The Burrito as Big as the Ritz

All cats are grey.

2010-01-28T13:04:00.000-08:00

Last night, several of the residents were sitting around watching old Pink Panther cartoons. One of them, an autistic kid with very thick glasses, was laughing so hysterically that he could barely catch his breath. When the cackling had subsided enough for him to catch his breath I said "So you like this, huh"

He sat and stared at me, scrunching his eyes, which is what he does when he's thinking very hard about how to explain something to someone else. He finally said "That long pink cat's a jerk!" and then turned his undivided attention back to the cartoons.

It's Complicated

2010-01-17T17:06:00.000-08:00

I've been rereading Brian Boyd's flat-out brilliant book on Pale Fire and planning a longish post on that, but haven't really been able to muster the slacker energy required to follow through.

Instead, let me just take this chance to mention that no one who values their time/sanity should see It's Complicated. I was warned off the movie, but didn't heed the advice. On some level, I think I thought "Hey, you put Jim Halpert and Alec Baldwin onscreen together and something funny is bound to happen."

The movie is off-the-charts bad. And I have a long, and distinguished history of being able to sit through, and even find some joy in, very bad films. So please please please believe me when I say this was just horrible.

To its credit, though, I found myself feeling so sorry for Alec Baldwin for having to be there at all. Up until about 30 minutes into It's Complicated I had always tacitly assumed that "sympathy for Alec Baldwin" was a feeling the chemistry set in my brain, no matter how hard it tried, would never be able to conjure up.

McNulty: The classic barnacle.

2010-01-13T14:40:00.000-08:00

While watching season one of The Wire again, it occurred to me that McNulty is essentially a gritty, heavily armed, badass version of Larry David, right down to the fat, slightly more competent, buddy. This is probably part of why I love the show so much--it's the first cop show I can think of that explores the schliemel/schlamazel archetype and applies it to a neo-noir protagonist. McNulty's last scene in season one, in particular, when he's on the boat, is crying out for the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme music.

That Mersenne was a funny guy. Life of the party.

2009-12-26T11:56:00.000-08:00

Last night, upon being asked to shut off his radio, a resident unleashed a Homeric torrent of obscenities. After he'd finally calmed down and complied, I remarked to another staff that "On that kid's home planet, there are 137 different words for 'fuck' ." It occurred to me that, when making a joke in which part of the humor is derived from using an exaggeratedly large number, I usually default to "137."

I'm pretty sure this is due, in part, to the fact that I think prime numbers are inherently funny. Someone said that once--Woody Allen, Larry David, Mel Brooks-- some sharp witted Jewish guy. It naturally follows that the largest prime number must be the funniest number. So I decided to see if Wikipedia had an entry about very big prime numbers, and, as it happens, there is exactly such an entry. I quote:

It was proven by Euclid that there are infinitely many prime numbers; thus, there is always a prime greater than the largest known prime. Many mathematicians and hobbyists search for large prime numbers. There are several prizes offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for record primes.[1]

The fast Fourier transform implementation of the Lucas–Lehmer primality test for Mersenne numbers is fast compared to other known primality tests for other kinds of numbers. Due in part to this and to the historical interest in Mersenne primes, many of the largest known primes are Mersenne primes. As of June 2009[update] the nine largest known primes were Mersenne primes.[2] The last 14 record primes were Mersenne primes. Before that was a single non-Mersenne (improving the record by merely 37 digits in 1989), and 17 more Mersenne primes going back to 1952.[3]

Clearly, 137 has a very very long way to go if it ever wants to be the funniest number. As it happens, though, there is also an entry for my own pet prime number, and as it turns out, 137 is no slouch:

One hundred [and] thirty-seven is the 33rd prime number; the next is 139, with which it comprises a twin prime, and thus 137 is a Chen prime. 137 is an Eisenstein prime with no imaginary part and a real part of the form 3n − 1. It is also the fourth Stern prime. 137 is a strong prime in the sense that it is more than the arithmetic mean of its two neighboring primes.

Using two radii to divide a circle according to the golden ratio yields sectors of approximately 137° (the golden angle) and 222°.

137 is a strictly non-palindromic number and a primeval number.

Not a bad pedigree eh? Eh? A Chen prime and an Eisenstein prime and did I mention also the 4th Stern prime? Plus it's a strong prime in the sense that it is more than the arithmetic mean of its two neighboring prime. 137 is the Cousin Jeffrey of prime numbers. Don't even get me started on its primevality.

So. Yeah. It's been a pretty spectacular year, and I'm looking forward to more of the same in the next decade. I need sleep.

These fragments I have shored

2009-12-21T06:07:00.000-08:00

Found a recipe for what looks like a killer pineapple carrot cake.
The last time I was in Chicago with any kind of time to kill, I found
this place called Doc's Smoothies, which I enthusiastically recommend
if you're ever in or around Wicker Park. The smoothies were
excellent, but their pineapple carrot cake was heaven. The ambition
is to recreate that experience. Preparing food is sometimes an act of
piety to sentimental impulses.

Blundered around looking for Christmas cards too late--far, far too
late.* Bought a few, then got too tired and cranky and went home to
collapse. Dropped the cards off in a mailbox in front of the post
office on the way home from work this morning. So a few people are
getting cards that will arrive a little late. Everyone else is
getting awkward excuses the first time we talk after Christmas. And
that seems fair enough.

Bought books that I hope will be entertaining on winter days (some SJ
Perelman, some Thurber, Marion Meade's book about Dorothy Parker).
Also ordered, at long last, Left for Dead II.

It occurred to me this morning, while I was performing my traditional wintertime slapstick routine of trying to scrape the ice off of my windshield while trying to keep my footing in an icy parking lot that I actually really enjoy the first couple of times each year I have to scrape my windshield. Icy mornings are invariably calm and quiet and eerily pretty. It's the 44th time of the year, give or take, when I start to indignantly resent the obligation and curse the winter. Hell is repetition, as either Beckett or Stephen King once said. I think it was King, which is fitting, since I remember having exactly the same thought the fifth time he re-wrote the same protagonists with different names in a different book.

Waiting on English muffin. Then bed.

===========================

* I nearly put a comma after the second "far". What stopped me was that I suddenly recalled an old episode of News Radio in which Dave had just handed Lisa a letter of apology from which she looked and angrily said "There's no comma after the second 'very' in 'very, very sorry.' "

On whom a world of ills came down like snow

2009-12-19T02:51:00.000-08:00

(Written Thursday 12/17. Blogger was having issues so I'm just now posting this.)

It's been a hell of a year.

The first real snowfall fell tonight. It's very early in the morning and the sky is still eerily bright. I left work early, after finishing my paperwork, ostensibly to finally get some sleep, but instead ended up wandering around in the snow for an hour. It's beautiful at first, gray and white and glistening falling through the glare of streetlights. It's all a matter of set and setting though--in a week or so when the ice is packed on the roads and everything is a dull gray industrial sludge color and I'm trying to keep my car on the road while driving over it, the charm flies off in a hurry.

DC Berman said it best (as is so often the case):

Bad snow, bad roads, bad bridges
Could turn a once bad man, religious
If thy kingdom ever comes
You'd better run, run run run

Earlier today, before work, I gathered up five notebooks and a couple of legal pads I've used for writing fiction over the past year. I had to decide whether to keep them or throw them out. Finally, I tossed all of them into an old toy chest with pirates on it that I keep in my spare room, with the absurdly optimistic hope that someday I'll have balls enough to re-read and maybe try to fix some of the terrible things I've written.

It's been a bloodbath at work. We're losing people, and always the wrong people. The wrong people get the axe, and the wrong people get promoted. A surprising number of kids keep showing progress. More and more I attribute this to their own toughness and desire for redemption and less to any particular knack any of us have for therapeutic interactions.

Last week I ran into a clinical supervisor from the other building. We like each other, but rarely cross paths. We were walking together toward lunch (I was stuck covering an extra shift that day) and we spoke:

Him: You look uncomfortable in the sunlight.

Me: I think I may have become a vampire sometime in the last year.

Him: Or a big unusually ugly mole.

Him: Christ. You know, I never thought you'd still be here at the end of this year.

Me: Yeah. It was touch and go.

Him: Well, if you think last year sucked wait until this year gets moving. I've seen our budget, and I've seen our waiting list.

Me: Bad?

Him: Oy vey, kid. Oy vey.

Me: At least I don't have a personal life to worry about.

Him: That's the spirit. You'll do fine.

Now, after wondering through blunderland for an hour or so, I can sleep the sleep of the dead before going right back into it.

Thou art a stiff necked people.

2009-12-09T07:03:00.000-08:00

We have a new person in charge of reading and approving therapeutic documentation. I had my writeup of an interaction returned "for corrections" because, apparently, he doesn't feel kvetching (as in "resident kvetched at length") is sufficiently standard English. It's the first piece of documentation I have ever had rejected, and even though I know even Dimaggio's streak came to an end, it still gets under my skin. After fuming for a few minutes, I simply crossed out "kvetched", replaced it with "vented his spleen" and resubmitted it. This could easily escalate into a full scale battle of wills, as I have no intention of resubmitting this particular documentation replacing the offending verb with anything but a colloquialism.

How is everything else going? Well, this was enough to make me kvetch my spleen out, so how do you think everything else is, smart guy?

and damn that noise!

2009-11-28T07:46:00.000-08:00

The holiday went extremely well. We took several of the residents to a nearby church that serves Thanksgiving lunch every year, and the guys all wore nice sweaters and behaved like well mannered young men.

The Academy itself provided a second Thanksgiving dinner that evening which also went well, though since I also ended up working that night I did my best to argue against the inclusion on the menu of "anything with sugar in it", instead suggesting "Maybe a bunch of that tripto-whatever....could you also sprinkle some of that on the pies?"

Nobody received any particularly upsetting phone calls from family members which, I noted to my supervisor, actually puts them one up on a fair number of people I know.

My only complaint is, of course, that I worked too many hours and am exhausted. But, to be honest, watching this particular bunch of guys have "the best possible holiday, under the circumstances" was worth the exhaustion.

Somehow I also, mostly accidentally, caught some of the penultimate episode of Monk. I'm a casual fan at best, but some of the residents are in love with the idea that "that crazy guy can be a detective"*. Anyway, what on Monk's shopping list was poisoned is pretty obvious. My prediction, though, and if this is the way it develops it will be pretty charming, is that the skinny schlemiel detective will be the one to finally put it all together and save Monk's life.

My neighbor has finally stopped operating his leaf blower (in early winter! in Illinois!) so it should be quiet enough to sleep.

=================================

* Some day I will sit them down and tell them the astonishing tales of a balls out lunatic named Richard Nixon who ascended all the way to the Presidency and, in the process, became the most terrifying, exhilarating, beautiful, and hideous political story of the late unlamented American Century. I don't think they're ready to hear about that, though, and certainly not late at night.

Mandatory Monday morning motivational meeting.

2009-11-23T06:47:00.000-08:00

Corporate hired a motivational speaker to come and, I guess, motivate us. What would motivate me, personally, would be the prospect of some kind of time off in the near future, but since we just lost several more staff late last week that seems unlikely. Other things that might motivate me would include: a ping pong table in the break room, free exotic and semi-exotic smoothies, some old timey arcade games like Defender Stargate (because I love killin' Yllabian Space Guppies), some sort of friendly prank war with other similar facilities, or an academy softball team. What didn't motivate me very much was some guy (nice enough, admittedly) giving what was pretty clearly a standard corporate motivational speech re-purposed for bleeding heart social worker types.

This one guy I'm friend with and I arrived a little late because we had both been doing actual work with actual clients, and the first thing we both noticed was the speaker's hair, which was short and slicked, plastered really, back against his scalp with some sort of enviably powerful gel.

Me (whispered): Oh look, it's Glengarry Glen Ross.

Other guy who came in late with me (whispered less softly): No no, Patrick Bateman.

Me (slightly too loud): Glengarry Glen Bateman.

The rest of the speech was downhill. It's really neither empowering nor inspirational to sit through an awkwardly repackaged productivity presentation after working an 11 or 12 hour shift dealing with and documenting real problems. Had I not kind of awkwardly ducked out early, I suppose I would still be there.

I watched The Black Dahlia, for some reason. That wasn't a great idea.

2009-11-20T07:07:00.000-08:00

The Black Dahlia is my least favorite of James Ellroy's novels, but I still walked away with at least a cautious affection for the book. De Palma's adaptation was one of those rare film adaptations that manages to highlight a book's weaknesses so brilliantly, while squashing its charms so ruthlessly, that it actually diminished my affection for the book.

I knew going in that the film had a reputation for being as long and charmless as any February afternoon, but I didn't know that it was going to try so hard to capture the most enervating and jejune obsessions and morbidities of Ellroy's early career. De Palma seems to think that Ellroy's genius is in his ability to invent twisted, perverse scenarios and characters with fractured personalities ruled by fetishes and compulsions. Really, it's Ellroy's genius as a writer of pure prose and hardboiled dialogue that makes him so compelling. The more twisted stuff, especially in Ellroy's early work, is something the reader is willing to put up with because Ellroy is so talented. Later in his career, through experience and good editors, Ellroy learned how to show a glimpse or two of the profane without giving the game away, but in his earlier works the voyeuristic and violently sexual fixations of the writer tend to test the reader's patience.

The three most tiresome features of Ellroy's novel--the sexual obsessions, his total inability to write an interesting female character (he overcompensates by trying to make every female character outlandish and dangerous), and his reliance on bizarre conspiracies and implausible coincidences--come out loud, clear, and hideous in the film. The longer the film runs, the more it becomes apparent just how hard it is to give a damn about any of the characters.

Occasionally striking visual imagery and nostalgic nods at long lost Los Angeles can't possibly compensate for the film's weaknesses. At most, the too brief moments of stark, bleak beauty, and the aching romance of Chandler era L.A. provide a brief respite which is always interrupted by somebody doing or saying something. Any time anybody does or says something in this film, it turns into a travesty. If you strung all the pretty visual moments together while playing a Flux of the Pink Indians or Jawbreaker song, you'd have something. Show a shiny silver Volvo driving in the foreground and you'd have a hell of a nice car commercial. But then the minute Johansson or Eckhart showed up on screen and said something, you'd feel the sudden urge to buy a Saab.

It makes me think back on elements of the book I really liked--the L'homme qui rit subplot, for instance, and the character of Emmett Linscott--and wonder just how in the hell it all managed to hold together. The parts of the book I always knew were ridiculous, like Maddie Linscott passing herself off as the Dahlia, are amplified from "problematic and mildly embarrassing" to "catastrophic failures."

As so often happens in bad crime films, the violent scenes are the most boring and the plot points are unintentionally hilarious.

Hartnett is passable as Bleichert because he has the right look and attitude to pull off "neo-noir protagonist" (although he bears little if any resemblance to the awkward street tough of the novel). Scarlett Johansson is unendurable as Kay, though that isn't entirely her fault given the script she had to work with. Still, in detective stories, there is always a fine line between playing the heroine like a pulp femme or a comic book damsel, and Johansson consistently makes the worst possible choice in any given scene. Hilary Swank chews scenery as Madeline Linscott, but she's downright subtle compared to Fiona Shaw who stumbles through the role of Ramona Linscott with the nuance of a meth addled drag queen doing an impression of Bette Davis. Patrick Fischler, meanwhile, has wandered in from a Dick Tracy strip to fuck up the role of Ellis Loew beyond recognition.

I had low expectations for the movie going in, but I had no idea just how badly it was all going to get fucked up. Unlikable and uninteresting characters doing inexplicable and implausible things to advance an incoherent plot that swells to an unwatchable denouement. Given that the movie is a couple of years old and widely reviewed, I knew what I was getting into, and kvetching about it is a little like going to the Bagel Festival in beautiful Mattoon, Illinois, and complaining about all the bagels and bagel-related products. Nothing had prepared me sufficiently, though, for this wonderland of piss poor performances combined with an unendurable story.

Clem Snide

2009-11-13T07:35:00.000-08:00

A few nights ago at work, I was watching this very low functioning kid trying to remember what the hell he was doing in the hallway.

A couple of months ago, low functioning kids started to trickle in because, as it turns out, there was really no other place for the courts and case workers to send them.

The vast majority of our residents are non-violent offenders, which means that if you absolutely have to send a developmentally disabled youth who would face a pretty hellish existence at any kind of facility where he's surrounded by aggressive, physically violent kids his own age, we're about as good a choice as any.

The bad thing is, most of us aren't really trained in dealing with residents who are so low functioning they have trouble performing even the most basic tasks. A few weeks ago, I literally taught a 15 year old kid how to tie his own shoes. That said, I've injured myself three times since early summer trying to extract English muffins from my toaster, so I'm perhaps uniquely qualified to help some of these kids out. It's a kind of "learn as you teach" situation.

The nice thing about dealing with low functioning kids is that you get to see real progress, especially in the first month or so they're in residential treatment. Often their home lives were so chaotic and unsettling that just by placing them in a stable environment in which people are patient with them you can experience what feels like years worth of development in a very short time. It reminds me of what David Foster Wallace said once about how much he enjoyed the time he spent teaching basic grammar to community college kids, because the progress was so immediate and measurable.

So a few nights ago, I was watching a very low functioning kid trying to remember what the hell he was doing in the hallway. This particular kid does this pretty frequently. He blunders out into the hall and then stands there for up to a minute, looking around, trying to remember what he wanted. He'll look up and down the hallway, grin vacantly at anybody he sees, and eventually remember what he wanted. Or not. Sometimes he just goes back into his room. I'm told that, whatever other progress he makes, "standing around trying to figure out what he's thinking about" is probably the way life will always present itself to this kid, so the best thing to do is just let him do it and then be as cheerful and encouraging as possible when he remembers what it was he wanted.

As he was standing there on the night in question grinning at the water fountain, I remembered the phrase "thought bubbles swell" but couldn't remember what it was from. It was days later when I finally remembered, while eating some avocado slices, that it was from a Clem Snide song, which reminded me how much I liked Clem Snide before I somehow forgot how much I liked You Were a Diamond and Ghost of Fashion before I somehow forgot about the records completely at some point.

So lately I've been listening to Clem Snide and reading that new biography of Anne Frank. Oh and watching the UK Life on Mars, which is also pretty brilliant and which I want to post about later if I have the chance.

The Exterminating Angel (Luis Bunuel, 1962)

2009-11-03T06:44:00.000-08:00

Best. Dinner party. Ever. Five stars.

Not my guiltiest pleasure by a longshot, but a guilty pleasure all the same.

2009-11-02T07:00:00.000-08:00

Hooray, Freezepop!

(Freezepop, mango and acai berry smoothies and random xkcd strips are a good way to relax on a cold November morning.)

The Spirit of the Beehive

2009-11-02T06:54:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago, my clinical supervisor recommended The Spirit of the Beehive. True to form, only two years and three clinical supervisors later, I finally took the recommendation.

