Antidisingenuousmentarianism

It might just be that my head is fuzzed up with a cold lately, but John Colapinto's profile of Spike Lee (not online) wasn't particularly illuminating. Maybe it's more so if you're not a fan of his work. I tend to consider myself so, although he often has big flaws in his films, due to his need to bonk the viewer over the head with insight. Clockers is probably still my favorite, but there are a few I've missed, including The 25th Hour, which I know is one everyone loves. Maybe Colapinto shouldn't be trying to convince people that Summer of Sam is a really good movie, for example. It's an interesting movie, but the acting is horrendous and the film as a whole feels like no one's minding the store. Mostly, though, I don't get the point of the profile? Spike Lee is mellowing? A little bit. Spike Lee has a new movie coming out? Yep, I know. I didn't know he was feuding with Clint Eastwood, but it's not shocking. Spike Lee says vote Obama? Not illuminating. Spike Lee is less of a jerk than you think he is? That's the real thing. It's not a convincing article at all on that point, unless the point is: "He's not being a jerk to you because you're white. He's a jerk to everyone." And he pretty much is. Great director, but the two don't have to go together. What Colapinto portrays as his impatience with less than excellence may partially be that, but it's also the fact that he's a rude little man who also happens to make some darn good movies.

Labels: New Yorker

You can call them Battle Rolls, but we all know they're sweet fruity goodness.

Labels: Target

Burkhard Bilger's boring article (har har) "The Long Dig," about tunneling machines, is not on the New Yorker's site (just blurbed), but if you can locate a copy, it's good reading and McPhee-esque. The part that made me turn down a page, though, was Martin Herrenknecht's description of why mass transit (and, therefore, tunnels) is needed:

Barcelona has more than a million and a half inhabitants, yet it's hemmed in by mountains on one side and the Mediterranean on the other. Rush-hour traffic often comes to a standstill downtown--"It's like a strap on your heart," Herrenknecht said--so the city is investing in public transportation.

"It's like a strap on your heart." Isn't that the most wonderful description of the frustrations of traffic? Not that speed is necessary, but motion helps. Otherwise one feels, indeed, restrained in crucial parts. My recent visit to Kroger made me feel that way. All pained and angry and hating humanity again.

You should also perhaps read Nancy Franklin's brief piece on the two political conventions, which is really about cable news versus network news, but is fairly silly. When you talk about the gravitas of the network folks and don't pair it with Charlie Gibson's fucking ode to the wonders of the balloon drop, you're kind of missing things. She says, of Chris Matthews and Keith Olberman and Joe Scarborough, that "you think these guys are going to burn the house down." And I, too, prefer PBS's coverage of the endless speeches, but maybe the house could stand to get a bit singed.

Labels: New Yorker

Dan Radcliffe has heard of the past. It make him a genius. Really, when my copy of Details arrives, picked from a small array of choices among which it seemed like the best, I should just take it straight to the recycling bin, but I am compelled nonetheless to see if there's new information contained therein. There is also an article on Terrelle Pryor that mentions how fast he drives (fast) but seems to think it's okay because, you know, he has awesome reflexes. Also, did you know he can jump over people? Well, no one in this state has ever seen that.

Labels: bad magazines

Because obviously the government shouldn't be in the business of nonessential services like maintaining roads. People have feet, don't they? They can walk places. Also, I'm pretty sure we could save a lot of money on the police department by just handing out guns...

Labels: ABH, opining

So it has been a little while since finding out about David Foster Wallace's suicide, and, while I've made a concerted effort not to think about it too much, being on a listserv devoted to the man himself makes it rather difficult to avoid completely. And also we did manage to get all moved and such, leaving less to be done and more time for thoughts. This article in Salon is the last thing I read, and it made me really tremendously sad again, but in a less selfish assholey way. I still don't understand it at all. I don't understand wanting to be out of this world. When I was in my very early years of high school I thought I felt that way, but it was an illusion and a brief one, thankfully. But what bothers me so particularly much about this Wallace thing is that the whole damn book is about how AA works, which is by setting small and achievable goals, by really committing to taking it one day at a time, and the book says, I think, sort of, that it does work, even if you can talk yourself out of thinking it does. That it's a way of dealing with the world that, if you do it, works and helps, and perhaps not just for addiction but for everything. It is probably a stupid and prejudiced misconception to think that you can use it to overcome clinical depression, but it does sort of work for things like obsessive-compulsive disorder and posttraumatic stress syndrome. Baby steps. I tend to think if you approach life this way, breaking down big problems into little things that can be done to attack them and make them smaller and more manageable, that you can do and fight and beat anything. The idea that it might not work after all is a very difficult one to encounter, one that kind of throws my whole philosophy on its fucking ear, and so the only way to move on is to presume that he failed in some way.

