Archives for June 2004
June 30, 2004
Long Weekend
3 simple things you can do to make me mad at the end of a 17+-hour workday:
1.) Say the words "long weekend" or "have a nice weekend". I work two retail jobs. I never ever EVER have a weekend, let alone a long one. When I start a 24-hour stretch of time off, I greet it with the same sense of wonder and anticipation that you all feel when you get on a plane to Honolulu.
2.) Make any reference to the "4th-of-July-holiday-weekend". The holiday is called -- read it slowly -- the FOURTH of July. Not the Monday closest to the Fourth of July. Every so often (about 2/7 of the time, according to my rough calculations) a holiday will fall on a day you would have had off anyway. If this happens, do one of two things: either enjoy the day, then tomorrow be ready to set the alarm clock, put your pants on and go to work, or shut up.
3.) Switch around all the street-cleaning days in Cambridge, so I can't park on any of my local streets, and get to drive in ever-expanding concentric circles at 1AM looking for that one elusive spot that I won't have to flee before 8 this morning. I don't think you really even sweep the streets anyway.
The ironic thing about all this is that I'm off Monday, and on Sunday night (the 4th) I'll be sitting on a cool roof-deck in Boston eating lobster. But a principle is a principle.
June 28, 2004
The Gloves Are Off
I was going to write my thoughts on Fahrenheit 9/11, which I just saw (though seeing a movie certainly isn't a prerequisite for talking about it!), but I just got home and spent 40 minutes deleting comment spam off my site, and now frankly I don't have the energy. I'm going to go see it again soon with a notebook, though.
All this crap led to one site, which (I checked) isn't even online yet. Again...Marketing 101. But I did a little investigation and found that this site is registered to one Alexander Morzov of Moscow. His email address is listed as se-traf@mail.ru. I certainly hope email spam spiders don't pick this up and force him to waste time deleting crap!
June 27, 2004
Film Festival!
Thanks aplenty to sooz for hooking me up with a pass to this week's Boston International Film Festival, and indirect thanks to her friend David Baeumler, whose film was in the festival, but who couldn't use his passes - so I could.
Short synopses of what I saw:
First was David's I Cannot Understand You It's a short (5-minute) cinematic love letter to Vienna, beautifully filmed and narrated by a philosophical tape recorder shown in various places around the city. The best line (I paraphrase): "We don't ask the fireworks, or the flowers, what they mean -- why do we ask this of art and music, and people?"
Next was Felix Allen's Economics 101, an amusing short about a student whose attempt to bribe his teacher backfires horribly. More humor came from Dara Resnik's Great Lengths. A teenage girl breaks up with her boyfriend because he's not Jewish, so he decides to convert. He can do the studying, he's willing (if not eager) to give up bacon cheeseburgers, but the surgery....
Next was Nothing Exceptional, by Douglas McGowan. It's the story of the most blase bunch of teenage girls on earth, trying to decide if the events of September 11th change anything in their lives.
The first feature-length film I saw was Australia's Straight To You, directed by Michael Egan. I'm not a big romantic-comedy fan(!), but this was funny and pretty cute. A temp/aspiring actor goes to work for a type-A female lawyer, and of course their initial hostility breaks into mutual attraction. I enjoyed it more than I expected.
Next was Andy Cambria's The Wet Floor, with an interesting twist on a convenience-store heist. The funniest film I saw all week was Talmage Cooley's Pol Pot's Birthday. As the humorless tyrant watches with disapproval, his petrified staff try to throw him a surprise party. Hysterical. Less funny, but still well-done, was Martha Pinson's Don't Nobody Love This Game More Than Me, where four thirty-somethings finish a game of pickup game and discuss life, basketball and desire.
Then came Saran Barnum's The Hillz, about four jaded whitebread teenagers who turn to a life of crime (except, for a while, the college baseball stud). It's a pretty interesting portrait of bored-to-mayhem suburbians, though it's almost derailed by the presence of Paris Hilton, looking more like a science experiment gone awry (like the attempt to mate a human with some sort of stick insect). Still worth a look.
(We're on the home stretch now.)
