To the best Alex and I can work out, "I Want Pussy" off of Ol' Dirty Bastard's Nigga Please is the song where a main part of the beat is ODB fucking a girl on top of a bass drum.

My paper for class... it's not a review, but the teacher got the impression. I make the argument that it's the apex of hip-hop. This is a controversial view, because the album's rather offensive, and others might prefer something more politically conscious. My stance is that 'conscious' hip-hop is frequently boring as fuck and I am infinitely more amused by people just talking about themselves and how awesome they are. The point of my paper is that the reason that an ODB album is able to be the apex of hip-hop is because hip-hop is really fucked-up.

The record's also hilarious. I don't know how much of the hilarity is intentional, but it doesn't matter. It's never unintentionally hilarious because the music is bad. The music is pretty fucking solid, the beats accompany ODB's flow (which is insane, but GREAT and listenable) well. I don't know how much of what is being said is jokes and how much is just straight-up real ODB bragging. "Girls want to fuck me when they smell my underarm?" I don't know. "I take the cocaine, it cleans out my sinuses?" That's not true at all, but I still don't know whether he means it or not.

But yeah, good record. If you see it in a used bin (and you might... it had a hit single, but it's fucking weird, and most people are dumb) buy it. I'm pretty sure it's a party record but I am not a partier. Maybe play it at a party where you don't know everyone there. It can function as a conversation starter, while also making it seem like there's a crazy drunken crackhead in attendance at your party, i.e. spicing it up.

Oh yeah, and the original title was The Black Man Is God, The White Man Is The Devil. It also probably could've been released under the name Big Baby Jesus, as ODB had announced that's what he was switching his alias to before the release of the record. That's a lot of religious imagery for an album predominantly about fucking.

The election's in less than a week. I am alternately filled with dread and exhilaration.

This is great:http://www.salon.com/news/letters/2004/10/27/youngvoter/ It's at Salon, so you have to watch an ad, but... it's very encouraging. It's a letter from a black 21-year-old. The giveaway that he's a liberal might be that he's at Salon, but... he's also young, and he's black. So there's no way he's going to support Bush. It's a great piece, and I'll just quote a good bit from early on: "I saw Ann Coulter on some show where she was literally speaking for black America. Being that she is an aging white chick with poorly dyed roots, she obviously got it wrong. Those polls saying how Bush will get 16 to 18 percent of the black vote are just wrong. To quote ODB, "Nigga please."

There's other, more encouraging things. That quote just makes me smile. Because it's about politics and it quotes Ol' Dirty Bastard. I wrote a paper on the album Nigga Please for class. It's a pretty fucking great record, for many reasons.

There's other stuff on Salon, and elsewhere, about the GOP's plan to shut down the black vote. God, I wish that news would break.

So yeah, swing voters: Yes, they're dumb. But what's funny is the idea that they're waiting for something. Waiting for one of them to do something amazing, or maybe to eat a baby or something. And the funny thing is... That could totally happen. If the news I just mentioned broke? God. Of course, the mainstream media totally isn't covering shit like that, shit that will henceforth be referred to as "important news." They're covering campaign stops instead. And the Red Sox.

Oh, yeah, so the election night drinking game. It requires two kinds of liquor. For every thirty electoral votes that go to Kerry, take a shot of happy alcohol, whatever that might be for you. Like it's a party. For every thirty that go to Bush, take a shot of something else, like you're drinking to forget. I don't know what I'm talking about, so I'm going to say rum for Kerry, whiskey for Bush. But it depends on your preferences.

So in between all the politics shit... I'm in this class that isn't very good. My teacher doesn't particularly like me, I figure, but I arguably bring it on myself by making my distaste for the class known. The class is just wrong and based around bad ideas. I don't want to seem like I'm just casting myself in a rebel fuck-all posture because I think I'm so bad-ass, but... I mean, fuck, I disagree. No one else speaks up. Story of my life? You know, maybe.

Also: I saw some movies. I Heart Huckabees, Team America: World Police, and Shaun Of The Dead. Three relatively different movies. They have a few things in common. One is that they're all mainstream enough that I can see them in shitty-ass Olympia, even if I see them later than other people. The other thing is that they're all comedies, and they're all funny. Yeah, I Heart Huckabees is a bit pretentious. But it's funny. And Team America's overall position is one I disagree with. Shaun Of The Dead... is pretty fucking solid, nothing wrong with it. Not all the jokes work, but I definitely laughed a good deal. Of course not all the jokes in a comedy are going to work. But all these movies had enough jokes that did work that I can recommend them as comedies.

There are times when I'm at a movie and I'm laughing at shit no one else is laughing at. You know what I think is key to enjoying comedies, to knowing whether you have a good sense of humor regarding comedies? Show up early at the movie, watch the pre-film programming. This includes the trailers and the stuff before the trailers... Either big expensive shit, like you're watching TV type stuff, or the ads on the screen and an unrelated pseudo-radio broadcast. In all of these things you should find things to laugh at. If you can find anything unintentionally funny, you are smart enough to judge comedies. If you can't, than you don't get irony, so I don't know what you're doing seeing the movies I just recommended. I know that most people reading this get the idea of unintentional hilarity. I'm just sharing my litmus test with you.

