CarrollBlog 10.1

There are big billboards up all over town for a new kind of men's underpants. The name of them is INNOVATION. I keep thinking how can you be innovative with men's undies? Every picture I see of them looks like what I'm wearing right now. I imagine this bunch of smart young, aggressive public relations people sitting around a table, brainstoming. They've been hired by the world famous underwear company to come up with a knockout new idea for this campaign. After much deliberation, one of them looks up and begins to smile. "Let's call them Innovation!" There's a pause as the idea sinks in. Then everyone there starts to smile and get excited. Innovation-- yes! That's a perfect name for the new model. The company loves the idea too and a zillion posters and ads are printed up, published, etcetera. But that gets us back to my original idea-- how can you innovate men's underpants?
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a headache inducer from IT (but interesting too):

CarrollBlog 9.30

I was reading an article about Bruce Springsteen because he's released a new album and is about to go on tour. It reminded me of a story I read about the singer some years ago that was heartrending. After 9/11, the editors of the New York Times decided to write small biographical descriptions about every one of the victims. They wanted to put faces and personalities to the lost, so they contacted the families and asked them to describe the people who had died. A great many of the victims were fans of Springsteen's music. Springsteen read all of these biographies and was overwhelmed by how many of the lost loved his music. Wanting to do something, he got in touch with the Times and acquired the telephone numbers of all the families who'd said their lost ones were his fans. For the next few months, Springsteen called each family and had a long talk with them about the people they had lost, how they were coping since 9/11, etcetera. One of the women he spoke with said, "His telephone call got me through almost half a day without crying again."
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CarrollBlog 9.29

In her book THE SEVEN WHISPERS, Christina Baldwin devotes a chapter to each of the 'Seven Whispers of spiritual commonsense'

CarrollBlog 9.28

Plague Victims Catapulted Over Walls Into Besieged City
by Thomas Lux

Early germ
warfare. The dead
hurled this way look like wheels
in the sky. Look: there goes
Larry the Shoemaker, barefoot, over the wall,
and Mary Sausage Stuffer, see how she flies,
and the Hatter twins, both at once, soar
over the parapet, little Tommy's elbow bent
as if in a salute,
and his sister, Mathilde, she follows him,
arms outstretched, through the air,
just as she did
on earth.
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"When you're writing, you're throwing it all in your dream machine. And you're throwing in whatever is handy and what is useful to you. And by the time I'm finished writing the book, I don't know whether something is drawn from life or not. It's been remade."

CarrollBlog 9.27

"The Japanese use the term mitate, which translates as 're-seeing,' or seeing afresh. This quality of seeing things freshly, as though for the first time, lies at the heart of mindfulness.
Mindfulness is not bound by expectations, habits, or the weight of our past, and so lets us see what we are doing as though for the first time. In Zen, this is called beginner's mind, seeing the old and familiar as though it were new, even surprising. Beginner's mind keeps awareness fresh.
This fresh awareness has a neurological basis. Ordinarily when we see or hear something that is very familiar to us-- like the tick of a clock in our bedroom, or the same old sights on our daily route to work-- the brain registers it for a moment or two, then tunes it out, no longer responding to it. For the brain, it's just not worth putting that much energy into observing the same old familiar things.
But the brain gets energized whenever something new or unusual comes along, getting more active as it perks up to pay attention-- something liked a bored one year old child who suddenly sees something exciting, like another baby or a dog. This quickening of brain activity occurs whenever we register something for the first time. It's called the orienting response-- the neural equivalent of beginner's mind. This perked-up interest continues until the brain familiarizes itself with the new thing. Then, once it has been fitted into a comfortable category, the brain tunes it out again."

CarrollBlog 9.25

Four of the major artists of 20th century America were all born this week-- F.Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot and George Gershwin. Plus Cervantes, the author of DON QUIXOTE. Some serious artistic ju-ju for those of you who emerged this week.
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CarrollBlog 9.24

an email from ON:

CarrollBlog 9.23

A bunch of boys in baseball caps, fat jeans, and skater sneakers are practicing their 'parcour' moves in the park. They jump back and forth from one high wall to another, do flips on the monkeybars, walk along thin edges as if they were tightrope artists. While all this is happening, one of the group films their every move with a handheld video camera. They aren't very good and all of them keep falling down and making clumsy mistakes, but they're laughing and having a great time. An old man who's had a stroke and walks with that signature limp and stiff arm held close to the body comes along. He stops and watches them. After a long time he looks at me and smiles. His whole face, the whole expression there says aren't they great? Don't you wish you could feel again the fearlessness they feel right now?

