i saw this on reddit the other day . . . and for a split second i thought that maybe my sister had written it. and then i noticed the username lol

The other night I watched METROPOLITAN . . . man, I could not get into it. As well made as it is, I don’t know . . . even when it’s satire, WASPy stuff makes my skin crawl. It’s an hour and forty minutes of rich kids hanging out in their parents’ New York apartments, occasionally punctuated by scenes in which they take a 1950s taxi from one apartment to another. Though yeah, when the hero of the film finally outs himself as a total fraud and utters this line, I felt like barfing.

Listen: Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans alike—for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending. That being said, nothing makes me feel more insane than the growing popularity of whatever this secondhand media absorption thing is . . . that is to say, this alarmingly commonplace thing people do now where they rely on AI or some asshole on YouTube in order to Experience Something By Proxy, to have it “explained” to them, whatever that thing may be . . . a novel, movie, TV show, video game, and on and on. It cannot be said that you truly experienced any of these things unless you lived with them . . . lived inside them! Otherwise you may as well start paying someone to go on vacation for you too.

I always remember that David Lynch quote about people watching movies on their phones. It is a similar sentiment:

Now if you’re playing the movie on a telephone, or on your computer, you will never in a trillion years experience the film. You’ll think you have experienced it, but you’ll be cheated. You’ll be experiencing weakness, and extreme putrefication of a potential experience in another world. So don’t let your friends, or some television advertisement, trick you into accepting weakness. Such a sadness. Power in that world is critical. Everything has been worked on to be a certain way. And if you don’t have a setup for your films, it’s a joke. It’s just the most sickening, horrifying joke. And this world is so troubled, and it’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real.

Anyway . . . sorry for yet another lonely diatribe. It’s just that when I was watching that movie the other night, I remembered darkly that someone had once told me they don’t actually watch movies anymore, they just listen to people on YouTube talk about them, and that that “counted” as having watched the movie, that the two were the same. Dude . . . are you out of your fucking mind!!! lol

‘market square of warsaw by night’
józef pankiewicz

about a year ago i was in warsaw . . . i need to finally finish writing about it. man, that was an amazing trip and i wanna go back. i know a girl there and i’d like to see her again too ☆

frankenstein

For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.

moby-dick

just fyi this is me

(via my bud devil’s blush)

At Katie’s behest, I watched LIFEGUARD (1976), supposedly a Ryancore film based on this tantalizing premise:

And how exactly is this Ryancore as fuck? Well, among my friends there seems to be this cartoonish perception of me as a freewheeling loner perma-bachelor. And yet deep down in the secret places in my heart, I am cursed to recall wistfully all my great loves of yore, and to yearn eternally for that radiant affection to shine down upon me one last time so that I might achieve some semblance of salvation. Uh . . . I mean, I reckon there’s at least some truth to that . . .

Anyway: I love the idea of a mid-70s dramedy set in Southern California about a hunky mustachioed sun-baked Sam Elliott hanging out in a lifeguard tower all summer making an hourly wage and trying to score some hot tail. I mean, look at this poster for God’s sake:

Yeah. That definitely rules. And it starts out OK enough . . .

. . . with Sam Elliott, the titular lifeguard, showing a young rookie lifeguard the ropes while winking at cute girls in bikinis and breaking up fights between teenage boys and saving people’s lives with his little red floatie. He drives around LA in his Chevy Stingray that he can somehow afford on a lifeguard’s salary, and spends his evenings bedding flight attendants and elementary school teachers in his swinging bachelor pad. He leads a carefree existence devoid of any conflict. Being a lifeguard . . . is there anything better? And yet he feels empty in some way he cannot place. Maybe there’s more to life than being completely free and having a zero responsibilities. Maybe life is meant to be shared rather than spent alone.

Sam ponders these things (kind of) between little glimpses into his everyday life: driving to a fast food joint to grab a hamburger and a Coke, flirting with a girl who is so horned up she’s a breath away from ripping off her bathing suit while he puts a band-aid on her finger, and plenty of scenes of him wearing aviator sunglasses and scratching his beastly chest hair while gazing off into the distant sea as the warm California sun sets upon another perfect day. All of this is set to a badly-aged groovy Moog synth score and interspliced with little comedy bits that are about as funny as an episode of the Brady Bunch. It has serious soap opera / afterschool special vibes and not in a good way. Every interior scene is lit like a first-year student art film.

At the 45-minute mark of this 96-minute movie, the story, or what little of it there is, had moved about three inches from the starting line, and I began thinking about other things I’d rather be doing, including cleaning my kitchen. Bummer.

I reported my findings to Katie and together we lamented how the movie fails to live up to its chill premise. It could have so easily risen above ordinary trash into the kind that glows in the dark, but alas, they went with the first draft. Any hack writer could have punched this thing up and made it a beautiful schlocky genre thing. As a hack writer myself, I kept thinking of all the little things I would have done to keep the good times rolling the entire time, but what are you gonna do. This thing is nearly 50 years old and feels that way. It is boomer-y as hell and thus a product of its era. Let it be said that Sam gave it his all. It’s not his fault LIFEGUARD feels like a dog turd that washed up on the beach during high tide.

Though hey: there is always the sea itself, which unlike this film is more vast and meditative and timeless than anything else I know.

Surf’s up!