57th Street

Of Interest to the Movie-Goer:

I title this entry “Save This Movie” because I’m really afraid that “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” will fall into the dustbin of movie history; perhaps it’ll be picked up and replayed by a desultory college student or two, but that’s it. I want to say that the film has so much to recommend it that it would be a travesty for it to fade into obscurity. Yes, it sports Fellini-sized self-indulgence, not terribly kosher for a sophomore director. Yes, it unashamedly exhibits time-lapse clouds…at multiple points in the film’s 2 hour and 40 minute duration. But this isn’t a Malickian fancy, though there is something that conjures that eccentric cousin of American cinema in the juxtaposition of brutality and natural beauty. “Assassination” features one strong (Pitt) and one brilliant (Affleck) performance. As a psychological study it is incredibly sharp and revealing. Its portrayal of the American West is unique and strange. And while it doesn’t ultimately develop its main theme–the interaction between myth and reality, or language and its object (“You can hide things in vocabulary,” one character says early in the story)–to any sort of satisfactory conclusion, it’s a rare sort of movie these days that tries to fit its head around these ideas at all.

Fuck-A-Doodle-Do!

I was walking through my dorm on a 4 a.m. ramble when I decided to take a look-see down in the basement. I had never actually visited our kitchen, for the use of which I had to contribute a hefty sum (a double sawbuck, or twenty dollars for you people who don’t use Civil War slang in a pompous and self-conscious manner), so I decided now was as good a time as ever. I walked downstairs into the basement, through the hall and past the entranceway adorned with a sign pronouncing the kitchen’s impending cameo in the sordid farce of my existence. The corridor between the entranceway and the kitchen was long, and the cooking area was darkened. I could barely make out the huge stainless steel refrigerator and island. I had just entered the kitchen proper when I simultaneously wheeled and heard from the direction to which I was turning a boy’s voice say quickly and brusquely, “Hey dude.” He walked past me and through the corridor; I noticed only his yellow tee shirt and the fact that he was holding his arm above his head, as if it were a periscope. To tell you the truth, I was pretty startled to see him there, and could barely manage a hello. For some reason, the image came into my head of some grizzled hillbilly reaching his hand out to a cornered, cowering wolf-cub as his (the hillbilly’s) dirt-smeared little children watch in ecstatic terror. “Hell, he’s scareder of us than we are ‘a’ him,” the wise old Alvah Dunning says. But back to the story. As the international dude was walking by me, my sensitive eye caught something behind him, a flash, a flutter, a flit, no more than a brush stroke at the corner of the canvas, which disappeared behind the other doorway to the kitchen. It took me a second to figure out what was going on, and then I bounded after it like a happy hound. Of course, the female, for that was what the darting blot of brown ink was, had disappeared. I was a cockblock! Now I knew the shame. The shame and ignominy of the cockblocker.

An old man talks to cats and makes fish fall from the sky, Johnnie Walker kills cats and eats their hearts, Colonel Sanders is a back-alley pimp with a knack for the supernatural, and a 15-year-old runaway finds shelter from a cross-gender hemophiliac while fulfilling an Oedipus prophecy. No, this isn’t a bad joke, and you’re not having the weirdest trip ever. You’re reading the latest Haruki Murakami novel, Kafka on the Shore.

Murakami’s “insistently metaphysical mind-bender” (John Updike’s observation) follows two distantly interwoven plotlines. In the first, 15-year-old “Kafka” Tamura (he has taken this pseudonym to avoid detection by the police) flees his sinister sculptor father in Tokyo and travels by bus to the relatively provincial Takamatsu. He wanders to the Komura Memorial Library, where he meets Oshima, a hyper-educated woman who identifies as a homosexual man, and Miss Saeki, an enigmatic older woman who hasn’t truly lived since her lover died when she was twenty. This bizarre cast of characters gives Kafka room and board at the library, ostensibly for his help as an assistant but mostly because they are interested in his spiritual journey.

