We approach some ambiguous history, coming upon 2007: the first time anyone heard Britney Spears' "Baby One More Time," which is to say, the resurrection of pure pop, of bubblegum if no other word will do, as the main form of commercial music making.
Remember the first time you heard it? Surprisingly, you might. It had already hit #1 (a feat that happened long before anyone knew what was going on, I might add) before I did, and heard it announced on The Peak 95.1, a "light rock" station in Colorado Springs that abandoned its adult-contemporary format for Top 40 at roughly the same time. I was in a car in downtown Colorado Springs, a Junior nearing the end of my third year in high school. The car was Brandon Camarillo's, a green Celica or Pontiac or in any case, a two-door. The day was sunny. The day before I'd heard Courtney Love mention her unabashed love of the song, and I, despite what I said to the contrary, loved it immediately.
Despite what many people said to the contrary, they loved it immediately. Britney beamed so innocent on the Baby One More Time cover, a smile right off the cover of Barely Legal 14, or worse, as Britney wasn't legal in any way. Today, I heard "Stronger" while walking home from Wallingford, and remembered just what a terrific pop song it was - sexy, propulsive, just the right dash of screw-you defiance in the tone. Friends will attest I was a bit obsessed with it when it came out, downloading the incredibly sexy chair-and-rainfall video and playing it on a dozen dorm computers. I'd say I was the perfect age for the Britney phenomenon - not the least of which is because I was her age. Still, she's significant in those significant years; her VMA striptease came early in my entry into the College dorms, "I'm A Slave 4U" the first song I downloaded at my new apartment sophomore year (my cheese-loving ex-roommate, Peter, was actually a bigger fan of "I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman," the rare Britney song - like "From The Bottom of My Broken Heart" or "Lucky" - that I'd prefer to forget). "Toxic," her absolute best song, induced something like a fever at the party commemorating my graduation from college (which would perhaps be more remarkable if the same fever were not also induced by any song by Outkast, Squirrel Nut Zipper's "Put A Lid On It," and Wilson Phillips' "Hold On").
I bring this up because it surprises me that, despite Britney's importance in the world of pop culture for the majority of so many of our adult lives, she can still inspire intense vitriol. At a party last month, a friend's sister, upon hearing the opening bars of "Stronger," leaped from her seat on the couch to run across the living room and into the bedroom where my iPod was, to change the song - "I can't stand Britney Spears, I'm sorry," she said. Mention her in public these days, and she'll get lobbed with a few familiar epithets - white trash, whore, fat pig. In fact, if it was not fashionable for a while to pick on Britney, who was always an easy target anyway, she seems the easiest of targets these days. Her sin now? She let her hair get long and brown, had babies, married someone who's clearly talentless and clueless. Were this amount of anger given to every woman in California who did those three things, I believe much of the state would find their heads exploding.
I was fascinated by the change in public Britney talk because the opposite has happened to her "rival," Christina Aguilera. In 2002, with the release of Stripped, Christina, revamped in assless chaps with a hairdo looking like a skunk breathing too much spraypaint, earned similar epithets. I loved Christina then, not because her songs were good (although, they were - any popstar would be lucky to make a song half as good as "Dirrty," or "Can't Hold Us Down" or "Beautiful"), but because she was responsible for her celebrity. Britney, catchy as her songs were, acted demure and non-responsive to her songs' contents - "I'm a Slave 4U," she said coyly, was - despite its provocative title, hard breathing in the chorus, and an orgy in the video - about dancing, or, was the product of a sexually promiscuous character having nothing to do with her. Even sexpot Beyonce would rile around and, basically, masturbate in the video for "Baby Boy" and coyly deny its nature, "I like to stay home and read, mostly," she'd say later, when questioned about it.
Christina, on the other hand, owned "Dirrty" and its contraversy, labled herself proudly sexual, wondered publicly and often why contraversy erupted when a woman made a bold and provocative song with hot dancers when men did it all the time. Christina released "Can't Hold Us Down," and made the lyric "it's a common double standard of society/ the guy gets all the glory the more he can score/ the girl could do the same and yet you call her a whore" singable. She took shit left and right and only made her message public. I can't imagne how many insults, how much hate mail Christina received in 2002-2003, the year "Beautiful" hit #1 and "Dirrty" ran on constant rotation at any danceclub in America, and she never once demured from the discussion that that could start.
