Colin Marshall

Extremes

Though it would be difficult to envision a cinematic sensibility further from mine than James Cameron's, Dana Goodyear's New Yorker profile of the man reveals higher-order qualities to be admired:

“This film integrates my life’s achievements,” he told me. “It’s the most complicated stuff anyone’s ever done.” Another time, he said, “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.”

[ ... ]

“The words ‘No’ and ‘That’s impossible’ and phrases like ‘That can’t be done’ — that’s the stuff that gives him an erection,” the actor Bill Paxton, who has worked with Cameron since the early eighties, says. Cameron reserves a special quotient of his anger for suits who get in his way. “Tell your friend he’s getting fucked in the ass, and if he would stop squirming it wouldn’t hurt so much” was the message he once told a Fox producer to deliver to an executive at the studio.

[ ... ]

There is a chivalric aspect to Cameron’s antagonism; he figures his struggles in heroic terms. “I try to live with honor, even if it costs me millions of dollars and takes a long time,” he says. “It’s very unusual in Hollywood. Few people are trustworthy — a handshake means nothing to them. They feel they’re required to keep an agreement with you only if you’re successful, or they need you. I’ve tried not to get sucked into the Hollywood hierarchy system. Personally, I don’t like it when people are deferential to me because I’m an established filmmaker. It’s a blue-collar sensibility.”

We happened to watch Xenogenesis, Cameron's very first short, in film class the other day. Here it is, fr yr viewing pleasure:

Rough, sure, but it probably ranks among my top three James Cameron movies. Avatar may be ridiculously ambitious, but man, does it ever look like a death march.

On a very related note, here is (former Marketplace of Ideas guest) David L. Ulin on William T. Vollmann. Or if you prefer, DLU on WTV. Or if you prefer, D-Ul on W-Voll:

Vollmann's abilities tend to be overshadowed by the sensational aspects of his career. Partly, it's the length of his books, but even more, it's the fixation on prostitutes and street life, and his tendency to put himself in the line of fire.

In 1982, fresh out of college, he went to Afghanistan to help the mujahedinagainst the Soviets; his account, "An Afghanistan Picture Show," was published in 1992. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the early 1990s, he survived a sniper attack that left his translator dead. While researching his 1994 novel "The Rifles" -- part of a seven-volume "Symbolic History" of America called "Seven Dreams" -- he spent two weeks at the Arctic Circle and nearly died of hypothermia.

These were death-defying stunts even for a young man; a decade and a half later, the father of a young daughter, his balance impaired, the hair at his temples graying, he seems heavier, slower, if not exactly the worse for wear.

For Vollmann, the issue is not just writing but also how he wants to live. "Last year," he recalls, "I was in Kurdistan in an area that had just been bombed. . . . We were going up a narrow canyon, right before twilight. It was getting dark, and I was looking down at the path and my glasses were all misted up with sweat. I was having a little trouble seeing my feet and there was a bit of a drop. And I thought, 'How much longer can I keep doing this?' And you never know. You either stop too soon or too late."

Back tattoo

peristaltor reminded me of an elegant, useful and — best of all! — useful Raymond Chandler quote: "There is no art without resistance in the medium, no success without the possibility of failure." Now, I've never read any of Chandler stories, but I have read my Kafka. Therefore, I will soon acquire the following back tattoo:

THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE
THERE IS NO SUCCESS WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE

Except picture that in Olde English script. Let me know what you guys think!

This is on purpose

Ted, my film production teacher, makes really solid selections of shorts to screen for us to discuss. Chris Marker's La jetée, for instance; one could hardly do better. He played Maya Deren's immortal Meshes of the Afternoon not long ago, and if you don't happen to be in the same film production class as me, you can watch it in the embedded player below instead. Now that it's on the net, I'm pretty sure it will go viral:



Some questionable responses led the post-screening discussion. "I hate the soundtrack!" Waaah. Give the baby his bottle. The most memorable came from some guy in the absolute back of the classroom — I'm an inveterate frontrow sitta, myself — who offered, "They probably just made that up as they went along, right?"

