It's difficult for me to type things at the moment. I just got back from the gym about 30 minutes ago, and my arms feel like Slinkies. My trainer gave me a fully body workout in about half an hour, which means I rapidly went from "Boy howdy, I'm all fired up for the incline presses!" enthusiasm to "Oh sweet Jesus, my nerves are being scalped". Right after the workout, I could barely stick a straw into my carton of Muscle Milk (sounds appetizing, right?). It was that bad.
I've lately found clothes made entirely of bamboo kind of interesting. From what I hear, they're really comfortable, and they give you a lot of hipster cred ("Your shirt's made of recycled cotton? Yeah, mines made of fucking bamboo. Now leave me be, I need to buy these Radiohead tickets before my chai latte gets cold"). The downside, of course, is that they're ridiculously expensive, and you could never wear one near a panda.
There's a button in my coat pocket. I don't really know where it's from, but I have a weird urge to try and buy something with it. Here's how I think it'd go down.
Cashier: Alright, the total's 10.66.
Me: Ok, let's seeee... 8, 9, 10 dollars. Ummm, I have 10. 50 and this button.
Cashier: What kind of button is it?
Me: I think it's for some kind of shirt.
Cashier: (Long pause) Ok, what the hell. Have a nice day.
Me: Yeah!! (I jump up in the air. Camera freezes. "Don't Stop Me Now" starts playing. Cue montage.)
It seems to me that, once they reach a certain level, athletes become a bit boring to watch because we always know they're going to win. I have an idea about this. Special, limited time only events where the athletes compete.... against animals. And I'm not talking about A-Rod versus a gibbon or anything like that. I'm talking animal's that'll give em a run for their money. Think about it: World-record holding sprinter Usain Bolt racing the 200 meter against an ostrich; Olympic gold winning long jumper Maurren Maggi leaping against a kangaroo; Mike Tyson coming out of retirement to box a gorilla (though which one's the real ape, right? yukyukyuk). Animals could also make relatively uneventful events enjoyable to watch. Think the men's 500 yard freestyle is a drag? Toss a live alligator in at the halfway mark. That'll speed things up. But, of course, the ultimate man vs. animal contest would involve only three things: Phelps. A dolphin. And the greatest 200 meter butterfly in history. You couldn't not sell tickets to that.
Is it just me, or is the fact that the St. Jude's Children's Hospital is named after the patron saint of lost causes funny in a sick kind of way?
There were funky Chinamen, from funky Chinatown
Friday, January 30, 2009
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Jews in My Closet
I spent most of Tuesday night in a kind of paranoid state. It started early on, around 4 or so, give or take an hour. I'd been awake for a couple of hours, and active, if active means I occasionally staggered from the couch to the kitchen in order to rummage through the pantry, snuffling and snorting through the Nutragrain bars and Lean Pockets like some kind of oversized, bearded gopher. I'd just eaten a couple Ritz crackers with some lobster spread, when I flipped on the tube and noticed that Casino was on AMC. "Well fiddle-de-dee!" thought I, "anything by good ol' Marty Scorsese should be just the thing to get me through an uneventful day!"
How wrong I was.
I started watching the movie about half an hour into its run time, and soon noticed two things; the first, that, although this was a Martin Scorsese movie, Robert De Niro was NOT Italian (he's a Jewish gambling handicapper! whoda thunk it?), and second, that the movie had been severely censored. This was understandable; if you're showing a movie where whacked-out Joe Pesci sticks a guys head in a vice, you have to do a bit of editing. That creates a lot of unintentional humor, though; watching Sharon Stone scream "Freak you Sammy! Freak you!" over and over, you can't help but giggle a bit.
The movie got to me, though. Beneath the gory sheen and coke-sprinkled glamour of the film's Las Vegas, there's a constant wire of paranoia. Everyone is out to steal and kill everything from everyone else. De Niro knows it; he gets a relatively conversational phone call from Pesci, and immediately takes off to another house with a shotgun and car. Pesci is thinking about killing him. He hasn't said it, but it's implied in the tone. In a way, the gangsters are like diplomats; they shroud their words with "howyadoins?" and "fuggedaboutits" until they have trust and respect.
Then they break out the baseball bats.
