A New Career In A New Town

The Golden Ticket Has Arrived

2012-02-16T11:05:00.000-08:00

Next weekend the wife and I are heading to Vegas for a weekend vacation. While there, we will eat dinner at E, a foodie mecca created by the international superchef, Jose Andres. (The e, by the way, has an accent aigu on it--as does the 'e' in 'Andres.' I can't make the accent appear on this interface, however).

Because I want the experience to be a surprise, I have purposefully tried to keep myself from learning too much about the food they serve at E. I know its inspiration is essentially Spanish, and I know that it's a redoubt of molecular gastronomy. Other than that, I'm a blank.

Still, I know its reputation (otherwise, why plan a trip to Vegas to eat there?) E is discussed on food websites in the same tone I imagine Spanish conquistadors must have once used when talking about Cibola. E, in fact, is not even really a "restaurant"; it's really a single room hidden inside another restaurant (Jaleo, a tapas place in the Cosmopolitan). It only has room for eight people in it, so it only has two servings per night. A meal lasts about three hours; it's mostly single bites (as I understand it) and comprises about 15-20 courses. Obviously the food is said to be sublime. Andres trained under Ferran Adria, the genius madman behind El Bulli, the restaurant most foodies consider to be the best in the world. (Considered, I should say: El Bulli closed for good last fall. Apparently now the best restaurant in the world is in Norway. Or Denmark? But I digress).

To get a reservation at E, I had to stay up till midnight on the day exactly one month before the night we wanted to go, and send an email requesting a reservation. Once we got the reservations we were sent, in the mail, our golden ticket. So, next Saturday, the 25th, I'll hand our ticket to the hostess at Jaleo and be invited into one of the inner sanctums of American eatery. It should be quite something. Any damn restaurant that sends you a golden ticket in the mail--that's one I support.

Michael Jackson's Immortal

2012-02-09T12:22:00.001-08:00

This is the letter I just sent to Cirque du Soleil.

Dear Sir or Madam

I’m writing to tell you about my recent experience at Immortal, the Michael Jackson Cirque du Soleil, which I saw last weekend at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Let me say first that this is eighth Cirque du Soleil-related performance that I’ve seen. I’ve seen, and enjoyed, O (three times), Ka (twice), Love, and…a touring one that had a loose South American theme (Samba? This was many years ago). I have recommended—proselytized, you might even say—your shows to family and friends on numerous occasions. I essentially compelled my parents to see O against their will (they’re not big ‘show’ people). I am, in other words, a fan.

Which made watching Immortal all the more painful. I have no interest in insulting you or your staff. Putting together a full-length musical performance can’t be easy, and certainly you’ve done it well in the past. Immortal, however, was offensively bad. It was beyond disaster. The choreography was lame and uninspired. The circus aspects of the show, such as there were, felt random and disconnected; my wife suggested that the show’s director had pulled out-of-work performers from other Cirque du Soleil shows and told them to do whatever tricks came easiest. I couldn’t even close my eyes and listen to the music; the audio quality made it impossible. It sounded as if someone had hooked up a dozen loudspeakers to a cheap stereo, shut the whole thing inside a high school gym, jacked up the volume and left it alone. And the routines! The dancing chimp! The life-sized white glove, which evoked nothing so strongly as the Hamburger Helper spokesman. The creepy insistence on foregrounding the Neverland ranch. The shot of Macaulay Culkin in the video montage. You couldn’t even say that the taste level of the questionable; it was only bad—irrevocably bad.

Beyond all the many passing failures, the show suffered from a failure of conception. Michael Jackson was not a prophet. He was not a social visionary. His ideas, such as they were, were banal and unexceptional (peace is better than war, love is better than hate, the environment is important, eetc.) And yet for reasons I can’t begin to understand, Immortal focused not on the early Michael Jackson, the singer and dancer whose work inspired us all with feelings of freedom and joy, but on the later freaked-out Jackson, the one who inspired only pity—or something worse. Why anyone attempting to produce a show that ostensibly paid tribute to Michael Jackson would decide to take away minutes from “Beat It”, “Billie Jean” or “Smooth Criminal” and give them to eight-minute renditions of “They Don’t Give A Damn About Us” or to a seemingly endless array of synth-drenched laments for the sorrow of the Earth’s future is more than I can understand. At the very minimum, it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about the legacy and significance of Jackson’s work.

Having said I didn’t intend to be insulting, I’ve just reeled off a list of what I guess might seem like insults. Unfortunately, there’s no other way I can describe what it was like to experience Immortal. And frankly, however insulted you may feel reading this, is nothing compared to how my wife and I felt by the time we left the show. We felt as if we’d been victimized, as if we’d been conned. Because Immortal was an insult; it was an insult to Jackson’s fans; it was an insult to Jackson’s legacy; and it was an insult to the thousands of audience members who paid out hefty sums to watch this debacle.

Included in this letter are my tickets, as well as the receipt showing the amount of purchase. I mail these in order to help your staff process my refund. Yes, refund. I have never before asked for a refunded ticket price for a live show. (I’ve never even walked out of a bad movie!) But in the case of Immortal, I have no choice. When I pay to see entertainment, I hope for brilliance—but I expect only competence.

Immortal did not come close to meeting that expectation. It was a tacky, cynical, slapdash affair in no way worthy of Michael Jackson’s name—or your own.

Just A Heads-Up

2012-01-31T12:18:00.000-08:00

I can't discuss it in any detail without feeling sad and ill, but if any of you out there are considering, even casually, attending the touring company version of Immortal (Cirque du Soleil's celebration of the music of Michael Jackson) DO NOT DO SO. Take your money, set it on fire, and then poke yourself in the thigh with a fork for an hour. You'll have a better time.

And this is from someone who likes Cirque du Soleil (usually) and love Michael Jackson.

The Guru Said Keep Walking

2012-01-28T09:40:00.000-08:00

So my question about this is... well. What do you make of it?

I found it on a poker site, of all places. A blog by a fairly serious player; he talked about how he watched it every day to motivate him to train and prepare for poker tournaments.

So then I watched it and the first time I saw it I thought: YES. ROCK ON. And I decided to submit my name to the NFL combine.

By the way, the voiceover is from some guy who styles himself The Hip Hop Preacher. He has quite a Facebook page if you're interested. The video, on the other hand, is from a East Carolina running back named Giavanni Ruffin. He has a twitter feed (I looked into all this on YouTube) that is sort of dispriting and inspring at the same time. Apparently he's trying to impress scouts in February and make the NFL.

Okay.

My point here is: I don't know, really. I don't know if this is genuinely inspiring or just kind of...over-manipulated rubbish. I do like the way it builds, though. And the long pauses in the audio track. So that you really do want to know what happens to the young man who goes out to the beach.

"Most of you people would rather sleep than be successful" That's funny. And true.

And I like the way he cites Fifty Cent, as if that sort of is the ultimate trump. If Fifty adheres to this philosophy, what more is there to say?

I don't know. I don't usually watch stuff like this--stuff with so few Muppets, I mean. But this kind of stayed with me.

Interested to hear your thoughts.

Probably worth watching in full screen.

I Am Not Issuing Another Post

2012-01-25T16:30:00.001-08:00

Until at least five people respond to the Muppet Video below. At least watch it. And say you have.

Because I know that I, for example, rarely watch videos that are on blogs. And that I've been a bit lazy, putting up lots of non-original material.

But this is non-negotiable. Five people must post some post that indicates that they've seen it, that comments on some aspect of the video that they couldn't otherwise comment on, without having seen it. ("Mama??")

I'm through playing. Word.

I Was In A Funk Today

2012-01-24T14:54:00.000-08:00

And then I saw this.

It gave me hope. I wish Beaker were a friend. I would want to spend as much time with him as I possibly could.

Tuesday, January 24

2012-01-24T14:35:00.000-08:00

This comes from Book I of The Histories, by Herodotus:

[Persians] are accustomed to deliberating on the most serious business while they are drunk, and whatever decision they reach in these sessions, it is proposed to them again the next day by the host in whose house they had deliberated the night before. Then, if the decision still please them when they are sober, they actd on it; if not, they give it up. Conversely, whatever provisional decisions they consider while sober, they reconsider when they are drunk.

The first part, I can believe. The second I doubt.

Ernest Givens Lives

2012-01-23T09:10:00.000-08:00

For an old Houston Oiler's fan, this article on the team's notorious "Run and Shoot" offense is irresistible. It name-checks Haywood Jeffries, for God's sakes. How can it not be worth your time?

A sample:

The run-and-shoot was supposed to be dead, at least in the NFL. The offense (at least one form of it) was conceived by Glenn "Tiger" Ellison back in the 1950s, while Darrel "Mouse" Davis developed its modern form throughout a four-decade coaching career that has touched nearly every level of football imaginable. The offense had its moment of glory in the NFL in the early 1990s. Back then, the Detroit Lions, Atlanta Falcons, and Houston Oilers (and the Seattle Seahawks, extremely briefly) ran the 'shoot, which featured four wide receivers and one running back on every snap. The offense used no fullbacks and no tight ends.1 These teams had mixed success. The Lions won 12 games in 1991; the Falcons won 10 and made the playoffs twice during their 'shoot days. But the NFL team that most exemplified the run-and-shoot, in both its glory and its shame, was the Houston Oilers. The Oilers made the playoffs in seven straight years with the run-and-shoot (and fielded a top-10 offense in each season), and quarterback Warren Moon blitzkrieged defenses with his four-receiver aerial assault. But the Oilers never reached the Super Bowl, and they managed to be on the wrong end of the greatest playoff comeback in NFL history. Against the Buffalo Bills in the 1993 wild-card round, Moon threw four first-half touchdowns, but he wasn't able to burn the clock and the defense collapsed in the second half of a 41-38 loss. The Oilers became part of an even more ignominious moment the following year, when Buddy Ryan, Houston's defensive coordinator, punched the team's offensive coordinator in the face. Ryan was no fan of the run-and-shoot, which he called the "chuck-and-duck."

Eventually, a consensus formed around the league that a team couldn't win championships with the run-and-shoot, and teams abandoned the offense. Without a tight end or fullback, they said, the 'shoot was "finesse only" and lacked the physical element necessary to win.3 But not everyone agreed. When Hall of Fame safety Rod Woodson heard Houston had given up on the offense, he said: "Tell the owner thank you, and tell the front office thank you. The run-and-shoot got the Oilers where they are, and I think defenses all over the league are going to be very relieved when they hear about it."

But the run-and-shoot went out of fashion for a reason. In a modern NFL full of tight ends and multiple formations, an offense that limits itself to one personnel grouping — whether it's four receivers and one running back or two running backs and a tight end — can't be successful. The run-and-shoot forced the Oilers, Lions, and Falcons to protect their quarterback with six players; without multiple looks, today's defenses would develop schemes to destroy those protections. Indeed, what killed the run-and-shoot wasn't the playoff failures or the perceived lack of physicality, but rather the zone blitz, which was designed to defuse the kind of six-man protection schemes that run-and-shoot teams used on every down. For a while, at least, everyone around football seemed to agree that the run-and-shoot had died and would never come back.

But the run-and-shoot never left.

For My Wife

2012-01-21T09:55:00.001-08:00

Who will love this. So do I. I laughed out loud watching it. It took me a few seconds, after it started, to figure out what was going on. But then I got it. And it's pretty damn brilliant. Recommended in full screen.

"that, in fact, I think, is the great use of suffering"

2012-01-20T09:39:00.000-08:00

One of the pleasures of reading Poetry magazine are its excellent critics. This month's issue features two outstanding critical essays, one by Clive James on the relationship between poetry and craft and another, by Adam Kirsch, on the recently-issued second volume of T.S. Eliot's letters. I've read four or five reviews of the letters so far and Kirsch's, I think, is the best.

Of course, Eliot himself is the star of the review (as he should be). I love both of these excerpts--the first for the power of the imagery ("regarding the world placidly through the fumes of an apertif"), the second for its wisdom and insight into human experience. In two quotes, you see why Eliot was such a great poet (and why Kirsch is such a good critic).

"...it has often been noted how much Eliot had in common with Henry James—he noted it himself in his self-justifying letter to his mother. Prufrock, one might say, is a younger version of Lambert Strether, the protagonist of James’s novel The Ambassadors—a sexless man of letters, the editor of a mild New England literary magazine, who comes to Europe in late middle age and realizes that he has wasted his life. “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to,” Strether famously exhorts, and it is a mistake that Prufrock fears he cannot avoid: “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,/Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?”

What made Eliot a great poet was the fact that in the crucial moment, he did find the strength to force a crisis. One of the most valuable and exciting achievements of theLetters is to document that moment, which came in the summer of 1915. After studying at Oxford, Eliot was expected to return to Harvard and finish his doctoral dissertation in philosophy. But as he wrote to his college friend, the poet Conrad Aiken, the prospect weighed on him like spiritual death:

I dread returning to Cambridge . . . and the people in Cambridge whom one fights against and who absorb one all the same. The great need is to know one’s own mind, and I don’t know that: whether I want to get married, and have a family, and live in America all my life, and compromise and conceal my opinions and forfeit my independence for the sake of my children’s future; or save my money and retire at fifty to a table on the boulevard, regarding the world placidly through the fumes of an aperitif at 5 PM—How thin either life seems!

He was willing to do anything, even wreck his life, in order to save it, as he hinted to Aiken in an earlier letter:

Does anything kill as petty worries do? And in America we worry all the time. That, in fact, is I think the great use of suffering, if it’s tragicsuffering—it takes you away from yourself—and petty suffering does exactly the reverse, and kills your inspiration.

Bowie's Drum Sound, A New Web Site

2012-01-18T14:59:00.000-08:00

I'm pleasantly shocked to discover a fantastic, completist Bowie site. "Pushing Ahead of the Dame" features an intelligent, devoted Bowie scholar ("fan" seems too trivial a word for the effort manifested on his site) writing a critical history of every song Bowie has ever recorded. It's not done yet (he's not reached the nineties) but all the major albums have already been discussed. Highly, highly recommended.

Here, for Dez, is a discussion of Bowie's drum sound during "Low," a subject we debated, a little, a few months ago:

“Breaking Glass,” officially credited to Bowie, Murray and Davis, is the most compelling groove on the album, despite it being left in a something of an embryonic state. Murray holds the track together with his fingers: the thudding echoing of Davis’ drums in the intro/refrain, the rolling bassline under the verses, which becomes the lead instrument in the final, vocal-less verse that gets faded out. Alomar’s lead guitar (he also plays rhythm guitar, a drone that Alomar described as his attempt to sound like a Jew’s harp) gets a battlefield promotion to secondary vocalist. His opening pair of riffs, phrases echoing and answering each other, are a more melodic hook than anything Bowie sings.

And Davis, who Visconti later called ‘the most original drummer I’ve ever worked with,” delivers beats that had never been on a Bowie record before: Low makes Ziggy Stardust sound like it was recorded on paper drums. (It’s as if he’s trying to imitate and yet outplay the synthetic drums on Cluster’s “Caramel”.) The trick was Visconti’s Eventide Harmonizer, which Visconti legendarily claimed “fucks with the fabric of time.” For Low, Visconti used the Harmonizer to sample the drum audio and, an instant later, echo the sound, but with the drums’ pitch dropped a semi-tone. Then Visconti, in his words, “added the feedback of this tone to itself.” So when Davis hit his snare drum, he heard in his headphones the “crack” but the following “thud” never stopped, it just deepened and deepened in tone. Visconti described the latter as sounding like a man struck in the stomach (forever).

At first, Bowie was unsure about the distorted drum sound, so Visconti sneakily turned down the effect in the control room but kept it on in Davis’ headphones. So on “Glass” (and other Low tracks) Davis is dueting with his echo, in real time. He’s varying the power and length of his snare hits, especially on the one! one! one-two! one-two! pattern in the intro, and seems to be creating the massive synthesized, gated drum sound of ’80s pop music in the process.

This was also, to me, a revelation (I thought Fripp used an Ebow on "Heroes").

While most guitarists that took on “Heroes” had to use an Ebow to get Fripp’s sound, playing a sustained run of A notes, Fripp had worked out the feedback patterns on foot, literally. Standing in Hansa’s Studio 2, his guitar routed through Eno’s EMS synthesizer, Fripp marked with tape the places on the studio floor where he could get a feedback loop on any given note. So four feet away from his amp was an A, three feet away was a G, and so on. Fripp stepped and swayed through the song, his sound owed to a simple cartography.
Fripp ran through three takes, and the trebly nature of his playing (further distorted live by Eno’s EMS) meant that each solo on its own sounded thin and wavering. So Tony Visconti blended all three together, eventually bouncing them down to a single track, to achieve what Visconti called “a dreamy, floaty effect.”

