Tunes for Late March

[Disclaimer: The following post was written with regards to the geographical location of 39.8460 North, 86.2642 West and the surrounding meteorological area. Those of you outside of the general Midwest will have to use your imaginations if your weather does not happen to match.]

And here we are, Monday, March 28, 2005, the first no-kidding day of spring. Yes, the calendar claimed that last week’s March 20 grey-skies-high-50-crapfest was technically the start of spring, but I disagree. You need some basic spring components for it to be spring, and we’ve finally got them: Current temperature, 61. Sunny. Light breeze. The smell of green in the air. The first day you leave your coat at home and don’t regret it. Again, simple pleasures. Change of season = good. Spring = very good. And tomorrow (see below) is going to be even more ridiculously perfect.

Now that it’s so absurdly nice outside, what music are you listening to that complements the niceness? Given that music is fundamentally atmospheric, it is vital to be listening to the right tunes on days like today and tomorrow. This is a tricky choice, and one which I submit to you. In the interest of sanity, I’m going to limit this to a single album. For me, Paul Simon’s “Rhythm of the Saints” is working quite well today. Bright, soft, not overbearing. A song like The Obvious Child screams spring to me. I would also recommend “Give Up” by The Postal Service, which has quite a few excellent songs for spring, including Brand New Colony.

So, what is your perfect spring album? Yes, I know, it’s tough to make an entire album fit one day, but take a shot. Submit comments below and give me something to listen to tomorrow.

Go Buy An Orange. Immediately.

Really, do. For whatever reason, the citrus gods have decided that March shall be the month of heavenly oranges of massive orangeness and deep sweetness and juice running down your fingers. You need to go out and get one right now if you like oranges even a little bit. I’m not kidding.

"Um,” say you, “you’re now dictating which produce we ought buy. Such goals were not mentioned in your introductory posting. Have you lost sight of the dream? Have you wandered astray into the orchard of temptation?”

(It is worth noting that you talk strangely. Why is this?)

Don’t worry. I am still coloring inside the lines. This is but a small detour to the not-in-a-box section of the grocery store. It will be worth it. When you get to your local fruiting establishment, skip the medium-sized bagged oranges, ignore the tangelos, do not be fooled by the pink grapefruit. Go directly to the large-as-your- head-oranges department. California Navel, #4012 (see below). They are currently three for two dollars or similar. Don’t worry too much about how they look, they’re all good right now. Buy one. Take it home. Eat it. Don’t waste it on fruit salad. Just sit down and eat it. Spectacular produce is one of the small joys of life. Go buy some before it’s gone. Yum.

Yes, this is my orange. I scanned it in.
Yes, just like in “Tron.”

*Promises of super-standard oranges may not apply to your geographical produce region. But really, what have you got to lose? Go buy one. And if you don't like oranges, well, then more for me.

I'm jumping....okay, not really.

An amusing photograph for your consumption: This is Lawrence North star Greg Oden (height: 7 feet; NBA prospect: high; future net worth: much) faking the holy living crap out of three defenders. For those of you who don't follow basketball, when you get three guys to jump on a pump fake, you are a) extra tricky and b) getting much-earned respect from the other team. This doesn't happen very often. Oh, and Lawrence North won the game, too, advancing to the state finals. Sorry for the small picture - the Indianapolis Star's website offers petite images only.

(Triple) Psyche!

Movie Review: I Heart Huckabees (C-)

First, a word on movie reviews: Being the educator-type, I’m going to rate movies on a A to F scale, as follows:

A: Go see this movie right now. Stop eating/driving/talking to other people and proceed directly to the movie theatre or video rental establishment. It will change your life, or at least leave you deeply entertained. Examples (in my book, anyway): Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, American Beauty, The Matrix, Fight Club, Saving Private Ryan, The Fisher King, Kicking and Screaming.

B: See it some time soon. It can wait for you to finish eating dinner, but you definitely want to check it out. Might not change your life, but will definitely surprise you, make you laugh extremely hard, get a little misty-eyed, or be otherwise impactful. Examples: Garden State, The Usual Suspects, Pulp Fiction, Being John Malkovich, Pirates of the Caribbean, Finding Neverland.

C: Worth renting, but probably not worth eight bucks to see in the theatre. Will entertain you, but doesn’t offer anything too original, tricky, or life-changing. Effective, but forgettable. Examples: Signs, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Confidence, Hitch, The Italian Job, Spiderman.

D: Skip it. Maybe if you’re watching television and this movie happens to be on and it’s that or “Elimidate” give it brief consideration. Or turn off the tv and go outside. Most frequent appearance in this category is the movie that looked like it had 3 or 4 potential but had a major flaw or flaws that hurt it badly. Examples: Ocean’s 12, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Cold Mountain, S.W.A.T., Hellboy

F: Do not watch this movie under any circumstances. I have already wasted two hours of my life, so let me save you from doing the same. If it was a rental, I turned it off. If it was in the theatre, I either left, tried to fall asleep, or started making fun of the movie out loud. The few examples that I can think of: Sergeant Bilko, Gods and Generals, Windtalkers.

Now, on to "I Heart Huckabees.”

You might not clearly remember this movie. It was released sometime in late 2004 and just recently came out on video. For a refresher (and to make a point), go here and watch the preview.

Looks like a bizarre yet funny movie, right? An “existential comedy,” claims the website. I was expecting something intelligent, goofy, but ultimately with a point. A little slapstick humor, a little dry wit, some big laughs, and characters who I could invest in, even if they were a little bizarre. Something in the vein of “The Royal Tennenbaums” or “Being John Malkovich,” perhaps. At the very least, I expected a comedy, per the advertising.

Not so much. A brief plot summary: Environmental activist Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman from “Rushmore”) in attempting to give meaning to a series of coincidences in his life, hires “Existential Detectives” Bernard (Dustin Hoffmann) and Vivian (Lily Tomlin) to investigate his life. To accomplish this, they follow him everywhere, watching and listening to the events of his life, which are getting worse by the minute. Through Albert’s interaction with Bernard and Vivian, he meets random people and does random things. Tommy (Mark Wahlberg), a radically anti-petroleum fireman, is one of them. He’s having about as bad a time of things as Albert is.

To go on much longer would be to suggest that this movie has a plot. Okay, it does, but just barely. A lot happens, but it is only loosely connected. What we’re supposed to get, I think, is that the events in the movie are connected in the same pseudo-existential way that Bernard keeps bringing up: “Everything is connected, and everything matters. Now isn’t that cool?” Well, no. Or at least it’s not cool enough to make any kind of coherent sense. This is a movie where you keep asking yourself what the hell is going on, gradually realizing that there isn’t a satisfactory answer to that question.

I spent much of the movie unsure if I was supposed to sympathize with Albert and Tommy, or just laugh at their expense. The movie seems to want both of these things from me, and as a result it fails when it’s trying to be funny and seems trite when it’s trying to be moving. The performances are fine, and in fact I think Hoffman and Tomlin do a nice job with their left-field characters, but ultimately, "I Heart Huckabees” feels like a jumble of pretend philosophy, failed comedy, and missed potential.

Grade: C-

This might look funny, but it isn't.

The Four Greatest Days In Sports

The NCAA Men’s basketball championship tournament is upon us, and as usual, everyone in the universe has something to say about it. Predictions abound. Sports pundits are in full-tilt form, assessing the teams, critiquing the seedings, weighing the regions and prognosticating with near-religious fervor. Their fortune-telling will, of course, be entirely forgotten once the actual games are played, but for now they keep us quite entertained.

And we mortals try to read the tea leaves, too. You’re in a pool, and so am I, and so is everyone you know. If you’re not, you should be. What do you have to lose? Ten bucks? And what is ten bucks to risk against the joy of nailing that 5-12 upset, choosing the first number one seed to fall, or picking seven of the final eight teams? Even if your bracket is a train wreck after day one, here’s the beauty of what that ten dollars does: it gets you involved in the year’s Four Greatest Days In Sports.

From Thursday to Sunday (rounds one and two) 48 games will be played. The television coverage will be gargantuan: nine hours a day of pure, mainlined, college basketball, in its simplest win-or-go-home format. The result is so intense, so concentrated, that it actually forms a bubble around the event, separating the good from the bad. The Four Greatest Days In Sports distill college athletics down to the beautiful and the true, and allow us to forget, for 96 hours, the things that shouldn’t be.

Here is what is pushed outside the bubble: Abysmal graduation rates. Academic scandals. The notion that athletics distract from the educational mission of a university. The inability of college football to choose a true champion. The dead-end debate about paying college players. Athletes leaving school early in hoards to chase NBA money. Illegal payments from boosters. John Chaney’s hot-tempered thuggery. Ohio State athletics.

