intellectual properties

le weekend

despite me having another bout of shoulder/neck pain and us being without a car (in the shop), it was a great weekend, probably because those 2 things forced us to relax and lay low.  several movies watched [liked: a serious man, up in the air.  did not like: fantastic mr. fox (a movie with george clooney and bill murray i didn't like?! thought it was boring, went to sleep halfway through), star trek (2009) (too many legacy issues, too many explosions, not enough script)], 2 sunny afternoon BBQs, time with friends, plenty of time outside and i even got a sunburn yesterday.   and now it’s a drizzly monday morning, and all i want is some hot thai curry.

on the bus (from “Veronica”)

“The bus humps and huffs as it makes a labored circle around a block of discount stores and a deserted grocery.  As the bus leans hard to one side, its gears make a high whining sound, like we’re streaking through space.  Looking beyond the stores, I glimpse green hills and a cross section of sidewalks with little figures toiling on them.  Pieces of life packed in hard skulls with soft eyes looking out, toiling up and down, around and around.  More distant green, the side of a building.  The bus comes out of the turn and stops at the transfer point.  It sags down with a gassy sigh.  Every passenger’s ass feels its churning, bumping motor.  Every ass thus connected, and moving forward with the bus.  The old white lady across the aisle from me sits on her stiff haunches, eating wet green grapes from a plastic bag and peering out to see who’s getting on.  The crabbed door suctions open.  Teenagers stomp through it, big kids in flapping clothes with big voices in flapping words.  “Cuz like–whatcho look–you was just a–ain’t lookin’ at you!”  The old lady does not look.  But I can feel her taking them in.  Their energy pours over her skin, into her blood, heart, spine and brain.  Watering the flowers of her brain.  The bag of green grapes sits ignored on her lap.  Private snack suspended for the public feast of youth.  She would never be so close to them except on the bus.  Neither would I.  For a minute, I feel sorry for rich people alone in their cars.  I look down on one now, just visible through her windshield, sparkling bracelets on hard forearm, clutching the wheel, a fancy-pant thigh, a pulled-down mouth, a hairdo.  Bits of light fly across her windshield.  I can see her mind beating around the closed car like a bird.  Locked in with privileges and pleasures, but also with pain.”

–from Veronica: A Novel, by Mary Gaitskill, the book I am currently reading. i have not read any of her other works, but this one reads, in style and content, somewhat like a female Bret Easton Ellis. slightly more poetic, but at the same time some of the sentences hit hard.  i like it.

the last laugh

recently on This American Life (which is just one of the best things ever, and in addition to the radio broadcast, i highly also recommend the televised/video portions, which you can get via Netflix etc.), they had an episode in which they were searching for funny funeral stories, and apparently this was a hard thing to find.

so i just want to put it in writing that when i die, i want there to be humor at my funeral. it’s ok if you cry too, but there better be some laughter. song and dance/skits/standup comendy/whatever. i’m imagining more of a posthumorous posthumous roast centered around poking fun at yet celebrating me, my life, and the things and people that i love than a funeral.

that is all.

QOTD

“don’t invent too many reasons for what you have decided to do!”

–from Susan Sontag’s “In America“, a book i am very much enjoying and highly recommend.

“2010″ still seems unreal to me.

on tuesday i had my work desk retrofitted so that now i am standing while i work.  it’s not a fancy adjustable desk, and i haven’t bought a taller chair yet, so i am standing the entire time i’m working. yes, my legs and back get tired, but this causes me to move around, stretch, take breaks. which is what i need.  and voila!  yesterday was the first day in 8 WEEKS i woke up without any noticeable neck or upper back/shoulder pain. yay!  of course, my MRI was scheduled for today.  isn’t that how it always goes?  i’m going in for the MRI this afternoon anyway, as this is a recurring problem and still might well be one that i am just avoiding. and, it was sort of a pain in the ass to get approved, i might as well.  perhaps puts another blemish on my medical record, but at this point i don’t really care about that. i’m optimistically hoping that someday “pre-existing conditions” aren’t the bane of healthcare they are today. anyway, will report on the results as soon as i get them.

in other news, i rode my bike to work every day this week again, which was nice. riding the bus makes me feel so trapped by timing and schedules and routes and is just kind of a pain compared to the freedom of biking.  last weekend i went and got a rear basket so i don’t ride with my backpack on, and despite continuous rain warnings from the not-so-accurate “accuweather” forecasters, it hasn’t rained yet this week.  next week?  let’s hope.  3 drought years in a row ain’t good.

