August 28, 1963

Movies: The Social Network

Last week I was listening to an old broadcast of Fresh Air (by old I mean three weeks old). David Edelstein, NPR's regular film critic, was listing his twelve best movies of 2010. I hadn't heard of 75% of them and if you aren't a film critic, then you probably hadn't heard of some of them either. Edelstein finished his list and he was asked why The Social Network did not make it because the film is the favorite in a lot of critic's circles. I listened to his response, which served more as a reminder that I needed to see the movie before awards season so I could access its worth compared to other frontrunners this year like True Grit, The Fighter, and The King's Speech. So I did. And not having seen The Fighter yet, I couldn't compare it with the SN, but I enjoyed True Grit and The King's Speech quite a bit more than the SN.

The SN is a good movie, but it's not great. I enjoyed it because people spoke very quickly throughout the movie. The whole film was an intense exercise in listening. Apparently, people who attend Harvard and/or score a 1600 on the SAT speak quickly and esoterically all the time. I love a movie that commands your utmost attention just to keep track of the arc of the film or who the hell is who. The acting was believable. Justin Timberlake puts in a respectable performance and by film's end you hate his character, Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster because he essentially talks himself into a 6 or 7% share of Facebook by suggesting the company move to California and he helps acquire some funding. But really, are we to believe Facebook wouldn't have taken off without his aid? I hope not. The SN's greatest shortcoming is that the viewer doesn't know the accuracy of the film. Mark Zuckerberg said that the film was not accurate at all, except for his college wardrobe at the time. So, what to believe? We know the lawsuits happened, but there is so much more to the film than lawsuits and beyond them we don't know what really happened during the creation and flourishing of Facebook. Jesse Eisenburg plays a pouty Zuckerberg who doesn't show much emotion at all from start to finish. Maybe that's the way Zuckerberg is in real life, but that doesn't make him hard to portray. If it were up to me, and it's not, I wouldn't consider Eisenburg for any awards because of this and that the competition this year is intense--plenty of performances outshine Eisenburg's.

Prior to seeing The SN I had heard that the movie portrays women in a disrespectful and degrading light. It does do that, but remember, the guys the movie centers around are in college and, whether or not it was an accurate portrayal, Sean Parker is no outstanding figure either. The characters are into women and sex. Are the women on Harvard's campus as good looking as the ones in the movie? There is no way. Are the women on Harvard's campus as easy as the women in the movie? Possibly, I don't know. Are there guys in college as interested in getting some as the guys in the movie were? You bet. So, for the most part, the portrayal of women in the SN was accurate.

I will write again soon about another movie. My closing thought: The SN was good, but man, not one of the finest movies of the century so far, like some critics have described it. I will say this though, The Social Network is better than Facebook.

Bad Days...

Happen when Sarah Palin appears above the fold in The New York Times.

Here's To...

Awarding mediocrity. There were 35 bowl games this year. I didn’t watch most of them, but from what I can tell they mostly sucked. This should come as no surprise. What kind of games do you expect to have when you put a 6-6 team up against a 7-6 team? Bowls used to be huge rewards for teams at the end of successful seasons, but now you only have to be at .500 to get in? Really, it’s despicable. And what it boils down to is the NCAA making more money off of its indentured servants. More bowls mean more money and who is opposed to that? Well, for one, I am.

It used to be fun to stumble across a bowl game on TV. You once had the guarantee of the two teams playing in said bowl game of actually being good. Now, not so much. I was about as excited to catch a bowl game over the holiday season as I was to find an infomercial for the Shake Weight.

Of course, classics like the Rose Bowl proved to be good games still, but enough with the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl, etc. Had Wyoming won two more games, there was talk of a bowl game. Are you serious? Wyoming was piss-poor this year and putting them in a bowl game would have done the same thing as most of the other games did, it would have just contaminated the airwaves.

First Pics of 2011

This New Year's celebration consisted of me taking a lot of pictures of the family's Scottie dogs, eating great food at restaurants, cooking excellent food at home, and me taking more pictures of the dogs because it is awkward taking picture after picture of a human sitting in the same room just to practice taking pictures with a new camera.

Here, Max and Molly take in the view from the 12th floor and watch our first substantial snow of the year fall by the window.

Chowing down at the Root Down. Awesome!

King Crab Legs for dinner on New Year's. Succulent.

Max overseeing his kingdom.

Airing Out 2010

I want to sit down and churn something out about 2010. I want you to read it and be astonished at what you’ve read, be in dismay about the year I had because maybe it was boring, but I made it sound like so much more than that.

