Name:Herbie T. Elf Country:United States State:Tennessee Gender:Male
Interests:Poetry & other writings, pop culture at its best and worst (music, movies, etc.) Expertise:No, I'm not really a dentist. At least, I'm not certified... actually I do PR work and teach for a private high school. Occupation:Education Industry:Nonprofit
Every year for seven years, I've gone to New Orleans with the same three guys, all teachers. Occasionally others tag along. Part of that annual ritual has been the burning and sharing of mix CDs for the travelers. I won't claim that our assimilated musical knowledge and collection of CDs and other music formats is more ginormous than another group of four music lovers. I'll just say we do OK for ourselves.
Anyway, during our last trip, one of the guys and I had a drunken conversation about working together to make a kick-ass blog that combined our love of music with our random thoughts. Because I really love working together with someone on something -- it goes back to my fascination with Michael and Elliott on thirtysomething, I'm sure -- I said Hell Yes.
(ABOVE RIGHT: I also have a habit of walking down Bourbon Street and taking pictures with large groups of inebriated women in the desperate hope that it makes me look like a Ladies' Man. It never works, but the pictures always manage to amuse me. For example, why the fuck is that woman on my right wearing a fake moustache?!)
I'm not sayin' I'm leaving Xanga, since that's not my plan. I expect
I'll be writing less on here, but I've learned that I can no more leave
Xanga for good than I can leave the South. I'm not proud of either
fact, either. It just is what it is.
But, if you've been wondering where I've been, that's where. I've been busy working on the beta version of our joint blog. It'll probably go through lots of adjustments in the next couple of weeks until we get really comfortable with how it looks and interacts. Anyway, I would invite all of my precious handful of Xanga pals to consider taking a look at my new effort. At the very least, you're bound to get some interesting music, and you might find a new read-worthy friend in my partner in crime, Bob.
It's just one life. It should mean nothing more or less, in a world full of inexplicable and inexcusable tragedies. But somehow, for me, today, news of the death of this young woman I've nev er met and would never know has hit me especially hard.
Our days are numbered, and we can never know when we'll hit the Death Lottery. This is easy to accept in the abstract, but oh so much harder to take to heart. Especially at moments like this.
I owe it to my dear white friends to inform them of one of the more addictive web sites I've run across in some time. It's received attention from numerous places by now, but I first stumbled on it thanks to a column in the LA Times.
The site is called Stuff White People Like, and it's absolutely freakin' hilarious. I hope this guy manages to turn this into a lucrative concept. Movie or TV show or something, because it's quite the gem. I almost hate to give an example, lest you think I picked a particularly funny one that's somehow better than the other ones. And I'm tellin' ya, they're all pretty freakin' funny.
Anyway, here's #55: Apologies.
White people know that their ancestors did some messed up things.
As a result, it has become hard wired for them to apologize for almost
anything.
In fact, white people are so used to apologizing that they start all
sentences that might cause disagreement with “I’m sorry.” For example
“I’m sorry, but Garden State was a better film than Hard Eight.”
In other cases, white people will apologize without being asked.
“Excuse me Dylan, you dropped a piece of paper in front of my desk.”
“Oh, sorry about that!”
It’s just that easy! Just point it out and they’ll apologize.
Sometimes if you are out late at night and a white person irritates
someone at a night club or a bar, the first thing they will do is
apologize in rapid fire mode in hopes it will stop them from getting
their ass kicked. This technique has a surprisingly high success rate,
as the aggressor immediately knows that fighting this person will be
very easy, with little satisfaction.
In other fun news, here's a song by the band The Afters. It's purely a Fountains of Wayne cop-out, but a fun song is a fun song.
Lamenting the fact that I don't really see movies in the theater anymore, but taking advantage of my 42" plasma TV's recent demise -- Circuit City is slowly going through the process of allowing me to replace it -- I've been watching about 3/4 of a movie every night on my laptop in bed.
In my current routine, my kids pass out at around 9 p.m., and my wife at around 10, leaving me about two hours a night to myself. I generally use this time to do one or two of a small number of things:
(a) read 'til I fall asleep -- this is for when I don't really want to stay up 'til midnight; (b) play in an online poker tournament -- guarantees 45-90 minutes of relaxing fun while listening to iTunes; (c) watch a movie (d) watch a TV show
While this list of options may seem horrifyingly dull to those of you who spend your time being creative and/or productive, please allow me the caveat that, once a week I usually take the time to work on my iMovie library or make a mix CD for someone or write the first draft of something to go on a blog or write emails to friends.
Sure, I could use these two-hour windows to craft a screenplay or novel, but then I'd get all these calls from agents who wanted to pay me millions and fly me around the country for book signings, and all the late-night shows would have me on to share my wit and charm, and then I'd get all these fan clubs sprouting up, full of single and married women who discovered my Xanga site and all my secret sexual hang-ups and confessions, and it would destroy my marriage and alienate my children, and then I'd move to LA as a newly divorced sex fiend who loses touch with his kids and ex but spends every night snorting coke off some new supermodel's butt, and then I'd start working on my memoir about how I miss the good ol' simple days of hometown domesticity, which would then be optioned into a movie to star Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet with the Fanning kids playing the part of my children.
And seriously, who the hell wants all that? More trouble than it's worth, I figure. So instead I watch a few more movies and TV shows.
But back to my original point.
Last night I watched 3/4 of Boogie Nights, the second (but breakthrough) film by wacky genius PT Anderson. I did this because I knew I couldn't see "There Will Be Blood" until it arrives on DVD sometime in the future and because I had just purchased it used for $8 at a local swap shop.
God I love this movie. It's not the kind of movie you can watch dozens of times like "When Harry Met Sally" or "The Breakfast Club" or "Braveheart," but what it loses on the re-watchability factor, it regains in spades in cinematography and ensemble brilliance. For those of you who appreciate one-take, lengthy scenes, there are at least five or six breathtakingly long, single-take scenes where the camera sweeps all over the place, capturing little interactions here and there, showing you the forest by leisurely strolling past all the pretty trees.
The film has three of my all-time favorite character actors: Don Cheadle, Philip Seymour Hoffman and William H. Macy. It has Burt Reynolds playing... well, something akin to Burt Reynolds. It has Mark Wahlberg pulling off a seriously underrated acting job. It has Julianne Moore doing what she is supremely gifted at doing, which is playing someone alluring on the surface who is overburdened with secret demons and slowly drowning. It has John C. Reilly showing that it takes a brilliant man to come across as totally stupid. It has Heather Graham's breasts.
Peter Travers said it best: "What is significant, timely and, finally, hopeful
about 'Boogie Nights' is the way Anderson proves that a movie can be
mercilessly honest and mercifully humane at the same time."
Books aren't a sexy topic, I'm the first to admit. I guess I wanted to dull the air a little from my last post, and what better way than to mention a few books here and there.
First, I used my gift cards at a local mom 'n' pop bookstore this afternoon to pick up my first book of non-fiction in at least three years. I first read an excerpt of The Bush Tragedyin Newsweek and was remarkably swept up in it. It's probably no secret that I'm no fan of our current President, whose arrogance and never-flinching bravado are the stuff of B-movies and not of good leadership. The part of the excerpt that really fascinated was the description of Dick Cheney's concern about a potential smallpox terrorist attack on the US and his willingness to take serious risks to require all Americans to be vaccinated for smallpox. Cheney is a man for whom the phrase "collateral damage" is, fighteningly, both common and acceptable. He is, for lack of an easier analogy, Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men." Except without the military experience.
The reason this book appeals to me is that, if the excerpt is a true indication, the guy isn't out to shit all over Dubya. He's just out to inspect, in some minorly sincere way, how a moderate governor from Texas managed to take the Blue/Red division of Clinton's America and make the blues bluer and the reds redder. And if his "bias" is in suggesting that Dubya is a failed President... well hell, that makes 75+% of our country biased.
The concept of viewing our Presidents as something akin to Shakespearean tragic figures also appeals to me, because I thought Clinton's story worked very nicely in that angle as well. It's a nasty job, being President, and for every one path to correct decision-making there's probably 1,000 trails to the Land of Eating Shit. So I'm fascinated by a book that acknowledges this guy screwed up a lot but also looks to explain the human side of that rather than, like Molly Ivins or Michael Moore, create a venomous two-dimensional characature to mock and despise. If I want to savor hatemongering and characature-creating, I'd read Ann Coulter.
I'm almost done with the latest Tom Perotta book, The Abstinence Teacher. I dunno if his books will survive in the annals of timeless literature, but they feel more substantive than lots of modern crap out there, and he's a very gifted writer whose characters feel domestically real without being painstakingly boring. It explores two characters on both sides of the war of conservative Christianity, how these sides deal with children, how they deal with sex, drugs and rock & roll, and how they deal with communicating with their neighbor and their spouse (and their ex-spouses). Since all this stuff is right up my alley, I'm enjoying the book, but I'd also concede that Little Children is a better book.
If Perotta's novel deals with a mostly normal (or normally fucked-up) domestic world, then Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn deals with the domestic opposite, people who are like, toooootally fucked up. Cutters (apparently teens now call these people "Emo," although I always thought that was a kind of music), serial killers, wickedly cold parents, strange sexual dysfunction. This is the stuff of Flynn's novel. But it's all that freakishness that made it such a compelling read, even if the overall quality of it was a little less than great. To put it another way, it's a gruesome and violent car wreck of a novel, the kind that you keep staring at even though you know you should mind your own business.
The top three Books To Be Read (I have 14... maybe 15) sitting on my shelf at the moment:
