Category: Journal

(there will be spoilers aplenty here, so if you don’t want to read about plot points and overall arcs from the sequel to Trainspotting, you probably don’t want to read any further. I guess if you haven’t read Gateway and you’re planning on doing so,  you might want to put a pin in this for later.)   My initial thought after seeing T2: Trainspotting was just how much it reminded me of Frederik Pohl’s Gateway. Feel free to scratch you head a moment. Let me explain: In Pohl’s book, the protagonist is in a spaceship approaching a black hole. The “hero” and his handful of shipmates come up with a plan that might allow them to escape. Instead, perhaps by intent or maybe by accident, screws up the plan, allowing himself to escape while dooming his shipmates to eternal falling into darkness. You can see how that rhymes with the ending of the first Trainspotting. Renton betrayed his mates and, as the film ends to the tune of Underworld’s Born Slippy, he recites a litany of ways he’s going to turn over anew leaf and live his old life behind. It’s a naive and cynical recitation. He’s mocking “you” when he says he’s going to be “just like you.” Twenty years go by, and Renton returns home. His abandoned mates are still slowly falling towards oblivion: Begbie’s in prison, Spud’s back quit heroin and then relapsed and trying to kill himself, and Sick Boy, now calling himself Simon, is running a dingy pub when he’s not running blackmail scams and scheming to open a brothel with his perhaps-girlfriend Veronika. No one is particularly happy to see Renton return. So why did Renton come back? He had a respectable life in Holland with a wife and a steady job as an accountant. At first, his return seems strangely pointless, just an excuse to get the movie in motion. However, it’s revealed that Renton’s escape was a failure. His wife is leaving him, his company’s about to fire him, and he’s got nothing. He fucked over his friends to get out, he blew it, and now he’s tumbling back in to his old life. The first film isn’t just the jumping off point for the sequel; it’s an anchor that keeps tugging at every attempt to break away from its gravity. It’s a fascinating way to make a sequel. The first film haunts every shot, and the music echoes the legendary soundtrack of the original. There are messages, subtle and otherwise, all through the film warning of the futility of trying to recapture the past and obviously, those warning could apply to both the making of the film and the viewing of it. The performances are terrific, particularly those of Ewan McGregor and Jonny Lee Miller as Renton and Simon. Renton’s boyish charm is intact, but it’s a good deal less charming. Simon’s intensity is riveting and their relationship is what carries the movie. They love each other, but there’s no trust and they can’t get over the past. Veronika, who has been wrongly called an example of the “hooker with a heart of gold” trope, is just removed enough and observant enough to see how things are going and plan accordingly. Begbie and Spud are more peripheral, providing menace and comedic pathos respectively. They’re good, but they’re not really central to what the movie is about. Ewen Bremmer as Spud is particularly good and you’re left with the sense that he might just have a chance at a brighter, or less dim, future. A few of the other characters from the original return: Mikey Forrester, Rents’ father, and, most poignantly, Diane. She’s only got one short scene, but it’s memorable. She was never really on the same trajectory as the guys, and now she’s in an entirely different universe. She offers some good advance that Renton obviously won’t take. The key scene, for me at least, was  a dinner conversation between Veronika and Renton where she asks him what “Choose life” is all about. Renton launches into another monologue, similar in form to the one from the first film, but wholly different in content and meaning. It’s now the cautionary tale of the damned who has, in fact, attempted to chose life, and every word he speaks is now bitter experience instead of a glib, mocking recitation of other people’s values. Even though you knew this scene had to happen, it still works and it’s devastating. The plot felt more like an excuse to explore aging, betrayal, attempting to recapture the past, and failure than to tell a story, but those are some pretty good excuses. There’s some incredible camerawork that exhumes and expands upon the first film. My only gripe, technically, was that the bombastic music wasn’t as on the nose as the first time around. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Wolf Alice; it just didn’t feel as essential to the film as that razor cut from “Temptation” to “Atomic” in the club scene the first time around. Which is a long way of saying, it’s a really odd experience watching T2: Trainspotting. At times, it feels like it’s pointing a finger at the audience, chastising them for wanting to relive the thrill of the first film. It’s a joyless affair for all its energy. It’s shot inventively and, like I said, the performances are terrific and it leaves you with a lot to chew on. In some ways, this was a legitimately better film than Trainspotting, but I didn’t enjoy it as much and I doubt I’ll revisit it as often, if that makes any sense. -RK    

