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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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« Review: Slither |Main| I Have Spent More Than Half A Lifetime Trying To Express The Tragic Moment »

April 1, 2006

Oh, The Fools Of April

By Dan Carlson

Last year, while working for that unnamed but definitely horrible academic publishing company in Thousand Oaks, Crazy F***ing Denise pioneered the April Fool's plans around the office. It was a Friday, and she, being the heart and soul of the misnamed Fun Committee, engineered the hijinks: We were all to call in sick, or claim to have car trouble, or say we had the clap, or something that would allow us to come in late. Then we'd all meet at Starbucks that morning, and slip into the building while the managers were in their daily briefing. Then they'd come out and see us all waiting there to surprise them and, I don't know, we'd all have a good laugh and life would be peachy up on Walton's Mountain and our nipples would squirt sunshine and we'd all be bestest friends.

So, the managers came out, and wowee, they were surprised. Of course, CFD had actually cleared the "prank" with the department head, Kim, so it wasn't as much a practical joke as a poorly choreographed elementary school skit, somewhere on par with a plan that any 8-year-old could devise. And Shaunna, this idiot woman whose job title I can't remember now, took the whole thing up a notch on the hilarity scale by rearranging staplers and crap on people's desks while we were gone.

Man, I was so close to punching Shaunna in the mouth when I quit that place. If she'd been a man, I would've killed her outright, but since she was just a mannish woman, I had to settle for hating her.

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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

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— Paul Giamatti, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, 12/14/04

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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.
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— Ask the Dust, John Fante