1. The night before, go out with the three best drinking companions in your company, along with a few other pleasant folks, to the friendliest bar in the city. Get pleasantly buzzed, hear good stories, eat bitchin', cheap-as Malaysian food across the road. Leave before the turd-in-the-punch-bowl cotillion of your company, who have eventually hunted you down like dogs, ruin the evening too often in too many ways.


2. The next morning, wake up at six with no trace of a hangover and confirm with the IRS that due to a typo on their part, you don't owe them $532, you owe them $57. Play through the wholly satisfying ending of an XBLA title of your choice.


3. Realize too late that you've misremembered the time for your circus class, run out the door, puff up the hill, but (crucially) miss the murderous warmup that normally begins said class. Notice how everything that follows in the class is now much easier. For the first time, get your foot placement right on the silks. (Note: this last bit is not necessary; it's merely included for those whose latent talents at circus sit somewhere below those of a parapalegic koala. With allergies.)


4. When you get home, start moving your stuff to your new room! In order for this to be a happy experience, ensure your new room is half again as large as your old one, has a great view of your chosen city, and puts as many solid walls as possible between you and the drunken frat apartments directly outside your old flat's window. (Not at all required but highly recommended is moving much closer to your flatmate that won't speak to you for reasons completely unknowable--and, hopefully, completely uninteresting--to you.) Do not overdo this; move only the essentials, like your bed, your desk, your computer, your TV, and your video game console(s) of choice. Clothing optional; books definitely optional.


5. Realize with only slight regret that you no longer have time in your day to cook your delicious dinner, but that since you've been thinking about your delicious dinner all day you need to eat an equally delicious late lunch. Find some of the best food in the city that isn't the Malaysian place from last night. Eat that. (If you happen to be in Wellington, New Zealand, particularly recommended is the combination of Abrakebabra's lamb burger with fries from Fisherman's Plate (Viggo Mortensen's favorite Wellington chip shop!) and that rarest of delicacies, gen-yoo-ine Heinz ketchup.


6. Head to the store for the ingredients for your now-delayed delicious dinner. Contrive to have your market unexpectedly, and for the first time in six months, stock the best peanut butter you have ever eaten. Buy two kilograms of the stuff. (Note: this should be the high point of the day.)


7. Go to a play. Make it a new play, a world-premier, and if it can at all be arranged, make it involve marital crisis, Antarctica, Kiwis (the people, not the birds), penguins (the birds, not the people, although one penguin should be performed by a person), and as a wholly incidental detail one of the three actors should be female and also naked a good bit.


8. Come home and watch your first NBA game of the season, where Detroit, in full salary-dump mode, ends the hated Lakers' lossless start to the season. Maybe drink a couple of beers.


9. Go to sleep, but not before spitefully stealing back the previously-communal living room table and DVD player from your swinish, unappreciative flatmates to fill out your much-larger, after all, new room.

One of Anton Chekov's most justifiably famous comments on the nature of theater is his observation that when an audience sees a gun in the first act, they're subconsciously primed to have it go off in the third. You know that you're in a particular type of awful play when the gruesomely hilarious corollary to Chekov's rule is when the dead baby arrives on-stage, and taking note of the internal state of your subconscious--it's too dark in the theater to trim your fingernails, it's rude to talk on your cell phone, but the play is too banal to think about on its own terms and too hep to be interested in entertaining you--you recognize that the thing your subconscious has been primed for is for someone to eat the dead baby.

And then someone does.

The other metaphor I'd bring up is slightly more cheerful. I remember a social studies teacher mentioning that one classic means used by archeologists trying to learn about different cultures living in the same physical location is digging and taking cross-sections of what people threw away. She went on to comment that future archeology performed on us would be distinguished by a solid layer of Coke can tabs. That statement achieves exactly what it intends, which is to be very depressing, regardless of its truth value. And on the face of it, this work invites the same despair over what the future will think of us: I'm ashamed on behalf of my generation for the sorrowful bemusement of scholars in 200 years, looking over this work and saying, "How did this playwright wander so far from the single, solitary rule of good theater, to wit, "Be Interesting"?" It's a dispiriting thought. But here's the consolation: this work is so modest, so categorically minor, that it will fall off the radar completely--in the simple act of opening the work rendered itself obsolete, and its level of irrelevance will only increase--and scholars will pay more attention to Tom Stoppard, who is, frankly, BETTER than our current generation deserves, and just skip on this terrible playwright's terrible output.

UPDATE: Gaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh. But just to respond to the playwright's brother's claim of desensitization to violence, as evidenced by The Dark Knight (and are you sure you really wanted to go there? Are you feeling perhaps a little touchy about your family name?): one of the great moments of the film for me is Bruce Wayne, doublet all unbraced, reflecting on the death of his sweetheart, and saying torturedly to Alfred that "she was going to wait for me," which Alfred knew to be patently untrue. That Batman, who sets the bar for earthbound demigods, who makes his living off of feats of timing and derring-do, should be so blind (and to more than the obvious), so hope-filled and so incorrect in a world that demands of him preternatural pessimism and correctness...it's wrenching, and heartbreaking, and was perhaps the first time in any Batman film that I felt the fanboy's refrain that Batman's exactly life-size. Frank Miller was too ham-handed to bring it off--not unlike Ms. Kane! and I promise we'll get back there--but this is what he was getting at. That Alfred then destroys the evidence of Batman's mistake, that he sullies and erases one of the more important wills and testaments of a woman that he too loved strikes me as being the action of a different sort of ideal, of the friend who, in matters of the heart, can snuffle out our never-more-important white lies, and then let them be. It may be couched in a balletic, aggrandizing thicket of toothless, metaphorical violence, but it's nevertheless an elegant rebuttal to Edward Albee's statement in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that in relationships, truth is the only important thing. Maybe it's the most powerful thing, but real life has a way of throwing up other test cases, every bit as complicated as George and Martha, that require more of the scalpel and less of the napalm.

And with the napalm, here we are back at Blasted. Sarah Kane is an inheritor of Edward Albee the way Madonna is an inheritor of Haydn, but let's assume that her brother is being both serious and true to his sister's motivation in his statement that "[t]he purpose of the violence in Sarah’s plays is to resensitize people to what violence is." Umm, if that's your intent, then maybe you should draw the line at the off-stage rape. Examining the impact of that event would be interesting. Or, alternatively, how about at the invasion of England by America? Or maybe at the nuke that gets dropped on London as a logical part of that invasion. Or maybe at the forced buggery. (I love, by the way, that the British have such a short, compact, frequently-used word for such a specific, not (relatively speaking) all-that-common thing.) Or maybe at the post-coital eyeball eating. Or maybe at the (entirely different!) dead-baby-face eating. But no. There are no lines drawn, and the play simply ends in exhaustion. Maybe the way to actually "resensitize people to what violence is", then, is not to make a laundry list out of it, but rather to make your audience give a rat's ass about the characters that are perpetrating this violence and having it done to them. But then, that would require craft, and that would take time away from Ms. Kane's so-interesting crotch-sniffing and id-trolling.

Final Notes of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet

The act starts with a slow-arriving dawn:
The chill that melts against your lover’s face,
And hope resilient, soaring ever on
Against the frozen grit of salt and space­;
But what goes up comes down. And it’s not sad­--
The miracle, they say, is in that rise:
The cosmos shouldn’t move. We should be glad
For songbirds etched against the dying skies;
But sad it is. And like a trickling tear,
Or motifs from the twilit mourning doves,
He registers the failure of the here:
That we should feel the largeness of lost loves.
The swallows twitter off, and so they may:
The loss of you the wrong no right can sway.

C: 3 J A
D: 7
S: 2 7 J Q
H: 3 5 6 10 J

What it is, first of all, is the kind of hand you hate to pass. Last hand you held, and your sister--to your right--came out badly for it. Now you're ten points ahead and she's at 93. Her boyfriend, Ryan, obligingly, is a few points behind, and across from you...you can't see her face, but she's much closer, within ten. It's a little frightening, and she's nearly as good as you are, and just as competitive, and so this is your chance to put it away, and you don't want to screw it up.

So you pass the ace of clubs and the seven of diamonds, and then you look. What the hell else? And suddenly there's this impish sense: pass the 10 of hearts. You'll have jack-fourth, for the stop of the moon, and everything else is negotiable. 10 of hearts...it goes.

Because the thing you're scared of is the middle ground. The date where you, as she charmingly says, "roll shit uphill"...that's easy. And the one where you can't think straight for a week...if that isn't solely a product of memory, glinting, with the force of a gauntlet throw across the table from you, then that's her, rendering you speechless and powerless, the solitary queen and six spades in her hand.

