the truth about barristers
» Monday, June 25, 2007

When evening strikes, as it does so relentlessly around here, people take cover in their bedrooms, where, out of mortal fear, they will themselves unconscious or thrash around in copulation. Not Palinode or Schmutzie, though. They talk.

Schmutzie: What's the difference between a barrister and a solicitor?

Palinode: Oh. That is such an easy question.

Schmutzie: Is it.

Palinode: Completely. To start with, a female barrister is called a barista.

Schmutzie: I didn't know that.

Palinode: You're lucky you asked me first and not some self-styled 'expert'. Would you like to know how it is that the men practice law while the women serve the coffee?

Schmutzie: I'm very curious.

Palinode: It's attributable to a set of ancient practices and habits known as sexism.

Schmutzie: Sexism, you say?

Palinode: It is also true that barristers learn the law in Braille.

Schmutzie: Um, no.

Palinode: Braille actually originated with the Royal Society of Barristers.

Schmutzie: Not at all.

Palinode: Barristers were called in to court during blackouts. Even in pitch darkness they could still carry on a case. That was how law conquered nature.

Schmutzie: This is worse than the time you tried to tell me that mass debeaking killed all the puffins.

Palinode: Hence the barrister's motto, In Darkness We Tort.

Schmutzie: I'm turning off the light.

Palinode: That's the only way to barrist.

Labels: conversations

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palinode's week of watching things
» Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Things Watched This week:

The Third Man 2-disc Criterion version and its enormous paunch of extras
Red Road
28 Weeks Later

Common themes: trash

If you were to form an opinion on the national psyche of the UK based only on the three films I watched this week, you might conclude that Britain is obsessed with waste management. There’s a strain of British film – the non Billy-Elliott-and-the-Calendar-Girls-Are-Brassed-Off-at-the-Full-Monte strain – that worships trash above all other cinematic elements. I don’t mean trash as a category or taste of film, I mean garbage. Heaps of garbage, Tesco bags turning over in the wind like sleeping drunks, newspaper and tickets and bottles blanketing boulevards and plazas, trash bins overflowing with the useless packaged crap of daily living. Even The Third Man, where garbage takes on the epic proportions of car bodies and whole buildings, where the climax takes place in a sewer, was a British film. What would Freud have said about a nation so obsessed with its own waste that it needs to portray people running around in the stuff for two hours? Something in German, I'll bet. Easy to parse and even easier to spell.

The least-known of the three is Red Road, a psychosexual thriller that rolls around in the thrills of voyeurism, sex and revenge. On top of all that is poverty, ugliness, the utterly creepy UK surveillance state, and the unbelievably bleak slums of Glasgow. If you wanted to travel in time to a future without hope, you can skip the expensive and energy-hungry time machine and just move to the Glaswegian projects, where people live in squalid high-rise blocks, knife each other in the open and fuck up against the graffiti-soaked buildings.



The film centers around Jackie, a woman who spends her nights watching the Glasgow streets through the exhaustive network of closed circuit cameras that decorate the lamp posts of urban Britain. Her ostensible task is to prevent crime, but often she just follows people around: a man with an aging bulldog, a cleaning woman who yearns for another employee. The only other thing we know about Jackie is that she's achingly lonely, wears a wedding ring despite the clear absence of a husband, and carries on a desultory affair with a man named Avery who comes round every fortnight in a van. They drive out to the country and have mostly clothed, unsatisfying sex in the front seat.



The early sex scenes are notable because they feature the only non-urban images in the whole film: a few static shots of a dirt road heading into pastureland. It reminds me vaguely of the token rural fantasyland of Brazil (a film by an American director about a garbage-strewn future Britain*) or Blade Runner (a film by a British director set in a garbage-strewn future Los Angeles). Beyond that foggy pastoral, though, there's nothing in Red Road but a landscape dominated by kipple. Even the people seem as aimless as wind-blown garbage as they wander from project block to laundromat to cafe to pub.

In case you're wondering, something does happen in the film. One evening at the monitors, Jackie spies a man and a woman having sex against a wall. When the man turns around, she recognizes his face, even through the blur of video scan lines. We don't know who he is, but we know that there's a line leading from him to Jackie's ruined life. She begins to stalk him on camera, and when that doesn't satisfy her, she goes out to the projects on Red Road and begins to insinuate herself into his life. After that, things get twisty.

On Tuesday, I went and saw another great Brit-trash film. 28 Weeks Later seems to be about the repressed urge to abandon all responsibility, run around the English countryside and bite the decent slow-moving folk. Either that, or it's about the tremendous fear shared by decent folk that violence and abandon will crash through their homes and carry them off in a blood-dimmed flood. The movie opens with a group of people barricaded in a house in the countryside, carefully rationing out the last of their supplies. Robert Carlyle and Catherine McCormack play Don and Alice, a couple who have lost track of their children in the wake of the outbreak. When the angry zombies attack, as they do, Don panics and leaves Alice to the bitey mercies of the monsters. Why are those things so miffed with us anyway?

