Man Killing Minotaur

Look, I don't want to toot my own horn or anything but ***HONK***HONK*** since this is my blog and all I just want to alert you to a pretty cool story I wrote several years ago Man Killing Minotaur that was published by our friends over at the excellent failbetter.com and subsequently nominated for a Pushcart Prize (which I'm convinced I lost out to Andre Aciman and/or Colm Toibin - but what can you do?).

Enjoy!

Confessions of a Car Buyer

I bought a new car about eight months ago. My last car, a Chevy Trailblazer, had passed the 100k mile marker and was breaking down about once a month, requiring me to call a tow-truck, requiring me to have work done on it (about $500-$1000 a month). It was time.

To make a long story short: Buying a new car is often a horrible experience for everyone. But buying a new car is especially horrible if you're six-foot-eight. You see, as it turns out, most new cars are not designed with six-foot-eight human beings in mind. Why? I have no idea. Is it a cost-cutting issue? Is it a lack of awareness? Are there not enough tall people designing automobiles?

Allow me to take you on the abridged journey of my recent car-buying experience, in the approximate order in which I sat in and/or test drove them:

1. Toyota Yaris, 2-door: Tiny little thing. I really like these cars. They remind me of the French Renault Twingo, one of my all-time favorites. I actually sort of fit in this car. As it turns out, the size of an automobile has NOTHING to do with how much leg room it has in the driver's seat. It's hard for some people to wrap their heads around this (especially car salesmen, oddly). The problem with this car is you would die if someone hit you with their shopping cart. Safety first! No go with the Yaris.

2. Toyota Prius: 9-months ago this seemed like the no-brainer new car to buy. I put my name on a waiting list at the local dealer and waited. When it finally arrived I went to drive it and found that the gear shift thingy juts out exactly where my knee cap goes. Not comfortable. In fact, I found myself sitting in a really tense, awkward position in the hopes of not pushing my knee completely into this sharp piece of plastic. If I bought the car, I imagined myself, after several years, of having a deformed body, my gait having been entirely reordered due to this one ill-placed control stick. Thanks, Toyota, you fucking prick.

3. Honda Fit: Cool car. Also, kind of like a sarcophogous. I fit in the Fit but I felt genuinely claustrophobic. Not a good feeling driving off the lot.






4. Toyota Camry: Back to Toyota. I fit comfortably in the Camry with lots of room to spare. But the Camry's for old people and even old people know it. Still, a totally reasonable car. Nothing wrong with it. Except it's stupid and ugly and I don't live in Florida. Let me put it this way: If I had kidney problems, was a war vet, retired, and living in Florida with my third wife this would be my car. I don't know why but it's true.

5. Subaru Outback: Too small.






6. Subaru Forester: I bought this car. Then I turned around and sold it. For exactly what I payed for it. It's a long story. Let me just say: this is an awesome car. When I drove it to the beach with my girlfriend and mom the week after I bought it I could barely walk when I got out. My legs just fit in such a way that I lost all circulation to my feet when I drove this car. I know this sounds stupid but how do you think I felt?

7. Audi A3: Super cool car. I test drove this car about 70 times. I think the Audi people genuinely started to worry when they saw me coming. But finally it was a bit too small. Just a bit too tight. But close.



And then I sat in and drove about a dozen other cars: Ford Fusion (big enough, but ugly), used Mercedes, used BMWs, used Audis, second trip to the Honda Fit (still too tight), second trip to the Prius (still with the gear shift in my knee), Volkswagon Jetta Sportwagon (could have bought it...big, nice...), Mazda (all models way too small), the sporty 2-door Volvo...and about a dozen other cars. I can't remember them all anymore and frankly I don't want to. So, what did I buy?

Nth. Audi A4: Fits great. The Germans know how to make cars for tall people. Why? They're the fucking Teutons, that's why. It's the best car I've ever driven. It's way more than I wanted to spend but.... I'm not complaining. But what the fuck, car makers? What, like it's so fucking hard to design a simple, moderately priced car that a tall fucking man can fit in? I'm sorry, it can't possibly be that hard.

