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01.11.2002:::
Modern cinema needs a movie powerful enough to shake the very
foundations of society, a deeply moral tale written from experience,
a story that can't be faked, one that lifts a great veil from the
eyes of the masses. I will do this. I will write that story. But it
has to be new.
So I'm going to dress like a black person and "see what it's
like." Oh, shit. Soul Man. Of course.
There's always the potential of sending a silver-spoon investor
to the gutter, replacing him with a vagrant for a "nature vs.
nurture" experiment and, after the vagrant has had spectucular
success investing in, say, pork bellies, we'll throw the whole
experiment out the window to prove that if the upper and lower
classes simply teamed up, the world would be a much better place. Or
I could infiltrate a college campus, pose as a Jew (posing as a
gentile), and after I am "discovered" and ostracized, graduate at
the top of my class while the prejudiced students are expelled. Or
meet a homeless man who seems crazy but, through a string of
wild coincidences, find that our lives are fundamentally intertwined
and there are valuable lessons to be learned from this so-called
bane of modern society. Or play a juvenile game with a bunch of war
buddies to see who can find and exploit the ugliest girl, only to
find that even ugly girls are special.
No. Trading Places. School Ties, starring Brendan
Fraser. With Honors, starring Brendan Fraser. And
Dogfight, with a brief cameo by Brendan Fraser. All of the
great masterpieces precede me.
Wait. What about a metaphysical exploration of a boy who suddenly
finds himself magically transposed into the body of a
full-grown adult? He'll get a job, rise among the ranks, woo an
attractive woman, and show that excessive "pragmatism" and
"maturity" may be spiritual diseases, while finding our "inner
child" leads to healing and redemption. That could be big.
01.10.2002:::
Weather Underground,
already featuring fewer ads than Weather.com (and no hovering
Flash ads, which were cool for 0.032 days), offers a $5-a-year
membership which would remove all advertisements from the site as
viewed from a paying member's computer. An interesting plan for a
company needing to generate revenue without going premium.
The tactic of premium membership is nevertheless an engaging,
practical approach. Heavy.com
now offers a free, limited selection of diversionary multi-megabyte
Macromedia material of some kind, but paying members receive access
to even more diversionary multi-megabyte Macromedia material
of some kind. Metallica could
offer a free version of their site with short hair, catchy pop-metal
lyrics, and current legal updates, along with a premium "pay"
version of the site featuring styled hair, black eye liner, and
full-album MP3 downloads for an additional $17.95 per album. CNN.com could conceivably release a
"slim" version of their popular news site featuring free, non-biased
reporting. Inside, paying members would discover a vast repository
of CNN's award-winning biased reporting. Also, Larry
King nude (non-members will see a cropped image).
Indeed, even 0(zero)format may decide to go premium. Users could
choose to pay for Toby's writing, or Dennis' writing, or both (Gold
Card Membership). Non-paying visitors would continue to see our
official logo and splashy color scheme - for free. Here's our plan:
the premium
proposal.
01.09.2002:::
A new feature about my wallet, and the crisis of wearing it in
the opposite pocket: I.D.
01.08.2002:::
Christmas came like a landslide. My current stack of
books-to-read amounts to nearly 10,000 pages. I am a slow
reader.
Friends of mine can slice through a book in a couple of days. Not
me. Yet I hope to finish the bulk of the stack by Winter's end.
Hibernation calls. I intend to read my books, write for
0(zero)format, consider exercise, and shun as much society as
possible until Spring. Now and then, I grow so deeply embarrassed
about my life that standing in the light of company becomes a
horror. I used to grow destructively depressed whenever I stopped
writing; I write more often now. The same occurred whenever reading
lulled. Living day to day without a book, my life became a broth -
no barley or noodle, no meatball, no nutrient or weight.
I like to have a book wherever I go, in case I'm stranded in a
dull place, or find myself alone, or feel depression coming on. All
three applied to the great comedy of errors that was late 2001. It
was a real Grady Tripp kind of December.
Books are lovely, like bees and honeycomb and faery dust! With
stingers, stuck throats, and blindness.
