More Than Human

There is a difference between mellowing out and losing your edge. Most people mellow out as they get older. That’s natural. Sidley Lumet made a string of good-to-great movies from the late 50s into the mid-70s, from 12 Angry Men to Dog Day Afternoon. His pace slowed after that, but he never lost it completely. His final film was Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, an unflinchingly cynical piece of work that would be impossible to sit through if it weren’t so gripping. A lot of artists have a 10-15 year period relatively early in their careers during which they crank out one classic after the next. Springsteen was like that. So was Akira Kurosawa. John Carpenter, too, although he was a little hit-and-miss even when he was in his prime. Alfred Hitchcock is an outlier. He made two of his best-regarded films, Psycho and Vertigo, when he was pushing 60. I haven’t seen any of his films from the 70s, but I’ve heard some very positive things about Frenzy. If I mellow out, that’s fine. If I lose my edge, kill me. I’m not kidding.

I’ve cried at only a couple of movies in my lifetime. Ikiru is one. If you’ve seen that one, you probably know which scene I’m talking about. Even if you haven’t, the DVD cover gives it away. Dear Zachary is another. It’s one of the most wrenching films ever made, made even more so by the fact that it’s a documentary. The last half hour of that movie will rip your heart out. The most recent one was Mary and Max, a claymation film from Australia. It’s on Netflix, so if you haven’t seen it, hie thee hence over there and watch it immediately. It’s about a New Yorker with Asperger’s who becomes pen pals with a little girl in Australia. As a warning, let me say that though the film is animated, it is not kid-friendly, and it gets dark pretty late into its running time. But it’s worth it. I respond to dark comedies better than most other genres, perhaps because my life is one. That film is hopeful, just unconventionally so. Don’t feel sorry for Max.

There’s a general rule that I’ve observed when it comes to couples. People who are in healthy, fulfilling relationships rarely feel the need to talk about it. You can spend a significant amount of time getting to know them before they say the words, “My girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/wife/partner/whatever….” People who are insecure about their relationship and want to hide behind it as a means of deflecting criticism are the ones who always gush about their partners and how perfect they are. It’s more willful self-delusion than anything else. They want to believe that because of this relationship, they are a totally different person than they were before. This requires that their partner sit still and be objectified to be complicit in maintaining the illusion. It’s a form of co-dependency, an immaturity that tries to pass itself off as maturity. There’s nothing wrong with a little PDA here and there, but if you make YouTube videos consisting entirely of you and your boyfriend kissing and canoodling, I feel justified in saying that your relationship is not long for this world. That is all.

I’ve said before that I never want to work a 9-to-5 job. I’m actually starting to like the feeling of being free when everyone else is at work, even if the flipside is that I often have work when everyone else is out partying. Maybe that’s because I’m a weirdo, or maybe it’s because I like to remind myself that I’m a weirdo. I wonder if other people find me intimidating. Do they hang back from talking to me because I scare them off? As I write this, I’m still doing a slow burn over the events in Ferguson, Missouri. I don’t have the time or the energy to talk about that at length now. But I will reiterate what I have said before: If you are one of those people who insist that this isn’t about race, you’re part of the problem. I hear people tell me that if I were nicer, people would be more willing to listen to me. No, I think the only way I ever get someone to listen to me is by telling them exactly what I think of them. It’s not “I speak my mind, and if you can’t handle it, fuck you” so much as it’s “I speak my mind, and if you can’t handle it, okay then”.

You can’t really get anywhere if you can’t have a discussion. And a lot of discussion gets shortchanged because the instant I say something negative about, say, a movie, somebody says, “It’s just a movie. If you don’t like it, you can watch something else.” That’s…not a response to my criticism, however. Sometimes, I watch/read/listen to stuff that I don’t exactly like. Sometimes I say so just to see what people say back. If all people have to say is, “Why can’t you just let Person X do their own thing and not be so judgmental”, I sorta shrug and roll my eyes at the same time, then walk away. When you put yourself out there in a public forum, you are opening yourself up to criticism. That doesn’t mean you have to like it. It doesn’t even mean you have to listen to it. It just means that you should acknowledge it. Because you can’t make the stuff you don’t like just disappear. And the reason other people exist is not to tell you how wonderful you are.