Meanwhile, Satoru Nakata, an old man whose childhood trauma deprived him of his memory and conventional intelligence but allows him to talk to cats, follows a trail of clues in a metaphysical scavenger’s hunt that leads him ever closer to Kafka, Oshima, and Miss Saeki. Along the way he picks up Hoshino, a truck driver and ex-soldier, who is sufficiently intrigued by Nakata that he ditches his job and his truck and becomes the old man’s disciple and sidekick (and a devotee of Beethoven’s Archduke Trio).

But for all Murakami’s postmodern surrealism, his narrative structure hearkens back to traditional themes. Besides the overt references to Greek drama (bits and pieces of an Oedipus retelling, and a near fatal backwards-glance into the spirit world), Murakami plays off the most fundamental aspect of Greek tragedy: fate. None of the characters in Kafka on the Shore is as powerful as the forces of fate that drive them, and none even try to resist. They accept the bizarre developments of their world with the resignation of a Greek chorus.

But unlike a Greek chorus, characters in Kafka react to the supernatural events that direct their lives with stoicism and some good humor. And that’s where Murakami’s wit really comes to light: by blending the inevitability of a Greek tragedy with a healthy dose of lighthearted surrealism, he balances the monotony of both genres. The fate that dogs his characters is neither moralistic nor predictable, yet its fantastic manifestations never fade into the languid dreaminess that plagues some surrealist literature. In short: fate provides the momentum and surrealism gives us something to look at along the way.

However, Murakami’s elaborate juxtaposition comes at a price. Like in Greek drama, none of the characters are quite flesh-and-blood—I wouldn’t fancy driving across the country with any of them (except maybe Hoshino the truck driver, who despite a supporting role enjoys the most compelling character development in the book). And the plot drags at times, taking us down false leads or going nowhere at all. Nakata and Hoshino spend the second half of the book trying to speak to a stone, while Kafka Tamura is falling in love with a painting. Something tells me Murakami won’t be getting many movie deals.

But that’s okay, because he probably didn’t want them anyway. He wanted to create a fairy tale steeped in our profoundest narrative and philosophical traditions, and in that he succeeded charmingly. The characters don’t trouble themselves with expectations or analysis, and neither should we. Just take it in and accept it for what it is—always weird and introspective, sometimes funny, and occasionally moving—and you may enjoy this metaphysical romp.

Of interest to the online talker:

AOL Instant Messager is dead, long live Google Chat. This didn’t happen out of technological natural selection. There was nothing Darwinian here. It’s just as more people use Gmail, more people use the instant messager that comes with it. That’s not to say that there’s nothing appealing about chatting on your email account. In line with everything else that is Google, Gchat archives every conversation so at any time you can look back and see how pompous you sound, furthering self consciousness and paranoia. It also emails messages if one of the talkers signs off.
Remember the days though? Remember the days when we all signed onto AIM. The days when people creatively -or crudely- thought of screen names, and then thought of new ones and then newer ones. Yeah, those days are over.
Then they “improved” AIM by adding the feature that tells you that the other person is typing. Today AIM has evolved to AIM Titan which seems to just be a smooth looking (but not actually) version of the instant messaging program. There’s also no more uniqueness to choosing a screenname. Your identity is your email address, which these days tends to be incredibly boring (example: jsmith321@gmail.com). There was something wonderfully expressive about coming up with a nom de guerre with little aspects of your interests or personality. I can remember being Astralmage, silvertiger317, Odysseus03, ATimeforwolves, BeyondtheOceans and many more. There are also people I know with dozens of different names. It was just this fun way of choosing a persona.
But no more. Internet talk has “matured” to this ultra-casual medium where any slight silliness is immature and awkward. Then again, now there’s a record of what’s said, and that’s kind of fun.

Of interest to the Chicago farmer:

Did you know Chicago had a pumpkin patch? I sure didn’t. Above is a picture of the beautiful and talented Terra in Chicago at one such jack-o-lantern garden. I’ve lived in that city for 19 years and I still don’t know…most of it.