29 February 2008

i want to be a _____ when i grow up.



if you

A)are on facebook, and
B)are experiencing questions about what you should do with yourself when you grow up

then you should take the new facebook quiz that i wrote. it’s very informative!

27 February 2008

FIND THE CAP'N HIS BLOODY PANTS!



[my friends are great. all of you guys, you're great. me, i'm less and less sure: i move in 2 days, have a 1st draft due in 12 days; apt's a mess, book's a mess; and i got to work 105min later than planned. [my 2nd alarm will go off at 6:25pm tonight (my first went off at 6:15, as scheduled)] i woke up at 8-o'something, yelling at my clock and the world in a cockney british accent. i think i'd been dreaming about pirates? BLOODY 'ELL! and i bolted out of bed, out of my dream but still in its language, hollering my way down the hall. 'ISS THA KINDA SHIT RITE 'ERE DAT WON'T BLOODY STAND! WON'T FUCKING STAND, WIL'IT? NO. FUCKING WON'T. t'wasn't till i got the toothbrush in my mouth that i realized a) i was talking in my make-believe pirate dialect, because b) i'd been aboard a battleship, loading the cannons when i woke up, and yet, unfortunately, c) i sounded like madonna last year, or d) britney last week]

listen, can i explain sumpin' to you about being a daddy?



[this is the vader sesssions: vader's scenes from star wars, with all the original sound except vader's lines, dubbed over with lines from other james earl jones movies]

yo mama's going on a date, can you dig that? and she's goin' with me, and she's gonna have a GOOD TIME--can you dig THAT?

25 February 2008

20 February 2008

this might be the least fun i've ever had on the beach.

ken's got that look on his face--like someone told him, i don't think i've ever loved you.

huntsmanic is pleased, freaked out.

i went to avclub's the hater today to read the haps on lohan's marilyn monroe pictorial in new york magazine, and almost immediately had my attention drawn unto the post below, to this ... this nifty enormity, this terrible delight:

Christina Aguilera's New Baby Is Loved, Terrified

(my original idea was to post the headline and photo, with none of the hater's comments and none of my own. but now i am compelled to say something. (and the crescent moon, you'd think, cannot very much mind a parenthetical):

i mean … aaaa-ah! … right? wt[screaming baby]f? isn’t that the only response? how in the holy f did that mean veiny zombie moon manage to steal joaquin phoenix’s eyebrows? and when did he do this? forget aguilera’s kid, i’m concerned about me, here: there’s a v. real possibility that i will now gaze up at the moon and see bette midler’s distressed mouth descending onto ben affleck’s chin, where i never did before)

19 February 2008

What's Worse - The Deadliest Pets on Earth


over at earth-shattering education encounter, we're delving into the superhero pet trend that killed a decade's worth of mojo.

12 February 2008

invisible man v hawkman.



playing directly off john hodgman's this american life segment, the eath-shattering education encounter considers the matter with the aid of pictures.

09 February 2008

songbook - nick hornby.

As the draft of my novel has progressed, I’ve found it increasingly difficult, reading other fiction, to engage the material at the meta end of the scale. Overall meanings, thematic happenings—I’ve recently devoted a large and largely pointless amount of brain space trying to invent and extract and relay those things in my own story, and frankly, at this point in time, reading someone else pull it off makes me tired. My story’s themes—what it’s about—are set, at this point. What’s not set are the character’s trimmings, their manner of behavior; and, in particular, the ambling pontifications of the narrator—how they unfold in proportion to the actions and conflicts in the story. These things being the case, I’ve been glad, in recent weeks, to take up books that play directly off the short form, as well as those with a narrative style that features a very familiar and direct voice.

Nick Hornby’s Songbook is one of these. A collection of more than thirty-five short essays on pop songs—essays in a rather loose sense, perhaps just as accurately and not less specifically called pieces—he points to the motivations for writing the book in the first, on Teenage Fanclub’s Your Love is the Place that I Come From.

First, from the end of the essay—
Now, whenever I hear “Your Love Is the Place that I Come From,” I think about that night, of course—how could it be otherwise? And initially, when I decided to write a little book of essays about songs I loved (and that in itself was a tough discipline, because one has so many more opinions about what has gone wrong than about what is perfect), I presumed that the essays might be full of straightforward time-and-place connections like this, but they’re not, not really. In fact, “Your Love Is the Place that I Come From” is just about the only one. And when I thought about why this should be so, why so few of the songs that are important to me come burdened with associative feelings or sensations, it occurred to me that the answer was obvious: if you love a song, love it enough for it to accompany you throughout the different stages of your life, then any specific memory is rubbed away by use.



And second, from the middle—
Writers are always squeezing things out because books and articles are supposed to be a certain number of words, so you have in your hand the actual (i.e., natural, unforced, unpadded) shape of this particular book; it is, if you like, and organic book, raised without force-feeding or the assistance of steroids. And with organic stuff, you always have to pay more for less. Anyway…

That ellipsis is his—it’s the actual end of the essay—and this is important to me: It points to how Hornby’s decided to put his words on the page, as do the em dash-enabled asides and frequent parentheticals: the voice is going to be eloquent and well-conceived, but also indulgent, and generally trustful that you’re with him and going to stay there. The first of the quotes above is longer than it needs to be, by a stretch, but I indulged—it’s long enough to capture Hornby’s rolls and rhythm’s, present throughout the book.

Also, and this is equally important to me right now, it captures his way of speaking ideas: his thoughts have a starting point that’s clear and honestly felt, and then he adapts or changes them as the essay moves along (“…and when I thought about why this should be so…”).

On the meta-themed level I claim to find so tiresome, just now, this is why Songbook is so great: It’s immensely personal—nearly as much about the mind and experience of Nick Hornby as it is about the power and romance of the song—and it’s also highly social. His own theories and vulnerabilities are worth going into because of how they’re connected to a given song, and he’s a terrific writer, so that’s fun; but the real juice is brought to you by the transitive property of songness, which says that two people can talk about a song they feel for and come away from conversation with a significantly increased understanding of each other. When I first read the first essay, I didn’t particularly know Your Love Is the Place that I Come From, and yet, so tasty was Hornby’s description of how that song had stuck with him, and the irregularity of how it's done so, given the other songs he’s loved over time, that I immediately connected it to Simon & Garfunkel’s Kathy’s Song, which is, to me, singularly and lastingly about a time and place that circumnavigated my badly conceived expectations. And I'd never thought about that before; I had in fact used Kathy's Song as a marker of what a song can mean to me, when given a specific piece of land in my own personal history ... and so there I was, after all of three and a half pages, with an understanding of music's personal power that was a click deeper.

He’s sneaky, this Nick Hornby, with the way he makes you want to know him even as you feel he's rather like you.

06 February 2008

dole : on fracas.



stephen colbert welcomes bob dole onto the report; after an opening dig, this:

sc: welcome to the show, sir. you're in the middle of an interesting situation -- you're in the middle of a frackas, right now.
bd: fraycas.
sc: (after a beat) it could turn into a fruckus, in a minute, if you don't watch out. i'm not afraid to hit old men.

eat poop . . . love



at the moment, amazon's top 10 features -

- 5 novels; this is actually up from the a few months ago, when there were 2. so we're okay there
- 4 books that do not have a colon in the title. so, yes, the colon is bleeding over into fiction titles as well
- currently duking it out for the #4 spot are Eat Pray Love and Eat This Not That, which is funny
- but the true centerpiece of the top 10 is the ellipsis ...
- there are 2 books in the top 10 that have ...s in the title. in the f'ing title. as far as i'm aware, a ... is used to signify
- the cadence and quirk of a character/narrator's voice, or
- the laziness of the author's brain
- and that's f'ing it. that's all. but now the usage has ballooned; eg
- three cups of tea: one man's mission to promote peace . . . one school at a time by greg mortenson
- now. paying a shill to serve up a squirt of praise for the back cover is a thing that's done
- putting that same quote on the other side, in the title, well . . . bang for your buck, i guess . . . one book at a time
- on a punctation-is-personal note: greg, really? it's too much for one man, greg: you're doing all the tea-drinking and all the peace-promoting, all by your one-man self? gosh. you must be so tired;
- why don't you stop writing your subtitle for a moment and have . . . a nap.
- feeling better? great! now pick where you left off in the subtitle, and if you need to use the word you used 5 words ago . . . ease into it, tiger; no rush . . . great job!
- the working title of huntsmanic's forthcoming #4-5 amazon.com bestseller:
- Eat Me Not You: One dude's journey in search of . . . food; first, though . . . he runs into these foreign cats who sell . . . this gonzo hash . . . it's pretty sweet . . . later, he cruises to the In-n-Out

05 February 2008

hip[nation]hop

upon seeing the video for the yes we can song put together by will.i.am and a bunch of his friends, i got a little tingle in my shoulders, one that grew right through till the end, as a good tingle does.



the tingle reminded me of a tingle from 4 years ago, one i got repeatedly, 'cos i watched eminem's animated mosh video like 12 times.



how's that for respective ends of the spectrum -- two songs, drawing on a similar base of inspiration: each is directly hopeful, is unabashedly, exclusively about solidarity; and each as different from the other as black from white.