Idea for Christian action adventure movie: For some reason the new messiah is delivered in a New Jersey hospital under mysterious circumstances to a mother (Maggie Grace) who claims virginity and disappears shortly after delivery. After that clunky bit of exposition, the real opening scene is in a NICU, with quirky nurses caring for premature and otherwise special newborns, a controlled chaos of beeping, crying, and the imperfect business of living.
Then these crazy Romans who've transported themselves to the future and acquired modern weaponry assault the NICU, burning it to the ground. When the smoke clears, the investigators are astonished to find one baby alive in the rubble, with a look of utmost determination on his face.
On his forehead is a cross of ash, a cross he will wear his whole life. The kid turns out to be Jesus Jr., a real bad-ass, with an approach to Lent significantly more hands-on than that of his predecessor."Ash Wednesday, motherfucker," is the pivotal line of the movie, delivered when JJ takes out Herod (in an Arby's parking lot) using a rocket launcher.
Over the closing credits he's on the Staten Island Ferry, a time for reflection. It's a cold grey day, the bitter wind is in his hair, and Jesus thinks back to the mother he never knew.
2.25.2009
2.24.2009
bookmark
One curiosity of having the little one on hand is that I newly feel the deep swells of emotion with regularity. I'm not the sort who's used it. More the type who identifies with over-linear Dickens villainry and keeps a lawyer on retainer to vet his admissions of love.
E.g. tonight. With the house asleep, I was considering the half of the Obama address I'd caught, working on some b.s. nonprofit restructure plan and (despite that) letting a sliver of Oboptimism surface in my consciousness.
Then there's a climactic stirring (like a tiny Kool Aid man punching through the fabric of space-time) and through the quiet the kid gives a mighty and woeful cry. I run upstairs, dash through his door and find that he's a full foot from his pacifier.
It's an easy crisis to avert -- pacifier finds kid, dad consoles kid through awkward patting and something akin to the worst massage you ever got in your life. But (without the option to not do this) I imagine him older, feeling at once the totality and please let him do well let him be okay of his emerging personhood.
Only the fact that I'm an emotional Excel spreadsheet keeps me from busting out crying. Instead it's like a bookmark for a cry, a little hiccup.
E.g. tonight. With the house asleep, I was considering the half of the Obama address I'd caught, working on some b.s. nonprofit restructure plan and (despite that) letting a sliver of Oboptimism surface in my consciousness.
Then there's a climactic stirring (like a tiny Kool Aid man punching through the fabric of space-time) and through the quiet the kid gives a mighty and woeful cry. I run upstairs, dash through his door and find that he's a full foot from his pacifier.
It's an easy crisis to avert -- pacifier finds kid, dad consoles kid through awkward patting and something akin to the worst massage you ever got in your life. But (without the option to not do this) I imagine him older, feeling at once the totality and please let him do well let him be okay of his emerging personhood.
Only the fact that I'm an emotional Excel spreadsheet keeps me from busting out crying. Instead it's like a bookmark for a cry, a little hiccup.
2.18.2009
what have we learned
a. South Jersey and the South Bronx aren't proximic.
b. Drinking yourself to sleep every night is only viable for 15 or so years.
c. Experimental rock won't sustain a family.
d. When you have a kid, it gets easier to understand the decisions your own parents made.
e. That said, never let your kids sense that one parent is strongly considering murdering the other. Even as a joke.
f. Diet Mountain Dew doesn't promote weight loss. Also, drinking eight cans a day makes your piss glow in the dark.
g. If you hide from everyone you know, you'll feel lonely.
h. Having had one bad shrink doesn't justify losing your mind in isolation.
i. Internet scrabble, web porn, and panicked scanning of the Times for disasters aren't effective forms of therapy.
j. It's okay to leave some folks behind, but those make stronger ghosts than they ever were friends.
k. Mr. Ramsay doesn't make a good model for a father. Working 60 hours a week doesn't make for a good father (provided you don't have to to sustain your family).
l. Religion is weird, sure, but it ain't worse for you than cable TV, free market economics, or getting your face ripped off by a chimp.
