first, simultaneous innovation, affirmed.
How is that the Royals hired Buddy Bell as their manager? Didn’t they just fire Buddy Bell? Anyway isn’t Buddy Bell just the Anglo Tony Pena (correction, that would be Eric Wedge).
I saw a not-very-belligerent panhandler wearing a Johnny Thunders t-shirt this morning.
Some notes on Star Wars Parts 1-6:
The first (4-6) movies are not actually good, it’s just that everyone watches them when they are children and lots of things seem good, because the only bad thing is not having things to like. For evidence I point to the people who sat behind at episode III, who were somewhere aged 35-45, which means they were 8-18 when the actual star wars movies began to come out. the ending of episode III, which is not as good as the beginning but is at least good because it reminds you that there is a part IV that you like and know, moved one of the old-ish people behind me to say “it sort of makes me want to rent the first ones and watch them” to which another one of them said “yeah, almost” and then laughed in a weird Lincoln-Square-i-like-my-pets-too-much way that suggested that by almost he meant “not at all” and he was going to go home and specifically not do that. which i took as motivation to think about collective imagination, the Star Wars franchise, literary merit and the elevation of marginal-quality sci-fi to cultural prominence in post-Watergate america.
the process of downloading that darth vader picture set off a conversation with a guy at work about seeing the new star wars movie. this conversation was awkward enough to make me not want to think or talk about star wars anymore, but let’s go ahead and finish what i started.
Some working notes for what we are about to go into:
1. Star Wars, the films themselves, is not terribly good. It has a pretty good but seriously plagiarized plot/mythology, god awful acting, inexplicably features Alec Guinness who seems like he just wanted access to the craft services trailer and would have accepted his brown robe as payment for the movie, and it’s breathtakingly dumb (space gangsters? a dashing smuggler? FLYING CARS?). it’s not any better, as “movie”, than, Starship Troopers, which is secretly good, or maybe a decently-crafted, historically aware soap opera. all of which you need to get over if we’re goign to get through this without inconvenience.
Right. These are bad movies written by a C-minus writer, that are indebted heavily to pulp texts of the preceding half-century, as well as religious mythology that anyone could have read off the side of a bus (well, reading it off the bus still counts for something, but whaterver). Still, the franchise enjoys massive success, and profitabilty/cultural prominence (which are increasingly the same thing), because literally everyone who is of voting age in america right now has seen all three original movies more than once. There’s a difference between knowing enough about the first three movies to get referents, to understand the general role of Star Wars in the larger conversation, and being the guy who waits in line, but not that much, in that the guy who waits in line pays more money but ultimately receives little more than the casual fan, except for the enjoyment of dressing up and making weird pencil sketches of spock in leather on a harley.
so their value as cinema (and i guess i should mean i’m referring to both star wars and star trek as a general grouped set at this point [ps, in interest of full disclosure, i used to really, really like star trek but in a secretive, semi-dignified way. like i had star trek books but i did not wear star trek t-shirts, or at least i dreamed of someday wearing star trek t-shirts when i was big enough to crush the lungs of anyone who mocked me]), ANYWAY, so their value as cinema resides mostly in everyone having seen them and sharing a smile at the Great Mystery, which is actually what George Lucas refers to something as in the movie but is useful as shorthand for why people like this crap. The value lies in a shared body of reference, the same way that people seem to enjoy “The O.C.” almost as much as a pretext for talking and viewing with friends as much as they enjoy it as a discrete artifact of literature (and then George Lucas goes and shows up on The OC). It’s worth mentioning that no one, outside of Larry David and like six other people, seem to have followed Star Trek past the end of the original series. The explanation for this is that Star Trek The Motion Picture is a terrible terrible