Parking enforcement, yo

I made a special trip with the camera to capture this one.

Abandon all hope

I was clearing out old emails at home the other night and came across a good discussion we had on the Elvis Costello mailing list back in 2006. The question was, what books have you abandoned reading? Now, I have at least one good friend of steely resolve who finishes everything she starts, no matter how painful the experience. I, on the other hand, have a lot less resolve—okay, let’s be honest and say hardly any. Unexpectedly, though, my abandoned list is not that long, since I don’t start a lot of books that I’m not sure I’ll be interested in.

The following list is in no particular order.

Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne
This one is not surprising in the least, although it’s mildly surprising that I tried to read it in the first place. I first heard of it in grad school, because it’s the subject of a (very dull) scholarly article written by a proponent of the Russian Formalist school of literary analysis (yeah, that sounds just about as dry as it actually is). The book is actually fairly entertaining, especially given that it was written nearly 250 years ago, but is so meandering and plotless that it finally lost my interest. It might have been easier to get through if I took some kind of recreational mood-altering substances.

Idiot, by Fedor Dostoyevsky
Another bad decision motivated by grad school. I was supposed to read it before my comprehensive master’s exams, but never managed it. A later attempt was also foiled when I quickly lost any interest in any of the characters, and couldn’t find a plot to speak of. I was surprised by my abandonment, though, because the other Dostoyevsky I’d read was actually quite good. If you want to give the Russian classics a go, I would recommend you try Crime and Punishment, which was way, way more engaging. Actually, start with Gogol—that cat had a sense of humor, unlike any of his fellow countrymen.

Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The third in my trilogy of grad school-inspired miscalculations. I don’t even remember a single thing about it. Did I get past the first page? I think I did. I would definitely recommend Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich instead, if you feel that you must.

The Bostonians, by Henry James
Whoa, was this one a crashing bore. I don’t think I made it past the first scene where a bunch of tiresome people say dull things in someone’s salon. Considering how much Boston gets your heart pumping, what with the gale-force winds and insane drivers, this book should have a lot more going for it. This was my first and last attempt at Henry James. I will not make a weak Dave Chappelle joke here.

Dune, by Frank Herbert
Admittedly, I pulled this one off my brother’s shelf when I was too young to really have a crack at it, but the first page was all I got through. Heck, even the Bible knows that you put all the dull genealogy a few chapters in so that you give the reader a chance to get interested. For whatever reason, I never went back. Doesn’t stop me from making postmodern, ironic references to the sandworms, so I figure it’s win-win.

Lord of the Rings trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien
I put these on the list even though I have actually finished them, simply because it’s remarkable to note that I made two attempts in my youth to get through all three, but got stuck both times at the end of Two Towers. Frodo and Sam get separated in Shelob’s lair, and then for some reason I failed to pick up volume three. For all I knew, Sauron got the ring and nuked everyone’s ass back to the First Age. Then again, I was too young for these, too; for example, it was only during the recent revival of Tolkien and my first adult read of these books that I realized that Strider and Aragorn were the same dude. Rest assured that I’ve now finished these easily, and got all the way through Silmarillion as well. Boo yah!

Sometimes I wish I was Catholic

Relax, that’s a line from a song. So I’ve turned the big 35 today, and I got this awesome peep cake from the Swami earlier, so I’m totally jacked on sugar right now. I took the day off work, which was schweet—now that’s a constitutional amendment I could get behind, that everyone should get their birthday off of work. Paid, I might add. Who’s with me!

Upswing

The last few weeks have been slowly crushing my soul, what with late winter weather (crappy, with extra crap on weekends) and some actual work at work (the horror!). But today was a much-appreciated break. Swami managed to scrape us both out of bed and we went cycling for only the third time this year. Even though it was only 30F, the sun was up and the roads were dry. Oh, and the wind was calm. All three are pretty much key for riding this time of year, believe you me. I absolutely cannot wait for the weather to improve, because getting on the bike seems to be critical to my soul’s happiness.

