is fucking awesome. I know, older film ('93), but jesus, it's fucking good. And, it has a great oral sex scene, which is topical with the Supreme whatnot and all. Oh, it's unfair to say this, but it's everything that Crouching Tiger wasn't...That is to say fucking awesome!!!
Saw a couple of flix: Punch Drunk Love, which is the PT Anderson/Adam Sandler sauce. Not so good, and shockingly short at 95 minutes. The Thirteenth Floor - not as good as PDL. It does, however, have Vincent D'Onofrio and has a "nested Matrix" storyline. Sadly, Gretchen Mol's tits only start poking through her shirt near the very end of the film. The payoff, though, isn't bad, as she walks out onto a sunlit balcony in a quasi translucent shirt which quite nicely displays her bounteous braless rack.
Current listening - Kool Keith's Dr. Dooom. Very very good.
Also went to the gym yesterday. It's a mixed bag, the gym, on the one hand regular exercise does tend to improve mood. On the other, while it is often fun to ogle attractive women in exercise clothing, this can also foster a black mood. I started exercising in order to lose weight and have a trimmer body. While I have lost no weight, the general lift in mood and the knowledge that I am exercising has made me feel much more comfortable with my shape.
Which is to say that I would like to let my bounteous braless breasts hang prominent and free. Just like Gretchen Mol.
The Matrix Reloaded. When I saw the first Matrix, I thought, "Gee, nice effects, but it's kinda slow and dopey during all the mystical/philosophical bullshit." I mean,
No one can be told what the Matrix is.
Brain in a jar, you pompous windbag.
What if the robots didn't know what chicken tastes like, and that's why everything tastes like chicken!
Suck my oil.
Of course it didn't help that the world suddenly fell in love with this deep and complex movie. Now, however, I suddenly see the films from the other side, as I think The Matrix Revolutions is a deep and complex film, and everybody else seems to think it a bunch of special effects action scenes with some bullshit philosophy.
Some thoughts on The Matrix Revolutions.
I had previously thought that Neo's powers at the end of the movie were the result of a "nested Matrix," or the argument that those who thought they left the Matrix never really did. Instead, they entered a different portion of the simulation which allowed them to act out the fantasy of being terrorists...er...freedom fighters against oppression. (That the terrorists strike from Zion is a nice touch.) My evidence for this had been the scene in which TMR's Annoying Kid (as opposed to TM's Annoying Chicken Head) gives Neo a spoon. In the first film, a spoon was memorably manipulated inside the matrix with the explanation that the trick to bending it was to realize "there is no spoon." Since Neo got a spoon in the "real world" in TMR, perhaps this indicates that he is in fact still in the matrix, or a "nested matrix," if you will. But what does the spoon really represent?
One of the several things that annoyed me about The Matrix was the way that the film portrayed computer control of reality. I thought that the robots should be able to just up and delete anyone that they found. Why would they have to sic agents on Zion's terrorists? Shouldn't they be able to delete these guys with a couple of keystrokes? What's more, that main agent dude, Smith, seems to be totally unrobotlike. He seems to seethe with hatred. Furthermore, he makes decisions which fall outside the dictates of the matrix‘ “rulers.“ Interrogating Morpheus, he asks the other agents to leave the room so that he can compare human beings to a virus, something that multiplies and multiplies, destroying everything it touches. When the other agents return, they ask him what he was doing. A real computer program would not be motivated in such a personal way, would not be so emotionally driven. It also could not act independently of its programming directives. Winamp would never refuse to play Linkin Park on the grounds that it’s shitty music.
One of the several reasons I love The Matrix Revolutions is that it redefines, clarifies, and develops the first movie. In a scene between Neo and the Oracle, she explains to him that although programs are written to control all aspects of the matrix, they have the capacity to misbehave. So while there are programs which act in perfectly regular way, controlling the behavior of, say, the birds in an invisible manner, there are also misbehaving programs which act in peculiarly human ways. The Merovingian has a love life, enjoys wine, and has a decidedly bitchy personal manner.
