It was an innocent errand, a friend and I were wandering the grocery store looking for two specific items.‚  I had spent a good 20 minutes doing laps through every aisle, carrying a cantaloupe in my hands, looking for this item.‚ 

I know that grocery stores are designed such that customers spend as much time possible in them — the more time to notice some item you had no intention of buying, but with that clever display, suddenly it’s a necessity.‚  Usually I win.‚  This time, the marketing won.

The cantaloupe was getting heavy, and shedding tiny bits of its rind onto my shirt.‚  We just needed one more thing before we could escape the maze of Albertson’s.‚  Escape was on my mind.‚  Then I saw this:

The drink is called “Vacation in a Bottle”!‚  The palm trees!‚  “Happy” and ‚ ”Relaxation” printed in bright, friendly letters at the top of a sleek aluminum bottle.‚  No stress about polluting with a plastic bottle.‚  Also in friendly letters, no caffeine and very little sugar in the drink.‚  No stress about polluting my body and mind with stimulants.‚  This drink is what stressed out Americans have been waiting for!!!

It was two for $4, so my friend and I each got a can.

My friend had Pomegranate Berry and I had Mango Lime.‚ ‚ I opened mine as soon as I got in the car.‚  Fizzy.‚  Tastes‚ familiar . . . like something I had a long time ago . . . reminds me of swimming in our pool . . . summer‚ barbecues . . . KOOL-AID!‚  It’s carbonated Kool-Aid!‚  Green flavor, to be exact.‚  The Pomegranate Berry tasted purple.

Feeling a little sheepish that I fell for such obvious gimmicks, I couldn’t help but admire the anonymous marketers who‚ took advantage of me.‚  I have noticed, as many others have, the prevalence of energy drinks in their fancy black cans with neon streaks.‚  Those black cans are intimidating.

Someone agreed with me and decided to make a more accessible drink, though I agree with this reviewer that the bottle design looks amateurish.‚  But why go through all the trouble of inventing a new drink, when you could just take Kool-Aid, add club soda and repackage it?

Fool me once ViB, but you won’t fool me twice.‚  I’m not drinking this Kool-Aid.

If you have never heard of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, and you love a good long immersion in a book, stop reading this blog right now and go pick up the book.‚  Don’t be deterred by the Oprah sticker on the front.‚  Those come right off, and sometimes even Oprah has good taste.

Anne Fadiman wrote, “[T]here is a certain kind of child who awakens from a book as from an abyssal sleep, swimming heavily up through layers of consciousness toward a reality that seems less real than the dream-state that has been left behind.”

I was that kind of child, and I read a book every night hoping to recapture the experience Fadiman describes.‚  With David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, I did find a realer reality in Edgar’s world.

I suggest jumping in without reading anything about the book, because that’s how I did it.‚  I spent the first quarter of the book fascinated.‚  Wroblewski spent those first hundred or two pages building intricate characters and their intricate connections to their surroundings: a dog-breeding farm in the 1960s.

Edgar is born mute, but I usually forgot that.‚  He uses sign language to communicate with the dogs.‚  Wroblewski adeptly describes the thoughts and emotions of the dogs, and conversations between dog and person.

When Edgar is fourteen (or thereabout), his father collapses and Edgar cannot call for help.‚  At this point, the story begins to fill the Hamlet‚ mold Wroblewski‚ chose‚ for it.‚  I had not realized until Edgar’s mom plays house with his uncle that the story was a retelling of Hamlet.

Hamlet has a very complicated plot, and every detail that I can remember is represented in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.‚  Yet Sawtelle has its own, separate identity.

Imagine the story of Hamlet as a line drawing; it is very detailed and rich.‚  It is complete: a perfect work of art.

With Sawtelle, Wroblewski filled in the lines with color, adding the subtlety of shades, giving the lines new relationships and definition.

Wroblewski is a talented story-teller.‚  At first I was jarred out of the story.‚  I knew the plot of Hamlet, so I knew how Edgar’s life story would end.‚  I was disappointed, betrayed.‚  Wroblewski didn’t need the gimmick of re-telling Hamlet, he told a beautiful story without reference to the Bard.

I was on an airplane when this happened.‚  I didn’t have much reading material, so‚  I dove back into Sawtelle’s life.

The familiar characters and events of Hamlet became unfamiliar.‚  I smiled at the blatant references that I had missed before.

