Sunday, January 24, 2010

Push Your Ideas

Great video about the creative process that cleverly uses paper to make its point

Craigslist Missed Connection of the Week: Taking the Words Out of My Heart


EVERY male employee of St. Francis Diner - m4m - 26 (mission district)


Date: 2010-01-24, 3:29PM PST

I was there again this morning. I was the guy in the 4-top wearing an Argyle sweater and eating a patty melt - you were every male employee on staff. I couldn't take my eyes off of you. Each one sexy in your own way. There is clearly some discrimination going on in the hiring process, but everybody wins. You all got jobs and I get unimaginably sweet eye candy. I got all of my words caught in my throat whenever you threw me a glance. I DID want more coffee, I just couldn't move to make that clear at the moment. Shark Tooth Necklace - you might have been the cutest of them all, but Dark Blue Shades of Camouflage, your baby blues melted my butter: I felt a stirring. Gray Shirt I got butterflies, manly ones, fluttering inside of me when you came to Pop's to let us know our table was ready. Even you, Plaid Shirt and Other Guy, were astoundingly suave and polite, erotically so. I just want to take you all to some kitschy looking trailer in the middle of a desert and drink off-brand beers and listen to some music that I'd pretend I'd already heard of. We wouldn't have to take all of our clothes of right away either: we could play some Big Buck Hunter and talk about architecture and tattoos. We could mud wrestle or make a fire, maybe toss rocks at some cans lined up on a fence. If you're looking to have a six-way - or maybe a monogamous long term relationship with each other and me - I'm willing to consider it.
See you soon,
XoXo
Randy Warmloins 

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Up in the Maguire




Up in the Air has the potential to be a great film. Its story reaches across demographics. It is as much as film for young upstart college graduates who are frustrated by their jobs as Associates at McKinsey as it is one for the middle-aged, those who have jobs and those who don't. 


It is a film about compromise, the way that age forces us to renegotiate our plans, and how our plans must be renegotiated to make sense in the world that we experience. Sometimes, Up in the Air shows this compromise to be one of finally acknowledging our dreams and going after them. Other times, the compromise means letting go of one's dreams in order to one day attain them.


But Up in the Air is ultimately a vaguely existential film, and has no intention of providing an out for our protagonist, played by George Clooney. Once so satisfied by his career-centric existence, he yearns for connection, and is offered it and then it is taken away. He is condemned to the life that he no longer wants, because he has worked at it for so long.


Up in the Air is best viewed as a companion of sorts to Jerry Maguire. In that film, Tom Cruise plays an agent who has a crisis of conscience and decides he wants a new kind of life. With the help of a man who wants to be shown the money and a woman with an adorable son, he is able flow into one.


Why Jason Reitman, director of Up in the Air, refuses to allow his protagonist to make a new life is unknown, but it drains Up in the Air of its immense potential to deliver the type of emotional experience that all great movies afford their viewers.


Related: New York Times Film Critic A.O. Scott revisits Jerry Maguire

Monday, January 18, 2010

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

You Can't Go Home Again

The last time I went to Paris, the world was a very different place for me. I had just finished my sophomore year in college which was more or less the worst year of my life.  Fall Quarter was made of endless emotional agony which led to a Winter Quarter of excessive work  and a Spring Quarter of no work at all. To prevent getting a 0.0 for Spring Quarter, I conducted original research and wrote it into a 20 page paper in two days and then I read 1200 pages of turn of the century Anthropological studies in 36 hours to not fail the final exam. My flight to Los Angeles was three hours after my final, and my flight to Paris was eleven hours after I arrived at LAX. I was a mess.

Paris was a panacea for my woes. It was never-ending daytime filled with buttery palmiers and crispy baguettes. The World Cup was on television and we were rooting for any team that spoke French. It was my first time in a city with an efficient underground transportation system, and my first time being legally allowed to drink alcohol. The mere act of strolling down the windy backroads of Montmartre felt like heaven itself, liberation from the life that I had always known.

It isn’t only Paris’ edifices and landscapes that create such an otherworldly playground. Its also the sense that its inhabitants are somehow more than you’ve previously known—more stylish, more cultured, more swaggerful. There were tweens roaming the streets who were both better dressed and more confident than I was in all of my 19 year old glory.

I’m almost four years older now, and certainly much changed. I have taken Feminist Studies which has much altered my innards, the Sartorialist and I unintentionally wear and buy the same clothes, and I a casual foodie with a retained penchant for McDonald’s and zesty cheese.  And still, I boarded Air France Flight 73 with all intentions of coming away from Paris with the same feeling that I had last time: overwhelming and all-consuming adoration.

Paris certainly has its pleasures. Rotisserie chicken with French fries is quite possibly the greatest culinary pairing of all time and being able to order hot chocolate without being a total loser is a sign of a more advanced culture. Their bread is both delicious and affordable, and sliced ham in France is something I can and did eat every day, whereas sliced ham in the United States is something that fills me with omens of food-poisoning and bad Subway sandwiches (speaking of Subway, the French are obsessed with them). French cafes and brasseries are something that San Francisco desperately needs and their belief in outdoor seating even in the winter—and the attendant heaters that make this possible—is a platonic ideal of living that we should all try to replicate.

I left Paris not with an all-consuming adoration, but nagging questions about why I didn’t feel that way. Paris, though lovely, didn’t offer the types of transportive pleasures that it had once provided. I wasn’t moved by the taste of the croissants or the perfectly constructed crepe from the street vendor near the Pompidou. The Metro still represents a wonderful form of transportation, but one that now seemed part of the grind rather than apart from it. Montmartre seemed on the side of the world and with nothing so great to recommend visiting it. And there weren’t any clothes (or stores for that matter) that I couldn’t find in San Francisco.

Perhaps San Francisco has spoiled me rotten with its endless produce, great food at casual prices, belief in to-go cups of coffee, great bakeries (Tartine, Patisserie Phillipe, Thoroughbread), thrift stores, its east meets west high-end department stores, parks, bars, and walkable streets.

That’s certainly part of it. San Francisco has probably ruined me for most other cities. But the underlying issue is that I love San Francisco the way that I do, I’ve been able to understand what it has to offer, because I’ve had time and the type of experience that only living in a place that can provide. How can I replicate the type of love that you develop in a year to a city where you’ve spent  a total of one month over the span of four years? I wonder, if you fall in love with a place on vacation, can you fall in love with it again without actually moving there? When a home is built in 11 days, maybe you can’t go home again.
.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Small Penis Syndrome



That's me on the right, obvi.

Seth's 10 Best Films of the 00s

This is the first time I’ve ever made a Top 10 List of anything. I’m not one for rules, and trying to have a set number of things has always been very difficult. Reading through the Top 10 lists for the Aughts, however, reminded me of how many great films from the Aughts were beloved by me and just not represented well so it was time for me to take a stand. My list is in chronological order—there can’t be one best film of the Aughts, just as there can’t be one  best day in June—and you may notice that some years are more heavily represented than others. Film always has its bumper years, when by sheer coincidence, a crop of unforgettable films find themselves screening at your local theater. Here, those bumper years are 2000, 2002, and 2007. The other two years represented, 2005 and 2006, have only one film each. This is in Sethland an accurate reflection of the landscape: the last years of the Aughts had great technical and formal precision, but no heart, and the early Aughts had lots of ideas but no direction.