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Andrew Lindemann Malone's Internet Playpen |
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Tuesday, 7/29/03 Here's what I was thinking about during my extremely rare down moments at work today: I've spent much of the past six years trying to make myself more resilient and stoic. I think I may have overreached on that one. Is it all that bad to linger in sadness or confusion or embarrassment or anger sometimes? I know I don't let myself do it, as much as I can at least, and I'm not sure whether life wouldn't be a richer thing if I did, occasionally, just feel deeply disappointed or frustrated or whatnot. I'm still willing to let myself feel blissfully happy, so we're okay there, but the other stuff seems somehow necessary also. Here's what I was thinking about as I walked home from Fresh Fields with my groceries: Damn, that woman is wearing the lowest-riding jeans I've ever seen! They're sure to fall off and leave me with a virtually unobstructed view of her generously sized behind! Keep your eyes on that! No, another voice intervened, wait, you shouldn't stare at women! It cheapens them and reduces them to mere sex objects! Hey, the first voice retorted, she reduced herself! No one forced her to wear them pants! And you haven't seen an ass either in the wild or in captivity for ages and ages! Then she walked into City Place. I have to admit I was somewhat confused and disappointed, but the feelings lifted naturally by the next stoplight. Ten more movie reviews from 2001 are up from yesterday and today. "What Lies Beneath" has just about the best marginalia ever.
Sunday, 7/27/03 Two new movie reviews are up now: "Bonhoeffer," a thought-provoking documentary about the Lutheran theologian of that name, and "Jet Lag," a fluffy but fun romantic comedy from France starring Jean Reno and Juliette Binoche. I saw both of these yesterday, which made for a Day of Contrasts. It was a rewarding day, though. I should note that the "Jet Lag" review has an extensive rant about Romantic Comedies I'm Sure I Would Have Hated If I'd Seen Them at the end of it, just for fun.
Friday, 7/25/03 I've been in the oddest mood for the past two days: Any cheerfulness I have seems directly dependent on listening to music with big, funky brass in it. Yesterday morning I was in a foul mood until I played James Brown's "The Big Payback" and a few cuts on my Chuck Brown live album, which lifted my mood with a suddenness ordinarily attributed to crack. The high was a little longer-lasting, but I found myself needing the brass again when I got home, at which time I played the Chuck Brown album all the way through and became almost euphoric. Today, not quite as severe, but my mood still improves dramatically with lavish applications of the horns, from DJ Kool's "Let Me Clear My Throat" to Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth's "T.R.O.Y." As James himself says, I need some hits. Though the Beatnuts are doing me pretty well without the help of the horns right now, so maybe this is passing. I'm against trying Lee Malvo in Virginia, because the motivation for doing so is not because he committed most of his crimes there but because Virginia law allows the state to execute minors in certain circumstances. I'm against capital punishment in general, because any errors made in its application are irreparable, and especially against it for minors, because irreparability seems especially tragic in that case. But I was in favor of executing Tim McVeigh, because he attempted to destroy an entire community and injure the state, and if he's proven guilty I'll be in favor of executing John Allen Muhammad, and frankly this article makes me feel like executing Lee Malvo is a terrific idea. I don't believe it intellectually, and if I were voting I'd vote against it, but I'd be lying if I said that, after reading about Malvo and Muhammad shooting a 13-year-old to "get Chief Moose upset," the impulse wasn't there. (Moral contemplation on a Friday night! The Hitchcock screening with his daughter at the AFI was sold out, and "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" isn't on at AMC for another hour and a half, if I want to stay up until 1 seeing that. Leave me to my own devices and this is what ends up happening.)
Monday, 7/21/03 The following is the conversation I was talking about on Saturday. It's actually one side of a conversation, the other participant being on the other end of a cell phone. It was overheard on the River Road shuttle from the College Park Metro Station during the morning of Friday, July 18:
Conversations like this make me happy that cell phones exist and that people are largely oblivious to their surroundings when they talk on them. Today we have a new little humor item, "The Real WTO," about the upcoming ministerial meeting in Cancun. I hear the AOPis will be there also. The "Battlefield Earth" review, among four others, is also now up. That review is the most linked-to piece I've ever written. Not coincidentally, it's got one of the top five leads I ever wrote.
Sunday, 7/20/03 A new In My Changer is up, in which I survey the music I listen to most when I'm baking desserts. Those of you who have eaten goods I have baked will no doubt be interested in this one. (Yeah, I know I'm good.) Also, ten of the 68 movie reviews I wrote in the year 2000 are now up. I'll be so much happier when this gets done and I can concentrate on beefing up the humor archives with the Johnny Newcombe stuff and the Ol' Dirty Bastard sonnets. Yes, those are real things.
Saturday, 7/19/03 Yesterday some of my co-workers and I went to a happy hour at Cornerstone, one of College Park's all-too-paltry number of alcohol-dispensing establishments. As often happens in college towns, some jackass with an acoustic guitar made his way up to a microphone to forcibly serenade a crowd mostly comprised of us and students who needed that pump-primining early-evening drink to steel them for their later forays into eventual vomiting. The acoustic-guitar threatened to accelerate their schedule, however, playing nauseating faux folk covers of "La Di Da Di" and the theme from "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" in a row. These caused Andrew to cry out in pain and, in the case of "La Di Da Di," involuntarily sing along due to the fact that the lyrics of this hip-hop classic run in my very bloodstream at this point. You could wake me up in the middle of the night and whisper, "La di da di, we likes to party," and I would respond "We don't cause trouble, we don't bother nobody," in as much rhythm as I could muster. So it looked to my co-workers as if I was feeling this rendition, when really it caused me much distress. The jackass got the handclaps, of course, but people who are drinking generally want to enjoy whatever they're listening to. Can you blame me for the fact that I didn't go out tonight? To make it up to my tortured psyche, I got the Beatnuts' Stone Crazy today. Did you know I'm getting mad money off the books this year? Youuuuu better watch your step. I had a hilarious conversation I transcribed yesterday, too, but I forgot to bring it home from work, despite the fact that I could swear I put it in my backpack. I hope I just left it at work, 'cause it's a good 'un.
Wednesday, 7/16/03 I have been stressed out lately and thus disinclined to do any serious writing or blogging. Actually, part of the reason I am stressed is that I am working on a story in which the main character suffers several tremendous psychological shocks in a short period of time. I feel bad for her, but that's how it's going to go. So I am doing serious writing, but you all won't see it for a long time, because the story needs to get good before I will put it up. If I have free time this weekend I will try to do an In My Changer. The last one is from March. This is unacceptable. Or, it would be if I was getting paid for this. One thing I need to call your attention to: an astonishingly fatuous column by Ralph Wiley on ESPN.com about the dearth of black Americans in major league baseball. While this is certainly a topic worthy of intelligent analysis, Wiley decides to chuck that and instead mix irrelevant personal anecdote with sweeping generalization to make an article with a vague whiff of writerliness but little else. He's kind of the Stanley Crouch of ESPN. Here's one particularly astonishing passage:
1) It's "sabermetricians," not "sabermaticians." 2) Sabermetricians have traditionally argued that the stolen base is overvalued. They argued this even back when Ty Cobb, world-class racist, held the record with 892 lifetime steals. 3) Sabermetricians argue that the base on balls has been one of the most underrated statistics. They also argue that power is generally undervalued — that power is generally more valuable than, say, all but the slickest gloves. Who holds the lifetime record for walks drawn? Rickey Henderson. Who holds the single-season record for walks drawn? Barry Bonds. Who holds the lifetime record for home runs? Hank Aaron. Who holds the single-season record for home runs? Barry Bonds. Damn, those sabermetricians are racist! 4) Tarring Bill James with the brush of racism, even subconscious racism, is so thoroughly counter to the available evidence as to be irresponsible. This is the man who, in his New Historical Baseball Abstract, listed Oscar Charleston, Negro League center fielder, as the fourth-best baseball player in the history of the game — better than anyone who ever played baseball except Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, and Willie Mays. (Where's that Mays guy from?) He has 12 Negro League players in his top 100; no one else who's done a similar evaluation has more than 4. Josh Gibson is the best catcher in baseball history in his book. Rickey specifically is listed as the 26th-best baseball player in history in James' book. He's the fourth-best left fielder in history, listed ahead of such beloved white folk as Carl Yastrzemski. This is prejudice? Well, that may have been unnecessary, but it sure was satisfying. Also a brochure that I got at work for FEDICO, which is group long term disability insurance for federal employees, says that, under their plan, "Maternity Covered! (Like any other disability)". But since I'm not in danger of suffering from maternity, I find this more amusing than insulting. I asked one of my co-workers, and she said that maternity made her disgruntled, but not disabled. Not quite.
