When Things Fix Themselves

Can a broken thing really fix itself? I like to think so. That weird shimmying alignment thing that happened on sharp left turns? Gone. That unnerving clicking noise my computer used to make? Gone. My leaky showerhead? Huh, it's fine now for some reason.

I want to believe in this because a belief that things can fix themselves is a vote against entropy, a vote against science and logic and loud shout for the idea of "good luck" or something. This naive hopefulness is probably a diirect result of my lack of mastery over the technical workings of these things...a return to superstition...where I need to make sacrifices to appease the Water Pump God and pray to the Microwave Oven Elves because bad things just happen for no reason in this world so why can't good things too?

Ultimately there is probably some confusion between the symptom of the broken thing and the broken thing itself. The shimmying thing has abated and the shower isn't as drippy but does that mean the problem is fixed?

I hate to admit it, but probably not.

The Fuzzy Logic of Credit

Recently I went to the bank to open a checking account for my company, Creative Ape. The guy setting me up said I had excellent credit and that I could qualify easily for a small business loan or home loan.

"Really?" I said. "No kidding."

I had always thought my credit was kind of mediocre. There were some big scabs from the college years and a lot of late payments, followed by the last ten years of what has been essentially non-usage. Debit and debit only has been my purchasing strategy.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to take concrete steps toward the organization of my sloppy life and one of my tasks was to cancel all dormant credit cards and open just one card with a better frequent flier mile scheme. I discovered there were still a lot of cards which were still active (although there was never any activity on them and they never sent statements and I never called that 800 number on the sticker on the back when the new ones came in the mail). I get a lot of mail from the different companies and often it was difficult to determine if it was a new card coming for an old account or if it was just a promotional thing or what. And who wants to read all of that fine print?

So in the end I cancelled about seven cards that had been dormant for 3 to 10 years. And each customer service representative stuck to the script and asked why I was leaving, especially when I had such excellent credit?

Because this is the data: I've had all of these cards for a significant amount of time and I'm not carrying a balance on any of them and I have no late payments on them.

Well duh. I haven't been using them.

But does the credit bureau know this?

Anyway, maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like my lazy, totally irresponsible behavior has sculpted my scabby credit into something smooth and firm and toned and reliable.

Maybe this fuzzy logic can work in my favor for a change.

Go figure.

Here Comes the Past

In the June of 1993 my girlfriend and I finished up spring quarter, quit our jobs, and moved to New Orleans. She had family friends there with whom we stayed for about four days while finding our apartment on 2nd and Carondolet. After that we were pretty much on our own. I had difficulty getting a job and eventually lied about my experience and got a job waiting tables in the French Quarter. She got a job doing photo processing all the way down St. Charles at the Riverbend. We had no money.

But it was a great time, and great fun. A great adventure, if you will, and one of the only memorable periods of my lame-duck college years. It was my first time to live away from Washington state and it felt so foreign. More foreign than going to foreign countries now. I crave this foreignness often but you can only go away for the first time once, and after that, well, everything pales.

It was a totally irrational decision to take off for a new place with no plan and no money, but had we actutally had a goal of scrimping and saving then we never would have left. And I can say that the adventure shaped me in some way, that it made me a better person, and more worldly, and much happier than I was, and I think about this period often, and about how even the humidity seemed foreign.

A couple of weeks ago an extremely flaky old friend showed up at my door. A and his wife were moving from Seattle down to Los Angeles. He was 34 and bored utterly with Seattle where he was never able to make headway doing artistic things there. He worked mainly in hi-tech and software development but near the end I think most of their savings got eaten up around the move and the transition out of working in Seattle.

They don't have a lot of money. And they don't have jobs. And now they are here. There might be a plan, or a loose goal, or something like that, but it all seems quite off the cuff.

Insane, kind of.

But exactly what my girlfriend and I did when we were in college.

