God Shuffled His Feet

Not sure what me trot out this ancient album. I'm always of such mixed feelings about it. Some of the songs are so interesting -- but some are strange and weak -- and the whole album just doesn't hang together well, somehow. But some of the songs really stay with me. Ever since I fell and banged up my ribcage, I can't get "Afternoons & Coffeespoons" out of my head -- this may also have something to do with the fact that The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has been hovering around my chamber like Poe's Raven.

None of their other albums measured up anywhere close to this one -- the third one, in particular, was really disappointing. This is why I'm afraid to write another book.

Coraline

How could I not like a movie that has a single character who is voiced by both John Hodgman and John Linnell? I wanted to like it more, though. It gets off to a strong start, but falls into a very mechanical structure (gather the three magic jellybeans, blah blah), and Coraline is a little bit hard to like - she's kind of mean and selfish. So, I liked it okay, but I wanted to like it more. I wish it meant a little more, and felt less mechanical. It made me reflect on a story that I'm working on, which may itself be too mechanical. So -- thanks for that, Coraline!

You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

Another great collection of Bukowski poems. On their own, they aren't much, but bunched in these collections, I always feel like I'm visiting with Bukowski, getting to know him better. I wanted to pick out a couple to put here, but mostly, on their own, they don't tell you much, any more than looking at one human bone would tell you much about a person. So instead, I'll call out two of the more unusual ones. The first is unusual because of its historical context:

beasts bounding through time --

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the over like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poinson
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human this breathing
in and out
these punks
these cowards these champions
these mad dogs of glory
moving this little bit of light toward
us
impossibly.
-----------

And the second one, well, because it is so unexpectedly technical:

16-bit Intel 8088 chip

with an Apple Macintosh
you can't run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can't read each other's
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can't use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.
-----------

We miss you, Chinaski!

Alegria

This was a very pleasing show, though I don't know if it's quite as good as La Nouba. One thing was a little disappointing was that we were in "half arena" setting, placing our seats at a ninety degree angle to the stage. But unfortunately, a number of the routines, especially the clowning routines, could only be fully appreciated from the front. That aside, there were some wonderful performances, and the German wheel performance was the best I've ever seen.

Napoleon Dynamite

I'm not sure how I went so long without seeing this movie. Well, actually, I guess I do know. I was busy when it came out, and when I saw snatches of it on TV, the scenes and characters just seemed so creepy that I wasn't really drawn to it. I was quite surprised, then, seeing it beginning to end, to realize that actually it is a very sweet film, and that the characters aren't nearly as disturbing as I thought they were going to be. I think that is part of the appeal of the film -- it seems that at any moment, something really disgusting is going to happen, but then it never does.

And the message of the film is surprising too -- I guess it's something like, "no matter how screwed up things are, they can still turn out all right," which is a message we always want to hear.

Yes!

I actually read this a little while ago, and somehow forgot to mention it. It was a pleasant survey of research on the nature of persuasion, with fifty short chapters, each describing the results of a different study. Since it's been a few months since I read it, I have the luxury of telling you what in it stuck with me:

1) "Social Proof" is very important to people -- that is, if other people are doing it that I feel some association with, it is likely to change my behavior. For example, telling someone that they are the biggest energy waster in their neighborhood is likely to get them to waste less energy. Surprisingly, though, the opposite is true -- telling someone that they are the biggest energy saver in their neighborhood will persuade them to save less energy!

2) Small favors lead to big favors. If someone asks you for a small favor (can you tell me the time?) and then later asks for a large favor (can I have a dollar?) you are more likely to grant the large favor than if the person skipped the small favor first. This appears to be because of a certain kind of rationalizing we do -- "I did a small favor for this person, therefore they must be of some importance to me."

3) There are a lot of Dentists named Dennis. In some creepy data mining, it was determined that one's name exerts some amount of influence on the job that one chooses. Roofers are more likely to have names beginning with "R"., etc. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how egocentric we are. An experiment with persuasive sales letters showed that if the persuader had the same birthdate as the persuadee, the persuadee was more likely to respond positively to the letter.

Wow -- look at all the stuff I remembered! I guess that's a good sign.

In short, it is an excellent book for getting a survey of the psychology of persusasion. It feels too much of a need to end each chapter with a painfully corny joke, but if you can overlook that, it's pretty good.

Adventureland

I really wanted to like this. I mean, it's about quirky people working at an amusement park in the mid-eighties, and in fact it was filmed right here in Pittsburgh at Kennywood Park! Sadly, while it had its moments, I was kind of disappointed. They really didn't capture the mid-eighties very well -- no one looked right. I must admit that Bill Hader was exactly like "Larry M.", a guy I used to have to work for at Riverside Park, but he was just a caricature. What seemed weird was that everyone was too old for the problems they were having. And basically, it was a sappy love story -- I thought it would be more of a comedy. Oh well. It was what it was! At least they got the Musik Express right... man, that thing could make a person want to kill themselves.