The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre, go dancing, go drinking, think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save and the greater will become that treasure which neither moths nor maggots can consume -- your capital.

It takes such an effort of self-hypnosis to write. Not hypnosis of the sort "I am a good writer." It's something else. And now, the additional difficulty of having to prize away the grip of this blog-person, witty and wry reader of news and popular culture. She is my enemy. She makes it impossible for me to write. She has it so easy: who cannot make detournements of New York Times headlines? (the New York Times? That's shooting fish in a barrel.) Who cannot allude to a few films and books and thereby confect an intellectual persona? She is my day job, my alibi. She writes her careless blog, carelessly because it is not the real work, while I labor at my fiction with the few meager resources that have not been squandered by her bon mots and her better mots. An expense of spirit in a waste of shame. And so each of us ruins the other, each of us is the alibi for and ruin of the other.

There are other enemies. My neighbors. When will life in this apartment become unbearable again, as it did yesterday and the day before. When am I going to be miserable? I know it is soon and yet I do not know when. I know it is soon and yet I also hope that it will never arrive, that too is torment, the possibility that it is over already, it is over and I do not know it yet but soon I will know that this anticipation has been for naught, it is all over already, the child next door is dead or paralyzed or has been kidnapped, what do I care which of these happy accidents has befallen her. My torturer.

The one writes posts is not my enemy. She is something worse: she is outsourced labor.

Look at her now, all I had to do was utter the word "torturer" and already she's just bubbling over with commentary and citations: a Cahiers du Cinema interview from the seventies, in which Foucault asks "why does all pornography nowadays take place under the sign of the Nazi, when the Nazis themselves were such Victorian spinsters?", which interview she will cleverly, she thinks, use to launch a description of today's tawdry and stupid torturers, "one wants there to have been a sinister master," she will write, "someone diabolical, clever, malignant yet darkly meaningful," she will write, boots worth licking, she will write in some fucked-up sexual allusion designed to make you wonder what she gets up to when she isn't at the computer. Nothing, that's what, nothing at all, I am here to tell you, she is false from first to last.

There really is another person in this city with my same first and last name and middle initial. I am not being cute or Borgesian now. I met her once, back when you used to have to do add/drop in person at the University of Washington. I still run into her phantasmally, whenever I have the utilities turned on or off. She probably has the worse end of this deal, given my credit rating.

There is still another who does what I do. All kidding aside. I'd be more precise, but one or both of us has signed a non-disclosure agreement.

SIFF

Before today, I was feeling like the film festival had passed me by, even though I'd had a full-series pass. Early on in the festival, I watched Bruce Weber's "A Letter to True," a fashion/celeb photographer's paean to his dogs. As I watched Weber's golden retrievers gamboling in the surf at his Montauk house--wait, it gets worse--I said to myself, "now my series pass should be stripped from me, and I should be banned from the festival for having submitted to this film." The part that's worse than the dogs-in-surf is all the Life-magazine-worthy meditations on heroic, masculine, soldierly sacrifice and death and 9/11. Don't ask how those were in the dog movie. GAAAH. It's like I went to the Reagan funeral before it ever happened, not that Reagan was a soldier, but that was the mood of Weber's film: pompous funebre.

So, aside from Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell (glad I saw it, but you couldn't say it was fun, more like a staged reading of a Kristeva essay, with beautiful Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi and his professional penis fighting a losing battle against an impassive, bleeding, sleeping, oceanic, abject female body); and a Korean horror film called A Tale of Two Sisters (terrifying, and, oddly, like Breillat's film, its horror was about menstrual blood); and Bruce LaBruce's The Raspberry Reich (which tried to do for leftist terrorists what his previous films had done for neo-Nazi skinheads, i.e, make them sexy--mostly a failure, with the best sex scenes getting interrupted for dreary citations of Marcuse or Wilhelm Reich. --Although "join the homosexual intifadah" is a pretty funny line, and there was a giddy, scandalous thrill in the prescient scenes of masked and balaclava'ed and keffiyeh'ed habitués of the terror-themed discotheque, like an Abu Ghraib drained of all its terrible meanings and made joyful. Though B La B had to have filmed before that story came out); --OK, aside from those, the festival was feeling like a waste, like I'd managed to miss every good film and pick every useless piece of drivel that will end up on the Landmark circuit anyway. Oh, and Infernal Affairs part I. Oh and also Maqbool, a Macbeth set in Mumbai, which the press release made out to be giddy wacky farce but was actually tragic and had a better Lady Macbeth than Shakespeare wrote.

But so apart from those, it was just one shrug after another. Until today. Today I watched Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe.

Unfortunately, I read Shaviro's review already. I agree with him that there's a lightness to Last Life in the Universe, and that's its greatest charm. A lightness that's helped along by the fact that the two main characters, one Thai and one Japanese, have only a few tags of Thai and Japanese and some very basic English in which to communicate. But the film mostly isn't about the sorrows or wry comedy of misunderstanding: it transmits affect remarkably well, this bare language of theirs.

There's a lot of flotsam in Last Life: a lot of liquid murk and things afloat or awash in it. But Ratanaruang's trash is not as transformed as Wong Kar Wai's, which becomes achingly beautiful --the blood washing down the abattoir drain in Happy Together, the same film's brilliant yellow warning/construction-site tape vibrating in a deep blue evening, the sopping cigarette butts and shower thongs adrift in the policeman's flooded apartment in Chunking Express. Apart from a fantasy sequence where a character plunges into the river and the thick weeds form a ring above his submerged head, the litter on view in Ratanaruang's film is sort of inert, uncommented on, neither horrific nor beautiful, or maybe a just a little of both.