VauxhallVelcraux

Whilst catering last night, I noticed that almost everyone in the VIP section where I was serving hors d'oeuvres was big, hulking and rude. Usually that means it's some financial firm celebrating evil's defeat of good, but '08 is not a banner year for them and in any case, these guys weren't potbellied as much as neck-less. Then I noticed David Beckham.

Officially, it was a dinner for the US Soccer Foundation, and there were pre-recorded video greetings from Presidents G. H. W. Bush and Clinton. Beckham spoke and actually gave a Lifetime Achievement Award to Pele, which was pretty cool, actually. Pele can barely speak English and is in fact still alive.

David Beckham was wearing a midnight blue suit with black shoes and a red tie. I couldn't get close enough to inspect his duds further because he was taking pictures with everyone, but the tailoring was pretty rad. He's much thinner than I thought, and not as tall (maybe 6'0"). And his voice is so boyish. His hair was shaved all around with a slight difference (maybe one guard) in length around the top; kind of stupid but he still looked good. Much better than the cornrows from 2002. The only bad thing is that you could just barely make out the odious winged cross tattoo on his lower neck. Reading his wikipedia profile, it turns out that he has a plethora of shitty, cliched, "meaningful" tattoos all over his 0% body fat body. What I did not see was his wife, the Spice Girl who can't sing and who looks like a UFO, which is good, because I want to bend it for Beckham quite badly so I might have upended a soup tureen on her.

As I was eating on the back stairwell during my break, he and his handlers walked by as the celebs usually do when they're leaving and don't want to attract notice. I'm probably paid to be discreet, but I almost started caring about sports. It wasn't quite like the time when Bill Clinton made the rounds, shaking all the waiters' and chefs' hands, but every server who's into dudes (about 95% of the women and 40% of the men) experienced some titillation when Beckham brushed our knees on his way out the door.

Incidentally, what is up with this photo, which is the first one that pops up when you google-image him?

His musculature looks painted on and reminds me of this:

As of Cleanse Day 11, I am almost certainly underslept but I don't feel it. The laxative tea makes me get up with what feels like a sine curve of nausea pulsing through my abdomen, so around 5-7 am I am roused each morning to go to the bathroom. Since I live next door to a foundry, as well as down the block and across the street from two separate concrete plants, the clamorous din of industry keeps me wide awake until just before it's time to get up, which is when I usually fall back asleep. I woke up at 5:30 this morning and have been up ever since. It's 4:00, the time of day when I am usually so tired that I just make tea and read blogs until it's time to go home, but I have lots of energy. No caffeine or alcohol in thirteen days! And it will be another five at least before I breach my Mormon lifestyle.

Also, my sense of smell has improved tremendously. This is something of a mixed blessing, because while it's novel to get a whiff of someone's reheated lunch and be able to identify its composition by olfactorily detecting the various ingredients, it sucks to be confronted with someone's chicken tikka masala and then go back to my desk sucking yet more lemonade out of my Nalgene bottle. It's not so much that I'm starving as that I'm tired of the monotony.

For, you see, this cleanse is a totalitarian dictator bent on making me a skinny unperson if I commit the thoughtcrime of fantasizing about mopping up burger fat with a curly-cut french fry. I can't really socialize, and climbing stairs is strangely difficult. But I've been crossing things off my to-do lists like never before.

Considering that Elliott and I spent the entire weekend together--waking, sleeping, all--I don't even have cabin fever or stress of any kind. My sex drive has been decimated, for sure, but I had an enormously productive weekend watching films, taking Dudley to the park, seizing my jackets from an inept tailor, going to the MoMA, etc. I even read Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine from cover to cover, and have since started Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great.

Toobin's book is pretty excellent. He examines the evolution of the Supreme Court from about 1990 through the present, with his central thesis being how the mere weight of precedent, the involuntary international renown of the various justices and their travels, and the excesses of the Bush Administration have generated an irresistible force of cosmopolitanization, and, with it, a leftward drift. Sandra Day O'Connor in particular is depicted from having morphed from a Goldwater Republican to something like an Olympia Snowe. Toobin can rely too heavily on the conclusions of a single telling anecdote to brand an entire justice's temperament and judicial philosophy (in particular, Anthony Kennedy's "vanity"), but the glimpses behind the most powerful and mysterious branch of the federal government are fascinating--and occasionally, titillating. Souter writes with a fountain pen! The Ginsburgs and the Scalias celebrate New Year's together.

