Colin Marshall

Buffering, please wait...

Paul Graham's been on a roll lately, and his new essay "Ramen Profitable" presents, like the best of his writings, an idea generalizable well beyond the domain for which he formulated it.¹ But first, permit me to spotlight the rice-and-beans recipe he includes in a footnote as an alternative to literally living on unhealthy instant ramen:

olive oil or butter
n yellow onions
other fresh vegetables; experiment
3n cloves garlic
n 12-oz cans white, kidney, or black beans
n cubes Knorr beef or vegetable bouillon
n teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
3n teaspoons ground cumin
n cups dry rice, preferably brown

Put rice in rice cooker. Add water as specified on rice package. (Default: 2 cups water per cup of rice.) Turn on rice cooker and forget about it.

Chop onions and other vegetables and fry in oil, over fairly low heat, till onions are glassy. Put in chopped garlic, pepper, cumin, and a little more fat, and stir. Keep heat low. Cook another 2 or 3 minutes, then add beans (don't drain the beans), and stir. Throw in the bouillon cube(s), cover, and cook on lowish heat for at least 10 minutes more. Stir vigilantly to avoid sticking.

Why can't more recipes be written like this? When I read others, they're all "2 apples, 3 teaspoons vanilla, 1 pound white stilton, serves 4" (or, worse, "yields 4 servings"). Just get some basic freakin' algebra in there — algebra — and everything's clearer, more readable and adaptable. In short, broken.

In any case, "ramen profitability," as Graham defines it, is the condition a startup company has attained upon bringing in a stable enough revenue to cover the founders' living expenses. The cheaper the lifestyles, the sooner ramen profitability comes. Why would you want to live in this materially sorry state? Leverage. When you're maintaining or slowly growing rather than trying to stop the bleeding, no matter how thin a trickle, the upper hand is yours in negotiations with parties who've got money to offer. This frees you to work on the product rather than dick for better terms or worry that the deal will fall through. If you close it, fantastic. If you don't, no sweat; you're no nearer the grave for it.

But this gets me thinking: businesses, hell. How many lives are even ramen profitable? Most of the twentysomethings I know seem to be praying for the best while the debt gradually mounts. Thirty-, forty-, fifty- and etc.-somethings don't appear to fare much better, and in some cases have only compounded their youth's problems. Some might respond that startups and lives aren't comparable; I'd submit that they are. Aren't the ways in which we're all like businesses inescapable? We own capital, we buy and sell, we lend and borrow, we make and lose. Our checkbook is our balance sheet, our use of our skills our product, our name and reputation components of our brand.

This proposition will draw protests from those claiming they don't base their lives "only on money," but as Peter Altenberg asked of the young girl who lamented that his interest in her was only sexual, "What's so only?" While there's much wisdom to the cliché about money not being able to buy the best things in life — to which I would tack on the caveat "not directly buy" — a lack of it is the most effective known means to attract the worst things in life. I do not — repeat, not — advocate the notion that dropping millions on the plasma TV, the mansion, the sports car, the hair plugs, the yacht and and the trophy wife will buy happiness. That way lies suffocating existential dread. But the freedom that the possession of money grants, as distinct from the spending of money (and the associated morass of stuff), is invaluable.

I call this "the buffer." In this specific case I mean the financial bulwark between you and the dole line, but the importance of the buffer in all resources cannot be denied. Amassing a sizable amount of cash on hand for the proverbial rainy day, coloquially referred to as "fuck-you money" (FYM) — not an expression original to me, though I do use it all the time — is a goal toward which I work. Slowly. Very slowly. Near-imperceptibly. But still! Combine a healthy FYM level with the life equivalent of ramen profitability, and you're free. I think of it in terms of, to lay another three-letter abbreviation on you, the current lifestyle month (CLM): the cost of one month of your current lifestyle. Your FYM divided by your CLM, then, tells you how long you could keep chugging along if all your income dried up today; your buffer, in other words. A ramen profitable life gets a lot more out of the same buffer — and it's much more likely to have one in the first place — than an extravagant one.

For a firm or an individual, an inadequate buffer is an engraved invitation to catastrophe. More specifically, it's an offer of an extended stay and full fridge to passing troubles that, given time and energy, can grow catastrophic. I meet people who've been living with a negative buffer so long that they've mentally recalibrated a perpetual state of catastrophe as normal. And there's a good reason for the FY in FYM: it's a phrase these people can't use in any situation that matters, though I often hear them shouting it in parking lots at, say, their equally catastrophically-lived boyfriends. They're effectively enslaved to crappy jobs, irresponsible roommates, shoddy vehicles and often even shoddier significant others because they lack the leverage — there's that word again — to do anything about it.

(And yeah, I know Peter Altenberg lived the quintessential unmoneyed, seat-of-the-pants bohemian lifestyle. Shut up.)

But this is all bone-stock common sense: mo' money, mo' choices. (Contra Chris Wallace, you get to choose whether you use it to generate mo' problems.) What's got me thinking is the question of which areas of life besides finance are amenable to buffering. A better way to phrase the generalization might be to ask, "Where is there most benefit in having more than you need?" The returns to being in better physical shape than you need to are obvious: nonessential but profitable tasks requiring physical strength still come up from time to time, even though we're a getting uncomfortable close to George Orwell's world operable by "little fat men" with stumps for arms. Much of the developed world only "needs" the capacity to reach their desks, remain there for eight hours, and return home.

Seems to me that the same goes for knowledge: none of us "need" to know very much, but the opportunities to score bonus points with a thick knowledge buffer arise with surprising frequency. None of us "need" all that many friends, but rare is the day when a few more in the buffer wouldn't come in handy. Allowing only the time we "need" to complete a project appears to be one of humanity's most common blunders; a time buffer, or being "ahead," alleviates the racing-the-clock pressure that, for some, harms the end product. (For others, it seems mysteriously to improve it. But, honestly, which one are you?)