That new Alexander Payne thing doesn't look very good at all. Sideways? God, the commercial even has a bit of "naughty girl, might have to be spanked" dialogue. What the fuck? Does anyone think that's edgy? Does anyone think that's funny? Has anyone not heard this a million fucking times before? Granted, it could be a matter of the funny jokes being too offensive for TV. But... God, that shit is just played out. It's fucking played out. And then when you see the actual trailer about the plot and shit... It looks like it's for boring old men. But the criticism has been made than About Schmidt is for boring old men, but I thought that movie kicked ass.

The Life Aquatic looks awesome though. Oh my god. Maybe a bit more jokey than previous Wes Anderson movies, but that's probably all down to editing, right? The trailer for Royal Tenenbaums had some obvious jokes that read subtle in the actual movie. But even if it is more jokey... I like jokes. It just looks fucking great. It opens on Christmas. I hope my brother and I live up to our Jewish heritage and leave before the Christmas dinner to see it.

So sometimes I think about the Pitchfork best of the 90s list, the second one. I always think about best records lists, but that's the one closest to my tastes, most reflective of what I like. And I mentally formulate my own list. Tonight I made an attempt to write that list down. It's awesome in that it really betrays me as a guy who only likes like five bands. It's also great in how quickly it falls apart... By the time it gets to Archers Of Loaf, it is abundantly clear that I am talking out of my ass and don't know anything about music at all. There's three Flaming Lips records in the top twenty, and Zaireeka is really just there in theory, because I only heard it once. It's hard as hell to make lists like this, because you ask yourself "Do I (a) more than (b)? Yes. Do I like (b) more than (c)? Yes. Do I like (a) more than (c)? Well... depends on my mood." And it falls apart as an exercise rather quickly.

So I just realized that people seem to be upping the number of fists to express new levels of awesomeness. Three-fists, four fists... The current peak is five fists, found in the title of an upcoming Matt Fraction comic.

Dude.

All you need is two fists.

I've got some viruses on this here computer. They can't be removed by anti-virus software, and I can't find the actual files yet. This could be a problem. So far the only thing I've been experienced was my computer wanting to show me gay porn... Not the most effective virus in terms of the large percentage of the population that wouldn't be bothered.

So when you do searches for files in Windows XP, the default setting involves a cartoon dog looking through a book. It is rather disturbing. It can probably be turned off, but I'm torn about whether I really want to do such a thing. Sometimes the dog looks up from the book to stare at you with big wide eyes.

So bizarre.

I should really be asleep.

Two words which will define the future: Gorilla Foundation.

Don't try a Google search. It's not on the internet yet. All in my mind. I'm writing it down because I sometimes forget the "foundation" part.

I like hanging around drunks because it drunks up my thoughts.

No essaying today, kids. Just some notes on the quick.

So a while ago (a week maybe? Probably more) my computer's hard drive died on me. It got replaced. But all the music I had on that old hard drive is now gone, as is a lot of writing. Beginnings of novels, journals of ideas, that kind of thing. So what can I do now, but come up with new ideas? The failure of the laptop led to my thinking about the failure of technology we nonetheless depend on, which brought to mind an old idea, which I then fleshed out, and long story short: my mind is a constant spring of disturbing imagery.

Class is okay. I disagree with the teachers in regards to several of the principles the class is based around, but in discussions I can make my fellow students drop their jaws. (I've done it to two separate students on two separate instances, and both times it was fucking amazing, because you can control your jaw, so there's no reason for that to ever really happen.) So there's that.

Oh, and the current goal of dorm J208 is to beat Sonic And Knuckles all in one go before October 19th. For that is the ten-year anniversary, you see. We realized this once one roommate (John Samson) put in some Dreamcast game compilation. While playing it, I made an offhand reference to 1994. Alex said he thought the game came out in 1996 or thereabouts. So he looked online and found out it came out on October 19th, 1994. This led to the decision to beat the game before then, and a lot of remembrances of the past ten years, growing up and shit like that.

I bought a belgian waffle iron and it is the smartest investment I have ever made. Or at least it will be until it breaks, which hopefully will never happen.

So the new Pixies songs... they're rather good indeed. Not the shock of the new, and they won't save music or anything, but it's one more good band in the world. They're still a good band. Their first new song has the chorus "bam thwok, oh, love, bang, wakka wakka wakka"which sometimes runs through my mind at times of intense joy. It's the joy of the fact that the Pixies are making music again, you know? It's nice. The Warren Zevon cover is good too, but it's not an original song with the chorus of wakka wakka wakka which means it's a lesser song than Bam Thwok.

