In the first thirty minutes I was on Facebook I went crazy trying to figure out how to disassociate my Facebook profile from a photo tagged with my name by a woman who once sent me an email inviting me to be her Facebook friend*. I've never met this woman, she doesn't know me, and the gentleman with my name in the aforementioned photo isn't me.
So yay technology and interconnectedness, right?
*I never got this - people just put a person's name in front of a popular email service provider and assume that's the person they want to talk to? In high school someone I know sent a really long email to what he assumed was the address of his girlfriend, because it was HerName@aol.com, and received a reply saying "I'm almost certainly not the HerName you're looking for, but she sounds like a lucky girl."
Lynchathon III, Part III: Inland Empire, Conclusion
FINALLY.
Actually, I think I've pretty much sabotaged myself, and probably did so intentionally, by waiting so long to write my reaction to Inland Empire that I'm left without much of anything to say, but in a more justifiable sense than I would've had nothing to say right after seeing it.
I suppose it's convenient at this moment in his career to look at Lynch's oeuvre as a whole and momentarily pretend that he's not going to do anything in the future. I assume that's not the case; in spite of my various misgivings and difficulties with much of his work, I very much hope it's not the case. But what you get by pretending that Inland Empire is Lynch's farewell work is that it's very much a return to the beginning of his career, as though he'd been following a long creative loop away from the example of Eraserhead and finally made his way back to the beginning; back to home. Like Eraserhead, Inland Empire begins with what appears to be an intelligible plot and then dives headlong, deeper and deeper, into a pool of Lynchian filmic dreamspace. It's as difficult to grapple with as every intervening Lynch film combined, and it's twice the length of Eraserhead. (Also, both films took literally years to make, unlike the rest of his works; the ever-unfolding production schedule undoubtedly both stems from and feeds the dreamlike, elusive relationship with normal cinematic storytelling that binds these movies.)
While I wasn't in the best frame of mind to watch it, I was in a more receptive mood than I was for Eraserhead, which is part of why - despite the aformentioned length - I drew more from it and had a better experience. But perhaps more importantly, and if I were going to pretend that Lynch specifically learned something from his sojourn in the relatively more accessible territories he mined for the 25 years between his first film and his most recent one it would be this, Inland Empire presents us with an inscrutable structure and story but marries it to a very scrutable emotional core, based in Laura Dern's astounding performance. The performances in Eraserhead are effective, but they're as inscrutable and outside the waking experience of life as everything else in the movie; we can reconstruct what the main character is going through emotionally - the film is, after all, more or less a dramatization of what's in his head and his heart - but the performances aren't so viscerally engaging because the emotional experience is presented in a way that's detatched from metaphorical viscera (though not literal, gastrointestinal viscera, of course). Whatever Laura Dern's character (characters?) is going through during Inland Empire, she puts that emotional experience onscreen through her own work as much as the film around her dramatizes it; though, as in Wild at Heart, her performance is by the necessity of Lynch's script and his world somewhat off-kilter, it's off-kilter in a way that ties directly back to recognizable human behavior, or rather the way we're used to seeing recognizable human behavior portrayed by modern actors in the Western performance tradition, which is the method of performance I - and most of you! - recognize as "realistic" however artificial its tropes actually are.
Dern pulls the disparate strands together, whether she's playing what seems to be her actual character - a somewhat distant actress - or the character that actress plays, or one of the various mirrors and shadows of those women. It's in some ways one of the most impressive performances I've seen because it really has to stand on its own in a way that very performances do. Not to diminish the quality work done by the actors onscreen with her - it's not that her performance needs to stand alone the way a one-woman show/monologue does, it stands alone because it's the only thing we have to hang our hat on, the only thing that reaches out to the audience and says "here, you can use me, use this, as your entrance into this world." And as someone who's a sucker for good acting that's skating on the edge of near over-the top emotionalism, Dern makes a congenial Constant Companion through the impenetrable (to me, certainly) rooms the film travels through.
(Incidentally, since I spoke at some length about Dern's scorching presence in Wild at Heart, this is why it's all about the performance, and what makes it in some ways more impressive: I think Dern is more attractive as a mature woman than she was as a 21-year old or whatever she was back then, but her performance, and her sex scene with Justin Theroux, isn't burning-the-metaphorical-filmstock [Inland Empire was shot on digital video] hot the way almost every scene in Wild at Heart was because it's not that kind of movie and not that kind of character and so it doesn't call for that kind of performance.)
