Myself

February

It’s been a breathless month.

Things that were supposed to happen did not. Things that weren’t supposed to did. File under “real life”, I guess.

Travel and work were the major themes of the last 29 days. I went to Vegas for a weekend, meeting five Romanian friends. We did a one-day trip to the Grand Canyon on a Friday, and the grandeur of the place blew our collective socks off. Hung around Vegas on a Saturday, taking in the sights and sounds, and one of them came back with me to LA. She stayed with me for a week, and we ended up going to San Diego for a day, getting drenched in the rain, walking around Downtown San Diego shopping for a change of clothes. I love the city, and apparently I am going there again next weekend, with another bunch of friends.

End of that week, we headed to Sequoia National Park, to see The General, and to Yosemite, where we saw The Captain, and I DJed in the car, and we had loads and loads of fun, and it was all fucking awesome. I am definitely going back to Yosemite in the summer, from what everyone says, the change of seasons really brings a different feel to the place. Back to Las Vegas, where I put my friend on her flight back to Romania, and took a flight back to LA, and spent the next two weeks punching Java code in the nuts.

Movies

The Ghibli theater watch continued throughout the month. I missed a few because of reasons mentioned above, but that’s okay. I am probably getting myself an American Cinematheque membership, just so I can continue attending the film screenings there. Breakfast at Tiffany’s on Valentine’s day was sublime, as was Once Upon a Time in the West as part of the Leone marathon. I wanted to see Giu La Testa, but missed the screening by a day, gah.

Unpacking

I got my books from India shipped. They arrived end of January, and it wasn’t until the second week of February that I finished unpacking the lot. This involved a trip to Ikea, a six-hour affair as I shuttled on with the movers’ truck, to multiple destinations. Five and a half shelves down (the half was borrowed from ‘Drea’s living room space, and there’s still eight boxes remaining. It’s surprising that I managed to get this done in such a short time, because I have a tendency to stop and ooh/aah at a book that I forgot I owned, or just crack open some interesting relic of the past and get sidetracked for hours.

Reading

After finishing The Count of Monte Cristo, I thought I would move on to more Dumas, The Three Musketeers in particular. On a whim, I began reading Just After Sunset, the only collection of Stephen King’s short stories that I hadn’t read so far. And just like that, I was drawn back into Maine again. Sunset over, I blazed through Eyes of the Dragon, a book I had read back in 1997, in a five hour sprint, and that did it. I am planning a King reread marathon, and am already three-quarters into Four Past Midnight. I feel like I am eighteen again, and it’s crazy how many memories and emotions come flooding back as I reread these.

I also finished the manga Death Note, just because I bought the box set on eBay dirt cheap, and it was too pretty to just rest on the bookshelf without being opened up.

What else?

Not happy about slowing down the Spanish lessons. My phone screen slipped from my pocket and shattered during one particularly agile leap across rocky terrain, and I had to get it replaced. Been to lazy to load the Pimsleur files on them again, especially since Spotify fits my music needs.

Not too happy about the deceleration in blogging. But there was no human way possible to meet my deadlines at work and do this every day at the same time. Also, as a friend said, sometimes it’s better to let life be. Amen to that.

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Fiction, Weirdness

Hello

YOU HAVE A PRIVATE MESSAGE FROM NATALIE FRITZ, said the subject-line of the first email.

“Hey Stranger”, Natalie began. “A friend of mine told me I can easily find someone in my area.” Blah blah portfolio blah blah call me yadda yadda discreet sexual encounter in hotel room. Five lines to get to the point. I clicked on the accompanying link more out of habit that actual interest, and moved on to Jackie Cassell, and Francesca Valdez, and Brittany Eyman. Tough to pick, all their profiles had an airbrushed, unimaginative similarity that screamed eager-to-please. Boring.

Francesca’s blunt “Let’s fuck like rabbits” helped. I wrote three lines – nothing too flashy, nothing that reeked of formality. A mild compliment, a Seinfeld reference in the second line (Seinfeld always gets them, somehow), and ending with a casual “let’s meet around five, take care”. Hit send. I figured it would take her about an hour to respond. She sounded a one-hour type, just like Kylie from last week, and Vivian and Jessy. There was this one – what was her name again, Corina? Clarissa? Yes, Clarissa – who responded in thirty minutes, the current record. I liked Clarissa, we shared a lot of discreet hotel time that week.

