I love you for sentimental reasons

As Ben Gibbard sings us his thoughts as only he sings them, you can’t help but think about your own life. Whether you admit it or not, if you’re of this generation, your thoughts probably sound a lot like his. His are literal, they are emotional, and they come after benchmark decisions and encounters. Your lying in your twin sized bed, you are at the Bixby canyon bridge, you think you are drunk enough to drive her home, and you are no closer to any kind of truth.

He’s like the guy who talks to himself when he’s walking alone, and hates walking alone. I get the impression that his life has been a series of relationships that were glorious once and burned away. In a recent essay in Paste magazine he confesses that he thought rock stardom would give him all the answers, but instead he feels just as pulverized by life as ever.

This is what Jack Kerouac felt when he wrote Big Sur. He let utter helplessness, alcohol and the despair of the people he loved consume him on that canyon where so many moneyed people vacation now. What’s worse is when fans were showing up at his door looking for some cheap rub off super Darma cool inspiration, man. Like the kids who walk up to Ben G and say “You know, I know I’m not supposed to…but I really liked your major label album.” So this is what fame really brings, more crap.

The wandering life of Jack Kerouac would be fun to deal with, but for Gibbard at mid 30s it’s the Big Sur that must be address. Kerouac’s latter year soul haunts on Bixby Canyon Bridge, the opening track of the new Death Cab for Cutie album “Narrow Stairs.”

Gibbard wrote these songs at the sight where Kerouac realized he shouldn’t write anymore, Big Sur. That text I have read. And I read it because there was a time in my life where I would follow Jack anywhere. It was summer and Norman was sunny and not populated. I had a bike. And every sparkling pool seemed deserted. I put beers in a book bag and jumped on my bike. This was the routine I kept for a few weeks reading all of Kerouac’s follow-up texts, which never matched that first thrill. Kerouac gave voice to the feelings I felt when I read On the Road. He gave me the ideal and then with Big Sur he crushed it. I put the book down and settled into lethargy.

Thankfully Gibbard went one step further and went to Big Sur. He one upped Jack because he came away from inner arguments, battles with the darker demon thoughts/memories with his creation. It shouldn’t be of any real big surprise. Gibbard’s voice has had, more than many of his contemporaries if not all save James Mercer of The Shins, this quality of nice. You guess his intentions are sincere, each syllable.

And this album touches on dark spots of middle age malaise As a result this is a darker record full of people who stalk girls and guys with insecurities like Bens. There are portents of apocalypse imagined during a California fire. In that track “Grapevine Fires” to fight the doom and gloom, Gibbard offers us young life, a girl dancing against a horizon all ablaze and the girl next to him that he’s drinking wine with in a paper cup, apropos of an early Death Cab song that comes to mind (“Champagne in a Paper Cup is never quite the same”) I guess when you are older and throw away all your illusions about material things bringing you happiness, drinking from the paper cup is even sweeter.

So, in one track you are seeing utter peace and utter destruction in song, which makes for challenging, rewarding art in this case.
In the imaginary conversation with Jack, saying he’s searching “for the place where your soul had died.” After he leaves, he wanders back to his car “no closer to any kind of truth.”

If you are a dimestore existentialist you might say that because each person has a unique life experience. A guy named Kierkegaard once held that instead of dealing in abstract principles (for example THE IDEA OF On the Road which is very fucking abstract and alluring) we should focus on the particularity of experience and its essentially individual nature, and only in this way do we come to realize our utter freedom (I quote from some one else’s summation). You feel fear, but that is okay because the fear is indicating that you realize how utterly free you are.

So Ben says goodbye to Jack, the ideal wandering American troubadour of light, and he starts digging back into his own weird, awkward stories. And voila! It’s a hit record. Surprise, surprise.
I’ve always thought this band original and that thought hasn’t changed.

I credit the unique chemistry of the band. The atmospheres inspire thought, and the words give vivid images. This combination has given plenty of aimless Me Generationers something good to listen to. I’ve been listening to Ben’s little stories since my best friend in high school gave me a top five with DCFC written at the top.

“Which album?” I asked.

“All of them. Photo Album might be the best”

The lunch bell rang.

He gave me Death Cab, which I still have, just as I‘m sure everyone who has has that first time they read On the Road. When our friendship died it was dead. I didn’t realize it and I fought it. Only till we both realized the thing was dead, could we be alive again. Him there and me here. To miss my friend is to be alive. To listen to the music we shared is to be alive…

Memorial. Day

The television news stations decided it was time to do stories about the soldiers themselves. No Chris Matthews tonight. I'd like topay respects to the boys and link to another piece of good writing from NYT folksy writer Dan Barry.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/26/us/26land.html

This story is about the lone Iraqi war vet in his particular health center.

