Wicked












I know that movies set in Boston have to feature Irish people, violence and beer in cans, but why do they all also have to be lousy with bad accents and epic scene chewing?














...but then the last thing I liked with a Boston setting was Spenser: For Hire.

Untied We Stand


There is an unwritten social law that if someone tells you your shoe is untied, you must immediately stop wherever you are and whatever you are doing and tie your shoe so you don't trip. You may have been going along fine for the past ten blocks with your shoelace untied, but the minute someone notices it, you are immediately in peril and must tie your shoe that instant or else you'll trip.  It's sort of the Heisenberg principal in reverse.  


When strangers stop me on the street to alert me to the fact that my shoelace is untied, however, I do not stop immediately, bend over and dutifully and gratefully tie my shoe. I might nod politely, but I keep on going until I find something to put my foot up on or I might even, heaven forfend, wait until I reach my destination before doing anything. You may think that it being my foot and my general well-being purportedly at stake, that that would be the end of the matter. However, since this is an unwritten law we're talking about, people often become unusually agitated and often downright insulted if I do not stop and tie my shoe that instant. They think that I am fucking with them. Now while fucking with people is one of my all time favorite things in the world to do, that is not what is going on here.


No longer a young man, I am now both overweight and none too limber, so for me stopping short in the middle of a block to bend over and tie my shoe may have all sorts of disastrous consequences. If there isn't a massive pile up of pedestrians behind me, there is still a good chance of all sorts of things untucking and popping out which would invariably lead to mass panic and stampeding on the street as other pedestrians attempt to flee the scene. What's more, bending at the waist and reaching for my feet is far more likely to lead to my having a heart attack or stroke than my not tying shoe would lead to my tripping. In fact, in all my nearly half-century of living, I cannot recall myself or anyone else ever actually tripping over an untied shoelace. A stumble maybe, but never a full fledged trip. Neither can I recall anyone ever falling onto a pair of scissors while running with them, nor have I ever seen a baby choke on the dreaded uncut grape or suffocate inside the nefarious dry cleaning bag. Furthermore, I have never had the misfortune to witness a child poke someone's eye out with a stick or jump off a bridge because his friend did. 


So if you see me on the street and my shoelace is untied, please don't worry about it. If you do feel concerned enough to tell me about it, please don't take it personally when I don't heed your advice. I do appreciate a simple heads up on dog shit though.

Try This...






Anti-depressants and other prescription mood controllers were introduced to the general populace in the mid-80s and gained prominence in the 90s. Never a particularly reflective culture, we took advantage of these high grade stimulants to bury the dark stuff for good and STAY PRODUCTIVE!


In retail it is always great to have a supply of umbrellas handy when it rains. It is even better to have a supply of umbrellas and be able to make it rain. In the 80's we did coke and crack and Wall Street was able to sell us, fittingly enough, Junk Bonds. Like any good crack high however, the thrill of junk bonds rapidly wore off and we crashed. In the 90's as anti-depressants were kicking in we found ourselves remarkably susceptible to believing that various markets--beginning with the internet--would never crash . That bubble eventually deflated and then burst as the planes crashed into the towers, but instead of facing reality we swallowed more fistfuls of anti-depressants and kept on buying. As always the force of our denial was equal and opposite to the amount of crap we were trying to suppress. We swallowed the notion the infinite rise of real estate values and the viability of credit default swaps like so many M&Ms. And then boom, it all began to crash, again. 


We swallowed Obama hoping he would  make everything magically all better. Then he had the audacity to be human while trying to deal with the nuts of bolts of our long ignored realities. Instead of mustering more fervor and support for him, we buried our t-shirts and fell silent in the face of those who decided that pounding the reactionary bottle would do the trick [good luck with that].


Anti-depressants are life-savers for the clinically depressed [until they stop taking them, cf. J.F.Wallace], for the rest of us walking wounded, like all drugs, they merely forestall facing reality. Therapy, analysis, inter-personal communication [i.e. talking] are all messy and imperfect modes for dealing with the burdens of reality. How about we give them a try? What do we have to lose? The first taste is free...

_____


Hey kids! Here's an awesome video about a great moment in sports and a time when most drugs did not come from Duane Reade. 

No Mas Presents: Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No by James Blagden

G-L-O-R-I-A

I met Patti Smith yesterday. It made me very happy.

I told her I got her book for the holidays, and that I was looking forward to reading it.

I was around back then.

It’ll bring back a lot.

I hope I can remember.

I’ll remember for you.

Cool

Weekend Pants

Lately my hair has been looking a lot like a cross between Brain Glazer’s and Yahoo Serious’. I’m really liking it.

 

One last thing about the tax deal: it spares us having to watch the Republicans run around pretending as if they ever really gave a rat’s ass about the deficit.

