(fame) puts you there where things are hollow

ELLIS: But people can create their own kind of fame with tech now. You can set up websites devoted to yourself. You can very easily live out that visual fantasy of yourself as famous. What may be different is that with such a culture of immediate gratification, the desire to actually move your ass, become talented at something, and then try to succeed at something like acting or singing or dancing is no longer necessary. Sometimes you watch those elimination rounds on shows like American Idol and wonder, “Do people really think this about themselves?”

BOLLEN: It’s gotten to the point that embarrassing yourself has overstepped talent. Talent is far less interesting or consumable than public spectacle.

ELLIS: Do we judge that human craving for attention? For fame? Doesn’t that need seem human in a way? “I’m here. I exist. Look at me.” There’s something weird about people putting that need down or judging it. I don’t know. I feel too contradictory when I discuss this. One side of me thinks, “This is ridiculous.” And then the other side says, “No, it’s also human.” I guess I just don’t know if I’m really that interested in complaining about the culture anymore.”

– full interview with Bret Easton Ellis @ Interview Magazine, regarding his new book, and the LA culture he has become famous for writing dispassionately about:

Sentimentality has no place in Ellis’s worlds—so much so that it is a wonder when any character thinks in the past tense at all. But now, 25 years after Less Than Zero launched his career, Ellis has made another shocking departure by going back to where he started. In June, Ellis releases Imperial Bedrooms, a sequel to his debut, which drops in on Clay, Blair, Julian, and other Less Than Zero denizens who, now in their forties, are haunting and haunted by the post-glamour, post-shock, post-moral, post-purpose Hollywood scene. Clay is now a screenwriter. Upon returning to Los Angeles from New York to work on a film, he slowly falls back into old ways—parties, drugs, sex—as the plot teems with more-graphic Ellisian tropes like murder, ghosts, dismemberment, and paranoia. For anyone assuming that the author has created something of an upbeat 90210 reunion, the opening pages clarify the difference between Hollywood’s favorite export and the actual on-the-ground circumstance: “The movie was begging for our sympathy,” says Clay, referring to the 1987 film version of Less Than Zero, “whereas the book didn’t give a shit.”

be kind; the universe owes you nothing

“When you recognize yourself feeling contempt for a human being, stop.

When you recognize yourself judging or ridiculing a human being, stop.

When you recognize yourself boiling human matters down to black and white, consider the gray areas.

Stay away from people who do the above things. Seriously. I avoid serially snarky people like the god-damn plague. Yes, there’s always room for a bit of viciousness and sarcasm in humor, and I can accept that. What I can not abide by an individual who cannot open their mouth without some sort of judgmental remark coming out of it. All the more when they shrink up/blow up when that sort of treatment is reversed upon them.

One more thing: the universe entitles you to nothing. You are not entitled to happiness, prosperity, wealth, anything at all. Any suffering you feel, or have felt does not mean you get any more of a break in life than anyone else. You are not owed a damn thing in this world. Do not ever act as if you are. Avoid people who do.

That being said: be kind. The only time you will catch a break is from someone who goes out of their way to be kind to you. Do so yourself, regardless of the above fact. This isn’t about fate or karma or any such mystical claptrap. It is about knowing you are, as much as you can, doing the right thing.”

–http://ask.metafilter.com/157204/Shiny-happy-people-speak-out#2253229, via google reader

QOTD: monkeys vs robots, wrt truth/logic

“That clear response, shorn of the ambiguities of presumption or prudence, would be the one given by a computer or a calculator and would be the only one that their inflexible, honest natures, that of the computer and the machine, would have allowed themselves, but we are dealing here with human beings, and human beings are known universally as the only animals capable of lying, and while it is true that they sometimes lie out of fear and sometimes out of self-interest, they also occasionally lie because they realize, just in time, that this is the only means available to them of defending the truth.”

– Jose Saramago, Seeing

RIP Jose Saramago

my eyes teared when i read this obituary this morning: Nobel Prize-Winning Writer Saramago Dead at 87.

From the 1980s Saramago was one of Portugal’s best-selling contemporary writers and his works have been translated into more than 20 languages.

But he never courted the kind of fame offered by literary prizes and his bluntness could sometimes offend.

”I am skeptical, reserved, I don’t gush, I don’t go around smiling, hugging people and trying to make friends,” he once said.

His outspokenness set off a storm of protest in 2002 when during a visit he compared Ramallah, a Palestinian city blockaded at the time by the Israeli army, to the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Holocaust survivors and intellectuals, including left-wing doves who were highly critical of the Israeli government’s policy toward the Palestinians, condemned Saramago’s statement as false and anti-Semitic.

In 1998 he said his book ”Blindness” was about ”a blindness of rationality.” In that book, which was made into a 2008 movie starring Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore, the population of an unnamed city is struck by a mysterious blindness which is never explained. Society’s fragilities come to the fore as a general breakdown of infrastructures ensues.

