It was movie night again with "Gozu," (cow-head) the new one from Takashi Miike. I had agreed with Amanda's assessment of "Audition" as a gratuitous appeal to sadism, with characterization meant to produce conflicting emotions, but too obvious to truly do so. Thom and I were befuddled by the Gozu poster outside, which contained excerpts from four reviews that sounded like they were for completely different movies. One said "Riotously Funny!," another called it "a surreal descent into madness," and I think another one used the word "horrifying." Thom said he half expected another one to call it the feel-good movie of the year.

It turns out the variety of classifications is pretty appropriate. I would not call this horror, but another review said "Now [Takashi Miike] has made a screwball comedy" and it had many of those kind of moments. The surrealism was certainly in full effect. But of course there are many levels of absurdity, and it's just as hard to make a good surreal movie as it is to make a.. real one. With Gozu I think Miike has made a great surreal movie. He actually maintains a cohesive storyline (depending on your definition of cohesive, perhaps) for the whole movie, so I disagree with the Times calling it a compendium of sketches and vignettes, although most of the surrealist ideas in it did come up once and then vanish. Overall the balance of the mundane and the bizarre was maintained impressively.

There were a lot of great little characters in the movie, mostly they would be employees at businesses who would behave in the funniest ways. The protagonist also did a fine job reacting "like a child" as Miike said to the strange things happening around him, without it becoming repetitive.

The music and sound were another high point, with excellent use of vocal distortions at a few points. My only nitpick is the use of extra sounds to accentuate some gross-out humor, which I always find hackneyed.

A surprisingly large part of my enjoyment of the movie came from seeing it in a theater, with probably the largest assemblage I expect to ever see for a Miike film outside of a festival, that being about 60 people. The laughter of the audience was that of utter disbelief at the proceedings.

I was quite surprised to find out in some perusing that Miike has made over 60 films, 5 already since Gozu, which was made last year. IMDb confirms it, but apparently a lot of them have been straight-to-video or made-for-tv.

On a related topic, I've decided that for most movies with infamously confusing plots, the explanation comes down to a deviation from reality at some key point, depicting instead the hallucinations or dreams of a character, followed by a return to it at another key point, with the location neither of those points made obvious. Usual Suspects, Mulholland Dr., Fight Club, Donnie Darko. They're not all perfect fits, and some appease the masses by making the big issue clear in the end and merely leaving the details foggy. But I think it's a fairly strong pattern. I have no idea if Gozu is one of these, but it's certainly possible. Other examples/counterexamples?

A few weeks ago, decided to check out the open mic scene at Keenan's Piano Lounge, just down Broadway. As expected, it was sparse, with fewer people there for the music than for the drinking, and no piano that I could see. But this had its good and bad points. It was rough playing with people talking loudly, but this made it good performing experience, and the polite tension of many open mics was nicely absent. I also can't complain about being able to play 15 minutes after walking in and do up to 5 songs. I only had three, two brand new ones, as is my custom, and Sloan's "Lines You Amend." My final original achieved an enthusiastic response from the girl who had played before me, and as she was leaving she told me about a "really good" open mic on Sundays at a place on Avenue C. I was encouraged by this and figured I'd follow the white rabbit to success.

I showed up to the place on Avenue C that Sunday with another new song and my guitar looking like this:

I probably should have heeded the omens when several times that day I stepped out into suddenly pouring rain that stopped as I was going inside, only to start up again upon my exit. The water leaked through my gig bag and wreaked some havoc on my decorations, and I had to hastily repair them at the venue. I got there halfway through the 4 hour event and signed up. H and Mr. former XS were already there. The music was considerably less adventurous than I had been hoping, and though I worried about the increasing volume of XS's derisive comments, my id felt some satisfaction that they were being said by someone. Then again, the sleepy country stuff being played by many performers was a fine contrast to what I had prepared, and that's always a good thing.

As time wore on we all grew weary, especially so when they had their 'featured performer,' a half-hour set in the middle of the open mic that is not announced as anything special. I was also confused at the parade of names that seemed to bear almost no correspondence at all to the signup list. As it got dangerously near the end of the event, a guy who was obviously a veteran started talking to someone else behind us about the MC. He said he tended to favor nice-looking girls when choosing the playing order. I suppose this shouldn't come as a surprise, but I think if anywhere, at the open mic level we should be able to avoid this. The veteran's comment seemed to be verified when a girl whose name I had seen directly after mine on the list got called up. The veteran also spent some time hassling the MC into letting him get a set in. He eventually relented, and at that point, at right about the time the open mic was supposed to end, the MC came up to me to tell me he had no time for me. He was purposeful in not apologizing, but recommended I come early next time and let him know I'd been here, and he'd get me in. The strange thing was that the entire time he talked, he was counting a wad of money, holding it inches from my face. For a moment I must admit I entertained the bizarre thought that he was going to pay me for my trouble. Well thanks for the advice, I thought, but I'll go back to Keenan's.

