October « 2007 « Black Marks on Wood Pulp / by Corey Vilhauer

Loving the losers

October 10th, 2007

How does a person continue to follow sports when it seems that at every turn hides another loss?

It begins to wear on you. It’s true. This Dolphins season has been less than savory. After starting out 0-5, the Dolphins are causing must of us who root for the team – for whatever inexplainable reason – to give up hope.

And not just for this yea. The future looks bleak too. With a defense that averages 52 years of age and one of the worst offenses in the history of football, there’s really nowhere to go but up.

Unfortunately, we can’t help but think “up” is a long ways away. We’re not floating close to the ceiling here, fighting to break through. We’re in the floorboards, a tell-tale heart just scratching to make it above the floor again.

The funny thing is that, after a while, you begin to embrace losing. I’ll forever root for the teal and orange, no matter how outdated their uniforms look and how many quarterbacks it takes to get a win, but I find myself rooting for losses, cheering for the difficulty of defeat instead of screaming for a win. The Dolphins are the only team to go undefeated throughout a season. Could it be that, 36 years later, we could see another unheard of feat – the totally defeated season?

The extremes are easy to root for. There’s a gamers high that is often associated with winning. It permeates all of sports – an aggressive loss of inhibition that causes fans to lose touch with reality and claim their squad the greatest. And at the opposite end, there’s a feeling of release. The games ultimately don’t matter – the stress of backing your team is dropped, and you can be a lovable loser, pitied by your friends and understood by your opponents.

Winning is stressful. It’s hard on fans. Losing, however, is expected. It’s easy. It’s relaxing to settle, so settle we must.

No – the real difficulty is being right in the middle – the .500 club, the win one, lose one (or even worse – win six, lose six) territory. This the territory of the Minnesota Twins. And this is the territory of my beloved Pacers – a team that has settled into mediocrity after several years of contending. Now, they’re an also ran – too good to get a decent lottery pick, but too bad to ever even sniff the playoffs.

So it’s odd to find myself torn between rooting for wins and rooting for losses. The Pacers are as vanilla as you can get – a boring team with a new coach in a lame division. They’re already matched up against two Eastern Conference powerhouses – the only two remaining, actually: Detroit and Cleveland. They have little chance of making a splash.

And I’m trying hard not to give up, already, before the season starts. But, even though they won their first preseason game tonight, I can’t help it. I’m already expecting the worst.

It all started with Michael Jordan. Being a Chicago Bulls fan was easy. As a kid, I picked a team that had a chance to win the championship. And just like that, they won it. I was spoiled, thinking my team always had a chance, fooling myself that the opponents held some sort of spell over my team when I knew they had no shot.

And, when I realized what I had, I gave it away. I stopped watching sports and found myself drawn back into different teams – new favorites; no more Cardinals – now it’s the Twins; no more Bulls – now it’s the Pacers.

Those decisions have brought me heartbreak. The Pacers were very close for a while. Very close – several Conference Championships and a Finals appearance. And the Twins, well, they’ve created some amazing second half heroics in recent years.

But regardless of the surges they’d make, they would ultimately came up short, leaving me exhausted and somewhat betrayed. My lucky card never came in; my wishes never came true. The photo finish I always dreamed of is still just that – a dream.

So you’ll have to forgive me. It might be hard to watch a loser. But it beats going through the tulmultous ups and downs that accompany a mediocre team’s season – the maybes and the could haves and the almosts.

It’s easier to just accept loss. At least the only place my expectations can go is straight up.

Straight from the basement to the floor.

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Issues Considered: Baseball, Basketball, Football, Indiana Pacers, Miami Dolphins, Minnesota Twins, Sports

Night driving

October 9th, 2007

A sudden fitness kick has plunged me head first into a pasttime I thought long in my past.

Night driving.

Since I couldn’t make time to go work out after work, I’ve started getting up at the ungodly time of 5:15 am in order to make it to the fitness center as it opens. This act leaves me plenty of time after my workout to head back home, shower, get dressed, kiss the family goodbye and head off to slave away at the keyboard.

