So Wait 'Till Your Boat Goes Down - That's When You'll Need Me Most

I Found That Essence Rare

Do you believe in karma? I do - sometimes, or at least I think I do, and then I also believe that it's bullshit: my lingering superstitions derived from an early childhood haunted by some bolt-slinging Judeo-Christian Ted Nugent-lookalike hovering, a mind filled with vengeance, off beyond the cirrus somewhere. Perhaps my understanding of the concept is stunted and inaccurate, possibly malevolent. Or maybe I'm just wallowing in a nonspecific variety of plight - the idea of a fate-directed cosmic punishment does provide a handy excuse for one's own unadmirable inertia. Think hard enough, and all faults become justifiable.

Once upon a time, when I owned a pleasant and efficient Toyota, my housemate had taken his car in for some repairs, and - due to an eccentric and ever-shifting work schedule, I was unable to offer him transportation to work one day. Relegated to bus riding, I remember him later groaning forth the observation that "the ugliest people in the world are on that bus." At the time, I found this evocative supposition to be trenchant, very sharp indeed. I've been paying for my endorsement of the observation ever since.

Many months and a handful of sad strange years have come and gone; the beloved Toyota is apparently reverting to nature. I enjoy my daily worker-bee commute, which involves an hour or so on a combination of busses en route to my lucrative 40-hour engagement with post-global underemployment and ego-scarring downward mobility. There are many, many familiars on my daily sojourn - I spend roundabout half an hour waiting for an uptown transfer. The vibe out on the street is most definitely interesting - workers and learners, loafers and dopers, backslappy denizens of the benighted creative class, always on the go go go, off towards the success, bosses, concepts evolving into presentations, those things that make us all tick: keep your eye on that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, where the good shit is. This is awe-inspiring, of a vaguely anthropological interest to lower creatures like me.

And, in the great yin/yang of the street, there's also a vaguely pathological undertone free-floating, ever ready to coalesce and materialize with instantaneous precision: the tardy tears and a raspy hail of innovative profanities inspired by liquor shakes and ill-timed, midday pharmaceutical crashes may tickle the eardrums from a distance, an impatient soliloquy of vernacular elements molded into one great, rolling, amorphous, syllable. This occasionally will migrate closer, to a more intimate proximity, perhaps accompanied by a more tailored personal request - please bruh o'Lord, help me out with a quarter, 50 cents...my mama died in my arms and I gotta get a heart transplant... Gas station after gas station, banished to the dim periphery of our sparkling village, all haunted by lottery lovers and informal prostitutes and university toilet cleaners howling crack arias into sultry summer sundowns as hybrids and minivans coast smoothly past, each a self-contained world unto itself. I know these folks too - I see them on my afternoon peregrinations, waiting for my transfer, and sometimes they speak, or sometimes I do, and I would really rather not, as I am an incorrigible asshole, and there are worlds around which I'd rather not have as slices of my own world - my aspirations are oriented elsewhere, my habits are far less renegade - but they have jobs too: not allowing me to forget my place, which is on the goddamn bus, me and all the other brown-hued people of this town who rush off at all hours, doing battle with complex transportation systems, so as to spend our hours behind the till or in the golden, sultry sunshine keeping enviable enclaves spotless, well-nourished and smiling in the afterglow of neourbanist fantasias - healthy lads, happy dogs, left-wing Rockwell-isms.

This second leg of the expedition is a serious miracle of efficiency - eagle-eyed doctorals, a healthy-looking flock of them, flooding on at every stop, with meticulous arrival/departure rituals well memorized. The first part of my commute tends to be far more interesting, and far less orderly - I've learned to be out of my humble door early, very early. I start the day on the other bus - the one that's never on time, a slow ramble through that sprawl of the apartment complexes (barracks-style, with a few 1970s-vintage mock tudors and faux-chateaux thrown in for maximum architectural shock) relegated to the unaesthetic and thoroughly utilitarian expressways that skirt the edge of town. Day, night, rain, shine - a slow parade of all the people who'd very much like to be somewhere else, if they could afford it, not a ghetto in the most trad of definitions, but rather a vaguely somnambulistic procession of unfortunates of all varieties, my people each and every one: tirades, imaginary friends, lunchtime drunks, gibberish soliloquies, demonstrative highs, and languid, lugubrious lows. Every bus shelter is papered over with revealing fliers, all of them university studies seeking eager participants, some of whom will be duly compensated for their proud service to knowledge: men who have fathered children with multiple, unknown women, secret junkies, dads who blew rent on lottery tickets and a couple fifths of Orange Flavored Alcohol Beverage, still smoking and pregnant?, bad gums, maladjusted genatalia, rabies, dalliances with prostitutes, halitosis, mange, and every other known malady, abuse and affliction that poor people still manage to get stuck with. The language is kind, gentle, occasionally well-translated, in the most dispassionate of ways, for it is very true that no one really gives much of a shit. But the study of habits has its' benefits - isolate the subject, for however long it takes to craft some sort of dissertation, and the path to future tenure for someone out there has been handily secured.

