| A poem |
[Oct. 30th, 2009|05:53 am] |
My haberdasher
has left the country
in a twin prop plane
with a faulty rudder,
leaving behind a
ransacked office
and an empty safe.
A wife in turmoil.
My pants are in ruins:
khaki confetti; my
shirts are stained with
mustard; my briefs
starred with cigarette
burns. And I don’t
even smoke. He left
a note, cryptic
and, frankly, rude.
I miss him. He cradled
my shoes like a mother cat
holding close her kittens. |
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| Steve |
[Sep. 25th, 2009|04:29 am] |
I'm not going to do a long tribute here. Just goodbye to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ubiquitousblink. There will never be another like him, and I will miss him the rest of my days. We met in 1986. It was one of those days when you meet someone who will be a major presence in your life. Most lives have one or more of those important days.
And today is the funeral. There are far too many of this kind of day.
But I'm meandering. The important thing was that Steve was funny, sweet, and smart. And that's not over-glorifying the dead. He was the kind of person the world could use more of. And there will not be another like him.
I miss you, friend. |
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| Though you can do long posts on facebook |
[Sep. 7th, 2009|10:38 am] |
there's a convoluted way to do it that makes it seem unreasonable.
I miss LJ; it's been a while since I've looked back and caught up.
All posts now seem to be from Tom, Bob, and Joe. The rest of my LJ friends have jumped ship to Facebook or disappeared off the face of the blearth. Since my last bunch of LJ posts have been links to videos or pictures, I jumped over to facebook as well.
But I miss reading and writing long posts, and forget how entertaining and well done the ones on Livejournal are. I'm thinking of returning to livejournal.
But there are a lot of things I'm thinking about doing that I just. Don't. Do. Like continuing the Ben Stockton stuff or finishing the Ben Stockton "book." Like starting something else new and fictional. Like storming into Best Buy and demanding they return to me my desktop computer, which they've had for a full week. Like collecting the two pieces of scrap paper, each containing a paragraph of a short story, and typing them into the two paragraphs I have on my desktop, so that I will have four paragraphs of a short story.
I hate typing on this laptop. Truthfully, I hate this laptop. |
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| Tonight: DAMNED |
[May. 8th, 2009|08:17 am] |
Tonight's the Boston Damned show, and I still have an extra ticket.
I had a somewhat lazy morning. I decided to walk to Haymarket for my breakfast burrito, but realized I'll later be walking around Boston all day. So I turned around a quarter of the way there, walked home, and drove over.
I think I'll leave just after noon. I have stunningly mundane plans. I want to buy Vans. I want to have the catfish and chips & salsa at The Border Cafe.
I want to poke around shops...but there are far fewer cool shops than there were ten years ago. The Globe bookstore? Gone. That cool little shop with all the foreign versions of movie posters? Gone. That basement CD store with all the rare imports with misspelled titles? Gone. The OTHER CD store across the street? You guessed it.
Even the cool HMV store, which looked like a Sam Goody's but had hidden rarities around every corner is now a furniture place.
Is the internet to blame?
Anyway, as I suspected, the weather reports have softened from rain all day to occasional showers in the afternoon. That's fine. The show is in a part of Boston I'm not familiar with, so I think I'll park near the Hynes Convention Center and take the green line. I can also scope out the meager lodging Katie and I will have when we go to Boston for our first anniversary.
I'm looking forward to the show, but I know I still have to get through the waiting around, the two opening acts, etc. Going to a show is exhausting unless the headliner is the only act. And that almost never happens. Plus, I'm used to going to bed early, like an elderly or an infant. When the doors open, I'm usually trying to stay awake to get to the end of a chapter of a book.
So I'll have a late drive home. I might need coffee to make it. I don't want to stay in a hotel, but I will if I just can't keep my eyes open.
Now I'm going to shower and rest up in the recliner. Then I'll sit in downtown Northampton for a while to people-watch. Then, the pike. |
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| Not-lanta Part 3 |
[Apr. 13th, 2009|07:17 pm] |
I woke up somewhat refreshed. I had a job interview later in the day. But I needed shoes.
I took Atlanta's rail (the only thing I liked about that place) to a shopping area where I wandered around until I found a shoe store. A redhead fetched my size, and I told her my situation--briefly. Spontaneously, I asked her this: if I get hired, can I take you to dinner?