By the way, if you didn't already know: Ergonomics is Social Control. Tell a friend.

I Am a Video Gamer

The thing about video games is that they'll ruin your life.

When are we going to stop beating around the bush and just admit, as a culture, that video games are the superior media experience to films and literature? There's really no comparison any more. It should have been a dead give away when, a year or two ago, the video game industry's annual gross surpassed Hollywood's and (unless Hollywood really innovates) I don't see them overtaking video games as the primary media/entertainment outlet in the United States ever again.

We should throw Hollywood a retirement party. At this party, Hollywood will receive a plaque that says: "Thanks For Your Decades of Escapist Fantasy! What Would We Have Done Without You (Besides Read More And Become More Involved In Our Daily Lives)? Best of Luck In Retirement! By The Way, Do You Have That Ten Thousand Dollars You Owe Us? Sorry To Keep Asking!"

To be continued...

"Oh, God!"

This is Part 1 of what I hope is an on-going series of film reviews. You know A.O. Scott's film picks at the nytimes.com?My reviews will be kind of like those where I review whatever random film I happened to have watched that week except I'm not going to record myself on video standing awkwardly in front of a wall or red velvet curtains looking like someone was about to walk in the room and decapitate me. By the way, has anyone followed A.O. Scott's physical trajectory over the past year and a half since he started doing those nytimes video shorts? When he started out he was super white and pasty with huge black bags beneath his eyes, wearing whatever wrinkled clothes happened to be lying nearest to him on the floor that morning. But within the past year someone must have stopped him in the hall at the New York Times offices and said something. I imagine the conversation went something like this:

NY Times Colleague: Hey, A.O....
A.O.: Hey, what's up?
NYTC: Hey man, awesome film review video.
A.O.: Oh, thanks man, that's really nice of you. You really liked it?
NYTC: (Pause) Yeah...it was...uh...
A.O.: What...is there something wrong?
NYTC: Uhm...no, it's just that...(looks around)...you look like shit.

Or something like that. Anyway, credit to A.O. for getting it together. Although, I have to say, I think A.O.'s shoddy appearance probably had more to do with the New York Times underestimation (and all of the newspaper business's underestimation for that matter) of people's desire/willingness to read/watch their news online. I don't think they had any idea that their little news videos would ever become a hundredth as huge as they are today. (Newspapers...we'll miss you...sort of).

Okay, back to the film review. For my first review...(drumroll)...I'd like to do "Oh, God!" Carl Reiner's 1977 film starring George Burns, John Denver and Terri Gar. Burns plays God and Denver plays the sweet supermarket manager whom he tries to convince to spread his word. Gar plays John Denver's wife who appears wearing a different super-tight pair of shorts or pants in every scene. I think this was her function in the film. They didn't even really pretend that Terri Gar was anything more than the smiling, blond tit and ass. She just was. And boy did she look great! You know, it occurred to me while I was watching this that Lisa Kudrow is basically her generation's Terri Gar - the goofy-yet-hot tall, skinny blond. (And then later that night I put on Lawrence of Arabia and thought about how Jude Law is his generation's Peter O' Toole and then I thought about how Hollywood basically operates on physical/character types which are repeated generation after generation, occasionally expanding into new types when the opportunity arises...I'm thinking, possibly, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a type-breaker, for instance....)

At the beginning of the film you think John Denver is horrible and that's why he never did any other films (besides the Muppets special) but he's actually pretty good. He's perfect for the role of a sweet, sincere everyman (who also happens to be your average non-believer...because obviously who isn't?) But the best part about this movie is the fact that it actually takes this scenario of God-returns-to-earth-to-spread-his-word-in-contemporary-America seriously. It would have been so easy to make a total farce out of this premise but they handled it really well. I was impressed.

Also, for some reason, the whole time I was watching the film I kept thinking it would be great to do a Japanese remake of it. I don't know why.

I give this movie three "YESSIR!"s. Wait, no, that's awkward. How about: I give this movie a big FAT LIP!?