oh, what else. let’s see. no, i haven’t seen Avatar yet as the 3D IMAX version is continually SOLD OUT in SF.  i’m not too expectant wrt the ‘amazing inspiring worldview-shifting’ some have reported, as from what i’ve seen heard, it’s just a retrofit of your standard colonialist-learns-from-natives tale (SPOILER!). i’m too jaded for that anyway and besides, it’s the visuals i’m going for, which is why i’m holding out for the 3D IMAX. plus, while i acknowledge there are always elements of impracticality and plot holes in any utopian vs dystopian/good vs evil storyline and expect no less from this one, i find it amusing that some uber-conservatives are irked at the film’s supposed ‘anti-American liberal agenda’, or that others are calling it “nativist“, as though all environmentalists hate modernity and progress and wish we’d just go back to idyllic hunter/gatherer mode and want to totally dismantle our capitalist system. *eye roll*

i have seen a whole raft of other movies lately (netflix on demand RULES!), and will try to post some reviews/recs over the weekend, or soon-ish.

ok, now i’m just blabbing. have a great weekend, y’all. and good luck with those new years resolutions.

back to the land & a reporter’s eyes

i love the way this writer writes so visually, and i think you will enjoy it too.
http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/back-to-the-land/#

also, in other NYT related bits, tonight i went to see an advance screening of the upcoming HBO documentary on Nicholas Kristof, “Reporter“.  i would recommend it when it comes out if you have HBO.

QOTD

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has courage to lose sight of the shore.”

-Yevgeny Zamyatin, who wrote one of my favorite dystopian novels, “We“, which i should read again.

~via

aside: i really need to start taking my own advice on these QOTDs.

recently read

i mentioned that i’d read several great books lately, and so here’s a little about them:

i already discussed A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius but i’m still going to recommend it one more time. while i’m not sure about the genius part, it was heartbreaking as well as thoroughly entertaining in both form and content for me as a Gen Xer in SF, CA.

then i read The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis, mostly because the film was coming out and I wanted to read the book first.  i was a little bored with the content and style, as both the disaffection and ennui of the rich and bourgeois and graphic physical violence have been aspects of his previous work (Less Than Zero, American Psycho), but it’s still well-written (and short) enough to have kept me reading.  i’m interested in seeing hollywood’s treatment of the subplot revealed in the end, given the actors cast in the film as well as current trends in the genre.

then i read Jose Saramago’s new book, Death With Interruptions.  two of his previous books rank in my top 10:  Blindness was one of the most intense novels i’ve ever read (and i’ve yet to see the film because i loved the book so much), and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ was just truly beautiful and amazing and i wish i could buy everyone i know a copy.  I also read The Double, but for some reason didn’t enjoy the content of that as much as these other three.  his style of writing and storytelling is enthralling and unique, and i think that Death with Interruptions showcases his talent as a wordsmith the best yet.  i was dogearring pages left and right and stopping to savor his wry use of words.  while the topic is mildly political in the current context of “death panels” in amercia, i read it as nothing other than a fast and furious fictional treatment of one of life’s most enigmatic human questions:  would life be better if we were immortal? is death a curse, or a blessing?

having run out of books to read on the trip then, i bought one of the few english language novels at the airport in Amsterdam before the flight back:  Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father (the one that unabashedly details his younger years, with ancecdotes that some chose to use as ammunition during the election, like his occasional use of drugs as a student, incidents involving racial dynamics, and the use of language like the Fword, none of which, for me, affect your ability to be President.)  i’m sort of ashamed that i probably would never have purchased this book if it weren’t because it was one of the few in English (limited choice), and then once i started reading it, even more ashamed that i knew so little about a president i voted for. i’ve been pleasantly surprised at, first of all, how incredibly well-written it is, and then secondly, how much i relate to his story and worldview.  i didn’t think i had a lot in common with a black christian ivy league politician, but apparently i do, and i have to say i’m enjoying it very much and would recommend it to anyone, especially people like me who may not know as much about Obama as we should. whether you voted for him or not, and whether you like him now or not, it’s a well written autobiographical novel and hey, he is the President.

finally, we saw Where the Wild Things Are yesterday, and i was pleasantly surprised there also with how much different the film was than i somehow expected it to be. with Dave Eggers as a writer (and if you’ve read his books, like the one mentioned above, then you quickly hear his voice in the script) and Spike Jonze as director i knew it was going to be different, but it wasn’t what i expected.  the original story is only 10 sentences, so to make a feature length film you have to make up a lot about character and plot, but unlike children’s stories like Alice in Wonderland or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or The Wizard of Oz or Brothers Grimm tales that have obvious dark sides to the original written works that were carefully reframed or edited out in the filmmaking for young audiences (Disneyfication), WTWTA goes the other way and takes a rather innocuous children’s tale and turns it into something much deeper, much weirder, and much darker than the original to the point that i don’t think it is even a children’s movie anymore. i think i expected something more like when they’ve taken short Dr. Seuss books and turned them into feature length films, adding silly adventures and subplots to the existing look and feel.  i love it when children’s movies center on adult themes (and Pixar has been a leader in that, with Wall-E and UP), but i think this goes beyond even that, which was surprising and interesting.  we went to an early show, and so the theatre was largely full of families with children, and i don’t think many of the smaller children got the movie at all, although the 10/11 year old boy next to me was crying, so for older kids it might mean a lot.   and, definitely a movie to see in the theatre, as visually it is stunning.

