Local Insanity

In the usual style of a stream of consciousness I’m writing this immediately after watching Garden State (thanks Kip!), which I just saw was written, directed, and lead by Zach Braff! My guess as to how it’d go is that they’d end up apart either because a) she had some terminal illness (oh wait, that’s A Walk to Remember) or that they were just meant to be friends that changed each others’ lives by giving the other perspective (uh, oops. Lost in Translation). Actually they end up together in the end but in a way that feels real and leaves much of the usual cliché behind.

So some people use drugs prescribed by a doctor to change their mood (Zoloft is the new popular one, right?). Some use drugs not prescribed by a doctor. Some use alcohol to deal with things in their life that they either can’t or don’t know how to deal with. I use movies. And music. And I know I’m not alone in this. How many of the three of you have that favorite movie that you like to watch on a rainy day or when you’re feeling just a little down? The funny thing is that people know this but it’s really just a perspective shift, like the Necker Cube.

Favorite message from the movie: when he’s talking to his dad, he said that they should try just being okay that they are who they are. Fricin’ obvious, no? But we don’t do it. Oh perhaps you do, reader #3, but I know the others don’t. And I don’t. I have these Bose headphones which I just noticed have a pretty low rating on Amazon. I’m not an audio snob, but I bought them because I liked them when I tried them out and they were on sale at a Good Guy’s closing. I stopped when the right side’s plastic part broke, that is until I took some initiative and visited my local Wallgreen’s to buy some Krazy Glue - about a year later. I even managed to avoid gluing my fingers to my eyelid! I use them to listen to music and language lessons on BART, since my iPod headphones don’t block out enough sound to allow me to hear what I’m supposed to repeat back in Japanese to the people staring ahead on BART who can’t hear me anyway. As a consequence of this I take them off when I’m walking, but it’s too much trouble to put them away, so I put them around my neck, and I realized that I must look a bit like Rob in High Fidelity with my leather jacket and messenger bag.

But the thing is, it’s really a costume, and it feels like a costume. I’m playing the role of That Guy who wears headphones while walking around and has a tape deck at home and prefers vinyl to CDs and makes lists of his top five whatever a couple times a day. It’s amusing to me that people might envision this whole other fictional part of my life based solely on my wanting to carry headphones that actually block sound. When I was in Santa Barbara I biked to work, and I became an environmentalist - at least to other people. I’m just a cheap bastard who is afraid of buying anything that’d tie him down is really all it boils down to, but that’s not what others think. Do I recycle? Yeah. Did I go watch An Inconvenient Truth and get freaked out by it? Sure. But I’m not an environmentalist.

The other point I liked from the movie, which was similar to the first, is shared by Fight Club and many others, just phrased differently. In Garden State it was that it doesn’t make sense to break off relationships with people in order to work out your “issues”, whatever they might be (exceptions might be made for those with homicidal tendencies, but I digress) and that you’ve just gotta live your life and deal (Kip, you should be nodding your head about now). The way Brad Pitt put it in Fight Club was, “This is your pain. This is your burning hand. It’s right here.” The extent to which this was what I did with Sarah is unclear to me, but it played a part. For that I’m sorry (as if it matters, nearly a year later).

Movies also provide for me some sense of anchoring. When I first moved to Bakersfield and didn’t know anyone, just starting high school, Kelly and I would get home from school and watch Hook. We watched that movie so many times. When I first moved to Santa Barbara I did the same thing, just with a different set of movies. I’m doing it now, and in my rotation are Pride and Prejudice, Superman Returns, Lost in Translation, and newcomer The Illusionist and perhaps Clerks II.

As a developer, this is sort of a natural thing to have happened. I spend a lot of time on the computer, and watching these movies is something I can do while I work without distracting me too much. It’s like an IV. I suspect, however, that there are better drugs out there. I enjoy spending time with friends, there are just not enough of them in San Francisco yet. Zazen is another that I’m determined to try. Wandering aimlessly around the city has proven to be beneficial. Today I discovered Glen Canyon, which doesn’t quite have the view Bernal Hill does, but it’s a lot more green and pretty.

I’ll close this weird post with a question: if you dropped everything right now and went traveling, how long could you go? Would you stop because of financial reasons, or homesickness, or something else? My answer: about a year, stopping for financial reasons.

I saw Superman Returns yesterday at Camino Real. It was a good movie, and fairly different from the other superhero movies that have come out in the last few years. It’s trippy how much the actor looks like Christopher Reeve. What struck me most about the movie was that it did not appear to be aware that it was a movie that was going to be judged, discussed, dissected, etc - it wasn’t self-conscious.

The acting was all good, but not spectacular. I felt that Kevin Spacey’s talents were underused. There was a plot twist or two, but they weren’t set up to impress and they didn’t feel fake. Superman’s time spent as Clark Kent was, if not actually short, then seemingly short - this is a good thing. He’s such an uncertain chump.

The use of Superman’s powers was refreshingly realistic and didn’t feel overdone. The flying scenes were awesome, especially the opening scene with the plane and the scene high above the earth, listening to everything.

This is one of the few movies that’s actually worth the price of seeing in the theater.