Christina this year has been greeted like a returning friend. Back To Basics, a smash for a double-record already, revived the old Britney-Christina who-sings-better debate, and produced an instant top-10 hit in "Ain't No Other Man." The record isn't good - each disc has a rather interchangeable nature in its songs - but it is somewhat astonishing, her disc 2 impersonations of Fiona Apple, Etta James, and Bessie Smith calculated, but accurate, catchy, and even in some spots, moving.
I don't expect Aguilera to be a big seller in another ten years, but that she's one now, and only releasing her third album, is a statement to the way she's handled her career. Spears, ever the sucker for the media attention she rallies against, has likely concluded her recording career, at least as far as successful and culturally relevant records go. I don't much care that Spears had a baby or married a dufus, or that Aguilera married a nice Jewish boy and re-imagined herself a 40's starlet (the first time, by the way, the either seemed to have helped jumpstart fashion trends - unless you count schoolgirl outfits or enormous snakes). Looking back, all I wonder is that if Spears had dropped that innocent we-swear-it's-not-porn smile after she made "I'm a Slave 4U," or tried to agree with and not counter the "I'm not that innocent" promise of "Oops I Did It Again," would she have been able to overcome her bad press? It seems that all she knows how to do, anyway, is demure, which is fine, except that it makes me wonder if Spears herself was always a little ashamed of her career and could've used a dose of Aguilera's aggressive, useful egomania all along.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Studio 60
Aaron Sorkin believes in America and he's not going to let you forget it. He believes in entertainers, in sports fans, in the president, and writing, as he does, with incredibly jaunty, fast, ribald, theatrical rhythm, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip premiered, a week ago, an apparent salve to television. It's irreverent! It bites the hand that feeds it! It shows that television must not be bereft of integrity and ideals and a modern pulse because it's about a TV show and network attempting fight to not be bereft of ingtegrity and ideals and a modern pulse!
Considering the ratings for the first two episodes of the series, it's likely that you've seen at least a few minutes of Studeio 60, but more likely you've heard about it in some respect. Sorkin being one of the very few household names in television writing, the show's been the "next big thing" of American drama probably since its pitch meeting, and it received all the pre-upfront press clippings and bidding wars that accompany these "next big things." It features a $3-million-per-episode price tag and boasts the largest set on network television, not to mention its A-list cast stuffed with names like Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford, Stephen Weber, D.L. Hughley, Amanda Peet, and Timothy Busfield.
What it is, then, is a drama about creating comedy - the show is a fictional competitor of Saturday Night Live on a fictional competitor of NBC called NBS (National Broadcasting System, that is). You could call it brave of NBC to let its flagship show of the new season be so self-referential and self-effacing, and to an extent it is.
But more than that, it's a show whose largest purpose isn't necessarily even to be good, but to present the image that NBC is irreverent and self-referential, and that they are, above all, about quality and care little about image - that they are the network on the edge.
It occurs to me, after a ceremonial devotion to the first couple of episodes, that I don't actually like Studio 60. More than that, I actually don't like Studio 60, but I sort of believe in it. It's arrogant, it's too high-falootin', and I'm not certain if Amanda Peet's performance as NBS president Jordan McDeere (how a woman as young as Peet gets to be network president is a different topic, but one that, I imagine, will be addressed) is deadpan or just terrible, which is more than I can say for Steven Weber's chairman of NBS, who's just a cranky and stern-looking nothing on the show. For it, its much-hyped Sarah Paulson character Harriet - a Christian! and a great person! - is based on Sorkin's real life ex and former West Wing co-star Kristen Chenoweth, and I'd much prefer Kristen Chenoweth in the Kristen Chenoweth part - Paulson is sexy alright, but she doesn't seem to muster up the type of brash spunk Chenoweth brought to Annabeth, a part that barely even existed on The West Wing, but was still memorable. In any case, it's hard to even register my own thoughts on the matter what with constantly being reminded by NBC to compare how it's living up to expectations.
Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing, I recall, was greeted with similarly obtuse fanfare - back in 1999, NBC's pre-pilot ads boasted lines like, "Every era has a great drama - LA Law! ER! NBC now invites you to the next great American drama!" It's helpful too to remind myself I never saw those original episodes of The West Wing as they aired, that I became a fan at the end of the second season and worked my way backwards. Had I watched from the beginning, I surely would have actively disliked The West Wing too - its initial episodes are pretentious and ham-handed, ostentatious about its own importance, and written with one grandstanding bit of oration after another (this was, to be fair, also the case with the pilot of Sorkin's first network dramedy Sports Night). In fact, looking back at it, I don't even like that first, multi-Emmy winning first season very much. And Studio 60's identical gambit - a male and female lead who used to date but now work together - then: Bradley Whitford's Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman and Moira Kelly's media consultant Mandy, now, Matthew Perry's head writer Matt and Paulson's Harriet - seems altogether much more successful on Studio 60, which Sorkin must know, as Kelly barely lasted the season on West Wing and Paulson seems poised to be part of the show's main focus.
So it's important to remember that, begrudgingly, The West Wing was the next great network drama, that its second season is a monument to which all dramas whould have to strive for, and that it was so doused in magnificent production values that when it was revived in its final season by writers other than Sorkin, the job seemed to have been easily accomplished by all the quality left behind from its inception.
The problem, I think, is that we may have already moved to a more rapid era of television consumption - every television report every tells you that year is unlike the years of the past, that TV's golden age is behind them, but I'm starting to think 2006 is not even 1999 anymore. Studio 60 earned 16.9 million viewers in its first episode, but, as was reported today, there are "no breakouts" amongst the new crop of fall premieres this year - "no surprises that capture the zeitgeist with instant high ratings like My Name Is Earl last year and Desperate Housewives the year before that," says a Reuters report quoting an NBC executive. That September is not even over and that no TV show has had more than 3 airings thus far does not seem to matter much in these pronouncements.
In fact, Studio 60's audience for the pilot dipped slightly from its first half hour to its second, and this is indication that it, too, will not be a hit (but this is not altogether an unreasonable projection - ABC's Six Degrees lost its viewers by 47% from one half hour to the next, its viewers no doubt worn out by an abyssmal premiere of juggernaut Grey's Anatomy followed by the even-more-abyssmal experience of watching any of Six Degrees). Still, I hope that the pressure gets taken off Studio 60 at some point so it can flatten out into something resembling normal episodes, something where the honestly obnoxious amount of self-referentiality can peter out a bit. One of the early death knell pronouncements for Studio 60 claims that normal, non-industry people "just don't connect to that much 'insider talk.'" This, if true, means only that NBC should cancel the show immediately, insider talk being all there actually is, besides a terrific set.
Then again, I recall early reviews of The West Wing wondering if people could give a damn about Washington "insider talk," a brand of talk that includes discussions of wheat subsidies and road tolls. An interesting thing: when TV shows try and recreate the actual day-to-day experiences of people - politicians or cops or mobsters or high schoolers or executives - audiences tend to show up.
Considering the ratings for the first two episodes of the series, it's likely that you've seen at least a few minutes of Studeio 60, but more likely you've heard about it in some respect. Sorkin being one of the very few household names in television writing, the show's been the "next big thing" of American drama probably since its pitch meeting, and it received all the pre-upfront press clippings and bidding wars that accompany these "next big things." It features a $3-million-per-episode price tag and boasts the largest set on network television, not to mention its A-list cast stuffed with names like Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford, Stephen Weber, D.L. Hughley, Amanda Peet, and Timothy Busfield.
What it is, then, is a drama about creating comedy - the show is a fictional competitor of Saturday Night Live on a fictional competitor of NBC called NBS (National Broadcasting System, that is). You could call it brave of NBC to let its flagship show of the new season be so self-referential and self-effacing, and to an extent it is.
But more than that, it's a show whose largest purpose isn't necessarily even to be good, but to present the image that NBC is irreverent and self-referential, and that they are, above all, about quality and care little about image - that they are the network on the edge.