In this sort of world programs appear driven by own artificial intelligence, an intelligence which is more independent and humanlike and artificial in that they are mechanical and not biological. They are more like programs in the movie Tron, little digital people, than they are limited instruction sets that can never act capriciously, like Winamp.
Soon after this conversation, agent Smith returns to the action. No longer an agent of the matrix, he is one of the rogue programs, acting in a manner that does not support the general consistency and well-functioning of the matrix. Able now to reproduce in an unlimited manner, devouring the lives of his victims in order to turn them into a perfect replica of himself, agent Smith has become the virus he always despised, focused on a personal mission of vengeance. That he becomes what he despises is a wonderfully human story arc.
One of the people he infects is a Zion terrorist who is attempting to leave the matrix via a telephone. As Smith approaches, the terrorist exclaims, “Oh my god!“, which the once agent takes as a vocative and replies, “Smith will suffice.“ Smith is not the first person in the series to be explicitly mistaken for god, as a douchebag in The Matrix called Neo his “own personal Jesus Christ.“ The poor fellow who cried out is then overwritten by Smith, who in turn leaves the computer simulated world and occupies the independent, living and breathing body the infected fellow once had.
And yet this is not the first example of a human being living with a piece of machine intelligence living inside his brain. The Architect explains that Neo has code in his body which is necessary for rebooting of the Matrix. Neo is a sort of bugfix for the Matrix. He is a human being but has programming in his brain. Neo and Smith are closely related, and both are figures which bridge the digital/human divide. This division and its transgression are explicitly mentioned by the Oracle in the scene I mentioned earlier. There, she tells Neo that the present problem can only be survived by an alliance of humans and technology. I believe, for this and other reasons, that Neo can stop the sentinels at the end of TMR because he has code inside of him and is not strictly human. By the end of the film, he is visually paired with the other transgressive character, the newly-human agent Smith.
In the Enter the Matrix videogame, a non-Gloria Foster and rather sedate Oracle gives further hints regarding the future of the conflict and, presumably, The Matrix Revolutions. She explains to Ghost that her body has been changed and her mind altered by an angry Merovingian. The code to hurt the Oracle was sold to him by a couple in order to save their child, a child who, the Oracle explains, is very important to the future of the conflict. I believe that this child will be another individual who combines machine intelligence and human intelligence, perhaps the child of a human being and a program. Combined with the apocalyptic-looking Neo/Smith fight, I feel an appropriate title for the final film is The Matrix: The Final Battle, and I wholeheartedly expect to see a tender birth scene turning into terror as the midwife looks down at the child and sees she has a dongle jutting out of her mouth. Well, perhaps that won’t happen, but I did want to write the phrase “she has a dongle jutting out of her mouth.”
Which brings me to something that I actually liked about The Matrix. In that film, in the scenes of a bug being placed in Neo, in Neo’s real world “birthing,” there is a strong element of horror. A nasty little mechanical spider pushes its way into Neo’s navel to infect his body. He wakes from this violation as if from a nightmare. Trinity then kidnaps Neo and penetrates him with a giant translucent dildo device which removes the bug. Very scary, and it also means that Trinity sticks into Neo before he sticks it into her in TMR‘s rave scene. The closest TMR comes to TM’s scenes of “rape” is the Merovingian’s orgasm cake, which is more humorous than horrifying.
But what about that damn spoon? It could represent that the simulation is ongoing, that even in Zion the people live in the Matrix. What does the movie tell us about this possibility? The Architect tells Neo explicitly that human beings can only live in the matrix if they choose to accept living in a simulation. He does not say that people will only accept a simulation that is particularly flattering to their personality or that feeds their fantasies of rebellion. In fact, when a pleasing, Skinner-box-styled matrix was attempted, it was a failure, as reality needed to be more complex and varied, with awfulness and violence in addition to happiness and supermodel rimjobs.