Warren Hooper's Out of the Shadows is a melancholy look at loss, death and forgiveness, without a bit of dialogue. Cliche, by Dallas Jenkins, is a pretty funny short piece: a cop-on-the-edge sets out to avenge his partner in a movie intentionally packed with every movie cliche in the book (right down to the grocery bags with the French bread loafs sticking out). Clever. And I liked Tap Heat more than I thought, too. It's also without dialogue; the whole story is told by tap-dancing. Better than it sounds.
The final film I saw was Nathan's Rebellion, directed by K.M. Fitzgerald. Shot in Western Massachusetts on an almost-literally shoestring budget, it's the story of a misfit 13-year-old who takes his teacher's advice to take the "road not traveled" and finds himself traveling through time to befriend a 1780s farmer. It's got a higher ratio of heart to dollars-spent than anything I've ever seen before, and the kid who plays Nathan is fantastic.
Sooz confessed that she brought me along because she thought it might rekindle my interest in writing and filmmaking. And, as is so often the case, she's right. I'm gonna go dust off some old ideas I've had.
June 25, 2004
Thank You, John Breaux
From Tuesday: The Senate votes 99-1 to fine the crap out of any broadcaster who broadcasts something obscene.
From 1791: Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.
Hmmm. Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, the prune-faced Puritan who sponsored this bill, stuck it onto a defense spending bill and rammed it through without debate. "This is something the public wants," he said.
Really? I know a pretty decent number of the public, and they all seem to be capable of turning off stuff that offends them. Maybe it's different in Kansas.
So thank you, John Breaux of Louisiana, for being the only one to resist the crusade. I'd like to think your fellow Democratic Senators would stand up to this more; I'm curious why not.
But then again, I'm not thinking of the children.
June 19, 2004
Open Question II: Not Nearly As Deep
Except for a 3-month stint in 2001, I've had this goatee for eight years. But now I'm thinking about its future. Should it stay or should it go?
June 18, 2004
Rats Desert Sinking Ship
I've said that there are three groups I want to see go down in flames this calendar year. One down, two more to go.
And now things are falling apart in La La Land. Yoda's fleeing the building before the crap really hits the fan; fitting, since we all saw what happens when the greatest coach of all time actually has to break a sweat coaching.
(And just for the record, can we bury the "Phil Jackson is the greatest coach of all time" argument? Unless someone out there has evidence of a Red-Auerbach-coached team that came into a series the unanimous favorite and then had its collective heart ripped out, thrown on the floor, and stomped on, that is.)
And Shaq wants a trade. And Kobe wants out of LA, though presumably not in favor of a mandatory 10-year contract to play ball in western Colorado. And carpetbagging "stars" Gary Payton (who in 14 seasons has one less ring than rookie Darko Milicic) and Karl Malone (ditto, in 19 seasons) are going to be left floundering.
It was painful to see the Celtics drop out of glory in the early 90's - though to be fair, two of their superstars were physically unable to play anymore and one died - but the mass exodus from Chicago in '98, and the current hit-the-lifeboats mentality in LA, mollify me somewhat.
But won't somebody please think of the celebrity hangers-on? Where do they go? Here?
June 13, 2004
Up On the Roof
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Mark at the bookstore hooked me up with a ticket to sit in the new right-field roof seats at Fenway. So there I was yesterday, watching the Sox and Dodgers from high above the field.
The bad stuff: the Sox got clobbered. And I clearly hadn't been in the sun for two years, and had forgotten about the existence of sunscreen. So I spent four hours doing my impression of a Kenny Rogers Roaster, and now I look eerily like Lobsterboy. Oh well.
The good stuff: it's an amazing new view of the park. You sit at a table (there are standing room seats up there, too) and get waiter service - the tickets are 100 bucks a pop, but each table gets $100 worth of complimentary food and drinks (water! lots of water!). We thought about getting 33 bags of peanuts, but cooler heads prevailed. I got a steak-tip sandwich, ice cream, and lots of cold beverages.
And I confirmed that I now live easy-walking-distance from Fenway. The first couple of pics above are from the stroll; over the Mass Av. Bridge, and down Comm Av through Kenmore. Fenway on an amazing sunny afternoon is as good as it gets. Even if the Dodgers hit 172 home runs.
June 07, 2004
Open Question
If you had the power to enact one law in this country, to be implemented immediately, and beyond repeal by Congress or the Supreme Court, what would it be? (I'll give my answer after a few have come in.)