We can, if not boil it down to, then at least frame all of this in the context of that Brian Eno quote I reference with alarming regularity: "Luck is being ready." How much more could there be to readiness than maintaining as many and as thick buffers as possible?

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¹ The slightly newer "The Trouble with the Segway" is also spot-on, and actually extremely compelling despite its apparently narrower potential purview.

Big Man Japan (Hitoshi Matsumoto, 2007)

Superhero narratives that try to answer the question "But what would they be like in real life?" have returned to fashion lately, but I haven't quite gotten comfortable with them. Returning to Alan Moore's 1985 Watchmen, something like the ur-text of realistic superheroism, I found myself, bizarrely, enjoying it in inverse proportion to the degree of superhero-y stuff going on at a given moment.

Here's what I think is behind that. In my interview with Ramin Bahrani, we wondered aloud about those who don't seem to find the world interesting enough as it is. Can someone really be so bored with life that they can find in reality no remaining stories worth telling, no characters worth observing? The aphoristic nature of only the boring being bored makes it no less true, and if you're so unfascinated by existence that you need to fabricate a Death Star or an elven army or a man who can eject claws from his knuckles, well, you do the math. Such flights of fancy have long spoken to me a poverty of imagination, not a richness.

That said, the fantastical stuff sometimes works. Rare as I find those occasions, they do happen. Moore pulled it off in Watchmen by telling an essentially realistic human story in garish superhero mufti. (Which makes one question the necessity of said mufti, but still.) Star Trek, at its best, is simply about a bunch of personalities that have to bounce against one another when confronted with various external (and sometimes literal, in the case of the crashier alien races) impacts. Taking reality and tweaking one miniscule component of it — endow the protagonist with rudimentary telepathy, say, which may or may not be hallucinatory — has proven to be fertile, though underexploited, creative soil.

So there's potential in them thar hills, but my feeling is that those mining this potential have been doing it all wrong. Recent films like The Dark Knight and Superman Returns have explored the deep, pervasive angst of the modern superhero, and probably not without cause: a costumed crimefighter's live would be damn lonely my its very nature. But I find angsty superheroes, in whatever incarnation, no less preposterous than regular superheroes.

Hitoshi Matsumoto's Big Man Japan sheds light on why. Superheroes aren't the stuff of tragedy, of hard drama: they're the stuff of dark comedy! The title hero is a weary, divorced fellow living on a thin gruel of government stipend and advertising revenue between the monster battles for which he's electrically transformed into a sloppy, towering brawler with Eraserhead hair. But fewer Japanese than ever show an interest in vaguely nationalistic battles in their streets between cartoonish titans; sponsorship and coverage are down, and an incompetent, chain-smoking agent doesn't seem to be the solution. Occupational malaise bleeds into every facet of the Big Man Japan's life, which appears to have been ruined by the once-heroic dynasty of which he's the current endpoint.

This is all revealed through "documentary" segments which follow the hapless Masaru Daisatô from his miserable meals of seaweed ("I like it because it only gets big when you want it to" — which is also why he likes his umbrella), to his seedy, listless trips to the karaoke bar to his complaints about his ex-wife's tight-gripped custody of their daughter to his endurance of endless anti-Big Man graffitti from the public. Contrast this with the fights, where an increasingly bewildered Daisatô in Big Man Japan form reluctantly beats down a series of low-rent giant destructive creatures: a building-destroyer with a comb-over, a lethargic stink-emanator, one whose only weapon is his eyestalk. (Naturally, most of them possess that eerie, uniquely Japanese monster combination of grotesque body fronted by relatively realistic human face.)

What the film understands — and more than puts across — is that superheroism is less a tortured struggle of vigilance and moral responsibility than a tremendous pain in the ass. This obtains especially under the Japanese conditions Matsumoto illustrates: nobody, the sullen Daisatô included, cares about much of anything beyond status-seeking, whining about perceived entitlements, feeding their vices and giving their dogs ridiculous English names. This doesn't add up to a Yukio Mishima-style call to return to the militaristic "greatness" of Japan's imagined past, but one can't help noting the unimpressiveness of the mainstream society that's grown in its absence.

Cargo cult creation

With "Cargo Cult Science", Richard Feynman popularized the story of the eponymous primitive tribe's misguided stabs at technology:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he's the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

"Cargo cult" has since become a byword for mistaking form for function, in any field. You've probably heard the reference so many times that you're frustrated that I've wasted your time going over it again. It occurs to me that this is a better way to frame my usual point about the inseparability of effort and context. To wit: you want to become the next Steve Jobs? Okay, then: just time-travel back to the 1950s site of Silicon Valley, grow up hanging around Hewlett-Packard, have an abortive college experience to do with calligraphy and then befriend Steve Wozniak at the Homebrew Computer Club. In other words, you are scrüd.

As a goal, "Become the next Steve Jobs" is only meaningful for hopelessly vague values of "Steve Jobs", and even then it doesn't mean much. Those who don't feel like defining their aims with useful specificity tend to fall back on affectations based on their idols' most visible qualities. But one can no more effectively become Steve Jobs with round spectacles, a black turtleneck and exclamations like "insanely great" than Steve Jobs became Steve Jobs with round spectacles, a black turtleneck and exclamations like "insanely great." Nor can one become the next Hunter Thompson with a bucket hat, a cigarette holder and an uncontrollable drug habit. Nor can one become the next Michael Jackson with a grabbed crotch, white socks with black shoes and a monkey. Nor can one become the next Wes Anderson with British invasion singles, elaborate set dressing and the font Futura.

