Tonight, Sara and I had dinner with Alec and Miki - who have just returned (for good this time, or so we're told) from Japan.  As always, the food was amazing - a green curry with chicken and eggplant and potato - and after-dinner conversation was a run-down of Alec's favorite recent movies and music.  He's probably the most well-versed person I know in the language of Japanese punk rock and Japanese pop culture oddities.  Tonight we talked about freakishly good Taiko drummers, 80's Japanese punk rockers and their amazing mohawks, and the hugely popular Japanese metal band X Japan, whose lead singer had one of the whackiest mohawks I have ever seen. 

I'm re-starting this blog to keep a journal of my thoughts about cultural happenings in Shreveport-Bossier City and also just to capture my thoughts on my friends and life in general.  It's such an interesting time - Sara and I just purchased our first home, so it's a transitional phase that's really worth capturing.  I work at The Robinson Film Center here in Shreveport, so it probably goes without saying that I'm very interested in cinema - it is the greatest passion of my life aside from Sara - so I'll be journaling my moviegoing experiences quite a bit. 

Not to belabor the point of why I'm blogging again, but I feel like I should get this out in the open:  I think it is an amazing time to be alive, and that Shreveport is as good a place as any to live in this moment.  Just in the last few weeks, I've had some of the best times of my life in our little city, whether that means going to a roller derby or a jazz festival or a movie screening, or just passing an afternoon at Excalibur Comics.  I don't subscribe to the idea that there's "nothing to do here."  The people who propagate that myth and endlessly, naively detail the ways that Austin, New York, and Los Angeles are the only places worth living just simply annoy the living hell out of me.  Sorry for the rant.  Let's have some fun.