Anyway, I'm trying to do a better job of appreciating all the people I love and tell them that I love them. I haven't told them that they'd better damn well stick around, but they should know that. It's implied.

Labels: DFW

Of all the things I have read on Sarah Palin, I think George Saunders's "My Gal" is the tops. This paragraph particularly:

Now, let us discuss the Élites. There are two kinds of folks: Élites and Regulars. Why people love Sarah Palin is, she is a Regular. That is also why they love me. She did not go to some Élite Ivy League college, which I also did not. Her and me, actually, did not go to the very same Ivy League school. Although she is younger than me, so therefore she didn’t go there slightly earlier than I didn’t go there. But, had I been younger, we possibly could have not graduated in the exact same class. That would have been fun. Sarah Palin is hot. Hot for a politician. Or someone you just see in a store. But, happily, I did not go to college at all, having not finished high school, due to I killed a man. But had I gone to college, trust me, it would not have been some Ivy League Élite-breeding factory but, rather, a community college in danger of losing its accreditation, built right on a fault zone, riddled with asbestos, and also, the crack-addicted professors are all dyslexic.

This is, of course, where we're going if we continue to devalue education. Law school at Costco, anyone?

Labels: New Yorker

It's amazing how much wasted time and exasperation one can put up with in the process of establishing a connection to phone, television, and internet that is not run by Charter Communications. And I must say that, incompetent in their own way as AT&T/Bellsouth is, every person I talked to on the phone, even those who put me on hold for forty-five minutes while talking to billing so that they could correct the completely mistaken address they'd applied to my account, or had communication with in person was incredibly nice and polite and at least attempted to be genuinely helpful. So I guess that's a positive. Anyway. Internets. It exists for real again in this house, meaning blogging be back on. Maybe a little this weekend. Normalcy returns.

Labels: bidness

This one has been longer than I planned and may be longer a while yet. Hooking up DSL apparently more complicated than expected. Thanks be to whatever for open networks in the neighborhood, although they are slow, and I don't want to take too much advantage. Back at some point, I promise.

Labels: bidness

I had hoped to leave you with a YouTube version of the Pizza Hut shocko-lat donk-airs ad, to annoy your senses for days while I am away, but that plan has failed. Anyway, I'm moving (across town) tomorrow. No internet for some days. I'll be back. I'm sure you have other blogs to keep you busy.

Labels: life

Alice Munro's "Face" is written from a male perspective, kind of unusual for her, but it doesn't change the total Munroness of the thing. You should read it, as you should read all of hers.

Also, James Wood has very smart things to say in passing about Marilynne Robinson, whom I haven't read but perhaps should. He writes of her perspective on modern moralizing:

But Robinson is illiberal and unfashionably fierce in her devotion to this Protestant tradition; she is voluble in defense of silence. She loathes the complacent idleness whereby contemporary Americans dismiss Puritanism and turn John Calvin, its great proponent, into an obscure, moralizing bigot: “We are forever drawing up indictments against the past, then refusing to let it testify in its own behalf—it is so very guilty, after all. Such attention as we give to it is usually vindictive and incurious and therefore incompetent.” We flinch from Puritanism because it placed sin at the center of life, but then, as she tartly reminds us, “Americans never think of themselves as sharing fully in the human condition, and therefore beset as all humankind is beset.” Calvin believed in our “total depravity,” our utter fallenness, but this was not necessarily a cruel condemnation. “The belief that we are all sinners gives us excellent grounds for forgiveness and self-forgiveness, and is kindlier than any expectation that we might be saints, even while it affirms the standards all of us fail to attain,” Robinson writes in her essay “Puritans and Prigs.” Nowadays, she argues, educated Americans are prigs, not Puritans, quick to pour judgment on anyone who fails to toe the right political line. Soft moralizing has replaced hard moralizing, but at least those old hard moralists admitted to being moralists.

This is a good reminder. The quick negation of great literature because it contains uncomfortable ideas is a foolish step, and one that certainly is taken often enough in UGA's English Department. Jane Austen? Wrote about the system from within and about the economics of marriage but didn't dwell enough on oppression or methods to get out from under it. Milton? Big sexist in that one of his major characters is a flawed woman. Spenser? Whoo. Issues. And so on and so forth. Throw it all out and you lose the words.

