Darth Vader vs Hank Azaria

I know I mentioned this on twitter but I am watching this clip too much not to put it on the blog. This is the trailer for Night at the Museum 2, a movie I will never watch, unless someone I trust tells me there is more of what starts at 1:39:



It is a testiment to the genius of Hank Azaria that he can manage to be funny surrounded by such dreck (though there seem to be a few other talented people nearby they are not nearly as amusing on the trailer). Think about how many ways the line "I don't think so" could have been intoned, and then realize that Azaria found the best one -- sort of faux-generous, as to say "I don't think it works, and you surely agree with me."

The Parable of the Greedy Man and the Envious Man

Jewish Parable, The Seven Deadly Sins, Solomon Schimmel, 1992. 

A greedy man and an envious man met a king. The king said to them, "One of you may ask something of me, and I will give it to him, provided I give twice as much to the other." The envious person did not want to ask first for he was envious of his companion who would receive twice as much, and the greedy man did not want to ask first since he wanted everything that was to be had. Finally the greedy one pressed the envious one to be the first to make the request. So the envious man asked the king to pluck out one of his eyes. 

The Final Scene of the Sopranos (Commonplace Book)

Thinking about endings tonight, having just seen the end of BSG (which I will post on over the weekend). Here is the last scene of the Sopranos, on of the most controversial things ever aired:



Say what you want about it, but I think it is surely the only ending: audacious, shocking, gut-wrenching, insane and understated all at the same time. A lot of people felt like it was a metaphor for Tony getting whacked by the guy who goes to the bathroom (to get the gun like in the first Godfather). But to me, that is neither here nor there. It is a vision of the show getting whacked. Brad pointed out to me that it is like when a friend dies -- all you want is just one more moment with them, anything. But it has to end.

"Alien vs. Predator": the poem (commonplace book)

This is a poem by Michael Robbins published in the January 12th issue of the New Yorker. Given Scott's post today on pop culture references in literature, I thought it would be a good thing to share today. It is pretty entertaining.

Praise this world, Rilke says, the jerk.
We’d stay up all night. Every angel’s
berserk. Hell, if you slit monkeys
for a living, you’d pray to me, too.
I’m not so forgiving. I’m rubber, you’re glue.

That elk is such a dick. He’s a space tree
making a ski and a little foam chiropractor.
I set the controls, I pioneer
the seeding of the ionosphere.
I translate the Bible into velociraptor.

In front of Best Buy, the Tibetans are released,
but where’s the whale on stilts that we were promised?
I fight the comets, lick the moon,
pave its lonely streets.
The sandhill cranes make brains look easy.

I go by many names: Buju Banton,
Camel Light, the New York Times.
Point being, rickshaws in Scranton.
I have few legs. I sleep on meat.
I’d eat your bra—point being—in a heartbeat.

KO-S: Ballad of Noah (Commonplace Book)

This song is from the album Hymns to Atlantis. It is an amazing album but this song has especially been kicking my ass lately.



I wont print all the lyrics here, but this passage is straight up William Blake-ian: Gnostic, Biblical, Phantasmagoric, and a little bit Cowboy (see Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man for how well Blake chimes with the American West):

under the sky cross the land with a horse.
it felt like a sky and the land were divorced.
the way it wasn't easy, a rock in the past
so what's the matter with you, when the rock just laughed
carrying a load for the conscious untoiling
i went to the water and the water was boiling
the load was heavy and rocks filled my course
my horse drank the water and the water killed my horse
i tried to keep going, weeping to me
a righteous wind blew and it was speaking to me
the way seemed harder since my horse been dead
i couldn't understand everything the wind said
looked up at the sky and seen something strange
returned to my country and my country was up in flames
the trees were bleeding, they said they couldn't hide me
where will i run to without my horse beside me?

if you reach a dead end trail
pray to god it never fails.
we've all walked each other's shoes
so everybody sings the blues.
if you reach a dead end trail
pray to god it never fails.
we've all walked each other's shoes
so you don't have to sing the blues.

Fan Made Thundercats Live Action Movie Trailer

Speaking of passive TV watching becoming active youtube trailer making (see the post from earlier today) -- have you seen this? This is deeply crazy, but you have to admire the work that went in here. My friend Brady sent this to me.

