Four Things. Part II

I promised you a rose garden, not brevity.

4 TV Shows

1) The West Wing

Tivolike capabilties at my mother’s house this past summer has allowed me to almost complete seeing all episodes of this, except for the most recent and final season since I’m obviously in Nepal. Great ensemble acting that acutely satisfies my wish-fulfillment regarding the 2000 Presidential Election while I regretfully reside in a State of Denial.

2) Gilmore Girls

I know, I know, I’ve openly emasculated myself. Mea culpa. However, smart, sharp, and rapid dialogue laden with literary and gratititious pop culture references, Alexis Bledel’s otherworldly eyes, small-town New England weirdness, and a shoutout to Third Uncle Brian Eno in a cubicle farm has won my heart. I don’t care what you think.

3) Battlestar Galactica
This is it, serious smart sci-fi that’s also probably the best drama on TV. Deliberate documentary-like shaky handheld cinematography, minimal breathless background music, claustrophobic shipboard sets, and the deepest, darkest sci-fi TV show since Babylon Five (until that stinker of a last season). I hope they haven’t blown all of their intellectual capital on the first two seasons. They’re not Cylons, they’re really Mormons! I’d kill (ok, maim) to have a glance at the series’ bible.

4) After that, I’m stumped.
There was nothing else I regularly watched for the past few years ‘cept Red Sox games. Buenos noches, amigos. RemDog! I watched tons of CSI with Shawn due to sheer inertia, and I blame him for my distaste for forensic dramas, despite Lenny letting love rule. What the hell is up with this genre anyway? See J.G. Ballard’s essay as an attempt at some sort of explanation for the hold it has on the American imagination nowadays.

4 Websites I Visit Everyday
(everyday I have broadband access, you mean)

1) metafilter.com

2) pitchforkmedia.com

3) questionablecontent.net

4) news.google.com

4 Favorite Places I’ve Vacationed

Long-term underemployment and seven years (and counting! I’m in my 8th, you were right, Lil, I’ll be that perpetual student) of grad school have not enabled many vacations. However:

1) Zacatecas, Summer of 2000
I could’ve stayed longer, if it weren’t for my unnamed poisonous ex-girlfriend’s stupidity before this trip. Hanging in the zocalo, eating avocado sandwiches, drinking lovely Zacatecan wine, few non-Mexican tourists, and a comfortable climate in July at 9000 feet was well worth the 18 hours it took to get there by bus from Austin. Cheap too. I’ll do it again sometime minus the toxic ex.

2) Weekend Trip to Vermont, Summer of 2003
Vermont is fantastic. These people with their no-billboard policy understand my need to decompress from omnipresent advertising. A fun but too brief roadtrip, but I got to enjoy touring Ink’s old collegiate stomping grounds, a swimming hole on the AT, sleeping in a lovely old farmhouse in chilly weather, escape from Boston’s mugginess, and a surprisingly good Tex-Mex dinner. Bucolic.

3) Mexico City, Thanksgiving 1994
My girlfriend at the time and I received a free trip from her mother that was won by her friends at a Chili's. They gave it to my exe's mom who couldn’t use it because she had burned up all her vacation time in Turkey, who in turn passed it on to us, broke student and recent ex-student. You got that? The result:

• A free week in the Radisson while I desultorily studied for the GRE (which I broke like a cheap maquiliadora piñata despite being unable to afford real Princeton Review tutoring),
• luscious dark Mexican coffee in the mornings (we couldn’t resist racking up a room service tab just for it despite stocking the room’s fridge with sammich makings)
• fantastic museums (20th century Mexican painting is so underrated)
• Teotihuacán
• great window shopping
• the best subway system for the money in the world.

4) Manali Summer 1998
I went there for a week as a treat after 2 solid months of attempting to work in Dharamsala. This was the summer of heightened nuclear tension between India and Pakistan, highlighted by a kill radius of one of the bombs tested by Pak published in some Indian newspaper centered on Connaught Place. Let’s just say this little jaunt involved all the things that Manali is justly renowned for, an unrequited crush on a Flemish girl, my one true whack at the great American novel, a Brit named Rug who, quite appropriately, resembled an ambulatory rug, soi-disant “space cake”, and the transcendent post-modern moment of hanging out in a cafe and listening to techno music and a sadhu chanting along in time.
Oṃ Shivāya nāmaḥ*

*(Heaven help me if I've gotten the diactrics wrong. All my costly education gone to waste.)

After meticulously compiling this list, I now wish I had added the two trips to Arkansas to hang out at Cossatot River State Park & Natural Area and Lake Ouachita. That, sadly, would have violated the one trip per ex-girlfriend unofficial rule, despite the wonderful memories I possess.