Monday, 7/14/03 There is a very short entry in the Gentrification Diary today about trying to go see a movie at the AFI Silver. The word "trying" is used advisedly. Otherwise, I don't feel like writing much today, although my mind is afire with new projects that will need to be written eventually.
Saturday, 7/12/03 A Top Ten list related to our president's recent sojourn in Africa and, specifically, the fact that he saw elephants vigorously copulating during this sojourn is now up in the Humor section.
Thursday, 7/10/03 The Spam-O-Matic would like to note with sadness the passing of Barry White, age 58, into that great, sexy beyond on July 4th. Ohhhhh baby. I have composed a little song to commemorate his passing, although it can capture only a fragment of the sadness we all feel. Besides having an inimitable voice, as the song above indicates, Barry's accomplishments included being the progenitor of a very specific style of makeout music that he could pull off handily and that resulted in laughable efforts when anyone else in the world tried it; topping the charts over and over throughout a long career despite being called the "Walrus of Love" by super-lover haters; and making either the best or the second-best guest appearance on "The Simpsons" in that show's presently overlong history. (He's fighting it out with Sir Gary Coleman; Gary's bits are slightly funnier, but Barry's episode, "Whacking Day," may well have been the best in "Simpsons" history, and it just doesn't work without Barry saying, "I love the sexy slither of a lady snake. Ohhhh baby.") That's quite a career, and one that brought love to the hearts, not to mention other body parts, of millions. The Spam-O-Matic salutes Barry's accomplishments and urges Eros to let Barry make unlimited love in a smooth, silky afterlife. I thought immediately of Barry's appearance on "The Simpsons" because FOX 5's Sonya Long made good on her promise to liberate Washington, D.C.-area "Simpsons" fans come July 1 from the tyranny we had previously suffered of reruns of the same damn few episodes. We've now got, yes, episodes from all the different seasons (by "all," I mean "two," for the two slots at 6 and 6:30 pm). Barry's ep comes in Season 4, and they're showing stuff from Seasons 1 and 6 right now; I'm hoping they'll be proceeding chronologically, even if it means that Barry comes much later. His appearance will still have a gravity that cannot be denied. Awwww yeah.
Monday, 7/7/03 A new entry in the Gentrification Diary makes its way through various topics, including SilverDocs, Tony Hawk, beer in Silver Spring, and a building called the Gramax Heliport. Lately I've been enjoying ThaFormula.com, and more specifically the interviews on that site. In their interlocutive forumla, the interviewer talks to the rapper for about an hour and asks half really interesting questions and half "Rap in 2003 is so much worse than it was in 1993. Why is that?" kind of questions. Then they don't edit the transcript or even provide much in the way of context. But it's interesting to read your favorite MCs (or my favorite MCs, anyway) holding forth at length without a backbeat. I read the Phife and Rakim interviews, and I'm going to start working my way through the Gang Starr Foundation series next. (Man, I can't wait for that Rakim album, to be titled Oh My God. They have another article on that site that describes DJ Premier working with Dr. Dre on that album. That's about like Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo writing a novel together, except that Oh My God will have a much better beat.) Eventually I will review Gang Starr's newest, The Ownerz, for this site, since I copped it four days after it came out and I have already developed strong feelings about it. But it will take some sitting-down time to write such a review; as always, there are about twenty million things I want to write, and some have priority.
Saturday, 7/5/03 It's 11:35 pm as I begin to write this. Just now I was walking home from the Metro and thinking about how tired I was and how being tired seems to magnify all my personality flaws and diminish whatever strengths I have and how I would really like to get to bed when I saw four young women in dresses on the sidewalk who I had to avoid walking into somehow. As I approached, I noticed that they were not walking entirely straight and they had leis around their necks. I started to take a couple steps off the sidewalk to minimize any disturbances (drunk people don't dodge well) when one of them called out "Hey! I remember you!" I turned around to see an attractive black woman I didn't recognize, but whose eyes had lit up. "We had a class together!" she continued. Okay, I shrugged. "University of Maryland!" "Correct." "It wasn't romantic lit, it was…Shakespearean lit." I suddenly had an extremely dim memory of someone who looked like this (though who typically had not worn this much lip gloss). "Medieval lit. Professor Coogan." "Yeah!" She indulged in a small bounce. "What are you doing here?" "I live up there," I said, and pointed to my building, which was about 50 feet away. "So what have you been doing? Did you graduate?" Some subroutine of my brain had figured out that I did not need to try to be a sparkling conversation partner to thoroughly delight this woman, so, mercifully for both of us, I did not try. "Yeah. Did you?" "Yes, I graduated, and I spent a year in China. And I just got engaged!" The picture clarified suddenly. "Congratulations." "Are you married? Do you have a girlfriend or…" "No." "So what are you doing out?" "I'm just going home." Pointing up at my building again. "To sleep?" Nod yes. "Did you just get off work?" "No." "So what are you doing out?" "I was just out now." "Oh, yeah, the fireworks." "That was yesterday," I started to say, and then thought better of it. "So I forgot your name?" "Andrew." "Andrew!" "And you are…" "Ami." (Accent on the first syllable.) I suddenly remembered who she was. I didn't think we'd ever spoken. But I was quite visible in that class because my prof allowed me to be a smartass and I took advantage of the opportunity. [Update from the next morning: I think we were in a group together for about 30 minutes discussing the Wife of Bath from Canterbury Tales.] As I was processing this with my fatigued brain, she yelled to her friends, a couple yards distant now, "This guy's from Maryland! He's a Terp!" And she cupped her hand around her mouth and hollered: "Woo woooo!" I did this as well, needing very little provocation for hollering for Maryland at any time day or night. Her friends seemed to think this was the greatest thing that had ever happened. "Go Terps!" one yelled. "Well, it was good to see you, Andrew," she said. As she started walking away, she continued: "Take care. Be safe. If you have sex, make it good." And I'm still dead tired and would really, really, really like to get to bed now, thanks, but just wanted to share that.
Friday, 7/4/03 Happy Fourth of July, everyone! Although I am ashamed of many things the American government does and has done, I nevertheless am still an enthusiastic patriot, albeit perhaps not for the normal reasons. I'll try to summarize those at some point in honor of the day. It probably won't be today, though, which does kind of remove the impetus. We'll see. Slate.com featured the D.C. Metro Blog Map a couple days ago, so new folks are checking out the site, it appears. A hearty Spam-O-Matic welcome to all. I hope you all enjoy yourselves here. Whether you're wasting time at work, at home, on the road or just for fun, the Spam-O-Matic is here for you. The presence of any useful content is purely coincidental.
Thursday, 7/3/03 We got two hours of administrative leave today so that we could prepare to get patriotic tomorrow. I'm completely serious. God bless the Fourth of July. Finally, we have a new movie review, in addition to the archive-filling: "28 Days Later." As I noted below, it's good. As I didn't note below, it's got zombies! And they're cool! Also, all my movie reviews from 1999 are now up, leaving the year 2000 to get done and then this whole thing will be done please sometime. Fun fact: In the year 2000, I wrote 68 movie reviews. There were 52 weeks in that year. That's 1.3 per week! And I was writing for allclassical.com all year and either taking 16 credits or working full-time! All I can say is the time-consuming ability of 16 credits at Maryland is wildly overrated. I'll soon be getting into reviews from the part of 2000 when I broke up with what has so far been my only girlfriend. As badly as I handled that, in so many ways, I have to say: my movie-reviewing ability never wavered. I'd be really disappointed in myself if it had. I'd be much more disappointed than I am as I read these old e-mails and marvel at exactly how badly I could screw up the situation, even with good intentions (not that she didn't deserve an equal share of blame, but I'm reading the messages I sent, to try to find movie marginalia). The first thing in my mind in sad times always is: Do what you have to, and do it as well as you can. When I do that, that's when I'm most proud of myself.
