By the way...

Did anyone else see the response to Obama by Bobby Jindal and think it was incredibly silly in almost every way? I didn't know what to make of the fact that the GOP had suddenly started touting him as their future - "Hey, you guys like young, ethnic men? We got those!" I was ready to see some formidable opposition from the Grand Old Party, but, man does this guy seem like a clown. Am I wrong?

Click here to watch it


"I actually suck!"

Back to School Like Rodney Dangerfield

Prof. Whitehead may not want me here, but I'm back at Bennington to stay. All I have to do in order to graduate is pass one exam. With the help of zombie Kurt Vonnegut (Kurt Zombigut) I can do it, but I was up last night dancing at the Oingo Boingo show in the student center and performing perfectly executed Triple Lindy dives at the rec center. All for the love of my son...


Me

Stray notes:

• Today in class we read a piece by Martin Buber. I realised what loneliness is when I looked around and there was nobody to laugh with about the name "Buber."
• It's really cold outside. Whenever I walk out I find myself saying in my head "It's FA-FA-FA-FREEZING!" and wishing that I could say that to someone without them being irritated by it before remembering that that person doesn't exist.
• Emily made me a schedule, which is very nice of her. There is a man on it with my name on his shirt as D-Bow, with the "D" being a bow and the hyphen being an arrow. How have I never in the course of my life thought of that?
• There's someone on campus who looks like Adam Freed, someone who walks like Sean and someone who sounds like Brian Schultis (kind of). I wish people I didn't know would stop unintentionally imitating people I did.
• I had my first class with Margie-babe today. It was intense. I don't ever want a class to end again with out-loud readings from Holocaust survivors quickly followed by discussions of our majors ("Dance-Lit!").
• I told someone after watching the first episode of Friday Night Lights on Hulu that, though it is widely acclaimed, I don't think I could get into it because I'm not that nostalgic about high school and never really liked football. Then I watched two more episodes and proved myself wrong. Now I'm hooked! Go Panthers! I'm sad!
• I brought one of my dad's old pipes back from home after cleaning it out into my trashcan. When I was in the car to the airport I realized that the large piece of ash I had removed was the filter. Bummer. Now I need a new pipe. It will go well with my growing incense addiction; my room already smells like a head-shop, it might as well get some of the accouterments. Next: posters of aliens in a wintry forest of mushrooms peeing "4:20" into the snow.
  

Coraline and Nine

Last night I saw Coraline, which was exciting. The Nightmare Before Christmas played an important part in fascinating me as a child while kind of spooking the living shit out of me at the same time. Plus, Laika studios is in Portland, so hometown pride abounds (except the kid in the film pronounced it "Ore-gahn" not "Ore-gun" which is distinctly wrong).

The visuals were amazing, but, is it just me or is Neil Gaiman not really that great? I only know a little bit about his stuff, but what I have experienced seems to me to be mish-mashes of other ideas and themes into wholes that don't necessarily become original. Now don't get me wrong, a lot of the children's movies I enjoyed growing up like A Troll in Central Park or The Last Unicorn weren't bastions of originality either, but still, that's not an excuse really... While watching Coraline I couldn't help but feel that it was a collage of themes and imagery I'd seen in a myriad of other places with little original substance of its own. It's the same way I felt about Stardust, Mirrormask and Gaiman's adaptation of Beowulf. I guess to make that claim I should have some solid evidence, which I don't, but did anyone else just find themselves recalling things like Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, James and the Giant Peach, etc. and not really appreciating the movie as something on its own?

I saw it in 3D, too, which was cool but exhausting. I guess it's a neat technology and it's sure improved since the red/green glasses days, but I don't miss "2D." For one thing, putting things on different planes but keeping them at the same level of focus isn't always realistic - sometimes it's just weird. Also, I felt like my eyes could never rest - they're still burning a little.

In other news, all my dad's tools are gone and most of the books are packed up. I helped Larry, Moe and Curly move a bunch of stuff into a storage unit out in Bumfuck Nowhere, Oregon yesterday (which is an unincorporated part of Salem). Now I'm counting down the days that I have left in my childhood home. It's really hard to pack everything you own when a) you hate cleaning b) you hate packing and c) you hate getting rid of things.

Tricycle Christ and the Sunday Blowout

Hey, as of yesterday I have 100 posts here! Wowza! Let's celebrate with a still from the (near) titular movie of this blog:


NSFW?