Because Ryan has disobligingly passed you three clubs, K Q 10, and now across the table comes the two, and your sister still laughing plays the ace, and then comes another club, and its yours, but what do you have to worry about? Nothing. You are invincible.

And she's just so complimentary, and her breasts are spidered at the top, beneath the stylish black lace, fronted with the sensible sweater spattered with rain, with broken blood vessels that speak of delicious sweaty humanity, asking for a moment of respite,

And you've gotten out of it, and Ryan leads the two of diamonds, at last, six tricks in, and your sister isn't even looking at you, she's staring besottedly at this man saying something as she casually lays down the harmless, harmless six of diamonds, and there she is, looking away...

And you know. You have, between talent and luck, this skill suddenly, and you cannot extricate yourself, the force of it all. And while you wish your witless brother-in-law were here beside you, he's not, and so you prepare to lay it down, with all the thoughtless foreplanning that you've earned over the years, and so you say, intriguingly, "There's a movie about a British hangman showing up here," and what does she do a few days later when she asks? Up she comes, and then you say, "Cold, right? Coffee, and brownies?" and then without even knowing why, without being able to stop yourself any more than you could re-pass those cards, you lay down your queen: "You can meet Esther....." And so up you go, stopping in the spitting rain to french--maybe the first time, but not without some kind of precedent--two thirds of the way up the staircase, nominally to catch your breath and truly to kindle it, and so Esther is brushed past, three or four words, and into the bedroom you slip, shutting the door, and if it isn't then then it's a week hence, in her bed, and all's well and awful either way. But there's no controlling it!, is the awful thing. You can feel and see the path in front of you, and can no more avoid it than chop off your arm. And if it's your sister, the person you want to hurt least in the world, who looks back at you balefully, if Ryan conveniently leaps up to get another couple bottles of Newcastle and your shadow-girl frowns, deeply disappointed, and all of a sudden all you are is the ten of hearts, and every spot an empty one, waiting for something, and all the recriminations and fury are under the bridge in no time.

Even in the ending, these things come in threes.

1. The writer gets out of the car, but--shades of the hero in My Favorite Year--he can't get out, or he does but he can't manage to express his gratitude to the spy who did such a brave thing so cleverly and so saved the writer's life. The words stick in his throat, and he retreats, the spy none the wiser: "Home, James." This is, of course, a story of what might have been; the film stock is all soaked in regret; no great surprise, just another missed connection, a quiet tragedy, and here it could end.
2. It does not end. The spy finds a book, by the writer, and he opens it, and of course, it is dedicated to him. This borders on schmaltz for about thirty frames. And then the third thing lands with--for me--all the force of that damn forgotten arm.
3. It lasts for about two sublime seconds, an intake of expectant breath followed by a slow collapse as you realize that this masterful actor, whose hands have never shaken during this entire exquisite exercise, has left you nothing, and it's the nothing that kills. The director--if it was his choice and not just the actor's--undermines the decision a few seconds later by freeze-framing, as the last shot of the film, a moment when the spy is buying the book, when he says campily, "It's for me", and has a more definite look of affirmation and triumph, but for me, the damage was already done.

Faced with a mountain of writing that I need to begin in short order, I of course wrote something else entirely: a response to a comment on the nytimes's Lede about Harry Potter 7 and the film Harry Potter 5 and the new Harry Potter themepark where the commenter said that J. K. Rowling was a money-grubbing slut who didn't know her fantasy tradition, and who should take the time to auction off the wands and quills that people send to her and then give that money to charity. She also said how glad she'd be when the whole thing was over with. I disagreed with this assessment, as follows. Someday I'd like to write a very long post about how spectacular I think the Harry Potter books are, and how important, and how traditional, and how encouraging, but I don't have the time at the moment. This will hopefully serve to gesture at my opinions until they can be expanded upon.

Elizabeth, I think you make some excellent points, but I interpret a number of them differently than you do. Although readers seem to be eager to push Ms. Rowling into the Lewis/Tolkien tradition, because she has proven talented at crafting a large, internally-consistent fantasy world, I've always gotten the sense that she sees herself (rightly, in my estimation) more as an iteration in the Austen-Doyle-Dickens-Christie-Dahl line, writers whose works are generally plot-driven rather than character-driven (although Eliza Bennet and Sherlock Holmes are certainly fabulous characters) and whose focus is more on telling a compelling story than writing well (although I'd put _Bleak House_ up against just about anything for beautiful prose.) And if you look at Ms. Rowling's world against one like Tolkien's Middle-Earth (or newer creations by more dedicated fantasy writers), I don't think it compares well at all: I believe that her primary goal was to construct a world that was sufficient to achieve her storytelling ends. And she is a talented enough craftswoman that she's able to create a world that's compelling for its own sake even if that wasn't her primary intention. But throughout the expansion of her fame she's behaved with extraordinary focus (and professionalism), never losing sight of her ultimate goal, which is to tell a cracking story that surprises and delights her readership. And so when people focus on the smoke and mirrors that she's used to achieve this goal, in the sent wands and quills you mention...well, she knows what such things are worth to her: they are nothing but a means to an end, and not interesting for themselves. If people were to send her writing that was inspired not by the world of Harry Potter but rather by Ms. Rowling's slavish devotion to great stories and telling them well, I doubt she'd treat them so cavalierly.

So given that perspective, I'd be very surprised if she does return to Harry Potter. Once her plot has twisted for the last time, I think she'll be relieved to get away from the attention her world has generated and just leave her fans to their own devices. (At the same time, if someone comes up to you with a dumptruck full of money and says, "We'll give this to you, and you don't have to do ANYTHING for it"...I'd certainly find that difficult to turn down. You seem to expect Ms. Rowling to be a saint, when in fact she's nothing but a ridiculously-talented storyteller.) And even though it violates all the rules of storytelling, she's got to be sorely tempted to kill Harry off just to show that she CAN, to demonstrate to you and everyone else that has (in my opinion) misread her motivation that she doesn't care at all about fame or money. At the same time, she has to be cackling delightedly at how frightened her readership is that she'll do exactly that: uncertainty is one of the best tools she has as a storyteller.

Regardless: you and I are in complete agreement that a post-_Potter_ world is also an exciting one, and may I mention Anne Ursu's _Cronus Chronicles_ as a low-flying alternative or complement to Harry for your young adult readers? I'm certain you know all about _Cronus_, but Ms. Ursu needs all the help she can get. Thanks for your thought-provoking comment.

Stephen R. Donaldson says that really prodcutve ideas are for him the confluence of two other ideas coming together and interacting with one another. He says the ideas that collided to create the Gap Sequence were Richard Wagner and Angus Thermopyle, which is a fabulous sentence, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense. Anyway, my two colliding events are Being John Malkovich and The Human Touch, a book I just started by Michael Frayn.

It had been so long since I'd seen Malkovich that I'd managed to forget the fabulous opening sequence, the extraordinary two-minute long puppet performance. When I first watched the film, I remember being disappointed by the artificiality of the puppets; for whatever reason, on this viewing, I'm far more impressed by how much they do manage to convey. "This block of wood", I think to myself, is experiencing religious ecstasy. This one's expressing horror. And that one over there, that block of wood is conveying raw, naked desire; as an audience member, you're almost knocked over by the forcefulness of the lust coming off of freakin' Pinocchio. That's a pretty extraordinary achievement.

But my favorite thing about that achievement is where Frayn comes in. His first chapter is all about traffic, about the spaces between where we're leaving and where we're going, and in it he talks about trees and literature. He says although we are wont to reduce trees to the component parts of "trunk" and "branches" (the leaves, he says, are like extras in a movie, who come and go with the seasons), to a tree its essential component parts are its roots and its leaves. Were it not for biology and competition, a tree could very cheerfully be nothing but roots and leaves. The trunk and branches are the trophies and the slag piles carved out by the traffic between these essential parts. And likewise, he says, literature is merely the record of what has been green and essential--"verdant" seems a likely word--in terms of art through the ages; what people have found meaningful and interesting. And yet, he says, channeling Heisenberg, as soon as you go to create a place, to stake your artistic claim in the current, as soon as you commit a shape it is out of date, leafiness on its swift way to mere trunkiness.

