Eating the Pavement

Happy Birthday, Scott

2009-07-12T22:22:00.006-06:00

I can never understand why people cite what age someone would be on their birthday if they were still alive. Maybe it is to find context but the fact is that when a person dies, he/she is frozen in time. Kurt Cobain will always be 27 years old. His music will never mature. I will never see him any younger than the disheveled kid he was at the moment of his passing. Scott will forever be 32. This September, I turn 38, and the age that separates the two of us will be six years. Next year, seven years will divide us. Ten. Twenty. Each time I gaze over my shoulder, Scott's 32 year old visage will stare back at me through memories and my dreams.

I miss him so much some times, it feels like a balloon that is expanding in my throat until I nearly choke from the grief. Sometimes I see it coming and other times I do not see it until it is upon me. The loss of a brother who lived far away is hard to grapple with. After the funeral and cleanup, I have returned to a life that looked much like the one I left 2 weeks earlier.

Last night, I watched the movie A River Runs Through It. The story has always been close to my heart but never more-so than now. Towards the end of the film, the aged father, Reverend Maclean, delivers a sermon that speaks to the death of Paul, the younger brother-

Each one of us here today will, at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question."We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed?" It is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us, but we can still love them. We can love completely, without complete understanding.

This morning, I went fly fishing in the mountains and it lifted my spirits. Along the banks of the Cache la Poudre River, I thought of Scott and I thought of the words of Norman Maclean. I gazed at the beauty around me and I found comfort in it.

Top 5 Week of September 8th

2008-09-09T16:59:00.003-06:00

1) The National Boxer-- I've got this in my mp3 player...it is one of those albums that starts to grow and stick on your brain like a fungus...okay that is gross but is a really good album

2) This song... I like songs that involve geology

3) O more geology

4) I've been biking a lot now...It is pure joy...maybe that is overstating things a bit I guess.

5) Blogging again.

Ode to the Missing

2008-08-15T23:48:00.001-06:00

Where oh where have the bloggers gone.
Where oh where could they be?

One had a kid
and another moved West
as for me
I'm just trying to be

Brian's Video Bar

2008-05-07T12:12:00.002-06:00

Although my long-running streak of non-writing continues, I have finally made at least a small contribution to this blog. At right, I have added Brian's Video Bar where the videos from my YouTube account will appear.

At present, I only have one video. It is the opening I designed for the television show I've been shooting and editing over the last year. The show is called Kid TV and this opening sequence is the first I've ever designed for a broadcast show. The show is produced through the Thompson School District here in Colorado and involves elementary school kids (K-5) who write and perform their pieces for the program. Next week I will be taping the 26th and final episode of this school year's program. It's been a blast.

So like I haven't posted forever

2008-05-01T19:47:00.003-06:00

Okay so like I had a kid and I haven't posted forever. I thought this was a great little talk about shift we have going on now from an inactive media culture to an active one. Hope everyone is doing great out there.

Apples In Stereo

2008-04-23T11:33:00.003-06:00

Apples In Stereo, Kind of a fun, up beat, guitar heavy band. I have had this thing in my CD collection for years. I have tried to listen to it many times but it just never caught on. I thought for this review it would be the perfect time to really listen and know this CD but after many times of popping in the CD I have come to the conclusion it must go. It is not that the album is bad, in fact it sounds pretty good but I just can not get into it. I listen and just think of other albums I like that do this better for some reason I keep feeling I have heard all of this before, and I could be nuts but Apples In Stereo is going away for me. That is not really a review so instead I have some images of ladybugs that have invaded my home and are driving me insane.

Suck in that Air

2008-03-12T13:37:00.002-06:00

Wow it has been a while, thought I would say it was because of the holidays that I got behind but I can't even use THAT as an excuse anymore, Oh well, jumping back into the music review world.
When last we left off I was talking about the first Air album that came out in 98' well this one is from 2004 it is called "Talkie Walkie" and represents a pretty big jump in "Airvilution" Transforming from a wispy, one step above elevator muzak to a band that makes "Real songs" with a start and finish just like a grown up band.
I have grown to really like this band and this CD in particular. "Venus" and Cherry Blossom Girl" are great for driving around on a spring day with the window down, fresh air blowing through your hair while wearing bad ass sunglasses and thinking your are so much cooler than anyone listening to the radio.
"Run" a robot sound scape with an almost child like vocal and soft choir undertones.
"Universal Traveler" yet ANOTHER good driving around song. Really if you don't believe me just buy they album wait for a great spring day and if you don't love it I'll give you your money back (not really, but go ahead and buy the album and drive around) Except until I sat down to write this and looked at the name of the song I thought they were saying "You Need A Soul Traveler" which, quite frankly I think is a better lyric. Hmmmm I might be writing my own song...
"Mike Mills" pleasant enough instrumental
"Surfing on a Rocket" just a shade too poppy for me but each to their own, if I wanted more of this I would just go back and listen to my "Love and Rockets" albums.
"Another Day" hmmmmm moody, not bad but I do usually skip it
"Alpha Beta Gage" another instrumental but I really like this one, anytime some one is whistling I give them points
"Biological"doesn't speak to me but I don't yell at the player when it comes on
"Alone In Kyoto"Made me feel a bit too much like I was a Renaissance fair
Well that is it, go get the album, even the songs that are not stand outs are better than most stuff out there, this is a great cohesive album of ten songs with some major stand outs on it.
On a side note this album has one of the worst album covers I have ever seen. Yes those are the two guys in the band and they have every right in the world to smack their mugs on the cover but, to me, the music and what these two guys look like do not mesh for me at all.
Some of these songs really take me to that, deep thinking, dreamy, slowing nodding my head to the music, place. And when I am there the last thing I want to think about are two greasy euro-trash dudes with horrible haircuts wearing.....cough...driving gloves?!.... what the hell. ABSTRACT COVERS BOYS..that is where you want to be....

Missing the Big Games

2008-01-20T06:55:00.000-07:00

I rarely watch sporting events- they make me crazy. Whenever I switch through the channels and stumble upon a football or basketball game on TV, my first impulse is to watch it. I check out the score, examine defensive and offensive setups... but the second I start to care about the outcome of the game, I have to leave. I have my favorite teams in the pros. I have my undergrad and grad school conferences that I could root for but really... it doesn't matter. Within minutes, I will find myself obsessing over strategy. If I am anywhere near an Internet connection, I'll start looking up teams on the Internet and examining their statistics and win/loss records.

I can't help it.

I don't know how people can bet on sporting events. I bet on my favorite team once when I was in Las Vegas and spent most of the day weaving from one casino to another, trying to get an update on the score. If I tried to regularly bet on sports, I'd die of an aneurysm on the first weekend. Though I love Bill Simmons as a writer, but I have absolutely no ability to connect with analysis of the over/under on sporting events. Maybe it's because he writes about sports all the time and it's a part of the culture. For me, sporting events are like high school. Rarely does any event affect my life in any way whatsoever, it always FEELS like the most Important thing in the World while it's happening.

My favorite sport is basketball. I had my favorites (Magic's Lakers, Clyde's Blazers) and my Mortal Enemies (Isiah's Pistons, Malone's Jazz). In 1998, however, I discovered that my mental investment was wildly out of proportion from my enjoyment of the spectating. I missed Michael Jordan's game-winning/series winning/dynasty-ending push-off and shot against the Utah Jazz in the final game of the NBA Finals. Two television timeouts earlier, I was so freaked out that Malone might win an NBA championship, I thought I was going to stroke... so I left the room. I sat down in front of a computer, opened three browsers, and looked up anything other than Sports. Fifteen minutes later, my girlfriend had to come tell me that the game was over and Jordan had won. I missed it.

Afterwards, I realized my inherent problem with being a spectator- it's passive. In the few, real crisis situations of my life, I have been focused and calm. It is because I knew that a decision had to be made- an action had to be taken- so I took it. With sporting events, I am stuck in a (self-perceived) crisis situation and can do nothing about it.

That is where sports games come into my life. The tension and enthusiasm is still there from the spectator sport. I still pitch fits and yell at my television, but now I can do something about it.

For Christmas, I obtained my first Playstation 2. In the video gaming world, sports games that cost $50 on their initial release can be purchased for $5 used after a couple of years because hardcore sports fans insist on playing with the most up-to-date rosters. Since I rarely follow sports on a daily basis, I don't care. So, a couple days after Christmas, I cruised into a Gamespot store and, for $20, I snagged copies of Tiger Woods Golf PGA Tour 2005, NCAA March Madness 06, College Hoops 2K6 and NCAA Football 06 and those will be my discussion topics over the next few weeks. I will be devoting articles on my experience with these games in future posts when I can sit down and get enough face-time with them.

The Great Gaming Rationale

2008-01-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

I'm 36 years old. Some might say that I'm too old for this.

To them, I say 'Fuck off'. It's an instinctual answer- I've done it all my life.

Still, as I sit in front of my television set and agonize over the drubbing my Ohio football team is taking at the hands of Buffalo, I have to wonder... why do I do it? It's not like this is a new experience for me. I've played MANY computer football games over the years.

It began before the heady days of console systems. I once commanded a little red dash down the football field with my ancient Mattel Football game. Later, Intellivision captured my imagination with it's numeric control pad and one of the earliest attempts at emulating a football field.

In college, I discovered the magic of Madden '93 football on the Sega Genesis and the satisfaction of crushing fellow dorm-mates (many college football players themselves) with Cincinnati's unstoppable, HB Option pass play. Madden was the first console game to really give a gamer a sense of playing real football.

Still, I'd be remiss to ignore the most popular game in my Senior-year dorm- Super Tecmo Football. Although Tecmo offered little in the way of naturalism, the over-the-top graphics and up-temp play made it perfect for tournament play and trash-talking amongst friends. It was also a good way to learn that playing computer games against track-and-field sprinters was a terrible idea (they REALLY don't like to lose).

Fifteen years have passed since those all-nighters with no girlfriends in sight. Now, I am married. I have a job. I have cleared the age of 35. Growing older has made me acutely-aware of time... particularly the wasting of it. Days and months rush beneath me and here I sit, in front of a television with a game controller in my hand. The controller has 6 times the number of buttons and two extra joysticks, yet the goal is the same- winning football games. What's more, I can see that I am amassing the sort of skills that shall serve me nowhere else in my life.

Yet, I play on. I growl and bark at the screen. I slam controllers into the carpeted floor in front of me. My audience has no idea what I'm doing or why I would willingly subject myself to such trauma.

Maybe it's because it's a puzzle I can solve. Unlike my life, I can tell when I'm winning or losing from one instant to the next. I know what success and failure mean. I can rant and rave in one instant, but the problems on this virtual football field are solvable. I can figure it out. My life, on the other hand, is not so cut-and-dry. My wins and losses are primarily attained through hindsight. I can't pitch a fit when the moment of failure happens. Such revelations are made hours, days or even months after they occur.

The second Bowling Green unleashes a 50 yard bomb against my weak-ass cornerback, I know that I made a bad decision to blitz the front line and call a 5-2 defense against superior wide receivers. I secretly long for a moment in my life when I know exactly the moment I fucked up a major decision in my life or can revel in a pivotal upturn in fortunes. These triumphant wins or grinding losses anchor me against the uncertainties that plagues life.

At least, this is what I tell myself as I exhaustively weigh the statistical abilities of my running backs and tweak my offensive audibles for the umpteenth time.

Fortunately, the loved ones around me have been patient.