Now, let's pause. I had a girlfriend at home. Or, as I recall, I did. I honestly don't remember whether we were on hold, or what. Maybe I was being a jerk. Maybe I was trying to convince myself I was free. Either way, she said yes.
I floated to the interview. The interview consisted of the usual stuff, then a test. The manager listed a name of books, and I had to tell her the author. I aced it, except for one, which was "Bleak House." I didn't ace the test because I was particularly well-read; I'd worked three years in Barnes & Noble. You tend to absorb that stuff there--like poison oak.
I was hired on the spot, but I never went back to the shoe store or took that girl out to dinner.
Instead, I walked all over Atlanta in my new shoes, even though they hurt. When I got back to the hotel, I had two horizontal wounds on the back of my feet. Blood soaked my socks, and my heels stung terribly as I peeled of the ruined socks. I ran a hot bath and soaked in it for an hour. Then I called my dad and said, "I'm coming home."
I'd had it with Atlanta. The areas that were supposed to be cool were dirty and squalid. The record store I'd read was the best in Atlanta didn't even have tabs with band names on them--just the alphabet. The whole thing had been a mistake--a "learning experience."
I bought a train ticket the next day. I had a bunch of hours to kill, so I walked around and found my way into a theater where I watched "Dumb and Dumber." Say what you will about that movie, but it took me right out of my life and made me laugh my ass off right when I needed it.
I got on the train as night fell and found a seat in the middle of nowhere. At some point overnight a tall, fat, bald businessman took the seat next to me. "My god," he said. "Are my calves swollen."
"Mm hm."
"Look at this." He began rolling up his pant legs.
I am in all situations unfailingly polite. If Hitler said hello, I'd probably smile and say hi back. I wouldn't want him to think I was rude. I apologize to beggars and say I have no money when my pocket's full of quarters.
When the businessman tried to display his swollen calves, I put my forehead against the window of the train and left it there until he reached his destination.
When I got home, I found a job and an apartment within bicycling distance of that job. It was my first apartment on my own. I reunited with Cindy. A new chapter. |
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| Not-lanta Part 2 |
[Apr. 4th, 2009|10:36 am] |
Like old "Lost" episodes, here's a flashback. Whooooosh. My Ford Festiva was tiny, the kind without a rubber bumper, so it was aqua green all over. It practically glowed in the dark, and you could parallel park it in a normal parking space. You could tow it by placing it atop any other vehicle except maybe a moped. Etc. This was a step up from my Honda Scooter, which started out black & purple, then faded to black & pink. Whoooosh.
Tom P____'s neighborhood will be familiar to anyone who's seen "Cops." Unkempt sidewalks. Groups of young men in clusters on corners, narrowing their eyes and glaring balefully and malevolently at passing cars. He pulled up to a house and I went inside. There was the smell of patchouli and B.O. I glanced into a dark bedroom with clothes piled ass-high on the floor. A hippie girl with filthy feet lay sprawled on a bed in dirty jeans and a poncho. A hippie guy with filthy feet wandered out, bumped into a door, and headed off in a different direction like a disheveled roomba.
Tom showed me to my room, which was sort of a porch with windows for walls. I turned to him and said, "I can't stay here." Bewildered, he drove me to a hotel. I checked into a room. Moving in my luggage, I left the door opened. A dog wandered in and jumped up onto the bed. I gave him some water and went down to tell the desk clerk. The clerk told me that the Grateful Dead had been in town and some kids had left the dog behind. How natural of them. I bought some dog food at a nearby convenience store, fed the dog, and went to sleep.
The next morning I called the cousin of the wife of a B&N friend, Matt. Matt had given me their number and advice to call them if I wanted some Atlanta advice (good advice would have been: "Leave Atlanta.")
I took a cab to their place. So far, people I'd run into had been surly, stoned, or stupid. The cab driver, I thought, was the perfect example of so-called Southern Hospitality. He said something about "that asshole Newt Gingrich." I laughed. Then he said he had moved there from New York City. Two weeks ago.
The instant I arrived at Matt's wife's cousin's place, I knew I was a nuisance. It was a couple; I found out later they were having a tense time. I slept on the second floor, and their dog joined me. Another dog, yup. I got along with this dog too. I told him my problems. On the second morning there, having gone around collecting job applications, after the couple had gone to work, I gave the dog a big ol' head scritch and headed out.
