working from home
» Thursday, August 30, 2007

Remember when working at home, or 'telecommuting,' was seriously considered as a prospect for the white-collar Western world? Remember when pundits had visions of people in their well-appointed home offices in a state of industrious relaxation, enjoying their days as they gardened, worked, relaxed, worked, pleasured their partners, worked, watched a movie with the kids, worked, slept, worked? Oh what a glorious future it would soon be when everyone stayed home to dissolve the boundaries between personal and professional, in the process transforming downtown city cores into empty shells of civic life occupied by rotting towers of industry.

If only.

By now it should be pretty obvious that the cheerleaders of telecommuting and the Office-in-Every-Bungalow America missed out on the fact that most white-collar work is a social enterprise, with people making decisions by wandering the floor and talking with different people. Workplaces that severely restrict face-to-face interaction tend to be tyrannical sweatshops, which makes me wonder about the 'freedom' that telecommuting promised. It's more like comfortable isolation.

Nonetheless, there are days when nothing is more satisfying than doing all your business from home. As necessary as human contact may be for the soul, sometimes you need solitude for your brain. You don't always need the guy who knocks gently on your door as a prelude to dumping the responsibility for some insanely dull but complex problem on your desk. You don't always want to explain, for the hundredth time, that even though your office door is right by the printer, it doesn't mean you know how to print off envelopes (Remember when I used to travel the world for a living? Sheesh). Sometimes you do what I did today: you stay the fuck home and keep everyone at email's length.

The chief advantage of working from home is so obvious that it pains me to mention it, but it's a rare workplace that lets you show up in a codpiece and clown makeup. At home, you have no one to horrify but your pets, your roommate, or your family. And those people just don't count. At any rate, they should be used to your codpiece by now.

I've heard that natty dressing and proper ablutions will put your mind in work mode, but I don't believe it. I pushed a ream of paper today, ironed out an interjurisdictional news release, booked ad space on billboards, trained a new employee and basically managed the shop in a Mr. Wong shirt and some snappy boxer briefs.

The other great advantage is the ability to take a shower whenever you want. Theoretically, you could go take a shower in the middle of a conference call and no one would even notice. And it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference, as long as you got back on for the thirty-second recap at the end of the call that neatly summarizes the previous ninety minutes. Ninety minutes. You could have taken a shower and watched Death Proof, but instead you get an awkward conversation with disembodied voices trying to talk over each other, resulting in little shards of voice flying all over cyberspace.

Then there's the whole thing where you can get up from your chair and go have sex in the middle of drafting a memo or signing off on correspondence. If you don't feel like getting up to have sex, you can stay seated. You can call someone over to have the sex with you, or you can just have it by yourself. If masturbation doesn't feel shameful enough, you can bust out a pan flute and play along with Yanni. Who cares? Whom besides yourself are you pleasing? You're not at work.

You're just working.

Labels: work

posted by the palinode | comments (1) | permalink | subscribe

a season in albuquerque
» Monday, August 27, 2007

When I was young and stuck to the television I used to wonder why Bugs Bunny always made the wrong turn at Albuquerque, or Albakoykee, as he would say it. How can you end up so incredibly lost by dint of one wrong turn at one city in New Mexico? And then there was the disturbingly barren or surreal look of the landscapes where he popped up for a look at the map. No matter where he emerged, Bugs seemed to wander into desert (or ice, in one case). Maybe loose sand is the path of least resistance when you're traveling underground.

It never occurred to me wonder where Bugs Bunny meant to go. I have vague memories of him playing the obnoxious tourist, but it always seemed like a scam to me, a faux-naive invitation to lure belligerent locals to their doom. He'd march up to a cartoon strongman or palace eunuch and ask for directions to Las Vegas, but I never believed, not for a second, that Bugs Bunny was actually lost. His home is his warren, and his warren comprises all the tunnels dug and undug that snake beneath the ground, some in progress, some pending. Just as you or I would add a room or knock down a wall, Bugs Bunny digs a tunnel. His digging isn't exploration; it's expansion.

So what exactly is Albuquerque? After all, there's only so many times you can pass through there until you figure out your basic mistake. My guess is that it's the last moral reference point, a landmark where a left turn takes you to your expected destination, but any other course of action lands you in a cartoon universe of upended physics and random violence. This is the place where hunters, bulls and blowhards prowl the landscape, waiting to take out their inexplicable rages on the ones who turned right at Albuquerque. Faced with these predators, Bugs adds to the moral map by kicking their asses in the most humiliating and smart-ass manner possible.

There are plenty of sources that find in Bugs Bunny's tricksterish behaviour a note of anarchism and chaotic fecundity, but he always struck me as a bit conservative. Bugs Bunny dresses in drag, smacks his enemies with anvils and escapes death by a whisker, but his quicksilver violence always imparts a cautionary moral lesson. He edifies as he bewilders, attacks as he defends, dominates as he plays the underdog. He tames his enemies, which is a weird job for a rabbit, but it somehow seems appropriate that Bugs Bunny, who in the real world would be relegated to the forked fates of cage or pot, should run around the world teaching foreigners to behave. The patriotic cartoons of the early '40s (Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips, anyone?) show his conservative, Manifest Destiny streak in full force. My advice to you, if you find yourself buying a condo somewhere to the right of Albuquerque, is to keep your head down and be nice to the wise-cracking rabbit when he sidles on up and mockingly calls you Doc.

