Artist, writer, poet, and Professor of the Humanities Bill Watterson wrote the definitive source text on the Nature of Cool in the late 20th Century. Witness his Zen-like efficiency of line and word.
“What Fun Is It Being Cool If You Can’t Wear a Sombrero?” has been my motto for so long, I’m number 1 and 2 in Yahoo Search for that phrase.
Pics from last night’s Sloan show. They rock. Also some other random bits all in the new Plog, arriving just 3 days after the last Plog.
Sorry to be so horribly sporadic. Not much happens around here, but when it does, it brings friends.
Last night rain came down in a peculiar way. I could only hear it. I was eating my dinner and I heard the sounds, but looking out the window, I could receive no visual confirmation. Were I deaf I would not have known it was raining. I had to stare very intently at the leaves outside my window before I could see some wet effect on them. I opened the window, and immediately my view was crowded by those two cats that live in my apartment. We smelled the air and watched the ground turn dark with moisture. Good times.
Last weekend I got my violin fixed, went to Chris’s birthday party at Heather’s (birthdays on September 11 deserve twice as much drinking as regular birthdays we figure), went out on the river with David and Emily, then went to see Hero, which was quite good. Pictures from the river in the new Plog.
I recently discovered that my web host offers a free bulletin board service. It’s really easy to manage, so I set it up here. I think I’m going to set a permanent link here for journal comments eventually.
Also, something that will always make me smile, no matter what. Four words: Pudgee the Phat Bastard.
Further compounding the blunt-force trauma to the soul that I received last night as described in the journal entry below, I also happened upon a television program on Bravo about Miami plastic surgeons. I thought to myself, “hey I wonder if my client Dr. Salomon is on that show? Nah, that’d be too weird.”
As I am quickly learning, nothing in the modern world can ever be too weird.
Dr. Jhonny Salomon (not to be confused with Dr. Johnny Salomon, or Dr. Johnny Solomon, or Dr. Johnny Salamon – don’t click the links, I’m just helping optimize him for multifarious misspellings) is in fact being featured on this show on Bravo called Miami Slice. He’s a plastic surgeon in Miami and the show is another in a series of reality shows that goes beyond the usual Lifetime or MTV plastic surgery case studies, and into the personal lives of the doctors themselves. The show throws in a healthy dose of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous/Cribs flavor as it shows off the lavish lifestyles of these plastic surgeons. I watched one doctor send his dog to the vet in a limo. I think I was too numbed from the cruel existential irony of the Pat Buchanan episode of Hardball to realize that every hour of television probably provides me with some support for the coming Apocalypse.
An amusing side note is that, in Jhonny’s bio on the Bravo website, Bravo refers to Miami as “a city where true love is often difficult to find.” My soul couldn’t help but cry quietly in the darkness for the plight of lonely plastic surgeons everywhere who are just looking for true love, for something…real.
I was just flipping through the channels (yes, Comcast still hasn’t disconnected my cable) and saw Pat Buchanan on Hardball with Chris Matthews. Ordinarily I wouldn’t give either of these savage twits the time of day but since The West Wing was on commercial, I figured what the heck and gave them a couple of minutes to speak to me. What followed was nothing short of a paradigm shifting without a clutch.
On this day, September 7, 2004, I fully agreed with every word that spilled from the mouth of erstwhile Presidential candidate and noted religious whack-job Patrick J. Buchanan.
I screamed in a toxic mixture of confusion and relief, which I imagine is how people must feel when Spiderman saves their child – suddenly this insect-man-thing comes to the rescue out of nowhere? Seems old Pattycakes is breaking from the party line and writing his own Bush administration-dissing tome. It’s called, ever so cleverly, Where the Right Went Wrong. Click this link to the Drudge Report’s list of quotations from Buchanan’s book and read along at home. Periodically pause to remind yourself that this is the man who called AIDS “nature’s retribution” to homosexuals, and who said “our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity.”
Looking at the quotations from his book, I could not ask for a more striking sign of the Apocalypse than the fact that, at least for today, Pat Buchanan provided me with a voice of reason and a breath of fresh air. Were I looking for a surer sign of the End Times, I have found it. What does it say about this administration when the liberals are standing hand in hand with the likes of Pat Buchanan?
After a very small amount of reconnaissance, I discovered NoahBambach.com and the online petition to get Kicking and Screaming onto DVD. Please sign it. For the children.
As many of you know, one of my favorite movies is a little independent film called Kicking and Screaming. Recently I discovered a film called Highball, whose cast is composed almost entirely of Kicking and Screaming alums. IMDb has it listed as having been written and directed by Noah Baumbach, yet the DVD case says “Ernie Fusco” for director and “Jesse Carter” as writer. IMDb is smart enough to know that these are pseudonyms, but I have to wonder why. Contractual obligations? Further compounding the mystery is the fact that, watching the DVD, one gets a sense that it’s a demo reel for a proper motion picture to be made later. The editing is patchwork in places, the lighting is awful, and sometimes the audio isn’t properly synched. At first I thought it was my machine, but no, the film is in fact, shoddy. This is unfortunate because there’s actually a good film going on underneath it all. Arriving two years after Kicking and Screaming, Highball features a near-reunion of the former’s supporting cast (most everybody’s here – Otis, Max, Chet, the video store guy, the “you’re pretty” guy, the writing teacher, the EuroTrash guy) as well as the distinctive dialogue-over-dialogue style that marks the work as Baumbach’s. Highball is also noteworthy for the appearance of Ally Sheedy as Ally Sheedy, Rae Dawn Chong as Rae Dawn Chong, and famed director Peter Bogdanovich as a random partygoer who does an assortment of spot-on impressions of Jerry Lewis, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and more. How weirdly wonderful is this film?
Incidentally, it looks as though Baumbach may be getting some bigger exposure as his co-writing credit appears on Wes Anderson’s new Bill Murray/Owen Wilson feature The Life Aquatic. So he’s got that going for him…which is nice.