Ceaseless Prattle

Hey, Bo Diddley

2008-06-13T08:01:00.002-04:00

I've had this video up all week. I'd never seen it before and don't know what it's from (but Robin probably knows the name of the concert movie, and probably ate lunch with its DP at Katz's in 1976, just before seeing Marc Bolan sit in on a Stooges set at Max's Kansas City).

ANYWAY, I think it's best summed up by the YouTube tags associated with it:

Tags:
Bo Diddley Amazing Wow best video ever awesome greatest guitar live

Metatextual efficiency expert

2008-05-29T08:33:00.003-04:00

I just sent an email to myself with a list of all the other emails that I have to respond to today, along with their authors. Did I say that clearly enough? When I arrive at Venue Two this afternoon, I'm gong to find several emails on my desktop, one of which is a note from myself, teling me to answer all the emails on my desktop.

This is one step closer to having a little robot version of me living inside my head, barking orders at myself and threatening to get out the shock collar. Which, to be honest, is where I suspect I'm really heading.

Pouring water on a drowning man

2008-05-24T19:39:00.002-04:00

Okay, seriously. Who thought it would be a good idea for me to work at a library?

This is an actual, literal photograph of my poor, overworked bedside table.

Good dog unhappy man

2008-05-20T12:53:00.000-04:00

RIP beast.

Lawrence the dog died in my arms this morning, which will surprise a lot of close-but-distant friends, because he was smart and strong. As a friend remarked a few weeks ago when I mentioned that the dog was seriously ill, “That seems like the kind of dog that you’d want to be lost in the woods with, if you had to be lost in the woods.”

The pup endured two separate bouts with Lyme disease. The first time, in summer 2007, the treatment almost killed him, but he finally rebounded nicely; when he got it again (again! vet’s blood tests confirm that he was clear in the interim), it went straight to his kidneys. With no working tool to screen out waste, the uric acid backed up into his bloodstream; full of poison, he lost all his appetite, got weaker and skinnier. For a month he’s been on K/D, and I’ve been administering fluids via an IV, and that probably bought us a month.

It was a pleasure going through all the photographs that I’ve posted here, because his weight and health have been so precarious for the last few months, I had sort of forgotten what a strong, smart buoyant presence he was for most of the five-plus years that I had with him. He was so lean that dog run confederates in the city used to speculate that one of his anonymous parents might have been a greyhound. I don’t suspect that that was true, but when I watched him take off after those lacrosse balls, I was impressed – the way you’re impressed by a well-designed industrial machine.

I plan to write more later, and maybe I will, or maybe I’ll spare you. How many times do you need to read Marley & Me? Lawrence was Brian’s fourth-favorite dog, and he was my favorite dog. He has slept in my bed for the last two thousand consecutive nights, and I’m going to miss him tonight.

errant art

2008-05-16T13:07:00.003-04:00

Just wrote this in an email to ol' Ozzy:

Harper's has their entire (160-year) history online and searchable, and free to subscribers, and maybe something like that is the future of print v. web. Because a subscription to Harper's only costs me about $15 a year, and though I've grown frustrated as, during the Bush presidency, it's grown into less of a thinking polyglot journal and more of an educated liberal/progressive/anarchist/paranoid rag, it remains good enough to buy, and this isn't the first time that I've gone online looking for something I read ten years ago. But what I want to actually say about that is: the end product is scans of the actual magazine pages, which have been scanned and OCRd to be searchable. The pages are big image files, so load somewhat slowly, so when you want to read something, you copy the text out and paste it somewhere else as straight ASCII data. And this works great for the bulk of the article, but where text is used as a graphic element – big, small, italics, what have you, in the interest of laying out the page or, in this case, the author bios – that ASCII data sometimes has a hard time keeping up, and what results are lovely little word poems. I've attached four.

I'll probably copy this into a blog post, since I never update those damn things, so no one ever reads them. The only thing I ever do when I feel like writing something is send email to Robin.

Another ten percent is ketchup

2008-03-30T20:43:00.006-04:00

All the people who say this critical darling (above) is just a laundry list of statistics alternating with anecdotes about the author's 97-year-old father: yeah, that's true, but as usual, what matters is how you do it, and Shields is falling with style. It's a marvelous read.

The statistic, though, that got me up out of my chair, walking around the house barking it at everyone (including the confused four-year-old Boy, who didn't deserve that): according to Shields, one-fourth of all the vegetables consumed in the United States are French fries.

Does that leave you as gobsmacked as it does me? Why or why not? Discuss.

Radio nincompoop: Finally, sled pie.

