Two Comedies

I discovered the Noel Baumbach jewel of a movie, "Kicking and Screaming" a few months ago. I watched it and thought about it a lot. Then, about a month ago, I watched it... eight more times. Although I haven't had this experience with a movie in a long time, I have had it with books - when there's enough to hold onto the first time, but it challenges you beyond that with a language that you have to learn slowly.

There is enough evidence to support a hypothesis that the characters all started as caricatures, but such a hypothesis would be moot. I don't know how many revisions Noel went through with his script, but there is not a sharp edge to be found in any of the characters, nor their various interactions. This is all the more impressive given the pushing and pulling the script does with the characters and, in the case of Grover and Jane, the evolution we see. I imagine that Noel could tell you about each character's childhood in depth, and it would all ring just as true as what we see in the movie. Call me a simpleton, but that is a "good movie trump card" in my book.

Like most glowing artistic criticism, listening to my tone will set you all wrong on the movie. It isn't perfect, and a big part of why I like it is undoubtedly that I relate to it so well. But maybe it is worth watching.

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Tonight, I saw "The Trip", which was hilarious. I can't remember the last movie I saw that was as funny as it is. And it, too, rings of truth foremost in its conversations and relationships and it too leaves narrative form (even further) in the background - good for it. But the real bonus was Steve Coogan's dream that Noah Baumbach wanted him to star in his next movie. Now, I can't claim that Michael Winterbottom was thinking what I am thinking. But, I am thinking that Steve Coogan's character in The Trip is an older, British version of Grover - cynical, listless, intelligent, talented.

I suppose that we all fit on some great tree of archetypes and sub-archetypes, and whatever you call it when someone you just met reminds you of someone you used to know, but you can't quite put your finger on what it is about them.

A Conversation With Myself

I have been engaged in writing for some time now, and although a flurry of keys has not been a constant current, my thoughts have undeniably stayed active and I have been having a consistent conversation with myself that underpins my progress. To avoid producing a one-sentence paragraph, I will now point out that I have sufficient writing instincts to notice such a trivial violation that, as a rule, is little more than a crutch for weak writers, or: I could title this sentence, "Treating the Symptom".

I have found it difficult to answer even such simple questions as, "For what purpose am I writing?" But, today I certainly made some progress. Before a person can write for others, they have to be able to write for themselves. Or: first comes the art of writing, which I would call a selfish pursuit because how could we know otherwise? For others to agree with you is this other matter. Others might disagree. You could suggest that the art of writing includes this, but I choose to believe that aesthetic considerations are aggregated only because they are subjective to begin with and thus must be aggregated if we are to talk to others about "works of art". To me, art ultimately resides in one person's mind, and if others agree, then fine - but agreement is not a prerequisite to the presence of an aesthetic experience. But to get back to the point - why do I write?

I have felt the answer all along, but I didn't quite get it into the correct words until recently. I initially thought it possible that writing was a means of closure to the subject matter. (I suppose this is simply a more charitable take on Nietzsche's, "That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts." But I now believe I was wrong. The new theory I offer for writing is to understand what I have experienced by having a conversation with my memories.

I have traversed a lot of mental and emotional ground in the last ten years. One day I wanted to understand what the hell had happened. It's not that I was unsatisfied with where I was (although it helps to realize that such issues are always a mixed matter). I couldn't accept that I had gone unaffected by my decisions. I couldn't believe that different decisions would have spit the same "me" out at the end of some other causal sequence - that the same "me" might be writing these same sentences having joined the circus years earlier or living behind a bedroom door all this time. I needed to see how I happened. Ultimately, I needed... need... to learn how to see ahead through the emotional perturbations of my decisions to the person that will come out on the other side. Not a decision made out of time and in a bubble; a decision that must be anti-fragile. It is critical that I make the big choices ahead of us the best that I can. I should have no other goal.

