Great Urinals of the Pacific Northwest

Rejuvenation hardware

Fat's best HEAVY TUNES of 2011

Malverde, Red Fang, Murder the Mountains
Short Version, Wild Flag, Wild Flag
running on nothing, Fucked Up, David Comes to Life
TNK, 801, 801 Live
Woke up Near Chelsea, Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, the Brutalist Bricks
Black Captain, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Wolfroy Goes to Town
The Czar: Usurper/Escape/Martyr/Spiral, Mastodon, Crack the Skye
(), the Men, Leave Home
Boring Girls (live), Pissed Jeans, WFMU Comp
We Left the Apes to Rot, but Find the Fang Grows Within, Red Sparowes, Aphorisms
jigsaw puzzle, Rolling Stones, Beggars Banquet
always never know when to quit, Big Business, Quadruple Single
Miss Two Knives, Single Bullet Theory, Single Bullet Theory
Estate Sale Sign, the Mountain Goats, All Eternals Deck
Jacket (orchestral), Shallow Gravy, Jacket EP
keep pushin', Pierced Arrows, 45

All Eternals Deck

Tied with David Comes to Life as the record that meant the most to me in 2011. Only misses were "the Autopsy Garland" (a fine song, but the Steely Dan references were a turnoff), "Age of Kings" (too much whispering, too much quavery violin), "Sourdoire Valley Song" (too slow, too much falsetto, but the lyrics might be the album's best), & "for Charles Bronson" (just too on the nose).

Though there's not one song that does it for me every-note/every-word, "Beautiful Gas Mask", "Birth of Serpents", "Prowl Great Cain", are damn close, and "Damn These Vampires" is as close to absolutely perfect as any song I've ever heard; I only left it off the best-song list to try to avoid being completely trite. "Birth of Serpents" and, oddly, "Liza Forever Minelli" have two or three lines that make me misty every single time. "High Hawk Season" makes me sing along with my nothing voice every single time. "Never Quite Free" might have the album's best arrangements, and even though I have no idea what it's 'about', the way the song is put together makes me happy every time I hear it.

David Comes to Life

Almost certainly too long, and with some weak spots like dry rot, but a hell-week when I couldn't go/be home, my lady was four time zones away, all I had was this record through the sub-thumbnail-sized speakers in my netbook, and even though I was kind of crying a lot, everything seemed okay whenever I heard something like "hello my name is David" or "where the fuck is the other shoe", or the spit-shout hoarse desperation of "it's all been worth it it's all been worth it it's all been worth it it's all been worth it".

The drums are obliteratingly good, the guitars sound as good as any record you've ever owned, the bass is mixed just a hair too low for me, and the entire album sounds/feels like a heart-full teary-eyed smile-cry confession about how much you like really like somebody and just have to tell them about it all about it right now now now it hurts and goddamnit I had to do it and live/die/lose/win/walk/run/cry/laugh I'll never regret a second of this moment.

My sophomore year, I bought Quadrophenia on tape, used at the Buckingham Mall, a many-mile walk from my house, and I spent untold hours walking around Aurora listening to it again and again--David Comes to Life is less ambitious, less over-done, and slightly less successful, but it rocks a lot harder, and I'm not in my sophomore year anymore.

The stupidest thing I did at a show this year was leave during the encore.

Picked "running on nothing" more or less at random. It's great. "life in paper" would have worked about as well and I'm going to stop adding to this list, b/c if I don't, I'm going to list all but like three tunes.

Pissed Jeans

Old song, probably, but I never heard it, and this specific version is the greatest thing ever. Extra-special bonus points go to the drummer for being incredibly game.

Everything about this track is perfect.

Short Version

This record is only middling, but it makes a lot more sense after seeing them live. On the album, you just get a lot of fairly restrained pop-prog, but live you get a couple of Sleater-Kinney alums with as much raw charisma as anybody playing music, Mary Timony's virtuosity and sly hamminess and a more-than-the-sum-of-the-considerable-parts let's-fucking-go-for-it ethos that made the long, long, version of "racehorse" one of the four or five best live moments I had this year. Real players in the service of an improvisational, incantory, Patti-Smith-like tune: my brain & body were both annihilated.