It’s all brought me back to a year and a half ago, when I would work nights and drive home at 2 or 3 in the morning.

I called it night driving. The act of driving at night, the streets completely empty, cars sparse and traffic lights blinking red-red-red (or yellow-yellow-yellow, depending on the right of way.) Darkness enveloping the entire city, with only street lights and the glow from 24-hour convenience stores left to make sense of what is usually a busy thoroughfare.

The difference between the roads and traffic at this time – between 2 am and about 5:30 am – is as different as, well, night and day. Where streets are otherwise busy, packed with anger and overflowing with anxiety, at night they become sooting ribbons of relaxation – a gentle drive to end your day, or a refreshing burst of life at the beginning. During the day, engines and music and voices fill the air in multitudes. At night, it’s just the hum of your tires and the whistle of the cold wind as you roll your window down.

Leaving work at 3 am, back in my other life, I’d find myself unwinding, seemingly uncoiling down the hill, seeing the same lights lit up – the same houses filled with night owls; the same stores selling late-night gas; our two hospitals, competing against each other for the night sky with their green or blue neon, as if this comparison could help make the final decision on a health care need.

I’d get to experience it in college a lot as well – returning late from St. Cloud to Marshall, or driving home after a Thursday night show at First Avenue in order to make it back for a Friday morning class. You listen to the radio, faintly, and you think.

Thinking. Always. I’m glad to have that back in my life again. Just me, the car and the road, friends again. Traveling alone. Always thinking.

Lights out. It’s time to drive.

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Issues Considered: On..., Travel

16 Page Read: Hippos Go Berserk!

October 8th, 2007

Hippos Go Berserk! by Sandra Boynton
Hippos Go Berserk! by Sandra Boynton Sometimes, the simplest things in a children’s book appeal to us adults. It might be a subtle artistic detail – the rolling of an eye, the distracted look, the cobweb in the corner that validates the fact that I, too, haven’t bothered to dust my bookshelves for the ten weeks since Sierra arrived. (And, to be honest, the 25 weeks before that.)

It might be a cleverly worded sentence – blunt enough to cause a burst of laughter, a rat-tat-tat that awakes a snoozing baby, rendering the story useless unless read during the waking hours.

Sandra Boynton has packed her short, board-designed books with these looks and sentences. And no one line amuses me more than the titular sentence from her book Hippos Go Berserk!

The book – as all children’s books are wont to do – features a lesson; counting from one to nine. The lesson is told through a boring day in the life of a hippo – a sad, lonely looking hippo who invites two friends. These two friends invite three more, etc. until nine hippos dressed as wait staff arrive at the lonely hippo’s door.

And, as promised, the hippos exhibit some darling looks. A wary glance over the shoulder. A stone bored stare at a fellow hippo. A shifty look of deceit. The 45 hippos that end up in the house may all look the same, but trust me; they all have a special place – a unique trait, a personality unlike any other hippo in the room.

So 45 hippos are packed into one house. What happens?

ALL THE HIPPOS GO BERSERK!

Just like that, I’m satiated. It’s a line that always fills me with joy – usually wondering how five words in a children’s book could make me laugh so hard. It’s improbable. Why is it funny? Really?

Maybe it’s the fact that none of the hippos are actually going berserk. Maybe it’s the fact that it was so unexpected the first time I read it. Maybe it’s because after they go berserk over the two pages in the middle of the book, they all start leaving.

Probably, it’s the idea of these sarcastic looking hippos all attempting to go berserk in one place, surrounded by waiter and waitress hippos, some in fancy clothes, some simply looking around wondering why they ever bothered to arrive, while the lonely hippo who started our tale dances on the table with a phone receiver on his head – the only hippo to actually bother going berserk.

Or, maybe it’s just the unknown power of the “sense of humor,” a collection of remembrances and triggers that are as different in humans as fingerprints or dental records. The simplest things can trigger laughter. No one knows why. It just does.

