Po…umms

Two roads diverged in the wood, and I- . . . I took out my Treo and checked out GoogleMaps, to figure out which one to take.

Do not go gentle into that . . . sketchy taco place.

No man is an island . . . unlike Governor’s Island, which is.

I felt a funeral in my brain . . . but they only have the place till 6, so they should be cleared out of there before we need to start setting up for the bat mitzvah, ok?

I saw the best minds of my generation . . . get National Merit Scholarships.

STRANGER! if you, passing, meet me, and desire to speak to me, why should you
not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you? . . . Actually, on second thought that’d be pretty weird–forget I said that.   

 

You try, try to post something with some kind of unifying theme, but then end up putting down a bunch of disjointed ideas

I need some kind of indie rock intervention.  I just bought five Billy Joel (Billy Joel!) songs from iTunes, from the An Innocent Man album.  The kids among my readers will find it risible that I actually paid for music at all online, but, putting that aside, my selection should be enough cause for concern standing alone.  Maybe it’s the perfect weather in New York the last two days (which, ironically, have been among the most stressful at work for a few weeks) that has put me in such an unaccountably good mood as to become especially prone to reckless cultural choices like this one.  I did allow myself the thought that the lameness of what I was doing was mitigated by the decision to buy these tracks not off of some Greatest Hits compilation — which is just for the lazy and uninformed — but rather from the original album grouping.  Oh, the lies you’ll tell yourself.  

But these are really good songs, right?  I mean, “For the Longest Time”?  ”Leave a Tender Moment Alone” “Uptown Girl“? This album was critical to my 7th- and 8th-grade Catholic grade school puppy love awakenings.  I know I rewound the cassette in my dad’s car to play “Tell Her About It” over and over, to build up the courage to call Jessica H_____. and ask her to go on a date to a movie at the mall (When I finally did, she got back to me the next day and said she couldn’t go that weekend, because she had to babysit one day, but she “wasn’t sure yet if it was on Friday or Saturday.”  Bullshit, Jessica — I saw right through that, even through the haze my infatuation, and I’m calling you out on it.  But it’s ok–we’re cool).  Plus I think my mom had the original record, and played it even earlier.  I can picture her (whether a genuine memory or fabrication I’m not sure) singing along to “Uptown Girl” in the car, tossing her hair back and forth in the wind, childlike and carefree.  At the same time, I really am worried about what this signals.  Two years ago I felt like I was at least right behind the crest when it came to which indie bands were coming out, and thought I could do a decently respectable job during most rounds of Hipster Band-Reference-Jerk-Off.  I hated Billy Joel then - he was the worst kind of sappy, maudlin, suburban wreck of a singer-songwriter that I couldn’t even bring myself to pretend at an “ironic” appreciation for.  And yet tonight I just bought him another gin and tonic. You know those farewell parties that terminally ill people have so that everyone who’d theoretically show up at the funeral gets a chance to say goodbye to the living person instead? That’s what my 29th birthday party is going to be this year, guys.  I’m buying fucking Billy Joel music now — clearly I’ve only got one year left, before I recede into the permanence of the banal.             

Relatedly, I found this headline on the wire service sidebar of nytimes.com today very funny:

ARTS   | May 7, 2008 
At 63, Rod Stewart Not Ready to Slow Down 
By REUTERS 
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Hall of Fame rocker Rod Stewart is 63 years-old, but nowhere near retirement as he considers a wish list of future projects that include a movie, an R&B album, and maybe even a fling with country and western music. 

I love the faux-suspense of whether Rod Stewart will be daring enough to follow through and try that fling with country and western music.  How could Rod Stewart’s thought process possibly involve any kind of undulating self-examination or restraint at this point?  It’s more like “Fuck it, I’m 63.  I’m just going to order the dessert and enjoy myself.”   

At my job I am able to work out on my lunch hour and so, since the weather has broken, I’ve been using the time to run outside.  Today I ran back and forth across the Brooklyn Bridge. Have any of you who live here not done this yet on a sunny day?  It’s transcendently lovely.  I left my fresh change of clothes in a locker at the New York Sports Club on Water Street, which I must say is a bit more well-kept than the one on Wall Street I usually frequent. (That sounds douchey, but I do not work in finance; that’s just where my office happens to be.)  Except that at the Water Street gym, they play house music throughout the whole place, including the locker room.  Maybe I’m sort of uninitiated into the overall Manhattan men’s locker room culture, but I thought it was profoundly weird to be listening to a remix of “Work it” by RuPaul while a bunch of naked, hairy older men surround me.  It’s already protocol not to look around any more than you have to, but that mandate was strengthened today by a terrible fear that if I did look up for more than three seconds my brain would match the visual to the soundtrack and detect some kind of synchronized pattern in the movements of the middle-aged bond traders and senior managers in there with me, all dangling their bits and hair-dryering their balls.  And also at Water Street the towel/attendant guy was really chatty, whereas at Wall Street they regard all the patrons with silent contempt, which I think is just right.        

