Grizzly Maze

I watched "Grizzly Man" on Saturday night, it was a hair-raising movie. Lots of interesting footage of bears lumbering around looking like disgraced television wrestlers scrounging for a bite to eat. They remind me of gorillas. I'd recommend it to anyone, director Werner Herzog (in black and white promo photo) always delivers the goods, but it did not make me like bears.

I have had recurring bad dreams about bears for years, I just had one last week. After seeing this film I am convinced that, although many forms of death are equally bad, there is nothing worse than being eaten alive by a bear.

I was glad that the audio recording of wildlife preservationist Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend being mauled to death wasn't played in the movie, and I was glad that Werner Herzog's face was turned away from the camera as he listened to it on headphones.

There is also a lot of entertaining footage of foxes in the film. Like dogs, foxes are also man's best friend, and they seem to provide much more reasonable companionship.

methadone stain

I'm trying to cut down on my caffeine intake, using Mountain Dew as a kind of methadone substitute for the usual uncut coffee. Put some in a thermos this morning, brought it to work in my gym bag. When I arrived the thermos was hissing and spitting (from the carbonation). Thought it was funny at the time; drank down my morning Mountain Dew without much difficulty.

I was changing my clothes at the gym and noticed a big, circular Mountain Dew stain on my shorts, definitely not in a conceivably natural perspiration pattern. I put my clothes right back on and went back to work. I was afraid that I would have felt humiliated if I had worn those shorts.

To make matters worse, Nicole is threatening to not fly to San Diego tonight if she doesn't feel better from the flu by this afternoon. She went to McDonald's with her pal Julianna on Wednesday and I know that's where she caught the flu. McDonald's is nearly the most unhealthy place ever, with the combination of the food and the type of customer who goes there. I mean the other customers.

I don't have any new Netflix to watch tonight, nothing fun to do besides play the Dairy Farm game on the computer, I'm almost freakin' out. If something good doesn't happen to me soon I'll probably drink straight coffee for breakfast tomorrow instead of Mountain Dew, I can almost guarantee it.

Exploitation Video

After posting this photo a week ago (Friday, January 20, 2006) I received the following message from someone I'll identify only by the initials J. Flo. :

"...you've got to take that picture of you in the vestlooking (sic) like a caveman off your blog immediately..disturbing and uncomfortable viewing.. I don'tnormally (sic) advocate censorship of any kind, but Iimplore (sic) you.."

I don't think the original photo was so troubling, especially when compared with my answer to the request. I've slightly blurred the image and added some static. Rather than soften the image, however, I think these effects make it more upsetting. To me it looks like a frame from one of those brutish, camcorder-shot exploitation videos from the internet (we've all seen them). One wants to shout, "Hey, where are the clown midgets and the dog collars?"

Mann's Chinese Theater

Saturday I went to see "The New World" at Mann's Chinese Theater with John Florendo and Amy Cheng (né Florendo). It was fun. The last time John and I were there with Amy was in 1997 to see the re-release of the original "Star Wars". Another memorable movie experience at Mann's Chinese Theater was to see "Se7en" - I was squirming away throughout the movie. It was still spooky walking down to the mens' room on Saturday.

"The New World" was very good, I'd recommend it to anyone. I was sure that I recognized one of my favorite actors in it, Noah Taylor (from "The Year My Voice Broke") and I was right, he had a small role. I'd read in history books about the dorky settlers looking for gold when they ought to have been planting crops, but I'd never seen it depicted in a movie. Yes, life was hard in prehistoric Virginia, but the Indians helped them. Then the Indians became violent against the settlers until more ships arrived and the Indians "sued for peace". Indian maiden Pocahontas was cute and Colin Farrell's armor was cool (if not completely effective against the Indian war hammer).

The Red Tsar

Somebody nice gave this book to me for Christmas and I am thoroughly fascinated by it. Hark:

"He was a self-creation. A man who invents his name, birthday, nationality, education and his entire past, in order to change history and play the role of leader, is likely to end up in a mental institution, unless he embraces, by will, luck and skill, the movement and the moment that can overturn the natural order of things."

In addition, my Russian classes begin again today. I am taking my 3rd semester of Russian language and my 2nd semester of Russian conversation. It's possible that I am spread too thin this Spring, we'll see.

Dairy Adventure

On my October trip to Illinois I got nephew Jarod a toddler's "John Deere" cup/bowl/plate set for his birthday. Jim and Janet may have been making of sport of me when they gave me the "John Deere North American Farmer" computer game for Christmas. Nevertheless I am enjoying it very much. In fact, I am semi-addicted.

