Saturday Night Live Open Thread

March 14, 2011, 8:00 am

≫ Next: Moscow Cat Circus as Metaphor for Life

I. Prehistory: When I was in middle school, everyone watched Saturday Night Live. Or, everyone with a television did. There were certainly students in my school whose families couldn’t afford one. They were usually the kids who got teased the most. I didn’t get to watch it but that was because my parents wouldn’t let me stay up past ten, even on a weekend. We had plenty of televisions.

The kids who had watched Saturday Night Live would gather on the playground at recess or after school while waiting for the bus and talk about how funny it had been and quote catchphrases back and forth to one another, frothing with laughter. I would laugh too, but I never really got the jokes because I hadn’t seen the show. Something about a lady in church who thought things were special and chef who was very neat. I laughed so people would like me. Of course, that never works.

This playground group discussion was earliest example of what we now call the Saturday Night Live Open Thread. Kentucky preteens in Jams and Jellies acting out short bits of the show behind the swingset were proto-.gifs. The kid in the jean jacket with the sleeves cut off who would say, “That show sucks” was a troll and when he punched you, that was like a downvote.

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Moscow Cat Circus as Metaphor for Life

March 14, 2011, 9:00 am

≫ Next: On the Wonder of the Electric Guitar and The World’s Best Guitarist

≪ Previous: Saturday Night Live Open Thread

Some days it feels like life is nothing more than two thin rods balanced on the shoulders of young women and we are crawling along those rods on our hands while a Russian clown grabs our legs and laughs at us.

I’m not the only one who feels this way, right?

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On the Wonder of the Electric Guitar and The World’s Best Guitarist

March 14, 2011, 9:30 am

≫ Next: UCLA Student Teaches the World About Manners

≪ Previous: Moscow Cat Circus as Metaphor for Life

For Christmas, 1989, my mother gave me an electric guitar. The sound it made was profound in ways that my 14 year-old self could not express, which is surprising considering the reputation for eloquence that Kentucians have.

A few months later someone explained to me that the strings were to be tuned to specific pitches.

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UCLA Student Teaches the World About Manners

March 14, 2011, 10:03 am

≫ Next: Perhaps Our Parents Just Want Us Dead

≪ Previous: On the Wonder of the Electric Guitar and The World’s Best Guitarist

Look, I’m not a racist, but white people really need to learn some manners.

(Thanks for the tip Huckabeast and Werttrew)

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Perhaps Our Parents Just Want Us Dead

March 14, 2011, 11:00 am

≫ Next: A Hedgehog Reviews Battle: Los Angeles

≪ Previous: UCLA Student Teaches the World About Manners

I often think about how my father didn’t take much time out to play with me. Sure, he let me touch a skeleton once and he would take me down to the train station to throw rocks at the boxcars, but other than that he was a pretty busy man and kept to himself.

My mother was pretty solitary too. Once the family could afford a second television, she put it in her bedroom, closed the door and never came out again. Once a month a check for her portion of the rent would appear from under the door. In the morning my sisters would leave a tray of cheese grits and cup of coffee for her outside the door. At night, my brother left ham biscuits. We would crouch by the door and could hear, faintly, the sound of University of Kentucky Men’s Basketball games and laughter.

Sometimes I wish they’d done more with us, but most of the time I am okay with how I turned out.

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A Hedgehog Reviews Battle: Los Angeles

March 14, 2011, 11:38 am

≫ Next: Kentucky’s Place in the History of Hip Hop

≪ Previous: Perhaps Our Parents Just Want Us Dead

Here is a hedgehog’s review of Battle: Los Angeles. My review of the film will be up later in the day, but I have to say, I agree with many of the points that she makes.

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Kentucky’s Place in the History of Hip Hop

March 14, 2011, 11:55 am

≫ Next: David Foster Wallace Interview Outtakes

≪ Previous: A Hedgehog Reviews Battle: Los Angeles

Hip hop was invented in 1791 by Col. James Harrod, founder of the Fort Harrod settlement in what is now Mercer County, Kentucky. One evening, Col. Harrod took a bite of some stew that was not to his liking. He turned to spit it out on the floor, but rather than spitting stew, he found he was spitting game. Unfortunately, Col. Harrod disappeared while searching for Jonathan Swift’s Silver Mine (probably was eaten by crows and turtles) and he took that wonderful art form with him to his grave.