ANYWAY the point being that after Eraserhead, which was at most kind of an oblique film in emotional terms, Lynch went on to make a bunch of movies that, in tension with the received narrative about his work, are very accessible and recognizable emotionally, and actually wear their joy and sorrow and heartbreak and terror on their sleeve in a way that seems inaccessible simply because we're not used to movies where the emotional experience is so unfiltered, especially in an otherwise challenging context. Inland Empire then closes the (artifical, intellectual, critically-imposed) loop by bringing that heavy emotional attitude to the mystery and dreamstate of Eraserhead. That - the unfiltered, whether it be emotional or visual or structural - is really the throughline, I suppose, of what I've had to say about Lynch and what I ripped from David Foster Wallace's "behind-the-scenes" piece on the making of Lost Highway, that what we get in a Lynch film seems like a more or less unprocessed transference from the man's innermost brain to our screens. The structural conceits we're used to - plots, character arcs, orderly and clever structures - are the detritus of the way our brains help us to make sense of the stimulus around us, an often inescapable imposition of the higher consciousness on direct human experience, one that is arguable necessary for us to live the lives we do, but one which arguable shuts off some potentially valuable experiential real estate, if we can let ourselves go and just feel everything without organizing it. That's, from a different angle, what we're getting when we experience ecstasy in whatever form, be it religious, sexual, social, and of course chemical: a reprieve to some greater or lesser degree from the ongoing wear of having an evolved, social, human brain. Thinking becomes tiring without reprieve.
Of course the catch is that no trigger is universal; not every sexual encounter gives you that release, not every art form moves you in that way. I used to find something hair-raising and exuberant about elements of the Catholic mass when I was a boy, and I don't feel that any more. Music can take me there, and sometimes film or even more likely TV (because what's going to push me over that edge is likely to be a built up reaction to a character or an onscreen relationship, and TV gives me more time to build my own relationship with the people on screen, and more time for them to get into the depths of a character if that what they want to do). Most of Lynch's films, for me, miss the mark of pulling my non-cognitive trigger. There are moments, and in the case of Mulholland Drive (admittedly one of the more accessible Lynch films on a moment-to-moment basis) I'm wrapped up in that world with real investment (and again consider how that movie is tied together by a remarkable performance, or really two remarkable performances, by its central actress), but for the most part the presumably unfiltered products of Lynch's brain miss my personal mark.
But there's nobody doing what he does, that I'm aware of, certainly not with American prominence, neither in his most remote and inaccessible or most inviting and intellectually intelligible works, and I'm certainly a bigger Lynch fan than I expected to wind up being. He's a challenging artist, which is in itself something I respond to; I've said that a Spike Lee failure (and in my opinion there's a fair number of them) is more daring and interesting than most other people's successes, and while Lynch can't really be judged in those same terms, he's equally worthy of respect and consideration even at his most questionable moments. I can't think of a good conclusion here so I'm just going to stop.
But not before I leave you with the credits for Inland Empire. Just get up and go and feel something, for your sake and mine.
As of the halfway point. (Please note, all adjectives are used strictly in a gender-neutral sense.)
LONG HAIRED ACHAEANS:
Achilles: HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE dick. Agamemnon: HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE dick. Diomedes: Just a hint of dickishness. Greater Ajax: Not that much of a dick. Menelaus: Kind of a dick. Nestor: Not a dick. Lesser Ajax: No impression one way or the other, which I guess is the shape of it when the other Ajax is around. Odysseus: Kind of a dick.
DARDAN TROY:
Paris: HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE dick. Hector: Kind of a dick sometimes. Helen: Kind of a dick. Priam: Not a dick. Aeneas: Not a dick. (Yet? Cause the better part of a millenium later, literarily speaking, he's gonna be a dick.) Various others: Relatively dickish.
THE DEATHLESS GODS:
Zeus: Pretty major dick. Hera: HUGE dick. Athena: Substantially dickish a substantial part of the time. Aphrodite: HUUUUUUUUUUUGE dick. Ares: Kind of a dick. Thetis: Dick. Apollo: Pretty much a dick. Poseidon: Kind of a dick; also a whiner.
