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
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.
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).
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(also, here’s a link (here) to an interview with one of the stars from the movie)
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.
Kierkegaard, 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).
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)?
I went and saw Trust the Man last weekend. It had an awesome trailer and i was pretty excited going in. Two hours later i left with a feeling that my gender had been bitch-slapped, hog-tied, thrown down the stairs and then urinated on. I wrote a few weeks ago about the impressive gender role reversal in Mr. & Mrs. Smith and at the end i commented about the overall lameness of men in most current Hollywood features, especially this summer. Trust the Man is the latest in that vein and most likely the worst offender yet.
There are two men in Trust the Man, Tom (David Duchovny) and Tobie (Billy Crudup) and while the movie pretends they’re likable guys and gives them some cute faces and funny scenes, the fact is that they are pretty much the most irresponsible, self-centered, insensitive, moral corrupt men to hit the silver screen in a romantic comedy this year. Tom (Dave D.), a stay at home dad, is married to Rebbecca (Julianne Moore) is a sex addict who tries to have sex with her at every turn no matter the time or place. He exercises no compassion nor tries to honest discuss why she won’t have sex with him. He instead decides to look at porn all day and have an affair with a single mother at his daughter’s school. Sweet. Tobie, a freelance writer, is dating Elaine (Maggie Gyllenhaal), obsessed with death and sports, totally self-centered, and avoids commitment and emotional honesty like its the plague. He’s also completely rude and annoying. He never once offers useful advice to Elaine or contributes any relevant conversation in any scene in the movie. Trust me, it’s painful to watch because i like all four of the actors and want to like them, but it was really pretty tough.
What do these men have going for them? Apparently nothing. The movie wants
you to sympathize with them and it is a romantic comedy and both couples need to get together and live happily ever. So, it follows Tobie’s attempts to win Elaine back and tracks Rebecca’s troubles at work. In any normal situation, there’d be a solid guy or at least someone somewhat normal somewhere which would start dating Elaine and that would be the end of it. But not here. Why? Because every other man completely sucks too. This is a movie of horrible horrible men at every turn. Rebecca (Julianne Moore) is surrounded at work by theater assholes and a young super sketchy cliche of an actor. Elaine tries to date two guys: one who’s a loud, long-haired musician hippie sketchball and another who is unintelligent German sprocket.
What about the women? This movie would have you believe that women are a) the only ones capable of holding a normal job that requires hard work and dedication, b) the only tactful gender, c) the only people able to live an un-neurotic existence, d) a doomed to a life of having to hold the hand of their man through life.
The icing on this crap-cake is that at the end Tom and Tobie cause a huge scene at a play and utter a few romantic lines that are (i kid you not), “I’m a father and a husband. I love you.” (David D.) and “I don’t want to live without you.” (Billy C.). And, because these guys were SO lame the whole movie, these lines do seem like a HUGE accomplishment. Thus the two ladies are overcome with emotion, take them back and everyone lives happily ever after. Puh-lease.
Side note: You know what also pisses me off is when the characters in movies are actors, directors or in the theater. It makes me think that the writer so uncreative that he can’t think of a career for these people that is somewhat normal. The four characters in this movie are a) an actress, b) a sports writer, c) a receptionist who writes a children’s book, and d) a retired marketing exec who becomes a writer. So, to recap: 3 of 4 are writers and the forth is an actress. Gee – that’s real original. The writer took the phrase “write what you know” a little too literally. At least he didn’t have it take place in LA.
With football season comes a new series of beer ads and i must say, I love the new Miller Lite ads.
(i had to chop the ad in half so it fit well in the blog)
If i don’t even have 20 RSS subs, what does that make me?