(China) Pictures at an Exhibition

TAIPEI, Taiwan - My trip is winding down at my aunt's house in Taipei, and because of the rain outside, it looks like I will spending my last night in Asia indoors. That's okay, I suppose...although there is apparently a tall building in the city in which you can get a really great view of all of Taipei---and it looks like I might not get a chance to see it for myself this time. Shame, but probably just as well; truth be told, I'm just about all traveled and sightseeing-ed out right now. I barely mustered enough energy and enthusiasm to visit the National Palace Museum in Taipei today, where there are a lot of artworks and artifacts spanning all the way back to the Neolithic Era. (Chiang Kai-shek really made sure to take 'em all before he left China, apparently.)

Anyway, looks like I might have enough time to put up a few pictures from all the major places we visited on our trip. So let's continue on with this photo mini-retrospective, shall we?

Temple of Heaven




I also visited Summer Palace, but I ran out of battery on my Powershot that day sooner than I expected, so I decided to use my mother's EOS camera to take pictures there. Unfortunately, I seem unable to transfer pictures from that camera onto my MacBook. Those will have to wait until after my mother and brother come back with their cameras.

Oh yes, and later that third official day of the tour, I did get a taste of Peking roast duck. It was glorious.

The Great Wall of China

I didn't climb high enough to be considered a "hero" in Chairman Mao's eyes...but I climbed pretty far, as some of my aerial photos hopefully suggest.

My brother, Masao, and I


My mother, the soldier...


Who needs Chairman Mao's approval? I'm my own hero!



No point to the inclusion of this one; I just thought it looked serene.


The goal for me: climbing to the top-most building I see from this angle






I made it! ...to my goal, at least.



Ming Tombs








After three days in Beijing, onward to Wuxi, in China's Jiangsu province...

Lake Tai





Turtle-Head Islet Park









Supposedly, throw a coin successfully on this turtle's shell and you'll get good fortune. I tried twice and failed. Guess no good fortune for me...



From Wuxi to Suzhou

Humble Administrator's Garden











Peekaboo!



That's it for now; gotta pack up and get ready for the airport tomorrow. I'm coming back to the U.S., readers! More to come...

The Hong Kong Situation

SHANGHAI, China - Today (Thursday) I was originally supposed to venture off by myself to Hong Kong for a few hours. Initially, I had planned on visiting the Wall Street Journal Asia office, just for fun. But then I talked to a few people at work, and they all said that there wasn't really anything special to the office---that it was just a regular office. So what the heck was I going to do for the rest of the five hours or so I was going to be in Hong Kong? Certainly that isn't enough time to take in very many cool sights. Besides, no one in my family coming on this China tour with me expressed any interest in accompanying me to Hong Kong. So I would be going to an unfamiliar foreign area all alone---a rather nerve-wracking prospect for me, despite what I've been told about how "ridiculously easy" it is to get around even for foreigners.

Thus, I eventually realized that it was probably a silly idea to wake up earlier than the rest of the group just to visit an office building in Hong Kong. Only one problem, though: by the time I realized the error of my ways, the tickets had already been bought and paid for, and all the flights had been arranged. And our travel agent was telling my mother---who arranged this whole trip for all of us---that the company backing this tour, Grand Holidays, couldn't do anything about it so late in the game.

My aunt, on my mother's side, is a frequent traveler, and she told us that probably the best way to try to rearrange my flight schedule at this point was to do something like wait until the day of my early-morning flight to Hong Kong to see if there were any other seats still available either on the same evening flight the rest of my family was taking from Shanghai to Hong Kong that day (we're all eventually going to Taipei, and we have to catch a connecting flight at the Hong Kong airport at around 9:15 p.m.) or on an earlier flight. A chancy proposition at best---so we asked our tour guide for the second, post-Beijing half of our 8-day tour to see if there was anything she could do.

