What it's like (formerly What I do)

A coyote crossed my path the other day. A big one with tall pointy ears and a mouth that dripped a lot of tongue. I braked and watched it run over the hill into deepest wilderness. As a relative of the wild dog, I never felt the fears that could get an ordinary mortal horribly ravaged. I like to ride the urban trail. Once I found myself inside a military compound where they take archery practice. My writing teacher had a knife thrown at her by the writer that I brought into class as an example of good writing. I practice yoga twice a week and I study hard at home. I watched part of Mad Max II on the tube tonight but otherwise I listen to music. Tonight it was The Chills, Ariel Pink, Ashtray Boy, Songs for Nao. Normally me and my housemate Udo (I say this because he's a dead ringer for the fab German actor Kier) listen to the Velvet Underground, Kath Bloom and the Grateful Dead. In my room, I play the Vivian Girls Everything goes wrong. The weather has been ill-conducive for reading, but I do it anyway. Tomorrow's forecast is more sunny weather.

My new best friend

Jane Dust - Summertime from Carbie Warbie on Vimeo.

What's your take on Norwood?

I'm a little deprived of Portis here. I find that deadpan style so fetching. What are you gonna name your daughter? Not Norwood I hope.

H: Norwood was fine. A quick diversion. I just think that Portis is McGuane lite. He's not laugh out loud funny and the pathos is missing. I never feel like anything bad is going to happen to his characters. I don't think I will read True Grit. On a Pitchforkian scale I give Portis a 7.2.

Saturday

I rode my bike out to Buffalo Park, in what's become a regular circuit. It's a faux-training facility, which means there are lot of people there looking silly in loud expensive nylon. They choose a number of different tracks depending on what kind of workout they want. I usually just turn around once I'm there. Sometimes I don't have a choice. Last week there was a race on and the time before that I stripped my crank arm and my pedal fell off.

Instead of going home I acted like I was going to the Grand Canyon (74 mi) and hit the museum a few miles down. I'm now at a family-run corner eatery eating a jalapeno burger, staring at Humphrey's Peak. I thought if I moved outside there'd be fewer flies and I was right. I'm glad the proggy classic rock that I heard indoors is still thumping and wailing away out here from some wire and speaker deal. I'm writing with an Eraser Mate. Fuck don't buy an eraser mate. They can't write with a darn and they cost a pretty penny.

This is a really good burger. The girl serving me sure is glum. I wonder if she's always like that or if something terrible happened to make her act that way. The other possibility is that it's Saturday and she's inside on a beautiful day serving half pound burgers and she's vegetarian and her chihauhau just got taken by a hawk. The call came through just before I showed up. I was feeling glum too until I went through the Ed Mell show at the museum of northern Arizona. That perked me up. Ed Mell does these cubist clouds and rocks capturing the impossibly weird depth perception of these one-of-a-kind landscapes. His cloudburst visions are heavenly. This infernal one is called Surrounding storm and it's a beaut. I wish Mia was here with me to see it

Maynard Dixon's a big influence on Mell. Funnily I was just reading about Dixon yesterday. Thomas McGuane had this to say:

"To me, no painter has ever quite understood the light, the distances, the aboriginal ghostliness of the American West as well as Maynard Dixon. The great mood of his work is solitude, the effect of land and space on people. While his work stands perfectly well on its claims to beauty, it offers a spiritual view of the West indispensable to anyone who would understand it."

Shia Laboof

I had fun watching Disturbia, a taut rewrite of Rear Window set in Disturbia, the disturbing burbs. Shia Laboof plays a disturbed teenager who throttles his Spanish teacher because he's angry about this whole bereavement thing (the least convincing part of the entire production), and gets a bracelet strapped to his ankle that will beep if he crosses the property threshold and he don't want that particularly with the Spanish teacher's cuisine working the case. He's an ass and will rough him up, if necessary, and does because there's events that force Shia to leave the house like the kids who light dog doogie on fire and leave it on his doorstep. Shia finds out too late what it is; he's already stomped the flame. Setting off down the street after them he gets to flaunt his running form and that should be a integral competent of any Laboof cinematic characterization. The housebound voyeur turns super-sleuth because it's exciting and he has nothing else to do since he Mom disconnected his gameboy and canceled his iTunes (it would have been a different movie if he had his iTues). If he calls the police, they might just solve the case and then he'd be bored again, plus he doesn't like cops for what they put on his leg. Furthermore we wouldn't have this movie. In a supporting role, David Morse owes something to Terry O' Quinn's Stepfather but really it's a great individual performance and he is very convincing. An uptown girl moves next door, who is Laboof's age and she adequately update's Grace's role.



Shila's Mom looks just like Royal Chord's Eliza Hiscox, always a good thing when Mom's look like those girls, I reckon.

Laboof underplays the whole thing rather well.