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Where, When, How Much, What Flavor.
My review of Michael Patrick MacDonald's memoir "Easter Rising: An Irish American Coming up from Under" has been published in last week's San Francisco Chronicle. It's a sequel to MacDonald's debut "All Souls" which I loved. I didn't love this one so much.
Does anyone else feel married to the new fall TV season? Around this time last year I had a small but managble stable of shows I watched with regularity--Veronica Mars, Grey's Anatomy, Gilmore Girls, Criminal Minds. I made time for an occasional Simpsons rerun. It left me with maybe an hour of TV viewing in the evening about every other day of the week. Kind of like a lover you have a smokin' hot time with but is moving to Estonia in a few months so you don't want to see too often.
race to this September and my casual affair has turned into a full blown committed, I'm-buying-birthday-presents-for-your-parents kind of relationship. There are easily 6 new shows (Kidnapped, Six Degrees, Ugly Betty, Brothers and Sisters, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip) that I've started following. I'm also flirting with Heroes and can't help but listen to my friends natter on about Entourage which is only a Netflix click away. Plus, I've got the entire second season of House M.D. on my laptop acquired through, eh, uh, some means.
Now I could watch 2 hours of TV, seven days a week and still not be caught up. I know it a temporary condition. Some shows will stay, others fall away, we'll have different priorities, want separate things out of the relationship. But for now, it's like being chained to a very large easy chair.
Thank god the Library Book Sale is this weekend. I could use the lack of stimulation.
Oh happy day! My piece on Citizen Media is in Fast Company this month. Page 30. On newstands now.
The Last Kiss (2006): "It has taken Zach Braff exactly one movie to become a cliche'."
Notes: Seen in New York over Rosh Hashannah weekend with my buddy Jo (owner of this fine establishment). We were not impressed.
From the Atlanta Journal Constitution...
Amid all the courses in bioinformatics and global economics, algorithms, combinatorics and optimization — look it up — the next generation of engineers and computer scientists is reading, even writing, poetry.
That makes perfect sense to Wayne Clough, president of Georgia Tech and a Ph.D. in civil engineering.
"The pursuit of science and technology is just as creative a process as poetry and the arts," Clough says. "Both require intensely creative people who can think outside the box, look at the same things everyone else sees and imagine something more, and put the pieces together in new ways."
For alumni who still might be wary of such right-brain activities, Thomas Lux, director of the Poetry at Tech program, offers a presentation every year called "Engineering a Poem."
"We're trying to diminish the stereotype of the poet as some dreamy bozo who wanders around and then all of a sudden gets struck by inspiration," says Lux. "Poems are made things. They have everything to do with intense emotions ... but poems are made things. They don't just happen."
Cheers to that (via Arts Journal).
"Fiction is best as the bearer of bad news" --John Updike
My first ever piece for the LA Times (a review of Chuck Klosterman's new book Chuck Klosterman IV) has just landed. I couldn't be happier.
Oh and an ancient episode of Talking Pictures is available for your listening pleasure.
L.A. Story (1991): "Los Angeles is a place where they've taken a desert and turned it into their dreams." --Line from the movie.
Notes: Seen via Netflix for the first time in 15 years. Still a sweet poetic fable about a city short on gentle. Quite an accomplishment.
Tinpot (adj): "Insignificant or unimportant; minor, often referring to leadership"
i.e. "A Tinpot Hitler"
Not to be confused with other uses of the word "tin" to mean "of lesser quality" like "Having a tin ear" and "a tinhorn operation"
I wonder if the tin industry knows their goods are being talked about this way.
And emotionally worn to a nub. Been catching up most of the day, which is just fine.
Here for the Jewish holidays so blogging will probably be light. L'Shana Tova, beeyacthes.
American Dream (1991): "Nothing is so sad as committed people crushed under the heel of time."
Notes: First seen at a packed Michigan Theatre my senior year in high school. Back then I was completely on the side of P-9, the meatpacker's union striking to keep their wages from being cut. Now, 15 years wiser, I see that this is a documentary about misplaced intentions and the terrible position of powerlessness working people found themselves in during the Regan era and continue to today.
It's hard to watch this film and not believe that labor unions have about 2 decades of catching up to do. And to ask how did they let this happen in the first place.
"The world is divided into two kinds of people. The people who divide the world into two kinds of people and the people who don't."
--Gloria Steinem (who at 72, still looks and sounds incredible).