Things looked pretty bleak for my chances of joining the rest of my folks on that initial Shanghai-to-Hong-Kong flight. First, it seemed as if we had to go through United Airlines, which is apparently notorious for refusing requests to change flights. Then, when our tour guide tried contacting Cathay Pacific Airlines to see what they could do, they told her they couldn't do much either. No one seemed willing to help us at all; everyone was seemingly referring us to someone else. The situation got complicated, but worse, it got fairly heated. It seemed like every time I opened my mouth to saying something about a sticky situation I caused, my mother implied I was being ungrateful for her help when she said "Shut up, I'm doing the best that I can!" Even more unpleasant, however, were some of the hypotheticals. Worst-case scenario: I would have to take that early flight to Hong Kong and essentially wait around for eight or so hours at the airport before the rest of my family arrived for the connecting flight. That's a scenario I couldn't bear to face, and the thought of it made me so glum that, throughout much of yesterday morning---when we visited the Yue Fei Tomb, West Lake and Longjing Tea Plantation in Hangzhou, China---I pretty much wore the same fixed depressed expression on my face. What had I done? What trouble had I caused, and what undue strain had I put my mother---who was basically trying to clean up the mess I had made---under?

Would this be a repeat of the disastrous end of that Maine trip a couple of summers ago---when, for those who don't remember, an emotionally brutal family argument cut our trip to Acadia National Park in Maine unceremoniously short?

But things are looking up! Our tour guide got a phone call while we were in Longjing Tea Plantation (tasting some delicious organic green tea, by the way) that confirmed that I would be joining my family on that 4:30 p.m. flight from Shanghai to Hong Kong today after all (and also that it would require an extra $100 fee to be paid). I don't know what finally did it, but when my aunt told me that the change had been made, relief swarmed over me the same way that aroma from green-tea leaves eventually swarms over you.

Needless to say, I enjoyed myself immensely the rest of the day, especially when we got to Shanghai and I got a chance to bask in its Times Square-like glitz and glamour. I even got a couple of (bootleg) DVDs out of the evening (I'll probably leave it at that and not mention any specific titles here).

So hopefully there will be no more unpleasant surprises today.

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I was going to upload a few more pictures from my trip up to this point, but Blogger seems to be having problems uploading my pics, at least from this particular Internet connection here in Shanghai Guangdong Hotel. I hope I'll actually have Internet access at wherever I'm staying in Taiwan (one of my relatives' houses). Let it be said for now that I have seen a lot, felt a lot, and quite possibly learned a lot. More details will come after I return home.

Days of Being Sleepy

SUZHOU, China - So my initial plan of trying to update every day with pictures of places visited during a particular day hasn't quite worked out, mostly because I've had little time to spend parsing through photos taken for a particular day on my Canon Powershot SD400 and picking and choosing the best (or least embarrassing) ones. By the time we all got back to our hotel rooms in the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel in Beijing the past three days, we've usually had to get ready for bed in order to wake up early (about 6:30 a.m.) every morning for the day's activities.

On the other hand, I might as well have used all the valuable time I wasted tossing and turning in bed the past three nights---trying desperately to sleep but never quite finding the will until, say, around 2 a.m., if I'm lucky (which I was last night...before I had to wake up at around 5 a.m. to pack up and catch a plane to Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport)---to post on this blog. Yes, readers, jet lag has caught up with me with an unexpectedly hard-hitting way, it seems. I expected to have trouble sleeping the first night (I finally got maybe an hour or so of deep sleep before waking up to a 6:30ish wake-up call), but then I spent the next night struggling in bed 'til about 2:30 a.m., and then doing same for about half the night last night. It sucks: after long days of traveling and sightseeing, I feel tired and sticky throughout the day, but then when it comes time to channel all that fatigue into the act of dozing off, I can't seem to do it. These days, then, I seem to be operating mostly on power naps in planes or vans, sometimes in uncomfortably close quarters.

Well, I'm about to hit a pillow here in the Suzhou Grand Metro Park Hotel in a little less than a half-hour, so we'll see what transpires tonight.

In the meantime, here is an extremely brief selection of photos taken from Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, two places we visited on Saturday, with a bit of annotation. More photos will hopefully be coming in forthcoming days, and more details and overall impressions will probably come after I return from China on June 1.

Tiananmen Square

No, no tanks on Saturday, but there was a police presence that forced everyone off the square earlier than expected.