And here's one related, lovely thing about Malkovich: puppetry is put forward as a serious, entertaining, neglected form, and to my mind delivers very well on that promise. And yet, naturally, most of the film's attention is paid to the puppeteer and not the puppetry; the latter is a handy metaphor and explanation for the control of Malkovich, but in a narrative sense Craig is the interesting one. And through the narrative we're made to see Craig for what he is: cowardly, duplicitous, and unable to exhibit much in the way of self-control. But what's interesting is how different he becomes regarding his art. He is engaged in communication of a clarity and power that far exceed the talents of most mortals. Certainly he can't say anywhere near as much as himself, in conventional conversation. And yet the neat divide that the movie makes consistently is between Craig and his creation. The hoopla surrounding the rise to prominence of Craig-as-Malkovich-as-puppeteer isn't purely inspirational--Sean Penn delivers the knock-out comic blow by acting exactly like Sean Penn, like a cocky, clueless hanger-on--but there's no suggestion that the response that people have to Craig's work is anything but natural. The madcap celebration of puppetry certainly has the potential to be cast in the same bizarro-mold as the Malkovich world and the monkey's self-revelation techniques, but I never get the sense that it's presented in that light at all. And yet, of course, so much of the creation is tied up for us as an audience in the creator. The puppetry needs to be extraordinary indeed to overcome how reprehensible the individual perpetrating it is. But if we come back to Frayn's metaphor, the mistake made by Sean Penn et al is the same mistake we make with the reduction of the tree to its trunk and branches: the art, the creation, is the important thing, it is our trunk, it is the thing that we make in the course of the interaction with the world. But we cannot help but associate the art with the artist, when really the artist's opinion is fairly irrelevant. It's the same divide the film is careful to make: the artist's self is irrelevant when compared against the body of the creation. They are two wholly different things to be judged, and the connection they once had is sundered as soon as the work is perceived.

Cinderella, Years Later

They missed the boring bit, those brothers: how
There were no trumpets, just a sweaty man;
A swaying page, a glass of wine, a fan
And suddenly a name he needed, now--
But rescued from this unforeseen mischance
By three long men, with leers a mile wide
They oiled smooth careless hands around my side
And pressed me to their wrinkled, beery pants;
Dancing, of course, is why they have these balls
And dancing cuts both ways: it sets a mood
But sets another, too; and what to say,
Between those hands, and delicate, pink walls,
And trying hard not to be thought a prude...
It took eight years for you to glance my way.

I have a lot to write this weekend (it's the weekend already! Kiwis celebrate the HELL out of Easter!), so I thought I'd start with something that should be relatively easy: I want to talk about Princess Mononoke and why I was so impressed by it.

A lot of it has to do with the technical achievement of the story. As a work it struck a difficult balance between being a comforting fairy tale and yet having a lot to say to our present. I've spoken in the past about the charm and the power of a work taking something familiar and changing it in ways that highlight the work's theme: Don Quixote is a good example, and The Incredibles, and the ghost ship in Pirates, where the ship's difference from something out of Coleridge had everything to do with the fact that these were, in fact, pirates, and so the ship was happily able to occupy the Jungian space held by "pirate ship" and "ghost ship" with a maximum of fruitful overlap. Mononoke was able to satisfy the hunger for a simple, familiar story--witness the outcast wanderer, his difference, his purity, his goodness, his strength vis-a-vis those he meets, the talking beasts, the guardians of the forest, creeping disease and its close ties to violence, and of course the love story--and yet corrupt it from what might be called the Disney ideal in useful ways. With the exception of Ashitaki and possibly Jigo, the bounty-hunter/priest, the characters in this work resist the simple categorization of good or bad. Like Greek plays, a lot of the drama in this work stems from capable people carrying their respective beliefs into conflicting actions; unlike Greek works, however, some of these motivations remain intriguingly opaque. Lady Eboshi, probably the most mystifying character in the work, is given startlingly little in the way of motivation for her outsized actions. Upon her introduction into the work, she's presented in short order as the (wholly unrepentant) root cause of the iron ball that has sealed Ashitaki's death and a Christ-like friend of whores and lepers. She is a conscientious administrator for a town it seems she has created out of pure will, a defender of her people in war, and yet has a blood feud with San and deliberately, mechanically, chillingly kills the forest god. This conflation of Christ and Ancient Mariner is certainly strange, and what makes it stranger is that we have no idea what drives this woman. The desire to protect what she's built is certainly evident, but why has she built it? Why is she, so whole and complete and super-human, so passionately interested both in the broken and in using technology to help them? But as with actors, it isn't as important to understand a character's motivations as it is that the actor clearly have some of them. There's nothing in Lady Eboshi's character that feels internally contradictory, and the audience's feelings for her are made to swing back and forth so often that by the time she kills the forest god there's no possibility of outrage, just a sadness about the loss of beauty and innocence that her actions necessitate. But she's merely doing what she thinks is best for herself and for her people. She is, in a lot of ways, the catalytic character that makes the action of the work go, and is its most bravura character creation.

But it also has a lot to do with the work's message. Precisely because it allows for a Greek-like discussion of a hot-button issue like environmentalism, the work is admirable. It recognizes the fact that we have all, in our own quiet ways, killed the forest god, or are beneficiaries of the complicated largess of the Lady Eboshis who have done it for us. (The movie reminded me of a conversation I had with an enormous Maori who led me on a tour of a cave in the center of the North Island: in a previous career he'd been a lumberjack, and he talked unashamedly about the immense personal power he felt when he'd been involved in chopping down the New Zealand equivalent of a redwood, a type of tree that, in addition to being unfathomably large, is deeply tied to the stories of the Maori as a people. His lack of anything resembling sorrow or repentance, and his communication of the power that the tree somehow transferred to him, the way he personally, immediately benefited from the destruction of this majestic, imponderably ancient and culturally-significant artifact, was instructive. And unexpected.) And it leaves us, like the Ring cycle and The Lord of the Rings, with an ending that sets us clearly on the trajectory that we now occupy: not needing to apologize, in the clear-eyed estimation of Ashitaki, for being human and for trying to carve an existence out of the lives of others, and yet recognizing the rights and spitfire determination of a figure like San, recognizing the just cause that she has in opposing us and seeing, at the same time, the Carville/Matalin-style love that can flower between the best and brightest representatives of these dueling orthodoxies. We're presented not with a theoretical, linear progression of the concepts represented by the Hegelian dialectic, but rather the far more true-to-life mishmash of all three--thesis, antithesis, and the phantom keen of straw-bale houses, solar panels, hybrid cars, and all the rest, that beautiful, muscular synthesis--all at the same time, in the same place, all equally valid and bouncing off each other in the doomed quest for individual dominance. That tension, that conflict, that balance between living our lives and hoping for something better, and the gradually-improving course that it yields...that is life, that is the living of this human life. Nature itself, in the form of cancer, yields a metaphor for the action of the purely consumptive: if we think merely biologically (always the path of least resistance), we will kill our host as surely as cancer does (and, if you can anthropomorphize cancer cells, with the same degree of innocent "Who, me?" bewilderment.) And we admire intellectually San's harmony, her disgust at smelling like what she is, her tiny footprints on the path she walks. But we are human because we can buck the demands of biology, because the brain is a biological mutation so freakish that it gets to, in some small ways, revolt against its parentage: we can not only admire San, but we can breast the gale that our genes present and take a slow, painful step or two towards her. That's why it's important that Ashitaki and San fall in love: that love is Neitszche's rope, strung between beast and overman (ironically, in this case the beast is the superman, and the overman the beast-girl); the product of that love is us. I'll quit saying the same thing over and over again, but really: what a rich, correct creation Miyazaki has given us.

I hope just a few quick words about the violence in the work to wrap up. I guess the first word would be, "Holy crap, this is a really violent film!" And the second word would be, "Holy crap, that violence is really graphically displayed!" We're a long way from Walt Disney: I compare it to the (okay, so strictly not Walt Disney, but same idea) moment when Obi-Won cuts that Darth Maul fellow in half and there's a very polite, sprayish crimsoning of the screen, and Mr. Maul falls and elegantly separates halfway down, and it's all very cool and self-cauterizing. Compare that to the climactic orgy of gore in Mononoke, the death throes of the blind albino boar, who is a riot of spurting blood, cancerous tentacles, rotting flesh, smoke, steam, and fury. But if his welter of bodily fluids is unprecedented in degree, it's just another iteration on the same theme established in the movie: in the first ten minutes Ashitaki, like he's playing a video game, shoots arrows in both of the first demon boar's eyes, and ten minutes later is lopping off limbs with highly capable abandon. The first time we see San, in the picture that's on the movie's cover, her face is covered with other people's blood. And Eboshi is capable of dishing out death and destruction in much larger, more impersonal doses. This is a film saturated with violence, and while it's certainly part of a grand pacifistic tradition to display the horrors of violence in order to argue against it (and it seems to me that the themes of the movie are more uncomplicatedly pacifistic than they are environmentalistic), but even so: was Ashitaki wrong to kill the boar in order to save his village? Is it wrong that the incompatibility between the worldviews of San and Eboshi culminate in violence? Or is it inevitable? And isn't it more useful to achieving your ends to be capable at waging violence as opposed to wishing it wouldn't happen? Isn't that what Eboshi's arming of the lepers and whores all about, the empowerment of the dispossessed? "They will need guns," said Ché Guevara, not at all a pacifistic man, and Miyazaki seems to be agreeing with him. In short: violence isn't given a free ride either way in the film, which is also gratifying.