Labels: New Yorker

Well, so no doubt you know by now that David Foster Wallace hanged himself a few days ago. I've pretty much been trying to pretend it didn't happen, but occasionally it's inescapable, and my inbox has filled up with many a remembrance and thought on the listserv I subscribe to. Mostly, I'm angry and I think he's an asshole. If you want to lose control of your legacy and be grouped with the depressed or the Moodys, if you want to be held up as that kind of writer, if you want to be a tragic fucking figure, then good job. I do feel tremendously sorry and sad for his friends and family. But I wish he had been able to endure. Perhaps I have been watching too much Joss Whedon-written television lately or maybe it's that Willa Cather has been on my mind, but it is your duty to stick around. Whether or not you believe in god (and it certainly seems that Wallace did, in some way), it's not really supposed to be your decision, and that can be just as much the result of societal forces as of feeling your body is a temple. It is a profoundly inconsiderate thing to do, to off yourself, leaving everyone else to clean up the mess and feel these horrible feelings, and it is doubly worse by the fact that it's the man who wrote this commencement speech, which is about nothing more than being considerate of your fellow man:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

It's not fair at all on my part to point out and be hurt by his failure, but so be it. I'll try to stop being unfair at some point, but I'm not particularly good at this grief thing. I've been very lucky, and even the fact that it's a writer and not a friend that I'm mourning is indicative of that luckiness. The first thing I told myself, after seeing the news, was "At least you didn't really know him." Met him once. Exchanged a few letters. Felt the kind of personal, warm connection many people did. But he wasn't my friend, and he wasn't my teacher, and I suppose, if we're going to get into bargaining, that I might rather he have done this than a person who is in my life in a more concrete way. Still, no more books, which is the most selfish way I can react but is really what it comes down to. No more of that fine voice. Let's do some Tennyson and be done with it: "In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er, / like coarsest clothes against the cold: / but that large grief which these enfold / is given in outline and no more."

Labels: death

Soup heated by eternal flames.

Labels: patriotism

This plan to "strengthen" (ha ha ha) school boards seems quite dangerous to me, despite its sensible recommendations in some areas. That is, I'm not really sure that the state has shown much concern for the welfare of its schools, so giving it greater control over the boards that run them strikes me as odd.

Labels: ABH, opining

Steve Coll's piece on General Petraeus and, by extension, the surge (I still feel ridiculous typing that word) is worth the read, not least because it contains strong hints that the author thinks Petraeus has political ambitions, and it certainly does seem he's the kind of Rockefeller Republican the party may yet return to nominating. The parallels between him and Obama are likewise interesting: both of them are data gatherers, relentless analyzers, those who sit back quietly and listen, then decide. This, however, is the creepiest part of the article, even more so than Petraeus's walking around sans helmet in dangerous areas, as if daring someone to kill him:

Petraeus is a professional briefer, and with a PowerPoint slide before him he will slip into a salesman’s rapid-fire patter. He illustrates his remarks with a laser pointer; he will swirl a bright dot of emerald light around a particular sentence fragment until a listener risks succumbing to hypnosis. Petraeus and his staff will discuss at length the shading of colors on a slide, or the direction of arrows depicting causality. When I asked, in a skeptical tone, about this passionate use of PowerPoint, the General responded in the staccato of the medium: “It’s how you communicate big ideas—to communicate them effectively.”

PowerPoint has its uses, but a passionate user of it is someone who is trying to sell you something (more than most people), and you should be wary of him or her. I'm sure nuance exists in PowerPoint, as well as in Gen. Petraeus's head, but it's not necessarily the color everything is painted in.

It's also not the shade of the world in which Alec Baldwin lives, but that world is at least interestingly crazy. Ian Parker manages to show Baldwin living in Whitmanian "do I contradict myself, very well I contradict myself" glory--that is, it feels like a hack job, but it doesn't quite end up that way. Rather, it tells us why we like Baldwin, and it shows what a difficult person he is to be close to, unless you take him with quite a bit of salt. He's also very amusing, both intentionally and un-:

Alec Baldwin does not regard himself as unusually volatile—one wonders if his verbal facility has sometimes stood in the path of introspection—but he acknowledges that he used to have a sunnier self. His memory is that it survived until the end of the decade: “Pre-1990, I was just candy canes and lollipops and ice-cream cones and unicorns; I was happy-go-lucky!” (This timing is challenged by an interview that he gave in 1990, when, looking back at recent years, he said, “I was Mr. Telephone Thrower” and “My whole life was agony.”)

