the Geek Squad’s phones are broken. Shouldn’t the geek’s squads tech issues be relatively easy to address, given the presumptive knowledge of their personnel? This perhaps should have been my first clue something was awry, but in any case, I asked to get someone on the phone.

When I did I was told their were still “five projects before mine,” so even though it had now been twice the time they told me it would take, I still needed to wait another day. “No problem” I chimed, amicably.

Another five days, now it is Wednesday February 6th. Still no word from the Geeks. I call them when I get out of work, finally able to get through, but am asked to hold. Fine. (still amicable, but a quiver of “here we go again”). Twenty minutes of Debussy’s Clair de Lune later (with period interludes to hear about Best Buy Employment Opportunities and Special Product Offers) a rep comes on the line:

“This is Antonio”
“Hi Antonio. I’ve been waiting to speak with someone about my computer. Are you from the Geek Squad?”
“Uhh…yeah. “
“You don’t’ sound so sure. Anyway -- – I dropped it off about eleven days ago to get backed up, and haven’t heard anything.. Is it ready?”
“Yeah hold on.”

Back on hold for five minutes.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s all done and ready. You can come pick it up.”
Surprised, because good news surprises me, “Great! I’ll be there tonight. How late are you open?”
“We close at nine. Thank you for calling Best Buy.”

No Best Buy, thank you. You may take a long time to repair things, but at least you provide affordable CDs.

I schlep up to Columbus Circle’s Best Buy. “I’m here for my Geek Squad job”

I’m asked to wait by a manicured girl whom Josh Kesner succinctly described as a “G.E.D. Candidate” when I told him this story. Ten minutes later: “It’s not here, but may be in the storage room. Let me go check.”

May be?

Thirty minutes pass. I try to play a little Wii but am too anxious. I pace a little; look at Bravia TVs (they are nice). Where’s my geek squad rep?

Finally I track down a manager and explain my story – displaying the equanimity of Mother fucking Theresa amidst the leprous hordes. “Let me go see where your computer is, sir. Give me two minutes”

More like twenty. I can’t even believe it. When I go look for her, back downstairs, she is talking to another customer about speakers.

What’s going on, miss? Where’s my computer?

“Oh we are just doing another check: there was some confusion.”

Now it’s about 90 minutes+ since I first entered Best Buy. Finally another sales rep comes and finds me, and brings me up to the manager I had spoken with. Then they tell me the, by then obvious, truth:

“Sorry sir. We can’t find your computer. We tried our best.”

We-Tried-Our-Best-Buy: your Best isn’t good enough.

Obviously I’m upset; “this is ridiculous”; “the worst customer service experience I’ve ever had” and “considerably more of a Kafkaesque experience than my usual Best Buy shopping trip” are some of the phrases I used.

They refund my money, and tell me they’ll call me by the end of the day today to let me know if they are able to find it. “Maybe it was filed wrong”

This isn’t a document. It’s silicon. It’s circuitry. It doesn’t fit in your typical hanging file. This is totally absurd: you can’t provide a repair service and just “lose” what you are repairing. When you get your car parked, the valet can’t be like: whoops sorry, forgot where I parked! Or to use a more extreme example, when you bring your kids to day care, they can’t just misplace what you drop off. “Oh sorry—they aren’t here anymore” That’s not how it works.

Just what I need.

Chicago > Dreamgirls > ________

Do yourself and the free world a favor and turn the volume up loud, click this link, and watch this utterly fabulous movie trailer:

http://movies.aol.com/movie/mamma-mia/25931/video/trailer-no-1/2038819


Experience a creepy Meryl Streep bringing gratuitous class to cinematic schmegma!!!...
Experience Pierce Brosnan, gayer than you've ever seen him!!!(gayer than in "The Matador")....
Experience ONE WOMAN, THREE FATHERS, FIFTEEN FABULOUS SONGS, and ONE TRUE LOVE!!!...
Experience the music of ABBA, musicdom's most mutated palindromic daemonspawn...
Experience..MAMA MIA!!


