Wreckless Musings [ii]

Written in phone whilst incredibly drunk:

There's a reason I came here. The reason is that i never do. I'm a pussy. I never hang thick with strangers. I never follow the[m] home and drink their booze and pretend i find their conversations compelling. I never do this. That's why I'm here. It's necessary. It's necessary to discover the person I always thought I was, the loose cannon, the weird stranger that sleeps on the travelers couch. I wanted to make no sense. and here I am. Living the dream.

Calvin, McCandless, and Me

I've decided I'm going to walk the Appalachian Trail, and I'm pretty sure I want to do it in the next five years, otherwise I'll be older and smarter and full of the angst of unfulfilled dreams. Like most of the people I know.

It's really just because I love nature, and love being in nature, and pretty much sweat the whole thing. No, I'm not the guy that explores Central Park or the rest stop on the Interstate, I need to be surrounded by woods, and so far I've done decent jobs of it. Some in Alaska, a lot in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, some in Vermont (Green Mountain Range) and some in New York State (though not as much as I'd like). I've been around, but the Appalachian Trail is really what I want to do. I'm not sure when this fascination for nature came about, but I'm pretty sure it had to do with Calvin and Hobbes.

Probably the most famous of the comics from the eighties to the early nineties or whenever, Calvin and Hobbes was a mainstay in The Press of Atlantic City, my local paper when I was younger. Every Sunday (we only got the Sunday paper) I'd zoom outside and grab the paper, my feet clad in white socks with black bottoms from the wet driveway. On the way back inside I would shell the front page and sports section like a hard-boiled egg and run back into my room, to look at the only colored pages that mattered to me.

This was back before Nancy got reverted (badly) back to it's 1933 roots and when Charles Schultz was still churning out funny stuff from time time, before the Parkinson's got so bad none of the characters had straight lines. Beetle Baily still got stomped by the Sarge and Bloom County was still around (though hardly something I understood). I still read Family Circus, hoping for a funny joke here and there (although I think I mainly read them when Billy went on his adventures and a segmented line indicated his path).

But Calvin and Hobbes was the first one I read, every time, even when we started getting the real paper during the week (or at least Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays). It was the drawing that really got to me. Bill Watterson could really get trees down. I've always liked to doodle and draw myself, though I don't think I'd win any contests since mainly what I liked drawing was stuff I'd never seen before: Mountains. I liked drawing trees on cliff sides overlooking long, flat valleys and caves built into low foothills under the Rockies or perhaps an idle tower of rock poking up like a black tooth from a desert landscape in a lonely corner of Nevada (or Utah, or Arizona. Like I said, I'd never really seen any of those things, and the internet wasn't around).

order the book online

What struck me about Bill Watterson was that he could draw those things, did draw those things, and the best part was that he captured them the way my mind saw them: as funny shapes against a stark background, or a wealth of color on a blank canvas. Calvin and Hobbes (even with the limited colors at first) spoke of an imaginary world that mimicked our own so well that no one would ever be able to tell the difference. It wasn't Utah, it was Calvin's backyard, it wasn't the foothills of Appalachia, it was the long, endless forest behind Calvin's house that he'd go traversing through, his best friend at his side, in search of hills to ride his wagon down, hidden flags for Calvinball, and cool rocks to carry back home and put on his windowsill.

I wanted Calvin's backyard, I wanted the otherworldly feeling I got from those comics, and to be perfectly honest, I still do. I've been camping many times, I've lived without electricity and powered lighting and cell phones and television, without the help of the internet, books, or even a tent. For me it was always about communing with nature, always about being free from the things that other people could not see living without. They were my Calvin trips. Sometimes I was alone (though I was surrounded by people), sometimes with my friends, but always with nature and the world. It felt good to cast all the woes and worries of civilization away with the phone in my car, left to wander for a day or so, or to leave all those things at home and go camp out for a week with little to no amenities from society.

But Appalachian Trail, man. That's where it's at, really. That's the Holy Grail for me. For some it's Alaska, like Christopher McCandless. McCandless was a kid from the East Coast who (like me) resented modern society and most of the bullshit stresses and warrantless misunderstandings of human nature. He (unlike me) however, decided to ditch the money he had, hop into his Datsun, and bail. He lived for two years on the road, never staying in one place for very long, never stopping to think too long and hard about anything. When he was tired he slept, when he felt like moving on, he did, and he let nothing tie him down (including his car after a flash flood had killed the battery). He lived month after month as a vagrant, a hobo, living off the land and needing nothing.



