Author: admin

James Wan tried to make me cry. I’ll admit that I’m not the manliest man to begin with. I often cry during Casablanca. However, those tears are triggered by the meaning I pour into the film, the history of when and why I first discovered it and some legit acting across the board. Bogart is the real deal. Paul Walker is not. His death was tragic and very much in the vein of the Fast & Furious franchise, so that sucks. Still, I never much liked or respected him as an actor. That is why it pains me to recognize that James Wan go so deep into my head that I was choking up in the last ten minutes of Furious 7. I hate you James Wan. I kind of adore you too.

Furious 7 is not a good movie. It is a pretty collection of over-the-top stunts wrapped around a paper thin and barely followable plotline like a pig in a blanket. The premise of the story is that the villain from Fast 6 had a older bad ass brother. To prove just how bad ass they cast Jason Statham and made his first scene one where he is talking to his laid up bro (not dead–that spells sequel or spin off with the Rock). As the camera pans out we see the big bro has just whupped an elite SWAT platoon’s ass and destroyed the hospital just to get to his bro. He did this alone, mind you.

Thus begins the wild senseless action porn that is Furious 7.

The movie was a fun and fairly useless ride, but in the last 10 minutes the director, James Wan, comes to life with a poignant tribute to Paul Walker that doesn’t even make sense in the context of the senseless film, but really yanks deeply at the tear ducts and calls forth a stream of wow. See it, just for that.

Some Thoughts:

1. George Washington gave the shortest inauguration speech in American history back in 1793. This was the same year the first US Hot air balloon was launched, coincidentally the last time on record an American president wasn’t full of hot air.

I was at a workshop this morning enjoying the stylings of Myrlin Hepworth and I noticed how immature the students in the back of the room were. I started making attributions, remembering the ‘type of students’ that sit in the back of the room and thinking about maturity vs. immature behavior and really considering why students would act in this fashion. Let me begin by saying that I don’t teach high school. I’m a college professor and with that comes a built in set of expectations of student behavior. Of course, those expectations are shadowed by another set of expectations–the expectation that students are going to remain immature children who will create any opportunity to make the class stupid and rather pointless–in other words, they will create a reality that mirrors their concept of what class is.

I’m struggling between the two divergent sets of expectations. The standards are in fact a spectrum. On the one end you have immaturity. On the other hand you have understanding and commitment (perhaps misnamed). Two students showed up 30 minutes after the session began. These are the behaviors of children and children experience life (generally) in a carefree ‘in the moment’ sort of fashion. I don’t know that I entirely dislike that but I am working to appreciate it and to understand what it means.

To hear it from other instructors that immaturity comes from a lack of appreciation of the subject, from boredom, from an inability to connect with the material being shared, from nervousness, fear, apprehension, sometimes even as a direct result of the growing awareness that they are entering a world of responsibility and are utterly unprepared for that. This last impression of meaning stems from watching students live lives within the boundaries of everything they already know–in other words they never explore the world outside of the reality their parents created for them.

Maybe that’s okay. It isn’t okay for me or even for my job and role on this earth. My goal in life is to get people to realize that there is more–that they actually want more, which is often why I focus on the ones who are so limited and why so often they are the ones who piss me off the most.

Some Thoughts:
1. 1792 was the first year the USA celebrated Columbus Day. Thus began the indoctrination of a lie. I speak of it on the eve of another lie–the like of Easter. What is Easter supposed to represent? Easter predates the resurrection of Christ as does the tradition of Easter eggs (representing the struggle between good and evil) and the idea of resurrection as embodied by the Phoenix. None of this has anything to do with a bunny either, so what the heck are we celebrating?

It may take a bit to get to the point here. I have a lot of thoughts swirling around on this topic and as I write the facts and ideas coalesce into something meaningful. I think I’m starting to understand why people get so angry about concepts like gay marriage.

I was working with Myrlin Hepworth today and he was reminding my students about the difference between concrete and concept. As he talked it triggered a swirl of thoughts in my head. Love is a concept. Belief is a concept. Marriage is concrete. The Bible is concrete. These things are houses for what are essentially indefinable concepts. When I think about the idea of love and communicate that with figurative language I relate love to the concrete things and actions I define as love-related. Someone else may have the same conversation and pick a separate set of relational objects. One thing we are both supposed to agree on is the Universal Language of Marriage.

This is where things get tricky.

For a large portion of the religious population, marriage is defined by the bible (a concrete house for belief/faith) as the love-based binding of one man and one woman. Marriage then appears to be the concrete house for both love and faith for these people. On the other hand, people like me believe in marriage as the concrete house for love alone. There is no added component—no roommate named faith associated with that. As such, the idea of marriage between two men or two women is just marriage and doesn’t pull a big bad wolf on my house in any way.

