Etienne! Screening in LA on July 14

Yay! Etienne! is playing on Tuesday, July 14 at the Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles at 8:00PM.

It is a heartwarming and weird kid's movie masquerading as an indie film. Or G-Force minus the lack of soul.

Hope to see some of you there!

Hamsters.

Boyfriend happened to have a VHS tape of Michael Jackson music videos lying around the house. In light of recent news, it seemed appropriate to pop it into the VCR and watch it in the living room while we ate toast for dinner.

Up until today, I don't think I have ever sat down and fully watched an entire Michael Jackson music video. We watched about four of his music videos in a row. I thought my pupils were going to dilate past my irises and swallow my eyeballs whole.

Holy crap. This shit is brilliant. And so fucking weird. And almost stupid. And yet--so brilliant.

I was never a hardcore fan, but I was never a hater, either. Someone really brilliant and really weird is no longer here on this earth. RIP, MJ.

--


Back in 2007 when the boyfriend was just a random tall cutie from Giant Robot and I was this sushi waitress chick who just finished college, the boyfriend was working as an associate producer on his best friend's movie about a college dude who goes on a biking trip all over Northern California with his beloved dwarf hamster dying of cancer.

Not being a movie-making person at all and not knowing much else about the plot, I listened with rapt interest about the hamster stunt doubles used in the movie. Two of them unexpectedly gave birth, and one of them had its head bitten off by the director's cat. I also learned that the non-sentient hamster stunt doubles used in biking scenes were really crocheted blobs of brown yarn.

Apparently a representative from the American Humane Association always had to be present to confirm that hamster abuses were not taking place. Now I know where those "No Animals were harmed..." claims really come from.

As months passed, I would occasionally see a random clip of this unfinished movie, which did not give me any further clues on what exactly to expect in terms of narrative tone or aesthetic quality. What is up with that chick? What is up with that turtle? What is up with that goat?

I thought to myself then: this is either a really good or a really bad movie in the making.

Finally, two years later, the hamster movie got finished. It is now in the midst of touring the country. "Etienne!", named after the dying hamster in the story, premiered at the CineVegas Film Festival earlier this month, and won the "Filmmaker to Watch" award.

It also had three screenings in the Bay Area last week, and I finally got to fulfill my curiosity about what this hamster movie is all about.

I watched this movie at two screenings--once in San Francisco and another at a hostel in Saulsalito. It is quirky and funny in a way that is not annoyingly self-conscious and phony, but surprisingly genuine and sweet. As one tagline from the official website so aptly describes, "Etienne!" is "An art film for kids." I couldn't agree more. (One other tagline from the website is "the first foreign film shot in the United States"--which I guess would only make sense if you watch the movie.)

I laughed a lot in both viewings, and days later, I am still mulling over the wonderfully sad and magical strangeness of certain scenes. Many of them involve really cute shots of hamsters. Some of them involve not-so-cute shots of banana slugs.

"Etienne!" has a lot of heart and deserves success. I am rooting for this movie to be seen by many more people in the months to come.

This description from The Hollywood Reporter made me laugh outloud:

The film actually plays like a more innocent, G-rated version of 1968's "Candy," with the wide-eyed journey taken by soft-spoken man-child Richard (Richard Vallejos) and his pampered pocket pet.

Read the full review of Etienne! on Variety and The Hollywood Reporter

R.I.P. Zikara

There are no more fleas in the house. There is also no more Zikara.

Zikara is one of the two cats I had been living with. Now there is only one.

Three days ago, Zikara died unexpectedly when my roommate was giving her a second flea bath using natural flea shampoo. She had an allergic reaction to one of the ingredients and died within ten minutes right on the bathroom floor. By the time I came home, my roommate had already buried her at her friend's garden, where another one of her cats had been buried there before.

I can close my eyes and still remember the weight of her warm body held close against my arms. She was big and heavy, and always gazed up at my face with large and luminous eyes in the kitty equivalent of a sad puppy stare.

She seldom made any noise. When I picked her up and squeezed her before tossing her out of my room, she would every so often give out a soft, feeble mew that was as small as she was big.

