Well, at least the song is devoid of irony

 

I was going to add my superfluous two cents regarding Hillary’s latest comments which, shall it suffice to say, may or may not relate to the sick fantasy that exists in some form among (judging by the volume of chatter) a not-negligible portion of both the Right (as fortuitousness, glee tastefully withheld of course while soberly intoning on the historical basis for the expectation) AND the Left (as martyrdom, while imagining what the anthemic U2 or Springsteen tribute song might sound like).  But as I already filled C’s ears this weekend with my thoughts on the matter (with an officiousness that can only be described as Olbermannesque, she might add), I no longer feel the need, and instead am content to share this footage of Hillary Clinton drinking beer and dancing in Puerto Rico:

 

 

Shilling

I loved Grosse Pointe Blank, and this looks like its spiritual sequel — John Cusack’s dark, cynical, mercenary persona is back — (those romantic comedies he was doing for a while were so ill-fitting). I have no idea if the movie will be good in any critical sense I would apply to most other things, but this is one that I am going to avoid reading the reviews for, and run out next Friday and enjoy as a (perhaps) guilty pleasure, regardless.

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.