December 2007

Christmas
Christmas was good. I don’t know when it actually happened, but somewhere in the last few years the joy of Christmas morphed from one of getting to one of giving. This year that joy was so vivid it was almost tangible, like a blanket up in which you could wrap yourself to keep warm. I absolutely love my family, and I enjoy little more than trying to make them happy. In the Midwest, families are normally insulted when showered with gifts as it serves to both seem to objectify a life in which hard work and values should take precedence over material things and also serve as an insult to the recipient. The one exception is Christmas, and I always enjoy exploiting it, while still staying barely on the respectable side of protocol.

My girlfriend and I ended up giving each other not only watches, but Citizen Eco-Drive watches. It’s tough to handle the situation by showing the correct amount of surprise and appreciation when you know that in a few moments she’s going to open essentially the same thing.

Honestly, I suck at giving gifts. I have absolutely no sense of style or taste. The one exception to this general rule is gadgets. My habit of keeping up with the latest and greatest cool shit gives me the mone advantage of knowing what the most popular battery-using presents are at any given time, and I took full advantage of that talent this year.

We watched a movie on Christmas eve. Here we go.

300
Like a pop-country song, it pretty much sucked. Aside from the quasi-accurate historical account and the admittedly impressive special effects, both devices were used to present a movie focused more on the latter than former, with little attention paid to a well-developed plot or storyline. I fell asleep during the middle, which somewhat invalidates this review, but when I woke up I didn’t really feel like I missed anything. The movie went pretty much like this.

• Set the small background story.
• Prove that the Spartans were much bigger bad-asses than the rest of the Greeks.
• Have a bunch of Persian attackers attack the Spartans and get slaughtered.
• Repeat ad nauseam.
• Heroes die.

It was the first full-on nude sex scene that I watched with both my sisters, my girlfriend, my father and my sister’s fiance. Objections couldn’t really be raised because my youngest sister was the only one who had already seen the movie. I think it may have been at that point I decided to go to sleep.

I realize I’m the third person to post my review of the season’s best intellectual thriller. For the record, I haven’t read the other two reviews posted here, so there may be some duplicate thoughts. Before I get to the movie, permit me to describe the setting.

Old Town Warren
The Old Town Warren Theater in Wichita, Kansas, is the best-kept secret in the middle of the hard-to-understand one-way streets and elitist bars that plague Old Town. The only theater with a bar about which I know, and my first experience was glorious. A fairly bad snowstorm came through town earlier in the day, leaving the parking lot empty and the inside of the building not much more populated. We had a few beers and food while watching a football game on the theater sized screen which was filled with content from three, separate projectors showing three different feeds. Inside the theater we found wide rows with no fewer than three feet of leg room, as well as buttons on each seat that were monitored by wait staff, only too happy to bring us another big beer during the movie. And what a spectacularly good movie.

Charlie Wilson’s War
I’ve known since the cancellation of Studio 60 that Aaron Sorkin’s next effort was the screenplay for some movie about the first war in Afghanistan. Finding out earlier this month about the release date made me eager to see it and recommend it to others. I hope those to whom I recommended the movie enjoy it half as much as I.

Here’s the quick review.

• The movie opened with nudity and drugs. Check.
• The movie had a church vs. state argument, won by the correct side. Check.
• The movie featured historical politics with a Sorkin flare. Check.
• “You can teach them to type, but you can’t teach them to grow tits.” Check.
• “For the love of Christ” said to convince an Israeli to provide munitions to the war effort. Check.

The movie did have some problems. Tom Hanks once again proved that he can’t act, though he so mis-acted this movie I didn’t know if it was Tom Hanks or Cuba Gooding, Jr. Also, the movie lacks the sensationalism, car chases and conspiracies that apparently create a box office hit. The other four companions who accompanied me to the theater were significantly less excited than I after seeing the picture, obviously due to the lack of the aforementioned glitz in favor of substance.

I, for one, can’t wait to see the movie a third time to enjoy, like a fine-Sorkin-smoky-Islay-single-malt-scotch, the beautiful and intelligent humor, dry wit and elegant political discourse that makes Charlie Wilson’s War one of the most enjoyable, if not best, movies I’ve seen in years.

This is my first attempt at posting on the new website. We will see how this goes.

I am currently on the last leg of my Kansas tour. Writing at the Classic Bean in Topeka, KS this evening before heading out with some ol pals from Topeka.

This all started last Thursday when I left Fayetteville and headed for Eudora. A wild evening ensued with ATB friend and soundman extraordinairre Matt Egging. Since, I have stayed at least one night in Topeka (three different locations), Medicine Lodge, Cheney, and will finish the tour Sunday night in Lawrence.

Cities I have visited: Eudora, Topeka, Medicine Lodge, McPherson, Wichita, and Lawrence. It was great to see family and a few old friends.

Next week, the tour will become regional as the parents and I will head to Queen Creek, Arizona for a few days to visit the family.

I wanted to take a moment and tell Aaron he was right about National Treasure. I saw the first one and wouldn’t have let someone pay me to see a sequel. I also agree with Lucas that Charlie Wilson’s War is a fantastic flick. I couldn’t disagree more about Tom Hanks though: the guy is an acting genius. Go watch CWW; it should make you think and question our government. Two things we are fans of in the ATB.

Thanks to everyone who came out and made RC McGraws such a special evening on December 7th. That was a fun show and one I won’t soon forget. I am holding out hope Aaron will start booking a few more shows this next semester. Turns out I have a Lawrence office now so I won’t be that far away. I am also still planning for Lucas, Aaron, Mason, and significant others to all come down to Fayetteville for a weekend.

