A Gilded Planet

10. José Martí 9. Rutherford B. Hayes 8. Julián Trujillo Largacha 7. Fidel Castro 6. Andrés Avelino Cáceres  5. George Crook 4. Abraham Lincoln 3. Venustiano Carranza 2. Máximo Gómez 1. Chester A. Arthur

I was standing in line at three in the morning waiting to see The Dark Knight Rises  at the Metreon in San Francisco when I first heard about the shootings in Aurora. Based on the number of people waiting for the 3:45AM showings at the Metreon, I imagine I am not alone in having had the experience of learning about this mass murder very shortly before seeing the most anticipated movie of the year. However, despite the highly associative proximity of these events, I feel quite uncomfortable connecting them in a meaningful way. Let me explain why. In April 1999, two kids wearing trench coats walked into a school and started shooting. That same month, Keanu Reeves wore a trench coat when he walked into a security checkpoint and started shooting. The second event happened in the movie The Matrix . Some people insisted on drawing a connection, saying that these kids took inspiration from that particular violent movie. Or they connected it to Doom , saying that these kids took inspira...

Chungking Express 1994. 102 minutes. China. Directed by Wong Kar-Wai. Watchdate: 11/2/2012. Chungking Express expresses romance and a sense of longing through moments, images and somewhat poetic abstract structure that take prominence over the two intersecting central narratives. The narratives do not follow a standard story logic, rather they use the associative logic of dreams: Qiwu is in love with May and his birthday is May 1st while he understands their relationship through canned food expiration dates; Tony Leung’s character gets over a relationship with a flight attendant by falling in love with a woman who later becomes a flight attendant and when he invites her to meet him at a restaurant called California, she ends up going to the state of California instead. The movie lies somewhere between the real (in that it depicts how people really live in Hong Kong to a certain extent) and the surreal in that it follows this odd associative dream logic I just attempted t...