Photo © 2009.
09
Oct 09
Quote Unquote
“When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.”
— Flannery O’Connor
19
Jun 09
Chocolate Bar
I think for every person there’s probably a perfect chocolate bar. I’m lucky to have found mine in my lifetime. My aspirations are fulfilled and my chocolate bar walk downhill begins.
Photo © 2009.
19
Feb 09
A Short Note About Adjectives
You have to be very particular about adjectives and not use them too creatively for descriptions. Push them into the wrong situation and they can stop meaning anything of consequence.
“Dastardly Chopstick.” Cool, but weird for the sake of being weird.
This is an important note to remember for many of the more uncommon adjectives, such as crepuscular. Certain adjectives like that one only fit deservingly with a very select group of nouns. You can’t just throw the word crepuscular around for this or that.
For example, there are just four things to which you should properly ascribe the word runny. Make-up, oil paint, snot, and cheese. If you say “runny fingerfoods,” you’re really only narrowing down the edible possibilities by half or less, providing your readers aren’t under five years old.
You see, adjectives shouldn’t be treated like sprinkles for textual ice cream. If you glob them on like a thick crust of multi-colored crunchies, you confuse your readers. And the more impressionable ones eat it up and get sick.
28
Jan 09
Quote Unquote
“A beautiful aircraft is the expression of the genius of a great engineer who is also a great artist. It is impossible for that man to carry out the whole of the design himself; he works through a design office staffed by a hundred draughtsmen or more. A hundred minds, each with their own less competent ideas, are striving to modify the chief engineer’s original conception. If the design is to appear in the end as a great artistic unity, the chief engineer must be a man of immensely powerful will, capable of imposing his idea and his way of doing things on each of his hundred draughtsmen, so that each one of them is too terrified to insert any of his own ideas. If the chief designer has not got this personality and strength of will, his original conception will be distorted in the design office and appear as just another not-so-good airplane. He will then not be ranked as a good chief designer.
All really first-class chief designers, for this reason, are both artists, engineers, and men of a powerful and an intolerant temper, quick to resist the least modification of their plans, and energetic in fighting the least infringement upon what they regard as their own sphere of action. If they were not so, they could not produce good aeroplanes.”
— From “No Highway,” 1948, by Nevil Shute.
24
Sep 08
My Bloody Valentine Sold Out
My Bloody Valentine at Roseland, Sept. 23, 2008. Photo © 2008.
I don’t know if they “sold out” but the venue did. They ended the concert with the infamous Disney ride that is their wall of noise finale. About 17 minutes of cacophony that is not unlike what you’d hear during an atomic blast. The room vibrated so much that hairs on my arms stood at full attention and my legs felt like mini-fans were circulating the air in my pants. Ear plugs definitely required.
16
Sep 08
Full Throttle Guitar
I got another chance to see A Place To Bury Strangers.
"Missing You" Single by APTBS. Photo © 2008.
The beauty of APTBS is in the layers of sounds and the references. Oliver Ackermann makes it look effortless to blend so many guitar sounds together at once that it sounds like there are two invisible guitarists on stage with him. I know this sort of effect playing isn’t easy, but you can tell that this is his passion. And then the projections behind the band, 16mm film strips that were madly edited like Quentin Tarantino meets Andy Warhol, were just the right icing on the cake—a pop art collage of vintage girls, cars, guns, and sparks.
The band sounds so much better live than on recordings that I really was wide eyed and disbelieving. It was full throttle guitar. I was also hoping the gig would give me the a taste of the feelings I had when I was infatuated with My Bloody Valentine, Lush, and The Jesus & Mary Chain, and it did. For a fleeting few moments, I was 17 again, with my headphones on. It wasn’t just nostalgia, although it was a sort of relief to know that the old shoegaze sound persists and is still evolving. The feeling was more like watching a magic trick and getting completely taken in.
18
Jul 08
The Road Diet
After reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I’ve been inspired to write a diet book called “The Road Diet.” I’m dabbling with the first draft. It’s a post-apocalyptic diet based largely on the protagonists’ subsistence foraging. No, there’s not going to be any cannibalism, at least until week 30. Everything should be easy to acquire for under $5 a week, which is easily affordable for Oprah book club members. Expect to lose weight!
Here’s a sample week:
Day One
- Breakfast: 4 fried corn meal patties, each made from 2 tablespoons of corn meal mixed with pork fat skimmed from a can of pork and beans.
- Lunch: water
- Dinner: 1 can of pork and beans heated in the can and 2 desiccated apples for dessert
Day Two
- Breakfast: 6 peanuts and 4 leftover corn meal patties
- Lunch: 1 package of grape juice mix crystals
- Dinner: 1 can of Libby’s green peas
Day Three
- Breakfast: water
- Lunch: water
- Dinner: 1 boiled leather watch strap
Day Four
- Breakfast: water
- Lunch: water
- Dinner: water
Day Five
- Breakfast: 1 handful of dusty barley seeds
- Lunch: water
- Dinner: water
Day Six
- Breakfast: water
- Lunch: water
- Dinner: 1/2 can of corned beef hash, 3 cans of Libby’s peas, 1 can of pears for dessert
Day Seven
- Breakfast: Navy bean soup (1 can of tomato paste, water, 33 navy beans)
- Lunch: water
- Dinner: 1/2 can of corned beef hash
11
Jul 08
Quote Unquote
“How can you make a fool perceive that he is a fool? Such a personage can no more see his own folly than he can see his own ears.”
— William Makepeace Thackeray
