I spent last Sunday at the home of my newest friend, a day before she left the west coast. There came a point where she said "Ever do the thing where you just stare at your face in the mirror for so long it becomes a bunch of different faces?" "No," I said, "but my buddy Alex said he did something similar as a kid, and that he later got the same feeling by drinking cough syrup." "Yeah, it's kind of like that." Then we sat and stared, my shortness keeping my face just barely within the mirror's frame. "Focus on the whites of your eyes," she advised. I did: mostly it was the edges of my mouth that shifted and warped. Minutes passed, and eventually I recoiled sharply to the right. "Did you see it?" "It happened like seven times, and finally I saw a face I really didn't want to look at. Dude looked like he was going to rape me."

This really happened. It is too subjective to ever be in a film, which is too bad for the cinematic art but amazing for life as a thing you live.

Today I learned that that girl ate some bad acid fairly recently, which probably played a factor in her leaving town, as well as my ability to get along with her all of a sudden. While talking crazy shit and eating rice with beets I liked her as much as I like anyone, and five days later I learn she's serving as a cautionary tale for the mutual friends who knew her for longer.

A thing I am determined to try to put in a movie is that moment where you are at a droney noise show, hearing all sorts of frequencies, and then you hiccup involuntarily and for a brief second the shift in ear pressure makes the whole scene much less intense, although only for an instant.

I just started watching Masaaki Yuasa's Kemonozume. Yuasa made Mind Game, highly regarded among my circle of friends, probably to the point of serving as a totem for all of the ones that do animation. (These people I generally don't consider anime kids, and I think they rank the Flash animation of Paper Rad about as highly, for different reasons.) This is his follow-up, a TV show less obviously expressive in its techniques(so far) but completely roughly beautiful and emotionally engaging. I don't think I can talk about the plot without making it seem embarassing, so it will have to suffice to say that there's this monkey character I really like, who's a small part. Okay I'll admit it: The show is mostly about flesh eating monsters and the sword-fighters sworn to kill them. I am really into it and interested to see how many consecutive episodes I can watch before getting sleepy. The ending theme lyrics start off with "I like to bite on the drops of rain. They're not sweet, in fact they're bitter. I like how the smell betrays my tongue."

Which as I type it brings to mind the Animal Collective song "Fireworks" the same way the associative nature of this post makes me want to point out that I've been rereading the David Berman book of poetry, Actual Air, (probably particularly "Self-Portrait At 28") as I try not to be disappointed in the new Silver Jews record. And the use of the word associative reminds me of the three hours of Gary Panter interview I listened to the other day, where he explains that Jimbo takes place on Mars, in the colony that's a combination of Texas and Japan, where time happens backwards so new artifacts of the past are perpetually being uncovered.

There is a noise ordinance proposed for downtown Olympia. I oppose this, and sent an e-mail to the city council urging that a public meeting be held to discuss the issue, indicating my negative stance on such an ordinance. (Many opposed think the proposal is written for the benefit of developers hoping to create condos in downtown.)

To my surprise, I actually got an e-mail from a city council member, that I very much wish to reply to, but my lack of knowledge is tripping me up.

In my original e-mail, I state that such measures as noise ordinances for commercial districts, in the way they neuter commercial districts, move Olympia away from being its own sustainable community and more towards being a suburb of Seattle and Tacoma. The response said that this was not the goal, but that "Downtown Seattle presents a model of success worthy of imitation." Obviously, the difference between Olympia and Seattle is that Seattle is more decentralized, there are several areas dense with small commercial businesses, which effectively serve the same purpose for their neighborhoods as downtown Olympia serves for the whole of the city. This is my main objection. However, what confuses me is this: I'm not quite sure what is being defined as "downtown Seattle." There's no real area in Philadelphia, for instance, that is classified as "downtown"- it would be kind of a misnomer for a city of that size. That said, I'm relatively unsure as to what area "downtown Seattle" refers to. It's not a city I particularly care for. Anyone who wants to define downtown Seattle for me, please do so in the comments.

So, I'm finishing up college, working on this short film as a final project. I was going to do it anyway, I'm pretty sure, I begun it not expecting to get any credit and then worked out a way to get credit so I could graduate this June. Last year, I made a little movie that I liked that has its problems- there's a lot of plot points that get depicted as abstractions. For instance, the climax of the movie is a guy being eaten alive by rats, I'm not sure how that reads. I was glad to not be graduating with my peers, glad that there'd been enough times where tuition never got paid to allow me another year to get my skill-set in order.