The Forbidden City

This makes me want to finally check out The Last Emperor!





One of the two guardian lions pictured below are male, and the other is female. Can you guess which one is which? Hint: note what's in the paws of each respective lion.



Supposedly you touch this tree below and it wards off cancer.

Lost in Beijing

BEIJING - As you can tell, I'm in China now, readers!

After enduring both a six-hour flight to San Francisco and an even longer---12 hours---flight to Beijing International Airport, my mother, one of my younger brothers, and I are chilling in the Great Wall Sheraton hotel here in Beijing.

We all had to wake up early on Thursday morning---at about 2 a.m.---to get to John F. Kennedy International Airport to catch a 6 a.m. United Airlines flight to San Francisco. Thus, none of us got a lot of sleep the evening before---and while I'm not sure about my other two family members, I wasn't very successful in catching up on sleep in the two cramped economy cabins we all sat in. So hopefully tonight I will be able to actually get some!

I'm not sure there's much else to say right now. Because we are a part of a tour group, we were greeted at Beijing International Airport by someone leading the group. It was quite humid. My aunt from my mother's side met us there---at least, after a lot of effort and near-panicked phone calls. The other people we've met with our tour group seem quite nice. We went to an amazing Chinese dim-sum restaurant that looks like a virtual marketplace inside and spans a few floors; I'm not sure I've heard of any restaurant as large as this one (but then it's not like I'm hugely active in the New York restaurant scene or anything...maybe the New Jersey buffet-restaurant scene...).

And now it's almost time for bed.

I'm hoping I can try to take some time every day on this trip to post some photos from that particular day. I think photo essays should probably be sufficient; I'll probably end up saving detailed commentary once I return from China.

For now...wan shang hao.

Running Scared

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - I haven't really had much time to deal much with Dusty's death, because a bigger, more serious situation overshadowed my life last week.

I'm afraid to go into much detail, lest going into too much explicit detail on this public forum affect my legal case any.

Legal case? Say what?

To try to make a long story short: a couple of Fridays ago I was involved in a minor hit-and-run...and, I am embarrassed to say---especially now that I am in a certain amount of hot water because of it---I was the party that ran.

I didn't drive away absolutely knowing I was escaping the scene of an accident. Okay, I may have felt a bump from my front-left bumper, but for all I know, it could have been from the rough, unpaved road I was driving on; and I saw no one around me react in a way that suggested he/she was aware anything had occurred. So I kept on going (if nervously and gingerly), eventually blotting the incident out of my mind altogether.

That set me up for the worst possible shock last Wednesday, when I get hit with four---count 'em, four---traffic tickets from the South Brunswick police, sent to my house via snail mail (and, worse, addressed to my dad, because the car I was driving is technically registered under his name, apparently).

The citations:

Leaving the scene of an accident
Failure to report accident
Careless driving
No liability insurance

Jesus Christ. Why didn't I stop??? (Was seeing Flight of the Red Balloon a second time that important to me?) I know the rules of the New Jersey roads; what was I thinking, continuing on like that? Where was my good sense?

I can't afford a license suspension now. Shit, people have gone to jail for this!

Not that it necessarily matters in the long run, but if you look at my car, you'll see little to no evidence of an accident of any sort. I can't imagine that the other car was damaged that much. Of course, I don't know that for sure; I didn't stop.

Now the duty of finding out the details from the other party falls onto my lawyer to discover.

Because of this situation, my weekend was pretty much an extended bout of depressed second-guessing; I couldn't even enjoy the warm feelings I felt after meeting with a few lovely people at The Wall Street Journal's New York office in the World Financial Center last Thursday regarding a possible post-monitor desk job. And now my China trip is coming up in a couple of days---I have to have this festering in the back of my mind while trying to enjoy myself overseas! (My mother tries to tell me not to worry, especially because I have legal representation. How can I not, though? This is pretty damn serious.)

I have no one to blame but myself, in this case. Still sucks, though.

P.S. Flight of the Red Balloon is still just as wondrous as I remember it. Definitely worth forgetting a hit-and-run accident for, although not worth the deeply unpleasant consequences.