But on record, "short version" was the best executed pop song with riffs and explosions and "Oh-KAY! Awl-RITE!" and bliss.

()

I don't remember why I went to this show alone; I do remember that I went to see Milk Music, who I love, and who played a very, very good set, and who were absolutely occluded in my memory by the savage brilliance of The Men. I had to leave (home) early, to catch BART, b/c living in the East Bay is a nightmare, and the last thing I heard was a phenomenal rendition of (). As untouchably brilliant as it is on record, hearing it live added a layer of repetition-build, 10 layers of dynamics, and 23 layers of intensity. The definitional HEAVY TUNE of 2011.

I just found out there's another record coming in early 2012, and that's the best culture news I've had since Chinese Democracy came out.

Malverde

Took me a long, long time to warm to this record. Two main obstacles: the first single, "Wires", sounds like (the) tepid gruel (typically) expectorated by Queens of the Stone Age; the first time I saw Red Fang was one of the greatest live moments of my life, with a couple drone-riff & groove-stomp burners they seem to have retired. Compared to "humans remain human remains" and "suicide", a lot of their material has lacked a certain luster--but this song is flawless like a mammoth-sized emerald avalanching down a steep hill, here and there bounding up and catching air, but it doesn't spare anybody, it only builds more tension before flattening whatever's in its way.

Red Sparowes

This band is a long-time favorite--I was loving their shit when I was still getting tattoos--and this EP adds substantial and nasty edge to the band's drone-flow style. Minute per minute, by far the best thing I bought this year. Takes me places every time.

Jacket

Fuck it, I can't help it: this melody really works for me. Venture Brothers is the best show on TV, partly because its creators are legit polymaths.

Woke up Near Chelsea

A toss-up: I only discovered Ted Leo this year, and I've already had a deeply weird relationship with his records. At least three times in 2011, I've been on camping trips with no music and Shake the Sheets stuck irremovably in my head--I shit you not! So for now, I'm not letting myself listen to that record, and I'm holding myself to the Brutalist Bricks.

I had a conversation with David Roth once, and he argued that the production on these records is unovercomably offputting. And there are moments of Bricks where that's almost true*: the drums all sound enh and the bass production is frankly repellent (nowhere more so than on "mourning in America" and the way-too-compressed "the mighty sparrow"), but on this number, Leo's songwriting/arranging genius takes over and rumble-tumbles big riffs over and around seizing melodies. In a way, choosing this song is a cop-out, but these two records spent a huge amount of time in my rotation this year, and will next year too, and this tune might be the easiest one to access if you're not me. (I came fucking close to picking "Tuberculoids Arrive in Hop", because I fucking love that song, but I thought it better to stick with a straight number.)

Only songs I can't seem to enjoy are "gimmie the wire", which is musically great but I can't get past the "Tipper" line, and "one Polaroid a day", with a creepily in-your-ear soul whisper-growl that I don't like from anybody. The way Leo & his band put a song together--which is songwriting far more than lyric-writing is--is one of the best things I've discovered in the past couple years. Lots of parts! And malproduced or not, the drummer is tight as fuck.

Black Captain

As good a song as Will Oldham has ever written--which inarguably means that it's as good a song as anybody has ever written.

TNK

Heard this on KALX, ran it down mere days later at a time when I was too broke to be buying records. It's by a wide margin the best tune on the record, unfortunately, but I like Eno well enough, and, per my gushing over live Wild Flag, have a lot of fondness for soloy pop-prog, which this is. (There was a BBC recording of Eno's band that turns all the still, measured perfection of Taking Tiger Mountain into slipshod boogie--no shit: avoid that one. Avoid it hard.)

jigsaw puzzle

Beggars Banquet is now my go-to Stones record. Not as scathing as Exile nor as studio-overreaching as Let it Bleed, it's just a perfectly executed collection of surprisingly varied songs--with essentially no idiot missteps (think "Brown Sugar"). I picked "jigsaw puzzle" because I think it probably has more verses than all other Stones songs I love combined.

Open question: did anyone ever take "salt of the earth" at face value?