Ted helpfully explained that (a) improvising the entire thing would've been an utter impossibility, especially at the time and (b) the apparent investment strongly hints that there's more to it than dickings-around. "Film's expensive and hard to work with, and it was even more expensive and hard to work with in 1943," he said. "It's not like she just slapped it onto VHS. Given that, how likely is it that she would've committed to so much time and effort spent in the name of making things up as she went along?" I can't remember how things went afterward, but chances are the conversation devolved into a discussion of whether Kevin Smith can make movies.

This line of thought struck me as useful. Want to know how seriously you should take a work of art? Look at the investment. But taken too literally, this rule quickly becomes absurd: Michael Bay's Armageddon required a $140 million investment with countless cast, crew members and executives involved, so naturally you should watch it instead of, say, Shane Carruth's $7,000 Primer, right? But think about it like this: was it more of a sacrifice for Bay (and Jerry Bruckheimer) to drum up that 140 grand, or for Carruth to scrape together his seven? It's all about relative investment, not absolute investment.

I came across the same idea expressed differently in a 2006 New York Times profile of young "mumblecore" filmmaker Andrew Bujalski. Critic Dennis Lim writes:

In today's independent film landscape, Mr. Bujalski is at once an anomaly and a stubborn idealist. While digital video is the default medium for low-cost moviemaking, he insists on grainy 16 millimeter. "There's a deliberateness to film," he said. "If these films were on video they would feel a lot more frivolous. Film allows you to make the statement that this is on purpose."

As an audience member, look for the components that say, "This is on purpose." Thus, a creator, you'd better make damn sure to include those components yourself.

Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008)

Two-thirds of the way through Danny Boyle's non-parodic Slumdog Millionaire, we're treated to this exchange between Jamal, the teenage hero who rises from impoverished orphanhood to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire's hot seat, and Latika, the girl he's repeatedly sought out since leaving her behind in childhood:

“Come away with me.”
“And live on what?”
“Love.”

This appears not to be intended as a joke, nor as a "character error," the error being an unwitting stumble into the merciless warzone of melodrama. The entire film, I fear, is actually pitched like this. A kaleidoscopic, poundingly scored piece of near-magical-realism where the unlucky get lucky and just the right people find themselves in rare self-sacrificing moods at just the right time, it's an unapologetic fable. This is fine so far as it goes, except that, to our long-suffering friends subtlety, nuance and plausibility, it does indeed owe a few apologies.

But Boyle is, for better or worse, a die-hard filmmaker of conviction. When you've got as much cinematic energy as he does, hustling the ridiculous past an audience's critical sensors sometimes works, as it did in 2004's near-morality play Millions. But there's a limit to this, and sometimes hubris gets the better of him, as it did when the countless ludicrousnesses, small and large, of 1997's A Life Less Ordinary ganged up and smothered him. The fantasy of Slumdog Millionaire demands an astonishing credulity of its audience, not just in its details and execution but in the very core of its being. We're perhaps better off treating it as a light show.

The premise, though, generates a potentially effective form. Knowing that his lost Latika watches Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Indian edition, Jamal jockeys his way onto the program, climbing to the penultimate trivia question before the show takes a lucrative tension-maintaining overnight break. Cuffed and hauled off by the police as he exits the studio, he spends the interim between the first and second broadcast in grueling interrogation, alligator clips, car battery and all. Jamal, we learn, grew up a "slumdog," one of the many millions who populate Mumbai's sprawling shantytowns. Without education or social standing, one of the cops reasons, how else but cheating could he have answered all those questions correctly, knowing of such exotic things as the location of Cambridge Circle, the weapon held by the Hindu god Rama and the face on the American hundred-dollar bill?