Experience the trailer that Josh Kesner so aptly described as a "quick rape" when we saw it in the theater before SWEENEY TODD. For a moment, the whole theater was silent -- then Josh and I started cracking up, and then the whole theater began laughing. It's for those glorious communal moments where I really understand how special the movie-theater going experience is, and how no home or mobile media will ever truly replace it. So that's what David Lynch is saying in this truly hilarious Apple video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKiIroiCvZ0


Truly, truly, horrifically funny. It's come to this.

We are who we pretend to be

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

What Dreams May Come?

I'm not (wholly) proud to say I've spent the better part of the last few days doing one of two things:
1) eating tremendous amounts of delicious food and
2)pining over Elizabeth Kuchinich



This is by far the hottest potential first lady in history; lo, indeed, perhaps she is the hottest person I've ever seen to be married to Dennis Kucinich (eating a kebab).


Over the last few days I've sunk into sort of a general malaise. Its symptoms include:
1) itchiness on arms and back
2) talking excessively about "fall foliage" to anyone who will listen
3) nostalgia for Robin Williams' movies I never really liked, like "Jumanji" and "Patch Adams"

and most disturbingly:
4) I seem to have developed spontaineous knowledge of the nature and purpose of the universe.

Sort of weird, all this celestial insight, but no one said infinite vision was easy. Look at Joan of Arc, she went crazy, and all she got was a glimspe. I got the entire enchillada a few nights ago while dozing through an episode of TWIN PEAKS. The entire history and purpose of humankind, whispered to me in a dream.

It's true I've forgotten what was whispered; It's also true this exact situation happened in the Twin Peaks episode I fell asleep watching. But no matter. One day I'll remember. One day I'll know again exactly why the world turns and oceans' heave and brew. Why the crisp night leaves a hollow quite unlike sadness, although that is how I would describe it to most people. Why the ebb and flow and hiatus of breath at close range, supine in bed, is so beautiful and devestatingly vast. I'll know all that again and I'll use this knowldge to lure Elizabeth Kucinich to bed.

Happy Thanksgiving.

a fondness for wands

Nothing makes me more angry than ex-post-facto politicization.

Obviously I'm talking about Harry Potter.

For those of you not Josh nor Shana (who both told me), you may or may not know J.K. Rowling, the rags-to-riches scribe of the Harry Potter books, announced one of the main characters in the books was gay -- the Head Wizard, and Harry Potter's role-model and father figure-- Albus Dumbledore.

Listen, I don't mind that he's gay. In fact, I like it -- rope the kiddies in with action, adventure, and (heteronormative) romance and then sucker-punch them with genuine social issues: that's always been my philosophy. But I think this is just sort of an egregious press-related maneuver--I mean, if Dumbledore was gay, as Rowling claims, PUT SOMETHING ABOUT IT IN THE BOOKS. Because there's nothing. I mean, when you are long dead and gone, J.K., all that will remain are the books. And your great political statement about heralding a gay hero was no more than yesterday's Drudge Report.

I know the obvious retort: it just isn't a big deal, so she didn't feel the read to mention it. Well that's just asinine and does not reflect the society in which we live. It's great for kids to have positive role models that are minorities -- whatever minority they may be -- but I think it's just sort of sneaky, media-whoreish, and narratively negligent to mention this key character detail just after the fact,casually at a press conference.

Because, let's face it kids, DUMBLEDORE does not exist. Dumbledore is a character in a book series. Anything that dumbledore is is in the books. He doesn't exist paratextually, although apparently his sexuality does.

I don't know; maybe I'm overreacting.

Promises are like babies: easy to make, hard to deliver

Saw Cronenberg's "Eastern Promises". Here is my treatise on yakuza, tiny babies, blintzes, and naked eye-gouging. There are spoilers, sorry:


It's interesting that David Cronenberg and David Lynch both released films in 2007 featuring eastern Europeans shadily huddled in alleyways. These movies also shared a similar theme: the fetishization of violence and the abhorrent results of realizing its appeal.