The effect of transferring memory so directly into writing is to have a conversation with those memories. They are pulled apart and I get some sense of what was present there, see how their essence changes with embellishment. It can be fascinating - the aesthetic content of a life. That it can be made better or worse strikes me as some enigma. This is the strangest of all mirrors I know - between what we are and what we imagine and project.

The Opposite of A.D.D.

I spent about six hours one evening this week reading Jens Lekman's online diary backwards from July of 2011 to the early days of 2004 when he started it; following links, listening to music he posted, and so on. I came to a couple of conclusions:

1) He is the "real deal" and has not simply gotten lucky or tripped and fell into a thematic goldmine

2) He is cursed with emotional instability, which always feels like something the world does to you but is actually a personality trait. The results are generally binomial - you get better or you get worse. Staying the same is the equivalent of walking an increasingly flimsy tightrope.

3) Because of #2, I am nervous as hell that his next album could be great, horrible, or anywhere in between.

I admire music that is unique, and he has shown several enviable qualities that few other artists have achieved:

1) Not only is he funny, but the humor improves the songs without lowering their replay value like other "funny" music, most of which is simply gimmicky.

2) He succeeds with sampling other music and turns great music into new music that is often equally great

3) His songs are often both overstated (the arrangements) and understated (subtlety in the lyrics) at the same time.

4) Many of his songs are sublimely ironic and are therefore something like modern poetry.

5) If you only listened to a song or two, you might make the mistake that he is a clumsy lyricist. With enough exposure it becomes clear that what he really is, is a brilliant lyricist who writes songs perfectly suited for a charmingly imperfect baroque singer who just happens to be himself. (See just about any of his songs; for instance, from "A Postcard to Nina": "Your father is mailing me all the time/ He says he just wants to say hi/ I send back 'out of office' auto-replies")

I skipped his show in Omaha in 2008 for $2 long island iced teas at The Underground, the dirtiest bar in town. I don't know that I have words to place that decision into any sense of order except to the degree that it, itself vividly testifies to the order of my own sorry existence in 2008.

The Day I Surprised Myself

I always liked the part in American Beauty where Lester says, "It's a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself." For many years, I would remember that quote and ruminate on it and determine that I had never done much to surprise myself. I wasn't hard on myself about it. I just assumed it wasn't my personality. I thought myself careful and steady and I thought someone would have to at least be less wistful as a requirement to be surprising, most of all to themselves.

I surprised myself when I went to Europe. That place is painted with such overwhelming and uniformly romantic brushstrokes as a place that young people from the United States visit to grow or "discover themselves" or whatever. Wonky. Anyway, that is something like the experience I had there. It doesn't embarrass me. For a very long time, I shied away from stereotypical actions and behaviors for no good reason except as some sort of rebellious reflex. But, that is just so exceedingly silly. What really matters is that our experiences are genuine and are our own. Whether others have shared similar experiences does not matter. So, let that be a lesson if you are a young person - you should not align your thoughts or actions by any particular expectations of the world. You should simply align yourself to your own expectations.

The last few days I have been preoccupied with thinking about the summer of 2008. It does not come naturally to us to remember our mindset some time in the past. We cannot recreate the blindness that is the future. But there were days that summer where I was looking at apartments because there were just three of us living at the house and rent and utilities were expensive split three ways. It felt, I guess, like it was finally time to move on, and I am guessing that my idea of moving on was to change as little as possible. I'm not sure that's the same thing as the "path of least resistance" but maybe some people's actions simply construct an unwitting pattern where relative stasis helps to ensure comfort or happiness?

I nurtured a big ball of angst about moving out of Omaha all that previous winter and spring and when summer rolled around I was proud that I had come to the conclusion that everything I needed was in Omaha. Moving somewhere else would not magically bring exciting people or opportunities to myself; I would have to change myself to find those things, here or otherwise. And I did and do love Omaha and my single overwhelming emotion towards it then and now is affection. So sometime in late July of 2008 I was going to move into an apartment and stay healthy running or biking and going to the gym and working as a Product Manager at Avantas because of course all these things were a simple destiny.