Tuesday, 7/1/03 Another five movie reviews from 1999 are up. I'm into when I started being employed by the Diamondback now, and I'm noticing that many of my first-semester movie reviews contain completely unjustifiable statements of greatness on behalf of the movies I was reviewing. I guess I was just intoxicated with power that I truly, truly did not have but imagined I did. I'd blasé myself down to an appropriate level of enthusiasm soon enough. One thing I have decided: I'm bringing back the Attractive Man Count and the Attractive Woman Count, both of which I ditched when I went pro. That's useful information, and what's more, it's useful for everyone, not just heterosexual males and lesbians, because I go that extra step beyond the typical boundaries of homoerotic squeamishness to plumb my psyche to find the hot dudes as well as the hot chicks. (I know, I know: Take it to Texas, Andrew.) The counts should be back in the reviews, and I'm putting them back in. Thanks to my recent switch to GoDaddy's hosting, I now have site reports that tell me how people are getting here. One of the ways, of course, is search engine queries, since Google is kind enough to look me over regularly. Here are the top nine queries, linked to the article that the search produced:
Frankly, I'm surprised it's not dirtier, since this is the Internet and all.
Monday, 6/30/03 I would like to note that the index page for the movie reviews has two sections called "Cream of the Crop" and "Bottom of the Barrel" that will not be filled until I get the reviews from 1999 and 2000 up. I wasn't able to do any reviews tonight because I saw "Double Indemnity" at the AFI Silver. It's awesome! They really knew how to do endings back in the 40s. What a sweet movie. Actually, an abundance of wonderful cultural stuff has made its way into my life recently, particularly ever since I ended my CD moratorium in May. Every CD I've picked up has been a winner. I hope to write little capsule reviews of them soon. And the AFI serves up a jewel a day, it seems like. Such a wonderful place to spend a bunch of time. Other things I hope to write sometime soon:
Saturday, 6/28/03 I love playing with other people's children. Barely had I even left my apartment to go move my laundry to the dryer when one little kid who lives on my floor said "HI!" from twenty feet down the hall. I said "Hi!" and he ran up to meet me. "Aaa-aa aaaay?" he said, touching his shoulder. All vowels, and I never did figure out the shoulder-touching. "No one understands you," his (attractive!) mom said to him, smiling. "Come here." I kept walking, but he ran to catch up with me. Then I realized his question was "Want to race?" I sped up for a few steps to open a lead, then slowed down to let him catch up. He followed me all the way into the laundry room like this, then looked confused, since he couldn't see his mom (though she was actually about fifteen feet away in the elevator lobby). "Say 'bye'!" his mom cheerily called to him. "Bye!" I said, waving. "Have a good day!" He waved and backed out, suddenly shy again. A few hours later I was shopping for shorts at Ross when a slightly bigger kid came up to me and put his hand in my bag and asked "What's in your bag?" He had a touch of an accent, and his mom (ten feet or so away) had a lot more of an accent, so I decided it might not be worthwhile to lecture him about not putting your hands in strangers' bags. Instead, I replied, "It's my big towel." "No it's not!" he instantly rebutted. "Yes it is," I countered. "No it's not!" he reiterated. "Yes it is!" I affirmed, smiling. "No it's not!" he decisively pointed out, since his mom was calling to him. I waved goodbye to him, and he beamed at his victory, but before he left the aisle, he told me one more time, just so I wouldn't forget: "No it's not!" Makes me smile just thinking about it. Five more movies from the 1-9-9-9 today.
Friday, 6/27/03 Not to get too serious here, but I've just been putting up movie reviews from 1999, and occasionally I find myself sighing over some awesomely unprofessional but sparky and exuberant construction (see the note at the bottom of the "Payback" review for an example) and thinking to myself, "Wow, I wish I could do that again." I'm saying this as much to myself as I am to you, but I know it's true to some extent for everyone who does anything creative: You can't go back. I'm never going to be able to just spray words onto the screen in the way I once did; for better or worse, I'm going to think about what I do when I write my reviews, and hone my sentences until they're sleek machines instead of the rough-and-tumble monsters of yore. If I try now to re-create said monsters, I'll end up with calculatedly rough-and-tumble sentences, which are about as entertaining as that sounds. I've gained a lot more than I've lost over the past few years; I can write a review like the one I wrote of "Lilya 4-ever" now, which was totally beyond me in 1999, and that's a valuable skill to have. (When I put up my review of "The Emperor and the Assassin," I'll point out how I'm attempting to write in a different style to match the grandeur of the content but find myself completely unable to actually do it.) But I suppose we all mourn what we lose more than we celebrate what we gain (he said after he put little post facto [ex-] boxes before every mention of the word "girlfriend" in the "Analyze This" review). We almost certainly shouldn't, but that's what we do. One madelaine, please.
Monday, 6/23/03 A review of "The Hulk" is up for your reading pleasure. If you don't have time to read it, I have two words for you: "Hulk suuuuuuck." There's a little more to it than that, but, sadly, not much.
Wednesday, 6/18/03 Credit where credit's due: My normal e-mail address appears to be working. I still find my hosting company's policy of not actually letting me know that they're working on the problem to be a bit disconcerting. On the other hand, I'm paying a disconcertingly low amount for this hosting—$25 a year. I'll do some cost-benefit analysis on that one and see what I come up with.
Tuesday, 6/17/03 My normal e-mail is still broken. I'm using this corporate one until I resolve the situation. As long as my hosting company isn't e-mailing me or fixing it, it looks as though the resolution will take the form of new hosting. Suggestions to the address linked to above. As it happens, I'm not the only person who thinks that karaoke at the Peyote Cafe is a good time. Apparently the First Twins, Jenna and Barbara, also enjoy them a good turn on the mic with a crowd of drunken bachelorettes around. The first article about this in the Washington Post featured the DJ asserting that both twins were drunker than a billionaire ordering an extra-large snifter of brandy to celebrate his enormous marginal income tax cut; the second (scroll to the bottom) had the owner denying this rumor. The DJ comes off like someone who thinks he will never do anything cooler than dis Jenna and Barbara in the paper and wishes to milk it for all the snide, self-aggrandizing quotes he can muster. I'm inclined to believe the owner, just for spite, even though I know in my heart that the DJ must be right. The DJ does deliver the true, undisputed, non-alcoholic dirt: Jenna Bush sang "backup" on James Brown's "Sex Machine"! However, this backup part is erroneously reported as "Get up! Get up! Get up!", when everyone with soul who's also superbad and looking for the big payback as soon as he or she can get up offa that thing knows the backup part is "Get up! Get on up!" Not that I expected Jenna Bush to be a conoisseur of the funk, but this (again) casts the whole incident in a less-than-entirely-believable light. Who can tell what happens at 2 am? Anyway, if I see them next time I become one with the mic and the backing track, I will be sure to report whether they shake their rumps when all I wanna do is zoom-a-zoom-a-zoom zoom and a-boom boom. This reminded me of the time last August that Jenna and Barbara, then underage, were caught downing Bud at Stetsons, another Adams Morgan alcohol-vending establishment. I e-mailed Spam-O-Maticker John Henderson, a former vendor of alcohol at said establishment, to see what he would have done if he had still been behind the bar and the JBs had asked him to vend them some Bud. I gave him these options:
John, always game, responded as follows:
Sticky indeed. With what liquid, exactly, we'll never know.
Monday, 6/16/03 My e-mail appears to be screwed up in a way where I can send e-mail but not receive it. This is part of what you get when you pay $25 a year for hosting, I guess. You can e-mail me here for now. (I'm not writing the actual text of this e-mail address to avoid getting spammed into oblivion.) I'm also on AOL IM as Bismarck71. Sorry. I've sent my hosters a couple messages alerting them to this problem, and there ain't much else I can do.