Now I'm working on this thing that was designed in my mind as a final project, and which I now realize is going to be completely tonally inconsistent and impossible to parse for any sort of emotional undercurrent. It's the sort of movie that, if someone had paid to produce it, there would be no return on investment upon its release, and whoever made it would never be allowed to make a movie again. Reviewing the audio I recorded today, I laughed a lot, and realized that, despite having seen so many movies, I'd somehow ended up an outsider artist anyway. My liberal arts education now amounts essentially to having grown up in a shack. I feel like I just found out I'm actually retarded.

I asked someone a couple weeks ago, "Do you think someone could puzzle together what a normal movie was, if they had seen a bunch of movies that were crazy in different ways, for instance Crank and Last Year At Marienbad?" The answer was no. The answer is no. Oh man. I'm really excited to finish it up and show it to people. I think it'll be really funny. I'm exhilarated.

The climax that I thought would be David Lynch a la Mulholland Drive is actually more David Lynch a la On The Air. (With puppets.) Oh man.

In other, perhaps related news: So the issue with the movie Juno is that, while all of the actors are fine, in the way that a big chunk of acting is the ability of an audience to project their own emotions onto them, every line of dialogue is completely atrocious and should not be allowed to be said by people in a movie, and the soundtrack frequently plays in such a way where it really seems not meant to supply emotion or a counterpoint to a scene, but just to show off the hipness of the movie.

Meanwhile, An American Werewolf In London is great, containing both Griffin Dunne's finest hour and a ridiculously gratuitous scene of car crashes. I saw it this morning and wanted to recommend it to someone in an unhealthy relationship this afternoon. Because of the part where the girl is with a dude that becomes a werewolf on the full moon, at her apartment, when she's not around. Yeah. Thought it was a potent metaphor for the times we live in. Unlike the movie Juno, which is really dismissive of abortions.

If YOU are not dismissive of abortions, you might want a copy of this movie I'm making. DVDs should be burned by the end of June, tell me if you want one.

Be Kind, Rewind ended up not being as good as I would want it to be, but I loved it nonetheless. As a comedy, none of the jokes really struck me as funny, despite the presence of people like Heather Lawless and Jon Glaser, not doing anything, but getting paid anyway. I like it for Michel Gondry getting naked with his process, and how, while it's less technically impressive than The Science of Sleep, it seems more open-hearted for the way it embraces community. It feels like a companion piece to Block Party in that way.

I really hope Gondry's next film ends up being the postulated Daniel Clowes collaboration of an adaptation of Master Of Space And Time, especially if the Clowes screenplay for a movie about the kids who made an adaptation of Raiders Of the Lost Ark ever gets made.

Until then I guess I am waiting for the release of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, and Tokyo, the film anthology including an adaptation of the Gabrielle Bell comic from Kramers Ergot 5.

Last night I watched a terrible movie. It was called Southland Tales, Richard Kelly's follow-up to Donnie Darko. It was a huge failure, barely released. It's a sci-fi movie that's completely unable to tell its story competently, and so reverts to voiceover narration. Those last two things apply to Mike Judge's Idiocracy, and that was my favorite movie of the year it came out. Southland Tales feels more like another argument that the world depicted in Idiocracy is already happening, with this feeling that its unable to get past vapidity, so steeped in the stuff is it. (It has an awful cast, consisting of big-name stars and Saturday Night Live cast members. Although also people who are smaller than SNL: Booger from Revenge Of The Nerds, Will Sasso from MadTV, a woman from Poltergeist.)

It also feels like it might be Richard Kelly's spiritual shield.

It is stupid nonsense, on every level, and one of those levels would have to be the way it keeps on heaping levels on. But: The moral of the movie is "Pimps don't commit suicide." This is literally said four times, one of which is the last line of the movie. It just makes me feel that all that vacuous shit- the movie is all vacuous shit, it makes me never ever want to live in L.A., for the way it's pointedly dumb- it's the world Kelly lives in, and that's probably a deliberate choice. I think I get the feeling of watching the movie of knowing where the guy's coming from- and it's a stupid place, that's mostly pot-smoke, knee-jerk liberal politics, and immersion in celebrity culture but I guess it gets him through the day. Donnie Darko was a popular movie with its cult following that probably existed for the same "Wait, I know exactly where you're coming from" reasons, it's just that, with this movie, where he's coming from is a place no one else can relate to. I do feel like I can recognize it, though: It's a garbage heap. There's no real sense of aesthetics, or value, or emotion- and I don't think any of that is intentional! I think it was all arrived at honestly, through being kind of stupid.

I can't recommend seeing it to anyone, even as I wish more people had seen it so I could know I wasn't hallucinating.

This story is amazing.