I’ve been getting more into classic comic strips lately. Does anyone remember Pogo? I had never read it, but then I found out that my main man Bill Watterson is a fan. So I guess I have some reading to do.

Back to Rome

I am generally wary of drugs. I don’t drink (much), don’t smoke weed, don’t even use over-the-counter stuff like aspirin (fortunately, I almost never get headaches)…you get the idea. The best way to explain this would probably be to say that I need to be able to function on my own terms before I go adding drugs to the mix. For obvious reasons, I’ve been drinking a bit more coffee these days, but a small cup of coffee shouldn’t give you more than a little jolt, right? If you have a small mocha at 6 pm and are still wide awake at 3 in the morning, there must be more going on than a low tolerance for caffeine. (Before someone asks, that actually did happen once. I don’t remember exactly when I had the mocha, but it wasn’t very late and I’m not even sure if I drank the whole thing. And I had work that morning. Fun.) My problem, it seems, is that I have so little experience with coffee that even after the physical effects have worn off, my mind is still sorting itself out.

A person should not be able to focus on more than one thing at once. I like to do one thing at a time and one thing only. I’m not a fan of multitasking. The night I had the mocha, I went home, watched a movie, and somehow thought about something else without taking my attention off the movie. How is that even possible? I have a lot to work on these days. It will be much easier to get it all done once I’m able to start with what’s most important. As always, the big question is, “What do you really need?” Once you answer that, you can move on to other things.

2013 is drawing to a close, so I feel that I should talk for a second about one of my favorite topics: movies. I saw a fair amount of films in theaters this year. Not all of them were masterpieces; some were fun (Thor), others interesting, but flawed (Ender’s Game), and a few were truly excellent (The World’s End). Of the films I’ve seen this year, my two favorites were Upstream Color and At Berkeley. The latter is a four-hour documentary about the administrative politics and academic culture of the titular institute of higher learning. I had to go way out of my way to see it, but believe me, it’s fantastic. (PBS is set to air it in chunks starting January 13, I believe. Keep your eyes peeled.) At Berkeley has no narration, interviews, or even subtitles to identify the people in the movie. As a California resident and an alumnus of one of the UCs, I identified strongly with the plight of students who are finding it harder and harder to pay for their education, what with the constant fee hikes and all. (Seriously, imagine that you’re paying $800 in rent. Then one day, your landlord knocks on your door and tells you that next month, it’ll be $1100. Then a few months later, he jacks it up to $1500. If that’s not illegal, it should be.)

What I’m really trying to get at here is that at a certain point, it’s impossible to separate who we are from the media we consume. I’m not sure how many others would list either of those movies on their best-of lists, but I don’t think that my love for them is purely a result of my own subjective biases. I’ve sung the praises of Upstream Color on this blog before, but to recap: It’s a mind-bending, ultra low-budget science fiction/romance about a parasitic organism that causes its victims to form a weird telepathic bond with each other. There’s way more to it than that, but if anyone remembers 2004’s cult hit Primer, you should know that this is by the same filmmaker, Shane Carruth. Someone should give him a million dollars. The way that man works, he could make ten movies for that. And judging by his only two features so far (nine years apart, because that’s how long it took him to put the second one together), they’d be good.

I had to go out of my way to see Upstream Color as well. There was only one theater in all of Manhattan showing it, and I had to clear space from my schedule because that week was a little busy for me. Who else gets so excited for low-budget science fiction and marathon-length documentaries about higher learning? But I find that as I get older, my tastes get more particular. There’s a lot out there that doesn’t interest me, but I feel that says as much about our culture as it does about me. We need blockbusters, but we also need documentaries. More people will seek out the former than the latter, but it doesn’t have to be that way. At Berkeley probably sounds like a chore to sit through, but it really isn’t. You just have to be open to new experiences, that’s all. I just wish there were someone out there who wanted to join me for this stuff. One of my acting teachers told me once that I gave performances that were strong, but self-contained, as if I didn’t want to let the other actors affect my performance. I can’t live my life that way. A friend asked me if I wanted to audition for a play she was directing not too long ago. The last play I did, I did largely because several people all but begged me to.

I wish like hell I had someone working that hard to get a date with me.