The book is obviously well written and Oscar Wilde must have been an interesting cat because some of the lines form the book are so insightful even to someone living in 2011.  Most of the interesting dialog is spoken by Lord Henry, one of Dorian’s older admirers, who is the devil on Dorian’s shoulder, equipping him with the rhetoric that allows him to act out in the way that he does with self-moralizing impunity.  Throughout the novel Lord Henry delivers some spectacular one-liners like:

Men marry because they are tired: women marry because they are curious, both are disappointed.

or

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

Fucking brilliant, and he keeps them coming throughout the novel.  A lot of what Lord Henry said and what Dorian does was probably considered deviant and horrible based on the public standards of 1800′s England.  Many of the book reviews of the time refer to “The Picture of Dorian Gray” as “poisonous” and that it contained “moral and spiritual putrification”.  The critics could not see past the aberrant behaviours of the characters to see the larger themes that the book contains.  This well crafted, thoughtful novel was simply tossed aside by many due to the content that could potentially be seen as off-putting or amoral.

This brings me back to the point that I brought up at the outset of the post of coincidentally seeing recurring themes in other forms of media.  As I was reading this novel I stumbled across “Irreversible” on my Netflix cue and decided to check it out.  This movie has a reputation for being pretty rough (rough, as-in a couple hundred people walked out of its screening at Cannes).  It is a French film shot “Memento-style” (the movie starts at the end and moves backwards in segments).

 Ho-ly-shit, it certainly lives up to its billing.  The first few minutes contain a vomit inducing camera spin and a certain sound frequency that is known to make people nauseous (I read about this after I watched the movie).  The director, Gaspar Noe, literally is attempting to make the viewer physically sick.  It is for good reason though as the characters are in a world of shit.  The first 20 minute segment of the movie (the end of the movie chronologically) is set in a hardcore gay club and climaxes with one of the main characters bashing another guy’s head in with a fire extinguisher.  “Irreversible” slowly pulls itself out of the terrifying abyss of its “ending” to reveal the characters motivations as well as some interesting perspectives on relationships, sex and life choices in general is it works backwards.

As the movie progressed the viewer starts to understand what is driving the characters and eventually has a happy “ending” (the beginning chronologically).  There are parts of the movie that are literally difficult to sit through (yes, there is a scene more disturbing that the start of the movie – I won’t spoil it though, in case you want to check it out, which I highly recommend if you are not squeamish).  I finished it, and I was glad I did, because I really witnessed a piece of art.  Even after the movie was over I thought about it and came back to one of the movie’s opening lines, spoken by a broken, half-naked, old French man: “Time destroys all things.”  Irreversible has a similar theme to “The Picture of Dorian Gray” as well as a disguted response from the critics.

I went on rotten tomatoes and saw the reviews much of which were positive, and anyone that had a negative review talks about the brutal content and fails to mention the artistry of the director or the compelling storyline.  I find it very unfortunate that many things in our society get dismissed out of hand for being different or challenging prevailing viewpoints.  “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and “Irreversible” are just two examples of this occurring, but it happens all the time.  The critics of the time failed to recognize a great piece of art when Oscar Wilde published his novel in 1891 and many people today miss amazing contributions to literature, music and film solely from the idea that art can be “poisonous”.  Art itself is nothing but a vehicle to elicit a response from its audience, I think that some of the readers and viewers are unhappy with their own response so they castigate the art itself, rather than turning the mirror on themselves and understanding why they are reacting the way that they do.

A great shot from "Irreversible"... what happens directly after this shot may not be suitable for all viewers...

I was so busy when I had first moved to Australia that I didn’t have time to write about my adventures of when I first arrived here (I know you are on the edge of your seat wondering what happened).  This is my attempt to right what once was wrong (kind of like a crappy version of  Quantum Leap) and fill you in on the details of my arrival and first few weeks in Sydney.  I am going to write about it a little differently though, it will be less bloggy and more like a personal narrative broken up into a few parts.  Then at the end I will combine the parts and put it into the short story section of the blog.  So without further ado:

I am a professional sleeper.  I can sleep anywhere at any time, just give me a 15 minute heads-up and I could pass out in the middle of a noisy bar or the night before an important meeting.  My mind can be cleared and my senses dulled at a moment’s notice to accommodate a long trip or the need to get away from life and just cease to exist in my brain for a while.