There are a number of farmlife scenarios to choose from, and the first one I chose to play was a dairy farm adventure. I have been saving the game I've been playing under the title "Milk the cows for milk"; a close associate commented, "What else would you milk the cows for? Pleasure?"

One begins the game with a certain amount of spending money available. The first things I purchased were a trailer to live in and a hot tub. Soon my "cousin Jill" came to live with me in the trailer. I noticed that one can track Jill's whereabouts on the farm at any time, follow her movements and activities without her awareness.

After failed attempts to figure out how to milk the cows (and after one had died), I discovered that I had neglected to buy any dairy equipment. I bought some but I am now several hundred thousand dollars in debt and I can't seem to find Jill anywhere on the dairy farm.

"Law Don't Go Here"

Upon purchasing my new cowboy vest in Tombstone, I remarked to someone, "You know, there's no sight more ghastly than a barechested man wearing a leather vest. Only a scofflaw or a sort of unruly cave person would dress that way." To demonstrate this fact I put on the vest and tried to pose in the manner of such a person. (note: see update Friday, January 27, 2006)

Soviet Hair

It may be that an inordinate amount of space on this blog concerns the way that I look at any given moment. Nevertheless, the other day in the Arizona Territories, I was making some sort of comment about my hair.

N. said, "Your hair looks normal, but then you keep running your hands through it and it gets all Trotskied-out."

"What the devil do you mean?" I asked. She showed me this photo of young Leon Trotsky. I've got to say that this visage does look familiar to me.

The Town Too Tough to Die!

Here are some snapshots of last weekend's trip to Tombstone, AT. Tombstone has historically been called "the town that is too tough to die" because it has survived for so long despite disastrous fires and having its mining industry completely wiped out by flooding. It is now a thriving tourism town.

As can be seen in the first picture, tours of the town via stagecoach are readily available. The horses are magnificent animals and there isn't a lot of crap in the street, very clean little town.

Nicole and I had lunch at Big Nose Kate's Saloon. Big Nose Kate was Doc Holliday's lady friend, played by Isabella Rossellini in the film "Wyatt Earp" and by Joanna Pacula in "Tombstone", The film "Tombstone" is the preferred movie version of the town's history, the locals are mad for it; "Tombstone" paraphernalia is as plentiful in town as gold and silver was in King Solomon's Israel. I haven't seen a single reference to John Ford's "My Darling Clementine" in Tombstone, possibly because it was filmed mostly in Utah. Anyway, we had a filling lunch at Big Nose Kate's and enjoyed the live performances of the thankless musicians (maybe townfolk were too rough-hewn to applaud in the old west?).

Back in the day The Tombstone Epitaph was the town's newspaper. It was run by John Clum who was a good pal of Wyatt Earp. Nowadays the Tombstone Epitaph is run by the University of Arizona Department of Journalism. Tourist folk can go inside and look around at the old time machine exhibits. Under the title of the newspaper you can read the remark "No Tombstone Is Complete Without Its Epitaph".

The highlight of Tombstone (for me) is "Tombstone's Historama", narrated by Vincent Price of all people (not that I'm complaining). The Historama is a little theater that features a performance by a rotating diorama of the town of Tombstone and a video screen that periodically drops down. Vincent Price tells us the history of Tombstone as we watch film reenactments (resembling Disney movies of the early sixties) or while spotlights take turns illumining various miniature scenes on the diorama. The cost of admission is somewhere between $5 and $8, but if you're like me you'll think that this is a small price to pay for such entertainment (especially if someone else is kindly treating you).

Our last stop in Tombstone was at the City Park. On our previous visit to Tombstone, I asked Nicole to wait for me at a picnic table while I took care of some business in the public restroom. I emerged only moments later and saw a vagrant man asking Nicole if she would like to give him a "personality test". I approached jovially and the vagrant man was bizarrely apologetic, expressing to me with guilt that he hadn't meant to bother my lady. I smiled and said to him "Oh, I'm sure she didn't mind." I gave him a kindly nod and lead Nicole away. Within hearing distance of the vagrant man I snarled at Nicole, "I thought I told you not to talk to anybody!!" I couldn't find the vagrant man on this visit but I asked N. to pose as if she was being asked to give a personality test to a stranger; I think she looks a little too comfortable.

On my next visit to Tombstone I want to see The O.K. Corral, Boot Hill Graveyard, and the Bird Cage Theatre.

