Ok, ok, ok,

I know I have said it before, but this time, I am going to really try to start updating this thing on a regular basis. I haven't been on the site much the last several months, but now I'm back.

So, what's new? Well, I have recently become obsessed with "The Office". I went from a casual viewer last season to a regular viewer and now an obsessive who has devoured the first two seasons' DVDs in a weekend and spends a good portion of the day at work on Office fansites.

Speaking of TV shows, while I am writing this I am watching Gilmore Girls, at one time one of my favorite shows. It has now become a prime example of my argument that there should be an FCC regulation that all TV series should only last five years. After that, some shows, such as The Simpsons, could apply for exemptions that would have to be renewed every year (The Simpsons' would have been denied after about season 12).

I just finished "Our Band Could be Your Life", a book about the 80s underground music scene and it has left me in confused state of inspiration and depression. The book details how people like Ian MaKaye, Calvin Johnson, Sonic Youth and others were able to build up an entire music scene out of nothing and follow their creative impulse. Most of them did it when they were my age or younger. I have realized that I really need to start doing more with my life.

This evening, I went up to North Mesa to take some pictures of Red Mountain. Once you pass the 202 freeway, you leave Mesa, bland American suburb, and you are suddenly in the middle of nowhere. Somewhere out there, the Salt River Indian Reservation begins, but I am not sure where.

As I am driving along looking for a good spot, I suddenly come upon a tiny cemetery, the kind you see in old westerns. Most of the graves were marked with simple white wood slats and are arranged as burial mounds, with stones marking the outline around them and small trinkets on the mound. I can't even begin to describe how beautiful it was in the setting sun, off by itself, on the bank of the dry Salt River bed, with Red Mountain and the Superstitions off in the distance and the lonely 87 highway trailing off in the distance.

I got out to look and sure enough, though there were a few recent burials, but many of the deaths date back a century or more. I don't know the name of it, how long it has been there, or who the people are the still use it (most of the graves, even the old ones, had fresh flowers on them). It seems to be a relic from our pre-suburb days, when Mesa really was a pioneer town. (For those of you not from the Phoenix area, this may need a little explanation. Our city has basically no architectural or cultural history that extends past WWII. It is rare to find a building built earlier than the '70s. And any history we do have was catalogued, packed up and put in museums and tourist attractions for the benefit of the "winter visitors" who come down from the midwest every winter. So, to find an unmolested, authentic link to our past, and not a kitschy simulacrum of it, is pretty amazing).

Needless to say, I burned up all the film I had with and am planning on going back tomorrow when the light is better. Quite an amazing experience.

One final note, for anyone who complains that their life is boring. I spent eight hours today in a cubicle entering H&R Block's year-end financial information into a computer. Most people would consider that a boring day, but it has been a wonderful day and I haven't even thought about that place since I clocked out at 2:30. I refuse to make those eight hours of my day the definition of my existence, they are a means to an end and they only make me work harder to suck the life out of the other 16 hours I am fortunate enough to have. (I don't mean to be preachy, but I've just had a lot of people in my life whining about their life lately, and I was there not too long ago myself, so I just needed to put down those feelings in writing.)

I'm trying to come up with something for the nifty little "about me" box at the top of the page, but I'm still enjoying the thought of Bill Walton having a bonny face (oh yeah, and if you were wondering, that is Bill Walton - basketball legend, Deadhead and possible missing link - in the profile pic). I guess I could throw up an actual picture of myself now that I have some decent ones on my computer, but that picture always just puts a smile on my face whenever I see it.

Anyone who complains about Arizona summers needs to wake up earlier. Though our afternoons can sap you of your will to live, our mornings, from sunrise to about 10 o'clock, are the absolutely most gorgeous things you can imagine. This morning, I got up at six and had my coffee and read the New York Times on my patio while listening to Little Steven's Underground Garage. A very good way to start the day. Not to get all hippie on you, but why would someone spend their Sunday morning in a church listening to some preacher tell them how 90% of the world is going to Hell, when they could just do what I did and bask in the true glory of God? Oh well, to each their own, but I feel sorry for those people who miss out on stuff like that.

Now I am off to Those Were the Days bookstore, one of the last bastions of quirkiness on the open-air mall we call Mill Avenue to find a book on model railroading for Father's Day and consult with the owners on where I can buy model railroading merchandise (they are scholars of odd hobbies and collections).