Sunday, 6/15/03 Happy Father's Day. More housekeeping in Movie Reviews, and one new movie review: "X2." It's basically the story of how the movie is not one you should see twice. However, I saw it the second time with my lovely and talented sister, and then I got to eat dinner with her, so it's okay. By the way, you can be notified via e-mail every time I write something that's not a blog entry. Just e-mail me and say that you'd like to be on the Spam-O-Matic notification list. It's almost like the old Spam-O-Matic, except really, really not.
Friday, 6/13/03 As promised yesterday, the hot hot prose of Lisa de Moraes, the Washington Post's television reporter. "Wait," an imaginary but narratively useful interlocutor pipes up, "you watch an essentially trivial amount of non-sports, non-'Simpsons' television! Why the hell are you boundingly eager for some chick's prose about the developments on the idiot box?" The answer: it's all the prose. It's not just the ladies! I find horse racing to be the most pointless crap in the history of the world, or at least of the present, when the swiftness of our horses is no longer a deciding factor in wartime, but I read most of Andrew Beyer's articles on the subject in the Post, because he writes about horse racing as if it is engaging and important and fascinating—in other words, because he communicates his enthusiasm in his prose. That's not quite what de Moraes does. She finds the business and product of TV to be dominated by inanity, overzealous risk avoidance, serial insincerity, and massive wastes of resources on predictably doomed enterprises. She also likes TV a lot, even when it's bad. Her solution is reporting that's laced with exactly the right amount of ironic asides. Reading her column is like listening to that friend of yours who seems to stumble into odd situations as a way to exercise a leveling dry wit. It's a lot more difficult to pull off in print for a bunch of strangers than it is to be someone's friend and rant verbally, though. Here's Lisa being unusually but effectively overt in today's column about Spike Lee successfully suing to delay the renaming of TNN to the Spike Network on the basis of some weird trademark infringement crap:
But this subject is funny enough that she can give herself free rein. Yesterday's column had a lovely little appositive that I kept thinking of and smiling at through my day, discussing Sanjay Mathur dismissing the "For Love or Money" bachelor:
She pretty much only gets away with that joke because she buries it and yet puts it in the perfect place: in the middle of the quote, in a nonrestrictive clause to further lower the profile, but right next to the clause she's (gently) mocking. She doesn't break the sentence to make the joke, she doesn't modify the main syntax to do it, she just puts it right where it goes. It's not a particularly original quip—one might even call it hackneyed, in isolation—but when dropped in there so well, it works better than it has any right to work. I notice things like this and try to learn to do them. Also, when I read Lisa's column, I have some idea what's going on re: these reality shows without having to, you know, watch them. However, I missed Kelly Clarkson's generously sized backside until today, when it made an appearance in tight white pants in a commercial for that creepy-looking "American Idol" movie (that I saw while watching "The Simpsons"). After all this talk about this posterior, I was looking for like a garbage barge-size thing. It was actually just an average-displacement derriere, nice to look at. If this is an unusually large ass in our modern entertainment world, our modern entertainment world needs a lot more mocking. That's probably just about enough text for today.
Thursday, 6/12/03 My employers are too damn competent. I have told many of you about how I was going out to California to help fight exotic Newcastle disease by writing things: working 12-hour days, living on $50 a day in meal money, writing about stuff I had absolutely no clue about, having my bed made every day, etc. Well, after a few months when the task seemed insurmountable, exotic Newcastle disease is suddenly almost eradicated, and as a result they have no futher need of my kind in sunniest Cali. I am disappointed. Not only was I going to get to see an actual eradication operation up close (although not up close enough to actually asphyxiate any infected chickens), I was also going to get to see if California really knows how to party. I've heard a lot of talk about that. On a completely unrelated matter, when I read male authors whose prose I enjoy, I admire it and steal from it as much as I can and what have you. When I read female authors with fine, shapely prose, however, I get a crush. The fizz of the feeling is pretty much indistinguishable from that feeling you got from looking at the prettiest girl in seventh grade, yes, although it's not quite as lascivious, for obvious reasons. Lately I've been thinking fond thoughts about Cynthia Ozick's prose, because I've been reading her essay collection Quarrel & Quandary and her skills are just killing me. She's so much defter than I am, even when she's letting herself be rapturous; she never loses control in flight. And she controls the details as well as anyone in the game. Look at this paragraph, from a review of Göran Tunström's novel The Christmas Oratorio:
Now, I do not think this is a particularly good book review (it raises several questions in other places that it doesn't answer, and not for particularly good reasons, either), but damn that's a fine paragraph. Notice the well-sustained fog metaphor: one use of "fog" as a verb and a later one as a noun, getting the resonance without sounding repetitious due to the change of part of speech; the metaphor extends to muting not only the sight but the energy of the "burning minds"; the wonderful use of the word "furred." Then you have the subtle extension to the window, so she can get in "crystal deposits," a wonderful simile. Back towards the beginning, the narrative is strong, but the beauty is not: she resolves this problem later, but just suggests it here. That last semicolon is beautiful, where it is; it resonates with the semicolon in the second sentence. And the following string of prosaic monosyllables perfectly embodies its own meaning without calling undue attention to itself. Yeah, baby, work it. (Tomorrow: Lisa de Moraes of the Washington Post! More hot prose maneuvering eXXXposed!)
Saturday, 6/7/03 Last night I dreamt that the world was about to suffer some grand catastrophe (this seems to happen a lot in my dreams) when someone realized why we were in this situation: "Heidigger never proved that we can't just move this universe into an alternate universe!" I'm not sure why Heidigger bore responsibility for this one, but the solution was obvious and immediately suggested: "Let's reanimate him and get him to prove it!" Heidigger looked a little stiff after we got him up and running, which probably was to be expected, but he couldn't solve the problem because none of us were German speakers and thus could not communicate the specific difficulty to him. Marty stood around saying "Was ist das?" and looking confused as our universe was moved into an alternate universe. New Earth and Old Earth didn't like each other too much. I'm not sure what this proves except that my subconscious is just as confused as my conscious. • I spent a lot of time today cleaning up the site, mostly by reorganizing the movie reviews. The new index page explains why I did this. I also removed broken links, made the disclaimer/copyright statement at the bottom of each page into a library file (so I can update all of them at once if necessary), and making a few corrections I noticed during other browsing. I hope now I can pay almost no attention to the site, thus fulfilling my lifelong dream. Wait: I have to add a bunch of links to the 134 movie reviews now, and I really should add the reviews I wrote in 1999 and (especially) 2000. 2000 has the "Time Code" and the "Charlie's Angels" reviews, which are two of my favorites. Not to mention the "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" review, which I wrote on deadline in doggerel rhyme! By the way, I wrote more movie reviews in January of 2002 than I have in January, February, March, April, May, and June so far of 2003. I'm a creature of habit, and my habits have changed wildly over the last year. I still get a bit of a vertigo-like feeling when I stop to think about it. I really can't remember how I used to do everything I did, and now my life feels both way more confined and way more flexible, and I'm still not used to it yet. Oh well.
Thursday, 6/5/03 "So, uh, why is there a Saturday blog entry that you didn't actually post on Saturday? And why isn't there more in the Gentrification Diary, when you said more would come 'soon?'" What can I say but that I forgot and then time kept on slippin'? It'll probably happen again. Yesterday, for example, I didn't do anything with the website because I went and saw the restored print of High Noon at the AFI Silver again, after having seen the movie for the very first time in my life on Friday night. It is an amazing print, with the lucidity of those black-and-white photographs that make the world look so much more nuanced and immediate than it does in color. But more than that, it's an amazing movie that has so far persistently defied my attempts to write about it, perhaps because it's affected me so deeply. Not for me the allegory-mongering that has attached itself to this movie with such frequency. I mean, if you wanted to, you could say that Gary Cooper is Bush and Frank Miller is Iraq and blah blah blah. That seems like a waste of time to me. What hangs ineradicable and unfathomable in my mind is the look of utter disgust on Will Kane's face at the end of the film—no triumph, no vindication, and drained, earlier on, of what could have been sadness. After going through the full range of manly emotions earlier in the film, it's just a blank, unferocious disgust, and it chills me to the bone. Will I ever be on the receiving end of such amply deserved disgust? Will I be someone who feels it? Will I stand up against evil if I see it, even if I could ratiocinate sitting down? I'm young and callow and I don't know, but I hope I can do it if I have to. It seems more human not to be able to, though.
