cheep success.

Oh my followers, what a treasure trove I stumbled upon today! My two hungers (fashion and film) were fed fabulously today, and at affordable prices to boot! Perhaps I will do something good for others as a way to celebrate my immense good findings (no).

I somehow managed to find the dopest pair of Number 5 PF Flyers in black at the Crossroads on Haight. But the real dopeness comes from the fact that they actually fit me perfectly. I always say that I have terrible luck when it comes to finding shoes at consignment stores, but in actuality I’ve accumulated I think three of my favorite pairs from secondary sellers. But this is definitely a first in regards to finding the exact color and model of a shoe I’ve been actively looking for from non-cheep retailers. And I nabbed the traditionally triple-diget footwear for a smooth $30. Aces! In order to stay in the thrift god’s good graces, I put down many a “meh” item that I knew I didn’t truly desire or require. A heavier wallet, an emptier closet; perhaps my greatest find was my ability to say “no, you affordable thread, no!”

But the greatest gift was at the Haight+Ashbury Amoeba, where my inner film geek fried his damn pants at the sight of a rare Criterion edition of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. Be still my beating heart! Siphoning through the ‘cult filmmakers’ section with lightning fast fingers (one of my favorite sounds is, without a doubt, the sound of DVDs being flicked through like a card catalog), I suddenly stumbled upon the digital gem and literally found myself taken aback with a gasp. “What have I done to deserve this earth?”, I found myself asking. I think it was good karma for being so frugal with uneeded clothing I could have easily bought that I was able to find something that I genuinely wanted. I fried and went to heaven. I also nabbed a collector’s edition of The Fly (also Cronenberg) and Children of Men. All for around $40. What a world!

I think we all learned a little something here (no).

stripped-down

This is the second time I’ve been to Vegas in one year*. This is either two too many or not nearly enough; risks of excess are appropriate here. The first time I came was in November, when I was still 20 — a mere three months until my 21st birthday, on the cusp of the demographic that Vegas attempts to attract. Now, at 21, I’m able to see this city in new, shimmering, ‘open-all-nite’ light. In fact, you can see the strip lights from everywhere, including my abnormally large hotel window. But then again, that’s always kind of been the point – to be able to see these buildings, these lights, this town of excess, from anywhere and everywhere

Towers shoot up from the cement sidewalks like weeds in a suburban yard. Those same suburbanites – the white mothers and whiter children, kept indoors at the risk of facing reality or worse, sunlight – bask in the artificial glow of hotel signs and show lights. The tangibility of Old Time Vegas is now gone; posters are replaced with TV screens; lights are replaced with…TV screens. The town, resembling a 3D puzzle, has advanced past comfort, disconnecting from all who inhabit it.

There is no end to excess in this town, but that seems to be just how the residents and visitors like it. There is an otherworldly quality to Strip (which is, for all intents and purposes, Las Vegas in its entirety), which is an oddity considering that there is nothing in the town that it is, in itself, original. The Venetian and Paris hotels emulate their respective European locals. New York, New York goes one step further, mimicking a city within our very own country. Even the strip clubs begin to blend together, abandoning any desire for originality (I saw cards littering the ground advertising a new club opening called Assgrab – opening a mere block away form Club Grabbyass).

But I embrace and even, dare I say, adore that tastelessness; the same way you put up with a family relative who drinks one too many white wine spritzers and then gets overly and theatrically anxious about not hearing spoilers. When my family and I visited in November (which was when I had originally planned on writing all this), we were taken on a night tour of the Strip by a man who knew the area well. He showed us the old (MGM Grand, The Flamingo), the new (Wynn Hotel, City Center), the borrowed (extensions of both The Venitian and The Palazzio have been on hold for further construction for over a year now due to an inability to pay back loans – as of now, a start up date is still unknown), and the black and blue (I am almost positive that the hooker I spotted was sporting a black eye and not, as my mom claimed, wearing that “chic raccoon-make-up kids wear now”).

But it wasn’t until we drove further down the strip that I was suddenly surrounded by something I wasn’t expecting: culture. Vegas culture, but a culture nonetheless. There was warmth that resonated from the Golden Nugget and Circus Circus, hotels that were top tier in their prime, but are now resigned to the lesser end of the strip, serving as nothing more than street corners for beaten down (or fashion-savvy) hookers to turn tricks on.

It was tragic, but Old Vegas was where my heart stayed for the remainder of our trip, and the months in between this most-recent excursion. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to take another trip down there like I would have liked, but it’s haunted me with startling detail.

