Halloween: The annual occasion on which I'm forced to face the fact that I am ever increasingly a boring-ass adult. Even more boring-ass than some other adults I saw today.
Most holidays mean less to me now than they did ten years ago. However, I can justify my dispassion for most of these with logic. For Christmas, I'm not a Christian anymore. For Independence Day, I've become unnerved by all displays of nationalism. For Thanksgiving, a combination of white guilt and general distaste for colonialism has given the historicity of the day some negative connotation. Add a general distaste for barbarism, and I can cite Columbus Day for the same reasons.
This leaves Halloween. I never celebrated what it "stood for" in the first place. I get paychecks, so I can eat candy whenever the fuck I want. Though I probably shouldn't.
I attended a Halloween party on Saturday. Yes, it was fun. But the party primarily consisted of a concert by a friend's band and general hanging out with people I would usually be generally hanging out with anyway. Tonight, some friends and I will get together. But there won't be any Halloween festivities. We may watch a movie, but it won't likely be horror. Most of us don't care much for horror.
I nearly put together a costume today. It may have been more for the appearance of "being fun" than actually "being fun." But the thrift store I peeked into on Saturday didn't have any robes. The plan had been to don a robe (I've let my beard grow out some; it's not working out too well) and a sign that read "Anglo-Jesus."
The Decemberists are about as great as a band gets. This is, of course, purely subjective. I often find that musical tastes and preferences are more disparate and subject to personal subjectivity than those of movies or literature. Not that musical criticism is irrelevant. I just find it to be of very little use. And I'm even worse at reviewing music than movies. But I'm not really a critic. Hence, this post will be filled with hyperbole and raving.
A few weeks ago, the Decemberists gave us their latest offering, The Crane Wife. Its namesakes, "The Crane Wife 3" and "The Crane Wife 1 & 2" (tracks 1 and 9, respectively), form an epic and evocative narrative. Splitting the story in this fashion is extraordinarily effective (I'm using e-words!) and provides an enquiring curiosity front that is still emotionally effective. This is what the Decemberists do best: overblown, intensely personal narrative. I love it.
This is not to say that The Crane Wife is the band's best effort. I'm still reserving that title for last year's spectacular Picaresque (seriously, check out that site, it has a full MP3 of one of the disc's best tracks, "The Engine Driver).
Some criticize the band, and especially lead vocalist and lyricist Colin Meloy, of being self indulgent. This isn't necessarily untrue. Meloy frequently invokes some of what are his obvious pet themes and settings in many songs. The band's sound is idiosyncratic and often intentionally reminescent of sea chanties. They've been called "pirate music" (source forgotten). But, like my affinity for Quentin Tarantino, when masturbatory art is this fucking awesome, I don't mind. Meloy is a masterful writer of fiction. He often communicates an entire novel's worth of empathy, setting, and plot in the span of a single four minute ballad (check out "O Valencia!" on the new album or "The Soldiering Life" on Her Majesty).
The Decemberists aren't to everyone's taste. I don't understand why, but I can respect that. But you owe yourself to find out if they're for you.
As a newly-converted pedestrian, I interact with people on the street far more than I did two months ago. People walking their dogs send and receive a friendly "hello," one of the kids smoking cigarettes on the stoop exchanges nods with me, I throw a smile at an attractive young woman and cast my eyes down before I can register a response, and I am usually more than happy to throw a dollar here and there to those on the street who ask for it. Today, I had an older gentleman ask me where me might find the laundromat two doors away from my apartment building. He apparently had some job to do there. I, of course, was happy to oblige, and let him know we were just two blocks away. He thanked me. Naturally, we were going the same way when the crosswalk light signaled to use we could cross, so we started off at the same time.
Thus it begins.
There was a car stopped with its fender halfway through the crosswalk. No big deal. When I had a car, I was guilty of this and worse. As a pedestrian, I have no problem with this situation. I mean, they're stopped.
This guy, on the other hand, has a problem with the situation. He yells at the guy in the car. I'm embarassed as fuck. Step up the pace, man. Leave this guy behind.