Saturday, 5/31/03 I just had a very pleasant time at the CD & Game Exchange here in beautiful Downtown Silver Spring. This was mostly because I found two great hip-hop albums I had been clocking—EPMD's Unfinished Business and Talib Kweli & Mos Def Are…Black Star—at low, low CDGEx prices, but it was also because of the clerks. The man who was kind enough to get my CDs from the cabinet tried to sell me the Djinni Brown CD in addition to my other purchases. Although I feel no pressing need to buy producer CDs, loving the rhymes just as much as the beats as I do, he was so nice about it that I mumbled some excuse about being "on a budget" and thanked him for taking the time. The man who rang up my purchase took my money and explained the CD & Game Exchange return policy: "If you have any problems, bring 'em back within a week, and make sure this date sticker is on there." Then he broke from the script: "But you shouldn't bring them back, because they're very good CDs." I assured him that I would only bring them back if they had, like, um—"A problem," he concluded for me, smiling. Yes, sir! His instruction was ultimately unnecessary, as I anticipate playing these CDs long and hard. But it's nice to get a real personal touch, instead of the professional personal touch you get at the big chain emporia. (I have been working on a poem titled "On Finding Myself Attracted to the Register Clerk at Borders" that will eventually explore the idea of the professional personal touch.) These guys just liked hip-hop and were glad that I liked it too.
Friday, 5/30/03 Another tale from the city in the Gentrification Diary. More to come soon.
Wednesday, 5/28/03 New entry in the Gentrification Diary today, about an encounter on the bus and what it recalled for me. Looking at the Diary, I appear to have covered some of this ground before, but whatever; this is a record of my thoughts, not an argument. I can make it into an argument later if I need to.
Tuesday, 5/27/03 Yesterday evening (or was it this morning?), I dreamt that I was the boon companion of Busta Rhymes, Lil' Kim and Angie Martinez (the latter being a deejay on New York City's Hot 97 hip-hop radio station and a wannabe rapper). We wandered about downtown Silver Spring having adventures. At one point, Busta Rhymes found a little office above the Caribbean nightclub on Ramsey Avenue across from the Metro. From this office, he could control the air raid sirens I had not previously known were poised to alert all of downtown Silver Spring's residents to possible attacks or calamities. But Lil' Kim and Angie Martinez weren't going to let Busta get frivolous with our civil defense system. (Also, Angie Martinez was referred to as "Angie Martinez" by everyone throughout the dream.) "Andrew!" 4-foot-11 Lil' Kim in full Kimmish regalia—i.e., not much clothing and x-tra high heels—yelled from a grassy knoll, with a bored-looking Angie Martinez at her side, cast against a blue-sky background. "Tell Busta to stop playing with those air raid sirens!" "Busta!" I said as I turned away from the two ladies. "Lil' Kim says to stop playing with those air raid sirens." "Damn, man!" Busta said, turning, his randomly generated dreadlocks swiping against some knobs and dials and his arm scattering a stack of papers. "I just wanted to see how these [expletive]s work!" I find this dream especially amusing because I am a vocal skeptic of Lil' Kim's talents for anything besides having her breasts augmented, I think Angie Martinez is a horrible MC, and I haven't liked much of anything Busta's done since his first album "The Coming" (except that single with Janet Jackson, "Give It To Me"). Why was I hanging out with these hip-hop personalities? I'll never know. But for a couple hours, we had a fast friendship and some wacky adventures.
Monday, 5/26/03 I found the permanent link to the Jordan articles on the Washington City Paper's site. I changed the reference to it below and also, as you can see, popped it up here.
Saturday, 5/24/03 I saw an awesome concert last night: the WPGC All Souled Out mega-neo-soul conference with Jaguar Wright, Floetry, Talib Kweli and the Roots featuring Cody ChesnuTT. I may write more about it later. I didn't write anything about it yet today because I got home at about 2 am and woke up at 7 am for some reason, and I've spent most of my afternoon napping in an attempt to correct this error. Frank Ahrens, who most of the time is one of my favorite writers in the Washington Post, today turned in an okay little article about "Matrix"-based advertising with a somewhat puzzling ending:
Now, myself, when when I buy an SUV, there's really only one question I ask: Is it invulnerable to attacks by men standing in the middle of the highway wielding samurai swords? But I'm not sure how many people share my feelings on this issue. I guess that's what will decide whether or not GM's decison to insert its products into one of the best action scenes of all time will translate into money in GM's registers. Of course, we're all really lying motionless in sensory-deprivation pods as machines harvest the electrical energy generated by chemical reactions in our bodies, so it doesn't really matter.
My massive protest campaign has forced the complete capitulation of the evil empire known as Fox 5 DC in one day. Sonya Long, program manager at Fox 5, sent me the following e-mail this morning:
How 'bout that. If Ghandi had had me on his side, the Brits would have cleared out of India faster than you can say "sticky wicket." Or at least by July 1. If you can think of something else we should protest, e-mail me, and if I think your cause is just, I'll get the engine running.
Wednesday, 5/21/03 You know how Fox 5 is rerunning all the same damn "Simpsons" episodes over and over again in the 6-7 pm weeknight block that all "Simpsons" fans love so well? I got sick of it and wrote them an indignant e-mail. You can get sick of it and write them an indignant e-mail too! Click here to get to Fox 5's page, then click "What's on Fox 5" and then "Talk to Fox 5" in the navbar to get to their comment form. Then write them something like this (feel free to copy it, replacing the stuff in brackets with descriptors of youuuu):
If they get enough e-mail, they'll eventually start rerunning different episodes just to get out from under the cybertorrent. At work, we say that comments aren't a democracy; people have to make good arguments. For Fox, however, the best argument is a lot of people threatening to take their eyeballs and their influenceable wallets elsewhere. Let's make it happen.
Sunday, 5/18/03 Rumors of my stopping writing movie reviews, which incidentally were started by me, were greatly exaggerated, 'cause here's "The Matrix Reloaded." I watched it and my first instinct afterwards was to review it. I momentarily stopped reviewing it to go perform karaoke with my sister and some of her friends as a celebration of her birthday. I leared many things:
In other news, based on the two episodes shown tonite, "The Simpsons" has officially lost me. I'm not going to watch it anymore. Just because you loved something once doesn't mean that you have to watch its agonizing death, especially when that thing you loved never really loved you back.
Friday, 5/16/03 The Detroit Pistons are going to play the New Jersey Nets in the Eastern Conference finals. This comes as a surprise to some analysts, who subscribed to the Great Man theory of basketball history and predicted that Allen Iverson, The Answer (to the question "Who is the greatest player in the NBA who is routinely tardy to practices?"), would single-handedly drag his Philadelphia 76ers teammates to victory. Au contraire. The Pistons threw people at AI, adjusted their adjustments to the resulting defensive breakdowns, and came back from a 14-point deficit for a tough road victory. The Pistons play what is called "team basketball," where everyone defers to the hot hand regardless of whether that hot hand is a veteran or a rookie, everyone helps everyone else on defense, and no loose ball is left uncontested. It's the kind of basketball I aspired to play in the NBA before I realized I was a relatively short white person with the lateral quickness of an M-1 Abrams tank. It's good to see my hometown Pistons succeeding with that style of basketball and making me remember those glory days of the franchise from 1988 through 1990 when we won our two straight championships with the Bad Boys. Though we played a lot dirtier back in the day. Also we won championships. Hmmm. One of those Bad Boys, Joe Dumars, is in the team president's chair now. To Dumars' name I have always attached the epithet "the best defender ever against Michael Jordan," which Jordan himself does not dispute. Looks like Dumars got one more steal on Jordan by trading Jerry Stackhouse to what used to be Jordan's Washington Wizards in exchange for Richard Hamilton. However, as players, Joey D formed part of the final barrier to Jordan's uncontested greatness; as execs, Dumars helped get Jordan's ass fired. Here are a bunch of really amusing articles about Jordan's time in Washington, courtesy of the local alternative weekly. Because that link will expire in a few days, I'll link directly to the stories entitled "Most Valuable Playa" and "Michael Jordan Tried to Steal My Date," both of whose titles should be pretty self-explanatory. I kind of want to write an article about MJ's stay in Washington, but I want to write a lot of things, and the MJ article isn't all that high on the list. If you all see me mention wanting to write an article that you might actually want to read, please let me know so I end up actually writing it. I write a lot quicker when I know there's an audience on tenterhooks for my prose, because my ego is a gigantic vermin to which I must feed unfathomable quantities of sugar water.
