Derik Badman's Journal

September already, it was cool the other morning when I went out for a walk. Hurricane Ida passed through last week, we were very lucky. We had a few hours of power outage, but nothing major, while a lot of people nearby (even just down the street a block) had flooding, long term power outage, and there was even a tornado that hit a few miles away. For all the things I get anxious about, for some reason, when there is an actual big storm and tornado warnings blaring on my phone, I don't feel anxious. By that point it seems too late to be concerned, the situation too uncontrolled. What always gets me is the before times, things I can get worried about before they happen or worry about even though they may never happen. It's that projecting into the future that seems to get me. I'll be (already am I guess) worried about going to the beach for a week and leaving Buddy here alone, but when I get in the car and start driving and am actually away, then I won't worry anymore. I should probably use some of that energy to plan a bit better for situations, like big storms. We certainly could be better supplied for cases of long term power outage. Flooding isn't likely for us since we are up on a hill.

Not a lot of movie watching this week. I started a few things and gave up on them. I did watch Wong Kar Wai's Chungking Express, which was really just a very stylish romcom. It's the kind of movie where people do quirky things for reasons. The director has a bunch of showy techniques like speeding up and slowing down action and a few times doing both at the same time between foreground and background, but at its heart it just felt kind of empty. Faye Wong was pretty mesmerizing in it, I can see why Lance Hahn wrote a J Church song about her.

Finished the book on Ozu's Tokyo Story edited by David Desser and now remember nothing about it. I don't think any of it really added to my Ozu knowledge/appreciation. I also started Ozu's Anti-Cinema by Yoshida Kiju, which is more interesting as it's written by a Japanese directory/critic who knew Ozu when he was young (I mean Kiju was young, Ozu was at the end of his life).

Earlier in the week I read Patricia Lockwood's No one is talking about this which I enjoyed for it's internet stream of consciousness style, but then got a little iffy about for it's life changing baby death narrative. The structure works as a kind of "reality pulling me away from virtual reality", but even though I've just read that the second part is autofiction, I can't get over that it felt... manipulative? cliché? in relation to the first part. Obviously as reality the situation sounded awful, painful, and surely changing how one considers life experience, but as fiction/literature it didn't work for me.