**Many thanks to Moby Games and Wikipedia for their links and pics

CMR: Air- Premiers Symptomes

2007-12-20T10:56:00.001-07:00

Ahhhh Air. I was intoduced to this band through a friend about 2001ish. A more aptly named band has never been. Air would be the national anthem of a country that defied gravity. A place where everyone floats in a warm climate and your brain has been saturated with painkillers. Yes, Air is an electronica mood band. But what is the difference between Air and say.... new age, waves crashing, wind blowing, cheesy crap. Well, the songs (if you can call them that) are cohesive, they go somewhere. It may be a slow relaxing pace but they are moving.
Air is made up of two French guys who like to wear suits. Premiers Symptomes is made up of thier singles before they became popular. So this CD is French electronica made up of pre-hits. Yes, I know that is a hard sell no matter what planet you are on but if you are relaxed and looking to stay that way "premiers Symptomes is the road for you.
I will admit that I have not listened to this album in a long time but once I did listen to it I realized this is not an album to listen to over and over again. This is an ocational taste of cloud only to be savored infrequently lest you start to fade away also.
I would go down the list of songs but they do not even list them on the CD and it really does not matter. Just plug in and space out man.

Craig's CD collection

2007-12-12T09:54:00.000-07:00

O.K. the voice of Craig has been long absent from Eating the Pavement, but I am back and back with a mission. The mission is this: Go through my entire CD collection starting with the A's and review each one. In this way I will not only be throwing out some good tunes but I will give out some band history, and a little personal history that fits each album. This way not only will you get something out of it by getting a heads up on some music you may not have heard about before but I can review my relationship with the CD. So, we all get to learn something.
First of all "yes" it is a CD review not an MP3 review, I like Cd's I am going to be on my porch with a broom yelling at those durn kids to keep it down with their MP3's and shaking my tiny fists yelling about the old days. The fact of the matter is that I like Cd's I like the idea of an album, a cohesive whole that I can listen to. I like cover art, I like looking in the CD and reading about crap the band thinks I will find interesting, like thanking their Cat, or the guy who sold them blow. I can not do with with MP3's so there
O.K. the first CD in the shoot is.........THE AFGHAN WHIGS "What Jail is Like"

Here is the cover of the album. It was a promotional use only thing so I must have picked it up in a bargain bin somewhere.
The Afghan Whigs started up in the late 80's but really came into their own in the early 90's. Critical acclaim for the band was never a problem and they could use positive reviews as toilet paper and still never run out of them, the problem The Afghan Whigs had was popular success. I am always a little on the fence about what that means. Is that the difference between hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions? who knows? and if you do please tell me. The point is that they could not break onto anything but college radio.
The sound of the band is a lot like the Replacements getting squished into Mudhoney. Basically take a bunch of angst and sandwich it between bleeding guitars. What does that sound like? Well, pick up What jail is Like and find out.
Like I said I found this album in some used bin somewhere in Iowa City when I was going to college. I must have vaguely heard from a friend about them and the thing was probably like three bucks so "why not"
What Jail is Like is and EP, with three studio songs and several live songs. They take a stab at some cover songs too.
First up is of course "What Jail Is Like" the studio version which is great. singing in the car music has never been so fun, and that gos for most of the album. the song is about some girl and something and him complaining about his past behaviour but not really apologizing. It does not really matter because the feeling of the song comes through well enough to feel "emo" but in more of ballsy way because of the guitars.
#2 Mr. Superlove: GREAT, nowhere else in the world can a man scream out "I am Mr. Superlove" and STILL sound all emotional and tender. This makes it a great crossover song. Guys and girls all get something out of it. Girl-emotion. Guys-get to yell "I am Mr. Superlove" AWSUM.
#3 Go figure a dark version of "Dark End of the Street" I realize there are endless covers of this song and there should be as it is a great song but this version is the perfect mix. It is like the two were walking down the street and bumped into each other "HEY, you got your dark, brooding music into my well written, emotional song", "NO, YOU got your well written emotional song into my dark brooding music" and so on.
WOW three better than average songs, this review guy must LOVE those Afghan Whigs and have no perspective. "Not true" I say
#4 Little Girl Blue---what the hell, If the album sucked this is what it would sound like. Too much with the whine and the guitar
#5 What Jail is Like (live)- the live version- ehh it is O.K.
#6 Now You Know-life is short-push the skip button
O.K. we are in a tie here three good/three not so good and only one more song to go
#7 POW out of the park "My World is Empty Without You/ I Hear a Symphony (live) This last track is what kept me coming back. For the first year or so I would only listen to this song. it is a cover of the Supremes hit "My World Is Empty Without You" and in the middle of the song just for about 20 seconds they go into "I Hear a Symphony" also by the Supremes. The song makes me just want to end the review with "JUST GET IT, NOW", but I will review on.... The song is dark but retains it's poppy roots, brooding but not boring, The song is over six minutes long and at the end you want more. A live version with energy to spare. How they even picked this over forty year old pop song from Motown is a mystery but it works so well I am resolved not to question.
The point is "JUST GET IT, NOW"
I am not going to rate albums with stars or happy or unhappy faces or any other rating system. If you don't know what to do at the end of a review, I must not have written it very well but I going to post a photo of something that should be a short hand to understanding the review. This week----Me looking all broody and moody

M.I.A. takes the offensive

2007-08-28T14:01:00.000-06:00

Life is a disjointed mess, but that's no excuse for my conspicuous absence from blogging. Unfortunately, I have acquired a job I like, so afternoons usually can't be devoted to the latest, online diatribe. I did want to call your attention to (so far) the best album of 2007- M.I.A.'s sophomore outing, Kala. I was an instant-fan of M.I.A. when I first heard her debut album, Arular way back in the day (like, 2 years ago). Unfortunately, the strong, independent mantra she lent to her songs didn't translate to her life and I soon found myself catching snipits of her songs in television shows and commercials. It's easy to shit on indie bands. In fact, the indie community has an ugly compulsion to shit on bands the second they find any success. Still, if you're a band like M.I.A. or Kasabian and your marketing image is all about breaking out of convention, then you sell your songs to corporations, then you're asking to get called out. With her new album, M.I.A. further-sinks any revolutionary, strong-female credibility when she teams up with Timbaland for the final track on the album, "Come Around".

Still, her music actually sounds like little-else in the musical landscape and that's enough to set her album a step above the rest. Once I stopped expecting her to be my Champion of the Underprivileged, I could enjoy her as a slamming dance track sans cliche.

M.I.A. pays tribute to Bollywood with "Jimmy":

80's Hip-Hop Videos go to Africa with "Boyz":

Enjoy.

Skullcrusher mountain

2007-08-18T16:55:00.000-06:00

This is a little song that we can all relate to

Education Friday

2007-08-17T08:45:00.000-06:00

I found this very interesting. The Pinky Show, where this clip is from, is producing some great & thoughtful political stuff.

Post punk 4-ever

2007-08-16T17:53:00.000-06:00

Okay my biggest guilty pleasure is post-punk from about 1978-1988. So let us rock out.

Joy Division-- This is from 1979...british music is so hyper-bolic think 1969 you have the beatles and mere 10 years later you have this explosion of great weird pop music. I dismissed Joy Division for a long time. It was such big favorite with all the goth kids and I was punk rock--as much as kid from a small town in Nebraska could be punk rock.

Husker Du: It was an absolutely frigid and grey night in December '88 that Husker Du was to play the Ranch Bowl in Omaha. I had been waiting a couple months to see them. I went up door and there was sign that Husker Du had broken up. And it all felt much colder.

The Smiths-- I still believe this was the best pop band of the early-mid 80's. Plus I think all rock stars should have to carry around flowers.

The Pixies-- It was too bad that Nirvana and grunge gets all credit for breaking out "alternative" music. Grunge was well not really that good in retrospect. The Pixies were the best.

Top 5 week of 7/22

2007-07-23T09:59:00.000-06:00

1) Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee. This really is a fascinating book. The premise is that John McPhee just tags along with the folks that move commodities across the United States. He rides along with haz-mat truck driver for a couple weeks and on barge through the Illinois river. I grew up reading the beats and folks like Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski. Now I really focus on history and non-fiction. So I am old but gosh darn it I more knowledgeable and probably more interesting to talk to at a BBQ or maybe not.

2) DEVO. DEVO out of all the new wave bands was the one middle America loved to laugh at the most. I am sure there were countless folks in early 80's that dressed up flower pots on their heads for Halloween. But they were really a great band.

3) Intelligence Squared. Discourse in America is pathetic. But what suffices for debate on CNN & MSNBC is well crap. It is this childish back and forth. So I was very happy to find this new podcast by good folks at NPR called Intelligence Squared. Last night I listened to the arguments on proposition "the global warming is a crisis". Listen I am a liberal sort that believes in environmental issues but the debate gave me pause. I was really surprised that in the 70's there was a lot doomsday stuff about global cooling.

You should listen.

4) Small Pond Fishing. With the new baby coming I haven't got to get away and fly-fish up in the mountains like I like too. I think that maybe coming to an end anyway. But I did sneak away to little pond at a city park I am close to on Sunday. I've always believed you make do with what you have. There is something glorious about water...you stick enough if it on top of the earth your bound to get something living in it. Sunday, I witnessed blue heron nesting, a turtle swimming, and a cormorant fishing. I fished for some big carp and I caught a couple of little bass. Don't worry I catch and release thus, no fish were harmed in the making of this blog entry.

5) Ultrasound. Geeze that is some crazy stuff.

ghost in the machine

2007-07-18T06:42:00.000-06:00

If you haven't already checked it out already please read Kappa No He's Blog this week on the Japanese myth of tsukumo-gami, which basically are inanimate objects that have reached their 100th birthday and then become animated living spirits. Apparently you can tick them off during there inanimate stage and when they become animate lookout. "...they do have the capacity for anger and will band together to take revenge on those who are wasteful or throw them away thoughtlessly," says wikkipedia. So I will be spending this weekend with my durable goods atoning and apologizing for the abuse I have shown them. If only I had known.

Top 5 week of 7/15/07

2007-07-17T12:09:00.000-06:00

I've got plenty excuses for my absence from the blog...but I will just move along to another awesome top 5:

1) Of Montreal. I picked up a lot music from my town library. It never ceases to amaze me what they stock on the shelves. Anywise I checked out Of Montreal CD entitled..."Hissing Fauna Are You the Destroyer?" I promptly checked in the CD at the end of borrowing period but it still showed up as checked-out on my account. I was worried and so I brought it to the 70-year-old Librarian's attention who promptly read out loud the title from the computer at the top of her voice, "Hissing Fauna Are You The Destroyer?" and just kinda stared at me. I just shrugged my shoulders. Enjoy.

2) Gardening like a hippie. Well the gardening is doing well. And I've been reading a lot of garden books by radical small farmers and gardening folks like Wendell Berry and Gene Logsdon. In between the microwave and McDonald's we forgot about good food and what it takes to make it. Anywise I suggest everybody read the omnivores dilemma and grow some food. I am now stepping off my soap box.

3) Pickled Pig's feet. I've been trying to cook more so I bought Rick Bayless's Everyday Mexican. In my town is a large immigrant Mexican population which translates into some great restaurants and some really good places to buy authentic Mexican ingredients. So a couple weeks ago my wife and I were at Mexican market and there they were on the meat counter-- a big jar of picked hooves just bobbing away. You feel very primitive eating the hoof and all but what the heck they aren't all that bad. Really we all eat the butt of the pig without blinking. I suppose my great grandfathers ate much worse.

4) Actually not dressing up in some weird costume to ride a bike or, alternatively, not riding to increase your lactic threshold or to break some record. Just riding a bike to enjoy it. (Note Craig's Photo...you should totally buy it from him).

5) Being a dad. So we are expecting at the Dart household so I am technically not a dad yet but close enough. I am pretty excited I am going to start watching a bunch of Leave to Beaver, Father Knows Best and My Three Sons re-runs to really work on my dad-a-titude before the tike comes a long.

