Colin Marshall

What it is

A partial list of categories about which rigid thinking routinely gets us into trouble:

• interesting/boring
• novice/expert
• fiction/nonfiction
• clarity/opacity
• amateur/professional
• art/business
• high art/low art
• sound/music
• girl friend/girlfriend
• outsider/insider
• narrative/nonnarrative
• one/many
• representation/abstraction
• true/false
• experimental/conventional

I got to wondering about this while visiting part two of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art's California Calling, an exhibition of works from this humble state's modernists over the past 60 years. I overheard, as one often overhears at modernist shows, a visitor complaining that they "don't understand" piece x. This called to mind a bunch of similar utterances I've heard or heard about over the years, including but hardly limited to demands for the symbolism of Chris Burden installations and exasperation from a friend of Madelaine's who, employed at a museum's gift shop, was constantly asked what the sculpture outside means.

But I also worried. As a museumgoer who happens to enjoy abstract modernism over perhaps all else, I fear that I might come off to those who complain about not understanding, getting, grokking the work that I regard myself as having successfully grasped it, having incisively Gotten To The Bottom Of It, where all the appreciation lies. This is not the case. As with the best narratives, song lyrics and publicity stunts, I find that the most enjoyable visual art is not, in any final sense, graspable. It has no Bottom to Get To.

Permit me to re-quote Jonathan Jones, as his relevant observation merits many more quotings than even I plan to provide:

The easier it is to say what a work is about, the less interesting that work becomes. The greatest art takes a lifetime to understand; the slightest takes a moment. And if it really is reducible to an explicit message, is it actually art at all?

It seems obvious to me — dangerously obvious, almost — that an artist, or most any class of creator, wouldn't want to simply dream up a message, encode it in layer upon layer of obfuscation and thrust it onto an uncomprehending public for the grappling-with. Infinitely better, though infinitely harder, to craft a work with just the right pitch of ambiguity that gives it as many meanings as it has viewers, listeners, readers.

Yet I've never mustered the courage to tell this to my fellow Steely Dan aficionados, nor to any observers of anything who insist on determining precisely what a work is "about," or, more hubristically, what a work "is." The procedure of figuring out what a work is appears to be nothing more than the identification of a category or of categories to slot it into that no further thought will be required. Permit me to now re-quote Doris Lessing:

I wrote a story, The Fifth Child, which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on.

A journalist from France walked into my living room and before she had even sat down said, “Of course The Fifth Child is about AIDS.”

An effective conversation stopper, I assure you. But what is interesting is the habit of mind that has to analyze a literary work like this. If you say, “Had I wanted to write about AIDS or the Palestinian problem I would have written a pamphlet,” you tend to get baffled stares.

My third re-quote is, naturally, of Douglas Adams, responding to someone who asked for the "message" of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

No message. If I'd wanted to write a message I'd have written a message. I wrote a book.

I have thought, written and bitched about this much before, but I hadn't considered the categorization angle. If you can categorize a work as "a story about AIDS" or "a series cautioning against the tyranny of bureaucracy" or "a song about Owsley Stanley," you feel satisfyingly "done." You have received the "I know what this is" impulse, as if you had resolved the shape of a distant sweet fruit or vicious cat on the savannah, and thus completed your task. But you're probably wrong, or at least missing out on the work's interestingness.

Hence my high enjoyment of my csn-prompted Friday visit to Los Angeles's Museum of Jurassic Technology. Here is a museum that eschews all categories, presenting an experience that's almost literally indescribable. Fact mingles with fiction, past with present, representation with abstraction, metaphor with the concrete, high with low, narrative with nonnarrative, experimental with conventional, outsider with insider, clarity with opacity. In its face, all conventional museumgoing practices fail, forcing the visitor to kiss the "I know what this is" impulse goodbye, at least for a few hours. Plus, their gift shop stocks almost every available Andrei Tarkovsky film on DVD, so hey.

To round things out with a fourth re-quote, I come to a man known for his repudiation of excessive categorical thinking, Mr. Alan Watts:

If you weren't thinking, you wouldn't notice the passage of time, and as a matter of fact, far from being boring, the world when looked at without chatter becomes amazingly interesting. The most ordinary sights and sounds and smells, the texture of shadows on the floor in front of you. All these things, without being named, and saying 'that's a shadow, that's red, that's brown, that's somebody's foot.' When you don't name things anymore, you start seeing them.

