rediscovering the shit on my shoes

I had a revelation tonight that, were I living back east or at least were I living in Baltimore, where I lived would be a tony neighborhood. I mean, the fucking former CAA building might as well be The Belvedere. Not to be confused with the Mister. 

Fuck, location is central, basics are almost perfect, you even get a walk past city hall and its gilded dome to go to work -- but this qualifies as inner city west-coast style. The respectable neighborhoods are all up the hill or less developed "neighborhoods," that, while they qualify as such, are much too large to substantiate basic civil existence on an old-world scale (meaning -- before cars existed). And I've met too many people here who will get their car to go half a block. True story. But that's an aside, and let's talk about the hill thing.

Now, make no mistake I don't think this is a bad idea: in general the riff-raff is less inclined to climb, esp. when it means they get farther away from freeway traffic, but something in this idea strikes me as horribly wrong. The buildings here are some of the oldest, not this pretty victorian shit but something that survived the quakes by being made well, or were made after it and are made even better.

Moreover, the monuments, arts, structure of the area says it should be so much better. And what is it? An effing ghetto. If I have one thing that always pissed me off about suburban life back east and west-of-the-appalachian culture in general is that if it means you have to be around people regularly, you must live in a ghetto. Not in a place that requires more substantive existence and people always being on their wits. No, you need to acclimate to the stupidity of the ghetto to get around beauty.

I've always said that if I ever went back to Europe, I'd never come back. I'm still tempted, but next stop (cross my fingers) will be New York. I'm done here. For several years now.

late night ruminations because i'm not sleeping

there will be no theme to this post, as quite frankly i'm only writing it in a fit of insomnia and disappointment because of it. so the list of random thoughts:

• Finished watching season three of Battlestar Galactica. Wow. I'd heard about this show for awhile, but frankly I'm amazed they've managed to pull off a show that's so bizarre, brilliant and absolutely unpredictable in a sci-fi setting. not that I have anything against sci-fi, but the genre usually relies on so many tropes it's not all that watchable. BSG...no. Easily one of the weirdest and most inventive shows I've seen since Twin Peaks, but without the Twin Peaks lulls.
  
• I miss days where I could just steal off to nowhere in particular, hang out, do nothing. Not to say I don't enjoy living in the city, but I miss the idea of going somewhere on a whim with no planning or agenda. That's the most nostalgia you'll hear from me for awhile.
  
• Music hasn't had the same power it once did for me. I still love it, but it used to be something that would just floor me and I would plan nights around. Maybe it's the prospects of not sharing.
• Grendel. Read it recently, made me realize that American authors do not write novels like that anymore. Slim, metaphysical, but also a full on monster story. Who knew? Too many American novels remind me too much of the author, like that was its purpose. 
• I'm taking a stab at making red sauce in my crockpot. We'll see what happens.
• I removed the last comment. It's too embarrassing.
• I need to get back to writing. My apartment is too much of a disaster to do so, though. Mainly to work on my portfolio.

for shits and giggles

I'm reopening an old blog. not restarting it, just reopening it to outside. Nocturnal SF. Enjoy the old shit. Also linked from my profile.

Shriveling, like a spider under a hot lamp

It just dawned on my that Virgin is closing. Granted, I'd already been there at least once since the discount signs went up, but it just registered with me today -- cons slicking the pavement right in front -- that it will be gone. It's one of those weird demarcation points I'm experiencing in SF in my tenth year here, and it was brought on by wondering what the hell is going to fill its space.

And the realization: nothing. Not for awhile.

CompUSA died. Circuit City died. Red Box is either closed or on life support. Tower and now Virgin. Some of these are places I gave a shit about, others just happened to exist but I wouldn't take the time to spit on the pavement in front of them out of their relative insignificance.

But Virgin -- I spent a shitload of time there. Not that it was anything respectable. It was overpriced, full of itself and generally a tourist trap. But it was also a great place to get DVDs and had a respectable jazz and classical selection, and I wasted quite a few lunch breaks there throughout the years. And now, seeing the sign that all the marketing bullshit is now on sale, it sort of gets driven home.

Pity the corpse of Virgin. Pity the phoenician San Francisco. Nobody likes to watch a bird while it's burning.

The Teachings of Donnie B.

Here's an amazing argument in the most recent copy of the New Yorker, taken from an article about Donald Barthelme's place in the postmodernist canon:

What killed that distinction [between high and commercial art] wasn't defining pop art up [to the level of high art]. It was defining high art down. It was the recognition that serious art, too, is produced and consumed in a marketplace. The point of [Andy] Warhol's Campbell's soup-can paintings was not that a soup can is like a work of art. It was that a work of art is like a soup can: they are both commodities.

