things that are things that are things that are

One movie that struck me a great deal when I first saw it was Linklater's Waking Life. For obvious reasons....it is an immensely lived-philosophy kind of film. Linklater is perhaps my favourite director - from Slacker, to School of Rock, to Before Sunrise and After Sunset, (all must see films in my opinion). Already appealing to my then-budding desire to be overwhelmed by everything (to be replaced by....a wanting to overwhelm at my whims, but turn it off when I need to go out and be functional?) - Waking Life was the perfect mind-bending flick to watch when stoned (a once omnipresent habit I lost some years ago).

One scene in particular that stuck out in my memory was of a movie (director? critic? thinker?) person being interviewed about what he calls the "holy moment" that film can capture. I should explain: Waking Life is comprised of a fellow who is uncertain if he is in a perpetual dream he can never escape from...some new, transcendent, dream to end all dreams. He spends his time alternatively in and out of awareness of himself and his condition...much of the movie involves him being entirely absent from scenes where people pontificate on matters about life, death, the capacities of language and communication...and dreaming and waking consciousness most of all. The limits of the human experience. These scenes seem to suggest that he has himself died, and the dream world functions as a boundary or home of death.


(the) One character I was referring to in that scene was talking about how film has an inherent relationship to the actors, and that the traditional view of acting - which lauds those who can act the most "different" from their "real" selves - is badly mistaken. In essence, the way in which hollywood producers tend to make roles with famous actors in mind - is a good thing...there are lots of examples of this. Lost in Translation might well be one of them (an aside about how the internet can lead you onto other and other things - looking up Lost in Translation on wikipedia to make sure my memory of it being an original screenplay was correct...led me to 1. put Marie Antionette on my Netflix list, because I have long wanted to see Sofia Coppela's follow up, and 2. to discover a quotation from Robert Frost about poetry being "lost in translation", which is a perfect pretentious intro to place on an Emerson paper that is mostly written but I've been kicking around for awhile about the role of nationality and language in the figure of the poet as imagined by Heidegger).

One morning (this morning) I had woken up, but didn't want to get up, be productive, any of that. So I thought I should browse the movies available on Ondemand (we now have all premium channels, which is an absurd amount of programming I haven't really exploited much) and see if anything caught my interest. One of showtime's ondemand offerings was a movie called I Am A Sex Addict, which was described as an autobiographical documentary about a filmmaker's struggles with sex addiction. I'd never seen a documentary about one's self on such a personal level, so the description was intriguing. I had always agreed (without having fully worked out my thoughts on the nature of film) with that Waking Life clip...that viewing film as just stories with moving pictures was limiting. Books were better for that format because stories are meant to evoke the imagination. Movies are a new and fundamentally different format that are about those specific people, those bodies, moving in time and space.

One can imagine my surprise when, as I started this movie to see what it was all about (not expecting to really watch it), it turned out to be the same guy who was in that Waking Life clip! Caveh Zahedi was the filmmaker (and subject) of this movie, and it was clear just how fundamentally he believed that movies should be about the people that appear in them (which is not to say they must always be documentaries or biographical, but that there is a non-circumstantial relationship between the character and the actor). It was one of the most fascinating movies I had seen in some time. He narrated the entire thing at the chapel where he was about to be married for the 3rd time, and recounts his entire history of loves throughout his life, and his working through of his addiction to prostitutes before going into the wedding ceremony. Insanely personal, hilarious...I haven't seen a movie that kept me that astounded in quite a long time. I appear to have invested all of my writing capacity in the lead up, because I don't really have much to say about the movie itself (why I could never be a movie or music critic..I'm much better at talking about peripheral elements that relate me to the material in lieu of the material itself). But you should see it if at all possible. Caveh's strangely protubing head, his all too human gaze, his fetish for vulnerability...abjectly compelling. Even if you didn't give a fuck for the entirely different way of relating to film, it is still a fascinating examination about addiction.


One music recommendation, because I feel terribly amiss if I put forth one of my rare long posts without referencing music or bad jokes somehow....I'm currently addicted to SoulOrganismState by Mummer. If I had to choose a place to live outside of the US, I would choose Vienna in a heartbeat. Partly due to the glowing recommendation of the place I have heard from my ex-girlfriend Nicole and others, and also because it seems to birth music that speaks to me very personally. I feel at home with lots of Vienna artists more so than I do even Portland bands! Something about the fusion of jazz with sweeping, chromatic electronica (stumbling across the Vienna duo dZihan & Kamien might have been one of the more formative accidents in terms of me being explicitly interested in what I call "chromatic" music). Apparently the scale caused by musical semitones is called chromatic - but that is not what I mean. I just discovered that...music theory was never my strong suit during my music-producing period of my life.