Eastern Promises is really just A History of Violence, but having roped in a more mainstream audience with his previous (and much more mainstream) film he allows himself a little more of the "bodyhorror" that characterized his earlier work. Cronenberg, for you nonfans, approached horror from a modern cautionary perspective, in Videodrome and Crash and The Fly and Naked Lunch and Dead Ringers(his best film) he shows us what happens when "technology" and "the body" overlap due to one of three things:

1- man's hubris (The Fly);

2- unstoppable perversion (Crash, Dead Ringers)

3-insanity (Naked Lunch)


With A History of Violence he allows his thematic approach to mature. It isn't modern technology as such that threatens "normal" humanness, if such a thing exists, rather it is the absolute failure of anonymity--the impossibility of anonymity--in the modern world that makes us constantly at risk. Viggo's character cannot re-start life after leaving his gangster ways because his gangster life weighs down on him -- he is "found out" but mostly because he could never really hide.


Similarly, Eastern Promises offers us an extension of this failure of anonymity. A Russian girl gives birth and dies wordlessly, but, alas, she has left a revealing diary that threatens the existence of underground yakuza-style Russian gangsters living in London. This damning book draws Naomi Watts and Viggos' characters further into this dark world, but also draws them together. Not only are the identity of prominent Russian gangsters threatened, but most importantly at stake is that of THE (tiny) BABY born in the film's early scenes. Her existence provides genetic proof of the villain having raped her, and is used to close the case in a sense.

I like this movie because we are reintroduced to what Cronenberg started in his last film, an exgesis on why we can never restart out lives/have two identities/go on lying forever. Not in this world. Not in a world where dying women leave diaries. Not in a world where babies surface to genetically prove our crimes. Not in a world where perverse curiosity (Naomi Watts is drawn further and further into this world because she "cares about the fate" of the baby, but her fetishistic maternal instinct are understood, in the film, as at least enmeshed in her sexual desire for Viggo).

I was interested most of all to see what Cronenberg would do with his new mainstream attention. What he would force THE EYE OF AMERICA (hyperbole maybe, but H. of V. was a big, big film) to gaze perseverently upon?

Answer: A dick. Viggo Mortenson's dick. An extended, naked, shower fight sequence. Well choreographed, I might add. Not what I want to see-- but sort of brilliant, Mr. Cronenberg.

I like mainstream-Cronenberg, even if he no longer can serve up perfect horror premises like he did in Dead Ringers (identical twin gynaecologists who work on mutant vaginas). But La-Di-Da, la-di-da.

D.C.ed over

Went to Washington D.C. a few weeks ago and had a horrible nightmare.

In Washington, because there isn't a one-fare-to-anywhere model of subway pricing, you have to swipe your METROTICKET or CHARLIEBUCK or whatever the hell they call it in our nation's capital (Freedomcard?) before you board and after you get off the train.


Listen, I get it.
Okay, Jeremy? I get how "awesome" D.C. metro is -- the flashing lights that let you know when you are about to get hit by a train, the nifty ticker that lets you know when the next Shady Grove-bound redline is careening through. Thanks. I even appreciate the entirely too-futuristic subway decor, which honestly looks more like the sub-arctic government base set in the X-Files movie than a public transportation depot:

(actual film still-- tell me I'm wrong)

Anyway, why, D.C. METRO, why? Why can't we develop a better system? What if I lose my ticket while on the ride? (this happened). What if I am wearing cargo pants and cannot find the pocket it is in for over 5 minutes after de-boarding? (this happened).

So the nightmare I had involved me being in the D.C. subway and losing my ticket. When I tried to tell a police officer they told me basically that I was shit out of luck and had to start life down in the subway. It is at this point I realize there is a whole tent community down in the subway of people who lost their ticket and were forced to re-start life "on the other side of the turnstile" with I-bankers, Smithsonian curators, even a (gay, Republican, fondling) senator here and there. I woke up just as a Hobo-ified Lila Lipscomb (small difference) was offering me some canned peas.