Thursday, 5/15/03 I was in a dark mood most of today. The normal cubicle banter rankled me with its seeming banality, constructive things to do at work were few and far between, and I couldn't see a way out of the malaise. All this is to establish that there did not seem to be much hope for the evening when I got off work and went to Giant Food before going home. I loaded up the cart with on-sale groceries (I hit the Cottonelle 2-for-1 special with a coupon—$6.58 worth of toilet paper for $2.59, baybee) and necessary produce, and was coming out of the toothpaste aisle (Colgate Total, 2 for $5 plus a $1-off coupon) when I saw that I would soon collide with another cart if I didn't stop. I pulled up. The cart turned out to be an older man who was, for some reason, beaming. "Well, if that doesn't…" he said. "Please, go ahead," I said, trying to smile. "I insist," he replied, with a small wave of his hand. "Thank you," I said, with what I'm fairly sure was a real smile. "Thank you," he said as I sped off to the orange juice (2-for-1 with a $1-off coupon). I don't know why, but that little act of politeness seemed to brighten that man's day inordinately. And because of that, the whole encounter brightened my day. And now, after dinner and some time away from the office, I feel pretty good. I hope you do too. (The fact that I had an ass-kicking day at the grocery story may also have something to do with my improving mood. With sales and coupons, I saved about $13 on groceries that would have been $32 at full price. With all the not-on-sale produce I bought, more than one-third off qualifies as an excellent outing. And I have enough Cottonelle for the entire summer now, in all likelihood. I realize this is yet another aspect of my personality that separates me from 99% of my chronological peers, but I enjoy this enough that I don't care.)
Monday, 5/12/03 That's Monday as in 2:30 am. I woke up at 1 am and can't get back to sleep. I dunno why. I had my improv workshop show today. Thanks to my family and Robert Kahn and Jordan Baker for coming to cheer. I know a lot of you would have come were you not tied up with the commercially mandated celebration of your moms. It was a small crowd. For most of this workshop, I felt like I was missing something—like I couldn't summon the proper attitude to do improv properly, compensated in unproductive ways, and flailed at or rushed at illusory solutions to oncoming problems rather than letting the problems, and the solutions, come to me. I wasn't interacting well with my teammates and wasn't enjoying myself. Then suddenly for the last two weeks (the rehearsal and the show) everything came together and I played pretty well and had fun doing it. The show went quite well, with strong performances from everybody, and the audience we had seemed to thoroughly enjoy itself. I was happy with how my team went easily through Changing Styles, as we moved from "e e cummings" style to Shakespeare to love story to spaghetti Western missing nary a beat. I also mananged eventually to guess all three of the bizarre items I was attempting to sell in Shopping Spree—a Harry Potter doll filled with whipped cream that discussed campaign finance reform, glowing toenail polish with a toothpick applicator, and a blender that mixed paint and was operated telepathically. The Harry Potter doll killed me, as first I didn't get Harry Potter and then spent what seemed like an eternity naming prominent Democrats until it dawned on me that maybe the doll already looks like someone. I can still hear myself: "Bob Graham? John Kerry? Tom Daschle?" Maybe that's why I can't sleep. But anyway, it was fun. I don't plan on doing it again soon, because it kills my Sundays (three-and-a-half hours for workshop and travel in the middle of the afternoon), but I will probably eventually do it again. Please let me get back to sleep now, O God of sleep, whatever your name might be. • Well, now it's 9:30 pm, which is a much more normal time to be doing updates. My esteemed godfather Mark has informed me, per the question at the bottom of today's first update, that the god of sleep is named Somnus. This was, no doubt, the inspiration for the word "somnolescent," among others. When I gained this knowledge, I immediately addressed a prayer to Somnus, the somewhat redacted text of which is printed below:
That prayer delivered, I'm going to bed.
Saturday, 5/10/03 For the past two weeks, I have let up with the whip I regularly apply to my metaphorical back and allowed myself to spend a lot of my nominal leisure time sitting on my literal ass, instead of laboring on whatever writing project has lately captured my fancy or attending momentous cultural events or reading about the issues of the day or pondering the dilemmas modern man faces in the new century. (Well, I've been doing less of the last one, anyway.) This has been an interesting experiment. On the one hand, I now find that I am not sucked up in the frenzies of worry and stress that often mark my springtimes. (For some reason, the changing weather and especially the frequent raining drain my energy, make my sleep less restful, and induce an unfortunate artificial nervousness in yours truly, which is why I have much less capacity for work these days in general.) "Don't worry about it; no one cares," I tell myself, and most of the time I'm right. On the other hand, I often find myself wandering around or sitting on my ass (especially sitting on my ass—this is truly a novel experience for me) and wondering exactly where I am, feeling lost and vaguely unreal without self-generated imperatives driving me towards some goal or another. This is not a pleasant feeling. I subscribe to the strand of Sartrean existentialism of which Nietzsche is the grandfather, the one that postulates that life is essentially meaningless (try to convince me it's not!) and that therefore our imperative is to construct a meaning for it, to create from the flotsam and jetsam sifting and zooming around us a structure that makes us happy and that doesn't, you know, destroy the rest of the world. Without my artificial structure, I find myself wondering what would happen if my office building were made out of sponge or if the law of gravity were overturned by the Supreme Court or if I could just get away with murmuring the vowels of "Hihowareyagood" at work. I feel kind of fatuous and fluffy-headed, like Tahj Holden used to play in the post, whereas I like to feel mentally agile and precise, like Lonny Baxter used to play in the post. I could stand to be a bit more fatuous and fluffy-headed, true, but you have to start out in the kiddie end of the pool. All of which is to say that I don't feel particularly stressed that I wrote the vast majority of this review of "Lilya 4-Ever" a week ago and I'm just getting it up now, and I don't feel particularly driven to write a review of "X2" even though I saw it with the estimable Robert Kahn yesterday and it was prodigiously cool. In point of fact, I feel less and less enthusiasm for writing movie reviews. I think I've written enough of them for now. Just to warn you.
Tuesday, 5/6/03 Lately at work I have been writing a rule that will be a very high priority when the relevant parties figure out what they want it to say. In addition, everyone involved would like to have a sense of how much information would need to be gathered to write the rule, so I'm writing descriptions of everything we'd like to do, but in some cases simply not describing why we want to do it, because I don't know why or don't understand why. It looks like this:
I normally take the position that good writing stems from an understanding of what you're trying to write, but here I'm trying to write something good that explicitly shows the places where I have no idea what the hell I'm talking about. Who says you can't learn new skills in the government? In other news, yesterday I saw the Tigers-Orioles game (Win No. 5 for my Tigers!) with some people I previously knew only from an Internet forum dedicated to the Detroit baseballers. It once again confirmed my long-held belief that the Internet is a good place for intelligent people to find each other, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm always glad when I seem to fit in with intelligent company. And the Detroit Pistons are playing selfless, dedicated, down-and-dirty basketball in the Eastern Conference Playoffs (motto: "Providing a Publicity Tour for the NBA Champions After They Win the Western Conference"). They roared back from a 3-1 deficit to the Orlando Magic and, as I write this, they're leading the Philadelphia 76ers at halftime, mostly due to stingy, crafty defense, an offense based on movement and energy more than sheer Kobe-esque talent, and the amazing domination of Big Ben Wallace. Woo doggy. The wild 'fro is back. I also have a review of "Lilya 4-ever," but it's not very good (the review). I looked at it and knew what to do with it, but couldn't figure out how to do it. It's like looking at a map of New York City and seeing that the Bronx is northwest of Queens; you still need to do a lot of figuring on how to get there. I hope to have lots of time to play with my writing for the rest of the week. Remember: ComedySportz workshop show. 3 pm on Mother's Day. Ballston Commons mall (Ballston metro). Call 703/486-HaHa. Be not fazed by the fact that the voice mail does not mention the show and simply leave a message stating that you'd like a ticket to the 3 pm workshop show on May 11. Tix are $5. More info on the venue here. I guarantee funny for you and your maternal unit.