And so the spoon. In fact, it does not have to mean that the Zion world is a simulation. It could, just as plausibly, mean that Neo must somehow transcend reality, that he must move beyond the normal physical world. Making this realization, he would be able to access his new machine/human nature and exhibit his new powers. Now the question is, would this result suck?
The Matrix Revolutions was such a treat for me largely because I hated the mysticism of the first film. Being pretty much a realist, I don’t believe that there are such things as fate and prophecy, that these are illusions which people invent to make their lives easier and more understandable. And so to have Morpheus spitting out religious bullshit about Neo really stuck in my craw. I was therefore delighted to see Morpheus punctured by TMR, which explains the prophecies not as divine truths but rather as rational processes. They are stories which are used to control people. I enjoy this because it much closer to the truth of human experience. In reality, there is no Providence. Rather, religion is a mundane thing, stories used by people to control one another. And this is the function of religion in TMR, except that the machines are telling the stories which Morpheus accepts. As surely as there is “no other world out there where everything’s going to be OK, there’s just this rock,” the prophecy of the One is a tool used to fine tune the matrix and ensure its viability.
In TMR, there is a scene just before the Oracle meeting which depicts a market street. The camera hovers over a stall displaying religious iconography. The portraits and sculptures are not derived from any single religion, but form a hodgepodge of figures from various religion. It is a window display in Baltimore’s Brewers Hill depicted in Blade Runner. The art seems to glow and the too-short scene is the most beautiful in the two movies. If, in Revolutions, it turns out that Neo can bring about the end of the conflict, it will be not because there was a divine plan to do so, that divine plan having been revealed in TMR as a machine’s story. Rather, it seems that the solution to the problem will be in understanding the conflict and coming to a conclusion that will allow peaceful coexistence of artificial and biological intelligence. It is a process that will involve Smith and Neo and a third party only mentioned offhandedly in Enter the Matrix. I am anxious about this ending simply because I have trouble accepting the logistics of a human being controlling machines through will in the real world. These seem superpowers to me. TMR, however, has successfully reversed the greatest drawback to the first film by portraying the previous religious overtones in a manner lacking in reverence. Religion’s salvation is a false hope used to frustrate those same hopes. In this context, the religious iconography portrayed in the street scene becomes sad and enigmatic and beautiful.
We can hope that The Matrix Revolutions will be as beautiful and intriguing as the street vendor’s portraits of the Holy Virgin, but even if it fails, The Matrix Reloaded is itself a fine film, and the increasing quality of films tantalizes with the possibilities for the third film.
Saw a significant chunk of the Manor House finale last night. Good reality show on PBS - people went to live in a giant mansion, and they had to do it Edwardian-style, so there were a bunch of servants supporting this one family.
At the end, the lady of the house, who is an ER doc in real life, talked about the tremendous gap between the priveleged and the oppressed and said something like, 'There were these terrible lows, but these were balanced by these tremendous highs. Of course, today we've evened things out a bit. So while the situation has improved for some people, those highs have been lost. Some people would say we've gone to far in evening things out.' What an evil cunt, but then she was corrupted, I guess, by living in tremendous privilege with tremendous power. Or she's just a cunt. Interestingly, her sister, who was not married and therefore in a lesser societal station, lost her shit and had to leave the show for a while. I guess her sister didn't notice.
Also, the chef loses his mind and, it appears, starts drinking heavily. He confronts Mr. Marie Antoinette at a party, saying that he did not follow the rules of the show by forcing him to update and healthy-ize his menu. Later in the evening, they show the First Couple being served some small dark snack. They take a bite, grimace, and then spit it out.
Finally, the old servant dude, whose grampa had been a servant in a similar home, had a really good point. He said that all the bad things that happened with the servants were hidden from the owners, so they only saw the good things about the servants, encouraging a great fondness for them. That fondness, though, was not reciprocal, presumably because, as a maid pointed out, the servants knew, through the course of their job, everything about the family. Plus, you know, that whole servitude thing.