Jamal responds to the grilling in flashbacks, explaining just how he happened to come across all this information. Each learning experience, distributed evenly over his life, paints a portrait of the modern young low-class Indian who, despite admirable vigor and perseverance, nevertheless can't catch much of a break without going on a hit game show. He knows where Cambridge Circle is because of his time as a tea boy, or "chai-wallah," at the local — yes — call center. He knows what Rama holds because, running away from a Hindu-led massacre of Muslims in which is mother is killed, he caught the unsettling eyes of a blue-painted little kid in Rama costume. He knows Ben Franklin's face is printed on the hundred-dollar bill because he was handed one by a visiting American couple during his days as an impostor Taj Mahal tour guide.

Dropping the false dime on Jamal was none other than Prem, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire's impossibly pompadoured Indian host. Despite his on-air enthusiasm and restroom encouragement, he keeps too firm a grasp on both the show and his own accomplishment as a slumdog-made-good to refrain from undermining his upstart contestant. This conflict, one of the various indentifiable seeds of excellent films in Slumdog Millionaire that whiz past as Boyle feverishly rushes toward the deliriously happy ending and end-credits Bollywood Dance number, could have supported a fascinating two-hour character study by itself. Instead, Prem's futile efforts represent nothing more than a couple of pathetic obstacles easily swept aside by the hand of fate — or, in this case, the hand of Boyle. Either way, the screen gives the same explanation after Jamal guesses — simply guesses — the final answer to the final question: "It is written."

For all its lack of self-awareness, though, the film is alive and passionate where most major pictures prefer to unconvincingly simulate both qualities. But that doesn't mean it's not frustrating — the "what could've been" laments, mourning the loss of much richer explorations of similar setups, aren't easily ignored — and surprisingly underestimating of audience intelligence. It's odd that the product of India's poorer, more perilous sectors and the director of Trainspotting should come out as pure Old Hollywood, but here it is.

The night goblins

I have intensely, ritualistically ogled the following light-capturing devices over approximately the last three days:




The Red One high-definition digital video camera. Price: $17,500 for the bare-bones body. The base production pack costs $1,250. The lenses set you back $19,000.




The Aaton A-Minima Super 16mm camera. Price: $15,000. And film, even Super 16, ain't exactly cheap, 'neither.




The Canon Canosound 514XL-S Super 8mm camera. Price: about $180 on eBay. I still can't afford it, but at least the night goblins allow me to dream about it. They can be cruel.

Tao Lin, self-promotion and the servals

Tao Lin has offered a free copy of his new novella, Shoplifting from American Apparel, to twelve people who write >1500-word blog posts about him. Here is mine.

But wait, why would I go to such a length — not that 1500 words is much of a length, really — just to get a free copy of a book? I'm inundated with free books as it is. If I'd invited Tao Lin onto The Marketplace of Ideas for an interview — which I strongly considered until I saw that he'd already busted out a bazillion interviews about SFAA, though if you're reading this and game, Tao, I'm still game myself — I'd get mailed a copy anyway. At least one copy. And if I were to come down with laryngitis that rendered me unable to interview, I could just request the book and never get in touch with its publicity contact.

The reason I participate nevertheless is partially because Lin has promised "mad hits" if my post makes it onto the list of twelve, but mostly because it exemplifies the sort of wonky self-promotional strategy for which he has become known. Perhaps the most notable of these happened when, overcome by an understandable desire to put "real" jobs behind him forever, he sold advance "shares" of his upcoming novel, simply titled Richard Yates, for about sixteen grand. He has raised Gawker's ire — though he later earned its forgiveness — for his constant self-promotional salvos. In what could also be reasonably deemed a sort of stunt, he founded his own publisher, Muumuu House, which for some reason interests me greatly. Regardless of its degree of stuntage, I should probably pitch my many experimental novel ideas to it. I have experimental novel ideas which I could execute at a moment's notice.

I must admit that anybody with such willingness to self-promote, self-market or whatever one wants to call it interests me greatly — though Lin more than most, since he's got a real product — because, as I've laid out here before, I have sucked at it more than anything I've sucked at before, currently suck at it more than anything else at which I am now sucking, and, probably, will continue to suck at it more than I shall suck at anything in the foreseeable future. I'm so bad at self-promotion that I have to participate secondarily in other peoples' self-promotional antics in hopes of "mad hits." Terror at the prospect of being seen as a self-promoter has something to do with it, though when Lin is depicted as a self-promoter, he somehow wins an even higher profile from the slam! It's like he's in a physical-law-breaking feedback loop of internet/literary fame.

