BOYHOOD

(Felt like a day from my old Toronto Film Festival days, watching both BOYHOOD and MAPS TO THE STARS in Tokyo rep houses. Here's a little something about BOYHOOD, with a look at the Cronenberg film in a few days to come...)

About halfway through its almost three-hour running time, I realized that another title for BOYHOOD might as well be GROWN-UPS. (Alas, Adam Sandler pre-swiped it for his comedies.) I was expecting (and received) a moving examination of what it might mean to grow up; I wasn't looking to find a film that was almost as much about adults and their ways. Almost every scene in the movie features either a) children watching adults as they amble around what they claim as their lives, or b) adults giving kids advice, in the form of insults, or shouts, or genuine expressions of deep love and concern. It's a two-way street, this movie is, and if the boy at the centre rarely, if ever, meets his counterpart halfway, well, that's kids for you. They do their own thing, with others (if they're lucky) nudging them some of the time. What a spirit this film wields.

Of course, the danger of naming a movie BOYHOOD is that it almost invites the viewer to watch it as some kind of statement as such. (Maybe a more apt, specific moniker would have been THIS BOY'S LIFE, but, alas, that title too is long-ago took.) Similar to Judd Apatow's THIS IS FORTY, by using a thematically grandiose title like this one, you run the danger of folks seeing the film and thinking: "Well, that wasn't MY boyhood, motherfucker. Speak for yourself, prick." And one could argue that there is a certain kind of, for lack of a better phrase, 'generic experience' going on here -- a range of childhood, adolescent, and young adult encounters involving bikes and nudie mags and school crushes and enforced haircuts and first-time drinking and awkward break-ups that almost seem as if they were plucked from a Young Adult book at random. There is a frequent here-we-go-with-the-next-common-experience-we-can-all-empathize-with element at play.

However, having said that: Who am I fucking kidding? Those commonplace events were the moments that resonated with me the most, and I can't deny that I felt myself getting choked up a few times. Laying awake in bed while overhearing your parents argue? Check. Life as a dishwasher? Check. Memories of meeting one's university roommate for the first time? Check. Check. Check. You got me, Linklater. Not always, or even often, but enough. More than enough.

Besides, what makes the movie work so well as cinema is not so much the narrative incidents as such but time, damnit, time. The manipulation of it, in cinematic tersm. The way that the movie allows a single life to unfold without anything extraneous. You quickly get sucked into the ordinary aspects of 'life', and you see kids grow up inexplicably fast, and you hear Ethan Hawke's voice get noticeably, audibly gravellier and growlier, and you suddenly very soon realize that there's truly no going back. No reststop on this train, kiddies. Linklater cleverly doesn't drape a 'story' onto this somehow simultaneously leisurely-yet-rocket-fast look at a life as it's lived, but there's something going on here, a linkage of sorts.

I mentioned earlier this idea of 'adults', with a capital 'A', and what I found most surprisingly moving about the film was my own dawning realization that children are mostly just pawns. Only at the end of the film does the protagonist finally get to do something just for himself; previously, his life (and this movie) was filled with non-stop, 'hey-bud' or 'you-fuck' adult interjections. And while some of these were drunken and obscene, there was this gentler thing going on, a continuous thread of groups of older people trying to help this kid out. Giving him advice. Hoping he listens. Stressing what's important. And I would imagine that teenagers might let a lot of those scenes kind of drift over their heads as they stare at the screen, like the scent of stale buttered popcorn slowly drifting towards those bright red exit-lights, but as somebody who's kinda/sorta tried to dish out some of those same types of awkward-advice speeches to youngsters in my life over the past bunch of years, I found their place and presence in this film very moving and daring in their plain-spoken goodness. The kid, bless his heart, was not eye-rollingly rude, but he just mostly took it all in with silence (or else with the odd short retort), as we usually did, as all young people do. Yet we see mothers, fathers, stepfathers, photography teachers, part-time-job-bosses, friends of the family, all chipping in now and then to shell out some good words. (Or at least well-intentioned ones.) The movie is just as much a wide-eyed, warts-and-all study of how desperately hard adults try to save (or just grab) the kids that inhabit their lives as it is about a boy trying to learn how to be a young man.