Describing my earliest aborted creative projects, I pinned the failures on an inability to recognize the importance of harnessing accident and the futility of reconstructing models. I still consider that a large part of the problem, but it's also describable in terms of the cargo cult. Wanting to write a funny story, I aped Douglas Adams' tone just as a cargo cultist would mount a bamboo antenna, not realizing that tone was simply the tip, and not a particularly important tip, of Adams' logic-gone-mad humor iceberg. Wanting to make an exciting computer game, I labored over dramatic, animated cut-scenes like the ones in my favorites, rarely implementing actual gameplay at all, just as a cargo cultist would gesture wildly to the empty sky with semaphore leaves. Wanting to draw an engaging comic, I would blow hours copying Hergé's distinctive line style and the odd, stilted sound of Tintin's translated dialogue just as a cargo cultist would spend an afternoon whittling coconut headphones. Result: some crappy, unfinished Douglas Adams pastiches; some crappy, unfinished cutscenes for games never conceived and some crappy, unfinished Tintin-y characters standing around on an otherwise blank sheet.

This tendency toward "cargo cult creation" plagued me for some time — to some extent, it still does — and I regularly see it plague others. I've seen few or no works that I consider to be failed that don't have at least a hint of the cargo cult about them. This is common to high-profile failures as well as low-profile failures, schlocky multimillion-dollar albums that don't work as well as maudlin, thrown-together garage songs that embarrass theircreators even twenty years later. Aren't the most humiliating things you did as a kid the ones that most obviously imitate the surface of other, better-known works? American Beauty has taken a lot of critical derision in hindsight, and hasn't it been drawn by the film's cargo-culty (yet eerily slick) imitation of the look, feel and sound of better "serious" society-criticizing films?

As hard as I come down on the term pretentious — and I maintain that it's used lazily or purely as a pose 99% of the time —I suspect that cargo cult creation has a lot to do with what someone who says it means to identify. It's less about pretending to be something other than it "really is" — psychic powers would be required to diagnose that — than simply misappropriating the qualities of something else. It's easy to imagine a sixteen-year-old penning their own cargo cult version of Catcher in the Rye, its misanthropic narrator repeatedly calling out adult society as "fake," which brings in accusations of pretentiousness like lightning to a rod.

One way to get around cargo cult creation could be to deliberately avoid including in your own work anything that might be construed as a formal or cosmetic similarity to the work you admire. Implementing this strategy would, for me, involve mercilessly cutting any and all, say, David Foster Wallace-style footnotes in what I write, Charlie Rose-style mid-response questions in what I broadcast, Brian Eno-style asynchronous tape loops in what I record and Werner Herzog-style ecstatic truths in what I shoot. The question to keep in mind at all times: "How similar can I make this thing to the thing I like, without them having any readily identifiable qualities in common?" Surely this would sacrifice some choice moves I could have made — footnotes come in handy — but the gain has to outweigh the loss.

To reiterate what's been written before: don't think what they thought, think how they thought. Don't do what it does, do it how it does it. Don't think of what it's about; think of how it's about it.

Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (Sang-soo Hong, 2000)

Stylus magazine once ran a profile of Sang-soo Hong, which opens as follows:

As a burgeoning filmgoer, I once idealized the perfect film as a completed jigsaw puzzle, where every piece fit, ripe for savoring. But there was a turning point where looseness became a virtue, rigidity became a vice, and holistic perfection was an oxymoron. Suddenly, it was possible to imagine a L’age D’or without its faux-documentary facade, an Eraserhead without gurgling chickens, a Mouchette without bumper cars, meaning without any sign of joy. There is a reluctant moment akin to pubescence in auteurist cinephilia, when every glance, every word, every color becomes a conscious choice, rather than an inevitable constituent. This is why the term “auteur theory” has always struck me as overly hesitant: how can the fruit of quantifiable decision-making be theoretical?

The author's experience mirrors my own, and our dual appreciations of Hong probably spring from a similar root. Nothing in his movies feels accidental, or at least nothing in them feels as if it was included accidentally. From what I understand, Hong is actually a skilled cultivator and user of accident — reputedly getting his actors drunk both in advance of and during shoots may have something to do with this — and he presents the fruits of his accidents only after meticulous selection and arrangement.

Not that I want to front like one of those process-not-product wonks — after all, if you don't have the product, the process doesn't mean dick — but I'm enamored of Sang-soo Hong's processes. I'm obviously into the products as well, as you'd gather from even a casual browsing of this journal's recent posts, but the more I learn about the way he works, the more I admire it. What initially grabbed me was his unsual attention toward structure. A refreshingly direct quote of his is often refrenced: "People tell me that I make films about reality. They're wrong. I make films based on structures that I have thought up." Structure seems an underused starting point for cinema, although it might be argued that it's actually the most common starting point in that screenwriters' first order of business is often to stick themselves with the old three-act stricture, as it were. While it's served certain recent films, especially Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop, quite well, I wonder if it's not high time to give the three-act a semi-dignified retirement. Hong actively works to bring this about.

Another element of the Hong method that I hold in increasingly high esteem is his insistence on shooting in sequence. Pen-ek Ratanaruang did the same in Last Life in the Universe, to astonishingly effective results. In both director's films, this appears to be another way to harness chance: when the actors and the other creators know that what's previously happened on the set is also what's previously happened on film, they can more confidently improvise and allow unscripted developments to evolve into essential components, allowing the whole project to more easily change for the better. In an interview with Cinema Scope, Hong describes incorporating into the work his responses to the locations and actors:

If I chose a different actress or actor, I might have come up with a different ending. I have some of the details, and then I shoot this person, and my response to this person and what she gives me makes up the next day’s storyline. One important factor contributing to that particular ending is who she is in real life. If you have too much conceptualization, the options in terms of where you get details are restrained, because of this strong outline. Of course we need some kind of outline, but I really like to pick up details from other places beyond the main dramatic points. For me, those dramatic points are not the centre. It’s up to you how you connect them. The details come from an unusual place and make a pattern, but patterns don’t necessarily have a symbolic meaning. That’s not my intention. My job is just to make a complex pattern so people can feel something that is alive. I can think of a person [points at a woman] — let’s say you and I met her and after two hours you can talk about her this way and I can talk about her that way. Because she is a living being, we can say different things about her. That’s as far as I want to go, rather than telling you what to feel.

Were I to write a short manifesto laying out the nature of excellence in modern film, I could hardly do better than that.

By virtue of its own distinctive structure, Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors takes events presumably shot in sequence and shuffles them into a nonlinear chronology from two individual perspectives. Of these, the main event is the deflowering of screenwriter and titular virgin Soo-jung by wealthy-ish rake Jae-hoon. Hong chops the coupling itself and the leadup to it into fourteen chapters, or seven from Soo-jung's perspective and seven from Jae-hoon's. The latter has more of a rom-com feel, if cinema stylized so unlike a rom-com can be deemed rom-commy at all. The former is imbued with more of what I would call a claustrophobic ominousness.

This sounds, I realize, a bit like the makings of one of those tiresome he said/she said affairs: "Hey guys, women think like this, but men think like this!" Despite his avowed thematic interest in memory and this subject matter's easy suitability for storytelling via unreliable memories, Hong eschews such obvious techniques. Soo-jung and Jae-hoon's perspectives depict, for the most part, the same events; much dialogue is echoed between the halves. The movie expresses variety of perception much more subtly, with light, blocking and camera placement; the differences lie in what's revealed. Any and all incongruities are conveyed purely cinematically. Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors is a film that could never be a book. And it certainly ain't no jigsaw puzzle, that's for damn sure.

Dr. Akagi (Shohei Imamura, 1998)

Last week's Marketplace of Ideas broadcast featured an interview with Kim Hendrickson of The Criteron Collection, producer of their new Shohei Imamura three-disc box set. It's a fantastic package, including three of the filmmaker's early-1960s releases. They're excellent films and have drawn the lion's share of Imamura's critical acclaim, but I'm beginning to think I prefer his more restrained later career to his brasher earlier. I maintain that 1979's Vengeance is Mine is the finest serial-killer movie ever crafted. 1997's The Eel

skillfully sheaths a vaguely sinister core in the charming sensibility of many of Japan's films of that time.

A big fan, Mr. Waggish serves up one of the sharpest takes on Imamura I've read in the blogosphere (though I daresay he underestimates Mizoguchi and Ozu in drawing comparisons):

There are very few other directors who deal with the world in such an all-encompassing totality, without the desire to tie it down into a preconceived structure. As I’ve said elsewhere, Imamura convinces you that the world continues infinitely beyond the frame, and that he could show you any part of it if he so desired.

Imamura put this skill on display in the early films, but it's not absent in the later ones. Dr. Akagi, the man's second-to-last release, has the same feel: he could show you anything, but he does show you the trials of a white-suited WWII-era country doctor who puts his nose to the grindstone on his country's hepatitis problems, real or imagined, even as the bombs fall, and that's no accidental choice. Waggish writes that "it displays for the first time what Imamura believes constitutes virtue in the rotten world he’d portrayed for the previous forty years." I'd say that's right; while not portrayed as a saint — he's often clownish, and sometimes appears to stand on the very edge of sanity — Akagi keeps his head out of service to the emperor and on service to humanity. He professes the (officially mandated) desire to devote himself to Japan and all she stands for, but he clearly just cares about helping people; observe his treatment and later recruitment of a torn-up Dutch prisoner of war.

The 1990s, for reasons I can't begin to discern, brought a bunch of Japanese movies built around small groups of eccentrics forced together by circumstances. Dr. Akagi is no exception: the middle-aged title diagnoser of hepatitis — the film's Japanese name translates to "Dr. Liver" — is a bit of a goof with his sock-tucked pants and straw boater, and his immediate coterie includes an unpredictable morphine-addicted surgeon, a drunken monk, the aforementioned Dutchman and a near-child prostitute who's taken a real shine — a real shine — to old Akagi. Imamura assembles this motley crew organically; it doesn't feel like eccentricity for eccentricity's sake, or at least there's enough sleight of hand going on to make it seem that way.

This is reinforced by the fact that holy men getting wasted, surgeons getting blasted, the daughters of prostitutes raised explicitly to be prostitutes — "Remember," cautions the girl's mother, "no freebie lays" — and morally impeccable wartime doctors treating and harboring The Enemy are just a few drops in the greater Imamura current. The man was as fascinated by and revealing of large-scale hypocrisy and irrationality in Japanese society in 1998 as he was in 1961. Politics, nationality, homeland, ideology: these things meant nothing to Imamura, who perhaps depicted nothing more, over his entire career, than the simple act of survival — whether over poverty, repression, chaos or hepatitis — and the vagaries it entails for the everyman. Akagi isn't obviously a stand-in for Imamura and his principles, but hey, close enough.

(Also, the film has a surprising retro jazz score that absolutely, unexpectedly fits. But Imamura was always deft with music.)

Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971)

Modern viewers will see this as yet another installment in the illustrious genre of Bad Guys Trying to Get In. Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo is its earliest clear exemplar, at least as far as I know, and John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 — which, itself, is essentially Rio Bravo remade, and shouldn't be confused with its own mediocre 2005 remake by Jean-François Richet — is the one I have the most fun watching. No decade did Bad Guys Trying to Get In as well as the societally paranoid 1970s, and the era also happened to master the Dangerous Rubes genre to boot. (Think Deliverance.) Straw Dogs goes for both formulæ in equal measure, forming what I'm forced to call a Dangerous Rubes Trying to Get In picture. Judging by its time-tied feel of pervasive eerieness, it must also pull from several other mainly-70s styles for which I can't quite find the words.

Just as Carpenter shot what was a western in all but the cosmetics — arguably, he's almost never done otherwise — Peckinpah hews to the genre's framework while thinly veiling it behind bucolic English sets and wide-ish lapels. Hell, the setting, a hamlet inhabited by the town preacher, the town harlot, the town idiot, the town drunk, etc., only differs in that it's located in Cornwall instead of, like, Nevada. Same for the plot: an egghead outsider moves to the village, accompanied by his native wife. Unable to properly interface with the grubby, rough-and-tumble locals, three of whom happen to be building his garage in a team lead by the wife's old boyfriend, he finds himself hassled in several omionous ways. I call the thugs' hanging of the couple's cat their most memorable attack — who could forget the sight of that tongue sticking out? — most critics seem more interested in the part where they rape the wife.

People just love talking about that rape. I suppose it's the film's centerpiece, but it's often treated practically as the film itself. Even the otherwise levelheaded Criterion release essay by Joshua Clover begins as follows:

Straw Dogs turns on a woman’s rape, and one can’t blame pictures for depicting. But the film shows the woman, after some tart resistance, seeming to enjoy it, and this approaches the apex of what a delicate soul might call “problematic representation.” It’s fucked up. What’s more, the film offers this sequence, if not for our crooked pleasure, then as a means to meditate on male violence as something like an absolute truth, beyond good and evil.

Yeah, well. One man's academic's "problematic" is another man's "intriguing"; played perfectly straight, the scene would play as yet another revenge-justification setup, and I've seen enough of those on late-night deep cable to last a lifetime. As it stands, there's a richness to it; alas, the same can't be said for the movie that surrounds it. As much as I enjoy the film and as many of its isolated elements I can praise, I'm hard pressed to ignore the plain vanilla filling at the heart of the action. While it's aesthetically distinctive and clearly crafted by the hand of a master — about what one would expect from Peckinpah — the film doesn't sit at much creative distance from, say, David Fincher's Panic Room: when in the final act a pack of soused, burly, makeshiftly-armed goons surround the couple's house and launch their zombielike siege, it's up to the runty "astromathematician" to, with the aid of boiling oil, some wire and an antique bear trap, regulate.

I'm strongly reminded of another 1971 release that shoves its milquetoast protagonist into an implausibly dangerous scenario: Steven Spielberg's Duel. That movie's thematic hammer hit hard, directly and repeatedly — as, unfortunately, has remained Spielberg's wont — on the thinness of humanity's bulwark against Hobbesian omni-war; Straw Dogs does the same, only without direct statement or the voiceover thought-narration of that statement, so that's a definite point of superiority. I'm simply weary of this thrust in general. I can only be told that civil society teeters on the brink of utter collapse by its very nature so many times before my mind tunes the warnings out. Either make with an actual collapse or shuduppa you mouth.

Jules and Jim (François Truffaut , 1962)

For all the vast, endlessly detailed knowledge friends assume I have about cinema, some really embarrassing holes totally Swiss cheese-ify my viewing experience. Sure, I might know plenty about the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ming-liang Tsai, Chris Marker and Sang-soo Hong, but I cannot be a true cinephile; my knowledge of the all-important Godard-Truffaut-Antonioni-Fellini-Renoir-Bergman axis is paltry. Paltry. Having admitted that, I clearly cannot show my face in good society until I've made this situation right. Fortunately, Madelaine came home with the Criterion release of Truffaut's Jules and Jim, offering a convenient entrée into my penance.

But what enjoyable penance, especially as penances go. Given my above confession, the shakiness of my grasp on aesthetic and philosophical sensibilities of the "French New Wave" must come as no surprise, so I'll just quote Ebert: "There is joy in the filmmaking that feels fresh today and felt audacious at the time." I felt a similar vibe emanating from Agnès Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7, also released in 1962, on which I wrote my first 3Quarksdaily column.

Both films wield what I can only call an inventive looseness, a playful dicking-around-with of cinematic conventions and expectations that somehow comes off as neither aesthetically noisy nor purposelessly indulgent. Varda's movie did it in its shift from color to black-and-white, its "guerrilla" shooting with the Parisian population as its unwitting extras and its chapter-headed, ostensibly real-time action — which wraps half an hour short of 7:00. Similarly daring, Truffaut's busts out even more of a technical cornucopia. And I quote Wikipedia:

Jules and Jim is an inventive encyclopedia of the language of cinema that incorporates newsreel footage, photographic stills, freeze frames, panning shots, wipes, masking, dolly shots, and voiceover narration (by Michel Subor). Truffaut's cinematographer was the virtuoso Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator with Jean-Luc Godard, who employed the latest lightweight photographic equipment to create an extremely fluid and distinctive camera style. For example, some of the postwar scenes were shot using cameras mounted on bicycles.

This must all sound like something of a garish funhouse to non-French New Wave habitués, but Truffaut, like Varda — and, as far as I know, like Rivette, Resnais, Rohmer, Chabrol, Godard and Demy as well — pulls it off. That itself may well be the magic of the movement: somehow, these directors managed to do all this junk well. The picture's aforementioned voiceover narration, for instance; typically, that's a gigantic red flag, the absolute flamboyant pinnacle of show-don't-tell violation. But the freewheling nature of the enterprise is so deeply instilled within Jules and Jim that its narration actually fits.