And a couple of random thoughts: first of all, if you've been working on a script for ten years, and you make that script into a three-hour-long movie (and you call it The Good Shepherd, say), and if the tone of the movie is throughout tight-lipped and square-jawed, typified by all kinds of dignified conversations between the giants of the opposing camps, the knights who in less 20th-century days would settle the matter with a nice satisfying joust, then be advised that even if she's meant to be a metaphor for poor beleaguered and misused Africa, making the climax of your film be some thugs opening a door in an airborne airplane and surprising your hero's would-be daughter-in-law by throwing her out of it is just a little too bizarre and crude to carry the day. While not, strictly speaking, terribly funny, it is so unconventional and so gauche that it will take on some pretty hilarious overtones, like Lips Manlis's bath in Dick Tracy. Anyway, that's my warning.

And I can totally envision the conversation that went on before they took the following picture:



Model: "Arright, I have some pasties on--should I take my shirt off now? Where are we going to be taking this picture?"

Director: "Oh, no, actually, you're going to leave your shirt on for this shot."

Model: "Oh! Is this going to be like one of those hair-dye shoots, where the focus is just on the hair? Cause, I mean, you can see, I went out and got my hair done, it's extra shiny...."

Director: "Umm, no, actually, we're not really going to make your hair the focus of the shot at all. [awkward pause] Actually, we're thinking that your hair will barely be in the picture."

Model: "But, I mean...we are selling shampoo here, right?"

Director: "Well, yeah, right, but actually, we thought it would be better if we just took a picture of you holding these vanilla beans."

[Very Long Pause.]

Director: "See, the shampoo's organic."

So the other day Esther, my 58-year-old flatmate, mentions the washing crystals that are in an unattractive cardboard box down by the persnickety plastic washing machine. She says she doesn't really know if they do anything, which explains why she's instructed me to add both the washing crystals and the ever-so-organic cleaning liquid to clothes when I go to wash them. I'd never heard of washing crystals before, and had assumed they were just another cute kiwiism.

And actually, before we go any further, let me digress a bit on that subject. For a place that comes across as a smaller, tamer, prettier version of Australia, Kiwis have an enormous stock of apparently-unique verbal habits. One of the best ones is the "sweet as" habit, which is the most common of an assumedly-infinite list of adjectives you can perform this trick with. As a frame of reference, a popular business both here and in Australia is called "Cheap As Chips", and that's sort of the way that "sweet as" is supposed to work, except there's no object modified by the adjective "sweet". "Sweet as!" is its own sentence, perfectly legitimate. But it would only be bizarre, and not delightfully cute, if it wasn't for its rhythm: it's spoken as though somehow the "as" has logically swallowed the invisible object, and with it taken on the primary focus of the statement. You don't say "SWEET as", you say, "sweet AS", drawing out the "a" and then of course saying with a Kiwi accent--more on this in a second. But back to the infinite possibility thing: you can perform this little trick with any adjective: "cheap AS", "hairy AS", "short AS", "smelly AS". These other phrases wouldn't lend themselves to being standalone sentences as well--"sweet as" is identical in meaning to the American "sweeeet"--but you could use them as part of a sentence, something like, "Aww, that thing's smelly as, innit?" But delightfully, that sentence has a couple of other Kiwi modifications: their "aww", used frequently, is actually a blend of "aww" and "ohhh", with the slight hint of the Hebrew "ch" sound tossed in at the end. And their "innit" is actually contracted, so that it basically comes across as "in't". And there are a number of other charming kiwiisms: another favorite, sort of the opposite in meaning of "sweet as", is their equivalent of "that sucks", which is simply "stink!". But because of the misdirections of Kiwi vowels, it comes out sounding like "stank", or maybe "stenk", which is somehow even cuter. A similar vowel thing (but not identical! Kiwi vowels are astoundingly slippery and inconsistent!) happens with the number "six", which always sounds like "sex"; today I had a 10-year-old boy reading me back a WEP password, and every time he got to a six I had to repress the urge to giggle. And just like Wellington proves that you can have a jungle without heat, "y'all" is absolutely unknown down here, but "reckon" is used a lot. On the technical side, "cache" is pronounced with a long a, and web addresses, when the speaker wants to sound cool, are abbreviated to "dub-dub-dub". Just SAY that out loud quickly and see if you don't break out in cuteness hives.

Back to Esther. I was a little confused by her statement about the washing crystals' lack of efficacy, but whatever, I figured. But then today, as I was standing in the shower, I glanced over and saw a bag full of pink rocks that was labeled "Bathing Crystals". And suddenly it all made sense: Esther has a couple of bowls full of largish actual crystals around the house, and every time we get in the car she pulls a dirty-looking brown crystal out of her purse and sticks it in the cigarette tray. There's a book on her bookshelf called "Crystal Healing Secrets". And so the reason I'm cleaning my clothes with washing crystals has nothing to do with how good they are at cleaning clothes and everything to do with the fact that the box says "crystals" on it. I find this utterly hilarious. Living with Esther is something of a very low-key adventure.

But still:

http://ct.kaist.ac.kr/yct2006/prog.html

Oct 30th

1:00 - 1:40 Yonatan Kelib & Jungmin Oh

1:40 - 2:20 Gilad Lotan

2:20 - 3:00 Man Lok Yau

3:20 - 4:00 Segnini Rodrigo

4:00 - 4:40 Suguru Goto

4:40 - 5:20 Sungwon Choe

7:00 - 8:30 An Evening with prof. Bill Buxton


Oct. 31st

9:30 - 10:10 Mark Barrett

10:10 - 10:50 Youngho Lee

10:50 - 11:30 Yongwook Jeong

1:00 - 1:40 Eric Keylor

1:40 - 2:20 Sang Min Oh

2:20 - 3:00 Cecilia Chung Kim

There's a lot to say here. One thing that immediately leaps to mind: holy no white people, Batman! Eric Keylor and I have already been in communication (he's also an ETC student or alum or some damn thing); I can only assume we'll institute the program of racial oppression in a unified fashion upon walking in the door. But it does make me wonder about the wisdom of having my talent in the little mini-talent-show that precedes the presentations be reciting poetry by a guy so arcane most English speakers have no hope of understanding him. Yyyyeah. Maybe I'll switch to Kipling. Same time frame. "The White Man's Burden"...that'll do the trick.

I'm also wondering if I can take umbrage from being the first presenter of the morning. I think everyone's getting picked up from the hotel, so there's no way for people to skip out unless they linger over the pastry line, but still. Let's get this one out of the way while people are still groggy? On the other hand, the good news is that the people who follow me won't be able to revenge themselves when I fall asleep during THEIR presentations.

Christ; I'm going to South Korea for free in a day and a half. When will this fact become something that I feel? It'll certainly happen when there will be all these symbols everywhere that I can't read; then it will be quite clear. Will it happen before then? Who can say? It'll be somethin' else in the meantime.

Slides. Must work on slides.

The good opinion of those you love is a beautiful thing indeed.

Their proving themself worthy of that love, when...for you see, this is necessitated--who else, why else, would you write for the first time in months when this magnificent program had accepted you and when you were now in Adelaide and loving it UNLESS you were drunk to that perfect level of hypersensitivity, where you can be a perfectly earnest schoolboy to the simultaneously belligerent and apologetic security officer on the train and be able to spell words right and shit and yet feel absolutely elated, absolutely high on endorphins...that is to say, at the same time, to be beautiful and flattering and of COURSE absolutely dead-on and supportive in a situation where I myself, I fear, would offer no such comfort...that just adds to the feeling. Soon my insensitive ox of a Bavarian roommate will barge in, laughing like a nervous Dutchman, and that will doubtless be the end of my high, but in the meantime....

I should back up. In my initial evaluation of this class, I said the person I was most attracted to was a giant named Cameron who looks a little bit like Lyle Lovett, only punishingly hot. He's done all kinds of interesting shit--Creative Writing BA from UCLA, marketer, teacher in Japan, game magazine writer, Fish and Game warden for San Francisco, construction contractor--all of which makes him the more desirable for me, and tonight he said two very complimentary things to me. One was--and here's the trouble, quite frankly, with non-linear narrative, because Thing A and Thing B here should be delivered at the same time exactly, except time doesn't work that way, and so the only thing that a non-linear narrator gains is the annoying task of having to make the experience explicable if a guest (GUEST! this is the word we're _1984_ishly forced to use! for audience member! or God forbid user!) does A and then B or B and then A--that he thought the girl I was chatting up was "high on the cute-o-meter", and the other was a more standard compliment which, with a bottle of wine under my belt, I didn't trust myself to respond to in company for fear I be thought soppy.

