Syntax of Things

Listing Backward

So a few of you have emailed and asked that I post a recap or "Best of" list.  I've warned you that I'm not very good at this.  Inevitably, I leave things out or make people mad.  So I want to preface this by saying that I prescribe to the adage that opinions are like assholes...I think you know the rest. 

So here you go:

Books

Best Book I Read in 04:  (tie)The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon & Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.  If you judge best by the number of recommendations to friends, then these win in a landslide. 

Worst Book I Read in 04:  Youth in Revolt by C.D. Payne.  Definitely painful to read.  I'm still amazed I made it through all 500 pages. 

Biggest Disappointment:  Kings of Infinite Space by James Hynes.  Could not suspend my disbelief long enough to really enjoy this one.  Sorry Maud!

Music

Best Album:  I wanted to say A ghost is born by Wilco and would have, but then the Arcade Fire came along and Funeral amazed me.

Best Song:  "Staring at the Sun" by TV on the Radio.  If you haven't heard this band, I feel for you.  Amazing sound and so very hard to describe. 

Biggest Disappointment:  R.E.M.'s Around the Sun. 

Movies

Best Movie:  I wasn't really blown away by anything this year.  No movie made its way on to my all-time list.  Because I have to choose something, I'll go with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Worst Movie: The Stepford Wives.

Blogs

Best:  Pick any listed on the left. 

Personal

Best Accomplishment:  (tie) Finishing Infinite Jest.  Seeing all of the ballparks in the California League.

Worst Day:  I'll never forget the night of Hurricane Ivan's landfall.  I can't begin to describe the amount of worry and fear that I had for all of my family and friends in the area. 

Happy New Year to everyone!  Feel free to disagree and/or discuss.

Artie

Married to a few of the most beautiful women in history, among the best band leaders ever, friend to Jack Kerouac and the Beats, Artie Shaw died today at age 94.

I love this quote:  "People ask what those women saw in me," Mr. Shaw said in an interview with The New York Times. "Let's face it, I wasn't a bad-looking stud. But that's not it. It's the music; it's standing up there under the lights. A lot of women just flip; looks have nothing to do with it. You call Mick Jagger good-looking?"

+ Listen to Shaw's "Traffic Jam"

Don't Forget the Ham Hock

Snopes offers up a list of New Year's superstitions.  The one that I'm most familiar with and the one that I follow mainly because it's one of my favorite foods is the eating of black-eyed peas:

A tradition common to the southern states of the USA dictates that the eating of black-eyed peas on New Year's Day will attract both general good luck and money in particular to the one doing the dining. Some choose to add other Southern fare to this tradition, but the black-eyed peas are key.

+ Black-eyed pea recipes.

Six Figures

If, like me, you are having a hard time putting all of this unfathomable news into some sort of perspective, I offer the following, a list of U.S. cities with a population between 100,000 and 125,000:

Time Keeps On Ticking

Now that we have a few microseconds less of the year to enjoy, I need to busy myself with one or two unfinished projects, including my own reflections on a strange and busy year.  I've been mulling over a "best of" or a "favorites" list, but I have a hard enough time remembering what I was doing last week.  Going back over a year's worth of movies seen, music heard, and books read is asking too much of my weary brain.  But I'll have something ready by tomorrow. 

The Gift That Keeps On Disappearing

I'm a big fan of the gift card--both the giving and the getting.  However, I find it extremely annoying that when I have a total of, say, $3.38 on my card, most of the stores will not give me the money, insisting that this small sum be used on merchandise. Most of the time, I end up forgetting that I have the card and this money is lost forever.  And that's not the only potential pitfall of the gift card:

It's the dirty little secret of select gift cards: activation charges, monthly service fees, unreturned balances, and expiration dates that can render worthless Grandma's new and much-welcomed form of expressing love.

Not all gift cards carry these stealth costs, but enough of them do that they're capturing the attention of legislators, regulators and lawyers.