New Music: Panda Bear

2007-07-12T13:13:00.000-06:00

I have been jonesing for some new music for some time now. I don't know why, but I've burned through so many indie-pop bands over the last couple years, I'm feeling adrift on the indie music seas. There have been a few interesting sounds to keep me interested. The one that has held my attention the longest is the second album from Noah Lennox a.k.a. Panda Bear entitled Person Pitch. The album runs along psych/trance lines, yet the music evokes a bubbly, summertime wave a la The Beach Boys. That kind of music would usually have me running in the opposite direction, but Panda Bear manages to weave a dark undercurrent that prevents the album from sending the listener into a diabetic coma.

I don't know what the hell is up with this music video. Someone spent too much time with the video effects machine at a public-access, TV station. Enjoy the tune.

Updates

2007-06-28T12:34:00.000-06:00

Craig: Peru or some other country where the water is not so good.
Brian: Alive and well settling into his rocky mountain home
Henry: Fly fishing the "run off" with zero luck.

Best song ever

Some Garden Pictures and Paul Simon

2007-06-13T17:38:00.000-06:00

We have been ridiculously busy at the Dart Household. The Garden and the plants have been coming in and it really is starting to feel like summer.

The Gardening is really progressing:

This our compost if you look real hard you can see the
worms...which is a really great thing if your into composting.

My Corn is totally awesome.

And for some reason I've been listen to a lot of Paul Simon--I really
dig his mustache in this video.

A Last-Minute Read

2007-06-04T12:04:00.000-06:00

On Friday, I purchased what I believe will be the last book I read in New York City. It's called Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. It is a dense read- somewhere between People's History of the United States and any history textbook you red in college. The writing is a bit dry, but it's a fantastic story that every New Yorker (and American) should know. It's hard to think of Manhattan as anything other than a pancake island of paved grids and steel canyons. Nowhere in American can I so readily forget that weather does something more than inconvenience my daily commute. It is strange to read of early colonists as they gush about New York's tremendous, natural resources and arrogantly declare them to be limitless. At 1,400 pages, I'm sure it'll be a quick read...

The pending move is all that I can think about even as I try to wring every last experience I can from this city. Wednesday is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Thursday is Shakespeare in the Park. Next week is Fire Island, the Whitney Museum, Donut Plant, a Vietnamese sandwich, and a couple more pizzas before we set sail on the 14th.

Gloaming

2007-05-24T18:05:00.000-06:00

This week, I am obsessed with words. Particularly, I want to know the words that we are tied to. For example, I have a strange association with the word 'shame'. Inexplicably, the word connotes a feeling of gnashing teeth every time I hear it. I'm most-fascinated with words that nag me- words that carry such weight, I fall in love with them.

The word that currently fills my peripheral vision is 'gloaming'. I had heard the word a few times, but two years ago, as I was re-reading Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, I came upon the word and it inescapably burned into my mind. I had read Tolkien's trilogy twice before so I had surely read it before. Yet I was caught. I found myself injecting it into conversations and searching for opportunities to weave it into my writings.

It is defined in The New Oxford American Dictionary as a "twilight; dusk". The word is from Old English and from the Germanic word for 'twilight' and the word 'glow'. As Tolkien wrote it, and I imagine it, gloaming is that fleeting pause in breath between day and night. The world feels mysterious and full of anticipation. Dawn carries the pause to the nervous anticipation of a new day, while the gloaming possesses a reckless, Dionysian bent to it. Perhaps it is the way I feel at this point in my life. It is where I live- a space dancing along the edge of consummation. As I stand at the edge of another great life change, I peer through that mystical, gloaming light and wonder if, perhaps, despite the best-laid plans, I can glimpse the forces that will carry me on another unexpected journey.

Kenny Rogers scares the crap out of me

2007-05-21T14:52:00.000-06:00

Man, my fellow bloger just creeped me out. I looked at that Kenny Rogers video, but I didn't have the sound. Creeeeeepy boy, What kind of puppets are those? They were the same kind that they used in that Genises video, and the same kind that were popular in the mid-eighties, when they had one of Ronald Regan that was showen on T.V. like seven billion times. Creepy then, creepy now.
Frisbee golf, man I love that game. It's FREE, which apeals to my cheap assedness, it's outdoors, which dosen't make me mad, and it's FREE. oh yeah, by the way it's free.
I do a little disk throwing with a few guys who are MUCH better then I am and they bring thier dogs. WOW, I have pictures, enjoy

Top 4 Fourth Week in May

2007-05-20T15:37:00.000-06:00

1) Cloud Spotting and generally paying more attention to the sky. So it is storm season now on the great plains. So in the afternoon we are getting some fairly big storms coming in from the northwest. I don't know much about clouds I am still learning to identify them. I found this web site from the cloud appreciation society helpful...they have a manifesto...and why shouldn't they. We also had our spring influx of big huge water birds like the pelicans and the night herons. So there is very good reason to keep your head stuck up in the air...keep your mouth closed though. Oh and this is a night heron:

2)Swan Swan H REM-- REM was terribly important to me from that awkward 15 to 18 year old period. I used to play Life Rich Pageant over and over at the record store. Which I am sure was super annoying. I had never seen this video before. Michael Stipe looks well a little dorky. Enjoy it anyway.

3) Monty Don-- Okay so our garden is taking off. The problem is that gardening just doesn't have a lot of male role models. Further more there really isn't any super cool garden dudes. Like Tony Hawk for skateboarding. So I was real pleased to find Monty Don's book called The Complete Gardener. Monty is really into gardening like a rock star really is into his drugs. He has great passage where he talks about his love of his really expensive shovel and double digging. Anyway if you are actually gardening this year instead of wimping out to go on some exotic trip to let's say Peru I'd pick it up.

4) Anatomy of Murder-- I watch this movie on vacation. It is brilliant. The original novel was written by future Michigan Supreme Court Justice. I know a little something about trial law and I wish I could channel Jimmy Stewart sometimes. However, I am not that tall.

The Gambler Deconstructed

2007-05-18T11:34:00.000-06:00

Small town Nebraska circa 1981 country was big: Alabama, the OakRidge Boys, and, of course, Kenny Rogers. Kenny with his mane of black/sliver hair and awesome grizzly man beard was a thoughtful almost philosophical artist in comparison to, "Oh play me some mountain music..." or some song that went "Elvira om-popa-uh-ma my hearts on fire for Elvira". No Kenny was laying down advice from his high perch on the popular culture mountain and all the kids on the bus knew the words by heart to The Gambler.

Okay so yesterday I heard this song on the radio. I just sort of stumbled on it. I still knew all the words. And alls I've got to say what kinda cockamamie advice is that. I'll tell you what kinda advice that is...it is the kind of advice you get from near dead degenerate on a train smoking cigarettes and begging for whiskey. Or in other words not very good or even comprehensible advice.

Let's look at the advice the dying sage whiskey grubber gives before he dies in sleep:

"You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em.
Know when to walk away, and know when to run.
You never count your money, when you're sittin' at the table.
There'll be time enough for countin', when the dealin's done."

Not much advice for a two minute ballad, but when you separate the wheat from the chaff that is all you get. There is the hold'em/fold'em advice; walk away/ run advice; and there is the countin' advice. What clearly stands out about the hold'em/fold'em advice and the walk away/ run advice is that it is all very, very, very, very vague. I'd say it is not even helpful. Maybe the gambler could have gave some more tips about when to run perhaps and maybe some examples of what is hold'em situation. I think the song says a little more about Kenny, than "the gambler", that Kenny could be hoodwinked by this old guy that only wants his whiskey by vague sayings he perceives as wisdom. And further Kenny thought this advice was sooooo important he had to record a song about it. Now there is the countin' advice, you shouldn't count your money when your sittin' at the table. Okay that is flat out stupid. You probably should know how much money you have when you go gambling because you may not be counting much when the dealing is done because you made a bunch of dumb bets not knowing how much money you had following the gamblers advice.

Top Five the 3rd week of May

2007-05-11T08:27:00.000-06:00

Went on vacation and... well my life got all messy... but I am back here is my top 5:

1) Happiness: I thought a lot about happiness while on vacation. Not the hey-I-am-feeling-great-today-kind-of-happiness but the Aristotle's view of happiness-- which a little more about contentment and well being. I am re-reading this book called Creating the Good Life : Applying Aristotle's Wisdom to Find Meaning and Happiness by James O'Toole. It sort of an Aristotle for dummies-mid-life-self-help-book. I really have enjoyed it. The reader digest version is this: the true test of happiness is will you be happy when you look back on your life from your death bed. You know little regrets. You spent your time wisely on good things. And also you should create some sort plan so you won't be full of regret when you eventually end up on your death bed. Of course this all gets a bit heavy and has made me feel guilty about playing hours of mine sweeper.

2) Not watching the freaking news. I realized I have an utter disdain for the local news. I've noticed more and more that it just makes me anxious. This morning on the local news I learned that there is rapist on the loose; children fall out of apartment windows; and somebody starved a seven year old to death. I understand that all of these events are tragic and we as humans are drawn to tragedy. It is all to overwhelming. In a big metro area stuff statistically is bound to happen...but do we really need this magnifying glass we call the news. Here an article from John Stossel (the guy with the mustache on 20/20) that kinda illustrates my point.

3) Yo La Tango-- Gots to love them. I think they have been around for like trillion years. But I love their new album "I am not a afraid of you and I will beat your ass", which in addition to a fairly good album title is also a great motto for your crest of arms--should have one of those things. Here is a nice video...if you can't get you tube just think of your favorite Yo La Tango song and hum it for a couple of minutes...or listen to any bumper music on This American Life.

4) Civil War on Great Courses-- I've been listen to college courses on tape for awhile now. I am really a geek. Anywise my background in science so when it comes to history I am as they say, inexperienced but willing to try. The Civil War was a real gap in my understanding of U.S. History. This course is great. I recently read Confederates in The Attic and I think that is great place to start to learn about the Civil War also the Ken Burns Special that aired a few years back.

5) Poem of the week:

This Is Just to Say
by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Old Guy Radio

2007-04-24T08:43:00.000-06:00

Although I spent most of my college day listen to the ruckus of Henry Rollins, Fugazi, and, stuff like Helmet as get older I love singer-song writers more and more--maybe it is the sudden drop in testorone in middle-age. I cannot stop listening to Sufjan Steven's album the Avalanche. It is compilation of out takes from the Illinois album. I think the whole thing comes off better than the original album.

Enjoy:

This video is fairly lame but the song is beautiful

This is some high school choir covering the same song. I'd say equally as cool.

Good Stuff: LCD Soundsystem

2007-04-23T12:25:00.000-06:00

Everybody needs validation at certain times in their life. Art serves two, primary functions: 1) to challenge 2) to comfort. Last week, I discovered a group of artists that are firmly providing me with heaping tablespoons of comfort.

LCD Soundsystem has just released a fantastic album called Sound of Silver and it rocks. If you haven't heard of LCD Soundsystem, you have to immediately stop what you're doing and go buy a copy of their first, self-titled album.

That's o.k.... I can wait...

Here's a music video of one of the goofier songs to prod you along...

Good stuff. It's always nice to have an indie rock album you can actually listen to on an exercise bike (my current obsession).

Well, now you have to go out and get their newest album that continues the energetic, fun pace but with the addition of two songs- "North American Scum". The second song would be my enablement Manifesto if it had been written two years go- "New York I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down". In true, Indie fashion, the band has produced a music video for "North American Scum" that succeeds in lacking any wit AND permanently scarring the song for all future listenings.

So, close your eyes...

Now, go have some fun...

Top 5 week of 4/22--ahh Omaha

2007-04-23T11:36:00.000-06:00

I am going back to Omaha this week. I grew up in the river city. I get all nostalgic about the place. Here are five things I love about Omaha.

