This Movie Should Not Be Rated G

Don't believe the previews, Up is not a movie to see with your kids (only because it's disturbing for them to watch a grown man cry).

1/4/10

If it were possible to patent a party concept, our neighbors should patent this one: on New Year's Eve they had six or seven families over, all with youngish kids, and they set their clocks ahead so that all over their house, at 8 PM they would read midnight, and they recorded last year's ball drop in Times Square and put it on their TV (there was a moment when someone paused the countdown so that all the kids could get organized, but no one suspected a thing) and we convinced all the kids that it was WAY past their bedtime (in my opinion, this is even better subterfuge than Santa Claus) and so not only was it the first time my kids rang in the New Year (with noisemakers, lots of popping balloons, kiddie champagne, and plastic wrap to pop . . . the noise made me want to curl up into the fetal position under the piano) but I also managed to tie one on from 5 PM to 9 PM and pretend that I made it to New Year's as well . . . which I haven't done since we were in Bangkok seven years ago.

He Turned Them Into Newts! It Gets Better . . .

War with the Newts by Karel Capek falls into a small but illustrious category: Super Excellent Books I've Read by Czech Authors (the other five books that reside there are Kafka's The Castle and his parallel work The Trial, Josef Svorecky's The Miracle Game, Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk, and Milan Kundera's The Joke) and I would have never heard of this one if it wasn't for a random recommendation by a friend over at Gheorghe (thanks Zoltan!) and I'm not sure how I made it nearly forty years without reading this . . . it's about a race of intelligent salamanders that undergo a population explosion due to the meddling of humans and the social, political, and geographical consequences of enslaving these newts so they can perform undersea construction, and then eventually educating, arming, and trading with the newts in a natural progression of amphibious advancement until-- in the last four chapters-- the title finally becomes an inevitability; the book was published in 1936, and it satirizes the post World War I political milieu as well as just about everything else, and it is loads more fun the Brave New World, and satirical like Vonnegut, and humorous like Charles Portis and David Foster Wallace, and-- as Monty Python can attest-- no matter how many times you hear the word "newt," it's always funny.

1/2/2010

We survived our first ski trip with the kids-- including packing (snow pants, gloves, hats, long underwear, fleeces and lots of socks); a 12 degree day with high winds (we went to an indoor water park-- it was even pretty cold in there, but they had a cool tube slide and Alex got hit with the 500 hundred gallon water drum and it pulled his bathing suit down); their first ski lessons; three nights paired with the kids in double beds, and driving home in a blizzard-- but in the end it will all be worth it, because our kids will be proficient skiers and what could be better than that . . . they will addicted to a sport that is not only dangerous, expensive, and contingent on the weather, but also may well disappear with the advance of global warming.

A Very Contextual and Very Specific Resolution

Happy New Year . . . and, in the spirit of the future, I'd like to come clean about the past: that apt end of the year quote I posted yesterday was not said by Yogi Berra; I made it up, and it actually doesn't make sense at all, not even in a Yogi Berra sort of way (unlike the unerring logic of this Berra maxim: "Nobody goes to that place anymore-- it's too crowded") and so I'd like to apologize, and you'll be happy to know that I've made a New Year's Resolution and it is this: in 2010, I pledge to try my best not to invent quotations and speciously attribute them Yogi Berra, thus denigrating his good name.

Yogi Guru

Another perfect sentence not written by me, and an apt one to end the year on-- this one is attributed to the timeless quipster Yogi Berra: "I'll tell you about the future tomorrow."

A Sentence in Which Dave Does Not Plagiarize

Here's a perfect sentence that I wish I could claim as my own (and honestly, if I had flat out plagiarized it, you probably wouldn't have known better, and the guy who said it-- film producer Samuel Goldwyn-- is dead, so I very well likely could have gotten away with, but I've decided to do the right thing and give credit where credit is due) and so here it is: "Anybody who goes to see a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined."

Remaindered

Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder is only worth reading if you like movies like Adaptation: on the surface, the book is a compelling read, and it's hard to predict the twists and turns produced by the narrator's damaged mind, and it's got a great droll British sense of humor about it . . . but as you read it, you will start to wonder if the book is not actually about the events it delineates, but instead about fiction itself, and reading specifically, and this might ruin any enjoyment you get from the very strange story that the narrator tells about his mysterious incident and the large "settlement" that he receives because of it; I'll give it seven and a half million pounds out of a total of eight and a half million.

No Idle Eskimos

It takes a long time to build an igloo.

Canker Diet

Your body works in mysterious ways: just before break I wished that I could lose a few pounds because I knew of the holiday gluttony ahead, but of course, I didn't act on this wish-- I just hoped it would come true, and, in a way, it did, because I got several horrifically painful canker sores under my tongue and was unable to eat anything but yogurt and noodles (you should have seen the spread of cookies, cake, cupcakes with bright red hyper-sugared icing, and candy that I ate NONE of, despite being within arm's reach of these goodies for several periods-- normally I would have DESTROYED a table full of food like that) and so I lost five pounds (which I'm sure I've gained back by now, but still, at least I'm breaking even).