There's one weird misstep in the article, though, right here:

(The writers mine Baldwin’s off-duty mimicry for their scripts; in a virtuosic scene last year, for instance, during a role-playing therapy session with Tracy Jordan, the troubled comedian played by Tracy Morgan, Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy drew five characters out of the air—three African-American accents, one Hispanic, one Wasp—in little more than a minute.)

That bit was one of the more amazing and amusing things on television last year, but Parker seems to imply it's because Donaghy's accents are good and accurate, whereas the scene works and is funny because they're not. It's a parody of multiethnic portrayals in one-man plays. And the only reason it works as a bit of therapy is because Tracy Jordan is an idiot, as is Donaghy in many ways. Almost everyone on 30 Rock is an idiot of some sort. It's what makes it a good show. Shows with a bunch of smart people usually end up in drama, while shows with people who think they are much smarter than they are make for beautiful comedy.

Labels: New Yorker

This plan to use sheep to control kudzu and other invasive plants is wonderful. Cheap, environmentally friendly, effective (presumably), and feeding a resource for milk, wool, and meat.

Also, you should read this excellent short piece on the city of Jefferson's plans to build a new reservoir. If you care about sensible water policy, that is...

The problem with promoting yourself as a medical corridor is that it kind of screws attempts at being a walkable, self-sufficient neighborhood.

Finally, if you missed Demarcus Dobbs's Q&A in the Red and Black yesterday, please to go read. Or just check out this gem:

RB: You and Knowshon are pretty good friends, right?
DD: Knowshon's a really good friend, we're real good friends, we're best friends. We hit it off our redshirt freshmen year. We lived right down the hall from each other. We actually got two ferrets together, raised them together and everything like that and now he has a little dog. The ferrets are back home at my house. We're bowling partners, so we bowl a lot together.

RB: What are the ferrets' names?
DD: We actually named them D-Money and K-Soulja. K-Soulja came about when "Soulja Boy" was actually being played during the games and everything. (Moreno) got a Superman cape from one of the fans so I thought it was only fitting to name it K-Soulja.

Labels: Flagpole, opining, Red and Black

Peter Boyer writes of the approach taken by both Republicans and, this time around, Democrats in the presidential race to winning the religious voter, and it's a nice, thorough article, full of interesting facts ("nearly a quarter [of Americans] have said that the attacks of September 11, 2001, are prophesied in the Bible"). I remain uncomfortable with the intersection of religion and politics, no matter how genuine and smooth Obama seems to be with it, and no matter how much it helps in winning elections, and also no matter how much it puts me at odds with my fellow citizens. This part of the article touched more nerves than others:

Obama addressed this problem in a remarkable speech on June 28, 2006, at a gathering of the Christian-left group Call to Renewal, in Washington, in which he offered a frank critique of liberal queasiness regarding faith. “There are some liberals,” Obama said, “who dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical, or thinking that the very word ‘Christian’ describes one’s political opponents, not people of faith.”

Echoing the themes of Deal Hudson’s 1998 Catholic-voter report, Obama said, “The single biggest gap in party affiliation among white Americans today is not between men and women, or those who reside in so-called red states and those who reside in blue, but between those who attend church regularly and those who don’t.” He told secularists that they “are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square,” and suggested that “a sense of proportion should also guide those who police the boundaries between church and state.”

He went on, “Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation—context matters. It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase ‘under God.’ I didn’t. Having voluntary student prayer groups use school property to meet should not be a threat, any more than its use by the High School Republicans should threaten Democrats.”

It's not that he's wrong, exactly, but it's also a difficult area in which to give quarter, and feeding the ideas of the Christian Right that they're being oppressed in the practice of their religion--when the members of Congress still feel the need to meet on the steps and yell out the "under God" bit of the pledge with vigor, as though hoping to catch His ear by volume--is dangerous. Again, Obama's not doing that, exactly. He's talking about being reasonable, kind of one of his big appeals, but telling people to chill out about the Pledge of Allegiance kind of bugs me. Even without the "under God" bit--and that bit is a problem for some kids--the whole mass recitation of allegiance to the symbol of the country has always struck me as creepy, probably because I went to a liberal communist school where we didn't do anything of the sort. Anyway, I'm still a big fan of the guy, and it's true that these sorts of statements will mostly only win him votes--it's not quite enough to make me go third party--but I also have to assume that he means the things he says, and occasionally they make me slightly less enthusiastic.

