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Sportscenter
Posted 11:57 PM, Jun 29, 2006 |
stuart scott talks to me
in the hotels i visit. i leave
sportscenter on all night, cable
television casting its replays
and highlights over and over;
after seeing them for weeks and weeks,
they all start to look the same.
sportscenter is always the same –
nothing else is, city after city.
even the time is different, hotel after hotel,
pittsburgh to kansas city to boulder, colorado.
even the paintings above the bed, the ones
everyone says are the same, aren’t. can you see
that the dog in the hotel room in couer d’alene
is running after the pheasant, but
the dog in the hotel room in lexington
is dragging its carcass back to you,
your gun still smoking in the corner of the frame?
i curl up in my hotel bed, take off my glasses,
but leave the television on, setting the sleep timer
for slightly longer than i’ll be awake. i listen to
linda cohn talk about the new york yankees
and i drift off. when i wake up,
the television is charcoal gray,
the color of a drawn curtain in a darkened
theater, the traveling show all packed up
and gone on ahead to the next town.
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The Summertime of My Soul is Ending
Posted 4:02 PM, Jun 28, 2006 |
Yes, tomorrow I report to Chatsworth, CA, for the beginning of some training that will eventually provide me with a freelance job writing math homework help, essentially. The training will run through the end of the next week, daily, with the exception of July 4th. Then I will be able to return home and work from home.
For the past two months, basically, I’ve been essentially unemployed, logging about 2 hours worth of time as an independent contractor for my former place of employment. I’ve watched a lot of sports, played a lot of tennis, read some books (although not as many as I’d have liked), but, to be honest (hold on to your chairs), it’s getting a little old.
I’m ready to go do some work, if for no other reason than being able to spend money without a slightly guilty conscience. Plus, and this is going to sound sick to some of you, I get to write homework help for calculus.
Calculus!
My favorite, no sarcasm.
In other news, tonight my prescription-writing companion and I are heading to the Beck show, with opener Jamie Lidell, who you might remember was my favorite Coachella act. (I’m too lazy to link to that old post.) I’m ending my brief visit into the land of unemployment with a bang, anyway.
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502
Posted 10:05 PM, Jun 26, 2006 |
Well, this marks the 502nd post for this little website. I missed the 500th and 501st in all my business, all my being creative and keeping you happy. That’s 500 posts including my current read and current listen, which have been a little stagnant lately, but have both been updated in the last, oh, ten minutes.
(I would’ve given the current read a link to Pitchfork, but Pitchfork has been up and down sporadically the last few weeks, and was down when I made the post, and Pitchfork is starting to be pretty lame and not good for much and they have a terrible, almost-unreadable design that they keep making worse and worse. Note to Pitchfork: your news section isn’t a blog, so don’t make it look like one. And you aren’t Amazon, so don’t try to sell me “related reviews” or tell me what the most frequently-read reviews are.)
Whew. Stepping off my soapbox…
Thanks for hanging around for 502 posts, anyway. (And thanks for hanging around for that rant.) It’s been 22 months, which means an Asian elephant could have gone from conception to delivery in the time that this blog has been around. Yes, this blog is now 1 Asian Elephant old.
I can’t believe that an elephant has a longer gestation period than a whale. Also, I don’t understand why every value on this list isn’t a range. You’re telling me that a chipmunk gives birth after precisely 31 days every single time. I seriously doubt it.
Oh, also, if you’re new here, and you just stumbled in here today, this is a pretty typical post, filled with mostly rambling. Less curse words than usual, though.
See you later.
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Prolific
Posted 10:11 PM, Jun 25, 2006 |
a day during which i write two lines is like
james marshall uncovering a spangle in the water,
a spanish chispa, a speck of an idea in the early
morning mill shadows. marshall and i bend together
over the heating earth, our fingers tracing the vein
of the river, feeling for the pulse of more
coming downstream. the small nuggets move
slowly, tumbling awkwardly like the first wheels,
the ancient movers rolling deliberately,
turning the earth beneath them.
marshall and i each find a piece on the first day,
one shard in the shape of a tooth,
and we mail it eastward where the news
of our good ideas spreads in the street,
the whispered opinions, in light of the evidence
at hand, advising all the young men to go west.
