the problem with happiness

Amy Bloom on happiness.

clipped from www.nytimes.com The real problem with happiness is neither its pursuers nor their books; it’s happiness itself. Happiness is like beauty: part of its glory lies in its transience. It is deep but often brief (as Frost would have it), and much great prose and poetry make note of this. Frank Kermode wrote, “It seems there is a sort of calamity built into the texture of life.” To hold happiness is to hold the understanding that the world passes away from us, that the petals fall and the beloved dies. No amount of mockery, no amount of fashionable scowling will keep any of us from knowing and savoring the pleasure of the sun on our faces or save us from the adult understanding that it cannot last forever.

walken's first weirdo

clipped from www.nytimes.com Annie Hall is a film with many great moments, and for me the best of them is the movie's single scene with Annie's younger brother, Duane Hall, played by Christopher Walken, the first of his long, brilliant career of cinema weirdos. Visiting the Hall family home, Alvy Singer — that's Woody Allen — bumps into Duane, who immediately shares a fantasy: "Sometimes when I'm driving . . . on the road at night . . . I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-­on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The . . . flames rising out of the flowing gasoline." It's Alvy's reply which makes the scene: "Right. Well, I have to — I have to go now, Duane, because I, I'm due back on the planet Earth."

ja!

clipped from twitter.com johnroderick    I don't pronounce my inverted question marks and exclamation points clearly enough to express myself in Spanish. I come across too blasé. 4:04 PM Dec 28th from Birdhouse Reply Retweet

on this year's best movies

clipped from www.nytimes.com By the time Warner joined this new specialty business 10 years later, with Warner Independent Pictures, all the studios were in the indie business. Films like Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Ones Are” and Steven Soderbergh’s “Informant!,” both released by Warner, might represent the end of that era. Even so, I like to believe that the industry’s central irrationality (its human factor) will remain and that there will always be one madman willing to give an artist like Wes Anderson millions to make a puppet movie about a family of foxes. And Colin Firth’s face crumbling like pulverized stone as he receives the awful news of his lover’s death in “A Single Man.” Some of the greatest filmmaking of the year was represented by the story of a happy marriage, which was represented with breathtaking narrative economy and a great depth of feeling in four sublime minutes in “Up.” ... A restless camera tracing lines of love among grieving family members in “Summer Hours,” a French film poignantly true to everyday life and emotions and almost impossible to imagine being made in America if only because of its insistence on ambivalence as a condition of human relations.

yay!

clipped from greylikesweddings.wordpress.com

the city if full of ghosts

clipped from ffffound.com Quoted from: Manuel Rebollo | DAYDREAM LILY 1.bp.blogspot.com/_xFm6-2MWhQc/Sx2nzdm4rUI/AAAAAAAADV8/u0qcOs0-adY/s576/Manuel-Rebollo.jpg

a radish-like beast

clipped from ffffound.com Quoted from: DETHJUNKIE* 17.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kuskgoemSq1qzs56do1_500.jpg

wes anderson's fantastic mr. fox

clipped from movies.nytimes.com At times this adaptation of Roald Dahl’s slender anti-fable — truer to the spirit than to the letter of the source — does not even look like a movie. In spite of the pedigreed voices (Meryl Streep and Bill Murray, along with George Clooney in the title role), it feels more like an extended episode of what progressive educators call imaginative play. The sets might just as well have been built out of available household stuff, the stiff figurines animated and ventriloquized on a classroom or bedroom floor by precocious children. All of which may only be another way of saying that this is a Wes Anderson film. His live-action subjects often move like stop-motion figures through landscapes that resemble drawings and models more than real places. (Think of the cutaway ship set in “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.”) There is a deadpan, understated quality to his performers that also suggests puppetry, and he shows a stubborn reluctance to let story take precedence over style. Is it is a movie for children? This inevitable question depends on the assumption that children have uniform tastes and expectations. How can that be? And besides, the point of everything Mr. Anderson has ever done is that truth and beauty reside in the odd, the mismatched, the idiosyncratic. He makes that point in ways that are sometimes touching, sometimes annoying, but usually worth arguing about. Not everyone will like “Fantastic Mr. Fox”; and if everyone did, it would not be nearly as interesting as it is. There are some children — some people — who will embrace it with a special, strange intensity, as if it had been made for them alone.

manhood for amateurs

Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son by Michael Chabon


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Even though it took me a while to get through this book, I have to say that I enjoyed it greatly. Michael Chabon is one of those writers that make me want to write for the rest of my life. He is just so brilliant.
I welcome his adventures in the non-fiction territory, and even though I am not a Jewish male in his 40s, I found a lot of what he had to share to be very relevant to my life. Some of the essays had me rejoicing with nerdery, some of them moved me deeply.
The only thing that keeps me from giving this book five stars is that although I am most of the way there with him on almost every topic, sometimes his geeky comics and science fiction knowledge (and the showing off of this knowledge) can make me a little edgy and I lose interest. However, his observations about reading, writing, relationships, and purpose were extremely interesting. His essays about childhood and how being a child has changed in the last forty years in this country were fascinating. I had heard three of them before, in a reading that Michael Chabon did during his visit to my university campus last year, but reading them made me appreciate his eloquent carefulness with language and choice of words. Moreover, his description of his younger son's mild OCD and his issues with symmetry (as one of the kinds of OCD) got me thinking about the last book I read.
I highly recommend this book to those of you who are feeling reflective about life lately.

