The Stained Glass Kaleidoscope

THIS BLOG HAS MOVED!

2010-11-01T05:49:00.001-05:00

It has recently come to my attention that some people still visit this site, which means it looks like I have not posted since May. Ha! :)

I posted notifications of my move everywhere but here apparently.

Go to my new blog at:

http://chadthomasjohnston.com

Enjoy! :)

Book Happenings

2010-05-04T07:33:00.001-05:00

It has been awhile since I have written about my book, and it is certainly not because I have not been thinking about and/or working on my book. Writing has indeed been sparse, as time has been in short supply as of recent. In the past month and a half we visited Wisconsin twice in support of Becki's Dad, who underwent emergency heart surgery, and we visited my sister and brother-in-law in Arizona on vacation. We have also worked on our house quite a bit and generally ushered chaos into the world as much as possible. But all is well.

I keep pushing the date around, but I really do hope to be done with this round of edits in the next few months. I have loved writing this beast of a book, and there are a few associated happenings going on with it:

1) Danny J. Gibson is 80% done with the book art, and a preview of his creations can be found at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/djgdesign/sets/72157623936034326/

I gave Danny a collection of Art Cues to prompt him, and he ran with them. In fact, he has apparently created something for each of the 100-150 cues I gave him. I will be submitting art samples with the pitch package I send potential agents.

2) Becki's twin Katie Damon of Ruby Lane Photography is coming down from Milwaukee town this weekend to take author photos, also for my promotional pitch to potential agents. We are going to have a good time setting up visuals. I want us to come up with some truly busy looking photos that are jam-packed with visual information, highly detailed, and a little weird. There will be lots of props and staging and cats.

3) I am submitting two short-form essays from the book (Purple Horseshoes and Boys Go to Jupiter to Get More Stupider) to Writer's Digest's 79th Annual Writing Competition (http://writersdigest.com/annual). The grand prize is three grand, and the winning author gets to meet with a group of agents and publishers. Might as well shoot for the moon, right? Even if you miss the moon, you might accidentally hit Mars, after all.

4) Oh yeah. I plan to finish writing the book. :) And then on to book two, which I came up with in the middle of the night one Friday night. I jumped out of bed at 2:00 a.m., ran downstairs and hammered out three pages of details/sketches in an hour and went back to sleep. It will be a radical departure from The Stained Glass Kaleidoscope. Be afraid. I want to knock it out in a matter of months. It promises to be a much easier endeavor than my current creative memoir, which is loaded from front to back with detail work.

Au revoir! :)

Swenson, Swanson, Samsonite

2010-05-03T07:07:00.000-05:00

I am on my company's Relay for Life team, and last week I sent our Team Leader on a wild goose chase for an invisible goose. A nonexistent goose, even.

Our team met up two weeks ago to discuss strategies for raising heaping mountains of money to benefit cancer research and, as our group sat around the table, each person signed a sign-up sheet. I have this horrible habit of writing not only my own name, but the name the person who is next to me, and with slight modifications. When I hand the sign-up sheet off to the person in question then, they are surprised to find they have a different surname than they did before.

My friend Hilary Edwards was in attendance at this meeting and I decided to sign her in as "Hilary Swenson." It just sounded so... right. However, instead of scratching through her newly invented last name she just assumed Hilary Swenson was someone else, a valid member of our Relay for Life team. She proceeded to sign her own name below that of our newest imaginary member, Hilary Swenson.

When our team leader Elizabeth Kanost was reviewing the sign-up sheet she came across Ms. Swenson's name and immediately drew a blank in her mind. She began to ask people in the office "Do you know Hilary Swenson? I can't figure out for the life of me who she is..." Forget about raising funds. She was on a mission to find this Hilary Swenson person. And so her mission continued. By the time she finally asked me, Hilary Swenson was practically a real person. Everyone in the office knew her name, at least. I would not have been surprised if HR had a file on her. "Well, she's signed up for the dental plan A, and she has been late to work 5 times in the past 6 months."

When Elizabeth finally asked me about Hilary Swenson I came clean. We did not, in fact, have a new team member who was adept at hiding under desks, behind doors, in tiny office cabinets. She just plain did not exist, and that was the harsh truth of it. Elizabeth did not stab me or kick me in the face. She just said, "I figured as much," or something along those lines.

I am the human monkeywrench.

No Tears to Cry Over "Tears" Candy

2010-04-25T23:23:00.002-05:00

I have long loved sour candy. It is probably made of chemicals that will create kidney stones and cause me great pain. But what a delicious road to pain!

In 1997 I discovered Cry Baby Tears candy, and after seeing it in stores for about a year or so, it disappeared. It was my favorite of all the sour candies, and I have searched for it online every year ever since. It is available in bulk, but if I order it I will eat it, and I do not need 15 lbs. of Cry Baby Tears.

Tonight Paul, Alyssa, Becki, and I were visiting the Fresh and Ready Grocery store here in Phoenix when, upon looking down, I noticed Cry Baby Tears on the ground near the store. Just scattered pieces of candy laying on the ground like shattered joy.

Once inside the store I began scavenging the joint for this long lost, much loved candy. Paul, Alyssa, and Becki could not understand the depths of this love, but they humored me as I searched. I came up empty-handed until... on the way out the door, I looked to the left and saw a cluster of candy machines, one of which featured my beloved candy. My wife handed me 25 cents, and I got my fix.

It was a moment of bliss, pure and simple. Better than hitting my head on a mountain.

Me vs. the Mountain: Sir Edmund Hillary I Am Not

2010-04-25T09:12:00.003-05:00

If you ever look in the mirror and mistake yourself for Sir Edmund Hillary, think twice before scaling the nearest mountain.  You might not be the hearty, hardened hero you think you are. Taming a mountain is not an easy thing. Fighting one, as I found out this week, is entirely futile.  If you are ever tempted to pit your fleshly frame against a mountainous mass of towering impossibility, be not mistaken. The mountain will win every time, and you will be reduced to rubble.

On Friday, my wife and I climbed Camelback Mountain in Phoenix, Arizona with my brother-in-law Paul. En route to the top Paul remarked to me, "If your Mom tried to climb this mountain, she would get distracted, turn around to talk to someone, and hit her head on an overhanging rock." Apparently I inherited more than my Mom's brown eyes and gregarious nature. At that very moment I felt a sharp pain in my skull, as if someone had fired and landed a cannonball on my cranium. At first I could not figure out what had happened. It did not take me long, however, to realize that I had hit my head on an overhanging rock.

I had been so concerned about finding secure footing that, in trudging along, I had largely been looking downward. It did not help matters that I was wearing a hat and sunglasses, restricting my view even further. I looked up and saw the outcropping rock that had headbutted me. It was utterly unrepentant, jutting out without a care in the world. "What'choo gonna' do about?" It seemed to say, taunting me. I always hated it in school when bullies unleashed lines like that. They never really expected answers to questions like this, and neither did the mountain.

Of course, Paul saw all of this happen. In fact, he remembers hearing the sound of my skull making contact with the mountain. He heard nothing like the music that accompanied "making contact" in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There was only the dull thud of my head hitting the mountain and probably, somewhere deep within the belly of the mountain, a chuckling sound.

Although there was a small gash on my scalp, my wife the Physician Assistant evaluated my condition and said it was only a flesh wound. We pressed onward and upward, and the mountain proved to be absolutely brutal all the way. The official web site for Camelback says it is not for beginning hikers. Apparently Paul never saw this web site, or at least did not heed its warning. "Yes, Chad and Becki," he seemed to say, "climbing Mt. Everest will be fun and easy. Just bring some trail mix and a scarf. No biggie." (I should give Paul some credit, however. Before leaving the house, he filled two sport-bottles with water and contemplated filling up a third, an empty mouthwash bottle that would probably leave any ice water tasting minty fresh, so at least we were hydrated.) Paul had apparently never read Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, which is essentially a story of death by mountain. At 2,706 feet, it was hardly Everest, but to my inexperienced frame it might as well have been.

Surprisingly, we made it to the top without any further injuries. We could see the entire city from the summit. It was exhilarating until I remembered we had to climb back down. Some portions of the climb had required us to use handrails for support because the terrain was so steep. These handrails bissected the areas of the trails they spanned, allowing hikers to safely ascend or descend on either side of the rails. On the way back down, it was these handrails and not the mountain itself that were gunning for me.

We had climbed halfway down the mountain when we came upon these handrails and, thinking I could safely lean back on one of them, I did exactly that. Nevermind the fact that Becki and I had been awake since 3:45 a.m. so we could fly to Phoenix with our standby passes. Nevermind the fact that the effects of sleep deprivation are known to mirror those of alcohol intoxication. I leaned back on the rail and found myself flipping headfirst over the rail, my hands gripping it all the while. In a split second I found myself upside-down on the rail. It all happened so fast, and I remember thinking in slow motion "I should probably hang onto this rail or something" as it did. I remember yelling "P-a-a-a-u-l!" He remembers turning around and seeing his brother-in-law hanging upside-down, his legs draped over the rail, his hands gripping it with white knuckles.  I suspect he remembers me looking something like a deranged lemur.

It was a moment of terror. In Kevin MacDonald's mountain-climbing reenactment documentary Touching the Void, one of the men interviewed in the film describes how he thought if a person fell while climbing the mountain, he would tumble all the way down to the bottom. For a moment I suspected I might somersault head over heels over thousands of rocks, all the way down to the bottom, rolling past the other tourists like a basketball, a living cautionary tale.

For Becki all of this was a source of laughter. On our trip to Arizona we met several of my sister's co-workers, and Becki proceeded to tell all of them about my mountain-climbing mishaps. It was a matter of payback, I suppose. I always tell stories about Becki and her Wisconsin accent. For example, when I first met her she pronounced the word "bag" the way most people pronounce the word "bagel" (BAY-gull). "Put it in a BAYG," she said at restaurants when she needed a doggie-bag. In her world, knights slew "DRAY-guns," and early American settlers traversed the continent in covered "WAY-guns." (Paradoxically, President Ronald RAY-gun was, in her estimate "Ronald RAGGIN.'") Now she is in the habit of correcting herself in order to keep people from noticing her Northern accent. Sometimes she corrects words that do not need correcting. "BAY-gull" becomes "BAG-ull," for instance. In Sunday School, she referred not to the 10 "PLAY-gues" of Exodus, but the 10 "plags," pronounced like "flags." It is impossible not to tease her about such things. I suppose then, it is equally impossible for her not to tease me about running headfirst into a mountain and treating a mountainside handrail like an Olympic athlete might treat the parallel bars.

From here on out I plan to stick to the hills of Lawrence, which are all the mountains I need.  I cannot emphasize enough how grateful I am to live in a flat state where I am not likely to hurt myself simply by going outside. Despite all of my mishaps, I made it over Camelback's hump with only a few lumps on my head and a deeper sense of humility, and I suppose I am better off for it. As far as mountains are concerned, I am now officially a pacifist. I will never climb into the ring with a mountain again. I might climb one again someday, but I will refrain from violence. I will also refrain from mountainside spontaneous gymnastics. That is, unless the mountain has other plans for me. Sir Edmund Hillary I am not.

Joe the Plumber Fixes Our Imaginary Problems

2010-04-15T06:56:00.001-05:00

A plumber named Joe - yes, that's right - Joe the Plumber has been working on the plumbing problems at our house as of recent. While Becki seems to think of this as something routine, I find it downright odd. I am, of course, aware of our very real plumbing problems. The downstairs shower fills with dirt and water, as if it is in the business of making people dirty rather than clean. It is a defiant shower. The toilet had a leak, and the sink was clogged as well. All the while we have two other functional bathrooms.

So it is strange, then, when Joe the Plumber comes to our house and begins to tell us why these problems exist in the first place, detailing what he will do to repair those things. To me it is as if he is saying "You have an invisible fairy on your shoulder, and she's got a broken wing, and it's really important that I fix it. Don'tcha see?" No Joe, I don't see. But I will take your word for it, I guess. This becomes even more apparent when one of our functional bathrooms becomes a focal area for Joe as well. The diverter in the shower is broken, but it's not the bathroom we use in the morning anyway, so does it really matter? Ah, but it matters to the wife. So it matters. Understood. Furthermore, the broken diverter is symptomatic of deeper bathroom ailments. Our diverter is "special." Judging from the pesky placement of our invisible plumbing problems, this confounded diverter must have been installed by a mischievous leprechaun.

Fixing the invisible fairy's broken wing involves ripping out the wall of the shower, delving deep into the plumbing, making a hole in the wall that bridges bathroom and living room, and leaving a hole in the living room wall for future plumber access. "Cover it with a picture, 'ya see." No Joe, I don't see. But that's okay.

It really is okay. But it is strange. I am very pragmatic when it comes to things around the house. I learn to live with broken things, and when someone attempts to fix them I say "But why? We have lived with that broken thing for years!" That is just how I am.

Add to this the fact that Joe the Plumber said (on separate occasions) to both my wife and I "You know, when you guys have kids you'll have to get rid of all those cats. They spread infection." This, of course, is why there are no families in the world that have both cats and children, Joe. Clearly. I did not bother to argue because Joe held the bowels of our house in his hands, and thereby our bowels as well. Never argue with a man who is holding your bowels in his hands.

Joe, we plan on keeping our cats, but we might get rid of you. You might spread infection. The jury is out on this one. We shall see. So far Joe has left his bag of plumbing goodies at our house after hours by accident and had to retrieve it off the clock. To his credit, he has fixed everything he has touched in our house, and he works for a major company. This means if our house falls into the bowels of the Earth (I know, more talk of bowels), I can call his company and complain.

