Did you know Fed chairman Alan Greenspan helped Ayn Rand write Atlas Shrugged? Hand to god, I just read that in The Economist. Downright unsettling. It's like finding out Madeline Albright was L. Ron Hubbard's mistress. Yuck.
"Grow up" and "Get over yourself" are admittedly hoary retorts, but classics all the same.
You know who should do a movie together? Jim Carrey and P.T. Anderson. They can call it The Man Who Learned To Cry and Moved a Mountain, and they can look mutually stricken and crumple into each other when the film is denied multiple statuettes on Academy Awards night ... while their girlfriends look on in camera-ready empathy (and possibly make out with each other later, at the Miramax after-party). The big winner that night will, of course, be Roger Kumble's Madame Bovary X, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar (in which Sarah Michelle will definitely make out with Jessica Biel).
We commit emotional states to memory the way some organisms deal with their exoskeletons -- discarding them fairly intact, so that we may try them on again at some later date, perhaps a little snugly, and relive the incidence of their formation.
Ricky Martin gives me the creeps. During his initial "everything Latino is new again" US media immersion a couple of years ago, I was disturbed by his beady-eyed obsidian narcissism; but in his current bodhisattva-inflected incarnation, he's graduated to full-on cross-the-street-to-avoid dingbat. With that spindly-legs-akimbo callisthenic heaving he calls dancing, he reminds me of one of those dudes who comes up to you and your friends in a club and asks for something completely off-kilter, like your shoelaces. And always with a homicidal urgency. Bang on.
The syntax of dreams is montage. The "now" of any given moment is part of a "forever" which operates to the exclusion of all preceding moments. The music of annihilation. Artifacts of the mind's semiotic libations. At least, that's been my general experience. During the last few days, however, my dreams have been curiously linear -- unfolding as a continuum in which I can move back and forth with some consistency and in which my conduct adheres to some likewise consistent body of physics. Of course, this is still a heightened reality -- more dynamic somehow, too many people, too many ... escalators -- but it's interesting nevertheless. It's as if my attention span took a deep breath and expanded with the exertion, and now the canvass of my mind's eye is more relaxed.
There are a lot of blue jays out today. When I was little, I used to call them bluebirds, but my third grade teacher, Mrs. Bell, disabused me of this misconception. Mrs. Bell was a bit of a psycho, as I now recall. She had it in her head that the robins (or was it sparrows?) of northeast Ohio were "out to get" the endangered bluebirds, so she used to run around knocking sparrows' (robins'?) nests out of trees on weekends. She also had it in for Christopher Columbus, but that's a separate anecdote. Her husband was in the F.B.I. (She used to repeat this jackass anecdote about how, one time, he apprehended a serial burglar by identifying a fingerprint on a single jelly bean.) And she looked like Anne Murray; although Candice Bergen would play her in the movie of my life -- in full Murphy Brown drag, of course. That's all I remember about Mrs. Bell.
Hypertext is Attention Deficit Disorder incarnate, which is why I rarely ever link to anything anymore. With the world fractal-cleaving in all directions, fanning out in hubs and spokes and arrows and flowers, I'm rediscovering the deceptively simple virtues of linear progression. The quickest route between two points is still a straight line ... even when it's a tangent.
Seasons, by their cyclical nature, tend to visit upon us the memory of seasons past; but Fall 2000 only reminds me of Fall 1996, and I'm not sure why. It's as if the intercurrent autumns failed to signify in some way.
I've come to believe in something I like to call the Activation Principle. Namely, it's a framework for describing what may be more commonly defined as "eureka moments" -- those times in life when you know you've hit on something. Every outcome begins with a single thought; every object may be viewed as a flare along a highway. I experienced such a moment, such a flare, just now, a few hours ago. I had to go outside and walk it off. (I smell like winter now.) It's not worth delving into just yet, in its embryonic state, but it's an idea, a discussion I'll have to visit again -- perhaps in a few weeks, perhaps in a few months. If time is ultimately a narrative continuum, a stitch made now will ramify at some later date.