That is why after climbing aboard, taxiing, lifting off and flying for an hour I was perplexed.  I was awake.  I don’t think I have ever been awake at this point in a flight.  This was not just any flight for me though.  This was a flight to Australia for which I had no return ticket.  I was leaving Southern California and not planning to come back for a long time.  I sat there with my eyes closed trying to force myself to sleep thinking of the last few weeks before I left the country.  The goodbye drinks, the farewell dinners, the moving preparations and all of the friends and family that I was leaving on another continent.  My thoughts shifted from the things I was leaving behind to the new world that I was entering.  I was nervous and there was no chance I would ever get to sleep.  Why would I leave a place that I know so well and risk an easy, laid back lifestyle just to move to another country?  That was my last thought until I woke up 13 hours later for breakfast.  I may not be a professional sleeper but I am definitely a top seeded amateur.

Airline food during a 15 hour flight is a necessary evil.  I had a long day ahead of me and if I waited until I landed to eat I would most likely crumble in a heap in the customs line.  My choice was runny eggs or mealy pancakes.  Runny eggs won and I started to deconstruct the plastic tomb in which my food was encased.  Not only are these meals disgusting, they also have to be the most anti-environmental way to eat anything.  Each morsel of food is packaged in its own non-biodegradable home.  They should just go all the way and put every square of toilet paper in its own shrink-wrap or hand out water in little capsules that you pop open, drink and discard on the floor like futuristic peanut shells.

After the plastic carcass of my meal was hauled away by the stewardess I was left to stare at the virtual map which showed my plane moving impossibly slowly across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean to my final destination: Sydney, Australia.  That tiny little dot on the map held all of the things that I was stressing about.  North Sydney was the location of my new office and the Harborside Hotel was where my luggage and I would be living for the next few months until the crate with the rest of my belongings would arrive.  It was also home to the 1 person on the entire continent that I knew outside of work, and I met her a few months before randomly, on vacation in Hawaii.  It was where I had decided that I wanted to live just two months before.  All of that was within the little spot that the video plane was pivoting towards.

Landing is my least favorite part of flying. I am never outwardly nervous but a part of me always looks out the window and wonders how there are not more crashes.  The pilots take a gigantic hunk of metal moving at a few hundred miles an hour and drop it perfectly on a slim strip of concrete a few thousand times a day, every day, with no incident.  Every other task that someone does in the course of my day is fucked up constantly.  How has something that is so difficult been done to almost flawless perfection for so often for so long?   Everyone is nervous during the landing because at some level they know humans are not meant to do this.  A tenth of a percent of me is amazed every time I don’t touch down in a cartwheeling fireball of my own demise.  After we hit the tarmac in Sydney everyone took a deep breath, stopped thinking about their potential death and started wondering where they wedged their laptop case 14 ½ hours ago.

I always think that I am going to get busted when I go through customs.  I had no drugs up my ass, no Mexicans in my suitcase or any flora or fauna that could possibly hump a wallaby and completely destroy the Australian ecosystem yet I felt every customs agent’s eyes drilling into me.  I would usually be tentative about being in the customs line but the flight had dulled my senses and the people watching was too fantastic to miss.  It is like a slide show that kept repeating as I wound around the queue.  First there was stinky Indian business man, and then the nerdy couple in sleep pants holding stuffed animals, and then the chick with fake tits that looked like she showered and did her makeup on the plane somehow , and then the sweet looking old couple and then the confused Asian family who were looking at their own passports like they were in a different language.  Each pass gave me a new perspective to observe the weirdness of the humanity around me.  If airports are a hurricane of people watching activity then the customs line is the eye of the storm.  The quiet calm before the assorted foreigners are spat out upon the baggage claim.

To be continued…

“One of the most disturbing novels that I’ve read in a long time.  It possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality.” – Michiko Kukatani, New York Times

Tonight I finished the novel and as I flipped the last page and closed the book I read that review again.  It doesn’t ring true anymore.  Actually I should qualify that, both statements are only half true.  I was prepared for some disturbing shit.  I have read American Psycho, another one of Bret Easton Ellis’s books and that is or comes close to the most disturbing novels I have ever read but save for the last 30 or so pages of “Less than Zero” was pretty pedestrian relative to the subject matter.  I could see where someone reading this in the mid-eighties could have that notion but in 2011 I have become numb to stories of this nature.  It seems dated from a shock value standpoint but from a representation of the way US society is moving it seems fairly prescient.

