The ‘Dredge Report

I apologize for leaving you all hanging as to my whereabouts, but I have a good excuse: I haven’t been blogging because I have been enjoying my life and my town and this season so thoroughly! Which includes but is not limited to:

(more…)

This photo is c. early 1920s; my grandfather is the little guy second from the left with the newsie cap. I can’t stop looking at it. There’s a lot to look at and think about—serious socioeconopoliticocultural stuff. But from time to time I keep cycling back to, “God, get a load of those fabulous flapper get-ups.”

What I am not going to say is that Philip Seymour Hoffman is the best actor of his generation, because that’s hackneyed by now. But what I will say is that I just watched a couple of movies of his that were mostly passed over by viewers—despite being critics’ darlings—that were both good. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead made me empathize with Ethan Hawke’s character (sheesh), and The Savages was less than the sum of its parts, but given that its two main parts are Hoffman and Laura Linney, you could do worse than to ‘flix it. Seriously, see the former. It’s a shame that more people didn’t see Hoffman’s acting in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Note that this does not mean that I’m in any rush to see Charlie Wilson’s War.

I always get e-mails that aren’t meant for me, but rather for some guy who’s a) in a band and/or b) applying for accounting jobs via Monster.com.

Today, however, I got a text message that wasn’t meant for me (“is any1 bieng cookie monster do u know”) and—wait for it—an Evite to a birthday party for someone I don’t know (nor do I know a single person on the guest list).

To answer the first question, I don’t think anyone’s going to dress up as Cookie Monster for Halloween. Probably just a bunch of boring Palin-Bleeding Bear duos. How crass.

The two best business names I’ve come across in Portland so far: “Let It Bead,” the bead store on NW 23rd, and “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” the hot dog stand on Alberta St.

FYI, Alejandro Escovedo does the best cover of “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” and you, sir, are poorer in spirit for not having seen him perform it live.

After almost 6 years studying and working in, for, and around the U.S. health care system and its policy/academia arm—including reading thousands of reports, white papers, journal articles, blog posts, and books on said subjects—here is one thing I can state with confidence: I hate it when metaphors of war are applied to medicine, and I hate it when metaphors of medicine are applied to health care policy and reform.

Waging “wars” on cancer or MS or any other awful disease doesn’t help us cure them; indeed, it doesn’t even give us a good framework in which to understand them. Battle, combat, fight, kill, defeat, conquer—I get it. We use these words because they make us feel powerful over diseases that we don’t (yet) have any real power over. Tired, cheap, and unoriginal rhetoric isn’t a crime; it’s just annoying.

The same goes for the endless opinion pieces published about how we fix our screwed-up health care system. After you’ve read the 196th op-ed or JAMA book review about how to “cure” our health care system with a big “dose” of competition/regulation/insurance coverage for faith healers/whatever, you too would feel like “asking” your “doctor” for an “IV drip” filled with “morphine” to “commit assisted suicide.”

Regarding the war on cancer rant above, it occurs to me that I hate it when metaphors of war are used in any circumstance except poetry or literature about humans and their tormented souls. “War against oneself,” etc etc. No more wars on nouns. What did drugs ever do to you?

So my company is sponsoring a  charity drive, which involves us giving money to charity to get a company match, and an exercise competition in which teams of colleagues compete over which team exercises the most in a month. The winning team gets a four-figure check sent by the company on their behalf to a local charity. The intentions are noble, but nothing brings out the liars and the exercise bulimics like a work-out competition. All of the scorecards, where team members enter their daily minutes of exercise, are posted on the Intranet, and I’m frankly amazed at the sheer level of bravado that some of the people are showing. Every morning I log-on with my calculator in hand and try to figure out how a few people have managed to rack up 2,600 minutes of exercise over nine days. Technically, you are allowed to count virtually enjoy form of movement as exercise, including just walking around, which I personally think is kind of lame. Even so, my company is large, and everyone has a desk job. The handful of people who are claiming to have done about five hours of exercise a day for nine days either have serious eating disorders, or mistakenly think that using your mouse is aerobic.

Either way, with stakes this low, it’s a sad spectacle.

I finally downloaded iTunes v8 (which, sidebar, reminds me of a conversation I had with my boss about my contention that V8–the bevvie—is only consumed by people “over a certain age”. What say you—are you under 35 and do you drink V8, and if so, why?), and it’s good. Per Spencer, I’m going to have keep the Genius sidebar mostly turned off unless I want to drop major scrilla on songs I didn’t know I needed. I also finally downloaded all of the cover art for my albums, and I’m amazed at how much this contributes to my enjoyment of the tunes. Granted, we still all hate CDs, but surely the cover art matters at least a little bit as one component of the album as a whole?

I’m actually on a mission to substantially reduce my stock of tracks. I have about 3800, down from about 4300 at its peak. The technical reason is that I need to free space on my paltry 55GB hard drive (and can’t afford a new computer right now, frown), but the real honest-to-goodness truth is that I don’t see any sense whatsoever in holding onto music that you never listen to, indeed that perhaps you’ve never listened to. I know I’ve downloaded hundreds of songs from eMusic over the years, and I haven’t gone through them all with a fine-toothed ear (or a fine-tuned ear). Every once in a while, and this is rare, I stumble upon a song that I’ve never really listened to before, and I’m blown away. Sometimes, even more rarely, it’s from an album I’ve had since practically forever, like when I realized the song “Goodnight Mr. Maugham” by the totally mediocre band Silkworm had a lyric (“The past is a foreign country / they do things differently there”) that I thought was perfect—for that moment, anyway.  But I can just as easily recognize an album that, for the most part, I downloaded in error and don’t need cluttering up my iPod.  Stay zen, people.

Every year, my friends and family send me photo text messages of things that they’re enjoying at the Texas State Fair, a legendary event that I haven’t been able to attend since I left town for college. Things like Fletcher’s corny dogs, and Pedro’s Tamales, and Big Tex. Every year, Texas’ reputation sinks a little lower as the vendors from the State Fair rack their brains to come up with new and innovative takes on deep-fried snacks. This year yielded an impressive crop: chicken-fried bacon, a fried banana split, and a deep-fried grilled cheese sandwich. Quote: “It’s like a wine tasting but there’s not so much spitting out.” Truer words never spoken! I am fairly sure that when Whitman wrote “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes,” he was referring to that rare, peculiar ability to appreciate equally the beauty in a serving of fried Coke and a 1982 Lafite Rothschild.

In other “Texas, my youth” news, my favorite bar in Dallas has closed its doors, so please excuse me while I engage some strolling down memory lane. The Meridian Room was the kind of place that you probably thought Dallas didn’t have and couldn’t support. A long wooden bar, local art on the walls, a shiny red-tiled ceiling, and, crucially, low lights. The music was just indie enough and the cocktails were well-made. The town’s sizable greasy hipster contingent made their home here, but everybody was welcome. My parents used to come here for post-opera cocktails—the opera hall is right across the street. It’s one of the first places I would go every time I flew home for a visit, and when I was living there, my friends and I would veer there a couple of times a week, at least. We always knew at least one of the bartenders or waitresses, either a friend or somebody that T. had made out with and was studiously avoiding. They treated us right. Marriage proposals; New Year’s Eve afterglows; monumental mistakes; half-priced club sandwiches on Wednesday nights. It all happened there.