This is one of those links that just needs to be passed along.

So whatcha waitin’ for? CLICK HERE!

Ok, first of all there’s this guy called Brian Fleming, and he made a movie called ‘Nothing So Strange,’ which is a mock-documentary about the controversy surrounding Bill Gates’ assassination. I’m looking forward to seeing it.

But, he also has a ‘blog, and some of the entries have short movies that go along with them. One has to do with how he faked a political group’s presence at the Democratic National Convention, for ‘Nothing So Strange.’ And my favorite is this one, which compares Apple’s ’1984′ ad to their most recent Super Bowl ad with Pepsi.

I’m really glad to see people smashing and reassembling the media world with such sophistication as this.

I’ve been trying to sleep on and off for the past 4 hours or so.

In between attempts at getting to sleep, I did the following: Watched TV for a while. Drank some single malt scotch. Read a couple chapters from a book. Read a chapter from another book. Talked to myself. Made herbal tea and drank it. Folded laundry. Looked at a comic anthology for a while.

Apparently, I’m more productive when I’m trying to get to sleep than I am during the rest of the day.

Seriously though, this insomnia comes from the fact that I’m pretty close to setting the deal on an apartment. Though I’m also kinda decided I’m not going to do it, so the cognitive dissonance machine is on full-bore, and I’m sitting around arguing with myself about it.

So why not write about it here, eh? The deal works like this:

There’s this woman, and she has an apartment that she’s leased into for another four months. But she also just bought a house, so she wants to move into that, and doesn’t want to make mortgage payments and pay rent at the same time. However, the lease is such that she has to fork over the amount for the remaining rent anyway. Her solution is to find someone who will live there and pay money to her, so she can pay the rent. She’s giving a discount to her sub-renter, to make it more attractive.

Now, I see an ad on craigslist, and it looks pretty decent. It’s not a cheap place, but it *is* a nice apartment, and though it’s not exactly the location I want, it’s not that far from where I want to be. And it’s only 4 months anyway. So I call about it, and she’s nice, and it’s all fine, except that now I have to enter onto her rental lease in order to have the right to be there.

So basically, I’d be paying a bunch of money to live somewhere I only kinda want to live, while opening myself up to whatever legal shenannigans my newfound friend might have in store. My gut instinct says she’s OK, that she wouldn’t skip town and leave me with the full rent amount and whatever other legal trouble existed between her and the management company. But still.

If the amount she wanted were really REALLY cheap, then it might be worth it, but while it’s not the wrong location, it’s also not the RIGHT location. So I’m pretty sure I’m going to bail on her. I feel bad about it after having expressed so much interest, but she said she had another taker, so no real loss, I suppose.

I think I’ll try and sleep again now. Woot.

Valentine’s Day movie review. I rented this last night:

‘Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life,’ is along the lines of ‘Eraserhead,’ but more confusing and abstract. Gorgeous, beautiful, stark, and pretty well creepy. The plot (such as it is) has a character entering an institute for servants, where he learns by rote how to say things like, “No, my master, don’t concern yourself. The burn does not hurt.” The headmaster’s sister falls for him, as does the headmaster. She dies of heartbreak, the headmaster wanders off into the darkness. The school disperses. Somewhere in there a demon is either having sex with or eating a stag, dialogue happens in about five different languages, the world outside the Institute is depicted as either a barren wasteland or a gauzy membranous world, and a man’s head is measured for horns.

To simply state the story, however, does injustice to what the movie’s really about, and the way it unfolds in your mind. It deals in exquisite slow motion with the issues of power and control, taking the lowly BDSM exhibition to a new artful level. The narrative (or, at least, the linear progression of events) unfolds according to its own logic, as a dream. The scenes where the lead character explores the Institute were reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker,’ but the brutal, dirty art direction beats Tarkovsky hands down.

Pretend you fell in love with someone when you first saw them in the decaying, stained ruins of an abandoned mental hospital, and you start to get the impression. And that’s not an easy feeling to convey, so my hat’s off to the directors.

Last night I rented a bunch of movies at Scarecrow. ‘Equilibrium,’ ‘Spellbound,’ and the Bill Maher HBO comedy special, ‘Victory Begins At Home.’