Of course, to effectively market oneself requires boldness, which I sadly lack. I have only recently noticed this in myself; it happened at just about the same moment that I noticed that boldness is one of the two qualities I most admire in others, curiosity being the other. While I can safely say that I Am a Curious (Fellow), my instinctive conservatism irks me like nothing else. I cannot even say that, on any identifiable level of awareness, I "want" not to take risks. In fact, I do want to take risks, but the monkey brain within me remains convinced that what I actually want is to avoid serval attacks. And self-promotion just puts you right out there, dead in the crosshairs of roaming serval packs.

But Lin, in his published photos, displays very few serval bite marks. Certainly none have thus far proven fatal. And this after making such bold moves as:

• Writing and publicly reading a poem that ends with the line "the next night we ate whale" repeated over and over again until everyone leaves
• Sending Gawker numerous e-mails jam-packed with lines like "I'm hot, young, that I went to NYU, and have ironic book-covers. I think you know what all this means" and "It would be good if you could cover an entire glass window with my 4x6 glossy, two-sided flyers."
• Asking for money, specifically in the Richard Yates fundraising instance (I can't imagine ever getting money out of anyone simply by asking for it, even if I framed it as an investment — perhaps this is why, despite my interest in all things entrepreneurial, I'm no entrepreneur)
• Starting his own publishing house
• Spending punishingly ascetic eight-hour writing days in New York University's library computer lab
• Tweeting tweets like: "feel like 'crapping out' garlic bread thru my 'pee hole,' seems like it would feel like intense masturbation, not sure what i'm describing"
• Asking people to write >1500-word blog posts about him

I am pretty sure that if I did all that stuff, I would gain a hundred times the radio listeners I have and perhaps a thousand times the readers. But Lin has already done it all, thus robbing me of the vital "originality."

As it happens, he's written a whole post of his own on the subject of self-promotion. Naturally, it is an impassioned defense of the practice. Some of its lines read as if directed, slightly angrily, straight at erroneously shrinking violets such as myself. "if you feel bad about promoting yourself you either have an error in thinking (you think not with facts but by received ideas and peer pressure)," he claims, "or you should begin to exist less and do the opposite of promoting yourself, if you want to not be a contradiction." If I've got this correct, his argument boils down to the facts that, if you consider yourself to be good and working in the name of advancement of things that are good in this fallen world, then your self-promotion is really just promotion of the good, and thus you should not hesitate to do it. "if you feel shame or disgust at self-promotion that means you either aren't able to view yourself without preconception, as just a 'tool,'" he writes, "or you are ashamed and feel guilty of your own existence, of what you do with the power, influence, and money that you already have." Perhaps the most elegant distillation of this viewpoint is as follows: "not promoting yourself is only 'in line' with your philosophy if you are 'insane.'"

Reflecting on this, I personally find that I am indeed working for the advancement of things that are good. When I record and broadcast a radio interview, I work for the advancement of sharp, entertaining conversation. When I write a blog post, I work for the advancement of information delivered on the Information Superhighway with humor and clarity. When I write up a movie I've watched, I work for the advancement of quality cinema (and the dis-advancement of mediocre cinema). When I whip out my DJ gear and spin a set or two, I work for the advancement of fine ambient music. When I make a field recording, I work for the advancement of richer listening experiences. When I get my act together to crank out more film and video, I will work for the advancement of more interesting visual media.

