Dear Friends,
Welcome to the Dinner Palace of Love. Each week, in this
place of low light, average expectations and high decor,
I will contemplate the thousand-year-old mysteries of human
affairs, such as:
*Who gets the melamine dinner set if we break up?
*My significant other has spent 30 hours straight playing
computer games. Should I worry?
*I found "the one" (I think). Should I call her back now,
in 10 minutes or 12?
If you're the type to ponder such questions, love can seem
an inscrutable mess. Subject to the forces of world history,
biology and pop postmodernism, we travel through life in
a hormonal haze that starts with puberty and never seems
to end. We dream of Byron and Susie Bright; we reach for
chopsticks but find only sporks.
Can I help?
I believe so. The Chinese people have lived together for
5,000 years without everyone getting a "headache" and going
extinct. It would be great if I could share that wisdom
and more with you. As my father likes to point out, though,
I am not Chinese--I'm Chinese-American. Any insights I have
were gathered the old-fashioned way: by making poor life
choices and then trying to cope with the horrifying consequences.
If you have a question, write to me at:
Suey Chow
Willamette Week
822 SW 10th Ave.
Portland, OR 97205
e-mail: sueychow@pobox.com
In the meantime, here's a question that's been of interest
to an assortment of WW staffers.
Dear Suey,
I have a terrible crush on Jason Schwartzman,
the kid who plays Max Fischer in Rushmore. He has the most
beautiful eyes, and it's so damned sexy when he sticks his
gum to the hospital wall. I also like Keanu Reeves, Ed Harris,
Kevin Spacey, James Spader, Wesley Snipes and Michael Keaton.
I just know I'm destined to live among these gorgeous and
sensitive men, and not with the squalid, pasty-faced chumps
who hang out in my building (no offense, boys). Everyone
says I'm crazy, but I want to get started with my new life.
Do you think I should move to Hollywood?
Starstruck on Stark Street
Dear Starstruck,
I'm not going to argue with your taste in men. It's
exquisite. You have managed to find spiritual and physical
beauty in a species that tends more toward middle age and
mismatched socks. Yours is a gift to be treasured.
But understand these hard facts about the Hollywood system.
You know that most films run about 120 minutes, right? And
did you know that it can take more than 90 days to shoot
a movie? This means that out of any 24-hour period you get
roughly 70 seconds of usable footage. It also means that
in a day's other 86,330 seconds, your favorite actors are
suffering from bad hair, poor lighting, fluffed lines, vacant
facial expressions and long bouts of boredom as they wait
for grips to reset the scene.
I think that if you were to compare a Hollywood noirfest
to any random two hours from a Portland Joe's life of apartment-based
microwave cookery, Joe could come off looking like a dud.
But if you pay attention to the best 70 seconds of a person's
day, when the writing of Baudrillard suddenly comes clear
to Joe as he gazes into his lover's eyes on a Sunday afternoon
with light filtering through dusty curtains and striking
his handsome jaw, you might notice something quite fabulous
about this ordinary guy. Watch for these moments and realize
that whether you find them on the MAX, in a movie theater
or shopping for fanzines on Sunset Boulevard, all of these
moments belong to you, not to Wesley Snipes.
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Willamette Week | originally
published May 5, 1999
|