1) Goldberg's Bread Pudding-- Breading pudding gets a bad rap because usually somebody's mom made with wonder bread and bunch of raisins = gross. But Goldbergs at 50th & Dodge makes the best darn bread pudding-- try it with ice cream.

2) Fish and Chips at the Dundee Dell-- The old Dell was great. It was right on Dodge Street, Omaha's main street, most of the seats and booths were broke...the bathrooms stunk, at least the men's room did...and it was great place to have a drink. The speciality was and is fish and chips served in a little aluminum sack. The trick is to douse the breaded fried fish and chips with about a quart of malt vinegar so you get this salty-sour-fried-fish stuff that is great after you have drank about 3 pints of Guinness. The Dell has since moved. It is actually in the Dundee neighborhood proper...the fish and chips are still very good.

3) Stoysich-- Omaha's stock yards brought in thousands of immigrants in the early 20th Century, many of them from mainland Europe. Most of them settled in South Omaha like my grandparents. Stoysich in the heart of South Omaha is remnant of the era: a true old world butcher shop with what seems like hundreds of meats, especially sausages. One my favorite things is to go to the back of the place and pick up one the cooked the sausages they sale...you then proceed put the sausage on a hoagie-like-bun and fill it full of sweet peppers. So good.

4) Field Club Neighborhood-- I love old houses. I live in one in my home town. Some of the prettiest and coolest houses reside along Woolworth Street in Omaha. I've spent hours just driving the streets marveling at some the great architecture.

5) Woodman Tower-- This is an icon to me, and I'm sure many other Omahans. It is a big old box of building. But it was a marvel when it was built in 1969. It represented to me the sort of industrial spirit of Omaha, but it is dang ugly that is for sure.

Music Man

2007-04-21T10:53:00.000-06:00

So, through the miracle of buying used music from Amazon.com (I'm cheap) I bought a bunch of new (to me) Cd's. I even ventured out a bit and bought some Cd's I didn't know anything about like:
Phantom Planet-a solid sort of O.K. band. Music I would not regularly like that much but, if you listen to it enough (which I did because I paid for the damn thing and I'll get my money out of the sumabith)it is infectious, mostly just that "California" Song. It's a corny song and just O.K. but here is the thing. Listen to that song like ten times, while singing along and by the tenth time you will be pouring your heat and soul into it, taken over completely by the sad sappiness of the song. So, I want everyone to go out, listen to the song and come back and tell me if this is true or not I dare you. This is kind of like a chain letter, by getting others suckered into the song I can be free of it.

Other Cd's
Neko Case "Fox Confessor Brings the Flood" Great music, keen artwork with (surprise) Foxes.

Flaming Lips "At War with the Mystics" Love those lips

Dandy Warhols "thirteen tales from urban Bohemia" Right on Music

Musical Sustenance: Part Deux

2007-04-20T05:40:00.000-06:00

Henry's right. We DO need more jazz in our lives... and Euro-dance music!

2007-04-19T16:23:00.000-06:00

We should listen to more jazz...dontcha think.

Five things I will Miss When I Leave NYC

2007-04-16T12:20:00.000-06:00

1) Doughnut Plant - located a couple blocks south of Delancey Street on the Lower East Side, the Doughnut Plant offers a fantastic and ever-changing selection of flavors. Over the years, I have sampled ginger, Meyer lemon, Pistachio, Coconut creme-filled, Tres Leches, Peanut Butter and Jelly, and Rose petal donuts... and I have yet to come across a flavor I didn't like. Their cinnamon rolls and sticky buns rock, too. The donuts are made primarily for gourmet food stores in the City and whatever they have left over is sold from 6:30 a.m. until they run out.

2) The Metropolitan Museum of Art - For New York City residents, it's pay-what-you-like and that makes it the best deal in the City and, perhaps, the world. Their collection is staggering. Morgan and I have spent many Friday nights here, sketching and taking pictures. You can take it to another level, rent an audio guide and spend endless hours in the many, themed galleries. It's phenomenal.

3) Chinatown - This neighborhood intimidated me the most when I first moved to NYC but it quickly became my favorite. I love the Vietnamese sandwich shops, the vegetarian dim sum, the Chinese bakeries, and a small, Thai supermarket that gets me kaffir limes for my curry pastes. It's one of the few neighborhoods still feels like a neighborhood. As I walk the streets, it feels both alien and comfortable and never disappoints.

4) The Bowery Ballroom - The best music venue in the City. It strikes the perfect balance between size and intimacy- there's not a bad seat in the house. The sound system is spot on and the lineup is a Who's Who of the indie music scene, and it's Clear Channel-free. I've seen everyone from Courtney Love to The Kills to the Notwist to the Wrens and the only reason I don't go every night is I'm an hour subway ride from home at the end of a show.

5) The Zip Code - I'll admit it. It feels cool to say that I live in New York. As a kid, the idea of living in a city of this size and density was terrifying. Despite the gentrification and precipitous drop in crime since the 1970s and 80s, this city is still a tough nut to crack. It's as expensive as hell and harder than ever to make it as an artist. I haven't fulfilled the grandiose plans I carried with me to the city, but simply living here has made me a survivor and proud that I have been able to hold my own in this city for this long.

My Top V for the Week 4/15--the ides of April

2007-04-14T13:14:00.000-06:00

1) Mischke-- Mischke brodcasts out of St. Paul, Minnesota out of KSTP 1500 which is a blow torch so I could pick up in Nebraska where I went college. Some of the most brilliant radio you have ever heard--and really there is no one like him. You can now pick up the podcast. http://www.mischkemadness.com/

2) Chickens--Ah chickens. Looks like the wife and I will be inheriting a set of backyard chickens. We are lucky that our town is where all the old farmers retired because livestock is generally permitted. A cow used to live in a yard across from the golf course for years. I've raised chickens twice prior...I've witnessed my dog swallow a chick whole--suffice to say I wasn't as happy about the ordeal as the dog was. I've seen with my very eyes a turkey in full attack mode against one of my little bantams--it was prehistoric. And of course I ate a lot eggs. I firmly believe life is much richer with chickens. http://raising-chickens.com/chicken-coops.html

3) The Elected live show on XM--who are these fellows? Very good show. http://www.myspace.com/theelected

4) Krautburgers-- Yummy cabbage, hamburger, salt and pepper baked in bread.

5) Yoga-- Okay so they came up with this Yoga-thing in India a trillion years ago and its all new-agey and weird, but really it is like the best thing in the world...especially, if your some thirty-odd-some guy with high cholesterol and demanded by his doctor to relax. I do hatha Yoga with a bunch of old ladies at retirement center-- you take what you get out here in the wild west. It reminds me of kintergarden nap time and p.e. I think at some point we will need to get out a parachute and shake it with foam balls on it circa 1979. http://www.yogajournal.com/

Condiment King

2007-04-13T07:01:00.000-06:00

So,I had to go to the grocery store and I was wandering around, as I am want to do in food stores (oohhh so many colors and shapes) then I came across my favorite area. The condiment section, I did not buy anything of course because I am in condiment rehab. I have a sickness that makes my buy way too many sauces and and dressings so my wife has forbade me from buying anymore until we get rid of what we have in about five months if we start using barbecue sauce (my true Achilles heal) on our cereal.

The reason I love condiments so much, well every other food item is pretty much locked up. In the cereals it's all about the major cereals, same with meats, and even frozen foods, soft drinks, and bread. It's all about General mills, Coca Cola, Jimmie Dean, Wonder Bread, blah, blah, blah. Even if you think a new exciting food item is on the market-- trust me it's not, because look a little closer and it is make by some big boring company. BUT not the condiments my friend. The condiment sections is the last frontier for an euntriprnurial young up and comer. I LOVE condiments. You could be in your backyard throwing together a bunch of crap to bbq your beef and and the next day put it in a bottle and take it down to the local HY-VEE store an who knows they might put it on the shelf right next to the big boys of barbecue sauce. It's only in the condiment lane that I realizes there are sauces I can't live without. There is a sauce for wild game, yes if you have shot something yourself and need a sauce for it some redneck had gone into production for YOU. Hell there were at least five such sauces last time I saw, granted I live in Nebraska but still.

There is a jar called "The Gravy Master" no, it's not gravy in a can, it's some sort of gravy concentrate, I don't know, so you can, what, add a little and save the time and money making all that gravy by yourself. I'm not sure, but that is what I love about the condiment section, it's full of mystery, questions about lifestyle, and just strange condiments. Who IS the "Gravy Master" some mad condiment making fool with delusions of grandeur no doubt, but just maybe he is the master of all the gravy he oversees. Who knows but condiments is where the Gravy Master's dreams came true.

I will be back to talk about condiments again my friends don't you worry.

My top 5 week of April 8th

2007-04-09T11:53:00.000-06:00

1) Harakiri dir. Kobayashi--Criterion Collection, www.criterionco.com. Movies can be such a wasted medium. When do you get the general public to sit down for two hours and really pay attention to anything. Harakiri is up there with old Shakespeare a meditation on death and culture. I won't ruin it for you but really the best movie I've seen in awhile. Makes you wish the cineplex folks made just a little better movies.

2) Giant Pumpkins, www.giantpumpkins.com/. I am really working hard this year to learn to garden with my wife-- who is like the best gardener in the world. However, I am set on going full bore and growing a giant freakin' pumpkin. At the end of the Summer I want a semi with a crane to come over to my house and move the thing down the County Fair. I'd like to block up traffic for a couple of hours. At the Fair I will proceed to have the crane lower my giant pumpkin down on all its competitors and crush the competition--literally and figuratively, but mostly literally.

3) The Comics Curmudgeon--joshreads.com/

Newspaper comics generally stink...well it's okay to say so.

4) The Thomas Jefferson Hour, www.jeffersonhour.org/ , I am radio junkie. Like-I-bought-a-shortwave-radio-in-the-90's-and-listen-to-it-after-my-wife-goes-to-sleep junkie. So I love this modern world and all those podcasts. The Thomas Jefferson Hour at first blush seems all too very dorky. Premise: Clay Jenkins pretends he is Thomas Jefferson and he talks about stuff. Once you get over the whole historical reenactment thing it is very interesting.

5) The Vaselines. I think bought this album in college because Kurt Cobain really liked them. Anyway I've been listen to it again you should as well.

My Wii Obsessions: Warioware and Zelda

2007-03-19T12:03:00.000-06:00

My right arm is aching this morning. I believe that I am suffering from the Wii equivalent of tennis elbow. The culprit is a game I picked up a couple of weeks ago called Warioware: Smooth Moves. I know that Morgan and I haven't been entertaining very many guests over the years, but never has that been so acute as right now.

This game is meant to be played with others... many others... preferably under the influence. The game supports 12 players and is a frenzy to play even in single-player mode. Hundreds of mini-games reside beneath the hood. I have been squatting and waving and punching and shimmying to the tune of a frenetic and catchy (EVIL) soundtrack. I got the Wii because I wanted something fun to do with people who weren't gamers. Too bad the system didn't come with neighborhood friends.

The other game that's taking up too much of my time has been the Epic known as The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. This game is HUGE. I have been playing it for 2 months and I'm still not finished with it. The save screen logs the number of hours you put into it and I'm somewhere around 59... if only I got paid for such commitment. Normally, this sort of gaming activity would be a deal-breaker with my wife, but fortunately the game is beautiful to look at and the puzzles are so much fun, Morgan has spent more than an idle hour or two helping me work through some of the more-challenging levels.

The plot of the game is pretty stock but the execution is fantastic. Rather than subject the gamer to another hack-and-slash fest, Zelda is provided with a fantastic array of tools and weapons that allow him/her to swing from claws, smash ice blocks, capture objects with mini-tornados and walk along the bottom of lakes. The first 2 hours of the story are terminal as the game tries to teach the in-and-outs of the movement and combat systems, but when the story picks up it's fantastic. I have played dozens of fantasy games and this quickly became my favorite. If you own a Wii, you should own this game.

Venus

2007-03-06T11:00:00.000-07:00

I understand that it is self-flagellating to watch the Academy Awards every year. The movies I love are rarely nominated and the winners are frequently the least-deserving- I don't know what the hell Academy members were thinking last year with Crash. I'm going to be good, though, and not bitch about this year's performance. There are plenty of snarky comments to be found on the Internet and in print. My issues with this institution go so far back, it's not worth the breath. I've got a friend-of-a-friend who is an Academy member, however, and that means that for 2 weeks of the year, I get to watch half the films I kinda wanted to see but wasn't interested enough to pay $10.75 for the privilege. This year, the movie I heard the least about was the one I enjoyed the most - Venus.

I knew that Peter O'Toole was up for an Academy Award for his role in Venus but heard little about the film. Peter O'Toole plays Maurice, an aged actor in the twilight of his career. Remembered mostly for his glamorous past and forgotten by the younger generation, he spends his twilight years playing dying grandfathers in films and wandering to the theater or the diner with actor-friends of his generation. The film has a smart, touching plot between Maurice and a young, street-smart woman who he calls "Venus", yet that is the least-interesting aspect of the film. Venus is a portrait of being old - how it feels to be old, how old people are treated and the roles that the elderly are expected to fulfill.

It never fails to amaze me how American culture (or most Western cultures, for that matter) treats it's elderly population. They are stereotyped in film and television as less-than-human children who shuffle, complain and fear change. Reality is that families and the culture largely ignores them or panders to them in condescending ways. What was natural and expected at earlier ages becomes lecherous and sinister in the later years. Somehow, elderly people are supposed to become softer, safer and less of whatever they were in their prime. I suspect it might have something to do with a contemporary fetishizing of youth combined with a terror of growing old.

Peter O'Toole does a spectacular job as the aging actor whose mind is still sharp, whose passions are still potent even as his body slowly gives way. Forrest Whittaker might have given the performance of his life in The Last King of Scotland- his Oscar acceptance speech was passionate and inspiring. However, Peter O'Toole performed an act of courage in exposing himself to the potential ridicule as a dirty old man by an audience that no longer sees him as Lawrence of Arabia or Henry II. He serves up his persona and our memories of him as a passionate, vigorous soul and uses it to expose our assumptions of what a human being should be in his/her later years. In a business based upon vanity, Peter O'Toole continues to both challenge and unsettle. He stood and delivered and I hope that I will carry half that that boldness into my later years.

Onibaba

2007-02-12T12:06:00.000-07:00

I am a lifer. I was an enthusiast throughout my childhood. I studied them in college. I even subjected myself to the machina of the Dream Factory during the mid 1990's in the hope of making them. Motion pictures have profoundly moved and shaped me. So, it was no small event when enthusiasm turned into cynicism a few years ago. The art form that gave me so much suddenly felt like a shallow, corporate shell of what I once loved. Sometimes I begin to wonder whether there are no longer inspiring surprises to be found. Though I have not seen every movie made, I have seen thousands of films- enough to believe that there is little out there to amaze me... then, something comes along that kicks my ass, rekindles my love of cinema and reminds me that no matter how long I live, there will always be surprises. This week, I sat down and watched the 1964, Japanese cinema classic, Onibaba.

Onibaba is one of the creepiest movies I've seen in years. Set during a civil war of medieval Japan, an old woman and her daughter-in-law live in a small hut amongst a sea of tall grass. They eke out a living by selling the armor and weapons of unsuspecting soldiers who unwittingly stumble into their grassland trap. With aid of halberds and a deep well, the women murder and salvage for millet and sake. The film is sparse on dialogue and instead fills the narrative with expressionistic cinematography and a minimalist sound. In an age of John Williams, Hans Zimmer, and Howard Shore it is a blessed release to watch a film that doesn't try to relentlessly steer me with orchestrated Muzak. The wind and clacking of the the long, grass stalks create an unnerving environment where death appears and disappears with startling swiftness.

What most struck a nerve with me was the primal quality of the storytelling- this is not Kurosawa's Japan. The characters are primal in their desires. Starvation, lust and violence drive the narrative from the start. The opening sequence of the film follows the women as they kill a pair of soldiers, strip their bodies, dump them into a hole, scarf a quick meal in their hut, then collapse on bamboo mats. The younger woman's lust for a man sends her racing through the tall grass at night into his arms, despite the terrifying possibility that a demon lives amongst the grass. All the characters are unsettling with their voracious, relentless appetites. A major part of the film's hook is that one never knows who to root- each character is fatally-flawed in more than a few, unpalatable ways. Onibaba reminded me that it is not spectacle that makes memorable movies- it is character. This film has it in spades.

Pan's Labrinth "Payback"

2007-02-05T17:53:00.000-07:00

As I am sure we are all aware, the democratic country we live in is a boon to free speech that we all enjoy taking for granite every day. So, I want to give my appreciation for free speech by not erasing Brian's blog about Pan's Labyrinth. By holding back and NOT destroying an opinion that one may not agree with or just happens to be WRONG we all benefit by opening our minds just a bit more and letting new misguided ideas in. And with that I say "RISE UP people of the world and see Pan's Labyrinth."
O.K. so Brian is not "wrong" because of course how can an opinion BE wrong but still... As you might suppose I enjoyed Pan's Labyrinth much more than Brian. Now to be fair, I read his blog and he mentioned that he had maybe "bought into the hype" of the movie. He had heard a lot about it in advance about it's originality. Now my good friend Brian is based out of New York, a regular movie mecca. I am conversely based out of Omaha.. that city in the bastion of cutting edge art and free thinking. Yoga classes are held in the park while coffee houses speak of new eastern philosophies. I feel sorry for Brian in his po-dunc, back-water, small-minded, hick town that he likes to call "The Big Apple" no thank-you I much prefer my cosmopolitan, eco-friendly, muti-cultural Omaha, Nebraska. Why just today my boss showed me a "funny" Internet clip of a re-arranged Kentucky Fried Chicken sign that read "HILARY SPECIAL, 2 fat thighs, 2 small breasts, and 2 left wings" I chuckled heartily about his keen insights on the Democratic senator. ha ha ha 2 left wings indeed! so clever. The point is that I did not get ANY information on Pan's Labyrinth before I saw it because... well... you know I live in a film gulag. In all fairness we do get some independent movies here in Nebraska the last one was called "Happy Feet".
I was thinking of writing about how much I enjoyed Pan's Labyrinth but now I think I'll just whine about the lack of good film here. No, no I'll stay focused.
Me and Brian just felt differently about that film. I found the back and forth between reality and fantasy extremely well done. The representation of Franco's Spain as seen through the fantasy world of a young girl was very compelling, creating conversations that were provocative. I also found the "reality" story just as good. the suspense of the whether the rebels will be found out or not. I didn't even know they used CGI, that is how good it was. I thought it was all dude's in costumes. O.K. I knew they CGed the legs a few times but all in all a bit of quibble if you ask me.
I can sympathise with Brian. I know what it is like to be expecting greatness and not have it happen, that is why all movie fans should move to Omaha, where you quickly learn to expect nothing, and are always pleasantly sup prised to find you were right. I'm off now to the latest indi film coming out here. I think it's from France, I believe it is pronounce "Grid-loc Gang" hmm I'll let you know.
late

Pan's Labyrinth

2007-01-17T08:04:00.000-07:00

Morgan and I decided to take advantage of New York's movie matinees ($6 before Noon) and schlepped down to 67th and Broadway for a flick. The critics had been gushing about this film since it was first released at the end of last year and we were eager to see something fantastical. I have been obsessed about macabre children's stories (i.e. Alice in Wonderland, the Oz books, anything by Dahl), and this film seemed to fit the bill.

The film is slicky-made- everyone is lit in that even, one-hour television drama style. The CGI scenes were generally effective, but there were a few moments where I couldn't help but notice how artificial they looked. In one scene there was a beautifully-rendered, writhing, mandrake root while another shot had a Spanish Captain staring through binoculars at terrible, CGI campfire smoke.

The story is strong in formula but there are some nice plot twists to be found. The film contains a significant (and somewhat indulgent) number of squirm scenes. I like the idea of a dark, dreadful fairy world but most of the gore is used to redundantly underscore the evilness of the Captain. Although many images are striking and effective at establishing tone, after a while it felt like they were more for the filmmaker's amusement than the story's needs. Though Ofelia's faun and faeries are interesting, they are simplistically rendered and do little to reflect upon either Ofelia's past with her dead father or her escapist perception of the world. I have seen enough magical beings in my filmic lifetime so their mere presence wasn't enough to induce a "wow" from me.

Writing fantastical stories is not difficult. I can let my imagination run wild and concoct wildly fantastical creatures and worlds. With the help of special effects artists and scenic sculptors, I could readily make a convincing world that is completely unfamiliar from our own. What makes great fantasy, however, is when those images are wrangled into the service of a specific, tangible equivalent. The Wizard of Oz (the film) showcases Dorothy's need to escape the mundane, American plains and learn that the world is cruel and one needs family to endure those trials of life and those characters (the witch, the scarecrow, the tin man) arise from the people and life around her. Roald Dahl's tales choke with the challenges of growing up amongst the cruelties of peers and adults and his villanous characters are often extreme representations of those personality types. The Brothers Grimm collection of folk tales are moral tales given fantastical vehicles to express them.

The most compelling character of Pan's Labyrinth was a strange, unnamed creature who kept his eyes in his hands. There is a brief shot where Ofelia enters his room and sees paintings along the ceiling that depict him killing and eating little children. Although the moment was brief and never referred to again, it intrigued me and, unlike nearly every character in the film, made me want to know more about this creature's story and Ofelia's relationship to him.

I enjoyed an opportunity to see a film that looks at World War II from a small corner of the world, à la For Whom the Bell Tolls, but I would have liked for the fantasy elements of this film to carry my perspective of such times to a new place rather than to showcase untethered imaginings. Still, if you like watching bugs turn into faeries, books whose pages morph from empty to ornate, or brief snippets of gore then this is probably the film for you.

Fun With Airlines

2007-01-08T12:48:00.000-07:00

So this year for Christmas I went to Sweden with my wife (who is Swedish). We have spent the last few years right here in Omaha, Nebraska for Christmas but it was time to spend a Christmas with the Swedish side of this marriage.

To get to Sweden from Omaha you have to catch a connecting flight in Chicago. It may be shocking that there is no direct Omaha-Stockholm flights, but it turns out that is not a financially viable line. Once I entered the Chicago airport, I noticed a subtle change- subtle as in jump right up into your face and say “NOTICE ME NOTICE ME”. The people who work at the airport have a bit of an attitude. As I walked to my connecting flight I could hear around me courteous airport staff helping passengers. “Did I SAY you have to go through security again” one annoyed, rage-filled staffer told a quivering old lady.

In this world of mass travel via airplane there are a lot of obstacles to sanity and comfort. For some reason when I overheard this conversation it made me reflect on the wonderful world of airplane travel. I have broken this up into a few different parts.

Tickets: About ten to fifteen years ago airlines finally took the leap into electronic tickets. Kicking and screaming, the whole industry took a leap they should have taken twenty years earlier- a leap that not only makes travel easier on the passengers but saves the airlines huge amounts of money and time. I bring this up first because I see the ticket as the hallmark of airline progress.

Take something that benefits EVERYONE and drag your feet for years. If this is something you personally engage in, watch out- you might be an international airline.

