Recommend

Synecdoche, NY.

Go see it. Now.

I can’t get into it too much at the moment, but to put it mildly, the gears begin to turn after seeing a movie like this. It’s art that forces the viewer to either interact with it or -if the viewer is unreceptive-to be seriously uncomfortable the entire time.

And that’s what I enjoyed the most. The non-linear, absurdist, slightly discomforting ideas that the film injects into your brain.

It’s far from perfect and far from genius, but it shakes you from your daily routine, it both elevates and insults that daily routine enough, that you can’t help but be grandiose and awed and humble and envious and full of ‘what if’s’.

I suppose that’s also what I enjoyed about the movie. The ability of the film to turn a burning glare on the real possibility that we are missing the important events in our own lives. We are paralyzed by fear and indecision and obligation. We make things more complicated and overthink them and thus regret is born. And then we reflect on regret we perhaps miss more important events. We try to learn from all the failures and learn from the mistakes but while we’re doing all this learning, we’re forgetting to pay attention to what happens in real time. We’ll always be one step too slow or a minute too late and then we die thinking that it should have been different. But it won’t be. The sooner we learn this the wiser we are, but once we learn that Godot really isn’t coming, our play will be over. So, does wise equal death?

.

.

.

We have been conditioned since birth to think of our lives as stories. There is a beginning. middle. and end to our stories, but there are also long crippling moments of indecision. But in the tales we are used to hearing and modeling ourselves after, there are no murky lulls, there are no mundane moments. Someone is watching those players dance across the stage at all time and by virtue of this very fact there is meaning and purpose.

What do I do in those most humbling of moments that no one is watching? Is there meaning to what is inside my head even though no one else knows what I am thinking? Perhaps there are those that can comprehend bits and pieces, but to understand the entire thing? If I can’t convince anyone to take stock of the whole shebang, does it matter at all? I can present myself in a hundred different easily digestible ways. Pre-packed, processed, inspected bits of me to be categorized, filed, and stored somewhere. But no one (or many) can make out the entire canvas, just fractions of the whole, and this makes the portrait meaningless.

In the end, Caden Cotard finally realizes this. The one person that had the best chance at seeing entire picture was there and he was frozen with doubt, letting her slip almost completely away.

Note: there are far more aspects to this film, I just thought I’d sleepily free-write for a while on a Monday morning.

In my fantasy world

I would never be ill and I would never have to burn my sick days recovering from my virus-induced coughing fits by sleeping for 12 hours.

Instead, I’d use the sick days for grand adventures. Whilst on these adventures ideas would accumulate in my head in an orderly fashion, like lemmings waiting in line. The lemming ideas would jump off the cliffs of my fingers or my tongue spilling out straight into my blog, or my paper, or my conversations.

That’s how sick days are in my fantasy world.

Urge to try fading, urge to kill rising

My cottage cheese brings all the boys to the yard.

visual

via patrickmoberg

Redux

“It’s just like after September 11. Back then no one wanted to be seen as not patriotic, and now no one wants to be seen as not doing all they can to save the financial system,” said Lee A. Sheppard, a tax attorney who is a contributing editor at the trade publication Tax Analysts. “We’re left now with congressional Democrats that have spines like overcooked spaghetti. So who is going to stop the Treasury secretary from doing whatever he wants?”

Killing time again

I wonder if there is a day you wake up and realize there is more behind you than in front of you. I wonder if you do anything different that day. I could, in fact, have already reached that moment.

Do you become serene? Do your eyes glass over with acceptance? Do you stumble around with that realization for a few days like a bad hangover? Perhaps it’s like indigestion, your stomach simmers for a while, but eventually the boil dies down to a manageable level. Perhaps it’s like getting fat, it hurts to look in the mirror for a while but eventually you get used to it.

.

.

I ask because I’m a believer in punctuated equilibrium. I believe that large changes happen very fast and there are long periods of stillness.

I sometimes imagine myself on a movie screen. I’m watching myself type, right now, in real time. I’m hoping just by virtue of the fact that someone is watching- even if it’s just me- a rapid series of events will unfold and appear and cascade and snowball. It lends an air of significance to everything I’m doing.

.

It’s more significant if someone is watching me try to erase the two-month old blue and red marker from my whiteboard. It’s suddenly meaningful and comical and exasperatingly funny that I’m haggling with my credit card company over a charge at a restaurant/dance club named “Hot Lead and Cold Feet”.

The name isn’t funny but because someone is watching it’s worth a chortle. How embarrassing not to have laughed at something that could possibly be amusing. So, to review, I’m fake laughing at something not really very funny while on the phone with a bank teller because I picture myself nervously watch the scene on some sort of movie screen. The scene of me talking with this man from Wachovia, shouting into the receiver like a 90 year old woman with hearing aids.

.

.

Maybe when I stop having these odd moments of watching myself is when I know I’m on the downslope. That’s when I know I am flailing around, plummeting clumsily down.