W/all due respect to the Ad Council, which does some fine work (actually, the first page of google results don't show the version of this ad campaign that appears in my neighborhood, and I didn't want to look harder than that, but it's better than this billboard), I haven't been really drunk in maybe a couple of years, despite being buzzed on a handful of occasions. Where I'm personally defining buzzed as "I can definitely feel that I've been drinking, I'm aware of its effects on me, and my tongue and emotions are...lubricated." And where I'm defining drunk as "I see two of things when I try to focus on them."
So anyway, not having been really truly drunk for maybe a couple of years, I'd forgotten that things get weird, like "after spending a few minutes across the street summoning my wilting dignity for one final push, I walked steadily through the lobby of my building, got in an elevator, struggled to get the key in the door, and then spent the remainder of the evening apparently flailing around on the bathroom floor attempting to induce sobriety before I went to sleep from 9PM-1AM. Also the whole seeing double thing, I'd forgotten about that." After being away for a while from that kind of state, it was strange to go through it all again while thinking: "what the fuck am I doing?" Also, after I finish this post I'm going to have to eat something, which will screw up what so far was a reasonably successful attempt at weekend sleep-schedule normalcy.
On the other hand, I think I was fairly successful in my lower level goals at my ex-coworker's July 4th party, these goals being something like:
(1) Be sociable and spend a few minutes talking to people I don't know. (2) Don't get drunk, but if I get drunk, get the hell out of there before I start stumbling. (3) Don't get weirdly competitive around [another former coworker's] husband.
Regarding #3, in addition to that former coworker being on the long list of "girls I sort of had a crush on for a period of five days to seventeen weeks that nothing ever happened with," her husband is a more or less professional comedian (and, having seen his act once, a decent one!), and very personally funny, which I think I usually handle well but am always internally afraid of overreacting to. Officially Funny people make me sort of twitchy because if I'm honest one thing I've gotten pleasantly used to in the last ten years or so is people thinking I'm pretty funny (maybe they're just being nice!) in my own peculiar way, and then I really want to make Officially Funny people laugh to prove that I am, in fact, a funny guy. Which to the extent that I might be a funny guy runs mostly counter to the nature and thrust of my funniness because I can't force it with great success, since I'm not that great at telling jokes and would probably be a bad standup comedian. Actually, I know exactly what I'd be like as a standup comedian: unfunny and rageful.
(1) If you buy a new computer and start thinking about using it to finally do some audio recordings, things are going to get very confusing and more expensive than you were planning on faster than you thought it would. Or at least that's the case if you're starting from scratch, which is what I'm doing.
(2) If you are looking for a MIDI controller, and you happen to feel comfortable playing keyboard instruments, then don't buy the neat little 25-key controllers. Even if you think "I'll mostly use it for drum patterns and perhaps some synth bass or whatever, I don't need to play full keyboard parts on it." It feels weird. A two-octave range doesn't sound so bad for those purposes until you look at it and freak out because you're only two-octave range is from C to C, which doesn't necessarily help you if you're playing in Ab. Of course, there's the octave switch key, but that takes its own reorienting. Actually, a few hours ago I was convinced I was going to return the keyboard controller, but I'm going to give it some more thought.
(3) I happen to SUCK REALLY HARD at playing MIDI drums on a keyboard. ESPECIALLY against a click track vs. some other pre-recorded sound. I guess that's a skill I need to pick up; I assumed my keyboard drumming would be better than my real world drumming, and it's ... not. More generally speaking, I know that weak time is one of my problems as a musician, and I have avoided working on it (to my shame!) but I wasn't expecting my first attempt at a drum track to sound so bad.
(4) I don't like the keyboard that comes with new Macs. I mean, I didn't learn that today, I learned it last week when I bought my new iMac. But I can't wait to buy a third party one. Except remember above how I just dropped a bunch of money on recording stuff. And not cool involved recording stuff. The absolute minimal basics. I want keyboards that go clickity clack and have some resistance to them.
(5) After much futzing around I managed to lay down a bassline. With a real bass. Direct into the sequencer. I am James Jamerson, except without the calluses or fluidity. Woo.
(6) Mics aren't sold with mic cords in the packages. So I can't do anything with a mic until I buy a mic cord. I didn't know that when I bought the mic today. I realized as I was buying the mic that I needed a mic stand if I were going to ever record some live instrument sounds (as opposed to direct injecting into the computer), so I ran back to get a mic stand. But I didn't think about the freaking cord.