A re-read of The Lord of the Rings equaled 1,008 pages.
The rest of the stack, in no particular order, is as follows:
The
Silmarillion, by: J.R.R. Tolkien
The
Hobbit, by: J.R.R. Tolkien
Infinite
Jest, by: David Foster Wallace
Strong
Motion, by: Jonathan Franzen (He wrote other books. Who
knew?)
Up
in the Old Hotel, by: Joseph Mitchell
Men,
Women, and Chain Saws, by: Carol J. Glover
Churchill:
A Life, by: Martin Gilbert
A
World at Arms, by: Gerhard L. Weinberg (Written prior to
911!)
The
Vietnam Reader, by: Stewart O'Nan
Twentieth
Century, by: J.M. Roberts (partly read)
The
Sagas of Icelanders, by: The Icelanders (partly read)
The
Quest for the Green Man, by: John Matthews
American
Pastoral, by: Phillip Roth
Wonderful
Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker, edited by: David
Remnick
Theodore
Rex, by: Edmund Morris
The
Watchmen, by: Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
Woody
Guthrie: A Life, by: Joe Klein
With luck, there will be a new feature tomorrow about wallets.
Bear with me.
(Cue sound effect of short-circuiting Ham Radio.)
01.06.2002:::
A new feature: The Rumor Mill
#3.
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"Well, that's the nicest chat I've had in a month of Mondays." -
Barliman Butterbur
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On Business Day 4, there was a response to The
Steve Experiment: "Is that your father?"
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Salon writer Joey Sweeney has written a magnificent
Year in Music article, featuring a sparkling description of the
new, soon to be released Wilco album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,
which gets better by the hour:
"An absolute fucking monster of a record. Sad and psychedelic,
jazzy and poetic, breezy and weary, the record is loaded with all
the clammy portent of the human experience. It begins with the
lines, "I'm an American aquarium drinker/I assassin down the
avenue," and just gets even braver from there."
Creed is awarded The Chicago Award for the Most Unbearable and
Ubiquitous Artist:
"Everything they do hurts my feelings."
And Nikka Costa receives the coveted Best Sideways Cleavage
Award:
"Ms. Costa is not here this evening to accept this award, so I
will gladly accept it for her, taking special care to honor her
requests that I thank God Almighty, her fans and the makers of
Scotch tape."
As a special bonus, 0(zero)format has learned that the author,
Joey Sweeney, has a band, The Trouble With
Sweeney, whose site offers an MP3 sampling of ingratiating indie
rock. Especially winsome are the tracks "He Has No Idea," "I Won't
Mind Going Back to Jerry's," and "$500 a Day Hall of Mirrors." The
songs are reminiscent of that nostalgia surrounding visits home
after you've moved away, when bars are full of yearbook
personalities, and streets are full of specters, especially after
midnight. You drive around, playing music on the stereo, thinking
how you've seen the world and maybe now, back home, you're just a
short step away from figuring everything out, but it doesn't
quite click because you're stuck remembering your first love, and
even though you're not in love anymore you want to see that person
and say, "How are you? I've almost got it all figured out."
But of all the people you meet, that person isn't one of them, and
you don't figure anything out. It's pretty sweet, though.
And what an album cover.
01.04.2002:::
Obscure Chinese Aphorisms
Wise is the man who lets his heart sing, unless his heart is an
idiot.
A door without handles is just a wall. Or a hole. Or a weird
window.
A slave with no master is free, but a master with no slave is
probably lazy and bitter, with a soft, oily body and bad hair,
sitting around all day complaining to the dog, who couldn't care
less.
At dawn, we are all children of the new day. Except for
bastards.
Go forth and boldly seek your fortune! You are not wanted here
anymore.
Pleasure and pain are twin serpents in the garden of your desire,
which is full of weeds, animal carcasses, and poison-berries.
Eat your fill, no more, no less. Drink heavily.
Dismiss your injuries, like the senile.
One cannot escape one's history, for it comes with broadswords
and bizarre torture devices.
Let your mind be an open bowl, and your body a skeleton, wrapped
in skin and fatty organs like a stuffed chicken.