One email from drugsonline_258 and another from Lin Courtney. I checked my Cialis stock just to make sure I have enough to last next week. Wrote a polite “hey-what’s-up” to drugsonline_258. Dougie – that was his name, a college drop-out with a T1 line, a heart of gold and a a steady supply of the good stuff – Doug the Dog made a point of offering great discounts to valued customers. I was one of them and I liked to keep up the personal relationship. You really have to admire a guy who knows how to maintain his customers’ inches-to-height ratio, if you know what I mean.

I didn’t respond to Lin – her last batch of MAX-Gentleman pills arrived two days too late, and she did not include the complimentary stash of Viagra that she promised.

Four mails from Nigerians. Henry and his friends, Christ. I took charge of Henry’s money a year ago. With a twenty percent commission, which was way less than the de facto thirty-five percent others charged. Twenty percent of his Swiss stash of two million dollars still made for a pretty chunk of pocket change, and my goodwill gesture was telegraphed to the rest of his countrymen, just like I hoped. Every other week, some oil prince or junior minister sent in a polite, awkwardly worded missive, full of detailed family histories and apologetic explanations and a seven-figure amount. I kept my replies short and my percent constant. I liked Henry and his pals. And other than a few nervous calls from Chase Manhattan about the frequent wire transfers to and from my checking account, things are fine.

The iPad offers are getting tiresome. Sure, they’re a dollar each, but not sure if I should get myself another one of those. Some site tries to scam me into spending $4.99, some spiel about matching 10% of retail price. Good luck finding a sucker, buddy.I send them crisp “Not interested” one-liners, the same that goes to the $800 VIP casino prizes, the holiday deals, the work-from-home offers. Too many of them with too little money, and I don’t have the time.

Francesca’s reply arrived just as I was done with my last email. Two minutes shy of Clarissa’s half-hour record. I texted her on the number she sent me, and got up to make myself some coffee. I glanced at the email from my my brother, and another from Jonathan from my old work-place asking how I was doing. I deleted them right away. I don’t have time for spam today.

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Books, Weirdness

Don’t Date A Reader

Don’t date a man who reads. Don’t date a man who spends more on books than on things that matter. Don’t be with someone who lives in an apartment filled with a mountain of paperbacks and hardcovers, out-of-date New Yorker and Economist magazines, the contents of which he may have glanced through the day he bought them and then stacked them up against the wall just to show that he made an effort. Don’t go out with someone who’d rather carry a book than a gym bag. He probably does not exercise, eats unhealthy and will have a heart attack at 40.

Don’t date a man who keeps going on and on about books and poems, essays and reviews. The kind of man who is so excited about the Murakami that he finished last night that he just has to tell you all about it, in detail, even though you are running late for lunch. He will casually ask you about the last thing you have read, and if you fumble, or mention a name that is too pedestrian, he will judge you for it. If you show the slightest spark of interest in his reading, he will proceed to thrust his enthusiasm on you. You may find it amusing at first, maybe even a little sexy, but it soon gets tiresome. Every conversation will become an endless thrust-and-parry of words; any casual comment you make will result in a barbed riposte.

It’s easy to notice – and avoid – someone who reads. He’ll be the one slinking through a bookstore looking for a title someone mentioned on an obscure literary website. He does not need to buy another copy of that Neil Gaiman book just because it is the Author’s Preferred Text and has five thousand extra words, but he will. The kind of man who grins like an idiot when he comes across a first edition of The Dark Tower or a dog-eared, scotch-taped copy of Catcher in the Rye, just because that he can brag about it to his friends later. If you date a man like that (and I really suggest you don’t), be prepared to smile and nod when he tells you (for the twenty-ninth time) about how he met Jonathan Franzen in a Trader Joe’s parking lot. But try talking to him about something remotely to do with life, or your feelings, or the last episode of The Big Bang Theory that you enjoyed, and he will probably not know how to react. Or tell you that he never liked that series anyway.