(7) Sans mic, I decided to direct record some guitar noodling. I won't lie. I was afraid of this moment. A couple of months ago I realized that I'd spent way too much time practicing on an electric guitar, unplugged, and therefore hadn't been noticing all these little ghost noises my deteriorating muting technique was allowing through. It was a difficult moment for me, and in my normal hysterical way for thirty seconds I considered giving up on electric guitar. (I don't have the same issues on acoustic, in part because I do different things on acoustic, in part because I play less acoustic, in part because I play a lot of fingerstyle acoustic and the right-hand muting is a lot easier that way.) And I've never heard myself recorded, and I've been walking around with the fear that if I listened to my own vibrato it'd sound really lame. So I recorded some guitar noodling. And...it wasn't bad! My vibrato, and playing in general, was incredibly timid, more so than it normally is, although not completely unrepresentative because I'm a little less confident in my electric playing than I was a year ago (see beginning of this item). But it didn't sound bad! It sounded decent(ish)! I started laughing. I haven't been that purely happy in months. As always, it didn't last long, but hey. It's gonna be ok, as long as I don't break the bank buying mics and soft synths. Reminder to practice and practice. I've always heard it's advisable to record yourself and listen critically, that it's an essential practicing tool. So here we go?
Like Matthew Yglesias, the quietly bubbling hype around the Infinite Summer project was getting me all excited, and making me feel like I should read the book for the 2.5th time. (I read it all the way through the first time, started rereading it last year and set it aside for other things.) Except that:
(1) 75-80 pages a week is nothing. When I read Infinite Jest the first time, I cannonballed through it, probably knocking it out in four or four and a half days. (I was on winter vacation, freshman or sophomore year in college [can't remember precisely at the moment].) Slowly savoring a 1000 page book of dense internal allusiveness doesn't work as well, I think, when you're pacing it out at 12 pages a day, or even knocking it out in bigger chunks every few days. You lose focus and there's something to be said about creating a hothouse in your own head. This is also a big part of why I love (and greatly prefer) watching tv shows on DVD, because I can plow through episodes at a time, and thrive on the continuity and interconnectedness (or, alternately, rave at the incoherence and contradictions).
(2) I'm starting my own cannonball literary run. Maybe I'll say some more another time; but I'm one quarter of the way through the Iliad. So you could say I'm starting way back.
It's been forever, yo. I still haven't written about Inland Empire and wrapped up my tripartite Lynchathon even though I saw like eight years ago now. Coming. It's hard to gather the energy for frivolously thought-and-reaction arty blogging when you're really tired and overworked, which is what I've been for a couple of weeks. I don't think it's just corporate, uhm, ethnocentrism, because I don't have a great opinion of everyone in the employ of the company I work for, but I do have a high opinion of the people I personally work with. I don't have a high opinion of the work done by a number of the people working for (directly or as contractor) our client. In one case I'm distrustful of motive, and in several I'm frustrated/exasperated by, essentially, the unreadiness of people who are supposed to be managing what is, let's be fair, an unwieldy situation, to manage that unwieldy situation. There's a learning curve for subject matter - I'm on that one with everyone else who hasn't directly worked in this field - but there's a learning curve for managerial competence and there's also a learning curve, I think, for business savvy, and I think our client, the government agency, which is heavily staffed by people who've never been near the top of an income-generating chain, is somewhat oblivious to (a) what it's like to go out and hustle for a dime, or to put it non-metaphorically, what it's like to need to make payroll when your client is several months behind in cutting you the damn check already, and (b) what people who have spent their lives being very good at hustling for a dime are willing to do to get a quarter.
But those weren't my "two things," so my post title has already made me a liar.
(1) A little navel-gazing blogging here: I went on a fairly restrictive, though not crazy-scary, diet last fall, and over the course of a few months dropped from (yeesh, I'm about to put the numbers down for real) 245 to 215. Then for a few months I did well at using the broader principles of the diet to eat intelligently while not depriving myself and sticking around that 215 plateau. I wasn't exercising regularly, and I wanted to lose more weight, so I told myself that in 2009 I'd resume dieting as I asymptotically approached my non-existent "goal weight"*. Instead, in 2009 I bounced back up to about 233 before restarting the diet in late April; I'm back to about 215 and taking a break for June to try and tread water, more or less, before making another concerted weight loss effort. (The highly restrictive diet isn't that restrictive - the more restrictive they are, the more bullshit they seem to be in the long run, I think; but worrying in an active way about what I'm going to eat for every meal becomes mentally exhausting. The broader principles of picking and choosing your spots and indulging here but not there are mentally easier for me, but my willpower was lax, hence the lapse.)
