Monthly Archives: February 2013

Feb262013

I Knew Her When, Part II

As I’ve written before, one of the real perks of working where I do is that I so often have the opportunity to meet and befriend smart, creative, interesting, quirky, funny, and extremely cool people… some of whom do very cool and enviable things like writing books that get published by actual, honest-to-god publishers and turn up in actual, honest-to-god bookstores and such, as my friend Diane Olson did last year.

Well, it’s happened again.

Jen Larsen used to be a — how do I put this? — a large woman. She thought, as many people do, that if she could just lose the weight, all her troubles would be over. She’d magically become confident, dynamic, beautiful, successful… that she would finally like herself. And so, like so many other people in a society obsessed with the quick fix, she underwent gastric bypass surgery. And the weight came off. But then Jen found, to her surprise, that her problems were still there… and she was no longer sure who the hell she was. Her memoir of the whole experience, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head, has just been released. I haven’t read it yet, but I know from my personal experiences with her that she’s witty, funny, self-deprecating, and brutally honest, and I’m certain her book is probably much the same. It promises to be an incredible read. Here’s a nice little animated trailer for it:

That’s Jen herself doing the voiceover, by the way. I’m sure she would deny it, but I think she’s a great reader. Stranger Here has already gotten some good reviews, and Diane Olson and I are taking bets on how long it takes before Jen is invited to meet with Oprah. In the meantime, she’ll be signing books in Salt Lake next week at the King’s English Bookshop; details here.

I highly recommend buying the book from your local bookseller, of course, but you can also get it from Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Jen’s website is here.

(Incidentally, Diane’s book — A Nature Lover’s Almanac: Kinky Bugs, Stealthy Critters, Prosperous Plants & Celestial Wonders — is still available! And still wonderful!)

Feb242013

Don’t Mind the Socialist in the Corner…

Robert Reich.

If the name doesn’t ring a bell, he was the Secretary of Labor for five years under President Clinton. These days, he’s a college professor, writer, and political commentator in any number of media (he shows up frequently on the Sunday morning talking-head shows). He’s a damn smart guy with a knack for saying stuff I agree with… or at least stuff I find interesting and/or enlightening. Of course, he’s also unabashedly, fiercely liberal, which means a significant portion of my Loyal Readers will reflexively sneer at anything he says and then change the channel. And that’s a shame, because so much of what he says is really just common sense. Like this, for instance, which I pulled from Reich’s Facebook page:

Several of you think we “consume” enough already. You’re right if you think of consumption in the narrow sense of just more “stuff.” But consumption can also be thought of more broadly, in terms of the things the richest nation on the earth should be able to afford — what we could obtain if our society had different priorities, if we used all our productive resources, and we were more equitable. Those things presumably would include more and better education, better healthcare, a cleaner environment, more of the arts, better public health, more protection from violence, more economic security, more leisure time. It could also include more natural beauty, better conservation of our wilderness, and innovations that saved on energy and natural resources.

Many of these are public goods; some are purchased privately; some are a mix of public and private. All improve our standard of living and quality of life. The real question is whether we have the political will and the values necessary to obtain them.

I think the question about political will has already been answered, sadly. Far too many Americans (especially among the population of my home state) believe the items he ticks off are “socialism,” or otherwise ideologically suspect, rather than seeing them as having any inherent value regardless of one’s politics. Leisure, the arts, and conservation, in particular, seem to be frequently dismissed as purely liberal concerns, rather than something that everyone ought to care about. The thinking seems to be that anyone who values leisure time more than work is lazy; that art-for-art’s-sake isn’t worth pursuing because everything ought to generate a profit, or it shouldn’t exist; and that conservation is some kind of smokescreen for restricting individual freedoms.

The thing that baffles and frustrates me is that people are constantly saying that this is the wealthiest county on Earth, the best country on Earth, that anything is possible here. I don’t dispute any of that. (Believe it or not, I am patriotic, in my own way.) But I do wonder why, if those things are true, these quality-of-life issues seem to be so impossible for America to resolve, at least on an equitable basis that benefits everyone instead of only the wealthiest… especially when you consider how many other industrialized Western nations do a better job of this stuff than we do. Especially when it comes to healthcare. There is no reason why a country as rich and inventive as ours can’t figure out a way to ensure that all our citizens have access to quality care when they need it — care that won’t bankrupt them, and won’t bankrupt society either. Except of course for this mindset that everybody paying taxes to support a common good is somehow immoral, and that the federal government should never be allowed to dictate to free enterprise how much it’s allowed to charge. Because that somehow deprives Americans of their liberty. And that includes their liberty to struggle and live in constant fear of an illness or accident, I guess.