No such luck. He didactically goes off an a diatribe about how nothing pisses him off like people with the cars nosed into the crosswalk. Did I hear about the woman who got killed this morning? I hadn't. I told him I had, intending to avoid prolonging this conversation any further. I'd have one more "Yeah, it's a damn shame," and we'd be plain out of things to talk about.
Naive, I know. I get the story anyway, even though it lacked all relevance: a garbage truck ran a red light and killed and injured the people in a pickup. I assure him I don't drive in as dismissive a way as possible.
Then I hear how he can barely see because he's been hit by cars a bunch. I'm not arguing that this isn't sad; I'm arguing that I didn't want to hear any of this. But I'm not the kind of person who can just fall back or run ahead of someone to end a street conversation. Especially not when I'm beginning to get the impression this guy might be slightly psychotic. His next story convinces me further: A couple days ago, he misread an incident of a guy walking behind him. One might say that he turned and "stepped to" this guy, who he angered. Then he's convinced a couple days later, this guy took three shots at him near the Salt Lake Public Library.
The last thing one wants to hear is that a guy like this has a gun. Chances are, he does. But one still dones't want to know. But he wants to tell one. He'll be ready next time this guy makes a move.
Scratch that. The last thing one wants to hear is that a guy like this with a gun knows where one lives. You know, in case he misread one of my exhausted mm-hmms. Just to be cautious, I duck behind the neighboring apartment building.
The trend set by Apple's ubiquitous iPod is irresistible for many. This time, I find myself among the many. A little over a month ago, I finally cracked down and bought a personal media player. I don't say iPod, because I don't mean iPod. After months of casual research, I picked up a Creative Zen Vision:M. I love having it. Video was a necessity; I have nearly my entire CD collection on it (the reason it's not my entire collection has far more to do with my laziness than any kind of space issues); and - this was the selling point that ultimately tipped me toward the slightly clunkier Zen over the iPod - it had built-in FM radio.
I pretty much only use the FM radio.
Turns out that my purchase of a media player coincided with an intense, burgeoning interest in public radio. So, my player stays tuned to FM 90.1 most of the day (I get to listen to it at work pretty much all day). I just can't bring myself to miss The Diane Rehm Show or the locally-produced RadioWest.
Perhaps I should point out that one can buy a small AM/FM radio for the price of headphones, whereas one of these players runs about $300.00.
Sure, it is nifty that I have all this music and video with me. And I do, in fact, listen to music on it now and then. For example, I've listened to The Decemberists's "The Crane Wife" several times on it, loading it onto the player the moment I brought the disc home from the music store. And I've just gotta catch Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" or the Five Stairsteps's "Ohh Child" on a station ID break or a boring guest. However, I did have a discman before. I could've, y'know, used that.
The religious right and I aren't planning to agree on most things any time soon: abortion, gay rights, social responsibility, the Middle East, Jesus, etc. One of the problems with aligning oneself with a political party or a particular point on the political spectrum (Wouldn't it be fun if instead of right and left [I personally like the ones with up and down as well], it was like the visible light spectrum? Centrists would be green. Moderate liberals would be cyan.) is that one finds oneself supporting issues simply because that's where they are without thinking about the issue individually.
One of the most frustrating aspects of this has been the lumping of climate change issues ("it's happening and we're all fucked if we don't stop it" vs. "nuh-uh") among the stances held by the American right and left. However, Mother Jones's blog brought my attention to The Evangelical Climate Initiative, supported by many important American Christian figures. Some of these names I recognize as people I've found consistently irritating. Yet it gives me some hope to see that not every evangelical Christian is game for strong-arming our way into the end of the world as we know it.
And it's about time. The raw footage for my film project, The Mustache, has been sitting on my hard drive since late May. Due to a move and various other factors, I'd put the editing on hold. I idly loaded it up again yesterday only to find that my last save was corrupted. Frustrated, I began reimplementing all the changes I had made to the end. Then I went back and tightened some opening scenes. Then I found myself actually excited about it again.
So I'm hoping to have a rough cut complete within the week. Then I'll send it off to my good friend, WiL Whitlark, to score. I've attached a little mockup promotional graphic I prepared for The Mustache. Disregard the "Coming Summer 2006" line. I apparently missed that.