Servant that I am, I cannot help but lapse into tantrums of judgementalism. Strive though I might for transcendent humanism, I have occasionally felt the obligation to say thank you to individuals who - a second earlier - might have explicitly called me a liar. All in a day's honest, respectable work. Unsurprisingly, warm feelings have become an exercise, like sit ups or cereals made from pseudograins - you know they're good for you, but there is that effort, that massive effort, herculean. Everywhere I look, I see an intricate cosmology of angst, so ubiquitous that it has lost any semblance of the personal. The semiotics of need - a universal accumulation of personal failures, crises, spectacles, ruts, ditches, disappointments, breath held, and no one (save for the alcoholic, homeless couple who spend drinky, drowsy afternoons riding from liquor store to liquor store) is relaxed. On that great slide to points beneath you, how on earth do you forgive yourself?

Every breath, an avenue of potential commerce: profit, loss, opportunity, debasement.

So Give Give Give Me More More More

Everybody's Got Nice Stuff But Me

So there's this great moment in the world of customer service: you're completing a transaction, and it's usually not an especially impressive one, when the guy in question - in a moment of grand, high theatre - snakes his arm around the credit card terminal, a fat shield of flesh manouvered to prevent your (that is to say, my) prying eyes from making the mental notation of his PIN number.

Dirty peon or not, I've been the victim of nefarious deeds digitally perpetrated upon my damn-near worthless plastic, so I can definitely understand the sentiment. But c'mon - thanks for the confirmation that we co-residents of The Most Progressive Town To Have Ever Existed (someone, somewhere, stand up for a pat on the back) have sunk to such an elaborate and theatrical level of callous assholism, as a raison d'etre. Those yard-mowing half-wit grocery-boy types, mouthbreathers, dumb as fuck; we're either the kind of people Randy Newman had in mind when he wrote "Roll With The Punches" ("Nice shoes little boy - can you tie them yourself?"), or perhaps the kind Dylan was really thinking of when he dreamt up "Idiot Wind" - it is indeed a wonder that we still know how to breathe.

Customer service was a snap choice - most likely a bad one, the way that most quick and unconsidered college decisions tend to be, calculated as a means to generating some extra spending money (this would be the 1980s, back when college students were from an economic sub-strata that might actually need or desire a side job for spending money). In retrospect, it was a real Faustian bargain, sell your soul kind of stuff. Once you drift over to the dark side, you're already - young and bright-eyed - moving down the path of turning into your job: you are stuck, this is you, and this is not impressive at all. "So...what do you do?" "Well, I ring up things for important people (an importance well-advertised, colossal, great brains, great projects, great greatness), and then I thank them as they slip away, muttering conference details into cell phones, power point, drafts, dots, motes, sketches of the concept, quadrilingual pre-school offsping (Ohayo gozaimasu. Dozo yoroshiku. Tomorrow, we start with Ni hao, wo shì David, and build from there.) in tow." I don't build things, design things, knock 'em dead on college radio, have subtitles streaming below me, or hold a doctorate in post-structuralist pataphysics; I make a petite amount of money, but not enough to count. A varietal of humility (not necessarily the most idealized one, which gets no real-time respect anyway) - it does give me something to work for - I have come to know, to bask in the amber glow of The Good Life, which is the carrot dangling before that tired, tired horse, at three or four above minimum wage, but there must be hope - onwards and upwards. Previous generations toiled until they died in stinking shacks in ratty sections of town without giving up, but hey - at the end of the day, a shack is a shack.

Another busy holiday comes, and then it goes - gotta love those holidays; they do have a phenomenal way of running you into the ground, which I do celebrate when payday rolls 'round - and I put my hours in through the majority of it - slow, sluggish days, followed by the sudden appearance of wave upon wave of the freshly tanned, all radiating health, a conspicuous lack of the kinds of minor gripes and grudges we lesser mortals tend to pass along to our own kind. This is the paid escape (a short, 3-day weekend, so this is a quick trip to the beach holiday, not a Christmas on the Mediterranean holiday), and I should be fair - I'll get mine soon enough, though I'll not be running off to anywhere - money's a little tight at the moment. Fair enough I suppose, for I am tired, and I am weary, and I could sleep four thousand years.

Downward mobility - what a fantastic (let's all ruminate, for a year ,or ten), axle-breaking pothole in the great freeway of progress we're all allegedly whizzing down. Put forth the idea to me as an 18-year-old; I would have sworn that you had completely, absolutely lost your mind. But I do also recall a flash of very unpleasant intuition, roundabout the age of 18: life is about to be no fun whatsoever. And what a ride it has been - precipitous vertigo drops, strange turns, weird phone calls, errors in judgement that never stop flashing back upon you - oh you will be reminded of those errors in judgement; for they are as strong as titanium - their staying power is phenomenal indeed. The love of simple being that I think I once wallowed in (windows cracked open, the smell of cut grass on a May afternoon as the distant sound of lawn mowers, and the more proximal jangle of Fables Of The Reconstruction merge into a crystalline Idlewild spring) is not often a presence in my day-to-day life now - every second awake has an edge, a hint of hysteria, something will stab through at any second, and turn your week into a fresh new catastrophe. Your lovers will fall quietly away - those soft 4 A.M. accents from Carolina East and West, Cochin or Chengdu are but a fading Fellini dream, a slippery screen kiss that slipped away into the sundown of a decade once lived. Your money will go - log in to the online account, your identity validated by the reassuring authority of technology - and you are now liberated to let your tears flow, anxiety reigns supreme, a spontaneous blizzard of autoimprovisational accounting. Your status - well, your status was a phony, arrogant delusion spawned in a secure upbringing, and your comeuppance will last a thousand years. Meanwhile - you will scramble and run, oh you will run hard my friend, straight into the ground, with the fat hand of fate ready to throw down another slap, just hard enough to get your tired ass running all over again.

