capnwatsisname 2.0
The adventure in tangent management continues.

I am here announcing my retirement. In the sense that Jay-Z is retired from rap and Michael Jordan retired from basketball and Mr. Belvedere retired (in, I can only assume, an episode where he feels that his family no longer needs him and he decides to retire but then they talk him into staying because the series had not yet ended). "36 Cents for Your Entire Brain" is not completely over, but I believe it's only courteous to notify you that this weblog is in hibernation. While I think about what I've done.

This is fantastic:


"You Think Money Grows on Trees?!!"

One of the few genuine pieces of literate pretension in my make-up (I pretty much improvise most of my pretension) is a quote I have always remembered, and could produce without notice at any opportune moment: "A writer is working when he is staring out of the window," Burton Rascoe. Not that I ever knew who Burton was, or, for that matter, was I working when staring out the window; the quote was written on the blackboard by my 11th grade English teacher, who I really liked, and there was something about it that felt vindicating (although it was, more honestly, added to my arsenal of rationalizations). I have not heard or seen it referenced since, until today, when I stumbled upon it in an interestingly different, and apparently more complete, form:

"What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he is staring out of the window." Burton Rascoe, American newspaper editor.

I am thankful for an understanding wife. But I also find this pretty funny.

You know how when you keep flipping back to ths same channels even though you already know there's nothing on, or how you keep going back to the fridge even though you already know there's nothing in it, or you keep picking up the same magazine even though you know you already read every page? Yeah, that's what this is.

The best line of music writing in 2006:

"That lyric hangs in my mind like an emergency exit.".

(For some reason, these pictures of a 20ft tree limb crashed through my back window, and the accompanying article about a huge amount of heatwave related damage done by falling trees in LA and San Fernando Valley, all disappeared about 48 hours after posting. I blame the government. You should have seen it.)

I was worried you might not have seen this.

I was reading some brief obits for some dear departed music industrians in Paste, and found it interesting to see the cause of death listed in each case. You may have pioneered the use of somethingernother and been the first suchandsuch of your generation, but you'd better keep your passing simple in order to have room for information about the things in your life you had some enjoyment in. A little luck, and your failed organs will get less print than your lived achievements, relationships, experiences. Anyway, it's an interesting human quality (or maybe just Western/American quality?) that we want cause-of-death information, as if that has some relation to the meaning or contribution of a person's life.

In a related story, Paul Simon's promotional pics accompanying the release of Surprise are really creeping me out. Is the surprise that he's joined the cast of Star Trek?

Its 86 degrees.

And raining.

At 10:45pm.

In Malibu, CA.

We saw The Lake House a few weeks ago (in a theater!), which is a movie about Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves and a deadly bus (I am not kidding). It also involves something that is not quite time travel, and is, at best, more romantic magic than sci-fi Delorean (kind of Frequency meets Sleepless in Seattle), but does have to do with being able to alter past events through information about the future. And future events through the influence of people in the past. But there is no traveling involved, really, even though, as I said, there is a bus. ( Read more... )

Rock Star: Supernova is almost an SCTV sketch, but with a more absurd premise. Rather than meet as juvenile delinquents and bleed, sweat, and rock drunkenly up Sunset Blvd to fame, these 15 individuals have been chosen as the most dramatically volatile pool Mark Burnett could create and Tommy Lee & Co. could put up with on the way to a win-win celebrity status boost. It might also result in some air time on MTV. At worst, more people will know the lead singer of Supernova than remember Gary Cherone's 15 minutes on stage with Van Halen.

I can only make some guesses here, as our Tivo preempted Rock Star with "So, You Think You CAN Dance?" (I am immensely enjoying what shifting the emphasis in that sentence accomplishes), but the online performances and the crack reporting at Television Without Pity gives me all the information I need (great timekiller when you're trying to get to sleep at 2am).( Read more... )

I had an era-ending experience, stopping in CD City, used & new media, for their closing sale. I was in need of a glimpse at some particular album art. You know, bigger and more extensive than the 3/4" square image iTunes or Amazon offers in the top left corner.

CD City used to be called something else, but it's been so long since I've been there that I can't remember. It's in this wallflower of a strip mall across from TO High School, which was at one point, no doubt, prime real estate for a used music store. The only shop in the structure that hasn't changed in the last eight years will deliver pizza while you sit at home looking at something prettier. And now it's time for CD City to go, big metal racks ($60) and all. ( Read more... )

I read Lincoln at Gettysburg, which traces how Lincoln's speech, which reframes the role and meaning of the Declaration of Independence and purposes of the forefathers, won the civil war and changed American identity (taa daa!). So, you know, it's a pretty good speech. Wills' background on the political and cultural influences on this moment were very a-ha enjoyable.

