Yearly Archives: 2004

Quartz

When peo­ple ask me what my favourite nov­el is, I tell them, “A Hero of Our Time”, and that’s been true for more than eight years now. It’s a prime exam­ple of Russian Romantic Literature, and I can appre­ci­ate that. It’s bril­liant, not only in it’s lyri­cal style but also for the com­plex­i­ty of the mind­set cap­tured by the pro­tag­o­nist, which makes it such a plea­sure to read through. It’s intel­li­gent, it’s inter­est­ing, it’s cre­ative, yet none of these things make it my favourite. It’s not even the book I’ve enjoyed read­ing the most.

It’s sim­ply been the most influ­en­tial.

Lermontov’s nov­el once offered me guid­ance (albeit blind­ly) when I need­ed it the most. His words have shaped me more than any­thing else I can think of, even though I’ve cast off most of my for­mer self relat­ed to this. I still see his work as being an inte­gral part of my devel­op­ment, in mak­ing me who I am at every chang­ing moment, and that is why I hold so much impor­tance in it.

All of it was a mat­ter of tim­ing. Otherwise, I’d prob­a­bly think that it was just anoth­er bor­ing book I was forced to read in grade 10 English.

The same goes with my rela­tion­ships, some­thing I would nev­er have thought was relat­ed to tim­ing. It’s fun­ny to think that my most sig­nif­i­cant rela­tion­ship was also my short­est by far, with a per­son who is most like­ly to think noth­ing of it at all. And every­thing that made it impor­tant to me was a com­bi­na­tion of a very spe­cif­ic mind­set I had at the time and the fact that this per­son was such a change from my pre­vi­ous girl­friend.

The same goes with my favourite movie and my favourite band. I’ve become a per­son who holds more sig­nif­i­cance in the things that change me than the things that please me.

And change is a prod­uct of time.

A Night Facing South

Crashed at Aaron’s last night, and my god how beau­ti­ful the sky was at his place. His unblind­ed win­dows were filled with an intense gra­di­ent, and it real­ly empha­sized the stark naked­ness of the trees that were bare­ly peer­ing above the hori­zon. It was the bright­est night of the win­ter, and the room was filled with orange-pink light. I lay on his couch, wish­ing I could keep my eyes open for just anoth­er sec­ond longer before I suc­cumbed to exhaus­tion.

How A Collectors Edition Can Be Worse

So I went to HMV to buy the lat­est Dream Theater album, and I see this Scarface pack­age. Turns out that it’s the full screen anniver­sary edi­tion pack­age that includes extra doc­u­men­taries, eight lob­by cards, DefJam’s “Origins of a Hip-Hop Classic”, and oth­er assort­ed mate­r­i­al. The only prob­lem with the box set is the ENTIRE FUCKING BOXSET ITSELF.

The box says that one of the bonus­es of the anniver­sary edi­tion is that it includes the orig­i­nal 1932 Scarface that “inspired” the 1983 ver­sion. However, in an inter­view with Oliver Stone about his writ­ing of the script, he actu­al­ly states that he even though he’ll prob­a­bly lose respect as a direc­tor for say­ing such a thing, he did­n’t like the orig­i­nal.

Aside from this, there’s a DefJam doc­u­men­tary about how Scarface has influ­enced and inspired so many hip-hop artists. Yet what DePalma and Bregman were going for was a movie with an anti-crime mes­sage, made rather obvi­ous by the EVENTUAL DEATH OF SCARFACE. The mes­sage was mis­un­der­stood when the movie was first released, when they had to go to court over the rat­ing, and the mes­sage is still being mis­un­der­stood, as shown through the lyrics of rap musi­cians. After the pro­duc­ers of Scarface brought psy­chol­o­gy reports as evi­dence that the movie was­n’t glo­ri­fy­ing crime, the idiot cen­sors had to shut up and give it a sim­ple R rat­ing. And now there are tons of rap­pers using all these Scarface quotes sam­ples in their songs (Big Pun — Leatherface, DJ Clue — Cops and Robbers, etc.), TOTALLY MISSING THE POINT, and box mar­kets this as a fea­ture.

And what else comes with the box set? A mon­ey clip that’s prob­a­bly as cheap as George Costanza, with Tony’s ini­tials engraved on them. My god, how cool would some­one look if they’re at a pok­er game with their friends and they pull out a mon­ey clip that does­n’t even have their own fuck­ing ini­tials on it. I’m sure every­one would look up to some­one try­ing to imi­tate a greedy, con­fused, drug-addict­ed, friend-mur­der­ing, coke-head who even­tu­al­ly goes bat­shit insane and kills him­self. Maybe some peo­ple just iden­ti­fy with Tony Montana, a peas­ant who fails to learn any class on his way to the top and self-pro­fessed gut­ter trash.

This box set should nev­er have been released. The orig­i­nal DVD was fine. I can under­stand peo­ple try­ing to make more mon­ey out of things, but not stay­ing true to the what the direc­tor and pro­duc­ers were try­ing to do is just too sleazy.