The Czar: Usurper/Escape/Martyr/Spiral

Not a huge fan of Mastodon. They're radically overproduced, and the vocals are probably the worst of any major band in any genre. But sometimes the guy stops his atonal keening and the band goes off. They're a lot like Jane's Addiction, in other words, in that their one-trick fake virtuosity is only compelling because they spend so much time fucking around trying to pull off things they're not good at. But at 3:45 or so of this one, when the acoustics & vocals fade away and we get a couple seconds of stolen-from-High-on-Fire Sabbath-saw riffage, nothing could make more sense or be more satisfying: at least until 5:25, when it gets even better for a minute.

Bonus points for the worst lyric any heavy band ever wrote: "wasting valuable time". Hey, dude: your moron B-school ambitions are showing. If you actually want people to think you're a metal band, you follow "wasting" with "my foes" or something. You don't write paeans to efficiency (FFS).

Miss Two Knives

Far the best song on the record, but there's only so many Cheap Trick records in this worthless, degraded world, so sometimes a man just has to shove two knives into the power-pop hole in his soul.

always never know when to quit

I put this on Noodles' .mp3 player and she called me one day to say "this is funny--it makes me laugh". That's half the reason I love Big Business. The other half is that the power of their fuzz & Jared's Axl-like ability to harmonize with himself is heart-squeezingly powerful.

keep pushin'

Saw Pierced Arrows a lot this year, for some reason. Kelly's drumming has gotten better and better, and the pre-Halloween show Noodles & I caught at Thee Parkside was as good as any Dead Moon show ever was. They also opened up for Dinosaur Jr. at the Fillmore, and garnered more than a few fans from the shockingly young crowd. That's where I first heard this peppy little number, which makes me smile.

*I should note explicitly that I think the Pharmacists are sounding on record exactly like they want to: the production Roth finds so problematic is deliberate, not incompetent.

Killer of Sheep

0. Pointlessly Long Introduction (new day rising)

Not to step on Dregs' toes here, but I got to scratch several movie itches simultaneously last night. I moved to Oakland almost exactly three and a half years ago, and for the first few months, out of work and aimless, wrestling with life-challenged depression¹ as a decided departure from my Portland-based stasis-stifled-self-centered depression², I spent most of my time drinking daylight coffee by the quart and reading the Times. It was there, probably, that I first heard of a 1977 student film called Killer of Sheep that had (a) blown minds upon its release and (b) gone unreleased & undistributed for decades due to music-rights issues.

Some years later, TWBGITW mentioned the film--I believe in the context of boys receiving bike-directed violence--as something I literally had to see.

Combine these two itches--either surely sufficient--with my oft-voiced one-liner about living in Oakland:

I like it partly because I get to use Berkeley & SF as resources without having to live in either one of them.

One of the key Berkeley resources is the Pacific Film Archive, which has expensive tickets and a tiny screen, but superb taste.

1. Killer of Sheep (everything falls apart)

PFA's presentation was stark and transitionless: no trailers, no promotional materials. They turned the lights off and rolled the film.

Deliberate or not, it was a flaw-free introduction to the experience: with no buffer, you're thrown into deep intimacy: tight closeup on a boy's face, with a bellowing voice dressing him down. Slowly you become aware the source of the voice is an undershirt-clad trunk in the foreground.

The words concern loyalty, solidarity, violence, and threat. The boy is told to stand up for himself and his brother right or wrong, or face consequences at home.

Another unbuffered transition: children at play. Now and throughout the film you see that this play is in ruins environmentally, essentially prop-free in terms of equipment, and constantly, constantly, violent.

The next transition feels less jarring, perhaps because the film's rhythms and stylistic unity are asserting themselves by now. You're in a kitchen, watching a man work from a deeply odd camera angle. Eventually the man knocks off and joins his friend for some coffee, talk, and dominoes. He's half-haunted, he says he doesn't sleep, he says he's done wrong, but "nothing that would make the Devil blush". And it is this man we mostly follow for the next hour and change, as he goes to work, mopping up offal in an abbatoir, as he endures a Sisyphian odyssey to secure a motor for his car, as he moves through and is completely enmeshed in a run-down world without resources of any discernable kind.

This is a poverty never seen on film, made rawer and rougher by the man--Stan, we discover--'s insistence that he's not poor, not really: he gives to the Salvation Army--gives--and..."you want to see poor...you go look at Winston's place..." where they're eating wild greens from a vacant lot and huddling around the oven for heat.

