For Relaxing (?) Times, Make It Cup-O-Noodles Time

Distaff Laffs For Your Amusement And Betterment

Let's get right to it, shall we?

Sometimes people say to me "who is Dorothy Parker?"

Those people are wrong.

Dorothy Parker is THE BEST and is also THE BEST. If you like drinking and reading about people drinking and you enjoy laughing and reading about people drinking, then you enjoy Dorothy Parker.

There is nobody wittier and more full of vim and fizz than Ms. Parker save Oscar Wilde. You will run out of bookmarks, marking the funniest, cleverest passages and you will feel like someone dropped an alka-seltzer tablet into your brain.

The Portable Dorothy Parker collects all of her most important stories, poems, essays, theatre and book reviews (which are a howl), and letters in one paperback tome. For all but the scholar, this is all the Dorothy Parker you're likely to need and I recommend it as highly as I possibly can.

If you ever want to be the sort of person who can charm the Carole Lombards of this world, you had better get yourself a working familiarity with the works of Dorothy Parker (and an ascot, natch).

  

Fran Lebowitz is often compared to Dorothy Parker. This is probably because she is a woman, is funny, and has a certain cynical joie de vivre.

All of these comparisons are fair, but Fran Lebowitz is really her own animal. She's jokier than Dorothy Parker, for starters. Her writing shares more in common with the comedy essays of Woody Allen than with the satirical frothiness of Ms. Parker. Curiously, many of the selections in The Fran Lebowitz Reader, which collects her first two (and only) books, seem more dated (they were all written in the late 70s) than do the selections in The Portable Dorothy Parker. So, sometimes, whatever verve and archness that might have come lancing through the page thirty years ago seems somewhat dulled by the march of time or by the wash of irony that has covered everything.

But there are these moments of page-kissingly brilliant comedy writing that make the whole thing worthwhile. For example, in the book's very first piece, one of Ms. Lebowitz's many paeans to latesleeping (bless her!), the following:

"12:35 P.M. - The phone rings. I am not amused. This is not my favorite way to wake up. My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two-thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish."

Are you sold?

You ought to be. She's a damned national treasure.

Hooray For The Salem Witch Trials!

This short story by Sarah Miller delighted me.

Smooth Jazz For Transparent Eel And Soprano Sax

This Is Lovely, But Surely Unsafe. Be Careful, Poland!

This Dog Gets Tickled Like A BOSS

7th Avenue Film Series #5

Peter Falk, R.I.P.

Peter Falk always amused me. He was funny and inimitable (except for the fact that everyone does a two-bit impression of him as Columbo).

He died today, peacefully, after battling Alzheimer's, which is a horrible thing to battle. In the end, he didn't even remember who Columbo was.

He had a glass eye. That's pretty cool. Also, The Princess Bride wouldn't be what it is without him and what it is is THE BEST.

These Are The Rules You Must Live (Summer) By

Esquire's rules for summer drinking are now assigned as summer vacation homework for all of you.

Long Live Fair Use

First Contact

Nothing Dirtier (Or Cheaper)

My Favorite Song About A Geological Epoch

Perhaps I Can Interest You In Some Skittering Electropop Radiohead

On The Road With Lara IV

More billboard sirens from the road:

Lara: "I just missed a goldmine opportunity. For miles and miles there were these signs advertising some sex shop called 'The Lion's Den' and then, when I finally got to the exit you'd take if you were going there, there was this big sign with Jesus on it that read

'JESUS SAVES PORNOGRAPHY KILLS'.

Kills who? Kills how? Seriously?"

Me: "You should have gotten out of the car and put a comma between 'Pornography' and 'Kills'."

On The Road With Lara III

So I guess she's back on the highway, still passing through Kansas. Our text exchange:

Lara: "Saw a billboard advertising the world's largest prairie dog; didn't stop."

Me: "You've made the biggest mistake of your life. When everything crumbles around you someday, remember that, when you came to this fork in the path, you chose NOT to stop and see the giant prairie dog."