One by one, the hippos leave. Actually, more accurately, nine by eight by seven, etc. until one hippo, alone once more, finds he misses the other forty four.

I always seem to miss them too. So, to the chagrin of my daughter – resulting in the first of a series of perceived eye rolls, I’m sure – I read it again.

Reading fathers go berserk!

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Issues Considered: 16-Page Read, Books, Sierra

Bunnies in color

October 5th, 2007

I’ve always loved the Bravia ads. Here’s the newest one – it’s right in the middle; better than “Paint,” not as good as “Balls.”

Lots of talk over at Gizmodo about how this idea was stolen from an artist. My take? The original art features ideas that were combined to use in the spot. But it was advanced significantly – to the point that it barely even resembles the original art. It’s more of an homage, though I’m sure if the original artists wanted to, they could yell “thief” all night and have plenty of support.

Actually, some of the art in question is just as stolen – it is a new treatment on one of my favorites, Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai.

I see the case on both sides, and if I was the artist in question, I’d be pissed. But I just can’t imagine there’s much of a case here. If there is, I’d better watch out with who I choose to inspire me. I’d hate to be lambasted for “stealing” an author’s style.

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Issues Considered: Marketing, Videos

What I’ve Been Reading – September 2007

October 4th, 2007

Books Acquired:
Heat – Bill Buford
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
Special Topics in Calamity Physics – Marisha Pessl
The Whistling Season – Ivan Doig
McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #24 – McSweeney’s Press
Water for Elephants – Sara Gruen
The Sportswriter – Richard Ford
The Master Butchers Singing Club – Louise Erdrich
Cooking Freshwater Fish – Lucia Watson

Books Read:
The Wonder Spot – Melissa Bank
Karaoke: The Global Phenomenon – Zhou Xun (not finished)
The Whistling Season – Ivan Doig
McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #24 – McSweeney’s Press

There’s an uneasy balance in life between necessity and want. It’s part of what makes growing up so hard – the realization that you can’t always get what you want (with apologies to the Rolling Stones). Need outweighs all aspects of life. You want to sit at home all day because you want to play Guitar Hero until your fingers bleed. You need to work because you need food and you need a place to live in order to play Guitar Hero until your fingers bleed.

That balance fueled my literature intake this month. On one hand, I was convinced that the books I had checked out from the library were completely necessary – crucial, even – to my literary needs. And the books I needed to read – the ones that had a deadline: September 28th, Day One of the South Dakota Festival of Books? I figured I had plenty of time to get those read.

My want pile was mainly fluff – Melissa Bank, a book on karaoke, the new McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern – and included some new books we got at a great Borders three for two sale (Special Topics on Calamity Physics and Heat). The need pile seemed boring and so, well, necessary – Ivan Doig’s The Whistling Season and Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter (both to be at the South Dakota Festival of Books) and Water for Elephants, this month’s book club book. And I had plenty of time for the need pile. Plenty of time.

Enter reality. You’ve got a little girl in the house now, Corey. Your reading schedule has been obliterated – not wiped out, but strung throughout the day, broken into pieces and scattered around the clock like seeds from a broken dandelion. The nights of reading from 9:30 to 11 are gone. Long gone.

This came as a surprise to me. I thought I’d be able to get my two required reads finished in the last half of the month. We were prolific in our book purchasing, breaking a months long fast (not counting, of course, the necessary Harry Potter). Things were stacking up. With all of these things riding with me, why couldn’t I read Melissa Bank and a book on karaoke at a leisurely pace?

Yes, that’s right. I read a book about karaoke. It was mildly entertaining, more for the little facts I gleaned than the book itself. Karaoke is an incredibly complex concept – a Japanese invention that has swept the world by branching into hundreds of different versions. Some karaoke facts for you:
• The Japanese claim inventing the first machine, but the Welsh claim to have invented the concept.
• Karaoke rooms are weird – it’s you and about four friends in a closed off room with a couch. It wouldn’t work here in the US, but it’s all the rage in Japan.
• In Japan, karaoke is so serious that women are urged to follow a strict set of “commandments” when singing at a work function in front of their boss.
• In Thailand and Indonesia, karaoke is a front for prostitution.
The pictures in this book are hilarious – each one depicting a goofy looking drunk person singing into a microphone. Each picture shows the subject at his or her worst. Though, really, isn’t that what karaoke is in the grand scheme of things?