Just Call Me Nostradumbus

2010-03-30T07:15:00.002-05:00

A year ago or so, my friend and co-worker Joanna Gillette and I were driving past the headquarters of the Lawrence Journal-World, our town newspaper, and there was a man walking outside of it who was bald but wearing a Prince Valiant haircut. He looked sort of like Phil Spector in the mugshot to the left, but this man's hair was trimmed evenly, perfectly level, all the way around at the bottom.

I drew a caricature of this man for Joanna’s cubicle at work, and he is saying “Do you find me creepy?”

Well, apparently one of our co-workers saw the picture and said “Hey! I knew a guy who had a haircut like that. He worked for the Lawrence Journal-World!”

“Oh really? That’s interesting,” replies Joanna, trying not to laugh.

Then her co-worker says “Yes, but he died a few months ago.”

So I found this man creepy when I saw him on the street and drew a picture of him and he died and his friend recognized him from my drawing and we found out about his death just because I drew a caricature of him.

Do you find that creepy? I do!!!

The Bermuda Triangle of the Heart

2010-03-29T07:23:00.000-05:00

Becki and I watched an episode of "Hoarders" the other night, and the psychologists who worked with the sufferers on the show said something about how compulsive hoarders attempt to fill inner voids with "stuff." They suffer loss and/or experience depression, and their hearts and houses become like miniature Bermuda Triangles, harboring lost wreckage from the outside world.

I was fascinated by this, especially as an evangelical (Ooh, how the word has negative connotations!) who has heard innumerable ministers talk about how all of us attempt to fill the holes in our hearts with "stuff" - cars, sex, money, power, and all the other clichés that tend to crop up in such talks. In Radiohead's "No Surprises," singer Thom Yorke sings about "a heart that's full up like a landfill." The heart is a landfill, especially for hoarders. The hoarder's house is a landfill too, and this landfill brings him shame even as it promises to alleviate his suffering.

Catholics believe in the transubstantiation of the Eucharist - that the communion wafer and the wine - become the literal body and blood of Christ when eaten. I do not share this belief, but it is interesting to me how we are able to take things from the physical world and take them within us in an attempt to medicate or complete ourselves. Those physical things act as a balm or a salve for our immaterial minds and hearts, and that fascinates me. We shop to comfort ourselves, and a new DVD or dress becomes something that soothes us in a strange way.

It makes it seem less absurd to me that God might enter the physical world in the form of His Son and die a physical death so we might have new spiritual life. We cannot host the physical Christ in our hearts, and talking about inviting Him to live within sounds something like asking a child's stuffed animal to similarly step inside. But at the same time, it makes sense in some strange way. We put material things into our immaterial hearts all the time and, for me, this affirms that we are spiritual creatures whose needs are not purely rooted in our physical humanity or the physical world we inhabit. As C.S. Lewis says, we belong to our "True Country." Thoughts for a Monday...

Zen Dreams and Jedi Passwords

2010-03-19T07:56:00.000-05:00

Note: I am writing this blog from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, prior to Becki's Dad undergoing a heart procedure at the hospital this afternoon. Keep him in your prayers today, as I am sure he will need it.

Becki and I woke up early this morning and walked to a diner called Copper Kitchen about half a mile away from her twin's house. The waitress there had actually heard of Lawrence, KS, and I ate French toast, two slices of bacon, two sausages, and two eggs over-easy for a mere $3.50. It was delightful to say the least. Of course, after all of that I might need my own heart procedure.

***

The other night I awoke to the sound of Becki exclaiming "Don't do it! Don't do it, don't do it!" in her sleep.

"Don't do what?" I indulged her. "What am I doing?"

"Greece," she said. "You're... (mumbling) Greece."

"I'm going to Greece?" More mumbling from Becki. "And you don't want me to go there? Am I going there without you or something?"

The next morning I asked her about our conversation in the dark, and she said she was telling me not to pour grease down the sink. Clearly. Grease belongs in the trash bin. Everyone knows that.

Two days later - yesterday - our garbage disposal became clogged. We left for Milwaukee with a pool of discolored water standing in the kitchen sink. Perhaps Becki's dream and reality converged somehow.

***

When I was a child, my password was "Jedi."

If strangers ever offered to pick me up from school or take me for a ride or give me candy, I was supposed to ask "What's the password?" If they said "Candy" or "Amber Alert," I knew to run the other way. Because the password was "Jedi." Of course, Becki and I joked this morning on our walk back from the Copper Kitchen that if a potential kidnapper ever did try to pick me up, the conversation would actually going something like this:

Kidnapper: Hey kid! Yeah, you! Wanna' go for a ride in my van with no windows?

Chad (age 5): My parents told me not to go for rides with strangers unless they know the password is "Jedi."

Kidnapper: That's smart, kid. Real smart. Well, do you want to go for a ride? The password is Jedi.

Chad: Boy, do I ever! Do you have some poisoned candy I could chew on? Maybe a caramel chew with a razor blade in it?

And then I would appear on the back of a milk carton and, 10 years later in Soul Asylum's "Runaway Train" video, and my parents would wonder how any kidnapper could have possibly gotten past the password test.

Bob and Holly Johnston on the Nightly News: He had a password. I don't know how anyone could have guessed it. It's 1983, after all. The year George Lucas released Return of the Jedi. The year when Jedi memorabilia and merchandising were out of control. I sure don't know how anyone could have guessed that. Want a Jedi Danish butter cookie?

Things I Learned from Stephen King

2010-03-16T07:04:00.000-05:00

Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft gets a huge, glowing ***** from me. I listened to the audio-book, which was narrated by King himself, and it was pure bliss from beginning to end.

In honor of the man himself, here are the things I learned from this reading:

1) Closed Door/Open Door - When it comes to your writing, write the first draft with the "door closed." This means "Do not let anyone read it," at least until you are done, and only then let your "ideal reader" read it. On the second draft, write with the "door open." Give the finished draft to a select group of readers so they might provide you with feedback.

2) Ideal Reader - King claims that most writers write with an "Ideal Reader" in mind. This Ideal Reader is the person the writer is essentially writing the text for, and in King's case it is his wife, Tabby.

3) Buy William Strunk's "Elements of Style," which I did. It teaches the writer to eliminate excess words, to be mindful of several stylistic preferences and rules that will make one's writing qualitatively better in the end. When I received my copy in the mail and told Becki what it was she said, "Style? Why do you need help with style? When it comes to your clothes, you don't really have any style, honey." It's about English, honey. Writing. Bah! It was pretty funny.

4) A story is a fossil you unearth in its totality. It is not something you concoct with great intentionality. It is a found thing, a discovery you dig up, dust off, and explore. King finds that "What if" questions have, more often than not, led him to write his stories. You ask the question, and in answering it you let your mind go, you go down the rabbit hole.

Thanks to this approach, I scrambled out of bed at 2:00 a.m. last Friday night, ran downstairs and wrote up three pages of notes about a possible 2nd book, and I remained quite satisfied with what I wrote. It is fiction, by the way, and something that will undoubtedly be infinitely easier to write than The Stained Glass Kaleidoscope has been (although I have certainly enjoyed writing it as well). The story, as I discovered, really was there, waiting for me. I have written up two possible sketches of future books through this method already.

5) Read a lot and write a lot. King does both. He reads an average of 80 books a year, and cranks out 1000 words a day. Of course, he gets to pursue the writing racket full-time. I have read 6 or 7 books already in 2010, which is not bad at all in my estimate. Especially considering my sister Alyssa is the real bookworm between us two siblings.

More to come...

2010-03-15T06:43:00.001-05:00

I know such talented people. I feel very fortunate.

www.djgdesign.com (Danny the Manny Gibson, the Designer)

www.ursulinedesign.com (Philip Cheaney, the Animator. This one is not working this morning... I will holler at Phil across the channels of e-mail.)

www.davidseume.com (David Seume, a KC-based singer-songwriter)

Enjoy the delicious fruits of their labor! :)

A Wrinkle in Time *****

2010-03-09T06:47:00.002-06:00

In grade school, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time was a book I saw everywhere. Either all of my classmates were reading it or it was in every issue of Weekly Reader or something along those lines. Either way, I assumed from the rainbow-winged creature on the cover that it was a book for My Little Pony lovers (i.e. girls) and not me. Twenty years later my friend Jennifer Harris (a girl) began talking about it every time I brought up C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy. Around this time, Steve and Michele Kawiecki bought L'Engle's Time Quintet series for Becki and I as a wedding present. This was a boomerang book. It just kept coming back at me no matter how many times I would hurl it away from myself.

Finally, convinced it was not merely a book for 4th grade girls, I sat down and read it. I knew I would just find it at my doorstep again some other day if I did not. As it turns out, it is a wonderful book. It is, above all other things, a theologically-minded science fiction book for children and adults alike. It is a meditation on freedom and, in particular, the freedom that exists within certain boundaries. Ah, paradox! Much as Lewis introduces his readers to worlds where Creation has never fallen in the Space Trilogy, L'Engle introduces readers to sinless worlds and, in the case of Camazotz, a world where human free will has been taken away altogether by some dark power. When pondering theodicy, people tend to ask "Why would God allow us to make sinful choices? Why could He not engineer the human heart in such a manner that it would simply be unable to sin against Him?" The response is always, "But then we would be robots and could never choose to love Him." This is the territory L'Engle takes the reader into, and it is a wonderful meditation on familial love, individuality, joy, and the mysteries of God.

I Hope You Have a Child Just Like You When You Grow Up

2010-02-27T13:35:00.001-06:00

When I was a wee one I used to "make deposits" behind the family rocking chair in the living room. In my pants, mind you, and not on the carpet. This story has followed me into my adult life and, as of today, in more way than one. Every parent occasionally tells his or her child, "I hope you have a child just like you when you grow up," and this is usually uttered in a menacing tone. In a way, this has been fulfilled today.

A few weeks ago Becki began to sniff everything in our living room, asking me questions like "Does this blanket smell like cat? I think this blanket smells like cat." What does cat smell like? I wondered. In the blink of an eye, Becki would throw the blanket or whatever smelled like cat into the washing machine, and suddenly she was like a cat when it covers one of its deposits in a litter pan to blunt the smell of urine or feces.

But I could not figure out what she meant when she said it smelled "like cat." Cats bathe themselves, after all, while dogs tend to smell like old wet mops. I like dogs, but I have always appreciated that people could come to our house and remark, "It smells nothing like cats in here even though you have five of them! Zounds!" If anything is going to smell "like cat," I suspect five cats might be capable of generating said smell. Were they so motivated, they might even be inclined to release a certain Eau 'd Chat into the retail perfume business.

I digress. As usual. As the weeks went by, I began to understand what Becki meant, but I could not for the life of me figure out why the living room smelled "like cat." She had washed every blanket in the house, and she had even cleaned the suede couch and love-seat with the steam cleaner, so they could not possibly smell even vaguely catlike. She washed and sniffed and washed some more, much as a cat will wash and sniff and wash some more, and I simply sat there completely stupefied.

Until today.

In one corner of our living room, at the base of the curtains, behind the end table, obscured by the lodon green lamp, I found it. Oh, how I found it: A urine saturated newspaper ad from Aaron's with a headline that read "A Sweetheart of a Deal." There was nothing sweet about this deal. One or more of our cats had urinated on this poor paper so many times it had congealed. It was caked with cat urine. So were the curtains. Normally a rusty orange color, at the base of this curtain in particular it was a muddy brown, and it smelled... well, like cat. Apparently, the newspaper-curtain combo was too much for cats to resist.

I immediately took evasive action, scrubbing down the urine-stained baseboard, spraying the carpet, taking down the curtains so they could be washed, steam-cleaning the carpet, and laughing all the while.

When I was a child I sat behind the rocking chair to take care of my business, and now my cats have followed in my footsteps. I have no children at present, but I do have cats who have carried out my parents' cruelest wish: I hope you have a child just like you when you grow up.

Note: Does the kitty in the picture look guilty? That's Omelie, and Becki and I both think it was her. She peed on the armchair down by the fireplace in our basement. Too cute to prosecute.

Machine Gun Becki and Old Chad Greasyhands

2010-02-26T07:57:00.005-06:00

Last night after Becki went into the garage to be on her way to church handbell practice, I heard RACKA-RACKA-RACKA-RACKA-RACKA-RACKA-RACKA-RACKA-RACKA-RACKA!!! It was deafening, even with the door leading to the garage shut. She immediately came back into the house, her face white as a pair of brand new crew socks.

"It sounded like a machine gun was firing at me," she stammered. It sounded like members of Al Qaeda were waging Jihad in our garage even from inside the house. Perhaps they were.

"It's the garage door," she said. "When I pressed the button to open it, it sounded like someone was shooting at me."

I looked at the garage door and, unlike most garage door problems, this one was fairly obvious. The sliding metal track that the door glides along as it opens or closes was dangling from the ceiling, limp like a broken limb in need of a cast.

"Take my car," I said, throwing her my keys.

"But how will I get to work tomorrow?" She asked, a look of sheer panic strangling her face. You won't, Dollface, I thought.

Within seconds she was gone, and I was on that situation like a jockey riding a horse named Old Catalina. A nut and a bolt had rattled loose, no doubt from repeated raisings and lowerings of the door, and I managed to secure them both, reattach the track to its proper resting place parallel to the ceiling, and tighten said nut and bolt to a satisfactory degree.

My hands were covered in grease.