Lara: "Well, but I don't think it was a real prairie dog; the billboard advertised it as being 800 lbs."

Me: "Lame. I would much have preferred to see just like a twenty five pound prairie dog."

Lara: "Yeah. Just one the size of a large cat. I would have died laughing."

On The Road With Lara II

So she stopped at a truckstop or something and texted me. I asked her to describe the place and its denizens:

"A whole bunch of morbidly obese white people in white sneakers with white socks. Alternatively, Crocs."

"There is an elderly homosexual couple in matching outfits (red shirts tucked into short white shorts) arguing over the fish tartar sandwich from Hardee's. The older of the two is wearing black loafers with white socks."

"There is a Hardee's and a Taco Bueno and a Kemp's Pizza. It is hot as balls and a fat lady, chewing with her mouth open, is looking at me disapprovingly."

On The Road With Lara

My friend Lara is driving across the country this week, on her way to West Virginia. She texted me from the road:

"I have decided that the only reason the speed limit in Kansas is 70 miles per hour is that, if I was to roll off of the freeway, the only thing that would stop me from just coasting forever would be one of these anti-abortion billboards."

Midsummer 2011

So here we are, the longest day of the year. After this, the night starts to slowly reclaim its hold on the days.

These cuspate days are always a bit bittersweet, i guess, but no time for that!

SUMMER!

Midsummer's Day is a day to celebrate Summertime and the sun and being outdoors and whatever. Have a BBQ, light the sparklers, and lay out in the yard after nightfall. Music should be played loudly and should be consist mainly of major chords.

AC/DC will never sound better than they will today.

In the old times, people used to have parties at this time of year, just like we do today. There weren't a lot of formal traditions like there were for May Day or Christmas or Easter; People just got together and had a big bonfire I guess. It seems - to me, anyway - that even the peeps of ye olden times knew that nobody needs a reason to get out in the middle of summer and have a big fire and dance dance dance.

You ever wonder why America celebrates its Independence Day on the fourth of July?

It isn't because that is the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. There was never a "signing" in that sense that people imagine, where everyone gathered around and passed the quill, one man after another, serious faces all around. The whole thing wasn't even signed up until about a month later - in August.

Nor was the thing published on July 4, 1776. Indeed, it wasn't issued in any form that the public (or the Brits) could see or hear until around July 8th and it wasn't printed in England until August.

It wasn't written or even finalized on July 4th, either.

It was, of course, submitted to the Continental Congress on July 4th and the text of it approved.

Still, it seems curious to me that this date and this document would be the source of our main national holiday. Could it be that the proximity to Midsummer helped fix the import of the date in our minds?

Certainly we celebrate it today much like we would Midsummer's Day, with feasts and fire and parties and the out-of-doors.

Whatever. It's only a musing. The important thing is that Midsummer is a great time of year and, if you're going to celebrate the turning of the year in regular intervals, this is kind of a BIG ONE.

This guy knows what I'm talking about (but don't do it like this guy, this guy is ridiculous):

Zola, The Breakdancing Gorilla

El Willy, The Salsa Dog

Clarence Clemons, R.I.P.

Clarence Clemons was a great saxophone player and he was the best part of The E Street Band.

 

Saxophone solos always make me nervous; it is such a slippery instrument. 

Clarence Clemons never made anybody nervous when he played. He made everybody happy.

It's lame that he died this way.

7th Avenue Film Series #4

10 Great Boring Things

1. Moby Dick (1851)



2. Lawrence Of Arabia (1962)



3. The Byzantine Empire (ca. 324 - 1453 C.E.)

4. Gustav Mahler's 5th Symphony (1904)



5. The Paintings of Mark Rothko

6. Vanilla



7. Helvetica

8.  Paradise Lost (1667)



9. Antarctica



10. Bread

Ginlemonade And A Conversation About Death

I'm that sort of person who much admires hammocks, but finds them sort of uncomfortable when lying in one and trying to drink from a long straw inserted in a tall cocktail.