CarrollBlog 9.22

In an email from a friend: "Remember our discussion the other day about if you had one wish what would it be? I finally figured out what mine is, and I'm not talking about the old cliches of I'd wish for world peace or a lot of money. I would like one moment of pure courage in my life. One moment or one incident in which I do something absolutely and unquestionably courageous. It wouldn't have to be big or major either. Something as small as telling someone off who really deserves it. Or taking charge of a situation that would normally frighten me or at least make me hesitate big time. I think my life would be enhanced a lot, as well as my perception of myself, if I knew that even just once I had had the guts to be truly courageous about something that mattered to me.

CarrollBlog 9.21

I walked into the paper store for no reason other than to have a look to see if they had anything new. Almost everyone I know who likes to write or read rarely misses a chance to visit paper stores and poke around for nothing in particular. It's probably something genetic-- some sort of paper and ink obsession gene that carries on from generation to generation. I needed nothing but still walked out of the store with a new black Rhodia notebook and a rollerball pen. 5 euros. Still one of the greatest bargains around-- a pen and a blank notebook for less than the price of lunch. Buying them is buying pieces of optimism. You don't know what you're going to use them for yet but you hope it will be something worthwhile and even if not, you can almost be sure that while using them, you'll be happy.

CarrollBlog 9.20

The Collaboration
by Tony Hoagland

CarrollBlog 9.19

http://books.guardian.co.uk/writersrooms

CarrollBlog 9.18

A nice quote in from AV:

CarrollBlog 9.17

I know someone who had a terrible childhood. Not just bad, or BAD, but genuinely terrible. The ingredients of a domestic horror novel, or the worst kind of OLIVER TWIST/Charles Dickens tale of deprivation and woe. Yet this person grew up to be not only a solid citizen, but a gem-- one of the few people I know who is truly special in many ways. Is their specialness a result of having had those bad experiences when they were young but prevailing in spite of them? I don't know. I don't know if they know. Recently it struck me that there are important people in our lives for both good things and bad. And much as we hate to admit it, the bad things-people in certain cases had more positive effect(s) on our development than the good people. An example: A successful painter I know was the child of a highly respected artist. He had an on again/off again relationship with his father all his young life and even more so when he realized that he wanted to be an artist too. In his early twenties, he made a series of paintings that he was very proud of and excited about. When he finished this "cycle," the first person he showed the work to was his father. The old man looked at them for a long time and then said "Son, they're shit." Then he went on to criticize them unmercifully. Years later the son told me that that was one of the paradigm moments in his life. It clearly demonstrated several essential, defining things that changed him forever. 1. My father really is a bastard and now is the perfect time to cut certain essential chords between us permanently 2. I don't think my pictures are shit and I'm going to keep on this same "line" no matter what the old man or anyone else says 3. Despite how much people say they love or care about you, they usually have their own vision of how you should "be" in the world. If you don't accept their vision of who you are and what you should be doing, there's bound to be trouble between the two of you. Whether it was the friend who had the terrible childhood but rose out of it like a phoenix from the ashes and today is a shining example for everyone who knows them. Or the artist whose father's "gift" to him was that cruel gratuitous insult, both of these people have succeeded at least in part because they were capable of a kind of human alchemy-- they discovered within themselves the capacity to transform the 'shit' of their bad experiences into gold.

CarrollBlog 9.16

Women wearing eyeglasses look wonderful.

CarrollBlog 9.15

something nice:

CarrollBlog 9.14

Almost everyone has some person from the past who continues to stick in their soul like a deep splinter. You know who I'm talking about. The most obvious example is the lover who dumped you years ago for reasons you still don't understand, or accept. The bully who tormented you in school, the teacher who inspired you and opened doors in your brain or soul that you didn't know existed. A neighbor who suffered and died with dignity but remained kind and thoughtful right up until the end. Ironically in some cases if you were to go to these people now and tell them what a lasting effect they have had on you, they would be genuinely surprised or perplexed. Because in truth you were only a very small cloud on their horizon, a blip on their screen, or someone they forgot very quickly. But boy, you sure remember *them*.