Toobin makes much of the relative isolation in which each justice labors; their clerks mingle and interact, but aside from regular meetings, the actual jurists allegedly work in monastic seclusion. And indeed, they are capable of bickering by proxy, through their opinions. On the other hand, he writes of the extracurricular connections among them: Rehnquist and O'Connor had barbecues together, O'Connor and Breyer were close, Ginsburg mothers Souter, Thomas is well-liked by everyone, etc. He also reveals his CNN/Beltway/Establishment position by peppering the text with the occasional revealing distaste for bloggers or hoi polloi. But it's an outstanding look at the Court and the political figures whose careers are affected by its composition.

That said, back to the cleanse. Day 11 is easier than Day 10, where I was constantly aware of what I'm not eating. I've lost just under ten pounds, which means that if I lose another five in the remaining five days, I will probably gain them back and stick with my weight as of today: 158 pounds. Now my goal is to weigh 150 by my birthday in March.

I haven't eaten solid food (except tiny slivers of lemon rind) in 260 hours. I will not eat for 121 more.

It's like a hunger strike for Darfur, only it's really so I can fit into all my pants.

When people casually ask me what I'm doing for lunch or see me come into the kitchen while they're heating up fragrant Indian food, they apologize profusely as if I were a mosque and they just entered me with shoes on, eating a pork rib hero.

I can tolerate the sight of food! To prove it, I will attend our weekly brown bag tomorrow, where there will be free kettle chips, Les Petits Ecoliers and cheese and crackers.

It's amazing how a single day of sub-par weight loss (in today's case, straight up zero) dampens your mood. I lost 2.8 lbs in the two prior days, which made me think I'd mastered the rhythm (eight glasses of lemonade, with some pulp and rind in there, seemed ideal) but apparently the body does what it wants. Fuck you too, body.

I'm exhausted every night because a) I'm not eating and b) the laxative tea makes me wake up at 5:00-7:30 in the morning, and by the time I've sat in the bathroom with the light on for a few minutes, I'm wide awake and it's not entirely pointful to try to get another half hour of sleep, over the din of the concrete factory's magic.

If anyone who doesn't know what they're talking about wants to vocalize their suspicions that the cleanse is either a hoax or deleterious for you, please shut the fuck up. Don't bother me; I'm on a cleanse.

I've lost 4.2 pounds.

Day 2 was pretty bad, because I couldn't warm up.

Day 3 was better and day four was the best, but today I've been starving and exhausted all day. None of the supposed superpowers (such as an enhanced sense of smell to the point where you can tell if someone next to you has a cold because you can detect the mucus in their head) have kicked in yet, nor do I have a coated tongue or weird body odor.

I forgot my cayenne at home, so I'm cold again (it warms your body and keeps your metabolism from slowing down). It's 65 degrees outside in January, and I can't really appreciate it. I went to the tailors and passed by a Popeye's and a McDonald's on Delancey--neither of which I would ever eat at--and practically stopped short when I saw posters for chicken wings and 2 McMuffins for $3, as if they were naked mannequins, either of the Kim Cattrall variety or the kind you might have seen in Gimbel's or Wannamaker's in 1948. Supposedly when you get cravings, it's for the things your liver is finally free to detoxify in the absence of new shit entering your body through your pie-hole, but I can't remember the last burger I ate. The last bad thing that entered me was ten pieces of bacon at a New Year's brunch, which might explain the craving for Mickey-D's.

The downside to this cleanse is that you can't really hang out with people unless it's at a movie, because everything else involves eating and drinking. Although Elliott and I cleaned the house pretty thoroughly on Sunday, as a nice balance to what was going on inside of us. We always abide strictly by zen principles.

It has been 118 hours since I chewed. I don't imagine eating solid food (and even then, soup) until the evening of Saturday the 19th, so 264 hours to go.

