Go and watch She Hate Me, Spike Lee's latest film. (It may still be out in some local theatres back home, or already on DVD; I caught it on DVD here, complete with a Spike Lee commentary track, for only two bucks. Go figure.)
If you check out www.rottentomatoes.com, a movie site that tabulates film critics' reviews from across the country and then somehow comes up with a collective score, you'll see that She Hate Me received the whoppingly-high score of 20%. (Meaning, 80% of critics hated it.)
Not a good omen, right?
Ah, but I'm of the belief that you must go and search out that which others collectively despise, because those are usually the very same things that give off glimmers of brilliance.
She Hate Me is a satire and a drama, and it does not fit into any box, and it does not want, or allow, any of its characters to fit into a box. It is messy and sprawling and uneven. It is about sex and money and power and money and sex and money and family and money and sex and what we will do, or think that we have to do, for sex and money. It is about our own images of morality.
It is raw and shaky and not altogether cohesive, like a lot of Spike Lee's films. It is ragged. It juts out. It is sprawling and a little unfocused. Kind of like life (only better lit, with a pretty cool music score, too, which life, unfortunately, lacks.)
Much of the criticism directed at the film had to do with its 'realism'.
A young black executive who is laid off from his corporation because the owners are crooked, callous, Enron-type scumbags who've stolen all the company's money decides to become a stud-for-hire and impregnate lesbians who are unwilling to risk having sperm-donors be the future fathers of their unborn children.
The idea is ludicrous, I grant you that.
But here's the thing: Lee's not going for realism.
It is a satire about money and power. He is playing and toying and challenging the stereotypes we all have about each other. He is asking you to consider what you know and why you know it.
"It's ridiculous that all these lesbian women are enjoying having sex with this man! How condescending! What a patriarchal male fantasy!"
That's what much of the criticism amounted to.
Hmmm. Do you think that maybe, just maybe, Lee is playing with our image of the black super-stud? Do you think he's possibly using these scenes to point out the ridiculousness of such stereotypes: Wow, here's a guy so skilled, so potent, that even lesbians love him!
Or consider the Italian woman he sleeps with, who, when telling him about her family, says: "Relax -- not all Italians are in the Mafia, you know."
And then we see that, of course, her family's in the Mafia. Her father even spouts long passages from The Godfather.
Stereotypes.
About race, ethnicity, sexuality.
This is a film that comes at you in a thousand different directions. It is long (perhaps too long), and the ending is not only somewhat unlikely, but a touch absurd, too.
That's why I liked it.
Movies are not made to be judged equally. Movies are not made equally. They are worlds unto themselves. She Hate Me is about the new age we live in, refracted and reflected. And yet, don't think of its world as our world. People and places are exaggerated and distorted to make a point. Characters and their actions can be seen as metaphors for entire segments of society.
I'm not saying you have to love the fim, or even like it. Humor and style and technique are personal, and you may not respond or react to how they're used here. That's fine. That's the essence of what makes movies work -- our likes and dislikes, our strange passions and quirky loves.
But it just seems that so much of modern cinema is made to be easily chewed, digested, forgotten about. It tells us what it's going to say, says it, then tells us again what it said. We leave the theatre smiling and happy and wondering what's on the radio. She Hate Me left me entertained, yes, but also bewildered, confused and unsure about what I'd seen or what it was supposed to mean.
The film allows you to be a co-conspirator, and it expects you, demands you, to bring your own ideas and insights along for the ride.
Saturday, February 26, 2005
THE ROCKETS' RED GLARE, THE BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR, THE TRUE NORTH STRONG AND FREE, WE STAND ON GUARD FOR THEE
So Canada has decided to opt out of the missle defence shield that American wants to implement up in the sky sometime soon.
I know, I know -- you're dismayed, confused, disappointed.
No?
Okay, maybe you haven't heard this news yet, and wouldn't exactly feel disturbed one way or the other now that you have heard it.
I'm with you.
It's does have at least the potential of being interesting, though, if only because it strikes at the heart of certain Canadian insecurities and contradictions, of who we are and where we want to go.
I think what happened is, Paul Martin, Canada's Prime Minister, bowed to political pressure from within his own party, other parties and Canada itself. Before he was prime minister, he was for the shield; now, looking at another re-election, possibly sometime soon, he's against it.
The thing is, let's say there's a missle launched from some bad and evil and petty country, and that missle is targeted at Dubya's bedroom window, and to reach said window, it has to fly its merry course over Canada's airspace.
If Canada isn't in on this super-duper shield thingee, theoretically, Dubya would have to pick up his bedside phone and ask Prime Minister Martin for permission to shoot down that pesky missle, and Paul would have to think about it, consult some people, get back to Dubya first thing in the morning, sleep tight now.
Does that sound likely?
Uh-uh.
We know that the States would want to down that missle whether Canada is with the program or not. End of story.
The larger issue is one of Canadian soverignty, and indepence, and not-relying-on-all-those-crazy-Yanks-down-south.
Canadians have a really weird relationship to Americans. We watch all of their movies and TV, and read their authors, and play their music, and shop over the border whenever we can, and lose our freakin' minds when Conan O'Brien does a week of shows in Canada featuring only Canadian guests, but we still like to assume that we're better, superior, more enlightened than our next door neighbours, even though a heck of a lot of Canadians don't actually know any Americans personally.
