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Broken Social Scene
Posted 11:09 PM, Oct 30, 2005 |
So I was supposed to meet a couple people at Saturday’s Broken Social Scene concert (Chris and Mary, you know who you are) but I guess it’s all their loss, anyway. I’m not a huge Broken Social Scene fan, but I like them well enough, and figured it’d be a good show, countless band members and all. The good news is, it may have been the best show ever. Certainly top three.
It’d be sort of lame to try and describe the show here in words. Like, dude, it, like, transcended words and stuff.
Well, seriously, anyway, it was one hell of a show, and seriously might have been the best show ever. Word.
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Put Clever Pun About Not Sleeping Here
Posted 10:19 AM, Oct 28, 2005 |
I only woke up 3 times last night. Yeah!
I was thinking about when I started teaching. I’d wake up every morning feeling nauseated, often unsure of whether or not I would actually vomit. I may have, on more than one occasion - those mornings have mostly been relegated to a dark place in my mind. The morning-nausea syndrome stuck around for a long time after I finished teaching. In addition to that, I learned, unfortunately, that I can induce such nausea by merely thinking about it, in most cases. But even then, nausea and all, I don’t recall ever having a problem sleeping through the night.
I figure this little episode will resolve itself in one of a few ways, listed in order of preference:
1) It goes away as inexplicably as it arrived.
2) I can make myself sleep through the night by simply thinking about it.
3) I sleep through the night most of the time, but still wake up occasionally.
4) I start to sleep at work, but nobody notices. In fact, my productivity actually increases.
5) I can’t sleep at all, ever. Again, my productivity increases.
6) Death.
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Spoony McSpoon II
Posted 11:30 AM, Oct 27, 2005 |
The Spoon show is free, actually, yo. Go to the Schell Brewery website for details on how to get tickets, which basically amounts to going to local bars like the CC Club on particular dates for a “chance to win tickets.” That explains the small venue.
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Sleepgate
Posted 10:41 AM, Oct 27, 2005 |
So not only can I still not sleep, but now I feel sort of crappy. Maybe it’s just lack of sleep, maybe it’s the same as whatever it is that is making it difficult for me to sleep, maybe I’m still cranky about the New Pornographers cancelling their show. It could be any number of things.
In any event, I am not pleased. When will the madness end.
Yes, I am too tired, even, to use proper punctuation.
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Spoony McSpoon
Posted 1:49 PM, Oct 26, 2005 |
According to Pitchfork, Spoon will be rolling into Minneapolis on December 8th and playing at the 400 Bar (?). It’s not posted on the 400 Bar’s site, but I suspect this will sell out.
I’ll add it to the calendar when I have a few (more) free moments.
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Sleepdate
Posted 10:26 AM, Oct 26, 2005 |
I only woke up 3 times between, like, 11pm and 2am. But wait, you say! Wait! That’s only 3 hours. That means you woke up, like, all the time?
A: Yeah.
Fortunately, after that, I was able to sleep until 7:15 when my alarm goes off. But still, like, dammit! Where has my sleep gone? What the hell?
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Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Posted 8:28 AM, Oct 25, 2005 |
Man, so I totally fucked things up with yesterday’s post. Last night… I can barely call it sleep. I think I woke up six times, yes, six, each time cursing the good name of my website and my stupidity for taunting the gods of sleep.
I had some crazy, fucked-up dreams involving my grandmother, an eight-track, a bunch of people living in my grandmother’s house, my old youth pastor, and a manatee.
Okay, not the manatee.
Seriously, though, fuck, I’m tired. What the —?
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Asleep in Two Parts
Posted 3:11 PM, Oct 24, 2005 |
For the past 20-some years, I’ve had no problem sleeping through the night. If the windows are open and it’s cold, I’ll wake up in the morning to find myself curled under blankets. If it gets hot, I’ll wake up to find the blankets on the floor. Very, very seldom have I awakened in the middle of the night for any reason.
So that’s all true, except for the last two nights, when I’ve awakened for no reason (at least as far as I can tell). It wake up just long enough to notice that the radio has turned itself off, my playlist has expired, whatever, and then I wrap my arms back around my pillow and slip away again.
It isn’t as if I’m waking up and lying there for hours staring at the black window. I just wake up, re-collect my thoughts, and then I’m back to sleep. But it’s odd, and it’s happened two nights in a row. Even though it’s barely mildly-bothersome, I wish it would stop. I want to have all my sleep in one giant chunk.
