Some thoughts on eXistenZ, twelve years later
Sometimes I find myself in the mood for David Cronenberg’s style of weird, which means diving into his older filmography. Cronenberg of late has been turning out gritty action movies with Viggo Mortensen (A History of Violence, Eastern Promises), films which are satisfyingly psychological but lack the visceral punch of, say, Videodrome or Naked Lunch. And I do mean visceral: Cronenberg loves his viscera.
So last night I was pleased to discover that I could stream both eXistenZ and Naked Lunch on Netflix. I’ve seen Naked Lunch a few times and would have streamed it had Jake been in the movie-watching mode. (This, by the way, followed a fifteen or twenty minute low-level argument wherein I was trying to convince him to go see a movie, Thor perhaps or Bridesmaids, but nothing apparently could lure him away from the charms of Civilization V.) Naked Lunch, Cronenberg’s homage to author William S. Burroughs, is the better movie; anyone who has ever seen film or listened to spoken word recordings of Burroughs would see that Peter Weller became Burroughs for that role. Really a remarkable performance.
It isn’t easy to summarize Naked Lunch, other than to compare it to another author-homage-film, Kafka, wherein Jeremy Irons played both the author and a number of his characters. So too does Weller become both Burroughs and several of Burroughs’s characters, dramatizing the author’s life but also living through some of his wilder stories. IMDB’s precis is thus misleadingly bizarre:
After developing an addiction to the substance he uses to kill bugs, an exterminator accidentally murders his wife and becomes involved in a secret government plot being orchestrated by giant bugs in an Islamic port town in Africa.
. . . which is like summarizing Lawrence of Arabia, “British officer visits the deserts of Arabia, goes native, and leads a rebellion against the Turks.” Technically accurate but misses the spirit of the film, you know?
Back to eXistenZ, which was, if you get right down to it, a modernization of Cronenberg’s earlier masterpiece, Videodrome. More below the fold, unapologetically laden with spoilers.
Dieting again
Soon after I got to Bakersfield, I started working out in earnest, and I also did a short bit (ten sessions) with a trainer. As part of training, she had me calorie count for ten weeks. Amazingly, I lost about 15 lbs while calorie counting (which for me is a big deal). After that I decided I could maintain my weight by working out and I didn’t need to mess with no calorie counting.
Eighteen pounds later, I’m still working out and the pounds have crept back with interest. I used the occasion of my new smart phone to get a free calorie counting app (My Fitness Pal, which is also available online). It’s a cool app. It will even scan bar codes, and it’s only occasionally stumped. (It thought my Lactaid Low Fat milk was Cheerios . . . that was interesting.) I’ve been at it for a week and a half and I’ve only lost about a pound and a half, but I’m not adhering to too strict of a count — 1700 calories per day. Two years ago, I was running anywhere from 1300 to 1600 per day.
But hey, we all know how worthless fast results can be. The diet I’ve adopted is fairly simple. Calorie counting forces me to think about what I eat, so I’ve stopped eating a lot of crap, and I’ve stopped eating unconsciously, just because the food is there. And that, I suppose, is what calorie counting is all about. I wouldn’t be surprised if in my non-counting days I was taking in 2400 calories a day or more. Donuts and candy bars add up after a while.
I will try not to read too much symbolism into the fact that I just dropped my new cell phone, shattering the face plate. Thank heavens for insurance.
D.
Quizlet
Guess what it is. No prizes, just that warm spot in your soul that comes from knowing you’re badder-assed than any other Balls and Walnuts reader.
And now, in honor of Mother’s Day, what is this woman standing next to? (NSFW . . . I guess.)
Honestly, some people.
A month ago, my dad hadn’t even heard of a smart frame, and now he’s pestering me because I haven’t uploaded any new pictures lately.
I bought my folks a Ceiva following a rare instance of “must have!” (my pal Stan has one, and had bought one for his in-laws in order to share pictures of his daughter). Mailed it to them with specific directions not to open it until I got there, because I knew they wouldn’t be able to set it up. Turns out it wasn’t so difficult to set up; the hardest thing was finding the box in the first place. My dad forgot that I had sent it to him. Fortunately, he’d left it in the most logical place possible, beneath the computer.