So, back at Evergreen, haven't done any blogging, or any social interaction. Social interaction is more of a priority. Sometimes I'm on the bus and there's stuff I want to blog, but when I return to my dorm that urge has passed. So now, my passion is gone. So I'm going through the motions. But anyway, yeah, Let's talk politics goes so good with beer. Or: Everyone is retarded except for me.

So, the current Republican talking point is to label John Kerry a... I'm going to call him a waffler, because the term they're using is FUCKING RETARDED. "Waffler" makes me think of waffles, and even though it's still a dumb term, it's not one that the entire media have jumped upon. Anyway, the reason they're using this terminology... It's not to galvanize the Republican base. To do that, you just keep on calling him a liberal. Whatever. It doesn't need to be done. It's not going to get Democrats to defect and vote for Bush. (or more likely, get them to not vote, or vote for Nader, or something else that's not going to happen, because Bush is too fucking terrible.) It's done to make him not look like a good leader in the eyes of swing voters. Swing voters. Swing voters, whose minds aren't made up. Who, when the polls vacilate between 41% and 48%, it's their fault. People whose opinions constantly change based on the facts being presented to them.

... Do you get where I'm going with this?

It doesn't seem like an effective tarring tool. Leaving aside the fact that the reason Kerry might vacilate is that he's learning, and understands nuance, which is what editorial cartoonists seem to be picking up on. This is what the Republicans seem to be saying: Hey, swing voters. Kerry's like you. And you'd make a bad leader.

What's weird is that... this might be the Republican stance? The closest I ever came to agreeing with Ann Coulter was when she stated that swing voters are dumb, because if you're an adult, you should know your beliefs and know whether you're a Republican or a Democrat. Even that I'd only agree with on a tentative basis. I mean, yeah, you should know which economic policy makes more sense to you. But, in terms of shit like war... Wars are easier to either justify or regret after the fact. Also: War wasn't always the Republican thing. That's a neo-conservative thing. Back in the seventies, Bob Dole denounced Vietnam and World War 2 as being Democrat wars. But I'm getting distracted.

You know who I agree with more than Ann Coulter? Chris Rock. In his last special, he called bullshit on the breakdown of conservative/liberal, of Democrat/Republican. His stance was that, if you're sane, you don't automatically agree with shit before you hear the issue. If you're sane, you don't tow the party line. (This is not to say that Zell Miller is sane. As has been previously discussed, he's completely fucking off his gourd, and as such, doesn't realize that he's registered with the wrong party.)

As I type this, I realize these are two separate issues, and I'm kind of going against my original implied definition of a swing voter. So, um, damn. If my presentation of ideas was done backwards, it would've read like this: Swing voters are okay. And how funny is it that Republicans, in their quest to win the swing voter's favor, just talk shit on the idea of them? I think it's probably the secret resentment that political parties feel for swing voters bubbling to the surface in a subliminal way.

In brief: I'm now anticipating my return to Olympia. I guess this kicked into high gear after my last day of work, and realizing that I'm now in the home stretch. The fact that the mugging made me afraid to walk a street near my house at night might've helped.

I finished my short story, Drawing In Frosting. I don't know how good it is. I'll be sending it someone's way soon as my laptop is back connected to the internet.

I bought some CDs today, and found out there's a new copy of Arthur available. I had an audible reaction. I forget the first thing I said aloud, but I know that the last thing I said was "hellzapoppin'." The cover feature was an interview with Grant Morrison, conducted by Kristine McKenna.

My brother borrowed a copy of Simpsons season 4 DVDs. I got to see some episodes that I hadn't seen before, including what Entertainment Weekly apparently named the greatest Simpsons episode ever.

I think I had more thoughts, at one point.

Another Summer living in Philadelphia, another mugging. This time I really didn't have any money on me, but this time, the robber actually cared enough to run my pockets and shit. He got my wallet, containing two photo IDs, (one for Evergreen, one for Camden County, NJ) my voter registration card, two bank cards, ( one for Wachovia, one for Bank Of America, both canceled now) two pre-paid phone cards, a Best Buy gift card with eight bucks on it, and maybe some other crap.

So yeah I think I can go back to Olympia now. (although the ID shit will need to be replaced in order for me to get on the plane.)

The latest Chris Rock HBO special, Never Scared, is now available on DVD. For a while I was thinking that Chris Rock is the funniest dude around, but after watching the special, I reconsidered that stance. Not that he's unfunny, it's just that other people are funnier. Chris Rock is just the most on-point dude, especially vis a vis the whole men and women/whites and blacks tip. Other people try to be on-point on more political matters, like the overrated David Cross (did you know that Phil Ek and Chris Walla were somehow involved with the audio engineering of his tour? There is no reason for that to be the case) but Rock's great for the kind-of-oversimplifying for the sake of a joke. This is good because it allows for his bits to have payoffs, as opposed to just being riffing for the sake of riffing. The fact that the person I would now name as being funnier is mining a completely different terrain of comedy (Mitch Hedberg) should really speak that I'm not downplaying the awesomeness of Chris Rock at all. Chris Rock's... to say he's more perceptive than funny just seems fucking insane, really. But I always quote his bits, and think of them, and keep them in the back of my mind, whereas I don't laugh out loud when they're said.

