June 2006: Nonrequired Miscellany

Web site: fartparty.org. If you inked the real me and put her in comic form, she would look like this. Seriously, I laughed so hard in my cubicle that I had to run to the bathroom and cry from tears of joy.

Music: The Mysterious Production of Eggs by Andrew Bird otherwise known as the most underrated album of 2005. While you were all combing your sideswept bangs and color coordinating your leg warmers to Sufjan Stevens’ Illinoise, Andrew Bird was recording some gorgeous stuff. His songs are subtle with lots of texture and a wide range of instruments. He also manages to interweave non-dreary lyrics about death. He recorded all the instruments on this album and is currently on tour. Stream his entire album at his website. Then buy it, cheap skate.

Book: Wake up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames. He’s considered the “edgier David Sedaris.” I like to think of him as the Henry Miller with a sense of humor. Though all of his works are fantastic, this one has an interesting circular/repetitious plot of self-destruction. The protagonist is the epitome of an anti-hero who fancies the subterranean life of alcohol and women (like Hemingway) but finds himself in compromising situations. This novel is a bittersweet exploration of alcoholism, the Great American Novel and a trust fund. Sounds like all my friends.

UPDATE: He has a new collection of essays entitled I Love You More Than You Know. Excellent so far, but I haven’t finished it. All interested individuals who would like to take me to New York to see his show, please apply herein.

EXCERPT

I saw this psychic rearrangement happen to a girl I knew in high school. She was a blonde with a good figure, but she had an enormous, catastrophic nose. She was ostracized and had no friends. Then one summer her parents sprang for plastic surgery. When we all returned to school, no one knew what to make of her. Then a football player asked her out. Suddenly she had friends. She became “cool.” She was considered beautiful, pretty, but I could see that in her eyes there was still the look of the ugly girl she had once been, a hint of fear that it would all be taken away from her. By the end of the year that look in her eyes was almost extinguished, but a trace was left. Still, her psyche must have felt a lot better. With a short nose to go with her other attributes, she was destined to be courted often and eventually married and impregnated, which was the goal of most of the girls from my middle-class New Jersey high school. But then her children would have big noses. No escaping one’s self. Her husband would wonder where his children’s noses had come from. Perhaps the marriage would dissolve. He might suspect infidelity. She wouldn’t be able to tell him the truth -- I’m ugly.

Film: Tommy Lee Jones’s The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. It took me a long time to see this movie because I expected a film about minutemen, crazed human hunters slinking along the Texas-Mexico border. Jones’s directorial debut is breathtaking, embodying the physical struggle of pursuing the American Dream while also navigating the boundaries of friendship and morality. We are so adjusted to Hollywood’s special effects that it’s easy to forget about the special effects of Mexican sunsets, southwestern terrain and Tommy Lee Jones’s gritty expressions. I’m sure the Director of Photography wanted to kill Jones in the end. Think Don Quixote meets Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.

Enjoy!