On Sunday, my wife and I met up with my sisters and my stepmother to spread my father’s ashes in the Brazos river.  That’s a tough line to follow.  We meet by the FM2114 bridge, a place which held a surprising emotional resonance for a farm to market road bridge in the middle of something within spitting distance of nowhere. We used to canoe on that stretch of river on a semi-regular basis. We owned a fiberglass canoe which was heavy, but very, very quite in the water. The current below Lake Whitney was pretty weak and the wind was always in our face, so it wasn’t particularly easy paddling. That was especially true since I was usually fishing and letting my dad do most of the work.  He never complained about that, at least, he never complained to me about it. I know I would have been ticket. The water was usually so clear that you could see the bottom of the river. It was one bend after another, white limestone cliffs on one side, rocky sandbars on the other. The banks were lined with cottonwoods, which are second only to the aspen in my opinion when it comes to the sound of the wind through the leaves.  We usually made a day trip of it, going about eight miles or so from the dam to the bridge. Sometimes, we’d stay on the water for three days, canoeing down to the headwaters of whatever lake is in Waco (Lake Waco, I presume). I’d get sunburned, usually lose a bunch of very expensive lures (rapalas were my favorites), and mostly, I had a great time with my father. That’s the man I want to remember. He was healthy, happy, silly, and he seemed to really enjoy my company. So, it seemed fitting that the last of his ashes *would be cast into the river at that location. One of my sisters prepared a speech and it was perfect and impossible to follow. I tried to follow it anyway. My younger sister, who wasn’t going to speak, did so, and there were tears all around.  I don’t know that there was any closure or anything of that sort; I’m not sure what closure feels like and I suspect you can’t recognize it when you get it. But this felt right and it was good to be with my family and say our peace and eat lunch together.** -RK   * His best friend Norm took some of his ashes to Arizona to one of the spring training ballparks. This, too, was appropriate, both in terms of location and the fact that Norm, who was as good to my father as a man could have been, was the one doing it. ** This is probably not something that belongs in this sort of post, but the Texas Great Country Cafe in Whitney, Texas, was aces. You can get your chicken fried steak deep-fried or (correctly) pan-fried. It’s the best chicken fried steak I’ve had since R.O.’s shut down.

Since I follow The Onion’s AV Club on Facebook, I see their Q&A feature pop up in my feed on a regular basis. They’re the sort of writing prompts I can’t resist and I’m not going to let the fact that I’m not technically (meaning “in any sense”) in the AV Club prevent me from offering up my answers to their questions.  This is the second one I’ve done. Here’s the first. There are going to be more, so let that be your warning. “What non-2016 book did you finally get around to reading this year?“ More than I can list, but the one that stood out was Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. So many classics have disappointed me when I finally got around to reading/listening to/seeing them. So many of my favorite writers cite Chandler as an influence that I was a concerned that there’d be no way he could live up to expectations. He lived up to expectations. Reading Raymond Chandler is just flat-out fun. His writing is taut without being Cormac McCarthy-ish minimalist, he’s a genius when it comes to figurative language, and creates memorable, breathing characters. I’m not at all sure that the plot held together, but I didn’t care. I felt a sense of regret when I finished The Long Goodbye because I didn’t want to leave it, and that’s about the best thing I can say about any book. “What one piece of pop culture most reminds you of the inherent goodness of humanity?” Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods is not his most famous book (that would be Good Omens, co-written with Neil Gaiman) and it may not be his best (probably Night Watch), but it’s the one that I turn to when I need to be reminded that people can be good. It’s a beautiful, funny story. Pratchett was an absolute master at delivering a message in such a way that you never felt you were being preached to. The humanity of the one single man in the face of both a church and a god which had abandoned any pretext of existing for any purpose other than their own should come across as heavy handed, but instead it’s charming. And then there’s the coda, which is as graceful a landing as any book I’ve ever read has managed.  “What song always gives you goosebumps, no matter how many times you’ve heard it?“ Easiest question on this list: The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now.” The proto-shoegaze guitar with that signature tremolo gets me every. single. time. Thanks to Soho using a sample of that guitar on their song “Hippychick,” I always hold my breath waiting for the drums to come it: Will it be The Smiths (yay!) or Soho (not yay)?   I know this is probably something that no one should ever say out loud about The Smiths, but I really wish there was a version of this song without Morrissey on it. There’s nothing wrong with his lyrics or vocals, but the instrumental track is just so perfect that vocals dull the impact a little. I could just put “How Soon Is Now” on repeat, put on some headphones, and I’d have all the music I’d ever really need. “Is there a supposed defining “masterpiece” in a genre or by an artist you love that you actually hate?“ I don’t get the film version of The Shining at all. It just feels like a slow, dull two hours that I forget as soon as I’ve seen it. I wouldn’t say I hate it, but I just don’t get it. For real hatred, I’d have to go with Anais Nin’s Henry and June. The first time I picked it up, I made it through one chapter, tossed it across the room, and took a shower. It’s not just that I find Nin’s point of view so ugly; it’s that she seems to be so very pleased with herself.  You know that guy, don’t you? That guy who goes around telling you about how he does horrible things to other people, but he thinks he’s the hero of the story? That could maybe make for a decent novel, but it makes for a profoundly ugly memoir. What’s your favorite movie poster?     Yes, that’s right. It reads “Two Men Two Machines Too Wild! Robot Jox accomplishes what all movie posters seek to do: It writes checks that the movie doesn’t even come close to cashing. The poster has everything you could ever want to see in a film (and by “you,” I mean “me in my 20’s”): Explosions, flying futuristic wedges, burning post-apocalyptic towns, and giant robots. Not just giant robots, but giant robots squared off to do battle! If you’ve seen the film, you understand just how wide the gap between the poster and the film is. For everyone else, I’ll just sum it up with one phrase: “Stop motion animation.” It’s almost as if the entire budget for the film was used to make this awesome poster and nothing was left for CGI, so they just used Play-doh to make the robots. A movie poster that makes me want to see a movie is a success and this one succeeds in ways that no poster since has ever managed. 

I just wrote a long, detailed post about my current physical ailments. Then I erased it. You’re welcome. Then I wrote a lengthy bit about working from home last week and that was exactly as interesting as a story about getting a chunk of my skin sawed out and it suffered the same fate. I guess there’s value in doing things that are important to you even when you don’t really feel like doing them.  So, that’s what I’ve done, twice, but I’m not going to take my perseverance out on you. If you made it this far, you deserve something nice, so here’s a list of the best Mr. Show sketches. It had embedded video. Treat yourself and click the link Treat yourself, You deserve it. -RK

My beloved Dell 6520 finally passed away a couple of weeks ago. There probably aren’t too many people who would refer to a Dell business laptop as “beloved,” but I’ve been using I’d been using this one for work and later as a personal laptop for almost five years now. It was heavy, islow, it gots three hours of battery life with an extra-large battery, and was old enough that the wireless card wouldn’t work with Windows 10.  It did, however, have the best keyboard I’ve ever used on a laptop., hence the “beloved.” To extend its life, I’d upgraded the memory and installed Ubuntu, which doesn’t require quite so much in the way of processor speed. That kept it viable for a while, but the hard drive finally gave up the ghost. I was faced with replacing the drive in an old machine that approached and long since passed obsolescence.  