Labels: albuquerque, bugs bunny

posted by the palinode | comments (8) | permalink | subscribe

history lesson
» Sunday, August 26, 2007

I don't usually recycle older material on my weblog, but I'm completely fucking lazy I just found a piece from my old weblog that impressed me with its pure insanity and unwillingness to please its audience. Anyway, come join me in a journey back in time to a simpler era, back in 2003, when the US was at war with Iraq and I spent my afternoons drinking draught at a faux-Irish bar. How times have changed.

***

Yesterday [March 14, 2003] I promised you an extravaganza (Waitress: What'll ya have? Customer: burger, fries, extra vaganza on my patty. Waitress: Extra vaganza is 50 cents. Customer: What a rip off. My mother keeps homemade vaganza in a Mason jar on a shelf in the basement) featuring Anton Szandor LaVey, Marty Feldman and Gilles de Rais. What follows is an excerpt. It is not the entire work. If this were the entire work you would receive instructions on where to go and what to do next (hint: find the nearest field and burrow in for the hard years ahead).

"NIGHT MOVES"
A graveyard at night. Full moon. Marty Feldman, TV and film comedian, stands next to an open grave. Anton Szandor LaVey, head of the Church of Satan, stands on the other side of the grave.

LaVey: By attending Church and worshipping the archon Jehovah, you actually serve the Devil with your hypocritical lusts. Truly, you fool, it is at my altar that you worship.

Feldman: [Holds up title card] Pardon me, I just came from a silent film.

Gilles de Rais, famed 14th century French nobleman noted for raping and killing young boys, runs up and stands next to Feldman. He is out of breath, and holds up his hand to indicate that he wishes to speak. Feldman and LaVey wait for him to catch his wind.

de Rais: Bonjour! Je cherche des beaux ephebes pour ravir. [Hello! He searches for beautiful children to ravish]

LaVey: I approve.

Feldman: [Holds up sign] I'm taken aback, but you seem like a nice fellow all the same.

de Rais: [brandishes a knife] J'inflige une blessure du couteau à vous! [He inflicts a wound of the knife to Marty Feldman!]

Feldman: [holds up sign] You can't kill me; I'm already dead.

Feldman falls into open grave.

Awkward pause. LaVey and de Rais stare at each other. LaVey clears his throat.

LaVey: You know -

de Rais: Je vous poignarde! [He knifes LaVey!] Et... je me frappe d'un coup de couteau! [And... he strikes himself a blow of the knife!]

LaVey falls into open grave. We hear Marty Feldman give a startled yell.

de Rais: Alors, je n'ai jamais conjugé tous des verbes en français. [Alors, he never conjugated all the French verbs.]

[He falls into the open grave as well. Pause. Marty Feldman yells again.]

THE END

***

When I read stuff like this it strikes me that I've been entirely too ingratiating and kind to my audience. From now on I'm dedicating my site to short plays featuring French monsters of history.

Labels: anton szandor lavey, gilles de rais, marty feldman

posted by the palinode | comments (3) | permalink | subscribe

palinode likes a google game
» Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Courtesy of a friend of mine on the everloving Facebook, I found another Googlist game. In this one, you take your name, which we'll say is Aidan for the sake of argument, and Google the phrase "Aidan likes to". I predict, since there are so many young-to-baby Aidans out there, that most of my results would involve sippy cups, aggresion and excrement. At the very least, I figured I would excavate the smooshy world of children's lives narrated in aching detail by their adoring wired parents. It's the vanguard of a generation of people who will grow up with lives partly exposed to the public sphere. Let's see how right I was.

NEUTRAL
Aidan likes Indie Games.
Aidan does not like sitting in the driver's seat.
Aidan likes to emulate.
Aidan, of course, likes his new vantage point.
Aidan likes being out and about in Hammersmith and Fulham.
Aidan likes them.
Aidan likes to call them.
Aidan likes to stay in.
Aidan likes it. Actually, he likes the theme song.
Aidan likes to see the different kind of the expression of my face [big sic].


COMMENDABLE
Aidan likes to talk and to sing.
Aidan likes red.
Aidan likes to help.
Aidan likes growing plants and cooking (and eating) food.
Aidan likes it a lot.
Aidan Likes Steve Carell.
Aidan likes to stay awake after his 3:00 bottle.
Aidan likes art.
Aidan likes that.
Aidan likes his new shin guards for soccer.
Aidan likes to roar and the T-Rex is just a cover for acceptable roaring in public.


QUESTIONABLE
Aidan likes to use dad's thumb as a gear shift...Faster Daddy!!
Aidan likes to vacuum. [Poor bastard].
Aidan likes to feel things in his hands.
Aidan likes buttermilk.
Aidan likes to tackle a massive jigsaw puzzle [Inappropriate].
Aidan likes to play with his Lamaze baby gym.
Aidan likes it clean.
Aidan likes Brian Lara.
Aidan likes to splash his mother!
Aidan likes bologna too.
Aidan likes the feisty little cub.
Aidan likes to lead us in prayer before dinner.
Aidan likes to sit under my chair and chew on his books.
Aidan likes this horse a lot.
Aidan likes Marmite on his toast for breakfast.
Aidan likes all the tot movies.
Aidan likes to poke me in the eyes.
Aidan likes to pull hair.