As a neat parlor trick that endlessly amused my friends, she had an unusual way of pawing out a kitty palmful of catnip from an open jar and eating it directly from her cupped paw, bent in front of her mouth, in the manner of a small child. No joke.

Zikara and the other black cat used to take naps together out on the patio, curled up around each other in a circular ball, making a kitty yin and yang of contentment under a small patch of sunlight. Now all there is left of her are the clumps of gray fur still matted within the apartment living room carpet.

Rest in peace, Zikara. I hope kitty heaven is treating you well.

Fleas.

The two kitties I am living with have somehow brought fleas into the apartment I am living in. This does not make for an ideal living situation. The fleas have infiltrated my bedroom, and sometimes I can see one or two of them hopping about on my white bedsheets.

Fleas and mosquitoes make me angry, because as long as I can remember, itch-inducing insects seem to instantly sense that my blood is liquid E for them. Fleas are all the more frustrating because their stubbornly hard exoskeleton prevents them from being crushed by conventional methods--you have to take a small metal tweezer and squeeze them to death until their little bodies are completely torn apart.

I have bites all over my arms and legs. I look diseased.

I bring up the topic of fleas because I read somewhere that if you leave an aluminum pie tin full of water on the floor, add dish soap or olive oil, and light a desk lamp on the surface of the water in a darkened room, the fleas will be attracted to the light, hop into their extermination pool and drown to death. Leave it to flea infestation to add a new sick guilty pleasure to my list. I have done this experiment for a night, and seeing the little red-brown bodies floating in the water made me terribly satisfied.

I hate fleas, but I still love the cats. They are not mine; there's a little black one with white socks, and a big gray one with long, lustrous fur. I forgive them, because every time I see them, I want to pick them up and squeeze them until their eyes bug out. In three months, I won't have two cats as apartment mates. I'll be living somewhere else in LA and I won't have fleas, but then I won't have cats.

For a very long time after college, I did not enjoy making art. I was getting too neurotic and self-absorbed about my level of creative productivity, and about proving myself to the rest of the world. It made me emotionally selfish, unhappy and uncreative. Instead of connecting with my friends and family, I was obsessed about getting something monumental done. Living life in this way, as many people eventually find out, has toxic consequences for the soul.

At some point during the time I was working in Japan, I made an unofficial pact with God or the universe: if there is a better way for me to be of use in this world that is not related at all to art, I will do it.

I went on a creative production hiatus.

That, and I finally learned how to meditate.

I'm doing more creative things now. I am drawing and / or writing every day. I don't care as much about having my own solo exhibition or illustrating the cover of a big magazine. More than anything, I want to always protect my ability to listen carefully for the idea or the story or the image that feels the most honest. When I bring the idea to the physical world, I want other people to feel that honesty, too.

This shift in perspective is healthier for me, and for the rest of the world. All I have to do is listen well. If I can do this, the rest will take care of itself. Honesty requires the least effort.

--

I haven't been using my desktop Stickies for months. Just this morning, I resurrected the program and was amused to find these random notes that had listings such as books to read, music to download or ideas for future drawings or stories. Most of these are embarrassing or personal, but I will share the one that made me laugh specifically because I don't remember why or how I felt the need to write this idea down in the first place:

"Woman on a date with a two-headed man. Which head does she like better? What would it be like to be a two-headed man."

--

I like the idea of a food pyramid for the brain. The apex of the pyramid would be Yahoo celebrity gossip and Cosmopolitan. The base of the pyramid would be good literature. Fruits and vegetables would be good news stories and essays. The meat and dairy would be interesting blog posts about cool stuff.

Going on a literary Atkins would make you dull.

Not too long ago, I watched this TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love. Many of you, I am sure, are familiar with this best-selling memoir of a woman who divorces her husband and travels through Italy, India and Indonesia to find herself. This book is so feel-good, so life-affirming, so empowering and sincere it almost feels like literary porn for women in their post-college lives. And I mean that in the best of ways. I really loved reading this book.