Then for lunch I hit an Indian joint named Punjabi Dhaba, which was damn good cheap Indian food. It reminded me of the best over-the-counter Indian place I’ve eaten, Flavors of India back in Columbus. That place was manned by just one dude and a woman I assume was his wife. I thought he was either really cranky or really rude, until one day I realized he was just insanely laid-back. He had this graceful method of ladling the food onto the plate, with just a little too much flourish to be blandly efficient. And the food, well, yum. Even with my stomach still full of dal and parathi, I still can get a little drool on thinking about Flavors of India. It’s good to know I can get that kind of fix here, just a 15-minute walk from the office.

So for now, the universe seems to be in alignment. Let’s hope it keeps up.

Oh, also, by the way, shouting out to a friend, good luck with the thing tomorrow. I’ll happily give you all the good vibes I got over here.

Leap day

Well, I gots to post on February 29. By the time the next one rolls around, we’ll probably all be brains in jars with terabit wireless implants for communication and virtual interactions in Fourteenth Life.

In contrast to the futuristic tone of that paragraph, things have been pretty retro this week. This morning I saw the video for Rick Springfield’s “I’ve Done Everything for You,” which is five minutes I’ll never get back (but I just couldn’t look away). And my bro tipped me off to the fact that if you run a little program called DOSBox, you can play Snipes on your Mac or Linux box. Oh man, did I waste a cumulative several months of my life playing that. I’m actually afraid to set it up now—you all might never hear from me again. At least, not until the whole brains-in-jars thing comes to pass.

Time killer

I blame Danielle for sending me this link. I got past level 10 once! Highest score so far: around 420K. Swami is kicking my ass up and down, of course.

Prepare to waste massive amounts of time

Pardon me, I need to go scrutinize a map of Africa.

Alma matters

As a graduate of William and Mary, I had a front-row seat to this week’s debacle of President Nichol resigning. He was the target of a lot of irrational right-wing blustering about a few topics; you can read about it all here (among other places, I’m sure).

When I was there in the early 1990s, W&M was a mix of a few goofy braniac weirdos like me and a whole lot of Young Republicans studying business and wearing blue blazers and chinos. Somehow I managed to look past the school’s associations with Margaret Thatcher, Scalia, and James Baker and focus on more progressive happenings, such as when Doug Wilder came to campaign. (Although I must admit that most of my time in college was spent shirking the assigned reading and going out for nachos.) But now, the attacks on Nichol are harder to ignore—if only because a fair amount of the conflict has been waged in my email inbox. Also, it’s been a stark change from the relentlessly sunny PR I usually receive, whose singular purpose is to induce me to donate some dough.

I have to say, anybody attacked by the likes of Michelle Malkin is pretty much all right by me. Virginia clearly is torn between its conservative past and a more liberal, hopeful future. Too bad this incident with Nichol is a clear step backward.

Speechless

Here’s what Mitt Romney said yesterday when he dropped out of the presidential race:

I disagree with Senator McCain on a number of issues, as you know. But I agree with him on doing whatever it takes to be successful in Iraq, on finding and executing Osama bin Laden, and on eliminating al-Qaeda and terror. If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.

What a tool. What a huge tool. Yeah, that’s not exactly reasoned political debate on my part, but the implication that voting for a Democrat is equivalent to “surrendering to terror” is so beyond batshit crazy that it’s hard to respond in a rational manner. It’s this kind of laughable rhetoric that makes me wonder how anyone takes these people seriously. (Although not enough people considered Romney worth taking seriously, so maybe that’s something.) The fearmongering worked in 2004, but since then it has seemed as though Americans were finally getting a clue regarding the current administration’s corrupt mismanagement. I can only hope that Romney chose his words less for their general impact and more as a coded message to the conservative base that he’s still willing to drink the crazy juice. Damn, what a freak show American politics is.

P.S. I’m also irritated that text after my blockquotes is always formatted all nasty. What gives?!

Review: Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when I realized that Larry Sanders was the best comedy show on television, ever. But I do know that it is true. I think I first became aware of this universal truth near the end of the show’s run, around 1996 or 1997, when I managed to watch the entire series without much trouble thanks to the relentless rerun policy of HBO.