So it's not as if I understand the art I enjoy most — I just avoid burning mental bandwidth by fruitlessly trying to fit it into more categories than it actually fits into. I should extend this habit of mind, this awareness of the danger of what I'll call "category dependency" (though that sounds like the name of a concept some social scientist already invented), to non-art stuff as well, leaving aside the fraught question of what, exactly, constitutes "non-art stuff" for another day.

One example might be the very way that one leads and constructs one's life. It's an area where I've been ultra-category dependent in the past, and I'd be surprised to meet anyone who hasn't. Remember the questions you faced as a kid about what you wanted to be in adulthood, and how responding felt like picking from a limited, predefined list: doctor, policeman, fireman, butcher, baker, what have you. This illusion seems to persist for many well into adulthood — hell, well into death. When I think about what I want to do now or in the future, my impulse is to put it in terms of other people. If I refer to a career that's "one quarter Werner Herzog, one quarter Charlie Rose, one quarter Brian Eno and one quarter David Foster Wallace," it's descriptive in one way but probably quite suboptimal communication in another. If you're imitating someone who's come before, after all, your greatest possible victory is to come in second. Why bother?

I've realized that charting one's own course in terms of other, previously-charted courses hurts as much as it helps. As much as claiming that you're working toward becoming like Joe Icon satisfies others' questions about your slightly unconventional aspirations, it's no recipe for originality. It certainly does you the dishonor of expressing no bolder goal than slotting yourself into a category, albeit a small one defined by an individual rather than a large one defined by an industry. Some people — a lot of people, myself included — get spooked when they lack an example to which to adhere. Sometimes they even discard their ambitions for lack of a predecessor. I'm considering adding "avoid adherence" to my list of heuristics.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 3. Vito Acconci's Open Book (1974)

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9:10 min. By Vito Acconci. Ubuweb's description:

Acconci's open mouth is framed by the camera in an extreme close-up, bringing the viewer uncomfortably close. A desperate sense of strained urgency comes across as Acconci gasps, "I'll accept you, I won't shut down, I won't shut you out... I'm open to you, I'm open to everything... This is not a trap, we can go inside, yes, come inside..." Acconci continues to plead in this way for the length of the tape, his mouth held unnaturally wide open. The pathological psychology of such enforced openness betrays a desperate struggle to accept and be accepted by others. The sustained image of Acconci's open mouth also evidences a sinister, vaguely threatening streak that is more or less evident in much of Acconci's work.

Though the commentary associated with Open Book seems to focus on the disturbing vibe generated the Acconci's slurred, insistent pleading, I'm more worried by his Halloween teeth. How did they get so jagged and strangely spaced? Is this the dental fate of the experimental filmmaker? Still, they're better than Al Gore's, I suppose.

I don't have so much to say about this piece, save that it represents Acconci's jumps from black-and-white to color and from no speech to almost nothing but speech. As a vehicle for creep-outiness, it's actually super-effective; directors looking to effectively convey a character's menace could take a lesson or two from Open Book's framing and delivery. Might need some zombie dentures, though, for the full effect.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: Vito Acconci's Pryings (1971)

21 min. By Vito Acconci. Ubuweb's description:

Pryings is a video recording of a performance by Vito Acconci in public with Kathy Dillon at a New York university. The artist shows a situation in which he is trying by force to open the eyes of the woman who stubbornly persists in keeping them closed. The camera follows the action of the couple by focusing on the chests of two of the protagonists. He pulls at her eyelids while she keeps her eyes shut tight. She tilts her head forwards and backwards, but he takes it in his hands and straightens it again. When her long hair covers her face, Vito Acconci sweeps it away with one hand and keeps the woman against him with the other. He pulls on her skin again and one eye opens, but the woman hides her iris by turning her eyes in their orbits. The white eye sees nothing. She struggles, pulling with her the body of the artist who holds her by the shoulders. The couple's tension is a source of emotion. The live soundtrack gives an idea of their movements and, in particular, Vito Acconci's breathing becomes louder with the physical effort. This struggle represents tensions - rather than oppositions - in couples of forces: feminine/masculine, open/closed. Vito Acconci experiments with the action of one individual aware of the other (open to the outside) on an individual closed in on herself.