After another week I realized it wasn't the look of my guitar I had gotten tired of but the sound. It was always one strum after another at these things, to the point where the mere sight of a guitar coming out caused me to sort of tune out and give up hope of hearing anything truly new. I figured the other patrons at Keenan's just might be having similar feelings. So this past Monday, I got out my old friend the 7 Dollar Keyboard, which I've had since high school and the Honest Ben Jonson days. It's about 16 inches wide and has a few tiny octaves, 8 sounds, some drum beats, and a microphone input. I've recorded with it a few times and slammed it into other instruments many times during performances. It still works, but its internal speaker seems to be blown, and its tuning sometimes changes erratically. It also makes a random sound every time you turn it on, which is awesome. I wrote two nice and simple songs on it and brought it in, by far the easiest performance transportation experience I've ever made for myself. Orville Davis, the MC at Keenan's who is a real cowboy and sings some nice country songs, was baffled when he saw it. I ended up following a Navy man reading poems so the contrast from the acoustic guitars was a bit dulled, but I think the weirdness of the songs made up for that. Peter's review:

"It was really good man. But I think you lost just about EVERYONE in here."

Two new songs as performed on the $7 keyboard, recorded on GarageBand after going back and forth several times and finally deciding I should give it a chance. It's okay for jotting down ideas. Some of the simplifications really seem like too much. Most people have operated a Graphic EQ on a stereo, I'd think they could do the same in this program. Instead we get a list of choices of EQ and reverb combinations with meaningless names like "LA Rock," which apparently is the genre these songs belong to!

1. flicker

2. is there a good way to say

We seem to have a confused sneeze protocol at work now. When it was just the four of us, there was an unspoken understanding that nothing really needed to be said, and that was just fine by me. Now some more people have been taken on, and everything's gone haywire. We've inevitably got some people who like to bless the sneezer, and some other people, when they are the sneezer, like to say 'excuse me' or even 'I'm sorry.' I'm much more afraid to sneeze now than I was before; who knows what kind of brouhaha it might stir up?

The other night I finally saw more than a couple minutes of the Olympics (my previous viewing was on the TV at Keenan's) and some mysteries popped up. Firstly, what countries are PNG and SCG? No point in leaving it a mystery since if you're looking at this you can easily google it: the former is Papua New Guinea, which makes me feel mildly stupid, and the latter is Serbia and Montenegro, which is just strange. No C in there. Looking at the whole list I also found there are separate abbreviations for the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The other mystery is that even in the abbreviations that are on the athletes' uniforms and equipment (as opposed to only the ones superimposed for American TV coverage), the country names being used are always the English names, as opposed to the ones in the native language. This seems like one of the worst instances of acknowledging English's dominance, considering the whole international spirit thing. Of course, there's also the question of languages with other alphabets, and of which is more dominant, English or the Roman alphabet. A friend suggested that they should, for example, just put China in Chinese characters, as that would look plenty distinctive even to our eyes rather than CHN, and is not even much less pronounceable. The larger question seems to be whether the spirit is true internationalism, or just trying to make foreign countries seem less foreign to Americans. Actually I'm really not sure if the latter is a good or a bad thing.

But enough topicality. I've recently returned to work on my rare word dictionary, trying to complete the second pass. I've also decided that after delaying for several months, I should finally implement my plan to incorporate these words into my vocabulary by taking a small random sample each day, and attempting to use them in conversation or blog entries. Of course it will be a challenge in the process not to overween. But to the reader I interpel, lay subjicible to the obscurities of this ridiculous language. [Boy am I glad no one can find me and beat me up on the web for talking like this]

Abuse of pragmatics: I've noticed an evolution in business greetings. When someone from another company comes to meet with us, they almost always say "Nice to see you" when they shake my hand, even if I've never met them before. This is pretty clever; there's nothing spelled out in that phrase that indicates we've met before, so even if we haven't it's not a strong enough contradiction to question them.

My next language learning project is going to be a kind of breadth-first search, learning roughly the same small amount of several languages before choosing one to take further. For each one I aim to learn: phonetics and reasonable pronunciation skills, basic structure and grammar, and a limited vocabulary (<300 words). The focus is on languages with non-Roman alphabets and ones with a lot of words lent to English, and ones that I think are cool. The list: Icelandic, Welsh, Russian, Modern Greek, Arabic, Korean, Italian...and maybe Portuguese. Time for each will be two weeks to one month. The challenge is to retain what I learn about each one and actually get my head into it, to find the place where a language starts to make sense as a way to communicate. Relaxing the stated time periods is probably preferable as a compromise to failing in that goal.

Sneeze Update: I happened to finally start reading The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language yesterday and serendipitously found on page 10 a note about sneeze protocols the world over. In Malagasy, which seems to be the language of Madagascar, one says velona 'alive.' In Mende, of Sierra Leone, one thanks the sneezer with biseh. In Tonga a sneeze is taken as a sign that a loved one is missing you, and the sneezer says Ikai ke nofo noa mua! 'Not to be nothing, alas', meaning it's a shame that the loved one is thinking about the sneezer, when it would be better were they thinking about nothing at all. I can hardly wait to baffle the coworkers with this foisonous pronouncement. Here's a page with an extensive discussion of Islamic opinions of sneezing and yawning. From the page: "The Jews used to intentionally sneeze in the presence of the Messenger of Allah (PBUH) hoping that he would say to them: `Yarhamukum-ullah (may Allah have mercy on you),' but he would respond with: "Yahdikum-ullahu wa yuslihu balakum (may Allah guide you and render sound your state of affairs).'" Scandalous!

Another new song, performed at Keenan's a couple times so far:

1. Connotations

What I like about it is the transitions. Usually my transitions are about as seamless as a quilt.