Wednesday, December 25, 2002

I don't know - maybe posting to weblog on Christmas morning is pathetic beyond belief, but I'm a little lonely!  Wow, this is pathetic.  I'm lonely in a good way, full of bittersweet feelings involving the mystery of the season.  I've actually had a pretty good week - I wrapped up (look, a pun - last refuge of the witless) my Christmas shopping early in the week, and therefore didn't have to venture out into the consumer madness of the 23rd and 24th.  Whatever.  I hung around the house, listened to more music, read some more Borges essays, and kind of indifferently surfed the web, trying to figure out how to spend my literally hundreds of dollars of bookstore gift certificates.  Everyone gives me a bookstore gift certificate, every year, and I always get a little paralyzed thinking about them all piled up, waiting for me (in the virtual sense, at least).  Actually, amazon.com sells so much disparate crap that I could have a shirt, or a CD burner, or a fondue set, or something.  I actually like the idea of a fondue set! It seems very seventies and swingin', but in a completely suburban fashion.  You know - gin and tonics, Mantovani, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, polyester leisure suits, fondue.   Wow, I think I just made my Christmas list for next year, gentle readers.  Who says weblog is a waste of time? Anyway, you don't care about that.  I don't even care about that.  I watched Apolocalypse Now while wrapping Christmas gifts, and then started Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts, but really had to stop when the bereaved protagonist began washing bits of shattered glass (detritus from the car accident that killed his wife) down his throat with bourbon.  No, I'm sorry - chewing bits of shattered glass, while sitting nude on the bathroom floor, with a creepy as all get-out Michael Nyman score in the background, then washing the glass bits down with bourbon.  People, is this an apt metaphor for grief, and if so, why is it presented in such a painfully literal fashion, exploding (I'm sure Mr. Greenaway would prefer 'subverting') the notion of metaphor altogether?  Is Peter Greenaway a cinematic genius, or a twisted Sadean set-dresser?  I can't decide, and keep watching his often quite-gross movies in an effort to come to some conclusion.  I mean, for every great Pillow Book, Prospero's Books, In the Belly of the Architect, there's a gross-out: The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, or A Zed and Two Noughts.   I'm sure there are all sorts of Tel Quel-derived theories regarding the powers of horror, the privileging of the abject and base, Bakhtinian inversion of cultural norms, and blah-dy blah woven into the structure of his films, but I guess I'm just not in the mood for that these days.  I think deriving some meaningful work of imaginative art solely from a theoretical or formal base is difficult, and compelling instances of this are rare.  I'm not really sure this is what Peter Greenaway is attempting, but his works, even the really good ones, seem a little claustrophobic and overly structured to me.  Some of his tropes are awfully compelling to me, though: the near-autistic repetition of image, the thematic attention to numbers, lists, and counting, and the obssessive attention to detail. I'm listening to another Icelandic musical offering this morning, Mum (with a little grave accent over the 'u', which I can't figure out how to type), Finally We Are No One.  I don't want to assert any sweeping racial or cultural stereotypes, but these Icelandic musicians seem quite fey and pixie-ish. I'm basing this observation on a tiny sample of four Icelandic bands: Bjork, The Sugarcubes, Sigur Ros, Mum.  Most of these names have some accent mark somewhere in them.  I was going to write "Bjork has a trema over the 'o' ", but then I realized that trema has an aigu over the 'e', at which point I give up, plus these aren't the right names for Icelandic accent marks anyway.  Actually, this is a pretty good CD.  Great, in fact - full of long washes of both acoustic and electronic ambient sounds, with lots of little pointillist details - until the singers come in, singing in their high-pitched elfin voices, at which point it becomes merely okay.   There's not much singing on this record, thankfully. Anyway.  Happy Holidays!  I'm off to have some fun. 11:29:35 AM