Questions for Batman
Saturday, July 26, 2008


Wow, Batman. Say you're the platonic soul who hasn't been to see a movie in twenty years or so, and you find yourself lining up with the millions to go see this bit of business. What to make of these batshit contortions? With the split personalities and the good-guy rich people and the excellent, unblemished public servants begging to have their faces melted off? What knowledge aren't you armed with? Isn't it likely that if you were a little behind the curve and turned to your partner and asked, of Maggie Gyllenhal's character, "oh, is that Batman's girlfriend?" or, "hey, why does she know Batman's identity when no one else does?" you'd receive a nutty non-sequiter answer like, "well, she was played by Katie Holmes in the last movie," as if that would explain her motivation for doing the things that she does. And, yes, Heath Ledger is mouldering in a box somewhere in a fair climate, which means, no Joker in the next installment -- a very important point, unless you had no idea what was going on. And is Two-Face dead? I can't tell. I mean, Batman survived the fall, so why not Two-Face? Oh, and why is this such a right-wing deal? Like, did they really have to have a scene which demonstrated the complete bankruptcy of voting on whether or not to, say, blow up a boat full of convicts? These questions will pile on in blockbuster movies in the years to come, I think.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:53 AM, ,


What Have I Seen?
Sunday, July 20, 2008

I've seen Iron Man, Indiana Jones, The Incredible Hulk, Hancock, Hellboy 2, and now Wall-E. The latter started with a truly insanely racist trailer featuring chihuahuas who go from Beverly Hills to Mexico and dance around a Mayan statue singing a song about how fertile and lazy they are, or something. They still dance in my mind. You could tell the girl chihuahuas from the boy chihuahuas by the way they were digitally manipulated to walk (the girl chihuahuas all walk like Marylin Monroe). Wall-E runs around picking up trash 700 years after the end of the world. He watches Hello, Dolly! on a VHS tape at night. I feel duty-bound to point out that 700 years into the future, humanity has become fat: it floats in space on a massive ship called the Axiom (why?) and drinks protein slurpees and communicates entirely through these weird floating screens, and they just generally and very broadly satirize consumerism, the little babies. Wall-E doesn't judge them, even though he's developed a Hello-Dolly!-based personality. He so identifies with the little trinkets he finds on earth -- sporks, jewelry boxes, lightbulbs -- that he actually folds himself up and shelves himself next to them. And when fatty wants to make a political change (i.e. go back to the now black-lung-y Earth and sow seeds, farm, take responsibility, etc.) he has nothing more to do than push a big, green button with a picture of the Earth on it. It's like voting for Obama! I do love to notice these things, though it makes me sick. I'm still thinking of the way Harrison Ford's pants fit him -- baggily, like an old man -- and of the way he was still able to sprint gazelle-like, pants and all, out of harm's way. Or of Tim Roth's spine as he turns into the Abomination (I still prefer the way Nick Nolte turned into The Absorbing Man in the first Hulk, by doing that Nick Nolte blustering thing while biting hard on a thick electrical cable.) So many millions of movie dollars! How can I possibly go see Batman now? I'll puke, for sure. But I will, because my eyeballs are set for maximum absorbency right now. Batman will enter into their already supersaturated state and cinematic colors will run down my cheeks. I'll watch the trailer for The watchmen, directed by that guy who directed 300, and I will be instantly critical of that and of everything else, and said criticism will plug up my ears with golden wax, and I'll have to go get antibiotics. Yay collegiate America! Hooray for bursting!

posted by Greg Purcell @ 11:15 PM, ,


Going Unchallenged
Friday, July 18, 2008

Contemplating the notion that you may be (may be, I emphasize, because you can't reveal every fucking mystery in a blog) in love with someone who may love you is tiresome, from the perspective of keeping things alive. So the question becomes, what then? Write a little, sure, though it's difficult during this heatwave. Write for money, yes, for now, fortunately. Exercise, reduce, take walks and then shower. Check. Not really interested in catching up with movies -- I've had my Netflix copy of Knife in the Water waiting for me for a month, wrapped in its unevocative white envelope. So I play Audiosurf. It's basically a music visualizer that transforms whatever track you have on your hard drive into an actual, literal track upon which you drive. The beats become obstacles you either avoid or careen into to accumulate points. I'm not very good at it, but my high scores for Fleetwood Mac's "Walk A Thin Line," Burning Witch's "Warning Signs" and Steely Dan's "Razor Boy" have gone unchallenged as yet. It's the ultimate in anti-rockism, a pure adulteration of what music is supposed to mean. It actually gives the art form a "point," which is what every charlatan wants, right? I love it.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 2:07 PM, ,


