Will Hines Dot Net

Salinger was a truly brilliant author. If Catcher In The Rye is too cliche for you mofos, then read Nine Stories and be the cool Salinger kid on the block. At least read A Perfect Day for Bananafish.

OR enjoy this sketch that Rob Lathan and I did in 2004 or 2003 or something for our one-time-only Spank “Rob and Will Fix America.” – J.D. Salinger Changes His Voice Mail

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This thing was the hit of the pre-YouTube Internet! Well, not really.
My Salinger voice sounds more than vaguely Indian.

Answer any or all:

• I want a better profile pic for my twitter. What should I do?
• In the book version of Let The Right One In, the vampire Eli describes once meeting an older vampire and asking why there weren’t more of them? The older vampire answers, and then points at Eli’s chest and coyly suggests something I do not understand. Explain that.
• Is it harder and harder to feel like one knows the current music scene, or is it just something all aging hipsters like myself feel?
• Is it okay if I describe myself as an aging hipster?
• I have eight unspoken for ISBNs and I’m going to use them to publish books by me and my friends. No question here, but if you have suggestions for books I’d like to hear.
• Could it be that the reason the dBs never got any bigger was the lead vocals were never really that powerful, despite the great song writing and arranging?
• You know that very sweet video some teenager made which is just footage of a girl sheepishly walking around a 7-11? And you know how lots of people crapped their pants over it? Am I a dick for thinking that that video is good MOSTLY because it had the good sense to put a good song underneath the footage and that we SHOULD be complimenting the music?
• Anyone know a simpler way to record a podcast than how I’m doing it? I do this: shotgun mikes into a mixer through RCA cables into the “line in” input of a Mac Book Pro into Garage Band. Export as .aiff, edit with Final Cut Pro, export as .aif and use iTunes to change to an mp3. Phew!
• How does Ricky J do anything that he does? Especially the History of Cup and Balls?
• Will we all live to see America be as wonderful as it could be? Or at least to experience hoverboards? How about food pills? Food pills! Food pills!
• Will someone ever dig up a piece of paper that resolves once and for all: who Shakespeare was addressing his sonnets to, what happened to Amelia Earheart, or what Kurt Cobain’s next album would have sounded like?
• What is the scariest short story I could read?
• Will I ever successfully do a Scottish accent on stage? What if I do not wish to put any work or concentration into this task?
• Will I ever live in another city?
• I know I’d prefer invisibility to flying, but how about phasing vs. turning to steel? Emotionally they are similar.
• Will I see Marvel Comics make an original roster of superheros that eclipses the Kirby pantheon? Not that I have anything against the Kirby pantheon, but forty years is a long time to base a company on re-runs.
• Farting, body odor or nose hairs? Which is worse and why?
• That’s it!

If you’re not reading Roger Ebert’s blog, you are missing out. Latest entry is on the joys of making out, especially in the context of the sexually repressed college campuses of 1960. Unguarded, honest, plainly stated — it’s a jewel, I say! A jewel!

His previous entry Nil By Mouth — in which he answers the question of whether he misses eating and drinking since jaw surgery took those things away — is heartbreaking and hopeful. Hooray Roger Ebert!

Reading Shakespeare’s history plays. Like all Shakespeare plays, I miss about 1/3 of the lines but I just plow forward. Even rushing through them a lot of the big moments come through: I felt badly for Richard II after he was deposed, I smile at Falstaff and Mistress Quickly, I’m scared of/impressed by the ruthlessness of Henry IV, and I get swept up at the increasingly heroic actions of Henry V.

I really wish I could see what these plays looked like when Shakespeare himself put them on. They seem built for fun, with lots of jokes and murder and backstabbing and grand speeches. It’s hard to imagine people actually understanding them as they were said. But they must have, right? Apparently the Globe Theater was a very large success, and the King’s Men (the players who built it) went on to outlive all of its founding members. How about those guys? Smart, right?

They call the first four history plays — Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2 and Henry V — the “Henriad.” Well, not everyone. Some people do. I’m going to. I like that word.

I like that Shakespeare’s characters rarely lie — or at least before they lie, the announce their intention to lie! People are constantly saying exactly what they think. They’d be good improvisers, these fictional characters. Except for the puns, which I never understand.

I’d love to film a couple of these scenes with UCB powerhouses filling up the roles. Someone make that happen.

I also jumped out of a plane this weekend but I honestly feel like describing that would be so obvious! You’re scared, you fall, you’re fine.