Talked about being D.C.ed over.

more things should brim

Mattnath here, getting my finger back on the pulse of the internet community. Hence, visual.

so I guess I could recognize that it has been 6 months since I've posted...

so I guess I could apologize for not getting up those thoughts on my trip to Chicago from way back when ...

or the fact that I went to India for two months without posting...

or the major life, career, and personal changes that have popped up over the last few months that have been unaccounted for here ...

but those things are past and the future, while humid on this eastern seaboard, is brimming with possibility. Finally, brimming. I like saying that: brimming. More things should brim.

Welcome to my blog new people; welcome back to the old fans (all three of you); welcome man and beast and demi-man and demi-beast and, why the hell not, gerbils (here and in heaven -- we miss you Lucy). The word 'blog' comes from the ancient Greek word for "a whale's vagina" but in the parlance has come to describe the collective mental masturbation and faux-urbane pontification of an entire generation. America. Fuck yeah.

As for me, I am much happier now that I've gotten that whole law school thing out of my system. Who the fuck wants to be a lawyer? (except, well, the many of you reading this that are currently in law school). More precisely: I dont want to be a lawyer. I never have. I'm glad I've finally admitted it to myself and to the World-At-Large. Not that I need to have this conversation with the cyber-universe, lord knows I've had it too many times already, but suffice it to say that I'm too young to submit to the idea that I shouldn't chase my dreams. Fuck it: they are my dreams. Anyway the bizarre existential weight I felt to GO GO GO WIN WIN WIN has abated, and hopefully now I'm concentrating on what I really want: sex and, occasionally, sushi.

India was great. Just what I needed. I don't really know what to say. A few months ago this was me (I tri-poded this):

and now I'm here:

That was a vista unto Nanda Devi, India's highest peak. By far the most beautiful campsite of my life.

Yesterweekend went up to Rhode Island for Andrew Kerner's wedding. I love the Kerner family, and the Roth family Andrew is marrying are just as crazy of characters. It was the best 300,000 dollar frat party I've ever been to. Picture an aging hippie living in her protest-filled youth, the hottest 48 year old in the world, three jeff kerners, a basset hound named Lola, a short doctor-creature named ted, and Elmer Fudd crammed inside a circus tent taking shorts of warm vodka. And that was only the rehearsal dinner. It was freaking fantastic. The ceremony itself was short, sweet and poignant. There's no one I could be happier for -- Andrew and Ali you guys rock all the groove spots.

And love prevails. Who would have thought?

So, with that I'll leave you with for now. Don't be a stranger! Hope we can talk more, I feel we've grown apart. I want to get back to how things used to be, Baby, before the stretches of silence, before New Blogger, before India. Back when I was gonna be a lawyer. Back before things began to brim.

all things go all things go

Went to chicago. Gathering my thoughts, then will post. Until then enjoy these pics. -Matt


Comb-over to end all comb-overs:

Trinia and I (that's lake Michigan, bitches):

Polarizing lenses are fun. This is right by Kevin's house:

And this is Kevin. On AirTran, Newark, NJ:

Taken over Trinia out the window. Bittersweet to be home:

Koogan is cute:

This was at the awesome Shedd Aquarium. Its a lizard or somehting. I don't know:

on the rocks with a twist

Twister is markedly more enjoyable when you are shit-faced. I only learned that this weekend when 20 of us paralegal-types went up to Vermont on a ski trip. Not my usual scene, I know, but as an installment of 2007's winter-doesn't-suck series I thought I'd give it a go. Twister, normally sort of uncomfortable and over-simplistic, is the kind of game where slightly-sweaty drunken fumbling and large dots of bright color are celebrated, not shunned. It, and the whole weekend, was a ton of fun.


Anyway, fifty drinks later this happened:

I do not know how we got into that position, but I think it was a "Right-Hand: YELLOW." What other games would be fun drunk? Write in and give me your opinion willya? The winner of this contest gets drunk on me, and we will play the winning game.