Worth Seeing for the Penguin
Monday, July 07, 2008

I had no plans over the July Fourth weekend -- and no money, due to a regrettable dating mishap -- and thus, waking up to the lonely start of said weekend, and feeling a sudden, palpable dread of the void, I decided to take a walk. I packed a lunch and started down 31st street near Astoria Boulevard in Queens, all the way to Queensboro Plaza, then I hooked a right and walked across the Queensboro Bridge, picking up my pace as I went, staring down at the weirdness of Roosevelt island and taking in the disconcertingly vertiginous perspective of the cable-car tram from eye level (as if one could Jump! over to it...but no! no! you'd never make it...), kept walking until I got to Central Park, ate my lunch, fell unconscious for ten minutes near the duck pond. So once again that day I woke with the void opening up before me like so much grey industrial foam, like human sterilization itself, and what could I do? I jumped up and started walking again, deciding just at that moment that my destination would be the Film Forum, where I would see the held-over Herzog film about Antarctica, waves of white and blue cinema to battle the spreading grey, and so I walked through the horrid jumble of Columbus Circle and over to 9th Avenue in order to avoid Times Square and it's afterbirth, which is 8th Ave. I began to feel a little light headed so I had an iced coffee, and I walked until the blocks all registered like musical notes: bodega, bank branch, bank branch, deli, bodega, deli, bank branch, bank branch, duane reade, deli, bodega. Finally got to the Film Forum, paid my 6 dollar member's fee, had time to kill, went around the corner and got a Pabst Blue Ribbon (three dollars, leaving me with a budgeted amount of one dollar left), which I drank in blessed silence, trying not to think of what I'd do with myself tomorrow, just staring open-mouthed at the television as colors sort of swirled and popped on the screen.

Then I saw the movie. My verdict? Not Herzog's best, but worth seeing, especially for the insane penguin.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:36 PM, ,


Bamberging in the Bamberg.
Friday, July 04, 2008


When Oscar Wilde cautioned that, "it is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious," he obviously sided with the charming. Being a fairly tedious person (I write poetry) I can agree with the letter of this aphorism but not with its emphasis. Because isn't it true that, once some genius like Wilde sets the bar on charm, the effect afterward becomes merely inflationary? And with that inflation, don't the charming soon find one another and pretty much stay in that rarified company? So, yeah, charm becomes as superfluous as yachts. Sooner or later, perhaps even now, there will be but one charming person left in the world, an impeccable person who can communicate, in a type of preternaturally gentile super-language, to the three or four also-rans able to decipher her charming jibberish. (Almost all literary fiction, incidentally, aspires to this penultimate state, but never to the top spot. The reason for this? I think it's that novelists are proud of being able to explain the workings of these horribly afflicted, charming circus freaks to the rest of us, and because we sometimes, in our tedium, pay them for privilege.) The rest of us must distinguish among types of tedium -- bulimia, Democratic politics, hedge-fund-management, "interesting" sexual positions, bowling, the eating of pro-biotic yogurts, etc., ad nauseum. The charming are no longer capable of describing this world at all: only the tedious can speak with the prerequisite dull articulation. Except, it happened one time. One time only, as far as I can tell. This rare event was called Cosmos. It's a novella by Witold Gombrowicz.

I'll bore you with the set-up. The narrator, Witold, and an acquaintance met by chance, named Fuchs, meet outside of a remote boarding house in order to get away from the pressing concerns of family and work. Both men are so utterly tedious they find no legitimate way to occupy their time while on vacation. Lucky for them, the discovery of a hanged sparrow, a bit of wood dangling in a decayed bit of masonry, and a few arrows possibly (but not actually) scrawled on the ceiling send them out on a mission to discover their provenance. They closely observe the family -- a stout, tedious, fairly stupid middle class bunch -- for further clues. Witold, in his one act of heroism, gets so frustrated watching the married daughter of the family patriarch interact with her housekeeper and her husband -- so tediously attentive is he in his search for "clues" that a phantom sensuality begins to surround her -- that he eventually strangles her cat. There is a fairly uneventful suicide at the end of the book, but that's pretty much it. It's one of your plotless kind of deals.