This weekend I traveled down to Roseburg with a friend. What an amazing little shit-hole. I saw the giant pit in the ground where I was born. I was told by my parents that, long ago, Douglas County Hospital (now the pit) used bo be next to a hill where famous goats roamed free. (When I was in elementary school I told my class I was born "in a hospital by goats" and they all laughed). The hill, Mt. Nebo, no longer has its Mt. Nebo goats, which used to come down into the hospital grounds and predict whether it would rain or not with their very presence. My friend told me that they all fell into traffic or were killed off. This is just one of the changes that Roseburg has experienced since I left it 20.5 years ago.

As we tried to leave, the tire on my friend's car went flat an hour out of town, looking like it ran over a lawnmower blade. We didn't have any of the right tools, so we had to call roadside assistance, which took an hour. After they left we discovered the battery had gone dead and we had to wait for another thirty minutes. Then a woman with no teeth on her bottom jaw except for canines (reverse vampire!) told us that the tire department at the local Walmart had shut down thirty minutes before our arrival. We eased up the freeway on a spare until we got to Springfield.

Springfield is nothing like it looks in the Simpsons. At the Springfield Walmart, Jeff Spicoli told us that they had just closed up an hour early, but that the Walmart we had come from usually stayed open later. Of course, nobody else was open given that it's a Sunday. The Lord may have rested on the seventh day, but if he wanted to get somewhere I'll bet he would have wanted four tires (unless he rode a tricycle).

Since there was no other alternative in sight, we drove to Portland on the spare, never going above 45 mph. This meant hugging the guardrail with the hazard lights on while the world literally passed us by. It was kind of nice, because it slowed down the whole day (it took four hours to get from Springfield to Portland, 2x what it should have), and there was a distinct sense that something wanted us to take it slow. Whatever the cosmic reasoning, we missed the 10:20 showing of Coraline, and that's that.

Tomorrow mom and I begin moving our lives down to a Salem storage unit. My room looks like a hurricane came in and fucked it. It's emptier than it was yet dirtier than it was. I can't bring myself to pack up my CDs yet. There are mixes that need to be made!

Some Things

Whew, I haven't found time to write in here forever. I think my readership has dropped off to zero (to match the readership of my other, more self-indulgent blog). Today I still can't be assed to make a proper blog entry, but here are some things:

• I watched Demitri Martin's Comedy Central special yesterday and laughed and laughed. Comedy Central is my de-facto channel to put on while I'm packing eBay packages because stand-up makes for good background. They've been advertising Martin's new show every five minutes until I got sick of his floppy-haired visage. I was a big fan of Demitri Martin when he was the youth correspondant on the Daily Show and I've always thought his whole schtick was just a little bit grating and I couldn't figure it out until someone told me they thought he was a smug little shit. He is kind of a smug little shit, isn't he? I don't think I could hang out with him, funny or not.
• I'm going down to Roseberg, the town of my birth tomorrow. It will be a great pilgrimage. I will take pictures of the depression floating by on the breeze.
• I'm in the process of packing my childhood bedroom into boxes. It's a very strange experience. It's given me the idea for a book, though. I've had the desire to write clawing at my brain for weeks now, but I haven't had a good subject (that's probably why I don't write in here anymore. Plus, like I said before, I have more of a life now that I'm back in the US). But I think I'm going to contrast some of the dumb shit I'm throwing out with some of the sweet shit I inherited from my dad (a machete, a skull, mysterious teeth...). It will give me something to do in Sue's class.
• Tonight I'm seeing Lykke Li. I was stoked until someone told me she was just ok in concert. Now I'm medium-stoked.
• The other night I dreamed about mice crawling all over a burlap dummy hanging from the ceiling of our garage. I tried to beat the dummy so the mice would fall out and I could catch them in a brown paper bag, but I was failing. My friend told me the mice represented petty fears and annoyances. I don't know.
• I just looked in a notebook I was keeping during travel from Belfast to home. In it I wrote a in/out list for 2009. The best one: Out - High School Musical. In - Reform School Musical.
• I started writing a couple of blog entries the other day, but I got tired of them and the fizzled out. One was about the batshit craziness of the comic strip, Safe Havens, and how I'm sad they've replaced it in the Oregonian with a terrible local strip. The local strip is called Adams' Apples and is about a teacher named Mr. Adams who teaches a class of wise-alec, adorable elementary school kids. I like to imagine it's about Sean's future. The strip looks like it was drawn in MS Paint and most of the jokes are like yesterdays: Person A: "I'm looking for those tablets that help you lose weight. What should I ask my pharmacist for?" Person B: "Girth-control pills!" That shit makes Garfield look like Proust.