It occurs to me, after a ceremonial devotion to the first couple of episodes, that I don't actually like Studio 60. More than that, I actually don't like Studio 60, but I sort of believe in it. It's arrogant, it's too high-falootin', and I'm not certain if Amanda Peet's performance as NBS president Jordan McDeere (how a woman as young as Peet gets to be network president is a different topic, but one that, I imagine, will be addressed) is deadpan or just terrible, which is more than I can say for Steven Weber's chairman of NBS, who's just a cranky and stern-looking nothing on the show. For it, its much-hyped Sarah Paulson character Harriet - a Christian! and a great person! - is based on Sorkin's real life ex and former West Wing co-star Kristen Chenoweth, and I'd much prefer Kristen Chenoweth in the Kristen Chenoweth part - Paulson is sexy alright, but she doesn't seem to muster up the type of brash spunk Chenoweth brought to Annabeth, a part that barely even existed on The West Wing, but was still memorable. In any case, it's hard to even register my own thoughts on the matter what with constantly being reminded by NBC to compare how it's living up to expectations.
Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing, I recall, was greeted with similarly obtuse fanfare - back in 1999, NBC's pre-pilot ads boasted lines like, "Every era has a great drama - LA Law! ER! NBC now invites you to the next great American drama!" It's helpful too to remind myself I never saw those original episodes of The West Wing as they aired, that I became a fan at the end of the second season and worked my way backwards. Had I watched from the beginning, I surely would have actively disliked The West Wing too - its initial episodes are pretentious and ham-handed, ostentatious about its own importance, and written with one grandstanding bit of oration after another (this was, to be fair, also the case with the pilot of Sorkin's first network dramedy Sports Night). In fact, looking back at it, I don't even like that first, multi-Emmy winning first season very much. And Studio 60's identical gambit - a male and female lead who used to date but now work together - then: Bradley Whitford's Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman and Moira Kelly's media consultant Mandy, now, Matthew Perry's head writer Matt and Paulson's Harriet - seems altogether much more successful on Studio 60, which Sorkin must know, as Kelly barely lasted the season on West Wing and Paulson seems poised to be part of the show's main focus.
So it's important to remember that, begrudgingly, The West Wing was the next great network drama, that its second season is a monument to which all dramas whould have to strive for, and that it was so doused in magnificent production values that when it was revived in its final season by writers other than Sorkin, the job seemed to have been easily accomplished by all the quality left behind from its inception.
The problem, I think, is that we may have already moved to a more rapid era of television consumption - every television report every tells you that year is unlike the years of the past, that TV's golden age is behind them, but I'm starting to think 2006 is not even 1999 anymore. Studio 60 earned 16.9 million viewers in its first episode, but, as was reported today, there are "no breakouts" amongst the new crop of fall premieres this year - "no surprises that capture the zeitgeist with instant high ratings like My Name Is Earl last year and Desperate Housewives the year before that," says a Reuters report quoting an NBC executive. That September is not even over and that no TV show has had more than 3 airings thus far does not seem to matter much in these pronouncements.
In fact, Studio 60's audience for the pilot dipped slightly from its first half hour to its second, and this is indication that it, too, will not be a hit (but this is not altogether an unreasonable projection - ABC's Six Degrees lost its viewers by 47% from one half hour to the next, its viewers no doubt worn out by an abyssmal premiere of juggernaut Grey's Anatomy followed by the even-more-abyssmal experience of watching any of Six Degrees). Still, I hope that the pressure gets taken off Studio 60 at some point so it can flatten out into something resembling normal episodes, something where the honestly obnoxious amount of self-referentiality can peter out a bit. One of the early death knell pronouncements for Studio 60 claims that normal, non-industry people "just don't connect to that much 'insider talk.'" This, if true, means only that NBC should cancel the show immediately, insider talk being all there actually is, besides a terrific set.
Then again, I recall early reviews of The West Wing wondering if people could give a damn about Washington "insider talk," a brand of talk that includes discussions of wheat subsidies and road tolls. An interesting thing: when TV shows try and recreate the actual day-to-day experiences of people - politicians or cops or mobsters or high schoolers or executives - audiences tend to show up.
Sunday, September 10, 2006
Notes From The First Days In Seattle
1.
