Some Musings On Yo La Tengo

1. I believe that, had Yo La Tengo been stationed on this rooftop playing this song just prior to Hurricane Sandy making landfall, the storm would have simply stopped spinning and fallen lifeless into the sea.

2. I believe it is possible that what Ira is doing here with this guitar could be considered a breach of his marital vows.

3. Perhaps you need a palate cleanser after you were so thoroughly undone by that last song:

Three Versions

1. It is the endless Wednesday night that we will all find ourselves in eventually, where you are driving with the windows down and it is summer and it is the middle of the desert in western Nevada. The moon is slowly colliding with the earth and you taste whiskey in your mouth and this is the song on the radio forever.

2. Or, maybe it is Madrid and it is 2:37 AM and there was a girl (or there wasn't a girl) and you are drunk and this song is playing on the big, soft headphones and you are looking out at the streets and they are all wet, even though it never rained.

3. Or, it is July and so hot that people sleep outside on balconies. You are swimming in a swimming pool with a green light at the bottom, on the left, and then the Maharal (or someone dressed like him) comes and rubs one letter (a single letter!) from the word written in candle ash on your forehead and then you are asleep and you don't exist, but this song is still playing and you are still under the water.

Obamamerica, Day One

Eight years ago, the Onion ran an article about Bush's inauguration. The headline, a quote from the Onionverse's Bush inauguration speech, read "Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over."

Who knew then how prophetic the little satiric newspaper would be?

After Obama's inauguration, I think the entire globe let out its breath for the first time in years. We barely got out alive.

In any case, Obama's speech seemed, at times, a thinly veiled rebuke of the Bush years and an only lightly coded message to America and the world that that whole nonsense - the anti-science, the fanaticism, the extra-legality, the unilateralism, the arrogance, the warmongering, the anti-environmentalism, and the anti-regulatory attitude - were all in the past and an aberration at that. Add to this the subtle charge that it was time for America to grow up and leave behind its reckless teenage years and the speech seemed to cover the next four years like a blanket. The rhetoric was not high flying most of the time, but the sentiment was intense and grounded in a way that felt reassuring, even in its sobriety.

I, for one, feel, for the first time in years and years, in awe of my country and civilization. Nothing will come off quite as well as I might dream it will, I'm sure, but everything is going to be better (it would have a hard time being worse).

I've never been so close to buying a flagpole.

America on, bitches.

p.s. how cool is Barack Obama? check out the new Whitehouse website, where you can, among other unprecedented transparencies, read the actual text of any and all executive orders, see the name and appointment of every single person nominated for a job by the executive branch, and read the actual text of the agenda the pres. plans to pursue while in office. I know it makes me a nerd and a wonk, but I get all curfluffled over ethics and civics. Oprah can have her grand love stories and tales of overcoming hardship - give me the simpler and deeper pleasures of an open and responsive democracy any day to get me all misty eyed.

My Reagan Era Threeway

So let's say I've decided to seduce these two P.Y.T.s after successfully picking them up at a discotheque.

The first thing I'd need to do is get them comfortable in my loft apartment. I'd seat them on my black leather sofa and get them each a glass of merlot. I'd casually mention that the cocaine (I'd probably call it "blow") was in the tastefully african decorative box on the glass coffee table and I'd go to remove my skinny tie (taking the opportunity to make sure my bathroom and bedroom were in order). A little dash of Drakkar Noir and I'm back in the room, checking to make sure the ladies are okay. They are.

I put some music on my Blaupunkt:

After this, the merlot, and the blow, we'd probably adjourn to the bedroom. I'd put Ladyhawke in the vhs player and turn the sound all the way down. The light from my neon clock radio would play off of all the reflective surfaces in the room - the metal furniture, the tempered glass television stand, the poster of the lamborghini countach.

Hopefully, in the morning, I'd be able to get them out of the place early enough that I could still get in a jog before I had to get to my job working on Wall Street or in an Advertising Agency.

Probably when I came home at the end of the day, I'd find a single shoulderpad one of them had "forgotten" under my pillow. The other one of them would likely have "forgotten" her high-waisted panties.

I'd unroll the sleeves of my blazer and pop open a wine cooler before settling in to watch Airwolf.

Janus

God of Doorways; of comings and goings.

Bet he's happy to turn (one of) his face(s) from 2008.

Was the most schizophrenic year I can recall.

Moved into our new house. That was nice.

Economy. (boo!)

Obama. (yay!)

Hoping 2009 is a better, rounder, more upward moving year.

My Mustache is My Hijab

How did I come to this, I often ask myself. How did the person I wanted to be diverge so precipitously from the person I actually am? I mean, am I really the sort of person who unironically wears a mustache?

It started, like so many things that turn out tragic, as a joke.

Har-har, shave the beard, leave a mustache tossed on your face like a hairy candy wrapper on a theatre floor.