David Foster Wallace Commencement Address

My friend Erin sent me a link to this way back in the middle of October and I just now got around to reading it. (Sorry Erin). It is very interesting, but I am still thinking about it, and have not quite yet landed on anything yet. Here is a sample, which you can click on to read the whole thing:

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

I find myself now also thinking hard about WHY Erin sent me this link. Is it because I was moved by Wallace's suicide, without actually having read anything he had written? He mentions suicide in the speech, which is kind of evil -- the whole thing rings strangely now, because you get the feeling that his chemicals or whatever prevented him from seeing the world the way he suggested it should be seen -- or he did see it that way and there was something terribly overwhelming in the vision? Because it required some awful strength none of us have? Or did she send it to me because she knows perfectly well that I am a bit obsessed with "the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing." Of course I worship all the wrong things, and suffer the results, as Wallace suggests, but he suffered too, obviously.

I do deeply admire that he discusses, at a commencement address, the dreariness of day to day adult life, and attempts to help. That is frankly an amazing gesture.

The Broken Kettle

A Freud joke via a review of Slavoj Zizek:

In order to render the strange logic of dreams, Freud quoted the old joke about the borrowed kettle: (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you, (2) I returned it to you unbroken, (3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. Such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments, of course, confirms exactly what it endeavors to deny—that I returned a broken kettle to you ...

Ruskin Quotes (Commonplace Book)

Working on a budget, I remembered some good John Ruskin quotes

“The bitterness of poor quality lingers long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.”

“There is hardly anything in the world that some man can't make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.”

Then I came across some other good ones, having nothing to do with money:

“In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it; They must not do too much of it; And they must have a sense of success in it.”

“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion — all in one.”

“They are good furniture pictures, unworthy of praise, and undeserving of blame.”

International Radio Operators Alphabet (Commonplace Book)

You know what I like and look up all the time? The International Radio Operators Alphabet.

Alpha
Bravo
Charlie
Delta
Echo
Foxtrot
Golf
Hotel
India
Juliet
Kilo
Lima
Mike
November
Oscar
Papa
Quebec
Romeo
Sierra
Tango
Uniform
Victor
Whiskey
X-Ray
Yankee
Zulu

Thank You For Being a Friend (Commonplace Book)

A footnote to our discussion of cover songs: Jason Powell sent this to Neil over on his blog and I liked it enough to post it here.

NYT: The Effect of Teaching on Writing (Commonplace Book)

Poor Mojo put this up on his blog a while back: David Gessner in the New York Times on the effect of teaching on writing.

I know we have a lot of teachers around here and I thought this would be good for debate:

Here is what Gessner said:

In the early, dark days of creative-writing programs, say, 30 years ago, many writers treated university positions not as jobs but as sinecures, and the university itself as a kind of benefactor. I attended graduate school at the University of Colorado in the early 1990s, and only one professor there ever learned my name; the rest, most of whom were granted their positions in the 1960s after the publication of a chapbook or two, approached their jobs with all the liveliness and enthusiasm of members of the Politburo. Iowa, of course, set the standard for the genius approach to writing in which the great man or woman allows the eager young to gather round, where they are to learn by osmosis. That was during the early outlaw years, when administrators, like cautious scientists, were first seeing if this thing, creative writing, could survive within the walls of the university. But times have changed, and these days teaching creative writing is more of a job, with all of a job’s commitments and a job’s demands. And those demands often crash up against the necessary fanaticism of the writing life. “Death by a thousand cuts” is how a colleague of mine described the academic life. Papers, students, classes, meetings, grades. They come all day like electric jolts, making it hard to be a good monk.

What, other than a romantic conception of the writer as creative monomaniac, is lost by the fact that many of us now make salaries almost on par with entry-level accountants? I think it is legitimate to worry that writers pressed for time will produce work that is more hurried; that writers who hand in annual reports listing their number of publications might focus as much on quantity as quality; and that writers who depend on bosses for their employment might produce safer, less bold work. Another thing that is undeniably lost is time spent reading great literature and communing with writers of the past. While the effect of teaching on writing may be a matter of debate, its effect on reading is undeniable. That is because there are only so many hours in the day, and those hours are used up reading our students’ work, which is, by definition, apprentice writing. Energy is finite while college students seemingly are not, and after teaching for a while you begin to feel as if you are in a “Star Trek” episode, lost on a strange planet made up of a thousand pods of need, all of them beaming out at you, sucking your energy, and all of them, invariably, asking you to read something. Since the reading life feeds the writing life, since we are what we eat, this can wear you down, to say the least.

The novelist Mike Magnuson puts this sentiment more bluntly: “What teaching has done for me is make me not want to read anything, written by anybody, for the rest of my life.”

John Ashbery's "Ghost Riders of the Moon" (Commonplace Book))

The title made me think of comic books, and then so did the final lines:

We collected

them after all for their unique

indifference to each other and to the circus

that houses us all, and for their collectibility  --

that, and their tendency to fall apart. 