So what has happened in the last 13 years of my life to make me change my opinion about this kind of behavior? I mean, it's always been irresponsible, sure, but isn't it worth it? Surely, it's worth it. Funny enough, I was one of the loudest proponents for them moving down and even gave some kind of "you have to seize life by the balls" motivational speech...but never in a million years did I think that they would actually get it together, say goodbye, and make the physical move down to LA.

Am I turning into a pussy? Is this what "adulthood" is about? Responsibility?

The whole thing is very weird...and it's very weird too to be one of two people that this couple knows in LA. So now there is pressure to hang out and have this whole chapter of my past reopened. I don't know that there is room for him, exactly. He burned me multiple times in our history. I don't know that there is space for new friends, or new old friends, or whatever. I have my life and I am satisfied with it and now there's this whole weird new awkward component coming in and knocking on my door.

But I am more concerned about what I am becoming, which is someone who acts out of a fear of losing what he has...instead going after what he really wants, which often entails risk...

Even more disturbing is that there is a motivational book about this called "Who Stole My Cheese?" and I have read it!

If I were still 22 and met my 35-year-old self, I'd spend a few days laughing my head off. Then I'd throw up. Then I'd laugh some more.

Eighteen Dollar Burger

The gf bought me an eighteen dollar burger last night (okay, so it was $15.50 w. tax and tip).

Remarkable!

Cinema of the Relevant

1. Jonathan Glazer
2. Alfonso Cuaron
3. David Fincher
4. Christopher Nolan
5. PT Anderson
6. Noah Baumbach
7. David O. Russell
8. Sofia Coppola
9. Richard Linklater (barely hangin' on)
10. Spike Jonze
11. Alejandro Inarrito
12. Ang Lee

Poseurs
1. Doug Liman
2. Guy Ritchie
3. Luc Besson
4. Robert Rodriguez

Noveling

I've decided to revisit the novel for another month, starting today. It's already been 9 months since the first draft petered out back on November 30. I can't seem to make any progress at all these days so I think I need to try the speedwriting thing once again. The goal will be to increase the scope of the book by about 50 percent while trimming by a third and dividing all action into 18 discrete chapters. This will be fairly hard because the things are still very poopy at this point. Alas, poop in, poop out.

Will post from time to time at the Noveling blog.

Anyone up for this? Anyone?

Cinema of the No-Longer-Relevant

1. Martin Scorsese
2. Wes Anderson
3. Atom Egoyan
4. Hal Hartley
5. Brian DePalma
6. Ridley Scott
7. Mike Leigh
8. Woody Allen
9. Oliver Stone
10. Spike Lee (oh wait, Spike is suddenly relevant again)
11. Quentin Tarantino
12. Francis Ford Coppola
13. John Woo
14. Anything with Al Pacino in it
15. The Coen Brothers

Joel Schumacher isn't on the list because he was never relevant

Meteor

There was this crate in the back, see, this unmarked crate in the back of the Bonham's and Butterfield's, that auction house on Sunset. This was six years ago and I was working on something called "Ginger's Rise," a low-budget movie, and non-pornographic too, although you might not be able to tell from the title. We were shooting some uninspired and talky scene in the auction house and ordered not to touch anything and there were paintings everywhere and antiques and they normally peddled fine furniture and wines and jewelery and even antique cars and things like that, but I am not a part of that subculture so it's hard to say for certain what exactly goes down at B & B amongst the auctioneering set. But I found this crate in the back and and lifted the lid off and inside was a dark gray stone, about two feet wide and a foot high and not spheroid or elliptical in any sense but like an enlarged version of the rock you might pull out of the ground, just kind of rocky overall, but smoothed out, very smoothed out, creamy almost although if you shrunk it down to the size of your palms the edges might get sharp again. I reached out and touched it and it was then that an employee happened by, because in stories like these employees wander by just at the moment when one is compromising his ethics and law-abidingness in general and spinal well-being too by leaning over and trying to heft a very heavy space object with poor lifting technique. He told me that it was, in fact, a meteor or rather a meteorite, technically because it was no longer not-of-this-earth and rather now-on-this-earth but not from it, if you know what I mean. I bent my knees and prepared to deadlift this medium-small stone and found that I could not, it was heavier than anything I had ever experienced, heavier than something designed for heaviness, like weights, for example. I could not lift it. It was dense and smooth and ridiculously weighty, like goddamn no wonder it made it here to earth where it probably crushed a football-field-sized hole in the desert before B&B found out and sent out an appraiser to hoodwink the white trash meteorite discoverer and buy the thing for a song and then smuggle it back to Hollywood to peddle to old Beverly Hills ladies with toy dogs and Bono glasses. I am telling this story because I drive by Bonham and Butterfields every day that my car is not in the body shop, and every time I drive by I think of the meteor and how fantastic it was that it was just sitting there, this object from outer space, amongst a bunch of vases and gilt-framed oil paintings in an unmarked crate where no one would ever see it except for me and my friend Luke who happened by with some scripts and when I showed him the 'roid he laughed long and loud and said he couldn't believe it either.