Following 1991's Terminator 2, I remember subsequent wannabe CGI crapfests being marketed as having the best visuals "since Terminator 2." Exhibit A: Freejack. Exhibit B: The Lawnmower Man. Horrible, both. These days, The Matrix appears to be the throne to which all pretenders aspire. So it is with some trepidation that I've viewed the nascent marketing for Red Planet. Best visuals "since The Matrix," the voiceovers intone. Worst crap since Mission To Mars, my intuition whispers.
Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw are the Robert Redford and Harrison Ford of network news, respectively. I guess that makes Katie Couric the Meg Ryan. And of course, Tim Russert is Randy Quaid.
I wish International Paper would put its television ads online. I haven't seen one yet that wasn't striking and evocative. My favorite is still the one that ran during the 1996 Summer Olympics. It juxtaposed various acts of civil unrest with examples of gamesmanship and triumph -- protesters' banners morphing into celebratory confetti; the metal fence outside a prison blurring with the mesh of a soccer goal. And their current campaign continues to employ the stark black-and-white photography that has served them so well in recent years -- broad, humbling skies; roads running toward infinity; and children: they always have children in their commercials. An artsy, somewhat daring campaign for what is essentially a commodity manufacturer -- innovations in Tencel and whatnot notwithstanding. Slick. Wonderful. Overlooked.
I think America is finally ready for a quirky, feel-good one-hour dramedy based on the movie Rain Man. When NBC's Ed (rhymes with "dead") inevitably flops, the cast can just transfer to the new show. Any takers?
Am I the only person who thinks washing cookies down with water feels gross? For some reason, I think sugary snacks need to be followed by something comparably sweet -- juice or a soft drink. And please, no milk. All those lipids ... I might as well be drinking Liquid Softsoap. Milk belongs in baked goods and cheese, not in a glass. I've never understood those Dairy Council ads portraying milk as a viable thirst-quencher. When I'm thirsty, I sure as fuck don't crave greasy animal fats. When I was little, my mom used to make me drink a tall, cold glass of milk every morning before school. And no matter how much Quik she put in it, I still found it repellent. What a lousy way to start the day. More often than not, I would pour it down the kitchen sink drain when she wasn't looking. Alas, there were no potted plants nearby. Would have made for a more amusing anecdote. Although, one time, I'm pretty sure I hastily "threw" the milk in the trash instead of the sink. That subterfuge was easily discovered, and I was furnished with a fresh serving of the wretched stuff. "Got Milk?" indeed.
For the second time this week, I've had this dream in which I'm living on a huge, impossibly sophisticated soundstage -- replete with realistic Truman Show geography and weather. Only, in my dream, the soundstage is populated with actors from various WB series. Come to think of it, maybe it was a nightmare.
Drawing pictures with strokes and fills has always been a laborious process for me; words come more easily. During my collegiate days, I would sometimes fight sleep and boredom in the classroom by rallying my faculties around a contemporaneous scene or tableau -- attempting to convey it, in my notebook, as compactly and completely as possible. Rummaging through some old files, I came across a fragment from a particular afternoon exactly two years ago: "He sat next to the window, but more than glass separated him from open space. There were the trees -- wide branches crisscrossing in layers, dipping, dappled; beyond them, a squarish building, three stories, red brick deepened to brown; and there, high above the bricks and leaves, framed in a small space of unfiltered light: a flag idling in the wind, now and again lifted aloft, set against the sprawl of the sky. The sun shone fixedly, unperturbed by clouds." If memory serves me, the course was Heroes and Mythmaking, or somesuch. Grass growing outside was obviously more interesting to me than the lecture already in progress, professorial chicken-scratch filling up chalkboard upon chalkboard like some hideous fugue.
There are moments when I'm overcome with a sense of well-being, a sensation not unlike the Precambrian warmth of sunlight suffusing drawn eyelids, a private red dusk, an afternoon nap.
Some days, dream aether trails me long after I've woken up -- little cumulous puffs of half-memories and afterthoughts. Or maybe I'm just low on carbos.
Cloudless sky, cold. Stars shining with the faltering light of dead violence. Sunlight soon to follow. Reminds me of slug line I've always liked, from James Cameron's original Aliens screenplay: "Silent and endless. The stars shine like the love of God ... cold and remote." Cold and remote. Is that an Aristotelian or Platonic conception? If you know the answer, you need to stop taking yourself so seriously. Some things are worth un-learning.
