Category: People

Independence Day

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I was given the book Independence Day by Richard Ford to read by a friend of mine. It’s a great read and very well written and i liked it a lot. I do feel some odd similarities to the main character, Frank Branscombe. He has a pragmatism towards life and love that i can relate to. While of course we differ in a lot of ways – he being 45 and divorced with 2 children vs. me 30 and not ever been married – i was curious to see what he would do on every page to see if i would react in the same way. In some ways it reads like a guidebook about how to survive as a middle-aged man. On others it’s about the quest to achieve continuity and self-actualization in everyday life. Frank’s life has had its ups and downs but he’s non-apologetic and pretty agreeable as a character.

Some of my favorite quotes:

Sally (FB’s quasi-girlfriend): you just want everything to seem perfect and everybody to seem pleased. And you’re willing to let seem equal be. It makes pleasing anybody be an act of cowardice

This is a huge trait of FB in the book and is definitely MPL material. This is what i do. Interesting….

Sally: You’re too smooth from one thing to the next. I can’t keep up with you very well.FB: I think i’m just more at ease in the mainstream. It’s my version of the sublime.

Sally: And you’re also very cautious, you know. And you’re non-committal. You know that, don’t you? I’m sure that’s what you meant last night by being beyond affection. You’re smooth and you’re cautious and you’re noncommittal.

FB: My judgments aren’t very sound, so i just try not to cause too much trouble. But when i feel something strong, i guess i jump in.

Sally: Or you seem to anyway

The book is also just about FB and his thoughts about life. Some random passages:

  • About renting vs. owning: I felt owning was enough different from renting (except that you couldn’t leave). In my mind a sense of contingency and the possibility of imminent change in status underlay everything, though we stayed for more than a decade, and i stayed longer. It always seemed to me enough just to know what someone loved you and would go on loving you forever and that the mise-en-scene for love only that and not a character in the play itself
  • About the 4th of July: It is an odd holiday, to be sure – one a man or woman could easily grow abstracted about, its practical importance to the task of holding back wild and dark misrule never altogether clear or provable; as though independence were only private and too crucial to celebrate with others; as though we should all just get on with being independent, given that it is after all the normal, commonsensical human condition, to be taken for granted unless opposed or thwarted , in which case unreserved, even absurd measures should be taken to restore or reimagine it. Best maybe just to pass the day as the original signers did and as i prefer to do, in a country-like setting near to home, alone with your thoughts, your fears, your hopes, your “moments of reason” for what new world lies fearsomely ahead.
  • Better to follow old Davy Crockett’s motto (amended for use by adults): Be sure you’re not completely wrong, then go ahead.
  • From RB as he’s falling asleep: Suddenly my heart again goes bangety-bang, bangety-bangety-bang, as if i myself were about to exit life in a hurry. And if i could, i would spring up, switch on the light, dial someone and shout right down into the hard little receiver, “It’s okay. I got away. It was goddamned close, I’ll tell ya. It didn’t get me, though. I smelled its breath, saw its red eyes in the dark, shining. A clammy hand touched mine. But i made it. I survived. Wait for me. Wait for me. Not that much is left to do” Only there’s no one. No one here or anywhere near to say any of this to. And i’m sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

Happy 4th

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The first motion in the Continental Congress for independence was made on June 4, 1776. After hard debate, the Congress voted unanimously, but secretly, for independence from Britain on July 2. The Congress reworked the text of the Declaration until July 4, when the 12 colonies voted for adoption and released a copy signed only by John Hancock, President of the Congress, to the printers.

John Adams the unofficial whip of the independence-minded, wrote to his wife Abigail on July 3, 1776:

The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.

He forgot to mention beers, bbq’s, baseball games and fireworks – but otherwise he pretty much nailed it

Also, a song for today: Independence Day by Ani (click here)

What's Going On this Weekend? Let's Talk About What Going In!

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Why go out tonight? How about 25 reasons why….