Sad News Getting Sadder

I've listened, read, and watched far too much news coverage of the disaster in southern Asia.  Flipping from network to network, seeing the same people interviewed, hearing the same tales of absolute horror and  constantly replayed images of destruction that were incomprehensible the first and fifteenth time I saw them.  How many bodies do we have to see floating in the now calm Indian Ocean?  How many images of blue and bloated death?  Of children crying at the loss of a parent or parent at the loss of a child?  It's all too much.  I woke up to a body count reported to be 20,000 and by the time I settled in to write this, they were estimating 50,000 dead, millions left homeless, and the fear that tens of thousands more could die as a result of disease.

An editorial in the Times of India puts it in perspective:

We know very little of what makes our planet tick. Though earthquakes are commonplace — every day a couple take place somewhere in the world — we don't know what causes them, particularly if they are underwater quakes. As Richard Feynman says: "We understand... the interior of the sun far better than we understand the interior of the earth". It was not till 1936 that we learnt that our planet has two cores, an inner and an outer. How the two react against each other, and with what repercussions, we have no idea. Volcanoes are common, but even experts are caught unawares by them. St Helens in the US exploded in 1980 with a force of 500 Hiroshima-size atom bombs. Yellowstone National Park in Montana is a mega-eruption waiting to happen. When it last blew, two million years ago, it created enough ash to bury New York state to a depth of 20 metres. Forget nations, our entire species might not survive such a cataclasmic giga-event — which for our planet is but a twitch of its skin. Such stupendous forces beyond conception can inspire only awe. And ultimate humility in the face of a mysterious creation which, to make itself complete, must inevitably contain the seeds of its own eventual dissolution.

So for now, we'll all grieve, donate money and time, and try to put back together what has been torn apart, but in reality, we're only waiting for the next disaster--natural or otherwise--and we'll do it all again. 

I'm going out on the back porch to get away from it all.  Call it denial; I call it self-preservation.  I need to see dogs playing in mud puddles.  I need to feel solid earth under my feet and breathe in the rain-soaked air.  I just need a few minutes.

+ Comprehensive list of relief organizations

Regarding a Loss

In case you haven't heard, Susan Sontag passed away this morning.  Ed has a nice collection of links to some of her essays, lectures, and interviews.  "Notes on 'Camp'" is a favorite of mine.

When the Levee Breaks

I'm still in recovery mode, which means that I'm staying away from anything that involves complex thought or coherent composition for at least the next day or two.  Thus, this flood of links:

--Reason #45654 why I think Alabama might just need an enema.

--I'm trying to think of ways to make this thing disappear before it gives me a heart attack. 

--This might be one of the coolest sites I've stumbled across in recent memory.  Internet geekery is an amazing thing.  I've always wondered what West Texas A&M's helmets looked like in 1965.

--Toffee-flavored cigarettes?  Why?

--If you have little kids, you might want to know that Adam Duritz, he of the fake dreadlocks and the annoying singing voice, whom you may know from his work with the Counting Crows, is planning on recording an album of songs for tykes.  You have been warned.

--In other "music for the kiddies" news, SoT favorite They Might Be Giants will star in a series of original music videos aimed at teaching preschool kids the ABCs.  The videos will premiere January 3 on the Disney Channel.

--Tom Waits will play a "wandering soothsayer" in a new film about a model turned bounty hunter.  He's also reportedly set to star alongside Lyle Lovett and Meryl Streep in A Prairie Home Companion. 

--If you haven't already, take the Observer's 2004 books quiz.  My score shall remain private.

I have one more day off and it promises to be a stormy one.  Check the radar in the top right corner and if you see lots of greens (or yellows or oranges) you'll know that I'm sitting on my couch with a big smile on my face. 

Is That an iPod in Your Pocket?