Labels: New Yorker

Million Dollar Ideas: Jared thinks that if some entrepreneur were to put English subtitles on one of the Spanish channels, it would increase his viewership many times over. It's true. Often, something looks intriguing, and sometimes we watch anyway, with our extremely limited Spanish, but subtitles could be sold as educational in both directions and it makes me, whitey whitey Anglo, less likely to flip the channel.

Labels: Spanish TV

Arrest: On Aug. 29, deputy Kip Thomas was dispatched to Wal-Mart to bring a shoplifting suspect to jail. The woman, Billie Mae Duke, 55, of Oak Park Court, Athens, was seen placing two DVD movies - Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 - and a pack of ground sirloin into a purse.

It sounds like kind of an awesome evening she had planned, though.

Assault: On Aug. 27, deputy Joshua Fowler was dispatched to the Kwik Shell Station on U.S. Highway 29, Hull, where an 18-year-old Lavonia woman said she was at the store when she saw a Hull man and his wife. She and the man exchanged some words over a prior incident and she said the man threw what she thought was a rock that hit her on the side of her head. Fowler questioned the man, who said he threw a piece of a Slim Jim, but he didn't think he hit her.

Assault with a deadly meat stick.

Damage: On Aug. 31, deputy Jason Luke spoke with an Oak Bend Drive, Hull, man, who said his ex-girlfriend came to this home and etched some profane words into his front door. He said she later sent him a text message saying "Sorry about the door. I was drunk."

Oconee. Madison.

Labels: police blotter

Not in the New Yorker, but in the Sunday Times (the English version), for once. Thank you, Chris Onstad, for pointing the way to the wonders of A. A. Gill, whom I've read a few things by before, I think, but never quite bowed at the feet of. Here is his piece on the Republican convention, which reads like blog writing raised to its apotheosis. Read this paragraph, at very least:

Sarah Palin is making the keynote speech. She has flown in from Alaska with her family. The announcement that this obscure governor is going to be the vice-presidential nominee has propelled the convention into the biggest, kitschest reality show in the world. The relations and the speculation about paternity, maternity, fecundity, mendacity and the gestation period for Eskimos has led to a Gustav of schadenfreude that has overwhelmed the shallow blogs on the web. Sarah’s womb is the black hole into which the best laid plans of the Republican party have disappeared.

A Gustav of schadenfreude. What a phrase. Jared said what makes it great is that no one will know what it means in a year. Half the people who read it won't know what it means right now. They'll skim right over that beautiful and ballsy little metaphor. Please, please. Read the rest. Especially if you need a sort of mental colonic after watching too much convention coverage, what with Charlie Gibson nattering on about his balloon fetish.

Labels: politics, prose

Grub Notes on the new Cozy Yum Yum (interesting) and on some of what, exactly, the job entails.

Edit: Well, um, never mind. It was there in the morning, but apparently they ran out of space in the print edition, so they also removed it from the website and it'll run next week. Arg.

Labels: food, writing

It's been a little while since I effed an o, but here we go. I knew I wanted to knit something for my friend Chris because he brought me back beautiful alpaca wool from Peru (not used below; it's in shades of brown) and just for being awesome and things, but it took me a little while to figure out what. Illusion knitting seemed like a perfect idea, being cooler than regular knitting. And once I saw this pattern with a hidden Greek key, well, it had to be done. It's kind of manly, as well as paying homage to his family's origins. So here it is more flat, looking just kind of stripey.


And here it is at the angle where the pattern becomes clear.

Yarn is Knit Picks Wool of the Andes, which was delivered to my door with absolutely no trouble.

Labels: knitting

John Updike's review of a biography of Max Factor is fascinating enough, but what you really need to check out is the photograph that ran full-page alongside it (at the same link), of Factor's "beauty calibrator." It looks like a medieval torture device or something out of H. R. Geiger's mind. And this description of how it worked is not sans creepiness. That said, the copy for this t-shirt that features a picture of it is something else. Um, calibration does not prove causation?

Labels: New Yorker

It's true. It's hard to create a master race and a strong fatherland without procreating more. Thanks for the tip!

And Carl Jordan is bringing up a mayoral pay hike once more. I'm for it in theory, and it's not as though the numbers being pitched are out of line with what mayors with similar duties in comparably sized towns make, but $90,000 still seems like a lot of money to me, especially considering most salaries or paychecks in Athens. There's no question it should be recognized as a full-time position, and I doubt anyone's going to get into it for the money (there have to be easier, less-headachey ways if you're the kind of person who's supposedly qualified to make that kind of cash), but, yeah... In a time of tight budgets, in a county with a serious poverty problem, how are you going to argue that $45,000 isn't an adequate salary for a public service position?