I suppose this is very good for writing; there is no shortage of material, though I don't know if I'm able to properly evaluate it's quality (If you're a poor man, your standards must never, ever drop, and you must never, ever be half-assed about anything at all, at any time. Period.). Between legitimate work, and minutes and hours wasted on public transport (I once added up the hours, and multiplied those hours by my wage - we don't call them salaries anymore), I don't have much time on my hands, wedging in a second job is so necessary it's actually evolving into something of a fantasy - the erotics of employment, especially of a variety you don't feel compelled to apologize for. A notebook for the bus - I noted I was getting a lot of great reading done while shuffling from place to place, and it did occur to me that I could probably get a lot of writing done as well. I keep my modest pad close at hand - random moments of calm, strange breaks in the tension, and then the words wash over me, oceanic in vastness and greatness.

So, another afternoon's intrigues and insinuations ebb and lurch towards their logical conclusion. A brief esacpe from tiny armies of Sirk's bleak and lacquered matrons, neo-urbanist refugees questing for exquisite finger foods with French (sounding) names; the multi-lingual descendants, swaddled deep within German-engineered strollers, with flustered nannies walking amok have likewise been left behind. I flee to the loading dock for a quick moment of escape, sunshine. I note a trio of sparrows, co-conspirators creating pop for my ears only - lined up on the soaked and rust-flecked railing, shrouded by the lowering mist that has turned the afternoon into a living Japanese watercolor. The trio improvises, with an intuitive sense of elegant harmony, before flight into the pale skies.

Shinjuku Thief

You Were Born. So now you're free.

1. You Were Born. So Now You're Free.

Just the other day, I was able to enjoy a most unusual dessert. It became quickly apparent to me that this was no ordinary dessert - it had been prepared with great care and creativity. Unorthodox elements - yuzu and rosemary and sasparilla and tamarillo - had combined, in the hands of an exquisite craftsman, or craftswoman, to form this dessert. I inspected it closely, taking note of its' shape and specific gravity, hoping to discern the manner in which these elements combined to generate the unique attributes of this specific food item. The key to unlocking its' magical secrets was apple, a modest little chunk, very carefully sculpted into a geometric shape and mildly flavored with cinnamon; soon thereafter I was able to discern and identify each of the varied components that united in forming this delectable aggregate. Mesmerized, approriately, I left the house, so that I could purchase a second specimen, in order to study its' nature in an isolated, scientific fashion.

Later, my friend - who is something of an accomplished situationist - came over, and he unexpectedly consumed the second specimen as we listened to Henry Cow's Bittern Storm Over Ulm. He confessed that he's becoming frustrated with a project - he's unskilled at the art of delegation, and the varied underlings charged with combing through academic periodicals in search of strands he can weave into gold are instead devoting unfortunate amounts of time to sexually provocative websites. I informed him that the entire enterprise carried with it a seamy undertone of colonialism, reconfigured into a more professionally pleasing presentation. He snorted the expected disapprovals, and then a short time later, it began to rain, very heavily - an epic-scale deluge accompanied by lightning and small hailstones; a severe thunderstorm warning had been broadcast over NPR (on in an adjacent room), introduced by a strange, screeching tone, followed by a mechanized voice that had been treated with a reverb effect to accentuate its' metamorphic quality. Our conversation gradually turned in the direction of politics.

(photo by Takuya Miyamoto)

2. The Fecundity Of Life

The skyline has been thoroughly, effectively retrofitted, a sleek revision, with elements of travertine and chrome. The greatest manifestation of a town transformed - once, I would never be able to procure such finely crafted dessert, but today, we are so much more! We have grown, we have prospered, and life's rich pageant is a buffet, stretched towards infinity. We have our humble roots as provincials - meat, potatoes, soul food, misbegotten crustaceans yanked from nearby estuaries and boiled alive, with blended spices. But times have changed. People and places - nondescript no more.

Undesirables have been dispersed, nevermore to befoul the glass-smooth and buzzing boulevards, cast instead towards the ranchy suburbs, leafy lanes once the stuff of reassuring prime-time dramas, but now a millennial recasting introduces a more newsworthy quality: mall declines, seedy strips, grown-ups working fast-food, dented siding, a Camaro on blocks used as a closet annex, a lowering aura of shadiness. This atomization of the police blotter all-stars is but one face of a great civic project, shrouded in the celebratory. A new day is indeed dawning. Your ticket up is your ticket out.