The End

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - For now, I'll let the following video I created this evening speak for itself.



Rest in peace, Dusty. (I wonder if we even gave you a fighting chance...)

No Country for Old Dogs

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - A few weeks ago, I told you all about Dusty's uncontrollable-bladder problem that my parents seemingly preferred to sweep under a rug, assuming right from the start that the problem was just a matter of old age and that there was nothing that could be done about it. Well, not only has this problem gotten worse since then, but another, more serious, problem has developed: readers, Dusty is becoming blind.

Over the past week or so, members of my family have noticed a white spot in his eyes growing bigger day by day. Now it has come to the point where he can't even go down our two front steps without a lot of effort; because he can't see the steps, he has to keep sniffing around in order to get an idea of where he is. And whenever we walk him outside, sometime he freezes up on us, as if he's afraid to keep on walking. You'd be afraid, too, if you couldn't see what was right in front of you.

In short, Dusty, if I didn't realize weeks before, is getting older, and he may well be in his last throes, at least with this family. And not only am I not really handling this all that well up to this point, but I look at the way the rest of my family reacts to these developments, and I feel deeply frustrated, both at them and at myself.

As ever, however, my feelings on this particular instance of rapid aging and---dare I say it---impending death are complicated and difficult to pin down in one word or sentence. So, if you will, allow me to deconstruct these feeling swirling around in my head. At the very least, I feel the need to work something out of my system---something potentially destructive if not let out in something of a constructive way, such as on this blog.

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The first thing that I feel when I see Dusty as he is right now is, of course, pity. Poor thing, he can't even see well anymore, can't help it when he pisses around the house, etc. I have to think that this is a standard human emotion when any feeling person sees any pet or human being in the state that Dusty is in, so I don't think I have to elaborate much further on what I mean by "pity."

Second thing is acceptance that Dusty is, simply put, getting really old. I wasn't willing to say this weeks ago, but I think I'm more willing to agree with it now: what else could it be? The dog was already pretty old when we adopted him a couple of years ago---we were told he was 8, but a vet examined him and concluded that he was probably older than that. So, unless a vet tells me otherwise, I can only conclude that these symptoms are merely the ravages of old age. And to look on the bright side: other than pissing and walking into the occasional wall, he does act fairly normally; he still claws and scratches at us for table scraps in a cute manner.

Third thing is the overwhelming sensation of experiencing a life aging so rapidly in front of my eyes. In the space of weeks, Dusty seems to have aged two or three years. Well okay, I'm probably exaggerating there, but that's what it certainly seems like.

But the most overpowering emotion I feel about this situation is a mixture of frustration, resentment and regret---most of it directed at my parents, but some of it directed at myself. This I will need to explain in more detail.

When I complained on this blog weeks ago about my mother's---to my mind, crazy---refusal to consult with a veterinarian about Dusty's possible bladder problem, a couple of people---including one mysteriously anonymous reader of this blog---suggested that I should just go ahead and take him to a vet myself. Moment of truth, then: I didn't follow that suggestion. I guess I was just too afraid of going behind my parents' back to summon up the courage to "bite the bullet."

Now look what has happened to him.

It's easy to play the blame game, so obviously I point my finger squarely at my parents, who had their chance weeks ago to try to do something to ameliorate the situation, but arrogantly and selfishly decided that it wasn't worth their time and money to do anything, and that they were somehow okay with just cleaning up after his messes. (In recent weeks, they had started blocking off carpeted areas---including the stairs going up to the second floor---just to prevent him from soaking a part of a carpet with his urine; that's how ridiculous it got.) Only now that he's going blind and pissing more often indoors does my mother finally decide to get pet insurance and talk about taking him to a veterinarian---although of course she is going to wait until the end of next week, when the insurance actually kicks in, before she makes any appointments. And only a few nights ago did my dad finally decide to speak up and echo exactly what I had told my mother weeks ago---that he needed to see a doctor and that all of this wasn't just old age. Jeez, Dad, it would have been nice if you had supported me a few weeks ago when I got into heated arguments with Mom about this same exact subject! (My mother, of course, responded to Dad's frustrated suggestion by keeping her facial expression fixed and looking straight at her computer screen, looking as smug and stoic as ever.)