INDICTABLE
Aidan likes the "tunnel".
Aidan likes to have a drink in the car.
Aidan likes hardcore.
Aidan likes to cover up the little squirt hole with his finger.

Labels: google

posted by the palinode | comments (11) | permalink | subscribe

got lost
» Monday, August 20, 2007

I wuz a-surfin this morning when I should have been a-workin and I found a story on The Civilians, a documentary theatre troupe that stitches together plays from interviews with regular folk about subjects serious and trivial. Their latest show is about lost things. Apparently they'd approached people and asked them to name one thing they'd lost. The answers ranged from the mundane (socks) to the tragic (love, loved ones, faith etc).

So what's the thing you've lost that you can't let go of? It can be anything, from an object to a memory to a vast metaphysical conceit. I lost my sense of adolescent entitlement in my early twenties. That one hurt: I remember the moment that the blind confidence that had propelled me through the decade suddenly crumbled. I was walking in a 7-Eleven parking lot. A car full of grade-A assholes pulled into the lot and started shouting insults at me. I was walking across their chosen parking spot.

They didn't even really give a shit. I happened to be in the wrong spot, so they decided to throw out a few insults and wait for me to keep moving. I was no different from anyone else who could have been standing there at that moment; my body just held a place, and it was just a body. My mind, my personality, the entire history that I carried around with me and held out in front of me, meant bupkus to the shitheads in the car. It meant bupkus to the shitheads inside the 7-Eleven. At that moment I perceived an entire planet full of shitheads who didn't give a rat's ass about me. I had to shed a huge part of myself at that moment, unbuckle it and let it drop. And I had to keep walking before the shitheads in the car shouted at me again.

Understand that I'd been shouted at before by people in cars. Cars had stopped suddenly and disgorged three or four guys looking to fight (usually my cue to wave and run). But I grew up in a small town, where the guys in cars were either people I knew or readily identifiable strangers from some town a half-hour away, bored teenagers trawling strange streets. It was a comfortable, nicely circumscribed universe, even if violence circled its curves now and again.

When I left that town at eighteen I took that universe with me. Four years later it fell off me in a parking lot and I've never gotten it back.

Nowadays, when I encounter a car full of jerks, I give them the finger and keep moving.

Labels: autobio, lost

posted by the palinode | comments (7) | permalink | subscribe

being american
» 

Sunday afternoon. Nothing much going on. Palinode slips on his new shoes. He likes to call them his 'fresh kicks'.

Schmutzie: What are you doing?

Palinode: Putting on my fresh kicks.

Schmutzie: Are you going somewhere?

Palinode: I have a hot date.

Schmutzie: No you don't.

Palinode: It's really possible.

Schmutzie: You don't get any hot dates.

Palinode: Remember yesterday when I went to the acupuncturist? Maybe I met somebody there and arranged for a hot date.

Schmutzie: No.

Palinode: Oh I see. You don't think I can get a hot date. Well I can and I have, and now I'm going out on it.

Schmutzie: Who's your date?

Palinode: (Points at the cat) He's right there.

Schmutzie: You can't go out on a date with Onion.

Palinode: I can do anything I want. This is America.

Schmutzie: No it isn't.

Palinode: Are you sure? We're speaking English.

Schmutzie: They speak English in England.

Palinode: I guess that's English.

Schmutzie: This is Canada.

Palinode: But I feel so free and brave.

posted by the palinode | comments (10) | permalink | subscribe

bergman week #4: flight of the conchords
» Sunday, August 19, 2007

Hells yeah. My week of watching, watching, pondering, writing and watching more Bergman keeps on chugging. Stay tuned as I mentally oil up and wrestle with cinema's great dead genius. Yeah, you just stay tuned for that.


Let's take stock of my Bergman week. On Monday I watched Persona, on Tuesday Smiles of a Summer Night, and on Thursday I baked braised sautéed enjoyed me some popcorn and went on a magical journey with Cries and Whispers. The verdict: so far I'm winning the pitched battle, the vicious contest that can have only one victor.

Tonight I thought I'd do something a little different and watch five episodes of Flight Of The Conchords. I wasn't sure if Ingmar Bergman had written the scripts or directed them or what, but I was pretty sure that I could look it up on the IMDB afterwards and find out the connection.

Right. I just finished going through the IMDB entry on the show, and to my great surprise, Flight is not an Ingmar Bergman screenplay directed by Liv Ullmann or Billie August. Colour me flabbergasted. All the elements are there: two New Zealand musicians trying to make in in New York City, lots of deadpan humour and understated scenes followed by pitch-perfect parodies of old music videos from the last twenty five years. It struck me, while I was watching the episode where Bret and Jermaine Jemaine adopt the rapper names Rhymenocerous and Hiphopotamus, that Flight was really the culmination of the ideas explored in The Seventh Seal.



