Monday, May 30, 2005

Memorable

So here’s the thing: I didn’t have much planned for this weekend.  I’d intended to take off last weekend, but that didn’t happen, so instead I just ignored the whole Memorial Day thing and figured it’d work out on its own.  And, as the Eurosages predicted, damn straight it did. 

Friday night I finally got around to seeing Ray, which I really enjoyed.  One thing I wish they’d done, though, is to have found some less common variations of the music they used - I knew so much of the score note-for-note that I had trouble believing that Foxx, who I must say was very impressive, was actually creating it - the music, much as I loved it, played against the dramatic performance rather than in support of it, I thought.  But anyway.  Good flick. 

Then on Saturday we went to Cornerstone Gardens with Dave and Kim and Daisy and Kaleb, and we all had a blast.  I recommend it wholeheartedly, especially to families with small kids.  Afterwards we had another scrumptious tasting at Cline, a longtime favorite of mine though apparently Dave hadn’t really spent much time there before (the watergardens were particularly gorgeous, with fountains and cascades and acres of lilies and irises; Daisy kept saying it was like Alice in Wonderland, which I rather liked).  Finally, we returned to Dave and Kim’s place for very tasty indian take-out supper, a bottle of Meeker (what?  damn! zin?  carignagne?  it was red.  i know it was red) and a clearly recollected and truly splendid bottle of Silver Oak ‘96 cab; then we had a screening of Sucker Free City, which I thoroughly enjoyed and keep thinking about.  It’s an unoptioned pilot, so it leaves a lot of questions expressly open, but I thought it worked really well - effective as well as entertaining. 

Sunday was a domestic day: I cleaned out the back study, starting with the top of the desk and working down through the file cabinet, then into the closet by cleaning out the random junk, and then the shelves, and finally the floors, even moving out the giant bulky stuff that just disappears when you don’t really look for it.... It took all day and I have a resounding feeling of satisfaction for having done it.  One more piece of the pie lifted off the floor to which it’s fallen, brushed perfunctorily, and replaced whence it belongs.  I’m not excited about the reams of old paperwork I need to shred now, but I’m back down to fighting weight and fitness.  The great thing is, of course, once the whole room is really well cleaned, it never gets dirty again, right? 

Monday started with yoga: we drove over the bridge to Sausalito’s lovely bayfront park where we met Nina, who teaches our Tuesday night class; she’d invited seven or eight of her students for a morning stretch.  We laid out mats and did about 90 minutes of serious work, including some handstands, some back bends, some cool partnered isometrics that pushed the pose into your bones, and sundry other suchlike.  Working outside in warm breezes by the gently lapping bayside, the sun on my face and the moon still showing above the mountains behind my shoulder, my body supported by the forgiving turf and by the goodwill of the strangers who are working alongside me, my face occasionally pressing into the grass where I am overwhelmed by the clean sent of the earth, and then I raise up into a backbend and am lost and dizzy staring into the featureless blueplate sky.... it was a really fulfilling session, in no small measure because Nina does such a fabulous job of inspiring and coaxing and expecting the most from each of us, that we all got a deep and complete workout no matter our level of expertise.  Then afterwards we went out for breakfast with her and with two of the others who’d come, locals who go a long way back with Nina, I think; they were very cool people and we ate a very tasty and satisfying breakfast in Sausalito, which is a fun little town if you get away from funnelcake row.  I was particularly impressed with how many people knew Nina; she was all plugged into the scene everywhere we went.  It didn’t surprise me but it was fun to see it happening. 

We came home and took a vigorous 20 minute nap, then roused ourselves and pulled it together to go to Jon and Lisa’s traditional grillfest for Memorial Day.  It was an intimate but enthusiastic gathering, and the grilled salmon and scallops were excellent; Heidi brought a cake that was a big flat disk about 15” in diameter, with a raised disk in the center about eight inches in diameter, with a raised star in the center of that.  Each layer was about 1.5 inches.  Altogether the damn thing had its own gravity field.  And it was chocolicious to boot.  Because Brian and Sha were not present, I was impressed into duty as the protouncle pummulus: the good friend on whom all the small children unleash their most destructive impulses.  I was slapped and punched and kicked, climbed upon and over, pinched and pulled and had my hat stolen.  I tell ya, those kids.  I love each one of them, and was deeply honored that they allowed me to play that role.  It was an absolute pleasure to get my nards headbutted by a four-year-old.  Of course, all things have their limits and we left in the early evening, the kids still screaming with laughter at each other and Jon glumly hosing out the mud-encrusted wading pool as Kel and I drove home for a night of gentle re-entry into the work world after a three-day weekend that I think we really got the most out of. 

