Jim Jarmusch and the End of the World (article for ADFF site)

Jarmusch's ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE was one of my two favourite films at this year's TIFF. I could sit down and write an entire book on it (if I had the time, clearly) but for now I've at least penned a small review article for the Abu Dhabi festival site, if you are interested. And see the film whenever and wherever you can: it's bloody great.

The Incomplete Age

Clearly, "completion" as a concept has been a challenge for me lately, as I have tried to make great strides with my dissertation while on a leave of absence from work. Every moment I am not typing great and meaningful things is laden with guilt. Even when I have been writing away at chapters, I've allowed a drought of posts here on my poor, infant blog to cause me no end of remorse and bad feeling.

So, wrapping these emotions up with the novel that I have recently begun to read, The Book of Dave, by Will Self, I found myself puzzling over a web-era phenomenon this morning: that is, all the languished, obsolete blogs that have been started then abandoned by well-intentioned folks across the past decade. The picture below is a screen-grab of the first blog I ever started, which was born - and died - in May of 2005. It only ever had one post, in which I referenced all the things I'd write about: film, travel, politics on either side of the border, life between Toronto and Los Angeles, etc. Poor Exorbitant City might have met a similar fate were it not for today's flurry of inspiration. (Of course, it likely will yet.)


The descriptor given atop the page on my first blog informed my non-existent readership that this blog was to be "the only solution to a peripatetic, transnational, time-sapped existence in which i am never everywhere at once." The chosen design was garishly pink. Somehow, I recall sorting out the code to give the website a custom icon to appear in the navigation bar... that's still the way it appears in my Mozilla bookmarks list, though I guess the uploaded image has died a natural death, since it does not seem to load that way any more. The few scraps of writing to be found on the page are over-wrought, if sincere and, well, well intended.

I cannot make this blog disappear from the web. The email account to which it was tied is dead, so I cannot find the way to access "the dashboard" for the corresponding user and delete it. So out there it stays, floating on the net waiting for nothing in particular except my periodic checks to see if it is still there.

Or, perhaps, waiting for some future researcher to come along and sweep it into a net with thousands of other samples from The Incomplete Age. This is where The Book of Dave is no doubt taking over my thinking. The novel is, in part, about the radical attempts at interpretation (and the resulting misinterpretation) of a London cabbie's notebooks -- written during our epoch -- by a post-apocalyptic English society centuries after. His histrionic rantings are taken as nothing short of scripture and tremendous social consequences follow from that.

But think about it for a moment: all the detritus out on the web now... those very personal, well-intended blogs started to commemorate a group or a university seminar, to help keep people in touch over long distances, to document a love of experimenting with different recipes involving stout ale, and what-have-you, that got off the ground and then fell into neglect. Are these the cave drawings that anthropologists of some future era will sift through trying to understand that cryptic period in which the web exploded into life? What will they deduce? That we were a society with great promise and a tremendous affinity for beginnings, but with very , very poor follow-through? That we didn't clean up the virtual mess we made any better than the environmental one? That some of us misunderstood the word peripatetic? Will we be labeled "The Incomplete Age," laughed at beside the Stone, Industrial or even early Electronic ages for our megalomania and lassitude? All because I can't delete that old blog or may, one day, let this one die?

City View

This is gorgeous. I came across the music of Max Richter today while on my never-ending hunt for music that I can listen to while writing. (Fundamentals: sparse, no lyrics, but not atonal or a-rhythmic, nor overly staccato or martial in tenor... I'm tricky that way... lots of Philip Glass, Eluvium and Arvo Pärt listened to around here.)

Richter is a German-born modernist composer who trained in the UK and Italy. I guess, in truth, I had encountered Richter's music previously, as a few of his songs were part of the soundtrack for Stranger than Fiction, but I can muster no particular memory of their place in the film. His compositions are very "cinematic," I think it could be said. I wonder if this means they work better when NOT placed in the service of film narratives but left to stand on their own, to filter in through my headphones while I try to arrange my disorderly thoughts about films and cities into a persuasive argument. Perhaps, but most likely, Richter's pieces are best served by being wedded with imagery like this:



The images were shot by filmmaker Yulia Mahr, who pointed a camera out Richter's NYC window over five nights while Richter was working on the album "Songs from Before" (2006). The song featured is called "Fragment." Collectively, the unison of image and music is exquisite, and produces impressions lying somewhere between the uncomfortable menace of Wavelength, or the chatty (then menacing) voyeurism of Rear Window, while simultaneously reminding me of the urban nighttime footage from Lawrence Johnston's astonishing recent documentary, Night (which I wrote about here and which I'd encourage you to see no matter where you had to drive or fly to to do so).

In the simplest of assemblages, the short film and the music explore the simultaneous beauty and distanciation of quasi-communal urban living.

You can watch other Richter/Mahr collaborations on youtube and, I imagine, all over the web... if you look.

In my next post: an update on that thing I did the other day, and some other sundry thoughts.

So I Did this Thing Today...

