Quibble

Why is it "pre-existing" [conditions]? Wouldn't a simple "existing" do the trick?

freedom

Hi glob fans,

I've been moving into a new apartment (with garage!), my latest excuse for neglecting you all. But here's a satiating tidbit: go look at Thor's blog (again). He's posted up scans of the 555 article from Cycle World. (Also read his explanation of a dad wheelie and look at the latest exploded-piston gore.) Good times!

More soon, promise,
xo

so dirty!

Couple of recent video bits from my friend and club bro Thor Drake:



From the SFRC retreat this past weekend:

Sam Lipsyte interview

...is up now at BookPage.

He's cool.


I also wrote a hasty blog post for the KBOO Movie Talk website, for anyone looking for places to hide from the hideous sunshine this weekend.

Hate

For some reason, the suddenly-everywhere expression "nom nom" (or worse, "nom nom nom") makes me want to reach inside my own skull through the left eyeball and squeeze the life out of my tiny brain.

Are we five?

We are not five.

(For the record, I also hate "meh.")

some updates

Dang, it's already February. Where's the time go?

Well, two weeks of it went to Colorado. I skied, ate a lot of ice cream, lost a filling, spent some time with the fam, including Karl & Natalie & their brainy little kidget. Went out on the town with my Uncle Mark - always entertaining. Two towns and two bars, a long dirt road, confusing amounts of beer on the house, a strangely affecting singer-songwriter and a karaoke nightmare. Just some of the highlights. I managed to stay out of trouble...this time.

Back in Portland I finally saw "Red Cliff," the new John Woo epic, starring my Ultimate Boyfriend, Tony Leung. Awesome. It's close to three hours long. The original is even longer -- two parts, like Kill Bill -- and now I want to see that, too. The chopped American version gets a little zoomy through the early history parts. Tony is perfect, of course. He's so powerful that he can't even fully be seen right away; the camera has to sneak up on him, stealing glances at an ear, an eyelash, a feather he's wielding. Tony's kung fu is pretty strong, but mainly he is honorable. And romantic. And sad. The turtle formation will blow your mind. Bonus: arrow-cam. Also starring is Cop 223, very handsome as well.

Friday night I finally caught "Where the Wild Things Are." It was sweet, and the kid who plays Max is adorable, as is the big furry James Gandolfini, but I wish all the other wild things didn't sound so much like, I dunno, Claire Danes? or teenage Portland emo kids or something. If you want a stuffed-animal movie that kicks phenomenal amounts of ass, I recommend again "The Fantastic Mr Fox." And I guess I can see how, in the very broadest possible conception of the universe, Dave Eggers and Wes Anderson are related, but -- not to me.

Anyway, "The Fantastic Mr Fox" is the first movie I've ever wanted to do an interpretive motorcycle-ride version of. If that says anything.

Speaking of motorcycles, some of my pals from the 555 (Thor, Germ and T-Bag) put on a wildly successful moto-art-show event the other weekend. Photos coming. I spent most of it huffing gas in a small engine lab, dressed in a huge orange jumpsuit and trying to appear helpful while several of my very favorite men tore into the guts of my dead SL175. It pretty much ruled. Now I'm busily hunting an apartment with a garage, so I can do that every Saturday night.

xo!

2009 movie roundup

Remember last year?

That was awesome.

OK, glob fans. It's time (a little late, actually) for the long-promised and much-postponed list of movies I saw and liked in 2009, followed by a few that I hated and some that I'll have to catch later. Feel free to discuss, mock, berate, scold, judge, etc. I'm probably forgetting some, but it's a start.

Here we go:

2009 Movies Seen & Liked (vaguely in order, at least the first half, based on today's mood and subject to change):

Anti-Christ

Tetro
The Fantastic Mr Fox

Inglourious Basterds

A Serious Man

It Might Get Loud

The Young Victoria

Moon

Coraline
Public Enemies
Zombieland

Star Trek

(500) Days of Summer

Duplicity

The Road

District 9

Drag Me to Hell

Coco Before Chanel

Red Cliff

The Men Who Stare at Goats

Up in the Air

Humpday

Beeswax

Dead Snow

Defiance

Avatar

Hated:

Angels & Demons (seen under duress in Stockholm)

The Proposal

Friday the 13th Remake (seen out of desperation in Panama)

To Catch Later:
Ninja Assassin!
House of the Devil
Orphan
In the Loop
Thirst
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Up
An Education
The Hurt Locker
Sherlock Holmes
The Informant!
Where the Wild Things Are
Black Dynamite
Me and Orson Welles
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus
Bright Star
Broken Embraces
Precious
Summer Hours

The Hangover

'...a certain vanished grandeur...'