And what’s left? Basketball. Just that. Ten kids on a court, playing their hearts out so that they can play some more. The grace of the game. The thrill that a 16 seed feels just being there. The passion of the coaches. The joy and heartbreak of the fans. Buzzer-beaters. The Cinderella college you’ve never heard of. Clutch free throws. Inside the bubble, college basketball is what is should be. Every game, every shot, every moment, it all matters. The bubble extends to the rest of the tournament, but these four days are the pure, untainted reason that sports were invented in the first place.

So even if you know nothing about college basketball, go join the madness. Fill out a bracket. Watch basketball all day Saturday. Get on somebody’s bandwagon. Get at least a little taste. I know, I know, it’s just basketball. But life inside the bubble is idealistic, graceful, and as cheesy as the “One Shining Moment” highlight video that CBS runs after the championship game. But it isn’t too much to ask that we suspend our cynicism for four days, or maybe the whole tournament.

Life is good inside the bubble, right Keith?

Wickets and Bowlers

I know absolutely nothing about cricket. I’ve never seen a match, I don’t know how it’s played, and I couldn’t name a single famous cricket player. That said, I’ve always thought that point-based sports have enough common elements that I could translate knowledge of a familiar game (say, baseball) to a theoretically similar yet unfamiliar game (cricket). This is not true even a little bit, at least in terms of understanding written game summaries. As an example, go here for comically incomprehensible coverage of the most recent India vs. Pakistan cricket competition (I think they’re called “tests”).

I see a batter and a ball, but beyond that, this is a mystery.

Winter the Assassin and Warm Weather Insanity

It’s mid-March, which means many of us in the snow-producing states are all done thank you with this business of winter. Personally, I’m coping, but I am also looking forward to that first day of 2005 when a wind blows, I brace for it, and then realize that it does not contain icicles and other wince-inducing sharpness. There is nothing like a soft spring gust.

That said, I have a deep appreciation – nay, respect – for winter. First of all, I think that a world covered by a foot of snow is one of the more grin-worthy sights around. That is a topic for another time, though. More importantly, I think that winter keeps us sane.

Why? Winter in much of America is a period of months during which, as Garrison Keillor said, Mother Nature makes a pretty good attempt to kill us. Humans are not well designed to survive five degree weather, or sideways-blowing sleet, or black ice on the highway, or even a foot of snow, no matter how damn pretty it is.

I believe that, in order that winter does not kill us, we are all born with a certain internal reserve, a core of determination that helps us to not die. This reserve is called upon constantly from November through March, helping us to remember our gloves, to take the extra time to warm up our cars, and to not slide into an icy retention pond. If you are out of food but it’s ten below outside, you call on your reserve to make it to the grocery. The reserve even functions on small, practical levels: it’s what makes you put up with cold bathroom tile in the morning instead of leaping back into your warm bed and hiding until noon. Come March, that core is just about drained, and it takes all summer – barbecue, days at the pool, bare feet in the grass, sweat on the back of your knees – to build it back up again.

Of course, the Grim Reaper version of winter only affects a portion of the country. This is where we get to the sanity part. I’ve had a fair amount of contact with Winter Free parts of the country. I lived in Boca Raton for nine months. I’ve visited Miami, New Orleans, south Texas, San Diego, and L.A. I’ll even include San Francisco on the list, because they’ve really only got pretend winter there. Here’s what happens if you spend too much time in a Winter Free area: you go varying degrees of insane.

That winter-survival reserve is innate to humans (or at least to Americans – my study is not yet international), and when it doesn’t get used it builds up and explodes in all manner of personal excess and absurdity. That energy has a genetically designed purpose, but misguided, it causes people to think that valet parking at the grocery store makes sense. They decide to decorate their yellow Lamborghini with pink and blue paisleys. A third tongue stud? A ninth tattoo? Dye the pubic hair pink? Wear a thong in public? Sure, why not? Consider the disparate percentage per capita of fake breasts, Rolls-Royces, and Rolexes above and below, say, 33 degrees latitude. Consider the tendency of everyone on the entire south Florida highway system to drive either 45 or 110, but nowhere in between. Consider Oakland Raider fans. Consider Hollywood. I tell you truly, where nary a snowflake touches the ground, there lurks insanity.

This is, of course, why many old people retire on a southerly heading. Their personal reserves are permanently tapped, and Mother Nature might finally succeed in knocking them off, so they have to flee. But since the reserve is empty, they can exist in the warm climate without exhibiting any symptoms of insanity, at least none different from their northern counterparts (inflexibility, high pants, Contract Bridge, etc.)