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The Sportswriter
Posted 12:04 AM, Oct 24, 2005 |
i lay there, my eyes closed after
noticing my copy of richard ford’s
the sportswriter is 10 years old. i tell you
this means i must have bought it when
i was in high school, but that doesn’t make
any sense, because when i was in high school,
i had no interest in divorced men
or redemption.
my uncle was divorced five times,
each pronouncement delivered to me
from my father with the hard pock
of a rubber racquetball coming back
at me off the far wall. the inside sphere
of rubber-tinged air squashed momentarily
but quickly returned to a perfect o of oxygen.
when my father spoke, i barely noticed, and knew
my uncle would try again.
when i tell you this, you turn on your side
and look at my profile as i look at the picture
of richard ford on the back cover. he looks
like my uncle, vaguely, and you say
maybe i was more interested in redemption
than i thought, or than i thought
was acceptable for a high schooler.
you kiss my cheek lightly, more a passing
of warm air across the edges of my beard
than a kiss, and turn off your bedside lamp
with a barely-audible click. i fall asleep shortly
after, and when i wake in the morning, i find
my bookmark on the floor beside
the bed and my copy of the sportswriter
is back on the bookshelf, filed away,
thought you swear you aren’t responsible.
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This is Funny
Posted 9:45 AM, Oct 21, 2005 |
This piece by Matthew Baldwin is funny. Ha ha funny. It’s about books and people who don’t seem as smart as me or you. If you are one of the people who wrote one of the reviews quoted in this piece, then you need to get a grip on the real world. Funny.
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Sarah Silverman: Coltish & Inappropriate
Posted 9:00 AM, Oct 19, 2005 |
A piece from The New Yorker about Sarah Silverman makes me uncomfortable, which is why she’s so fantastic. “Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ. And then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I’m one of the few people that believe it was the blacks.” And so on.
And the fact that she’s dating Jimmy Kimmel, a funny man, but one who vaguely resembles a gorilla (hanging around with the perpetually-hairy Adam Corolla doesn’t help), gives me a glimmer of hope.
Sarah Silverman is described as “coltish,” which is perfectly accurate and also has just moved to number one on my list of desired traits.
Me: “I want a girl who is… funny.”
You: “Is that the most important thing?”
Me: “No… No. I don’t think so.”
You: “So what is, then?”
Me: “She has to be coltish.”
Sigh. Swoon.
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Intersection
Posted 11:05 AM, Oct 18, 2005 |
I
i already knew
that two objects couldn’t occupy
the same place at the same time,
but i felt it when
our fullsize van tried
to share space and time with a ford fiesta.
the rear of the car turned into crumpled
construction paper, blue smeared with a silver
streak.
i can see the face
of the father’s daughter through
the cracked glass, a bead of blood
like an icicle on the end of her nose,
cold and red and far away, the car
spiraling around an asphalt center.
II
the pastor’s wife looked back at us,
all of us sitting forward, peering
through the windshield, and told us
to put our seatbelts on.
we all buckled, steel clicking into place,
and time seemed to flow backwards
for those few moments; time seemed to make
no sense, like pulling a parachute
ripcord while lying facedown on the ground.
when the police arrived, i could see the face
of the pastor’s wife in the rear view mirror. her
eyes were dim and narrow one moment,
wide like polished buttons the next. her fifties’
hairstyle, the lies sitting behind her straight,
white teeth reminded me of the housewife
in the smithsonian’s history of television exhibit,
eyeing walter cronkite lustily while serving
pot roast.
III
the intersection of things, the way two
things fit together, the sound
they make, the cold juxtaposition, the black
and white, all foreground for a moment,
the next all background, pushing forward.
the steam from the engine was lost in the fog.
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Follow-up
Posted 9:05 AM, Oct 18, 2005 |
According to this site, despite Lily Tomlin’s Edith Ann originating on Laugh-In, she also made special appearances on both Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live. Just to beat a dead horse.
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Stack
Posted 4:03 PM, Oct 17, 2005 |
On a semi-regular basis, while doing my morning Internet surfing here at work (Boss, if you’re reading this, sign off now), I find interesting (at least at first glance) articles and interviews and fiction and whatnot to read. I print it out, read it throughout the day, and put it in a stack in my cube. Just today, I noticed that the stack was growing quite large, so I decided to see what it consisted of. In no real order:
1) An interview with documentary filmmaker Errol Morris.
2) An interview with Jonathan Cott, a writer who lost 15 years of his memory due to shock therapy.
3) One-fourth of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which I did not read at work, but have read before.
4) Early Music, a short story by Jeffrey Eugenides.
5) An interview and feature article about Conan O’Brien.
6) After Life, an essay by Joan Didion about her husband’s death.
7) Capturing the Unicorn, an article about two mathematicians helping the Metropolitan Museum of Art with an ancient tapestry.
8) The Mountains of Pi, a feature article about one of the mathematicians discussed in 7 (above).
9) Crosstown Bus, an essay about small talk on the bus.
10) It’s Catching, a piece by David Sedaris.
11) A nameless article and collection of ruminations by authors regarding Gravity’s Rainbow.
12) In Case of Emergency, an article about crisis management.