"Grow up" and "Get over yourself" are admittedly hoary retorts, but classics all the same.
You know who should do a movie together? Jim Carrey and P.T. Anderson. They can call it The Man Who Learned To Cry and Moved a Mountain, and they can look mutually stricken and crumple into each other when the film is denied multiple statuettes on Academy Awards night ... while their girlfriends look on in camera-ready empathy (and possibly make out with each other later, at the Miramax after-party). The big winner that night will, of course, be Roger Kumble's Madame Bovary X, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar (in which Sarah Michelle will definitely make out with Jessica Biel).
We commit emotional states to memory the way some organisms deal with their exoskeletons -- discarding them fairly intact, so that we may try them on again at some later date, perhaps a little snugly, and relive the incidence of their formation.
Ricky Martin gives me the creeps. During his initial "everything Latino is new again" US media immersion a couple of years ago, I was disturbed by his beady-eyed obsidian narcissism; but in his current bodhisattva-inflected incarnation, he's graduated to full-on cross-the-street-to-avoid dingbat. With that spindly-legs-akimbo callisthenic heaving he calls dancing, he reminds me of one of those dudes who comes up to you and your friends in a club and asks for something completely off-kilter, like your shoelaces. And always with a homicidal urgency. Bang on.
The syntax of dreams is montage. The "now" of any given moment is part of a "forever" which operates to the exclusion of all preceding moments. The music of annihilation. Artifacts of the mind's semiotic libations. At least, that's been my general experience. During the last few days, however, my dreams have been curiously linear -- unfolding as a continuum in which I can move back and forth with some consistency and in which my conduct adheres to some likewise consistent body of physics. Of course, this is still a heightened reality -- more dynamic somehow, too many people, too many ... escalators -- but it's interesting nevertheless. It's as if my attention span took a deep breath and expanded with the exertion, and now the canvass of my mind's eye is more relaxed.
There are a lot of blue jays out today. When I was little, I used to call them bluebirds, but my third grade teacher, Mrs. Bell, disabused me of this misconception. Mrs. Bell was a bit of a psycho, as I now recall. She had it in her head that the robins (or was it sparrows?) of northeast Ohio were "out to get" the endangered bluebirds, so she used to run around knocking sparrows' (robins'?) nests out of trees on weekends. She also had it in for Christopher Columbus, but that's a separate anecdote. Her husband was in the F.B.I. (She used to repeat this jackass anecdote about how, one time, he apprehended a serial burglar by identifying a fingerprint on a single jelly bean.) And she looked like Anne Murray; although Candice Bergen would play her in the movie of my life -- in full Murphy Brown drag, of course. That's all I remember about Mrs. Bell.
Hypertext is Attention Deficit Disorder incarnate, which is why I rarely ever link to anything anymore. With the world fractal-cleaving in all directions, fanning out in hubs and spokes and arrows and flowers, I'm rediscovering the deceptively simple virtues of linear progression. The quickest route between two points is still a straight line ... even when it's a tangent.
Seasons, by their cyclical nature, tend to visit upon us the memory of seasons past; but Fall 2000 only reminds me of Fall 1996, and I'm not sure why. It's as if the intercurrent autumns failed to signify in some way.
I've come to believe in something I like to call the Activation Principle. Namely, it's a framework for describing what may be more commonly defined as "eureka moments" -- those times in life when you know you've hit on something. Every outcome begins with a single thought; every object may be viewed as a flare along a highway. I experienced such a moment, such a flare, just now, a few hours ago. I had to go outside and walk it off. (I smell like winter now.) It's not worth delving into just yet, in its embryonic state, but it's an idea, a discussion I'll have to visit again -- perhaps in a few weeks, perhaps in a few months. If time is ultimately a narrative continuum, a stitch made now will ramify at some later date.
Following 1991's Terminator 2, I remember subsequent wannabe CGI crapfests being marketed as having the best visuals "since Terminator 2." Exhibit A: Freejack. Exhibit B: The Lawnmower Man. Horrible, both. These days, The Matrix appears to be the throne to which all pretenders aspire. So it is with some trepidation that I've viewed the nascent marketing for Red Planet. Best visuals "since The Matrix," the voiceovers intone. Worst crap since Mission To Mars, my intuition whispers.
Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw are the Robert Redford and Harrison Ford of network news, respectively. I guess that makes Katie Couric the Meg Ryan. And of course, Tim Russert is Randy Quaid.
I wish International Paper would put its television ads online. I haven't seen one yet that wasn't striking and evocative. My favorite is still the one that ran during the 1996 Summer Olympics. It juxtaposed various acts of civil unrest with examples of gamesmanship and triumph -- protesters' banners morphing into celebratory confetti; the metal fence outside a prison blurring with the mesh of a soccer goal. And their current campaign continues to employ the stark black-and-white photography that has served them so well in recent years -- broad, humbling skies; roads running toward infinity; and children: they always have children in their commercials. An artsy, somewhat daring campaign for what is essentially a commodity manufacturer -- innovations in Tencel and whatnot notwithstanding. Slick. Wonderful. Overlooked.
I think America is finally ready for a quirky, feel-good one-hour dramedy based on the movie Rain Man. When NBC's Ed (rhymes with "dead") inevitably flops, the cast can just transfer to the new show. Any takers?
Am I the only person who thinks washing cookies down with water feels gross? For some reason, I think sugary snacks need to be followed by something comparably sweet -- juice or a soft drink. And please, no milk. All those lipids ... I might as well be drinking Liquid Softsoap. Milk belongs in baked goods and cheese, not in a glass. I've never understood those Dairy Council ads portraying milk as a viable thirst-quencher. When I'm thirsty, I sure as fuck don't crave greasy animal fats. When I was little, my mom used to make me drink a tall, cold glass of milk every morning before school. And no matter how much Quik she put in it, I still found it repellent. What a lousy way to start the day. More often than not, I would pour it down the kitchen sink drain when she wasn't looking. Alas, there were no potted plants nearby. Would have made for a more amusing anecdote. Although, one time, I'm pretty sure I hastily "threw" the milk in the trash instead of the sink. That subterfuge was easily discovered, and I was furnished with a fresh serving of the wretched stuff. "Got Milk?" indeed.
For the second time this week, I've had this dream in which I'm living on a huge, impossibly sophisticated soundstage -- replete with realistic Truman Show geography and weather. Only, in my dream, the soundstage is populated with actors from various WB series. Come to think of it, maybe it was a nightmare.
Drawing pictures with strokes and fills has always been a laborious process for me; words come more easily. During my collegiate days, I would sometimes fight sleep and boredom in the classroom by rallying my faculties around a contemporaneous scene or tableau -- attempting to convey it, in my notebook, as compactly and completely as possible. Rummaging through some old files, I came across a fragment from a particular afternoon exactly two years ago: "He sat next to the window, but more than glass separated him from open space. There were the trees -- wide branches crisscrossing in layers, dipping, dappled; beyond them, a squarish building, three stories, red brick deepened to brown; and there, high above the bricks and leaves, framed in a small space of unfiltered light: a flag idling in the wind, now and again lifted aloft, set against the sprawl of the sky. The sun shone fixedly, unperturbed by clouds." If memory serves me, the course was Heroes and Mythmaking, or somesuch. Grass growing outside was obviously more interesting to me than the lecture already in progress, professorial chicken-scratch filling up chalkboard upon chalkboard like some hideous fugue.
There are moments when I'm overcome with a sense of well-being, a sensation not unlike the Precambrian warmth of sunlight suffusing drawn eyelids, a private red dusk, an afternoon nap.
Some days, dream aether trails me long after I've woken up -- little cumulous puffs of half-memories and afterthoughts. Or maybe I'm just low on carbos.
Cloudless sky, cold. Stars shining with the faltering light of dead violence. Sunlight soon to follow. Reminds me of slug line I've always liked, from James Cameron's original Aliens screenplay: "Silent and endless. The stars shine like the love of God ... cold and remote." Cold and remote. Is that an Aristotelian or Platonic conception? If you know the answer, you need to stop taking yourself so seriously. Some things are worth un-learning.
powered by blogger™