Shoes Update

In the movie Koufuku no Okane, directed by SABU (who also directed Japanese anxiety zeitgeist masterpiece Monday), the protagonist, a man who walks through a large city and comes across all manner of desperate characters, meets an old salaryman about to jump off a bridge who gives a speech about how he can't stand himself because he's a boring person, has no friends, and can only speak keigo (Japanese polite speech). He leaves his shoes on the bridge where he jumps.

God, shoes are sad.

In brilliant other news, I start at MTV today with my internship. I also just got an e-mail from N- of P-Heavy fame and spent a good half-hour replying to her. Last night's gathering in Brooklyn was a success, and the frozen end of the night at the sake bar was a very chill and pleasant nightcap, but chill in a warm and cozy kind of way, not the locked-in-ice bring-the-tatars-to-their-knees kind of way that makes sleeping under an electric blanket such a wonderful pastime these days.

Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is by far the best Wes Anderson has done. It is staggeringly, achingly sorrowful. Murray is Murray, but he captures something we're all feeling now- that detached, dreamy thing. Don't read further if you haven't seen it, but the characters' constant recreation of their ideal selves as image is so now. The metaphor of their continuing breakdown in the ability to create even the image of a utopian reality cuts my legs out from under me. The uncertainty of living in an age defined by a cult of science is expressed exquisitely. And it's funny. Thank you, Wes Anderson and cast.