Grrr Raaaaaaar Etc.

Alright, position update. I am currently located in a delightful coffee shop on State St. in Madison, WI, little place called Fair Trade Coffee. Good coffee (or so I would say if I could afford any) and an excellent atmosphere: the walls a are nice warm yellow, the table distribution is calculated and perfect for accommodating everyone from that kid in the yellow and black sweatshirt by himself with the laptop to the small gaggle of peers that I've been dragged along behind.

So that's where I am (and if you could tell me right now I'm sure I'd love to hear where you are) and now that you know we can move onto more interesting things, like films I've seen recently. Let's go with The Incredible Hulk.

So, The Incredible Hulk, pseudo-sequel to Ang Lee's 2003 Hulk or The Hulk or whatever, is actually... not bad? Yes! It is! It is not bad, a worthy film to portray the Hulk-Smashtastic action that fills the comics and should be an easy adaptation to the screen, or so you'd think, and you'd probably be wrong, because the Hulk is another one of those Marvel characters with the wonders of internal conflict that the company might as well patent and slip somewhere into their logo. Unlike Spider-Man and Iron Man and all the rest of those witty bastards, however, Bruce Banner is too busy trying to cure himself of his oddities to bother with much wit, and the eponymous monster is too dumb to do anything but blithely narrate his actions, albeit infrequently. It makes for a strange comic book movie, all of the slam-bang action but none or at least few of the grins. They make it work, somehow, probably thanks to the lovely Liv Tyler, who manages to cement an emotional core into the film that one can actually care about, and even if you can't manage that (for God forbid a movie demand anything more than your ability to wonder slack jawed at CG explosions) than at least you can ogle her until your eyes dry out.

I'd talk more about the weird choice of Tim Blake Nelson for Dr. Stern and the occasionally spotty pick of William Hurt and maybe even how excited I am for the things that Marvel Studios is up to but I'm not getting payed by the word and Lord knows you lost interest somewhere around the word "gaggle."

Hm. Not as good as Iron Man, though.

Found a Job...

...and quit it immediately. Okay, to be fair, I'll be officially quitting it in... about seven hours, but even so, the effect is the same so cut the whining because I am sick of hearing it.

Isn't that a lovely picture? It only half relates; the notion of vegetarian shoes though... pure charm.

It wasn't the worst job, it was just boring and soul crushing and awful. Like customer service, except that people actually want information from you when you're standing around in the middle of Target like a very active coma victim. They're much less appreciative when you jump onto their doorstep begging for money with idealism leaking out of your nostrils. It's worse than them just not wanting it, it's them loathing you, the very fact of your existence about the equivalent of a particularly large and needy mosquito.

Canvassing. Door to door canvassing. The institution, Wisconsin Environment, lovely people really, had me memorize some lines, stuck a badge on me and kicked me out on my own into an upper middle class neighborhood obviously more worried about the length and coloring of it's lawns than the air around it. Now admittedly, global warming is not something the human brain was ever designed to fear but I would like to think that someone would give a damn- exactly the sort of thinking that gets one twenty eight doors in your face.

I don't care if I'm broke as hell. My self-esteem can only take so much, and enough people dislike me already.

No point convincing the whole of suburbia that I'm no good.

yours,
Noah J.

Concerts

So I spent last weekend in Chicago, which was much fun and plenty of ROFLs. Seeing Third Eye Blind in concert was sort of surreal- their sound is about one hundred percent the same and I felt like I was about twelve years old listening to them. They spent a lot of stage time talking about their soon-to-be-recorded fourth album (fourth? how long have they been around?) and displaying questionable fashion and headwear choices. Such is life.

The important part of the Chicago concerts was actually Broken Social Scene, who was pretty much wonderful. Kevin Drew does a great job of being rock n roll awesome without being a dick about it- plucking out the bassline of Shoreline was greatly improved by the addition of jump kicks and pick-held-high type maneuvering. Somewhat of an upsetting concert for me, though. Broken Social Scene is hell of good, but that means it got a lot of play and association- about seventy percent of the songs I know by them are the soundtrack to the various heartbreaks of my life, so the concert was somewhat melancholy in that respect.

