Several topics without a theme tonight…
Topic 1: I’ll admit that I go to an awful lot of concerts, including a number that I go to simply because I think it would be funny. And I am rather easily entertained as my continual watching of pro wrestling indicates. But just so I have it on record, no, I did not attend the Neil Diamond concert last night. If you could build a time machine and send me back thirty years I wouldn’t catch Neil Diamond in concert. (I would however make sure that Dubya got the baseball commissioner’s job so that the world would be a much nicer place.) But they filled our basketball arena for Neil Diamond last night. Are there that many people who need to hear “Sweet Caroline” one more time? Is there a level of irony that I have not yet reached at which this becomes a valid entertainment choice? Help me out here.
Topic 2: Picked up David Foster Wallace’s latest collection of essays “Consider the Lobster” over the weekend. DFW is one of my faves, a MacArthur genius grant winner who at the time was an associate English professor at Illinois State, which really is the high school after high school. He writes the way I would like to think that I would write if I dedicated my life to the task and was given an injection of talent along the way. This is a collection of non-fiction, which is where he is at his best or at least most accessible. Basically what he does is write these in depth, clinical, detached highly intelligent stories of common but bizarre situations. Like one in which he attends the Illinois State Fair and discusses the socio implications of the fair. Or in his latest book, he attends the adult film awards and writes about it with such a critical eye and in this post modern manner that you don’t notice that you end up reading through forty footnotes along the way. If you want to read something that is the polar opposite of The Da Vinci Code, pick up some of his work.
Topic 3: This might come as a shock to a lot of people, but I actually missed the finales of both Survivor and The Amazing Race this week. I know, I know, I should probably forfeit my vote in the annual Reality Awards as a result. This is only the second time that I’ve missed the finale of Survivor and the only one where I didn’t have a really good excuse. This season just never really did anything for me other than really hoping that Stephanie would lose again so I could just get her off my television. The Amazing Race was fun but the four member family teams were just too many people to keep track of and you didn’t have the same dynamics. Plus, they mainly stayed in the United States and part of the fun of the show is watching people go to places you’ve never even thought of visiting. Hopefully I’ll get back into the swing of things next year.
Topic 4: Ok, is it bad that I don’t have any Christmas decorations up in my apartment? I mean, I am a single guy so the fact that you can see the floor is actually an accomplishment but is there a minimal level of decorating that I am supposed to attempt here? Maybe what is missing from my life is a festive holiday atmosphere. Imagine that all of my searching could have been avoided by simply hanging up some colored lights. Yeah, this is what goes through my head late at night.
1 comment:
It may have something to do with Neil Diamond being a great songwriter. DJ Drew and every other push button bar jockey out there have ruined Sweet Caroline and corrupted a generation into thinking that was his only contribution to music.
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