Hold on, however: who am I calling arrogant and selfish? Because wasn't selfishness at play on my part when I decided I was too afraid to go behind my mother's back and take him to a vet myself? Is it possible that, subconsciously, I was almost hoping that Dusty would get worse just so I could somehow prove a point to my parents, or at least to myself regarding my parents? To think I was the sane one in all of this...

So now I'm feeling regret for not doing something earlier, and I'm feeling resentment toward my parents for allowing things to get this bad without a single consultation with an animal doctor. Who knows how much less serious this may or may not be right now if my mother, especially, had been more proactive and less up her own self-absorbed ass?

But all right, let me put aside the whatifs and angry vulgarity for now and focus on how we all move forward. And unfortunately, what I'm expecting as we move forward and try to deal with the situation has its own frustrations as well---chief among them being the fact that my mother says that she will absolutely not operate on Dusty's eyes even if a vet strongly recommends that she do so. "We'll do something about the pissing," she told me last night, "but I'm not willing to spend $5,000, $6,000 on eye surgery."

I balked at this in front of her, but then I started reflecting on this decision a bit more and realized that, if I was in this same exact situation with a dog of mine, I quite possibly would make the same decision. A dog may be man's best friend, but in the end, let's face it: I'm just as self-absorbed as my mother is. (If I wasn't, I probably wouldn't be devoting a whole epic-length entry to examining these feelings.) I got more important things to worry about in my own life right now. An animal's an animal; what are you going to do? Maybe there's just a time when one has to say goodbye.

And yet here's the rub: I find that I'm treating Dusty as if he were a human being---indeed, empathizing with him, especially in these current tough times for him health-wise. Whenever, for example, he has always whined and barked about being tied to his leash and left alone, I have always freed him from his leash; I'm still doing this now, even if I realize that eventually he will simply wet the floor and leave a big smelly mess. (Not that he wouldn't do this if he was tied down, anyway, I figure.) I talk to him as if he actually cares or understands what I'm saying to him. And now that he has these health problems, I can't help but feel for him as if he was a human being, albeit one that probably couldn't even begin to comprehend what's happening to him.

No surprise, then, that I seem to be feeling this situation more deeply and intensely than anyone else in my family---and I'm wondering if this sadness I feel is even appropriate. Again, it's not like an animal can really understand what's happening to him the way humans can. Is an animal like him even worth any empathy in the first place? Or am I just really sick in the head?

Maybe it's just that I'm just doing a crappy job handling what may very well be my first up-close-and-personal encounter with the possibility of death. One of the few other times I've experienced a death that has affected me in some deep way is with a violin teacher I had years ago, who died one day from pancreatic cancer without warning. And he wasn't even a flesh-and-blood relative. If this is the way I'm reacting to an animal's sickness---taking out my frustrations on Dusty, muttering bitter comments under my breath and voicing my simmering anger when no one else is around---imagine how I'd be reacting if, say, my mother herself became incontinent and blind. I don't think I can even imagine that right now.

All of this is swirling around in my head at a time when my Wall Street Journal job is in some kind of flux and as I contemplate my next move even as I try to live in the moment and take pleasure in the moments of leisure I try to give myself every day after work. I really don't need to feel the weight of a dog's mortality on my mind right now. Maybe the best thing for all of us is to just return him back to the animal shelter where we adopted him in the first place.

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At this point, I feel like the only way I can feel somewhat better about all of this is if I go up to my mother and demand an apology from her, acknowledging that she was wrong to fight with me weeks ago, and she should have taken Dusty to a vet as I---and everyone else I talked to---suggested then. I wish she would tell me that she feels a sense of shame about her inaction.

But sincerity and shame are probably two emotions that are beyond my mother's ken. And what would be the point of it, ultimately? Just to boost my own ego? That may satisfy me in the moment, but it wouldn't change a damn thing in the long run.