2. Killer of Sheep (hardly getting over it)

Plot and character play a significant role in this picture. The greatest impacts, though, came from three aspects of theme or mood.

• Stan's quiet and isolation is so profound, and so intimately presented, that his immobility, his almost unmoved and unresponsive countenance in the face of his wife's sexual needs, is painful to watch. It cuts even deeper as you watch his wife's determined, practiced primping.
• The primping of the mother is recapitulated in the film's many daughters--and half the movie is seemingly given over to meticulously detailed ramifications of Wordsworth's "the child is father to the man". Jocular jockeying among the men mirrors the everpresent wrestling and horseplay between the boys; though all the children we see are sexless, the genders are pretty thoroughly divided and already battering away at one another--as when a group of girls drive off a single boy, hurling his bike wheel and venom at his sob-wracked fleeing back. Watching the somewhat aimless kids slowly congeal into their parents, with a newly pregnant, shy young woman toward the end of the piece, or when Stan's son snarls at his tiny sister "I need some money", chills, freezes, saddens.
• Hardest yet to take throughought the near-total grimness and deprivation of the film and its milieu is the hammered-thin but not annihilated hope maintained. The primping counts here, and Stan's insistence that he's not poor, and these moments find endless echoes, as a handout is politely, sadly, turned down, or as everybody gets dressed up and heads out in a finally-repaired car for an afternoon in the country, an endeavour exactly parallel to Stan's grinding, doomed, quest for an engine. Or when Stan's little girl says to another, who's been missing a lot of school "but you'll fall behind". Exhaustion and effort are everywhere in the movie, and more than a little abdication and abandonment. The experience of watching this is split raggedly between wanting to cry "it's futile, you're doomed, give up" and gasping "you can't stop there".

3. Killer of Sheep (you can live at home now)

Maybe it's not hard to sum up Killer of Sheep:

if you like movies, black people, or true things, you need to see this film

Which probably explains why it went unseen for three decades.

4. Outro (keep hanging on)

Further reading:
New Yorker DVD of the Week
New Yorker reissue notice
NYT DVD notice
NYT reissue notes

--Fat, seeing Badlands & Mean Streets tonight, too

¹Three representative pieces. And one example of my mind absolutely splintering with isolation and frenzied self-directed fury: hard for me to read this one.

²In lieu of citing this, I will merely gesture toward this.

how you will know

Camping is, perhaps, part of human life, and to the extent that it is, it--like everything else--is received as a half-spiced mulligatawney, equal parts semi-sensical slogans grooved into your brain, your thoughts a needle running along them, the grooves' exponents echoes spilling out and dominating your practice for years of a life, only revealed after infinite mental repetitions to be just a nonce-rule, just a string of words once spilled out a mouth, nothing that could or should justifiably govern action--equal parts, I said--and the kinds of hard-won factoids that, given any opportunity whatever, will inevitably fly forth from your face like some kind of moral law every man jack must know instanter and follow for now & forever: one thing I know in the first sense about camping is that a person ought always to keep tidy, as a sloppy camp makes all operations shoddy and difficult (though I'm willing to pay certain prices, after all: once hiking a fastidious and entirely correct friend asked me to adjust my pack/sleeping-mat interface, based on "it's driving me nuts looking at the slovenly way you've attached it there"; he received only a snarl "if you don't want to look at my pack, all you need do is hike faster than me") and another the unexpected unpleasant lurks all places anytime but these are lessons essentially merely loitering in me, shibboleths to which I nominally subscribe/adhere but pay no mind, sets of thought but nearly empty ones, comprising the kind of code a man might abandon with nothing but a nag flickering at the nape of his neck, to, say, snag a few comestibles and accompany the world's best girlfriend in the world from a campsite to an adjoining beach for a sunset food/wine pairing not carelessly to be described nor quickly to be abandoned, the kind of code nagging that might make a man deeply paranoid and anxious upon the moment of a return to the campsite to find Rank Violation, the kind of code demanding the response to Rank Violation be infinite mental repeats of the notion "everything into the bear box before you walk away every time idiot", the kind of code that makes instant and complete sense out of bags torn and scattered, wrappers gnawed and spitty, vile pawprints tainting every item, nothing safe, nothing secure because nothing was (properly) secured, ruins strewn and surrounding and a sad self-rage imbuing every endeavour with an inalienable knowledge of failure.

