Capote: 
Great movie. Is really less about Capote and more about the events surrounding the writing of In Cold Blood, the true account of the brutal murder of a rural Kansas family. Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal is top notch and the film itself is beautiful and often funny. I left feeling heavy with thought and emotional stillness, which to me is the sign that I have seen something worth seeing. This feeling persisted. Highly recommended.
A History of Violence: 
Saw David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence” a few hours ago. It was a work of brevity. Almost nothing included that did not add to the central themes of the story. That was nice for a change.
**Spoilers ahead**
During my evening saunter to the bookstore I was delighted to discover a recently published (as of September 21st) sci-fi novel by Iain M. Banks, author of some of the most enjoyable science-fiction you’ll ever read. This new book is called The Algebraist, for reasons I haven’t discovered as of yet, and it was a Hugo Nominee for best novel. Iain Banks is one of those authors I look for every time I make my circuit through the aisles during my visits to the mega bookstores in my area. It is a very short list of authors and I was very pleased and pleasantly surprised to see his new book. I was wondering when he would get around to writing something else. I spent the next two and a half hours blissfully installed in one of the leather chairs back in the business section, which caused me to get home later than expected. I called breen on the walk home to let him know there was a new Banks book, but he quickly became less interested when he found out it wasn’t a Culture novel, the usual setting for Banks’ sci-fi where sleek machine minds run the show with characteristic dry wit. He said he might get it to read for his and Sarah‘s trip to Japan. That’s gotta be a long flight.
I finished “Foucault’s Pendulum” this morning. Something that resonated with me is the notion that the associative, connective impulse to see conspiracy all around has less to do with reality (what is that?) and more to do with an essential personal desire to blame something. It is a need to find causes rather than an attempt to accept or understand what is understandable. It’s difficult for me to explain, so I need to think about it more. Peppered throughout the book are quotations from all sorts of places like this one from Karl Popper:
“The conspiracy theory of society comes from abandoning God and then asking: ‘Who is in his place?”
It reminds me of when I first started blogging regularly in 2000 when I was around 22-23. I was very paranoid and obsessed about the various conspiracies threatening to turn the world into a black iron prison, figuratively speaking. It was an unhappy time mostly because of the sense of powerlessness and victimization. Powerlessness in the face of a desire for control and autonomy. I’ve realized that this was one of the growing pains in coming out of the last stages of my adolescence. For so long I defined myself in terms of negation, “I am A because A is the opposite of B and I don’t want to be B because I associate that with some sort of pain or injury”, but beyond that I had no idea who I was. In many ways, I am just now finding that out.
The above quotation makes sense if you think about it in another way. God can represent the child’s view of his parents, the inscrutable creators who are responsible for everything. As we mature, we have to necessarily abandon our parents (God) in order to become complete and whole individuals. Assassinated as powerful symbols our mothers and fathers regain their humanity. Everything that we blame them for has to be resolved because until then you cannot take on the responsibility for your own existence.
“Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.” – Albert Camus
Are feelings of paranoia and rebelliousness related to unresolved emotions? After all, what is rebellion but the expression of negation? Where does the desire spring from? Rebellion is not the same as disinterest or disregard. Rebellion requires an idea or authority to push against. It cannot exist without it’s opponent.
Some to inspire you, hopefully.
I was at Border’s today and investigated this book, “The Real Meaning of Life”, and I was surprised to discover that the content of the book was entirely created by respondents to a post on a message board inquiring into the meaning of life. Since everyone has their own view on this the book wrote itself. Could this be a cheap way to produce a light read?
I think it would be cool to have horns or antlers like this old man I altered in Photoshop. When you walked up to your friends you could bow your head and rattle antlers. It would be the equivalent of a high five. If you were frustrated you could scrape your antlers on a tree.
Good moralistic sci-fi satire from Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. This book has been an eery trip, very cold and numb, and depressing… yet funny. This passage gives you the flavor.
When did the body first set out on its own adventures? Snowman thinks; after having ditched its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul, for whom it had once been considered a mere corrupt vessel or else a puppet acting out their dramas for them, or else bad company, leading the other two astray. It must have got tired of the soul’s constant nagging and whining and the anxiety-driven intellectual web-spinning of the mind, distracting it whenever it was getting its teeth into something juicy or its fingers into something good. It had dumped the other two back there somewhere, leaving them stranded in some damp sanctuary or stuffy lecture hall while it made a beeline for the topless bars, and it had dumped culture along with them: music and painting and poetry and plays. Sublimation, all of it; nothing but sublimation according to the body. Why not cut to the chase?
But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance.
The woman and I watched Closer last night. I never went to see it in the theatre since the reviews at the time were lackluster, but that’s what I get for listening to someone else’s worthless opinion. It’s got great characters, great and memorable dialogue, and Natalie Portman spends one scene nearly buck naked.
What I liked about “Closer” is that it reminded me of all the sh*t and pain that’s mixed up in love. The entire movie is break-up / infidelity / love / loss / revenge concentrate. It’s every bad relationship experience you’ve had condensed into two hours. It’s real. But, it’s not all negative, just realistic and maybe cynical. It’s not just about relationships, it’s also about how people can be dishonest and screwed up because they’re self-loathing cowards. It’s a cycle: you seek someone to love because you have a hungry hole in your chest, you get involved with someone else because the hole is never really filled, then you betray your first lover and whip yourself with the resulting guilt so that everything falls down around you and you can be even more unhappy and pathetic. It takes work to be happy, dammit. I really believe that.
Like I said, there are some fantastic lines. Clive Owen is the star of this film, without a doubt, but everyone else is really good, too.
Some of my favorite lines:
Dan (Jude Law): You’re an animal.
Larry (Clive Owen): Yeah? What are you?
Dan (Jude Law): You think love is simple. You think the heart is like a diagram.
Larry (Clive Owen): Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist, wrapped in blood!Anna (Julia Roberts): Why is the sex so important?
Larry (Clive Owen): BECAUSE I’M A CAVEMAN!