Tom Tommorrow says most of what needs to be said about the Nick Berg matter, and the meme circulating right wing blogs that there's a conspiracy to avoid it.

I don't why specifically people are looking so much for pictures of his death, or why it shakes me less than it does the murder of Danny Pearl, but I hope to write more later. I have to get to Brooklyn now.

I am reminded of another reason I put away my blog. My life is fairly boring, even to me, who lives it, and the stuff that is not boring (my relationship, bizarre things that happen on the job) isn't repeatable. I'll make one exception today- a coworker tried to send me a transcript of some inane conversation he'd heard between the office manager and one of the salespeople. Unfortunately he accidentally sent it to the office manager, who shares my first name. The transcript doesn't reflect poorly on the office manager, it's really about the high decibel idiocy of the other guy, but the nickname chosen for him, taken from the character list of HBO's The Wire does. He appears to be taking it well, but I don't think he's seen the show yet, and I'm sure he's checking HBO's sadly complete character guides now.

Speaking of office politics, last night I saw Ikiru by Akira Kurosawa.
In its broad strokes, it's in the genre of "Yuppie Redeemed by Life
Changing Event" that plagued us through the 90s (in fact IMDB lists
"Life as a House" as a remake). Kanji, a successful bureaucrat, played
with mournful eyes by Takashi Shimura learns that he's dying of stomach
cancer and has left than six months to live and he realizes he hasn't
been living at all and that his son hates him. He goes on a wild night
on the town, flirts with a coworker played by Miki Odagiri who calls him
"the mummy" and eventually rededicates his life to forcing the stale
bureaucracy of Tokyo circa 1952 to build a park. Although you could come
out of there with a message of stereotypical uplift, that's not where
the film's interest lies. What we see of the effort to get the park
built is in flashback during his wake, from the drunken perspective of
the various functionaries he cajoled into building it, and it quickly
descends into squabling. He never makes up with his son or even tells
him he's dying, a decision the son calls "cruel" at the funeral. More
than any other movie about missed opportunities, Ikiru focuses on what's
beyond repair, on the lingering sadness, on how Kanji feels "darkness
everywhere, and nothing for me to hold onto, no matter how hard I try."
Even the scenes of him going on the town with a novelist have a bleak
feel- and there's a disorientation in Odagiri's eyes as he wanders busy
strip clubs and dancehalls in Tokyo that may have influenced Lost in
Translation.

The office politics in the film is done in broad, comical strokes (there's a montage at the beginning of a bureacratic buck being passed that's as completely predictable as it is brilliantly shot.) Kurosawa paints his society from the outside, but that's how he paints Kanji too, giving our first view of him through narration and gossip that insults him before letting us in, and then again returning to our view of him from the outside, as we can now see others through their reaction to him.

(Don't really have a conclusion here, just wanted to get a few thoughts up while the film was fresh in my mind.)

By the way, if comments are closed off on a post, it's not because of
any deliberate action- it's because there's a bug with the new blogger
feature that allows you to e-mail your posts into blog that seems to not
activate the comments for that post. I'll go back and correct them when
I get a chance.

But, in a world where I can count twenty well chewed pens within my immediate eyesight, it's important to remember, that some children are so poor that "a pen is like a scholarship to these children."

Best Street Food in Astoria

A new champion. Broadway and 31st Avenue, right across the street from the little Japanese market.

Blog roll will be returning soon, for those feeling slighted, or for
those who trust my opinion of which blogs are worthwhile. It's odd,
given the prominencedisturbingly Friendster-esque Profiles feature of blogger, that they don't seem to
have an easy way to implement a simple set of links. I might be missing
it somewhere.

One time only, soon to be deleted crazy face photo of me.
Posted by Hello

A few reasons for the long blogging hiatus:

1. I got tired of bitching about my job. After a while, every piece of bitching seemed to draw the response from my inner critic- "So why don't you just leave then?" (To which my inner economist drew up a picture of the job market in New York City) In addition, by the necessity of keeping job bitching pseudnonymous, I always felt like I was limiting the blog's audience to people who already knew about my discontent and had heard them a million times. I'm keeping it pseudononymous, though I can't imagine anyone navigating their way here doesn't know my real name, but I'm not going to be real serious about protecting my secret identity. That means that the job bitchings will be limited to my other blog, which is less of a blog per se than a series of random mutterings under my breath that I make on the R train in between spitting on eldery passengers.
   
2. I really found the name kinda pretentious and long winded. I mean, it's a pain for you to type in, you who have been so loyally visiting my updateless site for the last few months. It was just a name, based on an old Yiddish saying that I got out of a book of quotes when I was twelve that stuck with me for a while, but after a few months, it seemed to embody the worst kind of blogger boosterism from the political blogs I read- that they were the lone truth tellers fighting against a biased and indifferent media. Therefore, I pledge to you that any truth told here will be (a) boring, (b) trivial, and (c) easily found elsewhere. The running? Well running's just good exercise.
   
3. I kinda had two other blog projects festering in my mind, one of them, a non anonymous blog, can be found in it's stillborn state in a fairly obvious place, and the other, a group blog, will be coming soon.
   
4. General procrastination and laziness, which, technically speaking, this should be the perfect outlet for, but in general, I procrastinate specifically on writing projects. My first piece for the The High Hat should be up soon, and that has in all seriousness been a serious blow against my writer's block and procrastination. I figure keeping this up will be good writing practice.
   

I'm
(a) testing a new template
(b)seeing if the built in blogger comments work now.

Alright, I think I'm going to stick with this blog as my primary semi-private rambling place at least for now.