Similarly, I cannot quite manage to relax while lying on a blanket in the grass because I spend very nearly eighty percent of the time scanning the blanket for insects.

After one has taken the time to spread a large blanket out on the grass and has gone back and forth into the house several times to bring out and place carefully beside that blanket such things as a small stereo, a large book, and a mason jar filled with would appear, to the untrained eye, to be lemonade, but was, in actuality, almost entirely Plymouth gin, one feels silly to spend the entire afternoon sitting crosslegged and swiveling sharply to and fro, flicking insects (and bits of backyard flotsam that resemble insects) from the blanket instead of, you know, lying on it.

So, you make a go of it, mostly for the neighbors' sake, lying first on your back and holding the book above your head at arm's length like the steering wheel of a car pointed at the sun. But that grows tiresome quickly and you shift to your side. But then your leg is asleep and so you move to your stomach. But you can't really enjoy this either because you can't concentrate on a book when you are devoting so much of your mental capacity to reminding yourself not to kick your legs up at the knee and rock them gently back and forth like a teenaged girl does on television when lying on a bed and talking on the telephone.

So I was rather happy to receive the phone call from my friend, because it gave me an entirely plausible excuse to sit up straight and flick studiously at anything that looked like it had crawled or would like to have crawled near to me on the blanket, hoping for a summer home in the inside of my pantleg.

"So guess where I'll be living this summer," said the friend.

" . . . " said I, wittily.

"In a small apartment above an art studio!" said the friend.

"That's nice. I bet it hardly ever smells like failure if you keep the windows open," said I.

"There is a pond out back!"

"Ponds are nice; they give the mosquitoes somewhere to be from."

"It's only going to cost us a couple hundred dollars a month, because the lady who owns the gallery needs the money. It's kind of a sad story, actually; she's a ceramics artist."

"That IS sad."

"Oh, shut up. Anyway,  she married her highschool sweetheart, a painter . . . "

"Oh, god. Stop. I don't want to hear any more."

"And he was also a forensic scientist."

"Nope. Don't want to know."

"And they opened up this gallery and had two beautiful daughters."

"Yep. Good Story! Definitely that's the end of the story, because that is obviously a good story, right there, all wrapped up and narratively satisfying. Let's talk about something else now and not belabor it."

"And then, one morning, he's just dead."

"Better than one evening, amirite?"

Spied a spider the size of a smallish fried egg on the open page of my book. Gestured at it so that it would leap onto the blanket where I will never find it again. Will have to burn blanket later this evening.

"They were married for 34 years, were madly in love, had this business together . . . "

"And now she has to rent a room to you fuckmonsters just to make ends meet. Why did you tell me this story?"

"Well, we'll just have to fuck quietly when the gallery is open."

"Jesus."

"She sculpts these forest goddess statues. They're a bit dreamcatchery, actually, but pretty."

"Forest goddessing is, like gibson martinis and creative writing classes, generally better in theory than in practice."

"What are you, drunk?"

"I am what many intolerable people are but all decent people aspire to be: well read, unemployed, and moderately soaked through with gin."

I flicked a large and frantic ant even then struggling to scramble onto my leg thousands of millimeters across the yard.

"Listen," said the friend, "coffee Friday?"

"Yes," said I.

The usual pleasantries exchanged, I returned to my book and blanket and afternoon. I went for a large swill of my ginlemonade and found an expired gnat floating among icebergs on a yellowish sea.

Waiter, what's this gnat doing in my ginlemonade?

He's sinking to the depths of the mason jar when you insert a finger to try to fish him out, sinking to the the Davey Jones' Locker reserved for those fortunate gnats who drown in alcoholic drinks every summer.

Sod it. I'm going inside.

