Have you noticed? Pizza places have now decided, what? because of “the economy”?, to start tacking a delivery fee on to ordering a pizza. Here’s the breakdown:
Papa John’s = $1.90
Domino’s = $1.75
Pizza Hut = $2.41
Is anyone else outraged? Do we still have to tip?
N & I have been ill-ish and have wanted these past few evenings to do nothing but lie on the sofa with chicken soup and the DVR, and so last night despite a backlog that built up while we were in N.C., and despite NBC’s Thursday night of premieres (shame on you, NBC, for holding out on new 30 Rocks until mid-October! It’s your best show! You already skimp on the number of minutes each episode gets (average of 20 compared to the standard 22), and so help me if there are fewer total episodes this season than your long-ago-shark-jumped The Office we’re going to have to have words) we investigated the new shows on ABC’s Wednesday night lineup.
Men, apparently, are best left dumb and oversexed.
Continue reading ABC: Your Source for Mimbo TV
This weekend N & I were in Oak Island, N.C., where my sister got married. I did the ceremony. You may as well prepare for a long post on all this. It was, maybe, a once-in-a-lifetime event: getting to the write the words that people listen to while they watch a couple ceremonially join their lives. People seemed to like what I came up with, and it was fun standing there and being in charge and just feeling only happiness when they kissed right in front of me, and then it was over.
Good food at the restaurant, which was right on the water and reserved, the whole place, just for all of us. The centerpieces consisted of orange candles and sand set in glass vases and were, anyone could tell, a little unfortunate. The tops of the candles extended beyond the rims of the vases. They looked awkward, like a kid in clothes he’s well outgrown. The colors on the cake ran and the edible shells melted and looked wrong. You could tell they were meant to be shells and many of them were but some weren’t.
I’m not trying to be a dick. I’m just relaying a part of the experience of being at the wedding. I’m doing it wrong, though. Because, I mean, what are the options? When telling a story in whatever yer medium is, how do you render such details? TV gets it all wrong. TV puts stuff like this in shows called BRIDEZILLA and uses careful editing to create post-produced “drama” it couldn’t quite find on camera. On TV, an outsized candle or droopy marshmallow shell is the cause for life-stopping hell to be raised.
For the sake of brevity let’s skip all other media and go right to fiction. Even here you’ve got lots of options. The candle and the cake could be symbols for whatever theme on the state of things in the world yer trying to develop. They could be set dressing, rendered through a jack-knifed assembly of words no one has quite seen before—artful, stylized, “languagey”. But it feels a lot of times to me like a kind of lie to do either of these, because the fact of the candle, if it is a fact, is that it was fine, in the end. I mean, yeah, it was higher than the vase, but the sand inside was taken right from the very beach where the couple was wed, which made guests’ getting to take these centerpieces home all the more nice. Plus there was a ribbon tied plainly but attractively around the widest part of the vase. The misfortune of the candle was something anyone could notice and that everyone would forget about moments later.
Isn’t this, then, the effect one should go for in writing? Noticing and then forgetting? Being able to remember if you need to but not being forced to remember against your will?
The cake, well all I can say about it is that it was by needs gluten-free and tasted way better than the gluten-rich cake the restaurant provided for those unheedful of wheat in their diets.
I asked my sister whether she was upset and she seemed not to care too much. And then I kept looking for that part of her that was covering up the fact that this small part of her big day had been ruined, but I never found it. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t a big deal. There was so much else worth everyone’s concern.
Continue reading Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs and the Successes of Realist Fiction
Tomorrow I fly to go marry my sister.
To, that is, her boyfriend.
For 2010, I hope to be moving onward, and the Nebraska State Fair will be doing the same. I to who knows where. The Fair to Grand Island. Maybe I’ll be in Grand Island in a year’s time, but it seems unlikely.
We honor its passing from Lincoln the way we honored Pee Wee’s.
Far be it from me to hate on a movie filmed not just in Pittsburgh, but mostly in ever-beloved Pgh theme park Kennywood (that’s the Steel Phantom, above, which is now I think called something else, which for a time had either the longest drop or the most vertical drop or the fastest maximum speed of any other roller coaster in the country: and it’s not even the best one at Kennywood), but I couldn’t hold onto anything in Greg Mottola’s latest other than the set.
Continue reading Adventureland: So Dull!
Higgs takes contemporary art images out of the hands of gallery and museum-sanctioned curators, and into the arms of a renegade whose way of uniting images and text feels more related to poetry than to the expectations of art curation.
That’s from Art in America, y’all. So that makes it official.
Higgs’s um “blog” (sorry Higgs) has for a long time been a go-to place for more than just art. It’s called BRIGHT STUPID CONFETTI, and you can find it on your left there, or here.
Wasn’t it inevitable? Print-on-demand pricing being as low as it is, one can sell tons of generic-messaged T-shirts just by switching around occupations. Like tourist-trap mugs or license plates: just drop “taxidermy” in the right place.
Some of them seem designed solely for taxidermists, with requisite depressing (and factually inaccurate) puns.
Some of them are kind of worth buying.
And some of them are a deconstructionist’s dream-come-true:
More here.
Have you heard of this movie? One of Malkovich’s recent low-budget choices that seem not to get much pre-video-release attention despite his always great performances therein. This one stars Tom Hanks’s son as a guy who decides for no clear reason (he was unhappy; I guess it’s enough) to leave law school and get a job as a road manager for a washed-up mentalist.