What makes the movie work so marvellously well is its leisurely, continuous examination of this bizarrely temporal co-existence, the strange nowhereland that adults and children co-exist in at different (but paradoxically simultaneous) points in their lives. And the main actor, Ellar Coltrane, who was photographed for a few weeks for each of twelve years, centres everything in place because he wasn't much of an actor at all. (This is my theory.) This is a compliment. The film centres him and Loreli Linklater (who is the director's daughter) with a platoon of old pros, but it takes a child-amateur to show much 'acting' actors do. They're all excellent, the real actors, but Coltrane kind of just moseys along, as we all do through life, and he doesn't really 'steal' every scene; he just lets himself get sort of mugged. Yes, true, he starts to philosophically pontificate a bit when he hits his mid-teens, but hey -- that's what teens do. Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette are both fantastic, but they're acting, and they know it, and we know it; Coltrane for the entire length of the film gives off the nonchalant vibe of a kid who doesn't know that a camera is there, doesn't know that we're watching, probably could not give a shit. That's what cements him so firmly into the vibe as the years pick up their pace; the adults are awfully dramatic, but for him, it's just life. Kids don't know any better. Let everyone else handle all that drama.

The most revolutionary aspect of the film is everything that we don't see on the screen, namely its shooting history -- a twelve year span of time, with actors imperceptibly aging between twelve-month shoots-- but in the end, like all movies, it must ultimately fall or fly as a movie, period. This one often soars. It's been awhile since I've been this engrossed in a film. Scene after scene made me laugh or almost cry when thinking of (dis)similar moments in time from my own puny life. Yet I don't think what happens on-screen itself is necessarily all that new. There is a WONDER YEARS element that must be acknowledged. Yes, it lacks the false sentiment, and goopy life-lessons, but in the end, thematic and narrative pyrotechnics aside, it's still just a film about aging, about dealing with the pain and joys of growing up and leaving home as we all did (and still do). It's enormously clever, even brilliant, in the narrative gaps it embraces, the bullshit 'plot' it eschews and spits out with an almost crazy abandon, but all the lunatic-hype surrounding the film makes it sound as if the space-time continuum itself has been transformed with each celluoid frame. This is a movie. That's all. A movie. And, like all movies, it's actually nothing like life, but boy by the end does it come pretty damn close.

MANUAL VERSUS STICK

I think we tend to forget how mysterious, even mystical, the act of reading can be. Or should I say the art of reading, because this blend of observation and creation requires the reader to contribute at least half as much as the author. The writer may painstakingly set up the scene linguistically so it takes place in 'the kitchen', but it's MY brain that almost aways envisions this kitchen as being the exact one that existed in my first house as a child, my seven-year old self-perceptions colouring all pages to come. How does this happen? What's going on here in this interface between words on a page and images in my head? And to complicate this idea even further, when one reads that same scene, only this time in a foreign language, what's happening at the neurlogical level? The, dare I say it, subconscious level? What, exactly, is controlling what my brain decides to perceive, almost against my own will?

If I'm trying to read something in Japanese (a language I'm still struggling to learn), in comparison to English (a language I've sort of got the basic gist of), the result is tantamount to finally learning to drive with a shift-stick when you already can drive manually. Reading English, I'm trying to appreciate the author's style, understand the moral/thematic/narrative intent, get off on the stylistic effects; deciphering Japanese, on the other hand, is nothing but groping, awkward jabs almost sexual in their clumsiness, a staccato process of stumbling along in big stops and slow starts, my brain simply hoping to catch what the main point might be. (I often compare the strained process of reading a foreign langauge to driving your car through a constant series of tunnels with the radio on; every time you come across a new word or concept, it's like the music being cut off in your car for a spell of some time as you suddenly pass through another dark tunnel, before the song unexpectedly starts up once again as you leave the tunnel behind, only to quickly realize that this road ain't nuthin' but tunnels.)