Tombstone Sweeney

For Christmas my gal give me a gift certificate to the western wear store in Tombstone, AT. I saw this here vest and thought to myself, "Surely this is my new look. Yep." Can a cowboy hat be far behind? It is a powerful image.

Hellectreek Leduhlend

Speaking of music, I just turned on the Russian internet talk radio station "Echo of Moscow". Very disorienting for a beginner until you pick up the flow of conversation. Had no idea what the topic was until they started talking about "Dzhon Layneen", "Meesh Meeshell", "Dzheemee Khendreekh" and "Hellectreek Leduhlend". What wonders lie ahead...

Salad Days

I just watched a compilation DVD of three Minor Threat performances called "Minor Threat - Live". The first one from December 1980 was my favorite, and only twelve minutes long; it was their second show ever and young Ian MacKaye even had hair. The poor quality of the black and white video gives the show a very dreamlike atmosphere, especially if you watch it in the dark. It's bizarre to see girls darting around at the show with long hair and it enhances the dreamlike effect.

The video quality improves with the next two shows, one from 1982 and the last one from 1983 just before they split up for good. As far as content goes, these shows, and the interview with Ian MacKaye, seem like they could have been videotaped this morning. I wish my head was shaped differently so I could shave my hair off too.

Scream like a Buffalo

Unlike many folk, I was inside a movie theater on Saturday from about 2 p.m. until about 2 a.m. I paid the matinee price for "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and then I stuck around and watched "Hostel", "Memoirs of a Geisha" and "King Kong".

My favorite character in "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" was the Buffalo General of Jadis the White Witch. Whenever he would get worked up he would throw his head back and scream like a buffalo. I liked Tilda Swindon as Jadis the White Witch, but I can't imagine her playing Nico from the Velvet Underground in the upcoming bio movie. The children in the movie did a good job but they had very fleshy lips, it was actually distracting. I can imagine the casting director saying, "Bring me children with thick lips!" Nevertheless, I would recommend this movie to anybody, a surprisingly good job. Even the boy who played the wicked brother Edmund (the most annoying character in the book) didn't annoy me, I enjoyed imagining him to grow up to be a mod.

A movie I can't recommend to anyone is "Hostel". It's going to be a long time before I agree to see another movie with Quentin Tarantino's name slapped on it. He didn't direct it but he let them use his name, so I'll just assume he likes depictions of sadism in all its glorious forms and I'll always associate the word with him. Sadism can be interesting (the movie Japanese movie "Audition" is interesting) but you won't see anything innovative or imaginative along those lines here. This movie don't understand that yucky isn't scary, it's just yucky. As for blowing the lid off of current American and Euro-culture antipathy, that was a shocker, who would have guessed.

I liked "Memoirs of a Geisha", it looked great and it was very entertaining. Contrary to popular belief, most of the film doesn't involve nudity. In fact, none of the film involves nudity. It's because being Geisha isn't about being naked, it's about making people imagine being naked. Initially I thought, "Why didn't they just have the actors speak Japanese instead of English with Japanese accents?" But the three leads are played by Ziyi Zhang, Gong Li, and Michelle Yeoh, so they would've been speaking Japanese with Chinese accents. But here's the most ridiculous part: I thought the male lead was played by Chow Yun-Fat, and didn't I feel like a friggin' fool when I found out that it was actually Ken Watanabe. But it was a good movie, I'm looking forward to reading the book.

"King Kong" was good and it didn't seem overly long even at three hours and twenty minutes. About forty-five minutes of that time involves the camera lingering on Naomi Watts' face, but she's pretty so how can a brother complain? The computer animation was perfectly acceptable, entertaining, and not annoying. This is saying a great deal, for there was a lot of computer animation. Depression-era New York looked great and the jungle was galvanized with prehistoric savagery. One horrible scene involved a guy being eaten alive by giant swamp insects that resembled the most harrowing aspects of both male and female genitalia (and with multiple rows of sharp teeth), but if you just keep telling yourself that it's only a cartoon it's endurable to witness. It's a fun movie, don't believe the player haters who say otherwise.

Art Institute of Chicago

During my holiday in Illinois we went to the Art Institute of Chicago and it was plenty fun. Regarding that Toulouse-Lautrec picture "At the Moulin Rouge", I read that at one point the lady with the green face on the far right was sawed out of the picture and then replaced in the 1920s. Walked around the museum for about three hours and only saw a fraction of the stuff. The next time I'm in Chicago I'm going to go right back there and pick up where we left off. At the end of the day somebody nice bought me a fine bookmark of that suit of armor; I was so happy.