I've spent three days getting to know and falling in love with my new iPod.  It really is all that and more.  During the honeymoon, I've made note of a few things that I thought I would share:

• I started with an initial upload of 1844 songs at nearly 10GB.  I soon realized that I had some duplications and a few albums that I really didn't want popping up in random play, so I've taken it down to 1731.  That's close to five days of continuous music. 
• First song played (song shuffle mode) was "Blanket Hog" by The Long Winters.
• I think one of my ear canals is smaller than the other.  The right ear pod fits perfectly and is easy to insert; the left just doesn't want to go in at all. 
• Why is it that my least favorite songs always come up early and often in the shuffle mode?  Do I have bad iPod karma?
• My first religious experience with my iPod was standing in the middle of a deserted dog park staring at the skyline of San Diego while listening to my own Tindersticks mix.  Unfortunately, the moment was short lived.  I soon realized that the dogs had disappeared and that I had no idea how long they had been gone.  Somewhere in the neighborhood of two songs or so just isn't a good way to measure time.  Anyway, they were on the other side of the park and came running when I screamed the word "Treat."
• I was one of four million people to receive an iPod for Christmas.  What does this mean?  The City Pages has a few theories.
• After much thought, I've decided to name it doPi.

A Flat Note

What does it say about a person when the highlight of his trip to the "World Famous San Diego Zoo" was standing less than thirty feet from an elephant when it farted?  This came but minutes after the same elephant relieved itself of what appeared to be roughly two bales of hay.  Why I stood there and watched could be an item for a qualified therapist to sort out, but I felt the little boy in me drawn to one of the most disgusting things imaginable.

Anyway, thanks to all of the excitement and the three-mile hike (estimated) up and down hills through four or five ecosystems at least, I'm planning to spend a good chunk of today recovering while plotting out how to spend my Borders gift certificate. 

The Next Thing I Hear Will Be Digital

It took a while, but I finally woke up in a Christmas mood.  Unfortunately, my mood was 2000 miles away in the town I grew up in where this morning they actually received a dusting of snow.  I've never had a white Christmas, so you can imagine the disappointment.  I'd originally planned on going there this Christmas, mostly to check out some of Hurricane Ivan's damage, but circumstances kept me here in San Diego where it is a cloudless 65^o and might as well be just another day in April.

I hope Santa brought you everything you wanted.  Right now, I'm loading up the iPod and readying for the Surf & Turf. 

Just think, it's almost over!

10 ? "Merry Christmas"

I'm happy to announce that as of Christmas Day I will join the growing population of iPod owners.  Santa let me in on this secret, so I spent the better part of the week frantically following my iPod's course from China to Japan to the Phillipines to Kentucky.  After a brief layover in Lexington, my iPod disappeared from the radar but turned up the next morning in the overworked hands of my UPS man.  Though it's still in the box (and I don't officially know about it) I'm already having second thoughts about asking for it.  It's not that I won't use it, but I don't have the greatest track record as far as electronics and Christmas presents are concerned. 

Before I explain, let me first say that this wasn't always the case.  One of the first Christmas presents which I vividly remember receiving was a small black-and-white TV.  I couldn't have been more than five or six, but I'll never forget walking into the living room and seeing it next to the tree.  For the next twelve years, the TV would sit beside my bed and serve as host not only to a world of 70s and 80s sitcoms and teledramas but also an Atari, a Vic 20, a cable decoder that would illegally pick up Showtime and Cinemax--making a young teen a happy boy many a late night--and a Nintendo.  I eventually had to put it down when it blew a tube in the late 80s.  It still stands as the Christmas present I used the most.

Then there's the Vic 20.  I spent months before Christmas 81 (or was it 82) asking, hinting, begging, offering my services as a child slave, crying, and basically making a boy ass of myself.  I had to have the Commodore Vic 20.  I remember telling my mom that if the computer wasn't waiting for me Christmas morning, there might as well not be any presents because I would not find any happiness in the world.  She managed to play it cool, laying the ground work for a surprise by building up a certain level of expected disappointment.  "You know your dad had to find a new job this year.  We can't spend much on Christmas gifts," she'd say. Of course I got the Vic 20.  But Christmas day was probably the only day that I was happy to have it.  The thing was like a retarded Atari asking more from the user than the ease of plugging in a cartridge.  I did try.  I bought a book about BASIC programming and managed to make words scroll down the screen and change colors.  I added a cassette storage device so I could save my more complicated word scrolling, but in the end, the Vic 20 became an expensive dust collector under the TV.