Yet another reason I love Katie Roiphe (read the full essay in the Jan 3 NYT book review for many more reasons) -- here she's talking about guys like Dave Eggers and Benjamin Kunkel, in contrast with the old rogues, Updike and Bellow and Mailer and Roth:

The younger writers are so self-­conscious, so steeped in a certain kind of liberal education, that their characters can’t condone even their own sexual impulses; they are, in short, too cool for sex. Even the mildest display of male aggression is a sign of being overly hopeful, overly earnest or politically un­toward. For a character to feel himself, even fleetingly, a conquering hero is somehow passé. More precisely, for a character to attach too much importance to sex, or aspiration to it, to believe that it might be a force that could change things, and possibly for the better, would be hopelessly retrograde. Passivity, a paralyzed sweetness, a deep ambivalence about sexual appetite, are somehow taken as signs of a complex and admirable inner life.

jeez, it's been, like, a YEAR

Hello, neglected legions of glob fans. I come to you today with a whole new level of respect for people who hold regular, full-time jobs AND somehow magically keep up with writing their blogs, or anything else. I can't even get the dishes done. I guess that's what weekends are for?

Good news: In mid-October I secured an emergency post at the Oregon Public Health Department (an emergency for me, not for the health department). I took it because it's thematically relevant to this glob (and because I wasn't sure my parents were really all that excited about the idea of me moving back in). I've been writing about the Illness Formerly Known as Swine Flu, or hini, which is very serious and not to be mocked. Here you'll find what little evidence there is against the popular and not outlandish view that I fritter my days away watching soaps and eating bonbons.

Fancy!

Anyhow. Here's some of what I've been up to besides that:

As hinted in a nearby post, the mighty sfrc voted me in as its newest member. The hazing and branding were painful, but I think it will be worth it in the long run. (Of course, on hearing this news, my motorcycle instantly died, so I've been riding a Vespa kindly loaned by Bradford ever since.)

What else? I interviewed Joe Sacco about his new book, Footnotes in Gaza. He had a cold but was very nice. I tried not to make my hero worship obvious, but I think he might've picked up on it a little at the end of the conversation, when I said something like "I've read ALL your books and everything you do is AWESOME and I think you're just the BEST and do you think maybe we could be friends?" (Sigh.)

I've also reviewed a couple of other things for BookPage, including two graphic novels, Nylon Road and Stitches (see below), and the new short story collection by Amy Bloom (good book, lame review). More of those lined up for the next couple of months -- I get to interview Sam Lipsyte, which should be cool, and do another graphic-novels roundup for spring.



Had another show on KBOO, in which somehow I lost control and admitted that as a youth I enjoyed reading the sort of books in which many of the characters were dragons. I still don't know how this happened. (It's true, though. Might as well get used to it.) I think the next show will be our end-of-year/decade favorite movie lists, but I'll put mine up here, too, because the funny thing about me being on the radio is that my tiny little munchkin voice cannot actually be perceived by the human ear, so it's all kinda futile. Better to write it down, I think, for people who really want to know.

Oh! Also, I tried out for the Mt Hood Ski Patrol a few weeks ago. It was a lot of fun, although I didn't make the cut this time. I think I bombed the interview. But I did get to fulfill a lifelong dream of bumming around with Ski Patrol guys all day, and as a bonus, at the end of the day, I saw Glen Plake. (I think I forgot to tell you that, Karl.) He was shaking hands and signing autographs in the parking lot, part of a tour of small ski areas on the West Coast. Awesome! Anyway, I think I'll try out again, maybe in February.

I spent Xmas Day on a Wong Kar-Wai marathon. Hard to beat.

That's it for now. Apologies again for the wimpy updating! Guess what one of my New Year's Resolutions is going to be?

xo

news

Speaks for itself...

SFRC

:)

cheating

Hi, this is a cheater post because I've been busy. (More about that later.) So instead I'm recommending something my friend and colleague Zach Dundas wrote. This is so pretty! Nice writing, Zach!

xox

on language

Jeez, I was already sad about the death of William Safire. But now the magazine has apparently given his column to this guy...ugh!

movies

I've been posting some movie reviews on the KBOO Radio blog, since the radio show itself is now only once a month. It's not the most attractive website in the world, and it's confusing to navigate (at least for me), but the reviews should be appearing here, in case anyone's interested.

Secrets of Success

What's really going through the minds of professional motorcycle racers:

Recent Adventures

I have a bunch of photos to post from my recent trip to Glacier Park in Montana with my dad and our friend Patrick Goodall, but they're not ready yet. So instead I'm posting some photos from Saturday's two-stroke ride, an annual event perpetrated by the Sang-Froid Riding Club. This was my first time on a two-stroke! I gotta get one. They're weird but fun. They sound great and smell even better! You can't tell that from the photos, I guess, but if you ask anybody who was hanging around in Lake Oswego last Saturday, I'm sure they'll tell you it's true. If they can hear the question.

These were taken by Kenny Shinn, who let me borrow his friend Mona's bike for the day. Thanks, Kenny!

At the Sandy Hut, the launching point for all good rides.


On the Canby Ferry, with Dora, Tom Burnett, and Berkeley. (I don't trust my kickstand.)


Made it! All the way to Oregon City! Victorious.

terminology

I wish "locavore" meant someone who intends to eat everything in the vicinity.

8pm and I'm still reading the paper

But at least it's today's paper.

From Michiko Kakutani's NYT review of The Bolter, by Frances Osborne - I can't wait to read this book. (It's about the English "scandal queen" Idina Sackwell, the author's great-grandmother and my new hero, a rotten-girl role model famous for "lovers without number," dirty sleepovers and public bathing in champagne, among other things....)

Ms. Osborne notes that in Edwardian London adulterous affairs tended to be conducted between the hours of five and seven (known as a "cinq a sept") because it took women lots of time in those days to unbutton and unlace their layers of corsets, chemises and underskirts, let alone relace and rebutton them up afterward, so lovers scheduled their visits for just after tea when "ladies were undressing in order to exchange their afternoon clothes for their evening ones."

Starting to understand why the Brits can get so strict about their tea-time....

Not Writing

More about my favorite subject, this time from Will Ferguson in the Globe & Mail:

Not writing is the easiest thing in the world to do. And that's what an author means when she says she is “working” on a book. Working means “not writing.” Working means reading, working means “research.” Working means watching TV. Working means taking long diversionary walks. Working means perusing newspapers with an unnaturally intense interest. It means everything and anything except the actual act of writing.

Thanks RVB for the link!

Dang

I knew something felt kinda off this weekend, and I just figured out why: I missed a "top secret" Richmond Fontaine show at the Kenton Club on Friday. Dang! I'm almost never in town when they play, and the one chance I get... Well, maybe things will get back on track if I just keep watching their new video over and over and over....

Writing Is Hard, part 573

Here's why it always takes me so long to get anything done, as explained by Jack Hitt in the Atlantic:

If the story involves talking to people, talk to them as long as they will stand to have you around and then talk to them some more. Keep reading. Outline a structure to the piece. Set that aside for now. Realize you don't know enough. Go over all your interviews and research notes again, only this time, make a laundry list of all the great details, large and small, along with the best quotes. Look at that list a lot. Begin the process of re-reading all of your research. Bail out of re-reading all of your research by convincing yourself that what you really need is a long walk to think about "structure." Walk toward your shoes and look at them. Blow off the walk altogether. Descend into a shame spiral. Now, catch up on your HBO tivo'd backlog. After several hours, take another ride on the shame spiral. Lumber over to the desk and go over the interviews again. Make notes of your notes in tiny scrawl so that they can fit on a single sheet of paper. Look at the details. Write down the big ideas that form the superstructure of the piece. Realize you are a pompous git for thinking that ideas have anything to do with it and go back to that list of details. Set it aside. Read some blogs.

The next day, re-read the single sheet of paper with the notes of your notes and wonder, what does this shit even mean? Then outline a structure. Indulge in a nice long afternoon of intense self-loathing. Start to write according to that outline. Throw that draft away. Write a new outline. Go over your notes. Re-interview a few people. Realize, as if you hadn't realized this a thousand times before (most recently, a few minutes before) that your own big ideas about this story are pathetic, but this list of details and the more decent quotations from the interviews -- there's some pretty good stuff in there. Fiddle with writing a few more paragraphs. Microwave your cold cup of coffee for the third time. Go over your notes again. Yell irrationally at your spouse/child/dog/a bare wall. Now, kick the wall. Limp. Review all the transcribed interviews one more time from beginning to end. Paste a large sheet of paper to a wall and, standing up with a fresh cup of coffee in your hand, outline the piece in really big letters. Realize that you've misunderstood the point of the entire story all this time. Scream the word "fuck" really loud in an empty room. Do this about 40 times. Wipe off the flopsweat. Look at the notes on the single sheet of paper and realize just how brilliant they are, or moronic. Espy the grime on your bike chain -- it could use a good cleaning with some WD-40. Start writing the lead paragraph again. Set that aside. Find that single cartoon frame from "Peanuts" that you keep in a box somewhere, the one in which Snoopy is reading a publisher's rejection letter for his novel that goes, "Has it ever occurred to you that you may be the worst writer in the history of the world?" Read it and laugh. Later that day, read it again and not laugh. Feel really, really sad. Go over your notes one more time. Look at earlier drafts and passages and realize that maybe this stuff here is the lead, actually, and then if you follow that outline from seven outlines ago, it just might work. Re-read the last couplet of the first strophe of Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella. Look at those riffs in the earlier draft again and realize some are not that bad. Convince yourself that your bike chain really does need another good cleaning and what's that gunk on the inside of the rear fender? Read the latest draft-like substance and think that, with a little work, maybe this won't be too embarrassing. Feel mildly excited that there could actually be something here worth reading eventually. Look at the list of details again. Re-read the edited draft and start to feel better. Or, if not, set it aside and then repeat all of the above instructions, only this time, after each step, masturbate.