"Haircuts I think are the undiscussed topic of our time"

2012-01-17T13:56:00.000-08:00

I've written here often of my admiration and ongoing semi-obsession with Brian Eno. His thoughts on art, science, emergence theory and a whole lot of other fascinating junk can be read here. (It opens with a woman talking about totem poles, but that's equally fascinating.)

An excerpt, to whet the wombat:

There are really only four things you can do. You can repeat something. You can re-evaluate something that used to be there and you've now put a different value on it. You can leave something out, and you can put something new in. And putting something new, which is always considered to be the defining act of being an artist, is only one of four, I think. All those other four decisions are just as important.

Of course, folk music and pop music apparently don't do very much of the latter one, of the innovation one. They are doing a lot of the other ones; they are reevaluating things that were around. They are choosing to leave something out, which can be a very important decision. They are looking again at what already exists; that's the definition of traditional and folk music.

But because of our sort of enlightenment history of wanting to reward novelty we tend to favor, or dignify, or elevate the forms of art that specialize in novelty. And I think we tend to over-reward them actually, or rather we over-value them at the expense at those other conversational forms of art that are going around all the time around people or between people, like hairstyles, there is a popular art form that nobody talks about except me and a few hairdressers.

Monday, January Something or Another

2012-01-16T09:49:00.000-08:00

The long weekend studying American History ends today with, sadly, Reconstruction. Perhaps no topic in American History is less enjoyable to contemplate. Dispirited, uninspiring people giving up on any chance of actually effecting the goals for which the Civil War was fought. Drunkenness, pettiness, idiocy. It's not going to be an exciting morning.

Above is a video I found on Browser. I dedicate it to my Wife, who has to spend a lot of her life listening to presentations on Power Point. I have not had that privilege, but my guess is that the video is accurate. Feel free, my readers, to let me know if I'm wrong (or add in any missing bits).

Sunday, Jan 15

2012-01-15T09:15:00.000-08:00

Ok, it's true: I missed one day. I apologize. I have a student who's taking a US History midterm on Tuesday. We met yesterday and we're meeting tomorrow. I've had to reread 200 pages of history in the last day or so. Plus, I had to watch football. How else could I be ready to help my student talk about the Corrupt Bargain? I couldn't. Watching the Saints game yesterday (WOW!) was crucial to understanding the election of 1824. Everybody who understands American History can understand that.

In other news, my two friends at A Special Way of Being Afraid and Gonna Need A Bigger Boat (links on sidebar) have decided they too are going to start posting regularly. So check out their pages; once more they are back among the land of the living. John, at ASWOBA, has recently continued his long-delayed movie list. And Ray, at GNABB, has posted recently about the Texans.

The Texans! I'm almost ashamed to admit how much I'm looking forward to watching the game this afternoon. Is there any chance we could win? My heart says yes. My brain says maybe. It's not going to be easy but I think we have a shot. What we can't do is let Joe Flacco beat us. (That's a surprising sentence, huh?) Last time we played the Ravens we did exactly that. Our secondary got burned a few times on big pass plays. That can't happen today. Stopping Ray Rice is hard enough. If we do that, we have to win. No more Anquan Boldin. No more, I say. No more.

Or, as Henry Clay is reported to have said at his notorious dinner meeting with John Quincy Adams on January 9, 1825: "No more Goddamned Anquan Boldin. Johnathan Joseph has got to do his job. He's supposed to be a Pro-Bowler, right? RIGHT?"

No wonder he became the Secretary of State!

A Love Poem

2012-01-13T10:19:00.000-08:00

"For Grace, After A Party"
by Frank O'Hara

You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn't
interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,
and isn't it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn't there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn't
you like the eggs a little
different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.

When You Are Looking At Something, You Cannot Imagine It

2012-01-12T10:41:00.000-08:00

from "Paraguay"
by Donald Barthelme

Herko Mueller walks through gold and silver leaves, awarded, in the summer months, to those who have produced the best pastiche of the emotions. He is smiling because he did not win one of these prizes, which the people of Paraguay seek to avoid. He is tall, brown, wears a funny short beard, and is fond of zippered suits in brilliant colors: yellow, green, violet. He is, professionally, an arbiter of comedy. "A sort of drama critic?" "More what you would term an umpire. The members of the audience are given a set of rules and the rules constitute the comedy. Our comedies seek to reach the imagination. When you are looking at something, you cannot imagine it." In the evenings I have wet sand to walk upon--long stretches of beach with the sea tasting the edges. Getting back into my clothes after a swim, I discover a strange thing: a sand dollar under my shirt. It is strange because this sand is sifted twice daily to remove impurities and maintain whiteness. And the sea itself, the New Sea, is not programmed for echinoderms.

Thoughts On Mitt

2012-01-11T08:23:00.000-08:00

Andrew Sullivan excerpts a small part of this post from Dan Drezner on his blog today. I include more of the entry because I find it so relevant. As far as I can see, the best argument partisans put forth for voting for Mitt Romney is that he has business experience. Government, the argument goes, should be run like a corporation--with attention to profits and deficits (or something like that). I find this argument unpersuasive for a number of reasons. Take, for example, Social Security. Without being made to, how many companies would pay their workers a living wage (sort of) after they had retired? If the US was to be run like a company, why would we keep paying out Social Security? How is it good for the bottom line? How many companies would enforce onerous safety regulations or use more expensive processes because they were more environmentally friendly? Companies do those things, in general, because governments compel them to. If the US itself is the company, however, it sets its own rules. And if profit is what matters, we can throw away all sorts of institutions and practices that most Americans would, in reality, not want to see done away with (Environmental Regulations, Government Aid, All Entitlements....). It's a specious analogy.

But, on to Drezner.

The thing is -- and this is kind of important -- governments are not corporations. I cannot stress this enough. There's the obvious point that in democracies, legislatures tend to impose a more powerful constraint than shareholders, making it that much harder for leaders to execute the policies they think will be the most efficient.

There's also the deeper point that it's a lot harder for governments to be "unsentimental" when it comes to the provision of public services. It's a lot harder for states to eliminate the functions that are less efficient. Frequently, demand for government services emerges because of the perception that the private sector has fallen down on the job in that area. This means that the government has been tasked with doing the things that are difficult and unprofitable to do. It is precisely because these government outputs are often so hard to measure that Newt Gingrich's claims about Six Sigma sound pretty laughable. Even libertarians who want the government to reduce its operations drastically will acknowledge the political risks and costs of trying to execute this plan.

To be fair, there are some policy dimensions where this analogy holds up better. Cohen implicitly argues that America's willingness to jettison costly and inefficient foreign ventures -- cough, Iraq, cough -- is an example of this kind of turnaround strategy. Fair enough. Even on foreign policy, however, it's hard to execute this kind of ruthless efficiency. Israel is prosperous enough to not need the $3 billion it gets in U.S. aid. Good luck to anyone trying to cut that. Africa is not a vital strategic areas of interest for the United States, but I suspect AFRICOM isn't going anywhere. I've been a big fan of getting the United States out of Central Asia, but critics make a fair point when they observe that the last time the United States tried this gambit, Al Qaeda took advantage of it.

There's been a lot of bragging in the 2012 primary about candidates that have "real world" business experience, and how that translates into an effective ability to govern. That logic is horses**t. Being president is a fundamentally different job than being a CEO -- because countries are not corporations.

Tuesday

2012-01-10T08:03:00.000-08:00

I'll tell you what makes me feel good: going to bed at 9:30. I got something like ten hours of sleep last night, and for once I woke feeling great. Sleep! That knits up the raveled sleeve of care. Or something like that.

The problem with taking on a long involved project like reading Herodotus is that you can't read anything else while you're doing it. Well, I can, of course, but I'm not going to. I have a pile of a dozen books that I got for Christmas sitting on my shelf. They all call out to be read. But, no. First I have to get through Herodotus. Or do I? I don't know; maybe I could read only another hundred pages and then take a break. Herodotus has finally got into the history of Greece (in book FIVE, no less); that means the actual Persian should be coming up. Or maybe not. There are another 300 pages to go. So we'll see.

On my daily walks I'm listening to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. Gaiman is a wizard at big ideas and scene setting; his actual prose, however, leaves a lot to be desired. The sheer imaginative power carries you along, but I still can't help wishing, once in a while, that he didn't write like a very dedicated high school student. (Note the pronoun shift in that sentence. Terrible!)

Another beautiful day in SoCal. I have been urged by the Wif-al Unit to write more about family and home life and less about what I'm reading. But what is there to say about home life? It's peaceful and calm and idyllic. The wife is in her office, the Bink is at her feet, gently snoring. Things move on apace.

Addendum: all are urged to read this outstanding discussion of the life and work of PG Wodehouse by A.N. Wilson.

Solitaire

2012-01-09T09:23:00.000-08:00

My father relaxes by playing solitaire. Over the holidays, coming into the kitchen on a Sunday afternoon and seeing him carefully studying his pack of bent, often-shuffled cards, I thought of a story by John Updike. The first paragraph is excerpted here.

"Solitaire"

The children were asleep, and his wife had gone out to a meeting; she was like his father in caring about the community. he found the deck of cards in the back of a desk drawer and sat down at the low round table. He had reached a juncture in his life where there was nothing to do but play solitaire. It was the perfect, final retreat--beyond solitaire, he imagined, there was madness. Only solitaire utterly eased the mind; only solitaire created that blankness into which a saving decision might flow. Conviviality demanded other people, with their fretful emanations of desire; reading imposed the author's company; and one emerged from the anesthetic of drunkenness to find that the operation had not been performed. But in the rise and collapse of the alternately colored ranks of cards, in the grateful transpositions and orderly revelations and unexpected redemptions, the circuits of the mind found an occupation exactly congruent with their own secret structure. The mind was filled with being strained.

Sunday Morning

2012-01-08T09:28:00.000-08:00

-If anyone wants to bet with me on Obama winning the election, I will give them the Republican field. I will take Obama. And we can bet as much as you want.

-The new season of Downton Abbey has begun. Through my wife, we have the entire second season on DVD. Last night we watched the first two episodes. So far I'd say it's just as good as the first season. World War I has started. Matthew is at the front and the aristocratic women of the Abbey have begun to exit their cosseted environs and interact with the wider, working world. The old characters have come back and a few new ones have entered the fold. Matthew has a fiancee; the brooding bad-tempered lady's maid, O'Brien, seems to have found a softer side (slightly softer anyway; she still torments a new maid who gets above her station with a host of made-up chores); and Bates, as usual, is making honorable sacrifices for the good of the household. The Bates storyline, so far, is my least favorite--can't we just let the man have a little happiness?--but that's a small criticism. This season looks as good as the last.

-Two hours yesterday of American History, on the founding of the Colonies all the way through the Revolution. This after I spent the weekend reading about Teddy Roosevelt, Progressivism, and the First World War. Oh well. I mostly remembered what we were doing. The US was founded by Greek merchants, I think. And Egyptologists looking for alien ruins. Then, we fought against Libya and founded a new nation, using a constitution we'd stolen wholecloth from Erasmus. That may not be completely accurate but it's close enough for a high school student.

-GO TEXANS!!!!!
I shouted several times at the TV while watching the game last night. Am I ridiculous to believe we have a shot to beat the Ravens? If we do, we could get home field advantage back for the AFC Championship (if the Steelers end up as our opponent, that is). Man, it's been a long time since I watched a sporting contest and actually CARED who won.

"A Community Needs A Dojo"

2012-01-07T09:04:00.000-08:00

This New Year's Eve, some friends introduced me to this video. It starts funny and gets, uhm, awesome. Maybe there are still great bands around?

Day 2: Tidbits

2012-01-06T09:27:00.000-08:00

-Did you know in Britain, instead of 'tidbits' they say 'titbits?' We Yanks changed it because we thought 'titbits' was too suggestive. You did know that, didn't you? Does everyone? I don't know. This is what happens when you work with fifteen year olds. You start to lose sight of what is common knowledge.

-I lost ten pounds in the last half of last year. My goal for this year is to lose ten more. I'm going to try and increase my walking distance to a minimum of four miles, and my running distance to three. Yesterday I ran 2.3 miles; for me that's pretty long. I'll keep adding over the next few months. By April I want to be at three miles per run.

-My weekend playoff predictions: Saints, Steelers, Texans and Giants. I'm picking the Texans out of personal bias; I doubt I have enough distance and objectivity on the situation to think about it rationally (I would never bet on that game, for example). The Giants are my playoff sleeper team. They're incredibly erratic but when they play well they can play VERY well. Last week against the Cowboys they looked great. If they can keep going like that for the next few weeks, I predict they make it to the NFC Championship.

-One more football prediction: as long as Jerry Jones runs the team, the Cowboys will never win another Super Bowl.

-Also (last football thing), how does Norv Turner still have a job? I don't get it.

-Reading goal for the next month: ten pages of Herodotus a day. I'm also going to start reading some of my Christmas books. Not sure where that will start.

-Date night tonight. Then, back to the tutoring grind. I have to help someone prep for a US History test tomorrow. It's been almost a year since I helped someone study US History so I'll have to spend the afternoon rereading my old High School textbook. Then, I'll focus the whole lecture on US monetary policy in the 1880s. Nothing kids like more than bimetallism, or learning about the Gold Standard. And nothing that I like more explaining! (Actually, I do like bimetallism. But then, who doesn't?)

I'm Back!

2012-01-05T09:04:00.000-08:00

And committed, once more, to posting every day for the next month. I'd challenge my friends and allies to do the same.

For today, an excerpt from The Vertigo Years, by Philipp Blom, a book about the experience of living in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century--about the emotional and intellectual instability and, at times, madness that pervaded European culture in the years before World War I. Highly recommended.

(This is for my brother).

Speed and energy--not always well directed--were declared the watchwords of the day. So universal was the feeling of pressure that the respected and conservative paper Deutsche Rundschau could run a story about a high-school boy who had contracted a fatal meningitis from learning the gerundive of the Latin verb amare (to love). One has to admire the journalist for finding a story that included all ingredients: the rigidity of society represented by the school, the pressure of having to work hard in order to get on, and the devastating confusion resulting from any confrontation with sex--even or especially in the gerundive.

Random Football Prediction

2011-12-15T12:49:00.000-08:00

I would just like to go on record to say that I think New England is going to beat Denver by more than 7 points this weekend. It's relevant because that is currently the spread. Denver is playing at home and they have the Chosen One of God at Quarterback. Nevertheless, were I a betting man (which, as it happens, I am) and, were I in Vegas (which, as it happens, I am not) I would be plunking down some C-notes on New England. Denver is a mediocre team that has been the recipient of many, many, good breaks the last few weeks. The miracles have to end. This is the week.

The New Muppet Movie

2011-12-05T07:41:00.000-08:00

Totally rocks. I mean, I'd see a Muppet Movie no matter how good or bad it was. That goes without saying. But the new one--it's actually pretty great. Up there with the old ones (not the first one, of course, but definitely in the same league). Bret Mackenize (from Flight of the Conchords) wrote some pretty great, singable tunes ("Life's A Happy Song"), the jokes were memorable, the story moved along. All in all highly recommended.

Friday November 11

2011-11-11T17:46:00.000-08:00

Well I've posted very little this month I know. No real excuse except a lingering emotional debility. Or a lack of energy. Or something. It's not been a very good month. And I don't have much mojo working right now. My time keeps getting broken into small parcels. And, going back home for a brief time and seeing all the old gang and feeling companionship and energy from them again only makes California's isolation more difficult and unpleasant.

So, my usual policy when I'm filled with despair and grouchiness is to not post on the blog--figuring there's nothing worse in the world than reading other people's complaints. But, at the same time, I know from experience that often just forcing myself to write a post tends to lift my mood. So it's a double-edged wombat, as it were. Or maybe a double-furred wombat? That's a lot of wombat!

And the good news is that next week I'm going to New York, to see friends of all stripes and furriness. And the tutoring is very busy, although that's a mixed blessing. It's more money but it's less time to do the second draft of the play. The second draft is essentially becoming a page one rewrite, which is a thing to make one sad. To make me sad, actually. But that's okay. It's not that I can't build the bridge, I just need time to get all the pieces. That, at least, is a development.

"Pepe is a Prawn"

2011-11-01T12:30:00.000-07:00

The Paranormal Activities bit, about a minute in, is where this started to make me laugh out loud.

