Friday Funnies

I hate the word "Funnies." That's why I used it. If I could have written "Friday Funnies" in that googledy Comic Sans font, I would have.

But so. Here are a few things, one about bombs and two about Obama.

1. Beware, those who use urban slang! No longer can you shout, "This pretzel mix is the fucking bomb."
2. I just found out Barack Hussein Obama is a smoker. I can't tell you how much this pleases me. And, yes, yes, I know: Smoking's bad blah blah blah. But I like that Obama smokes. Why? Because it shows that he hasn't had all of the humanity wrung from him by politics. Humans do stupid, pleasurable things—they have bad habits—like smoking; and I, for one, would rather elect a fallible human than a perfect robot. It's funny, but in in this way Obama reminds me more of Bill than Bill's own wife does. (Not that spouses are necessarily similar, but you get my point.)
3. Time for reader participation, via the comments function: What do you think Obama's brand is? I've got my money on Camel Lights, but damn do I wish he smoked Lucky Strikes.

11/27/07

The dates dotted in this journal, with gaps
amidships, are clicking on up inevitably,
as they are wont to do. Three years now,
and my want for you, my want of you,
keeps coming back like an old football injury.

I never played, but the metaphor seems apt:
prior glories, hard hits, a longing looking-back
that, too rigorously examined, having kept reading,
proves not to hold up so well. Well oh well.

Used to I could induce rapture
at will, by picture, poem, or rereading
old emails. Often, substances got in on the act.
A doomed, dready dreaming, mouthing a memory
like an ice cube in August: delicious, but gone quick.

Now not so much. Sobriety's conspired
to make life realer. Clarity can be a bit dull.
That old pull's perhaps been dispelled
by my newfound stability. The pilot light's lit
but I've turned off the gas.

Back in Black Tie

From this past Friday night at the M&C Gold Awards, held at the Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts on Manhattan's Lower East Side:

Birthday 2K7

I had a good birthday. Thanks to all of you who wished me one—and nuts to all of you who didn't. (Not really; I just like saying "nuts to you." Makes me feel like a 1930s "newsie.")

My mom and my dad both called yesterday to wish me a happy birthday. Both of them sang the happy birthday song to me; it's kind become a family tradition to do so.

After that, though, on the phone with my dad, he said, "Man ... you're 28. Two years away from 30, 32 years away from 60 ... unbelievable."

"You're right," I said. "I know. It's just a bad calculus that don't ever get any better, does it?"

"No, it sure doesn't," said my dad, laughing hard.

Post No. 200!

Happy Post No. 200 to me! To celebrate, here's a something I wrote:

On Sun and the Interest of What’s Happening

In the Viennese café, after the movie,
we chose a sunstruck seat
in the covered outdoor garden’s corner.
“How have you been doing?” we asked one another.
“How was Japan?” “How are you and your man?”
“Japan was good,” I said. “Japan was really great.”

Maya was enjoying Brooklyn: the quiet, the space,
the more-laid-back life. But she wasn’t sure she’d stay

in the city forever. In fact, Maya was sure
she wouldn’t stay. I sipped my latte and picked at
the strudel with schlag. The light made it all
seem somehow unreal, like when in shadow
you view a street thoroughly smashed by sunshine
across the way. “And I don’t know where I’ll go.”

Earlier, in the movie, a bad-for—but mad-for—one-another couple
looked out, arms around waists, onto a Paris dusk.
I thought of my girl like that, then, and London.
It wasn’t good but it was something.

“So who do you see?” Maya asked. I stirred
from my sunny reverie and rearranged the cutlery, anxiously.
A minute earlier I’d have had an answer, but the sun seemed
to shut all that down;

the light a viscousness in which I’d been trapped,
sap slowly surprising an insect, henceforth caught,
preserved for eons, dust motes dancing in slo-mo.

Everything telescoped. “Joe,”
I said. “I talk a lot to Joe.”