With no other motive than getting to the next book on my list, I dove into Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation, which, as it turns out, is a record of her pilgrimages to sites related to the Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley assassinations. Also a good read, and, as far as I know, some good historical work couched in rock-critic essay style (the as-I-see-it big picture + juicy bits of trivia). Not as acutely hilarious as all the raves she gets from Conan O'Brian and John Stewart caused me to expect, but insightful and witty in a likable, self-referential Let's Go: History kind of way. O'Brian and Stewart, by the way, voice Robert Todd Lincoln and James A. Garfield, respectively, in the audio book version. This is only distracting if you're not already put off having the entire book narrated by Violet Incredible.

One of Vowell's closing observations (um, Spoiler Alert?) is also about the importance of rhetoric. While heroic, Lincoln's actual political agenda, in speech and action (as Wills also reflects), was not as forwardly all-persons-are-created-equal as he might now be credited (granted, it's hard to be that socially progressive when you're trying to preserve the Union). This mythic role was, in part, secured by Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. After taking in Wills' assertions that Lincoln's Gettysburg address reframed our national identity, I'm quite intrigued by the idea that King ends up reframing Lincoln's identity as the egalitarian liberator.

(Although Vowell doesn't provide any footnotes. Or, perhaps more accurately, they are invisible. Taa daa!)

Mood: Excited, about news that Don & Lori Chaffer have been in the studio the last few months.

Other mood: Curious. Don produced Songs from the Voice, Volume 1 for a project initiated by Chris Seay that appears to be a "retelling" of the biblical story through a variety of media. This record includes a lot of my favorite voices: Sara Groves, Jill Phillips, Don & Lori Chaffer, Christena Groves.... I haven't gotten to the bottom of "the Voice" yet, but the album appears to have a connection to a new translation by Thomas Nelson.

Look it up and tell me what it says. I have to study.

Sometimes when pomo/emerging people unChristianese something, it's hard to get to the bottom. Those of us who speak the language have to work a little harder so everybody else doesn't - supposedly. Sometimes its like an English translation of a Japanese advertisement that was already a wooden translation of an English slogan. We are not us, we are you, see? Of course, I'm all for whatever. Hooray, everything!

In Abilene, at a major grocery chain and at the airport gift shop, you can buy more than one book debunking The Da Vinci Code, but you can't buy The Da Vinci Code. This, I think, might have some correlation to the great success of Angels and Demons.

The nice thing about Angels and Demons is that it has a virtual 1:1 correspondence to the characters and the plot arc of The Da Vinci Code, the movie (I can't say anything about the book version, as it was not available at the airport gift shop). This is nice, since while I fill in all the blanks with Tom Hanks, Ian McKellan, Jean Reno, et. al. (actually it was Sophie Marceau or Monica Bellucci rather than Audrey Tautou, and I had to fill in a skinny British guy whose name I can't remember for Alfred Molina*), my imagination has extra time to consider what Dan Brown is doing with all our money.

I predict a cable TV movie with Harry Hamlin or Peter Gallagher. Or Lorenzo Llamas.



*On imaginitive vacation after appearing, in his younger self, as David Carr (opposite younger Tilda Swinton) in Nick Hornby's How to Be Good.

On Wednesday, we went to church, and four white guys in their early twenties reflected on Jesus' radical social reorientation that broke down barriers between classes, races, and gender, by marveling at their own wonderous arrival at this moment despite being from (wait for it) different states. "What else might have brought us together here," they pondered, than the very power of the gospel? Parents rich enough to afford private Christian education, my wife astutely observed. I can't be too hard on these guys - I like them. I was them. I am them. But we are part of the problem. ( Read more... )

We were in Texas this week. And there were thunderstorms, and there was ZiegenBock. And it was good.

It was also over 100 degrees most days, which made some of the local advertising especially interesting. "Our pizza's always hot and ready!" "HOT SALE!" at a casual wear store, and "Try Our New Heat Lamps!" at a tanning salon. What could be more appealing?

My favorite local billboard for high risk auto insurance: "Have Tickets!!"

Yesterday I saw a poster for Diddy's new mogul scent, Unforgivable:

"Life without passion is unforgivable."

PTS* PR Guy #1: How about, 'Life without passion is unforgivable?'
PTSPRG2: No, that would imply that Unforgivable smells like a passionless life.
PTSPRG1: Yeah, but that's not what I mean.
PTSPRG2: Yo, those magic beans are real, dog. Word out.

Keep it real, D.

*PTS: "Prepare the Sexy," a term Diddy used on Letterman to describe his staff's activities before his arrival at the P. suite.

Current Mood: relaxed

This is so great. The Carleton Singing Knights from Carleton College, MN, sing an acapella version of Sufjan Steven's "Chicago." According to their website, they recorded "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Part 1" on one of their albums - a song I've often wanted to claim I was going to arrange for a capella singing. Might be worth my lawn mowing money.