Don’t date a man who reads. He is the kind of man who says he has a busy social calendar, but chooses to sit in his room and alphabetically index his collection instead. He can’t pass a bookstore without popping in “just to see”, but complains about waiting for you for fifteen minutes outside the changing room of the department store because his precious reading time is ticking away. He spends hundreds of dollars on eBay buying full runs of Louis L’Amour novels, but wears the same pair of sneakers everywhere because he cannot spare the extra money to get himself a good pair of shoes. Don’t date a man who, on your birthday (if he remembers your birthday), buys you another book that you will never read. Who thinks flowers are impractical and environment-unfriendly, but continues to buy paperbacks because e-readers “don’t smell right”.

Don’t date a man who reads fiction. He thinks that life is a fairy tale, and that happy endings exist, and that every story needs a villain. He sees the world in black and white and avoids the grays. He has a smart, ironic comeback every time he messes up, as if his wrong-doing can be washed away with puerile, second-hand wit. He will consider himself more knowledgeable than your friends; he scoffs at their conversation because he thinks they are shallow. He will go to the movies with you, but rolls his eyes at the parts you enjoy, because they are not faithful to the book. He will accompany you to parties, but refuse to wear anything but Threadless t-shirts because he feels dressing up destroys his individuality.

Don’t date a man who reads. He’ll keep the bedside lamp on till 2 in the morning to finish the last chapter of the book he’s reading. Chances are high that he will sigh loudly when he’s done, just to make sure you wake up uneasily and ask him if everything is all right. Don’t date a man who will refuse to go out on a sunny day, choosing instead to loll in bed and reread his Wodehouse. If you lie with him, he will scratch your head distractedly. If you try to cuddle, he will push you away and ask you to make him a coffee. He will say please, but as an afterthought, and only because Mr.Darcy would have. Yes, the sex will be interesting, but only because he is thinking of Henry Miller and Nabokov.

You don’t deserve a man who thinks he is a Victorian hero come to life, who pretends he can take care of everything but cannot fix a leaking tap, whose  has his head in the clouds and up his ass. You don’t deserve a man whose room smells of musty paper and printer’s ink. You definitely do not deserve a man who refuses to get a TV connection because he cannot stand commercials. You don’t want to be with someone who cannot stand on a beach and watch the moon rise without quoting Shakespeare. A man who can recite Tennyson by heart, but does not know the names of his neighbors. A man who always – always – wants to get the last word in.

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Myself, Other People

Marina Memories

So we arrived at the apartment at about 8 PM, after a long drive back from Vegas and through bad traffic. “Tired?”, I asked. “A little”, she said. “Hungry too, but let’s explore.” It was a little chilly outside, so we put on our jackets and I led the way.

(Not before the book tour, and the cat tour. The cats were a little bemused by this new visitor who crooned at them enthusiastically, but they coped. Except Elvis, whose default reaction is set to Distrust With Extreme Prejudice, and who scampered into his True Mistress’s room and locked himself in. Um, no, he did not lock himself in, that was just a figure of speech. Elvis The Scaredy Cat just refused to greet the new arrival until he was sure she did not intend bodily harm.

The book tour made an impact, the right kind, except for the unopened boxes. “You have too many books.” Don’t I know it.)

So we headed out, and I gave her a tour of the Marina behind my apartment, brightly-lit and welcoming as always. We passed the boats lapping gently in the water, and I pointed out the amusing names some of them had. One was called Mon Cherie.  “That’s not right”, she said. “It’s bad grammar.” “Sure”, I chuckled. “Maybe you should go correct it.” I showed her my favorite boat, one named Tooth Ferry. “Sometimes, in the evening, you can hear a pig squealing in the distance”, I said. “Or at least I thought it was a pig, but then I realized that it was probably a seal.” She had begun to laugh, but the mention of seals piqued her interest, and more so when I mentioned that we could probably go kayaking one day of the week.

We did not go kayaking, but we got to see seals. That is a different story.

By the time we reached the other end, it was clear that we were losing the hunger game. “I know just the place for dinner”, I said. “It’s a fifteen minute walk.” We doubled back, and there were joggers running by, and people with pets. “So people in LA do walk”, she exclaimed. “I thought it was only cars and more cars.” “Not necessarily”, I said. “I don’t have a car yet. And this is Marina del Rey, not Los Angeles.” “Same difference.” She had the happy grin I recognized, the kind of grin I usually have when I am walking through the Marina by myself. The only difference was the lack of a soundtrack in my ears, but the company more than made up for that.