However, McCandless was also a little too loose, not unlike Calvin when he decided to run away to the Yukon. McCandless's dream, his Holy Grail, was Alaska. He decided to get up there, probably for one last big adventure, but unfortunately he had been reading a lot of Tolstoy and Thoreau, and not a lot of survival magazines or books concerning the biggest frontier in the United States. Five months after being dropped off with little more than a couple of tuna fish sandwiches and ten pounds of rice on the Stampede Trail just East of Denali State Park, Christopher McCandless was found dead in an abandoned bus, literally walking distance from food or help, starved to death (although some think it may have been due to poison from eating moldy seeds). He made two errors in his great journey: no map, no research. There was a line of cabins near the site where he died, but he had never found them because he thought he was in the middle of nowhere, and his return up the trail was stopped because the summer run-off from the mountains nearby had blocked his way out. If he'd had a map, he'd have found those cabins, if he had done some research (or hadn't stuck to the desert for most of his other travels), he would have realized that tiny streams in April can become untraversible rivers when the snow melts. Even Calvin read a map (though he thought the Yukon was literally inches away, because he had no idea how to read one. I mean, he's six.)

I'm not mocking McCandless, though. I totally understand where he was coming from, and agree with him on almost all points. Living on the grid does suck, it's a nuisance and worrisome and a pain in the ass. I'd love to go off and live like Calvin in the woods, alone or otherwise, finding and expereincing the beauty in the world all around us. However, though I want to, I probably won't. I like writing, I'd like to get a book out some day. I'd like to have a wife and kids and all that shit that McCandless didn't want or understand (and that Calvin didn't want to understand). I'll probably do the Appalachian Trail, or at least enough of it to make me feel accomplished, and I'll come back to the world and pay my taxes like a good automaton. Does this make me a sell-out, a grevious wretch who's going back on his ideals, cashing in on those things that make me lazy, weak, and misunderstood? Maybe. But I know that when I come back from the Trail and see my family and go back to work or whatever that I did something I had always wanted to do, gone somewhere I'd always wanted to go, and that I had accomplished something worth doing.

I think Calvin would understand.

References:
"Christopher McCandless -." Wikipedia. Web. 11 Jan. 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_McCandless.
"Calvin and Hobbes -." Wikipedia. Web. 11 Jan. 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_and_hobbes.
Krakauer, Jon. Into the Wild (MTI). New York: Anchor, 2007. Print.
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Why I am Sick of James Cameron

God am I sick of hearing about the Avatar "experience."

I don't care how special the effects are, or how groundbreaking Cameron's new explosions are, I don't care. And I'm certainly not spending 15+ bucks just to discover the CGI film of the century has a plot that adds up to an age-old hackneyed "walk in my shoes" plot that was old and tired after Dances with Wolves.

Tell me, why is it that movie-makers use the same plot point in ever fucking film featuring another culture? Dances with Wolves, as previously stated, is a good movie with a good message easily visible in every post-western Native American film this side of The Last of The Mohicans, not to mention shitty Tom Cruise samurai movies.

The bad guys are exploiting (or planning to exploit) an easily-offended, simple culture of (Native Americans, Indians, Aliens, Asians, Africans) wherever. Insert poster boy who is just another guy, doing his duty. He's sent into enemy territory and wait for it--turns sides! Just like every cameo, sidekick and rogue/good guy/bad guy from Rocky Sullivan in Angels with Dirty Faces to Motherfucking Han Solo in motherfucking Star Wars has ever done in great and shitty movie alike. Oh, wow, gee, Jimmy! Way to cash in on one of the oldest characters in the known universe. Not only that, but you spent the most money to do it, and the creatures you spent billions of dollars on (when you weren't CGIing more explosions than Michael Bay) still look like fucking cartoons.

What happened to the Cameron I grew up with, the one I knew and loved? The one who took Alien and made it into a crazy-slick action movie and pretty much reinvented the science fiction action genre? Or what about how he created The Terminator and then made a sequel that is still jaw-dropping to new faces everywhere? I've never been more afraid of checkered tile in my life than after watching that movie for two hours.

But we saw what happened to those, didn't we? Aliens turned into a love triangle between an android, a clone and a hideous alien/human thing beyond understanding.

Mmmmm.

Not to mention the way Cameron allowed the studio system to ravage the unconscious teenage body of The Terminator into a ridiculous venture into what I guess was supposed to be some sort of Philip K. Dick storyline that failed because--oh yeah--there was no effort at all in making a movie that was more than a Christian Bale vehicle that caused a meltdown of Chris Bown v Rihanna proportions.

And who can forget the ten-hour borefest of Titanic, the biggest movie on the planet for most of my teen years, where the highlights were Kate Winslet topless and the last fade to black that finally showed that this was one turd that could flush. Not to mention the Academy slurping on Jimmy's own fat, wet, sinking CGI cruise ship, and burying the needle on the "fuck integrity" meter and going for the ratings bump.