But the point is about psychology, and it's interesting to me that it's only by virtue of having lost weight that I really understand what I was doing when I was heavy. It's been clear that the foremost reason I became fat is because I became habituated to constantly snacking, in the afternoon and evening, before and after dinner, on various chocolate delivery mechanisms, and that this snacking was both a physical habit - I became completely accustomed to the notion that if I were sitting at a computer, one hand would be semi-regularly handling the cookie duties - and an emotional crutch, albeit a pretty poor one. I've had a few occasions in the past two weeks (remember above about the job stress?) where I had a kind of desperate anxiety-attack-by-food of the sort that regularly overtook me before, and what I noticed is not how shallow the emotional relief is - I've always seen that - but how horrible I feel physically, right afterwards. I actually articulated the thought out loud to some of my coworkers: "Oh my god, did I used to feel like this all the time?"
* Supposedly the "ideal" weight for someone of my height, if you go by Body Mass Index, is somewhere in the vicinity of 165 or 170, but I don't think this is a realistic goal for me. I'm not naturally huge, but I'm bigger-framed than that; I weighed 165 when I was 16, which was both when I reached my full height and when I would last be describable as "lanky". When I graduated from high school I was about 185, and while I was already pretty soft around the belly, I was only in the early stages of the normal late-adolescent "filling out" most guys experience, which happened in college, albeit masked by the fact that I was adding fat via my diet way faster than my body was adding muscle via natural testosterone surges. The short version of the above is that I've never had a moment where I was both fit and physically mature, so I don't know what my baseline should be. Adjusting for a slightly bigger frame and the fact that I'd ideally like to wind up a few smidges more muscular than the guy who actually falls into the middle of the BMI chart's "normal zone", I'm guessing I want to see what happens if I drop to about 200, +/- 5 lbs., and then start weightlifting for real. (Which is its own double-bind: weightlifting in and of itself increases muscle, which burns fat, so weightlifting is actually the most effective method for long-term fat loss. But, short-term, you don't build muscle without eating enough for your body to spend the energy necessary to burn it, which in practice means you'll probably gain some fat as well unless you're really, really disciplined.)
OK wow but enough about fatty's delusions of physical fitness shall we?
I do have other delusions.
(2) I realized today, while thinking about Nine Inch Nails and how I'm an idiot for never seeing them live and now they're, basically, done (though Reznor himself isn't, whatever that means going forward), and also thinking about guitars, that my delusional aspirations of instrumental capacity have been all wrong because I've been thinking that I want the same things from the guitar and the piano, albeit in different spheres. What I want from the piano, though I haven't played one in months and I'll have to start from scratch, more or less, when I eventually resume playing, because I did it all wrong for the first seventeen years...what I want from the piano is to be an interesting and personal improvising pianist, in the jazz idiom, which to me implies balancing a heavy dose of individuality and creativity with a broad grasp of jazz (and related styles') piano's history and various conduits and the chops to pull it all off, feeling comfortable in a variety of situations. I know I'll never be a physical virtuoso - if nothing else, I don't have the discipline, and I probably don't have the brute capacity either - but more than anything on the piano I want to be a player, in whatever sense that makes sense to me.
What I want from the guitar isn't, foremost, to be a player. I adore impressive guitarists, especially when they're musically impressive as well as physically impressive, but while I think it'd be awesome to have those abilities, that's not what I want most. I'm more moved, I think, by the electric guitar as (a) song delivery mechanism, and (b) electric noise generator. Playing songs and using effects to create interesting textures is what ultimately grabs me most about the electric guitar, and that's what I want to do with one. I both need and want a reasonable technical and idiomatic facility to make it work the way I want to - Billy Corgan said you need to practice until you can execute the fantasies in your head, and he made clear that for him that took more practice than Billy Joe Armstrong but less than Yngwie Malmsteen - but it really clicked for me today that as much as I think it'd be cool to be able to do what, e.g., professional sidemen and studio musicians do, let alone single-minded guitar virtuosi, I'd rather be a poor man's Kevin Shields or Billy Corgan or Trent Reznor than a homeless man's Carl Verheyen or Allan Holdsworth.