Las Vegas wants your sins. Around town, the billboards scream for your attention and for your desires - on Nickerson at the Fremont Bridge, a white quote amongst purple and blue show lights reads "I had to unbutton my pants!" On 4th and Bell, another white quote, "I joined a threesome." In Ballard, "We tried things we don't do at home!" You may have to look at these billboards three or four times before you realize they're attempting double entendre - in small print towards the bottom of the unbuttoning-my-pants billboard reads the quip "Dining can be your excuse." The threesome billboard says "Golf can be your excuse."
I've gone to Vegas two or three times, and I may not have joined a threesome or spent an unusual amount of time unbuttoning my pants, but I did feel the need to smash every beer bottle I passed along Flamingo Ave. at 6 in the morning, and I did once break a vow to not gamble, drink, or smoke cigarettes during an hour-long dinner with my unlce on my way to Los Angeles, only to find myself doing all three within 5 minutes and, in fact, delaying my call to meet my uncle so I could do it. So I can't necessarily say the scent of sin is all that far off, or that the billboards are lying.
They are, however, clearly meant to stir the rapaciousness out of the corporate bore that's taken over. This makes enough sense - to many, at least. Perhaps I'm less romantic than I used to be about Vegas. Once, the brother of a friend from high school was describing his time in Vegas and nonchalantly ended a sentence with, "because, in Vegas, you have to do an eightball in the Caesar's bathroom."
I suppose everyone's Vegas sins are different, but they come from the same place - the desire to shake things up, to release whatever inhibitions keep us from, say, doing coke in the bathroom at Macy's. As for me, things are shaken up enough for one season, I can't see me returning to Vegas anytime soon, even if threesomes are a possibility.
2.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about Beyonce's new single "Ring The Alarm" lately. It's catchy, to be certain, but it's not simply a catchy melody. What works about the single is Beyonce's aggression - the chorus isn't sung, it's shouted, the verses more accurately described as a passionate shout than as singing. Yet you can't turn away from it, from its periodic loud claps that could be thunder or jail doors or even a gun shot. I'm amazed that this song hasn't hit #1, as thus far I wouldn't even describe the song as particularly successful. I'm amazed that everyone isn't at least drawn to that anger, that the anger itself isn't getting stuck in people's heads.
3.
When I think about Fremont, the artsy Seattle neighborhood north of Lake Union, I sometimes hear the clop of horses, as if when I was there last, carriages were wandering 36th Street. A good friend lives there with a balcony giving him a perfect view of the Seattle skyline, and my favorite coffee shop since I moved here has a deck that peacefully looks towards the almost absurdly high Aurora bridge. Here as in Boulder I find myself going to the least conveniently located coffee shop imaginable (I am staying in Magnolia, southwest of the lake), but Fremont is the place in Seattle where most things seem possible.
This week I house sat at a friend's coworker's townhome on 43rd street. At 5 in the morning her grey cat, speckled like a cow, started meowing from her rooftop deck. I opened the door, and felt greeted by the dull grey light, the otherworldly glow of the skyline, the green hills built in every direction regardless of how possible it seemed to build houses or buildings or roads. I thought the cat should never want to be inside, Seattle this time of the year being the only comfort a person could need.
This is, of course, nonsense. I've walked all over this city now and know even a beautiful locale (and, in the late months of summer, during its rare stretches of sunshine, no city is more beautiful), and know that, without a job and a place to live, I can feel as rafish and lost as I did when I was unemployed and sick in Boulder. At least I have more options for coffee.
I left the cats outside when locking up the coworker's house for the last time. I wondered if that would be a problem, knowing the unlikelihood anything would ever happen to a cat - these things that seem unikely to blink at falls from trees, at balancing high above the ground on pieces of wood two centimeters across. It seems that everyone seems a little happier in Fremont, though, and maybe she'd barely think of anything wrong when she could simply go to her roof and watch the city.
4.