Labels: ABH, opining

Why I am still watching Charmed. Please, feast your eyes upon this YouTube tribute to an episode highlighted by the genius directorial work of Ms. Shannen Doherty (doves!). Did I mention it's set in the Old West?

Labels: Charmed

Okay, so y'all already know I don't give a shit about handbags. I carry one because it's the most convenient way to tote my stuff around, but it came from Kohl's and it probably cost $15. Still, this profile of Marc Jacobs in the style issue of the New Yorker is interesting in the way it portrays the philosophy of The Devil Wears Prada: if you look good, you feel good.

Jacobs is well aware that he has shapeshifted from a withdrawn schlump in eyeglasses into something . . . special. “Somewhere along this nutrition-gym thing, I started to develop a sense of, I don’t know, a sense of confidence,” he said. For Bruce Banner, it was gamma rays; for Marc Jacobs, it was free weights. He went on, “All of a sudden, before I knew it, I started to say, Gee, I’m really happy with the work we’ve been doing. I’m really happy with the house I live in. I’m really happy with the way I look when I look at myself in the mirror. I spend hours in the bathroom now. I used to spend five minutes! But I like taking a shower. I like shampooing my hair. I like putting on moisturizer. I like wearing jewelry. All of these things I used to think, That’s not for me. I’m on the floor picking up pins or I’m sketching all day, what does it matter what I look like? And then I discovered, you know what? It does matter. It makes me feel good. I get it! I went for a manicure and a pedicure this morning, and I understand when I look at my hands and they’re not, like, scabby and bleeding—it’s great!” He has made his home a museum and his body a work of art beautiful enough to reside there.

Sure, spending five minutes getting ready might mean you hate yourself, but it might also mean you're focused on something outside yourself, something Jacobs seems to have problems doing.

He went to France for the first time at seventeen, and “cried like a baby” on the plane home, because he felt so sure that he was meant to be a Parisian. “Living with my grandmother, I just kind of grew up feeling like I’m not going to be obliged to spend Thanksgiving with a bunch of people I didn’t like—or who didn’t like me! I shouldn’t do anything, or shouldn’t feel anything. I either do feel or I don’t feel. I’m not going to should feel. Whether we’re talking about contemporary art or we’re talking about family, pretending that I feel something I don’t feel doesn’t really achieve anything. People say, What if something happened to one of them? Well, if that happens and I regret that, that’ll be the way it is. But right now it’s not something I’m regretting, so I can’t act on that.” When Jacobs says that people should be shameless, he is talking about something more than exhibitionism. He seeks a kind of relentless authenticity.

Relentlessness is something that can be positive. Likewise for authenticity. But combining the two feels wrong to me. Pretending something you don't feel achieves tons of things, not only good family relationships, but good relationships with lots of people. It means you don't go around creating conflict and getting in fights. It doesn't mean you have to fake your life or your personality or anything of the sort. What it means is that you have a grasp of those outside your head--their needs, their wants, their feelings, etc. I'm not saying anything about Jacobs as a designer (he has interesting influences, at very least), but as a person he could maybe use more shame, less shamelessness.

Labels: New Yorker

I know where your mind was when you wrote on the UPS Leader Board after the 4 p.m. game yesterday that Rosario Dawson had scored the winning touchdown. Believe me, I'm sure she looks really hot in football pants, and we should all agitate for her to be more involved with the NFL. But, sadly, it was Dante Rosario, who is not only not Rosario Dawson but, as a side effect of that, also a dude. Next week, Carla Gugino kicks a field goal to ice it.

Labels: TV

Hole in the Wall is a bit like Wipe-Out only louder and with no chances (yet) to say "balls." While the amazingly simple premise somewhat explains its appeal, the amount of yelling (both on the part of the live audience and then on the part of that guy who used to be on the Guinness Book of World Records show on FOX and then also Brooke Burns) makes it fairly difficult for me to watch. To be followed on the schedule by Ow, My Balls!

Labels: TV

I'm not necessarily opposed to zero-based budgeting, but I'm also not sure it either a) would serve as "some hedge against tax increases" or b) should. Again, I'm not saying there's no waste in government offices--there is waste in all offices--but the ability to cover for six months without a position does not mean that position isn't necessary, and, clearly, the state probably isn't going to start giving local governments any more money any time soon, which most likely will lead to local tax increases. Justification for expenditures should always be made, but implementing procedures supposed to lead to that justification often just means more hoops to jump through and considerably less efficiency rather than more. I'm not sure how you balance the goal (efficiency) with the reality.