If you are married to a non-Jewish woman who hates to clean her hair out of the shower drain, and you point that out to her, she will either deny it, contradict it, or completely ignore you. If are married to a Jewish woman who hates to clean her hair out of the shower drain and you point that out to her, she’ll say, “I don’t clean hair out of fucking drains.”

Netflix is now totally bored with the DVD side of its business. Every third disk I get from them is scratched up and unwatchable.

I’m not saying Assange did or did not rape those women in Sweden, but, given what I know of the cases, if he were just some random Thom, Steig or Lars, the Swedish constabulary would NOT have brought charges…

If you think “constabulary” is an old-fashioned word, what about “cables”? –As in the diplomatic cables that Assange stole—As in short for “cablegram”: a telegram sent by underwater cable, c. 1875. Every time I hear the term I think of foreign relations being conducted in the drawing rooms of the well-born over tea and shared connections. I imagine missives being dispatched and, yes, cables being sent. I don’t know what it says about the practices of the diplomatic community that they think they are still communicating via a method that peaked about 100 years ago, but for some reason it’s oddly comforting.

Bernie Sanders for President

According to a NY Times article from Dec 8, "the only groups likely to face a tax increase are those near the bottom of the income scale -- individuals who make less than $20,000 and families with earnings below $40,000." The increase for those in that bracket has to do with the difference between the new reduction in Social Security payroll taxes [there's a good idea, aging America], and the non-extension of Making Work Pay [Obama's signature tax cut-so sorry old sport]. " 'It will come to a few dollars a week,' said...an analyst at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, 'but it is an increase.' "


Put another way, loosely estimating those "few dollars" at $10 per week, that would add up to $520 over the course of a year. That same percent increase on a millionaire making exactly $1M [increase taxes on millionaires? then we'd see class warfare] would come out to be roughly $13,000 [the yearly latte bill]. If that increase were applied only flatly to all our nation's approximately 4.7 millionaires, it would yield $61,100,000,000. That's not quite as much as we would have reaped had the Bush era tax cuts on the top 2% been allowed to lapse, but you get the idea. This is to say nothing of what we're losing in capital gains taxes, the elevation of the estate tax cap or, most perniciously, the loophole that taxes hedge fund managers [hedge fund managers!] at a maximum of 15% of earnings [the capital gains rate] instead of the roughly 30% that is the going rate for normal million/billionaires.


Bernie Sanders for President!

Get Off the Life Raft: You’re Squishing My Hips

We all know if it had been up to her, Kate would have skooted over. But James [“My fists are made of ham, but everything I touch turns to gold!] Cameron needed Leo to die somehow, so….Get off the damn raft pretty boy!

Still, while our economy sinks like the you-know-what because of can’t fail [can’t sink] bonds [boat], watch out for the fat ass rich scrambling to stay on top of whatever shit is still floating – they are vicious.

I remember once leaving a very posh benefit at the Met, I was leaving the affair feeling all classy and shit when I stepped onto 5^th Ave. to hail a cab. I was elbowed out of the way by a silver haired woman in a designer gown as if that cab were the last one off the island before the peasants revolted.

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Tyler Brûlé  used to be on my Top Ten List of People I’d Most Like to Hit, but then I took him off it because who really cares? Now, however, he’s popped up in New York magazine shilling yet again for empty consumerism and calling it style.  I still didn’t care enough to put him back on the list, but then I noticed [somehow for the first time] that “Tyler Brûlé” is about as real as “Häagen-Dazs.” This d-bag had the chutzpah to add both an acute accent mark AND a circumflex to his last name, and it worked like a charm. We deserve everything we get.

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Man of  the People

I’ve always felt bad about being annoyed by the aural leakage of people’s cheap headphones on the subway. I thought, “Who am I to complain at having to hear the tinny blowback from their crappy music when these poor folk clearly can’t afford better headphones.” It took a few years to get past my middle class guilt and realize that these poor folk had their cheap default headphones plugged into hi-tech mp3 players. Cost of iPod Touch: $250. Not being willing to spring the extra $20 for a decent pair of earphones: just plain cheap ass.

 So That's Why!

Because he hates to lose!

 One of the worst things about being a sports fan, besides having     saddled my kids with the ignominy of being Mets and Jets fans, is having to listen to the god-awful ramblings of sports announcers and commentators. The twaddle comes at you like an all out blitz and only occasionally does it registers just how stupid or downright pernicious some of their pat formulations can be. My new least favorite is, "He really hates to lose." Lately, I've heard this chestnut trotted out when they're talking about quarterbacks and trying to explain just why they're so dreamy and awesome. 