Nothing for nothing means nothing

The philosophy of nothing has found its way into my day. It’s Sunday and I should feel comfortable with nothing. Yet in doing the things I had planned for the day, I am crushed by how wasteful it all feels. It doesn’t help that each activity reminds me with spoken and printed words.
I think of one of the Taft kiddos, J, 13 female, who would get loud, letting you know when she was bored. Solutions. Checkers? No. Pool? No. Tell me a story, J. “There was this time me and my friend were climbing trees and she fell down. It was funny." Did you help her? "No.” This is not the exact story that was told to me, but it captures the spirit of the story. On that day, even the timeless, divine activity of storytelling resulted in a big fat nothing.

Nothing surrounds us every day, and we must crush it. Yet, maybe there are too many people “acting” to the point where they are destroying--this is an idea often posed. I have to keep finding ways to argue against it. What the pieces of art that I have been observing suggest is that it is sometimes noble to do nothing at all.

Richard Linklater’s “Slacker”

Slacker is the filmic Ulysses of “Austin, TX. This is consciously stated in the film when one guy throws a typewriter into the river while reading from Ulysses: “Listen, this is what Leopold says when he got fucked over (by a girl).” The homage is a bit of a tongue in cheek moment with drowning of writing instrument, but I feel the director sincerely loves this book or else he wouldn’t take stylistic choices from the book: its absurd , strange serendipitous moments, the talking to people on the streets, the ambitious scope of representing varieties of people in fragments.

Slacker is worth watching a few times, but dangerous to make yourself a disciple of the film. Its mission, the director says in the anniversary edition notebook, among many is to pose questions rather than answers by using characters without history. Without more than 10 minutes of screen time for each character, the viewer will give all his attention to the talk, the words, not the motives. If we are asked what we think of any of the characters, we would say they are all assholes.

Kant took his walks alone.

One man literally looks like death as he tells a couple university students with a camera that “all you workers out there, the commodities you produce are just another piece of your own death!”

Why is he not working?

I'm waiting for the true call.

What's the true call.

I'll know when I hear it!

Appropriately, and in synch with Linklater’s strict guidelines for casting, this man looks like the walking death with no job. But he is interesting to watch. Do we want to watch him forever? No.

The characters in Slacker are indeed characters. We listen to them talk. When I find real people like this in the past I have recoiled and have been intrigued. Part of it is passivity. I don’t know what I expect them, us to be doing.

The man billed as Dostoyevsky Wannabe sits in a coffee shop yakking at friends who don’t seem to care what he’s saying:

“Who’s ever written the great work about the immense effort required in order not to create? … the obsessiveness of the utterly passive … intensity without mastery…”

This man, like others in the film, make their slacking principled. Has the cult success of a film like this made Austin an unbearable place to be or The Athens of America? I don’t know. Or rather, how many Dostoyevsky wannabes can a city hold?

Hugo (also human inspiration for the Oklahoma town Hugo)

The drunks and hedonists of Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” wax philosophical on their own indulgent living habits. Hugo is more of a moralist than Linklater, and his characters that wax on ennui and self indulgence are not portrayed in the text as artists in their own passive or exciting right.

Like Austin, Paris in 1832 is full of crazies who find principles while loafing, drinking and nibbling off the fat of the Paris land. Fringe societies are found inside and all around the luxuries of rich nations.

For one drunk, Grantaire, to drink is enough when revolutionaries are shedding blood in the beautiful June.

I criticize, but I don’t insult. I’m speaking here without malice and to ease my conscience. Receive, Father Eternal, the assurance of my distinguished respects. Oh! By all saints of Olympus and by all gods of Paradise, I wasn’t made to be a Parisian, that is to say, to ricochet forever, like a shuttlecock between two rackets, from the company of loafers to the company of rioters! I was made to be a Turk looking on all day long at Oriental hussies performing those exquisite Egyptian dances.

More wine drinking from a drunk wiseman who gets a lovely girl pregnant and leaves her to resume his lawyering. This is Tholomyes:

Down with wisdom! Forget all I’ve said. Let’s be neither prudes, nor prudent! I drink to joy; let’s be joyful. Let’s finish our course of study with folly and food. Indigestion and the Digest. The world is one big diamonds and I’m happy!

The all over the place points elsewhere in the rant contradict each other, and he uses none of his knowledge for noble deeds done by the likes of other characters in the novel who have the economic odds stacked against them. Like some of the Bud, Pacifico drinkers in Slacker, one could say that these two characters from Hugo’s world are wasting their intelligences.

That may be the biggest challenge that faces us: how to apply the knowledge we glean from others, school or elsewhere. We may be lucky if we find one application a year that contributes to the greater good. A film like Linklater's is good because it poses questions that most films don't give a shit about. It holds a window to you in hopes that you realize that you're own intelligence is unique and open, it could be wasted by your employer or you can own it and find avenues for independent expression (as Linklater and Hugo have) or you can search for….Well we are always searching aren’t we?