So on the recommendation of my friend Liane, I went to see world famous DJ Paul Van Dyk do his thing at 1015 Folsom this Saturday. I danced for 4 solid hours and left feeling like I had witnessed the entirety of human history presented as a collage of sound. In a word, epic.
My friend Nina was in town so spent the better part of Sunday with her and many of our mutual friends. Got up early this morning to have breakfast with her.
Now I feel like my body's been hit with a thousand hammers. I need sleep, a massage, a decent meal and to spend a day unpacking from Alberta, paying bills and getting caught up on my nothing.
I don't regret for a moment the life I'm leading now but I do still get reminded that I am not 21 anymore and need to pace.
Pass has been purchased. I will be back this year for round #8. Just an attendee this time, which is fine.
You going?
So I'm at the breathtakingly beautiful Banff Centre today in the mountains of Alberta, Canada. I'm speaking at Annual General Meeting of the Alberta Book Publishers Association which I wanted to come to last year but was in the middle of book touring. I'm glad I could make it this time.
The Banff Centre is an arts and cultural center about 90 minutes north of Calgary. World famous musicians, writers, arts study, teach and present here. I've heard it called the Tanglewood of Canada. The hotel on the campus I'm staying at looks from the outside like a college dorm but my room is more comfortable than many 4 star 39 floor monstrosities I've stayed at in the past.
And the setting? Daaaaaaayyymmm. Mountains so tall and majestic they look in danger of toppling over. Rod-straight pine trees that remind me of my childhood in Michigan. Today it snowed (the Executive Director of the program told me Canada has two seasons, "July. And winter) cold and heavy. I'm no longer accustomed to winter after 6 years in Northern California. But, ah, the snow weighing down the Aspens, sliding off the hills like a version of the glaciers that carved out this valley. It looks like something Jack London would have dreamed about.
I'm not staying at this hotel but they just don't make 'em that way anymore.
Did I mention elk? I was warned not to feed the elk because they can be aggressive this time of year.
I gotta come back here.
"The poet is not the bundle of contradictions and insecurities that sat down at the breakfast table that morning" --W.B. Yeats
"Every day I walk out into the world to be dazzled, then to be reflective."
--Mary Oliver (via The Writer's Almanac)
The Huffington Post has reported that Rep. Jack Murtha will announce today that he's calling for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Around this time yesterday, Apple unveiled iTunes 7.0 and a bunch of other cool stuff. Engadget has a complete rundown.
I'd like to sample the former and kick the latter to the curb.
At home in bed. I had stayed up too late the night before, working and had called my trainer to ask if we could work out in the afternoon instead of the morning. Fast asleep, I was awakened by a phone call from my friend Britton, who didn't even say hello.
"Kevin, the World Trade Center has collapsed"
I spent a few groggy moments on the phone while I turned on CNN and try to make sense of it.
The rest of the morning I was on the phone or emailing, with friend, family every I though think of within a hundred miles of New York, Washington DC or Pennsylvania. That afternoon my friend Laura and I walked around the neighborhood in a haze, bought sandwitches and rented the movie The Best Years of Our Lives.
We still talk every year on Sept. 11. To remember.
Where were you?
Have you seen this? I want Gene Weingargten to give me a steaming pile of advice every five years until I die. Or he does (via del.icio.us/popular).
The Tao of Steve (2000): "Scoring doesn't make you good at winning"
Can anyone tell me the song playing at the beginning of this trailer? Looks like a great movie.
According to this report, Ellen DeGeneres will host the 2007 Oscars, which I think is a damn stupid idea. John Stewart may have not been great but he's precisely the demographic the Oscars are losing year after year. Ellen's sitcom went off the air in 1998. She now hosts an afternoon talk show. Great stuff I'm sure, but who is the Ellen DG audience? Stay at home moms? Gay folk? Doesn't it feel a little like Tony Danza being asked to host? Doesn't it feel a little too light and chatty for the Oscars? Is Ellen bigger than I'm aware of?
Verb (1): "To play actively and boisterously; frolic."
(2) the practice of swinging from and playing off of a ship's mast
Also the most successful album by XTC.
(via NPR).
I forot that last week was Maria Montessori's birthday. I was a Montessori kid. Were you?
Accepted (2006): "For the first time in movie history, a comedy set on a college campus does not include a panty raid."
Notes: Seen in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with my brother and sister in law.
This is Dragonforce, my new favorite band. In case there was any doubt, I am now the least cool human being on the planet (via Pud).
Just links today
Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times edited by Kevin Smokler
