crazy kids
Tuesday, sep. 26, 2006 | 0 comments
Today was a super duper ultra day of public transportation: I rode BART, I rode a shuttle bus, I rode the VTA light rail, and CalTrain, and boy are my charms tired.
It’s not even nine o’clock yet, and I’m already seriously thinking about bed. I just have to last ten more minutes, then it’s officially “past nine,” and that’s a somewhat dignified time to go to sleep, right? Wow, remember when you were little and all you wanted out of life was to be allowed to stay up after nine o’clock? “Just let me watch the first five minutes of Love Boat! PLEASE!”
As a kid I was also a huge fan of playing games like “grocery store” and “bank,” chores that are not nearly as exciting to me now that I’m old. And shaving my legs! I used to get in the bathtub and lather up my legs and use the “sharp” edge of a worn-down bar of soap to simulate the act of shaving. Just for the thrill of it! And now I get to shave my legs all the time. My life, it’s like a gift.
My friend Levon (co-owner of the great St. Francis Fountain) once told me about this golden realization he’d had, that if his teen-aged self had been able to see his life now — with his hundreds of records and his motorcycle and the going to see bands all the time and his very own apartment and the no curfew whatsoever — he would have been so supremely stoked.
Me: “Wow. That is GOOD. I’m totally going to do that, start looking at my life through teen-aged-colored glasses!”
Levon: “You like that? Enjoy it now, because it lasts maybe ten minutes.”
It’s true. Once you think below the surface of that one, you realize that having the kind of life that would provoke a stoked sensation in a teenager is perhaps a somewhat dubious distinction. Perhaps. But still…it would be nice if there were some way to resurrect childhood’s love-affair with the mundane. Banking, for instance. What if paying my credit card bill or visiting the ATM filled me a great, satisfied happiness? Actually, that would make me insufferable, and crazy. “I know, you guys. Let’s go to the BANK! AGAIN!!”
Have you noticed that? How the things young children think and say sound a lot like the kind of things crazy people say? Like if an adult came up to you and told you about how all cat angels are born on the sun (expect for the one that was born in China), you would think that person was totally insane. But kids, they totally get away with it.
Oh look, it’s 9:18!
an inspiration point
Monday, sep. 25, 2006 | 0 comments
Are you aware that Jackass: Number Two is getting good reviews? According to Nathan Lee of the New York Times: “this compendium of body bravado and malfunction makes for some of the most fearless, liberated and cathartic comedy in modern movies.” Meanwhile a review from J.R. Jones of the Chicago Reader celebrates the film’s “inspired dadaist moments.” What? How can this be?
On one hand: totally terrifying. And yet … it’s also sort of inspiring to discover that this is a world where a movie featuring a (as another reviewer describes it) “guy who craps in a miniature toilet” is able to muster some mainstream love. It’s almost as though anything could happen.
the secret lives of mall security
Sunday, sep. 24, 2006 | 0 comments
Walking through the parking lot at the mall, we see two security guys frantically busying themselves with something mysterious on the ground — a crime scene? As we get a little closer, we spot two more mall cops, and they’re hovering over the first two guys, illuminating their work with flashlights. A security vehicle is parked behind them at an urgently hasty angle, its lights flashing. Really curious now, we crane for a better look. And there, on the cement floor of the parking garage, is a scattering of … paperclips.
What, we wonder, would they have done if it had been binder clips?
punforgivable
Saturday, sep. 23, 2006 | 0 comments
There is a store off highway one that’s housed in a retired train car. First of all, the name of this store is “Successories,” which, okay. And then there’s the tagline: “A train of thoughtful gifts.” A train of thoughtful gifts? A train of thought…ful gifts. Ohhhh! Oh.
go to sleep
Friday, sep. 22, 2006 | 0 comments
I made the mistake of buying an entire angelfood cake from the Safeway bakery earlier this week, and I have been eating it by the fistful. Angelfood cake defies being cut with a knife like a normal, civilized cake; try to saw off a slice with a blade and the angelfood just squishes defiantly. So I’ve been reduced to ripping off pieces of cake with my hand, like an animal, or King Henry the Eighth.
Another big event this week: I saw a sneak preview of The Science of Sleep. (Biggie thanks to Jonathan Wells, by way of friend Wendy, for the invite!)
What a beautiful, weird, startling, funny, and convincingly dreamy movie that was. But also, wow, so much sadder than I thought it would be. I’m not at all sure, because deciphering that movie feels very much like muddling through an actual dream, but was that movie about…schizophrenia??? Broken (as in grossly dysfunctional) hearts? Was it just a nightmare?
All I know is that when it ended, I felt as though I’d just woken up from one of those dreadful, chloroform knock-out dreams in which you do something terrible, irreversible. Behind your eyelids, you cry and cry, and then when you wake up, for the first slender moments before you regain true consciousness, you’re sure you’ve really gone and mucked up your life this time. Tragedy! Awfulness! Horror! A few cobwebby moments later, though, you piece together that it was just a dream, just a dream. It takes some effort though, you have to stop and think about it like a scientist. Did I flush my baby down the toilet? No because…that’s right, I’ve never actually been pregnant! Also babies don’t fit down toilets. And then, once you finally convince yourself that none of it happened, you feel so relieved, like you just out-maneuvered a real, life-destroying mistake.
So I don’t know, is that good? I can’t quite figure it out. But I do hope you go see it, if only so we can sit down and decode it together. (Oh and go check out some of filmmaker Gondry’s other videos and things, so great.)