Are You There, God? It's Me, Your Cellular Service Provider
Yes, there's a reason they use 555 phone numbers in movies.
{Found on Airbag}
Birds
These little brown birds have begun collecting on my windowsill in the mornings, and they like to greet the rising sun with incredibly loud repetitive chirps that manage to pierce the glass and brick and drive directly into my subconscious. As a result, most of my dreams the last couple days have been segueing abruptly from whatever pleasant fantasy I've got going on in my head to swarms of attacking birds. And it's not pleasant. And these things are so damn loud, I can't fall asleep for more than fifteen minutes or so at a time after that initial wake-up call, and any subsequent dreams are just birds.
As a result, I'm really beginning to hate the little suckers.
In retaliation, I figure I've got the following options:
Option 1: I can buy the little kid across the street a .22 with a scope and commission him to pick off the unsuspecting feather bundles as they alight on my windowsill. Drop a couple of the suckers, word would get around right quick, and they'd soon find another place to congregate. Problem is, I don't know how the little kid's mother would react to my arming her son and sending him off on the Dawn Patrol. And even if she was okay with it, I've watched her kid play basketball on his Nerf hoop, and his aim's so bad, he's lucky if he can hit the sidewalk. Giving this kid a rifle and having him fire away at my windows might not be the best of ideas.
Option 2: I get myself a cat, and raise him entirely on the window ledge. Set up a little platform out there he can sleep on, give him a little water in a dish, and let him earn his keep and his dinner by killing and eating whatever comes in his jurisdiction. The ledge is plenty wide enough for a cat to walk on (provided the cat's on the not-to-hefty side), and if he played his cards right, he could get a pretty good daily catch. Granted, life on a window ledge might not be the cushiest of cat existences, but hey, New York's a rough town, and iit could be a lot worse. And I could set up a little awning that would keep most of the rain off.
I'm leaning toward the Option 2, right now, but we'll see how tomorrow morning goes. I get woken up by the feathery bastards one more time, I might have to get drastic.
An Open Note to the Counter Guy...
...at Bagel World on Court Street.
I don't know if you were pissed at having to work on Memorial Day, or if you're just generally a dick, or whatever. But HEAR ME, COUNTER GUY. When I, having just walked a dozen blocks through a torrential downpour to get to the establishment that pays your bills, ask for an everything bagel with a little bit of scallion cream cheese, you do NOT:
• proceed to smear that bagel with enough cream cheese to choke Delta Burke and reduce the entire thing to a sodden mess
• slide the thing over the counter at me like a friggin' hockey puck
• give me attitude when I have to ask a second time for my coffee since your one-lobed brain wasn't firing fast enough to process the request the first time
• wait to be asked to put my foodstuffs in a bag, and THEN put it in a paper bag which aforementioned torrential downpour will reduce to shreds in about ten seconds.
Had I not been soaking wet when I got home and discovered the shit sandwich that passes for a cream-cheese bagel in your closely-spaced eyes, and had I not been so ravenously hungry and then calmingly sated after carving the excess pound of cream cheese away from said bagel and devouring it (because Bagel World does have some damn good bagels), I very well might have returned to your place of work in short order, wielding the closest blunt object at hand, which is currently a metal folding chair or an extremely heavy antique vacuum cleaner, depending on which hand you pick.
Mark these words, Bagel Man, and mark them well: you fuck with my bagel again, you best be ready to get a Hoover in the face.
Thirty Seconds
Don't mind me, I've just been thinking. Specifically, I've been thinking about music, and albums, and reviews of such, and what they're going to become of all of them now that you can hear thirty seconds of every track off the new Goo Goo Dolls album or whatever-you-fancy thanks to the Apple Music Store.
Example: for the last few weeks, I've been thinking about buying the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, Fever to Tell. At least, I was thinking about it until I got a chance to give it the iStore treatment and spent about six minutes giving the record a listen (which is a decent percentage of the whole, given the fact that the entire thing clocks in at around 35 minutes). And in six minutes, I was able to determine that I wanted nothing to do with it. Recycled psuedo-fem-punk, and poorly recycled at that: heavy guitars and synthesized wailing, repeated ad nauseum, with nothing in the way of originality and little distinction between the tracks. The eleven thirty-second giblets I heard could have easily been blended into a single track, with that annoying mono-quality audio effect that sounds like the whole thing was recorded over a ham radio. My friend Michael Malice, who knows full well the glory of chick punk and worships the ground it spits on, wouldn't deign to wipe his ass with the liner notes. This, THIS, is what the mainstream / alternative music press has been practically wetting its collected self in anticipation over?
I formed, hardened, and polished this opinion in six minutes. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, in eleven thirty-second intervals, I was able to condemn not only an album, but the popular music group that created it and the publications that favorably reviewed it. I got 'em all, in one fell swoop. I killed them stone dead in my personal worldview in under four hundred seconds. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs = rubbish.