”We’re rational beings but we don’t behave rationally. If we did, there’d be no starvation in the world,” he said.

Such compassion and anxiety about the skewing of priorities in modern society is evident in all his works and also gives a clue to his enduring sympathy toward the Communist Party.

He was frequently compared with Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his writing is often described as realism tinged with Latin-American mysticism, particularly for his technique of confronting historical personages with fictional characters.

Portuguese critic Torcato Sepulveda said Saramago successfully ”sought to reconcile the rationalism of his materialistic world view with the richness of his baroque style.”

Others disagreed, saying Saramago was too intellectual and that his storytelling pace often slowed to a dreary plod, or that his sparing use of punctuation and speech marks confused the reader.

Saramago had a remedy: ”I tell them to read my books out loud and then they’ll pick up the rhythm, because this is ‘written orality.’ It is the written version of the way people tell stories to each other,” he said.

i cannot recommend this man’s works enough. “Blindness” is still one of the most compelling novels i’ve ever read, “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” is absolutely sublime and a must-read for anyone intrigued by those Biblically undocumented years of Jesus’ life and what they might have contained, “Death with Interruptions” is the darkest of dark comedies, and as I mentioned I just started reading “Seeing” just this week, about what happens to politics in an election in which 87% of the ballots cast are blank. I didn’t enjoy “The Double” as much as the others, but it is still worth reading. His style and vision are unparalleled, and his poetic and unbelievably creative investigations of religion, politics and culture are some of the most daring i’ve ever read.

RIP to my favorite author, and thank you for all that you gave to the world. he was a prime example of the provocative thinker and reason for art: if what you are doing causes no one to question, then why do it?

fool(e)

whatever it is that you are doing, make sure that it is not unremarkable.

.::.

i just finished watching Henry Fool. it took me a while to like the delivery of this film, particularly by the title character, and i waivered on liking the stage cadence, and some scenes are uncomfortably unwatchable, but the screenplay writing and the social commentary held me and in the end i thought it was pretty brilliant.

while it is not the focus of the film, i recommend it particularly for anyone who’s ever felt pressure to have their art justified.

female + fiction

this morning i didn’t go to work because it was super sunny and friday i was in too much pain and so i drank my coffee, took some pain meds and went to sit in the garden and read my book until the pain meds kicked in. and then when i came back inside i was sort of hypercaffeinated/doped up and got into unconscious multi-tasking mode (where you do numbers of things at once even though you’re not in any kind of hurry whatsoever) and almost took a banana into the shower (tweet).

if there’s one plus side to all this pain management it’s that i’m spending lots more time reading in the garden, which is nice because i no longer have public transportation time for reading since they cancelled my AC Transit bus line to work. i also get most of my exercise biking to work now, which is good because i haven’t actually gone to the gym very much at all lately and my bike commute is pretty much the only daily exercise i’m getting. (tweeted side note: yesterday on the way home i got pulled over by the emeryville police for blowing a stop sign on my bike. i have never even been pulled over while driving my CAR in california. i pleaded ignorance and apologized and was let off with a warning.)

anyway, i finished the book – The Anxiety of Everyday Objects. it was sort of eerie, actually, how much i related to this book about a young wannabe artist working a desk job in a small manhattan law firm. and also, i realized part way through, that it’s sort of odd that this was the 3rd book i’ve read in a row about young women struggling with identity/life changes. i posted a bit before about Veronica, a novel about a young model, which i really enjoyed and then handed off to Vera, and then after that i read a book i pulled from my Mom’s bookshelf, What Girls Learn, about a couple of young girls and their mother who gets very ill, which was refreshingly honest about puberty but pretty emotionally dark.  i would highly recommend both Veronica and The Anxiety of Everyday Objects to other women because i think both of them dealt with issues in a very adult and uplifting/bigger-picture kind of way; What Girls Learn was decently written, but somewhat adolescent in it’s view. or maybe the writing just wasn’t as good, i don’t know.

i’m not sure why i read 3 books in a row on such a similar theme.  obviously i am still figuring out “who i am” (always, a neverending inner monologue), and questions about female identity in this modern world are on the forefront of culture right now, what with 2 women taking over the political headlines combined/contrasted with all the plastic surgery/airbrushing/extreme dieting/female imagery and the commentary on that subject in pop culture. it makes sense women (or maybe just me) are discombobulated. in the past i’ve not been regularly drawn to books on this subject, but my fiction choices of late have shown that it’s on my mind a lot more than maybe i was aware of.

because i now needed a new book and to change pace, today i went to “The West’s Oldest Independent Bookseller” and one of the only local bookstores left in Berkeley – Books, Inc. on 4th street- and bought Seeing by Jose Saramago, a tangential follow-up to Blindness, one of my all-time favorite novels (and now a movie but i haven’t seen it yet). this book is about (farcical yet unnervingly realistic) political upheaval. From The New Yorker:

Saramago’s sombre masterpiece “Blindness” had an almost mythic power, whereas his latest novel, a political satire set in the same nameless capital city, opens with more wit and less heart. When Election Day coincides with a terrible rainstorm, the government worries that no one will venture out to vote. This fear is unfounded, but the election results are even more alarming: seventy per cent of the city’s voters have cast a blank ballot. Saramago has enormous fun imagining the official acrobatics precipitated by this apparent vote of no confidence, and, as the political hypocrisies and bureaucratic absurdities multiply, the narrative hums with correspondences to current events. Initially, readers may miss the previous novel’s intensity of feeling, but this one’s lightness proves deceptive: for Saramago’s beleaguered citizens, even thoughts never uttered can be fatal, and everyone is guilty until otherwise notified.

looking forward to it.

thoughts from last night’s concert

[the first opening band] is like Neil Young, as played by Ben Affleck. they are so *sincere*, and if there is even a hint of irony it is unintended. that could be a compliment.

2 girls in the bathroom with total 80s Flashdance getups on said (very loudly) they didn’t like Ezra Furman’s voice. “the music is OK but his voice is not very good. i just don’t like the way he sings”. they probably would have said the same thing about Bob Dylan in 1963.

Delta Spirit was just a bit too….plaid for me. we left before it was over.

tonight’s musical menu = delicious

tonight’s musical menu:

• appetizers: ill gates + sh1pwr3k @ Equity happy hour in SF (5:30-9:00)
  
• main course: ezra furman & the harpoons @ the Independent, SF (opening for Delta Spirit, whom i have never seen or heard)

amazingly hand-crafted electronica elaborately woven with organic sounds driven by undertows of dance-able bassbeats followed by live poetic raw guitar+vocals music that will make you dance, laugh and maybe cry? honestly, using only current music being made in my circles of friends, i couldn’t have scheduled a better music menu for myself if i tried.

unrelated but musical note:

• i learned this morning that Metallica’s “Unforgiven” = length of my commute to work if i drive the car.  i bought this song as a cassette single when it came out, and listened to it hundreds of times.  remember cassette singles? 1990-1991 was a really weird year for me for reasons i won’t go into here, so it makes sense that i *totally connected* to such a lame song. oh, metallica.  so much cheese for such a hard rock band.

• the fact that i just tagged this post “ezra furman” + “metallica” + “ill gates” + “sh1pwr3k” speaks volumes about my current and life-long musical tastes.

(concert resume has been updated)

(concert resume: n. A complete and comprehensive list of concerts that one has attended. Often casual conversation between fellow concert goers.)

the state of 2010

i’m not one who believes in apocalyptic theories, whether it’s the Second Coming of Jesus Christ Our Lord or 2012: The Mayan Prophesy or even just mundane, secular, Nuclear WWIII.

but the fact that this is 2010 and

1. Arnold Schwarzenegger still holds a very high political office in the USA and

2.To replace him, two of the top winning candidates in yesterday’s CA election are extremely rich white republican WOMEN who were CEOs of HUGE CORPORATIONS (which TK calls the “Girls Gone Wild Senate Race“…ouch! oh, what does this say about the world, especially California, today? the socio-eco-politico-anthro discussion could be endless)

and

3. Ozzy Osbourne is now a health columnist for the Times of London

really sort of freaks me out in a dystopian 1984 kind of way, without even mentioning everything else.

June 8 2010 – SF/CA Election Cheat Sheet + Why voting “No” is important

False Profit Cheat Sheet

A Prop 13, Seismic Retrofit – YES
CA Prop 14, Top-Two Primary – NO
CA Prop 15, Fair Elections – YES
CA Prop 16, PG&E Monopoly – NO
CA Prop 17, Insurance Persistency Discounts/Rate Hikes – NO

SF Prop A, SFUSD Parcel Tax – YES
SF Prop B, Earthquake Safety Bond – YES
SF Prop C, Film Commission Appointments – YES
SF Prop D, Public Employee Pensions – YES
SF Prop E, Costs of Protecting Dignitaries – ?
SF Prop F, Rent Increase Appeals – YES
SF Prop G, Transbay Terminal – YES

For full explanations visit False Profit.com

If you live in Alameda County, like me, go to SmartVoter for information about the Alameda County items on the ballot, specifically Measures A-D, which are minor, or visit the East Bay Express voter guide.

In general, I’m against voting for huge state measures at the ballot box (voters being swayed by commercials and misleading short summaries should not be making decisions; elected officials guided by experts should be making decisions, that’s why we pay them), and I especially agree with the Green Party – “When we can’t understand a proposition’s effects and side effects, we should usually vote No.”

To be clear: For those of you who don’t understand your ballot propositions and therefore just figure you won’t vote, NOT VOTING is not the same as Voting No.  VOTING NO IS IMPORTANT.  It keeps badly organized, faulty laws that people don’t really understand from being implemented.