Then it struck me that I was probably still drunk from the night before. A quick recollection of Bergman's work showed me that nothing could be farther from The Seventh Seal than an episode of Flight Of The Conchords. But if Bergman had helmed this quirky series, it would probably have been about two young Swedish women trying to make their way in a New York City (looking surprisingly like a deserted, rocky island in the North Atlantic).

Episode 1 - Ingrid and Elisabeth are riding a train. People get on and off. Some of the passengers are people from their past. Others are not quite human. The train never stops. There is no God.

Episode 2 - Apartment hunting! Ingrid and Elisabeth visit a series of cramped flats and eventually move in with a dying woman. They sit at her bedside and wait, all the while thinking back on their lives, trying to remember a time when they weren't gripped by anomie and a paralysis of the soul.

Episode 3 - Poverty. Ingrid and Elisabeth pool their money but still can't get in to see a movie. They merge into each other. A tarantula crawls across the screen. A nail is driven into a hand. Old people lie in hospital beds. Old filmstrips. Bergman filming the action. A boy. The end.

Understand, I kid because I love. Watch this next clip about robots.

Labels: film

posted by the palinode | comments (6) | permalink | subscribe

guessing
» Friday, August 17, 2007

No Bergman today. Tonight, instead of watching the unraveling of someone’s psyche onscreen, I’m going to get schwacked at a friend’s going-away party. Tomorrow you’ll be treated to my thoughts on either The Silence or Hour of the Wolf.

It occurred to me today, as a 250-pound man braced his weight against my shins and pushed my knees back over my head, that my physical therapist has no clue what’s wrong with me.

Really, not a clue. Every couple of weeks I go in, throw down my $45 and get electrodes attached to my back. Then he comes in and hauls me around on the table like a sack of flour. It hurts. It brings relief. It takes a day or two for my muscles to cramp up again and leave me bent over like an osteoarthritic old man.

I am given exercises to do and cautioned not to do them to excess. What’s excess? In this case, anything that aggravates my back. But movement of nearly any kind aggravates my back, so I push the exercises as far as I can, until a noticeable twinge stands out from the ambient background of pain. I’ve raised my baseline for tolerable pain considerably over the last six months.

For months now, I’ve been aware that no one knows precisely what the problem is with my back (there’s a very long waitlist for neurosurgeons here). I’ve managed to put that knowledge in the back of my brain and continue to wait for a date with the MRI. But today, the awareness suddenly hit me that these various specialists, these people whose job it is to align, realign, stretch, flex and mend my body have no idea, beyond a bit of guesswork, what has happened to my spine.

I could tell from the look on my therapist’s face. He was clearly thinking about something else the entire time – another patient, a utility bill, who knows – because he’d given up thinking about me. All he could really do was relieve my pain a bit with the electrodes and restore mobility and strength to my muscles. But he knew that no amount of this was going to straighten me up. Not even if I did the exercises like clockwork for the next ten years. I was thanking him for his help and he was already out the door, on to someone with a problem he could solve.

On the upside, it looks like I’ll be getting my neurosurgeon appointment before the end of the month. Which means I’m only a few weeks away from an MRI, a diagnosis and a decision. My acupuncturist actually told me the other day that he was ‘excited’ to have me as a patient, because my case was so exceptional and extreme. I carry a firm belief that the surgeon will tell me that I don’t need surgery, and that a steroid shot and a brisk walk each morning will take care of it. It’s fun to cling to because I suspect it’s utter bull, and that at some point I’m going to be lying face down on a table with my spine exposed. I only hope that the surgeon has something better than guesswork to go on.

Labels: autobio, pain

posted by the palinode | comments (3) | permalink | subscribe

bergman week #3: unending torment
» Thursday, August 16, 2007

All the kids are flocking to the portcullis of Palinode's Palace. They all wanna get in and read about the latest kooky-fresh Bergman film! Kanye West pretends his sales slump is the result of internet piracy, but he and everyone else knows that the kids have dumped hip-hop for Swedish despair. They wave their DVDs like they just don't care. And they don't: they're nihilists.

Tonight's film: Cries and Whispers (1972)

Anna and Agnes
At some point in the early '70s, after many successes and awards, Bergman must have decided that he hated his audience and wanted them to suffer. Incapable of making a bad film, he instead decided to make something that felt like you were being dragged across a sheet of barbed wire by your nostrils. He called that something Cries and Whispers, and after you've finished watching, you will never want to die - because it takes years, hurts like hell and keeps hurting even when you're a corpse.