... that probably made no sense. I sent an email, out of the blue, to a highly distinguished professor in UCLA's department of Urban Planning. I have been considering a critical/theoretical construction of his for some time now and recently decided it could be the missing dynamic that subtends questions of periodization, methodology and intent in my Introduction and... by extension... the entirety of my dissertation.

Emailing him resulted from my following one of those random impulses that I have to try to take the "virtuality" out of my current academic situation. (I've been corresponding with some of my committee by email and phone and just yesterday emailed our remarkable Student Affairs Office in the FTVDM department to ask him to please print and deliver a letter to another committee member who apparently does not email, ever.) After all, if I were still in the environs of UCLA, I could have found out this professor's office hours and just turned up, all inquisitive and such.

Though, in fact, randomly meeting him face-to-face would probably have made me dreadfully nervous and all the smart, informed questions I had about his work would likely have turned into a lot of "hi smart mister... I think you are smart... can I use your smart words in my book?"

So, a thoughtful email was probably the way to go. It may lead to a fruitful exchange of ideas between two people interested in notions of community, progressive scholarship and urbanism, or, it may have ruined my academic career permanently. Or, he may never write back and the result will be fantastically nil. I'll update if anything comes of it.

Exorbitant Happiness?

Incredibly, an article in En Route magazine caught my eye tonight (discovered via Where). Yep. En Route, the magazine found on Air Canada airplanes, which I have pulled out of a seat-back pockets countless times, flipped open, discovered the crossword to be already half complete, and then closed with some small measure of disdain and a complete measure of disinterest.

But, now, En Route is writing about cities. The article, "The Happy City," explores initiatives recently undertaken in Bogotá, Mexico City and even Paris to make cities happier by making them more pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly, less asphalt jungle and more urban Riviera, and more prone to positive encounter and intersection. The initiatives include turning motorways into beaches in the summertime... in Paris... who would have thought? The author, Charles Montgomery, has a lovely writing style that interweaves moments of flâneur-like urban description with some fairly strong reference to urban researchers and planners:

"There is a wondrous, stirring power to the Champs-Élysées. The street’s lifeblood pulses along sidewalks that are cumulatively much wider than those famous six lanes of traffic. It exists between paving stones, newsstands and café tables, in the dripping of ice cream cones, in long legs and gusts of wind and in the electric possibility of a thousand simultaneous stolen glances.

"The more time we spend on foot, on bikes or even on public transit, the more we slow down and the more we fuel this kind of social alchemy. Ironically, it may be the crisis of climate change – and the push for carbon austerity – that reinvigorates street life around the world."

It's a very interesting read -- again, from an airline magazine no less -- and dovetails with my dissertation's analysis of the function of intersection in urban narratives. In the films, intersection is calamitous, often fatal. In the brilliantly re-planned Happy City of (really?) the real world, close encounters with urban others is the idealized road to a more content, trusting and trustworthy populous. Whence the disconnect?

Also, for another marvelous late-night read about urban culture, head over to my favourite speculative architecture blog and check out Geoff's post on Cloud City (proposed by Studio Lindfors for a design competition aimed at concepts for a disaster-destroyed NYC). As is often the case when I encounter a seemingly impossible concept city, I find myself convinced that this zeppelin -based urbanism is inspired directly by Invisible Cities, but find myself unable to lay hands on the passage, given that book's uniquely confounding structure. Maybe I'll be able to find it tomorrow.

[image courtesy of Studio Lindfors]

The Monkey on Your Back Is the Latest Trend

So, since last posting, my quest for floors has been totally unsuccessful, I've had exactly one meltdown, exactly one dose of bad news about my dissertation (just when you think the deadlines can't get any tighter, someone finds a way to insist on getting the finished product sooner), gone to San Francisco, got caught in the rain, watched groceries roll down a steep, steep San Francisco hill, been hurt (no joke) attempting to do this class with my sister, said goodbye to a beloved coworker and thought of two dozen more ways to make myself feel badly about my doctoral qualifications.

I did, however, get some writing done today, and it is not yet midnight.

And, rather than waste time on the emptily yet overly emotional spectacle that is the Superbowl, I opted instead to finally go see the almost overly emotional mini-spectacle that is Juno. Not only did it play at TIFF, where I am happily employed (well, most of the time... more on that later), but it seems everyone on the planet has seen it. Parents of a three month old have seen it. My parents have each seen it... not even jointly. The person sitting beside you as you read this, or someone who will sit beside you a little later... they'll have seen it. So I felt immensely derelict in my film-going duties for having managed to miss (NOT avoid, just miss) it thus far. And, by now, I feared the hype. I feared the inevitable disappointment that befalls me when all the world has seen and loved something and convinced me that I have missed the veritable second coming of entertainment itself. I typically despise the thing that everyone else adores. (Case in point: that Sarah Silverman anniversary video for Jimmy Kimmel... wow that was dull.)