Check that great line break separating "circus" from "that houses us all" so that for a minute you think he literally means a circus. And check the near tautology of the second of the three reasons: "we collected them ... for their collectibility." I particularly like the tension between permanence and entropy in the collection: we collect things (like comics) so that they will be kept safe and not fall apart, and we collect them because they have some kind of permanent value to us -- those stories last forever somehow -- but here it seems more like we collect because we like the fact that their falling apart is inevitable. We like things that fall apart in the end. 

I am really embracing the idea that I can just get on the blog with unfinished ideas. 

Previously on Lost Music (Commonplace Book)

I have not had much of a chance to look at this yet, but Brad sent this to me for perusal. He said The Ballad of Sayid was his favorite.

http://www.myspace.com/previouslyonlostmusic

The Migration (Commonplace Book)

I meant to put this up yesterday. Sorry.

I do not know anything about the football, but this commercial is beautiful.

Fiest on Sesame Street (Commonplace Book)

Ok, so Slate and Neil already put this up and it is now weeks old. I don't care. I want it on my blog.



Astoria, by the way, is where Sesame Street is filmed; 30 Rock is also filmed here, at Silver Cup Studios.

Simpsons: You Can't Handle the Truth (Commonplace Book))

One of my favorite Simpsons moments, a mash up of several big film speeches including A Few Good Men and Patton (and some generic courtroom stuff I think, but if you know where it is from, please tell me).


via videosift.com

Lions Reunited (Commonplace Book)

I do not plan to make this a trend, but today I am make a rare -- unprecedented? -- break from appreciations of poetry and popular culture. This clip was just too good, and I wanted to put it up.

So these two guys raised a lion cub and then had to release him. This is their reunion a year later, and they were told that the lion would not remember them.

Third Rock from the Sun: Shatner and Lithgow (Commonplace Book)

Scott reminded me of on one of my favorite shows, Third Rock from the Sun, and I found one of my favorite moments on it on the YouTube.



The key to the joke (forgive me if you already know this, but not everyone does) is that a young Shatner starred in an episode of The Twilight Zone in which he saw a creature on the wing of a plane he was one (and, of course, no one believed him). Then, many years later, when the Twilight Zone was remade as a movie, this episode was incorporated, with Lithgow in the Shatner role.

I think I watch too much TV, and so I find it very satisfying when my useless TV knowledge comes in handy.

The Beat that my Heart Skipped (Casanova Soundtrack)

The Beat that my Heart Skipped (Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip) is the fourth song on the Casanova soundtrack as outlined in Casanova 14. It is my favorite song on the album, no contest. The rhymes especially are great fun. The video will not embed for some reason so CLICK HERE to see it and read along below.

Every now and then I cower and I need to find empowerment
Empowerment is paramount to how I can begin to mount
A plan that I can implement
to make a dent on ignorance
Instead of drunk belligerence
and the dissidence of miscreants
Especially in this instance
with the never ending persistence
to use the words in each sentence
as if they were blunt instruments
to beat a hole in the defence
of this beauty and her innocence
which serves to just build resistance
in spite of all my good intents.

The beat that my heart skipped

This is the beat that my heart skipped when we first met
Now that I’ve heard it, it leaves me with a kind of regret
No disrespect
We just left a lot of people upset
And what we had wasn’t really what we’d come to expect

Well good god damn and other such phrases
I haven’t heard a beat like this in ages
To miss such a beat would have been outrageous
But when you heart skips a beat its ruthless and aimless

She caught my attention in her fishnets
Then she reeled me in expecting nothing more than kissed necks and quick sex
But that weren’t the case with this platinum princess
She’s attracted my interest
So I wanted to impress….
Upon her all the positive things
That come form having more than just a one night fling
But that’s something that’s easier in theory than in practice
Since pick up lines are tactics
To get prey to the mattress
And this actress
Is practiced
In shunning such theatrics
When put upon daily by tactless geriatrics

So my genuine advances are met with po-faced scepticism
Throwing complements but she just straight elects to miss them
Her lips were put on this earth for dispersing wisdom
God forbid I suggest she lets me kiss them

But I really want to know what she thinks of me
Because I’m loving every idiosyncrasy
But I ain’t one to jump through hoops to make a 1st impression
Been there, done that, learnt the worst of lessons
We want to be loved for who we appear to be instead of who we are
So I real selves take a backseat behind the pomp and the façade
And that’s as true of the rude boys, downing pints and acting hard
As of the kids shunning convention with clinical disregard