In fact, I might have forgotten about the film altogether were it not for the fact that bees have been a recurring theme in my reading lately. It started when I re-read that wonderful little book Chabon wrote in which he imagined Sherlock Holmes as an old man who has retired to keep bees. Chabon wrote eloquently of bees and made a life spent as a beekeeper sound idyllic. It reminded me of a short story I read, a very long time ago (I was 10, so 23 years), about an old man who kept bees and who was also, secretly, a bee himself.* Then, finally, I was reading some short stories a friend wrote in which he alluded to the old legend that as an infant Pindar was fed honey in his crib by bees, foreshadowing his skill at spinning honeyed words into sweet, languid passages. This concatenation of apian allusions finally jogged my memory and I remembered that I'd always meant to watch this old Spanish movie in which bees and Frankenstein's monster (or his ghost, or the idea of his ghost) were important characters.

Incidentally: By the time the clinical who recommended it had left, he and I were very much at odds, so if the film turned out to be terrible I wouldn't have been awfully disappointed.

Fifteen minutes into The Spirit of the Beehive, I was already fascianted. From its palette of autumnal yellows and oranges to its exquisitely decaying architecture (Spain, 1940something, immediately after the civil war, in the first days of Franco's ascendancy), the film is visually arresting. Set against laconic imagery (fallow fields, crumbling wells, winding roads, a lazy cat with brilliant green eyes) the only lively things in Spain after the war seem to be the children and the bees. The kids live in a world of their own, largely disconnected from the complacency and ennui of their parents and teachers.

One of the children, Ana, a playful but sad little girl, becomes enraptured by James Whale's adaptation of Frankenstein and comes to believe that a deserter from the routed Republican army is the spirit of the monster from the film. Her sister has told her a ghost story about the monster's ghost living on abandoned property near their home, and Ana takes the tale to heart. Disconnected from both her parents and the other children, Ana forms a bond with the soldier, who is soon discovered and executed by the government police. In the end the strange little girl is again alone in her parents' house, invoking the spirit of the monster which she believes must still be out there, even if the soldier himself has been executed, since spirits do not have bodies and can never really be harmed.

The film is pretty short (about 90 minutes). There is very little action onscreen and nobody says too much. Two little girls live in a big, crumbling house with their parents, who don't really talk to each other. The mother writes letters to a distant lover, while the father tends to his bees. Ana watches movies and plays with her sister. Her sister isn't evil but can be cruel--she squeezes the cat until, despite its lazy good nature it claws her just to get away, and she plays mean jokes on Ana--mostly because she wants desperately to shock someone or something into lifelikeness. Ana fixates on the ghost of a movie monster because, like her parents and her sister and everyone around her, she's locked in her own private world that she wants desperately to superimpose upon the dying, decaying, outer world.

F.H. Bradley said once (I can't remember exactly how he put it) that everyone is in their own prison and that everyone, in looking for the key to their cell, only manages to confirm that they're in prison. Spirit of the Beehive is both somber and beautiful. It shows lost, isolated people who try to cope with their own private prisons. It's sad and beautiful to watch the way they try to touch each other. Despite the despondency, the film ends by holding out a slender, pale prospect of redemption. Ana has not transcended nor escaped--she remains locked in the same patterns and delusions as ever. But she still wants to connect to something outside herself, more affirming than the solemnity and cruelty and apathy that surround her, and she's still undefeated only because she keeps trying.

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* The Bee Man of Orn, a children's story by Frank Stockton

Yuppie and the Alien (The Hidden, 1987)

2009-10-31T06:55:00.000-07:00

I watched The Hidden on a portable DVD player in a particularly saturnine lounge in an isolated county hospital on the night before Halloween. By the time I had camped out in the lounge, it was already a little past 2 in the morning. I was at the hospital because one of our residents has a severe bronchial infection, and somebody had to spend the night with him. By 2 he had finally fallen asleep, so I left his bedside to go entertain myself until my relief arrived. Everything in the lounge down the hall from the kid's room was kind of yellow and pale orange and the total effect was sort of garish melancholia.

This was somehow the ideal set and setting in which to watch a movie about an alien species that takes possession of a number of Los Angelenos in the late 80s and makes them steal expensive cars (the alien is partial to Ferraris) and go on killing sprees. A young, young, very young Kyle MacLachlan stars as an alien policeman posing as an FBI agent who is tracking down the evil alien. Richard Brooks (Paul Robinette of Law&Order, the Ben Stone Era) also makes an appearance as a brash young cop already rocking the high fade that would later become Robinette's trademark. The soundtrack is chockful of late 80s IRS Records acts, including a Lords of the New Church song and a few Concrete Blonde tracks.*

The movie hits all its marks both as a movie about LA at the end of the Reagan years (car dealer snorting coke with a customer signing the papers to buy a Ferrari, record store clerk with a handgun in his cash register, and everyone from the cops to the store clerks with blow dried hair), and as a low budget horror thriller (cheesy but graphic special effects, gratuitous violence, unapologetically absurd premise). There are a few standard 80s cop movie jokes about the ridiculous weapons that are being confiscated from street gangs (a bazooka, a military grade flamethrower). In short, the film did everything I expected it to, a little better than I expected it to.

I liked the movie. It was sort of like the highly underappreciated Cousin Larry to Repo Man's Balki Bortokomous. It was perhaps the most pleasing combination of cops, guns, yuppies, space aliens, and Ferraris I've ever seen. In some more perfect world, the "cop buddy movie with aliens, Ferraris, yuppies, and guns" is not just a recognized cinematic formula but is, in fact, the 3rd most popular genre behind only "movies about valley girls in post-apocalyptic settings", and "romantic comedies about teenagers who have to band together to overthrow an alien invasion." But here, in this tragically ordinary emanation of that sublime possible world, The Hidden pretty much stands alone.

================================================

* Sadly, neither Human Switchboard nor The Surfing Brides make an appearance.

Pretending it's a whiz kid's world

2009-10-26T07:10:00.000-07:00

It is completely unsurprising that I spent 20 minutes or so after work sitting around a diner, having breakfast with a couple of coworkers. Several of us get together pretty frequently at the same diner to exchange gossip, compare notes, and kvetch about how pointless it is to even learn the names of new staff, these days, until they've worked a program for at least a month.

This morning I was sitting, picking at a bowl of oatmeal, facing a big window. I was bathed in cold sunlight, trying to ignore an irritating head cold that is likely to turn into a full blown sinus infection at some point in the near future. This older guy was talking about a kid who used to horde spoons, who had, in fact, an entire bureau drawer full of spoons one day when staff searched his room. The other guy at the table was on deck with his own anecdote that he was itching to tell, and I was in the hole, but not really paying very close attention. Say that I was half paying attention. The other half of my brain had a bit of Teenage Wildlife stuck on repeat, and was worrying about whether Bowie was being anti-Semitic when he called Gary Numan a "broken nosed mogul."

Then all at once there was silence and both my friends were looking at me expectantly. From where I was sitting, I could see several huge trees with uniformly yellow leaves. All the leaves on the ground out front that I could see were also yellow, and a couple of trees along the road outside also looked yellow. It reminded me of that scene in Love and Death where Woody Allen has his character, who has spent his entire life in rural Russia, describe the afterlife as something like "Wheat. Lots of wheat. Really really tremendous amounts of wheat."

It was pretty clear I was expected to say something, so I mumbled "Yellow. Such a yellow fall. Yellower than I can remember." Now this is a terrible thing to say when people are trying to have a conversation. You can't really affirm or deny yellow. You can't support yellow nor dissent from yellow. You can't compare this yellow to other shades of yellow you've seen....at least not in any practical sense that would keep the conversation moving forward. It's pretty much a conversation killer.

The old guy squinted at me and said "What'd you say?"

"I said 'Yellow'."

"Oh yeah? Well I say you're yellow, pardner."

Amours de la pieuvre (The Love Life of the Octopus)

2009-10-21T06:28:00.000-07:00

It's my own fault, really. I'd looked forward to watching Painleve's documentaries about the life aquatic as a means of relaxing. Indeed the short film I'm watching now, about seahorses being seahorses, is as beautiful and tranquil as half-heard Danish indie rock, which places it very high on the tranquility spectrum.

My mistake, the part that is my own fault, really, is that the first short I chose to watch was The Love Life of the Octopus. This film was precisely what I ought to have expected it to be--beautiful in a convulsive, vaguely unnerving, way.

There's nothing tranquil about watching surprisingly clever, tentacled monsters awkwardly undulate and flop around. Painleve's film about ocotpodes is, quite accidentally, the most effective adaptation of Lovecraft's oeuvre to film.

Dear Buck Martinez: Can you stand up straight, while I illuminate a few of your flaws....

2009-10-20T05:54:00.000-07:00

Buck Martinez has been terrible at every job in professional baseball he has ever had. If he were hired as a peanut vendor at Wrigley, I assume he could somehow fuck that up. As a player, as a manager, and now as an announcer, Buck Martinez has just flat out failed.

From Buck Martinez's Wikipedia entry:

Martinez made his major league debut in 1969, playing 72 games with the Kansas City Royals. Over the next few years, however, he developed the reputation of being an offensive liability, and he never appeared in more than 95 games during his time with Kansas City, through 1977.

Martinez was traded twice over the next few years, first to the Milwaukee Brewers in late 1977 and then to the Toronto Blue Jays in early 1980 after being designated for assignment. Martinez is most remembered for his time in Toronto, where he twice hit 10 home runs (in 1982 and 1983) and was regarded as a solid defensive catcher

.

As a player, his career best offensive years were two seasons of ten homers, and he was considered more/less adequate defensively. So how was he as a manager?

In 2000, Martinez was hired as Toronto's manager after Jim Fregosi's contract was not renewed. Martinez's energetic attitude was seen as the right fit for the Jays' young roster and through the first two months of the season Toronto outperformed expectations. The success, however, was short-lived as the team struggled through the remainder of the season and they finished a mediocre 80–82. He was fired 53 games into the 2002 season after posting a 20–33 record. Ironically, at the time he was fired the Blue Jays were on a three-game winning streak, having just swept the Detroit Tigers. He was then replaced by Carlos Tosca

.

Well, how does a career record of 103-118 sound? Terrible? Yeah.

None of this would be quite so irksome if Chip Caray* didn't occasionally pause from his own enfilade of solecisms to talk up his partner's impeccable baseball credentials from time to time (his partner is Buck Martinez!).

And yet somehow, stupefyingly, the thing Martinez is worst at is announcing professional baseball games. C'est incroyable!. (That's French for "Fuck the heck.")
=================================
* Hearing Chip Caray do even a few innings this postseason has made me appreciate even more how unbelievably good Steve Stone was to be able to carry Caray all those years in Chicago.

Humanizing the distance.

2009-10-19T06:24:00.000-07:00

I was called away from watching the National League Championship Series at a friend's house because of Serious Problems at work. The guy I was watching the game with, a vulpine old guy who knows every Yankees opening day lineup since before I was born, remarked "That's exactly why, when they asked me for my cell number last year, I said 'Oh, don't worry, if I need anything I'll just call you'." Driving over, it occurred to me that TBS's announcing team is to the post-season as Edward Lane was to The Thousand Nights and One Night. I mean, I'm just saying what's on everybody's mind.

When I arrived, there was a very angry kid standing in the middle of his program's television room, shouting obscenities in rapid succession. He was particularly fond of "fuck" and "fucking", which he used in bizarre sequences, sometimes using "fucking" to modify "fuck" (eg "what the fucking fuck") and if you'd just substituted "nothing" for "fucking" he could have been shrieking out Heidegger from memory at high decibels.

This sort of new staff with whom I get along pretty well was standing there trying to reason with the kid. The staff kept saying "Remember your ABC's", which is more/less exactly what he should have been saying. The "ABC's" is our slang for that ancient communication technique where one remembers to phrase everything in the form of "When you _____, it makes me feel _______, because ______." When a kid is in the middle of a meltdown it isn't going to help, and it may make him angrier, but the idea isn't to deescalate every situation at every cost so much as it is to emphasize coping skills so the kid can think about them later. Pretty much nothing shows you're pretty damn serious about a coping mechanism than standing there in front of a kid who wants to punch you in the face and urging him to use the technique anyway.

Finally, the kid yelled "When you fucking stand there, it makes me fucking want to fucking hit you in the fucking face because you're fucking ugly." The staff laughed, which was actually the right thing to do, since it broke the tension without any further escalation of violence. It took a long time and lots of both of us talking to the kid after that, but we finally convinced him to go to bed. By the time I was finished with the paperwork and requisite email notifications, the evening was already utterly and completely shot and another guy had a bootlegged copy of Inglorious Basterds, which I want to see both because I'm a BJ Novak fan and because someone who may or may not really be Bret Easton Ellis tweeted that the movie was "the first great movie of the year"*. More about that movie later, maybe, but I was pretty tickled to see Tarantino go out of his way to namecheck Le Corbeau**.

They're also gutting the mail room, which also contains a fax machine, a copy machine, and the main time clock. Apparently, they're putting in tile to make it extra slippery for winter. I found the fax machine in a conference room, and several of the mail shelving units down a hallway leading to some offices, but the copy machine has gone completely missing, which meant walking across the quad to the admin building to make copies of several of the forms. But at this point I'm just kvetching when I really need some sleep. But if I still can't find the copy machine tonight, I'm probably going to have to let somebody know.
=============================================

* This same twitter account also announced that a Miley Ray Cyrus song is its favorite song at the moment and that Joseph Gordon-Levitt has given the best performance by an actor so far this year. This both does and does not sound like Ellis, and, if it is Ellis, he may or may not be sincere. Artists of the subtle schools, etc. Though I don't think I share the affection for Miley Ray Cyrus, I was a huge fan of Joseph Gordon-Levitt in his 3rd Rock From The Sun days.

** Le Corbeau, among its other virtues, has my all time favorite parody of Pascal's Wager, which takes the form of a dialogue between an old doctor and a young doctor.

Old Doctor: Will you be joining us for Mass, then?

Young Doctor: No. I'm not religious.

OD: Oh. I should have guessed. You have the self-assurance of an atheist.

YD: You're religious, then?

OD (Dismissive): Eh. I'm cautious. I always take out insurance. It's cheap enough.

Bobby Fischer, Caissa's favorite son. (The game of the century)

2009-10-17T05:54:00.000-07:00

On October 17, 1956, Bobby Fischer, 13 years old and playing with the black pieces, defeated 26 year old American master Don Byrne (who had won the national championship just a few years earlier) with a queen sacrifice to win the Rosenwald Trophy in New York. At such a tender age, Fischer, through a combination of genius, obsession for the game, and cold blood, won the brilliancy of the century.

It's a common misconception that Byrne was completely suckered by the sacrifice. Although it's a seductive notion that Byrne so underestimated his unnervingly weird, precociously supercilious, little opponent that he blindly assumed Fischer had made a terrible blunder, the fact that Byrne saw the risk in accepting the sacrifice and played it anyway makes Fischer's nerve, and his understanding of hypermodern chess theory, even more impressive. Early in the game, Byrne moved the same bishop twice in a row, and lost tempo. Fischer pounced on the mistake, which must have seemed trivial to Byrne at the time. To try to disrupt Fischer's efforts to take advantage of Byrne's laggardly development and failure to castle his king, Byrne placed Fischer's queen in jeopardy. Fischer shrugged, moved his own bishop, and dared Byrne to take the queen. Going into the exchange, Byrne was aware that the queen sacrifice was likely to be a clusterfuck but he clung to the notion, that was about to be spectacularly discredited, that gaining a queen was worth almost any complications with regard to positional development.* Put simply, he was a master level player and thought the little kid was a sitting duck with his queen off the board. When the dust settled, Fischer had captured a rook and both Byrne's bishops, maintained his position advantage and controlled the tempo. Twenty moves or so later, Byrne was mated.

Fischer's life did not begin under happy circumstances, nor did Fischer turn out alright in the end. Geniuses don't always have happy endings. Fischer's last days were stained by bitter paranoia, appalling anti-semitism, and bouts of outright lunacy. Being good at a game, even being brilliant at a game, doesn't excuse any of this. But at the same time, nothing can take away from the audacious brilliance he displayed as a teenage prodigy. Teenage dreams, so hard to beat.

================================================

* In a game Byrne ought to have been familiar with, and which 13 year old Fischer already was familiar with, Fischer's hero, Paul Morphy, 99 years earlier, had defeated Paulsen with a similar queen sacrifice. Fischer's ability to synthesize modern chess theory with the elegance of the romantic school makes me a little giddy.

Chunnel.

2009-10-16T06:06:00.000-07:00

The most important Wikipedia entry ever.
Here's what happened:

I had a dream that I was waiting outside the historic Egyptian Theater in beautiful DeKalb, Illinois, in a sleet storm, pacing around in muddy slush, waiting to see a film called Chunnel. I was the only person there and it was almost showtime but for some reason they weren't opening the theater which was getting on my nerves because I was really eager to see the film. When I woke up, I honestly couldn't remember if there really was an action/adventure film called Chunnel (perhaps something in the Peter Hyams oeuvre) or if it was a fake film I'd seen referenced somewhere. My first thought was actually that Andy Dick had gone to see it at some point in News Radio.

Looking over the article, of the fictional films mentioned in Seinfeld, Checkmate is actually probably the one I would most like to see filmed, though Rochelle, Rochelle is, of course, the most famous.

Peter Hyams, by the way, should have his own film festival, as he is the embodiment of Gore Vidal's quip about the key to making bad but profitable films, "Shit has its own integrity." Peter Hyams is the man who made Timecop, Running Scared*, Capricorn One, The Relic, and 2010. He's worked with Crystal, Lithgow, Gould, OJ Simpson, and Telly Savalas. He wrote, produced, and directed 2010 and, by his own account, as his Wikipedia page recounts, when he went to Kubrick to see if he could get the Master's blessing to make the film:

He's one of my idols; simply one of the greatest talents that's ever walked the earth. He more or less said, 'Sure. Go do it. I don't care.'

Apparently, Hyams found these words encouraging, and God bless him for it. Here is a man who could consider "Whatever's Cool With Me" one of the 20th century's great love ballads.

Anyway, Stay Tuned is a seriously entertaining flick, and if anybody could make Chunnel, Pete Hyams could make Chunnel.

=========================================

* Running Scared, in part because I saw it at such a tender age, when I was 10 (and a huge Billy Crystal fan), has always defined the cop buddy movie genre for me. It also has the distinction of being one of the ugliest movies ever shot in the city of Chicago. More than any other film, it really captured the "holy fuck, what are we even still doing here?" gestalt that marked the latter parts of the Harold Washington era.

A film I'd pay to see. But not to make. Plus I don't know how to make a film. So, here we are.

2009-10-15T05:52:00.000-07:00

Proposal for a preview for a film that will help end the anxiety of America's descent from Empire to sideshow curiosity by reminding audiences that, Christ-like, my generation already totally felt this angst a long long time ago, when the decline became inevitable and we were all just waiting for the end of the world, really. The film will be called: Torn Tretorns, Wet Flannel, I Hear They've Got a Good Scene Down There.