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Weather Report
Posted 10:32 PM, Jun 22, 2006 |
Long time (not really), no post. So here you are, faithful.
The weather here in Los Angeles is weird. If I said that about Minneapolis, you’d assume there was a July ice storm, or that a tornado had sucked up Lake Calhoun and deposited it backstage at the new Guthrie - Minnesota is one freakweather state. But here, when I say it’s weird, I mean:
it’s always exactly the same.
I remember rain the same way that I remember kindergarten - vaguely, yet fondly.
It rained once here since we arrived. Oh! And another day it sprinkled, but not enough to stop playing tennis, so that doesn’t count. Rain isn’t rain unless it interferes with your plans.
Every day, it’s smoggy or cloudy or whatever you want to call it - I call it, cleverly, “gray,” until late morning or early afternoon, and then it is clear, or “blue.” Then it gets dark, or “black.” So that’s pretty much what Los Angeles weather boils down to, gray, black, and blue. The weather here is like the victim of a bully, just kind of laying there all wounded and uninteresting. It’s like that victim in the sense that it is really just an abused version of what I know as weather.
And so that’s the weather report. More observations from Los Angeles to come in the following days/weeks/months/years (I can’t tell anymore - every day is the same.)
(The same!)
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Customer Disservice
Posted 10:55 PM, Jun 19, 2006 |
Almost everything I attempted today went wrong. I’ll be surprised if you can even read this post; most likely, my entire website will be taken over by someone selling C1ali$!
I went to pick up a tennis racket I was having restrung. Brief history of tennis racket:
Approximately 1 year ago: purchased racket, new, but cheap, at Dick’s Sporting Goods.
Approximately 1 week ago: Broke racket strings, took to get restrung. Was told to pick up “any time Wednesday.”
Last Wednesday: Showed up sometime on Wednesday. Racket was not ready.
Last Friday afternoon: Returned to pick up racket, which was ready.
45 minutes later: Broke brand new racket strings.
15 minutes later: Called re-stringer. He correctly guessed where the strings broke. Told me to bring it in Saturday and he’d take care of it.
Saturday: Brought it in. Re-stringer doesn’t even work on Saturday. Left it with lackey.
Today: Went to pick up racket. The racket was declared unfixable due to shoddy construction. This is an unsurprising development, and results in me getting a new racket from the re-stringer, since he offered my store credit, etc.
Boy, what a racket! (Like you didn’t see that coming.)
I also bowled next to:
1) a 45-50 year-old fellow and his mother. She was out, literally, in her housedress. She toddled up to the line and dropped the ball, watching it roll slowly in the direction of the pins. I think the entire bowling alley must be built on a decline. I would be amazed if she bowled her age.
2) a man with the worst body odor in recent memory, and this from someone who spends a fair amount of time in bowling alleys, where people wear used shoes, sweat in them, and then return them. This guy was trying to win some sort of award.
I actually quit mid-game, put my shoes on, and walked outside, enjoying the frenetic pace of life in a relatively good-smelling city.
In addition to my bowling neighbors, the bowling alley staff actually began to resurface lanes during people’s games. If you’re not familiar, they have this giant machine, the width of one lane, that they run down each lane to re-wax. This requires (obviously) the bowler on the lane in question to stop bowling (apparently mid-game) and also requires (apparently, again) a long extension cord to stretch across the approach surfaces of up to 6 lanes, causing mass confusion and general unpleasant feelings all around.
I received a book, purchase via Half.com, that was listed as being in “Like New” condition. It was scribbled and marked up liberally, including, in the back, a page-and-a-half litany of the book’s allusions to Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. This book is Like New in the same way that bowling neighbor #2 was Sweet-Smelling, or bowling neighbor #1 was Young.
Today was the kind of day you just want to curl up under the couch and wait for it to fall on you, inexplicably, and knock you unconscious until tomorrow.
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Note to ESPN
Posted 11:58 AM, Jun 15, 2006 |
I hope ESPN remembers this in 4 years when the next World Cup rolls around: Eric Wynalda is a terrible commentator. And it’s not even that I disagree with any of his analysis.