With ten days to go, I should lose about 12 more pounds if the trend holds steady. That would be a shade under the 10% of my body weight that I hoped for.

My gut feeling is that 2008 is going to be a great year for everybody. 2007 was, heretofore, the absolute zenith, but I gained a lot of weight. As a 167.8-lb. walrus, my vast gut now possesses the predictive powers of ten tweens' fingers on an Ouija planchette. So my prediction is that Dakota is totally a retard, and 2008 is going to be a great year for everybody.

If the Iowa caucuses sustain their ridiculous, inegalitarian and anticlimactic role as kingmaker (fully ten months before the actual election), President Obama will be there at some point next year signing single-payer health care into law. I don't care that he has sort of flirted with a universal health care system that incorporates existing HMOs and Big Pharma or that his insipid and anti-intellectual bromides that constitute his message of hope and change make use of right-wing talking points to distance himself from actual progressive grassroots. What I care about is that one of the whitest, most rural states just picked an urban African American senator as the recipient of its delegates and disproportionate media largesse--over Hillary. That's a sign of progress: that a wealthy, educated biracial man can shunt a borderline-elderly, wealthy, educated woman of privilege into third place.

Universal health care will of course mean that thousands of creative young people dependent on their menial day jobs for the health insurance they provide will soon be able to ditch them and go freelance without fear that a staph infection or a broken arm can decimate their financial futures. It would be naive to say that will translate into some golden age of artistic production. But it will certainly reshape the job market in favor of people who can barely tolerate working in an office.

As far as Mike Huckabee goes, I'm delighted to see Mitt Romney's attempt at purchasing victory thwarted and look forward to the ensuing civil war within the Republican party as the evangelicals who now expect to course to victory try to wrest control from the corporate-types who always regarded them as useful idiots. Take that, Mitt, with your stupid fucking rich-boy name and your gross Paulie Walnuts temples and your asinine and grossly unhistorical contention that freedom requires religion.

Huckabee is not the only conservative on the rise. Bill Kristol, who might be the shittiest of all television gasbag pundits (read Glenn Greenwald for a list of malevolent and foolish statements) has now been hired as an Op-Ed columnist by the New York Times. So now we can enjoy our terminally liberal media with a nice injection of fear-mongering and imperialism from a man who thought the Iraqi occupation would take a few weeks. He also looks like Rutger Hauer.





I don't think you can tell the difference. Bill Kristol is a neocon replicant hitchhiker, but without a bird of prey.

Subject change. When did New Jersey become one of the most progressive states in the country? California may be trying to address climate change by suing the EPA over its ridiculous refusal to permit higher auto emissions standards in the nation's largest car market--to which New Jersey and even New York State and our colossal disappointment governor have signed on--but New Jersey has made the gay equal, abolished the death penalty (first state to do so since its 1976 reinstitution), and now might allot its electoral votes to the national popular vote winner. Plus the Democrats now have a good chance at picking up one or two seats there--maybe three. Honestly, it's becoming a model state. UPDATE: New Jersey has now formally apologizedfor slavery.

***

While I want to count among my New Year's Revolutions the desire to double Guantanamo, triple the murder rate (to halve the rent!) and quadruple my carbon footprint, the conclusion is: Sadly, No.

I would like to publish my novel (through a literary agent), learn enough graphics skills to make a living off of it someday, blog more frequently, be a better dog owner by taking Dudley to McCarren Park more, bike to work whenever possible, watch 200 films and read 50 books, eat at a great restaurant at least once a month, take yoga classes, wax my excess body hair and continue my pursuit of reaching all fifty states by age thirty (only two years and two months to get to the remaining eighteen).

In order to achieve the energy level necessary to accomplish these things, I’m going on the lemonade cleanse with Elliott. For two weeks. This entails laxative tea at night, followed by a gruesome saltwater flush each morning (two tbsp. uniodized sea salt in a quart of water, which cannot be absorbed by the blood or the kidneys, so instead of pissing it out you shit it out). Then, six to twelve times a day, you mix half a lemon with a tablespoon of Grade B organic maple syrup, a dash of cayenne pepper and 10oz warm water.

