I was at Border’s today and investigated this book, “The Real Meaning of Life”, and I was surprised to discover that the content of the book was entirely created by respondents to a post on a message board inquiring into the meaning of life. Since everyone has their own view on this the book wrote itself. Could this be a cheap way to produce a light read?
Arts
Horned man
I think it would be cool to have horns or antlers like this old man I altered in Photoshop. When you walked up to your friends you could bow your head and rattle antlers. It would be the equivalent of a high five. If you were frustrated you could scrape your antlers on a tree.
Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake
Good moralistic sci-fi satire from Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. This book has been an eery trip, very cold and numb, and depressing… yet funny. This passage gives you the flavor.
When did the body first set out on its own adventures? Snowman thinks; after having ditched its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul, for whom it had once been considered a mere corrupt vessel or else a puppet acting out their dramas for them, or else bad company, leading the other two astray. It must have got tired of the soul’s constant nagging and whining and the anxiety-driven intellectual web-spinning of the mind, distracting it whenever it was getting its teeth into something juicy or its fingers into something good. It had dumped the other two back there somewhere, leaving them stranded in some damp sanctuary or stuffy lecture hall while it made a beeline for the topless bars, and it had dumped culture along with them: music and painting and poetry and plays. Sublimation, all of it; nothing but sublimation according to the body. Why not cut to the chase?
But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance.
Down with movie reviews!
The woman and I watched Closer last night. I never went to see it in the theatre since the reviews at the time were lackluster, but that’s what I get for listening to someone else’s worthless opinion. It’s got great characters, great and memorable dialogue, and Natalie Portman spends one scene nearly buck naked.
What I liked about “Closer” is that it reminded me of all the sh*t and pain that’s mixed up in love. The entire movie is break-up / infidelity / love / loss / revenge concentrate. It’s every bad relationship experience you’ve had condensed into two hours. It’s real. But, it’s not all negative, just realistic and maybe cynical. It’s not just about relationships, it’s also about how people can be dishonest and screwed up because they’re self-loathing cowards. It’s a cycle: you seek someone to love because you have a hungry hole in your chest, you get involved with someone else because the hole is never really filled, then you betray your first lover and whip yourself with the resulting guilt so that everything falls down around you and you can be even more unhappy and pathetic. It takes work to be happy, dammit. I really believe that.
Like I said, there are some fantastic lines. Clive Owen is the star of this film, without a doubt, but everyone else is really good, too.
Some of my favorite lines:
Dan (Jude Law): You’re an animal.
Larry (Clive Owen): Yeah? What are you?
Dan (Jude Law): You think love is simple. You think the heart is like a diagram.
Larry (Clive Owen): Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist, wrapped in blood!Anna (Julia Roberts): Why is the sex so important?
Larry (Clive Owen): BECAUSE I’M A CAVEMAN!
“The Return” and fatherhood
I watched a great movie this weekend, Vozvrashchenie (The Return). I was doing my regular tour around Blockbuster trading out rentals and I just picked it up. I think everyone should watch it because it works on you. You’ll carry it with you for days after. It deals with subjects everyone has some experience with: having a father and being a father. There is at least one important female role, but most of the story revolves around two brothers and their estranged father who shows up out of nowhere to take them on a journey. The journey with this father they’ve never known is an initiation into manhood squeezed into 7 days. The sons are faced with harsh lessons and each reacts differently to the experience.
The older I get the more I think about what type of father I will be. I also find myself looking back at what I learned from my father and the role he played in helping to shape my character and personality. I don’t know how much was intentional, but there were often lessons woven into the things my dad did with my brother and me. Like how he would send us to help our elderly neighbors, or how we always had to help him work on projects for our grandmother like building a deck or cutting the grass. Family was always important, so was being a good neighbor. I still try to remember all those things.
Audiobook Reviews
Lately, I’ve been checking out a lot of audio books to read while I drive around town. It makes the driving so much more relaxing and enjoyable. You get the added benefit of learning something. Here are a few I’ve listened to recently.
