As reporting the mundane events of my life has become boring to even egotistical me, I've decided to abandon it in favor of this more ambitious and daring project. Having received two D plusses in the two German classes I took this semester, my prospects are grim and the future is forbidding.
And so, I am undertaking this most ambitious and lofty
venture, this Guide to Boredom. Standing before me are the three weeks of Christmas Break 2000. These are three weeks that I will be spending at home, and the only job I could possibly secure there is a job sacking groceries at the Winn-Dixie that my sister manages. Reluctant to subject myself to this, I am hard pressed to find a useful way to spend my time. And since Pain and Privation are the whole of this world, and since they cease to torment only him whom they have delivered into the hands of Boredom, and since I am in neither pain nor am I experiencing privation, I am going to begin writing this, this most astonishing and illuminating Guide to Boredom.
I have only one notion of what this guide is going to be like. Whenever I report something from the three dimensional world where people walk around and eat and so on (hereafter, meatspace), I will put this at the top of it:
Dispatch: mm/dd/yy 00:00
I have no plans, no prospects, and at least one semester more before They put the hammer down and kick me out of school.
We begin here.
12:15:18 A.M. 12/18/00 (Sunday)
I wonder what Jason Bateman is doing these days. I'm sure some crazy fucker somewhere has a list of his accomplishments and achievements...
Here's one.
This is pretty nifty.
December 23, 2000
L'amour est un oiseau rebelle
que nul ne peut apprivoiser,
et c'est bien en vain qu'on l'apelle
s'il lui convient de refuser!
Dispatch
Christmas 2000:
They taught us to love, they taught us to rock.
Warrant.
Dispatch
December 26, 2000:
So, like, today is totally my birthday. My parents gave me Wagner's Ring Cycle. $147.98 value. Not bad. And so I spent the day listening to Das Rheingold, which is pretty fucking awesome. It drove home how much of cinema music is directly ripped from Wagner. I'd be pissed, if I were his corpse or one of his heirs (but Megan tells me that her voice teacher Mr. White once worked with Wagner's grandson, who was a total prick and was, like, pissed all the time, so maybe that's why...).
So I have attained the age of 21 years, making me legally accountable for all my actions and allowing me the privilege of purchasing alcohol and whiskey, the water of life.
I watched 36 Fillette the other day, which had a relatively realistic sex scene in it. But the movie wasn't really all that great. If I wanted to watch a fickle girl be unable to make up her mind about sex for a while, I'd go outside and throw a rock and watch the first girl I hit. But the acting in 36 Fillette was really good.
In my boredom, I played Snake on my Nokia phone until I got a score of 96. Beat that, fuckers.
Dispatch
Early December 27, 2000, around 3:35 a.m.:
To the credit of the writers of The Beverly Hillbillies, they named the proprietor of the cemetery Mr. Mortimer. That will be addressed later.
I've spent the last five hours doing the following things: 1) purchasing these books: Peter Singer's introduction to Hegel, Hegel, Schopenhauer's The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, volumes I and II, and Steve Martin's Pure Drivel. 2) watching Rope, which is really excellent and has a moment at the end when Jimmy Stewart achieves a really incredible transformation and causes me again to wonder why he ever got a reputation for playing nice-guys, 3) watching one of the early Laverne and Shirley episodes when they're still living in Milwaukee, and 4) watching the beginning of The Beverly Hillbillies.
1) I'll talk about these books later. I listened to all of Das Rheingold in the last 30 hours and I'm still digesting that. Besides, nobody reading this gives half a shit about the fourfold root of sufficient reason.
2) Rope: This was very good, very well played and filmed, and had a very evident homosexual subtext. Christ, was it flaming. Watch it and listen to Brandon's breathing. But it was an excellent film, and I wish that I had watched it two years ago when I rented it and didn't return it for two weeks. The lighting effects in the background were well-executed and the effect of the setting sun, though not very creepy at the time, impress me upon reflection as giving a feeling of impending doom. And as I said above, Jimmy Stewart is really good. It was a very pleasant hour and twenty-four minutes and I wasn't bored at all.
3) Cindy Williams, who plays Shirley on Laverne and Shirley, is really pretty. I like her a lot. Also, I didn't know that the show was set in the sixties, but that explains the double taps on the sink.
But Cindy Williams... wow.
4) To the credit of the writers who wrote this episode of The Beverly Hillbillies (I don't know what the name of this particular episode is, but the plot revolves around Jed's attempt to purchase land in the country so that Granny can farm it, but because of his yokely Appalachian brain he assumes that "Happy Valley," a cemetery, is actually a real-estate service. The woman is old, the plot is not a plot of land, but a cemetery, and the purchase is to be a surprise for Granny. You can figure it out from there. I'm not going into it any further.), they have made excellent use of the events to write funny dialogue. The script is well-turned, though like many sitcoms the plot hinges upon the misunderstanding of a fact that would almost never be misunderstood in reality, and then is sustained through variations and augmentations of the original misunderstanding. But that's not what I want to address here. I want to address the character of Granny. What good is she? Admittedly, she causes many of the misunderstandings that drive the plots of almost every show... but so far as I can see, she's nothing but a crotchety old drunk whose ineptitude is as unappealing as is Oliver Wendell Douglas of Green Acres's inattention to the displeasure of his wife during the pilot. (oh, and to the credit of the writers, they managed to reference the other fish-out-of-water Cold War Era Yokels-meet-haute-coutre stuffed shirt sitcom, Green Acres) Perhaps the writers of The Beverly Hillbillies are trying to tell us that what we love and cling to most is precisely that which makes our lives difficult, and it is this overcoming of difficulty and working out of our problems that ennobles us as a race of people, makes us compassionate and worthwhile, merciful, good, and decent, no matter how toothless and yokely we may be.
