A couple posts will stick around.

Everything else is moving to

http://www.fldisinhibition.com

Here’s why two and a half minutes of Miami Vice are better than any food or consumable. Because no one else can do it. No one can create Starry Night again. No one can write Ficciones again. No one can compose Rites of Spring again.

Food is repeatable. That’s mostly the point. You have a recipe, you have a dish.

Wine is at least a rarity. And, of course, so are some food dishes. But if you’re eating rare food dishes, you aren’t reading this blog. Odds are, you don’t even use the Internet. If you’re worrying about how long your Kobe beef was massaged during calf-hood, you aren’t worried about what anyone has to say about … well, much of anything. You probably throw your socks and underwear out after wearing them once. You probably think they just magically appear laid out on your bed too.

Film in general gets the shaft. If you’re of a certain education level, you dismiss most film as populist entertainment. Just look at how Miramax came about in the 1990s and it’s clear there’s a market for hipster movies. And there still is (did anyone see the Brothers Bloom trailer?). Writers are terrible about it. So are academics. I think writers piss me off the most because they tend to dismiss it because it isn’t writing. Look at, for example, Jaws. Super populist. Deeper than almost every hipster movie in the last ten years. Why? Well, simply, because people were smarter then. High school graduates knew more words then than they do now (but not as many as graduates knew in the late 1940s, which is why you don’t get a lot of solid mid-range filmmakers anymore, there’s just no market for them).

With few exceptions, the best filmmakers of today were already working in some capacity in the 1970s. Certainly among American filmmakers.

I go to Table 6 and get the Roasted Lamb Collar because I know it’s good. Because I’ve had it before and they can duplicate it. Nothing duplicatable really compares to this….

And nothing compares to the end of Broadway Danny Rose either.

I never realize how much I like weekends until I have two on call in a row.

This last one made some money (the one before didn’t); enough I would have gotten the wife that netbook if she’d wanted it. The thing’s so small when I asked if the screen was longer than my cock, she had to think real hard. (the screen won, but I hear it’s the girth that matters anyway). But the money’s only a band-aid. For it to make a real difference, it’d have to be something like … hmm … if 30x=600 … 20 calls. 20 calls, if they weren’t terrible and were properly spaced, wouldn’t be impossible. I think coworker1 got 25 calls over the Thanksgiving weekend last year–when I was enjoying a fine Thanksgiving dinner catered from Le Central, the decent French place (is it snobby to have a decent French place and then the French place you really like).

Speaking of which, am I having the fam in for Thanksgiving this year? I think my dad invited himself. My sister might be busy. I was kind of hoping my friend D would come in because we had such a good time when he visited over New Year’s and this time I wouldn’t have to take any time off, but it’s not looking promising. I saw that and he’ll probably be crashing on my couch come November anyway.

Hopefully, the wife’s mom and grandmother are coming out for Christmas. I say hopefully because odds are I’m going to fuck up by then.

But back to this weekend.

I’m going to read. I already know that.

Sunday morning I think I’m going to get agent queries together and then just print out the pages and use the postage at work on Monday.

I haven’t decided if I’m drinking Sunday. If I were just giving it up because I were trying to be healthy, I’d definitely do it. But the last drink yesterday hit me pretty hard. Could have been the Diet Crush. Whatever it was, not sure I want to be drinking hard Sunday. It might make me real sick, so I could stay up late Saturday and get ripped. But I suppose that move isn’t a wise one either.

Eh.

So what to do with the weekend?

Sleep; read; watch a movie (I was thinking Once and a George Sanders Saint and something else, maybe the Towering Inferno, but then I remembered the podcast movies). No idea when we’re recording the next episode so I guess it doesn’t matter too much.

What else … gym. Obviously. On Saturday

And I don’t want to be annoying.

Well, honestly, I don’t want to be annoying to like … four people who follow me.

Because I’m drunk. Ish.

A little.

That probably was like four shots of vodka.

Whatever.

gmail.

Gmail footer dynamically changes. First it said something about importing from yahoo and outlook and now it says to add shit to my contact list. Fuck my google contact list. It has EVERYONE I’ve ever emailed.

You know what my phone numbers, notes and more are for people?

Neither do I.

So I’m editing this picture I took of myself at the gym.

I don’t know why I took it. Oh, wait, yes I do. Because I looked–imo–good. I look like an asshole taking a picture of himself in a mirror with an iPhone in the picture though.

Motherfucker, gmail just changed again. It’s telling me I can get gmail on my phone! Wow. On my rotary dial phone? Shit. I don’t know how to access the browser. Fucking douchebags at google, use the right motherfucking language. cell phone, mobile phone. Whatever the fuck. Not motherfucking phone. Phones have been around, what, seventy goddamn years. They didn’t have “web browsers” until the last ten. At most.

It’s weird to think I grew up with some of this shit.