But slowly, all of Vegas might be following suit, until there is no lesser end of the Strip to speak of. After over twenty-years as one of the fastest-growing metropolises in all of the United States, Las Vegas now faces the highest foreclosure rate of any major city, with the unemployment rate having jumped from 3.8% to 12.3% in just three years.

Sheldon Adelson, who has lost more money during the rigors of the economic collapse than anyone else on this world we call the earth, is the 76-year-old chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., which owns the Venetian hotel, the Convention Center and a plethora of other lavish landmarks. In 2007 and '08, he was the third richest person in the world, with a net worth of $40 billion. By February of 2009, he’d lost $36.5 billion — more than the GDP of half of the countries in the world. That's his crane parked between The Venetian and The Palazzo.

This town is hit hard. You can see it. I guess that’s what happens when you’re a city known for extravagance during a time where extravagance is the problem. But there is something hilariously and appropriately fitting about Vegas’ profligacy. I missed it the first time around; I originally though that it was simply a town that was re-built in its own shallow image. And it is! Where Vegas once took itself perhaps a bit too seriously, new Vegas knows its attraction, and it plays up its grandeur. It’s a town that embraces its superficiality, and I adore it for that.

But now I see a meaning in it. Because the people that ruled Vegas in its heyday — a time where lawlessness meant cutting deals over nightclub dinners and treating your woman of the week a bit too nice — meant something different. The ones who traded pharaoh gold for pinstripes ruled this strip of land, this post-capitalist desert, like the very Roman rulers and Greek gods that these casinos and hotels now pay tribute to. These landmarks serve not simply as extensions of grandeur, but reminders as well. Reminders of better times and perhaps even a self-fulfilling realization that Vegas, like all empires, like a tower of cards, will inevitably collapse.

It’s that self-awareness that makes New Vegas so magnetic a force. Fiji is the only water available here. Floor 13 doesn’t exist in a single hotel. And a 5-year-old casino is actually 25 in strip years. But what this answer to post-countercultural America really does is personify the ever-fleeting idea of that American dream, which is at this point so foggy a phrase that it’s lost all meaning and substance. But it’s rooted here, in the blood of a city that now houses halted construction and casino owners hustling twice as hard. What this city is and has always been built on are bets. Bets that people will want hotels larger and glitzier. Bets that even once we find fiscal equilibrium, our desire for the over-the-top will never falter, and we’ll come back to a city that preaches sin as a virtue. Bets that may prove to be wrong, but the Strip nevertheless goes all in.

I use to think what happened in Vegas, stayed in Vegas. Turns out what happens in Vegas speaks for everything outside of it.


-----
*By year I mean school year, which for a student is the only official method of measurement.

updates

For the past few months, Rod would change Leesa and Stephanie's facebook status any time they were foolish enough to leave their page unattended. A smorgasbord of stati invade their respective friends' news feed. The topics, though varied, would, more often than not, come back to "poop" related jokes. Eventually, Leesa and Stephanie begin to retaliate, changing Rod's facebook to status to poop-centric updates any chance they could. But their revenge was rarely fruitful; anytime Rod's status was changed, everyone would simply write it off as yet another ridiculous Rod antic. He was unstoppable, and, for some reason, impermeable to embarrassment or humiliation.

Frustrated, Leesa and Stephanie began to craft a facebook status that would truly teach Rod a lesson. They crafted a status that hinted at Rod having experienced a potential breakdown, resulting in an extended stay in an unidentified treatment facility. The prank, however, was ill received by the public, with an outpouring of concern and support. Eventually, Leesa's inbox (both computer and text) was flooded with agonized pleas: "Is Rod okay?", "What's going on?", "Is there anything we can do?", et all. The prank resulted in more work than laughs, as Leesa had to respond to every message explaining the joke that had gone horribly awry. Defeated once again, Leesa and Stephanie succumbed to the realization that perhaps there was no way of getting even.

On February 23, 2010 , Rod walked into his bedroom, only to be greeted by a particularly fowl smell. Investigation lead to a terrifying discovery: a mound of poop plopped on his bed sheet, assumed to have been left by the house cat. Shocked, Rod got to cleaning, confused over how and why the cat would commit such an atrocious act. But when attempting to update his facebook status or tweet the event, he was faced with an alarming truth: his Rod antics — his celebration of all things poop, and obsession with the satrically disgusting — would mean that no one (no one) would ever believe him, instead believing the event to be nothing more than a disgusting joke.