I remember walking a tremendous distance down a busy road with my small suitcase. I had found out about a hotel that had a decent rating in a book, and I was headed there. When I found it, it had changed names. I paid $150 for a week, using a traveler's check. A girl led me to the room. There were bugs on the walls and in the shower and in and on the toilet. I approached the bed; a robust people smell emanated from it. I pulled back the covers. An enormous bug.
I found my way back to the front desk. Again: "I can't stay here." I know, a snob, right? That early in the morning, they had no big bills in the register. So I walked out with $150 in singles sitting in my front right pocket like a baseball.
Again I walked. Miles. Finally, giving in, I checked into a $150/night hotel. I took a long bath. Later that day I'd be interviewing at a store that sold rare and antiquarian books. Strangely, the store was in a mall. First, I needed to get a decent pair of shoes.
Coming up: an indecent pair of shoes, a girl, a job, blood.
In Part 3. |
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| Not-lanta Part 1 |
[Apr. 4th, 2009|04:31 am] |
Back in 1993 I was working in Barnes & Noble as a department manager. I'd been there three years, I think, and I was looking for a change. I don't remember all of my reasons for deciding I wanted to chuck it all and try Atlanta. I do remember that I'd been demoted--in my opinion a grudge job by the newish manager Larry, who'd moved to books from K-mart, and insisted on referring to books as "product."
Friends had told me it was great in Atlanta, and jobs were supposedly plentiful. I wanted a Journalism job, and I thought I'd had it with New England winters. I sold my small Ford Festiva (aqua colored!). I cashed in a bunch of $2 bills that I'd kept around. My parents let me use the money I'd been paying for "rent." I was leaving behind a girlfriend--Cindy--but we did not break up, because it was assumed that once I'd established myself and got a job, she'd join me.
And one day I got on a bus. Taking the bus to Atlanta is a bad idea. Well, taking a bus anywhere isn't the greatest. A dozen transfers. Dirty, sketchy stations in the middle of the night. My utter inability to sleep on public transportation.
On one of the last legs of the journey, a fat redneck with a red shirt and a missing tooth asked my name. I told him, and he said it endlessly, poking me in the shoulder, asking me what I was doing, what I was listening to on my walkman, where I was going. He was drinking beer, and he was bombed.
At a McDonalds stop, I told the bus driver this guy was drunk and harassing me, and that I was going to sit up front by the driver.
Now, I'd arranged to meet up and stay with Tom P____, who I'd known in college. Tom did not pay for room and board, but slept in his van and snuck into the dining area for nearly every meal. He was an odd guy, intense but decent. Tom told me he lived in an "upper middle class black neighborhood" and sent me a few pictures of a squat, unassuming house surrounded by foliage.
As the bus pulled into the Atlanta station, I positioned myself by the door, and squeezed out right when it opened. Fleeing the redneck, I ran into Tom. He had shaved part of his head, and a swath of his hair was bright green. A plastic dinosaur was safety pinned to his gray leather jacket. We got into his small car and he drove through squalor and mayhem and slum. He kept talking and talking and it occurred to me that he seemed unstable, manic, insane. I began constructing in my head some vague plan b.
Then we entered his neighborhood. My jaw dropped.
Part 2 soon. |
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| I loves me some rare books |
[Apr. 1st, 2009|07:32 pm] |
Got T.E.D. Klein's "Reassuring Tales" yesterday. A numbered copy and signed; only 600 were printed. I think he's an extremely talented writer and I'm looking forward to reading these.
Also, just finished up "Confederacy of Dunces." A painfully funny book.
Now I'm on one of my wife's favorites: Georges Simenon. He's her Donald E. Westlake--prolific and skilled. You have to love Maigret. I'm trying not to speed through it to get to the Klein book. |
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| From Ebert's Q & A |
[Mar. 22nd, 2009|07:49 am] |
Q. At the age of 12, I was livid while reading your trashing of my favorite blockbusters. I've outgrown those days. I read your review of "Fanboys," and for the first time was struck hard enough to comment: Absolutely spot on! What struck me was the insightful glance at the current trend in our culture toward group-think. It's everywhere -- music, television, fashion, business.
The arts scare me the most. Too much energy is being wasted on fruitless endeavors and trivia. A quick glance at one of innumerable fan message boards will reveal the emotion and time invested in fandom. In the search to be different, the fans become the same -- a tired cliche taking pride in their uselessness. "Get a life," indeed! I congratulate you on the tone of your review. I can only hope that someone hates it enough to start listening to what you have to say!