It occurs to me now that the Nintendo Wii is a drunk person's system. Yes sir, when I knock back a few all I want to do is box. Wii Sports lets me. The Bergenites just got a wii, so naturally I am headed over there today to play. I have a Wii story but it will have to wait until tomorrow. Until then...then.

-MSN

trying the winter-doesn't-suck approach

I am the only idiot that goes hiking in new hampshire on the coldest weekend ever (well Paven, pictured below, was also idiot enough. Or super-brave). Turns out it was a great, great idea. I had a blast, stayed warm, and saw some unbelievable shit. Take a look at these pics, the first with my new camera:

there are many more if you want to see! Love, Matt

but to be wholly taciturn in your reserve, is not allowed....

Willy Wonka 2005 is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. And I saw "Bats."

Welcome back to my blog. It is a new year and not a leap or election containing one. Still, it is a year where lots is going to happen. So far its dividends have paid off handsomely. More on this now.

Let us start with new years eve. Which was back in The Berkshires at Adam Freelander's house. For those of you that don't know Adam Freelander, which is no one who will ever read this, he is about yay high and is a "ginger" (as in red hair). He also is one of the funniest people I've ever met (tied with Josh and Colin Pedersen -- I've finally come to grips with the fact that they just have their 'own humor'). Anyway he has a house that can only fairly be described as awesome. There are also lots of curiosities in his house, like a sculpture of a man's bust and a very large pharmacist's scale. There were also tags everywhere that said "Freelander" which I kept finding on myself. I still do not understand them.

I do not remember New Years much at all. I don't even think I was that smashed. I just remember cooking chili for a very long time, and then drinking champagne, alone, in the jacuzzi. I remember calling things duralogs. I remember Emily Capetta. I remember playing catch the next day with Derek and Rachel Goodman. And you were there...and you were there...

I looked up freelander on wikipedia:
A freelander is term for a person or group seeking political/personal freedom through emigration to and settlement of open land. The term is primarily used in a fictional or speculative sense of freelanders emigrating from earth to other bodies in the solar system.

That is a perfect description of our friend adam. He is busting forth into the cosmos and he is muthafucking badass. In the speculative sense.

Speaking of cosmos, Stephen Hawking recently determined mathematically that a large percentage of his life's work, including the theories regarding an alternate universe that have propelled him to international stardom(and inspired the entirety of the Sailor Moon anime), cannot possibly be true. That is the true measure of a genius -- they are so smart they disprove their own theories that no one but them understood anyway.





Oscars: everything sucks. Children of Men should have a best picture nomination. Inland Empire, and Laura Dern especially, has been unilaterally shafted. But Children of Men, man, I'm glad its getting technical props but seriously. Little Miss Sunshine? Carell is a genius, okay, who else can take a homosexual Proust scholar with suicidal ideation and make it funny? But its not fucking enough. Come on. Plus the little boy that looked like a prepubescent elliott smith (actually like an adult elliott smith but miniaturized) really freaked me out.

Even Josh and I agreed on Children of Men, which is no small shakes. He after all won't touch anything Lynch with a ten foot pirogi and I fail to see the merit of going to the movies so see "Over the Hedge" or "Fantastic 4." But if there ever was a time for "to each their own." Besides I'm not the one that went to film school.

Breaking my own rule, I'm going to mention one thing about Lost. Last night Anjia figured out what the smoke monster is. She just said it, and it makes totally sense. As far as I'm concerned that no longer needs to be debated. The monster is....POLLUTION. Lost has become a liberal fairy tale about future dystopia. In the future, pollution becomes intelligent and strikes back. Don't litter.

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:

1 Comment -

Show Original Post

Anonymous said...
Hi, I was looking over your blog and didn't quite find what I was looking for. I'm looking for different ways to earn money... I did find this though...a place where you can make some nice extra cash secret shopping. I made over $900 last month having fun!make extra money now
2:54 PM
1 Comment -

Show Original Post


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