That Looks Like A Difficult Bed

Eternal Summer

This Just Makes Me Uncomfortable

The Change Was Made Uptown

Get Well, Clarence.

Do It, Fluid

Chiara Unchained

I'm standing in front of the stove this evening, cooking dinner, when Chiara rushes up to me, grabs me by my collar and, eyes narrowed and teeth bared, raspingly shrieks:

"I. Neeeeed. Chocolaaaaaaate!!"

Then, as I stand there stunned, she releases my shirt, darts over to the small desk in the kitchen, grabs her car keys and her purse and launches herself out of the house and into the car.

She came back from the market ten minutes later and wordlessly, with furrowed brows, began mixing brownies from the mix she'd purchased.

Rattails And Irony (And White Denim) Make Beautiful Music Together

Start SEEING Psychopaths

Just read Jon Ronson's latest book The Psychopath Test and enjoyed it thoroughly.

The book meanders quite a bit and sometimes even loses focus, but, in essence, is about the development and employment of the clinical test for psychopathy, a test that seems to be, by all accounts, highly accurate, but that has opened a Pandora's Box for the psychiatric industry (not to mention the prison industry and the media).

The book is sort of terrifying, really, full of tense meeting with and descriptions of psychopathic personalities, but Ronson's telling is always so charmingly disaffected and so frothy and gently sardonic, that you never linger long on the nightmares he's toying with.

If I had a complaint, it would be chiefly that the book barely skirts the most interesting single premise put forward by the book is that, while perhaps 1% of society is psychopathic, the percentage of those in the top positions of power and influence, on Wall Street, say, is likely to be significantly higher. Indeed, Ronson even suggests that it seems plausible that most of the really terrible things in our society may be directly caused by the neurological deficiencies of a very few people at the top.

This is a profound sort of notion (and profoundly frightening), but for a lack of good science on the subject, presumably, it is tantalizingly dropped as a suggestion and then almost ignored for chapter after chapter of discussion about psychopathy in the (much better studied) criminal justice system.

But this what-could-have-been complaint aside, it really is a delightful book about a topic we all treat with as amateurs in casual conversation. The only downside of reading this book is that you are likely to have the same trouble Ronson did after becoming more familiar with the criteria by which pyschopathy is judged:

You start seeing psychopaths EVERYWHERE.

It's The Weekend; Catnip For Everyone!

7th Avenue Film Series #3

On (Even In Praise Of) Boredom

THIS is the greatest essay about boredom ever. Really.

Summertime Is For Anthems Of Summertime (Because Summer Is A Solipsist)

David Bowie For Emperor Of Everything!

Ægypt Becomes Egypt, But It's All Right

Finished Endless Things, the fourth and final part of John Crowley's Ægypt.

It is a strange little book, quite different in tone and structure and detail from the other three; it is almost more of a lengthy coda than a continuation of anything that came before.

In Dæmonamania, there was a climax (really, two climaxes) that had been earned and that was unexpected in shape and significance, but here there is the slow denouement of the story or of the world or of hermeticism or of youth or everything at all.

Without giving too much away, this is a book, not as those before, about the cusp of two things, but about the consequences of finding oneself on the other side of that cusp. Crowley treats that gently and humanely, as he always does, and a person of a certain age and certain settledness cannot help but find himself reflected here in ordinary triumphs and ordinary defeats, not to mention in the slow dilution of what once seemed magical or secret or rife with possibility and is now revealed to be a luxury of youth or worse - of aggressive naiveté.

What happens when the magic drains out of everything?

Well, you get on with life, for a start. And that is pretty good, too.

There is hardly a point to a review of this book, really. No one who hasn't read the other three would think of reading this one and no one who has read the other three will need to be convinced. So let me just say it like this:

I never had a book (a series of books) speak to me the way these have; I never felt so like myself reading these beautiful books. The sadness and sobriety of Endless Things feels as true and inevitable as marriage and mortgage and career and disappointment and, most importantly, as the revelation of unexpected, realer things.