Oh, did I mention Avatar has been nominated for 4 Golden Globes? It's true. And it'll probably win, because the Golden Globes are voted on by foreign press people who rarely have anything to do with film itself, they just review them. So, in other words, if you want to someone who has no idea what you go through for a role to vote on whether or not your movie was any good, proudly encourage the Golden Globes. Who gives a fuck what a bunch of foreign press hollywood reviewers think? Do I get to give out an award because I have an opinion about movies? Where's my Golden Globe for "calling the Hollywood Foreign Press" out on their bullshit?

However, if you'd like to get a real award from people who are actually in the business you're in and have some kind of clue as to what the fuck you were doing, go for the Academy, who will snub you anyway, until they're worried you might die before they congratulate you on movies that were amazing over twenty years ago. So either way, if you make quality pictures, you're fucked.

But in walks Cameron, who if you don't remember, proved that Jesus Christ lived and died a little while ago, and will probably slay at the awards this year for another useless epic we'll all wonder how we liked five years from now. Take it, Jim, and eat shit.

You know whats crazy? Wildebeests. Like, take all the wascawwy wabbits in the world and pile them together and you've got like a quarter of a motherfucking wildebeest. Those things are ill.

PS Happy Christmas to all those who read whatever I'm putting up here. I promise I'll put more stuff up here as soon as I am able.

PPS So I tried to find some pictures of wildebeests being badass, but all I could find was pictures of them getting owned by lions. So much for that.

Confession

I wrote this using an on-line program called wordperhect that is basically stupid and unnecessary, but is pretty neat overall, like the coolest stuff on the internet. Check it out if you like, I recommend it.

But anyway I landed on the site and this little bit of prose-like mess sprung to mind. People forcing my to be arty makes me get a little arty.

Translation is as follows:
I'm not sure what it is but every time I see you it makes me crazy. I don't shake or anything, I just lose all the parts of me that make any sense and end up blathering like an idiot at the circus. I don't know what it is about you that makes me react this way or -------As if I can't tell you exactly what I want to say exactly the way I want to say it. My toungue does weird stuff and my mouth gets dry and I think of all these clever things to say that aren't clever at all and so it makes me want to not even try anymore. I don't think about it anymore: I just run away and hide so you can't see me.

Cool photos

I know no one reads this blog, and that's fine. But if someone out there eventually does, check these out, they are neato.

They are color photographs from the 30's and 40's (mostly taken in the midwest United States). That may sound boring to you, but every time I've viewed photos from the 40's they were in black and white (and usually very good, too, Dorothea Lange, anyone?). But these are interesting just because they're just barely color photos: everything has just enough color saturation to make it noticeable; in other words, there's no high-def color blasting going on, they're just simply pictures taken simply for documentation, and mostly depict daily life in small farming towns and ranches.

Unfortunately, some (read: most) are riddled with Flickr tags because some people just can't see something on the internet and imagine that that something couldn't be better with them interacting with it. Honestly, where on the internet can a person just fucking look at a photo and not have some moron writing "LOL This silo looks lk a dildo!!!!!!111!!"?

ANYWAY, I thought these were pretty neat, as far as color photos of stuff we normally see in black and white go. While browsing them I couldn't help but think of Ted Turner and how he wanted to colorize all the old-school movies from the fifties, and this was back when the colorization process usually ended up making the actors turn red and purple on the screen. What Turner wanted to do was make the movies look like these photos, but he was a moron and decided to try to fuck with classics like Casablanca and The Petrified Forest. Wrong Teddy boy. Leave the colorization process to the movies who use film that can actually reflect colored light, as opposed to making all the movies fit your version of shitty colorization.

ANYWAY, check these photos out. They're cool.

What To Do, what to do

I am different from everyone.

I know everybody is different from everybody else and that somehow we are all the same decomposing material and noxious waste. I know how we're all human and alike, but really unique in our own special way, and all we have to do is find our niche.

However, I am slowly coming to the idea that I have no niche, I have no specificity, I am not obsessed over anything, and this just may be my downfall. Especially if I want to be a writer.