No, here it is: I give "Oh, God!" a BIG SLAP ON THE NECK!!!

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

Not only is this maybe the greatest pop song ever recorded but it's the greatest pop song ever performed with a backing band of hand puppets.


You know, this is a tricky song to get into for the first time if you weren't already into it. It's on the radio all the time. It's always on in the supermarket. It's as ubiquitous as any pop song from the last forty years. It's an easy song to not get too excited about. I didn't get into it until last year (my 32nd year!) and I don't even remember what did it. I think I was just sitting around with my girlfriend one night when she put her old record on and...!!! I had one of those inexplicable pop music moments that happen every so often, the kind of truly profound, existentially deep moments that pop music may have even created...and it was like I heard "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" for the first time, as if Elton John were just some unknown 22 year old living in Brooklyn and this was a track off his first album. Except way, way better than that. In every possible way. This song is stupid good.

I'm not an audiophile and I don't think analogue is better than digital or anything like that but I do think one of the reasons why this song is so amazing is because it was recorded at a particular moment (1973) when analogue recording equipment was at its prime paired with one of the great 20th century pop stars also in his prime working with his longtime songwriter/collaborator Bernie Taupin, also in his prime. It's a rare and utterly pristine combination...you can listen to this song a hundred times in a row and not get tired of it. It's huge, it's majestic, it's interstellar.... That slow down-tempo just kills me. It's perfect! And the space in between the verses! And the drum fills! What!? I'm not even sure you could write and record a song this good today...I actually think this is like a once in a generation type pop song. I mean, look, not every generation sends astronauts to walk on the moon. So why would it be any different in pop music?

Bill Cosby's Sweaters

You probably already know this but Bill Cosby's sweaters are actually portholes into other dimensions. Yeah. If you stare into one long enough you will be transported far, far away (depending on which sweater he's wearing, obviously - each sweater leads to a different intergalactic dimension). Although, as a side-note (I feel like its my psuedo-journalistic duty as a blogger to warn you): One time, while I was staring into one of Bill Cosby's sweaters, I was transported, not to another dimension, but to my mothers bathroom! Fortunately, she wasn't in it. But what if she was?

In any case, here's a Bill Cosby sweater moment:




Also, The Cosby Show is NOT a documentary so, Ron, you owe me five dollars.

Happy travels!

Literature With a Capital "L"

About once a week during the late-eighties, while my mother was at the local mall (apparently intent on maxing out one credit card after another), she would drop me off at the local Powell's bookstore where I would spend three or four hours slowly perusing the bookstore aisles - reading a page here, a back cover there - familiarizing myself with the work of hundreds of different authors. This was back in those blissfully naive days before I had a concept of Literature with a capital "L," before I'd ever heard of the Literary canon, before I had any name recognition for such classic authors as Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald et. al. Quite honestly, this was at a point in my life when I thought Louis L'amour was the most important living author (don't tell anyone I said that - unless you're talking to Louis L'amour).


In those pre-Literary days I was particularly drawn to the work of (in no particular order): Berkeley Breathed (Bloom County), Herge (Tintin), Patrick F. McManus (outdoor humorist, author of such books as The Grasshopper Trap and They Shoot Canoes Don't They?), Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (co-authors of The Dragonlance Chrinicles), and Jeffery Archer (British author and former Conservative member of Parliament whose book As the Crow Flies was, at 800 pages, the longest novel I'd ever read - though, actually, come to think of it, it might still be the longest novel I've ever read...). But you know what? All of these book are really good. I would happily re-read any of them. They may not be thought of as Literary or whatever (I mean, Tintin, obviously has cultural cache) but who cares? They're awesome.

But, anyway, there was one author, one series, in particular, that I was drawn to above all others as I trolled through those Powell's bookstore aisles: Gar Wilson's Phoenix Force. (Actually, as it turns out, Gar Wilson doesn't exist, but was rather a pseudonym for a collection of authors: Robert Hoskins, Dan Marlowe, Thomas Ramirez, Paul Glen Neuman, Dan Streib, and Mike Linaker.) With titles like, "Korean Killground," "No Rules, No Referees," and, "The Fury Bombs," and covers that depicted crouched men firing small arms into the distance, what was there not to like?