piece of shit. Star Trek II, on the other hand, is the real shit to make you feel shit, despite being the first cousin, literary-merit-wise, to Star Wars. But anyway, Star Trek and Star Wars subsist on the echo they set off in the heads of impressionable children. fair enough. right, the post-Watergate thing. My whole big flourish there was to suggest that part of the expansive success of Star Wars and partial success of Star Trek lies in the fact that while their charm over children was manifest and undeniable, they managed, in the years from 1974-1983, to charm a generation of slightly older children and young adults who sought refuge from the Watergate-energy-crisis-Tehran boil by pretending to still be captivated by whooshing noises and faux-dramatic scores and LASER BEAMS. I can’t claim superiority, but I will point out that my favorite movie is still Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade, which is evidence of a weird festering kind of skipped-generation nostalgia that teaches us that the coolest thing in the world would be video footage of your grandpa beating the shit out of someone. Am I wrong? Am I wrong? I need a breather. I apologize for flashing the mid-tempo let’s-talk-about-culture sign when what I really wanted to do the whole time was just watch Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade. Why make up bad guys when you have Nazis, who aren’t just content with genocice and fascism but also want to claim a disproportionate share of important, fake early-Christian archaeological items. And that guy, who told like five months ago that Indiana Jones was bad because it was orientalist, I will fight you. You are Orientalist. You are Edward Said
The shit where people, all kinds of people, are walking with polo shirts with the collar flipped up: I have a suspicion that reactionaries and various kinds of bigots are already taking to the battlements are talking about how either it makes most people look stupid or that white people shouldn’t do it or whatever. i don’t know which side i am on other than to say that, if flipping your collar up is OK or in style for a minute, when do i get to start wearing overalls with one strap off like huck finn. that’s what i want to know.
i don’t understand the physiology of trend-extension: why would you want to do specifically what other people are doing. it;s like getting into the longest line at the supermarket so you can feel like a member of the majority. specifically, why would you do this with polo shirts. is this related to kanye west dressing like the bad guys from One Crazy Summer? Why did he do that? rank nostalgia is one thing; even if I Love the ’80s/’90s/’40s makes my brain hurt and i wish people wouldn;t watch it, i accept that they do, and i understand the reasons why. they show goofy shit, and then people make vaguely potty-mouthed comments on it, and everybody is entertained, allegedly. but then the #1 rap music guy started dressing like magnum PI, indie rock kids starting doing coke because it’s funny, and now the white college kids i see at jimmy’s are dressing like magnum pi.
on the other hand, i did see that guy, who wears replica jerseys all the time, wearing a very nice Mark Teixiera number.
Project “get an actual job” appears to have been greenlighted by the tower. i’m not sure that we have 100% buy-in from the board here at PredragCorp. oh god damnit. i was going to fill out that meme about music that whet and moacir did but, well, i don’t really pay attention to lyrics enough anyway. Aaron Boone needs to mail himself back to Cincinnati and leave the part of ohio that didn’t support the confederacy. that or possibly consider hitting over .140 for some part of this season. i’ll probably do that music meme in a minute.
i’m going to point out that i’m doing this because i’m bored, and i don’t expect that the end result is going to entertain you more than it gave me something to do for ten minutes and a chance to walk my mind. for some reason today i am being shadowed by people i used to work with, people that i have especial, if unearned, wishes to not talk to, which desires so far have been 100% gratified, although these are the kind of not-talking to desires that overcome satisfaction, in that not talking to these people isn’t enough, having someone go back in time and erase even being in the same room as them for a minute is what i would prefer. i’m sorry i can’t help it, o dana, come on
You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be saved?
I’ve never read Fahrenheit 451. maybe i read it in school. is it the one story where it rains everyday and they live on venus. so i gather that in F451 there is something getting rid of the literary tradition. i would save something that inspired other things, but whet already said the Bible and or Paradise Lost (i don’t hear any votes for Paradise regained or whatever the sequel is called and ben already said Don Quixote. so i guess something that is foundational to a certain church of literature that i tend to patronize but at the same time contains within both good and bad examples of how to do things — which means Crime and Punishment, except i think the sideswipes contained within at Nietzsche and other clowns is kind of non-essential. which is something you can say about pretty much everything that isn’t dignified by being 1000+ years old. In this particular MVP voting I think Don Quixote is clearly Shaq, in that it has certain inbred advantages (7′3″, 310 = being the first novel) and certain performance-related edges (posting 25/10 every night = being the godhead of many other important novels, also having shit to say about any nebulous academic idea you can throw at it) but also has, depending on your view, certain inbred disadvantages (spends large parts of part II dealing with haters = goes on radio talk shows and claims to have slept with Aaliyah, Julia Roberts, Laura Bush, etc, isn’t Steve Nash = written in deranged medieval Spanish). And the same shit you can say about all the likely suspects. The Inferno, Shakespeare, the various parts of the Bible (there are no apocrypha floating around for other important books — like if someone went into a cave in England and found the shakespeare outtakes and it was just a bunch of fart jokes and lewd sketches). But the point of the question, obviously, isn’t the right answer but an answer so i guess i would save: The Great Gatsby which, yeah, will sort of fade into bolivian as the present rumbles away from 1920s Long Island rich people. i don’t want it as the pinnacle to visit, i want it as a weird roadmap to different stuff. Plus, you have to rep your set, and as a dislocated midwesterner (rust belt is different from minn., but let it by) who went to college with crazy rich people (or just swap ‘dislocated… rich people’ with ‘American’) and then got confused, i feel some kind of brotherhood, even if the author died or whatever you want to say to me about citing socioeconomic identification with the artist being bad form. Anyway, when someone can make the millennial suburban Great Gatsby, i will have gotten what i wanted from the world of literature, and at that point i’ll stop running faster and stretching out my arms further and just read Christy Mathewson books and baseball prospectus and drink a lot of bourbon.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
i guess i just set myself up to say Jordan Baker but that’s not true, so: this question is also weird and dumb, but i still feel the demiurge to prove myself by picking somebody undeniable, or failing that, obscure enough to avoid denial, so, some hits:
Raskolnikov’s sister (you *know*)
The Inuit ladies from The Rifles
Kitty from Anna Karenina
The crazy shepherdess (“I am the distant fire and the far off sword”) from Don Quixote
Lee Harvey Oswald from Libra (tugging at collar)
Lee H.O.’s wife from same, also from reality (objection, fail to see relevance)
Pretty much any of the weird prophetic/totemic skinny girls from Murakami save for Sputnik Sweetheart, at least the high-class hooker with the prettiest ears in the omniverse
The girl who dates both Blanchard and Bleichart from The Black Dahlia
The ex-wife from Humboldt’s Gift
Not Emma Bovary – would be creepy and make me feel bad
St. Augustine
The last book you bought was…?
The last books i bought were The Rainbow Stories, Those Damn Yankees (not that great, in the end result), The Power Broker (as a gift), Ragged Dick (as a weird bad idea), and a collection of Alexander Cockburn, which i can’t even offer a reasonable excuse for other than instead of committing emotional adultery on myself by being interested in politics i halfass it by reading out-of-date political journalism, which is like buying porn with exclusively ugly or otherwise disabled people in it. The last books I got (i live next to Powell’s nee) were Slouching Toward Bethlehem, A Civil Action, and something else that I forgot already.
The last book you read was…?
The last book i actually finished was Those Damn Yankees, which is maybe the tenth best non-fiction book about baseball I’ve read this year. I mean, yeah, Steinbrenner is a big asshole who wants to spit hot crap on America’s soul, how’d you figure that out? But now a book about how baseball is consitutionally immoral comes off the presses every six minutes, so give Dean Chadwin a gray’s papaya and some spare change for being early to the peeing contest. The last extremely good book that I almost read was The Recognitions, the reading of which had a powerful, deleterious affect on my personal well-being, sanity, in addition to the literal back pain that carrying it caused. Still, I’d recommend it to most people I know who like to give themselves migraine headaches, even if represents the first, strongest impulse of American post-modern fiction in privileging artistic exceptionalism over artistic viability (like, is it possible to read this book without having an allergic reaction to how spiky it is)
What are you currently reading?
The Rainbow Stories, which i read a bunch this morning and afternoon. Things I learned in first 141 pages: William Vollmann probably is lucky to be alive. William Vollmann actually went ahead and contracted the services of at least one prostitute, which is sort of gratifying to know, although god knows why. “Red Hands,” the second story, after the skinhead chapter, is one of the more direct and powerful things i’ve read by Vollmann (not that he isn’t fairly direct in general). About the differences between blowing up a department store and breaking the neck of a mouse in a laboratory experiment, about killing people for structural reasons. Also about jumping off boats into New York harbor. Check it out, it’s short enough that you could read it in a bookstore without feeling bad about it.
Five books you would take to a desert island…
Big ones that burn well? I don’t know. Can i trade the books for a gun or fishing pole or boat. I guess. Maybe one that alleviates the metaphysical anguish of being on a desert island. This question is dumber than the others ones, really. If you want to know what my favorite book is, i already answered that.
Five literatures i will force my children to read and react to every year until they escape to college or a foster home:
1. The Great Gatsby + Madame Bovary
2. Selections from Gaddis, Bellow, Pynchon, DeLillo, Vollmann and DFW
3. The Bible, but maybe in a second language, for fun and happy accidents
4. Some kind of self-curated baseball omnibus (1919 literature, Nelson Algren, The Wealth of Nations, John Stuart Mill, The Natural, you know, stuff. some other relevant things: economics general survey, readings in american race politics, physics, sabrmetrics, Moby Dick, etc)
5. Shakespeare. Just all of it, to keep them honest.
1. You’re not allowed to stand in the giant-multiethnic-faces-encased-in-glass fountain area at Millennium Park with shoes or socks on. Pigeons can shit on this, but people can’t wear shoes on it. this is why Chicago, as a major city, can’t have nice things. in Rocky III, when paulie gets the robot, he can’t just have a robot and enjoy it. he has to turn it into a porn slave. Chicago can’t have a pretty-nice downtown park area with a giant multiethnic faces-shooting-water fountain device without turning the Waffen-Segway Korps loose on unsuspecting suburban pre-teens who just want to play int he water. This is every single thing that is wrong with america.
2. Is it ok to want to fire eric wedge
 
3. more later about the article in new york magazine entitled “I HATE BROOKLYN”: it’ll be worth the wait. i might even have to buy the magazine just to dispense hate on this article. i have a complicated relationship with new york city and new york magazine, but this is for different stuff.
4. last note on the knitting thing: i never said video games were better or even equal to knitting, i just said i don’t like knitting and i don’t like the fact that i play video games. i’m even trying to sell my damn playstation, so why don’t you fucking yarncovered fascists people go back to eastern fucking europe and knit me some artisanal breadto knitting, and i’ll go back to being a raving homosexual. i think i am confusing knitters with the christian right/hipsters/eastern europe. so i’ll leave off then. anyway, Tribe in 05, and i’m walking to the train now.
1. several dozen pictures of jay witasick.
I’m trying to wear leather shoes again, and it’s going about as well as it usually does. I got rotting water lillies on my new balances yesterday and I understood it as a flaming spear from God trying to tell me to go back and attempt to wear grown-up shoes again. I spent some time this morning in the shower thinking about how it was time, and then i started thinking about Brook Jacoby.
can i borrow The Ice-Shirt from someone, if someone has The Ice-Shirt?
So, William T. Vollmann? why aren’t more people excited about him? Powers I can understand people sort of sleeping on (Richard Powers is kind of like the Vijay Singh of Great White Novelists– a totally viable chance as like The Guy, but somehow a little too effortless to really get excited about (except for the Vijay Singh lightning safety PSAs). Actually maybe the reason people don’t like Vijay is because he’s kind of arrogant/snooty about women, whereas there’s not really a reason to dislike Richard Powers novels other than there are too many of them and some aren’t so great. Which is probably something you can say about Vollmann, too. Pretty much everybody except James Joyce, and well, 1 of his 2 novels isn’t actually something you can read, it’s just sort of this lingering insult that takes a year to pronounce. I guess, what i’m saying is, if there was either fantasy sports with novelists, or like a collectible desktop card game (also with novelists) William Vollmann is definitely a guy I would want on my team, because he is awesome and draws his own maps, and I enjoy his fiction, also.
From Amy:
I just wanted to comment so that I could gain a little clarity on this. I am a Knitwear designer, as well as a knitter. I have practiced many other art forms in the past (none with textiles). i have noticed with almost every thing I have done, there are a few talented and useful practitioners, and many totally unskilled and often volatile amateurs. I enjoy what I do, and it IS a neccessary pasttime if for no other reason than that without designers, there would be no sweaters to purchase in the store. however, the recent surge in popularity is often aggravating, and strange. Although basic knitting skills are not hard to acquire, the influx of unskilled new knitters doing it because it is hip often a) expect big results with little effort b)assume that since athing is "handmade" it is of high quality c)often waste time and money attempting to gain a skill they do not have the talent or ability to learn. this , of course, does not apply to all knitters, but there are many out there with awful spatial comprehension, poor knowledge of color, and very very low reading comprehension skills (oh DO NOT let me get into that one). This is often a very irritating phenomenon for me, as well as other skilled knitters. I think many of the "new" "cool" things that are popping up in the knitting world give the skill a bad name. I love what I do, and find it neccessary and rewarding, but I really can't understand why it is becoming so popular, and am anxious for the craze to pass. it is sort of like millions of tone deaf people taking up opera. So, for clarity-are you completely opposed to knitting as a whole, or just the trend?
Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Amy, and I would like to clarify a few things about the Anti-Knitting Bund. We are strenously against the trend and not the historical construct of making clothing out of yarn with your hands and metal sticks. Perhaps the earlier white paper was unclear and flecked with hasty language. Actually I know for sure that it was. Anyway, we could all stand to take a minute and pay attention to what Amy has to say, because she is, as they say, on point. Maybe what I should have said, instead of “I (bleep) hate knitting” is that I hate hipster arts & crafts trend-spotting, but that doesn’t leap off the tongue in the same way. So, Amy, everyone, I think what we need now is some Pete/knitting community perestroika. I encourage everyone to go out and continue to knit professionally and have a swell time doing so. If you are knitting for the wrong reasons, I don’t respect you or like you and you are making Amy’s life harder.
I am a knitter, and I thought your post was hilarious. I am glad I read it. I just hope the other knitters out there realize that to take your post seriously is the true waste of their time. Thanks for the laugh! [punctuation smiley]
topics for future research in re viability as speculative celebrity fiction candidates
1. horatio alger jr (the famous one)
2. pierre bernard/oom the omnipotent
Was somebody telling me something about how Tony Danza visits guys on Death Row and tries to make them see the light of God? If so I would like to be reminded of the specifics of that. Also, apparently my blog got flamed by knitters over the past two nights. Several of the more thuggish knitting advocates made weird vague comments comparing reading and writing to knitting, and others suggested that my hate for knitting is a result of having been neglected by my mother, and in general an threatening air was put across by the knitting delegation. It was also suggested that i buy my clothes at the Gap (I am reeling) and that I am probably a raving homosexual.
Is Yuppie an insult anymore? I think it is, but that’s because I grew up reading Mad Magazine and American Splendor. I would spend some time workign this out but I don’t actually want to and I am leaving now.
|
|
|