If you have not studied Hamlet, there is much to love in the 562 pages of The Life of Edgar Sawtelle.‚  You will experience American rural life as it was before computers and cell phones.‚  You will observe the relationship between a boy and the dog who helped raise him.‚  You will experience tragedy as so many characters make destructive choices in response to chaos.

If you know Hamlet intimately, you will be surprised at the depth that Wroblewski gives to characters.‚  They may participate in the same events as the classic play, but these characters do it for their own reasons, not to serve a gimmick.

Foreign policy would make more sense to such a large group of people if we could reliably often discuss it using rap feuds as examples. Tongue could be firmly planted in cheek here, but Marc Lynch makes a couple of really good points.

About foreign policy. And also Jay-Z. To wit:

But the limits on his ability to use this power recalls the debates about U.S. primacy. Should he use this power to its fullest extent, as neo-conservatives would advise, imposing his will to reshape the world, forcing others to adapt to his values and leadership? Or should he fear a backlash against the unilateral use of power, as realists such as my colleague Steve Walt or liberals such as John Ikenberry would warn, and instead exercise self-restraint?

Is Marc Lynch the Kai Ryssdal of FPM?

Tab dump!

So I’ve got three articles sitting in my Firefox window, and I need to get rid of them if I’m going to scratch this itch at the back of my brain. Over the weekend last week three separate articles on three very different news sources identify just how crazy the Republican Party is.

To wit:
1) From Wonkette: Glenn Beck and guest call on Osama to nuke America to save it.
2) From Slate.com: Richard Nixon is the gift that keeps on giving.
3) From The Washington Post: Dick Cheney influenced the Executive’s response to his leaking Plame’s identity.

Bat. Shit. Cray. Zee.

I’ve got a job thing today, and will be able to write more on these nutballs later this evening.

And, in brief, here is why:

And yet “" and here’s the part where I really think ROTF approaches “art movie” status “" the movie’s id overload reaches such crazy levels that the fabric of reality itself starts to break down. Michael Bay has boasted about how every single shot in the movie has so much stuff going on in it, it would take your PC since the dawn of time to render one frame. After a few hours of this assault, you feel the chair melt and the floor of the movie theater becomes an angry mirror into your soul. Nothing is solid, nothing is real, everything Transforms.

I might have to go it alone; I had a partner-in-shame for “The Day The Earth Stood Still,” but will likely go stag for this one.

Internet!

Here are my most recent book reviews (in most to least recent):
1) “Horse Soldiers” by Doug Stanton sucked.
2) “Hey! Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone!” by Craig Schuftan was amazing.
3) “The Chris Farley Show” by Tanner Colby and Tom Farley, Jr. surprisingly stuck with me (and still does).

More stuff right here.

When you’re writing a book about the military, this critic thinks, you’ve got to be a great writer. You have got to know what you’re doing, and you have got to understand the shark-infested waters you’re swimming in.

A bad book about the military will do one or several of the following things: 1) reduce the troops to tropes; 2) wave a flag; 3) become an excuse for an author to enter into a partisan argument between himself and the reader’s sensibilities; and 4) read like a Michael Bay (or, if in the 90s, Jerry Bruckheimer) movie.

I just finished reading an earnest attempt at macho beachside literature, “Horse Soldiers,” pitched to me by the PR company slinging the book as something for Dad on Father’s Day (which was Sunday?). My dad’s a retired Commander in the US Navy, so I couldn’t really think of the book without wondering how he would feel about it, and the military has kind of seeped into the back of my mind and informed, I’m finding increasingly as I get older, how I look at most things.

As such I feel compelled to discuss further the risks of writing a sensationalized take on military strategy, to elaborate on my negative review of the book, which should appear on Blast sometime this week.

The thing is this, at bottom: Nobody’s going to go to a book about military strategy, especially the War On Terror, without a political position of their own. I, myself, think the entire affair was ruined the moment the Commander in Chief decided not to pursue Bin Laden, so, within those confines, the Horse Soldiers’ mission (to fight Al Qaeda) wasn’t really the issue. The issue I had with the book was more that it didn’t do what it could to treat the soldiers as people, and instead gave us a Tony Scott movie with a pair of protagonists, a faceless enemy and a host of extras.

It’s about, I suppose, “supporting the troops.” The author, Doug Stanton, did a monumental amount of research to put “Horse Soldiers” together, and it shows. But Stanton’s encyclopedic amount of interviews and legwork produced not a book full of humanity, but a book full of pop and action. I didn’t care about the people whose lives were at stake in the war, and I didn’t get a sense of how their campaign fit in with the rest of the war, and these two things made the book into an excercise in sugar-spinning.