I have big hands. I never realize it sober. Drunk or stoned, all the time. In pictures too apparently.

I ought to be thrilled, since I was always worried–after Raging Bull–I had small hands.

I also used to be worried I had a small cock.

Amazing how finding out grown women–28 to my … 20?–couldn’t stop talking about it changes one’s perception of things.

Motherfuck. Looking at my gmail footer change again. I’d like to catch it doing it; watch pot and all.

Or something.

Just the right amount.

The pig mask thing is a reference to something Dan Savage said on the Savage Lovecast.

Work shoes… fuck, who makes them? They’re some kind of leather athletic thing. White guy shoes.

So, back when I was … twenty-two I recut an incredibly shitty movie–Gia–into an incredibly good movie. I think I was twenty-two. That was still when I was going to transfer to NYU and work at my friend’s sister’s editing house. It’s like three fucking lifetimes ago and it’s been eight years.

My DBBF called it The Thin White Girl due to the reliance on music and quiet. It wasn’t exactly easy, because Michael Cristofer is a film criminal of the first order. Thought he was Bob Fosse or something. Douche.

It’s like the only movie where Angelina Jolie is any good. I mean, I suppose she was okay in Changeling, but she wasn’t good.

It was a lot of work. I opened it with “Changes.” Then Michael Mann came along with Ali and stole my opening idea. Great minds and all, I suppose.

Blog’s changing a bit (again). Maybe a lot. Fuck if I know. I’m drinking cheap vodka in a diet rockstar again.

(My title for the Gia recut was The Brightest Angel). But anyway.

It’s not all friends.

I love going to see movies with DBBF. And even with my friend D, though he and I don’t really like the same kind of movie anymore.

No, now I’m getting roped into seeing Star Trek in IMAX on opening weekend. Why? Because a friend of mine HAS to see it. But he HAS to see it soon. Like it fucking matters if we wait a week. Next weekend, not this weekend, we’re hoping to see it with this guy I knew in middle school who lives nearby (he was at that party last weekend). I don’t want to see Star Trek twice. Even if it’s okay, I don’t want to see it twice. The era of seeing okay summer movies twice with different sets of friends (I mean, shit, with this first friend, the one from grad school, shit… I had to see Iron Man twice because of him) is long over. It was fine in 1989, when I’d go see Batman and Weekend at Bernie’s multiple times with different friends. It was probably even fine in 1992, when I went to go see Buffy the Vampire Slayer a couple times with different friends. Or 1998–I saw the Faculty a couple times.

But not anymore. And not Star Trek? I mean, nobody wants to go see Redbelt multiple times with me.

• XP, SP2
• Pentium D 2.66Ghz
• 960MB ram

Mac specs

• OS X 10.5.6
• 1.5 Ghz PPC G4
• 512MB ram

The PC had trouble running the following (at once): excel, chrome, tweetdeck, yahoo messenger, itunes and… something else… maybe internet explorer. Oh, and some shitty freeware PDF viewer that lets you do mark-up.

The Mac is currently running: Mailplane, ecto, tweetie, yahoo messenger, Drive Genius, Mail, Time Machine, Growl, iStat.

Guess which one works better? Yeah, the much slower (by the numbers above) Mac. I’d love to install Intel Leopard on the PC but I a) don’t know how and b) probably shouldn’t futz with a work computer so definitively.

Oh, I also tend to have Yojimbo, Excel, Word and Taskpaper open on the Mac without problems.

iTunes is a different story. Since I use SimplifyMedia to play the home library and because that’s another app that’d be running and using up resources, I just have my iPhone plugged into speakers and run SimplifyMedia off it. I can’t search and can’t repeat playlists, but it’s a small price.

So what can’t the Mac do?

Well, most online video apparently. The PC–I think–can. The G4 PPCs always sucked for mpeg-4 and now that youtube’s gone over to it… well, it’s a good thing I’ve got the iPhone around in a pinch. If I just desperately need to watch youtube, because it comes up so often. Though I suppose if someone were to send me a link to a Coldplay music video… like Fix Me… I’d want to watch that.

I can’t play any games on the Mac. I mean, I suppose I could if I wanted to dig up a bunch of three or four year old games. But since I’ve had the iPod touch/iPhone, I haven’t given a shit about computer games to kill the time. iPhone games are much better for the short five minute diversions.

Well crap, Port Map doesn’t work with whatever shitty router they’ve got here. Because it’s ancient, I’m sure (or because I’m connected straight to the DSL modem via wireless). Doesn’t really matter. Don’t need a lot of home access to the work computer. I could set up logmein.

I just realized I could set up Bento to make emergency forms. That’d be kind of neat I suppose. Seems like a lot of work.

