Aug
26
Striking out in all directions
August 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Today, this morning, I embark upon a road trip.
Fingers crossed. I will sleep in four states and be home Sunday if all goes according to plan.
Aug
25
The new state motto
August 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment
“Why is pain considered such a virtue around here? It oughta be the new state motto. ‘Kick me! I love it!’”
(Dr. Joel Fleischman, Northern Exposure)
Aug
24
Andrew Francis
August 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Oh, bizarre connections.
I have been rewatching Escaflowne, in which a primary villain is English-dubbed by a very good but very adolescent boy. Out of curiosity I looked it up. It turns out ten years later he plays Dana’s gay younger brother on the L Word.
From anime to Showtime in a few easy steps.
Aug
23
August 23 Miscellany
August 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment
► To the best of my knowledge, Enfatico is a consulting agency working mostly for Dell Computers. All I care about is their sharp, simple website, whose design I am currently admiring.
► Journey to the Center of the Earth: Oh, so terrible, but the best unintentionally funny movie I’ve seen in a long time. Also: Brendan Fraser in not one but two tank tops.
► Pineapple Express, however: Surprisingly good, consistently funny, and with only a few totally awkward jokes.
► If you didn’t know the difference between a lexicon and a dictionary, neither did I until last week. A dictionary includes more contextual information, and can include expansive tangents (see Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable).
► Yesterday on the phone a customer told me, “I do not give two craps about your company.” Ma’am, in these tough economic times, please limit quantities to one. There is no need to waste.
Aug
22
Friday Night Lights
August 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Daniel Lanois’s beautiful, expressive “Sonho Dourado” (português for “golden dream”) elevates the 2004 soundtrack Friday Night Lights. All but two of the tracks are by postrock outfit Explosions in the Sky, to whom I was introduced by a fleeting college friend from the band’s homestate of Texas. I listened to the album for a long time before it occurred to me to see the movie, which a friend and I rented pretty much at my insistence one quiet weekday night at school.
In case you were wondering, the movie is terrific. It is especially resonant if you are from a small town with high-school football culture.
NBC began airing a television series based on the movie and the original book (link is to Wikipedia’s disambiguation page on the whole FNL complex) and I heard good things but was skeptical. The movie surprised me, though, so the show deserved a fair shake.
It is, in turn, a terrific show. Again, it spoke to things in me I’d long forgotten. This Pajiba guide (from their list of the 15 best television seasons of the last 20 years) does a good job describing the feeling, especially when he describes how humbling and expansive it is to realize that the golden boys of rural America have lives as complicated and messy as anyone’s.
Of course, there are flaws. Much like every show with an ensemble cast, the characters run into each other in unlikely ways that feel disingenuous sometimes. I would never, never have spontaneously spent a day with the popular kids who were mean to me, or even the ones I just didn’t think were very smart or interesting; this holds true even moreso for the kids further marginalized by sports culture. I also feel very strongly that the show puts a liberal spin into a small town where it very likely did not exist. The book’s author came in from the outside to study the town and its team culture, which gave him the distance to describe in depth a small town’s deep-seated attitudes. That distance is critical. In my own small town, I can only imagine the ostracization a student, teacher, or parent would experience if he or she stood up to the racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and xenophobic climate.
But . . . I don’t know, this almost makes me love the show more. It’s like counseling in hindsight — an attitude adjustment when I am, clearly, as intolerant of my popular classmates as they were of others who were different. There was certainly much more to each of their stories than I ever saw.
As a side note, this show has more blatant, consistent product placement than I’ve ever seen. Endorsers include Applebees, Chevrolet, and Dell. Ahhh, the American way.
You can watch every episode of Friday Night Lights on NBC’s website.
Aug
21
Fall into the Gap
August 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Just now, I noticed (and laughed a lot) that the Gap describes their “super bell jeans” as a “sophisticated silhouette.”
Take that, twirling hippies! Bellbottoms are for grown-ups now.
Aug
21
Up, down and all around
August 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
(by Charles Bukowski, copied from The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps)
i sometimes get edgy
wonder where i’m at,
miss a step or two, feel
lost.
everybody i know seems
taller
more intelligent
kinder
than i am
and
of course
not as
ugly.
but that mood never
lasts
very long.
i take a good
look around,
a straight
hard look around
and then
i know
better
but just
for a
while.
***
In recent years, Bukowski holds the title of Misogynist Poet Laureate of liberal-arts ladies nationwide. He is misogynistic, brutal, and a little amateurish. (See: his clunky, too-autobiographical novel Post Office.) That aside, though: I love Bukowski.
The poem above is one of my favorites. He captures both the fleeting moment of self-doubt and the subsequent feeling of lightness and acceptance, and he does it with mild macho grace. I wonder if his popularity among the liberal-arts crowd is a reaction to our educations in “real” poets . . . A line I heard quite a bit from my classmates in rural Illinois was, “How can it be a poem, it doesn’t rhyme!” Nonrhyming, arrhythmic, variant poetry only appeared in my public schooling through textbook segments on “outsiders” (ruralspeak for any minority, racial or cultural) and the hippie English teacher I knew in high school.
Literary opinion varies or discounts Bukowski altogether, and I can see where all of it comes from. His language is not at all polished, there isn’t much in the way of imagery or figurative language, and then of course there’s his substance abuse and wanton objectification of women. Let’s not make the man into something he’s not, though; he admits, both in his work and his journals, that he’s a pretty ignorant unqualified guy who writes in order to keep moving through his daily life of brokeness, shitty jobs, and bad relationships.
It’s this barebones necessity that resonates with me: urgency to spit out the words to explain the terrible day you have, the terrible moment when you envy someone more successful, all of the poisonous things that ever happen — pointedly when you’re to blame — and experience meager-but-critical relief as a reward.
Bukowski mostly published through the small, artisanlike Black Sparrow Press, whose paperbacks are characterized by their textured tagboard covers. They also published Wanda Coleman, a California poet who shares my birthday.
Aug
19
A shiny shirtless man
August 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment
A shiny shirtless man in the alley saw me smoking a cigarette and said, “Hey, you got an extra?”
“Sure,” I said. “I got them for free. They’re menthols.”
“That’s cool,” he said.
Aug
19
Camel Crush
August 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Friday night at Quenchers, some promoter was giving away packs of Camel Crush. That Boing Boing page brings up an interesting difference between Japan, where the cigarettes were initially run in test markets, and the United States. People here are much more likely to adhere to a single brand of cigarettes for their entire lives.
I interpret this loyalty as a sign of addiction, for better or worse. Most people end up choosing a brand of cigarettes that’s either the least expensive or the most widely available (Marlboro reds, or Pall Malls of yore). These are the same people who buy cartons at a time because they know they’ll always be smoking the same kind.
There’s another group, in which I’d place myself, of people who smoke because they like to smoke. I haven’t ever smoked regularly for more than a few months at a time, but I also like to try different cigarettes and see what’s out there. I don’t drink the same tea every day, or eat the same thing for lunch, so why would I always smoke the same cigarettes?
Aug
17
Stranger Than Fiction
August 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Professor: What’s your favorite word?
Harold: “Integer.”
Professor: Good, good, good.