The Beer Retard - May 2nd, 2005

Man, I haven't had time to take a breath and relax lately. The SFIFF has been going strong and I've seen 4 films. All have been great and all have had interesting Q&As afteward. Maybe the most important of these was yesterday's screening of Adam Curtis's BBC series, The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear. The series traces the history of the radical Islamist movement in the Middle East and the Neo-Conservative movement in the US and draws parallels between the two while showing how both have created the current fucked up situation we're living in today. Even if you know the main ideas being presented, all the details will open your eyes to stuff you had no idea about. The program combined with the Q&A was really valuable to me in a lot of ways that I don't even have time to get into here. The short version is that I realized that there's nothing wrong with believing in nothing in today's world because there's really nothing left to believe in. All we can do is search for some kind of meaning and maybe the search itself is enough...for now. Not sure if the series will be shown in theatres around the country or on American TV, but if it is...it's mandatory viewing.

So this week is going to be a continuous rollercoaster of activities that I'm going to want off of in the middle. The schedule looks like this:

Monday - Gang of Four
Tuesday - Miike's Izo at 12:45 at the SFIFF, a trip to meet with the bar owner for the pool team, schmoozing with the bartender before the match, our first home match against the best team and the most dominant player in the whole freaking city
Wednesday - Beyond Our Ken at the SFIFF
Thursday - swanky sake tasting at the Claremont for some client of decadentscholar's employer

On Friday, I'm sitting on my ass and doing nothing. Not a goddamn thing.