I actually got some "for fun" writing done the other night. Out of the blue, I wrote a poem with a slightly surreal, not-entirely-sure-what-it's-about edge. I sent it to my friend, R, who -- in the midst of some solid criticism -- promptly advised me to try it in a different format, such as a short story. Good advice, and naturally, as always, the good advice requires more work <G>. Plus, it'll give me a good excuse to reread my Norse mythology, which I'd been meaning to do anyway.

06/30/2006 -- 10:10 p.m.

A couple of reviews up on the interwebs today, both focusing on Johnny Cash releases. So yes, I had to listen to pretty much nothing but Johnny Cash for a few weeks. And let's face it, life doesn't suck when you can listen to Cash.

The first, found here, is of the upcoming American V release, an awfully strong record that, supposedly, rounds out his work under Rick Rubin. Good stuff, and it's impossible to separate the music from the reality of Cash's life winding down. One thing the site does, which I think is really cool, is to attach relevant video clips to the ends of reviews. Here, it's the video for Cash's version of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" (courtesy of YouTube's seemingly neverending goodness). Might take a while to load, but it's a tearjerker.

The other, here, is of the recent compilation of Cash's duets with June Carter Cash. Some awfully good stuff here, although the path through their '70s work -- like nearly everyone's '70s country work, really -- is a little bit less satisfying. Like I say in the review, one of the striking things about this collection is how the mood evolves over the course of their career from feisty to polite. That's not a bad thing, just interesting.

I'm reasonably happy with both reviews, although there are always things I wish I'd said better. I think parts of the American V review came out especially well.

06/28/2006 -- 9:51 p.m.

"But I was young and foolish then / I feel old and foolish now"
-- They Might Be Giants, "Lucky Ball and Chain"

First off, props to Google and the fine lyrics sites that it finds. For quite a while, I'd had a variation of the above lyrics running through my head. My faulty memory had someone like John Prine singing them in very sad, world-weary tones. Nope, it was TMBG, and the singing is much more spry.

Anyways...

You just have to learn some things the hard way:

1. If you let leaves and other debris collect at the base of your windshield and under your car hood, your car will flood during the next two-inches-of-rain downpour. This happened to the missus' car; she got in the car Sunday morning to about an inch of standing water in the foot of her Golf. Then, then, if you forget to air it out over the weekend, you're greeted on Monday morning by a moldy smell reminiscent of cat pee.
   
2. If you let a truck sit under the barn for a few months without moving it, something will decide to live in it. I thought it would be a snake, since I've found a couple of five-foot-long snakeskins around the barn and the truck. But instead, mice or squirrels or something have taken up shop somewhere in the truck, as there are cracked acorns resting on top of the air filter everytime I open the hood. And something scurries whenever I go poking around in there, too.
   
   The reason the truck hasn't been moved is because, presumably, the starter's dead. A car-savvy coworker has told me to take a hammer and beat the crap out of the starter housing. This will be great advice as soon as I can find the starter housing, although I suspect it's on the underside of the truck, and I really don't relish the thought of crawling under the truck and hammering around while god-knows-what kind of vermin drop down on me in fear.
   
   Oh, and the truck has a leak as well, due to a fender bender ages ago -- plus it's an old truck. 13 years old -- so it's smelled like cat pee for a while now.
   
3. When you live in the country, on the straightaway part of an isolated road, you will eventually fall victim to one of the South's great summertime traditions: someone's going to tag your mailbox with a baseball bat. I'm currently concocting all kinds of schemes involving concrete, re-bar, and duct tape to make it a little harder for some pissants the next time they come 'round. In a perfect world where magic works, I'd have a djinn trapped in there, a cranky one who won't like his mailbox being disturbed...
   
4. If you hit your mid-thirties and let yourself get about forty pounds overweight, your body will punish you ... with extreme prejudice.

06/25/2006 -- 1:36 a.m.

Spent the day running errands, eating superb Mexican food, and napping off some superb Mexican food. Then it was a few hours of weeding the garden.

We hadn't had any substantial rain in what seems like forever, and we ended up getting about two or three inches worth over the past night. Everything in the yard that was parched just soaked it up and made up for lost time by growing at doubletime. This included the weeds in the garden, which in our garden consists of the most vibrant field grass you can imagine.

Seriously. When we walked out there, some of it was two feet tall. And due to some recent weekend trips, we way were behind on our weeding. The stuff was everywhere.

So a few hours were spent picking green beans, zucchini, and eggplant. And pulling huge clumps of field grass up by the roots before carting wheelbarrows full of the stuff down to the lower-40 to fill in some low spots. Man, what a job (with still more to do tomorrow), and I practically needed to be hosed down before the missus would let me back in the house. But parts of the garden are petering out. The broccoli and lettuce are pretty much done for the year, and we'll be digging up the bulk of the potatoes tomorrow. That'll clear out about a fifth of the garden, and we can worry about only what's left.