As evolving provincials are wont to do, there is the usual shopping: the basket is filling swiftly, elements are on sale, alkali metals that spark to life after detuned soundchecks, noble gases whose integrity remains shaded behind the oaks of a campus green; elements lifted from the continent, and from the subcontinent, and from the dark continent. There's a great proliferation of boutiques, Provence à Piedmont - here the soundtrack is Pavement, there the soundtrack is Debussy; for every scene, there is a score. And as is true in every go-for-the-Oscar moment, that perfect, big score - configured with great precision - must never, ever startle or surprise.

Thus, my findings - as of yet - are inconclusive.

3. St. Cajetan

Let me tell you about the place I live. First, a room: the blinds are ancient, very old, rescued from a garbage pile somewhere. Ditto the carpet, a cheap apartment plush built in to the place, over the standard plywood sub-flooring. An oriental rug (an anachronistic term that somehow persists), a hand-me-down. Empty spaces - the former home of things sloughed off, victims of pressing needs to attend to the power bill, the water bill, or the general built-in costs that accompany living, walking around and breathing. Life is good.

And it truly is - there is the philosophy: less is more. Slough off the excess, the ephemera, the crap and clutter. To a profound degree, it is a philosophy of those who have something to give up in the first - you must be able to afford to let go. So here's what life has become - cavernous, the great chamber of emptiness. Taste is something I can no longer afford, after relinquishing a DVD collection (Italian, Japanese, Taiwanese, French, Mexican - a global tour of the great cinema that - in theory - remains a great passion; one would be hard pressed to find battered and beat copies of many of them in the local video shop, and I'm a few hundred miles off the retro-and-festival circut), and a CD collection (peaking at a genre-hopping several hundred, before collapsing back down to the five or ten no used shop would accept), I am left with books, unsellable as no one reads. Someone else out there, some entrepid shopper has the good fortune of lucking up on those obscure Bengali and Japanese DVDs that never found release in the United States. We've all worked for it, the right to consume, we've all put in our 40 hours, we all have earned the right. But the sand shifts beneath your feet, and what was mine is now yours forever. I have bare walls, dingy carpet, a 3-room apartment a block up the street from a whorehouse, and a rotting Toyota I can't afford to fix. Life is good.

On the daily hike to the bus stop - gotta get to work somehow - I took note of an interesting trend I've noticed before. At 6 A.M., it's especially pronounced. This would be the tendency of the local homeless population to spontaneously burst into splintered, fractured song. It's an impressive spectacle - impromptu performances of Rick James and Sly Stone (what message is being sent here), jazzed improvisationally with liberal doses of profanity and - from the one gentleman a block from the co-op grocery - non-specific threats of uninvited anal sex and breast abuse. Commuters, to work far more prestigious than I've managed to luck into (the use of one's mind and knowledge while working: what a novel, exotic concept!) whiz by, a blur of taillights streaking through the shifting chiaroscuro pastel dawn. The sound of strange, weird song echoes off the walls of non-descript nearby buildings. Perhaps it's folk music.

Days are rough things. Each one a struggle, a serious battle to not drown in the tide, washed away by the world itself. My eyes open, and I always wonder what exactly is going to hit me today? There's a daily rhythm of being slowly hammered into the ground; it never lets up. I look around and see everything that's gone. You are stripped down to the one final essential - the mind, restless mind, monkey mind, deconstructive mind. It's accounting prowess is incomparable - it never stops the endless, running tally of all that has been cast off, up, and away.

4. Ever Get The Feeling That You've Been Cheated?

Everything, as always, continues it's spiral. The rains begin. They were waiting for me - hail and phenomenal downdrafts and seismic convusions of thunder. Lightning - an impressive storm of it - doing its' dance; there is electricity around me, as always, it would seem. My very own trial by fire. The walk, as usual, goes on forever, and I slow down gradually, tired at the start of the day, worn down and run down already, blasted by the unsolicited harangue of nature itself. Lightning strikes again, very close, and I dart into a building, a big blockish monstrosity of 1960s architecture. Concrete and glass. The storm has knocked me into some place I do not recognize - I have no idea, and this building is vast - seas of cubicles that stretch on for miles it seems, long hallways with little windowless offices, little geometric caverns with glossy painted cinderblock walls. People dart about, papers in hand, distant murmurs, impromptu hallway conferences. I wander. I need help - within seconds, I will be late for work, and this will not be good. The deeper I travel into this building, the less certain of anything I'm becoming.

Still soaking from the storm, which howls and rages apocalyptically outside, I take a tiny eternity to make my way down yet another hallway. I peer into the open door of a randomly chosen office. An immaculately dressed Asian woman sits behind an L-shaped desk, hypnotized before a flat-screen monitor; occasionally she keys a figure into a spreadsheet. I stand, soaked, at the doorway for several seconds, the twin sounds of her typing and the random, periodic crashes and gusts accompanying the storm, which has lost none of its ferocity. "Ma'am, excuse me. I have somehow gotten lost, and I'm very sorry to interrupt, but I was wondering if you could direct me back to the front of the building." She casts a suspicious, inspecting glance in my direction. "I was on my way to work, I walk - and I ran in when the storm hit, and I'm still not precisely sure how I ended up here."