If I see a few more of his movies, I think I'll be compelled to write the longest, dullest treatise on the movies of Tsai Ming-Liang. I caught his The River this week and am in love with the way he makes his characters move. Like he did to astonishing effect in What Time Is It There and its perfect epilogue of a short film "The Skyway Is Gone" and to occasionally ass-numbing effect in Goodbye, Dragon Inn, his characters seem to move fully ignoring each other's awkwardness and solipsistic quirks. Characters walk past each other, follow each other, run literally into one another and carry on their blinded way. No one speaks to each other usually, and certainly never about major events.
I must say I love the way in his movies people continue to act in spite of all logical intuition. His movies all have moments that shock or sadden or seem to happen simply because nothing else is happening, and what's most interesting about his movies is that people's best approximation of following each other around makes up the majority of their lives. The rest can so often decoding the bizarre events occurring everywhere, silently, even the ones we're inexplicably in the middle of.
5.
Back in Boulder, I'm told the kid I spent the bulk of my time with at work is doing well. Not just well, I'm told I wouldn't recognize him - that he's participating in class and engaging people in conversation. Back in Boulder, a good friend of mine has decided to move out of the apartment he just moved into and head to Chicago or Dallas, he should decide which this week. Back in Boulder, the second baseman on my old Softball team broke her nose when hit in the face with a baseball. Back in Boulder, a friend called me to tell me he'd just finished surgery correcting his knuckles from "that time I punched a wall in Dublin." Back in Boulder, a friend noticed smoke from his engine and flames behind his dashboard as he pulled up to his girlfriend's apartment; when he got out, he watched his car burn before his eyes. Back in Boulder, a therapist I used to work with died suddenly of a heart attack on the middle of a Monday. It was my replacement's first day of work.
It was a summer in which weird, tragic, funny, or just puzzling things happened everywhere, that everyone seemed to be on the verge of major life decisions, catastrophes, or both. If you wanted to leave your longtime lover or fly suddenly to Portland or start a long distance relationship with someone you met for 10 days in Israel or start crying again or, why not, uproot your life and move to Seattle or New York or Chicago or Dallas or (in one especially unusual decision of a friend of mine) Mauritania, this was the summer for it. The days were longer than usual, hotter than usual, more chaotic than usual, but things getting too hot and too long and too chaotic is often what leads us to getting things done in the first place.
Las Vegas wants your sins. Around town, the billboards scream for your attention and for your desires - on Nickerson at the Fremont Bridge, a white quote amongst purple and blue show lights reads "I had to unbutton my pants!" On 4th and Bell, another white quote, "I joined a threesome." In Ballard, "We tried things we don't do at home!" You may have to look at these billboards three or four times before you realize they're attempting double entendre - in small print towards the bottom of the unbuttoning-my-pants billboard reads the quip "Dining can be your excuse." The threesome billboard says "Golf can be your excuse."
I've gone to Vegas two or three times, and I may not have joined a threesome or spent an unusual amount of time unbuttoning my pants, but I did feel the need to smash every beer bottle I passed along Flamingo Ave. at 6 in the morning, and I did once break a vow to not gamble, drink, or smoke cigarettes during an hour-long dinner with my unlce on my way to Los Angeles, only to find myself doing all three within 5 minutes and, in fact, delaying my call to meet my uncle so I could do it. So I can't necessarily say the scent of sin is all that far off, or that the billboards are lying.
They are, however, clearly meant to stir the rapaciousness out of the corporate bore that's taken over. This makes enough sense - to many, at least. Perhaps I'm less romantic than I used to be about Vegas. Once, the brother of a friend from high school was describing his time in Vegas and nonchalantly ended a sentence with, "because, in Vegas, you have to do an eightball in the Caesar's bathroom."
I suppose everyone's Vegas sins are different, but they come from the same place - the desire to shake things up, to release whatever inhibitions keep us from, say, doing coke in the bathroom at Macy's. As for me, things are shaken up enough for one season, I can't see me returning to Vegas anytime soon, even if threesomes are a possibility.
2.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about Beyonce's new single "Ring The Alarm" lately. It's catchy, to be certain, but it's not simply a catchy melody. What works about the single is Beyonce's aggression - the chorus isn't sung, it's shouted, the verses more accurately described as a passionate shout than as singing. Yet you can't turn away from it, from its periodic loud claps that could be thunder or jail doors or even a gun shot. I'm amazed that this song hasn't hit #1, as thus far I wouldn't even describe the song as particularly successful. I'm amazed that everyone isn't at least drawn to that anger, that the anger itself isn't getting stuck in people's heads.