Daniel Bauer, Ontario, Canada
A. Fanboys were intensely unhappy with that review and have let me have it. To what I've said already, I'll add: It's fine to have fun as a fan, but to define yourself as a fanboy -- to offer that as the reply to "what are you?" -- is sad. |
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| On Van Morrison |
[Mar. 14th, 2009|10:09 am] |
This morning I went to the Green Bean for breakfast.
Two weeks ago they were playing old, pre-raspy Tom Waits. Nice. This week, however, they were playing Van Morrison.
Words cannot fully express my dislike for this performer. Here I meant to say, "Look at the cover of Astral Weeks and you'll see what I mean." But the picture I was thinking of I can't actually find. Can anyone locate the following image: A little, young, long-haired Van Morrison in a white dashiki, standing outside, looking thoughtfully at a flower or a blade of grass or something? It is the picture that my brother and I saw in a display window in downtown Northampton, and I made my brother laugh by saying, what was it? "What a douchebag." Or something of that nature. Anyway, this image to some would be enough to rouse anger. But it's not all.
There's the reedy, pushy vocal. The easy listening music yelled over by the insistent repetition of nonsensical phrases. This morning the one that stood out was "Diddle-la diddle love diddle-la diddle luh-diddle la, diddle love diddle love diddle-la diddle love diddle la diddle diddle" until I started throwing my silverware and my food and doing my Michael O'Donoghue impression of Mike Douglas with nine-inch needles being shoved into his eyes. Actually, I just alternately ate and groaned.
Then he was yowling about cherry wine. And there's the one where he yells "Dit dit dit!" And on and on and on... |
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| Anthony Lane pulls no punches |
[Mar. 7th, 2009|10:22 pm] |
Dark Visions
“Watchmen” and “Leave Her to Heaven.”
by Anthony Lane March 9, 2009
The world of the graphic novel is a curious one. For every masterwork, such as “Persepolis” or “Maus,” there seem to be shelves of cod mythology and rainy dystopias, patrolled by rock-jawed heroes and their melon-breasted sidekicks. Fans of the stuff are masonically loyal, prickling with a defensiveness and an ardor that not even Wagnerians can match. One lord of the genre is a glowering, hairy Englishman named Alan Moore, the coauthor of “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and “V for Vendetta.” Both of these have been turned into motion pictures; the first was merely an egregious waste of money, time, and talent, whereas the second was not quite as enjoyable as tripping over barbed wire and falling nose first into a nettle patch. In each case, the cry from readers was that the movie was doomed by its treacherous departure from the original; Moore distanced himself from both productions, and he has done so again with the new adaptation of “Watchmen.” The movie was written by David Hayter and Alex Tse, and directed by Zack Snyder, but nowhere do we see the name of Moore.
The bad news about “Watchmen” is that it grinds and squelches on for two and a half hours, like a major operation. The good news is that you don’t have to stay past the opening credit sequence—easily the highlight of the film. In contrast to all that follows, it tells its tale briskly, showing how a bunch of crime-fighters formed a secret club known as the Minutemen, who in turn were succeeded by the Watchmen. This entails a whisk through history from the nineteen-forties to the eighties, with shots of masked figures shaking hands with John F. Kennedy, posing with Andy Warhol, and so forth; these are staged like Annie Leibovitz setups, and, indeed, just to ram home the in-joke, we later see a Leibovitz look-alike behind a camera. But must we have “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” in the background? How long did it take the producers to arrive at that imaginative choice? And was Dylan happy to lend his name to a project from which all tenderness has been excised, and which prefers to paint mankind as a bevy of brutes?
As far as superheroes go, two’s company but three or more is a drag, with no single character likely to secure our attention: just ask the X-Men, or the Fantastic Four, or the half-dozen Watchmen we get here. There is Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a slip of a psychopath, his face often obscured by a bandagelike mask, on which inky patches constantly blot and re-form. There is Dan (Patrick Wilson), better known as Nite Owl, who keeps his old superhero outfit, rubbery and sharp-eared, locked away in his basement, presumably for fear of being sued for plagiarism by Bruce Wayne. There is the Comedian, real name Eddie Blake (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), whose tragic end, early in the film, we are invited to mourn, but who gets his revenge by popping up in innumerable flashbacks. There is Laurie, who goes by the sobriquet of Silk Spectre, as if hoping to become a top-class shampoo; she is played by Malin Akerman, whose line readings suggest that she is slightly defeated by the pressure of pretending to be one person, let alone two. Then there is Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode), who likes to be called Ozymandias. Goode played Charles Ryder in last year’s “Brideshead Revisited,” and I fear that, even as Ozymandias murders millions from his Antarctic lair, which he does at the climax of “Watchmen,” Goode’s floppy blond locks and swallowed consonants remain those of a young gadabout who might, at worst, twist the leg off his Teddy bear.