Something stupid this way comes

Loyal readers of this blog (both of them) are likely familiar with my hatred for stupid neologisms. In these "pages," I have previously excoriated The New York Times Magazine's use, in an otherwise fine profile of the band The Arcade Fire, of the word "ginormous." It has come to my attention that another terrible word is upon us: vajayjay. Apparently this word is being pushed/popularized by Oprah, after being used on Grey's Anatomy (though of course the word predates the show). I learned of the plague-like spreading of this awful word via The Onion A.V. Club's blog The Hater, which is written by Amelie Gillette. (Also, isn't that a great name? Nothing like a nom that conjures both a cute Frenchwoman and shaving.) In the entry in question, Ms. Gillette introduces us to the word vajayjay, "aka the world's most annoying word popularized by the world's most annoying popularizer of annoying things, Oprah." Well said.

I'd just like to go on record here and say that I am sick and tired of the infantilizing of everything. Ginormous is a word a teenager says. Vajayjay is a word a toddler says, or a toddler's mommy says to her (or, I suppose, him, though I can't imagine why). Similarly, men are not to wear shorts unless at the beach or engaged in some vigorous outdoor activity; enough with the T-shirts sporting clever sayings or kitschy nostalgia, like Mr. Bubble—in fact, enough with T-shirts, unless they are of the plain white variety, altogether. All these words the people who write Gawker use: douchebag, asshat, and the like are what junior-high students call one another. So fucking knock it off already. Wear your pants like a man, your skirt (or pants or dress or whatever, I don't care, I'm not trying to start a thing here) like a woman, say "fuck" when you want to, and lay off the childish euphemisms for your naughty bits. Let's start to elevate the discourse by—oh, I dunno—elevating the fucking discourse.

It has been my experience

that people are split more or less evenly between two differing camps when it comes to Halloween: there are those who love it and there are those who think it's stupid. And, much like Republicans and Democrats, you don't find too many switching sides. Also, it's often disastrous when a member of one group tries to date a member of the other: much like the Montagues and Capulets, only with one person (girl or guy) dressed up like Romeo or Juliet, and the other in street clothes, or "civvies," because they think that dressing up is stupid.

I fall in the latter camp. I dunno, I just don't care.

Done with my chores, Pa.

Here at work, one of my bosses calls our work "chores." As in this week, after getting back from Japan, his asking me amiably, "So, are you catching up on your chores?"

I kind of like that. It makes me feel like the magazine is a family that is obligated to care for you; you just have to earn your keep by writing stories, chopping firewood, and toting water.

This one goes out to Dad

I read this recently in The New Yorker. I was surprised by the use of my own personal dad's favorite hymn, as well as by the—not onomatopoeia, but something close (does anyone know the word for this?)—that ends it. An excellent poem.

Aubade in Autumn

by Peter Everwine October 15, 2007

This morning, from under the floorboards
of the room in which I write,
Lawrence the handyman is singing the blues
in a soft falsetto as he works, the words
unclear, though surely one of them is love,
lugging its shadow of sadness into song.
I don’t want to think about sadness;
there’s never a lack of it.
I want to sit quietly for a while
and listen to my father making
a joyful sound unto his mirror
as he shaves—slap of razor
against the strop, the familiar rasp of his voice
singing his favorite hymn, but faint now,
coming from so far back in time:
Oh, come to the church in the wildwood . . .
my father, who had no faith, but loved
how the long, ascending syllable of wild
echoed from the walls in celebration
as the morning opened around him . . .
as now it opens around me, the light shifting
in the leaf-fall of the pear tree and across
the bedraggled back-yard roses
that I have been careless of
but brighten the air, nevertheless.
Who am I, if not one who listens
for words to stir from the silences they keep?
Love is the ground note; we cannot do
without it or the sorrow of its changes.
Come to the wildwood, love,
Oh, to the wiiildwood as the morning deepens,
and from a branch in the cedar tree a small bird
quickens his song into the blue reaches of heaven—
hey sweetie sweetie hey.

Back from Japan

Back from Japan. A crazy, bizarre, wonderful trip. Among other
things, I:

1. Sat at the bar where Bill Murray first saw Scarlett in Lost in Translation.
2. Got attacked by deer outside of a temple in Nara.
3. Fell in love.
4. Saw Mt. Fuji from the window of the Shinkansen, or "bullet train."
5. Ate many, many things which I had no idea what they were.
6. Bowed about one million times.
7. Got offered a naughty massage.
8. Shook the hands of about 50 Japanese schoolchildren, who wanted to try out their English on me.
9. Saw all these tiny, nearly three-person bars down back alleys in Osaka.
10. Stayed in five-star hotels nightly.