Putting your flight, seat, and gate number in a clear-to-see and find area of the ticket is NEW. In the 90’s my airline tickets resembled numeric crossword puzzles, with gate, flight and seat information scattered indiscriminately across an ocean of random numbers that have meaning only to airline workers or some pagan airline. You would have to forsake your own personal faith and pray should you ever want to decipher your ticket and find your gate. Let me say that again, making the word SEAT big and placing YOUR seat number next to it is a NEW invention of the airlines. Somebody came up with that just ten years ago and that guy got a big raise, and robust men patted him on the back, and said things like “Johnson- ticket make good read. Me CEO, me big man, now I make plane go zoom zoom hee hee.” Some of you might notice that I didn’t say a woman invented this concept and that must be true. There is no way a woman was involved because a woman would have figured out tickets should be easy to read on the FIRST DAMN ONE EVER PRINTED.

I am not going to obsess on the walk through security because everyone knows how ridiculous it is and I just…it just hurts my head. But I will note that because I remove my shoes, take off my belt, stripped off my dignity and submit to random acts of searching stupidity I no longer have to be asked the dumbest questions created by man i.e. “are you carrying any weapons?” When my wife went through the final step to getting her green card I had to go in with her and prove we were married. Here are some of the questions they asked her. “Do you have any relatives you are bringing with you into the U.S.?” Fair enough, a question worth asking I suppose. This was followed up with “Are you a terrorist?” I kid you not, that was a real question. There was also, “have you ever been or are you currently involved in the trafficking of illegal drugs?” Maybe these are not stupid questions maybe our jails are so packed because questions like these catch criminals all of the time. Maybe this is the greatest invention in crime fighting since Batman- I doubt it, but I digress.

The most interesting thing I have found out about airport security is the differences that occur country-to-country. If you are at an airport in the good old U.S.A. well, be prepared to have your grandmother strip searched and tasered for having a pair of knitting needles. Are you leaving Sweden? Well, expect a polite, non-rushed security check that might also resemble a line at the grocery store. Did you just get done vacationing in Laos (yes, Laos has an airline, called Lao Air, Fun Fact: Lao Air is one of only two airlines in the world that does not make public it’s safety record….yea) Walking through security in Laos is a lot like just walking, there is not much of a check. Now I have to think this is because A. Laos has never had a terrorist problem. OR B. Even terrorists who are going to blow themselves up are afraid to fly Lao Air. O.K. now I’m not even digressing I’m just wandering around the landscape of airline security.

queing for the new Wii

2006-11-21T08:29:00.000-07:00

I did it. I didn't think that I was gonna do it. I had convinced myself that I had exactly Zero chance of getting my hands on one. I saw the lines outside Circuit City and Best Buy on Thursday as rabid enthusiasts stood in pouring rain for the privilege of dropping $650 on a Playstation 3. I, on the other hand, was interested in the less-than-half-the-price Nintendo Wii, which was set to go on sale on Sunday. I knew, however, that I had neither the time nor inclination to stand hours outside a storefront in the hope of buying a game console. Was the Wii launch going to be a similar zoo? Did I have any chance of getting one? I hoped to find something online, but Amazon's promise of pre-orders never materialized. Sunday came and went and I was resigned that I was out of luck. Still, Morgan suggested that I should stop by Nintendo's store before work on Monday and see if there were any left.

That's right, folks... my WIFE wanted me to get a gaming console. She is not a gaming enthusiast. In fact, I'd go so far as to say she is gaming enthusiast Kryptonite. Still, there was something about the Wii that caught her eye. Maybe it was the promise of an intuitive interface. Maybe it was a desperate attempt to find a game that we could play together. Maybe she recognized that shortened days and cooler temperatures meant a VERY long winter for two New Yorkers who would not be able to afford to go out on the town and escape the bell jar that is the New York City apartment dwelling.

Maybe it's best that I not ask too many questions.

So, I schlepped my ass out of bed, and 50 minutes later, found myself on line and indoors with a cup of coffee and donut in my hands. A dozen people stood in front of me in line including a pair of execs who barely knew what they were standing in line for except that their kids wanted one. Behind me was a late 20-something who told me he worked at Best Buy and wanted to get a Wii for his girlfriend, but they'd already sold out. Over his shoulder, I could see a couple of guys, shadowboxing in front of a plasma t.v. with Wiimotes in their hands. A couple cameramen videotaped their antics and interviewed marketing execs.

Ten minutes later, I was standing outside the NBC Studios (one door down from the Wii store) as screaming fans shook cardboard messages for the Today Show cameras. In my hand, I held a shopping bag with a Wii, a copy of the newest Zelda game, and a couple of extra joysticks. I had just enjoyed, perhaps, the most-positive shopping experience I've ever had. Seriously.

A good day in the City... how odd.

My wife and I busted out the system while our 2 cats sniffed and spread out on the packaging. I undertook the dubious task of hooking the Wii. The space behind my "Entertainment Center" is a gnarly mass of cables that took me a good 10 minutes to navigate. Plugging in a piece of electronics is always a challenge in a pre-War-built apartment. It looks like the father's electrical outlets in A Christmas Story and is about as stable. Still, we were up and running relatively quickly. The Wii had no problem finding my Internet router and after a couple download updates, it was ready to roll.

The first half hour was spent just getting used to the new controllers. The Wiimotes are comfortable in the hand and fun to use. Morgan and I took turns making "Mii" characters- little avatar characters you can save in your Wiimote, share with others and appear in games like the included game, Wii Sports. Morgan isn't terribly comfortable with joystick gaming and it took her a little while to get comfortable with the interface, but soon she was creaming me at the bowling and golf challenges. The game tracks your stats and there are fitness test games that allow you to track your improvements over time. A couple of the games were inexplicably awkward to play. Boxing quickly degenerated into a flailing mess as few of our movements seemed to be accurately reflected in the game. Golf was also difficult to control. I couldn't get an accurate gauge of swing strength. Bowling, tennis and baseball were all a blast, particularly the baseball game. I can't wait to have a real baseball game simulation on this sucker.

We were exhausted from all the swinging and throwing so we didn't try Zelda out except for the first few minutes of the introduction. Frankly, what had excited me about the Wii was the multi-player potential and although I did want to play Zelda, I wanted to save it for the winter months when it becomes too cold to go outside and I can't afford to get out of the house.

LANDMARK MOVIES

2006-11-16T16:25:00.000-07:00

O.K. I will bite for the biggest WOW films that made me sit up and take notice of the finer points of actual film making. To give credit where credit is due, before I took notice of the more amazing films out there, my film discrimination started with realizing all movies were not good. That may be a whole different blog, but the first movie I realized was bad was…. “Johnny Be Good” it was a vehicle for Anthony Michael Hall, and also featured Robert Downy Jr. Even at that young age I thought “This is not funny, this is horrible.” Since then I feel ripped off all the time and still believe Lucas personally owes me money for that second Star Wars trilogy, but there is nothing like the first time.
But, on to the blog, the five films that really changed my perceptions of film and sometimes of life and you should go out and rent them right now. Do it for your country to it for yourself, you deserve it, you work hard and life is too short for bad films.
#1
Evil Dead II
BACKGROUND: Come back with me my friend. Come back to the late eighties, to a place in the mid-west, Nebraska to be specific. At this time in this place there was a video store called Applause Video. A store at the cutting edge of technology, not only did Applause carry VHS but they also rented the shockingly advanced BETA tapes. But this video world only had room for ONE format of tape and Beta was not it. Everyone on earth owned a VHS machine, everyone that is except my Dad. A smart consumer, my father did his research and found the technologically of the more advanced Beta machine to be the smart buy, a little reluctance to admit defeat, he owns said machine to this day, but I digress. Like a Rumsfeld after a landslide Democrat election, the Beta was doomed. Applause Video had a fire/obsolescence sale, all Beta tapes, only two dollars each. I bought about fifteen Beta tapes, throwing in Evil Dead and Evil Dead II as an afterthought, what the heck they were only two bucks a pop.
A few weeks later, my friend Ian was over and we watched the first Evil Dead movie. Average, pretty gory, but nothing special. Then we put in Evil Dead II.

THE MOVIE: While in film school, frequently, as we WERE in film school, the question of favorite, film, director, scene, ECT…. would come up. “Hal Hartley” one pretentious art student would say, “Hartley, he’s O.K. but Kieslowski with his Color trilogy is amazing” another film snob would pipe up. “The Evil Dead II is the best movie EVER” I would state with pure conviction. You see, I was ‘keeping’ in it real’. Hartley and Kieslowski are fantastic and I could write a whole entry on both of them but Evil Dead II was the first time I noticed the creative ways a person could use a camera, and I don’t mean in a porn way either.
The first Evil Dead is about a bunch of teen age kids who go to a cabin in the woods and awaken evil spirits who posses the living. Evil Dead II takes up where the last film left off: Ash, the only survivor from the first film basically re-lives the first film with a slightly bigger budget and a lot more ambition.
Watching Evil Dead for the first time was shockingly fun. I had no idea what I was in for. The character of Ash acts like one might in a horror movie. His first instinct is to get the hell out of there, that was cool; no one EVER acts like they SHOULD in horror movies. The evil spirits will not let him leave and chases his car. Once he hit the tree and got thrown threw the windshield, I thought he was done for, but Ash got up and started running, he runs into an unbeleveably, big on the inside, cabin. His hand gets infected with evil and he ends up cutting it off with a chainsaw while yelling “who’s laughing now!” That was my; “you had me at hello” moment. Or it might have been the fact he uses duct tape to bandage the hand. Really, it is the creative use of camera that got me started loving this film. The “monster”, for ninety percent of the film is POV shot of the monster, this same ‘monster’ shot was used later when Raimi worked with the Cohen Brothers on their crime masterpiece Blood Simple. There is a tight close-up shot that shoots out to the tops of the trees vie crane shot. This is not a deep film, there is NO subtext. What it is, is a wink, nudge, hugely creative, fun film. The first Evil Dead was very gory with a little humor, Evil Dead III or Army of Darkness has no gore and a ton of humor, but me and my friend Goldie Locks both agree Evil Dead II is just right.

THE RESULT: I went to film school

#2
Razor’s Edge

BACKGROUND: Had to be around 1990, my sister was dating a guy who read a bunch of philosophy books, he was quiet, intense, and all punk rock. He really liked this movie so I ended up watching it because in his quietness I always believed he was thinking something deep. Turns out he just didn’t know how to talk to people, go figure, but he turned me onto this film.
THE MOVIE: This version of the Razor’s Edge is a re-make of a 1950’s movie, which is an adaptation of a book, all by the same name. The film is about a man who is living in high society Britain, he enters into service in WWI, and has a life changing experience. When he comes back to his rich life style he puts off the high paying job to go figure out life. He works in a coal mine and eventually goes to India to speak with monks. When he comes back he tries to reconcile his new found spiritual beliefs with those of the very materialistic life he left.
This film was Bill Murray’s first venture into ‘serious’ film territory. Razor’s Edge bombed at the box office, putting off for years another attempt by Murray to try a role like this. The mind reels to think of what might have been if the movie had done well, Lost in Translation, and Broken Flowers would have to wait a scant ten years or so. I think his next movie after Razor’s Edge was Ghostbusters II.
Fun Fact: Duran Duran’s Wild Boys was on the soundtrack of this film. Mercifully it was only in the credit, still…… what the hell?!? Because I know when I think “1920’s melodrama about a man weighing the questions of existence, and enlightenment”, I think- Duran Duran.
THE RESULT: Aside from a very few attempts to shoehorn some Bill Murray ‘humor’ into a drama, this is a great film. I respect it just for taking a stab at something deeper than a wading pool, but not so deep as to loose the audience. This was the first film I saw that made me realize there was more to movie life than 16 candles and Die Hard. “Ahhhh Refreshing”

#3
MANHATTAN
BACKGROUND: Somewhere around 1992-93 I started getting into Woody Allen movies and since my co-blogger Brian, took Annie Hall, I get stuck with the ugly step-sister, Manhattan. This is actually a big movie for my friend Rocky, I remember seeing Manhattan and then going over to Rocky’s trailer at the trailer park (we weren’t making all that much money back in the day) and saying “let’s watch this” I remember Rocky being really impressed with Manhattan and going on and on about it, he of course, was right.
THE MOVIE: Woody Allen made ten years of slapstick, funny, but let’s be honest not THAT funny films, then the huge light-year leap forward with Annie Hall. Yes it is a fantastic film but I contend that Manhattan is an equally far jump forward. There is more emphasis on the drama, and that beautiful black and white photography. The lies people tell each other and the lies they tell themselves are all shown here and with great wit. It’s just like real relationships except I have never been that funny when someone is breaking up with me, well, I might have looked funny to other people but trust me it’s not the same thing.
THE RESULT: I gush about Woody Allen films all the time, except, you know, the last 13 films he made. But he had a great run for about 20 years there. So, go watch Manhattan already.