Once we were cleaned up and feeling human again, we spent the night watching The Brothers Grimm, and I have to admit, most of the lukewarm reviews were pretty much dead-on. Terry Gilliam always makes gorgeous movies, but sometimes it seems like he forgets how to tell a story. TBG had what I felt was a needless plot point of making the brothers into con artists, and then there was a really needless and cluttery subplot involving the French occupation of Germany and a French general who seemed to always be fouling things up when the main story was getting going.

I guess what disappointed me the most was that Gilliam didn't seem to be working towards anything. The most interesting part of the story were the little touches from the familiar fairy tales in the daily life of the characters. An old woman with an apple at the door. A girl in a red cape in the woods. That sort of thing. Obviously, they were supposed to serve double duty: one, that the characters were living the story, and two, that one of the Grimms would later incorporate these elements in his stories. But it really didn't amount to much, lost in the din of an action movie that fell short of its director's talent. I mean, this is the guy who gave us Brazil, which seems to be more and more prophetic every day, and he can't make a film worthy of fairy tales?

Gilliam's always at odds with the studios, and always seems to have a documentary ready-made to show how the interference of the suits got in the way of his vision. I wonder if something similar exists in the case of The Brothers Grimm. Or maybe Gilliam was just slumming, or maybe even playing things safe so that he could show he was capable of making a mainstream Hollywood movie. Whatever the case, two-thirds of The Brothers Grimm could have gone missing, and it wouldn't have hurt the film very much.

Some nice touches, though, here and there. The torturer who kept a string quartet on-hand in his dungeon so he could have music while he tortured (a touch I felt would have fit right into Brazil). Trees moving on their own in the forest to hide the trails. The entranced body of a girl floating up from the depths of a pool. Too many crows to count. As usual, some great images, but they didn't really seem to be in the service of anything.

06/23/2006 -- 10:46 p.m.

How the heck did this happen? I finally have time to call my own. I got my column turned in. All my reviews are turned in. I finally have time to devote to my own writing, meaning the fiction and stuff that I'm always jotting down notes for, but never actually getting around to writing.

Man, I really don't know what to do with myself. I have at least a couple of weeks before the next assignments need to be started, so it's crunch time -- time to prove that I can actually sit down and do something for some reason other than a looming deadline.

It was nice at work today to listen to a lot of music for pleasure: some Mountain Goats, the new Mission of Burma disc, that excellent new Gram Parsons collection. Listening to be listening; you can't beat it.

I spent last night watching Be Here to Love Me, a documentary about Townes Van Zandt. I didn't know it was on DVD, but a post on my buddy Niel's blog alerted me and I knew I had to check it out.

Wow, talk about a man with demons. Through interviews with those who knew him, the documentary skims through his life, discussing things like the electroshock treatments forced upon him as a young man that erased his childhood memories. Steve Earle recounted watching helplessly as Van Zandt played Russian Roulette with himself. Someone else talked about walking in on Townes injecting Bourbon and Coke into his veins. Townes himself told a tale of falling asleep while sniffing glue, the tubes of Super Glue still in his mouth -- the dentist had to break that mess out with a hammer and several of Van Zandt's teeth came with it.

As a whole, the documentary was a bit like Van Zandt's songs: plenty of open spaces to draw your own conclusions. Interviews with Van Zandt's family could have gone into a lot more detail, but there was enough for the viewer to see the conflicting emotions at play. I was all set to dismiss a lot of Guy Clark's commentary as someone who just wanted to relive the good times and not face up to the bad, but then they had a clip of Clark at Van Zandt's funeral. Clark, dressed in a suit and holding his guitar, followed Lyle Lovett up to the mike after Lovett had performed one of Van Zandt's song. Clark, referring to his long friendship with Van Zandt, says something to the effect of, "I hope I get through this. I booked this gig about 35 years ago." The funeral erupts in laughter, and it seemed to reinforce the notion that Van Zandt was an old soul racing to the grave, and for all the efforts of his friends to intervene, that there may have been only one way for Van Zandt's life to end: of heart failure brought on by his self-abuse.

Such a loss. Van Zandt wrote some of the saddest, most gorgeous songs I've ever heard in my life. And he wrote many of them at such a young age. "Tortured genius" has become a bit of a cliche, but it really seems to apply to Van Zandt. I mean, really, no human should be able to pen a line like, "Sorrow and solitude / These are the precious things / And the only words /That are worth rememberin'."