Saturday, 5/3/03 The front page of this week's Rite-Aid circular says in large letters at the top "Don't Forget Mom!", with a helpful subhead reading "Mother's Day is May 11th." The product in the bottom-right corner of the front page is a 12-pack of Coronas on sale for a mere $10.99. I know what I'm getting my mom for Mother's Day! Thanks, Rite-Aid!
Friday, 5/2/03 I bought my mom the book Postmodern Pooh by Frederick Crews for her birthday, and she was kind enough to lend it back to me for a quick read. It's a skilled skewering of both modern critical theory in its worst excesses and the most inane reactions to it that takes Milne's well-loved tales of the titular bear as its jumping-off point. The chapters parodying Frederic Jameson's Marxist cant, Harold Bloom's obsession with both Falstaff and himself, and Stanley Fish's brilliant smugness are particularly incisive. I recommend it to all English majors and anyone who has undertaken any graduate work in a liberal-arts field. Anyway, I thought of Crews' skill again when I read, on the Web outlet of Dave Eggers' McSweeney's, Jeff Alexander and Tom Bissell's transcription of the commentary of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky on The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. This should be hilarious, and indeed, Alexander and Bissell have some great ideas as to how these luminaries of the left would tease out a subtext many of us would think nonexistent in Tolkien's work as transmitted via Peter Jackson. But these dudes forgot one thing: Zinn and Chomsky both have particular ways of talking. And they're different ways. And they're different than most of us, too. But Jeff and Tom (I feel close to them now, for I have failed many a time in the same way as they) don't both to differentiate between Zinn and Chomsky, and the speech of both is ridiculously flat. Good ideas wasted! It saddens me. I'm sure both gentlemen will realize the error of their ways and come back to drop a gem on us, though. To satisfy your lit-crit parody jones this weekend, I have posted in the Humor section my close passage analysis (done in what I did not know at the time was the New Critical style) of Madame Bovary. It also has a special Madame Bovary Parody Songbook at the end of it. I wrote this in high school, and I haven't written a lot of stuff that's funnier since. Reading this over again, it's amazing to me how many of my favorite jokes were already in place at that time. Maybe five hours of sleep a night and endless unceasing stress were actually good for me.
Tuesday, 4/29/03 I am in a much better mood now. You all can stop feeling awkward about my having so prosaically revealed my true feelings in a forum that has left you all more accustomed to smartass rejoiners and abstracted musings. There won't be any more of that, forever if I can help it. Seriously, I don't know really what to do about stuff like that. Is the Web a completely public place that deserves my public face? Am I ready to have my public face accurately reflect my mental state, instead of pretending to the extent necessary to ensure some continuity? I guess these are questions larger than the mere Web, though. I'm certainly not going to be able to answer them in the next couple of minutes, which means we can leave them hanging for now. Here's an article by the St. Louis Post's classical music critic in which, among other things, she trashes hip-hop and those who celebrate it as incapable of appreciating the finer musics in life—you know, like classical. She's getting a rather snotty letter as soon as I find the time to write one. (Link found first on Arts & Letters Daily.) Though I do owe some other people I actually like mail as well. Tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen, tomorrow I shall write.
Monday, 4/28/03 One of the side benefits of taking these ComedySportz workshops has been meeting interesting people. One of these interesting people, Sandra Hull, has a blog of which I have become a devoted reader. Sandra is an extremely funny woman both in person and in print, and in the finest blog tradition, quotidian tales of misspellings, inconveniences and minor hazards of apartment living become hilarious and poignant by turns as she renders them into prose. Check it out. I plan to put together the e-mails I have received in response to the call for pizza thoughts sometime next week. Keep voicing your opinions. Additionally, I am in a bad mood. If you have any particularly inspirational thoughts to share about how life has a point and stuff, now would be a good time to send 'em along. • Update: I'm in a somewhat better mood now. At the very least, I have my sense of gallows humor and stuff back.
Sunday, 4/27/03 I would like to point out that this blog entry by Jason Walther, titled "For Whom the Taco Tolls," is extremely hilarious.
Thursday, 4/24/03 Two pieces of momentous news. First: The May issue of Jazz Times, America's Jazz Magazine, is out. The large picture on the cover depicts Los Hombres Calientes. A smaller picture and headline in the upper-left corner lets the reader know that an article about Regina Carter also appears inside. I wrote that one. I urge you to go to any of your finer newsstands and pick up an issue, both to read what I quite modestly think is an extremely interesting article and to support Jazz Times, which will eventually plow some of the money you spend on the magazine back into paying me to write more lengthy features. I hope. Second: The date of the final show for the current session of workshops for ComedySportz has been set. It's May 11th. A few of you may be saying to yourselves: "That's Mother's Day!" But of course. What better way to spend your Mother's Day than by taking her to a performance by amateur improv comedians? I promise you, I'm better than I was last time! Those who came last time need no further introduction, but other people should not only note the existence of ComedySportz, a fine improv comedy show that takes place in the name-based juvenile humor mecca of Ballston, Virginia, they should also note that I have been taking a workshop there to learn the art of acting silly in a structured manner, and that they can view the results of said workshop in the form of a show. This show will take place at 3 pm on Mother's Day, and tickets to it cost $5. Which is better: showing your love for your mother by hanging around with her, or showing your love by taking her to watch me make a fool of myslf (along with eight other people whose writing is not featured on this website) for an hour and a half? Call 703/486-HAHA to make a reservation. (Just say on the message that you want to attend the workshop show at 3 pm on May 11.) More info on the location, ways to get there, and shows that do not feature Andrew can be found at ComedySportz's website. Everybody please come!
Wednesday, 4/23/03 Eminem is finally in a real live rap battle! And with Ja Rule, that rapper I can't stand! How exciting! But I just heard the response song Em, 50 Cent and Busta Rhymes recorded in response to Ja Rule's freestyle dis-fest, "Hail Mary." Bus-a-Bus is batting cleanup, and he drives in all the runners with a rap that's incredibly vicious and offended at the same time. Em doesn't really do all that much on the track. On the other hand, the "8 Mile" DVD has a great impromptu battle, according to Slate. I'll have to check it out. I'm softening on the Eminem issue, particularly when I read him making respectful comments like these about Rakim. The more he's a rapper and the less he's a Cultural Phenomenon, the more I like him. It's impossible not to like his skills, if you enjoy the hip-hop music, and I never denied them, but the media attention—more specifically, the type of media attention—he was getting was corrosive. Today marks the debut of the Consumption Reporting section in The Rest of Our Culture. Some content got repurposed into it, but the first new piece of content is Pizza Wars, marking the first time in months I have said I would write something "soon" and then actually had it up after a relatively short span of time. I would love to have everyone's opinions on this one. My godfather Mark has already promised that I will have his. Do you want his opinion to count for more than yours? No? Then e-mail me.
Tuesday, 4/22/03 I have been added to the D.C. Metro Blog Map, which was featured in the Washington Post a coupla weeks ago. Props to Maureen for making the spiffy-ass map and to all my fellow bloggers for having the good taste to hang out near public transit in both cyber and physical space. It's fun to poke around and see all the different uses to which blogs can be put. On Friday, I went to the Giant pharmacy and waited about a half-hour for my prescription, reading about pharmaceutical supplement deregulation (really). A little girl came up to me and sat down with her sister and started a conversation with me. She was complaining about having to go to school that Monday (it was still spring break in Montgomery County, apparently), and said how unfair it was that D.C. kids didn't have to go. I pointed out that D.C. students had to stay in school for longer than Monkey County kids, and tried to change the subject by asking where she was from. I almost didn't hear what she said for the sirens going off in my head. "YOU SOUND LIKE A PEDO! SHE'S GOING TO RUN TO HER DADDY AND YOU'RE GOING DOWN TO THE STATION!" But she didn't seem to notice, and we were soon comparing our buildings. ("I have entire floors without numbers that are called M and L! The 'M' is for mezzanine. It's a French word that means 'a floor between two other floors.'" I'm so pedantic.) Then her daddy came, and she ran off midsentence, and he and I smiled at each other before the three of them left. I'm still hoping she didn't mention it to her pops. I have no desire to see my face on a poster on the Community Bulletin Board. Today I brought my toffee chocolate chip cookies to work. There are some people there who are seriously obsessed with those cookies now. I was remembering when I brought those cookies to a Super Bowl party (still warm from the oven!) and the attendees just could not stop eating them, right up to mock confrontations over the destination stomachs of the final three or so cookies. I didn't do much work today (didn't have much to do), but I guess the day had its own satisfactions. Coming soon: Pizza Wars! The comprehensive guide to eating my favorite food. Yes, as if I didn't express enough of my opinions!
