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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," "Waiting in the Wings," "Out of Gas," "April is the Cruelest Month," "20 Hours in America," "Colonial Day" 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 Clock
View Article  I Saved Latin. What Did You Ever Do?
This is the order:

Rushmore (Obvious.)

Bottle Rocket (Close choice.)

The Royal Tenenbaums (Tries a bit too hard.)

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (Enjoyable but distant fourth.)

This is the order. It is unchangeable, and it is good.

Do you doubt the order? Go make thyself clean, and return when your soul has cleared.

View Article  If It's Barely A Sport, It's On The Ocho
FCC Comissioner Deborah Tate has come out in favor of the family-friendly cable tiers some programmers are now offering for consumers who want to keep "racy" content from entering their homes. Additionally, John McCain, whom I like, and the Parents Television Council, whom I openly despise with every ounce of my soul, are pushing for cable companies to offer more family tiers and a la carte programs, so that parents can pick and choose their content and keep blood and breasts and whatever else scares them away from their kids. Now, I'm not sure why the parents are willing to give up the options for a variety of content in an effort to protect their kids when they, as parents, should probably be a bit more proactive in their kids' viewing habits; if your 11-year-old is watching "Nip/Tuck," maybe you should try turning it off before calling on the government to intervene.

Nevertheless, there's a good idea at the bottom of all this insanity. Tate has said that friends of hers express displeasure at paying for a full block of channels and having to block out "half the stations they are paying for." This is a good point.

I'm sick and tired of paying a cable bill and having the money support OLN, the Golf Channel, FSN, ESPNs 1-27, the weird Asian channel called AZN, MTV Espanol, Fox News, BET, HSN, Lifetime, E!, and G4 Tech TV. Mainly all the sports crap, since CNN and Bill Simmons keep me in enough headlines and commentary to pass for normal at the office, and the rest of the channels I just plain don't need.

My complaint has nothing to do with "decency" in programming; I'm single, have no children, and enjoy all the stuff you're not supposed to let kids see, anyway, so asking me to give up HBO and Comedy Central is a bad idea. I'd like to see the a la carte plan happen because I'm tired of paying for stuff I never use. I know there are legions of men and women out there happy to pay for that stuff. Let them have it.

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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

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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.
— August Van Zorn


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