 

Entropy

Today I noticed yet another sign of the reckless speed with which I continue to approach the teeth-gnashing devastation of my 30th birthday.  For whatever reason (the whispered suggestion of summer,  turning the page to warmer days), I took a moment’s notice of the date — May 1.  As I’m prone to do from time to time, I started daydreaming about previous May 1sts, and what my station in life had been for them.

Except that, when I used to do this, I’d think back one, then two, then three, perhaps up to four or five years, amusing myself by measuring how much of my life’s plot I could reconstruct for each reverse annual milestone.  Today, however, when I thought back to previous May 1sts, I didn’t start with last year, but instead immediately jumped back ten years, and then twenty.  (I suppose May 2007 still feels enough like last week that I just jumped right past it.)  But in doing so I didn’t exactly stumble upon a wellspring of nostalgia:

May 1, 1998 — Finishing up freshman year of college.  I don’t remember what courses I had specifically, other than a senior history seminar that the visiting assistant professor teaching it, who I hung around a lot and allowed myself to believe I impressed intellectually, let me take.  Must have been cramming for finals, I guess.  Gearing up for a summer job filling in Excel spreadsheets and Access databases, obtained via a favor of a friend of my mom’s at her company.  Dating someone, long-distance and very, to my mind at the time, seriously.  I have not seen her in almost as many years.  Monica Lewinsky shit on the news all the time.  Jeez, is that all I remember?

May 1, 1988 — Finishing third grade.  Little League practice probably starting — the germination period for the fabulous athlete I would one day become.  My teacher, a nun, took a few minutes each day to let each of us in the class take turns reading aloud from “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” (and its sequel, “More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark”), which I had brought in.  That’s all I got.

This was just depressing.

Phrases I did not use today

“Mmm-MMM, I’d like to get a bite off a’that muffin top.”

“Looks like a drug deal gone bad, just twenty minutes before we got here.”

“Say, what a great sash.”

“How was the CIA today, honey?”

“It shouldn’t take the worst blizzard in thirty years for you to admit to yourself that you really want to be liked, Quentin!”

“Christ recommends this cheese.  Here, try a piece.”

“No, no — not emphatic, but literate.”

“You’ve been running pell-mell through my telenovela brainstorming sessions all day.”

“I’m going to have to demote you for conduct unbecoming a hemoglobin.”

“Social worker-smocial worker.  She smelled pretty.”

“I hope this isn’t too forward of me, but I painstakingly restored this chafing dish you said you liked.”

“All my life I’ve been looking for these boots and now that I’ve found them, it just sort of feels empty.”

“Hey, what are you guys, a bunch of fake electrons?  You should be excited!”

Only of interest to some

I was in Chicago this weekend and saw, for the first time, a couple shows at the I.O. (née Improv Olympic) Theater in Wrigleyville. This was highly amusing to me because, even though years later I took improv classes in New York, I had never once set foot in the I.O. when I lived right around the corner from it back in 2001-02. When I lived in Chicago, my theater experience of choice was the Neo-Futurists’ show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (30 plays in 60 minutes), which I saw at least once every few weeks.  The Neo-Futurists opened a New York outpost roughly the same time I got here, first in Park Slope and now in the East Village, putting on a version of Too Much Light in the same building where tons of indie improv teams now perform on weekends.  So it was with great delight that when I went to see the show here in New York a couple months ago, I got pulled on stage to be in one of the plays.  My part was a to-the-death-competitive spelling bee contestant, which I handled with brief aplomb, albeit hopping with laughter during one of the funny bits (as I sometimes do from the backline in improv when a teammate makes a particularly tickling move).  Then, due to legitimate nervousness driving from the pressure of time — an average of about two minutes being allocated to each play — I misspelled a word I’ve typed a thousand times (although I can’t remember what it was now).

This was quite a personal disgrace; if any of you ever commit a crime of moderate violence and, addled with numbing boredom during a stretch of your home confinement sentence, find yourself tracking back through all the missives you have ever received from me, I do believe you will find it very difficult to locate a single spelling error.  I pride myself on being as orthographically accurate as a situation can possibly allow; as a practice, I do not even abbreviate or miscapitalize my text messages.  After the play, one of the New York Neo-Futurists graciously thanked me for participating, although, feeling self-chastened, I dumbly did not reply.  It was still fun to be a part of it, though.

One thing that I did NOT enjoy at my recent visit to the I.O, however, was the fact that there was a piano player (!) who provided supposedly matching musical accompaniment to the improv.  It was horrendous — muddling the actors’ dramatic developments and transitions, and being a generally unnecessary distraction.  We were sitting right next to the pianist, and all throughout the show I had to work diligently to sublimate the urge to yank him off the bench, throw a cup of water on his face and scold him for getting in the way of the funny.      

The way I broke it to my seven-year-old, when he started to take it out of the cupboard and then got upset when I told him he couldn’t.