Reasons he is terrible:
1) Since the U.S. lost, he’s been a broken record. Not only has he harped and harped on the topic, he’s demeaning and insulting to the American team. Granted, they didn’t play well at all. And, I’m not raising this issue in some sort of patriotic bid. But he’s just name-calling, now, which isn’t informative or instructive (let alone constructive).
2) He’s insulting to Julie Foudy. Again, I’m not Julie Foudy’s biggest fan - not even close. But his comments toward her are demeaning and insulting. (Sound familiar?)
Wynalda is grating and difficult to watch and listen to. His smug attitude and holier-than-thou approach is irritating. If I want to watch people that sound condescending, I’ll turn on the World Series of Poker.
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Fiction: Photographs
Posted 8:55 PM, Jun 13, 2006 |
 Peter and I were both born on July 12, 1978. I was born first, by almost fourteen minutes, and Peter followed like an afterthought.
We shared a bedroom every day until the day Peter died on our ninth birthday. Every day except the first three weeks. Peter spent the first three weeks of his life in an incubator at the hospital; I was taken home after a couple of days but was, apparently, taken to the hospital daily to see my twin brother. You would have been hard-pressed, even then, to know we were twins, even at that age where most babies look the same. In photographs, Peter’s right hand looks to me like a mass of clay or a malnourished, deformed melon. The right side of his face drooped, making his baby pictures unintentionally comical. He and I spent afternoons on his bed in the last year he was alive looking at them and laughing. I wasn’t sure it was okay – we always did it when my parents were out – until one day, we came across a photograph of Peter, shortly after he arrived home from the hospital. The photograph showed the two of us in the kitchen sink, my mother’s hand on his head and my father’s on mine, and Peter was wearing an expression (one that couldn’t be helped) that looked like he was going to fart in the sink. Peter would get this same expression when he actually was going to fart, and when we saw the photograph, he burst out laughing. I halfheartedly joined in, watching Peter to see if I could read his sincerity. His head lolled back, his eyes tearing up, and he turned and looked at me, rosy-cheeked. He put his good hand on my shoulder and looked at me in a gathered moment of seriousness, like a scene out of a movie, and simply said, “Laugh.” And since then, before and after Peter’s death, I have laughed to bring the two of us closer together.
I also realized soon after Peter’s rare moment of seriousness that we only looked at the photographs when our parents were out because he wanted the photographs of times that neither of us remember – the two of us in the sink, and later the bathtub, or sleeping on the floor at the end of the hallway – he wanted those photographs to mean something to me. They already conjured up memories in my parents, but he wanted them to conjure up memories for me, too. Peter was always cognizant of the fact that, while he was literally made from our mother and father, he was made, maybe even more so, from me.
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Fiction: Tooth
Posted 10:31 PM, Jun 11, 2006 |
The first time I saw anyone lose a tooth was when my brother fell against the countertop in the kitchen. He was standing on a chair because I was standing on a chair; I was standing on a chair to try to reach the light bulb in the hanging light in the middle of the kitchen.
The chairs were stained and sticky; two of them were covered in mail that my parents hadn’t opened yet. My brother and I were standing on the other two. The chairs were never used for their intended purpose. The only times I remember using them were for the two of us to climb on or under, one of us always hiding from the other, and the other always knowing exactly where to look.
“Peter,” I remember saying, my face looking up at the light bulb as if I could draw it closer to my outstretched hand by magic, “don’t stand on the chair.” I could hear him on the chair, the wood creaking, an uncontrolled giggle escaping between his teeth. The light bulb dangled tantalizingly close, one fingernail scraping against it.
I stood on my toes, my feet arched. I could feel my chair shake beneath me, a quiver as if a cold breeze had just run down its back, and then the hot glass of the bulb was between my seven-year-old fingertips. As I pulled my hand back instinctively, I remembered my father telling Peter and I not to try to change light bulbs; we had both always been fascinated by them, and my father always seemed to be able to predict where the two of us would get into trouble.
My weight shifted as my hands shot away from the heat of the bulb. I had to reach for the arch of the back of the chair to avoid falling off, and Peter, echoing my actions a split-second late, tried to do the same. His body twitched slightly , his hands spun crazily in the air, and his socks slipped, somehow, on the sticky seat of the chair. He reached for the arch of the chair, but his twisted, almost-useless right hand couldn’t hold it, and he fell, mouth-first, onto the corner of the countertop.