What can I say about Larry Sanders? If you haven’t seen it, then your life is that much grayer than it could be. It had that vibe you get when you’re playing the piano and your fingers just happen to strike the best sounding chord ever. Or you’re playing tennis and you aren’t overthinking things and hit the most incredible shot you’ll ever hit. At that point you sit back and think, well, that was a moment of greatness I should savor, in case it’s the only one I ever experience. I’m not kidding, Larry Sanders was just like that.

So it’s long been a source of deep suffering that only the first season has been released on DVD. (And frankly, the character of Larry’s wife is so uninspiringly obnoxious that there’s some definite suffering involved in watching that season anyway.) There’s been a lot of speculation about why there haven’t been any other releases, among them the idea that all the musical guests are complicating the licensing process, or the ridiculously acrimonious lawsuit that was pending between Garry Shandling and Brad Grey. (Can I just say for the record: Brad Grey is a hangnail on Satan’s littlest toe.) But regardless of the reasons, the world has remained cruelly deprived of a DVD compilation of the entire series. And for chrissakes, you can buy the full run of freaking MacGyver, how is it possible that Larry Sanders remains incomplete?

But at last, last year I found out (thanks to Lifton over at WFW) that Shandling had finally crossed some kind of Rubicon and was putting out another DVD. I finally got it for Swami for Xmas, and now that we’ve watched the whole thing I can give it a proper review. Not to be deliberately turbid, but here are all the adjectives I could use to describe it: good, bad, great, transcendent, disturbing, depressing, essential, heart-wrenching, and completely awesome. I could come up with a few more if I thought about it a little longer, I’m sure, but I doubt the exercise is helping any of you understand what I mean.

What’s the big deal? Well, this is by all accounts the last DVD we’re ever going to get, so that automatically casts a poignant light over everything. It’s bad enough when great things come to an end, but far worse when someone tells you that you’re not even going to be able to experience the whole of the greatness again. (And here I must mention the travesty that it’s not for lack of technology, or some kind of tragic force majeure, that’s keeping us from seeing this stuff—after all, the laws of physics have permitted us to view any episode of MacGyver we might desire.) True, with this four-disc set you get over thirty of the episodes, many of them with deleted scenes and some with commentaries, but dammit I want them all.

Nevertheless, this is one fine set. Of course some fantastic episodes are left out, but a damn lot of great ones are included. You also get several audio commentaries, individual interviews with just about all of the cast, lots of deleted scenes, and a few incredibly weird interviews that Shandling did recently with some of the people who guested on the show. (These are weird mostly because Shandling appears to be the single most neurotic and uncomfortable person on earth, although he’s also one of the funniest goddamn people I’ve ever seen in an off-script situation.) And the fourth disc is a huge amount of material just about the final episode, which is all well worth it. The only disappointing thing I found, besides the fact that some of the cast come across in their interviews as not very bright, or self-absorbed, or sometimes both at once, was that the reunion with Shandling, Jeffrey Tambor, and Rip Torn was a heavily edited letdown—after watching the three of them kick ass all over the place in the show itself, I was hoping for something more there. (Geeky sidenote: Before I ever saw Larry Sanders I already knew of Tambor from Max Headroom, man did I love that show.) If it’s possible, this DVD set has actually caused me to become an even bigger fan of Larry Sanders now than I was before.

But I hope I don’t come across as insane when I argue that there’s something far more important to be gained from this DVD than just having a bunch of the episodes handy at last. There’s a larger message to be grasped that addresses my earlier metaphor of that perfect piano chord or tennis shot. As you learn about the process of making the show through the audio commentaries and the interviews with cast, and as you learn a little more about Shandling through the interviews he did with various friends, you are invited to face an essential fact about human achievement: It’s never easy. Even that piano chord wasn’t actually easy, considering the hours of playing, listening to music, training of muscle memory, and all of the other factors both mundane and important that made it possible for your fingers to hit those keys at that precise moment. It wasn’t easy to make that show, to write jokes that are still funny today, to create and inhabit characters that seem so perfectly real, to stick cameramen in closets and on rollerblades to get shots that make it feel like you’re in the room when it’s all happening. It wasn’t easy for Tambor to be Hank Kingsley, or Torn to be Artie. (Well, it was probably easier for Rip, but still not all the way to truly easy.) I admit I’ve never watched recent shows like the Office, which also purport to be showing you real or realistic people and situations, but I doubt they would be possible without the groundbreaking work of Larry Sanders to build on. And it was work, definitely work.