Saturday, 4/19/03 I just got off the phone with my Citibank customer service representative. I was three days late with my February payment, because I didn't get to sit down and pay my bills for a while in between writing the Jazz Times article and working on the memoirs. Fine. I'll pay you the exorbitant $25 late fee. But they also feel empowered to charge interest for the entire month on the balance that was only late for three days. The dude I just talked to sounded like he was dealing with a recalcitrant child when I asked him to explain that one. Nothing like condescending to an angry person to effectively fulfill your customer service mission, dipwad. I don't really care if it's standard policy; it's a culmination of a long series of stupid things that card has done. My Citibank MasterCard used to be a Citibank Visa until I got a mailing cheerfully announcing that they were switching me over, and that there was to be no further discussion of the matter. The Citibank card was the one that had the telemarketers associated with it who would call up and say, "We'll just sign you up for this $69.95-a-year service and you can cancel at any time if you don't like it!!! Just say yes! Did I hear you say yes? No? But you really should say yes! After all, you can cancel at any time if you don't like it!!!" Their bills are full of Exclusive Offers to buy $4 flashlights and personal-travel kits; I bought the flashlight, and it sucks ass. And Citicorp's chairman, Sanford Weill, is the guy who encouraged Jack Grubman to change his rating on AT&T in exchange for help in getting Grubman's kid into the 92nd Street Y preschool. Who wants to enrich that scumbag, when I could enrich some less obviously venial scumbag? And my Citicard doesn't even give me anything (like cash back or airline miles) for my troubles. All of which is to say, I'm going to pay them their $1.68 and, after I get their next bill and it says "$0.00" on it, I'm canceling that card like Fox canceled girls club: with all possible speed.
Friday, 4/18/03 Last night I dreamt that I went to Kentucky Fried Chicken with my man Nate Vaughan and had a BBQ chicken sandwich. It was good! But, somehow, I only noticed after getting almost all the way through the sandwich that it was actually a burger, and not only that but a barely cooked burger. The redness of the meat screamed at me and I…well, you know. I think this is my body's way of telling me: "Stay off the beef."
Thursday, 4/17/03 More on Silver Spring: a review of the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center's biggest screen here, and some musing on What It All Means from a gentrification perspective here. Eventually, I'm going to put up my Guide to Washington-Area Theaters so this can have some context. Also Soon: Reviews of both of J-Live's albums (I'm seriously obsessed with J-Live right now) and a gentrification musing on why Silver Spring can't become Bethesda II—I dearly hope (as prodded by my godfather Mark Knoblauch). More Eventually: The Grand Movie Review Reorg and Momentous Strategy Change. Right Now: Thankfulness that I'm not presently vomiting, which was not true yesterday. (D.C. area readers: Do not order a burger at the D.C. Chophouse and Brewery. Based on my experience, you have about a 50% chance of getting a nasty case of food poisoning.)
Saturday, 4/12/03 I went to a concert by pianist Marc-André Hamelin last night. It was one of those unfortunate concerts where the first thing on the program is by far the best-written and best-played (Schumann's Fantasiestücke), so the rest of the concert was a little disappointing even though it had some good stuff. Hamelin played some of Leopold Godowsky's Studies after Chopin's Etudes, which includes a left-handed version of the "Revolutionary Etude" that does not seem to be missing very many, if any, notes. It was a "wow" moment, but I like to get more than just a "wow," and Hamelin played it so affectlessly (not that I blame him; he was probably concentrating on hitting all those notes) that I couldn't just get swept up in the storm and the amazement. Anyway, here's a paragraph in the liner notes for that concert that builds you up for something really funny and then doesn't fulfill those expectations:
This is an OK story, but it would be a lot funnier if it ended like this:
I'm thinking about writing a short, jocular essay about modern classical compositional styles, which would be an excuse to dis a bunch of people whose compositions I had to write about for the All Classical Guide and to extol a bunch of others. I thought of this when I heard Hamelin play his own compositions and immediately thought, "Oh, he's a curdled-milk Romanticist." I might as well write all these terms down with some definitions if I'm carrying them around in my head.
Thursday, 4/10/03 Hey! There's already another entry in the Gentrification Diary! I must be enthusiastic about this or something! Thanks to my mom for correcting a typo apiece in the previous entry and the poem.
Wednesday, 4/9/03 Today we embark on the Gentrification Diary, my telling of the transformation of Silver Spring. Silver Spring may not be much to most people, but it's my hometown, and I want to tell all about it the best I can as it both disappears and ascends. I'll try to update this fairly frequently with stories, reminiscences and commentary on whatever's happening 'round town. I put up a poem related to the old Silver Spring as well; it's juvenalia, but I still like some things about it.
Monday, 4/7/03 I'm skipping the NCAA championship game tonight. This is because last night I was minding my own business asleep in bed when the fire alarm went off at 2 am. I waited fifteen minutes in bed, silent and still, for it to shut off, knowing deep in my heart that it was a false alarm. But then my self-preservation instinct took over and I started down the stairs to the lobby. Halfway down: the alarm shuts off. I can't get back to sleep. I get four hours of sleep. So I'm going to bed early tonite to try to forestall what will be an extremely miserable tomorow otherwise. I'm amazed I only fell asleep at work twice today. Euuugh. But who cares about this championship? Two schools I feel essentially neutral towards. Woo doggy. I care about it in an abstract way, but I don't want to ruin my tomorrow for it.
Saturday, 4/5/03 Another fascinating thing said in my presence! This was outside Ballston Commons mall, from one of three chattery middle-school girls who had just yelled that weird baiting "Hiiiiiii" middle-school girls have honed to an unbelievable level of annoyingness at some unfortunate passerby: "He's at the mall, like, all the time! I'm like, Don't you have a life? Aren't you in high school?" Would that those two had been as mutually exclusive as this young one seemed to think.
Thursday, 4/3/03 On the Red Line going to the Wizards game yesterday, a man and a woman sat down behind me, conversation already in progress, and certainly not embellished here (you think I could make this crap up?): Woman: "At first, I really liked him. I was like, 'He's so funny!' But then—he's just so physically unattractive." Man: "Yeah, that was the first thing I noticed when I met him."
Tuesday, 4/1/03 You people think I'm going to tell some elaborate lie for your enjoyment today? You people are suckers. Today (this is true) at work during a staff meeting, we were discussing the new Emergency Operations Center on the fifth floor of my building. My boss asked if anyone had been up there and knew what it looked like. "I would like to watch four basketball games at once on its big TVs," I said. "It would be a great sports bar if it weren't for all the office stuff there and the lack of alcohol." This may not have been the right thing to say. I do desperately want a good sports bar to go to that isn't dominated by foreigners from another state rooting for their foreign teams, though. And that isn't in Virginia. That's another state! I live in Maryland, where thanks to the timely suspension of habeas corpus we were on the right side of the War Between the Good States and the Bad States, thank you very much. Tonight (this is also true) I'm going to go to the Caps game against the Florida Panthers. (All together now: Why is there hockey in Florida?) But I'm going with a Special Twist: I'm going to sit in the mezzanine. I paid close to 90 bones for the ticket (it all went to charity, though, so it's OK). A full report on this will be posted as soon as I can write it on the site you love to bookmark on other people's machines. (That's this one.)
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All this tasty writing ©2002-11 by Andrew Lindemann Malone. All rights reserved. |
