Pixel Mist (Slight Return)

Historic Postcards of Hannibal, MO

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:55:28 GMT

Historic postcards of Hannibal, MO -- that's Mark Twain's hometown, y'know! -- discovered in the bottom drawer of a chipped n' rotting wardrobe at a junk store in Baldwin Park, CA. I paid $8 for the lot, which is entirely too much -- I try not to pay more than $.50 for my postcards, especially in little places like this. But the lady wouldn't budge, and I kind of had to have these.

Wonder if Huck knew when he lit out for the territories, this is where he'd end up:

Honestly, I often wonder the same thing.

Of course, it's entirely a nostalgia-act for me to invest a silly, mass-produced postcard with such meaning. However, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that, to me at least, there's something disquieting about finding vestiges of the "old America" tucked away like this. Punctures my notions of sanctity, I guess; the things I've held holy and that have shaped my life, relegated to a dustbin like this.

More on this later tonight, I think.

An Inspiring View

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 21:40:43 GMT

I hope this graffiti refers only to the represented family's pride of ownership and not the can's contents. Otherwise, we're looking at a grizzly garbage day.

Taken outside my apartment building, God help me, on the way to work.

LOL CAPITALISM

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 22:46:57 GMT

ohnoes teh capitalism is still collapsing!!

keynesianism answer

"Coke Is Corn"

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 21:47:04 GMT

By a simple set of syllogisms, and through a catchy tune, we reveal the hoary inter-connected worlds of indus-agro, milit-indus, and indus-fizzdrink.

And we have done this, of course, for the greatest purpose of all: selling better fizzdrinks.

We have submitted this advertisement to four agencies, as well as directly to the Pepsi-Co Co, and have received no word back as of yet. Gentlemen, we await your response.

"The World's Greatest Shoe"

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 05:02:28 GMT

As part of our on-going efforts at selling out, 15 Jugglers Group -- a surly gaggle of former radicals hellbent on degrading their once passionately-held beliefs at every turn -- have produced this "spec" commercial for Converse's Chuck Taylor All-Star line of shoewear.

It is our belief that this video captures the truth of the product. As we all know, this is always the ultimate aim of that highest of arts, the 30-second television commercial. Enjoy in good health.

SPAM Poetry: "whaler prefix prefix"

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 02:24:56 GMT

In this postmodern burlesque on Melville's Moby-Dick, poet euaffairs.miti@gov.mt positions seemingly contradictory binaries (the "piece bright genre fellow" of l. 3 with the later "musky jowl genre") to comment on/amplify the 'vital textuality' of the original piece. However, hints of the poet's reliance on structuring meta-narratives -- the "mikado flight winch pants," for instance, indicate a biological determinist's view of gender -- run counter to her more radical, post-structuralist tendencies.

"Whaler Prefix Prefix"
by
euaffairs.miti@gov.mt

whaler prefix prefix.
object kernel burg limp!
piece bright genre fellow.
coign golosh memo burial?
eery ran mangel.
object seek shift.
raise hawker prater mitre!
mikado flight winch pants?
lapsed armful dyke forum?
prefix quirk shove.
winch armful paying abrupt.
modest prefix blazer skull.
prater ensoul ago.
soda reef.
mitre xyster coign.
object eery.
musky jowl genre.
hawker object river alone!
pod flavin drank prater.
drank rafter.
chump panel chump genre!
limp hawker.
cargo shove lapsed dyke?
rafter modest dabby skull!
xyster jowl royal bummer!
hawker bummer pally locum!
drank putlog.
coign wherry blazer jamah?
berate plica fan sketch?
buyer modest jamah.
lapsed alone drank hale?
drank genre jamah photon.
plica chump genre paying!
royal drank seek.
coign tern fan.
mitre hawker.
gusset prater tag shift!
fuse jowl inward genre.
fascia menace.
hale menace barlow quirk.
genre ratine forum abrupt?
pod coign.
fascia seer alone armful.
stint prater.
redhot case kopec mitre?
fascia jamah seer jamah?
fibber piece.
jowl alone fellow skull?
peeved inward blazer buyer.
bummer jowl sketch bungle.
reply cargo bijoux modest.
case quirk chump genre.
sequel drank curtsy whaler.
paying pally.
cargo inward royal shove!
raise burg flavin.
pod paying sketch dyke?
dyke object lapsed.
prefix seek retool bummer.
pants retool bummer bijoux!
shift jowl fascia.
sketch mitre prater ran!
eery winch avenue.
flavin cargo.
burg locum seer burg!
ran tag gusset xyster.
river tern locum.
pep dyke kernel.
gnomon golosh hawker paying.
plica soda fuse.
chump hawker.
tern cargo buyer ago?
armful eery bijoux.
photon shift pep.
whaler menace.
seer pants armful kernel.
curtsy river menace.
mitre pod pod tag?
photon avenue mangel seek!
attire gusset limp tern!
ratine redhot mikado whaler.
panel winch.
mikado raise.
abrupt skull bummer shove!
pod kopec locum reef!
eery bungle ratine modest.
locum forum kernel eery.
alone mitre dyke kopec?
photon seer quirk.
locum hale tern pep!
pod whaler photon.
quirk avenue.
skull pep seek.
sketch bright xyster seek!
panel xyster paying sketch!
ran seer.

"Whatever Works"

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:23:26 GMT

Saw Whatever Works, the new Woody Allen film, yesterday afternoon. Here are some thoughts:

--Larry David was great, despite reviews to the contrary. He sold Allen's lines well, and pulled off his own take on Zero Mostel's affected, grandiose pacing brilliantly. What surprised me most, however, was how effortlessly he brought pathos to Boris when the situation called for it, especially in a pivotal scene with Evan Rachel Wood towards the end. There were hints of his range in Season 4 of Curb Your Enthusiasm, but nothing like he managed to do here.

--Patricia Clarkson's sub-plot is one of the funniest, weirdest things Woody's thrown in a movie in ages. Definite echoes of Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex here. Ed Begley's doesn't work quite as well, but the conversation between him and the gay feller is vintage. Hi-larious.

--I love Harris Savides, but I don't think he quite got the proper view on Woody's New York. As the man said in a panel discussion on the film:

My memories of New York are unrealistic. The New York that I grew up loving was, ironically enough, the New York of Hollywood movies, where people would live in the penthouses with the white telephones and come home at 5 in the morning with ermine draped over their shoulders. This was the New York that I knew.

Savides's cinematography fails to capture the "New York of Hollywood" that Woody and Gordon Willis captured/commented on in Manhattan. One shot in particular -- a long take of Boris walking through his apartment that recalls Savides's work on Elephant -- is emblematic of this problem. Can we imagine shakily following over Zero Mostel's shoulder as he walks through his apartment? The street conversations Woody has perfected throughout his career receive a similar treatment, and while the disjunction between realism and artifice can be interesting (as in Roma), it just don't work here, folks.

I think A.O. Scott nailed it in his review for the Times:

[The scenes'] deliberate pacing and the decorous rhythms of the dialogue might charitably be described as classical, given the picture’s occasional evocation of a Broadway-to-Hollywood adaptation from the 1930s. A less generous word might be sloppy, given the near-total absence of the kind of Lubitschean verve of which Mr. Allen, when he’s on his comic game, is capable.

...or, in summary, freeing up Woody's camera little gives the movie a turgid, lifeless feel.

--Location, location, location. Insularity is one thing, but restricting this story to some grubby Chinatown blocks and a pair of very cursory cutaways to Grant's Tomb and the Statue of Liberty fails to give it the grandeur it deserves.

--Some of my favorite Woody moments involve incidental characters and slight side gags. (Think Jeff Goldblum in Annie Hall or that great shot in Manhattan when Isaac, possessed of an odd romantic notion, runs his hand through the Central Park Reservoir and emerges with a fist full of mud.) Whatever Works was short on these throwaways, and the few that did make their way in failed to connect. Here's a "for example." Randy Jones, a young actor, hits on Boris's young wife, Melody, by telling her he lives on a houseboat and sits around thinking about "things" and playing his flute. To me, that's one of Woody's best slams against young pretty people in a while -- and God knows I loves my slams against young pretty people. But the line fails when delivered by actor Henry Cavill; he's so dreamy and earnest as to make this sound like a pretty appealing prospect. This should've been a great "put your foot on my heart" moment, but as played it's a shameful echo of Jonathan Rhys Myers's shameful performance in the shamefully overrated Match Point.

--There's a pretty clear line between what seems like work from the original 1970s script and new additions. The last scene, which I hope to God was written now, was really awful. Just bad, bad, bad.

--All in all, Whatever Works felt like a successful remake of a great Woody Allen picture from the 1970s. When it's on, baby, it's on. Boris's lectures are hilarious, as are Melody's manglings of his ideas; and Patricia Clarkson's plot was so good it could've been a movie of its own. General critical consensus seems to be, "Woody doing Woody -- again. Get back to Europe!" My problem is that if felt like Susan Stroman doing Woody.

There's a lot more to say, of course, but I feel this post has already gone way over for what was intended to be a brief gloss on the film. But it's really a perplexing little picture, a little bit like Ginger and Fred without the, you know, gusto.

I'm hung up on analyzing it for two reasons: 1) After four years of pretending to want to make and write movies, I'm actually doing it, and I need to dedicate as much time to analyzing film as I have to hacking apart literature; and 2) I've been missing New York a lot lately, and despite its flaws and woeful insularity, Whatever Works made me miss it even more. I'm interested in hearing what any of you had to say about it -- for some reason, I'm really compelled to figure this sucker out!

SPAM Poetry: "Saw a frog..."

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:54:39 GMT

Received this pearl from my great friend, the poet nguyenxuanvinh1981@yahoo.com:

"Saw a frog stretching forth its big"

The king's daughter was delighted,
Taipei

[possible attack Web site withheld]

Jr. Overlapping solemnly
coax

Discussion Questions

1. nguyenxuanvinh1981@yahoo.com omits a noun at the end of his title, causing confusion as to what the adjective "big" modifies. What do you think "big" could modify here? (Let's be mature, please.)

2. Some may see nguyenxuanvinh1981@yahoo.com's seeming disregard for traditional forms as being inspired by post-structuralist linguistic and literary theorists. Considering your readings from Derrida's Glas for last week's class, please discuss the deconstructive aspects of nguyenxuanvinh1981@yahoo.com's poem.

3. Do you think the charlatan Mark Z. Danielewski wishes he could have written this?

Thu, 28 May 2009 18:32:02 GMT

"I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life," he said.

West, a college dropout, said being a non-reader was helpful when he wrote his book because it gave him "a childlike purity."

Sometimes, the comment itself is sufficient comment.

Help Me, Please

Sat, 23 May 2009 04:18:51 GMT

Dear refined friends, both native and from overseas ~

Help me.

Please, help me.

You can help me in 3 easy steps. Really, it's very easy!

1. Watch:

2. Contemplate. If you're a member of peripatetic school, take a nice long walk and think on it. Carve yourself a nice semi-circular Thomas Aquinas notch in your desk and park your belly there. Do what you need to do. But please: think.

3. Tell me where I live. Tell me what this country is. Tell me what weird collusion of corporatism, idiocy, and rank chicanery could make this happen. How -- in what possible world -- could this exist?

I'm not even angry about it; merely bewildered.

Please, friends. Help. Explain this to me. Explain Gucci Mane to me. Explain Soulja Boy Tell 'Em.

Don't leave me now in my hour of distress.

Sir R. Rabiee's Reliques Of Ancient Online Blogetry

Fri, 22 May 2009 22:13:47 GMT

This hoary box, the"Wayback Machine" Web archive, contains
all of my youthful scribely indiscretions -- and yours.

Back in the day when a player was a player, I used to write for a Web site called The Village Broadsheet. Our mission was to offer news both of interest to and concerned with the then-booming East Village "anti-folk movement." (You may have heard of The Bowmans, Jeffrey Lewis, Nicole Atkins, or Jaymay -- all Village Broadsheet favorites and drinking buddies. Though I can't remember if Lewis drank or not.) The site went down not long after my writing partner Matt and I moved to LA. There were plans to expand coverage to the West Coast, but they fizzled and died.

The Web site offered me a few unique opportunities, including the chance to get very drunk with Keane, interview Jon Brion at the height of the Fiona Apple Extraordinary Machine debacle, and chat with Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes before he went all Faux-Bowie (Fowie?). More importantly, it gave me a unique viewers-rich venue to spout off about anything in particular -- very important for a depressed, often drunk, and hopelessly egotistical 23 year old.

Thanks to Sun Microsystems' Wayback Machine, I was able to be mortified by such hits as:

--A long, long essay on Brian Wilson's Smile! Ironically, this was supposed to be a three-part review -- but I never finished it. (Rimshot.) I enjoyed re-reading this piece, even though it's honestly pretty bad.

