Watch and Learn – Meta movies

I was watching “Spartan” – David Mamet’s pretty damn good film with less swearing than usual but the the same staccato macho dialogue as usual – when I thought of State and Maine, one of my favourite films about making movies, and so, as often happens with people with a Linnaeus complex, I made up a list of five other movies about making movies which I have seen and liked.

8 1/2.

It’s mandatory. But it’s mandatory because it’s awesome. It’s a bit irksome at times, but there’s a shot of Marcello that goes from him to a pan into memory that is so unbelievably good (or so it seems in my memory) I watched it a few times at least. Marcello is a model of adult coolness—like Brando in The Wild One all grown up and all Euro sophist-i-cat in a suit, who would simply smile at the question, “What are you rebelling against?”, light another cigarette, and say “Ciao, bella” as he walked away.

The Stuntman

I remember my parents going to see this. I remember that because I still couldn’t go because I was too young—just like when they went to Apocalypse Now! Well, thank god it came out on VHS about a decade later. Peter O’Toole is great and whatever happened to Steve Railsback? He’s so good in it. There has to be a good DVD of this floating somewhere around the markets here in the Lair. Anyhow, I remember loving the games that the movie (can’t remember the director’s name at the moment, and I am not going to cheat with IMDB) plays with the “is it the movie or the movie movie?” that Fincher’s The Game (and Mamet’s House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner and Heist and…) does much later. Dig it up.

Beware the Holy Whore

Fassbender’s take on cinema which Metro Cinema showed a long time ago. Apparently he threw the cast together and put them in a slow pressure cooker to see what simmered up. Lots of gristle is what he got. Nasty and brutal, but great. Funny at times, too, but it’s a nasty humour—it is Fassbender, so what do you expect? Wonderfully shot in the hotel, with mirrors and doorways playing a major role.

Viva Erotica

Leslie Cheung is a director of softcore, Cat III films, in Hong Kong, and Shu Qi is an actress. She is in one of her first legit movies, I think, but still gets naked, which is, no doubt, one of the reasons I got this VCD a long time ago (found it in Chinatown in Edmonton). A lot of fun, and Shu Qi is quite good, as is the rest of the cast, and it’s much better than Tsai Ming Liang’s Wayward Cloud, which has one of the nastiest endings I have ever seen.

State and Maine

Not the best but my favourite on the list. The warmest Mamet film, too, I think, but still with dialogue that is unmistakeably his. It’s great to see (or hear) a talky film where the talk is the thing, not just filler to move a plot—a throwback to the lovely screwball comedies that tossed around bon mots like a superball thrown in an acquarium. Everything works perfectly and how can you go wrong with a cast with William H. Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rebecca Pidgin, and Alec Baldwin? Even Sarah Jessica Parker is great in it. I take quotes from this frequently; “You like kids? Never saw the point of ‘em. Me, either”; “And then that happened”; “It’s ludicrous. So’s our electoral system, but we still vote.” [yes, they may not be verbatim quotes, but it’s memory, the beauty of which is it’s inaccuracy].

Addendum ad infinitum

Altman’s The Player could be on here, but I haven’t seen it since it came out, but I remember the opening shot that was great and Richard E. Grant is fabulous. Tom DiCillo’s Lost in Oblivion could make it, too, I am sure, but the same thing goes in that I haven’t seen it in yonks. What happened to DiCillo? Guess it’s time to look at the old IMDB. Maybe it can give me a clue about Railsback, too. Oh, and Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire. And I’m sure that, like all lists, several more things will suddenly pop into my head. Oh, couldn’t John Waters’s Cecil B. Demented be on here, too?

GAAK! Edition One

I apologize for all those trekkies who got here believing this was a discussion on or a recipe for Klingon food. The fact that I know this should tell you a lot about me.

All editors have things that annoy them. I finally broke down and decided to list some of the latest irks. I’ll avoid the jargon–going forward (ho!)–that plagues us unless it is something so egregious–talent (gaak)–that I can’t help myself.

Number 1: Is Comprised of
Why do people turn a great verb into something like the passive voice but isn’t? From the publisher’s introduction to Stephen Shore’s book, “American Surfaces”, comes “The book is comprised of a
chronological sequence of photographs…” Hey, it’s just “the bookcomprises”.  This prompted the post.

Number 2: On a (weekly, daily, monthly, hourly) basis
Why add three useless words? Do people think it sounds more important? Of course they do. That’s why people write and talk like that. Puff up your chest and adjust your chin wattles then roll it out of your
gob. Adverbs are lovely. Adverbs are a bane, though, so when you need one, just use it and get it done, unless you are a sadist who enjoys slowly ripping a bandage off of someone, making sure to pull every hair out by the follicle and stretch the skin to the tearing point.