Fucking raccoon incursion. Never leave your campsite alone. Never leave anything out and unattended. There's probably raccoon jizz on two-thirds of my belongings. Fucking raccoon incursion.

scenes from a relationship: poor pegsmanship

The world's best girlfriend in the world & I went camping in an undisclosed because it's fucking awesomely cool stay out of it so next time we don't have to go on a pig-friggin' Monday night location. In our preparations, it was revealed to us that our planned date had been declared a spare-the-air day, which meant: no campfire. This is not a huge problem, since our primary camp recipes don't require fire, and since I'm never not willing to call it a night a little early and retire to the tent for a lengthy bout of cribbage.

(Primary camp recipe for Fat Contradiction/TWBGITW.)

That said, it was clear that we were going to need to supplement our light situation. I'm a huge fan of my new headlamp, but TWBGITW has made it clear that a lamp will grace her unruffl'd brow exactly never. Plus holding a flashlight all the time is awkward--to say nothing of holding a fleshlight all the time--and what the hell: there is a robust tradition in the human race of having a central light source around which most activities can be arrayed/arranged--and who exactly is Fat Contradiction to buck tradition?

Nobody, that's who.

As I banged the confounding box around my prospective purchase on a handy toddler, attempting to extract/assess the item ('s battery requirements, listed exactly one tiny place in a miniscule font for fuck's sake), my phone rang and I did proceed to have the following conversation.

TWBGITW: So, you picking up anything else?
Fat: Yah, I figured we'll need some extra light, so I'm getting a bug candle and a lantern.
TWBGITW: Oh, what kind of lantern?
Fat: It's the one that looks like a rocketship.
TWBGITW: Is it a good one?
Fat: ...
TWBGITW: Is it a good brand?
Fat: It's the one that looks like a rocketship. I'm getting the one that looks like a rocketship.
TWBGITW: (Patiently.) Oh, sure, of course. Well, see you later.

--Fat, pretty happy with the lantern that looks like a rocketship

The Spy Who Shagged Me

Josef von Sternberg made six more films with Marlene Dietrich, after directing her 1930 debut, Der blaue Engel. While her supporting role in Der blaue Engel showcased Dietrich's confident and empowered on-screen sex appeal, Dishonored (1931) further capitalizes on that breakthrough by featuring her as the star of a Spy Film where her missions all require her to "use her body as a weapon."

Von Sternberg's legacy is sex and glamour. Typically he also uses exotic settings, such as Austria in Dishonored. And it is in this film where one may observe his innovative medium close-ups of his lead actress, which show the woman backlit and filmed in soft focus. The backlight (sometimes called a hairlight) gives Dietrich a halo effect, accentuating her swirling tresses with silver. But another effect of the backlight, which is placed above and behind the actress, is to leave a deep shadow under her chin. This shadow gives her face a quality that makes it look like a porcelain mask, and it's funny that this film's central motif is the masquerade.

Dishonored opens with the iconic image of a formally attired Agent X-27 (Dietrich), veiled, pulling up one of her thigh high silk stockings--this image also bookends the film. Like Lola Lola, there is absolutely nothing life can throw at this woman that could even come close to cracking her icy cool veneer. X-27 is more though. She's "not afraid of life, of course [she's] not afraid of death either." And she's fearlessly clever, always up for a party, a master of disguise and just so happens to have a pet black cat with her at all times.

The film's romantic cynicism is embodied in the recompense the Austrian military gives X-27 for all of her service. In one of the more bizarre climaxes of classic Hollywood, we await the execution of X-27 before a firing squad while she smugly defies any sense of panic, glammed up and applying lipstick as she (and we) wonder if anyone would actually be able to shoot a woman who looked this good (and who, it is subtly suggested, fucked most of, if not all, the men who are raising their rifles at her--the prurient subtext abounds throughout the film).

Victor McLaglen has real chemistry opposite Dietrich. And his Russian military uniform maintains the masquerade motif--I forgot to mention, von Sternberg also spares no detail with costumes.