Unnecessary Risk

So we're hired to do seven days of second-unit reshoots on a poor man's "Fast and the Furious" racing movie called "Redline." My guys and I are on a commercial for the first two days so I bring in a whole new crew to replace us for those days and then we come in on "Redline" on Day 3 after the machine is already up and running.

The stage is up by Magic Mountain Parkway but us lowly second-uniters have other things to do this morning--that is, launching the producer's $250,000 Porsche off a cliff and filming it. Five cameras. Two crash cameras at various stages up the cliff, two cameras at the top filming the launch, and one camera below, my camera, right below, far below, but right in the line of fire. A wheel is rigged to pop off during the crash; who knows where that will end up?

The second-unit director is a short Italian stuntman named Johnny with a slicked-back pompadour. The second-unit DP is also short and Italian, and though there is far less back-slapping machismo coming from the DP, he seems willing to go along with Johnny's persistent need to push the boundaries of safety.

I turn around and gesture at the assistant director, who (with the neophyte key grip) is supposed to be in charge of safety on set. The AD makes a feeble comment to the director, who glares defensively. The DP looks at me directly and asks if I'm willing to do the shot from the bottom of the cliff. It seems clear that he is telegraphing me to be the bad guy here and say no for all of us, so, having nothing to lose, I do. "I'll be more than happy to roll the camera and then walk away and have the camera get crushed, but I'm not manning that camera."

The director storms off, cursing me under his breath (this is about 3 minutes after I've met him for the first time). The DP glares at me, as if to say, "What are you doing? Why are you jeopardizing my relationship with this director?"

And so it goes for the next five days, with the stuntman/director putting us in jeopardy. We're out in the middle of the street, where three cars drift around a corner, fishtail, then split the camera on either side. Or they strap the DP to the hood of a car with a ratchet strap around his waist and no helmet. The DP is excited to have this job; it is a giant step up from the low-low-low budget movies he is used to doing. He is going to do whatever the director asks him to do, and the director, since (as a stuntman) he is used to taking unnecessary risks, expects everyone to do the same.

So everyone thinks I'm a pussy. But whatever. I hate this environment where speaking out and standing up for one's personal safety is seen as the most treasonous thing in the world. Take the job. Do the shot even if it's unsafe. If you say anything, you'll never be hired again. Terrible. I'll probably never work with these people again. But that's okay...it's not really too big of a deal.

But the whole situation reminds me of Haskell Wexler's documentary, Who Needs Sleep? which takes on Hollywood and its abusive 80 hour workweeks that cause people to fall asleep on freeways. There are an infinite number of people who are willing to work these hours, hazardous as they may be, and if you try to change anything then you're gonna be canned and someone will fill your spot. It's medieval.