Agnes
Cries and Whispers is the White Stripes of cinema: everything in it is either red or white, with only occasional side trips into black. Three sisters and a maid live in a blood-red mansion in 19th century Sweden. Agnes is dying. She's been dying for years, but now she really means it. Played by Harriet Andersson (the way nubile maid from 1955's Smiles of a Summer Night), Agnes looks as fragile as an eggshell but still somehow beautiful. Her sisters Karin (Ingrid Thule) and Maria (Bergman regular Liv Ullmann) are looking after her in her last days. Anna (Kari Sylwan) is Agnes' maid, confidante and something like her surrogate daughter, although I would say that she's Agnes' last link to human warmth and the almost redemptive pleasure of touch.

blood red and ivory white
One thing you know for sure: she's not going to get any genuine human warmth from her sisters. Both are solicitous and caring, but their personalities place strict limits on their capacity for love. Maria's vapid and flirtatious behaviour conceals a self-centred and cruel nature. In one scene, a lover positions her in front of a mirror and assesses her character by the tiny lines in her face. He describes all her flaws, but she revels in the finely detailed attention he pays to her face, knowing that his disgust is the weaker obverse of his desire for her.

Maria watches herself in the mirror
Karin, paired with a despicable and bloodless husband, carries around a lifetime's worth of hatred and disgust. Every movement of her body and twitch of her masklike face betrays the nausea she feels over her own existence. The signature scene that displays her character relies on an unexpected and liberating act of self-mutilation. If you watch it with your children, you'll have a lot of difficult explaining to do.

Karin uptight
Like many of Bergman's films, the emotional torment of the characters eventually warps the story until grotesque, magical shapes emerge. Cries and Whispers, with its two-tone pallet of blood red and ivory white, its melodramatic screams and its protracted scenes of suffering, already bends into expressionism, but its climactic moments seem to come straight out of a European folk tale.

Karin relaxes with some blood
The best reason to see Cries and Whispers, as with most Bergman films, is the caliber of the performances by the women. Bergman has such a tight grip over the material that it sometimes seems overly formal or schematic, but the actors close the emotional gap that he deliberately introduces with his careful structures and isolated, disjointed scenes. Maybe you don`t give a rat`s ass about the scene transitions or flashbacks, but you can`t forget Harriet Andersson`s death throes, or the way Ingrid Thule runs her tongue stiffly over her lips as she cuts herself with a piece of broken glass. And you certainly can`t forget Liv Ullmann`s ability to shift from kindness to immense cruelty without even changing expression.

In conclusion, Cries and Whispers wins my Least Resembling Anchorman Award.

Labels: film

posted by the palinode | comments (4) | permalink | subscribe

bergman week #2: three smiles and we're out!
» Wednesday, August 15, 2007

What's this? A second installment in a week of watching Bergman films and blogging about each one, just for the sheer entertainment value to readers who completely don't care about Bergman? Um, yes.


Today: Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)

The first thing I noticed was that Bergman did not know the title of his own film, which he insists on calling ‘Sommarnattens leende’. This is not English. What’s more, the characters don’t speak English, which infuriated me. Their lines are displayed in English at the bottom of the screen; why didn’t they just look down and read their lines? Instead they speak in a series of syllables that hover on the edge of comprehensibility. I call shenanigans on Bergman and his attempt to inject some arty pretentiousness into a light comedy.

Also, these people live in a terrible place that has no colour, and their faces are entirely drained of colour, so they must be sick. In keeping with the charcoal landscape, their clothes and homes are shades of grey as well. Why are we watching sick people who can’t read English? Is Bergman making a social statement of some kind? Surely the turn-of-the-century bourgeoisie was a healthier and better educated class than he portrays here.

I’m not sure if the stature of the actors is related to their obvious illness – what’s going on there, the plague? – but I couldn’t help noticing that every actor was extremely small. By and large, not one of them measured greater than six inches. Sometimes their faces would swell grotesquely and grow so huge that I couldn’t even see their bodies, and then instantly they would assume their normal, if tiny, proportions. To make the situation even worse, sometimes they would try to perpetrate the illusion of walking closer to or farther from me by slowly expanding or shrinking. It was so obvious that these people lived solely on a two-dimensional surface (they’re also shockingly thin). Frankly, it was a bit embarrassing to watch them go to such lengths to convince me that they lived in a three-dimensional space.

And while we’re on the subject, I’ve had it with characters that walk to the left or right and then vanish off the side of the screen. Where do they go? They must have to crowd together terribly in that tiny offscreen space. I don’t care how skinny you are, it must be a terrible ordeal. Ever since I realized that I could never clean out all the little dead Marios that fell beneath the bottom edge of my TV screen, I’ve campaigned to television manufacturers for more offscreen space, but with the advent of flat-panel TVs, I fear the situation is not going to get better any time soon.

On to the story. Smiles Of A Summer Night is a shockingly indecent tale of moral turpitude and sexual perfidy disguised as comedy. What’s funny about sex, I ask you? Sex is for making babies. Making babies is funny to you, Bergman? Outside of an Anne Geddes photo, are babies themselves funny? No. But those Anne Geddes pictures – ha ha. Did you see the one where they’re all dressed up like flowers in a pumpkin patch? OMG funny. If she made a film there wouldn’t be all this naughtiness – just funny babies.

The movie starts with Frederik Egerman, who seems like a really decent guy. He’s a middle-aged man married to a teenage girl, which is really wholesome, and his son Henrik is entering the priesthood! I had a lot of respect for the Egerman family, until it turns out that the decent guy is actually pining after an actress named Desiree (!) Almfeldt. Then it turns out that Henrik is lusting after Petra the Maid, who exposes herself to a man of God! Um, hello. As for Anna – I can’t even talk about it. But it gets way worse.

