Surprise! You Have Strep!

Some people say everything happens for a reason, and though I don't believe them, it is fun to pretend that this might be true; so the reason I got strep throat and spent Saturday in a delirious fever state and could not attend the big surprise party that night (we were part of the "plan" to execute the surprise, and perhaps one of the reasons I got strep is that I hate surprise parties-- they are stressful and I don't like keeping secrets, and what is the ultimate goal? to give the recipient a heart attack?) is because this was a fitting way to finish reading James Ellroy's trilogy of alternate history that he began with American Tabloid (the JFK assassination) and finished with Blood's A Rover . . . so in my strep-addled state-- which mirrored Dwight Holly and Don Crutchfield's mania, all of us coming in and out of consciousness, I read several hundred pages of document inserts, obtuse diaries, rogue cops, RED agents, cover-ups, cut-outs, torture, black bagging, Haitian voodoo, men with machetes and wings, emerald worship, an undercover cop with the Bent, J. Edgar Hoover's paranoia, homosexuality and racism, Tricky Dick Nixon's abrasiveness, Sonny Liston doing morphine suppositories, Tiger Kab, Klan Kamps, Black militant groups pushing heroin and knife fighting and shooting children, a peeper "detective" biting the head off a rat to break a voodoo curse, Trujillo vs. Papa Doc, fruit squeezes, right wing strong-arming, left wing radicalization, Redd Foxx snorting coke, document heists, betrayal, backstabbing, perversion, hate tracts, money laundering, voodoo porn, and, of course, loads of conspiracy . . . a fitting end to this for both Ellroy and me; it is a good read despite the conceit of the diaries, I give it four "perfect kidney shots" out of five.

2/8/10

Together is a Swedish film about a commune in the mid-seventies, and the moral is that you can't fight human nature: no matter how much of a hippie you, no matter what your beliefs are, no matter how committed you are to changing the world order, your kids will still desire meat (the kids picket for hot dogs in the kitchen one night) and TV and play violent games (there's a great scene where one kid plays Pinochet, the Chilean torturer, and forces the other to "say you like Pinochet!") and adults will desire stability and loyalty and family . . . as Birger says, "It is better to eat porridge together than pork chops alone," and-- like this sentence-- the plot rambles through the lives of all the members of the commune and a few outsiders . . . there's no need to focus on a particular story, it's really more like surreal episode of the TV show Big Brother, but from the seventies and with deeper characters and a nostalgic look that makes it more like an artifact from that era than a film; I give it one congealed glutinous Socialist bowl of porridge out of one, I loved it.

2/7/10

Apparently, high school kids find it really scary and funny if their teacher leaps over his desk and knocks over a chair and a water bottle and a stapler on his way to intercept a note being passed from one boy to another . . . even if it is during the filming of a short film that they wrote in Creative Writing for their "final exam"-- I think they thought I would calmly get up and walk over and demand the note, as I would do if I were playing myself, but what they didn't know is that I was acting-- I was no longer their calm and collected teacher, I was someone else; one guy actually leaped out of his seat when I came charging over, and for the next scene (where I had to take another note-- this wasn't the most thrilling plot) we set up a stool, a stack of thirty books, and a garbage pail for me to run through . . . and now I know why it's fun to be an action hero: you get to knock stuff over indoors.

2/6/10

Missed the turn for Wawa and had to go to Quick Check for coffee, and I'm glad I did because on the register there was a sticker that read: We check ID for anyone under 40 for alcohol and tobacco . . . that's right, if I were buying cigarettes the cashier would have taken a look at me, discerned that I was thirty nine, and then taken a peek at my license to make sure I wasn't artificially thinning my hair so I could buy some KOOLS . . . I suppose you are safe if you exhibit signs of Alzheimer's or wearing a Depends undergarment or have a pock-marked and wrinkled face and a rosacea red nose that can only come from decades of alcohol abuse but otherwise-- because just about anyone can appear to be under forty-- you will be carded at the Quick Check (which I do admire for spelling both words in its name properly, though were are so many trashy variations available, think of the ink they would have saved if they named it Kwik Chek).