Sometimes, I think I work better with deadlines. When we were editing The Great Sandwich Adventures, I had a pressing deadline - the same day photography wrapped. And I'm mostly happy with that cut. When we did Hopscotch Hotshots, we didn't really put the hustle on till Patrick announced that he wanted a December screening and we scrambled our asses to make the finished product. Left with time to tweak the hell out of it, with no outside pressure to finish in a timely fashion, I apparently can't trust myself. Sometimes I find myself wishing I had a personal assistant to carry around a clipboard and inform me of how I could be making better use of my time. Granted, I should probably work on policing myself better; but when will I do that?
You've probably heard of the Lancet study (and if you haven't, I've provided a link to some news about it) that claims that upwards of 600,000 people have likely died in direct and indirect consequences of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. This, of course, has been widely disputed by the Bush administration and many other media figures. Diane Rehm had a very interesting segment on her show the other day, hosting a co-author of the study with a few other guests, most of which were skeptical. (Slate provides an interesting analysis.)
Regardless, this raised an issue with me that has nagged at my mind for some time now. I often hear guests call in to programs and complain about the over 3,000 (3,413 according to current Wikipedia figures) coalition personnel killed in Iraq since the invasion. This gives us slightly under a 200:1 Iraqi-to-coalition forces mortality rate. I'm not saying this isn't tragic. Every single one of these deaths, regardless of who they were or where they stood, is a tragedy. It comes as no surprise that Bush doesn't give a fuck about how many civilians have been killed in the conflict. And it surprises me only slightly less that no official body is bothering to make any real effort to track deaths. However, it hurts me to know that we, as a culture, see our national boundaries as such bold divisions that we are far more outraged about our relatively small number of military personnel killed in combat. Even if that number is off, the number of Iraqi civilian dead far outweighs our losses. Yes, they may be more likely to be the children of people we know, and yes, it's terrible that they were essentially lied out of existence. However, the sooner we can all accept that every one of these slain mattered as much as the other, the sooner we can recognize one another's universal humanity, the more likely we can actually end this whole bloody affair.
Not that that's going to happen. Not that I have a real idea for a solution to all this. It's just sad.
Roughly two weeks ago, I saw "my car" of the last two years for the last time. The money was delivered, the papers signed. That Friday night, I walked home.
Despite my newfound restricted mobility, I actually feel freer. This may come partly from the fact that, due to the relieved demand of monthly car and insurance payments, I've cut back my work schedule by twenty hours each week. However, I've found myself truly enjoying walking to and from work or the grocery store. Granted, it takes three or more times as much time (and far more physical exertion) to get from one place to the other. However, living and working in (or, I guess, near) downtown Salt Lake City means that most things I need are within a range of twelve blocks. In Salt Lake, of course, a block is an eighth of a mile, but considering that (and the none-too-shabbiness of our public transit system), I just couldn't really justify car ownership anymore.
The primary reasons* are twofold: obviously financial, but also environmental. Now, I realize that me giving up the consumption of five to ten gallons of gasoline per week isn't going to save the planet. Nor do I expect that I will serve as some sort of role model, inspiring the masses to lead greener lives. And I certainly don't see myself as some sort of paragon of environmentalism. However, not only do I wish to watch the polar icecaps melt with as little guilt as possible (don't fret; there'll still be fucking plenty of guilt), I think the same principle's at play as when you encourage your friends and family to watch a show for which you're fearing cancellation: sure, you and they aren't likely to receive a Nielsen survey, but with any luck, your actions are indicative of a larger movement. You feel like you're doing your part.
Naturally, I don't condemn people who own cars. How could I? We live in a car culture. We probably won't ever not (unless, you know, the impending collapse of civilization is that severe). Unless you're driving an SUV down the block or have ever professed admiring thoughts of a Hummer Limo (seriously, goddamn), I've got no beef. Hopefully, though, those who can get by without an automobile will. And hopefully we come up with something soon that will help keep those who can't get by without one from fucking up the planet so severely.