The preview opens with a tracking shot showing a battered maroon BMW slowly advancing down a city street. It's a pluvial, gray gloaming, and both sides of the street are full of neon signs for pawn shops, liquor stores, and record shops. The sidewalks are full of stumblebums and college kids and it's hard to tell them apart, and hard for them to tell each other apart, and for just a second you see a girl on the sidewalk turn to a guy she thinks is her boyfriend, realize he's a homeless guy, react in disgust and then run forward to catch up with her group. There is a girl driving the BMW and she's alone, wearing a Jawbreaker shirt and a cardigan and she's silently mouthing the words to REM's Camera as it plays on the radio (i fell by your bed once i didn't want to tell you.... i should keep myself between the pages....)and then she stops at the red light. At the red light, the camera finds a businessman walk past a girl holding out a coffee cup. He drops in a quarter and she yells "Hey asshole that Frappuccino cost me four bucks" and flips him off and he looks back in mild confusion but keeps walking.*

Smash cut to a barren supermarket parking lot on the same rainy night at roughly the same time. There are few cars in the lot, and the way they're parked (at seemingly random intervals, like the drivers showed up when the place was busy and were still hanging around) implies they mostly belong to night employees. A kid with a mohawk, covering his supermarket issued button down logo shirt with a stained and torn navy surplus jacket, is in the parking lot wrangling stray carts. He looks moody, brooding, maybe a little confused and his mohawk is sad and sodden in the rain. The camera goes in the front door of the supermarket, down an aisle of breakfast cereal, under maddening fluorescent lighting, and finds two girls (wrist tattoos, hemp necklaces, obviously stoners) stocking shelves. One says "Where's Kieran?" The other replies "Probably doing ordering slash inventory" and rolls her eyes and they both laugh.

Cut to a back office where a girl, Kieran, is covertly getting stoned. She's dressed for success--khakis, white buttondown shirt, navy vest, and clearly honestly believes nobody knows what she does when she is ostensibly doing ordering/inventory. She's in a chair, not looking at a green on black computer screen and it is pretty clear that, with a couple of quick adjustments, she could be doing a good impression of someone doing work just in case she should hear unexpected footfalls in the hallway. What she's really doing is paying attention to a boombox. A cassette case that obviously contains a breakup mix tape from an ex (the case has something like "goodbye kieran" with a broken heart next to it) lies beside the boombox, and a song from her ex's band is playing. It sounds like a pretty standard DC Indie Anthem (even though the story takes place somewhere in the Midwest) and it's basically the polysyllabic language of entitlement sung in a quavering voice over mathy drone rock. I haven't had time to think too much about this song, especially since I'm not really making this movie and have no budget, but it should be good enough that the viewer could plausibly believe people would show up to see the band play.** The camera pans over Kieran, who is gently weeping, face held in her expressive hands, and finds the slightly incongruous pair of battered, torn, red on white Tretorns she wears to work.

One final smash cut, this time to a bowling alley. Kieran's ex's band is playing there, that same night, while her sister drives her maroon BMW up and down the street and while Kieran herself "does inventory" in a well ventilated back room. The marquee outside reads "1 Nite Only: We Could Streak The Sky Like Comets". In the parking lot, more college kids and homeless people are trying to buy pot from each other. The bowling alley is poorly lit and the crowd is pressed tight into what is usually the game room, while league play takes place on the last two lanes. The crowd is drunkening, swaying with the music, and Kieran's ex's voice drones just above the instruments. He's wearing battered K Swiss, torn jeans, a Pram tee shirt with a flannel shirt over it, a pair of Wayfarers, and his hair is short and messy and he's clearly just doing the best he can, pinned wriggling and flailing in the uneasy interregnum between two eras. The song ends but the feedback keeps droning, and he says "This is for a girl who didn't come here tonight. It's called 'Your Torn Tretorns'...." The last shot is of the drummer, already out of time as the song is beginning. As, let's face it, were we all.

===========================

* Later we find out the businessman is in the same accounting firm as the girl in the used BMW's father.

** Having spent more than my fair share of time in coffee house basements, church basements, dive bars just off campuses, and indie book stores that were for some reason willing to rearrange their shelving afterhours every so often to accommodate 17 member bands with 157 pieces of equipment and their 9 or 10 sullen, mostly motionless, fans, I can honestly say the song wouldn't need to be that good to do the trick. It should be noted that this is not to disparage some of those old DC Indie bands I still love, like Smart Went Crazy and Jawbox. Just saying, we'd show up for basically anything with a colorful flier.

All that's left is vices torn....

2009-10-14T06:27:00.000-07:00

A guy I enjoy bullshitting with at work was telling me excitedly about a new show he'd seen advertised, called White Collar, which seemed to be about an FBI agent and some sort of master criminal whom he arrested then sprung from jail to help catch even bigger criminals. The reason the guy was excited about this show is that he and I are perhaps the world's foremost living Hardcastle & McCormick fans and the plot sounded, to him, similar. I made approving noises while sipping a cup of Twinings Lady Grey, as is my custom, but when I looked into the show later I found a number of reasons for pessimism.

First, the premise of White Collar seems to be that the world's greatest rogue conman, a guy with male model looks and the charisma of Felix Krull*, is teaming up with the FBI's answer to Inspector Morse to solve crimes. This immediately flies in the face of what may have been H&C's greatest charm--the glaring mediocrity of both main characters. Judge Hardcastle, based on the sheer number of convictions he seems to have had overturned ,wasn't a shining star on the California state bench. Similarly, McCormick's only real skill was how shamelessly he was able to strut around with a perm and a pair of tight 501s. They teamed up to catch equally mediocre criminals who might have been fine if they'd limited their activities to selling bags of oregano to high school kids or shaking things loose from vending machines, but who inexplicably thought they could run international drug rings and orchestrate high ticket art thefts instead. Two idiots driving around in a powerful red car while the Reagan era silently collapses around them is entertaining--this sounds more like a wholly unsatisfying cover version, perhaps the Goodwill Hunting to Hardcastle and McCormick's Real Genius.

The other problem that immediately presents itself is the presence of Tiffany Amber Thiessen in White Collar. Amber Tiffany Thiessen? Tiffany Amber Dawn Marie Thiessen? I can never remember. She plays the FBI agent's wife.

Now I'm okay with the fact that Zach Morris's ex has moved on. I'm sure Zach was no picnic to live with when he got older, espeically not once he became Andy "The Widowmaker" Sipowicz's partner on the NYPD. Smug preppies don't always age well. I picture Zach Morris, Ferris Bueller, and Parker Lewis all sitting around the bar at some TGI Friday's in, say, Shaker Heights, around closing time, munching on mozzarella sticks and stinking of Aramis, trying desperately to pick up a waitress in a pair of red high tops who just wants to get home and watch The Vampire Diaries.**

So it's fine that she moved on, but the problem is, the existence of a wife fucks up the whole dynamic. A large part of the unstated humor of H&C derived from the fact that you have this elderly, ultra rightwing judge, a widower, living in his hilltop mansion with a roguish young ex-con sporting a perm, tight jeans, and a rakish grin. Questions were bound to have arisen, Espeically in aftermath of the Roy Cohn era. Let's just leave it at that.

They've taken away the bumbling. The powerful red car. The implications of a homosexual scandal involving a former Conservative judge and his ex-con companion. There's really nothing left.

So that's why this television show I've never seen is nothing like Hardcastle and McCormick, which it never actually claimed, so far as I know, to be in the first place. Notch another one in the win column. Quod erat demonstrandum, baby.

================================================================================

* Vain as a peacock with all the mannerisms of a petit maitre, as David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford, once described Anthony Eden.

** Now that's a movie I'd pay to see, particularly if Dennis Haskins reprised his role as Principal Belding, who has since retired from the fast paced world of secondary education to spend his golden years as the weekend bartender at the aforementioned TGI Friday's.

Stephen King--Just After Sunset

2009-10-07T06:06:00.000-07:00

Just After Sunset was an impulse purchase. I was in Borders to pick up Inherent Vice (which has been a pretty good time so far) and happened to walk past a big display for the paperback release of King's newest collection of short stories on the way to the register.

I've always considered King first and foremost a superb writer of short stories. Since writing short stories has been, ever since the 1950s, a poor man's game, an indulgence of already famous writers and artschool trustafarians, there aren't too many good short story writers left.

The stories in Just After Sunset can be divided into two groups: The ones that suck and the ones that don't. Sad to say, there are more of the former and fewer of the latter than in any of King's other collections.

In the interest of staying upbeat at this ungodly hour (it's early in the morning, but that's well past midnight when adjusted for us daysleepers) I'll start with the stories that were enjoyable.

Rest Stop: Rest Stop is a story about a famous writer of hardboiled fiction who publishes under a pseudonym and whose quotidian mannerisms as a wholly unremarkable professor of literature are wildly at odds with his authorial persona. He breaks up a domestic dispute he stumbles into at a rest stop along the highway, and the line between the badass character who has made him a fortune and his own milquetoast mannerisms become slightly blurry. This is the most mature and satisfying iteration of King's career long obsession with the question of the relationship between writers and the worlds they create when they write.

Stationary Bike: Another story about a hack artist who begins to immerse himself in a world of his own creation. The narrative is sloppy and King clusterfucks the climax, but it was still a fun read.

N [Lovecraft Mythos] Another of King's postcards to Lovecraft. A shrink slowly descends into madness after a series of visits from a patient who is convinced he has blundered onto a spot where reality is wearing thin and The Old Ones are poised to break through. King, despite his obvious piety for HPL, is staggeringly more gifted as a storyteller than Lovecraft ever was and so his "tribute stories" often turn out better than any of the weird tales to which he's paying tribute.

The Cat From Hell: A professional hitman meets his doom trying to assassinate a vengeful spirit in the guise of a house cat. The back story is kept to a minimum, the hitman is fairly likable (King has always been eerily good at writing sympathetic criminals), and the story is unapologetically weird. It's one of the best stories he's written since Night Flier.

Mute: Mute takes the form of a lapsed Catholic's bizarre confession to a priest. It is well written, engaging, and extremely creepy. A quibble: Like so many horror writers, King has a difficult time writing female characters.* King's women tend to be fairy tale princesses, or fairy tale witches, with very little room for nuance in between. By writing from the point of view of an estranged husband whose wounds are still fresh he mitigates this weakness slightly--the narrator of the frame story's bitterness is plausible and his offhanded admissions of his own indiscretions make him just unreliable enough as a narrator to give King some distance.

In total, this is 192 pages of decent fiction. Now, for the rest:

Willa: Unreadable. There are some passengers on a train. Or are there? Some shit happens to them. Or does it? I got pissed off. Or did I? Yes, yes I did. Harold Bloom probably liked it, though.

Gingerbread Girl: There is an uninteresting woman and she's being pursued in an uninteresting way by somebody who is uninteresting and this lasts for 84 pages.

Harvey's Dream: This was published in The New Yorker and I think it was meant to be poignant. I can sum it up thus: Dear New Yorker, please send me money and handjobs from reviewers. Love, SK.

The Things They Left Behind It's described by King as a "9/11 Story." It's been a long, long time since I've disliked a narrator this much.

Graduation Afternoon: Appalling. Here's the weird thing though--this reads exactly like a terrible, terrible knockoff of Less Than Zero/Informers era Ellis.**

King gave Lunar Park some bizarrely effusive praise, and there are two reasons why this always bothered me. First, I remember seeing an interview a long time ago where King talked about meeting a hip young American writer in the late 80s who turned out to be a world class cunt. I'd always assumed this was Ellis or McInerney or maybe Donna Tartt. I guess McInerney is the most likely, since King took some pretty personal shots at him in The Stand. The other thing is that I remember an introduction to one of King's books a long time ago where he ranted rather bitterly about the emergence of what he considered facile, off-putting minimalism in American fiction. Saying "I hate minimalism" and then saying, years later "But I love Ellis" is like saying "I hate circles of dough covered in sauce and toppings, but I sure love pizza."

Anyway this is a really hamfisted horror story about rich, indolent kids that reads like shitty Informers fanfic. Its three major weaknesses are plot, characterization, and narrative style. King also has this problem where he can never seem to write about rich people without getting pie-eyed and self-conscious, even though he has been a rich person with more money than God or Ellis for most of his adult life. Contrast this with a 20something Ellis, who wrote of wealth and affluence so laconically that I've known bright people and good readers who have read Less Than Zero from cover to cover and never realized just how fucking rich Clay's folks were.

The New York Times at &c: A ghost story that's also a love story and also a story about getting older!

Ayana: Have you ever seen Bagger Vance? Have you ever said "Man, I'd love to see Bagger Vance?" No? Save yourself 25 pages.

A Very Tight Place: Two rich aging men in Florida, one of them gay, both of them going nuts, are having a lonesome private war. The premise was so promising, and this is the one short story that would probably have made a hell of a good 300 page novel. Unfortunately, as it is written, the 82 pages is much too long as it quickly descends into a poorly executed grossout story with an unconvincing denouement.
==========================================

* Less trouble than Lovecraft, who simply never included a woman in his stories unless she was an honest-to-God witch, or Koontz whose misogyny is palpable. The only horror writer I can think of offhand who writes interesting female characters is Barker.

** I've written enough terrible knockoffs of Ellis to know one when I see one.

Major League 3: Back to the Minors (How Quick Bright Things Come to Confusion!)

2009-10-02T06:13:00.000-07:00

A guy I've become pretty good friends with at work leaves in a few days for a new job in Minnesota. His wife is already up there, so he's spent the past week being bored. On my night off, we got together at his house to watch the first mathematically meaningless Cubs game (Cubs games have been existentially meaningless since early September, but the last number has finally been crunched on the wild card race). It was a sodden night at the tail end of a season in which, to quote Bush the Elder, we have been enjoying difficult times, and not enjoying them very much.

The game was canceled early on because of the rain, but not before 137 year old So Taguchi scrambled around the bases for a completely meaningless slapshot double in a completely pointless game. The fact that the double will now be erased from the stat books as a result of the cancellation only makes it even more heroic and amplifies my affection for the strange little man who will almost certainly not even be invited to spring training this winter.

Anyway, with the game canceled and a whole night left to kill, we decided to watch Major League 3. How do I feel about this movie? It stars Teddy McGinley, Corbin Bernsen, and Scott Bakula. That is, hands down, the greatest cadre of aging, second tier celluloid preppies I can think of off the top of my head. It's like Bull Durham meets Revenge of the Nerds. Oh, bonus, unlike Bull Durham, it's actually about baseball, instead of being about how hard Kevin Costner can Matter.

The movie appealed to me for the same reason So Taguchi's double appealed to me. For the same reason colorful deflated balloons lying in the corner after a celebration appeal to me. It's the romance of playing frisbee in the snow. The allure of going to IHOP on Christmas day.

(by strategy)

2009-09-27T08:00:00.000-07:00

The urge to listen to Brian Eno again developed more or less like this:

Sometime last week I was listening to a bunch of old Tears for Fears stuff, which included their cover of Ashes to Ashes. That made me itchy for Bowie. The generalized Bowie urges naturally led to a particular urge to hear stuff from the Berlin Trilogy. The Berlin Trilogy led to Eno. Eno urges are dicey--I steered clear of his David Byrne collaborations (with which I have a sort of Charlie Brown/football relationship from way back) and toward Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).

So I had a bunch of Tiger Mountain tracks on random shuffle (because take that, Brian Eno, that's why) and I heard the words "a certain ratio" in True Wheel and it reminded me of how people supposedly thought (still think even) that A Certain Ratio had troublesome Nazi leanings based on their name, even though they took the name from this lyric and not from the National Socialist eugenics propaganda. Then sometime later, shortly before I had to leave for work, my favorite track on the album, Burning Airlines Give You So Much More, came on and I remembered that old band Burning Airlines and how, after 9/11, they caught some pretty major hassle for their name.

Driving to work I formulated my own Oblique Strategies card:

If you take your band name from a Brian Eno lyric, you should expect some inconvenient misunderstandings.

This little piggy became purple and angry and swollen.

2009-09-24T05:54:00.000-07:00

A phrase to which you quickly become accustomed when you break your toe is "There's not really much we can do about it."

Consider the following exchanges:

Nurse: Yep. It's broken.

Me: Okay. It hurts.

Nurse: Yep. Not much we can do about it.

Me: Oh.

Nurse: We could tape it to the next toe.

Me: Would that help?

Nurse: Not really. Not at all, actually. But some people want us to do it.

Me: Wait, why did the doctor want me to come in at all?

Nurse: See if it was broken. And how badly.

Me: Does that make a big difference?

Nurse: Not really, I guess.

Me: Super.

Slightly later, the doctor entered.

Doctor: Broken.

Me: So I hear.

Doctor: I could give you some painkillers.

Me: Probably not really necessary.

Doctor: Not really. Nothing we can do though.

Me: So I hear.

Doctor: It will heal on its own.

Me: Well, super.

It's only been a week and it actually feels/looks much better already. As a bonus, it's running season at work (kids can tell it's going to be too cold for half-baked escape efforts soon so they really seize the day, here in early autumn), but I'm largely excused from joining in pursuits/search parties, because I'm really pretty useless in that regard right now.

Everything should try again....

2009-08-25T06:39:00.000-07:00

A post every 4 weeks or so. That's a pretty good pace, right? That should eventually land me one of those coveted "professional internet sophist" gigs? "Hello, Connor, this is The New Yorker calling and we wanted to say we've really enjoyed the 2 or 3 half-assed posts you've sort of carelessly thrown together this month...."

Anyway, I turned 33 a few weeks ago. That part was okay, but then a few days before my birthday John Hughes went and died and a few days after my birthday the Cubs started to do the collapse on an epic level.

I am too tired to post much, and need to get to bed so I can get a little sleep so I can get up and do it all again tonight. Here is the video for Pet Shop Boys and Bowie doing Hallo Spaceboy.

Let's read Acephalous, together.

2009-08-05T07:59:00.000-07:00

I'm rereading A Supposedly Fun Thing, and I'm reasonably sure that this post by SEK, in which he compares Leverage to The A Team, will be the best thing I read this week not written by David Foster Wallace.

Of the A Team, he writes:

In the 1980s, heroism only came from the barrel of guns aimed by incompetent men at similarly scattershot adversaries—because for all the gunplay, no one was ever shot. When these world-historically poor shots grew tired of wasting ammunition, they would chase each in vans until one of them found a wall in need of Kool-Aid, then someone would punch someone, everyone would laugh, and the day would somehow have been saved.

This contrasts with Leverage:

We want to believe that simpleminded evils are not, in fact, simpleminded, but that we've been duped by highly competent con artists whose methods are so arcane they can only be countered by other, more highly competent con artists. We enjoy the show despite the con because we want to believe such cons can't be understood and really just want some vicarious vengeance.

SEK does an enviable job of staking out and arguing a position about pop culture about which I think he's mostly serious. I'm naturally sympathetic to arguments that take the form of "x, if you think about it, is really a remake of y for a new generation" (I'll go to my grave convinced Good Will Hunting was a Gen X remake of Real Genius) and Scott makes his case extremely well. There's a very bright line between the people who do this sort of thing well, and people who giggle and "Aw shucks" their way through similar arguments and only succeed in making a pig's breakfast of the whole thing.* SEK always seems to be one of the former.