2010 was anything but boring, but I don’t know if I can convey that anymore. As it did like the year before, 2010 started off with a trip to Florida, but through January, February, the birth of my nephew, and a conference championship my mind was with my MFA applications to ten schools. I had labored over them for almost a year and I felt like I applied to the entire spectrum of writing programs out there. Starting in late February, or was it early March, the rejections started to trickle in. First, was Wyoming. Then I can’t remember who came next. But I do remember there were nine more and the agony of going to the mailbox every day was sustained until the last letter arrived in April. I took it—the last letter—up to the apartment with me. The blinds were drawn. It was dark. I lied on the couch. I didn’t weep. I didn’t tear up. I yelled. I fucking yelled.

March is a blur. I had the whole month off. I don’t even know what I did. I wrote about the rejections. I did an annual spiel on the Oscars, self-published of course. There was a power outage and I wrote about, writing, what I believe to be, some of my best words in 2010. On the way to work one day I pulled over and threw the key to the Longmont house into Lake Michigan, cursing it in the air and hoping some feelings would sink to the bottom of the lake with it. And then Kate and I went to Wyoming and Colorado. It was cold and snowy and being in Laramie was tough knowing I wouldn’t be going to school there in the fall.

I wandered aimlessly through April, wallowing in failure (a little like I am now, but hey, that was a huge chunk of 2010). I not only coached practices, I did practices. I threw myself into them, destroying my body and finding out that I can still be fast in the pool. When I do my best in sports I tap a vein of aggression and I get lost in it. I had plenty of fuel.

The venting continued in May, one of the most stressful times of my 20s. We had made our plans for the next two years and they were denied from us. In the middle of it all we went to Mexico to escape it. We were successful in that, but the stress was waiting for us the day we got back. What next? What now? Then I went to Colorado and spent a few nights with good friends looking for our new home. Then, a wedding in May for two people in love. But it was tough and weird at times, stages of the healing process. Getting everyone together again felt right and wrong, stages of the aging and living process. Instead of a strong bond among all of us I was acutely aware of an aging history held together with feeble attempts to reestablish community. Honestly, I thought the shit was going to hit the fan this week. It didn’t so much. Some things went better than expected and for the other things, well, words went unsaid and feelings unshared, traits once rare among this group.

Like Milwaukee knew we were leaving, it threw us thunderstorm after thunderstorm in June, ephemeral, but breathtaking and humbling exhibitions of power. I searched everyday for jobs. I didn’t land one and started to doubt the wisdom in moving back to Colorado. My Mom visited us one last time in Milwaukee. Kate and I started watching Lost this month on Hulu and we never looked back. Concerning movies and TV, Lost was easily the highlight of 2010 for us. It was outstanding and our devotion to it was respectable.

July started with another vacation. This time we were off to California to see friends married, to see family, and to breath in some salty air. And then we were back in the Midwest for a few more weeks of packing and thunderstorms, one of them giving us seven inches of rain in three hours. Imagine if California got that? In our final days in Milwaukee we shed tears, took a lot of pictures of our apartment, and welcomed my Dad to Wisconsin so that he would help us move to Colorado.

I blogged twice in August. We settled into our new home, not the home we thought we would be settling into, but we thank God every day it wasn’t. We drove up our first fourteener. We went to Wyoming. The West opened its arms for us and we basked in its warm, dry, sunny climate. The proximity of friends and family helped ease the joblessness on my part. And after working for a week, Kate was offered a full-time job.

I wrote a love letter to Milwaukee in September. I witnessed Boise St. give Wyoming an ass-kicking. We finished Lost, with a blitz of 3 episodes, plus a two-hour finale, in one day. And then I got a job and we started P90X.

October: I worked some. Spent some time catching up with friends in Colorado. We had visitors. Colorado proved to be as beautiful as ever. Life went on.

A lot of people voted Republican in November. I didn’t. Are you kidding me? We spent our first Thanksgiving as a married couple with my parents and grandparents. Kate worked through the holiday and it didn’t seem relaxing for her at times, but my busy holiday schedule started at 4:30 the morning after Thanksgiving. November was warm.

In December I’ll tell you now, publicly, that I celebrated a private accomplishment. The month flew by with busy work schedules and the time to relax and celebrate our Creator was upon us in a matter of hours. We had a new camera to document it and the years ahead. The wounds sustained earlier in the year have partially healed, yet I still sometimes find in me a crushing doubt, chanting, “Failure, failure,” at me every time my hands rest on this keyboard. In the waning days of 2010, Kate’s family joined us as we welcomed 2011 into our lives, a year that can’t possibly contain in its 365 days what I want it to contain, but I will greet its every sunrise and toast its every sunset in search of it.