Somewhere, Leesa and Stephanie smiled.

and that's what adulthood is: you wake from the nightmare and realize there's no bigger bed to climb into.

I'm sitting in this wonderful, large, plush arm chair that the Abbey litters its comfortable floors with. I love this café; I feel so peaceful and confident when I'm here. I feel like all the things I have to do are so manageable. I haven't been feeling that too much lately, so any place that gives me that kind of comfort is worthy of blogging about/talking about/venting to/crying over.

I think I've been really exasperated recently. I hate the question of what my biggest fear is, mostly because I hate questions that I have no answer to. But recently I've realized that my biggest fear (as in biggest — big, big) is not growing. Not that my fear isn't growing, but that I'm scared of not growing. The idea of not growing absolutely terrifies me, mostly because I'm surrounded by some of the most wonderful people in the world — all of which have managed to change immensely. My classes this quarter have been somewhat underwhelming, but interesting and necessary nevertheless. After my 'Introduction to Film Theory & Criticism' class last quarter, I think everything else is going to just always pale in comparison. It really changed my outlook on film and everything else I hold dear to me. It made me care about my passions differently, and it, without a doubt, helped me grow.

With budget cuts rising, financial aid dwindling and resources become scarce, I've become so much more conscious of my relation to my university. I want to get the most out of my education not just because I desire it, but simply because I pay for it. So when I find myself in an intellectual slump, there is no way it won't cause me to re-think everything around me. But I also think its horrible that I equate personal development with schoolwork, as if the two are mutual exclusive. I've talked to 5 different people about this very idea over just the last two weeks: how to separate our personal growth from academic expectations; personal desires from outside obligations. I shouldn't resent an education that is optional, that I've chosen and that I'm paying for. But I think, more often than not, I do. I look at a syllabus littered with assignments, and I think about all the things I'd rather be reading. I count the number of hours I spend researching papers I have to write, and consider all the experiences I could be having.

I chose not to go abroad because I didn't want to burden of schoolwork to interfere with time I'd rather spend immersing myself in new customs and total strangers. I'm becoming more and more happy with that decision as the year continues on. I think I need these full years spent in one place. The fact that every house I move into constantly feels fleeting (I decorate with the knowledge that they will, again, be packed up in 9 months) is enough to deal with, let alone interrupting it with a semester abroad. My twenty-first birthday gift from the parents is a big one: they said they'd fully fund a trip anywhere, anytime for however long. It's a huge thought, and an even bigger gift. I feel so lucky; it grants me the kind of peace I'm lacking daily sometimes. Supportive family, loving friends, financial freedom (knock on wood), endless opportunities, youth that (at least currently) feels both fleeting and everlasting. So why do I feeling like I'm missing something? Why can't I shake a feeling of emptiness that seems to linger?

I immersed myself in a party last night where 90% of the people in the room were strangers. Spent my time going up to random unknowns asking them what their deal was, attempting to connect with the various party goers.

Of the 7 most noteworthy people I met, 5 of them came from divorced families. Go figure.

me rite prety one day.

It's rained the past week.

No, that's not the right term. It's been a damn biblical flood the last few days. This is of course coming from a twenty year old upper class Californian who considers a light shower the tell-tale signs of winter approaching. Though it's finally cleared up a bit (it was an uncharacteristically beautiful couple days this past weekend), I still feel the storm approaching: rains that have taken too long to fall; winds that are sure to knock tree branches from their redwood empire, inevitably blocking the one road that leads to campus; the downpour of avoided reading assignments; a gust of class days flying by, reminding me that the only thing that's quicker than a new quarter starting is a new quarter ending.

Most of all, I worry that I'm not growing. I'm not being challenged intellectually. These grades, these stupid letters that are supposed to mean something, have made it so that I look at them as some sort of barometer of intellect, as if another 'A' on an essay really means I'm growing. Last quarter, my Introduction to Film Theory & Analysis class proved to be the most demanding and challenging class I've ever taken. It was also, without a doubt, the single most influential curriculum I've ever been subjected to. I was reading theorists that I now praise like rock stars; writing about subjects and film's that have changed me as a student and, most importantly, a film lover; developing theories that would divide me in half. I hate not feeling that same challenge, that send sense of desire to be better than I am. Now, I'm reading a book that says:

"To delve into the topic further would require too much time. You can read more by researching further; use search engines like 'Google' or 'Yahoo!'."

