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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. 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 certain TV shows — for starters, "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," "Look Who's Stalking," "The Garage Door," "Charlie Gets Crippled," "Wind Sprints," and "Corner Boys" — 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, or at any rate a heartfelt attempt to interpret them. I guess I was made to be a film critic.

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June 14, 2005

Notes From My Department Meeting, 6.14.05

By Dan Carlson
A woman is brought in to explain how to use our new office chairs. (1) Who actually needs help figuring out how to sit down? (2) Why is this woman so nervous and out of breath? She's got the easiest job in the world: telling employees how to use chairs. "You just sit down in it. Don't lean too far forward or you'll fall out. Okay, I'm going on break."Two men from another supply company give us the rundown on how to use the new arms on which our computer monitors are mounted. One of them refers to either himself or their team (hard to tell, I'm not really listening) as MacGyver. Joke bombs.Joyce again announces her intent to use the men's restroom if the women's room is occupied. If I ever walk in on that, I'll drive straight home and kill myself in the slowest, meanest way possible.June birthdays are announced, including mine. They're going to sing for me in two weeks. I'm getting really bad at looking surprised and enthused at the office.Complaints of elevated temperature in the room end the meeting 10 minutes early. I'm not hot at all, so maybe the complaints had more to do with the predominantly middle-aged women in the room than the thermostat.The company picnic is this Saturday. A lobotomy and a toddler and I'd be the perfect attendee.

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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

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— Ask the Dust, John Fante