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Pouring Buckets
So this stupid French flick I'm halfway through is on pause and I stepped out a moment ago to see if my local DVD store has a copy of Kiss Me Deadly. Their computer says "yes"; their physical inventory says "no." Damn shame. Excellent movie. I'd much rather watch it a second time (I saw it first this past Saturday at the American Cinematheque, with the screenwriter at the ripe age of 94 present for a Q&A afterwards) than sit through this pretentious piece of junk that presently spins in my DVD drawer.
Today as I come into the office I cannot not help but notice how strikingly shiny our potted plants' leaves look. Do our custodial staff go around windexing and waxing them? Armor-All? I wouldn't be surprised.
It's been raining steadily all day long, long grey clouds drooping over the northern province of San Diego that I call home. I wonder what the weather's like at the beach. Should I wear my wool trenchcoat? Or is that too much anachronism? I pull on my leather jacket as I step out into the drizzle.
Leaving the office this evening, I run into a girl, one of the ones who interviewed me in October 2000. I ask her if she wants to go with me to a special preview screening of The Dancer Upstairs tommorow night. She says she's doing yoga. One look at her and I think I should give the tickets away and do yoga, too.
She casually drops that she's moving to New York next month. This takes me completely by surprise. She says she has no plans, no ideas about what she wants to do next, just that she needs some time off and she's tired of being a cog in the corporate machine. I tell her that everyone's a cog in the machine, it's just a question of which machine. She counters that she wants a job where it's not so overt. I looked into her eyes, suddenly felt like this was the last time we would talk, and felt my mouth go dry.
I walk over to Srinivas's cube and we talk about coding and India. He's working on a set of drivers for a CD-printer. I walk over to Marius' joint one aisle over. He says Yvonne's New York move is the most stupid fucking thing he's heard. I tell him that I think I'm jealous of her ability to work without a safety net. We talk about the respective projects that we're doing on the side. Marius agrees to come to The Dancer Upstairs tomorrow night if no one else will. He is a good friend, Marius.
During my Kiss Me Deadly quest, I run into my apartment manager. She calls me by name, but I don't know hers, so I just smile and say hi. Our eyes lock and I look off to the side and remark how cold and wet it is outside. She nods and smiles back. I should flirt with her some more, I think, but somehow it doesn't seem like the moment. Have a good one, I say, and go off to the DVD section to meet ultimate disappointment. Can I rewind the last ten minutes of my VHS life and replay that last exchange? She probably doesn't like Spanish cinema, anyway.
This past Saturday, I'm at my best friend's ex-girlfriend's housewarming party somewhere in LA. I don't know where it is because I just follow Mike to get there. The apartment is about 700 square feet and there are 70 people inside. There's a small balcony outside where people can go out to smoke and make out between liquored conversations. I alternate between the alcohol supply and various clusters of people, meeting countless PA's at major studios who are all "really" writers working on a coming-of-age screenplay. I leave the party two hours later feeling vaguely like a fraud and just want to go home to design inkjet cartridges. As I pull my car away from the curb and turn on my windshield wipers to counter the oncoming rain, I hear a sharp scraping sound and realize that someone has stolen my wiper blades. Fucking pathetic car thieves; they could at least steal something substantial. I reflect that incompetence and laziness are not restricted to lawful professions and drive back to San Diego with raindrops in my eyes.
I go out on a blind Salon.com personals date as the sun comes up over the San Diego mountains a few hours later. We have brunch at Le Peep in La Jolla. I am tired and drink lots of coffee while she talks about her irritating date the previous night and the sassy pooltable chick who wore Wallmart clothes; she says she can't stand Wallmart and takes her sweatshop clothes source very seriously. Ha ha. She majored in writing at UCSD and is an editor at a nonfiction publication that is not named. She's kinda cute and I dig her but sense that she thinks I don't meet her standards. On the way out to the parking lot, she asks where I parked and I point toward some cars. "A Jetta, I knew it!" she says. "No, it's the Mazda next to it." She says she could have sworn I was the kind of guy who would drive a Jetta. I now know where her priorities lay.
The musicians on The Piano Teacher are all bad and the teacher herself is the worst, wooden and flat. The people who made this film obviously do not live or die by music and only pay lip service - the worst kind of disrespect - to Schubert and Beethoven. I do not find the main character attractive in any way. She is immensely irritating and stupid. Die, bitch, die - and take a chainsaw to your equally irritating mother, please. That irritating shit must run in the family; best to get it out of the gene pool before it spreads. Relax, I think a moment later, it's only bad fiction.
It's good that the rain continues late into the night. It gives me an excuse to crank up the dark storminess of the Appasionetta on the hifi. I want to hug Rudolph Serkin for rescuing Beethoven from the grip of pretentious French cinema and consider preparing my own recital of the three B's. When you nail a passage of Beethvoen's seventh violin sonata, when you're totally inside, method-acting your instrument to inhabit a 200-year-old soul floating somewhere out there, you receive a reciprocal habitation of genius in your corpse that lingers for just a few moments, causing you to feel more beautiful, more alive than ten gorgeous people wired on coffee, wired in parallel. Certainly more beautiful than I feel when I stare at myself in the mirror before going out on a date.
At the Cinematheque on Saturday, people clap when the screenwriter's name appears on the opening credits. People apparently do this all the time in LA. I smirk at Mike, but soon eat it as the most incredible film noir unfolds before my eyes. Fast, witty, cynical. A bunch of brilliant cameo characters who liven up the landscape. Genius. I want to own a copy of this movie, but this DVD place is letting me down. I bet Amazon will come to the rescue.
God, I don't know how to handle this whole Yvonne-impromptu-quitting-and-moving-to-NewYork thing just yet. Should I call this Sunday brunch girl back and ask her out on a second date? I wonder how many other Secret Life of Eric Saxby scripts are being written by partygoing Emerson College graduates and if I should just give up on filmmaking now before I turn into one of them.
Dude, people are so nuts. I don't know how I even live with myself sometimes. I think it's time to put on a fresh pot of something. The rain shows no sign of stopping and I'd hate to miss any of it. Lovely stuff, rain. Fuck, I need to replace my windshield wiper blades. Is Wallmart still open this time of night?
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