THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

Aside from a brief snapshot of throwing a small can of tomato paste at my mother's head for no obvious reason, most of my earliest memories consist of trying to make people laugh in any way possible. I used the tools that were available to me: my body for standard physical humor -- passing gas through any bodily orifice and variations of "baby fall down" were hoary chestnuts of mirth and merriment -- and my voice for imitations of things I saw and heard. This means that the standard vocal go-to's were pretty typical for a socially awkward skinny white male of a certain age and time -- lines from movies ( Caddyshack , Blazing Saddles , the Monty Python catalog), quotes from television (especially Looney Tunes / Merrie Melodies ,  SNL and The Simpsons ), and so forth -- and while I'd like to say things have changed from then to now, they really haven't. They really haven't. As the spark of singular creation is largely absent in me, I've always been ...

Around the age of 16, I discovered I could dunk a basketball, and the game of basketball suddenly became a bit more fun. When it comes to dunking, most people jump off both feet, leaping towards the hoop via an elegant synchronicity of upper and lower musculature. Sadly, I never had that strong a frame -- my standard joke has always been that I have the body of a 13-year-old African girl, and in my teen years, that wasn't far off -- so I dunked off one foot, pushing off with my left leg. At my jumping peak, I had around a 34" vertical leap, and dunking was relatively easy for a while. Just under twenty years, to be exact. But when you dunk off one leg, that leg will twist in the socket like a mortar and pestle, with each twist grinding a bit of cartilage into nothing. And when you combine thousands of those twists over years of basketball with the odd now-and-again acute trauma -- such as the occasional undercut causing me to crash to the ground -- you end up with bone-on-bo...

After wavering for a couple of years, my friend Brian Siers and I decided to finally make the trip out west in 2004 to a festival called Coachella, about a half-hour east of Palm Springs in a sleepy dessicated burg called Indio. At the time, it was a two-day weekend festival -- the first night featured Radiohead and The Pixies, while The Cure headlined the second night. (I remember lots of things from that weekend, but I still chuckle when I think about Dick Valentine from the band Electric Six thanking Radiohead for being their opening act.) On that first adventure, we didn’t really know what we were doing -- we drove from San Diego instead of Los Angeles, we had no OTC painkillers, we stayed far away from the festival, we were stuck in traffic for hours, and so on -- but we still had a great time. As we came back year after year, our Coachella game got better and better, as we fine-tuned each and every aspect of our adventures. And while the music remained compelling, the trip b...

In less than a week, Michigan voters (well, at least around 20% of registered Michigan voters, if the projections are accurate) will go to the polls to vote on Proposal 1. There have been lots of "Vote Yes" television ads trotting out the big guns and the little people alike, but I remain unconvinced -- I'm voting “no” on Proposal 1 for a variety of reasons. The sales tax increase will give Michigan one of the highest sales taxes in America at 7%, which means that tourism will most likely be negatively impacted, even though we have nice things like abundant water and surly retail providers. This new normal of 7% will have the greatest impact on those with low to middle socioeconomic status -- it's estimated that Proposal 1 will raise taxes by about $200 per year for every person in Michigan, and it's certain that a family of four could find better ways to spend $800 over twelve months. (And let’s remember that when the rich say that the poor don’t pay taxes, ...

And just like that, it's over two years since my last post. Damn. Since that last post: *I've moved from just outside of Petoskey to just outside of Gaylord *I've watched one of my oldest and best friends beat colon cancer *I've talked about J.G. Ballard in a Palm Springs swimming pool with the director of Deadpool *I've flown to London for a brief vacation and to see Kate Bush perform for the first time in decades *I've traveled over 5000 miles in 33 hours to see Sparks perform with an orchestra in Los Angeles And most importantly, I've gotten married to a wonderful woman who makes me laugh and think and so much more. Lots of fantastic things in my life, thankfully, but this blog absolutely vanished in the process. So while I'm pretty much certain that anything I do here will die a quick digital death, it still feels like something that I might want to resuscitate from time to time. Consider this a dip of the toe back into the sandbox of i...

Every time I've taught my Contemporary Film class, I've found at least one or two students who don't seem to grasp and/or enjoy the exploration of implicit meaning in films. The idea that symbolism and latent content percolates beneath the veneer of narrative (or, in some cases, is the narrative) just sits wrong to those folks for some reason; I can even remember a student from many years ago in a class I taught on Stanley Kubrick asking me why films had to mean anything.  (He plagiarized a final project and failed the course.) I was reminded of that student after reading about the upcoming film Room 237 , a documentary covering some rather interesting interpretations of the meanings potentially contained within The Shining .  In general, film criticism over the decades has shifted from a more modernistic and canonical approach -- one of objective content knowingly delivered by the filmmaker with full intent and purpose -- to the more recent postmodernist perspective, whi...

The Psychology of Music infographic