What a great series, truly. I sincerely hope “never” doesn’t really mean never, and we get the full run someday. In the meantime, go get this set (or at least borrow mine) and as Hank says, get ready to have a good time.

Buko tarts and final thoughts

I’ve been meaning to write one more post about the Philippines trip, and finally have gotten around to it. Ignoring any sense of narrative, I give you a completely unorganized list of things that I remember the best, now that it’s been a whole month since we got back.

Tropical tennis: One of the most fun things we did while we were there was play tennis with Kaskasero and his parents at their club. The courts were covered with crushed gravel and shell, which was kind of like a clay court in terms of play. It was nice to play some doubles for the first time since last summer, even though my internal clock was telling me it was three in the morning! And as the sun went down, any tennis ball that was hit high in the air was immediately dive-bombed by bats wondering if their sonar was pointing out the biggest insect of all time. So neat.

The ring of fire: My number one goal of the trip (besides seeing Kas get married, of course!) was to see a volcano—a trip to the Pacific Rim wouldn’t be complete without that. So the day after the wedding we drove to Tagaytay, a bustling resort town a couple hours’ drive outside of Manila. The town is perched on the ridge of a huge volcanic crater, at the middle of which is a big lake with Taal Volcano in the middle of it. Totally awesome views.

The town itself kind of reminded me of the Cape around Hyannis, with lots of people and lots of places selling stuff. You could get all kinds of food by the roadside; this photo shows some people selling hot corn on the cob.

But the number one thing you’ve got to eat in Tagaytay is the buko tart. Buko is young coconut, and the tarts come packed in boxes so you can grab a stack to go. Definitely tasty. Here’s a fellow blogger’s account of a buko tart from Tagaytay.


The wedding: Of course, the main reason we went to Manila was to see Kas get married. I’m so glad we did, too. The whole thing was really great, seeing him and meeting his fiancee/wife for the first time. They’re really good together and I wish them all the best. Congratulations, you two!

Tuff juice

We interrupt the Philippines report to mention that Swami and I went to the Celtics game versus the Wizards last night. It was the second game in a home-and-home series, and the Wiz managed to beat the Celtics at home last Saturday, despite the fact that Gilbert’s still out healing his knee. Man, with Garnett on the team this year, it’s been looking damn good for the Celtics so far. I won’t even mention the home opener, where they absolutely crushed the Wizards (and that was with Arenas!). Anyway, it’s tough to watch your team on somebody else’s home court, especially when that court’s in Boston. The fans here aren’t exactly charitable to opposing teams or, frankly, awash in the notion of sportsmanship. And the fact that the Wizards had just beaten the Celtics two nights ago meant that everyone was a little, shall we say, pumped up.

Despite my partisanship it was pretty awesome to see Garnett on his new team, though. And to see him live, which I hadn’t done before. Dude is intense, let’s put it that way. Just look at that picture from the Jan. 12 recap I linked to in the first paragraph. And it looked like the Celtics were going to win without too much trouble, after the Wizards had a disappointing third quarter and were down 14 points in the middle of the fourth.

But then my man Caron Butler took over, scoring some amazing layups and getting fouled and helping the Wiz outscore Boston 25-6 in the last six minutes. It was something else to hear that crowd, who had been screaming so loud all night, end the game in a stunned hush. (Here’s the recap for posterity, with a great pic of Caron.) It was tough to be in an arena where the outcome was considered a shocking loss, but I managed to walk out of there without my huge grin attracting any attention. And listening to the Boston fans loudly bitching about the loss on the T, that was pretty sweet, too.

On an unrelated note, this is my blog’s 100th post. Go me!

(Edited on 2 Feb: Dammit, they took all the cool pics down off the recap pages. Sorry!)