After that really quite excellent opening, the action switches to armed compound in London, where the 15,000 or so survivors are being housed and protected by an American force. They even give the compound the fanciful title 'The Green Zone' - wherever did the filmmakers come up with that catchy name? The Green Zone is a bit like a scrubbed-down version of the Glasgow projects from Red Road, all steel and concrete high-rises and crowds of shell-shocked people trying to knit together a life in a zombie-depressed economy. If you replace the cameras with American soldiers, the similarities between the two films become startlingly apparent. There are identical scenes in which the camera roves from window to window, catching little bits of ordinary people's lives, while a sympathetic authority figure (Jackie In RR, Good Soldier Doyle in 28WL) watches with a smile.

Mind you, Red Road is a story about a family irrevocably torn apart by accident and death. In 28 Weeks Later you get the pleasure of reunions. Into the Green Zone come Imogen and Mac, the lost children of Don and Alice. Don is already waiting for them. He tells them a fanciful tale of watching their mother die at the hands of the zombies and leaves it at that.

For the next twenty minutes everything seems tidy - a tidiness filled with the threat of galloping blood-vomiting zombies, but still - until the two children sneak away from the armed compound and drive a scooter through deserted, rotting, filthy London. This is probably the most striking image in the entire film, as the children speed bravely through a thriving city that has become a cenotaph.

Oddly enough, there’s very little fear at this point that the children will encounter monsters. Instead, the tension comes from witnessing the old order turned inside out. The city they find evokes the terrors of a neutron bomb, which promised to destroy populations but leave buildings intact.



When the monsters finally show up, with the craven dad in the van of the attack (long story), the movie slumps into ineptitude. Detail, character, plausibility and well-staged action sequences are pretty much sacrificed to the exigencies of completion, with potentially great scenes of horror ruined by shaky camera and overly rapid cutting. What's even worse, they neglect to trash up the sets - with the exception of an overgrown stadium, the streets of London are suspiciously tidy again as the survivors run from the infected. Say what you will about Brazil or Children of Men, they keep their dystopias messy.




When it comes to garbage, though, both of these films look downright scrubbed and shiny compared to The Third Man. For those of who you don't watch the film every six months or so, The Third Man takes place in late '40s Vienna, when the city was divided unter the control of the US, Russia, Post-war Vienna is worse than a slum or wasteland; it's an underworld of bombed-out buildings and empty pavilions, where faces peer from corners and criminals vanish into sewers. Vienna is a quartered corpse infested with scavengers.

That's all. There's garbage. I'm done with this entry. Take care!


*People what know Brazil will point out that the film is not necessarily set in Britain - that the entire world has become overrun by a ludicrous totalitarian regime - but it's about as British a setting as it gets.

Labels: film, trash

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random notes, no doodles
» 

Just wait til you see the doodles.

One twenty eh em.

I suspect cell phones.

Von Sudenfed makes me happy. Is that so wrong? I haven't watched this video What the video lacks in variety it makes up for in Mark E. Smith and Mouse On Mars in drag.



I interrogate vineyards. I take the dog sweaters to task, that have made us all so unhappy with their innumerable sins.

It's time to deport the take-out menus. Maybe then our society can begin the long healing process.

We spent the morning smashing all the remote controls in our house, but the appliances refused to die. In the afternoon they all left.

The spirit wasn't willing, the flesh wasn't weak, but the fridge was off.

Damn it, when I say Judd Nelson stole my hot tub, I mean it. I mean I never had a hot tub.

Labels: useless

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fish derby trio
» Thursday, June 14, 2007

Hey out there. Have you ever dreamed of a career in the promising field of journalism? Are you halted in your tracks by a grade four education, a stake through your skull and a recurring case of Bell's palsey? It turns out that may not be the stumbling block you imagined! I received this in my inbox from a company that sells ad space in newspapers (redacted a bit for anonymity):

Got an event comming [sic] up ?

Advertise across the province for just $25.00

Sports Day -- Rodeo -- Home Comming [again, sic] -- Church Reunion

Annual Picnic -- Family Gathering – Aniversery [a bit more sic] -- Ball Tourament [oh come on, people - tourament? This is an advertisement?]