Anyway, regardless of whether or not you liked her book or even read her book, I still recommend anyone to watch her lecture. To boil this video into a nutshell, Elizabeth Gilbert asserts that we should all see creative genius as something we 'have' or 'tap into.' This is in opposition to the conventional idea that certain people 'are' geniuses, something fully integrated into their personal identities.

Under Elizabeth Gilbert's paradigm shift, we are humbled by the creativity that inspires us than becoming arrogant by it.

--

"No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes forgetful in order to meet the demands of the things seen and the things being made." - Flannery O' Connor

I included this quote in one of my first blog posts two years ago, and I want to share it again. This is selfishly more for myself because as time passes, I want to remind myself how much this quotation makes more sense to me.

Instead of sleeping at a reasonable time, I found myself gulping down more chapters of Reading Lolita in Tehran. I promised that I would stop at one chapter, but then I kept going. When I finally forced myself to stop and put the book away, the ideas and the characters kept me awake.

When I find a book this engrossing, I find myself disappearing. I wish I could find a better way to describe it.

Maybe I'll just describe the mental image that I had last night:

A person is reading a book--and then, very slowly, the outline of her being disappears. Her physical existence taking up space in the room and her internal existence--her life history, her everyday problems, her most troubling insecurities--everything personal about her dissipates into the black words marching across the pages of the book. As the person completely disappears, the book she is holding appears to floats mid-air, and the pages seem to turn itself like a ghost is reading it.

This transcendence is possible because the reader of the book allows herself to temporarily un-exist for the levitation of the book, which now seems to inhale and exhale very slowly with every turn of the page. The book, now a living creature in its own right, unfolds itself to the world like a flower opening its petals for the first time ever.

A fake blog post of inane updates in anticipation of my next real blog post (sorry, David):

* I am the proud owner of a used red bike with a detachable basket. Watch me zip around West Los Angeles while defying death and fatigue. My new red bike fills me with childlike joy.

* I will be spending a week in San Francisco mid-June, to catch several screenings of Etienne! If you happen to live in NorCal, you should catch these screenings, too, especially if you like hamsters. Boyfriend and I will be crashing at my best friend's apartment, and then after that, the apartment of another childhood friend I haven't seen in ages. I love it when friends live up in San Francisco.

* Preggers friend de-pregged herself to pop out this cute little baby girl. Holy crap!

I got to hold a week-old human in my arms. It was weird. It was awesome. It was mind-blowing!

* I finally hunted down a copy of "Reading Lolita in Tehran" at my local library. I started ten pages, and I am hooked.

* Life is good.

Homegirl still at UCLA asked me if I missed college. I said, without a moment's hesitation, "No." Being in the real world makes me feel more like a real person.

Best lady friend came up to see me. We had a dinner date at Cha Cha Chicken, walked around the beach, and then hanged out at my apartment before she left me to go salsa-dancing. This lady can write eloquently, play several instruments, dance salsa--and will one day be a future doctor in your city if you have the good karma to have a well-rounded doctor as my best lady friend.

Best lady friend told me about the two weddings she will be going to this year: a conservative, traditional wedding being held by her childhood friend, and a barefoot picnic wedding being held by her boyfriend's friend. I told her about preggers friend, and how the freaking baby is due anytime soon.

Uh-oh, I'm entering that phase of my life.

--

I'm almost done with Three Cups of Tea. It's good nonfiction reading, and I highly recommend it. Anytime I feel stressed or feel like bitching, I think about all the shit that the dude had to go to just to build a school for a tiny mountain village in a remote mountainous corner of Pakistan.

I'm not sure what I should read next.

Ever since I started meditating, things have been strangely falling into place. Or maybe they've always been falling into place, and now I have more sense to notice them.

My little life story has suddenly been pumped with literary steroids. No cliffhangers, but certain Themes and Motifs are popping up with greater frequency in capitalized letters. Hello there! Time to grab a highlighter and make notes in the margins. This young grasshopper is ready.

Got to tat-design for another friend. This time it's a shark!

Being 24 rocks.