Anyway, when I got online, I was thinking I was going to talk about comedians in vehicle movies (long story short: BAD IDEA) and talk about how great Pootie Tang is, and the key to enjoying it. (essentially irony, but more irony of the fact that you are watching a movie called Pootie Tang, about a rap star crimefighter who is too cool for the English language, and the movie's really poorly made but it's not a BAD movie, and many of the jokes just fucking work and are funny.) The irony thing would spin into talking about John Darnielle talking about "ironic music appreciation" in an interview with The Believer, and how it's basically just listening to things that you don't quite "get," but enjoy regardless. This was then going to lead to me talking about the complete fucking insanity of Ol' Dirty Bastard's album, Nigga Please. (It's insane... I've heard he doesn't remember making it, but more apparent when you listen to it is the complete lack of rhymes... I think most people think it's crap, but there's a charisma to it, even when talking shit on whitey and talking about girls on his dick.) Apparently Chris Rock does the intro to that album, but I haven't listened to it, just heard some bits while in my brother's room, looking at a clock. It would've wrapped up with me talking about someone's offhanded comment in Vice (I hate this magazine a lot in theory, but find it compellng and enjoyable as opposed to repellent in practice) that they think that "heavy metal is the new rap" which they probably meant in terms of hipster irony whiteboy appreciation, not in terms of defining youth culture of America... Which seems true and prescient, and I should mention that in that Believer interview, John Darnielle (he's the guy in The Mountain Goats with the zine/website Last Plane To Jakarta) was talking about metal. His fondness for/fascination with the band Deicide came up.

So, I've tackled all those topics, but in abridged form. It's like the cliff notes to my thought process. I am sleepy and have to go to work tomorrow, I should also meet up with both of my parents once or twice before I go back to Olympia, which is starting to seem crazy fucking soon.

There was a family function at my mom's house that my mom might be pissed at me for missing. There's cake in the fridge which might rightfully be mine. There's clothes on the floor of the living room which definitely are rightfully mine, but I gave them to my mom to get rid of because they suck ass. Lots of shirts she gave me for Christmas, I said I'd never wear, and she insisted that I would. Looking back at it now, I should've used the comeback that I'd been dressing myself at least since I was five and that wasn't going to change, but more important in retrospect is that I was completely right and she was full of shit. But to bring it back to a Chris Rock I didn't laugh at, but will be stuck in my memory for all eternity, a man can't win an argument with a woman because a man is concerned with having his argument making sense, which is an obstacle women aren't concerned with. Maybe there are some women reading this thinking Chris Rock and I are misogynists, but in your heart you know that is not the case, even if you are unwilling to concede that Chris Rock is, as ever, fucking on-point.

So, I haven't whored for McSweeney's for awhile. But recently, on the "McSweeney's recommends" section of their site, they recommended not moving. Which... um, yeah. Pain in the ass. Besides the whole packing things up thing, living in two different places and moving twice in a short span of time ends up in me missing many many shows.

Anyway, yeah, back to the whole talking about movies thing.

Watched Almodovar's Live Flesh. When it was over, I realized the thematic similarity/repetition at the heart of the oeuvre that I hadn't picked up from the other three movies I saw. This one put it over the top. I don't know if it's a bad movie, but in a way it's one I wish I hadn't seen because it tarnishes his other work. I imagine that if I'd been following Almodovar all this time, Talk To Her may not have kicked my ass like I did.

Also watched Tom Tykwer's Heaven. Apparently, when someone I knew saw it in the theater, much of the audience was pissed at the ending. Endings that piss people off tend to make me happy, unless it pisses people off by just being aggressively shitty. (like A.I.) This ending made me happy. Most of the movie... The first two-thirds (excepting the very opening scene) seem vaguely thrillerish. Not so much in execution. It's not much of a nail-biter... A lot of people call the movie hypnotic. But it's compelling, plotwise. The final third takes on a more languid tone, vaguely pastoral. (This opinion is shaped mainly by a few shots very close to the end.) The plot stops developing, basically. And then it ends on rather daring note, the kind of thing that I want to call "magic realism" as someone who has heard the term before but hasn't read Marquez and really has no fucking clue what I'm talking about when I say that. Think the ending to Barton Fink, if everybody took my advice and watched Barton Fink. Or that one scene in Magnolia everyone talks about. Basically movies embracing the fact that they are not real life and doing stuff which might not work according to its own logic, but rather, does something that DEFINES the movie's logic as being much larger than the strict realism-with-some-oddity it seemed to be embracing. Realism with some small oddities, but then one GIANT fucking oddity. I love that shit. Eat it up with a spoon.