That got me thinking: is thirty seconds really enough time to form a responsible, cohesive opinion? What would the Beatles sound like in thirty second intervals? Would I have bought The River, and every other Springsteen album, if I could only hear half-a-minute of each track?
Thankfully, I didn't have to think too long. The Beatles sound brilliant in thirty second intervals, because they WERE brilliant, and because they knew pop hooks like no-one else before or since. And a couple clicks on the Apple Music Store had me listening to a fraction of The River's second-disk first track, "Point Blank," which had me immediately reaching for my CD album so I could hear the rest of it. Point made.
Still, thirty seconds isn't much. Doesn't allow for big musical shifts and change-ups and the like. Half-a-minute of "Stairway to Heaven" would probably leave most people shaking their heads, wondering what the fuss was about. Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombones sounds incomprehensible in that timeframe, even if his "I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You" still retains a bit of its beauty.
What it comes down to is, these are previews of songs, not the song itself. And like many previews (DREAMCATCHER's tense, haunting trailer springs immediately to mind), they may, or may not, be an accurate reflection of the thing as a whole.
But I still think the Yeah Yeah Yeahs suck.
Holy Mother of God...
I want this. I really, really want this. Honestly.
An Imperial Star Destroyer made of Legos. Over three thousand of 'em. The sucker's three feet long. It's also three hundred dollars, but hey, what can you do?
If you loved me, you'd buy it for me right now.
Fashionista
My buddy JC's been putting his mad flash skillz to good use...
Bedside Reading
The stack of books on my bedside table is now approaching critical mass. See, I reserve certain books for bed reading. Not the stuff I take with me every day on the subway or read while lounging on the couch; no, my bed reading is the stuff that requires concentration, that I can't get into on a crowded subway car, or on the couch with the television on. I'm talking about heavy-duty reading, the meaty stuff. Of course, since I'm usually exhausted by the time I get to bed, the books on this pile can tend to reside there for a while.
The bedside stack currently consists of:
Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, by Eric Meyer
Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard
The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, by Byian Talbot
The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing, by Norman Mailer, autographed
My grandfather's ancient copy of A Treasury of the Familiar, by Ralph L. Woods
And I recently added one of my personal favorites, You Can't Win, to the stack. A stark memoir of bum-turned-town-librarian Jack Black's travels across America at the tail end of the 19th century, it reads as hard and cold as a straight razor, and cuts just as deep. It's a great late-night book, and I got a hankering to pick it up again after seeing a 1978 performance by Tom Waits on Austin City Limits, a program I'd stupidly forgotten until I stumbled across it again on late night television last weekend.
Speaking of late-night television, why did no one tell me that Michael Paré is now an interstellar bounty hunter?
And speaking of Michael Paré...I guess I can understand why you might need to get your obsessive love for him off your chest, but, c'mon, people: don't you think you might be scaring him just a bit with your site?
Vinay
This is an old classmate of mine. His name is Vinay, and he is apparently training to join the U.S. Foreign Service. Good luck, Vinay!
This news, while inconsequential to most, will make the day of at least one other person I know.
Meanwhile, yes, I haven't updated lately. I had some troubles transferring my site to my new host (had to reinstall Movable Type, which was somewhat daunting), and I've been busy learning to dismantle iBooks and seeing The Matrix Reloaded. I'll have more on the latter here, once I get my head around it...
Grey Skies
I went for a run this evening, under grey clouds that threatened to bring rain but didn't, against a cool wind that felt more like Fall than mid-May. I ran through Cobble Hill, down Henry Street, and the wind brought smells of garlic frying in olive oil that filled the street. Good smells. Still lots of Italians around these parts. Overhead, a flock of black birds banked and headed north, silhouetted against the grey sky.
As I ran, I was listening to U2's Achtung Baby on my iPod. I hadn't heard it in a while, and my interest was renewed by a discussion with a coworker friend, who maintained that it was U2's best album. I always went with Joshua Tree for mainly sentimental reasons, but after having given the former a good spin, I think I have to concede he's right: Achtung holds up quite a bit better than its predecessor, and excels it not only in the overall strength of its songs, but in the album's impressive feat of taking a good sound and running with it in a completely different direction, to create something that sounded distinctly different, and better, than anything that had come before.
In other news, I started taking apart computers today, and even managed to get them put back together.
Fire
I loaned my dad my copy of Young Men and Fire, Norman Maclean's excellent account of the 1949 Mann Gulch forest fire that claimed the lives of several smokejumpers. In return, he forwarded me the photograph below which, according to the email, was taken by a fire behavior analyst from Fairbanks, Alaska named John McColgan, in the Bitterroot National Forest in Montana, in the summer of 2000. Terrifying and beautiful. And if you haven't read Young Men and Fire, you should.