With a little encouragement from Nicole, I decided to retire the Dell and get something new. So, behold! I am writing this post on a brand new Acer Chromebook For Work (yes, that’s really what it’s called). My main requirement was that, whatever I got, it needed a minimum 1080p resolution.. The other thing I wanted was something that would allow me to work if I needed to, but work wouldn’t be right there in my face every time I turned it on. The thing that made a Chromebook viable was the appearance of decent remote desktop apps on the Google store. Now, I can log into a terminal server at the office if I need to, but that functionality is off to the side.  With that out of the way, I can concentrate on what I really want a laptop for: Reading, writing, and watching the occasional video. I just unboxed it, so I don’t have any in-depth thoughts to share yet. It’s ridiculously fast, much faster than my gaming desktop. The battery life is supposed to be in the 10-12 hour range, but I haven’t had a chance to check it out for myself yet. I currently have only seven tabs open, which is low for me, and there’s no hint of a slowdown yet, so I’m pretty sure that power isn’t going to be a problem. So…neat. I really like it so far.  I haven’t had a chance to play with the offline mode yet, but, obviously, it’s going to be pretty limited. I won’t be playing any games or editing videos on this machine, but that’s what the desktop is for. This is for sitting in a comfortable chair and relaxing. I’ll miss ya, old Dell 6520, but based on my first impression with the Chromebook, I don’t think I’ll be missing ya for very long. -RK

It is nigh-impossible to get to me office this week, so I’m working from home. My track record working remotely is not especially good. I’m easily distracted, which is why having my own work space is critical for me.* Curiously enough (to me, at least), the fact that I have a lot of work with very tight deadlines is a huge help. Nothing focuses a body like fear, and that is something I have in abundance right now. This is probably obvious most of you, but popular, catch music turns out to be a poor soundtrack for work. Even relatively unpopular pop music slows me down. It’s probably the lyrics, because I’ve been listening to Mogwai’s Young Team all morning and I’ve been going great guns. I’m sure that they’d be thrilled to know that their music is so conducive to the performance of middle management tasks. That seems like something they’d aspire to. Above: Excellent music to listen to while whittling your soul to a nub. By the way, oak pollen is awful. I’m almost certain that oak pollen was the inspiration for the thread in Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders books.** That stuff touches me and I look like I’ve been burned. Last night I looked like I’d just come home from a party…a chicken pox party. I’m getting really, really tired of this. Time to get back at it. Hopefully, the steroids will kick in. It’s hard to think about anything other than tearing my skin off right now. -RK     * You’d think the meds would help, but alas… ** I have no factual basis for this certainty.

I picked up the new solo album by the lead singer for Bad Religion, Greg Graffin this weekend. I’m not sure what I was expecting. His first album, American Lesion, was a Todd Rungren-esque effort. The second, Cold As The Clay, was a straightforward folk record. Any guesses where the third one went? If you haven’t figured it out, re-read the title of this post. The new album, Millport, is a country album. This being Greg Graffin, there’s absolutely no winking or irony in it.* It’s not just one style of country. There’s folk, bluegrass, alt-country, a kind of bluesy-rock country, and even some Eagles-ish 70’s soft-rock country. In fact, there’s a lot of Eagles-ish 70’s soft-rock country.  Millport was produced by Graffin’s Bad Religion bandmate and co-songwriter, Brett Gurewitz, and he’s backed by the rhythm section of Social Distortion. There’s a lot of southern California in there, so it’s no surprise that there’s a lot of the “Laurel Canyon” style of SoCal soft country. For my money, those are the weakest songs on the record, as he’s riffing on a style I didn’t care for the first time around.  The bluegrass, on the other hand, is a lot of fun.  Banjo-riffic! I’m an unabashed fan, so it’s no surprise that I kind of dig this direction.  This is the sort of music you’re more likely to hear on a public radio than any country station.  Graffin’s been in a punk band since 1979, so it’s fun to hear him trying something new.  Most of it works, some of it works really well, and all of it is interesting. If you’re in to rootsy, bluegrass-y country, give it a listen. -RK * Well, I guess you could say that the lyrics to “Time of Need” are ironic, or at least they would be if you had never listened to any Bad Religion records.

