Class or No Class

 The series of posts that follow, on this worn out and abandoned blog, are simply my way of memorizing and interpreting lessons from my class. I suppose I should organize my thoughts here, something I've been having trouble with lately.

So yes, this is just a weird way for me to engage with my coursework.

Backing up a moment, let's mention why I'm at this point on my life, way late. My first attempt at college was interrupted by my father's death, a weird shifting of the estate by my stepmother, and false claims of his bankruptcy that left my brother and I with no inheritance. My father did not have a will at the time, for reasons that are not known to me. This effectively ended my first stab at college.

Many years later and I've been working at a job that has a union, and it was idiotic of me but it took me a couple of years to take advantage of the online free college program that the union provides. If you are part of a union, check the Union Plus website to see if yours participates.

I'm currently a third of my way toward my associate's degree, and for some reason I decided to go with a business degree. Well, that one is actually easy to explain, it's basically the generic requirement on most job applications these days. So right now I am attending classes for American Government and Principles of Management.

If you found these entries, you're invited to glaze over and go elsewhere. If this actually interests you, welcome aboard. I'm not doing this for an audience, but for some reason my brain is saying this is the best way for me to engage with myself.

I'm going to start these entries shortly, but I will note that my management class hilariously begins by analyzing management techniques utilized with Egyptian slaves. This kind of thing is helping me realize that a business degree ultimately isn't for me, but I will finish my associates before moving on to better things. Besides which, even subjects that cause some revulsion can inspire further studies into subjects that are anathema to business. I already have several books from the library on degrowth and the deconstruction of the powerful mythology surrounding the idea that corporations are beholden to shareholders.

I may also use this blog to experiment with original thinking on these topics, as well as attempting to put together academic papers that I'm working on.

I'm definitely also trying to get back into writing about entertainment, philosophy, and other subjects that have always loved. I will probably post those somewhere more visible by modern standards, but I will definitely link to them from here just in case.

The hidden gem of 2015's cinema

As a huge fan of the movies from which it sprang, I watched Ash Vs. Evil Dead through to the end.

I have thoughts, but that's not what this is about so here's the summary; I was entertained and frustrated in equal measure.

Fortunately there was a Kiwi import that satisfied that delicate nerve cluster where the desire for comedy, horror, and affectionate homage all have an unlikely union, and that movie was What We Do in the Shadows.

Possibly the best mockumentary since This Is Spinal Tap and almost definitely the top comedy of the year, it's co-written by Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords) and Taika Waititi (forget about his credits, what a name!) It concerns a group of vampires sharing a flat in New Zealand, navigating the usual hazards of being a supernatural creature in modern life as well as the petty squabbles familiar to anybody who ever had to co-habitate with people who are significantly different from oneself, but familiar enough to provide an irritating reminder that we're probably not any better.

It is also, by rapid turn, hilarious and even a bit freaky. The soundtrack is lovingly selected, and oscillates skillfully between classy old world period pieces and the kind of sickly sweet modern music that Dracula might get into if he just got with the times.

Something that's held to separate the fondly remembered comedy from the utter shit being churned out lately (Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, etc.) is a fondness for the source material, which is definitely on display here. These are classic vampires transported into modern society without any of that pesky revisionism. They don't sparkle in the sunlight, they fry. They can't stand holy symbols worn by corpses, and they can't even get into a nightclub without convincing the bouncer to formally invite them inside. They follow all the rules we've known from the old folk tales straight through to the White Wolf RPG rulebooks. But for all that, they just can't reach an agreement on laying down newspaper before slaughtering their guests. When pressed to explain why they prefer virgins, Clement's character makes an awkward comparison to rather preferring to eat a sandwich that he knows nobody's fucked.

But despite the temptation to keep giving you examples, even saying this is probably way too much because the joy of a movie like this is allowing you to figure it out on your own. Watching the awkward comedy of a classic mockumentary give way momentarily to skillfully-executed vintage horror is a lot more fun than I've had in a while, and if it sounds like your kind of thing as well, just go seek this one out immediately. I have a bin full of Academy Awards screeners I have yet to view, but right now this is easily in my top three movies of 2015.