At this point, of course, I'm just waiting for some clever television writer to write the pilot for Hardcastle & McCormick in the Sitra Ahra.

========================================

* Sad to say I'm frequently in the latter group. Boethius's admonition Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses is a phrase that's often on my mind.

Official Product Endorsement; Taste of Thai, Thai Style Noodles

2009-08-04T07:09:00.000-07:00

When you come down to brass tacks, A Taste of Thai noodles are simply a gentrified version of a Cup o' Noodles. There are certainly better prepackaged Thai lunches on the market. The strength of Taste of Thai, Thai noodles, is in the ease and speed of preparation.

At work, the 3 AM lunch break is often a movable feast. By which I mean I often have to be able to move around, sometimes semi-quickly, occasionally from one end of the campus to the other, while eating it. Out of frustration, plenty of people who work predominantly my shift resort to seeking nourishment mostly in bar or smoothie form.

Everything necessary for the preparation of A Taste of Thai, Thai noodles, is crammed into the box (which looks like a takeaway container) in sealed packages, which can easily be opened by hand. Preparation is merely a matter of dumping everything together (you have to break the noodles up by hand), adding water up to the fill line, and microwaving for about 4 minutes. In about 6 minutes (5, when your fingers acclimate themselves to the function of breaking tiny noodles into tinier noodles) from start to finish, the meal is ready.

The noodles are about as okay as mass produced noodles of an indeterminate shelf life can be, but it's the sauce that is truly excellent. The peanut sauce noodles are best when enjoyed with either passion fruit or raspberry green tea and the red curry with either peppermint tea or ginger ale.

Disclaimers:

I've only ever eaten Taste of Thai, Thai noodles during strange interludes well past the witching hour. Nightsleepers may not enjoy them as much.

I have not been in any way compensated by the makes of Taste of Thai, Thai noodles for this post. But I'm totally open to the idea. Email me.

OMG THE 80s!

2009-07-23T14:54:00.000-07:00

I believe the 80s really ended sometime in late 1986. They didn't begin until sometime in 81 or maybe even 82 (Rodney Bingenheimer probably knows for sure) and then in 1986, when Less Than Zero was published and Songs from the Big Chair was released and the Mets won the series and the market crashed, all that needed to be accomplished had been accomplished.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about that particularly fruitful period between 84 and 86 because of a piece of Real Writing I've been working on frantically (or at least frenetically) when I've had any time to spare from work obligations.

Between work and scribbling things down for the writing project, this blog has been pretty neglected. I can't promise that's going to change in the near future, although sometime in the next couple of weeks the frenzied pace at work should calm, at least temporarily. Then I will finally have time to blog about, for example, Adventures in Having High Blood Pressure For a Week, Adventures with Bureaucracy, Why Michael Scott is Right About Human Resources (that one may never be fit to print), and my whole series on Why 3rd Rock From the Sun Was a Better Series Than People Give it Credit For.

In the meantime, in the course of sifting through the gaudier detritus of the 80s, I joyfully rediscovered The Gleaming Spires. And I'd like to share that. This is the video for "are you ready for the sex girls."

I've been asked that question a million times.

2009-07-18T07:30:00.000-07:00

Last night, I was talking to a guy at work and we were comparing our knowledge of bad jokes. He used to live outside Boston, and that reminded me of a very old and awful joke I couldn't wait to repeat.

A tourist grabs a burger kind of late one night, and after the meal he realizes he's been in Boston for three days and has only eaten burgers and pizza. So in the cab on the way back to his hotel he says to the driver "Hey, where can a guy get scrod around here?" The cab driver says "Buddy, I've been asked that question a million times, but never before in the pluperfect subjunctive."

Thank you. Thank you.

Incidentally, the Wikipedia article on "Scrod" dedicates an entire section to a form of that joke, noting:

Contrary to the joke, however, "scrod" is not the pluperfect of "screw." The "third-person pluperfect indicative", though a legitimate grammatical construction ("he had gone" is the corresponding part of the verb "to go"), is used in the joke for humorous effect only; the structure of the given sentence would not support its use.

So. Take that, old joke. You just got fact checked!

The schlemiel spills his soup on the schlamalzel.

2009-07-12T11:01:00.000-07:00

Too many rotations. Too much paperwork. Too little sleep. My brain is running like hell and getting nowhere fast.

That said, I sometimes have moments of trivial glory. Last night, a co-worker called me a schlamazel, because I tripped while carrying a container of salad and spilled it on the floor. I told him this would really make me a schlemiel, yes, but not a schlamazel. I reminded him of the old Yiddish proverb "The schlemiel waiter [the klutz] spills his soup on the schlamazel customer[the guy who secretly enjoys having terrible luck], who doesn't complain and thus lets the schlemiel waiter keep his job and spill soup on another customer." It's funnier in Yiddish, I've been told.

But then, suddenly, even though I have only seen reruns of the show four or five times, fifteen or twenty years ago (and didn't enjoy it), I became absolutely certain the first two words of the Laverne and Shirley theme song were "Schlemiel! Schlamalzel! Something and something else incorporated" We argued about this for about five minutes. His first position was "That's not what they say, they just say nonsense, not even real words." His final position was something like "I just don't care at all anymore."

Good news. Google confirmed that I was absolutely right. I have an astonishing memory for old theme songs. From television shows I never liked. That pretty much everybody has forgotten. Because they were terrible.*

Christ. I would just erase this, but it's the first time I've had the time and energy to post in so long that what the hell. It's pretty much this, or a plaintive screed about endless hours and escalating paperwork.

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* I also have a terrifying ability to remember plots from Empty Nest. And a half-baked argument for why it was secretly an extremely important, even influential, show. But by now I'm already trying your patience.

Soto makes bid to be Dock Ellis's personal catcher.

2009-06-26T15:42:00.000-07:00

So. While most of the league is wandering around amphetamine-tweaked and roid-ripped, our catcher likes to stare at pretty colors and listen to Phish*.

Mercifully for Soto, this news didn't break until the recovering Rookie of the Year had already started to come out of his sophomore slump. Now that he's hitting and throwing again, Cubs fans are probably going to shrug off anything up to and including involvement in Aramis's international cockfighting ring. His suspension from international baseball competition for two years (even though the next WBC isn't for, like, three years?) is also merciful, since it means when he starts off slowly again next season Brenly won't be able to harp endlessly on him for playing too many innings in the off-season.

Still, it seems like Cubs Nation is sort of heading in the wrong direction w/r/t banned substances. I'm not saying all our guys should be on everything Bonds was taking--it's my understanding some of that shit was really only safe like for livestock and zoo animals. Also we probably don't want our catcher on whatever Manny's taking, because I'm still not totally sure ManRam realizes he caught a 50 game suspension. I think he may just think that for some reason the season is starting really, really late.

I just feel that if our guys are going to insist on being drug addled embarrassments, they should at least be caught using performance enhancers rather than performance inhibitors. Just, you know, care enough to cheat a little. That's all I ask.

==========================================

* People still listen to Phish, yeah? Fine. Shut up.

Some Cubs fans are pretty racist. Someone else made fun of them better than I can.

2009-06-21T00:37:00.000-07:00

Much as I dislike Ozzie Guillen, the tee shirts marketed during the crosstown Cubs/Sox series reading "Ozzie Mows Wrigley Field" and showing a terrible likeness of Guillen pushing a 1950s style lawnmower were an embarrassment. The slogan and caricature are racist, plain and simple.* There are plenty of reasons to make fun of Guillen (his homophobia, his insensitivity, his stupidity) but the shirts were an example of base, inexcusable racism. The most entertaining commentary I've seen on the shirts comes from CSTB's Rob Warmowski who somehow, despite his affection for the Chi Sox, is not only able to read and write but consistently writes insightfully, entertainingly, even eloquently about baseball. Warmowski wrote:

Having had many months to think of a replacement for last year’s Humanitas award-winning “Horry Kow” Fukudome paean, Cub Nation idly looked out the bay window of its Lake Forest manse and noticed that lawn mowers have nameless, Ozzie-like people attached to them. (I’ve got some friends in merchandising, so if next year anybody wants to run with my Cubbie-blue Klan hood, complete with lil’ red “C” on the front, drop me a line.)

Warmowski is so right and so funny that I'm willing to overlook his cringeworthy reference to "smallball" in the posts's closing paragraph. I, for one, hope the Sox continue to play "smallball" for the entire 162 games they will play in 2009.
=================================================

*The 1950s style lawn mower, though, is probably pretty accurate, considering how Zell seems to have insisted Hendry approach the off-season.

Markets want to be free.

2009-06-19T14:17:00.001-07:00

Frontline did another segment on Wall Street before the collapse the other night. I think it was called "OMFG WTF?" Its basic thesis was that Ken Lewis is a, like, grandmaster level jackass whom no sane person would so much as ask to feed their cats while they're away on vacation. They kept showing this really unflattering black and white picture of Lewis sort of smirking and biting his lip at the same time. When PBS producers are making a point, they're seldom subtle.

But there was a segment on Paulson's reaction to the crisis in its early stages. Paulson was sort of being cast as a guy who is almost on the right side, the way Agent Skinner was in the first few seasons of X-Files, before he finally became an official Good Guy. They kept using words like "intense" "brooding" "obsessed" to describe Paulson which, frankly, is the kind of thing you'd sort of like to see out of a guy who had his set of responsibilities. It might have been nice if he'd brooded and obsessed a bit more a long time ago, when the mess might have been preventable, but things being how they are it's at least nice to know he probably punched some walls or snapped at the help or something.

One of the talking heads was discussing how Paulson and his team sat around in an office the first Monday after Lehman went the way of all flesh, waiting for the markets to open "Eager to see what was going to happen." Now. The word "eager" made me smirk here, because I doubt any of them were actually eager to see the full scope of the derivative and the damage done, but then I thought "What if someone was? What would that guy be like?"

So I started picturing this dude, probably in his late 20s. It's his first big meeting. He's wearing a Dartmouth green tie with little hunting dogs on it that his sister bought him at J. Press. He has his "good luck pennies" in his loafers, which are the two pennies he got back the first time he used his fake ID to buy some wine coolers in high school. His father, three uncles, two brothers, and seventeen first and second cousins are all investment bankers. He still has a boarding school haircut and he's just sitting there, giving everybody nicknames while other hands are clenched tightly to the arms of chairs, eyes glued to CNBC. Andy Bernard style, he keeps calling Paulson "Hammerin' Hank" and saying "This is gonna be awesome, Hammerin' Hank! Beer me a Pellegrino would you? Oh man by noon this market is going to correct itself and industrious, strong willed men will once again be building their own fortunes...."

I'd like to think that later, when the police showed up, nobody could remember exactly how he'd ended up flying out the window. Paulson just shrugs and says "Who knows. Probably really bummed out over the game the other night. Fucking Red Sox fans. Also, I think he was a homosexual."

Darren Daulton is one crazy son of a bitch.

2009-06-17T06:03:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago, I was talking to a friend who grew up in Philly about the crazy way Steve Carlton believed the Jews ruled the world in secret and also, somehow, ruined his ability to throw a slider. He assured me Carlton was far from the craziest ex-Philly, and mentioned Darren Daulton. Then we started talking about something else, probably really important, and I don't think I probably thought about Dutch Daulton again until last night.

Last night, while commenting about that obviously juiced up Phillies team with Kruk and a suddenly buff Dykstra and Darren Daulton and his magically rejuvenated knees, I Googled Daulton to confirm that his last name was spelled with a "u". My main concern was that Daulton seems like the kind of guy who might Google his own name for references on baseball blogs and then beat the hell out of anybody who spelled it wrong. Anyway, I happened to remember my friend's cryptic comment about Daulton's crazybrainedness and checked his Wikipedia entry. Under Personal Beliefs we find:

Daulton holds a series of beliefs related to conspiracies, metaphysics, and numerology. He maintains that the universe is created and sustained by numerical synchronicities, and that all matter is charged with vibrational energy, which has escaped human perception because it is extradimensional in origin. He believes that those who are conscious of this energy can manipulate it to affect reality in different ways, such as altering the weather. He also believes that the pyramids and Mayan temples were created by a lost civilization, and that people with knowledge of the workings of the system will "ascend" at the conclusion of the Mayan calendar on Dec. 21, 2012, at 11:11 a.m. (Greenwich Mean Time), vanishing into a new plane of existence. [5] He recently claimed in a televised interview with ESPN that he has "skipped through time" and undergone "astral travel" and will "blast into space."

Daulton has authored a book on metaphysics and numerology, titled "If They Only Knew," published in 2007. In the book he discusses numerous aspects of metaphysics, referencing experts in the field, and his personal experiences.

Actually I guess a lot of people believe in the Mayan calendar thing though. I suppose on 12/21/12 at 11:11 GMT we'll find out who is really crazy, me or the crazy roided up ex-catcher.*

======================

*It's the crazy roided up ex-catcher who is really crazy.

The rise of the nation state.

2009-06-16T16:15:00.000-07:00

Robert Farley ruminates, presumably prompted in part by the unrest in Iran, about the rise of the modern nation state over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money. Even though the post is (by his own admission) largely a regurgitation of Arendt, it's an A student's regurgitation and proves very valuable in a very compact space. Farley writes:

The modern nation state is an extremely efficient killing machine. We know this from our Tilly; the nation-state replaced its competitors, such as empires and city-states, because it could develop and support institutions of internal and external domination. The nation-state successfully extracted a large surplus from its population, which it transformed into the coercive means for acquiring even more internal surplus and for waging external wars.

He then elaborates:

The long century (1789-1914) can be regarded as the period of consolidation of the institutions of the modern nation-state. The last competitors were either eliminated or co-opted, small statelets were amalgamated, and the lower and middle classes were fully integrated into the domestic processes of the state. The perfection of these institutions, as much as anything else, allowed European states to conquer the rest of the world, and to apply the institutions of the modern-state to heretofore unfamiliar populations. This was, it is fair to say, a bloody process. It saw untold colonial depredation, from the conquests of Africa, South Asia, and North America to the "opening" of China and Japan. The Wars of the French Revolution exceeded any previous conflicts in size and destruction, largely because of the increased extractive and warmaking capacity of the state. Still, the old ways were not wholly replaced; in Europe, at least, much of the traditional elite continued to hold the reins of the state.

This process of perfection would culminate in 1914, when the truly destructive nature of the state would be unleashed. Internally and externally, the major states of the world set about the task of murdering as many people as possible. Eighteen million or so were killed in World War I. In 1917, the Russians had a Revolution designed to hand their state to right thinking people, and those right thinking people murdered dozens of millions more. Between 1939 and 1945, the German state murdered six million Jews, along with roughly twice as many Poles and Russians. The Japanese state murdered about 20 million Chinese. The good guys in that war (and I use the term with no ironic intent) saw fit to incinerate millions of German and Japanese citizens by dropping bombs on them as they slept. Following World War II, the Chinese state killed some fifty million of its own citizens, concentrated in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The various combatants in the Vietnam War killed about 4 million altogether, and the Khmer Rouge killed probably 2 million. All of this was made possible by the institutions of the modern nation-state; its extractive capacity, its efficient bureaucracy, and its ability to maximize military power.

Reading through this, I was reminded of Vidal who (I think correctly) noted that a Jeffersonian (or more accurately Hamiltonian) meritocracy will, sooner or later, yearn to develop into a full-blown aristocracy. Likewise, a nation state will want colonies and a colonial power will want an Empire. If the bureaucracy of a nation state became ever more refined and ruthless (as was Orwell's fear and Huxley's fear) then it's chilling to think of how much personal freedom could be restricted. In the developed world, it's possible that the notion of "personal freedom" really only exists in the tension between the calculations of bureaucrats and the machinations of powerful people who always secretly yearn for imperial splendor, for a full-blown empire. The urge to Empire may be the only check on the ability of the nation state to grow increasingly efficient at developing mechanisms of control and destruction.

It should be noted, in fairness, that if Farley's long and extremely worthwhile post was the work of an A student summarizing a century of political thought, this post has been the work of like, at best, a B student with a pretty good record collection and encyclopedic knowledge of baseball lore.

An open letter to Michael Schur (aka Ken Tremendous). If you don't like posts about defunct baseball blogs, you shouldn't read this.

2009-06-15T18:23:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Tremendous,

You probably won't even read this, considering it took you like, two months to reply to that fan mail I sent you that one time about Fire Joe Morgan. And I mean that's cool, I totally understand. You're a busy guy. Hell, I don't even answer all my mail and I don't get that much of it.

I mean yeah, Bob Somerby of The Daily Howler, who writes a serious blog (and who also went to Harvard, just like you, Mr. Big Shot, although he didn't marry Regis Philbin's daughter) always answers within literally days of receiving a mail, but I know you've had the whole Parks and Recreation thing going on, which I guess must be why you quit writing Fire Joe Morgan, you self-obsessed son of a bitch.

Hey how is Parks and Recreation working out? Can't say that I've watched much of it (maybe like 9 or 10 minutes total, spread out over two episodes) but the critics haven't exactly been kind. Personally, I enjoyed the camera work. Didn't really laugh at any of the jokes. Maybe it's one of those "too well written to be funny" things though. Or maybe without Novak and Kaling and Krasinski you're sort of lost. Or maybe the problem is there's just not enough Cousin Mose in the series. That could be your big theme next year. Have Cousin fucking Mose show up wielding a feral raccoon and maybe wearing big overalls with an ironic "Beat Farmers" shirt underneath it. That would probably work.

What I'm trying to say is, the world needs Fire Joe Morgan way more than it needs an Office spinoff that wasn't even really an Office spinoff. I mean unless Ryan Howard is going to show up next season and run for city council, I know I'm never going to watch it.

On the other hand, Joe Morgan and Steve Philips have been strutting around lately like they own the place. And it's even worse than that. A-Rod is really making me start to believe in the concept of a choke artist, and I need somebody to talk me down from the ledge. Just the other day, I made a joke to a co-worker (Yankees fan and sort of coyoteish looking but otherwise a solid guy) about how "In mid-June with nothing at all at stake in a game that's already well in hand against a team you know you won't face in the post-season there's nobody I'd rather have at the plate than A-Rod." I know it was cheap and I know it was wrong but what in God's name is the guy's deal? I just need....I just need someone to repeat phrases like "regression to the mean" in a comforting manner. Liberals have Rachel Maddow, Conservatives have Glenn Beck, I need you, Ken Tremendous.

Plus, when I'm sitting here looking at Alfonso Soriano leading off for the Cubs with 14 homers and like, fucking, what, 28 RsBI, I need someone to reassure me both that runs batted in is a fairly useless metric of offensive efficacy and that batting order isn't all that important.

I know there are still some good baseball sites, but I miss you, Fire Joe Morgan. Most of the time Baseball Prospectus kind of puts me to sleep (and they never ever namecheck Jawbreaker or David Foster Wallace) and Squawking Baseball has some troublesome rightwing leanings I don't really appreciate.