Click to enlarge.
The Forensic Engineer
[the start of something that's been kicking around in my head]
If when, sitting on his couch, late at night with the lights turned low, listening to an old movie or soft music and having a short glass of whiskey, he chooses to look on his life as it currently stands as fiction, then it would be this:
A pulp from the 1930’s or thereabouts, ten cents, a garish cover of primary colors with a drawing of a man holding a woman in his arms, or a man stepping from a rocket-ship, or battling a whale or some other such nonsense, promising action and intrigue or suspense within the flimsy covers. The main story would not be his story, however. His story would be buried in the latter pages, or if not buried, well, postponed.
The tag-line would be, “He could SOLVE the RIDDLE of THE GREATEST DISASTER, but he was CRIPPLED by the FAILURE of HIS ONLY LOVE!” The lead artwork that of a nattily-dressed man, khakis, rolled-up sleeves and cocked fedora, staring at the ruins of a collapsed bridge as a pretty blonde wept inconsolably in the foreground. The title, “The Forensic Engineer.”
The Forensic Engineer, Carl Orbison, the Structural Detective, the Master of Disaster, was the man who, after the bridge had fallen and the tears were wept and the teeth were gnashed and the question of “Why, God, why?” was wailed and shouted by the mournful and the angry, provided the answer in no uncertain terms.
Why, God, why?
Because moisture seeped into the structural supports and froze, and expanded, and cracked, and melted, and eroded.
Why, God, why?
Because wind caused the structure to oscillate, and that oscillation took on a frequency, and that frequency became a wave that tore the structure apart.
Why, God, why?
Because.
The forensic engineer was not God, not by a long shot. But he knew the answer.
God knew all answers. God was, is, omnipotent. But he never answered the questions, so the forensic engineer stepped in and filled in the blanks. Because that was his job, and because he knew, too.
What he didn’t know was why his marriage failed, why his love collapsed, why his closest friendship grew brittle and eventually shattered. God probably knew, but the forensic engineer, the Master of Disaster, didn’t ask.
Carl Orbison was master of all he surveyed, and all he saw was disaster.
Random
I came home last night after having a drink and seeing a movie with a friend of mine, and for whatever reason, sat down to write. I ended up pounding out eight pages of what could be a television pilot before falling into bed at three in the morning. So today, I was a bit out of it, but managed to study a little for the Apple Certification exams while preparing to switch my web host, an ordeal in and of itself, and one I probably wouldn't be going through if my current host hadn't been bought up by Interland, a company that's caused me far too much misery for me to even consider helping them prosper. And my new web host has the Image::Magick PERL module already installed, which'll let me redesign my site to show off my photos a bit.
Anyway.
Walking through the park this afternoon, I watched a kid playing baseball with his friends scale a thirty-foot fence in under ten seconds, then climb down the other side to grab the ball after it was slugged into home-run territory.
"Lookit that," one kid called. "He's like Spider-Man."
"Go, Spider-Man. Go Spider-Man," they chanted.
Spider-Man grabbed the bar, chucked it over the fence, then made it back over even faster than the first time, without breaking a sweat. Oh, to be young.
On television, I'm watching Clint Eastwood wave around a .357 Magnum and scowl and slap women while trying to act like this is somehow different from a Dirty Harry movie. And any second now, I'm gonna turn it off and go back to re-reading Glenn Dakin's splendid Abe: Wrong For All the Right Reasons.
Or maybe I'll just get some sleep.
Doodle of the Day
My Picasso Ninja Death Battle doodle was selected as Doodle of the Day. I'm so proud.
Birthday Boy
My friend Dave just had a birthday. He is old, old, old.
Clearly, he's also mean, mean, mean.
Happy birthday, Dave.
No, it's not SARS
Michael Malice, never one to be outdone in the obscure-comic-art-hinting-at-Batman's-pedophiliac-tendencies department, has written to inform me that he's had the original Bad Touch page hanging on his bathroom door for over a year.
In other news, X2 rocks the almighty hizzouse. Director Brian Singer and screenwriters Michael Dougherty, Daniel P. Harris, and David Hayter have done better than I could have hoped in creating a flick that's not only a fanboy's wet dream, but a massively entertaining film in its own right. Excellent.
And from The Onion...
"...unwrapped from bandages at a press conference, the ungodly Bride twitched grotesquely several times before turning to face her would-be mate. Reporters in attendance said the Bride recoiled upon setting her eyes on Ashcroft's horribly misshapen visage, letting out a blood-curdling scream.
'When the lovestruck Attorney General tried to embrace the Bride, she shunned him, just as the entire world has shunned him,' CNN reporter William Hurlbut said. 'It was truly tragic...'"