I think for Hugo what makes Paris great is that its young people are always so aware of their potential that they riot when they perceive society to be unjust, wasting their potential. Take the recent example of rioters. Kids were not getting jobs after college because old folks weren't leaving theirs. Their intellegences were being wasted, as they saw it and the young folks held protest in and around The Sorbonne.

Throw Hugo's freedom fighters in America and they will risk being strangled and pacified by internet and a pair of headphones, as I am right now. It's the 21st century, Thom Yorke is telling me.

There is this constant struggle of tone in the book between terrible and beautiful. It is beautiful to be a watchdog over society, and it is terrible when the group takes indignation way past the shoreline where unnecessary death is the result of the wave of protest. In which case Wannabe Dosteyfsky says, "I told you so!"

Paris is both those things, terrible and beautiful (as Yeats also said of Dublin, Ireland 1919). Riots are destructive, and little tragedies spurn from them, but they are the soul of Paris. And the people who so thrive to put ideas into action are beautiful in spirit. Some of these actions, Hugo says, have made Paris “The light of the world" (and certainly the American Revolution and the French Rev that the fighters in Hugos are nostalgic for are spiritual kin).

And it can be said that Slacker was the light of independent film in the early nineties, showing what young people could do with their energy, a camera and $20,000 bucks.

So how shall we find this balance? What are you going to do with your knowledge?

At the Movies: South Land Tales

(May read like Greek if you haven't seen this film)

I suppose there are dozens of angles I could use to approach this sprawling, weird "tale."

First, I will say that it opened my eyes to talent that I once would have dismissed. Watching the star power of Sean William Scott, who flexes some nice subtle acting chops here, Duane (The Rock) Johnson and Justin Timberlake was something of a pleasure.

Second, an independent voice in the director Richard Kelly who boggled my imagination in high school with his film Donnie Darko. I'm tempted to put him in the arena with David Gordon Green, Gus Van Sant and Paul Thomas Anderson as uncompromising, lyrical directors. But Kelly has some focusing to do. But he's got the lyrical part down, and that's important.

This film has a doomsday plot that's, like Darko, hard to follow, and probably takes a few viewings for the average viewer to nail down.

But it's not really worth it. The movie takes so many chances visually, comedically, etc. The audacity, the nerve that this film has is incredible. I still can't believe it got made. And I don't exactly recommend it for all. It got boo'd at Cannes and it made no money (this it shares company with every other movie made which concerns the current war in Iraq).

The only angle I can focus on I think is the Iraq one, because it is the one plot thread that is grounded in some serious realism. Justin Timberlake and Stilfer (I'll take the liberty to call him) got back from Fallujah. This immediately resonated with me because I met at Chicago O'Hare airport a careful speaking black man who was a veteran of that foggy battle, or "push." He drained 3 margaritas during our short talk.

"Full Metal Jacket shit," I remember him telling me.

And when the shit is fucked up, why not be an anarchist in terms of addressing this issue on film terms. Kelly has a get-even tale in store for his characters, and it's the first movie i've seen that has fun with the war in a way that's still pretty indignant. It may be my favorite of the pictures though I haven't seen Kimberly Pierce's Stop Less yet.

One of the veterans in the film uses a kind of Soma (there are Huxley and Orwellian plot constructs at work in this film it can probably go without saying), and another character is a Soma, dreamy and numb, and he's been thwarted through time in a real scientific time portal kind of way. But any young man who sees the shit they see over there, are they not funneled into a weird portal that will warp their sense of time and place for the rest of their lives?

Southland Tales exists in a place that's science fiction, but not really. And this very contemporary part of the film made it very alive for me.

The film has a lot of crazy ideas and they are delivered in a plot that fails gorgeously. I'm willing to bet this film will endure as a kind of cult classic.

And the soundtrack kicks ass with its Moby, Pixie's B-sides and John Cale-d out National Anthem

At it's core, it's about our boys over there and the ones who make it back here, here being a place full of equal risk, violence, turmoil in this film.

Timberlake is a third man kind of character, you hear him but you don't meet him until near the end. That's when Mr. Kelly delivers a master stroke, a music video (a medium comprised of our language), a dream sequence that manages to speak for the young man's angst for this 5 years and going war and the young man's determination to fight against this war. JT is lip synching a song that's not his, and I can't reveal the song here.

He has made a kind of rock star sacrifice, showing the kid's got some serious pop culture savvy brains. His lip synching, the way it is presented for 2-3 minutes in this film, transports you out of the realm of plot and maybe even film. I'm pretty sure that for this 2-3 minutes film we are seeing art. That is this scene does what art is supposed to do. Says the things a lot of us feel, forget we feel, and then remember we feel it intensely when the art in question shows it to us, puts in our face. It's essential.

