Pristine Angie’s Good Homemaker Adventures at www.d332.com

A friend told me just last night that our video rental store had closed down and vacated the premises. Pre-Netflix, it was the last bastion against the staid Blockbusters that surrounded it. It offered the unrated versions of movies where its competition watered them down. It had swinging western-style saloon doors that opened into the adult section. But best of all, the woman at the front desk gave unsolicited eyebrow-up, furrowed-eyebrow reviews of each movie you chose, long before Siskel and Ebert agreed to respectfully disagree. Boobsie’s query on the whereabouts of Showgirls yielded a dry “Have you tried the comedy section?” The infernal “I would like to buy your copy of Gross Misconduct” was met with “Everything in this store is for sale, except that.”

I think on the two-for-one day when I rented “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” with “The Chaucer Finger Puppet Theatre presents Eddie Murphy’s Tranny Fantasies in Middle English” her eyebrows stunned Elizabeth Taylor’s into retirement.

Believe me, we tried to keep this place alive. Even after I defected to Netflix for my Bunuel and Bergman flicks, I made it a point to drop in for an occasional helping of Mean Girls or American Pie. But the truth was that I’ve done three circuits around the entire foreign section, and I was beginning to see myself in Kieslowski’s “The Double Life of Veronique. The entire place was a skeleton, kept alive by the throbbing section in the back, where men in raincoats fingered copies of “Anal Queens and other famous Republicans.”

The masochists in us have seen our favorite video rental matriach (heaven knows if Tarantino had worked there, he would be filming for PBS today) through pregnancies and seasonal illnesses. The hotel behind them had been demolished and rebuilt, after several asbestos-related deaths. The shack down the road had been busted on the biggest ecstasy operation ring on the east coast. And the day WalMart mysteriously appeared in the back parking lot, I knew it was only a matter of time. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, but I bet she flicked off the lights and locked the door for the last time

…and drove off into the sunset with her copy of Gross Misconduct.

Ricky and Boobsie meet at my place quite often these days. My place has turned into a clubhouse of sorts. Often people sleep over, burning the midnight oil into the early morning hours, talking about their girlfriends or their ex’s. I get to practice wifely duties such as tucking each of my boys into beds, sofas, sleeping bags, and couches and preparing their belongings to be carried off the next day. In the morning, I make coffee, juice, some light breakfast before sending one by one out the door and off to work with a singsong farewell and a mental pat on the rear.

(more…)

Hello all, I am deleting the “Ask Pristine Anything” Forum. On the whole, it’s a whale of a bulletin to administer, and I just don’t have the time to check every single day to see if there’s a new posting. If you want to ask me anything or have any questions in the future, just do it right here on any post. Sorry. The negligence was totally mine when it came to running that forum. I set it up before I made my site Wordpress-compatible.

I simply spend very little time online, as I have a big aversion to the thought of becoming one of those people who are “chained” to that pixelated Skinner box throughout the day. In fact, one of the reminder Post-It’s that I tacked to the side of my monitor reads: “The amount of time one spends online is proportional to the need to get a life.” I love the internet for finding and exchanging information, but to loiter around chatrooms and spend countless hours (even minutes) on instant messengers talking about absolutely nothing, forming senseless cliques and throwing around off-the-hip opinions and grudge sarcasms is simply not my style.

The most unflattering light on any person is the illumination from a computer monitor.

The final installment to the Godfrey Reggio-Philip Glass trilogy, a series of dialogue-less movies which documents the transformation from serene and organic Mother Earth to present-day artificial cyber-repetitiveness.

Many of the complaints filed by devoted followers of first movie Koyaanisqatsi stem from the notion that Naqoyqatsi is overblown with bells-and-whistles artifice, lacking the mystique and shamanistic qualities of Koyaanisqatsi. I tend to agree, in the sense that cinematographer Russell Lee Fine apparently throws every special effects filter into his digitized computer editing software for Naqoyqatsi. Throughout the movie, I frequently asked whether the film-makers have made a technical mistake and put the entire movie on negative film (as opposed to positive film), thereby generating practially 90% of the images in reverse. Is Fine trying to show us that viewing a reverse image will somehow enable us to penetrate into the depths of a setting? This would be akin to using big words to describe deep thoughts.

I think an oversight of Naqoyqatsi naysayers is that they overlooked the notion that this closing installment is, in fact, a continuum, a fulfillment of the prophecy set up by the Hopi words in the preceding two movies: Koyaanisqatsi (1. Crazy life. 2. Life in Turmoil 3. Life out of balance 4. Life disintegrating 5. A state of life that calls for another way of living), and Powaqqatsi (An entity, a way of life, that consumes the life force of other beings, in order to further its own life). Koyaanisqatsi, in 1983, visually predicted a future where cosmopolitan grids would be no larger than a micro-processor chip. Naqoyatsi merely realizes this prophecy.

If one were to inspect our present environment, our popular movies, and our daily household surroundings, it would become obvious that much of our world has been digitized. Naqoyqatsi presents that reality quite accurately. A trilogy of works is often a documentation of elapsed time, for the creator of the artpiece as well as his or her audience. Certainly Koyaanisqatsi‘c cinematographer Ron Fricke, is acquainted with that concept, as his other film along the same genre, is entitled Chronos. For Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass to return to the format of their initial movie after some twenty years, would have been a dreadful mistake that would shortchange an artist’s evolutionary vision.

What I find lacking in Naqoyqatsi, is the spiritual insight, an earthy shamanism that reveals all that we see around us, but fail to realize. Koyaanisqatsi was singularly the most influential movie in my life, as I often revisit the concept of time, the repetitiveness of our lives, and the way we squander our short stay here over negligable tradeoffs. Koyaanisqatsi was a wake-up call that forced me rethink and spend my lifetime searching for another way of living. Naqoyqatsi, in contrast, is a sign of the times: It does not question, it does not seek. It is simply content with its artificial digitized CGI (computer generated images) reality, and expects us to accept it, unquestioningly.

And that, is its deepest message.

After a certain time on the weekends, the T4 bus turns off its meter but continues to shuttle people back and forth between the Sultanahmet (the old city) and Taksim Square the beginning of Istiklal Cadessi, the main pedestrian thoroughfare in the European section of Istanbul. On our first Saturday night, we hopped on one and found ourselves next to a quartet of young Turkish boys who were probably no older than twelve or thirteen. They were bursting with laughter and excitement. All the darling buds of youth.

Well, if you didn’t count the .45 automatic handguns they were pointing out the bus window and shooting at people on the sidewalk.

Sure, they were toys. If you can call full-sized, non-neon barrel-tipped, metal colored guns with operational safety levers, functioning hammers, retractable slides, and detachable clips toys. The plastic ammo even pops up out of the top loading clips. Here is a subway (crossing beneath busy streets) kiosk store carrying these full-sized toy guns.

(more…)