4 Places I’d Rather Be

Nowhere else right now, but in the future:

1) Vienna
Coffee, Riesling, Guglhupf, and kipferl. Klimt, Mahler, and Wittgenstein. You do the math. Anyone please, puh-retty puh-lease send me a copy of The Austrian Mind right now. I’m craving it after reading "Wittgenstein's Vienna" and “Vienna Blood.” See below.

2) Vientiane and Luang Prabang, Laos
I can’t wait to go there; I have to get there soon, soon, now, right now, maybe hopefully sometime this year. Apparently, more French people are living in Laos now than during the colonial period. Good French bread, yummy Laotian food, a mild Southeast Asian climate, hopefully miminal development, and a Theravadin Buddhist environment. Yes, please.

3) Vladivostok
Who knows, this place might be a pit, and it’s not even listed on the Lonely Planet Guide website (is it in the book?), but flying just past it on my way to Nepal this time has whetted my appetite for Far Eastern Russia at the edge of the continent. It’s a dark post-Soviet/newly petrochemically power Russia mystery to me. I can’t help it, Alaska is too passé.

4) Venice in the Winter
It’ll be poignant, and I’ll spend an afternoon on or near the Bridge of Sighs as a prisoner of desire in the weak winter sunlight, contemplating the decrepit beauty of the Bride of the Sea as she glacially, gracefully, and gratefully sinks into the Adriatic.

4 Recent Books

1) Vienna Blood - Adrian Mathews
A surprisingly good techno thriller set in Vienna in 2026. This has a strange but lush tone, enough extrapolation that should satisfy sci-fi fans, and a truly interesting engagement with biotechnical, genetic, and political issues that are coming soon to a neighborhood near you. Keywords: eugenic, cacogenic, aristogenic. How ‘bout aristomemic for a neologism, Dick Dawkins and company?

2) The Annotated Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
I’ve been waiting to read this after reading “Reading Lolita in Teheran.”When the annotated version showed up at Pilgrims Books at a cut-rate, I was happy. Still am, the annotations help with some of the 50s period references that would’ve escaped me, and I always love intertextual goodness. Too bad I read the intro first though. I know this book disturbs women, and rightly so, but I expected more insight into the allure of younger women who are not necessarily illegally young.

Nevertheless, it is still a stunning indictment of American bourgeois society that resonates today despite a shift to a hyperconsumer society with a focus on connoisseurship in incidental commodities like coffee, gourmet food, and mid-20th century modern furniture for the moneyed and not so moneyed self-styled dissidents among us. Umm... It’s bougy, baby! Still required reading, especially since Nabokov despised psychoanalysis and carefully crafted Lolita accordingly.
Bravo, Vlad! Ce n’est pas une pipe, Siggy.

3) Playback - Raymond Chandler
It's a Raymond Chandler Evening
At the end of someone's day
And I'm standing in my pocket
And I'm slowly turning grey
Thanks, Robyn. I think I’ve finished all seven Chandler books with this one. Sigh. Here he makes deliberate references to the genre, the last one he wrote, but not ironically. Was he incapable...

Look, here’s my recent epiphany. Hardboiled fiction is the equivalent of Harlequin romances for men. We all (those among us who gender-identify with virile male/tough guy) vicariously imagine ourselves to be a tough broad-shouldered and ruggedly handsome man who rights wrongs outside of the law, frequently sleeps with extremely eager and curvy women with minimal courting, can take a vicious beating, and settles beefs decisively with a gun or our fists. Least that's how I read this genre. Chandler isn’t so blatant with these particular genre conventions, but it’s so readily apparent with Mickey Spillane and the Mike Hammer books that it ain’t funny, sister. So what? Take off, buster. You annoy me. I’ve met all kinds of punks in my time... Ah, call it a guilty pleasure and I’ll keep my eyes peeled for more Dashiell Hammett books here in KTM.

4) Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms - Stephen Jay Gould
A collection of his monthly essays from Natural History magazine. An excellent stylist, clear and extremely interesting in that nerdy science way that is leavened nicely with ample historical documentation that thoroughly satisfies the inchoate historian in me. I’ve grown more interested in the effect that the theory of evolution has had on the social sciences, particularly philology and Buddhist Studies à la Baumann and Briggs. Hopefully at some point I’ll have a brilliant idea or two in this regard, but let’s not hold our breaths, shall we?

Now, The Four People I Tag:

Don't have four people. Most of my friends, as far as I know, don't have blogs, and I mulishly refuse to insist that they start one to satisfy your unreasonable demands. I can't imagine that Shawn would put something like this on the Trivia Jihad webblog since jihadis are too busy drinkin', trivia-playin', and whorin' their way through the great Boston metropolitian area. I'm sure Ryan is actually working on his dissertation. Padre Scott don't seem like that type either. Yammo, a.k.a. Amzig, updates more infrequently than I do.
I'm stumped, Miss Ladie, you'll just have to cope.