Beer for breakfast, and other indulgences

It’s high time I talked about one of my favorite subjects in the context of the Philippines trip: food. I consider myself pretty adventurous for an American, which I admit isn’t saying much, here in the land where ketchup is considered by some to be spicy. But growing up, we ate all kinds of weird things: tongue, liver, kidneys, and every imaginable vegetable, including the infamous brussel sprout and ones you ain’t even heard of like kohlrabi. So I was well prepped for Filipino food, which seems to consider just about anything edible, including crickets. (Note: it is damn near impossible to Google anything about the eating, rather than the sporting, kind of cricket, so no link for you.)

First off, let me be clear that I did not try the crickets. And I didn’t cross paths with balut, although I admit that after a beer or two I might have actually tried it if someone had plunked it in front of me. But I was spared. Anyway, having said all this, the food was consistently awesome. Besides the daing na bangus I already mentioned, another seafood standout was inihaw na pusit (grilled squid). Just damn good. I was also glad to have tongue again, which I haven’t had in ages. Yay kaskasero for having it at your wedding! Also great was sisig, which is probably best when you have no idea what’s in it. (Everything is chopped up nice and small, though, which helps with any urk factor you might feel.) You can see the squid and the sisig in the picture below: sisig on my plate, and squid two serving dishes away from the camera.

Don’t forget the rice, of course! Rice with every meal including breakfast. And everything is eaten with a spoon in one hand and a fork in the other; you use the fork to push food onto the spoon. And if you’re paranoid about food safety like I am, you wash everything down with San Miguel, which is a pretty good beer considering that I pretty much hate beer. (Even Jet Li and Stephen Chow like it, so who can argue?)

As for nonnative food, well I have to laugh, because there are heaps of American chains in Manila, and I studiously avoided them all just like I do at home. Shakey’s is apparently popular there, which is amusing because I think they have almost no presence in the U.S. these days. And how funny is it that I traveled almost 9000 miles to eat the first Krispy Kreme doughnut I’ve had in a long while?

I leave you with a link: This article has a lot of interesting stuff in it about eating in Manila. And based on my own experience, I have no doubt that it’s all true!

Crowd control

First off, happy new year everybody! And now back to the Manila report.

I should backtrack a bit from the previous post and spend a little time describing our arrival on Monday night. It was a four hour flight from Tokyo, which definitely qualifies as insult to injury. We arrived around 10:30 pm local time, and you could feel the warm humidity from the jetway, of course. It was probably about 75F/24C and balmy, with a strongly funky overtone. Or maybe funky, with a slightly balmy overtone. Anyway, once we slogged through Immigration, waited an eternity for our bags—I think each person on that 747 was shipping eight boxes full of Christmas presents home—and got through customs, I figured we’d see the smiling face of kaskasero waiting to pick us up.

Not quite. I need to provide a little background on the scene, though, and explain about balikbayans and other overseas workers. Lots and lots and lots of Filipinos work outside the country all year, and then come home at the holidays. By lots I mean gazillions. So the international airport around Christmastime is a total madhouse (although for all I know, it’s like that all the time). For a lot of overseas workers, their whole family will come to meet them at the airport, and so there’s an outrageous mob of people waiting for arrivals at any time. So in order to handle the crowds, all the people waiting to meet arrivals are kept in an area away from the airport, behind a big fence and gate. If you’re the one arriving, you follow signs for the family waiting area and then get sorted by last name. Then you come out into an open area where your family can spot you from a distance, and persuade a guard dude to let you through the gate to meet your peeps. Kind of complicated, but totally necessary, I suppose. Fortunately it wasn’t too hard to figure out on no sleep!

In general, Manila is ridiculously crowded. Apparently the hordes are at their height around the holidays, so we saw the scene at max capacity. Besides the vehicle traffic on the roads, there’s also nutso amounts of people packed in the malls, and pedestrians randomly crossing streets whenever there seems to be a tiny break in the cars. (Or no break at all; I swear people were actually nudging pedestrians out of the way with their cars.) Occasionally the government sees fit to try and discourage people from walking across the faster highways; hence this sign:

Roughly translated, it says “Don’t cross here, you will die.” Of course it turns out that others have noted these signs. Funny, and yet not. People actually do cross any road, any time, even the elevated highways like EDSA, and apparently they don’t always make it.