Would you believe this is an actual quote? I kid you not. I want, more than anything, to know I'm getting better. And it doesn't help that anytime I sit down to write something new I convince myself that I can't write for shit, and that anything I've written that's been even remotely successful was pure luck and nothing more. I want to tell myself to "snap out of it", but I can't shake the feeling that my success has been good fortune, and that anything from here on out has the chance to fall to the wayside. I have to embrace the shitty first draft, but I can't. I can't weather the storm of potential failure.

How in the hell do I plan on moving to the East Coast if I can't deal with California drizzle?

Nineteen Ninety Nine.

I sit at the tail end of the new millennium’s first decade. A perfect cultural perspective, divided in half: my childhood growing up observing the decadent excess of the 1990s and my formidable years in the blatant reality of the new millennium – fleeting, promising, disappointing, redefining. A harsh reality, dumped like a brew of molded dangling carrots and ice-cold rancor.

What did my cinema see? It saw everything and nothing; the disillusionment of the people – the spectator, the mother – and the photoplay itself. It began with the unease of the unknown – a stench of fear that has emanated from the cultures of yesteryear: the ticking collapse of the stock market plummet; the echoing tick of doomsday clock’s minutes to midnight. “Reality! Reality!” they shouted, humming a prayer that only those with skin can offer. But the culture evaporated when the zeroes returned with comrades. The 2000s hit us in every realm – what did the cinema capture?

The machine. The device, the apparatus itself. Us in transit, now stalled permanently. The dripping jail cell rot of the mirror stuck to Neo’s finger as he pulled back in The Matrix. He digests the silver, delivering a scream echoed out by the bloodcurdling ambience of a server disconnect. He is agonized, tortured, but free. The apparatus was the allure of the organic in the light of its barren scope -- the green tilt of nature now replaced with the neon glow of a digital code. Reality, thus, was the scarcity, and the machine was our artificial prevention from the ‘real’. To feel the natural and the return of the organic we must unplug ourselves and face the chrome-covered intensity of actuality.

A warning. A sincere hope that the pratfalls of the horrorshow before us would never mimic the world that watches. We attempted to refuse. Now in 2009, the scaled blue skin of the Avatar in James Cameron’s titular film, offers the same sense of ‘real’. The artificial digitations of the organic, and our complacent stupor with which we watch, all rested in 90-degrees with glasses the sizes of the reel itself gazed appropriately on the screen.

Avatar preaches the beauty of the organic and the desperate need to preserve its natural allure, yet it is a plea made through the machine, the inorganic preaching the power of the tangible. Those in the Matrix pods are depicted as victims to the development of the real, and we truly do succumb to its ease: “it’s not organic, but it’s close enough”. Now, we watch the cinema not for how it reflects reality, but how it resembles it. The goal is to force the unreal to mimic until it reaches secondary existence, a sort of doppelganger to the substantial – the cluster of starspark freckles scattered along the electric blue flesh of the Na’vi’s, looking as if it mimics the ‘real’ feel of Cameron’s cat-smurf blanket of skin.

We are watching the birth of the matrix. We aid in the disintegration of reality itself. I watch with disbelieving eyes as the people lay within the pods in an electronic embryonic state of being – electronic replaces umbilical, our eyes sag because we’ve never used them before. I laugh disbelievingly, nodding my head in faux-critique posture until days later I am transfixed like a saucer eyed cub at the artifice of reality on a screen that preaches disconnect as a virtue: “look at your size in comparison to your creation – the machine has surpassed you”.

I am hell bent to experience the experience. I arrive an hour before the electro-cinematic rolls tape. I am eager to become the pod, allowing the cinema of attractions to continue onward. I sit back and am presented at. The fetal positions that humans-turned-batteries find themselves in within the hollowed human grapevine looks comforting, and I slowly find myself crossing my legs a little closer than before, until I find both legs atop my cushioned theater seat, feeding the machine (both the cinematic, that, in the wise words of Christian Metz, doesn’t exist until I watch it, and the industry machine itself).

How have we gotten here in only ten years? The shift from the warning of 1999 to the complacent and subtle transformation in late 2009; we face extinction on a mass level, and I return to my fetal position for another fix of the fantastical, larger, brighter, closer to both reality and the audience. I am blinded, and worst of all, I am becoming the very thing I shook my head at so confidently. In the era of the nines, I rallied against the necessitation of the plug in. Now my cinema depicts the organic as only achievable through the process – Jake Sulley feels more alive within the electronically accessed natural world – and through the spectatorship. The nines are over; we are at the tail end of the zero decade, and our warning to ourselves went unnoticed, resigned simply as spectacle, not statement.