m. The media hasn't given sufficient attention to the loneliness of that chimp's death, out of his head on Xanax, shot by the pigs, limping back to the familiar to curl up and bleed to death, stranded between the world of beasts and the world of men.
n. Avoid nonprofit Kool-Aid and you may be able to sustain a home, personal, or artistic life.
o. If you work in workforce development, don't regard the workers with contempt. You're useless, you're retrograde, you're a sack of shit if you think the people you're trying to help are inferior and somehow to be saved by your brilliance.
p. Employers can't take care of their low-income workers. Neither can rinky-dink worker associations. Unions can.
q. That said, weak unions, unions destroyed by in-fighting and cow-towing to employers, are useless.
r. All you need is love. And money.
s. And artistic fulfillment.
t. And an end to that feeling that things are hosed, off-kilter, headed south.
v. Friends and family. Music, books, and movies.
w. Your child's smile. Your partner's sense of humor.
x. A vast moving to the left of the American political landscape, caps on income, free health care, jobs for everybody, etc., followed by a sincere effort led by the U.S. to actually better the world, rather than bullshit/seemingly failed anyway efforts to liberate the strategic oil value of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
y. A bullet in the brain.
z. Just kidding. but to, you know, put that death wish into it's proper context.
b. Drinking yourself to sleep every night is only viable for 15 or so years.
c. Experimental rock won't sustain a family.
d. When you have a kid, it gets easier to understand the decisions your own parents made.
e. That said, never let your kids sense that one parent is strongly considering murdering the other. Even as a joke.
f. Diet Mountain Dew doesn't promote weight loss. Also, drinking eight cans a day makes your piss glow in the dark.
g. If you hide from everyone you know, you'll feel lonely.
h. Having had one bad shrink doesn't justify losing your mind in isolation.
i. Internet scrabble, web porn, and panicked scanning of the Times for disasters aren't effective forms of therapy.
j. It's okay to leave some folks behind, but those make stronger ghosts than they ever were friends.
k. Mr. Ramsay doesn't make a good model for a father. Working 60 hours a week doesn't make for a good father (provided you don't have to to sustain your family).
l. Religion is weird, sure, but it ain't worse for you than cable TV, free market economics, or getting your face ripped off by a chimp.
m. The media hasn't given sufficient attention to the loneliness of that chimp's death, out of his head on Xanax, shot by the pigs, limping back to the familiar to curl up and bleed to death, stranded between the world of beasts and the world of men.
n. Avoid nonprofit Kool-Aid and you may be able to sustain a home, personal, or artistic life.
o. If you work in workforce development, don't regard the workers with contempt. You're useless, you're retrograde, you're a sack of shit if you think the people you're trying to help are inferior and somehow to be saved by your brilliance.
p. Employers can't take care of their low-income workers. Neither can rinky-dink worker associations. Unions can.
q. That said, weak unions, unions destroyed by in-fighting and cow-towing to employers, are useless.
r. All you need is love. And money.
s. And artistic fulfillment.
t. And an end to that feeling that things are hosed, off-kilter, headed south.
v. Friends and family. Music, books, and movies.
w. Your child's smile. Your partner's sense of humor.
x. A vast moving to the left of the American political landscape, caps on income, free health care, jobs for everybody, etc., followed by a sincere effort led by the U.S. to actually better the world, rather than bullshit/seemingly failed anyway efforts to liberate the strategic oil value of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
y. A bullet in the brain.
z. Just kidding. but to, you know, put that death wish into it's proper context.
2.10.2009
the king of new jersey
There’s a town to the north on a high hill, and on that hill there’s a prefabricated castle with a high tower from which one can see the entire state. At night it’s really something, with the lights twinkling, those million lives, all those odd wind-up Jersey dreams in glittering fretful motion.
Atop the tower sits a contemplative man on a wicker patio chair. He’s singing along to something, with if not pitch then emotion as his top priority. With raised and gracious hands he conducts Newark landing patterns, toy planes landing on a circuit board, electrons newly glued to New York bonds. The King serenades too the quieter patches of the state, forests mountains rivers roads all headed ocean, ocean. And lo, he is satisfied.
