Today it's about what's at the NYAFF tonight, and then I want to rant about the Supreme Court.

It's Friday night, so I'll probably be going down to the New York Asian Film Festival if I can get tickets in time to check out a new movie from Han Jae-Rim starring Song Kang-Ho, the hero of The Host. It's called The Show Must Go On.

Here's a link to everything you need for that Right here including showtimes, tickets, and more of the NYAFF.



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I'm sort of angsty today. Paris HIlton gets an hour on CNN to talk about her bullshit, while in the meantime I assume most people will completely gloss over what the Supreme Court just did. These are my opinions of course, and I'm not speaking for GR here. But the decision the court made yesterday was a landmark decision that we are now stuck with. Any attempt to address the economic, institutionalized racism of attempting to provide minorities and immigrants with access to safer, better schools is now and forever dead in our country.

Justice Stevens in his opinion declared: ... indeed, the history books do not tell stories of white children struggling to attend black schools. In this and other ways, The Chief Justice rewrites the history of one of this Court's most important decisions....



Indeed Brown vs. Board of Education may have been one of the greatest, most just and crucial decisions the Supreme Court ever made. The kind of decision that earned the U.S. a reputation as a paragon of liberty and equality. And it was all completely thrown away yesterday on some twisted logic that feigns ignorance of a history of slavery, and a result of slavery being a disenfranchised lower class that has race as its marker.

Great commentary on that is here.

Here's a trailer for the entire New York Asian Film Festival going on right now. I may be attending some more movies and maybe even some director interviews for the blog. The lineup is awesome, as ever, everything from a new Gamera movie to arthouse fare from the director of Suicide Club and new Korean movies.

Oh yeah and Bi-Rain yodelling. Check out the lineup and so on at this link here.

Here's a first image from Spike Jonze's adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are. Dave Eggers writing the script, Sendak's reclusive approval, Henson's company doing some of the creature work. And that's Max Records, the brilliant little boy from my Stable Song video. I'm biased, but I think the kid is prodigiously amazing.

Click it to make it bigger.

Sourced from MTV's site, obviously.

It's been a great weekend. Will write more later but right now I just want to say if you are in New York and you get a chance you should go check out Souther Salazar's show at the Johnathan Levine Gallery. It's phenomenal. I know Souther has been working on it a long time and it shows. Absolutely gorgeous all around. I marvel at how he takes things like lightbulbs and transforms them into something poetic; and the larger pieces are some of the best I've seen from him. For those not in NY you can check it out at the link above but the scale of some of the pieces is amazing, as well as seeing how Souther will cram a space with work from the ceiling to the corners of the room. He might not need the extra shout out but I found walking around that room really inspiring. Here's my favorite piece.



I brought my camera but forgot my battery, but the GRNY show was exactly what I like about the store so much in New York. Just a lot of great people hanging around talking. Getting Anders Nilsen to explain his Wolverine and Batman piece was cool, and I was really impressed by R Kikuo Johnson's stuff especially one with a lion carrying a woman away.

For all that my favorite moment of the night was getting a cab ride and talking about Harry Potter. Seriously.

This completely passed me by... The NYAFF is on right now, which is pound for pound one of the best film festivals in New York. Click here to go check it out. Last night they screened Hard Boiled... A print, something I've never had the privilege to check out. I already grabbed my tickets to Chan Wook-Park's latest, I'm a Cyborg It's OK. Check out their programming.



Last night: left my apartment and at the end of my block stopped to help two guys with a Bolex who looked like they were having problems shooting, but weren't. I'm positive one of them was Sufjan Stevens.

2nd Avenue station in the East Village smelled like incense, which was pleasant. Outside of the station a woman was yelling homosexual slurs at full blast at people coming up the stairs. Heard odd bits of conversation on the walk to the GR Store that made my head hum. NY is especially good for collecting dialogue. Saw Michel Gondry and his painter son across the street but was late to get to GR to see Jeffrey Brown so I didn't go over.



Caught up with Cheryl who runs GRNY and does a damn good job of it, too. And then Jeffrey, who I hadn't seen since last year's San Diego comic con. Jeffrey's latest book is this:



And you can get it at the GR Store at this link. I think it's one of his best books but you have to be into cats and appreciate the smallest oddest things they do.