Monday, October 24

2011-10-24T09:49:00.000-07:00

Shocked to see the total lack of response to the excellent Tinie Tempeh video I put up Thursday. I've been reciting his rhymes to myself all weekend. My wife even compared him (favorably) to The Streets--favorably! (She prefaced that by saying--correctly--that I probably wouldn't agree.) But his rhymes are clever and fun and his general attitude towards life is festive and upbeat, in a knowing ironic way. So I can relate.

Have to fly to Houston this weekend for a semi-expected funeral. My grandmother was 102 years old; she'd lived a long and happy life. In recent years her medical problems had made it harder and harder to do the things she most enjoyed--working in her garden and walking in her neighborhood. So, all in all, it was probably as optimal a death as one could have. If I were speaking at the funeral, I think I'd talk about wisdom. We'd like to hope that as we get older, we all get wiser. In reality, though, I'm not sure that's the case. So the trick for those of us who are still relatively young, who are still aspiring to acquire wisdom from our elders, is to work out who actually possesses wisdom and who only thinks they do. And there's no surefire way to do this. But, one reliable signpost, I think, to indicate a person who may actually may be wise is that they still have a capacity for joy. As most people age, they tend (in general) to become less joyous. This is understandable; in some basic way life is suffering--the more we live, the more we suffer. So joy becomes, with age, more difficult. The ability to feel and express joy despite advancing age is one of the surest signs I know that the person aging has somehow gotten wisdom--and is someone therefore we should seek to learn from.

Of course, joyousness despite advancing age can often make a person seem foolish. Think of Falstaff: the greatest fool--and sage--in all of Shakespeare. His foolishness is one with his wisdom; two sides of the same coin. My grandmother, who retained a capacity for joy well into her late nineties, could also in her way seem foolish. Her entire philosophy of life could be accurately reduced to: growing tomatoes is a lot of fun. But in the time I spent with her (when I lived in Houston I used to visit her every week) I always came away feeling like she actually did know what she was talking about--that she actually had wisdom. She was alone in a house with just her maids; her husband had died more than twenty years ago, and yet despite it all she was still--in general--remarkably happy.

I hope our visits together allowed me to gain from some of her wisdom. At the very least I hope I can emulate her spirit of joyfulness. Those readers who attended my wedding (which I think is pretty much all of you) might remember the speech she gave before dinner about our relationship. In its details, it was almost entirely inaccurate. But in its underlying insight, it was completely true. It may have been the best speech of my whole wedding. Now the speaker is no more. But the words, I hope, in some way will endure.

Call me chauvinistic but she can't even spell it

2011-10-20T15:31:00.000-07:00

Tinie Tempah--what I'm listening to now. Here he's featured with Chase & Status, but he's the attraction. Get his album, Disc-overy for lyrics like this:

papz (paparazzi) see me up in the vicinity and flash me
i'm the definition of definitive and catchy
the only thing that's bigger, quicker, slicker
more black and more upper london is a taxi

Weekend Report

2011-10-18T10:23:00.000-07:00

The Parents were in town this weekend which gave me an opportunity to do some of the LA things that tourists usually do. After four years here, I still hadn't been to the Getty Museum (which I pass daily driving to tutor). We cooked for them one night and went out the others. Their experience was a bit desultory I think--the freeways were even more clogged than usual and their hotel proved to be a major disappointment. But it was nice that they came. Exhausting, but nice.

I saw two new movies last week. One was In The Loop. A dark comedy about the political machinations that lead up to the US/UK declaration of war on Iraq, In The Loop is the only movie I can ever remember Netflix recommending to me with four stars (when they do the thing about "What YOUR Rating Will Be.") I had high expectations, therefore, and I have to say they weren't really met. Every character in the movie is deceitful or cowardly or manipulative or...base. It's supposed to be funny, but I found its cynicism so excessive that I couldn't care about the comedy. A fantastic cast with great performances (James Gandolfini as a coarse US General was particularly good) but the movie itself did not equal the sum of its parts.

My other recent viewing featured a corp of Scottish Bagpipers and Alec Guinness. Therefore, you would assume that it had to be great. And, indeed, Tunes of Glory did not disappoint. Well, okay, it disappointed a little (the ending maybe didn't work perfectly). But mostly, Tunes Of Glory gets an unequivocal "Yes" from the ANCIANT reviewing team. Guinness is the movie's center, of course; he plays a rough and ready, hard drinking Scottish soldier who's been assigned the command of a military outpost in the Scottish highlands. The plot involves his growing conflicts with a by-the-book commanding officer who's brought in to replace him, but the plot is less the draw than the performances. Also, the bagpipes. There are a LOT of bagpipes. Plus, a lot of people drinking Scotch and using words like "lassie" non ironically. It's a good time.

The Big Meal in NYC

2011-10-13T09:45:00.000-07:00

After years of writing restaurant reviews for the New York Times, critic Sam Sifton announced that in his farewell column he would select the single "Best Restaurant" in New York. To nobody's surprise, he chose Thomas Keller's Per Se. The wife and I (who are heading to The Big Kiwi in a month) have already considered having a blowout meal at Keller's world-renowned foodie Mecca, but the cost and time commitment made us waver. The article doesn't really change my opinion; although part of me thinks this would be a fascinating, perhaps sublime, experience, I also question how any one meal can be worth close to 1000$ (the price of a nine-course dinner for two with full tasting menu and drink pairings is slightly less than that, but not much).

Luckily, in another 'farewell' column Sifton also ranked all the restaurants he's ever reviewed in New York. There, again, the list of places awarded three and four stars is predictable: Daniel, Jean-Georges, Del Posto, Ai Fiori, etc. Still, worth looking over for those interested in American fine dining.

Right now I'm leaning towards Eleven Madison Park for one (possibly our only) big blow-out New York foodie dinner. Although Per Se still has a dark fascination...

A Post With More Home Life In It

2011-10-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, while I was working on a scheduling issue with one of my students, she said that maybe we shouldn't meet late in the afternoon on Friday, "because you might want to have Date Night with your wife." I don't know where it came from; it's not as if I ever talk to this girl about my wife, or about Date Night. (Also the meeting in question was going to start at 4:30, which has little chance of interfering with Date Night around the ANCIANT household).

Then, later the same night--on a Date with the wife--I was told that my blog has not featured enough family stuff of late. There's been no Bink. There's been no wife. That's no good, the wife said. My readership wants family life!

So, here's some snippets of family life--centering around Date Night no less--to appease the quiet majority my wife thinks is out there.

-We went to a new Italian restaurant. The food was above average, the ambience was great. The service was terrible. But they had forty dollar Barolos, which is pretty great and pretty rare. The wine alone made it worth the price of admission. Barolo--the grape of the gods. Reminds me of my friend Cold Bacon, who sent me a great email yesterday. But that's not apposite.

-Discussion Topic At Dinner (Main): my wife's research. She has about nine different projects at various stages of completion right now, and I need constantly to be reminded of what they are and what they aim to do. Her most exciting project is...

-The Illumaniti. The wife has been invited to a National meeting of higher-ups within her work universe. They are going to meet at a retreat somewhere near DC and decide the future of the planet. The price of Zinc. Who'll win the next Presidential election. Stuff like that. So, if you have any hopes for the future, submit them now. It's all about to be decided.

-At the end of the date, when we returned to the Eager Dog Locale (aka our house) I let my wife suggest some appropriately romantic music. Her choice? Rumours. (!?) Don't get me wrong: I LOVE LOVE LOVE Rumours, but....I don't know. The album is a chronicle of two different marriages dissolving. It has Stevie Nicks singing things like "if you don't love me now, you will never love me again." Yes, it's Stevie Nicks, which is an absolute good. But I had to question the mood of the thing. ("Chains...keep us together" I quoted to my wife. To which she said, defiantly, "that's right. I am your chain." Which, while true, doesn't necessarily awaken thoughts of love in me. Or anyone.)

Anyway, it was all moot in the end because I don't have Rumours on my iPod (inexcusable, I admit). So she got a second choice, and with it she picked....Led Zeppelin. (!!!) And there was much rejoicing! We watched a long documentary about Robert Plant when we were in London last year. I think that, combined with It Might Get Loud (which we also saw recently) has finally allowed my wife to put aside her high-school associations with Led Zeppelin (i.e. geeky boys and Rush) and listen to them on their own terms. Doing so, she has realized--like all right-thinking people must--that they are fricking awesome. (One of the few bands from my youth that I actually seem to like MORE, the older I get.)

So anyway, I got to listen to Robert Plant singing about ringwraiths last night, during a date. Now THAT is romance. Yes it is.

Oh, and here is some Bink.

Current Input(s)

2011-10-06T09:36:00.000-07:00

What I'm Listening To:

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
by David Byrne and Brian Eno (2008)

One of my favorite recent purchases, and for sure of David Byrne's best non-Talking Heads albums. An album about aging that is not maudlin or self-pitying and that actually rocks. Grown up music that's still invigorating. Three and a half stars. (Out of five)

What I'm Reading

Dead Souls
by Nikolai Gogol

I keep intending to stop reading this book but then I keep reading. I think that says something about its hidden depths. Either that or my hidden persistence. It has no real story, instead the author just follows around a would-be entrepeneur as he meets and talks to various members of Russian society. It fees like a documentary, or a piece of New Journalism a hundred years avant la lettre. Except it's not--it's a novel. One that I never look forward to reading, but always think about with interest when I'm done. Three stars.

What I'm Watching

Samurai Assassin
by Kihachi Okamato

Decent but uninspring. A displaced ronin joins a conspiracy to murder an important samurai daimyo. He is compelled to make increasingly difficult and painful sacrifices in order to help the conspirators until ultimately he leans (too late) that the daimyo he has plotted to kill is in fact his own father. Two and a half stars.

Sept 30

2011-09-30T09:27:00.000-07:00

Watched Kobayashi's excellent Samurai Rebellion this week. A pacifist and something of a gentle cynic, Kobayashi makes movies about the failures and inconsistencies of the samurai code. In Samurai Rebellion, for example, the injustness and capriciousness of the daimyo (the lord of a particular region) ultimately pushes one of his followers (played here by T Mifune) into open rebellion. The inciting incident involves a courtesan whom the daimyo has grown tired of. Wanting a new lover, he forces the courtesan to leave his house and asks Mifune to marry her to his son. Mifune demurs at first but then, reluctantly, agrees (he had intended to choose his son's bride for himself and resents having to take a 'fallen woman' into his household.) The courtesan and the son eventually fall deeply in love, at which time the daimyo changes his mind and calls the courtesan back to his court. At this, Mifune balks. Ultimately, a mini-war breaks out, with predictably deleterious consequences. The movie traces out Mifune's growing disillusionment and resentment toward not only his daimyo but the whole system which supports him. Really, really excellent. (Harakiri, also by Kobayashi, is similarly great.)

Have been watching 30 Rock in syndication at night of late; it’s on twice here at 11:30 and 12. Surprised to find how poorly it holds up, how much less good it seems now than it once did. Not sure exactly why and would like to figure it out. A few great episodes, of course, but... hmm. It's a lot less funny than I remember. Also Tina Fey is starting to wear thin. The fact that she frames herself as a klutz who eats all the time when she’s in fact thin, pretty, and successful may be part of it. Feels all like a ruse of some sort, I don’t know.

"He Left Us Too Soon When He Croaked On Top of That Chick For Hire"

2011-09-27T09:41:00.000-07:00

As I was reading the article in last week's New Yorker about Tony Bennett recording a duet with Lady Gaga, I thought occasionally of an SNL skit from a few years back called "The Tony Bennett Show." In it, Alec Baldwin does one of his funniest bits--impersonating the irrepressible, and often inappropriate, old crooner. This weekend, watching SNL, I was happily surprised to see Baldwin reprising the role. The whole thing is pitch perfect and hilarious.

Why Anyone Would Go

2011-09-25T10:19:00.000-07:00

I never thought I'd be writing this but after reading this piece in Slate, I think I want to go to Burning Man next year (!). If only to be able to witness things like this...

There was also a Billion Bunny March. This involved hundreds of people—sorry bunnies, journalistic ethics require me to provide a factual attendance estimate—dressed in bunny costumes, parading together around the city. OK, I hear you saying, cute, fine, whatever. But then people in carrot costumes show up to protest the march! With signs demanding bunny-carrot equality!

At one point I happened upon a wooden pier in the middle of the open desert. It was about 75 feet long, and 20 feet high at its furthest reach. Actual ocean-going yachts (they had been refitted with motorized wheels) pulled up to the pier and docked at it, sometimes three at a time. Passengers would disembark and party on the pier to the thumping sounds of a DJ. Then people hopped back on the yachts—often different yachts than they'd arrived on—and the boats pulled away and sailed off into the desert again.

When there were no yachts at the pier you could go fishing off its edges. A woman handed us a fishing rod with a small toy tied to the end of its line, urging us to dangle our lure and see what we might catch. After a few moments, a dude in a crab costume jumped out from beneath the pier and grabbed the toy in his mouth.

"It baffles me that grown people must convince themselves that those with whom they disagree are stupid or malevolent.”

2011-09-23T14:06:00.000-07:00

I highly recommend this fascinating and thought-provoking consideration of George W. Bush written by a former Washington Post reporter who had an opportunity to get to know him--well--over a number of years. Whatever you think of his presidency or his politics, this is worth your time. The comments beneath also bear looking at.

Thursday, Sept 22

2011-09-22T21:33:00.000-07:00

Long tedious day of driving and errands. First to Gucci to haggle with people about a purse I've finally convinced them to take back (it's involved two separate trips and a long, crafty letter to their corporate offices). That took an hour each way in traffic. From there to [Bank Name] to deal with more ridiculousness for our refinance plans. Even describing what the underwriter for our hopefully-soon-to-exist new loan is asking us to do, the hoops within hoops within hoops he wants me to leap through, singing, would take more energy and time than I can summon. And it might not be plausible anyway. Suffice it to say that the mortgage industry has gone from a policy of giving anyone off the street who wants a loan whatever they want without any background check to one of requiring DNA extractions, personality tests, and donations of blood and kidneys. It's horrible.

Watched a fairly mediocre Samurai film a few days ago—Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman. (Directed by Takeshi "Beat" Kitano). Zatoichi's a classic iconic Japanese figure, maybe a bit like Robin Hood for the UK or The Lone Ranger here. He's a blind samurai master who travels around Japan righting wrongs and saving the downtrodden and such. All sorts of directors there have used him in all sorts of ways--this is the second movie I've seen in which he was the hero.

Movie didn't work on various levels. Main problemwas the hero's near total invincibility. He can win at dice by listening to themroll in the cup; he can defeat any other samurai in battle; he can sense when a man is dressed as a woman just by...I don't know. Smell? Point is, this Zatoichi could basically doanything, which makes for poor drama. Heroes without flaws are not heroes--they're Gods. (How much less interesting would Superman be without kryptonite?) The only drama in this Zatoichi was seeing HOW he would eventually be ranged against the various baddies threatening the peaceful countryside. Once that happened, there was no doubt he would defeat them. And so, no point in watching.

Movie was shot in 2003 and had some very stylized violence in it that made me think in bad ways of Tarantino. Also, Monty Python (the skits where people have their heads cut off and blood shoots twenty feet out of their neck like from a hose). Actually it may have been one of the no doubt nine dozen samurai swordfight movies that inspired (if that word can be used so loosely here) the two Kill Bill movies. I don't know. But it wasn't worth my time.

Tomorrow I go back to REAL samurai movies, with some Kurosawa and some Mifune. And some real work without driving. And, maybe, in the evening, a Sierra Nevada. Sweet, sweet Sierra Nevada.

Tuesday, September 20

2011-09-20T08:54:00.000-07:00

Yesterday turned out to be a very good one for work.

Sunday's new student went all right but notgreat. Didn’t get as good a ‘read’on her as I would have liked. Still the mother is no nonsense about work and she is drivenenough to have told her mom she wanted an SAT tutor at the start of her junioryear. So it should be all right. Still not sure if I didn't say a few things I shouldn't have. I give myself a B to B- on our first meeting.

I think I’m giving up on Dead Souls. 300 pages in and I guess I should justfinish. But I feel littlemotivation. Gogol's voice is for himthe attraction I think and though it may have been ground-breaking whenpublished the contant authorial interruptions and commentary feels now gimmicky, tired, and over-cute. (“Oh some readers may object to _ I know, but what can Ido? This is how we poor Russians are!”) Too much of that. I startedreading Isaac Babel short stories yesterday but I think I’ll also begin a novel ofsome sort.