But hey, as Reich said, priorities…

Feb202013

A Late-Winter Afternoon Walk

There’s a fresh-smelling breeze wafting in advance of an approaching storm.

Crusty, freeze-dried piles of old snow look like tired men slumping their shoulders as they release themselves into widening circles of moisture on the sidewalk pavement.

My iPod somehow knows to dredge up some Grateful Dead as I stroll past the storefront where the Cosmic Aeroplane used to be, decades ago.

And all this puts me in mind of the young man I used to be and somehow lost track of.

I miss him.

Feb112013

The Perfect Milieu

After an infuriating last-second ambush by an account manager led to me working late on Friday night (he caught me returning from the restroom at two minutes to quitting time!), I spent a good part of the weekend pondering how I could obtain that life of leisure you hear about. I never did come up with anything that seemed workable, but William Faulkner certainly had it all figured out:

…the best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it’s the perfect milieu for an artist to work in. It gives him perfect economic freedom; he’s free of fear and hunger; he has a roof over his head and nothing whatever to do except keep a few simple accounts and to go once every month and pay off the local police. The place is quiet during the morning hours, which is the best time of the day to work. There’s enough social life in the evening, if he wishes to participate, to keep him from being bored; it gives him a certain standing in his society; he has nothing to do because the madam keeps the books; all the inmates of the house are females and would defer to him and call him “sir.” All the bootleggers in the neighborhood would call him “sir.” And he could call the police by their first names.

So the only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost. All the wrong environment will do is run his blood pressure up; he will spend more time being frustrated or outraged. My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

Sounds about right to me. I can certainly verify the bit about blood pressure, frustration, and outrage. Now, if only I could find a brothel in need of a landlord somewhere in the Salt Lake area… hell, it wouldn’t even have to be a landlord position. I’d be willing to be the ladies’ handy-man, like Paul Newman in The Sting. I could fix a carousel, I think…

(Quoted passage from a 1956 interview with Faulkner published in the Paris Review. Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Feb042013

I’ve Been Pulped!

I’ve long been a fan of the “pulp aesthetic,” i.e., the general style of illustration that graced the covers of the old pulp fiction magazines that were popular through the first half of the 20th century. There were pulps for every imaginable genre — romance, westerns, war stories, detective fiction, and even sports — but, not surprisingly, the science-fiction and adventure pulps are my favorites. Their covers were sometimes lurid, and often had very little to do with the actual content of the magazine, but they stir the imagination of my inner twelve-year-old with their depictions of square-jawed heroes, fair damsels, loathsome aliens, foul villains, and horrific monsters, all set against the most fantastic of backgrounds. They’re just plain fun to look at. And of course this old pulp art was the direct forebear of the paperback novel covers I found so captivating during my formative years in the 1970s and ’80s, in particular the ones painted by Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo. So naturally when our colleague Jaquandor ran across a little something called the Pulp-o-Mizer — “the customizable pulp magazine cover generator” — naturally I had to try it out for myself. Here’s the cover I designed for this very blog, as if it were a feature seen in one of these old magazines:

So what do you think? It’s probably no coincidence that I chose the dude with the jetpack, considering I’ve lately been reading a collection of all-new Rocketeer comics, but I think the image suits my blog anyhow. If I was a bit more clever than I am, I’d set it as the background for Simple Tricks, but alas, we’ll just have to enjoy it in the current post. Here today, gone tomorrow, I suppose.

Incidentally, if you’re intrigued by this style of art, might I recommend the excellent Pulp of the Day blog, which provides a constant stream of classic pulp covers for your artistic enjoyment? It’s been one of my daily stops for years…

Feb032013

I Shouldn’t Like This…

Fact: My dislike of JJ Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek remake movie only grows the more I think about it.

Fact #2: The trailer for its upcoming sequel, Star Trek into Darkness, not only failed to grab my interest, but actually irritated me with its fade-in/fade-out editing and its pretentiously somber tone.

So, given these two facts, you would think that a fan-made trailer for the original Star Wars trilogy, cut together in the style of that Into Darkness preview, ought to have me pulling out what’s left of my hair, right? Certainly I was expecting a pretty painful experience… and yet, weirdly enough… it works:

I think it works very well, in fact, considering I’m suddenly in the mood to go watch me some Star Wars, which is, after all, the whole point of a movie trailer. But I still don’t know what to make of Abrams getting his hands on Episode VII. If nothing else, it makes me uncomfortable to think of having the same man in charge of both the big sci-fi franchises of my generation. They’re supposed to rival each other, these two pop-cultural juggernauts, differing in theme, tone, texture, and probably a dozen other intangible concepts that literary types like to analyze. But with only one man’s vision guiding both, isn’t there a danger of them becoming too much the same? Of their identities bleeding into each other? We’ll see, I guess…