Last Wednesday, I was invited to be on the radio to play some records. I brought along a copy of Wooden Wand's Harem Of The Sundrum and The Witness Figg, thinking I'd play one of two songs that struck me as stand-outs. When I say "stand-outs" in regards to Wooden Wand, I am talking about songs that might not end up being the "best" over time, just that thing in radio parlance where something jumps out as a single, or something with more clarity of light than murky atmosphere. When there, on air, my mind blanked on what the second song was. I played "Vengeance Part Two" because, looking at the playlist, I couldn't remember what song "Eagle Claw" referred to.

Later on I realized 'oh right, that's the song where the chorus is "don't say your last words 'til you die".' A lyric I take to mean a refusal to lay down and die a living death, kind of a flipside to David Berman's "on the last day of your life, don't forget to die" line from the Silver Jews song "Advice To The Graduate." On another hearing, I heard the line differently, as "don't save your last words 'til you die," which is sort of the opposite sentiment, but, right, don't view your life as a narrative you can control. Both of these hearings, which are kind of opposites in terms of "What am I supposed to do with these awesome last words I have lying around to use?" apply to Wooden Wand's music in the way in which it's so all over the place in its alternation between psychedelic jam albums and more straightforward singer-songwriter stuff. I can't name a favorite, "best" Wooden Wand record. The best record for the jammy stuff is the Wooden Wand And The Vanishing Voice album The Flood. The best song-oriented record would be the James And The Quiet. This is for records that are actually released on labels, there are slews of CD-Rs around on bootleg networks whathaveyou. There's one I really like from a Spring 2006 tour where Hush Arbors covers Neil Young's Sugar Mountain with a series of high-pitched unnerving notes.

The constant records, under a bunch of different names, is what sort of frustrates the narrative impulse which probably is what makes someone popular- It's hard to place a clear progression, hard for people to agree on a favorite record. How many of the bad reviews of James And The Quiet were probably written by people who wanted jammy stuff? Music reviewers- who I don't hate at all, who I don't think are silly or worthy of mockery- are dealing in words, and end up receptive to narrative clarity. When the record Second Attention came out, filled with religious allusions, critics didn't know what to make of it, so they complained.

The next record made by the guy who uses Wooden Wand as an alias will be done under a birthname, on a major label, and is rumored to sound like Tom Petty.

So this post is a tribute to the scrambled musical path of Wooden Wand, where even the bad records have their moments. Good times.

I buy very few comics these days, due to budgetary constraints. It seems like people who buy more have lower standards, in a way that's not necessarily to their detriment. The more things you consume, the easier it is to evaluate something on its own terms. I think I can listen to music more honestly due to the volume I consume, but when I buy a comic, I tend to have unreasonable expectations- I expect it to work on every level a comic can possibly work, rather than as just an aesthetic experience.

Anyway, Kevin Huizenga's Ganges 2 works on every level a comic can work. I listed his stuff at the top of my 2006 list- his complete output that year. Then, in 2007, nothing came out, except for a minicomic called New Construction that I didn't read because I would've had to order it through a website that didn't have anything else that particularly appealed to me. Ganges 2 came out today, after a hiatus that would suggest a year spent working on it.

New Construction, apparently, had deleted sequences from Ganges 1, a suite of short stories. Something appeared on Huizenga's blog (linked to in my sidebar) that seemed like something from Ganges 2 in the middle of last year. In retrospect, it seems like that was probably the deleted sequence that appeared in the New Construction zine, and that shows up in Ganges 2 in expanded form. There, it was a small vignette, with a vaguely poetic ending. Here, it's a period piece set during the dot-com boom that allows for all sorts of tangents and details. When that poetic ending is reprised here, it's still not quite amazingly moving, but there's less weight on it after the extended narrative of the rest of it.

Huizenga exists at this point on the alternative comics spectrum between something like Chris Ware (Eddie Campbell might be a better comparison point) and something like Paper Rad. Here, he starts talking about video games, and their kind of abstracted relationship to nature, which is vaguely the province of Jacob Ciocci. There's also a really great scene describing a fictional platforming game using some Ben Jones-ish details for jokes. But there's this more bookish/short story way of going about it, with a more delineated cast of characters playing off of each other, and the politics of the day and interpersonal dynamics are drawn in detail. But the tone is closer to melancholy than depression, because people are capable of warmth and feeling in Huizenga's comics. Sometimes, Huizenga navigates the divide even further, by using crazy cartoony doodles to communicate some kind of abstract epiphany in thought process at a comics' climax. I love it when he does that, but it seems like his best comics don't do that, in favor of being more controlled and concrete. His three stories from Drawn And Quarterly Showcase that were reprinted in Curses don't do that, for instance. This comic doesn't do it either, but it does start off with this abstracted overture of drawing that seems like something out of issue 18 of Paper Rodeo. It's kind of superfluous filler compared to the generally literary thrust, but it's great for what it is.