The non-resolution of this situation highlights the resources used in the performance. In Vito Acconci’s conception and the logic initiated by his introspective actions — filmed in Super 8 — the performance has physical resources, the body as place or medium, and a clearly delimited space. Pryings is a representation of the performance as an artistic process and medium, and a metaphor of the idea "opening someone's eyes".

The challenge here: what can I add to that already pretty exhaustive-sounding description? I suppose, as will be the case with all of these poss, I'll focus less on the content and more on the viewing experience.

Like Conversions, Pryings, was shot on black-and-white Super 8mm film, a format I've come to realize possesses endless aesthetic possibility. (Remember Nowhereland, after all.) But this time it's got sync sound and is officially presented as a "videotape." Thus we get a bit of tape jitter at the beginning and bottom-of-the-screen distortion, which prompts us to wipe away a lone tear of nostalgia for the VHS era, lost forever.

Brian Eno once, as he's often done, spoke an applicable line. I don't remember it verbatim, but it has to do with limitations becoming a valid aesthetic choice once they're no longer limitations. He may specifically have been talking about the glitchy muddiness of analog video tape. Though tape's limitations certainly remained limitations in 1971, I couldn't help but envision a future "VHScore" movement while watching this.¹

As the vast majority of Pryings' frames are very tight shots of Dillon's scrunched face accompanied by Acconci's prying hands (and his jaw, which isn't doing much prying), I couldn't help but try to determine of she's the same gal who made the surprise third-act appearance in Conversions. From what little I can identify, they look alike, though only in ways that most 70s NYC experimental film girls looked alike.

I really hope the operative symbolism here isn't actually the opening of one's eyes, especially if that means the viewer's eyes, but especially if that means the Unappreciated Visionary Artist's hands on the Unappreciative Philistine Viewer's eyes. Even if we assume the worst, though, seeing Pryings as an allegory about the struggle of the visual arts, we must note that Acconci doesn't ultimately suceed: Dillon fights tooth and nail, successfully, to keep those irises off-camera. So maybe the potential allegory is richer than I'd have thought.

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¹ Might Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers be VHScore's shot across our bow?

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: Vito Acconci's Conversions (1971)

I consider myself a fan of video art and experimental film, but thus far I've mostly appreciated it indirectly, via its aesthetic and conceptual influence on more "mainstream" cinema. By this I don't mean to submit that Stan Brakhage's oeuvre has somehow informed the work of Kevin Smith or anything, but with certain directors' stuff, the mark of famed cinematic experimentalists lies right out there in the open. Think of the repeated quotation of Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon by a certain David Lynch, who himself is widely regarded as a living gateway between the experimental and the conventional. All art forms could use more of his sensibility.

I also seek not to become one of those guys who simply blogs about whatever movies he happens to see. Craving both intellectual direction and an excuse to see more video art and such, I've decided to systematically explore the form and report back from within. This is a project on which I've wanted to embark for some years, but always against the looming obstacle of inaccessibility. Unless you spend your life jetting from museum to museum, experimental motion pictures of any format ain't easy to find. Even when available on DVD, it's not readily available on DVD. After I saw part — but not all — of Mako Idemitsu's HIDEO, It's Me, MAMA at the Museum of Vancouver, I found I'd have to shell out 40 simoleons (plus ten more for S&H) for a copy on disc. Not in this lifetime.

When I discovered Ubuweb, things came together. The internet's repository of all things avant-garde, the site archives sound, music, prose, poetry and, best of all, film and video! That section stocks the works of about 400 artists, creators, experimentors, agitators and messers-around. It thus feels necessary that I watch every single one of those works and write them up. What do I stand to gain? Jeez, probably a graduate-level education in the film/video avant-garde, at least. Plus my own projects will brim with the unusual modes of conception and striking visual strategies I absorb by osmosis along the way.

* * *

65:30 min, three parts, b&w, silent, Super 8 film on video. By Vito Acconi. Ubuweb's description:

In these three exercises, Acconci plays with trans-gender illusions, manipulating and altering his own body parts to suggest sexual transformations. For example, he burns the hair from his chest with a candle, then attempts to create the illusion of having female breasts.