#4
RAVENOUS

BACKGROUND: It had to be about 1998, I went to a movie, and it was this one.

THE MOVIE: Guy Pearce plays a civil war solider that is sort of dishonored and sent to a remote camp with a bunch of screw ups in the mountains in new California. Robert Carlyle plays an army office who leads a small wagon train that winds up becoming a second Donner Party; Carlyle is the only survivor and wanders into camp. It turns out he ate all the other people and wants to keep eating people because it is his road to eternal youth and great strength.
Have you ever seen some strange, weird animal that everyone but YOU thought was strange. Something like a squid, or pug dog, or hairless cat, well, maybe not a hairless cat those things can’t be loved, it’s a scientific fact. Anyway, Ravenous is my ugly mutt that no one loves. ; <> Ravenous had problems from the start. In production they switched directors, then there was a flood that swept away half of the set, and all that wasn’t half as bad as the marketing. Ravenous had the largest drop of audience from opening week to second week of any movie EVER. I think since then that honor has been given to The Real Cancun. I think Ravenous does not deserve this, as a matter of fact I think Ravenous is a great film. Extremely well acted, with subtext about the consumption, greed and sense of entitlement that has grown in this country from the start. Alas, it was not the ‘right kind’ of gross out for the horror audience, and way too much raw carnage for the art house crowd.
THE RESULT: I’m a bitter bitter man who snarls at people whom happen to disagree with me. Art house crowd you are on notice, Ravenous is better than Life is Beautiful and has more to say about the human condition. You horror clone babies should watch something more challenging than Hostel, or the latest gorography flick, watch something good for once, and leave my puppy alone. Sniff…. Sniff….

#5
Network

BACKGROUND: 1991 or so, at my friend Rocky’s apartment with his nutty room mates and they were watching this film. I loved that place that we affectionately referred to as ‘The Palace’, it was not like a cozy warm place to hang out at. In fact it was the opposite of that, sort of strange and a little tense all the time, it was great. Anyhoo, they would watch a movie rarely and when they did it was not the typical movie for our age group.

THE MOVIE: A network anchor man gets fed up and starts to say what he feels. Famous for the line “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore”. Network is a satire of the media and the drive for ratings at any cost, released in 1976, at the time it probably seems a bit overblown, now it seems par for course. Super watchability.

THE RESULT: This was the first film I saw that was ‘old’ and was still sharp. A bunch of old actors I had never heard of: Peter Finch, William Holden, Robert Duvall, and an old people story about the media and I loved it. I had no idea, at the time that a movie that had not come out last week could still be good. Apparently if you have a great script, and good acting it doesn’t matter how old your film is, who knew?

Movies That Fucked Me Up- The Top 5... no, 6! (arrgh)

2006-11-07T09:12:00.000-07:00

In order to stretch our blogging muscles and get a few entries under our belt, I'm gonna try another Top 5 List. I know this runs the danger of making us a High Fidelity knock-off, but I laugh in the face of cliché. Besides, nobody's reading us so it's not like we're pissing everybody off- that's for later.

Today, I want to lay out the movies that Fucked Me Up. I'm not talking about gross-out flicks or movies that sport The Usual Suspects-style plot twists. I'm talking about movies that seized my Expectations, nailed them against the wall and slapped them around. That's right. These movies knocked me out of the Tree of the Mainstream and showed me there was more to movies than bullwhip-wielding archeologists, aliens in the suburbs, or romantic comedies where pretty women mate with men too witty to survive Real Life.

NOTE: I kinda fucked up and wrote descriptions for six movies instead of five and now I can't bear to part with any of them. So, you're stuck with a bonus film... lucky you.

#6... no, 5 (ack!)
Desperate Living
Background: No matter how many movies a person watches, he'll never see them all. I read a profile on Quentin Tarantino and the gazillion movies that he's watched at the rate of something like 3 or 4 a day. It's no frigging wonder that his movies are references-of-references-of-references nowadays. His daily exposure to Real Life has got to be about 15 minutes, tops. I gave up trying to be the Film Know-It-All. It's too damn exhausting. I haven't watched more than a couple Fellini films. I never "completed" Scorsese by tracking down a copy of Boxcar Bertha. I still haven't seen Pandora's Box. So, there. Deal with it.
Until a couple years ago, I hadn't watched a single John Waters film except Pink Flamingos-- the perfunctory, shock-film that every first-year, film student has to watch the second he moves away from his parents. A friend of mine gasped in horror when I confessed this dirty little secret and immediately lent me every DVD of John Waters that he owned.

The Movie: The John Waters film that rocked the hardest was Desperate Living. Made five years after the infamous Pink Flamingos, this movie feels almost relaxed in its offensiveness. This is, perhaps, the most quotable movie on the planet. Where else could one possibly hope to find such memorable lines as "Go home to your mother! Doesn't she ever want you? Tell her this isn't some communist daycare center! Tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother I hate you!" The opening credits are over the serving of a cooked rat on a dinner platter. One character cuts of his/her penis with a pair of scissors. As for the Queen Charlotta... well, I don't want to spoil it for you.

What it Did: Desperate Living blew me away because of how comfortable and casual John Waters' ensemble cast pull it all off. Fuck Sid & Nancy. This movie IS Punk- absolute freedom. This movie looks like the most fun a filmmaker could hope to have with no budget (a.k.a. every film I've ever made). It felt like I was peeking in on this degenerate ensemble of misfit filmmakers having the time of their lives... and I longed to be a part of it.

#5
Nashville
Background: This film came in the end of my film school years. About this time, my fellow students and I were scampering along the streets of Iowa City with a Bolex in one hand and a Nagra recorder in the other. We were blowing wads of cash on film processing and learning the fundamentals of filmmaking. We learned how it's standard practice to start a scene with an establishing shot, then shot/reverse shot setups and a medium shot for transitions. As for sound editing, the One Thing you didn't want was overlapping dialogue- you can't get consistent volume levels, it limits your editing options, etc.

The Movie: Robert Altman throws 13 main characters into the city of Nashville. Characters talk over one another. Long, establishing shots are held through entire scenes. An audience often has to decide which conversation to listen to, then filter it from the one or two other conversations going on at the same time. The story had characters wandering from one meeting/party/encounter to another with no, clear, establishing incident or rising tension. Only the drama of Barbara Jean's nervous breakdown tried to carry an escalating plot.

What it Did: Showed me that I'd wasted a ridiculous amount of money on film school. Here's your film school, right here-- 1) Story dictates style, 2)Look at the world around you 3)Now, go make a movie - $20,000, please. I've watched this movie a dozen times and gotten something different out of it Every Time.

#4
Annie Hall
Background: Any movie nominated for an Academy Award should be automatically disqualified from this list, but fuck it. Before Annie Hall, I had seen Bananas, Sleepers, and Take the Money and Run so this might explain why I was completely confused when the the pratfall guy in glasses suddenly started talking like an adult.

The Movie: Best-written movie. ever. It's staggering to believe that the man who wrote this was the same person who befouled celluloid with The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. Annie Hall is a staggering series of narrative rule-breaking. Alvie Singer (Woody Allen) steps in and out of the narrative. He talks to other characters (in and out of the context of the scene) . He speaks directly to the camera. He effortlessly switches from present tense to past, then back again. He takes characters on tours of his character's memories. He's all over the fucking place and even falls into animation for one scene. This is the Unteachable Script. It violates just about every rule of screenwriting and Sensible Filmmaking.

What it Did: There are great novels and plays out there and better overall films, but there is no equal from a writing standpoint. If one's passion is strong enough, all the rules can go fuck themselves. This is a singular effort of vision. I don't care if he married his step-daughter and tanked his career in the late 90s-- this is a Great movie.

#3
Trainspotting
Background: I was living in Los Angeles at the time and I was dreaming of being the next Hal Ashby/Orson Welles/Kurosawa (I was young). This was a couple years after Pulp Fiction when Hollywood was in the midst of an embarrassing attempt to replicate the coolness of Pulp Fiction (Tarantino included), but what they were producing was pap next to this.

The Movie: It's slickly-made, has a perfect-- and APPROPRIATE-- soundtrack, and the best opening sequence in cinema. Ewan McGregor could do nothing but shitty films the rest of his career (Star Wars what?) and I would still admire the fuck out of him. Irvine Welsh's novel is brilliant, but I don't know what crazy fuck thought that it could be made into a movie-- thick, Scottish accents, drug abuse, AIDS, underage sex, and a baby death. And the movie still manages to end with something resembling a happy ending. Are you fucking kidding me? Robert Carlyle's turn as Begbie is as good as it gets.

What it Did: Made me realize that I was in the wrong fucking country for making movies. It tore through innumerable clichés of drug abuse by showing druggies as people, why they do heroin and why the fuck they would keep doing it. It put four fantastic actors and a great novel on my radar and showed me that even the most insufferable characters are likable if you've got the right actor and a personal-enough story. I could sit down and watch this movie Any Time/Any Day. It's hardwired to my film sensibility, now.

#2
Liquid Sky
Background: I watched this movie at the Bijou Theater- the University of Iowa's tiny, movie theater and the polar-opposite environment of this movie. I went because I liked the name of the title but stayed for an absolute head-fuck, particularly for a film student who was living in the heart of the American Midwest.

The Movie: There's nothing like a transsexual, NYC, early-80's, science fiction film directed by a Russian filmmaker to fire the imagination. Liquid Sky is one of those typical, underground movies that wallows in it's terrible plot and odd characters but works because there's something real, pushing beneath the surface and making it come together. It also has the best lesbian rape scene ever.

What it did: It floored me to realize that there was this amazing, dark, heroin-based, music culture in New York City that I'd heard nothing about and a it took a movie like this to show it to me. The acting is terrible, the special effects are laughable, but it got made. The sucker got made. It was also sported the angriest, most-nihilistic characters I'd ever seen. Unlike John Waters' menagerie of Cult, I found that I DIDN'T want to join this group of bitter folks, but I loved to watch.

#1
Requiem for a Dream
Background: I had just moved to New York City and was eager to see a film that took place near my new home. I remember thinking, "Oh, cool! It takes place in Coney Island- that's at the end of my subway line here in Brooklyn! It's from that guy who did Pi and has that hottie from Labyrinth! This should be fun!"

The Movie: If Lou Reed wrote a crystal meth version of "Heroin", set it to the musical cacophony of Oasis's "Champagne Supernova" then convinced Iggy Pop to perform it, then that would be a musical equivalent to this movie. It is brutal, unrelenting, and incredibly-written. Jennifer Connelly pulled a performance that's on par with McGregor's in Trainspotting. When she goes to see Big Tim (Keith David) and he gives her the line "I know it's purty baby, but I didn't take it out for air", you can feel the bottom drop out. Ellen Burstyn is the engine that drives this baby, though, and she pushes it hard and right off the cliff.

