"once in a lifetime"

things: i moved to brooklyn last weekend. i like it much better in williamsburg than in midtown. my new room has a green wall.

i'm reading haruki murakami's 'the wind-up brid chronicles' right now and am kinda freaked out because i've seen two other people reading it on the subway in the past three days. yesterday, the guy who was reading it was sitting next to me and he noticed me reading it as well and we smiled.

today on the train into the city, a youngish man was listening to the talking heads on his ipod and standing stark still in his kenneth cole overcoat, not realizing we could all hear his music. that's the great thing about ipods. possibly, one of the only great things about them really.

i was driving through pennsylvania in december when my car broke down in a small town. this picture wasn't taken near there, but i really enjoyed driving through the PA landscape once my car was fixed, and maybe someday i'll live there.

more tales of fleeting love in the city

i fell in love with a boy over christmas. actually, i was in love with him for awhile and just didn't realize it. but that's a different story for a different day.

yesterday i fell in love, briefly, with the man who blew me a kiss on the way to work. it was, in the moment, a selfless gesture that restored some kind of humanity in me. it jarred me out of my monotonous walk to work along the gray sidewalks. it was beautifully simple. it was purely a compliment. one that i desperately needed. in retrospect, it was also slightly creepy and whatever. but i'll take it with a childlike innocence like a kiss on the cheek from a grandfather - it's only creepy if you're looking to be a skeptic.

an exchange i enjoyed recently:
girl: you're a glass-half-empty kinda guy, aren't you?
guy: what glass?

i decided to stay here a little longer, in this city, in this job. perhaps i haven't given it a fair shot.

darjeeling limited

The only way to appreciate Wes Anderson’s filmmaking is to look at it as an exercise in purely visual filmmaking. Sure, he’s technically a narrative filmmaker, but when are those narratives actually the driving forces of his films? Often, Anderson coyly makes beautiful frames, exposes us to an artistic vision – a world of make-believe mixed with melancholy – and ultimately neglects characterization and plot development.

In The Darjeeling Limited, this is truer than ever. A beautiful film, bleeding from the edges with all the rich colors, textures, and patterns of bourgeoisie and Bengali, it mostly lacks any narrative integrity. Lots of actions are taken, some exposition occurs, and characters have presumed breakthroughs, but really, when the closing credits appear over the footage of the rattling train, it’s hard to remember what happened.

As the narrative is relatively unimportant, there’s no fear of exposing the film’s twists and turns or ruining it for anyone. Briefly, three brothers [Brody as Peter, Schwartzman as Jack, and Wilson as Francis] reunite in India to visit their mother [Huston]. They have been estranged for a year, following the death of their father, and haven’t seen their mother in at least as long. Traveling by train through the Indian subcontinent, they are clearly supposed to discover themselves while meeting others and communing with family. Perhaps this happens, perhaps it doesn’t. None of the characters are really compelling enough to warrant getting emotionally involved in the film. It stops mattering what the brothers do, only where and how they do it.

So much of the film can be written off as “Wes Anderson-ish,” but it deserves more attention than that. As usual, the main characters are white-washed aristocrats, clad in dapper duds with a touch of absurdity. Peter explores sand dunes in the Indian wilderness wearing only a pair of pastel pink boxer shorts and a dress shirt. Jack typically covers himself in tailored suits, but leaves out the loafers that would make the ensemble fastidious. Francis has his head wrapped in gauze for almost the entirety of the film - after riding his bike into a rock wall, or something to that effect - and complains when a shoeshine boy steals his $3000 shoe. Huston is a devoted nun, dressed in simple, somber attire, but with eyes ringed heavy with dark eyeliner more appropriate for a night out than a nunnery. These one-dimensional characters, based almost entirely on surface personality traits, are flung headlong into an equally unexplored but superficially beautiful setting, and the story begins! Wait, no. Anderson quite simply never makes it beyond constructing these shells of the characters and their environment. But that’s okay.

Objects and personal effects almost give depth to Anderson’s visual world. The personal mythologies of his characters are more evident through their belongings than their behavior or interactions. The brothers’ matching luggage, inherited from their father, covered in embossed animals and palm trees; the iPod station and musical wind-ups that Jack carries with him everywhere; the sunglasses adorning Peter’s forehead; the collection of cough syrup bottles inhabiting the brothers’ train car; the burgundy and saffron-colored Hotel Chevalier bathrobe Jack stole; the belt that Francis repeatedly gives to Peter, only to take back every time. Interaction is based around objects in this film, rather than between living, breathing characters. Even after Jack sleeps with Rita [the train attendant], she’s no more of a character, and everyone still simply calls her Sweet Lime. The closest the brothers come to real interaction is the absurd fight that starts with whiplash from the belt and ends in near-blindedness from pepper spray. Its as if Anderson believes that personality is owned, rather than embodied; that psychic development is intrinsically related to stuff more than to conversation. The big denouement moment of revelation that Anderson tries to concoct is nothing more than the abandonment of all the artifacts that had defined the brothers until then. Running in slow motion to catch the train, they fling their luggage away. The metaphor of emotional baggage is far too heavy handed here, to say the least.

The short prequel to the film, Hotel Chevalier, examines the ideas of estrangement, love, and travel more effectively, despite trapping its characters in a hotel room. Its lack of attachment to the full-length film [rather than playing before the film in theaters, it’s only available to watch online at the moment] is unfortunate. The kitsch and characterization of objects is still there. And, as always, the mise-en-scene is engaging and gorgeous. But the characters are closer to being multi-dimensional here than in The Darjeeling Limited. Portman playing the ex-girlfriend to Schwartzman’s Jack is pitch perfect. Their dialogue is stilted, but their physical interaction is comfortable. Every look or word exchanged shows the awkwardness of a relationship resurrected for a single night in a French hotel room.

The places where Anderson references Hotel Chevalier are the best moments in The Darjeeling Limited. The short film’s narrative combined with the visual pleasure of the full-length film provide a perfect amalgamation, making it even more regrettable that the two aren’t being screened together. Anderson has, once again, succeeded in defying expectation and creating a film project that rethinks the idea of what a film should be and what it should do.

tupperware

i fell in love with the boy with pale blonde hair. he, eating his lunch on the steps of the corporate headquarters of some monstrosity in the rays of afternoon sunlight. talking on his cell phone, wearing reading glasses. we were destined to be together because he ate out of the same tupperware containers from ikea that i use when i pack lunch.

backgammon

yesterday i fell in love with the two old men sitting at the outdoor cafe on my way home for lunch. they were talking loudly in italian and laughing laughing laughing. they played backgammon in the early afternoon.

optimism

i woke up this morning at 3:33, wide awake in the pre-dawn, catching 5 minutes of silence on the street outside my window. when i actually woke up to go to work later, i was filled with a really wonderful sense of hope. partly influenced by the cloudy appearance of the day slowly beginning, and partly by some other indescribable force. i felt it again as i walked around outside during lunch. that anything is possible and that good things are going to happen.