And that doesn’t even get into the good stuff.  But that’s for another place and time. 

TO CONCLUDE: Here are a number of photos I took at Cornerstone.  Look, but don’t touch.  That’s how they get DNA samples, man. 

The front plaza at Cornerstone was decorated with young trees planted in beds of purple glass.  No, really - it looked like this:

This was a garden dedicated to screen doors and Johnny Cash.  It’s not your citified garden, now, nor your countrified garden - it’s a warren of screen doors that impart a curiously peaceful feeling when you pass among them, “Ring of Fire” playing in a sometimes stammering or overlaid loop in the background.  Well anyway we thought it was cool.  Here’s Daisy enjoying it.

Another garden was a carpeted hillscape, domes and valleys and cirques and canyons all smoothly upholstered for naked feet to wander among.  Before you wandered into this vale of moguls, you sat at a bench and took off your shoes.  The bench was set into a narrow verge at the front edge of the garden, and it was lined with coconut shells - JUST LIKE THESE ONES:

This garden was the pits.  Regardless, I rather liked it.  There’s a rectangular pool at the bottom with little fish swimming around in it.  I think it creeped out Dave.

In this garden, we followed curving paths laid out with red bamboo poles on a ground that faded from black at the edges to white in the center, where, on a pedastal, stood a small black pool in which the words of Francis Bacon (not francis bacon) floated.  Yes, I know it sounds weird.

The “Garden Party” garden was just like a typical game of giant rope balls, except this one was freestyle.  Yow!

Then there’s the blue tree.  It speaks for itself.  (cf Truffulas.)

One of the gardens has a cool tunnel.  It’s short and simple, but it’s a lot of fun to be inside of, whether or not you’re with a two-year-old who has just discovered the falsetto range. 

This garden honors migrant workers and it’s phenomenal.  This is just a small piece of it; much more of this garden is worth visiting but can’t be seen or even suspected from here.  I thought that was particularly ingenious. 

This garden is a space that seems lifted out of time, lined with screens of eucalyptus leaves and other chairs and long paths leading to wide calm pools at which these two chairs sit in tended beds of pebbles, so restful that they defy people to sit on them. 

This is a border of nearly 500 pinwheels.  I think I should have gotten up higher for this shot, but what are you going to do.  IT’S A GODDAMN FREE WEBSITE.  Really.  People. 

This structure stands in a garden of long green boardwalks, very restful and peaceful, and from it hangs a draping curtain, and inside dangle threads of fishing line, and people write messages on small blue plastic disks and attach them to the threads and they spin and reflect and transmit light onto a sand floor.  It was totally unexpected and very effective.  Everybody walked out smiling. 

There were also a cafe and a few high-end shoppes there.  One of the shoppes is called Artefact, and it had some really cool stuff, like european town-hall clockfaces turned to rust, and aging gazebos in new orleans wrought iron, and old iron urns with wild colors showing through the paint.  Here’s a few items I particularly liked: 

And that’s all I’ve got for Memorial Day, 2005.  See you back here in one short year and let’s see how I measure up!

Friday, May 27, 2005

Binding Agent Two: Projections

The introduction of a new stapler into my life a month or so ago has instigated a series of revellations to me which any regular reader of this site would have anticipated, since I typically overthink everything so much my teeth get tired.  That’s okay, me and my uncontrolled cogitations have learned to live together.  But usually, when I do my little essay-writing exercises and exorcise those notions, they stay exorcised.  It’s rare that the process takes me to a place where the notion I’ve fleshed out demands more flesh as little as a month or so later. 

But that’s what’s happened with the stapler.  Who’da thunk.  Not the new stapler, mind you, at my amusingly untidy office desk - not this time, anyway.  This time it’s the other stapler at the other desk.  And this one’s a whole new ball of old wax. 

It was easy, in retrospect, to get rid of the weak stapler at work.  It was nothing to me but an impediment, and dismissing it was an act of self-reclaimation, a rejection of erroneous beliefs about my own competence or lack thereof. 

But the home stapler is a different animal altogether.  It’s a heavy grey swingline in cold dense steel.  It sits heavy on the desk, heavy in my palm.  It drove the staple with a clean firm action, folding the tines flatly against the back of the sheet with inexorable precision.  It was with deep satisfaction that I grafted its pretense of order and structure onto the diffuse confusion of my personal affairs - those that could be stapled, anyway.  It sounded industrial when it punched out a staple - more akin to a rivet hammer than a paper clip.  I got it 15 or 20 years ago, and it was far from new then; even so, its battleship grey paint is unchipped and undulled by years of service.  The only thing that reveals its age to the inquiring eye, is the sticker. 