Suggestions welcome.
Some recommendations:
Popol Vuh - tracks: Aguirre and Aguirre II; Brothers of Darkness, Sons of Light; Mantra of the Touching of the Air. album: Tantric Songs
now, this is "new age" music. really. also often used in Werner Herzog films. like Aguirre, the Wrath of God, for example.
The Animatrix - worth a rental at least. Beyond is cool and the best of the bunch - s'about a small Japanese town where a glitch in the Matrix causes haunted-house-type effects. Trippy, with a druggy falling down scene which reminds me of the carpet scene from Trainspotting. Ninja Scroll dude's is cool, too - nice scifi twisty story. Aeon Flux guy's deal isn't horrible, either. That man really is the inheritor of the Heavy Metal legacy. Which, if one is into jerking off to cartoons isn't a terrible thing.
Not that I am, just saying if one is.
On Raekwon's album Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, there's a track in which the Clan assumes the identities of gangsters and each takes on various pseudonyms. One can hear Method Man crying out "Noodles! Noodles!" I always found this amusing but never got the reference.
Yesterday, I decided to drive up to Streetside records at Ballas and Olive, near the Dairy Queen and KFC. Used to be a decent enough chain with a fair selection, it recently underwent an identity change, adopting the new small-chain style of record store. That is, it started selling toys, candy and novelties, eliminated the large Bjork posters and replaced them with glowsticks. Like Record and Tape Traders in Baltimore, these places cultivate a TRL-mediated head shop aesthetic. No glass pieces or bullets, but lighters, incense and plastic pens styled to look like hypodermics - click the plunger to write, but the liquid inside is fluorescent green or blue.
Sadly, the Streetside had closed, and I was forced to go to Borders, which carries New Pornographers records and where once I bought Bonnie Prince Billy's Ease Down the Road. Despite that experience, I doubted I would find Dr. Dooom's First Come, First Served, the record I was looking for.
I did, however, find a copy of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America on DVD in the more-complete international version which runs around four hours and is split (!) across two DVDs. I snatched this up, and the purchase made up for the lack of Kool Keith.
Leone apparently turned down The Godfather to direct this film. Music , courtesy Ennio Morricone, often has a direct, shown source such as a character playing a small pocket flute, or a record player. The soundtrack includes a Muzak'd version of the Beatles' Yesterday. It's a gangster movie about four Jewish hoods in New York from the early 1900s through the 70s. Well worth seeing. It's very pretty, has an extremely young Jennifer Connelly, and Treat Williams before he expanded like a furry version of the Thing.
The protagonist is played by Robert DeNiro - the character has greater depth than the young Vito Corleone. Unlike the broad, romantic Godfather characters, these people live on much more understandable terms. The gang doesn't run Vegas, it runs a speakeasy. Instead of walking the underworld like kings of nations, DeNiro's gang runs small-time schemes, does protection for unions. The emotional power of the film's plot flows from the characters' wants and desires and shortcomings instead of the juxtaposition of a bunch of killings with a baby's christening. Very worthwhile film. DeNiro's character is nicknamed Noodles.
The new incarnation of Streetside had previously failed my record store test - they had no Will Oldham records. I was, however, able to pick up a cheap used copy of the Bob Marley Legend compilation. At that time, I also picked up a Beach Boys DVD which featured extended footage of the Fire short film from the Smile era, as well as a large portion of Brian Wilson playing Surf's Up on Inside Pop. This song is probably not well known by the handful of Superelectric readers, and I cannot recommend it strongly enough - try to find the version from the Smile sessions. It appears on disc 2 of the Good Vibrations box set, and tends to be labeled "Brian Wilson solo" or "demo" or "solo piano."
Borders had Kool Keith's Matthew, for some reason.