Though I'm approaching Ubuweb's video archive alphabetically by creator surname — because that's how it's already organized, so boom, no effort burnt — I'll bet I could hardly have picked a less appealing first selection¹ for viewers dubious about experimental film. (You know who you are, you dead-eyed, mouth-breathing philistines. I kid, I kid.) Ambiguous title? Check. Stark black-and-white? Check. Lowest possible film resolution? Check. No soundtrack? Check. Over an hour long? Check. Nonnarrative? Check. "Plays with trans-gender illusions"? Check.

The film begins, and for its bulk sticks, with part one, "Light, Reflection, Self-Control", which follows a candle moved around the surface of Acconci's body. Though it primarily roams his hirsute chest — whose hair, it must be said, that candle proves surprisingly effective at removing — and zooms in on a nipple or two, it gets around to other, less identifiable regions as well. Sometimes I worried that I was looking straight into a taint, but usually what I suspected to be taints were merely more conventional patches of skin manipulated by fingers.

And speaking of digital manipulation, it's not long before the squeezing begins. When Ubuweb talks about Acconci's "attempts to create the illusion of having female breasts," I think it refers to the extended sequence of him squeezing his man-boobs. (This gives the impression that he's in pretty doughy shape, but he later turns out to be of the more standard 70s-substance-usin'-artist body type. Not that I'm calling the guy a druggie, but you know what I mean.) I don't know what it is, but watching man-boob kneading hits me like nails on a blackboard. I after five minutes or so, I could hardly bear it, but, readers, I have a commitment to uphold.

This ceases in part two, "Insistence, Adaptation, Groundwork, Display", which opens with Acconci having adopted what I believe modern parlance calls a "mangina." (I sometimes call it the "Buffalo Bill tuck.") As he shuffles toward the camera, the percentage of the frame filled by mangina approaches 100. Just before making physical contact with the lens, he rotates to give us the reverse shot. After making the loop a few times, it cuts to him jogging at the camera, back and forth, back and forth. Another cut finds him turning around and around, doing some sort of yogic-y stretches. The next gets closer to the mangina as Acconci performs what look like can-can-style kicks. Some squatting follows.

It must be said that these gender transformations aren't particularly convincing. As a straight male and thus a veteran observer of naked wimmins, I never found myself even close to fooled by Acconci's man-boobs, no matter how hard he squoze them. I suppose the mangina works a little better, but what we see is, at all times, clearly 100 percent dude. I'm glad nobody walked in on me watching this, because, if we're talking about gender assumptions, they'd really formulate a few interesting ones about me.

The setup changes dramatically in part three, "Association, Assistance, Dependence", which introduces a second player in the form of one of those skinny 70s girls who show up a lot in experimental film. As Acconci and his associate attempt what appears to be the only sex act possible while maintaining a mangina. (It looks like something even lewder than it is, though, so you might not want to screen this one at work. Assuming your work was okay with all the tucking and pinching and such before.)

Semi-fascinating context effect: as unerotic as this would be in a normal setting, it's positively titlllating when compared to the near-hour of almost uninterrupted views of hairy man-flesh that preceded it. Again, I'm a fellow of the straight persuasion, so of course I'm going to get more interested when a lady joins the party, even if that lady looks strung-out and is most of the time obscured by Acconci's pallid form. But I can't imagine that the Portrait of the Artist as a Squozen Man that was parts one and two would do much for the average gay viewer. (Sexuality-diverse readers, can you confirm or deny?)

All this fits with what I already know about what floats Acconci's artistic boat. He seems big on auto-eroticism, which anyone familiar with his 1972 performance piece Seedbed surely knows. There, he hid under floorboards and masturbated to fantasies, which he shouted aloud, about anyone who entered the gallery. Seven more of his films, all from the early-to-mid-70s, remain to be seen by me, so it won't be long before I know if they're all in the same vein. I see Seedbed itself resides on Ubuweb, so perhaps I shouldn't expect any surprises.

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¹ Yes, Marina Abramoviç is the first filmmaker listed, but her entry just redirects to Pierre Coulibeuf's. So Abramoviç fans have a couple letters to wait.

The turkey sandwich lifestyle

For Thanksgiving, Tyler Cowen twote:

The plain truth: Turkey hardly ever tastes good.

That, I have long thought, is this holiday's elephant in the room. You think up recipe ideas for what could be months, prepare for perhaps weeks, spent at least a day actually cooking, and what's it all revolve around? Turkey, quite possibly the least appealing meat commonly eaten in the developed world. Its blandness is well-documented, but I haven't read much about what I consider to be its fundamental sadness.

