POWER

I've had to join Kim's Video to round out my Western craze. I've seen 13 of the damn things this month, and most of those were from Netflix. I guess I broke the Netflix pony down. Sure enough, there are bloody hoofprints up and down my sidewalk.

Earlier this week I made the mistake of renting a Region 2 version of Johnny Guitar, so I had to head back to Kim's to make an exchange. The glassy-eyed grrl stomped over to the empty box, and pointed out the large 'Region 2' label on the box, which I guess I missed. She also told me she couldn't give me credit for another rental, even though I'd only been in 3 hours before. Fortunately, her manager stepped in and did the right thing, but only after making me feel like an idiot for missing the label. Didn't bother me, though - I know he's just pissy because he hates his job.

Anyway, the next day I'm getting off the 6 train after work and I see the same girl running toward the turnstile to catch it, the very turnstile I'm about to exit through. I casually push through, and throngs behind me follow, leaving her powerless and dejected as she watches the train leave.

Gotcha, sis. I'm sorry I didn't tell you I have the power to make wrong things right again, but last night, you didn't give me the time.

PRICK

I took my first cab ride since the transit strike and asked my cabbie how he made out during the 3-day cabstravaganza. He said he made $100, but it wasn't worth it, due to traffic, and rude passengers. People refusing to pay. A woman who refused to pay more than $10 to go from 84th and 2nd to wall street, although she had the money, and with the meter on would cost a lot more. My cabbie actually waived the interzone surcharges after that.

New Yorkers can really be pricks. Next time you see one, punch it.

MORNING

To paraphrase Patton Oswalt, Phill Collins can suck cock on a tightrope for writing 'In Too Deep', which was playing and ruining during my visit to Dunkin Donuts this morning.

I'm up to 48 Westerns and still a little drunk.

STEREOLAB

Stereolab is coming to Town Hall on March 17-18th. I've never seen them. Are they worth it live, or should I sit at home and listen to my records?

SAFE

I work a block-and-a-half from MoMA, and joined earlier this year. With $20 admissions and $75 annual memberships, it was an easy sell. You get unlimited visits, free movies, and a special member coat check. I used that once, though, and my coat came back smelling like mothballs and wormwood.

Anyone who's been there knows it's overload--you spend too long inside to justify the entrance price, absorb too much so that the stuff that really grabbed you is diluted, and leave with agoraphobia and sore feet. It took me 47 of the paid 52 weeks to realize, finally, that with a membership I can spend 30-45 minutes at a time walking down there, checking out one or two exhibits, and heading out refreshed.

The last couple weeks have been pretty mellow at work--last week with the strike, this week with the boss out of the office. So two weeks in a row, I've gone during lunch. My first stop is Janet Cardiff's installation of a Thomas Tallis motet, a 40-voice vocal piece sung by a Salisbury, England choir of men and boys. The room is approximately 40' by 25' and has 40 speakers set up at ear level in 8 groups of 5 set in an oval around the perimeter of the room. The piece is 11 minutes long and is jaw-droppingly beautiful. You can sit in the middle and let it wash over you, or walk around and listen to the individual voices. The reason I keep going back to hear it is the piece is preceded by 3 minutes of junk time - if you put your ear up to any speaker you can hear a guy warming up, a guy clearing his throat, or a couple kids discussing a new watch one of them just bought. I find these subtle touches do as much to transport me as the splendor of the music itself. So on every visit I hang at a different speaker to hear how that particular singer prepares.

Next up is a minute or two in James Turrell's A Frontal Passage. It's hard for me to describe the effect here. It's like living inside David Lynch's heart. In my version of From The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, I hide out at MoMA and sleep in here.

After that I hit one new exhibit. Today was SAFE: Design Takes on Risk, up on 6. It closes next week, but there's a good interactive site to see some of the mind-bending stuff designers have created to embrace (and lampoon) our world's expanding exposure/obsession to danger, fear, and paranoia. You need to check it out.

Some of my favorite items were:

bulletproof clothing (designed by Israelis), although instead of using Kevlar, they use swan and pheasant feathers. Swans are bulletproof!

A bedside table that can be immediately dissembled and used as a bat and a shield. Yes, a shield. Designed by James McAdam, who is my new best friend.

The Karryfront Screamer bag. If someone tries to yank the bag from you, the strap breaks and the bag emits a 138-decibel scream. That's a jet engine at 100 feet, motherfuckers.

The Swiss Fondue Earthquake Safety Table. Self-explanatory.

The Date Rape Spike Drink Detector. Works like a pregnancy test, but instead of pissing on it, you dip it into your vodka and red bull. Has a woman ever read anything I've written here?

The 3 in 1 Kite/Splint/Inflatable Body Warmer. I couldn't make that up if I did drugs for 160 years.

Homeland Security Blanket. A blanket that tells you the current Homeland Security threat level.

GiantMicrobes. Any of my friends who have small children can expect one of these stuffed animals as a gift next time around.

But by far the coolest thing was the video demonstration of the Oldcastle Glass Blast Mitigation System. If you go to the MoMA site and scroll until you find the mound of dirt with the broken white picket fence and click on it, the mitigation system is right in the middle. Click on it and then hit next. An embedded video file will play.