These are generalities. Here are specific bits I liked: The strip of panels at the bottom of a page where Glenn drives home, goes to sleep, and dreams of corridors. Specifically, the rhythm, cutting from outside a car to inside, to then being outside of Glenn's sleeping head and then inside a dream sequence, and how that is inforced by the compositions.

I also like how, on the very next page, the vistas of the videogame remind me of the movie Black Narcissus. There's this gorgeous palette of shades of blue that make up the color in the comic, so the technicolor of that film isn't diminished by the one-color of the Ignatz books' format. Black Narcissus had all painted backdrops, in keeping with the videogame's artifice later highlighted: It's a deliberate allusion, but a subtle one.

There's other things- the strength of comics to balance the subjective and objective, and the way that the captions tell a parallel narrative to the drawings, which happens in Huizenga's comics a lot, and is almost not worthy of note, besides to point out how dynamic the depiction of action in the images is this time around, and how lived-in the narration is, compared to the sometimes facts-cribbed-from-books nature of, say, "The Curse." That had it's own strengths, in terms of information about starlings I didn't know, that made it pleasurable to read, but this development seems distinctly like artistic growth.

This isn't to say it's perfect, that every choice seems like a good one- I don't know why there's that drawing of Glenn's head popping off in the middle of a meeting, but it's still a great comic, and those moments where it becomes a little too excitable are just evidence of reach exceeding grasp in a way that seems like it should be expected from a great cartoonist actively trying to become a better one.

I'm sure I've talked about this before.

There is a scene that ends the documentary The Cruise, where Speed Levitch is standing in front of a door, pontificating. The door is labeled "Emergency Exit Only- Alarm Will Sound." It leads to the roof, or some kind of overlook. Speed is explaining how this sort of sign, this sort of wiring, is the opposite of "the cruise" as he defines it- being able to go wherever, being free. Sometimes these doors aren't alarmed at all, it's an intimidation tactic. You open it, and nothing happens. Although sometimes it's a silent alarm, and the police accost you within minutes.

He opens the door. No alarm goes off. He opens it wider, and because of the f-stop on the camera being for indoors, the frame fills with light and overexposure, and that's how the film ends.

It is an amazing moment of film-poetry, and it seems to capture an obscure feeling perfectly, through metaphor.

There are so many films being made, so much of everything being made. Sometimes it is worth it for when something like that happens, this weird metaphor added to the language, like the Gupta Empire coming up with the idea of zero. You know, that's why we have empires, or cameras and film stock.

Paper Rad news: That video Problem Solvers is amazing. Three segments, all with songs, all with lyrics that are hard to discern due to mixing, masterful use of Flash, very funny jokes. Also, apparently Wyld Fyle (the commerce-minded group of Jacob Ciocci, Ben Jones, and E-Rock) are doing a commercial for Corn Pops. And Extreme Animals did a cover of Archers Of Loaf's "Web In Front" at South By Southwest, that I would very much like to hear.

Newspaper news: The Stranger is a much better written paper than The Portland Mercury, with which it shares a design sense and probable owners. Portland is a better city than Seattle in almost all ways, but seems weirdly car-choked compared to most other cities in a way that kind of put me off.

Portland news: I went there to see the Boredoms and slept on sidebar-linked-blogger/shit-talker extraordinaire Ben Parrish's floor.

Music reviews: The new Silver Jews record is silly, although I like the parts where Cassie sings. Bands are letting me down in 2008!

Movie reviews: I started watching O Lucky Man!, the follow-up to If..., directed by Lindsay Anderson and starring Malcolm McDowell. So far, so good. It's tonally closer to The Ruling Class than If..., at least so far. Partly this is because of the professionalism of its construction.

I just learned that one of my favorite books, John Barth's End Of The Road, was adapted into a movie starring Stacy Keach and James Earl Jones. It doesn't look good, per se, but there it is.

Sometimes I will get two bands confused with each other, before hearing either one. For example: The Afghan Whigs and Archers Of Loaf were the same band to me back in 2003, and when I was in middle school, Blur and Rush were indistinguishable. The most recent confusion for me to correct were the bands Ecstatic Sunshine and Awesome Color. Awesome Color are on the record label Ecstatic Peace, which is a fine label, but as I learned when they opened for Dinosaur Jr., Awesome Color are kind of terrible. The difference between Ecstatic Sunshine and Awesome Color is that the former are pretty, with volume kind of on the fringes of the sound in a way I know will dominate live, but Awesome Color are just kind of dumb.

