Really Cool Word: "Malfeasance"

Malfeasance

Noun : wrongful conduct by a public official

Heard tonight in the movie Fargo. "We're investigating some malfeasance."

Read Recently: Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

Backstory: I always buy a hardcover book on my birthday, something I've been keeping an eye on but can't justify buying in hardcover. I dug Sittenfeld's essay on lit groupies in the New York Times (even wrote a reply) but didn't know much about Prep and felt, somewhere, I'd only be buying it to read about grouping sessions in the P.E. supply closet. But your birthday is when you let such defenses down.

Notes: 4 years in the life of Lee Fiora, a lower middle class kid from Indiana at an exclusive prepatory school in Massachusetts. I think she's been called "Holden Caufield in a kilt" although she lacks HC's brazen and misdirected confidence. By a whole lot.

Verdict: I love books, movies, TV, anything about the high school experience. My father and I watched Dawson's Creek together for most of the length of its run. Proudly. But you're bout 150 pages in before you realize that Sittenfeld is telling the story backwards, that Lee is older and has, we hope, learned a few things. Sittenfeld inhabits both halves of her protagonist with complete confidence. This isn't another annoying tale of pubecent self-absorption or a smug cultural shooting gallery with WASP privledge as the ducks. She plays fair with her text, a coming of age tale in the archetypal sense. Lee goes to class, has crushes, makes friends and loses them, fights and makes up with her roommate. It's all been done before but Sittenfeld seems to know that. She focuses on character instead of milestones, making Lee a real person, someone we might pity but are more than interested enough to spent 409 pages with. There are times when her whining never stops and her self-analysis sounds rote rather than inspired but they are rare enough not to distract from Prep's achievement: A novel about high school that doesn't make you wince or look away in predictibility.

Recommended. If you're into this sort of thing.

Lone Star State of Cinema:

The Drive-In is alive and well in Texas. Yeeehaw!

One Book, One San Francisco:

So this fall all San Franciscans are hereby assigned to read the same book. I'm eager to see how this turns out, especially with my friend Rosie at the helm.

AV Club V. 2

The Onion AV Club has redesigned and looks great. They've also got several RSS feeds, the lack of which prohibited me from reading them more frequently in the past. Now, I'l never miss another interview with Pat Benatar again.

Book Contract, then What?

My friend Elizabeth Spiers spells out in 800 words what I've been yammering about for 3 years. And better. She's going to put me out of a job.

Epic Walks:

So my friend Roman does this thing called "Epic Walks" where he'll walk with a friend or loved one for several hours and enjoy each other's company. 'Course he lives in Chicago where the steepest hill is a speed bump, not here in San Francisco where hills as much a landmark as the Golden Gate Bridge.

On Saturday, I hadn't been to gym but I also wanted to go to the movies. Suzan had errands to run so she dropped me off at Stonestown Mall where I caught an early screening of Junebug (lovely, sweet litte film) and walked home.

I shouldn't have worn brand new shoes. 10-12 blocks in my angles were already starting to tingle. So I slowed down, started up, skipped dawdled and tried to focus on what a beautiful summer afternoon it was in San Francisco rather than how much cardio benefit I was getting.

The whole walk took about 90 minutes not including lunch. If I focused on number of blocks left, I got discouraged so I tried to concentrate either on my immediate surroundings or let my thoughts wonder. And keep my feet moving.

When I was 14, my mother and brother and I climbed a 3,000 foot mountain in Switzerland without knowing it. We just kept following paths this way and that. The elevation was gentle enough that it didn't strain you. We got to the top without realizing it because we didn't look up or ever stop and think "I wonder how far we've come." Our minds were elsewhere.

I believe I can walk a helluva long way if I'm not in a hurry and my focus is on the steps rather than the finish line. But when you're done and you look at how far you've walked and yes, you're feet probably hurt and you wonder where the afternoon went, you can say "I did that? Man, that's pretty damn cool," and you'll remember it for a long time.

WORDCOUNT Reborn!

Eons ago I linked to WORDCOUNT, which links every word in the english language by commonality of use, then promptly forgot what it was called. My buddy Emily Hambidge just linked to it as part of her Weekly Roundup. Thanks EH.

"The" is the most commonly used word in the English language followed by "of" and "and".

Free (?) Garage Sale:

Emily just sent me a link to the Really Free Market, a once a month garage sale in San Francisco where everything is free. What a neat idea.

It's the last Saturday of the month, which means tomorrow. I think we're going.

SFist Burns Burning Man:

So SFist is all hating on Burning Man. A few of the comments took offense but most seem to agree with their assertion that

Really, is there that much of a difference between Burning Man and Spring Break? All it is a bunch of (mainly) kids going somewhere warm to party and get laid. The only difference is that while Spring Break is made up of meathead frat boys from the Midwest and airhead sorority girls from the South, Burning Man is made up of frustrated liberal art majors and artist types who have to turn it into something that's just so important and so much better than what mere mortals do so they can make themselves feel that they're just so much more important and so much better than anyone else.

I'm a little surprised the Burning faithful haven't risen up in protest. The whole dang festival was born here. Maybe they've heard it all before. Or maybe (and I could just be suspicious), the folks who scream loudest about the values of the Playa aren't the ones that read SFist?

Scott Beale of Laughing Squid and I have talked some about this. In the early '90s (before my time, right in the middle of his), the San Francisco undergroud art scene and embryonic web community were many of the same people. The hacker ethic fueled not only obvious geek/artist hybrids like the Survival Research Labs but the early Well discussion boards and the founding of Wired Magazine are examples of the same art/technology crosspollination. The dot com boom cleaved the two communities somewhat, with inflated rents displacing artist spaces and the glut of media and cultural opportunities necessitating the need for more obvious and diligent marketing of creative work. When I arrived in 2000, it was quite common to meet a writer with a half-dozen best selling books who didn't see the need for a web site or think the Internet was all that big a deal.

Things have been turning around and I couldn't be happier. I love the web and the arts with equal ferocity and believe in celebrating creativity no matter in which half of the brain it begins. It's not silly but potentially self-destructive to say that artists should fear technology or technologists don't get true creativity. All of our work can't help but be enriched by exposure to modes of creation unfamiliar to ours.

I think the return of Webzine could be huge, ushering in a new arts era for San Francisco where technology is seen as ann instrument of artistic endeavor instead of a necessar evil. Here's hoping...