book club beta

[Vegas The Crystal Method]

Yo yo, my avid readers.
I finally UPDATED my blog and transfered everything over to blogger's new layout template thingy. Awesome. This means that you can search the archives much easier, and...um....I don't know what else it means. I think I used to have two reasons why I should spend as much time upgrading as I did, but I can't think of the second one. I guess that makes it null, then.

Joey's trying to help me get in touch with my "gangsta" side, and this is as far as I've gotten:

Me: Peter, I'm going to break this martini glass and poke you in the eye with it.
Joey: Now that was gangster.
Me:The breaking the glass part, or the poking the eye?
Joey: (less enthusiastically) The glass, dude.

I guess I still have a ways to go...

I'm looking forward to Beer Club this Thursday. Friday's class was canceled, so I get to sleep in. No early morning bike ride to hear Dr. Glenn's Observing Story of the Week.

html, xml, what the hell?

Alright, for those of you that seem to be having trouble with pictures loading on this page, please leave a comment at the end of this post. For some reason they only like to show up in my browser after a few refreshes.

Also, I'm hopefully going to upgrade this blog in the next few weeks. I created this domain so long ago that I'm still working off of one of blogger's old template designs, and I'd like to upgrade to the new layout version. Pretty much the only advantage to doing this is because it makes the archives much more informative and navigable. Unfortunately, blogger uses a really confusing XHTML language to format the whole layout thing, and that's not something I'm too familiar with. Though they give the casual user many more options as far as what goes in the sidebar and such, it really restricts those of us that are trying to customize the page (I know that it doesn't look like I've done much to mine, but I promise you that I have. Notice the blue inner-border around my title [that takes changing several parameters to accomplish], the wide title spacing, the wider post and sidebar divs, the fact that viewed links don't change color, the perma-post at the top of my page [which had to be coded in, I couldn't just create a text box like you can in the new layout templates], etc). You can edit the HTML in the text box layout things, but they're really not that compatible with the language. I think that blogger assumes that you're going to do really basic things like make text bold or red. Ooo, so fancy.

So since they're giving me such hell, it's taking much longer than I expected. I've said it before and I'll say it again: are you happy now, blogger? You've got me pulling out my hair. Bravo.

If you'd like to keep up with my progress (I mean who wouldn't?!?), go over to my Gorilla Man blog. What's on there so far has taken me ~3 hours to do.

all those in favor of knee freckles say "aye"

[Daft Punk Radio on Pandora]

Ally told me that I've created genocide on my own ass hole. She's surprised I haven't killed her yet. Sorry I just told all of you that...

Manager Steve from work was sporting a sweet pair of throwback kicks tonight. I was talking to him about them, and it turns out their the same pair of Vans that he's been wearing since '93. Rock on, Steve.

Remember the Airwalks that everybody wore in 5th grade (around '95)? They were made out of that soft swede-like material and had white honeycomb shaped soles. You know what I'm talking about, right? They were all pretty much the same design but they came in different colors, so it didn't matter if you wore out the soft-rubbered soles in 2 months (quite frankly, you were probably trying to wear them out that quickly by keeping the laces untied and dragging your heels wherever you went) because you then had an excuse to go get (aka have your parents go get) a new pair with the freshest color combo to come out of the Airwalk laboratories. The ones in the picture are for sure not what I'm talking about, but they're the closest I could find.

Steve and I got to talking about fashion and he told me that "an old person's fashion sense is the same as it was when he/she was the coolest they've ever been." That's why old jewish men still walk around in their blue powder suits. That's why Neil Diamond wishes he still had hair so that he could feather it.

There's a dude that comes into the Café all the time with his long teased curly hair, leather pants (clearly too tight in the crotch), and snakeskin boons. I once was kidding around with a bartender saying that it looks like it's 20 years ago and he's rocking out with Poison on their first world tour. Turns out they guy was in a hair band in the late '80s and they did open for Poison at one point. The guy was probably rolling in the ladies back then, but then Nirvana came around. Poor guy hasn't been half as cool since, but he sure tries to keep the fashion alive. He reminds me daily of how glad I am that we've moved past that decade. Unfortunately, with the way fashion works, he's definitely going to be hip again soon.

I really don't know when I was at my coolest. My fashion has stayed pretty stagnant now for a while, but I think that's just because I don't have the money to buy myself a new fashion sense. I'm scared that I'll reach my coolest soon while I'm still wearing the clothes that I bought 5 years ago when I graduated high school (when I clearly wasn't at my coolest). That means that I'll be stuck wearing clothes that I was wearing when I wasn't cool for the rest of my life. Curse you, vintage graphic tees!!!

Aye.

something isn't right

[His 12 Greatest Hits Neil Diamond]

I'm going to quickly reiterate my warning: don't read this review if you intend to read the book, which I highly recommend doing.

Book: Running with Scissors Augusten Burroughs 8/10
This book had the uncanny ability to make me severely uncomfortable. I'm pretty sure that was Burroughs' intention, though, and succeeded quite effectively. Between the rape and numerous other messed up sexual relationships, shit prophecies, Poo Bear (the worst nightmare of a child I could dream up), and general uncleanliness found throughout, rarely a page went by that I didn't have to just laugh out loud to cope with my discomfort.

I generally don't like the idea of autobiographies or (I guess) memoirs about oneself (whatever the difference is). When I first started reading this, the first-person narrative really made the autobiographical nature of the book stand out. But as I got farther into the story, the more fictional it seemed to become (due to the incredulous stories Burroughs recounts), and the more I started to like it.

The story started out with a nine-year-old Burroughs following his mother around the house as she got dressed up and ready for her own poetry reading. Their relationship seemed caring and normal, nothing too out of the ordinary. Augusten was a very observant and imaginative little boy, taking pleasure in little things like the ticking a cooling hairdryer makes. This was about as far as I had read when I wrote in my The Giver review about how I didn't understand why this book isn't on middle school reading lists across the country.

Then we meet Dr. Finch, that fat sombitch (read as Jackie Gleason ala Smokey and the Bandit) with his sticky masturbatorium. Everything goes downhill for the Burroughs family once they mix their lives with this guy's. Augusten went from being a strangely well dressed pre-teen to a tragically hopeless fuckup with the turn of a page. The language, drug use, explicit and detailed accounts of fucking (that was not making love), the copious amounts of feces, and the all around anarchist-like (complete disregard for order) behaviors quickly cued me into why this book might not be appropriate for youth. Hell, it was barely appropriate for me.

All throughout the book, I kept expecting the end to be a real tragedy. Augusten never had a future, his best friend was Natalie (who I was sure was the worst of the Finches), and his mother was as bad a basket case as they come. As he explains it:

Our lives are one endless stretch of misery punctuated by processed fast foods and the occasional crisis or amusing curiosity. pg 274

[No Need to Argue The Cranberries] Zombie is probably in my Top 10 Favorite Songs of All Time list.

But all along, you know that somehow he has to have made it out of the Finch's grasp since he wrote the book. I thought maybe he and Hope (who was my favorite for a while because I thought she was the most grounded of the Finchs until she started to spoon her fathers shit out of the toilet. ugh) would pull a Bookman (what an asshole, I'm glad he ran away) and leave together. But surprisingly, it was Natalie that came out as the most successful family member. Maybe the Doctor's unorthodox parenting and letting his children pick their own parents actually worked in this case and gave Natalie enough distance from her family to see some light at the end of the tunnel. Good for her. And once her and Augusten left the Finch home to live on their own, he started to shape up as well. Sure school didn't work out for him, but who didn't see that coming? With his mother's help (I suppose she could be seen as the true savior of Augusten because she came clean about the Doctor raping her), Augusten finally liberated himself from the the Finch clan entirely and pursued his dreams in the Big Apple.

Like he said, they were destined for something great and were running towards the aforementioned light at the end of the tunnel, but they had been running with scissors. The scissors in this case are the Finchs, I'm sure. If their was to be one downfall in Augusten's life, it wasn't going to be his mom or dad, or even his lack of schooling. It was the Doctor.

As a final note, I'd like to explain why I write this blog through Augusten's words:

...I also wrote in my journal more. Writing was the only thing that made me feel content. I could escape into the page, into the words, into the spaces between the words. Even if all I was doing was practicing signing my autograph. pg 172

UPDATE:
I was recently going back through the writing I did over the past year (which was what led me to start this blog) and I found this little nugget. It's a little more long-winded than Augusten, but it still gets my point across. When I wrote this, I never intended for anyone to read it, so it's very stream-of-consciousness. I didn't edit it at all from the handwritten version to here, although I did cut one section out. It really didn't make much sense.

9/24/07
There’s something so alluring and glorious about the thought of being a writer. I feel like once I started reading (circa age 19) my drive to write has vastly increased. Even the simple pleasure of hearing my fingers quickly and gracefully tap dance across my keyboard is reason enough to want to being writing. The thought that I’m slowly running out of ink via my pen tip. I’m eating paper and breading kilobytes until my computer is full of typing. There’s an idea of freedom that seems to be associated with writing, and I want that freedom. I want to sit at my computer (typewriter) like Michael Douglass did in Wonder Boys in my pink bathrobe as it pours rain outside [transcriber’s note: it’s now dumping the first big snow of the season today]. Maybe even smoke a joint or two every now and then to get my creative juices flowing. I want to write to no end, or at least my own end, no deadlines. Create the life, and live as, of, and live as, another human being. Through him I could be funny, sad, emotional, elated, whatever I wanted to be. Maybe I could paint a picture of my ideal life or one I never want to live. I’d have the luxury of making it as sunshiny or hellish as I’d like, and be able to look at it from a distance. I could fulfill my fantasies or live my worst nightmares without having to take off my pink bathrobe. And if I could do it, successfully write a masterpiece, or at least something I’d consider to be my own personal masterpiece, then I KNOW that Ally could do it too. Do it better, in fact. She’s a much better writer than me, and I think that if she was able to get a spark of inspiration, her creativity could run wild all over the page and it would be represented so much more elegantly than I could ever hope to do to my own subjects. Maybe if I got a new computer (Apple: here I come) and got into a good setting (eg outside of Boulder, outside of school, inside a lot of free time) I could start writing. Often when I write at home with ally around, I get slightly embarrassed. Almost like she’s judging me. I feel like I’m a poser or something. Only established writers are allowed to even try. I don’t want her to judge me for trying to be creative (which I’m not, hence this autobiographical non-fictional story here) or for trying to be something I’m not. I do understand that this insecurity is stupid, unfounded, and unnecessary, but it still affects me nonetheless. Therefore, if I ever have a chance of writing, I also need a secluded space, my own are of the house, to work in. Coffee shops, cafés, restaurants, libraries and the like would work for out-of-house working (it’s NOT work, first of all, so ignore the word choice, and second, why would I be working out-of-house? Wouldn't Isn’t that synonymous with out-of-pink bathrobe?), but It would not suffice as my sole outlet for writing.

...

I think that step one in becoming a writer should be is reading. I need to read more. It motivates me, it tells me my likes and dislikes, and it’s fun in the mean time.

i wish

By they way, the possible job offer I talked about in the last post is in fact NOT what Scott detailed here. We need to make some money before we start that so that we can afford enough space to create a low-humidity aging room.

Oh, maybe someday...

zombie jesus

[2001 Dr. Dre]

I know this album is so 1990s (see why that's funny? I'll give you a second to think about it...) but it's still pretty damn good. As far as gangsta rap goes, nobody does it better than D.R.E.

Today at work, someone (David) brought up the oddities of Easter and what it's celebrating. He was joking around about how today marks the day that Jesus rose from the grave Thriller style and went about doing his zombie things for the subsequent 40 days. Though he was joking, it actually got me thinking about how bizarre this story really is. Being non-religious myself, I don't really know much about Jesus' resurrection, so my understanding may be completely off base. Nonetheless, I bet that if he had actually lived in Massachusetts during the 17th century (which I suppose would then be re-assigned as the century preceding the 1st century, right?), he would have been hung for witchcraft. These days, if some motherfucker just popped up out of his tomb after being dead for 3 days, even the most devout church-goers would be thinking "run, bitch!" (btw, I think all that cussing can be attributed to Dr. Dre).

[Frances The Mute Mars Volta]

There's another guy that I work with that's a real pervert. He hits on all the girls there that are all 30 years younger than himself. I'm seriously afraid that he's capable of doing some pretty bad things, like I think he doesn't have enough of a conscience or self control to NOT worry me. Fuck that guy, he frequently ruins my day.

Time for him to get fired/die of a heart attack.

Also time for me to get the hell out of there. I've been at Boulder Café for ~2.58 years, and I'm ready to get a real job. The money is so good and regular and IN CASH that I'm afraid that leaving is going to be kind of hard. I'm honestly anticipating making less money in a career-oriented job. That's nones-the-cool. But it has to be done. I'm not the most articulate person in the world (this post has already taken me that better half of an hour to write, edit, and re-write), so interviews scare me. My "interview" at the Café was a manager (who quit one week after hiring me...I was his last hire ever) telling me that the uniform is black and khaki, and asking me when I could start. Not really the best preparation for future interviews.

I've got a possible real-life job in the works, but I think that I'll keep it under wraps (on the DL, if you will) until it develops a little further. Profuse amount of luck (or prayers...although I have a feeling I lost all of my religious readers at the beginning of this post) sent my way might be appropriate at this time.

On a positive note, Lindsey from Wine Club just started working at the Café. She should really write about it on her haiku blog, but unfortunately she rarely updates it.

Regardless, that's a great idea for a blog, and it's a great blog.

moth hunting with a rubber band

The last post I did seemed to have broken from my typical introspective type, but I thought it was entertaining to write nonetheless. Nothing important enough is happening in my life right now to write about (yet here I am!), so I decided to write about some one else's life. I could make excuses by saying music is very important to me and that I have very strong opinions surrounding the issue or whatever, but the real reason I talked about Ms. Johansson was because it's enormously more entertaining than anything I'd have to say about myself. So as an effort to keep my oh-so-large fan base pleased, I'll occasionally diverge from my thoughts and readings from time to time.

I actually gave this a lot of thought last night. I almost felt like I was getting a little tabloidy by talking about celeb gossip. I realized that several times a day potential blog topics pop into my head, and I always forget them by the time I get here. So starting today, I'm going to start carrying around a little pocket moleskine notebook to write these topics in. I've also found that it's really useful for when I'm reading my book. Sometimes it takes me a few weeks to finish a book, and by that time, I've forgotten half of the opinions I had developed throughout.

So I'm sure you all are dying to know what I wrote down today. Sit down, get ready for this:

"moth hunting with a rubber band"

Wow. Today must have been a slow day. It's not even a good topic to write about, I just thought it was funny at the time. But I might as well let you know what it means.

Today is the Friday before spring break and my only class was Astrophysics at 10 o'clock. The teacher, Jason Glenn, has a very interesting and nerdy sense of humor. I mean he's an astronomer...enough said. Well he decided a while ago that he's going to have a short storytelling at the beginning of every Friday class. These stories are generally based around his experiences when doing observational research. They always take place in a different state/country, some wacky (and equally nerdy) scientists are always present, and expensive equipment is always involved. When things go wrong, this combination makes for a good story.

Today's observing story was about when Glenn was doing research at a 10 meter diameter submillimeter radio telescope in Arizona...unfortunately I didn't write down the name. I remember thinking "I don't need to write down the name, I'll be able to find it online," but alas, the name eludes even my proficient Google-Fu. To make a long story short, some guy was dangling from a crane scrubbing off plastic that had melted to the surface of the telescope and his chemical suit pants caught on fire. I guess Arizona gets kind of warm and the telescope was kind of reflective.

So one of the wacky scientists that Glenn worked with there was this hardcore southern manly-man that lived to hunt. When he was stuck at the laboratory doing observations all night, occasionally his desire to kill something would flare up and he'd grab a handful of rubber bands and hunt all of the moths in the observatory (since these telescopes have to be open to the sky, their buildings usually stay exposed to the outside). I was going to use this to open up some sort of dialog about how pointless hunting is and crap like that, but frankly this post has gone on too long already.

Glenn said that you always had to watch your step because so many dead moths constantly littered the floor.

bleeding ears

[Begin to Hope, Soviet Kitsch Regina Spektor]

Hallelujah. Everybody should be running to their computers to clear 70MB off of their iPods in anticipation for May 20th. "What's happening May 20th?" you may ask. I'll tell you: Scarlett Johansson is coming out with her debut album Anywhere I Lay My Head.

I'm pretty sure this marks the beginning of the end for ScarJo. She's already got a lot of media attention because, let's face it, she's pretty and she's been in some high-profile movie roles. IMO, she's not a very good actress, but that's another story (You don't have to be a good actor today to make it big in Hollywood. It's all about the lucky roles your able to land. Another good example of this is Orlando Bloom who has always been stale no matter what role he's in, but he keeps getting offered jobs by big-namers like Peter Jackson, Cameron Crowe, and Ridley Scott.). Now what's the first thing people with mild success do? They set their sights on the dreaded crossover. They think that since we go to the theaters to see their latest big-budget movie and buy all the US Weekly's with them on the cover, we'd like to hear them whine in hi-fidelity over heavily sampled, unoriginal beats. Thanks, Lindsay Lohan, but I do NOT want to get A Little More Personal, "raw" or otherwise. This concept seems to occur in reverse sometime, too, and some end up better than others.

To make matters worse, the album is allegedly eleven tracks with only one original. If you do the math, that makes nine ten of the tracks unoriginal. Apparently they're all Tom Waits covers. In all honesty, I'm not even sure who this guys is besides what I could gather from 30 second samples of his music on iTunes, and I have a feeling that having Lil' Red cover his music in not a good idea. The one original song is called "Song For Jo", which leads me to believe that "Jo" can only be referring to her. This can't be a good thing; I thought only rappers and Gwen Stefani talked about themselves in their songs. David Bowie is also attached to the album which raises some questions. Is he in desperate need of money? Is the album really that good that he just wants to work on it out of the kindness of his heart? Has David Bowie gone crazy? All good questions.

Since JoJo already has all of this media attention, this is only going to increase it. Unfortunately, although these crossover artists produce some pretty awful music, TRL seems to eat that shit right up. There's fucking pop culture for you. So with the dreaded paps constantly following her around day and night (preferably drunk outside of the trendy flavor-of-the-week nightclub), you have to wonder if she's going to snap like the other media whores of today (see below). I just sure hope that she's not going to screw herself out of a successful acting career because of a stupid foray into the singing biz.



ending the post with [Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga Spoon]

rate this

A word about ratings:

I kind of have my own way of standardizing how I rate items. I kind of discovered this on IMDB, though their system is still pretty faulty. I've noticed that to some people a 6 is a terrible rating, and for others, it's not so bad. So what I do is make 5 completely neutral; I didn't like it, I didn't dislike it. If something I'm reviewing was slightly less than pleasurable for me to read, then it might get a 3 or 4. If I really really enjoyed something overall, but there were some parts that lost my interest or certain elements of the book weren't as good as they possibly could have been, it might get an 8 or 9. In only reserve perfect 10s for my absolute favorite books of all time. I figure that throughout my lifetime, there should only be a handful of 10s ever given out. And as I said earlier, my ratings can change dramatically through time (most movies shoot into my Top 5 while I'm still watching them). I'm pretty pliable when it comes to my opinions (I suppose to a fault), so I'm somewhat willing to give out more 10s than I otherwise would because I know that one of them will probably bump another one down (make sense? not really? well shut up).

I suppose it would make more sense if things were rated on a scale from -5 to 5 with 0 being neutral. That would be the most intuitive way of doing it, but since we're a society based on a base ten numeral system (Mario Livio's book The Golden Ratio has a great section on base number systems. I think it was some Egyptian society that had a base of 64...or something like that. Crazy.) most people feel comfort in having things be out of ten, or some power of ten like percentages (percent: per one hundred, you get the idea).

Generally speaking, I would recommend most books with ratings of 6 or higher.

for the young

[Ghosts I-IV Nine Inch Nails]

I tend to only post when I'm really tired. I'm okay with that, though, because sleep is a waste of time. Anything I can do to put off sleeping is, therefore, not a waste of time. So here goes some procrastination:

Book: The Giver Lois Lowry 7.5/10
So it took me a few more days than I expected to finish this little guy. It's only ~180 pages, which puts me at about 20 pages per day. I guess quantity isn't the goal here, though, it's quality. Right? Maybe.

Now, unfortunately, when I finished this book, I immediately went onto wikipedia to read about it (see boots), and its summary and analysis was almost exactly verbatim what had been floating around in my head for the last week. See, I've found that the advantage to having this blog is that I think about the books I'm reading in more depth as I read. I think that this is partly the reason it took me a little longer to read this "young adult" book (I'll get back to that definition a little later), since I would constantly think about things I had just read. I also try to minimize those times when your eyes move over the words, but you don't process any of it. In order for me to understand the book, I need to have read it. Obviously. So as I was reading this book, I kept thinking about passages and themes that I could talk about on here, and I came up with a certain vocabulary, if you will, to be able to describe them. Since I read wikipedia's startlingly similar analysis to my own before I was able to get mine out of my head and onto (paper?), its vocabulary kind of took over my own. Since they were similar to begin with, it wasn't very hard for it to do. Now when I think of the book I think of words like "utopian" and "soft sci-fi" which are not the words I was going to use. Its weird to try to explain this, but I feel like wikipedia infiltrated my thoughts and manipulated them. I'm sure wikipedia's just buttering me up to become a part of some army it's forming. Stupid machines taking over the world.

To sum up: if you want to read my summary of the book, just check out the wikipedia page. It's probably more eloquent than me.

One thing that I did think about a lot while reading was why it's classified as a "young adult" book. I remember reading it sometime around late elementary to early middle school, and not quite soaking much of it up. Given, I've always been a pretty poor reader and it used to take a lot of willpower (that I never really had) to concentrate enough to understand books. So it may not really speak to much on the difficulty of the book (I didn't really understand Good Night Moon until I was in my late teens. Man, what a revelation that one was.).

But it got me to thinking where the cutoff is between adult and young adult fiction is. At first I thought that it had to be sentence structure and language. Surely young adult books have more precise language, less beating around the bush with unnecessary metaphors and shit like that, and simple-to-understand words. I love to read books that I need a dictionary for because it makes me feel like I'm being sophisticated or some shit like that, so I always keep one on my bedside table. Interestingly, I found myself reaching for it occasionally while reading this book. It certainly had its share of challenging passages in it. Sure it wasn't as metaphor-laden as, say, Calamity Physics was, but I've read many a grownup novel that doesn't use any kind of verbal trickery to get its story across.

Well then it's obviously the themes, right? Maybe. The themes in this book, like the inherent need for freedom and deep emotions, were pretty obvious - not in a bad way, it's just that they were never really disguised. Lowry made these pretty clear throughout the book, so there aren't really any surprises. Maybe this lack of depth contributes to it being young adult? Perhaps. But are these really childish themes? No. I feel like the real life relevance of the book (like recognizing that their societal control (eg eugenics, euthanasia) parallel real life events such as the Nazi movement) is anything but childish. Maybe I'm just reading too much into it, and maybe kids can understand that the society depicted was pretty fucked up.
(Ghosts just ended, so now [Lullabies to Paralyze Queens of the Stone Age])

As a last ditch effort to understand the age classification, I attempted to blame it on the main character's (Jonas') age (12-13). That's obviously a futile argument because not all youth-oriented books are about youth, and vice versa. I just started Running With Scissors today, and (at least so far) the main character is 9 (I think), and as far as I know, it isn't on middle schools' reading lists across the country.

I'll end by saying this: I don't care if The Giver got a slew of awards geared for young adult fiction, it's still a great read for those of us no longer in that category. I really enjoyed it.

i talk too much

I was just on Scott's blog, and the way he types is exactly the way he speaks. I can actually hear him saying the things he writes in his posts. I wonder if people can hear me in mine? I doubt it since there really are no people to read my posts, but whatevs.
I sure hope I don't ramble as much in real life as I do on here, but I'm pretty sure that's just wishful thinking.

I'm close to being done with The Giver. It should have only take me a few days to read, but I've been a little busier lately. Though it's midnight, and I only slept 5.5ish hours last night and have been up for 16 so far today, I think I might just try and finish it now.

btw, today was probably the most full, sucessful, productive (I didn't get much tangible shit done, just personal goodness fulfillment) day I've ever had. Without trying to ramble too hardcore, here's the rundown:
1. Woke up at 8AM with a mild hangover as a result of last night's cocktail club.
2. Took an astrophysics exam. Bombed one question, rocked the rest (I think).
3. Ate breakfast and read. I love eating and reading at the same time. It's a simple pleasure I really cherish.
4. Took Ally out to lunch at California Pizza Kitchen and ate a whole BBQ chix pizza less than two hours after having eaten aforementioned breakfast on a mildly upset hangover stomach.
5. Shopped for AJ's bday with Ally.
6. Played guitar, showered.
7. Went to Nick's house and chilled with the Cheyennee-G.
8. Hiked with Nick, Jordan LM, Tomper, and Greg to the "chairs" or some shit like that. Looked at Boulder, threw rocks, shivered (improperly attired: hobo plaid collared shirt and skater shoes).
9. Went to dinner at Sushi Tora. Ate dessert at Cheesecake. Shivered in between.
10. Watched one of my past teachers on a video about the upcoming FY09 NASA budget. Check out Pimp-Daddy Burns.
11. Wrote on my blog.
Still to come today: read, sleep...in that order, hopefully.

and so it goes

Apparently when I pick up a phrase (eg fuck-me boots), I can't help but beat it to death. Another one that I say to myself all the time is that bad odors smell like "mustard-gas and roses" thanks to Slaughterhouse-Five.

boots

[Pisces Iscariot Smashing Pumpkins]

I sometimes spend an hour or more online after having seen a movie just reading about it, trying to learn as much as I can. When I finish books, I'm even more obsessed. I always wait to look the book up and read about it until after I've finished. I even (try) to refrain from reading the cover because they always like to give the exciting things away to get people to buy the book. I'd much rather read about those exciting things in the context of the story. It's really bizarre how strict I am about that, yet I'm a big fan of LOST spoilers. Weird.

Anyway, after finishing Calamity Physics, I was reading things about it, and came across an article talking about the use of young, attractive authors' (such as Marisha Pessl) good looks as a marketing tool. The article described a picture of Pessl in which she's wearing "a pair of buttery leather high heals" that were later referred to as "fuck-me boots". This, surprisingly, was done while still being able to maintain the article's journalistic integrity.


Ever since I read that article, I can't see a pair of similar boots without calling them fuck-me boots. Every time, without fail.

intro

[Eraser Thom Yorke]

The last few months I've been keeping a word document documenting (coincidentally) the books I've been reading lately. This is just a web-based continuation of that, I suppose. I intend to write in the same candid style that I have been, almost as if I were just talking to myself (which is all I'm really doing, anyway). I've considered publishing my backlog of word-based posts on here too, but I think it's unnecessary since no one's going to read this anyway. Well, except for me.

Book: The Road Cormac McCarthy 8/10
A few days ago I finished The Road and haven't had the chance to write about it yet. I'd never read a McCarthy novel before, and I've been really looking forward to being able to. Ever since I found out who he is (first introduction: last spring in Fredricksmeyer's writing class when the "world's foremost Cormac McCarthy scholar" lectured us on his only other passion in life: Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven. btw, how do you become the world's foremost scholar of anything? I mean, I understand how you do it, but at what point does your obsession become a noteworthy achievement?)(second introduction: No Country for Old Men the movie. It was like one of my least favorite movies when I went to see it [I rank movies long before I see them], but after the first 3 minutes when serial badass with a 3-year-old-girl-from-the-1970s haircut Javier Bardem choked the shit out that cop, the movie instantly shot up to being in my top five [I also make almost every movie I like be in my top five for at least a few hours after seeing it].) he's been this kind of mythical figure.

I need a fucking change of music. Thom is the man, but it was putting me to sleep and after getting no sleep last night because of daylight savings, I need something that won't loll me into a deep trance. Hence
[St. Elsewhere Gnarls Barkley]

So I've been really intimidated to read anything of his. But I finally got around to doing so once I finally finished the marathon read of Calamity Physics (took me like all of February to finish. weak).

The book is bleak as hell, but rightfully so. McCarthy never really gives you any signs of hope because there are none in the world he creates. It's set in a post-apocalyptic Earth in which no life can really sustain. As I was reading, it reminded me of the asteroid that impacted Earth and killed all the dinosaurs: constant global cloud cover, ash covering the land (as they walked through it, images of Neil Armstrong walking through the lunar regolith popped into my head), fires burning through the dead forests, and mass extinctions (he talks a lot about how there's no more birds or fish). Wikipedia, though, says that McCarthy has admitted before that he assumes that the devastation was caused by man, and that the environments described in the book resemble a nuclear holocaust (I just remembered, there was a flashback the man had that described several earth-shaking booms or rumbles or something, which reinforces the bomb theory). This therefore lead some green environmental guru to label McCarthy as one of the world's biggest environmental eyeopeners by showing us how fucked up shit can get if we fucked shit up. It's like Les Stroud to the extreme. Without any other forms of life other than humans (the only other things they encountered were mushrooms and a single dog), everybody resorts to scavenging for canned food (since the story seems to be set within half a decade or so of the initial devastation, most other foods have gone bad or been scavenged already. But since it hasn't been too long, it's not impossible to find food overlooked by others in the years past.), and some have resorted to cannibalism - the only semi-readily available meat source. At one point they even find an infant roasting on a spit over a fire.

The whole thing is just a struggle for their (the protagonist and his young son) survival, and it's just an endless cycle of scavenging and hiding. This makes it so that the plot isn't real linear (although it's mostly chronological save for a few flashbacks) and instead read more as a string of situations that were thematically linked by showing how the man and the boy would find different ways of surviving in different situations. There's no real reason (that I saw) that the series of events had to occur in the exact order they did. Occasionally I'd try to go back and look up specific passages, and this story structure made it hard to find useful reference points that would easily tell me if they happened before or after the passage I was looking for. This didn't detract from the story at all, it was just something I noticed and thought about quite a bit.

Now that I'm falling asleep for real, it's time to wrap up. As I read, I kept thinking about whether it would make a good movie or not. I like doing that with books and trying to visualize how it would look and who would play the characters and what parts of the story would be cut, etc. I think that this book would have to be handled very carefully if it were adapted to the screen. I think that it's McCarthy's style to have very little dialog describe what's going on, and I'm wondering if such a visually informative movie would keep a pop-culture MTV generation audience's attention, and I honestly don't know if it could be done without straying too much from the story. I'm afraid that if it is made into a movie (I should leave out the "if" because it is for sure become a movie), they're going to make it into an action focusing mainly on the cannibalism and the few "action-packed" confrontations that happen in the book. I'm just afraid that it's not going to do much justice to the book. Viggo Mortensen isn't a very good dialog actor, so we'll see if they can keep his mouth shut enough to make the movie not seem too wooden.
Whatever, I'm over it.

UPDATE: [from 3030, Deltron 3030]
...half the world's a desert
cannibals eat human brains for dessert
buried under deep dirt, mobility inert
I insert these codes for the cataclysm...

stupid blogger

So I need to post something to be able to preview any edits I make to the template. Are you happy now, Blogger?