The narrative traces the decade-ish-long friendship of the titular Austrian Jules and French Jim and the love triangle that develops between them and Catherine, who Truffaut once described as a classic "turn-of-the-century bitch who slept around." Perhaps that sums it up, but it also sells her craziness short: year after year after year, Catherine jerks the two buddies around, marrying one, giving ultimata to the other, running around on both, constantly demanding a balance of her bizarre internal emotional ledgers, and acting as impulsively as possible in order to demonstrate her "freedom." These trials, which refuse to end until Catherine drives off the edge of a bridge with Jim in the passenger's seat, are undoubtedly well-wrought pieces of cinema. But one question still lingers. Given this woman's age, promiscuity, vengefulness and — let's call it what it is — stupidity, what could these strapping young men possibly see in her? Why would one labor under an iota of desire for a woman who's been around the block so many times — even if she was sane?

The purge

Given this journal's increasing role as a forum for me to preach to myself, what a futility it would be if I neglected to practice said preachings. (Hypocrisy has its uses, but not in a population of one.) In my argument for less, I quoted from Paul Graham's essay "Stuff", in which he makes kind-of-but-not-really the same point I do: the less stuff you've got, up to a point, the better. His distaste for miscellaneous objects is well laid-out — as, I hope, is my raw hatred for same — but he does utter a caveat:

I've now stopped accumulating stuff. Except books — but books are different. Books are more like a fluid than individual objects. It's not especially inconvenient to own several thousand books, whereas if you owned several thousand random possessions you'd be a local celebrity.

At first, I clung to this point, perhaps assuming it excused my ludicrous overspill of bound volumes from their shelves. But now, having come to the less-is-more conclusion on my terms as well as on Graham's, my grip has loosened. While I'm all for the maintenance of a well-stocked home library — who could live without the knowledge that, no matter what, there will be an interesting book nearby? — I'm growing increasingly dubious about the necessity of my own's size and composition. Books take up physical, visual and mental space, they're a pain to pack and move, and each one added to the total diffuses attention that should be focused only on the best of them. As I must constantly justify my own existence, it seems that each of my books should face no less a test.

Really, in our modern world of libraries — I have access to at least two separate systems — and free-flowing information on the net, what books do I need to own? Some essentials are obvious. Art and architecture tomes, which are more like design objects in and of themselves, and are the closest thing to useful "reference books" surviving today. Anything Tom Stoppard, Kobo Abe, David Sedaris, Edward Tufte, Brian Eno or David Foster Wallace-related stays, because I've already demonstrated that I pick those guys up again and again. (Generally speaking, anything I repeatedly look to specifically as an example of what to achieve should, I think, remain in my possession.) Certain works, like Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, George Pólya's How to Solve It or Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, exert some sort of mystical undecaying draw, so those stay.

Similarly, some nonessentials are obvious. Old galleys? Gone. Duplicates? Gone. Research books for completed projects? Gone. Anything a syllabus instructed me to buy? Gone. But, as ever, it's the border points that pose the greatest challenges, and in this case those would be the volumes I can't quite determine whether or not I'm likely to return to. Especially nice or rare editions have some protection — I'm not much of a Sherlock Holmes buff, but that 1930s collection I picked up in antique store isn't going anywhere soon — but Penguin classics? Flimsy, pamphlet-like Dovers? Mass-market paperback sci-fi? When, exactly, am I going to pick those things up a second time? (Why, for that matter, did I pick them up the first time?) What absolutely doesn't matter here is (a) how much I paid for the book in the first place, since it's a sunk cost and I'm paying mental bandwidth for just having the thing around and (b) how "good" I think the book is. If I dispose of it and one day yearn for it, I can simply buy it again. If I don't think a repurchase is worth it, then how much could I have liked the book in the first place?

And what of the books still unread, purchased up to a decade ago with the vague intention of one day probably maybe reading them? While I firmly advocate a well-stocked Strategic Literature Reserve, how valuable is one comprised of a bunch of books acquired on hunches? I've got seven or eight Robertson Davies novels sitting around, all recommended by respected friends and thus almost certainly excellent, that I've spent years and years not reading. At this point they've blended into the background, become part of the furniture. My brain has tuned out their presence, all but erasing them from my perception like it erases an object that's stationary within one's field of vision. Wouldn't having borrowed a library's copies of these books, with their attendant due-date deadlines and attention-drawing foreign-object-ness, been more effective? The action of purchasing a book seems to defer the reading, since it feels as if you've already done it.

Which may actually be the point, come to think of it. My newly zealous book-purging mood is driven in part by the fear of becoming one of those pathetic book fetishists who roams from sale to sale, snowballing acquisition after impulsive acquisition into a gigantic Katamari of dusty, obscure ink and paper. (These, in case you're wondering, are the people who rail against the Kindle by launching into incoherent raptures about the smell of dust jackets and taking books into the tub and whatnot.) I find myself more irritated than ever when someone goes on and on about the books they've recently bought, because buying and owning books means nothing; books are for reading, period. This sounds like a simple point, but it's one that I've failed to understand before, to my detriment. All forms of culture are simply tools to program your brain, and filling the shed accomplishes nothing by itself. Failing to keep the trivial you-bookstore transaction absolutely separate from the vital brain-book transaction brings about an ugly slippage between altering your mind and — shudder — signaling your bookishness.

