I think I'll drive down to LA tomorrow. Back Saturday, so no RT party for me.
Some stuff I wanna check out, and hopefully I'll get to meet up with some friends. As much as anything I'm going for the drive. I think I'll swing by Yosemite along the way.
Coming up to the end of my vacation, and no real regrets about staying arount town. If anything I was a little aggravated about some stuff I couldn't get my mind off of, but I remember feeling the same thing when I was in Rio last year. Gives truth to that hippie bumper sticker, 'Wherever you go, there you are'.
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Consider the Reader
Just finished reading "Infinite Jest", just in time for me to have nothing quite as fun to read during my two-week vacation.
It's a bizarre book. Lacking the background to draw good comparisons to other literature, I'm stuck comparing it to movies, which isn't such a bad idea, actually. A lot of the movies it reminds me of actually came out after IJ, so I can't help but wonder if it had some influence.
Imagine if Wes Anderson directed a film of a Chuck Palahniuk novel like Fight Club that incorporated the sort of multi-faceted geo-political intrigue of a film like Syriana or Traffic. Then imagine the story being broken up and told out of order like Tarantino often does. Then toss in some Pythonesque absurdity for good measure and even some elements that you might recall from Max Headroom. Then stop the novel just as everything seems to kind of be coming together, leaving readers to piece together what really happened from indistinct flashbacks and vaguely clairvoyant dreams or hallucinations laced throughout the novel.
The over-achieving and highly dysfunctional Incandenza family that the main thread follows recalls/portends the family in Anderson's Royal Tenenbaums, right down to the crash-n-burn tennis career of one of its characters. The family itself lives on an elite tennis academy James Incandenza (the father) founded after becoming successful with some kind of cold fusion and optical technology. The halfway house setting for the other thread recalls/portends the group therapy sessions and brutality of Fight club, packed with sardonic-yet-revelatory descriptions of AA meetings and recollections of past physical and sexual traumas expressed vividly through a deft use of slang and turns of phrase instead of explicit details.
This is all set in an absurdist near future where the US, Canada, and Mexico have been coercively united under the Organization of North American Nations (forming an unfortunate acronym in the process, one of many in the book). Instead of numbered Julian-calendar years, ONAN accepts corporate sponsorships to determine the name for each year, leading to calendar dates such as "May 19, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment". Interdependence Day is celebrated in commemoration of the union of the three nations instead of Independence Day. Years before sponsored time are referred to as Before-Subsidization time, or BS time. The Internet has given way to the Interlace, whose data are transmitted to tele-puters, or TPs.
A massive cold-fusion accident and toxic-dumping in the US's northeast has lead to the forcible ceding (as in we force the 'nucks to take it) of a massive chunk of the US northeast to Canada, now referred to as the great concavity. Dumping privileges are retained, though, accomplished through garbage catapults located throughout the northeast that launch garbage payloads into the concavity with a funny 'Shoop!' noise.
Getting the picture? And I'm seriously just glossing over everything.
International intrigue comes into play as an extremist cell of Quebecois separatists, already frustrated from union with Canada and now inconsolable from allegiance to ONAN, hatch a plot for a terror campaign to finally gain independence. Infinite Jest, a film made by James Incandenza shortly before he went mad and microwaved his own head, had apparently achieved such a level of entertainment that it was lethally addictive to anyone who viewed it. Viewers surrender completely to it and die after losing control of all bodily functions. The terror cell, many of which are legless and wheelchair bound from a bizarre initiation ritual, hopes to find the one hidden master copy of Infinite Jest and threaten to distribute copies throughout a US they view as helpless to resist the allure of such entertainment.
As the terror plot progresses, the story hops around various points in the characters' lives to develop the connections between them and the various members of the Incandenza family and ultimately to the senior Incandenza himself and IJ. All of this is necessary because nobody can directly view IJ without succumbing to it. Pro- and anti-ONAN bodies are in pursuit of information on it either to use it or to develop an antidote for it.
That's the basic setup, but one can't help but feel as if the plot is somewhat besides the point of this whole 1,079-page tome. There's a story, and you definitely are driven to find out what happens to its characters, but there's so much hopping around that reading it feels more like reading a collection of short stories, monologues, and dialogs. Some parts are in a quasi-screenplay format. One is intended to look like an insurance report that was forwarded around over e-mail by office mates. Wallace is constantly switching the voice in his writings as he switches between settings and characters so that while much of the book is in the third person, it feels first person because the language changes so drastically to reflect the subject of the current passage.
I can't seriously claim any solid understanding of what the real point of it all is -- there have been more than a few scholarly papers on it, and you hear 'great American novel' bandied about a lot by some critics. Most of the characters in the book suffer from some kind of addiction or compulsion, so that's an obvious theme, but the book also touches on other topics ranging from incest to commercialism to American foreign policy.