What I realized after skimming through the first half of the book is that this is far too goofy a subject to be taken so seriously. The writing was reminiscent of a PhD dissertation, with each chapter breaking down the finer aspects of karaoke. In reality, karaoke boils down to one thing: singing while drunk in front of people. In other words, it’s every Friday night for Scott Stapp.

Ha! See that? That’s a Creed joke! Sorry – I’m just trying to distract from the fact that I didn’t really feel as strongly about Melissa Bank’s The Wonder Spot as I did her short story “The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine.” And therein lies the problem with reading a really great short story – you go on looking for more from the same author and, regardless of how good they really are, you find yourself disappointed. Don’t get me wrong. It was good. It’s a female version of David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, a chronicle through life using a series of sort-of-connected short stories. It just wasn’t what I had hoped.

Of course, that’s not the case with the McSweeney’s crew. I always expect something entertaining, and I’m rarely disappointed. This quarter’s collection was filled with manly stories – featuring guns and espionage and private investigating and all of that. McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern is even more known for its binding and cover design, and this quarter’s collection was given a high budget. The book is double bound – two books facing opposite ways joined together at the back cover, like Siamese twins who share the same heart.

I’m actually not technically finished with that book (I’ll get to it tonight, I’m sure) and I wasn’t technically finished with The Whistling Season when the Festival of Books came around. Thankfully Ivan Doig didn’t give any of the book’s final twists away. (Thankfully, also, from a “whoops, I didn’t read” standpoint, Richard Ford failed to show up. So at least I wasn’t left wondering what the hell he was talking about.)

The Whistling Season, when I first started reading it, reminded me too much of My Antonia — too much “windy plains living on a homesteaded shanty” and not enough, you know, non-prairie stuff. This is one of the downfalls of the One Book South Dakota selections – they nearly always concern themselves with prairie life. It’s partly necessary. The OBSD is supposed to represent the region, which is why we have had The Work of Wolves, Gilead and now The Whistling Season over the past three years.

Eventually, though, I fell in love with The Whistling Season. I found myself completely entranced with the story – a couple of big city siblings come to the middle of Montana to start a new life. One becomes a housekeeper, the other a teacher – both tied to the same family, a homesteader and his three boys. It’s from the oldest boy’s perspective that we see the book come to life, and it encompasses a wide range of topics – how children learn, the one-room schoolhouse, love, life, all of that crap you want in a book.

So it separates itself from My Antonia and other typical prairie books in having a modern heart. Instead of regaling the reader with grain after grain of wheaten plains, we are instead introduced to relationships, to people who know big words and Latin and astronomy; the farming and homesteading take a back seat to the main story, instead of overpowering it. In fact, I found myself quite enamored with the father – Oliver Milliron – and the carpet bagging, unlicensed but incredibly qualified teacher – Morrie Morris – two characters that simply overflow with clever wordplay. You know Ivan had a blast when he was writing those two characters, and when they meet, verbal acrobatics is the only way to describe it.

Sorry – I have to stop typing. Kerrie has put down Water for Elephants. And I have four days left to read it before book club. There’s nothing worse than cramming for a voluntary group event. But, if anything, at least it will help me learn the difference between need and want. Right?

Right?

Comments: 2

Issues Considered: Books, Literature, What I've Been Reading, Writers

Another non-ordinary day

October 3rd, 2007

Heading back to work after a week off can be harrying – I’m being attacked from all sides with rush jobs and hot copy requests. Of course, that’s what I should expect. After all – the words can’t stop, and as the only copywriter around here I guess I’m responsible for all of them.