Number 3: people thinking that business is the bringer of Doom and Destruction

Pah! Try reading blurbs about art. Since becoming hooked on Google Reader and subscribing to scads of art and photo sites, I now look at the stuff I get handed more fondly, even gratefully. Yes, using “synergize” three times in two sentences is terrible, but stating that a photo of a rock “speaks of the endless dichotomy between the ethereal realm of ideas, the Platonic sphere, merely glimpsed as shadows upon that cave wall, and the physical world, whose concrete monoliths crowd the sky and threaten us with their looming blackness in the night” is an enema of ground glass. Business English can mere look wistfully up through an overpriced telescope at the lofty peaks of pretension that art criticism reaches.

Dictionary from the Lair

This is not a Chinglish dictionary, but a wiki from observations of GZ life.

From the road.

Critical Mass
When the number of pedestrians reaches the point that the group is imbued with a sense of power and a false sense of invulnerability that it will cross the road under any circumstances, firm in the belief that drivers will halt because they don’t want to damage their cars, not because they don’t mind killing a few people.

Right-Of-Way
The right to go whatever way whenever a driver wishes, particularly if the person has those a white, military plate, which is the equivalent of a pill of unlimited power in a video game. This is appropriate since they drive with all the decency and sense of entitlement as someone playing GTA.

Road Rage
What I get when watching traffic here but no one else seems to have.

Shoulder Check
What?

Anticipation
What a driver needs when the car just ahead on the left will suddenly veer right to get to that fast approaching off-ramp which had been mentioned two hundred metres ago on a sign which you passed just before the same car, which had been on your right and behind you, decided to switch lanes to pass you. No one needs this except to avoid everyone else who doesn’t have this. What?

Rock, Paper, Scissors
Big beats small. Expensive beats big. Bus beats expensive. New bus beats old bus. Old lady on a tricycle with 3oo pounds of cardboard and her nearly dead husband riding on top to hold the ropes beat new bus.

Rules of the Road
I have a car. You don’t. I rule.

Arguing yourself into then out of a corner

I was walking home last night from work and passed a new billboard advertising a job bank. It used a word I started to see here, but one has crept into business jargon: the use of ‘talent’ to describe a professional; eg., “We are seeking a lot of talent”. I see it in recruiting brochures. I hear it in presentations. It irks me.

Mozart was a talent. Da Vinci was a talent. Cartier-Bresson was a talent. Proust was a talent. Stelan Skarsgaard is a talent (have you seen Zero Kelvin?). Someone with an MBA or an accounting or finance or economics degree or all of the above is not a talent.

It probably bled in from the performing arts. No doubt it started as marketing. Perhaps it’s a way to make people in number-crunching professions or some other humdrum and non-creative job feel that what they do is creative. (Please, there’s a qualitative difference, but that is a huge argument.) I wouldn’t quibble over saying that some are talented managers or financial advisors, meaning they have some innate ability or are particularly suited to a job, but that doesn’t mean the same thing.

Non-creative industry businesses that use ‘talent’ like that don’t want talent (and neither do a lot of the creative businesses, but that’s a big argument). Talents are independent. Perhaps not all are iconoclasts, but they are generally different from the norm. Businesses want malleable people who think freely within a strict set of guidelines and work well with others. They don’t want innovators, but people want to be innovators.

People want to be creative or recognized as such. It makes them feel special. The need for ‘talent’ contradicts the corporate drive for standardization in appearance and behaviour but fulfils some need to promise that whatever profession it is, however many hours it leaches, it will not extract a person’s essence. “Talent” promises individuality.

The word also denies for skilled professions what it does for artists, for whom it taken as the sole factor that goes into making art: thought, education, technique, and skill (though some art is very skilful but without talent and is maybe not art is another huge argument but related to the one in the previous paragraph). What’s wrong with the word “skilled” or “dedicated”? Is it that these words make work sound like ‘work’ and not ‘play’? Again, this is from the naive notion that “art” is not work; that is simply pours forth easily and without effort.

Maybe the word shouldn’t be used like that at all. An ex-girlfriend didn’t think so. She refused to use it. She could paint and draw, and sing and play instruments. She had perfect pitch, could play a scale on the violin within minutes of picking it up the first time (to the annoyance the violin’s owner), and not only identify if an instrument in a track was real or synthesized but also what synthesizer was used (this is back in DX-7 days). She was an example of talent, but she emphasized the need for work, skill, and practice.

I don’t go as far as her to invalidate the word, but I think she has a point. It is overused; it over-simplifies; and it discourages. Removing its power empowers. I tell writing students that good writing is a skill and that they can learn it. Talent is important, but not more than hard work. This means that talent is ubiquitous and not as special as we all hoped. Perhaps it’s why the everyday photographer can turn out exquisite photos because, generally, photography doesn’t require the work of other arts and automation takes away a lot of the skill. They aren’t going to turn out the elaborate stagings of a Wall or Witkin because those take work. It’s the drive and tenacity that make the difference. It’s the effort.

Now that it is in the hands of marketers and business leaders it will become the most awful of things – business jargon. Not that it will join horrible things like ‘impactful’ or ‘going forward’, but it will become meaningless. Maybe that’s why I hate the use so much: I hate to see words I like, words that mean something for me, become flotsam and jetsam. In this case, though, I think I have argued myself into believing it a good thing.

Hmmm…that was not my intent. How odd.

Looking for Mr. Write

Yesterday I was on the elevator when I saw a commercial for a shampoo. That’s not unusual.

The shampoo was called Slek. That is unusual.

It’s a good name for an expectorant, a vomit inducer, or a laxative, having that wet sound ending in a nice plop. It’s not a shampoo name.

Onomatopoeia is cultural, though (dogs here go wa wa, not bark or woof), and perhaps it’s a sonorous word in Chinese. Or perhaps they were looking for “slick” or “slik” and just got it wrong: short ‘e’ and ‘i’ are often confused (‘Windy’ is a common name, and it’s a delicate matter to explain why it might not be a good one). I could never use “Slek”, just as I would never use “Bawang[!]” (exclamation point mine) shampoo – not even if it is endorsed by Jackie Chan.

“Bawang” makes me laugh. I think of cartoons, of Bugs Bunny or Fritz the Cat. It’s the sound of a rubber mallet hitting a head or of a cat suddenly getting an erection walking down the street. I am afraid I would start laughing, slip on the soap, and be found in the most awkward and humiliating of positions – you don’t think Elvis’s last thought wasn’t that he was going to be found with his pants down his ankles and his fat ass seeping over the seat?

Perhaps in the search for avoiding words and acronyms that are offensive in other languages, marketers have overlooked euphony. Or all the good words are taken.

Froggie Went a Courtin’

I should have known.

Going to a restaurant called “The Frog Prince”, I should have known what to expect. Frog.

Lots and lots of frog.

The restaurant also had crab, but my friend couldn’t eat shellfish and had her heart set on fried and boiled soft-skinned amphibians.

I had recently eaten frog and a plate of some kind of skin, and this girded me for the arrival of the big bowl. Unfortunately the frogs came as do many kinds of meat here if it’s from small enough animals – whole. Get a chicken and it comes on a plate, sliced and spread out as if sunning itself, head, ass and all. I think it’s so you know it’s a chicken and not, say, processed crud. The frogs, likewise.

Markets in Taipei had prepared me, filled as they were with buckets of immense frogs, bigger than I had ever seen – bodies larger than the span of my hand. Remembering this did not, as might happen when thinking of a big, juicy steak, make my mouth water. I probably wouldn’t do so if I thought of the cow and not the product either. That’s the thing about the small critters: you can’t escape the food source: it’s not some piece of meat distant and removed; it’s a whole creature, warts and all.

Thankfully, they weren’t the big belchers, just medium sized things, skinned but otherwise seemingly whole. Eating was not a delicate matter. You lifted one up to your mouth, ass end first, yanked a leg off, sucked the meat off, and spat the bone out. They are pretty damn meaty and had legs the biggest steroid guzzling bodybuilders would be proud of. The front end was slightly different, having their useless T-Rex arms. But there was some kind of fried up pocket tucked up to where the missing head was. I don’t know what it was, and it’s best not to know when it tastes good.

I managed to strip quite a few little hoppers and they were quite mild – no, not like chicken. The broth was not; it was oily and spicy and nicely greased up my innards for the next few days. But good. Which is much more than I can say about the personnel. Service is not a strong suit with Chinese restaurants – except for Dong Bei Ren, which has staff that actually smile – but this was a new level.

The service reminded of the faerie tale nature of the title in that the woman behind the counter was the rudest and loudest restaurateur I have ever encountered, reminding me of the wicked stepmother from every Cinderella-like story. She was very toad-like, and perhaps ran the restaurant as some kind of vengeance against her more environmentally flexible brethren. Squat, with a jutting jaw and, I swear, huge warts, she had only one mode and that was shouting.

One couple came in and, I gather, ordered crab. A guy came up to their table a few minutes later holding a writhing crab. The waiter (?) showed the crab off, twisting it about, but the couple wasn’t happy. In most places, this is simple: get a different crab. But the waiter disputed the customer’s assessment or something. The volume quickly elevated and toad lady, hearing a commotion, joined in, easily out-bellowing all concerned – I swear I saw the wattles on her neck inflate. The couple left, the man saying something about toad ladies attitude.

That was the first time I had ever seen anyone leave a Chinese restaurant because of bad service. I thought it impossible. Indifference and rudeness are modes of being, so I have to imagine that toad lady started going on about the customer’s mother, ancestors, and sexual proclivities.