So in response to his pestering, I’ve been uploading lots of the photos that I had posted to the blog over the last three years. Hopefully that will satisfy him and my mom. And if the pictures upload tonight, it’ll be a nice Mother’s Day present come morning.
And my son’s mother? She refuses to celebrate Mother’s Day. No slave to Madison Avenue she.
D.
Not a cover
Currently my favorite song by Rasputina. Lyrics below.
Not a terrible photo of yours truly
We had our quarterly face-to-face Chiefs meeting down in Pasadena today, so I took the opportunity to have dinner with my sister. Shot I took of her was one of them candid photos, so I don’t think she’d appreciate me reproducing it here. My photo, on the other hand, was not half bad.
We ate at Continental Burger. The waiter claimed he remembered me “from 20 years ago.” Why? “Because you have such a beautiful face.” He also claimed to have worked at Continental Burger for fifty years. We weren’t sure what to make of him, but he seemed harmless enough. Occurs to me only now that I should have posed in a photo with him, my old pal from 20 years ago.
D.
Food fight
This one caught my eye over at Daily Kos: What is the most bizarre thing you’ve eaten?
I suspect that anyone who had pica as a child (as I did) can beat the entries to webranding’s diary. My favorite non-food edibles as a child: wood (my bed frame, mainly), chalk (including some sort of concrete-like deposit in our back yard), and the tar off a telephone pole.
So what else do the folks at Daily Kos have to offer? Some interesting ones: warthog sausage (ain’t that just a toothy pig?), fresh termites (and a variety of other arthropods), chocolate-covered worms, baby rat kebabs, live baby rats, kangaroo, and puffin. Odder still are some of the things people THINK are unusual: eel, sea urchin, octopus (all standard sushi fare), a variety of snakes, gators, jellyfish. Two things I tend to crave from time to time are jellyfish salad and ankimo (monk fish liver).
But I think my old pica habits have ’em all beat.
How about you — any odd offerings?
D.
Now I’m smart
We bought new phones yesterday, and Jake and I upgraded to smart phones — Androids. Mine’s an EVO HTC. And as with any new technology, I have no idea what I’m doing.
I owned a Blackberry for a short time three or four years ago. The internet access was useful to me once. Once. Jake and I were hanging out in downtown Seattle and we decided to find a haberdasher. Turned out we were only a few blocks from Byrnie Utz Hats, a wonderful place by the way, definitely worth a visit if you’re in Seattle. I can’t remember that Blackberry being useful on any other occasion. Eventually, I decided it wasn’t worth the extra money and I changed back to an ordinary cell phone. The precipitant cause of the change? I suspect it was the usual ATD*.
Smart phones weren’t all that smart back then. (Knowing me, though, I doubt that I exhausted its capabilities.) I don’t recall there being a whole lot of apps. And I don’t recall my Blackberry having camera or video capabilities. Smart phones have come a long way since then, but I’ve done fine with my dumb phone and thought I could live without. But then tragedy struck — T-mobile got bought out by AT&T, whom we despise because they donate to teahadists and other radical righties, and who routinely used to pull slimy maneuvers on us when we had them as our carrier. You know — fees would unexpectedly (and mistakenly) show up and then we’d have to spend forever on the phone getting them to undo what they had done. Creeps.
I’m not sure if Sprint will be any better, but at least it’s not AT&T.
And now I need to figure out how this sucker works. Thus far, I’ve determined how to change my wallpaper. I know there should be a way to sample mp3s to create custom ringtones, and I know that Karen and I should be able to do video chat with our two phones, and I know there are supposed to be thousands of apps out there, but I haven’t found any of this stuff yet. The app market directly accessible on the smart phone links only to a few dozen apps. WTF?
Maybe I should read the manual, or look for tutorials on the web. I’m a manual/tutorial kinda guy.
D.
*Accidental toilet droppage.
Jake at Red Rock
I’m having trouble using Gimp to make my file size smaller. I used to use Paint Shop Pro for this, but PSP came close to killing my laptop. So I’m stuck with Gimp, I guess. Anyway, just my way of apologizing if this takes a while to load.