Since I follow The Onion’s AV Club on Facebook, I see their Q&A feature pop up in my feed on a regular basis. They’re the sort of writing prompts I can’t resist and I’m not going to let the fact that I’m not technically (meaning “in any sense”) in the AV Club prevent me from offering up my answers to their questions.  “What critically scorned TV show have you enjoyed watching, either in the past or present?” My first instinct is to answer Under The Dome, the show which gave the expression “hate watching” meaning for me, but since the question specifies “enjoyed”, I’ll go with Fantasy Island. In many ways, Fantasy Island was a repacking of The Love Boat: A one-hour anthology series featuring several storylines per episode, many celebrity guest stars, and neat wrap ups at the end of the hour. Whereas The Love Boat was never anything more than treacle, Fantasy Island had a couple of advantages over its predecessor: The wish-fulfillment premise features a mysterious host named “Mr. Roark” whose nature and abilities were never fully explained. At times he seemed a supernatural tempter who was more than willing to provide mortals the means of their own destruction. Sometimes, though, he seemed to be restricted by either his powers or his moral code, a man who genuinely sought to protect his guests from their folly. Of course, the other ace up Fantasy Island’s sleeve was the fact that Mr. Roark was played by Ricardo Montalban. His suave, sophisticated demeanor could (and did) sell people cars based on a completely made-up type of leather used in their interior. A Fantasy Island rebooted today would have a darker feel, fewer corny morality plays, and far better writing. It wouldn’t, however, have Ricardo Montalban, and without him, what would be the point? “What piece of pop culture do you think most accurately describes what the future will look like based on the current state of the world?“ Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan is a great deal more than a Hunter S. Thompson-in-the-future stunt. It’s my go-to point of reference for every election since 2004. The three candidates for President embody archetypes I didn’t even know existed when I first read the book, but now I can recognize in politicians every election cycle. If you want to understand modern politics, you’ll get a more realistic picture from the “Year of the Bastard” collection than you’ll get anywhere else. It’s not just the politics that make Transmetropolitan the obvious choice here. The whole story is told against a backdrop of amazing technology that becomes mundane minutes after it hits the street. The poorest of the poor have miracles at their disposal, but they’re shabby miracles by the time the lower class gets their hands on them. People become so jaded by their flashy toys that they forget how to do some very basic things, and the consequences of forgetting are very, very believable. “What is your all-time ‘turn-off’ album, where you checked out from a band you previously loved after listening to it?” Styx’s Kilroy Was Here seems like the obvious answer here: It was so reviled that it not only turned most of the band’s fans against them, it actually turned most of the band against Styx. Therefore, it was the last real Styx album and that doesn’t seem to fit with the spirit of the question. Instead, I’m going to go with Rush’s Grace Under Pressure. Don’t get me wrong: I love Rush and always will. But, I was working in a record store when Grace Under Pressure was released and I heard it a couple of hundred times and it still never grabbed me. It felt weirdly distant and bloodless to me. Despite hearing it so often, none of the songs stuck with me.  Few bands have a three album run as strong as Rush did with Permanent Waves, Moving Pictures, and Signals, so maybe Grace Under Pressure was always going to be a disappointment. I just felt as if I’d already heard the best Rush had to offer and, while I’ve heard every album since, I haven’t felt the need to buy any of them. “What foods do you only eat while traveling?“ I am not proud of this. For long road trips by myself, there is nothing I like more than the chicken planks at Long John Silver’s. I don’t mess with the sides, which are mediocre under the best of circumstances. I just get a family sized order of planks only and eat them until the grease congeals. If you’re not familiar with the chicken plank, it’s a long strip of white meat which was obviously frozen, then thawed, and then dipped in Long John Silver’s exquisite cornmeal batter and fried. Their cornmeal almost makes their fish taste good; on chicken, it works wonders. The only downside (other than the fact that I’m eating a family sized order of fried chicken strips) is that it loses its luster as well as its edibility when it cools down. All food has a point at which the scales tip between “delicious” and “bound for the trash.” That line of demarcation comes more quickly with the chicken planks and the gradient is more severe. But, while they’re still fresh? Best. Road. Food. Ever. “What music do you wake up to in the morning? (Or wish you would wake up to?)