In recent years I've had similar lack of success asking for such electronic items as a camcorder and a first generation mp3 player.  The camcorder has spent most of its time buried in the corner of one cabinet or another.  I did manage to record a cross-country road trip, but since then I've rarely taken it out of its bag.  Like the Vic 20, the mp3 CD player was a bust.  It would play mp3s, but there was no way to adequately organize the music, so a full CD was a nightmare of random play.

I have high hopes for the iPod.  I've cleaned up iTunes and tinkered with the tags.  Everything is in order and ready to go.  If it turns out like the Vic 20, I'm asking for socks next year.

Merry Christmas to all.

Another Mood Helper

In order to help those of you still struggling to get into the Christmas swing of things, here's a video of Robert Pinsky reading a poem by 17th century poet Robert Herrick.  If you'd rather read it for yourself, here's the poem:

Dark and dull night, fly hence away,
And give the honour to this Day,
That sees December turned to May.

If we may ask the reason, say
The why and wherefore all things here
Seem like the Spring-time of the year?        

Why does chilling Winters morn
Smile like a field beset with corn?
Or smell like to a Mead new-shorn,

Thus, on the sudden? Come and see
The cause, why things thus fragrant be:
Tis He is born, whose quickening birth
Gives life and luster, public mirth,
To Heaven and the under-Earth.

We see him come and know him ours,
Who, with his sunshine and his showers
Turns all the patient ground to flowers.

The darling of the world is come
And fit it is, we find a room
To welcome him. The nobler part
Of all the house here, is the heart.        

Which we will give him, and bequeath
The Holly, and this Ivy wreath,
To do him honour, who's our King,
And Lord of all this revelling.

The Nut's Tree

For the third straight year, Ma and Pa SoT will be celebrating Christmas in San Diego.  This means that yours truly will be playing tour guide/entertainment director for the next several days.  To be honest, I'm sitting here trying to come up with parent-worthy activities that we haven't already done.  We've hit all the highlights:  Coronado, Mt. Cabrillo, La Jolla Cove, Julian, the desert, Balboa Park, the Zoo, and on and on.  Last year, I drove them up to L.A., proving once and for all that I'm a good son because only a good son would drive through L.A. traffic on his day off just for the sake of driving in L.A.  The past few years my dad has hinted at wanting to go to Tijuana, but I've managed to convince him that unless he wants to a) get really drunk on the cheap b) get really cheap drugs or c) get really depressed, he might want to stay north of the border. 

One of my goals each year has been to treat my parents to some cuisine that they can't easily find--or won't think of finding--in their tiny town.  Last year, I finally convinced them to go to a sushi restaurant with me by telling them that the menu would offer more than just raw fish.  I ordered a few "safe" rolls--California and Philadelphia--but despite all of my assurances that "even Elaine will eat these" they wouldn't budge from their position that raw fish should be used only as bait.  Dad did put one Cali roll in his mouth but it ended up in his napkin and I ended up hearing how disgusting it was for the remainder of the evening.

This year, we'll try Greek.

Another obstacle I face every year is my dad's car sickness.  Anytime he rides in a moving vehicle for more than five minutes he ends up with his head between his knees.  We've remedied this in the past with generous doses of Dramamine, but then he ends up falling asleep and missing the scenery.  And Mom and I can't carry on a descent conversation for all of the snoring.  Two years ago, I made the mistake of taking the trolley into Old Town not thinking about the rocking to and fro.  We made it through two stops before my dad had the green hue.  Oddly enough, he's okay as long as he's driving, so I'll be offering him the wheel this week.

I'll figure something out eventually.  Maybe we'll just sit here and stare at the Christmas tree for five days.  Stay tuned.