I think Canada is a fundamentally different breed of country than America, if only because we've grown up in the shadow of a superpower, but we're not a superpower, and so we've had to figure out, and are still endlessly figuring out: What are we, then, if we ain't the big kid on the block? (Hopefully not a New Kid on the Block, because that band broke up a long time ago, and they were pretty lame to begin with.)
I'm not saying that Canadians opposed to the shield are wrong; they're morally right in their own minds, and you can never cavalierly dismiss someone's morals. Hell, I'm inclined to oppose the shield too, if only for patriotic reasons.
Are these reasons pragmatic or practical, though?
Hmmm.
That's more difficult.
We live in a tough, unforgiving age. In other words, bad stuff, really bad stuff, can happen quick, soon, now.
America is going to do what they want to do whether we like it or not.
The question is, how do we respond? How do we stand up for ourselves? How do we chart an independent course while being, essentially, dependent on the States for our security and well-being? After living in Japan (thousands of years old, with their own freakin' language) and Cambodia (thousands of years old, also with their own freakin' language), I've finally realized how young Canada is, how fundamentally immature and developing this great country is, this cultural mosaic of every language and shade known under the sun.
We've still got a long way to go, though. Got a lot of questions to answer. A lot of uncharted waters to navigate through.
I don't have any answers, but the questions keep coming, and how we respond to those questions in a mature, realistic fashion is what will allow the ongoing Canadian experiment to reach the next level, and the next, and the one after that.
I know, I know -- you're dismayed, confused, disappointed.
No?
Okay, maybe you haven't heard this news yet, and wouldn't exactly feel disturbed one way or the other now that you have heard it.
I'm with you.
It's does have at least the potential of being interesting, though, if only because it strikes at the heart of certain Canadian insecurities and contradictions, of who we are and where we want to go.
I think what happened is, Paul Martin, Canada's Prime Minister, bowed to political pressure from within his own party, other parties and Canada itself. Before he was prime minister, he was for the shield; now, looking at another re-election, possibly sometime soon, he's against it.
The thing is, let's say there's a missle launched from some bad and evil and petty country, and that missle is targeted at Dubya's bedroom window, and to reach said window, it has to fly its merry course over Canada's airspace.
If Canada isn't in on this super-duper shield thingee, theoretically, Dubya would have to pick up his bedside phone and ask Prime Minister Martin for permission to shoot down that pesky missle, and Paul would have to think about it, consult some people, get back to Dubya first thing in the morning, sleep tight now.
Does that sound likely?
Uh-uh.
We know that the States would want to down that missle whether Canada is with the program or not. End of story.
The larger issue is one of Canadian soverignty, and indepence, and not-relying-on-all-those-crazy-Yanks-down-south.
Canadians have a really weird relationship to Americans. We watch all of their movies and TV, and read their authors, and play their music, and shop over the border whenever we can, and lose our freakin' minds when Conan O'Brien does a week of shows in Canada featuring only Canadian guests, but we still like to assume that we're better, superior, more enlightened than our next door neighbours, even though a heck of a lot of Canadians don't actually know any Americans personally.
I think Canada is a fundamentally different breed of country than America, if only because we've grown up in the shadow of a superpower, but we're not a superpower, and so we've had to figure out, and are still endlessly figuring out: What are we, then, if we ain't the big kid on the block? (Hopefully not a New Kid on the Block, because that band broke up a long time ago, and they were pretty lame to begin with.)
I'm not saying that Canadians opposed to the shield are wrong; they're morally right in their own minds, and you can never cavalierly dismiss someone's morals. Hell, I'm inclined to oppose the shield too, if only for patriotic reasons.
Are these reasons pragmatic or practical, though?
Hmmm.
That's more difficult.
We live in a tough, unforgiving age. In other words, bad stuff, really bad stuff, can happen quick, soon, now.
America is going to do what they want to do whether we like it or not.
The question is, how do we respond? How do we stand up for ourselves? How do we chart an independent course while being, essentially, dependent on the States for our security and well-being? After living in Japan (thousands of years old, with their own freakin' language) and Cambodia (thousands of years old, also with their own freakin' language), I've finally realized how young Canada is, how fundamentally immature and developing this great country is, this cultural mosaic of every language and shade known under the sun.
We've still got a long way to go, though. Got a lot of questions to answer. A lot of uncharted waters to navigate through.
I don't have any answers, but the questions keep coming, and how we respond to those questions in a mature, realistic fashion is what will allow the ongoing Canadian experiment to reach the next level, and the next, and the one after that.
CALL YOURSELF HUMAN
It's fascinating, how you can be walking along, thinking thoughts, counting steps, wondering what to eat for dinner, wondering what you always wonder, and then have your life flip-flopped and tweaked.
Yesterday, I was heading home from work, my white-dress shirt gradually growing damp with sweat as the hot Khmer sun slowly made its lingering descent. (A Cambodian dusk is always a welcome event.) Approaching the stoplight at Sihanouk and Monivong, I heard the excited chatter of children up above.
"Hello! Hello! Hello!"