On the last day of the shoot I rear-ended this guy while driving to work. It's been really busy and we've been working long long days out in the sun every day and I was spacy but awake and looked away for a second..enough time for traffic to stop so I could crush the guy in front of me. My car had been out of the body shop for less than a week. My hood is all pushed up and my grill and bumper are demolished, but the car was still drivable. I made it to work and we worked all night and when we finished at 5AM, I couldn't make the 20-minute drive from downtown to my place in west Hollywood. I kept falling asleep and running off the freeway on the 101 and no amount of windows-down, radio-up, face-slapping, singing-as-loud-as-I-could would keep me awake. I exited on Sunset and pulled into a gas station and slept for a few hours.

So I actually feel lucky that I rear-ended that guy, when the alternative is much much worse.

This is a picture of two of the ridiculous cars in "Redline." The orange car in the foreground is a Saleen and gets 3 mpg.



This is a picture of the 2nd Unit DP, strapped to the hood of the car with a handheld Eyemo. No helmet.



This is a picture of the set medic, treating the DPs wounds after completing the hood-strapped, car-to-car shot.



This is a picture of the stunt coordinator mapping out a motorcycle stunt with leaves, twigs, rocks, and little squares of black tape.



This is a picture of Surly E.



This is a picture of the Corvette that got trashed in the course of shooting.



This is a picture of my newly scarred car after the last day of shooting.

Chess Boxing!

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=1348

My Ridiculous Rental Car

Last week my Subaru was crushed in the parking lot of the Camera House. The offending vehicle, I am happy to report, was the camera truck for the commercial I was working on at the time (Kay Jewelers, eww). It seems so fitting that it was the camera truck (our camera truck) was the very thing that wrecked my parked car. Something about my personal life getting the smackdown from my work life, an "unrewarding" work life, something like that. The production assistant driver punched the side of the truck to show how upset he was by this.

This is a picture of my poor Subaru, which was hit sideways in the rear-end area and shoved three feet sideways.



This is a closer-up version of the damage.



Now the Subaru is in the body shop and I'm driving a ridiculous rental car, the Chrysler Pacifica, a pimped-out SUV in Chrysler's newish "luxury" line (PT Cruiser, etc). The thing is so large I can barely wedge it into my parking space at home.

This is a picture of the monster.



This is a picture of my record-setting gasoline purchase.



The gf's Prius is at least ten times more efficient. But not as fun! No, not as fun! Besides, I will survive any accident now, yes I will...

The Big Boycott -or- Say No To AVP2

I've decided to boycott all remakes and sequels coming out of Hollywood for the next two years. These people need to be punished, really punished. It used to be that remakes and sequels were done only to megablockbusters, but these days if a movie turns a profit at all then it's going to get a sequel. Big Momma's House 2? Alien V. Predator 2? Remake of the Hitcher? Remake of Adventures in Babysitting? Love Boat's coming soon, you can count on it.

The gf insists I'm missing out on a complete life by not watching Superman Returns, but I have to take a pricipled stand on this one. I won't reward these executives for their complete lack of balls. Every year there are fewer and fewer films that don't come from some prexisting source material, be it a former version, a prequel, a famous novel, a Broadway musical, whatever.

The exception to this is Jackass 2, b/c it was shot on mini-DV for about 5 dollars...

I notice that Neil La Bute has remade the Wicker Man, BTW, and I fear the worst...

Big Muddy

Portland
Detroit
Long Island
NYC
Dyersberg, Tennessee
Oneata, Alabama
Pascagoula, Mississippi
New Orleans

Back in New Orleans again to finish up this State Farm commercial I've been working on. Because the French Quarter was settled on some of the highest ground in the city, there is an inverse relationship between the age of the buildings and how they weathered the storm. The 1800 buildings were fairly unscathed. Further afield the 1900 buildings did almost as well (the Garden District, etc). The areas furthest away, settled on the lowest ground, got their asses kicked.