CarrollBlog 9.13

In a moment of madness, a friend and her husband volunteered to be in a talent show at a local school. Both are talented singers so that wasn't the problem. They simply don't like performing in front of an audience. So, soon after spontaneously agreeing to participate they knew they'd made a horrible mistake but couldn't get out of it. Things only got worse as the date of the show approached. Both people got more and more nervous. The husband actually had a few panic attacks, and when his wife woke up some mornings the very first thing that flooded her mind was thick dread at having to sing in that ridiculous show. The episode might have been funny if their emotions weren't so genuinely awful. When they were in the car driving up to the show, she turned to her husband and said, "You know what I hate most of all? An hour after this is over we're going to laugh at ourselves and think how silly. We'll say we were just childish for getting so upset. It wasn't so bad. But damn it, *this* is reality, right this minute-- not an hour from now, and now IS bad. It's horrible. What I'm feeling in the pit of my stomach this moment is all out black terror. Why will I dismiss that later as me being silly and stupid when I'm not stupid and this really is scary? That's my reality, right now, not an hour from now after it's finished. *Now.*
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http://www.curiousexpeditions.org/

CarrollBlog 9.12

My next door neighbor locked herself out of her apartment and had to call a locksmith to come and open the door. She said it took no more than a minute for him to do it but then he asked for 140 euros, about $185. When she asked why it cost so much for one minute's work, he said "because I'm an expert and this is a difficult lock." She said if it's so difficult, how come it only took you thirty seconds to open it? He said 140 euros, please.
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One of those schizophrenic days where the weather changes dramatically every five minutes between pounding rain and brilliant sunshine. I take the dog out for a walk in the sunshine but ten minutes later it starts to rain hard. The dog looks up at the sky and then at me, clearly confused. I can almost hear him ask what the hell's with this weather? His whole body slumps very humanly because he loves his walks but hates rain. Defeated, he turns around and starts walking towards home.
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Almost every morning at the cafe, the old man who walks like a wind up toy stops outside the place and peers in as if he cannot decide whether to enter or not. But he always does. I wonder if the hesitation is because he's really trying to decide whether or not to buy his coffee, or because he just gets a kick out of flirting with the idea of denying himself that small pleasure.
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and in today's mailbag, this letter just in from "Miss Sharon Hutchinson":

CarrollBlog 9.11

He said "From what I can see, there are basically two types of people who use the Internet regularly-- the ones who write blogs and participate in sites like Flickr and MySpace, and there are the ones who only lurk and read what others have written. The problems with the ones who 'participate' are too many of them think anything that happens in their lives will interest the world. What they had for dinner at the restaurant, what stores they visited when they went shopping yesterday, who they talked to on the phone. The Internet has in unexpected and important ways democratized the airwaves. But in doing that, it also opened the floodgates of superficial, uninteresting sludge that fills up most peoples' lives." I had written something similar to those sentiments a long time ago on this blog so it was interesting to hear similar conclusions coming from someone else. He also said one of the distressing things he realized via web surfing was how lonely middle class people are and how much need there is in them to download the trivia of their lives on someone.

CarrollBlog 9.10

Valentine for Zepher, Age 12
by Francette Cerulli

CarrollBlog 9.6

An American couple are looking at calendars in the German bookstore. I'm standing a few feet away so I hear the woman say, "I like the pictures on these calendars but I'm not going to buy one because none of them are in English." Which makes sense for a brief moment until I think-- calendars only have numbers and pictures on them.
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The new puppy is very sweet and funny, except for the toilet paper. For some reason he is obsessed with sneaking into the toilets whenever he can, grabbing rolls of toilet paper and racing around with them in his mouth, decorating the apartment with multi colored scrolls. I keep thinking maybe he's trying desperately to tell us that in his last life he was a proctologist.
________________
I go to the dentist's office to have my teeth cleaned and am shocked when a very beautiful woman I've never seen
before comes in to do the work. She has a tattoo of a head on the inside of her slim wrist. As coolly as I can, I keep trying to look at it by tilting my head this way and that, but all I end up with is a wicked cramp in my neck. It gets so painful that I ask her to stop her work for a moment so I can unkink my head. The things we do when we're around beautiful women...
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a strong one from GB:

CarrollBlog 9.5

"Kyoichi Tsuzuki, a Japanese photographer and publisher, has spent nearly a decade taking pictures of luxury-obsessed Japanese in their tiny apartments surrounded by their collections of clothes, ties, scarves, jewelry, handbags, and shoes for the FASHION NEWS, one of Japan's oldest fashion magazines. Tsuzuki calls his subjects "happy victims" because, while they are victims of brand marketing, the items seem to bring them a sort of happiness. There is the Hermes collector, a patent executive who lives in a tiny fourth floor walk up flat. He keeps all of his Hermes shirts, ties, and leather goods in their original boxes and bags, which are stacked up on his tatami floor. He spent about $4000 on a Hermes briefcase that he carries with a Hermes towel wrapped around the handle to avoid damaging the leather with his hand perspiration.
"There is the Buddhist monk who collect Comme des Garcons religiously. Once a month, the monk shed his robes. dons Comme des Garcons avant-garde constructionist clothes, and heads from his temple to Tokyo to pick up a few more pieces. He is so convinced of their miraculous powers that he says his delinquent sister cleaned up her act when she started wearing Comme des Garcons. There's an English teacher at a prep school who started wearing Gianni Versace's flamboyant designs to keep the attention of his students. After ten years, he had one hundred pieces of Versace as well as an impressive Bulgari jewelry collection. He lives in a shoebox apartment with his unemployed girlfriend who spends her days organizing the collection. There's a Tom Ford collector, an Armani man, a McQueen girl, and a Martin Margiela maniac who is so fastidious about his collection that he never cooks at home because he doesn't want the clothes to retain the odors. The only thing in his refrigerator is eyedrops. "When he gets thirsty," Tsuzuki said, "he goes to a convenience shop and drinks there then goes back home. He does not want to put any trash in the room."