Sometimes, my brain is connecting the Japanese word to its English counterpart; at other points, encountering an unknown word, I almost-unconsciously seek to somehow integrate its purpose in the larger context of the sentence. Meaning, suss out if I'm looking at a verb or a noun or an adjective (or whatever), and see if I can recognize at least one of the kanjis (Chinese characters) that compose the new word, or try to at least guess what the word might possibly mean based on the theme of the paragraph. (It's all like some glorified board game that requires no dice.)

This process of embattled comprehension is a familiar constant, and it essentially means that my brain as I read usually kind of hurts. A pain such as this is an odd and pleasant thing. I mean, how often can you feel your brain ache? I don't mean like a headache; I mean more of a mindache. Linguistic contortions are somersaulting around in my skull. I'm grappling with concepts that sometimes can only be understood in this new acquired tongue. This, in itself, is both electrifying and, in the literal sense of the phrase, mind-numbing. A good thirty, forty-five minutes of trying to read Japanese, and I need a breather. (One can only ask so much from the thoughts that try to sustain us.)

What's interesting, too, even intriguing, is that Japanese is so fucking different from English that at times it doesn't even seem that language-learning is at work. The predominance of kanji means one is 'reading' a constant stream of 'pictures', some of which you may know the meaning to, but not the words, or else the pronunciation of, but not the meaning, or else a little bit of both, or often one or the other. 'This is reading?" I sometimes think, but of course it is, only it's done from right to left, and up-to-down, and my brain, if I'm lucky, can somehow assimilate what's going on, or at least give it a fair shot.

Which brings me back to the 'scene-in-the-kitchen' episode I mentioned earlier. As we read (in any language), our brains create pictures for us, based soley on the symbols inserted via two scanning eyes. Neurons at work. Synapses at play. Squiggles on a page, acquiring significance, even altering our moods. But what else out there in the world is affecting the content we consume?

The other day I read an article about how some scientists believe that it's our physical surroundings and sensations that literally create the thoughts that we think; the brain is connected to the body, and if the body is cold, or warm, or full, or hungry, the brain as a receiver of signals alters itself accordingly.

Thus, the chair that you're sitting in at the moment might be a tad hard. A little tough on your tush. As you shift your butt around, you either gain or lose comfort. This distracts you from my words, or else focuses you more completely. As a result, at a miniscule level, your ability to enjoy, agree or remain indifferent to my point has probably unconsciously shifted in small subtle ways, just as your buttocks adjusted themselves on your seat. My ideas are conveyed from the screen to your eyes via alphabetical blips, yet the process is slanted based solely on how you're sitting. (Add something read in a foreign language to this procedure, and who can tell what's going on with the brain and the body in such uneasy concert?)

Reading is such a familiar, intimate pleasure that, as with eating or farting, we rarely stop to take stock of what's truly going on. Our very views of the world are shifting and sliding with each word that we read. Entire mental paradigms are crumbling as we stay still and imagine. Vocabulary in foreign tongues is fucking greatly with our heads, yet your mum passing by you and your laptop will just note your blank daze. Right now I'm resting my computer on my gut, and I'm sprawled out on my futon, and my feet-in-black-socks are lazily stroking the white wall, and I'm trying to get across thoughts in English on what both that language as itself means in relation to another, and I don't know how your posture is at play as you scan these few words, but I do know that it's fun, this reading thing, this writing thing, this constant shifting from automatic to stick, this trying-to-make-sense-of-ourselves-and-our-worlds-through-the-words-that-we-use, and the whole motley enterprise, so straining and ungainly, is ultimately the kind of deep mental pool I don't mind diving into head first.