When the lady at the front desk of the Cheesecake Factory asked us if we wanted to sit outside, facing the water, we looked at each other, a little hesitant about sitting in the cold. “We have the heater turned up, don’t worry”, the girl smiled. Outside it was, then, facing the beach and the distant lights. By the time the drinks arrived, both of us were grinning at each other, happily munching on the bread that in our hunger tasted like the Greatest Bread Ever Baked. When we waited, I told her about the cute waitress who once served me there last year. “Hi, my name is Penny”, she had said. And I looked up at her, looked down at my menu, and hoped she did not realize I was trying to conceal my grin. “Oh, it’s fine”, Penny from the Cheesecake Factory grinned. “I get that all the time. Just don’t knock on your table three times when calling my name, and I won’t throw a plate at you.” It was probably rehearsed, but I collapsed with laughter. Penny wasn’t there this time, but Micah made us feel comfortable. The food, when it arrived, was delicious. She could not finish her’s, as I knew she wouldn’t – dang American portions. I bulldozed through mine with the rugged pace of a Terminator model T-1000. I ate every slice, sipped every drop, and I knew I would be back.

“Are you ready to walk some more?”, I asked. She was, or so she said.

By the time we got to Venice pier, we had decided that ice-cream for dessert was out of the question, tantalizing as the Creamery looked. Thankfully, last-minute moral dilemmas were avoided by the closed sign on the door. Besides, it was too cold for ice-cream – the wind whistled in our ears and tickled our necks. As we got nearer, the sound of the waves drowned out the music from the bars nearby. “We could drop in at the Whaler later”, I said. “Uh huh”, she said, with a huge grin on her face, all her attention focused on the ocean. I had a feeling the Whaler wasn’t going to be part of the night.

The pier glowed bright and welcoming, with a row of lamps leading inward. I hadn’t been there in a while – I preferred to walk there in the afternoon, where the warm sunshine tamed some of  the sea breeze, and when it was teeming with the strange variety of visitors that Venice Beach was known for.

“How much further does this go?”, she asked. All we could hear was the rushing of the waves below us, and the lights on the beach turned smaller and smaller. The lamp posts that marked our way just showed us the path, but a few meters beyond lay the darkness of the ocean. For a second, I thought of what would happen if there was a power-cut just then, if we would see anything but black, and keep walking until we plopped into the ocean. I stifled a mental giggle, and thoughtfully did not say anything aloud.

When we got to the end of the pier, we found out we were gatecrashing a quaint little soiree. A couple slow-danced in the middle of the circle, oblivious to our presence. The guy sang softly and the girl hummed along to a few phrases. “Is that… German?” I whispered. “Spanish”, she whispered back. Somehow it felt necessary to whisper, and disrespectful to interfere with their mood by declaring our presence. From time to time, they laughed together, full-throated laughter that merged with the whooshing of the waves and made us smile to ourselves.

Confession: the ocean at night always reminds me of this Buz Sawyer story that I read as a kid. It was just that the colors in the cheap Indrajal reprint were very evocative, and the story itself, about a seagull’s egg and Buz’s down-on-his-luck brother and his family was poignant enough to be the main point of association in my mind for an evening stroll by the sea.

After sometime, the song died away, the lovers bid their adieu, and exited stage right. We stayed. We sat on a solitary bench that faced the darkness, and though our jackets felt paper-thin against the wind, after sometime the cold bothered us no longer, and the bench felt more comfortable than it should have. We looked up at the stars twinkling through the parts of the sky that were free of clouds, and at the city lights shimmering behind us. Every now and then, a plane hummed above,  drowning out the constant, reassuring ocean roar with its own banshee scream. That and the distant sirens in the city reminded us that the world existed beyond that well-lit circle, that time and our ears had not really frozen.

We sat there for a long time. Silent. Happy.

