Lots to write about, but no time. This is how I fail at blogging...
Stayed up late last night compulsively checking the Mariners' score on my phone (they lost in extra innings), then reading another chapter of my Father's Day present. For Father's Day, I got a gift certificate to Third Place Books. I purchased this book: https://www.amazon.com/Evicted-Poverty-Profit-American-City/dp/0553447432/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
Lots to write about that especially. But it will have to be another day.
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Monday, June 20, 2016
Resurrection?
Thinking of resurrecting this blog because:
1. Sad to see my mad writing skills go to waste
2. It is the political season after all, and Donald Trump is a muse of social criticism.
Although in annals of my blogs abandoned after four or five posts, the one about my kids is way better: http://itsyandbubba.blogspot.com/ Maybe I should resurrect that one instead. Maybe I can do both, but I don't think I can do hybrid, because they're so different in tone. One is Christopher Lasch meets Roger Ebert and one is "Baby Blues" meets "Hyperbole and a Half." Actually, if I was one quarter as good as any of those things, I could die happy.
If I am able to pull off the resurrection, which is a rare feat indeed, I may need to be far more stream of consciousness to have time for this. Itsy & Bubba, my last blog attempt, I started when "Bubba" was very young. With very young children, you have both less time and more time than ever before. Now that they are a couple of years older, I only have less time. Never wanted to be that guy, but I do want Itsy to learn to swim, and play soccer, and, heck, probably learn an instrument and a foreign language and a martial art while he's at it. America's great dilemma: why must we live vicariously through our preschoolers?
Anyhow, in another show of arrogance, I've come to believe that the social/political criticism I might offer is just as cogent and thoughtful as most of what I read these days, so how about we dust off that keyboard and give it another go? We'll see how long it lasts...
1. Sad to see my mad writing skills go to waste
2. It is the political season after all, and Donald Trump is a muse of social criticism.
Although in annals of my blogs abandoned after four or five posts, the one about my kids is way better: http://itsyandbubba.blogspot.com/ Maybe I should resurrect that one instead. Maybe I can do both, but I don't think I can do hybrid, because they're so different in tone. One is Christopher Lasch meets Roger Ebert and one is "Baby Blues" meets "Hyperbole and a Half." Actually, if I was one quarter as good as any of those things, I could die happy.
If I am able to pull off the resurrection, which is a rare feat indeed, I may need to be far more stream of consciousness to have time for this. Itsy & Bubba, my last blog attempt, I started when "Bubba" was very young. With very young children, you have both less time and more time than ever before. Now that they are a couple of years older, I only have less time. Never wanted to be that guy, but I do want Itsy to learn to swim, and play soccer, and, heck, probably learn an instrument and a foreign language and a martial art while he's at it. America's great dilemma: why must we live vicariously through our preschoolers?
Anyhow, in another show of arrogance, I've come to believe that the social/political criticism I might offer is just as cogent and thoughtful as most of what I read these days, so how about we dust off that keyboard and give it another go? We'll see how long it lasts...
Monday, August 24, 2009
I will probably never write my memoirs...
But this could be a start:
I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there was my apartment in North Portland, on Killingsworth Street. It was on the second floor of a turn-of-the century brick building, with new deep green carpets and a mustard yellow kitchen. Every night I would ride the bus home from my call-center job downtown, cook up some Ramen or Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, sink into my rummage-sale leather love-seat, and turn on my brand new Denon CD player. I didn’t have a TV.
It was 2004 then. Digital music had already cut deep into the sales of compact discs, but I was intent on preserving the album as art form. My friend Joel Dunham, who was getting his MBA from Oregon State at the time, had started writing album reviews for a website, and had convinced me that I should join him in creating a rival to Pitchforkmedia.com. I remember, I was listening to a lot of Sufjan Stevens and Arcade Fire at the time, and thinking up superlative bloviations like:
Whether Win Butler, Régine Chassagne, and their bandmates in The Arcade Fire were attempting to make a philosophical statement about the loss of the utopian ideal or merely an aesthetic one, they’ve accomplished both with their debut album, Funeral. Their Quebecois environs may look utopian to all the newly disaffected youths this side of the 49th parallel, faced as we are with four more years of rampant absurdity, a stagnant economy producing fewer and fewer jobs, and perpetual war necessitated by the perpetual hate of our ever vigilant nemeses. But the dark spirituality of Funeral hints at an existential turmoil far more fundamental than that caused by mere political division.
And:
On Illinois, Sufjan Stevens has taken his "50 States" concept, inaugurated on 2003's Michigan, well over the top of anything resembling tasteful restraint. Surprisingly, he successfully circumvents all the usual badges of artistic credibility such as detachment and a simplistic, often stultifying sense of "purity," instead tackling this conceptual project with reckless abandon and personal investment. The result betrays Stevens' unique ability to craft complex soundscapes that are not only thoroughly pleasing to the aesthetic senses and occasionally even danceable, but also completely free from pretension.
I remember the first time I heard Chicago, my favorite track from that album. It was a couple months before I moved to Philadelphia. Stevens was playing at Dante’s in downtown Portland. Joel and I had weaseled our way into free admission from the promoter, under the ostensible pretense of interviewing Stevens for our website. The first opener, Denison Witmer, was a guitar-toting troubadour, who wrote an entire album about moving to Philadelphia and was, at the time, dating the daughter of the homiletics professor at the tiny Conservative Christian liberal-arts college nestled snuggly away in a forgotten corner of the Allegheny mountains, far from all the dangers of urban life, from which I had graduated only a year before.
The second opening act was Joanna Newsom. Joel and I, in our critical furor fueled by Czech pilsner, jumped to the premature conclusion that she was a fraud. In hindsight, I now understand that she is not only a genuine artist, but that she played a part in one of those existentially important moments that happen rarely in life. She was perhaps the most angelic musician Stevens could have found to descend on Dante’s that night. Joanna Newsom playing her harp, Denison Witmer beckoning me to the city of brotherly love, and, of course, Sufjan Stevens himself, prophesying of places we had been and places we would go: “I was in love with a place in my mind, in my mind. I made a lot of mistakes in my mind, in my mind. if I was crying in the van, with my friend, it was for freedom from myself and from the land. I made a lot of mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes.”
I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there was my apartment in North Portland, on Killingsworth Street. It was on the second floor of a turn-of-the century brick building, with new deep green carpets and a mustard yellow kitchen. Every night I would ride the bus home from my call-center job downtown, cook up some Ramen or Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, sink into my rummage-sale leather love-seat, and turn on my brand new Denon CD player. I didn’t have a TV.
It was 2004 then. Digital music had already cut deep into the sales of compact discs, but I was intent on preserving the album as art form. My friend Joel Dunham, who was getting his MBA from Oregon State at the time, had started writing album reviews for a website, and had convinced me that I should join him in creating a rival to Pitchforkmedia.com. I remember, I was listening to a lot of Sufjan Stevens and Arcade Fire at the time, and thinking up superlative bloviations like:
Whether Win Butler, Régine Chassagne, and their bandmates in The Arcade Fire were attempting to make a philosophical statement about the loss of the utopian ideal or merely an aesthetic one, they’ve accomplished both with their debut album, Funeral. Their Quebecois environs may look utopian to all the newly disaffected youths this side of the 49th parallel, faced as we are with four more years of rampant absurdity, a stagnant economy producing fewer and fewer jobs, and perpetual war necessitated by the perpetual hate of our ever vigilant nemeses. But the dark spirituality of Funeral hints at an existential turmoil far more fundamental than that caused by mere political division.
And:
On Illinois, Sufjan Stevens has taken his "50 States" concept, inaugurated on 2003's Michigan, well over the top of anything resembling tasteful restraint. Surprisingly, he successfully circumvents all the usual badges of artistic credibility such as detachment and a simplistic, often stultifying sense of "purity," instead tackling this conceptual project with reckless abandon and personal investment. The result betrays Stevens' unique ability to craft complex soundscapes that are not only thoroughly pleasing to the aesthetic senses and occasionally even danceable, but also completely free from pretension.
I remember the first time I heard Chicago, my favorite track from that album. It was a couple months before I moved to Philadelphia. Stevens was playing at Dante’s in downtown Portland. Joel and I had weaseled our way into free admission from the promoter, under the ostensible pretense of interviewing Stevens for our website. The first opener, Denison Witmer, was a guitar-toting troubadour, who wrote an entire album about moving to Philadelphia and was, at the time, dating the daughter of the homiletics professor at the tiny Conservative Christian liberal-arts college nestled snuggly away in a forgotten corner of the Allegheny mountains, far from all the dangers of urban life, from which I had graduated only a year before.
The second opening act was Joanna Newsom. Joel and I, in our critical furor fueled by Czech pilsner, jumped to the premature conclusion that she was a fraud. In hindsight, I now understand that she is not only a genuine artist, but that she played a part in one of those existentially important moments that happen rarely in life. She was perhaps the most angelic musician Stevens could have found to descend on Dante’s that night. Joanna Newsom playing her harp, Denison Witmer beckoning me to the city of brotherly love, and, of course, Sufjan Stevens himself, prophesying of places we had been and places we would go: “I was in love with a place in my mind, in my mind. I made a lot of mistakes in my mind, in my mind. if I was crying in the van, with my friend, it was for freedom from myself and from the land. I made a lot of mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes.”
Friday, August 1, 2008
Backlash Begins
I'll concede up front that The Dark Knight contains more genuinely dark and creepy moments than any other Batman film. But it's also annoyingly constrained by all the commonalities and contrivances of the genre and, while it doesn't necessarily ask to be held to the highest of standards, its flaws are obvious. That is to say, while successful on its own terms, it falls short of artistic greatness or even very effective emotional manipulation -- which seems to be what film-goers usually want.
So I was surprised to read this morning that, not only has it already broken a bunch of box office records, the Dark Knight is now aiming for the big one. While this popular reception can probably be explained by the fortuitous intersection of fanboy flattery and tragedy-mongering celebrity obsession, the 94% Tomatometer Rating is more troubling. I've been sitting here for a couple hours conjecturing a severe case of critical groupthink...which might be overstating things a bit. Either way, let's just hope all these lock-stepping fans and critics haven't considered the film's fascist implications.
So I was surprised to read this morning that, not only has it already broken a bunch of box office records, the Dark Knight is now aiming for the big one. While this popular reception can probably be explained by the fortuitous intersection of fanboy flattery and tragedy-mongering celebrity obsession, the 94% Tomatometer Rating is more troubling. I've been sitting here for a couple hours conjecturing a severe case of critical groupthink...which might be overstating things a bit. Either way, let's just hope all these lock-stepping fans and critics haven't considered the film's fascist implications.
Friday, July 25, 2008
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Not blogging is not awesome
So I think I'm putting this blog to rest for at least the next month or two. Maybe once I'm down in Georgetown, I'll be lonely and I'll feel the need to seek out more awesomeness in my life to write about. Until then, hasta luego.
Monday, May 26, 2008
May, the month of awesome
So many awesome things have happened in the last couple weeks, but my blog has just been sitting here collecting cobwebs. How sad! Oh well, it happens. I mean, since I'm writing about things that are awesome, I may as well only do it when I feel like it, right? Otherwise, it wouldn't feel very awesome. Right now I feel like blogging because it's Memorial Day. The second most awesome holiday in May after Cinco de Mayo. So get out there and grill some veggie burgers! Hooray!
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