June 05, 2004
Ronald Reagan
Reagan was President from when I was 6 years old to 14. He's the first President I ever knew of, and I guess part of me thought he'd be President forever.
And now he's gone. I'm strangely ambivalent about the Gipper's legacy; on one hand, his policies and his politics helped pave the way for the train wreck that's happened since. There's a lot about him that makes me want to go up to every Baby Boomer I see and scream, "How could you let this happen?!?" But more on that another time, maybe.
And yet, for all that, there was a charm and an earnestness about him that we haven't seen since. There's also an anecdote about him I read somewhere that I want to share. He was doing radio broadcasts for a minor-league baseball team in Illinois. The station couldn't afford to send him on road trips, so they installed some kind of telegraph system that would send constant updates. Ron would then use his charm and wit to flesh the numbers out into a realistic-sounding play-by-play. Well, in the middle of one game, the machine broke. So Reagan just narrated the batter fouling off pitch after pitch after pitch until someone could come in and fix it.
Reagan was a true American original, and for better or worse, the country wouldn't be the same without him.
June 04, 2004
An Open Letter To My Comment Spammers
First, kindly go to hell. None of the kind of people who read my site are the kind of people who are going to suddenly be moved to reconsolidate their debt or buy a dish network, just because some jackoff with a fake IP address and a stuck "CAPS LOCK" key suggested it in a comment thread about the collapse of the Old Man of the Mountains.
Second, and I'm being pedantic here, if you are advertising a legitimate service (wait for laughter), it might help if the link to your service actually brought up a web page instead of a File Not Found page. I think that was covered on the first Monday of Marketing 101.
Third, I repeat point one. Kindly go to hell. If I have to spend more time deleting your crap than I do writing, I'll quit writing and devote the rest of my life to hunting you down and torturing you. Don't tempt me.
A Good Music List, For Once
I love lists; I hate lists. But for some reason, music lists stick in my craw more than any other. I bit my tongue and held off from commenting on some stupid magazine's list of the worst songs ever that tabbed "We Built This City" -- one of my many many guilty 80s pleasures -- as the worst ever.
But this list nails it. It's the 50 Coolest Song Parts of all time, with links to mp3 clips of the cool song parts in question (admittedly, most of the clips sound like they're being played underwater, but you get the idea). The top 5 are undeniable:
1. The drums kicking in on "In the Air Tonight";
2. Roger Daltrey's primal scream in "Won't Get Fooled Again";
3. The opening riff to "Barracuda";
4. "Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me....";
5. "My name is Sue! How do you do! Now you gonna die!".
I don't totally agree with the rest of the list, of course (like, hello? Where's the opening riff to "Welcome to the Jungle"?), but it's a valiant and pretty comprehensive effort. Plus it links to VikingKitten. Well done.
June 02, 2004
Bush Game
Get yourself to a fast computer with good sound, check at the door any tendency to get offended easily, and play the Bush Game. It took me about 40 minutes to get through the whole thing.
'Fahrenheit 9/11' on June 25th
As much as I am dying to see this (And I'll be there. Opening day.), I would gladly sacrifice it playing anywhere in the Boston area, if it meant that it was on screens all over Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and Michigan, and Missouri, and even Florida.
I'm Ready, Mr. DeMille
Hilary is totally obsessed with 8-tracks. So much so that VH1 spent the last two days filming her for a new show called "Totally Obsessed", which they're rolling out in August. She was a total natural for the camera; I can't wait to see how it all comes out.
How I come out, I don't know. Yes, they spent quite a bit of time talking to me about her and her total obsession. They filmed me and Hilary talking 8-tracks for good half-hour in the bookstore's used-book department, and another good half-hour filming me by myself. I'm the one with the goofy grin (I kept trying to look serious; it kept coming back) and the Whale sweater on.
So I make my national TV debut sometime in August. I'll keep you posted. Best-case scenario: I make Salon's "I Like To Watch" column and develop a cult following. Worst-case: I look like a total chump and embarrass Hilary. Somewhere in-between and most-likely scenario: I look like somewhat of a chump, but Hilary looks really cool.
Time will tell.
June 01, 2004
Just An Observation
I went outside tonight and saw my breath.
It's June 1st.
Someone should lose their job for this.