The sticker is a typical file tab sticker, three inches by 1/2, with a once-orange stripe across the top. Typed - with a typewriter - on it is the phrase: “PROJECT SAVE”.  When I first found this particular stapler, it was in a box of office equipment to be discarded by whereever I was working at the time - a bank’s corporate offices, I think, or maybe a studio in LA.  It was a place, anyway, that went through a lot of deskly accoutrements, and they were ready to scrap another box of such stuff with this stapler thrown in too.  “Project Save?,” I asked whoever was in charge of the process as I pulled the old workhorse from the bin of refuse.  “Wuzzat?” “Oh I dunno,” was the apathetic response, “I think it was something to do with recycling old equipment from a school or something.” “Can I take it, then?” “Whatevah...”

So the Project Save stapler came home with me, and it served me well for years and years.  Every time I used it, it felt reliable and solid.  It bit hard and held fast, a solid fistful of office efficiency with a gratifyingly trustworthy clamping action - and every time I had occasion to pick it up or punch it down, I read that label again.  PROJECT SAVE.  How long ago had it been acquired, and by whom, originally?  Where had it done its service?  What hands had wrapped around it, what documents had it bound?  How many offices had it occupied in its mysterious career?  Where the hell did I even find it in the first place, anyway? 

The questions melded, over time, into a worn wrapper that contained this understated tool, till I no longer thought of them as individual questions but rather as a bundle of myseries that were, as a group, comfortingly familiar in their inpenetrability. 

The stapler never seemed to age or change - except for that PROJECT SAVE sticker, which grow more soiled and harder to read as the years passed.  It was stuck on securely, but was as the portrait was to Dorian Grey, revealing to the attuned eye the inevitable viscissitudes of time. 

Lately, that label has become pretty much totally obscured by grime.  I kow what it says, but that’s because it’s grown into my psyche, not because I can actually read it.  And then again, something else seems to have changed lately, too.  I pick up my reliable old stapler and try to use it, but no staple emerges.  I check; it’s not empty, so I try again on a dry run - staple.  Re-insert the paper: no staple.  I fiddle with it till I can conclude that it’s only working every second time it’s cleared.  It’s falling apart, evidently, or already fallen.  Project Save has taken it quite a long way from its unknowable origins, but now, reluctantly, it may be time for me to initiate Project Discard.  There’s freedom to be had, and clarity, and progress.  I just know I’m gonna miss the old guy.  Makes me wonder a little exactly what’s been saved, and by whom.

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Force Feeled

Sith!  Sith!  Sith!  Last night I saw a 140 minute commerical tie-in for ringtones, burger king, and Vaderville Amusement Enterprises.  I took a twilight stroll with my friend Laila up to the looming mass of Yerba Buena and Metreon, where we met Jeannette and Jason, her long-time best friend, and not much later, we were joined by Natalie and Rick, the fittest damn couple I’ve ever et a big bacon burger in front of.  Supper was tasty, if not particularly distinguished, and then we ambled over the footbridge to the theaters where Kel joined us (fresh from work herself) for the 7:50 screening of “I Married a Teen-Age Vortex of Galactic Negativity.” But I didn’t get the bug.  My negativity is much more specific.

and by the way, if you really don’t want to know anything at all about the movie, don’t read this.  I’ll just ruin everything for you.  I can’t take that kind of responsibility right now. 

There was much about the movie (this was not a film) that I enjoyed, much that was technically brilliant and ocularly overstimulating.  More so than the first movies, this one was so visually complex and beautiful that I never got bored, even when the plot was particularly ploddingly predictable.  This movie was also sufficiently nuanced - on paper, anyway - to make it a much more compelling vehicle than the last two releases in the series, full of moral challenges and psyches pushed to the breaking point. 

So why did Kel and I spend so much of the movie laughing into our cupped hands, trying not to offend those for whom this screening was a pilgrimage akin to the hajj?  And for the record, Jeannette’s friend Jason appears on-screen as a supernumerary, and has a screen credit for his work as a compositor who blended as many as fifty visual layers into a single image.  Jason was cool and his work was mindboggling (though being upstaged by Jar Jar Binks has got to sting a little).  I’ve got nothing from the dark side to say about this epic as a masterwork of craftsmanship.  Where I get whiney is when we think about it as a character drama.  I thought the first three flix were character-driven, in a landscape of incredible machinery.  This movie and the two that preceded it seem to me more like movies about machines, some of which have taken remarkably human-like guise.  Dialogue was unfeelingly phrased and delivered; character development seemed to happen, when it happened at all, as an external overlay and not as a change from within.  Time magazine quotes a blog somewhere that suggests the movie would have been better as a silent than as a talkie; I rather agree.  Having seen The 39 Steps not too long ago, the stilted conventions and simplistic setups that Hitchcock was already working through and around, seem to continue to stymie Lucas.