So what’s the benefit to the Mac at work? Well, Mailplane’s superior. So’s Yojimbo (Yojimbo actually makes my job–that actual job I rarely do–much easier and faster). Tweetie’s kind of better than tweetdeck. Kind of. There’s a lot I don’t like about Tweetie, but it’s the best native Mac twitter client I’ve used.

Spotlight’s another big deal. I have Google Desktop on the PC but it’s freaking useless; running Leopard, which has a much more intensive Spotlight than Tiger did (and therefore shouldn’t run well on this shitty PPC), I’m able to pull up whatever I want. When I need it.

I’ve never really had a real use for Spotlight. At home, I use it to delete old files I haven’t opened or some shit. But here, at work… in a few days, it’s totally changed the way I do my job.

Of course, I do still have 56 to do items in my email. But I’m slacking on those because I’m lazy and I was lazy on the PC too.

Textexpander. I’ve got textexpander running too.

Here’s everything from 5/7/09

* * *

A tomato falls

Splats on the sidewalk

I step in it

*

A landing clamp

Open on the floor

Takes me to space

*

Muscles in my arm

I’ve never seen before

Start to hurt

*

I cough up blood

It covers my lips

Not that pretty

* * *

Live twitting the podcast with a designated twitter account?

Listener voted shows?

What the heck is our email?

Tell cohost to think of the next show’s movies so we can announce them

Does port map work on work mini? Can I set up dydns?

Is any external hard drive built to last?

A g4 mini as a work machine. Notes for the blog

* * *

The first series is me working haikus because I’m freaking lazy and I don’t write poetry and I remember how much I liked writing haikus in undergrad with the prominent Japanese American poet who’d rather talk about hamburgers than poetry.

The second bit is a list of podcast-related stuff.

No idea why I want port map working at work. I think so I can reset remotely?

Is any external hard drive built to last is a reaction to something I heard on the macgeekgab.

The G4 Mini as a work machine… I’m thinking about writing about using this ancient, broken machine for work—and having it be superior to the newer XP PC.

My brilliant idea.

It’s my application of someone else’s idea.

I have two monitors at work now, one for the PC, one for the Mac. The M1, just because, sent me this picture she took of some objects. A drink, some stamps, a list of books, etc. It makes for a brilliant wallpaper. Change the list of books to a list of upcoming DVD releases circa 1999 and I think I have the back cover for my novel. Maybe even the front cover, since no one liked my other ideas.

Then the M1 made me this other, similarly awesome wallpaper for the second monitor. Same idea, arranged objects.

About a year ago, the Iconfactory released an Indiana Jones wallpaper. It was supposed to be his desk. I’m not going to do my whole Indiana Jones IV post right now (and probably never will).

In grad school, I took a class with David Robbins (and, wow, if he googles himself and finds this, he’s going to learn a lot more about a student than he’d want to). He was very big on artifice not affecting art.

So, the M1 staged those photos–definitely the second one, probably at least one part of the first one–but it doesn’t matter. They’re great photos. Great wallpapers.

So what about a site of created wallpapers. Or fuck that. That seems like some lame way to make money off selling shit.

What about people making wallpapers for other people. Almost everyone has a digital camera, right? And a bunch of stuff (presumably, I mean, you’re an American and we love our stuff–if you’re not, I apologize for assuming you’d have to be an American to read this blog. Wow, that sounds … German, doesn’t it?).

Like a wife or husband making up a desktop wallpaper, of objects, indicative objects–a collage of a person’s stuff–for their spouse overseas. Or like a cheap ass mix tape, since mix tapes, at least as far as I can tell, require some computer geekery to pull off these days.

I’m going to make M1 a wallpaper (she hasn’t asked for one). I have no idea what I’m going to put on “the desktop” yet. But since hers are so great, I’ll have to do something particularly good.

But at some point I got douchebag best friend to listen to him. He might have started listening to him around the same time.

We were supposed to use Semi Suite in some student film. It’s so lame calling it a student film. What else do you call it? A short film made in undergrad? I mean, for some of them, I technically was a “video production” or whatever the fuck my prestigious almamater called it major. Or pledge.

Whatever.

But it’s frustrating not to know what project is was. Douchebag best friend probably doesn’t remember ….

It might have been the adaptation of Cathedral, the Raymond Carver. Now, I know everyone gets all gooey over Short Cuts, but–as a writer–reading Carver then seeing that movie? It’s one of the worst adaptations in film, because Altman doesn’t get it. And I love (and hate) a lot of Altman. But it’s kind of like that Gary Sinise story about Ken Kesey. Sinise just put on some grandoise Cuckoo’s Nest adaptation and Kesey was blaise about it. Kesey told Sinise his favorite Cuckoo’s Nest production was a high school one. And Sinise mocked him in the interview for it. Who’d know better?

The Cathedral short never happened.

My douchebag best friend, the reluctant actor of so many shorts, didn’t want to headline, didn’t want to give the part to his wife’s gay friend, who was too young.

