The Mexican citizenry show us in the US how it’s done.

How is it that there’s a new David Sylvian project and I don’t hear about it for a year?

O well.

Just outside the Apple Store.

“My associates can bring peace to the middle east…”

I might have posted this before. I don’t think so, though. It’s a file that’s been sitting on the computer desktop for a really long time, and I want to file it properly. But before I do….

A Walk In The Woods

There was a time when a walk in the woods was a bad idea. You didn’t want to be in the woods unless you had to. If you had to travel, you stuck to the roads, to the busier path. Think of every fairy tale where someone wanders off into the woods, and something really bad happens to them.

I’ve stood next to trees that were 700 years old. Seven hundred. It’s a number hard to fathom. Then again, if you could talk to a 700 year old tree and ask it what its learned, it would have to say, “What do I know? I’ve been standing in one place all this time.” This is the bristlecone pine speaking, a tree that basically preserves itself with its own sap.

700 years of snowy winters, dry, hot summers, people coming by and marveling… People thinking that spending five minutes looking at a tree is a long time.

This is what I get from a walk in the woods. It’s a paradox. It’s ennobling, and it turns my whole existence into a tiny fleck. A tiny fragment of something that was tiny to begin with.

I have a joke I tell, though it’s really inappropriate and irreverent, and people think I’m trying to be a jerk, when really I’m just being silly. It’s like a knock, knock joke, except the other person starts it. Usually they don’t know they’re starting a joke, which is why it confuses them. They start by saying, “What do you do for a living?” And much like the bristlecone pine, my answer is, “I metabolize.”

And it’s one of those coyote jokes. It’s a comment on the banality of asking what someone does for a living. It’s completely honest, too. I metabolize, and therefore I’m alive. It’s word play and fuck-you at the same time. And naturally this is a little too much for most people. It’s a measure, too.

And like the bristlecone, I’ve endured that question so many times. So many winters and summers, and so many recurrences of “Hi! What do you do for a living?”

Walking in the woods, no one asks what you do for a living. Everyone you meet – the trees, the birds, the ground cover, the reptiles and riparian runabouts, the waders the watchers the worms and wrigglers…. the geese, the game, the Giardia… even the happy banana slug – they’re all too busy living to bother to ask. If you’re a predator, they know what you do: You eat them! If you’re not a predator, then who cares?

Not so hot any more.

Just so you folks weren’t left hanging, thinking it was still hot here.

Carry on.

This is the funniest thing in the world:

(Source)

And this is why it’s the funniest thing in the world.

Seriously, I can’t stop laughing.

Eyman is the guy who showed up at a press conference in a Darth Vader outfit. He makes his living by getting rich conservatives to give him money so he can run initiative campaigns.

Update:

(I guess *that’s* why I bought the scanner; so I could make that in ten seconds.)

The other day I was waiting at the bus stop at 125th and Lake City Way. The 75 was due to arrive in about ten minutes. Under the shelter was a couple trying to escape the heat; they were wondering if the 65 went to Matthews Beach, which it doesn’t, so I told them they wanted the 75.

There was a strange, tall, oriental-looking gentleman, with a very worried look on his face and coke-bottle glasses. Dressed all in black, with a ten-year-old laptop briefcase. He eyed everyone suspiciously. There was also a rather large man with a bag of groceries, a box of breakfast cereal conspicuously poking out the top. He looked beaten down, red-faced, in need of a big glass of water. He waited a full fifteen minutes for the bus to arrive, and then when it came, he rode it three blocks and got off.

But that’s not what this story is about. It’s about the pathos-inducingly wiry guy, maybe 20 or a little younger, wearing an iPod and track shorts and muscle shirt and wrap-around mirrorshades. He might have been albino; he was certainly pale and he had white hair. He glanced at me, and I glanced back, and gave him a nod of howdy, and he nodded back. And then he occupied the sidewalk, there in the shade of the three-storey Washington Mutual buildling with dancing.

He was obviously listening to Michael Jackson’s ‘Billie Jean.’ He enacted the whole music video through dance, singing out some of the words. Wiry white guy acting like his own iPod commercial. He wasn’t such a bad dancer. He’d twirl around, grab his crotch, do a moonwalk, spin around again, do that little yelp that Jackson does in the song…

The couple under the shelter were amused. They started laughing. I don’t think they intended to be cruel, either. People don’t just start dancing, so they were stunned. The all-in-black man shied away to the other side of the universe. The big guy just sighed. I was grinning, and started watching the people in the cars stopped at the stoplight.

They were watching this guy dance. Some were laughing at him, some were diggin’. Dude had created a scene, trading in the currency of a song and a video everyone was familiar with, but which no one could actually see or hear at the moment. They could only remember, their memory jogged by semi-capable dance moves seen at a bus stop.

The bus came. He moonwalked to the door and climbed in. He ended up sitting right next to the couple who had been trying to escape the heat at the beach.

Later, he took out the ear buds and said, out loud, to whoever was listening: “I really love hot days like today.” Reply: “Yeah, makes me feel like dancing.”

‘Conquest of the Planet of the Apes’

Yes, Severn Darden is in two Apes movies, and I will eventually watch them both as part of this project. One is ‘Conquest.’ He plays the same character in both: Kolp, a cooly officious technocrat. The role doesn’t ask much of him in ‘Conquest,’ which is pretty much as you’d expect. Darden does a fine job of being creepy, and some of the other performances are OK, but mostly it’s just a silly movie.

I remember really liking this movie as a kid, and I think the reason is the relationship between Ricardo Montalban’s character and Caesar, the product of the previous sequel: ‘Return to the Planet of the Apes.’ Montalban is so protective and kind, and Caesar is so alone. It also had the brutal mayhem at the end, when the apes finally turn on their masters.

The politics are trowelled on. Much is made of the fact that one of the Governor’s aides is black, and that he, ‘…of all people…’, should understand the plight of the apes. And what’s really tricky about this aspect of the movie is that it puts black militants of the mid-’70s in the role of apes. The apes win, of course, but still. It’s almost a big joke on itself, but there’s no indication that it’s self-conscious enough to play that way.

Plot in a paragraph: Apes are slaves, talking ape from the future arrives and leads them to freedom through revolution. Sort of. The apes are slaves because there was a pandemic disease that killed off all the pets, so the humans took apes as pets, and then later as slaves.

And in my re-write: The pandemic also caused the apes to start to evolve speech and writing, which they practice in privacy. The pandemic will be the cause of ape speech, not the time travel paradox in the movie as it exists. When Caesar comes around, he finds he can have very limited conversations with other members of the ape underground. In fact, some gorillas will be better tacticians than he is, and apes all over the planet are in communication with each other, which is how the revolution is possible. Caesar will actually be a moderating force, calling for compassion rather than death. Also: The black bureaucrat won’t be a sympathetic character. Caesar will explain that he ‘of all people’ should understand, but he’ll say, “Yeah, I understand, but… You’re apes.” This is when Caesar will abandon compassion.

That’s my five minute re-write. I think I’ll start doing that regularly for movies I talk about here.

Because you’re all dying to know: It’s still hot.

I worked on the van yesterday, and got a little too overheated. Today has been general laziness. Once the sun is sufficiently over the horizon (I live on the eastern slope of a hill), I’ll rush a few tasks before darkness.