By day he’s a dentist, one of the three best on the seaboard if one takes Mouths East magazine at its yearly word. If on that hill he parks a car more high-performing than his travel regimen requires, if his vacation frequency (if not his retirement) is recession-proof, his sense of typical supper perhaps too much a fancy feast, then it’s for fixing and filling the mouths of every malcontent in the northern third of the state. Had you’d seen what he’s seen, beheld and tweaked hourly the ugly open mouths of a million dis-careful brushers, you might well deserve the same for yourself.
After dark as now the King prefers the allied music of multiple tenors or one Satchmo’s greatest hits, revitalizing stuff when taken with from half to an entire bottle of wine. With the music swirling loud around him and the entire state at his command, it really is a wonderful world, but the lovers also all really do win and then tragically lose each other. (The sadness is amplified when conveyed by three or more tenors; you can picture 6 or more worlds falling apart, in Italian probably, Italian worlds falling apart so it’s even sadder, even more passionate, even more likely to involve multiple lovers per sadness, 9, 27, 81 lovers crying all at once, celebrating their new-found loves and mourning their even more newly broken hearts).
He’s lost both his parents. They were old, sure, but they’re gone, it seems like almost all the rocks he ever knew are gone. From where he sits, on his tower porch on the high hill with a perhaps extraneous final glass of wine, the King of New Jersey can make out the faintest picture of his castle gone to ruin, his legacy only a memory or plaque on someone’s wall or unattended gum.
He cranks the tenors or brings the trumpet into closer focus and looks out to the Atlantic, to where the horizon ends. The sneaky brass or crying overlap of big male vibrato briefly unstick him from time...
…and for a second he’s sitting on his father’s shoulders, looking down into his mother’s glowing hopeful eyes, with the world in ascent, in full bloom, everything a grand opening.
Atop the tower sits a contemplative man on a wicker patio chair. He’s singing along to something, with if not pitch then emotion as his top priority. With raised and gracious hands he conducts Newark landing patterns, toy planes landing on a circuit board, electrons newly glued to New York bonds. The King serenades too the quieter patches of the state, forests mountains rivers roads all headed ocean, ocean. And lo, he is satisfied.
By day he’s a dentist, one of the three best on the seaboard if one takes Mouths East magazine at its yearly word. If on that hill he parks a car more high-performing than his travel regimen requires, if his vacation frequency (if not his retirement) is recession-proof, his sense of typical supper perhaps too much a fancy feast, then it’s for fixing and filling the mouths of every malcontent in the northern third of the state. Had you’d seen what he’s seen, beheld and tweaked hourly the ugly open mouths of a million dis-careful brushers, you might well deserve the same for yourself.
After dark as now the King prefers the allied music of multiple tenors or one Satchmo’s greatest hits, revitalizing stuff when taken with from half to an entire bottle of wine. With the music swirling loud around him and the entire state at his command, it really is a wonderful world, but the lovers also all really do win and then tragically lose each other. (The sadness is amplified when conveyed by three or more tenors; you can picture 6 or more worlds falling apart, in Italian probably, Italian worlds falling apart so it’s even sadder, even more passionate, even more likely to involve multiple lovers per sadness, 9, 27, 81 lovers crying all at once, celebrating their new-found loves and mourning their even more newly broken hearts).
He’s lost both his parents. They were old, sure, but they’re gone, it seems like almost all the rocks he ever knew are gone. From where he sits, on his tower porch on the high hill with a perhaps extraneous final glass of wine, the King of New Jersey can make out the faintest picture of his castle gone to ruin, his legacy only a memory or plaque on someone’s wall or unattended gum.
He cranks the tenors or brings the trumpet into closer focus and looks out to the Atlantic, to where the horizon ends. The sneaky brass or crying overlap of big male vibrato briefly unstick him from time...
…and for a second he’s sitting on his father’s shoulders, looking down into his mother’s glowing hopeful eyes, with the world in ascent, in full bloom, everything a grand opening.
2.08.2009
the week in movies
Taken: When a former CIA operative (Liam Neeson) mistakenly allows his hot-assed teenage daughter (Maggie Grace) to visit Paris, she is abducted by Albanian sex traffickers. If he is to prevent her virginity from being taken, he must kill every man in the city within 24 hours.