Christmas Eve

Once the music starts I tilt my head backward and stare at the ceiling, which is not always truly magnificent, but I stare at it like it is and I smile because everything is magnificent tonight. Christmas Eve is an oddity. As I enter adulthood, this night has become the one night of the year when I feel bombarded by the past, like it’s trying to make me feel guilty for enjoying the night. My cynicism tries hard to eat away at the night with thoughts of broken hearts, misplaced trust, and betrayal, but its massive effort fails. On this night, when we celebrate the birth of Jesus, I find that the flicker of a candle is more mesmerizing, the embrace more meaningful, the music more magical, and the mystery and wonder of our God more evident than any other day of the year. Rejoice that it’s easier to forgive and it’s easier to love tonight. And a God that makes us feel that way this day, or for all of them, is worth praising.

Merry Christmas!

New Camera

I picked up our new camera yesterday, a Nikon D7000 with an 18-200mm Nikkor lens. We haven't yet taken a picture with it, but we are just getting starting and can't wait to take this puppy out and start shooting.

Nat Geo Photos

National Geographic announced the winners of their annual photo contest. Check them out here.

Surf's Up, Milwaukee

Missing Milwaukee right now, not the weather, but that Milwaukee is on the shores of a lake you can surf on, and they were this week. From jsonline.com.

Dynamite

Hanukkah ended last night, but I thought I'd share this one.

Click here.

Big Pic: Pearl Harbor

I have linked to the Big Picture before, but I just checked the site today (I hadn't visited it in a while) and they have a stunning collection of pictures from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The history captured within the pictures just blew me away.

Click Here.

No Points For Variation

After weeks of no blogs, this, another picture post, doesn't really spice things up, but the view last night from our apartment was something else and I had to attempt the capture with my point and shoot even though I knew the camera wasn't going to replicate what I saw. I am hoping to remedy that in the near future with an upgrade, but I thought some of these were cool enough to share. The shelf of dark clouds and the mountains made such a beautiful band of light across the horizon that I couldn't pass it up.

October Pictures

My nephew, Nate. Cool dude.

The Banana Belt

As Denver’s first snow swirls outside my window, Milwaukee is experiencing a heat wave, the only time since late July that it has been warmer there than in Denver. I wintered in Milwaukee for the last three years and during that time I forgot how much easier the winters in Colorado are than in the upper Midwest. Of America’s 50 largest cities, Minneapolis is the only one that has a colder average annual temperature than Milwaukee.

Although average annual snowfall is higher in Denver, the first winter I spent in Milwaukee it snowed over 112 inches, an all-time record (pictured above, just one of many blizzards that winter). The winter of 2006-2007, the last winter I spent in Colorado, was record-setting in terms of snow. There was enough of it to cover not only the shadowed corners of your yard but the entire street and neighboring field for over a month. To have snow on the ground for over a month; that was a big deal to some Front Range residents and it was the first time I could remember having snow on the ground for that long. But in Milwaukee, if the snow only stays for a month you are in good cheer. It’s not unusual for there to be snow on the ground for three months straight. It’s not that they get more than Denver—I already covered that—it’s that the cold takes your breath away and they get slightly less daylight than Colorado in the winter.

When it comes to average annual temperatures, there is no competition. Among the places I’ve lived, only Laramie, Wyoming can compete with Milwaukee’s frostbite-inducing cold. Denver has its days, but I can’t honestly say the winters in Colorado are tough.

It’s amazing what a few years in a much colder environment can do to the way you respond to weather elsewhere. After just a few months of college in Laramie, I felt like I was going to the tropics when I drove south for an hour. Fort Collins was consistently 10-15 degrees warmer than Laramie. It was good I had that training, because without it I couldn’t have weathered the winters in Milwaukee with as much good cheer as I did.

Don't Forget

Conan O'Brien returns to television tonight on TBS. Locally, he's on at 9pm. I'm looking forward to it. Follow TeamCoco here.

The 2010 Midterms

After this November 2^nd, it is easy for me to be frustrated with and disappointed in thousands and thousands of Americans who, in 2008, launched the Senator from Illinois into the White House and then, only two years later, gave Republicans the majority in the House because Obama hasn’t yet dug the country out of a hole the Republicans led us into.

But I am still sanguine at times. Maybe I am crazy for being that way, but in previously shared governments meaningful legislation has passed and so I hope that the Republican majority in the House and the Democratic majority in the Senate can find common ground instead of going back and forth in a debate without results.

