Daily View, 5/15

Am looking for a new job. This is pretty damn liberating and has elevated my mood considerably. Perhaps that accounts for the new influx of activity on this recently dusty blog...

• Alligators are eating more people lately. Personally, I find all this very interesting. And of course, the action is in the Florida interior, the armpit of the universe—I was adopted into a family of Floridians, and whenever we'd go south for a visit there was the inevitable animal encounter. No one was ever eaten, despite the potentially disasterous combination of citified houseguests and gators underneath the cars parked in the driveways (they'd crawl up from the swamp at the end of the street): "Go out and move that log so we can get to the steakhouse," said one of my unsuspecting out-of-state uncles, etc. I guess in a way I'm fascinated by big predators because we no longer have to use our natural instincts to evade them—we look at them in zoos or hunt them to extinction and think that we're giants in the food chain. So really, how awful that people got eaten, but please, that's nature.


• Usually I would scoff at this sort of thing (twinkly tribal music makes me angry, not relaxed), but I had a good ten minutes of Deep Forest with Chill Radio earlier today and it took me back to a simpler, non-Republican time when environmentalists were hip and it was inevitable that a certain number of birthday and holiday gifts would be purchased from places like the Nature Company. Sigh.


• Ok, let's talk about Wes Anderson. I am started to OD on the Wilsons (Owen especially—blech), and Wes did not help his career by collaborating with the pompous ass hack Noah Baumbach (who further loses points by being married to the grating Jennifer Jason Leigh) on the interesting but ultimately doomed mess that was Zissou, but overall, I still have a soft spot for him. He's got a new Amex ad and is getting some press lately: Slate has both an entire article on the Amex ad itself and a separate article about Anderson as part of the slow-outputting gang of filmmakers known as the American Eccentrics (since when?). With Wes working on The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Spike Jonze on Where the Wild Things Are (not to mention Sophia finally getting off her ass with this Marie Antoinette thing), I'm looking forward to the lit-hip-eccentricity that is going to kick in soon—people like me become cool again for about ten minutes, then go back to being misunderstood by the majority. Always an adventure.


• I dig this solar lamp. I would totally use this.


• Dr. Katz is out on DVD! I used to love Dr. Katz... but of course, that was a different time. These days the Squigglevision might give me a migraine. The Voice blurb about Munich pretty much sums up my feelings about Munich, as well. Eric Bana is a meltingly delicious hottie, but not even I can take Spielberg's climactic shooting metaphor seriously. Is it wrong to want to know less about the Mossad and instead just want another big predator movie? Sigh.


• What a cool website about Washington Square Park... photos, personal stories and a bit of a slick interface and apparently, I'm hooked.


• Yesterday I was helping a friend house-hunt and the broker told us that it was clear to him that we were soulmates. This was a little uncomfortable, seeing as how 1) we've known each other since we were 10 and never been inclined towards a romantic effort and 2) the dude is married. I sang at his damn wedding. Anyway, the broker told him that he should "reconsider" his current choice of wife and take up with me. !! You gotta love how people just speak their minds to total strangers, even when they're wrong.


• "Everything you love, everything meaningful with depth and history, all passionate authentic experiences will be appropriated, mishandled, watered down, cheapened, repackaged, marketed and sold to the people you hate." Poor Von Dutch. Poor all of us, really.