Get Psyched – The 7 Steps To A More Psyched Life is hereby available. Well, actually we’re not going to start shipping books until January 20th. But the website is open and taking orders. $33 for full color interior, $12 for black and white interior (both look great).

See the sample pages to see how cool this thing looks. Thanks to Damian Chadwick for making it look amazing, and to Dyna Moe for giving us a great cover!

This is a self-published venture and very much an online one. Rob and I wrote it with wikiepedia software, are printing it via lulu.com and using paypal.com to process the payments. We copied Porter Mason’s bassistwanted.com model! We are copycats! We may get our crap together and get it listed on Amazon.com at some point but for now it’s all going through getpsyched.biz.

We saw the first proof yesterday, and it looks great! Get Psyched!

For those of you discouraged by criticisms of Obama’s first year, I point you to this — it was item number one in The Economist’s “The World This Year” round-up:

Barack Obama was inaugurated as America’s 44th president. In a whirlwind first year in office, Mr. Obama overturned a prohibition on federal funding for stem-cell research, eased some restrictions on dealing with Cuba, lifted a ban on people with HIV traveling to the United States, pushed Congress to pass health-care reform, promised to close the detention camp at Guantanamo, pledged a cut in American’s emissions and promoted the first Hispanic person to the Supreme Court.

I’ll remind you that The Economist is a conservative British magazine, which has a skeptical attitude at best towards America in general and Obama in particular. Still, when tallying what’s important about the year, there’s no doubt of the positive overall change that’s happened. It’s fair game to criticize the president as harshly as you want — it’s part of the job — but step back and see the trends: we’re in a good place, getting better. Full disclosure: disagree with me and I’m probably going to totally ignore you.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Get Psyched is going to be a book, almost definitely in time for Christmas. GET PSYCHED!

Frequently Asked Questions About This Post:

Q: Really? A Book?
A: Yep, Rob and I wrote a book. It’s written and almost done being laid out.

Q: But not really. This is a bit?
A: Nope, we really wrote a book. 110 pages on how to properly Get Psyched.

Q: Wow! Who’s publishing it?
A: We are.

Q: Oh.
A: Yeah, well what’s wrong with that? It looks great, it’s hilarious and it will instantly solve all of your problems immediately.

Q: What if a real publisher gets wind of this, sees some sample chapters and wants to publish it?
A: We’d likely sell out immediately. Barring that, be on the lookout for Dr. Lanny Latham on the corners outside of Barnes & Nobles everywhere, soon.

I don’t remember seeing this since I’ve started improvising. Hamlet’s advice to actors. Here’s his comments for comedians (I believe saying to avoid laughing at yourself on stage):

And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them, for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That’s villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.

VILLANOUS! Also, the opening comments speak against over-acting, methinks:

It offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant — it out-Herods Herod. Pray you avoid it.

So bad acting out-Herods Herod? It’s worse than the man who asked for the head of Jesus? Hyperbole much, son? This guy sounds like Delaney!

Fun, though.

CONS: It makes you look like a pretentious douche. Or maybe like a tiny-dicked angry person reading Nietzche prominently like Kevin Kline’s character in A Fish Called Wanda. It’s heavy. It’s dense and rambly with lots of big words hanging off of run-on sentences and therefore takes mental energy.

PROS: It’s more fun than you’d think. There’s more funny parts than I remember. The dramatic parts are very cool. Melville seems crazy but he seems to know it. You feel like a smart person. You feel like an American.

If nothing else, you should read the first paragraph if you’re a New Yorker. Ishmael is explaining why he feels the need to go to sea, and the way he describes himself feeling depressed in NYC (wanting to knock people’s hats off of their head, stopping in front of coffin stores) feels accurate to me!

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

Whole book here.

What are the most American books? I was catching up on Mad Men episodes, and got to the point where one of the British managers of Don Draper’s ad firm says “I have been reading some of your American literature” and I knew that it’d be Mark Twain because whenever someone says they are reading American literature it’s Mark Twain. I remember an Atlantic Monthly profile on Saddam Hussein years and years ago which said “He even reads American literature — the complete Mark Twain sits on his bookshelf” (the profile was not complimentary, despite what that sentence implies).

Separate from that, on the documentary shoot we were watching an episode of Jeopardy while waiting for some lights to be set up and Moby Dick was one of the categories. I was surprised that most people in the room knew the answers to most of the questions even though few had read the book. But maybe that’s because Moby Dick is one of the Great American novels so we all hold onto whatever knowledge we glean because we know it’s “important?”

I certainly don’t mind Mark Twain being the first guy people think of when trying to think of an American author. But what others do people think of? What are the most American books? Or authors?