So, you know, seriously man. It's time to come home. I'm sorry I said those things about Parks and Recreation. I'm just hurt. I miss you.

He's just not that into you.

2009-06-15T13:53:00.000-07:00

Once a week at work, all the residents on a given program will get together and watch a movie they've voted on and that the staff has approved. Usually, most of the votes are for some anime thing nobody is ever going to approve, and then a random mainstream movie will win by getting, like, two votes. Last night, the movie was "She's Just Not That Into You", and it devolved to me to help them "process" the film when it was done. Processing a film basically means talking about it with the guys and, if any scenes triggered any kind of bad memories or inappropriate thoughts, we try to talk through it.

My response, when I received an e-mail from the clinical supervisor telling me which movie I'd be processing this week, was something like "How am I going to help them process it when I plan on having gouged out my own eyes 20 minutes into the movie?" He strongly suggested I find a way, adding that once when I'd taken a night off he'd ended up processing "Bend it Like Beckham" and so that I sort of, like, owed him one and it was maybe time to take one for the team.*

Anyway, I was pretty amazed by how non-eye-gougingly-terrible the movie was. It was sort of cute, all things considered. Like The Rules of Attraction meets When Harry Met Sally. Also, because the sexual content was fairly tame, there was no actual substance abuse on camera and because basically everybody got a happyish ending, there were very few negative feelings to process.

I mean, it was definitely a Kelly Kapoor-ish movie, but if you had to sit down and watch a movie with Kelly Kapoor, this would be the one to watch.

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* My best sports were always tennis and chess, so I don't really have a great concept of "taking one for the team." I am, however, familiar with the notion of a pawn sacrifice, which is more/less the position I felt I was in.

And as things fell apart nobody paid much attention.

2009-06-11T16:23:00.000-07:00

I'm showing my age again, but lately it seems like every time I read anything, anywhere, regardless of whether it's spun from the putative right or the putative left, this song cues in my head. Most recently it was reading the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's comment that he hadn't spoken to Obama lately because "the Jews won't let me."

Please don't nuke the whales.

2009-06-09T14:48:00.001-07:00

About once a week at work I have an argument with this one dude about vegetarians. He tends to lapse into this exhausted Dennis Leary schtick about how vegetarians always want you to feel guilty for eating meat, and I patiently explain that I'm pretty sure no vegetarian over the age of 15 really does that, least of all in the middle of the middle Midwest.* The conversation inevitably spirals into him explaining how man has been given Dominion over the animals, who were put on earth to serve as tasty treats. He also has a weird grudge against trees and those who hug them, and spotted owls, even though I'm fairly certain the latter are not very tasty.

So the other night, when he started talking about this television program I've never actually seen where some "hippie types" try to keep Japanese whalers from whaling, I was pretty sure I could see where the conversation was going. To my surprise, however, he expressed this weird empathy for the whales. "They're big and strong and pretty and people should just leave them alone," he said, before expressing admiration for the "hippie types" who hassled the Japanese whalers.

His quirky affection for whales led to another aspect of his personality I find peculiar--he says he has never read any non-fiction book from start to finish. But he remembered that he was supposed to read Moby Dick once, and remarked "That captain wouldn't leave Moby Dick alone, and he got what was coming to him."

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* Added, semi-related fact, most airlines don't routinely serve peanuts anymore. They're more likely to give you those tiny little bags of pretzels, instead, so comedians ought to update their material accordingly.

2009-05-27T12:58:00.000-07:00

Bedazzled by the facade of head coaches and tyrants

2009-05-27T11:29:00.000-07:00

Stan Van Gundy looks and behaves as if he spends his off-seasons trying to cut in line at soup kitchens. On the other hand, Cleveland head coach Mike Brown bears a striking resemblance to failed OJ prosecutor Chris Darden. So, based purely on the superficial appearances of their head coaches, it's hard to tell which team is more doomed.

That said, David Stern had better pray as hard as he can that Cleveland comes back and wins the series somehow, someway. Because an Orlando/Denver final would put up ratings numbers comparable to those of the The Tick live-action series, episode 3.

Julian Barnes on John Updike

2009-05-23T16:15:00.000-07:00

Julian Barnes is a very smart man, and I recall reading, with much enjoyment, both England, England and Flaubert's Parrot. It was with some surprise that I glanced at the latest New York Review of Books online update to find an essay by Barnes lionizing John Updike. The self-described Updikean writes:

Hearing of John Updike's death in January of this year, I had two immediate, ordinary reactions. The first was a protest—"But I thought we had him for another ten years"; the second, a feeling of disappointment that Stockholm had never given him the nod. The latter was a wish for him, and for American literature, the former a wish for me, for us, for Updikeans around the world.

I always felt Updike only had two weaknesses as a writer: the stories he tried to tell and the style in which he tried to tell them.

I'm not sure whether Updike's oeuvre fully deserves all the animosity I bear it. His pro-Vietnam politics, his association with (what he himself describes as) "the gentleman's club" of William Shawn's New Yorker, his literary feud with Vidal, probably all contribute something to the disdain I feel for his work.

The admiration Barnes feels for Updike can probably partially be explained by the fact that, for a Brit staring at America from the outside, Updike may well have represented one of the more defensible of the rabidly pro-American voices of the late 20th century. Certainly Updike did seem, as Barnes notes in the essay, "gentle". In fact, his justification for his defense of the barbarism of Vietnam was nothing more than the fact that he felt he owed it to his country not to question his President. Updike, the well-scrubbed good little boy that he was, felt those who opposed the war were "spoiled" and "ungrateful".

In his fiction, too, though he would occasionally lash out, Updike was careful to make nice with the reader, never to do anything sneaky or underhanded. He was quintessentially middle class, middlebrow, middle of the road. He offered a pious, solemn, sympathetic view of suburbia. He may have hated women, but only a little bit, and only the uppity ones, and besides, usually the only reason they turned out bad in the first place was that they had gotten involved with bad (non-Updikean, unpatriotic, reckless) men.

Updike ultimately, I think, considered himself an apologist for The American Way of Life. He was part of a generation in which one had to stake out an absolutist position, one way or the other, on The American Way, and Updike elected not to bite the hand that was feeding him. For foreigners trying to make sense of just why the latter part of the American Century turned out the way it did, I suppose Updike makes about as much sense as anybody.

A sleepless afternoon's general observation about political writing in the 21st century.

2009-05-23T11:31:00.000-07:00

There is no more miserable creature than a daysleeper on a holiday weekend. Even with the white noise of the A/C directly above my head and the chalky blue noise of long-since memorized movie dialogue coming from across the room, noise from some nearby barbecue made sleep impossible. Which is how I came to spend an hour or so this afternoon reading political blogs from the putative Right and putative Left and finding myself consistently sort of grimly amused.

In the same way that so many who espouse a belief in "small government and laissez faire capitalism" also wrongly believe themselves to be the intellectual heirs of Hamilton and so many who want nationalized this and that believe they are the true heirs of Jefferson (which is even odder and more maddening), cheerleaders for the Republicans will betray their core values in a heartbeat if it means keeping gays from marrying and cheerleaders for the Democrats will abandon their core values in a heartbeat if it means "making the rich pay their fair share" (whatever that even means).

The worst part about the sophistry on both sides, really, is that they will present detailed, semi-coherent arguments in which both premises and conclusion roundly contradict positions they've taken within, say, the last week or so.

No, I don't have any particular examples in mind, because my objective isn't so much to ridicule partisans as to offer them some constructive criticism. It's especially irritating that Republicans don't already know how to do this, since it's a strategy that was more or less perfected in the late, unlamented Reagan years by one of their own.

William Buckley used to have this strategy, from which the new generation of scribblers could learn, where, when he was about to adopt a sentimental position which ran directly contrary to his stated convictions, he would dispose of this unhappy inconsistency within the first few sentences. “Now of course one should be able to allow what one wishes to allow and ban what one wishes to ban in one’s club, university, household, church, voting laws…” or something of that sort, for instance, if he was about to argue that his alma mater was being unfair to some club for crew cutted crypto-Nazis. He’d then use a conjurer's trick, such as telling a long, rambling, semi-related anecdote that may or may not prove to be amusing and usually involved either a gaggle of dead Greeks or the rowdy crowd at boarding school. At any rate, during the patter, one tended to lose track of the fact that he had just offhandedly announced that, for the next couple of pages and couple of thousand subordinate clauses, logical Buckleyan principles would be suspended in favor of sentimental Buckleyan affinities. Then he’d argue from pathos and bathos and from appeals to credibility of Church Fathers and so on and he’d usually manage to not quite shred his own belief system in the process of arguing contrary to his espoused Conservative core values. It was actually sort of pretty to watch.

I ordered the lobster.

2009-05-21T14:31:00.001-07:00

A friend of mine has an interview coming up, and it's a pretty big deal so he spends a fair amount of time and energy angsting about it. It's a lunch interview, and it reminded me of a story a professor of comparative politics I had told once about her worst and funniest interview.

The woman, by the way, was really pretty spectacular. She was young, pretty, brilliant, and she taught the Hungarian electoral system like it meant a damn to her. She and her husband were probably the two most popular young profs on campus. Once she made a comment about "feeling stoned" during an 8 AM class then hastily clarified "I'm not though. Seriously. I mean believe me, if I were stoned, I'd be a lot more interesting to all of you. And you'd probably be a lot more interesting to all of me."

Anyway, one day toward the end of the year she was talking to a couple of us about some interviews she'd had before she landed her job teaching the sons and daughters of bored lower upper middle class intellectuals in the middle of the corn. She said there was one job (I forget where and it probably maybe wouldn't be ethical to say anyway) where one of the men interviewing her had a very unusual last name. It was a lunch interview and they were making small talk, waiting for the waiter, so she commented on the name, and remarked that the only other person she'd ever known with that name had been in her graduating class. Because she was nervous, and is one of those people who talks too much when nervous, she went on a longish tirade about what an insufferable, pompous twat the guy had been and then, when she noticed the interviewer staring botkins at her, she laughed nervously. He cleared his throat and remarked "Yes well, his mother and I are still very proud of him."

I laughed, once I did the social calculus and assumed it would be okay to laugh, and this one guy said something like "Holy God what did you do?"

The prof smiled and said "Well, I did the only thing that made sense. I ordered the lobster. I'd heard good things."

Air conditioning unit installation status: semi-successful

2009-05-20T10:41:00.000-07:00

I had to buy an air conditioning unit today for my bedroom. The unit in the front room, as my landlord pointed out, is a swell unit. However, as I pointed out, my bed is in, you know, the bedroom and, moreover, I also spend most of my abundant spare time at home (last week I believe I had nearly 15 consecutive minutes of uninterrupted leisure, which I used to not quite solve a chess problem that had been puzzling me) in my back room. So we reached a compromise where, rather than him paying to have someone come in and take out the old, burnt out wall unit and replace it with a new wall unit, I would simply buy a window unit and he would do nothing. It's difficult to bargain from a position of power when you're standing in your doorway in a bathrobe and slippers with little duckies on them at 3 in the afternoon and keep trying to explain that "This is totally, like, 2 AM to my internal clock so give me a second to get my thoughts together..." so I think I got about the best possible deal under the circumstances.

Trying to install the A/C, I was reminded of Belloc's famous lines:

Lord Finchley tried to mend the electric light.

Himself. It struck him dead. And serve him right.

It is the duty of the wealthy man.

To give employment to the artisan

The problem, of course, is, that unlike Lord Finchley, Count Connor of Slackula is impecunious or, at the very least, a tightwad, and, moreover, a member of America's Classless Society (TM), and is thus expected to be able to perform very minor maintenance tasks on his own.

Status report: I picked out a hell of a sturdy A/C, which I can tell because it is still happily gurgling out cold air even after having been dropped from my window. Twice. At this point, it is relatively secure in the window (it rattles a bit but I've never been one to be too concerned over a little rattling) and the window seems to be sealed effectively, keeping the cold air in and the warm air out. There are a few parts on the floor next to the window, of course, that I couldn't quite put to use. I'm assuring myself they're superfluous and not "Something that will prove, with a horrible crashing 'thud' or a terrifying 'screech' one day, when I am sound asleep, to be absolutely vital."

Geese.

2009-05-20T03:41:00.000-07:00

During rainy season here in Flatland, ad hoc lakes can form in the course of a few hours in the middle of fallow fields. Geese who, like American politicians, tend to be sonorous, confused, general nuisances when it comes to territorial issues, are invariably quick to claim these sad, doomed, fugazi lakes for their own flocks. One such lake formed in a field next to a Best Buy I occasionally frequent, and the geese have made themselves into a real menace not only in that sodden, muddy field (to which they are welcome) but also in the adjoining parking lot, where their presence is not really appreciated by, you know, moi.

The other day, I had to honk my horn and then wait impatiently as two geese stared at my car and then finally decided to slowly saunter away from the parking spot near the door in which they were standing. A third goose wandered past me hurriedly like a freshman running late for his 8 AM Introduction to Introductory Basic Concepts in Conceptualization class as I tried to enter the store. 20 minutes or so later, I left the store with everything I came for and strolled footloose and fancy free into the lot only to have a goose walk beside me and actually physically nudge my cart.

Despite the injunction of a beloved commenter warning against writing about encounters with nature in light of the fact that Fuck You, Penguin does it better, I nevertheless feel obliged to point out that geese are complete and utter jerks.

Good job, God. Way to go, with the robins.

2009-05-17T05:51:00.000-07:00

I'm a little ashamed to say that, even though I've spent much of my life in bucolic surroundings, this morning was the first time I'd ever really noticed a robin gathering up grass and straw and whatnot for its nest.

Part of the problem, I think, is that when I see a bird pecking around on the ground, I expect to see it pull up a worm, which is something I totally don't need to see. But this morning, waiting on my replacement to show up, gazing gazily out the window, I noticed a robin plucking up little pieces for its nest. The most entertaining part was how, every so often, it would stare up at me, as is to say "What? You want trouble?"

And I don't. I don't want trouble, robin. I've seen that Hitchcock movie. And the re-make of that Hitchcock movie. And I read that bird attacks, worldwide, against people, are increasing at an alarming rate. So please understand, robin, that I was staring, like, appreciatively, thinking what a good job it was doing with its nest stuff gathering.

Aesthetics.

2009-05-16T17:07:00.001-07:00

This blog is really ugly and at some point, one day when I'm not working 15 hours and scribbling semi-coherent notes to myself at 3 in the morning about the novel I'm working on (notes that later, in the harsh light of day, often turn out to have merely been long diatribes about hideous shirts co-workers are wearing) I'm going to get around to making it less ugly, somehow.

The problem is that this requires time, energy, and attention to detail, and those were never really among my strong points. But I just wanted to make it clear that I do care about you, the reader's, aesthetic sensibilities and I'll do what I can to make this place less hideous. Of course I'm pretty sure that promise has been part of every mayoral campaign in Cleveland since 1960something.

Synchronicity II

2009-05-15T15:27:00.001-07:00

Fell asleep reading The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland by Yeats which, despite having one of the gayest titles in the history of poetry (rivaled only by Burroughs' masterpiece "Men and Nubile Boys With Whom I Would Love to Have Homosexual Intercourse And Did I Mention I Totally Got Screwed Out of the Adding Machine Fortune That Rightly Belonged to Me?") is also one of my favorite poems by Yeats. I've always been especially haunted by the last stanza:

He slept under the hill of Lugnagall;
And might have known at last unhaunted sleep
Under that cold and vapour-turbaned steep,
Now that the earth had taken man and all:
Did not the worms that spired about his bones
proclaim with that unwearied, reedy cry
That God has laid His fingers on the sky,
That from those fingers glittering summer runs
Upon the dancer by the dreamless wave.
Why should those lovers that no lovers miss
Dream, until God burn Nature with a kiss?
The man has found no comfort in the grave.

Anyway, later today while nervously waiting on important news, I checked xkcd, and saw this:

I Love Math.

2009-05-14T15:24:00.000-07:00

My taste in music is, at best, by my own admission, suspect. More than once I've had intervention style conversations with friends that sooner or later take the approximate texture and shape of the conversation Elaine once had with Jerry that began with "You've always had certain...tendencies. But they've always been just that...."

The point is, I've been listening to far too much I Love Math, lately. My favorite single remains Volcanic Ash, but a hasty search of YouTube turned up a pretty good fan video for Some Bridges Are For Burning.

Destination: Morgue

2009-05-13T03:27:00.000-07:00

Like Joan Didion's fiction, like Nietzsche's poetry, Like F. Scott's dialogue, James Ellroy's short fiction and gonzo journalism miss the mark. Reading through Destination: Morgue, I was flabbergasted by how none of the brilliance of his longer fiction seems to carry over.

The problem is, I think, that even though Ellroy considers himself a crackerjack hardboiled stylist, what makes his longer work interesting is the obsessive exploration of the idea of sin, the heartbreaking impossibility of complete redemption and the destructive, transgressive nature of ambition. Ellroy may only have four or five real characters whom he trots out under different names in slightly different scenarios time and again, but those characters are well drawn and the paths they take and the mayhem they create is thoroughly engaging. The fact that, for a few pages at a time, his prose can really pop, is just a bonus.

In his shorter fiction, it's impossible to develop much more than a vague irritation with his characters and his verbal pyrotechnics enervate more than they delight. There's bluster, tough talk and attitude but the result is more Law&Order: Unique Little Snowflakes Division than anything worth paying attention to.

It's weird because once I'm hooked on a writer's style, I'll usually go balls to the wall to defend their whole oeuvre. I mean, I've not only read Glamorama thrice, but I've already cast the movie and figured out the soundtrack in my head. But in Ellroy's case, when he misses, he misses big.

There are times, of course, when he's almost brilliant, but never brilliant enough, never long enough. It reminds me of a description he wrote in LA Confidential of disgraced (about to be killed) ex-hotshot cop Jack Vincennes, when he says that he "Smiled, almost hit the mark, was almost bigtime Big V."

There's the zinger.

2009-04-30T07:45:00.000-07:00

Although I'm not convinced that rap music leads to violently entrepreneurial instincts in teenagers, and nor do I necessarily believe that video games will cause kids to steal taxicabs and murder tourists, I have noticed an undeniable tendency of life to imitate hack comedy, at least in terms of delivery.

That is to say, I've noticed among coworkers and acquaintances an unnerving tendency to relate a long, boring story about something that happened to them during the course of the day, then change inflection slightly at the end, say something like "I mean, c'mon, you know?" and then pause, semi-confused, seemingly waiting for a laugh track.

Slightly more alarming is how often there is someone there to fill the role as laugh track. Generally, this person won't be aware a joke is being told until they hear the "I mean, c'mon" cue and see the expectant look on the face of the raconteur. At that point, the laugher springs into action, filling the terrifying silence with a mechanical, comforting chortle.

On some mornings, such as this morning, when two or three, especially terrible, story tellers all get in on the fun, each with their own private laugh tracks sitting beside them, it feels like being stuck inside a Suddenly Susan episode, forever.

Anatomy of a tense night.

2009-04-27T14:23:00.000-07:00

The door hadn't even shut behind me when somebody looked up from doing paperwork and said "They just had a code red on the behavioral unit".

