One of the strangest metaphors (similes?) I’ve ever seen in a film review:
“More than four decades after his last film, Ozu persists in our craven culture like a social worker taking blood pressure readings on a stock exchange floor.”–Michael Atkinson in the Village Voice (via Greencine)
Yeah Ozu’s stuff is verrrry slow and America moves verrry fast, but…I don’t get it. And social workers don’t take blood pressure. Very weird choice of image.
Did I see correctly this morning when I saw a life-size image of The Three Stooges in the window of Store24 with Russell Crowe as Moe? Please tell me I did. Please. I still haven’t seen Fahrenheit 9/11, but I can assure you that if Crowe is indeed starring, I will be first in line on opening night to see this baby.
Awhile back I complained about people not getting my dry jokes. Today I want to complain about people not hearing my jokes. I hate this. You can’t really repeat yourself without sounding like a needy, attention-seeking ass, so it usually ends up a missed opportunity. For example. We have staff meetings. In one, someone was complaining that our private staff area, which has a couch that people occasionally nap on, doesn’t have any way of alerting people that it’s occupied. “So if I’m feeling sick and I go in there to lie down, nothing’s gonna stop him (motions to the older guy sitting next to her) from barging in while I’m trying to rest.”
The matter was discussed and before we moved on I tried to insert, “And Ernie, please stop disturbing Jennifer while she’s resting.”
But someone else spoke up at the same time and drowned out my comment, so no one heard it.
I’m starting to feel like Mabel Longhetti hawking spaghetti in A Woman Under the Influence. “You want Gmail? Hi. Hi you want Gmail? You? You want Gmail? Gmail? You?” I’ve asked all my dinosaur non-blogging friends and they invariably respond “What’s Gmail?” Just like they responded with “What’s a blog?” when I told them I had one. They are not dazzled by the Gmail’s girthy storage space and they are unimpressed with email hipsterdom.
I have three more. You? Gmail?
My blog posts seem so often to involve my experience with public transportation that I’m thinking this blog should be titled Subwayblog. After Tony’s busblog. But Subwayblog is lame. Maybe MBTAblog. Or T-blog.
No, they’re all lame.
Guy mentioned awhile back that he saw a poem in a certain spot etched into the brick on the floor of the Davis Sq. station, and I managed to break from my morning trance this morning and go looking for it. There are several, but this is the one he mentioned. It’s under the escalator. I like it so I’m reprinting it. Quite a famous poem, I’m sure, but I know nothing about poetry so it’s new to me:
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you–Nobody–too?
Then there’s a pair of us?
Don’t tell! they’d advertise–you know!How dreary–to be–Somebody!
How public–like a Frog–
To tell one’s name–the livelong June–
To an admiring Bog!–Emily Dickinson
I think poetry is the ideal art form for public transportation. It is completely portable, cheap, no-hassle. Film will never be an art form of the street. It requires too much money and equipment. No government body is going to project films all over its transportation systems. The most underground of underground films still require money and equipment and difficult exhibition problems. Poetry requires a pen and paper. Maybe a chisel.
“The only social lubricant more effective than booze is psychotic self-absorption.”
A nice essay pleading for more silence in films (via Greencine):
“Music best retains its power by being rationed. When music is everywhere in a film, audiences feel less rather than more. …The omnipresence of music in films is part of a general cultural pattern of obliterating silence, in lifts, airports, shopping centres, lobbies and restaurants.”
I like the essay and I agree there’s too much music in films, but I don’t think it’s just silence that’s being obliterated, it’s also diegetic sound. There’s no such thing as silence in an airport, a shopping center, a restaurant. You’ll hear the sounds of other people, of plates being dropped, delayed flights being announced, etc. Even in a library you’ll hear the sounds of other people existing. Of a buzzing fluorescent light. Of pages being turned. Of people being shushed. That’s what’s being obliterated with excess music, and it’s just as important as silence.
I don’t know if there really is such a thing as silence anyway.
(UNRELATED: A stranger emailed me through this blog and I accidentally deleted the email while cleaning out my inbox. Sorry, I’m not intentionally ignoring you. )
I posted this and now am editing it to add more text so that the picture doesn’t look lame being bigger than the paragraph. I wonder if the post shows up repeatedly in people’s aggregators or kinja pages or whatever. If so, they should be set so that doesn’t happen. I edit stuff a lot. Sometimes for typos, sometimes for bigger things, and that could mean my posts show up 12 times in your aggregator. Sorry.
So they cancelled Lollapalooza due to low ticket demand/sales and looking at the lineup of dinosaurs (excellent dinosaurs, but dinosaurs nonetheless) I now see why I’m having trouble finding much new music to listen to. If the best they could muster from the current music scene was a bunch of dinosaurs then that says a lot about the music scene. Or it could just say a lot about the limited imagination of the concert organizers. Haven’t all of these acts been on Lollapalooza before? Sad. There’s got to be more going on out there than Britney Spears. There’s always an underground, I just need to find the right rock to look under. It’s certainly not in Boston, I know that much.
I wonder what it means when you see a black cat and it doesn’t cross your path but just walks toward you on the sidewalk and passes you as you’re walking, just like any stranger on the street. And as soon as it passes, a bee somehow buzzes into the tiny space between your hand and the iced coffee you’re holding, causing you to fling the coffee onto the street to get the bee off you. Hmm.
I woke up thinking wow, that Reiki did some voodoo hoodoo last night cuz I am one with the universe on this sunny breezy day. Then I get into the subway station and sit down to wait and as the minutes continue to pass and pass and pass my oneness begins to fade and then plummet as I look at my watch and see I’m now going to be LATE after leaving the house EARLY in my oneness. Twenty minutes later the train comes and I board with furrowed brow and evil eye and stay that way until we pull into Harvard and I step off the train and a young woman in a BRIGHT neon yellow polyester suit and foot-high beehive (not a joke, literally 12 inches high at least) scurries past me to get on the train and I laugh and others laugh and the train takes off and I see everyone in her car smiling and I’m smiling and everyone who got off the train is smiling as they disperse into Harvard Square and I say thanks to the freak-woman for brightening our day, she must be some kind of beehived angel (or a blip in the matrix?), and I am one with the universe again.
I hate this article. I love Ben Stiller, but this article is lamely written. Can you please tell me what “whacking 70’s and 80’s go-for-it comedies” are? That sounds to me like a writer who can’t find the right word so he just uses all of them.
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