Sam the Eagle and my Dad:

My dad's favorite kind of humor is when an uptight snob gets his/her just desserts. So I've been sending him and we've been bonding over Sam The Eagle clips. The one above has been his favorite thus far.

And today is his 65th birthday. Happy Birthday Dad!

Thought of the Day: For my girl...

"These are the dreams that we dream. These are big and special things.
These are days, of rain and shine. You and me. And I feel fine."

--The Bodeans

Just one more day please...

Still catching up. Need one more day please.

From the 'Vantage Point" of Friendship:

So I'm taking myself this afternoon to see Vantage Point (trailer) Why? Because it is the debut screenplay of one Barry L. Levy, a close friend of mine from high school. Barry and I have known each other since 1990 and actually wrote a screenplay together all those years ago called "Parental Consent" about a high school boy whose mother keeps murdering his prom dates.

He obviously made much more of our early partnership than I did.

Seeing it this weekend is my little contribution to its opening weekend, the crucial statistic in measuring movie success. I'm busier than sin this weekend and its raining but one of my promises to myself and the people in my life this year is that I support their endeavors, just as I'd want them to support mine.

So congratulations Barry. Your old friend Kevin is hella proud of you.

Word of the Day: "Fantasia"

Fantasia (noun): "A medley of familiar themes."

Seen: In Maya Angelou's Singin', Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas which I'm reading at the moment.

Golf is in the Ruff:

Maybe you heard but the popularity of golf has flattened out. Reasons are numerous:

“The answer is usually economic,” Mr. Kass said. “No time. Two jobs. Real wages not going up. Pensions going away. Corporate cutbacks in country club memberships — all that doom and gloom stuff.”

In many parts of the country, high expectations for a golf bonanza paralleling baby boomer retirements led to what is now considered a vast overbuilding of golf courses.

Between 1990 and 2003, developers built more than 3,000 new golf courses in the United States, bringing the total to about 16,000. Several hundred have closed in the last few years, most of them in Arizona, Florida, Michigan and South Carolina, according to the foundation.

At the meeting here, there was a consensus that changing family dynamics have had a profound effect on the sport.

“Years ago, men thought nothing of spending the whole day playing golf — maybe Saturday and Sunday both,” said Mr. Rocchio, the public relations consultant, who is also the New York regional director of the National Golf Course Owners Association. “Today, he is driving his kids to their soccer games. Maybe he’s playing a round early in the morning. But he has to get back home in time for lunch.”

Being a dedicated mini-golf player myself, I can't say I'm shedding a lot of tears over this. I'd be interested to hear how the people's game of moats and outsized animals is doing.

Literary Titans and their Birthday Cakes:

Today, February 21st, is the the birthday of W.H. Auden, David Foster Wallace, Anais Nin and Ha Jin.

Crazy! (via The Writer's Almanac)

Continued Silence:

Working on a book review. Must finish by tomorrow night. More upon completion.

San Francisco Writer's Conference:

I will speaking all weekend (starting today) at the San Francisco Writer's Conference. Posting may be light and I will undoubtedly be hoarse.

Museums After Dark:

My awesome girlfriend pointed this piece in the NY Times out to me. Apparently, it's now standard for museums to be open at night and throwing after hours events.

Over the last decade, just about all of New York’s major museums — and a few of its minor ones — have jumped on the nocturnal bandwagon, hoping to hook a younger generation on museumgoing. But they’ve hooked the older crowd as well, with some offering live music or D.J.’s, performances and lectures, discount prices and, not surprisingly, booze.

A majority of these evening activities are on Friday nights, seemingly perfect for just-arrived out-of-town weekenders. The crowds they attract appear much more New Yorker than tourist. The average attendee comes with high heels and a hip handbag, not sensible shoes and a Lonely Planet guide.

Here in San Francisco, both the De Young Museum and Yerba Buena Art Center do this too.

Which actually raises an interesting question my dad and I were discussing this weekend. What is the obligation of a non-profit organziation to cultivate a new generation of supporters?

The brat in me yells "A Huge One!" I'm just as tired as you are of staid, lifeless organizations assuming that, because my grandparents gave to them out of social obligation, that I will simply roll over an do the same. Welcome to the age of limitless choice, where the law is "If you don't speak in my language, I don't have to listen."

However, as Pa Smokler points out "What if another organization in the same community is already doing that? Does every single organization everywhere have to have a young person's initiative?"