But it could just be that Granny is useless and the assumptions of Dome City are right, and Granny should have been sent to Carousel long ago.
Dispatch
December 27, 2000 6 p.m.
So, I'm watching the Real World (I've been asleep since eight a.m.) and I don't know which season it is or where the cast is living, but again I am very glad that I don't have any of their lives. I suppose I don't care about other people enough to interest myself in their problems. What's her name in Hawaii (M something) had a drinking problem, but I don't even really care about that. I'm amazed at how much they whine. It looks like high school.
I'm going to go get something to eat.
Dispatch:
December 28, 2000 around 5:20 a.m.
Meatspace report for the last few hours:
1) Saw Cast Away. 2) Ate veal. 3) Read most of Cole's movie page.
1) Cast Away. Really fun to watch, especially the second act when Chuck has to figure out how to open cocounts and wear shoes and deal with the sight of salty bodies and talk to a volleyball. As was written on Rotten Tomatoes, this movie proves that you can put Tom Hanks on a desert island, film it, and it will be entertaining. Admittedly, the movie could have been a little darker, but it was nice and dark and rich in atmosphere and really fun to watch. There were very syrupy and melodramatic moments in the film, but this is Zemeckis and that's something to expect. Though there were schmaltzy and overdone moments, the whole movie was really a lot of fun. Fun fun fun. I don't feel that I wasted the free pass Scotty gave me.
2) The veal was good. I know what veal is, activist. Step off.
3) Cole's really put together a pretty nice Heavenly Creatures page. So I suppose I'll write a nice, long The Godfather page. There are some pretty perceptive reviews of the movie, but also some ridiculous and stupid reviews (probably written by unemployed English majors). So stay tuned for that.
other news: Licensed to Ill, in addition to being a nifty pun, is a really good album. I miss the old intro to MTV news in which they included a sample from "The New Style".
We're seriously moving into the merciless shaggy heartland of Haircut Country. That will have to be remedied.
Get off my tip.
More later.
Dispatch
December 29, 2000
I went to the dentist this morning, and then I went to Target. It was completely silent inside Target. It may have been the best period of my life in the last three months. There was no Muzak, and there were only five or six people in the store.
So I got my hair cut yesterday. And then I went and bought used books and during the bookbuying eavesdropped on an old woman talking about her family. This woman seemed extremely contemptuous of everything that was not her. And she lacked judgment, that much was clear. I was glad not to be related to her. She complained at one point that, while her daughter's Christmas Vacation ended shortly and she had to go back to work, her daughter's husband didn't have to go to work until January 3rd, the bastard. Perhaps her son-in-law is a manipulative bastard and lives like a leech off of her daughter, but from my perspective I saw a bitchy and assholish old woman passively-aggressively bitching about her life to a bookdealer who obviously didn't care in the least. But I got a paperback of The Documents of Vatican II.
Oh, and I made use of my alcohol-buying clearance this morning at Target. Too bad it was for 750ml of White Zinfandel. The cashier didn't even card me, but since I have such an indomitable and confident air, really as though I'm the master of the universe and any whim I might have, no matter how disgusting or daughter-defiling it may be, is my birthright, I wasn't all that surprised. In fact, I took it so thoroughly in stride that any surprise I might have felt was immediately changed into indignation at the thought that the cashier ever could have requested identification, and that indignation was immediately changed into arrogance, and that arrogance no doubt made me seem all the more impenetrable.
Dispatch
6 a.m. December 31, 2000
I got the maximum possible score on Snake yesterday. The maximum possible score is 312. Regrettably, I don't feel like reporting anything right now. I should make a note to write about "Backfield in Motion" and how it does not relate to 105.9, the local funk station. But I'll do that later. Also, I read Franny and Zooey, which was better than The Catcher in the Rye. Then I read an abysmal gurlpage.
312. 312. Just try to beat that, fuckers.
I'm going to drink coffee.
Dispatch:
January 4, 2001
So, I read Farnham's Freehold, saw The Godfather, Part III, Barton Fink, Manhattan, The Player, PCU, and I'm about to watch Blue Velvet. Eventually there will be comments about all this stuff.
All of the reviews of The Godfather, Part III, are abysmal. And even Ebert's review of the first Godfather picture is bad.
Here is the script of Barton Fink.
The Mack only looks out for The Mack. The Bitch thinks The Mack is looking out for The Bitch, but The Mack only looks out for The Mack.
Dispatch
Friday, January 12 2001
I'm ending the Guide. Soon I'll pipe this into whatever project I'll use to chronicle the Spring Semester. It's Friday night and there's nothing to do. Gotta find something to do. Class has begun and here the guide ends.
This way to the Experiment
