Filed under: music | Tags: indie bands, ryan gosling, silver lake childrn's chorus
I’m a fan of actor Ryan Gosling. He was absolutely riveting in last year’s Half Nelson (for which he was nominated for an Oscar) as a strung-out heroin addict who still managed to hold down his day job as a public school teacher. Good stuff. Also played a screwed-up yet highly, highly intelligent teenager who commits murder in this overlooked film called The United States of Leland a couple years ago. Terrible title, great little indie film.
Now, Gosling has released an album with his own band, Dead Man’s Bones. It’s called “In the Room Where You Sleep”, and features Gosling singing and playing the piano, backed up by a chorus of schoolkids singing an eerie, goth-like refrain.
Filed under: iowa, travel | Tags: des moines art center, iowa, smash, tasty tacos, zzz records
Cutting-edge photography at the Des Moines Art Center. Yesterday's visit included seeing recent acquisitions like Wolfgang Tillmans and Chuck Close.
In my other life, I graduated from Drake University with a theater or journalism degree. I interned at the Des Moines Community Playhouse or wrote captions for The Des Moines Register. Made friends here, spent lots of time with siblings here in the Midwest. I lived in a shitty apartment on Ingersoll Avenue near the Alpine Bar and wrote many failed novels (this part is true). I drank in Des Moines.
Reality: Eighteen years ago, I made the decision to move to the East Coast to attend Boston University, never looking back. So it’s always a strange feeling to imagine what my life might have been if I stayed close to home.
I’m writing this post from a hip coffeehouse called Mars Cafe, with Neutral Milk Hotel playing on the loudspeakers and kids with big bolt earrings and tight pants working as baristas behind the counter. Musicians by night? Web designers? In Des Moines, you never know.
I have to admit, I like Des Moines. On my list of must-do’s in this sleepy little city:
Never manages to disappoint. And the curators have subversive taste (more for me to enjoy), running to Kara Walker and her no-nonsense cut-outs that challenge notions of male superiority and African American identity, or Wolfgang Tillmans, whose photographs elevate punks and queers to the level of the Mona Lisa and David.
2. The Salvation Army.
I always find the best stuff at The Salvation Army. The main store is located at the base of the capitol building; this year, I found a pair of super-cool camouflage pants for a couple bucks. In past years, I’ve scored a set of highball mugs with Freemason logos; 50’s-style tins for flour, sugar, and coffee; and a Boy Scouts t-shirt with Des Moines patches sewn onto the sleeves.
3. Smash.
Brought my friend Dan here last year, and he bought three shirts, including one that reads, “Des Moines: Just Outside the Middle of Nowhere.”
4. ZZZ Records.
Witt and I discovered that they moved this year–he thinks because they were priced out of the East Village–but this place is an institution, no matter where the location (as long as they keep their physical location!–don’t let the economy kill the indie record stores, yo).
5. Tasty Tacos.
I don’t know how to truly express my love for their flour tacos. Light, fluffy, deep-fried goodness. Only in Des Moines.
Filed under: intelligence, pop culture, world | Tags: housewives of orange county, intelligence
Things I’m thinking about: commerce depends upon preying upon the dumb. I want to say that I’m not an elitist, but sometimes I am. Why apologize for being smart? Why pretend we’re all equal, intellectually, when we’re not?
Let’s face it: I know that people are smarter than me, and I don’t fear them or take offense. If someone I respect mentions a theory or author I don’t know, my instinct is to note her or his name for later. Happened just now with the writer John Bellairs. Who is he? What did he write? Thanks for sharing, Trevor, I’m curious to find out.
The movement in America against intellectualism is so strong, and so apparent, that I feel guilty when I crave literature–a simple essay, a good book.
I recently read an essay entitled “The Fender Bender,” about an American citizen who happens to also be an “illegal” alien (an idiotic phrase–people can not be illegal). The author’s name was Ramon Tianguis Perez (a pseudonym, for obvious reasons), relating a narrative about dealing with a simple traffic accident. It gave me pause; expanded my already liberal mind to consider the challenge of interacting with police if you don’t have official documents–a driver’s license, a checking account.
Yet for all my intellectual curiosity I’m still drawn to The Real Housewives of Orange County; I want to waste time on the sofa learning how to decorate cakes with fondant. Tell me you don’t want to click on the links in the previous sentence. Totally irrelevant information when people are hungry in other parts of the world, when my country attacks and murders civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq.
What right do I have to enjoy shallow TV? How do we, as citizens of the wealthiest and most powerful entity in the world (except for the Catholic church) work to help the poorest countries in the world?
I’m depressed by the idea of complacency.
Quick break to walk Lucy and refuel the Mini Cooper at Iowa 80, billed as the world’s largest truck stop. On spinning racks here, you can buy an embroidered badge the size of a pizza that reads, 18 WHEELING FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA: IF YOU BOUGHT IT, A TRUCKER BROUGHT IT. Other fine gifts: a glass unicorn; a child’s t-shirt with the Orange Crush logo altered to say “I want my CHRIST”; and more spare truck cab parts than you could possibly imagine.
As I was leaving I overheard the cashier ask a diminuitive woman in all honesty, “And you want to buy a shower, too?”
There’s more dead animals than you’d think along the Eisenhower Interstate System.
At one point yesterday, between Erie and Toledo, I thought I was driving along a deer cemetery. Reminded me of of Ginsberg’s great poem, A Supermarket in California. (It’s one of my favorites, and I pretty much share it every semester with my students–California, as well as his straight-forward instructions for Ways to Revise a Poem.)
Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados–babies in the tomators!–and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I think it’s the images of long unfettered aisles, peopled in Ginsberg’s imagination by husbands and babies (in my own memory, a family of four dead deer) that calls up the comparison. Totally disparate things, I know, but maybe it’s the dislocation of road travel that creates these odd juxtapositions. You’re not tethered by the quotidian when you’re on the road: no bills, no garbage day, no arm draped on the refrigerator door, hoping a hot meal will magically spring to life. You’re more prone to free-association when you’re driving. To daydreaming. And to creating patterns and meaning unbound by minutes and hours, or the chatter of others.
I took the photo above on my way out of Ithaca. What’s so surprising to me is not the fact of the roadkill–I am thankful and humbled by the employees of the Ithaca Department of Public Works–it’s just the method of transportation that’s a shocker. Living in Boston, in the concrete heart of it all, you don’t find yourself following dump trucks with dead deer hanging off the back.
N.B.: The Big Boy in the title of this post refers to the 24-hour restaurant connected to my hotel, not a self-anointed nickname.
My overnight in Ann Arbor has multiplied into night two. Got in touch with my cousin Hope (her sisters are named Faith, Charity, and MJ) and we’re gonna brave the elements–zero degree windchill and a relentless blowing snow–to see downtown.
Ann Arbor has the rep of being a bastion of liberalism, so will report back if I’m accosted by all the same-sex couples smooching on Main Street.
Lucy in the navigator seat
Finished up my grades yesterday and set off for Ithaca to visit my nephew, BJ. He’s working at the Ithaca ScienCenter, and his supervisors have given him heaps of responsibility as the Museum Services Coordinator (suckers!). But seriously–BJ seems quite content with his job, and sees his important work as valuable for a business law degree in the future (forget NYU and Columbia, come to Boston College!).
Crossing an old railroad bridge outside Albany
Lucy has been dealing with the road well, only getting excited when we slow down at a rest stop or an intersection (New York rest areas blow Massachusetts’ away).
I listened to the the first half of A.M. Homes’ The Mistress’ Daughter, a beautifully written and at times, disturbing (Homes’ signature style), memoir of her maddening, mysterious relationship with her biological parents (she was adopted at birth). At one point she muses on the sexual tension between fathers and daughters–particularly with her gruff, ex-quarterback of a biological father–and their rendezvous in hotel bars. Also began the first couple chapters of Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge–not nearly as literary, but moving for Cooper’s reflections on the suicide of his brother and the wandering path to his career as a journalist.
Today to Ann Arbor to visit my friend P.F. and his new wife, Honor. Hoo-rah!
Filed under: education, literature, pop culture | Tags: angels in america, chalk, denis johnson, dream, jesus' son, pinoy poet, teaching, writing
With literary rock star Denis Johnson at AWP two years ago
I woke from a long, vivid dream this morning wiping my thumb and finger together. The narrative of this dream involved a morning literature class at B.C. I was so focused on facilitating a good discussion that I forgot that a group of my colleagues–a hiring committee, actually–was observing.
My notes, scribbled in notoriously illegible blue ink, were useless. I sweat under my necktie (why was I wearing a tie?) and in the creases behind my knees. It was the teacher’s equivalent of the actor’s nightmare: appearing on stage buck naked. My undergrads were supportive of my efforts but the cabal of professors was combative. What literary value was there in Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson’s story collection of a heroin addict? Why discuss the gay themes and criticism of Reagan-era policies towards HIV/AIDS in Angels in America? Who are these Pinoy poets, and why teach them beside canonical authors like Whitman and Emily Dickinson?
I’m what you might call an active dreamer: I swat my arm if I’m dreaming of a tennis match, and I talk out loud when I’m agitated or fearful.
After I woke this morning and headed toward the sweet, sweet coffee already brewing, I realized that I was still wiping the traces of imaginary chalk dust away.
Apparently, I’m only 72% experienced. Just took The Life Experience Test this morning between grading of writing portfolios. Some of my observations about the questions:
- quite a bit of machismo abounds–bonus points, for example, if you’ve ever been in a fight;
- to my pleasant surprise, the questions lacked homophobia (“Have you ever slept with a guy?” “Worn the clothing of the opposite sex?”), and indeed you had more life experience points if you had
- the target audience is definitely middle-class bourgeois folks like me, with questions such as “Ever had a personal trainer?” and “Been to a symphony?”
I cracked up when I noticed that on one page of my results, I answered yes to pretty much everything except “Played beer pong” and “Flown first class”. I was never a good test taker, ask my high school Calculus and Chem teachers.
Filed under: Guinness
I’m taking a break from posting about social concerns today because my roommate had to put his dog, Guinness, to sleep last night. That’s her with a catheter in her arm in the photo above (those eyes! even to the very end, though dogs can’t communicate verbally, she was letting me and Ashish know it was alright with those sad eyes).
Guinness was a loyal, oftentimes rambunctious (I say this only half-jokingly), and loving dog. After a few pints of (what else?) Guinness in her honor, I wrote a quick poem–yes, I do write poetry, though only about once a year–also in her honor.
Goodbye, old friend.
EXPENSES You get three options for your dog when it's time. A ceremony, sandal wood candle, five hundred. The funeral: friends, Handel and cremains. Five thousand. Her disposal-- just like Coetzee's Dis- grace, nothing, fifty bucks. No one should profit, really, but I'm not naive. I know you're not supposed to write about dogs, just like you're not supposed to choose. - Ricco Villanueva Siasoco, 12.12.08