There were maybe six of them, waving at me, smiling. I waved back, smiled. Cambodian children embody goodwill.
And then the nun came out.
Like, a real nun, the Mother Teresa kind, wearing the same blue and white traditional garb.
"Hello!" she said. "Come inside, come inside, sir."
She grabbed my arm and tugged me along, this smiling Cambodian woman. I checked out the sign on the side of the building: SISTERS OF MERCY MINISTRIES, I think it said.
What am I going to do, say no to a nun? (Even agnostics have to hedge their bets every now and then.)
Up the slight row of stairs, and there they were -- kids, a couple dozen of them, from infants to ten year olds, playing on the ground, resting in their beds. Some of them were smiling and healthy. Some of them just layed there, their eyes distant and blank. I met one boy, perhaps two, who had no hands; they looked as if they had been hacked off, leaving only two little stumps. So I smiled and shook the stumps.
Does that sound strange? It is. It's strange and bizarre and heartbreaking beyond belief, shaking the stumps of a two year old boy. It makes you feel sick and guilty and helpless.
The nun pointed out another child that had just arrived that day. He had five brothers and sisters, and the father had just been killed in a construction accident, leaving the mother unable to care for this newborn. So, here he was. The nuns took him in, no questions asked, mind the stairs on your way out. Simple. There was an Asian-Canadian woman there from Toronto, where I went to university, helping out with the kids. Strange, the connections that can be forged so far from home.
Have you ever been in an orphanage? After teaching in a few of them, I can reassure you that they are very, very humbling places. And a Cambodian orphanage can take the cake. Any worries you have about your own life are thrown out the window, instantly. You don't want to consider the lives of these children in the future. Even their lives now are somewhat sad, or completely sad. One little boy just came up to me and grabbed onto my leg and wouldn't let go, as if I were his favorite uncle, not some total stranger. The nun told me that these children have very few people to talk to, hug, hold. Come back anytime, she said. Anytime.
And, of course, as the announcers on TV would say, 'these are the lucky ones'. And they are. There are a lot of kids in Cambodia that dwell on the streets, sleep in the rain, scavenge for food. These kids have light, space, warmth.
I'll come back, if only to chill with the kids for a little while. If only to get in touch with something that is so remote and yet so near.
I walk by this place every day! I'm outside, and they're inside, and that's the conundrum right there. None of this is different from what goes on back home, of course; none of this is necessary unique. It's the details and degrees that are different, the hacked off limbs, the deformities from birth. I have hands and some of them don't; I have a place to go to, and they don't.
Maudlin, I know, and self-pitying, and all those other emotions that Cambodia drags up from inside you. A perpetual pity party, if you want to look at it that way.
But it's important, I think, to remember that there are places, on the same roads that we walk, the same streets that we drive, that are filled with the forgotten, the left behind, and those who dedicate their lives, with no reward, to helping them get by. It's important to remember what society chooses to forget.
If we don't, how else can we truly, honestly call ourselves human?
Yesterday, I was heading home from work, my white-dress shirt gradually growing damp with sweat as the hot Khmer sun slowly made its lingering descent. (A Cambodian dusk is always a welcome event.) Approaching the stoplight at Sihanouk and Monivong, I heard the excited chatter of children up above.
"Hello! Hello! Hello!"
There were maybe six of them, waving at me, smiling. I waved back, smiled. Cambodian children embody goodwill.
And then the nun came out.
Like, a real nun, the Mother Teresa kind, wearing the same blue and white traditional garb.
"Hello!" she said. "Come inside, come inside, sir."
She grabbed my arm and tugged me along, this smiling Cambodian woman. I checked out the sign on the side of the building: SISTERS OF MERCY MINISTRIES, I think it said.
What am I going to do, say no to a nun? (Even agnostics have to hedge their bets every now and then.)
Up the slight row of stairs, and there they were -- kids, a couple dozen of them, from infants to ten year olds, playing on the ground, resting in their beds. Some of them were smiling and healthy. Some of them just layed there, their eyes distant and blank. I met one boy, perhaps two, who had no hands; they looked as if they had been hacked off, leaving only two little stumps. So I smiled and shook the stumps.
Does that sound strange? It is. It's strange and bizarre and heartbreaking beyond belief, shaking the stumps of a two year old boy. It makes you feel sick and guilty and helpless.
The nun pointed out another child that had just arrived that day. He had five brothers and sisters, and the father had just been killed in a construction accident, leaving the mother unable to care for this newborn. So, here he was. The nuns took him in, no questions asked, mind the stairs on your way out. Simple. There was an Asian-Canadian woman there from Toronto, where I went to university, helping out with the kids. Strange, the connections that can be forged so far from home.
Have you ever been in an orphanage? After teaching in a few of them, I can reassure you that they are very, very humbling places. And a Cambodian orphanage can take the cake. Any worries you have about your own life are thrown out the window, instantly. You don't want to consider the lives of these children in the future. Even their lives now are somewhat sad, or completely sad. One little boy just came up to me and grabbed onto my leg and wouldn't let go, as if I were his favorite uncle, not some total stranger. The nun told me that these children have very few people to talk to, hug, hold. Come back anytime, she said. Anytime.