Thing B: Tonight I got an Aussie girl's phone number. Her name is Rachael, she makes films, and she wore a biking helmet over her cap ("It's fucking cold out!") She works at a converted IMAX theater that now functions as a cabaret space and bar, and it was such a flatteringly simple matter of chatting with a pleasant singer named Nat and making eye contact as her conversation broke up to have her drift on over and introduce herself and then off went Nat and oh heavens did we talk. She doesn't like video games, but she's willing to be a guinea pig for a demo of my group's next game, so now I have THAT as motivation to make sure that it's decent.

Meanwhile, tomorrow we head off to Kangaroo Island. The weekend is being paid for completely by the program. Also flattering, in the face of the $7500 I wired to CMU today, is the fact that this transaction is complicated, where they accept and act upon the fact that my simply giving them money is unacceptable, that they have to muddy the waters with gifts--to win my respect? To buy my allegiance? It's like the discovery of the expense account at work, only more so again, where behavior I would think of as expensively deviant is suddenly accepted, normalized, REIMBURSED.....

On the whole then, on the back of two 14-hour days, this one has been very, very fine.

...and I wish I'd seen this one before heading out on my 45-minute beach walk at 7:15 this morning. (I am, by the way, exactly 6 feet tall. Just for the poetry of the thing.)

So I'm working on these damn application essays for CMU, and they're important to get right and of course writing is pretty hard. I feel like I've kind of fallen down the rabbit hole with the third essay, which spells out my thinking about interactivity and video games and art and entertainment and why the MMORPG will not yield meaningful (and thus sustainable) games. I've gotten a long way along this argument, but I found myself beset by doubts and questions, and so I'm going to just inarticulately spell out in this space what it is I think and then use this as piles of flesh that I can then pack around the skeleton of the essay form.

I start off with a rumination about why Pixar's work is better than reality shows (and by extension why Alex Guinness was a better actor than Marlon Brando) that basically concludes with my conviction that the audience needs to be the artist's primary consideration, and that art--or the making of art, and that's an important distinction, because the experience of art is the thing that requires an audience, and it's the only way the work is completed, but in this context I'm purely interested in the creation of art, sans audience, but doing that while being aware that really it's the audience that matters--needs to be less about finding or unearthing truth and more about communication. If the artist his discovered some truth--let's take The Baltimore Waltz, whose truth is that AIDS sucks because it isn't a purely random disease, that it's something its victims bring upon themselves, but just barely, because really in terms of humans as bundles of biology having sex is as everyday and natural as, say, sitting on a toilet seat, and then also that universal chestnut that love ultimately makes death okay--then the goal of the artist needs to be to allow the audience to come to that same conclusion. It's not enough for Paula Vogel, the playwright, to realize these truths; she needs to allow her audience, to lead them by the hand, to these same truths, and to clear the way and ready the field for her audience to come to the same revelation that she did. Now, this is an extremely populist and theater-oriented vision of art, and maybe that's the point that needs to be made: that theater, or more generally narrative, is the true parent of video gaming, and not...phew. Purely aesthetic creation? I need to contrast theater with Michelangelo's David's big honkin' hand, or his Second Coming's Popeye-forearmed Jesus, or the riot of the Laurentian library. These objects, Michelangelo's creations, are...man. They are what they are; they're important for theater, and yet they stand on their own. Maybe the best distinction is between a movie, which is definitely a narrative form, which needs must be focused on the Paula Vogel idea above, and its soundtrack, which is non-representational (although of course that needs some nuance, because that's more true of, say, the closing credits than it is of the swell of strings when the Death Star explodes, and then of course there's the irritating specter of Til Eulenspeigel or however you spell it and Berlioz's beloved, but never mind, never mind) and exists solely as an aesthetic creation that an audience can enjoy as merely (merely!) pleasing to the mind and senses. Maybe a solid distinction is within the film Lemony Snicket, where the work itself is all about communicating its truth, its theme, which is that kids aren't taken seriously but should be (the same theme as Harry Potter 6, incidentally), and it achieves that through the seriousness, the extraordinary gravity, of its kiddie actors, and the cloying and irritating silliness of its adults, but then at the end you have these extraordinary credits, which really have nothing to do with the work as a whole but are a pure pleasure for their own aesthetic sake. A similar phenomenon, in reverse, is evident in Dancer in the Dark, where the breathtaking overture (and GOD DAMN THESE COMPLICATIONS because of course the real appeal of the overture is that it is a narrative work, that simply adding time makes it...wow, and now I've got to think about time...makes it tell a story) is more satisfying than the execution of the theme, which appears to be, I don't know, the meek and misunderstoodedly slutty will get their reward in heaven? Thinking back to my aesthetics class, it did seem like these art objects were more what writers focused on, assumedly because the aesthetic needs of, say, theater were relatively straightforward. In a couple of days Ryan, Judith's brill philosophy-majoring boyfriend, will arrive, and I'll ask him about this over a Franziskaner. What makes art art is an interesting question, but it becomes less interesting when narrative is introduced, because the aims of narrative are so obvious.

Obvious they may be; unsatisfying, or easy to achieve, they are not. And so that needs to be one point of my essay: that it's narrative, with all of its understood problems, that games need to focus on more than they've been doing lately. The tricky thing with games--and this is the knot that has caused me to switch over to this format to get my thoughts out--is that the audience is a more active part of the overall experience of the work than in any other medium out there. So that, that interactivity, is definitely something that needs to be understood, and studied, the same way the technology behind stage lights needs to be understood as a producer of theatrical art, or the first-person/third-person styles need to be understood for novelists. Interactivity is the cachet, if you will, of games: it's games's particularity, their claim to fame that distinguishes them from movies and everything else, Spielburg aside. And the MMORPG is definitely what interactivity looks like carried to an extreme: theoretically, every game will be different, and all elements under the user's care and supervision. Interactivity allows the user to become the artist in a way not seen in any other art form. MMORPGs, or interactive online communities, in that sense, resemble a new variation on a blank canvas, or a programming language, or the block of marble so huge it had its own name that Michelangelo carved the David out of. They are meta-art, not art but the means of creating it. And that's an interesting direction to take games, but it doesn't ultimately take full advantage of the artistic talent that drives game development. Game developers are better artists than Joe Orcsbreath out of World of Warcraft, and I think Joe's more interested in being entertained than in creating his own work. While not forgetting about the fun that creation can offer, nor that that ability to create is the unique thing about games, games need to focus more on traditional elements of entertainment than they've been doing to date. That's the argument I set out with the intention of making; I'm more pleased than I can say to actually arrive here.

So here, then, is my proposed structure: in speaking to Judith, she's told me that the French have two different terms: objet d'art, which translates to "art object" and which I'm going to call an "aesthetic work"; and ouevre, which doesn't mean what it does in English, but instead takes the word for "egg" as its root and refers to a work with a surrounding shell and something in the middle, which I'll describe as a "narrative work". The major distinction between these two works is a sense of forward drive, of an origin and a destination, a beginning and an ending, which narrative works have and aesthetic works don't. Now, like all classifications ultimately, this one turns out to be a continuum, with, say, painting and sculpture--museum art--comfortably on one side, and novels and theater comfortably on the other. Poetry and music are troublesome to classify; both have rather obvious beginnings and endings, and yet they make relatively little use of their temporality, I claim: William Carlos Williams (an extreme case, I'll admit) would be happy if the audience could get the sense that the speaker's sorry he ate the damn plums but they were so delicious all at the same time. My boy Gerard uses the physical space of poetry in a pretty simplistic sense: he has the stuff about the world at the beginning, and the stuff about God at the end. But there is that distinction; it's somewhere on that continuum. ANYWAY. I've dived into sentence #2 or so of the essay. There are aesthetic works, and there are narrative works. Video games are slightly vexing, but (traditionally, at least) are narrative works, with their levels, bosses, and endings all being tied up in their appeal; interactivity is their artistic singularity, the thing that distinguishes games from all other forms of art. Then I talk about the method, about how Guinness > Brando etc, and why that is, and then conclude something like this:

The ways in which games are not, or are different from, traditionally narrative works is territory that MMORPGs or other interactive environments are attempting to explore. Taken to an extreme, the environment that they develop is not so much a work as a meta-work, a medium in which creation can take place, like a blank canvas or a programming language. Although this is a very interesting direction to take games, over the long term there are three problems with it: first what might be called the Sim City problem, which is that virtually everything possible in the world of the work could have been (or already has been) created by the game developer, which makes the work created be the user unoriginal; secondly, by pushing the burden of artistic creation from the developer onto the audience, you underutilize the fact that the developer is presumably better at creating these worlds than is the average member of the audience; and finally that creation is a difficult process that becomes tedious as complexity increases, and that the vast majority of the gaming audience is looking for entertainment in games. I don't deny the enjoyment that creation can afford--again, as interactivity is the singular aspect of games, it needs to always be carefully considered--but at the present moment developers' interest in interactivity has exceeded the capacity of games to entertain. That pendulum needs to swing back, with greater focus being placed upon and more care being taken with the nature of games as narrative works of art. Some of these solutions are obvious--getting better and more original scripts would be a huge start--and some are less so--careful efforts need to be made to prevent users from doing whatever they want in a world--but in the current video game climate, all are necessary in order to move video games to the next quantum level of appeal, significance, and quality.


