Lack of comments when my blog has been up several days is unacceptable and intolerable. This isn’t a tunnel, folks, it’s a continuum. Do your part.

Last night I was showing Paul and some of his buddies how to play Titan. Paul suggested I log on and tune in RadioParadise.com, so I did, and of course, an IM from my ex girlfriend Kristy pops up immediately. So I spent the next hour or so running back and forth from the kitchen to my bedroom, typing to Kristy (whom I never get to talk to, so if she was feeling chatty I wasn’t going to discourage her) and making moves on the Titan board. If I hadn’t been teaching these guys how to play, I would have simply conceded the game and let them slug it out… like I said, I don’t get to talk to Kristy very often… but this just had to be something I really couldn’t blow off (at least, not and be a good person, I felt). ::sigh::

Then I made the mistake of being honest with Kristy about why some of my responses were taking so long, and she got pissed off at me, as people will when they find out you’re not giving them your undivided attention. I’ll tell you, being truthful is very rarely rewarded in this world. Had I simply been involved in a normal board game I’d have blown it off for her instantly, but, as it was… oh, well.

I’ve gotten two chapters done on the Jeff Webb art book and Jonathan seems to like what I’ve sent him. And I got a $50 payment from Warlord of Erberos being printed in Thrilling Mysteries In Space deposited to my PayPal account yesterday, which is better than a slap in the belly with a wet fish any time. The roaches here seem to be in more or less full retreat; we still see them on occasion, but we’ve cleaned up a lot and the occasions are getting further and further between.

Yesterday some weird set of quantum social dice rolled all sixes and my brother Pat, my cuz in law Mel with her kid Justus, and two of Paul’s friends (whom, I grant you, are regulars here) all showed up within five minutes of each other. It was odd. I don’t think I ever had that many people in my apartment in Tampa in the five and a half years I was living there, other than one time I hosted the family Christmas party.

There’s a vague possibility someone may be showing up to help me get my books and stuff to a storage facility today. Or not. And Paul may be getting a call telling him he got this job at the Circle K today. Or not. It’s all very undefined. But I need to make a run over to a grocery store with an empty backpack; Paul’s fridge/freezer is alarmingly low on actual food. I also need to get to my bank and get a cash transfusion. And another Wal-mart trip would be good, but that we need to hook a ride with someone for. I can already see myself becoming an expert at cadging rides whenever someone with a car drops by.

Paul told me when I moved in that he doesn’t cook, he microwaves, and I thought initially that seemed a fine way to live, but I’m finding that apparently I cook a lot more than I thought, so I need to at least get an electric frying pan. And I’ll have to start washing my dishes immediately; you cannot leave dirty dishes in Paul’s sink without attracting unwanted insectile attention.

All told, though, things seem more or less under control here.

Paul has a lot of movies I wouldn’t pay anything at all to see, but that I’ll watch for free. In the stack: Wonder Boys, U-turn, and Eight Legged Freaks. God knows when I’ll get to them, but there doesn’t seem to be a rush.

I brought the two library books I still had out along with me, and I guess I own them now… at some point I’ll have to call the Tampa Library, tell them I lost them, and pay for them (hopefully using my debit card). Or I could keep calling the library and renewing them forever, provided no other Chelsea Quinn Yarbro fan comes in and wants to reserve them…

I’m about three pages from finished with Come Twilight, and then I have to read Communion Blood. I thought I found little time to read at the other apartment, but that’s nothing compared to out here, where it seems like there’s always someone around demanding social interaction… or if they aren’t, I have a movie to watch, or some project on this computer to work on.

It’s good to be busy, I guess.

However, those hypothetical folks out there who hypothetically enjoy this blog should realize that lack of comments makes doing this fall way down on my priority ladder. I’m just sayin’, is all.

THE FIRST RULE OF FIGHT CLUB

My recollections of Fight Club were hazy. I remembered seeing it in the theater, liking it for the most part, but thinking that apparently whoever had made the film really had had no idea how to end it, so they’d just blown everything up. I also remembered wishing that they’d cast an actual hot chick in the mandatory hot chick part, instead of Helena Bonham Carter, who I found kind of repellent in the film.

I also remember the movie getting a lot of flack. Some reviewers felt it was full of idiotic machismo. Others called it actively evil, glorifying empty headed and vicious violence in a manner that even the most excessively gory horror movies did not do, since at least in horror movies, the monster gets defeated at the end, while in Fight Club, it’s the protagonist who is doing these horrible criminal acts, and he is generally depicted as being admirable while he does them… and, arguably, in the end he survives and even gets the girl.

I can also remember a few reviewers heaping odium on Edward Norton. Norton seems to be that kind of actor. He gets good parts in big movies so I assume a lot of people like him (I do, or I like his acting and don’t mind the way he looks) but there is a devoted subgroup out there that seems to loathe him. I can more or less understand this; it’s how I feel about Ben Affleck. What I loathe about Ben Affleck, though, is that apparently he can drop by the apartment or house of nearly any major Hollywood movie starlet any time, and they’re all his ex girlfriends, and pretty much all of them will fuck him if their current boyfriend or husband isn’t standing right there at the moment. Any man who finds himself in that sort of position who isn’t me should be strung up by the balls from a streetlamp on Main Street by piano wire, as far as I’m concerned.

Norton doesn’t seem to be in this position, and I’ve enjoyed several of his films, so I don’t have that problem with him.

But, anyway, as I say, my recollection of Fight Club were hazy. It was a movie I’d thought about buying on videotape, but I recollected that ending I’d thought was disappointing, and didn’t want to pay full price for it… I didn’t even want to pay $9.99 for it. However, when I saw the Deluxe Edition DVD 2 disc set at this local pawnshop Paul took me to, for $8, I thought, what the hell.