Another thing I experienced that ties in with this theme is security. It was everywhere. You couldn’t walk into a mall or hotel without opening up your bags and often walking through metal detectors, and there were bomb-sniffing dogs and armed security guards in a lot of places, too. It was somewhat reassuring, given the unrest that the country experiences now and then, but also unnerving, since you recognize it’s all there because there’s a need for it. When we flew out, there were three separate security checks to go through at the airport, including one just to get into the building. Although, that wasn’t what bothered me about the departure. What bothered me was that they charge you 750P/$18 cash before they allow you to fly out. What the heck?! Fortunately we were warned at the hotel. Kaskasero, I’ll pay you back, I promise!

Daing na bangus and traffic

I’m back on the blog at last! First, a technical note. At first I thought of methodically going through each day of the trip, but then I wondered whether it might make more sense to do themes instead. In the end it looks like this first post has a little of both. Anyway, over the next several days I hope to post as much about the trip as possible, and if it appears at all organized, so much the better. If not, well, ya got tags you can use to find your way through.

The first full day of our trip got off to a good start, with what’s apparently a typical Filipino breakfast: daing na bangus at a local chain, Pancake House—yeah, quite the exotic name! Anyway, the dish is a fried marinated fish served with a pile of garlic rice that has a fried egg on top. Awesome hangover food, I imagine, and good jet lag food as well. In fact, after just one plate of this I wish I could have it every morning. (Here’s a recipe, here’s a pic.)

The first day also gave us the trip’s theme song, which is good—every trip needs a theme song. Thanks to kaskasero playing it incessantly in the car, it was track 9 from this disc: “Awitin Mo Isasayaw Ko”, a disco song covered by Pedicab. (Not that the band name means anything to me!) The beat moves a hell of a lot faster than the traffic in Manila, believe me. In fact, if you had to choose one word to describe Manila, it’d be traffic. Goddamn, I have never seen such traffic.

It’s hard to describe. Imagine a four-lane road, with at least six cars abreast. Imagine mopeds buzzing in between all the cars. Imagine a huge fleet of these crazy vehicles called jeepneys, full of people and decorated with all kinds of wacky designs. (Pic below.) Now imagine everything traveling at about 5 mph. Oh, and diesel smoke and pedestrians everywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that there are people who live in their cars permanently, trying to get to a house they haven’t been able to reach in years because of the awful traffic. In fact, traffic is so slow and heavy that vendors just roll their carts of stuff in between cars and hawk everything from peanuts to cigarettes. Totally insane.

Greetings from Narita

I’m currently sitting in Narita airport in Tokyo, operating on about two hours’ sleep, and my internal clock says it’s about three in the morning, just to keep you all informed. The long flight from Minneapolis to Tokyo wasn’t actually as bad as I thought it could be, though. Swami and I snagged one of the rows right at the back of the plane that has only two seats across, so it was nice not to have to share a row with anyone else. I saw a cool sunset out the window of the plane when we landed—picture forthcoming when I get back home.

Edited on 30 Dec. to add: here’s the photo.


Now it’s on to Manila, an additional four hours in the air that’ll probably seem much more like punishment. And the Great Asian Adventure of 2007 begins!

On the edge

Whoa, it’s been well over two weeks since my last post. I’ve been frantically getting ready for the trip to Manila and D.C., and at this point I think I’ve achieved Batman-like levels of preparedness. Anti-malaria drug, antibiotics, bug repellent, sunblock, hand sanitizer. Based on that list one might think we were heading for the middle of the Amazon, but no, it’s just bourgeois risk aversion over here. And speaking of bourgeois, I also have the portable DVD player, the digital camera, a schwack of movies, and lots of easy-to-read geeky sci-fi books.

I do wish we were blowing off the family Christmas, though, but maybe experiencing it through a haze of jet lag will actually turn out to be better than the usual lucid suffering. See you all on the other side—hopefully, though, I’ll have a chance to post from the road. Regardless, I promise a full report at the end of the month when normalcy returns!