2008-03-29T12:55:00.002-04:00

Some things, when you get to heaven, you can measure in terms of Actual Time Spent (washing cars, 164h; attending births, 22h). Other things are so pervasive and enormous, you measure them as Percentage of Life Spent (sleeping, 31%; commuting / work-related travel, 4.5%). For a little while there, "making mix tapes" was threatening to move from my list A into my list B.

In high school, it makes sense to make mixtapes for girlfriends. In college, it's still sweet. When you're 35 years old, and you just can't decide whether the next song should come in on the two or the four, and you're auditioning it this way and then that way, then playing the entire previous song trying to figure it out ... as Dennis Miller once said, "you've probably made a serious vocational error somewhere along the line."

So here you go. For best results, iTunes. And to all those who are too cool for Bruce Springsteen, I offer: When a man is tired of Rosalita, he is tired of life.

I'm sure they're just happy to be asked

2008-03-27T17:18:00.003-04:00

Portrait of the Gonzo journalist as a swimming fool: who knew?

2008-02-18T21:21:00.002-05:00

All quotes from Gonzo [Wenner / Seymour], which is overall better than you've heard; like most "oral biographies" I've seen (especially Plimpton's Capote thing from a decade or so ago), its primary fault is rhetorical flab.

Who knew that the good doctor was so crazy for chlorinated water?

Richard Goodwin: But at Hickory Hill, i'd wake up and look out the window, and there would be Hunter in the swimming pool. I found out later that Ethel (Kennedy) was a little worried about Hunter's presence around the kids – but mostly he just swam. [p189]

Ralph Steadman: On the night of the fight [Ali-Frazier in Zaire], Hunter had a big bag of marijuana, and he took a bottle of Glenfiddich I had bought him down to the pool with a bucket of ice nd the bag, threw the marijuana into the pool ... and dived in and just hung by the side of the pool, smoking and drinking and loving the whole meaningless nature of it. [p 191]

Patti Stranahan: ...we used to let him swim in our pool every night. He was quiet, and he could do whatever he needed to. [p 275]

Marilyn Manson: ...he really, really wanted to come to my hous eto get in my swimming pool, which I had told him was as hot as a Jacuzzi. [p 407]

Felicitous adjacence

2008-01-16T20:03:00.002-05:00

iTunes, coupled with a home FM transmitter and about 2.5 TB of hard drive space, has made my life not so much perfect as fully realized. And as silly as that is, it's not really a joke. In the nineties, I used to make MiniDisc mix tapes because the MD's shuffle function played back without gaps. (If you are not sufficiently a nerd to understand all of that, you have no business on the Internet. Go read Robert Fulghum.)

My entire day around the house is accompanied by iTunes' Party Shuffle function pulling from a list of about 12,000 songs. It just chugs through them, like the big custom jukebox that it is, playing Curtis Mayfield after Charles Mingus after Frank Zappa, never tiring or asking me to turn it off (both of which services the wife provides in spades). And occasionally, just like all those little monkeys crouched tirelessly over their little typewriters, it comes up with a segue that merits a headline.

I was served both of these sequences today.

A:

The Residents: In between dreams
Bill Frisell Quartet: Stand up, sit down
Violent Femmes: Jesus walking on the water

B:

Big Star: Holocaust
Sondre Lerche: It's our job
John Wesley Harding: I can tell (when you're telling lies)

Give 'em the evil look, son.

2007-12-28T19:56:00.001-05:00

I don't know these people. I don't know this baby. I'm posting this here, having seen it on Boingboing, because every single time She sees it, she laughs so hard she nearly wets her pants.

Parents have trained baby to "give 'em the evil look" on command.

High praise: The correct ingredients of bottom

2007-12-12T20:51:00.000-05:00

In the event that I ever die, I want you to volunteer to write my eulogy. And what I want you to do is just plagiarize this section of Sly Stone's liner notes from Dance To The Music, plugging my name in for Larry Graham's:

I am grateful to Larry Graham who constantly adds the correct ingredients of bottom whether it be on stage, in the studio, or swappin' fives on a street corner. Larry can sing anything, play anything and do anything. Larry is as funky as nine cans of wet magic shave. Gone Larry!

Please, don't hurt 'em

2007-12-09T21:09:00.000-05:00

If the reference doesn't make you smile, you are either too old or too young; you are either too hip or insufficiently hip.

If it does: you are just right.

Triborough Bridgecam

2007-12-09T20:56:00.002-05:00

I always loved this. After the southbound Harlem River Drive connects with the FDR, just before you emerge under the Manhattan legs of the Triborough Bridge, there's a street sign.

