Posted on Wednesday, 09/25/24.

I’ve added a small new element of styling to this site that permits me to indicate subsections more obviously. I’ve done this out of a recent, petulant desire to match some of these posts to the basic structure of my thoughts, which have felt episodic and circumscribed. If some larger, connecting thread appears then it is probably an illusion, and the multiple cups of coffee I’ve had today feel as if they dissuade illusion, though I imagine I am more susceptible to them now than ever.

On Mulholland Drive

One of the DVDs I bought from the BOOK-OFF in 新宿 was ‘MULHOLLAND DRIVE,’ which I have seen before, though not for years, and which I have not watched outside of a theater. UChicago’s DOC-FILMS must have shown it for their Lynch series, I remember, either in the fall of 2018 or the late winter of 2019. I watch it this time in two parts, the first in my apartment using my projector at night, and the second (the last thirty minutes) during an afternoon a couple days later. I stop watching when Rita and Betty discover the body. I had forgotten the look of it, how it is slick and gummy. This image is the second horrible moment in the film, though far more honestly so, the first being the creature behind the wall out back of ‘Winkies’ (for which the movie might be most famous, in that superficial way that early, self-contained, shocking but easily dismissed as humorous scenes sit snugly in the minds of most viewers).

I consider saying things like that this is the only movie I’ve seen that operates by the mechanisms of dreams without imploding. This point is difficult to make sound significant because it is easy to describe, or even to feel how dreams are, but an entirely different thing to show this with literal image and sound and narrative device to people who are awake and attentive and expecting basic filmic bollards. In fact such difference is why I’m vertiginously terrified of movies and their making. The easy way to describe the mechanisms of dreams is to borrow the terminology applied to certain illusions: that something which appears alright at first crumples under closer inspection, or conversely that some arrangement of parts appear locally correct but violate some series of global rules. That unlike basic experience various aspects and scales of a dream do not agree, are not persistent, and very often know what you are thinking because you cannot get outside of the thing or take a break from it.

Besides the cleverness though, besides the front-brained activities of characters with two or three names, besides twins and symmetries and the Ouroborosian stuff that remind us that all film is chopped up and shot out of order and recorded onto multiple tracks and spliced and dubbed and copied That I’m saying ‘besides’ here is a little dismissive, as for people subject to the same fetters as me these sorts of nods and tongues-in-cheeks are sort of necessary throat-clearings to allow us to relax and accept (after only immense cerebellar exhaustion) whatever secret soft, sweet thing has been hidden at the nucleus of the faff. the movie is very moving. I realize I like to write about how people who at one point cared deeply for each-other come to hate or injure each-other; the reasons I care about this so much are here suppressed and hidden from the reader, save that they may know I find myself, on the cycle of years, separating or reconnecting with people with whom my connection couldn’t be said to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but merely ‘important’, ‘essential’, or less charitably ‘unavoidable.’ And at the end of all this, inside the trope of a distressed damsel whose loses her memory, the movie permits the second-time viewer, who knows who knows each-other, and how, and who knows the trope and thus can let it slip effortlessly down into their amygdala, to desperately hope things had been different. This desperate wish is the whole first act of the movie, just after Diane has put the gun in her mouth, and just before her bed goes up in smoke. The second-time viewer allows it to be this simple, The second-time viewer allows The Cowboy to exist. and thinks things like that I wish we could have been better to each-other, or that this morning is really more beautiful than any morning I have ever seen, and so on.

On fake wooden beams in Brooklyn Roasting Co

In the morning, during my first cup of coffee, I look up to the high-ceilings of Brooklyn Roasting Co, a small local chain obviously inspired by the average NYC converted-warehouse coffee shop, and see that for about half the roof, slightly away from the edges and restricted from unnecessary alcoves, that parallel wooden boards are suspended from large steel frames to give the illusion that the building’s timber joists are exposed. The building is steel-skeletoned. I look to the ceilings corners and see large I-beams coated in a mottled spray-cement of some sort. I marvel at how good the fake beams are, really, at giving the feeling of a brick-built warehouse with solid wooden joists, which of course have basically never been constructed en-masse in Japan given its seismic activity. The coffee is a medium dark roast and clean. The night before I ordered their decaf, which must be made to order, and the bottom had silt, which may mean they grind too finely, or use some other type of filter for their pour-overs. This café has the highest concentration of white people in almost any area of 下北沢, though I am not sure if this is because of its name, its relatively obvious location near to the station and on the first floor, its free and un-managed wi-fi, its reasonably 3rd/4th wave coffee, or something else. The men I see often look like they could be in tech, or creatives. Some of them take Zoom calls in the café, which is almost unimaginable to me. I imagine they look at me and think similar things. Occasionally I see couples, or larger groups with children and more obviously touristic accoutrements. On evening a middle-aged woman sitting at the table next to me consumed an entire salad laden with various ingredients. Pairs of young women will gossip next to me while I work in the late mornings. I often wear headphones, though keep some awareness up for whether the place has become overcrowded and if I ought to give up my seat. I have a punch-card now, even, and sometimes the baristas appear to recognize me; one of them is spectral and tall, and makes cortados without expression.