The Republicans are now the ones who find themselves with a mandate to govern as they see fit. This is a unique situation where they have to shift from just saying no to everything that came down from the White House to actually presenting solutions beyond making the Bush tax cuts permanent, repealing health care reform, or privatizing Social Security. Republicans came to power in these midterms because they kept promising the American people that they would represent their interests and that they would focus on jobs and reducing the deficit. I would love to see a Republican party with that focus. However, when I read the following in the paper this week I can’t help but shake my head at the Republicans:

But fresh from their victories, Republicans may have little incentive to defer to his [Obama] leadership. In the days leading up to the election, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, a top House Republican, repeatedly said there would be “no compromise” with Mr. Obama.

Is it too much to ask for Republicans to actually govern instead of again pushing on us their overtly divisive dialogue and diatribes, which accomplish nothing for the American people? If this remains the single more important thing they can do, then they have ensured their defeat in 2012 and such a defeat will be well deserved if they continue to just say, “No.” And while I am hopeful that the Republicans will do something good for America, I also know, and am comforted by the fact, that when 2012 is here, and if the Republicans have held to McConnell’s plan, than they will be in the minority again.

There are some positive signs from Tuesday’s election. There were several high profile candidates (O’Donnell in Delaware, Tancredo in Colorado, Raese in W. Virginia, Angle in Nevada, and Miller in Alaska) who all received glowing endorsements from Sarah Palin and they all lost. This is a huge bright spot. Even in her home state, Palin’s endorsement couldn’t even fend off defeat by Lisa Murkowski, a write-in candidate. This will not prevent Palin from running in 2012. She is obsessed with herself and there are enough delusional Americans out there who will push her to do it. However, in Alaska, where she was popular enough before she was McCain’s running mate, she has fallen flat on her face, leaving the governorship and the people she claimed to care about. Above the rest of the Republican candidates for 2012, she alone is the most narcissistic and it is the glorification of herself she wants to serve, not the “real America” like she always says. I suspect by 2012 America will be sick enough of her whiny voice which never delivers solutions or facts, just embellished tales from the crypt far-right.

And I don’t know how Harry Reid did it, but he defeated Sharron Angle, which is also another bright spot. Sharron Angle is a crazy ass. Read this, from a radio interview in Portland where she suggest an armed revolution: "I hope that's not where we're going, but you know if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I'll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out." I would have been much more concerned for this country had she won. I’m not a fan of Reid either, but I am sorry, Nevada had to pick the lesser of two evils on Tuesday and thank God they did.

Colorado decided to give the Democrats a little more time in office. I am relieved they did, even if it was just by .9%. Had Buck won, the Dems would still control the Senate, but Colorado remains a battleground state. Obama won quite handedly here in 2008. That Colorado is giving him another chance is a good sign for 2012. Perhaps, by then, states won’t have to give Obama another chance, they will see some change by then and they will vote to continue it.

For me, the big takeaway is to be thankful that this campaign season is done and to hold the crazy belief that politicians will actually do their job for a year before they start campaigning again. That’s a lot to hope for. And then there are the Republicans. Will they actually do something over the next two years except rail against Obama and prep for 2012? Only time will tell, but Americans will get a very good representation of how the Right is going to govern and “re-invent” themselves and that is, in a way, comforting to me because if it’s anything like 2000-2008, I think the same Americans who contributed to this Republican comeback will be reminded of why they voted for Obama in 2008 and do it again in 2012.

2010 Midterms Pre-Blog

America, you did let fear give you a Boehner. Luckily it didn't last longer than four hours and we didn't have to seek immediate help from a doctor (a psychiatrist, that is) because the Dems retained their hold of the Senate.

More on yesterday to come.

November 2, 2010

For the short blog below I am borrowing from a hilarious sign from the Rally to Restore Sanity. The sign refers to John Boehner, Republican House Minority Leader who could likely become Speaker of the House with a Republican wave tomorrow. So, here's my message...

Tomorrow...Don't Let Fear Give You A Boehner.

Actual Bumper Sticker

I am in the process of transcribing voice recordings I have fallen behind on. One of them I listened to today was from May 15. On that day I saw a bumper sticker and wanted to remember what it said. It was on a truck seen in Milwaukee. It read:

Those that buy cars or trucks from foreign-owned companies are butchering America's economic health in an expensive way whether they admit it or not. Don't kill the eagle!

Well, I don't admit that I am butchering America's economic health by owning a Nissan and a Toyota, but I will admit to having better cars than the American-car-owning version of me that doesn't exist. However, it was news to me that I was killing an eagle.