It reminded me of a dream I had during my sophomore year of college at Missouri State University. I dreamed there was a bicycle obstructing my dorm room door and I could not go through it. In my dream I fiddled with that bicycle like a fiddler on the roof, and it never sang for me - not even one bit. I awoke the next morning and found my roommate staring at me.

"You were messing with my bike at 3:00 a.m," he said. "Just sitting there, moving the pedals with your hands." Indeed, there was a bicycle in our room in an upright position on a bike chock, standing freely between our two wardrobes.

"I did dream about a bike last night," I said. "But I doubt I was actually messing with yours." He shook his head and went back to sleep. Minutes later I stepped into the shower and, as I began to pour shampoo into my hand I looked at it and realized it was covered in black bicycle grease. These dirty hands...

I had indeed attempted to go for a midnight ride.

Grease does not wash off easily, Dear Reader. I washed and washed and only managed to get all of the grease from the garage door track off of my hands this morning. The garage door opened like a charm after I intervened, by the way, proving that I am not entirely incompetent in matters of home repair. Granted, I did manage to leave several 4" nails jutting out of our front porch this fall in an attempt to repair two broken steps, but my friend Brandon undid all of my damage when he succeeded where I could not.

That's beside the point though. From here on out, I will keep my eyes peeled for more opportunities to save Becki from machine gun garage doors, and whenever I manage to fix something I will wear the evidence on my hands as proof to the world of my prowess as an amateur repairman in training.

"The Glass Castle" by Jeannette Walls *****

2010-02-25T06:45:00.006-06:00

In Stephen King's On Writing, he talks about a particular piece of poor writing he once read that acted as something like a small pox vaccine for him. The writer repeatedly used the word "zestful" to describe a variety of things, and as a result his writing has been immune to the word "zestful" ever since. I doubt he will ever use the word.

Just as writers can be shaped by bad writing, I cannot help but think that in the case of Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle, people can become immunized to bad living by being exposed to a lifetime of it. Like Susanna Sonnenberg's memoir Her Last Death, The Glass Castle is a book that strongly favors the "nurture" argument in the age old nature vs. nurture debate. We find the author defining herself in opposition to her upbringing, which is compelling literature even if it was the pits for the author to endure.

In the beginning of the book we find the author grown up, running into her mother as she is digging through a dumpster. Her parents are homeless, and she lives on Park Avenue in New York City. At least she did then. Her parents chose their path and were happy with it, at least insofar as one can be happy living on the streets. They were not always homeless. When she grew up, her family bounced from house to house, town to town, like a pinball. Each house was uniquely run down. Her father was an alcoholic, her mother an artist repelled by undignified notion of a job. For food, the author and her three siblings found themselves digging through the trash at school. At home, they threw their trash into a giant pit they dug in their own backyard because they could not afford to have the city pick up their trash. When the Walls children grew up enough to fly the coop, they did, and they made lives for themselves despite the fact that their own parents could not make heads or tails of their achievements. I cannot help but think of Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint art, in which he creates his art while being physically restrained in some way. The resulting art is the product of that strain, and that desire to overcome it.

With regard to the author's upbringing, it probably sounds like Hell on Earth, and I suppose it was. But there is also a certain charm, a certain absurdity about it all that even the author seems to recognize. She has written a gem of a book. It is funny and goes down easy despite its often dark subject matter. She manages to transform something that could have read as a pitch black memoir into something of a magnetic curiosity, and it makes for rapturous reading. I cannot recommend it enough.

I Will Have to Hurt the Academy If 'The Hurt Locker' Wins Best Picture

2010-02-21T19:44:00.009-06:00

If The Hurt Locker wins Best Picture in 2010, I will eat cat litter. I seriously do not understand how it can contend with the likes of Inglourious Basterds, Up, Avatar, or District 9, all of which are fine films in their own right. People say Avatar's story is a caricature, a paint-by-numbers operation, Dances with Wolves in space, but I would rather see Kevin Costner in an astronaut suit chasing interstellar buffalo than spend two more hours in Iraq.

Why do we need another film about Iraq? Even more, why this particular film? What makes it noteworthy? When Oliver Stone's World Trade Center came out only a few years after 9/11, the critics soiled their shorts over it, and I thought Stone was positively loony. Same thing with the documentary Flight '93. As Americans, we have heard about Afghanistan, Iraq, Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, conflict in the Middle East, oil, and the plight of the twin towers so much that we have developed an aversion to all things related to them. We are sponges and we have been saturated. We cannot hold anymore, or at least I cannot. It is like when I was a child and I ate too many sausages at a Baptist Prayer Breakfast and got sick, and was unable to eat sausage again for over ten years. I have a taste aversion to it all.

My wife Becki expressed as much when she reacted to James Cameron's Avatar, noting that the conflict between the Americans and the Na'vi, the indigenous population of the planet Pandora, was too reminiscent of the American conflict with the Middle East. It was a caricature of the way we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.

All of this being said, I am not sure whether or not The Hurt Locker is a good film or not. I watched it and found it to be suspenseful, its protagonist complex and enigmatic. But ultimately what I saw was the six o'clock news as it has been every day since 9/11. I know that is not what the film purports to document, but that is how my mind categorized it. File under Bush. File under Iraq War. File under "Things I Am Sick of Hearing About."

What am I supposed to take away from this film as a civilian who has never aspired to be a soldier? Even more, as a person who never supported America's preemptive strike on Iraq in the first place? I cannot think of a single thing.

This is essentially a film about a man who defuses IED's for a living. His job is utterly unique in the universe, and it would not exist if wars were not fought in the first place. Whether it is authentic in its portrayal of this man and his job is really of no consequence to me, as I do not support the war that necessitated this job in the first place. It makes it difficult then, for me to "support" the film.

Like other Americans I know, including my wife, I have seen too much footage of Iraq over the course of the past seven years, and it is difficult to distinguish between news and art, and perhaps that is the point. But for me, it is not a point that needs to be made. Just as I had seen enough of the O.J. Simpson murder trial long before it ended, I have seen enough of Iraq to never make me want to vacation there.

My parents have been reaching out to international students for years at their church, and they have become friends with a variety of Middle Easterners, and they have all been remarkably kind and goodhearted. Movies like The Hurt Locker have a way of reminding us that the Middle East is a hotbed of hostility, and I fail to see how that is helpful in our present political climate. When I think of the people my parents work with I am reminded that the media's portrayal of the Middle East is myopic. There is no room for these wonderful people in the media's portrait of Iraq or Afghanistan, and as a result the American people are shone only part of the picture. Why make yet another movie that portrays Iraqis in a largely one-dimensional manner? It just does not make sense to me.

Sorry kids, but I hope The Hurt Locker is hurt badly enough that it cannot hobble to podium to accept an award. Especially one for Best Picture. For that honor, I cast my vote for Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.

Little Deaths

2010-02-15T06:40:00.010-06:00

The Apostle Paul told us that the most excellent way was love, but for many people love is something of a specter, a slippery abstraction that means everything and nothing all at once. It is a black hole of a word, and millions of people have been sucked into it, the very light at the core of their beings pulled into its singularity. In American pop culture, love is a feeling, a flash of euphoria, a biochemical phenomenon that leads to bliss and then, as with the praying mantis who cannibalizes her mate during sex, a death of sorts.

My conclusion: Love is not simply a feeling. It can manifest itself in the form of feelings, but as C.S. Lewis contends in Mere Christianity, "Love as distinct from 'being in love' - is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God." Not exactly the stuff of Sex and the City, clearly. No butterflies flutter when we choose to love our spouses when they are as prickly as porcupines or hedgehogs - when they are at their most unlovable. If anything, butterflies fly away at those moments and we are left instead with something like the plague of birds that descends upon Bodega Bay in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. But we choose to love our spouses despite the way we feel, and we are better for it, and they are better for it too.

In the case of the sacrificial love of Christ, love was indeed an act of the will, and in particular the will of God, which was also His own will. For Christ, death on a cross was an act in which that cruel instrument of death pointed to life for all of us, and He embraced that life for us even though it meant death for Him. In the example of Christ, love is an act of the will, a hoped-for goodness seen even while it remains unseen.

My Dad once taught me something priceless about love, and I have carried it with me ever since. As a pastor he counsels many married couples, and he once talked of a man who referred to his wife affectionately as his ball and chain. I am free to think of my wife as my ball and chain, but because she is a woman with needs and wants and not a cumbersome object shackled to my ankle, it clearly does not benefit her or me if I think of her that way. For my Dad, loving my Mom is something he chooses to do on a daily basis. He illustrated this idea by talking about unloading the dishwasher, which is one of his least favorite activities in the world. He said sometimes he unloads the dishwasher for my Mom because, at the time, he possesses a genuine, heartfelt affection for her. Other times, he unloads it not because a feeling motivates him to do it, but because he knows in his heart and mind that she will benefit from this act. Still other times he does it out of dutiful obligation. Finally, laughingly, sometimes he unloads the dishwasher because he does not want her to yell at him for being a slouch.

I think for us fallen creatures who are made in the image of God, love is all of those things, and when we realize it is ultimately always an act of choice, of the will, we are free to choose sacrificial love. We can do this for friends, family members, even our enemies. We may only die little deaths, unloading the dishwasher when we least want to, but our little deaths will always point to Christ's sacrificial death, which He chose, and which ultimately brought us life.

A Recess from Excess

2010-02-14T17:25:00.011-06:00

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, my wife's hometown, a place called the Comet Café offers a bottomless supply of bacon to its patrons every Sunday night. Bacon is my Kryptonite, my Achilles Heel, if you will. In my humble opinion then, observing Lent in America is something like choosing to refrain from eating bacon at the Comet Café when it is heaped in front of you like a veritable mountain of meat, just waiting to be scaled. It is an exercise of the will not to indulge in excess precisely when excess is most present, and Lent is an exercise that spans not merely a matter of hours on a Sunday evening, but 40 consecutive days.

In America, excess is ever-present. Restaurants serve large drinks that might easily be confused with portable swimming pools. Cable television offers hundreds of channels to subscribers, heaping image upon image in the landfill of the mind. Technologically advanced phones purport to do everything but save our souls, and the fine folks at Apple are sure to engineer an application to that end for the iPhone. It is only a matter of time.

On a personal note, my iTunes library is currently stocked with enough songs, sermons, and audio-book files that it would take 77.4 days to cycle through them all. While I consider myself a student of all of these things and my peers boast comparably bloated libraries, I have a feeling that if the Great Physician were to conduct an audit of my computer and my heart alike, He might see sickness where I see bounty. In fact, He might diagnose most of us with feverish materialism and recommend that we take a recess from excess. He might prescribe a daily regiment of self-denial, and tell us to call Him every morning for follow-up.

The call to Christ-like self-denial is one we would rather not answer. "Wrong number," we tell God, if we muster up the willpower to pick up the phone at all. We think we are failures if we are unable to yield ourselves to God all at once, and cannot imagine that He may revel in each step we take toward Him, no matter how small. It may be that self-denial begins, as Bill Murray's character in What About Bob? says, with "baby steps."

In his book The Life You've Always Wanted, pastor and author John Ortberg writes about spiritual disciplines and, in particular, the training process that informs such disciplines. It is not enough, he explains, for a person to simply wake up one morning and decide to run a marathon. A substantial amount of training is required to condition the body and develop adequate stamina and resolve. So it is with our spiritual lives as well. With the help of God, we practice flexing the muscles that enable us to say no to those things that are Kryptonite for us, and the more we practice, the more we are able to say no and actually mean it.

Perhaps this year, Lent will be a season for us to practice saying no to the excess of the world and yes to excessive love of the Lord. Perhaps we will learn to think of hunger not as a problem to be remedied by a sizable slab of bacon, but as a state of emptiness in which we must remember our spiritual emptiness and our need to be filled by the Bread of Life. Perhaps we will take baby steps toward God, and He will rejoice in us. Even the climb up a mountain of meat or a butte of bacon begins with a single step.

Her Last Death ***1/2 (out of 5)

2010-02-10T15:32:00.005-06:00

Memoirs are ultimately only as good as the lives of their writers. I am halfway into Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle, and it is so effortless, so compelling, so funny, and so shocking it makes me jealous. I do not wish I could live the author's life, mind you - I simply wish I could write such a book myself.

With Susanna Sonnenberg's memoir Her Last Death, the reader experiences a mix of things. Here we have a unique story of a girl who is raised by a mother who whirls through cocaine and lies and lovers with the force of a Kansas tornado. The most shocking of her lies? That she has cancer, a ploy to get closer to her children. The book starts out with the author finding out that her mother has been in a horrible crash in Barbados, and the reader is left to wonder if the crash is a fabrication. The author chooses not to visit her mother on her deathbed, and this sets the tone for the book and sets the story in motion.

Her Last Death is the story of the author's relationship with her mother, her sister, a steady succession of lovers and, finally, the man she eventually marries and the children she has with him. It is shocking and serious in tone, with no site of a funny bone for miles. Where The Glass Castle has wit to make its more shocking elements more buoyant, Her Last Death is humorless but poetic in its prose.

If anything, this book is an argument in favor of nurture in the old nature versus nurture debate. Despite seeing her mother's excesses, she follows in her mother's footsteps in the way she migrates from one lover to another as if she is trying on a pair of shoes. She passes judgment on her mother, but then goes on to act like a more conscientious version of her. How can she act otherwise when this is all she has known?