THE MAN WHO QUIT MONEY

It's kind of astonishing how often money comes to mind. If you don't have enough of it (which none of us do), we spend endless hours every day calculating what we need, can afford, should allow ourselves to indulge in, at what price to ourselves; if we have more than enough (which all of us might actually possess), we stil crave a little bit extra, a litte more pad in the pants. From the time we have our first pink piggy banks, we're saving, hording, dreaming of the future. That this whole monetary system is a man-made concoction of assests is something we usually overlook. (There, hovering placidly just above your bank, is a blue sky and some clouds that do not give a shit.)

Mark Sundeen's THE MAN WHO QUIT MONEY is a fascinating non-fiction examination of Daniel Suelo, a middle-aged American who gradually decided over time to give it all up. His passport, his bank account, his money -- the whole deal. This might make him sound like your everyday 'bum' (which, truth be told, a good many folks have decided is exactly the case). Yet, from his point of view, it was a calculated, soul-wrenching decision earned over a good many years, a process, a whittling down of philosphy until he found the right blade. His lifestyle demands: Is it possible to truly live without coin in modern-day life? Can one barter and scavenge and still consider that existence? Or we could invert the question and gaze instead at ourselves: Do we consider our lives of consumption the be-all-and-end-all of what we want from this time that we must spend together?

Daniel Suelo's almost-primitive approach to living is not for everyone, or probably anyone, at least those of us who consider ourselves to be 'first-world' attendees. Having spent a good part of the last ten years in third-world countries, I do find myself sickened at times by what wealthy folks throw away -- both in terms of physical, material goods, and also related to their own sense of self. (This kind of judgement runs the risk, I know, of being some hippie-dippie load of shit, but I include myself in the caste of those I kind of despise.) Poor people are not necessarily more noble, or even humane; lack of a working economy leads to crime and corruption, and in such desperate circumstances the darkness of our hearts tends to devour the light.

I get that. There's just something, if not enlightening, at least disturbing, about quietly witnessing how others -- without all the flashy adornments of life -- manage to make it through the day with the occasional smile, while I  scoot back (with a scowl) into the consumer madness  that encapsulates how must of us co-exist. That sort of parallel view of humanity's have-and-have-nots sticks in your craw over time, an almost tangible gob in the throat that is both sweet and sour, and such a confusing, palpable aftertaste of upchuck makes a life-story like Suelo's less crazy-sounding over time. Makes me wonder about what we all need to explore. Not so much a 'back to nature' movement, but more of a stripped-down, inward tilt into what we truly want and require from ourselves and each other.

 

GIVE ME THE TIME OF DAY

Is there any sight as sad and as sweet as a solitary orange traffic cone, under the glow of a streetlight's soft golden lamp, two mute friends at attention, the night their lonely dark cloak? Perhaps the vending machine just down the road has its own desperate charm. Coffee and cokes, sports drinks and fresh water, all bottled up, arrayed in short rows. Awaiting coins. A few clinks. A deposit. Do those plastic tubes feel anything at all as they fall to their shelf just a few drops below? Surely a fate such as this must be viewed as quite grim.

Yet you, too, when looked at by night, when watched while you sleep, might possess a similar pity. Drooling, picking. Moaning, sighing. For seven, eight, even nine hours? Do we still exist when we can't even claim to pretend that we know what we do? I suppose I could set up a camera to catch every moment and gasp. Set it up right by your bed, or my own for that matter. Post it on YouTube. So the world could then see -- who we are, when we are nothing at all but our deeply sleep-selves. Could be a kick. Or a fright.

For what if we view that ourselves in that time are nothing more than slightly, presumably smelly (if not rank), robotically slow-motion, barely functional variations of a traffic cone, a street lamp, a vending machine? Kind of colourful. Mostly mute. Dull, to be honest. Oh, but our waking selves, so full of ourselves! That is a sight, you might say! (I don't know about you, but I like to think that I live just by day, but surely the night, too, has its own secret claims.)

I like to believe and implore: Don't look at me as I rest. Give me the time of day. I'll be up for you then. (Even an orange traffic cone gains more glimmer by noon.)

ENVIABLE POSITIONS: A BIRD ON A ROOF AND A PHILOSOPHER'S LONG CONFESSION

This morning on my run I noticed a small black bird perched on the edge of a very large building. Just sitting there. How many feet above ground this building was, I'm not sure, but neither you nor I would lounge and relax as this bird did so well. Was it planning its next flight? Had it sat there before? Was this its usual crouch? How come I often fall to the ground while tripping over small stones, yet this bird with the brain the size of my left testicle (I'm estimating here)can somehow rest assured that its poise and its wings won't just once let it down? To sit, on the edge, of a building. Good lord. And not be contemplating suicide while doing so. That must be the mark of an ignorant kind of small genius.

Don't mind me. Just my own form of philosophical gunk. Mostly because I just finished reading a rather wise book by Brian Magee called CONFESSIONS OF A PHILOSOPHER, and it's got me thinking again about all the questions I ask myself when the lights lose their glow. Magee, a British writer, former MP, television host, and, it goes without saying, a keen philospher, examines the arc of his own life through the prism of his philosophical obessions that began at a rather young age, starting around the time when he confided to his sister that it was rather bewildering how he could never remember the exact moment he fell asleep each night, and she responded, rather exasperated, that NObody does, silly. Thus began his questioning of life and its endlessly enigmatic, befuddled, bedazzling mysteries.

I can make my own confession here, which is that I couldn't quite follow all the summaries and encapsulations of the famous philosophers he's studied and revered throughout all his long years -- Kant, Schopenhauer, Karl Popper, etc -- but he does a workmanlike shop of making even an imbecile like me get the gist of the central theories. And I'm comforted by the fact that the book ends on an almost tender note, with Magee confessing that, after decades of study, he's no longer closer to understanding any answers that have arisen from his intellcttual pursuits -- but at least he's found a way to ask more interesting questions.

Just what I like -- no answers. The older I get, the less answers I want. Just give me questions -- better questions, more colourful questions, more infuriating questions. They cause me to ask more quesions, and more, and when somebody actually tries to answer life's puzzles, I find myself exasperated, almost pissed off. "Don't GIVE me your 'truths'," I always think to myself. "Let me formulate my own lies."

Take death. One section of the book -- I can't remember which, and I can't remember who he's quoting, and I'm lovin' this because this is not school and I don't need a footnote, woo-hoo adulthood, and screw academia! -- formulates a wonderful notion concerning death, namely, that we'll never know what it's like. Think of it this way: When we're alive, it's literally impossible to experience what death will be like, as we're still alive during the pondering, and when we finally die, the 'me' that is so concerned will no longer be around to experience it. This is true irregardless of whether or not you're a religious believer or a fervent atheist; if you think there's an afterlife, whatever makes you 'you' will most definitely be transformed into another, non-material self, and if you're an atheist, well, you DEFINITELY won't be around to experience it, because there's nothing to experience at all. I find this kind of hypothesis (which he acknowledges is only just that) almost comforting. We'll never actually get to know death at all. "What a rip!" as we all used to say. Yet what a relief, too!

Magee also does a wonderful job of exposing some of the ridiculous trends of philosophy that have overtaken the academic world in the past fifty years, none of which I can articulate at length, but most of which centre upon the study of philosophy as a purely linguistic category, with the focus on 'meaning' being reduced to the semantic explanation of how words, by themselves, in conjunction with each other, create the fabric of life.