Last and hugest is Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), who is buff, buck naked, and blue, like a porn star left overnight in a meat locker. Whether his fellow-Watchmen have true superpowers, as opposed to a pathological bent for fisticuffs, I never quite worked out, but this guy is the real deal. He was once a physicist, but, after an unfortunate mishap, he found himself reintegrated as a radioactive being, equipped to peer into the future, nip to Mars for the afternoon, and divide into multiples of himself for nuclear-powered group sex. I felt sorry for Crudup, a thoughtful actor forced to spout gibberish about the meaning of time and, much worse, to have that lovely shy smile of his wiped by special effects. Dr. Manhattan is central to Moore’s chronological conceit, which is that President Nixon (Robert Wisden), having used our blue friend to annihilate the Vietcong, wins the Vietnam War and, by 1985—the era in which the bulk of the tale takes place—is somehow serving a third term.
“Watchmen,” like “V for Vendetta,” harbors ambitions of political satire, and, to be fair, it should meet the needs of any leering nineteen-year-old who believes that America is ruled by the military-industrial complex, and whose deepest fear—deeper even than that of meeting a woman who requests intelligent conversation—is that the Warren Commission may have been right all along. The problem is that Snyder, following Moore, is so insanely aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power, that the film ends up twice as fascistic as the forces it wishes to lampoon. The result is perfectly calibrated for its target group: nobody over twenty-five could take any joy from the savagery that is fleshed out onscreen, just as nobody under eighteen should be allowed to witness it. You want to see Rorschach swing a meat cleaver repeatedly into the skull of a pedophile, and two dogs wrestle over the leg bone of his young victim? Go ahead. You want to see the attempted rape of a superwoman, her bright latex costume cast aside and her head banged against the baize of a pool table? The assault is there in Moore’s book, one panel of which homes in on the blood that leaps from her punched mouth, but the pool table is Snyder’s own embroidery. You want to hear Moore’s attempt at urban jeremiad? “This awful city, it screams like an abattoir full of retarded children.” That line from the book may be meant as a punky retread of James Ellroy, but it sounds to me like a writer trying much, much too hard; either way, it makes it directly into the movie, as one of Rorschach’s voice-overs. (And still the adaptation won’t be slavish enough for some.) Amid these pompous grabs at horror, neither author nor director has much grasp of what genuine, unhyped suffering might be like, or what pity should attend it; they are too busy fussing over the fate of the human race—a sure sign of metaphysical vulgarity—to be bothered with lesser plights. In the end, with a gaping pit where New York used to be, most of the surviving Watchmen agree that the loss of the Eastern Seaboard was a small price to pay for global peace. Incoherent, overblown, and grimy with misogyny, “Watchmen” marks the final demolition of the comic strip, and it leaves you wondering: where did the comedy go? |
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| Horrible howling upstairs neighbor |
[Mar. 1st, 2009|06:22 pm] |
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is moving out! As Shane MacGowan says, YYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH... |
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| You're welcome. |
[Feb. 22nd, 2009|08:20 am] |
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| With his TV station he was trying to improve the image of Muslims |
[Feb. 17th, 2009|07:26 am] |
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The founder of a U.S. Muslim television network has been arrested and charged with murdering his wife by beheading her, the network's Web site and local media reported.
The whole story, and picture of the happy couple, at the link:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090216/us_nm/us_bridgestv_murder |
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| My wife made me a wallet using |
[Feb. 15th, 2009|11:54 am] |
the album insert from the Damned's "Grave Disorder"
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| This one's for my brother |
[Feb. 9th, 2009|07:43 pm] |
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| Horrible howling upstairs neighbor |
[Feb. 8th, 2009|05:20 pm] |
The hippie couple upstairs harbors a horrible would-be singer in one of their rooms. She is in the video below, in white, dancing like someone who has no business dancing. Today--all day--she's been singing upstairs or in the basement. I don't think she's hit one actual note. See below for a glimpse of the horror, the pretension, the...urg.
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| Run DC |
[Feb. 8th, 2009|11:17 am] |
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