If You're Dave, You Need to Know This Shit

Just in case there's some kind of Freaky Friday type incident, and your mind suddenly inhabits my body, here is my mnemonic for remembering which side of each car the fuel tank valve is on: Subaru has an "R" in it and the tank valve is on the right (which also has an "R" in it) and JEEP is spelled with four letters and so is the word "left," and this mnemonic also works with the nautical direction "port," which also has four letters and also means left (so if my JEEP were an amphibious vehicle when it was in the water and I was pulling up to a dockside gas station, I would pull up with the port-side facing the dock).

2/4/10

Alex and I were both occasionally a little lost and occasionally a little antsy during Charles Ross's One Man Star Wars Trilogy, but by the end Alex (who is five) and his dad (who is thirty-nine) had gotten into the groove; it really is a one man show, no props or special effects or costumes, just Charles Ross playing every character from the old trilogy and also providing music and sound effects (I don't know how he does two shows a night, his voice must be ragged from doing Darth Vader and all the lasers and explosions) and his Jabba the Hutt impersonation was priceless, as were his "additions," to the films-- at first Alex yelled, "That's not in the movie," every time Ross made a joke, but then he understood the concept (although I don't think he got the joke at the end, when Vader took his mask off and Luke said, "You're not black?") and after it was over Ross gave a sneak preview of his new show: One Man Lord of the Rings, and his Golem was spot-on . . . and he certainly needs to start doing a new show, he's been doing his one man Star Wars performance for the last SEVEN years.

2/3/10

My wife thinks we should spend some money on painting our house, but I think we should spend some money on a hollow-bodied guitar; my rationale is this: if we paint the house, our house will look nicer and then we will more likely be robbed . . . so its better for our house to look a bit moldy, but be full of cool stuff (but she's not buying it).

My Cast For Catcher

Now that J.D. Salinger is finally dead, perhaps his family will allow a movie to be made of The Catcher in the Rye, and I'm assuming this will take a LONG time to get sorted out, and so the digital technology will be such that any actor from any time period will be available . . . so here is my star-studded cast-- but you have to imagine the person at the proper age to play the role-- for Holden Caulfield I will go with Arrested Development age Michael Cera; Alan Ruck (Cameron Frye from Ferris Bueller's Day Off) will play Ackley; young Brad Pitt for Stradlater; John Malkovich for the wise but creepy and perhaps latently gay Mr. Antolini; Lindsay Lohann for Phoebe-- briliant choice both for the red-hair and her fall from grace; East Brunswick's Jesse Eisenberg for Holden's younger (and dead) brother Allie; Gabe Kaplan as Old Spencer; Risky Business era Rebecca De Mornay as Sunny; and Johnny Depp for his cool and affected older brother D.B.

Olympic Snowboarding Theme

Today my blogging efforts are here; I wrote an Official Olympic Snowboarding preview for Gheorghe: The Blog, which mainly consists of rambling commentary, a Greasetruck rendition of the Olympic Theme Song (for Snowboarders)-- you can play it if you click over on the left--and the observation that Shaun White (otherwise known as "the flying tomato") looks a little like Carrot Top (and they both have vegetable nick-names) . . . so if you have a few minutes, check out it out, and if you tool around a bit on Gheorghe, you'll find more absurd Official G:TB Olympic Previews.

1/31/10

This is a very subjective review, but the new Neon Indian album "Psychic Chasms" seems to be tailored exactly for my brain-- it's a collection of short, psychedelic heavily filtered pop-like compositions that I can't stop listening to, it's like Ween doing even better drugs than Ween has access to, it's like the band channeled my thoughts and set them to music . . . so I don't know if this review is helpful, but The Week gave the album four stars and those people over here agree, so it's not like I'm crazy or something.

Some Cars

More Malcolm Gladwell tidbits from What the Dog Saw: in most cities, five percent of the cars produce 55% of the carbon monoxide pollution; most cars, especially newer models, run quite clean, but "kit" cars, older cars, and dirty engines can produce carbon monoxide emissions which are one to two HUNDRED times more than standard-- so the pollution problem isn't so much about everyone driving, it's about a small group of people driving a small group of annoyingly filthy cars.