Ecstatic Peace are from Baltimore and are signed to Carpark, kind of like Beach House and Dan Deacon. All these acts use different instrumentation from each other, but all seem kind of pretty, and have some kind of relation to volume. Even Beach House, who are totally quiet and gentle, have organ used as this blanket in this way that's like early nineties shoegaze. So far Ecstatic Sunshine doesn't seem quite as great as the others but I've just heard a few songs so far. (Also I think they're instrumental. They kind of have that "instruments playing themselves" feeling, but more stripped down than when you hear a bunch of musicians jamming out.)

This is probably worth another post of its own, but I just watched three movies starring Warren Oates in close proximity to each other. He is good in all of them, and all are pretty good. These movies were Two-Lane Blacktop, Cockfigher, and Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia.

Dash Shaw's Bodyworld webcomic is totally great.

So's the end of this interview with Andrew Earles, for completely different reasons. Edit to emphasize: Just the end, where the interviewer asks Earles to define a hipster on. The reviewer betrays his not really having his own thoughts and opinions in favor of received knowledge and it's great.

Persepolis isn't so good. I am referring to the movie, having not read the comic. I thought about reading it, though, when it came out a couple years ago, and was generally acclaimed across the board. In the time since I've started to feel like the critics I like reading didn't really like it. Marjane Satrapi did other comics, which seemed like they were largely ignored.

I don't think I've read a big bashing of the book though, which does seem to be what the public is crying out for.

I walked out of the movie, thinking of the vague criticisms that haven't been quite formulated into essay form by other people. I left not because it was egregiously offensive, but because I felt like I "got" it. Where it was going, that there was nothing to get. The history happens in the background, and is never really presented in a way that's actually useful- knowing that world events effect some people is probably not as politically useful as knowing why the things are happening. The actual happenings are all in the background. What's in focus is this ordinary girl. This is what some people think is amazing, this is what works for people. But even her life isn't that much in focus, in terms of actually giving you insight to it. Was any of it in focus? It all seemed a blur, of signifiers of "ordinary girl"- western pop culture- and signifiers of Iran- revolution and the Shah. But why were things happening? The most vivid moments don't seem like they're coming from anywhere. Which kind makes them less than vivid.

I keep on thinking of The Wire, which is wrapping up now, and presents such a view of the way people effect systems while still being a part of them, and doesn't depict any of them as evil, just sort of at odds with each other. It gives you a great deal of insight into how political systems and bureaucracies work, by depicting them as made up of people, and then showing the consequences of people's actions. It's in deep focus. There, things that happen seem "real" in a way that they don't at all in Persepolis.

Also, Persepolis- while probably looking better as animation than it did as a comic- doesn't look so great. It has an alright style- an interesting one, that does the job (I guess- in a lot of ways, another style could convey more about character, or feeling, or information about Iran or whatever virtues the work's supposed to have that I didn't really pick up) but there's never a dynamic composition. There's a lot of cartoonists whose style doesn't really work for me and seems generic but who are masters of body language or balancing an image. Yeah- not a lot of body language in this one. These are the things that actually convey things graphically, like character, rather than just vague events. It's the same thing- not a real eye for detail, things aren't in focus. Things aren't felt. So I walked out early, maybe missing some stuff, but kind of convinced I wouldn't due to the nature of autobiography.

(Huh, Neko Case is covering The Train From Kansas City in audio form in the other room. I didn't know she did that.)

I liked The Savages, though, with its Chris Ware poster, and its single allusion to the work of Lynda Barry, and its eye for real things. It's probably also somewhat autobiographical, but with an eye towards details, and with a plot controlled by its characters. The detail about the toes curling up, Laura Linney surprised someone would want to read an unproduced play- and the way Philip Seymour Hoffman never offered- a student asks "what's the difference between narrative and plot." It's not the most visually stylized thing, but then, it's not animated, and has actors to do the work of conveying feeling with body language. There's even sight gags! This is Tamara Jenkins' follow-up to Slums Of Beverly Hills, a movie that was essentially okay, and this is better than, while still not being completely awesome. Who knows what of it I will remember months from now? (Probably Philp Bosco writing "prick" on the wall.) Sure, other things- the use of prescription drugs, the bad sex- will fade into other movies that had a better eye for detail, or that I just saw first, but still, it's got scenes other than that- where the subject matter is, with the decision to put the father in a nursing home- all of that works, and is well-observed, and can be recalled easier than I can recall the history of Iran as depicted in Persepolis.

Sometimes I read news that makes me go "What the fuck? No fucking way, no fucking way!" like the retard I am but keep hidden. The news of David Fincher directing an adaptation of Charles Burns' Black Hole is the latest thing to do this, even with a crazy election going on. That could actually work really well.

Oh also: I like this band High Places. I wonder if having an album that's actually produced will ruin them or make them better- it seems like it could go either way.