Phew. Even more so than usual, comments are encouraged.

Tonight I went and saw Broken Flowers at my favorite theater in the city, a place that's still around solely because of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It's a lovely, vintage theater not far from the coast, and it's rarely crowded, and it only has one screen in a beautiful auditorium. It's nice.

Broken Flowers. It's an interesting dramatic experiment: the story at the center of this work is small, but more significantly it's also completely pointless. It seems like everywhere there could be something mythic and romantic, the story deliberately injects something dog-eared and banal. In what could be considered the climactic moment of the film, when the main character hands off his birthright of knowledge to his son, he says something like, "The past is gone, and we don't know what the future holds. All we've got is this, is the present." This is not a profound statement, and it seems to illustrate that the trip that's made up the core of this work hasn't taught Don, the main character, anything. In two movies with similar themes, About Schmidt and Schultze Gets the Blues, there are revelatory moments at the end that illustrate the growth of their respective characters. Not so in this one. And so the central idea of drama--that a character ends a work differently than when they started it--is pretty well flouted.

David Copperfield, which Dickens said was his favorite of his novels, begins with this sentence: "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." In one sense, this is just a dowdy bit of Victorian false modesty: David Copperfield, successful writer and braver-out of all the horrid Uriah Heeps and Steerforths thown in his path, clearly has earned success in his life, and so declaring him anything but the hero of his own life would be ridiculous. And yet David, just like Don in Broken Flowers, is intriguing in a dramatic sense because he actually does so little. "Hero" is an extremely interesting word for Dickens to use in the opening sentence; given David's passivity, "benefactor" might be more appropriate. But David Copperfield is a wonderful novel not because David himself is particularly interesting, but because of the cast of characters outside of himself that he reacts with and against. Likewise, Don is an extraordinarily flat character; as an audience, we don't get any sense of much of anything of consequence about him. And yet the plot, and strange quirks in it, keep dragging him along: his forceful neighbor's insistence that Don get to the bottom of the mystery presented at the beginning of the work; the nude girl named Lolita who has big heart-shaped earrings and talks to Don about popsicles; the brief handclasp between two women that in a flash illuminates everything that has happened over the previous ten minutes; a talking cat; trigger-happy rednecks. It's these little incidents, these moments, that kept my interest moving forward through the work. The work refused to bow own to any standard dramatic conventions, and yet somehow generated undeniable interest. It was never a boring work, despite how little happens in it, and that I thought was an impressive achievement.

As a sort of appendix to this not-so revelatory comment, I'd like to note that one reason this works is how generous and how careful Jim Jarmusch, the director, is with the little stories he's telling. The opening credits, for instance, feature the path a letter that incites the remainder of the story from when it's mailed to when it's delivered. Although we can't see anything about the mysterious person who mails it (we only see their gloved hands), the envelope is pale pink, and so in a sea of white correspondence, it's consistently easy to pick out. As each step along its journey is introduced, the card appears in increasingly novel ways: in one moment it's just a flash of pink moving across the screen as it gets whipped through an automated processing unit of some sort. At the end, the camera shifts to a mailperson, who's walking her route, and she first delivers mail to this bustling, energetic house, with a number of happy black children running around and an appropriate number of toys strewn chaotically across the yard, then walks in front of a stand of huge, thick, tall trees that have the effect of isolating the neighbor from the racket and then into the yard of a very large, tastefully decorated home that looks silent and isolated. That's the home of the person who's getting the pink letter, it turns out, and a lot is communicated about him in that initial contrast: not a family man, he lives privately and quietly with good taste and a fairly fabulous amount of wealth. These are the kinds of details that Jarmusch over and over gets across with crystal clarity, which I found to be the most consistently enjoyable aspect of the film. His pictures really are worth a thousand words.

Wilde: I have to go back to him, you know.... Bosie is what became of me. He is spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented, but these are merely the facts. The truth is that he was Hyacinth when Apollo loved him, he is ivory and gold, from his red rose-leaf lips comes music that fills me with joy, he is the only one who understands me. "Even as a teething child throbs with ferment, so does the soul of him who gazes upon the the boy's beauty; he can neither sleep at night nor keep still by day," and a lot more besides, but before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself. Then we saw what we had made -- the piece of ice in the fist you cannot hold or let go.

So tonight I finished watching the miniseries of Lonesome Dove. It was made many years ago, and it's tremendous. I'd read the book back a couple of years ago, during my post-baccalaureate purgatory in Colorado, and thought it was okay. McMurtry's language, which is coarse and brusque but mostly charmless, stood in stark contrast to what I was finding in Bleak House, which I read at the same time and much preferred. But as a film, the plodding sameness of McMurtry's prose is easy to transcend or ignore and it becomes much clearer what a superlative western it is. This was somewhat clear to me then, but after the film, it's much more obvious now.

There's an awful lot to be said for Robert Duvall's performance as the central character, Gus McCrae; among living actors, I can't think of many who so consistently impress me so deeply, and it may be the single finest performance I've seen him in. In a way it's unfair: Duvall (born, of all places, in San Diego) inhabits his role so completely and effortlessly that he makes Tommy Lee Jones (from San Saba, TX) look just a little too refined. (Although with Jones it feels like it's mostly a matter of taste, and his accent's divine, and he completely redeems himself at the end with his last line, which is sarcasm from a man that doesn't know about sarcasm and which speaks to Call's profound, heartbreaking self-loathing...I digress.) And Duvall then collides with the dreadfully miscast Anjelica Huston, and oh my. It's her discomfort with the language that makes you realize how completely Duvall and friends (but especially Duvall) buy into every redneck syllable.

But that isn't what I want to talk about. More interesting to me are the questions that McMurtry raises not through his language but through his plotting and his exemplary character work. Lonesome Dove exemplifies a type of brave work, that feels confident enough in the style it's mimicking to have every breath it draws steeped in its tradition...and yet at the same time continually squint at everything, so things feel much more sordid and real. (Don Quixote, which I'm reading in the car, was one of the prototypes of this.) Gus himself is a tremendous example of this at work: his words open the work, and it would be his novel from beginning to end...except he dies with 100 pages left to go. The rest is dealing with his body--like As I Lay Dying, only much humbler, and dirtier--and the adventures that his partner, a straight-man of the first order compared against the easy wit of Gus, goes through in getting Gus buried and disposed of. What a falling-off; in Gus we have this heroic man, who can do so much that the other characters in the work can't, and it's his corpse that is the central figure of the end of the work. Gus claims at one point in the movie to Newt that he and Call were made for riding in to new, unsettled country, and then tells Newt not to relay what he'd said to Call, because Gus likes to give Call the impression that everything Call does Gus resents because it makes for work for him (Gus). He had some charmingly cowboy way of putting this--"I like to make him think he's nothing but a passel of trouble"--but there's no denying, for me at least, that Gus's dying wish to get himself buried in Texas when he dies in Montana really is a passel of trouble. It's ironic (and none too pleasant for Call) that McCrae, who for the entirety of the book was the very essence of independence and self-reliance, should lay such a cross on another person at his death. But it feels right; McMurtry is not creating a perfect man here, just the best man in the area, or the one that stands tallest among the many tall men and women in this tale.

