January 2009
29 posts
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“When Christ called his disciples, he called fishermen; he didn’t call nobody...”
– Howard Finster
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Sympathy for the Spader
It must be hard for James Spader to date, because 1. he would likely date women familiar with his oeuvre; 2. a woman familiar with his oeuvre would bring certain expectations; 3. sometimes he must feel pressured to go through the motions and sexually humiliate his date, when all he really wants is to watch his “Mad Men” DVDs and not have to plumb the depths of someone’s psyche.
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Roger Ebert has some kind of problem
“I found myself wishing a major director would lavish this kind of love and attention on a movie about my fetishes.”
1997
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Internship update
So I work in a public housing highrise for elderly and mentally disabled people. We are organizing the building—“power in numbers” (i.e. we are enlisting crazy people in our Marxist army).
You know how your great-grandmother’s house smelled? Stale cigarettes, unidentifiable ointments, stewed meats. Some days I come home smelling like that—one notch above the nursing...
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Two short one-act plays
THE HOMESICK INTERNATIONAL STUDENT
Student: Mommy, it is impossible for me to eat supper without a harpist playing.
THE WHITE PERSON WHO MISUNDERSTOOD WHAT “COMMUNITY ORGANIZING” IS
Lady: I don’t think the library should have these books. I’m keeping them.
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"A Friend of Mine"
I think it is possible to receive a piece of wisdom and spend a long time trying to internalize it (though maybe never quite making it automatic). I am practicing. So:
A Friend of Mine
I am thinking about a friend of mine, how she is not only what she believes she is, she is also what friends believe her to be, and what her family believes her to be, and even what she is in the eyes of chance...
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Broken window theory
Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones… one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. [The Atlantic, 1982]
Ways to extrapolate the broken...
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I figured out how to make an MP3 of that Bill Callahan stream, “The Breeze/My Baby Cries.” So now you can download it and put it on your Zune and listen to it again and again, all night, until you are dehydrated from crying.
Download I’m sorry; I removed the link because this song is so good that you should really spend 89 cents on it. I felt convicted about piracy for the first...
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Oh, Onion:
BOSTON—As he does every morning on the subway ride to work, Steve Kaell rapidly penciled random numbers into The Boston Globe’s sudoku grid in an effort to impress adjacent commuters.
Not unlike in 10th grade when I would transcribe the lyrics of Jon Brion and Magnetic Fields songs to give to this girl I had a crush on—wry poetry I had written.
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Bill covers Kath Bloom: "The Breeze/My Baby Cries" →
Not from the new album. Comes with a lovely (i.e. flattering) write-up by Pitchfork.
Now you can download the MP3 here.
[I talk about Smog a lot. If you want to read more, ]
Vice Magazine: NEW YORK - I WORK IN A BIOGRAPHY... →
scrollr:
creative underclass, lost in time
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I will have answers to these questions by Apr 27
One of my classes this semester is Systematic Theology Part II—the term refers to a theology that tries to be as broad and coherent as it can, instead of dealing with issues piecemeal. That’s how you wind up with Barth’s 14-volume, 6-million-word Church Dogmatics.
Some people say that it is impossible/unrealistic to construct a systematic theology, but these are the same people...
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There aren’t many places in the world where you can observe people pass in the hallway and say, “Salutations!” unironically.
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The Rita Wilson relationship model
I was thinking that Rita Wilson has it right:
Find someone who is more talented than you, better liked by your peers, richer, and better looking.
She’s awkward and a terrible actress, but no one would ever say, “Poor Rita Wilson,” because she’s married to Tom Hanks and probably owns a Guatemalan slave to pour the milk into her cereal every morning, and he gets her all...
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Movies that occur in a confined space are always memorable to me—anything on board an airplane (Red Eye, Airplane, Soul Plane, etc.)… Dawn of the Dead… Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?… that one where knocked-up Natalie Portman lives in Walmart.
Same goes for sitcom episodes that visit new sets, like when Dharma and Greg break into a country diner and run it for a...
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Bonnie 'Prince' Billy: Beware →
New album’s cover/tracklist. The song titles are scary, they sound like a NIN cover band going out on their own.
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Immokalee dispatch
I am in Florida studying how a group of migrant tomato pickers has organized. Each picker gets handed a bucket that holds 32 lbs of tomatoes. They aim to fill 125 buckets per day, which makes 4,000 lbs of tomatoes they pick and haul across the field, seven days a week, if they get chosen from the parking lot where buses pick up the workers at 5 am every morning. They get paid 40 cents for each...
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It is true, I have a long tradition of end-of-year...
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