I don't know about you, but I've never chosen to eat turkey unless all the other available options are truly repulsive. (Vegetables, for example.) Having come to regard the turkey sandwich as a symbol of wan resignation, I cannot fathom the mind that possesses enthusiasm for it. I find few images sadder than that of the sad-sack who, given all of the world's brilliant culinary variety, actively chooses to eat a turkey sandwich. Glumly he pulls the defeated meal from his rumpled brown lunch bag, biting softly in as the smothering clouds of pedestrianism engulf him.

Hence the expression "turkey sandwich lifestyle," which I mainly use in my internal monologue. A turkey sandwich lifestyle is, you might have guessed, the lifestyle equivalent of a turkey sandwich: limp, featureless, willfully bland. I have what might be called a lengthy list of goals, near the top of which sits "don't live a turkey sandwich lifestyle." If you find yourself resigned to turkey, Mistakes Have Been Made.

But turkey's problems, I suppose, constitute the relishable challenge of Thanksgiving. You have the fixed component of your meal: the turkey. Now make it good, if you dare.

What-ifs not to ponder

• What if this project is ignored?
• What if this project is ridiculed?
• What if I run out of enthusiasm for this project?
• What if this project itself runs out of steam?
• What if I'm later embarrassed by this project?
• What if The Establishment rejects this project?
• What if The Market rejects this project?
• What if people are too stupid to appreciate this project?
• What if money is too crass to finance this project?
• What if this project sets off my inexorable domino line toward irrelevance and ruin?
• What if this project fills me with regret?
• What if this project's opportunity cost robs me of the opportunity of a lifetime?
• What if I have to stay up some nights working on this project?
• What if others consider this project to be a pipe dream?
• What if I quit this project and look like a flake?
• What if this project reveals the weaknesses I've spent my life concealing?
• What if this project necessitates doing a bunch of stuff I don't feel like doing?
• What if this project exhausts me?
• What if this project keeps me from a comfortable life?
• What if this project diverges from my precious vision?
• What if this project generates unforeseeable hassles?
• What if this project is not the absolute optimal thing I could be doing right now?

"Favorite" and "best"

Recently on Battleship Pretension, Tyler and David presented their top-ten-movies-of-the-2000s lists. This was even more relevant to my interests than usual, as I've been thinking about what to put on my own version of same. We've seen a rich decade, cinematically speaking, and if you, like me but unlike many art-philes, didn't care about George W. Bush, you could actually appreciate stuff to boot. So that was awesome.

One particularly interesting issue arose in T&D's preamble: when you make such a list, should it comprise the best films of the decade, or your personal favorite films of the decade? Tyler even had two separate lists at the ready, one of bests and one of favorites. Later in the show, they'd occasionally remark on the spread of a particular film's position on the two lists. I recall David saying he'd rank Apocalypto, which he apparently loved and which I get more interested in seeing with each unexpected salvo of praise I hear about it, higher as a favorite than as a best.

But I don't think I understand the distinction. Me brains cannot compute the concept that how much I liked a film — or a book, or an album, or whatever — and how good it "really is" could be two distinct values. How much do I like Maborosi? I find it pretty much perfect. But how good is it? Well, pretty much perfect. That's why I called it that three sentences ago.

This would seem to imply that I'm not down with either (a) the notion that works can be objectively good or (b) the notion that works can be subjectively good. The trouble with (a) is that it pushes me into relativist territory, where every object is exactly as good or bad as the subject finds it. That in itself is not so big a problem, but how far would it leave me separated from those wingnuts who go around insisting that science, say, is "just another narrative"? The trouble with (b) is that, if I believe that goodness somehow resides "in" works of art, I'll turn into one of those stuffy guys who tut-tuts everything other than Renaissance sculpture and photorealist landscape as juvenile posturing. Can there be a way out?

24

I re-watched James Marsh's Man on Wire in editing class class last week, and I first-time-watched Tyler MacNiven and Ayumi Meegan's Kintaro Walks Japan (available in full on Google Video here) last night. These two documentaries are not entirely without connection in my mind, as they both chronicle efforts to do something interesting not for the payoff, and not for the lulz, but for the pure bettering-of-life of all involved.