I cried with him, both of us sitting on the floor, his left hand, his better hand, clutching one of his front teeth. My mother came home well after we had finished crying, and I remember Peter walking up to her as she took her long, black winter coat off in the hallway. Blood had dried on his chin and he held out his left hand and slowly opened it, like a flower, and showed our mother his tooth. I was taller than him, and looking down at his hand, I could see pockmarks as if his tooth had tried to chew its way out of his clenched fist.
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Reasons that Soccer is Excellent
Posted 6:14 PM, Jun 10, 2006 |
Reason #1: Matches are approximately 2 hours in length, halftime included. There’s a reason that Hollywood feature films are approximately 2 hours long. It’s a nice time span, a nice chunk of time in which you can have some drama introduce itself, build, and then resolve, and people don’t get bored, they don’t develop bedsores, etc. 2 hours. Perfect length.
Reason #2: Strictly World Cup: C’mon. It’s country vs. country. I’ll be the first to admit that those commercials about soccer changing the world, etc., are silly, but still, the fact that entire countries (the U.S. excepted) are declaring national holidays (see: Costa Rica) just to watch their countrymen compete against another country’s players… You can’t beat that. (It’s better than the Olympics because people care, there aren’t 100 silly events like Ballroom Dancing, etc.)
Reason #3: No commercials. A silly reason, perhaps, but as someone who watches 99% of the sporting events I watch on television, rather than live, this is important, and it should be important to you too.
Reason #4: Tied closely to reason #3 - near-constant action. Moreso than baseball and American football, certainly, and basketball, too, and hockey doesn’t even need to be considered, it’s so irrelevant. Those people that look at final scores of 0-0 (see: Sweden vs. Trinidad & Tobago) and conclude, “That must have been a boring game,” obviously didn’t watch or don’t understand soccer or were too busy watching Hollywood blow things up this summer to care.
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World Cup Basketball?
Posted 8:49 AM, Jun 9, 2006 |
I’m no World Cup Soccer apologist, but I just got done watching the Coors Light Six-Pack of Questions (or something) on ESPN. They asked Julie Foudy, ESPN’s soccer analyst, siz questions. Each question was phrased like this, “Julie, who in the World Cup is like __________? (insert name of NBA player here: Jordan, Bryant, Wade, …)” Now, I know this country is not soccer-crazed like the rest of the world (which is too bad, for numerous reasons), but can’t we examine and talk about soccer, especially World Cup Soccer, on its own terms instead of comparing it to basketball, a sport in which it has nothing in common (except that both are sports)?
With that being said, let’s hope the U.S. team isn’t the Indianapolis Colts, or worse, the Washington Generals.
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The 5 Obstructions
Posted 7:01 PM, Jun 6, 2006 |
Just recently saw The 5 Obstructions during the Danish L.A. Film Fest. The film is, on a surface level, 5 remakes of the Danish short film The Perfect Human, which was shown immediately before The 5 Obstructions. In each remake, the original filmmaker (Jorgen Leth, who has on hand afterwards for a brief interview and then to take some questions from the audience, about which, stay tuned…) is required to remake the original film but with some rules in place. The rules are presented by Lars von Trier. The resulting films are shown in the film, intercut with footage of Leth and von Trier discussing the films, the rules, etc. Pretty good stuff. I liked the films/obstructions that were more “fun” than serious, but they were all good.
So the moderator, a film critic from the L.A. Times, finishes his interview with Leth and then asks for questions. This tall girl in the same row as me, traveling with her obnoxious companions, raises her hand and is the first to be called on. “Well, actually, I have three questions,” she begins.
Like this girl couldn’t have just picked one of her lame questions to ask? Did she honestly think all three were that important that they had to be asked, recognizing, as she must have, that time is not infinite? So she asks her three lame questions, which Leth answers, and then she interrupts him to re-phrase her question, thinking that he hadn’t understood it (after all, he doesn’t, like, speak English very well, right, because he’s, like, Danish (flip hair here, then look snooty)). But it turns out he had understood it and was, in fact, answering it.
