I feel old, man. It’s not so much that I thought yeah, three decades, I’ll be totally settled and everything will be awesome! because I’ve never been big on lying to myself. I certainly know people with wives and kids and houses and Serious Business careers who don’t. So that’s okay.
Part of the reason I feel old is that our new way of being, never being fully present and never alone, feels more acute than ever this year. And I am not simpatico with it. I’m old enough to remember when being online meant firing up my modem for an hour to log into my rented unix shell for Usenet and the web via Lynx and today I’m stressed out because I’ll be out of circulation for 12 hours on my way to Athens on Tuesday. Do I think this is bad? Of course not. Look at poor Neda, how her death will make a difference because our little connected computers are as much machines that kill fascists as turntables ever were. And they play music too. But I wasn’t born with a cell phone in my hand like the kids these days. Never in my life have I felt out of time with the dance. Not until 2009, a date that at least feels sufficiently futuristic.
“Morrison: Yeah. I went to see Crank: High Voltage when we were in Los Angeles. I had just watched that, and I thought everything else just looks like slow motion, really. [...] To me that was just a great action film, and every action film after is going to have to try and move at that speed.”
I make no secret of wanting to write the screen adaptation of Gantz and that would be my starting point, using the freneticism of Crank 2 as a chassis for modern Japanese horror sci-fi.
Saw The Girlfriend Experience - Sasha Grey was better than I expected (nervousness under a cool exterior was a good match for her character) but there wasn’t much substance to the film itself; watch Bubble first if you haven’t or better yet Schizopolis. Tried five minutes of The Ramen Girl, Brittany Murphy’s Japan-only (right?) film about a girl who gets dumped by her boyfriend while visiting Tokyo, distractingly bad production values, turned it off. Also saw FILM OF THE YEAR, Crank 2. That’s right, Crank 2. I didn’t see Crank 1, and you don’t have to either, this film stands alone. Get past the superficial racism and sexism and you’re left with a pretty astonishing…live action experimental cartoon. Tomorrow: Star Trek. Looking forward to: Trick ‘r’ Treat, District 9, Mother (Bong Joon-ho - you guys remember how much I liked The Host and parts of Memories of Murder) and above all, Soudain le Vide/Enter The Void.
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The Zen master Mu-nan had only one successor. His name was Shoju. After Shoju had completed his study of Zen, Mu-nan called him into his room. “I am getting old,” he said, “and as far as I know, Shoju, you are the only one who will carry on this teaching. Here is a book. It has been passed down from master to master for seven generations. I have also added many points according to my understanding. The book is very valuable, and I am giving it to you to represent your successorhip.”
“If the book is such an important thing, you had better keep it,” Shoju replied. “I received your Zen without writing and am satisfied with it as it is.”
“I know that,” said Mu-nan. “Even so, this work has been carried from master to master for seven generations, so you may keep it as a symbol of having received the teaching. Here.”
They happened to be talking before a brazier. The instant Shoju felt the book in his hands he thrust it into the flaming coals. He had no lust for possessions.
Mu-nan, who never had been angry before, yelled: “What are you doing!”
I met Bill Clinton last week for two seconds. I gave him a hug. Picture coming soon. What I wanted to say was “thank you for making the decade I came of age in awesome” but instead I just kind of got sucked into his field. That’s okay.
Movies: I’m watching Two Lovers right now, saw Anvil (pretty good, more about friendship than metal), Fanboys (terrible) and The Uninvited, which I liked for what it was. Thanks to Louis, about to watch Def-Con 4: Defense Condition which looks INCREDIBLE.
The new XL Kindle reads PDFs, which is great and everything, but I’m surprised they couldn’t get the price down a little more. The thing with Kindles is they break, so you have to factor that into the purchase price. I’m still a huge fan of eink and color will be great when that comes, but at some point commodity pricing needs to take over and make these things cheap, wireless access aside. Reading is fundamentally different than computing.
Food: I subscribed to a CSA farm box and man is it making a huge difference in my cooking. The quality is so much better it’s no joke, better than local farmer’s markets I’m too lazy to go to anyway. I’ve started looking around for local sources of meat, too. Even if you don’t care about the environment (which I do, but not on a personal oh-noes-my-carbon-footprint-is-up-by-3% level), it’s well worth investing in local food sources for taste and health reasons. I still love McNuggets and Coke, don’t worry.
It is a hot day, but there’s a healing wind coming in through my window.
1996 was the year before I went to college and my second year of reading CMJ, the College Music Journal magazine, which came with a free CD sampler every month. This was a big deal - I wouldn’t see my first mp3 until October of that year, when I started downloading them from IRC over a V.34 28.8k modem. So anyway, at that time, getting 20 new songs for five bucks was pretty exciting. My musical life was that, the radio, and the excellent, excellent Repo Records in Bryn Mawr, which has since closed down (what happened to you, super-nice Melanie who worked there?), and of course my friends’ taste.
So my favorite song of the year, Possibly Peking, was from one of those CMJ samplers, by a band called Sammy. The profound Pavement influence is clear now, but at the time all I knew of Pavement was that haircut song, and if Cut Your Hair was the only Pavement song you knew, wouldn’t you think Sammy was the better band? This album is interesting because it’s pretty solid, was issued on Geffen, and no one has ever heard of it. The album cover is really evocative of mid-90s New York for me, when everyone had bangs. Anyway…
I write