Have been enjoying return of NFL far more than Iexpected. Having DVR makes a hugeimprovement to watching games. Theability to fast forward through commercials, kickoffs, and Dan Dierdorf makesthe watching experience exponentially better. The league itself continues to be the best run in prosports; the salary cap allows relative parity (no Yankees and Red Sox buyingthe best team every year) and because of the season’s brevity the actual games allfeel important. It’s a surprise tome—as little a jock as there ever was one—but I’ve become a real footballfan. I even watch football ‘analysis’shows (of which a great parody could and should be written—if I were on SNL I’dpitch this in week one). Although Iwill say that, for my money, Mark Schlereth is the worse—and the dimmest—commentatorin all of sports.

Watched a fascinating documentary on BobbyFisher over the weekend (on HBO). I knew alreadymost of the facts about his life, but I’d never seen the video footage—hisconfrontation with Spassky in '72 and his steady devolution thereafter into an anti Semitic conspiracy nut. (His radio address exulting in the attack on the World Trade Center was particularly unsettling). Thepress conference he gives when he is allowed to enter Iceland and become a citizen(2001?) stands out, especially the exchange between him and Jeremy Schaap aboutJ’s father’s “typical” Jewish treachery towards Fisher. Then the older man from Iceland whotalked about how exhauasting it was to be around Fisher, how he drove everyoneaway. Not that that neededexplaining—it was plain on the video. But fascinating. Mademe feel much more sympathy towards him than I ever had. His mother more or less abandoned him at sixteen and he clearly never developed even the most minimal socialization skills. (He basically locked himself in his apartment and played chess from sixteen to his mid twenties). Although I have a fatigue about thegenius madness thing. We like tohave our geniuses nutty so we are freed from the burden of being notgenius.

Sunday September 18th

2011-09-18T10:36:00.000-07:00

Planned to write all day Friday but decided to try and take things easier this weekend. I've had to tutor both days this weekendso I won’t have much time to myself, and I'm down in the up/down fatigue excitement cycle that a long project involves. I don't usually write on the blog much then, but I am trying to force myself to post every other day.

Bink misbehaved Thursday night; howled for a while afterbedtime and then began clawing up the box. We have a box that we use to keep him inside the kitchen; acardboard box, and on top of it a large plastic box containing his food, leash,playthings and sundry. There usedto be two cardboard boxes and then the plastic but he’s done so much clawingand eating damage to the first box we’ve taken it away. Now he’s on the second box. Some nights he goes quietly to bed andmakes no fuss. Other nights he makes considerable fuss. You can hear him clawing and biting atthe box from the bedroom. Both wife and I got up a few times to try and stop him but he wouldn’t relent. In the end the only solution was to goto bed and come in the morning and pick up all the shards of cardboard his workhas left. Then he's tired all day (from having spent the evening working on the box) and doesn't sleep that night. And the cycle continues.

You might wonder why we keep him in the kitchen for thenight at all. We’ve tried lettinghim roam; the problem is that he will see one of the neighbor’s cat (or sense,more likely) outside the front door or back den windows at 4 in the AM and howland how and howl. The front doorhallway is right next to the hall where our bedroom is and that howl shootsdown the long hallway like a rocket. No sleeping through that. The ideal would be to somehow train him not to howl at things during thenight (especially cats—burglars might be okay) but we don’t know how to dothat.

After all the fun on Thursday night, wife bought a pet gate for the kitchen which I then installed, using my many macho powers of...installing things. So far the gate has not provoked his wrath--no nights of clawing and howling have yet occurred. I don't know if that's because he's been tired again at night or if somehow the gate makes him less aggravated than the box. We'll see.

Friday September 16th

2011-09-16T09:26:00.000-07:00

I'm going to resume my 'journal a day' practice for the next month. Except it will be 'journal every other day.'

Last night watched Taste of Cherry by Iranian director A. Kiarastami. A man drives around Iran in a car trying to find someone to help bury him after he commits suicide. That’s the story. It’s mostly all shot inside the man’s car. The people he meets are all men, and seem to represent the spectrum of people in today’s Iran (well, some spectrum). They are each deliberately noted as being from different places (Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Lorestan(?)) and work a variety of jobs that seem to represent roles in modern-day Iran—soldier, seminarist, guard. The movie ends with the man taking sleeping pills and lying down in the grave, as he’s told us he would. The ‘drama’ such as it is involves whether or not the man has taken enough sleeping pills to wake up or not (this is the role of the person who has to help him—either to wake him, in the morning, or bury him).

Movie was not what you’d called thrilling. In an interview on the DVD, Kiarastami talked about how he personally disliked movies that compelled you to be thrilled. Movies that grabbed hold of you and didn’t let you think. He said he preferred movies that you thought about for days after seeing them—even if, during the viewing, you fell asleep. Some of my favorite movies, he said, are ones I fell asleep watching. He went on to talk about how nice it is to nap in a movie. I think he was joking, a little. But maybe not. Anyway, the movie definitely had a soporific quality. I’m not sure I agree that that’s a useful or worthwhile goal. In fact I think it rather isn’t.

Also you never find out if the man wakes up or not. The movie's last scene is of the director and other film people (crew, cast) gathered on a ridge working to get the sound down for some shot in the film. Post modern flim flam, is how it felt to me.

I Didn't Know There Was A Basingstoke in Westphalia

2011-09-14T12:51:00.000-07:00

Spending all of the morning dealing with bank and mortgage people. Sweet lord is it difficult. We're refinancing our house. We have perfect credit, we have savings, we earn money--and still. They cavil and harass. The bank wants records and proof of everything. The amount of documentation we've been asked to provide--at this point I'm not going to be surprised if my middle school report cards have to get faxed somewhere. It's exhausting and aggravating but the banks have all the power; there are so many people right now trying to do refinances they can demand to see into every detail of your financial life. And you have to take it. It fills me with rage.

Other than that, not too much afoot. We're planning where to eat in New York City, in November. Also, what shows to see? So far our only decision: Anything Goes. Cole Porter + PG Wodehouse. What could be better than that? Also, the subject of a great, great Monty Python skit. (Starting above at the two minute mark) The dining options are, of course, insane. We've decided to leave Per Se for another time (a nine course four-hour tasting menu is more than we're ready for). I'm not sure what else we'll do. The Cloisters, I think, and maybe The Frick (where neither of us have been). Why are we planning now? It's fun to plan in advance--looking forward to things is a great source of human joy. Maybe the greatest? But before that can happen we have to get done with our mortgage people. And that will not be among the greatest of human joys. No, or even in the top ten....

Sail

2011-09-10T12:50:00.001-07:00

Dangerous? Yes. Insane? Probably. But also, strangely beautiful.

September 7

2011-09-07T13:21:00.000-07:00

I recommend this excellent if unsettling look at the malaise within the Republican party--from a Republican. Depressing but informative.

September 1

2011-09-01T21:15:00.000-07:00

I don't know why I didn't much want to write anything last week. I was sort of down. I don't know why. I felt creatively at an ebb; I wasn't inspired, I felt very blah. Maybe it was to do with what I've been reading? I always assume that it's garbage in, garbage out, and of late I've been reading a lot of blogs and newspapers but nothing really nutritive. I read the first Flashman novel, which was fun but not inspiring.

Now, for no reason I really know about, I've started reading Gogol's Dead Souls. So far it's pretty excellent. The wife and I are planning a trip to New York City in November and that has got me excited. Also, I've got a new deadline for the play. On September 15th, I'm sending into at least one contest. I also intend to send it some friends for feedback. The goal is to get it so that every page is a 'seven'--meaning on a scale of one to ten, that no page is worse than a seven. Hopefully many pages will be better. But they may not. The ultimate goal is to have it all to be an 'eight' with moments of nine and ten. But it's been harder than I anticipated to go from fives and sixes to seven. After this draft, I'll take comments, and do one more rewrite. And then, I'm done.

August 20

2011-08-20T16:25:00.000-07:00

Watched another movie by Ermanno Olmi, this one called Il Posto (the job, the position). I don't know if it's that I've learned a little now how to watch his films, or if I was just in a more receptive mood, of if it was just a better movie, but this one, unlike my last, really worked for me. Like a lot of semi-socialist working class art (the Realist novel, e.g.) Olmi's films are very much concerned with work--with what we do at our jobs. Il Posto is the story of a youngish man who applies for and ultimately gets a job working at a fairly vast sprawling company somewhere in Milan. (The factory and offices I learn later are based on Italy's Edison Corp, where Olmi himself worked until he was 33). Like i fidanzati, the story is fairly minimal. He takes the test to work at the corporation; he walks around Milan with a girl he has a crush on; he gets the job and goes to work; he tries to reconnect with the girl; he settles into the job. That's it. And yet the attention to detail, the versimilitude, the quiet beauty of so much of the action, elevates it into something mysterious and almost holy. At times it reminded me of Daumier. At times it reminded me of De Sico. But mostly it was like nothing else I'd seen. Highly recommended.

Addendum: in the interview with Olmi that came on the DVD, he specifically denied that his work belonged to the tradition of Italian Neorealism. The Neorealists, he said, used outdoor locations and a documentary feel, but their main characters were always portrayed by professional actors. Olmi on the other hand, used everyday people in making his films. No actors. Therefore, he claims, while he was influenced by Neorealism, he was not, himself, a part of that school. For whatever that's worth.

August 17

2011-08-17T14:44:00.000-07:00

Haven't watched any movies in a while, or read much. Without input there is no output. So I had a return to ANCIANT movie day, and watched an Italian film called I fidanzati ("The Fiancees" or "The Affianced"). Directed by Ermanno Olmi (whose work I don't know at all), the movie had very minimal story (at least in the sense of 'dramatic conflict that leads to self-realization.') It's about an industrial worker of some sort living in Milan who's transferred to Sicily for a few months. The literal and cultural distance between Milan and Sicily leads to tension between the man and his fiancee (who has not gone with him). The movie is essentially a series of Neorealist-tinged vignettes about life in backwards, peasant-dominated Sicily. The man goes to a festival, deals with a landlord, works in his factory--basically goes about day to day life. Nothing much happens, but by the end of the film when the man returns to Milan he and his fiancee have reconnected emotionally. Their distance and uncertainty has turned into true love, and we sense that their-long prolonged wedding will soon take place.

Like a lot of Neorealist cinema, the movie veered a bit too close to documentary to thrill me very deeply. It was pleasant and unthreatening and undemanding, but I don't know if it did that much for me one way or another--other than making me want to go to Sicily (which is striking and beautiful, in a harsh, spare way).

After the movie, I worked--from about 3 to 10. Trying to make the play shine and sparkle. Right now it's a car with a strong powerful engine but with holes in the floorboard and without a working turn signal, brake light, stereo, et. al. It'll go--even go fast, I think--but the ride isn't going to be too pleasant for whoever's inside. So I have to get some nice fabric on the dash and figure out how to make the seats comfortable and attend to a thousand uninspiring details that make the difference between bad and good and great. Then, we take it to the Dakar Rally, and whup up on people.

All right. Off to go walking.

August 14

2011-08-14T14:34:00.000-07:00

Terrible weak of recurring medical stuff (reactive hypoglycemia flaring back up) leading to muddle-headedness and depression. After making some diet adjustments (more slow carbs, especially in morning, careful rations of coffee) I think I've got thing back under control. Hard to perfectly control my blood sugar and still maintain a weight loss diet, however, though I think I'm getting back to it. Probably what messed things all up was the weekend in Vegas. No exercise, lots of fatty foods, not enough sleep.

Also very hard to get back into writing groove. Think that as of today I'm almost there. Before I left I was working twelve hours a day and had no problem getting down to work every morning. Now I find myself wanting to go check the internet every hour. The work I have done has been all right, but I haven't done enough of it. My hope is to have a rewrite done in a few weeks. At which point, we'll see.

On top of all this, Bink has decided that he needs to get up every night at 3 AM and howl for a while. Maybe he thinks the Redcoats are coming? I don't know. We've been experimenting with letting him roam around the house at night (instead of penning him up in the kitchen). It seems not to be working. The problem seems to be the neighborhood cats. They wander through our yard in the early morning and Bink feels the need to protest. The cats, of course, are unbothered. Not so his owners. The kitchen-penning must return, I fear.

Finished a very mediocre Balzac novel before going to Vegas (The Black Sheep). Now reading Herodotus, though not intently. Listening to Wodehouse's ultimate Jeeves and Wooster novel (Aunts Aren't Gentlemen.) Not his best by any means--most of the plot and characters feel much-recycled--but still not without its joys.

Two great TV shows to recommend: Workaholics, on Comedy Central, and Louie, on FX. Everyone knows about the latter, I think, but I'll add my voice to the chorus of those calling it the best show on TV. (The recent episode featuring Dane Cook turned out to be one of the most unexpectedly fascinating and--somehow--moving 30 minutes of TV I've seen in a while. A close second was the less recent one with Joan Rivers). Workaholics is a lighter, sillier show but still well worth watching. It's twenty-something guy humor, which is not a genre everybody necessarily warms to. (My wife, e.g., tends to hate it). But, for my money, it's about as good a representation of that kind of humor as I've seen in years. The actor's timing is especially noteworthy.

Terrible dreams last night in which my brother and a long-ago girlfriend conspired to keep me from attending my brother's wedding (to his current wife) and rehearsal dinner. I ended up crashing the latter, to the dismay of my entire family. Now all day I've felt this strong urge to apologize to various people for ruining an event that didn't happen. Hmm.

August 12: Republican Debates

2011-08-12T09:18:00.000-07:00

Ezra Klein's article in today's Washington Post opens as follows:

The most telling moment of Thursday’s GOP debate wasn’t when Michele Bachmann cooly stuck a knife between Tim Pawlenty’s ribs, or when Rick Santorum plaintively begged for more airtime, or when Mitt Romney easily slipped past questions about his record on health-care reform. It was when every single GOP candidate on the stage agreed that they would reject a budget deal that was $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases. Even Fox News’s Bret Baier couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. He asked again just to make sure the assembled candidates had understood the question.

That says it all for me. This is why I cannot seriously consider the Republicans as candidates.

August 10

2011-08-10T10:17:00.000-07:00

Every one of these articles is funny. They'll appeal especially to my D&D/Computer Gaming Friends and fans of "Comic Book Guy" from The Simpsons.

Sample excerpt (from "Don't Come Crying to Me When You Need Someone Who Speaks Elvish")

No, it is not easy, but you had already made some inroads. You recognized the essential difference between the Cirth "runes" of Balin's tomb and the Tengwar "letters" corrupted by Sauron upon the One Ring–so basic and fundamental a difference that many students overlook it, to their later dismay. And, although I feel the high-elven dialect of Quenya would have given you trouble and Valarin, the tongue of the Valar, would likely forever elude your grasp, I thought you certainly capable of one day becoming conversant–if not fluent–in Sindarin. But it was not to be, for you, like Radagast The Brown, have chosen the path of blissful ignorance. In so doing, you turn your back on the riches of the world.

August 9

2011-08-09T08:59:00.000-07:00

We got back from Vegas about 3 pm yesterday afternoon. Helicoptors swarmed above the freeway. One of the exits near to our house was entirely blocked off. We swung by the kennel and picked up the Monster (dirty, tired, and smelly) and took Sepulveda back over the hill. Police had cordoned off a neighborhood en route (Sherman Oaks). Turns out this was what the helicoptors were doing. My first guess was it was some kind of car chase. (They happen here with distressing regularity). We found out later that there'd been an armed robbery at a hair extension factory (!!) in our neighborhood. The thieves had broken in, taken 20K in high-end hair extensions, and then abandoned their van in the middle of a residential neighborhood. The police were trying to find them.

Then, we get home. I check my iphone. The stock market has gone down almost 700 points. The city of London is in flames. Waist-high weeds fill our front and back yard. (Our yardman is out of town). After dinner, I start to feel cloudy-headed and dizzy. My hypoglycemia, it seems, has returned.

It is not, in other words, good to be back.

First Draft Done! Going To Vegas

2011-08-05T15:10:00.000-07:00

The first draft of my play--the play I've been wrangling with for almost two years now--is done. It's rough and raggedy and definitely needs a rewrite. Said rewrite will start on Monday, when the wife and I return from a weekend in Vegas and some much-earned vacation. Hopefully that rewrite will take no more than about a month, after while time I'll...what? Send it out into the world to struggle and (one hopes) prosper. Of course what 'sending it out to the world' actually entails, or how I will do that, or how I SHOULD do that...I have no idea. But, that's a problem for another day.

