thoughtcrumbs : january 2000

Things for which I am thankful this year:

• Trivia night at the Basement Pub.
• Alt-Tab. So it looks like I'm working.
• West Wing politics.
• Hazel, who smells my breath in the morning and likes it.
• Friends and TV show characters through whom I can live vicariously. And those who sometimes inspire me to take risks.
• John Mayer's fine, fine ass.

It's disconcerting, scary even, when you mistype Google.

We cool like dat. From Scotty's John Mayer road journal: "It was another great day in Portlando. The Schnitz was another cool theatre. Allyson and I sold merchandise to the Ned Portlanders. By the way, we note your strong regard for single-file lines, something unparalleled in any other part of the country."

Thank God I'm younger than Zadie Smith. I still have a couple of years to catch up with the savant darling of the literary world. And until last night, I wasn't even aiming to be a writer, but somehow she manages to inspire anyone within earshot. words leap from her tongue, like "autodidact," "infantile," and . . . well, I'm struggling to remember a third but am failing because I also spent half the evening fantasizing about what smart children she and Dave Eggers would have. (Anybody else do mental celebrity genius matchups?)

Two choice passages from her latest essay, On the Road: American Writers and Their Hair:

Coming from two cultures, as I do, both with hundreds of years of hair experience between them, it has become my habit to give hair-product advice to American writers, who – let us be honest – spring from a younger, immature grooming tradition, vibrant though it may be. If we can save nothing else from our old and beautiful Europe we must pass on what we have learnt. It is with this pedagogic mission in mind that I have taken such writers as Easton Ellis and T.C. Boyle aside and discussed the dangers of excessive gel and spray, respectively; I do not shy from sitting Sontag down and discussing the possibilities of subtle highlights. My advice is not always heeded, but I am English and so continue to give it.

and

Sometimes, when I am very embarrassed, language leaves me and only one word comes to my aid. That word is: thing.

And so I end up saying to Lorrie: “Oh, no…but when I said the thing I didn’t know that you and thing were like thing… and the thing is if I had known the thing about the thing I never would have gone on about the thing like I was some kind of a crazy thing who just does things as if saying that kind of thing was in any way …”

Sincerest apologies to the person who ended up on my site searching for "free porn usernames and passwords." Go get 'em, tiger.   Just elsewhere.   But kudos to the person with the clever query "she's unusually unsual." I've always wanted to be called unsual.

Rob Lowe's good looks aside, one of the reasons The West Wing is so successful is its clever banter. The dialog is its own character, prominent in every scene and quoted the next day around the proverbial water cooler. Don't we all wish we were able to fire such witticisms in rapid succession? As such, I have great respect for both Aaron Sorkin, the producer, and those real life political pundits whose college debating skills pay off on a daily basis. Now, on the other side of the tracks is another group of sharp-tongued interlocutors, whose verbal freestyling is undeservedly criticized for the lifestyle it entails: the inner-city rappers dueling nightly on the mic and the streets. (Okay, yes I sound like a poseur, or like Ben Folds, all alone in my whiteboy pain. And yes, this entry is informed entirely by the movie I saw last night. But just pretend I have enough cred a couple paragraphs, m'kay?)

Eminem's surprisingly poignant 8 Mile, like The West Wing, features fast, hard-hitting dialog constructed like the best legal arguments: acknowleding your opponent's viewpoint and then discrediting it point by point. "Yes, I'm white. Yes, I live in a trailer park with my mom. Yes, I work at a shitty factory. Yes, six of your boys beat me up last night. And yes, you slept with my girl. But I'm still here saying fuck you. What can you say that I don't already know?" At the weekly battles, rappers get 45 seconds to dis each other in front of an antagonistic crowd. I doubt corporate lawyers could handle the pressure. This intense sparring garnered wild cheers and clapping from a theater of white, fleece-ensconced suburban professionals in Portland.

Sadly, the rest of the movie lacks much substance; potentially thoughtful scenes, such as the moment between Eminem and wannabe rapper Cheddar Bob, are cut short, and many details are whitewashed, making Eminem look only slightly scrappy but definitely as lovable than Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. And now for the non-sequitur: The title sequence font was appropriate; seemingly friendly letters with razor sharp descenders, kind of like fanged smiles.

Chris Isaak and Michael Franti deserve some kind of public service award for all the crime fighting they inspire. Can I hear an amen?

From Margaret Berry's Women's Fashion article in The Morning News:

Jeans
Pull them on; glance in the mirror. If your ass doesn’t look antigravitational in these jeans, if it doesn’t look like some other woman’s ass entirely, put them back. Can you heft moving boxes without displaying a porn-star triangle of G-string? Could you picnic with his parents in these jeans? Could you successfully accessorize with a halter-top and a shot of tequila?

Please, think of the kittens.

Seriously, don't quote the bible in your arguments for or against a ballot measure. Especially don't quote it in bold caps.

Dan Savage on why he left the Willamette Week newspaper:

Because they're pussies. And I mean that in the most non-gendered sense of the word.

Significantly less pierced that I'd expected (read: no more than say, your average Promise Keeper), Dan Savage entertained a roomful of trendy Portlanders at Powell's last night, pimping his new book, Skipping Towards Gomorrah. His premise: Conservatives preaching moral lifestyle imperatives are clueless and have unfounded arguments. His chapter ridiculing the argument against gay marriage by highlighting another lifestyle the conservatives should be rallying against as the greater evil -- swingers -- is clever and hilarious.

The second half of the evening focused more on Iraq, with Savage promoting war surprisingly effectively to a room full of pacifists. Too often, he argues, leftists spoonfeed each other anti-war and other liberal rhetoric, resulting in an impotent cadre of head-nodders and me-too-ers. The right has become much more powerful by listening to the left and then arguing against it; the left should be questioning and listening to its opponent more, as well. If Democrats were more in favor of the inevitable war, Iraq would be in better shape: we'd soften the cowboy politics of Bush, Cheney, and Rice. (Savage's argument, not necessarily mine.) Savage regularly reads conservative literature, all the better to hone his own debate skills -- and all the better to shock those of us with noses buried in Utne Reader and The New Yorker.