Fish Derby -- Canoe Races -- Water Sports Day

Dog Show -- Agriculture Fair

These are some of the communities that ____ go into each week with our network of weekly papers: [here should be a list of all the local podunks that money can buy; it’s a shame that I can’t really include them, because some of the names of towns, villages, and reserves are excellent to behold]

Also we have footprints into many smaller communities around these listed. More information is at our web site _______ or e-mail us at _______________

I don’t know about you, but these are the guys I want advertising my fish derby. But what exactly is a fish derby? Is a hat worn by fish? A hat made out of fish? A smart fishskin derby worn by the discrimating gent or au courant young lady looking to make a dent in the impervious surface of jaded journalism? If you wear a fish derby to your home comming, or maybe accesorize it with a ball tourament (a small metal axle designed for rotating balls and keeping them fresh), the small-town print media will come a' stampeding.

Labels: fish, scorn

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Now i know why they call Facebook the two-headed bitch queen of the intertubes. Don't they? Well I do.
» Monday, June 11, 2007

After years of frustrated hopes and expectations, Facebook has finally turned the internet from a radiant web of communication into a small, stuffy room full of everyone you've ever known. People wave at each other, speak publicly and privately, poke each other incessantly and generally behave as if they’re attending an endless party, except all the drinks are virtual and the drug of choice is contact and all its small thrills. It’s an evolved Myspace free of the band trappings and atrocious design issues, an AJAX-heavy Friendster for Web 2.0.

I signed up on Facebook a few weeks ago. After thirty minutes I’d found and friended practically everyone from my past. If I remembered their names, if their faces seemed familiar, I netted them but good in my Facebook friending trawler. The experience of virtually resurrecting my adolescence, even my childhood, online was intoxicating. Old girlfriends, barely remembered classmates, people whose guts I’d hated for reasons I'd long forgotten – I friended them all and scoured their profiles. Who likes decent music (a few people)? Who has kids (everyone)? Who still looks the same after eighteen years (again, everyone)? And of course, who's secretly obsessed with the past, constantly reliving and redoing it in their imaginations, turning tiny humiliations into gigantic victories, and releasing the unbearable psychic pressure of all the irredeemable but inconsequential mistakes they've ever made? Who's with me on this one?

As in real life, the faces from the past on Facebook are willing to forgive you for the numerous jerky sins that you committed in your adolescence. Old girlfriends, to whom I gave no good reason for speaking to me again, are happy to chat back and forth with me about time and adulthood and whatever else. I find myself reminiscing and catching up with people that I barely spoke to back then. Eventually this tumble of chat and memory is going to lose some of its energy and flatten out, and I’ll lose touch with some of them again. But thanks to Facebook, they’ll always be immediately accessible, as if they’ve just gone to talk and drink in the kitchen for a while, before returning to the main action in the living room.

Having said all that, there are things about Facebook that drive me absolutely crazy. Some of them are inherent in the design, others are inherent in the users. Since Facebook is so dependent on its users, though, it’s hard to distinguish one from the other. In no particular order, here they are:

The Wall. If only they hadn’t named the public message section “The Wall”. Facebook feels like a modern loft apartment, all clean lines and tall windows and a nice plasma screen with a constant feed of information set high in one corner. The Wall calls to mind a teenager’s attic bedroom, where everyone goes to smoke dope after school and write Led Zeppelin lyrics on the slanted ceiling. On top of that, most of the messages on The Wall are cryptic and one-sided, subjects and context clipped away in the economy of the back-and-forth conversations between cybergraffitists. “Oh yeah! Can’t wait to be there!” and the ubiquitous “Hi there! How’s it going? Long time no see!” crowd the Walls and turn them into indicators of your ability to attract commenters. At moments it skates close to purely phatic communication, the equivalent of yelling "Hey! Hey you!"

Profile Photos. The profile photo is the first thing that people see when they encounter your name. It’s an advertisement for your personality, a logo of yourself. Some people don’t get it. There are several photo sins that people commit:

• The Professional Portrait. This is like handing out business cards at a five year old's birthay party.


• The Group Shot. Which one of the five shrieking girls in black tank tops are you? Are you split into separate entities, or are you fused, hydra-headed, into an undying Screwdriver-swigging monster?


• The Family Portrait. Again, which one are you? I know you're not the two-year old or the one with the goatee. Are you at least the one in the middle?


• The Hasselhoff. Ah, hah, hahahahhhh. You look just like David Hasselhoff. Wait a second - that IS David Hasselhoff. Oh, that is the kick.


• The Nolte. Warning: this is no ordinary picture. Nick Nolte’s mug shot comes from the stirred-up silt of our collective unconscious. For that reason, you should show restraint, lest the picture sail into your unguarded consciousness and consume you.

The End of Privacy. So, why is Facebook out there in the first place? Is it a philanthropic enterprise for bored middle-class college students? Or a gigantic data-mining project masquerading as a social utility network? If you guessed the latter, then I will airmail you an Arrowroot cookie.* The people who run Facebook have more DARPA ties than Dick Cheney’s walk-in closet.** Seriously, if there's any reason why you should delete your information and walk away from Facebook, it's the lines of connection between Facebook, In-Q-Tel, the CIA, DARPA and the Total Information Awareness Program that should make you feel uneasy. Here's a Flash presentation on the relationships that go into the MOST AWESOME BIG BROTHER EVER.