I saw some movies recently:

Jodorowsky's The Rainbow Thief is really normal, despite the title seemingly implying a whole movie that never takes place. It's really light compared with something like Santa Sangre. It's spiritual tones- "money isn't important" are the sort of thing seen in other movies, but here filtered through vague allusions to alchemy and somehow more convincing for Jodorowsky's well-established kook credentials.

Nights Of Cabiria has this one absolutely amazing scene involving hypnosis. The majority of the movie still feels cynical, even if that's not its intent- it only seems to be able to throw off the shackles for a brief period of time.

WR: Mysteries Of The Organism starts off with some fascinating documentary footage of Wilhelm Reich's followers and townsfolk, and then everything else is kind of dull, from the narrative stuff in Yugoslavia to the documentary footage of people just trying to be sexually liberated. The ten to fifteen minutes of documentary footage is interesting. So's the DVD menu. Elijah Brubaker's Reich comic is pretty good so far though. (Oh wait, I guess three issues have been printed. When I say "good so far" I'm talking about the first issue, which is the only one to be shipped to stores thus far.) I prefer the free expressiveness of the art to the restraint shown in Chester Brown's Louis Riel, although there's some stylistic choices that seems not so well-done.

David Lynch's On The Air is great! I started watching in on VHS, and have so far seen the three episodes that actually aired.

Every episode just leads to this slapstick everything-goes-wrong-but-it's-all-right finale. There's stupid sound effects all over the place, and things repeat in each episode that aren't quite gags, but are just weirdness. Miguel Ferrer is a really good actor. There's also bits of extended sexual innuendo of the type that annoyed me on Arrested Development. Holy shit, was this show ahead of its time! Although also while looking back in time- there's all kinds of corniness and one character is your standard "foreigner" caricature.

David Lynch just directed the pilot, but like with Twin Peaks, his style hangs over the episodes he didn't direct. It's kind of the opposite of what you'd expect from him- a slapstick comedy- but the way in which he's present totally works and is amazing.

I'm not bemoaning the loss of it from the airwaves or anything, because part of the reason I like it is because it's clear (ABUNDANTLY clear) why it would be a failure, but I would bet money it was funnier than anything on ABC at the time, or since. It's completely the opposite of The Simpsons or Seinfeld- probably the only examples of funny things at the time- partly because of how assured it is in its corniness and lack of hipness. Which is mainly why it's so great. I laughed really hard at this show, but it's funny on a number of different levels.

It seems like this great companion piece to 30 Rock, actually, in that its that show's complete opposite.

An ongoing list of movies that aren't available on Netflix for one reason or another, that I have either seen and am now recommending, or and hoping to encounter at the video store the next time I go to look for rentals, which will be Monday. This doesn't count things that were never released, like the Timothy Carey movie The World's Greatest Sinner, which I do hope to see at some point. (I'll recommend to people watching the Stanley Kubrick movie The Killing, and trying to pay attention to the character Timothy Carey plays, especially if you don't know who he is- Just watch that movie looking for anyone who might be a great character actor and you'll have fun. That movie's great!) I also won't list things that are kind of recent or that rumor has as coming out shortly that can be saved on Netflix. I'll mention things that are available to be saved on Netflix if the movie in question is really old and more likely to be found on video.

Brewster McCloud: I have seen this. It's great. Bud Cort stars in Robert Altman's favorite movie that he directed- it feels like it influenced Wes Anderson way more than Harold And Maude, or any of the other movies Robert Altman directed that I've seen, but with this kind of fractured editing and a freewheeling style that's completely at odds with the more controlled nature of some of those other things.

A Matter Of Life And Death: This is Sammy Harkham's favorite movie, and even though he's not the greatest cartoonist, that guy's proven his taste. This is apparently in the upper-tier of Powell And Pressburger films. Black Narcissus is amazing, as is Peeping Tom, and to a lesser extent The Red Shoes. The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp is good enough, and I haven't seen any of his other movies. I really want to see this.

Tampopo: This isn't available in a region one DVD. I tried to watch it on DVD on a player that couldn't handle it. The people I was going to watch it with have seemingly since seen it, presumably on VHS, and loved it. I've had it talked up to me quite a bit.

WR: Mysteries Of The Organism. This is on DVD! Criterion put it out this Summer! Netflix doesn't have it, although they have the director's follow-up, Sweet Movie, which is really filthy and I was totally into it. This is a kind of fractured-collage movie about Wilhelm Reich, and I guess also the political state of Yugoslavia in 1968? Anyway. The first issue of Reich, the comic book autobiography of Wilhelm Reich drawn by a dude who used to live in Olympia, is waiting for me to be purchased at the comic store the same day I rent this movie. The plans to build an orgone accumulator are delayed for the time being but will maybe start up again after that day.