She saves the vast document filling her monitor and slowly turns in her office chair. She slowly crosses her hands and sighs. "I see. Give me one second, and I can lead you back out. For the moment, please have a seat." The office is desolate in its' plainness - the scattering of personal effects on the desk stand out in extreme relief. I slowly scan them all - a ceramic candy dish, nearly empty, with the generic logo of some random tourist destination. A photo of her and her husband, in the driveway of a rather large house. A handful of novelty post cards, simulated pop art scenes with mildly idiosyncratic messages worked into the design, cartoon-style. A coffee mug, with the logo of a mjor comupter company on one side. The cup is full, steaming, I can smell the coffee. "Where might I locate some of that coffee?" Another sigh. "Out the door, turn right. Left at first hallway, then two doors down, on the right. Look - I can lead you out, but I might be a few minutes. Just warning you in advance." I don't have a tremendous amount of choice in this matter, so I stand, and follow here directions, in dire need of fresh coffee. I call work en route, to let them know that I will be late, which I'm sure they've already figured out.

After a melodramatic conversatiion, filled with additional sighs, along with vague warnings to the general effect of "You are aware that David will be in today, right? This is not a good day for you to be running behind schedule - we got a business to run here after all," I find a clean mug (there's a character from an infant's television show emblazoned across the front - colorful creatures that dance and ululate incomprehensibles in an emotive fashion), thow in a quick shot of sugar and fill the mug with the not-exactly fresh coffee remaining in a dingy, globulent carafe. It has that slightly singed taste unique to old coffee, a taste that lets you know that this beverage will turn you into a nervous wreck in absolutely no time, but somehow, you're gonna drink it anyway. I slowly make my way back to the woman's office.

The spreadsheet is gone, replaced by some document filled with tiny print. She's scanning vaguely while conferring on the phone with what sounds to be a multitude of colleagues, some of whom are apparently located on different continents. Another crash from the storm outside. I stand and begin to survey the grey steel shelves at one end of the office. Mostly technical manuals, mixed in with a smattering of

By all means, have a nice day, and do please let me know if I can help you with anything.

People Getting Divorced

Someone Left The Cake Out In The Rain

I don't know the precise title of the poem, or the precise year in which it was written, but there's an old piece by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, which opens with the following words: People getting divorced / driving around with their things in their car...

My first encounter with Mr. Ferlinghetti was highly unanticipated - in my lowly high school, located in a suburb of Charlotte, the library included a handful of examples of beat writing: a general anthology, and two of Ferlinghetti's collections. This was quite the discovery - at the time, a nefarious 11th grade English teacher (anachronisms like schoolmarm and spinster lady would be perfectly approriate for this wiry and severe woman) was lobbing dreadful Victorians into an unenthused audience (myself included) of Breakfast Club contemporaries.

Roundabout what felt like the thousandth week of assorted Brontes and moors and cloaked ciphers named Heathcliff, the fundamental joy of reading was spiralling into its' death throes. I wandered through the library foremost because I was a nerd, and the library was quite the sanctuary, where my outré, green-haired friends and I could commiserate freely without suffering the unwanted intrusions of chain-smoking juveniles with disabling fixations on shop class and Molly Hatchet's Greatest Hits.

But after a certain point in time, Steven King's latest just wasn't managing to carry the same old expected appeal. In wandering about the library, I'd taken to reading record guides (a crash course in essential obscurities to search for after school, careening with the aforementioned green-haired no-gooders back and forth across sprawly Charlotte, pinging from one deeply strange, hole-in-the-wall record shop to another), and film guides as well. Then, after an assault of poetry - late-Victorian, of course - an angry reaction, response to the insinuation that poetry had presumably died a horrendous death at a point in some proximity to (a) the Harlem renaissance, or (b) the 1929 stock market crash - I set upon a silent, undeclared quest to find decent poetry which might be marginally closer to contemporary life than runes, glyphs and windswept moors. The discovery of Ferlinghetti came about very soon afterwards.

People getting divorced remains vividly in mind - more than perhaps any of Mr. Ferlighetti's many artful creations. Those opening lines - an absurd mix of freedom and dread, gloom and glory, liberation and lugubrious afternoons with lawyers - contain infinite contradictions, ironies - these are words with adamantine detail and precision, and I was keenly interested in their suggestiveness. There is a cinematic image, a certain great departure from Mr. Ferlighetti's probable intentions which immediately occurred to me, and I've never forgotten it: this image of exceptionally cool, affluent thirtysomethings - very hip, in the tackiest of possible ways: the kind of folks who seek out Eurotrash wives, blow 60 grand on chintzy decor, and then forget to turn off Wheel Of Fortune while screwing - in a mechanized fashion utterly undeserving of gentler, more euphemistic language.