On January 1st I flew to Chicago and from Chicago I flew overnight to Stockholm and in the early hours of the new day I sat in the international terminal at Stockholm - Arlanda International and looked out the window into the strange dark of the Scandinavian morning. It was 5:30 am and it wouldn't start to get light out until nine or so, by which time I would have taken the hour-long flight to Helsinki and wandered around the Helsinki airport and taken a bus to the downtown train station. But sitting there in the international terminal, I had my first meditation on how that moment was such a product of my ability to surprise myself and nothing else and I think that one of my initial reactions was, "what the hell have I done?", but of course that was simply a reflex that I had constructed unwittingly from all my wistful years of stasis.

I had been traveling for about a full twenty-four hours when I got off the train in Mikkeli and got into a car and rode the ten minutes through a quiet snowfall to my dorm and I was up most of the night, impossibly isolated and all I wanted to do was talk and in the absence of the chance, I went for a nighttime walk with Bon Iver. I think it just took the moment in the airport for me to internalize impossibility into what it really was, which was reality. I did many amazing things the next five months, but they all felt immediate and real and indeed it was the return to Omaha and a pattern like the one I had previously known that felt unreal.

There's a part in the song "Rocky Dennis' Farewell Song" by Jens Lekman where he says:

"I could sit and watch my life go by
Or I could take a tiny chance, 'cause
Someday I'll be stuck in some museum"

And I think that I have taken one step that I had to take and now I need to learn to become that person always, because I am living in Omaha and staying healthy biking and going to the gym and working as a Product Manager at Avantas, which is not a criticism, just an observation.

The Pulse

My personality and my choices have brought to life a strange, long pulse that dances me interminably between the strangest of extremes - ones I have learned to control so readily, once they appear to me. The bipolar axis between joy and despair, urgency and boredom, optimism and purposelessness. I suspect my mental and emotional stabilizers are too loose, allow me too much freedom. I stand my joys in front of myself so eagerly to indulge. I am no longer afraid of running out; I want it all now.

Let's just talk about at least one up and I will leave the downs to worry about myself:

On my recent trip to Colorado, after the second consecutive long, strenuous day of hiking, we settled into our camp and I crossed a narrow stream with my iPod. I had gone to great lengths to compile a playlist meant to listen to in the dark and alone in the wilderness. (If you're wondering: something like a miasma of ambient and minimal music (Fennesz, Boards of Canada, Animal Collective's "Campfire Songs", snips of Eno) with a handful of delicate melodic numbers (Will Oldham, early Grizzly Bear).) I was exhausted, certainly too exhausted to be hungry, though I was depleted mightily. The ground was a little spongy under my feet, or perhaps my feet were simply spongy things now. The rocks and trees of the forest acted out of turn; I sensed something light, a web of presence beyond randomness. My brain caught this anthropomorphism and checked it out of existence and then went back into sugar-starved remission. Perhaps I simply sensed order and perhaps we are evolved to feel awe at that. I walked up a slope, down a slope, looked back up. I caught sight of trees that begged me with gestalt identities, wandered through breeches of enormous split boulders. The trees and rocks stood patient for me to look into and look through. And I, too, I knew then and now, am re-learning patience in moments such as this; the world, I sometimes forget, must stand always waiting, but I have a choice. I have not had a drug-induced psychedelic experience in a very long time, but my heart seeks out their specters in strange moments of respite, my brain away or asleep. What does this mean? Why are these things as they are?

I am always trying to answer the question of what I want my life to be. I often have some model of the world built to satisfy questions like that and it often burns down in moments like this. I search through the rubble and feel remorse towards the match.

Aesthetics and Objectivism, Living Together

Buffett has said that we should try to go to bed each day a little wiser than when we woke up. What a wonderfully robust idea. I would go one better - in a Nassim Taleb way - and say that we should learn to experiment with alternate approaches to things we do wrong. Such an idea is not simply robust, but anti-fragile (induced stress - in this case, many things going wrong - will prompt the system to grow stronger).