First of all, I love the numerical elegance of the actual number. 24 is not an awkward prime number like 23, nor is it a boring milestone like 25. It's divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24. If you're into Chinese astrology, 24 is the year of your power animal, the year that comes every twelve years when you are in your element and you just PWN the world.

Secondly, 24 is just young enough and just old enough. I'm no longer a college test-tube baby, and I'm still idealistic enough to not be completely crushed by the weary reality of the world. Older and wiser people, thank you for not snickering in my face.

Maybe it's all the positive and spiritual energy that comes from living with my roommate, who has already lived so many lives. Maybe it's all the butter from the buttery pumpkin ravioli I ate last night that's making its final euphoric death rounds in my arteries before I fall to the floor from a cardiovascular shutdown.

I'm feeling good.

Friendy-friend whom I do not see very often dropped by my place tonight. We made pumpkin ravioli that wasn't really ravioli, because the ravioli skin was actually wonton skins. The whole east meets west thing, nyuk-nyuk-nyuk. It was slathered in butter sauce and sage leaves cooked in melted butter. I need to finish typing this blog entry before my arteries completely solidify and I fall to the floor dead.

As free dinner entertainment, we watched the two cats I live with kill a bee in the living room.

Though I ain't no J-Lo, I am digging this whole cooking thing. I like the idea of eating my way upwards a learning curve dotted with progressively tastier and more complicated dishes, provided I don't accidentally eat the poisonous part of a blowfish along the way. It also helps that my roommate happens to love cooking, and has a kitchen equipped with every cooking utensil I will ever need or never use. My future culinary potential: WIN.

Also, feeding other people makes me feel like a benevolent master. I am voluntarily bypassing my capacity for violence and giving you homemade spaghetti instead.

The woman who works as a cashier at the Ralph's I live by is one stylin' lady. In the few occasions I've seen her, I always remember her having perfectly manicured nails, funky black-frame glasses, a million-watt smile, and the age-ambiguous beauty that can date her at 39 or 55--the point is, she's Asian, middle-age-ish, and she looks good.

This woman owns at her job. She's upbeat, cheerful, sassy and finds a way to personally relate with every customer who passes through her line. Sisterly to the fellow ladies, a platonic gal pal to the grown men, a mother hen to the young 'uns. I wish more people were like her.

People like her remind me what's truly important in life. Not whether or not you have a high-paying job or drive a fancy car, but whether or not you can out-sass a mouthy customer from taking advantage of the express line, beetch!

--

So knock on wood, I am not suffering from the terrible economy as other people are. I still have a job, I'm not living in Orange County with my parents, and as far as I know, I have no mouths to feed. But as a Californian, I read with interest a Time magazine article on the prospect of California legalizing marijuana to save what remains of their shitty economy.

It all started with something David said. We were finishing our last rounds at the Farmer's Market this morning, and I mentioned how though the recession sucks, it at least is forcing creativity out of desperate people, such as the 25-year-old laid off engineer who decided to make a profitable business out of building jellyfish tanks. And then David said, "Can you imagine how much more vibrant Farmer's Market would be if marijuana was legalized?"

I mean, seriously.

I had this sudden utopian vision flash through my head. An upward spiral of people buying seconds, then thirds and fourths of homemade corn tamales and savory breakfast crepes. Organic hummus and goat cheese sales just skyrocketing off the charts. People buying bag after bag of pistachios, trail mix, and dried mango.

Everybody holding hands and laughing. Unicorns.

Maybe that's just me.

My very preggers friend is super-preggers now. As in, the baby can be due any day now. Yesterday, I stopped by her house after work. I felt the baby squirm under her stomach. She grabbed my wrist and gave the palm of my hand a quick tour across the topography of her wide belly. This is where the baby's head is, this is where her back is, this is where her elbows are...

Preggers friend told me how she and the man were walking around Third Street Promenade earlier that day, and has come to the conclusion that shopping is boring when you're pregnant. "Now I know how fat people feel," she mused outloud. "To see all these cute clothes for thin people and not be able to wear them."

I am not ready to be pregnant for a while. Right now I am happy living vicariously through my friend. Any day now...