omg you guys.

i wish i could have heard this presentation. this makes powerpoint look like a pile of puke.

Water Baby gets a pretty positive review at the A.V. Club.

Well, I’m back from vacation. Have a bunch of posts that I’m percolating at the moment. We’ll see how many of them make it to print and how many of them die in my head as bad ideas as I think through them a little more. First up are my first impressions (more like 5th or 6th impressions at this point) of the new Coldplay album, the somewhat pretentiously titled Viva La Vida, or Death and All His Friends. On the trip to Indiana, a 10-hour slog through Nothing, OH, we were stuck listening to the CDs that my dad had brought along. I just brought my mp3 player, mistakenly assuming my mom had a hookup in her car. So unfortunately it was a long, boring car ride full of new John Mellencamp, the new Alanis Morissette, the new Coldplay, and the Cowboy Junkies. Given the choices, you can imagine I had Coldplay on mostly constant rotation. I’ve never really had strong feelings for Coldplay one way or the other. It’s true that I’d rather hear their songs than probably most others likely to get played on the radio, but they’ve never really sparked any excitement, passion, or even revulsion in me. Indeed, it seems to me that most of their detractors rarely attack them with anything but the fact that they’re exceedingly boring. However, I’m here to tell you that I think Brian Eno seems to have come to the rescue on this score.

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I think this story http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=hays/080718 says alot about the town where Mark and I grew up.  It’s not every day one’s hometown is fodder for the farthest reaching sports website on the planet.  Mark may not agree, but I think this story sums up in a nutshell where Stratford is headed (if it’s not there already):  right in the dumper.

My favorite part is the picture of Raybestos Field circa 1974.  I’ve played and watched quite a few ball games on that field.  Now it’s completely neglected and so grown over it looks like something out of I Am Legend.   Good thing too, because you probably don’t want to get too close.  Raymark, nee Raybestos, made brake pads using asbestos, and didn’t, ahem, do such a good job of disposing of the waste.  Now Stratford is home to two Superfund sites, one being Raybestos Field.  I can only imagine what was kicked up by folks sliding into home.  A Wal-Mart now sits atop the former Raybestos/Raymark factory site.

I really miss music videos like this. Especially ones that have that renaissance feel and zorro.

Amazingly, the above screenshot is from a mega man game that is to be released on WiiWare, and actually the equivalent on PS3 and Xbox 360. For those of you who don’t own a current generation gaming system, WiiWare is an online content delivery system for the Wii. You can download games directly to your Wii if you have an internet connection.

I imagine most of you probably played the mega man games when they were on the nes. I mostly like this idea.

I’m sitting here with the school’s copy of The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006. For some background, Houghton Mifflin publishes a Best American Series every year. These books compile outstanding examples of writing in a few different categories including, short stories, mystery, comics, and science and nature writing. I recently became aware of this when I decided that the things I wanted most to read about, at least as far as fiction is concerned, are those for which I have the most context. Dreiser, Bronte, Austen, etc. all write great novels I’m sure and were probably writing in a time when the novel was the be all end all of storytelling. I find just can’t make the jump to be engaged by anything from that time period. The victorian era is just implacable to me. There have been some exceptions to this, I liked Dracula a lot and I remember being amused by this one section of a D. H. Lawrence book I read (maybe The Rainbow) that was about some really homoerotic Judo match of all things, but all in all it’s just whatever. If I’m going to read something that wasn’t written after 1920 then it should be something that’s going to be really edifying and that I can get a lot of mileage out of, viz. Paradise Lost, world mythology, and things like that.

It actually started with questions like, “has anyone my age written a biography about growing up in America? I’d like to read that especially if they talk about Nintendo and tv shows and little league and the internet and shit like that.” or “where’s all the fiction about things happening in the present day?” The first thing I did when I really had this desire formed in my head, was that I began browsing quarterlies. It’s actually amazing the amount of literary publications that are put out. In addition to obvious stuff like the new yorker there are tons of state quarterlies and reviews that just put all kinds of shit out. The problem is that the quality is quite uneven, or perhaps its just that theres too much to sift through everything. I was browsing these electronically and since jstor seems to have them all almost exclusively as page scans it becomes quite a nuisance. That’s when it dawned on me that I should start looking into anthologies, remembering one afternoon I spent in Barnes and Noble reading a short story anthology and being fairly satisfied.