Um, my brother bought a copy of Drugstore Cowboy so I watched that. Fun sidenote is that one of the movie's screenwriters is named Daniel Yost. I know a guy with that name. I also liked the moments with flying hats. That movie is just okay, nothing great. The kind of thing where you can imagine the director falling off sharply and creating pieces of shit like Elephant, Finding Forrester, and a Psycho remake, but this was made while they were young and hungry. Like, when you're done watching it, you wouldn't call Gus Van Sant a genius, and you wouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt ever, but you can concede that it's an alright movie. And, even though it's just alright, he never made anything that good again. So you accept it as a fluke, and chalk the quality up to Daniel Yost and William S. Burroughs, and then you go on living your life. (The moments with the floating hats are pretty fucking cool though.)

I saw Melvin Goes To Dinner. Which it turns out is not a comedy. Some of the cameos in there are rather surprising. I recommend it to fans of Richard Linklater. It's based on a play. One of the special features on the DVD is a scene from the play, which really brought home how I don't like plays as an artistic medium. Ugh. Seriously, why make a play when you could make a movie? Fuck plays.

I also saw Blood Simple, which was okay. Coen brothers doing something not a comedy. Which means... it's okay. I borrowed Miller's Crossing from work and will watch it tomorrow, along with Amores Perros. Apparently it's way better.

I also started watching Spartacus on DVD from work but the DVD crapped out. I liked it though. My brother mocked me for getting it, due to the gayness of gladiators.

There are some people I would like to contact but I'm not sure if the information I would use to contact these people is out of date or not. One of these people is Diana Fanelli. She used to read this, but I don't know if she still does, as a) it's rarely updated and it seems like most people should have stopped reading it, and b) I have no way to get in contact with her so I haven't communicated with her since the posting became erratic. Anyway, if you, the person reading this, are Diana Fanelli, contact me while I'm still in Philadelphia.

Which, for those of you keeping track, means sometime in the next two weeks. If I were in Olympia over the next two weeks, I could see Deerhoof.

So, on reading and writing: I finished Gravity's Rainbow. Yay me. I can't recommend it to anyone though, even though it had its moments. I started Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but yeah I don't know if I really have the drive to read through it, at least in order to finish it before school starts. My brother's been getting David Sedaris books from the library, and my mom's been buying books that aren't crap. (I told her to pick up 100 Years Of Solitude, and she's also bought a handful of ex-hip book-club-style books from Borders' Buy 3, get 1 free table, so she's got the first Augusten Burroughs book, Life of Pi, and some other stuff.) My brother also has some books that he owns and I sometimes think about reading, like William S. Burroughs' The Wild Boys. All of these ae lighter quicker reads than the actually pretty enjoyable and compelling Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. And after Gravity's Rainbow, my brain is going to have to decompress on the light quick reads before reading another ungodly long novel. Oh and yesterday I got a handful of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, (best comic ever) rounding it out, so maybe someday soon I'll be able to spend an afternoon reading that whole run front to back. That would be a fucking great afternoon.

Did I ever write about how my mom has some girl from church living in my room? Okay, technically, it's not my room, it's a guest room, with a lot of my shit there. (i.e. comics, making the room important for my Best Afternoon Ever plan) But anyway, yeah, that's happening, which kind of sucks.

Oh and I told my mom I was stopping going to her church (you know, the one I grew up in) because it was too conservative and I felt consistently more and more alienated from the proceedings. I've had differences in terms of interpretation with the church leadership for fucking forever, but now, you know, I gots me a job, so it's one more reason to stop going. These two things combine so I won't be seeing my mom as much as I have been. Which I'm pretty cool with, except for the kinks in the Best Afternoon Ever plan. That's really all I care about.

So, yeah, writing. I am a slow writer. Here's the latest news. The book I had entitled Get Broken has transmogrified and now is being called Powers Of Observation. I'm pretty excited about it, although I should probably do more research before I write any more. The story I called Shoppe is now called Drawing In Frosting, but isn't quite done. There's a part of me hoping I can finish it by the time school's out.

I have two more short stories that I've written and finished since taking up the short story form in earnest following being kicked out of my dorm room last November. One's called Of Mice And Men, which I submitted in the McSweeney's August Van Zorn contest and a few people have read. The other's called Companion, which no one has read and I might submit for publication after I'm back at Evergreen. I finished writing Companion before the school year ended. But yeah, still haven't finished Drawing In Frosting, which I think I began writing around the same time as Companion. Actually, probably before.

I'm a slow writer. Don't know what I'm going to do when I'm in a writing class, where presumably I'll have to write fiction. Essays and autobio I can pretty much crap out. Maybe other people are faster at writing fiction because they just write thinly-veiled autobiography, or maybe I just suck. I mean, it's not like I'm slow because I'm meticulously crafting sentences, I'm slow because I have to wait for more insights to write down and pace out the thing. Drawing in Frosting had like a three-paragraph meditation on the nature of marriage. And the rest of the story is all about the interaction between a husband and wife. The husband doesn't quite understand the wife, which needs to be made clear, but it's being written from the husband's perspective, so I can't just declare it. So... that's going to be tricky.

