The Big Sleep

There's too much that I want to do, but not enough worth devoting full attention to achieving. In the end, when I curse myself for not being as far along as I ought to be, I resolve to shape down my focus but just end up getting bored. Classic ADHD, you're saying of course; no use in denying it. But it's not as if these things are impossible, just poorly orchestrated. This year, all I want is to keep working, maybe start performing live again, finish this play I'm writing... and maybe it comes down to getting life as a process rather than an ascension or declension that is bound to leave you behind. Ugh. How morbid. How morbid and completely boring.

Up until now, the weather in Chicago has been intolerable. Subzero temperatures, wind and snow scraping at the skin shards of glass, the streets empty and post-apocalyptic... Jolly Jack has never been so dead on. [ http://www.thepostshow.com/2006/01/26 ] I've been watching the Olympics on and off with Nick and Alice, nostalgic for the days where I'd put Chopin waltzes in the record player and skate across the kitchen floor in my socks and long underwear. What gets me the most are the contestants who finally get there and can't perform because of some drunken ankle sprain or some petty feud between team members. I mean, you spend years training for a few brief seconds of potential glory and it suddenly, all potential is devoured whole and you're back to zero. And you can either wait another four years or decide to hang up your suit to dry, but either way, you've lost a lot of time trying to get to a boat which sails you by before your very eyes. I can't imagine that anything hurts worse than that. But it's what I love about the Olympic; that sense of finality, the "epic upsets, victories and everything in between" as NPR described it.

I wrote the opening to a screenplay yesterday that might have potential. [ http://community.livejournal.com/theboysupstairs/2290.html ] The half-baked premise involves a man who has spent the past three decades in a celluloid coma after being sentenced to life-in-prison at age twenty-five. He sells a successful screenplay and uses his films as a means to live, breathe and interact with the world as he might have known it. A studio decides to commission him a two-picture a year deal and hire a lawyer to reevaluate his case and possibly bring about his release. He is subsequently forced to deal with messiness of the life as he left it behind and to disengage from the cinematic illusions he has dedicated himself to for the last thirty years. I like the idea of expanding our scope to include behind-the-scenes action footage as a framing device. It's a stylistic conceit, but it's there to never let you forget that it's a film; I think it would support the story and I don't know if I've ever seen that done before. Maybe in Dogville, which was fucking garbage. Anyway, I think I started it because I wanted to write something that dealt with our modern-day fixation on voyuerism, entertainment and the self-absorbing (though necessarily self-fulfilling) root of it all. Ha! I'm much too tired to take any of this seriously. You can probably tell.

I don't know where to end. So I guess I'll end with a vague quote from my (written) journal. Take from it what you will:

"Ask him why he underlines his books, if he lives in your neighborhood, then ask him if he'd like to have dinner. You'd have done it already if you weren't so afraid that he might find out that you're wearing his name on your boxer briefs."

Oscar Projections & Insipid Commentary, Part I

BEST MOTION PICUTRE OF THE YEAR

Brokeback Mountain

Hideously overrated, but will probably WILL WIN just to reinforce that the gays own Hollywood. Which we do, by the way. *sugarsnap* George Cukor is probably pissing himself in his grave.

Capote

Okay, let’s face it: this was fucking excellent. Probably the first film I’ve scene to depict writers as the scared, soul-sapping monsters they can be. Given the oblique subject matter, I find overwhelming positive response to be sort of a surprise.

Crash

If you don’t count Magnolia, consider Crash “Short Cuts: The Sequel”. But this time we get a whole lotta’ ham-fisted, one-note insights on race. A lot of people were affected by it, I just fell asleep in my corn nuts.

Good Night and Good Luck

Skipped it.

Munich

For my money, this is the film that SHOULD WIN, if only for the fact that it merits its own controversy and makes all other historical fiction look irrelevant. The screenplay is a debacle and it isn’t a better film than “Schindler’s List” or even “Capote” for that matter, but Good God, it’s certainly more brave.

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BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A LEAD ROLE

Phillip Seymour Hoffman for Capote

Someone call the doctor, we've got a rare SHOULD WIN/WILL WIN situation. A performance that shows anyone who thought they could act that they were, in fact, very, VERY wrong.

Terrence Howard for Hustle and Flow

Skipped it.

Heath Ledger for Brokeback Mountain

Best Underplayed Performance? Maybe.