1/29/10

According to a Malcolm Gladwell in his new anthology What the Dog Saw (and also according to the cities of Denver and St. Louis) it is easier to cure homelessness than to manage it; in other words, giving the most incorrigibly recalcitrant homeless people their own apartments-- for free-- and providing one counselor per ten homeless people to check up on them and aid them in gaining a foothold in society is far cheaper than paying the medical bills they generate because of frequent ambulance rides, detox, dialysis, pneumonia, and head injuries (they are constantly being brought in to the emergency room, where they are given treatment despite their inability to pay . . . thus how Reno's Million Dollar Murray earned his nickname) but this solution often meets with outrage from the general populus, despite its cost effectiveness, because it just doesn't seem fair that someone might work three jobs in order to make ends meet yet someone who contributes nothing to society gets a free ride . . . but the store owners in Denver were quite happy when the crew of chronic inebriates (whose drink of choice was mouthwash) were no longer a permanent fixture on Sixteenth Street.

1/28/10

I hate our new coffeemaker, though it looks much nicer than our old coffee maker-- which was a cheap piece of junk, and it had no built -in grinder, so we used a little grinder, which wasn't very loud; this new machine is fancier, and it has a built-in grinder, but the problem with this is that the built in grinder gets wet from condensation every time you make coffee, so you really need to clean it far more often than the old combination, and it sounds like an airplane taking off . . . so in essence, our upgrade was a downgrade.

1/27/10

Good thing there were witnesses: after eating most of my apple last Friday, I announced to Stacy and Rachel (that's right, go ahead and ask them; they will confirm it!) that i was going to throw the core over my head, without even looking first, and it would drop into the wastebasket, which was probable twelve feet behind me (but guarded by the mini-fridge and the table with all the food prep stuff) and Rachel said, "You'll splatter it over everything," but she was so wrong, because I dunked it.

1/26/10

If you want to watch something weird and artsy, with shades of Welcome to the Dollhouse (a world where children are more adult than the adults that "care" for them) then check out Me and You and Everyone We Know: Miranda July (who actually is a performance artist) and John Hawkes are both incredibly difficult not to watch-- they are visually compelling as well as bizarre, and there a few priceless scenes that are nothing like anything you've seen . . . I give it 6000 punctuation marks out of a total of 8000.

1/25/10

I know it's crass, but sometimes when I'm about to complain about something trivial, I think to myself: what do you have to complain about? at least you don't live in Haiti! and then I move on with my life, suddenly feeling fortunate . . . but I wonder, where do Haitians think of when they want to feel fortunate . . . stop complaining, at least you don't live in a box on the surface of the sun?

Seamen Nailing Things

You know it's going to be a good history book when you read a sentence like this: 

"Among the able seamen, the initial going rate was one ship's nail for one ordinary fuck, but hyper-inflation soon set in"

and this sentence was written by author Richard Holmes, while describing Lieutenant James Cook's expedition to Tahiti in his book The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.

1/23/10

In the Loop is a political satire with enough profanity rival David Mamet's Glengarry Glenross and enough droll comedy to rival the original version of The Office; it satirizes two governments (Britain and America) in the midst of the most monumental decision making process-- the the decision of whether or not to go to war; the plot is Byzantine and the language dense and allusion filled (Catherine stopped watching because she said it didn't seem like they were speaking English) but when the Prime Minister's angry Scottish spin master refers to opera as "subsidized foreign fucking vowels" and threatens to "hole punch" someone in the face, it really doesn't matter if you know what 's going on: I give it 11,000 troops out of 12,000.

1/22/10

I was rushing to finish "making water" because the bell had rung and I needed to get to class, and in my rush, I somehow flung my paperback copy of Much Ado About Nothing into the urinal, but it didn't get particularly soaked with urine, and so-- thinking of the title of the play-- I pulled it out, wiped it on my pants, and went to class, and my students were none the wiser.

Update!

Click here for the news story about what I witnessed yesterday-- see the sentence below-- the guy who I watched jump off the edge of the bridge over the Turnpike in order to elude the police broke both his legs!