Tag: friends

a darkling plain where dudes are being totally uncool to each other

I think it’s time to get my dietary stuff back in line right now. I had no breakfast, no lunch, and two dinners today. Mind you they were good dinners and a right amount of food but this isn’t going to work.

Saw Stuart play and some friends tonight. Everyone was cool but for some reason I felt totally socially awkward, like I wasn’t wearing pants. Weird. I think it was just me, though.

Then salome_st_john put up the bat signal that she was about to murder her room mate for reals so I galumphed over there and we went to Kappo Honda (dinner #2). I have to say that lotus root tempura and pumpkin croquette are two of Japanese civilization’s great contributions to the world.

I love this rain.

Stuart Saves Rock ‘n’ Roll

changeng has been a hero to me for some time, because he does music exactly how he wants and is a superstar. Also because he can do the weirdest versions of songs with the funniest and most unlikely instrumentation and do them really well, not just the tacked-together way a novelty artist would.

Monkey, toy piano, xylophone, slinky, whatever it takes, Stuart will use it.

So anyway he’s saving rock ‘n’ roll, and I urge you to read this account of his gig at the Lords of Chaos tour. This is a NuMetal/pop punk tour for The Kids These Days: Atreyu, Deftones, Thrice, Story of the Year. Not what you’d recommend for a guy who plays “When Doves Cry” on a hurdy-gurdy. But this is Stuart and he’s magic.

Looks like he wins! Damn. Maybe there’s hope after all.

Chabon on MFA programs and being a little shit

This is interesting. Michael Chabon was a student of my father’s in the UCI MFA program more than 20 years ago. He’s been a family friend since, and I also admire his writing.

In his website column this week he writes about the value of the program. He’s given props to my dad before by name, many times, which was gratifying. This is more interesting. He talks about the phenomenon of being “a little shit” as he says he was, or more particularly a talented by self-absorbed young privileged man, and then being dumped into a group of peers who were talented and also different: older, more experienced, more mature, and more than half of them female.

Food for thought, especially on the topic of male literary misogyny. Oh, and I see it was published in Details, the magazine of little shits everywhere.

notes from underwear

Food note: Today I rediscovered the beauty of a whole fat fresh scallion sautéed just until the green changes.

Geek note: It takes all freakin’ day to compile KDE.

Drink note: The Macallan 12 year is a beautiful thing and on sale for $38 at Hi-Time.

Car note: based on an observation in the Hi-Time parking lot, the Lotus Elise is a beautiful thing if and only if you do not get it in a loud lime green color.

Love note: salome_st_john rules

End note: Everyone needs to read (more) Graham Greene

I had two dinners today

Pasta e fagioli and a romaine salad with blue cheese and walnuts. Then out into the brisk evening (read: too cold for me) to see if friends were about. joyfulagitator was about to kill us all but fortunately others showed and I assume they went off to have Actual Fun. salome_st_john popped up outa nowhere and we went to Kappo Honda and grazed a bit. They’re really good at this pumpkin croquette thing they do. You know. The thing. With a pumpkin croquette.

I got wrong number email today thanking me for linking to http://www.owies.com/ which when you’ll see it I think you’ll agree has some of the worst crafts material ever created. Holy crap that Noah’s Ark thing.

There were a couple of very 1998 looking industrial goth guys at the Harbor/Gisler Chevron station tonight filling up their shitty old pickup. They both had gigantic bottlebrush hair extensions in a ghastly maroon shade, those high boots with lots of buckles, those stripey socks, white faces with lots of eye makeup, the Gothy Man-Skirt. They were seriously mansoning my marilyn. Other stereotypes at the gas station included the Vietnamese girl with the blond-streaked hair and the Scion Tc and the chainsmoking Persian cab driver who was going to blow us all up.

Everyone wants to touch my robot.

hurray for springheel_jack!

I just got in the mail from him two books: Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps and Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato.

The Greene is wonderfully gloomy. Mr. G heads off to Liberia in the late thirties and wallows in the horrors of colonialism. Not only are things completely fucked-up, but reading it now I know how much worse they got. All of the gloom is worth it, though, for his prose.

Going After Cacciato is a wonderful novel that I read when it came out. I haven’t had my own copy (I read my dad’s) and hadn’t re-read it since, although I have recommended it to others. It’s a picaresque journey/magic realist fantasy set during the Vietnam war, but that doesn’t do it justice at all.

Thanks Nat! That was really cool of you!