*Bonus reason: Do you know how much shit can go wrong with cars? One minor engine or tire or mechanical or structural glitch can set you back thousands of dollars and incapacitate/inconvenience you for days. Neurotic as I am, sometimes the added anxiety of a potential "what's that sound?" or "what's different about the way this is handling?" as I walked out to the car in the morning was damn near unbearable.
New Year's resolutions don't seem to work. I'm sure there's a hilarious anecdote I could tell you about what happened to the titular character in the comic strip, "Cathy," but I'd rather not (you see, it probably wouldn't actually be hilarious). I bring this up not because of the pending new year (2007, I think, may very well suck, just for the record), but rather because of my recent resolution.
Here's the story: About two months ago, I started a job as a production assistant at an advertising agency. One of my responsibilities is stocking the fridges with a wide assortment of sodas. Naturally, they had all my favorites (Coke, Coke with Lime). So I had a couple a day for about two weeks. However, I hadn't had much soda recently - sure one or two here or there once a week, but it struck me to how unaccustomed to soda I had become.
Let me take this story back further about two years. In 2004, I was drinking a shitload of Coke. By my calculations I was drinking roughly one hundred fluid ounces a day (yes, that's unhealthy). I loved the taste and also had developed quite a caffeine addiction. Fortunately, I began to get my fix from coffee instead, which is both a) the best drink ever and b) better for one's health. Though I'd cut back drastically, I still liked to keep a 12-pack of Coke on-hand or was liable to buy a twenty from the gas station.
However, after drinking two Cokes one afternoon at this job, as I could feel a habit redeveloping, I said to myself, "I need to stop drinking soda." And I have. Boom. Right there. Cold fucking turkey.
I've made some allowances: I allow myself to (much like a smoker who will smoke only at a bar) drink with fast food - though I still usually opt for water or no drink - or anything with alcohol in it (I can't just pass up a rum and Coke).
I theorize that had I decided instead to give it up "for 2k7," I would have found it much more difficult, still pursuing the habit until the arbitrary division between the years rolled around and the desire was neither as strong nor immediate. Not that I've ever been one for New Year's resolutions (or the whole New Year thing either) in the first place.
First, allow me to offer any sort of apology necessary for not updating this blog with much frequency. I don't know how most circles of friends treat the bloggers in their midsts, but I've been quite constantly chided for my lack of updates.
The reasons for this are numerous:
I've been busy as fuck. For over a year, I've been working two jobs, one full-time and one part-time, giving me roughly sixty hours of work a week. Additionally, there's been a move, I've sold my car (more on that later) (or not), and I've been trying to concentrate on writing things other than my blog. Though I have, regrettably, not done enough of that. Then, I'm trying also to read, watch movies, I'm currently addicted to "The Wire," and I need to get out once in a while.
Politics. I really don't want to turn this into a political blog (or a plog or polog, or whatever the hell the Internet decides it could be shortened to). However, I've become increasingly politically aware (and just a little active). Considering my political stances (left) and general regard for humanity, it's been a downright depressing affair. I mean, whatthefuck.
Aimless. I'm torn on where to take this blog. As stated above, I'm trying to avoid turning it into a political blog. But I also don't want to be so presumptuous as to turn it into a sort of review blog, though I sometimes feel compelled to write about the movies I see, but wish to balance that with other posts. At the same time, I've integrated my blog into my website, which is essentially my portfolio. This is convenient in many ways, but seems to carry an implication that I should focus it more on site content, of which there hasn't been much new stuff of late.
Well, there you have it. My aforementioned full-time job is about to go part-time, so I'll have more time for all my side projects. My intent is for this to be the post that ushers in a new phase for my blog. However, on more than one website have I made a post resolving to post more content more frequently, only to find myself staring at that page some years later, recognizing it as my last update to the site (Darkwing Duck Page, JMP, Newt's Pond...).
I pretty much only use the FM radio. 
And it's about time. The raw footage for my film project, The Mustache, has been sitting on my hard drive since late May. Due to a move and various other factors, I'd put the editing on hold. I idly loaded it up again yesterday only to find that my last save was corrupted. Frustrated, I began reimplementing all the changes I had made to the end. Then I went back and tightened some opening scenes. Then I found myself actually excited about it again. 