3.
When I think about Fremont, the artsy Seattle neighborhood north of Lake Union, I sometimes hear the clop of horses, as if when I was there last, carriages were wandering 36th Street. A good friend lives there with a balcony giving him a perfect view of the Seattle skyline, and my favorite coffee shop since I moved here has a deck that peacefully looks towards the almost absurdly high Aurora bridge. Here as in Boulder I find myself going to the least conveniently located coffee shop imaginable (I am staying in Magnolia, southwest of the lake), but Fremont is the place in Seattle where most things seem possible.
This week I house sat at a friend's coworker's townhome on 43rd street. At 5 in the morning her grey cat, speckled like a cow, started meowing from her rooftop deck. I opened the door, and felt greeted by the dull grey light, the otherworldly glow of the skyline, the green hills built in every direction regardless of how possible it seemed to build houses or buildings or roads. I thought the cat should never want to be inside, Seattle this time of the year being the only comfort a person could need.
This is, of course, nonsense. I've walked all over this city now and know even a beautiful locale (and, in the late months of summer, during its rare stretches of sunshine, no city is more beautiful), and know that, without a job and a place to live, I can feel as rafish and lost as I did when I was unemployed and sick in Boulder. At least I have more options for coffee.
I left the cats outside when locking up the coworker's house for the last time. I wondered if that would be a problem, knowing the unlikelihood anything would ever happen to a cat - these things that seem unikely to blink at falls from trees, at balancing high above the ground on pieces of wood two centimeters across. It seems that everyone seems a little happier in Fremont, though, and maybe she'd barely think of anything wrong when she could simply go to her roof and watch the city.
4.
If I see a few more of his movies, I think I'll be compelled to write the longest, dullest treatise on the movies of Tsai Ming-Liang. I caught his The River this week and am in love with the way he makes his characters move. Like he did to astonishing effect in What Time Is It There and its perfect epilogue of a short film "The Skyway Is Gone" and to occasionally ass-numbing effect in Goodbye, Dragon Inn, his characters seem to move fully ignoring each other's awkwardness and solipsistic quirks. Characters walk past each other, follow each other, run literally into one another and carry on their blinded way. No one speaks to each other usually, and certainly never about major events.
I must say I love the way in his movies people continue to act in spite of all logical intuition. His movies all have moments that shock or sadden or seem to happen simply because nothing else is happening, and what's most interesting about his movies is that people's best approximation of following each other around makes up the majority of their lives. The rest can so often decoding the bizarre events occurring everywhere, silently, even the ones we're inexplicably in the middle of.
5.
Back in Boulder, I'm told the kid I spent the bulk of my time with at work is doing well. Not just well, I'm told I wouldn't recognize him - that he's participating in class and engaging people in conversation. Back in Boulder, a good friend of mine has decided to move out of the apartment he just moved into and head to Chicago or Dallas, he should decide which this week. Back in Boulder, the second baseman on my old Softball team broke her nose when hit in the face with a baseball. Back in Boulder, a friend called me to tell me he'd just finished surgery correcting his knuckles from "that time I punched a wall in Dublin." Back in Boulder, a friend noticed smoke from his engine and flames behind his dashboard as he pulled up to his girlfriend's apartment; when he got out, he watched his car burn before his eyes. Back in Boulder, a therapist I used to work with died suddenly of a heart attack on the middle of a Monday. It was my replacement's first day of work.
It was a summer in which weird, tragic, funny, or just puzzling things happened everywhere, that everyone seemed to be on the verge of major life decisions, catastrophes, or both. If you wanted to leave your longtime lover or fly suddenly to Portland or start a long distance relationship with someone you met for 10 days in Israel or start crying again or, why not, uproot your life and move to Seattle or New York or Chicago or Dallas or (in one especially unusual decision of a friend of mine) Mauritania, this was the summer for it. The days were longer than usual, hotter than usual, more chaotic than usual, but things getting too hot and too long and too chaotic is often what leads us to getting things done in the first place.
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