Recommendation: I just bought the new Criterion Collection DVD ofDazed and Confused and everyone should do the same, even if you own one of the other (far inferior) DVD versions. It finally gives one of the best films of the 90's the proper respect it deserves. And with that, I will leave you with the final thought for the day:

"You just gotta keep on livin, man. L - I - V - I - N."
-David Wooderson
late 20th-century sage and philosopher

Sooo, that posting more often thing is taking a little while to kick in. Oh well, I'm slowly getting better. Life is pretty boring right now as I spend most of my time sitting in a cubicle and avoiding work as much as possible while waiting for grad school to start in the fall. I do have to say that I love the new site layout. It is going to take some getting used to, but it is a perfect reflection of where the site is at this point in its history.

I'm moving next week out of my boring-ass Mesa neighborhood and into south Tempe, 15 minutes from ASU, across the street from a Tower Records (where I'm at now, I have to drive for 20 minutes to find a Best Buy so this is a definite step up) and only a few miles from Changing Hands, AZ's greatest bookstore.

I just watched the SG show on G4 (a channel I did not even know existed until I saw the news item about the show) and became very depressed when I realized that Missy was younger than I am now when she started the site. I need to get off my ass.

Wow, I can't believe how long it's been since I wrote anything in this damn journal. Well, today is a new day. The last year has been by far the weirdest of my life, but I am finally in a wonderful place and am actually going to to try to take a more active role in the SG community. This site is still one of the most amazing places on the web to me, and I would like to be more a part of it. I have been lazy or shy in the past, but, much like Tony Soprano after being shot by Uncle Junior, I have a new lease on life and a new carpe diem attitude.

Yesterday, I was a good son and went with my mother to church for Mother's Day. She goes to one of those evangelical Pentecostal churches and while I try to keep an open mind about everyone, even crazy right-wingers, this place never ceases to make me want to vomit. I won't go into the specifics because I am sure you all have a good idea of the kind of church I am talking about. However, as much as I hate it, I find going to this church every few months to be an invigorating experience, and I would you all do the same every once in awhile. It does two things.

1) It makes you realize that, crazy beliefs aside, the majority of the people who make up these Christian Right congegrations are good, honest people who you wouldn't mind knowing. Their leaders are usually con men who have brainwashed them and played on their fears to the point that they are willing to support something so idiotic and anti-American as the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, but they do not truly carry hate in their hearts for anyone. If we are ever going to end the stupid red/blue divisions that have defined our country for the past several years, people on our side are going to have to take the first steps toward reconciliation.

2) It makes you appreciate everything about your life so much more. People in those churches are in such a forced state of happiness and are experiencing such a small piece of the wonderfully wide world that God created that it makes you realize the importance of being open-minded and open to new experience. I am always trying to experience as much of life as I can, and my visits to this church only reconfirm that conviction.

I am currently listening to the Rise Against album, which I picked up yesteday mainly for the ballad, "Swing Life Away". The album is good as modern punk goes, but their political content (which swings from expectedly naive to surprisingly thoughtful) got me to thinking about the state of poltical music in the world today and particularly about one of my favorite bands of my teenage years: Rage Against the Machine.

As a teenager, I was a predictably naive budding leftist, taken in by Michael Moore and the romantic ghost of 60s idealism. Rage was the perfect soundtrack for self-absorbed white middle-class youth trying to turn their natural youthful rebellion into a righteous fight for justice. Future sociologists looking for a defining moment of the death of the American left need look no further than Rage's set at the Tibetan Freedom Concert in which they flew a large featuring Che Guevera (Guevera, romantic symbol of rebellion to the American left, was in fact a huster and murderer whose communist rebellion in Cuba was sponsored by the same Chinese government that is oppressing Tibet).

Ironically, Rage broke up in 2000, a year before politics became important again to the average citizen. Since then, Zach de la Rocha has dropped off the face of the earth and the other members have formed the decidedly apolitica Audioslave (though Audioslave's concert in Cuba shows they haven't let their marxist leanings behind). I shudder to think what a Rage album would sound like today. 9/11 and the war in Iraq turned their brother-in-arms Michael Moore from a well-intentioned but misinformed nuisance into a hate-filled megalomaniac who depicts Saddam-controlled Iraq as Candyland while thanking the American poor in the military for giving their lives as "their gift to the rest of us" (i.e. upper-middle class white liberals who do not have to worry about their sons and daughters ever being sent to war). Yes, Rage broke up just in time to see their self-absorbed version of leftist politics be rendered completely irrelevant.