  1. If you don’t drink that booze, someone else will – now get off your ass
  2. Bad ass nicknames like “Chuggybear,” “The Alabama Hamma,” “Pukey McPukerson” are not awarded to people who stay home to do laundry (ahem: kmr)
  3. This is the one and only night your soul mate will wander into the bar. Seriously.
  4. Word on the street is the booze has been trash talking you all day.
  5. It’s far better to have a good time you won’t remember than a dull one you will.
  6. Remember your English high school teacher that you used to call “Mr. McTightass?” You are starting to remind me of him.
  7. How the hell can you walk around sober when you’re an insignificant speck in an infinite and uncaring universe?
  8. Churchill and FDR got drunk, Hitler didn’t. Need i say more?
  9. If you don’t you’ll wake up in the morning all bright eyed and bushy tailed, and who the hell wants to go through life acting like a goddamn squirrel?
  10. Your friends can’t have a good time without you.
  11. Or, even worse – your friends might have a great time without you.
  12. There is a 1000 percent better chance you will land a starring role in the upcoming Paris Hilton video Vegas Orgy.
  13. Your lawn is so much more comfortable when you’re loaded.
  14. That feisty barmaid might finally, you know, pick up on what you’re laying down.
  15. Are we down on this little place we call earth to have a good time or watch other people have a good time on TV?
  16. Your girlfriend has rented a bunch of chick flicks you can snuggle to – including Legally Blonde 3.
  17. If you don’t hunt the booze, the booze will surely hunt you.
  18. When you write your memoirs you won’t have to go through the hassle of making up a bunch of decadent adventures.
  19. Modern life is a shit storm and booze is the only umbrella without any holes in it.
  20. You did your goddamn monkey dance for the Man and now you get your monkey treat.
  21. The day will come when you will have to single-handedly face death, and there isn’t a person alive who can tell you what will happen next.
  22. Hemingway shot himself after being sober for two months.
  23. When your coworkers ask “What did you get up to last night?” you can smile all cool like and say “Maaaaaan, you don’t wanna know,” instead of chirping “I alphabetized my DVD collection and found out I have two copies of The Truth About Cats and Dogs! Two!”
  24. Remember your childhood dream of meeting a brewery heiress and jet-setting around the world on her dime? You think that’s going to happen while sitting in your goddamn apartment watching Planet Earth’s Shallow Seas?
  25. It’s so much easier to call up those your ex and explain exactly where they went wrong.

No One Belongs Here More Than You

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I just finished this book of short stories by Miranda July. The stories are both funny and sad.  The writing is great and the stories are very unique.  It’s an easy read and I’d recommend it to anyone.

Miranda wrote and directed the movie You, Me and Everyone We Know which was very quirky but still very good.  If you like indie films, i’d recommend you check that one out

Love is a Mix Tape is a Sad but Good Book

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I recently read the book “Love is a Mix Tape” by Rob Sheffield. It’s a book about Rob and his wife: how they met, how they fell in love, how she died suddenly and how he’s coping with it. They were both rock critics so every step of the way, there’s music and a mix tape. It’s a sad book, but it’s a good book. If you want something to cruise through, and you like music of the 80’s and 90’s i’d recommend it. Some of my favorite passages:

Every time i have a crush on a woman, i have the same fantasy: I imagine the two of us as a synth-pop duo. No matter who she is, or how we meet, the synth-pop duo fantasy has to work, or the crush fizzles out. The girl is up front, swishing her skirt, tossing her hair, a saucy little firecracker. I’m the boy in the back, hidden behind my Roland JP8000 keyboard. She has all the courage and star power I lack. She sings our hit because i would never dare to get up and sing it myself. She moves the crowd while i lurk in the shadows, lavishing all my computer-blue love on her, punching the buttons that shower her in disco bliss and bathe her in the spotlight. I make her a star.

The new wave girl knows what pop dreams are made of. She knows that Debbie Harry was just kidding when she sang, “Dreaming is free.” She knows dreams are something you have to steal. The new wave girl scams on other peoples identities, mixing and matching until she comes up with a style of her own, knowing that nothing belongs to her, that she just gets to wear it until somebody else comes along with faster fingers to snatch it away. She knows pop dreams are a hustle, a deception, a “glamour” in the witchcraft sense of the word. She knows how to bluff and how to scam. She sings about counterfeiting, shoplifting, bootlegging, home taping. She’s in on the hustle – you steal it, it’s yours, it’s legal tender. The new wave girl knows all this, which is why she is dangerous. The new wave boy knows how dangerous she is, which is why he stands behind her. The boy and the girl, together in electric dreams.