View all my reviews >>

the wanting comes in waves / repaid (live at the bbc)

I am all full of love for this again.

the rake song live

Here Come The Waves: The Hazards of Love Visualized

too much happiness

clipped from www.nytimes.com Alice Munro’s Object Lessons The Germans must have a term for it. Doppel­gedanken, perhaps: the sensation, when reading, that your own mind is giving birth to the words as they appear on the page. Such is the ego that in these rare instances you wonder, “How could the author have known what I was thinking?” Of course, what has happened isn’t this at all, though it’s no less astonishing. Rather, you’ve been drawn so deftly into another world that you’re breathing with someone else’s rhythms, seeing someone else’s visions as your own. One of the pleasures of reading Alice Munro derives from her ability to impart this sensation. It’s the sort of gift that requires enormous modesty on the part of the writer, who must shun pyrotechnics for something less flashy: an empathy so pitch-­perfect as to be nearly undetectable. But it’s most arresting in the hands of a writer who isn’t too modest — one possessed of a fearless, at times, fearsome, ambition. Munro’s own contrarian streak is displayed in the structure of her narratives. Many writers begin a story in medias res, but a Munro story is liable to end in the middle of things — that is, well before (or well beyond) the moment when a reader expects to find resolution. The very shape of things, along with our sense of what is important and why, seems to shift as we proceed. The real story keeps turning out to be larger than, and at canted angles to, what we thought it would be. The effect is initially destabilizing, then unexpectedly affirming. In the introduction to her 1996 volume of “Selected Stories,” Munro reveals an endearing idiosyncrasy: “I don’t always, or even usually, read stories from beginning to end. I start anywhere and proceed in either direction.” She goes on to explain that she doesn’t read in order to find out what happens so much as to experience the world of the story, to inhabit it for a while, “wandering back and forth” in it, discovering the ways it alters her perspective. This Alice-in-Wonderland propensity, this inclination to regard fiction as a dynamic creation and the reader as a mutable participant, may provide a key to reading Munro. More than that, it suggests something provocative about the uses of fiction, about its moral purpose as well as its potential to have an impact on our lives.

embedded episode - "the decemberists, hazards of weirdness"

Full episode of Embedded with The Decemberists, Hazards of Weirdness, in several parts. The episode includes some footage from the rehearsals of their rock opera Hazards of Love, a concept album that they released earlier this year, and which my friend Scott and I saw live in its entirety when The Decemberists visited Kansas City. It was the best concert I have ever been to.

Part 1:



Part 2:



Part 3:

colin meloy on bob mould's influence

First Snow

First Snow
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happy snow

happy snow
Originally uploaded by tamaki

Fall Colors in Early Morning Snow

Fall Colors in Early Morning Snow
Originally uploaded by jackaloha2

Snowed in

Snowed in
Originally uploaded by Amundn

Let It Snow

Let It Snow
Originally uploaded by My Personal Point of View

Colored Snow

Colored Snow
Originally uploaded by Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton

Paris under the snow

Paris under the snow
Originally uploaded by Gregory Bastien

52|365 ||| it snowed..

52|365 ||| it snowed..
Originally uploaded by .bella.

It's Snowing Outside -- AGAIN (blue hue)

It's Snowing Outside -- AGAIN (blue hue)
Originally uploaded by RIPizzo

Snow Falling on Cedar

Snow Falling on Cedar
Originally uploaded by Fort Photo

Mystical Snow Flickrman

Mystical Snow Flickrman
Originally uploaded by Elsa Prinsessa

Snow dance

Snow dance
Originally uploaded by www.andreakamal.com 

snow on snowed

snow on snowed
Originally uploaded by Pernart

heather and her mother's dog

I just bought this beautiful drawing by the artist Carson Ellis. I am super excited to have some new art for my place! Yay!

these pretzels are making me thirsty!

anonanimal live

and a damn good version, too!

crayola!

love vs. pizza

drawn andrew

clipped from andrewbird.tumblr.com

her morning elegance

I am in love with this video.

Oren Lavie - Her Morning Elegance
by IgnitionVM

Oren Lavie - Her Morning Elegance

michael chabon on sex and fatherhood

julia wertz cracks me up

Julia Wertz on IM.

clipped from www.fartparty.org Q: I IMed you but you didn’t answer, what gives? A: I’m not a big fan of the IM from people I dont know. That doesn’t mean we probably wouldn’t get along champion, but the nature of the IM freaks me out a little. It’s like I’m just sittin’ there, eating a sammich and someone just walks right in and is like “stop what you’re doing and exchange words with me” totally bypassing the doorbell to boot. (email is the doorbell in this metaphor, ya’all, use it)

juliet, naked

new death cab for cutie EP

illustrated missed connections

I love missed connections, too!

clipped from manmakehome.com Sophie Blackall’s Missed Connections October 5, 2009 by manmakehome Great idea – I’m always fascinated by the ‘Missed Connections’ in the paper.  Thanks to Sophie Blackall for illustrating them for me. I hope that guy realizes she bought him that milkshake. Available for purchase here.