Let me explain. I love music. Music is great. Music is something that can get inside your brain and twist it into bows or knots, fold it into an oragami swan or crumple it into a wet ball and toss it in the wastebasket. Music is the one thing that I'd have to say 90% of the world at least can handle on some kind of level. Some people love punk rock, blues, metal, emo, hip-hop, r&b (do they even call it that anymore?), soul, "classic" rock, 80's hair metal, pop, grunge, country, bluegrass, &cetera &cetera &cetera I could go on for fucking days. Some people like one kind of music and THAT'S IT. SOme people have a mixed bag. But me (and a lot of people I know) like ALL KINDS OF MUSIC. And that's where I sit. Somewhere on the gray line between all genres. I like almost everything. Our mixed bags are bigger than most (like those who just like blues, jazz, and swing and big band and...oh sorry), but that doesn't make us any better than those who like trance, house, techno and industrial. We're just different, and I get that.

But here's my problem: can I write about just music? Fuck no. I see what that does to people. Before you know it, I'll hate music. I'll hate the morons who don't listen to the music I've had on heavy rotation the last four months. I'll start looking down my nose at musicians who didn't affect me with their songs when I can't even play a fucking instrument (no hand-eye coordination, and I'm REALLY fucking lazy) .Look at Rollingstone's David Fricke. That guy fucking sucks. There are people out there (me included) who don't believe he EVEN LISTENS TO THE MUSIC HE REVIEWS. I mean, the guy rates an album like Nevermind three stars when it comes out and then retro marks it with five ten years later because he's afraid to look like he didn't know what he was talking about. Of course anyone worth his salt isn't going to Rollingstone's Music-Industry-Spoonfed-Music-"Reviews" anyway, but that 's beside the point. That can't be me. I can't be that egotistical (he said, writing an article about how different he was from everyone). I can't take a job that demands I focus and analyze music as if it was a frog on a rubber plate, it'll kill the whole reason I listen to music: to get away from analysis and get to where I feel good again.

Not only that but I don't know enough. I don't know when Nevermind was released unless I look it up. I don't know how many albums Tool has, I don't know how many bands Jack White is in (3?4?). I don't know my stuff. I can't convince you I know what I'm talking about unless I have that knowledge, and I'm certainly not going to fake it, because then I'm a fraud and have no value whatsoever.

Same thing with movies. I can't review movies, because I have little to no interest in telling people about a movie before they go see it. A preview is enough, but personally I think I'd be a much better person if I didn't even watch them before I walk into a movie. Previews ruin things, they ruin the magic before the movie--they build expectation (which can lead to disappointment) and kill the idea of honest intake. How many times have you watched a preview or read a review that a) gave away key plot points that would have been better left out or b) looked so stupid that you would never see it in a million years or c) got you chomping at the bits to go see that movie only to have you walk out of the theater twenty minutes into the film?

There's no way to solve this, really. Without promotion you can't have movies but that's why I can't review movies: I don't want to give away major plot points and I certainly don't want to take four thousand words and trash something I found no value in that you might really like. Everyone is different. Transformers 2 did really well at the box office, but the movie had no artistic or asthetic value. Yet it made billions (and I saw it in the theater, don't ask). But the key problme I have in reviewing movies is the same as music: I don't know my stuff. I like movies, but that doesn't give me the right to talk about them in anything but vague, compromised terms. I can talk about the thematic elements of The Dark Knight, but the only people who want to read that are decent film teachers and friends who don't mind listening to me ramble at length about morality plays when they really need to take a shit. I can't write a forty-thousand word review and submit that shit to the Times.

Many authors try to stick to one genre of writing: something that they're really good at or know a lot about; Stephen King is versatile, but he watched a ton of movies when he was a kid, mostly the badly made sci-fi/horror flicks made in the fifties and sixties. Dude obsessed over those, hitchhiking back and forth from a neigboring town to watch film versions of penny-dreadfuls. Crichton was a medical student obsessed with technology and the weird relationships of it's advancement and nature and how humans and technology really mean terrible things for each other. John Grisham worked in a law firm and knows his shit when it comes to law. He loves it, and he loves to show the morality between the decisions people make and the law that represents them. He's a beast. Clancy does military stories, Anne Rice does Vampires, Mark Twain did rural South in the 1800's, Fitzgerald did the rich youth of the twenties (well, the white ones anyway), and Steinbeck did the Depression-Era common man. These people all know their stuff and so their art drove them in that direction, they wrote what they knew and they knew what it was about their lives that was interesting.

My thing is, I don't know what I'm into. I know a lot of trivial information about books and movies and music. I don't have a career to use for material. Plus what I do know is boring: I know how to paint a garage and play video games and put off writing a paper. I know how to eat too much and play too hard and how to roll my ankle on a porch step and limp for a week. But is that enough to try and write and sell stories on? Is what I have that churns in me enough to live on so I don't have to worry about stupid shit anymore (something I know too much about)?

I guess I'll just have to do what I can with what I have and hope for the best. I suppose it's something I'll have to learn to do, just like everything else.