Joaquin Phoenix for Walk the Line

Stellar in the music sequences. Was he acting too? Funny, I can't remember.

David Strathairn for Good Night, and Good Luck Skipped it.

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BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A LEAD ROLE

Judi Dench for Mrs. Henderson Presents

Skipped it.

Felicity Huffman for Transamerica

Gender confusion is so passe. I wasn't particularly convinced that was transgender, either. Obviously I've seen too many episodes of Desperate Housewives. But still, this was an achievement. Definitely a SHOULD WIN.

Keira Knightley for Pride and Prejudice

Skipped it. (Yawn)

Charlize Theron for North Country

Skipped it.

Reese Witherspoon for Walk the Line

Reese's cups sure does one mean rendition of "Wildwood Flower", but please spare us the vintage dresses. WILL WIN.

- MORE CULTURE VULTURE SNARK SOON TO COME -

The Game of Give and Take

So I have this unusually clairvoyant connection with the shuffle option on my I-Pod. A friend of mine maintains that this is no accident, but a part of some inauspicious marketing strategy by the Apple Corporation. Yes, apparently this strategy, my friend says, involves certain processing devices that are implemented so that we'll bond with the product through mechanical puppy love. (To reiterate, it’s his conspiracy theory. Not mine.) All I know is that from the moment I leave my door to hit the street, I can usually count on my “mechanical lovepet” to churn out the perfect playlist matching every change in the weather, location, disposition, etc. It usually succeeds at this with an almost eerie cinematic efficiency. This week is no exception. Which means the fact that “Can’t Hurry Love” by The Supremes starts to play every time I’ve seen an ambulance or run into an ex-lover is a little more than Tarantino-irony, baby. No, that’s just not good.

How many heartaches must I stand?/Before I find the love to let me live again?/Right now the only thing that keeps me hanging on/When I feel my strength, it's almost gone…/I remember mama said…

How did this song, probably somewhere in the Top 5 most recognized in the American pop-music catalogue, turn so suddenly into this colossally cruel, omnipresent warning of life spinning so terribly out of control? (For the record, it hasn't yet. At least I don’t think it has.) As an agnostic with no coherent sense of the rowdy spiritual forces that may (or may not) surround him, I tend more to lean towards recognition of the coincidental, the paradoxical, but mostly, if I’m being honest, the completely nonsensical. So when I hear the words “You can’t hurry love”, they forge themselves into an encrypted anagram which say: “Expect less, breathe more” or “Slow down, sugar… your youth ain’t up for bargain just yet.” A therapist might call this projecting. A prison guard or grocery clerk might call it keeping everything in check. I prefer to think of it more like a quick glimpse or two in the rear view mirror… looking back in a series of paranoiac spasms and pushing forward into a greater sense of becoming.

When I left home at seventeen, the objectives were simpler then. It was about going to school and meeting him, who would give me an internship here, where I’d secure a position, drop out of school and move there, which would supply me with enough opportunities and surrogate family to officially call that place home. It was about living in a constant state of arrival, which seemed at the time to be the only real way to find success in the world. A guy I dated briefly in college was similarly driven, hence Act III of our relationship ending in bloodfeast and fiasco. But it wasn’t until I laughed in his face when I heard him say: “Failure was not an option” that I understood the extent to which I’d been jinxed, tested, even scammed by these earlier ambitions. I had always known to some extent that talent and drive were, in themselves, insufficient. I had always known that the “getting there” would be a process, one which would inevitably consist of a lot of excruciating waiting. What didn’t occur to me is that this process would take its toll on one’s own survival to point where things like talent and ambition would be rendered irrelevant; you might even forget that these things existed in the first place.

The term “coming-of-age” is interesting to me. Some would say it signifies that defining part of a person’s life when all routes seem open, but no direction seems accessible. I would add that it’s also when a person reconciles him/herself to what the world is and is not, and their capacity to deal with those immensities and disappointments. But this Twilight Adolescence that everyone talks about in their early-twenties seems less innocent than the days when we were skipping gym and picking at our pimples. There’s more at stake when you fail, and as one of my character’s say “less room for you and your dream to walk the same street.” So maybe when Diana Ross and The Supremes were singing about “love” being “a-game-of-give-and-take”, what they were describing was the fight for self-affirmation, the fight for what our hearts deserve…