In Man on Wire, Philippe Petit and his coterie of shady pals sneak into the still-under-construction World Trade Center in order to string a wire between the towers, on which Petit walks for 45 minutes. In Kintaro Walks Japan, Tyler MacNiven walks from Japan's southernmost point to its northernmost point. Both walks, both documented, both impressive. But what makes them impressive? I would submit that the components of impressiveness, in the sense of what happens to impress me, are (a) unusualness, (b) life bandwidth demand and (c) risk.

It's not unheard of to take a walking journey, but it's quite a rarity to take an epuc walking journey, sleeping wherever you can pitch a tent, across an entire foreign land which doesn't really speak your language — and making a movie out of it nearly by yourself. Can we treat the unusualness of wire-walking 1368 feet over New York City as self-evident? Traversing his south-north improvised footpath across Japan ate 145 days of MacNiven's life, and that was just for the journey itself. Petit's epic stunt demanded intensive preparation, at least a couple false starts and, ultimately, no small degree of subterfuge. Going it alone for over 2000 miles on foot with a 45-pound backpack, exposed to the elements and bunking with whatever strangers one finds along the way, is a roll of the dice even in as docile a country as Japan. And can we also treat the risk of wire-walking 1368 feet over New York City as self-evident?

A couple more data points resonate even stronger with yours truly:

• Tyler MacNiven's age at his Japan walk: 24
• Philippe Petit's age at his WTC walk: 24

And they bring to mind the following others:

• David Lynch's age at the release of The Grandmother: 24
• David Foster Wallace's age at the publication of The Broom of the System: 24
• Brian Eno's age at the launch of his solo recording career: 24
• Apichatpong Weerasethakul's age at the release of his first short: 24
• Jesse Thorn's age when Public Radio International picked up The Sound of Young America for distribution: 24
• Tao Lin's age at the publication of Eee Eeeee Eeee: 24 (I just read Shoplifting from American Apparel, so he's been on my mind lately)

Which all combine to contrast with the following figure, which will show you where I'm going with all this:

• The age Colin Marshall turned three weeks ago: 25

I realize this smacks more than a little of Robert Rodriguez — who, I can't help but note, shot El Mariachi at 24 — freaking out about about what Steven Spielberg was doing at his age in Rebel Without a Crew. And I'm not normally into treating life as an age-of-accomplishment race against one's admired figures. I'm actually against thinking that way; I've tried to talk more than a few friends out of it in the past. But damn.

Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009)

Moon's advance press raises one's hopes, but then, this is a day when hopes for science-fiction cinema are easily raised. Rumors of high aesthetics, deep psychological resonance and CGI eschewed for elaborate miniatures make the it sound like the formidable yet implausible love child of 2001, Solaris and Silent Running, and in fact Jones hired one of the latter film's effects men. Such a pedigree admittedly prompts impossible expectations, but with the genre's recent standard of substance set by the likes of J.J. Abrams' entertaining but unexaminable Star Trek reboiling, we take hope wherever we can find it.

Much of the movie's buzz regards it as a twist delivery system, as if M. Night Shyamalan had finally made his inexorable way into outer space. Since Jones all but lays out his cards quite early in the film's brief runtime, these attempts at plot-point concealment seem unwarranted. At the tail end of a three-year stint maintaining a mining site on the moon and jonesing to return home, Lone astronaut Sam Bell wipes out in his lunar rover. He wakes up in the infirmary of the space station Sarang, his home for the length of the job. But since he's supposedly the only human on the entire rock, how did he get back there? Did someone drag him all the way? But who? The film raises a suite of eerie questions.

It answers them quickly: Sam did. Or at least he will. Out of bed, he sneaks over the the crash site, out of which he pulls a body, only to discover that it appears to be his own — and it's alive. It seems both Sams hold equal claim to the name, though the rescuing Sam has less in his short-term memory than the rescued. Accepting the situation with a strange degree of equanimity, the twins go about trying to determine what's going on. Hence the second volley of questions: Is one of them the "real" Sam Bell? Are there more? Is the original Sam Bell perhaps elsewhere? Is he even alive?

The explanatory mechanism here turns out, alas, to be an Evil Corporation, or at least an amoral one that's discovered how much labor can be extracted from an indefinitely long series of clones if you tell them elaborate enough lies. Sam One and Sam Two make a stab at putting one over on their employer by having one of them actually return to Earth rather than file themselves away in Sarang's below-ground morgue, but personality differences roughen the road. Yes, they're technically the same person, but it's all about nature and nurture, I suppose.