What it Did: This is a Breen-era, cautionary tale with no brakes and no censorship. It's a tale with virtually no hope from the beginning, then it gets worse, and I couldn't stop watching it. I still pull it out just to watch some of the phenomenal scenes. I was one of the first to buy it on DVD, but I've never been able to watch it a second time in one sitting. Not since Schindler's List have I seen a movie that I enjoyed more yet never wanted to see again.

4 Relationship Hurting Games and 1 Savior

2006-11-05T13:59:00.000-07:00

My Co-blogger has gone through his past of game playing and it plays out very much like my own. I am amazed to see the name Zork after all of these years. My God, did we really play an all text game!
I think Brian has tapped into a topic that is little covered in the news. How many of us have relationships that are strained just because we only want to get to the next level? I am up to the challenge to name such games.

Relationship and Games for better or worse: For Better:1 For Worse:4

#4
GIANTS
This is a fun arcade style game where you play some sort of outer space humanoid cat in a space suit with a British accent. It is creative with good game play and very funny. Actually I never got in much trouble over this one. It is timed out pretty well and the obsessive factor is only medium. But, Brian had five and even with this one I only have four so I had to fill out my list a little and it's a great game so pick it up. Plus I only got in trouble for playing it like once or twice, and that was really because of some other stupid thing I did.

#3
ANY FIRST PERSON SHOOTER
"No One Lives Forever", Return To Castle Wolfenstien", "Quake Arena","the new DOOM", Metal Of Honor", "Call Of Duty", "Red Faction". I could go on but then I start to have a real sense of self realization about the time I have wasted playing these things and I start to feel a little sick.
Be it space alien, Nazi scum, or shambling zombie, and SOMETIMES Shambling Nazi zombie scum, (someday they will finally have a Nazi space zombie, and the world will be complete) I love to shoot them all with a big gun. I have wasted more time feeling like I'm saving the world than actually doing anything at all . My wife may say "Craig it's a beautiful day why don't we go outside and read while we sit in the hammock." to which I respond "Honey, as we speak there are Nazis trying to bring the dead back to life, France has already fallen under their iron fist. It is my responsibility, neh my DUTY to kill Nazi scum today, Hammock be damned!" She shrugs, with a slight rolling of the eyes, and gos outside.
What she does not understand is that I am a man of variety when it comes to these games, a Renaissance man if you will. Sometime I come home and I need to kill aliens with the plasma canon, or maybe it's time to stay back from your enemy and go the way of the sniper, and every now and then but not often you just have to see how far you can get with that stupid knife they defaulted you with at the start of the game (not very far, in case you were wondering). One of the big problems with these games is not only am I not doing anything but I'm not learning anything either. Brian may have amassed a huge amount of useless statistics but he is also a wiz with computers in general. i.e. he got this blog going, he build a computer, or more to the point he put the covers of the games he played on his list next to their number. Just getting into this blog and making this post was a huge challenge for me, akin to a dog licking peanut butter off the roof of its mouth. Sure, the dog can do it, but it takes a LONG time, it's frustrating and it looks funny. Well, I made my titles red so there. Other than that I won WWII and saved the universe a bunch, but not really.

#2
BALDUR'S GATE
O.K. so I can be cheap. see, thrifty. I don't really keep up with the current games. It is my only real discipline, by now owning a game I will not play that game. But, if I can buy a game that has been out for years it's really cheap, but then of course I play it and that is where the problem is.
Baldur's Gate is a dungeon's and Dragons adventure game. Form a party kill monsters go on quests. I get caught up in checking out the game world. So many things to get your group, so many places to go and I'll just check out one more thing. Once the wife has told me she is going to bed I know I have about thirty minutes of good faith game play left. As in, if I am in bed half an hour, after she has told me she is going to bed everything is fine. If I push it to one hour, it's still O.K. but there is a distinct chill in the air. So, when I started playing Baldur's Gate and my wife told me she was hitting the sack. I said "I'll be down in a bit." Five hours later I learned that five hours is not "a bit". I can play first person shooters for a while now and then put them down. The same thing can not be said for Baldur's Gate. Damn you Baldur's Gate I shake my tiny fist of rage in your general direction.

#1
GRAND THEFT AUTO III
This time sucking, relationship hurting game was made by a pack of divorce lawyers and marriage counselors who needed to drum up some biz. How dare they make a game so cool. And the wife does not understand. I played this game so much at a friends house one night that when I drove home I started to think "I bet those light poles will snap right off if I hit them with the car, hmmmm". I spent a whole hour flipping my car off the top of a parking garage just to see how far I could get, then taking different cars, trucks, buses up and jumping them off the edge too. I have abandon the mission of the game altogether and spent hours just going on a kill crazy rampage. Yelling over to my wife "Hey, check this out I'm going to shoot this guys leg off", and they say there is no more romance left in the world. Yes, I have to say GTAIII is my number one. They are all great games so please, if you want to stop enjoying real relationships with real people and blow off the many wonders and mysteries of this amazing world we live in, go and buy any of these and start your path to eye strain bliss.

#1
TIGER WOODS GOLF
My brother-in-law has this game on his system. I'm not sure what sister it is. PlayStation or something. This is the best game in the world. I don't even care about golf, but is is pure fun squeezed into a game. It is fun to play alone, but here is why it is in the "for better" category, it is a blast to play with other people too. Four people can play at a time. My wife loves to play it, THAT is how fun it is. a game with four takes about an hour and half, so bring on the cheese dip, get that case of beer, lets play golf. This game is a god send to people who like to game but are tired of trying to get their equal opposites into their game. Game on.

Top 5 Games Likely to Ruin My Marriage

2006-10-24T07:43:00.000-06:00

For far too many men of my generation, computer games have been a way of life. My first non-arcade gaming experience was standing in front of a Commodore 64 in some remote corner of Sears, playing the Worst Adaptation of an Arcade Game EVER- Pac Man. Despite the heinous, flickering graphics and a maze that was bad, even by early 1980s standards, I was enthralled. My first gaming console was an Intellivision. It didn't have the brand popularity of the Atari 2600 or the Holy Grail that was Colecovision and their near-identical port of Donkey Kong, but Intellivision had a fantastic baseball game and a strange, world-domination game called Utopia which helped to fill the loneliness of having just moved thousands of miles from my friends (in Fairbanks, AK) to a suburb of complete strangers who loved to say "ain't" (Augusta, GA).

After the Intellivision, I upgraded to the Apple IIc and the butt-numbing addiction of the Ultima series, the text-based Zork series, Epyx's Summer/Winter Games and the 3-D block mazes of The Bard's Tale. Clearly, I had no life. But that didn't stop me from buying a Nintendo, then a Sega Genesis (for the Madden franchise) and eventually an old 286 PC wherein I could REALLY get to wastin' time in Ultima VI, Railroad Tycoon, Civilization and a succession of SSI titles like Phantasie III, Eastern Front, Pool of Radiance and numerous other titles too embarassing to mention. Fortunately, my endess pursuit of gaming bliss was interrupted by friendships, social engagements, a budding film career.

I purchased a new computer in 1998 and quickly re-discovered the time suckage that is computer gaming. Baldur's Gate, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Civilization 2, Quake, Doom, Red Alert and a host of sporting titles soon clogged the ol' hard drive. Despite this, I managed to find a wife, write a number of plays and muster the oomphta to move to New York City. I have no idea how I managed it. In 2002, I built my own PC and got sucked into a new generation of insanity. I have played many games over the years and endured some very rocky relationships. Universally speaking, I can't think of a single girlfriend who enjoyed the game playing but there are some particular gems in the game world that particularly grate. I consulted Morgan on her personal, pet peeves. Still, I had to factor in the obsessive nature of games and how likely I was to ignore the long, dirty looks and heavy sighs from by my Significant Other.

So, I present to you, my list of the Top 5 Games Likely to Ruin My Marriage:

#5
Rome: Total War
I have installed and uninstalled this game at least 3 times. That's the sign of an obsession that refuses to go away. I won the long campaign as a member of the Julii, but then I had to win as one of the other two Roman factions. Then I had to win as the Gauls. Then Germania. Brittania. Spain. Egypt. The major time-sucker is the stunning field battles. It's thrilling to take hundreds of troops, then align, charge, flank and re-group them against a huge army. And nothing cements a relationship like the sound of 50 screeching, barbarian women as 200 berzerkers charge a line of hasati warriors. Nope nothing like it. Then, when the roman general flanks me and sends my soldiers running for their lives then kill them one-by-one, my wife really gets to enjoy the thrill of me shaking my fist at the monitor and swearing like a sailor.

#4
Hearts of Iron II
Any authentic, board-style wargame would do in this slot, but this one is my most-recent favorites and is a great example of a game with just enough complexity to pique my obsessive nature and subsequently nullify any attempt at a social life. A good wargame is all about the statistics. I have printed out and poured over hundreds of pages of military analyses, unit rankings/ratings and game FAQs, only to get my ass handed to me two hours into the campaign. Of course, that only comes after hours of carefully delegating resources, building roads/factories, negotiating/trading with other countries. What does that mean for a perfection-obsessed person? That's right! One! More! Time! My wife has noted (and I cannot disagree here) that I have amassed an incredible library of detailed statistics in things that are Utterly Useless in the real world... And?!

#3
Civilization (any version)
I had an English-major roommate my Junior year of college whose only interests were books, the Chicago Bears and beer. His only connection to computers were through word processing. One afternoon, I introduced him to a game I'd recently bought called Sid Meier's Civilzation. I left him that afternoon and when I came back late that evening, he was still playing. I went to bed and the next morning, he was still playing. I went to classes and when I returned for dinner, he was still playing. Civilization is EVIL. Pure EVIL. It is a game that can be played for hours and at the end, the only thing you can think is about how you've immediately got to start a new game so this time you can get it right.

#2
Railroad Tycoon
Sid Meier has probably done more than anyone to fuck up relationships around the gaming world. His games are easy to start, addictive and endlessly replayable. Four sequels to this game have been made, but the first offers the a deceptively-simple interface, rewarding challenges and a high annoyance value. The game featured maps of the Eastern U.S., Western U.S., England and Europe. Resources and factories were randomly placed at the outset of every game, so no two endeavors were quite alike. It has all the addictive quality of Civilization, but what sets Railroad Tycoon high on this list is the sound effects. The Sound Blaster sound card would chime with all the subtlety of a 1980s arcade. A multi-pitched 'ding' of the cash register announces the arrival of a train into a station. Towards the latter half of the game, with 20 trains dinging away, it is a cacophony of irritation that can easily sever the bonds of holy matrimony.

#1
Madden Football (any version)
No contest. This game contains all the elements that make computer games annoying to my wife. The game is endlessly replayable, there are innumerable sound cues and effects that can are played over and over and over again, it's sports-related, the real-time aspect assures her that I have to play a game from beginning-to-end, and she knows that, at any moment, my mood can immediately be ruined by a bad play. I don't take defeat lightly and when I am beaten at the last second by a freak play where my corner is, inexplicably, wildly out of position, I have a tendency to lose my shit. My temper tantrums are self-contained affairs that only result in injury to myself. Still, they are loud and immediate enough to shock every person (or cat) in hearing range. Desks/walls are punched. Controllers are slammed on desks. At the divorce hearing, Morgan will attest to this and her accusation will be corroborated by my brother, my former roommates, and every person who lived in the University of Iowa dorms in the early 90s.

First Post

2006-10-17T09:52:00.000-06:00

After ages of hand-wringing, it's time to get this party started. As soon as Craig accepts the invitation to co-author this newbie blog, the games can begin. We have a lot of ideas, but things are just getting underway so please be patient- bookmark us and come back in a week. I just took a newbie template to get the ball rolling, but it'll probably change a lot in the coming week.

It has begun...