Then we went to Rocketship in Brooklyn with Jeffrey's friend Caroline to meet Paul Hornschemeier and our friend Jesse DeStasio. I talked to Jeffrey about the preponderance of car crashes in his comics, observed or he's a part of. I recognize this in part because I have seen so many and been in so many that I was not driving in at the time. Jeffrey says he's seen several a year in Chicago with alarming frequency. And a book he's working on now features some.



Much nerdy conversation later we split - but one of the best things we talked about was how all of our parent's met. It's sort of funny how most of the esteemed graphic novelists I know despite having carved out respect for the form are actually of course all extremely geeked out and will thrown down just as much on some French novelist as much as the X-Men or Warhammer 40k. With MOCCA in town there were a lot of people there. I ended up back in the East Village fixing someone's flip flop with the string on my hoodie and lying cozily in a hammock on a rooftop and drinking sake. And that's when my night got really good.

Jeffrey and some other amazing artists are giving out ice cream and present tonight at GRNY. Drop by.

New York is crazy this weekend. So much art to see and graphic novelists to come bother. Since Souther and Saelee are busy I'm going to make the last push here. Tonight: Jeffrey Brown signing at GRNY, which I'll drop by. I'm always amazed by how small NY really is. I gave Monsieur Gondry a bunch of Jeffrey's books for his birthday and they just bumped into each other this afternoon. I'll be over at the store around six to say hi to Jeff. Jeffrey's working on something called The Incredible Changebots that he's been telling us about for three years now, which I saw a bit of and I am dying to have it in my hands.

Then hopefully we'll head out to the wonderful neighborhood Rocketship Comics which has on a regular basis probably the best graphic novelist signings in NY. There Paul Hornschemeier is signing his new book, and I'm supposing like all of his books it's another essential graphic novel. Check out a a beautiful preview of pages here.



Paul has an awesome blog here, too.

Tomorrow night at the Jonathan Levine Gallery Souther Salazar has a new show and in the adjacent gallery Shepard Fairey has an installation going up. And then back to GRNY for the art opening there. Can't wait to see Anders Nilsen's stuff. Check out Souther's page here.

All the details on Giant Robot's shows are here. Then MOCCA on Sunday of all things...

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This weekend I went and caught Satoshi Kon's new movie Paprika on a late night whim. I urge you to see it before it's gone. I think Kon is underrated and this isn't as faultless and perfect as Millennium Actress but the visual invention on display is staggering. I am so going to rip off this credit sequence someday, somehow. He's garnered plenty of praise but what he's doing is so fundamentally unique in anime and the animation work by Madhouse is incredible.

Lewis Carrol's poem Jabberwocky.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
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For the person who cheers me up. Who understands wonderfully beautiful nonsense words that feel good to make and sound in your mouth.

I want to write about two people I've met recently who made a tremendous impression upon me; one an activist, the other an artist.

This weekend I had the good fortune to spend some time with Adrian Hong - the founder and director of LiNK, Liberty in North Korea. And I urge you to visit that website. I met him and his buddy Eliot, and although Adrian strikes me as an intensely passionate and intense guy him and Eliot have a great sense of humor and warmth so I liked them immediately.



For years my email sig had a link to Human Rights in North Korea. My angst directed at the situation was one of those little causes I carried for myself. What's ultimately shocking to me most importantly is how people I know who are genuinely informed about politics know so little about the situation.

By lowest estimates the famine resulted in 3 million people dead or missing.

We are talking about a country run by someone who shuts off the electricity to his own people at night.

When I write here on this blog about the tyranny of mythology and narrative constructs I mean in its most horrendous form something like what you see in North Korea. A leader who has attained a false divinity to his people by absolute control of the story. Jong Il's insanity may be amusing on a kitsch level, but he is a perfect modern day example of someone enshrining themselves and the almost unbearable awfulness of humanity to fall under the spell of a situation like that.

Whatever you think about North Korea, if you haven't read testimony of defectors or seen the pictures of dead families attempting to flee into China, or the video footage of farmland turned into opium crops... You don't know the magnitude of this.

Something that made a huge impact on me years ago was the work of RENK. They were smuggling cameras into North Korea to obtain footage. Several of their journalists went missing. This to me was an application of filmmaking that was vital and truly important.

It's all too easy to get overwhelmed, to fall spell under the weight of just how terrifying the evidence is for our species as a whole. So we give up. People like Adrian impress me because they actually are doing something about this. In any case I hope to help him in some small ways as I can when I can in future, but please please visit the website to at least learn what is at stake and what has happened.