Portraying both main Sam Bells, one more the station brings aboveground and presumably the voice of another still, heard over a moon-to-Earth videophone, Sam Rockwell, the living midpoint between leading man and character actor, puts on essentially a one-man show. (The only other major character is a placid robot assistant, like HAL but more benevolent, voiced by Kevin Spacey.) His Sam One is a skittish, obsessive shambles on the brink of disintegration — these clones only need three-year life spans, after all — while he plays Sam Two as more of a cockily hostile Tom Cruise type. He creates two clearly different individuals who are also, it seems, the same individual.

As an actor's showcase as well as a proof of the concept that a modern futuristic movie can look even more compelling without the aid of CGI, Moon is impeccable. (As space films go, it's the best-looking in years.) But establishing Sam Bell's experience — or, rather, the Sam Bells' experience — on film requires the utmost steadiness of hand, and here the hand falters. The histories of both science-fiction and psychological cinema insist that this sort of situation simply can't come across in 97 minutes, and they're correct. That Jones paces several stretches of the picture expertly, especially those before Sam Two's appearance, underscores the uncomfortable jerk of the inevitable instances of compression.

The movie does a fine job of acting as if it's always well-paced, but ultimately it simply doesn't have enough time to make the audience's experience anything like Sam's, to make us feel what he feels, to conjure the environment of Sarang beyond its sights and sounds. All narrative films are, in some sense, visual summaries of an experience, but when Moon rushes, as it does through its abrupt ending, it's as if it's providing us with the Cliffs Notes when it knows full well we want the text.

A monstrous pairing

Madelaine asked me what I planned to cook this week. The flop sweat began as I desperately thought through the possibilities. As much as I enjoy cooking in the event, I suffer from severe cooker's block: rarely does the idea of what to make come easily. As for intuitively knowing which "side dishes" best combine with which "main dishes" to form "meals," forget about it; I throw myself on the tender mercy of combinatorial randomness and hope for the best.

"Salmon," I blurted. "Wasabi salmon."

"With what?"

Uh oh. "Um... potato cakes."

"What about sweet potato cakes?"

"Sold."

I thus found myself making wasabi salmon and sweet potato cakes last night, the recipes for which follow. The salmon I adapted from an Epicurious page:

3/4 cup wasabi peas
4 8-oz salmon fillets
Two or three limes

Preheat oven to 400°F. Blend wasabi peas in processor. Arrange salmon fillets skin side down on lightly oiled baking sheet. Sprinkle fish with sea salt. Press ground wasabi peas onto tops of salmon fillets to adhere, covering tops completely. Grate lime peel and sprinkle over salmon; drizzle with one tablespoon oil. Roast salmon just until opaque in center, about 10 minutes.

Transfer each salmon fillet to a plates. Serve with lime wedges for self-drizzling of fish.

The sweet potato cakes I made by following pretty much the first Google hit:

1 1/2 cups sifted all-purpose flour
3 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 1/4 cups mashed cooked sweet potatoes
2 eggs, beaten
1 1/2 cups milk
1/4 cup butter, melted

Sift dry ingredients into a mixing bowl. Combine remaining ingredients; add to flour mixture, stirring just until dry ingredients are moistened. Drop by tablespoons onto hot greased griddle or skillet and fry, turning once, until browned on both sides. Makes one hell of a lot of pancakes, so watch out.

But how palatable, I sense you dying to ask, was the combination of wasabi salmon and sweet potato? That's not for me to say, though I will admit that I ate so much of the stuff that I rendered myself nearly immobile for the rest of the evening. Res ipsa loquitur. Then again, you're talking to a guy who ate peanut-butter-and-tuna sandwiches for lunch at least once a week throughout middle school.

But deliciousness aside, it seems to me that the product of cooking matters far, far less than does the act of cooking. Permit me to gesture toward the musty old trunk of clichés about journey over destination. While putting this monstrous pairing together, it occurred to me that it probably feels good to cook because cooking is something: it's a sequence of real actions that actually involve stuff in the world and produce tangible results. This recommendation may sound weak — don't a lot of pursuits... "involve stuff?" — but it signifies the physicality, immediacy and clarity lacked by much of what we might spend our time on. I suspect it's no accident that so many people who shuffle figures around Excel sheets all day long turn to the kitchen for their only solace.