Almost a year after Katrina and some of these areas still look like they got hit by a bomb. Gas stations with caved in roofs, Demolished strip malls, vacant streets, water marks on buildings 10-15 feet in the air, FEMA trailers everywhere. Each residence had a spray painted x on it with numbers filling in the quadrants of that x: number of residents, number of bodies found, number of dead animals, etc.

The French Quarter and financial districts are up and running but some of the suburbs still don't have electricity. Outside of the city center it's hard to see this "renewal" that's supposed to be happening. They are poor areas and they were ignored before and they are still being ignored and they will be ignored in the future.

Former population of Orleans parish and its environs: 1.1 mil
Current population: 200k

It kills me to see New Orleans like this. The place is f***ed up good.

It makes one want to have a drink or three and hey, New Orleans can still accomodate this urge.

This is a picture of the crew outside of Larry Flint's Barely Legal strip club at 4 in the morning. I have never felt so exploited in all my life. I return to a hotel room and pull out crumpled one-dollar bills from all pockets. Strippers, weird...



This is a picture of Sleepy E at the controls of a helicopter after the all-night debauch and one hour of sleep. Helicopters are always more squirrelly than you realize. He does not vomit.



This is a picture of some demolished homes. FEMA trailers in effect.



This is a picture of what I was looking at when my door flew open in midflight and wouldn't lock shut again. "Don't worry," said the pilot. "Not a big deal."



This is a picture of downtown. We were the first people to photograph the rebuilt Superdome in 35mm, which was completed the night before.



This is a picture of Cafe du Monde at 1 in the morning the next night. Being here again fills me with wist.



This is a picture of cafe au lait, 3 beignets, and ice water. Three dollars and fifty cents.



This is a picture of Sleepy E after his two-week beatdown. Note the classic Spud/Dominique era Hawks shirt and puffy-eyed optimism of the sleep deprived. You cannot hear the chirp of cicadas or see the winged cockroaches scuttling across the floor or feel the grimy press of humidity against your bare skin but you know these things are still there, of course they are.

Detroit Rock City

Didn't stay in D.Troit proper but somewhere northeast. Stayed in when I should have gone out: shenanigans at a Canadian strip club, director gets her bod licked onstage by Russian stripper, E sleeps back in the hotel.

This is a picture of the combo DVD/VHS player in the room:



This is a picture of the CD/alarm clock:



This is a picture of Ethernet and phone cables (no wifi):



Given this data can you pinpoint when this hotel came into existence?

The Whine Bar -or- Shut Yo Mouth

What is it about the non-complainer? What is it about this person? The stoic smile, the gentle reassurances, the fortitude, the boundless optimism. How in the do they keep their negativity in check? Or is it that they are able to shut it off at the source? How is this done? But how do they not rail constantly against the annoying injustices of existence? How I ask you? I try desperately to be like them, to keep my mouth shut, to detach, to cowboy up and be a real man who endures in silence, who never shows weakness. But still I cannot stop myself.

I complain pretty much constantly. I don't know when this started but that's where I'm at and that's where I've been at for a long time. There are two possible explanations for this: 1) The amount of complaining is not directly related to the amount of catharthis-requiring suffering, and so fills up time and space regardless of mood, and 2) That my life is unbelievably and consistently crappy.

When I first started doing camerawork there was always some older, bitter crewmember on set who grumbled about the rates, the food, the work, everything. "Why did he take the job, then?" I'd ask. "Put the guy out of his misery." How unpleasant to be around someone like this, a negativity oozer, a sour sack of bile. Yuck.

I have become this guy. Which is terrible, really, and selfish. I basically disallow too much complaining in my department but I'm free to whine as much as I want because it makes me feel better. It's what we do when faced with our own powerlessness. We complain. The complaining will not solve the problem, nor address the forces that created the problem to begin with, nor alter any decision or result in the future. It helps us to cope with our impotence and that is all. Can you believe that? How horrible.