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Someone else I met recently had a tremendous impact on me.

One of the effects of my wanderlust is knowing so many great people who are spread out all over the world, and sadly sometimes I lose touch with them. Life and the maintenance it requires intervenes in its own fashion and the same happens to them, or you forget to respond to an email and life goes on.

But in that peculiarly unsettling modern fashion I heard secondhand and was able to vaguely ascertain that this person had an awful accident recently. Infuriatingly, thanks to the Internet, I heard the worst possible thing first, as one only can in a modern fashion.

It's been a very strange day and night since then.

Well this is for them, as someone who doesn't pray, to someone who does and told me the value and importance of it... I know we only met for a single night, but many things you said and told me about resonated with me enough that they are still carried with me now, for all the hardship in your life you set me off feeling better about my own. I hope more than anything that all sees you well, and you get better. I want to see the mosquito story someday. Your close friend needs you here in this life.

An incredible shooting star ran over Brooklyn last night, low flying and burning bright. Never seen one like that before here in the city. There was something I wanted to wish for immediately on impulse because of things going on in my life. But I stopped myself and gave the wish up for you. Be well.

Still can't sleep...

McSweeny's needs your help. The group behind such amazing things as The Believer, Wholphin's, and the Brooklyn Superhero Store, the 826 Valencia Pirate Store, and many other wonderful drop in tutoring programs. The good thing is you can benefit as everything is on sale on their website.

Click here to read the whole story.

Right now there's a perfect lazy Sunday companion going. Man Vs. Wild marathon on the Discovery Channel. It's about this nutbag survival expert named Bear Grylls who is dropped into isolated environments with as little equipment as possible and tracks how he finds his way back to civilization. It may be a stunt but it's my kind of stunt.



I always wonder though with shows like this: how the hell does the camera operator do it? They go through all the same physical challenges but have to carry their gear and shoot, too. It's like the sherpas who go up to Everest. They deserve some big credit, too.

One of my favorite gifts to give people is the SAS Surivial Guide, which I think may be one of the most indispensible books ever written and compiled. It's a perfectly compact, concise, and apparently thorough list of every essential fact of surivival on this planet; how to source and purify and obtain water, food, shelter, and what dangers exist in the environment and how to deal with them. Too bad the pocket version is out of print. But seriously it's a compendium of some of the most important and hard won information as a species we've ever collected.

I've been writing some things on the side which is sort of antithetical to blogging; I need to use the experiences around me to borrow for that sort of thing. Apologies on the lack of updates, but it may run that way for a little while.

I promise though to write some more thoughts about my tyrrany of narrative theories as a followup; and I'll try to be more lucid and clear about it, too. Everyone instinctually knows fairy tales are impossible but that doesn't stop yearning. Narrative and tropes and archetypes are not in themselves harmful, either. I think however reptition of a mythic structure is, though.

Turkish Star Wars. There's a bizzare tradition that spans the globe of countries remaking Hollywood movies by literally stealing their footage and music and cutting it into their own production. Turkish Star Wars is probably the best example. It violates every rule of film grammar and sense. It starts off with a man filmed in front of what appears to be a tv playing shots from Star Wars and archival NASA footage running backwards and forwards with music from Superman. The guy wears a motorcycle helmet with walkman headphones. And from there it continues to get weirder as Turkish Luke and Han have nipple holes cut out of their outfits. Check out this awesome training montage.



Well here's a decent article from the Guardian with links to clips from Turkish E.T. and my new favorite, Nigerian Titanic.

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"All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers' plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children's games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot." --Don DeLillo, White Noise

What's the story? I have written before on this blog about narrative and who shapes narrative; usually when I write about some poltical belief of mine. Nick and I had a long discussion about the Sopranos finale; he's much more invested in the show than I am and he thought it was a copout, along with most general reactions I've come across. For me the question is: why are we so obsessed with narrative closure?

Why have endings become so important? The ends of television shows, the last few pages of a book, the shocking twist ending, and so on. I'm old enough now to recognize that life doesn't offer such neat, tidy resolutions. Nor do years of taking in too many fictions dilute the fact that most story constructions as outlined by gurus in Hollywood have become so completely transparent to me. The one that always makes me groan is the romantic comedy's forced breakup in the third act that leads to the reconcilation and dramatic hookup.