The more I think about it, the more frustrated I get, in fact. The book’s got staying power; I’ll give Stanton that.

So, I got unemployed a long time ago (back in March, he says, dusting off the cobwebs from Overthinking It), and was sitting in my apartment applying for jobs with my girlfriend this morning, when I came across this quotation, from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, ‘It is in me, and shall out.’ Stand there, baulked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.”

I dedicate this to all of you going through hard times.

shb

I realized I was addicted to texting when I grabbed lunch at Panera. I traipsed over to the soda dispenser. I don’t usually drink soda, so I couldn’t decide between Pepsi and Dr. Pepper. Naturally, I sought the opinion of my best friend, Nichole.

How did I, a 26-year-old graduate student, who has lived on my own for several years, get to the point where I could not make a simple decision about a lunchtime beverage without sending a text to a friend I haven’t seen in over a year who lives two time zones and half a country away?

Oh no, I thought, I’m officially a statistic. I can now be lumped with those socially inept teenagers who can’t carry on a coversation because of the cell phone glued to their palms.

I recently ran out for a short shopping trip and I forgot my phone. I had to purchase a new suitcase with no texted input from Nichole, my mom, or my sister. I could not send pictures of my options. I had to make the decision all by myself. I’ve made these decisions plenty of times before I had a cell phone. In post-unlimited-texting world: it was lonely.

Okay, so I went to see that little movie based on some four-color funny book that just hit theaters, “Watchmen,” and maybe it was the inundation that comes along with every big-budget movie like this, but when I finally got to see how Zach Snyder, David Hayter and Alex Tse rendered their homage to Alan Moore’s work, I was underwhelmed.

If only because, jesus, it’s like you hear “Birdhouse in your soul” every day for a year, right, then you go see Barenaked LadiesThey Might Be Giants? And they play it live and the whole crowd is erupting but you’re just sort of whelmed, neither over-nor-under.

But I’ll tell you: the Film Companion and Art of the Film coffee table books? They are so cool.

If only because, well, they’re clearly written by people who are very passionate about the comic, its philosophy, its meanings, and how its visual representation, as a comic (or a film) makes the philosophy and themes of the story reality. They’re both written, in short, by more or less complete nerds.

It’s weird. I was captivated by both books when I sat to read them a couple of weeks ago, before the movie came out. I couldn’t look away. The amount of work and detail that made it into the movie’s production was borderline fetishistic. It was the creation of a world.

Maybe I’m a process person, finding the work that went into the movie more enthralling than the movie itself. Anyway, check the books out. You will not be disappointed.

The deconstructionist middle finger of Alan Moore’s “Watchmen” showed an industry built around taking masked heroes seriously just how silly it was.

It was the punk kid in the back of the classroom who knew everything already, and was angry with and bored at the kid in the front of the classroom who didn’t know the answer but was the quickest to throw his hand in the air.

It told everyone to grow up, and they did. By and large, the Watchmen made Batman who we know today. It made Superman a demigod. It made the X-Men take their allegory seriously. It made the Punisher a big old anti-war parable. Comics were never the same after the final issue of that series, they say.

Zach Snyder’s “Watchmen” simply can’t live up to that. And I suppose I shouldn’t tell a guy to give something an honest try, because everyone should try. But Snyder’s a kid wearing his dad’s suit and tie.

Snyder isn’t as brilliant, as angry, as well-versed in the medium he works in, or, simply, as crazy as Alan Moore, but he loves Moore’s book, and his earnestness really shows. I feel like if Hollywood kept training on lesser Moore books, like, maybe if they had a different director keep taking stabs at “V for Vendetta” until they got it right every two years, maybe in 20 years or so we might have had a “Watchmen” movie as insane and as genius as the book.

See, the next comic book movie we get? It’ll still be a comic book movie. The absolute genre subversion of the source material didn’t come through with the adaptation, and that’s the movie’s central problem.

Beat for beat, Snyder did pretty well. The movie is weird, but not as weird as the book. It’s philosophical, but nobody’s got the brain Moore does. It questions the genre not of comic books, but of comic book movies, a genre only a bit more than a decade old in its current form, which started, (I hate to say I know this), with the stupefying success of the 1997 “Blade” movie.