A week off can do a lot to render the creativity cells useless, as well. I’m getting out of the habit of writing loosely and without care and back into the habit of carefully crafting each syllable as if a company’s entire sales plan depended on it.

When I sat down at my desk today, I noticed something I had posted a year and a half ago – something that has been so much a part of my daily sight that I forgot I had even typed it out. It’s a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, one that I thought would be inspiring and refreshing. Thankfully, it still is – I snapped out of my doldrums and got right to work.

That quote:

“Every Day Is No Ordinary Day”
I had an almost intolerable awareness that every morning began with infinite promise. Any book may be read, any idea thought, any action taken.

Anything that has ever been possible to human beings is possible to most of us every time the clock says: six in the morning.

On a day no different from the one now breaking, Shakespeare sat down to begin Hamlet.

It’s one of my favorite quotes. And in reading it, I realize that he’s right. Each day begins with endless possibilities. Anything could happen. It wasn’t just Hamlet that was begun on a day like today – it was East of Eden, “Mona Lisa,” the ceiling at the Sistine Chapel, Revolver, the screenplay for the Godfather. Every creative work in the world started somewhere. On a day just like today.

Now back to work I go.

EDIT – I’ve just realized that this isn’t the first time I’ve commented on this quote. In fact, I said pretty much the same thing about 10 months ago. Still, the quote holds true, even if I do have a penchant for repeating myself too often.

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Issues Considered: Literature, Marketing, Music, Writing

The Boss

October 1st, 2007

Bruce Springsteen’s on tour again. Which means Sirius has taken over their light rock channel and replaced it with a 24-hour-a-day Bruce Springsteen Channel, E Street Radio.

It also means I, a person lumped in the incorrect demographic, can rejoice in everything that is “The Boss.”

Loving Springsteen isn’t anything new – millions have been enjoying his music before I have, and a good chunk of them haven’t been middle aged. But it’s weird to look around at a group of fans and notice that, without a doubt, you’re in the lowest percentile in terms of age – a spring chicken among the roosters ready for slaughter.

But here I am.

I discovered the singability of Springsteen through karaoke, where I would attempt to put an ironic spin on “Born to Run;” you know, “Oh, jeez, look at how cool I am by singing this incredibly unhip song.”

How naïve I was. Springsteen may be old, but he’s not unhip. And then, it stuck. I started listening to it for what it is. I reached out and latched on to the deeper cuts – the hits that didn’t make the radio every day. I gained an appreciation through listening to Tony Kornheiser in his last days on ESPN radio, when he would completely skirt sports topics and focus solely on aging rocker music, Bruce Springsteen being one of his favorites.

The irony wore off and Bruce came alive. I saw his image blossom before me, his music deepened, his characters filled out and his stories became incredibly slices of life; people who lived and loved and all of that, in the flesh.

I don’t know if it’s the gruff, weathered farm hand voice or the simple poetics, but Springsteen sounds more like the voice of America than any person I’ve ever heard.
I mean, the guy’s from Jersey, and he sounds like he was pulled up from the dirt in the middle of Kansas, brushed off and sent off to study depression era pain and mid-50s heartbreak – he’s every time and every place in the United States.

He’s a Woody Guthrie disciple, a Steinbeck scholar and a modern day rock icon, all at once, mixing tough and pleasantly broken in lyrics with a sensibility that screams patriotism. That’s patriotism in a good way – the kind that means you love your country, not your government; you fight for what’s right, not what’s proper.

From Tom Joad to Rosalita, “Thunder Road” to “The River,” comic relief to a higher plane of understanding, Bruce Springsteen has formed a little niche in my musical rotation.

And to those of you who have already known his greatness – to those of you who spread the gospel of The Boss throughout the nation while us young’ns sat nursing on Green Day and Pearl Jam, thinking we had found the most accurate voice for our generation – you’ll be happy to know that we hear you. Loud and clear.

Three cheers for The Boss.

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Issues Considered: Music, Sirius