And the director doesn't care where it came from, he put it there and stood by it the way a good pimp stands by his ho. And since pimps never commit suicide, I trust Richard Kelly will keep making interesting films.

A Beautiful Day In The...

Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the debut of Sunshine Bear and the release of a new EP from the dependable El Paso Hot Button.

But Saturday The Neighborhood made a permanent imprint on my musical consciousness. I rocked myself sweaty during their set.

I can say they are the most exciting band to watch in Oklahoma right now, and, from what I hear, Tyson Meade (DJ extraordinaire and former Chainsaw Kitten) thinks the same. He was gushing over a recent Neighborhood performance (seen here at Norman music festival/photo by Evan French, stolen off Facebook by Danny Marroquin).

Matt Duckworth's drums remind me of Death from Above 1979 in its different intensities and rhythms. The interplay between band mates is great. Phil Rice's vocals are sterling. The 3 piece manage to keep the sound slim enough to where you can enjoy each element, much the same way Vampire Weekend (who opened for The Neighborhood) and The Strokes command attention on first listen. Those bands have a sound that blew up fast, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the same happen with these guys.

Saturday they busted out The White Stripes "When I Hear My Name" and I almost rocked my head off. Their album Our Voices Choked with Fireworks is good, but the live show is better.

So if you get the chance to see these guys, go see them before they break out. I know I will again.

Book of the Week

Yeah. Papa Ernest. Some people were just born with a writerly name.

One of my former colleagues said she makes room for a reading of "Old Man and the Sea" once a year, to remind herself of beautiful language.

I immidiately retreated to Barnes and Noble and read it in three separate sittings over three cups of coffee. And, I came away with a lot more than I did in 6th grade, when the book put me to sleep.

There's a lot one could dissect. The Big Blue Marlin is a metaphor for his career. But I guess every one has their big blue marlin. There's one big thing we want, and when we get it, it gets eaten by sharks. Life is hard for the fisherman. But the art of fishing, the beauty of the beast, the respect, the gamesmanship is where the thrill lies, not the outcome.

Others draw Biblical allusions to the Santiago character as he falls asleep with palms up and arms spread out.

All these things are fun to ponder. But the story is about a man with passion, a man who notices every trade wind, every fish and bird, a man who knows the environment. And that's what really stood out to me because I think our new generation of writers may not be so perceptive of nature in the way the old schoolers well. How well Hemingway can precisely describe the movements of the sea. And his word choices always feel right. I've never read the word "garbage" like I have today when I found it in the last ten pages of this novella.

I think he said himself that he tried to write about a real situation, a real man, a real boy. And if he did that, made things real, then others could seek meaning in it.


Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize for this, and it is a fitting last triumph. It feels like the work of an aged man (I wish I wasn't alone, but growing old is to grow alone, I think is the line where Santiago is reflecting on his age).

Favorite Line (approximately): Dimaggio was once poor like us, I bet the great Dimaggio would fish with us.

Recommended.

The Car Test

Recently I've acquired. Two of them pass the road test. Well three. I was going to take Death Cab in the Buick to Lake Thunderbird but a thunderstorm won the day there. The new Billy Bragg felt a bit like age, while the new Black Keys haunts the blind spots of your mind just as much as it rocks. It's been the second highest rotation. Pitchfork rec. World's Tallest Man and his excellent Shallow Graves LP appeals to my Bob Dylan piety. It's kind of like "Freewheelin."

The recent playlist in descending order of times played.

1. Death Cab for Cutie- Narrow Stairs (* Grapevine Fire is a high water mark)

2. The Black Keys- Attack & Release

3. The World's Tallest Man- Shallow Graves

4. Neva Dinova- You May Already Be Dreaming (interviewed them)

5. Tom Waits- Orphans, Brawlers, Bastards (coming to Oklahoma! There's a song about a North Carolina diner on here that'll tear your heart out and pour scalding hot brown stuff on it)

6. Coldplay- Violet Hill (new layers of sound for the band; Produced by Eno and it shows!; also announced they'll be coming; can't wait to hear the rest of this; wonder if the French approve of having a Delacroix splattered on like this....)

7. The Fugs- "Boobs a lot" (Ben Clack of Dark Meat admitted the Fugs are a big influence on their own psychadelic sound. I recommend catching them this week at the Conservatory in OKC. 17 folks on stage blowing horns and yelling and playing blues licks).

The Readers

Now seems as good enough time as any to address the issue of books.
On this point I agree with the Texas born, and Texas livin,’ author Larry McMurtry. One of the pleasures of having a library is that you can have these books around to look at in anticipation for the actual reading. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin called this “the aura of reading.”
In the same book of essays McMurtry calls Edmund Wilson (a giant of a lit critic whose personal library can now be seen at The University of Tulsa) an “accumulator” of literature not a “collector.”

I have been an accumulator of literature since I picked up a copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s “the Rum Diary” and was given a copy of “ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by James Joyce that I had to give back after a class discussion (which somehow compelled one classmate to draw a parallel to the film Ghost Ship, a movie I’ll never see but perhaps should/ I did later call this kid a dick in front of a class and teacher but that‘s because he said my Pony Press editorial needed “an editor,” which it needed 5).

I remember disliking having to give back The Joyce. I have made up for it by collecting books I want to read in earnest and by going to Ireland to pay tribute to Mr. Joyce, unfortunately he had broken egg shells dripping rain water over his dandy bronzed shoes.

My hoarding is something of an extension of the enthusiasm I held for these two books the first time I read them, 12th grade. And still my accumulating leads me to similar joys. I haven’t felt so good in recent years as when I sat on my Target futon next to the cracked window of my living room in the early sunlight, finishing McMurtry’s “Terms of Endearment.” It told a good story. Who needs a job when you have books., and when you still don’t really know what a good story is!

Reading Thomas Wolffe’s Look Homeward Angel on the bench between Bizzell Library and Evans Hall felt particularly memorable. Borrowing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise from my friend James and connecting its narrative to my own college experience. Leave it to Kurtz to pick the best of the best writers to read for his book of the year. Getting AR points in middle school for John Grisham books. Tears for poor Holden Caulfield. Listening to professor Masopust read Homer and seeing how many sticky notes he fit in it. Reading The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay on the Crimson red wood planks of my old Emelyn front porch. Finally finding a Faulkner (As I Lay Dying) I could understand at Lake Thunderbird.

I like to go back to books as well, find things. My collecting, and I’ll steal a metaphor from McMurtry here, is the river my mind has traveled. In my life bodily obligations always interrupt things. I need to find a career, I need to work, I need to keep tending to my inherent social itch, a garden is on the way. But like McMurtry, I truly discovered that reading was a pleasure that would be central to my well-being, or personal sense of satisfaction, for the rest of my life. It probably also something to do with the fact that I get sick of people but I don’t get sick of them. Even when I’m alone, I want to meet some more people.

To play with the stereotype of the bookish worm that Jim James of My Morning Jacket excellently has fun with in the new song “Librarian:“ I don’t care what any one says, if you are good reader, you are a people person. You just might not be letting the 9-5 world know that you are.

I don’t fully make sense of all the things I read, I can’t finish a crossword puzzle, I’m given to pacing and taking walks. I like beer. I read 3 at a time sometimes. For instance I’m reading my friend James Nghiem’s novel, another friend’s screenplay, “Walter Benjamin and The Dairy Queen” by McMurtry, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserable…and I’m hearing Tom Yorke’s ominous generalizations on “In Rainbows” on a speaker somewhere off.

It’s really no wonder that I always drop shit and no one I can think of really depends on me to finish anything, ever.

But, going back to the library, all of these half read books bring me comfort. They are pleasures to be enjoyed at a later time. And I have met people with similar feelings about books. Some of these I have envied for their intellect and talent and discipline, some I have studied under. Most of them are my friends.

I find that when going back to a favorite book, or disc you are reminded of the people who have created these things. You realize that they were once young, and they once walked the earth and had the same suspicions about the outside world that you and your little case of phobias have right now. And you remember that they created. It probably hurt, it probably required sacrifice. But hey left their work for you. Writers are often perceived as egoists, but not to the point to reverse this fact: they have left something for you.

McMurtry talks about how literature classes mean nothing to him. He looks for the great readers. The mark of a great reader is someone who can give you something you never would’ve dreamed of, something that slips through the “market place” and the “academy.”
This is where my status as “a reader” falls by the wayside. I’m still very curious about getting caught up with the academy choices, and that has been the single biggest flaw in my reading. I hope this John Wesley Harding book will help get me out of it.

And all I’ve had is the market place. But I do consider many people who have peopled my life to be “readers” just the same. And they have given me books to put atop my tower of babel in my home that I wouldn’t give up for the world.

So I hope that you will know who “the readers” are and I hope you look for them. Because there are lot of things you don’t know about civilization, deserts, rivers, cooking, redemption, football, India and other things. Gotta find your readers.

(In the photo above) McMurtry says Susan Sontag, S.T. Coleridge are great readers, the former he has known, the later sets the precedent for every reader.

My friend Jimmy (in green) reads everything; his area of emphasis is in Southern matters. He has introduced me to more ideas of theosophy and philosophy than I thought I’d encounter at this point. He’s not ashamed of the popular fiction. When I gave him a Wilco album, he came back with his own Five Theses on the lyrics of Jeff Tweedy. Not so many music discussions that I have get penetrating so quickly.

The man doesn’t fuck around. He always has a book. He’s one friend I’ve continued to trust and consult on political matters as well, since the English class we took on Wordsworth and Coleridge. He’s also a Calvinist, and that takes a certain kind of discipline that you need to look for when finding the readers of the world.

I know that my friend Hunter S. was a reader. He pointed me toward all kinds of good stuff: Faulkner’s Barn Burning, Woody Guthrie, Norman Mailer, the old testament, Howl by Ginsberg. He made a point to put his reading life into his journalism, which has always made for good reading for this searcher. My friend Jimmy reads everything.

Chuck Klosterman does it. As Radiohead slivers out of my left ear I remember his words, more than any other I have read on the band: “Hanging out with Radiohead is a lot like smoking pot with librarians.” Do I remember these words better than Pitchfork’s because Chuck is a real reader and has read enough to see where people err and when they write a word that sticks? Maybe. When Chuck left Oxford, they sent him home with a book, and of course he referenced the book--passing his readerliness to other readers whether they liked it or not.

When I sit back and look at my library I like to think that I will read all of them. I know I won’t. But I’m still glad I have them. My friend Moneybags left my home with some Salinger and I’m sending Hesse to Big D Carter. Austin is reading Camus but not because of me. I’ll probably send some McMurtry to my Germans, whether they like it or not. These transactions are also a part of this river.

I would like to celebrate some of the “readers” I have met in my lifetime. I would turn to these people for a recommendation or I have noticed how they have carried books through their life in a way I perceived as meaningful to them. If you’re not on here, you probably should be, it is 1:42 a.m., as I post this late night reverie. I offer apologies now.

The Great Readers of my Young Life

The folks at blog.largeheartedboy.com. Their 52 books in 52 days series really helped me clue into the contemporary scene.

Jimmy Williamson- The man recently mourned my scuffed up John Coltrane CD. And he was right, this was a sad loss.

Terry Shiftsfleer- This man had read all kinds of hip American writers I hadn't touched yet like Jonathan Lethem! Tim doesn't go out a lot ("I have all these books!"). He's well versed in all the political philosophies. and like me he's not afriad to fumble his fries at McDonalds. Met him in Ireland, learned much about much especially life in Germany from him.

Meike Broscinski- She will teach literature in Germany. Her favorite author, or the one she talks about with me is Nick Hornby and Irvine Welsh. My time in Ireland was marked with books and talks about books with my new European friends. Meike was one of those who became distressed that she could not read everything and I can count on her for a list of “Book’s I’ve Read.”

Jasmin Ostermeyer- German. Bad horror movies and Bertolt Brecht. She was familiar with a world I never knew, but we still got on. She’s also working to be a lit teach in Germany. Like Meike, has written for the public.

Recommends things to me that I look at longingly. Someday.

Chris Steffen (staffer at Rolling Stone, former Daily colleague): Steffen would go out of his way to hassle real writers for Daily stories. Steve Almond he interviewed and published a story on the state of contemporary literature. I don’t know who read it, but Steffen enjoyed the interview. First person I met to trash Dave Eggers. He had Kerouac on his trip with a band on the road and his library is also a stack of books he will never get to. I can always count on him to talk about music biographies. Elvis, Sam cooke, Neil Young, etc.

Mrs. June Page- The teacher who let me borrow Portrait of the artist and gave me a few good marks and some bad ones. She has read everything. Her lecture on melancholy is memorable. Studied at Oxford recently after becoming a nationally certified teacher. Can find 4 copies of the same book and she told me never to read Faulkner, sentences that last a page, she laughed, knowing she loved that shit herself. A good teacher. Raised some good, inquisitive kids.

Allison Meier- Her tastes have influenced me big time lately. In Hugo, her favorite, I see why we have it wrong when we scoff at epics. The European writers created little universes of their novels. She wants to write for the rest of her life. And she has the same holistic ideas of the personal library I have. I now carry in my possession three of her books, and she doesn’t nag me about giving them back, which she should.

Tyler Moneybags Weinrich- He is the target audience for a writer. He can’t read all the time, but when he can he does so he wants a good story. He’s good to have drinks with as well. Knows a good thing when he sees it, I guess.

Stephanie Singer and Shandhini Raidoo- These two roommates talked like characters in some literature that has fallen out of fashion on the American scene. And that’s a good thing. I wouldn’t know Julia Child if it wasn’t for Stephanie and I don’t think of Marquez without thinking of Shan welcoming her summer with “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” And of course Steph was in love with “Love in a Time of Cholera.” Conan Doyle, Alan Dershowitz the lawyer and a book about a farm came from this place. Their curiosities seem bottomless.