Half-assed tv follow-up post

I'm finding it hard to keep up with real life here now that I have one. In lieu of that, here's some more comments about tv and junk:

My fears earlier this week were unfounded about The Office. Oh man was that a good episode; right back into the bittersweet funny.

My fears about Skins were very founded, though. (Spoilers if you care) Skins took a page out of Degrassi's book this week and sent its most interesting character to Africa (right after we got to know him!). There were some ok moments as stories and characters develop a little bit, though I sure wish it would stop trying to be edgy and crazy and just represent how real teenagers act. In my opinion, the inclusion of a mobster character who gets tangled up with teenagers for some reason (not to mention his comical henchmen) is like when The Flintstones added the Great Gazoo or Itchy and Scratchy added Poochy: it's just unnecessary and bizarre. If they went all the way and made him act like a human being (problems with that this season) they might get somewhere, but instead he drinks Cup o Noodles to show he's tough and challanges a 16-year-old to a fight that consists of eating raw peppers. What the fuck? What universe is this?

As for what's happening in the Bow household, I'm surrounded by things that need homes. Since my mom and I are both moving, everything we own needs to be packed, given away or sold. A mountain of old t-shirts and baseball caps is going out the door to make room for weird inheritances like a machete and creepy masks. They're not interchangable when it comes to usefulness, but some things are more important than others.

All Things Geek

• Today I finished posting all of my dad's old board games on eBay. The geek money's piling up! Nobody wants Assassin, though, which shocks me. Going by the box lid alone, it's easily the coolest game.
  
  
  From what I can tell, the game is like Taxi Driver except instead of a mohawk Travis Bickle has a mullet and his target is John McCain.
  
  Assassin's only competition on the cool-o-meter is the dashing fellow on the cover of Rail Baron, the "game of building railroad empires" (which I'm keeping for myself). He's There Will Be Blood but drunk.
  
  



• In other media news, my literature burnout has moved me to comic books. I read Phoebe Gloeckner's A Child's Life, Debbie Dreschler's heartbreaking Daddy's Girl, a bunch of R. Crumb and now I'm halfway into Watchmen. I sure like them words when the come with lots of purdy pickshures. Reading the much hyped Watchmen, I totally understand why it's considered a classic. I didn't know how into it I was until I saw a preview for the movie the other day and had a nerdgasm. I hope it doesn't suck.
  



• As for music, I can't stop listening to Love's Forever Changes. Sometimes it sounds like someone going crazy, sometimes it teeters into hippie-dippy bullshit, but most of the time it's just an amazing beautiful album. I bought it for my dad but I don't think he ever really liked it. I'm not sure why. I can't embed anything from it, but check it out anyway.
  
• Today on TV there was a British movie from 1999 called Virtual Sexuality on. I remember passing it at Hollywood Video and always thinking that it was raunchy Cinemax-style porn. Little did I know that it was basically Just One Of The Guys but with shitty CGI. The amazing thing is how late-'90s everything about it is. There's bleached tips and Macy Gray everywhere. When my kids want to know what 1999 was like I'll hand them VHS copies of this, Can't Hardly Wait and Spice World.


• I'm afraid that all of my favorite TV shows are dying. I thought the last two episodes of The Office were pretty weak in comparison to what had been going on. What, so the Angela/Andy/Dwight triangle reaches a head and then the issue's dropped and everything's normal? No! I have a stake in these imaginary people's lives and I want resolution!
  
  Degrassi's long been put out to pasture, but that doesn't make its decline from pre-teen, Canadian guilty pleasure to pre-teen, Canadian guilty pain any more acceptable. Who are these new people that I'm supposed to care about? You can't just send characters to Africa and expect me to forget about them, Degrassi writers; not when you've left me with this:
  
  
  
  But what's really broken my heart is Skins. Oh Skins, I loved you so much! For those of you who aren't British and/or retrograding back to middle school, Skins' first two seasons were hella good. What started as a guilty pleasure (Matt warned me it was "Degrassi meets Rules of Attraction") turned into one of my favorite shows ever. But now? Let me list some of the offenses: extensive plots involving gangsters; penis-tattoos; drawn-out fart jokes; live goldfish-eating; characters nobody could give a shit about.
  