If von Sternberg's influence seems to pop up in some of Kubrick's (or Ophüls') costume dramas regarding mise en scène, then Strauss' "Blue Danube Waltz" played during the party scene may have been partly responsible for the space ballet sequences in 2001: A Space Oddyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick). But there's no way to know--I'm probably reaching. The party is what ultimately caused my appreciation for von Sternber's delirious, baroque decorative touch. The frame is crowded with streamers and elbow to elbow party guests masked, continuously blowing party favors erect. And somehow, in spite of all of this clutter, the camera omnisciently sweeps up and down as it cranes and pans.

For me this artifact is timeless. But in a way, it's almost more risque than anything else I can think of from modern films. For instance, the scene where X-27 seduces the adjutant is uncomfortably kinky. After we follow a cut and find them drunk in his room, X-27 pretends she's a child as foreplay. Was this a request on the adjutant's part? An offer? It's a little creepy.

Finally, I'd just like to point out one more instance of how far this film goes in its unabashed camp sensibilities. In addition to the vagina as weapon of mass destruction, and the spy who somehow always gets to have her black cat with her (even when imprisoned for treasonous acts), the central plot device here is also one of the classic screen maguffens. X-27 has to find a piece of music that the Russians have that will potentially kill thousands of Austrians (Umm, how exactly?).

And I wish I could say more about the lighting in this movie. Some directors just got that knack--the play between light and shadow here are wonderfully displayed.

--Dregs

what's good in life

Further to my notes of last week sometime, the Completely Un(re)searchable & Myfterious SE, purveyors of RoHs Quality, have proven themselves worthy enough. At press time, this writer had not mastered the striking of sparks with the steel/magnesium; but the headlamp had proved on the instant of its deployment the superior form of light dispersal.

Particularly indispensable is the oft'-elided red LED option. In field tests, this writer frequently found himself grinding his teeth as others without the red LED option blinded the everloving [redacted] out of him by training their candlepower-supplemented gaze 'pon his face. Whereas projecting the field of one's vision in cool long red waves is, at least, less annoying and abusive than other alternatives. To say nothing of the lack of crippling jaw/neck pain often earlier occasioned by lengthy interlucdes of holding one's two-AA Maglite uniformly between one's lips, or more firmly and enamel-abradingly between chipped front teeth. If you want to camp, you want a headlamp. This one works fine.

Other Thing

An aging rocker dude of the DIY persuasion once had a long, frustrating couple of weeks. His enjoyment of doing hobbies had palled somewhat. In part because DIY practices can infect all processes/products with what Kipling termed the "rather more-or-less" and what everybody else calls the "half-assed". In part because DIY techniques often focus on the accessible or attainable at the expense of the (task-) appropriate and specialized.

Anyway, in his badly-patched skinny jeans the aging rocker dude making nachos in his filthy ruin of a kitchen spat to no-one (not even the chair)

I'm DONE using shoddy shit, I'm done half-assing it, I'm done fucking around and doing things badly just for the sake of doing them myself. Life's too short. Here on out, I'm using good things, I'm sticking to what I'm good at, & I'm insisting on high quality in myself, my activities, and my surroundings.

Then the aging rocker got excited by his new load of surplus and he used his new Army-style can opener to open a can of refrieds for his nachos.

It worked quite well.

Fat hearts American Science & Surplus

It's a small list of brands still worth caring about in this world. One of the few that will reliably bring some magic into your world is American Science & Surplus, self-bestowers of the basically irrefutable tagline "incredible stuff, unbelievable prices".

I get a catalog from these guys every 6 months or so, order something about every year, basically just so I keep getting that catalog, a minor miracle of the copywriter's trade. Pun-filled and crackling with line-drawing illustrations, it's not unreasonable to assert that the only product manufactured by AS&S is of higher quality than the panoply of products they distribute. --Not that the goods on offer here are necessarily shoddy or disappointing: they're just invariably presented both amusingly and in their best light.

For example, picked literally at random from a number I discovered while trying desperately to dig my way out from under what appears to be seven (7) London Review of Books, four (4) Harper's, and a lot (sigh) of New Yorkers to get through:

Wind-up Vehicular Fridge Magnet
From our Unlikely Combination Division comes our first-ever wind-up vehicle capable of climbing any vertical ferrous-metal surface, like your filing cabinet or (non-stainless) fridge, thanks to tiny embedded magnets. Also chugs along on the horizontal. Measures 1-7/8" x 1-1/2" x 1-3/4" tall with the winder. In assorted colors that we'll decide on, thank you very much.

