Holiday Travels, Part II

I spend a few days in Phoenixville, PA (near Valley Forge and Philly), with UMass pal Kaecyy. He and his brother, his girlfriend, her best friend, and her boyfriend all live in this quasi-gated community in the middle of the woods.


Within lurks all manner of oddities. Here's a picture of the living room. It began as all Chinese decor, but evolved into a painted mantle, killbot puppet on the TV, Woodsy the Owl pillow, tiki-totem pastiche. Awesome.
The rest of the pictures are just a sampling of what you'll find in his house. They are the scary clown hung on the wall over the toilet, which Kaeccy explains is "often found turned around because people don't like him to watch"; two old dollies that his girlfriend found on eBay recently; and an alien blow-up doll--an Xmas present. I think you get the idea that his house is one big bohemian playground where time has no meaning.

Holiday Travels, Part I

My first stop was Kingston, NY (near Saugerties, Woodstock), for a brief visit with long-time friends, the Brothers Schikowitz. Highlights:

--setting up two drumsets facing each other and battling it out with Ben S.
--The freak accident at their aunt's Xmas party. Apparently, one relative's Passat has a computer chip malfunction and the car went Maximum Overdive alive and insane, hitting everyone's car, including my brother's. He's now got enough insurance money for 1/4 of a new car, as the Passat bulldozed his into a telephone pole (he wasn't in it). When we tried to move the Passat, just turning the engine on almost caused another accident. Now I look at my Jetta sideways.
--Sam S showing me the archery target, which he shoots from his bedroom window. One morning the arrows sizzles through the air and lands in the target, when at once we hear, "You fuckin' assholes, I just let my dog out!"
--Aforementioned dog has a ball on the inside of his leg (see picture).

Flow Chart of Blame

This holiday season, as I sit next to my fake log fireplace, tipsy on Scotch, I reflect back on all those whom I despise. Whom to blame for my troubles? The carollers outside? Yes! Now that I own my own plot of land, I can send them to my side door and then spring out of my shed with an axe! I will stack their chopped limbs by my fake logs fireplace and slowly burn them to a Kris Kringle Krisp! Did you know an appendage keeps you house warm for a full two hours? Me neither! But Christmas is the season for giving. And for taking. Carollers' lives. Mmmmm....scotch and roast cheer....

Lady in the Water

Shyamalan's latest film essentially reduces the "true meaning" of storytelling to spiritual fundamentalism. A fundamentalist requires belief in a self-enclosed, ahistorical, rootless, system of signs, all of which point to each other.

The film's plot line "invents" its own mythology, but by using parataxis as a methodology: like when 6-year olds tell you about their entire day, each event equal in meaning ("I ate some ice cream, and then there was a dragon, when I fell down, but Janie has a blue hat!" Nothing in this film has any symbol that we might match up to one that we already know from the vast vat of cultural capital. No, Shyamalan, says, "It's MY story. It bears NO resemblance to anything, ever." Well, fine, then I won't try to match your ferocious creatures with any of the one's I already know; I won't try to compare your "Interpreter" character with any other kind of interpreter (there are so many!).

It's like when you tell a kid who thinks he invented the wheel that others have already done it, and the kid says, "No, it's MY wheel. It's a Shyamalan-Wheel. No, it's not even called a wheel, it's a Porchumztzkrpl!" And since he kills of the critic-character, who dies after having reviewed several cliches about people who die in movies, we know that Shyamalan's real beast, his worst enemy, is All Critics and Naysayers Who Don't Believe.

It's as if he's been waiting his whole life to make this film, but first he had to trick people by making blockbusters that followed narrative rules and had interesting twists like a decent pulp mystery novel does. "Fooled ya! I was just giving people what they wanted: moderate entertainment with heartwarming messages of facile transcedence. What I really want is to vocalize my personal fears that if I don't get to make the REAL movie I want, that if no one likes it, that they really want to Kill me. Critics don't believe. They're out to get me! Please believe in me. Or I'll die. All good storytellling will die. You just don't understand. It doesn't have to make sense to YOU. This is MY GOD, the God no one understands until they take some time out to get to know Him...I mean Her, and Her name is Story. And she's stares at you from the floor of the shower, huddles in the corner. How can you not want to help her, I mean beleive in me, I mean her."

Fundamentalist New Age Baby Boomer Crap, this one.