No, probably the best thing to do at this point is to accept the mistakes that were made, and above all to accept the situation that we are all in now, and go from there. That's exactly what human beings do when faced with the death of another, cherished human being, right? I guess I'm really just dealing with this for the first time ever.

I can't stop what's coming.

Good Night, and Good Luck

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - First Marcus Brauchli, then a few of my fellow monitor-desk employees, and now...Matt Zoller Seitz???

Those winds of change I spoke about in my last entry are now starting to feel more like a hurricane.

Matt Zoller Seitz, for those who don't know, is the founder and so-called "Editor Emeritus" of The House Next Door, an entertainment-related blog toward which I occasionally contribute on movies, the film business, other art forms, and even occasionally politics. This week, Matt made a momentous announcement: that he is leaving the print-criticism world and focusing his creative energies almost entirely on filmmaking. This means that, while he still intends to maintain a presence in the comments sections of entries, he will no longer be writing full-length film reviews.

His gain, our loss.

I'm trying to convince myself not to get too bummed by this. I mean, it's not like he's leaving the blogosphere behind or anything; he's just getting out of the business, so to speak.

Still, I can't help but feel rather wistful about this particular departure...not only because I value Matt highly as a critic---he's gotten to me to think more about form, style and how both create meaning in movies than any other critic I read (his New York Press article on Barry Lyndon was a particular eye-opener for me, and probably the reason why I consider it my favorite Stanley Kubrick feature)---but also because of what he's done for me in the past.

I posted a comment on the entry in which Matt made his announcement, so I might as well reprint some of it here:

It's spring 2006. I am still just a lowly writer for the weekly entertainment section of the Rutgers daily paper, and I'm itching to break a bit out of my review-writing comfort zone and try my hand at a one-on-one interview story. It's Oscar season, and thus I decide it might be fun to take a bit of the piss out of the usual Oscar hype by getting a professional film critic's perspective on not only the Oscars, but on movies in general.

Who would be my interview subject, however? Well, I had recently become quite attached to the film critics writing at the New York Press at the time, Armond White and Matt Zoller Seitz (I think Godfrey Cheshire had been let go before then), and while I briefly flirted with the idea of sicing White's singularly fiery sensibility on unsuspecting Rutgers folk (no offense to the guy, who I still read religiously, even if that screed of his last week did put me off), in the end I decided to try Matt---seemingly more approachable, and I figured that maybe his background as a Star-Ledger TV critic and filmmaker would add a bit of depth to the conversation.

After having a complicated time trying to arrange for an in-person interview, we decide to do a phone interview, which I conducted while sitting alone in an editor's chair in the Targum office, digital recorder in hand, speakerphone on. The interview lasts about 1 hr. and 20 minutes, and Matt is lobbing thoughts about The New World, the good and bad points of the Oscars, the state of movies today, TV versus cinema, and so on while I try my best to jot down as much as I can in my notebook for possible use in my story. Of course, once the interview is over, I look over my notes and realize there were questions that I neglected to ask, and thankfully he is around at about 10:30 in the evening to answer 'em at home.

As someone who hadn't done much interviewing in general up to that point, I was rather nervous about how all this was going to turn out, because throughout the interview I was flying mostly on the seat of my pants, trying to be an attentive listener and feed off Matt's responses while trying not to forget the points I wanted to cover. But I completed the interview, I wrote it up, and got it published a little less than a week later. [Check it out here]

I sent a link to the online version of the story to Matt; later, I check my email account and discover that Matt had sent me exactly the kind of sincerely inspirational response I had been waiting for from a professional film critic/journalist ever since I decided that that was the field I wanted to pursue in college. I won't reprint the content of the email here (although I still have it archived); suffice it to say, it was just about the kind of confidence-builder I needed at that point in my life. And, as I have later discovered in becoming a sometime contributor to The House, that email was indicative of the broad generosity of spirit that would later infuse The House Next Door, and could only come from a man who was equally generous.