Paul Blart: Mall Cop: A mall is overtaken by a suburban gang, and it's up to a mild-mannered security guard (Kevin James) to kill them. When Blart is rendered paraplegic during a botched apprehension on an escalator, his family leads an advocacy campaign in support of euthanasia and his right to end his own life.
Under a Pile of Sailors: When a West Village dinner party exceeds all expectations, a young couple (Viggo Mortenson and Don Cheadle) move to central Jersey to save their relationship. New neighbors (Paul Giamatti and Marisa Tomei) recount their own Fleet Week experiences, and the four develop a shared appreciation of maritime history. A far-reaching inquiry into the nature of sublimation, set against a rolling sea of flashback sequences.
Curvas Peligrosas: A Mexican geometry teacher (a reinvigorated Cantinflas) finds himself transplanted to South Central Los Angeles, where he inspires his students using a novel method: tantric sex. Under his enigmatic tutelage (“Stand… and deliver” and “It’s like tic tac toe in circles”) they learn key lessons in math and life, until a grim school board chair (Iman) threatens all. The resultant appeal to the United Nations was filmed before the General Assembly.
Quest for the Yarmulke: After a sequence of prophetic dreams, a young Jew (the excellent newcomer Herman Rosenbluth, who also directs) drops out of law school and begins his search for the golden yarmulke that will usher in a new Messianic age. His worried parents (convincingly played by Rosenbluth’s own parents) give chase, following our hero across the American Midwest and as far as South Dakota, which he stubbornly refers throughout as “the New Israel.”
Bride Wars: Best friends (Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway) become rivals when they schedule their respective weddings on the same day. Recognizing the bitter futility of the American wedding ritual, they vow to kill themselves simultaneously on the internet, and will the proceeds toward eliminating child mortality from malaria in the developing world.
Facebook of Evil: After installing a mysterious application on her Facebook page, a young woman (Kirsten Dunst) is at first amused to notice a sequence of seemingly innocuous changes to her profile. When one by one her friends die under mysterious circumstances, she enlists the help of her hacker ex (a trim Wayne Davis), who may know more than he lets on.
2.04.2009
one about mexico
I've been trying to think of the right Mexico story.
One would be about an obese American who visits Todos Santos. His Spanish is perfunctory and poor by that standard, but his sense of dumb mission is unquestionably intact. He makes the trip alone or with his helpless family, and over a single night he makes it his goal to eat all the tacos in town, pot by steaming pot of goat, carne asada, fillet after fillet of fish, thousands of breaded shrimp.
The toppings can be left to the imagination, but the impression should be of a man determined to burn away entirely his memory through the effects of pepper on the tear ducts and mouth. In his quest, the man must confront the laws of gastrointestinal physics and (at a certain point nowhere close to achieving his goal) his heart or some other part or parts of his body best left imagined invariably give way.
The good people of Todos Santos leave a simple white marker at this gentleman's final stand or cart, and whether it's as a cautionary reminder or salute to the improbable, we'd better not speculate.
The guy's ghost wanders out into the desert, marking time with all the other dead things, marking the gray beauty of the Pacific, paying proper respect to Venus as it descends each night, plummeting into the sea on fire.
One would be about an obese American who visits Todos Santos. His Spanish is perfunctory and poor by that standard, but his sense of dumb mission is unquestionably intact. He makes the trip alone or with his helpless family, and over a single night he makes it his goal to eat all the tacos in town, pot by steaming pot of goat, carne asada, fillet after fillet of fish, thousands of breaded shrimp.
The toppings can be left to the imagination, but the impression should be of a man determined to burn away entirely his memory through the effects of pepper on the tear ducts and mouth. In his quest, the man must confront the laws of gastrointestinal physics and (at a certain point nowhere close to achieving his goal) his heart or some other part or parts of his body best left imagined invariably give way.
The good people of Todos Santos leave a simple white marker at this gentleman's final stand or cart, and whether it's as a cautionary reminder or salute to the improbable, we'd better not speculate.
The guy's ghost wanders out into the desert, marking time with all the other dead things, marking the gray beauty of the Pacific, paying proper respect to Venus as it descends each night, plummeting into the sea on fire.
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