If memory doesn't get you the tendency of life to swing between extremes of the good, the bad, and the banal means that a sense of permanent happiness is elusive. And yet that is what a happy ending is, some state of attained grace after conflict and change. What then of the dramatist who dares so say that people may not even grow and become better; they might become worse? It does happen. Or I think of something I once read, I believe, in a Primo Levi book: "All love stories are tragedies. Either one lover dies before the other, or they die apart." That to me does not devalue love or our need for it. Maybe by facing up to such a brutal fact it makes it all the more precious.

I believe that there is a tyranny of plotting and shaping of narrative, especially in regards to the formulaic notions and industries that lead to their construction, which has affected our sense of mythologies such that they have led us down some dishonest paths. Most cinema has become enslaved to logical narrative when it has more capability than that. I want mythic structures which are honest but still inspiring.

But why is any of this ultimately important? Because I think the same forces that drive culture at large and audience expectations to partake in so much narrative (without doubt we are with our devices and networked connections the most story saturated people who have ever lived) and expectations of what that narrative is, a framework to make sense of the chaos that is living, leads us to accept narratives about who is in control and why. And hence you have the situation in Iraq.

I don't believe these are dissimilar notions.

I'll write more if anyone's interested in such rambling...

Knocked Up and Sopranos and old movies. I debate whether there's a point adding my voice to the fray. But I'm a pop culture junkie, especially when pop culture aims high. Such is my pop culture obsession that I realize now the indvidual word "fray" has been devalued by pop culture thanks to a band.

I'd be biased toward Knocked Up to begin with as a Freaks and Geeks devotee; I know of no other show that came even close to a dead on portrayal of adolescence. Even when it was sentimental it'd pull its punches with some well earned cynicism or a leftfield random bit of sadness that seemed real. Since then Judd Apatow's comedies have been my favorites, and I say that as an admitted dour, pretentious person who does not find that much funny. At all.



I checked it out with Cat and Emily and my friend Will who just moved to New York this weekend. We all liked it without fault. I often ramble on at length about how modern American movies lack the texture of what it's like to really live in America; it doesn't necessarily even need to be a dismissive or critical view. But one of the luckiest experiences of my life was getting to tour the country with a band and thus see the entire country from the road. That compressed experience left me with no doubt that a largely homogenized experience dominates outlying suburbs; the social environment and vernacular against which our lives play out is rarely reflected in our movies. People have to be falling in and out of love outside the Border's books parking lot; or having cosmic epiphanies in a Best Buy.

An enshrined figure in Hollywood is Billy Wilder; deservedly so. One thing that I love about his comedies from the past is that they do reflect the texture of the times. And they often forgo sentimentality entirely for a brutally comic truth. For years Cameron Crowe has been trying to emulate the best aspects of his work, but I think he tilts a little too much towards the soft side of things. Sneakily, it's been Apatow who bit by bit has figured out how to do it.



For all the raunch in his comedies its merely an expression of our modern vernacular, which in my day to day life borders frequently on the obscene. His perceptions of characters, too. There's a subplot involving a married couple in Knocked Up that's rarely funny and more depressing than anything in its stark truths about marriage. His referential dialogue could be put in a time capsule; from a 3 year old who wants to listen to Green Day (so that's who's been responsible for their megastardom) to a 5 year old girl saying she used google. Then there's the pack of losers, alumni from Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared who are so aptly nailed that I feel embarassed to remember exactly what times of my life and friends were just like that. Anyway, most people love it. It's funny. It's affecting, even, and for all its brutal honesty it isnt mean or cynical. Enjoy a silly deleted scene, as sweet as the combination of cupcake and beer Will got in a diner last night after the movie.



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Another show that seems to get the texture of American life, albeit completely unreally, has been The Sopranos. This must be the definitive article on the series closing. I'm here to defend the ending; but I must say that in recent years I've only barely casually watched the show (whereas I know the first few seasons very well) so I am not a committed fan who has been following dangling plot threads. I've admired the shows refusal to committing to overarching narrative. It isn't a show like Lost that thrives on clever plot points. Last night the series ended with a final scene that within moments had the collective zeitgeist wailing online.

I thought it was brilliant. I thought it ended like a novel. I thought it was pitch perfect and brave. I do not think it was a simple fuck you to the audience, as so many have asserted, or even a cruel joke. In fact, again, it's a bit of brutal honesty. It refuses to assert any simple lesson for life; only that it goes on (or perhaps doesn't, in as terrifyingly blank a manner as possible) and there is no state without which memory doesn't punish somehow nor does your future even out into anything like a state of permanent happiness.