Boring, yes? I can't deny it. But consider this: Witold is not really the protagonist. I mean, how could he be, since all protagonism in this novel is charmless and therefore un-literary? Who cares about protagonism among the tedious? So, then, I choose as my protagonist, my hero, (because I have nothing better to do on this July 4th, except maybe write a few poems) Leo the patriarch. It's true, he does takes a long time to reveal himself. The description of him comes early, at the dinner table. "Leo Wotjys was like a gnome. His head was like a gourd, and his bald pate, reinforced by the sarcastic flashing of his pince-nez, dominated the whole table." Leo hums constantly, talks wistfully and abstractly of the past, and lets loose a constant, thin stream of what the narrator calls "verbal monstrosities," as when he wants his daughter to pass him the radishes: "Pray papass to your papakins a radiculous radicule, my precious bulbul."

He is justifiably ignored by the narrator in favor of the unutterable minutia of his daughter's mouth, its particular ghostly relation to the housekeeper's mouth, the arrows on the ceiling, etc. Yet Leo comes to the fore now and again, humming his little songs and rolling up little crumbs of soft bread and lining them up in neat little rows. So far this probably sounds a little sub-Beckettian and you're probably right. It's funny like Beckett, themed like his work, and all written at just about Beckett's level (which, whatever, probably makes it top-notch). Yet Leo becomes more persistent throughout, hums more, suggests a family trip to the mountains. Once there, Leo starts humming like a lunatic, his hands start to flutter, he takes on an aspect of almost manic self-satisfaction. In sight of the mountains, he corners Witold and gives him something akin to a manifesto. It beginns with a word, "Berg," an utter nonesense word which immediately deports Witold to the back of the narrative, and he reacts with ineffectual anger, for "Berg" is the summation of Leo's life, a fully self contained system, encompassing even the narrator, a world in which tedious Leo rules with absolute authority. "So," says Leo, "you are a bamberger, then. You're a sly one. I'm a bamberger too. We shall bamberg happily together."

He elucidates by telling a story. "Once, while we were living at Drohobycz, an actress came to the town on tour, she was a superb creature, absolutely superb," he says (and here he's describing perhaps the only charming personality to ever intersect with his life, someone who, even then, one had to pay to see). He continues,

...and one day I happened by pure chance to touch her hand on the bus, oh, what heaven, what ecstasy, oh, to be able to start life all over again, but it's no good, you can't put the clock back. I felt bitter and resentful, but I ended by pulling myself together and deciding there was no point in wasting time thinking about touching someone else's hand when you had two hands of your own. Believe it or not, after a certain amount of practice you can get quite expert in touching one hand with the other, under the table, for instance...So, I can't complain, I have managed to get something out of life. If others have managed to get more, well, good luck to them.


His manifesto continues. "You can enjoy ourself like a pasha at the dinner table making little bread pellets...Epicurism, or voluptuousness," says Leo, speaking directly to Wilde, "can be of two kinds, it can be like a wild boar, a buffalo or a lion, or it can be like a flea or a mosquito." This is Bergery. I'll get nutty here and say that New York -- charmless, pleasureless New York, defined at every block by bank branches dressed up to look like nurseries -- is full of this bambergery, shameless bambergism. It began with the receptionist at the front of the cubicle block, with all of her little fuzzy-headed trolls lined up on her computer monitor and her teddy bear sweaters and bits of flair, but it has since spilled out everywhere, on the lips of those with liprings, in those disgusting Maori earlobe-holes the punks wear, in the "Gettin' Lucky in Kentucky" T-shirts worn by otherwise healthy-looking Midwestern college boys. Bergery exists in sideburns, flip-flops, Deicide T-shirts, vintage dresses with puffed shoulder sleeves. The five-dollar-bill now shows the Bergery of our treasury by taking on a purplish hue. New York is the epicenter of Berg, its pleasureless people, out brunching or fetishizing new bands with cute new sounds, its foremost ideologues.

I took a lot of pleasure the other day in helping out a pretty, fresh faced worker, a likely example (I see them all the time now that I've read the book), someone with the effronterous Bergery of an Obama pin tacked to the lapel of her grey business ensemble. Someone so white she had little pink blotches on her cheeks, as if her whole body were screaming for Bergism. She said she wanted something for a long weekend trip, and that the last book she read "and really liked" was Michael Chabon's "Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay." I suggested Cosmos to her -- "it's a little unusual," I said. "I think you'll like it very much." So triumphant and small did I feel at that moment, I did not even look back at her as she made her purchase and walked outdoors to the perfect little weekend I had designed for her. Cue fireworks, illuminating my face through the window as I sit home, contemplating the small.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:44 PM, ,