the yes men: how to fix the world

if you haven’t yet seen the footage of the Yes Men’s (who?) most recent stunt with the Chamber of Commerce, it’s here and worth 10 minutes of your time.

some articles and a little about the context:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2009/10/19/091019ta_talk_surowiecki

Resigning in protest is not in the American grain. Robert McNamara stuck around as Secretary of Defense even after he decided that the Vietnam War was a disaster; Colin Powell did the same during the Bush Administration’s push for war with Iraq; and in the lead-up to the financial crisis, few high-profile executives stepped down over disagreements in philosophy or tactics. But resigning in protest has gained popularity of late among an unlikely group: big corporations. Last Monday, Apple announced that it would be quitting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of the Chamber’s opposition to global-warming legislation. And that was just the latest in a series of defections: in the past few weeks, the public-utility companies Pacific Gas & Electric, PNM Resources, and Exelon all announced that they’d be leaving the Chamber, while Nike quit the organization’s board of directors…

…But it may reflect a calculation that global warming is simply too big an issue to get wrong, both economically—few companies are really going to benefit from the melting of the polar ice caps—and from a public-relations point of view. It’s also probably no coincidence that these resignations have come at a time when the Chamber’s anti-regulatory zeal looks not just outmoded but self-defeating. Had the Chamber supported tougher regulation of financial and housing markets, after all, the myriad small businesses it represents would undoubtedly be better off today. And it’s far from clear that across-the-board hostility to regulation is really in the best interests of the free-enterprise system. We assume that lobbies always recognize what’s best for their members. But they don’t, and, in the case of climate change, they may very well be missing what the companies that have resigned in protest have seen: global warming isn’t just bad for the planet; it’s bad for business.

follow-up

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/jamessurowiecki/2009/10/the-us-chamber-of-commerce-now-90-smaller.html

for privacy reasons, i can’t say too much about my professional experience working with the Chamber of Commerce on environmental issues, but i can say that this made me very happy.

their current movie “The Yes Men Fix The World” is out now.

mistakes i know i am making

i’ve been lazy again this week and riding the bus instead of biking to work. the upside is that i get offline reading done in the 20-minutes each way that i otherwise don’t find/make time to do. i finished A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and reading dave eggers on the bus every morning put me in a thoughtful and contemplative but good mood. now i’m reading The Informers, and reading Bret Easton Ellis on the bus in the morning does not so much put me in a good mood.

anyway, i know i am going to europe for the first time TOMORROW and so should write something maybe about that today also, but before i forget, in the appendix/addenda to AHWOSG, written later after the first publication, called Mistakes We Knew We Were Making, Eggers discusses the inevitable position that non-fictional, autobiographical writers get into, which is that, because we do not live solitary lives, we write about OTHER PEOPLE. and those other people may not like what you wrote about them, or the circumstance, or how you remember it, EVEN IF IT’S TRUE. or, maybe, i should say, ESPECIALLY IF IT’S TRUE. which i can understand, you know, from their perspective. your “dirty laundry” being published for the world to read. it might sting. it might put a huge brick-heavy damper on relationships. and this is something i’ve been faced with recently, what with my whole huge extended family joining The Facebook and realizing that i’ve been writing about my life here for, oh, 8 years now, and even though i try not to say too much about other people and personal things, i have done so, sometimes without really remembering and suddenly these ghosts from the past pop up and people are angry, disappointed, hurt. so just after a recent bout of this, i was reading the very end of the addenda of the book, and Eggers wrote something that made me feel, not…justified, but encouraged? to continue to be open and share. he says (more than once in the prelude and appendix, actually):

“We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our past and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself….

…Because secrets do not increase in value if kept in a gore-ian lockbox, because one’s past is either made useful or else mutates and becomes cancerous. We share things for the obvious reasons: it makes us feel un-alone, it spreads the weight over a larger area, it holds the possibility of making our share lighter. And it can work either way - not simply as a pain-relief device, but, in the case of not bad news but good, as a share-the-happy-things-I’ve-seen/lessons-I’ve-learned vehicle. Or as a tool for simple connectivity for its own sake, a testing of waters, a stab at engagement with a mass of strangers.”

and i agree. so while i do deeply respect and recognize personal boundaries and have taken great care over the years to not represent anyone but myself (and honestly the family-related post that recently upset someone i didn’t even realize was publicly published - BLOGGER FAUX PAS), i also do not believe in covering up, hiding the parts that aren’t pretty. because i too believe that it does not make you less yourself, less valuable, to show your flaws. those with flawless facades are difficult to believe. they are hard to connect to. possibly this is why there is so much Schadenfreude in our human nature: because in the mistake we see others make, we see ourselves. and so sometimes i admit, when i hit that “publish” button, i know it might be a mistake, but the feedback (even if negative), the connectivity, always makes up for it.

(semi-related note that i couldn’t work into the text above: sometimes even people you don’t know get really offended by you writing about your own life. dooce.com, blogger of epic flaw-revealing proportions, has started publishing her hate mail and monetizing it. SUCH a good idea. haters suck.)