Aside from the internal nervousness, there's the knowledge that all the characters are being constantly watched by the FBI. This is accepted as an unalterable fact, and its a paranoia that they incorporate into their lives. Phones tapped? That's cool; I got bug sweepers. The movie's best scene perfectly illustrates this. De Niro is in a meeting with some investors on his swanky club home/golf course. Halfway through the meeting, there's a rumble, and a single engine plane coasts out of the sky and lands on the green, two agents hurriedly exiting. The FBI had been spying on De Niro for such a long time that they're plane had run out of gas.
Of course, all the paranoia eventually proves to be justified, as we all knew it was. This takes away from it's impact a bit. The worst paranoia is never shown; it is only suspect.I wasn't thinking about all this after the movie. I was still bored. I wanted to watch something else. My dad was upstairs watching Munich. I decided to join.
Not a good idea.
I started Munich relatively excited. I'd heard great things about it; it had Eric Bana as the most kick-ass Jew since Moses; and it was directed by Steven Spielberg. And for the first hour and a half, it was great. Lot's of action, intrigue, philosopohical soul searching, torsos hanging from ceiling fans. Good stuff.
And then it got paranoid.
The plot's pretty complex, and I don't want to go into much detail, but it basically entails this; after several bungled missions, and two dead agents, Bana starts thinking someones out to get him. The beauty of it is that, while everyone around him seems to start dying mysteriously, nothing ever happens to Bana. He's left to stew with his own darkening thoughts, disillusioned with the country and cause he thought he knew. This part is good.
But Spielberg hits you over the head with it. He wields the paranoia like he's using a shovel to butter a piece of toast. What starts off as an interesting thematic element soon bogs the whole film down. When Bana ripped up his room in a feverish attempt to find invisible bugs, I was ready for the movie to be over. By the time Bana was having visions of the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes by Black September whilst having sex with his wife, I wanted to punch Spielberg in the face.
That night, when I was going to bed, I almost checked the springs under my mattress for a bomb.
But I didn't. So its ok.
I'm afraid of Americans; I'm afraid of the world
How wrong I was.
I started watching the movie about half an hour into its run time, and soon noticed two things; the first, that, although this was a Martin Scorsese movie, Robert De Niro was NOT Italian (he's a Jewish gambling handicapper! whoda thunk it?), and second, that the movie had been severely censored. This was understandable; if you're showing a movie where whacked-out Joe Pesci sticks a guys head in a vice, you have to do a bit of editing. That creates a lot of unintentional humor, though; watching Sharon Stone scream "Freak you Sammy! Freak you!" over and over, you can't help but giggle a bit.
The movie got to me, though. Beneath the gory sheen and coke-sprinkled glamour of the film's Las Vegas, there's a constant wire of paranoia. Everyone is out to steal and kill everything from everyone else. De Niro knows it; he gets a relatively conversational phone call from Pesci, and immediately takes off to another house with a shotgun and car. Pesci is thinking about killing him. He hasn't said it, but it's implied in the tone. In a way, the gangsters are like diplomats; they shroud their words with "howyadoins?" and "fuggedaboutits" until they have trust and respect.
Then they break out the baseball bats.
Aside from the internal nervousness, there's the knowledge that all the characters are being constantly watched by the FBI. This is accepted as an unalterable fact, and its a paranoia that they incorporate into their lives. Phones tapped? That's cool; I got bug sweepers. The movie's best scene perfectly illustrates this. De Niro is in a meeting with some investors on his swanky club home/golf course. Halfway through the meeting, there's a rumble, and a single engine plane coasts out of the sky and lands on the green, two agents hurriedly exiting. The FBI had been spying on De Niro for such a long time that they're plane had run out of gas.
Of course, all the paranoia eventually proves to be justified, as we all knew it was. This takes away from it's impact a bit. The worst paranoia is never shown; it is only suspect.I wasn't thinking about all this after the movie. I was still bored. I wanted to watch something else. My dad was upstairs watching Munich. I decided to join.
Not a good idea.
I started Munich relatively excited. I'd heard great things about it; it had Eric Bana as the most kick-ass Jew since Moses; and it was directed by Steven Spielberg. And for the first hour and a half, it was great. Lot's of action, intrigue, philosopohical soul searching, torsos hanging from ceiling fans. Good stuff.