And, of course, as the announcers on TV would say, 'these are the lucky ones'. And they are. There are a lot of kids in Cambodia that dwell on the streets, sleep in the rain, scavenge for food. These kids have light, space, warmth.
I'll come back, if only to chill with the kids for a little while. If only to get in touch with something that is so remote and yet so near.
I walk by this place every day! I'm outside, and they're inside, and that's the conundrum right there. None of this is different from what goes on back home, of course; none of this is necessary unique. It's the details and degrees that are different, the hacked off limbs, the deformities from birth. I have hands and some of them don't; I have a place to go to, and they don't.
Maudlin, I know, and self-pitying, and all those other emotions that Cambodia drags up from inside you. A perpetual pity party, if you want to look at it that way.
But it's important, I think, to remember that there are places, on the same roads that we walk, the same streets that we drive, that are filled with the forgotten, the left behind, and those who dedicate their lives, with no reward, to helping them get by. It's important to remember what society chooses to forget.
If we don't, how else can we truly, honestly call ourselves human?
Friday, February 25, 2005
WHY CHRIS MAY (OR MAY NOT) ROCK THE OSCARS
Once again, I'm stuck in Asia when the Oscars roll around.
I've missed them the last, what, six years, having been in Japan and Cambodia without cable. Now I have cable, true, but I think the show's airing taped, a couple of days after the event. (Incidentally, cable in Cambodia is weird -- you get channels from Italy and the Philippines and Taiwan and Indonesia and Thailand and Malaysia and Singapore. Rich Cambodians can even watch selected Canadian dramas, should they so choose. Nobody in Canada watches Canadian dramas, so I'm not sure why Thai TV carries them, but...)
I'll get to see the show, I guess -- just not live.
That's when Chris Rock works best.
Chris Rock is, I think, one of the funniest stand-up comedians I've seen in the last decade. Probably the funniest. Because he tells the truth.
Notice I said 'stand-up'. On Saturday Night Live and in the movies, Rock comes across as rather stiff and uncomfortable. Not a good actor, I don't think, although the movie he directed, Head of State, had its moments. They were few and far between, but when they hit, they hit.
Chris Rock live, however, no-holds barred, is a sight to see. He is blunt and political and nasty. He stalks the stage like a panther looking for its kill. More importantly: he's funny. Laugh-out loud funny. Sometimes piss-your-pants funny. Sometimes silly, often crude, always blatant. Seinfeld says what we're all thinking; Rock says what he's thinking, which is always riskier. And usually funnier, too.
(At the same time, I don't think he oozes comedy. Guys like Jim Carrey and Eddie Murphy and Martin Short and Mike Myers -- if you think they're funny, that is -- seem to me to be touched by the comedic gods. They are comedy personified. And, yes, three of those dudes are Canadian, but I'm not nominating them for nationalistic reasons. I swear. Look, we guys also gave the world Celine Dion, so I know we're not perfect.)
Rock works for his jokes. He gets that wild look in his eyes as he stalks out the laughs before slaying them, and us. They are, quite often, pointed commentaries on racism in American society. I can't vouch for their accuracy, not being American, but I can vouch for their impact. He's funny.
(Not that he's only about race. Funny is funny is funny, and he's funny no matter what he's talking about. He's got a quick, agile mind. I saw him on Regis once talking about his newborn daughter: "I just hope she doesn't end up on the pole." Regis asks him what the 'pole' is. Rock says: "The stripper pole. If your daughter ends up on the pole, you have officially failed as a father. End of story.")
The Academy Awards, God love 'em, can be a bit stuffy, though. I have no doubt Rock's jokes will be clean. I have no doubt they'll be funny, too. I just wonder if some kind of comedic disconnect will take place, because everybody's so uptight and waiting and wondering if they're going to win that little bald and golden trophy, and then they have to sweat it out and listen to Rock try and slam the industry that they're a part of. If the audience's not into it, if they wait a little too long to laugh, that silence might seem really long and really deep as it passes on through the TV screen.
But good luck to him. Chris Rock tells the truth (as he sees it), and he seems to me to be in the tradition of Bill Cosby and Bob Newhart and Jerry Seinfeld, who were all reporters whose primary beat was life itself, the small stuff and the big stuff. Fundamentally, the human stuff.
Let's hope Rock rocks so he'll keep on having a forum for telling the truth for as long as we want to hear it.
I've missed them the last, what, six years, having been in Japan and Cambodia without cable. Now I have cable, true, but I think the show's airing taped, a couple of days after the event. (Incidentally, cable in Cambodia is weird -- you get channels from Italy and the Philippines and Taiwan and Indonesia and Thailand and Malaysia and Singapore. Rich Cambodians can even watch selected Canadian dramas, should they so choose. Nobody in Canada watches Canadian dramas, so I'm not sure why Thai TV carries them, but...)
I'll get to see the show, I guess -- just not live.
That's when Chris Rock works best.
Chris Rock is, I think, one of the funniest stand-up comedians I've seen in the last decade. Probably the funniest. Because he tells the truth.
Notice I said 'stand-up'. On Saturday Night Live and in the movies, Rock comes across as rather stiff and uncomfortable. Not a good actor, I don't think, although the movie he directed, Head of State, had its moments. They were few and far between, but when they hit, they hit.