It is by marshaling the pieces of evidence that lead me to these conclusions that, despite his refusal to engage in normal capitalization, I judge Lin as genuinely smart and witty. Nobody who has read his Stranger article on what he, as an outsider, can tell you about Seattle could disagree:

People from Alabama or Florida or anywhere else seem to always be talking about how Alabama and Florida are a lot better than wherever they currently are, I think because they are trying to convince themselves that they were not "cheated" out of something by growing up in Biflow, Florida. It isn't sarcastic at all when someone from Alabama says they wish they were back in Alabama. But people from Seattle when elsewhere somehow do not ever try to convince themselves of anything, I think because they feel like if they say something like "In Seattle my chicken fingers would never be served raw by accident" it would be like saying "A poodle is a kind of dog" in that it's "an accepted fact" to people from Seattle that Seattle is "better" in the same way that it is "an accepted fact" that poodles are dogs. Someone would never try to say that a poodle is a kind of cat.

I should add that rarely does a day go by when I don't think about the Urban Elitist interview in which Lin claims that he feels as if "'making money' is 'inextricably tied' with 'just doing something so that there can be things to do instead of feeling bad,' 'trying to have more people know about you so that you can meet new people for various purposes,' 'doing things to feel excited,' and 'doing really ‘retarded’ things in order to relieve boredom, like buying a large billboard on Houston street and putting a hamster drawing on it.'" Man oh man, does that ever resonate with me. Money is one thing, and it's no doubt an important thing, but it's also just one thing of many, and I go all nutty if I focus on it to the detriment of the others. If I were to articulate my own goals as far as making cool shit, "trying to have more people know about you so that you can meet new people for various purposes" wouldn't land too wide of the mark. Collaboration, after all, is the soul of creativity. And all these experimental novels ain't gonna get written in a vacuum.

And indeed, Lin seems to both (a) make cool shit and (b) meet new people for various purposes. He even goes on reading tours! In his brilliant essay "How to Do What You Love", Paul Graham defines to work as "to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve," and I think Lin falls more or less in line with that. He's making original contributions to the world, and, though his vegan-ish diet seems to be unsettlingly packed with unsatisfying-sounding foods like "kale" and "baby watermelons," he looks far from the point of starvation. This has to have been the first instance of Tao Lin-Paul Graham linkage on the entire internet.

I see that this post has now reached 1673 words, so I should probably slam on the brakes. I've overshot the goal line, but some of the words in this big chunk of prose are Lin's, so I bet it all evens out.

See my sack

I very much enjoy Scott Simpson's tumbleblog ("tumblblog"?). He probably has the perfect sense of humor. This post, for instance, made me laugh more than anything I've read in this godforsaken second half of the aughts:

Pronounced “EYE-lins,” I.Y.L.N.S. is a failsafe mnemonic device I use to remember my passwords:

It’s
Your
Last
Name,
Silly!

If you found this tip useful, let me know!

Now, all the finest bits of humor are funny for a whole wad of reasons simultaneously, but this little gem takes the cake on that front. Just to name a few of the angles that rise with haste to the top of my head:

1. The supposed "mnemonic device"'s acronym is confusing and outwardly meaningless
2. He attempts to imbue it with memorability by way of a pronunciation that makes it more confusing
3. He implies that not one but all of his passwords are his last name
4. By presenting this tip as "useful," he flatly assumes that everyone, without exception, does this
5. The "Silly!" at the end, while endearingly goofy, also smacks of a word one would add to a mnemonic device simply in order to form a recognizable acronym — i.e., "Keep It Simple, Stupid" — but here the "S" makes it even less like a real word
6. The device is more complicated than the password itself

Much of this comes to what I call the humor of the "unanswered why." Another example of this is when a friend proposed something of an internet practical joke along these lines: put a link up that says "see my sack." Assuming that you mean your scrotum, people will eagerly click. But then they'll only find pictures of your backpack! All the laughs I got from this — for they were many and intense — were triggered by the unanswered why, to wit: "Why would anyone want to follow a link that actually did offer pictures of some stranger's scrotum?"

Zombieland (Reuben Fleischer, 2009)

"Zombieland" is, in Ruben Fleischer's film of the same name, what the remaining living citizens of the United States of America have rechristened their country. One can't help but assume that it was also written on the scrap of paper that, in the tradition of Brandon Tartikoff's scrawled "MTV cops" note that launched Miami Vice, got the project rolling. While the first two acts of this dispiritingly three-acted story turn up present and accounted for, they pretend to no nobler a role than as the spindly superstructure straining to support a single elaborate set piece: "Hey, have we seen zombies swarm around an amusement park yet?" someone must surely have asked. "You know, like Disneyland? That'd be a real zombie... land."