Some Thoughts:

1. Watched my son mail-in a practice today. He was very much the Allen Iverson of practice and this reflects negatively on him in the eyes of the coach. It reflects negatively on me as a dad who is supposed to prepare his kid and a coach who is supposed to expose his players to athletic rigor Clearly none of this surfaced tonight. Instead I watched a kid who was obviously checked out in the days leading up to his first home game. Speaking of that game, I can almost check ‘watch my kid play a tackle game’ off the bucket list. Everything following is about him and his (apparently limited) desire to play the sport. I didn’t (consciously) push him into it and I refuse to push him to continue if his head isn’t in the game. Then again, maybe he’s just having an off night.
2. Napolean Bonaparte was elevated to commander in chief back in 1791. Earlier that year the Big Bottom Massacre in Ohio kicked off the Northwest Indian War. Rough year.

I had the opportunity to sit with a woman who was openly ranting about her husband fearing for his life and being discriminated against largely based on his race and his profession. I felt for her in the early moments of her rant. Then she dropped a bit of privilege and reminded us that we shouldn’t be discrimnating against him, because he’s a white cop. She went on to suggest that it wasn’t just affecting him but his entire family–especially her having to be a wife standing up for her man and fearing for his safety when he walks the streets. I thought to myself, what a strong moment here. This woman has a chance to finally feel like what it means to walk through the world with brown skin, or with a Koran cradled in your arms, or to be from a part of Korea no one wants to speak proudly about, or wanting to have sex with someone who has the same parts as you. Unfortunately–and realistically–it mattered more to her because it was about her and someone she loved and it was about someone and something she always group up thinking was the ‘right thing’ and had the identity of the majority and was something to be believed in. I thought, isn’t it ironic that the people I mentioned above all likely felt just as badly about their experience as she did about hers? I’m willing to bet that not one of them identified as being the ‘bad guy’ either, and also like her, complained about how mass media is driving the interpretation of their group. Too bad she didn’t seem to realize that.

1. Georgetown College was founded in 1789, 102 years before basketball was invented. 226 years later they suck at basketball.
2. That was also the year we named Washington our first US President.
3. Later that year Kentucky rolled out the first bottle of Bourbon Whiskey. The correlation is obvious. From the first ‘crowning’ of an American president we’ve been driven to drink some hard shit…especially when thinking about basketball.

I’ve been thinking about moments lately; thinking about the things I remember best–being down by the water with a loved one and feeling that tingle of a shiver, missing the turn on the way to a new location and realizing at once the promise of that future place. I can paint my entire life in moments. Some of these moments bring me pride, some pain, and all of these moments are how I register memory. I believe that one of the most important things in life are to create moments. As I slip deeper into the tech stream I’ve recognized that I often spend these potential moments recording them as moments vs. living them. Alongside that comes the realization that I sometimes speed through moments in search of what is going to be great next. I see that tendency in my kids as well, and that is unacceptable.

This all came to a head in my mind recently when I was thinking about today’s Wrestlemania event and how my kids are so excited about putting on costumes and parading into the house to watch the event and to have a moment to remember as part of their childhood. Today isn’t about pictures, its about memories and having a moment with my kids that we can remember forever.

Some Thoughts:

1. CNN’s preference for symphorophilia is problematic. They spend so much time focusing on plane crashes that they neglect all of the other stories that are out there in the world and important.
2. D.C. and Sierra Leone were both founded in 1788. Count this as another interesting historical coincidence given that one was founded as a seat of national government and the second was built as a location for freed slaves. Both wound up being extremely important in terms of our understanding and the international conversation about slavery. At the same time, both were immediately mired in corruption and strayed from the original purpose of the founding.

As the summer approaches and I ready for my creative writing and mythology courses I find myself drawn back into a web of fantasy an sic-fi writing that both thrills and annoys me. There are conventions I see in authors that help define genres in ways I enjoy and in ways that I detest. For example, Brett Battles, a noted post-apocalyptic thriller writer is as noted for his inability to create legitimate female characters. He uses the ‘As good as it gets’ method. In other words, he, thinks of a man and removes reason and accountability. This in turn creates a host of female leads that reflect badly on the genre and often alienate readers (that same chick he writes for every female character is super annoying).

In the same vein, the best fantasy authors tend to focus mainly on the same part of the fantasy world. Few write about Joe the cobbler. Many write about Prince Joe and his many devious friends. I am no different. My epic fantasy presently focuses on a series of characters adjacent to the crown. It is a milieu piece at heart, which attempts to show the life of the commoner by having characters who either came from those roots or masquerades as such. I’m disappointed in myself. I feel that I could just as easily tell the human story–the commoner tale–from the perspective of a commoner swept up in all of the crazy of the high society. In truth I’m better equipped from a knowledge standpoint to do so. I don’t almost entirely because everything else I’ve read has been about the people who ‘matter’ and there is a sense of trepidation about pitching a book about people who don’t matter.