I first heard it in a Philip Rivers puff piece [a week later he went out and lost to the Raiders. At home. Rivers must have hated that!]. Then last night I had to listen to the Monday Night crew tell me how Brady hates to lose. As if that's why he's so great and not his height, arm, innate timing, talent, poise, hard work, the team around him or the [friggin] coach who put it together and schemes like Bobby Fisher. As if the rest of us who aren't elite quarterbacks or Yankee captains just love to lose; love, love, love it and that's why we lose more often than we win because we're weak. That's why we're poor, and that's why rich people are rich: because they wanted it more and deserve everything they get, so we should shut the fuck up and let them keep their god damn tax break.

Not an Instrument; Not a Country

Renzo Piano's addition to the Morgan Library Museum is a creature both beautiful and rare: a museum expansion/construction that is not a grandiose testament to the egos of its architect and the museum's trustees, an abysmal breach of duty both to the art going public and the art they are going to see, or a colossal waste of money. Instead it is a seamless add-in that yokes together three disparate spaces across the better part of a highly developed city block. The main space is wide open and airy, and yet still manages to have nooks and crannies capable of surprising the visitor and granting her privacy and repose. Primarily steel,wood and glass, it is an incredibly warm space. The steel girded and gridded supports are painted, but in the grey December light seemed plated in silver and no doubt would have been had J.P. Morgan himself been footing the bill.

I was there to see the Lichtenstein show, a display of drawings early and on. The show itself was surprisingly warm as it showed the artist as a young man struggling to master his new approach. His greatest and most charming challenge seemed to entail finding a way to replicate the Ben-Day dots he loved so much with mechanical uniformity by hand. I got to learn that "poichoir" is a lovely word for stencil and that "frottage" does not just mean "dry humping." I also got a wonderful sense for Lichtenstein's sense of humor. In a special niche of the exhibit, the curators had dug up an old door from a studio the artist inhabited during a stay at an art colony in Colorado. A small windowless space, Lichtenstein turned it into a 3-D cartoon using electrician's tape to form contour lines around doors, walls and outlets, as well as heat squiggles and knocking sounds. Hilarious and, dare I say, fun. 


Lichtenstein made a big deal about trying to make passionless art. In restrospect, I think he was trying to get away from the faux white boy passion of abstract expressionism -- and who could blame him? If the trade off is humor for the gesture of passion, I'll take humor every time.


Ultimately, however, Lichtenstein's work is about timelessness. Whether it be the tail gunner going down, the hot dog, the knock on the door, the Alka-Seltzer tablet dissolving or the brush stroke expressing--Lichtenstein captured it, froze it and reduced it to its simplest form funny, lovely and for all time.

From now on things are going to change around here...


For years Beth has been urging me to put my random annoying and only lightly edited thoughts immediately into the blog, but I have always chose instead only to upload the carefully honed and well picked over nuggets of only my most highly relished brain turds. Then I read the essay "Isn't It Romantic" in David Rakoff's new book, Half Empty. 


I do not say this out of pride or anger or bloated sense of self, but I could have written the entire essay - almost word for word - about fifteen years ago. Of course making a claim like that is ridiculous and unprovable, except if you're willing to believe Beth who could attest to having been made to listen to every annoying insight contained therein ad nauseum for almost the past fifteen years. However, as a wife cannot be compelled to testify by her spouse [or is that against her spouse], the only way to stop being unprovable and ridiculous is to step into the rush and the bother of the blogosphere, mind dump every day and force you to read it.


I shall hold my nose and jump in:


Half Empty?

It starts simply enough with an idea. The idea that cars should, at this point in their evolution, be able to tell us how much gas we have in our tanks. I do not mean a red needle pointing to a white lined fractional break down of the tank's contents splayed out like rays of the sun. I also do not mean an LED version of the same thing. I am not even content with those guesstimations of miles left in the tank before you need to fill up. I mean an honest to god reading of precisely or even not so precisely how many GALLONS are in my tank. 


How hard could it be? My car, a 2006 Subaru Outback, tells me so many things I do and do not want to know [I love knowing the outside temperature/do not need to know their highly suspect miles per gallon estimates: 22 mpg, no wait 9 mpg, no wait 37 mpg...]. My car is also very concerned that if the key is anywhere near the ignition, I damn well better be in the driver's seat and strapped down NO MATTER WHAT otherwise the perpetually intermittent binging ensues. Why can't my car also tell me that I have 2 gallons in my tank? Wouldn't that be a useful piece of information? Wouldn't it be nice to rent a car and not have to guess how many gallons are in that eighth of a tank you just used and not have to spend your entire driving time trying to triangulate your mileage, your best guess at mpg all while trying to remember precisely where the needle started its decline all so you don't end up buying too much or, even worse, too little gas for the car upon return. Perhaps this one little feature could re-start Chrysler?


It's not a big thing, but it's a beginning. We could probably have done it fifteen years or so ago, but we didn't, so we might as well do it now. Let us begin.