“ There’s nothing that gets me going quite like coffee. Coffee, however, is not music. It may feel that way sometimes, but it is not. The song that really gets me going in the morning is “In A Big Country” by Big Country. The guitars-sounding-like-bagpipes thing and the massive drums vaguely-uplifting lyrics feel like a call to action. Listening to it while driving in to work, I always get the urge to just keep driving and leave all of the bullshit behind and start a new, authentic life somewhere beautiful. This is not a helpful state of mind for someone going to an office. I need something less like emotional Viagra and more like emotional saltpeter. Maybe Nine Inch Nails “Everyday Is Exactly The Same”? On a side note, the song on my alarm clock is Mogwai’s gorgeous “2 Rights Make 1 Wrong.” Every alarm clock should have this built in.  That was fun. I think I’ll do this on a semi-regular basis (unless I get a cease-and-desist). -RK  

I seldom write posts on my phone, but it seems appropriate today. My city is currently in transit, transforming itself into something wholly artificial in anticipation of a festival grown too large for a real city to contain. New marquees are going up over dozens of storefronts. They’ll be gone in two weeks although nothing about them suggests impermanence. The sign above the newly dubbed “Mashable Room” looks more like a permanent fixture than the signs over most of the local businesses.  Even the most temporary of street signs, the paper fliers, have an air of unreality to them. Every likely location for affixing one has been wrapped in clear cellophane to facilitate the removal of the flimsy, xeroxed placards. The weekly newspaper is now daily. Time, like everything else, has become an unreliable. In two weeks, everything will return to normal, leaning only overly full trash cans and a sense of morning after regret.  I used to be an eager participant in the fantasy world of SxSW. Now I’m one of the jaded locals who will avoid downtown at all costs during the festival. Only… I’ve just learned that the New Pornographers are playing a day show on the 15th, and there’s no way I’m missing that.  -RK P.S. The band in the header image is Glasvegas. They were one of the better “next big thing” bands I’ve seen. I hope they’re doing OK.

“The angry sunset provide elaborate background for Principato and Malatesta on this cruelest of Sundays in the oiled-down lot between the merry-go-round and miniature train as they attempted to clarify with flailing fists and crude polemics an important theological question. Not the first two friends in history, certainly.” When my brother-in-law recommended Tom McHale’s Principato to me, I’d never even heard of him. I was not alone in this as no local bookstores carried any of his books. In fact, Amazon only carried him through third parties overseas. Given the breadth of the selection available through Amazon, essentially “everything which could be considered ‘still in print’ by the most generous of standards,” you’d have to say it’s a pretty obscure book. What’s curious is that McHale was highly acclaimed in the 1970s. The dust jacket has enthusiastic blurbs from presumably enthusiastic reviews published in the Wall Street Journal, Time, and The New York Times Book Review. These and other reviews compared him (sometimes favorably) to Evelyn Waugh, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, John Updike, and Philip Roth. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, and he was writer-in-residence at Monmouth University.  McHale was, by many measure, a tremendous success as a novelist.* You’d think he’d have left more of an imprint on popular culture, or at the very least on my narrow view of it. I can’t explain why he’s so throughly evaporated from the public consciousness. I don’t have a critic’s eyes for quality, but I found Principato both literary and enjoyable to read, and you can’t ask for much more than that. It’s a funny, earthy novel that makes its points without getting preachy. It’s certainly one of the better books I’ve read over the last couple of years. So I don’t get it. Maybe it’s that none of his novels were made into films or television shows. It could be that the Catholic themes limit the audience. Perhaps contemporary reviews aren’t a good indicator of lasting impact (ok, I think I can take the “perhaps” off of that one). I don’t know. The arc of his career is hardly encouraging to anyone who immortality through their art.  I’ve just started William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and it’s going to be a difficult one. Just forty-ish pages in, I can’t tell if Burroughs is a stylistic acrobat whose brave, timeless prose continues to challenge a half century after he wrote it, or if he’s just a writer whose stylistic tics and use of slang are so “of their time” that they lose clarity over time. It’s probably a little of both. Scratch that: It’s almost certainly a whole lot of both.   * And yet, if you search Google for “Tom McHale book”, this McHale’s books start at number six on the list after five guides by the gun-enthusiast of the same name.