She had no off switch, no smarmy side of oozing charm, no telephone voice, no pleasantness. She was a boil on the arse of the world; one that continually sprayed puss over all. I wished that tipping was expected, because I think voting with cash is all the woman would understand; though I imagine she has such a blubber of bitterness built up that everything is the fault of others.

I think she runs on the blindness assumption: that when one thing goes, the other things magnify themselves to compensate, so she can be as rude as she is because people will therefore think the food must be fantastic, otherwise there’s no way the restaurant could remain open. Trouble is, the customers do too, and the Frog Prince or Prince of Frogs falls into that horrible little cauldron of restaurants in Asia, the famous ones, for which fame is the be all and end all. The Paris Hiltons of the food world. No one knows why they are famous but it’s a self-feeding and eating existence, like an animal which can exist by eating its own shit.

Everybody can be wrong, and the fame can be unwarranted anymore. Though, I guess, the Frog Prince could be entertaining as dinner theatre or some kind of performance piece.

One Big Petri Dish

Humidity is relative, but high humidity makes life generally unpleasant at the extreme ends of temperature. It does give you good skin, though. It’s a tough trade-off. I no longer have to deal with splitting skin and cracking hands in winter, but I have to deal with sweating in the shower in summer.

I also have to deal with mould.

On the soles of my shoes.

I just bought a printer and was reading stuff about the best ways to print and preserve. Keep the paper and photos in an environment between 60 to 70% and never frame the photos when the humidity is too high lest they stick to the glass. Judging by my shoes, the relative humidity is somewhere north of 70%.

I now have to decide between buying a cabinet to keep my photo gear in and buying a dehumidifier for the room where I store the stuff. I will eventually get both, though it might be easier to simply toss a whole ton of silicon over the floors, but I am afraid I might end up with that monster from Star Trek, the one that ate silicon and Spock had to mind meld with. And even though it was one of my favourite episodes – but almost never shown, probably because I don’t remember any scantily clad alien babes or Kirk exposing a baby-oiled chest – I don’t really want something like that in my apartment.

I’m not allowed pets.

But it’s a wet heat

When I moved to the Lair from Hong Kong I expected it be less humid. It made sense to me: no ocean or other large bodies of water nearby. My first dose of summer swelter last year proved me wrong. Guangzhou is not more humid than Cheung Chau, whose summer sop could turn you green if you sat in one place for too long, but it’s damn moist – like a steam room turning to a boil.

The summer is nigh and the air is saturated. It has been storming for the past week or so everyday, but it’s nice that the air isn’t hazy; it is actually foggy, the word that the government used to use to describe the schmutz that passed for atmosphere. Fluffy and puffy clouds and ebony storm clouds alternate. The air shudders and the rain pelts down. Then it clears up.

But the air is heavy. You can feel it. Clothes take forever to dry outside. If still had my long, curly hair it would be in dreads, the humidity coiling it tightly together. And it’s deceiving because the air seems clearer than normal. But it’s not.

On Saturday night, after another amazing jazz performance by Yannick Rieu, I walked out to cross the road and get a cab. I stopped on the footbridge to take some pictures and when I checked the results, the lights streaked out in the photo, sheared and bounced about by the moisture in the air. It was gorgeous.

I have been meaning to wander down in Zhuzhiang Xin Chi (New Pearl City), this Xanadu they are building here. Right now it’s a construction zone. Almost all of it, but the scale is deceiving from the office window. Not so on the street, where a line of dumptrucks waits to be filled in a few scoops from a shovel, and workers spray down the wheels to keep the dust down.

It’s a hopping place after midnight. Trucks are forbidden during the day, so at night they race down the sprawling empty streets, built for thousands of cars, but now home to a few stray dogs, workers returning home from a long day, and the odd photographer wandering around.

It was magic if, like me, you find industry beautiful. The frames wrapped in the green, and the yellow storks on top with kliegs, lighting it all up. It hasn’t been farmland for who knows how long. GZ is old so there is no point in mourning for parks and trees that probably haven’t existed for centuries. They are building a downtown at least double that of my hometown of Edmonton. In just over two leisurely hours I walked about a quarter of it.

Staggering, really, when I think of it on a scale I can identify. I am unfamiliar with projects on such a vast plane. From the empty streets you get an idea of it as you walk and walk and walk past fence after fence after fence around cavernous holes and mounds of worker’s shelters. You can get an idea of it in Manufacturing Landscapes, the documentary about Edward Burtynsky, the Canadian photographer who made an interesting book about the transformation of the land.

It’s centuries of change in the West done in a decade. Like watching time-lapse of a blooming flower – or a rotting corpse (if you like Peter Greenaway). All our sins condensed in a rush of grasping hands and running feet. In the sound of a shovel cutting the soil.