There are at least two positive consequences to the mindset that treats books as objects more or less like any other. First — and this generalizes widely — constant weeding is an aid to the iterative process. Outing the old and inning the new washes away the clinging junk that obscures your view of who, exactly, your current iteration of yourself is; it's like not having to look past your lingering racecar bed and Linkin Park posters to get a clear view of the adult you. Second, the need to clear space and minimize clutter, when applied to books, provides a pretty damn forceful incentive to read the things, because when you finish them, you can get rid of them! While I don't desire a book-free existence, I do desire to possess far fewer books that I do, and those of a much higher standard of quality. Getting comfortable with mercilessly tossing them and prioritizing the reading far above the owning should, given sufficient iterative cycles, lead right to it.

Stratum upon stratum

I agree:

Tyler Cowen, the economist, advises readers to “snap up foreign fiction translated into English, if only because the selection pressures are so severe”: in order for a publisher to think a work of fiction worth the risk of translating and promoting to a foreign audience, its quality has on average to be higher than the average for homegrown work.

It used to operate the same way for music as well: the hurdles to getting music from Africa or South America or Asia released and promoted in the west were so high that only the better stuff got through, and the average world music release was better than the average pop album.

I've written on this strategy before: the more (and harsher) external selection pressures to which you subject your cultural experiences, the fewer you have to exercise yourself. Per the above, if you limit yourself to foreign fiction that had to survive the translation/promotion gauntlet, you'll have a smaller but much stronger pool of choices. Despite the article's reservations, the same still (sort of) goes for music: snag the stuff that had to see hell to get to to you, no matter where you may be.

This sits right in line with my advice to friends looking to get into film but unwilling or unable to pile as much time into it as does the neighborhood cinéaste: go old, go foreign. While not a flawless prophylactic against suckage — I could name a dozen old foreign pictures, even allegedly "beloved" ones, that aren't worth the light to project them — this procedure surely beats recency-biased random selection. To aspiring American seekers of quality film, I suggest spending a year viewing only non-American movies that are at least thirty years old. Attach one more filter mandating that, if DVDs, they must be released by the Criterion Collection, and you're also almost guaranteed a rich presentation.

I can, under these rules, generate almost effortlessly a viewing plan that includes Seven Samurai, The 400 Blows, Walkabout, High and Low, Andrei Rublev, Branded to Kill, Autumn Sonata, Cléo from 5 to 7, Good Morning, L'avventura, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Solaris, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Tokyo Story, Diary of a Country Priest, Le Samouraï, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Vengeance is Mine, The Face of Another and Last Year at Marienbad. Watch just those and you've had a better film experience than most. Hell, watch just those and you've had a better life than most.

If you'd like to get seriously stringent, apply a cost of production filter as well, to ensure maximum creativity. (Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy, here you come.) It's like wine grapes: you want to drink the stuff made out of vines that had to fight, and hard, to see the light of day. It's no coincidence that capricious weather conditions and stratum upon stratum of unfriendly ground produce the grapes of some of the most complex, enjoyable wines out there.

Less

Quoth Paul Graham:

Once you've accumulated a certain amount of stuff, it starts to own you rather than the other way around. I know of one couple who couldn't retire to the town they preferred because they couldn't afford a place there big enough for all their stuff. Their house isn't theirs; it's their stuff's.

And unless you're extremely organized, a house full of stuff can be very depressing. A cluttered room saps one's spirits. One reason, obviously, is that there's less room for people in a room full of stuff. But there's more going on than that. I think humans constantly scan their environment to build a mental model of what's around them. And the harder a scene is to parse, the less energy you have left for conscious thoughts. A cluttered room is literally exhausting.

I'm often asked how many blogs I read. The answer: increasingly few, especially after this morning. I've just burnt a chunk of time reducing the number of feeds in my RSS reader from 30 or so to 19. This wasn't the first round of cuts; when started RSS-reading, I piled everything under the sun in there, aiming, I assume, to construct some sort of bustling informational paradise. Needless to say, this setup rapidly grew hopelessly cluttered. Wielding the shears with merciless abandon, I've trimmed my blog garden down to the following:

• The delightfully varied 3Quarksdaily, which I happen to write for myself
• Still the finest curated collection of general fascinating internet things, Jason Kottke's blogioneering Kottke.org
• Paul Graham — like, doi
• Ben Casnocha: The Blog, as if you couldn't already tell by the frequency with which I reference him
• My longest-standing daily read, Marginal Revolution
• The ceaselessly-championed-by-me but somewhat rarely updated Waggish
• Merlin Mann's 43Folders, and though it hasn't been particularly update-y lately, the recent posts merit dozens of re-readings
• Neat-stuff accretion Cool Hunting, which I've for some reason been ignoring until very recently when I happened to take a glance and think, "Hey, this stuff is pretty neat"
• Information Aesthetics, which holds me over between Tuftes
• Robin Hanson's Overcoming Bias, for when I need a hit of humanity perceived as a bunch of mating signals (and I often do)
• Less Wrong, the community version of Overcoming Bias where I'm only a tantalizing eight "karma points" away from posting myself
• Roger Ebert, who has proven to be just as articulate and thoughtful a blogger as he is a film critic, and who is particularly astute on the subject of midcentury midwestern childhood
• Edward Champion's Reluctant Habits, because he has the capacity to get a lot angrier than I can (read: angry at all) about stuff
• The Documentary Blog, as I loves me some documentaries
• The Sound of Young America, for which I also happen to write myself
• The Elegant Variation, the first litblog I ever read
• The ambient trifecta: Ambient Music Blog, Low Light Mixes and AmbientBlog.net

I haven't gone far enough. Nor have I gone far enough trimming back any of my life's gardens. Nor do I believe I could ever afford to stop: where my mind once sought a steady ideal and tried to come up with strategies to realize it, it's now in the simpler mode of constant, continuous winnowing. This is as true for RSS feeds as it is for the rest of my media diet — its print journalism component, for instance, is basically down to The Economist and the New York Times Book review, and I've semi-failed to pay much attention to either in the past few months — as it is for writing — not for nothing is "the maximum amount of information within the minimum word count" my credo — as it is for day-to-day schedules, physical environments and the stuff that fills them.