Labels: ABH, opining

I got to write about the new album from The Game, but it's a fairly joyless affair for the most part. I do get to compare him to Brian Wilson, though, perhaps a new device.

Labels: music, writing

I was going to point out that not all that many people give a shit about hockey anyway, but then I saw the number-one google result for "hockey mom." Can we keep it that way?

Labels: Sarah Palin

Team Ramsey provides a photoset of our lunch at Cozy Yum Yum. Some yum. Some confusion.

Labels: food

An explanation on that Sims and Maxwell vote: it was for the same reason Carl Jordan voted against just turning off some of the streetlights, unbending principle, just in the opposite direction. That said, I'm still kind of surprised we didn't hear more about freezing positions temporarily earlier. It's not all that bad a situation compared to the one the university is in. In other words, temporary freezes of a few positions are a big improvement over permanent freezes of pretty much all positions.

Labels: ABH, opining

Thank you, Kmart. Otherwise the existence of John Deere fruit snacks would not have been known by me. The shapes are: tractor, sun, barn, Gator, pig, and some kind of bulldozer-looking thing. They taste pretty good.

Labels: food

Wait. Harry Sims opposed not turning off streetlights? Too much fun talking about it?

Labels: ABH, opining

1) Hamlet 2: Okay, so just because I don't think the full movie is total genius doesn't mean I don't think Steve Coogan's performance is. I mean, he's even pretty great in Night at the Museum. Nor have I seen all of writer/director Andrew Fleming's work, but the movie does bear some small resemblance to Dick (albeit with a far more manic performance at its core). I do think that Mike is right to point out that one of the key sentiments in the movie is that enthusiasm trumps talent, and it's one that appears in Dick as well, less explicitly. The characters Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst play are not particularly bright girls, but they manage to take down Nixon. Anyway, I wouldn't want anyone to go to the movie expecting true, life-changing cinema, but I wouldn't mind if someone went to the movie. We shared the theater with a maximum of four other people, two of whom kept walking in and out, which is fairly sad for a 7:45 showing, even if it was on a Sunday on a holiday weekend. Really, I should point out that not only is Coogan's pathetic drama teacher on rollerskates, but he also falls down a lot, both when drunk and when sober. An extended, sad montage of his trip to school, complete with many a fall, was the point when I realized Milk Duds are a poor choice for a comedy, as helpless laughter leads to sudden inhaling, and it would be quite easy to choke to death as a consequence. It's also a little bit embarrassing to laugh as hard as I did in an almost-empty theater, but I could not stop myself in many, many parts.

2) Pineapple Express: Sometimes I think the best thing Judd Apatow ever did was discover Seth Rogen. I didn't really laugh as hard in this as I did in Hamlet 2, but I also felt happy and amused the entire time. That is, it's just differently paced, and it's a significantly better film, although it, too, has its sloppiness. Still, I could watch Franco and Rogen interact for several more hours, and no doubt I will get to whenever the DVD comes out. This kind of "dudes shooting the shit" stuff is also what David Gordon Green is absolutely best at--the scenes of All the Real Girls that consist of just that are the real reason to watch that movie (you could skip the rest). In a completely opposite theatrical experience to the one above, the room was packed at 9:45, and I thought it quite possible that the row of college students next to us, who talked loudly during the previews, called their friends, stood up and chatted with other people entering the theater, and eventually asked if we could move down a couple of seats, might ruin the movie, but they mostly shut up and they didn't laugh through all the jokes, and, basically, the movie is strong enough to survive it. Plus, much like Superbad, it has really nice, heartfelt things to say about friendship. Yes, the end goes on too long, but the final diner scene redeems it. Also, James Franco crying while eating a hamburger might be my favorite small moment in the whole movie.

Labels: movies

George Packer's "Letter from Rangoon: Drowning," from the August 25 issue of the New Yorker, asks in its subtitle "Can the Burmese people rescue themselves?" and, sure, it's about Burma--lots and lots of pages about Burma--but the article also has a thin layer of double meaning, most clearly at its end:

On April 29th, the Burmese government announced that rain showers, with winds of forty-five miles an hour, were approaching the southern coast, from the Bay of Bengal. The population never learned what was coming until Nargis, a Category 4 cyclone, made landfall on May 2nd, with winds three times as strong. Nargis raged all night, and the storm surge drowned much of the Irrawaddy Delta in twelve feet of water. Whole villages vanished. Families tried to survive by climbing palm trees in the darkness and holding on until the morning; afterward, the corpses of parents and children were found with their wrists lashed to one another. At least a hundred and thirty thousand people died, making Nargis the worst natural disaster in Burma’s history.