So, computer froze at the tail-end of a long post. Here I go, retyping it.

After my last post, I decided not to write about every movie I see as I rarely have anything to say about said movies.

That said: Gus Van Sant's Elephant is a cinematic abortion, as boring as Lost In Translation and for many of the same reasons. It aims to capture alienation and loneliness, and decides to go about doing so in the same fashion. It's even more bullshit about high school than it was about foreign lands. The other points, when the movie makes the killers players of violent computer games and gay lovers, are even more bullshit. Do not see Elephant. If the point it was trying to make was that high school violence is OK because everyone in high school is a lame-ass with no personality, it succeeded. Holy fuck did this movie have no characterization. I didn't give a shit what happened to anyone. Everyone in the movie could've died and I would've met those deaths with apathy.

That was rented by my brother, along with a copy of the as-yet-unwatched Predator 2. My brother also made me watch Spaceballs. He kept on telling me to keep watching as really funny parts were right around the corner. I left in the middle, feeling sleepy, and mentally added Mel Brooks to my list of dudes that aren't funny at all.

Peter Sellers is still on that list, even though The Party sucked. It was Sellers in slapstick mode. I really don't get the comedy in people falling in water. When Sellers spoke to make jokes, I laughed. But that only happened once.

I borrowed Man Bites Dog and Sunset Boulevard from work. Sunset Boulevard's cool, except for a few elements that I excuse due to when the movie was made. (Melodramatic at parts and the insertion of the score at big moments) Man Bites Dog was good, although I don't like the whole making points about media violence by making a violent movie thing. Yes, I'm sure they were aware of it, and it's a good movie regardless, way better than Natural Born Killers, but... It's really more just an issue of my own idea of what film should be. If I ever make a movie, I'm not going to indict myself and make myself part of the problem. I don't know. If I hadn't seen Natural Born Killers, I probably wouldn't bitch about that element of Man Bites Dog. And again, Natural Born Killers had a lot more wrong with it than just being a part of the problem it railed against.

And I saw Sonic Youth last night. Not as good a show as the one last year. Afterwards I really ironed out the kinks in my whole "hating everything but still I guess loving people" bit. I guess all cultures/subcultures are shit. The only way you can be cool is to pretty much reject all of them, but this doesn't mean rejecting everything, as there are many many people who don't fit into one cliche or scene.

But yeah, try to think of a good culture, because maybe I'm wrong.

So basically, I work, I steal CDs from work, I borrow DVDs from work.

I also read Gravity's Rainbow, which I'm close to finishing. It's not great. It's decent, and I will be filled with a feeling of satisfaction when the book is complete. Even though it's not going to satisfy my desire for books that just break my mind and flip my shit, I'll just be proud of myself.

So, um, movies.

First off, Natural Born Killers is a total piece of shit. Fuck that movie. Tries too hard, not funny, cliche-ridden.

Flirting With Disaster is smile-funny, not laugh-out-loud funny, and cute but nothing more.

Dog Day Afternoon is pretty damn good. Sidney Lumet knows how to do drama.

Alphaville is better than Weekend, but that says very little. Enjoyable, but I'm not going to recommend it.

Vertigo may or may not make sense, or come together. It's also very slow-paced until shit starts happening. The twist was one I didn't see coming. Has anyone discussed Mulholland Drive (or maybe Lost Highway) in the context of Vertigo? Obviously Vertigo's not as over-the-top, but it does have a long segment where you ask yourself "what the fuck is going on here."

Barton Fink is underrated. What a great movie, which I wasn't quite expecting because no one talks about how awesome it is. I liked it more than Fargo, easily. It's not that funny, but it's damn compelling and kind of entertaining.

Killer's Kiss made my mind wander. I guess the shots looked cool, because it's Kubrick, but slow-paced. Everyone likes Kubrick, but who's seen all of his movies? Fucking no one. People just tend to go based on other stuff about the movie they find interesting, which in itself is kind of fascinating. It's weird how most Stanley Kubrick collection sets don't include all of his work. He wasn't that prolific, he made 10 features, not counting Killer's Kiss and the one, shorter movie he made before that. Killer's Kiss has the great line "you're an old man, and you smell" said by a woman to the gangster who... loves her, I guess. My mind wandered. But that's a great, quotable line.

I also borrowed The Party but will watch that tomorrow.

Oh and I bought and read Caricature by Daniel Clowes. For those not in the know: Daniel Clowes is a cartoonist, does a comic called Eightball, which is mainly an anthology of just his work. It was in this that the comic Ghost World was serialized, which sucked as a comic, but he helped adapt into the movie, which was rather good. The new issue of Eightball's pretty damn good, and it's fascinating to me to read the online discussion because of the ambiguities of it, and people having their own ideas of what it's about. It brings to mind discussions of short stories in English class, only everyone involved in the discussion is smart and it's not being moderated by a complete dumbass. Caricature is a collection of short stories, in the Raymond Carver mold, but funnier. I liked it okay.