Without Matt and The House, who knows where I would actually be publishing movie-related pieces and reaching a wide audience? For this, I am grateful, and my only regret, Matt, is that you left print criticism before I could really blossom (I feel I haven't yet made my big breakthrough yet, for various reasons). Of course, another thing this blog has forced me to do, especially in recent weeks, is to consider whether there is much of a future in print film journalism, as I had originally hoped. Maybe the 'Net truly is the way of the future; if so, then I better prepare to find another way to make a living (especially if I want to live close to NYC---where the action is)!

I think that excerpt speaks for itself, but let me add a couple of things:

I cannot help but admire the guts behind making a major decision like this. I mean, becoming a full-time filmmaker, man! The first question that would pop up in my mind if anyone made such a decision would be, how would you support yourself? Getting paid for writing movie reviews for a paper would at least go some way toward helping to, at the very least, put a roof over your head as you pursue your artistic passion; without that, what then? All the passion in the world may not necessarily get you enough money to get bites to eat day-to-day. I've been raised not to buy into the whole "if you really love something, you'll find a way" ideal; for that reason, unless I had a clear idea about how I'd go about supporting myself financially while doing something as unstable as art-making, I might never summon up the courage to pull the trigger the way Matt has done. (Maybe I just put too much value in being secure at all times---it's probably why I'm still working at The Wall Street Journal right now.) That---perhaps even more than the simple fact that I count him as a friend and as a mentor---is why I sincerely wish him well in this new phase in his life, and hope for the best for him. I probably would never summon the nerve.

Maybe I shouldn't worry too much about him. I've gotten a sense of the man over these past two years---and I've met him a couple of times---and my sense is of someone who has the practical good sense and worldly wisdom to go along with that burning passion. In the podcast interview accompanying his announcement, for instance, when he says "There's more to life than movies"---well, that may be surprising, perhaps, to hear that from a film critic, but I hear a hard universal truth in that statement. Sure, the best movies can perhaps help you get a better sense of the life swirling around you, or at least challenge you to perceive your world in a different way---but, in the end, movies are movies. They're just images flickering on a screen---maybe images that you react to with every fiber of your being, but images they remain. What you get out of those images, perhaps, depends on what you bring to them, and what you do with those newfound perceptions. At heart, however, they're no more "real," really, than words on a page. So if you're expecting constant enlightenment from the cinema---well, maybe you'd be better off simply seeing the world on your own instead of expecting to have it brought to you via movies. Because most likely you'll be disappointed in that regard.

I'm not entirely sure if that's what Matt was getting at when he uttered those words, but that's what I get out of them, and it's the kind of wisdom I have valued from Matt for a while now. I just hope he will still be around to offer more pearls of wisdom of that sort as I continue on my own uncertain journey that is Real Life.

(Of course, it also just makes me realize how little life experience I actually have, and how much living I have yet to do.)

Anyway...so if you're reading this, Matt---well, I don't think you really need to hear yet another round of "good night, and good luck" (yes, to steal from a TV broadcast legend), but I'll say it again anyway: thanks for all that you have done for me up to this point, and lots of luck in your future endeavors! (And hey, I might not mind being of assistance on some feature you're working on in the future, either---try to get my own filmmaking experience, if I haven't tried at my hand at it myself until then. A part of me says I really should...)

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Two (or three) brief final notes:


First (and speaking of The House Next Door): I had mentioned in passing a couple times before that I was working on a piece about Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 Pierrot le fou. Well, it's finally up; check it out here. What the review doesn't really get into is my own personal reaction to the film: its first hour has always struck me as brilliant, but then its second hour---even after three viewings---always feels somewhat rote and disappointing, with a conclusion that feels more indifferent than anything else---fitting, perhaps, but emotionally exhausted and dry. On the other hand, my intellectual side tells me that perhaps that distant, uncomfortable feeling is part of what makes the film so mysterious, fascinating and unsettling long after those initial visceral disappointments have faded away. (Besides, who knows if even Godard had his heart in the film's second hour either? His subsequent, radical films suggest that maybe his mind really was on other things.) For that reason, I found myself admiring the film more and more as I worked on this article, and I already can't wait to revisit it.