Cati Harris- Girl carries a book with her everywhere. Worked at WLT. Knows a shit ton about Russian writers, speaks it too. She is well versed in the oral tradition as well. She’s kind of a traveler, wanderer and is able to articulate her misadventures very well.

Damon Akins- Always carried a book, shunned Newspapers. Lived in the land of the Frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner style. I’ve never seen such dense essay test questions. Could only be from a bookish American Frontier Professor. Also an indie rock pedant who teaches his kid Deerhoof songs.

Gene Perry- Wrote a sci fi novel when he was 12, or tried too. Like to talk about strange literary facts at parties, like how no one could make sense of the manuscript that Ralph Ellison left behind.

Nate Weygant- Because he truly wants to know how Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon would’ve turned out. Claims to shun fiction.

Rita Kerezstesi- My favorite person from the literature department at OU. Seems to have read everything. Loved her thoughts on black literature, her angles seemed fresh (Booker T Washington as a trickster figure? Never thought of that). Had a sense of humor about the real “important” writers like Eliot. Very concerned with Faulkner. Talked about geography a lot, different places she’d been. Why communist architecture sucks, why graffiti in Brazil is interesting. That was good.

Honorable Mentions:

Jess Brown- Parties too much. But loves to find new books and encourage poetry talks among other Norman kids. Gave me The People, Yes! And some regional stuff. Loves the road.

Connoly and Connoly's Used Book Sellers (Cork, Ireland).

Man was an Orwell junkie. We went through passages of Why I Write together while he smoked his pipe under an awning in the rain. It was again confirmed that my study abroad experience was complete. He preferred Wolffe and HST, probably because the proper thing. Good set up, disorganized.

Wilder- Wilder knows Latin, or will.

Darren Carter- Just beginning to wade in the waters.





Lindsey Brend- I feel this one does most of her reading on the internet. But you can always find something interesting to read at her place.



Josh Stoops- A college career and a dose of Kerouac has turned Stoops into a promising explorer.

Baxter Holmes- A sports writers encyclopedia. Studies the cigar chompin' old timers and the David Halberstam stuff. Keeps a book in each room his house, like stations. book on the toilet. Book in the parlor room next to the big exercise ball, three books by the bed. And a book for the TV room.



Mr. Burns- It has been 20 years since Burns was an avid reader. He did a lot of Ayn Rand and all American history. Wars. He’s a Korean War veteran himself with a biting wit who loves kids though he won’t admit it. I never have seen a person handle wild kids so gracefully. He’s got panache. Bought him some Hemingway because Bogey played in the movie. And he looks to kick start his reading again after he retires in 15 days.



Chris Dearner- The man is books. Versed in computer language and Steve Earle on the side.

Old Oklahoma, in signs

I drive around a lot. And I have a camera. So I thought I'd put pictures of signs and things I thought stood the test of time here in my home state.

Some were taken in Kingfisher and Binger while storm chasing. Others in Guthrie. Still others on the north side of Oklahoma City where I have worked the past months.

The gas pumps are from Mustang!

Here's the flikr link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannymarr67/

Election Night coverage

I won't blab too much about this night. There are plenty of professional bloggers out there. I saw two of 5 pundits pulling out their own Apples on the way to a commercial breaks. Keith Olberman read from the Washington Post blog on the air.

But it seemed over for Hillary Clinton to me during her half hearted pre-victory (it was still unsure at the time) speech. Her voice was flat. And look at Bill! You can't see it here, but he looked deflated and bored. This looked like a campaign on its last tottering wheel.

Though Wolf Blitzer over at CNN prefaced his lead-ins with "CNN is the best political team ever!" kind of tags, I thought MSNBC was the place to go. There was simply more reporting. Tim Russert has talked to everyone and can even give us a "sense" of the voices of the people he talks to. Chuck Todd gave his red marker "back of the napkin" calculations, county by county, super delegate by super delegate. Olberman and Chris Matthews try to one up each other with obscure references and metaphors. That is balanced by the solid analysis of Todd and Russert.
Put them together, great night of political TV.

Skinny Guys Move a Ton

Exciting weekend.

My man James let me know that Andy Nunez, owner of Opolis, needed help moving a storage unit into his back yard. The thing was huge.

The pay was Pizza Shuttle and Miller High Life, a combination that never let me down before. It felt pretty old school to work directly for your meal.

I've always known Andy to be a good businessman and a fine drummer, but he really is the kind of guy with the vision to watch the History channel and put what he sees into action.

We moved the yellow box by placing it on 4 PVC pipes and rolling it, Egyptian style. When the back of the box reached the end pipe, the pipe was removed and placed at the front of the box.

