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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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« The Lengths We Would Go To: An Online Transcript |Main| Thursday Newsday »

January 23, 2007

Doing The Numbers: The Wedding

By Dan Carlson

Odds that a beautiful woman will be on your flight = (amount of money you spent on ticket) x (destination) - (luck)

Odds that she will be sitting next to you = (previous sum) / 999

Odds that there will be a hot single bridesmaid that wants to hook up with you = (Just don't even try)

Odds that your bridesmaid friend will hook up with the groomsman that's been cruising her all night = (his high tolerance for alcohol) x (his even higher tolerance for repeated rejection) / (her moral fortitude) / (the fact that this dick's girlfriend is actually with him at the reception) + (your willingness to make a kamikaze run at this guy) + (again, her fortitude) ... x (no way)

Odds of dying in the God-forsaken blasted tundra of Colorado = (susceptibility to pain) x (lack of all the layers apparently needed to survive on the icy plains) + (it's cold and I want to lie down now)

Odds that you will see a black person in Colorado = N/A

Odds that you will actually dance at the reception = (amount of alcohol consumed before the cash bar kicks in) + (willingness to look like an ass in front of way too many strangers) + (somebody found some extra Shiners) x (hey, it's vacation)

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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