On Negotiating by Mark H. McCormack
This is a great audiobook with loads of practical experience and advice on the strategies and techniques behind negotiating. McCormack presents numerous anecdotal examples to illustrate his points and brings his business leadership experience to the fore to provide very valuable insight and information. The material is highly valuable and you will find yourself thinking back to it when you encounter any type of situation that requires coming to an agreement. The biggest lesson to me was about thinking big during a negotiation. Don’t be afraid to make an insultingly high or low offer. If you start out splitting the difference during a negotiation you will have even less leeway and you will likely end up with a bad deal. The higher and lower you go (depending on if you are the buyer or seller) the more room you have to maneuver. This book is highly recommended for anyone. You will soon find new opportunities to put these techniques to work.
Stop Paddling & Start Rocking the Boat: Business Lessons from the School of Hard Knocks (1995) by Lou Pritchett
This guy has a folksy charm with his Memphis twang and fantastic stories gleaned from his 36 years with Procter & Gamble. Starting off in sales right out of college he worked his way to head of P&G’s Phillipines division and onward. Most memorable yet simple idea: if you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward. Don’t quit, don’t stop. Keep working to improve yourself and your work. It’s a process that never ends.
Short, Grumpy Movie Reviews
“A little guilt goes a long way.” I liked this movie a lot. Christian Bale’s skin and bones look was palpably disturbing. It’s one of those movies you’re going to want to read more about after watching it because there are many layers and details to catch. Bale did a great job in this one, but he doesn’t usually make me believe in him in most of his roles. I do think he is a good and convincing actor, I just can’t put my finger on it.
The last time I watched this movie was about ten years ago. I fell asleep then, although I liked parts of it. This last time I watched it I stayed awake, but it barely held my attention. I do not get this movie. I still don’t. What am I missing? Ten years has changed very little in terms of my experience of this film. There are beautiful moments, but that does not make it great. River Phoenix and Keanu are great in MOPI, but if it weren’t for that, I could not give it more than two stars.
Liked Al Pacino in this one although his performance was overdone. Johnny Depp and Michael Madsen… not so much. Every time I watch something with Michael Madsen it seems dated now. His squintyness gets on my nerves.
“Good advice never gets old”
Words of wisdom get lodged in my head and I like to get them out so they can be shared with anyone else who might find them useful.
- “Good advice never gets old” – JC spotted this one at a gas station on the way back from picking her up at the airport after her short trip to Lubbock.
- “At twenty a man is a peacock, at thirty a lion, at forty a camel, at fifty a serpent, at sixty a dog, at seventy an ape, at eighty a nothing at all.” I think about this Gracian quotation quite a bit, especially as I approach “lionhood”, which is a good description of what I’ve been feeling now that a lot of my shiny surface is starting to wear off and I feel like I’m maturing in some hard to define way. The older I get the more I feel like I’m being either polished or worn down. When I’m feeling optimistic, it’s polish. When I’m feeling negative, it’s being worn down. I thought about the stages one goes through in life yesterday when I was at the grocery store behind an old man while waiting to check out. He look slowed and bowed by time with his modest selections of frozen vegetables and twenty pound bag of wild bird seed. He seemed almost transparent or invisible, and I tried to imagine him in his twenties or thirties and how he might have been different. Surely, he was not preoccupied with feeding birds then. Maybe as we get older and we realize we have more life behind than ahead of us, we take more enjoyment in the natural world around us that will live on after we pass.
Today’s quotation
Courtesy of my personalized google page.
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
– George Bernard Shaw
Funny World of Warcraft video: Leeeeeroy!
There’s a funny video that’s been going around that shows a group of World of Warcraft players about to go on a guild-organized dungeon crawl. Check it out here.
Edit: See the comments for more information. The original file was removed from the server for bandwidth reasons, but there is now a bittorrent available here.