The new camera works, here's proof.

Some quick shots from a trip around downtown today. As I improve with this thing, I'll whittle it down to just good shots. As for now, the last camera I had with this many buttons used film. Film, for those of you who don't know, is an archaic form of imprinting photos that required a dark room, a place that required hours of delicate work and also where undergrads used to fuck.

Unpleasant Comedies: A couple of reviews

A Film With Me In It (2008)


I'll just confess I watched this for Dylan Moran, an Irish comedian who is definitely in my top three. I also watched it on a stay-in date, which you'll find hilarious in a minute, after I've told you a bit about this movie.

It's a commonly cited difference between American and UK humor, that is America all jokes eventually point to having the biggest dick in the room, where the British come from a very modest, often defeatist place. Well, now take the Irish, who for the last few centuries haven't largely been allowed to own their own shit, and you can guess what kind of grim comedy comes out of there.

A Film With Me In It involves two broke schlubs trying to make a movie, and then basically everybody dies. One by one, in horrible fashion, in accidents that appear very, very hard to explain away as anything other than foul play. Crippled brothers are crushed, girlfriends are impaled, and faithful old dogs are... also crushed. It gets so bad that when the cops come round, they wind up abducted by our protagonists.

This is what's contained with the boundaries of the trailer, mind you.

A Film With Me In It is bleak, shot in darkness and squalid settings, and has more in common with thrillers than comedies, though people with an ability to yank joy from a gauntlet of stomach-churningly tense situations should get enough of a laugh to warrant a look. And there is a lot of genuine dark humor from the well-written dialogue and typically Irish understatement of an insane situation. It's not for most people, though.

Super (2010)

Some movies are doomed to obscurity and mediocre reviews due to the mass audience -despite having a love affair with some mutant definition of irony- having little appetite for irony focused on themselves. Super is ostensibly a superhero movie from Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn. Most people have seen his PG Porn webseries, and that's a good start at plumbing his crazier depths, but Super is a bandage that's been torn away from a man's psyche way too fast. The trailer might make you expect a quirky, loveable indie comedy. It doesn't prepare you for a parade of miserable people, heads being caved in with a pipe wrench, and two genuinely psychotic protagonists.

Rainn Wilson from The Office stars as what appears to be an "average guy" whose wife (Liv Tyler) relapses into her old drug habit and leaves him for a major pusher (Kevin freaking Bacon). After moping around and binge watching an old religious superhero tv program, he has a despair-induced hallucination that the almighty personally touches his brain and decides to become a costumed crime fighter. After a few bungled attempts, he enlists the aid of a bored comic shop employee (Ellen Page) and figures out that he needs a weapon.

What follows is a cartoonish montage of our protagonist beating people with a wrench and dropping concrete blocks on heads to a series of pastel freeze frames reminiscent of the old Batman tv show, and then it gets really savage. Page's character figures his secret out immediately and appoints herself as his sidekick, and she's even more unhinged than he is, crushing a thug's legs with a car and then spewing an unbelievable stream of invective while laughing at him.

And when they finally go after the drug lord who stole Wilson's life, then it just turns into a highly theatrical explosion of bullets and flying body parts. The trailer makes an attempt to convey this, but really fails to capture the more bleak part of the movie's tone. And that's probably the whole point, the denial of what the audience wants in favor of what they should think about. That's probably also what keeps this movie from being more well-known.

The characters are bizarrely likeable despite being absolutely wretched, with Gunn's usual skill at writing giving the slightest welcome nuances to heroes and criminals alike, and he's set the groundwork properly for this bizarre mix of humor and horror-level violence to work, but make no mistake; this is a grim, grim piece of work that turns the usual superhero flick theatrics on its back to point and convey a rather distasteful but vivid message. The strength of the movie is certainly in the performances and subversion of expectations, but the overall arc will alienate most viewers who may feel... legitimately... that the joke is on them.

Still alive

Find that one thing you love and shut up about it.