Dallas

On Christmas Day in Illinois, Nicole's aunt and uncle visited and they brought a fuzzy puppy named Dallas. I could not stop thinking of Tom Skerritt's character Dallas from the movie "Alien" (1979). N. and I were sitting on the couch petting the puppy Dallas then it wet on us and we had to change our clothes. I like those Illinois dogs but they tend towards incontinence.

Horror

My mom asked me if there were any interesting passengers on the airplane back from Illinois and I said no. On the short connection flight from Las Vegas, however, I did find the guy sitting next to me was a little annoying.

We'll call him Roman. Roman was a young man listening to his ipod, bobbing his head to the music, and reading Details magazine. That's all. Nevertheless, I felt my space violated. If only Roman hadn't taken the infernal liberty of bobbing his head to his music, he wouldn't be the subject of a blog today. He gave the impression that he thought he was on television, that the world was his t.v. show, that folk around him needed to know that he was enjoying his ipod tunes. I sneered every time I turned in his direction.

As for me, I was quietly enjoying my book of H.P. Lovecraft horror stories. On the airplane I finished reading "The Lurking Fear" (turns out the crazy Dutch family eventually devolved to become underground-dwelling albino apes who rampaged on the countryside during every thuderstorm), I read "Rats in the Walls" (Guy discovers family secret - since Druidic times his people used to breed cavemen under the family estate in order to chow down on them and to feed them to rats), and I started reading "The Shunned House" (Edgar Allan Poe used to walk past a house owned by Lovecraft's auntie in order to woo a poetess who lived up the street. Apparently Poe used to hit the bars on his way over and was pretty tight by the time he would show up at the lady's house. After only four visits the poetess broke off their acquaintance, despite the fact that Poe was a master of horror and an opium addict.).

Jake and Browser

Fulgent is the word for my holiday trip to Illinois. This word means "dazzlingly bright" or "radiant", but it sounds more like "big boy". The incident during which I most wished I had access to my Island of Hair blog was this.

Nicole, her pa, and I drove from her pa's house in the Oglesby township/Deerpark territories to her brother Brian's and her sister-in-law Tracy's house in Princeton, Illinois. We were going out to dinner to celebrate my birthday and Nicole's pa's birthday at The Prime Quarter Steak House. Whenever Nicole's pa drove us anywhere we listened to an XM satellite radio station called "Hank's Place". "Hank's Place" plays a great deal of old-timey country swing music which I really liked listening to. Over time N. has become more ambivalent of the general fare on that station but she is nevertheless very patient with it and we are both partial to Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys.

We arrived at Brian and Tracy's house and immediately their two dogs went haywire. Jake and Browser are two powerful brown boxer dogs and they are supposedly brothers. Animal protection services rescued Browser from an abusive homelife in another household and the brothers ended up reunited at Brian and Tracy's house. I wish I had brought my camera but they more or less resemble the two dogs in the picture.

I love those dogs, Jake and Browser, and I love dogs in general, and in addition I am occasionally required to put a bold, jovial face on the intimidation that the big ones inspire in me.

Browser seems like a normal-sized dog, but very powerful and muscular. Jake seems powerful and muscular and huge. He doesn't have any neck, his head starts at his face and continues on back until it becomes his shoulders. The sound they make is constant skittering and clacking of dog toenails on the wooden floor and occasional wet snorting noises. Those dogs remind me of a pair of giant, meaty, hair-covered fists prowling around at thigh-level. Every approach of Jake and Browser involved shoving me. It seemed that what they would have most liked would have been to knock me down to the floor where they could run their tongues all over my head.

I sat down on the couch and petted big Jake as well as I could, trying to calm him down. My gloves became filthy with dogness and saliva; I semi-consciously forgot them in Illinois when I left. No matter the calming influence I tried to imbue in Jake, he was nevertheless inclined to riot. He so tired himself that he had to go panting to his huge, steel water bowl and slurp up a bellyful. Brian warned Jake not to drink too much water to avoid throwing up. A few moments later, with casual cheerfulness Jake threw up a pool of bubbling, slobbery water onto the floor. Deaf to the words of disapproval spoken around him, he stepped backwards, clearly absolving himself of culpability. With a chuckle in his eyes he glanced up with enthusiasm, as though we'd all shared a great joke. Just as quickly he frowned and wandered away, already bored.