Chris Rock live, however, no-holds barred, is a sight to see. He is blunt and political and nasty. He stalks the stage like a panther looking for its kill. More importantly: he's funny. Laugh-out loud funny. Sometimes piss-your-pants funny. Sometimes silly, often crude, always blatant. Seinfeld says what we're all thinking; Rock says what he's thinking, which is always riskier. And usually funnier, too.
(At the same time, I don't think he oozes comedy. Guys like Jim Carrey and Eddie Murphy and Martin Short and Mike Myers -- if you think they're funny, that is -- seem to me to be touched by the comedic gods. They are comedy personified. And, yes, three of those dudes are Canadian, but I'm not nominating them for nationalistic reasons. I swear. Look, we guys also gave the world Celine Dion, so I know we're not perfect.)
Rock works for his jokes. He gets that wild look in his eyes as he stalks out the laughs before slaying them, and us. They are, quite often, pointed commentaries on racism in American society. I can't vouch for their accuracy, not being American, but I can vouch for their impact. He's funny.
(Not that he's only about race. Funny is funny is funny, and he's funny no matter what he's talking about. He's got a quick, agile mind. I saw him on Regis once talking about his newborn daughter: "I just hope she doesn't end up on the pole." Regis asks him what the 'pole' is. Rock says: "The stripper pole. If your daughter ends up on the pole, you have officially failed as a father. End of story.")
The Academy Awards, God love 'em, can be a bit stuffy, though. I have no doubt Rock's jokes will be clean. I have no doubt they'll be funny, too. I just wonder if some kind of comedic disconnect will take place, because everybody's so uptight and waiting and wondering if they're going to win that little bald and golden trophy, and then they have to sweat it out and listen to Rock try and slam the industry that they're a part of. If the audience's not into it, if they wait a little too long to laugh, that silence might seem really long and really deep as it passes on through the TV screen.
But good luck to him. Chris Rock tells the truth (as he sees it), and he seems to me to be in the tradition of Bill Cosby and Bob Newhart and Jerry Seinfeld, who were all reporters whose primary beat was life itself, the small stuff and the big stuff. Fundamentally, the human stuff.
Let's hope Rock rocks so he'll keep on having a forum for telling the truth for as long as we want to hear it.
AS TIME GOES BY: JOANIE LOVES CHACHI, INEVITABLY FALLING ICE CREAM CONES, AND WHY NOT TO CHEW GUM ONSTAGE AT YOUR HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION
I refuse to believe it's February just because the calendar says it is, not only because it's bloody hot and freakin' sunny out, as it is all day, every day, but also because I'm convinced that time has sped up since I've graduated university, that the universe itself has undergone some radical shift in temporal distortions, unless it's only now, on the cusp of thirty, that I'm finally realizing how life works.
Kurt Vonnegut knows how life works. He's simultaneously the funniest writer I've ever read and also the most serious. Don't know how he does it, but he does, and in one of his older books I'm reading right now, Palm Sunday, he often returns to the idea of time, of how all of us are mere newcomers to this world, of how, when children accuse their parents of being screw-ups, the best one can say is, essentially: "What do you want from me? I just got here!"
It's true, isn't it? We all just got here. I'm (supposedly) going to be thirty this year, but I can't quite believe it, because last week I was in Grade Five, standing at the front of the class giving a stellar speech on why comic books are the greatest known things in the history of mankind, and just the other day I was graduating high school, chewing gum while I was up on stage the whole time before getting chewed out in turn by Mrs.Forgeron when I went to go pick up my coat at the end of the night: "Scott, you were chewing gum up on stage the whole time!"
(The moral is: Don't chew gum during really important events, because your high school English teacher will rip you a new crevice for doing so.)
And I've never seen Mrs.Forgeron since that night, and, while that isn't particularly strange, one not having seen one's high school English teacher since, well, high school, it does kind of make me sad, because that's the last thing I remember of her, and it's a funny moment, a human moment, and it's imprinted in my psyche, that single point in time before time itself started to rocket forward, with me in the caboose, hanging on for dear life.
So, yes, we all just got here, and guess what? We're all leaving here soon, too.
A morbid thought?
Not necessarily. As Woody Allen once said (far funnier than I will), not only is there no God, but trying finding a plumber on a Sunday.
In other words, the practical aspects of life are often more of a pain-in-the-butt than the cosmic questions. And death is certainly a pain-in-the-butt, but you can't get more everyday than that, or more mind-blowingly, galactically incomprehensible, either.
And they're the same thing, in any event -- the daily life and the cosmic. It's all tied together in this impenetrable, unfathomable spiral of space and time that scoots us along. We hang on and go for the ride. I'm trying to figure out how to survive Phnom Penh one day at a time, while the solar system continues to expand and contract, or do whatever it does.
(Not that I can understand all that, either. Like space -- how come there's no up or down? Can someone explain it to me in a way that actually sounds logical, or plausible, or even possible, 'cause I just don't get it. Whenever someone accuses me of writing a story or a blog that isn't plausible, I just point up at the moon and say: "Is that freakin' orb plausible?" Okay, I don't really say that, but I've thought about it.)
I think the best thing do is hope and plan for a long and healthy and happy life, understanding that it's going to go by in less than a blink of an eye, that disease and death are all we have to look forward to, and that all of our random acts of kindess and violence, our Valentine's Day cards and Christmas hugs, our stabs-in-the-backs and momentary moments of heartfelt reconciliation are all merely candles in the wind, as transitory and meaningless as Joanie Loves Chachi. (Not their love, which I'm confident is eternal and bursting with meaning, but their show, which was actually pretty good, if my seven-year old self can be trusted. So maybe there was some meaning in its demise, after all, if only because it allows me a fond memory of me and my best friend Mariano, both age seven, laughing with glee on the porch of my old house at a Mad Magazine parody of the show, Joanie Loves Chooch it was called, where Joanie spent the entire story plotting to kill Chachi with a kitchen knife. I remember so much of that moment, that stupid and wonderful childhood memory, and I refuse to believe that it happened twenty-two years ago. Not possible. Didn't that show just get cancelled two years ago or something? Seems like it...)
And don't discount or discard those strange, fleeting moments of bliss, those seconds of happiness that suddenly pop up when you're combing your hair, or stepping out of the shower, or watching a three year old drop his ice cream cone onto the floor as his eyes grow wide in disbelief at the unfairness of the universe. (Get used to it, kid.)
They're all we've got, those moments.
Maybe they're enough.
Kurt Vonnegut knows how life works. He's simultaneously the funniest writer I've ever read and also the most serious. Don't know how he does it, but he does, and in one of his older books I'm reading right now, Palm Sunday, he often returns to the idea of time, of how all of us are mere newcomers to this world, of how, when children accuse their parents of being screw-ups, the best one can say is, essentially: "What do you want from me? I just got here!"
It's true, isn't it? We all just got here. I'm (supposedly) going to be thirty this year, but I can't quite believe it, because last week I was in Grade Five, standing at the front of the class giving a stellar speech on why comic books are the greatest known things in the history of mankind, and just the other day I was graduating high school, chewing gum while I was up on stage the whole time before getting chewed out in turn by Mrs.Forgeron when I went to go pick up my coat at the end of the night: "Scott, you were chewing gum up on stage the whole time!"
(The moral is: Don't chew gum during really important events, because your high school English teacher will rip you a new crevice for doing so.)
And I've never seen Mrs.Forgeron since that night, and, while that isn't particularly strange, one not having seen one's high school English teacher since, well, high school, it does kind of make me sad, because that's the last thing I remember of her, and it's a funny moment, a human moment, and it's imprinted in my psyche, that single point in time before time itself started to rocket forward, with me in the caboose, hanging on for dear life.
So, yes, we all just got here, and guess what? We're all leaving here soon, too.
A morbid thought?
Not necessarily. As Woody Allen once said (far funnier than I will), not only is there no God, but trying finding a plumber on a Sunday.
In other words, the practical aspects of life are often more of a pain-in-the-butt than the cosmic questions. And death is certainly a pain-in-the-butt, but you can't get more everyday than that, or more mind-blowingly, galactically incomprehensible, either.
And they're the same thing, in any event -- the daily life and the cosmic. It's all tied together in this impenetrable, unfathomable spiral of space and time that scoots us along. We hang on and go for the ride. I'm trying to figure out how to survive Phnom Penh one day at a time, while the solar system continues to expand and contract, or do whatever it does.
(Not that I can understand all that, either. Like space -- how come there's no up or down? Can someone explain it to me in a way that actually sounds logical, or plausible, or even possible, 'cause I just don't get it. Whenever someone accuses me of writing a story or a blog that isn't plausible, I just point up at the moon and say: "Is that freakin' orb plausible?" Okay, I don't really say that, but I've thought about it.)
I think the best thing do is hope and plan for a long and healthy and happy life, understanding that it's going to go by in less than a blink of an eye, that disease and death are all we have to look forward to, and that all of our random acts of kindess and violence, our Valentine's Day cards and Christmas hugs, our stabs-in-the-backs and momentary moments of heartfelt reconciliation are all merely candles in the wind, as transitory and meaningless as Joanie Loves Chachi. (Not their love, which I'm confident is eternal and bursting with meaning, but their show, which was actually pretty good, if my seven-year old self can be trusted. So maybe there was some meaning in its demise, after all, if only because it allows me a fond memory of me and my best friend Mariano, both age seven, laughing with glee on the porch of my old house at a Mad Magazine parody of the show, Joanie Loves Chooch it was called, where Joanie spent the entire story plotting to kill Chachi with a kitchen knife. I remember so much of that moment, that stupid and wonderful childhood memory, and I refuse to believe that it happened twenty-two years ago. Not possible. Didn't that show just get cancelled two years ago or something? Seems like it...)
And don't discount or discard those strange, fleeting moments of bliss, those seconds of happiness that suddenly pop up when you're combing your hair, or stepping out of the shower, or watching a three year old drop his ice cream cone onto the floor as his eyes grow wide in disbelief at the unfairness of the universe. (Get used to it, kid.)
They're all we've got, those moments.
Maybe they're enough.
EITHER WAY
Sometimes I think it would be nice to move back to my hometown and get a small apartment and find a job at the arena where I used to play hockey as a kid, Bill Burgoyne Arena, where I could work in the concession stand, serving Cokes to parents who wait patiently for their kids to emerge, stinky and sweaty, from the after-game calm of the dressing rooms, as my parents once waited for me. In the downtime I could read books, jot notes for my own book, observe a place and a time that was once simply part of my life and is now only a memory of life. I could get reacquainted with the city and the people that made me. Not a bad gig, really -- the cold of the arena, the sounds of slapshots and whistles, the faces of the kids. I could take a skate every now and then, I'm sure. Hot chocolate whenever you want. There are worse places to work.
And then I think no, no, Matsue is the place to live, because Matsue is this small town in Shimane Prefecture in Japan, along the west coast, where I once visited because the great writer Lafcadio Hearn, Greek by origin, lived there, writing his thoughts and observations on Japanese life and culture in the nineteenth century, which helped me formulate my own (probably wrong) theories on Japan, and I wanted to see what he saw, feel what he felt. I went and visited his house, the house that he lived in over a hundred years ago, the house where he wrote many of his books. Very cool (to someone like me). It's a nice town, quiet and near the ocean, and not so small that you would become lost in your own foreignness. There's a few English schools there, and even though I vowed that I wouldn't want to teach English in Japan again, it wouldn't be all that bad, all things considered. A change of pace from the Tokyo suburbs and the Phnom Penh lunacy. There would be the ocean relatively nearby, and temples, and I could work on my Japanese. I'm sure there's lots of local festivals throughout the year that would bewilder and fascinate me.
I think I could carve out a life, either way.
And then I think no, no, Matsue is the place to live, because Matsue is this small town in Shimane Prefecture in Japan, along the west coast, where I once visited because the great writer Lafcadio Hearn, Greek by origin, lived there, writing his thoughts and observations on Japanese life and culture in the nineteenth century, which helped me formulate my own (probably wrong) theories on Japan, and I wanted to see what he saw, feel what he felt. I went and visited his house, the house that he lived in over a hundred years ago, the house where he wrote many of his books. Very cool (to someone like me). It's a nice town, quiet and near the ocean, and not so small that you would become lost in your own foreignness. There's a few English schools there, and even though I vowed that I wouldn't want to teach English in Japan again, it wouldn't be all that bad, all things considered. A change of pace from the Tokyo suburbs and the Phnom Penh lunacy. There would be the ocean relatively nearby, and temples, and I could work on my Japanese. I'm sure there's lots of local festivals throughout the year that would bewilder and fascinate me.
I think I could carve out a life, either way.
Thursday, February 24, 2005
ISN'T THAT CLEVER?
So super-canuck Keanu Reeve's next movie is about a lonely guy living in an empty house who ends up exchanging letters with Sandra Bullock, who also somehow lives in that same house, only two years in the future, see, so they have a long-temporal relationship going on, not merely a long-distance one.
Clever.
And Brad Pitt's new movie will be about a young actor (played by Pitt) who looks exactly like the hot young film star 'Brad Pitt', thus experiencing daily humiliations and frustrations as he's constantly compared to his better-known, better-paid lookalike.
Also clever.
That's the problem, though.
So much of modern storytelling is obsessed with being clever.
If something's not wacky, zany, odd and weird, it won't get made, or it won't be considered good, or it won't be considered, period.
So we have the movie Adaptation, which was all about the screenwriter of Adaptation writing a movie that turns out to be...Adaptation.
And we have movies like the recent Kevin Spacey directed Bobby Darin bio-pic Beyond The Sea, which is a fictional movie-within-a-movie kinda thing, where Spacey plays Bobby Darin directing a movie about himself, in which he interacts with his younger, boyhood self.
Oh, and then there's The Village, which has a big twist I won't tell you about that others guessed, but I didn't, cuz I'm not that swift, but it, too, is, altogether now, 'clever'.
Don't get me wrong. I actually really liked all of the above movies. (Even The Village. Scared the bejesus out of me. Not that I had much jesus in me anyways, but...)
It's the trend that scares me. The impulse to move beyond other aspects of storytelling, things like character, and theme, and mood, and into the more transitory, isn't-that-an-awesome realm of cleverness.
It's a matter of space and time, I think. Movies exist in two hour blocks, right, and so you better say what you gotta say, quick, or else everyone's going to lose interest. (Kind of like a blog.) That's why Norman Mailer, the great writer, once said that sportswriters are faced with the burden of being clever. Meaning, a novelist has space and time in abundance; he or she doesn't have to rely on being clever (which usually means snide) to hold someone's attention. A sportswriter's gotta prove his literary worth right off the bat.
You ever read David Foster Wallace? His mammoth novel Infinite Jest is damn clever, but it's cleverness stretched out to thirteen hundred pages. It's fiction, but there's footnotes, and when you check the footnote at the back of the book, you'll often find fifty or sixty more pages of the story, continued. So what do you do? Read the footnote, and lose track of the main text, or read the text, and wonder what the hell the footnote was all about? Clever. And genius, too, because he had the space (and the balls) to provide a not-altogether-comfortable cushion of depth to that cleverness. (Incidentally, I saw Wallace give a reading about nine years ago at the Toronto Harborfrount literary festival. As I was waiting in line for him to sign my book -- or, rather, his book -- a photographer took a picture, a flash picture, a bright picture. "If you could get that so the flash would fill my entire field of vision, that would be great," Wallace said. Clever.)