So, before this gets away on me, I stumbled across the best american series in general and the “nonrequired reading” (BANR) in particular. BANR is the Fight Club to the Best American’s The Piano. The thing that really hooked me about it from the get go was noticing that the introduction one year was written by Mr. no blood for oil himself “Viggo Mortensen.” I’m like, an introduction…written by Aragorn…where can I find this thing? That’s actually not the volume I’m reviewing, that’s the 2005 edition, (introduction to the 2006 edition is by Matt Groening). Anyway, the series editor is Dave Eggers of Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius fame (though that doesn’t mean a whole lot to me as I don’t know anything about that book and it just sounds like a fucking stupid title) and the format is that the selections are made by people outside of the literary mainstream, a large portion of whom are still in school. I guess that’s supposed to lend it some street cred or something. And you know, all in all, the result is exactly what you would expect of a venture like this, although that might not be true of those who aren’t cynical “wheat freeing” sons of bitches. I should also note that the stuff in BANR is not just short stories, there are essays, speeches, comics, and all kinds of written stuff (for example, there’s a compilation of Chuck Norris jokes, of which I was heretofore unaware).

This review is actually a little premature because I haven’t read the whole thing. I guess with an anthology that’s the point. Some of the stuff in here is just dreadful and I couldn’t make it past two pages, however, there are some selections I was meaning to read a little bit more in depth before reviewing. I figured I should just get this out of the way though.

I’ll share my thoughts on some of the pieces starting with the good ones.

The Good

David Foster Wallace, Kenyon Commencement Speech: This is really good. This is exactly the type of commencement speech you want. I never read Infinite Jest but this speech is good enough that’s it’s got me interested. Basically what this is is advice on how to cope with inevitable decline of life following graduation, the drudgery, the final routing of idealism. The crucial observation that he makes is, I think, “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” Meaning that if you exercise no discipline in your inner life or just leave it to chance you’re going to end up fucking bitter standing in the checkout line at the supermarket.

Julia Sweeney, Letting go of God?: A chance encounter with door to door missionaries prompts a woman to examine faith more closely by reading the bible carefully. Predictably, she starts finding narrative and moral inconsistencies and that leads her to leave her church. For me personally, I don’t know, I just like reading about people talking about scripture.

The Bad

pp. 1–54: The book is in two parts. The first part is kind of a grab bag of stuff, mostly lists playing off the notion of Best American something: best american first sentences…. These are largely pretty lame, there’s “Best American Fake Headlines” which is just stuff taken from the onion, “Best American Things To Know About Chuck Norris” which are entertaining I suppose. The worst though, and I think this shows the problem of the collection as a whole are the “Best American New Band Names.” Death from Above 1979 is on the list, but it pisses me off so much that on the same list are fucking shit VH1 wankers like panic at the disco and the raconteurs. Just no editorial sense at all or understanding of music from a fan’s point of view.

General Badness: There’s lots of stuff about the war in here including a kind of throwaway inclusion of the full text of the Iraqi constitution. I’m like, am I supposed to read this word for word? There are not one but two stories centering on mail order brides as if that was such a huge issue today. There’s a contribution by Rick Moody whose presence really casts a douchey pall on the enterprise. Stuff I thought would be good like “Pyongyang: A journey in North Korea” an excerpt from a graphic novel about NK, turn out to be kind of a let down. It’s like, I get that it’s weird there, tell me something else.

Specific Badness, Haruki Murakami, “The Kidney-Shaped Stone that Moves Every Day”: I was going to get into this in more detail but I think I can sum it up as follows. Best American Sentence from BANR 2006, “He wore a Perry Ellis shirt of deep blue silk with a matching summer sports jacket.”

Considering that Zach is, in some ways, the fulcrum of roaringshark I thought I’d draw your attention to the fact that he’s on vacation this week. I’ll try to make up for his absence as best I can. Looking at the Archives on the sidebar it’s kind of hard to believe that we are coming up on the start of the third! year of roaring shark. Where did all that time go? In some ways I feel as if the site is still just beginning and finding itself as corny as that is. While there are definitely lots of ups and downs here, unfulfilled potential, and long stretches where it seems like not a whole lot is going on I’m still proud of the fact there’s always been at least a trickle of activity, like when you go away in the winter and leave the water running just enough so that the pipes won’t freeze through.

Sorry for all the video posts. I’m working on more in depth stuff, but you really have to see this. It’s a trailer for a video game I found at 1up. Wow.

I have to admit that rpgs have never been my thing. But I didn’t know what final fantasy viii was like.