"Give all the toys to the little rich boys"

Finally!  I've figured out why I'm having trouble getting in the Christmas spirit.  Until this morning, I had not heard the one holiday song that I actually like.  Despite hearing carols and every conceivable version of nearly every Christmas song ever written, I'd yet to hear the Kink's "Father Christmas."  In my opinion, this is the only song that matters. 

The situation has been remedied.  Thank you, Ray Davies.

If you've been missing it also, download it here.

{Lyrics under the fold.}

On the Menu

With the parents' scheduled arrival mere hours away, I still have plenty of cleaning to do, so things will be a little slow around here today.  Fear not, plenty of the people listed in the sidebar have promised to stick around through Friday providing all of you stuck in cubicle or office hell plenty to read while you clockwatch away the rest of the week.

If you're still trying to decide what to cook for your holiday meal, the BBC has the results of a poll conducted this year in which the participants were asked to list the fifty foods everyone should try before they die.  (The ones I've consumed are italicized.)

1. Fresh fish 2. Lobster 3. Steak 4. Thai food 5. Chinese food 6. Ice cream 7. Pizza 8. Crab 9. Curry 10. Prawns 11. Moreton Bay Bugs 12. Clam chowder 13. Barbecues 14. Pancakes 15. Pasta 16. Mussels

17. Cheesecake 18. Lamb 19. Cream tea 20. Alligator 21. Oysters 22. Kangaroo 23. Chocolate 24. Sandwiches 25. Greek food 26. Burgers 27. Mexican food 28. Squid 29. American diner breakfast 30. Salmon 31. Venison 32. Guinea pig

33. Shark 34. Sushi 35. Paella 36. Barramundi 37. Reindeer 38. Kebab 39. Scallops 40. Australian meat pie 41. Mango 42. Durian fruit 43. Octopus 44. Ribs 45. Roast beef 46. Tapas 47. Jerk chicken/pork 48. Haggis 49. Caviar 50. Cornish pasty

The Year in Crappy Journalism

LA Times media columnist David Shaw lists his picks for the worst journalism of 2004.  My choice for top of this list (or bottom):

Mark Swed, music critic for the Los Angeles Times, described Richard Strauss' epic opera "Die Frau Ohne Schatten" as "an incomparably glorious and goofy pro-life paean" in a February review. Unfortunately, "pro-life" in his review was changed to "anti-abortion" in the published version, even though abortion is not an issue in the opera, which "extols procreation," as The Times acknowledged in a correction the next day. Even more unfortunately, a second correction was required the following day to point out that the first correction had "incorrectly implied" that it was the reviewer who had characterized the work as "anti-abortion."

Fake, Plastic Holiday Cup of Cheeriness

(Note:  The following contains links that direct you to photos.  I apologize for the poor quality of these photos.  The camera has been drinking...not me.)

Last night, I decided to harvest the tree in an attempt to find my Christmas spirit. 

I'm glad Christmas comes only once a year.  Can you imagine surviving this twice?  Sometimes I think I might become a December-only Jehovah's Witness or join some cult that eschews any celebration other than one's birthday.  But then I think of the trouble and decide that assembling a tree and putting up with all the merriment for a few weeks isn't so bad.

Besides, with my tree, it's just a matter of sliding things into place.  Reshaping, bending, untwisting.  Making sure the plugs go in the correct socket.   

You can't worry about things being warped or leaning too much one way or the other.  You can't pay attention to details at this stage.  Just keep the finished product in mind.  Just worry about getting to New Year's Day and then faking all of those resolutions and resolving that next year you'll put the tree up only if you're forced at gunpoint--the same resolution you've made the past three years.

Don't think too much about anything.  Just trim.

And whatever you do, don't mourn the losses.

Think about the look in their eyes when they open those special presents.

Before you know it, it will all be over.

He's Watching

Sometimes the strangest things show up in my referral list.  This one may take the prize for "Funniest while combining elements of creepy and huh."