I get the changes to the source material he had to make, which I really don’t want to discuss here. In a way, they do sort of work: the movie is less a sprawling epic than it is a taut novel, where everything in the story revolves around the central characters. I suppose given three hours (but it didn’t feel like it) and not a series which can take even the most assiduous reader a week to read cover to cover if they do it right, the movie did admirably enough, but if you go to the book’s deepest bit of strange, the chapter of Dr. Manhattan on Mars, you’ll get to the book’s philosophical core.

The movie? Not so much.

I suppose that’s the problem. A lot of the philosophy of the book had to be trimmed down to make room for the fight scenes which didn’t appear in the original in the first place.

But here’s what worked, as I’ve sure you’ve heard. Doctor Manhattan, the Comedian and Rorschach are practically trying to wrestle the show from one another. Billy Crudup is transcendent in the role, and where other people saw detachment in his character, I picked up on a great deal of sadness. The special effects team that created him, too, deserves no end of praise. The Comedian also was played with a layer of depth that one might not notice at first. And Rorschach? Jackie Earl Haley just walks away with it. It was amazing.

If the rest of the movie lived up to the promise of its central characters, I would have no problem calling it one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time. As it stands, though, the three best-played characters feel like they’ve walked into a lesser movie.

Go if you love the book already. You’ll spend the hours after the movie talking about where it went wrong.

Otherwise? Take the three hours and watch “The Dark Knight” again.

I thought it was bad when my mom joined Facebook.‚  It was my fault.‚  I did that thing where you add pictures then invite friends via email to view your photos.‚  I thought she would be able to see my photos without opening an account.‚  I was wrong.

She signed up, saw my photos, then I unfriended her.

That’s right: I unfriended my mom.

Before you let the shock and horror flood your nervous system, you should know that I talk to my mom at least once a week on the phone.‚  During one of our weekly conversations, I told her I was unfriending her because I don’t like to mix social circles.‚  It never works out.‚  And really, my mom does not need to see some of the comments I make.‚  Really.

But then, my hip aunt joined Facebook, along with every other middle-aged American.‚  I told her I wouldn’t accept her friend request, but she insisted.‚  So I friended my mom again.‚  (BTW I’ve never used “friend” as a verb so much.‚  Makes me feel sloppy.)

There’s a certain etiquette on Facebook that I didn’t realize existed until my mom broke it.‚  I am by no means embarrassed, it’s just revealing of the type of interactions to which I’ve grown accustomed.‚  For example, with over 200 friends, I do not feel the need to comment on every status update or posted link.‚  For awhile, my mom would comment on everything.

I’m okay with it now, and the shine has worn off for her.

Then, my cousins joined Facebook.‚  My nine-year-old cousin, and my 11-year-old cousin.‚  So now, I have to refuse requests to “buy a digital pet” or “fight on Family Guy” or whatever.‚  I get 10 quizzes or applications a week from those guys.‚  I wonder if I should tell them they’re breaking etiquette, like interrupting a conversation.

“Children, please do not flood me with games and quizzes, I’m talking to the grown-ups.”

Woke up this morning to a pair of slap-you-in-the-face headlines. The first, from Boingboing, is a good earnest ‘how is everybody doing’ post:

What are you telling yourself? How are you all sleeping at night? Are you hedging your bets with canned goods and shotguns, or plans for urban communal farming? Are you starting a business? Restructuring through bankruptcy? Moving back in with your parents?

My favorite Spider Robinson aphorism is “Shared joy is increased, shared pain is lessened.” Jump into the comments and tell us about your plans, dreams, denial and successes.

The second, from the Post? Not so good: Swift, Steep Downturn Crosses Globe.

The echo-chamber answering its own question? It’s weird to wake up to realize the apocalypse might have happened, and I slept through it. The market is amazing that way.

Commenters/trolls: how you doing with the economy? Everything alright on your end? Do you still have a job? Afraid you’ll lose it?

Did you hear? It’ll be Mr. Darcy vs. the Predator!

It might prove something of a boon to those who reach for the remote control when yet another costume drama comes on television: Elton John’s Rocket Pictures is developing a new spin on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, this time featuring a nefarious seven-foot extraterrestrial with hideous mandibles and a penchant for human blood. Yes, it’s Pride and Predator.

It’s about time Austen is getting a refreshing new spin. And you know, you just know Mr. Darcy would kick some ass.

Developing…