‘Equilibrium’ was better than I expected, but also pretty darn slow in places. It looks like an ‘Outer Limits’ episode stretched to 90 minutes. Still, the idea of a dystopian future where everyone takes a drug (called ‘Prozium’) in order to abolish emotions is pretty ripe for meaning. The gun katas were pretty cool, too, which makes for an interesting dichotomy: We assume violence comes from emotion, but it can also come from a purely rational need to control. Also, the casting is brilliant; Christian Bale, from ‘American Psycho,’ as an emotionless elite whose job it is to destroy the feeling-rebels.

‘Spellbound’ made me very happy, because it’s a bunch of geeky kids and their obsessive parents, and who can’t resist that story? It’s a documentary following the lives of a half-dozen kids as they prepare for, and participate in, the national spelling bee in DC. Worth seeing.

‘Victory Begins At Home’ was attractive for the same reason Al Franken’s book is attractive: It tries to approach our current political situation as if it were funny. Neither Maher nor Franken are joke-tellers, they’re humorists, so the material itself (terrorism, Bush administration, 9/11, war in Iraq) maintains its gravity, but the observations are hilarious. For instance: Half of Americans think Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11. Well, let me tell you: Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden are both bad guys, but the Joker is still not the same guy as the Riddler.

Ok, so in this entry I ask: What’s the counter-argument to the neoconservative argument?

I got two answers, both of which say that the counter-argument involves actual work and effort on the part of the powerful (and the not-so-powerful) in order to change things around.

My concern is not with how hard it is, or how much spiritual work it represents, but how the vision can be simply stated. The neoconservatives haven’t always been Republicans; they took over the reins of that party as a way of enabling their vision, which is no small task. Without the vision of an America that dominates the globe through military power, with the potential side-effect of spreading democracy, there wouldn’t have been a reason to do it.

So maybe my question shouldn’t be ‘what’s the counter-argument?’ and should instead be: How would you state the counter-vision? Or maybe, what vision do you have for the way the US acts in the world?

Last night I went to a mid-price Asian fusion noodle house, because it was close to the place where I was going to buy groceries. And if there’s one thing I know, it’s that you should never buy groceries while you’re hungry.

I was alone, natch, and while I wasn’t underdressed, I make exactly zero effort to look hip or trendy. This meant that, natch, I got shitty service. The party behind me was seated before I was, and when they finally deigned to give me a table, it was the one sticking right out into foot traffic by the entrance. There was another table in the corner, away from the loud and chaotic, so I asked the guy, hey.. can I sit there instead? He rolled his eyes and gave me a nasty look, but let me switch.

So I sat there forever and finally got to order, and sat there forever waiting for my tea, and then sat there forever waiting for my pho. The pho broth’s overwhelming main flavoring was onions. Like, they had put more onions in the stock than just about anything else. I’m OK with onions, but raw onion soup wasn’t what I had in mind.

But by this point it was a dare. It was a test, a challenge. I can take anything you dish out, you service-industry assholes! If I ate lots of noodles without much broth, it was acceptable. Plus, I added a bunch of the spicy sauce.

I had to flag the waitress down to get more water, to get more hot water for my tea, to get my check. True to the solitary dining experience, no one gives a shit about you. And this is because you’re only ordering one dinner, and fifteen percent of one dinner is half as much as fifteen percent of two.

Yes, it all boils down to tips. Not whether you have a pleasant dining experience, but how much take-home your waitress will end up with. Which, ironically, is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if they treat you like shit, you don’t tip them, so single diners end up having a reputation for being poor tippers. Which means it’s OK to treat them like shit.

And with this in mind, I gave a huge tip. But I wrote a note on the currency in large, unignorable letters: THE SERVICE SUCKED.

Zao gets a zero.

I’m reading ‘Iraq’s False Premises,’ and the following runs through my head:

The neoconservatives have very clearly stated their vision (misguided as it is) for America in the next century. This is basically the only source of their power and influence.

What is needed is a clearly-stated alternate vision. The alternate vision exists, it just hasn’t been stated in such a way that it catches people’s imaginations, the way the neoconservative Globalist Colonialism Lite(tm) has. They argue: We have the military power, so let’s freakin’ use it before we’re knocked off the top of the food chain.

What’s the counter argument?

Radio monologues, reminiscent of Joe Frank:

Your Radio Nightlight