McGarryBowen with the follow-up joke. Good stuff. 

Drog5, best holiday creation from any agency, ever. 

Here are some book and album reviews I just wrote to Erin Swanson in an e-mail. I wrote them kind of buzzed. Cold red wine in the evening makes things beautiful. I particularly like these reviews. So I’m putting them in a public place. 

Books:

(Neither of these are new. But books don’t have to be new to be good, ya know? I don’t care if you’ve read them already. Read them again. They’ll probably be better than when you read them last). 

1. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs - Chuck Klosterman (Why I think you will like this: Because he’ll take 2 random things that have nothing to do with each other, and make a point about how they have everything to do with each other. and how together they tell the story of the human condition. Put quite simply, I think this is what advertising is.) 

2. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway ( Why I think you will like this: Because the narrator, Jake Barnes, a writer, has an interesting way of being hyper-self-aware in that he tells the story of the human condition through his own mental processes. But not just that. He has an amazing way of saying so much with the simplest little dialogue. It’s like, he doesn’t develop his characters with descriptions or adjectives, he develops them with these little nuances. The way they say something to someone. Or the body language they use. And it’s brilliant.)

Albums:

1. EMA - past life martyred saints  — (why i think you will like this: Man, just one of those albums that hit the experience of being a fucked up girl on the head. But it’s rawer than Kate Nash or Rilo Kiley or Regina Spektor. It’s closer to Ani Difranco. But not so folksey. It’s much more indie/new wave.) It’s hot.

2. Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues — (Why I think you will like this: It’s beautifully reminiscent. But the kind of remincence (not a word) that is about moving forward. It feels like a journey in a desert. It feels like learning about your future by contemplating your past. With tambourines and shit.)

3. Cults - Cults — (Why I think you will like this: I just started listening to this one. So I can’t tell you much. But it’s celebratory and desperate at the same time. It’s laughing and it’s crying. It’s drunk and it’s high. If you mix blue and yellow together it makes green. And I like that. 

A few of these are puns. One or two rhyme. The rest are awesome. 

One of the first 5 minute music videos I’ve been able to sit through. Aside from Korn - Freak on a Leash. But that doesn’t count because I watched it on TRL. And TRL was awesome. 

I really like this one. 

It’s pretty long. But the best quotes are:

On banning the word “epic”: “Standards for using ‘epic’ are so low, even ‘awesome’ is embarrassed.”

On banning the acronym “BFF”: “These chicks call each other BFF (Best Friends Forever) and it lasts about 10 minutes. Now there’s BFFA (Best Friends For Awhile), which makes more sense.”

On banning the phrase “I’m just sayin’”: “‘A phrase used to diffuse any ill feelings caused by a preceded remark,’ according to the Urban Dictionary. Do we really need a qualifier at the end of every sentence? People feel uncomfortable with a comment that was made and then ‘just sayin” comes rolling off the tongue? It really doesn’t change what was said, I’m just sayin’.”

“And we would never have known if you hadn’t told us.”

I got Netflix for the first time in my life a few days ago. I am quite in love with it. And I don’t know why more people don’t talk about it in their daily lives.

Maybe they do and I just haven’t paid attention. 

Either way, I want to talk about it a lot.

I feel like I went to a garage sale and bought 1,000 movies and TV series for $8. And they’re all in a van out back. And all I want to do is get through them all. 

I can see this being both glorious and tragic. 

How am I going to get any work done this break with all those movies just sitting in that van waiting to be watched?

At the same time it’s dangerous to put out mass amounts of work without putting anything in. 

I’m going to post every time I complete 5 movies. Because 5 seems like a reasonable number. Even though I have a general distaste for our society’s unwillingness to schedule or count anything on multiples of 4 or 6 or any other number besides 5. 

Sometimes I set my alarm for not 9. But 9:03 or 8:57. Just to be rebellious. 

Moving right along. 

Here are the 5 movies I watched:

1. When Harry Met Sally: Don’t look at me like you disapprove of the fact that it took me 25 years to watch this movie. I’ve watched 3 quarters of it up until now. Anyway. It’s Annie Hall 12 years later. And Annie Hall was significantly more neurotic and painfully self-aware. In other words, I like Annie Hall better. When Harry Met Sally is still good though. 

2. The Jerk: Big fan. Steve Martin is kind of hot. Even as a retard. The thing I noticed about this movie that I really liked is…nowadays movies featuring “the idiot” character type are chock-full of stupid humor. But this movie has really smart humor. I can’t think of a recent “idiot” movie that uses smart humor. I know you’re probably thinking, well what about movies like Zoolander, Anchorman, Wedding Crashers? No. That’s self-aware stupid humor. i.e.- using stupid humor but acknowledging that it’s stupid. Which makes it smarter. But it’s still not smart humor. Disagree with me if you will. I love a good debate in the evening. 

3. Inception: Mind fuck. I really like an original story. Which was my favorite part about this movie. We’ve never seen anything like it. What I didn’t like about Inception was all the shooting. I didn’t understand it. Who were they shooting at? Why was there so much shooting? I don’t know. Maybe this is one of those movies you have to watch at least 2 more times before you really understand it. But generally I just feel like any movie that spends a good half hour on gun porn could be a half hour shorter. I liked the love story and the dream stuff. Couldn’t they have just been content with mind-bending, cerebral, fantasy, romance, drama? Why did it also have to be an apocalyptic action movie? Whatev.

4. Being John Malkovic: This was another really original story. I’ve heard people say that they thought this movie sucked. I didn’t think it sucked. I think it was just really bizarre. I enjoy bizarre.

5. The 400 Blows: You probably haven’t seen this. But watch it if you get a chance. It’s a French film from 1959. The dialogue is simple. But the character development is brilliant and complex. It reminded me of a J.D. Salinger story. 

ok, that’s all. I wish Netflix had a feature that allowed you to see what your friends were watching or share movies with friends. K bye.

You know what I hate about the world, but now also myself?

(3:22 am is a good time for a harangue such as this one. Don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s not.)

I hate the fact that nobody writes anymore. At least not for general audiences. And that’s most probably because nobody reads anymore.

This is due to a decision, that I think must’ve been made about 6 months before text messaging came out. The mobile phone companies probably held some sort of industry-wide convention in a midwestern highway Holiday Inn conference room where they all decided nothing longer than 160 characters was worth reading. And then twitter came out and said Amen Brother! And now we’re all fucked. 

Especially us writer folk. Don’t get me wrong. I love brevity. Really I do. I hope to one day be so concise that my sentences don’t even need articles.

Actually, I think all of us who call ourselves writers are in agreement that we’re perfectly comfortable being known as crazy fucks. But to be known as a crazy superfluous fuck, that’s a dark place from which there is no returning. 

Nonetheless, I hate myself for putting out one of those blogs that looks like every other blog on this vast internet of ours. The sharing of the videos and the pictures and the one-line quips. The re-posting and the uploading and the attaching — but not one single piece of original written content. For months at least. 

I used to be someone who wrote blog entries in paragraphs. 

And maybe it’s true that no one reads paragraphs anymore. But just because the rest of the world is proud of their declared illiteracy doesn’t mean the choices should be: limit yourself to 160 characters or figure out how to craft the next great American cat video. 

k, I’m done. Goodnight sweet interwebs.

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstacy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so you can give that to people, then you are a writer."