Tag: 5 Thoughts

Handsful of topical mentations.

5 Thoughts: The Grand Old Process

1. THERE IS A CERTAIN COMPULSION to the act of writing: an unscratchable itch that won’t let the fingers refrain from their fruitless but busy task, whether on paper or keyboard.

2. To ask writers “Why do you write?” is to confess an ignorance of this basic graphomanic drive. One writes because one can’t not write, just as one breathes because one can’t not breathe. It is a function of having a particular sort of bodily structure, of brain or lungs or soul. Just as creating is joyful — physically pleasurable — refraining from creativity can be quite painful. Continue reading “5 Thoughts: The Grand Old Process”

5 Thoughts: Seminal v. Derivative

1. ONE OF THE CHICKEN-OR-egg challenges of modern media (social and traditional) is their pervasive sense of nonlinear immediacy, by which I mean the everything-at-once flattening of the artistic landscape.
Continue reading “5 Thoughts: Seminal v. Derivative”

5 Thoughts: It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Teacher

1. EVANGELICAL ATHEISTS LIKE TO STATE two reasons why the Torah is irrelevant: 1) It was written in the Bronze Age, and 2) it’s festering with contradictions.

2. Leaving aside the point that many of our species’ current intellectual systems also date from the Bronze Age, I’d like to address the so-called contradictions. Sure, they exist. But my argument is that they’re not accidental, but intentional. Continue reading “5 Thoughts: It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Teacher”

5 Thoughts: Lessons Learned by an Autodidactic Home Cook

1. THE SMALLER THE KITCHEN, THE greater the discipline. And the organization.

2. Thrift rules. In other words, there are no such things as “leftovers” — only the beginnings of future meals. (Thank you, Tamar Adler, for this bit of back-pocket wisdom.)

3. Keep your most-used recipes hanging over your main prep-counter/stove. Keep also a folder for (annotated!) recipes already cooked, in addition to filing future-use recipes by preparation media (“skillet,” “sheet pan,” “slow cooker,” etc). Organization, remember? Continue reading “5 Thoughts: Lessons Learned by an Autodidactic Home Cook”

5 Thoughts: Pattern Matching

1. THERE ARE TWO TORAH STORIES which have troubled me for some time.

2. The first is about the giving of the Ten Statements (AKA the “Ten Commandments,” but “statements” is closer to the actual Hebrew). What should have been a joyful event was marred by the incident of the Golden Calf — epiphany ruined by idolatry.

3. The second has to do with the consecration of the Tabernacle: the portable God-tent containing, among other things, the Ark of the Covenant (which itself contained the aforementioned Statements). Continue reading “5 Thoughts: Pattern Matching”

5 Thoughts: The Third Thing

1. ONE OF THE THINGS THAT frustrates me as a writer is my own self-limitation. Specifically, I am speaking of the notoriously difficult and bothersome Third Thing.

2. The Third Thing works like this. I will write a sentence that begins, say, with a simple thesis: “There are three things that Elmer worried about…” Two examples will occur to me right off the bat: “…death, taxes, and …” It’s what comes after the “and” that always gets me.

3. Now, you might say, “Who really needs three examples of something? Just write two and be done with it.” But my Muse won’t let me. Continue reading “5 Thoughts: The Third Thing”

5 Thoughts: Informed Appreciation

1. IT’S ONE THING TO LIKE something. It’s something quite else to know why you like it — and how it came to be.

2. “Informed appreciation” is the key to that knowing. Only when you can comprehend the effort, expense, skill and moxie involved in making anything — dance, music, sequential or static art, acting, a useful tool, a good meal — can you be said to have truly grasped its essence.

3. This is especially true of those things that are done so well that they look easy. Take Dick Van Dyke’s 1960s-era physical comedy, or Gene Kelly’s soft-shoe; it’s as though their bones are made of rubber, if indeed they have any bones at all. Continue reading “5 Thoughts: Informed Appreciation”

5 Thoughts: Comix with an X

1. CRUMB. GRIFFITH. SHELTON. THESE (AND other “sequential artists“) were the visual architects of my immediate post-adolescent universe; whose spare-but-dense works were strewn reverently on the couches and mattresses of my very late teens and very early 20s; whose fractured catchphrases (“Yow! Are we having fun yet?” “Hey kids, while you’re out smashing the state keep a smile on your lips and a song in your hearts!” “Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope!”) worked their way into the conversations of my fellow-freakly peers. Continue reading “5 Thoughts: Comix with an X”

5 Thoughts: Confessions of a Vicarious Eater

1. “WHAT DID YOU EAT?” THIS question works its way into every conversation I have or had with someone (online and off) relating to culinary experiences.

2. There’s a reason for this: I am obsessed with matters gastronomical. Not in a bad way; perhaps “obsessed” is the wrong word. “Deeply fascinated” would be a better descriptor. I simply enjoy cooking, eating, discussing, and reading about food in all its wonderful forms — especially if they’re unfamiliar to me.

3. I come by it honestly. When I was a kid, whenever we’d go to a restaurant and see something unfamiliar on the menu, my dad would say “Bring us two orders of whatever that is.” Continue reading “5 Thoughts: Confessions of a Vicarious Eater”

5 Thoughts: Re-re-RE-Viewings

0. THERE ARE FILMS THAT YOU see once and say, “Meh.” Then there are others which grab hold of and mold your psyche in unexpected ways; movies that cry out “Watch me!” and require repeated viewings to grok in fullness — films that, while deep enough on their own, reveal new depths as the viewer grows with life-experience. Here are five to which I return every couple of years to measure myself.

1. Casablanca. Perhaps the greatest movie ever made, it has everything — romance, intrigue, honor, superb acting / writing / directing, Humphrey Bogart. Who doesn’t want to watch Bogie go from cynic to idealist and wind up fighting Nazis with someone he barely trusts? Continue reading “5 Thoughts: Re-re-RE-Viewings”

5 Thoughts: The ORIGINAL Matrix

1. WHILE I DON’T BEGRUDGE THE siblings Wachowski their success, and I don’t really believe they stole my idea, as the first populizer of something called “The Matrix” I feel I must firmly and finally speak my piece.

2. Make a circle with a dot in the center. The dot represents you. Within the circle is the sum of your knowledge. Outside the circle is the vasty unknown. The circle itself? I call that The Matrix.

3. This simple reality-diagram was created by me c. 1990, long before the first installment of the popular film series, as part of the work I did for Obscure Research Labs. Continue reading “5 Thoughts: The ORIGINAL Matrix”

5 Thoughts: Grocery Shopping

1. IT USED TO BE CALLED “doing the marketing.” And it is one of my life’s favorite small pleasures.

2. This simple joy can probably be traced back to my dad and I doing it together every Saturday or Sunday morning (or so goes my memory), when I was a young’un in Massachusetts. We would visit one store for meat, another for produce, another for household products, yet another for baked goods. Continue reading “5 Thoughts: Grocery Shopping”

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