Sonnenberg's life is a messy one, later including an abortion when her husband emphatically rejects fatherhood before accepting it a mere matter of months later. The author herself with angst that the aborted baby would have come to term two months after her husband changed his mind. This part of the book infuriated me, as she and her husband either wanted to have the baby or abort it. Putting the child up for adoption was out of the question for them. There was no consideration whatsoever for the child.

Sonnenberg's writing is poetic, heartfelt, and a triumph in the way it conveys her story. One thing I noticed in particular, and Sonnenberg notes this herself: She grew up so fast, experienced adult things at such a young age, found herself in such serious situations so young, and all of this because of her mother's influence more than anything else. It is as though she never had a proper childhood, never got to laugh at things children laugh at. Some books hint at a spiritual reality beyond the frame of the written page, and this one does not. It is void of God, void of anything beyond the reality of the moment, and this is no doubt because the moment is always so urgent for Sonnenberg. It demands her attention. But it is also sad to me that she is left to sort through her life with eyes that she largely inherited from her mother. She is damaged, but hopeful as she has two children of her own, bringing them into a world where she resolves to be a mother unlike her own.

In Limbo

2010-02-10T15:12:00.003-06:00

Having worked on this book for over two years now, I find that I feel a bit like an astronaut might feel while floating away from his spacecraft into the starry blackness of space, cut loose, untethered.

I work on a piece and think it is communicating something worthwhile, and then my wife reads it and says "That's one of your weaker essays... and it's long." This makes me check the readings on my spacesuit. Am I getting enough oxygen? Why does my inner robot tell me what I have written is good when my wife's comments seem to directly contradict this? Are my instruments malfunctioning?

Are my wife's instruments malfunctioning? Or are they functioning within the parameters she has specified for her own operations? That is to say, is she simply uninterested in what I have written because she finds the subject matter itself uninteresting? Does her criticism matter in the sense that I need to make adjustments based on her suggestions, or do I take it in passing as a "Note to Self." As in, "Note to Self: Watch out for Potholes When Driving." On the other hand, I wonder if she is simply inexperienced in the art of reading essays? In my experience with her, she almost never reads essay-driven works, never makes it through meditative pieces that are not propelled by narrative.

I begin to wonder if I am getting space madness. Ultimately, I decided to keep on writing and let critics be critics. Not everyone will understand. If five people like my essays, I suppose I could be happy with that. "Space," as the tagline for the indie-film The American Astronaut says, "is a lonely town." I plow onward as best I can, using whatever light I have.

My essays probably are too long, but I kind of do not care. I like singer/songwriter Mark Kozelek, who makes no bones about recording a 14-minute dirge that plods along like a horse trapped in a tarpit in January. He does things on his own terms. It is okay to create on your own terms, is it not?

So my wife was bored with my essay. Perhaps I would be bored with it too if I were able to read it for the first time. Perhaps it does not matter, as I sought to give my best regardless of the outcome. Perhaps it is the outcome that matters. And the outcome is, I am floating through space, headed out of the Milky Way Galaxy, en route to intercept space junk and Elvis' ghost alike.

A Book Report: Where I Am in the Writing Process

2010-02-03T08:43:00.003-06:00

I think the final, official, full-length title of my book (at least if I am allowed to dictate such things myself) will be:

The Stained Glass Kaleidoscope: Essays at Play in the Churchyard of the Mind

By Chad Thomas Johnston

I am off work Friday and have through Sunday to work on writing while Becki is away at a retreat with women from church. I am looking forward to pounding away at the keys. I still have segments to work on in the following long-form essays:

The Simplicity Complex
Living in the Desert of What We Deserve
Minds and Mops: Custodians of Creativity
Looking the Trojan Gift Horse in the Mouth

Also, the following short-form essays still need work:

The Doghouse Is a Wonderful Place to Repent
Revelatory Rivers
Fireflies of Laughter in a Jar

I would say the revision process as a whole is probably over 75% complete, which is a good thing. I hope to be able to give this to my editor friends Jennifer and Jillian sometime around March's end or thereabouts. I am doing my best to take my time, maintain my sanity, be a good husband and worker at my day-job, etc. on top of the book work. The process is fun, and at times maddening. But overall I love it. I hope it ends up being worth all this work! If nothing else I will have achieved what I set out to do, and at least my family will be able to enjoy it.

Corresponding with Anne Rice, My Impression of LOST, etc.

2010-01-28T13:17:00.006-06:00

Last week I reworked the introduction to the long-form essay "Hell Knoweth No Flame-Retardant Souls: A Devil of a Good Time at the Cinema" for the book, and now it is as smooth as Amish butter, and hopefully as delicious.

This week I also wrote author Anne Rice (Interview With the Vampire) and she replied to me five or six times, much to my amazement and childlike enthusiasm. Like a 7-year-old I was tempted to stand on my head while consuming Cheetohs and say to her via my webcam, "See what I can do? Lookit me!!!" But alas, I did nothing of the sort. She probably gets enough e-mails from aspiring authors like me all the time as it is. The temptation continued. "Please pay attention to me, Anne! I promise I am worth your time! I can even juggle an orange!" And so it goes. But she was very kind, and I thank her for her kind words. She even wished me the best in my writing. I wish I could adopt her as an Aunt or something. Can I, Mom and Dad?

Her memoir, Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession, is a five-star read. She beautifully describes how she came to find insights about life and God in her childhood, and specifically before she could read. She is candid about her limitations, her progression from faithful Catholic to seeker whose questions led her to find answers outside of the church, and finally back to Jesus Christ in a very personal way. It is a beautiful memoir, intimately rendered, and the work of someone who clearly wants to satisfy the public's curiosity about how an author might go from writing about vampires who feed on the blood of others to writing about the One who shed His own blood freely for the sins of humanity.

Now I am reading three books. I am finally reading for real. It is nice to learn a thing or two about writing from reading. Those three books include Susanna Sonnenberg's Her Last Death, Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, and Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle. Two crazy memoirs and a book about the life of Christ as a child.

In other news, my friend Danny and I regularly exchange e-mails, and most recently we bantered about how "high-octane" LOST is. There is nary a moment in LOST where drama is absent. In e-mail I wrote my impression of a script from an episode of LOST, and Danny deemed it worthy of publication here. I have revised it a bit since my initial write-up. For your perusal and amusement:

(From a lost LOST episode, 2010)

Sawyer stumbles into the underground bunker where the Dharma Initiative once maintained a respectable delicatessen. Jack is making Kate a grilled cheese sandwich with gruyere on rye. It is 11:57 a.m. Sawyer grabs the sandwich out of Jack's hand.

Jack: D*mm*t Sawyer, I made that GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICH for Kate!

Sawyer: You think you got the market cornered on grilled cheese, Doc? Where I come from, a sandwich don't belong to no one 'less it's in his gullet. Stand down, Patch Adams.

Kate: Jack! Sawyer! Stop it! Just me give me my grilled cheese. I need the energy so I can flee from the authorities and all of you, even though I really cannot go anywhere since we are trapped on an island that is apparently a figment of God's imagination.

Locke: The grilled cheese sandwich is a map of the island. LOOK!

Michael: WALT!!! W-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-ALT!!!

Walt's Ghost: It's not me, Dad. It's just a grilled cheese sandwich that happens to strongly resemble me. And please, stop yelling. You yell so much we lost 17% of our viewership during Season 1. When you died in Season 4, people cheered. People cheered, Dad.

Sayid: I will torture that sandwich and EXTRACT THE TRUTH FROM IT!!!

Ben: No Sayid, don't do it. It's Kate's. Unless she wants to give it to me. And she does want to give it to me. Because I know about her past. And I will tell the authorities where she is after I travel to America via submarine and kill 12-15 of Charles Widmore's employees.

Sun: NO!!! NO BEN!!! Give Kate her sandwich... It's... it's all she's got left. And she's all I've got since my husband disappeared. I'm from Korea.

Claire: I think I deserve the sandwich since my last name is Littleton, a not-so-thinly-veiled reference to the town in which the Columbine killings occurred.

Baby Aaron: Gugghh. Sammich.

Charlie: GIVE ME THE SANDWICH! It has HEROIN in it!!! Frodo! Come quickly!

Jin: Sun! I am right HERE!!! 37 YEARS IN THE PAST, BUT SEEING YOU AND THE SANDWICH THROUGH A VORTEX!!! I am so hungry, and I am Korean too!

Charles Widmore: I planted a fake sandwich on the bottom of the Atlantic so no one would know what happened to the real sandwich.

Analucia: I know I was only on the show for about five episodes, but I think that entitles me to a sandwich.

Jacob: Better that you take the sandwich than I, Kate. Because I live in a cabin and am invisible until the last episode of Season 5, and I apparently have no life whatsoever. A sandwich that good would be wasted on me.

Hurley takes the sandwich from Sawyer.

Hurley: *GULP!* (Swallows sandwich and tub of Ranch dressing. Builds monument to Libby, his dead girlfriend, out of empty Ranch dressing tubs.)

Writing Update: Steinbeck, Rice, Walls, and District 9

2010-01-25T06:52:00.011-06:00

I have a writing vacation scheduled for the weekend of Feb. 5-7, as Becki will be at an American Baptist Women's conference. I am taking Friday the 5th off so I can pound away at the keys and spend my day in a state of mental constipation. Ha! I find that bigger blocks of time are helpful for me when it comes to writing, as I feel less constrained and better able to dig into the writing trenches.

All good writers read, as everyone knows. And I have been reading something fierce. I just finished John Steinbeck's East of Eden (*****) and was most proud of sailing through a 600-page book without any snags of setbacks of any kind. It was a superb book, paralleling the Cain and Abel story in Genesis, and sprawling this way and that with vignettes that were sometimes genealogical offshoots and other times merely minor character studies. Steinbeck zeroes in on the Hebrew word timshel, which informs the Cain and Abel story. When sin crouches at Cain's door, timshel -thou mayest - overcome it. There is something very existential about the choice-making aspect of this. You are free to choose, say Moses and Steinbeck alike. A wonderful book from an American legend.

On audiobook I have been listening to Anne Rice's Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession, which tells the tale of Rice's return to faith after her years as an atheist and writer of vampire stories and erotica alike. It is a real delight thus far, although Rice herself is not the narrator. I am about 1/3rd of the way through the book.

Yesterday I began reading Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle and am about 40 pages into it. The opening line kills: "I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster." Her Mom, as it turns out, is a bum, and one that has chosen to be one because of her values. The book is by turns shocking and hilarious so far, and I cannot wait to read more.

Becki and I saw District 9 this weekend, and it blew us away. ***** all the way. Between Avatar, Moon, and District 9, 2009 was a good year for science-fiction. I am surprised my Dad has not had kittens yet. Then again, maybe he has and I simply do not know about it.

Great inspiration for writing if you ask me! I finished one short-form essay - "Reveille" - this month and repaired minor sections of a host of others. I plan to delve deep on the remaining long-form essays on my vacation. I am a little nervous, as it promises to be something of a daunting task. I need some encouragement!

Sam Rockwell Rocks Well in "Moon"

2010-01-22T08:26:00.002-06:00

Moon ***** (out of 5)

Sci-fi fans know suffering. My Dad loves sci-fi, and I cannot even tell you how many bad sci-fi films he has endured in hopes of finding a new favorite, a new classic. I think he has come to enjoy even the bad ones because they celebrate his favorite genre, even if they only do it poorly.

Well, here's some news for my Dad and for sci-fi fans everywhere. "Moon" with Sam Rockwell (It really is a solo performance) is a genre masterpiece. My co-worker Bill remarked that he thought it would be standard sci-fi fare about "a guy alone in space who goes crazy," and my buddy Brandon commented that the robot (played to perfection by Kevin Spacey) would probably turn out to be like Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I feared it would be a variation on Solaris. It was none of these things, fortunately.

It's about a man who has signed a 3-year contract to live on the moon and help harvest helium as an energy source for the Earth, and I will say nothing beyond that because anything else would introduce a spoiler or two. See it for yourself and be in awe of the score, the acting, the plot, and the celebration of a genre that seldom sees the glory it deserves.

My Favorite Films of 2000-2009

2010-01-20T06:47:00.007-06:00

These are my Top 50 films of 2000-2009 in alphabetical order. These are the films that tickled my brain, warmed the cockles of my heart, made me laugh, almost made me cry (I apparently have no tear ducts), made my heart pound with terror, shocked me, branded my brain for life as with a cattle prod, etc. Not all of them are films for Mom and Dad or your husband or your wife or your kids or your friends or even your pets. Some of them would be difficult to justify enjoying or finding worthy of inclusion on this list, and yet here they are. This is not a "Best Films of 2000-2009" list. This is a list of my favorite films of the decade, so shame on you for snubbing your nose at me for including Legally Blonde. Just as pop music occasionally yields a gem, so does mainstream Hollywood. I joke, and yet I am serious. Here they are, alphabetically.

Amelie

As imaginative a love story as it is colorful, I had the privilege of seeing this on the big screen at the opening of the Moxie in Springfield, MO.

Amores Perros

Tarantino must have been jealous when this came out, as this is most definitely the best film he never made (and he probably did not make it because, as far as I know, he does not speak Spanish).

Bubble

Static, meditative, modestly scaled, and minimalistic through and through, a gem to behold and contemplate complete with a score consisting solely of Robert Pollard (Guided by Voices) strumming his guitar.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

The first Chinese wuxia film to make a splash in the American mainstream, and the first one I ever saw. This, along with the summer I spent in the former Soviet Union, opened my eyes to the world beyond the borders of America.