Someday soon I'm going to need to buy clothes.

Only music I've purchased is Streethawk: A Seduction by Destroyer, and a copy of Black Eyes' Cough on vinyl for Alez. I want to listen to the Black Eyes more, and I want Pitchfork to review it. It's a fucking crazy record. I've stolen a lot of music, very little of it notable. I now have a copy of Gentlemen by the Afghan Whigs, which makes me a minority for my age bracket. They're a nineties indie rock band, but not one the very good ones, and they've fallen out of fashion. Archers Of Loaf are way better.

Like many of my blog entries, this one ends when my urge to shit becomes to much to take. That is to say, now.

Keeping in touch sucks. I suppose it's a necessary evil, but I do not enjoy it very much at all. Today I called up Evie Nelson, talked to her on the phone. Evie will be reading this, and I don't want her to get confused: she is one of my favorite people. Many of the people reading this are some of my favorite people. People I want to keep in touch with, in a certain way. I want to know what they're up to, where their head is at.

But, more than that, I wish I was with them. Right now, I am living my life in limbo. In a perfect world, that is not the case. I am with these people who I sincerely enjoy, and we are doing things and having adventures, having shared stimuli to talk about. Without the constant stream of shared stimuli, conversations become dull and vague, trading in Jungian universal experiences and pronouns. (or movies and tv and news and music and shit... fun but feels shallow) Right now, I wish I was traipsing around California, living some kind of greatest hits reel of someone else's life, talking with her old friends and ex-friends, arbitrarily deciding that some of them suck and telling them so, because these aren't people I'll see again. I'll get yelled at later for it, but what the fuck, fun times, these are the memories that we share.

Or instead of California, it's Portland, or Alaska, or... Not Chichester, obviously, but I suppose I could hang out on other people's college campuses for short bursts of time when the school year starts. In theory. This is not actually going to happen.

Of course, if some one visited me in Olympia I might feel awkward about the convergence of lives new and old. I'm aware that this is true for other people's lives as well, so maybe adventures in someone else's life that is seperate from my own is not what I want. Maybe the different circles of friends should stay home and only the geography would remain. I'd show kids from Olympia around Philadelphia, showing them places to eat and how cheap CDs are if you know the right places. If kids from high school went to Olympia, I would obviously have nothing to show them. But still...

I lamented yesterday that it's fucked up that work is pretty much all I have in the way of a social life. But, in a way, going to work/school, or living near people just might be the ideal in terms of interaction. Something constant. Trading off reading material, knowing the same people and having inside jokes, because you sure as hell can't make new inside jokes over phone lines. Friendship over phone lines, or via the postal service, feels like homework. It's rewarding homework, but still, homework.

Also: thinking about the people I know, and am friends with... The more shared experiences I have with them, the bigger the space they occupy in my brain. The easier my thoughts run in their directions. Complex neuropathway maps of associations. There are people who I think about when I think of high school, when I think of college, when I listen to music, when I think about movies. Keeping in touch segments them off into little compartments, file cabinets full of information about people, "where are they now?" pieces of trivia.

And even if I met up with these people, shared a lunch or something and a conversation, even that isn't optimal because the conversation is about "keeping in touch," the telling of old stories (not of shared nostalgia, although sometimes that occurs as well) rather than the creation of new events.

Basically, I crave adventure, and it's easiest to get excited about people I'll be spending time with in the future. (Alex and Loren: I've got an idea for a movie! Maybe you don't want to be involved, which is cool. But you'll be around when I try to get other people involved! It'll be sweet! Also, maybe adventures in rockbanding? Loren on bass, Alex on laptop, fun times playing shows in downtown Olympia? Goddamn, that'd be rad! Let's fucking rock that action!) Which sucks, as there are many people who I won't be spending time with in the future who I would love to be excited about because they're fucking cool, and I care about them.

So I've been thinking about my recent past in the vague terms of "growing up," looking at myself from not-that-long-ago (high school years) and just wondering about the general what-the-fuckness of it all. I'm not even particularly immature, but just looking at the people that surrounded me and the contradictions makes me wonder. It's hard to articulate.

Basically, I look at myself from not that long ago... let's say when I was in ninth grade... Four to five years ago. In many ways, I'm a different person. In many ways, I'm innately the same person. Which is an interesting contradiction, but not what I'm getting at. What I'm getting at is how, when viewed as a narrative, I don't quite know how I got from point A to point B.

The thing is that I viewed myself as having my shit together at that time. But I've viewed myself in such a fashion for a while... Probably since I was eight. This is pretty much how everyone operates, I figure. But, in high school, also thrown into the equation is this feeling of "it's all downhill from here." Not in terms of "these-are-the-greatest-years-of-my-life"... From that perspective, nowhere to go but up. But in terms of having a fear of the loss of ideals, that people associate with maturity.