... and much, much more.

I don't know how to put this, but I'm kind of a big deal.

Go here now: Smart Fitzjerrell

Prison Break

I see ads for this show, and I don't get it: do they just keep breaking out of prison every episode? Do they keep getting put back in? You'd think that such an inept crew of prisonbreakers would eventually just settle in at the ol' hoosegow.

Which brings to mind:

Hoosegow: NOUN: Slang. A place for the confinement of persons in lawful detention: brig, house of correction, jail, keep, penitentiary, prison. Informal: lockup, pen. Slang: big house, can, clink, cooler, coop, joint, jug, pokey, slammer, stir. Chiefly regional: calaboose. See FREE.

Thanks, Roget's II!

A remnant

Harry Stares It Down

God, the long weekend looms,
a cold spot in the hallway, lonely fullness
of action outside, the flecking
Christmas lights up far too early.

Saturday stretches out like a hungry animal.
It growls: alarm, wake, shower, coffee,
pacing the floorboards until 5pm arrives
and unlocks the liquor cabinet.

Later later later later

Later, a smile stuck stillborn,
Harry doesn’t laugh with
the others at the bar, their jokes.
Like a retarded kid capering, he thinks cruelly.

So, what to do. Only this:
Crush the fucking can, cracked cherrywood
bar and buy another. Good buybacks here.
And mostly, drinking’s better than not.

But then comes
last call and
still there’s Sunday
to stare down, sweet Jesus Sunday,
an arid expanse inhabited only
by twenty-four smirking hours,
an orange light blinking on the percolator.

And when that day’s duly weathered, again it’s:
alarm, wake, shower, coffee, until

work and a blessed white mind
on Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday.
Thursday. Friday.

Dying for the weekends to quit coming.
Too chickenshit to do it.

Bill O'Reilly Is a Horrible Racist

Recently, Bill O'Reilly took the Reverend Al Sharpton out to dinner at Sylvia's, the famous Harlem soul-food restaurant, to thank him (the Rev.) for appearing on The Factor. Here is what that classy fellow Bill had to say about the place:

"It was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn't any kind of craziness at all."

My god! Can you believe it? Blacks — blacks! — behaving themselves in a restaurant!

O'Reilly went on to add, "There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, 'M.F.-er, I want more iced tea.'"

I mean, can you believe it? Who woulda thunk it?

At any rate, Media Matters for America posted a clip of Bill saying the stuff above on its website, thus stirring the pot (appropriately, I might add — I feel like lots of the ridiculous shit O'Reilly says just gets ignored, 'cause he's such a lunatic) and prompting Bill Shine, senior VP for programming at Fox News, to comment, "This is nothing more than left-wing outlets stirring up false racism accusations for ratings. It's sad."

Yeah, it's very sad, isn't it, Bill and Bill? Terribly sad. I mean, here O'Reilly was, trying to give the coloreds credit for behaving themselves in a restaurant, and what happens? The vicious left-wing media attacks him for it. Poor O'Reilly.

That fucker should be fired just like Don Imus. But it won't happen — or it won't happen easily — because it's Fox News.

Flavorslaton Strikes Again

Upcoming goings-on include:

Thursday 9/27 @ Jacques-Imo's: The SugarTone Brass Band
Friday 9/28 @ Webster Hall: Okkervil River
Saturday 10/6 @ Randall's Island: Arcade Fire
Wednesday 10/10 @ Southpaw: The Raveonettes
Friday 10/12 @ JFK: Hunter (ooh ... meta) goes to Japan!
Thursday & Friday 11/1 & 11/2 @ Terminal 5: The Decemberists

Any & all are welcome to attend any & all events!