Desiree Almfeldt is an actress (or slut) who lives alone but has a child (because she is a slut). She even has a married lover (on account of her sluttiness). It’s pretty clear that she’s putting the moves on Frederik Egerman, even as she parades her manwhore around. Meanwhile, Mr. Manwhore has a young wife who’ll jump anyone if it suits her purposes. Dens of iniquity wouldn’t let these libertines through their fuzzy doors.

Then the movie takes a strange turn that I suspect is Satanic. Desiree’s mother invites everyone to her country estate and offers them a “magical wine” (coughSatansbloodcough) to release their inhibitions. And then all hell breaks loose in a long sleepless night that keeps everyone running around until dawn. At some point I stopped keeping track of all the ‘moist meetings’ going on in this film. Liberal critics like to say that the ending is ‘happy’.

Happy? Sure, if you think that having sex with people outside of wedlock is what makes you ‘happy’. Statistics show that at least 75% of the people in this film will eventually commit suicide from the stress of a godless lifestyle. This film is more scandalous than Notting Hill and Moonstruck put together.

Labels: film

posted by the palinode | comments (1) | permalink | subscribe

bergman week
» Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Hey Jackie Chan: fuck you. Chris Tucker? Brett Ratner? Eat my ass. It's Bergman week in Palinode's Palace. In the wake of Ingmar Bergman's death, I've gathered up a few of his films, and I'm going to watch one every evening and blog all over it.

Tonight's film: Persona(1966)

Who's the kid? What's he doing? No idea.
Ingmar Bergman was a man. A Swedish man. A man who died. But before he died, he made films. Dozens of films, about death, faith, doubt, redemption, salvation and sex. No one thought to stop him, and by the time they realized what was going on, no one could. His films marched out and invaded cinema, dug out a space in annexed territory and began to build strange rocky landscapes where tortured people wandered back and forth, fueling regret with bitterness, fear with doubt, acceptance with regret. Bergman's characters didn't all live in this place - Smiles of a Summer Night and Fanny & Alexander are downright charming - but for better or for worse, this is his most memorable landscape.

Even though most of Bergman's films have dropped from modern pop memory (remember The Magician? The Serpent's Egg? Me neither), Persona is probably the work that most people associate these days with the Bergman style: sparse, impenetrable, jarringly strange and preoccupied with themes of sin and character. This is a shame, not only because it does a disservice to Bergman's body of work, but it also misses much of the point of Persona, which is to keep you staring at the faces on the screen, even though there are only two characters, and one of them is mute. Film students who emulate Persona's style usually miss how entertaining the picture is.

Godard once said something to the effect that all you need for a film is a girl and a gun (the guy, presumably, being the audience, or the camera). Bergman knew that you didn't even need the gun. During a summer at a cottage in the country, a nurse named Alma (Bibi Andersson) tends to a famous stage actress named Elisabeth (Liv Ullmann), who has fallen mute in the middle of a performance, a condition which appears to be a conscious decision.

In the face of Elisabeth's silence, Alma begins to talk. And talk. And talk. Initially Alma seems flighty and unimaginative, but as the relationship between the two women grows more intimate, she begins to pare away her layers to reveal a person who is deeply confused and miserable about the irreparable disjunction between the whirlpool of her unconscious desires and the calm forward trajectory of her life.

God we're miserable. Wait, there's no God.

Elisabeth, by contrast, has no illusions about inhabiting an integrated self. She is a succession of masks, a person who multiplies herself by taking on roles. When, out of disgust at herself, she drops all her masks, she discovers that there is nothing underneath, no persona to assume, and so she remains mute. This strategy should make her weak and vulnerable - after all, she's been assigned a nurse - but instead it makes her monstrously strong. Her silence turns her face into a complete blank, able to reflect back whatever the viewer wants most to see.

What Alma most wants, unsurprisingly, is herself, a mirror image in whom she can safely confide her secrets. One night she gets drunk and tells Elisabeth, in blisteringly candid and erotic language, about a spontaneous orgy she experienced on a beach with a friend and two "terribly young" boys. The exact age of the boys is never specified, but it's clear that they're young enough to make the act scandalous and maybe even criminal. The episode is a source of deep shame for her but also the highlight of her erotic life.

The sexual episode and the subsequent abortion have clearly ruptured Alma's consciousness, and the wound has closed so unevenly that it constantly threatens to break open again and destroy her orderly life. There are two Almas to contend with: the one who looks forward to marrying her fiancé and having children, and the one that comes out from hiding to grab pleasure and leave the guilt to the other.

Rarely a good sign.

Eventually Alma discovers that Elisabeth has abused her trust, and the film literally breaks, the reel tearing and burning in the projector's light. Once the story has been respliced and rethreaded into coherence, the women's roles have shifted; Alma begins to treat Elisabeth cruelly, seeing coldness and indifference in her silence where once she saw compassion and sympathy. Both women are in need of healing, but it's clear that their psyches are falling apart. In a sequence that may be a dream or a complete abdication of realism in film, Alma begins to ventriloquize, speaking for Elizabeth. It's not clear who holds the power at this point: although Alma begins to whip Elisabeth with her deepest, most shameful secrets, it's quite possible that Elisabeth is using Alma as a proxy for her own desires. In any case the differences between them vanish. The two women merge in a shot that has to be one of the most nauseating and disturbing images ever committed to film.

