Samantha Powers Was Right

Hillary Clinton IS a monster.

It's become a ridiculous charade: what will each new day bring? Will Hillary be making a "heartfelt" gesture of calling for party unity and a positive campaign? Or will she be making some new out-of-left-field, unsubstantiated charge against the Obama campaign? Hillary, just stop. Not because I worry about the divisiveness of a protracted primary campaign, but because you are starting to act like the mean-spirited, tactless political schemester your opponents have always accused you of being.

Besides, you are becoming as annoying as André Rieu.

I'm Not Paid to Write the Lyrics (and a public plea)

Anyone who follows my musical career (by choice, or incidentally), knows that tunesmithing is almost tantalizingly easy for me, but that writing lyrics is an unbelievable drag. I've written words to many songs that I'm pretty happy with, in retrospect (for the most part, songs post-college), but if anyone (outside Gibbs & Sharon) had any idea the extent to which I struggle, painfully, to get my thoughts coalesced into a non-cheesy, lyrical form, you would be amazed that I ever managed to finish anything at all.

The worst part of it is that, especially these days, inspiration is fleeting. The motivation to go down into the basement comes and goes (and is mostly gone). I need to be able to seize those golden moments and hammer the inspiration into reality. What's maddening is that I don't struggle for words at all in almost any other writing endeavor. But it is what it is. Just a bit ago, Sharon gave me a spate of time free to go down into the basement to sit down with pen & paper to come up with some words to got with this new song I'm writing - a song I'm more excited about (the musical basis, and the chorus) than any I've had cooking in recent memory: My Friends, the Brits. But here I am, an hour an a half later, with nothing to show for my time but some frustrated scribbling and my last free daylight hours for at least the next week or two flushed down the toilet. I have enough of an artistic sense to know really, really good words when I see them. And everything I was putting down on paper today was not it.

What to do? I can no longer waste any more time, especially when I am currently riding a wave of motivation to record. I must call on an old friend - my favorite lyricist (right up there with Paul Simon): P. Gibb! I need you! Please, will you write the words for My Friends, the Brits? Just based on the title alone, I think you know where I'm headed with this, but let's connect on the phone and talk it through a bit more (that is, if you think you're up to the task).

The struggling-with-lyrics thing; a significant enough issue in my life that I think a blog is long overdue. The public plea was something I thought I'd do for fun. But I am serious about it. Everyone else can watch this artistic collaboration come together first hand, and maybe even shed a wistful tear (or any kind of tear) thinking about the musical history of Pat & Dan.

February Movie Recap

(still in the wake of my reading of Dracula this past fall, my vampire movie research continues)
Bram Stoker's Dracula
1992
Rating: 7
Surprisingly faithful to the novel (hence title), however, cinematography was dolled up to the point of being downright distracting.. Some fine performances excepting that of Keanu Reaves, who was in way over his head here.

Clerks
1994
Rating: 7
Points for ambitious concept and ability to roll through a one and a half hour parade of goofballs interacting with convenience store clerks. Some genuinely hysterical moments, some groaners. Still trying to get my head around whether the crappy acting was at all intentional or just an aspect of the exceedingly low production value.

Sisters

A twelve-month retrospective

Sisters

Wirelessless

So, the recap:

The guy from Wireless Minneapolisvisited yesterday morning and the long & short of it is that our weak signal was unrelated to the Vonage issue. Doing a test run on an antenna outside our house got us a super strong signal; however we were still unable to get the phone to operate normally, to the utter mystification of the tech. I have a theory that, since we were relatively early adopters of Vonage, we are working with something like a 1st-generation modem, without some of the bulit-in quality assurance technology, and that it is unable to comprehend the varying signal that is through-the-air. I could have potentially worked through Vonage to try and get an updated modem, but I'm not sure the extra hassle (extra days without phone service, and trying to work out something so Comcast didn't terminate our existing contract in the meantime) was worth a gamble on a theory based on nothing buy nearly undeducated speculation.

Wireless Minneapolis may roll out a package option to include internet phone sometime in another year or so. If so, I'm back in the game.

January Movie Recap

Thought I'd take a cue from Mixx and start offering up movie thoughts - recapping a given month's viewings in a single post . It'll be pretty easy, as I'm just lifting the ones I'm already doing for Dan's Movies 2008. You guys in the "inner circle" will just get a sneak preview. Here's January, a little after the fact. Things started out on a slooow pace, owing to an incredibly busy start to the year; but I was fortunate to begin things on a streak of three straight "8s."

Silent Movie
1976
rating: 8
True, Mel Brooks has a weakness for working really hard on gags that don't advance the story, but I found this non-stop smorgasboard of laughs (some big, some small), refreshing and enjoyable; especially as I did not suffer so much as a single, unwelcomed and cheesy, "poignant moment."

