Something the internet can do is make a person feel cynical and out of touch like everything else, faster. I don’t know what to do with myself or my hands here in the internet of June 2008. If by the internet I mean you. More and more I just hang out with bad information on food and fuel and flooding. And fires, and studies on death by pollution. Sometimes there is a lot of YouTube video I wake up and don’t know how I got there, Angelina Jolie. That is all. And then in the middle of the information I will get a longing or a pang for my own private internet of 2003, which felt small and private. There were like 7 of you I thought of when I was here. And the same is true now. But now, in addition, I can’t feel my limbs. I feel like … a polar bear… a worm … a cotton ball. Spreading. Detached. Before, I was hiding in a very specific sort of place and after a while I ran out into the street to say hello. I (thought I) knew roughly where I was. Hiding and who I wanted to encounter.

Now I feel like a glob.

Maybe it’s good for me? (in the sense of valuing confusion/bewilderment)

1. Ironman last weekend. The hero as ipod, or the most awesome PDA ever. Dream of total containment. Dream of absolute freedom of movement.

2. Third installment of the Berlin Alexanderplatz tonight. I missed last week, which meant renting episodes 4-7 and catching up at home. Moment where I was sure it would be unavailable at the video room on piedmont ave. because everyone else in the bay area must be obsessively following along, too. Then had a really difficult time stopping myself at episode 7, but managed. Somewhere in the environs and links around the conversation going on at Open Space, someone mentioned the 1931, 88 minute version as in “why watch all 15 hours when you can…” (I could be wrong about this, I can’t remember who said it or where.) I point towards what I can’t find to say how struck I was during episodes 4-7 by the necessity of seriality and length to Fassbinder’s project. The serial and sheer size fits (performs, in a dreadful, perfect way) Biberkopf’s dogged cycle of beginning over again and again. Also the religious/moral tone of those re-beginnings – he is, again, a ‘new man’ (or a bird, or…) and then he is himself, and then it is another episode. (binge, retreat, beginning, violent encounter.) My inordinate (and mildly distressing) affection for Franz only increased while watching these episodes, but I feel a little let off the hook by Brecht Andersch’s great post – perhaps it’s the actor I’m fond of, not the character. It is often difficult for me to extricate actors from their roles. Everything onscreen makes me so nervous. I was a real wreck during Ironman. I can’t believe this is only the halfway mark of Alexanderplatz. Or a little beyond halfway. Feels like we’ve lived a long time already in the beerhall alone.

The scene where he has a conversation with his three beers and one schnapps!

Seriously!

June 19, 2008 * 3:44 pm

June 11, 2008 * 7:53 pm