I have a lot to say about that. The play was basically scrapped in its entirety on July 3rd (a very important date for me). I then rewrote it almost from scratch. The scrapping and rewrite were the result of what seems to me still to be maybe the most crucial insight or discovery about how to structure long narratives that I've ever had. In a way I feel as if I've unlocked the secret, although I now that feeling is at least in part illusory. Still, it's been a big month. I've understood something for the first time and I think it will help a huge amount going forward.

Also, totally unrelated as this is: I've decided that not only will I be voting for Obama next year but that I may actually give money to the Democratic Party. The Republican shenanigans with the debt ceiling last month, on top of the increasingly persuasive proof that our current deficit is as much the fault of George W as anyone else (J Chait in the New Republic has a good piece on this right now) combined with the fact that somehow Sarah Palin remains someone who's embraced by a sizable minority (at least) of the Republican Party... it's all too much for me. Obama hasn't been perfect, and the Democrats irk me in non-trivial ways. But, it doesn't matter. I'm done with them. They showed their true colors this summer I think and I for one did not like what I saw. (I suppose that opinion could change if the Republicans manage to nominate a moderate like Huntsman. But, they never will.)

Okay. Off to Vegas. Posting to resume (I hope) next week.

Programming Note

2011-07-28T14:20:00.001-07:00

Sorry that things have been so spotty around here. The wife and I are going to Las Vegas next weekend (first weekend in August) to see some friends. When I get back, I plan to resume regular posting. I think I'm going to aim to do my "30 Days of Posts" again, only this time space them out so that they fall every OTHER day. Hopefully this will allow me to have to more to say, as well as giving my loyal and scrappy readership a regular schedule of posts to look forward to. Or, alternately, to fear and despise. Whichever you all prefer.

Anyway, I'll be back with regular posts starting on August 8th.

More Evidence The End of The World Draws Nigh

2011-07-26T14:11:00.000-07:00

It's more or less common knowledge that The New York Times has been experiencing a steady decline in quality over the last decade. In the last year or so, I'd come to believe that they'd hit bottom; I didn't think they couldn't realistically get worse and still be a functioning newspaper. This Sunday's edition of The Book Review, however, pretty conclusively proves I was wrong.

July 18

2011-07-19T15:31:00.000-07:00

This will be a brief odd entry but I just was standing at my kitchen counter eating lunch and I had a thought: at this moment, right now, in time, I am truly happy. And I wanted to record it. Why was I happy? I walked this morning, did my pushups (140) and then grilled some chicken I had marinating overnight. I ate it with brown rice and reheated mustard greens from a few days ago, in front of the TV, watching part of a rerun of The Sopranos (where Johnny Sac changes his mind about killing Ralphie when he finds out his wife is cheating on her diet). Then as I was at the counter cleaning up everything I had a forkful of the mustard greens-not reheated this time-just out of the Tupperware, so that they were lukewarm. And then I had one more bite of chicken. The chicken was delicious. I've started grilling meat with the lid open, so that it takes longer but allows more heat to go on each side, resulting in a crispier harder 'bark.' I put maybe a smidge 'too much' pepper on it this time (white and black) but it turned out well despite that (perhaps because I had no garlic powder and had to use garlic salt, instead of pure salt and pure garlic powder as I do normally, thus making sure the ratio was 1:1?) Anyway. That's all. Because yesterday I for some reason read my old journal from when I was in [Midwestern town] with [old girlfriend] (who I've been thinking about recently, and recently tracked down her PhD thesis online and read that) and I don't know. I don't know what I thought reading that journal. It stirred some bewildering welter of emotions, but of what specifically that welter consists, I don't know.

So that's all. Just that I'm happy. The play seems to finally have a shape. The wife is in Rome, so I'm alone but not in a bad way. Knowing the current isolation will end makes it seem not like isolation, in a way. More like we're both away at work.

But that's all. The moment at the sink is the point. Because happiness is just a piercing moment now and again, and it passes so quickly it's usually not worth setting down. So I'm setting this down. (And also, I should say that I've felt more and more of those moments over the past few months. More than I have in a while).

That would be an interesting idea for a story, or some kind of devotional journal exercise at the minimum: "Moments of Happiness." Where everyday you set down something in your life that made you happy, for an instant, and that was it. "To Say Yes" What you were saying yes to that day.

Mega Wombat

2011-07-13T10:36:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Johannes for this link which includes the phrase 'rhinoceros-sized wombat.'

Thursday July 7

2011-07-07T09:40:00.000-07:00

Watched Jacques Becker's Casque D'Or last night. French gangsters fight over a woman ('a tart' as she's called by a respectable matron in the film) with predictably deleterious consequences. Well, maybe deleterious is too strong a word. There are a few slappings and one death, but as is typical with the 'hard men' one encounters in French movies, their toughness is foregrounded much less than their...well, Frenchness. They play backgammon and talk about cheese and engage in various other cultural cliches that make French movies of the era (it was shot in the 50s, but takes place around the turn of the century) so recognizable.

Listening to The Mating Season (another Jeeves and Wooster) on my daily walks right now. Just encountered one of the funniest Wodehouse scenes I can remember coming across, a village hall entertainment dominated by a family known as the Kegley-Bassingtons. Can't possibly do justice to it here. Enough to say that my estimation of Wodehouse's powers continues to balloon.

I haven't bought any new books in quite a while. Instead I've been reading the ones I've already got. I finished Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana last week; now I'm working on On Growth And Form. I've almost done with The Myth of Sisyphus (it's a hard slog) and am about halfway through Tomas Transtormer's Collected Poems. Wanting to read some plays yesterday, I got down an old anthology of Restoration drama. Then, ten minutes in, I remembered: I loathe Restoration Drama. So, instead, I'm reading some of the critical essays contained at the back of the volume (it's a Norton Edidtion, thankfully). The Transtormer poems have their moments but a lot of them seem to consists of a speaker describing a snow-covered road (or maybe a forest) in a muted and unadorned language. They're very Swedish, in other words (in the Ingmar Bergman sense. Not the ABBA sense) and thus do not accord with summer in the Valley in California. Where there are a relative paucity of snow-covered roads.

All These Moments. Will Be Lost

2011-07-01T22:46:00.001-07:00

July 1

2011-07-01T09:40:00.000-07:00

My current interest in samurai movies lead me last night to watch Sword of Doom, another classic of the genre. Directed by Kihachi Okamoto and released in 1966, Sword of Doom is the story of a cold, soulless semi-evil samurai named Ryunosuke. The first scene in the film shows him killing an old man on a pilgrimage to a shrine for no apparent reason and the rest of the movie continues in the same vein, with Ryunosuke's murders soon getting him expelled from his village. Forced to work as a hired gun in Edo, Ryunosuke becomes an assassin, spending his days gazing morosely into the distance and arguing with his wife (whom he's married after forcing her to have sex with him earlier in the film) and his nights killing other people for money. His 'empty style' of fighting makes him essentially impossible to defeat in battle, effectively draining the fight scenes of any suspense. There's a subplot about a brother of a man he's killed and his romance with a would-be courtesan, but mostly the movie is Ryunosuke, brooding. People who praise the film make much of the final ten minutes, an action sequence in which after going more or less insane, Ryunosuke attacks a houseful of armed men. For me, the ending didn't make up for the tedium of the first two hours. Lots of gorgeous and dramatic camera work, but not much of a story. (Apparently it was intended to be the first movie in a trilogy that was never made. Maybe that explains it).

For some reason I also watched half of the new episode of True Blood. Its incredible silliness intrigued me enough to want to know the backstory and that lead me to spend an hour reading episode summaries of the first three seasons. They were also silly. So, that's an hour I'll never get back.

Unsatisfying day of work yesterday. Feel down. Also, my blueberry muffin mix hasn't arrived in the mail. Isn't life hard enough already without having a tupperware of low fat blueberry muffins on hand to make it better?

June 28

2011-06-28T08:10:00.000-07:00

Today is the day called "Let's Find Out if The Home Warranty We've Been Shelling Out For All These Months Will Actually Help Us." A home warranty is essentially insurance. You pay a set fee (about 500/year) and in return, when anything breaks in your house, the home warranty people fix or replace it. At least, that's what they say. We've never used it. Today, though, I have people coming to look at the garage door opener and the kitchen vent. The garage door opener has been spotty since we moved here (I can usually get it to work but I sometimes have to wait outside the garage pushing the button for a long time to make that happen). The kitchen vent does work, technically (it blows air) but its power is so limited that it's effectively impossible to cook anything that produces any kind of odor or aroma. That's why I almost always either grill outside or make chinese food. I'd like to start pan frying fish, or roasting stuff in the oven, as I did in our old apartment. But right now doing so involves smelling up the whole house. A new vent might change all that.

So it'll be a morning of service men, not at all the kind of morning I enjoy. At the same time, our gardener and our cleaning lady are coming. So Eliot should be utterly and totally insane. All these invaders! They must be fought off! And what better way but by barking at them or, better, by taking his blanket in his mouth and shaking it back and forth with extreme vigor. That will show them! Or something.

June 27

2011-06-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

Watched Hobson's Choice last night, a David Lean movie set in the 1890s. Story is about a buffoonish domineering merchant who tries to prevent his three daughters from marrying. The heroine, his eldest daughter, contrives a way to escape the house by proposing to one of the cobblers who works in her father's shop. Cobbler is unwilling and confused but the eldest daughter is not to be denied; a force of nature, she succeeds in wrenching the cobbler out of her father's shop and ultimately setting him up in his own business. For me this is the best David Lean movie ever made. Highly, highly recommended. Dickens meets Balzac meet Daumier with top-notch performances by all involved (Charles Laughton as the blustering, bumbling father was particularly good).

More than halfway through Part I of Tom Jones on tape. Have to admit my appetite to keep reading has diminished. Not sure I'm ready for 20 more hours of this stuff.

Very difficult day of work. Am at the glowing core, where all the electric lines run together. Had one great idea and many bad ones. Blargh.

June 26

2011-06-26T09:09:00.000-07:00

New recipe for sauteed mustard greens quickly proving a favorite. Ate mustard greens, brown rice, and a bit of marinated grilled pork tenderloin last night (marinade is sirracha, worstershire, olive oil, garlic, brown sugar, salt, pepper). Healthy-ish and pretty tasty. No wine, despite the urge. Which is strong.

Per my recent exchange with JMW about Kurosawa (see below) I investigated his discography. Turns out he directed in the neighborhood of thirty films. Of those, I've seen about half. So I was wrong. I haven't seen near to all of his films. Nor am I likely to any time soon.

Today will be a day of work. Yesterday was a day of plumber. The plumber has come and fixed our sink. He has fixed my shower. He was explained to us the nature of the valve above our water heater and how it can be activated to release pressure in the system. Or something. I don't know, really. I think my wife and I together understand maybe 25% of what you need to know to own a house. Less, maybe. Now the wife wants to get a water softening system. Our dishes don't get clean when washed. She thinks this is due to our water being too hard. Our water is mean. It's tough, bitter, prison-yard water. It must be reformed. I needs schooling and Bible study. Love too, maybe. Presumably that now will happen. Well actually no it won't--not exactly. Water softening systems cost many thousands of dollars; installing one involves banging around in the pipes and maybe ripping open our walls. This we are not up for. Instead we will get a filtration system installed on the main line. This will filter all the water coming into our house. The virtuous water will be allowed in. The drug dealing water will not. That, at least, is the plan.

June 24

2011-06-24T09:51:00.000-07:00

Watched Kurosawa's Sanjuro yesterday. As my wife said, I must be at a point where I've seen nearly all his films. Funny thing is that the movies of his most people recommend have turned out not to be the ones I most prefer. Seven Samourai, Ran, Rashomon, High and Low--I've seen and enjoyed them all. Still, I think that Yojimbo, Hidden Fortress and Ikiru (movies typically not recommended to interested viewers just coming to K) are, in fact, his three best films. Also realized, watching Sanjuro (which was excellent) something so obvious it's probably not even worth stating: the Jedi Knights of Star Wars ARE samurai. Forces of good in a chaotic world moving from place to place trying to right wrongs, armed with only a sword and the power of their code. I know Lucas got the ideas of R2 and C3P0 from Hidden Fortress. I wonder how many other ideas he took from Kurosawa.

Fantastic day of writing yesterday. Maybe my best ever, in terms of the number of problems I solved. Possibly due to my new diet (oatmeal with fruit in morning, light snack at 11 am, no food till light dinner) and new walking regimen, but I feel physically as good as I have in years. Probably not drinking a bottle of wine every night helps but I think undereating slightly is also a plus. I'm more cheerful, more motivated, and more energetic.

Also want to talk about a fantastic Chekhov story I read last night ("The Student") but I'll put that for later. I've almost finished my book on cell biology. Next I'm starting a book I read about on John's Second Pass site--On Growth And Form. Should be interesting.

June 23

2011-06-23T08:59:00.000-07:00

Just got an email from amazon recommending I buy Yes's "Close to The Edge." In college, my freshman year, I listened to that album almost every day, turned up as loud as my roommate's stereo could go (well not that loud. But very loud). The whole dorm came to know it. But amazon is right; it is the definitive prog rock album. One I haven't heard in a long time. Time to rectify that maybe? Chris Squire's bassline is the crucial element.

Yesterday a long wasted time of waiting for a plumber who never arrived. Took Binks to groomer and read my book about cell biology. I should write more about it later. Right now I have to go take the wife's car to have its oil changed. So much time in my life and yet the errands seem to devour it.

June 21

2011-06-21T09:32:00.000-07:00

Well vacation's done and I'm back at work. The wife is now in DC, at a conference. I'm pushing the boulder back up the hill again, after a long time ignoring both boulder and hill.

Yesterday a long work day. After a week or so away it went slowly. So much I realize is kept in my head usually--about what's going on, what's supposed to happen at set parts--that coming back after a time away involves not just going back to the problem(s) to solve but refamiliarizing myself with the whole contraption, as it were, of the play.

Bink has been exhausted since we got him from the vet. Yesterday I started to be worried that he was TOO tired--even he usually doesn't sleep all day. Without the wife here to consult with my paranoia tends to grow. Another of the many benefits of not being alone--keeping you grounded in reality. In fact, the Bink was just tired but I couldn't help checking up on him as he slept in various points and positions throughout the day, making sure he was still breathing. Which is somewhat odd. Strange that I would worry about him sleeping, something I usually wish he did more of (especially when I work). Any variation from routine seems ominous, I guess.

Have joined audible.com and am enjoying the new frontier of books on tape. Walking about 45 minutes a day, it's astonishing how much 'reading' you can get through. My first book was Jeeves in the Morning; now that I'm done with it I've moved on to something more ambitious (and much longer)--Tom Jones. So far, it's been excellent. It's also something like 60 or 70 hours long (in three parts) so it should last me the better part of the summer. And it's a book I've never read. Nor really ever wanted to (strongly). I picked it to listen to because it came highly rated on the audible web site. So far, I'm not disappointed, although I do miss Cecil Beaton imitating Jeeves' voice. One benefit of listening to a book (not reading it) is that it's impossible to skim. I realize, as I walk, that I have a tendancy to not attend too carefully to passages I either find difficult or tedious. Listening that's not possible. You 'read' every word. With Wodehouse that was an undoubted benefit; he puts so much care into his language that missing even a word or two really matters. I think it will hold true with Fielding as well (though I've already noticed a tendency to repeat himself and overlabor certain ironies--something more common in the 18th century, it seems to me. It's as if irony needed to be more explained because people weren't so used to it.)

No tutoring for the next month at least so it's time to really work. And diet. Those are two big agendas for the next few months.

June 8

2011-06-08T09:37:00.000-07:00

This will be my last post for the next week. We're going tomorrow to Houston, for a wedding, after which time we're going to Puerto Rico for a vacation. The vacation will involve lying in the sun, drinking things with Rum in them, playing low stakes roulette and, undoubtedly, bacon. (The breakfast near where we stay is one of the main attractions of the trip). My nascent diet will have to be put on hold for the next week. But that's okay. I've already lost a few pounds and I'm confident I can return to LA and get back to it without any hiccups.

Sadly, the Binks is going to have to be boarded during all this--at the NEW KENNEL. We've been acclimating him by taking him to the new place once a week for the last month. Hopefully he'll be able to bear it without being too upset. We are already the both of us fairly upset. He's so small and helpless! How will he hold up with all the other dogs? What if one of them picks on him? What if he forgets to drink water? What if he gets lonely in the night? What if he thinks we've abandoned him forever? What if the kennel where he's staying is invaded by an alien race and it's up to him to push the one button that will send them back to their home world but he hasn't gotten enough sleep and he pushes the wrong button, the one that lets them take over our planet?

It's all very worrying.

