The Clairvoyant Zoopraxiscope

Saw John Waters on TV in a mid-prandial rush to leave home this morning, speaking about a photography exhibit up at the New Museum. He commented that if you make a lot of people angry, that's usually a very good thing. Which of course is half true. There's good anger and bad anger, in relation to artistic response, in particular. If the anger is the anger of frustration, rage at someone's ignorance, that's bad anger. If the anger is the anger of upheaval, of resistance to thinking in a new way, that's good anger. Yessir.

Speaking of resistance, tried to get my beloved to say she would consent to watch Serial Mom with me. Her resistance? On a scale of 1 to 10? 18. What drove it up was a general tone of annoyance, mixed with the resistance. To think someone might not want to watch Serial Mom! To thunk!

I had the experience this morning, all too common in NYC, of walking very nearly beside a stranger, slowing down, finding that that person was slowing down as well, speeding up, feeling a brief sense of relief, and then, upon finding I had put some distance between myself and the stranger, slowing down, only to find myself nearly parallel with the dratted person once more. We want to engage, but think better of it, but then we think better of that. And that. And that. And that. How anyone gets anywhere, or ever makes any human contact, is a mystery to me, bound as we are by such Zeno-like constraints.

The kind of debates that take place in Bertolucci's The Dreamers remind me of the sorts of conversations you might find in Dr. Zhivago or Anna Karenina, long aesthetic discussions which might take several pages, might have nothing to do with the plot, and yet are nevertheless reaches out into the world beyond the story which are essential. The conversations, to me, seem utterly genuine, a certain kind of display of intellectual macho which takes place all the time, even now, even in culturally bereft 2004. Sure it's embarassing to listen to, sort of a Woody-Allen-cutting-room-floor type thing, but that's neither here nor there. The response they evoke does not make the conversations themselves invalid or gratuitous.

A new addition to the list: Runaway Jury... It seems, at least to me, that Grisham's novels make satisfying, if not lasting, movies. The sparky elements of the story--the mysterious cooperation of John Cusack and Rachel Weisz, the watch-ish object John Cusack keeps looking at, the explosions and odd occurrences that take place in the court room, the suh-thun accent of Dustin Hoffman--are interesting, but merit only a twinkle in the mind. The visuals are not remarkable, except for some sandbag-esque touches (when Rachel Weisz is sent flying into a wall of juror pictures, the ruinous quality of Cusack and Weisz's headquarters--which is justified at the end of the movie). What is gratifying is the beginning/middle/end of the movie, the sense of completion. It is a strange and somewhat unfortunate thing that an interest in plot or structure, if too large, immediately relegates an author to the sludge pile, regardless of any other qualities the author might possess. Grisham is nothing special, to be sure, and neither is the director who made this movie, but there is a grain of accomplishment here, evident at least on the morning after.

Also watched Lost in Translation. Almost better on the small screen than it was on the larger one. I like the doubleness of it, that sense that nothing is happening, and yet somehow, when Bob Harris switches from tea to beer while having lunch with Charlotte, the moment takes on a Chekhovian, uh, moment. Or the way in which everyone in the film seems so gigantic so much of the time, because of the closeness of the camera work. There is something dismayingly "cool" about it, as if neither Murray nor Johansson are trying particularly hard--but then, they don't really have to, given the constraints of the story and the script. So why blame them?

Watched Un jour se leve (Daybreak) (Marcel Carne) recently, felt often as if I had just taken a slow-acting anaesthetic that, before it sent you off to sleep, distorted your perceptions. I kept thinking, as I watched Jean Gabin and Arletty, 'Those people are really feeling emotions. Christ! Pass the guacamole!' And then there would be a swooping, bizarre camera angle--which has by now of course been updated, outdone--but still!--that would make me feel almost dizzy on my futon, and then another one. And then there it would be: well-written dialogue (Prevert), tastefully executed facial expressions that nevertheless bore the mark of the advent of talking films, and a unified plot structure. Lordy. Wha' happen'?

Have been unpacking recently, found quite a few books I had thought I lost or had, with a false sense of relief, thought I didn't own, among them The Book of Questions, Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Chessmen of Mars, and a copy of The Two Towers with the cover torn off. It is important, though difficult, to balance one's reading, to make sure that the moments we allot to it, those quiet or perhaps noisy (inwardly) times, are not all of the same texture. One might balance, for instance, a reading of Tolkien with a reading of Rosmarie Waldrop's Blindsight with a reading of Winston Churchill's The History of the English Speaking Peoples, Vol. 1: The Birth (Berth?) of Britain. In this way keeping afloat, not becoming polarized. Other words for this creed might be "health," "diffusion," "staying well-balanced," or "having no focus." For me, it simply Is.