One of my favorite comments that my prof made about Ulysses was that Bloom, the main character and the channeller of the Odysseus archetype (which Gus is as well: Clara refuses to marry him with the line that he's an inveterate wanderer), was the hero of the novel, and by extension the greatest hero of 20th century literature, because of his sympathy for women. Bloom goes to a laying-in hospital to see a female friend of his who's giving birth because he feels sorry for her, and as a result he meets Stephen, which is the critical meeting of the work. I like the implication that in Joyce's world, the heroic in the present day has been transformed into something so unimpressive and yet uncommon; it rings true to me. And I think that has real application to Gus: he really does appear to be able to do anything, from kill a bunch'a Injuns to make a woman swoon, and yet a lot of that Call can do as well. But Call has the resolve to stick at difficult and mundane tasks, which it appears Gus doesn't, really, and in answer, Gus has the ability to dynamically moralize. This isn't to say he's a preacher or anything, and really maybe the better word is just empathize. Gus is a vastly empathetic character. When he rescues Lorie from Blue Duck, he's concerned for the other people in July Johnson's party, but he's more concerned for the state of Lorie's mental health, and acts accordingly. When he's with Clara, he's able to defend Call from her anger because he sympathizes with Call. He understands, far better than Call, how much Call's being Newt's father means to Newt. He understands what makes Lorie hang her hopes on Jake Spoon, and understands how they will be disappointed. He is, in short, given a novelist's gifts of understanding and compassion, and while he doesn't use this talent entirely altruistically--no Saint Gus coming down the line--he still can't help but be moved by the travails of others, which he understands so clearly. What's rare for someone who understands everyone else so well is that he's got such a defined personality himself. I found myself wondering how well Clara understands him when she talks about his relief when she refuses to marry him, because in speaking about Clara he so consistently gives the sense that he loves her so deeply he really will do nearly anything to please her--and yet there he is, riding away to Montana (and his death) against her entreaties simply because he and Call "like to finish what we've started." Clearly, if Clara isn't correct, per se, she's very close.

But it's Call, at the end of the novel, who becomes a really important character, because of what he can't do that Gus can. Gus has seen a lot and thought about it and his emotional and moral resilience is the result. Call has seen a lot, but he hasn't internalized it in the same way as Gus. McMurtry over and over and over again in his novel talks about people being confused, about people disorienting other people. Dish with regards to Lorie is one prime example, as is Newt with regards to fucking everything, but also the thing that Call mentions as he's walking across the plains to deposit Gus (and that Tommy Lee or perhaps his director doesn't really get across) is how confused he is, how scared he is by both Clara's anger and his own uncertainty at this Sisyphean task that his best friend has set him to. Like many of the cowboys in the work, when confronted with a situation with a number of options, Call strongly moves in the direction of his first impulse, and continues to walk down that path to its conclusion, but this time he's left very uncertain that it's the right thing to do. The ability for planning and foresight is something that Call doesn't appear to have been much blessed with, and he feels the pain of it. The final chapter rings with his heart-breaking uncertainties: "He had gone through life feeling that he had known what should be done, and now a woman flung it at him that he hadn't." And: "Gus had spent a lifetime trying to get him into situations that confused him, and had finally succeeded." And: "He never felt that he had any home on the earth[.]" In witnessing the extremity of the reaction of everyone around him to Gus's death (or at least the extremity of the reactions of Lorie, Clara, and Call), it's driven home how much Gus was capable of understanding, because of the variety of people who all loved him so desperately. But Call's case feels the saddest of the three, because he's hammered out of the same "super-cowboy" mold as Gus, and thus capable of so much: witness the hordes of people who hear about the task of getting Gus down to Austin who're one part curious, and one part awed...and yet at the same time, witness Call's reluctance to talk about it, especially after Clara's diatribe. He certainly misses the heroism of his actions, because he's the one doing them, and any pride he might have had at the achievement when he finally gets done is rotted away by Clara's certainty that he's doing wrong.

But the fact that inspired me to write at such bewildering length about this work was that I'd misremembered that achievement. From the first time I read the novel, I remembered Call not making it to Austin, not making it with Gus's body back to the place where Gus wanted to be buried. I remembered him being compelled not to do it by the fact that Call himself was going to die if he didn't divest himself of Gus, and so he buried him somewhere else in order to survive. This is completely wrong. Call does make it to Austin, he buries Gus exactly where Gus asked to be buried, he fulfills his obligation, and is only troubled by the fact that there's no satisfactory marker to serve as a headstone for his friend. But the point is that Call has aimed for this epic achievement, and at the end, he makes it. But it's like the end of the vengeance narrative: it doesn't prove to be sufficient. He's accomplished this heroic deed, truly the stuff of high adventure, but he's still mired in despair, he's still lost in the choices he's made. Whatever limited glory he might have achieved for himself in his own eyes has been leeched away by the extremity of his self-loathing. And so, in the end, it's almost like Gus has successfully killed his friend. Gus has set him this enormous, heroic task that's now completed (and, judged by the small amount of ink and celluloid it consumes, it's been completed without anything resembling adventure), but now it's over, and because Gus isn't around to save Call from himself, there's nothing left for Call to do but die. At the end of both works, Call wanders into Lonseome Dove again, which is almost completely deserted, but there's an important difference between novel and movie. In the movie, Call is whole and sound, and his time in Lonesome Dove merely allows him to give him brutal, self-loathing "Hell of a vision" line, and then ride away, assumedly to wander once again, perhaps back up to Montana, perhaps somewhere else, only this time without the purpose that Gus gave him. But in the novel, the "Hell of a vision" line is delivered some time before, and Call comes into town with a festering bullet wound he refuses to get seen to. He's feverish and sick and only still seems to be operational thanks to the will and toughness that make up the core of his character. But again, it seems that Gus's death is very likely to kill Call as well.

And that's the difference in Call's character that comes out of my mis-remembered circumstances: in my fantasy world, when Call states that the place he is, wherever it is, is as far as Gus is going to go, he's doing several things: he's saying that Gus's dying wish is not as important as Call saving his own skin; he's making a bold statement that his own life is worth living, even after Gus's death; he's admitting that he has limitations, and by extension that he's human, which is precisely what Gus had earlier claimed to Newt was what kept Call from acknowledging that Newt was his son. And this vision of Call being brought out of himself and committing an action so thoroughly un-Call-like is very attractive: it states that although he's feeling real bad in Lonesome Dove because of his bullet wound, he'll make it at the end and go on wandering because his earlier actions claimed that his life is still worth living. There's appeal in this hope, which is completely lacking in the actual ending of the novel. In that ending, he makes it to Austin after a long struggle, and is immediately lost and without purpose. He wants to avoid doctors and large cities because he's feeling uncertain in his mind, but of course he's going to continue feeling uncertain in his mind so long as he's losing blood because of his wound. His situation isn't going to get better, he's taking no definitive action to improve it, and that's where the novel ends. Call's horror at suicide may end up saving his life, as may the compassion of strangers, but at the end of the novel, the reader gets the sense that if Call keeps going to the way he's going, he's going to die, which he might think of as appropriate since the world without Gus is so hard to live in. The movie has it both ways and neither: the fact that Call's healthy as he rides out of Lonesome Dove, with the swelling music in the background, easily gives the sense that he'll go on forever. But as a consequence it misses the pathos that comes from Call apparently undone by the death of the man he loved and depended on. While the movie isn't reluctant to dwell on all the things that were lost through the work, it stops short of the novel's statement that, by implication, the action of the world will very soon overwhelm this final giant of the earth.

King Arthur had asked his wife to be kind to the young man. She was fond of her husband, and she realized that she had come between him and his friend. She was not such a fool as to try to atone to Lancelot for this, but she had taken a fancy for him as himself. She liked his broken face, however hideous it was, and Arthur had asked her to be kind. There was a shortage of assistants in Camelot for the hawking, because there were so many people at it. So Guenever began going with Lancelot to help him with the ball of string.

He did not take much notice of the woman. "Here comes that woman," he would remark to himself, or "There goes that woman." He was already deep in the hawking atmosphere, which was only partly an affair for females, and he seldom thought of her more than that. He had grown into a beautifully polite youth, in spite of his ugliness, and he was too self-conscious to allow himself to have petty thoughts for long. His jealousy had turned into unconsciousness of her existence. He went on with his hawk-mastery, thanking her politely for her help and accepting it with courtesy.

One day there was particular trouble with a thistle, and he had miscalculated the amount of food which ought to have been given the day before. The jerfalcon was in a foul temper, and Lancelot caught its mood. Guenever, who was not particularly good with hawks and had no special interest in them, was frightened by his frowning brow, and, because she was frightened, she became clumsy. She was sweetly trying her best to help, but she knew that she was not clever at falconry, and there was confusion in her mind. Very carefully and kindly, and with the best intentions, she wound the creance up quite wrong. He took the wretched ball away from her with a gesture which was almost rough.

"That's no good," he said, and he began to unwind her hopeful work with angry fingers. His eyebrows made a horrible scowl.

There was a moment in which everything stood still. Guenever stood, hurt in her heart. Lancelot, sensing her stillness, stood also. The hawk stopped bating and the leaves did not rustle.