June 6

2011-06-06T09:39:00.000-07:00

Watched The Long Good Friday last night, starring a young Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren. A british gangster tries to go legit by interesting American investors in a project to turn parts of London into a site for the '88 Olympics. The story and style were hit and miss for me (great late 70s keyboard parts, however) but the acting--especially that of Hoskins--was spot on. Something about watching a British gangster movie makes me want to start calling my phone "the blower." "Get on the blower to Tommy and tell him we need shooters," is the kind of thing one wants to say, having seen a movie like that.

Listening to Jeeves in the Morning on my walk right now. A long-ago gift given by Johannes. The older I get the more I admire PG Wodehouse's prose style. The high tone and convoluted diction is meant as a joke, of course, but that doesn't make accomplishing it any less difficult. Wodehouse gets it right every time; he's a great crafter of sentences, among his many other virtues.

Our tecate tile back patio is currently being cleaned and treated by a workman. How does the Monster feel about this, you might ask? Not good. He is yowling and whimpering vociferously from the other room. It's a hard life, being a small bear. Only you can detect the danger that lurks in the hearts of the people your foolish owners let into your backyard. The price of freedom, as The Binks reminds me often, is eternal vigilance. Also, huge amounts of sleep. And treats. But mostly, eternal vigilance.

Sunday June 5

2011-06-05T10:09:00.000-07:00

Twice in the last two weeks the wife and I have spent close to 300$ on dinner for two. Last night it was at Providence, a highly rated and regarded LA seafood restaurant. (Seems like it maybe aspires to be the Le Bernadin of LA?) And like last week, the meal did not come close to living up to its billing. Was it good? Absolutely. Were there moments of brilliance? Yes: there were moments. But for that amount of money, I don't want moments of brilliance: I want only brilliance. I don't want dry duck or octopus that's rubbery. I want perfection. And this was not perfection. Not even close.

So, that makes me kind of grouchy. I feel like I've been suckered, slightly. But oh well. What can I do? And the service, I must say, was impeccable. As you would expect.

I want to write about the moving and fascinating This American Life I listened to yesterday while walking (4.5 miles) but I don't have energy now. If you go to their website, where you can download all their episodes to listen to, it's called something to the effect of "If Kids Ruled The World." It was put out in the last year and was absolutely first-rate. Highly highly recommended. Moving and funny and thought-provoking. Great great stuff.

Day 88

2011-06-03T10:25:00.000-07:00

Listened to a fascinating "This American Life" yesterday (part of my walking regimen: walk a few miles, and listen to TAL). The subject was tenacity; people who don't give up, who refuse to give up, even when all available evidence suggests that they really really should. The most interesting story was about a guy in Orange County who thought, when Conan O Brien left NBC, that he might try and be his replacement. To get the job, he decided to start his own talk show. In his house. (His bedroom, actually). Which he did. It ran for more than two years, and involved a house band, writers to do monologues, guests, a sidekick, and, eventually, an audience numbering as high as 70 or 80 people. (They eventually moved from his bedroom to a Veteran's Hall). He quit his job, depsite not having much savings, and dedicated all his time and energy to the talk show. In the process, he almost wrecked his marriage, went heavily into debt, and, as you might guess, did not end up replacing Conan. Insane insane stuff. (The show by the way was called The Duke Finemaster show, and apparently exists on YouTube).

Watched Fassbinder's "The Marriage Of Maria Braun" yesterday as well. A bit too random in structure for me--biographical obviously, but still--but still worth the time. Fassbinder is a director I know very little about.

How the Mavericks managed to win that game yesterday I don't know. All I know is that it made me excited enough that I was actually shouting inside our house, at ten in the evening. I'm not even that big a basketball fan. It was just a great game. And it at least gave us all in the good part of America hope that the Heat might have a chance to lose. And suffer for their sins.

Day 87

2011-06-02T08:39:00.000-07:00

Woken by prolonged and unsettled howling. Thought for sure the house was being broken into. Of course it wasn't. Apparently another dog a few blocks off had started barking and Binks, in a show of solidarity, had thought it best to bark along with him. For twenty minutes. Loudly. I was in the middle of a vivid dream involving training to teach middle school at my old Houston area school. For months I had been trailing around a middle school geometry teacher, helping her in the classroom, and trying to learn how to be a good teacher. Then, when filling out my evaluation, my mentor teacher informed she had debated between giving me "twos or ones" but decided to give me all ones. She THEN told me that ones were the worst rating there was. I had no future as a teacher, that was the basic gist. It was very unsettling. A large amount of my dreams seem to involve failure. Is this common?

The Stephen J Gould book (The Flamingo's Smile) continues to be excellent. Fascinating essay last night about the way flamingos eat by turning their heads upside down to dip them in water. Upside down eating posture explains their strange smile, in which the lower and upper jaw seem to be reversed. I also learned that flamingos eat in much the same way as great whales, by using filters in their mouth to remove tiny particulate foodstuff from the water. Their tongues are thick and fleshy (unusual for most birds, who tend to have thin, stringy tongues) in order to aid in the filtering process.

Long day of errands yesterday will give way to long day of work today. Doctor went fine (although I learned I now weight close to 200 pounds!), tux place went fine, it all went fine. Now it's time for TCOB.

Day 86

2011-06-01T09:19:00.000-07:00

I've gone to an every other day type posting deal as some may have noticed. Try and contain your sorrow and despair at not reading me every day. It's hard but it'll get better.

Doctor's appointment today to get me some more of that good thyroid medicine I love so much. That means today will be another day of errands, since I do have other things to do (get contacts, pick up tux alteration, buy new mustache wax) and since the doctor's thing already comes in my sweet spot for writing. It's my 2:30-5:30 work, after I've run, when I've got some endorphins when the morning's thinking starts to yield results. Sometimes. So today is another day off, of which I've had too many. But it must be done.

Heat's win seemed inevitable last night. They played the same as in Chicago. They hang around for three quarters, doing nothing spectacular but keeping close enough to prevent a blowout. Then, come fourth quarter, they unleash their superstars. Dallas had all kinds of chances to put the game away before then--for all the talk about the Heat's stifling defense the Mavs had a TON of open looks--but it didn't happen. Too many turnovers and too many missed shots. I'm starting to worry it's going to be Heat in four or five. At least give us a series, Mavs!

I wonder if LeBron genuinely regrets "The Decision." If he could do it all again, would he do the big public announcement? And if the answer is 'no' is it because he actually gets why people found it so galling, or just because, having seen the negative reaction, he doesn't want to repeat it. Like a small child who touches something hot--he may not understand why he got burned but he knows he doesn't want to do it again.

Also let me say I really like the Breen/Jackson/Van Gundy announcing team. Their personalities mesh very well. Van Gundy can be ridiculous--the lengths he'll go to apologize for or otherwise excuse star players never cease to amaze--but he knows the game and he's funny. Mark Jackson always seems to be auditioning for a coaching job with his commentary but oddly I find that endearing. And Breen does a nice job of mediating between the two, occasionally provoking and sometimes conciliating. I wish they called baseball too. Maybe I'd watch more games.

Day 84

2011-05-30T09:01:00.000-07:00

Worked most of yesterday, into the night. New ideas getting harder and harder to come by. Earlier, when I said I'd solved all big problems: that was incorrect. Turns out a small crack can hide a big chasm. But that chasm is being filled. Thought by thought, agonizing intuition after agonizing wiping out of prior agonizing intuition.

A break is needed.

New books arrived, including The Flamingo's Smile, a collection of essays by Stephen Jay Gould. Don't know why, but I've never read any of his material before (maybe an odd piece in the New Yorker). So far I'm thrilled with the book. I'm more interested in natural history/popular science these days, and Gould is about the best writer in that genre I've found. Also, the fact that it's a book of essays makes it easy to dip in and out of. (I also started The Myth of Sisyphus, but that's clearly going to require more concentration.)

Tutoring all afternoon. Then, leftover pozole. Got a great new recipe. Stewed pork! It's what's for dinner....

Day 82

2011-05-28T10:07:00.000-07:00

Woken this morning by loud and prolonged howling. Wife got up and for some reason left the Monster out to run around (his usual routine is to go back in kitchen lair rest area after wife wakes up and feeds). He sat by the window, I guess, and got angry at the cats. Too much yowling.

Finished two books yesterday--The Comedians and The Ghost Soldiers. The latter got better the more I read it; the former did not. I'm trying to finish the Eco book but the writing is so poor it's difficult. It actually makes me angry this book was reviewed as well as it was. It reads as if it were written by a computer program trying to mimic English--a computer program written by someone who doesn't speak English, even. It's filled with all sorts of glaring grammatic errors, and the prose style is muddy and awkward beyond belief. Half the time I read it I honestly can't figure out what the meaning is supposed to be, so poorly phrased is so much of it. How could anyone recommend this book?

I ordered nine more books online yesterday. Tried to start reading Passage To India yesterday but it didn't do much for me. Maybe another time. I've ordered a lot of books on genes and natural history; I think it's time to read some non fiction.

Diet continues. No alcohol and long walks in morning (plus cardio, etc). I feel like I'm fighting a war against my stomach. Every day I look down at him like he's an arch enemy. Eventually he will be defeated. But he is a wily and relentless opponent--he won't go quietly.

Day 80

2011-05-25T11:30:00.000-07:00

Going to get my tux altered for an upcoming wedding I had the unpleasant experience of learning that I have gained so much weight that the pants are beyond alteration. Sweet lord how depressing. I started a diet last week but I guess it'll take a long long time to get down to where I was when I married. I've been trying to find a tennis clinic group out here but the coach keeps offering me times that conflict with my tutoring. I think he's given up on me as a result. The real key for me is eating dinner no later than 6:30. That, however, is often not possible if I want to eat with the wife. Stephen Fry seems to have a lost a lot of weight by walking every day. Maybe that's a way to go. Not that I don't exercise. I do. But clearly I need to do more. How else will I be able to appear in Milan for the 2012 collections?

Day 79

2011-05-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

The End of the Affair

When we last left our hero (and Johannes) they were sitting in their rental house reading and waiting to go back to the concert venue. We were both of us, I think, steeling ourselves for a fairly unpleasant concert.

And then we got there.

And it was fine. Better than fine...it was outstanding. The wind, while not completely gone, had subsided enough to be pleasant. The music was underway, and it was excellent. El Ten Eleven, the first band we saw, consists of only a drummer and a guitar/bassist. The guy (let's call him the bassist, since that's his primary wombat) plays a riff to the drums and loops them into a pedal. The riff repeats and he plays a new riff over it. Pretty soon a fairly complicated set of interlocking patterns has built up from all that looping. (He alternates between guitar and bass while effecting his loops, using a double-neck instrument for most of the set). The songs build slowly, gathering in intensity as the loops accumulate. Then, inevitably, he does something that strips away all but one or two of the built-up loops. The tension subsides, and then there's another round of loop-building.

Some of the songs do tend to sound alike. But the thrill of watching Kristian (that's the loop-builder's name) build up each new song from nothing was significant. He was also plainly very happy to be up there performing and his joy rubbed off on the crowd. Neither J or I was necessarily expecting that El Ten Eleven would put on a great live show. But in fact, they did.

After El Ten Eleven came Rubblebucket, a Brooklyn-based band which featured a horn section, eight or nine members, and a lot of uptempo craziness.

The El Ten Eleven experience was about standing and listening. The Rubblebucket experience was about dancing. Sadly for everyone there are no pictures of me dancing. But dance I did. Because that is what I am all about.

Rubblebucket was a more satisfying live music experience, for me, than El Ten Eleven. They got the crowd riled up, they laid down some grooves, they had a trumpet player who did some body-surfing in the crowd while he played. They had a percussionist. It was high-energy stuff. Great ending to the show.

I'm going to pass over the EmCee who asked us to observe a moment of silence so we could 'feel the desert' and then told us to try and practice "Wishcraft." (By praying for world peace or some such). Certain kinds of hippies can actually make me want to vocally support war. He was one of them.

On the way out, we stopped at the shrine that had somehow been assembled in the middle of the music area. It's hard to do justice to its good-natured insanity in only a few photos. But I'll try:

The large figure in the center is the Virgin Mary. The other figures around her are..uhm...NOT the Virgin Mary.

On the way out Johannes insisted we stop and take a photo of an airplane that someone had mounted near the entrance of their property. Apparently, in doing so, he fell over and ended up rolling around in the dust. Sadly I missed that spectacle.

That night we ate leftovers, watched True Grit, and generally chilled out. I learned J thinks Matt Damon is a bad actor. He learned that I disagreed. We agreed, as I recall, that I was right. About that, and just about everything else.

The next morning we got up, cleaned, and headed out. (Finishing off a few of the blueberry muffins I'd made before we left). I dropped J off at the Palm Springs airport and headed back.

Day 78

2011-05-23T09:59:00.000-07:00

Today is going to be a day of errands. Have to get tux fitted for upcoming wedding, go to doctor, go to optometrist, all sorts of good stuff. Tutor. Binks will be alone all day which means, I don't know what.

I'm going to finish the trip report tomorrow or the day after. Right now I'm going to go exercise before my day of driving around. Nice dinner last night with wife at our local neighborhood bistro, but it involved me eating more, and later into the night, than I have been for at least a week. I'm on a mini-diet right now, in preparation for our upcoming June vacation to Puerto Rico ("Port of Rico.") So nothing big here today, I guess.

Day 77

2011-05-22T11:01:00.000-07:00

Very tired after a late night working and poor, dream-confused sleep. The Comedians is excellent but grim. The last half of Get Him To The Greek, which I caught last night when trying to fall asleep, was fairly good. It's very dark here now which is unusual for LA. My 13 year old just took a second SAT. He did worse on this one than the past two. That is not at all good. I meet with him tomorrow. We'll see.

Day 76

2011-05-21T09:46:00.000-07:00

Two more photos from the hike

A few things I forgot to mention about the events in the last trip report:

-After failed hike to sculpture garden but before successful hike in cattler rustler's canyon (rustle rustle) esteemed companion Johannes repaired both of our holey shoes using needle and thread. I guess all those years he told me he was doing a surgery residency weren't wasted.

-J and I can't be around each other for any length of time without one of us (me usually) finding some subject to repeatedly mock about the other. This time it was Google Maps. For the first day we were together J seemed to be checking his iphone every ten minutes. Then, on the drive, any time I wondered out loud if a gas station were near or where we should eat he would inevitably respond, "why don't we check Google Maps?" After a while I had the idea that everything J did was based on google maps and that all questions that the world could offer could be answered using it. So, for the rest of the weekend, any time either of us had any question about anything, I would say, "Check Google Maps." What year did Proust finish In Search of Lost Time? Who's the starting goalie for Manchester United? What kind of bird is that, there in the road? All of these questions, I suggest, should be--nay, must be--answered using Google Maps. At one point, after telling J that if he checked Google Maps he could actually see into the future, I started laughing so hard I had to pull the car over. I'm laughing now just thinking about it.

I'm not sure Johannes thought it was as funny.

-On our cattle rustler's hike, we got a brochure that showed photos of animals common to Joshua Tree. Among them was something called the Dusky Chipmunk. Because we are, basically, both of us nine years old, this also struck us as hilarious. Everywhere we looked dusky chipmunks seemed to frolic. In great thundering herds they ate up the horizon blacking out the land like locusts.

Well, not really. But in our imaginations.

* * *

Okay, back to the narrative....

When we last left our two (dusky) heroes they had completed a grueling one-mile hike in Joshua Tree National Forest. That over, we (they) headed to the festival. The band we both wanted to see (El Ten Eleven) didn't go on until four pm, but we figured we'd get there early and enjoy the atmosphere. Ogle the hippies, as it were. I don't know. (Originally, we'd planned to go to the festival when it opened at 11 am, but after Johannes found a video on YouTube of the morning's featured artist playing an instrumental piece on his guitar entitled "Dolphin Love Bliss" (really), we reconsidered. Wisely, I think. There's only so much dolphin sex I can listen to in the morning.)

Anyway, we got the fest around two. Here are some photos of what we saw walking in.

The fire truck was notable for having a plaque on it that said "Dr Bronner's Magical Soap." As long-term blog readers will remember, I wrote at length about a documentary the wife and I saw when we first moved to LA about said Dr Bronner. He is, to put it succinctly, a fascinating and fairly insane human being. (He thought part of the secret of the history of the universe involved Mark Spitz.) I have no idea how that fire truck connected to the good Doctor, but that's okay. I still liked it.

The "Free Dancing" sign was in front of an area closed off by RVs and the fire truck. Inside it, people were listening to a heavy-beated reggae and shaking somewhat rhythmically.

