The God Question.....and the GlamRockTiger Answer

I want to be a good strictly rational scientific agnostic/pantheist, but I'm also drawn to mysticism at times. So I've decided: From now on on WEEKDAYS I will quote Richard Dawkins, scoff at those who read horoscopes and openly mock followers of organized religion. (You can mock me back...that's fair.)

On WEEKENDS I will express expansive feelings that "SOMETHING is out there," delve into tarot cards and numerology, and possibly even attend a Sunday Celebration at Glide Memorial.

As for HOLIDAYS....on Holidays I will just be drunk, and God, whether he exists or not, will be irrelevant.

The pope's comeuppance?

Atheist authors Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins want to arrest the Pope when he visits England in mid September. Wow...if they were to pull this off, it would be such a media spectacle. Godspeed you, my friends, I wish you the utmost success! Lord knows I would love to see that sick, creepy, pompous little degenerate get his comeuppance!

Chinese Laughter

Tonight I again attended one of my favorite events, Pub Trivia at the Presidio Cafe. It was so much fun. We just missed placing in the top three this time. I didn't drink a drop of alcohol. And still I'm so glad I went.

I have a team, and they are a fun group. One or two change each week, but there is a stable core of which I am, or am becoming, a part. We learn, we laugh, we eat fairly decent food, some of us drink, some of us don't. And usually we come in the top three.

I now know that the Statue of Liberty is the heaviest statue in the world, the U.S. is the biggest exporter of grain in the world, and the first woman to climb Mt. Everest was Japanese.

Although there seems to be some debate over which country has the largest standing army - China or North Korea.

I joined the team thanks to Bay Area Linkup.

On the bus ride home I watched the Chinese people enjoying a joke together. Even though I didn't understand a word of it, seeing them laugh, I laughed too. Which reminded me how unimportant spoken language can be to communication.

Bouncer Redux

Katy St. Clair got a bunch of hate mail in last week's SF Weekly for her previous "Bouncer" column in which she dared to question gay men's musical taste, based on the bland, formulaic, so-not-rock-and-roll music that is played in typical gay clubs. I thought she had a good point. And this week's "Bouncer" is really good, too. And really funny.

"No one wants to drink alone. Except George Thorogood."

"I was like a ronin grandma: I get to play with kids and then hand them over to their parents after about 40 minutes."

"All of this reuniting was of course facilitated by Facebook, that site we all love to hate, but check several times daily."

There's a part about how good babies smell, which includes this:

David's 11-year-old daughter thought this was weird. "He doesn't smell good!" she laughed.

"Oh, indeed he does," I said, like a wise old sage on the mountaintop. "When you get older, you take the time to stop and smell the babies." She nodded, no doubt edified by my wisdom.

Read the whole column here.

My version of AA's Serenity Prayer...

God grant me
The profanity to bitch about the things I cannot change,
The fierceness to change the things I can,
And the sexiness to know the difference

nightmarevolution

Also at Another Hole in the Head last night (see previous entry) I saw Nightmares in Red, White and Blue. This is a really great documentary on the evolution of the horror film, starting in 1910 with the first silent film version of Dracula and continuing up to modern times, when many people are turning away from American horror films because they've just become a contest to see who can be the sickest, most graphic and sadistic. It touches on SO many films and places each in its proper chronological context. It's similar in tone and style to the IFC films documentary The American Nightmare that I love (and own a copy of), but much more ambitious and exhaustive in scope, and features new interviews by horror greats like John Carpenter, Joe Dante and George Romero.

"What does it take to kick people in the ass hard enough to wake up?" Romero asks at one point, discussing the post-Sept. 11th American political landscape.

Also one of the commentators makes note of the fact that, when you meet the men who make horror films - Carpenter, Romero, Wes Craven, David Cronenberg, Eli Roth, etc - they are peaceful men, not mentally disturbed in a violent way, intelligent, politically active, liberal. "These men," the commentator states, "open themselves up to all the things other people repress, and it's the people who repress those things you have to worry about."

Good point!

Strange Symbol

Tonight, volunteering for San Francisco's horror/sci fi/cult film festival, "Another Hole in the Head," I saw a fantastic, and fantastically strange, film: Hitoshi Matsumoto's 2009 cinematic mindfuck Symbol. (A few years back he made a splash with Big Man Japan, which I missed but will see soon.)

This was one of the weirdest and most unpredictable films I've seen in recent memory. And the only one I've ever seen whose main plot elements include sushi, a man trapped in a seemingly holographic room, a toilet plunger, a key, a rope, a Mexican pro wrestler named Escargot Man, and....baby penises.

LOTS of baby penises.

I said afterwards, "That movie is a work of genius." Warped, surely - but isn't that so often true of genius?

A Taiwanese kid, a fellow volunteer, said he thinks Matsumoto was indebted to Stanley Kubrick and that the finale was a sort of homage to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I can sort of see that, in the ending sequence.

Anyway, if you want your mind blown by something truly strange, I recommend checking out Symbol. If you're in San Francisco, it plays one more time - on Saturday the 24th, at Viz Cinema - as part of Another Hole in the Head!

Dogshit galore

J.F.C., does EVERYONE in San Francisco own a dog?

That adds up to a lot of dogshit.

By the way, if one more person tells me that dogs are loving and cats are cold and selfish, I'm going to throw fresh dogshit at them.

You can look at dogs and see that they're loving...I see them as needy and constantly in need of validation. Whereas cats, rather than being selfish and disinterested, are merely more secure in who they are.

Basically, human-dog relationships are more codependent.

Yes, this is a generalization and not true of all dogs (or all cats).

But, on the flip side - Yes, there are people who get crazy and "hoard" their cats, and end up with way too many of them, but that stereotype is of a mental illness that by no means represents the vast majority of people who own cats.

There are more domesticated cats in the U.S. than there are dogs.

Although you wouldn't know it here in my city!

Where the Wild Things Weep

“I like the way you destroy stuff, good technique, there’s a spark to your work that can’t be taught.”

So says one of the Wild Things to Max in the film version of Where the Wild Things Are. I fancy the makers of this film had high hopes of it being something like the Wizard of Oz of our time. Spike Jonze directed; Dave Eggers co-wrote the screenplay; Tom Hanks is a co-producer. Catherine Keener plays Max's careworn mother. The Wild Things - portly, ramshackle muppet-monsters - are voiced by well-known actors like James Gandolfini, Forest Whitaker and Paul Dano. And the soundtrack features songs by Karen O and various other musical hip-stars. It's all very cool. And it's awfully emo. There's a lot of intimate talking, sharing of secrets, sensitivity to other peoples' shortcomings. There are times when it feels like a therapy session. I enjoyed it, but it didn't have quite the impact I wanted. Whether that's due to the shortcomings of the film or to my own status as a jaded, cynical adult, I can't say for sure.

Generally, when adapting a book into a film, I think it's best to maintain as much fidelity as possible to the source material. The problem with this film, of course, is that the source material is a slim, succinct children's book with nowhere near enough dialogue or action to fill an hour-and-a-half movie. The screenwriters had to fill all that extra space with their own imaginations, and unfortunately, their imaginations aren't nearly equal to that of Maurice Sendak.

I was going to say "Jim Henson has nothing on the Wild Things," but then I read this article stating that it was the Jim Henson Creature Shop that was behind their creation. Call it a muppet monopoly!

One gripe: the film missed my favorite detail about the book as a child: the way Max's room grows, over the course of three pages, into a moonlit forest wilderness!