Well no. That seems positively wasteful.

Efforts to attract new generations are time consuming, expensive and must be deployed with great care. Some non-profits simply don't have the resources to do that radical paradigm shift, even some of the time, with no certain payoff. And I sympathize with that reality.

However, I also believe there is no greater recipe for failure than ignoring the inevitable future. And the future says that most organizations a few decades from now will have to depend on a more hybridized mix of small and large donors, and non-monetary opportunities for involvement. Big donors are few and far between and are spreading their resources out more than ever. Little donors can become big donors, particularly if you involve them early on. And every organization has costs that can be outsourced to volunteers if done skillfully.

The future belongs to those who prepare for it today. How ready are we?

Hip Hop in Portrait:

Lest you thought the National Portrait Gallery (my favorite museum in our nation's capitol) is all oil-on-canvas, dead-white-dudes-on-horses, their new exhibition is called "Recognize! Hip Hop in Contemporary Portraiture."

Since its inception in the late 1970s, hip hop has become hugely influential in America. While images of hip hop performers are as pervasive in our culture as the music itself, some visual artists have created powerful images that both celebrate and explore the complexity of this creative form. The six artists and one poet whose work is included in RECOGNIZE! have approached hip hop culture through the lens of portraiture, and, in combination, their contributions highlight its vitality and beauty.

How contemporary of them. I love it. They've even got a little flickr group going.

It's been a few years since I've been out that way but this may be a good reason to head back.

Sam the Eagle Rats out Commies:

Reason Number #8129 why The Muppets was so brilliant. Here's Sam the Eagle parodying Joseph McCarthy's famous "I have a list of communists" speech.

Genius.

Thought of the Day: "Dreaming"

"We are always dreaming. Even when we are asleep, our dreams are an underground river."

--John Ashbery (via KCRW's Bookworm)

Read Recently: "The Shape of Things to Come" by Greil Marcus

Title: The Shape of Things of Come: Prophecy and the American Voice

Author: Greil Marcus

Synopsis: Cultural critic Greil Marcus weaves together John Winthrop, Bill Pullman, 24 and Pere Ubu to discuss this particular point in our cultural history.

Assessment: One reads Greil Marcus to watch Greil Marcus think. His themes are often buried beneath linguistic flourishes and his connections, when looked at straight on, seem like utter nonsense. But the journey is the point here, not the arrival because the arrival is imaginary.  Or put another way, do you really want to interrogate the value of why Bill Pullman's face is a visual stand-in for the violence at the core of the American soul or are you just glad Marcus raised the question at all?

Verdict: Very artfully constructed but with little take-away. All whipped cream and no sundae. But its damn fine whipped cream (first heard about on KQED Forum).

Why San Francisco Should Stay in San Francisco...

Never mind that this afternoon, I got yelled at for being "intolerant to pedestrians" (I was driving to pick up organic food coloring. At a co-op market. Any more PC and lampposts will start scolding me for being "carbon-centric"). Now I come home and read this piece in the LA Times about Speaker Pelosi's attempts to "Green the Capitol." Speaker Pelosi of course represents the loon-ball peninsula where I make my residence.

The cafeteria, which primarily caters to House employees but is also open to the general public, ditched its old food contractor and reopened after the holiday recess with a new menu that punches every available slot on the eco-friendly ticket favored by food trendies: "organic" (as in fertilizers and pesticide-free), "sustainable" (as in farming techniques), "rBGH-free" (as in milk), "cage-free" (as in chickens), "fair-traded" (as in grown by co-ops in the Third World), "local" (as in grown within a 150-mile radius in the First World) and, where possible, combinations of two or more of the above. Oh, and no trans fats -- this cafeteria food is good for you too.

In the old days, the House cafeteria, like its Senate counterpart in the basement of the Dirksen Office Building on the north side of the Hill (also open to the public except during the lunch rush), offered the usual cafeteria fare: meatloaf, burgers, chili, giant slabs of coconut cake with mountains of whipped bad cholesterol on top. You can still get a burger in the Longworth cafeteria -- but it's made from "humanely raised, antibiotic-free beef." You can still get chili too -- if you prefer "roasted corn and poblano chili" to the old-fashioned meat-and-beans variety.