The giant rocking horse speaks for itself.

I regret not taking a picture of the large purple amethyst-shaped structure where people could sit to absorb the healing energies of the planet. It's probably because I was too distracted by the wind.

Because let me tell you: there was some wind.

We had prepared, in packing to go to Joshua Tree, for extreme heat. We'd brought sweaters and jeans and jackets for the cold. But we had not prepared to be in a sandstorm. And unfortunately it was a sandstorm (or close to) that greeted us that Sunday afternoon at the festival. Sand was everywhere. It blew into our eyes, it blew into our mouths, it made it almost impossible to stand facing anywhere but away from the wind. It was miserable. There was no way you could watch music in that kind of environment. That's not true. You could watch it; you just couldn't enjoy it. Standing there it felt like we were seconds away from being lifted up and taken away to Oz.

So, after a brief debate, we left. The plan was to come back in an hour and hope that the wind had died down. Neither of us were especially optimistic that would happen (it had been at least moderately windy the whole time we were there). Nevertheless, after scarfing down the chicken curry burritos we'd bought from one of the few food tents that hadn't shut down due to sand blasting damage we drove back to the house feeling, both of us, far far less dusky than we had on the drive in.

Although the burritos, it should be said, were excellent.

To Be Continued....

Day 75

2011-05-20T11:46:00.000-07:00

I am going to continue my trip report tomorrow, I think. It takes more time to deal with the photos and today I'm going to focus on work.

I worked all day and into the night yesterday. I have solved all the large to medium/large problems in the play and am now left with small to medium problems. I had thought this advance would be welcome. Instead I find myself missing the large problems. The large problems intimidate because they seem unsolvable. The small problems, however, seem so picayune as to be beneath one's effort and time. For example, Sam, one of my characters, has gotten fired before the play starts. The reason she got fired could or could not be important. I mean, I could make it interesting and expositive of her essential flaws and character (and should, I know). Or I could just say she did some random X and move on. It's not a sexy question, at least not yet. But I have to infuse her backstory with the same amount of effort and love as everything else. Genius, as Henry James said, is an infinite capacity for taking pains. I think about that quote often. (I'm not saying I'm a genius, obviously. But only that it's what I aspire to.. genius in the work, I mean. In this work at least). It's like in Pawn of Prophecy (another touchstone book in my life, believe it or not)--Durnik telling Garion that he works as hard on the iron joints that are under the wagon, that no one will see, as those above.

Actually that's not relevant here, now that I think about it. Sam's backstory will be seen, albeit glancingly. The point is, yes, big things are made of small things, and God is in the details and all that, but details are hard to engage for the very reason that they are details. You want to build continents, not figure out the color pattern on the scales of the snake that lives in one corner of the barn in the hero's first girlfriend's barn. But, in the end, that's how you build a continent. By working out all the snake scales.

Day 74

2011-05-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, my friend Johannes sent me some of the approximately 40000 photos he took while at Joshua Tree. I'm putting a few up right now, with the idea that I'll do more later.

The hotels around the festival grounds were cheap and desultory so we stayed in someone's home. (This seems the normal way, from what I could gather). I booked the place at the last minute so I didn't have high expectations, but it turned out great. This is the view from our back porch. That's a fire pit. There was also a hot tub, a horseshoe pit, and a charcoal grill.

Both nights we were there, J made fires inside that fire pit. In so doing, he proved his barbaric machismo. I grilled hamburgers, and onions, and zucchini. J insisted we grill a cucumber. I don't know why. Well, yes I do. It's because he's not very bright.

This was one of the numerous artworks inside the house where we stayed. It was by far the most disturbing. (Many were actually pretty nifty. My favorite was a butterfly made by looping thread around nails, that hung in the bathroom). It hung above and to the left of the TV and seemed to follow you about the house with its deep mysterious eyes.

After we got there, on Saturday, we went to the store and bought supplies. (Wisely, we did NOT check before heading out to see what supplies the house had already, so we ended up buying a lot of stuff we didn't need. Oh well.) When we got back we decided to hike from our house to a nearby sculpture garden. All the roads were unmarked and both of us had, for some reason, decided to set out on a hike on sandy roads wearing shoes with holes in them. We quickly accumulated large coatings of grit around our feet. After a time, we gave up the quest for said sculpture garden and turned back. As we passed one of the houses on the way back, a fairly angry-seeming dog popped out from behind its fence and ran into the road behind us, growling and barking. Johannes and I moved past it quickly, worrying somewhat that it might try to attack. As soon as we passed its property, however, it stopped and watched us depart.

Oh, also, J kept trying to tell me it was a coyote. Probably the thoughts of the upcoming cucumber-grilling had confused him.

The next morning we went hiking in Joshua Tree National Forest. The first photo shows a large expanse of said trees. The second shows one of the views of the hike ("Hidden Valley.") The hike involved a box canyon where cattle rustlers used to go to hide out and rebrand their stolen cattle. I made a mental note of the place, planning on going there with my next herd of rustled vicuna.

Here are a few more hike-related photos, taken from my camera:

To Be Continued....

Day 73

2011-05-18T09:27:00.000-07:00

Got back from Joshua Tree on Monday afternoon. Hoping to put up many photos as well as a blog post from travel companion and stalker of the dusky chipmunk, Johannes. If not, I'll post about it myself, but not at this moment. The very short summary was that the trip was great in many ways; the music was only a small part of the enjoyment, and there was much merriment and a certain amount of paintings of rabbits with antlers. Jackalopes, as it were. Also, an iron sculpture of the head of a bull. And a large dodecahedral building (at the festival) painted purple, meant to represent an amethyst, that was supposed to channel and direct the energies of the universe to anyone who sat inside. The inside was painted green. Something to do with the different chakras that green and purple represent, respectively. I don't know. The festival, in other word, was a thing of for and by hippies, but LA hippies more than San Fran hippies. So, more yoga and insane philosophy (something called the 528 movement, which I have to research) and less "groovy let's end the war by meditating." Although there was some of that too.

But it was all pretty great. And I will post more about it soon including, I hope, some photos. (Johannes was a madman with the camera).

Day 69

2011-05-14T10:31:00.000-07:00

About to hit the road to Joshua Tree. Yesterday had some good mojo, including a visit to a 'doctor' who told me she liked to round down blood pressure numbers from odd to even ("I like to round down to the even number") and a store with a weekly fight night run by an amateur cage fighter (Johannes got in there and threw him around, just to show him). Wife got home very late, unfortunately, but still time for good banter and shenanigans.

Idea for a skit we came up with: before (or after) the wave of beaver trapper come to canada, a wave of porcupine trappers. Try to make coats out of the fur, find they're painful and unpleasant to wear. Then, hit upon the beavers instead.

Back in two days. Electric hippies, here we come...

Day 68

2011-05-13T09:41:00.000-07:00

Well I put up an entire post yesterday about the Joshua Tree Music Festival (where I'm going, with Johannes, tomorrow) and now it's gone. This makes me grouchy. I had cut and pasted descriptions of some of the artists playing at the fest into the post. Oh well. Not sure what happened there. Problem with blogger. It was up for a while, anyway.

Going to get Johannes at airport, then buying supplies of all sorts. Probably we should get javelins, I think. And scuba equipment. So there's a lot to do. Right now am very groggy. Worked all last night on play. Watched first 2/3 of Floating Weeds, surely one of the best movies ever made. (Last saw it circa 2005, so it's essentially new to me at this point). Poor wife is working all day and all night. Luckily she gets off service today. She needs a break.

Day 66

2011-05-11T09:47:00.000-07:00

Turns out my American History student is actually taking Modern European History and that she wanted help not preparing for a test, but writing a paper. The subject? Was Marshall Petain a patriot or a traitor? (Her answer: the latter). At the end of the session, I told her to rent The Sorrow and the Pity because, well, it's so good. The best documentary ever made. (Really. HIGHLY recommended. Long, but easy to break into separate viewing sessions). Also, it's about Vichy France. So there was some relevance.

It turns out she got the idea to write about Petain through Lord of the Rings. (She was curious about "You shall not pass!" which lead her to Verdun which lead her to Petain). So, that endeared me to her, obviously. Not that I much like LOR (I was never a Tolkein head), but that she displayed that level of geekiness. It's what we like to see.

As I told her, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that every single French play written between the years of 1945 and 1970 deals in some way with the legacy of Vichy. At least every one that I've ever read. Novels too, I'm sure. And since I was a French major in college, I had to endure quite a number of said plays. Of course at no point during those studies did we actually learn the details of what HAPPENED in France during the War (events are so pedestrian), but still. It's a subject near and dear to my heart. And Sartre's. "Do not be a collaborationist pig," was essentially the summation of my college studies in French Literature. A lesson I still follow to this day.

So my reading up on the Grange and the Haymarket strike and the Taft Administration will avail me nothing. Oh well.

More tutoring this afternoon and evening. I've started reading Graham Greene's The Comedians, about the situation in Haiti in the 60s.

Day 65

2011-05-10T10:08:00.000-07:00

Terrible day yesterday; Binks ate a half a bag of almonds on Sunday night (left on an end table; he pulled them down and chewed through the bag). So yesterday he was terribly sick. Profuse vomiting and diarrehia in morning followed by a long day of general physical discomfort. I spent the morning and early afternoon following him around and watching to make sure he didn't get worse and occasionally taking him outside, to vomit and excrete. A good moral for you kids out there: if you eat a quarter of your weight in roasted almonds, you will be sick.

Binks, I'm sure, had no idea why he'd woken up so sick. The idea of connecting his Sunday night's depredations with his Monday morning illness would not occur to a dog. And thankfully he's now back to normal. But yesterday was stressful. Poor Bear!

* * *

Finished Howard's End, a book whose final 2/3 do not live up to the promise of its opening. Not a terrible book, but one deeply flawed--by a semi-incoherent philosophical substructure; by a massive implausibility at the core of its plot (Margaret's marrying Mr Wilcox); and by a prose style that lurches dangerously between the archaic, the glib, and the sermonizing.

Watched Kurosawa's Stray Dog yesterday, about a Tokyo cop whose quest to find a stolen gun leads to a larger examination of post-war Japan. Found the pacing tedious but still enjoyed a number of the set sequences.

Today I go back to tutoring American History. Mostly I get my American History tutoring jobs at the end of the year--May and June. That means that this time of year I have to reread American History textbooks to prepare. Right now I'm reading about the Grange. No one ever talks about the Grangers anymore. Why is that?

Day 64

2011-05-08T17:18:00.000-07:00

There's an emotional and spiritual vagueness to Howard's End, a kind of murky sense of half-felt emotion that I associate with Bloomsbury, turn-of-the-century literature. Victorian certainty has begun to erode but it isn't gone altogether, and the hard clear lines of Modernism haven't yet emerged. It's a strange era and the book has that strangeness about it. I don't entirely know what to make of it.

Day 63

2011-05-08T10:45:00.000-07:00

Back to work today after a day of errands (contact lens issues) and tutoring. The White Noise session was even more painful than I anticipated; luckily my student had a good handle on what she wanted to say and we didn't have to work too long. No caffeine yesterday which meant I slept long and deep and now feel great. Dreams were intense and weird but I won't go into them. I'm getting near the end of Howard's End but I'm going to wait and post about it when I've done. I'm resolved to finish at least three of the books I have going right now in the next week. Eco's History of Beauty will be next, and then James Tate's book of poetry (which is starting to grow on me). Discovered yesterday that our back yard now holds a second bee hive (we've had one from the time we moved in). Seems like a lot of bees for one yard. On one hand, they're good for the plants. On the other hand, they are bees. May need to have that taken care of, though I'd prefer to just ignore it. That's the best way most of the time, I find. Just ignore things, and let 'em fix themselves.

Day 62

2011-05-07T10:28:00.000-07:00

Tutoring session last night with my 13 year old went fairly well. Mother thankfully did not blame me at all for son's recent so-so showing on practice SAT. Turns out many of his problems were due to the intense pressure he puts on himself to succeed. In doing timed test sections with me, in his house, he feels relaxed and is able to work. Doing the same sections at a test site, he seizes up. He's one of the few students I've ever had who puts more pressure on himself than I do--who wants him to do well more than I do. Except his wanting to do well does not necessarily translate each week into him doing all his homework. Anyway, I tried to calm him somewhat about the test, reminded him that, after all, he was only 13 (and still scoring better than half my 17 year olds). I've only tutored one other 13 year old in recent memory, and that one was a while back. I think I've kind of lost sight of their unique psychologies. He's a fascinating boy.

Today is a day of not writing. Instead I'm going to run errands all day. I have to tutor this afternoon; then I'll cook dinner. My student today needs help getting ideas for an essay. The essay's subject? What else. It's White Noise. The book I revile the most. The book I spent two weeks writing mini essays about my several years ago (in this blog), trying to explain al that was bad about it...it's back. That means I'm going to have to skim it this afternoon, and then, worse, pore through it, this evening, to help my student. It's like some horrible overrated post modern vampire. You keep thinking that it's dead and it keeps coming back to fight with you....

* * *

Here's a great link, to a visual essay about the role of dogs in war. Very moving (in a good way) with some pretty incredible photos of dogs in their army gear....

Day 61

2011-05-06T00:32:00.000-07:00

Thursday Ritual of writing is always the same. At 2:30 I start a movie. Usually something difficult, from the Criterion Collection most of the time. At 3:30 or so I stop it, unfinished. At that point I sit on the couch for an hour thinking about whatever at that time I deem the largest unresolved problem in the play. Eventually I start to get ideas. Then I go to my study where I sit in a DIFFERENT CHAIR and think for another few hours. At some point I feed the Binks, then close my study door so he won't come in for attention. At 6:30, give or take, I eat 1/3 a chicken breast and some almonds. If my ideas have lead me towards dialogue I will have started typing at that point. If they're just going to backstory and meta-structure type stuff, I write them down in various organizational documents. At 7 pm I open a Diet Coke. I sip it slowly over the next two hours. I make myself keep working until my brain is totally fried. When that happens, I emerge from the office, microwave some leftovers, and watch Thursday Night TV (saving my favorite show, Parks and Rec, for last). Sometimes this emergence happens at 8:15 (when things didn't go well), sometimes at 9:45 (when things went very well). Never before 8. The longer after eight it takes for me to emerge, the better it went. Tonight I think I emerged at 8:30. Not great, but okay. I'm left with the ending to solve. Just that! Not a very important matter, the ending.

Actually it's somewhat true. Many many great novels/poems unfinished. Of course, the same is not true of plays.

Anyway, Thursday Ritual is key. It's the intense, power-through, let all things alone and just THINK discipline thing of it. No matter how badly I'm thinking or how miserable I am, I just sit there. And sit and sit and sit. It is much much harder than it sounds. I just did it, and I'm done with the TV, and the one beer I get with it as reward (well, two tonight) and the excessive Kettle Chips that I also sometimes allow myself, as additional reward. Now I'm reading a little before bed. I'm counting this as tomorrow's post because it is tomorrow here.

Oh, I forgot to add. Usually at about 11, when my wife goes to bed, I finish the movie I started that afternoon. Sometimes, though--and this rarely happens--I find it too boring or uninspiring to force myself to go back to. Such was the case with today's movie, one of Renoir's very last films, The River. Its story was actually not horrible, but I couldn't get past its extreme datedness. Plus the actors were just horrible. It was adapted from a novel, also, which would have been fine if the novel hadn't aged so badly. The movie featured narration taken directly from the novel, which did not help the overall...gestalt. Or whatever.

Took the Binks to the vet today. He has to get shots updated before he can be allowed to interview at the new would-be boarders. At night told not to move certain cups from drying rack. Cups must be in certain places? First I'd learned of that.

I only drink Diet Coke--or any caffeine--later than 2 pm on Thursdays (well, if I have 'work hard all day and night' sessions on days other than Thursday I have one then, too, of course). Part of me thinks I get so much done on Thursdays because of said Diet Coke. Mostly though, it's about accumulation. The map of intellectual progress--the graph--is not y=x. It's y=a^x. Every additional hour, the results get bigger and bigger. They grow exponentially. Obviously, since that's an exponential equation.