The Chinatown Lantern Festival

Good lord. I thought I posted this back in... well, something like six months ago. The hell with me. I log in to check and see if somebody from the past still looks in on me (we all have that one little sad sack thing we do and this is mine) only to realize that one of my posts has "Draft" next to it.

So here's a thing I did that feels like about seven lifetimes ago.

Just photos this time as I'm way behind. The Chinatown lantern festival was billed as being held rain or shine and lived up to that promise. Volunteers had to wipe down the concrete floor of the outdoor stage with paper towels between acts as child acrobats, martial artists, dragon dancers, and more performed in the soaking wet.

The Miss Chinatown court braved the weather as well and stuck around for the duration, and after speaking to Miss Friendship Becky Lam it was clear that these ladies were selected for far more than their looks. Community service and a keen interest in the arts was a strong component of who she was. The rest were just as awe-inspiring.

Diverting the stream, destroying several small towns in Tajikistan

The adventures we've begun to embark upon lately have grown considerably, and I refrained from posting narratives here for the fact that we were working on a new website just for them. I finally faced the fact that I needed to get content up quickly and worry about finessing it later, so for now just point your browsers here for the adventure travel and urban exploration:

http://zerolinar.wix.com/violent-aperitif

This blog will continue to update sporadically with everything else. Hopefully I'll expand the new site soon to include better indexes and the stories behind all the photography you can currently view.

Basements and Chocolate

Downtown Los Angeles is a cultural oddity within the larger anomaly known as America. As the comedian Eddie Izzard once pointed out, Americans tear down their history, and this is probably a bit appropriate; it's really a young country in the grand scheme of things and had a good lead on the rest of the world for being able to embrace the new. A further gag comes to mind with Steve Martin in L.A. Story giving an architectural tour to a British visitor and pointing out the history of the city through its houses: "Some of these homes are twenty years old."

And yet I think there's currently a big retracing of this sentiment that you can really find tangible evidence of where I live. A glance out at the downtown skyline from where I live frames the modern highrises as a backdrop against which you'll see the grand old hotels from the turn of the century, and the warrens before them from somewhere in between.

On 6th Street, between Spring and Broadway I think, there's a line of bodegas selling cheap and bootleg audio equipment, little walk-in closet-sized shops that sell junk food, and any number of people hawking goods of dubious nature and use in any language that happens to not be English. And right in the middle of this block, there was a walled-off grotto that was recently unearthed and brought back to its former glory. When you pass by, you might get whiplash from stopping and staring in disbelief. It's exactly one hundred years old as of this writing and is nothing but one big piece of Dutch tile art. It's known as The Chocolate Shop and it's very, very gorgeous and out of place in the rat den that surrounds it.

It's being polished up for use as a restaurant, you can only get in on Saturdays after making an appointment with the Los Angeles Conservancy down the street, and I was strictly forbidden from photographing it.

Don't worry, that didn't stop me. I snapped a few surreptitious pictures, but there was a bigger payoff down the road.

The next day I went to the wholesale district on a tip from a friend about some underground crawlspaces that went beneath Main Street, at one point with light filtering down through a street grate. Something he had discovered as a child in the 80s. So I went by expecting to set up an appointment in a week or two, but the owner himself came down to let me in. And brother, the place hadn't seen the good graces of man in a while.

Yeah, hope you're not claustrophobic. It's tight down there. 

What creepy basement is complete without an abandoned shower?

 

See if that tells you how long the place has been abandoned. The owner regaled me with stories of Prohibition-era shootouts in the upstairs area of the same location.

So the owner is this 90-year-old Isreali man who is still really spry and active, and he takes to my enthusiasm for the basement, offering to show me something else he owns. A building, he says, with old tile art.

"The Dutch Chocolate Shop!?" I ask, and he confirms it. I've just stumbled dick-first onto the guy who can okay one of the ultimate downtown photo fests. Camera ready, let's go!

So here it is; this out of time place, this other Netherlands, this... just this.

 

It's a gorgeous world out there. Have you taken a bite lately?