Today was day one. It’s 4:00 and I’ve had four glasses of lemonade and untold quantities of water. The salt water gave me incredible diarrhea, somewhat akin to Angel Falls during the rainy season. It reverberated throughout the ACLU like an audio beacon of terrorist-coddling. Yesterday I ate only fruit and the day before that fruit and salad, and I won’t be eating any actual food until January 19, because you need to drink orange juice only for a day as a sort of cool-down, followed by vegetable soup and probiotics.

So as of the afternoon of day one, I’m pretty hungry and can’t really concentrate on anything. On Fridays at work we have “brown bag,” where everyone eats together in the library and NYCLU pays for some cookies, crackers, brie and pretzels. Even though it was unbearable to be around people eating fragrant things like Indian food on top of the delicious junk, I used it as an occasion to self-righteously boast about my new crusade to shed my 2007 muffin top to what I assumed would be sympathetic co-workers, in order to generate possible social pressure to hold me accountable. A couple of people agreed in principle and one person has actually done it (for four days) but there were some stares. Well, fuck you too, I’m going to be svelter than thou! I'm going to be a big old head with a stick for a body! Zero weight for '08!

Elliott and I saw the newest Coppola film, Youth Without Youth at the Paris Theatre this week, and before getting into I'm going to lavish considerable time and attention to the accoutrements of the theater-going experience. First, it's a sincere pleasure to sit in a theater with only one screen, even if you have to go to 58th Street to do it. (Seriously, it was dark and snowing up there and they have an FAO Schwartz; that's how far north it is). Some budding soft-drink company called Tava was giving their shit away for free. Rich or poor: everyone loves free. I hadn't eaten dinner and reconciled myself to getting reamed up the ass for popcorn that makes your lips burn, but downstairs in the concession they were handing out free bags of popcorn plus gourmet cupcakes. When something has dulce de leche all over it, I'm going to take two, even if the item in question is a vagina dentata. But gourmet cupcakes will do.

Even though I can't fit into my pants anymore, I totally had popcorn, soda and three halves of three cupcakes for dinner.

Now the part about the movie. Coppola came out, age sixty-eight, to plug his latest film with a disarming level of earnestness. It's the first since The Rainmaker, which came out in 1997. While disputing his introducer's claim that his production company, Zoetrope, was "on hiatus," he ticked off a list of things his daughter Sofia was doing as proof that his own creativity hadn't sputtered out completely. Kudos, nepotist.

After plugging his wine label, he wryly referred to his desire to be a "young, independent filmmaker" before popping a Cialis with the Weinstein brothers. Then it was time for the worst film I've seen in the theaters so far in 2007. In short, it's the story of a scholar (Tim Roth) who at the age of eighty is struck by lightning and heals into his forty-year old self, with time to complete his magnum opus on the origins of language. His accrues supernatural powers and falls in love with a woman who's the exact double of his first love, and they travel the world together as she falls victim to various trances and altered states, speaking in tongues and brushing ever closer to the primeval language of man.

As an screenplay adapted from Mircea Eliade's story of the same name (a Jorge Luis Borges copycat), it was essentially dead in the water from the get-go. Imagine trying to remain faithful to the story about the king who commands his cartographers to draw increasingly detailed maps of his domain until they eventually create one that's exactly its size. To that, add a horrifically bland performance by Tim Roth with assistance from a bevy of high-pitched Eastern European doctors and academics who are seemingly motivated by pure beneficence.

This is not a whimsical film. Its flirtation with magical realism adheres strictly to its conventions as a plot device, without any interesting explorations of the themes that would, you might think, leap to mind immediately once you'd heard a one-line synopsis. The way in which Roth's "girlfriend" ages while he remains eternally youthful isn't boring because it's a common cliche; it's boring because it's like Dorian Gray with the decadence drained away. It doesn't even make sense. You never really see any hint of what Roth is working on, nor does the film clue you into why it matters. He's merely focused. There is an undeveloped allegorical theme of Romania through the middle third of the twentieth century, and the unrealized promises of all its abortive governments, but no amount of newspaper front page montages can sustain such scattershot connections.