But this is a difficult mental routine to maintain, and mastering the art of cutting detritus loose — let alone separating the detritus from the valuable — is even tougher, given the human brain's overperception of loss. When I interviewed Merlin Mann on The Marketplace of Ideas, we discussed a modern fantasy: hiring guys to take all your things away and bring back only what you actually use over the following weeks. How much of our junk would any of us, in all honesty, get back? A third? Maybe half? Moving house, to an extent, provides a natural opportunity for this sort of procedure, which may be why my internal countdown-to-relocation clock seems to be calibrated on a three-ish year cycle. Too much time in one place, and it fills with kipple.

As for time, so for space. I suppose I'm lucky that, while I'm a mid-twentysomething and thus relegated to a succession of small apartments, I also prefer a multiplicity of small, minimally-designed spaces, both aesthetically and intellectually. I fear not that my next place will have too little room, but too much; I worry not that I will have too few possessions to my name, but too many. My dream is to have several available dwellings, absolutely no larger than I require, in select locations across the globe. The homes I desire bear no nooks or crannies amenable to the accumulation of tchotchkes, knick-knacks, whimsicalities and other material of nightmares, nor do they present sprawling stretches of open wall or floor that sing siren songs of "fill me, fill me." While I find the look of smaller, emptier rooms pleasurable, what's more important is that I myself am actually better — sharper, more capable, deadlier — when I'm in them.

A recent epiphany — experienced, naturally, while tidying up — suggested that one's home, as well as all the other locations one inhabits, temporally and psychologically, is primarily an environment for thought. As Graham writes above, clutter exhausts; I personally find that a surfeit of discrete objects seriously get under my skin. The less there is around, the better I think, and that holds for concrete surroundings as well as for computing — as the above-linked Tufte once remarked, "No matter how cool your interface is, it would be cooler if there were less of it" — and for the sonic background — no mistake that I link to three ambient music blogs. This is what repays, and then some, the perpetual effort to excise stuff.

I consider the double-edged-swordiness of possessions to go hand-in-hand with another of the useful, far-reaching (and few) realizations of my adult life: experience is the important factor, no matter what the entity, event or concept considered. Perhaps a representative culinary example. I used to believe that I simply disliked Italian food because, for most of my life, my experience of the cuisine consisted of gigantic portions and relative blandness: enormous bowls of monoflavor pasta; endless punishing, indistinguishable layers of lasagna; monotonous loaves of garlic bread stretching to infinity. Turns out I only disliked the Olive Garden-y treatment of Italian food I'd been getting in restaurants, which, at least in most of what I've seen in the States, hews to quantity and away from quality. There indeed exist Italian joints that I find choice, and they invariably serve much smaller portions.

It's a common populist joke to poke fun at "fancy" restaurants' tendency to charge higher prices for relatively tiny amounts of food when compared to their more mainstream counterparts, but it only works if you consider food to be a fungible good. I don't; in fact, the older I get, the less I consider to be truly fungible. At this point, almost nothing is simply a product to be purchased wherever it's cheapest. Everything has some experience component, and in the case of comestibles, it's a significant one. While it may well be possible to obtain the "same" food, in that it's made of many of the same molecules, from the convenience store down the street as from the downtown eatery, the two experiences bear only a trivial similarity. (The same goes for buying the "same" record in a clean, well-organized shop versus yanking it from the bottom of the umpteenth disorganized Goodwill bin of the day.) Not being immortal and thus obligated to have the best experiences I can, I'm ready and willing to shell out the bucks for a superior experience in any venue. (And in the case of food, reduced serving size is a benefit in and of itself; cheaper restaurants charge less for more, but they tend to serve amounts of food that aren't large enough to produce viable leftovers but leave me on the uncomfortable side of fullness nonetheless, so I'd gladly fork over more money just for the superior experience of a non-distended stomach.)

In Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control, the Isaach De Bankolé-portrayed Lone Man frequents museums, viewing only one painting per visit but experiencing that painting to the fullest. (He also, as a matter of course, orders two small cappuccinos in two small cups at cafés, avoiding the inferior drinking experience of a single large cappuccino.) Perhaps that's a suitable metaphor for how I'd like certain parts of life to be: simple, streamlined, focused, unencumbered by obligation and admitting no room for nonsense, vacillation or distraction. The natural enemy of such a state is the immortal creeping kudzu of mediated attention sinks, mental noise and, of course, stuff. I suspect the trick is to build your life in such a way as to let as little of it through the walls as possible in the first place; filters any closer to you are less predictable and much more of a hassle to use effectively. Better a short, incomplete stack in the in box than a tall, comprehensive one to sift through every time you sit down.

When you minimize the stuff, the noise, the shiny baubles and the like, what, then, takes on even more importance than the massive importance it held before? Your mind. I find that the fewer tools of distraction I've got, the greater the difference it makes whether or not I've put my brain's house in order. Spartan surroundings reveal, starkly, whether I'm in a strong mindset or a crappy one; absent distractions, a focused, open mind makes a heaven and a messy, clouded mind makes a hell. And that's the other side of the coin to the pursuit of aesthetic and physical environmental clarity: you have to make your mind an interesting enough place to handle it. Taking away all the stuff that can be taken away underscores how vital it is to cultivate all that can't be.