PRONE

So I've been inactive. I hate this time of the year; I grow a little wearier of the Christmas season in New York every year. It's great to see friends and family, but that's true year-round. Everything else (parties, shopping, crowds, darkness, excessive cheer) is a little formidable, and someone always throws up after drinking my homemade eggnog.

The strike cheered me up. Real chaos. I know the strike did a lot of damage to a lot of people's wallets, but, hey, that's New York -- it's a big chew & spit whirlpool.

I logged 20 miles of walking in the three days of the strike. that's the distance at which my friend Tim Paul and many others hit their wall in a marathon. 3 days of walking and I still don't know how long 26 miles is. And I had several meals and hours of sleep in there.

At this time of year I lie prone on my carpetbed and try to relive the year, nose in the fibers. It was one of the busiest years of my life, but I have no idea what I did, and no idea how I got it done. Strangely, the strongest memory I have is from the end of last year, when I got home from the Christmas holiday at my parents' and thought about how I was going to spend 2005. I made lots of stupid goals, to be sure -- the 50 westerns, yeah, but cartoony stuff too, like "I want to be a mascot." "I want to cheat death." "I want to almost get hit by a car on Park Avenue, bang on the hood, get chased around the car, jump in the driver's door and speed away". Seriously. Stupid. I was looking to shake it up.

Make no mistake--this was a great year. I can't remember another year in my life where everything that happened to me was so undeniably good. Even when I was 1 and didn't have a care in the world, I fell out of a high chair and cut my chin open.

This year, I also tried to dive deeper into music. Fat chance--I was deep as I could go. In the last month, the darkness of the dive started to consume me, and I began surfacing. So as this year ends, my head's poking up, and I'm looking around, and have no idea what to do. My instinct is to float and wait.

So that's it. A wild and meaningful year, to be sure. My thanks and love to everyone who made this year good and lasting. I hope I reciprocated.

Let it Be

Tonight, my friends, we're talking about the best album of all time.

My favorite album of all time is "Let it Be" by the Replacements. I can't get into why, but you'd have to stab me to convince me otherwise. I just bought a dictionary and a globe, and the iconic album cover of the Replacements on that roof is in the dictionary next to like 50 of the words. "Iconic", "Tonsils", "unsatisfied" (which isn't even a real word). Amazing.

Everything I've ever wanted out of music is some recognition, some communication between maker and listener, some even ground to walk upon with my musical heroes. By the time I found my way to Let it Be, I realized that the Replacements already completely recognized me. They were drunk and hitting on me (I Will Dare), telling me jokes (Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out), teaching me guitar (Favorite Thing), trying to teach whores about romance (Answering Machine), androgynous (Androgynous), but most importantly, pissed off (Unsatisfied).

The globe I bought has no reference to the Replacements. In a nutshell, that's what's wrong with the world.

THE LEAST COMMON MULTIPLE OF SUICIDE

Every now and then I swing by the Web site of my first job, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. AFSP is a small research/education driven foundation which faced some struggles while I was there. It was stricken externally by the considerable social stigma of suicide (some people still don't believe in clinical depression, and we know how Christians feel about it) and internally by an often contentious relationship between leading scientists and Survivors of Suicide as to where the monies should be spent--grants or direct support. Anyway, they appear to be thriving, so I occasionally drop by the website to see how they're doing, read the latest research grant applications awarded, see which C-list celebrities they had at their most recent spring gala (although they're edging towards C-plus listwith Mariel Hemingway and Emmylou Harris) and whether my original boss and Foundation founder Dr. Herbert Hendin is still alive. (He is).

DISCLAIMER: When I left AFSP, I thought all the internal stuff was preventing the organization from focussing enough attention on its real mission, so I was a little disgruntled. A little wide-eyed and naive, I'm sure. Also, the pay sucked.


On the website I noted this ad. 'Every 18 minutes, someone kills themselves. Every 19 minutes, someone is left to make sense of it.'

What in the name of Lucy von...who came up with this? If somebody's committing suicide every 18 minutes, someone or someones are grieving every 18 minutes, right? Using algebra, we can conclude that for every 19 suicides, there only 18 'someones'. If you're bad at math, let me demonstrate:

Let x=the number of suicides, and y=the number of grievers.

x/18 = y/19 (Each event at the rate it happens, in minutes)
19x = 18y (multiply both sides by 342, the Least Common Multiple of 19 and 18)

There you go. One out of every 19 suicides goes unaggrieved. That is truly tragic.

My heart goes out to Survivors of Suicide. I wish AFSP provided them more intelligent promotional materials.

Westerns (part 36 of 50)

So here we are. it's AC/December. Chant that slowly to get the full effect. (Thanks, Ted.)
I knocked off a few more westerns, but I've got 15 to go, and one month to see them. Tonight I watched Junior Bonner by Sam Peckinpah.