Gilbert Goddfried: Dirty Jokes
2005
rating: 8
Laughs aplenty in this vulgar 49-minute capture of a small club show of the comedian, including an impressive, 12-minute version of infamous "The Aristocrats."

The Apartment
1960
rating: 8
Recalling a workday world setting that is dated but themes of skullduggery that are not, this Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine romantic comedy is compelling, involved, and - in the end - quite sweet.

SPAM as Spoken Word

The cast....

Jenifer Grubbs and Luitpold Tarwater (intrepid reporters)
August Freudenburg (the absent-minded reporter)
Bartholomew Cordova (time-traveler)
Gladwyn Barreto (the hit-man)
Brock Bradshaw (the quarterback)
Luke Lathan (man about town)
Toby Cain (the "other man")
Dylan Potts (the struggling musician)
Bruno Colbert and Jake Martin (from the Motor-Cycle gang)
Simon Frye (wealthy financier)
Barton Bellamy (his driver)
Cooper Adams (anchorman)
Cornelia Neri (daughter of the prophesizer)
Gustavo Wolf (of the German Secret Police)
Young Beard (the hero)
and introducing...
Mitchel Starks (the autistic boy nobody notices)

It is What it Is.

In the four days since I've had it set up, my Wireless Minneapolis has been an unequivocable disaster. Our internet connection is usually there (but sometimes not), but the signal strength is too weak to support Vonage. We can make calls (except when we can't, and never from our handheld unit), but cannot receive them (except twice, and then only on the base unit).

We have a transmitter node a half block away and our antenna is about a foot from a window, angled right towards it. My steel siding should not be an issue, according to the most recent tech to whom I've spoken. According to all of them, my connection speed should just be "screaming," but - in fact - it is like a limp dick.

In my last couple of calls in, I've tried to impress upon them the difficulty of leading a normal life when unable to receive phone calls at home. And I have two more days until Comcast sends out some fucker to terminate our connection to them. In one last-ditch effort to try and keep me as a subscriber, Wireless Minneapolis is going to send out a tech Thursday morning to try and see if an externally-mounted antenna will do the trick. They claim a 98% success rate when such odd cases as mine are “escalated.”

I’ll still believe this one when I see it.

From doctors to tech service people to financial advisors, I have a long history of being told: “Now THAT’s a new one.” For me, in issues ranging from foot care to routing numbers to just plain expecting a CD-ROM to work, abnormality is the norm. At this point – and really since about age 16 – I’ve learned to expect the unexpected.

Amazing. Transformative, almost. The journey begins?

(pretty much transcribed from an email to Mixx earlier to-day)

Amazing. Transformative for me, almost.

Last I saw the final two parts of a three-part series on PBS called "Walking the Bible," in which the host, a guy by the name of Bruce Feiler, traces the path of the Israelites during their exodus out of Egypt during the five books of Moses in the Old Testament. But that doesn't do the program, or its effect on me, justice.

Perhaps it was the peaceful, meditative atmosphere surrounding the viewing (Rose fell asleep in my lap in a darkened living room. I didn't want to risk setting her down anywhere & waking her up, so I just hung out there in the dark until I decided to flip on the tv). But - and I've mentioned this before - I sometimes am awe-inspired by the character of religious antiquity. The permanence and history of of some of the places & cultures this guy visited was pretty amazing. I found it interesting, the transformative (to use the word) journey Feiler went through in writing the book/doing the film. Some interesting stuf fif you happen to want to read an interview with him: http://www.pbs.org/walkingthebible/interview.html He sums up his experience with "The story of Walking the Bible for me is that I went inlooking for science, and came out craving meaning, in a nutshell."

I've been so utterly turned off by almost every religious instance I have observed in the world over the past few years, that I've pretty much closed myself off to even being open to an opportunity for my own religious experience. He doesn't exactly come out of the experience saying that his faith in such and such religion has been confirmed, but just that - going into this incredibly stark environment, in the midst of these powerfully moving symbols that are at the root of these religions, you are suddenly able to let go of various rational pieces of your brain and open yourself up to something higher. Don't freak out - I'm not joining a revivalist congregation of any sort any time soon. But I think this whole thing about me being turned offon religion has made me deny a certain aspect of my being, which is thatI still crave a sort of meaning that is beyond that which I can touch and see and examine in a peer-reviewed scientific study. And I found myself, at the end of the viewing, with this sort of "journey" suddenly back on the radar, where before it was not. Wow - this is the power of public media in action, huh?

In any event, a viewing of all three parts in one sitting is currently on the agenda, and the book is definitely going in the GoodReads queue.

I also hope Mixx will post his own perception-altering experience he shared in response to my original email.