I thrilled with anticipation at the responses this would engender. I especially liked imagining the abject horror and revulsion a furry caterpillar like growth would inspire in attractive women. They’d crinkle their normally smooth foreheads and ask me ‘why? why ever would you wear a mustache?’ and I’d insouciantly reply that it was ‘for kicks’ or ‘as a lark’ or even ‘to piss off my wife’.

It was supposed to be ridiculous, you see; something funny because of the discomfort it would cause me socially.

Now I don’t know who I am anymore, and neither does my mustache.

To be fair, I did (and do) receive my share of oddball double takes when I stroll into a shop or a restaurant or supermarket, but nothing like the behind-the-hand giggling I’d hoped for.

I eventually squeezed out a patch for the chin and another for just under the mouth, attempting a sort of an Errol Flynn effect, thinking that would seem even less legitimate a choice of facial hair, but to no avail.

Hell, Chiara likes it!

She balked when I recently shaved, telling me that my face sans mustache and friends appeared “puffy.” I then suffered the further indignity of having to grow the whole nonsense from the ground up - no mean feat for someone with blondish facial hair.

So now here I am, a man who wears a mustache.

Don’t call it a goatee - it’s three separate pieces of facial hair. I have some dignity remaining to me.

I’m calling it a D’Artagnan.

I can tell you that I might wear a cape or a porkpie hat and I’d feel less costumey.

I wonder if my upper lip will ever feel the warmth of the sun again, or the coolness of the pillow at night.

My mustache is the hijab of my mouth.

While the Cat is Away

. . . the mouse will sort of sit around, feeling bored and kinda lonely.

So Chiara took a jetplane to Italy on Sunday, and she left me and the cat (the actual cat) to hold down the fort. The cat might disagree, but I think it’s going all right so far; I almost always remember to feed her.

I mean, sure, the place is getting a little frayed around the edges, but nothing catastrophic. It is like the end of the Roman empire: it just gets more decadent and unkempt, and the dustbunnies make some inroads into the interior (in this metaphor, they’re the Visigoths), and eventually Chiara comes home and clucks and tsks a bit and we clean house and presto, Renaissance!

Thing is, when your wife goes out of town for a month or so, you spin these gossamer webs in your mind’s eye about what it’ll be like. You imagine that now, at last, you’ll have that poker game, or smoke those cigars, or watch those pornographic movies, or go to those bars with your bachelor friends. You think that you’ll play music as loud as you want because no one will be in the other room trying to watch the Biggest Loser. You think you’ll go out every night and the cat thinks she’ll be allowed to sleep in the bed.

Of course, the reality is somewhat more tame. Mostly you just wish you had something to do. You feel sort of depressed and suddenly feel sure that, were your wife around, you’d be having sex. And you feel sure it would be way crazier than any sex you actually have with her. The bed is noticeably colder and the house noticeably quieter.

I guess you play the music (mostly so you don't feel so alone) and you get to dance like an idiot, but that’s more fun when someone is there to roll her eyes at you.

And you don’t really like cigars or strip clubs or whatever anyway.

And the cat? Hell, she’s batshit crazy. Who knows what she thinks about cigars or stripclubs? And if I let her in the bed, Chiara will probably knife me.

So, unless someone gets me out of the house, This’ll be more or less just a great opportunity to catch up on some reading. I’m looking at you, Grapes of Wrath.

Well, and the porn. That part is just like you imagine it will be, more or less.

Barbarian Musings

It’s this time of year, when the mercury falls and the thermostat rises, that I often reflect on beards gone by.

The Christmas Beard is the gift I have to give myself every year, but I’ve neglected myself once again. I miss my beard. I should have shaved off the rest of me instead.

There are two sorts of people in the world, of course: people who like beards . . .

And women.

Women in the audience should know a curious thing: wearing a real beard provides almost the exact same sensation as wearing a false beard held on by cosmetic glue. Should any of you ever wish to experience an hour or two of facial hair, simply purchase a kit from your costume shop. You won’t be disappointed. Or you will be. In either event, you will have magnified your knowledge of beards.

Under a beard, one forgets oneself. Or, anyway, one forgets the contours of one’s chin and jaw - which is the same thing.

When you cut away the beard from the rest of you, you reveal mostly regret; a pasty, raw, unfamiliar kind of regret that you’d just as soon cover with bristles.

Oh well.

Don’t shampoo your beard in the shower, imagining that it would benefit form the process as does the longer, softer hair of your scalp. It only makes your beard itch more, I’ve found.

A beard is the scaffolding upon which a mustache is constructed.

A beard is the camouflage that conceals your true purpose. Then, like the sculptor sees in the stone the statue’s final form, you find the final courage to carve the mustache from the hairy medium.

But mustaches are an advanced maneuver and should not be attempted lightly or with much hope of happiness or success. The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

It feels weird to brush beards out, away from your face. It hurts, but in the way that chewing on a canker or worrying a hangnail hurts. That is to say: it hurts in the way you cannot quite stop yourself from doing, though you know you will regret it.

