Do It: Le Clown Triste de la Vie

What could be better than Star Wars? Star Wars co-written by George Lucas and Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre, perhaps?

Could there have been a collaboration? Well, the movie was released in 1977 and the famous existentialist did not die until 1980. So it is possible. And the Internet is nothing if not a haven for the possible; naturally, someone out there has tried to give us a glimpse of the imaginary.

Do it: Watch The Existential Star Wars.

PS - If the sad, nihilistic, nauseating live death of existentialism had a soundtrack it might include a song by Bjork. Oh, and her "Army of Me" is like a woeful requiem knitting together the dreams of the troubled sleep of a respectful prostitute; now playing on iTunes.

Excellent Quotes: To Hate Like This

I am reading Will Blythe's classic sports memoir, To Hate Like This is to Be Happy Forever, about the Tar Heel-Blue Devils basketball rivalry, on the iPad. It is recursively Southern storytelling and filled with references to games and places I recall in various states of clarity. It is sad and wistful. It is reflective and thoughtful. It is about more than basketball. It is also quite often plain old funny as all get out. Witness this exchange between the author and his girlfriend's nine-year-old son, Harry, in NYC:

"Harry, who had been watching me watch the game, asked, 'Why do you get so mad?' Normally, he would have delighted in an adult's swearing. But now he was edging backward across the room, the way people will when you have a gun pointed at them. His eyes were wide.

'Because I hate Duke,' I explained.

'Why do you hate them?' he asked.

Here I hesitated. A young boy had asked me a guileless question, and he needed an adult response.

'Well, that's an interesting question,' I told him, channeling Mister Rogers, 'and it deserves an honest answer.' I paused for a moment, as I had seen his mother do when addressing an earnest inquiry by her son. Children are our future. We must teach them well, even when it is hard.

'The truth is they are terrible people,' I told him."

-Blythe, Will. To Hate Like This is to be Happy Forever: A Thoroughly Obsessive, Intermittently Uplifting, and Occasionally Unbiased Account of the Duke-North Carolina Basketball Rivalry. New York (NY): Harper Collins e-books, 2006. P. 33 of 684.

PS - Woefully, I worked at Duke briefly, although I rarely admit it. Living in D.C. after graduate school and desperate for a job--I was temping at law firms and sleeping on a single bed that had been stuffed into a glorified walk-in closet in a group house with my best friends who all had solid employment--I was offered a position at Duke THREE times before I accepted my fate. The job was not even really a Duke job; it was just affiliated with the University and Coach K had nothing to do with it. Yet, I was deeply conflicted. That was when I knew that basketball might be creeping too far into my world view. Oh, and "Down By The Water" by The Decembrists is something else to be obsessive about; now playing on iTunes.