So, you know, read them already so we can have something to talk about.

Me? I'm going to have to start them over again right away because I probably never missed so much in a book as I did in each of these that comprise Ægypt.

We Need More Jonathan Richman Videos In The USA

This Is Really The Only Song If You Are Slowly Transforming Into A Balloon Vagina

You Guys, It's Summer; Let's Call Everybody Al, Shall We?

The Traditional Gift

While at dinner last night, I was describing to Chiara the list of "traditional anniversary gifts" that I feel quite sure no one has ever paid any attention to.

She asked what they were and I read them to her:

Me: "First year - Paper."

Chiara: "Money."

Me: "Second year - Cotton."

Chiara: "A tissue."

Me: "Third year - Leather."

Chiara: "A belt."

Me: "Fourth year - Fruit or Flowers."

Chiara: "A basket of flowers?"

Me: "Fifth year - Wood."

Chiara: "A broomstick to the head."

Me: "Sixth year - Candy or Iron. Candy OR Iron?"

Chiara: "Heavy candy?"

Me: "And here is this year's - Wool or Copper."

Chiara: "A copper sweater?"


Bonus Chiara non sequitur from later in the evening:

"Humphrey Bogart looks like one of those guys who has too much saliva in his mouth when he talks."

When I Was Single, I Thought Marriage Would Be Like This Song Sounds

It isn't of course, but both are still good!

Seven

Today Chiara and I have been married seven years.

I can only assume that she is hanging around for the insurance money, because I certainly wouldn't be married to myself for seven years.

And I have a kind of rule that I don't use this blog for serious, sincere things.

So, instead I will just report what Chiara said the other day about the angry man in the theatre, who shouted at the old woman using her phone during The Cave Of Forgotten Dreams:

"I know that all those people in the theatre were old, I mean, they were like archeologies, but that old woman was only playing with her blueberry for like one second before that old man yelled at her. Is he crazy?"

Love you, amore. You're the one who is crazy.

Oh, and P.S., Une Femme Est Une Femme is a DELIGHT, you brat.

7th Avenue Film Series #2

One Blanket On The Grass Forever, Please

Dance Party USA Forever

Is A Wind In The Windowscreens

Is a wind soughing in the windowscreens
Tonight and i would like to follow it
Backwards, climbing against its current, slipping as a salmon upstream
To find the place, miles from here,
From which it set out. There, I would like to lie down
Under wheeling stars for a long while and dig
Fingers strong into loamy earth when
My own troubled susurrations stir and come
To mind and grow heavy and yanking
Until they leave me again, like a wind,
On their long journey to sough in my windowscreens tonight.

Blackberry, Blackberry, Blackberry

Meditation At Lagunitas

by Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking.

The idea, for example, that each particular erases

the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-

faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

of that black birch is, by his presence,

some tragic falling off from a first world

of undivided light. Or the other notion that,

because there is in this world no one thing

to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,

a word is elegy to what it signifies.

We talked about it late last night and in the voice

of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone

almost querulous. After a while I understood that,

talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,

pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman

I made love to and I remembered how, holding

her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,

I felt a violent wonder at her presence

like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river

with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,

muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish

called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.

Longing, we say, because desire is full

of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.

But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,

the thing her father said that hurt her, what

she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous

as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,

saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Thumbs Up For Rock And Roll, Indeed

Look, obviously (obviously), you have all already seen this.

That doesn't matter, because it (and this kid and riding bikes and rock and roll) is still THE BEST:

Grave And Troubling News

Look, we all know that the total lack of Prince videos on YouTube is the worst of all of the Internet Crimes (the crime is coming from inside the Prince! get out NOW!), but I have discovered a new and awful injustice on the web:

Apparently there are literally NO videos to be had of T.Rex performing "The Slider" live?

This cannot stand.

And this is not going to be sufficient for a whole summer of internets:

Get on it, Obama.

Summer Is The Undeniable Season