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Dan Carlson
Houston, Texas

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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The Counter

the world

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May 16, 2007

We Could Be Heroes. Or, Anyway, I Could — An Online Transcript

By Dan Carlson

me: if i were a superhero, i would be shovelin dan the shovelin man
i would go around planting trees
and speaking out about the environment
and having anonymous sex with groupies
and i would drive a bus
and i would get in adventures
they would want to make my life into a kids' cartoon, but it would be too risque
Sis: haha
kind of like tek jansen?
me: tek jansen wouldn't be fit to clean the grit from my shovel or wash my sheets, not without extensive training in my shovelin man ways
Sis: haha
you need sleep
me: i can sleep in my bus while jenny drives me to the rally
Sis: who's jenny?
me: duh, sarah
the redhead who's organizing the rally i'm speaking at
she saw my shovelin dan photo and said the image of me in that hat made her feel like a woman should
Sis: wow
just... wow
me:
for i am shovelin dan, the shovelin
MAN
gonna dig me a hole, gonna plant me a tree

Comments: 15

Kevin Longrie

If I could be a superhero....

Spender

Funneh.

ryan English

hahahahahahahahah
I knew it all along
you ARE shovlein dan the shovelin man

Cool site. Thanks.
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I think your site is very good and complete, but the information you have here

dustone

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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

The Shelves

Dan's  book recommendations, reviews, favorite quotes, book clubs, book trivia, book lists

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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