--An attack on 50 Cent in which I accuse him of being a 21st Century minstrel! This one garnered some death threats on a 50 Cent message board. Not so proud of this, as the politics are wrongheaded and liberal, utterly lacking in historical understanding. I won't link to it, but I do like the line, "In other words, the CIA put crack in the ghettos, and the record labels put 50 Cent in a Chevy Escalade. Man, they’re smart."

--A piece on Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine that was quoted in an MSNBC story! This, by the way, was when I first realized the news was bunk. I mean, they quoted me? I was hammered, angry, and (apparently) had a cold. I was listening to a bootleg album in my decrepit apartment in Washington Heights, and I spouted off a little.

Troubling questions: 1) Why did "the news" need to cover the bootleg album? 2) Did they not realize this was just an op-ed piece? 3) MSNBC had to go to the frakkin' VIllage Broadsheet for their scoops?!

--A piece called "Elvis Was a Racist," about how Elvis wasn't a racist! Despite some youthful liberties in argumentation, I'm actually proud of this one. Oh, and if you don't like reading my name next to something I've written, you can hop over to the Elvis Information Network, where they've attributed my article to someone named Sanja Meegin and put a question mark in the title!

After my SPAM-related identity crisis yesterday, reading my words -- words written when I was so pointlessly and self-pityingly drunk, angry, and sad -- attributed to someone else made me feel strangely free. I only wish the Elvis Information Network or some other anonymous blogger had taken away the rants about ex-girlfriends, the rants about leaving New York, the a-historical liberalism, or the smarmy hagiographies for washed-up old pop singers instead.

We had a lot of fun with this site. It made us feel special, we wrote some middlingly good stuff, and I'm sure it would've improved with time. It's sad to re-live the decline of the Broadsheet: from fledgling e-zine to "blog" (remember when that word was new and shiny?), from blog to infrequently updated ghost town full of fancy promises of a bi-coastal edition, and finally...

Beep.

Beep.

Bip...

Boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooop.

At least now I know where to find a Greek villa if I need one.

An Astounding Bit of Spam

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:11:57 GMT

I don't know why this piece of SPAM struck me as so...it's weirdly profound to me, for some reason. Maybe not profound -- that's probably the wrong word for it -- but upsetting. Here, read. Be chilled:

Hello Jim

Spring is the time to get Jaeger LeCoultre watch, and the only place to get top notch watches that look and perform exactly like the originals is

Take advantage of our spring specials and get yourself Jaeger LeCoultre watch that you've always wanted!

Our Jaeger LeCoultre have all appropriate markings, wordings and engravings same as orginal.

Sincerely,
Mr Self

Questions it brings up:

1. How am I Jim? What's my essential "Jimness," that the feller's gonna call me "Jim"?

2. What's a Jaeger LeCoultre watch? Can I afford it? (Probably not, not even a knock-off version.)

3. Who is "Mr. Self"? Is the implication that I, myself, have emailed my doppleganger -- this so-called "Jim" character -- with an irresistible offer? Or has my Id somehow manifested itself as "Mr. Self" in order to appeal to my Super-Ego, Jim, who would never consider spending money on a fancy wristwatch? Is "Rob," the ego, merely a puppet for "Mr. Self's" desires, which are kept in some sort of check by "Jim"? What's a MR. Self, eh? What if it'd been sent from MRS. Self? What would that mean? That I'm a man with a lady super-ego stuck inside me? Or a lady with a man's super-ego?

I'm scared. Someone put this in context for me, please.

Burbank: A Rotting Orange of Infinite Despair

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:41:01 GMT

Burbank: A Rotting Orange of Infinite Despair from 15 Jugglers on Vimeo.

The Little Red Book of Hot Looks for Spring: The 100 Flowers Line

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 22:37:19 GMT

You may want to flip through this with the arrows provided, as I am a foolish man and can't figure out how to slow the slideshow down. Damned Picasa.

Also, hello again.

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 23:42:03 GMT

More at ELLA: "Glamorous Poverty: Friday Night Soup Kitchen at The Edison." This article nearly got someone fired (not me, at the bar). My first article for them, on developer Rick Caruso, led to ad revenue being pulled from the site. Apparently I'm destructive when I write about real life.

At Post Pulp: TwitCrit #1. By Darsh Lilivend.

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 10:25:39 GMT

Taking it to Rick Caruso, a grand bastard, indeed.

Many more gruesomely Ashcroftian larks to come.

Check at ELLA and PostPulp.