And then it got paranoid.
The plot's pretty complex, and I don't want to go into much detail, but it basically entails this; after several bungled missions, and two dead agents, Bana starts thinking someones out to get him. The beauty of it is that, while everyone around him seems to start dying mysteriously, nothing ever happens to Bana. He's left to stew with his own darkening thoughts, disillusioned with the country and cause he thought he knew. This part is good.
But Spielberg hits you over the head with it. He wields the paranoia like he's using a shovel to butter a piece of toast. What starts off as an interesting thematic element soon bogs the whole film down. When Bana ripped up his room in a feverish attempt to find invisible bugs, I was ready for the movie to be over. By the time Bana was having visions of the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes by Black September whilst having sex with his wife, I wanted to punch Spielberg in the face.
That night, when I was going to bed, I almost checked the springs under my mattress for a bomb.
But I didn't. So its ok.
I'm afraid of Americans; I'm afraid of the world
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Tiny Noises
I've come to the realization that the best part of songs are the small things, the tiny noises that you don't necessarily hear the first time through. They're like those undertones in fine wine, only detectable to the trained palette; the novice tongue tastes the grapes, yes, but the more refined tongue, the more aquainted tongue, detects the smoky oak of the wooden barrel that held it; the spicy tobacco of the dirty men who pressed it, smoked in those hours between pickings; a dash of vanilla, thrown in to meld with the dying fruit.
Or so I've heard. Not that I'd know, of course. That'd be illegal.
Let me elaborate a smidge, though. When I say the best part, I don't really mean musically or structurally per say (they layered two violins playing at opposite octaves over a synthizer!! OMG!!). I'm talking about those little things in the song that actually make you love listening to it. I have many personal examples.
My favorite part of "My Body is a Cage" by Arcade Fire happens about 3/4ths of the way through the song. For about two minutes, Win Butler has been moaning urgently about dancing with the one he loves, while the dirge-organ in the background grows incrementally louder. This is cool, I think, it's going to end up with a really nice cresendo. And so it seems, until a moment after the second verse, when a mountain of sound is vomited out, the moody organ replaced in a blink by a massive funeral march with what sounds like the most down-beat gospel choir in creation.
To be perfectly honest, my heart skipped a beat.
The little things are what propel a song, what make it worth listening to; I would never have lisened to Radiohead's "Reckoner" if it hadn't been for the techno-tambourine amazingness of its first minute, and The Crystal Method's "The Name of the Game" hooked me with perhaps the best opening lyrics of all time ("Listen all you mothafuckahs!").
And then there's the things in music that you aren't quite sure why you like. It may be a word, a guitar descent, a (God forbid) drum solo. But it sticks with you; whenever you hear that song later, even if its been an obscene amount of time since you heard it last, you can always pick up that one little part out of the whole sonic sturm und drang. At the moment, it's a verse in "Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthin' Ta Fuck Wit" that does it for me; "Me fear no one, oh no, here come the Wu-Tang shogun, killer to the eardrum!"
I'm not sure why I like this verse. All I know is I can't get it out of my head.
In fact I'm a hard act to follow
Or so I've heard. Not that I'd know, of course. That'd be illegal.
Let me elaborate a smidge, though. When I say the best part, I don't really mean musically or structurally per say (they layered two violins playing at opposite octaves over a synthizer!! OMG!!). I'm talking about those little things in the song that actually make you love listening to it. I have many personal examples.
My favorite part of "My Body is a Cage" by Arcade Fire happens about 3/4ths of the way through the song. For about two minutes, Win Butler has been moaning urgently about dancing with the one he loves, while the dirge-organ in the background grows incrementally louder. This is cool, I think, it's going to end up with a really nice cresendo. And so it seems, until a moment after the second verse, when a mountain of sound is vomited out, the moody organ replaced in a blink by a massive funeral march with what sounds like the most down-beat gospel choir in creation.
To be perfectly honest, my heart skipped a beat.
The little things are what propel a song, what make it worth listening to; I would never have lisened to Radiohead's "Reckoner" if it hadn't been for the techno-tambourine amazingness of its first minute, and The Crystal Method's "The Name of the Game" hooked me with perhaps the best opening lyrics of all time ("Listen all you mothafuckahs!").