The Promise of the 'More'

Dear James Cameron,

There is something between an artist and a ringleader – the same way there is something between a speaker and a politician – that is a far better suited title for you and your cinematic cohorts. You don’t quite pillage our cultural landscape as much as you promise to. But we’ve seen what you’re capable of: taking the purposefully melodic horror of Ridley Scott’s Alien, and transforming it into a wartorn battlefield epic in Aliens, a film whose differences from its predecessor transcend simple pluralization.

What have we done to deserve this feast for the senses, devourer of the spectacle? A punishment for our culture’s abundant love of excess, perhaps – the equivalent of the parent who, one finding you smoking a cigarette, forces you to finish the whole pack. But we haven’t smoked just one in years. We’ve fallen for the desire of more, the desperation for more, the drug-infueled fix for the senses, the shutting down of the brain and the vicarious orgasm of the external: my eyes, my ears, but not my mind. Stimulation on a mass level; I feel dirty.

A marketing campaign built entirely on meaningless bombardment – first of the visual, then of the narrative. You have promised us this, and only this: we haven’t seen this before. But we have, just as much as we haven’t. So I ask you, rather bluntly: what the fuck is Avatar? What is it really? Not what it should be, or what it was 14 years ago. But what is it now? What do you want it to be/hope it to be/need it to be – not for you, but for us.

Because what would have simply entertained nearly a decade and a half ago is now left as more an analysis of us, our culture, our desire. You’ve produced something that you felt we needed before we needed it – a choice of your own accord. Now, we’ve seen it all, but we are still immersed in an industry, a society, that tells us ‘we’ve seen nothing yet!’

Progress. We do nothing but progress, but to no secure endpoint. Oneupsmanship on a grandiose level; I fear for the worst. Above all, I fear you, Mr. Cameron, are a puppeteer of this ambiguity. There is something larger – necessary even – in what Avatar seems to be presenting to us. But I know that it’s aware. Christian Metz speaks of the voyeur within the cinema, that film is not aware that we watch it, but needs us to in order to exist – it doesn’t want to know that it is being viewed, yet demands it.

Its one spoken word – “this is great” – is all we need as viewers. We watch, and the film demands that we care. And, perhaps most importantly, we are in the last legs of being able to pretend we have a choice. At 20, I stand at a point of reflection. Half of my consciousness inhabits the last half of the Twentieth century, while the other half persists through the first part of the Twenty-First.

“We have evolved! I swear it!” And what better place for that false promise – accusation, even – than through the photoplay, the cinema itself. You have taken on a debt of reflection, promising to show us things we’ve never seen before, and things that we can never see again. Because what film does is transcend the spectacle and capture the moment of evolution – on a cultural level, a mechanical level, and an internal level.

But what the early Twenty-First century has shown us is that there is no separation for film to document. The cultural landscape has become externalized, mechanical in nature, and absent in objective spectatorship. We watch to feel on a personal level – our only moments of internal solitude in an age of constant accessibility and expected voyeurism. And so there is your film, which comes to us mere weeks before we embark on the unknown, and continue down the already downtrodden new millennium’s second half.

These weeks of apparent anticipation should be looked at with a nervous eye – one that asks us all to make a decision as to which way we will go: the route of the tangible, the internal becoming externalized, and our cinema reflecting that. Or a refusal. A refusal to heed the promise of the ‘never-before-seen’, avoiding at all costs the empty, and, instead, demanding something more: something to hold on to; something that is not as fleeting as the memory of the moment the cinema showed us something, but the cinema itself.

We’ve disregarded the tangible ages ago; even the romantics, with a tendency to hold on for too long, have traded the photobooth strip of pictures for Apple’s Photo Booth album. We don’t touch anything. And so a film – about humans being transported into the body of a ‘non-human’ creature – begs the question of what it is that Avatar is doing? Depicting us, perhaps, exactly as we are: desperate to be submerged in the mechanical, loosing touch, but gaining power -- or a secondary sense of it. We are placed into the Avatar, and we loose ourselves as we gain a notion of 'our selves'. That is what the Avatar does, but what is it that Avatar is doing?

The answer is nothing and everything: it is progressing us, but without the tangible, without realism or motion on our part or its creators. So, instead, I await, with befuddled enthusiasm for subject matter which neither interests me nor intrigues me for its actual value, but instead for its zeitgeist defining prowess, its ability – or audacity – to claim refuge in the neither-regions of our cultural consciousness, as something surpassing cinema or experience, becoming both and neither in the process. This is not film.

Sincerely,

Rod Bastanmehr