On fall and the Scholastic book fair

The first days of fall have, as if it were their right, made the weather suddenly cooler, at least for the past few days. Walking without immediately feeling my forehead go damp is a revelation, and through some misassociation of cause and effect at least temporarily lightens my mood, as if whatever nervousness had been making me clammy before had suddenly gone away. I associate this drop in temperature with the start of the school year proper; for some reason I suddenly feel bookish, but also older than I have ever been (true, of course, but the meaning is clear), and further than ever from the years 2002 to 2007 (also true, and a corollary of the above, but the meaning is clear).

Online, people who grew up in temperate public school districts in the suburban United States ascribe nostalgia to this time of year and its associated events. In particular some time in the late fall the Scholastic book fair appeared, A better expression would be came to town as as a child I had no sense of how or why this event happened, only that, like a traveling circus, it represented some possibility for oddities, for perhaps even news from afar, and above all an excuse to be away from home after hours without my parents, after the sun, even, had gone down. even at that stage dismissed by some parents (and embraced by some students) as an excuse to market wares to children, with the proportion of offered goods which were non-books increasing year over year.

The scholastic book fair; taken from the web, but of course exactly as it was remembered.

The public library at Indian Valley Elementary School was small even to me then, though that it was a separate building entirely, opening nearly directly onto the main blacktop, afforded it some magnificence. It was mostly a single space, divided in half with one side devoted to computers and printers and the other to the main shelves, forming a comb along one wall. Directly off the entrance to the right there was one enclosed space, a nook, with built-in blonde wood benches along three sides (too deep for me to sit on comfortably) and a couple of chairs along the remaining wall, from which our librarian Mrs. Anderton, would read to us briefly on certain library days the frequency or purpose of which I can not remember. Once we were read to from The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, whose beautiful, misty drawings I still remember, and is curious in its simple appeal to children for whom the purposeful distortion of common fairy tales might not be obvious.

Early exposure to hammy postmodern noodling (with late 90s collagish motifs), immediately impressionable on a large portion of my and classmates’ writing projects.

It was this nook that contained the most engrossing displays during the book fairs, which must have been over a week or so, though in memory they were a single night. The benches would be stacked high with new, glossy books, many of them paperback though with embossed or otherwise shiny or holographic covers. The center of the room was also filled, some platform or series of boxes bought in so that the nook became a cavern around which one skirted, careful not to disturb the piles of wares. Usually I would be permitted a book or two, or was given some money to purchase something directly. Sometimes I would buy a decorative eraser, or even a Smencil, though even then I felt that the books were more central to the experience, there because they were new and interesting, and a much more reasonable thing to buy. There would be a horror section, a fantasy section, something devoted to the latest series and fads. Books that came with journals with keys, books that came with action figures or glow-in-the-dark plastic frogs or kits for growing salt crystals. There may have even been special displays to house copies of the latest big-sellers; large cardboard fold-outs that could be seen across the room, even over the beige, hulking Macintosh G3s that the library then still had, though even I could tell they were old, and could not run the best apps like KidPix.

All of this is to say that when the wind cools and the days are mostly overcast, even here, I can’t say that I’m not in a thin fellowship with the rest of the people my age and who grew up on the coasts of the US, even if it is a little embarrassing that that connection is founded on consumption and mass-market paperbacks. Buying books is one of the only activities I feel very little shame about, and I am sure that my basic comfort in visually busy spaces filled with books has a simple lineage wrapped up in all of this, too. I think some straightforward attempt to recreate these spaces, or to buy books published then, is destined to be a little too thin, despite certain ease, despite a near endless set of things one could acquire, but I feel what it might feel like—the possible mechanism of it—and can see smaller, less immediately failure-bound efforts that are cousin to it in my daily activities.