Or perhaps, I will just watch myself sink. And that show really scares me.

.

.

I sure do spend a lot of time waiting for this to happen don’t I?

Gets me off

I am aroused by the use of arcane, misunderstood rules of procedure in governance. So is Ezra Klein.

Boycott of Marriot Hotels and the State of Utah

With the sweetness of an Obama election comes the news that my home state of California narrowly passed the terribly intolerant Proposition 8.

Via AmericaBlog (an excellent left-leaning source of news and commentary) thankfully, there are legal challenges to its passage.

Post-mortem, it appears that pro-Prop 8 (anti-gay) groups were much better funded and took this issue much more seriously than the anti-8 groups.

It seems that no one believed California, the state of Cesar Chavez, and legalized marijuana, and a white minority, and the free speech movement, and the laid back devil-may-care attitude would actually vote against homosexual marriage. Whoops.

Mormons, Orange county evangelicals, and religious minorities produced massive amounts of literature to GOTV for Prop 8.

.

.

So, as these court challenges are pending, and future efforts to right this wrong simmer, there is a call to boycott everything Utah as the Church of LDS was a monstrous (and I mean it in every sense of the word) donor to the anti-gay effort. The Mormon owned Marriot Hotels should be number 1 on that list. The boycott would be ala the Cracker Barrel boycotts of the early 90’s. Cracker Barrel’s ridiculous employment policy stipulated the firing openly gay workers on site. The boycott exerted significant public and economic pressure on the restaurant chain to find a way to a slightly less discriminatory set of rules.

I love this idea and think economic boycotts are underutilized. I’ll hopefully be updating more with this as it progresses. AmericaBlog, DailyKos, and others have lots more.

Overheard in my office

“You know, when I’m about ready to die and I’m looking back at my life, I will remember Tuesday November 4th 2008 as one of the great experiences of my life”

.

.

This is coming from a nationally recognized public interest lawyer who’s testified before Congress, given a speech to the Federal Reserve, run for Philadelphia City Council (narrowly losing), and served on countless government boards, panels on Philadelphia civic improvement , and general do-gooder committees.

He’s devoted his life to public service and he’s also recently been very successful in the private sector.

And here he is, talking about Obama’s election like a kid the day after Christmas (or Hanukkah or Festivus) who got the exact lego set he’s always wanted.

He’s giddy. He’s relieved.

This is a guy who lived through the urban blight of Philadelphia’s decay in the 70’s and 80’s. He’s seen and fought against mayor John Street’s epic embezzlement of Philadelphia city funds. He was the architect of a flagship program to prevent the mass foreclosure of Philadelphia homes as a result of the proliferation of questionably predatory mortgages.

.

He’s a short, Jewish man with thick spectacles and yellowish skin and the beginnings of a punch who’s made a career of recognizing injustice and fighting it at every opportunity. He is outraged without succumbing to anger.

He worked 12 hours on Tuesday at a polling place in North Philadelphia. He chose the location because the lines were long and the people were anxious and the election workers fretted and were confused about what sort of ID required for voters new to that precinct.

He set them straight with his honest, but never smug, affect.

He genuinely knows that this is one of the greatest moments of his life, and is unashamed to say so.

.

.

This is not only about Obama and his campaign, but also about about this lawyer in my office. Obama could quite possibly be the guy with the smallest ego that has ever been in the White House. No doubt, he thinks highly of himself, but Obama understands systems, he understands processes, he realizes it is not about him and that he can make only a small difference.

.

When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, “I don’t consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that's green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f—ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.”

.

I love this anecdote. And I suspect the lawyer in my office does too. It’s not about Obama, or me, or you individually, it’s about virally spreading information and awareness and passion. There is a diminishing role in our government of the soft bigotry bred by isolation and unfamiliarity. Obama ran a campaign on ideals of community. His economic proposals require a togetherness unseen in American politics since the New Deal. His promises to take collective responsibility for the health care of all citizens demand that we deal with not only our own problems, but our neighbors problems, and the problems of the man around the corner, and the couple on the other side of town, and the community on the other side of the country.

This election represents this.  But Obama is wise enough to know he is only a small part of that.

.

.

The lawyer in my office knows this too, which is why he can be so easily effusive about Tuesday’s result

.

.

I can only hope I am this optimistic and hopeful and open to change when I’m 60.

SCOTUS

I don’t have much to say right now. I’m a little busy and my mind is mostly just too exhausted to form coherent sentences.

So, in the interest of posting more, I’m just going to link to articles on the web that pique my attention.

This article is from the estimable Glenn Greewald who has blogged about issues like Patriot Act Spying, 4th Amendment encroachment, and Guantanamo torture.

In this latest edition of insight on under-the-radar government affairs, Greenwald discusses the potential dropouts from the Supreme Court and the burden- that will fall on President Obama (feels good to say that)-to fill those empty slots.