Because the book is mostly about his wife’s death, there are quite a few sad parts. Such as…

We drove away with nothing inside us. I talked to Duane a bit, kept repeating to her the line Harvey Keitel says to Tim Roth at the end of Reservoir Dogs: It looks like we’re gonna have to do a little time….Every time i started to cry, i remembered how Renee used to say real life was a bad country song, except bad country songs are believable and real life isn’t. Everybody nows what it’s like to drive while crying; feeling like a bad country song is part of why it sucks.

The book is great to read and i especially like how he interprets Nirvana as a band largely speaking to us about marriage and how Biggie Smalls played a huge part in his mourning process.

Technology Incantation for Muggles

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My friend danah boyd gave a talk at the Etech conference last month (link is here). I just got around to reading the speech which i thought was fantastic. She begins it….

Isn’t there something magical about how fast the Internet went from a defense project to a key part of social infrastructure? Isn’t there something magical about how grandparents are blogging and activists are remixing popular TV shows to make social commentary? It is my belief that if we stare solely at the technology, we lose track of the true magic that exists around us.

What she does in the speech is break down how startups, corporations and almost anyone thinks

if you want to think about people, you need to understand how technological and corporate decisions interface with people’s lives and practices…

danah breaks down America’s society into stages and then describes the top 5 priorities of each stage, which are:

Life Stage #1 Life Stage #2 Life Stage #3 Life Stage #4
* Friends * Sex * Labor * Family
* Attention * Friends * Family * Health
* Play/Leisure * Money * Money * Religion
* Sex * Play/Leisure * Power * Hobbies
* Consumption * Labor * Property * Friends

As someone who is moving from stage 2 to stage 3 (damn that’s scary) i see this switch happening. Friends are harder to get access to as work and relationships/marriage take a more important role in everyone’s life.

I like how she can switch from looking at behavior patterns to how corporations and startups behave and deliver products:

Startups typically are naive about people’s practices but utterly passionate about technology. If they’re lucky, their technology will reach the hands of a population for whom it will make complete sense. This population will morph their product to meet their needs. And if the startup is not stupid, it will support this morphing, learn from it, and seek to make more and more happy users. Companies typically try to model out demographics and design for the market that they think is most monetizable. They go straight for mass adoption based on need, not love. Even more so than startups, they tend to blow through their early adopters so that they can get to the cash-cow as fast as possible. Warning: once you destroy the trust of your early adopters, you’re on the greed path.

All in all, it’s a great speech and worth checking out if you’re at all interested in technology (even if you’re not technical).

Mutual Appreciation: Not a Bad Indie Flick

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This past weekend i checked out the uber-indie flick Mutual Appreciation. At first, i was completely bored, but then i began to notice that the film has some real brilliance.

The movie is about kids in the 20-30 year old post-college trying-to-figure-it out stage. The dialogue and self-awareness of the characters in the movie are dead-on. Most movies today over-narrate or even have voice-overs telling you exactly what’s happening every step of the way. This film instead builds scenes using awkward pauses, glances by the characters, and body language which is much more authentic and real.

The movie is about a recent college grad, Alan, who is a musician and leaves a busted-up band for New York. He tries to stay focused and fends off all types of distractions, including the attraction to his good friend’s girlfriend. There are some great scenes in the movie and some of the things i particularly liked are:

  • There is a strange series of events that occur when Alan stops by a party well after it has finished and hangs out with 3 drunk women. Normally this would result is a bizarre series of events that’s pretty funny but instead this film portrays how current gender relations have shifted and in today’s post-feminist era women end up completely dominating tentative males
  • The songs played in the film are really good. The first song, “Things are what you make of them” by Bishop Allen is a great tune. I tried to find out what the other ones were, but couldn’t. If anyone knows. please drop me a line (or comment below)
  • The movie is just raw and it is in a good way.
  • The dialogue is extremely accurate to what guys and girls age 22-30 would talk like. There are about 4 scenes in this movie that are exactly the same as my experiences in NY – the awkward and pompous dialogue of the over-educated and under employed sitting around acting sophisticated while drinking wine and staying up late.
  • In places you’d normally expect something to happen – like an event – nothing does. Instead, you see someone get verbally rejected or visually stimulated. This isn’t a movie about events but rather emotions. Depending on what type of movie watcher you are, this could be a great thing or a horrible thing.