And indeed, nobody looking for the shambling, cannibalistic dead swarming around ferris wheels, concession stands and swinging pirate ships will bemoan a bill of false goods. As a zombie delivery system, the picture is a well-oiled machine that whirrs to its maximum operating speed almost immediately. Eschewing a build, it commences its salvo of blood-vomiting, sinew-scarfing animated corpses without hesitation, as the protagonist, a virginal collegiate weenie called Columbus — the untrusting denizens of this newly barren, rough-and-tumble continent go by the names of their destinations, except when they don't — rattles off his personal list of rules for Zombieland survival.

These guidelines are simple and numerous, though we're only privy to a few. "Cardio." (Because it's surprisingly difficult to outrun a zombie.) "Double tap." (Because zombies often fail to expire after absorbing only one shotgun blast.) "Always check the back seat." (Because zombies hide there.) Columbus' most useful rule from the audience's standpoint, "Don't be a hero," signals, of course, his fatedness to be the hero. Slowly making his way to his semi-estranged Ohioan parents by whatever means of conveyance he happens upon — the streets are strewn, Rapture-style, with unmanned vehicles — he cautiously joins forces with Tallahassee, a middle-aged roughneck whose only remaining desire compels him to consume as many Twinkies as possible before their last expiration date passes.

Columbus and Tallahasse soon wind up in a pas de quatre with the sisters Wichita and Little Rock. After getting swindled by the girls a time or two, the boys elect joining over beating, and together they close in on Pacific Playland, the amusement part that Wichita has promised the 12-year-old Little Rock will deliver a zombie-free return to childhood innocence. Bearing west, the gang of four continue to dispatch zombie after zombie by whatever means seems funniest — I recall garden shears — and take a breather to cathartically trash a chintzy Indian reservation gift shop.

That the male leads band together with what happen to be their sassier, wilier, more sketchily-drawn female mirror images suggests that some or all of the imaginations at work may be unequal to the film's task. Much else in Zombieland's first half, an oddly dutiful march of dry highway landscapes, broad one-liners and endless exploding squib packs, provides supporting evidence. A shaft of hope breaks through when the foursome find their way into Bill Murray's mansion and encounter the man himself, made up in protective zombie drag. Tallahassee, who loves himself a viewing of Caddyshack nearly as much as he loves himself a twinkie, goes into incoherent raptures. Little Rock, presumably younger than The Man Who Knew Too Little, claims ignorance, which prompts Columbus to screen Ghostbusters for her in Murray's lavish private theater. "You're about to find out who you're gonna call!" he excitedly exclaims, directly over the theme song's reveal.

What in a bolder film would be the opening swerve of a sharp left turn into unexpected, radically unformulaic territory turns out here to be mere tonal interlude. Putting this anomaly behind it, Zombieland promptly resumes its trajectory toward the inevitable. Well-scuffed but alive in the aftermath of the obligatory Pacific Playland showdown of which you'll be spared the details, Columbus, Tallahassee, Wichita and Little Rock pile into their Hummer and blast down the road toward the end credits, in an equally risk-free wrap.

As refreshing as it is not to have to endure the formation of serious intragroup romantic pairings or watch these plucky survivors rise as the brave green shoots of Earth's repopulation, these absences are cold comfort in a film so deliberately disposable. Every frame of Zombieland's fleetingly brief runtime — and especially its every reference to both the particular pop culture of the moment and the particular pop culture about which the moment is lazily nostalgic — carries the discomfiting feeling that nobody involved in its production cared enough to channel their $23 million into anything that might still resonate with the far-flung audiences of, oh, 2015. Anaconda jokes do not, it seems, a timeless classic make.

