My roommate is moving out and Maya is moving in, meaning that the music studio can now be just a studio and not a bedroom studio. Among other things, this has meant embarking on a cleaning journey of a scale unlike any I have previously undertaken. Usually when I clean, I have one task in mind, and though I might discover in the process another level of cleaning that needs to be done, I'll stick with the original plan and put the other task off for another time. But this time, if it can be cleaned, and needs to be, it must be. It is a huge job. What happens to an apartment in two years with two lazy bastards living in it is no joke. We make ourselves blind to it most of the time because we want to just get on with our lives. A while ago I wrote an entry explaining my philosophical objections to spending too much time cleaning and having to be too nice to my possessions. Much as I hate to admit it, I can feel my tendencies changing on that front. My mind can still adapt to the buildup of filth on a stove over the course of a few months, and therefore not experience any unpleasant feelings each time I go into the kitchen and see it. But the shock of it going swiftly from filthy to spotless can be quite pleasant. Of course I can never appreciate that effect while I'm cleaning, because all I see then are the few spots that remain. It's only later when I've partially forgotten the hard work that went into it, and stopped looking at it up too close.

I've also been buying a whole lot of household stuff that either belonged to my roommate or was just really old and crappy. This is fun because I have the chance to overthink each item, asking if it's the best design, the right material, the right size, though I know that even if it weren't, I would easily get used to it and never think about it again, as I've been doing with many of the suboptimal things I had before. Many of these are items I've never had to buy myself before. It's making me feel very bourgeois to be shopping for them, rather than picking them up off the street or dragging them from place to place after years of usage. That's what happens I guess.

On the Bx15 bus across 125th St., a woman [hereafter 'Borrower'] stepped on and asked if anyone had change for her $2. After a few moments another woman ['Lender'] sitting near the front of the bus held up a TransitChek metrocard, then stepped up and put it in the machine. The Borrower started thanking her profusely, and the Lender said no problem, it's unlimited. After the Lender sat back down the Borrower attempted to give her the $2, but the Lender refused to accept it. As she kept on thanking her the Borrower attempted to thrust the money at her, but the Lender parried and it fell to the floor. The Borrower was unfazed and moved on to find a seat. The Lender picked up the money and forcefully stuffed it into one of the Borrower's bags before sitting back down again. The Borrower continued to thank, saying "no really, I just appreciate it so much, so helpful of you." At this point other passengers seemed to join the chorus, saying "that was so nice of you, so very nice." The Lender looked like she just wanted to be left alone.

Spoiler alert: talk of what happens in several recent films ahead.

Two screenwriting trends that have emerged in recent years have caught my attention. The first is the device in which, while at first glance the movie appears to tell a straightforward story, in fact part of the story was not 'true' in the movie's world. It was either made up or dreamed or fantasized by one of the characters. 'Figuring out' the movie then entails determining where this break between the movie's reality and the character's fantasy occurred, absent any of the usual cues like wavy lines or ethereal music, though sometimes with more subtle ones. The Usual Suspects, Mulholland Dr. and Swimming Pool could all be cited as examples. The funny thing about this technique is that only critically acclaimed movies seem to use it. I'm not aware of any crappy movies that had such a twist in them. Some are probably out there, but they're forgotten indies or B movies rather than Hollywood blockbusters.

The other trend is the ambiguous ending, which sometimes renders the entire plot ambiguous. In this case, there is usually evidence presented for multiple explanations of the action, but it seems to have been carefully balanced so that only each viewer's personal prejudices will lead them to conclude that one or another was what really happened. I hesitate to name examples for the reasons below, but the one I just watched that inspired this was Caché. I think The Minus Man also qualifies, or at least it wanted to.

There are two points to be made, and this thread illustrates both pretty well. First, these two techniques tend to dovetail. For many films that appear to divert from reality into a character's fantasy, the question can be asked, did they just imagine all that, or did it really happen? This is the case at least for Memento and Swimming Pool. And for any film with an ambiguous ending you can find at least one person arguing that some part of the movie was just imagined. The second is that the ambiguous ending is particularly devilish, because you never know for sure if it was meant to be ambiguous, or if there really is one true explanation, toward which one piece of evidence tips the scales. After all there are many films, such as The Usual Suspects and Primer, which might seem inexplicable on first viewing, but in fact have perfectly logical explanations. This always provokes arguments, and thus this is probably the easiest way to make a movie that "you'll be talking about for hours!" The director always refuses to say anything one way or the other. The question often comes up in these arguments of what makes it a better movie. Does it make a point about realism or anything else to have a truly ambiguous ending? Are some of the explanations just too mundane to be true? After a while I feel a bit embarrassed to be debating something that seems to have been constructed for the sole purpose of being debatable--though again, most of the movies that use this have plenty else going for them, and meaningful ideas that are not weakened one way or the other by the ending.