Look, son.  I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly.  This is a mint jelly, and it’s a bit of a refined taste.  Up to this point your only exposure to the genre has been that sugary Smuckers stuff that Mommy spreads on bread for you with peanut butter.   This does not go good with peanut butter.  And don’t even act like you’re just gonna put it on a piece of toast and not end up wasting it because you don’t like the way it tastes.  You can have something else instead.    

No, stop giving me that look, mister–it’s not that I don’t want you to have good things. It’s just that —  I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly.  This jelly costs $11.99 for an 8 oz. jar at Whole Foods, and it’s organic.  What you’re looking for is something sweet to put on your English muffin, which is completely valid, given your age.  I mean, you eat cut-up hot dogs in the afternoon, for crissakes; no one expects you to know your Béchamel from your Béarnaise at this point. Just consider yourself lucky.  Youth and innocence slip away, my child, and you spend horridly massive amounts of time mourning their loss once you get older.  I think considering that, you’d do well to just take my advice and treat what’s in that little jar as so much Edenic forbidden fruit. Pick something different.

Oh, stop it! I don’t care what your mother does when you’re with her–this is my weekend!  I already told you that as far as I’m concerned, I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly.  I bought it specifically because Clarissa is coming over for dinner on Wednesday, and she’s Lebanese, so I’m making lamb.  No, I don’t think that’s a ridiculous assumption.  It’s thoughtful is what it is, unlike a certain backbiting crone who shall remain nameless, and who doesn’t have the simple decency to trade visitation dates when I’ve got something important.  Someday you’ll realize that there are more worthwhile pursuits in life than just getting what you want at any given moment, even if you’re not sure yourself what it is that you want, although it always seems to involve heaping ruin on the person dumb enough to try to make you happy.  My mind is made up, son — go see what’s in the fridge, you can have something from there instead.

What? I was savi- . . . aww, screw it — you can have my milkshake.   

 

Bounce back with bullets

 

• Hipsters shouldn’t use the word “awesome” anymore.  It lost its retro 80s tone at some point over the last five years; I’m not sure when.  We need a new word.  Perhaps I can suggest “Meow-licious?”
• As a matter of fact, hipsters need to stop with the 80s retro nostalgia thing altogether.  The 80s are dead.  They were revived briefly, as a joke, and then, all the sudden, everyone realized wistfully that the 80s were totally Meow-licious in terms of art and style (tell me you didn’t listen to “Let’s Dance” tipsy late at night on the subway home all the time around 2002 — you didn’t?  Well I did) but now, it’s overdone.  When I hear certain 80s songs now, I no longer think about my childhood, but about the time last week, last month or last year I listened to them, the original context wiped away by their more recent witty (or jealous) revival.  And it’s not just music — there are so few original 80s references that haven’t already been mined and rehashed at this point that it seems depressing to even try to come up with anything fresh.  But just to wring it out, here I go: Carl Lewis.  There — the 80s is done, son, so let’s hang them up and move on.     
• The 90s just seem silly to revive, because everything then was so self-aware and ironic that it’s probably just overall too meta to adopt tonge-in-cheek.  The 60s have been done (I seem to remember that being the nostalgia thing back in the 80s), as have the 70s, 50s and even the 40s (remember Bette Midler in “For the Boys”?  ”Memphis Belle”? “Atonement“, for god’s sakes? or that whole swing revival 10 years ago?).  God knows the 20s have been done (one could argue they’re the basis for the 80s?) and the 30s, well, what would you do for that, just have a wild resurgence in the popularity of eating soup that you have to wait on long lines to get?  Doesn’t Hale & Hearty already cover that? [It's late.]  Same deal with the 1910s — unless we figure out a way to integrate huge amounts of soldiers returning from overseas fighting disfigured and dispirited into our current culture, along with a renaissance of muckraking journalism and paranoia and concern that D.W. Griffith movies will cause audiences to have seizures because they’re just too real.  Come to think of it, that might be the way to go.
• Also, this is a picture of me and my brother, taken this past Christmas.  This shows what my head would look like if it were wrapped in plastic because it was some kind of deli meat that you would buy from a store. 

 

Ain’t like that

Just in case anyone was wondering, I haven’t stopped posting on this shit because I got a tumblr blog or nothin’.  Back soon.  

The Race and Politics speech

An utter triumph for the campaign and for American political discourse — finally, a credible public persona gets it right.  Brother gets up there and says, w/r/t racism and its devastating legacy of persisting injustice, that that shit is real.  But. . . the story can’t end there, and we’ll never move forward, whether as individuals or or families or congregations or as a society, without acknowledging not only that shit is real but that shit comes in different stripes, and afflicts all of us, and so can only be comprehensively overcome in efforts of unity and transformation.  Or, well, maybe you should just watch it yourself. Oh, and try to ignore the appallingly dull-witted CNN summary points at the bottom of the screen.  Full text here.  

The Logic of Hillary ‘08

I like these videos: