Boo!

Happy Halloween everybody! I'm playing it very low key this year since we had our party last weekend and that's all the holiday I need. I was a pirate.

So I'm home, Suzan's out. I've just listened to Saint-Saens's Dans Macabre, a wonderful 19th century piece that my elementary school music teacher, Ms. Stafford used to play for us at Halloween and we got to dance around like skeletons. Dans Macabre means "Dance of the Dead" and the piece is all about the one day a year (that would be Oct. 31) when the dead get to stand up and dance like the living. Death accompanies it all on his violin.

Ms. Stafford would play the song on a record player, one kid would be Death (usually a little blond girl. I never asked why) and the rest of us would be the skeletons.

So I turned off all the lights in my apartment, put the song on the stereo and flung myself about the room like a pile of bones caught up by the wind.

"Oh, that's what it's called!"

In my newest review for Film Critic.com, one reader wrote in to tell me I was talking about "Character-driven" films in my first paragraph. In retrospect, I probably should have known that.

Moving While Standing Still:

See, the thing that sucks about new friends is that just as ya start to get to know each other, they leave. I know it's not personal. It's just that good-bye always makes me so sad.

I hate to see people leave this place that I've grown to love so much and some irrational part of me wants to keep it under glass, the same unsmudged jewel-like city I moved to nearly 3 years ago. But San Francisco, from the outragous cost of living to the frenetic pace of life, to the earth rumbling beneath our feet, is not an easy place to lay down roots. I'm going to try but seeing people I know leave makes me, even for a silly moment, question that decision.

It's so beautiful here today. I really can't imagine wanting to be anywhere else. And thank God for a while at least, I don't have to.

You out there..#64!

Apparently, someone has voted me one of their three Desert Island Bloggers, which is way nice of them. I was positive I knew everyone who visited here (hell, I could fit them all in my garage), but sometime a few months ago, my number of daily visitors jumped from about 27 to about 64. Yes, I pick over these things. That only makes me pathetic, not a bad person.

I have no explanation for this sudden spike in interest. I think the quality of my blogging has remained nice and faintly amusing and irrelevant and unlinked by anyone of pull. But here we are, at a lecturn, with 64 of you in the audience. And there we begin.

*clearing throat*

Hi, I'm Kevin and this is my blog.

Dated and Loving it:

So our "Different Decade" Pre-Halloween party was a blast, a houseful of wonderfully tacky costumes worn by a fabulous group of folk (Wendy, Jane, Bryan, Maggie, Lane & Courtney and Apollo to name but a few). Susan was gussied up as Dorothy Parker. I was a pirate.

You didn't hear it from me but Evan Williams (yes, that Evan Williams, Mr. Blogger) is a dancin' fool. He was dressed as either Starsky or Hutch (WARNING: Link is noisy). Probably both.

Someone has pictures of this event, right? Please let me know.

Begin the year with Bankruptcy:

Students at the University of Ottawa have set up their own campus bookstore in direct competition to the University's with the express goal of putting them out of business. Anyone who has attended a major university in the last decade knows this is an action long overdue. My own Johns Hopkins University did business through a Barnes and Noble-owned store which held students effectively in indentured servitude. You needed books, the store charged outragous prices and most of the neighborhood shops didn't stock political treatises of ancient Sumerians or Developmental Biology texts. And this was before Amazon.

Bravo Ottawa.

Hometown Bash-ing:

My friend Amy pointed me to an online diary creatively titled Ann Arbor Sucks, a broadside of my beloved hometown. It's pretty opaque and not just because of the black background. The diarist merely identifies his/herself as a "grad student at the University of Michigan" no major, no age, not even mention of a gender. They do however like Stereolab.

I grew up in Ann Arbor and naturally think it's the greatest place in the world. But if I was graduate student age (and still as bitter and misanthropic as I was when I was a graduate student) I'd probably be knocking Ann Arbor about the ears too. It's a beautiful little university town in which to be an elementary school student, a retired professor or hell, even a college student. But to be in your mid-twenties, looking for underground polka music, alternative puppetry performances or to just to culturally spread your wings, Ann Arbor feels pretty damn provincial.

I don't live there anymore, if that's an indication.

Imtermission:

Sick. Very sick. Heeling slowly but surely. Must not blog today. Until I return, please enjoy these virtual studios of artists I stumbled across during this year's San Francisco Open Studios.

Superhero Designs: Funky Jewelry and portraits done in highly-saturated paints.

Mark Faigenbaum: Prints and collage boxes using architectural blueprints, maps, engineering graphs and other geometric patterns.

Tofu: Paintings and mixed media collages in bright, vivid colors. Reminds me of the film Waking Life.

Hark...

My friend Lars Kongshem is an education journalist by day and an amateur composer by night. He wrote this instrumental called Calla Rain in honor of the birth of his friend's new baby and gives a moving little explanation of how it came together. Check it out (real audio format).

What I'd Like to Hear at my Funeral:

"Kevin Smokler was my great friend. But I don't ever remember telling him that. The words that are spoken at a funeral are spoken too late for the man who is dead. What a wonderful thing it would be to visit your own funeral. To sit at the front and hear what was said, maybe say a few things yourself. Kevin and I grew old together. But at times, when we laughed, we grew young. If he was here now, if he could hear what I say, I'd congratulate him on being a great man, and thank him for being a friend."

--Inspired by Waking Ned Devine