With steering it took a few hours, but it was fun to watch the plan work out.

We successfully pushed the box safely into a discreet tree shading in the back yard, as you can see. Andy said if he was 20 he could live in it.

There were 8 guys or so. Most of us were not the biggest. We started with only one jack, that's why James has that towell there, to protect his hands from intense pressure.

Andy's brother worked the jack and gave directions while guys from The Separation and a nice fella with good sideburns pushed as well.

This along with the garden I've been digging have given me a good chance to work with the earth and my hands. More on the garden in another installment....

Am I My Brother's Keeper?

I must warn that a good deal of postings will concern films. There will be subjects like forgotten films, cult classics, book of the week. I'll engage with the pieces of media I come across randomly. The more I stray away from arts reporting, the more you'll see about flicks on the NMYP.

I'd lump this entry under the forgotten films category.

Today on cable TV I found two not so well reviewed films that pitted brother against brother. In The Hi Lo Country a big King Ranch style ranching operation splits a town in two between authentic cowboys and company men who gave up the cattle drive lifestyle. Big Boy (Woody Harrelson) and his brother LV (Cole Hauser) don't get along when LV takes a job with the big money ranch when Big Boy is off to WWII being a hero.

In Undertow, the third film by the young prodigy Green, who has so far specialized in films about down home people in the South, tells the story of a psycho (Swet Home Alabama's Josh Lucas in a welcome change of tone) comes after his brother Del (Dermot Mulroney) who has taken his own family into hiding in the sticks of Georgia (somewhere near Savannah). The brothers have some issues to settle and things get pretty rough.

Green is obviously exploring new film techniques in Undertow. He freezes frames, uses the spooky score of composer Philip Glass to give the banjo acoustic music an otherworldly quality. He also explores themes from old American literature. When the boy (Billy Elliot star Jamie Bell) flees from his home and takes to the road we are taken on a weird southern odyssey. He meets a black family that feeds him and his brother pot pie, befriends some orphan girls, stealing goods from rickety corner stores along the way.

This part of the plot feels downright Huck Finn. The family head Dermot Mulroney also talks to his boys about a mythical river man of Hades and how he takes the Gold Coins from the dead as price of admittance. Del's father stole these coins and give them to his son. Psycho brother is after these coins, which Del keeps in hiding.

This feels confusing upon first viewing, but I kept in mind that in this film, like all of Green's, people in his universe tell jokes and stories orally. There is no video games or internet. Emphasis is placed on the story and the humans who must interact with each other to tell them. This concern of Green's will lead him toward more literary themes.

In Undertow as in Faulkner the past always comes bubbling up to the surface of the present.

Lastly, I'll comment on a scene at the end of the film. Our Huck Finn meets a pretty orphan girl with a flare for junkyard fashion.

They drain a green bottle of wine together. Most kids would throw the bottle away in the trash or in the woods. But there girl asks him for a piece of paper and a writing instrument. "Writer your wish," she tells him. They both write a wish, place it in a bottle. And the girl throws it in the river. If the bottle reaches the ocean, which can be rare, the wishes will come true.

There is no trash to Green. He uses every resource to put meaning to it. The guys working in the Marina, an abandoned green house, a junkyard tuba. Like Tom Waits and his incorporation of junkyard things into his music productions.

And both of these men have been dubbed "American" artists. Is the only way to become a poet laureate in America to film shots and write verse about junk?

Naw, there's more here. Green deals with stories about family (the ones we are stuck with and the ones we make out of our own experience) told in a natural landscape, with rivers and woods and scraps that more wasteful sorts have discarded-- and only kids have the imagination to put meaning into these things again.

The first film was a modern Western directed by Stephen Frears (The Queen) called Hi Lo Country. This film is worth checking out for Woody Harrelson's (sp.) performance. He eats up the screen as Big Boy, the cowboy who refuses to get any job in the Post WWII economy that doesn't concern the cattle drive "Cowboyin' is fun!." Also there's some great swing country music in it.
Sam Peckinpah wanted to make this film, but he never got around to it. Martin Scorsese put up some cash for it too, I think with Papa Peck in mind.
I think this film is out of print, but if you like bull fighting, Coca Cola in the bottle, Hank Williams and Bob Wills, whiskey drinking poker players, blue skies and a big sounding score it may be for you.

Both of these films are not perfect. The acting isn't always so hot in Hi Lo Country and Undertow is so bleak and you don't see what Green does best (young love) until the third act of the film when two orphans meet and wander about together. And people don't really go to the movies to watch kids dig around in a junkyard (another stopping point in the Undertow odyssey).

But these are ambitious films, and I enjoyed them. The fact that I watched two films with such Biblical themes (Cain and Abel) on the T-V seemed strange and rewarding.