And so - this paragon, this studio-tanned example of a great, groovy new class of cool - cooler than you, or I - is suddenly freed; flying down the 8-lane 101 southbound through Silicon Valley in a convertible European sports car, motorik autobahn fantasies freely and perhaps sensually indulged, a recently discovered, youngish lover - the kind of potentially expensive ladyfriend once referred to in a hit Randy Newman song as a "big nasty redhead" at his side, a stray wet kiss after a sly joke and shifted gears. And he is gliding, all speed and style, swiftly away from a cabernet Calistoga weekend (chatty, cokey, cosmopolitan as the slow fingertip caresses of languid, transluscent summer sunsets give way to the chill of a California night's suggestive multiplicity of options), tires' sigh soft harmonics on flat, anthracite-dark asphalt - the fault-cleaved Santa Cruz range a low and fading silhouette to the right - past million dollar split-levels and nubby ranchettes nestled in tinderbox eucalyptus groves, the white-on-emerald sign for the matter-of-fact (yet vaguely triumphant-sounding) Semiconductor Boulevard hovering above industrial park rooftops on the left. Onward and farther south still, towards the prinicpality of Mountain View, the brain trusts of Menlo Park and Palo Alto, with the valley-filling sprawl of San Jose spreading beyond them beneath onyx skies, a glorious August eve in the Golden State, illuminated by the pink-white eclipse light of buzzing iodine street lamps, the fading heat of sunshine radiating from pavements and freeways into the evening's languid tectonics. Those constraints of marriage - a God-given legalism, now besmirched by popular culture and the unshackling of bra-burners and cocksuckers and miscellaneous other shacker-uppers - have eroded and slowly morphed into calibrated arrangements, subsidiary clauses, negotiated rights of first refusal. But no bother - our golden protagonist is free, fabulous and forty: wind in the hair, jingle-jangly pocket change (plus a fat little brown-tipped roach) in the ashtray, ammonia-scented blueprints of Le Corbusier's worst nightmare still rolled and rubber banded in the back seat. The aftershave, the wallet, the shoes, the seamless and enveloping production job of The Long Run (all the debutantes in Houston, baby, couldn't hold a candle to the plastic surgery disaster that is you) rising from discreetly nestled speakers - all coalsece within this remarkable and handsome vehicle to form a definitive, absolute atmosphere. Aglow, and the great love of the world swoons, coasts and glides into the infinity of darkened skies speckled with a million worlds awaiting their conquest.

Within the temperate embrace of a West Coast dry season, we have arrived at what it's all about - we all know what it is (whatever we would like for it to be). This is ambient, in the extreme - an artificial atmosphere, zero-gravity, liberation, with our fundaments of oxygen and nitrogen transformed, oxidized into a phenomenal cumulus of dollars, simulacra become the almighty himself, rising and floating with you, upwards and free. Breathe deeply, comrades and co-conspirators. Make a wish, make two or three or eight - that sweet honey sunshine will never, ever end.

Eddie Money

I Think I'm In Love. Cuz I Can't Get Enough.

So...I think all families have - by definition - a certain nebulous aspect: the outer limits are vague, and there are always mysterious step-aunts and proto-cousins a couple counties away, or in nominally familiar-sounding cities (Joliet? Las Cruces? Muncie?) in states unseen. They may or may not pop up at the occasional family reunion, or as some unannounced Thanksgiving surprise shrouded in sighs, whispers and the sort of ethereal intrigues delicately deflected from the ears of the youngest attendants (who develop - at a surprisingly early age - an uncanny knack for seeing through such machinations, without letting on that they do). The precise nature of the relationship is vague, held at a discreet distance, and the nature of that distance is likeley less grand than potentially grim. And as a child, it is expected that you will assume and understand - via some mysterious process of geneological osmosis - how this obscure familiar fits into the intricate and highly local scheme of things, and that you'll refrain from asking the sorts of questions that might cause the delicately finessed social dynamics of a simple holiday dinner to crack, craze or crystallize into a melancholy, spontaneous epidemic of malevolent bad vibes.

I had one of those vague variety of aunts, named Carrie, who passed away after years of declining health about 20 years ago. She lived in a semi-frightening and generally unmaintained housing project in Southwest Charlotte, and my mom and varied other relatives would drop by her barracks-style abode to take her shopping or to the doctor, offer some company, or otherwise assist.

So, one volcanically hot July afternoon my mom and I have dropped by to take Aunt Carrie to a doctor's appointment, and we'd gotten her cable TV - she loved her soap operas, and she was passionately riveted to the local newscasts that rarely informed as often as they frightened or titillated. As my mom is helping to get her ready, I'm in the front room flipping channels in wild quest for something, anything interesting, and I stumble across a great, yet heretofore uncommented-upon moment in rock history: Eddie Money's hit single (not especially well-remembered at this late date) I Think I'm In Love, in heavy rotation at the time on MTV. Eddie's being very impressive, bridge-and-tunnel rock at it's most strident, hookline drilled deep into the subconscious - and he's gyrating like a big, hairy, discombobulated mesocyclone looming over Kansas (perhaps the tropical-storm-force breeze, calibrated to tangle his coif in time to the song's rhythm, is forcing him to jiggle around like that), whilst filling us in on his urgent, heartfelt romantic proclivities. At some point during the middle of this calisthenic spectacle my Aunt Carrie, at last ready for her close-up, strolls a rickety old lady kind of stroll out into the living room. She stops suddenly and watches, mesmerized for all of about three seconds, before slowly pointing at the TV and laughing one of those quick, sudden and unexpected kind of laughs (gaspy and loud), exclaiming That man...is a fooool. And then she shook her head, and laughed quietly to herself most of the distance out to the car.