If you get a chance to check out my latest web endeavor, go to www.LitTunes.com. It is a website dedicated to using popular music in teaching literature/writing.

Hope this belated blog post finds you well. Happy New Year indeed.

Still willin,

g

Charlie Wilson’s War….

good flick.

You thought that was all I planned to say?

It was, so this is unplanned, and should merit accordingly.

From a cinematic standpoint, this reel is the equivalent of a Lincoln Town Car. Classy, with plenty of angles and a comfortable feel, and absent the gratuitous widescapes and moving sound scores we would be subject to if Angelina Jolie had been cast. Well done and not overdone. Excellent job.

Tom Hanks has never been a favorite of mine, and I can’t put my finger on why but I believe it has something to do with him not being able to put a finger on the character he assumes. Somehow I can never believe fully his performance, yet as Charlie Wilson his character was not so extreme that my pre-bias took hold. Just as the camera-play went, so did Hanks performance: thankfully lacking the extremes of reticent monologues and over-the-top charades that makes for great quotes but ruins the context.

On to the part I do enjoy - Philip Seymour Hoffman has become my favorite actor as of late, and he was perfectly cast in the CW’sW. Hoffman play Gust, an underwhelming-looking CIA agent who seems to be a matchmaker, the guy who puts together the pieces to make the puzzle. Picture Gust as the second baseman who bats in front of the homerun hitter, stealing signs, pulling the hidden ball trick, flustering the baserunners with comments about their wives promiscuity. He plays the part perfectly.

Julia Roberts is in the movie too. I don’t find that too important, so that’s all I’ll say.

This Christmas break, enhanced by the divine convenience of landing on a Monday and Tuesday, was one of gifts, new media and giving. The most novel gift, given me by my girlfriend’s grandmother, was one of those remote control helicopters. Too small and light for any obviously useful purpose like strapping a camera to it as was my first impulse, one is resigned to simply enjoy flying it. I have been doing just this activity, and as I do I continue to be more amazed at the simplicity of such enjoyment.

I watched three movies over the course of the last weekend. I’ll be discussing all of them here over the next few days. The first to the plate was National Treasure: Another Bad Movie with Nicholas Cage.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets
Having watched the original National Treasure only a few weeks before and initially dismissing it as a “poor man’s Di Vinci Code”, for some reason I went in with high hopes for the sequel. I left amazed that a movie with such a budget for special effects spent so little of it on the writing and screenplay. If I watch Transformers and the new National Treasure in the same weekend and find Transformers easier to believe, something is wrong. Now I know that the movie is fiction and based on manufactured stories of treasures and clues and hidden…things, but that basis is not the source of my complaint. The movie asks the readers to believe that a geek can hack, in no perceivable time, the most secure IT infrastructures in both the US and the UK, as well as believe that in England they have no cops patrolling the streets. The enormous amount of damage done to public property during the car chases and break-ins goes unpunished for the hero, nothing more than a rogue historian. The notion that this historian can singlehandedly gain access to, much less kidnap, the president of the United States is laughable. However, all these plot problems aside, in a world where people want to believe in conspiracies and base the believability on the special effects budget and speed of the car chases rather than the evidence and arguments, this movie is bound to be a hit.

This video will blow you away.

Merry Christmas

I normally dislike blond jokes, and jokes in general are more of an annoyance than anything respectable, but sometimes there are exceptions worth making.

We sold over 1300 items in Olathe on Saturday, setting a record not for the number of lots but for the number of hours in a Purple Wave auction squarely at 12.5 hours. A long day indeed, we started at 10 a.m. and finished at 10:30 p.m., packed up and came home braving the wintered roads making it back hours after midnight.

It was the first away auction in a long time that I wasn’t scrambling to make things go correctly. The last auction found me coding well into the third hour of the event before I could relax and know that our item presentation display wasn’t going to break. I could relax at this auction, which went quite smoothly, knowing that the improvements to our systems are starting to pay off.

In t-minus 15 minutes I will be firmly seated in Willard Hall, trudging through my final final of the semester. I am currently doing all I can to delay the inevitably of failure i.e. blogging.

In roughly 2 hours, Lance Staggenborg and I will have declared war upon our livers. Battleground: TW’s bar. Casualties: shots and kegs. We invite allies of any creed.

Sayonnarra

your homie, Maddy

From the May, 2007, show at Bobby T’s with Mason and G.

I was reading my RSS feeds this morning. I finished with the most recent post from my friend Rob’s weblog, entitled Dream Not of Today. The blog post was entitled Boobjob. In it, he referred offhand to the “frozen wastelands of Kansas” and I thought to myself, “what a dickish thing to write about my state”. I turned off my Treo, opened the bathroom door, walked out to the living room and looked outside my Manhattan, Kansas, house.

2462 2465 2468 2471

Sections of town were closed off that I, in my eight-year tenure in the Little Apple, had never seen closed. Limbs had fallen on cars. Windows were broken, bonnets crunched. The main power grid was offline for many hours. My sister expects power restoration in days, not hours, as a tree fell on the line coming into her house and is a lower priority than repairs that will themselves restore heat and power to multiple houses.

I was fortunate to retain power and Internet throughout the day. Spending the day coding and helping friends with their weather-induced hardships, I welcomed the relaxing, though slightly annoying, change of pace.

I just put up some more videos and pictures of stuff and other things.