Enticing.

You get some good gifts out of this catalog: a little penknife with a built-in flashlight, a life-sized white plastic skull, an inflatable moose head... And you can score some useful prizes with a sharp eye: as illustrated, I just ended up with a couple nice little funnels, some of those Army-style can openers, and a firestarter--all just in time for a quick camping trip in the redwoods! Sure, my Swiss Army knife does a creditable job on cans, when necessary, and I already had one metal funnel exactly the size of my new one, and I'm a little unsure about the quality of that headlamp, and maybe graph paper has proved to be the only sure-fire way to induce writer's block I've so far discovered...but that little glass funnel? Pretty. And a cheapo headlamp is something I'll not be afraid to use/abuse the hell out of, which is exactly what a man wants/needs on a camping trip...

And, writer's block or no, the AS&S stock of graph paper takes ink better than any comparable product I've ever owned--fun to scrape a stylus on. Anyway, if you like small boxes of pleasing things &/or advertising produced with a light heart & lighter touch, AS&S is well worth your time.

Side note: As for camping gear, I've spent half my life on Coleman products--they're cheap, but they're not very good. Sort of what you buy when you don't want to step all the way up to Stansport (to say nothing of outfitting oneself primarily in Coughlan's kit). I note, however, that all the camping items in this latest batch were from some company called, helpfully, SE. I suspect these will turn out to be a step down from Coleman. To put it another way, I suspect they will turn out to be useable, if perhaps occasionally frustrating. As for the quality, I shall defer to the text on the headlamp: "RoHs Quality", which, I mean...I really shouldn't have to explain RoHs Quality by this point. Reviewiera has been cranking out the finest in objective subjectivisms since 2006, for fuck's sake. To help guide me discover the uses of these SE items--of RoHs Quality--I shall turn to the packaging:

Stainless Steel Funnel
Great for Pouring Liquids into Flasks, Small Containers, Jars, etc..
Nylon Shafts
Flexible yet durable glass filled nylon shafts resist fracturing
Magnesium Fire Starter
Gently Shave [always, always good advice, there] a Small Quality of Magnesium [less good, but worth a shot]
8 LED Headlamp
Adjust inclination if needed.

--Fat, adjusting his inclination

Great Urinals of the Pacific Northwest

Fay Bainbridge state park

Bitch Problem

Often I have compared movies to women; a whirlpool from which my gaze cannot escape; a search for understanding.

Personally, I wonder if I go too far seeing things in binary terms. (Like, I like girls and movies.) But I feel Der blaue Engel (1930, Josef von Sternberg) has just cause for this perspective. The plot centers around Rath (Emil Jannings), an aging college professor, and his tragic downfall after falling helplessly over travelling cabaret star Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich). These two principal characters depict a pair of one of the most extreme generalizations of how to live life. She is sharp, tough and cynical--takes the hand she's dealt. He is a bitch, weak and sentimental--he curls into a slobbering mess and cries. This distinction alone suffices to cement this film's place in the canon of feminist cinema.

I can't believe when I first saw this movie I empathized with Rath. To identify with his docile victimization is naive and masochistic. Furthermore, I am dismayed to have scorned the Lola character, reproaching her betrayal of this man who loved her so dearly. Lola has real problems, but doesn't let them get to her. She's also a victim, but by fighting, instead of giving up like Rath, she's actually the more virtuous. This brings me to another pair of themes.

The film's title comes from the name of the nightclub Lola first performs in where Rath sees her--The Blue Angel. As a woman, Lola is a contradiction of just these terms. She's an angel onstage and in public; while she's blue in her private life. That's my guess, anyway.

Rath doesn't see Lola for the woman she is, and that is his undoing. It's also evident in the songbird that dies during the film's introductory Rath sequence. Rath doesn't even comprehend that the bird is dead. It is as though he is incapable of appreciating that the bird is mortal--he just expects it to sing and keep him company. Although I don't empathize with Rath, I feel sorry for the tragic ending he represents and hold it as a warning of what can happen if you act like a bitch.

--Dregs