In Magee's view, philosophy has completely lost its target; by studying the great philosophers, one is grappling with the ancient concerns, fears and hopes of man from the beginning of civilization itself. Having philosophy centre itself on language itself is a ridiculous notion because, as Magee brilliantly elaborates, we live most of our lives in a non-linguistic kind of state. We eat, fart, drive, walk, talk, all of it fueled by this vague, sort-of-fluid 'ghost in the machine' that somehow forms our notion of consciousness, but rarely, if ever, is it reduced to mere words. Think about it -- the shirt you put on this morning, the toast you almost burned, the hand in your own crotch the last time you got off. Nothing 'verbal' was going on; billions of neurons were firing together and these somehow led you to take certain actions that led to other actions, which led to sensations, both good and bad (or usually indifferently dull), and words formed no part of any of it. We use words to talk, to write, but they are approximations of that invisible 'stuff' that somehow makes up our lives, both inner and outer. Your eyes our moving down this screen; your fingers are scratching your cheek; you're suppressing the burp that so madly wants out. A hundred, thousand, million sounds, sights, smells and sighs make up each perceptual moment of your day, and this is your life, and if philosophy wants to believe that meaning itself is nothing more than words doing their own linguistic form of slow waltz, well, Magee ain't havin' it. Life is about the deep, abiding, resonant questions that cause children to wonder just what it all means. Philosophy should, at its roots, allow those fundamental seeds to still sprout.

So.

Anyway.

A good book, it is. Highly recommended.

Now back to that bird.

Does it think these things?

I don't think so.

It just sits on that ledge, letting the morning grow grey.

I would like that, too. To sit on a roof. Not worry about falling.

But I'm down on the ground, with gravel my foe as my toes find a fault.

Why me? I wonder. Why can't I rise from this earth and find a perch like that bird?

Don't know.

But if I knew, I wouldn't be able to ask those questions, would I. That bird doesn't seem to question much, if anything. He sits and then soars; I fall and ask why. Who's got the more enviable position? You tell me. (Or, better yet, don't.)

THIRTY YEARS IN ONE MORNING

The first morning of the first day of a new year, dark and brisk, my body alive and fresh, and I hear, as I run, the voice of a man on a phone, his tone angry and sad. I can't understand everything he's saying, but these are those familiar tones that insist what language obscures. You know the ones I mean. High-pitched, abrupt, with strange shifts downwards, almost diagonally; you didn't know voices could do that sort of thing, shift ranges so fast. As I ran I glanced to my left, and noticed that the man, physically, did not look to be perturbed, or, to be more accurate, pissed off. He looked like a hundred other middle-aged Japanese men look like on mornings such as this -- small and intent, his exercise an authentic expression of a casual, yet steady discipline imposed from within. His strides were precise and fluid. Nothing random at work. He was headed somewhere. A hat on to combat the cold. If not for that voice, I wouldn't have even spared him my glance.

Yet that voice! Here I am, at least trying to pretend that I'm feeling good as this fresh year commences, and here he is, enraged and so sad. I can barely make out him saying something about 'thirty years'. That's all I can catch -- 'thirty years'. Is it a lover who finally gave him the boot last night over beers? An employee whose own self-regard has made his old boss useless and passe? A childhood friend, I thought. Japanese often cling to their old friends. (In what other country do people in their mid-fifties regulary attend elementary-school reunions?) Somebody close, of course. You don't wield a brittle voice such as his against a convenience store clerk.

I stayed moving on the path that led straight towards the big bridge, while he took the lower route, the one that wound smoothly through trees and led down somewhere dark. I heard his faint voice ranting, but it soon drifted, then died. Some small part of me wanted to go back and help. Tell him that it was New Year's Day. Life was moving forward. The phone call was already over. But what if he was drunk? Mentally ill? Worse, what if all that rage was still valid? 'Thirty years' was all I had heard him say, and thirty years is a long time. Thirty years ago I was six. His harsh night was already heading towards the first small hint of day, but I knew that those three decades of his would not soon rise out of his ditch.

HAIKU: THIS MORNING'S MT.FUJI

This morning's white-capped Mt.Fuji

boldy bisects the sky --

underfoot frosted grass, sprouting for its own peak.