They say committing adultery in your mind is just as sinful as the completing act itself. I wonder if the same thing goes with complaining...if I still experience a burning need to complain but do not--does this signify anything? Is this an improvement? Or is this just eliminating the symptoms of a much larger problem (alas, fixing the sweaty palms does not make a fever go away).

I wish I could be one of these people, one of these patient people who could stifle the need to rant about poor customer service and unappreciative employers and idiot policy. What would that be like? Or, even better, what would it be like to feel no ill will at all?

Perhaps it's God I need to find. Many of the poorest countries on earth (Haiti, etc.) are happier than wealthier countries b/c they have religion. Ah, to complain less, surely it is more difficult than giving up coffee. A noble goal but hardly realistic, I know this. God, this is horrible. I hate this. How I hate complaining all the time. Stop it. Shit.

On Tour

Portland is the first stop on a two-week, eight-city, post-Katrina State Farm commercial. This sounds fun but is actually kind of stressful b/c we are understaffed and there is a motherlode of unreliable equipment to marshal and I am the only one to blame really when things start to go bad.

I haven't been to Portland in many many years but it is beautiful and small and leafy and filled with bicyclists and young almost-indigent alt kids that bring back "My Own Private Idaho."

I love Portland.

This is a picture of Powell's.



This is a picture of Evelyn Waugh marketed as Chick Lit (!).



This is a picture of the Willamette (sp?).



This is a picture of the teddy bear that came with my swanky eco-friendly hotel.



This is a picture of my purchases (I have no business buying so many books and lugging them around without reading them).

Narratives of Wonderful Awfulness (Profane Album Version)

So, it turns out the g-friend's very good friend's boyfriend is a guy I know from a long time ago...someone I haven't seen in probably six years. He lost forty pounds of fat and gained fifteen of muscle in the interim, while I've bloated back up to over the 100 kilo mark (the shame!).

He said he thought he had saw me once about a year ago, walking across a parking structure in Koreatown to the Hollywood Video on Western. I said yeah, that was probably me, and then I told him the story of my near-fistfight in that particular store:

Here is the amazing narrative in case you forgot

J in turn recounted his own narrative from the exact same Hollywood Video on Western: a large raving black man in front of him was insulting the Chinese couple at the front of the line. "Fucken Chink blah blah go back home you fucken slanty-eyed blah blah." Then he honed in on the woman: "Your fucken Chink wife is an ugly ass whore blah blah." Apparently this went on for quite some time until the line clicked forward and the Chinese couple was able to leave.

The Chinese man elected not to engage, obviously, and they went home without incident (other than humiliation, of course). But for my friend, this event changed his life. "I don't want to be that guy who just stands there and takes it while some asshole berates his girlfriend. I'd want to kick his ass or at least hurt him in the process." J's girlfriend is Chinese American....so from that day on he started working out and now he's in incredible shape.

You might disagree with his reasoning, as to whether violence in that situation is appropriate or not...I actually think it is...the older I get the more I think physical violence is acceptable in certain circumstances. Call me a savage. But hey, sometimes you have to engage, like it or not, and when that happens you better be ready. (I encourage people to post their age-of-majority-and-older fighting tales here...)

But he's in great shape now thanks to this altercation.

If find that many good things in my life have come as a result of tremendous awfulness. I never would have lived in Asia and traveled had my life in Washington State not been a total piece of shit. I never would have become such a Productive Machine had I not wasted my years in college and not "felt behind." I never would have developed such dogged discipline if I had been actually able to succeed without really trying in high school and college.

"You should find that raving black guy," I said, "and thank him for changing your life."

"Yeah, I should, shouldn't I?"

Moral: Don't go to Hollywood Video.

Fife Milton Junior Soccer Club

First of all, the Americans got crushed again today and went home with their tails between their legs. People can blame the loss on questionable officiating, but Ghana simply outplayed them, just like every other team in this World Cup. The Americans were pathetic, really, and scored only one goal in three games (the goal against Italy was put in by one of the Italians). I don't even know why I care; nobody else does. Besides, it's cooler that Ghana advanced (the only African team to do so); they are clearly excited to be there and are calling half-day holidays so they definitely deserve it.

