Pilgrim’s Progress

Yesterday I went with my friend Joe to see the eponymous movie, which was directed by the Cohen brothers. Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, and Josh Brolin, this movie was just soaked in atmosphere. Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, it’s full of his usual cast of lawmen, outlaws, border rats, and other back-country characters.

A lot of people die in this movie. Or, to put it differently, a lot of people are killed in this movie. I mean an awful lot. And so when I got home my mother asked me how the movie was, and I told her it was great, but she wouldn’t have lasted through the first two minutes. My tastes and her tastes have only the teeny, tiniest overlap, mainly in the area of obscure foreign dramas. She can’t understand the appeal of movies like this (or other great movies like Fargo), because to her the violence and death is only repulsive, never entertaining.

Is it wrong to enjoy a movie like this, which isn’t so much immoral as amoral? I think there are two ways to look at it. One way would be that somehow these movies are abberations, and by making, promoting, and watching them we are somehow encouraging this type of behaviour. Another way to look at it, which is the one I subscribe to, is that by watching these kinds of behaviours, it somehow innoculates us against them in reality. Not that I’m saying that people who don’t watch movies like this will all become sociopathic killers, but maybe by watching we somehow feed that aggressive, impulsive side of ourselves that is best kept locked up.

Either way, if you liked Fargo or The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, you’ll love No Country for Old Men.

As most of you know, I don’t drink alcohol. No, I haven’t converted to Islam (yet, at least), but I haven’t had a drink since April 21st, 1993 at approximately 1:30 AM. How I remember it that exactly is another, much longer story. The point is that although I no longer drink, I like to stay informed about alcohol and the drinking culture in general. That’s why, when I was in Las Vegas last week (see this post) at the Global Gaming Expo show I acted as a personal drinking advisor to my good friend Ronnie. There was a section of the show dedicated to various libations, a veritable cornucopia of booze, which I helped Ronnie navigate with my savvy selections of liquors and wines. Below, you can see the progression of Ronnie’s drinking, in time-lapse format.

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It has been a loooong time since my last post, but I feel that I have excellent reasons, and since it’s my blog, that’s good enough for me! Last week, I was in wonderful, wooley, Las Vegas, and it took me a few days to recuperate from that trip. For your enjoyment, here are some photos from my odyssey:

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One of the many reasons I dislike Texas. Note the dead animal head.

I have arrived...

I guess the casino food & beverage guys don't have a ton of imagination.

See the comment for JustACafe.jpg.

This is the hotel we were staying in. I think it's just awesome that this is a relatively low-end hotel on the strip.

I can't see Trader Vic's without thinking of the lyrics to Warren Zevon's Werewolves of London.

Giving directions in Vegas must be a lot of fun for the locals. "Turn right at the Arc de Triomphe...

"Turn left at the Eiffel Tower...

"If you pass the giant Harley, you've gone too far." Awesome.

Just the name of this movie evokes feelings of loneliness and emptiness, for me at least. It’s a story about a Japanese fisherman who is estranged from his adult son. Finding out that his son has terminal cancer, he decides to take a very uncharacteristic chance and go on a trip to China. His son is a huge fan of Chinese Masked Opera, and after viewing a documentary that he made, his father decides to go to China to film the famous opera Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles.

Once in China, he encounters many obstacles which eventually lead him to a remote village in the mountains, where he befriends a young boy, Yang Yang. Through Yang Yang he finally begins to address some of his issues with his own son.

This movie was very atmospheric, with a broad sweep of locations that helped set the tone. Everything from a snow-covered Japanese fishing village to the barren mountains of China gave feelings of emptiness and silence. Worth seeing.

Sometimes when I’m out working with my laptop, I come across something that  really needs to be dealt with when I return to my desk at home. Maybe it’s something I’ll want to file, maybe I need to delegate it, or maybe it’s just something that I’ll want to put into my inbox and process later. A really handy way to do this is to print to your home printer in offline mode. Then, whenever you go home and plug back into your docking station/printer out will pop anything you chose to print while you were out. No thought required, which fits neatly into my philosophy of making systems as completely fool-proof as possible.

So I haven’t been to Sin City in more than a decade (and my oldest child is 12, cooincidence? I think not!), but next week I’m going out there with some friends to a gaming show. I’m pretty stoked! I haven’t had anything resembling an actual vacation for myself in a loooong time. If you don’t hear from me by next Saturday, assume I’ve ditched everything, changed my name to Vince, and become a blackjack dealer.

I finally did it. I did a quick count, and as far as I can tell I’ve started training in seven different martial arts styles in my life (not counting just auditing a teacher or trying something out for a month or two). In all that time, the closest I got to a black belt was a brown belt I received in Isshin Ryu just before my teacher relocated to Pennsylvania. Every time I’ve gotten close before either I moved, my teacher moved, or something truly bizarre happened (one of my teachers had been having an affair, left his wife, and absconded while owing back rent and tuition to several of his students).

Thursday night I finally managed to earn a black belt, and I’m still tripping about it three days later. My test was delayed three hours, so I didn’t finish testing until 11:15 PM. I couldn’t sleep afterward until 2:00 AM and spontaneously woke up two hours later.

I know that my knowledge today isn’t any better than it was last Sunday, and I know that the belt doesn’t really make any difference in what I do every day, but now when I’m talking to a non-martial artist I can tell them that I have a black belt instead of having to explain exactly where I am in my training. And now I can start teaching what I know to others and really start understanding what it is I’ve been doing for the last four years.

 Gaman!

I’m mainly focused on the ones in my stomach. I’m testing for my blackbelt tonight, even though my teacher’s teacher has basically told me that I’m wasting my time. But even though I’ve been given no hope, I’m oddly optimistic. I guess freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
Wish me luck…