What you can't get are large portions of the high-calorie, high-energy comfort foods favored by many of the workers who man the security stations and mind the vast physical infrastructure at the House. When I worked at the Library of Congress, the top lunch choice of security guards was fried chicken. "Green" food is food for desk jockeys with picky appetites.

It was a relief, then, to trudge up the Hill to the Dirksen building, where, give or take a few updates (sushi, for example), it was cafeteria business as usual: mac and cheese, double burgers (undoubtedly from inhumanely raised cows), unfairly traded Starbucks coffee, Cheetos-dispensing vending machines and those shredded carrots amid the lettuce at the salad bar that demarcate the socioeconomic line between the food proles and the foodies. Not to mention real stainless-steel flatware and real china plates. Perhaps that's because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is not into "greening," or perhaps it's because certain Senate dishes -- such as the famous navy bean soup, on the menu since 1903 -- are simply iconic. Dated though the Senate fare might be, the lunch-hour traffic was as dense in Dirksen as it was in Longworth.

Now I'm all about my lifestyle and workplace not leaving the planet a sty for the next generation. But I also find I'm most willing to do good when it's fun to do good. And since I find being serious for people who lack the imagination to be silly, I believe anything can be made fun.

Enter the environmental movement which for two generations has putting its most sour, fundamentalist foot forward. The planet is doomed, its your fault, so start doing penance with crappy-tasting food, ugly clothes and yert-living now. Enter Al Gore, The Breakthrough Institute and green capitalism which say "Listen, things are a mess and we're all stuck on this rock together. So we might as well sing during cleanup."

What's this have to do with Speaker Pelosi and her too-precious-by-half cafeteria? It's a living-embodiment of the worst parts of her hometown and mine: That to be conscious means to be a humorless scold. Which is antiquated, ineffective and a bummer. And makes me want to take a tour of the Capitol cafeteria with Speaker Pelosi and pass out organically raised, free-range whoopie cushions.

Only I would complain...

The wondrous thing about the Internet is, now that we can individualize and commodify our taste down to the level of genetic code, we can also find mutations that will only annoy us. Yes us.

Try it. The next time something really really bothers you, be rigorously honest and say "Would bother anyone else? Like, in the whole world?"

Case in point: 5 minutes ago, I was ranting that the Library of Congress only has webcasts (which have to watched in front of your computer) and not podcasts (which can be downloaded and watched at any time) of its fabulous events. And then I stopped and said "Would this annoy anyone on planet earth but me?"

Then dowsed my head in a bucket of water.

Try it. It's quite sobering.

Trampoline Hall in SF:

Trampoline Hall, a Toronto-based public series of lectures by non-experts (i.e. people who aren't qualified to talk about what they are talking about), will be arriving in San Francisco later this month.

The plug on Facebook describes it thusly...

The lectures are sometimes ridiculous, sometimes moving, and always wildly unpredictable. Each talk is followed by a Q&A with the audience which is usually also a lot of fun.

Sounds like just my kinda thing, I being the guy who downloads lectures for fun. Clearing Feb. 25th as we speak (via Photojunkie).

Scary Email News:

So guess what? We hold our breath when reading email.

That's downright scary. I tried to hold my going past a cemetery last week and made it about 25% of the way. I suck at holding my breath. And I've been known to suffer from sleep apnea.

So what's the latest horrifying thing we do while plotting through our ordinary lives? Fainting while rolling over? Paralysis while organizing the refrigerator? A series of strokes while tying our shoes?

I'm going back to bed (via Caterina.net).

Thought of the Day: "Goodbye"

"I'm going to go now. It's been wonderful. I've make some great friends, had a lot of laughs. Consumating got me through one of the toughest times of my life. But I'm not going to sit around and watch it crumble. I've got a life to lead that Consumating helped give me. It's the best tribute and legacy I have to give it back.

So goodbye all. Google Kevin Smokler anywhere and you'll find me. We will all meet again someday, another day to ride, another place in the sun."

--The Weeg. (My final post on the site upon hearing this evening of its demise)

2008 By The Numbers: A Neat Idea

My close friend Justin Sondak is doing a neat blogging project called 2008 by the Numbers. For this year, he wants to read 52 books, see 100 live theatrical shows and run 1000 miles. He blogs his progress each week and does a little summary of important world events over the past seven days.

Simple, compact, useful. A great use of the medium. Unless this shambling mess you've been reading....

Instapaper:

Any messed around with Instapaper yet? Its a simple tool for saving things you want to read later. I'm not sure it's all that much different than my Del.icio.us page but I'm willing to give it a spin.