Check it out:









These books are basically the literary equivalent of a 1980s Chuck Norris movie. Think Delta Force and Invasion U.S.A. (still probably two of the most violent movies I think I've ever seen, by the way). Phoenix Force was this small, elite, anti-terrorist unit that traveled around the world covertly killing bad guys, drug lords, hijackers, terrorists, etc. I half-thought these books would have made a comeback during the Bush-Cheney years but even given the post-9/11 political environment the Phoenix Force books (I hesitate to even call them novels) were still too ridiculous to bring up as reference points. But, when I was twelve or thirteen years old, I loved them. I read like forty of them, one after the other, like a middle-aged divorcee cruising through a stack of romance novels, just sitting around waiting for Bronchial cancer to kick in.

The reality is, more than the writing, I was really drawn to the covers. It was at that point in my life when I'd spend all my time day-dreaming about gun fights, violence, explosions, hand-to-hand combat, torture, you name it. I was that little boy (but aren't most little boys like that?) and these covers were exactly what I wanted.

But everything changed when my mom sent me to a private school in eighth grade where books like Phoenix Force were, shall we say, totally looked down on. At school I started reading books like Catcher In the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, Night. And I hated these books. I thought they were SO boring. Sure, there are prostitutes in Catcher..., a cold-blooded hanging in Mockingbird..., a shocking murder in Mice..., and Nazis in Night, but when you're used to your protagonist mowing down a roomful of masked Colombian drug-lords with an Uzi (in the first scene), the reading experience just isn't the same.

Seriously, though...if you were a 13 year old boy which book would you rather read?

It took me a couple years to get into capital "L" Literature. It wasn't until my sophomore year in high school when we read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Sun Also Rises (and then a year or two later when we read Death of a Salesman and Denis Johnson's Jesus Son) when I started tuning into "serious" literature. I have to credit my sophomore English teacher for turning me towards Literature and away from supermarket reading (this is the same English teacher, by the way, who one day told me that Jeffrey Archer was vacation reading for old women and who, incidentally, was charged with statutory rape years later, causing him to flee to his native Ireland, never having cleared his name...but I digress). I wonder what would have happened if I kept reading those violent action/adventure books and was never introduced to "real" writing? Would I still be a writer today? What kind of writer would I be? Would I be dead? Would I have joined the armed forces?

The Great Pacific Northwest

I really enjoyed this recent piece in the New York Review of Books, a dual review of Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy and Jon Raymond's collection of short stories Livability:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22470

Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy is, of course, the recent indie film shot and based in and around Portland, Oregon and Raymond is an author (and co-screenwriter of the film) whose short story the film was based on.

Growing up in the Pacific Northwest I always felt divorced from culture. And when I say culture I mean great artists, great works of art. When I was younger I was all-too-aware that Oregon could claim no Nietzsche's, no Michelangelo's, no Proust's, no Mark Twain's, no Hemingway's as one of its own. It seemed to me that no one of cultural import ever came from the northwest and I think, for a time, I grew up suffering from a kind of regional/cultural inferiority complex.

Needless to say, I don't feel this way anymore. As Jonathan Raban points out in his NYRB article the pacific northwest is simply new to the cultural scene. Compared to the northeast, the northwest is still a teenager. Compared to Europe, we're barely out of the womb.

Great piece!

America's Bedtime Story

I'm glad Jay Leno is finally leaving The Tonight Show.

That was a long seventeen years. People talk about George W. Bush's eight years in office as being bad for the country; that's obvious. But no one really talks about Leno's seventeen years on the Tonight Show and its negative effects. Leno's Tonight Show (compared to Carson's) was a cultural lowest common denominator. The jokes were almost always bad, the level of discourse almost always low. Leno's a stand-up routine guy, not an interviewer. I can't think of one celebrity interview he did that was at all compelling. Not one.