13) The Dress, an Orange Prize for Fiction short story winner by Sam Binnie.
14) An interview with David Sedaris. (For someone who doesn’t like Sedaris, really, why is he in my stack twice?)
15) The Big Fish, an article about Suck.com, the “first great website.”
16) Oversite, a terrific short story by Maureen McHugh.
17) A transcription of David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech to the Class of 2005 at Kenyon University.
18) The Candy Man, an essay about why children love Roald Dahl’s stories and why many adults don’t.
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Two Completely Unrelated Things
Posted 11:56 AM, Oct 17, 2005 |
1) Yesterday, I made a tasty burger. Good beef, thick wheat roll, swiss cheese, ketchup, mustard, lettuce, onions, tomatoes, jalapenos. Sigh. I took a picture of it, but the picture didn’t turn out so good. Trust me, it was a tasty burger.
2) Edith Ann, Lily Tomlin’s precocious little 5-year-old, showed up first on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, and I can’t find any record at all of her ever being on Sesame Street. I’m just sayin’.
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Rogue Wave
Posted 11:54 PM, Oct 13, 2005 |
I updated the show schedule, adding Rogue Wave, along with the (Olympic) Hopefuls, in late November at the Triple Rock. Yeah.
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The Big Nothing
Posted 5:33 PM, Oct 10, 2005 |
Wait a minute, here. So that whole New York City subway thing turned out to be… nothing? Not a credible threat? But… But. But everyone was all worked up? Over nothing? I just… but…
Well, I guess with that bird flu coming, we need to put the other fake impending disasters behind us. We, as a nation, can only really focus on one impending disaster at a time.
My mistake. I apologize for bringing it up.
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Pandora
Posted 9:14 AM, Oct 7, 2005 |
I’m messing around this morning with Pandora, (thanks to TMN) part of the Music Genome Project. Yeah, it lets you make custom radio stations based on aspects of music such as tonality, rhythm, instrumentation, and so on. It’s nice because it doesn’t just say, “Well, if you like Artist A, you’ll like Artist B because everyone who likes A likes B.” It actually keys in on the particular music.
The problem, though, is that I still end up just wanting to hear the music I have on my mp3 player. It’s the same reason I don’t listen to the actual radio. This is a little better, and it’s playing stuff I’ve never heard of (Creeper Lagoon? Ray’s Vast Basement?) that sounds ok. But not as likable to me as the stuff I listen to. Maybe I’ll run across something. 10 hours are free, and unlimited use for 3 months is only $12 (or $36 for a full year), so I might give it the old college try anyway. (Unfortunately, it’s broadband only, so I can only listen to it at work, but it’s a lot better than working ha ha ha.)
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Phoenix Flu or Head to the Caves!
Posted 10:51 AM, Oct 6, 2005 |
Dammit, am I sick of hearing about this damn bird flu already. Tired of it. I’ve had enough. I had the bird flu back in Y2K when the terror alert was red and everything was all fucked up.
No, wait. Y2K? Yeah, that turned out to be a big nothing.
But those terror al— no, those were useless too, unless you count inspiring fear and panic amongst the masses.
So, because we all have to have something to be scared of, we have the bird flu, risen from the ashes of 1918, ready to make everyone head for the hills, or wherever there are no birds. I guess the caves, since bats are, like, mammals and stuff.
Head to the caves!
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Two Updates
Posted 6:39 PM, Oct 3, 2005 |
I updated Hyperpoem today (168 lines in 14 poems) as well as the show schedule – I also formatted the latter in descending order by date, rather than ascending.
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Seven
Posted 3:24 PM, Oct 3, 2005 |
 The first time I ever met Maria was on a blind date at an amusement park. I was sitting on a bench next to an old, rickety roller coaster, the White Lion, eating a bag of peanuts. Maria was half an hour late, and she apologized over and over again. Sometimes I think she only went out with me on a second date because she felt so bad about the first one. In any event, I can’t remember another time in our relationship when she didn’t arrive someplace precisely on time. She prided herself on it.
I remember the complex criss-cross of shadows from the wooden frame of the roller coaster casting early-afternoon shadows on the pavement. There were little pools of water filling indentations in the black path. The air was still thick and damp, full of humidity, the morning’s rain sizzling away.
I didn’t kiss Maria until our third date, four weeks after the amusement park. She moved in two months later, and we didn’t look back. I didn’t really look forward, either.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, in retrospect, that Maria left. Our relationship had turned into one of convenience. I can’t imagine people being married and not taking one another for granted sometimes. I see the opposite in Hollywood movies, every frame with the loving couple touched by tender moments, every day bookended by romantic breakfasts and dinners. I don’t think that’s how it works, but my relationship with Maria worked in much the opposite way, after a while. The romantic episodes began to bookend weeks, then months, rather than days, and after a while, they faded away entirely.