Second: know what I consider genuinely exciting in my life? It's my unreasonable delight in finding out that both Wong Kar-Wai's My Blueberry Nights and Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Flight of the Red Balloon are playing at the same art-house theater in New Jersey. Yessss!!! (Maybe that says more about how dry my own life is than anything I would candidly divulge; I'll leave that to you readers to figure out.) I've already raved about the Hou film on both this blog and The House, of course---but I didn't expect it to be playing anywhere here. Now that it has come around, however---fuck it, I think I'll go check it out again and see how it holds up. (I have little reason to believe it won't.) I previously had low expectations for the new, American-language Wong film, mostly because of the middling advance reviews and the sense that Wong pretty much summarized all of his visual and thematic concerns in 2046. I mean, after the sheer ambition and scope of that work, pretty much anything that follows would probably, by sheer default, feel like a trifle. But I've read a few recent reviews---including Matt's at The House---that dare to take My Blueberry Nights as something at least a little bit more than simply Wong on autopilot; after reading those reviews and seeing 2046 again recently (I loved it a lot more the second time), I am officially stoked to finally see this. Hopefully I'll get to both films, if not this weekend, then very, very soon.


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Finally, I might as well return back to Matt Zoller Seitz to end this entry, with two links and a passage from one of his reviews.

First link is to the Amazon page for the one feature he has made to date, a microbudget multi-character roundelay called Home. It's actually not a bad little movie, worth checking out---and a) I intend "not a bad little movie" without a trace of condescension, and b) I'm not just saying that because the maker is a friend of mine.

Second is to a particular passage from his review of/feature on Steven Spielberg's The Terminal, in which he responds to the usual knocks about Spielberg by explaining what he calls "The Friendship Theory of Movies." It never fails to get me thinking:

Most people have lots of friends, for the simple reason that it is impossible to get everything we need from just one friend. Human beings are too complex and imperfect, so we must content ourselves with seeking out friends who satisfy one or two needs, three if we're lucky. We have friends who are great at giving advice, but whom we wouldn't trust to feed our cats when we're out of town. We have friends who've deceived or betrayed us, but who are so resourceful and clever that we'd like to have them beside us in an unfamiliar city if our heart suddenly gave out.

This same attitude can apply to movies—and moviemakers. I'd like to think that if it were applied more often, film criticism might seem more reasonable, less full of mindless idolatry, adolescent snottiness, Soviet-style dead-end polemics and all-around b.s.

Oliver Stone, for instance, is a fearless dramatist and a bold assembler of images. His jagged, free-associative montage style probably gets closer to representing our media-addled, multitrack consciousness than any strategy in modern cinema; in sheer fluency and daring, only Jean-Luc Godard and Craig Baldwin (Spectres of the Spectrum) can touch him. But any moviegoer who looks to Stone for droll humor, evenhanded political analysis and nuanced female characters is wasting his time.

Or take Kubrick, one of the great ironists and visual poets of modern times, a cautionary satirist who took a God's-eye view of humankind's pitifully arrogant schemes. He could be showily cold, cruel and reflexively smug at times. (Think of Private Joker's wiseass lecture in Full Metal Jacket about how the "Born to Kill" and peace symbols on his helmet symbolize the Jungian duality of man. It's so juvenile and embarrassing that it might have been staged by a precocious 15-year-old who just discovered Dr. Strangelove.) And if you're looking to be reassured that most people are basically decent and can escape the prison of their conditioning with a bit of elbow grease—and who hasn't felt that way on certain days, or wished he could feel that way?—Kubrick cannot satisfy your needs. Spielberg can.

Which is why I propose that Spielberg's detractors treat him as they'd treat any other thinking person they've known for years. They should stop expecting him to be something he's not (hard-edged, bleak, bitter) and instead take a closer, more appreciative look at what he is, while keeping in mind that the relationship between artist and audience involves a certain division of labor. The filmmaker tries to choose material that plays to his strengths, makes a few game stabs at mastering things he's not good at, then resolves to avoid or downplay his own weaknesses, forge ahead and try new things, to the best of his ability. We the audience respond by taking the artist seriously, honestly assessing his faults and virtues, seeing through his nonsense and savoring his moments of clarity, invention and wit. That's what friends are for.