That’s enough of the whifty cineschool meta-analysis, eh?  Let’s get down to brass tacks, or whatever they’d call brass tacks on some weird alien reptilian world where nobody ever flashes a nipple, no matter how many of them they have:

* The most lifelike character in the movie is a muppet.  This is a bad sign for living actors nationwide.

* The bad guy is named after dookie.  (Sorry Melbourne, your name is no less unfortunate now that it’s been taken over by intergalactic evil avatar Chris Lee, still working his Hammer magic four decades after he was outed as undead.)

* The bad guys are named Grevious and Sidious.  Oh come on.  Their freaking kindergarten teacher could have told us they would be cosmically evil, based on the names alone.  “Grevious!  Sidious!  Stop pantsing the Weiner twins!  Don’t you want to grow up to dishonor your given names?” I’m sure it was only with deep disappointment that Lucas accepted the fact that “Slytherin” was already trademarked.

* There is no way, no freaking way in hell, that those two enormous babies came out of that Princess Amygdala’s romantically diminutive abdomen.  Kel noted that the only way they could have fit up inside of her tiny self was if she had no internal organs - unless that’s how she met her fate: maybe they ate her from the inside?  Oh come on, don’t pose your hypertechnical objections.  It’s possible, especially in a world where:

* During a dogfight that appears to be in space, a window gets blown out and our fearless warriors are ejected into space, though of course they crawl their way back to the safety of the shattered bridge of their crippled intergalactic winnebago.  They wrestle it into a landing approach, and the hull starts to heat and burn.  “We’re in the atmosphere,” one explains to his cretinous friends, who apparently never even saw Apollo 13 (Tatooine, we have a problem...).  Okay, here’s the technical quibble: if they were above the atmosphere when the window got blown, then they were in space, where exposure to extremes of temperature and low pressure would trash your internals something fierce.  In researching this answer, I learn that 15 seconds or so of exposure to space won’t hurt you much in the long term. To this, I call bullshit.  Why don’t you try it, mr scientist, and tell me what you think of it, with your “extinct” NASA website?  The experience of being exposed to open non-atmospheric space in the movie, rather, seemed only to heighten the skills of our heroes.  This is because they are made up. And rather silly.

* Why does the cybernetic general cough?  And how come he hacks up a cyberlung when he so much as crosses the room, but in a pinch he can drop five stories, land on his feet, turn into a cuisinart, and escape at high speed, without any additional respiratory difficulties?  Did they cut the scene where he sucks his huffer, as over-humanizing his twisted metal persona? 

* Irritating is his syntax.  Listening him to, in my ass a pain is. 

* Jar Jar is only good for comic relief.  Having him show up as a chief mourner is like having Marcel Marceau show up to sing the national anthem.  To blind people. 

* When you finally kill the bad guy after 20 minutes of hand-to-hand combat, and a trusted aid hands you the special weapon you’d dropped long before during a death-defying fall from a cliff, and which is the essence of your character, give us a moment of acting, there, please?  Are you surprised?  Happy?  Relieved?  What we got was the look I see when someone drops litter in the bus and someone else hands it back to him: sort of, “oh yes that’s mine, I suppose, or at least till I can drop it somewhere you’re not looking.” More “strained politeness” than “elation at having my jedi soul back in the palm of my hand.” I know that joy, by the way, and I did not see it on screen.  Maybe in the NC-17 version?

* Sam Jackson’s direction from Lucas probably went something like this: “Whiter, Sam.  Whiter.“ Kel kept trying to remember him with the jeri curls from Pulp Fiction, but it was like they put his face on Quentin Tarantino’s body.  He had no charisma, no power, no passion, and definitely no “Bad MF” wallet.  And I think that sums up my problem with this movie pretty well: There was no one who was wallet-worthy in the whole mix.  And while I’m at it, when Jack lost his grip on Marwan and let him smak down on the pavement, but then blew up the missle over Los Angeles, averting a nuclear disaster, we could have used some tie-fighters and a wookie or two.  I kicked over 24 hours of my tv-watching time, dude; I deserve some bigger explosions! 

Tomorrow: no explosions.  Earth beckons, and never let it be said that I’m not a sucker for a good beckoning.