The young man knew, in this moment, that he had hurt a real person, of his own age. He saw in her eyes that she thought he was hateful, and that he had surprised her badly. She had been giving kindness, and he had returned it with unkindness. But the main thing was that she was a real person. She was not a minx, not deceitful, not designing and heartless. She was pretty Jenny, who could think and feel.

A little about Romanticism tonight, I think. I debated with myself, after I finished my dismissal of Million Dollar Baby and then read Roger Ebert's breathless paean to how much Clint made the proles think about euthanasia, whether I'd just missed the point of the movie by pigeon-holing it into this good-movie/bad-movie duple. I decided not, and rationalized my feeling with one of the chiefest ills of Romanticism in the wrong hands, namely a tendency towards inexactitude. Clint's problem with making a thought-provoking work on the subject of euthanasia is that he's dealing with this immensely, intensely real problem, one of the least legislatable issues of the present day because it's so personal, so invariably unique, so grounded in the world and the person or people involved. And Clint makes a morality play out of it. The issues that he raises--should I kill this girl the same way her daddy killed his ol' hound-dog, as some critic snidely put it--are not real issues that are faced by someone in this circumstance. The life/death decision is pretty much out of the hands of any individual, because hospitals are so good at keeping people alive; the angst of Clint's Romantic hero, out past the sidelines, really doesn't enter into the equation. (That's not to say that other forms of angst don't enter into the equation in real life, but the big operatic one just happens to be the one that Clint falsely focuses on.) So, fine, fine. Clint doesn't have to make a movie that treats realistically or profoundly with a person's right to death. The problem is, though, that chatterers are pretty convinced that's exactly what he's done (and they have Roger Ebert (!!!) to confirm it form them!), and so Clint has made a statement film that doesn't offer anything meaningful to the debate, and may have perhaps done some serious harm. It occurred to me the other day that what he's done is something like what Chasing Amy did back in the day: at a time when the nature of homosexuality and that nature's repercussions were at a crisis point, Chasing Amy strode boldly in and portrayed a dilletante lesbian, who was fortunate enough to find her true love in a non-threatening, safely hetero relationship. Now, I imagine this does happen; I of all people can understand a girl getting tired of boys and deciding to diddle around with girls for a while. Fine. Great. But there is a percentage of lesbians--and I think it is a healthy majority--for whom such flexibility isn't an option. What would have been a more valuable (and more interesting) film would have been one where the lead male had taken his brooding Byronickness and hunted this girl over and over again only to be consistently rebuffed by the simple fact that she wasn't interested. "Sorry; you know, you seem like a nice guy. But you must be a nice guy for someone else. Because I am physically unavailable." And likewise: because the story of the athlete dying young is so familiar, and in many ways so appealing, I think it needs to be carefully examined for fear of its being given in to without sufficient thought. A more compelling political statement would have been made if she'd gone in exactly the opposite direction, if, instead of going from 60 to 0 and making no more forward progress, the girl had used the extraordinary will that had been on such display for the entirety of the film and moved on to something different. Okay, you know, this sucks, and the past will be forever haunting. But there's still life to be lived. And doing something to recognize the fact that her life, no matter how circumscribed (especially vis a vis the life of her past) was still a life, and that no matter its difference it still had merit, was a statement I thought was seriously missing from the film. At least show some images of Stephen Hawking before you shuffle off into the dark.

Closer yielded thoughts about a different danger of Romanticism. After I got finished watching it I was reminded of a couple I know who are good friends of mine. She isn't a stipper, and he doesn't look much like Clive Owen, but I thought a somewhat disturbing observation I'd made about their lives illuminated an interesting aspect of the relationships in Closer. This couple I know met each other in their freshman year in college and after that basically turtled. They had in one another all they could ever want, and everyone outside of that diad was irrelevant and vaguely pitiable. Now; these are people that are remarkably in love with one another; each seriously appears to have found the perfect mate in the other. And that's wonderful. But what Romanticism preaches is that that's sufficient, that after you've found this one other person to plight up your life with that basically ends your relationship with the human world outside of that other. And that seems to me to be a dangerous attitude. Now we look at Closer, and sure enough the work is claustrophobically fixated upon these four individuals, and they in turn are obsessively fixated on one another. Virtually the only sight we as an audience get of people outside of this love quadrangle is Jude Law's scornful comment about the people who show up to art openings and the Manhattanite hordes checking out Natalie Portman's ass at the end. And I get the sense that the amount of damage these four people are able to wreak upon one another has a lot to do with their brittleness as humans in society. As romantics, they've all bought into this idea that the only external relationship that ultimately matters is the one they have with their chosen sexual mate. And that attitude's okay, or not actively harmful, so long as you live in a universe like my friends do, where there's no competition and no turbulence. But when so much of one's self is tied up in this ideology and in this other person, when either the ideology or the other person is proven to be flawed or unworkable, through circumstance or biology or whatever, then the individual doesn't have very much to fall back on. The despair, the mental agony that's on display in Closer comes from these individuals completely lacking safety nets. Any time they miss the trapeze, it's WHAM and they're in the hospital for another six months. But this myth, that one's sexual coupling should be not only preeminent in one's life but solely sufficient when it comes to human interaction, is a very Romantic idea. The idea that you pour all of what you are into one other person and present a blank to everyone else is very appealing, but I don't buy it. I continue to think that Napoleon Dynamite, with its society and support network of the disenfranchised, actively points the way to a viable way of life far more than does Closer. I find friends, and friends with whom one has very deep connections, are hugely important for getting along. Now! I also haven't met the Romantic succubus of my soul, either, but if she threatened such damage to the relationships I have outside of her I don't think we would ultimately have much of a relationship. I'm a big believer in community: I think it's the answer to Annette Bening's line in American Beauty that "you can't trust anyone but yourself." She's right, I guess, that you can't trust any one person to the ends of the earth, but her conclusion is wrong because you can trust people in the aggregate. In times of need, okay, most people are going to let you down. But the power of community is that one's needs are divided among many, and one can leech comforts variously from those that surround us. The life of seclusion, no matter how sexy it sounds (especially compared against frumpy socialization), is too hard for actual living in. Give me the sloppy overflow of days.

Let's say you're Clint Eastwood. Let's say that everything you do in a movie has already been done, that you're breaking no new ground. You're too old to have any original thoughts about film, if original thoughts about film are even possible anymore. So you've moved from an artist to an artisan (providing, of course, you were ever an artist.) And so now your mission is uncomplicated: instead of trying to do anything uncomfortably interesting, like Chris Rock before Oscar ceremonies, all you're trying to do is make a smooth-bore, 100-octane injection of brilliance. Now there's no question, that's real hard to do. But I think Eastwood's capable: for an hour and a half, Million Dollar Baby was so dead-on target it soared. And then it just disintegrated. How, if you're Clint Eastwood, are you so good at making that first hour and a half and so bad at the rest of it? He's shackled the film to a putrid corpse. It's maddening. I don't know what someone needs to do to him, but it sure would be nice if the man made an entirely good film.

And so here we are again, left with the little shards that did go well. The best, for me, was the moment when Clint breaks down and starts telling this girl stuff, how to be good, and it's this incredibly revelatory moment for her: it's wisdom that's completely counterintuitive, but even as she tries it the first time you can see her think, "You know, this could be right." It's a beautiful, beautiful moment. It reminded me very much of acting (especially when Morgan Freeman had a voiceover about the same time that talked about how everything's backward in boxing), and of reciting verse. It's that moment when something wise is imparted, and it dovetails with experience or will and it's suddenly the very right thing at that moment and there's a quantum leap, or rather your ceiling just flies upward and you suddenly have the capacity to be much, much better than you've ever been before.

Clara once commented off-hand that she expected she'd have a teacher for her entire performing career. I doubt that's actually going to be true, but when she said it I was stabbed by envy. This envy requires some major assumptions, worthy of Eastwood's world, blown out of the water by an experience I had with Mark where he told me I had to dissolve in drunken tears at some point and shit, I've never been able to cry on command, but I gave it my gamest effort and he said with an unusual intensity when we were done that the crying had been done well and had been very effective. That's crap, and what one always needs in a teacher is the ability to see you wholly, to exist inside your head and inside your skin and correct the things you do wrong. But to have that second voice, to have someone to whom you say, "Okay, this is what I've got," and then to have them respond, "Okay, good, but here's the way to better".... It sounds like paradise. The craft of software engineering, at least at ViaSat, no longer provides such excitements, and I'm the more appreciative for being good at it: if you're constantly improving, it gives them more reason to fire you than if you're just plain good. Still, I'm reminded of the Sondheim song from Dick Tracy: "When you have it all / There's one thing you miss / And that's more."

Also: girls suck. Unless they're Josiane Petitt.