Bergman's monster, the Almalisabeth.

And then it's morning, and they're leaving the cottage. So, what's happened? I think Bergman's answer would be: a film happened. Which would not be too fatuous or flip a response. Bergman spikes the film with strange images and sequences that clearly don't belong to the narrative. The opening shot is the ignition of the arc lamp, followed by film threading through the spool. He gives the game away entirely when, in the middle of a scene with Bibi Anderson, we suddenly see Bergman and cinematographer Sven Nykvist at the camera, craning down for an inexplicable shot of Liv Ullman lying on her back and looking into the lens. Persona pushes our willingness to take narrative at face value, injecting fantasy into reality without the standard cues that allow audiences to sort out what they're watching. The best way to watch Persona is to throw out your notion of narrative, and instead let it burrow into your mind.

We're making a film over here.

Labels: film

posted by the palinode | comments (2) | permalink | subscribe

the whole wide room
» 

Following in the wake of Schmutzie's thoughtful posting of a Flight Of The Conchords clip, here's my contribution: an ode to a girl who's so beautiful she could be a part-time model:



Beck can go eat his Prince-parodizing heart out.

Labels: music

posted by the palinode | comments (2) | permalink | subscribe

making a porn from common household objects
» Sunday, August 12, 2007

So like everyone else in your postal code, you want to make your own pornography. Disappointed by the little pictures on the internet and the general low quality of cheap gonzo porn - the erotic equivalent of reality TV - you've decided that it's time to take control of your own sexual entertainment. There's no shame in the impulse, but like most others, you really don't know where to start. You don't have a hot tub in the backyard or an outpatient recovery room in the garage. Have no fear. This is a guide to making a low-cost, entertaining porn in your own home out of cheap, easy-to-find materials. At worst, a quick trip to the hardware store will solve your problems.

The first thing you'll need is a roll of chicken wire. Unroll a section and shape it like a cone, with a depression at the top. Make sure the depression is relatively deep, let's say 1/5 of the total height of the cone. I'm not going to tell you how big to make the cone, but since this is porn, the bigger the better.

Next make a paste out of equal parts flour and water. Alter mixture to desired consistency. Add white glue for extra stickiness. Don't worry about not making enough, because you can always make more if you run out.

Soak strips of newspaper in the paste and begin to lay the strips over the chicken wire. Continue until the surface area of the chicken wire is completely covered. Keep covering the cone with the paste-soaked paper until you can no longer see the pattern of the chicken wire and you're fairly sure that you'll be able to handle the cone without puncturing it. Let dry in a well-ventilated room.

Once your paper cone is dry, it's time to get busy with the tempera paints. Mix some brown tempera in water and start painting the cone brown. Let dry. For added flourishes, you may want to paint the tip a nice fiery red. Paint the base of the cone green if you like to indicate plants. Get creative!

Now it's time to decorate your cone. I like to use old Monopoly houses and pieces of real greenery to glue around the base. This step only takes a few extra minutes and really pays off in production values when you get to the shoot.

Now that your cone is ready, it's time to find a woman. Women are available just about anywhere, except for certain mosques, some conservative think tanks, and wherever dough-faced white men are paid ridiculous amounts of money to do screw-all except make us miserable. Women are so prevalent that you yourself may be one (make sure to check). If you are a woman you may decide to use yourself, but in porn, as in most creative endeavours, much of the joy comes in sitting back and enjoying what you've created.

N.B.: Some people believe that a woman is not necessary for pornography, citing the 'gay male' genre as evidence. In fact gay male porn is largely a myth, and most entries in the genre are the result of management oversight combined with packed shooting schedules.

Once you've found your woman (again, make sure to check), you should dress her in a sexy outfit, like a bikini and cowboy boots, or - my personal favourite - a neon yellow unitard with a football helmet. That's probably the best.

Still with us? You're almost ready to make your own porn!

The final step comes in preparing the money shot. This is the most important element in porn, the bit that signals that the scene has come to the end. Most porn consumers will not understand that the sex act has finished unless you show a great burp of ejaculation all over the place. Otherwise they will stare at the screen until it gets dark out and they start to snooze.

For maximum effect, the woman should actively participate in the money shot. First, she should approach the cone, probably sexily, and pour baking soda into the depression. Then, with a sexy flourish, she should pour vinegar into the baking soda. The resulting chemical reaction will cause oodles of frothy, acidic foam to erupt from the cone and pour down onto the base of the cone, where the Monopoly villagers live their quiet lives. The woman should raise her fists (sexily) and say, "I am your God! Die, puny villagers, die!" You can imagine the reaction of the villagers: some run, some pray, others realize that their last moments are at hand, and they start fucking like mad. Disaster sex, that's the hottest kind.