Which will just go to show you, since I doubt I’ll ever watch anything on the 2 disc set except the movie. There’s five different commentary tracks on the first disc, and a whole bunch of shit on the second disc, and it’s like my Spiderman DVD… I doubt I’ll ever even pop the second disc into the player. Who’s got that kind of time?

Anyway, I’ve been watching bits and pieces of Fight Club over the last couple of days, in between working on the Jeff Webb art book and teaching these guys how to play Titan and like that. And it’s a far better film than I recalled.

David Fincher is an interesting director. I don’t say he’s a good one because while I’ve seen all his movies, I didn’t really much like any of them other than this one. He’s got the atmosphere thing down, in much the same way as Ridley & Tony Scott do. But the plots of his films are often simply too ridiculous for me to be able to suspect disbelief in… for example, the various tableaus created by the serial killer in Seven are just absurd, and while the premise of The Game is fascinating, there’s simply no way any company could stage something that elaborate in a real world setting and keep their subject so tightly under control in so many dangerous situations… without their subject knowing what was going on and signing a consent form and waiver of liability, they’d never even try it. But Fight Club, for all that it seems absolutely ridiculous, actually more or less makes linear sense from start to finish. Most likely the protagonist couldn’t have easily gotten away with all the stuff he got away with, but, on the other hand, many split personalities are oddly brilliant, while their core identity is not… it’s as if we all have a genius living somewhere inside us (sometimes many geniuses in many different fields) that we keep buried, but going schizoid allows some people to manifest those capacities as separate sub-identities.

As to the stupid ending, having watched the film more carefully on DVD now, I realize the ending is necessary. His line to Marla that ‘everything will be okay now’, as the buildings start to fall, is the necessary final resolution that provides a moral underpinning to the film, by showing that his actions have indeed had consequences. He may have succeeded in killing his rogue split personality (although one doubts that can lead to anything remotely like real mental health), but everything he did is still in motion, and the world is profoundly fucked because of his emotional dichotomy. Everything is NOT going to be all right, and it’s his fault.

I also need to take back my unkind thoughts about Helena Bonham Carter. There’s really nothing wrong with the way she looks (in fact, she’s quite hot) and I would gather she’s a good actress, too. I simply find the character of Marla completely appalling.

What I find most astounding about some of the bad reviews I remember of this film, though, is that apparently there are film reviewers out there who do not understand that simply because the protagonist of the movie is taking actions and saying things that sound profound, that doesn’t necessary mean the movie itself is saying these actions and those statements are worthwhile, positive, or valid. Everything ‘Tyler’ does and says in Fight Club is sheer fucking pigheaded criminally irresponsible lunacy from start to finish. I think the movie makes this pretty clear. Tyler lives in an environment that is nearly an existential embodiment of filth and decay. His teachings are clearly evil; they exemplify dehumanization, humiliation, debasement, and mass degradation. Every action Tyler takes and every sequence of events he initiates, from the formation of ‘fight clubs’ through his insistence on driving a car (with two psychologically dependent followers in the back seat) in a rain storm with his hands off the wheel to teach himself the value of ‘letting go’, right up through the final successful attempt to bring down the modern world’s financial structure, results in pain, suffering, self destruction and disaster. His self imparted revelations and lessons result in him hurting himself and others, both physically and emotionally; the fact that he’s scarring those stupid enough to listen to him for life, psychically, being neatly reflected by the chemical burns he inflicts on all his followers’ hands. And unless one is willing to reject the basic tenent of secular liberal human morality… hurting others unnecessarily is wrong… it should become clear to anyone watching this thing that while ‘Tyler’ is certainly depicted, to the nondiscerning eye, as being cool and admirable and heroic, in fact, he’s sick, deranged, evil, and pretty much completely fucking wrong in everything he does.

If there is one aspect to Fight Club that I sincerely hope is deranged and absurd, it’s the notion that an army of unthinking, unquestioning, violent male drones could be built this way… that, as this movie seems to imply, there is an entire generation of males out there seething within the bonds of civilization and longing to join a social organization in which they pound the living shit out of each other in basements with their fists. I know there are those who reject civilization’s softening influence, but I’d like to think most of them spend most of their lives in jail, because that’s where our civilization puts people like that. I’d hate to think that the world is full of men holding down shitty jobs who are just waiting for a Tyler Durden to come along, galvanize their buried brutality with a ‘fight club’, and then sculpt them like so much wet soap into an ant-like army of urban terrorists determined to smash our culture like a dropped aquarium and live like looters amongst the ruins, wearing leather clothes that will last them the rest of their lives, and scaling the vines wrapped around the empty shell of useless skyscrapers so they can look down on the subsistence level peasants laying out strips of jerky to dry in the empty car pool lanes of the unused interstates.

I understand the charismatic pull of big pretty pictures and stereo sound, though. The first time I watched this film at the theater, I felt alienated and repulsed, and while I knew the impulse was wrong, nonetheless, I felt there must be something wrong with me, in that I knew I would never in my life join any such ‘fight club’, and in fact, if I found out such a thing existed, I’d think anyone who participated in it was simply fucking crazy. The fact that I find such a proposition repulsive, however, doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with me, it means there’s something right with me. I’m simply not the sort of person who would ever enjoy beating the living shit out of some total stranger, or, worse, getting the shit beaten out of me by that same stranger simply to momentarily escape the boundaries of civilization.

Personally, I like civilization. It provides me with hot showers, super Wal-Marts, the writings of Lois McMaster Bujold, Robert A. Heinlein, Barbara Hambly, and Alan Moore, and… well… yeah… DVD players, TV sets, computers, and movies like Fight Club.