Not a surprise...

... but this blog is going on hiatus. Like previous "let's blog for fun" projects, it's difficult to maintain without feeling like it's going too many places and nowhere at the same time. And while this might sound incredibly snobbish, it's more difficult drumming up the motivation to write an open-ended blog post when I've been getting paid to write (all of which can be read on this blog).

I suppose this space will be kept open in case I feel the need to utilize it.

Rappers, known your basketball trivia

Newly blog-wielding friend, Miss Mezzano, recently put up the almost decade old(!) "Summer Girls" music video from late '90s boy band, LFO (or as their wikipedia calls them, Lyte Funky Ones. I know...) Even in 1999, that song was one of the most baffling chart hits. How else could anyone explain an upper-class white boy rapping non-sequiturs about girls, Abercrombie & Fitch, the summer, chinese food, girls in the summer, etc.?

It's interesting that after ten years of trying to repress this song from ever popping in my head randomly, the first lyric that really slapped me in the face reminded me of one of more rant-worthy snippets of recent upper-class white rapper Asher Roth.

Compare if you will:

• "[With reggae inflection] I am champ-ee-on / at beer pong / Allen Iverson / Hakeem Olajuwon"

• "You're the best girl that I ever did see / the great Larry Bird / jersey 33"
  

Let this be a lesson to gimmicky rappers looking for a way to complete their rhyme scheme - know you're basketball trivia.

(The offending post)

Food for quote: Tim O'Brien on writing

"By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened [...] and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur, but that nonetheless help clarify and explain."

- From The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.

---

My stage managing friend Kate told me once about the two different schools of acting. There is "method," which gets actors in the press all the time for their months of research and tales of completely immersing themselves into a character maintaining it on and off screen/stage. I should say that my knowledge of acting theory is limited to my four years of high school drama club and one semester of a "Acting for Non-Theater Majors" at NIU, so forgive me if I butcher this theory. But from what I gather, method acting requires one to do as much as they can to become a character externally and internally.

Then there's the Brechtian theory, which seems to underplay that kind of immersion. Sure, mind exercises, meditations and research are valuable tools, but no matter what, there are always two people onstage - the character and the actor portraying the character. In the end, it's someone onstage, pretending to be someone else. (Hey actors, I'm not saying that what you do isn't incredible. I'm not saying it doesn't take a high level of skill and talent to do what you do. Let's just call a spade a spade. A painter makes pretty pictures. A writer puts words on paper.)

The latter came to mind upon reading the above quote from Tim O'Brien. It came from a piece of fiction based on his real-life experiences fighting in the Vietnam War. O'Brien blurs the line between fiction and truth by naming all the characters after people he served with and, in passages like the one above, breaking the fourth wall and admitting that certain things are exaggerated. In The Things They Carried, there are two O'Briens; the one who writes the stories drawn from his war experience, and the one in the stories.

When discussing the book in a writers group at my local library, other writers described how when they wrote memoirs on particularly hard or tragic events in their life, they too were able to separate themselves from the incident and look at it from a neutral position, because their trauma had been turned into story, something they could poke at, tweak and craft into something emotionally true, even if it's not one-hundred percent factual. Before, I had believed that writing creative nonfiction required a more method approach, and would try to mentally inhabit a past-self when I wrote. But O'Brien, and apparently the rest of the writers group, seems to fly in the face of that notion. Writing about the past isn't the same as writing history or journalism. The only thing that needs to be cited in memory, and is there anything more fickle and random than memory?

I finish this with another quote from Mark Twain; "It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense."

A new link for the right side of the page

An internet friend from way back has finally found her perfect social network/blog medium - the Tumblr. It's stream-of-conscious overload of images, text and music fit nicely with her persona, so have a look-see at Mizz Mezzano's Black Hearted Love for her stylish and very NSFW randomness.

A brief list of things I've enjoyed consuming.

1. Two Suns by Bat for Lashes [album]
2. Post-Nothing by Japandroids [album]
3. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien [book]
4. Dollhouse [TV]
5. The "Cafe Disco" episode of The Office [TV]
6. Mexican train dominos [family game]

Shooting nature in the face

Now that the weather has turned a corner into consistent pleasantness, why not take a walk and see what I find? Pics from April 22 & 23, 2009.

Adventures in Overthinking: "Mr. November"

Today, I felt a bit closer to the many anti-P.C. natured people in America. You know, the ones who laugh at Larry the Cable Guy and Carlos Mencia and think things like "developmentally challenged," is just "retarded" with too many syllables. Just when you think the things you love to watch, listen to and read are nothing more than entertainment, someone else comes along and makes you think again.

No one told me my favorite song, "Mr. November," by my favorite band, The National, had something not-P.C. in it. I can only claim ignorance to what being "the great white hope," actually meant. Sure, I had heard the phrase before, but it was one of those phrases that at my age was simply in the public knowledge without any idea as to where it came from.

Enter Ken Burns, and his documentary, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. For those who immediately thought of the terrible surfer/singer-songwriter, Jack Johnson was the first black man to win a heavyweight title in boxing. But in doing so, he brought on him an almost national racially charged hatred. This was the early 20th century, and black people weren't supposed to be flamboyantly wealthy and dominant like white people were.  So in an effort to take back the title, there was a search for "the great white hope," the caucasian who would beat the black Jack Johnson. 

Flash-forward to 2005, and the Brooklyn indie-rock band, the National close out their breakthrough album, Alligator, with a song called "Mr. November," a powerful rock song with a pre-chorus that reads, "I'm the new blue blood / I'm the great white hope." I'd always heard those lines as mantras of self-encouragement - something a batter could get himself pumped up with before he goes to the plate. But now, it feels like every time I say it, I'm saying, "I'm going to be the guy from the superior race who shows the rest of the world what for."

The National are as white as they come, but my super-fandom makes me want to believe that they weren't trying to convey any racial superiority. Part of what makes the song great is how the lyrics are all about past glories and pick-me-ups while singer Matt Berninger delivers it in his sad-sack baritone. You get the impression that no matter how many times he screams "I'm Mr. November," he's still going to find a way to mess things up. Maybe, by using a dated term, he's widening the disconnect from merely picking himself up to actual redemption. Or maybe he just likes boxing.