Over the last several years I’ve had a lovely birthday tradition: STEAK AND CAKE! Celebrate with the Kaiser-Tran-Ackerman with dinner at Damon’s in Glendale and cake from Portos. Unfortunately it looks like I won’t be able to follow through with tradition this year. With The Grandmother’s increasing dependence on me (I can’t be gone for more than 3 hours at a time because I have to give her meals) and with just how busy my family’s schedules are, it looks like no STEAK AND CAKE for me. No being able to get out of the house for a night. And, turning 37, I would be in a prime of my life. Shame.
So now I’m left with dreams, fantasies of what I want to do for 37.
– A really bourgeois champagne brunch complete.
– A coke-fueled depraved orgy.
– A buffet of drugs to sample and try.
– Watching several films.
– Booze. Lots of booze.
– Gathering everyone I know and just hanging out and chilling. With booze. And drugs.
I think it’s funny that my birthday falls on Easter Sunday this year. Yeah. I’m going to be trumped by a god I don’t believe in.
The more I read, the more I become acquainted with my intellectual shortcomings. Believe me, there are many, but one thing that really bugs me is the fact that I have a hard time recalling plots to stories once I have finished consuming them. This isn’t exclusive to books — I still can’t tell you the ending of half the movies I watched for the 2010 BJs. And that was less than a month ago!
With Slade House I’m told that this is some sort of sequel to David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, and it automatically causes me to roll my eyes not out of disgust but of being forced to hash up the plot of a book I read a year ago. I do remember a fully enjoyable book that was engrossing right up until the very end which was a sort of cop out. I do remember wannabe immortals feeding upon the souls of a special sorts of mortals to feed their immortality. And the Alps.
But Slade House isn’t a sequel at all. It’s a stand-alone story that unfortunately was not as engrossing as The Bone Clocks. Told in vignettes as twin wannabe immortals begin their soulsucking, each vignette nine years apart, it made it difficult to fully dive into the story. Once one story ends, you have to begin the process all over again and so on and so forth.
Unlike The Bone Clocks, the ending is more satisfying. While it does end with a bit of cliffhanger, it doesn’t feel as cheap and rushed. However my interest flagged in the middle parts, by the end I was completely hooked and going where Mitchell wanted to take me. Where he led, I followed.
The Slade House is a tiny book — at 6 inches by 7 1/2 inches it’s physically smaller that most books and is only 238 pages long. While I anticipated it taking a day to read, I spent parts of three days getting through it. Again, probably my shortcoming more than anything.
The renovated Laemmle Monica movie house on 2nd Street in Santa Monica.
The upcoming end-of-the-line station for the Expo Line in Santa Monica.
At 6 am, a loud crack of thunder woke me up from my slumber, and the heavens opened up. Rain, hail everywhere! We got half an inch of rain in an hour, and just like that the skies cleared up leaving a windy and crisp day for us.
It is a bit hard to read a book when I have a rare weekend off. Dallas Aunt comes to town, and finally I am free to do what I want to do: hang with friends, go see all the foreign films I’ve been meaning to see (Embrace of the Serpent and Son of Saul being great films and highly recommended by me.) Rachel Cantor’s new novel Good On Paper finally arrived for me at the library, but my I was ready to party down as much as I party down nowadays.
The problem is I really had to read this as quickly as possible judging from the list of books on hold I have with the library. About four of them are becoming available at the same time despite my best attempts to time them out. Fortunately since I hate driving and took public transit as much as I could, it gave me some good chunks of time to spend reading.
Here is a novel about a down-on-her-luck translator in New York City named Shira getting a seeming dream job translating the new work of a Nobel Prize winning Romanian/Italian poet Romei while trying to keep her makeshift family and life together. The first half of the novel builds the pressure in her life until it comes out exploding about 2/3 of the way through.
I’ll admit I enjoyed Samantha Hunt’s Mr. Splitfoot a lot more than Good on Paper. I wasn’t as engrossed as I was in the former. Then again that could be the symptom of reading the first 100 pages while on transit. It’s a perfectly fine novel, although one thing lingered as I finished the epilogue.
At the point where Shira’s life explodes, I thought I missed something. It was certainly written with the intent of the mind-blowing explosion ready to happen. “Shira! he half shouted, his coital dream cracked open like a canteloupe.” “With the precision of film rolling backward, the pieces shot back into place, the shattering of my life became whole.”
Cantor brings back strains of prior events as she brings this all to a climax, and perhaps it is my shortcoming that I completely missed it. I knew it was a something, but what this something was mystified me for a bit. There I had Shira in bed completely devastated, and here I was in bed more fully clothed than Shira wondering why.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great book, but I am upset that I missed the full effect of the climax. But, I suppose, that is my own personal motif.