The book is a first person account of Clay, a privileged 18 year old coming back home to Los Angeles for winter break and having an existential crisis in the midst of “catching-up” with his “friends”.  The second he arrives he is immersed in an excess of sex, drugs and partying but amidst all the characters socializing and fucking each other no one ever makes a connection or has concern for anyone else.  It is like each character is a ping pong ball bouncing around a large room.  The collide and ricochet everywhere but in the end they are physically and emotionally unchanged after all of their interaction.  No character ever empathizes with any of the other characters and any conversations that might lead to going beyond surface level concerns are greeted with a one word answer or a bump of coke.  Is that disturbing?  This is merely an amplification of the way many people interact except these characters have no restrictions.  They have unlimited bankrolls and no judgement from authority figures thanks to the success of their absentee parents.  It is the eighties version of Lord of the Flies, except this time their island is Southern California and Piggy and Ralph are no where to be found.  A majority of the novel could be released as someone ghostwriting the exploits of Lindsay Lohan or some rockstar and people wouldn’t bat an eye.  That’s why the reviewer’s statements about this book no longer ring true.  As a society we have moved closer to emulating the characters in this book than anyone in 1985 could have imagined.  The idea of this being the “air of documentary reality” is unnerving in its truth rather than its possibility.

I appreciated the writing style of the author, he apparently wrote this when he was 19 and the way he captures the disinterested views of an 18 year old realizing the terrors of the world is remarkable.  The book is basically small 1-2 page vignettes that coagulate into a loose narrative structure that can be disorienting.  The disorientation is an effective tool though, the drugs, parties and characters start blending together imparting to the reader a feeling of drug addled psyche dealing with a hostile and uncaring world.  The book is an examination of Clay looking at his life and grappling with adulthood and uncertainty about himself.  There are 3 phrases that are repeated at intervals throughout the book: “Disappear here”, “You are a beautiful boy and that’s all that matters” and “People are afraid to merge.  To merge.”   These also happen to be the main areas of examination of the book: Death, what one thinks of themselves, and how one takes that self view and integrates it into society and peer groups.

In the end the book doesn’t really resolve any of this but that’s the point.  It is a story of a boy becoming a man and taking on the uncertainties of adulthood.  In the first few pages one of Clays friends says “I want to go back”.  “Where?” Clay asks him and his friend replies “I don’t know.  Just back.”  Clearly he is yearning to revisit a time when the world was simpler and the shroud of adolescence shielded him from the stark realities of life.   As extraordinary as the circumstances of Clay’s life our he is in the same situation as everyone else, a solitary soul in an uncaring world blindly groping for meaning amidst the masses.

Have you read the book?  What do you think?

PS – By the way, I am planning to watch the movie (wchich I have never seen) and I checked out the trailer:

Less than Zero trailer

Talk about missing the point… I know I am just going to hate this movie.  Based on the vintage 80′s voice over guy’s cheesy tag lines it looks like a complete dumbing-down of the original idea into a vanilla “drugs are bad” type cautionary tale.  Hollywood, you suck.

There is something satisfying about going back through things I have written in the past and pulling out a nugget that I forgot and enjoying that moment once again.  I was just out on the couch lounging and talking with one of my friends who is about to leave town about random life stuff and everything seems so fleeting.  At one point we could not even remember what we had just been talking about.  What was important enough to verbalize disappears into the ether forever to never be fully realized at the same time in the same way again.  Even things that are “important” fade over time and become insignificant or forgotten.  I have a personal journal on my computer, a notebook where I keep my more general ideas, a book with the dreams I am not too lazy to write down and a box full of emails that I will never delete.  I have all of these things partly because of my dope addled brain but another part of me wants to mark the passage of time and attach some timelessness to it – though I realize even these thoughts are fleeting.

I wish I always had this urge to document what is happening with me because I would have accumulated some interesting stats that I would be still compiling today.  I was talking with a friend on the phone the other day and we both thought it would have been a good idea to tally every time we had ever fucked, and have that number going as a running total.  I’m not talking about the number of people we have slept with but rather the number of times we had actually fucked (or made love, for those more sensitive in the group).  Wouldn’t you like to know that number?  No?  I’m crazy?  That’s not crazy… having another 10 minute conversation arguing about what would actually constitute your Official Lifetime Sex Number (OLSN, patent pending) is a little crazy.  She said it would be any time either party came through penetration.  I think it should be more based on penetration and clothes going off.  So each time there are both of those activities, clothes coming off and penetration, that would be one notch.  I want those stats!  If only I were a little more forward thinking as a youth, I would be able to rattle off my number for you today.  But I digress…

I guess ultraparadoxical is an attempt to add another outlet for my obsession but in a more public setting.  As a society we generally attach more credibility to the things that more people are interested in.  I generally disdain that idea but in this case I want to try it out.  Instead of having all of these things to myself I want to pass time with some random people who happen to stumble across this site.  If you like what you see please tell your friends, or if you don’t have any friends get out from behind your computer and go get laid, you are never going to get your OLSN up just sitting there.

Seriously… you… yeah, you… the pasty looking guy with the stained wife-beater and sweatpants… don’t make me say it twice… go!

No stolen base in sight

Free taco dreams over