1.22.2012

got a healthy six hours of sleep today. except it was from 7pm to 1am. had not slept the night before. i attribute this to the fact that i drank a ‘neuro sleep.’ did not expect to feel the effects of this drink but i did. roommates were watching a movie but i thought i could fall asleep so i retired to my room, where i lay for the next 7 hours before going to work in the morning. think i may have been feeling a little bit too good to sleep. maybe i was nervous about something. work was patently absurd. spent most of the morning pounding out coffee drinks, having lots of physical energy from fast-paced work, wanting to make jokes too, struggling to make anything make sense. sense of humor was not so much ironic or sarcastic as manic.

this could be the first year in a few that i do the book a week thing. just finished the marriage plot. it was at its best when the kids were in college. felt like i was there again. a weird book in that it states its admiration for old-fashioned realism and then tries to update it/bring it back. the struggle as it is identified is an admirable one, just one that this book does not bring anything more to. also, with leonard’s resemblance to david foster wallace/mitchell’s being from detroit (as eugenides is)/madeleine’s love for victorian literature but also for leonard, eugenides seems to be evoking the struggle of the writer of his old-fashioned kind of fiction against that of a man like wallace, with his unabashed post-modernism and comparative unreadability, the manic highs and lows of reading something like infinite jest. i am not a particularly deep or analytical reader in the way that i am an analytical film-goer, so it’s ususally a bad sign if i pick that kind of stuff up immediately. obviously well written, but at times feels like an illusion of depth. just gonna say it: pretty sure i will write a better novel than this.

in unrelated news i have made it to the finals of the austin chronicle short story contest again. i’d love the prize money so that i can buy the original presses of the negative approach 10 song ep, along with poison idea’s “pick your king,” and quit my job. not just being coy about the unrelated-ness to my saying i will write good novels. the contest has a lot of money, but it is not a good one. i can tell these stories i’ve written are not all that good. greater work lies ahead, hopefully. i have been called an excessively pessimistic and cynical person, but am generally optimistic about the possibilities that life holds.

 

live blogging nicolas cage, vol. fifteen: Trespass

“TRESPASS”

I have not had the internet in a year and I did not know this movie existed until today. I am not sure if this came out in theaters.

menu screen very promising. Diamonds, broken glass (broken diamonds???), shotgun shells.

First line: “I don’t understand why we can’t continue construction.”

Fastest phone dial in history.

Nicolas cage, living in a white house and literally wearing rose colored glasses. Well, orange.

“Mom’s being arbitrary and inflexible.” Cage as rational, adaptable, consistent.

If Nicolas Cage were the star of Inception the tag line would’ve been “your wardrobe is the scene of the crime! Yeesh!” or was that minority report. either way.

“I need hugs.” – Nicolas Cage, Trespass

I am pretty sure he just referenced his pachinko commercials.

Sunglasses the same color as the walls. Fantastic stuff. they don’t teach you this in film school. oh wait, yes they do.

I do not want to see Nicole kidman in this underwear.

A white house full of black rooms.

Fucking bank heist montage music playing as a 16 year old girl sneak out of her room to go to a party. And Nicolas cage worried about his daughter smoking cigarettes. Painting the picture of a good family. Eventual cage freakout potential is enormous. I’d like to say this is a morning erection, after all it is 6 in the morning, but this is not the case.

Faceless cops. Fake cops. Are there any other kind?

Infighting between criminals. Can’t wait to see how cage exploits this.

this villain character’s elocution is just top notch.

An odd twist. Cage is seemingly grabbing the upper hand but acting so bizarrely that it seems this is a situation in which neither has the power. It’s not so much a power struggle as an absolute void of power.

Cage attempts to become an accomplice in theft of his property.

Every scene reveals another layer of an incomprehensible onion and I realize that I have been crying for as long as i can remember.

all this time Nicolas cage has been refusing to open an empty safe.

Cage as organ donor. Intimidating thought.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and the victims of those desperate measures serve a higher calling.

“I’m worth more dead than alive.” – Nicolas cage. Spoken like a man who knows he will never die.

twists and untwists and retwists and all kinds of stuff until it all knots together into…exactly what you thought was going to happen in the first place.

The house is on fire and crumbling but the home has come together!

4.23.2011

i am either an insomniac or an alcoholic. i may have become an alcoholic while unintentionally self-medicating myself in an attempt to stave off insomnia. all i know is that i do not sleep before six anymore. which now that i have thought about it is not that far off from how i always was.

i am eating so many beets these days that i am surprised when my urine is not purple and my poop is not purple.

saw lightning bolt again. so good. maybe my favorite working band. one of my good friends is a drummer and i ask him about brian chippendale’s drumming. he says something like “i can’t tell if he’s technically good or not because i just have no idea what he is doing. but it doesn’t matter because it is awesome.” he tells me that the drum setup is very low and close together for a man of that size and that many of the amps behind them on stage are false. it strikes me that lightning bolt plays this music lots of people wouldn’t call music but frames it in such a theatrical manner.

i bought a record player like a month ago and have developed a disgustingly expensive habit. i am pretty much operating on a one record a day average right now. they are costing me anywhere from 98 cents to 20 dollars. if my tax refund hadn’t come last week i would probably have spent myself out of a vacation by now. four more years!

having a record player has made music interesting to me again. it is simply too easy to obtain music on the internet. it just accumulates because i do not have the discipline to listen to it and then i am overtaken by the illusion that i have no new music, when in reality i have never heard half of the songs on my computer (which is now dead). anyway i bought a record player because i was sick of not being able to listen to music in my room. i am forced into an entirely new relationship with new music and this is very intriguing. i have only bought a few of my favorite ever albums on vinyl at this point. right now i’m doing a lot of “things i always had but never gave myself a chance to get into” phase. i listened to double nickels on the dime three times in the past two days and it might be one of my five favorite albums ever. i listened to meat puppets ii twice today and it might be one of my five favorite albums ever.

double nickels on the dime is so good. there is an audacity to putting 45 songs on an album which is just really exciting to me. there are songs about vietnam and cars and coming of age and all that. it is maybe the only album i consider to be “about everything” in the way my favorite giant books are.

meat puppets ii is really interesting. this is what i wrote while listening to it for the second time today. unedited:
punk rock’s outsider attitude that it kindof shares with country, a similar sense of boredom and desperation but in an entirely different landscape. a psychedelic landscape. this seems to be a bizarre and brilliant fusion of the three made all the more exciting by the fact that none of the associations i have made actually fit together all that well.
the landscapes with their apparent permanence and mismatched rhythms seem to know that the finished picture is only one possibility offered by the puzzle. the least as it were is the finished picture, taking up the least space and ultimately requiring the least ingenuity/creativity.
i am still very concerned with the idea of time. i asked a college student what she was going to do after she graduated in a few weeks and she said she didn’t know. i was just trying to make small talk but i still am baffled by the fact that i still think in this way. post collegiate ennui is not all that different from garden variety ennui/uncertainty. i know that a lot of people after college were not at all concerned with “what they’d be doing” whether they were hippies or people who knew what they wanted to do. it seems to me that the people who were asking themselves “what now” at age 21 will likely be asking themselves the same thing all the time for the rest of their lives–when they are 30 and in the fifth year of some ten year track toward something, when they are seventy, etc. we all reach for ‘life’ and ‘death’ in equal measure. i am still not sure why time concerns me so much. the things that do not exist seem to take up the most space in the mind.

[in the margins, side of page: THIS ALBUM RULES]