It doesn’t really keep you warm, a beard, but it cuts the wind. It denies you the pleasure of a cool pillow on your face. This is a thing you learn to miss.

It gives you something to do when you are thinking about something. Stroking a beard while musing or concentrating is a terrible cliché. Like most terrible clichés, it works.

Everyone should grow a full beard at least once in their life. That so many will not is a kind of tragedy. Beards are to the male experience what childbirth is to the female.

Maybe haircuts would be a better fit there.

In any case, as the narrator in Cheever's The Swimmer had an inexplicable contempt for men who did not throw themselves into pools, so I have an abiding distaste for those who shave every morning. And a special hell is reserved for those who ignore the grain of the ingrowing beard by shaving against it.

You might surprise yourself by growing a beard an entirely different color from the hair on your head.

Also, with a beard, you’ll look better in a baseball cap, but worse in a collared shirt, but better in a crewneck sweater, but worse in a sportcoat. These are the wages of beards.

When you finally do buckle under the pressure from the women in your life and shave your beard away, you will feel a sickly regret and loathe your puffy face and ill-defined cheekbones, not to mention your gullibility and the ease with which you folded under pressure. You’ll want nothing so much as to pluck the hairs one by one from the sink and glue them back to your face.

It will take a while to tan the bottom part of your face. People will notice.

Oppenheimer's Horn, or, the Sax Perilous

Is there any instrument quite so dangerous as the common saxophone? Is there any musical device more deadly when misapplied or more affirming when used wisely?

A trumpet is almost always welcome - bright, forceful, and gregarious - it is the vivacious coed of noise, brilliant and beloved.

A saxophone (already of the moodier woodwind family) is another creature altogether. It does not play well with others, preferring to solo and to warble and waddle through scales that swoop dramatically from low to high and high to low. Many is the song that has had to hold on with white knuckles while the sax uncoils and sonically elbows the other instruments out of the way. One is always fearful that the whole thing will bobble out of alignment.

Thing is, when used sparingly and judiciously, the saxophone solo can be plaintive and triumphant and anguished and sexy. But when used recklessly, when used with abandon, or without a firm hand insistent on restraint, the sax solo is an aural oilslick, spreading and seeping into every corner of a song and leaving mold cheese in the corners.

A badly deployed sax solo can be a melismatic tumor.

A well deployed saxophone riff can be a joyful wail, at once more complicated and more human that all but the finest cornetist can coax from his or her instrument.

A Clarence Clemons may be worth a hundred Kenny Gorelicks, but am I wrong to cringe with anxiety when the first blast or burp of a sax pours into a ballad (or even a jump number)?

I would place the saxophone under glass and give, among living musicians, Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison the only keys. Those who would like to borrow the saxophone for a song here or there would have to appeal to them. Jazz musicians would have free access, but would need to sign out and file the proper forms stating their intent and indemnifications in the event of a cheese-spill.

The soprano sax would be declared a violation of human rights.

Musings While Watching The Birds in bed with Chiara

“I wonder if it is supposed to be a sly play on words that the film The Birds is really almost entirely about women.
The awkward pauses, glances, and conversations between Tippi Hedren (the poor man’s Grace Kelly) and Suzanne Pleshette (the rich man’s Stockard Channing) chew the scenery in a way that the titular animals never do except in that final scene.

Jessica Tandy and Pleschette and Hedren spend their catty energy almost entirely on the attentions of hamburger-in-suit Rod Taylor. The women fight almost resignedly for this hunk of middle age while the passions of the (actual) birds rise to a fever pitch.

Bird attacks almost always follow conversations with or about Mitch, Taylor’s character, our great jutting jaw-and-chin. One is left to ponder whether this biblical plague visited upon the inhabitants of sleepy Bodega Bay is really little more than a manifestation of the prefeminist fear that a powered class of men felt when forced, for the first time, to truly face up to the power of femininity unbridled.

Women, it should be said, have often been associated with birds - in slang and in mythology – both to celebrate their otherworldliness (from the male perspective) and to denigrate it.

And, the only safe haven when the birds stage their first attack is in the Tides Restaurant, named for that mysterious and powerful force of nature that, like women are supposed to be, is ruled by the moon.

Inside we find, huddled and angry, the women of Bodega Bay, who see Tippi as the cause of it all. Is this because she is a liberated (though idle) woman? Or is it because – perhaps as in all Hitchcock films – the female lead is really a cipher for female sexuality, a subject feared as much by the women of Bodega Bay as by the men? Is it that Mitch, as the only male in the town of any import, is so jealously guarded as a source of lantern jaw and broad shouldering?

In the end, when our heroes beat that slow, sinister retreat, is Hitchcock suggesting a détente with the surging power of the feminine? Is it meant as a kind of terrible rebuke of feminism, that it can be figured as a scourge from which none will escape, run as they may?”

He wondered (aloud) as his hand wandered (allowed) up her skirt. She continued to watch the movie.