Ah, say you, what about mudslides, hurricanes, brush fires, earthquakes and the like? Is not Mother Nature trying pretty hard to thin the herds of Winter Free dwellers as well? Yes, but in ways that the internal reserve doesn’t address. You can’t struggle through an earthquake: either the ground will swallow you or it won’t. Fleeing a hurricane or a wind-blown brush fire doesn’t tap the reserves of inner fortitude so much as it taps the reserves of adrenaline. The months-long siege of winter is no comparison to the bipolar Blitzkrieg of sudden natural disaster.

So there you have it. If your personal reserve is called upon to survive a northern Winter, it won’t boil over and make you go berserk on you when you’re not looking. If it’s eighty degrees in January, watch out. You may already be wearing six hundred dollar sunglasses.

This isn’t to say that insanity is a bad thing, per se. We need Hollywood to be crazy and detached from reality so that they can put beautiful dreams on film without some wet blanket saying “that’s now how it would happen.” We need the guy with the pierced neck and the blue hair playing the bass fiddle on the beach because he makes things more colorful than they would otherwise be. The world would be deeply boring without the insane and partially insane. So, northerners, maybe the trick this March is to splurge a little on your reserve, cut loose, and try a bit of insane personal excess. But just a little bit. You don’t want that Easter ice storm to kill you.

-Tyler

[Endnote: I have not figured out how New York City fits into this equation. Lots of snow there, yet the place is chock-full to the gills with insane people. Any ideas?]

Photo of Home

For your viewing pleasure: A photo of the earth taken from something floating far above it (the Space Shuttle, a spy satellite, or possibly a parachute-wearing photographer launched from a powerful catapult). Notice how massive the Sahara is. See a larger version of the photo here.

Welcome to The Yellow Shirt

Hello, and welcome.

At the outset, I offer you this continuum of modern life:

Consumer: Watches, rents, buys, channel surfs, web surfs. Information is consumed, judged on the basis of a) I like it or b) I do not like it and is shortly thereafter discarded altogether. Information is not processed. The consumer is your average 21^st century target marketing audience: a mental sheep.

Critic: A consumer with an interest in the structure of things. Consumes, but has an understanding of what he consumes and why. Interested in how and why things (things = tv show, newspaper comic, movie, cereal box, car bumper, etc.) are built. Has an opinion on just about everything.

Producer: Makes things. Writes the tv show, draws the comic, directs the movie, plans the cereal box, drafts the car bumper. Enjoys the blind adoration of the consumer, risks the interrogative wrath of the critic. Most importantly, creates something new, whether it’s the Great American Novel or a humorous e-mail to a friend.

Quite simply, this blog* is an effort to shift my relationship with the world towards “producer” and away from “consumer.” As a graduate student, I have a fair amount of free time on my hands, and I’ve found lately that I’m doing a lot more consuming and criticizing than I am creating.

As such, I offer you this: My thoughts. Yes, this doesn’t promise much in the way of distinction from every other freaking blog out there except the “my” part, which is what I’m counting on. My thoughts. And at the end of the day, there are worse things that I could be doing with my time than writing, even if nobody’s watching.

Some lofty goals:

1. I will write at least once a week.

2. I will try to remember that brevity is wit.

3. I will not set any other lofty goals, lest I shoot for the moon and hit the ceiling. Baby steps to the door.

Likely topics:

Hell, I don’t know. Whatever comes to mind. I do intend to include recommendations on things that I have consumed and enjoyed from a critical standpoint: music, movies, books, breakfast cereals, etc.

Other explanations:

I have chosen "The Yellow Shirt" in an effort to keep it simple. I was going to dig up some cool latin phrase or obscure historical reference, but there is a fine line between educated and pretentious. I wear a lot of yellow, mostly in shirt-form. It’s a small wardrobe-based philosophical statement. A simple reminder to myself that a moment of sun is good, no matter what. Some days a yellow shirt reflects where I am, other days it's where I wish I could get back to . Bottom line, though, it’s just a title, not an all-encompassing statement of belief, so don’t read too much into it.

I have chosen this font because it is familiar and because of the seven fonts from which I could have chosen, none defines me as a person. If such a font exists, I'm in big trouble.

I have chosen this aesthetically pleasing template for similar reasons.

And you have chosen to read this far. Thanks for that. More to come, within a week.

-Tyler

*Regarding the word "blog": I don't like it. I understand where it came from, but it's a goofy word, and not goofy in a good way like "noodle" or "spaz" or "adobe." I'm working on a substitute. Online Journal? Too clunky, too boring. Brain Postings? Too clinical. Personal perspectives? Sounds like a self-help book. Web Log? That’s about right, but if we could just shorten it to something catchier than that…