If The Tonight Show is in fact "America's bedtime story" which I think you could make a compelling argument for (although probably now less than ever) you want someone highly qualified to fill the post. I mean, we're talking about viewing audiences of 10-15 million people a night. That's a far larger audience than most politicians ever get, let alone on a nightly basis. And if you think about those kinds of numbers over a 15-20 year period, it's not so crazy to suggest that the man chosen to be The Tonight Show host must inevitably, on some level (however small and/or subconscious) effect the mood of the general TV-watching American public. Which makes the pick of Letterman over Leno to replace Carson all the more baffling and unfortunate.

Leno had his farewell show with his final guest (and successor) Conan O' Brien this past Friday night:



After watching Leno's last show I had to youtube Carson's final show just to do a one-on-one comparison (not fair to Leno, I know, but...):



I still remember Johnny Carson's last show like it was yesterday. I cried. It's hard to believe that was 1992, hard to believe that Carson's Tonight Show overlapped with the '90s. He was the best.

Here's Carson's final T.V. appearance, a surprise guest appearance on Letterman's new CBS show (how cool is this?):



And for fun, take a look at this, one generation prior:



Rather than trying to recap Carson's career and legacy, here's his NYT obituary (incidentally, the longest obit I've ever seen - an obit that will, I believe, only be surpassed in length by Bob Dylan's, that is, assuming the NYT outlives Dylan which, as of today, is not at all a sure thing, but I digress...):

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/arts/television/24john.html?pagewanted=all&position=

There was a really interesting piece on Conan in last week's NYT magazine http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24Conan-t.html that tries to explain the process by which a Tonight Show host is chosen. I can't say I understand it. It seems comparable to the electoral college: highly political, involving numerous trips to the midwest, lots of hand-shaking, hot dog-eating. The article suggests this is why Leno was chosen over Letterman as Carson's replacement: Leno was more amenable to playing ball re: Late night politics whereas Letterman preferred to stay at home (I'd say things worked out okay for Letterman).

(On side note: What's Craig Kilborn's story? Where did he come from and (more importantly) where did he go? What happened? I thought he was pretty funny in a highly contemptuous, tall-guy sort of way. I thought for a minute there that he was seriously in the late night mix...Anyone? What happened to Kilborn?)

Anyway, will Conan return The Tonight Show to its pan-American Carson-era glory days? Will Andy Richter rejoin the show? Are we preparing to enter a 30-year Conan O'Brien Era? Will I be 63 when Conan passes the torch to the next late night host? Will TV even exist in 30 years? Will anyone besides my girlfriend or mother read what I'm writing right now? I have no idea. But what I do know is that it should be interesting to see how Conan adjusts his game for the earlier, larger Tonight Show audience and how this effects the new Conan vs. Letterman scheduling match-up. Should be good.

Richard Ford and the Aquarian Writer

Several years ago my friend Stuart decided to read Richard Ford's The Sportswriter on a whim. His whim was that he and Ford share the same birthday, February 16th (my birthday happens to be the next day). Stuart (himself a writer) thought that he might enjoy the writing since he a Ford are both Aquarians. Anyway, Stuart loved the book, thought it was hilarious, and immediately read through Ford's trilogy The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land telling me whenever possible that I should read them too, that I would love them. He was right. I was never able to get into John Updike's Rabbit series or even Philip Roth's Zuckerman series. I tried. I love the idea of a literary serial with a single protagonist whom you grow with, watch change. But, honest to god, I never found Updike's prose captivating in any way. Am I missing something? And Roth...well...I don't know. I should be into Philip Roth. I mean, on paper, it would just seem to make sense: Dark, humorous Jewish author seeks same in reader. Portnoy's Complaint is hilarious no doubt but that's the only novel of his I could finish. You know, I think it's one thing to spend an hour an a half with a neurotic Woody Allen character or a half hour with Larry David, but to spend, what, a dozen hours or more with one of Roth's characters who tend to be a hundred times less likable or accessible than the former? No thanks.

In any case, it was a great relief to find in Ford's Frank Bascombe a serial character that I could really get into. I wonder though - how much does the fact that Ford and I are both Aquarians have to do with me liking/sympathizing his writing? Has anyone ever done an astrological literary study? I can't imagine a study like that would ever be taken too seriously in the academy but who cares? This is a blog, not the University.