All paths lead to home, all journeys to peace, all massive
critical injuries to heaven.
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MTV News announcement: George
Lucas officially pronounced dead.
01.03.2002:::
Bits:
The Yes Men offer a
program called Reamweaver 2.0 that anyone can use to forge a replica
of major web sites - with customizable word replacements. This
page (look close), for example, takes the most current CNN.com
home page, makes a copy of it, and swaps words like "Bush" for
"Leader," "Osama bin Laden" for "Satan," and "Terror" for "Evil."
Its purpose is to show that CNN and other news organizations may
exhibit secret biases, that if they said "Leader" and "Satan"
outright there would scarely be a difference in the ultimate meaning
of their news reports.
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Business Day 3 of The
Steve Experiment: resounding silence.
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Someone recently reminded me that Gene Kelly performed the title
song/routine from Singin' in the Rain with a 103-deree fever.
What did he expect? Jackass was singin'
in the rain.
01.02.2002:::
Meet The Homies.
The local A&P Supermarket began filling one of their 50-cent
gumball machines with Homies a couple of months ago. We were hooked
the minute we dropped two quarters and out popped Wino, clutching
his bottle in a brown paper bag. He is one of a series of
collectible gangsta figures, straight out 'the Barrio. This, ladies
and gentleman, was a revolution in cheap plastic toymaking.
The Man did not take kindly to The Homies. Creator David
Gonzales had met with startling success when he introduced the
series to California vending machines, but when the LAPD caught wind
of the tiny, Mexican American hoodlums loitering at supermarket
exits, they put their big shiny boots down. "They glamorize gang
life," said the LAPD. A group of Mexican American activists agreed.
Payday, for instance, cell phone in hand and bling-bling a-blinging,
doesn't represent the best of the Mexican American heritage. Bouncy,
a spectacularly endowed female Homie, is not what young Mexican
American girls need to see, let alone foxy Gata, most frequently
seen acquiescing Hollywood, the Homies' #1 pimp daddy. Where, cry
the objectors, are the Mexican American lawyers, teachers, and
CEOs?
There is, however, El Padrecito, who is based on Gonzales' real
life brother, a Franciscan Catholic Priest in Southern California.
El Padrecito baptizes The Homies, offers guidance, and earns their
respect through charitable Christian deeds. He is a "second father"
to The Homies. He has his own website. Its motto is "Menudo
for the Soul." You can email El Padrecito, or view his online
archive of Q&A's. In one, he advises a Homie named Flaco, who is
in love with another Homie named Sad Girl. Flaco is concerned
because his friends say that Sad Girl has "slept with a lot of
guys." El Padrecito replies:
"Friendships, whether with males or females, are sacred gifts
and something which we ought to treasure. So be careful with rumors
from your so-called friends, especially if these rumors may destroy
a potentially new friendship with Sad Girl."
Good advice for Homies and non-Homies alike. Besides, we know
that Sad Girl will definitely put out.
The Homies were banned in California, but quickly made their way
to Seattle. From there, they stormed America. You can take a Homie
out of the Barrio but...
Those we get from the A&P gumball machine are forming a mini
gang within the potted plants on the counter between our kitchen and
living room. We call it the urban jungle. They're representin'
Westchester County. So far, we have six: Big Spooky, Gordo the Chef,
Conejo, Wino, Gato, and the infamous Willie G (with Low Rider
Wheelchair!).
We desperately seek: Hollywood, Loco, Bouncy, Ice Block,
Jokawild, Rastaman, Japon, Payday, Chato, Shorty and, of course, El
Padrecito. We have much love for The Homies.
01.01.2002:::
Happy 2002!
December was a pig's heart, nailed to the door. But that's all
over now.
A new feature: The
Book Under the Chair, by Tobias.
Also, The Steve Experiment:
My boss gave me a frame for Christmas. I ran a search for "Steve"
on Google Image and came across this fellow: Steve.
I printed a copy and put Steve into the frame. The frame is on my
desk, at the office, not promintent but plainly visible. How many
business days will it take for someone to ask about Steve? What will
they say? Answers
forthcoming.
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