The Cool Kids played as well. They were pretty good? They need more material before I can judge them proper, and then judge them I shall.

Overall, a good weekend with good music and fun times. This post wouldn't be quite so terrible if I weren't so tired, so I'll catch some sleep so I read this in the morning before crying, brought to tears by the shame I have brought on my family .

yours,
Noah J.

Manhattan

Every time that I log into this account I get all sheepish, typing in my login slash e-mail whatever rocknrollanoah. It's a holdover from older times, you know, and though I've grown very attached to it I sometimes wonder what people think looking at it.

Finally got around to watching Manhattan tonight. I'm absolutely in love with Woody Allen movies, at least the movies from his earlier period (forgive him his later period work, I beg you); the dialogue is just so tight and witty and it has that completely unrealistic quality of reality that really only exists in movies. Watching Woody Allen and Diane Keaton fall in love on screen is always so exciting- they have a very unique chemistry that makes me one hundred percent okay with them having their relationship over a whole slew of films.

The soundtrack was phenomenal, Gershwin throughout. Usually I'm not the sort that would even discuss the soundtrack but recently I've found myself listening more- maybe I'm getting better at watching movies.

The girl who plays Tracy in the movie, no one big, just, you know, Mariel Hemingway. It's strange though, women in movies I mean; Mariel Hemingway became really quite attractive but at the age of something young that she was for Manhattan she's a sort of face you don't see in movies anymore. Like Shelley Duvall, a good actress with a very unique look, attractive on some level that is definitely not the mainstream. It's disheartening. Today I look at movies and I see woman all in some degree of the popular aesthetic and I can't help but wonder where all the original actors went.

God bless Laura Linney, I guess.

yours,
Noah J.

Pornography

This would be my... second blog? Third? One way or another, I've left a couple of them trailing in the dust. I've been trying to sort out for a while what the point of blogging is; I don't want to be another web diary, endlessly noting the inanities of my daily life, demanding that people care, weeping nightly at my empty comment spaces.

I did that anyway for a long while, and I have had quite enough of that thank you very much and yet the horrifying urge to blog remains, so I might as well make it interesting, at the very least.

So anyhow, pornography.

Now, I understand completely that I'm not everybody and there is certainly no universal truth to be said about people, except perhaps the constantly dreary presence of Death hovering over our collective shoulder, but I feel relatively safe saying that men watch more pornography than women, and it's quite likely that I watch more pornography than the rest of the men in my apartment.

Let me clarify.

I'm an English major, which means that not only will no one hire me, I also find delight in analyzing the living fuck out of any thing that jumps around in my periphery, waving its hands about for attention, be it video games or movies or music or the lunatics that I refer to charmingly as friends, little escapes my overpowering desire to intellectualize, and picking apart their every facet has become as compulsory as eating. Porn, for me as for so many others, began as a supplement to masturbatory impulses and it served that purpose just fine until my brain started picking up on patterns and variance and next thing you know I'm watching pornography in my downtime, puzzling over different varieties of faked orgasms and kinks and wondering what the hell it is that's up with the internet or maybe society but more importantly what the hell it is that's wrong with me.

Regardless of any hesitation I have about my newfound fascinations something in me wants to write about it. That something deep inside is crying out that a thesis on the development of fetish pornography or the mainstreaming of amateur content would be worthy and interesting. It's a tough voice to shake and it just keeps yelling. "C'mon!" it shouts, not without allure, "I'm sure it couldn't possibly backfire on you!"

Then on Craig's List I saw an ad looking for freelance writers to write reviews of adult films, and it was like a shining door lined with gumdrops suddenly appeared before me. Write reviews of adult films and get paid to do so? Phenomenal. Sign me up and do it quickly.

But a certain reluctance overtakes me, which I guess is a problem of reputation, which Iago tells me is not really of much importance but he was a tit anyhow so I guess I can throw that out the window. How can I go into this endeavor the reviewer that reluctantly and snobbishly watches porn and avoid becoming a porn obsessed pervert so overtly dedicated that he can't help but write six paragraph diatribes on breasts?

What? I don't know either.

yours
Noah J.