So I was so pleased to love Juno, to love it enough, in fact, to giggle and then get all weepy eyed and shelve all analytical distance. Ok, in truth, I've spent quite a bit of time since the film -- and even a bit during -- muddling over how insufficient traditional auteur theory is when confronted with a film such as Juno that is so clearly signed by its mercilessly clever screenwriter (the improbably but delightfully named Diablo Cody) and by the defiantly excellent performance of Ellen Page as much as by the decisions of skilled director Jason Reitman and his wiz of an editor, Dana Glauberman. But I struggled to keep it in check (I still am as I write this) since going to see it was supposed to be a nice cathartic break from all things film-theoristy.

And, given the abovementioned tears, it was clearly cathartic. Of course, I've been getting weepy-eyed a great deal lately. I may have welled up at one of the trailers that preceded the film. I may have sobbed my way through the final five minutes of Rescue Dawn, Werner Hertzog's truly wonderful remake of his 1997 documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly. The latter might not seem so odd to many who've seen it -- it takes a fantastically simple narrative device and tells an incredibly lasting tale of human perseverance and is given heft by a ludicrously good and criminally overlooked performance by Christian Bale -- but I watched it on a plane, on one of those little choose-your-own adventure type screens that are about two inches by five inches in size. It was the kind of screen that ought to flatten landscapes, deflate epics and belittle (sorry for my literalism) performances, no matter how strong. But Rescue Dawn still managed to be excellent, and not just as a way to kill time between YYZ and SFO. Its politics seem somewhat transparent and, to me anyway, also completely appealing: why retell Dieter Dengler's story now, in a trenchant, viewer-ensnaring narrative form, if not to hammer in the point in every screening, everywhere, that troops, abandoned in North Vietnam then or in the Middle East now need to come home?


So, yes, I have been having some heightened emotional responses to film lately, but the monkey on my back that answers to the name of diss is getting both fatter and meaner and that probably has a lot to do with it. (It hurts to walk on bare concrete... all the more so with monkeys on ones' backs.) And, truthfully, I wouldn't be in this racket in the first place if I didn't prize the power of films to unlock and unleash emotions that are inconvenient, often unpredictable, even unwieldy.

In other news, I've been meaning to post about the dream I had in which I was hanging out with Paul Virilio, except it was Virilio as embodied by some younger dude who may have been Viggo Mortensen. Virilio, Viggo... I guess I do not need to go too far to figure that one out. We were talking about fear and his (Virilio's, not Viggo's) theory of dromology. (How much would I enjoy it if Viggo had his own theory of dromology?) It made perfect sense at the time and I woke up laughing, which is a plus.

Next week, my dream about my fireside chat with Baudrillard as embodied by Michael Cera.

ABD ("Always Be Doing [something]")... Easier Said...?

The watery disaster that has befallen our home (and this past week's sundry ironically related disasters, such as repeated water-outages) have run amok with my writing momentum. Yesterday was an abysmal day in that regard; today is slightly better, so far. I had set this past Friday as a chapter deadline... I have to re-schedule that deadline for this Thursday and try and try and try.

I did, however, find myself organizing my thoughts in a chart today... its completion sent me into paroxysms of quietly self-deriding laughter over my sheer delight at the false sense of accomplishment it brought. I wonder if I ought not to have chosen a career as a statistician?

In other news, I had a tremendously lovely dinner at a friend and colleague's home last night... where I got my first-ever glimpse of his ludicrously lovely home office, and the simply astonishing library of books on film culture, history and theory that he has meticulously organized there. It made me more jealous than was rational. Having been fairly recently separated from the bulk of a formerly shared film library, I have to decide whether to try to build up a personal reference library from scratch, or whether to adopt the philosophy that owning less and borrowing more is the way to live (at least until I have a professor's salary and on-campus office). For now, just about as many books as will fit on the shelf of my desk seems to be my plight/state/fate.

Now if only my desk had an actual floor underneath it still, as opposed to raw, crumbly, stained, recently flood-saturated concrete...

Hi-Rise Under Water

For this post, I tried to find some smart, sexy graphic to illustrate in oh-so-wry a manner the theme, but despite such searches as "city underwater," "underwater skyscraper," "lost city of Atlantis" and "help! my condo flooded," nothing really caught my eye. So instead, here's a picture of the actual thing...

It has been an awful few days. In additional to waylaid mail, an injured (sprained? chipped? who knows?) baby finger, and a totally inoperable cell phone, my home flooded. Despite being several floors above ground, Tuesday's freakish thaw lead to a perfect storm of melting water on the balcony failing to go down an inoperable drain and then flooding in under our floors through a faulty membrane. Whatever all that means, the floors have had to be taken up in most of the condo and will need to be replaced, five industrial-sized fans and dehumidifiers are blasting away trying to dry out the soaked walls and concrete and making sleep an impossibility and, perhaps worst of all, the lovely productive writing streak I had going over the weekend and the beginning of the week is completely shot. Two and a half days of nothing. Nada. Depressing.

We are admitting defeat and moving out for a few days... hope doesn't just spring eternal... it floods in through the walls and covers everything I own...


**Update (January 13): my super-high-capacity memory stick broke into two pieces for no apparent reason this morning. One minute, whole; the next minute, little bitty bits of data. Seriously! C'mon already...