  These characters who seem to be drawn from imaginary TV-types rather than actual people - sensitive sk8r boi, walking pharmaceutical receptacle (Chris without the likability), Screech-like nerd who the former two are friends with for no discernible reason, xtreme maybe-lesbian (probably not) named Naomi Campbell (wtf??), twins (one's wild the other's not and probably is a lesbian). Oh, and Tony Stonem's little sister who the show keeps reminding us is totally attitude and anything-goes, yet somehow became way less interesting now that she talks. Skins - don't make me hate you. Please come back down to earth.
  

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Back to that irritating nerd and Darcy's froggy, Jesus-loving sister in Degrassi, let me put a question to you, world: is the nerd stereotype even relevant in 2009? Revenge of the Nerds? Fine. Saved By The Bell? Cool. The straight-laced programming geek in Virtual Sexuality? Ok. But now that the internet has taken over our lives and people camp out all night for Apple products is there still a cultural otherness to nerds? Look at tv - shows like The Office and motherfucking Chuck; movies like Rushmore and its imitators; the rise of Michael Cera and all indie quirkiness.

The outdatedness of the nerd stereotype really hit me when I was on the airplane from Belfast and they showed an episode of The Big Bang Theory. I guess it's a popular show, but it felt to me like something from another era. Haven't the nerds finally taken over? When the biggest movie franchises of the last decade have been The Lord of the Rings, comic book movies and Star Wars, I think we need to reevaluate things. Does this really represent a reality anyone thinks of as true anymore?



Of course, this is coming from someone who reads comic books, watches childrens' programming and then goes and writes about it in his blog, so what do I know?

Steve Martin and the Bloody Nose

"Waved to Sal, he's Filipino!"

Amelie Gilette at the Onion AV Club wrote about Saturday's SNL with this really cringe-worthy banjo performance by Steve Martin. I was aware that SNL had stopped being funny, but I hadn't thought about Steve Martin. I know he's a comedy legend, but all I can think about are Pink Panther parts 1 and 2, Cheaper By the Dozen parts 1 and 2 and this. IMDb is telling me he was in The Man With Two Brains, but I don't think I believe them. Was Steve Martin ever funny?

Regardless of history, this performance is not for comedy's sake nor is it for an upcopming children's album. It is an honest-to-God, sincere song for adults. Shocking.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I don't normally write about truly personal things here. It feels exhibitionistic and cheap to me. But I felt like sharing today.
Last night I think I had my first dream truly dealing with my dad's death. I had a dream a couple of weeks ago where he was around and I had to wake up to remember he was dead, which was strange, but this was different. In my dream I was reading out of an imagined childhood book I owned, personalized with a main character named David Bow. In the book David finds a briefcase containing paternal signifiers like a trenchcoat, fedora and pipe. When he opens it his father magically comes back. I was reading from the book to friends, but when I got to the part about opening the briefcase I just started crying so hard I couldn't read. All my friends understood.

Earlier in the dream I was at a party with some people. The party was like a child's themed birthday, with giant inflatable barnyard buildings we were informed were empty. I thought that meant there would be no animals, but I found a pen with some coyotes inside. The pen-keeper told me and my friend that they called them "big porcupines," which made sense to us when he grabbed one by the scruff of its neck and lifted it, yelping, outside the cyclone fencing. He then proceeded to lay it on the ground, where it exposed a big, jagged mouthful of teeth.

I couldn't tell what he was doing to it, subduing it or killing it, but he had a knife out and was moving around its body. Blood started to come out of its nostrils and, it seemed, elsewhere, forming a big river of blood in the mud at our feet. I was startled and my own nose started to bleed. I wiped it with my hand and ran to the bathroom across the dirt road to wash up to save me the embarrassment of having the man notice I was bleeding as well. This is the third night in a row where I've dreamed of my nose bleeding in response to being startled by things (last night it was a horse rearing at me). This is weird in a lot of ways, one of them being that my nose doesn't bleed when I'm startled (though once it bled in 6th grade Humanities class when the teacher said "Regina, Canada" and I contained my laughter so much I think it created some kind of pressure).

I have a book from 1938 about dream interpretation that I consulted when I woke up this afternoon. It says that a nosebleed is a good luck sign and "augers health and relief from anxiety." Or at least it did in the '30s. Online dream journals all say different things.

Anyways, I dreamed for so long that I woke up very late and now I'll be awake again all night.