Dear Zachary

If documentaries get more powerful than this, please let me know. An utterly devastating film that explores the depths of human evil and simultaneously celebrates loving and being loved.

Dogville

Lars von Trier gives us a 3-hour film that is essentially a play on a flat, black stage with chalk outlines for houses and figures, a Winnie-the-Pooh narrator, and a morality tale about human depravity. My second favorite film of all time.

Donnie Darko

Who knows what the ending of this film really means, and who cares? It may have been an accident, but this somehow works, and gloriously. A film that deserves to be a cult film.

Enchanted

Yeah, I know. It's Disney. But it is a new direction for fairy tales, and it is about time someone went there. Amy Adams is perfection.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

A love story that is as mind-bending and beautifully complicated as so many love stories actually are, and with the sort of creativity that crackles and fizzes like soda in a glass.

Frozen River

This film went straight to my heart - nay, my soul - and took up residence there. No small feat.

Gangs of New York

People say does not soar to the same artistic heights as Taxi Driver or Goodfellas, but I think it ranks among Martin Scorsese's best work, warts and all. It is raw and dirty and beautifully rendered, and does not disappoint this viewer. I do think Cameron Diaz was miscast, but I can live with flaws in a film.

Garden State

Time in a bottle for me: The year was 2004. After living in a weird, inside-out world for four years or so without any proper explanation, I was diagnosed with OCD. Suddenly, the world was new and all things were charged with potential. A flawed but lovely, heartfelt film that captured the indie-rock Zeitgeist and also captured what was happening in my own heart.

Ghost World

I admit. I did not "get this" at first. And then I got it. And then I loved it.

Head-On

There are films, and there are FILMS. This one is a FILM. Mom and Dad, do not bother. This one is not for you. But Alyssa and I loved it.

George Washington

Absolutely effortless and totally transcendent, a film that takes to the silver screen like a duck to water, and one that blew over me like a breeze at the end of a dark, Autumn day despite its dramatic heaviness.

Gran Torino

I admit I did not appreciate Clint Eastwood until I saw this film. I watched this twice in one day and suddenly found myself a convert.

Grindhouse: Double Feature

Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez are two directors who remember that film and fun go together like peanut butter and jelly - peanut butter and jelly with zombies and killer car chases, that is. A celebration of cinema through and through.

Grizzly Man

Alongside P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood and Punch-Drunk Love, my favorite film, and my introduction to maestro Werner Herzog.

Henry Poole is Here

Such a small, unassuming film with such a big heart and such beautiful spiritual searching. Like Frozen River, this one lives in your heart well beyond the roll of the credits.

Hero

Recalling the multiple-perspectives of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, and building on director Zhang Yimou's visually sumptuous filmic past, Hero is definitive Chinese eye candy. I have probably seen this 30 times.

High Fidelity

The best viewing experience I have ever had in the theater. I sat down to a film by Stephen Frears based on a novel by Nick Hornby and found that they both knew me and every 20-something male I knew. A thoughtful film about life's intersection with pop culture, and relationships in a fallen world.

I’m Not There

I owe my love of Bob Dylan to Danny J. Gibson, who introduced me to his works. I owe my love of director Todd Haynes to his film Safe, which I discovered by accident on a shelf at the Lawrence library. Put Dylan and Haynes together and "viola," as they say.

Inglourious Basterds

Oh Tarantino, you can do no wrong in my eyes. This is how everyone wished WWII would have ended. That is, if it could not have been prevented altogether.

Inland Empire

Forget structure, forget waking life as you know it, and enter Lynch's ultimate nightmare. An epic digital horror film shot in Poland without a shooting script, and the sort of film you are likely to either think of as total nonsense or total brilliance.

Italian for Beginners

Sweet, small, and real. And Danish, despite its title.

Kill Bill, Vol. 1 & 2

The Spaghetti Western collides with Kung-Fu cinema, and the result is brilliance across the board. My "colleagues" in film school hated Tarantino, but I imagine Uma Thurman could take them all down with one roundhouse kick to the face.

Legally Blonde

It is difficult to say why I like this film so much. I only know that I have watched it so many times it must be a favorite of mine, and it is.

Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Twelve hours of your life you will never get back, and twelve hours you would never want to give back. Unless you are Bryan Brown, in which case you are doomed. I was not a full-fledged believer in Tolkien until I had seen these with my family multiple times. See the extended versions, please.

Lost in Translation

Like a subtle tea that refreshes as it becomes an acquired taste. This is a beautiful and somewhat formless meditation on alienation and dislocation, but without all the paranoia of say, Radiohead's OK Computer.

Minority Report

When this came out all I heard was "Blah blah blah, Spielberg has made better... flawed... Tom Cruise... annoying." Yeah, whatever. I love this film and find it to be one of the best future-looking films ever made. I can do without Blade Runner despite its classic status. I would not want to do without this one.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Pure joy.

Mister Lonely

I hated Julien Donkey-Boy, so when this film came out I was predisposed to dislike it. Harmony Korine's work, in my estimate, was less of an acquired taste than a foul one that deserved to be spat out. This is as surreal and interesting as independent films get, complete with Werner Herzog cameo, skydiving nuns, and a Michael Jackson impersonator, among other things.

Monsters, Inc.

I saw this on the flight to Belarus in June of 2002, and I was smitten. I loved Toy Story with all my heart, and this was just further proof that Pixar was no one-hit wonder, no one-trick pony.

Palindromes

Note: This film is not for the faint of heart. It is quite disturbing, and I recognize that. For me, however, a film that disturbs is a film that unsettles all of the dust that has accumulated, that unseats you from your comfortable armchair. I love this film, and that is the long and short of it. It lodged in my mind like a splinter and fascinated me for a long time. See Ebert's review at the link above. I think he summarizes things well.

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

This film was not marketed to American audiences because film executives thought the aberrant sexuality depicted in it would disturb more than entertain. It was a huge box office success abroad, and for good reason. It is an excellent film, and one that is certainly not for everyone. But it is truly intoxicating experience as far as films go, and it is more like a dark fairy tale than anything else. It is about the realm of the senses and, in particular, the sense of smell.

Punch-Drunk Love

This is not "Billy Madison" part two; do not expect it to be. It was not made by Sandler and his usual team of writers. It was made by P.T. Anderson, and it is a dreamlike meditation on the loveless and the unlovable, and it is a work of creative genius.

Rivers and Tides

A documentary about an artist who creates art from nature, in nature, and whose creations are destroyed by (you guessed it) nature.

The Road Home

Zhang Yimou is one of my filmic heroes, and this film is one of the big reasons why. A memorial to the roads we walk that become meaningful simply because we have walked them with those we love. Zhang Ziyi is young in this, and memorable as well.

Shaolin Soccer

Kung-Fu + Soccer + Hong Kong comedian Stephen Chow as writer, director, and actor = Ha!

Sin City

I did not want to like this because I thought it would be filth for filth's sake, frankly. But after watching it I had dreams about it, and then more dreams, and then I decided I liked it, and then I bought the Director's Cut of it. It has been a marvel to me ever since.

The Son

A perfect film. One that you must bear with at times, but one that is ultimately powerful and unrelenting in its message. We should all thank France for delivering such a delicious slice of directorial prowess and redemption.

Sorry, Haters

I have long despised overtly topical films, and especially those that pretend we actually want to hear more about Iraq and 9/11 than we already have/do on the news. This is one of a few post-9/11 films to blow my mind. The critics were divided about it, and rightly so. It is a powderkeg that is likely to scatter viewers in all directions.

Spider-Man 2

As a kid I saw Superman, and as a teen I saw the Batman movies, and then this came along. With all due apologies to all other superheroes, this is my pick for all-time best comic book-based film. It has heart, heat, heft, heroics, and hilarity. Spider-Man for President in 2012.

Spirited Away

Leave it to Hayao Miyazake to make a case for Japanese animation. I was ready to write off anime as a category of films best left to the nerds, but the man proved me wrong. This and Princess Mononoke made it impossible for me to dismiss this genre without hitting myself on the doorknob on the way out.

The Devil’s Backbone

Yes, I know Guillermo del Toro also directed Pan's Labyrinth, and yes, it was a solid enough film. But I am more inclined to champion this film for its restraint, its sheer creepiness, and perhaps (ultimately) simply because there was so much hype around Pan's Labyrinth that, by the time I saw it, I saw only the hype and not the film itself. I saw this one without any film over my eyes. Plus, horror films are so often brainless gimmicks designed to produce cheap scares. This one does nothing of the sort.

The Machinist

Perhaps I liked this so much simply because Christian Bale poured so much of his heart, his soul, and his body weight into this movie. A skeletal figure onscreen, Bale steals the show, if only because we cannot look away from the horror we are beholding.

The Prize-Winner of Defiance, Ohio

I saw this at Hollywood Video, rented it, and two hours later found myself overjoyed. It was an unlikely pick, I thought, as it came with no bells and whistles or Hollywood hype machinery. But it was wonderful for what it was, and it still is.

There Will Be Blood

P.T. Anderson = The Future of Film. My #1 film of the decade.

Touching the Void

I did not want to see this, and then I did, and it grabbed me by the throat and did not let go. Pure exhilaration.

Waitress

Oh Andy Griffith, you show-stealer you! Despite the fact that there are so many things about this film that I disagree with on principle, I cannot help but agree with its heart. It is a beautiful heart, and one that smells like so many different kinds of pies. A real gem, and also a real loss considering the murder of its director, Adrienne Shelly, shortly after its release.

Olympic Cat Puking

2010-01-08T08:26:00.007-06:00

Fact 1: Cats puke.

Fact 2: 5 cats puke 5 times as much as 1 cat.

Fact 3: We have 5 cats.

Fact 4: That's a lot of puke.

This morning as I descended the stairs to go to work I saw the aftermath of what was no doubt an Olympic feat. I feed our cats first thing in the morning, and they are usually terribly excited to eat.

Fact 5: Sometimes when cats are terribly excited to eat, they overeat.

Fact 6: When cats eat more than their stomachs can properly hold, they expel the contents thereof.

Upon descending the stairs I looked down and beheld a truly sporting puke that spanned 3 stairs. It must have been projectile vomit. There was enough food there to satisfy a blue whale for a few days. The kitties must have been extraordinarily hungry. I am not sure which one was responsible for this feat, but whoever it was deserves a gold medal.

Reflections on Timothy Keller's "Counterfeit Gods" (****)

2010-01-07T08:43:00.003-06:00

I finished reading Timothy Keller’s Counterfeit Gods (**** out of 5) this morning under my full-spectrum lamp and found it to be something like 177 mirrored-pages that called me to look at myself - in particular, to look inward - and discern what idols in my life take precedence over God. The primary thesis of the book is that idolatry is at the root of all sin, and this is why it is the 1st commandment God gives in Exodus.

Keller claims that the financial executives that killed themselves last year when the stock market plummeted did so because their idols had fallen, because what they valued most had suddenly fallen into disrepair and destruction. In writing this book, the economic recession of the past year becomes fertile ground for the discussion of our own idols, which he identifies (among others) as sex, money, and power – all things that a society is likely to turn to for replacement-transcendence in God's stead. While I initially perceived the book as being formulaic, I eventually came to see Keller’s ideas as being expertly crafted and ultimately very timely. To drive home his points he discusses relevant Old Testament passages and demonstrates how they ultimately relate to New Testament passages. The Jewish reader would find Keller’s approach interesting I am sure, as he presents a seamless fluidity between Old Testament ideas and their fulfillment in Christ and the New Testament. His language is plain and simple for the layperson, and yet it is probing and plumbs deep.

People have said Keller is the new C.S. Lewis, and after reading this and his apologetic volume The Reason for God, I am inclined to think that people who make this comparison have not actually read either Lewis or Keller. Keller offers a cerebral but clear approach to scripture that is ultimately personal, pragmatic, and respectful (a necessity when communicating in the post-modern era), while Lewis tended to dwell more in the abstract with the conceptual, the philosophical, and the academic. Even his fiction books are essentially dramatizations of theologically-based ideas. Both Keller and Lewis are worth reading for the post-modern Christian who is trying to find an anchor in a seemingly shore-less universe. I recommend this book as one man might recommend that another go to the doctor – it is like a check-up, and it is one that all of us would benefit undergoing. While sometimes I feel Keller's conclusions are unwarranted or overreaching, his thoughts are ultimately sound and thought-provoking.

It is especially interesting to me to read this book after just reading Neil Gaiman’s excellent American Gods, in which the gods of television and technology, among others, vie for the attention of the devoted masses against the tried and true deities of old. In a very personal way I have come to an interesting place in the past few months, and all of this seems relevant. The past few years I have tried to do as much as I possibly can with a 24-hour day; to write, to create, to devour culture so as to maintain a level of inspiration, etc. My friend Danny and I have a saying about this: We “eat the whole pizza.” Our appetites for knowledge and inspiration have been boundless like our appetites for pizza, so we have feasted at the banquet table of ideas like children with bottomless stomachs.

Having done this long enough, however, both of us have arrived at the conclusion that simplicity is ultimately better. We have realized that we have limitations and cannot be all things to all men all at once. We have to sleep, to rest, to live, to enjoy our spouses and our families, etc. Keller really gets at this in Counterfeit Gods, asserting that the Fall of Man prompted us to reject the notion that we have limitations. We cannot do everything all the time because we are not God; we have physical bodies that tire as we use ATP, brains that grow weary as neurotransmitters are depleted, and only so many hours and minutes in a day where we are awake, let alone away from our jobs. That being said, a life of unlimited banqueting seems on the surface to be in tune with the freedom that is found in Christ to celebrate the gift of life, to live loudly and joyfully, etc., but it is actually something that depletes life itself when that freedom is not limited in healthy ways.

I want to live more simply in 2010, to savor each bite of food I taste (as the characters in Lewis’ Perelandra did, enjoying only one piece of alien fruit at a time without the need to have more at the moment – having more is a way of trying to fill a hole that can only be filled with God), to enjoy the music I already have, to write as best I can when I can, and not at the expense of sanity or relationships. I think I will be better off for it. I was in the habit of making monthly mix CDs for friends, but I can no longer do that. It has become taxing, and I began this long before I got married, and I think it is wise to discontinue this practice in light of more important things that are now a part of my life. I still plan to get up at 6:00 each day and write, but if I do not crank out perfection I will not despair because my book is not my God. I have been writing it all along because I love life, my family, God, ideas, the very practice of writing, etc., and those things in themselves justify writing a book. So I will continue happily to sculpt my 100,000+ word beast until it reads the way I want it to, and I will do so without self-criticism, without despairing my limitations or faults, etc. if I can. There is great joy in all of this for me, and that makes it worthwhile.

The Year in Cultural Consumption and Digestion: Movies I Loved

2010-01-03T08:04:00.033-06:00

My favorite films I discovered in 2009:

1) Dear Zachary - One night when Becki was at a conference I sat down to watch an evening's worth of films in total solitude. I dialed this one up on Netflix, having heard it was a solid enough documentary. I had not counted on the fact that it would leave me in a daze afterward, unable to do anything at all. It was the only movie I watched that night, as it delivered something like a death blow to my system. It is as heartbreaking and terrible a tale as has ever been told, and it is true, which makes it even more heartbreaking and terrible. At the same time, the love of friends and family in the film outshines the darkness to some extent, lingering like the halo the sun leaves around the moon during a lunar eclipse. It is a chilling and beautiful film, and it should be seen by anyone who is human, and especially anyone who would deny that humanity is a fallen race.

2) Frozen River - This is a small-scaled film about small people with small lives and small ambitions, but its impact is disproportionately huge and ultimately transcendent. Melissa Leo's performance ranks among the best I have ever seen. It asks whether the end justifies the means, and ultimately the end becomes something else altogether when it finally arrives. We humans might return a lost wallet to the police because we have been programmed to do so, but other situations are more mysterious, more desperate, and less by-the-book. As beautifully transcendent and powerful a film as I have ever seen in my life. Watch this and be transported across the frozen river.

3) Gran Torino - Until this year I always thought Clint Eastwood belonged to my parents. Every once in awhile I would see Dad squint his eyes and look surly and mean, and then I would realize it was just Mom's chili speaking through him. But I was always reminded of Clint. This movie persuaded me that Clint Eastwood, in fact, belongs to everyone. I watched it twice in one day, as I was so impressed with Mr. Eastwood's acting and direction, and I was surprised by how touched I was by the whole thing. It truly moved me, and it has been on my mind ever since. All the best movies linger like this.

4) Inglourious Basterds - In my brief and later aborted attempt at earning a Ph.D. in film in graduate school, I met up with many people who said, "Oh, I hate Tarantino. He's a misogynist and a collage artist. What a rip-off." Clearly, it was so misogynistic of Tarantino to write such a ruthless role for Uma Thurman in the Kill Bill movies. Clearly. As for being a rip-off, he is a collage artist to be sure, but I always find that he takes old things and stews them in his directorial pot and produces a soup that is sure to tantalize taste buds Tarantino style. I have yet to be disappointed with his violent visions. Of course, the people in my program would have said the bat carried by the Bear Jew in this film was a phallic symbol. Sorry kids. Sometimes a bat is just a bat. Stop whining and enjoy this superb slow-burner. It's a revisionist WWII revenge fantasy that builds ever so slowly like a long fuse on an explosive powder-keg that ignites in the last half hour of the film. Boom.

5) Onibaba – The kind of film that splits your head right open and dazzles your brain with stunning visuals and demons to boot. This officially belongs in my list of Top 5 horror films of all-time now, and let me tell you, that list is a hard one to shake-up. It is haunting and strange and sensual (Cover your eyes!), especially for its time, and it employs feudal Japan as one of its characters in a beautiful, abstract way that Zhang Yimou would later invoke when he used rural China similarly in his 1987 debut, Red Sorghum. Movies do not get better than this.

6) Ink - Sometimes Hollywood's bloated budgets result in overcooked films that are not fit for consumption. Ink, on the other hand, was clearly made on a relatively small budget, and despite its decidedly amateur bent, it also offered something fresh and new and surprising for me; it showed me things I had never seen before. It is sort of the underdog among the films I have listed here, as it is not the brainchild of Clint Eastwood or Quentin Tarantino. Nevertheless, it is a promising film, and this film's promise is much more interesting than the crop of films that Hollywood routines craps out each year into the cinematic toilet.

7) CJ7 – Stephen Chow is not a household name in America yet, but he should be. With Shaolin Soccer and Kung-Fu Hustle, he made in-roads into the American mainstream, but he has yet to experience the success of stateside native comedians. CJ7 is his E.T. It is goofy and strange and sweet and full of childlike joy. Watch it, keeping in mind that Chow is from Hong Kong and, if you are from Missouri or Kansas like me, Hong Kong is probably going to be a bit foreign to you. Foreign but delightful.

8) Bigger Stronger Faster – I initially did not even want to see this after having heard seemingly hundreds of speeches about steroid use in sports. I hate sports to begin with. Inexplicable then, isn’t it, that this movie cracked my top 10? It is that good. See why for yourself.

9) Coraline – I am a sucker for stop-motion animation, and I have not seen Wes Anderson’s new entry into this timeless category yet, so this year I will have to go with Coraline. As a lifelong fan of The Nightmare Before Christmas, I already liked Henry Selick before even seeing this picture, but I appreciated his dark and beautiful visions even more after seeing it. And of course, having just read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and knowing that he wrote the story this film is based upon, I count myself a fan of his work now as well.

10) Strictly Ballroom – In college my friend Brianne talked about this movie non-stop, and now I see why. It is full of non-stop whimsy and feverishly funny sequences that celebrate the joy of dancing and film alike. It is as dizzying as dancing itself, but lucky for me, it is far less embarrassing than any of the times I have attempted to dance myself. I did not have to humiliate myself once to enjoy this one immensely.

In Other News…

This weekend Becki and I saw two films that blew us away. Yesterday in the theater we saw Avatar: 3D (*****), and I must say it was absolutely stunning. It felt like I had actually visited another world, and for the first time in my life I had no complaints whatsoever about the CGI. It looked photo-real, and it felt real, and it did not feel in the least bit rubbery or cartoonish or conjured. The whole operation was airtight, coherent, and utterly convincing. I heard critic after critic saying the story was ho-hum, but to me the story was inextricably intertwined with the visuals, with the inventive world of Pandora, etc. I give it five stars. James Cameron has raised the bar for science fiction. Good luck to everyone else. You will need it.

The other movie that blew us away was the Danish dark comedy Adam's Apples (*****) It was wickedly funny, creative, and as perplexing a theological puzzle as anything I have seen. It emphasized the "dark" in dark comedy, and it was more shocking than anything else in this regard, but it was wholly worthwhile and wonderful. The characters and their outrageous actions kept us interested throughout, and there was nary a dull moment in the film. If dark comedies with theological implications are your drink of choice, by all means give this one a shot.

The Year in Cultural Consumption and Digestion: Other 2009 Readings (Continued)

2010-01-02T08:15:00.017-06:00

American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

*****

An expertly crafted, highly imaginative, well-researched novel about the gods of old days who, having been long forgotten after being brought to America by the travelers who believed in them, are left to survive on their own terms whilst a battles rages between them and the gods of television, technology, etc. Formally, Gaiman is spare and straightforward, but the ideas he expresses are wonderfully creative. The main narrative is punctuated by odd and sometimes crude vignettes about the old gods coming to America.

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

*****

Oh Annie Dillard, you won the Pulitzer Prize because you are actually good. Really, ridiculously good. Can you please come to my house and live in my brain and teach me how to write properly? I make great soup, and Becki has lots of cozy blankets laying about. Make yourself at home. Make my brain your summer home. This book is writing gone Zen, and writing gone gossamer.

Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer

*****

I am not a Mormon, but I have few Mormon friends whom I respect greatly. I do not believe what they do even though certain aspects of our beliefs would overlap on a Venn diagram. This book focuses on fundamentalist Mormons (emphasis on "mental"), and two in particular who believe God commanded them to kill a woman and her baby. This main narrative gains momentum as Krakauer provides an overview of Mormon history and Mormon fundamentalist history as well. It is a spellbinding read through and through, and it gets at the age-old question that all Christians must sometimes answer: If we believe God has spoken to us, how do we know it is God and not merely our internal "tapes?" An unbelievable read.

The Family That Couldn't Sleep by D.T. Max

*****

Who knew a medical mystery could be so gripping? This book is about Fatal Familial Insomnia, which is actually related Mad Cow Disease and a whole host of other diseases. The connections are frightening, the research in-depth, the stories all over the map. And yes, with Fatal Familial Insomnia, you stay awake until you die. Lack of sleep is not what kills you, however. There is something far more sinister and far simpler at work behind the scenes, and it is a protein known as a prion. Forget viruses. Forget terrorists. Proteins are the new terrorists.

Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton

*****

It would be easy enough to say Chesterton was a pompous blowhard, but it would be far more difficult to explain that he is my new favorite pompous blowhard. This man wrote so effortlessly yet so beautifully, and with such candor about his contemporaries, their thoughts, about his own beliefs and how he arrived at them. Reading this was like reading the most arrogant mysticism, and in Chesterton's case arrogance is not something to be scolded. He had such a truly original mind and an equally original voice, such that the appearance of arrogance was the only thing that could possibly result from what he wrote. He was a wily court jester who wrote with a wink and a nod, and he carried a big stick, and he walloped the fallacies he encountered along life's way with it. He was a master of inversion and antithesis and turning ideas inside-out like one turns ones pockets inside-out. It was not an easy read, but it was certainly a worthwhile read, and I can see why it is a classic. I enjoyed it greatly.

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

*****

I tried to read this multiple times when I was younger, but apparently my mind was simply not up for the task yet. My friend Danny, who reads about a million books a year, told me he read it and made it sound as though it was as easy as falling out of bed in the morning. That being said, I read it this year finally, and I love this book dearly. It is a compilation of the talks Lewis presented via the BBC during wartime, and he is as original and thought-provoking as ever. Even more so, his ideas are profound but simply expressed in a manner befitting both the layperson and the scholar. It is a short work, and a worthwhile one for all who have questions, for all who seek answers, and for all who enjoy the mind of C.S. Lewis as I do.

The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs

***1/2

When an Esquire magazine columnist decides to follow the Bible literally for a year, it is sure to be interesting. And so it is. At times hilarious, at times ridiculous, I found myself reading this and thinking how I would read the Bible if I had not grown up in a Christian home. It is easy to be critical of the interpretations of others when you are so attached to how you see things that you mistake your perspective for the only one in town. That being said, my biggest criticism of this book is also my biggest criticism of my own faith journey and the journeys of every Christian I know. Jacobs opts for religion a la carte, picking and choosing the verses he will follow at the exclusion of countless others. As I said though, this is what we all do, liberals and conservatives, fundamentalists and mentalfundalists... You get the picture. An interesting read.

The Reason for God by Timothy Keller

****

People are calling Timothy Keller the new C.S. Lewis, and I suppose the mantle fits well enough. He offers a respectful, cerebral argument in favor of faith in Christ, and does so in a way that addresses many major objections that are common to unbelievers. On the other hand, Lewis was more philosophically inclined, wrote with more of a decidedly academic bent. He language was more elevated, his ideas more conceptual and less concrete. I prefer Lewis to Keller, but I think Keller is well-suited to address much of the post-modern age's questions. I am not sure the book is going to convert atheists, but it might persuade a few agnostics. If nothing else, Keller is a voice of respectful reason in American culture, and that is something that the mainline Christianity has sorely lacked in recent years (i.e. during the Bush administration). Yes, there was a time when Christians were not synonymous with Republicans, and I long for a return to the days where religion is no longer mistaken for politics and vice versa.

The Year in Cultural Consumption and Digestion: Other 2009 Readings

2009-12-31T08:28:00.007-06:00

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

***1/2

An expertly crafted mind-bender to be sure, but so existentially melancholy and nihilistic I found it difficult to finish the book. My friend Brandon bought this for me for my 30th birthday in September of 2008 in hopes that it would prompt me to propose to Becki. I proposed alright, but not because of this book! Becki, on the other hand, loves this book. We will watch the film when it comes out on DVD.

Stiff by Mary Roach

*****

Who knew cadavers had such interesting lives? Becki and I certainly did not. This is truly a journey into a bizarre alternate reality where the dead are important - nay, vital - members of the world we inhabit. It is a morbid and morose account of the lives of the dead, but it is also darkly comedic as one might expect from the title. I briefly corresponded via e-mail with the author and told her how grateful I was that such an odd book existed. It is truly as weird and wonderful as they come.

My Stroke of Insight by Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor

****

A neuroanatomist writes a book about her own stroke and her own recovery. It is fascinating and highly insightful. I knew about the plasticity of the brain because of what I have learned about OCD, but I had no idea what the brain was truly capable of. Anytime a car thief thinks he/she is sharp for being able to hotwire a Mazda, he/she should think about a brain that rewires itself after being impaired by a stroke. It is a far greater feat, I assure you. I asked Dr. Bolte-Taylor via e-mail why my brain tired from writing despite the fact that it has no moving parts to speak of, that it did not expend energy (ATP), etc. She said the brain fatigues because of the use and depletion of neurotransmitters that need to replenish. Pure fascination at its best.

MORE TO COME!!!

The Year in Cultural Consumption and Digestion: Me, Myself, and Sci-fi

2009-12-29T13:15:00.009-06:00

While Dad is my family's resident sci-fi connoisseur, this year Dad and I trekked into interstellar space together, reading C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. I had reservations about reading sci-fi novels, as I thought I might end up becoming fluent in Klingon as a result. Surprisingly, the genre ended up teaching me a thing or two about theology, and even more about the mechanics of the writing craft.

Written in the 40s, Lewis' Space Trilogy has little to do with the physical world of outer space as we presently know it. His writing is clearly informed by the scientific knowledge of his day, but for the most part, the physical world(s) he writes about serve his stories, which are obviously allegorical. Suspend your disbelief, Dear Readers. Suspend it in zero gravity.

Out of the Silent Planet (***1/2), the first book in the trilogy, features Lewis finding his voice in the genre, and while his first steps are elementary enough, they are also thought-provoking and worthwhile. While the first two-thirds of the book are standard sci-fi fare, sometime during the last third, Lewis' universe assumes a theological bent that casts life on planet Earth in an entirely different light. At the time of this reading, I also listened to N.T. Wright's lectures on the Veritas Forum. Lewis and Wright pushed outward in my skull, and my inner world expanded as a result. My perception of creativity was permanently altered. People talk about the narrow-mindedness of Christians, which saddens me. The imagination of God is clearly broad enough to include, as film director Kevin Smith put it in the disclaimer at the beginning of the movie Dogma, the platypus, among other things. If Christ is truly the Son of God, Christians should be the most imaginative lot on the planet.

Lewis certainly affirms this in the 2nd book in the series, Perelandra (*****). People most often associate Lewis with the Chronicles of Narnia, or with his more overt theologically-minded works like Mere Christianity or The Screwtape Letters. Little did I know, upon embarking into the world of Perelandra, that I was about to read my new favorite C.S. Lewis book, a work so colorful and imaginative and theologically charged that it would win me over completely. Lewis dramatizes theology in such a beautiful way in this book, making the abstract concrete, providing us with a new perspective on the human condition through comparison with the inhabitants of another world. Among other things, he aims to imagine what it would be like if man had never fallen from grace. Lewis works out this theological puzzle with panache in this book, and with remarkably powerful results.

The third and final installment in the trilogy, That Hideous Strength (****1/2), was a more than worthy conclusion to the series. It seamlessly integrates Lewis' love of myth with his experiences in the academy, resulting in a work that is highly cerebral, complex, and surreal. Structurally, it features Lewis at his most ambitious. He adeptly juggles parallel narratives, populates his world with a whole world of memorable characters, and finally interweaves elements of the first two books even as this book feels distinctly unlike them. Honestly, it is difficult for me to decide whether I like this or Perelandra better, but I think I like Perelandra better from a conceptual standpoint. They both stand tall in Lewis' oeuvre.

After reading these three books from January to March, I found myself appreciating sci-fi as a genre in a way I never had before. I cut my teeth on the Star Wars trilogy and grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my Dad, but I only saw them as stories set in space rather than intergalactic parables that had the ability to speak about life here on Earth. Not all works of science-fiction function this way, but Lewis' Space Trilogy certain does. Lewis travels into the black abyss of outer space only to turn his telescope back on us so we can see ourselves from a God's-eye view.

Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (*****) takes place in a different universe than Lewis', but like the Space Trilogy, Card's novel features a world that is charged with potential, with the ethical implications of human choices, with imagination, and with the sort of riveting narrative most writers only dream of conjuring up.

While Lewis' trilogy is too transcendent and academic in tone to translate well to the realm of film (It is worth noting that Perelandra was made into an opera at one time), Ender's Game simply begs to shine on the silver screen. It is riveting through and through, mind-bending at times, and at other times elementary and childlike like Ender Wiggin, the child prodigy who is the book's protagonist.

I cannot recommend these four books enough, and I cannot thank my Dad enough for voyaging into the Beyond with me in 2009. I hope to read the sequel to Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, in early 2010.

Passing the Torch Like a Flaming Bag of Feces

2009-12-19T17:38:00.007-06:00

Last night Becki and I babysat Emily and Trevor Johnson, who are so adorable that if being cute were a crime in Kansas, they would be in jail forever, or at least until they outgrew their childhood cuteness. We would adopt them, but their parents are wonderful. Granted, we could plant a plastic baggie full of cocaine in their van, phone the police with a tip, and send them to the state penitentiary for a few years if we wanted. There are probably ethical problems with this approach despite its obvious charm, however.

I digress. We babysat Emily and Trevor last night and Becki and I showed them the immortally beloved 1980's film Goonies. At one point, one of the characters called another character a turd. Emily, who is 9, immediately turned to me and said, "What does 'turd' mean?" Could this question have been directed at a more appropriate person than myself? Ask yourself, Dear Reader. I have a Ph.D. in Scatology, after all.

I still remember when I was a child and Dad taught me what the word "turd" meant. He was changing Alyssa's diaper, and no doubt it contained a doozy of a doody. He playfully said, "You little turd," referencing Alyssa of course. Like Emily last night, I inquired "What's a turd?" He explained it was another word for poop, doody, etc.

I was thrilled to find that such a word existed. It really seemed to capture the essence of feces in a way that "poop" and other slang words never really did. That being the case, when I first heard someone use the profane "'s' word" I thought it sounded all wrong. I immediately suspected people only said it because it raised eyebrows and incensed adults. It rhymed with "hit," and sounded percussive to the ear, and unless one is talking about explosive diarrhea, poop is simply not percussive. "Turd" felt right, sounded right, rolled off of the tongue and right into the toilet just like any fecal descriptor should. After learning the word from my Dad, I walked around the house for the next 13 years or so, mindlessly chanting it, much to my parents' dismay.

Keeping that in mind, I will return to little Emily, who asked me "What does 'turd' mean?" Her brother Trevor, who is 5, echoed her inquiry: "Yeah, what does 'turd' mean?" I explained that it was another word for poop, and I told them how I learned what the word meant from my Dad. It was a rite of passage for the Johnson kids. They looked older and seemed wiser in that moment even though they were laughing uncontrollably. Trevor repeated the word as if he were trying on a new pair of sneakers: "Turd?" Yes, Trevor. Turd. Becki and I both laughed equally uncontrollably.

Before long, Emily and Trevor were using the word in sentences. "I made a turd today, Chad," Trevor said. Emily mostly just giggled, pretending to be embarrassed when it was obvious that she was highly amused by the whole thing. She was bursting to use the word at school, clearly.

We finished the movie, and I was grateful they did not ask about other words in the movie that somehow slipped under the PG-rating radar. I was grateful they did not ask about "One-Eyed Willie," the name of the pirate whose treasure the Goonies are searching for, and a popular slang term for a certain male part. Upon hearing a character utter his name, Becki and I looked at each other immediately in astonishment. We had never noticed this before. We suddenly had an inkling what it might be like to be parents, what it might be like to try to be cultural gatekeepers for our children, preventing them from stumbling upon things that might compromise their innocence.

When their parents came to pick them up, I told them their children had learned a new word. They were amused, thankfully. Of course, their mother Anne corrected Emily when she incorrectly used the word as a verb, as in "I was turding." "It's a noun, Emily," she explained. Around this time, Trevor began unleashing a flurry of turds, at least verbally. "I'm a turd! Chad's a turd! I made a turd!" It was like looking in the mirror and seeing a midget with blonde hair mimicking my every move.

There Will Be Blood

2009-12-15T10:49:00.002-06:00

Writing is going well lately. I have mostly finished revising three of the short-form essays in the book in the past week or so, which is refreshing. I am learning that my first drafts are not nearly as good as I ever think they are, which means that Annie Dillard was absolutely right when she said that there is not necessarily a relationship between your elation or depression about your work and the work itself. But at the same time, I am finding drafts to be more than suitable overall for building and layering and structuring things. My essays have become increasingly nuanced this year, and that is because I have revisited them over and over and revised them and slashed and burned and added and substracted. It has been a fun year for writing.

In the world of movies, I continue to be amazed by how much "There Will Be Blood" has grown on me since I first saw it on January 18th, 2008. Becki and Danny and Millie and I saw it in Kansas City the weekend it opened, and I was underwhelmed by it initially, feeling it was overlong and bloated, and paint-by-numbers in many ways. The nuances (word of the day, apparently) of the film have come to light in subsequent viewings, and it has become one of my all-time favorite films. It is in my Top 5. It may eventually eclipse "Grizzly Man." It may have already done so. It is one that captures so much about the human condition and our alienation from God, and in such clever ways. Plus, the acting is blow-the-roof-off amazing, at least as far as Daniel Day-Lewis' performance goes.

A Very Unorthodox Orthodoxy

2009-12-03T10:08:00.004-06:00

I have enjoyed reading G.K. Chesterton's "Orthodoxy." He is known for his love of paradox, of inversion and reversal, of laying waste to his contemporaries with his wits. I can see why C.S. Lewis loved him so much, and I look forward to reading more of his material. I have "Heretics" and "The Everlasting Man" on my Amazon Wishlist now, and I hope I can digest them in 2010.

Becki just started "The Hobbit" by Tolkien.

The writing has gone well this week. Last weekend whilst in Wisconsin I took it upon myself to go through a print of my entire book and highlight art cues for Danny J. Gibson, who is creating art for the book. In the process, I found myself editing and thinking of all sorts of ideas, and I was able to write a new introduction and conclusion for the long-form essay, "Animals Marching Two by Two Into My Heart." The weekend provided me with a few humorous experiences which I will not share here because then they would not read quite as well in the book. Suffice it say, the writing went well enough, although there are elements of the essay that still bother me. It is one that contains the heart of the worldview that is expressed in the book, but there are passages that feel amateurish to me. I guess that is what readers and editors are for. I have now lined up around 20 readers for when this draft is all done, and I hope to have it completed no later than February.

Writing Makes One Identify With Toast.

2009-11-25T09:44:00.004-06:00

After a week-long hiatus from writing, last night I pounded away at the keys and knocked out a substantial portion of the remainder of "Boys Go to Jupiter to Get More Stupider." Then this morning at 5:00 a.m. I popped out of bed like a piece of toast from a toaster, my brain brimming with ideas like the cup of coffee I carried with me. (Today's gourmet creamer was Pumpkin-Pecan Pie flavored). I went downstairs, pounded that short-form essay into submission, and finished it with a Karate Kid crane-kick. I am quite pleased with the results.

As my friend Kai commented on here yesterday, writing may not be so much a balancing act as much as it is an integration of labor and grace. We agreed that it was something like a street corner where labor and grace intersect. Of course, standing on a street corner and working makes me think of prostitution. Perhaps that metaphor is no good after all.

In other news, I listening to U2's new album again, as well as the works of Aimee Mann and Michael Penn. I had no idea Michael Penn was Sean Penn's brother, and I really did not know that he is married to Aimee Mann. Two heroes of mine, united in music and matrimony. Props to them! My question is, why haven't they collaborated more? They covered the Beatles' "Two of Us" on the I Am Sam soundtrack, the Boss' "Reason to Believe," and they recorded an original composition titled "Christmastime" for P.T. Anderson's Hard Eight soundtrack, but that is it to my knowledge. Sure, Penn did some backing work for Mann on her I'm With Stupid album, but beyond that, I want a joint album. Consider this a formal request, Michael and Aimee.

Writing is a Balance of Grace and Labor

2009-11-24T13:28:00.005-06:00

In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard mentions that she can only write for so long, and then she has to recover and recharge. I relate to this 100%. In April or May I read Dr. Jill-Bolte Taylor's My Stroke of Insight, and she actually replied to an e-mail I sent her about this phenomenon. I said, "Why is it that, even though the brain has no moving parts, I find myself feeling fatigued after I have written for awhile? Why can't I write for 6 hours straight without a break?" She explained that the neurotransmitters in our brains deplete as we do things like writing, and that they need to replenish. The body is such an elaborate chemistry set! It is such a finely-tuned thing, and it is both amazing and frustrating from this standpoint. People think you just sit down and write, and that is that. But it is work, and sometimes it is work that collides with grace, and beautiful sentences emerge from the cracks in your manuscript like tender green plant shoots. There is a real balance of grace and labor in writing that comes as one tinkers with words. You forage for days and uproot countless words and sentences and plunder everything you have written, and suddenly you find that one green shoot emerging, and you nourish it, and you count yourself lucky. And then you collapse and let your neurotransmitters replenish.

Little Things

2009-11-19T08:33:00.004-06:00

I really enjoy the little things. A huge cup of coffee with chocolate raspberry creamer at 6:00 a.m. in my mancave with Othello on my lap, gleefully trying to buck the cup out of my hand. That cat is more like a steer than a cat.

Dolly Madison Donut Gems out of the vending machine at work when I forget to eat breakfast at home.

Packages in the mail addressed to me.

Seeing Becki when she first wakes up with her face all scrunchy and her hair sprawling every which way.

Charlotte following me around the house because I am her owner and she is my cat and she is ever loyal to me.

Sitting around in PJ's, streaming Netflix movies on TV with the wife.

Discovering movies I have never heard of and being blown away by them.

Pizza pizza pizza.

Beach House, with their minimalist Suicide-esque drums and their ethereal dreamy chamber California music.

Making mix CDs for friends and loved ones.

Hunting for musical treasures on music blogs.

Sophie climbing into bed and sleeping between Becki and I every night.

Omelie rolling over to have her belly rubbed every five minutes.

Oliver leaping up to attack nails and tacks and other objects that protrude from the walls.

My church family, and especially Dottie's meatloaf.

Movies: Star Trek **** - High octane stuff! I loved it!

The Ramen Girl ***1/2 - A real gem of an intercultural indie flick that is heartwarming and hilarious.

You Destroy Me (EP) Available on Amie St. Music

2009-11-19T07:14:00.003-06:00

I am slowly making my back catalog available for download on Amie St., and the "You Destroy Me" EP is now available for free. The price will increase with user downloads, which means about a year from now it should cost about $0.12 (US Dollars).

I wrote and recorded this in May of 2005 for a Missouri State student film titled The Last Lonely Man. I provided a highly caffeinated remix, an acoustic version, and an instrumental version as well.

Yes, I did make the CD art in five minutes. Danny J. Gibson will probably chop off my head and mount it on the wall for using such terrible design principles, but I am a slacker and am happy enough with its awful aesthetics. Enjoy the tracks.

http://amiestreet.com/music/chad-thomas-johnston/you-destroy-me-ep/

Writing is Like Pulling Teeth

2009-11-17T08:28:00.006-06:00

Today writing was like pulling teeth, and since I did not feel like tying one piece of twine to my tooth and the other end to a doorknob... Well, you get the picture. I decided to clean house this morning instead of writing.

I hate stepping away from an essay when I am in the middle of working on it, but sometimes it is very healthy and helpful to do so. Writing is like building a house brick by brick from the ground up, and rewriting and editing is sort of like pruning an enormous shrubbery. I think my most recent work has been growing every which way, and as a result it has lost its center. I almost need to start all over with it again. Sometimes when I am researching something I get too deep into the subject matter I am exploring and then, when I write, the whole thing becomes this lopsided piece about what I have been researching instead of piece that is merely informed and enhanced by what I have been researching.

I read that Flannery O'Connor had hundreds and maybe even thousands of pages of rewrites for when she wrote Wise Blood, and of course she did not work with the benefit of a word processor. That makes me feel a little better about my own ineptitude.

The weirdest thing about writing is that I can write something so exciting and then return to it later only to find that it is structurally questionable, littered with cliches, a near duplicate of something else I wrote two years earlier, etc. When Jason Martin of Starflyer 59 recorded his Gold album, he tracked all of the instruments and fine-tuned every detail, and he remarked after the lengthy, obsessive venture ended that there was a bit too much of himself in that project. It is really hard not to run into yourself over and over in writing because you are writing from your brain and no one else will loan you theirs, or their experiences. So there will always be a bit too much of myself in my writing. Knowing that is helpful and, as G.I. Joe said, "Knowing is half the battle."

***

In the world of movies:

Dear Zachary ***** - Nothing short of astonishing. One of the best documentaries I have ever seen. It can be streamed on Netflix.

Orphan **** - One of the best American horror films I have seen in awhile. Nice twists, no CGI-happy special effects wizards at work here, and tension throughout.

Laura ***** - A remarkable piece of film noir from back in the day. Otto Preminger directs.

"Ink": A Review

2009-11-16T08:22:00.004-06:00

****

The book of Ecclesiastes tells us there is nothing new under the sun, and the world of film often verifies that. However, every once in awhile a film comes along that reaches for the impossible and grasps it momentarily. "Star Wars" did this when it came out. "The Matrix" offered something like this as well, becoming a new sci-fi classic and channeling the Zeitgeist like a cultural lightning rod. That being said, "Ink" is something special.

It is that rare film that displays a certain naivete that is often characteristic of new filmmakers, but also the sort of soaring ambition and imagination that are more commonly associated with the bigger names that appear on the marquee. The story feels like it was built from the most elementary of building blocks, and yet it still manages to feel like director Jamin Winans is seeking articulate a new filmic grammar all of his own.

My wife says it is amateur but imaginative, and to a certain extent I think that captures it. At the same time, I think I can agree with that without intending for the word "amateur" to be insulting. There is a certain ambition behind this film that propels it along without regard for critics, that is utterly sure of itself and its singular vision. I applaud that, and in a big way. Whatever criticism I might have for this film, I am really quite fond of it and was very impressed with it.

It is something like a science-fiction fantasy, and since I do not believe in recapping plots, I will let you do the research yourself. Or better yet, stream it instantly on Netflix for yourself and let me know what you think. It is a film that is content to play in its own corner of the world on its own terms, regardless of faults or flaws, and it does not try to win you over and capture your imagination. It simply does so.

Updated Blog: Blue Ridge Cinema East Slideshow

2009-11-15T15:18:00.004-06:00

I have updated the segment about the demolition of the Blue Ridge Cinema East, as I found a slideshow of the demolition with excellent photos courtesy of Flickr user Mtfrazier.

See two posts ago...

Traveling in My Cardboard Space Shuttle to Visit Missouri's Dead Malls

2009-11-14T16:27:00.009-06:00

From the time I was one until I was approximately four I lived with my parents and our cat Missy in the parsonage on the right in Sibley, MO, about 13 miles from Independence. The church on the hill to the left is Six Mile Baptist, where my Dad pastored during that time. I decided to pay the old house a visual visit today for sentimentality's sake while working on "Boys Go to Jupiter to Get More Stupider." The essay is really coming along, although I am not terribly motivated at the moment. Sometimes I would rather chew zwieback than write.

View Larger Map

When we lived in this house, Dad built a space shuttle out of cardboard for me, and I remember it to this day. As soon as Becki and I decide to begin rolling out the children (which will not be happening today), I plan to consult Dad about the construction of cardboard space shuttles, as this was one of the highlights of my childhood and especially my time in this house.

During my research today I also found out that Blue Ridge Mall and Bannister Mall, both staples of my childhood, were closed and demolished. Below are Flickr collections of the Blue Ridge Mall and Bannister Mall sites. The Blue Ridge photos appear courtesy of http://www.labelscar.com/missouri/blue-ridge-mall and photographer Rod Shelley, which the Bannister Mall photos appear courtesy of Flickr user Innerhorse.

Childhood in Ruins: The Demolition of the Blue Ridge Cinema East

2009-11-10T08:24:00.013-06:00

In the process of researching for "Boys Go to Jupiter to Get More Stupider," I found out that the theater my parents took me to when I was a child is no more. It was the Blue Ridge Cinema East, and in its defunct state it overlooked Hwy. 70 like a tomb on a hill for over a decade. In August it was finally demolished. The slideshow above chronicles the destruction of the site in 213 photos, but they are not in chronological order. It begins with everything mostly destroyed and eventually shows what the building looked like before it was demolished. Most notably, the set is erroneously titled "Blue Ridge West Cinema."

The pictures in the slideshow above do not really do my childhood memory justice, as I remember the building itself being blue. In my research I discovered that it was, in fact, blue in the 1980s. I know we saw a variety of movies there, although I cannot be sure which ones. As a child I remember seeing The Empire Strikes Back, E.T., Return of the Jedi, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Clash of the Titans, and Superman I and II.

My parents - if they are reading this - could probably confirm which films we saw there. Mom and Dad, do you recall? Please answer. Help your son. If you will not cooperate, I will probably have to put one of those mind-controlling eels from The Wrath of Khan into your ears to help me reap a harvest of knowledge. According to Mom, I was so scared by this film that I spent the majority of it with my head buried in her chest. Thank you for scaring the beejeebers out of me, Mom and Dad.

The ad to the right is from the original opening of the theater where my parents and I blasted off into outer space and beyond back in the early 1980s.

Writing is Like Herding Cattle

2009-11-09T08:14:00.000-06:00

Writing is like herding cattle. I realized this today as I worked on a short-form essay about Dad titled "Boys Go to Jupiter to Get More Stupider." It can be so difficult to corral all of your ideas and get them on the same page. Sometimes they stampede. Sometimes they just stand there and chew their cud, unwilling to do your bidding. Writing is really quite terrible. I love it.

The title of this morning's essay, of course, comes from the grade-school taunt that was so popular at my school: "Girls go to Mars to get more candy-bars, and boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider." Of course, "girls" and "boys" were interchangeable in this chant. Come to think of it, it might be better if I change the title of the essay to "Boys Go to Mars to Get More Candy Bars," as it is a tribute to my Dad and not an attempt to ridicule him (for the most part, at least). Wow! This blogging stuff really works! It's like therapy - "the talking cure."

In other news, the Rolla Daily News published our wedding announcement, although they spelled our last name Johnson in the headline. As if that were not enough, when Mom submitted the article to the paper she mistakenly wrote that Becki's middle name is Catherine when it is, in fact, Christine. Becki's twin sister's full name is Katherine. I hope our marriage is legitimate. Hopefully this will not nullify our union...

What the World Needs Now is Blog, Sweet Blog

2009-11-08T06:51:00.004-06:00

Once upon a time I had a blog, but then I decided I was writing enough that I may as well be writing a book. As Annie Dillard puts it best, "Writing sentences is difficult whatever their subject. It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick." That is kind of how I felt about blogging. I might as well write a book.

That was in October of 2007. That book's working title is The Stained Glass Kaleidoscope, and I am well underway on it now. I have 223 single-spaced, typed Microsoft Word pages of text (which translates roughly to approximately 375 pages of manuscript text, according to the conversion calculator my friend Joanna uses at Allen Press Inc. where I work). I am two thousand percent determined to finish this book, find a suitable agent for it, and get it published. This blog, then, is an effort to chronicle a writer's journey.

I alternate between exhilarating excitement and demented derangement on a regular basis when it comes to writing because it is truly a challenge that is both fulfilling and maddening. When I was a child, my Dad built my sister Alyssa a doll-house that featured a chimney on one end, and he laid each brick individually on that chimney like a true mason. It took him hours and it was a very meticulous labor that he inevitably brings up the moment someone in the family mentions the doll-house. I do not wonder why. This is exactly what writing is like for me, and I am equally proud of my achievements when I spend hour upon hour positioning word after word. I am even happier when the finished product resembles a chimney or, rather, what I meant for it to resemble from the beginning. Writings sometimes totally lose their shape and structure along the way and, where you meant to build a dinosaur in the beginning, you end up with something that looks like your second-grade teacher, who by all estimates was in fact a dinosaur.

I am sitting in a mancave designed to accommodate my writing needs. It is filled to the brim and spilling over with culture in the form of books, records (hanging on the wall) and, although I keep my film library elsewhere in the house there is a TV/DVD player here as well, should I need a blast of filmic inspiration. The purpose of this room is to a) provide me with a suitably comfortable workspace, and b) provide me with a convergence of all sorts of things that I find inspiring to keep my mind fueled and ready to write.

I have subscribed to Writer's Digest magazine, which frequently lists agents on the lookout for specific types of manuscripts. I have books about the print industry, about getting published, and even a copy of Alice W. Flaherty's The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain. I have two editor friends and multiple designated readers who are prepared to give me in-depth feedback on the manuscript once I finish the current draft, which I hope to be done with sometime in January 2010 if possible. Being married and having a full-time job mean I cannot devote myself wholly to writing, so I have to get up each morning at 6:00 and pound away on the keyboard. Sometimes I write in the evenings too.

My entries here will not be long, as I have a book to write, and I simply want to keep a record of my writing adventures/misadventures, of inspirational happenings, of culture I have devoured that others might enjoy, etc. I want to leave a footprint here rather than a complete archaeological record of the process, in other words. This will probably be my longest entry.

This weekend I started and finished Annie Dillard's wonderful book on writing, titled The Writing Life. She is just the most amazing wordsmith. What is really funny is how I identify with her. In preparing for the task of writing, she does the following: "To crank myself up I stood on a jack and ran myself up. I tightened myself in a vise-clamp and wound the handle till the pressure built. I drank coffee in titrated doses. It was a tricky business, requiring the finely tuned judgment of a skilled anesthesiologist. There was a tiny range within which coffee was effective, short of which it was useless, and beyond which, fatal. I pointed myself. I walked to the water. I played the hateful recorder, washed dishes, drank coffee, stood on a beach log, watched bird..."

Later, having imbibed too much coffee she writes "Now, alas, I had cranked too far. I could no longer play the recorder; I would need a bugle. I would break a piano. What could I do around the cabin? There was no wood to split. There was something I needed to fix with the hacksaw, but I rejected the work as too fine. Why not adopt a baby, design a curriculum, go sailing?" I love all of this! This is truly how it is. You try to bring about the ideal state in which you can write, and it is a real challenge. Coffee helps me at 6:00 a.m., but sometimes our cats leap all over me and nearly knock it out of my hand because they are so excited to see human life after hours of deadness and snoring (Mine, not Becki's).

If you are an aspiring writer, The Writing Life is a fantastic read. I recommend it highly, although you will inevitably feel humbled in the process of reading it, as Dillard is a maestro.

I just know Becki is going to wake up and come down to my mancave any time now, so I am going to wrap this up. Again, future entries will be shorter. I hope you enjoy the blog, and I hope I enjoy it too. I am determined to keep it up. Give me a shout-out and let me know you are reading. Thanks!

Sincerely,

Chad Thomas Johnston
Pretending Writer