JB stars Steve McQueen as an aging rodeo star. I'm a little young to have experienced the Steve McQueen zeitgeist; my only exposure as a kid was as an 8-year old Cub Scout. Our troop went on a tour of a firehouse, and the fireman/tourman giving us the rounds jokingly introduced one of his fellow smokeeaters as Steve McQueen. My immediate reaction was to say "Who the fuck is Steve McQueen?" but I censored myself, because the firemen were cool, I didn't want to swear in front of my dad, who was required to be there as an escort, and...wait, I didn't even know the word 'fuck' then.

Peckinpah is a master of telling stories within stories. This movie's about the rodeo, but it's mostly about the family. McQueen's got a money-grubbing brother, a sweet mother, and a loose cannon of a father who's already let his wife and his kids down many a time. Whether you've bitched about silver mines (Mr. Bonner's passion) or report cards, this family feels, uh, familiar. Arguments only come to the surface once or twice, but the measuring yourself in relation to your siblings, second-guessing things to say to your parents, and occasionally saying and doing the right things to strengthen the bonds that have been forged--this is all common ground.

My family life is significantly more mundane than anything showing in a movie available for public consumption. But a recent development in our family has led to a grave situation, like Junior Bonner, that will remain unspoken:

No Chainsaws at Christmas.

3 years ago my parents retired, and moved from the dull-as-dishwater suburbs of St. Louis to the breathtaking mountains of Virginia. I've always been expected to 'go home' for Christmas. When Christmas was in the Midwest, I was at the mercy of the airlines, and I grew to hate winter holidays and family get-togethers. But in Virginia, everything is fantastic. My dad, always one to scoff at the beaten path, drew me a map of single-lane mountain roads to his place. A great gift. Now I drive country roads drive through some of the most beautiful country I've seen.

These past few Christmases in Virginia have been a load of fun. My parents did a minor land grab, and have several acres of trees, mostly standing, some felled by disease or hurricane. So on the last three Christmas Eve's, Dad and I have trudged out into the yard with the chainsaw, wheelbarrow and wood chipper and felled a few trees. Using the chainsaw is wild, humbling fun, but it's hot work, so dead winter is the best time to do it. I find it humbling, because I get tired quickly, and it takes concentration to keep from brushing an idling chainsaw against one's leg, cutting through it like bear tooth into butter. And wild fun, of course, because of Leatherface.

This year, my sister wants my 3-year old niece to wake up in her Baltimore bed and go downstairs and have Christmas waiting for her, so the family's getting together there. So no mountain roads, no chainsaws. I can't tell her no, so I'm left to look meaningfully off into the distance and bull-ride my way into a golden bourbon sunset like Steve McQueen. Bull-riding...sure it's fun and it's wild, but it ain't Leatherface.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER

At the end of Microdot rehearsal tonight, we ran through Divide and Conquer by Husker Du.
Divide and Conquer is my favorite song of all time and has been for the last 16 years of my life.

After ruminating on classic rock through early high school, I got angry and started listening to Metallica. I listened to 'One' over and over, and cried myself to sleep because my faded black t-shirts weren't blacker. Times were tough in my Midwestern suburb. I may have even had a mullet at some point.

The outcast at my school that I wanted to be more like (everyone's got one) was Bruce Templeton. When he heard I'd been subsisting on Metallica, he lent me the ultra-rare Garage Days $5.98 ep, where Metallica covers two Misfits songs; Last Caress and Green Hell. They were the greatest things I ever heard. Imagine living the first 17 years of your life seeing only green and blue, and then one day being introduced to red. Holy shit.

I went back to Bruce and asked for more; he made me a fantastic mix tape of loud bands. Minor Threat, Fugazi, Mudhoney, 7 Seconds were all on there. He also lent me vinyl copies of the Husker Du God Jesus and Holy Shazbat--New Day Rising, Flip Your Wig and Zen Arcade. I'll never forget--he gave me all this stuff but he told me with total confidence that I would love Flip Your Wig.

It turns out that the other two records Bruce lent me are considered by Husker Du fans--let's shorten that--Husker Dans to be the best records ever. (I understand there's a faction that think that Warehouse:Songs and Stories is the best, but they're all toothless, balding, schizophrenic and ugly.) Bruce knew I'd eat up Flip Your Wig, though, so he pushed that one. And I'm glad he did.

The first side is unquestionably uneven: the title track, 'Makes No Sense At All' and 'Green Eyes', possibly Grant Hart's most beautiful song, are absolutely amazing, awe-inspiring songs. They're interspersed with two scrap heap songs, 'Every Everything' and 'Hate Paper Doll'.

And then after Green Eyes, Divide and Conquer comes on. Sweet Jesus on a rickety rickshaw. Husker Du pounds out three chords, and the Ramones and the Sex Pistols and the Clash and every punk who ever existed should be envious. And the lyrics! Everything that Bob Mould nightmared about the future has come true. My favorite lines:

"It's all here before our eyes
Safety is a big disguise
That hides among the other lies"

Wow. At age 17, I'm bowled over by the conviction of these lyrics. At age 33, I'm knocked over by how prescient this angry fat guy was.

So I am psyched and humbled to be in a band that recognizes the power of this song. We played it tonight, and let me tell you, in case you haven't done it in awhile: singing your favorite song makes you invincibile, even if it's only for a short time. but it works. Thanks Dave and Joe.