(also, here’s a link (here) to an interview with one of the stars from the movie)

Quotes from Feast of Love

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For no reason at all i picked up the book Feast of Love today. It’s a great book, one of my favorites. Here are two quotes from it. The first is an interesting story about Kierkegaard. The second just nails the sadness and self-reflection of Charles Baxter, the main character and narrator.

feastKierkegaard, the Danish philosopher fell in love with an attractive girl, Regine Olsen, and then he had concluded that they would be incompatible, that the love was mistaken, that he himself was so complex and she was simple, and he contrived to break the engagement so as to give the appearance that it was the young lady’s fault, not his.

He succeeded in breaking the engagement, in never marrying her. Cowardice was probably involved here. Kierkegaard wished to believe that the fault lay with the nature of love itself, the problem of love, its fate in his life. From the personal he extrapolated to the general. A philosopher’s trick. Regine married another man and moved away from Copenhagen to the West Indies, but Kierkegaard, the knight of faith, carried a burning torch for her, in the form of his philosophy, the rest of his days. This is madness of a complex lifelong variety. He spent his career writing philosophy that would, among other things, justify his actions toward Regine Olsen. He died of a warped spine.

For some reason it give me great pleasure to read of someone who, out of bitterness of letting his love get away, spent an entire career postulating that love & God can’t be spoken of and are thus dying. Just think what the religion and philosophy worlds might have been had he just gone through with the marriage. Oh, but then again, he literally did not have any backbone.

Now, here’s the 2nd…

What’s agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn’t care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you – if you happen to be me – with homecoming queens first, then girls next door, and finally anybody who might be pleased to see you now and then at the dinner table and in bed on occasion. You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you. The workings of nature are mysterious, but they do account for a certain amount of despair among single persons, the irrelevance you sometimes feel.

Just so you know, he (Charles) does end up with someone at the end.  So, the world is just and it does end well (for him at least).

Why does Snoop Carry An Umbrella?

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Fo drizzle, yo

This is my annual Snoop post. Even since Dre’s The Chronic, i’ve been in love with Snoop’s rapping. I even wrote a paper in college for an English class where i translated The Scarlet Letter to the lyrics of Nuthin’ But A G-Thing, it was renamed Nuthin’ But an ‘A’ Thing. Luckily, i’m not the only one who loves The Dogg. Danielle (who has no internet identity) sent me the following two gems…

The first is a site called Gizoogle. This is a site that will translate the text of any other site into Snoop-speak. If you look at what it does to the post i put up a couple weeks ago (below), it’s fantastic. I don’t who has the time to make site’s like this. But god bless them.

Here’s what i originally wrote:

This is a good graph that was sent to me that can accurately diagram who the person next to you in bed is, or how they fit into your dating perspective. While some of my friends have set up camp in the Zone of Pain with their “go ugly early” strategy, others jump between the dreaded cycle of Friend – Awkwardness – F-Buddy – Awkwardness, while the rest meander around in the dating zone with occasional layovers in the Zone of Pain.

becomes this

This is a good grizzay tizzle was sent ta me thiznat can accurately diagram who tha person nizzy ta you in bed is, or how they fit into yo pimpin` perspective wit da big Bo$$ Dogg. While some of mah niggaz have set up camp in tha Zone of Pizzle wit they “go fugly early” strategy, otha jizzle between tha dreaded cycle of Friend – Awkwardness – F-Buddy – Awkwardness, while tha rizzay meanda around in tha pimpin` zone wit occasional pusha in tha Zone of Pizzy.

awesome.

The second is a free-style rap from a guy in LA. He’s able to perfectly imitate Snoop, Jay-Z and The Game. It’s an amazing video. I like how the DJ is at a complete loss for words at the end. All he can keep saying is “jesus christ!”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbivRkS9viE&mode=related]

Finally, my friend Adam sent in this clip of Snoop going into Rick Dees studio and hitting on Patricia, Adam’s girlfriend.  It’s not every day that my buddy’s woman is flirting it up with Snoop.  Pretty funny.

Where Are You in the Dating Graph?

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attractivenesscale.jpg

This is a good graph that was sent to me that can accurately diagram who the person next to you in bed is, or how they fit into your dating perspective. While some of my friends have set up camp in the Zone of Pain with their “go ugly early” strategy, others jump between the dreaded cycle of Friend – Awkwardness – F-Buddy – Awkwardness, while the rest meander around in the dating zone with occasional layovers in the Zone of Pain.

Where do you stand (or should i say sleep)?