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Dan Carlson
Los Angeles, California

I'm a twentysomething white male with ambitions to be a professional film critic and generally spend my days getting paid to watch movies and write about it. I try not to think too hard about how I want to build my life around talking about other people's creations and not mine. A compulsive reader and stubborn cineaste, I take an often contrary stance to my more fundamentalist peers and upbringing by celebrating the pursuit of the good, and the Good, in life, love, art and film. If you watched enough episodes of a few TV shows ("The Hungry and the Hunted," "The Cut Man Cometh," "The Body," "The Zeppo," "Waiting in the Wings," "Out of Gas," "April is the Cruelest Month," "20 Hours in America," "Colonial Day," "An Echolls Family Christmas," and "Look Who's Stalking," for starters), you would understand me completely, and you'd also realize that much of my worldview and philosophical insights are heavily influenced by fictional works/programs, and many of the good things I've said in my life are just a regurgitation of someone else's imaginings. I guess I was made to be a film critic.

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« Part 3 |Main| Review: In Good Company »

January 3, 2005

A Continuing List Of Suggestions For Better Living, Or Resolutions, To Be Carried Out In The New Year

By Dan Carlson
19. Stop drooling in my sleep. This will not help me with women, and in fact will probably wind up hurting my case.

20. Convince myself it's not gay to enjoy reality/fantasy programming commonly embraced by gay culture. Repeat mantra as necessary until all doubts are removed: notgaynotgaynotgaynotgaypleaselordineedawomannotgaynotgayboobsnotgay, etc.

21. Tell my roommate who owns a pipe and reads Ayn Rand he's a douchebag for owning a pipe and reading Ayn Rand.

22. Quit my job when I realize I liked being unemployed better. Work at local video store with expectations for life comfortably lowered.

23. Visit homes of everyone who's read The DaVinci Code. Kick them in the nuts. Move on.

24. Wear MC Hammer-esque parachute pants on casual Fridays. Turn stares of confusion into jealousy when I do the running man in my cube with far greater flexibility than denim allows.

25. Steal co-worker Joyce's office supplies and feign ignorance when interrogated about the crime. Continue until she attributes missing items to Alzheimer's. Return missing supplies. Repeat process until I am promoted or she quits.

26. Buy set of tools and workbench to feel like a real man. Cry myself to sleep when I realize it doesn't work.

27. Ignore voices in my head exhorting me to scourge myself with steel wool when I think Dirty Thoughts.

28. Teach myself to use restrooms at work. The 90-minute commute for the comfort of my own john is growing inconvenient.

29. Ignore #28 above. There's no place like home.

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"The critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising."
— Pauline Kael

"Film lovers are sick people."
— Francois Truffaut

"I hope I strike a blow for chubby bald men everywhere. I hope they rise like an army."
— Paul Giamatti, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, 12/14/04

"Let others praise ancient times, I am glad I was born in these."
— Ovid

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Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
— Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
— John Stuart Mill

We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
— G.K. Chesterton

We were, for the briefest of moments, something greater than the sum of our uncertain parts; we were youth itself, in all its painful glory and sharp joy.
— Me, Fall 2003

There is a time in the lives of most writers when they are vulnerable, when the vivid dreams and ambitions of childhood seem to pale in the harsh sunlight of what we call the real world. In short, there's a time when things can go either way.
— Stephen King

Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.
— Ask the Dust, John Fante