'Too much' is the overarching theme I get from it. Throughout the book you see things taken literally to ridiculous extremes. ONAN is the formalization of how the US just imposes itself on the rest of the continent. As if air pollution wasn't enough, garbage is now actively lobbed into Canada. James Incandenza is an experimental filmmaker that critics often refer to as audience-hostile with his bizarre style, in one case making a film where a character looks into the camera the last third of the film spouting apologies. Regarded as mediocre, he finally makes a film that is so entertaining it's lethal. The children and teens attending the tennis academy are so totally immersed in their drive to achieve super-stardom in tennis they know little else. Characters are constantly going on drug binges or overdosing.
And ultimately, of course, the book itself. You can't help but look at the massive volume of this thing and its 388 end notes and not wonder if there's a statement to be made in the delivery as well.
It's a bizarre book. Lacking the background to draw good comparisons to other literature, I'm stuck comparing it to movies, which isn't such a bad idea, actually. A lot of the movies it reminds me of actually came out after IJ, so I can't help but wonder if it had some influence.
Imagine if Wes Anderson directed a film of a Chuck Palahniuk novel like Fight Club that incorporated the sort of multi-faceted geo-political intrigue of a film like Syriana or Traffic. Then imagine the story being broken up and told out of order like Tarantino often does. Then toss in some Pythonesque absurdity for good measure and even some elements that you might recall from Max Headroom. Then stop the novel just as everything seems to kind of be coming together, leaving readers to piece together what really happened from indistinct flashbacks and vaguely clairvoyant dreams or hallucinations laced throughout the novel.
The over-achieving and highly dysfunctional Incandenza family that the main thread follows recalls/portends the family in Anderson's Royal Tenenbaums, right down to the crash-n-burn tennis career of one of its characters. The family itself lives on an elite tennis academy James Incandenza (the father) founded after becoming successful with some kind of cold fusion and optical technology. The halfway house setting for the other thread recalls/portends the group therapy sessions and brutality of Fight club, packed with sardonic-yet-revelatory descriptions of AA meetings and recollections of past physical and sexual traumas expressed vividly through a deft use of slang and turns of phrase instead of explicit details.
This is all set in an absurdist near future where the US, Canada, and Mexico have been coercively united under the Organization of North American Nations (forming an unfortunate acronym in the process, one of many in the book). Instead of numbered Julian-calendar years, ONAN accepts corporate sponsorships to determine the name for each year, leading to calendar dates such as "May 19, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment". Interdependence Day is celebrated in commemoration of the union of the three nations instead of Independence Day. Years before sponsored time are referred to as Before-Subsidization time, or BS time. The Internet has given way to the Interlace, whose data are transmitted to tele-puters, or TPs.
A massive cold-fusion accident and toxic-dumping in the US's northeast has lead to the forcible ceding (as in we force the 'nucks to take it) of a massive chunk of the US northeast to Canada, now referred to as the great concavity. Dumping privileges are retained, though, accomplished through garbage catapults located throughout the northeast that launch garbage payloads into the concavity with a funny 'Shoop!' noise.
Getting the picture? And I'm seriously just glossing over everything.
International intrigue comes into play as an extremist cell of Quebecois separatists, already frustrated from union with Canada and now inconsolable from allegiance to ONAN, hatch a plot for a terror campaign to finally gain independence. Infinite Jest, a film made by James Incandenza shortly before he went mad and microwaved his own head, had apparently achieved such a level of entertainment that it was lethally addictive to anyone who viewed it. Viewers surrender completely to it and die after losing control of all bodily functions. The terror cell, many of which are legless and wheelchair bound from a bizarre initiation ritual, hopes to find the one hidden master copy of Infinite Jest and threaten to distribute copies throughout a US they view as helpless to resist the allure of such entertainment.
As the terror plot progresses, the story hops around various points in the characters' lives to develop the connections between them and the various members of the Incandenza family and ultimately to the senior Incandenza himself and IJ. All of this is necessary because nobody can directly view IJ without succumbing to it. Pro- and anti-ONAN bodies are in pursuit of information on it either to use it or to develop an antidote for it.
That's the basic setup, but one can't help but feel as if the plot is somewhat besides the point of this whole 1,079-page tome. There's a story, and you definitely are driven to find out what happens to its characters, but there's so much hopping around that reading it feels more like reading a collection of short stories, monologues, and dialogs. Some parts are in a quasi-screenplay format. One is intended to look like an insurance report that was forwarded around over e-mail by office mates. Wallace is constantly switching the voice in his writings as he switches between settings and characters so that while much of the book is in the third person, it feels first person because the language changes so drastically to reflect the subject of the current passage.
I can't seriously claim any solid understanding of what the real point of it all is -- there have been more than a few scholarly papers on it, and you hear 'great American novel' bandied about a lot by some critics. Most of the characters in the book suffer from some kind of addiction or compulsion, so that's an obvious theme, but the book also touches on other topics ranging from incest to commercialism to American foreign policy.