The ending of the Sopranos was what a 60 year old man should be writing and pushing especially when they've earned an audience. I'm all for colossal creative failure as long as the intention is brave and challenging. Ultimately the show was never really about the mob, but it handled that aspect of its story so well it attracted viewers because of it. It was really always a show about a mid life crisis writ large, about a sea change in our way of life in this country... One where a violent thuggish mobster sees a therapist. The final episode of the Sopranos fetishistically, obsessively cataloged modern day aspirant American life; materialistic worship above all else, when you can delude yourself enough to ignore the violence required to attain it.

Oh yeah, and the use of a Journey song, that was the real fuck you cruel joke. Loved it.

I'm having head problems. I hit up the GR store yesterday evening to pick up the new issue. While there I grabbed one of the new GR hats, a knowledge hat made from amah bag material.



Eric showed me the first one awhile back and I was immediately coveting so I was happy to finally be able to grab one. I just like the use of such a fantastic, ubiquitious material. Unfortunately... I have an unusually large head. It's rare to find a baseball hat that will fit my head and I usually have to have it closed on the last tab if at all to wear it. The hat is beautifully made, there's nothing wrong with it, I just really do have problems with hats. It's why I tend to become attached to friends' hats if they fit - I can't believe I found one. In fact I stuck it on Cheryl of GR and my friend's head yesterday and it fit them perfectly fine.



I mean seriously look at that bulbous noggin, that swollen brain case. So the thing doesn't fit my ginormous cranium.

And then today in my taqueria the girl I see every few days who works the register sort of made an unpleasant noise that went "Ayyyyyyyyyyieeeeee" when she saw my newly short short hair.

Anyway, great work on the new issue. It's pure conicidence I met Dan-ah Kim at the same time Eric was interviewing her, and the piece is a great reflection of the wonderful person I've come to know and champion here. I was way into the music articles in GR48. Also, you get to see Eric with fake boobs and Martin with a swan cock or something as well as a fighting Dave Cho mannequin. That mannequin sits in Eric's living room and it has scared the piss out of me and I saw Dan freak out once late at night bumping into it.

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One of my favorite places in New York is the Babycakes bakery. As Dan has pointed out some of us just can't digest the dairy... Information that wasn't in the user's manual. For people like us, this place is manna from heaven. My inability to handle lactose kicked in during my mid twenties, which is pretty typical for asian males.





I had no clue so I thought I was sick until an article way back in GR helped me figure out what was going on and I cut out dairy entirely. So I had memories of all the foods I had to stop eating. Lactaid helps but it's like stomach roulette - one in six times it doesn't help. Vegan desserts had never done it for me - they're too flaky and dry and don't taste right; too bitter or sweet. I suppose I have a fairly wicked sweet tooth. But then Eric gave me a cupcake from Babycakes during one of his trips out to NY and I became a convert. They are the best vegan desserts I've ever had. Granted, it's no creme brulee or caramel soaked chocolate chip bread pudding with vanilla ice cream...



But somehow without using milk or eggs, they craft really exceptional desserts here that some people can't even tell are lacking using the best ingredients. The result being I can pig out on brownies and cupcakes and chocolate chip cookies.



Ask em for a cookie sandwich if you ever hit them up... And best of all they're open late. So after a giant Ktown feed and then desserts we went to see Paris, Je'Taime on a complete whim, missing the first short, which I wrote up awhile ago. Early reviews weren't too kind but since release it's garnered more critical support and I think it's absolutely worth seeing because the short film is an art in itself - and in many ways it's harder to pull off a good short film than a feature. Surprises abound in the thing and it has a sweet, breezy quality. Many of them are great, but for me Tom Twyker's is worth the price of admission for a stunning montage that compresses an entire relationship into minutes. Something I always wanted to do in a music video but I don't think I would've done it as well. The best quality is how many of these are moving; no easy feat in a short film to capture emotion.

I joked last night that they should do I Love New York, and I guess it's happening, with a whole other host of directors including Chan-Wook Park. I think it's a brilliant idea and hope they keep moving to different cities. One curious thing is the preponderence of stories about English speakers hanging out in Paris. And also, to see what a Christoper Doyle directed piece is like. I would describe it as "feverish". Ahem. But overall a very enjoyable movie to drop by on a whim in the East Village late at night.