When the film Waking Life came out, a lot of people seemingly dismissed it and the ideas put forth as being sophomoric. A lot of things are dismissed as sophomoric... i.e. dick jokes. Waking Life was being trashed for having an idealism about it's ideas and being in love with philosophical discussion in a way that people felt like they had outgrown when they left their dorms. Which kind of proves my point as mentioned above. I mention Waking Life also because these are ideas that are kind of touched upon in one scene. But yeah, sophomoricism, I guess, encompasses both philosophical discussion and being a fan of dick jokes. (What's sad is the low level of discussion I've encountered even at my hippie college... It rarely goes on as is, if this is the high point, no one on Earth has any reason to exist.) Usually it's because being a sophomore (I was always unclear as to whether or not this referred to college or high school) is often synonymous with getting high. (Which I guess could account for the low quality of the discussion, but the implication seems to be that if people didn't get high, they wouldn't think about anything larger than themselves ever.) Anyway, as anyone reading this knows, I am a fan of both the philosophical discussion and the dick jokes. These things seem pretty goddamn innate. (Seriously, if it's not my sense of humor and the thinking of deep thoughts, what the fuck are the defining elements of my personaity? Bad social skills? Fuck, I thought that was something I was getting over...) I don't think I'll outgrow them, and at this point in my life, I don't want to. But the idea of personal growth looms on the horizon like grim death.

There is of course the possibility that my life isn't going to make sense as a narrative until I am very old, which I don't want to consider because it goes against my belief that I am on top of my shit right now, at age nineteen, and as self-aware as I ever will be. (It is the self-aware writer part of me that laments the use of parentheses in this and the previous paragraph.)

Oh, more movies I had rented, but had forgotten to discuss.

El Topo: I had an even more lukewarm to this than I did to Santa Sangre, as this is more rambling and not as tight in terms of narrative. So it produced moments of "what the fuck" in that way, not the good way.

Dead Man: This was cool.

Last Temptation of Christ: I guess I'm just not feeling the Schrader/Scorsese team. Which is disappointing.

Um, I also watched my brother's copy of Fistful Of Dollars. I was often confused by what was going on. I'm thinking that the western, even the cool kind of western, not the John Wayne killing people who are darker-skinned than he, is not my genre, no matter how much I would want it to be.

It would seem that my coworkers are the closest thing I have to friends right now, in that going to work is all I have in the way of social interaction. And it's not like I even like all of my coworkers. And I doubt any of them consider me anything more than a weird dude.

So, that's a sad state of affairs.

In the absence of real events we talk about movies, and in absence of criticism, we just throw some shit out there: I saw 2LDK, Lady Snowblood, and Human Nature. 2LDK was good, I wish I had fast-forwarded through Lady Snowblood. (there was a bit in Coupland's Microserfs about everyone being so busy at work that they couldn't watch tv, so instead they would record it with subtitles on, then play it the next day, fast-forwarded while they ate lunch, and the idea of doing that with foreign films has stuck with me. Not the artsy kind, but martial arts movies with long periods of tedium, like Lady Snowblood kind of was) Human Nature was underrated, and I enjoyed it a good deal.

I would like to apologize to anyone reading this for having wasted their time so thoroughly. I wish that instead of these journal entries you could just see footage of me working at work, edited in such a way so all you get is my non-stop cleverness.

I could write a whole letter to Alex just about music and pitchfork and shit. In brief: David Bowie's Low is not that good, neither are the Fiery Furnaces. Funkadelic's Maggot Brain is pretty damn great though, not funky/danceable at all really... I've heard some of their other stuff that is more in that vein and I'm not feeling it as much, but Maggot Brain is pretty solid. Also: Some crackhead came into the store yesterday selling stolen CDs. She had good shit, but sometimes the good shit was just the packaging and different things were contained therein, like a copy of the first Godspeed record in the case for Spiderland. What sucked is I thought she had a copy of a Destroyer record, but when I looked at the CD, which had very little information on it, just a map of constellations, what I took to be the label and the CD number corresponded to something completely different, what it was I don't know. Also: A copy of Fennesz's Venice, which I kind of wanted to see if I could buy on the cheap then send your way. Oh dude, and the good record store in Philly actually sells a copy of Girl Talk's Unstoppable. And there's this band that played in Philly called Growing that are from Olympia, but are apparently signed to Kranky, they're like harsh drone stuff, ex-hardcore kids or something like that.

This computer... the keys don't give as quickly as I would like them to.

My doppelganger from college came into my store not that long ago, which was kind of weird. A group of people from high school stumbled in as well, that same night. That was a crazy night, in a way, but disappointing... these were not people I was friends with. this was an altogether different clique. I've seen other people, on South Street, who I didn't hang out with either.

So yeah, I might've said this before, but I'll say it again, because it seems appropriate for me not to know whether or not I've actually said it before: I am living in limbo.