And we just kind of forgot about it.

But it would have been amazing. I’d been watching a bunch of Fellini at the time–good and bad as Fellini’s are–and it would have been amazing. Funny the best film script I ever wrote was the last one, the one I did nothing with. I don’t even have a copy anymore.

But, no, we weren’t going to use Semi Suite in that one.

In fact, I think the Semi Suite thing was just some bullshit–like my douchebag best friend would play it on the jukebox or something.

Until recently, Mann always had at least one great cinema moment in his films. Thief has one, Manhunter has one (“my man”), Last of the Mohicans (theatrical, not director’s), Heat has three or four, Miami Vice has one (the I’ll Be Gone sequence). Insider doesn’t, Collateral doesn’t. Et cetera, et cetera. Public Enemies will not, Ali doesn’t have any.

Other great moments–The Last Temptation of Christ, the ending. Henry Fool, the ending.

Those are the ones I’m thinking of now … maybe the helicopter rescue in Superman (maybe).

These are cinematic payoff sequences, where the medium just skyrockets in potential. Most movies don’t have things like them, most great movies don’t have things like them (Kubrick never had one of these). They’re somewhat populist moments. I’m trying to think of another example and I really can’t. Mann’s kind of the best for them, just because he understands that kind of payoff storytelling.

In grad school, when I was still working towards a story collection versus a novel, I used to want to write something with one of those cinematic payoffs. It’s incredibly hard to even conceive of a way to get them down in a draft, much less edit them, much less make them successful. I’m trying to think of a novel with one of those moments. Cat’s Cradle has one. Vonnegut has them, but he usually saves them for the endings. In Cat’s Cradle, he does it early. Bluebeard’s got a great one.

Novels don’t tend to work in moments like that. In singularly memorable moments … not even punch in the gut ones, just moments in general.

As a going present, my professor/mentor gave me an annotated copy of Dracula. I fucking hate Dracula. I wrote an essay about how much I hated Dracula–and she read it out loud because I was busy with my mom’s … I guess memorial service is what it’d be called. So I couldn’t figure out why she was giving it to me.

HUGE Dracula reference in the novel. About it sucking no less. And I totally forgot about it. And giving a copy of Dracula as a gift was part of the fucking scene in the novel. I felt like a douchebag. It’s probably the second most thoughtful gift I’ve ever gotten. No, first. The only competition was when my dad got me this Muppet Show soundtrack CD. So I douched on this great gift, because it wasn’t a memorable part of my own fucking novel. I mean, I kind of recovered–I blamed it all on being a drunken dipshit.

No big cinematic moments in the novel, the first one (no idea what’ll happen in the second). In fact, one of my advisors told me to put one in–the eureka moment–to make it more sellable and I argued for about two hours to not. It was a funny scene–I mean, I hated this two-faced woman but she did know some stuff and sellable was one of them–because we were in this “family friendly” coffee shop and there was this kid around and we both kept swearing and getting nervous looking, like we’d get 86′d.

I think I’d like to do one of those moments. Paul Pope does an amazing one in 100% (ending). But they’re not easy in literature. I”m pretty sure T.C. Boyle’s never had one, no for Rick Moody. Pynchon has a bunch, obviously, but he always cuts them short. I feel like I just read another one–besides Cat’s Cradle–but I can’t remember what.

Our dealer connection went like this.

First it was my dbbf’s friend/roommate who’d get the coke from his pot dealer (who got it from someone else). Pot dealer looked like a red-haired Ted Neely.

Yeah, because Jesus would have been white. Sure.

So eventually, it got to the point we could go straight to the pot dealer.

Then it got to the point I could go along with the pot dealer to pick up from his supplier.

Apparently, and I only kind of remember this one and I don’t remember it being a big deal, I once scared the living shit out of the pot dealer while fucked up on … ritalin probably and drunk off my ass, speeding through rural West Michigan while blaring Tom Jones in the car.

I mean, I believe a lot of this story. I did used to drive 100 miles an hour (we got it up to 120 once, which fucking rocked). I mean, dbbf was screwing his girlfriend in the back seat. I didn’t really want to drive slow, right? I wasn’t worried about him finishing or whatever, I wanted the car ride to be over.

I did snort a lot of ritalin back then.

I did drink a lot back then.

And I did have a Tom Jones greatest hits CD.

So, I suppose my only problem with the way this story is reported back to me–like I remember it, I was zonked out of my mind on ritalin and fucking hammered–is the pot dealer getting scared for his life. I remember it was a fine, amusing drive, where we discussed the importance of police in society.

Tom Jones comes up, this story comes up, because last night M1 did me a favor and named a character for me.

She didn’t go with Delilah, but she went really close ….

We probably didn’t listen to Delilah that car trip though … I always preferred Daughter of Darkness.