A street sign that reads FDR DR n one side and TRIBORO BR on the other.

Let's be clear, for our nonnative friends, that the FDR drive is a ten-mile-long, six lane highway bracketing the east side of Manhattan, and that the scale of the Triborough Bridge can be discerned from its moniker: it's not even a thing, it's several things, it's a series of bridges that, taken collectively, spans Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx. It must weigh, I don't know, a million tons.

Let's be clear: if you ever got close enough to this sign, on foot, that it could do you any good by telling you where you were, you would be dead.

Erie Hotelcam

2007-12-09T20:37:00.000-05:00

You have to do some work to get to it, but it's there ... it's there ...

What's a little extra apostrophe? It's not cast in iron, out there for all the world to see.

Borderscam

2007-12-09T20:14:00.000-05:00

Yes: the clerk had to put it somewhere. That is true.

A juvenile sense of humor is a terrible thing to waste.

UPS Storecam

2007-12-09T20:10:00.001-05:00

Hyphenmania!

Makes you wonder whether a corporate memo mentioned the importance of getting the Thank-Yous out on deadline.

You're-welcome, Citizen-Murphy! Come-again!

Fridgecam

2007-12-09T19:43:00.000-05:00

I can appreciate that the Tropicana people have real influence on my family's insides, and if you give them enough credit for good intention, that it could even be called "nurturing."

What are they doing to the outside of my family?

Home Depotcam

2007-12-09T19:32:00.000-05:00

What's in this barrel? Oh, a fish!

A clever formulation that would be the perfect title for a fact sheet about fatal disease except that it's so viciously insensitive, it pains even me

2007-10-16T15:25:00.001-04:00

Canswer.

all this stuff

2007-10-04T14:03:00.000-04:00

The bother-in-law* has posted, more succinctly than I ever would have, the explanation:

And I know, it's been a while.
It'll be a while longer, terribly busy.
As are we all, I suppose.
And yet.
There's all this stuff, you see.

(Haiku formatting mine.)

*The typo was accidental at first, but was also perfect, though not, I assure you, true.

Meanwhile, around the corner, Hungary lurked

2007-07-31T15:18:00.000-04:00

The Alexandria Link wasn't on my radar before Dad gave me a copy for my birthday; it was clearly built from a Da Vinci Code Erector set, from the terse, cliffhanger-rich, 700-word paragraphs to the Article + Historic Term + 4-Letter Noun title kit. And I think that's terrific. I think one or two books a year that kick off with their bibliophilic protagonists defenestrating burning buildings is the right amount. (I also enjoyed the current Bruce Willis vehicle, and I ate lunch at McDonald's last Saturday.) Other books that I didn't think were as good at doing whatever this newly hatched genre does, exactly, include this, this and – stinko! - this.

A bunch of folks fussier than I have attacked Brown's book for its less-than-deathless prose; it never much bothers me in a thing like this, because I figure every metaphor is just another obstacle between you and the next exploding car. In fact, in the sixty pages I read last night, I only found one sentence that I'd nominate as a howler. From page 51:

Sweden loomed on the horizon.

So, via American Heritage: did the northern nation appear as a threatening, shadowy form, or did it seem about to occur?

Is it live, or is it Dogmental?

2007-06-30T13:04:00.000-04:00

Paused just now, while putting away the dishes, because I thought I heard one of my children calling me from elsewhere in the house; turned out it was just the mournful trombone entrance in the Andy Biskin record on the radio. That's a good band.

---- ---- ----

This blog's title was chosen ironically; I knew when I opened up this wing of the manse that I wouldn't have the energy to post at more than one place regularly. I'm putting this notice up as a teaser for you / threat for me that within a ~~week or so~~, er, little while, I intend to write a thing explaining why I've been absent from there, and everywhere, for a month, and why the last month has been so extraordinary for me. (I know, I know, you can hardly wait.)

Zap!

2007-03-07T15:21:00.000-05:00

I know that a bunch of image files got deleted from this blog; I don't know how, but I did it while I was uploading the last bits of the regular site (I synchronized backward, like a Bizarro-world web updater: "You, empty folder! You take precedence over full folder! Now me will throw up for breakfast!") I'm going to leave the resulting screwed-up blog entries where they are, with the thought that at some point I might go through and reload the image files. Also, I might sprout wings.

New new newspeak!

2007-03-07T10:48:00.000-05:00

Listening to the ads on talk radio today, a perfect new doublespeak phrase occurred to me. Who will be first? MBNA? Bank of America? Who will be the first to market debt – a home equity loan, a credit card – as Inverse Wealth?