During bad idea week I talked about my idea of doing portraits of fierce pandas. Ummm. Yeah.







I just saw Caids eating some grass so I guess she's not feeling well. I know there are reasons that explain why cats do this, but I want to know... How do cats learn to eat grass?

Here's a bunch of b-boying stuff... An AP news article of all things on how Korea is dominating the b-boy scene. I dig the offhand mention of Crazee Grandma, who does headspins at the age of 67.

And here's two clips of the soon to come Planet B-Boy which got raves at Tribeca and I heard has a ton of footage of the Korean team throwing down.

Lupe Fiasco, Kanye West, Pharrell, and Thom Yorke together. Sick track. Lupe is so so underrated. Yeah, so it's just them rapping over the original track, basically, which is probably one of the reasons this is never coming out commercially... More like something off a mix tape.

Check it here.

We were talking about Miranda July the other night. Here's a Mike Mills video featuring his sweetheart for Blonde Redhead. I'm just the messenger here.



That said, I am interested in her short story collection and admit I really got a kick out of the website that she put together to promote it.

And here's a rather demystifying article on her that's manna for her admirers.

This is why I couldn't wait for Nick Harmer's blog to start up. In a single day he manages to recount having just spent days at a music activism conference in New Orelans and what he saw there, followed by a very gross and bizzare story about that guy with TB who Nick apparently was friends with when they were kids. You won't find word of this guy's crazy checker implant on CNN.

Nick's blog is here.

What a strange day few days... I haven't been writing so much here because I'm busy writing a project for myself. I haven't gone back to really dedicated, eight hours a day writing in years. Which is always a misnomer, anyway. I think eight hours a day of writing is comprised of seven hours of staring at a wall or monitor.

Weds. I decided very late and impromptu in the evening to have a BBQ in the backyard. I put the word out and quite a few people were free to come by on short notice. Some I hadn't seen for months. The BBQ was a failure. I was racing the sun to get it going and hopefully have it wrapped up not too late for a weeknight because sound travels so well in backyards here. I failed miserably. Our coals dully glowed grey rather than red hot after an hour, and any burger sitting on that girl was going to get roasted like a thanksgiving turkey. At 9:20 pm I called it and went and got tacos for everyone. I felt awful, because so many people had come and pitched in to help make it happen. Ken's wife Linda marinated corn. And they didn't get to taste the meat of their labors. The people in my taqueria were asking me why I needed so many tacos on such short notice. That's the really sad part because last summer every time we went to have a bbq we never got as far as getting the grill going and would lazily just get tacos instead. The curse of living by NY's best taqueria. That said, my friends were great company. I like bringing disparate people together who have the same interests. I wish Dan had been able to come by, though. I bet he would've gotten the fire going.



This getting the bbq grill ready picture says it all. Something was wrong to begin with. After Ken blew everyone away with his expert level Guitar Heroism, everyone left except for Cat and Emily and we started to watch Tarnation... But after an hour of it we needed to go for a walk. My neighborhood was beautiful under the moonlight and the summer is at that pleasant state right now. And we found an ice cream shop open at nearly 1am.

We had all this leftover meat and the next night Cat and Emily returned... Gracious of them to give it a shot again. And it worked. Thanks to advice from my Dad and the nice old lady who lives next door laughing at me going all pyromaniac on the grill... It turned out to be something that's really easy to do.

Given the fact that between ten people there was no certainty on how to bbq, and I found that someone had googled how to bbq, here is the secret knowledge passed unto me by elders regarding the secret of fire.

Pile the coals (and use plenty of them) as best you can.
Make sure the vents are open on the bottom of the charcoal grill to feed the fire with oxygen.
No newspaper is needed.
Lighter fluid and flame for a bit.
Then wait. Just wait a good hour. Cover it with holes open on the lid. Once the coals go grey on the edges no more lighter fluid is needed.
When you cook the meat, fat dripping off will get the fire going even better. Once the coals are going good and red, spread em out. Voila.

Now we can do this all summer long.



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Everything else this week has been health insurance (I finally found some), bills, throwing out my contact lenses due to what's probably unnecessary hysteria, and writing and writing and writing. I've been around a lot of friends lately but I miss one person who's gone right now. Haven't felt that in awhile, and it's comforting in its own way.