Buck Howard is a great character. Malkovich gives him a shoulder-joint-busting handshake that’s funny every time. And so the movie should be great but it’s not even that good. I couldn’t figure out what was keeping me from falling in love with it until the end. All throughout the movie, Colin Hanks’s character has been letting us know not just what’s going on, but what his character thinks about what’s going on through a cinematic technique I want to spend the rest of this blog post um, interrogating: the voice-over.
Because there’s kind of a house I want to buy.
I don’t have a lot of cars, and surely not a Ferrari 250 GT Spyder California, but there’s all kinds of space to, safely, display some.
It even comes with an answering machine that plays the most deliciously droll outgoing message to anyone who might call up, be it opportunistic best friends, or high school principals.
I’ll totally go halvsies. Or maybe tenthsies.
I think I like it because it argues for an aesthetic, kind of. Rather than just saying: Ugh, dead animals. Or: Rad, dead animals. Or: Ironic!
Plus some of them are really funny.
Continue reading New Fun Blog: crappytaxidermy.com
The delay in posting has been long. Very sorry. I’ve been waiting jumpily until I could officially announce that my book, The Authentic Animal, has been picked up for publication by St Martin’s Press.
St. Martin’s Press!
I’m way too excited to be able to say much about it. Mostly I don’t know what to do with the news that St. Martin’s seems to love my strange taxidermy book so much. They love it! And it’s a great press, where lots of folks you’ve heard of got their starts (Dan Brown, Augusten Burroughs, Janet Evanovich), to say nothing of the prestige of the parent company and all its subsidiaries.
“Welcome to St. Martin’s Press,” my editor told me earlier this week, and it was like clouds parted and a million trumpets blasted that Macintosh-bootup sound. Except without the apocalyptic overtones.
More news as it comes. Now I just need to finish the book….
Omaha’s KXVO is showing a whole bunch of Simpsonses I’ve never seen before. And now I’ve got a new favorite quote:
If word gets out about this, Kwazy Klown Airlines will be a laughingstock.
Take that, “Are there any persons, spells, or critters to which you attribute this accolade?”!
Amanda Nazario is a writer, DJ, dogwalker, and artist living in New York. She grew up there, right on the upper-west side, and as a native she’s somehow reached her thirties without ever learning to drive. With such public transportation, who would blame her?
Now she’s going from never once driving a car to driving a van across the country, wireless Internet broadcasting equipment in tow, and bringing her radio show, Nazario Scenario on Washington Heights Free Radio, to the masses. Billed at WHFR.org as “your scene if you like singalongs, rollicking hilarity, sweetness and light, or general merriment,” NS is like that right sort of themeless eclectic mixtape your friend that knows more music than you do makes on a whim and sends to your mailbox one afternoon. You’ll hear Willie Nelson and ELO and Superchunk within a fifteen-minute interval—and it’ll sound exactly right.
To raise the funds, Amanda’s signed up with fundraising Web site Kickstarter, which enables people to pledge money to the project without much risk. The Mobile Nazario Scenario needs $10,000 to happen, and it needs this money by October 15. If—heaven forbid—the money doesn’t get raised, everyone walks away as though nothing happened.
But what if she got the money? What if you helped make the project happen?
Here’s Amanda, to give you a sense of why you should head over to her project and donate whatever you can.
interview with Amanda after the jump
It helps to have schtick when yer online, but Octopus Magazine’s schtick is handled better than one would expect. Every issue plays off the number eight in some way. Last time, or maybe the time before that, they had 88 poets featured in the journal, which is massive and great. This time they have only eight, but these eight are all introduced by eight other poets. Or people. Which I imagine would feel great if you were one of those featured eight. Like you’re in some kind of anthology.
There’s also reviews of other poets, one of which is written by yours truly. I’d never reviewed a poetry book before, and such is the result of a person reviewing a poetry book who reads maybe one poetry book a year. I shirked a lot of duties, I guess is what I’m saying.
Still and all: go read Octopus. It’s almost like the Internet was invented to increase poetry’s audience. Poems are so much more fun to read online than blog posts.
You can go grab just one and then get back to your other work.
A few things I love:
I. Fred Armisen
I confess to liking him ever since Fericito started showing up on SNL’s Weekend Update, because while the whole “Ay, Dios mio!” thing may be overly simplistic it just about killed me every time. Now I just like him because of how smart his stuff is. Like Nicholas Fehn, the guy who comes on Weekend Update and riffs off the news headlines. It’s never funny. Like: one never finds a place to laugh. But it’s clear the whole thing is improvised, and I’m always nerdily impressed by the performance.
More things I love after the jump
Artist Kent Rogowski turns plush teddy bears inside out and restuffs them. Innards become cute/frightening outards.
Cute or frightening? Where’s a toddler when you need one?
(Pretty sure I had that last one growing up. Winnie the Pooh, right?)
So I’ve been between novels for a long time now, since June, really, and the other day I grabbed a few things off the shelf to try out. I’ve got the rest of the summer ahead of me, and thought maybe about spending it with another long, long, long books. So I opened Gaddis’s The Recognitions which was slow going until the second page, where I found this paragraph:
Continue reading Errant Reading
I know it’s gauche to gush, as a small-press publisher, about the books you publish; best to let their brilliance stand representatively alone. But I want to take a minute to talk about how excited we were when Hagel’s story came to The Cupboard’s inbox, and to try to get you to understand why you need to read it.
First off: it’s a story about a new kind of superhero who sings in a cabaret act.
Second: isn’t this sort of a perfect reason not to read a piece of fiction?
Continue reading Caia Hagel’s Acts of Kindness and Excellence in Times Tables
Brooklyn-based artist Natalie Stevens takes and sews them into new animals. Then she photographs them in natural habitats.