Labels: how-to, lies, porn

posted by the palinode | comments (8) | permalink | subscribe

flight of the manatee
» Thursday, August 09, 2007

Patrick Smith of "Ask A Pilot" has nothing nice to say about the Airbus A-380:

As it prepares to enter scheduled service, the Airbus A380 has been busy with so-called proving runs and public relations junkets, flying around in the colors of Singapore Airlines and Emirates, its first two operators. There are hundreds of new photos posted over at Airliners.net, all of them confirming what we already knew: that the plane is grotesquely ugly. There are no flattering views of an A380. It is without question the most hideous airliner ever conceived.

So I looked around and Ah, Sweet Time-Traveling Jesus, he's right.

Look at that sad-ass lumbering beast. It's like a crying manatee coming at you.



Or try this one out. I'd never seen a plane that looked like it was going to vomit before, until I found this photo.



Did they get a blue whale drunk, paint it up and stick on some wings? People: if you die on this plane, you will die in the ugliest, most ungainly kerosene-spewing hulk that ever dropped from the sky.

Labels: scorn

posted by the palinode | comments (3) | permalink | subscribe

tiki nana snaps her tips, sings the blues
» 

Whoah. Your problem - if I may be so bold as to suggest you have one - is that you haven't yet seen Nana Mouskouri singing a jazz tune surrounded by tiki pan-Africana set dec.



Oh no she di'n't.

Now your problem is solved.

Labels: music

posted by the palinode | comments (3) | permalink | subscribe

Everything I Needed to Know About Matt Damon I Learned at the Movies
» Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Last night I went to see the new Matt Damon biopic The Bourne Ultimatum, starring Matt Damon himself as the fresh-faced young assassin who outwitted the CIA, NSA, NKVD, and the Illuminati and some Hutterites to gain control over his destiny and become a big new Hollywood star. You don't see him going to Boston and writing the screenplay for Good Will Hunting with his Afflecky pal, but that's the part of the story that everyone already knows, right? The Bourne Ultimatum will tell you everything you never suspected about Matt Damon. To wit:

1. Matt Damon has the blandly handsome features of an all-American college quarterback from the 1940s, which makes it all the more surprising when he punches you in the larynx and throws you over a bridge.


2. Matt Damon is capable of hopping from country to country in seconds, but this is western Europe we're talking about, so it's not as amazing as it sounds. He may or may not have the power of teleportation.


3. You will do exactly as Matt Damon says if you want to live.


4. All doors on Earth unlock themselves for Matt Damon.


5. If you are in a crowd standing next to Matt Damon, and it crosses your mind that you might like to lift his wallet or have sex with his nearest female relative, Matt Damon will break your arm in five places in the time it takes him to eat a french fry.


6. Matt Damon can kill you while reading Harry Potter and not lose that childlike sense of wonder he experienced when he first discovered J.K. Rowling's magical world of enchantment.


7. Matt Damon answers the door by leaping out the back window, jumping across rooftops, outfoxing Interpol for no particular reason and then calling you from your jacket pocket. And you weren't even wearing a jacket when you knocked on his door.


8. Matt Damon's urine has the sweet scent and taste that signals the onset of Type II diabetes. He doesn't know yet.


9. Matt Damon was personally bankrolling Trent Reznor's career. This is why so many people were trying to kill him.


10. Always take the elevator. If you use the staircase you take the risk of running into Matt Damon, who will stab you in the kidneys as he passes by. It's not personal, it's a reflex.


11. Matt Damon does not answer to Matthew. You can walk right up to him screaming 'Matthew!' but he'll just keep playing his Wii like you're not there.


12. European subways are outfitted with security systems or turnstiles to prevent fare jumpers. They are all programmed to ignore Matt Damon. In fact, Matt Damon has a permit to run from one end the world to the other without stopping. He has a special permit from Neptune to breathe underwater.


13. Matt Damon sprints 22 out of every 24 hours. In order to maintain this pace, he must eat twice his body weight every day. He lives next to an Olive Garden restaurant and really takes advantage of their bottomless soup offer.


14. Matt Damon is invincible once he gets behind the wheel of a car, just like everybody else.

Labels: film, lists

posted by the palinode | comments (10) | permalink | subscribe

rooney or manatee
» Tuesday, August 07, 2007

This is a bold blogging experiment, or ‘blogxperiment,’ as it’s known by most. Instead of smacking down a single entry and dictating your reading material to you, as if I were some Idi Amin of Ublogda, I’m giving you a choice between two possible blog entries. Two! Possible! Blo! Gentries! You can either read about #1) my habit of keeping useless receipts, in the style of an increasingly deranged Andy Rooney, or #2) my desire to imitate a manatee. You can’t read both, though, so make up your mind now.


#1. It seems to me that it’s getting harder and harder to do anything in life without someone handing you a receipt. Four dollars at Starbucks will get you a cup of coffee and a slip of paper telling you what you already know – that you just got ripped off. Why do you want that painful reminder riding around in your billfold, just so you can file it away later in the hope of a tax break?

I think my liver just stopped. No, wait, there it goes. Good for another day.

My Marguerite is dead, but if she were still around, she’d tell me stop bringing home those damn receipts. Andy, she’d say, Those receipts are trouble. And she’d be right. I’ll never send them to my accountant. T