Nathan Rabin's Year of Flops

I don’t know if any of you out there in TV Land have seen these before, but one and all have to start reading The Onion A.V. Club’s series “My Year of Flops.” Here’s a link to the entry on the movie The Fountain, which made me choke back laughter (“Maybe they figured they could fire Aronofsky right before shooting wrapped and give Hugh Jackman a ...”).

Basically the guy, Nathan Rabin, just reviews the most terrible movies of all time. It’s amazing. Here’s what he had to say about the recent Lindsay Lohan movie Georgia Rule:

“The film’s bizarre tonal left turn from Evening Shade sassiness to emotion-choked family soap opera suggests what Golden Girls might look like if they decided to shut off the laugh track for a three-episode arc illustrating that Rue McLanahan’s geriatric sexual adventurer was raped during college and that all her vamping and lustful one-liners were really a desperate way of overcompensating for not feeling desirable or pure sexually.”

Wow. I mean, that is just a colossus of a sentence. I am in awe. That might be up there as one of the greatest sentences ever, no kidding.

A beautiful paragraph

Herewith, please find a beautiful paragraph from a beautiful story about the parrot named Alex who recently passed away:

Many linguists argue that only human brains have the ability to nest ideas within ideas to form the infinitely recursive architecture of thought: When you’re done eating breakfast would you look in the box at the back of the table for the yellow rubber glove with the middle finger turned inside out?

Man, that's just, wow. I highly recommend the (short) article, which can be found here in The New York Times.

Kid Nation

This Wednesday evening at 8pm is the CBS premiere of Kid Nation, a new series wherein 40 kids aged eight to 15 are left in an abandoned mining town to fend for themselves.

Yes, that's right, it's Survivor but with children. This, I think, has the potential to be one of the best shows ever—maybe even better than Joe Millionaire. Can you imagine the possibilities? What if they form a pudding-based economy? What if they elect a dog president? What if they start eating each other? Man, I hope they start eating each other. I hope it ends up like the Simpsons in which Bart takes over Kamp Krusty, I really do. (I'm fully aware that it won't, but a man can dream, can't he?)

NOBODY NEEDS ANY OF THIS SHIT

The street profiled in this NY Times article is Grand Street, which is about 5 minutes from my apartment. The writer writes that "those looking to find what made this neighborhood [Williamsburg] cool a decade ago need to venture a little farther these days, to Grand Street — where a good-looking mix of old and new restaurants, experimental galleries and girlie boutiques have carved out a more relaxed way to burn through a Saturday."

She then proceeds to take a little tour down Grand, enumerating the best of the street's shops. There's Pop, "an adorable little shop that sells colorful dresses and graphic t-shirts," Armoire, which "serves cold mimosas to members of the local fashion set as they paw at exquisitely crafted silk dresses," and Chopin Chemists, which "looks like an old apothecary shop, but ... sells designer candles like Paddywax ($16.99) and Voluspa ($21.99)."

Adorable ... paw ... fashion set ... designer candles ... (elsewhere in the article) pretty ... popular with laptop users ... storybook ... arty ... splurge ... and so on and so forth.

Just let me ask: when did hipsters completely transform into yuppies? Maybe it's been happening all along, and I haven't just been paying attention, but the smug, self-satisfied consumerism with which this article is shot through makes me SICK TO MY STOMACH. You do not need a goddamn twenty-two-dollar candle. You do not need to burn through your Saturdays. You do not need cold mimosas. To hell with storybook, pretty, arty, splurging and the rest of this nonsense. It's all escapism, it's all worthless and it won't make you happy.

Long time no blog

Hola, amigos. What's goin' on? I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, but it's like life keeps raining shit down on me and I don't have a shit shovel big enough to clear it all away.

Anyway, in the news today, CNN's obtained a transcript of the new Bin Laden tape. I think you can also buy it on iTunes for $1.99. Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security, said that "the United States follows a standard procedure to analyze any tapes it receives."

He goes on:

"We review it for authenticity, we review it to see when we think it was made, if it's a single tape or a compilation of outtakes. We look to see if there are overt messages or hidden messages."

A compilation of outtakes? Is that, like, a blooper reel? Or a "best-of" mixtape? Deleted scenes? Alternate endings? I wanna see the one where Bin Laden keeps cracking up when saying the name of Russia's president.