If interested parties happen to remember at their next chance, I'm curious what John B thinks about Once Upon..., and where it falls in the Leone filmography.
Sadly, Kate failed to come a-lickin'. Oh well, we move on. It stormed quite a bit last night. A great big authentic St. Louis thunderstorm. The menacing clouds arrived in the late afternoon, filtering all available light to a pale gray-green. The effect is very cinematic, the houses start to look like they're in the Matrix. After a few fits of showers, the real torrent started. The typhoon portion of the evening didn't last long, though it was around long enough to knock out the power.
There are many bad things to say about suburbs. In mine, however, there are quite a few large trees which serve to create the appearance of a forest. It can be quite lovely in that respect, although the trees do to cause problems with the powerlines, I suppose. Laying in bed, listening to the rain subside, I could hear a saw being used far away.
When the worst of the storm had passed, I went outside to have a cigarette and look for frogs. When the wind blew, the rain collected in the trees' leaves shook loose, and came down with such a clamor that it sounded like a full storm. No frogs, unfortunately.
Drove to work today, in the garage there was a small frog. I gently grabbed his sides, which were suprisingly (to me) soft, and nudged him to the side lest he be run over. I expected him to jump away as soon as I got near, but he didn't. He was still sitting where I'd left him when I drove off down the street. I take this as a good sign. A frog in the garage portends a rimjob from a supermodel. Or some such.
So I drove out to Best Buy this weekend, really just to practice driving. Parking in those little slots is hard, and I also got my first taste of highway driving.
Once at Best Buy, I browsed and was delighted to discover a copy of the Playstation game Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style on clearance for 6.99. While the game isn't really all that great, it's certainly worth donating 7 bucks to the Wu cause, especially since I've been undergoing a bit of a Wu Renaissance of late, confirming my love for the RZA's style, which I frankly prefer over any other member of the Clan, even the much-respected GZA, even the much-loved Method Man, even the much-sought-by-authorities Ol Dirt Dog. Additionally, I've bought some less-than-perfect Star Wars games (Rogue Squadron, Bounty Hunter, I am looking nastily in your direction), basically for the coolness of the license, so I might as well do it for the people who brought me
I'm causin' more Family Feud's than Richard Dawson
And the survey said you're dead
Fatal flying guillotine chops off your fuckin head
Having scored this cheapie, I started to walk towards the checkout, yet decided, on a whim, to see if they had a copy of Stroszek on DVD. This being Best Buy out in the Valley (an area behind Chesterfield Mall which has been turned into a giant strip mall in the middle of fucking nowhere), I figured my chances to be slim. I was delighted to discover a copy for 19.99, an extremely purchasable price.
At the checkout, as an extended ringing up process took place thanks to my clearance item purchase, one of the cashiers, a young woman hanging out with my cashier, looked at my purchases in the order of Wu Tang, Stroszek. Her comments?
Aren't you lucky!
Wer-ner
St. Louis, city of dreams.
I am hiding in the extended entry portion of this note the fact that I was entranced by my own cashier, an altogether too young woman with a prominent yet small nose that elegantly curved to a delightful point. I thought at once that she was quite beautiful and lamented that she would most likely not find such beauty in a film like Stroszek, or in any truly beautiful thing. Of course, I could be quite mistaken, but I doubt that the majority of even those who consider themselves "film fans" would pick as their favorites movies outside of the most recent 15 years. Of course, I should temper my sadness at this thought with the admission that my own film literacy is far from encyclopedic, that tastes can certainly vary, and that falling madly in love with random, inaccessible individuals is merely a way at grasping at an impossible fulfillment, a means of diverting oneself from more mundane practical action, a lens that distorts perceptions of beauty.
I should get out more.
I recall hearing this as a joke one day, the repeated phrases such and such has a big ol butt, such and such else has a big ol butt.
And yet, I cannot place the reference.
Is it only a joke told by some individual, or does it reference something else?