In Rangoon, a computer programmer watched the storm from the seventh floor of a building in Chinatown that swayed in the wind. Satellite dishes and water tanks flew off rooftops; boats blew back and forth across the river. In the morning, he went out with his son and found a city that had lost most of its great old trees. For the next two or three days, there was scarcely any government presence on the streets. Citizens were trying to remove the trees blocking the roads with handsaws. No news was coming in from the devastated delta. It was as if the government had ceased to exist.

“I realized we must do this ourselves,” the programmer said. His cell phone was still working, and he called friends in Upper Burma, asking them to send down bags of rice. By the fifth day, he and his friends in Rangoon had organized themselves into an emergency-relief team, bringing supplies to refugees who had gathered in makeshift camps at schools and monasteries. At one site, the first evidence of civil authority appeared in the form of two policemen, who demanded to know what the programmer and his friends were doing. A monk shouted at the officers, “This is the job you should be doing!” The policemen backed away before the refugees could turn into a mob.

Is George Packer saying the government's lack of responsiveness to Katrina is what really changed the swing of politics in this country? If the article hadn't run when it did, the thought might not have occurred so strongly, but, at very least, there's certainly a parallel of sorts between the current U.S. government and the Burmese government, with both of them seeking mostly to preserve themselves and their friends, at the cost of the people they're supposed to be governing; both of them relying on a silly interpretation of numbers (in one case, numerology; in the other, trickle-down economics) to make decisions; both of them stubbornly shut off from the world around. There are, obviously, plenty of differences too, but don't tell me Packer doesn't know what he's doing here.

Labels: New Yorker

Hmm, Brian Wilson has a new record, and it's pretty good, but it's not as good as it should be, considering that he's Brian freakin' Wilson.

Labels: music, writing

For god's sake, please decide in favor of bus ads. It's not as though the buses are currently advertising-free on the interior. It's just that that advertising is for governmental programs and notifications. The exterior wouldn't be particularly harmed either.

Labels: ABH, opining

It didn't start off too auspiciously, when I stepped in a hole in the grassy bit between the sidewalk and the road getting out of the car to hit up a yard sale on N. Highland in Atlanta. A deep hole. A hole that made me quite thankful I have apparently very flexible ankles. Anyway, see? The foot and all attached to it is just fine, perhaps a tiny bit swollen on the outside at the back. In many ways, I'm happy I'm the one who stepped in the damn hole, despite the unpleasantness of the whole experience (being treated as though I were some sort of lawsuit-happy faker by the horrible woman who owned the house/yard sale; no admission of responsibility, unsurprisingly, but also no "I'm so sorry you injured yourself"--i.e., no admission of humanity), considering that I do have flexy joints and also health insurance. Whew.

Anyway, apparently the universe is in some sort of good mood toward my feet, as I also snagged these Via Spiga boots for $5.

This embroidered thingie of deer has nothing to do with feet, but I also bought it, unable to resist its charms.


What else in Atlanta? An adventure to an Indo-Pakistani restaurant, located way the eff out, in which we were determined to get some damn kabobs and waited in the empty dining room, with no one acknowledging our presence, for literally an hour. The discovery of Elizabeth Zimmerman, author of sparklingly blunt prose and inspiration (although she is undeniably crazy). A trip to Youngblood Gallery, which happened to be hosting a Craft magazine shindig in which very simple weaving was taught, and I was made to pose for a picture holding the magazine (Jared's in this issue, hence the photo, but he wasn't there). Then we returned home and I unearthed the fruits of my labor some months ago. Potatoes!

Labels: life

I'm not saying Hamlet 2 doesn't have some very good things to say about art, but I also think Mike is overstating things a bit. How do we know the play within the movie is any good? Well, because the movie says it is. But it's in the movie's interest to say so. I enjoyed the very few scenes from it we get to see, but there is certainly something missing. I do not accept something as a triumph from hearing it is a triumph.

Now, if you would like to analyze the play within the movie as an attempt to provoke a connection with the audience within the movie in much the same way that the play within Hamlet (the original) functions, that might be acceptable.

Labels: literary observations, movies