I resisted reading Taleb for a long time, because my first exposure to him was a video in which he most completely ruffled his feathers at an interviewer in his most arrogant way. But, I am such a hypocrite! If it is difficult to suffer fools (I must admit I think it is, although the sole strategy I allow myself is simply to attempt their avoidance), then it is difficult, too, to suffer lesser philosophies. He is no quasi-intellectual (read his recent paper on tail risk treatments across distribution domains here). But do not misunderstand me - I am no snob. As these formless (though potent) ideas have taken shape and combined and aged within me, I have found the most common effect to be that I speak of them less. (to assume that such a tendency belongs also to others is to be shown convincing evidence that we are not evolved for this society we have formed)

Such things are not my primary joys today, though. I have come back to literature after being gone so long, and it has been something like a renaissance. I have been both reading and writing with a joy beyond what I have experienced in a long time - ten years or more. What strange teleological thinking I have always had, to assume such things could simply end. I believe I have banished that from my mind, although I may find myself broadening such a thought beyond my wildest dreams before I am done here. BioTime (NYSE:BTX) seems to be cracking the code to deliver stem cell-derived regenerative therapies for everything from retinal degradation to heart disease in the next few years. Speaking of telelogical thinking, what will happen to the earth's population when regenerative therapy is not only complete but ubiquitous? The effect on availability of human capital practically begs for a new era of slavery (we may consider our laws to be based on collective morality, but over time the morality implied by our laws bends towards profit).

And quite separately, others will find me endlessly delusional to suggest it - and although I still mean it only as playful conjecture - one day we may find that we are not from the past, but from the future. Extrapolate the history of video games and regenerative technology into the future and what do you have? Would you want to live in that world or this one? It even invites fractal arguments of iteration - probably the outer world does not quite look the same as ours, with both symmetries and derivations pervasive in its architecture and ours. What a book that would be to write.

But I digress. I was talking about books, and I was sitting here thinking about one or two of them, even as I was writing something completely unrelated. I want a long holiday alone with my books without urgency, alone with thoughts and easy desires. I want to escape the anxieties that my lifestyle has injected so unnaturally into my everyday composure and disposition. I want my mind to clear. So, I will work on that first - eating healthier, developing an approach to health that will work because it will feel natural. Now, if only I could wake up early to do yoga or take a long lunch at work to meditate.

And finally, I can see my two worlds living together, after all these years. I believe my future is to accept objectivism and aesthetics into the same place in my mind and go forward. But if I must choose, objectivism will not stand a chance. Give me the loves in my life and set me off.

A Book and an Update

I am reading "Fooled by Randomness" by Nassim Taleb, which by any standards of what I have read before, makes me feel still inadequate. It can almost be described as a treatise on knowledge. A wide subject, and one he does not completely traverse, but he touches many parts and many of them turn to gold. I think his next book - Anti-Fragility: How to Live in a World We Don't Understand - looks to be even better and I can only hope that its ultimate influence is both strong and positive. He is a dreadfully arrogant and disagreeable man but he is also often right.

What else is there to be said about the present? I am happy with myself and find myself wondering if this is the eye of some great hurricane, passing - for sure - too slowly over me to notice what is happening at all from one day to the next. Coming to understand some layer of life only succeeds in breaking confusion through to the next layer. Lately I have become concerned with my health. What have I done, what do I continue to do to my body and mind? I can't help but think that I have become a bit of a hypochondriac. I imagine my mind slowly destroyed by medication, my eyes and my ears by my own failure to acknowledge their fallibility.

But these feelings are fleeting. Hopefully they are just strong enough to motivate my own tempered and rational action. Hopefully they ultimately serve to bring me back to myself as I have been and continue to be - not as something permanent or immovable but as someone at peace with his own being that follows a long arc towards an end we can be sure is unavoidable.

The weather is warm, the food lately has been great (great Mexican Eggs Benedict this morning and an even better Moroccan Brochette sandwich this afternoon), the bike riding enjoyable and Merry's company always wonderful. I'd love to get greedy but instead I will try only to be thankful.