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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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September 11, 2006

A Girl I Know Once Referred To A Toilet As A "Pee Hole"

By Dan Carlson

In what could be the saddest and truest indicator yet that cable programmers have really, really run out of ideas, I was fortunate enough to stumble across a phenomenally stupid show on the Travel Channel, which seems to be a repository for all the crap Discovery Channel just can't bring itself to air.

The show appeared to be a countdown show, the kind of mindless program that spends an hour talking about roller coasters or chocolate factories or something appropriately mild that's best suited for at-home moms, shut-ins, and young children of questionable mental development. This episode announced its intention to count down the 10 best bathrooms in Las Vegas. Bathrooms in Vegas. Bathrooms in Vegas. I can't say it enough. Bathrooms in Vegas.

I only made it to #9 before I blacked out; my roommate found me curled on my floor in a pool of my own blood and urine. But before I lost consciousness, I witnessed the show's breathless accolades for a Star Trek-themed crapper at the Hilton. The narrator, who must surely hate himself, exhorted viewers to "Set their phasers to urinate!" No lie.

It was the greatest thing I've ever seen.

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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

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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