Except tonight some jackass from AT&T came to the door to harass my wife about getting some service he wouldn't explain. The door right next to my study, I heard it all and had to come out. My wife is far too polite to people who come to the door. I immediately tell all of them to go away. Really. I assume that nothing important to me--no information I need to have--will ever come via a person at my front door. The very fact that they ARE a person at my front door means, by definition, they are pointless and unnecessary. My many brilliant ideas exploded by his droning incessant voice, I scowled and interrupted frequently. After being mean to him for a while I finally realized that his initial claim--he would switch us over to free fiber optic whatever just like they were doing everywhere else in the neighborhood!--was, of course, hooey. What he actually wanted was for me to switch our Time Warner Cable Bundle to AT&T. In a sense, he was telling the truth, I guess. He didn't want us to pay him to switch us over--but he did want us to pay him, for the service. Filled with rage, I told him to go away (even though the price he quoted me was cheaper.) I don't like Time Warner at all, but at this point, I'm so angry--still--that I feel like calling AT&T and canceling my cell phone service, just to vent. This, I know, would do exactly nothing.

"You're a young guy, I know I don't have to explain what fiber-optics are to you." This is something he said to me!!!

If only I'd thought in advance to have some sort of large cat sleeping in a tree branch in our front yard. That would have cut his meanderings short--being confronted with an angry puma. Or even a moderately displeased one. It still wouldn't be good.

Day 60

2011-05-05T09:41:00.000-07:00

Well, no reflections on blogging are, in fact, coming today. Things are getting slightly more busy than they have been over here. My tutoring's picking up, the quest to find a boarding home for Binks before June has begun (we have to take him for interviews!), and my backyard llama grooming business is really taking off.

I am going to keep blogging for the foreseeable future. I can't promise another thirty days, but, at this point, the habit of writing a few hundred words every morning is so ingrained in me that stopping seems pointless. I would like for a few more of my posts to be more intellectually rich--less of "I did this, I did that" and more "here's what I'm thinking about this...." But that is neither here nor there. I will keep posting, on something, for at least another few weeks.

I learned a small cooking fact last night: "chili powder" is NOT, as I had believed, just the powder from chilis. It is, in fact, a mixture that includes powder of chilis but also cumin, garlic, salt, and various sundry seasonings (depending on who makes it). Generally real chefs avoid it, preferring instead to use the actual powder from actual chilis (Cayenne, Chipotle, etc). So, no more chili powder. Instead, cayenne. Or, whatever.

This was learned (passive!) because I made tacos last night using a recipe from, of all people, Emeril. They turned out fairly well--good flavor--although the question of what cut of ground beef to use is still up in the air. The standard for hamburgers is ground chuck, 20% fat. (As opposed to ground beef, which is a lower cut of meat). That seemed a little fatty for tacos, though. I'll try 10% fat next time, I think.

Binks got groomed yesterday. He's been moody and sullen ever since. He's like a dog-Samson, except that instead of making him weak, cutting his hair makes him grouchy. His hair is the power to be joyous. The longer it gets, the happier he is. Now, as I told my wife, he's like a fifteen year old boy who just wants to lock himself in his room and listen to The Cure.

Random Link: This GQ Article on ex-NBAer Stephon Marbury's attempts to launch a business empire in China is worth a read. How could it not be? It's Stephon Marbury. And, in it, he uses the phrase, "I want to own my own city." Really.

Day 59

2011-05-04T10:18:00.000-07:00

New grilled shrimp recipe is a keeper, I've decided. Only trick is to leave the shrimp on grill long enough so that they come off without sticking and yet not so long that they get overcooked. Tricky grilling anything delicate (fish, seafood) because of their tendency to stick to grill. Oiling helps with the first side but by the time you turn it the oil is often gone. Ah, the problems of suburbia.

Health has been mostly great for the last few months. Combination of eating smaller meals during the day and taking thyroid medication seems to have done it. No more than one or two very small dizziness episodes for the last sixty days. That's good news for my pro hockey career, obviously.

Tomorrow I want to try and reflect on 60 days of blogging. I know the last few days posts have been more and more cursory. Truth is, I've run out of things to say. I'm reading Howard's End, working on my play, cooking dinner, dealing with humdrum stuff. Sure, once in a while I take part in a shamanic initiation, or go on a drinking binge with Gerard Depardieu, but mostly it's work and domesticity.

The good news today is that our next disc of Downton Abbey arrives in the mail. Only three episodes on one disc, but still. That's more than three hours of goodness. Can't wait!

Day 58

2011-05-03T10:26:00.000-07:00

Watched Le Plaisir yesterday. Directed by Max Ophuls, it takes three stories by Maupassant and sets them end to end in order to form a completed movie. The stories relate only to each other by theme. They all address, in some way, the nature of pleasure (romantic pleasure, specifically). For me the best sequence was the one in the middle story, in which a group of high class prostitutes attend a village communion service. The obnoxious salesman on the train who tries to sell them garters; the starstruck mayor of the small town who insists they all sit in the best pew in the church; and most of all, Jean Gabin as the brother of their employer, who picks them up at the train stop in the cart he uses to haul hay and fusses over them with a mixture of brotherly pride and romantic ardor--these were some of the best moments.

Tonight's menu: grilled shrimp with penne and broccoli rabe. So I need to go to the store. That's going to be the next task of the morning. Then, the work. Then, jogging. Then, pick up the Binks. He's getting his hair cut today. And other sundry grooming elements. The Maltese has no undercoat of fur, which means that he doesn't ever shed. (Fur is the dog equivalent to the skin of a snake, or bird feathers; it's genetically programmed to 'molt' at certain times every year.) Instead, his hair just grows. And grows and grows and grows. If it's not trimmed every few months he starts to look like an enormous ball of fluff. Worse, it grows in front of his eyes, and he can't see. And that makes it very difficult for him to help out as a caddy at the local golf course. Or, work on his sculptures.

It seems more and more likely that the kennel where we take Binks when we go on vacations will close at the end of the month. This is a serious problem. It's taken him two years to get used to that place. We're going on a ten-day trip in the middle of June. That's a long time for the Animal to be outside of the home. We cannot possibly take him to a new place--somewhere he's never been--for that trip. We have to locate a new kennel before that and take him there once or twice to get him used to it. Which is going to be tricky and unpleasant, probably, for all involved.

If anyone wants to take care of a dog for ten days in June, let me know!

Day 57

2011-05-02T10:30:00.000-07:00

Just found out that one of my SAT students didn't do great on a practice test he took on Saturday. The kid is 13, trying to get in the 600s (or 700s) on Math and Verbal to get into various high level summer programs they run for the gifted and ambitious. He did okay on the test, but no better, score-wise, than he did six months ago. Which obviously does not reflect well on me. Of course, I also found out that his mother let him stay up till midnight the night before the test and that he was exhausted going in. So now I'm trying very subtly to pin the blame on her, while she, very subtly, is trying to pin it on me. What fun! (I say things like "if you weren't such a bad mother--and a bad person, really--this might not have happened. Did you think of that?")

I feel like I should say something about us getting Bin Laden, but I'm not sure what that is. I want to play the South Park song ("America!") but I have to go find it. I guess what I wonder is how much of it is a symbolic thing and how much difference it will actually make in helping us be more safe. I don't know any more about the issue than what I read in the paper, but it seems to me that in recent years Bin Laden has been more of a figurehead than an actual mastermind/director of terrorist attacks. He's had to keep hidden and that's kept him out of the loop, as far as planning terrorist acts goes. None of which is to say that I'm not celebrating his capture. I am. (I love America!) I only wonder if it's going to have any meaningful impact in the war on terror, or whatever we're calling it now.

But it's good to know American Special Forces can kick ass, when the time comes. Go Joe!

Day 56

2011-05-01T10:11:00.000-07:00

Had a dream about an old friend from high school--someone I haven't talked to in 20 years almost--calling me up out of the blue. Long conversation ensued about what seemed like nothing (though she did talk about how broke she and her husband were). Only when she hung up did I realize she was asking--in a very subtle, masked way--for me to ask my father to help her get out of a traffic ticket. [SI]. I had to call her back to say I'd help.

Yesterday we went furniture shopping, an act which always puts my wife in a good mood. Well, maybe it's more getting out of the house that puts her in the good mood. But she was in a good mood, that's the point of it. We bought no furniture, but we did get to the West Side of town where one of our favorite Mexican restaurants can be found. There, we got to eat spicy pork, putting ME in a good mood. After dinner we watched the first two episodes of Downton Abbey on DVD. Written and created by Julian Fellowes, the screenwriter on Gosford Park, Downton Abbey is the story of the relationship between the wealthy family and their servants living on a large--actually, immense--stately home in the English Countryside. It is, essentially, Gosford Park as a mini-series. (It even features Maggie Smith, reprising a very similar role as the one she played in GP). Not surprisingly, both my wife and I totally loved it. I'm sending back one of my Netflix DVDs unwatched tomorrow just so I can speed up the arrival of the next disc.

I am currently in the process of reading 11 separate books (I counted yesterday). Surely that is not good. Surely I should just pick one and finish it. But, that seems in no danger of happening. I don't know when I stopped reading one book at a time, but it's been a while.

Woke to find the Bink's receiving detangling and grooming from my wife. He look disgruntled but patient enough--he knows a treat will come at the end if he sits still. It's exactly like I used to look when I was a boy and someone would try to put me in my tie for Sunday School. And then brush my hair! Like I couldn't brush my own hair!! (Well, to be fair: I couldn't. But that's not the point!)

Poor Binks. The cost of beauty is not small.

Day 55

2011-04-30T10:25:00.000-07:00

Some talk of spending the afternoon looking at furniture on the West Side. We need a new dining table, so it's got to be done. Still, looking at furniture is not among the tasks I look forward to. Maybe the dining table will present itself within the first twenty minutes and we can spend the rest of the time dancing and singing. Seems unlikely.

I of course ended up watching some of the Royal Wedding, despite making no effort to do so. Much like the NFL Draft. It's something I would never care about ordinarily, but which, through the mass efforts of a large portion of society, I've somehow come to care about. ESPN's relentless plugging of their own coverage of the draft is done, I know, to help their ratings. In three weeks--maybe three days--no one will care who picked who in the third round. Still I found myself watching for almost an hour yesterday, enduring the loathsome Mel Kiper just so I could learn where various people I've never heard of and don't care about will end up playing football. Very odd.

Day 54

2011-04-29T10:26:00.000-07:00

Last night I watched The Friends Of Eddie Coyle, a movie about hoods and crooks in South Boston in the 70s. Robert Mitchum stars as a man about to go to prison who's trying to find out ways to avoid doing time. He's "stood up" for his criminal buddies in the past, but now he's starting to wonder about the price of being so honorable. A young young Peter Boyle (of Everybody Loves Raymond fame) is a bartender who makes extra money on the side by talking to the cops. For me the best scenes were the ones of the bank robbery (at the beginning) and the various interactions between the gun broker and the people buying guns from him. In mood, it felt a little to me like Dog Day Afternoon, though of course they were directed by different films and shot in different cities. Interesting too, that in a movie about crime and criminals, only two people get shot (and one a very minor character) in the whole film. The first death doesn't even happen till halfway in. As I told my wife, if this had been made today, the body count would have hit twenty by the first hour mark.

Since I seem to like to try and read as many books at the same time as possible I've also started The Great Enigma, a collection of poems by Tomas Transtormer, and Fall Higher, Dean Young's newest book. Last night I also read about half of Rilke's Letters To A Young Poet. Worked from about 3-9 last night, which is always leads to my best ideas. (The longer you sit and think about something, the better it goes. Graph of working/ideas vs time is not linear but exponential. Momentum is everything).

I wanted to make some predictions about the NFL Draft (a subject, I know, you're all eager to hear about). I usually only make predictions about quarterbacks, and my record in the past has been, let's say, checkered. Specifically I predicted the following:
-Matt Leinart would be a good to great player
-Jay Cutler would be a great player
-Vince Young would be a bust
-Colt McCoy would be a successful starter

So far it's too early to say for sure about Colt McCoy. I was right about Vince Young (to my everlasting delight), wrong about Matt Leinart (REALLY wrong, too) and sort of wrong about Jay Cutler. He's been okay, but not great, obviously. So given that I have no track record or no expertise, why make more predictions? I don't know. But I'm going to:
-Cam Newton: major bust. (I have a bias against 'athletic' quarterbacks who have character issues and/or are rumored to be fairly stupid. I have to say, too, that I REALLY dislike the guy, and that probably enters in. Still, I think in three years he'll be on the bench or out of the league altogether. When your first weapon is your feet, you tend not to learn to read defenses until it's too late.)
-Jake Locker: I think he'll make it. A solid starter for three or four years, that's my pick.
-Ryan Mallett: I want to predict that he will do better than a lot of people think. I know he's got character issues, and has the mobility of a stoned turtle. Still, I think he's got the arm and the attitude to be, if not a huge success, then at least more of a success than people think. (As of this writing he still hasn't been drafted, however; it might depend on what system he ends up in).

Okay, make your bets about the next season accordingly.

Addendum: This article in Slate describes a company that tries to evaluate potential greatness in draft picks based on how they speak. Worth a read.

Day 53

2011-04-28T09:56:00.000-07:00

Dante has reached the circle of Saturn, home to the contemplatives (monks, founders of monastic orders). He's asked about predestination, a favorite subject. The question of how God can know everything and yet still give human beings free will is one that comes up several times in the Paradisio. The answer gets complicated, especially for people who aren't versed in Scholastic Theology--or, I guess, any theology. I am one of those people. But, to summarize: we have free will. So, be comforted!

Many new books arrived yesterday. It's always a happy occasion. I've started reading Howard's End, which I read last in 2002. I hadn't remembered how great it was. I'm 50 pages in and am already loving it. There's a kindness, a gentleness, to Forster's tone that I find especially soothing. His characters have flaws but he doesn't condemn them for them.

I took some pictures of our flowers yesterday but none of them really captured their splendor. Still, I'll try to post them anyway. Only seven more days till I've blogged for sixty straight days. The mind reels...

Day 52

2011-04-27T09:30:00.000-07:00

Work on Act I now involves turning sketches and drafts into polished scenes. Polishing is taking much longer than I anticipated; all the micro problems I'd forgotten about in working out the large scale structure now reappear. Writing a mix of engineering and physics. In engineering you have a set problem--a chasm that needs a bridge, and a pile of material. Your goal is to use the material to make a bridge, a nice-looking bridge ideally. Sometimes, though, you're in pure science mode (physics). You have a chasm and you have no material; before you can figure out how to make a bridge you have to figure out where to get the material to build it with. Maybe you have to make it in a lab. Maybe you have to carve it out of the rocks. But that will take other tools, and you have no tools. Maybe you should just walk out onto the air above the chasm and hope you don't fall?

But you will fall. You will.

New work on relationship: we've made a new rule that we must eat together at dinner table at least every other night. Pattern of getting home and watching TV while we eat precludes conversation which is I guess the glue that holds it all together. Sitting at table is helped by recent furniture purchases which make the dining room area less gloomy and underdeveloped. Wife has found a great mirror which has an almost rococo frame, curving and ornate. Helps to undercut the room's previous austerity.

Flowers are in bloom everywhere in yard. Roses, carnations, even our cherry tree has come back to life. I should take some photos; our garden is probably the house's best feature. We also have a beehive in the tree in the backyard. At one point our gardener told us he could get us honey from it. That promise seems to have fallen by the wayside. That's fine. We don't really eat all that much honey anyway.

Day 51

2011-04-25T21:32:00.000-07:00

I just can't help feeling like you should all be listening to The Joy Formidable. And the reason I can't help feeling that is because it's true. True true true. Welsh people sing better than the rest of us. This is well, well documented. Now, I'll concede that their album (The Big Roar) has only four GREAT songs. That's fine. I'm not saying it's Outside. I'm not saying it's Low. I'm not saying it's McGarnigle and the Peasnips go to Jackson (Allman Bros Bootleg). But it's better than Neon Bible. It's better than the xxWhoever. It's better than Pavement or Dinosaur Jr (and I like Pavement! And it's not Jay M's fault he's not Neil Young). I know: it isn't 1997. L Barlow is no longer extant. That's fine. Everybody's fine. But why aren't you listening? (As Christopher Walken): "Why aren't you calling?" Look at this woman--with her bleached white hair...surely she's got passion. I need to find a video for "Abacus." That's their best song.

Day 50

2011-04-25T10:33:00.000-07:00

This is short and photo-heavy, but, hey, I've posted something for 50 straight days. If I want to go to photos for one day, I'm entitled.

The purple jacket was worn over the holidays and was, I have to say, entirely necessary (lots of rain and cold in Houston). I like that it makes him look like a Russian cadet.

The napping stuff ('action photos' as we call them around here) features Bink in a car seat. The car seat had to be installed and was waiting around the house, so Binks nestled into it. The 'long white sausage' shot in the middle was taken while he slept. He woke up as I prepared to take the photo. As he sleeps, he extends himself into poses that are pretty remarkable.