"Did we send anybody over?"

"Couldn't spare it", said one of the three staff sitting around a table filling out reports. So I sighed, turned around, walked out the door.

I didn't exactly run so much as walk briskly over to the other building, but then from the bottom of the stairwell I could hear a voice yelling and loud thumps (I found out later the thumps were chairs being overturned) so I sprinted up the stairs.

Out of breath by the time I got up to the unit, I was met by a man named Danny. Danny is the approximate size and shape of a mountain. He's at least 6 foot 5 and at least 350 pounds. These are conservative estimates. I think you could probably build a 6 foot 5 350 pound guy out of Danny and have enough stuff left over to build a plucky, scrawny, white, second baseman with a can-do attitude and lots of heart (constructed from the remnants of Danny's monstrously huge heart). Danny looked down at me and said "This kid is huge and strong as fuck. If we can't talk him down, we're going to have some serious problems."

I didn't know whether to start giggling or just piss my pants and run back down the stairs.

The story, as it turns out, ends happily. After flinching a couple of times as the kid overturned a couch and threw a chair, we were able to calm him down using approved crisis intervention techniques, which included reasoning with him calmly and bribing him with a couple of packages of Ritz crackers.

I was, I must say, quite good. Though I suspect I'd have been less effective without Mt Fuji standing next to me. It was classic "Good Cop--Holy Fuck That Cop is Huge" technique.

Smells like cyanide.

2009-04-26T15:45:00.000-07:00

Several times during the course of The Big Sleep, Chandler gives Marlowe the ability to smell cyanide in a drink, once from about ten paces. Chandler was one of the great pure prose writers of the late, unlamented, American Century, and Marlowe was one of fiction's greatest recurring characters. Usually, Chandler was just enamored enough of all the clever little tricks in Marlowe's bag that he showed them off without overplaying his hand, but I always felt like the "smelling cyanide in a glass of booze" trick was going a bit far.

Cyanide, Marlowe assures us, smells like almonds. Hemingway said the same thing about gangrene. Thanks to Hemingway and Chandler, as an adolescent escapist, I developed a real aversion to almonds. Also, I always wondered, if cyanide smells like almonds which smell like gangrene, then wouldn't cyanide smell like gangrene and, really, who in God's name is going to drink a big glass of something that smells like gangrene? Sickos, that's who.

In fairness, it's possible that Chandler got it exactly right, that cyanide in a glass of booze does smell like almonds, although it became my understanding, later, that cyanide doesn't develop a faint almond like odor until after it's already in the bloodstream.

Even reading charitably, though, and assuming that Marlowe really could smell the poison in a glass of booze, this makes me really wonder just how useful cyanide could possibly be as a murder weapon.

Murderer: Here you go old boy, have a glass of whiskey with me.
Victim: Why thank you....hey something smells like almonds.
Murderer: It's um...my aftershave lotion. "Eau d'Almonde". You like?
Victim: No, no, I'm pretty sure it's coming from my glass.
Murderer: You must be going crazy. Drink up, crazy.
Victim: Wait a minute, that's cyanide. You're tying to poison me, you asshole!
Murderer: Am not.
Victim: I DISTINCTLY SMELL THE AROMA OF SLIGHTLY BITTER ALMONDS, WHICH MEANS CYANIDE.
Murderer: [sighs dramatically. shoots victim. curtain closes]

Crouch End

2009-04-25T14:34:00.000-07:00

I'm consistently amazed by just how good Stephen King was, probably still is, when he writes focused, unrepentantly weird, stories. When he's writing unreconstructed horror, King is absolutely masterful.

When I was an obnoxious, precocious little kid, King was a guilty pleasure. I'd freely admit to being charmed by Lovecraft, and Machen, and by Maupassant's Le Horla (all discovered directly or indirectly via King) but I was so embarrassed by King, the loud, unkempt, crass American tourist, that his works remained locked in desk drawers and under beds and anywhere else a less insufferable adolescent might have hidden porn.

Crouch End, from Nightmares and Dreamscapes, which I re-read last night, is a story about American tourists, a husband and a wife, who get lost in London and blunder into an alternate dimension. The woman staggers out again, maddened, and tells a story about a part of London populated by perverse, sinister caricatures of children and animals and terrorized by creeping, lurking, devouring monsters. An old cop and a young cop listen patiently. The young cop wants to write the tale off, the old cop is disinclined to dismiss her out of hand. The husband is gone for good, the woman has gone permanently mad, neither cop is ever exactly the same again.

Crouch End is one of my favorite of King's short works. King has always worn his Lovecraft fanboyism on his sleeve, and the story is a straightforward Cthulhu mythos fan fic. It's surreal to watch a story intended as an homage to Lovecraft so far exceed anything in his oeuvre.*

The things I most wanted to do at 13 (although I was too ashamed to say this very loudly, then) were play third base for the Cubs and write like Stephen King. A couple of years later, the first time I ever had my knees buckled by an 80 mph curveball that started somewhere behind my head and ended up over the inside corner of the plate, it became pretty clear that the Cubs were going to have to struggle on without my services. But if I could ever write anything as good as King's good short fiction, my life certainly wouldn't be a waste.

===============================================================
* I continue to believe that making Crouch End's protagonist a very intelligent, likable woman was a kind of playful jab at Lovecraft, who seemed to consciously avoid creating any female characters with any spoken lines.

Analytic truths and the NBA

2009-04-22T14:34:00.000-07:00

Disoriented by Detroit's 25-4 4th quarter run in which the Pistons were able to almost come back and beat the Cavaliers, LeBron James staggered into WVO Quine's territory when asked whether he felt the Cavs had been complacent in the closing quarter. He replied:

No, I wouldn't say we were complacent. I just think we got a big lead and then maybe didn't play as hard as we should have.

I'm grateful to LeBron because, although I'm not very interested in the NBA, I am intensely interested in the question of analytic vs synthetic truth, which probably maybe hasn't been addressed so thoughtfully since Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism.

Welcome back. (Your dreams were your ticket out)

2009-04-20T15:02:00.000-07:00

My two days off were uneventful, except for buying a computer, on which I am now typing these words before heading back to work tonight.

I've been admittedly maudlin lately, and I've spent the past hour or so reading old poems that mean something to me. Whatever it says about my taste, the book in my possession that shows the most signs of being read and re-read until it is almost in tatters is a Wallace Stevens collection. I've had it forever, and it's been dragged nearly everywhere. I will go a long time without reading, mentioning, or even thinking about Stevens, and it isn't really uncommon for people who know me well not to know how much, in certain moods, I appreciate his work.

The poem I've read more than any other is The Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock. By Stevens's standards, it is an unusually sweet, transparent little poem.

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches Tigers
In red weather.

Consider Phlebas

2009-04-05T14:09:00.000-07:00

I'm painfully aware of being much too close to 33, which is itself much too close to 35, which brings up the idea of 40, an idea which, in my hot-blooded (or at least lukewarm blooded) youth seemed inconceivable. That said, the other night at work I was reminded that, in some ways, I've more or less always had the taste of a 67 year old man.

While talking with a co-worker about television shows we missed from a long time ago, I mentioned that sometimes I got the urge to watch Matlock which was, of course, even in its heyday (two decades ago) considered Must See TV at retirement communities nationwide. His horrified reply was "Jesus, Grampa, I hear Murder She Wrote is on later. You want me to make you some chamomile tea and some fuckin' dry toast?"

"Murder She Wrote? Really? With material like that you should get a job writing for Jimmy Kimmel," was all up with which I could really come.

The sad thing is, though dry toast and Murder She Wrote wasn't very tempting, I really could go for an Early Bird Special and a few episodes of Rockford Files.

We work together again tonight so, Costanza-style, I'm planning on spending little free time before heading in coming up with a way to really zing the guy. Whatever I think of, it will be smart material and a smart crowd will appreciate it.

Herman Franks, RIP

2009-04-02T04:50:00.000-07:00

If you're not a pretty big baseball dork, the name Herman Franks probably doesn't mean much to you. Suffice to say he was a hell of a good baseball man, and a hell of a good Cub, who died a couple of days ago.

At HJE, Mike D eulogizes Franks passionately and eloquently:

one of my earliest memories of rooting for the Cubs was the visage of this pear-shaped old man who made a spectacle while giving it to the umpires, and how much it enraptured me. You could say that Herman Franks is the reason I became a Cubs fan in late 1979...But none of those players made me appreciate what was at stake until I was struck by the scene of the overmatched and mediocre and eliminated Cubs team fighting like hell against the big, bad, black and gold Pirates of Pissburgh...And Herman Franks wasn’t gonna take that shit from no umpires and let his team get knocked down by nobody. No, sir.

It was so good that I quoted most of it, but it's worth reading the whole thing.

Edmund Wilson

2009-04-02T04:22:00.001-07:00

A guy whose taste I respect recently took me to task for comments I made about Edmund Wilson. My friend has an agenda--he's utterly daft for Fitzgerald and Wilson did more than any ten people to rehabilitate Scott's image once it was in utter desolation. Incidentally, Wilson was curiously silent while Fitzgerald's image was being desolated in the first place, but by the Pat Hobby era, even if one loved Scott not much could be done.*

Generally speaking, critics can be safely ignored when they offer their opinions of books and should only be read if they write well enough to give pleasure to the reader. That is to say, generally speaking critics can be safely ignored.

The most revered of our present critics, Michiko Kakutani misreads 5 out of every 4 books she reviews, a feat she accomplishes by sometimes launching into a languid digression during her review of a book in which she manages to misread an additional, usually only incidentally related, book. Despite this, she is rarely worth condemning because I doubt she has ever written a review persuasive enough to change an intelligent reader's opinion of any book.

Wilson, on the other hand, was both very intelligent and highly persuasive. His misreadings of Nabokov persist to the present day. He misread and maligned Waugh and was largely responsible for the hamfisted insistence of an entire generation of critics on Marxist and Freudian interpretation and reinterpretation of far too many blameless, defenseless, texts. Wilson was clever and articulate and for too long too many readers (especially students in the humanities and, worse, other critics) would hastily substitute Wilson's judgment for their own when it came to texts they didn't have the time or inclination to read.

I think Wilson's value is twofold. First and foremost, he can be read with enjoyment. Beyond that, Wilson was skilled at wandering through the second-hand stores of the shabbier parts of our culture and discovering an occasional gem of a book that had either fallen into disrepute or never had any reputation from the beginning. In Fitzgerald, of course, he found the proverbial Golconda amongst the rhinestones--but that was cheating, because he knew where that gem had landed all along and only had to make sure to be the first one to get there. But in other works, like Patriotic Gore (Civil War literature), Wilson is able to find minor masterpieces going on the cheap and buff them until they obtain a weak, pallid shimmer.

The problem with this is that they remain just that--minor masterpieces. By the time one has outgrown the desire to wear beaten to hell corduroy jackets and Nixon's the One! era hideous plaid pants, one has sort of outgrown Wilson.

===================================

* I remember a long time ago remarking to one of my professors that F. Scott's daughter had said something like "Jay Gatsby may be what my father is remembered for but it was Pat Hobby who sent me to Vassar" to which my professor said something like "Pat Hobby was always an ass, but even for him that was a terrible thing to do".

Battlestar Galactica

2009-03-29T06:46:00.000-07:00

A relatively relaxed night at work was marred only by the repeated entreaties of a co-worker to "just give Battlestar Galactica another chance". With some effort, I declined demurely several times.

Let me say here what I was too polite to say there: I loathe Battlestar Galactica and I'm happy it's no longer on the air. And for the record, I'm also glad Dark Angel is no longer on the air. I'm fucking ecstatic Firefly was shitcanned so soon. I only vaguely knew of Alias's existence, but when it finally disappeared I breathed a sigh of relief. Each of the thousand Star Trek the Next Generation spin-offs was, in its own unique way, a goddamn pox. Deep Space Nine. Enterprise. Voyager. Saved by the Bell: The Starfleet Academy Years. All of them.

I sincerely hope that Fox greenlights some series based on some Robert Jordan or Larry Niven bullshit just so I can listen to the indignant squeals of its fanbase after its cancellation following episode three.

It isn't really fair, however, to close before admitting a bit of my own science fiction/fantasy/whatever fanboyism: If there were ever a series based on Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency I would be likely to watch every minute of it, and defend it as loudly, as incessantly, as anyone ever defended the Star Gate ~~cash cow~~ franchise.

Bought a ticket to the world but now I've come back; or, We're back for more cash.

2009-03-27T08:01:00.000-07:00

Spandau Ballet is reunited, and Michael Hann is not pleased:

I loathed Spandau Ballet first time round; I loathe them equally now. More than any other musical assembly with the possible exception of Stock Aitken and Waterman, they are Thatcherism on vinyl.

England of the 1980s, of course, had a crystal clear cultural identity, and Thatcher was at its center. Every palpitation and spasm of the culture was interpreted as either a rejection or ratification of Thatcherism, and the Dragon Lady cast her shadow over the nation in a way that not even Reagan did across the Atlantic. In such an environment, it was natural that minor artists become little more than coefficients of the culture, but Hann contends that Spandau Ballet's connection to Thatcherism was more than accidental, more than symbolic:

But it is mostly their fault, and it's hard not to believe the band themselves understand the linkage. After all, the Tony Hadley homepage on his agent's website describes the band's demise thus: "As the Thatcher years drew to a close, Spandau disbanded." You don't hit on that formulation by accident. Hadley himself is a committed Conservative who attends party conferences and was rumoured to be interested in running for Parliament. And he's definitely not at the Cameronian "hug a hoodie" end of the party: he liked the way Thatcher did things.

Hann also, naturally, paints with broad strokes, hitting on the familiar touchstones of pop culture critique: style over substance, cheap plastic thrills, a once proud nation living in a coma. As an observer far removed in time and space, I'd be inclined to pish posh these a bit and say that Spandau Ballet couldn't have been worse than 99 other similar bands, but no less a figure than Billy Bragg seems to side with Hann:

Billy Bragg has even attributed his decision to become a performer to them: "One day [I] saw Spandau Ballet on Top of the Pops wearing kilts and singing Chant No 1 and something in me snapped. I was waiting for a band to come along to play the kind of music I wanted to hear, and none was forthcoming, so it was that moment I finally realised it was gonna have to be me,"

He gazed a gazely stare

2009-03-23T06:42:00.000-07:00

Over at Hire Jim Essian, Bad Kermit has some unkind words about Davey Johnson's decision to play Cap'n Clutch, Derek Jeter, over Jimmy Rollins. Writing about the Calm Eyed Assassin:

Anyone who would draw up a roster that has Derek Jeter playing shortstop with Jimmy Rollins on his bench is an idiot. Jeter played a relatively routine ground ball into a double, giving Japan three late unearned runs. But even worse than allowing Jeter to disgrace the United States of America is inexplicably having Adam Dunn lumber around in right field while Mark DeRosa(?!) plays first base. If you can’t hide Dunn in a grazing field, the next-best place to hide him is first base.

As for Adam Dunn--I really like the guy. I like his power production. I love his OBP. I love the fact that he seems half-comatose much of the time and evinces an almost patrician disdain for the game of baseball that compensates him so well. Like a porcine Persian cat, he doesn't exactly bite the hand that feeds him but he also pays it no mind. However, yeah, Dunn's delightful insouciance makes him a poor choice if you actually need a position fielded that's likely to require him to move more than a few feet to his right or left at any point.

Shakespeare in the Park

2009-03-22T16:55:00.000-07:00

Received information on this summer's Shakespeare in the Park in Central Park, and it's kind of a hell or high water situation because not only Twelfth Night, but also The Bacchae is being performed this year.

To sweeten the pot, The Bacchae is directed by Joanne Akalaitis, with music by Philip Glass. I've never actually seen anything Akalaitis has directed, but I remember reading with delight of her skirmishes with Beckett about her production of Endgame. It's hard not to admire, just on principle, a woman whose artistic vision (right or wrong, I have no idea) was so strong and whose personality was so obstinate that she stood up to Beckett.* Also, with Glass scoring a Euripides play it's hard to imagine going too far wrong. Or rather, even if it does go very far wrong indeed, it's likely to be a bedazzling sort of atrocity.

But the most important thing is that I've never seen Twelfth Night performed professionally and it would be a pleasure to see Sir Toby and Malvolio's bitter feud brought to life.

====================================================

A hasty consultation of Google yielded this NY Times review of the contentious production of Endgame. If I find a better source later I'll post it, because I remember finding the back and forth between director and writer hilarious.

Saint Joan of Didion on Doris Lessing

2009-03-21T17:09:00.001-07:00

An excerpt of Doris Lessing's memoirs is available at Granta 100 (not to be confused with the less scholarly but considerably more upbeat Haircut 100). The passages deal with Lessing's obligations as a little girl to watch over the family's chickens and their precious, precious eggs. True to form, Lessing presents us with a sunny opening:

What a scatterbrain, what a feckless girl’—so my mother would say of me to a guest, a visiting policeman, a neighbour coming over about some farm problem. ‘What a harum-scarum!’ Did she believe in the evil eye? No. And the Chinese, who, we are told, may say of their own, ‘This is my worthless wife’, ‘This my useless son’. Are they averting the evil eye? ‘She’s such a flibbertigibbet,’ usually said with a fond little laugh. What could she have meant? But the real question came much later, for if you are thirteen, fourteen, what she says has to be taken as true. This knot of wants, needs, angers, attitudes, a confusion of emotions, amounts to being a scatterbrain, the feckless child? Later you had to ask, how could she have used those words on this over-serious, critical bookworm of a girl? A mystery.

The entire excerpt reminds me of the childhood stories Phil Hartman used to tell on News Radio, where he would launch into a tale about some kind of horrifically emotionally scarring event from his youth ("So after I was cut from the football team, my mother said, in front of everybody on the team mind you, 'Well, Central High has lost a fullback but the family has gained a daughter'") and then smile, look away and say, wistfully, "Good times. Good times".

I was reminded of the opening of Joan Didion's essay on Lessing:

To read a great deal of Doris Lessing over a short period of time is to feel that the original hound of hell has commandeered the attic. She holds the mind's other guests in an ardent contempt. She appears for meals only to dismiss as decadent the household's other attempts at writing well. For more than twenty years now she has been registering, in a torrent of fiction that increasingly seems conceived in a stubborn rage against the very idea of fiction, every tremor along her emotional fault system, every slippage in her self-education. Look here, she is forever demanding, a missionary devoid of any but the most didactic irony, The Communist Party is not the answer. There is life beyond the vaginal orgasm. St John of the Cross is not as dotty as certain Anglicans would have you believe. She comes hard to ideas, and once she has collared one, worries it with Victorian doggedness.

Edit

In my haste to peck this entry out before leaving for work, I forgot to mention that, it not being my habit to browse back issues of Granta, I found the link to the Lessing excerpt via 3QuarksDaily.

Really, Citigroup? Really?

2009-03-21T06:31:00.000-07:00

CitiBank is running a new series of ads that show a sequence of very brief clips of ordinary people walking around having dialogues with each other about ways they've found to save money.

The problem is, none of the dialogues are actually any good. Nobody says things like "So we pulled the kid out of Cranbrook, put him back in a public school, and told him if he gets stoned and steals one more car he's just gonna have to be on his own, probably go to jail or something," or "Finally I just had to take the credit card away from my husband. Told him next time he needs a new suit at Barneys he's just going to have to pay cash. His own cash".

The worst segment of the commercial, though, was one in which a woman says, very smugly, to her friend "I always steal shampoo from hotels. Haven't paid for a bottle of shampoo in years". Okay three things. 1) Usually that shampoo just isn't very good. Your hair is going to look terrible and you're going to get fired. Is that what CitiGroup wants? 2) Why was the woman so proud of herself for this? I steal pens from offices. Haven't had to buy my own pen since 1982. But this isn't something I bring up in conversations with friends. 3) Scavenging for hygiene supplies is seriously the best the financial gurus at Citi can give us? Holy shit are we fucked.

I guess what I'm saying is, who is the ad genius who came up with this one?

Piety.

2009-03-21T06:04:00.000-07:00

There is a memo from a dead man hanging in nearly every office in the main residential building that forbids employees from leaving their cars unattended in the winter to warm up and defrost. The memo was written three winters ago (long before I arrived) and has been the subject of fierce debate and criticism.

The memo's author, who died of a heart attack a couple of summers ago, is universally regarded as a first rate bastard and a real son of a bitch, but that's not what makes the memo controversial. The disagreement about the legitimacy of the policy stems from the fact that no one is even sure whether he had the authority to make up rules. He was a clinical supervisor, not an administrator, which, some contend, means he could, at most,write policies for his own department. Others say that, because the memo was originally e-mailed to all staff and CC'ed to the top two administrators, the fact that they did not immediately quash it implies consent on their part. That said, both of those administrators have since been replaced, and as the policy does not appear in any handbook, but only in memos taped up in some but not all offices on campus, it isn't even clear whether the new top administrators are aware of, let alone approve of, the policy.

Since temperatures dropped into the 20s last night (welcome to spring in the heartland, right here in what Costanza might call "the big meaty part of the curve") all these issues and more were discussed by cold, frustrated employees who didn't want to spend one more morning sitting in their goddamn freezing cars waiting for the frost on their windshields to melt. The arguments were various and intensely delivered. There were strict constructionists, textualists, literalists, even a few bold souls who insisted that the text belongs to the reader and, as such, the memos ought, at long last, to be collected, wadded up, and thrown away. The fact that the author died and that we now have seemingly random memorial services to remember him several times a year made it into a kind of Christ story.

As for me? Well, I follow the rules. I've seen what happens when you go off like a loose cannon, pursing your own agenda without any kind of agency sanction. You find yourself in a windowless basement office assigned a redheaded skeptic tag along as a partner and then you get written out at some point because of contract disputes and other obligations, even though the next couple of years after you're written out consist mostly of people sitting around saying "I wonder if Mulder will come hang out tonight". And let me tell you, that is not how I intend to spend my seasons 8 and 9, guy.

When anybody accuses me of being a brown nosing boyscout I just politely explain that I used to listen to punk rock, I guess, but that the revolution is over and the bums lost. Condolences!

Avocado smoothies.

2009-03-19T17:38:00.000-07:00

Avocado smoothies are phenomenal. There's a Mexican grocery a couple of miles from my apartment that sells excellent avocados. Once you have a good avocado, you can't go too far wrong.

Recipe (for 1 smoothie. Just sort of do the math if you want to make more than one. We're all math nerds here anyway.):

1 avocado
some honey (buy expensive honey, because it tastes better and consumerism is our patriotic duty)
1 cup of vanilla soy milk
some ice

Blend the hell out of it. Voila.

Some recipes tell you to include the avocado stone in the blender. I don't, but that sounds exciting and I may try it one day.

Some recipes also call for sugar, but the honey makes it sweet enough for me. I do want to try it with some Himalayan pink salt someday though.

You can also add other fruits (mangoes and bananas work especially well, raspberries are frequently recommended but I'm not a fan of the combination).

as a figure in the distance even to my own eyes

2009-03-19T03:57:00.000-07:00

Spent most of my night off in an office, on the clock, in a semi-frenzy, trying to deal with piles of paperwork that has to be processed immediately. I'm not burning out, but God knows I prefer therapeutic interventions and group sessions to the documentation.

It was a relief to finally walk out into the night, which was warm enough that I didn't need a coat over my sweater but cold enough that I could see my own breath. The sky was clear and the moon so bright it hurt my eyes to stare into it.

Exhausted but in high spirits, I didn't care that my left shoe had come untied, which was a miscalculation, because the ground was so soft that my foot sunk down into some mud, and when I took another step the foot came up but my shoe stayed put. This is the third time that's happened to me (drainage, especially on the quad, is not ideal), and yet I seem not to learn. Luckily nobody was around this time, especially since I then slipped on the wet grass and fell right on my butt while trying to extricate the shoe from its predicament. My balance isn't that bad, but, you see, I was trying to hop on one foot to keep the other one from getting wet while I yanked on the shoe in the mud and...so yeah. In retrospect, I really should have been able to hear the Looney Tunes theme playing in my head and known how it would end up.

Earth Girls Are Easy.

2009-03-15T15:59:00.001-07:00

Nostalgia does not attach itself to hard, gaudily bright plastic, and on its merits the film is, of course, all but unwatchable. I'd forgotten just how irritating Julie Brown was, particularly when shrieking.

Plus I think a lot of my fond memories of this were actually fond memories of My Stepmother is an Alien.

Still, kudos for putting Jesus and Mary Chain on the soundtrack.

Vidal on Scott

2009-03-14T16:55:00.000-07:00

Vidal infamously plays personal politics in his literary essays. In many ways, he is a smarter, more charming, Edmund Wilson*. When he is offering specific criticism, his insight is usually diamond sharp, but when he plays at generalization and sweeping proclamations he often becomes enervating. It's been said that Vidal did more than anyone in the 20th century to popularize Dawn Powell, which is very much to his credit, and his attacks on John Updike (and against the gentleman's club of the William Shawn era New Yorker) are also invaluable.

So it isn't too surprising that Vidal offered one of the most astute comments on Scott Fitzgerald I've come across. In "Novelists and Critics of the 1940s" Vidal summarizes Fitzgerald's appeal thus:

...whose chief attraction is that he exploded before he could become great, providing a grim lesson in failure that, in its completeness, must be awfully heartening when contemplated on the safe green campus of some secluded school.

That probably pretty accurately summarizes, at least, my own era of rabid dedication to the Fitzgerald oeuvre. It was a kind of sad, post-adolescent devotion to the cliche that it's "better to burn out than fade away".

The older I get, the more I see the value in Scott's shorter works, and the more I regard Tender is the Night as not just his own best work, but one of the best works of the early 20th century. So many writers who evince early genius are at their best before their authorial persona develops. Some continue being fruitful long enough to again shed that persona and write something brilliant again later, some don't.

As excellent as This Side of Paradise was, for Fitzgerald, works about maturation remained purely speculative fiction. It's eerie to think how good that romantic egotist could have been had he ever become a personage.
===================================================================

*I am admittedly uncharitable to Wilson because I dislike so much of what I know about him. Chiefly: 1) As a critic, I can't forgive him for his disastrous misreadings of Nabokov, and 2) as a human, I can't forgive him for being physically abusive to his wives and lovers (McCarthy in particular).

Dave Foley raw and uncensored!

2009-03-13T08:04:00.000-07:00

Pretty accurate paraphrase from a News Radio commentary track:

Writer: So this is the episode, Dave, where your old singing group shows up from out of nowhere and wants you to join them in a reunion. They were played by Bob Odenkirk and David Cross...originally I think we wanted a Kids in the Hall reunion for this episode but it didn't happen. Why was that?

Dave Foley: Because Kids in the Hall are assholes.

Then, later....

Writer: Did you ever read any of the internet Kids in the Hall sites while you were on News Radio?

Dave Foley: Yeah, I remember reading a lot of people who were seething with anger at me over quitting the group.

Writer: Well, would you like to apologize to them now?

Dave Foley: I guess I'd like to reiterate a big "Fuck you".

Icicle Works.

2009-03-13T07:25:00.001-07:00

Listening to a CD of the songs mentioned in Less Than Zero in my car last night. Embarrassingly enough, it's very difficult to stay within the speed limit when Whisper to a Scream comes on. It's also difficult not to sort of sing along with that Earthquake Song from Valley Girl. So what I'm saying is that yes, I drive around listening to 1980s anti-coming-of-age-novel-themed soundtracks and enjoy it far too much.

It's a brilliantly bright, abominably cold morning, which, I think, is the ideal set and setting for Whisper to a Scream.

Duck tacos.

2009-03-12T09:23:00.000-07:00

I started trying to learn to cook this winter because I was bored and bummed out. It was as much in self-defense as anything else--left to my own devices I tend to overeat when going through a blue era and learning to cook was a way to not eat too many frozen pizzas. The results have mostly been amusing, often edible, disasters. A few people, mostly other single guys who aren't getting any younger, have asked me for recipes for reasons that range from a desire to stop eating they're still living in dorms to trying to impress girls.*

Some time ago, after some show or something, we went to a restaurant called De Cero, which is a pleasantly trendy Mexican place in Chicago. I had duck tacos there, and they were delicious, so one of the first things I tried to make were some duck tacos. I used a recipe by a chef who I guess is mostly famous for his irritating television presence, but it turned out reasonably well. I've added my own comments to, I guess, be helpful to people like me.

Ingredients
* 1 tablespoon olive oil
* 1 cup julienned onions
* 4 cups duck confit, shredded
* 1/2 cup tamarind sauce
* 1/4 cup chopped green onions
* 12 small flour tortillas
* Vegetable oil for frying
* 1 cup sour cream
* Juice of one lemon
* 2 avocados, seeded, peeled and diced
* Juice of one lime
* 1 teaspoon minced garlic
* 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons diced tomatoes, peeled and seeded
* 1 cup grated Monterey Jack cheese
* 2 cups shredded lettuce
* Tabasco sauce
* Salt and pepper
Directions
In a saute pan, over medium heat, add the olive oil. When the oil is hot, add the onions and saute for 1 minute. Add the duck confit and saute for 1 minute. Season with salt and pepper. Stir in the tamarind sauce and saute for 2 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Stir in the green onions and remove from the heat

I'm still not sure exactly what a saute pan is. I have these two things that both look like skillets. One is slightly shallower than the other so I usually use that when it says "saute pan". The first time I made this I used the deeper of the two skillets though and it still turned out okay.

Use expensive olive oil. The bottle should look like a bottle of olive oil Christian Bale might buy. Also use a pepper mill, not a pepper shaker such as one might find at Arbys. That's an important message about growing up.

Also he wants you to put in the normal onions first, then add the green ones. I'm not sure how much difference it really makes.

In a large skillet, heat the vegetable oil for frying. When the oil is hot, fry the tortillas, a couple at a time, until golden brown, about 2 minutes. Remove the tortillas from the oil and drain on a paper-lined plate. Season the tortillas with salt and pepper.

I like to gingerly place the tortillas into the hot oil and then sort of mince backward a step or two, because the oil is really hot. To remove the tortillas, I used like these metal salad tongs, and that worked pretty well. The "paper-lined plate" may seem a little anal but it's actually a pretty good idea. Again, use a pepper mill for the pepper. You've gotta really class it up.

In a small mixing bowl, whisk the sour cream, lemon juice and cilantro together. Season with salt and pepper. In another small bowl, combine the avocados, lime juice, garlic and 2 tablespoons tomatoes, together. Season the mixture with salt and pepper.

I didn't have a mixing bowl. Cereal bowls work fine. Also I didn't have a whisk the first time, so I used a fork. But later I bought a whisk and that worked way better, so as long as you're splurging on olive oil and fancy pepper, go ahead and buy a whisk. Also the lime juice should come in like a bottle, not a whimsical green lime shaped container.

To assemble, lay one tortilla in the center of each plate. Place 1/2 cup of the duck mixture on top of each tortilla. Top the duck meat with the shredded lettuce, tomatoes and cheese. Top with a second tortilla and repeat the latter procedure. Top each taco with the remaining tortillas. Garnish the tacos with the cilantro sour cream and guacamole.

With a gun to my head I can't assemble a taco so that it doesn't fall apart, but you probably can. Otherwise this is self-explanatory.

All in all, this recipe is very good and relatively idiot proof.

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*Unless you're much better at it than I am, I can't really see how this would impress a girl. It's more likely to invoke a sort of amused sympathy and a polite suggestion that you perhaps go out for sushi next time.

Bleed Dodger Blue.

2009-03-12T04:28:00.000-07:00

A conversation with a co-worker from two nights ago...

CW: I read a thing by your buddy last night.

Me: Who?

CW: Tommy Lasorda.

Me: Oh yeah? What did Tommy have to say?

CW: I think he was saying that the World Baseball Classic is the most important thing in the world right now and you can't go to heaven unless you want the US to win.

Me: What about people in other countries?

CW: He wasn't specific. I don't know if he thinks they're going to heaven anyway.

Me: Yeah. There won't be any foreigners at the Big Olive Garden in the Sky.*

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* Originally, this was to be accompanied by a link to an old post on Lasorda's mlb.com blog in which he listed the "best pasta restaurants in America", which included several different very specific chain restaurant locations (ie "the Olive Garden at the little mini-mall out by the airport in Houston" or something). Unfortunately I found the post originally through FJM and they were allergic to linking properly to articles they ridiculed, and a perusal of Lasorda's blog archives evinces bupkis. So if you could just pretend the link was there, that would be great.

To make up for it, here is footage of Don Rickles roasting Tommy Lasorda from like 20 years ago or so.

At least it's an ethos.

2009-03-07T17:26:00.000-08:00

Ioz, formidable for guile in peace and war, offers one of the most entertaining takes I've seen on Rand in a long time. In response to the increasingly irritating screech of the "going Galt" meme (in which people who imagine they are integral to society and further imagine their "success" is going to be punished by Obama the Radiant threaten to totally withdraw and let society collapse a la' John Galt), Ioz writes:

Ayn Rand wrote an entire book about railroads without once mentioning The Pacific Railway Act, whereby the eeeevil government gave railroad companies millions and millions of acres of land. Trying to construct a coherent personal economic ideology out of a Rand novel is as realistic, likely, and sane as trying to set up a street gang using The Outsiders as your manual.

2009-03-07T04:42:00.000-08:00

Spring.

2009-03-06T04:33:00.000-08:00

We've had nice weather for two whole days together, and there are no breakneck temperature drops predicted for the near future. It was chilly this morning (high 40s?) but still warm enough to stand outside for a few minutes in a bathrobe and slippers feeding strawberries to a greedy but ungrateful squirrel who would scamper several feet away and eye me suspiciously to eat a berry and then return when he was finished to see if I had more.

My dad always told me that if I lived someplace temperate I'd miss having seasons. My dad always told me a lot of things, like that Duke Snider was a better center fielder than Willie Mays, but objective data doesn't always bear those claims out. Still, there's a weird sense of accomplishment when winter is finally over and I've somehow survived.

My Valuable Hunting Knife has always been one of my spring songs. It's bittersweet this year because it reminds me of someone I love who's gone (she's not a survivalist or anything, we just both liked the song) but these days bittersweet feels better than sugarsweet anyway.

The Informers film (new trailer).

2009-03-06T03:50:00.000-08:00

Although I continue to hope against hope for a film adaptation of Glamorama (other than, you know, Zoolander), in the immediate future I'm happy to settle for seeing The Informers on the big screen. The Informers contains some of Ellis's best pure prose, and some of his most jarring scenes. That reviews of the film vary violently is hardly surprising. I'm remaining optimistic, and the most recent official trailer is fairly promising. If nothing else, it's going to be a pretty film.

My big worry is that it's going to be very difficult to capture the sense of desolation, anomie and creeping, overwhelming apathy that Ellis creates between the scenes of flamboyant debauchery. Traditionally, stentorian, dazzling hedonism seems to be easy to capture on screen. Loneliness, slow rot, and the sense that everyone and every thing is slowly but steadily slouching straight to hell is harder to capture. I can't think offhand of a film that manages to oscillate between the two extremes in a way that would do The Informers justice.

On the Sri Lankan cricket massacre.

2009-03-05T08:12:00.000-08:00

Sportz Insight does an excellent job of explaining what the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team means to those of us far outside that particular circle:

It is not that blowing up school children in a bus or businessmen in a hotel was any less tragic or underlined the ruthlessness and pointlessness of these perpetrators of terror any less. But targeting guest cricketers from a friendly country just crosses the line at so many different levels in the context of Pakistani culture.

Cricket is the one thing our struggling country has been able to be good at on a global level and consequently the one thing Pakistanis have come to closely associate with their sense of self worth. Foreign commentators on the country's obsession with the sport always seem to miss this point. It is the one thing that has united a divided country, across age, across ethnicity, across political or ideological leanings. To attack cricket is to make a statement that these terrorists will pull out all the stops. They will attack children, they will attack teachers, they will attack women, they will attack indiscriminately, and yes, they will attack cricketers as well. Yes, this time it is personal.

Peavy may still be a Cub. Also, I heard Jim Morrison is running a cajun restaurant in New Orleans under an assumed name.

2009-03-05T07:27:00.000-08:00

Oh, Paul Sullivan. God loves you, but what could he do?

The Jake Peavy saga began in November and lasted through most of the off-season, leaving Cubs fans wondering if the Padres ace would be in blue pinstripes by Opening Day.

It hasn't happened yet, and there's no indication a Peavy deal ever will be consummated. But there's little doubt he's a wanted man in the Cubs' clubhouse.

"Love to have him," Ryan Theriot said. "That's definitely the type of player you want on your team."

The Cubs are waiting for the Ricketts family to close its purchase of the team before deciding whether to re-explore the possibility of acquiring Peavy. Talks have not resumed since the last day of the winter meetings.

I love the scrappy quote from the scrappy Ryan Theriot, the little man with the big heart and the never, ever, evereverever say die attitude, even when it comes to a deal that was dead on arrival.

It's sort of charming that Sullivan just won't give up on this. In addition to seeing Peavy pitching in the Friendly Confines, other things Sullivan is looking forward to this summer include:

That Castlevania movie coming out.

The big Husker Du reunion tour.

The long-awaited next season of Firefly.

Astonishing tales of academic life in California.

2009-03-05T04:38:00.000-08:00

The reason Glengarry Glen Ross was on my mind in an earlier post, I think, is because of this astonishing true story from Acephalous about a random encounter with an hilariously confrontational stranger/parent of a prospective student. He writes

FORMER STUDENT: To your left you'll see the Student Center and the Zot-n-Go. Coming out of the Zot-n-Go is my favorite composition teacher ever (SEK waves and smiles politely as she puts her hand to her face and in an exaggerated whisper says) who actually wears that cap to class sometimes.

PARENT: (loudly) Fucking loser.

SEK: (stops) Excuse me?
SEK turns to confront PARENT and sees the sort of uptight wealthy white folk who grow on trees out here. He comes from money and married young and is likely upset at how much a college education costs. He has a foot and about 100 lean lbs. on SEK.

PARENT: You heard me. (steps to SEK)

SEK: (walking backwards) I have office hours to attend to.

PARENT: That's what I thought.

SEK: (confused) You thought I had office hours?

Having watched friends of mine sit sheepishly and burn lobster red while their prototypical Horrible Tennis Parent fathers (and sometimes mothers) verbally abused officials and opponents during high school matches, I feel absolutely terrible for the kid. Plus, whose dad wears a suit to a college tour? Dork.

Epileptic surgeons with their eyes X'ed out

2009-03-05T04:15:00.000-08:00

There was a documentary on PBS last night discussing the days leading up to the stock market going totally bitchcakes last year. I was only half paying attention, and the constant repetition of "Merrill Lynch", "Bear" "JP Morgan" and such was soothing, because it reminded me of the times last semester of college when I was half paying attention to my classmates' catlogues of upcoming job interviews. Then this guy with early 90s Wall Street style hair (these days sadly so seldom seen on anyone outside the friendly confines of Long Island) came on and started talking about Paulson and Bernanke. Paulson always makes my ears perk up because 1) He's a Cubs fan, 2) He's utterly insane, and 3) We come from roughly the same 'hood (Barrington Hills, yo). Gordon Gekko was explaining that "I think of Paulson and Bernanke as being like a couple of grizzled surgeons, plunging in to operate on the economy".

Exhausted and bored, I started having this sort of 80s sitcom dream sequence in which I was a patient with, say, a broken leg and a ruptured spleen from a car accident who looked up and saw Bernanke and Paulson getting ready to operate on me, and I became absolutely certain of what the outcome would be. I'd wake up and see two self-satisfied affluent white dudes standing over me, looking down. Paulson would calmly explain "I also removed one of your kidneys and sold it to Chinese organ thieves, because free market. Also, I set your broken leg but amputated your other one, to teach you that you can't just go around breaking your legs and not expect consequences. I call that moral hazard". Then Bernanke would wink at me, and point out the third, utterly useless arm growing out of my forehead. "I gave you an extra arm. Because Great Depression. I also tied festive purple and yellow helium balloons to the fingers. Your fingers. Partially your fingers, they also kind of belong to Jamie Dimon. It's complicated. You're welcome".

Note: In fairness, I think the hair was less Gekkoesque and more Baldwinian, like the total douchebag from Glengarry Glen Ross. The dude with the long boring monologue about "I flew to the office in a platinum helicopter encrusted with diamonds, that's my name!" and "Pants are for closers. You faggots can walk around in your underwear until you at least get a sit".

Netflix shipment.

2009-03-05T04:13:00.000-08:00

The greatest Netflix shipment ever? Time will tell.

1) Night of the Comet.
2) Earth Girls are Easy.
3) They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore
4) The Trial
5) The Librarian: Return to King Solomon's Mines

I'm a little afraid Earth Girls are Easy won't be as good as I remember it. I tend to see it as a period piece, an anthropological curiousity, a postcard from a time and a place that's gone forever. Sometimes movies like that continue to delight years later, and sometimes they lose their luster. Still, I remain convinced that if Julien Temple (circa 1988 or so) had directed Less Than Zero it would have been a far more bedazzling travesty. Also IMDB's "movie meter" (whatever that is) tells me Earth Girls are Easy is up 2% in popularity this week. Whatever that means. I think it means my idiosyncratic taste in books and movies is somewhat outperforming my 401K these days.

What!

2009-03-04T11:50:00.000-08:00

I should be sleeping, but,although my legs and eyelids are heavy I just can't drift off, so instead I'm drinking pomegranate juice and watching Soft Cell videos. This would actually be a damned good way to spend my time if I didn't need to be up and at work in a matter of hours.

In which James Ellroy tells off a hypothetical old lady.

2009-03-03T07:51:00.000-08:00

Like Hemingway, like Ellis, like Nabokov, James Ellroy plays around with a public persona that seems to serve both to sell books and allow him to have a few cheap shits and giggles. The real Ellroy is buried behind mirrors and masks, although the Ellroy that Ellroy plays on book tours would threaten to punch me in the mouth for saying so.

For a long time, I avoided Ellroy's work because most of the people who kept recommending it to me were schmuckish (fools' praise, after all, stains), and their recommendations made him sound unbearable. When someone with suspect taste tells me an author's prose is "gritty minimalism" I just assume it's going to sound like a warmed over version of Fight Club. I Am Chuck Palahniuk's Unearned Sense of Self-Importance.

Ellroy, however, is masterful. I recently re-read American Tabloid/The Cold Six Thousand (2/3 of a soon to be completed trilogy) which chronicle the strange relationships between a number of gangsters, spooks, cops, dupes, patsies, and junkies in the years leading up to, and in the aftermath of, the conspiracy to assassinate JFK. With regard to hardboiled fiction, between Ellroy and Chandler it's a tossup (Ellroy would cast a resounding vote for himself, as many times as he could get away with voting).

After finishing The Cold Six Thousand, I was craving more Ellroy so I checked his Wikipedia page to see if there is a release date for the last book. In the process, I came across this charming quote from Ellroy:

L.A. Confidential, the movie, is the best thing that happened to me in my career that I had absolutely nothing to do with. It was a fluke—and a wonderful one—and it is never going to happen again—a movie of that quality.

Here’s my final comment on L.A. Confidential, the movie: I go to a video store in Prairie Village, Kansas. The youngsters who work there know me as the guy who wrote L.A. Confidential. They tell all the little old ladies who come in there to get their G-rated family flick. They come up to me, they say, “OOOO… you wrote L.A. Confidential.... Oh, what a wonderful, wonderful movie. I saw it four times. You don’t see storytelling like that on the screen anymore.” I smile, I say, “Yes, it’s a wonderful movie, and a salutary adaptation of my wonderful novel. But listen, granny: You love the movie. Did you go out and buy the book?” And granny invariably says, “Well, no, I didn’t.” And I say to granny, “Then what the fuck good are you to me?"

Save the angles for the Schillings.

2009-03-03T06:07:00.000-08:00

I've always thought Curt Schilling was a cunt. However, up until last season, I always suspected Jim Edmonds was a closet homosexual who did a lot of ketamine and enjoyed sending text message pictures of his dick to his old frat buddies, but as it turns out he was able to come up with some big hits for us.

What I'm saying is, Curt Schilling is a cunt but he's a cunt I wouldn't mind seeing with a one year incentive-laden contract in Cub blue. Schilling (aka Scythehands Voxslayer) blogs in his blog that:

I have said to no one, including myself, that I am definitely coming back, because it’s not true. However if I did, the Cubs, and Tampa, were they to need a starting pitcher for the 2nd half of the season and into October, would be 2 situations I’d be very interested in.

If Schilling made himself available at a reasonable price, especially if Sean Marshall turns out to be a huge wad of vaguely man-shaped failure as the 5th starter, it would be a risk well worth taking.

Speak, Mnemosyne.

2009-03-02T07:18:00.000-08:00

Finished paperwork early so I was sitting around reading Borges essays, which I find frequently frustrating. There are, of course, times--usually for four or five lines at a stretch--when Borges shows dizzying brilliance. The rest of the time, by fits and starts, he vacillates between writing like the half-smart frat boy who shows up to class unprepared and then rambles endlessly trying to sound smart without saying anything and, at the other extreme, being excruciatingly subtle.

At his worst, here is what Borges reminds me of:

I once sat next to a close friend at a dinner party. My friend profoundly disliked the host and hostess but was also the most painfully, priggishly proper person this side of the Atlantic. I looked over and he was vehemently salting his salad while staring directly at the hostess, who wasn't really paying attention to him. He was grinning like a lunatic and he finally leaned over and whispered to me "I'm salting the salad and I haven't even tasted it yet". He will go to his grave convinced no one has so effectively insulted another person since d'Anthes got under Pushkin's skin. I'm sure he still believes it was only the decline of western civilization and the tragic death of d'amour propre that kept someone from challenging him to a duel over the recklessly salted salad.

Anyway, this morning, a friend came up and started bullshitting with me. He's an older guy (mid 60s) and we mostly talk about sports and quote Seinfeld at each other. We got on the subject of basketball, and he said "My grade school coach is in the state hall of fame. Of course I've still got a bone to pick with him, and I guess I probably always will...."

He then went into this story about how when he was 12 he'd been his team's starting point guard and in a county tournament game his coach had diagrammed a play that ended in him passing the ball off to some other kid who was to take the last shot of the game. They were down one, so they'd win or lose with that shot. The kid missed, and my friend said "Until my dying day I'll believe that if he'd let me shoot the ball, we'd have won the game". Except when he told the story, it was full of details. Like, he remembered individual plays from the game down to the minutiae.

The game was over 50 years ago and he remembers how particular plays at particular points in the game broke down. He remembers fouls that should have been called and passes that should have been caught. He remembers that the other team's coach was wearing "an ass ugly yellow tie".

By the time the story was over I was not only entertained but more than a little awed.

Coldplay

2009-03-02T05:45:00.000-08:00

I'm really proud of the way Coldplay has grown musically. There was a time when they were little more than "That band that sounds too much like Radiohead".

But now, depending on the radio single, they're not only "That band that sounds too much like Radiohead". They're also "That band that sounds too much like Bush", and even "That band that sounds too much like U2".

Wait everybody still listens to Bush, right? I mean that's still a perfectly valid frame of reference?

Thanks for listening to the 1995 year end countdown here on KROQ! And don't forget to check out the Strokes playing with the Dandy Warhols at the Knitting Factory on Friday night!

Say hello, wave goodbye.

2009-02-27T15:10:00.000-08:00

The season finale of Psych a couple of weeks ago was fairly excellent. I'm unrepentantly enamored of the series, and the last episode struck most of the right notes and came off as sort of a Valentine's for people my age with my interests who are me. Corbin Bernsen was underused, as he was for most of the season, but Rachel Leigh Cook's reprisal of her role as Abigail (the Jordan Cochran to Sean's Mitch Taylor ) was a nice surprise.

Something that has been troubling me ever since I saw the episode, though, was the choice to end the episode with some limey guitar strummer's cover of Soft Cell's Say Hello, Wave Goodbye in the background. In the first place, his version of the song is intolerable. But the song itself is also an odd choice, given that it was one of the bitchiest pop singles of the 80s. It's a lovely song, but so spiteful that it seemed a deeply weird choice for the season's cheesy/romantic fadeout.

Baseball for modernists, or Dear reader, let's read Acephalous together.

2009-02-27T09:16:00.000-08:00

The incomparable SEK posts a "modernist lineup" which combines my two favorite things, baseball and books. Not only is SEK smart and funny, but his literary taste is pretty damned good.

The prototypical leadoff hitter should radiate self-importance. He has one job and one job only: to get on base. He has one style and one style only: ostentatious scrappiness. Leading off the for modernists is Ernest "Papa" Hemingway.

If our shortstop must be a Derek Jeter clone, I can think of no one better than Joseph "The Con" Conrad: criminally overrated and not nearly so versatile as his ardent supporters insists. His once merely poor range has so deteriorated people point to where he is and exclaim: "There he will be!" But if you need someone selfish to ground selflessly out to second, "The Con" will move the runner along. Slot him in the #2 spot.

Philip Jose Farmer

2009-02-27T09:00:00.001-08:00

My high school rhetoric instructor was always pushing three writers on me: Chandler, Thucydides, and Farmer. Chandler because "He invented the private detective daydream you love so much", Thucydides because he chronicled "the way people always have been and always will be", and Farmer because he was the "great escapist". I fell in love with Chandler, developed a wary, cautious respect for Thucydides, but never managed to so much as warm to Farmer.

I love hack artists of all description. Dick, King, Adams, Maugham, Robert Parker, Jim Thompson, Hammett, Stephen Leacock, and James Thurber are just a few of the myriad scribblers of all types and genres whose works continue to delight and enthrall.

For whatever reason, Farmer's voice completely missed my ear. People whose taste I respect (in addition to my high school mentor) have professed enormous affection for the man, one of my friends going so far as to call him in an e-mail this morning "like a cross between Borges and Dick".

I never saw it, but I did appreciate what he was trying to do. I really wanted to like his Riverworld series and have always been profoundly jealous of the concept. Something in the execution was a turnoff, but it's still sad enough to see him go. Farmer was an original, and a thinker, and there are too few of either type running around these days.

The Daily Howler v. Olbermann

2009-02-27T07:38:00.000-08:00

Bob Somerby is one of my favorite bloggers. I really appreciate his ramshackle, pamphleteering prose and, in the tradition of Paine and Duane and Cobbett, he thinks nothing of turning on his ideological confreres when they behave like imbeciles.

Keith Olbermann has become one of the sacred cows of the putative American Left, although I've always felt that things would be a lot better for all parties had Olbermann and Kilborne just stayed at Sports Center, where they were very good, rather than pursuing their own projects which have invariably been very bad.

In today's Daily Howler, Somerby goes after Olbermann's sanctimonious piffle (scroll down past Collins to get to Olbermann part):

This is a deeply stupid program. Even on Fox, no one has ever run a program this way, with only one party, and one point of view, permitted on the air. Most incredibly, Olbermann employs a string of the very same stooges who led the assaults against Clinton, then Gore. Their targets have changed—but their dumbness lingers. Once again, we’ll offer this thought: A modern nation can’t run on dumb. Your nation is put in peril each night as this big hack dumbs liberals down.

Look at the Harlequins!/Lunar Park

2009-02-27T04:23:00.000-08:00

Finished V.N.'s last novel (Look at the Harlequins!) last week, and was struck by the similarity between this book and Ellis's Lunar Park.

Written largely in response to prevalent unflattering misunderstandings about Nabokov's private life (especially those generated by Andrew Field's terrible biography Nabokov: A Life in Part), Look at the Harlequins! was narrated by a famous Russian writer who embodied all the worst nonsensical rumors that had circulated about V.N.

The narrator of Lunar Park is B. Easton Ellis, but a tabloidized version of the famous writer who proudly embraces all the scandal and gossip that has circulated since the mid 80s regarding Ellis's personal life, substance abuse, sexual predilections and monstrous egotism. The narrator takes particular care to not only affirm but positively luxuriate in the unflattering portrait presented in the hostile documentary This is Not an Exit, in the way V.N.'s narrator flaunts the very worst accusations and implications made by Field.

Both books are, probably, the worst of their respective author's output. Nabokov was in his 70s when he wrote LATH! and his creative powers were probably in decline. Ellis is an odd duck and it's hard to say if he's burnt out or if he has something left.

I personally liked both books, despite their warts. Nabokov was still a genius. Ellis can still write like very few people have ever been able to do and the last long passages from Lunar Park still bring tears to my eyes, despite the novel's glaring weaknesses.

What I'm curious about is to what degree Look at the Harlequins! may have directly influenced Ellis. Obviously he's familiar with V.N. (everybody is reading Nabokov these days so that proves nothing), but I am thinking in particular of the way Ellis tried to spin American Psycho. He insisted it was, at its heart, a book preoccupied with morality and decent conduct narrated by a charming monster, which is exactly the way Nabokov always took care to explain Lolita. In interviews, Nabokov declared "far from a frivolous firebird I will be understood as a moralist", and Ellis has repeatedly said things like "at the end of the day, I'm fundamentally a moralist". In Lunar Park Ellis repeatedly highlights the way American Psycho restored a fortune that had been taken away from (lost by? squandered? pissed away? too much?) him, just as Nabokov and his biographers emphasize the way the similarly explosive Lolita returned the fortune that had been confiscated by the revolution.

There's also a good chance that the only real similarity between the two works is that they're the product of charming, terribly talented egomaniacs lashing out against uninformed criticism of their personal lives, but I'm still intrigued by the similarities (although, as V.N. had John Shade note "similarities are only the shadows of differences, all people see the same differences but different similarities").

Adolf Coors presents: Three idiots and some kind of...lich or something talking about baseball.

2009-02-27T04:07:00.000-08:00

Finishing up some paperwork, half paying attention to Sports Center, my ears suddenly perked up when I heard them announce the first "Coors Cold, Hard, Baseball Fact" segment of the year. Last season, this highly informative regular feature, sponsored by the beer owned by the notoriously insane, dangerously rightwing, Coors family, was responsible for some really marvelous howlers, especially when Steve Philips was given the chance to vent his disgust at the use of "statistics" and "analysis" to determine the value of a baseball player. Hey Mets fans, remember when this guy was running your team? Remember? Remember? Ouch, stop that.

This time it was Karl Ravech, John Kruk, Philips and Peter "Gammo" Gammons all kind of standing around awkwardly wearing identical maroon polo shirts, looking like they were waiting to make a presentation at the International Carpet Cleaning Supplies Distribution Comapny Conference (InCarpCleanSupDistCoCon '09!). Almost certainly the greatest collection of raw brainpower since Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson and Madison sat around kvetching about who was going to get the last piece of canvasback duck and arguing about whose tooth had just fallen out onto the table.

Ravech poses the question to Kruk: Which individual player will have the biggest impact on the National League East this season?

Kruk replies loudly, confidently, "The Philadelphia Phillies".

Christ, I've really missed these guys.

Fire Joe Morgan necromancy

2009-02-25T06:28:00.000-08:00

The other night, sitting around at work arguing about baseball with some co-workers, I cited my favorite joke from the late lamented FJM:

I have an idea for what to do after "Who's Now?" is over. It's called "what time is it?" A panel of ESPN experts would sit around and argue about what time it was. They would never agree because the time would always be changing. People could vote on-line and the it would all depend on when they voted.

At the end you would have some idea of what time it was.

I mis-attributed the joke to "some dork who called himself Ken Tremendous" when in fact it was by some dork who called himself America's Sweetheart, which makes me feel sort of bad, since America's Sweethearts is my favorite of the post-post-post teenage heartthrob Cusack oeuvre.

Anyway we decided that What Time is It would actually be well beyond the abilities of almost every ESPN personality. Stephen A. Smith would just randomly shout out colors he likes, Skip Bayless would talk about how much he hates clocks, and Woody Paige would simply be wrong, somehow, by exactly two minutes and twenty-seven seconds, no matter how carefully he scrutinized the clock.

The point is it's almost baseball season and goddammit do I miss Fire Joe Morgan. Instead of reading this you should just go back and re-read their archive.

The curious case of the horrible adaptation.

2009-02-25T06:14:00.000-08:00

The Curious Case of Benjamin was pretty terrible.

I'm an unapologetic sentimentalist who is often, admittedly, too easily swept off my feet by bedazzling prose. As such, F. Scott will always have a special place in my heart.

That said, there were three things Fitzgerald could not do to save his life:

Write dialogue.

Write scenes in which something happens.

Construct a plot.

So it isn't really surprising that adaptations of his work are inevitably terrible, I just really hoped that poor Benjamin Button (already warped well past the breaking point to be stretched into feature length) would be a prettier travesty.