While many of the individual shots are beautifully composed (including the titles), the film is painful. It's essentially one large, ponderous, slow-moving fiasco. It's like a demigod orchestrated the collision of two galaxies over the course of an eon and expected us to be enthralled as stars missed each other by light-years and only a few stray asteroids banged together. Coppola wants to be a young filmmaker, but the ability to conjure up a budget that must have lurched into the tens of millions doesn't come from small-scale viticulture. He's an old man who tapped decades worth of favors to disgorge this shitty meditation on recuperated youth, and like Roth's hidden monograph, it's irrelevant.

I went with Elliott to see Crispin Glover at IFC last night and it was terrif. He looked good (although I don't like his hair, it's too 90s; also, if he turns to the side he looks completely different in profile) but I was really impressed with his ability to give an hourlong performance without water, then screen the second film of the IT Trilogyand then field questions before sitting down to sign books and posters, lavishing several minutes on each person. It was at least four or five hours of work and he didn't look the least bit fagged out.

The performance consisted of him reading excerpts from several of his strange little books, which had nothing in the way of linearity or a through-line but for the vague thematic resemblances: quasi-scientific nineteenth century scientific discourse, animal dissections and paranoia. You know, same old, same old. There is a certain way of approximating insanity that Glover writes towards which is really excellent. He observes the logorrhea that accompanied the imperial mania for classifying everything and uses it as a jumping-off point for brushing against terror and insanity. There have been different ways of understanding the insane--none of them very good--and medical science from the late 1800s juts out like an escarpment. Glover doesn't "go crazy onstage" so much as make use of text. He performs most of the same words that appeared on the accompanying slide show of pages from the books, so the words were right there in front of the audience. The text (as text) contains typographically set words like you'd find in any book, but drawn-in words that slip between dialogue, excess narration and marginalia superimposed over the "story." Also, it was really fucking rad to watch his control. The occasional discrepancy between the words on the slide and the words Glover uttered indicates that at times he's ad-libbing because he hasn't got the entire thing memorized verbatim, but that might be a sort of deliberate Spaulding Gray-like tic. You read along and Glover intones things in a far better way than you read them. I guess, simply put, that's what makes good acting good, but the sudden discontinuities in pitch or emotional tenor were really rad.

The film itself was also fantastic. It's a somewhat comic horror movie about a man (Stephen C. Stewart) with cerebral palsy and a hair fetish who winds up strangling a series of attractive women, except for one disabled woman who refuses his romantic overtures out of prejudice. Stewart's words are essentially incomprehensible all of the time. His first victim is played by Margit Karstensen, who, in addition to looking slightly MTFish, is incredible at playing a generous but put-upon divorcee with a slightly crazy ex-husband.

The interiors are all brightly colored and harshly lit, with sparse furnishings and open walls that suggest a stage production, the omniscience of the viewer and a total lack of privacy for lives that exist entirely within a single room. In contrast, the nursing home/institution from which Stewart emerges for his spate of murderous dates is populated by goggly gargoyles and grotesques. It's amazing, and will never be released on DVD because Crispin Glover has yet to and in fact may never recoup the production costs and earns what he can by touring in perpetuity.

There's something about Glover that seems vaguely autistic. He reminds me of my landlord, a 70-year old sculptor named Tom Clancy, from the brief period I lived in Clinton Hill. He who was incredibly intrusive and regarded our house as his personal art project (which, to an extent, it was). He would calmly sort of try to regulate our daily lives without realizing how shockingly inappropriate and irritating it was, but you could say increasingly rude and pointed things to him without the least emotional reaction passing across his beatific face. He was either truly imperturbable or else considered us to be such lowly peons that no matter what mud we threw at him, it wouldn't matter. Crispin Glover gives me that vibe. He's Buddha-like, but I bet when negotiating something pertaining to his artistic vision, he's inflexible and stubborn and oddly effective. Being born into privilege probably helps, but it's not an aristocratic air as much as a singularly focused confidence. Then he signed books for at least half an hour, chatting with everyone. One might not expect such a degree of earnestness from him, but there it is. I wanted him to write "Dear Pete, You're my density...I mean, my destiny," but chickened out. He had that weird falling-out with Robert Zemeckis over the sequel.