It was rediscovered in 1988 at a middle school in Lexington, Kentucky:

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David Foster Wallace Interview Outtakes

March 14, 2011, 1:00 pm

≫ Next: What is the HTML for “Vomit”?: A Review of Battle: Los Angeles

≪ Previous: Kentucky’s Place in the History of Hip Hop

I read Infinite Jest over Christmas break after my first semester of law school. Actually, I started during finals and it is reflected on my transcript. I read the bulk of the book on a treadmill in a basement, running nowhere. I lost no weight, I got no healthier, but I was happier. For all of the sadness, I was happier. I finished the book supine on a couch in a one bedroom apartment in North Carolina and when I finished the last page, I returned to the first and felt my mind fall out.

The summer I should have been studying for the Virginia Bar Exam, I read Consider the Lobster. I would study in the food court of our local mall. The only two restaurants were Roman Delight and Panda Garden. Whenever suretyship and the rule against perpetuities grew too much for me, I would slip the white book out of my bag and read, forgetting for a while even the smell of old grease that filled the air. That summer there was a bat in the mall and I watched with delight as a security guard chased it all morning with a broom. I passed the Bar Exam.

David Foster Wallace’s unfinished final novel, The Pale King, will be published in thirty-two days. As is the case with many of you, I have a great deal of admiration for Wallace. To be honest, it goes beyond admiration to something else, but I will stop short of trying to describe what I feel. It was my intention to post an one of the many excellent interviews with him that are available, but then I came across this collection of outtakes from an 2003 interview for a German magazine and it just felt like the right thing to post. A shy, nervous human doing the best that he can.

It is not hard to be good but sometimes it is hard to be.

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What is the HTML for “Vomit”?: A Review of Battle: Los Angeles

March 14, 2011, 1:55 pm

≫ Next: And Now It Is Time To Rest

≪ Previous: David Foster Wallace Interview Outtakes

1. Introduction: From nearly the moment the theater darkened, I realized that a movie about the complete destruction of a city on the Pacific Ocean was maybe not what I was in the mood for and that I had very likely made a terrible mistake.

SPOILERS AWAIT YOU!

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And Now It Is Time To Rest

March 14, 2011, 2:41 pm

≫ Next: Meet Today’s Guest Blogger: Mans

≪ Previous: What is the HTML for “Vomit”?: A Review of Battle: Los Angeles

The idea of living in a haunted house appeals to me. I like the idea that my home, the boring bricks and warped windows that each day don’t seem to add up to anything special, might harbor a secret past, a secret life, some slumbering memory that is beyond me. Unfortunately, no house I’ve ever lived in has been haunted by anything more than mold and cat hair. The closest to a paranormal experience I can recall was once when my brother’s room started to smell like sulfur, though I think that was less attributable to a Satanic presence and more to an Easter Egg that had been hidden in his closet and never found.

One weekend when I was in high school, a group of us decided to go out to this haunted house we’d heard kids at school talk about. A slanted and peeling farmhouse on the far side of a field on the edge of town, beyond the quarry. My skin prickled at the possibilities. Dark halls. Broken windows with billowing, moonlit curtains. Soft voices murmuring around corners.

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Meet Today’s Guest Blogger: Mans

March 14, 2011, 6:30 am

≫ Next: Das Unheimliche

≪ Previous: And Now It Is Time To Rest

A long time ago, in central Kentucky, a young woman and a young man had sex and then some months after that, I was born. I had a full head of hair, parted on the left, and the nurses liked to hold me and comb it for hours. It is my understanding that I

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Das Unheimliche

March 14, 2011, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Happy Pi Day

≪ Previous: Meet Today’s Guest Blogger: Mans

[videoembed size="full_width" alignment="center"][/videoembed] When I was a young boy, a Spider-Man poster hung on my closet door for a short time. My parents ended up having to take it down because it scared me, and by scared, I mean I stood on my bed for hours screaming "DEAR CHRIST! THIS GREAT RED BEAST IS TRYING … More »

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