Anyone else spun?

A public service announcement from Kevin, friend of Nina:

Ahem, I'm only to say this once. My friend Nina is not Diablo Cody.

Nor am I (that would be Kevin)

to be confused with Jon Favreau...

Much as I would welcome such things.

From One Festival to another: SF Indie Fest

The San Francisco Independent Film Festival pulls into town this weekend and I'm quite excited. They'll be over 75 films playing in an around the Mission this weekend which shorter lines and a lot less mishigas than the San Francisco International with lands a little further uptown in April.

I've been using Without a Box, a web-based tool on the festival's site that lets you select which films you want to see and..I don't quite understand what else. I'd like to be able to pick my movies and then view them in some sort of calendar interface. I've got a support request into WAB to ask if I can.

In the meantime, C-Dub and I are going to have a movie date on Saturday night, probably taking in Stuck. Sunday I've already bought tickets to Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation which, if you can believe it is this...

A shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark produced and directed by three boys from the Mississippi Gulf Coast – over 20 years ago. The trio of 12-year-olds - Eric Zala, Chris Strompolos and Jayson Lamb - began shooting in the summer of 1982 and wrapped seven years later. This remake has everything -- the rolling boulder, the live snakes, the heart-thudding truck sequence, and everywhere flames, flames, flames. With a few inventive substitutions -- a puppy dog stands in for a monkey, a boat for a plane – they didn’t skimp on production value by including a submarine, a truck on fire, a melting face, the same copy of a 1936 Life magazine used in the original.

Here's the trailer:

Overall, the festival's got a really solid lineup. I hope I can squeeze a bunch in while catching up from AWP.

Kay Ryan goes to AWP:

Before I get all carried away  with gush for AWP, I'm going to recommended to myself that I read poet Kay Ryan's essay "I Go to AWP.", pointed out by my friend Aviya. For balance, if nothing else.

Thinking about AWP Afterward...

Ahhh AWP. How I remembered you and how much you've grown. There's even room for a bratty troublemaker like me amidst your folds of earnestness and literary importance.

I kid. In 2006, a week after the demise of my 5-year relationship, I attended The Associated Writing Programs's annual conference because it was in Austin, abutted SXSW and I needed to get the hell out of town. Since I was bitter and angry, I spent the better part of 3 days being bitter and angry to complete strangers who were really just there to let me know about their lovingly edited literary journal with a sassy title like Jumping Coffee Table or something.

I shouldn't have gone. I should have done what normal people do with a broken heart which is drink too much and kick drywall. Instead, I'm 1500 miles from home, without purpose or anchor and castigating some poor soul from Pine Manor College for not having a URL on the front of their student publication or for giving it some less-than-sassy-moniker like Lower Hills Review.

Amid that bile, I came away with exactly one useful observation: The paper literary journal is on a shrinking island of relevance but its contents are as important as ever. How it will matter to future generations will depend almost entirely on how it takes advantage of new systems of delivery.

Or put simpler, when was the last time your saw a literary journal with an RSS feed? Aren't we due for one?

I've grown and so has AWP. I went this year, happy and purposeful, as a representative of BookTour who had a table at the conference Book Fair. Our goal: To get colleges to add their literary events and visiting writers series to our database. And since it was also the celebration of my one-year anniversary with my girlfriend, I had something wonderful to come home to after a long day of conferencing.

I also noticed this year that the academic writing community was beginning to acknowledge, with considerable maturity, that seismic changes are afoot in the world of literature. Panels like "It's Not Hopeless: The Future of Independent Publishing" seemed realistic instead of in denial. More and more journals are seeing the web as crucial to their growth. And when I told departments that we were building the "world's largest database of author events, online and 100% free" they seemed excited instead of bemused.

I also ran into some old friends (Carolyn Kellogg, who remains effortlessly fabulous and David Kipen, without whom such things don't seem right, and Aviya Kushner, whom I simply don't see enough of), neighbors from back home (I boarded an outbound flight with have the Stanford Stegner teaching faculty) and made the acquaintance of a journal about meat. Plus about 65 other small publications doing excellent work, with top-flight contributors. Got me energized about writing more.

A solid productive trip, with a lovely anniversary thrown in. You just may see me in Chicago this time next year, eager to pick up the latest issue of Jumping Coffee Table