R.I.P. Celebrity Hailing From Edison

We were discussing the death of Brittany Murphy in the English office the other day-- she was raised in Edison, New Jersey-- and the impact a celebrity's death has on people, and I decided that there is no particular celebrity, no matter how much I appreciate their art, that would make me sincerely grieve if they kicked it-- unless I happened to be friends with them (and I am not friends with any celebrities) and while I might pre-emptively miss the future films, music, paintings, cartoons, and/or books they were going to produce, but usually, if I already like a celebrity, their best years are behind them (and, as I wrote earlier, it might actually pique my interest in them: David Foster Wallace's suicide didn't make me sad, but it did make me read 680 pages of Infinite Jest).

Merry Buy-A-Bunch-of-Shit-We-Don't-Needmas

In the spirit of the Copenhagen Climate Summit, I promise to reduce my cynicism by 80% by the year 2050, but until then: Merry Christmas and may the New Year bring even greater tidings of energy use and materialism . . . perhaps this will be the year when our economy gets humming again and we start consuming an even greater amount of the earth's resources.

What Does This Album SOUND Like?

Just a taste of some of the worst album art of the year, as chosen by Pitchfork-- if you have an appetite for more, go here.

Dave Fishes For Compliments (and Catches Flak)

So here's what happens when you fish for compliments: the other day when I went to the doctor's office for a physical and some vaccinations, the doctor noticed the gross skin flap growing above my eye, and before I knew it, I had agreed to let him stick a Novocaine needle in my eyelid and snip off the flap-- and, despite my anxiety, this minor surgery went quite well-- minimal bleeding and hardly a bruise-- so the next morning, when I walked into the English office, I asked the teachers in there if they noticed anything different about my appearance-- forgetting that I hadn't shaved for a few days and I hadn't had time to wet my hair that morning and I hadn't showered since the morning before-- and my friend Stacey said, "Catherine kicked you out of the house, and you slept in the car!" and someone else said, "You're growing a beard," and someone else said, "You're not combing your hair ever again" and after everyone had a good laugh at my expense, I had to point out that the skin flap was gone . . . and then Stacey confessed that she felt a pang of regret for a moment after her witty bon mot, but then she remembered that one Friday when she was dressed casually, and I told her it looked like she was getting ready to do some work in her shed (or maybe I told her she looked like a mechanic, I can't remember) but once she remembered that, she didn't feel bad any longer.

Dave Is Ambitious (For a Moment)

While I was shooting baskets at the gym, I decided on a radical plan of action: I would gradually become a LEFTY . . . I would start doing EVERYTHING left-handed and I would research handedness and keep an account of my journey from right-handedness to left-handedness and the effect it had on my personality,  my brain and my coordination (and perhaps it would even lead to me reverse aging, it might have a "fountain of youth" effect) and then I would write a fascinating non-fiction book about handedness in general and my own quest to reverse my brain's predilection, but after a few minutes of shooting baskets left-handed the ambition went away, which is probably why I only write only one sentence a day-- mainly with my right-hand.

Rhetorical Inoculation

I got into a debate with a student about vaccines the other day in class (because I mentioned I was getting my swine flu and tetanus shot) and I became a bit passionate about the topic, which is always embarrassing-- I try to remain as neutral as possible about most things-- but I ended up asking the class to raise their hands if they were for polio and the death of millions of children, and then I asked the class who was against polio and the death of millions of children-- but I got my just desserts, as my arm really hurts where I got my tetanus shot (but at least I have no chance of getting lock-jaw).

The Radical Elvis

I finished my first Slavoj Zizek book the other day, First as Tragedy, then as Farce, and now I need to read seven other books to figure out what he was talking about (I guess, like most other humans, I need to brush up on my Lacanian and Kantian semiotics) but though his ideas are radical, he's also pretty fun to read in the brief moments you understand him (he's been called "the Elvis of cultural theory") and his main point is that the world global system is not actually capitalism, because every time it melts down, tons of state money is poured into it, and the title indicates how unified we are in this-- he illustrates that the language of post 9/11 (the tragedy) when the nation was unified against terrorism is similar to the language used when the nation bailed out the banks (the farce)-- George Bush, Obama, and corporate America were all on-board-- and we are quicker to galvanize in order to save Wall Street than we are to confront dire environmental and poverty problems . . . and that to combat this attitude there needs to be a radical and violent shift left, because the left is not the left, and the "dictatorship of the proletariat" is not even a threat, and he sees this as true democracy, but realizes that no democracy allows power to the people until they are divided into the liberal and hedonistic intellectuals, the fundamentalist populists, and the outcasts (who resort to religion and gangs and such) and once these people are at odds with one another and have no common space to meet and cooperate, then the government and corporations and rulers-- the hegemony, he calls it-- can get down to business without much conflict from the populous . . . or that's what I got from it.

Half Moon + Half Moon = Full Moon

Just when I'm about to kill my son Alex (his teacher sent a note home because he mooned some kids in the hallway . . . he thought it would be funny . . . and on top of this, lately he's a had a bad attitude and he's been fighting with his brother non-stop) he figures out how the commutative property of addition operates, all on his own-- it's like he knows when he needs to do something really cute or clever to avoid being thrown into the wilderness.

Sexism and Spiders

I was really the woman of the house Monday night: I cooked dinner for both my wife and the kids (Catherine was at physical therapy) and I dealt with Alex's bathroom issues and, worst of all, I killed a giant hairy wolf spider which appeared in the middle of the playroom . . . when Catherine got home she was so pleased to have missed it all.

Dave Can Text!

I had to call my father's secretary to tell her my e-mail address so she could send me a document to edit for him, but when I called she said, "I'm at the dentist, could you text it to me" and I was able to say, proudly, YES I CAN.