the photo

newyorkmug.jpg

the info

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.

Calendar


November 2008
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30

The Counter

the world

the library

the shots

www.flickr.com
This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from dan_carlson. Make your own badge here.

« Frakkin' Toasters: The Enjoyable Hell Of "Battlestar Galactica" |Main| Baby, We're Gonna Be Up Five Hundy By Midnight »

October 11, 2006

In Verse: Or, Somebody Put On Some Archie Bell And The Drells So We Can All Tighten Up

By Dan Carlson

Sing me one more song about them dusty plains / Them honky-tonk angels and their lonely beehive pain

I've made my bed, so here I'll lie / I'm rollin' West Texas teardrops in my eyes

There's a seat for you at the rodeo, and I've got every slow dance saved / Besides the Mexican food sucks north of here anyway

It's written all over the face of the daughter of the mayor of Marble Falls / When she winds up in Denton town, doing the Valium waltz

There only two things in life that make it worth livin' / That's guitars that tune good and firm-feelin' women

Alison in Galveston somehow lost her sanity / And Dimples who now lives in Temple's got the law lookin' for me

She lived in Berkeley till the earthquake shook her loose / She lives in Texas now, where nothing ever moves

Nighttime would find me in Rosa's cantina / Music would play and Felina would whirl

Well there's floodin' down in Texas, all the telephone lines are down / And I've been tryin' to call my baby, Lord, and I can't get a single sound

I sure do love them red-haired girls / I'm just like all the boys from Texas

A Lone Star State of Mind

--------

Comments: 0

Post a comment

the post

Questions? Comments? Complaints?

Drop 'em in the mailbag.

homefeed.png

The Lines

The Quotes

"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

Current Reading

In Rotation















Powered by
Movable Type 3.33

the wisdom

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