And with this nonchalant assessment, I shut of the TV, and held the door for Carrie, as we ventured off for an afternoon's adventures in the modern health care industry.

Satyajit Ray: Nayak

Nayak: Satyajit Ray and the demystification of celebrity
(India, 1965)

Nayak, which has recently received its' first ever DVD release in the United States, remains one of the more stylistically more daring entries in the long and fascinating cinematic career of Satyajit Ray. It isn't quite the knockout that some of his other films are, but it remains one of his more obscure works (unfortunately) to Western film aficionados, and there are more than enough intriguing experiments going on here to make it worth seeing.

At a basic level, Nayak presents a character study, of matinee idol Arindam Mukherjee (Bengali star Uttam Kumar) as he travels by train from Calcutta to Delhi. The casting choice of Kumar was a brilliant move on the part of Ray, who was interested in creating a film that would focus less upon a star's star-power, and more on a star's inner world. Ray was known for literary and intricate dramas, which were the antithesis of the sorts of more conventional films that Kumar had become known for, and Kumar's revelatory performance is an unexpected display of theatrical prowess, with great psychological implications revealed through drama, but also through the slightest of gestures or expressions.

Kumar is paired here with Sharmila Tagore. Tagore - along with Soumitra Chatterjee - appeared in many of Ray's films, and this is one of her finest performances; among other qualities, her character offers an image of a very specific sort of 60s cool, a stylishness that could perhaps rival that of Jean Seberg in Godard's Breathless. This noted, her character here - an initially reluctant journalist who approaches Mukherjee in a dining car for an interview - is predominantly striking for more cerebral qualities: her tough confidence, her independence and her persistence.

The interview and conversation between the two rapidly shifts away from expected star-meets-paparazzi territory into something more psychologically intrepid, with hopes and fears and any number of personal anxieties delved into. Ray's decision to build a narrative out of the unguarded moments of two individuals who would normally (for personal and professional reasons) be considerably less open is ambitious - a certain amount of 'demystification of celebrity' goes on, and I would guess that it had to make for difficult filming: how to cinematically visualize a story built entirely upon inner moments? Ray elects for a nonlinear approach, with an abundance of flashbacks, and a spectacular and surreal dream sequence (centered around Mukherjee's greatest fears). This approach is a bit disjointed, and the film has a certain difficulty in sustaining it's rhythm, but the film is also always visually very inventive and interesting, affording Ray the opportunity to delve into a variety of new-wave influences, which lends the film a brisk stylishness.

Gaining a first-ever official home video release in the US, one would hope that this portends further releases - Ray's most famous films have gone out of print in the US, and a handful of Ray's finest films - Kanchenjungha, the sublime Days And Nights In The Forest, and the magical Adventures Of Goopy And Bagha have never made an appearance on DVD in the US. As another of his key works, it's great to see Nayak finally getting a long-overdue release.

Nagisa Oshima: Death By Hanging

Nagisa Oshima: Race, Identity, Crime, Punishment, Guilt, Innocence & Gallows Humor

(Japan, 1968)

Japan's galvanizing film theorist and all-around enfant terrible of cinema directed Koshikei, internationally known as Death By Hanging in 1968. This would be the second film in a dramatic comeback and creative upswing that also included Diary Of A Shinjuku Thief, The Man Who Left His Will On Film, Ceremony and Boy, and climaxed with the legendary and controversial In The Realm Of The Senses (Ai No Corrida) in 1976.

Oshima was initially trained as a lawyer, and upon finishing law school, he drifted into radical left activism, initially connected to the anti-nuclear protests that erupted in Japan in the early 1950s. Later in the decade, he managed to find entry level work for Shochiku studios, and in spite of his regular claims of utter disinterest in cinema, he began moonlighting as a film critic and quickly gained a reputation for deconstructive and socially relevant readings of contemporary film. By 1959, not yet 30 years of age, he was already directing.

His initial offerings were lumped into a 'Japanese new wave' - a description dreamed up by studios as a marketing term; in the face of sinking ticket sales, studios were hoping to co-opt and cash in on the then-developing French new wave. Oshima, however, seemed to take the idea to heart - in spirit, he was an analytical provocateur in the fashion of Godard, and he quickly set about crafting similarly rigorous and inventive films: Town Of Love And Hate, Cruel Story Of Youth, The Burial Of The Sun, and Night And Fog In Japan all appeared within 2 years, and featured the same kinds of wild stylistic and structural experiments (and previously unmentionable kinds of social criticism) seen in the finest of the new European films.

Studio response to the inflammatory Night And Fog In Japan had a disruptive effect upon Oshima's career - ejected from the studio system, he continued to work, but his films became less certain in their messages and ideas, and he operated at a greatly diminished profile. The outwardly unfocused films he made during this period can, nonetheless, be read as test runs for the spectacular creations he would offer later in the decade.