This was courtesy of Louis Menand, and it blew my fucking mind. Not for the observation of it, which is a trivial distinction. What mindfucked me was the way it put so succinctly an essential complaint I have had with a mood permeating the circles I've been around.

What does this really mean? Essentially, Warhol's soup cans brought the world to its logical summation. It's kitsch. Cultural criticism mistaken as artistic relevance. It's not constructive but nihilistic. And that's not the world want to live in. It's a dead outlook.

If art is not striving to find at least the odd, the weird dissonances associated with everyday life and find some type of tether between them, then all it really is is a pretty little trifle. We don't feel it, we don't need it. It isn't essential in the way that food, fucking and -- for some -- religion is. Maybe for all -- I've always held that Modernists biggest failure was the path they took to make art the new religion, and therefore as essential as Sunday Mass was to the 1300s.

With its push to emphasis on titillation and the superficial, the contemporary era essentially pulled high art and art in general to the levels of porn, minus the stache or what have you. It's all superficial -- and not even satisfactorially animalistic -- fucking. It's not attempting to be anything else.

So here's my ultimate manifesto:

If you're looking at a piece of street art, ask the fundamental question "So what?" With any gallery opening or new track of music: "So what?" Any film: "So what?" What else did the work bring to the table? What was this looking to do to me or change or mold or push or punch or spit on me?

Not everything is going to be effective here, but shit if you're not going to find -- if the artist is taking his audience seriously and not just completely absorbed in his- or herself -- that incrementally you have changed. Your life, whatever. Your outlook, your world view has been altered in such a way that you eventually look at yourself and say "I can't go back now." Even if it's not apparent what the "what" is, there's still a "what" that has already happened. And it's unsettling, in a good way.

Faithful readers, I promise not to talk your head off in the next one. I'll find some toilet humor for next time.

And now a note from your friendly neighborhood tenderloin resident

I get home last night, and granted I'm a bit tipsy as a result of a Valentine's Day that was mercilessly locked in singleness. Stumble through the apartment, jump on the computer and make a pizza. Go to the window for a quick smoke.

So as a point of reference, I live across from the Phoenix Hotel. Literally I overlook the parking lot and have an angle on four of the rooms that face it. Of course you had the regular emotional outcrying, the drunken aborted near-blows, the dealers staying clear because it's in their best interest to just stand by and laugh. And one room, a spotlight shining out, I do a double-take when I realize there's a couple going at it doggy-style.

Of course I do the natural thing and grab my binoculars. I size them up.

I have to throw in caveat upon caveat here. I am not a pervert (at least, not this type). I respect people's privacy and have no problem looking the other way if I happen to catch a glimpse of something that was meant to be a private event, private gesture or private otherwise.

But please, people. I'm also a red-blooded male, as well as a study of human nature and necessity, and it's not like it isn't obvious that there is a full set of apartments right within eyeshot. If you're in a city, close your fucking drapes! I don't care if you're twenty stories up, pull the fucking drapes. Now I'm on the fourth floor, the phoenix is only two stories, and here are these two people going at it. If they're going to be that fearless, I'm not going to give a shit.

After about four minutes, they got the hint.

So how was it? Mechanical. I got the impression watching them that, for all the seeming enjoyment and energy, there was no connection. It was fucking, and not even animal fucking. These two people either had never met before or, if they had, don't know a thing about each other.

That, and in spite of the fact the woman still had her dental floss on -- merely pulled aside for the activity -- she was completely uninteresting.

The ritualistic Saturday death spiral

As some of you may know, I waste my saturdays watching Sci-Fi, movies descended from an absolute pile of dreck. Upon occasion you might get a feature film that had some sort of official release (seriously, though, how did Bloodrayne and its sequel get a full release?), but the usual fare doesn't stray far from the in-house productions. And what a team they are.

I am personally convinced that the SciFi studios must have an army of six-year-olds thinking up this shit. I mean, how many movies can you see about raptors and pterodactyls and giant squids? The most recent example: Attack of the Sabertooths, a shitty take-off on Jurassic Park, but with the sexier, far more intriguing concept of -- wait for it -- sabertooth tigers. Rocking.

But then it gets more twisted than that. See, the movies are thought up in a day care facility, but the damned things have so much crappy blood effects that you might as well be watching slaughterhouse footage. Who exactly is the intended audience? When I was old enough to savor guts splattered across the screen, I had long graduated from anything to do with dinos. (okay, so I was playing forgtotten worlds and phantasy star II on my sega genesis, but who's really asking?) I wanted something terrifying, like zombies or vampires or werewolves or something.

Oh wait, they have those weekends to. I'll shut up now. And drink my coffee.