What's ultimately satiated is the filmmakers' apparently overwhelming fear that the public, appalled by a lack of zombies, might well storm the box office demanding refunds. We thus get it all, and then some: zombies running, zombies jumping, zombies staggering, zombies chasing, zombies chowing down on flesh, zombies spewing ichor, zombies smacked upside the head, zombies losing their heads, zombies run over, zombies smacked by doors, zombies shot. Especially zombies shot. The effect is of a light-gun arcade game in attract mode, humanized half by genuine wit and half by leaden wisecrack. But hey, you want amusement park zombies? You got 'em.

A Commitment to Social Media

This reply to my New Zealand bleg, from Angela of Positively Wellington Tourism, is elaborate enough to deserve being re-posted in its entirety. Businesses with a Commitment to Social Media, take heed: this is how you do it. Not with a paragraph out of stock, semi-spam, self-linking "reply" file, but with this:

"I could not care less about the Things You Must See. Any landmark featured on a postcard does not require my presence."

Fair enough. Guess you won’t be dressing up as a bee and posing in front of the Beehive then.*

In terms of things not necessarily on the figurative Things You Must See list, but that you must in fact see/do I’d recommend:

- Havana coffee and the chocolate brownie at Deluxe on Kent Terrace
- Watching a movie at the Embassy Theatre (conveniently located next to Deluxe)
- Going to a play at Bats and/or Downstage
- Getting a barperson to read your cocktail personality at Matterhorn (nb: this isn’t actually an official tourism product – I’m just immensely indecisive when it comes to drinks of choice and luckily they’re skilled in the realm of tastebud reading)
- The Writers Walk
- The Sunday food markets
- Fidel’s Café on Cuba St
- Havana on Wigan St
- Sweet Mother’s Kitchen on Courtenay Place.

* People don't actually do this.


"Actually, I want to actively avoid most places tourists go. I care more about existing amidst NZ life as it's lived; I can see the damned Sky Tower on Google Earth. The one exception is museums, but I'd be going to those anyway, even if I lived near them. (Smaller art galleries I'm definitely interested in.)"

This is good. We have lots of museums. Te Papa is the national one, Museum of Wellington is the local one, and there’s a cricket one, a Cable Car one, a Katherine Mansfield one and probably some others.


"I will, at least some of the time, be carrying around field recording gear, so sonic richness is a plus."

For sonic richness of the urban variety, I’d suggest hanging out along the waterfront about 8am on a weekday. People transport themselves to work in a variety of ways here (bike, walk, rollerblades, skateboard, running etc) and it can make for quite an aurally interesting experience given the changing underfoot patterns of the developed infrastructure. For sound recording of the natural variety, do a night tour at ZEALANDIA – it’s a sanctuary about 10 minutes’ drive from the CBD and you can hear kiwi calls. The males are the high pitched ones and the females are of a lower vocal tone. Please note, I am talking about birds here, as in animals. Not 'Kiwis' as in the colloquial reference to people of New Zealand descent.


"I tend to prefer the built urban environment to the suburban or rural. But I realize that this is one of those breathtaking-majesty-of-nature countries, so I'm keeping my mind open like a well-functioning parachute. (It may say something that I'd originally considered doing the less nature-y north island only.)"

This is also good as ‘built urban environment’ is what Wellington does. Although one of our key marketing pillars is ‘nature close to the city’ and Wellington is in the North Island so I am somewhat concerned the ‘less nature-y’ reference means our marketing team need to step it up a bit. I’ll have a word. Wellington’s downtown is pretty small – read 2km in diameter – so I won’t tell you where to go, you’ll find it.


"I never made it to the second and third Lord of the Rings movies."

So the movie tour circuit probably isn’t going to be your thing. If you’re out Miramar way (which you probably won’t be as it’s quite suburban and I note you don't really do suburban or rural), go and have a coffee at Café Polo and check out the Weta Cave.

Art galleries and the like are listed on www.WellingtonNZ.com and we also run www.texture.co.nz when we've got our underground hat on. The latter is a good point of reference for music gigs that are on when you're in town.

We're also on Twitter at @Wellington_NZ if you want to be kept in the loop when you're about/on your way.