Even if the relationships outlined are insignificant, the fact remains that Facebook will send your traditional concept of privacy to a deep, dark place, and you'll have fun doing it.*** Until some lawyer successfully argues that you don't have an expectation of privacy on your social networking site.

Diminishing Returns. An ex-junkie friend of mine described his addiction as “five years of my life spent chasing five seconds.” The same could be said of Facebook. The initial experience of finding old friends overwhelmed some circuit in my brain, and ever since I’ve been going over friend lists to find just one more person from my past to add. But it’s never as good as the first time.

Relationships Conducted By Poking. Someone pokes you on Facebook. You poke back. They poke you in return. To acknowledge the poke, you poke them. Then they poke you. This will go on until our electrical grid collapses and we lurch out from our homes, pale and blinking in the intolerable natural light, drooling out the single word “Pooooke”.

Amassing Friends as Objects. We all know that if your Facebook friends were all plunked down in front of you, there are some you'd latch on to, and others you'd more or less ignore (just like good old physical life!). In Facebookese, “friend” is a debased term that ecompasses soulmates and people you made eye contact with once, but he or she is a face to add to your ever-growing, increasingly awesome list of friends. In Facebook, as in most online social networks, a person is judged by the number of friends amassed. Welcome to friendship as token. Oh yeah, it's the inhuman online utopia of Facebook.


*will not mail you a cookie.

** Das ist der Rimshot.

***I will mail a cookie* to anyone who can identify what I'm paraphrasing with this line.

Labels: facebook

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the old-timey times
» Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Attention: do you like the old-timey pleasures of a sar-sa-pa-rilla on a sun-dappled afternoon? Ambling along the crick with your family? Do you like shooting at an upturned tin bucket? How about reading another installment of Travels With Greg, my story of a six-week documentary shoot through Europe in the fall of 2004? Oh, that’s an old-timey pleasure that doesn’t even require you to leave the computer. Join us as I stumble around Heathrow looking for the Customs office, sleep-drunk and smelling ripe.

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these turtle games (are tearing me apart)*
» Monday, June 04, 2007

So: the turtles in the hotel pool are messing with me.

Last Wednesday-Thursday (that mushy middle of the work week) I was waiting for a cab to take me from work to my physiotherapist. I sat down at the lip of the two-tiered turtle/koi pond in the lobby of the hotel when a group of children skated by. Look! They shouted, pointing at the water. They’re humping each other!

I twisted my head around to look. I assumed they were talking about the turtles and not the koi or a couple of humans who’d stumbled into the pond. The turtles were definitely not humping one another, but a small, light-shelled fellow had climbed on top of one the big ones, and from that elevated vantage he was staring me down.

It appears that after several months of being looked at by me, the turtles had decided to look back. Maybe they’d figured out that there was an entire world above the concrete lip, and they were taking stock to see if it was worth invading. Probably not. What does a hotel lobby have that a few turtles want? Aside from the lost & found box behind the front desk. And of course, the sweet taste of panic-flavoured human flesh.

Have you ever competed in a staring contest with a turtle? It’s a loser’s game. Even if the turtle turns its head, you can’t be sure that those jet beads aren’t still fixing you in their gaze. And when the turtle finally slides off his friend’s back and slides into the water, it’s not out of defeat. He’s simply toyed with you enough. Just long enough to make sure that everyone in the hotel lobby has witnessed you in a staring contest with a reptile.**


*Or: Turtle Games Will Tear Us Apart (Again)

**Or whatever those primordial creatures of armour and slime are.

Labels: shame, turtles

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i has a camra?
» Friday, June 01, 2007

Yahoo! I got me a swanky, nearly pill-sized* little digital camera. They call it a Lumix FZ-8. I call it Daniel the Camera. Why Daniel? Because many years ago, when I was an orphaned boy wandering around the ruins of Eastern Europe, a man named Daniel locked me in a shed and forgot about me. I nearly starved to death. Daniel looked a lot like my camera. Here is the only surviving photo of that half-human, half-animal jailer who nearly destroyed me.



And here are a few images I took of stuff 'round the house.


Here are two otherwise civilized cats exploding into arcs and blobs.


And then some more.


These are wind chimes that Schmutzie's parents brought us from the Dominican a few years back.



It behooves you not to forget the Crab House Crunch.

Anyway, every time I look at my camera, I think of Daniel, and my heart grows a little colder. It's good to have a camera.

*Obviously I'm talking about a sizable pill.

Labels: awesome, photos

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