So what I'm advocating? Originality, yes. Innovation, of course. But also the other, more rounded parts of stories. The stuff that can't be pitched in a, um, pitch.
Go watch Osama, about a young girl in Taliban Afghanistan. I'm serious. I know, I know, you've seen so many Afghani movies recently, and they always disappoint you, but this one won't. You must see this movie. It's blunt and brutal and beautiful. Nothing 'clever' about it. It focuses on a girl, and her country, and her life.
I'm thinking of Cambodia. Of the street kids I see every day. Of what their lives must be like, their mornings and evenings, their childhoods and (hopefully) their adolescents. Wow. What a story it would make. Your heart would have to break.
I read and watch and love all kinds of stoires, but there has to be a foundation centred on something real and lasting. Stories have got to emerge from people and places, not from cheap gimmicks.
Now, having said all that, I've got this really cool idea for a ghost story, where the ghosts travel through not only space and the bridge between life and death but between time, too, so you'd have this situation where a new father's lying in bed, right, sleeping beside his newborn baby, barely six, seven months old, and then he sees his bedroom door slowly open, and who should enter but the ghost of his still-living child, only the ghost is a four year old boy, not a baby, so he now knows that his kid only has three more years to live...
Kind of clever, no?
Clever.
And Brad Pitt's new movie will be about a young actor (played by Pitt) who looks exactly like the hot young film star 'Brad Pitt', thus experiencing daily humiliations and frustrations as he's constantly compared to his better-known, better-paid lookalike.
Also clever.
That's the problem, though.
So much of modern storytelling is obsessed with being clever.
If something's not wacky, zany, odd and weird, it won't get made, or it won't be considered good, or it won't be considered, period.
So we have the movie Adaptation, which was all about the screenwriter of Adaptation writing a movie that turns out to be...Adaptation.
And we have movies like the recent Kevin Spacey directed Bobby Darin bio-pic Beyond The Sea, which is a fictional movie-within-a-movie kinda thing, where Spacey plays Bobby Darin directing a movie about himself, in which he interacts with his younger, boyhood self.
Oh, and then there's The Village, which has a big twist I won't tell you about that others guessed, but I didn't, cuz I'm not that swift, but it, too, is, altogether now, 'clever'.
Don't get me wrong. I actually really liked all of the above movies. (Even The Village. Scared the bejesus out of me. Not that I had much jesus in me anyways, but...)
It's the trend that scares me. The impulse to move beyond other aspects of storytelling, things like character, and theme, and mood, and into the more transitory, isn't-that-an-awesome realm of cleverness.
It's a matter of space and time, I think. Movies exist in two hour blocks, right, and so you better say what you gotta say, quick, or else everyone's going to lose interest. (Kind of like a blog.) That's why Norman Mailer, the great writer, once said that sportswriters are faced with the burden of being clever. Meaning, a novelist has space and time in abundance; he or she doesn't have to rely on being clever (which usually means snide) to hold someone's attention. A sportswriter's gotta prove his literary worth right off the bat.
You ever read David Foster Wallace? His mammoth novel Infinite Jest is damn clever, but it's cleverness stretched out to thirteen hundred pages. It's fiction, but there's footnotes, and when you check the footnote at the back of the book, you'll often find fifty or sixty more pages of the story, continued. So what do you do? Read the footnote, and lose track of the main text, or read the text, and wonder what the hell the footnote was all about? Clever. And genius, too, because he had the space (and the balls) to provide a not-altogether-comfortable cushion of depth to that cleverness. (Incidentally, I saw Wallace give a reading about nine years ago at the Toronto Harborfrount literary festival. As I was waiting in line for him to sign my book -- or, rather, his book -- a photographer took a picture, a flash picture, a bright picture. "If you could get that so the flash would fill my entire field of vision, that would be great," Wallace said. Clever.)
So what I'm advocating? Originality, yes. Innovation, of course. But also the other, more rounded parts of stories. The stuff that can't be pitched in a, um, pitch.
Go watch Osama, about a young girl in Taliban Afghanistan. I'm serious. I know, I know, you've seen so many Afghani movies recently, and they always disappoint you, but this one won't. You must see this movie. It's blunt and brutal and beautiful. Nothing 'clever' about it. It focuses on a girl, and her country, and her life.
I'm thinking of Cambodia. Of the street kids I see every day. Of what their lives must be like, their mornings and evenings, their childhoods and (hopefully) their adolescents. Wow. What a story it would make. Your heart would have to break.
I read and watch and love all kinds of stoires, but there has to be a foundation centred on something real and lasting. Stories have got to emerge from people and places, not from cheap gimmicks.
Now, having said all that, I've got this really cool idea for a ghost story, where the ghosts travel through not only space and the bridge between life and death but between time, too, so you'd have this situation where a new father's lying in bed, right, sleeping beside his newborn baby, barely six, seven months old, and then he sees his bedroom door slowly open, and who should enter but the ghost of his still-living child, only the ghost is a four year old boy, not a baby, so he now knows that his kid only has three more years to live...
Kind of clever, no?
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