Here's a completely unofficial list of Aquarian authors listed in order of birth with a note next to each re: whether I've read them and if I liked them (this is what passes for a scientific study here at Down Around The Sun:

James Joyce, Feb. 2: Vastly overrated. I mean, I understand his historical significance, his innovations within Modern Literature, etc. but I never, never, NEVER think to myself, "Gosh, I really feel like reading some James Joyce right now." Never. And I honestly think that should be relavent criteria for whether or not an author's work is good or attractive rather than just historically significant.

Gertrude Stein, Feb. 3: Now here's a modern experimentalist I can get behind. She's fantastic. There should be more of Gertrude Stein's work plastered around public spaces: on buses, park benches, sky writing, on the ceiling at the dentist's office, you name it, name it, you name it, name it, don't name it, you name it, don't name it, you name it.

J.M. Coetzee, Feb. 5: The best Aquarian writer, in my opinion. Several years ago on my previous stint living in Portland I was single, I was teaching and I had a really stripped down life. I spent my evenings lying in bed doing one of three things: Looking through L.L. Bean catalogs, watching all of David Cronenberg's films and reading all of J.M. Coetzee's books (this is an unbelievably fantastic threesome by the way, I strongly recommend it to the twenty-something bachelor on the verge of depression). Anywho, is there a better contemporary writer than Coetzee? I don't think there is. In my mind he's the Michael Jordan of his generation. He took the torch of "best writer of his generation" from Beckett (whom he wrote his doctoral thesis on) and expanded on Beckett's reductionist vocabulary in the most compelling, intelligent way. His stretch of work from '99-'07: Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man, and Diary of a Bad Year is, I think, unparalleled by any contemporary writer. In fact, can you think of a writer with a better eight year stretch of four novels? When I first read Disgrace I thought it was the best, most engaging novel I'd read since Lolita for the first time. But when I read Elizabeth Costello for the second (and then a third time) I realized that's his best book, and maybe the best novel written in my lifetime (it deserves a post of its own). All I have to say is: what will he do next?



Charles Dickens, Feb. 7: Never read him.

Jules Verne, Feb. 8: Ditto.



Abraham Lincoln, Feb 12: Not a literary author, obviously, but one of the most important writers in the American canon (of course, who knows how much of his speeches and proclaimations were written by Lincoln himself and how much was written by speechwriters, associates, etc. but for the sake of argument...).

Charles Darwin, Feb 12: Terribel writer. So terribel I'm going to leave in the mispelling of the word "terribel". When is someone going to prove Darwin wrong? It's only a matter of time. I'm really looking forward to it. Marilynne Robinson's essay "Darwinism" from her collection The Death of Adam is a good start. It's a difficult piece but it carves out a space in which an intelligent, "scientific" thinker can oppose Darwin without being thought of as merely a "creationist". I guarantee you, the second Darwin's theories become obsolete no one's ever going to take him seriously again. Ever. He's like that college boyfriend/girlfriend you were with for a couple years who you were convinced you were going to spend the rest of your life with, but then one day woke up and realized you don't even have that much in common.

Paris Hilton, Feb. 17: Has she written a book yet? I don't know. I just wanted to advertise the fact she and I have the same birthday and I happen to think that's f*cking awesome.

Michael Jordan, Feb. 17: Yes, I share the same birthday with Paris Hilton and Michael Jordan. Can anyone beat that?

Virginia Woolf, Jan. 25: I like Virginia Woolf. I like how kooky she was. Her suicide is kind of undeniably hardcore. I like her novels. I think A Room of One's Own, in particular, is an elegant statement that, I think, will continue to speak to readers for a long, long time to come.

How's that for a scientific study? Not bad, right? Who have I missed? Help me with the list.

To end on Richard Ford...here's a great piece he wrote for the New York Times for their Writers on Writing series in which he describes his writing process and the importance of not writing:

http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/110899ford-writing.html