So what are we left with in today's politically charged world. Unfortunately, political music today is a perfect example of corporate america's destruction of rock's soul. Many rock bands have spoken out against Bush, but their radical chic posturing is just as idiotic and hollow as Alec Baldwin and the rest of FAG crowd (if you are offended by that last sentence, rent Team America: World Police. Right now). Meanwhile, on the right, we have Toby Keith and his ilk pandering to the red state crowd. On both sides, it is not protest, it is marketing. Their is nothing of the immediacy and and true emotion of Vietnam-era songs like "What's Going On" and "Fortunate Son" (or even, on the red state side, of "Okie from Muskogee"). Maybe that is because, more than ever, war is abstraction to these people. Neither they nor anyone they know will ever actually fight in one. In Conor Oberst's pathetic entry into the protest song genre, "Landlocked Blues", he sings "We made love on the living room floor. With the noise in the background from a televised war." I don't think he did it on purpose, but Oberst perfectly summed up the reaction from musicians and artists to the war in Iraq: fucking (or, more accurately, jacking off) while people they will never meet die on the other side of the world.

I'm a teacher, and today I return to work for a month of inservice and preparation before school starts on Aug. 15. This is only my second year teaching and it is at a different school than I was at last year.

To get myself ready, I put together a little triple feature of movies that inspire me. Herewith, my thoughts on those movies:

Rock n Roll High School

I know, not exactly the first movie that comes to mind when you think of "inspirational" films, but this movie has such energy and vibrancy that it continues to astound me. The greatest thing about it is that it imagines an alternate universe in which The Ramones are the pop stars they always should have been. The sheer pop delight of their music and the energy of PJ Soles as Riff Randall make up for all of the movie's failings (and there are plenty. This is a Roger Corman production after all). The "Do You Wanna Dance?" musical number remains one of the most joyful three minutes in movie history.

Waking Life

I didn't get into this film at first, but it has grown on me over the years. Every time I watch it, the disparate, seemingly random pieces become more and more connected to reveal the film's underlying theme: life is a vast sea of untapped potential -creatively, spiritually, scientifically - and we should work harder to make our waking life have the limitless potential of our dreams. As a teacher, I also love this film (and several of Linklater's other films, such as Slacker and Before Sunrise) for the way they revel in the joy of intellectual pursuit. I (no doubt like many other people) often had that joy crushed out of me by lifeless teachers. I have thus made it my job to turn kids on to learning just like Linklater and many of my other heroes did for me.

Dazed and Confused

What can I say that hasn't already been said? To me, it ranks right behind Pulp Fiction as the defining film of the '90s. I don't know how many times I've seen it, but something new strikes me everytime. This time, I have just recently finished Steven Johnson's new book Everything Bad is Good For You, in which he argues that pop culture actually makes us smarter. One of his main arguments is that mainstream entertainment has gotten increasingly complex over time, and storytelling techniques that forty years ago were relegated to avant garde theatre are now popping up in mainstream entertainment like Seinfeld. This crystallized something that has always struck me about Dazed and Confused. Linklater created a Robert Altman-style plotless ensemble piece that is favorite movie of many people who would never have the patience for an Altman movie, or even one of Linklater's more experimental works like Slacker or Waking Life. It, like Pulp Fiction, is both picked over by film scholars and beloved by jocks and stoners who would look at you cross-eyed if you used words like auteur around them. More art should strive to be like that.

All right, so I haven't been updating this as much as I planned thanks to my new job and other various shit happening in my life. But here I am now with not a lot to talk about personally, so I am going to rant about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

I saw the movie tonight and have to say I was a little disappointed. It nailed many of the details from the book that the first film lacked (the Bucket house, Loompaland, the squirrel room) and some of its updating was excellent (particularly the characterization of Violet and Mike Teevee), but it also missed the mark in many regards. The pace of the whole film felt rushed, which was particularly egregious considering that most of the third act was dedicated to the silly backstory about Wonka's father that was invented by the filmmakers. Overall, I will still take the Gene Wilder version.

However, the one element of the film that works brilliantly is Depp. His interpretation of Wonka is vastly different from either Wilder or the book, but he reinvents the character brilliantly and shed new light on the entire story for me.

Depp plays Wonka as a reclusive germ phobe who can't stand the kids he makes a business of delighting ( despite Depp's physical appearance, he's actually more Howard Hughes than Michael Jackson). In this regard, he is similar to Roald Dahl himself, who, like most great children's authors, despised kids. Why is it that people who do not particularly like children are so good at pleasing them? Watching Depp, I realized that it is because if you don't like children, you don't bother condescending to them. Depp's Wonka is so horrible with children because he does not differentiate them from adults (whom is not particularly good at dealing with either). Similarly, Dahl was beloved because he did not talk down to kids. He, like Wonka, worked in a world of childlike imagination but did not treat it as child's play. He treated it as deathly serious business.

What is the point of all this? I don't know.