Monday, December 23, 2002

I had a nice Christmas celebration with my girlfriend last night.  She's off to Kansas this morning, to visit her family.  I got excellent gifts from her, a big pile of CDs and DVDs.  I like everything, I'm listening to Sigur Ros' excellent ( ) as I write this - that's its title, two parentheses.  Slightly pretentious, I suppose, as is the album packaging with not one word, song listing, production credit, or band member's name therein.  Sigur Ros is an Icelandic band that plays slow, melodic, mostly instrumental rock music, with lots of dynamics.  Their singer occasionally adds vocals, in an imaginary language (I've heard him, in interviews, refer to it as 'Hopelandic,' which is pretentious as well).  You know, I love Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Mogwai, Cocteau Twins, A Silver Mt. Zion, all that stuff, so Sigur Ros is just my thing, although their music has a yearning quality that makes me a little sad.  Particularly this morning, as I rattle around my darkened house, slightly at loose ends, with two weeks off from work, with my girlfriend in the air over Oklahoma by now, and my good friends and family off on their various holiday journeys.  That's fine.  I crave solitude, then get all anxious about making good use of it, and find I need to spend a bit of time sitting on my hands worrying before I can function properly.  Hence this journal entry.  I'll be fine by noon! Anyway.  My nice girlfriend, who has all sorts of insight into what I like, because I go on and on about things in a didactic style (in case you hadn't noticed, gentle reader!), also gave me a box set of all Werner Herzog/Klaus Kinski films - Aguirre, Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, Cobra Verde, Nosferatu, Woyzeck, and My Best Fiend (a documentary about the famously contentious Herzog/Kinski relationship).  Aguirre, Wrath of God is hands-down my favorite movie - I put it in the DVD player last night to show my girlfriend the opening scene, with the conquistadors threading slowly down that Peruvian mountainside, descending through the cloud layer - just incredible.  I saw Lord of the Rings: Two Towers on Saturday, and I liked it a lot (as much, in fact, as I can possibly like a movie with an elf, or talking tree, or dwarf, in it).  I enjoyed looking at the beautiful New Zealand landscape in both LoTR films, and it is clear to me that the director is specifically proposing that landscape as a central character -something to be reckoned with, something which defines and delimits the scope of the film, and something which the 'human' characters, over the course of their long journey, must oppose themselves to, even as they struggle to win it.  I liked that part of the movie very much, and found that forced opposition to the thing dearly loved, the turning of home into the site of some terrible, death-filled inevitability, heartbreaking.  The film was very similar to Aguirre in this regard, although landscape as metaphor/character/destiny is much more complex, and finely drawn, in Aguirre.  Of course, Aguirre, Wrath of God has the advantage of the awesome Klaus Kinski, who I just adore.  I've never seen another actor with such ready access to a seemingly endless emotional store of madness, rage, envy, confusion, loneliness - everything.  He just slays me.  I've never been one to seek out famous people, gawk at them, get their autographs, etc., but I would have loved to buy Klaus Kinski a drink or two.  Yeah, he's dead.  But - you know - at some long, zinc-covered bar, at world's end, where crowds of beloved or lost dead murmur and laugh and shift, and slender glasses of wine, redolent of blood and iron, down the bar's length.  You know.  You put your head down, turn your gaze left or right, and close one eye.  And that axis of desire and loss, and the drifting whorls of smoke, and the pouring of words into any old ghost's ear.  You speak memory, you gather lost and forgotten moments like you finally remember everything you wilfully and angrily denied about time.  It comes back. You know. I will add that my enjoyment of LoTR: The Two Towers was somewhat curtailed by my feeling that I was watching it in a zoo.  My girlfriend and I were happily settled into our preferred seats at our favorite theater, one row above the horizontal aisle that bisects most stadium-style theaters.  All the late-comers were rushing about, looking for seats, getting their popcorn, and so on.  So the aisle in front of us was crowded, and slightly confused with all the back and forth.  Two men, who very clearly had significant physical disabilities, were struggling to manuever their electric wheelchairs into the designated slots on the aisle.  They were engaged in this tortuous process, when three twelve or thirteen-year-old boys completely impeded their progress, without so much as an "excuse me," in their rush to get to their seats.  Well, I got so mad that all the blood went to my head, I kind of involuntarily rose up out of my chair and felt my girlfriend grab my arm, very tightly, and force me back down.  Then, to top it all off, I heard these men's helper or caretaker or friend very politely ask the woman sitting in the seat next to the wheelchair section to move to an empty seat one row above her current position, so that he could sit next to his friends, who could sit nowhere else in the theater. She very brusquely refused, gentle readers!  I was so damn happy when one of the men next to her proceeded to engage in some involuntary hooting and chirping during the film.  I was so upset that it was well into the second hour of the movie before I could let go of my anger and allow myself to be immersed in the imaginative world of the film. Gentle readers, I don't want to paint myself in a too-positive light.  I think bad thoughts about the strangers with whom I am forced to share the world, all the time.  They annoy me, they're not like me, they're painfully slow and purposeless, and I typically just want them to get the hell out of my way.  But I also believe, very strongly, in the notion of public spaces, and try very hard to honor the rules that I feel are implicit in the sharing of said spaces.  I feel lucky, all the time, that my parents taught my brother and me about the distinction between the public and private, and the various rules governing these spheres.  If I had cut in front of anyone, much less a disabled person, during a trip to the movies, my parents would have made me apologize to the person in question, and would have then proceeded to remove me from the theater.  And I say this as someone who saw about five movies between the ages of six and twelve,  and for whom they were always a huge treat and a reward.  But even as that too-excited and happy ten-year-old, I would never, ever have done such a thing.  Oh well. And I'll just add, before closing this too-long entry, that, during the course of my writing, my CD changer has spun through all my new acquistions - Sigur Ros, Sade, Low, Wire - and has come to rest on a CD single of Yo La Tengo's cover of Sun Ra's "Nuclear War."  I can't imagine a more appropriate song to delineate our current global tensions - "It's a motherf#cker, don't you know.  If you push that button, your ass got to go."  Sometimes the simplest sentiments state things so well.  Happy holidays, gentle readers.  I wish for you all lots of gifts and kisses from those you love, and who love you in return. 10:52:22 AM