oracle

a couple of weeks ago this american life tried to tell 20 stories in 60 minutes. most were light, some affecting, but one left a strong impression. david rakoff recounted how he decided to quit his job at a japanese company developing a computer portal through which people can log on to virtually chat with each other and share information because he felt the technology would be a failure. of course, this was a preliminary version of the interwebs. then he went on to tell how he's completely missed the boat on other breakthroughs, like the time he went to see madonna in the 80s at danceteria and declared that she wasn't going anywhere. or how when he was an editor at a major publisher he passed on "men are from mars, women are from venus." i think he deemed this his negative ability to identify trends.

in turn, i started thinking about my own shortsightedness. it's more just laziness, really. after college (fall of 2001) i ran into a friend of mine in the east village. he mentioned that he and his band will be performing at a small cafe 3 blocks away from my apartment that weekend and that he could add my name to the list. i really meant it at the time when i told him that i would come by and watch. of course, saturday rolled around and i was feeling "tired." and besides, whose band actually gets anywhere? i never really heard from him again.

oh yeah, my friend's band? the scissor sisters. le sigh.

i'm not sure whether that's better or worse than my friend who decided to leave her internship at us magazine in advance of its proposed change from a monthly publication to a weekly, since "that's not gonna go anywhere."

or any of these.

links i like

as written earlier, i have given up any hope. i'm not doing it to be a partypooper or to be contrarian or to jump on a bandwagon. i am just not feeling it anymore. "it" has been replaced with an overwhelming sense of doom.

so here are some funny/informative links. yay.

1) everyone luvs the guv! i really hope he ascends to a bigger platform than even new york bc he really is the straight talk express.
2) i don't find anderson cooper all that attractive, but i dare you to not laugh at this video.
3) here's some more fodder for those of us who think sarah palin is a fucking idiot who makes me ashamed to be a woman. and/or a hockey fan.
4) you should read this. painkiller addiction? check. daddy issues? check. crazy? check.

oh yeah, the greatest news of all: 30 rock is returning on october 30. i'll just put the season premiere on loop to get me through election day.

Blindness

The trailer for the film version of Blindness is above. In theory, there's a lot to love here--Julianne Moore is in it and it would be inappropriate and disturbing for me to elaborate on why that's excellent, so let's just accept that it is; the director created the visceral mind-fuck that was City of God. But clearly something's lacking. While the book is both dystopic and beautiful, the trailer suggests your standard near-future, science-fictiony, disaster fare. My friend Nancy says the problem with making Blindess into a movie is that the full achievement of the work itself has no place in cinema--that is, the book is terrifying precisely because it presents an entire world to us mainly through characters who have no sight. The ugliness of our species is lade bare, but simultaneously made invisible. Even the characters are nameless--they are anonymous, blind guides through a sudden apocalypse. That Saramago crafted a book from this premise is an achievement itself.

I know I complain a lot about how Hollywood likes to ruin things that I love, but how can you adapt Blindness--maybe one of the three greatest achievements in the last fifteen years of international literature--into a movie about sight? Julianne Moore's character--the Doctor's wife, the only one spared--says at the end of the trailer, "The only thing more terrifying than blindness is being the only one who can see." I disagree with the proposition, and her role, it looks like, will get more emphasis in the movie than the book--she, not the blind, will be our guide. If that's the road we're being led on, if this is a movie about being the sighted voyeurs, then this film's going to be a clunker.

But there is hope: If you'd told me the plot of Children of Men--also, a Julianne Moore film, also a film about an inexplicable epidemic--and then said it was going to jump off the screen and punch me in the solar plexus, I'd have been skeptical, but that's exactly what that film did.