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Movies, Myself

The Ghibli Theater Watch: Princess Mononoke

This is easily the darkest of Miyazaki’s films, dark not only in the sense of the themes but also in that most of the film seems to happen in a twilight world, with little or no sunlight. Probably because most of the proceedings unfold inside forest canopies. The climax involves the morning sun, but the tension onscreen, with a decapitated being groping around for his head, negates its effect.

While Spirited Away had cute and quirky forest gods with the occasional gross-out creature thrown in, Mononoke’s menagerie of beings fall squarely on the malevolent side of the supernatural spectrum. The worm-infested Tatari-gami that attacks Ashitaka’s village in the opening sequence,  San’s guardian wolf-god (goddess?) Moro, the Ape gods that demand to eat human flesh – these are some scary, no-nonsense creatures. Even the benevolent deer god is a death-deity in his night-walker form.

And the kodamas? They are cute, I agree, but the clattering is fucking creepy, man. A lot of things in the film are fucking creepy. Like the part where Jiko’s men follow the wounded boar god as he stumbles blindly towards the Shishigami’s island, slithering alongside him wearing the skins of dead boars. Or the first time we see San, her face smeared in red, a feral creature of the woods. She spits out blood, and stares at the camera. Creepy.

Mononoke is also unique in the sense that it is an action movie from the Ghibli stable, and a period action movie at that. The violence is served without mercy – bullets and arrows whiz towards their targets with precision, blood flows freely, body parts fly sans concern for parental guidelines. The fight sequences are brutal and gravity-defying – San and Ashitaka’s rooftop confrontation, or the wolves leaping across jagged cliffs to strike at Eboshi’s procession. The final onslaught of the boars against the humans is a harrowing scene of destruction that makes you want to look away. Hisaishi’s score reflects the turmoil of the battlefields, one that booms to taiko drums and echoes through deep, rippling cello sweeps. There are brief moments of respite, like during the kodama sequences, but they are few and far between.

As always, it’s the details that get me. How the presence of Yakkul the elk (easily my favorite character in the movie) kind of nudges at the otherworldliness of the setting. The way we learn about Ashitaka’s outsider status (and that of his people) when he tries to buy food from a village market in course of his quest. Lady Eboshi is one fascinating non-villain, and you would be hard-pressed to really dislike her or not see things from her point of view. Mononoke, like most Ghibli films, has things to say about the relationship between mankind and nature, about co-existence and mutualism, and its lovely to see shades of grey abound in the story, instead of broad strokes of good vs evil.

The scene where Kaya, one of the girls in Ashitaka’s village gives him her Gyoku no Kogatana (and the subs say “obsidian knife”) made me smile, because I remembered suddenly the name of the gentleman who had written the dialogues for the English version. He was not as well-known then as he is now, but I remember reading his discussion about why he chose the word “obsidian” instead of something more generic, like “jade”. His name was Neil Gaiman. He wrote the dialogues to make the film, soaked in details and minutiae of Japanese folklore, more accessible to Western audiences. One such changed detail that came to mind was the voice of Moro. Japanese culture has male voices for wolves, regardless of gender – and it comes as a shock to a first-time non-Japanese viewer (umm, me, circa 2004) when you realize that San calls Moro “mother”. To remedy that, Gillian Anderson voiced her in the American dub.

While I really did not remember much of the film from my eight-year-old viewing, the memory of one particular scene lingered, and I looked forward to see how my perception of it would be altered when I saw it now. That scene – in which the deer god appears for the first time, and makes his way towards the wounded Ashitaka on the island, flowers blooming and withering in his wake – occurs in perfect silence. When it played on my PC, I was half-tempted to check if the sound system had conked off. If I remember right, the Weinsteins tried to introduce a musical score in this sequence for the US release just because audiences weren’t used to absolute silence – Miyazaki refused, obviously. I am not sure how Americans watching it in theaters in the early 2000s took it. But in the Egyptian that night, when the deer god made his appearance, I realized two things – one, I was holding my breath. And two, so was everyone else in the theater. The guy two seats away from me, who had been wheezing until then, had fallen silent. The gang of students giggling behind me, ditto. No popcorn being chewed, or shoes shuffling in the dark, or creaking seats. Have you ever been in a packed theater that has fallen silent at the right cinematic moment?

That was something to remember.

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