The more I hear about Wellington, the more intrigued I am. Even when what I hear comes from people, y'know, actively selling it and such. I still might want to dress as a bee, though. I'd probably have done that anyway, no matter the country.

Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (Wayne Wang, 1985)

"What went wrong?" Such is the standard cinéaste's lament about Wayne Wang, which has reverberated through the halls of cinema for at least a decade. Watching 1985's Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, just like watching its 1982 predecessor Chan is Missing and even 1995's Smoke, turns out to be an impressive and disheartening experience in equal parts: impressive because of the bold, formidable filmmaking skill on display; disheartening because this skill has, in recent years, been squandered on the schlocky likes of Anywhere But Here, Maid in Manhattan, and Because of Winn-Dixie.

We may never know the cause of Wang's wrong turn. Certainly the man himself isn't talking, assuming he knows. But even in his strong sophomore feature, we see signs of a struggle. Here, the angel on the director's shoulder offers him the chance to become the next Ozu. The devil on his other shoulder makes a pitch for the dark side, filled as it is with by-the-numbers heartwarmers who've cashed in their early promise. While the forces of cinematic good win this round, the victory doesn't come effortlessly, and Wang's angel walks away with a few nasty bruises. If only it knew what lay in store.

Indeed, Dim Sum — whose clunky subtitle, in hindsight, probably foreshadowed trouble down the line — a study in benign familial dissolution, reads like an application for Ozu's vacant seat in the cinematic pantheon. Even the requisite kiss-up is there: Tam, the family's substitute patriarch, a bar-owning former business partner of the deceased father, sees fit at one point to analogize the situation of he and his to a certain "old Japanese movie," obviously Late Spring. Geraldine, the 30-year-old daughter still living in the parental home, increasingly unable to remain but lacking the wherewithal to hitch up to her long-distance boyfriend, must therefore rise to the forbidding Setsuko Hara role.

This film, in contrast, features a mother not dead but immersed in semi-unreasonable preparations to become so. Convinced of her imminent death by a fortune teller's prediction — her often-revised means of assigning jewlery inheritance has become a family joke — the mah-jongg-loving 62-year-old dreams only of marrying off Geraldine, attaining United States citizenship and paying one final visit to the motherland — in that order. That all this comes to pass will not, presumably, constitute a spoiler, nor will the revelation that nobody sees their way to their choices with absolute clarity. Geraldine kind of wants to marry Robert, her L.A.-based squeeze, and kind of doesn't. Her mom wants her off and on her own, but kind of doesn't. Tam professes his own desire to marry the woman of the house, though perhaps he kind of doesn't have one.

The newer film lacks the impact of its referent, to put it mildly, but not the pleasure of its aesthetics. Legend has it that Wang found the seed of the picture in an array of western-style shoes he saw laid out, Chinese-style, in the hallway of a home to which he paid a visit. Dim Sum gives the sight of such a tableau, and many other such striking moments, its proper due, framing it to perfection and observing with impeccable stillness. The visual and temporal sensibilities resemble the Japanese master's almost uncannily. Late-afternoon sunlight streaming onto a momentarily abandoned sewing machine; two women sweeping their adjacent, almost mirrored back porches; the waves as seen from the family's San Francisco Chinatown home: some of this sort of thing even Ozu himself didn't do as well.

But despite the visual points Wang scores, Ozu keeps the upper hand in the subtlety game. Though admirably restrained about eighty percent of the time, the film occasionally, if briefly, wallows in moments of swelling string instruments and immediately melancholy yet cosmically optimistic smiles backed by pre-weep eyes. Even when this happens, it's orders of magnitude less false or maudlin than in a hundred thousand other similar films one could name, but it still strips the picture of some of the immediacy and joie de cinéma possessed in force by, say, Chan is Missing. Endearingly, for the most part artfully and with quiet but substantial comedy, this family muddles its way to the end. But it's more of a standard happy ending than one would like, and the happiness itself falls uncomfortably far into the unambiguous side. We're a long a way from Chishu Ryu peeling the apple, that much is certain.