Time Masters- Bryan Fordney said this was amazing and posted some screen grabs. I didn't look into it until now, when I found out it was the same director as Fantastic Planet, and has designs by Moebius! Dude!

On The Air and Hotel Room- the TV shows David Lynch around the same time as Twin Peaks. These actually are at the Olympia video store, unless they've been stolen since three years ago. If they're on VHS here, they might also be where you are.

The Rainbow Thief and Santa Sangre- I've seen the latter. It's pretty restrained and normal for Jodorowsky, although it has this sort of horror-movie vibe, and maybe the misogyny that people see in his comics but I don't get from The Holy Mountain at all. The Rainbow Thief stars Peter O'Toole, who you may know from the movie The Ruling Class, and Christopher Lee, who you may know from the movie The Wicker Man, if all you know about cinema is early seventies British-psychedelia films, which I think would be a totally fine thing for that to be all you knew. I really like the idea of them in a Jodorowsky movie. I also like the idea of just watching another Jodorowsky movie, actually. These are the last two movies he directed, in 1990 and 1988, respectively. Might as well bring up Tusk as well, from 1980, which might not be as good but I would probably watch.

Possession: Another movie recommended by Sammy Harkham! I don't know if people read that Family blog I link to, but I sure as shit do. This was brought to his attention by people who work at a famously great video store in Los Angeles. I bet they have this movie available. Note: They also screened it on film at the Silent Movie Theatre.

Phase IV: Another thing brought up on the Family blog. Saul Bass made a movie! It's a science fiction movie about ants! There's a lot of footage of ants running around because the plot sort of stops mattering to the film at a certain point! There's another movie with the same title starring Dean Cain that Netflix knows about but is probably terrible!

A Thousand Clowns: This used to be available on Netflix as a Play Now thing you could stream on your computer, but this laptop doesn't have the hard drive space for that. This is Jesse Thorn's favorite movie, he of The Sound Of Young America radio program that I also link to from the blog sidebar. Apparently it has both a man-child and a child-man as characters! I really want to see this.

Spirits Of The Dead: This is a horror anthology collection of three films, including one directed by Federico Fellini. I heard about this from that Eli Roth AV Club feature where he programmed a theoretical film festival. Apparently the other two movies aren't so great, but the Fellini one is amazing.

Hellzapoppin!: Alex Tripp had this shown to him in class once. Apparently it stars this old comedy duo, but this movie is really weird and plays with the form of cinema and cliches and whathaveyou. Alex loved it, and that guy is basically me when it comes to movie tastes.

The Landlord: Hal Ashby's first movie. Apparently kind of legendary in black cinema circles, I think? I hope to see it at some point. Maybe not so pressing as the others, but still.

Insignificance: Nicolas Roeg's career kind of fell apart after making a bunch of crappy movies, but this has kind of an interesting premise and a Jim O'Rourke album named after it. Jim O'Rourke's favorite movie, apparently, is Performance, by the way. This movie has no rock stars, but Gary Busey plays Joe DiMaggio.

Also it seems possible I'll end up renting Two-Lane Blacktop from the video store because Netflix has it as having a "very long wait." I'm not even sure I'll like that movie. I hope I like it enough to make it seem imperative that I see Cockfighter right away, because I like that that movie exists, but right now it seems like I will see it years from now because of how many other things I would rather see before that. (Apparently there's a scene in that movie where a dude presents the head of a rooster he bit off to his beloved as a gesture of his affection. Cinemaaaaa!)

The first part of this post is about Olympia:

My mom, who lives in the New Jersey suburbs, has talked to me about Olympia and its whiteness, its lack of urbanity. I tried to defend it to her, because she hasn't really spent any time here, and only knows what I tell her about it. I kind of defended it in bad terms, which I'll now redefine. Olympia, despite its lack of any real minority population, still has this culture that my mom and a lot of people like her romanticize and associate with different races, that's a lot "warmer" and more "wild" and "open" than people's traditional experiences with their neighbors. Someone at the Capitol Theater told me, that after they'd introduced me to someone and I was a huge weirdo and then ran off, that the person I was introduced to said "That's what I like about the Capitol Theater. People here are so different than what I'm used to." At the time I was just confused, but then I realized the thing how I was being viewed. That's the Olympia I live in, though.

The thing is, because it's done by white people, it's more easily accepted and integrated, dealt with. Right now, I believe, the single most popular record in the country is the soundtrack to Juno, composed largely by Olympia resident Kimya Dawson. I have nothing against Kimya Dawson at all. I am generally wary of things that are that embraceable, for reasons that have nothing to do with the thing being embraced: They can't help being lovable.