La Mala Educación

San Diego Union Tribune movie critic David Elliot speaks with director Pedro Almodóvar about his new film Bad Education.  When asked about his place in film history, Almodóvar responds:

I don't enjoy the labeling, but it has been around since I started. The language now has the word Almodovariano, meaning comic, risky, exaggerated. But I like having a nicho – a niche, right? That means in Spanish, first, a space you buy in the cemetery, but it has more to do with having a place for yourself in life.

Now That I've Recovered Use of My Fingers

So I came away from my trip to Amsterdam with only one photograph, hastily taken while sitting in the cramped cabin of a U.S. Air plane, hoping that I would be lucky enough to sleep until Philadelphia, or at least Greenland.  Who needs photos when I have my memories.

Saturday Goodness (almost!)

I was all set to provide a link to two new songs from the Decemberists which were posted earlier today over at Stereogum, but it seems in the time it took me to go out and watch Closer and eat at Applebee's, Stereogum yanked the post.  Not sure why, but you might want to check back there to see if they go back up.  I've got my own copy but I'm afraid of lawyers so I'll only say that if you can find a way to contact me and have a method of receiving largeish files I might be able to send you directions on how to grab them.  Pretty good songs, too.  In true Decemberists fashion, one of the songs is about a barrow-boy named Eli.  Makes one realize that it's a long time 'til March when the new album, Picaresque (changed from The Infanta) comes out.  According to a comment in the now absent post at Stereogum, the track listing will be:

1. The Infanta
2. We Both Go Down Togethre
3. Eli, The Barrowboy
4. The Sporting Life
5. Espionage
6. Lost At Sea
7. 16 by 32
8. Engine Driver
9. Bus Mall
10. The Mariner
11. Angels

A live version of "The Sporting Life" can be found here.

Fire!

I have to remember to start bringing my camera to work.  This morning, I missed the chance to take pictures of a three-alarm fire with all of its black smoke and flames and fire trucks, not to mention the hundreds of people gathered on sidewalks everywhere to watch.  It was an interesting way to start the morning.  At first, I thought the sirens might be a side effect of the jet lag, but when people started gathering around the windows, I quit installing my new laptop port to watch for myself.  At first, we thought it might be a car fire  but then the smoke grew heavy and before long flames started shooting out of the top of a building, which turned out to be a residential hotel.

It took the fire crews around an hour to contain the flames, another hour of watching and investigating, and by mid-morning the Red Cross was set up in the parking lot across the street.  Now the news is reporting that one person died and at least seven are missing, though those seven might not have been in the hotel at the time. 

Speaking of fire, the photo at the right shows the aftermath of a blaze that destroyed the "Love Shack" (bugmenot login: dawgathens2 password: theevent), the house that inspired the B-52's song and in which the band wrote the song "Rock Lobster."  I guess it's fitting that the tin roof, though of course rusted, appears to be the only thing that survived the fire.

Fog

I've finally made it back to San Diego, but I'm not all the way here.  I spent twenty-nine hours in a combination of airports, airplanes, and bus, the latter thanks to a thick fog over San Diego that caused a diversion to L.A. and a bus ride home.  Instead of a 9pm arrival, I finally made it home around 2:30am, then up for work at 7.  Needless to say, I'm in need of a long night's sleep and the weekend and hopefully my own fog will lift.  Much has happened since I last posted and much to tell you about, including:

--The Braves' offseason moves.  Smoltz back to the rotation; the trade of little more than nothing for Tim Hudson.  A few more moves are needed, but this counters the Mets and their overspending for Pedro.
--A really interesting dining experience in Amsterdam.
--I'm working on my own version of a Best of "things" in '04 list.  Stay tuned.
--The King is for sale.
--More on Kerouac and The Windblown World.
--The Arcade Fire will be playing San Diego on January 17.  Nothing to discuss, really, just wanted to mention it.
--And  I'll finally name the Syntax of Things theme song.  {Suggetstion box still open.)