Beginning with the dizzying Violence At Noon (in 1966), Oshima embarked upon a dramatic comeback. His films had intuitively evolved into complex discursive dramas, laden with overlapping themes which often upset the traditional verities of a newly-affluent society, but were striking in their inventive and unexpected eloquence. A great many filmmakers have been willing to extract mesmerizing drama from socially difficult ideas, but - in the hands of Oshima, this conceit was increasingly held together by an organization of thought that was airtight, challenging and wildly original. And fresh from the striking resurgence seen in that film, Oshima expanded his palette, with Death By Hanging taking on issues - that, while superficially rooted in Japanese specifics - engage aggressively with controversial issues of global relevance.

Death By Hanging begins and ends as a faux-documentary, opening in an execution chamber; we are to view the hanging of a condemned man (introduced as "'R' - A Korean"), after his conviction for a rape and murder. The attempted execution goes awry; R survives unscathed, but for one aftereffect: he's been rendered amnesiac, obliterating both his memory, and his sense of identity. The film begins a slow spiral away from faux-reality, into something far less categorizable (Brecht and Kafka both surface as comparisons in many published assessments of this film): as identity, and classical definitions of guilt, innocence, crime and punishment all begin to splinter, the film shifts into a wildly stylized mix of philosophy, social observation, avant theatrics and ruthless comedy. If the mind of a guilty man is wiped clean, and he's left with no concept of his own guilt (whether acknowledged or contested), is he guilty? Would the execution of such a man remain punitive, or would it become state-sponsored murder? In such a scenario, what ethical constructs would absolve jailers of guilt in the murder of a murderer (who may not be a murderer - this is left unresolved) who isn't aware of his status, role or identity?

Rather than play this as didactic melodrama, Oshima opts for a riskier tactic - as the film slowly, systematically moves towards elaborate anti-realism, the film also gradually becomes far funnier - a ruthless, deadly humor in which the punch lines are built upon social conventions which are widely accepted in an unquestioning fashion, for the questioning of them would swiftly lead to great moral discomfort. R's captors set about a course of attempting to jog his memory through a theatricalized, imaginative impromptu re-creation of the crimes for which he was convicted. This rough and raw performance fails to achieve the intended effect, and in response, the prison guards resort to ever-more surreal extremes in performance, with the 'guilty' man viewing, as something of a makeshift theater critic and voyeur, as the performance slowly morphs into something more avant-garde, ever more sexually and racially shattering.

As R's awareness of his own criminality has vanished, so has his ethnic or racial status as a member of a minority (Korean) group which has historically been segregated, allotted the most lowly employment, or has otherwise been discriminated against. The film's humor first erupts into the open as prison guards attempt a fumbling explanation (to a genuinely befuddled man) of his minority - and therefore inherently racially inferior status (and the relative disposability to society inherent in such a status). R's response is utter incomprehension, which in a tour-de-force moment of performance, arrives with both the kick of the most trenchant of post-civil-rights critiques of social relations, and the timing of truly stunning comedy. This devastating moment questions - as noted by critic Maureen Turin (the idea of mutable aspects of identity also figures prominently in some of the writings of Jacques Derrida) - and challenges the notion of a fixed identity - and, thus, any possible rationale for societal bigotry, and sets the tone for much that follows.

From here on, the re-enactment sinks into film-within-a-film, and film-within-that-film, in a brilliant, chambered structure that shifts - through very tightly constructed discourse and theatrics that modulate between these many overlapping themes into an engaging, architectural labyrinth of subverted logic and heightened drama. The death chamber suddenly transforms into an (imagined) childhood home, and the theatrics peak with R observing as his captors attempt to imagine, and then improvise, the social rigors of his childhood; it is assumed that - as a despised minority - he must, by default, have experienced a torment-filled childhood. Simulations of alcoholism, domestic violence and child neglect are enacted within the walls of this newspaper and cardboard shanty hastily assembled within the confines of the execution chamber. This is presided over by a priest - since R is a Korean, it is assumed by the guards, but not investigated, that he is a Korean Catholic. R occasionally, dispassionately, critiques their performance and sense of set design.

As we move towards this point within the film, Oshima's early faux-documentary tendency gradually dissolves into, first, a lean and heavily symbolic visual sense, with confining lines, claustrophobic spaces and oblique rising sun and noose images, along with occasional visual allusions to Catholicism. Shot in black and white, Oshima's sense of visual composition is - at first - stark and uncluttered, with both the opening and closing scenes notable for a deliberately clinical sleekness; throughout Oshima avoids fluorishes like fades and dissolves in favor of simple cuts, and occasional new wave touches. Moving into the more theatrical heart of the film, the camera becomes more mobile and fluid, seen to fine effect during the childhood re-creation scene, and a later scene which re-establishes R's identity. Here, shot lengths lengthen, as sets slowly become mobile and Oshima's systematic undermining of perspective, identity and social logic becomes complete.

Oshima's long run of mid-60s to mid-70s films are, for the time being, extremely difficult to see outside of Japan, where several lavish box sets have recently been released. This is highly unfortunate - a number of participants in the global cinematic new wave (including the Japanese one) became known for ethereal experiments longer on style than substance; both inventive and virtuostic in craft, Oshima's work surpasses that of many of his better-known contemporaries. Death By Hanging may well be one of the greatest films of the 1960s to have been seen by very, very few people. Should the opportunity to see it arise, it shouldn't be missed.