Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

I had never seen a Yasujiro Ozu film, including his oft-mentioned classic, Tokyo Story (1953), when I watched this movie a couple of years ago. I started with Good Morning  (1959) because I figured a comedy would be a good place to start and felt the premise of Tokyo Story to be somewhat daunting. It made me excited to see more examples of his famous "pillow shots," where Ozu cuts away from the narrative to focus on a landscape, an empty room, or a household item, and build his world. This interest in Ozu's framing was only a starting point because now I plan on watching his entire filmography for narrative as well as cinematography and everything else that makes his mise-en-scene and ideas so enjoyable. I will write about fifteen of them for the blog and rank them.  One of his later comedies,  Good Morning  examines how two young boys challenge their parents' rules because they want them to buy a television to watch Sumo matches. As with most of Ozu's ouevre, t...

Joan Baez's interpretation of "Don't Think Twice, It''s All Right" is my favorite because her vocals add soulful clarity to Bob Dylan's thorny narrative. Track This  is a recurring feature of Snobbin' that turns the music appreciation dial up and rips it off of your stereo. It introduces a new track, allows readers to rediscover an underappreciated one, and serves as a forum to discuss a song that falls into the ear candy category and should be listened to unabashedly for years to come.

As someone who writes both fiction and nonfiction every day, I often discover snippets of writing in notebooks or in long-forgotten files on my hard drive. Generally, I know what they are. At least, I have some idea of why I wrote them. If they are nonfiction, I sometimes revise them for blog posts. The fiction snippets are more difficult to use. I always tell myself that I will finish the story or find a place to use it in the ever-expanding novel that I secretly contend is narratively daring. This snippet is amusing, if nothing else, so I am sharing it. Perhaps, I want to remind myself at some future date that I will eventually finish each of these brief pieces. Another thing, why did I think I could use goosebump as a verb? For this story, I wonder what was coming next: a scary ghost story, a humorous tale, a novel about Bill and his madcap crew of camp rangers, or the secret life of William Jefferson Clinton. One thing I do know is that I am now hungry for s'mores. Take it ...