And then there's the things in music that you aren't quite sure why you like. It may be a word, a guitar descent, a (God forbid) drum solo. But it sticks with you; whenever you hear that song later, even if its been an obscene amount of time since you heard it last, you can always pick up that one little part out of the whole sonic sturm und drang. At the moment, it's a verse in "Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthin' Ta Fuck Wit" that does it for me; "Me fear no one, oh no, here come the Wu-Tang shogun, killer to the eardrum!"
I'm not sure why I like this verse. All I know is I can't get it out of my head.
In fact I'm a hard act to follow
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Declaiming Waters, None May Dread...
Tomorrow morning I am going to wake up at 5 o'clock and jump into a medium-sized pool filled with lukewarm water. I'm still not really sure why I'm going to be
doing this.
The following thoughts will be going through my mind.
Oh man am I tiiiiired. Wow. I'm actually about to fall asleep while walking. Don't do that. Thinking of something shocking. Recent studies have shown that large swarms of pesticide-resistant killer bees are on the rise in the Southwestern United States.
Thats better.
Ok, la lala lala, putting my suit on, la lala, damn this thing is tight, hmm hmmhmm, theeeere we go. Everything in order? Yup. Ok, walkin on the pool deck, strrrreeeetchin my arms, geez, am I really that hairy? I'm like friggin homo halibis. Gimme a club and a loincloth, and I could have been an extra in 10,000 BC.
Ooook, time to get in the water! Huh. It doesn't look that cold. Doesn't feel that cold. Hey, maybe this won't be so bad after all! Ok, on three. One. Two. Three. Four. Damn. Ok, on eight. Six. Seven. Eigh-
FuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckcoldcoldcoldcoldcoldfuckfuckcoldcoldfuckcomegatherroundpeoplewhereeveryouroamandadmitsweeetJesusitscoold!
This will essentially go on for the next three or four minutes. Don't worry. I get used to it.
I always wondered why I decided to swim for exercise. Definitely not for the competitive aspect. I considered the various diamond facets of my future a while back, and winning gold in the Men's 200 Free was not among them. To be perfectly honest, I'm an ok, maybe slightly above average swimmer. Nothing spectacular. If I was ranked on a fish scale, with a halibut being a swimmer who can't go 25 yards without inhaling their body weight in water, and a swordfish is a swimmer who I'm pretty sure is part merman/maid, I'm about a cod.
Or maybe one of the smaller tunas.
Really, the thing I love about swimming is that it gives me time to think, when I'm struggling not to drown on backstroke flip turns (I'm getting better). I do some of my best thinking in the water, uninterrupted, with just the muffled sound of filters and the staccato of my legs reminding me of the outside world. When I was 10, for example, I mentally constructed a lengthy poem about chocolate pie while swimming a particularly dreary 1000. And then I got out of the water and promptly forgot it.
I would do that, wouldn't I?
A girl in my Spanish class was having a bad day today, so I decided to cheer her up with a corny joke.
Me: Hey C., want to hear a joke?
C:(confused) Sure...
Me: Ok, so who's bigger, Mr. Bigger or Mr. Bigger's son?
C: (disinterested) Who...
Me:(freakishly enthusiastic) His son! Cause he's just a little bigger!!!
(Awkward silence. I stop grinning after about five seconds and pretend to conjugate some verbs)
I hate it when things like that happen.
I dreamed last night that I was in a Hollywood moooovie...
doing this.The following thoughts will be going through my mind.
Oh man am I tiiiiired. Wow. I'm actually about to fall asleep while walking. Don't do that. Thinking of something shocking. Recent studies have shown that large swarms of pesticide-resistant killer bees are on the rise in the Southwestern United States.
Thats better.
Ok, la lala lala, putting my suit on, la lala, damn this thing is tight, hmm hmmhmm, theeeere we go. Everything in order? Yup. Ok, walkin on the pool deck, strrrreeeetchin my arms, geez, am I really that hairy? I'm like friggin homo halibis. Gimme a club and a loincloth, and I could have been an extra in 10,000 BC.