One thousand miles

As of today, I’ve ridden 1000 miles on the bike this year. That’s a little farther than the distance between Boston and Louisville! (Swami has me beat, though, with almost 1200—that’s Boston to Birmingham, Alabama.) And since it’s getting damn cold now, I probably won’t get too many more miles in for 2007. Next year, the goal is to ride a metric century (62.14 miles); this year’s longest ride was the Hub on Wheels at 41, so the goal is 50% farther. No problem, right?

Nice view

Here are two pics from a recent trip to Asheville, North Carolina, both taken from the parking lot at the top of Mt. Mitchell. It’s the highest mountain east of the Mississippi.

How high is it exactly, you might ask?

Creativity, where is thy muse

I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity recently, because I’ve been in what feels like a slump on and off for the last year or so, and also because I just read Sandman: Dream Country. One of the short stories in that collection (“Calliope”) deals with the creative muse and writer’s block.

But I should elaborate on both of those reasons. The first reason might seem surprising, because it’s not like I haven’t been writing. The prime exhibit is this blog, which does count as writing, even if it doesn’t all necessarily count as entertaining writing. But it’s not like I’ve been staring at blank screens nonstop for the last year. What kills me, though, is that I had a taste of real inspiration, where I sat down and banged out a scene-by-scene plot for a story over the course of just a few minutes, a plot which sprang so fully formed out of my head that I was able to actually produce a complete work once I filled in the structure. This is in stark contrast to the rest of my fiction writing, where I have probably finished less than 1 percent of everything I’ve started.

So now that I’ve experienced one time where it was blissfully easy, really paint-by-numbers easy, I want to feel that again. But of course it hasn’t happened, and I wonder if it will ever happen again. I’d better be satisfied even if it doesn’t, you know? It’s a damn lucky thing, damn lucky.

Then, reading Sandman, I wonder how it is even possible to live entirely based on one’s own creativity. Anyone who writes anything, from novelists to people trying to put together an email in their cubicle, knows that many times it’s just a brutal slog to get something down. But to think that the result of that slog could be the difference between the success and failure of one’s livelihood, well, that would be a crushing responsibility. I suppose that right there explains the impetus behind works like “Calliope,” where writer’s block itself becomes the driving force of the tale. At some point you figure you might as well use the block itself for material. It’s a particularly crafty bit of self-preservation.

Creativity itself deserves a little more scrutiny, too, I think. I tend to think of people as either using it, or not, but that’s far too simplistic. It’s not just writing, or composing, or singing, or playing. It’s actually realizing that if you are hammering away at a problem and it’s not getting resolved, that you should try something different. It’s going around something, rather than through it. Which is why I’m sitting here typing this, rather than wondering when the hell I’ll ever have that flash of inspiration visit me again. At least there’s a blog post for today, now, and that’s worth more than nothing.

Striking writers

So Hollywood’s writers have gone on strike for the first time since 1988. That gives me the perfect excuse to think about what I was doing in 1988 (since this blog is All About Me, of course). That was the spring I was stuck at home before I went (back) to college, when I was slogging through a year of community college. I watched Letterman religiously back then, back when he was the funniest thing on TV. (For the record, though, I hate Chris Elliot.) I had not yet decided to watch Star Trek: TNG, which was probably a good thing because it pretty much sucked until the third season.

Of course, that was an election year, and the inevitable end of Reagan’s presidency was finally on deck. I was still too young to vote, and things didn’t exactly turn out the way I wanted, but at least Bloom County’s National Radical Meadow Party was still holding raucous caucuses. And we all have fond memories of Bentsen’s “You’re no Jack Kennedy” moment.

In the realm of music, I was just getting into Crowded House with the foolish impression that I was finally getting into a band fairly early on in the game. Then I found out about Split Enz, whoops. I think that was also during the brief period when Sting was cool, which lasted up until I went to a show on his “Nothing Like the Sun” tour in August and decided he was kind of lame. That summer was also spent buying all the Genesis albums, which may cause you to wonder whether I should really consider myself an arbiter of cool.

All in all, the spring and summer of 1988 were characterized mostly by lots of sitting around waiting for my life to get its shit together. Er, is there any way I can tie that in with the writers’ strike? Too bad nobody from the Guild is around to help me out.