War and Peace

As I'm waiting to hear back from some folks about work(and waiting isn't something I do very well), I decided to kill some time and do the unofficial double feature thing at my local cinema of the Court Street variety, a multiplex where movie-hopping is about as Brooklyn as Spike Lee. The only things there I hadn't seen were The Incredible Hulk and Sex and the City. As I'd had some interest in both, the latter a little more than the former, it seemed to make sense to pair them together.

If it's true that we all see the world differently, then I, as a student of the arts, tend to see symbols in everything. My attraction to a work deals with what about it I can and cannot identify with. Within both films were things I needed to be reminded of if I'm ever going to be freed from box that comprises my life these days.

With the Hulk (an excellent sequel beautifully handled by director Louis Leterrier outside of an ending that obviously been touched heavily by executive hands), the film's focus is about control, about how the rage that exists within those of us who have infernos beneath the surface can be channeled and harnessed for the greater good. Though this contribution to the world comes with its sideeffects, it is also a means of separating the wheat from the chaff within those around us, what appears to be vs. what actually is.

David Banner, so eager to please his superiors and to achieve his highest potential as a scientist sacrifices himself to prove that that greatest power man has ever been created can be controlled. But as a result he loses control, ironically unleashing the God-like power man was never meant to possess upon the big-egoed men who dreamed of just that. Ed Norton wears it well. And though I didn't see the original, I just don't think Eric Bana could have hacked it in the same way.

I don't know how in the hell I managed to follow Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and the ever-annoying Charlotte through six seasons of television. Unlike most men who got into the show, I didn't do it because of some significant other or because I had some kind of a thing for any of the actresses. In truth, none of the women I dated while the show was on were really that into it.

My interest in the beginning came from the fact that it was precursor to Oz during my first year in New York. So K, Wood and myself would check it out mainly to see what stupid mistakes the cast would make in their dating choices. As a reviewer of the film would later comment, the protagonists of Sex and the City the show were never women that I wanted to date, but served more as the very embodiment of why I came to hate dating. But they were all lovable in their own ways, and even after Carrie played Aidan, the guy whom I saw myself as being most like of the love interested to grace the show (Steve being a very close second) I still followed it until the end.

So what did a macho-enough guy gain from the chick flick of the decade? A number of things. First, I'm completely over Jennifer Hudson. Outside of a musical her acting is stiff and I just didn't believe much about her other than the fact that she's from the Midwest. By now, I know that accent by the back of my hand. Two, Carrie's choices in clothes were always awful, though two and half hours of expensive heels did give me a few ideas on the fantasy front [Keep your mouth shut Dervish! I don't want to hear it!] What the fuck was that bird thing she had on the side of her head and that bullshit Soul Train dancer wannabe getup she was wearing in the Duane Reade? And did you see that shot of her from the side when she was laying in bed in the dark? for a second I though she was Ed Norton from the first movie. But let me be nice. This is a "Good Kenji" blog.

Third, as the lives of professional folks (a group which I am sometimes a part of, depending on what I made that year] our options in love and family are varied, and the death knell that so many women my age view as their thirties just isn't so. I don't give a fuck how many women's mag articles and gynecological rumors say otherwise.

But unlike this flick and those like it, it's been my experience that people do not say that they're sorry until it doesn't matter anymore. Once a certain kind of damage is done there is no getting back together, no romantic scene in front of a picturesque backdrop that makes it into the scrapbook for mother to give the daughter, or at least not in the world where I live in. But hey, it's just a movie right. The one line that did stay with me is the one about how your 30s are the decade where you suffer the consequences from the mistakes of your 20s. You get a little wiser. You make better decisions. You come to realize that acting on impulse isn't everything.

For so much of my life everything has been a battle. Existing in a career that is generally without fixed routine, it's always been a fight, whether it's to get up in the morning, get press coverage, to get the subject to answer the right question, to get the assignment or the deal or the option or your name in Variety. As a boy it was always a fight too. I learned in the street that the only way to get your fellow man to respect you is generally to let them see you punch a few people's lights out. The times I took heads off were usually times when I felt like I had something to prove. The times that I controlled myself were the ones when I thought I had the potential to kill somebody.

So now, as I rapidly approach my Jesus year, as I avoid the mirror of my past successes in favor of trying to start all over again, out West, in what's lefdt of publishing and perhaps most importantly, within me, it's peace and tranquility that I seek the most. As I will most likely continue to wander this city and the world on the solo I work hard to center myself in all my decision-making and to have faith, to no longer lean on what cannot save me and embrace myself in order that others might do the same down the road a piece.

Old friends have gone in search of their own fortunes. But new ones have taken their place, as have new challenges. I am trying to forgive and am forgiving those who hurt me in the past, realizing with age and time that in many cases I was the messenger who got shot or an innocent bystander caught in the drive-by of their own denials. I shot some people too and I asked for forgiveness. I've learned that it's the folks on the other plane who give the best advice.

Living in a world of what you did in the past will kill you quickly. It will make you fat. It will make you impotent. It will eventually cause you to take a sledgehammer to the house you live in just so you can get a view of the cemetery you were allegedly trying to get away from. Though it's becoming clear that I'll need to leave this lodge sooner than not to start anew some kind of way, I won't be doing it so that I can take it back to an era far behind me. Those days are gone forever now.

As I seek peace my own fears become my worst adversary. I wrestle with them nightly and sometimes during the day, winning two out of three more often than not. In the past when I've seen fruit it's been my first impulse to grab it off the vine without question, never checking its ripeness, never questioning whether or not it might be poisonous. Now I know to sit at the edge of the treeline and wait.

When the fruit I seek finally falls it will land right in my lap as I sit cross-legged with eyes closed, focusing on the Divine within, saving the fire and brimstone for shield rather than sword, protection rather than attack. In the fable it was the tortoise who reached the finish line before the hare. I rather enjoy the taste of rabbit. But in my world it is the turtle who is viewed as sacred. Out.