Over the last couple of days, I have seen a lot of Koreans get very angry at Chris Rock’s Oscar joke. Child labor is not funny, they rage. Not all Asians are good at math, they say (and seeing some of my cousins, I know that is definitely true.) As the furor kept getting louder and louder, it got me very self-conscious: did it make me a bad Asian that I actually chuckled at that gag?
As society has turned more into an outrage society where we express our displeasure in all caps on Twitter and Facebook and nuance is just another four-letter word, I decided I would only get outraged about real things. You know, that it wasn’t until the last decade that us Hapas were given equal rights in Korea. That I speak only in English in Koreatown to get better service than if I spoke Korean. That my entire time growing up at a Korean church it was made very clear to me that I did not belong.
So yeah. I found it very delicious that some Koreans got mad.
Brendan and I recorded our look back at the best films of 2010 in our very subverted and perverted minds. It really did sound like a very good idea at the time: revisiting the movies of 2010, seeing how well they aged over the last five years.
I started with the appropriately titled Rabbit Hole directed by John Cameron Mitchell. If you are going to dive into a bunch of movies from 2010, it is sort of appropriate to see it as going down some sort of rabbit hole and into an alternative world. I should have known that it was a sign of things to come.
The notes I made about Rabbit Hole after watching it: Painfully mediocre. It’s an adaptation of a stage play (problem no. 1.) It’s just fine at best. A meditation on grief, all it is is a superficial snapshot. It’s nothing deep. And since it was a stage play, it has some LOUD ARGUMENTS. Disappointing since I like JCM.
There really were some low points. Life During Wartime, Todd Solondz’s sort-of-sequel to 1998’s Happiness. It just flirted with the characters we first met during Happiness and was just plain blah.
I didn’t think much of Inception, thought The Social Network was just fine and only made it through 15 minutes of Exit Through the Gift Shop before angrily turning it off and regretting this endeavor.
But here are my top 5 films from 2010 that was totally worth the pain of going through some pretty awful/mediocre films.
5. Heartbeats (Les Amours Imaginaires)
Directed by French-Canadian Xavier Dolan, it’s yet another movie featuring a love triangle that the French love. It’s not as tragic as Jules et Jim (what is?), but no one is completely happy in the end. Dolan can frame a shot and has impeccable use of color which adds to the richness of
the movie. I loved it when it came out, and I loved rewatching it now.
4. Dogtooth
This Greek film is one of the most fucked up things I have seen in a while. A patriarch who has imprisoned his children in his home, the children are now young adults who are completely stunted. Unlike this past year’s documentary The Wolfpack, these kids have no concept of the outside world. It is one of the most audacious and biting satires made in a long time.
3. Kaboom
I love Gregg Araki’s movies, and this one is a return to his nihilistic teenage apocalypse films of Totally Fucked Up, The Doom Generation and Nowhere (my personal favorite.) I love these stiff caricatures, the sexual fluidity, the music, the style. I actually rewatched this to cleanse my palate after watching Life During Wartime. It was very much needed.
2. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes that year. It’s a very simple movie of a man preparing to die and is visited by the human ghost of his dead wife and monkey ghost of his long-missing son. You’re expecting something quite supernatural and extraordinary to happen, but it doesn’t. Oh, there is a catfish cunnilingus scene, but apart from that it is pretty straight forward. I just saw the trailer for Weerasethakul’s latest film Cemetery of Splendour which will be released in the States soon, and I must see it.
1. Trash Humpers
Not everyone is going to like this movie. In fact, almost no one is going to like this which is a shame. Directed by Harmony Korine and shot on fucked up VHS tapes, it appears like a bunch of found-footage clips in Gummo-like vignettes which make up a film. This group of miscreants in rubber prosthetic masks fuck shit up, force people to eat pancakes drizzled with dish soap, shoot hoops, light firecrackers and hump trash cans. While Gummo has moments of heart warming sweetness, Trash Humpers doesn’t let you off the hook. This is fucking genius and further proof why everyone should see all of Korine’s films.
I don’t know why it took me this long to do so, but I finally got around to reading Dorothy Parker. It made me wonder who are our best critics out there.
But one of her poems really struck me pretty deep. It’s called “Résumé”
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
With the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge parked over the West in recent weeks, the thought of any rain reaching the ground here in Southern California seemed a pipe dream. Despite the still stronger than all hell El Niño that still exists, the RRR has trumped anything the Pacific could bring.
I knew they predicted some rain today, but I figured it would completely miss us out here. But at 1 as I was headed out to market, I felt some skywater hitting my head. It seems like it has come. Rain has come.
We’re not going to get much. The rain will clear out over night, and back to warm weather. The RRR will win out.
On a different note, can some of you folks in other parts of the country send us some water? KTHXBAI!