Then, later, the moderator says, “One more question,” and he takes a question from someone on the right side of the theater, and Leth answers it, and then one of tall, self-important girl’s companions blurts out something like, “Can you elaborate on that? I was wondering…” and then proceeds to ask a question which in no way relates to the original question Leth just finished asking.
Come back to Earth, girls. You know, Earth, the planet that revolves around the sun?
Sorry for the rant. Really, though, the movie (and the short on which it’s based) are both excellent. Probably best viewed in the privacy of your home.
(And, Return to Oz update: the film is at the Westwood branch of the Los Angeles library system - I’m going to call them tomorrow to have them send it over to the nearest branch, or just go get it.)
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Return to Oz
Posted 9:33 PM, Jun 3, 2006 |
Does anyone else remember that movie Return to Oz? It popped into my head the other day, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. I watched it a ton as a kid - the only real characters I remembered without looking online were Jack Pumpkinhead and the flying sofa, but after reading reviews, I remembered Tick Tock, the princess with interchangeable heads, the ornament room. And it stars Fairuza Balk (not that that should be a real big draw).
Must see.
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Basement
Posted 11:33 PM, Jun 1, 2006 |
I was thinking tonight about my grandparents’ basement. I can’t remember the last time I was in their basement, and I remember when I was a kid, it was always a strange place (as was the second floor of their house - all grandparent activities took place on the main floor, seemingly). Both the upstairs, as the second floor was referred to, and the downstairs were cool, especially the floors.
The basement floor was primarily concrete with no covering, but there were large, oval, woven rugs in front of the washer and dryer - I remember that. But backing up:
The stairs were these wooden stairs, all tread, no riser board, and a simple wooden railing that you could just crawl (or fall) under if you wanted to. My cousins and I were consistently told to not crawl under the railing.
Underneath the stairs, covered by curtains, was a sort of pantry. I guess I never really thought of it as a pantry - it always seemed like discarded food. I never equated it with meals I ate at my grandparents.
The only other room in the basement was this sort of parlor room; the floor there was green and gray institutional-type floor tiles. It had a pretty nice table, I believe - thick wood, a dining-type table, and a bar, too, although again, as a kid, it’s use didn’t really click.
I think the reason that none of the uses really clicked is because I never actually saw any of it get used. I never saw anyone take anything from the pantry or the bar. (I’m sure people did.) In fact, there’s really only one time I can remember other people really being in the basement, and that was for some sort of birthday party or something - lots of people, long tables set up, lots of chairs.
There was a low table in the other part of the room, basically a coffee table. The floor to that part was still the tiles, but then also covered with this red shag rug with at least an inch of shag. Just this huge, hairy rug. And on the table, this fancy chess set, all glass pieces. I remember that the king and queen were almost indistinguishable from one another, and we’d always wonder how you were supposed to tell them apart.
I can’t recall the last time I was in that basement, but I’m sure it was the last time, if you get my meaning. My grandmother is in a nursing home now, well-immersed in Alzheimer’s, and I haven’t seen my grandfather in quite some time. I can’t imagine I’ll set foot in that house any time soon, and even if I do, I’m sure I won’t go in the basement. I really have no reason to go in the basement, no reason to want to, but then I also have little reason to even think about the basement, and maybe even less reason to write about it.
Things happen for strange reasons. All the coincidences of the day led me to think about my grandparents’ basement, of all places, right before going to sleep.
It doesn’t even seem like a real place, this little house just outside of Duluth, MN, from way over here in Los Angeles.
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Mezzetta Hot Chili Peppers
Posted 7:34 PM, Jun 1, 2006 |
Pretty rare that I make food recommendations on here, and pretty rare that I inflict pain upon myself, let alone tell you about it, and when both this things (food + pain) happen at the same time, you should sit up, dear reader, and take notice.
Allow me to recommend to you Mezzetta’s Mexican Style en Escabeche Hot Chili Peppers with carrots and onions. (I can’t find them on the Mezzetta web site, but I can assure you that Mezzetta makes some fine products.)
Anyway, these Hot Chili Peppers are the hottest thing I’ve ever purchased in a grocery store. One little pepper and I’m sweating, and I’m someone who devoted a lot of his childhood to consuming spicy foods.
These peppers are Indian Hot, my friends. I urge you and your bravado to go to the grocery store right away.
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