Ooook, time to get in the water! Huh. It doesn't look that cold. Doesn't feel that cold. Hey, maybe this won't be so bad after all! Ok, on three. One. Two. Three. Four. Damn. Ok, on eight. Six. Seven. Eigh-
FuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckcoldcoldcoldcoldcoldfuckfuckcoldcoldfuckcomegatherroundpeoplewhereeveryouroamandadmitsweeetJesusitscoold!
This will essentially go on for the next three or four minutes. Don't worry. I get used to it.
I always wondered why I decided to swim for exercise. Definitely not for the competitive aspect. I considered the various diamond facets of my future a while back, and winning gold in the Men's 200 Free was not among them. To be perfectly honest, I'm an ok, maybe slightly above average swimmer. Nothing spectacular. If I was ranked on a fish scale, with a halibut being a swimmer who can't go 25 yards without inhaling their body weight in water, and a swordfish is a swimmer who I'm pretty sure is part merman/maid, I'm about a cod.
Or maybe one of the smaller tunas.
Really, the thing I love about swimming is that it gives me time to think, when I'm struggling not to drown on backstroke flip turns (I'm getting better). I do some of my best thinking in the water, uninterrupted, with just the muffled sound of filters and the staccato of my legs reminding me of the outside world. When I was 10, for example, I mentally constructed a lengthy poem about chocolate pie while swimming a particularly dreary 1000. And then I got out of the water and promptly forgot it.
I would do that, wouldn't I?
A girl in my Spanish class was having a bad day today, so I decided to cheer her up with a corny joke.
Me: Hey C., want to hear a joke?
C:(confused) Sure...
Me: Ok, so who's bigger, Mr. Bigger or Mr. Bigger's son?
C: (disinterested) Who...
Me:(freakishly enthusiastic) His son! Cause he's just a little bigger!!!
(Awkward silence. I stop grinning after about five seconds and pretend to conjugate some verbs)
I hate it when things like that happen.
I dreamed last night that I was in a Hollywood moooovie...
Saturday, January 10, 2009
A Good Place to Start
So! With this post, I will officially become part of the Blogosphere, this vast, interconnected web of tangled stories, a million voices declaring a million unique identities with a trillion words. Living threads. The greatest single diary in history.
Not to sound grandiose or anything.
Anyways, before I start talking, I should just like to clarify one thing: this is not a blog for fans of the 8o's New Wave band the Talking Heads, and I, unfortunately, am not frontman David Byrne. I am, in reality, Andrew. Nice to meet everybody.
Now to talking.
I really don't know what to say. I'm new to blogs, and as such, have spent the past day or two muddling through the set-up, staring blankly at the the lay outs and puzzling over the information (why do they want to know my birth sign? is the blog going to tell my fortune?) But really, its just the fact that the whole thing's different from Facebook, and its a bit of a tech shock. Its like reading a manual from Canada that has just enough French in it to confuse the hell out of you (ok, I'm exaggerating a bit. just a bit though)
But I've just started. I've got all the time in the world. God willing, a lot of things will be posted. Some will be poems. Some will be rants. There may be a screenplay. You never can tell with these things. To be perfectly honest, I really don't think anyones going to read this.
But, to be perfectly honest, that isn't the point, is it?
I'll be coming back soon.
Not to sound grandiose or anything.
Anyways, before I start talking, I should just like to clarify one thing: this is not a blog for fans of the 8o's New Wave band the Talking Heads, and I, unfortunately, am not frontman David Byrne. I am, in reality, Andrew. Nice to meet everybody.
Now to talking.
I really don't know what to say. I'm new to blogs, and as such, have spent the past day or two muddling through the set-up, staring blankly at the the lay outs and puzzling over the information (why do they want to know my birth sign? is the blog going to tell my fortune?) But really, its just the fact that the whole thing's different from Facebook, and its a bit of a tech shock. Its like reading a manual from Canada that has just enough French in it to confuse the hell out of you (ok, I'm exaggerating a bit. just a bit though)
But I've just started. I've got all the time in the world. God willing, a lot of things will be posted. Some will be poems. Some will be rants. There may be a screenplay. You never can tell with these things. To be perfectly honest, I really don't think anyones going to read this.
But, to be perfectly honest, that isn't the point, is it?
I'll be coming back soon.
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