October 2009
1 post
A Blocked Writer
Two stories I’m having trouble getting off the ground:
A dramatization of the James Harvey/Andy Warhol situation. James Harvey was an abstract expressionist painter who worked as a graphic designer. For his work , he designed the Brillo Box that Andy Warhol made the centerpiece of his first show and made him famous. Primarily for positing that even something like a Brillo Box could be art if...
September 2009
2 posts
An iHole
Things I use the Notes function in my iPhone to keep track of, with examples of each.
Celebrity sightings:
Bars I have enjoyed. Room 18.
Christmas gift ideas. The Ghost Whisperer (for Dad).
Books to try to schmooze a free copy of at ALA:
Restaurants I would like to check out. Chinatown Ice Cream Factory.
Cryptic-to-indecipherable germs of story ideas. R.D. Laing/Robots.
Stuff to do with...
An Art Historian
Though I can think of few things that are more indulgent and indicative of my insulated economic place in the First World, I spend a lot of time worrying about art’s place in society. Specifically the visual arts, which have a longer history than music and theatre, and thus can illuminate societal trends in a more thorough way.
As someone fundamentally seeking adulation, appropriate credit is...
May 2009
6 posts
A Misanthrope
Things that I forcibly ignored while future Nobel-laureate Salman Rushdie was reading an amazing unpublished story about big themes like age and death:
A woman loudly pouring and then shoving orange Tic-Tacs into her mouth. A man compulsively checking his phone to see if Sox-Yankees was rained out. Flash cameras specifically prohibited by the introducer. An old couple putting on their rain...
A Cable Customer
Actually, Mike D. has not become a cable customer. He would, though, if there was cable a la carte. The ESPNs, Comedy Central, and the Sam-Waterston-looks-like-a-Muppet network would be all he needs. (TNT’s business model, as it only runs ads for The Closer, is the corporate equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.)
Right now he Hulus everything except for NBA League Pass Broadband,...
A Number-Cruncher
Though this blog will not compete with fellow Lansing native Nate Silver, I thought I would share an amazing and disturbing economic statistic (it is my forgotten major).
On a world scale, stock-market turnover increased from 28% of world output in 1990 to 81% in 1998.
Nothing that hasn’t been said a billion times before, but the tripling of anything in a short time resembles nothing more...
A Nerd About Town
Q: How did you spend your Saturday, Mike D.?
A: Funny you ask, I was going to blog about it. 1. Interviewing a promising potential roommate. Cleaning to Eponymous before she arrived — Driver 8 stuck in my head ever since.
2. Going to a panel on the future of the short story from the Pen World Voices Festival. Hate to say it, but having old, deaf people speaking in their third language is...
A Wikipedia Theorist
If Jorge Luis Borges were alive today, he would certainly be creating hoaxes on Wikipedia. I like to imagine the pages for Pierre Menard and Tlön, Uqbar not with “Plot Summary” and “Publication History” sections, but instead with reference links to both actual and false webpages.
The Colbert Nation tripling the elephant population or revealing Warren G. Harding’s...
A Blogger for the Second Time
As I’m the only person you know who has been dooced (good story that can’t be told on the web—set aside 45 minutes and buy me a drink), you should add this to your RSS Reader. The title of this blog is a sly nod toward the title of that ill-fated creation.
Haphazard observations and potential catastrophes to follow.