Oh right, that's a thing I wanted to bring up, that apparently there was, like, a half-a-million-dollar offer to her to write a theme for Wal-Mart? She turned it down.

I look around Olympia and see a place being developed in weird ways from what it was when I moved here, five years ago. Five years ago means I am in no ways from here. In all likelihood, the people moving into these condos popping up have a greater claim to this area than I do, as they're probably from neighboring towns I've never been to. Olympia's a safe place, with a lot less meth use than those places, and probably better schools. Incidents of violence are rare.

That story I told of being forced into a fight by some drunk out-of-towners the other week was notable for its oddity. The only thing that might keep property values down is the stupid anarchist/activist graffiti that we all suspect is being done by rich college kids who have recently moved to town. They're all stupid, but fuck it, god bless them for being unpleasant.

Still, areas filled of junk cars and old greenhouses are all getting cleaned up to make way for town homes and condos. I can't blame it on the pleasantness. I can't even call it gentrification yet.

But I do feel there's a thing out there in the mass culture that I find kind of offputting, encroaching upon some kind of graveyard. It seems possible it'll do good things- please god let it get Obama elected- (I'm sure that comes out of left field completely) but it is, in itself, its own blandness. Obama is nowhere near as bland as the last two Democratic nominees for President, as a person, but I think I'm just put off by the general mechanism that sways the masses.

The second part of this post is about movies and comics and music and shit.

This new mainstream would need to lead to a new "________" (multiple choice fill in the blank for a series of synonyms, with a) being something like "independent sphere" b) "underground" c) "counterculture") that could travel farther. The whole soft indie comedy is starting to feel at this point like Pulp Fiction-inspired neonoirs started to feel after Memento came out. (I like Memento, I'm citing it as a last hurrah.) I'm imagining a psychedelia that's vaguely informed by stuff like The Holy Mountain and the recently viewed Sweet Movie, only this time with satire that's actually funny. I saw Daisies after an interview in Arthur with Jimmy Joe Roche promoting Ultimate Reality. Ultimate Reality isn't quite the sort of the thing I'm talking about, but it's on the right track. It might vaguely feel like a poor man's Paper Rad, rather than an offshoot of its more narrative directons. (Man, that complete Cold Heat book can't come out soon enough. That kind of stuff might be exactly what I'm talking about. Only I imagine a movie instead of a comic, due to cinema's ability to integrate myriad parts to form an overwhelming whole and thus be accessible and communicative.) I talk about this sort of stuff all the time on this blog.

In addition to that stuff, I really like the movies made by Powell And Pressburger, The Archers. I just saw The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp- I'd tried to watch it before and couldn't make it through it, but that movie's pretty good. I was reading this thing about their mission statement, their list of thoughts- one was that a filmmaker needs to a be a year ahead of not just his peers, but the general trends, because a film takes a year to make. So, there's that.

I talked about Chameleon Street and the idea of a black Orson Welles. It turns out that some people think of The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp as a British Citizen Kane. Which it is nowhere near as good as, but: People talked about There Will Be Blood as being like Citizen Kane in terms of its American-ness, its story of capitalism sort of creating and destroying a man. The Powell and Pressburger film should probably be viewed as a British alternative in terms of not being about capitalism at all, so much as it is about manners and gentlemanly decorum falling out of favor as time goes on. Which means its not as interesting. (Meanwhile, A Matter Of Life And Death is called the British Wizard Of Oz and is apparently Sammy Harkham's favorite film, and is completely unavailable in the U.S. on DVD.)

As someone who doesn't care about Bob Dylan at all, I'm Not There just made me want to see Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. This isn't to say it's bad: It's a fine movie, but it's at its best when its able to depict something other than Bob Dylan saying cryptic things in interviews and press conferences, which is approximately a third of the film- Essentially, that's all Ben Whishaw's depiction does.

I don't intend to post everytime I receive a compliment, but oh man. This is from my friend Jamie, who is currently a member of the band World History, who you should see while she's still in the band. About my movie, she said, in an e-mail, that it "reminded me of a harmony korine film, but with a lot more substance. and without the artsy arrogance. or chloe sevigny. i hate chloe sevigny." Thanks Jamie! (For future reference, I will only post compliments of me that include insults of other people. I might also just post any insult of other people that I am told I can post.) Jamie is also the only person to have paid for a DVD, as all other copies have been given away for free. She gets a thousand gold stars. If anyone wants a copy of that movie, "The Reason Why Our World Is Coming To An End," or the DVD I burned today, where I tell a version of "the aristocrats" for twenty minutes that I recorded in early 2006, after a winner of the contest to be a DVD extra was already announced, but before I learned that submissions had to be under ten minutes, contact me.