CarrollBlog 9.4

It is cloudy this morning so I imagine you sitting indoors somewhere in weather like this, staring out at the grayness. It is chilly too, so you're wearing a thin coat or thick sweater. Plum colored or gravel gray. Your fingernails are dark red but your lips are pale. Are you meeting someone? Or are you alone the whole day? Are you talking animatedly to a friend or silent, your hands still? Hands are not important to me although I know they are crucial to some people when describing their dream mate. On the chair next to you is a small purse. Or maybe none at all-- you don't like clutter. When you leave the apartment, often it is just with your keys in one pocket and some cash in the other. There's a cellphone too but you don't like to use it and usually forget it at home. I'm talking about the woman sitting half in shadows in the corner of an afternoon restaurant, one hand in her hair while she speaks into the phone in a language you've never heard before-- Norwegian or Turkish. A waiter comes over. Smiling, she gives him her full radiant attention, even if it's just to order a glass of wine. He walks away happy. She said something he liked, something unimportant but witty or kind that made things nicer for a few moments. I knew a woman who said she fell in love almost every day with men she passed on the street, men sitting in buses reading newspapers, in bars talking with their friends about sports. She said falling in love was the easiest thing in the world. I never could figure out whether she was right or dead wrong.
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and something wonderful-- Oscar winner 2005 for animation:

CarrollBlog 9.3

Candles
by Carl Dennis

CarrollBlog 9.2

One day when I was living in Los Angeles, my agent called all excited. He had arranged a meeting that afternoon with a film producer who had a giant hit running everywhere then. Supposedly this producer knew my work and wanted to talk to me about writing a script for him. The meeting was far away in the San Fernando Valley so I drove a long time hoping that the trip would be worth it. The man's office was large and impressive beyond belief. You knew at a glance that this guy was a major mover and shaker despite being very young. One of the golden ones who broke out of the pack early and because he was smart and imaginative, blew away the competition. A secretary ushered me into his office and I almost did a double take on first seeing him because the man looked about twenty. He was older, but not by much. We sat and made small talk for a while. Then he said he liked my books and thought I'd be the perfect person to write the film around an idea he was really excited about. An idea that, "like a gift from the gods," had just come to him out of the blue. I smiled and said Wow, what's the idea? He said "A computer is so smart and advanced that it falls in love with the person who is running it." I waited to hear more but that was it. After a long time I said as diplomatically as possible "That's the whole idea?" He nodded enthusiastically. Weighing my words, I said well you know, others like Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Powers have already written both short stories and novels about the same idea. And I'm pretty sure there were others too. The producer looked at me like I had just slapped his mother. "A smart computer falls in love with its programmer? You've actually seen that done before?" I nodded and knew this meeting was over.

CarrollBlog 9.1

A few years ago, a really terrific independent film called THE TAO OF STEVE came and went with little fanfare. It showed and did well at some of the festivals but not much else. I had not heard about it till my pal K said I'd like it. Since their taste is impeccable in such things (hi K!), I got hold of a copy and watched it twice because I liked it so much. It is smart, funny, and so incisive about genuine matters of the heart that you don't know whether to grin or be embarrassed. The story is about a slacker who lives with a bunch of other slackers, all of them aimlessly frisbeeing through their days. Then our boy meets a terrific woman and because he's finally found something that matters in his life, he works hard to get out of his 'pass the bong life' and amount to something so he can be worthy of her. If this plot sounds familiar, it's because the flavor- of- the- moment film KNOCKED UP has an almost identical storyline. What I don't understand though is STEVE is a much better movie than KNOCKED UP in just about every way. Yet one film is loved by both audience and critics, makes a ton of money from the moment it appears, Oscar nominations... while the other disappears with only a few traces. I keep thinking about the woman who both wrote and directed STEVE and how she must feel about this matter.