'Too much' is the overarching theme I get from it. Throughout the book you see things taken literally to ridiculous extremes. ONAN is the formalization of how the US just imposes itself on the rest of the continent. As if air pollution wasn't enough, garbage is now actively lobbed into Canada. James Incandenza is an experimental filmmaker that critics often refer to as audience-hostile with his bizarre style, in one case making a film where a character looks into the camera the last third of the film spouting apologies. Regarded as mediocre, he finally makes a film that is so entertaining it's lethal. The children and teens attending the tennis academy are so totally immersed in their drive to achieve super-stardom in tennis they know little else. Characters are constantly going on drug binges or overdosing.
And ultimately, of course, the book itself. You can't help but look at the massive volume of this thing and its 388 end notes and not wonder if there's a statement to be made in the delivery as well.
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Spoils
Finally on my vacation. I've had my fill of umpteen-hour flights to the various corners of the globe/nation, so I've decided to go for the exact opposite of 'getting the most' out of my vacation time this time around, and will be spending my time visiting the fabulous San Francisco Bay Area. I'm planning on doing a few Wushu workouts, doing a few jogs up to Lake Temescal, taking a long drive around to places that will help clear out my head, and spend time in coffee shops on my new MacBook stealing some poor sap's Wi-Fi to make pithy blog entries, such as I am now. That is, I'm planning on doing absolutely fucking nothing.
The difficulty of this is not to be underestimated. The preoccupations of the last month or so has left unquenched my blood thirst for affordable East Bay real-estate. A flawed-yet-highly-desirable target has wandered into my sights and I'm trying to make some casual moves on it, which I'm finding is about as easy as running a 'casual' space shuttle launch. I never expected home-buying to be an easy process, but I'm still surprised with just how many variables there are. I've lived a long, happy life without pondering WTF a sewer lateral is, but now it's one thing I absolutely can't stop thinking about w/r/t this property, and the grave, archaic injustice of having to share one with two other residents. It's all likely moot anyway, for my shot at this particular property is slim at best.
Time is a rare ally here, though, and I need to learn to work with it. Though my sanity suffers, I can live at home slightly longer to wait for ideal targets and to better condition myself to go in for the kill when the time comes by straightening my finances out even more.
I need to talk about other things or else I'll be a total wreck. Which I will. Talk about other things, that is. I finally saw a respectable movie that I really enjoyed. I've finished reading Infinite Jest. The A's choked in the league playoffs. I'm fostering a dog through Milo. I'll talk about all that. Next time.
The difficulty of this is not to be underestimated. The preoccupations of the last month or so has left unquenched my blood thirst for affordable East Bay real-estate. A flawed-yet-highly-desirable target has wandered into my sights and I'm trying to make some casual moves on it, which I'm finding is about as easy as running a 'casual' space shuttle launch. I never expected home-buying to be an easy process, but I'm still surprised with just how many variables there are. I've lived a long, happy life without pondering WTF a sewer lateral is, but now it's one thing I absolutely can't stop thinking about w/r/t this property, and the grave, archaic injustice of having to share one with two other residents. It's all likely moot anyway, for my shot at this particular property is slim at best.
Time is a rare ally here, though, and I need to learn to work with it. Though my sanity suffers, I can live at home slightly longer to wait for ideal targets and to better condition myself to go in for the kill when the time comes by straightening my finances out even more.
I need to talk about other things or else I'll be a total wreck. Which I will. Talk about other things, that is. I finally saw a respectable movie that I really enjoyed. I've finished reading Infinite Jest. The A's choked in the league playoffs. I'm fostering a dog through Milo. I'll talk about all that. Next time.
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Labor Month
FINAL-ly!First real weekend I've had all month -- there must be something ironic about having worked every single day since Labor Day in September. Appropriately enough, though, most of the crew has been enjoying a real windfall in wages precisely because of our embattled labor union contract, rendering material the otherwise intangible physical and psychological tolls of miscalculated production schedules. I more than doubled my income for the month by working 70+ hour weeks, at least one of which was 80+. We even entered into what the wags refer to as 'golden time', where every single hour counted as overtime because we had crossed beyond the normal, sane limits of continuous work days.
It's sort of like this month has been that hell-of-ironic-punishments. So you like your job, eh? Just HOW much do you like it??? You like your co-workers, eh? Just HOW much you like 'em? You want to make more money, eh? Just HOW much do you want to make it? It all became a huge blur.
Anyway, insane as it was, I think we turned out some really great work. Do check it out if you live around the 200 or so theaters nationwide that will be capable of screening it.
Don't ask how. Just watch.Next Mission:
Roll out! ... after my vacationNeedless to say, this is a highly coveted assignment, and I consider getting crewed onto it as some kind of payback, be it administrative or karmic. It'll be a real relief, too, since it'll be more of a standard show (i.e. not stereoscopic), that I'll be supporting along with another more experienced ATD I hope to learn a lot from.
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