All 162 games in a baseball season count the same, and dedicated teams focus every single day, treating every game with the same level of importance. Each team has a relationship with the game, one that requires the utmost attention and, ultimately, care. I suspect one of the reasons I am so passionate about baseball is out of respect for this attentiveness, something that I can’t, have never been able to, achieve on my own, when things really count.
Maria was never late after our first date. She interpreted her lack of punctuality as a sort of personal affront against me and she was determined not to let that happen again, and she didn’t. I wish I could point to one thing in our relationship, one thing that I fucked up on (and there were many) and say that I never did that again, I never fucked it up ever again. I can’t think of a single thing.
Lots of times, when she would come home, especially later, when she would call and say she’d be an hour late, she’d show up, an hour late, as expected, and I didn’t bother to be home. She was left to make a ramshackle dinner, leftover turkey sandwiches or some other dry, boring meal. I wasn’t the most punctual, the most loyal, the most responsible of people.
So maybe the stack of money sitting on my desk, distracting me while I try to think of what to write her, maybe that money is my responsibility towards Maria. Money can’t change the past, but it can make me feel better about the present. In some way, I feel I owe Maria the money, and I’ll give it to her if she asks me again. It’s worth $7,500, even $15,000, to rid myself of the anger and resentment I’ve been carrying towards Maria, that anger and resentment that’s mostly disappointment in me.
So it turns out that there are so many reasons for me to give the money to Maria, and I can’t think of one reason not to, except that it’s a lot of money, but money comes and goes. It’ll come back, and the only thing it was doing in the bank was sitting there, anyway, making pennies in interest.
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A History of Violence
Posted 12:29 PM, Oct 3, 2005 |
Overall, I can’t say I really liked the movie because it made me feel sort of dirty and bad. Sin City made me feel the same way, but that was a lot easier to dismiss because it was a comic book. A History of Violence was more… realistic, or at least the violence was presented in a slightly more realistic, less sensational manner. I still have issues with the analogy that Hollywood makes that being graphic and blunt about something is somehow more valid, more meaningful than stating it in some other way. It seems like Cronenberg’s idea was to hit us in the face with graphic violence and try to sort of shock us with it. Yeah, yeah, I get it. Violence is pervasive, perverse, nasty, ugly, and, in reality, is so far removed from the sensationalized violence of Armageddon, Pulp Fiction, and even Sin City. But you know, I don’t need you to show me a face that’s half-missing for me to get that.
Overall, and I get the impression that this is the deal with Cronenberg, but I speak from ignorance, having only seen his Dead Zone and that a long time ago – I understand that he isn’t the most subtle of fellows. Given that, the fact that he directed this fits right in with the frequently not-so-subtle screenplay. Again, the screenplay wanted to hit us over the head with the message of the film. I felt like a lot of the plot points were silly and served only to further the message – it’s like a board game with interesting mechanics but a wholly tacked-on theme. It’s too bad that the high school baseball scene was so ridiculous and the high school bully character so overdrawn (as most Hollywood high school students are) and that it occurred so early in the movie. It really set the stage for me to be prepared to witness an thin plot that was present only to further the message.
But, you know, it wasn’t all bad – in fact, I sort of liked it, overall, but it’s the kind of movie that I don’t need to see again, at least not for a long while. It really strives to be an “important” film, and succeeds in a lot of ways – it does have interesting things to say, important things to say about violence, how it’s transferred from person to person, how it’s perceived, how someone like Tom Stall, who has seen both sides of it, doesn’t want to be perceived as a hero, but really just hopes it will blow over.
It has some subtle moments, too – just a few. And the acting was excellent, for the most part, particularly the son and also William Hurt. Ed Harris was a bit too over-the-top, but only just a little.
I’m not giving it some number or astral-based rating, but anyway.
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The Narrow End of Things
Posted 11:14 AM, Oct 3, 2005 |
i can see the narrow end of things,
a tunnel funneling to a single
point, an inevitable ending.
the water runs downhill,
dripping from the cool underside
of the mountain that was made
in the past but sits, brooding
and melancholy gray, in the center
of my eye.
trying to change anything
is like pushing water uphill,
trying to keep the tide from my feet
with a cup made from my bare hands.
the best thing to do is put the balsawood
boat of my heart in the current,
and watch it float, maybe
fly downstream, its paper sail
a white flag of surrender under
the cold earth of my history.
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Show Schedule
Posted 10:35 AM, Oct 1, 2005 |
I added a show schedule link with the rest of the fustlethrum. It’ll be updated from time to time, as I run across shows. I probably won’t continue to post shows here in the main blog, but I might make a note that I’ve updated it, as I try to do with hyperpoem.
The show schedule is a pop-up, so if you have pop-ups blocked, well.
Word.
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