Tropes run sci fi and fantasy. They run literary fiction as well, but it is more often viewed as a starting point, with the character story driving the value of the literary work. Hell, Jane Eyre is a trope built with tropes as building blocks.

I guess all this is to say that we need something new in terms of vision from the sci-fi and fantasy realms. Harry Potter was cute but it was just another coming of age story set against the backdrop of the out of place rich kid with skills in a school of established people. New is difficult. We’ve long operated on the premise that there are only seven basic plots and we multiply that by character, location, and perspective to create limitless tales. However, these tales aren’t limitless. It is time for an 8th and 9th plot. We need something new.

Some Thoughts:

1. Last night I was reminded of a valuable lesson: Sleep. Do it often and fruitfully. Without such machinations ones writing resembles the slow and random hacks of a monkey at play.
2. Monday I cut the cord. Bye bye DirecTv.
3. 1787 marks the publication of the Federalist papers in the U.S. This also coincides with the George Mason’s offering of a bill of rights (which was immediately and vocally shot down) and, perhaps more tangentially, when Arthur Philip launched his fleet of criminals towards Botany Bay in Australia–yet another British effort to rid the kingdom of undesirables and upstarts. I wonder why Australia never gained the traction USA did. On the other hand, perhaps Australia’s time is yet to come…
4. There is something to be said for waking to the howls of young children waging war over minutiae. They want to fight each other and it doesn’t matter what they fight over. The question is why?

A few days from wrestle mania and I am prepping to throw the first party I’ve thrown in years. This and the painting of a hallway has me slipping in and out of consciousness… Another night where ten minutes mean very little.

Some Thoughts:

1. 1786 was the year of Shays’ Rebellion, an uprising which has long reminded me of The Boston tea Party. That’s the thing about perspective. The powerful tend to write history in their perspective and whitewash what they do as fundamentally right…

Movement is the key. In returning to AZ I recognized the cardinal (pun) difference between here and home (NYC) is movement. In New York people live in the street. People are out all day and night moving and doing and dancing and generating that frantic energy the city thrives on. Here in a state full of sleepy bedroom suburbs a much smaller percentage of people are moving and doing. Most are trying to make it through the day in order to get to their evening shows. I fell into that trap immediately and repeatedly once I returned. In fact the only things that kept me from disappearing into my couch were the mountain of work needing to be done and, more importantly, the awareness that I was falling back into bad rituals.

Tonight I broke the spell by climbing off the happy couch and painting a wall. I’ve long discussed painting parts of the house, even going so far as buying the supplies. Putting the paint on the wall was a huge step because it meant that I started a job that needs to be finished, and in some ways that jump started me to perform other needed chores.

I no longer feel like I am on the verge of something. I feel like I’ve rolled back down the hill and have to pick myself up and start climbing again–with a different path and plan to reach the summit. I also recognize that I need to incorporate ‘save points’ into that climb–moments of pure opportunity to reflect. I’ve gotten better at it, and reflection has made me aware of a great many things about myself and my life–including the obvious need for further reflection.

But enough about me. I think it is time I got back to blogging about things that mattered  a bit more than just one spry fella.

Some Thoughts:

1. In 1785 the London Times printed its first issue. Today blogs and other digital media are more widely read by the population of London than any print paper ever is. These times a’changin.

It is still so hard to talk about sports. As a former Cyclone I wretched at the one point loss in the first round of the tourney. It hurt. That particular Cyclone ball team had the best set of match ups to get to the round of 8 and even further. Instead the team seemingly overlooked a defensive-minded UAB team whose matchup zone defense was built to defeat versatile offenses like that of ISU. What state didn’t have was a true #1 scorer who could take the weight of the game himself, and that is what beat them. Now there are 16 teams left dancing and Kentucky still looks as strong as ever.

Back to football: Rex Ryan feels like Buffalo is his last shot at being a head coach. He may be right. If he doesn’t do well then he is done. Maybe he can be DC for the Jets… Still, I don’t think it happens. I’m still waiting for an RGIII draft day trade.

Truthfully professional sports have taken a backseat to the youth sports my kids play. In fact I get to see my son play tackle for the first time in a week or so. I’m stoked to see him perform at his peak and I hope he does well. I think it is more fun to watch him and the other kids play, because there is more purity in the game at that level–from fans and from players. There is no threat of a ‘dark stain’ on the career of a player for bad behaviors or TV worthy scandals to excite.

Some Thoughts:

1. For whatever reason, 1777 got stuck in the drafts folder. I published it out of order. Messy.