So, the question is: at what point does soccer become uncool? I played youth soccer up into high school and it always seemed fairly popular. There were four teams in our area for our relative age groups: Jaws (Raq's team--these days it would be spelled "Jawz" no doubt), Sounders II (a "sequel" to the Seattle NASL franchise), Sounders III (a sequel of a sequel, my team), and the lowly Falcons. All kids realize that kicking a ball up and down a field and running around is tremendous fun. And there was--and is--a great turnout for youth soccer, before kids realize that it's uncool, I guess.

But I'm not sure when and where this happens. Once you enter high school being a soccer player is about as cool as tennis...or cross country...or any of the other non-gladiator sports. There's football, and then, to a lesser extent, there is basketball, and then there is everything else. At least that's the way it was in our school.

Club soccer was in the fall but JV soccer was in the spring, so when I was a freshman I decided to forgo baseball for the soccer team. Even though I had played as a defenseman for the previous five years or so, the coach put me up as a striker in our defensive 4-4-2 formation. I was totally ineffectual. Where my height was an advantage on defense it made it more difficult to handle the ball in tight quarters or in attacking mode. I wasn't fast enough to outrun defenses and we were so bad that our midfield just hung back and packed it in on D, so there was never an attacking midfield...it was just me and the other striker waiting for a long ball that we'd eventually bungle and lose.

But for some weird reason I never told the coach that I had played 8 years of club soccer, first in the midfield, then in the defensive third. I was outspoken and a little bit of an asshole; so it seems really bizarre that I wouldn't have relayed this crucial bit of information to the coach. I didn't score a single goal the whole season and I started to hate soccer.

It's interesting how these little events can dramatically alter the course of one's sporting life. Get cut as a 7th grader and you might not ever play again. You're off-track and the team becomes a little gang and it's harder than ever for you to get back on track...even though it's only 8th grade. They know the offenses, you don't...etc..they know each other...So the JV coach probably just thought I sucked, and that was that. As a sophomore the better players moved up and played varsity. I stunk it up on JV for another season and then I quit. Soccer was suddenly unfun.

And that was that.

Moral: Speak up or have your talents squandered on JV for two years.

Now I'm getting itchy to kick the ball around again. I have a friend who plays in a rec league and I'm thinking about going out and recapturing my youth, experiencing those glory days anew, and pullin hammies in the process.

Will Middlebrow Ever Blog Again?

A. I'd like to think so
B. Not if he can help it
C. Them're purdy long odds, I reckon, given the evidence
D. If he responds to guilt, which he has in the past
E. Yes, but only fortmonthly
F. What's blogging?
G. All of the above
H. None of the above
I. Some of the above

World Cup and the Decline of Productivity

The 2006 FIFA World Cup is upon us and I am getting nothing done. These are Idle Times for the film business in LA (but not in NY for some reason), and I was hoping to use these weeks to catch up on life in general, but I shelled out for cable TV for the first time in my entire life and now I'm up at 6AM every day to watch the games. This is better than the 11:30 pm/4:30 am slots from the 2002 World Cup in Korea and Japan...but it's still wreaking havoc on the system. I am in a bizarre 2-Naps-per-day mode to accomodate the early start times...

The Americans look terrible, the Japanese look terrible, the English look terrible, even the Brazilians look mediocre. So far only Argentina looks good. Four out of the five African countries lost already (Ivory Coast, Angola, Togo, and Ghana). Tunisia plays tomorrow against Saudi Arabia, I think. So I'm putting all of my hopes in with the Mexicans...and my plan is to go back into my neighborhood and watch the game in a local bar surrounded by passionate Latinos who actually care about the sport.

Here's a story in The Economist about why the World Cup is far superior to the Olympics.